Hey people! This was supposed to be up a long time ago, but due to a physics essay (3000 words, too- but I got it back, and I got an A! Hellz yeah!) and a trip to New York (and I'm dedicating this particular chapter to them- people in New York are a lot nicer than people down here, in the South, which goes against every single thing I've ever heard about the North) I've been too busy to do much. So, to make up for it, I'm doing this big ol' chapter.

And another note! There are some of you out there (you in particular, Tiger :) who love Final Fantasy 7. For those of you who do, I have a special treat. Starting this Friday, October the Eight, I will be writing a plot and character synopsis of Final Fantasy 7, starting with a synopsis of the themes present within the work. Ladies and Gentleman, I will be posting this synopsis on , at my personal weblog. So, to all of you here, I grant access and the right to review my work! The address is: . Please (please please!) leave a review there. I cannot stress how important it is to me. It will be my first non-fiction piece of published work, and I really want people to review and tell me what they think. A premature (but hopefully not too optimistic) thank-you to everyone who decides to review my analysis.

And now for my lovely reviewers!

Soundwood: Got your e-mail, Soundwood. If you didn't get it, then write me at my LJ account above, and we'll use it to talk. LJ, unlike Hotmail, loves everybody. :) Liked your letter, by the by- well thought out and very intelligent! Ten points already. (laughs)

As for the review itself... glad you like Yugo, he's one of my personal favorites (that, and I love wolves, period) and I'm trying to write him as best I can... spirits of the dead killed by HB? Good guess, Soundwood! You are almost right, but as they say, almost only counts in horseshoes. They are spirits of the dead, but not Zoanthrope spirits. It'll get explained later in the story.

Glad you love the details. I love details myself (big Stephen King fan here) and so try to put them into everything I do. It's also good to know that I've made at least one reader aware of the danger of the Zoanthropes in real life! (glances around crazily) They are with us! They are all with US!!! (men in white coats with hypodermic needles appear, Silver shrieks and runs away)

(In newer, safer, less populated place) Those guys are always following me... I wonder why? (eye twitches)

V Guyver: Thanks for reviewing! There is no logical support for racism, whether religious or scientific, and those that seek one are monsters in the extreme. Though, to be honest, I would rather deal with someone who believes in a (supposed) religious reason for racism than someone with a (supposed) scientific reason. Those who think they have a science behind their slaughter are far more dangerous- look at Stalin. Truth is, logic is one of the most dangerous things in the world- a new book I heard about recently says that some beliefs are so "stupid" people should be killed for believing in them. The author was speaking specifically of Christianity. I'm a devout Christian, and I think other religions are wrong, but I'm not going to go kill people over them. Logic is dangerous when used wrongly.

Enough of that. It's...

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter 12

Beauty in the Park

Outside Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, near heart of Tokyo, Japan, 3:30 a.m., Night of the Mark.

Shina begins walking through the corridors of the hospital, heading towards the front door, where she will exit and enter into the madness that is this night. As she walks through the crowds, walking past crying mothers holding their children and weeping (or following alongside bedcarts that are being rolled out, if the child is too sick to move, and weeping; the hospital has decided to move as many patients as possible to other, slightly safer locations, and they have already evacuated all of the third floor), fathers holding their own children or loved ones and crying, and the nurses who are desperately trying to impose some sort of order on it all, Shina does not notice the furtive glance of one man- a man with a long brown rainjacket on. He glances at her and just as rapidly glances away. Something is wrong with this man... desperately wrong. But we don't know what it is. And, alas, we have no time to stick around and read his mind. Shina walks out, and we follow with her, quick and silent as sleeping shades in the night.

Shina walks outside, and a group of extremely harried, extremely tired policeman (several who are eating rice balls sweetened with a variety of sauces that the white grains have been soaked in; it's the Japanese police officers' version of donuts, merely proving once again that the world is far more odd than any story could ever be) look at her before turning their attention back to the crowd. If nothing else, there is one thing all police officers in the world will agree upon: Everyone hates the media. The media are, to both the police officers and every other free-spirited intellectual, the ultimate bane of humanity.

Newspapers have mutated over the years; they were at first almost holy, selling simple articles whose clean, polite wording and script seemed cold and rational but in truth was hot powerful, powerful in its very simplicity; by allowing the facts and just the facts, it allowed others to judge as they saw fit without making or prejudicing that judgement for them. In the modern world, the media has become corrupted beyond belief, caring not at all for truth or facts but only for "their" side of the facts or "their" version of the truth. The media, most of it owned by megacorporations, has become extremely biased and prejudiced against others- it often only shows the bad side of things, and when it does have something nice to say, it's always for only one person or group (and the media picks a darling and sticks with them like nobody's business. No one receives the attention and the "love" of the media like one of their own hand-picked darlings... and these darlings are often the very last people normal souls would ever choose as someone to love. The leader of the New York Mafia was considered a media darling in his day, as was Al Capone.)

A good example would be the U.S. media during the 2004 presidential election- no media other than Fox would ever show anything "bad" about Kerry, yet would go to great lengths to show "atrocities" about Bush. A media should not do that. It should report facts. If Kerry does something bad, say so. If Bush does something good, say so. If the facts are completely opposite, say so. A media should not (and in a perfect world would not) be the judge and arbiter of all things; and yet it acts that way.

Hm. A sad state of the world, when the media acts for a bias. The police officers now arguing with the reporters from a Tokyo newspaper as Shina walks by them are a classic case in point; the media despises police officers, here in Tokyo, especially after the events of the Zoanthrope breakouts, and especially the famed "Shanghai" incident, so called because the Japanese police officer involved in it was a man from an ancient Chinese family (they'd come over several decades ago, before China went Red) whose surname was Shanghai. Officer Shanghai had been walking along his beat one night when he saw a group of teenaged humans attacking a Zoanthrope child in the middle of the night. The child may have been a Zoanthrope (boar Zoanthrope, actually) but it was still a child, and the fear the older children produced outweighed the physical reality that the child was considerably stronger than any of them (or all of them put together, actually). Officer Shanghai pulled out his pistol and ordered the teens to stop. When one complained that it was just a "Beast Freak", Officer Shanghai repeated his command for them to stop, or he would shoot. One of the teens, slightly drunk both on sake and the feelings he was getting from beating on the child, threatened him with a chain. Officer Shanghai proceeded to shoot the offender, a perfect shot in the chest, that sent the other teens running. The shot teen died moments later. The boar Zoanthrope ran off, scared for its life by the gunshot (the child is still alive, hiding in the streets of the city; very street-smart and wily, he's seen Stun several times before on his midnight runs but he has too much cunning to be seen and too little guts to talk to him) and Officer Shanghai, knowing his police career was over, called the incident in on his radio, feeling very grand and great that he had managed to save a life, no matter whose it was. Two squad cars had arrived soon enough, and after that, it had seemed like the whole world was spinning around him. Everything literally just went from that moment on- he had no control over anything at all.

Officer Shanghai was, predictably, hanged by the media, but the fierce defense of his fellow police officers (rallied by one sergeant's cry of "What if it was your call?!?") made a sentencing hard. Finally, it was decided that he was to be demoted but not entirely fired. The result has made the media, most of whom were made out to be a bunch of hysterical bigots by the incident, extremely suspicious and hateful of the police. The police near Shina right now are keeping mostly silent and communicating as much as possible without words. As the old T-shirt maxim says, "Anything you say will be mis-quoted, and then used against you."

Shina walks past them, heading out in the night, pretending to be merely another curious onlooker in a place already full of them. She moves her head from side to side slowly, then slightly faster, whipping the air around her head into a slight vortex. The resulting motion drags more air to the area of the face, and makes sniffing out a scent easier. It also makes telling the exact original direction of the scent harder to point out, but for faint scents or those times when one has no idea where to start, it's the best way to find one quickly.

Shina shakes her head and snorts, her nose filled with the odor of cat, and begins to perform a slower, more methodical search, lifting her nose and sniffing delicately at the higher, lighter air currents. They are harder to sense than the lower, more brisk air currents, but the scents they carry are far easier to track than those carried by their lighter, more fickle brethren. Long, when training Uriko in the art of Kenpo (as well as teaching her about her Zoanthrope form) spoke often of the proper way to sniff: searching the lower currents will get one confused very easily, as they shift and swirl constantly, and sometimes create new scents by the very mixture of old ones carried on them (Long had once thought he'd been tracking a boar, only to find some very old, very dry sheets of leather lying on the ground, whose scents the breeze had picked up and carried, turning them into the stale, dry shit smell of a boar), while the upper currents, harder to detect though they were, were infinitely calmer, and allowed for much easier access to the object emitting the smells on it- and as far as either Long or anyone else knew, the upper currents never led anyone wrong. Shina stands and sniffs, nose testing the air as our mouths would test water, to see if it was good or bad, and while she draws her fair share of odd looks from a few select members of the crowd (two of them a pair of adolescent boys, separated by about twenty feet in distance and zero feet in brainpower, who thought she was the hottest person they'd ever met until she did that weird sniffling thing- it was a hospital, after all, and so both boys think she's got some weird sort of disease and that she's about to freak out on all of them), she ignores them all. She finds what she is looking for, and then begins walking towards the source of the smell, nose twitching only slightly now, as she hunts and hunts for Uriko and Kenji.

We follow behind her, but soon outstrip her and head for the two of them on a direct path, one which has us flying over buildings until we reach the outskirts of the park, where Bakuryu is currently giving up control to Kenji and where Yugo has managed to finally stagger in, dropping down on a drunk's bench and puking his guts out, sick to his stomach from the encounter with the Heaven Breaker.

We fly.

-

Park, about five blocks from Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, Tokyo, Japan. 3:40 a.m.

We find our targets and swoop down on them, circling and circling like great birds of prey, and as we do so we survey the surrounding area. Below us (and behind the young couple on the bench) a small road sits, its paved surface merely another black gleam in the night. A few streetlights adorn it, active for the few cars or people active at this hour. F. Scott Fitzgerald once described this time as the "dark night of the soul", and though we tend to be less pessimistic and "down" then the great literary master is, we must admit that it is right now, with neither sun nor moon in the sky, that the night seems darkest. The trees here look like ebony towers of spears in the darkness, and the stars above are not warm and bright as they are when the moon is first ascending to its throne in the sky; they are cold, distant, bright, like ice points hung in some velvety blanket. The grass is invisible, and only the soft sigh of wind brings noise to this place. A jogger, some half a mile away, runs by, performing what may be the earliest early morning run in the history of the world. Other than him, no one else is about right now save us and our young charges. As we float down, the detail of the world flows to us, and we observe our favorite Zoanthropes' current positions in the park.

Bakuryu sits down on the bench beside the slowly-coming-awake Uriko, settling himself in comfortably, just enjoying the feel of the night breeze's as they play across his skin. He's going to have to give this up, soon- even now, he can feel his other, Kenji, getting restless, abiding by his agreement and waiting until Bakuryu thinks Uriko is safe before he comes out, but wanting more and more to get out and make sure she is okay, because Kenji trusts Bakuryu about as far as he can throw him. Considering Kenji cannot even physically throw Bakuryu in the first place, this is a very small amount of trust indeed.

Bakuryu chuckles as he muses over these thoughts, and glances at Uriko as she begins to wake up. Her lithe, cat-like body (very cat-like, now; she even has ears and a tail, which for some reason has always tickled Bakuryu to death, in that black place he calls a heart) shivers and shudders, and she shakes her head in a quick back and forth motion, clearing it for a moment as she rises up. She puts a paw to her forehead and moans.

" Ow," she whines, "my head." Rubbing the spot above her eyes where her skull was forcibly introduced to the Zoanthrope Kohryu, she makes a small pouting face which Bakuryu, seated behind her on the bench, cannot see. He can, however, see her behind, and grins as he watches her shake her body, which causes the most intriguing motions of her ass and posterior parts. "I feel like I was just in a car wreck..." She continues rubbing her head, and almost absent-mindedly scratches her foot with her tail (something she does often when in beast form; her tail is extremely prehensile, especially compared to those of other Zoanthropes, and she uses it for everything from holding small objects to scratching that itch one can never quite reach on the back). Startled into shock by the realization that she even has a tail, Uriko jumps up and turns around. Behind her, smiling cooly, sits Bakuryu.

"Kenji?" she mutters apprehensively, and in an act of grace and courteousness which shocks Kenji, Bakuryu abruptly vacates the driver's seat. Bowing to Kenji in his head, Bakuryu says, "She's all yours."

Not really knowing quite what to say, Kenji plops himself into the driver's seat and takes control.

"Hey, Uriko," Kenji says, and his former grin of cool becomes replaced by a slightly shy, much more innocent smile. "You... passed out. Ba... I dragged you here. It's a park. A safe place." Shrugging a little self-consciously (Kenji is getting very uncomfortable, being here, alone, in the middle of the night, with his sometimes on sometimes off girlfriend, even though, with a head wound on her part and the cops chasing after them on his part, there is as little romance in this scene as in a viewing of a public restroom) Kenji says, "We're waiting for Yugo."

Uriko nods, then rubs her head. " Did he... hurt you?" she asks, saying it slowly not due to shyness (she doesn't even know the word, figuratively speaking) but because the large, angry knot on her forehead is proclaiming its existence in loud words that seem to beat against her forehead in rhythm with her heart.

"No," Kenji says. "You're worse off than I am."

She smiles. "Maybe so." Rubbing her cheek with her paw (one of the feline traits she acquired when she turned into a beast) she mutters a shocked "Oh!" and begins morphing back. Sometimes she cannot change; but this time, everything works out okay, and she shifts back slowly, hair rescinding back into her body, ears slowly losing their great peak and becoming normal human ears, tail swallowing back into her body until it is finally gone. When she is done, she looks down at herself- and moans again.

"My dress is ruined," she whines, and we look down and see it is so. Getting into a fight is hard on a kimono; turning into a Zoanthrope and then getting into a fight is even worse. Uriko's dress is torn in many places, and she no longer has shoes, her bulging claws rending the house slippers she was wearing when she changed. "Oh well," she says, immediately changing tact, "at least we're okay." As we circle around the pair, listening to them, she winces and puts her hand against her forehead. "Oof," she says, gingerly rubbing it. "Kenji..."

Kenji looks at her. "Yes?" He's concerned for her- rather sweet, actually, considering he'd just placed her life in the hands of an insane killer less than thirty or so minutes ago.

Then again, one has to make do with what one has, so by that standard, he's done fairly well by her... By all of us, maybe.

"I'm fine," Uriko says, and smiles at him. Her face suddenly saddens, and the smile turns bittersweet. Turning her head slightly to the side, she says, " Kenji?"

He looks at her. "Yes?"

"What I said in the hospital... about you not being a monster..."

Kenji looks away and suddenly seems to close up, the defense he has against all the world, his face growing cool and impassive all at once. Of course, if he'd just think about it for a minute, he'd realize Uriko has nothing mean or hurtful she could possibly say to him- he had just saved her life, after all, in the fight against Kohryu (of course, that had been Bakuryu, but the again, it's all one and the same, isn't it? Kenji and Bakuryu. Two souls... or just two sides...?) and it would be the rare and spiteful person indeed who would find anything at all wrong with their rescuer after such a situation- but Kenji is not a man who ever thinks of the bright side of things. He has been hurt and broken, ill used, all his life, and so he has never really learned to trust anybody. He has already told Uriko far more this night than he has ever revealed to anybody (with the exception of Yugo) in the entirety of his life, and though he trembled on the edge of telling everything to everybody (both Yugo and Alice, Uriko, all of them) in the hospital room, Kohryu interrupted that sentence before it ever began, and now Kenji is sure he will never tell them. Never.

He can't. Or maybe he simply won't.

As Uriko sits with him, Kenji closes up, and waits for the hammer to fall.

"It's true. You're not a monster." Uriko leans over and hugs him tight, surprising him out of his calmness, and a deep, almost existential sadness- maybe the only real emotion in Kenji's mind at all times- takes him over. He leans over her and hugs her back.

"Thank you," he whispers. " Thank you."

Uriko nuzzles him, and says, " Kenji... what you've done... you saved me! That's a good thing, Kenji, a heroic thing. You're not a monster." Uriko lays her head against him again, and says, "So just let it go, okay? Just for a little bit."

And as Kenji slips off into sleep, Uriko trailing after him (it's been one hell of a long night for these two), he hears her whisper these words to him, as she falls asleep on his chest...

"Just for a little bit, okay?... No bad dreams, just sleep..."

And so they sleep.

We fly.

- R & R please! I know the style seems a bit odd, but I am returning from a long absence, so give me a bit of time, folks. And for a friend of mine who will remain unnamed (begins whistling "Eye of the Tiger") the last scene is dedicated to you. May you live strong, live long...

And vote for George W. Bush. :P