I:
Tara quickly sidestepped the chained knife - there was probably a more precise name for the thing, but she didn't know it - and it streaked past her. She suspected that the crazy, golden-haired woman was just throwing her blades at anyone in sight. Fortunately, that meant that the thrower didn't know how much combat training Tara had. (Or possibly, some previous incarnation of Tara had, and she was benefiting from.)
In any event, as the knife thunked into its target - a wall - Tara reached up from her crouched position and grabbed the chain, hoping to pull its handle out of the woman's hand. That would leave her at least fifty percent disarmed, and make the next part of this a hell of a lot easier.
Sadly, Tara's luck seemed to have momentarily run out. Yanking the chain proved ineffective - it was like trying to pull a ship's sea-anchor up with her bare hands. God, that meant the woman was seriously strong.
"Say, aren't you dead?"
Amazingly, the lunatic was talking to her - and, she noted, looking at her in a way that she might almost call confused.
"Not yet," Tara snapped, letting go of the chain. Worked metal, like this, was more-or-less impervious to her powers. She needed to find another strategy, fast.
"No, I don't mean now, I mean before now. Something about an exploding underwater base or some such bloody nonsense." Damned if the woman didn't sound quizzical.
"It's a long story." Concrete in the floors? No, they'd make her pay for the repairs, and she'd almost exhausted the funds on the bank card she'd found after waking up.
"Oh. Well, then, screw it." Without another word, the lunatic jerked back the knife in the wall behind Tara, almost cutting her side as it recoiled, and sent the other one right at her. She narrowly dodged that one by vaulting over one of the racks of shoes to her side.
Still trying to think of a strategy, she noted quickly that most of the other customers on this floor had retreated towards the bounce tubes going down. In fact, there was a huge pileup in front of -
Oh shit.
"You know what? Those things aren't nearly as safe as they make them out to be," the madwoman called out, still apparently standing where she'd been earlier. "Even with all the fail safes, there's a one in a million chance that none of them will work.
"And you know what they say about million to one chances."
That was when the screaming really started.
II:
The alarms started to go off less than an hour into Diane's first shift, and she found herself just a bit confused when everyone just looked around, seeming as confused as her. They had to have been through a fire drill before now, surely.
"All employees and associates, please evacuate the building. This is a Class 5 emergency, not a drill. Repeat, all employees and associates..."
Class 5 emergencies hadn't been covered in the brief safety seminar she'd been given earlier that day. But whatever they were, clearly the other employees were taking them seriously enough to be quickly exiting the basement stockroom and heading for the hallway containing the bounce tubes. She chose to tag along.
Unfortunately, there were a lot more employees than bounce tubes to carry them up. Each tube could only handle about nine or ten people, tightly packed, and so there was something of a choke point in the evacuation proceedings. Diane found herself near the back of the bus, outside the doorway to the last "down" tube.
That was how she happened to see the people falling through it.
Diane watched in a sort of distant horror as they dropped past her, some screaming, some apparently too shocked to do that. It wasn't until she saw the plummeting baby carriage and heard the wails as it dropped out of sight that she finally found her own voice. "There are people --"
Whatever else she might have said was drowned out by the cries and shrieks of other employees as they also discovered what was going on beside them. A tiny part of Diane's mind murmured that this was a wonderful bonding experience for her new family.
"The tubes have been compromised!" called a voice of authority from up ahead. "Proceed to the stairway." The mass of people began to move forward while Diane spared a moment to admire the speaker's euphemism. It was the best one she'd heard all day.
She was beginning to suspect that she might actually get through this all right when, just as she passed the last "up" tube, someone shoved her on her right side. Off balance, she stumbled into the tube and the force field slammed into her like her first cellmate's fist.
She was heading up much faster than the normal safety settings would permit. The doors to the first three floors passed by in a flash. Abruptly, Diane realized that she was going to be reduced to a pancake on the roof unless she did something.
Bracing herself against the invisible wall underneath her, she threw herself forward. Her toes brushed against the top of the door-frame, and she somersaulted to a halt on the floor in front of the tubes. Eighth floor, she blurrily realized from the shoes all around her.
But who the hell was that?
III:
Rick slid the hovercycle in and out of traffic on the crowded expressway into Opal City. It would probably have been faster to just run - he could easily break the fifteen-second mile - but to do so would have attracted more attention than he wanted right now.
The speaker inside his helmet buzzed. "It's starting," said Lorraine's voice. "There are clear reports of metavillainous activity in downtown Opal City. Bridwell's, if I understand the intercepts right."
He didn't doubt that she understood them perfectly. "Anybody we know?"
There was a full moment's worth of hesitation before she answered. "The Harlequin."
His jaw tightened. "It would be."
Snapping down the helmet's visor, Knight gunned the cycle's engine until it shot up over the other vehicles, then roared towards the battlefield.
IV:
In the first instant after Rumiko had realized that the golden-haired woman standing near the center of this floor was responsible for the danger she'd sensed, she had dived for cover.
This was not simply a case of discretion being the greater part of valor, though that did play a part. But she had to open up the false bottom of the bag, remove the two blades from it, and also pull out the mask. And even more than that, she had to study her opponent.
The mask fit around her face perfectly - which was strange, given that it had been designed for another woman, nearly half a century ago. But perhaps her distant kinship with Yamashiro Tatsu was closer than either of their families believed.
She was tightening the ties around the back of her head when the screams began in earnest. She looked back towards the bounce tubes just in time to see the mass of panicked civilians push a woman pushing a baby carriage into the shaft - and then see her and it plummet out of sight.
Enough.
She drew the katana and its matching wakizashi from their hilts, then rose and cried aloud, "Yurusenai!"
The madwoman, who'd been giggling, looked a bit startled at her appearance, and asked aloud, "I'll what?"
Praying that the distraction would last long enough, Rumiko dashed towards her foe and struck low and high simultaneously.
To her shock, the woman blocked both blades with her arms. The fabric alone couldn't possibly be that strong, could it?
"Wow, a swordfight! And me without my bright yellow suit. Oh well." And with that, the woman pushed Rumiko back, and began to slice at her with a new pair of knives. Rumiko parried, but found that any sort of riposte would be impossible. Her foe was too strong and too fast.
Unless some other distraction came soon -
Even as she thought that, a red-haired woman was vomited up out of one of the bounce tubes. She looked up with a disoriented expression, and the madwoman seemed to start at the sight of her.
"You," she said in a breathy sort of voice. "I remember you. I remember you lots!"
An opening! Rumiko drove the edge of her smaller sword towards her foe's stomach.
But the opening, if it had ever existed, had passed, and the madwoman's feet were already above where her stomach would have been. She went so far as to use Rumiko's head as a post to vault over her, and rolled until she was right in front of the new arrival.
From the baggy right sleeve of her shirt, she produced a broad-bladed knife, and drove it forward into her newest victim's skull.
Author's Notes:
For the Japanese illiterate: "Yurusenai" means, roughly: "I will not forgive you" - only the feeling is a lot stronger than that. Perhaps the phrase "you are unforgivable" comes closer.
Tara quickly sidestepped the chained knife - there was probably a more precise name for the thing, but she didn't know it - and it streaked past her. She suspected that the crazy, golden-haired woman was just throwing her blades at anyone in sight. Fortunately, that meant that the thrower didn't know how much combat training Tara had. (Or possibly, some previous incarnation of Tara had, and she was benefiting from.)
In any event, as the knife thunked into its target - a wall - Tara reached up from her crouched position and grabbed the chain, hoping to pull its handle out of the woman's hand. That would leave her at least fifty percent disarmed, and make the next part of this a hell of a lot easier.
Sadly, Tara's luck seemed to have momentarily run out. Yanking the chain proved ineffective - it was like trying to pull a ship's sea-anchor up with her bare hands. God, that meant the woman was seriously strong.
"Say, aren't you dead?"
Amazingly, the lunatic was talking to her - and, she noted, looking at her in a way that she might almost call confused.
"Not yet," Tara snapped, letting go of the chain. Worked metal, like this, was more-or-less impervious to her powers. She needed to find another strategy, fast.
"No, I don't mean now, I mean before now. Something about an exploding underwater base or some such bloody nonsense." Damned if the woman didn't sound quizzical.
"It's a long story." Concrete in the floors? No, they'd make her pay for the repairs, and she'd almost exhausted the funds on the bank card she'd found after waking up.
"Oh. Well, then, screw it." Without another word, the lunatic jerked back the knife in the wall behind Tara, almost cutting her side as it recoiled, and sent the other one right at her. She narrowly dodged that one by vaulting over one of the racks of shoes to her side.
Still trying to think of a strategy, she noted quickly that most of the other customers on this floor had retreated towards the bounce tubes going down. In fact, there was a huge pileup in front of -
Oh shit.
"You know what? Those things aren't nearly as safe as they make them out to be," the madwoman called out, still apparently standing where she'd been earlier. "Even with all the fail safes, there's a one in a million chance that none of them will work.
"And you know what they say about million to one chances."
That was when the screaming really started.
II:
The alarms started to go off less than an hour into Diane's first shift, and she found herself just a bit confused when everyone just looked around, seeming as confused as her. They had to have been through a fire drill before now, surely.
"All employees and associates, please evacuate the building. This is a Class 5 emergency, not a drill. Repeat, all employees and associates..."
Class 5 emergencies hadn't been covered in the brief safety seminar she'd been given earlier that day. But whatever they were, clearly the other employees were taking them seriously enough to be quickly exiting the basement stockroom and heading for the hallway containing the bounce tubes. She chose to tag along.
Unfortunately, there were a lot more employees than bounce tubes to carry them up. Each tube could only handle about nine or ten people, tightly packed, and so there was something of a choke point in the evacuation proceedings. Diane found herself near the back of the bus, outside the doorway to the last "down" tube.
That was how she happened to see the people falling through it.
Diane watched in a sort of distant horror as they dropped past her, some screaming, some apparently too shocked to do that. It wasn't until she saw the plummeting baby carriage and heard the wails as it dropped out of sight that she finally found her own voice. "There are people --"
Whatever else she might have said was drowned out by the cries and shrieks of other employees as they also discovered what was going on beside them. A tiny part of Diane's mind murmured that this was a wonderful bonding experience for her new family.
"The tubes have been compromised!" called a voice of authority from up ahead. "Proceed to the stairway." The mass of people began to move forward while Diane spared a moment to admire the speaker's euphemism. It was the best one she'd heard all day.
She was beginning to suspect that she might actually get through this all right when, just as she passed the last "up" tube, someone shoved her on her right side. Off balance, she stumbled into the tube and the force field slammed into her like her first cellmate's fist.
She was heading up much faster than the normal safety settings would permit. The doors to the first three floors passed by in a flash. Abruptly, Diane realized that she was going to be reduced to a pancake on the roof unless she did something.
Bracing herself against the invisible wall underneath her, she threw herself forward. Her toes brushed against the top of the door-frame, and she somersaulted to a halt on the floor in front of the tubes. Eighth floor, she blurrily realized from the shoes all around her.
But who the hell was that?
III:
Rick slid the hovercycle in and out of traffic on the crowded expressway into Opal City. It would probably have been faster to just run - he could easily break the fifteen-second mile - but to do so would have attracted more attention than he wanted right now.
The speaker inside his helmet buzzed. "It's starting," said Lorraine's voice. "There are clear reports of metavillainous activity in downtown Opal City. Bridwell's, if I understand the intercepts right."
He didn't doubt that she understood them perfectly. "Anybody we know?"
There was a full moment's worth of hesitation before she answered. "The Harlequin."
His jaw tightened. "It would be."
Snapping down the helmet's visor, Knight gunned the cycle's engine until it shot up over the other vehicles, then roared towards the battlefield.
IV:
In the first instant after Rumiko had realized that the golden-haired woman standing near the center of this floor was responsible for the danger she'd sensed, she had dived for cover.
This was not simply a case of discretion being the greater part of valor, though that did play a part. But she had to open up the false bottom of the bag, remove the two blades from it, and also pull out the mask. And even more than that, she had to study her opponent.
The mask fit around her face perfectly - which was strange, given that it had been designed for another woman, nearly half a century ago. But perhaps her distant kinship with Yamashiro Tatsu was closer than either of their families believed.
She was tightening the ties around the back of her head when the screams began in earnest. She looked back towards the bounce tubes just in time to see the mass of panicked civilians push a woman pushing a baby carriage into the shaft - and then see her and it plummet out of sight.
Enough.
She drew the katana and its matching wakizashi from their hilts, then rose and cried aloud, "Yurusenai!"
The madwoman, who'd been giggling, looked a bit startled at her appearance, and asked aloud, "I'll what?"
Praying that the distraction would last long enough, Rumiko dashed towards her foe and struck low and high simultaneously.
To her shock, the woman blocked both blades with her arms. The fabric alone couldn't possibly be that strong, could it?
"Wow, a swordfight! And me without my bright yellow suit. Oh well." And with that, the woman pushed Rumiko back, and began to slice at her with a new pair of knives. Rumiko parried, but found that any sort of riposte would be impossible. Her foe was too strong and too fast.
Unless some other distraction came soon -
Even as she thought that, a red-haired woman was vomited up out of one of the bounce tubes. She looked up with a disoriented expression, and the madwoman seemed to start at the sight of her.
"You," she said in a breathy sort of voice. "I remember you. I remember you lots!"
An opening! Rumiko drove the edge of her smaller sword towards her foe's stomach.
But the opening, if it had ever existed, had passed, and the madwoman's feet were already above where her stomach would have been. She went so far as to use Rumiko's head as a post to vault over her, and rolled until she was right in front of the new arrival.
From the baggy right sleeve of her shirt, she produced a broad-bladed knife, and drove it forward into her newest victim's skull.
Author's Notes:
For the Japanese illiterate: "Yurusenai" means, roughly: "I will not forgive you" - only the feeling is a lot stronger than that. Perhaps the phrase "you are unforgivable" comes closer.