To his credit, High Priest Geo did not burst into laughter at the breakfast table. Instead, his cheek twitched, and a high-pitched giggle rose from him at first, to be followed by half-stifled chortling. The loud, unrestrained belly laughter came only after he'd given up any attempt to salvage his own dignity.
Schneider regarded him with a cold, flat glower from the other end of the table, then acknowledged Yoko. Yoko could only blink at her, clasping her own mouth very hard in order to keep from grinning. Arshes was only maintaining her composure by not paying attention.
Schneider sighed. "Are you done yet, old man?" she demanded of Geo, who was still laughing too hard to speak. "I just came by to show you how neatly I've slipped through your glorified holy seal."
"Hahahahaa . . . how's that?" Geo managed, daubing at tears of mirth with his napkin.
"Isn't it obvious? The last person Yoko--or any other virgin, for that matter--is going to kiss, is another woman!"
"He's--she's got a point, father," Yoko remarked, still wide-eyed.
"Heeheehee. . . . That may be the case, Dark Schneider, but what was your reason for wanting to conquer the world in the first place? Wasn't it ultimately so that you could have all the women in the world for yourself?" Geo pointed out, and resumed laughing after another fit of giggles.
"That's--it's been taken into account," she answered hastily. "First, I have to finish conquering the world!"
"And in the meantime, you'll have to change your name to Pink Schneider," a voice proposed from the shadowed far corner of the room, turning heads in its direction, and setting off Geo even worse.
"Who's there?" Schneider demanded.
"Oh, just me," a girl answered, stepping forward out of the shadows. She was short, of a dramatically curvy build, and as pale as Princess Sheela, although her dark hair was cropped short and her knee-length dress was a plain, indistinct color. "Who would have guessed Dark Schneider would turn out to be such a lovely young lady?" she mused sweetly, approaching only slightly.
"Who the hell are you?" Schneider asked automatically.
"Heeheeheee. . . . Oh stop, my stomach hurts," Geo wheezed.
"Guess," the girl said, and dealt her a dark, sly smile.
"You . . . you're the one--who did this!" Schneider nearly hissed. Arshes' eyebrows rose.
"Well, anything's possible," the strange girl admitted, pushing up her glasses as she batted her eyelashes innocently. "I'm mostly here for observation. So, how are you finding your new body, Schneider-san?"
"How did you do it--without any trace of magic?"
"I'm sorry, that's proprietary information," the observer smiled cheerfully. "If there's anything else you'd like to ask, though--"
"Not really. . . ." A globe of red energy crackled alight over Schneider's open palm, and she began to advance on the girl. "I just want to see what happens when--" She was cut off very suddenly by tripping on the long hem of her borrowed skirts, and landing on her face. The spell she'd been forming shattered on the floor, and ricocheted in several pieces off the ceiling and walls, until Geo bothered to shield the breakfast table, Yoko wisely hiding underneath it. When the chaos was over, the observer was gone.
"No, Schneider-san," her voice answered, seemingly from the rafters. "If you kill me, you'll be a woman forever."
"Dammit," Schneider snapped, rubbing her cheekbone, and Arshes came over to help her up.
"So, it isn't your own spell, then," she commented, and could not suppress a tiny smirk. "I didn't think it was deliberate."
"What difference does that make," Schneider grumped.
"I suppose, if you can't undo it, none at all," Yoko deduced, returning to her toast. "Are those Arshes-san's things you're wearing? No wonder you tripped."
"We'll have to get you something to wear in your own size," Arshes concluded.
Dark Schneider groaned.
For someone accustomed to finding his wardrobe in caches of enchanted treasure, or stripping it from the corpses of fallen adversaries, the trip through the local market to Tailor's Row was as gruelling and humiliating as it was boring. And of course Yoko and Arshes couldn't shut up. . . .
"Well of course it's going to look horrid, if you leave your posture like that!" Arshes scolded as Dark Schneider scowled up at her, slouching inside the umpteenth outfit she'd been stuffed into that morning.
"You look like an old lady, standing like that," Yoko confirmed.
"Put your chin up and your shoulders back--like that," Arshes instructed, brusquely posing the cranky clotheshorse. "If one of my troops slouched that badly, I'd have her beaten. There, that's much better! It's really a good color for you."
Yoko had to agree, and the banter went on until Schneider was at last bundled back into the clothes she'd arrived in and purchases were finally made--at Arshes' discretion.
"Well, I'm glad to have that bullshit behind me," Schneider remarked, having a good stretch in the street outside the tailor's. "I'm ready to get back to the castle now; my feet are killing me--"
"Well then, it must be time to get you shoes," Yoko grinned, taking her by the elbow. Dark Schneider recoiled in horror and brushed her off.
"Shoes? If we buy anything else today, it's lunch! And maybe armor!" she insisted. "I'm not putting on anything else pastel-colored, filigreed, embroidered, or--"
"Watch out," came a sudden warning. Schneider had forged ahead of the group during her rant, almost walking backwards, when she was taken by the hand and neatly pirouetted around a fresh pile of horse leavings.
"Say, you're not a bad dancer," the youth holding her hand commented as he helped her regain her balance.
"Wh-what'd you do that for?" she burted automatically, more angry at herself for blushing than anything else. The boy appeared to be in his late teens, and wore the uniform of the castle guard, which only seemed strange in that he wore glasses as well. He was about Arshes' height, a head taller than Schneider, and his straight dark hair was cut uniformly at about chin-length.
"I was afraid that if you stepped in something unpleasant, it would ruin your sexy walk," he smiled, and suddenly it struck Dark Schneider that not only was this youth holding her inappropriately close, but his steadying hand rested on her butt.
"Hey, get your hand off that!" she demanded, untangling herself rapidly and blushing even worse. "D'you have any idea who I am!?"
"No, I don't," the young guard answered, still in the same calm tone. "Please, tell me."
"I am the legendary dark sorceror--ah--" Schneider paused on noting over her shoulder the grins suppressed by Yoko and Arshes, in anticipation of a much bigger laugh. She improvised. "--Rushe," she finished, almost smoothly. Better to lose grandeur than face.
"Ah, the Lady Rushe. And what might your destination be this hour, Lady Rushe?" He executed a brief, formal bow.
"What the hell business is it of yours?" The more furious Dark Schneider grew at herself for blushing, the worse she blushed. Maybe if I stop looking at him. . . . Then she smacked herself inwardly for so girlishly averting her gaze.
"I wondered if the Lady Rushe and her handmaidens might like an escort for the afternoon," the boy offered, pulling out all the stops in his display of gallantry.
"Handmaidens!?" Yoko snapped. "This is the Thunder Empress Arshes Nei! If you'd been in the guard for more than a week, you'd know it already!"
"And if I were you, I'd make a strategic retreat before offending the daughter of High Priest Geo Note Soto any further," Arshes recommended with a bit of a glower, and the youth's suave facade withered rather suddenly.
"Well, far be it from me to disregard the advice of an empress," he faltered, stepping back for a quick escape. "Lady Rushe, I beg your leave, in hopes of once more basking in your radiant presence," the guard added hastily, backing into traffic. "Stay well!"
"Wait a minute! Who're you?" Schneider yelled, almost starting after him, and the youth half-turned to face her again.
"Oh, me?" he called over the street noise. "My name is--" He was drowned out abruptly and hidden from view by the passage of a handful of clattering pottery carts, and naturally, when they were gone, so was he.
Arshes folded her arms. "He was unusually pretty, for a castle guard," she noted with suspicion.
"Yes, he struck me as some sort of con man, or unemployed actor," Yoko agreed.
"Hey, I'm not that plain, as a woman!" Schneider argued. "Just because you're women and unable to sense it now, doesn't mean my sexual magnetism is in any way diminished!" she asserted, leading them down the sidewalk.
"Oh yeah? If that's the case, why don't you have men all over you, like you supposedly did with women?" Yoko pointed out, and Schneider paused.
"Men are just better at resisting . . . temptation," she said, striking a subtly provocative pose and sweeping her platinum-blonde hair back from her neck, then batting her eyelashes briefly. A number of heads turned in the traffic around them, a number of accidents were very narrowly averted. "It's only a matter of time," she added, dropping out of her erotic stance and continuing down the street.
"Well, she's got us there," Arshes murmured. Yoko shut her gaping mouth.
"That calculating little minx--"
"I wonder if this means Rushe is also female. . . ."
"Well, it's not like you're gonna find out!" Yoko insisted huffily, and the trio's progress was interrupted for the second time by Dark Schneider, frozen in her tracks outsize a cobbler's establishment.
"Ino Marta's tits!" she swore. "A shoe sale!!"