Week 24: Darya talks to Ace and Parvati.

Darya stood nervously in her room, her keepsake box she kept under her bed open and the contents scattered over her desk. She was wearing an shirt, the buttons of which she occansionally fiddled with, and she kept on looking towards her door.

Finally, she sighed and said out loud "Bell, if Parvati and Ace are in, can you call them here please?" she asked.

When he heard Darya's summons, via bell, Ace was sitting on the coutch once again surounded by datapads, doing some sort of research into flying recon-drones for the SY mission later in the week. It wasn't going very well though so Ace put down his pad and made his way over to Darya's room.

He knocked gently on the door. "Darya. It's Ace. You wanted to see me?"

Parvati had just gotten back in when Bell had let her know about Darya's request. She frowned worried for a few moments and checked quickly over her memories to see if she'd accidently done anything that might have caused offense either to Darya or, more likely, someone for whom Darya was speaking. She honestly couldn't think of anything, other than teaching Pinkie she'd been out most of last week.

She headed to the main living area and dropping her bag headed over to Darya's room quietly smiling thinly to Darya when she got close. "you wanted to see me?" she asks with some trepidation.

Darya's door opened, and she allowed the other two agents into her room. She pointed at the two chairs by her workstation, one for her and one for Dusty in his new body, and gestured for them to sit down.

"I'm sorry for throwing something like this on you two." said Darya, her voice slightly shaky. She reached for a glass of water on her bedside table. "But...I need to tell you this, before we go into Japan, so that I know someone will be around even if the mission goes wrong." She took a sip of water, then continued. "There's someone...I need someone I can trust to look after her, if anything happens to me." Reaching over, Darya handed them each a photograph of a woman, looking like a mix of Russian and Chinese nationality, sitting up in a hospital bed waving at the camera and smiling. "This is...my sister, Natasha. She...she's been in a coma for the last eighteen years. Only recently have I gotten the funds to treat her. But...she's still not well, she still hasn't recovered. And..." her eyes swelled slightly with tears "If anything goes wrong, if I die...I need to know someone is there to help her..."

Ace stood there, stunned. Darya had talked about her sister before, never in much detail, and Ace knew that she was the most important person to Darya. The person that Darya had dedicated half of her life to helping, and to suddenly ask the two of them to look after the most important person in her life meant, well, it meant a number of things. It meant that Darya was really scared that she was goign to die, yet was going on with the mission anyway. It meant that Darya trusted these two people she had only recently met with the safe keeping of the most important person in her life. And that meant a lot.

Ace looked at the pictures scattered on the bed.

"Eighteen years? I didn't know she was so ill." Ace looked up at Darya and locked eyes with her. "Of course. I'll do everything I can to help. Starting with this: Don't go on the mission. Darya, if you are this worried about her, about you, don't go. You wouldn’t have shared something so personal, someone so important to you unless you didn't think you were coming back and if you are that worried then why are you going on the mission? There will be other missions; you don't need the money that badly, do you?"

Parvati sat silent for a long moment, this was not what she had expected when she had sat down and it took more than a few minutes before she spoke. Unlike Ace she made no statement that Darya shouldn't go. They were all Kshatriya and Yama would claim even the mightiest of them eventually, such was their fate and more than that such was their duty, their Dharma even.

"You have my word on it." Parvati says softly and calmly. "I will do all that I can to protect her and heal her." She remains almost unmoving her hands folded calmly in her lap.

Darya rubbed her eyes to remove the tears. The viral modifier hadn't quite finished it's work, meaning that her appearance was a weird mix of Japanese and Russian. "It's...not a matter of the money, and I don't think I'm going to die on this mission...I think we've planned it well, and I think we'll be okay...but it's more just in case, you know? I wanted you two to know simply so that even if a mission does go horribly wrong, at least one person will not be on it and can look after her...now seemed like a good enough time as any."

She leaned back on her bed. "But...I'm going because I don't trust the Shi Yukioh. They've already forced over a million people from their homes, and I don't know what they're doing to the other ones left inside the country. If they are hurting people, I want to find out, and I want to show it to the world and I want to make them stop. That's...why I'm going."

She paused. "That, and I'm one of the best at seeing ninjas."

"We have dangerous jobs. We never know when it could all go wrong and a bullet through the brain is still fatal, most of the time. Even for Agents. I... yes. Of course I'll look after her. I'll do everything I can, same as you would. Though I do hope you are not planning on dieing any time soon."

Ace glanced at the two women in the room, and locked eyes with Darya.

"Why don't you show us where she is? Can we visit?"

Darya nodded, and pulled up a map of Russia on her computer. "She's here." she said, zooming in on one city in Siberia. "Yakutsk neurological hospital. It's a little, out of the way place, mostly supported by the UIG...and my paychecks", she said, laughing slightly. "You're both welcome to come with me to visit at anytime, if you want...I'm probably going to be heading up there next week."

"Yeah, I'd like that. I think I should meet her, even if she don't know I'm there. You are a good person, Darya. I won't let you down."