This story is a work of fanfiction. As such, it owes a great debt to the creators of the characters used herein: Rumiko Takahashi, creator of Ranma, and Kunihiku Ikuhara who created Sailor Moon from the work of Naoko Takeuchi.
This story's main home is ｒａｎｍａｆｉｃｓ。ｒｕ／ｆａｎｆｉｃｓ／ｙｏｕｒ＿ｄｅｓｔｉｎｙ＿ｉｓ＿ａｎｎｕｌｌｅｄ／ｅｎｇｌｉｓｈ .
(シーンブレイク)
Your Destiny Is Annulled
Chapter 21,
Industrial Dungeon Crawl
Unremarkable tunnels were stretching in all directions branching, merging, twisting sharply up and down. Like gray bowels.
"We can keep searching for it till the end of time," Ahta grumbled. "We have to split to comb this area thoroughly. Let me take the upper levels, Akane the middle and Ranma the lower ones. Just keep your eyes open. They had checked this area of course, but they always do this hastily, with a quick and dirty magical scan. Who knows what the creeps could have left lying around. So don't touch anything, all right? Don't come close, even." He handed the girls chunks of white rock to mark checked passages. Then he disappeared in a tunnel leading to the upper levels.
"I don't like this idea," Ranma grumbled with distaste. She was feeling some vague apprehension.
"All right, your suggestion then?" Akane made a pointed pause met with silence on Ranma's part. "Just as I thought. I don't like this too, you know. Don't worry." She stepped up to the gray-haired girl to hug her lightly. "I will·be careful."
Ranma wanted to object, badly. But she couldn't put the disjointed, vague impressions into words. So she decided to keep silent, lest she blurted out something really·stupid.
"All right, here we go." Akane turned around. Soon she disappeared beyond the nearest corridor turn, twin scraping sounds reaching from that direction as she marked her passage with an arrow.
Ranma sighed as she headed for a corridor that descended sharply leading to the lower levels. Down there there were the same bowels of empty corridors meandering and branching in convoluted ways. Ranma was feeling ill at ease being in there. She couldn't say herself, why. Maybe because such labyrinth would feel more at home in a nightmare, not in reality?
Marking yet another corridor as a dead end — it branched into two, one leading too far away from the search zone with the other diving deeper still — Ranma returned to the previous branch and drew yet another criss cross mark on the wall. Dead end, check.
She turned into a new corridor. The feeling of wrongness persisted, haunting her. Ranma stopped to try and figure it out. Something was wrong. There was something wrong with her. She couldn't put a finger on it, though. Was there some alien factor affecting her body? The thought of her reflexes failing her was disconcerting. Ranma knew from close an personal experience that there were worlds out there where ki did not work turning all her hard-earned skill into a useless — or worse, suicidal — heap of habits and knee-jerk reactions. But ki was working here, right? Closing her eyes she began a complex series of kata, modifying the deadly dance on the fly to incorporate the tunnel walls both usable for rebounding and as a weapon to slam opponent against. She finished by touching the wall with her index finger and opened her eyes. Her finger was touching the center of a dark spot she chose as the final target.
Her body was perfectly fine.
And still, something was wrong.
Ranma sighed, shook her head and moved on thinking that she'd have to take a rain check on these doubts. Ranma was loathe to do this. If there was something wrong with her... If they found it out in a battle, it would be too late. She'd overextend, or miscalculate her opponent's strength. Or fail to feel a danger in time... As Akane failed to... feel that pushing... that button...
Suddenly, the fragments of thoughts fell together with a sharp click. That's it! It was a vital part of the danger sense that wasn't working! Namely the sort of clairvoyance the most experienced martial artists develop that allows them to avoid a falling rock or other threats devoid of hostile ki and killing intent. Here, in Ahs, manipulating time was impossible. But what is clairvoyance if not cheating time? Which Ahs prevents with the iron fist of its rules. That was also why Solar Teleport wasn't working: it includes foreseeing the destination point as a part of the process!
Why didn't he recognize the existence of such a glaring hole right away? Ranma knew the answer. Too used to perceiving the danger sense as something solid, indivisible. He just couldn't wrap his mind around the idea that parts of his danger sense could work or fail separately.
There was one more thought that surfaced from the depth of the subconsciousness: that sharp click, it did sound in reality. From the floor. Lost in thoughts, she failed to notice a pressure plate.
Ranma wanted to cuss but her remaining lifespan proved to be too short for that: several pairs of ghostly blades erupted from the tunnel walls in bursts of pulverized rock, closing rapidly like giant scissors.
Ranma twitched to dodge, only to realize there was nowhere to. She was surrounded by blades, trapped in a rapidly collapsing rhombus of free space.
A SICKENING CRUNCH
It almost didn't hurt, she thought as she was plummeting into numbing blindness.
(シーンブレイク)
Deep silence reigning supreme, the world shrouded in fog. A placid river was flowing between shores of green grass.
Ranma twitched, her surroundings fading in like an instant photo. Where had she been just a moment ago? What...
She found herself kneeling, dressed in a formal kimono. Not what she'd prefer: it was fine clothing and all, but fighting in it would be... bothersome. She was sitting on the very edge of the shore facing the other side of the river. Beyond the flowing water — it was hard to tell how far, for some reason — there were two grannies. Both dressed like her in formal kimono, kneeling facing her.
Who could they be, thought Ranma. It's like I should know. No, wait. A feeling of cozy warm lap and a hand petting the newly born kitten floated up from some corner of her memory. It's that old lady who had been helping me out of the neko-ken, Ranma realized suddenly. She smiled at the old lady who was one of very few people that had left only nice memories of them.
The other granny was feeling... Unfamiliar, but at the same time like family. The old lady smiled at her warmly. "So that's how you grew up, my grandson. Pity we haven't been destined to meet." Her smile turned sad.
"You are too early to join us," the granny-from-neighborhood said with a frown. Could it be that your father, let's not speak of him, finally overstepped reason too far?"
"No, I..." Ranma began politely. "Aw, crappity crap!" she finished far more colorfully when she finally realized what·this place was and which river it was. "Wait, wait, wait, grannies. I kinda love you and stuff, but I have an unfinished task! I have to save Usagi, and Akane, and..." The words died on her tongue, empty and powerless. All of that did not matter anymore. Everything was in the past, carried away by the quiet waters. Make one step, and here's the other shore, and there is no return. There was nowhere to return anyway. No need to.
Ranma stood up. Quiet and detached, she stepped into the water.
A disgusting sound tore the silence apart. It was like thousands of electric motors whirring discordantly. The fog parted. A giant hand of a mechanical God reached out to grab Ranma roughly. Then it jerked her away, down... or up... perpendicularly to this ghostly reality. The shores of the river of the dead, the grandmother who didn't live to see him born, the granny-from-neighborhood — everything dissolved in a gray void. Ranma felt her senses deadening...
(シーンブレイク)
Yuck, I'm seeing weird things now, Ranma thought opening her eyes and trying to blink the bleary fogginess away. Had I breathed some fumes in? The idea seemed plausible, especially as her senses were severely dulled. Her eyes just couldn't focus on the gray stone in front of her face. The silence was far too deep for a cave, and she wasn't feeling her tongue. Not just tongue, she realized with sudden horror. Her entire body too! Judging by what her eyes were telling her, she was face down on the floor, but she couldn't feel anything. There should be at least feeling of stone under her left cheek, and some pain too, as there was blood pooling from her busted nose.
Am I paralyzed? Ranma thought with a chill. I'm feeling like a zombie. In her mind, she paled, her hair standing on its ends. Ranma tried to jump up, to move her numb body, but the stone floor in her field of vision did not even twitch. Instead, muted but still disgusting wet sounds reached from somewhere to her left. Oh no, Ranma thought, nauseated: she suddenly remembered the closing rows of blades. And the moment when she put Brya's 'dead-raising' construct to her forehead. The same as Akane did.
Ranma felt like throwing up. She had to see the final proof. She began making walking motions with her fingers. There was a wet rustling from the left. She kept trying, moving her fingers stubbornly. The rustling grew closer, then an arm severed at the elbow crawled into her field of vision trailing torn sinews.
Ranma tried to scream but her lungs were somewhere on the floor, so her scream came out utterly sile— ear-splittingly loud. She sat up in a jerk surveying the inside of the rail car with eyes bleary from sleep.
A dream? That was just a dream! A silly nightmare! Ranma laughed weakly with relief.
"What are you yelling for?" Akane asked her angrily.
Ahta just cleared his ringing ears.
"I, well, err..." Ranma mentally panicked trying to find an excuse, to avoid explaining her nightmare. After that... accident with Akane her nerves were frayed, while the desire to shield her wife from any trouble grew overwhelming, able to overcome any logic. "I, heh-heh, just a practical joke."
"Oh, you joked..." The upper part of Akane's face was hidden by an ominous, unnaturally deep shadow — much deeper that her short hair would be able to provide. "I'd like to ask you..." Her fist slammed into Ranma's ear with the force of a jackhammer throwing the pigtailed girl off the bench. "TO NEVER JOKE LIKE THAT AGAIN!"
"Hey, hey, coolant," Ahta squeaked, having pulled his legs up and plastered himself into a corner.
It's fine, Ranma thought feeling her ear pulsate with pain, swelling. It's good. You remain blissfully oblivious, my dear. My stupid fears haven't touched you.
(シーンブレイク)
Ami let out a quiet sigh. Her head was swelling from all this work with formulas in a notation she wasn't used to. From having to fill in blanks in the local theory of spatial manipulations. She would have gotten stuck long ago if not the portal controller with its built-in function of calculating path to the next token. The reality of inter-universal transit proved to be inhumanly complex, much more so than she had thought based on her experience of creating a portal into the pocket universe of the Dark Kingdom. Even she, with her intellect, would've needed years. Thankfully, there was a cheat sheet, an Ariadne's thread of the series of coordinate transformation matrices pointing the way to the next token.
The remaining work was a trifle: to extricate the part of transformation corresponding to transiting to the next world and implement it in formulas for setting the portal device. A low-powered portal device designed for connecting to elemental pseudoplanes, utterly unsuitable for the task at hand.
Energy cost was the limiting factor. Ami was re-calculating all formulas from scratch for the third time now, trying to get sane values. But there were no reasons for optimism yet.
The two scientists weren't helping, busy squabbling on that very topic.
"Come on!" argued the cyan-haired old lady. "The practical benefits will outweigh any cost anyway!"
"For your society, maybe," the bald shorty wasn't giving up. "While my center would lose its entire budget for the next three to five thousands."
"Don't be so petty," Khassahcht was admonishing him. "This breakthrough will bring so much good for the entirety of mankind, there is no way your center would not benefit from it."
"Pretty words," disagreed Lukhyt. "Even if this reckless scheme of yours succeeds, have you seen the resource cost? How much phasemana per thousand would we need for keeping a minimal trade exchange with other universes?"
Ami shrugged with guilt, her eyes firmly on the calculating board.
"Who, should I ask," continued the bald mage, "will be hunting phase swallowers in industrial quantities? Did you forget the specific mortality? Well, I can remind you: almost two thousandths!"
Ami started: was their way further on paid with human lives?
"Please, there is no need for such dramatism," Khassacht said waving him off. "If need arises, we'll repurpose a harvester or build a specialized machine for your swallowers. We'll get them.
(シーンブレイク)
When the train stopped, Ranma stepped up to the door and reached for the handwheel.
"Stop, don't be stupid!" Jumping up to her, Akane stopped her with a smack upside her head. "Who told you you can leave? Wait until they come and open!"
"Fort Lykht is a small station," Ahta noted with disapproval as he turned the handwheel wlile Ranma was rubbing the back of her head. "We do everything by ourselves here."
Ranma cautiously slid the door aside. The car was filled with the glow of setting mini-suns, the stuffy heat of the wasteland breathing in her face. Shivering from the sharp transition she took a quick look around. Stack of assembled railroad sections, were stretching some distance away along the track, rails pre-assembled, connected with cross-ties. To the right, right beyond the tail of the train, there was a double chain-link fence reinforced with a grate along its bottom. To the left there were stacks of crates resting on the ground. Beyond these there was a two-story full-metal building, its edges rounded and its windows like slits. Some kind of latticed frame was rotating slowly on its top.
It was clear they weren't in an oasis.
Ranma jumped down to the hard ground of the wasteland. The grass, where it wasn't trampled down, was gray and withered, covered in white streaks as if it had been sprayed with some poison. Ranma jumped up to the car roof to take a better look around. The train was standing inside a round, fenced off territory of some three hundred meters in diameter, with the small building at its very center. This circle of bare ground and dead gray grass was lined with branching rail tracks, almost like a common rail station — except the gaps between the tracks were thirty of forty meters. Ranma counted six parallel tracks. Entering as a single track, these branched, then joined again on the opposite side leaving the yard as a single track again.
The fenced-off space was mostly empty, with rare stacks of rail sections, boxes or aluminum I-beams stored on the ground.
"Help me carry the cabbage," Ahta called from below. "They need five boxes in total."
Ranma took one last look around. She noticed a rise in the ground on the side the train came from, barely visible through the blurry haze common for the wasteland. Were they close to some oasis, but outside? She hopped down.
Waving off all attempts to help her, Akane took all five boxes holding these over her head for balance. The long flat boxes of three meters in length had mesh wire sides and latticed tops, making for a wobbly tower as tall as Akane was. She was balancing it easily.
The two girls and one guy went to the small building.
"What are we going to do?" Ranma asked Ahta once she overcame her unusual shyness. Not that she was afraid of him.. her. More likely, of herself.
"Our task is to comb the area using your device as a detector. As I understand from what I've been explained, it points distance in meters."
"Erm..." Ranma opened the medallion, only to stare at the empty screen and a lot of buttons labeled with big words surrounding the Latin keyboard in the center. "I think it's the 'List of functions'? Or 'Analysis'...?"
"Give it to me," Akane said as she turned around to hand the boxes to the other girl, her arms outstretched.
"You two are something," Ahta mumbled under his breath. "It's almost three hundred kilograms of cabbage."
Ranma let out a heavy sigh as she hung the medallion on her wife's neck before taking the boxes. She held them over her head as well.
Akane clicked the buttons some. "All right, it gives the numbers..." Suddenly, she exploded with outrage: "What's with this thing! From seven hundred meters to infinity?！"
"Most probably, the artifact in question must be inside your auric event horizon for this to work," Ahta reassured her. "Coherence is poor at distances more than four hundred meters, the vast majority of location methods doesn't work. This also dictates the diameter of the station zone. It couldn't be made larger, the only solution is adding yet another zone close to it." He pointed at the roof of the building.
Close up, it was resembling a bunker as the thickness of its aluminum walls became apparent. The edges of the roof and the narrow, slit-like windows were bristling with sharp spikes. The thing rotating on the roof looked like a radar: it was a conglomeration of rods and cables. But there were also ledges. With small fuzzy forms languishing on them, napping... Ranma misstepped almost dropping the boxes. Squirrels! All with their muzzles facing in the same direction. The 'radar' was slowly, inexorably turning towards the three newcomers. Ranma swallowed. One squirrel, a foxy one, opened its eyes and stared at the gray-haired girl. Ranma shuddered.
The door of the bunker building was opening outwards. It was heavy, with rounded corners and a handwheel in its center. Twirling it Ahta swung the door open with effort.
"Serious stuff," Ranma approved involuntarily as it became apparent that the door was some thirty centimeters thick, narrowing slightly in small steps. Considering the fact that the local aluminum was two or three times more durable than good steel, even a siege youma would have a hard time bashing such a door in.
Akane had to close the medallion and take the rear end of the boxes. The girls squatted to make the top box fit through the door. Beyond the door there was an airlock exactly big enough to accommodate two people carrying a box. Ahta closed the outer door, turned the handwheel locking it and only then pushed past the girls to open the inner door.
"I see you take safety seriously," Akane noted.
"Of course!" he agreed. "An idiot that shirks it would be catapulted expeditiously, to tend to garden beds. Every kind of extra-oasis activity does have its own strict mortality norms, how else!"
Akane was taken aback by such a reply, having no words to respond.
Beyond the inner door, right across it, there was a storage room door. They put the cabbage in a cooler section delimited by a metallic roller shutter.
"Where should we go now?" Ranma inquired. The first floor only consisted of the storage room and a stairway up running in parallel to the airlock but in other direction. The storage room door was placed at a small angle, so that a box could be easily dragged upstairs from the storage.
"Necessity to fill," explained Ahta.
Still, this translation is far from perfect, thought Ranma.
They took the stairs. The second floor turned out to consist of one large room spanning the entire bunker. Ranma cautiously glanced around if there were any squirrels loitering around. There were none.
The first thing attracting attention was a machine-gun on a stand pointing down at the stairs. Very well thought out: if the things rush en masse they'll be all mowed down here from their backs. Other than that, the room contained storage racks reaching the ceiling full of weapons and some tools. There were also stacks of crates along the walls and two more staircases leading back to the first floor. As is befitting of a real fortress: to reach the sleeping people, enemy have to go through the second floor first it being a good line of last defense.
There was a desk near the machine-gun, cluttered with stacks of papers.
"Good day," Ahta greeted the desk.
A head of a severe mustached man rose from behind the papers and folders. "Positive," he replied. "Necessity?"
"To fill," Ahta explained gesturing towards the girls. "Non-typical. You see, these two are aliens, not registered anywhere. Have to work inside the inner perimeter to harvest an artifact."
"Using form five, then," the man grumbled digging through the papers. "I hope they at least have their registration from the bottom if they are from there?"
"Alas," Ahta said, shrugging. "They are from another universe."
"Bullshit?" The mustached one raised his head to cast a measuring look at the girls.
"No, it's confirmed," Ahta replied. "Just believe me, uncle Ysltt, there are amazing things happening now! The Awesome Old Hag develops it together with Baldy."
"Those two? Together?" Ysltt shook his head in amazement. "Then I'm ready to believe even in the end of the world." He looked the girls over once more, then dug into papers mumbling "Then we have to use the form five-sch... Which backer should I write in?"
"Erm, the Society of Ah-constructing?" Ahta suggested, unsure. "Or, better, the Center of planaristics?"
Ranma was utterly disinterested in all this bureaucratic stuff of theirs. She continued studying the room, attracted by a quiet, regular clinking from behind. It turned out there was a big ring of round lamps attached between two racks in such a way that the mustached man could see it well from his place. All the lamps were glowing green. One after another the lamps were blinking accompanied with a quiet clinking. It was obvious that the speed of this process corresponded to the slow rotation of that squirrel-bearing thingamabob on the roof. Ranma shivered: what if one comes down here to take a leak or to eat?
To distract herself from the unnerving thoughts she started studying the weapons on the racks. There was very little variety: revolvers, shotguns with drum magazines, submachineguns with drum magazines. Each of the three kinds was presented in numbers, accompanied with small pyramids of magazines and large, open boxes with ammo. Just like nuts in a mall: each box did even have a scoop.
Ranma picked one revolver round up, to take a better look. This resulted in a heavy slap upside her head from her spouse.
"Don't stick your hands where they don't belong!" Akane hissed, irritated for some obscure reason.
Ranma sighed quietly, unable to object due to feeling too much reverence towards her wife after all they were through
It was Ahta who couldn't take this anymore: "Are you sure you are married?" he asked crossing his arms and frowning at Akane with disapproval. "Is it fitting for a spouse to treat their significant other like that? Is it fitting to tolerate such misconduct?"
"He is, uh..." Akane tried to defend herself tentatively. "He is being a fool again..." Abashed, she tore the round from Ranma's hand and put it back in the box.
Ranma was having conflicted feelings: on one hand, his wife was being badmouthed. On the other hand, it was being done to protect himself. "But she's a girl," the pigtailed girl tried to excuse her significant other.
"And how does that relate?" Ahta asked harshly.
Ranma blinked. Wasn't this obvious? "Well, I'm a guy, she's a girl," she tried explaining again.
"So what?" Ahta was not accepting such an argument. "How does that give her right to beat on you?"
"Well, err," Ranma was confused, not expecting such an outlook. "Uh, she's a girl..."
Akane felt terribly embarrassed. She lowered her eyes, blushing.
"You are both people," Ahta replied sharply. "Man, woman — all are equal before Death." His voice was full of resolute conviction. "Gender handicaps and bonuses may affect your specialization choice, but for human relationships these are nothing!"
Ranma did not have an answer for that. She had never looked at it from that point of view. Men have their own roles, women have their own, acting these roles for centuries to the best of their abilities. Both husband and wife do have their duties. Each their own. Right?
"I'm sorry, Ranma," Akane said quietly. She then put her arms around the gray-haired girl's shoulders. "I just... I won't do that again, I promise."
"Aw, I don't mind at all," Ranma yielded at once.
"What will your weapon loadout be?" the mustached one interrupted them.
"Weapons?" Ranma glanced at the racks of firearms. "We kind of don't need it. We'll make do without it."
"They are masters of martial acrobatics," Ahta explained.
Ysltt stared at him like he was a complete idiot. "Daughter, do these aliens of yours even know that a third of the creatures kills with a touch?"
"We know," Ranma hurried to reassure him. "We won't let hem closer than ten meters!"
"By the way," Ahta asked with sudden concern, "how are you going to do with only your bare hands?"
"With a ki blast," Ranma explained the obvious.
"With an air blast?" Ata clarified.
"Of air charged with emotion," Ranma explained feeling irritation at the medallion suddenly showing aptitude for lame puns.
"Of air charged with air? It's the translation again, isn't it?"
"No! With life energy, simply speaking. I'll show you when we get outside."
"And how effective it is?" Ysltt inquired.
"Well..." Ranma smirked. "Effective enough to keep someone like me from getting into the melee range if used on open ground with no cover."
"I see." The mustached one wrote something in the form. "Take revolvers then, otherwise you'd have to fill the liability waiver and accompanying forms." He waved a thick·pack of blanks in the air.
"Uhh..." Aha stared at the girls with puppy dog eyes.
"All right, we'll take 'em," Ranma reassured him. "I would never have though I'd be walking around with a revolver." She grabbed a nearest one from the rack and put it in her pocket.
Ahta made a pointed cough as he picked a holster with a cartridge belt from the next rack. It was made of thick rough fabric with metallic insets.
"Oh. Of course." Ranma quickly girdled herself with the holster and moved the revolver there.
While Akane was equipping herself, Ranma pulled the revolver out again to examine it. "I wonder how does one disassemble it?"
"Disassemble?" Ahta asked. "What for?"
"Well..." Ranma frowned. "To clean it... I don't know much about guns, but even I had heard you have to disassemble and clean them each time after you shoot, otherwise the mechanism mucks up with soot."
"What soot?" Ahta saked in confusion.
"Uhh, from gunpowder?" Ranma was beginning to think that medallion started raving again. were they talking about the same thing even? "That pushes the bullet when it burns?"
"But the bullet is pushed by inert gas," Ahta corrected. "The liquefied nitrogen in the cartridge is heated by runaway discharge of a fire rune that is engraved inside on the base. Then it pushes the bullet as it expands. Where would sooth come from?"
"Oh!" Ranma slapped her forehead. "In our world, guns aren't magical so they use fast-burning chemicals." She replaced the revolver in its holster.
"Let's go?" Akane suggested.
As they were walking towards the exit, Ranma paused at one rack: "What is this weird gun?" she asked pointing at a bulky weapon that attracted her curiosity. It had a massive ribbed barrel so thick her fist could fit in there. There were lots of gauges and verniers. The most prominent feature were three large cylindrical tanks connected with thick armored hoses. The tank set had shoulder straps, intended to be worn like a backpack. All the three were of different colors, labeled. But the medallion couldn't translate written language.
"It's tarydinator," Ahta said matter-of-factly. "It's for sweeping purges only, too bothersome a gun: you have to refill it often, to watch the pressure and the force field strength constantly. It shoots crystals of concentrated water of life freezing it on the fly in the barrel. You can shoot in bursts, ten to twelve shots per second, or in salvos, akin to a buckshotgun, with approximately one shot per second. It's heavy, the ammo can't be stored for long so you have to resupply it constantly. In short, when you have to claim land from endless hordes this gun is priceless. The rest of the time it sits in storage gathering dust. By the way, far from every creature is affected by water of life. The third tank here is for iodinated water of death. But you have to figure it out in time and manage to switch."
"Don't forget the lights, night is coming!" the mustached man reminded them.
"Of course!" Ahta grabbed three forehead lights with straps.
They walked outside leaving the station zone right after the train: it wasn't stopping at this station for long. The three token explorers waved goodbye at the gunmen of the tail gun platform, its bulky cow-catcher slowly receding into the blinding sunset glow. The chain-link gate rattled behind their backs, closing. Akane opened the medallion, then began breathing noisily through her nose. Ranma glanced at her with concern: it looked like her wife was developing allergy to the infernal contraption.
"Where to now?" Ranma asked taking a careful look around. "Is this your typical noxland?"
The sunset was on its most incovenient stage, with the glowing haze hiding the distance more effectively than any darkness could. The sky overhead was gradually darkening.
"Not exactly," Ahta corrected her adjusting the straps and putting the light on his head. "We are inside a withered oasis. Took it from the creeps not so long ago. It's of course fenced off along its edge and purged, otherwise no one would let you just waltz out like that, especially with night coming. But keep your guard. The fence is not guarded, you must understand." Pulling out a map he found their bearings and strode forward keeping his right arm close to his holster.
"A withered oasis?"
"Well, an oasis lives for four or five hundred thousand, then it gradually dies down turning into a branch of noxland, if unusually rich in resources. But that's usually not true as many former oases are mined through and through even from before the written history, all the resources depleted.
"So one day humans will have no place to live?" Akane exclaimed, horrified.
"No." Ahta laughed. "It's not that gloomy. Sometimes, a new oasis emerges on a formerly vacant ground. You'd better not stand close, of course. The birth of a new oasis isn't called 'Big Bang' for nothing."
After walking for some four hundred meters they had left a crumbling ruin of the central spire to their right, surrounded with a dry depression. The sunset was dying down, the sky turned greenish with stars and sheets of auroras emerging slowly. The lights turned on on their own. Ranma pulled her light out from her pocked and began adjusting the straps squinting and grumbling when the light hit her eyes.
"This is approximately the place." Ahta gestured around. "Now your detector should be working properly and we will easily find the artifact in question. In a circle with diameter of a hundred meters it's piece of cake."
You shouldn't have said that, missy, Ranma thought with disapproval.
Akane opened the medallion. Stared at the screen. Her eye began twitching.
"What?" Ranma asked cautiously.
Silently, Akane held the medallion out for her.
"56 to 108 meters..." Ranma read from the screen. The numbers changed. "Now 63 to 120... Wouldn't it be easier to simply comb around?"
"Let's try to mark the smallest one of several measurements on the map," suggested Ahta.
They did that, walking to and fro for a whole hour marring the map with pencil marks. In the end they got a tentative minimum of some forty meters. Inside a radius of some sixty meters.
"I'm afraid this could only mean one thing," Ahta concluded as he checked the map. "We have to get down in the dungeons."
"There are dungeons here?" Ranma asked feeling a chill travel down her spine.
"There are," Ahta confirmed squinting at the map. "As in any other withered oasis. What a snag, the tunnels are only mapped for a small distance from the entrance... This oasis is ancient, it's probably several millions old. There are no resources, that's why no one ever bothered claiming it."
Following the map, they walked a hundred meters away and descended into the dry depression of a former lake. there, amidst the coarse grass they found a smooth, round hole prudently blocked with a grate.
"Out of luck again!" Ahta exclaimed at the sight of a massive padlock.
Akane stepped forward glad to have something to vent on. The grate emitted a pitiful dying creak. A twisted bar popped out with a clang. The padlock remained intact, but there was now a hole pushed apart in the bent grate, large enough to get through.
"Well... That works too," approved Ahta.
They went in. A round tunnel of some three meters in diameter was leading steeply down twisting chaotically.
"Doesn't look like a mine," Ranma noted surveying the dark, smooth walls of solid rock. "More like a huge wormhole." She turned to Ahta. "Hey, couldn't by any chance the master of this cozy nook crawl out to greet us?"
"No, of course not," Ahta reassured her. Everything here died ages ago. "Well, until you decide to visit places a few hundred meters lower... But the thermal gradient is steep here, so the heat of the magmatic intrusion remains would kill you well before you could meet any... manifestations. These die without out-of-the-scale levels of magic of life as quickly and surely as the creatures of noxland die in an oasis!"
"Oh. Thanks, that reassures me," Ranma grumbled in reply. It was nice to know that these tunnels were stretching down to fiery abyssal depths inhabited by... things.
After some meandering they had reached the point under that area on the surface where the medallion had displayed the minimum. The tunnel was starting to branch here.
Akane opened the medallion. She looked at the screen. With a feat of willpower, she managed to keep her eye from twitching. Then she growled, in a good imitation of a cave bear: "33 to 60."
They tried walking to and fro down the twisting, branching tunnels. The uncertainty was hopelessly large, the medallion could show 15, then, just five meters later show 70. Ranma was feeling this dungeon pressing down on her psyche: the unremarkable tunnels were stretching in all directions branching, merging, twisting sharply up and down. Like gray bowels.
"We can keep searching for it till the end of time," Ahta grumbled. "We have to split to comb this area thoroughly. Let me take the upper levels, Akane the middle and Ranma the lower ones. Just keep your eyes open. They had checked this area of course, but they always do this hastily, with a quick and dirty magical scan. Who knows what the creeps could have left lying around. So don't touch anything, all right? Don't come close, even." He handed the girls chunks of white rock to mark checked passages. Then he disappeared in a tunnel leading to the upper levels.
"I don't like this idea," Ranma grumbled with distaste. She was filled with an overpowering apprehension.
"All right, your suggestion then?" Akane made a pointed pause.
"Ah?！" Ranma's eyes opened wide in sudden realization. "That...!"
"What's wrong with you?" Akane asked worriedly.
"That's it!" The gray haired girl hit slapped her fist against her palm. "It was a prophetic dream!"
"Those are impossible here, right?" Akane objected doubtfully. "Maybe it's just deja vu? Let me check if you have a fever." She placed her palm against her husband's forehead.
"I don't know if it is possible or not, but I saw all of this already," the pigtailed girl replied. "Down to the smallest gesture, up to a word. Right before..." She shuddered. "Before I was cut to pieces."
Akane gasped. "So that's why you yelled back then up—"
"Let's watch the floor," Ranma cut her short as she bent down to better illuminate the floor with her forehead light. "The ceiling too. They had checked it, all right. Probably scanned with magic against magical traps. But what about pressure plates? Let's go warn Ahta first while she haven't stepped into one yet. We'll also ask her if they have something like mine detectors for such cases."
"How could that be," Akane mumbled, disheartened. "The loop was closed."
"Future isn't set in stone," Ranma replied harshly. "What happens if I change my mind and make a turn towards the trap?"
"The medallion would give a signal and..." Akane fell silent in sudden realization. "Oh. I would have it with me at the time!"
"Exactly. Ahta! Hey, Ahta!"
(シーンブレイク)
"That's complete and utter nonsense!" the bald shorty was shouting, spit flying. Ami didn't even need the translation. The transformation she and the elderly sorceress had managed to draw using mutual contradictions between their outlooks and complementing each other's work, it was contradicting the officially accepted theory so much, he was simply unable to accept such revolutionary concepts.
Ami couldn't blame him for that. Her head was threatening to split. The breakthrough cost them a lot of mental effort.
"But this 'nonsence' converges too well to be such," Khassacht parried. She was probably tired too, but she wasn't showing it. "Using three independent methods. And the cost, look at the energy cost! After a small optimization it'll require even less than connecting to most pseudo-planes!"
Ami winced: this 'small optimization' was promising to become yet another battle against formulas in unfamiliar notation. It was a hellish strain, even with the local mentha-boards for automated processing of formulas, in many aspects more convenient than computers back home.
"Do as you please!" Lukhyt shouted back angrily before he left trying to slam the armored door behind him. It proved to be too heavy for that.
"A pity," Khassacht commented. "Without him tuning the portal will be much harder. Unfortunately, I do not specialize in fine tuning such systems..." She turned to the lab assistents to continue in a sweetest voice: "Boys, who of you is good at tuning the portal array?"
(シーンブレイク)
"Forgive me, but I'll never believe that clairvoyance is real," Ahta noted sceptically, wrapping the words 'utter nonsence' into a more polite form.
"But In our world it does work," Ranma said.
"What, really?" Ahta stopped sharply turning to face Ranma which brought them uncomfortably close. She moved away with displeasure. "There are worlds out there where this anti-scientific fiction is reality?"
"It's quite real," Akane affirmed. "We also know our— someone's daughter from the future who time traveled to visit us. And we have another friend who has prophetic visions... even if they are so vague even she can't make heads or tails out of them."
"Come to think of it," Ranma added, "my teleportation includes a form of clairvoyance too. I move faster than light, but to move I have to, uh, get a good feel of the destination. So I am a kind of visionary too." She smirked. "I'm so badass that even the causality principle—"
"What" Akane turned to her seeing Ranma suddenly freeze mid-sentence.
"Stop!" the pigtailed girl exclaimed tensely. "It's the place!" She pointed at a slightly discolored part of the floor. "It's... that pressure plate." She shuddered.
"Really, a pressure plate trap!" Ahta replied, shocked. He then frowned. "But maybe you are experiencing deja vu? Maybe in reality it's some sort of instinctive trap sense or something similar?"
"Let's trigger it and you will see," Ranma said. "There are things kinda transparent scissors bursting out of the walls." She started searching for something to drop, but the tunnel was smooth, without any convenient loose rocks.
"From the walls?" Ahta peered at the smooth stone that did not have a slightest crack. "I don't think so, these are completely undisturbed." He knocked at the wall, listening. Then he pulled out his white stone and quickly drew some sort of squiggle. It reminded Akane of calligraphy at home: the same fast, sprawling motions, the same harmony hidden in the seemingly sloppy lines. "There is nothing in the walls," Ahta concluded.
"I'll go bring a bar from the grate," Ranma suggested.
"No need to," Ahta stopped her. Holding his rock in a fist he made several sweeping hand motions over it. Then he threw it at the trap.
The small pebble hit the plate with such force as if it weighed half a hundred kilograms, dust and stone crumbles flying. Then it remained as if glued there, inside the suspiciously discolored spot.
The trap clicked loudly. Then a much louder crunch sounded as several pairs of ghostly blades erupted from the tunnel walls in bursts of pulverized rock, closing rapidly like giant scisors.
When they closed, the blades disappeared without a sound.
"Kinda like that," Ranma summed up.
"An Ahs-construct," Ahta whispered in shock. "It couldn't be anything else."
"You'd be..." Akane had an urgent need for a paper bag. "But it's... You could dodge..."
"I was lost in thought," Ranma explained. "Back there, in the dream. I screwed up, didn't react until there was nowhere to dodge to. Was lying there until—" She shut herself up but it was too late.
"The zombie-raising construct!" Akane said with a gasp as she remembered her own awakening without her lower body. "You'd remain... conscious..." Stumbling, she steadied herself against the tunnel wall as she fought the nausea with all she had.
"I blurted out again," Ranma grumbled unhappily. Then she turned to Ahta: "So it was an ahs-construct, you say?"
"Not magic, for sure," he confirmed, frowning and worried. "By all signs it couldn't have been anything but an Ahs-construct. That's bad. It means the trap was set up by humans."
"Humans?" Ranma asked.
"Well, what is the source of Ahs-constructs? The Ahs-Lords. It's their way of participating in the economy. They put a part of their power into creating Ahs-constructs which are one of the rarest resources in our world, with stablest exchange rates, along with platinum and vanadium... But what a waste, using Ahs-constructs for traps!"
At this moment they were interrupted by an ugly cackle reaching from deeper in the tunnel. All three of them tensed.
A rhythmical, whispering rustle approached from the darkness beyond the tunnel bend. Then a creature came into view. At first glance it looked like an unpleasantly glossy white hybrid of a giant woodlouse with a humanoid torso growing out of it, the arms unnaturally long and thin. The misshapen head on a disgustingly long neck was glaring with two deeply seated black eyes.
"Yeah, Brya was much nicer," Ranma noted off-hand as she flowed into a deceptively relaxed stance. This·psycho wasn't looking even remotely friendly or harmless.
Ahta pulled his revolver out without a moment's hesitation. The gunshot rattled their ears in the confined tunnel. The creature proved to be very fast: the bullet only smashed the fringe of short tentacles along its left flank although the blond was aiming at its centre of mass. The second bullet hit true... to ricochet from a barrier that had flashed momentarily with crystalline facets around the fist the white woodlousetaur managed to throw forward.
"Ahs-shahs-ah?" Ahta exclaimed in shock as he froze, his gun still aimed at the creature.
Ranma squinted suspiciously. That wasn't just a fist, the thing was holding something in it.
"Ahs-construct?" the medallion repeated belatedly attracting attention to the fact that you couldn't rely on the translation in fast-paced combat.
Akane moved forward.
"Syytr lschass, schischkris ta!" Ahta called out to her in alarm as he pointed at the damaged tentacles. The uniform white mass was writhing, resembling either a slo-mo boiling or a mass of worms. The resilient fringe framing the woodlouse body was regenerating visibly.
"Disgusting!" Akane backed away.
"Le's hit it together?" Ranma asked as she moved her hands back and to the right.
"Don't touch, absorption/merger danger!" the medallion caught up.
"I could figure that on my own," the gray-haired girl grumbled as she exchanged glances with her wife. "Mokou..."
"Raitsui..."
Ahta turned towards them in awe forgetting to watch the enemy in his amazement.
The white thing cocked its head, glaring.
"..Takabisha!"
"..Dan!"
Two ki-blasts hit at once, spaced approximately a meter apart to prevent the enemy from blocking both. The woodlousetaur threw its clenched fist in between. The charges of ki disintegrated, but the resulting burst of air pressure was enough to throw the creature a couple meters backwards. It started screeching something, spit flying.
"Any ideas?" Akane asked.
"I don't like its fist," Ranma replied. "There's something—"
"I'll be error diction is not clear enough you," the medallion tried valiantly to translate. "Deforming/warping error, diction not clear enough grating in a rotating manner error, phrase not finished."
The glossy-white creature fell silent and opened its fist with deliberate slowness letting them take a look at the thing resting on the palm... It was the orb of a token! Then it croaked something triumphantly.
"The bastard!" Ranma snapped out with irritation.
"So it was because of him!" Akane grew outraged. "That's why we couldn't find the token! We were running all over the place taking measures and he was walking around with it!"
"Die," the medallion translated emotionlessly.
"Watch out," Ranma warned quietly: the woodlousetaur was making some suspicious gestures over the token with its left hand.
The creature shrieked with malice as it sent a veritable fan of ghostly blades flying at the three humans. The crunching of crushed stone masked any other sounds, the white bastard disappeared behind thick clouds of dust lit with their forehead lights.
"Whoops!" Ranma exclaimed as she deliberately toppled Ahta who was running away, sluggishly in her perception. Grabbing the guy like a sack of potatoes she dashed away: the windmilling blades were gaining, it took only a second for these to traverse from the enemy to the spot formerly occupied by the humans.
Ranma was trying frantically to remember the exact route back to the surface, afraid the enemy technique would chase them to the exit.
Fortunately, this thing proved to lack homing as it sank into the rock at the first turn, moving in a straight line. the girls stopped listening carefully. The ground kept shaking for a couple seconds more with crackling and rumbling, then everything went silent except an occasional falling pebble.
Visibility had decreased sharply:the lights were only making the clouds of suffocating dust look denser by lighting them.
"Go back to it!" Ranma shouted as she dashed back towards the enemy. Akane followed, catching up to her. After a moment of hesitation Ahta rushed after them slowly, stumbling on the crushed rocks. The tunnel grew narrower, its right wall now a flowing mass of gravel.
"Why!" Akane managed on the run.
The air was a bit clearer at the initial spot, the white creature visible through the dust at its previous position. The tunnel was relatively intact here, its walls only carved with deep gouges.
"We can't let it get away—" Ranma began explaining. The woodlousetaur shrieked as it noticed them, beginning its hand gestures again. "Mokou Takabisha!"
The bastard proved to be fast enough to block with the token. The ki blast disappeared without a trace, but it did stop the creature from making its gestures.
"Excellent!" Ranma exclaimed with joy. "It can't use its barrier and that technique at the same time!"
"But it's a stalemate anyway," Akane reminded her worriedly. "We have nothing we—" Her eyes lit with enthusiasm. "I have an idea! Cover me!"
"Don't..." Ranma squeaked feeling her insides collapse into a pit of ice. Not again! What was she planning? "Don't touch it!"
"I know!" Akane replied without looking as she began moving at the enemy.
"Mokou Takabisha!"
The ki blast came out anemic: Ranma was too beside herself with worry to muster enough confidence. It did its job, though, distracting the monster. Akane rushed faster than wind, rebounding from the wall and zipping over the enemy's head as it concentrated on putting up a barrier. The woodlousetaur was barely a meter high, so the tunnel with diameter of some three meters gave her lots of space to pass the creature safely. But she didn't just pass it, she managed to snap out a ki blast of her own. Weak as it was, it hurt the enemy's tail. Then she disappeared beyond the bend of the tunnel turning to the right. Only a moving spot of light in the dusty air was giving her presence away.
The white thing went apeshit. Turning around with an angry screech it began making its gestures aiming after the girl who had disappeared beyond the bend. It barely had enough time to throw its arm backwards when the angry Ranma sent a mighty ki blast its way.
"Sah tschaust chkik?" Ahta asked her worriedly as he finally caught up with her, his revolver on ready.
"I'm bluffing!" Akane's shout rang clearly from beyond the bend. The spot of light jerked, there was the click of a trap activating, then the loud crunch of blades erupting from the walls. The spot of light stopped moving. The creature snorted with satisfaction as it turned to face Ranma.
If not the timely warning, the pigtailed girl would have had a heart attack right then and there. Even so she almost felt sick at he sound of a trap activating.
"Mokou..." Ranma began slowly, gathering a charge of energy in her hands pulled back.
The woodlousetaur screeched hurrying with its gestures, trying to make it itn time.
"..Taka..bisha!"
An extremely powerful ki blast streaked towards the monster. It threw its arm forward beforehand, snarling and showing its small, shark-like teeth.
The second ki blast hit its unprotected back simultaneosly with the first one, pushing the enemy down and sending it sliding towards Ranma with its face against the ground. Did they make it...? She stepped back, away from the white stuff the woodlousetaur's wounded back was bleeding like glossy maggots.
Screeching, the wounded thing straiightened its torso up and slid like mercury towards the wall, its woodlouse body rising up the tunnel curvature. The bastard covered itself with the token, its barrier now flickering non-stop like ghostly crystalline facets.
"The nerve!" Akane voiced everyone's thoughts.
A pause followed. The girls were glaring a the owner of the second-to-last token from two sides. It was sneering in return.
"Maybe we should have tried asking it nicely from the start?" Ranma asked rhetorically as she turned towards Ahta. "Huh, Miss Rapid Shot?"
"Meaningless," he retorted matter-of-factly. "It's a creep. It's impossible apriori to converse with them due to their... physiological features. In their natural habitat they are quasi-stable psychos and can act quasi-reasonably, but at the sight or smell of a human they become unstable psychos."
"So, not a chance?"
"It'd devour you," Ahta explained. "Well, or rape you then·devour you. That's a certainty."
"Bugger." Ranma glared at the creep. It hissed in return. "What should we do now? Any ideas how to pluck it out of that barrier?"
"By the rules, we have to retreat and return with a purge team. If we are allowed to join it. But a creep using an Ahs-construct, not to say a construct of such power... That's unprecedented. I'm afraid our worrywarts will begin gathering a joint strike troop from all the oases around."
"We can't let it go!" Ranma objected heatedly.
"Why?" Ahta asked with confusion.
"Oh!" Ranma got it. "So you haven't heard me then! That bally in its hand over there is the token we are searching for!"
"Bullshit?" Ahta replied with disbelief.
"Here." Ranma hastily untied her bag to pull one of the tokens out. The ball was glinting like mercury in her hand, angular black squiggles floating lazily inside it.
The guy made a step away with trepidation as he uttered something translated by the medallion as "error, a logic bomb in semantics".
At this moment the creep noticed the token in Ranma's hand. Screeching in horror it began making frantic gestures with his left hand over its token, glancing between the girls harriedly. Akane launched a ki blast at it which naturally disappeared but interrupted the spell.
Ranma squinted as if aiming. Then, suddenly, she threw her token!
The creep managed to throw its arm forward. The speeding token passed through the barrier as if it wasn't there. There was a crack, then two tokens were flying in different directions, the white creature screeching and shaking its bruised hand.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
The gunshots thundered in the confined tunnel. The creep was still slumping with its head smashed, bleeding white vileness, when Ahta began reloading.
It was a monster, you act quickly and matter-of-factly. Sailor Moon would have approved.
Rebounding from the walls, the tokens started rolling downhill, further down the tunnel, making loops and twists like balls in a pachinko game machine. Akane rushed to catch them.
Meanwhile, the woodlousetaur was melting. The white muck was flowing off twisting and writhing, laying open a twisted, blackened skeleton.
"Don't get close!" Ahta warned Akane again. She had caught the tokens — thankfully nothing sticks to them — and was about to jump over the mess.
"How would I get back, then?" she asked. "All the floor here— Ack!"
The white mass began boiling, spitting large drops. Hitting the walls, these drops were starting to move fluidly and chaotically, like glossy white woodlice. Akane backed away hastily.
Ahta made several hand gestures over a spare stone he pulled from his pocket. "Catch!" he shouted throwing the stone at her as soon as the translation finished. "Draw a warding circle across the tunnel circumference!" Pulling out yet another stone he demonstrated by quickly drawing a line across the tunnel taking great care to fill in gouges in the rock left by the 'fan of death'. Where he couldn't reach Ranma lifted him up by his legs.
Akane drew her line by simply running in a circle across walls and ceiling.
"Now step back five meters!" Ahta crouched down and started drawing a pattern of runes.
'This unlucky gal's magic is akin to writing haiku directly with ink on a canvas,' Ranma thought. 'The form seems free, she pauses at times in thought. And her face is... inspired.'
The wtite muck meanwhile had flowed transforming into multitude of of larger woodlice, the size of rats, that were streaming across the walls and ceiling with quiet but ugly squeaks. Touching the warding circle the little things were jerking back as if stung. Akane shivered thinking 'Each one kills with a touch, and no one knows if they can jump as well. Try break through these!' She cast a nervous glance back, into darkness enshrouded in dust.
Finishing with an energetic stroke Ahta jumped back. Ranma followed his example.
There was no glow, no other cheap effects. The woodlice simply fell silent all at once, freezing in place. They lost their gloss. The ones on the walls and ceiling fell down, smashing at times like they were made of cheescake.
Both the warding circles and the pattern of runes turned grey, vanishing slowly.
"It's safe now," Ahta said kicking the nearest woodlouse carcass. It shattered with a quiet splat.
(シーンブレイク)
"Mind explaining me this joint here?" Khassacht tapped her staff against a particular point of the spell circle that had grew so complex it was beginning to resemble a layout of some microprocessor. "What do you think would happen to it under load and where do you think will the backslash go?"
The guilty lab assistant tried to pull his head in between his shoulders as if expecting to be bonked with the crystal ball at the business end of the staff any moment. There were low scaffolds placed over the rune array, lab assistants crawling along them adding to the already complex patterns. They were drawing with deceptively simple white stones and brushes with silvery white paint.
"So let me explain it to you, young man," Khassacht finished harshly. "We'd be left without our last generator." She pointed her staff at burnt remains of a huge machine covered with tarpauline. "Even now, we have been forced to use a jury-rigged replacement for the last half thousand after another quite talented someone had the great idea to shave three percent off the mana cost by getting rid of the backup circuits."
Stimulated properly, the lab assistant hastily wiped the sloppy circuit using a sponge with neutraliser to begin drawing it from scratch.
The aged sorceress nodded regally as she continued circling the circular array scrutinizing it.
"I'm very sorry," Ami shouted as she leaned out of the observation deck window, "but the sector along the third axis doesn't converge! You have to add a balancer, or better two! And a stabilizing circuit over there!" She pointed with a magical pointer that worked very much like a laser pointer.
The lab assistants let out a collective groan: there was no place for more circuits there. They had to erase everything and redraw an entire sector from scratch, twice more densely.
(シーンブレイク)
Finally they were going back. Their task was completed successfully, the sixth token was in their possession. There was only one to go! Ranma tried in vain to curb the premature joy by reminding herself that bad things tend to happen on the final stretch. It wasn't working, she wasn't feeling like thinking about bad things.
It was stuffy and hot in a car without a climatic control unit, but that couldn't spoil their mood. Poor Ahta! He had to fill a lot of papers for the three of them to be allowed riding a train without a passenger block.
Now all three of them were sitting on boxes filled with some hardware, chatting animatedly. Nothing helps to forget former tensions like a battle fought together.
"It's like that old anecdote, you know," the blond was saying. "Mag-resources, thought the surveyor. Food, thought the mag-resources."
The girls laughed. Wiping the sweat from her forehead, Ranma took a gulp from a canteen. "By the way, I wanted to ask. Where does all that water of life and death come from? I think I have a good guess about the living one, there's a circular pond around the central peek that emanates life energy so strongly it's scary."
"You have good intuition," Ahta confirmed. "The water of life accumulates in the oasis springs where it is usually so concentrated it's instantly lethal. The Khas-Khasaeert spring, for example, has concentration of 180. You could use it for sterilizing."
"And the drinking water?"
"It's preferable for a human to drink water balanced at exactly zero. In practice, drinking water is usually made from the water of life by distilling the spring water to a factor of 0.04..0.1. The unneeded magic of life is vented into the atmosphere to not waste this resource. It's renewable, but the thicker the protective haze, the better. But that's second rate water. What we are now drinking is first rate water, for surveyors. Initially it's made 1.3, to compensate for the withering effect of the noxland. Because in the wasteland any water, including that in human body, is slowly turning into water of death logarithmically approaching minus one. That's mostly why it feels so unpleasant here, not because of the heat."
"Well, I figured that—" Ranma began, only to fall silent, them exclaim: "So that's why I was feeling so bad when we were walking the noxland the first time around! I was suffering from thirst even before that, so..."
"Thirst and noxland is a very dangerous combination," Ahta agreed. "It leads to quick exhaustion and weakness... Your endurance is impressive as you were walking for several hours, you say, without any protection."
"And bathing?" Akane inquired.
"The same second rate water. The distilling plants capacities are huge, the magic of fire is like dirt around here. It's what around a third of the creatures possess. By the way, all waste is drained down into the deep layers. It's about the level of tunnels we were exploring. In a living oasis the concentration there is higher that half a thousand, it's not magic of life anymore but wild magic. Even inorganic waste disintegrates there. And the water, of course, returns back to the spring, perfectly purified."
"Isn't that dangerous?" Ranma asked.
"It is," agreed the blond. "If one gets sloppy managing the house reductor. For most such idiots the first time their toilet begins a philosophy dispute with them is usually enough to get them straight. Well, the effects vary. Up to carnivorous cabbage growing out of their kitchen sink. Lethal cases are rare, but bitten asses happen. But these things usually happen in the frontier oases where population is lower and people are less disciplined."
"The horror." Ranma shivered. "Though that's convenient, I must admit. Do they fill steam locomotives with the same second rate?"
"No, they use fourth rate there. It's technical water, no one cares for neutrality much. It ranges from minus one to 3, it's more important that it is distilled. Well, there's also a third rate, for watering the gardens. It has the factor 6 to 8, which is perfect for vegetables and very bad for a human."
Ranma shivered involuntarily recalling how she drank her fill of 'technical' water from the cistern.
They sat in silence for awhile. The train was swaying slightly, clanking on the joints. There was stuffy twilight in the car, with the only light source being someone's forehead light lying on a box.
"How did you become a surveyor?" Akane asked the blond. "I mean, who usually chooses this job in your world? It's probably dangerous."
"Of course it's dangerous," he agreed. "That's why everyone goes through it as soon as they finish training. It's usually from the age of five or six thousands."
"That's approximately fourteen years old!" Akane was horrified. "Why so early?"
"Sailor Moon began at that age too," Ranma reminded her.
"What do you mean, why?" Ahta asked, confused. "Because they are most expendable members of the society at that age, without valuable knowledge or experience yet. Well, think for yourself: would you send an experienced scientist or an engineer to do a job where only 24percent survive to the end of their career? I mean, it's a temporary thing of course, a stage of life. Without going through it how could you know your worth if you aren't from that one fourth of survivors?"
Akane became visibly pale and sad.
"The living space is limited," Ranma reminded her grimly. "And don't make a face like that. Every outwardly nice society does have its underside." When the translation finished she addressed Ahta: "Ain't I right?"
"Indeed," he agreed. "It's the merciless law of survival of the fittest. Because the natural lifespan of a human is seventy to eighty thousands with reproductive functions working for most of it."
"It's some two hundred years," Akane translated. "Then... Then I can understand... But sending your own children to do the job where three fourths die horribly..." She suddered.
"Don't think of us as senseless," Ahta said quietly. "Each death is a tragedy. Each surveyor does everything possible and impossible to stay alive. They repeat the rules and instructions even in their sleep. But such is life. Such is our world, and we don't know another. The entirety of mankind, all the six hundred thousands of humans and two hundred thousands of neanderthals, live like that."
"What about going beyond the bounds of the planet?" Ranma asked.
"We tried. Earth is now passing through a dense globular cluster with several active pulsars. Beyond the atmospheric sheath, radiation kills anything in minutes. Astronomers say it's five or six millions until the cluster is passed. Maybe our descendants will try..."
"It's almost fifteen thousand years," Akane translated.
"But we won't give up," Ahta said with a fake optimism. "We'll make it. The mankind can't live in its cradle forever, as some ancient sage had said."
(シーンブレイク)
Somewhere in the core of the system, one of the control circuits made of chained time switched its status flag. The objects of influence were reaching the desired position, nudged there by light touches of controlled quantum fluctuations. Ready to play their preset parts.
The status quo will be kept for the next: undefined, no boundary conditions set. System integrity: perfect. Available energy: 2.3 by 10 times 73 Joules.
(シーンブレイク)
"Finally!" Ranma said with relief as the elevator platform reached the test projects cave.
Ahta had wanted to accompany them, to peek into a first alien world. There was no telling when they will repeat the experiment or if he could participate. But alas, he was caught by some bureaucrat and made writing reports. Ranma sympathized him. She had similar feelings toward the calculus homework: necessary but boring.
"Welcome back, guys!" Ami called to them from the observation deck window. "We can go in a few moments! Just let me finish the vertical adjustment!"
"If we want to do everything properly, we'd better deactivate it and re-check again," Khassacht grumbled. "I don't like these last-minute aiming problems. Especially considering the failure of that circuit to work," She pointed at a part of the spell circle glowing silvery white, "while its failure is theoretically impossible."
"Yes, but a comrade is waiting for us," Ami objected. "Besides, it's fixed by the center of Earth almost perfectly, as well to the latitude and the axis of rotation. Moreover, we'd be able to use our magic in that world. Worst case we'd disembark high in the sky. Ranma and Akane can land safely from a free fall from any height. That's probably why the loop remains closed whatever attitude I set. While we have these devices, success is assured. I already corrected the exit point according the nav-point they show...!"
"Well, when you have such a trump card," Khassacht called back doubtfully. "Anyway, do what you think is right. I got my bonuses, I fulfilled my part of the deal. From the cynical point of view I shouldn't care about your fate anymore."
"Finished!" Ami ran out of the armored deck to descend the stairs hastily and begin meandering along the delineated paths between spell areas.
The incredibly complex rune array began glowing brighter, a hazy ball forming above it with a crackle to begin growing. A light extendable bridge started reaching for it with a quiet clanking.
"Well, time to say our goodbyes," Akane said as she walked up a small flight of stairs to the bridge. "Farewell, granny. You did so much for us!"
"Thank you very much." Ranma bowed deeply.
Ami hastily joined them on the bridge: "Get ready, it'll activate soon!"
The murky ball flattened into a disc becoming darker and darker until it began flickering with something resembling frosty patterns over pitch black.
Nothing was happening.
"I don't get it." Ami looked at her medallion, then at the circular portal again. "The loop is closed, there should be landscape visible from high up."
"Mana expenditure is nominal!" someone called from the observation deck through the loudspeakers. "For how long should I hold it like that?"
"Shut it off," Khassacht waved tiredly. "We'll be remaking the vertical adjustment circuit. It's pretty obvious you opened the portal into solid ground."
"It's not!" Ami retorted heatedly. "Look," Careless from ehxaustion and headache combined, she pointed at one of the 'frost patterns' with her finger. "Here's—"
Too close!
With a disgusting crunch, a web of brightly glowing cracks spread across the surface. A howler sounded under the ceiling. The light in the cave blinked turning red.
"Mana expenditure spiked!" someone frantically shouted from the observation deck. The armored shutters fell with dull clangs.
Khassacht ordered something in a strong commanding voice but the medallion didn't have time to translate.
A thundering flash, and the protective barrier burst with the sound of crushed glass. The portal turned into a roaring, pitch black hole sucking in air. Akane managed to grab Ami around the waist with one hand, almost breaking the girl genius in half. Such was the force pulling them in. Akane managed to hold on.
When the roaring hole swallowed them, the broken handrail was still clutched firmly in her hand.
Ranma watched in horror. Her loved one was falling away into the black abyss, shining brightly from one side as if she was in sunlight.
A moment later the pigtailed girl let go of the rail to dive after them.
She was spun slightly. The sun was shining in her eyes at each turn, disorienting her. Her eyes were stinging awfully. Her blood was singing, pulsing in her extremities like Ranma's whole body suddenly fell asleep. And this terrible, absolute silence in her suddenly popped ears! There was no doubt, they were thrown out into outer space. The stars weren't visible simply because the sun was. She took a look around as best as she could through the stinging in her eyes. Sun was there, Earth wasn't. It wasn't even in sight. What about the closed loop, she wanted to yell. Taking yet another look around she noticed a crescent of the Moon barely visible in the sunlight, the proper size as it should look from Earth.
What the heck is going on!
Akane and Ami disappeared from sight. Blood was humming in her ears, there was sharp pain in her eyes, there was sharp pain in her chest. Her time was running out. The magic! Hastily, she pulled the henshin wand from her collar. It was pulsing with energy ready to give her power. All was needed were four short words.
Ranma raised it: "..."
How does one say "Sol stellar power, Make-up" with lungs full of pure vacuum?
The sunlight was starting to darken.
Akane‼ Ranma thought frantically trying to find a solution but finding none. There was only the eternal silence of the Void around her.
And but one tenacious thought: "I can do it!"
Saotome Ranma never gives up without a fight.
(シーンブレイク)
2008 — December 19, 2013 — May 4, 2014. Translated May 5, 2014
Ding! Tropes unlocked:
Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female on Male
Thanks for C&C to:
— LawOhki
— Crystal
— ryuumon
— Orphus users (34 bugs so far)
— LawOhki
— Crystal
— QSMQEP
— ryumon
— Orphus users (32 bugs so far)