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[estirose]

This is kind of a post for random comment-sized fics. I'll be putting them in the comments and indexing them as needed.

Note that most of the Garo entries take place in a kind of High School AU set in the world of Kamen Rider Fourze. Yes, it's complicated. Some others take place in the Go-Busters universe.

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GARO Makai Senki, HS AU, Mio reads her penpal's letter

[estirose]

PGP is a way of encrypting and signing emails (and other things, but it's used a lot in emails); you need to have a private key (used for decrypting messages, more or less) and a public key (for encrypting messages, mostly). I figured it would be easy enough for both characters to use.
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Mio sat down at the computer. She enjoyed corresponding with Marie-san, who was more than willing to talk to her about what it felt like to be a Mage in America. She hadn't convinced Marie-san to find a husband and settle down to get married, but she supposed that was a quirk with some mages. Especially Marie-san's kind, the pyrokinetics, who were usually too busy defending other peoples' families to start their own. (At least the good ones were. The bad ones were usually the ones that ended up passing on their genes.)

She ran Marie-san's encoded message through PGP, through her key. Marie-san had taught her to use the encoding software in order to email messages back and forth on such a sensitive topic. Not that most people wouldn't think that the two of them were discussing fantasy games - Marie-san was also active, as a cover, with a local group that played role-playing games once a week, mostly something called "Pathfinder" - but it was better to be careful.

"Mio-san," Marie-san had written. "I had wanted to talk to you for a while." Her sentence caused Mio to frown, and she wondered if her friend had used the wrong tenses by accident. Japanese was not easy for the American. But she continued reading Marie-san's letter. "Your friend is doing well - he's going to be a good Mover, isn't he? Fire is a difficult element for him, isn't it? It was hard for me, too."

Mio had to smile at that. Marie-san had told her a little of how she'd discovered she was a mage, and she was glad that Leo hadn't manifested that way. "Fire is mostly moving chemical bonds," Marie-san wrote, and Mio had a feeling that she'd been limited by what words she knew. But she'd tell Leo anyway what Marie-san had written.

It was sometimes hard to talk to Marie-san, given her English needed improvement and so did Marie-san's Japanese. But it was important. She'd have to ask Marie-san to write things out in English when it came to Mage abilities. She could get an English speaker far easier than Marie-san could find a Japanese one.

"He should not give up hope," Marie-san wrote next. "If he can do air now, he will learn the others later. Tell him 'work hard'."

Mio nodded at that. It might help Leo to have some encouragement - if he could concentrate on air, it might save him.

"I look forward to your reply." Marie-san wrote short letters because she was embarrassed about her Japanese proficiency.

She shouldn't be, Mio knew, but there was little she could say. Instead, she opened her own text program to compose a letter in English, hoping she was good enough that Marie-san would answer back.