Editing City Series:Volume5b Chapter20 (section)

===Rosetta’s Journal===

We are on the train to Paris. I believe it is around 4 o’clock in the afternoon.

This our first time to really relax in two days so I will use this time to write my journal entry.

First I will write about the day before yesterday. Early in the morning of July 30 Lady Beretta spent around an hour flying around after defeating the black dragon until finally crash landing in a vineyard in the mountains of Auxerre. She ended her Recréa and appeared from a closet-like box on the floor of the secondary cockpit. However she had passed out from exhaustion. I managed to carry her about a mile away from the Lourd de Marionnette before the sunrise. It took her a full day to recover.

I was glad I had brought her luggage – including a change of clothing.

She woke up late last night. She returned to the Lourd de Marionnette to try and Recréa into it again – I did not accompany her – but she returned after giving up because the spare fuel tank was almost entirely used up. She said the Excède Emblème – the transformation that let her fly and run really fast – burned through the fuel like crazy.

We discussed a great many things in the darkness last night.

What had happened to the people of Herlde. How far this vineyard was from the closest town. That I felt bad we could not return the Lourd de Marionnette to the Germans. Whether Mother Rose was okay or not. How we would get back into Paris. And more.

She thanked me once during it all. She remembered everything I had told her during the battle with the black dragon.

And she told me something else.

When we were in Herlde she had said there was something she had to tell me. She began that discussion by asking me a question.

“Rosetta. What if you had to kill someone? What would you do if you knew the only way to have what you wanted was to erase someone from this world?”

My answer was simple. A method requiring that must be wrong so you would need to come up with a method that allowed you to remain with that person.

She looked troubled when I said that but she also nodded in a satisfied way.

And she said something else.

“You see Rosetta. I think I want to liberate France…and to fight toward that end. But doing that might mean losing someone.”

“Can’t you think of some way to not lose them?”

“I can try. I didn’t make it in time for Phillip though. But I think I still can for her. I won’t give up and I’ll fight. Because I want to save her too.”

That seemed like the Lady Beretta I knew.

I had no idea what she was talking about but I will try to remember it. I asked her who that person was and she said they were a relative of hers back in America. When I asked if they were close to death due to some kind of disease she smiled a little and rubbed my head.

I was apparently reading too much into it.

We then ate some of the vineyard’s grapes for a late-night meal and walked throughout the night. We used the position of the moon to leave the mountains to the east and arrive in the city of Auxerre. Lady Beretta sold some grapes she had gathered in her coat without me noticing and used that money to buy train tickets. A lot happened.

<Right now Lady Beretta is jotting down some kind of notes in her own journal on the side table by the window. She is writing her own name and some names I do not recognize and joining them with lines while also writing down a lot of years and dates to make some kind of calculation.

But she must not like the results she is getting because she occasionally sighs.>

She seems to be worrying over something. But I am sure she will find an answer eventually. She always does.

She opened up to me. But. But there is one thing I have not told her. It is true I told her so much while inside that Lourd de Marionnette. I truly believed everything I said. But I was also afraid.

I was fine at first but I realized something upon hearing the dragon’s scream.

–I was inside a machine designed to bring harm.

From that moment until we crash landed I clutched Lady Beretta’s stripped-off clothing to my chest and trembled there in the secondary cockpit. Whenever she moved and beat down that dragon I would either hear it screaming or begging her to stop and I had to bite down on her sleeve to bear with it. She did not like the screams either but she thought they were necessary to protect us.

I do not know why it scared me so much.

I have felt like this in the past. Like when I thought about the blood while cooking and wondered what would happen if I cut my own hand with the knife. The difficulty breathing I felt then was very similar.

When Lady Beretta finally ended the Recréa I wept and held her unconscious body to me. I was so happy that she was no longer fighting and no longer part of that weapon. It was such a relief.

And when I carried her outside I screamed at the state of the Lourd de Marionnette I had been riding inside. I slumped to the ground with Lady Beretta in my arms. The Lourd de Marionnette that had been wielding that spear and soaring through the sky had its clothing torn and its cream color stained with dark blood.

Something about it made no sense to me.

Lady Beretta had managed to protect us by doing all that but she could not have known that would be the case until it was over. What was she thinking when she began to fight? Why was she so confident that fighting would have such a positive result?

It makes no sense to me how you can know an unseen result will be a positive thing.

If that is what it takes to protect people then I must not be able to protect anyone. Lady Beretta said some cool things and thanked me but I could not even say that and felt a mixture of guilt and satisfaction from her praise.

I was briefly glad that I am a Belle de Marionnette. I might be a machine but I can continue to evolve in accordance with my will and feelings. I am different from those weapons – such as the handgun that fell from the sky on the night of the Normandy landing operation – that have no will of their own and simply exist to kill people.

I cannot tell Lady Beretta how much of a relief that is.

She is so much better than me. She has the confidence to properly use such great power and I simply do not. Sir Phillip had that same ability. They are both so strong in a way I am not. During the school festival I wrote in my journal how much I hated simply being protected by her but now I am not so sure what to think.

Maybe I only exist to be protected. Maybe I am only a Belle de Marionnette which makes me less than them.