Kaname couldn't shake the feeling that she was being watched.

It had started several days ago; ever since she had gotten back to DSM from Christmas vacation with her folks. No matter where she went on campus -- the admin buildings, the classrooms, the Commons, the library, the dining hall -- she just couldn't get rid of the sense of being observed. Now it was the first week of classes, and the sensation still hadn't stopped.

Kaname was not, by nature, a particularly paranoid person, but there was a limit to everything, and by the Spirit, she was starting to reach it.

"I just don't get it," she complained as she and her companion ate lunch, as they usually did, at table seventeen in the main dining commons. "I've been here for over a year and a half now, everything's been going great, I haven't been particularly hit on or anything, and now this happens! It's enough to make a girl go crazy."

Lindsey Willows tilted her head curiously, regarding her turquoise-haired older friend. "It's been getting that bad?" she enquired, before taking a bite of her (thankfully fresh) shyam.

Kaname groaned, and rolled her eyes. "Lins, I've been getting this feeling even in MY DORM ROOM. Which, I'm telling you, is seriously freaking me out. Even when I'm making my rounds in Hamlin Four, it just hasn't - let - up. If this doesn't stop, I'm going to start going stir-crazy."

Lindsey nodded, and made a thoughtful sound. While her friend had a reputation for being something of a workaholic, and definitely had a driven personality that had drawn comparisons (both favorable and non) to one of the founders of the Duelists' Society in the past, she wasn't somebody who was excessively high-strung or hair-triggered. She could reach startling heights of aggression when she got going, but she was just as often willing to take a deep breath, relax, and have fun. If she was getting this worked up over seemingly nothing, something had to be going on.

She flicked a glance over Kaname's shoulder briefly, and then asked, "Are you getting that feeling right now?"

Kaname paused in her consumption of her chef's salad, chewed, swallowed, and regarded Linsday with a measure of confusion. "Huh?" She hesitated for a moment as she set down her fork, then slowly took a breath. "... yeah, now that you mention it..."

"Don't look around," Lindsey continued, in a quieter tone of voice. "Just keep your focus on me, make like ... like you're about to check your face for salad dressing."

Kaname caught on quickly; she reached into her school bag for her compact, and flicked it open. "Damn it, do you have a napkin?" she casually asked, indicating the wadded up paper on her tray. "I used up my original one cleaning a spill by the soda machines."

"Sure, here." Lindsey handed the replacement over to Kaname, and as their hands touched, she murmured under her breath, "Four tables back, to your left. The guy who's sitting at attention, dark hair, dusky skin --"

"-- and with a scar on his cheek. Got it," Kaname replied, dabbing with the napkin as if she was cleaning off a particularly stubborn spot of ranch dressing. She waggled her compact mirror so that it was pointed in approximately the right direction over her shoulder, and studied her quarry more closely.

He was a human male, about the same age as her, if she was any judge, with the aforementioned dusky skin and close-cropped dark hair, either black or a really dark brown, she couldn't tell for sure. On his left cheek there was a curious, x-shaped scar. But the most striking thing about him was his eyes: somewhere between grey and blue, with a surprisingly intent expression in them.

"Huh. He doesn't look like much," Kaname muttered to herself, wiping at her own cheek before setting the napkin down. "Let me know if he does anything before we finish eating, ok?"

"Sure thing, Kaname," Lindsey replied, and with that matter settled, they resumed their meal. It passed with little incident, save for the continued presence of the unwanted observer. Aside from eating his own meal, he did not appear to take notice of the other students moving around him, instead keeping his focus on the two girls.

Lindsey sighed, finishing her shyam. "Still no change, Kaname."

"Right. No help for it, then." Squaring her shoulders, Kaname put both of their dishes on her tray, shouldered her school bag, and stood up. "Follow my lead."

Kaname started toward the exit, moving with a sort of casual purposefulness. Now that she was facing him, the Mystery Guy wasn't looking at her, but he wasn't doing it in a painfully obvious way. She was approaching so briskly that he couldn't get up and try to slip out without running into her, so he simply sat where he was and waited for her to go past.

Which she didn't do, instead sliding suddenly onto the seat opposite his at the table while Lindsey, improvising fast, sat down next to him. Short of overturning the table and escaping in the confusion, there was no way out for him now.

"Hey there, new guy," said Kaname with exaggerated friendliness - so exaggerated that it would have taken a real block of wood not to detect the undercurrent of barely contained menace in it. "Say, listen, I realize DSM has this mission of cultural diversity and all, and I don't know where you're from, but around here it's sort of generally considered uncool to stare at girls like that. Particularly girls you don't even know. It's seriously rude."

"And creepy," Lindsey added.

The young man looked from one girl to the other and back, his expression almost entirely blank. He didn't seem embarrassed - didn't seem to have any reaction at all, in fact. His reply, when it came, was as flat as his affect, a deadpan, monotone, "I wasn't staring at you."

The denial was utterly unconvincing, but at the same time, weirdly unanswerable. It was just so bald-faced, there was no crack in it for Kaname to get her fingernails into. She ended up just staring at him for a couple of seconds, willing herself not to sputter, and then saying,

"Yeah, sure, pal. Look, I know when I'm being stared at. Are you new? 'Cause I've felt like I was being watched since the semester started, and that's quite a coincidence."

The young man nodded once, mechanically, and replied in that same blank, nothing-to-get-ahold-of voice, "I'm a new transfer, yes. But you're quite mistaken. My presence here is only a coincidence. Excuse me."

So saying, he rose, slipped nimbly past Lindsey without seeming to be nimble about it, and left the dining hall. The two girls sat and gave each other did-that-just-happen looks for a few seconds.

Then Lindsey turned her head to look at the exit he'd just left through and said, with a slow smile that said the matter was starting to catch her interest, "Let's test that, shall we?"

They emerged from Hannibal Hamlin Hall's main ground-floor exit onto the Institute Common, a large, irregular, grassy expanse in the center of campus. As they passed the big sycamore tree by the bike racks, Lindsey asked in a slightly-louder-than-normal voice, "Hey, Kaname, can you give me a hand with my math homework?"

Kaname eyed her friend for a second, wondering what she was yelling about, before she caught on and replied in the same exaggerated voice, "Sure, if you can help me out with my revisions for sociology."

"Great! Let's go to my room, it's quieter."

Since Lindsey was a member of the Institute Duelists' Society, her room was in the Castle, up at the top of Castle Hill on the edge of campus. From the Common, this was ordinarily reached by a footpath that led up the side of the hill, past Spencer Lab and through a small wood, a short and pleasant walk in good weather.

It was in the Single-Acre Wood, as she had expected, that Lindsey leaned toward Kaname and murmured, "Yep. There he is." She kept walking, maintaining a stream of innocuous chatter, until they reached a bend in the footpath through the wood - then suddenly whirled and backtracked, vanishing behind a tree with a sharp cry of "A-ha!" - followed immediately by a high-pitched sound of dismay and a heavy thud.

"Lins? Lindsey!" Kaname shouted, following her friend's path into the brush. She rounded the tree to see Lindsey, half-sitting against the base of another tree a short distance away, covered in snow that had fallen from its branches when she hit the trunk, looking dazed and trying to get something out of an inside pocket of her coat. Opposite her, in a combative semi-crouch with some kind of giant military knife in his hand, was the New Guy.

A phenomenon Kaname had noticed only a few times before in her young life settled over her then, as she barged around a tree and into the face of what appeared to be distinct personal danger. It was a side effect of her peculiarly mixed genetic heritage, one which, though useful, she didn't find particularly pleasant and generally went out of her way to avoid - a sort of analytical fugue, in which a valve at the back of her mind opened and the knowledge and experience of her vast and complicated bloodline flooded in, semi-submerging her own identity in a hugely competent but unnervingly impersonal collective that would do whatever was necessary to remedy the situation.

Through eyes no longer entirely her own, Kaname took a few milliseconds to examine the New Guy's stance, his weapon, and his tactical options in minute detail, as a whispering polyphonic voice murmured in her mind's ear:

Target's body at forty-five degrees, motion of the right arm back, bent at an angle. Grab with right hand to pull off balance, pivot own body counterclockwise to face the target's back. Twist right wrist at pressure point Kappa. Kick with left leg at the back of the knee, shove with palm behind the shoulders, lean in with the torso to accelerate and force target down.

Follow with the full weight of the body, leading with the knees to pin. Remove firearm from small-of-back holster before impact.

Result summary: Right hand temporarily useless. Bladed weapon dropped. Balance hopelessly compromised. Winded from impact with the ground. Leverage eliminated. Firearm confiscated. Further aggression impossible.

Total time to pacification: nine seconds.

She didn't remember following that plan, as such, because it all happened so fast and, in a sense, she wasn't driving. It must have worked, though, because when she came back to herself she was kneeling astride the New Guy's back, one of her knees pinning each of his elbows, and she had a pistol - which she had apparently taken from under his jacket - aimed at the back of his head.

Lindsey Willows finished getting to her feet and deployed the collapsword she'd taken from her inside pocket, not that it was necessary now. "What the crap," she said to no one in particular.

"uhm srfmdr," the New Guy mumbled into the snow.

"Damn right you do," said one of Kaname's ancestors before the collective relinquished her nervous system fully. Riding the crest of the adrenaline wave and trying not to think too hard about what she'd just done, she sprang up, seized the New Guy by his collar, and dragged him to his feet, then shoved him. He stumbled a few yards away, slightly favoring his left knee, and then turned to face her, rubbing at his right wrist with his left hand. His expression was still basically blank, as if he had no particular emotional response to what had just happened to him.

It only really hit Kaname then that she was holding a firearm. Blinking, she said, "What's this?" Quickly and efficiently, she checked the status of the weapon - loaded, round chambered, safety on - then thumbed the safety off and pumped three rounds in a neat triangular group into a nearby tree that had nothing of note behind it but a small ridge of earth.

"OK, it's real, then," she mused matter-of-factly. "Spirit, what's with the hand cannon here?" She re-safed the gun, reversed it in her hand, and held it out to Lindsey, who had put away her sword again and come up behind her. "Lins, secure this, will you?"

"Can do - waaaait a second," said Lindsey, taking the pistol. She eyed it narrowly, then looked over it at the impassive face of the New Guy and said, "Where'd a punk like you steal an A&K Mark 23? This is a CID Lensman's gun."

Kaname stared, first at Lindsey, then at the New Guy. Her expression hardening, she took two steps straight into his personal space, getting eye-to-eye with him. "You better have some damn good documentation, my friend, otherwise I will report you to Campus Security."

The young man looked gravely back at her for a moment, then said, "May I retrieve my identification?"

"Do it slowly," Kaname told him, nodding. "Right hand."

The New Guy nodded and fumbled in his top pocket for a moment with his still-somewhat-numb right hand, withdrew a small leather fold, and tossed it at her feet. While she crouched, not taking her eyes off him, to pick it up, he came to something like attention and said briskly,

"Sagara. Sergeant, TechCom, B-1328, assigned to protect you."

Kaname blinked at him. "... What?" She picked up the ID fold, straightened, and opened it, examining the document within. "'Sergeant Sosuke Sagara,'" she read. "'TechCom Security Solutions, a Member of the Rhodos Group.' OK, I guess that does license you to pack heat on campus," she conceded, "but it doesn't entitle you to pull a shiv on my friend here."

"I apologize for that," Sagara said with a slight bow. "She surprised me. I believed myself under attack and reacted by instinct." Then, with a very slight archness, he added, "Upon identifying her as no threat, I would not have harmed her."

"No threat, my ass," Lindsey muttered, but Kaname shushed her, looked at the young man's ID once more, then closed the fold and tossed it back to him. He made no move to intercept it, letting it fall at his feet.

"So you're like a mall cop," she said.

"I'm a private security consultant," he replied, not really correcting her. "My assignment is to ensure that you come to no harm. I apologize for presenting the appearance of stalking you. My instructions were to avoid direct contact if possible. Ideally, you weren't supposed to know I was even here."

Kaname snorted. "They might want to send someone a little more subtle next time, then," she said. "Like, I don't know, a marching band. OK, so who hired you?"

"That's classified."

Kaname's eyes narrowed. "'Classified'? Seriously? It's classified who hired you to stalk me? Yeah, you're gonna want to re-think that."

"That's for Command to decide," Sagara replied stiffly. "I'm just a soldier. I do what I'm told to the best of my ability." Lindsey and Kaname just stared at him, once again left without any real response by his strangely unanswerable matter-of-factness. When they didn't reply, he picked up his knife and ID and went on, "With your permission, Miss Willows, Miss Chidori, I will return to my duties. If I may be dismissed?"

Kaname blinked at him, then decided there would just be no percentage in chasing this car any further up the block right now. "Um... all right." She gave Sosuke a brief salute, which he crisply returned. Beside her, Lindsey saluted as well, if not as vigorously. "You're dismissed, sergeant."

"Thank you, ma'm," he replied, before making an about-face and heading back towards the campus Commons.

Puzzled, Kaname watched as Sosuke retreated down the hill. "... why the hell did he call me by my middle name?" she asked nobody in particular.

"Beats me, Kaname Chidori Sterling. Now, about my math homework?" Lindsey asked with a grin.

"Right, right," the taller girl acquiesced, and together, the two friends headed up the hill to the Castle.

"Oh, yeah," Lindsey added as if she'd just thought of it, "and I'm gonna have to get rid of this gun. But that's OK. Boba'll know what to do with it... "

"DSM Panic! Mission 1: The New Student Is A Sergeant?" (a Symphony of the Sword Mini-Story) by Philip Jeremy Moyer with Benjamin D. Hutchins
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