"You are no longer children," the High Priestess said once they were gathered in circle. "You have proved that you have the wisdom and the strength of will to be counted adults. And so, certain things will change. All your lives, we have eaten apart from you. Now, we will share our meals. It will be the same with sleeping: we will not set aside a special area just for us or just for you."
The sisters gaped at her. "You mean that we'll…"
She nodded. "You will at last see my true face. And those of Rika and Ayano. At our next meal, for eating and washing are the only times we will remove our masks in Temple."
Ashi could scarcely believe how her heart swelled at that; she felt, she felt, she had no word for what she felt. Her mother, their mother, finally counted them full adults, not children in need of training. "I look forward to it."
The High Priestess nodded to her. "It has been a long day and trying. Let up perform our devotions, then sleep." And so they did, sleeping soundly upon the concrete floor.
.oO()Oo.
The next day, they gathered to share breakfast, and the sisters gaped at their mother's bare face. She looked almost exactly like them! There were a few subtle differences, which they attributed to her being older, but they looked far more like her than Akane like Ayami. Ayano's face was longer, narrower, though from what they had learned, she would still be counted beautiful, and even the brutish Rika's face was surprisingly soft-looking, even delicate, in sharp contrast to her massive physique, and her skin was a strange, nearly shimmering grey. Unsurprisingly, it was Ashi who asked the needed question. "What are you?" she asked of the giantess, her tone one of puzzlement rather than challenge.
"My people are from another star," she answered. "A world were everything weighs much more than it does here. So my people are very large and very strong and very tough compared to Earth people. I was," and she trailed off, hesitating at how to express it. "I was one who fought for others' pleasure. I was hit in the head, very hard, and it hurt my mind, and I was taken far away and abandoned in the forest. I wandered, lived like a beast, until your mother's mother found me, and took me in. I was made part of the Temple, and put into the Pit of Shadows, and became the strong arm of the High Priestess. But when I drank a little of Aku's essence, it made my mind wake again."
"Would you like to learn how to read?" Aji asked her.
"Read?" she replied, and looked to the High Priestess. "If it pleases you?"
That one shook her head. "Reading is only for the most devout, a sacred mystery no other can master."
"But it isn't!" Adi quickly said. "We have all learned to read, Aji in less than a day! Test us, from the Book of Aku, or the cooking book over there!"
The High Priestess rose, and took the book on cooking, and brought it back. She flipped to a page with a recipe holding many strange words. "Read this," she commanded, and Adi read, slowly and carefully. "I did not think you were so devout as that! Oh, my daughters, I am so proud of you!" The she sighed. "But Rika is not ready for those mysteries."
"Mother, that's what Adi and Aji are telling you: reading isn't a mystery of Aku, it's just a thing you learn," Ashi put in, and her mother stood and raised her staff.
"You will recant your blasphemy immediately!" she demanded.
"No!" Ashi insisted. "I will not recant, for I have committed no blasphemy. We have all seen that people with no faith at all can learn this. If they could master it, then surely Rika can learn it! We will teach her ourselves if you will not!"
The High Priestess glared at her wayward daughter. Always the troublemaker, this one. "Very well. You will teach Rika to read. You will have six days, and if you fail, you will spend the six days following as her training dummy, and you will recant of your blasphemy!"
"Agreed," Ashi said instantly. "And I will pledge it upon Aku's idol." So the women did, Ashi that she would be Rika's training dummy for six days if she could not teach the giant to read, and the High Priestess that if Ashi succeeded, the accusation would be withdrawn. Then they finished their breakfast, and after they'd all cleaned up, Ashi and Rika sat down to her first lessons while the other sisters began the task of familiarizing their mother and her assistant with the city and how to live in it, so far as they knew how.
To read… Rika did not know if she had ever been able to do that, but she wanted to. To look upon the godsigns, and know their meaning… that was the greatest wonder she could imagine. And so she settled in with Ashi, patiently working through the signs and their meanings. By the time of the midday prayers, she was starting to get the general sense of the marks, and by the time the others returned and Ayami and her daughter came by to visit, she was definitely making progress, though she could not honestly call herself able to read yet.
.oO()Oo.
After the service, the sisters went to the Dome, and found to their delight that they'd been given a battle to fight. A coalition, seven of the best fighters in the Dome's stable. It would be a melee, no fixed pairs, just the Dark Stars against the Add Hawks, and oh, how they ached to really cut loose. As they stepped into the ring, a jumble of rubble and trash, they immediately spread out, leaping to wide-spread vantage points to spy out their opponents.
Ashi spotted hers before he could spot her: a creature with features somehow both extended and flattened at once, with black-striped white fur and a tail. A kunai flew, faster than any but she or her sisters could avoid… or so she thought. The creature twisted away with speed she could barely credit, and only Ashi's own incredible reflexes got her behind cover before the air itself caught fire. Behind the bricks, she drew out her bow.
Aki sprang from point to point, a streak of darkness not settling long enough to target. She'd spotted a little creature with pinkish scales and a very big weapon, and that one would be her target. She flung a bullet at it, and was rewarded with a blast of light that melted its way through the wall she'd been standing on not two instants before.
Avi disdained her preferred tactics of stealth and speed this time, reasoning their opponents would expect those; instead she picked her target, a green-skinned woman about two thirds RIka's size, in red boots and scant loin and chest coverings who carried a truly enormous axe. A pair of rocks as big as her own head served her for ammunition; the first, the woman struck aside with her axe, the second, hidden behind the first, took her square in the face, and Avi seized the opportunity to leap atop the woman's head and slit her throat with a kunai. A moment to look about and she was off to Aji's side.
Aji had no chance to choose a target; a creature of shifting, flowing, changing colours that seemed to consist entirely of waving, boneless appendages chose her, the appendages not supporting it holding very weird-looking weapons, ones whose shapes hurt her eyes to look upon. One of these, the thing swung in her direction, forcing her to run for cover from a shower of golden rings. She quickly scuttled up a column, hoping the creature wouldn't be able to perceive her through solid stone.
Vain hope, that; she heard a hiss and pushed away barely in time to avoid an explosion that tore apart the top of the column. Her guts turned cold in atavistic fear reaction and she ran for another bit of cover while the creature stalked her: of its multiple weapons, she'd only seen two and didn't even know what the ring-tosser actually did. She had to take this fight to her opponent, and so took a course she hoped would surprise it, running not to the nearest bit of cover but to the second-nearest, barely avoiding a beam of hot light that carved a furrow in the ground. Well, at least the tactic had worked. She produced her sling and a bullet, then a kneeling overhand throw produced a satisfying smack and she sprinted for another bit of cover, a section of wall, this time beating a stream of projectiles by less that a handspan. But she was closer now, and stood to launch a proper bullet at her opponent's likely location, and a shriek unlike anything she'd ever heard or imagined tore across her ears. A good sign, she hoped, and slapped the wall beside her with her left hand, then pivoted around that point to the wall's top, and sprang at the ball of appendages, producing her heavy chopping butterfly swords.
As she dashed toward her opponent, a second blur attacked from the side, Avi with her great kanabo. The creature swung two weapons toward her, and fired the ring-tosser. She twisted as she flew, and managed to mostly avoid them, but three struck her torso, and tried to pull together, bend her into a ball. She bent backward with her great club, then swung down hard, the pull of the rings lending the already mighty blow greater force, and a strike hard enough to shatter a granite statue's head split the gelatinous creature's central body open, and it keened fit to split their heads. But a lifetime of suffering had inured them to pain, and Aji's butterfly swords fell heavily upon what she guessed to be its brain and heart, and the creature went still.
"ENOUGH!" roared the announcer. "We have our winners, the Dark Stars!" and the crowd burst into cheers and howls even as the remaining fighters went to their knees in surrender. The sisters vanished their weapons, and held out hands to their foes. "Rise," Ashi said. "You fought well and bravely. Now go, and honour your dead as you see fit." The bested fighters accepted the gesture, and the two sides bowed to each other before withdrawing.
.oO()Oo.
"Weird kids," said the tiger-man, once back in the green room. "They're so… open? No, that's not right."
The surviving female fighter, a lithe bundle of whipcord and sinew under skin the colour of dark wood, nodded to that. "More like… accepting. They accepted that we were trying to kill them, they tried to kill us, two of us died, then the fight was over, and that was all that mattered. No grudges, no resentments, what we'd been doing honestly didn't seem to matter to them. It's like all they have is right now. Weird girls. Very, very weird."
.oO()Oo.
The girls in question collected their share of purse and gate, and on the way back to the Temple, made some quick stops. They let themselves in just before midnight, and bowed to their mother. "We have great news," Ashi said, and told the tale of the battle. "In celebration of our first kills of thinking beings, we brought these things for after our midnight prayers," and she gestured to the flat, square boxes and the slightly tapered cylinders Avi and Ari held. "Enough for a light meal after our devotions," she said, and after the packages were placed on the kitchen counter, they joined their mother and worship sisters in midnight prayers, adding to the normal adorations their thanks for the opportunity He had granted them.
Devotions complete, Ashi, Ari and Aki rose and went to the counter, where they opened the boxes, folding their tops back, then poured from the cylinders a liquid that resembled blood, filling their own cups, then the newly acquired cups, tall and tapered, red within and black without, they produced from their darkness. They laid the boxes with their odd discs in the centre of the circle they asked the rest to form with them. "We took the liberty of buying more cups, Mother, in Aku's colours. This food… we're not sure if it's acceptable under Temple rules, to be honest. But the foods we knew can be costly, and hard to find. And we've only just started learning to cook."
The High Priestess sniffed at the disc, and examined it carefully. "It is not… exactly… a violation of Temple law, but it is definitely a violation of our custom. I will permit it, as this is a sufficiently significant occasion, but do not repeat this." Ashi said she would not, and the others affirmed the same. "The cups please me, they are very appropriate to the Temple. Your cups are not, but they are yours by right, and I will not demand you cast them away. You have faced trials enough to be called Sisters of the Temple. You lost your mother, your trainers, your home, yet you rallied and held to your mission. You nearly died of your own ignorance, yet you rallied, and sought out the one person in all the world who could help you, despite the loathing you doubtless felt for her. You managed to adapt to a completely foreign environment, and track down Sister Ayami, for Sister she clearly is, however weak her faith has become. You were preparing to consecrate a new Temple, and how could I ask more than that?"
Ashi and the others beamed at their mother's praise. "Thank you," she said softly. "Do you wish to try this food? The drink is an amazing thing we have found here, it is called grape juice." And the ten enjoyed their light meal before returning to sleep.
