trans_9 | Do As I Say, And Not As I Do [Closed]

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Do As I Say, And Not As I Do [Closed]

This was a conspiracy. However Sherry and Vivio's respective parents had come to the conclusion that it would be a good idea for them to room together, must've have certainly forgotten how much Sherry disliked being stuck in small rooms with people she barely knew.

And a few words here and there when Sherry went to download a new book or watch a movie in the Media Library didn't count as a long and lasting friendship between children. Be nice, her parents had said.

Well, she hadn't said anything particularly blunt lately, did that count? Sherry rolled over to her side in the dark room and looked at the back of her roommate's head. Their parents had done their final check up on the girls before turning out the lights and going of to do whatever it was adults did once they sent their children away.

"Vivio. Vivio. Are you awake?" Sherry whispered loudly.

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Sherry sighed at Vivio and trudged to the door. Hindsight was 20/20: maybe she should've just made a run for it, and thrown Vivio under the proverbial bus.

Claire sighed as the girls marched past, closing the door behind them and dropping a hand on Sherry's shoulder as they walked, just to make sure Sherry didn't decide to make a break for it.

"My little ringleader," she muttered quietly, doing her best not to find it funny. This was serious parenting time, after all.

Vivio walked on, hanging her head.

To her, she was probably a dead girl. Or at the very least, a punished one.

Sacred Heart hovered right behind Vivio, wanting to comfort the girl, but held back. If Nanoha came in and saw it doing so, she'd be mad at him as well!

The elevator dinged, and out of the doors came one of the other girl's mothers - who sighed in relief when she saw Claire with Vivio and Sherry in tow. "Oh good," Nanoha exhaled, "You found them. Did they get too far?"

"Barely got out the door," she replied, giving Nanoha a slight smile, steering Sherry into the elevator. She wasn't going to let go of the little girl until they were back upstairs.

Nanoha wasn't the only one in the elevator; Vivio's other mother was also there, and the worry was clear on her face, especially when she saw how terrified Vivio seemed to be.

"Are you two okay?"

Oh, no. Worst nightmare confirmed. Nanoha-mama and Fate-mama are here.

Vivio cowed a bit, looking down, shuffling her feet.

"...we're okay..." Vivio said.

Oh great, both sets of parents had been on high alert. Sherry kept her eyes trained onto ground and tried not to look completely irritated with the failure of her plan. It was even harder to keep the annoyance out of her voice, and she failed for the most part.

"We didn't go anywhere."

"Well, that's not as bad as it could have been," Nanoha said, closing her eyes - and then putting a firm hand on Vivio's shoulder as she steered her into the elevator - that didn't mean it was good, either.

"Leon's upstairs, Claire - I think he was going to check the sky lobby first."

Claire nodded her head, relaxing her grip on Sherry's shoulder a little once the doors closed.

"He'll hopefully be back by the time we get upstairs, then." She knew Sherry would be hoping for otherwise, but even if he wasn't there, she was just going to call him, anyway.

Oh, he was back. A call from the Sky Lobby to the ground one told him that a pair of girls had passed through, only to be retrieved by a redhead. So after breathing a sigh of relief, he decided that he'd meet them there.

So, when the elevator doors opened again, there he was, in the hallway, and he looked none too thrilled at the moment.

Oh boy. The stone of dread that had been sitting high in Sherry's chest dropped down into her stomach. She glanced up once at Claire, and then back at her father before immediately looking at the nice, red carpet on the ground.

"...uh-oh." Her shoulders sagged slightly. She had a pretty good idea where this was going, and it wasn't ice cream.

Vivio looked at Leon and realized that she was PROBABLY wishing Nanoha was the one doing the talking at this moment.

On a scale of 1 to 10 on being scary? Leon was ranking at "Vita", right about now.

No, wait, "Signum".

"...meep..." Vivio peeped out.

"Go back into your room," he commanded in a low, dark tone, "and wait."

The adults had to decide how very dead those two were.

Nanoha let go of Vivio's shoulder so she could do just that, understanding Leon's meaning. "We'll come talk to you after you've had a chance to think about what you two did."

And after they've talked, of course.

Sherry's bangs fell into her eyes, and all for the better if you asked her. It meant that the withering glare her father had laid on her was at least mitigated by them. "Yessir," she mumbled and did her best not to sigh. At least, not loudly.

The girls hurried inside their room and Sherry closed the door behind them with a click that rang sharply of finality. She glanced at Vivio. "It's fine if you blame everything on me; it was my idea, anyway. The less trouble I can mitigate from you is probably for the better." At least Vivio's parents were three times less scary than her father right now.

Sherry ticked off the things her parents were likely to take away from her: she was probably, without a doubt, grounded. Her electronic reader would probably be taken, too. There was definitely going to be a lecture about not sneaking off, since her parents seemed to enjoy The Lecture. Depending on the length of her grounding, she could probably deal with the punishment of having her reader taken away. Sherry flopped back on her bed and stared at the ceiling.

How had they caught them so quickly?

Vivio also let out a small, meekly "Yessir" before following Sherry into their room. Vivio was a lot more scared than Sherry was - she had a bit more at stake than Sherry did at being grounded. Nanoha and Fate could take Sacred Heart away - which pretty much equated to "no magic" - and with her as the Media Library's librarian, she could actually be punished for doing something reckless.

"...no. No, I can't do that, Sherry." Vivio said. "This is my fault just as much as it was yours. I should have done more to stop you... to stop us. I knew this was a bad idea and I should have spoken up before it got this way..."

Meanwhile, back with the parents!

Fate wasn't a stern parent. Not at all. She spoiled her child a bit, was the type to help her stand rather than let her stand on her own, and was generally the parent you'd go to when you want to get away with something.

But even she had to agree that some sort of action needed to be taken with this. Disobeying them was one thing, but disobeying them and attempting to sneak out into an unfamiliar city, on an unfamiliar planet, at night was something completely different.

"So... what are we going to do?"

Yes, Fate was horrible with disciplining. So it's up to the others to think of a suitable punishment. ~~Don't worry, girls, she'll at least make sure they're not too harsh.~~

Leon was good at being the stern parent, or, at the least, he was good at being stern, the whole parent thing was still a work in progress. Though once the girls disappeared to their room he did drop the glare.

Not that he could entirely blame them for wanting to go out. It was their first time off the ship in Who Knows How Long, and on the surface, this place didn't seem that dangerous. But going out, unsupervised, at night, on an alien planet was definitely on the list of things Sherry was clearly Not Allowed To Do.

"Ground them 'til they're thirty." That seemed fair, right?

It sucked that the kids had felt the need to disobey one of the few rules they'd laid down, but Sherry was getting to that point where she was starting to push her boundaries. While Claire was habitually more lenient about boundaries because she herself was a pusher and hating being a hypocrite... she recognized they needed to be in place.

Of course, she was also here to make sure that Leon didn't go overboard with the punishment. She glanced over at him, arching an eyebrow.

"Maybe until the end of the week, and they can't leave the hotel without a parent," she amended, clearing her throat.

Nanoha frowned in thought. On the one hand, she was the stricter of the two, and she didn't quite disagree with Leon's first impulse to ground them for a while. On the other hand... "...we need to be stern, but we also need to remember that we might not get another chance for shore leave for a long time," she pointed out. "It might be a bit too cruel to be too harsh this week."

"What if they have to go out with a parent, but we hold off on the grounding until we're back on the ship?" She looked at Leon. "And then it can be for as long as we think we need."

"That sounds fair," Fate said. "It really would be too cruel to keep them from enjoying the free time we were given. Like Nanoha said, we might not get another shore leave for a long time..."

Plus, the girls would ~~probably~~ most likely be incredibly upset or mad at their parents if they were confined to the hotel for the rest of their stay, and Fate was sure the others didn't want that.

Nanoha glanced sidelong at Fate. "But," she interjected. "They still need to understand why what they did was wrong. This doesn't mean they get out of a talking-to."

Feh, you women and your being 'reasonable.' It's not as if he suggested drop-kicking them out of a window.

Leon gave a bit of a look as the punishment got progressively lighter to virtually non-existent, but he rolled with it. He never really had to punish Sherry before this, and punishing her while punishing someone else's kid along with her was awkward territory, so he didn't push.

Instead he looked at his watch. "We should let them stew for five more minutes before we go in." And they needed a gameplan for when they faced their kids.

"Good cop, bad cop?"

"Probably the best way to handle it, yeah." Claire exhaled, tilting her head to the side a little. She almost thought having to go back on the ship after this would be punishment enough, but Sherry had oddly always coped better with living on a space ship than most of the adults. The type of punishments that would work for some likely wouldn't, on her.

Grounding her from TV, for example, would likely be completely pointless.

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