Ranma belongs to Rumiko Takahashi. Noir is written by Ryouei Tsukimura
and directed by Kouichi Mashimo.
Gensou Rakuen
By Thermopyle
Thermopyle.anifics.com
#####
Chloe's last knife flew through the air and embedded itself within the
Japanese man's gun-arm when he brought it up to defend himself, causing
the yakuza thug to yell out in pain. She took the chance the
distraction gave her and rushed forward as best she could on her wounded
leg, hoping he wouldn't recover in time to shoot her again, this time in
a more fatal location.
He did.
She was almost there, just a few feet away and about to make a desperate
grab for the knife, when he realized how close she was and swung the gun
around, wildly, desperation and fear on his face despite the difference
in size between the two of them, and fired.
The bullet smashed into her left shoulder and she was knocked away,
falling on her back to the floor. The pain flooded through her, both
from the sensation of tearing skin and muscle and from the impact when
she hit, and she was stunned momentarily. Quickly regaining her senses,
she pushed up with her other arm and shoved both legs out, trying to
jump to the side in case he fired again.
In her pain, she'd forgotten about the previous, less distracting
injury, and when she tried to use her right leg the pain flared back up,
causing her to collapse again as her movement became uncoordinated and
too weak to succeed.
Why wasn't she dead yet?
Blocking the pain with a great deal of mental effort and deliberately
slowing her breathing because she knew that if she was to survive, it
would only be through desperate, unfailing action, she looked up at the
gunman.
He was staring down at her now, blood dripping from both hands. In one,
her knife was held in a fist, and the blood was from his other arm, from
where the blade had been removed. In the opposite hand, his gun was
held and blood could be seen leaking out the cuff of his suit and
running down the body and barrel of the gun before falling to the ground
below. His breathing was rapid, much more so than her own, and he had a
furious look on his face.
He tossed the knife aside, still looking at her, then raised the gun to
aim at her face. "You little bitch," he said, in Japanese, which she
knew, "you cost me a good job today. When you meet my boss and comrades
in hell, give them my regards."
As he squeezed the trigger, another form shot out from behind the nearby
trees and its arm flashed in a scratching motion towards the man's. The
bullet went wide, impacting on a nearby tree, and his sleeve was
instantly shredded, bits of cloth scattering into the air around it, and
the skin bared beneath was ripped, long trenches of gore appearing, deep
enough that the bone was evident in several places. The man dropped the
gun, screaming once again, holding it to his chest and cradling it
protectively with his other hand as they both looked at the newest
arrival in astonishment.
It was a boy, about ten years old, just like Chloe, and whereas the
yakuza had scratches on just his arm, the boy had them all over his
body, albeit less severely. His filthy clothes, some kind of martial
arts dogi, were barely intact, and even the few areas that they covered
could be seen to have barely-dried scabs running underneath them from
the more openly displayed regions.
Not having any idea what was going on, or how the boy had done that,
Chloe managed to push herself up, favoring her right leg and being
careful not to move the injured arm. The boy, an odd gleam in his eyes,
turned at her movement to look at her, and then when the man, tears
running down his face as he tried to hold his arm motionless, reached
down to pick the gun back up with his uninjured hand, the boy whirled
back around and... hissed at him, like a cat. He froze.
Unsure of whether the boy was friend, foe, or just some wandering
psychopath, Chloe stood slowly, carefully. The boy ignored her, so she
moved away from him, her eyes never wavering as she watched him, unsure
of his capabilities. He stayed crouched in front of the yakuza thug,
staring at the man intently as if the two of them were cat and mouse,
and the cat wanted to play.
Backing up to almost fifteen feet away where her knife lay on the
shortly-cut grass, she picked it up with her off hand, wiping the dirt
that had stuck to it from it's impact with the ground off on her cloak.
She'd trained to use both, but her left hand, the injured one, still had
the advantage. That wouldn't stop her from killing with her right,
however.
Taking advantage of the man's frozen terror, she snapped the knife
forward in a throwing motion. It hit him in the throat, catching him
completely by surprise, and he fell to his knees, clutching at his
throat as a look of terror filled his face. He clearly didn't know what
to do, whether to try pulling it out or if that would simply aggravate
the situation. A few moments later and it became a moot point.
The boy moved his attention from the corpse ahead of him back to Chloe,
who stood still, unsure of what to do next. Witnesses had to be killed,
but she was already injured, and she'd thrown her knife away to kill her
target's last bodyguard because she wasn't sure if she could get close
enough to the boy to simply stab the man to death, instead. Would the
boy let her kill him, when he'd already shown some odd fighting ability?
His clothes, his feral state, the scratches all over his body, and the
way he'd come out of the forest surrounding her target's mansion
suggested he was some kind of wild kid who'd developed mental issues
after being abandoned at some point. So was he capable of telling
anybody about her or what he'd seen, and if he was, would he be
believed?
Wondering for a brief moment what that child would do, Chloe quickly
came to a decision. She stepped forward, careful not to hurt her leg or
swing her torso enough to aggravate her shoulder, and began to move
towards the gun that lay on the ground several feet away from the boy
and corpse.
He did nothing in response, other than continue to study her closely, so
her actions gained a bit of confidence, although she didn't let her
guard down. She soon reached the gun and bent to pick it up, keeping
her eyes on the boy the whole time despite the incredible pain coming
from both of her gun wounds.
Slipping her finger into the trigger guard, she raised the gun to point
at him. "Sorry kid," she said quietly, and he tensed, then she pulled
the trigger.
He moved to the side, evading the bullet completely, but did nothing
else.
She adjusted her aim with a bit of concern. She hadn't seen him move.
She fired again.
He moved back.
She began pulling the trigger as quickly as she could, the shots never
quite hitting him as he began to run about in random directions, but
always staying within thirty or forty feet away from her.
When the last shot was spent, she tossed the gun to the side, deeming it
useless. The boy, still once again, watched as she pulled her knife out
from the man's throat, then wiped it clean on his clothes before
slipping it into a harness beneath her cloak.
The kid was crazy. Leaving him alive would cause no problems.
She turned and walked away, towards where she was supposed to be picked
up, and then heard him move to follow.
Chloe sat silently in the back seat of the limo, wishing fervently that
the damn boy would die and leave her alone. He'd followed her all the
way to the rendezvous point, then, when she was forced to answer
questions about who he was and why he was following her, the men who
were to escort her back to the village had been amused at her answer,
obviously thinking that she was mentally incapable of killing a boy her
own age. They soon found out it wasn't a mental problem when she told
them to shoot him, and they all failed.
Having regained a healthy respect for her, as well as a certain sullen
mood at so having embarrassed themselves, they had agreed to leave the
boy as he was, and simply depart as planned. Chloe had gotten into the
limo, and they'd started to drive off. The boy, obviously not wanting
to be left behind, ran to the car in his strange four-legged lope, and
ripped a hole in the door before jumping in to resume staring at her.
She was the only person sitting in the back seat, and she was too
injured to fight such a lunatic, so she did nothing. The men had been
forced to do the same, since the only way they could try shooting at him
again was to stop the car, get out, and then shoot into it, and there
was no telling if the boy would stay put if she were to exit first out
of a desire to not get shot herself. So they, too, did nothing, and the
car continued towards where the private jet back to France was waiting.
The hole in the side of the car, making the wind blow rather loudly as
they drove, as well as the intent study she received from the crazy cat-
boy sharing a much-too-confined space with her, was really beginning to
get annoying.
Despite that, she soon found herself drifting, getting sleepy after the
night's events, and was about to slip off into unconsciousness when
something heavy landed in her lap.
Her eyes shot wide open and she looked down, letting out a whimper of
pain from where the crazy kid was curled up on her legs. After shoving
him to the floorboard violently with her usable hand, she quickly
slipped it back within her cloak and drew the knife, trying to stab him
with it before he recovered.
She missed, and in the small lunge forward, managed to unbalance herself
as her leg once again failed to move properly. She fell on her face
beside the knife, which was embedded partially into the floorboard, and
the boy simply sat next to her, staring once again with a hint of
playfulness and something close to reproach in his feral eyes.
Glaring at him, she pulled herself back up to the seat behind her and
resolved to stay awake from then on.
She lay now on a table in the jet, a plastic sheet beneath her to catch
the blood, as a Soldats physician inspected her injuries. The leg, she
knew, had just been grazed, so there was no bullet to be removed and
only the cut to be sealed with some number of stitches. The shoulder,
however, had been hit regularly and the bullet had, after impacting hard
enough to chip bone, remained in her flesh and would need to be dug out.
Noir or not, that wasn't a level of pain she was eager to experience,
and she accepted the suggestion of the doctor to have drugs administered
to keep her unconscious for that part of the operation. As she slipped
off to sleep, she hoped that the crazy boy that nobody had been able to
get rid of wouldn't try jumping on her again and making an even bigger
mess of things.
Chloe started awake as the plane touched down on her native soil. She
was back in France, and would soon be rejoining Artena, who would look
after her until her next mission was necessary.
She was no longer on the table and instead was lying on a comfortable
couch, a blanket draped over her body, underneath which she found
herself to be naked except for panties and the bandages on her leg and
shoulder. Both injuries were somewhat painful, but much less so than
they had been right after she had received them. The drugs would
probably finish wearing off soon and the pain would return, but she
could deal with that without any problems.
Sitting up, she tossed the blanket aside and moved to stand. She
stopped in surprise when she saw the boy in the room and looking at her
with those strange eyes of his. What was his problem? Presumably
nobody had been able to get him to leave her in peace while she slept,
but apparently he had been deemed safe enough to be left alone with her
while she did so.
Ignoring him for the moment, she carefully pulled on the change of
clothes that had been set aside for her, then belted on her various
harnesses, which had already been stocked with knives, and wrapped her
cloak about herself before sitting back down. The plane was still
moving, so there were a few more minutes before they finished taxiing
around the airport and were able to get out.
Looking back at the boy to study him in return, she saw that, even
though his dogi was still in miserable shape and he had smears of dirt
on various parts of his body, he was remarkably fit for their age. He
was also fully healed from all of the scratches that had covered him-
-she looked at the digital clock on the nearby wall--only fifteen hours
before. How was that possible?
He'd been awake both when she'd been knocked out, and since she woke up,
had he slept at all in that time? If so, had anybody tried again to
kill him, or had they figured keeping out of his way was the safest
option?
Either way, it looked like Artena would probably have to decide what to
do with him. She'd already proved herself incapable of doing so in her
current condition, and none of the men on the plane would be able to,
either, whether that was from lack of opportunity or from lack of taking
advantage of some opportunity that she didn't even know about.
Once the plane pulled to a stop, the doctor knocked on the door and
entered. He wasn't surprised to find her awake, and quickly ran through
a set of questions with her about how she felt, just to make sure that
he'd done his job properly. Once that was done with, he left and she
followed him out the door, the boy trailing behind them as expected.
There was another car waiting for them on the runway, not far from the
stairway leading out of the plane, and she said nothing to any of the
people about before immediately going to get into the car, holding the
door open for the boy because she definitely didn't want to endure
another windy ride. He jumped in after a moment's hesitation, and she
stepped inside herself, then once she was settled, the driver switched
gears and they headed off.
They drove for hours through farming country, the last stretch being a
dirt road many miles long, before they arrived at the village. The
driver stopped at the outskirts of town, knowing he wasn't very welcome
within, and they exited the car and she began to walk, the boy
scampering about alongside her. Everybody she passed bowed in respect,
although there were a number of curious glances at her companion, but
she did nothing to acknowledge their gestures and simply moved on. Soon
they were past the town and headed for the manor itself.
Now the boy was behaving a bit more wildly, jumping into trees and
chasing off after butterflies, and despite her hopes that he'd lose
track of her while running off, he did not, and always reappeared after
several minutes. She'd been expecting him to wear himself out and
simply collapse into sleep, since they'd both been awake when they
arrived at the airport not long after dawn and he hadn't, as far as she
knew, had any sleep during the night, but he was still behaving as
actively as when she'd first seen him the night before. Jetlag didn't
seem to have any hold on this boy.
Soon enough it was getting dark and they still had several hours of
travel ahead of them, so she unwrapped her cloak and laid down a bit off
the side of the path, covering herself with it for a bit of added
shelter. Almost immediately the boy tried to jump into her lap again,
which she found odd since he'd left her alone when she was sleeping
before, but she simply shoved him to the side, after which he kept his
distance. She fell asleep wondering how human eyes could glow in the
darkness like his did.
When she woke the next morning it was just after dawn, and the pain from
her injuries had abated somewhat, to be replaced by an added general
soreness in the damaged parts of her body. It wasn't too uncomfortable,
and she was able to ignore it just as she had after being shot in the
first place.
Standing up, she saw that the boy was awake, and she wondered yet again
if he had had any sleep or if he was just perpetually alert, as seemed
to be the case. Dismissing it as unimportant, she walked back over to
the path and was again on her way. The boy quickly followed.
By midmorning she could see the manor and the grape fields surrounding
it, and she found herself walking slightly faster. It'd been about a
week since she'd left, and she was eager to return home, to Artena.
Soon she was almost running through the fields, ignoring the burning in
her leg as she overworked it and possibly split the stitches. She
looked about, knowing that somewhere out here, Artena would be attending
to the grapes as she usually was at this time of day.
A flash of shiny-brown caught her eye and she stopped, turning, to see
Artena stand up and do the same, looking towards her with a warm smile,
a basket full of fruit on the ground at her side. Suddenly Chloe was
flying forward, going as fast as she could, and then found herself in
Artena's arms.
"Hello, child," said a pleasant voice into her ear.
She looked up and smiled. "Hello, Artena-sama. I'm back!"
"Yes, I see that you are," Artena said, a hint of playfulness in her
voice. "Did you have fun?"
Chloe heard a sound from behind her, and turned, and she felt Artena's
posture change as she looked up. A little ways behind them was the boy,
torn clothes hanging loosely, looking upon them with interest.
"Who is this?" Artena asked, a curious note to her tone as she looked at
the pigtailed wild-boy, causing Chloe to hate him for distracting Artena
from her own homecoming.
"He saved my life in Japan," she said, "I tried to kill him, since he
was a witness, but I haven't been able to, nor has anybody else who
tried. He won't quit following me." She hesitated, suddenly aware of
her own slightly labored breath from running and the wetness on her leg,
where several stitches had probably bust. "Should I try again?"
When Artena didn't answer immediately she separated herself from the
older woman and prepared to attack. She could see as she did so that
the boy looked fresh as a daisy, like he hadn't just been chasing her
for the last twenty minutes as she searched for Artena. How did he do
that?!
Slipping her hands beneath her cloak, she grabbed several throwing
knives and quickly snapped her hands forward, releasing them towards the
boy as fast as she could. Throwing several at the same time was nowhere
near as precise, but this time she was trying for coverage, not
accuracy, as she'd already found that he could dodge one at a time with
ease.
Four knives flew through the air, spread out enough and at different
heights so that a normal person couldn't dodge in either direction fast
enough to avoid getting hit, yet they were still close enough together
that somebody who stood still would get hit by at least one--more, if
they tried too late to get out of the way. Rather than trying to duck
or run to the side, or even take cover behind some grape vines, he
jumped.
Fifteen feet, straight up.
Gawking in surprise for a brief moment, she took advantage of the
situation and threw some more knives at him, knowing that he didn't have
enough maneuverability to dodge them as he fell. The knives were on
target, exactly where she wanted them to be, spread out over an area of
about a square foot centered on his torso. Before they were even close
enough for him to block, he swung his arm out in front of the knives as
if to defend himself from them.
Despite the impossibility of it, his action worked, and the knives were
all knocked out of the air, hitting the ground at about the same time as
he did. He never touched them, they just... flew aside, as if hitting
an invisible wall, or being hit BY an invisible wall....
Chloe stared at the boy in consternation, who looked back in apparent
boredom. How dare he embarrass her so in front of Artena-sama?
Trying once again, she grabbed several knives and whipped them at him,
this time not even trying for accuracy, hoping that if one or two flew
wild he wouldn't have time to react. Instead, he ran forward, right at
her! Just before the knives would have thunked home into his body, he
leapt through the air, twisting as he did so, dodging each one. One of
the knives did go in the wrong direction, but didn't even get close to
hitting him, two others were a bit off and he was able to slip by with
feet to spare, and the last slipped through a hole in his dogi before
continued on its way, having gotten within mere inches of his flesh.
She didn't have time to react to his charge, she was only beginning to
reach for another knife when his body impacted with hers, his weight
landing on her chest and knocking her to the ground, the pain from both
the hit and the landing causing her to cry out despite her best efforts.
Her cloak had been closed when he landed on her, and his weight was
keeping the flaps immobile, preventing her from reaching any of the
weapons contained within. While she contemplated what to do, looking up
at the hateful boy, he bent down to put his face right above hers, then
licked her on the nose.
She punched him in the head, with the arm that wasn't screaming at her
for mercy, and he let himself be knocked aside. She knew he could have
stayed put if he wanted to, he was obviously toying with her for some
reason.
Breathing heavily, she pushed herself up, again favoring opposite arms
and legs, then drew out her dagger and moved to attack at close range,
instead. She didn't think she would be successful at that, either, but
Artena-sama seemed to want the boy taken care of, and she wasn't going
to let her down, or dishonor that child as her future partner.
"Chloe."
She stopped, but didn't take her eyes off the boy. "Yes, Artena-sama?"
"Has he ever jumped on you like that before?"
"No, Artena-sama... twice he jumped into my lap, but never onto my
chest."
"Has he ever tried to hurt you?"
She frowned. "No, Artena-sama, he just... stares at me, like he's
playing a game, and it's my move."
"Very well. That's enough for now, lets go inside and eat."
Chloe turned in confusion, the boy forgotten for the moment, and watched
Artena pick up the basket of grapes and then move towards the manor,
holding it at her side. Looking back over at the boy, she hesitated,
then moved to pick up as many of her knives as she could find, and he
did nothing to obstruct her. When she gave up on finding the last
three, she turned and headed after Artena, and the boy followed behind
her.
With Artena's urging, Chloe went to her room and changed into some more
comfortable clothes, being careful not to upset the bandages any more
than they already had been. Also at Artena's urging, she left her
harnesses in her room and headed back to the kitchen unarmed. It made
her feel nervous, with that boy following her everywhere, but the fact
that he hadn't attacked yet as well as the way he'd easily bested every
effort she made to kill him when she did have weapons consoled her
somewhat, although she'd rather have a knife in her hand if he did
attack, even knowing that it would probably do no good.
When they returned to the dining room, there were three plates set out,
and Artena was already sitting at her usual place. The boy's plate was,
thankfully, not set where that child ate when she came on her infrequent
visits. Chloe sat down in her spot, and, when given permission, began
to eat. The boy simply jumped up onto the table and put his face in the
food, somehow managing to transport the stuff directly up into his mouth
in a manner she didn't quite see, and then by the time she was on her
third bite, he was licking the surface of the plate clean. She stared
for a moment, but when she saw that Artena was continuing as if nothing
had just happened, she resumed eating her own meal in silence, waiting
to see what Artena would say.
Once they were both finished, she looked at Artena expectantly.
"Did the mission go successfully, apart from this boy's... unexpected
participation?" asked the older woman.
Chloe nodded in response. "The target was easily killed, as well as his
bodyguards, but there was one man who had been separated from them for
some reason and he caught me by surprise as I was about to leave. His
first shot hit me in the leg, and I was already down to one knife, so I
threw it as a distraction and then tried to kill him before he
recovered." She hesitated. "I failed, and he was about to shoot me
when the boy arrived and... clawed at his arm, somehow, making him drop
the gun. I killed the man and then tried to do the same to the boy, as
a witness, but was unsuccessful."
Artena was silent, and stared at the boy with a thoughtful expression on
her face, so Chloe looked at him as well, wondering again at the oddity
that he had displayed in his physical capabilities and the way he acted,
as well as why he seemed to be fixated on her.
"Has he ever said anything, given any indication of his identity or why
he's following you around?"
"No, Artena-sama, he hasn't. He's not talked at all, at one point he
hissed, like a cat, at the man who was trying to kill me." Chloe
frowned, remembering what he'd looked like at that time. "When he first
appeared, he had scratches all over his body, but they were gone when I
woke up on the jet yesterday morning, and they shouldn't have been."
"Well," said Artena, "he doesn't seem to be a threat, so don't hit him
anymore. We'll just see what happens and take it from there. For now,
let's get those clothes off and take a look at you, it looks like you're
bleeding again."
"Yes, Artena-sama," she said, then stood up and moved towards the
medical room, taking off her clothes and setting them aside, then
slipping up onto the flat bed contained within for this purpose.
After checking that her shoulder wound was okay despite the fighting
earlier, Artena peeled off the gauze on her leg, which had been soaked
through and pulled painfully at the injury when it came loose. Several
of the stitches had to be re-sewn and she was able to handle the pain
for that well enough, but she was really annoyed at the way Artena kept
having to step around the boy, who seemed to delight in putting himself
in her way.
Soon enough they were done and Artena helped her off the table and
assisted her in putting her clothes back on, which she appreciated. By
then it was around one in the afternoon, since they had arrived several
hours earlier, and Chloe was ready to rest a while, which Artena
supported--Chloe usually took naps in the early afternoon around her
training and reading times, and her day so far had certainly been full,
if not of practice.
After being walked to her room by Artena, with the boy tagging along as
he seemed happy to do, Chloe was put in bed and the curtains drawn shut.
She was about to ask if Artena could tell her a story when the boy
jumped up into the bed and then settled himself down on her stomach,
curling about like a cat and seeming to think the spot was rightfully
his. She reached out to shove him away.
"Stop," said Artena, "let him be. We'll see what happens, remember?"
She nodded, still annoyed at him, and Artena let herself out of the
room, turning the light off as she went.
Chloe lied in bed with the boy's weight on her stomach, happy that he
didn't weigh much for a boy his apparent age, and tried to not think
about the knives that were just out of reach within her wardrobe
cabinet, and how useful it would be to have one of them at this moment.
She was still thinking about that when she fell asleep.
Ranma opened his eyes slowly, cautiously, unused to the idea of having
time to do so. Pops must have some kinda trap planned, some weird
training exercise that would surely teach him something about an obscure
martial arts waking technique. It was the only explanation.
Staying still as his now wide-opened eyes looked about the room he was
in, he wondered at his location. He was lying, curled up, on something
warm and lumpy that was slightly smaller than he was. It was a person,
but definitely not his father.
He listened silently for a few minutes, hearing nothing but his own
breathing, which he was careful to keep controlled and even, and that of
whoever he had been sleeping on, whose breath sounded the same. They
must be sleeping.
Trying to keep his weight stationary as he moved, he raised his head off
of the chest it was lying on, then turned it to the left, to look
upwards upon the person beneath him.
It was a girl with short reddish-purple hair, a lock of it bound into a
ponytail that hung along one side of her face. Her eyes were definitely
not closed, and her mouth was made into a frown as she looked down at
him.
"Ah... who are you," he asked, "and where's my pop?"
Her frown deepened, and something about the expression on her face made
him want to laugh, but instead, he just uncurled himself so that he was
laying lengthwise on top of her, looking straight down at her face and
in a more comfortable position. He noticed her hands balling into fists
as he did so, but she didn't move to hit him.
"He's probably back in Japan," she said. "Where you should still be.
How come you can suddenly talk?"
Back in Japan?
"Hey, what do you mean by that, and where am I?" he demanded, looking
around the room to see stone walls, and that the room was completely
bare except for the bed and a clothes cabinet that stood in one corner.
As he was glancing about, he felt the girl shift beneath him and turned
to look at her, but too late to keep her from hitting him in the side of
the head and knocking him to the floor, landing on his side.
"Ow... what the hell did you do that for?"
Instead of answering, she threw the sheets she laid under to the side
and jumped out of bed herself, in the opposite direction from where she
had pushed him, and ran over to the wardrobe. He heard her pull the
doors open but couldn't see what she got from inside, since the bed was
in the way, so he stood up, still annoyed about being hit like that.
Once he did so, he could see that she had furled a cloak about her
shoulders, somehow managing to buckle the top around her neck already,
and she had a knife in each hand. She was standing in a position that
would allow her to throw them easily if she wanted to, he noticed.
Ranma grinned. "I hope you don't think you could hit me with those."
"Who are you, and why have you been following me around?" she asked,
extending the knives in a threatening gesture.
"Hey, I'm Ranma Saotome of the Saotome School of Anything-Goes martial
arts, and I don't follow no dorky girls around! You take that back!"
Instead of doing the reasonable thing and saying she didn't mean it,
then putting the knives down and wandering off to play with some dolls
or something, she yelled something he couldn't understand, and threw
them at him!
Surprised by her speed and accuracy, he almost failed to dodge in time.
They were spaced just under chest-width apart from each other, with each
one being aimed at a different side of his ribcage so that he couldn't
escape in either direction without having to move his whole body several
feet to the side, which he knew he wasn't fast enough for. So instead,
he lifted his arms into the air and turned, letting them approach him
from the side, and they quickly flew past him to bounce off the stone
wall a couple of feet away, falling towards his feet and making him hop
to escape having his toes cut off.
He turned back to the girl. "Hey, are you nuts?!? Don't do--shit!" He
dodged the next two knives by rolling forward and putting the bed
between him and the girl, then before she could jump on top of it and
stab him from above or go around the bed, he shoved backwards with his
whole body, sending the bed skidding backwards on its wheels towards the
girl.
Hearing her startled yelp, he took advantage of the situation, jumping
to his feet and dashing towards the door, which was luckily on the same
side of the room as he was, and escaping the room before the girl could
retaliate. As he passed through the doorway, he swung the heavy wood
shut behind him to give him more room to escape and find out what was
going on.
Finding himself in a hallway, the walls and floor made of heavy stone
like the last room, he guessed and ran left, turning at the nearby
corner. There was a window on the left, and as he went passed, he
glanced outside to see snow-capped mountains in the distance, with hills
closer by, and, a little distant from the building he was currently in,
fields of some kind.
Where the hell was he?
Continuing to run around in fairly random directions, although trying
not to go back in the direction he came from, he quickly came upon a
room with a an old wooden table set up in the middle of it. The table
had two glasses of water on it and one of what looked like wine, with
some of that odd foreign silverware set to the sides of each glass. He
stopped. Where there was a dining room, there was always a kitchen
nearby, and, looking through the several doors that led out of the room,
he quickly found it.
For some reason, he was absolutely starving, like he hadn't eaten in
days, and just the idea of getting some food was making him incredibly
anxious, his belly growling out 'feed me!' in a pleading, insistent tone
that he just couldn't resist.
Stepping quickly into the kitchen, he was surprised to see that it was
already occupied by a woman in her late twenties, who had brown hair
down to her upper back and some kind of white robes on. She didn't look
at all Japanese, and, now that he thought of it, neither had that crazy
girl from earlier. He did notice that she was in the middle of setting
out a meal for three people, judging from the number of plates she had
sitting on the counter.
"Um... hi!" he said, a bit nervously, as he looked at her food.
She smiled at him. "Hello, child. You look hungry."
"You bet I am! Is any of that for me?" he asked, pointing to what she
had on the stove. He wasn't sure what a lot of it was, but it smelled
pretty tasty and looked reasonably edible. Maybe he could eat most of
it before that girl showed up looking for him.
"Some of it is. We'll be ready to eat in just a minute, and Chloe
should be here soon."
Ranma frowned. "Is Chloe the girl with red-purple hair, my age, a real
psycho?" She smiled, so he continued, "She'll be here pretty soon,
maybe you should just give me the food now."
"No, we'll all eat together. Don't worry about Chloe, she'll calm down.
Ah, it's done," she said, turning the stove eyes off and separating the
food out evenly onto the nearby plates. It didn't look like it was
going to be enough.
Just as she was finishing, the girl burst into the room, chest heaving
and knives in her hands. He noticed that she was favoring her right leg
slightly, and wondered if he'd hit her with the bed earlier, not that
she hadn't deserved it. She looked like she wanted to attack him, but
he was standing close enough to the woman that throwing knives at him
could be risky.
"Artena-sama?" Chloe asked, glaring at him.
"It's time to eat, child," Artena said simply. Chloe frowned, but
tucked her hands inside her cloak, pulling them back out soon
afterwards, empty. After doing so she walked calmly up to him, taking
one of the plates off of the counter at his side, then turned and walked
back into the dining room.
Ranma followed her example, and heard Artena do the same as he headed
for the table. He sat down opposite the girl, and Artena sat at the
head of the table, in-between the two of them.
Chloe and Artena sat in silence for a moment, hands pressed together in
front of them and eyes closed, then relaxed from their positions and
began to eat without a word, using those strange looking utensils. He
stared at his own, trying to figure it out, before picking the thing up
and trying to spear his... whatever it was, with it. When he lifted, it
flopped back down onto his plate, so he looked over at Artena to see how
she was eating.
She was using the edge of the utensil to chop her food into smaller
pieces, then scooping it up as if with a spoon. He tried duplicating
the maneuver with his own utensil and found it to work, although holding
it seemed rather clumsy. Why didn't they just use chopsticks?
Setting the utensil down carefully, he drank some of his water, quickly
emptying half of the glass before returning to his food, which he
started shoveling into his mouth as fast as he could, now that he knew
how to. It was soon gone, so he gulped down the rest of his milk then
looked to his dining companions to see how they were doing.
Chloe was looking at him with annoyance, gripping her utensil a little
bit harder than was probably required, and the woman had a slight smile
on her face, for some reason.
"What?" he asked, looking back and forth between the two of them.
The girl muttered something he didn't quite catch before returning to
her own meal, and Artena simply said, "I wasn't expecting you to be that
hungry."
"Oh," he responded, somewhat disappointed. She obviously didn't intend
to give him any of her food, or make more. Maybe there would be
something to eat out in those fields he saw earlier?
He sat in silence for a minute, watching them eat, before he felt he
needed a distraction from all the food that was going into other
people's mouths.
"Where are we?"
Artena finished chewing, swallowed, then said, "We are right on the
border between France and Spain. You're a long way from home. What is
your name, by the way?"
"Oh, it's Ranma Saotome, of the Saotome School of Anything-Goes Martial
Arts. What do you mean, we're in France?" he demanded, stumbling
slightly over the foreign word.
"I mean, you're not in Japan anymore. What is the last thing you
remember?"
Ranma thought back, then frowned. "Well, my dad was teaching me
something... a new technique. I must have blacked out during the
training." He looked at Artena suspiciously. "Did you kidnap me?
Where's my pop?"
"We didn't kidnap you," Chloe said irritably. "You followed me home. I
was in Japan and you were acting like some crazy animal, you kept
jumping on me and wouldn't go away."
He stared at her. "I did not!"
"Yes, you did!" she said.
"I did not!"
"Ranma, what are your parents names?" interrupted Artena.
Sticking his tongue at the girl briefly, having had the last word, he
answered, "My pop's name is Genma Saotome. He told me my mom is dead,
but I don't remember her anyway."
She nodded in response. "I'll see if I can contact your father. You'll
have to stay here for a few days, though."
"Okay... it'd be easier if you just told me which way Japan was, though.
I can walk home, right? Me and my pop have been traveling all over
Japan, I think I could make it back okay."
Chloe smiled, and he glared at her. "What's so funny?"
"It would take you most of a year to get to Japan from here if you were
walking, and you would still have to get from China to Japan somehow,
and I doubt you have any money," Artena answered. "Just stay here a few
days, and I'll try to get you home, okay?"
Taking advantage of the girl's distraction, he reached out and speared
some of her food with his fork, slipping it into his mouth before she
noticed. Somebody that ate as slowly as her obviously wasn't very
hungry anyway, and besides, she deserved it.
Judging from the look in Artena's eyes, she noticed the movement despite
his speed, but said nothing, so he merely grinned at her. Maybe being
here wouldn't be too bad after all, if he could get her to make more
food for him.
"So?"
Belatedly, he realized he still hadn't answered her question. "Oh.
Yeah, that might be better, I guess."
"Good," she said, then resumed eating her breakfast. After a minute,
Chloe started to do the same, and she glared at him when he laughed at
her look of confusion.
When they finished, Artena told him to have a look around, telling Chloe
that they needed to go look at her bandages, which made him wonder how
she'd gotten hurt. At least he knew why she was favoring her right leg,
though, which he'd noticed earlier.
Rather than starting to explore the house itself, Ranma decided to head
outside and see what the area was like, since the glance out the window
had made him curious. Locating a door that led outside was the work of
a few minutes, and once he exited the building he was left blinking at
the brightness, since it was so sunny out.
It was also a bit colder than he was expecting. Nothing he couldn't
handle, but he was still a bit chilly because of the state of his
clothes. Taking it as an excuse to get some exercise in, he started
running around the building, looking in all directions as he did so. He
found that he was located in a small valley, the fields he'd seen
earlier being a short distance away. Beyond and to the side of those
fields was an old, broken-down stone structure that looked like some
kind of coliseum like he'd seen on television.
The mountains seemed to stretch in all directions, or at least rather
jagged looking hills, but they were higher to the north, and that was
where the snow-capped peaks were located. If he decided to split even
after his decision to stay, he'd have to head south, but after that he
didn't have a clue what direction Japan was in. Would Artena tell him,
if he asked?
Shrugging the thought aside, he jogged over to some of the nearby field,
which he soon found to be of grapevines. Reaching out eagerly, he tore
a bunch away, then proceeded to pop a few of them into his mouth,
planning on inhaling as many as he could. He was still really hungry.
When he bit down, he found out that they had seeds. Yuck!
Grumbling at the injustice of it all, he started walking around, trying
to keep moving in the chilly air, and began eating the grapes one at a
time, spitting the seeds on the ground as he devoured their plump
wrappings.
He wouldn't be cold if his dogi wasn't ripped near to shreds, and he
remembered how that had happened, but what about afterwards? How did he
get here, wherever here really was, from Japan? From traveling all over
the country with his father he was familiar with Japan's climate, and he
knew it was a bit too cold here for him to be in Japan, at this time of
year anyway, which meant Artena had to be telling the truth.
And if she was, then Chloe might be right about him acting like an
animal and following her around, which really sucked. If that was the
Nekoken, then he didn't think it was going to be very useful.
Why would he follow her around, though? Sure, she seemed to be a good
enough fighter, for a girl, and her throwing stuff at him did bring back
memories of playing with Ucchan, but that's all that Chloe was--a girl.
She was likely to bang her knee and start screaming her head off or
something, as one of the girls that wouldn't leave him alone last time
he went to school had done, and that had gotten annoying real fast.
So if he had been acting like a cat, why would he follow her around?
Maybe cats were too stupid to know the difference.
Ranma finished off the grapes and tossed the stem into the nearby
fields, then decided that his hunger had faded enough that going inside
would be more comfortable than staying out here and getting full while
being cold. The seeds made it so he just couldn't exercise properly
while eating--if he tried, he was likely to swallow the damn things and
choke to death. Besides, he still had to look around inside, to see if
there was anything fun to play with.
Shivering once more, he headed for the nearest entrance.
Chloe laid still as Artena reapplied the bandages, the pressure of her
touch still painful but getting easier to ignore. She was a fast
healer, and she would be okay within a week or so.
"Everything looks fine," said Artena. "We'll just keep you on the
antibiotics I gave you last night for a while, and you should heal
quickly, as usual."
Chloe nodded. "Artena-sama? Are you really going to let that boy stay
here?"
"Yes, at least for a few days. After that, we'll see."
She hesitated, then asked, "You aren't going to put him in that child's
room, are you, Artena-sama?"
"No," said Artena, "I don't think I will. He probably wouldn't like
sleeping there, anyway."
Chloe frowned at that. He should be happy to be put in that child's
room, not that he deserved to even go there. It would be disrespectful
to let him.
"Do you want him to stay with you?" Artena asked, with a hint of a
smile.
Artena must have read the answer in her face, so she quickly continued,
"I'll put him in one of the guest rooms. I do want you to try to get
along with him for now, by the way, at least while you're still injured.
You need to relax your training for now, too."
"I'll try to be nice, Artena-sama," she said. If that boy were
disrespectful towards Artena-sama or that child, though, she would have
to teach him a lesson.
"That's all I can ask," was her reply, as Artena helped her get down off
of the table and put her clothes back on.
"I'm going to go practice, Artena-sama," Chloe said, wrapping her cloak
about her shoulders and clipping it shut at the neck.
The older woman looked at her for a minute, then nodded to give
permission. "Alright, but don't go overboard."
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Chloe sighed. There went her last knife again.
Standing up, she walked over to the target and pulled the knives out,
not even bothering to slip them back into their harnesses, then returned
to her seat twenty feet away and started over.
There wasn't really anything else she could practice right now, with her
leg and left arm injured. It was best to let them heal before she tried
any more strenuous activity, even though she hasn't hesitated to use
them as hard as necessary when attacking Ranma the day before, as Artena
had desired her to do. That had been a mission, part of her
responsibility towards Artena, and her own health wasn't a consideration
in that case.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Even when he had made her angry earlier she had been careful to stay
within certain limits of activity, with her jumping out of bed being
about as rashly as she had acted with respect to her wounds. She'd paid
for it, too, having been barely able to throw accurately after the way
she'd shoved off with her arms, the pain in her shoulder being almost
unbearable. Her leg wasn't as big an issue, but it, too, needed to
heal, which is why she hadn't been able to catch Ranma when he fled her
room.
For that same reason, she was unable to reasonably do more than throw
knives at a target board, and even then it was just with her right hand
that she did so. It was chilly out, as well, which made her forced
inactivity more distressing than it would have been otherwise, since the
cold made her rather uncomfortable despite the pants and long-sleeved
shirt she had on underneath her cloak.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Again, she stood up and went to retrieve the knives. When she was
halfway there, Ranma appeared at the target and yanked the knives out
himself. She stopped, and waited. If he wasn't being helpful and
fetching them for her, she was going to hurt him.
She watched as he started tossing one of her knives up a couple of feet,
catching it when it fell, then tossing it back up again. He did this
for several minutes without giving any indication of even seeming to
notice that she was there. Finally, she gave up on being patient.
"Do you mind? I was in the middle of practicing. Give them back!"
He just looked over at her, eyes shining with innocence. "But why?
You're a girl, don't you have some dolls to play with?"
Reminding herself that she'd been told to be nice, that his being a
complete jerk didn't negate that in any way, and that she was injured
and supposed to be taking it easy, she said, sweetly, "I'll go play with
my dolls if you can show me that a real man, such as yourself, can do it
better. Otherwise, YOU can go play with the dolls while I stay out here
and practice."
He reddened at that, clenching his fist, and, she noticed as some blood
began to trickle out from within it, cutting himself. "You're on!"
Chloe just turned and walked away, halting where she had been throwing
from earlier. Ranma had followed her and soon stood at her side,
alternating between glaring at her and glaring at the target. He was
also massaging his hand, which seemed to be bothering him.
After a minute of waiting, she asked, "Are you going to throw? Or will
you just give up?"
Not giving her a verbal answer, he dumped all the knives but one into
his left hand and took the remaining one between the fingers of his
right. He pulled his hand back over his head, then brought it down and
forward quickly, releasing the knife.
It hit the ground about halfway to the target, base first, then flipped
forward several times, passing the target before coming to a rest.
"Imbecile," she said, in French.
"What did you say?" he demanded, stepping right up to her and yelling
the words into her face.
"I said 'That was one.' Keep going," she responded calmly.
Ranma stayed there a moment longer, then backed off, muttering something
she was sure was insulting but didn't quite catch. Looking back over at
the target, he took a few deep breaths, then prepared to throw again.
This one cleared it by several feet.
He tried again, and missed again. He went through the whole set, some
hitting the target, none sticking, and by the time he was finished Chloe
had lost track of most of her knives, which, while annoying, was also
very satisfying at the same time. She had others inside that she could
get easily enough, losing some wasn't going to be a problem.
"Well," she said, looking at the target, "it seems I've won. You can go
ask Artena-sama where my dolls are while I try and see if I can find any
of the knives you scattered all over the place."
Not waiting for an answer, she walked forward, heading for the first
one, trying to remember where the others went.
Ranma stomped back to the house. Yeah, he'd play with her dolls...
maybe rip some of them to shreds, but boys could be rough, right? She'd
deliberately embarrassed him for no reason at all--he'd been about to
give her the knives back when she'd challenged him like that, and he'd
had no honorable choice but to accept.
Weapons were for weaklings, and he knew that her skill with knives, no
matter how surprising in a girl, wouldn't help her at all in a fight
against him, but it still allowed her to beat him at throwing them.
He'd lost, horribly.
Which meant he was going to have to train to be better than her.
Brightening slightly at that thought, he started moving a little bit
faster. The fact that he was still cold was another incentive.
Once inside he headed for Chloe's room, having a general idea of where
it was. He hadn't gotten around to exploring the place earlier, having
decided to follow the girl when he saw her exit it when he was on his
way in, so he wasn't sure where her room was. After a few minutes of
wandering around the hallways and poking his head through doorways, he
found the right one.
Her bed was still where he'd shoved it to, right in front of her
wardrobe, so he pushed it back out of the way and then opened the
cabinet, looking inside. Not that many clothes were contained within,
but there were certainly more than he had, and none of them had rips
like his dogi. Pushing hangers to one side, he looked at the floor, but
the dolls weren't there, either. Instead, there was a box filled with
several dozen of the throwing knives she had been using, the thin,
hiltless blades piled on top of each other.
Figuring she wouldn't miss a few, he grabbed five of them. He'd need
some for practice. After taking them, however, he realized that he
didn't have anywhere to hold them. The whole trashed outfit thing was
really starting to suck, but at least he could hold all five of them
grouped together within one hand until he went to practice. Hopefully
Chloe or Artena wouldn't notice before he hid them somewhere.
Shutting the cabinet, he looked around the room again. There weren't
any dolls.
Ranma frowned. She'd said he could ask Artena where they were, but he
didn't really want to do that, so he might as well use it as an excuse
to explore the place. Then, when he found them, he could just pretend
to play with them for a minute or two, then go start working on his
knife-throwing skills.
Decision made, he exited through the doorway and started wandering
around, trying to explore the house as thoroughly as possible. No
telling what kind of neat stuff might be hidden, even in a house of
girls.
Most of the place was made of brick, but he found that a few of the
rooms did have wood starting about five feet high. The most notable of
these had a very high ceiling and looked like one of those Christian
churches his pop had dragged him to on occasion while begging for food
and wine. It even had the whole stained-window thing, the sunlight
shining through it to cover the room in varying shades of light. Near
the front of the room were two long swords fastened to the normal podium
type thing such churches featured, which he thought was rather odd.
Behind them, on the wall, was the stained glass, which was made in the
image of two women with the same swords as on the podium, with another
woman standing between and back from them.
What religion was this, anyway?
Dismissing the thought, he resumed his self-guided tour. There really
wasn't much to see, there were a few rooms similar to Chloe's, most with
the beds bare although he did find another that had sheets on it, which
he figured to be Artena's room. There was also a basement but not
enough light for him to see into it, and the torches set infrequently
into the walls of the building were all unlit, so he couldn't use one of
them to brighten his way downstairs. He'd go back and look at it later,
though.
It wasn't long before Ranma was pretty sure he'd explored everything but
the basement, and he still hadn't found any dolls. Where the hell were
they? Had she hidden them somewhere? He'd been looking for them for
quite a while, it seemed like....
Ranma smirked. He'd played with her dolls long enough, he decided, so
now he'd get some practice in. He headed towards the front entrance,
knives still in hand, and was almost there when he passed a room he'd
checked out earlier. Before, it had been empty, but now Artena was in
it. She was sitting at a table set by the window and writing on
something, but she noticed him and looked up, smiling.
"Ranma?" she said, causing him to stop. "If you're going to go outside
we're going to need to find out some nicer clothes, because it's a bit
too cold out to be running around dressed in those rags."
He frowned at her suspiciously. "I ain't wearing no girls' clothes.
I'll be fine."
She seemed amused by his response, and said, "Chloe's pants and shirts
are made for boys your own age, she just wears them instead of dresses.
So they're not girls' clothes."
Ranma shook his head. "If a girl wears them, they're girl clothes."
Artena nodded thoughtfully, studying him, her smile gone.
"Nope. Not gonna do it," he insisted stubbornly.
"This sucks," he said sourly, stepping outside. She'd stuck him in a
pair of brown cotton slacks and a plain white button-up shirt. At least
they really were guy's clothes, and even though Chloe shouldn't be
wearing them to begin with, it had worked out well for him. Artena
either hadn't noticed the knives, which were now in his pocket, or she'd
decided to overlook them. He wasn't sure which, and didn't really care.
Now that his skin was properly covered, though, the slight chill of the
fall air was easily ignorable. Artena had told him that she would send
Chloe into town with him sometime in the next day or two to get more
clothes, so what he had on now should be alright until then. In the
meantime he'd spend time practicing to make sure he was able to beat
Chloe before it was time for him to go back to Japan.
He walked over to where Chloe was still throwing her knives, careful not
to make any noise, and watched her for a while, trying to get a sense of
what the movements involved were. He studied the way she gripped the
knife, the manner in which she swung her arm, and the timing of the
release as she did so. Ranma also noticed that she almost always hit
the target near the center, although he wondered why she was only
practicing with one arm instead of trying to become proficient with
both.
Deciding that he'd picked up the basics of knife throwing, he headed off
towards the ruins he'd seen earlier, of that old coliseum. That'd
probably be a good place to practice, since it was far enough away that
Chloe probably wouldn't see or hear him training.
While on the way there, he made sure to grab a couple more bunches of
grapes, popping them into his mouth and then spitting the seeds back out
as he went. The ruins were a good twenty-minute walk away, and he
managed to finish the grapes off before arriving.
It was much bigger than he was expecting, and once he got there he could
see that there was even more behind the coliseum, with rows of broken-
columns following stone roadways to other buildings and areas.
Ranma entered the coliseum and saw that the arena within had a number of
broken and rusted weapons scattered about the sand of the fighting area.
There were big bricks all over the place, as well, that had been stacked
into miniature towers at one point but had since fallen with the passage
of time. Looking at the stands that surrounded him, he couldn't even
begin to guess how many people used to watch fights here.
He carried a wooden post, one that he'd seen lying unused at the edge of
the grape field, over to the center of the arena, then put it down and
begun digging. He soon had a hole that was a couple of feet deep, which
he put the end of the post into, then began refilling it with sand while
holding his target steady with one hand. It wasn't as sturdy as he
would have liked when he finished but it would hold well enough for
throwing knives at, which was the whole point anyway.
He backed away from the target until he was about the same distance he
had been throwing earlier, then took the knives out of his pocket and
tossed the first one, making sure to copy the movements he had seen
Chloe using. The knife duplicated his first throw and hit the ground
halfway between him and the post, the sand stopping it much more quickly
than on the previous attempt.
He tried again, then again and again and again, then went and picked
them all up to start over. After about a half hour he had managed to
get a few hit the target and actually stick, although none of them sunk
very deeply into the wood, and those that weren't hitting were at least
coming within a few feet of doing so.
A couple of hours later he was hitting the target consistently, which
was good because the post was smaller than the square board Chloe had
been using for target practice, but he still hadn't managed to figure
out how to get the knives to fly through the air properly, so that when
they struck, they would be pointed blade-first. Instead, the knives
were just as likely to hit with the base of the handle and then bounce
back from the post without sticking.
When he threw, the knife would spin through the air, flipping end over
end before it hit, but when he had been watching Chloe, her knives had
been unwavering as they sailed straight towards the target, sinking
deeply into the bulls-eye of what she was throwing at. So what was the
difference?
Having stopped to try to figure out what the problem was, he finally
noticed that it was beginning to get dark and the temperature was
dropping. Ranma picked up the knives and slipped them back into his
pocket, and then headed back towards the building they were staying at.
He grabbed some more grapes on the way, hoping that what they had eaten
earlier hadn't really been dinner, but some kind of late pre-dinner
snack.
Chloe watched silently as Ranma walked past her on his way to the Manor.
She had noticed him spying on her earlier while she practiced and
decided to follow him when he left, not expecting to see him begin
teaching himself how to throw knives properly. At first she'd just been
annoyed at his theft and had simply stayed where she was while trying to
think of a proper method of punishing him for it, but by the time she
had come up with a good solution she'd already seen a rather remarkable
improvement on his part.
So she stayed longer, and he kept getting better as she watched. The
boy certainly wasn't as good as she was yet, but at his current rate of
improvement it wouldn't be long before he got awfully close to being so.
After waiting a few minutes to let Ranma get his distance, she left her
hiding place in the stands and moved to follow. She remained at the
exit until Ranma had gone out of sight over one of the hills on the way
back to the Manor, and then started towards it herself. While she
didn't really think it would matter if the boy found out she had been
spying on him, she still preferred to not get caught at it. When she
got to the top of the hill, she crouched down and crept forward to check
his location, and saw that he was almost there.
It was hard tell from this distance and in the fading light, but it
looked like he was eating some of Artena's grapes. Surely even he
couldn't be *that* rude, though, to steal food from his host just
shortly after being fed.
After he entered the Manor she stood back up and started walking towards
it herself, looking for any evidence of what she both hoped he hadn't
been doing and also hoped that he had, unable to figure out which would
be better, for him to have not been eating Artena's grapes, or for him
to have been doing so. The first would show that he was at least
slightly respectful, and be the only sign of such a trait that she had
seen so far, while the second would be something that she might be able
to get him in trouble for.
Chloe got past the grape fields and then to the Manor without finding
any signs of Ranma's theft, but was still uncertain as to whether that
was because he hadn't taken any grapes, or whether he had simply thrown
the remains far enough away that she couldn't see them with it almost
dark out. Somewhat disappointed, she entered the Manor and went looking
for Artena, deciding to check the room the older woman wrote her letters
in first.
When she reached the room, she heard Artena say, "No, Ranma, we've
already eaten dinner. You'll have to wait until tomorrow."
"But you only gave me a bit of food! I'm still hungry!"
Greedy fool.
She stepped through the doorway and announced, as both of them turned to
face her, "I'm done practicing, Artena-sama."
Artena smiled at her. "Good. Are you going to get ready for bed?"
"Yes, Artena-sama," Chloe replied, then noticed Ranma popping something
into his mouth. She looked at him to see that he had the decimated
remains of a grape bunch held in one hand, and a group of seeds held in
the other.
She found her hands balling into fists at her side, but still asked
calmly, "Did you have fun playing with my dolls, Ranma?"
His response was for his face to contort into an annoying smirk and say,
"Yup! They were fun! Best dolls I ever played with!"
She glared at him, fists shaking now. "I don't have any dolls."
Ranma's smirk turned into a big grin. "You didn't mean these?" he
asked, pulling her knives out of his pocket with the same hand he held
the grape seeds in, smearing juice all over the polished metal. "You
were playing with them earlier."
"I wasn't *playing* with them, imbecile! They're not toys!" Chloe
tried to snatch them from his hands, but he pulled away at the last
instant.
"Ah, wait!" he said, jumping back from her. "I'm not done playing with
them yet!"
Chloe reached into her cloak and grabbed at her knives, deciding to take
advantage of Ranma's hands being full and kill him while she had the
chance.
"Chloe," said Artena, who was still sitting at her simple desk, "I'm
going to show Ranma to his room, and then I'll be along to tuck you in."
She stopped, her knives still in their harness, but continued to glare
at Ranma, who was leaning back against the wall in a relaxed position
and popping the last few grapes into his mouth. After a moment she
turned to Artena.
"Okay, Artena-sama. I'll go get ready," she said.
Artena smiled at her. "It will just be a few minutes, Chloe."
She nodded in response, then left for her room wishing that she really
did have some dolls, because she felt the urgent need to stab something.
When she got there, Chloe found that her bed had been moved back into
its original position, either by Artena or by that annoying boy when he
had been in her room stealing her knives. She hung her cloak and
harnesses in her wardrobe and then took off the pants and shirt she had
been wearing. She changed into another shirt, a much bigger one that
she liked to sleep in, and got into bed.
A half hour later she found herself to be nodding off. Usually Artena
would come to tuck her in, then tell her a story. She'd then fall
asleep to the sound of Artena's voice talking quietly right beside her.
She enjoyed that.
Chloe was really, really beginning to hate that boy, because she was
sure that Artena's absence was all his fault.
Ranma woke, blinking uncomfortably in the sunlight that shone upon him
through the nearby window. He turned to the side to look away, then
rubbed the crusty sleep out of his eyes. Yuck.
He climbed out of bed and then looked out the window curiously. It was
still bright, but his eyes were adjusting quickly, and he was able to
note the position of the sun in the sky. It was much higher than it
should have been.
His stomach grumbled suspiciously.
He left the room Artena had showed him to the previous night and went
looking for the woman, hoping that she had something ready to eat.
Usually Ranma wouldn't have breakfast immediately after waking up, but
most mornings started out with sparring at dawn, which had been hours
ago. His stomach was on a certain cycle of eat, empty quickly, eat
again, and for some reason it had been disturbed this morning.
After checking in the crude kitchen and dining room, he looked in the
room that Artena had been writing in the day before. Once again, she
was there, scrawling out the weird symbols of some other language.
French, he guessed.
"Hey," he asked, "when is breakfast?"
Artena looked up at him, her pen stopping. "It was over two hours ago,
Ranma. Lunch will be ready at noon."
"What? Why didn't you wake me up?" he demanded. He was hungry!
"I sent Chloe to get you up," she said. "She told me that you wouldn't
wake, so we let you sleep. Chloe ate your breakfast for you, so the
food wouldn't go to waste," she added, almost as an afterthought.
"She ate *my* food?"
Artena nodded slightly. "Yes."
He was really beginning to hate that girl.
Grumbling vague threats, he left Artena and headed outside, keeping an
eye out for Chloe as he did so. Ranma didn't see her anywhere, but she
doubted she was hiding from him. He walked to the coliseum again, more
slowly this time to give him an opportunity to eat more grapes and fill
his stomach as much as possible. Once there, he began practicing again,
setting himself the same distance from the wooden post as before.
After gathering the knives again for the umpteenth time, he stopped. He
was doing something wrong. His throws, while hitting the target
consistently now, seemed to be completely random as to which end the
knives hit with: base or point. They were also spread out where they
hit the board, more than he would have liked, anyway. That they were
hitting it was an improvement but not enough of one to satisfy him, or
to beat Chloe when he challenged her to a rematch.
His right arm had gone beyond hurting some time ago. It felt heavy and
awkward, and it was difficult to move it as adeptly as he normally
could. There was an easy solution to this, however.
Ranma switched hands and resumed throwing, this time starting over with
his left. He did even worse than he had started out. He was right
handed, and while he had in training become quite familiar with the use
of his left arm, it was still a little bit less accurate, a little bit
less comfortable to use. For what he was trying to do, that difference
in performance made quite an impact.
None of the knives hit the target. He kept trying, though, picking them
up and then walking back to the throwing point and tossing again. By
the time his left hand and arm were starting to hurt, to become even
more clumsy in comparison, he was only able to hit the target about half
of the time, and even then the knives were sinking into the wood at
seemingly random points. One would hit near the base of the post,
another near the top, a few in between. He just couldn't get them to
group together at about the same height, those that didn't just sail
past the post and into the sand beyond.
Deciding that his left hand was becoming too tired to continue, he
switched back to his right, which had had enough time to recover that he
was able to throw effectively with it again.
After letting one last knife fly, which missed as his arm was again
feeling completely dead, he collapsed to the sand, lying on his back and
looking up at the sky. Each arm lay parallel to his body and felt so
heavy that they might have been of the sand beneath him rather than of
flesh and blood. He would rest awhile, to recover, and then start
again.
So Ranma deliberately relaxed his muscles as much as he could, to the
point where his arms started to hurt even more. He wasn't quite sure
why that was, but it was something he had become familiar with, when he
had the opportunity to relax after any kind of unfamiliar exercise that
his father would put him through. He started with his arms, then worked
his way to his other muscles just for practice, letting his whole body
go as dead limp as he could cause it to. His arms, having had the most
exercise, hurt the worst from it, but the rest of his body was
uncomfortable, too.
Satisfied that he was relaxed enough, he studied the few clouds that
passed high above him. There was a light breeze, which brushed lightly,
strangely ticklish against his skin, relaxed as he was, and it pushed
the clouds slowly past. The sky darkened slightly as one passed across
the sun, and the temperature dropped slightly with the sudden lack of
direct warmth.
As he stared up at the partially obscured star, he noted its position.
It was after noon, by an hour or two.
"Dammit!"
Ignoring his hollow stomach, which his noticing the time had called
attention to, he wondered what it was that he was doing wrong. As far
as he could tell, he was throwing the knives in the same way that Chloe
had, so he should be able to hit the target perfectly. That he wasn't
meant that there was still something he was doing wrong. So what was
it?
After thinking about it for a while, he still couldn't figure out what
the problem was, and his stomach was beginning to get more insistent, so
he stood up and brushed off the little bit of sand that had stuck to his
back and head. Then he went and got a few more bunches of grapes before
heading back to the coliseum, eating them as he walked.
Once he finished eating, he started practicing again. His technique was
flawed somewhere, and he wasn't going to quit until he'd figured it out.
The next time he stopped, this time completely exhausted and barely able
to move his arms with any real dexterity at all, was when it was getting
too dark to see the post. He had never gotten substantially better--the
whole day had been, for the most part, a waste of time. Throwing with
his left hand had become slightly more accurate but still not even to
the mediocre level that his right was at. His right hadn't improved at
all.
After spending a few minutes finding the knives, none of which had hit
because of the low lighting and his dead arms, he set off towards the
Manor.
Chloe was full. Incredibly so. She felt slow, sluggish, and she
definitely did not want to be involved in a fight in her current state.
Ranma's not being here, of course, meant that she wouldn't. It was also
the cause for her stomach protruding so obviously. She could actually
see where the food had caused her to expand, a lump in her middle being
easily visible.
Regardless, she was quite happy. Ranma had missed dinner. He'd also
missed breakfast and lunch. That meant he should be starving. Even if
Ranma had eaten a few of Artena's grapes, damn his rudeness, he would
still be disappointed when he showed up to find a lack of food waiting
upon his arrival.
Assuming he showed up at all, anyway.
She'd gone to the coliseum a couple of times during the day, being quiet
and careful as to not alert Ranma to her presence, and watched him
practice for a while. His attitude towards the knife throwing had
changed completely from what it had been before. Previously, he had
been calm, methodically throwing the knives and judging the results,
using small variations on the movements involved in order to refine and
improve his skill. Today, however, he had been acting quite frustrated;
throwing the knives harder than necessary, not aiming as carefully as he
had before, and muttering curses regularly. Ranma hadn't improved
substantially, either, unlike the day before, despite his spending much
more time at it.
Chloe herself hadn't been able to do more than low-level practicing,
just using her right arm, since she wasn't able to stress her body too
much. Her wounds were healing quickly and there was a significant
amount of improvement after only three days, but she still had to be
careful to keep from making her injuries worse. So instead, she had
spent much of her time in one of the sitting rooms, reading, completing
most of 'Alice in Wonderland' that day alone. There weren't many books
at the Manor, but she was able to borrow others, like she had that one,
whenever she went into the village. The villagers were always eager to
please her.
She wasn't sure what alerted her, but Chloe looked up from her book and
over to the doorway. Ranma stood there, looking at her with an odd
expression on his face. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Was
he going to ask about dinner?
"You look like a pregnant cow," he said. "Maybe you should start eating
less."
Before she could respond, he stepped away and was gone.
"Jerk."
The next morning Ranma made it to breakfast, and ate just as quickly and
noisily as he'd done the first time he was fed. As soon as he finished
he left without a word of thanks to Artena, or even bothering to wait
until they had eaten their own meals. They continued in silence for
several minutes before Artena spoke.
"Are you going to go see what he's doing again today, Chloe?" she asked.
Chloe finished chewing and swallowed. "Yes, Artena-sama. I don't
expect him to improve much if he's still acting like he did yesterday,
though."
Artena nodded, and Chloe wondered why the older woman was so interested
in the boy's training. Ranma would be gone soon, so why did it matter
to her? That he could avoid Chloe's knives certainly indicated his
skill, even if she was injured at the time, but that shouldn't have any
importance to Artena, except perhaps in that Ranma might be a threat.
If he was a threat, he should be killed. Chloe would do it, if Artena
allowed her to. If she could, which she wasn't sure about in her
partially healed state.
Chloe paced herself so that she finished eating at the same time as
Artena, and when Artena said nothing, Chloe thanked her for the meal and
went to her room. After putting on her harnesses and cloak and making
sure that all her knives were accessible, Chloe left the Manor and
headed to the coliseum again.
On the way, she spotted a number of grape seeds lying scattered across
the ground. That boy was definitely trying to annoy her.
When she arrived, she was careful to make no sound, slipping through one
of the huge arching doorways that so many people had once passed
through, so very long ago. Now, she entered alone, and the only
participant in the games was a young boy her own age. Chloe wondered
what the girl would think of Ranma, not that they were likely to ever
meet. No doubt she would be more than a match for him. Chloe herself
was certainly less skilled, more hesitant to strike, than that girl was.
Inside, instead of throwing knives, Ranma was running through various
kata. She assumed them to be from his family school, which he had
mentioned when he introduced himself in such a rude fashion after waking
up sane two days previously. He jumped about on the sand, throwing
punches and kicks and twirling around to strike at imaginary opponents
in all directions. The sand underneath him, mostly hard like everywhere
else in the coliseum, was beginning to break up, becoming loose under
the repeated impacts and Ranma's shifting weight.
Ranma wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, the best she has seen.
She herself had had a number of instructors, teaching her knife-throwing
and how to fight barehanded, with swords, spears, and a number of other
weapons. Every lethal weapon she could conceivably be taught with had
been trained into her to some degree, to the point where she could now
use almost anything, no matter how innocent in purpose, to kill people.
Her instructors, however, had still been better in their specific fields
than she was. Being able to recognize that difference in skill also
allowed her to realize that Ranma was better at unarmed combat than she
was, enough so that even if she was healed, she didn't think she could
kill him except by surprise.
She wasn't sure what his capabilities were, though. As he danced back
and forth across the arena, leaping from place to place as he went, she
noted that he wasn't jumping near as high or easily as he had when they
arrived at the Manor. His jumps, while impressive for a boy his age,
weren't at the same extreme as his jumping fifteen feet into the air as
he had done previously. The effort he was putting into his practice was
easily visible, he was sweating profusely, making small grunting noises
before pushing himself into the air, sometimes a bit clumsily and
landing with awkwardness, and the difference made her wonder if there
was more to the feline behavior he had at first exhibited than his
simply acting as a cat. The physical abilities he had shown before
weren't present now. Why?
By now, Ranma was taking big, gulping breaths, his actions had slowed
down, and it was clear that he was soon to stop. She watched silently,
and several minutes later, he did, and she could see that he was
literally shaking with the effort he'd just put himself through. Rather
than taking a break to recover, however, Ranma walked over to the post
he'd been using as a target for the past two days, picked up the knives
he had placed there, then moved to about thirty feet away.
Taking a deep breath and then releasing it slowly, he threw the first
knife, and Chloe tracked it through the air as it sailed towards the
post--and then passed it.
"Shit!"
Ranma took another breath, held himself still for a moment, and then
threw the next knife. It hit the target, but base-first instead of
point, and it bounced and fell to the ground. The next knife hit the
post as well, this time correctly, and stuck with the blade sunk into
the wood by about half an inch, as best Chloe could tell.
Half an inch really wasn't enough, she knew. The blades were four
inches long, the handle the same length. That was enough to kill
somebody if the knife hit in the right location, but a half inch
wouldn't do more than irritate and cause some hesitation or panic in the
target. That could be effective, but it was still better to simply kill
the person, instead.
The next knife hit a few inches away from the previous one, this time
penetrating twice as deep. An inch still wasn't enough. The fifth
knife clipped the top of the post and then flipped end-over-end until it
landed in the sand several feet beyond.
Ranma stood still for a minute, fists clenching at his sides, then
relaxed slightly and breathed out. Then he went and picked up the
knives, easily jerking free the two embedded into the post, and went
back to his throwing position. He started over.
Three of the knives hit and stuck this time, the other two bouncing off
after hitting with the knives hit wrong. Of the next five, only one
throw was successful, and the five after that, two. In the next set,
none.
Ranma continued to get more and more erratic in his throws, repeating
his mistakes of the day before, until eventually Chloe couldn't even
consider what he was doing to be practice. He wasn't at all in control
of himself, and the way his knives were missing was a clear indication
of that. What was the problem? He was obviously capable, physically,
of throwing better, his quick improvement of two days before showed
that, yet his current performance was simply abysmal.
Deciding that she was wasting her time, Chloe backed away from her
observation point carefully, until there was no chance that Ranma could
see her if he happened to look in her direction, then turned and walked
back towards the Manor. If she and Ranma were to go into the village
and get him some more clothes the next day, then she wanted to finish
her book so that she could return it in exchange for something else.
By the time lunch was ready, Chloe had finished her book and found
herself with nothing to do, so she decided to help Artena by setting the
table. Putting the silverware and dishes out, she wondered if Ranma
would show up today, or if, like yesterday, he would continue
practicing. By the time she went back into the kitchen to help bring
the food in, however, Ranma had arrived. Rather than helping, he simply
sat down and waited for the food to be delivered. Chloe noticed that
his hands had dirt on them, which he hadn't bothered to wash off.
Once they sat down and started to eat, Artena asked, "Ranma, are you
still playing with Chloe's knives?"
Startled, Chloe looked at her, and then over at Ranma, who smirked back.
"Yeah," he said. "They're a lot of fun!"
"I've seen your target. It's not getting much use," Chloe shot back.
Ranma reddened at that and opened his mouth to retort, but Artena beat
him to it.
"Ranma, I'm going to send Chloe into the village with you tomorrow to
pick up more clothes. You're going to be here a bit longer and I don't
want you to keep wearing those every day."
"Hey!" he said. "I ain't staying much longer, and these clothes are
just fine! I don't need no more!"
Artena sighed. "They're getting dirty and you can't just keep borrowing
Chloe's outfits all the time when those need to be washed. And you will
be staying until I can locate your father, which may not be for another
week or maybe longer."
Ranma looked down, obviously inspecting his garments, which had sand
stuck to them in some places, and sweat stains in others. Chloe was
sure that would make a mess of his bed sheets, if he hadn't already done
so the night before.
"Fine," he said, after a few moments. "I don't need HER to go with me,
though. Just tell me where it is, and I'll make the trip alone."
"Do you know French?" asked Chloe, pausing with a forkful of food
halfway to her mouth.
Ranma glared at her.
"The people in the village don't speak Japanese, you know," she
continued. "You'd just wander into town and start speaking gibberish,
and they'd look at you like you were mad. Then you'd probably try to
steal some poor woman's clothes and get shot for it."
"I would not!" Ranma burst out.
Chloe just smirked, and resumed eating.
"I wouldn't!" he insisted.
"Chloe will go with you," Artena said again.
Ranma grumbled under his breath in response, but did so quietly, and
Chloe kept eating her meal with silent satisfaction, although she felt a
trace of regret as well. Chloe wished that Ranma had refused to go
along with her; in that case, Artena would have had her pick up some
clothes for him, which she would have been delighted to do. Most of the
villagers wore simple attire, however, and she wouldn't have been able
to get anything too embarrassing for him. But she could have tried.
Once Ranma stopped muttering what Chloe didn't doubt were comments about
her, he quickly tore through his meal, finishing before she or Artena
were even close to being done. Having completed, he stood and stepped
away from the table.
"I'm gonna go play with Chloe's knives some more," he announced, a smile
pasted on his face as he moved towards the door.
Chloe waited until he'd already exited the dining room and she could
hear Ranma walking away, then called out, "Try not to hurt yourself!"
When she heard the boy miss a step, she grinned over at Artena, who
looked back calmly, her lips curved slightly upwards. Apparently Ranma
couldn't think of a response very quickly, however, and he kept going
after that brief pause. Chloe sighed happily. Life was good.
"He's going to try to get back at you for that, you know," Artena said,
still smiling.
Chloe nodded in response. She expected that the boy would attempt to
retaliate in some way, but she was sure she'd be able to handle it. She
was Noir.
Chloe ate a few bites more of her meal, then asked, "Artena-sama, do you
think Ranma will start trying harder, now that he knows you've been
watching him?"
"Maybe, Chloe. If he did, would it matter?"
"...No."
She was Noir. Someone like Ranma could be a challenge, but she would
always come out on top. For Artena, and for that girl, she would
eliminate or overrun all obstacles.
"No, it wouldn't."
"Good."
She was Noir. Which meant that she was going to have to figure out a
way to beat Ranma in more than a simple knife-throwing competition. She
might be able to nail him with her knives, once her left arm finished
healing and she was able to use it properly, but there wasn't any way to
be sure without testing it. The easiest solution she could think of was
to kill Ranma while he was asleep. Greater skill meant nothing in the
face of willingness to make use of all means necessary. The best
solution, however, would be for her to improve to the point where
surprise was no longer necessary. But how long would that take?
Certainly more time than Ranma would remain at the Manor for.
So. If Artena allowed her to, Chloe would kill Ranma while he was
sleeping. Then she would train until, if Ranma had been present or
alive, she would have been able to kill him without the boy's abilities
being handicapped in such a manner.
"Chloe?"
She looked up, and saw that Artena had finished eating and was looking
at her in concern. Chloe smiled. "Sorry, Artena-sama. I was
thinking." She quickly started in at her food again, cursing her
absent-mindedness.
"I see," said Artena, before she went silent.
Over the next few minutes, Chloe was very self-conscious of the scraping
and clicking noises the silverware made against her plate. She ate
quickly, but carefully, and she didn't look up as she chewed. Instead
she kept an eye on her quickly diminishing food, until it was gone.
Finished, she raised her head, and saw Artena smile at her. She smiled
back, relieved that Artena wasn't angry with her for becoming
distracted.
"Would you like to take a bath today, Chloe?"
"Yes!" she said, happily, and Artena gave her another smile.
"Very well. Let's clean the dishes, and then we'll go to the hot
springs."
Chloe jumped to her feet, almost knocking her chair over, and began
taking the dishes into the kitchen. It'd been a while since Artena had
given her a bath.
Chloe stepped into the steaming water carefully, not wanting to slip
this close to the edge of the hot spring. Breaking her head open wasn't
something she wanted. The hot water, calm and unmoving, crept up her
legs as she walked forward, the submerged areas of her body feeling
disjointed, almost cut off from the rest of her. But pleasantly so.
She continued until she was deep enough, then ducked her head under the
water and held herself still for half a minute, relaxing in the
comforting heat that surrounded her completely. With a sigh, she stood
again, and this time it was the revealed portions of her body that felt
uncomfortable, like they'd just been ripped from the womb and wanted
nothing but to return to their previous warmth.
"You enjoy this too much, you know. I might have to begin rationing
your baths out more carefully."
She turned and looked guiltily towards Artena. "I like the heat," she
confessed. "Almost hot enough to hurt, but not quite. It feels good."
The older woman nodded, stepping into the pool herself. Rather than
moving further out into the water, however, Artena settled down onto one
of the steps. Her hair was bound up safely to keep it from getting wet,
though she was submerged up to her upper chest. She leaned back against
the edge of the pool, and Chloe could see Artena roll her shoulders.
Maybe they were slightly stiff from spending time at her desk, writing
letters.
Chloe also noticed the effect those movements had on Artena's body.
Artena was so pretty; Chloe hoped that she could look like that when she
was older. That was a ways off, and for now, it was unimportant.
Still, Artena was her ultimate goal. She wanted to be as good as that
girl was, true, and wanted to live up to the expectations that were held
for those who were Noir, but what she desired after that was to be like
Artena. Beautiful, intelligent, and kind. So very kind.
While Artena took a few minutes to relax, Chloe moved about in the
deeper area of the spring. The floor where she was at was very hot,
where the water leaked up through the rocks beneath, so she was careful
to keep treading water rather than letting herself settle down into it.
The water was deep enough that she had a foot or two of freedom to move
around in, which was plenty as long as she didn't forget where she was.
The temperature was higher, here in the middle of the spring. It was
borderline intolerable, and as Chloe moved about, arms and legs passing
through the water, each motion was accompanied by a surge of heat
running across her body. The air she breathed in was hot, her lungs
feeling a touch scorched as she inhaled. Her body felt heavy on the
exhalations, sinking into the water. She closed her eyes, sleepy.
"Chloe!"
She turned her head to the side, somewhat dizzily. She was so hot. It
felt good. What was wrong? Her breath came in short gasps. "Artena-
sama?" Where was she?
The heat felt different now, lesser. She was moving through the water
again. Hadn't she stopped?
#####
End for now.
and directed by Kouichi Mashimo.
Gensou Rakuen
By Thermopyle
Thermopyle.anifics.com
#####
Chloe's last knife flew through the air and embedded itself within the
Japanese man's gun-arm when he brought it up to defend himself, causing
the yakuza thug to yell out in pain. She took the chance the
distraction gave her and rushed forward as best she could on her wounded
leg, hoping he wouldn't recover in time to shoot her again, this time in
a more fatal location.
He did.
She was almost there, just a few feet away and about to make a desperate
grab for the knife, when he realized how close she was and swung the gun
around, wildly, desperation and fear on his face despite the difference
in size between the two of them, and fired.
The bullet smashed into her left shoulder and she was knocked away,
falling on her back to the floor. The pain flooded through her, both
from the sensation of tearing skin and muscle and from the impact when
she hit, and she was stunned momentarily. Quickly regaining her senses,
she pushed up with her other arm and shoved both legs out, trying to
jump to the side in case he fired again.
In her pain, she'd forgotten about the previous, less distracting
injury, and when she tried to use her right leg the pain flared back up,
causing her to collapse again as her movement became uncoordinated and
too weak to succeed.
Why wasn't she dead yet?
Blocking the pain with a great deal of mental effort and deliberately
slowing her breathing because she knew that if she was to survive, it
would only be through desperate, unfailing action, she looked up at the
gunman.
He was staring down at her now, blood dripping from both hands. In one,
her knife was held in a fist, and the blood was from his other arm, from
where the blade had been removed. In the opposite hand, his gun was
held and blood could be seen leaking out the cuff of his suit and
running down the body and barrel of the gun before falling to the ground
below. His breathing was rapid, much more so than her own, and he had a
furious look on his face.
He tossed the knife aside, still looking at her, then raised the gun to
aim at her face. "You little bitch," he said, in Japanese, which she
knew, "you cost me a good job today. When you meet my boss and comrades
in hell, give them my regards."
As he squeezed the trigger, another form shot out from behind the nearby
trees and its arm flashed in a scratching motion towards the man's. The
bullet went wide, impacting on a nearby tree, and his sleeve was
instantly shredded, bits of cloth scattering into the air around it, and
the skin bared beneath was ripped, long trenches of gore appearing, deep
enough that the bone was evident in several places. The man dropped the
gun, screaming once again, holding it to his chest and cradling it
protectively with his other hand as they both looked at the newest
arrival in astonishment.
It was a boy, about ten years old, just like Chloe, and whereas the
yakuza had scratches on just his arm, the boy had them all over his
body, albeit less severely. His filthy clothes, some kind of martial
arts dogi, were barely intact, and even the few areas that they covered
could be seen to have barely-dried scabs running underneath them from
the more openly displayed regions.
Not having any idea what was going on, or how the boy had done that,
Chloe managed to push herself up, favoring her right leg and being
careful not to move the injured arm. The boy, an odd gleam in his eyes,
turned at her movement to look at her, and then when the man, tears
running down his face as he tried to hold his arm motionless, reached
down to pick the gun back up with his uninjured hand, the boy whirled
back around and... hissed at him, like a cat. He froze.
Unsure of whether the boy was friend, foe, or just some wandering
psychopath, Chloe stood slowly, carefully. The boy ignored her, so she
moved away from him, her eyes never wavering as she watched him, unsure
of his capabilities. He stayed crouched in front of the yakuza thug,
staring at the man intently as if the two of them were cat and mouse,
and the cat wanted to play.
Backing up to almost fifteen feet away where her knife lay on the
shortly-cut grass, she picked it up with her off hand, wiping the dirt
that had stuck to it from it's impact with the ground off on her cloak.
She'd trained to use both, but her left hand, the injured one, still had
the advantage. That wouldn't stop her from killing with her right,
however.
Taking advantage of the man's frozen terror, she snapped the knife
forward in a throwing motion. It hit him in the throat, catching him
completely by surprise, and he fell to his knees, clutching at his
throat as a look of terror filled his face. He clearly didn't know what
to do, whether to try pulling it out or if that would simply aggravate
the situation. A few moments later and it became a moot point.
The boy moved his attention from the corpse ahead of him back to Chloe,
who stood still, unsure of what to do next. Witnesses had to be killed,
but she was already injured, and she'd thrown her knife away to kill her
target's last bodyguard because she wasn't sure if she could get close
enough to the boy to simply stab the man to death, instead. Would the
boy let her kill him, when he'd already shown some odd fighting ability?
His clothes, his feral state, the scratches all over his body, and the
way he'd come out of the forest surrounding her target's mansion
suggested he was some kind of wild kid who'd developed mental issues
after being abandoned at some point. So was he capable of telling
anybody about her or what he'd seen, and if he was, would he be
believed?
Wondering for a brief moment what that child would do, Chloe quickly
came to a decision. She stepped forward, careful not to hurt her leg or
swing her torso enough to aggravate her shoulder, and began to move
towards the gun that lay on the ground several feet away from the boy
and corpse.
He did nothing in response, other than continue to study her closely, so
her actions gained a bit of confidence, although she didn't let her
guard down. She soon reached the gun and bent to pick it up, keeping
her eyes on the boy the whole time despite the incredible pain coming
from both of her gun wounds.
Slipping her finger into the trigger guard, she raised the gun to point
at him. "Sorry kid," she said quietly, and he tensed, then she pulled
the trigger.
He moved to the side, evading the bullet completely, but did nothing
else.
She adjusted her aim with a bit of concern. She hadn't seen him move.
She fired again.
He moved back.
She began pulling the trigger as quickly as she could, the shots never
quite hitting him as he began to run about in random directions, but
always staying within thirty or forty feet away from her.
When the last shot was spent, she tossed the gun to the side, deeming it
useless. The boy, still once again, watched as she pulled her knife out
from the man's throat, then wiped it clean on his clothes before
slipping it into a harness beneath her cloak.
The kid was crazy. Leaving him alive would cause no problems.
She turned and walked away, towards where she was supposed to be picked
up, and then heard him move to follow.
Chloe sat silently in the back seat of the limo, wishing fervently that
the damn boy would die and leave her alone. He'd followed her all the
way to the rendezvous point, then, when she was forced to answer
questions about who he was and why he was following her, the men who
were to escort her back to the village had been amused at her answer,
obviously thinking that she was mentally incapable of killing a boy her
own age. They soon found out it wasn't a mental problem when she told
them to shoot him, and they all failed.
Having regained a healthy respect for her, as well as a certain sullen
mood at so having embarrassed themselves, they had agreed to leave the
boy as he was, and simply depart as planned. Chloe had gotten into the
limo, and they'd started to drive off. The boy, obviously not wanting
to be left behind, ran to the car in his strange four-legged lope, and
ripped a hole in the door before jumping in to resume staring at her.
She was the only person sitting in the back seat, and she was too
injured to fight such a lunatic, so she did nothing. The men had been
forced to do the same, since the only way they could try shooting at him
again was to stop the car, get out, and then shoot into it, and there
was no telling if the boy would stay put if she were to exit first out
of a desire to not get shot herself. So they, too, did nothing, and the
car continued towards where the private jet back to France was waiting.
The hole in the side of the car, making the wind blow rather loudly as
they drove, as well as the intent study she received from the crazy cat-
boy sharing a much-too-confined space with her, was really beginning to
get annoying.
Despite that, she soon found herself drifting, getting sleepy after the
night's events, and was about to slip off into unconsciousness when
something heavy landed in her lap.
Her eyes shot wide open and she looked down, letting out a whimper of
pain from where the crazy kid was curled up on her legs. After shoving
him to the floorboard violently with her usable hand, she quickly
slipped it back within her cloak and drew the knife, trying to stab him
with it before he recovered.
She missed, and in the small lunge forward, managed to unbalance herself
as her leg once again failed to move properly. She fell on her face
beside the knife, which was embedded partially into the floorboard, and
the boy simply sat next to her, staring once again with a hint of
playfulness and something close to reproach in his feral eyes.
Glaring at him, she pulled herself back up to the seat behind her and
resolved to stay awake from then on.
She lay now on a table in the jet, a plastic sheet beneath her to catch
the blood, as a Soldats physician inspected her injuries. The leg, she
knew, had just been grazed, so there was no bullet to be removed and
only the cut to be sealed with some number of stitches. The shoulder,
however, had been hit regularly and the bullet had, after impacting hard
enough to chip bone, remained in her flesh and would need to be dug out.
Noir or not, that wasn't a level of pain she was eager to experience,
and she accepted the suggestion of the doctor to have drugs administered
to keep her unconscious for that part of the operation. As she slipped
off to sleep, she hoped that the crazy boy that nobody had been able to
get rid of wouldn't try jumping on her again and making an even bigger
mess of things.
Chloe started awake as the plane touched down on her native soil. She
was back in France, and would soon be rejoining Artena, who would look
after her until her next mission was necessary.
She was no longer on the table and instead was lying on a comfortable
couch, a blanket draped over her body, underneath which she found
herself to be naked except for panties and the bandages on her leg and
shoulder. Both injuries were somewhat painful, but much less so than
they had been right after she had received them. The drugs would
probably finish wearing off soon and the pain would return, but she
could deal with that without any problems.
Sitting up, she tossed the blanket aside and moved to stand. She
stopped in surprise when she saw the boy in the room and looking at her
with those strange eyes of his. What was his problem? Presumably
nobody had been able to get him to leave her in peace while she slept,
but apparently he had been deemed safe enough to be left alone with her
while she did so.
Ignoring him for the moment, she carefully pulled on the change of
clothes that had been set aside for her, then belted on her various
harnesses, which had already been stocked with knives, and wrapped her
cloak about herself before sitting back down. The plane was still
moving, so there were a few more minutes before they finished taxiing
around the airport and were able to get out.
Looking back at the boy to study him in return, she saw that, even
though his dogi was still in miserable shape and he had smears of dirt
on various parts of his body, he was remarkably fit for their age. He
was also fully healed from all of the scratches that had covered him-
-she looked at the digital clock on the nearby wall--only fifteen hours
before. How was that possible?
He'd been awake both when she'd been knocked out, and since she woke up,
had he slept at all in that time? If so, had anybody tried again to
kill him, or had they figured keeping out of his way was the safest
option?
Either way, it looked like Artena would probably have to decide what to
do with him. She'd already proved herself incapable of doing so in her
current condition, and none of the men on the plane would be able to,
either, whether that was from lack of opportunity or from lack of taking
advantage of some opportunity that she didn't even know about.
Once the plane pulled to a stop, the doctor knocked on the door and
entered. He wasn't surprised to find her awake, and quickly ran through
a set of questions with her about how she felt, just to make sure that
he'd done his job properly. Once that was done with, he left and she
followed him out the door, the boy trailing behind them as expected.
There was another car waiting for them on the runway, not far from the
stairway leading out of the plane, and she said nothing to any of the
people about before immediately going to get into the car, holding the
door open for the boy because she definitely didn't want to endure
another windy ride. He jumped in after a moment's hesitation, and she
stepped inside herself, then once she was settled, the driver switched
gears and they headed off.
They drove for hours through farming country, the last stretch being a
dirt road many miles long, before they arrived at the village. The
driver stopped at the outskirts of town, knowing he wasn't very welcome
within, and they exited the car and she began to walk, the boy
scampering about alongside her. Everybody she passed bowed in respect,
although there were a number of curious glances at her companion, but
she did nothing to acknowledge their gestures and simply moved on. Soon
they were past the town and headed for the manor itself.
Now the boy was behaving a bit more wildly, jumping into trees and
chasing off after butterflies, and despite her hopes that he'd lose
track of her while running off, he did not, and always reappeared after
several minutes. She'd been expecting him to wear himself out and
simply collapse into sleep, since they'd both been awake when they
arrived at the airport not long after dawn and he hadn't, as far as she
knew, had any sleep during the night, but he was still behaving as
actively as when she'd first seen him the night before. Jetlag didn't
seem to have any hold on this boy.
Soon enough it was getting dark and they still had several hours of
travel ahead of them, so she unwrapped her cloak and laid down a bit off
the side of the path, covering herself with it for a bit of added
shelter. Almost immediately the boy tried to jump into her lap again,
which she found odd since he'd left her alone when she was sleeping
before, but she simply shoved him to the side, after which he kept his
distance. She fell asleep wondering how human eyes could glow in the
darkness like his did.
When she woke the next morning it was just after dawn, and the pain from
her injuries had abated somewhat, to be replaced by an added general
soreness in the damaged parts of her body. It wasn't too uncomfortable,
and she was able to ignore it just as she had after being shot in the
first place.
Standing up, she saw that the boy was awake, and she wondered yet again
if he had had any sleep or if he was just perpetually alert, as seemed
to be the case. Dismissing it as unimportant, she walked back over to
the path and was again on her way. The boy quickly followed.
By midmorning she could see the manor and the grape fields surrounding
it, and she found herself walking slightly faster. It'd been about a
week since she'd left, and she was eager to return home, to Artena.
Soon she was almost running through the fields, ignoring the burning in
her leg as she overworked it and possibly split the stitches. She
looked about, knowing that somewhere out here, Artena would be attending
to the grapes as she usually was at this time of day.
A flash of shiny-brown caught her eye and she stopped, turning, to see
Artena stand up and do the same, looking towards her with a warm smile,
a basket full of fruit on the ground at her side. Suddenly Chloe was
flying forward, going as fast as she could, and then found herself in
Artena's arms.
"Hello, child," said a pleasant voice into her ear.
She looked up and smiled. "Hello, Artena-sama. I'm back!"
"Yes, I see that you are," Artena said, a hint of playfulness in her
voice. "Did you have fun?"
Chloe heard a sound from behind her, and turned, and she felt Artena's
posture change as she looked up. A little ways behind them was the boy,
torn clothes hanging loosely, looking upon them with interest.
"Who is this?" Artena asked, a curious note to her tone as she looked at
the pigtailed wild-boy, causing Chloe to hate him for distracting Artena
from her own homecoming.
"He saved my life in Japan," she said, "I tried to kill him, since he
was a witness, but I haven't been able to, nor has anybody else who
tried. He won't quit following me." She hesitated, suddenly aware of
her own slightly labored breath from running and the wetness on her leg,
where several stitches had probably bust. "Should I try again?"
When Artena didn't answer immediately she separated herself from the
older woman and prepared to attack. She could see as she did so that
the boy looked fresh as a daisy, like he hadn't just been chasing her
for the last twenty minutes as she searched for Artena. How did he do
that?!
Slipping her hands beneath her cloak, she grabbed several throwing
knives and quickly snapped her hands forward, releasing them towards the
boy as fast as she could. Throwing several at the same time was nowhere
near as precise, but this time she was trying for coverage, not
accuracy, as she'd already found that he could dodge one at a time with
ease.
Four knives flew through the air, spread out enough and at different
heights so that a normal person couldn't dodge in either direction fast
enough to avoid getting hit, yet they were still close enough together
that somebody who stood still would get hit by at least one--more, if
they tried too late to get out of the way. Rather than trying to duck
or run to the side, or even take cover behind some grape vines, he
jumped.
Fifteen feet, straight up.
Gawking in surprise for a brief moment, she took advantage of the
situation and threw some more knives at him, knowing that he didn't have
enough maneuverability to dodge them as he fell. The knives were on
target, exactly where she wanted them to be, spread out over an area of
about a square foot centered on his torso. Before they were even close
enough for him to block, he swung his arm out in front of the knives as
if to defend himself from them.
Despite the impossibility of it, his action worked, and the knives were
all knocked out of the air, hitting the ground at about the same time as
he did. He never touched them, they just... flew aside, as if hitting
an invisible wall, or being hit BY an invisible wall....
Chloe stared at the boy in consternation, who looked back in apparent
boredom. How dare he embarrass her so in front of Artena-sama?
Trying once again, she grabbed several knives and whipped them at him,
this time not even trying for accuracy, hoping that if one or two flew
wild he wouldn't have time to react. Instead, he ran forward, right at
her! Just before the knives would have thunked home into his body, he
leapt through the air, twisting as he did so, dodging each one. One of
the knives did go in the wrong direction, but didn't even get close to
hitting him, two others were a bit off and he was able to slip by with
feet to spare, and the last slipped through a hole in his dogi before
continued on its way, having gotten within mere inches of his flesh.
She didn't have time to react to his charge, she was only beginning to
reach for another knife when his body impacted with hers, his weight
landing on her chest and knocking her to the ground, the pain from both
the hit and the landing causing her to cry out despite her best efforts.
Her cloak had been closed when he landed on her, and his weight was
keeping the flaps immobile, preventing her from reaching any of the
weapons contained within. While she contemplated what to do, looking up
at the hateful boy, he bent down to put his face right above hers, then
licked her on the nose.
She punched him in the head, with the arm that wasn't screaming at her
for mercy, and he let himself be knocked aside. She knew he could have
stayed put if he wanted to, he was obviously toying with her for some
reason.
Breathing heavily, she pushed herself up, again favoring opposite arms
and legs, then drew out her dagger and moved to attack at close range,
instead. She didn't think she would be successful at that, either, but
Artena-sama seemed to want the boy taken care of, and she wasn't going
to let her down, or dishonor that child as her future partner.
"Chloe."
She stopped, but didn't take her eyes off the boy. "Yes, Artena-sama?"
"Has he ever jumped on you like that before?"
"No, Artena-sama... twice he jumped into my lap, but never onto my
chest."
"Has he ever tried to hurt you?"
She frowned. "No, Artena-sama, he just... stares at me, like he's
playing a game, and it's my move."
"Very well. That's enough for now, lets go inside and eat."
Chloe turned in confusion, the boy forgotten for the moment, and watched
Artena pick up the basket of grapes and then move towards the manor,
holding it at her side. Looking back over at the boy, she hesitated,
then moved to pick up as many of her knives as she could find, and he
did nothing to obstruct her. When she gave up on finding the last
three, she turned and headed after Artena, and the boy followed behind
her.
With Artena's urging, Chloe went to her room and changed into some more
comfortable clothes, being careful not to upset the bandages any more
than they already had been. Also at Artena's urging, she left her
harnesses in her room and headed back to the kitchen unarmed. It made
her feel nervous, with that boy following her everywhere, but the fact
that he hadn't attacked yet as well as the way he'd easily bested every
effort she made to kill him when she did have weapons consoled her
somewhat, although she'd rather have a knife in her hand if he did
attack, even knowing that it would probably do no good.
When they returned to the dining room, there were three plates set out,
and Artena was already sitting at her usual place. The boy's plate was,
thankfully, not set where that child ate when she came on her infrequent
visits. Chloe sat down in her spot, and, when given permission, began
to eat. The boy simply jumped up onto the table and put his face in the
food, somehow managing to transport the stuff directly up into his mouth
in a manner she didn't quite see, and then by the time she was on her
third bite, he was licking the surface of the plate clean. She stared
for a moment, but when she saw that Artena was continuing as if nothing
had just happened, she resumed eating her own meal in silence, waiting
to see what Artena would say.
Once they were both finished, she looked at Artena expectantly.
"Did the mission go successfully, apart from this boy's... unexpected
participation?" asked the older woman.
Chloe nodded in response. "The target was easily killed, as well as his
bodyguards, but there was one man who had been separated from them for
some reason and he caught me by surprise as I was about to leave. His
first shot hit me in the leg, and I was already down to one knife, so I
threw it as a distraction and then tried to kill him before he
recovered." She hesitated. "I failed, and he was about to shoot me
when the boy arrived and... clawed at his arm, somehow, making him drop
the gun. I killed the man and then tried to do the same to the boy, as
a witness, but was unsuccessful."
Artena was silent, and stared at the boy with a thoughtful expression on
her face, so Chloe looked at him as well, wondering again at the oddity
that he had displayed in his physical capabilities and the way he acted,
as well as why he seemed to be fixated on her.
"Has he ever said anything, given any indication of his identity or why
he's following you around?"
"No, Artena-sama, he hasn't. He's not talked at all, at one point he
hissed, like a cat, at the man who was trying to kill me." Chloe
frowned, remembering what he'd looked like at that time. "When he first
appeared, he had scratches all over his body, but they were gone when I
woke up on the jet yesterday morning, and they shouldn't have been."
"Well," said Artena, "he doesn't seem to be a threat, so don't hit him
anymore. We'll just see what happens and take it from there. For now,
let's get those clothes off and take a look at you, it looks like you're
bleeding again."
"Yes, Artena-sama," she said, then stood up and moved towards the
medical room, taking off her clothes and setting them aside, then
slipping up onto the flat bed contained within for this purpose.
After checking that her shoulder wound was okay despite the fighting
earlier, Artena peeled off the gauze on her leg, which had been soaked
through and pulled painfully at the injury when it came loose. Several
of the stitches had to be re-sewn and she was able to handle the pain
for that well enough, but she was really annoyed at the way Artena kept
having to step around the boy, who seemed to delight in putting himself
in her way.
Soon enough they were done and Artena helped her off the table and
assisted her in putting her clothes back on, which she appreciated. By
then it was around one in the afternoon, since they had arrived several
hours earlier, and Chloe was ready to rest a while, which Artena
supported--Chloe usually took naps in the early afternoon around her
training and reading times, and her day so far had certainly been full,
if not of practice.
After being walked to her room by Artena, with the boy tagging along as
he seemed happy to do, Chloe was put in bed and the curtains drawn shut.
She was about to ask if Artena could tell her a story when the boy
jumped up into the bed and then settled himself down on her stomach,
curling about like a cat and seeming to think the spot was rightfully
his. She reached out to shove him away.
"Stop," said Artena, "let him be. We'll see what happens, remember?"
She nodded, still annoyed at him, and Artena let herself out of the
room, turning the light off as she went.
Chloe lied in bed with the boy's weight on her stomach, happy that he
didn't weigh much for a boy his apparent age, and tried to not think
about the knives that were just out of reach within her wardrobe
cabinet, and how useful it would be to have one of them at this moment.
She was still thinking about that when she fell asleep.
Ranma opened his eyes slowly, cautiously, unused to the idea of having
time to do so. Pops must have some kinda trap planned, some weird
training exercise that would surely teach him something about an obscure
martial arts waking technique. It was the only explanation.
Staying still as his now wide-opened eyes looked about the room he was
in, he wondered at his location. He was lying, curled up, on something
warm and lumpy that was slightly smaller than he was. It was a person,
but definitely not his father.
He listened silently for a few minutes, hearing nothing but his own
breathing, which he was careful to keep controlled and even, and that of
whoever he had been sleeping on, whose breath sounded the same. They
must be sleeping.
Trying to keep his weight stationary as he moved, he raised his head off
of the chest it was lying on, then turned it to the left, to look
upwards upon the person beneath him.
It was a girl with short reddish-purple hair, a lock of it bound into a
ponytail that hung along one side of her face. Her eyes were definitely
not closed, and her mouth was made into a frown as she looked down at
him.
"Ah... who are you," he asked, "and where's my pop?"
Her frown deepened, and something about the expression on her face made
him want to laugh, but instead, he just uncurled himself so that he was
laying lengthwise on top of her, looking straight down at her face and
in a more comfortable position. He noticed her hands balling into fists
as he did so, but she didn't move to hit him.
"He's probably back in Japan," she said. "Where you should still be.
How come you can suddenly talk?"
Back in Japan?
"Hey, what do you mean by that, and where am I?" he demanded, looking
around the room to see stone walls, and that the room was completely
bare except for the bed and a clothes cabinet that stood in one corner.
As he was glancing about, he felt the girl shift beneath him and turned
to look at her, but too late to keep her from hitting him in the side of
the head and knocking him to the floor, landing on his side.
"Ow... what the hell did you do that for?"
Instead of answering, she threw the sheets she laid under to the side
and jumped out of bed herself, in the opposite direction from where she
had pushed him, and ran over to the wardrobe. He heard her pull the
doors open but couldn't see what she got from inside, since the bed was
in the way, so he stood up, still annoyed about being hit like that.
Once he did so, he could see that she had furled a cloak about her
shoulders, somehow managing to buckle the top around her neck already,
and she had a knife in each hand. She was standing in a position that
would allow her to throw them easily if she wanted to, he noticed.
Ranma grinned. "I hope you don't think you could hit me with those."
"Who are you, and why have you been following me around?" she asked,
extending the knives in a threatening gesture.
"Hey, I'm Ranma Saotome of the Saotome School of Anything-Goes martial
arts, and I don't follow no dorky girls around! You take that back!"
Instead of doing the reasonable thing and saying she didn't mean it,
then putting the knives down and wandering off to play with some dolls
or something, she yelled something he couldn't understand, and threw
them at him!
Surprised by her speed and accuracy, he almost failed to dodge in time.
They were spaced just under chest-width apart from each other, with each
one being aimed at a different side of his ribcage so that he couldn't
escape in either direction without having to move his whole body several
feet to the side, which he knew he wasn't fast enough for. So instead,
he lifted his arms into the air and turned, letting them approach him
from the side, and they quickly flew past him to bounce off the stone
wall a couple of feet away, falling towards his feet and making him hop
to escape having his toes cut off.
He turned back to the girl. "Hey, are you nuts?!? Don't do--shit!" He
dodged the next two knives by rolling forward and putting the bed
between him and the girl, then before she could jump on top of it and
stab him from above or go around the bed, he shoved backwards with his
whole body, sending the bed skidding backwards on its wheels towards the
girl.
Hearing her startled yelp, he took advantage of the situation, jumping
to his feet and dashing towards the door, which was luckily on the same
side of the room as he was, and escaping the room before the girl could
retaliate. As he passed through the doorway, he swung the heavy wood
shut behind him to give him more room to escape and find out what was
going on.
Finding himself in a hallway, the walls and floor made of heavy stone
like the last room, he guessed and ran left, turning at the nearby
corner. There was a window on the left, and as he went passed, he
glanced outside to see snow-capped mountains in the distance, with hills
closer by, and, a little distant from the building he was currently in,
fields of some kind.
Where the hell was he?
Continuing to run around in fairly random directions, although trying
not to go back in the direction he came from, he quickly came upon a
room with a an old wooden table set up in the middle of it. The table
had two glasses of water on it and one of what looked like wine, with
some of that odd foreign silverware set to the sides of each glass. He
stopped. Where there was a dining room, there was always a kitchen
nearby, and, looking through the several doors that led out of the room,
he quickly found it.
For some reason, he was absolutely starving, like he hadn't eaten in
days, and just the idea of getting some food was making him incredibly
anxious, his belly growling out 'feed me!' in a pleading, insistent tone
that he just couldn't resist.
Stepping quickly into the kitchen, he was surprised to see that it was
already occupied by a woman in her late twenties, who had brown hair
down to her upper back and some kind of white robes on. She didn't look
at all Japanese, and, now that he thought of it, neither had that crazy
girl from earlier. He did notice that she was in the middle of setting
out a meal for three people, judging from the number of plates she had
sitting on the counter.
"Um... hi!" he said, a bit nervously, as he looked at her food.
She smiled at him. "Hello, child. You look hungry."
"You bet I am! Is any of that for me?" he asked, pointing to what she
had on the stove. He wasn't sure what a lot of it was, but it smelled
pretty tasty and looked reasonably edible. Maybe he could eat most of
it before that girl showed up looking for him.
"Some of it is. We'll be ready to eat in just a minute, and Chloe
should be here soon."
Ranma frowned. "Is Chloe the girl with red-purple hair, my age, a real
psycho?" She smiled, so he continued, "She'll be here pretty soon,
maybe you should just give me the food now."
"No, we'll all eat together. Don't worry about Chloe, she'll calm down.
Ah, it's done," she said, turning the stove eyes off and separating the
food out evenly onto the nearby plates. It didn't look like it was
going to be enough.
Just as she was finishing, the girl burst into the room, chest heaving
and knives in her hands. He noticed that she was favoring her right leg
slightly, and wondered if he'd hit her with the bed earlier, not that
she hadn't deserved it. She looked like she wanted to attack him, but
he was standing close enough to the woman that throwing knives at him
could be risky.
"Artena-sama?" Chloe asked, glaring at him.
"It's time to eat, child," Artena said simply. Chloe frowned, but
tucked her hands inside her cloak, pulling them back out soon
afterwards, empty. After doing so she walked calmly up to him, taking
one of the plates off of the counter at his side, then turned and walked
back into the dining room.
Ranma followed her example, and heard Artena do the same as he headed
for the table. He sat down opposite the girl, and Artena sat at the
head of the table, in-between the two of them.
Chloe and Artena sat in silence for a moment, hands pressed together in
front of them and eyes closed, then relaxed from their positions and
began to eat without a word, using those strange looking utensils. He
stared at his own, trying to figure it out, before picking the thing up
and trying to spear his... whatever it was, with it. When he lifted, it
flopped back down onto his plate, so he looked over at Artena to see how
she was eating.
She was using the edge of the utensil to chop her food into smaller
pieces, then scooping it up as if with a spoon. He tried duplicating
the maneuver with his own utensil and found it to work, although holding
it seemed rather clumsy. Why didn't they just use chopsticks?
Setting the utensil down carefully, he drank some of his water, quickly
emptying half of the glass before returning to his food, which he
started shoveling into his mouth as fast as he could, now that he knew
how to. It was soon gone, so he gulped down the rest of his milk then
looked to his dining companions to see how they were doing.
Chloe was looking at him with annoyance, gripping her utensil a little
bit harder than was probably required, and the woman had a slight smile
on her face, for some reason.
"What?" he asked, looking back and forth between the two of them.
The girl muttered something he didn't quite catch before returning to
her own meal, and Artena simply said, "I wasn't expecting you to be that
hungry."
"Oh," he responded, somewhat disappointed. She obviously didn't intend
to give him any of her food, or make more. Maybe there would be
something to eat out in those fields he saw earlier?
He sat in silence for a minute, watching them eat, before he felt he
needed a distraction from all the food that was going into other
people's mouths.
"Where are we?"
Artena finished chewing, swallowed, then said, "We are right on the
border between France and Spain. You're a long way from home. What is
your name, by the way?"
"Oh, it's Ranma Saotome, of the Saotome School of Anything-Goes Martial
Arts. What do you mean, we're in France?" he demanded, stumbling
slightly over the foreign word.
"I mean, you're not in Japan anymore. What is the last thing you
remember?"
Ranma thought back, then frowned. "Well, my dad was teaching me
something... a new technique. I must have blacked out during the
training." He looked at Artena suspiciously. "Did you kidnap me?
Where's my pop?"
"We didn't kidnap you," Chloe said irritably. "You followed me home. I
was in Japan and you were acting like some crazy animal, you kept
jumping on me and wouldn't go away."
He stared at her. "I did not!"
"Yes, you did!" she said.
"I did not!"
"Ranma, what are your parents names?" interrupted Artena.
Sticking his tongue at the girl briefly, having had the last word, he
answered, "My pop's name is Genma Saotome. He told me my mom is dead,
but I don't remember her anyway."
She nodded in response. "I'll see if I can contact your father. You'll
have to stay here for a few days, though."
"Okay... it'd be easier if you just told me which way Japan was, though.
I can walk home, right? Me and my pop have been traveling all over
Japan, I think I could make it back okay."
Chloe smiled, and he glared at her. "What's so funny?"
"It would take you most of a year to get to Japan from here if you were
walking, and you would still have to get from China to Japan somehow,
and I doubt you have any money," Artena answered. "Just stay here a few
days, and I'll try to get you home, okay?"
Taking advantage of the girl's distraction, he reached out and speared
some of her food with his fork, slipping it into his mouth before she
noticed. Somebody that ate as slowly as her obviously wasn't very
hungry anyway, and besides, she deserved it.
Judging from the look in Artena's eyes, she noticed the movement despite
his speed, but said nothing, so he merely grinned at her. Maybe being
here wouldn't be too bad after all, if he could get her to make more
food for him.
"So?"
Belatedly, he realized he still hadn't answered her question. "Oh.
Yeah, that might be better, I guess."
"Good," she said, then resumed eating her breakfast. After a minute,
Chloe started to do the same, and she glared at him when he laughed at
her look of confusion.
When they finished, Artena told him to have a look around, telling Chloe
that they needed to go look at her bandages, which made him wonder how
she'd gotten hurt. At least he knew why she was favoring her right leg,
though, which he'd noticed earlier.
Rather than starting to explore the house itself, Ranma decided to head
outside and see what the area was like, since the glance out the window
had made him curious. Locating a door that led outside was the work of
a few minutes, and once he exited the building he was left blinking at
the brightness, since it was so sunny out.
It was also a bit colder than he was expecting. Nothing he couldn't
handle, but he was still a bit chilly because of the state of his
clothes. Taking it as an excuse to get some exercise in, he started
running around the building, looking in all directions as he did so. He
found that he was located in a small valley, the fields he'd seen
earlier being a short distance away. Beyond and to the side of those
fields was an old, broken-down stone structure that looked like some
kind of coliseum like he'd seen on television.
The mountains seemed to stretch in all directions, or at least rather
jagged looking hills, but they were higher to the north, and that was
where the snow-capped peaks were located. If he decided to split even
after his decision to stay, he'd have to head south, but after that he
didn't have a clue what direction Japan was in. Would Artena tell him,
if he asked?
Shrugging the thought aside, he jogged over to some of the nearby field,
which he soon found to be of grapevines. Reaching out eagerly, he tore
a bunch away, then proceeded to pop a few of them into his mouth,
planning on inhaling as many as he could. He was still really hungry.
When he bit down, he found out that they had seeds. Yuck!
Grumbling at the injustice of it all, he started walking around, trying
to keep moving in the chilly air, and began eating the grapes one at a
time, spitting the seeds on the ground as he devoured their plump
wrappings.
He wouldn't be cold if his dogi wasn't ripped near to shreds, and he
remembered how that had happened, but what about afterwards? How did he
get here, wherever here really was, from Japan? From traveling all over
the country with his father he was familiar with Japan's climate, and he
knew it was a bit too cold here for him to be in Japan, at this time of
year anyway, which meant Artena had to be telling the truth.
And if she was, then Chloe might be right about him acting like an
animal and following her around, which really sucked. If that was the
Nekoken, then he didn't think it was going to be very useful.
Why would he follow her around, though? Sure, she seemed to be a good
enough fighter, for a girl, and her throwing stuff at him did bring back
memories of playing with Ucchan, but that's all that Chloe was--a girl.
She was likely to bang her knee and start screaming her head off or
something, as one of the girls that wouldn't leave him alone last time
he went to school had done, and that had gotten annoying real fast.
So if he had been acting like a cat, why would he follow her around?
Maybe cats were too stupid to know the difference.
Ranma finished off the grapes and tossed the stem into the nearby
fields, then decided that his hunger had faded enough that going inside
would be more comfortable than staying out here and getting full while
being cold. The seeds made it so he just couldn't exercise properly
while eating--if he tried, he was likely to swallow the damn things and
choke to death. Besides, he still had to look around inside, to see if
there was anything fun to play with.
Shivering once more, he headed for the nearest entrance.
Chloe laid still as Artena reapplied the bandages, the pressure of her
touch still painful but getting easier to ignore. She was a fast
healer, and she would be okay within a week or so.
"Everything looks fine," said Artena. "We'll just keep you on the
antibiotics I gave you last night for a while, and you should heal
quickly, as usual."
Chloe nodded. "Artena-sama? Are you really going to let that boy stay
here?"
"Yes, at least for a few days. After that, we'll see."
She hesitated, then asked, "You aren't going to put him in that child's
room, are you, Artena-sama?"
"No," said Artena, "I don't think I will. He probably wouldn't like
sleeping there, anyway."
Chloe frowned at that. He should be happy to be put in that child's
room, not that he deserved to even go there. It would be disrespectful
to let him.
"Do you want him to stay with you?" Artena asked, with a hint of a
smile.
Artena must have read the answer in her face, so she quickly continued,
"I'll put him in one of the guest rooms. I do want you to try to get
along with him for now, by the way, at least while you're still injured.
You need to relax your training for now, too."
"I'll try to be nice, Artena-sama," she said. If that boy were
disrespectful towards Artena-sama or that child, though, she would have
to teach him a lesson.
"That's all I can ask," was her reply, as Artena helped her get down off
of the table and put her clothes back on.
"I'm going to go practice, Artena-sama," Chloe said, wrapping her cloak
about her shoulders and clipping it shut at the neck.
The older woman looked at her for a minute, then nodded to give
permission. "Alright, but don't go overboard."
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Chloe sighed. There went her last knife again.
Standing up, she walked over to the target and pulled the knives out,
not even bothering to slip them back into their harnesses, then returned
to her seat twenty feet away and started over.
There wasn't really anything else she could practice right now, with her
leg and left arm injured. It was best to let them heal before she tried
any more strenuous activity, even though she hasn't hesitated to use
them as hard as necessary when attacking Ranma the day before, as Artena
had desired her to do. That had been a mission, part of her
responsibility towards Artena, and her own health wasn't a consideration
in that case.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Even when he had made her angry earlier she had been careful to stay
within certain limits of activity, with her jumping out of bed being
about as rashly as she had acted with respect to her wounds. She'd paid
for it, too, having been barely able to throw accurately after the way
she'd shoved off with her arms, the pain in her shoulder being almost
unbearable. Her leg wasn't as big an issue, but it, too, needed to
heal, which is why she hadn't been able to catch Ranma when he fled her
room.
For that same reason, she was unable to reasonably do more than throw
knives at a target board, and even then it was just with her right hand
that she did so. It was chilly out, as well, which made her forced
inactivity more distressing than it would have been otherwise, since the
cold made her rather uncomfortable despite the pants and long-sleeved
shirt she had on underneath her cloak.
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.
Again, she stood up and went to retrieve the knives. When she was
halfway there, Ranma appeared at the target and yanked the knives out
himself. She stopped, and waited. If he wasn't being helpful and
fetching them for her, she was going to hurt him.
She watched as he started tossing one of her knives up a couple of feet,
catching it when it fell, then tossing it back up again. He did this
for several minutes without giving any indication of even seeming to
notice that she was there. Finally, she gave up on being patient.
"Do you mind? I was in the middle of practicing. Give them back!"
He just looked over at her, eyes shining with innocence. "But why?
You're a girl, don't you have some dolls to play with?"
Reminding herself that she'd been told to be nice, that his being a
complete jerk didn't negate that in any way, and that she was injured
and supposed to be taking it easy, she said, sweetly, "I'll go play with
my dolls if you can show me that a real man, such as yourself, can do it
better. Otherwise, YOU can go play with the dolls while I stay out here
and practice."
He reddened at that, clenching his fist, and, she noticed as some blood
began to trickle out from within it, cutting himself. "You're on!"
Chloe just turned and walked away, halting where she had been throwing
from earlier. Ranma had followed her and soon stood at her side,
alternating between glaring at her and glaring at the target. He was
also massaging his hand, which seemed to be bothering him.
After a minute of waiting, she asked, "Are you going to throw? Or will
you just give up?"
Not giving her a verbal answer, he dumped all the knives but one into
his left hand and took the remaining one between the fingers of his
right. He pulled his hand back over his head, then brought it down and
forward quickly, releasing the knife.
It hit the ground about halfway to the target, base first, then flipped
forward several times, passing the target before coming to a rest.
"Imbecile," she said, in French.
"What did you say?" he demanded, stepping right up to her and yelling
the words into her face.
"I said 'That was one.' Keep going," she responded calmly.
Ranma stayed there a moment longer, then backed off, muttering something
she was sure was insulting but didn't quite catch. Looking back over at
the target, he took a few deep breaths, then prepared to throw again.
This one cleared it by several feet.
He tried again, and missed again. He went through the whole set, some
hitting the target, none sticking, and by the time he was finished Chloe
had lost track of most of her knives, which, while annoying, was also
very satisfying at the same time. She had others inside that she could
get easily enough, losing some wasn't going to be a problem.
"Well," she said, looking at the target, "it seems I've won. You can go
ask Artena-sama where my dolls are while I try and see if I can find any
of the knives you scattered all over the place."
Not waiting for an answer, she walked forward, heading for the first
one, trying to remember where the others went.
Ranma stomped back to the house. Yeah, he'd play with her dolls...
maybe rip some of them to shreds, but boys could be rough, right? She'd
deliberately embarrassed him for no reason at all--he'd been about to
give her the knives back when she'd challenged him like that, and he'd
had no honorable choice but to accept.
Weapons were for weaklings, and he knew that her skill with knives, no
matter how surprising in a girl, wouldn't help her at all in a fight
against him, but it still allowed her to beat him at throwing them.
He'd lost, horribly.
Which meant he was going to have to train to be better than her.
Brightening slightly at that thought, he started moving a little bit
faster. The fact that he was still cold was another incentive.
Once inside he headed for Chloe's room, having a general idea of where
it was. He hadn't gotten around to exploring the place earlier, having
decided to follow the girl when he saw her exit it when he was on his
way in, so he wasn't sure where her room was. After a few minutes of
wandering around the hallways and poking his head through doorways, he
found the right one.
Her bed was still where he'd shoved it to, right in front of her
wardrobe, so he pushed it back out of the way and then opened the
cabinet, looking inside. Not that many clothes were contained within,
but there were certainly more than he had, and none of them had rips
like his dogi. Pushing hangers to one side, he looked at the floor, but
the dolls weren't there, either. Instead, there was a box filled with
several dozen of the throwing knives she had been using, the thin,
hiltless blades piled on top of each other.
Figuring she wouldn't miss a few, he grabbed five of them. He'd need
some for practice. After taking them, however, he realized that he
didn't have anywhere to hold them. The whole trashed outfit thing was
really starting to suck, but at least he could hold all five of them
grouped together within one hand until he went to practice. Hopefully
Chloe or Artena wouldn't notice before he hid them somewhere.
Shutting the cabinet, he looked around the room again. There weren't
any dolls.
Ranma frowned. She'd said he could ask Artena where they were, but he
didn't really want to do that, so he might as well use it as an excuse
to explore the place. Then, when he found them, he could just pretend
to play with them for a minute or two, then go start working on his
knife-throwing skills.
Decision made, he exited through the doorway and started wandering
around, trying to explore the house as thoroughly as possible. No
telling what kind of neat stuff might be hidden, even in a house of
girls.
Most of the place was made of brick, but he found that a few of the
rooms did have wood starting about five feet high. The most notable of
these had a very high ceiling and looked like one of those Christian
churches his pop had dragged him to on occasion while begging for food
and wine. It even had the whole stained-window thing, the sunlight
shining through it to cover the room in varying shades of light. Near
the front of the room were two long swords fastened to the normal podium
type thing such churches featured, which he thought was rather odd.
Behind them, on the wall, was the stained glass, which was made in the
image of two women with the same swords as on the podium, with another
woman standing between and back from them.
What religion was this, anyway?
Dismissing the thought, he resumed his self-guided tour. There really
wasn't much to see, there were a few rooms similar to Chloe's, most with
the beds bare although he did find another that had sheets on it, which
he figured to be Artena's room. There was also a basement but not
enough light for him to see into it, and the torches set infrequently
into the walls of the building were all unlit, so he couldn't use one of
them to brighten his way downstairs. He'd go back and look at it later,
though.
It wasn't long before Ranma was pretty sure he'd explored everything but
the basement, and he still hadn't found any dolls. Where the hell were
they? Had she hidden them somewhere? He'd been looking for them for
quite a while, it seemed like....
Ranma smirked. He'd played with her dolls long enough, he decided, so
now he'd get some practice in. He headed towards the front entrance,
knives still in hand, and was almost there when he passed a room he'd
checked out earlier. Before, it had been empty, but now Artena was in
it. She was sitting at a table set by the window and writing on
something, but she noticed him and looked up, smiling.
"Ranma?" she said, causing him to stop. "If you're going to go outside
we're going to need to find out some nicer clothes, because it's a bit
too cold out to be running around dressed in those rags."
He frowned at her suspiciously. "I ain't wearing no girls' clothes.
I'll be fine."
She seemed amused by his response, and said, "Chloe's pants and shirts
are made for boys your own age, she just wears them instead of dresses.
So they're not girls' clothes."
Ranma shook his head. "If a girl wears them, they're girl clothes."
Artena nodded thoughtfully, studying him, her smile gone.
"Nope. Not gonna do it," he insisted stubbornly.
"This sucks," he said sourly, stepping outside. She'd stuck him in a
pair of brown cotton slacks and a plain white button-up shirt. At least
they really were guy's clothes, and even though Chloe shouldn't be
wearing them to begin with, it had worked out well for him. Artena
either hadn't noticed the knives, which were now in his pocket, or she'd
decided to overlook them. He wasn't sure which, and didn't really care.
Now that his skin was properly covered, though, the slight chill of the
fall air was easily ignorable. Artena had told him that she would send
Chloe into town with him sometime in the next day or two to get more
clothes, so what he had on now should be alright until then. In the
meantime he'd spend time practicing to make sure he was able to beat
Chloe before it was time for him to go back to Japan.
He walked over to where Chloe was still throwing her knives, careful not
to make any noise, and watched her for a while, trying to get a sense of
what the movements involved were. He studied the way she gripped the
knife, the manner in which she swung her arm, and the timing of the
release as she did so. Ranma also noticed that she almost always hit
the target near the center, although he wondered why she was only
practicing with one arm instead of trying to become proficient with
both.
Deciding that he'd picked up the basics of knife throwing, he headed off
towards the ruins he'd seen earlier, of that old coliseum. That'd
probably be a good place to practice, since it was far enough away that
Chloe probably wouldn't see or hear him training.
While on the way there, he made sure to grab a couple more bunches of
grapes, popping them into his mouth and then spitting the seeds back out
as he went. The ruins were a good twenty-minute walk away, and he
managed to finish the grapes off before arriving.
It was much bigger than he was expecting, and once he got there he could
see that there was even more behind the coliseum, with rows of broken-
columns following stone roadways to other buildings and areas.
Ranma entered the coliseum and saw that the arena within had a number of
broken and rusted weapons scattered about the sand of the fighting area.
There were big bricks all over the place, as well, that had been stacked
into miniature towers at one point but had since fallen with the passage
of time. Looking at the stands that surrounded him, he couldn't even
begin to guess how many people used to watch fights here.
He carried a wooden post, one that he'd seen lying unused at the edge of
the grape field, over to the center of the arena, then put it down and
begun digging. He soon had a hole that was a couple of feet deep, which
he put the end of the post into, then began refilling it with sand while
holding his target steady with one hand. It wasn't as sturdy as he
would have liked when he finished but it would hold well enough for
throwing knives at, which was the whole point anyway.
He backed away from the target until he was about the same distance he
had been throwing earlier, then took the knives out of his pocket and
tossed the first one, making sure to copy the movements he had seen
Chloe using. The knife duplicated his first throw and hit the ground
halfway between him and the post, the sand stopping it much more quickly
than on the previous attempt.
He tried again, then again and again and again, then went and picked
them all up to start over. After about a half hour he had managed to
get a few hit the target and actually stick, although none of them sunk
very deeply into the wood, and those that weren't hitting were at least
coming within a few feet of doing so.
A couple of hours later he was hitting the target consistently, which
was good because the post was smaller than the square board Chloe had
been using for target practice, but he still hadn't managed to figure
out how to get the knives to fly through the air properly, so that when
they struck, they would be pointed blade-first. Instead, the knives
were just as likely to hit with the base of the handle and then bounce
back from the post without sticking.
When he threw, the knife would spin through the air, flipping end over
end before it hit, but when he had been watching Chloe, her knives had
been unwavering as they sailed straight towards the target, sinking
deeply into the bulls-eye of what she was throwing at. So what was the
difference?
Having stopped to try to figure out what the problem was, he finally
noticed that it was beginning to get dark and the temperature was
dropping. Ranma picked up the knives and slipped them back into his
pocket, and then headed back towards the building they were staying at.
He grabbed some more grapes on the way, hoping that what they had eaten
earlier hadn't really been dinner, but some kind of late pre-dinner
snack.
Chloe watched silently as Ranma walked past her on his way to the Manor.
She had noticed him spying on her earlier while she practiced and
decided to follow him when he left, not expecting to see him begin
teaching himself how to throw knives properly. At first she'd just been
annoyed at his theft and had simply stayed where she was while trying to
think of a proper method of punishing him for it, but by the time she
had come up with a good solution she'd already seen a rather remarkable
improvement on his part.
So she stayed longer, and he kept getting better as she watched. The
boy certainly wasn't as good as she was yet, but at his current rate of
improvement it wouldn't be long before he got awfully close to being so.
After waiting a few minutes to let Ranma get his distance, she left her
hiding place in the stands and moved to follow. She remained at the
exit until Ranma had gone out of sight over one of the hills on the way
back to the Manor, and then started towards it herself. While she
didn't really think it would matter if the boy found out she had been
spying on him, she still preferred to not get caught at it. When she
got to the top of the hill, she crouched down and crept forward to check
his location, and saw that he was almost there.
It was hard tell from this distance and in the fading light, but it
looked like he was eating some of Artena's grapes. Surely even he
couldn't be *that* rude, though, to steal food from his host just
shortly after being fed.
After he entered the Manor she stood back up and started walking towards
it herself, looking for any evidence of what she both hoped he hadn't
been doing and also hoped that he had, unable to figure out which would
be better, for him to have not been eating Artena's grapes, or for him
to have been doing so. The first would show that he was at least
slightly respectful, and be the only sign of such a trait that she had
seen so far, while the second would be something that she might be able
to get him in trouble for.
Chloe got past the grape fields and then to the Manor without finding
any signs of Ranma's theft, but was still uncertain as to whether that
was because he hadn't taken any grapes, or whether he had simply thrown
the remains far enough away that she couldn't see them with it almost
dark out. Somewhat disappointed, she entered the Manor and went looking
for Artena, deciding to check the room the older woman wrote her letters
in first.
When she reached the room, she heard Artena say, "No, Ranma, we've
already eaten dinner. You'll have to wait until tomorrow."
"But you only gave me a bit of food! I'm still hungry!"
Greedy fool.
She stepped through the doorway and announced, as both of them turned to
face her, "I'm done practicing, Artena-sama."
Artena smiled at her. "Good. Are you going to get ready for bed?"
"Yes, Artena-sama," Chloe replied, then noticed Ranma popping something
into his mouth. She looked at him to see that he had the decimated
remains of a grape bunch held in one hand, and a group of seeds held in
the other.
She found her hands balling into fists at her side, but still asked
calmly, "Did you have fun playing with my dolls, Ranma?"
His response was for his face to contort into an annoying smirk and say,
"Yup! They were fun! Best dolls I ever played with!"
She glared at him, fists shaking now. "I don't have any dolls."
Ranma's smirk turned into a big grin. "You didn't mean these?" he
asked, pulling her knives out of his pocket with the same hand he held
the grape seeds in, smearing juice all over the polished metal. "You
were playing with them earlier."
"I wasn't *playing* with them, imbecile! They're not toys!" Chloe
tried to snatch them from his hands, but he pulled away at the last
instant.
"Ah, wait!" he said, jumping back from her. "I'm not done playing with
them yet!"
Chloe reached into her cloak and grabbed at her knives, deciding to take
advantage of Ranma's hands being full and kill him while she had the
chance.
"Chloe," said Artena, who was still sitting at her simple desk, "I'm
going to show Ranma to his room, and then I'll be along to tuck you in."
She stopped, her knives still in their harness, but continued to glare
at Ranma, who was leaning back against the wall in a relaxed position
and popping the last few grapes into his mouth. After a moment she
turned to Artena.
"Okay, Artena-sama. I'll go get ready," she said.
Artena smiled at her. "It will just be a few minutes, Chloe."
She nodded in response, then left for her room wishing that she really
did have some dolls, because she felt the urgent need to stab something.
When she got there, Chloe found that her bed had been moved back into
its original position, either by Artena or by that annoying boy when he
had been in her room stealing her knives. She hung her cloak and
harnesses in her wardrobe and then took off the pants and shirt she had
been wearing. She changed into another shirt, a much bigger one that
she liked to sleep in, and got into bed.
A half hour later she found herself to be nodding off. Usually Artena
would come to tuck her in, then tell her a story. She'd then fall
asleep to the sound of Artena's voice talking quietly right beside her.
She enjoyed that.
Chloe was really, really beginning to hate that boy, because she was
sure that Artena's absence was all his fault.
Ranma woke, blinking uncomfortably in the sunlight that shone upon him
through the nearby window. He turned to the side to look away, then
rubbed the crusty sleep out of his eyes. Yuck.
He climbed out of bed and then looked out the window curiously. It was
still bright, but his eyes were adjusting quickly, and he was able to
note the position of the sun in the sky. It was much higher than it
should have been.
His stomach grumbled suspiciously.
He left the room Artena had showed him to the previous night and went
looking for the woman, hoping that she had something ready to eat.
Usually Ranma wouldn't have breakfast immediately after waking up, but
most mornings started out with sparring at dawn, which had been hours
ago. His stomach was on a certain cycle of eat, empty quickly, eat
again, and for some reason it had been disturbed this morning.
After checking in the crude kitchen and dining room, he looked in the
room that Artena had been writing in the day before. Once again, she
was there, scrawling out the weird symbols of some other language.
French, he guessed.
"Hey," he asked, "when is breakfast?"
Artena looked up at him, her pen stopping. "It was over two hours ago,
Ranma. Lunch will be ready at noon."
"What? Why didn't you wake me up?" he demanded. He was hungry!
"I sent Chloe to get you up," she said. "She told me that you wouldn't
wake, so we let you sleep. Chloe ate your breakfast for you, so the
food wouldn't go to waste," she added, almost as an afterthought.
"She ate *my* food?"
Artena nodded slightly. "Yes."
He was really beginning to hate that girl.
Grumbling vague threats, he left Artena and headed outside, keeping an
eye out for Chloe as he did so. Ranma didn't see her anywhere, but she
doubted she was hiding from him. He walked to the coliseum again, more
slowly this time to give him an opportunity to eat more grapes and fill
his stomach as much as possible. Once there, he began practicing again,
setting himself the same distance from the wooden post as before.
After gathering the knives again for the umpteenth time, he stopped. He
was doing something wrong. His throws, while hitting the target
consistently now, seemed to be completely random as to which end the
knives hit with: base or point. They were also spread out where they
hit the board, more than he would have liked, anyway. That they were
hitting it was an improvement but not enough of one to satisfy him, or
to beat Chloe when he challenged her to a rematch.
His right arm had gone beyond hurting some time ago. It felt heavy and
awkward, and it was difficult to move it as adeptly as he normally
could. There was an easy solution to this, however.
Ranma switched hands and resumed throwing, this time starting over with
his left. He did even worse than he had started out. He was right
handed, and while he had in training become quite familiar with the use
of his left arm, it was still a little bit less accurate, a little bit
less comfortable to use. For what he was trying to do, that difference
in performance made quite an impact.
None of the knives hit the target. He kept trying, though, picking them
up and then walking back to the throwing point and tossing again. By
the time his left hand and arm were starting to hurt, to become even
more clumsy in comparison, he was only able to hit the target about half
of the time, and even then the knives were sinking into the wood at
seemingly random points. One would hit near the base of the post,
another near the top, a few in between. He just couldn't get them to
group together at about the same height, those that didn't just sail
past the post and into the sand beyond.
Deciding that his left hand was becoming too tired to continue, he
switched back to his right, which had had enough time to recover that he
was able to throw effectively with it again.
After letting one last knife fly, which missed as his arm was again
feeling completely dead, he collapsed to the sand, lying on his back and
looking up at the sky. Each arm lay parallel to his body and felt so
heavy that they might have been of the sand beneath him rather than of
flesh and blood. He would rest awhile, to recover, and then start
again.
So Ranma deliberately relaxed his muscles as much as he could, to the
point where his arms started to hurt even more. He wasn't quite sure
why that was, but it was something he had become familiar with, when he
had the opportunity to relax after any kind of unfamiliar exercise that
his father would put him through. He started with his arms, then worked
his way to his other muscles just for practice, letting his whole body
go as dead limp as he could cause it to. His arms, having had the most
exercise, hurt the worst from it, but the rest of his body was
uncomfortable, too.
Satisfied that he was relaxed enough, he studied the few clouds that
passed high above him. There was a light breeze, which brushed lightly,
strangely ticklish against his skin, relaxed as he was, and it pushed
the clouds slowly past. The sky darkened slightly as one passed across
the sun, and the temperature dropped slightly with the sudden lack of
direct warmth.
As he stared up at the partially obscured star, he noted its position.
It was after noon, by an hour or two.
"Dammit!"
Ignoring his hollow stomach, which his noticing the time had called
attention to, he wondered what it was that he was doing wrong. As far
as he could tell, he was throwing the knives in the same way that Chloe
had, so he should be able to hit the target perfectly. That he wasn't
meant that there was still something he was doing wrong. So what was
it?
After thinking about it for a while, he still couldn't figure out what
the problem was, and his stomach was beginning to get more insistent, so
he stood up and brushed off the little bit of sand that had stuck to his
back and head. Then he went and got a few more bunches of grapes before
heading back to the coliseum, eating them as he walked.
Once he finished eating, he started practicing again. His technique was
flawed somewhere, and he wasn't going to quit until he'd figured it out.
The next time he stopped, this time completely exhausted and barely able
to move his arms with any real dexterity at all, was when it was getting
too dark to see the post. He had never gotten substantially better--the
whole day had been, for the most part, a waste of time. Throwing with
his left hand had become slightly more accurate but still not even to
the mediocre level that his right was at. His right hadn't improved at
all.
After spending a few minutes finding the knives, none of which had hit
because of the low lighting and his dead arms, he set off towards the
Manor.
Chloe was full. Incredibly so. She felt slow, sluggish, and she
definitely did not want to be involved in a fight in her current state.
Ranma's not being here, of course, meant that she wouldn't. It was also
the cause for her stomach protruding so obviously. She could actually
see where the food had caused her to expand, a lump in her middle being
easily visible.
Regardless, she was quite happy. Ranma had missed dinner. He'd also
missed breakfast and lunch. That meant he should be starving. Even if
Ranma had eaten a few of Artena's grapes, damn his rudeness, he would
still be disappointed when he showed up to find a lack of food waiting
upon his arrival.
Assuming he showed up at all, anyway.
She'd gone to the coliseum a couple of times during the day, being quiet
and careful as to not alert Ranma to her presence, and watched him
practice for a while. His attitude towards the knife throwing had
changed completely from what it had been before. Previously, he had
been calm, methodically throwing the knives and judging the results,
using small variations on the movements involved in order to refine and
improve his skill. Today, however, he had been acting quite frustrated;
throwing the knives harder than necessary, not aiming as carefully as he
had before, and muttering curses regularly. Ranma hadn't improved
substantially, either, unlike the day before, despite his spending much
more time at it.
Chloe herself hadn't been able to do more than low-level practicing,
just using her right arm, since she wasn't able to stress her body too
much. Her wounds were healing quickly and there was a significant
amount of improvement after only three days, but she still had to be
careful to keep from making her injuries worse. So instead, she had
spent much of her time in one of the sitting rooms, reading, completing
most of 'Alice in Wonderland' that day alone. There weren't many books
at the Manor, but she was able to borrow others, like she had that one,
whenever she went into the village. The villagers were always eager to
please her.
She wasn't sure what alerted her, but Chloe looked up from her book and
over to the doorway. Ranma stood there, looking at her with an odd
expression on his face. She wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Was
he going to ask about dinner?
"You look like a pregnant cow," he said. "Maybe you should start eating
less."
Before she could respond, he stepped away and was gone.
"Jerk."
The next morning Ranma made it to breakfast, and ate just as quickly and
noisily as he'd done the first time he was fed. As soon as he finished
he left without a word of thanks to Artena, or even bothering to wait
until they had eaten their own meals. They continued in silence for
several minutes before Artena spoke.
"Are you going to go see what he's doing again today, Chloe?" she asked.
Chloe finished chewing and swallowed. "Yes, Artena-sama. I don't
expect him to improve much if he's still acting like he did yesterday,
though."
Artena nodded, and Chloe wondered why the older woman was so interested
in the boy's training. Ranma would be gone soon, so why did it matter
to her? That he could avoid Chloe's knives certainly indicated his
skill, even if she was injured at the time, but that shouldn't have any
importance to Artena, except perhaps in that Ranma might be a threat.
If he was a threat, he should be killed. Chloe would do it, if Artena
allowed her to. If she could, which she wasn't sure about in her
partially healed state.
Chloe paced herself so that she finished eating at the same time as
Artena, and when Artena said nothing, Chloe thanked her for the meal and
went to her room. After putting on her harnesses and cloak and making
sure that all her knives were accessible, Chloe left the Manor and
headed to the coliseum again.
On the way, she spotted a number of grape seeds lying scattered across
the ground. That boy was definitely trying to annoy her.
When she arrived, she was careful to make no sound, slipping through one
of the huge arching doorways that so many people had once passed
through, so very long ago. Now, she entered alone, and the only
participant in the games was a young boy her own age. Chloe wondered
what the girl would think of Ranma, not that they were likely to ever
meet. No doubt she would be more than a match for him. Chloe herself
was certainly less skilled, more hesitant to strike, than that girl was.
Inside, instead of throwing knives, Ranma was running through various
kata. She assumed them to be from his family school, which he had
mentioned when he introduced himself in such a rude fashion after waking
up sane two days previously. He jumped about on the sand, throwing
punches and kicks and twirling around to strike at imaginary opponents
in all directions. The sand underneath him, mostly hard like everywhere
else in the coliseum, was beginning to break up, becoming loose under
the repeated impacts and Ranma's shifting weight.
Ranma wasn't, by any stretch of the imagination, the best she has seen.
She herself had had a number of instructors, teaching her knife-throwing
and how to fight barehanded, with swords, spears, and a number of other
weapons. Every lethal weapon she could conceivably be taught with had
been trained into her to some degree, to the point where she could now
use almost anything, no matter how innocent in purpose, to kill people.
Her instructors, however, had still been better in their specific fields
than she was. Being able to recognize that difference in skill also
allowed her to realize that Ranma was better at unarmed combat than she
was, enough so that even if she was healed, she didn't think she could
kill him except by surprise.
She wasn't sure what his capabilities were, though. As he danced back
and forth across the arena, leaping from place to place as he went, she
noted that he wasn't jumping near as high or easily as he had when they
arrived at the Manor. His jumps, while impressive for a boy his age,
weren't at the same extreme as his jumping fifteen feet into the air as
he had done previously. The effort he was putting into his practice was
easily visible, he was sweating profusely, making small grunting noises
before pushing himself into the air, sometimes a bit clumsily and
landing with awkwardness, and the difference made her wonder if there
was more to the feline behavior he had at first exhibited than his
simply acting as a cat. The physical abilities he had shown before
weren't present now. Why?
By now, Ranma was taking big, gulping breaths, his actions had slowed
down, and it was clear that he was soon to stop. She watched silently,
and several minutes later, he did, and she could see that he was
literally shaking with the effort he'd just put himself through. Rather
than taking a break to recover, however, Ranma walked over to the post
he'd been using as a target for the past two days, picked up the knives
he had placed there, then moved to about thirty feet away.
Taking a deep breath and then releasing it slowly, he threw the first
knife, and Chloe tracked it through the air as it sailed towards the
post--and then passed it.
"Shit!"
Ranma took another breath, held himself still for a moment, and then
threw the next knife. It hit the target, but base-first instead of
point, and it bounced and fell to the ground. The next knife hit the
post as well, this time correctly, and stuck with the blade sunk into
the wood by about half an inch, as best Chloe could tell.
Half an inch really wasn't enough, she knew. The blades were four
inches long, the handle the same length. That was enough to kill
somebody if the knife hit in the right location, but a half inch
wouldn't do more than irritate and cause some hesitation or panic in the
target. That could be effective, but it was still better to simply kill
the person, instead.
The next knife hit a few inches away from the previous one, this time
penetrating twice as deep. An inch still wasn't enough. The fifth
knife clipped the top of the post and then flipped end-over-end until it
landed in the sand several feet beyond.
Ranma stood still for a minute, fists clenching at his sides, then
relaxed slightly and breathed out. Then he went and picked up the
knives, easily jerking free the two embedded into the post, and went
back to his throwing position. He started over.
Three of the knives hit and stuck this time, the other two bouncing off
after hitting with the knives hit wrong. Of the next five, only one
throw was successful, and the five after that, two. In the next set,
none.
Ranma continued to get more and more erratic in his throws, repeating
his mistakes of the day before, until eventually Chloe couldn't even
consider what he was doing to be practice. He wasn't at all in control
of himself, and the way his knives were missing was a clear indication
of that. What was the problem? He was obviously capable, physically,
of throwing better, his quick improvement of two days before showed
that, yet his current performance was simply abysmal.
Deciding that she was wasting her time, Chloe backed away from her
observation point carefully, until there was no chance that Ranma could
see her if he happened to look in her direction, then turned and walked
back towards the Manor. If she and Ranma were to go into the village
and get him some more clothes the next day, then she wanted to finish
her book so that she could return it in exchange for something else.
By the time lunch was ready, Chloe had finished her book and found
herself with nothing to do, so she decided to help Artena by setting the
table. Putting the silverware and dishes out, she wondered if Ranma
would show up today, or if, like yesterday, he would continue
practicing. By the time she went back into the kitchen to help bring
the food in, however, Ranma had arrived. Rather than helping, he simply
sat down and waited for the food to be delivered. Chloe noticed that
his hands had dirt on them, which he hadn't bothered to wash off.
Once they sat down and started to eat, Artena asked, "Ranma, are you
still playing with Chloe's knives?"
Startled, Chloe looked at her, and then over at Ranma, who smirked back.
"Yeah," he said. "They're a lot of fun!"
"I've seen your target. It's not getting much use," Chloe shot back.
Ranma reddened at that and opened his mouth to retort, but Artena beat
him to it.
"Ranma, I'm going to send Chloe into the village with you tomorrow to
pick up more clothes. You're going to be here a bit longer and I don't
want you to keep wearing those every day."
"Hey!" he said. "I ain't staying much longer, and these clothes are
just fine! I don't need no more!"
Artena sighed. "They're getting dirty and you can't just keep borrowing
Chloe's outfits all the time when those need to be washed. And you will
be staying until I can locate your father, which may not be for another
week or maybe longer."
Ranma looked down, obviously inspecting his garments, which had sand
stuck to them in some places, and sweat stains in others. Chloe was
sure that would make a mess of his bed sheets, if he hadn't already done
so the night before.
"Fine," he said, after a few moments. "I don't need HER to go with me,
though. Just tell me where it is, and I'll make the trip alone."
"Do you know French?" asked Chloe, pausing with a forkful of food
halfway to her mouth.
Ranma glared at her.
"The people in the village don't speak Japanese, you know," she
continued. "You'd just wander into town and start speaking gibberish,
and they'd look at you like you were mad. Then you'd probably try to
steal some poor woman's clothes and get shot for it."
"I would not!" Ranma burst out.
Chloe just smirked, and resumed eating.
"I wouldn't!" he insisted.
"Chloe will go with you," Artena said again.
Ranma grumbled under his breath in response, but did so quietly, and
Chloe kept eating her meal with silent satisfaction, although she felt a
trace of regret as well. Chloe wished that Ranma had refused to go
along with her; in that case, Artena would have had her pick up some
clothes for him, which she would have been delighted to do. Most of the
villagers wore simple attire, however, and she wouldn't have been able
to get anything too embarrassing for him. But she could have tried.
Once Ranma stopped muttering what Chloe didn't doubt were comments about
her, he quickly tore through his meal, finishing before she or Artena
were even close to being done. Having completed, he stood and stepped
away from the table.
"I'm gonna go play with Chloe's knives some more," he announced, a smile
pasted on his face as he moved towards the door.
Chloe waited until he'd already exited the dining room and she could
hear Ranma walking away, then called out, "Try not to hurt yourself!"
When she heard the boy miss a step, she grinned over at Artena, who
looked back calmly, her lips curved slightly upwards. Apparently Ranma
couldn't think of a response very quickly, however, and he kept going
after that brief pause. Chloe sighed happily. Life was good.
"He's going to try to get back at you for that, you know," Artena said,
still smiling.
Chloe nodded in response. She expected that the boy would attempt to
retaliate in some way, but she was sure she'd be able to handle it. She
was Noir.
Chloe ate a few bites more of her meal, then asked, "Artena-sama, do you
think Ranma will start trying harder, now that he knows you've been
watching him?"
"Maybe, Chloe. If he did, would it matter?"
"...No."
She was Noir. Someone like Ranma could be a challenge, but she would
always come out on top. For Artena, and for that girl, she would
eliminate or overrun all obstacles.
"No, it wouldn't."
"Good."
She was Noir. Which meant that she was going to have to figure out a
way to beat Ranma in more than a simple knife-throwing competition. She
might be able to nail him with her knives, once her left arm finished
healing and she was able to use it properly, but there wasn't any way to
be sure without testing it. The easiest solution she could think of was
to kill Ranma while he was asleep. Greater skill meant nothing in the
face of willingness to make use of all means necessary. The best
solution, however, would be for her to improve to the point where
surprise was no longer necessary. But how long would that take?
Certainly more time than Ranma would remain at the Manor for.
So. If Artena allowed her to, Chloe would kill Ranma while he was
sleeping. Then she would train until, if Ranma had been present or
alive, she would have been able to kill him without the boy's abilities
being handicapped in such a manner.
"Chloe?"
She looked up, and saw that Artena had finished eating and was looking
at her in concern. Chloe smiled. "Sorry, Artena-sama. I was
thinking." She quickly started in at her food again, cursing her
absent-mindedness.
"I see," said Artena, before she went silent.
Over the next few minutes, Chloe was very self-conscious of the scraping
and clicking noises the silverware made against her plate. She ate
quickly, but carefully, and she didn't look up as she chewed. Instead
she kept an eye on her quickly diminishing food, until it was gone.
Finished, she raised her head, and saw Artena smile at her. She smiled
back, relieved that Artena wasn't angry with her for becoming
distracted.
"Would you like to take a bath today, Chloe?"
"Yes!" she said, happily, and Artena gave her another smile.
"Very well. Let's clean the dishes, and then we'll go to the hot
springs."
Chloe jumped to her feet, almost knocking her chair over, and began
taking the dishes into the kitchen. It'd been a while since Artena had
given her a bath.
Chloe stepped into the steaming water carefully, not wanting to slip
this close to the edge of the hot spring. Breaking her head open wasn't
something she wanted. The hot water, calm and unmoving, crept up her
legs as she walked forward, the submerged areas of her body feeling
disjointed, almost cut off from the rest of her. But pleasantly so.
She continued until she was deep enough, then ducked her head under the
water and held herself still for half a minute, relaxing in the
comforting heat that surrounded her completely. With a sigh, she stood
again, and this time it was the revealed portions of her body that felt
uncomfortable, like they'd just been ripped from the womb and wanted
nothing but to return to their previous warmth.
"You enjoy this too much, you know. I might have to begin rationing
your baths out more carefully."
She turned and looked guiltily towards Artena. "I like the heat," she
confessed. "Almost hot enough to hurt, but not quite. It feels good."
The older woman nodded, stepping into the pool herself. Rather than
moving further out into the water, however, Artena settled down onto one
of the steps. Her hair was bound up safely to keep it from getting wet,
though she was submerged up to her upper chest. She leaned back against
the edge of the pool, and Chloe could see Artena roll her shoulders.
Maybe they were slightly stiff from spending time at her desk, writing
letters.
Chloe also noticed the effect those movements had on Artena's body.
Artena was so pretty; Chloe hoped that she could look like that when she
was older. That was a ways off, and for now, it was unimportant.
Still, Artena was her ultimate goal. She wanted to be as good as that
girl was, true, and wanted to live up to the expectations that were held
for those who were Noir, but what she desired after that was to be like
Artena. Beautiful, intelligent, and kind. So very kind.
While Artena took a few minutes to relax, Chloe moved about in the
deeper area of the spring. The floor where she was at was very hot,
where the water leaked up through the rocks beneath, so she was careful
to keep treading water rather than letting herself settle down into it.
The water was deep enough that she had a foot or two of freedom to move
around in, which was plenty as long as she didn't forget where she was.
The temperature was higher, here in the middle of the spring. It was
borderline intolerable, and as Chloe moved about, arms and legs passing
through the water, each motion was accompanied by a surge of heat
running across her body. The air she breathed in was hot, her lungs
feeling a touch scorched as she inhaled. Her body felt heavy on the
exhalations, sinking into the water. She closed her eyes, sleepy.
"Chloe!"
She turned her head to the side, somewhat dizzily. She was so hot. It
felt good. What was wrong? Her breath came in short gasps. "Artena-
sama?" Where was she?
The heat felt different now, lesser. She was moving through the water
again. Hadn't she stopped?
#####
End for now.