Chapter 8 - The Storm Begins to Break (Mirelle's POV... mostly)
A watcher would see a picture of tranquillity in a park in Paris early every morning. Every day for three weeks, two people meet in the darkness, or in the sun. And they do martial arts. Sometimes Tai Chi. Sometimes they spar with each other. He's better, but she matches his grace, even if she can't match his skill.
You may wonder how martial artists sparring could be tranquil at all, but you would just have to watch them to understand. Every movement spoke of a delicate dance the two were teaching to each other as they went along. It's lucky that both of them were very quick learners.
In fact, as time passed, someone very observant might notice that the park was being occupied slightly earlier every morning. Someone very, very observant might see the two people meeting outside the park. Someone using night vision equipment might have seen one nervously take the other's hand and hold it the whole way through their walk home very early one morning after hours of conversation at a corner bistro.
That someone was doing all the watching detailed above, and in fact making reports on it to other people should really come as no surprise.
A phone rings in a police station one morning.
"You are being activated. Stand by for instructions."
"Yes, ok. That's good."
A pulse quickens in anticipation of action.
On the other side of the world, another phone rings in a hotel room.
"Prime, you are being activated. Proceed to Paris. You know what to do."
"Understood."
A hand reaches for an old dented potty training seat, but hesitates, and then picks up grenades and firearms instead. All of them disappear inside an expensive leather trench coat. After all, people change as time passes.
In quite a nice apartment on the sixth floor of a building in Paris, someone receives a heavily encrypted e-mail from a contact they hadn't been in touch with in quite some time. It says:
They're on the move again. I don't know what triggered it, but things have been crazy around here just these last two days. Watch yourself. I'll send more details when there are some to send.
(Mirelle's POV)
I'd been afraid of this. I'd almost been able to convince myself that the little bit of freelance work I was doing wouldn't attract the attention of Les Soldats. It was, after all, my daily bread and Kirika's too. But it was a foolish hope, and my encounter with the killers in the sewer about a month ago had simply been the first warning shot in the battle that was about to start again.
That Kirika and I were Noir, the true Noir, meant that there were probably certain ritualistic formulas that needed to be followed within the Soldats organization. There were probably elements within Les Soldats that needed to be convinced of the truth of the new ways that had been embraced by the leadership.
The sudden increase in seemingly random unsolved murders across Europe that I'd been tracking in the news certainly made this seem likely. But now an agenda had been decided on. The assassination squads were on the move again, drifting into Paris with their masks and their guns. Their target was again Noir. My contacts told me this much. So we'd just have to fight again and keep winning to live.
The unknown factor in all of this was a certain Ranma Saotome. I'd started the background check on the man the day after I'd met up with Kirika outside the park. Even if Kirika hadn't been willing or able to admit how she felt about him that day, I had a pretty good idea. The last few weeks had just confirmed my initial suspicions as they saw more and more of each other. I'd even seen them holding hands last night. So this Ranma was Kirika's boyfriend.
He was also a policeman who'd been sent to Paris to capture or kill Noir, who was working right now with their special taskforce. He was also a skilled martial artist, and a survivor of most of the bloodiest and roughest police cases in Japan in the last five or six years.
Before this, the top of his graduating class at the police academy even though some of the instructors seemed to hate his guts from their comments on his files.
Before this, a high school student with low to average grades at the 'infamously violent Furinkan high school'. Before the age of sixteen, things were very hazy and I didn't have a good grasp on his early life at all. When I confronted Kirika with all of this information in one huge packet... well we had our first and only real argument with each other.
We started talking about him, and I was really surprised by how much Kirika had come to trust the guy in such a short time. Plus, she seemed to know he was here to kill us. He was the enemy plain and simple, and a capable one at that. I don't know too much about martial arts beyond my training, but he had a reputation for being good in the police, and the Japanese police were unusually oriented towards martial arts as it was. So he was a serious threat to us, and he had to die, it was that simple.
I'd told Kirika all this. I'd shown her the files on some of the stuff he'd been involved in. She just looked sad as she looked through them, and told me that I didn't have to worry, she trusted him. But she didn't explain why.
Ok, maybe I'd been a bit out of line when I told her that no matter how good the sex was, it wasn't worth us getting killed for. How was I supposed to know they'd only just started holding hands? I just figured that a guy who looked like him would have been moving faster with a girl as inexperienced as her.
I asked her what the hell he'd been doing before the age of 16, because there weren't any records. Maybe she should ask him instead of trusting him. Maybe she should ask him what he did for a living. Maybe she should ask him about the redhead who kept showing up in reports about him for some reason. Maybe she should ask him about the fifteen cultists he'd 'been forced to defend himself against' in a Tokyo hotel.
I not sure what else I said to her, but something really got her mad, and she started actually shouting back at me. Saying "Can't you see he understands me, Mirelle? Can't you see it?" I sure as hell couldn't understand her at all, and after some more shouting, I eventually just had to fall asleep listening to Kirika sniffling in her room.
This morning she stopped and apologised to me on the way out to spar with him. Said she was sorry she was so emotional. Said she loved me like a big sister and a mother all in one. Said he was her second real friend, and that they understood each other like she understood me.
She actually blushed when she said friend.
Then she ran out the door to go meet up with him.
I couldn't leave things sitting like that. That's why I was sitting in a chair in the apartment of Ranma Saotome with a silenced pistol in one hand and a tape recorder ready to record, waiting for him to get back from work. I'd get some answers from him one way or another, even if Kirika wasn't going to talk. If they were the wrong answers, I'd leave the body and bring the tape for Kirika to hear. She'd hurt in the short term, but hurt was always better than dead.
Around 7:00 in the evening I heard him in the hallway, grumbling, opening the deadbolt and the lock. I lifted my gun ready to threaten or to fire. He walked into the room. I'm not sure if he heard me take a breath to tell him to put his hands up. I've never seen anyone move that fast. Ever. I got some sort of impression of him spinning and moving towards me, but that's all. Before I really knew it, he was above me, knocking my gun hand back, his eyes shining cold grey in the waning light, his hand clenched in a fore-knuckle fist and poised to strike at my throat. I hadn't even had time to tighten my finger on the trigger of my gun.
He just looked at me.
"Mirelle, isn't it?" he asked.
I manage to grunt out some sort of affirmative and that must have been good enough for him. He just took my gun and threw it on the bed, sitting down himself.
"You're the second person who tried to kill me today, so 'scuse me if I was a bit rough with ya."
I nod. I see some blood on the collar of his shirt as he flops back on the bed with a sigh. And then suddenly pops up again, looking at me.
"Hey, before I forget, do you know what sort of flowers she likes?" he asks, blushing a bit.
I find that my mouth is still hanging open a bit.
He blinks at me. "Ummm... you know Kirika, right?"
I nod.
"So, ummm... what sorta flowers do you think she'd like?" He asks again. He's assumed I can speak Japanese. "Look," he says, "would this go better if I threatened you a bit and stuff first? You know, wave the gun around, scream at you a bit, tie you up or something? I was just hoping we could skip that bit and get down to talking... you know... it's been a long day."
"Sorry," I manage. "So you're ok with the fact that I was waiting here with a gun?"
"Yeah, whatever," he says, shrugging out of his suit jacket and hanging it up. "I almost figured you might be here after Kirika had said you'd been asking about me. That's basically why I didn't just rip your head off through the wall, ya know?"
I blanch a bit. Could he have just done that? I really didn't know what he was capable of. I didn't know what he'd do when I pushed him.
"I actually really... ummm... like her, you know?" He said, starting to talk again without any sort of prompting from me. "You don't need to worry about me hurting her or turning her in or something. I know, sorta weird with me being a cop and all, but I guess that's just life."
He shrugged out of the holster and tossed it onto the bed. If he'd tried to draw his gun, I might have had time to stop him. Maybe.
"So you know who she is?" I ask. "You know what she does?"
"Yeah, since the day we met really. She sticks out like a sore thumb if ya know what you're lookin for. But I guess it's cool, I mean she doesn't want to be killing people, and I can live with her past if she can deal with mine."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm afraid I really just don't understand. If you've read our files, you know the sort of thing we've done. You're a police officer. I've read your files too. You've killed people like us."
"Naw," he said with a shrug, as he unbuttoned his shirt. "Hold on a sec, ok? I just gotta change." And with that he walked into the bathroom, leaving me in a room with two guns. Was he cocky? Or insane? I just sat still. Nothing I'd read prepared me for dealing with him.
"See, the only ones I've killed have been the real bastards. Your files don't read a lot different from mine when it comes to the sort people you've left dead behind you. Unless you've whacked some kids I don't know about or something?" he asked, poking his head back around the door jamb.
I shake my head. He comes back into the room again after a while. I couldn't see any marking at all on his neck next to the bloodstain on his collar, but from the amount of blood on the collar, he must have been hit there. No bandage either. I looked back up at his face.
"Look," he says, "I don't know what it was when I met up with her, but I thought I had stuff in common with her. Maybe her life is crazy, and she's done some stuff she regrets. Same with me. But she's real tired... I think that's what I saw, you know? And maybe I figured we could just talk and be friends or something, but... ummm... yeah. Now I guess we're sorta more than that, I guess, and we do understand each other real well after all." I could see a light flush across his cheeks, and realise that he was actually embarrassed to be talking about this with me.
"And that's it?" I ask.
"Yeah, that's it," he said. "I'm not a big one for thinking ahead, 'cause things usually mess up when I do. Maybe we can help each other out a bit and get out of this mess or something. Maybe we can just hang out with each other, and talk and stuff, I don't know. I hope you're ok with that. I mean, she really likes you and stuff."
"And you're not going to hurt her?" I ask.
"If I get anything to say about it, nobody's gonna hurt her," he said. "Hey, look, if you want to keep on talking, you can come up with me to the roof, but I really gotta work out for a bit, or I'm gonna go crazy."
He tossed my gun back to me where I was sitting in the chair.
"No, I think that's all," I trail off, still not keeping up with him. He was just letting me go? Just like that? He opened the front door for me, and motioned me out. I turned to him once I was in the hallway. "You know if you hurt her at all, I'll be coming back trying to kill you, right?"
"Yeah," he said. "I wouldn't want it any other way. I know I got the drop on you this time, but I've seen your files, and I know what you can do. I'm not blowing you off or anything, you know? I just mean I'm glad you're out there lookin' out for her."
I nod, and walk off down the hall. His door shuts. I'm not really that much better off now than I was. But when he'd said that he understood her, I thought back to what Kirika had shouted at me the night before, and a few things got a bit clearer. Maybe it didn't matter so much what they did, but just that they felt some sort of connection.
Who was I kidding? I still didn't understand them, but at least he seemed serious about taking care of her, and he seemed to have some of the skills it took too.
And why were his cloths soaked when he came in?
I made my way home slowly, taking detours, thinking things over.
Kirika called a greeting to me from her room when I got back to our apartment.
"Ranma called and said the two of you had met up and talked a bit. Have you cleared everything up with him, Mirelle?" she asked me.
I was thankful to him. He could have told her I was there to kill him, and I'm not sure what that would have done to my friendship with her. Maybe I'd just have to trust her a bit more as well. I walked into her bedroom.
"I think maybe I'm starting to..." and I trailed off. Kirika was sitting on the bed surrounded by a wide variety of weapons, including a submachine gun, several pistols, and a whole collection of knives, ammunition, and aerofoil grenades. I hadn't even known she owned them.
"That's great Mirelle," she said, with a little smile at me.
"What the hell is all of that?"
"Ranma called before he talked with you," she said. "He'd been attacked at work by a Soldat member, and he wanted to warn me. He got hurt Mirelle. Not bad, but he got hurt."
That explained the comments he'd made, and the blood on his collar. I wondered how that had happened. It must have been someone good to make a mark on him. I took a closer look at Kirika.
"They won't hurt him again, Mirelle, not if I can help it," she said and slipped the full magazine of ammunition back into the butt of the high power FN 5.7 Tactical pistol she was holding. She looked mad in a way I'd only seen once or twice before, and I suddenly felt a resolve to check over all my weapons again. I was going to need them.
With Les Soldats on the move again, and targeting Ranma as well as us, the shit had well and truly hit the fan.
Chapter 8 Author's Notes
- Sorry that I skipped a bit of time here and basically glossed over the start of Ranma and Kirika's relationship. But trusting each other and just starting to talk would have taken quite a while, and I wanted to move things along a bit. If anyone really thinks its vital information, I can always go back and write a side story or something.
- Ok, and I'm changing POV again. Sorry people. This will be the last time a Mirelle POV chapter shows up for a while... I just needed to explore how she was looking at the developping relationship between Kirika and Ranma. As for why Kirika isn't explaining herself more... well, she isn't so good at that sort of thing, and plus she's probably afraid of being teased more (with good reason)
- The next chapter will backtrack a bit and deal with Ranma's day and then move forward from there. Sorry about the weird arrangement of time, but as I plotted stuff out and wrote it just ended up being like that.
A watcher would see a picture of tranquillity in a park in Paris early every morning. Every day for three weeks, two people meet in the darkness, or in the sun. And they do martial arts. Sometimes Tai Chi. Sometimes they spar with each other. He's better, but she matches his grace, even if she can't match his skill.
You may wonder how martial artists sparring could be tranquil at all, but you would just have to watch them to understand. Every movement spoke of a delicate dance the two were teaching to each other as they went along. It's lucky that both of them were very quick learners.
In fact, as time passed, someone very observant might notice that the park was being occupied slightly earlier every morning. Someone very, very observant might see the two people meeting outside the park. Someone using night vision equipment might have seen one nervously take the other's hand and hold it the whole way through their walk home very early one morning after hours of conversation at a corner bistro.
That someone was doing all the watching detailed above, and in fact making reports on it to other people should really come as no surprise.
A phone rings in a police station one morning.
"You are being activated. Stand by for instructions."
"Yes, ok. That's good."
A pulse quickens in anticipation of action.
On the other side of the world, another phone rings in a hotel room.
"Prime, you are being activated. Proceed to Paris. You know what to do."
"Understood."
A hand reaches for an old dented potty training seat, but hesitates, and then picks up grenades and firearms instead. All of them disappear inside an expensive leather trench coat. After all, people change as time passes.
In quite a nice apartment on the sixth floor of a building in Paris, someone receives a heavily encrypted e-mail from a contact they hadn't been in touch with in quite some time. It says:
They're on the move again. I don't know what triggered it, but things have been crazy around here just these last two days. Watch yourself. I'll send more details when there are some to send.
(Mirelle's POV)
I'd been afraid of this. I'd almost been able to convince myself that the little bit of freelance work I was doing wouldn't attract the attention of Les Soldats. It was, after all, my daily bread and Kirika's too. But it was a foolish hope, and my encounter with the killers in the sewer about a month ago had simply been the first warning shot in the battle that was about to start again.
That Kirika and I were Noir, the true Noir, meant that there were probably certain ritualistic formulas that needed to be followed within the Soldats organization. There were probably elements within Les Soldats that needed to be convinced of the truth of the new ways that had been embraced by the leadership.
The sudden increase in seemingly random unsolved murders across Europe that I'd been tracking in the news certainly made this seem likely. But now an agenda had been decided on. The assassination squads were on the move again, drifting into Paris with their masks and their guns. Their target was again Noir. My contacts told me this much. So we'd just have to fight again and keep winning to live.
The unknown factor in all of this was a certain Ranma Saotome. I'd started the background check on the man the day after I'd met up with Kirika outside the park. Even if Kirika hadn't been willing or able to admit how she felt about him that day, I had a pretty good idea. The last few weeks had just confirmed my initial suspicions as they saw more and more of each other. I'd even seen them holding hands last night. So this Ranma was Kirika's boyfriend.
He was also a policeman who'd been sent to Paris to capture or kill Noir, who was working right now with their special taskforce. He was also a skilled martial artist, and a survivor of most of the bloodiest and roughest police cases in Japan in the last five or six years.
Before this, the top of his graduating class at the police academy even though some of the instructors seemed to hate his guts from their comments on his files.
Before this, a high school student with low to average grades at the 'infamously violent Furinkan high school'. Before the age of sixteen, things were very hazy and I didn't have a good grasp on his early life at all. When I confronted Kirika with all of this information in one huge packet... well we had our first and only real argument with each other.
We started talking about him, and I was really surprised by how much Kirika had come to trust the guy in such a short time. Plus, she seemed to know he was here to kill us. He was the enemy plain and simple, and a capable one at that. I don't know too much about martial arts beyond my training, but he had a reputation for being good in the police, and the Japanese police were unusually oriented towards martial arts as it was. So he was a serious threat to us, and he had to die, it was that simple.
I'd told Kirika all this. I'd shown her the files on some of the stuff he'd been involved in. She just looked sad as she looked through them, and told me that I didn't have to worry, she trusted him. But she didn't explain why.
Ok, maybe I'd been a bit out of line when I told her that no matter how good the sex was, it wasn't worth us getting killed for. How was I supposed to know they'd only just started holding hands? I just figured that a guy who looked like him would have been moving faster with a girl as inexperienced as her.
I asked her what the hell he'd been doing before the age of 16, because there weren't any records. Maybe she should ask him instead of trusting him. Maybe she should ask him what he did for a living. Maybe she should ask him about the redhead who kept showing up in reports about him for some reason. Maybe she should ask him about the fifteen cultists he'd 'been forced to defend himself against' in a Tokyo hotel.
I not sure what else I said to her, but something really got her mad, and she started actually shouting back at me. Saying "Can't you see he understands me, Mirelle? Can't you see it?" I sure as hell couldn't understand her at all, and after some more shouting, I eventually just had to fall asleep listening to Kirika sniffling in her room.
This morning she stopped and apologised to me on the way out to spar with him. Said she was sorry she was so emotional. Said she loved me like a big sister and a mother all in one. Said he was her second real friend, and that they understood each other like she understood me.
She actually blushed when she said friend.
Then she ran out the door to go meet up with him.
I couldn't leave things sitting like that. That's why I was sitting in a chair in the apartment of Ranma Saotome with a silenced pistol in one hand and a tape recorder ready to record, waiting for him to get back from work. I'd get some answers from him one way or another, even if Kirika wasn't going to talk. If they were the wrong answers, I'd leave the body and bring the tape for Kirika to hear. She'd hurt in the short term, but hurt was always better than dead.
Around 7:00 in the evening I heard him in the hallway, grumbling, opening the deadbolt and the lock. I lifted my gun ready to threaten or to fire. He walked into the room. I'm not sure if he heard me take a breath to tell him to put his hands up. I've never seen anyone move that fast. Ever. I got some sort of impression of him spinning and moving towards me, but that's all. Before I really knew it, he was above me, knocking my gun hand back, his eyes shining cold grey in the waning light, his hand clenched in a fore-knuckle fist and poised to strike at my throat. I hadn't even had time to tighten my finger on the trigger of my gun.
He just looked at me.
"Mirelle, isn't it?" he asked.
I manage to grunt out some sort of affirmative and that must have been good enough for him. He just took my gun and threw it on the bed, sitting down himself.
"You're the second person who tried to kill me today, so 'scuse me if I was a bit rough with ya."
I nod. I see some blood on the collar of his shirt as he flops back on the bed with a sigh. And then suddenly pops up again, looking at me.
"Hey, before I forget, do you know what sort of flowers she likes?" he asks, blushing a bit.
I find that my mouth is still hanging open a bit.
He blinks at me. "Ummm... you know Kirika, right?"
I nod.
"So, ummm... what sorta flowers do you think she'd like?" He asks again. He's assumed I can speak Japanese. "Look," he says, "would this go better if I threatened you a bit and stuff first? You know, wave the gun around, scream at you a bit, tie you up or something? I was just hoping we could skip that bit and get down to talking... you know... it's been a long day."
"Sorry," I manage. "So you're ok with the fact that I was waiting here with a gun?"
"Yeah, whatever," he says, shrugging out of his suit jacket and hanging it up. "I almost figured you might be here after Kirika had said you'd been asking about me. That's basically why I didn't just rip your head off through the wall, ya know?"
I blanch a bit. Could he have just done that? I really didn't know what he was capable of. I didn't know what he'd do when I pushed him.
"I actually really... ummm... like her, you know?" He said, starting to talk again without any sort of prompting from me. "You don't need to worry about me hurting her or turning her in or something. I know, sorta weird with me being a cop and all, but I guess that's just life."
He shrugged out of the holster and tossed it onto the bed. If he'd tried to draw his gun, I might have had time to stop him. Maybe.
"So you know who she is?" I ask. "You know what she does?"
"Yeah, since the day we met really. She sticks out like a sore thumb if ya know what you're lookin for. But I guess it's cool, I mean she doesn't want to be killing people, and I can live with her past if she can deal with mine."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm afraid I really just don't understand. If you've read our files, you know the sort of thing we've done. You're a police officer. I've read your files too. You've killed people like us."
"Naw," he said with a shrug, as he unbuttoned his shirt. "Hold on a sec, ok? I just gotta change." And with that he walked into the bathroom, leaving me in a room with two guns. Was he cocky? Or insane? I just sat still. Nothing I'd read prepared me for dealing with him.
"See, the only ones I've killed have been the real bastards. Your files don't read a lot different from mine when it comes to the sort people you've left dead behind you. Unless you've whacked some kids I don't know about or something?" he asked, poking his head back around the door jamb.
I shake my head. He comes back into the room again after a while. I couldn't see any marking at all on his neck next to the bloodstain on his collar, but from the amount of blood on the collar, he must have been hit there. No bandage either. I looked back up at his face.
"Look," he says, "I don't know what it was when I met up with her, but I thought I had stuff in common with her. Maybe her life is crazy, and she's done some stuff she regrets. Same with me. But she's real tired... I think that's what I saw, you know? And maybe I figured we could just talk and be friends or something, but... ummm... yeah. Now I guess we're sorta more than that, I guess, and we do understand each other real well after all." I could see a light flush across his cheeks, and realise that he was actually embarrassed to be talking about this with me.
"And that's it?" I ask.
"Yeah, that's it," he said. "I'm not a big one for thinking ahead, 'cause things usually mess up when I do. Maybe we can help each other out a bit and get out of this mess or something. Maybe we can just hang out with each other, and talk and stuff, I don't know. I hope you're ok with that. I mean, she really likes you and stuff."
"And you're not going to hurt her?" I ask.
"If I get anything to say about it, nobody's gonna hurt her," he said. "Hey, look, if you want to keep on talking, you can come up with me to the roof, but I really gotta work out for a bit, or I'm gonna go crazy."
He tossed my gun back to me where I was sitting in the chair.
"No, I think that's all," I trail off, still not keeping up with him. He was just letting me go? Just like that? He opened the front door for me, and motioned me out. I turned to him once I was in the hallway. "You know if you hurt her at all, I'll be coming back trying to kill you, right?"
"Yeah," he said. "I wouldn't want it any other way. I know I got the drop on you this time, but I've seen your files, and I know what you can do. I'm not blowing you off or anything, you know? I just mean I'm glad you're out there lookin' out for her."
I nod, and walk off down the hall. His door shuts. I'm not really that much better off now than I was. But when he'd said that he understood her, I thought back to what Kirika had shouted at me the night before, and a few things got a bit clearer. Maybe it didn't matter so much what they did, but just that they felt some sort of connection.
Who was I kidding? I still didn't understand them, but at least he seemed serious about taking care of her, and he seemed to have some of the skills it took too.
And why were his cloths soaked when he came in?
I made my way home slowly, taking detours, thinking things over.
Kirika called a greeting to me from her room when I got back to our apartment.
"Ranma called and said the two of you had met up and talked a bit. Have you cleared everything up with him, Mirelle?" she asked me.
I was thankful to him. He could have told her I was there to kill him, and I'm not sure what that would have done to my friendship with her. Maybe I'd just have to trust her a bit more as well. I walked into her bedroom.
"I think maybe I'm starting to..." and I trailed off. Kirika was sitting on the bed surrounded by a wide variety of weapons, including a submachine gun, several pistols, and a whole collection of knives, ammunition, and aerofoil grenades. I hadn't even known she owned them.
"That's great Mirelle," she said, with a little smile at me.
"What the hell is all of that?"
"Ranma called before he talked with you," she said. "He'd been attacked at work by a Soldat member, and he wanted to warn me. He got hurt Mirelle. Not bad, but he got hurt."
That explained the comments he'd made, and the blood on his collar. I wondered how that had happened. It must have been someone good to make a mark on him. I took a closer look at Kirika.
"They won't hurt him again, Mirelle, not if I can help it," she said and slipped the full magazine of ammunition back into the butt of the high power FN 5.7 Tactical pistol she was holding. She looked mad in a way I'd only seen once or twice before, and I suddenly felt a resolve to check over all my weapons again. I was going to need them.
With Les Soldats on the move again, and targeting Ranma as well as us, the shit had well and truly hit the fan.
Chapter 8 Author's Notes
- Sorry that I skipped a bit of time here and basically glossed over the start of Ranma and Kirika's relationship. But trusting each other and just starting to talk would have taken quite a while, and I wanted to move things along a bit. If anyone really thinks its vital information, I can always go back and write a side story or something.
- Ok, and I'm changing POV again. Sorry people. This will be the last time a Mirelle POV chapter shows up for a while... I just needed to explore how she was looking at the developping relationship between Kirika and Ranma. As for why Kirika isn't explaining herself more... well, she isn't so good at that sort of thing, and plus she's probably afraid of being teased more (with good reason)
- The next chapter will backtrack a bit and deal with Ranma's day and then move forward from there. Sorry about the weird arrangement of time, but as I plotted stuff out and wrote it just ended up being like that.