Hey everybody. I'm back! So...

One thing. As a Republican (and, henceforth, as a miniority on the Internet) I have only this to say:

YES! Go Bush!

(coughs) Ahem. Now, let's get on with it, shall we?

It's...

"SHOWTIME!"

Chapter 13

Battles Begun, Battles Ended

Park, about five blocks from Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, in Tokyo, Japan, Night of the Mark. 3:50 a.m.

We lift off and leave the two young loves sleeping peacefully next to each other, flapping our wings to reach up into the night air and find another not very far from here. And not very far is exactly where we go; we fly for only a few minutes before we cross over Yugo's head, finding him lying next to a bench and puking his guts out into a nearby trash can. We fly down, the chill night breeze flying unfelt through our feathered and leathered wings, and as we land on the ground, we see his body shake with weakness.

Yugo coughs a little bit more, a dry, racking sound, like some harsh motor that doesn't want to work in the cold of morning, then shudders and shakes some more before finally settling down. He takes a deep, shaky breath, then another, and another, finally calming down to the point where he can breathe normally again. Yugo closes his eyes and moves his head away from the trash can (he doesn't want to look at his own vomit; he's afraid it might make him start puking again), scooting back on the bench and finally taking up a small section of it, huddling up with his knees to his chest, shaking and feeling as if he's ready to cry, as if he's hurt so bad that nothing but tears could help it. But he doesn't cry; he feels like he can't at the same time he feels like he must. It's confusing to him, and very messed up, but it is the best he can make sense of the way he feels.

Yugo does not know it, but he's not the only person to have felt this way after a dealing with the Heaven Breaker. After agreeing to buy it, the chief of police for Tokyo (a good man, if a little dull, which to many city managers is the perfect type of person to become police chief; good enough to catch the crooks in the streets, not smart enough to catch the manager's work in exploiting the city funds) walked out of the room where the deal had been made (wondering why the executive from the Mishiyama Corp. had seemed so slimy to him) and suddenly, inexplicably, found himself sick. He had been found later, passed out in one of the bathrooms nearby, vomit everywhere on the floor. The police had hushed it up, believing it to be a case of stomach virus (which had went around the police department that week- the week they had bought the Heaven Breaker, which should have probably warned some of them of something, especially since the executive from the Mishiyama Corp. had made their cop-sense tingle all day with the word "Criminal" flashing in their minds whenever they saw him) and so the news never got a hold of it. The police chief never connected his bad feelings with the Heaven Breaker, though he has sent several notices to the Mishiyama Corp. telling them that the Heaven Breaker causes "inexplicable feelings of motion sickness" in those that drive it, or at least, " a very disoriented feeling", which the Mishiyama Corp. constantly chalks up to "balance problems" and the fact that "the police are new to using it and will quickly become accustomed to it, eliminating your problems with sickness and fear." It should be noted that nowhere in his letters did the police chief ever mention anything about fear, but unfortunately, he never picked this up when reading the return letters they sent him. If he had, things might have gotten very interesting for the Mishiyama Corp. for a while.

Yugo eventually settles down, and the half-cried unshed tears in his eyes finally sink back into his eyelids, awaiting another day to weep. Yugo gets up, and, shaking his head, catches a wiff of something. Quickly raising his head and taking a sniff, he identifies the smell- it's Kenji and Uriko. He breathes a sigh of relief and turns to follow the scent, walking quickly to find his younger brother and his girlfriend, glad that, even if they are not okay, he is nearby and able to help them if they need it.

Already walking along quickly, he hastens his steps. Soon he is comfortably jogging, edging towards a run.

We take wing and fly.

-

Abandoned Warehouse in Tokyo, Japan. 4:10 a.m.

Stun watches as Jenny falls into fitful sleep, still in her Zoanthrope form (contrary to every single thing Stun has ever read or watched on TV about werewolves and other were-beasts, Zoanthropes do not change form when they fall asleep, get knocked out, or anything else; the change is conscious for everyone he's ever met, with the exception of Uriko, who's transformation isn't very stable at the best of times and is not always completely under her control), then turns his mind towards what had hurt her. Stun's mind is extremely strong and very capable, and he is the one person whom Busuzima respects out of the ones arrayed against him. Busuzima thinks Long is too honorable to kill him (the one outcome Busuzima has ever feared; he believes that, so long as one has life, one has power, one has options, and one has escape), believes Uriko to be hilariously funny (she once attempted to attack him and accidentally tripped while rushing towards him; Busuzima has never forgotten it and has repeatedly heckled her as "Stumbles" whenever they enter battle), and generally treats the others with disregard and contempt. But Stun (or Stephen, his real name and what Busuzima calls him) is the one person whom Busuzima respects; he is the one person whom Busuzima enjoys fighting. Fighting for fighting's sake is fun, even for Busuzima, but fighting with an opponent just as crafty, just as smart, and most especially, just as good at mind games is fighting on the purest level for him. Busuzima finds Stun a worthy opponent.

Which is one reason why he turned him into a Zoanthrope on a black, stormy, terrible night long ago, when the lightning was so bad it seemed as if the sky was shrieking every time the lightning razed down the side of the sky and tore open great, rain-bleeding jags out of it. Busuzima changed him, not out of malice, but out of respect; Busuzima had just recently turned himself into a Zoanthrope, and had decided that, if Stephen was his greatest nemesis (and he was; Stephen was usually only one step behind Busuzima in the scientific realm, but unlike the mad doctor, he had a sense of compassion and heart that would not allow him to participate in Busuzima's crimes, making him a powerful voice against Busuzima's evil in the offices and apartments of Tylon), then it was only fitting that they be equals in that area as well. At the time, Busuzima was the only living Reptile Zoanthrope in the world, and so he thought it just that his greatest opponent also be the only living specimen of his kind. Busuzima now has many brethren in the world, most based off his research, but Stun is still the only Insect Zoanthrope in all the world.

Stun's mind turns towards the events of the day, constantly replaying them in his mind. He even searches his own actions for possible clues (not that he is afraid he did something on purpose- far from it- but he does realize that perhaps his actions had caused Jenny to be hurt so badly that the normally tough and strong Bat Zoanthrope would be so tired and so seemingly timid), but he eventually shakes his head in vain and gives up. He cannot just think his way out of this mess. Getting up and stretching slightly, he gently taps his friend on the shoulder.

" Hey," he says, gently, quietly, trying to avoid alerting the bums nearby to his presence, " Jenny."

She moves slightly in her sleep and says, eyes closed, " Where am I?"

" The warehouse. I haven't moved you." Jenny knows that there was always the chance Stun would move her while she slept; all of the Zoanthropes have awoken in a place different from the one they slept in at one time or another, due to various reasons.

" Oh." Gently, she cracks open one eye, and says, " Is it morning?"

" No," he says. " But close to it. You need to go home. And I want to check on Alice...."

Jenny waits to see if her heart will pound in her chest like it did when she first heard him mention going to Alice's, but she doesn't feel anything and attributes her former feelings to mere nerves and the shock of being hurt like she was. " Alright," she says, nodding to him. " Let's go home, then." She prepares to stand up, and when Stun reaches out to gently grab her wing/arm (one of the funnier conversations she and Stun have had- one that comes back to her now, as he helps her up- was about the proper definition of her hands in bat form- were they wings? Arms? Leather jackets that haven't been processed yet? Stun has a wry, somewhat dry sense of humor, and in a world where so many people hated Zoanthropes and wished them dead, anyone with a sense of humor on the side of right was a good thing), she gratefully accepts his hand and stands up. Moving slightly, shaking her body to make sure no vestiges of pain still remain in it, she shivers and stands up fully.

" Hey," she says. "What are you going to do?."

He shrugs. " I'm going to head to Alice's, see what I can find there. Then I'll probably go over to Yugo's house, check on everybody I can there..."

She nods to him, and says, " All right. I'll spend the rest of the night in bed... I don't hurt anymore, but I think it best not to move, don't you?"

" Yes," he says. " Now... I'll see you home first."

She smiles rather wryly, and says, " Oh, how gentlemanly of you. And after so fine a date, too...."

He snorts and turns, looking for the window he came in through. Finding it, he leaps to the top of it, easily making the eighteen foot jump. Jenny, too, leaps, though she flaps her wings once or twice as well, to clear the extra distance her jumps lack when compared to Stun's (Jenny's legs are strong, but paradoxically, the same lightness that allows her to fly is the same lightness that makes her too light to jump properly; she is not heavy enough to gain the momentum to propel herself through the air like Stun does, and so must flap to get anywhere she wishes to go). Stun awaits her, and then, heading out over the rooftops, he and she run, Jenny eventually taking to the air (but not flying too high; if she is suddenly hurt again, she wants to be able to crash land with relative safety) and Stun running along below her, finally coming to her high-rise apartment on the outskirts of one of Tokyo's fashionable districts. As she prepares to land in her open window (she has a massive window, one of her main requirements for any place she lives nowadays; if it doesn't have a nice window, how can she get out and enjoy flying?), she stops and lets out a call to Stun, in a pitch far too high for humans to hear but nicely suited to his ears.

" Stun," she says, her voice sounding tinny but otherwise perfectly audible (to us, even the tinny noise is negligible; our ears are far superior even to Stun's), " I don't know what happened to me, but I want you to be careful tonight. I don't feel the way I did a little while ago about Alice's house, but I still don't think that anything good happened there tonight." She shivers as she remembers the feeling she had had, of danger and madness in Alice's house, then says, " Be safe, my friend."

He nods and says, " You too, Jenny." The words are barely whispered into the air, but they are loud enough for Jenny to hear, and she nods to him before flapping quickly into the open window of her apartment. We follow her as well, entering a place that, even in the darkness, is sumptious in the extreme. As she lands inside, she changes back into human form (the bright lights and flames of change which Busuzima thought were the result of "rapid changes in body function" that "charged the nearby atmosphere with bright but harmless phosphorence due to electricity" flaring up around her and then dying as she finishes the change), then stands up and puts on a small silk nightie she hung on the side of the bed earlier this night before going out to fly. She looks out the window, and below her, a lone figure in the darkness, stands Stun, looking up at her with his inhuman and yet friendly yellow eyes. She nods to her friend, and he nods back (she can't see this light, subtle gesture in the dark; her eyes, even in Zoanthrope form, are like a human's, and she is mostly nightblind), before turning to run off into the darkness. We watch all this with our ever-gazing eyes before slipping out the window like running water over oil, down the walls, rushing off into the night to find someone else to play with, a someone who has finally found Yugo's trail and is linking it back with Kenji's, and is just now finding Yugo as he leans against a tree in his favorite park in Tokyo.

We fly.

-

Park in Tokyo, Japan. 4:15 a.m.

Yugo leans against the tree and rests his head back, tired to the bone from this long, horrible night. He breathes in deeply, and as we fly up to him, to study this man up close, we see that he is badly, badly sick, sick to his stomach from many things: his worry over Kenji, his fight with Kohryu, his encounter with the Heaven Breaker. He is not sick in the normal sense of the word, not sick in the bodily, physical sense of hte word, but he is sick in the mind, sick of this day and everything it had brought. He is tired, now, and just wants to rest. He leans against the tree more heavily, and sighs again.

" Are you okay, Yugo?"

We turn as a calm, concise voice speaks to Yugo, but he does not. His ears are still too badly wounded from his previous battle to be of much use to him, and he still cannot hear anything save the lowest and most base of sounds, which are transported through his bones to his ears in the first place and are more felt than heard anyway.

The speaker is Shina, as calm and cold now as she was twenty minutes ago, when we left her outside Our Holy Mother Medical Hospital, having just found the scents that Uriko and Kenji left when they departed (or, more accurately, Bakuryu, Kenji, and Uriko left when they departed; with Kenji, two is always a crowd) and departing after them in the same calm, cool manner in which she now approaches Yugo. Seeing the small line of blood that leads away from Yugo's ears and is even now flowing slowly down his face like some sort of watery line or crack in the side of his neck, Shina believes that he must be deaf or close to it. She doesn't know the reason, but she has never really cared much for reasons, anyway; she is much more focused on effects. She is the kind of person who does not care whether a hammer or a crowbar is used to pry a nail up; all she cares about is that the nail is pried up. That is usually a good thing, because you never know when you may have to jerry-rig something up, and someone who is focused on "right tool for the right job" is usually the last person you want to have try to innovate their way out of anything so challenging as a cardboard box; but it is sometimes a wrong thing, too, because someone who cares only about effects may fail to see that the reason is sometimes far more important than what happens afterward. In most cases, true, the effects are all that matter (for instance, the young man who shot the Austrian duke and henceforth started World War I had reasons, but they are unimportant; the bullet he fired is the only thing that anyone has ever remembered about him), but sometimes it is the reasons that matter more than the effects. In World War II, the German Nazis researched many diseases upon the Jews in the internment camps, mostly to fulfill their own sadistic glee, but also for a twisted sort of research. That the effects of this research were actually quite useful to many pharmaceutical groups around the world (those that could stomach the way these insights were gleaned, anyway) is beyond question, but the reason such effects were found in the first place makes the results so horrible that many would rather wait and develop these results after years of research rather than spend one hour touching the records some hideous hand recorded long ago, in an internment camp right next door to Hell and worse in every way possible. Hell, despite everything that has been said about it, isn't so bad when you think about it- only the deserving bastards who've earned it ever go down there, and so the place is, in the end, just. But the internment camps had no justice in them, no justice at all, and in the end, the things done in there are too horrible for words to ever describe.

Shina walks up to Yugo and, completely uncaring of the shock she's about to give him, gives him a gentle push on the shoulder. Snapping awake, Yugo jerks up, then sees it's Shina and relaxes. He mouths something, not really knowing how loud he's saying anything and so speaking so softy that even we strain to hear him. " Shina! You scared me."

She merely looks at him, not moving or acknowledging him in any way. Realizing she didn't hear him, he repeats, louder, " Shina. You scared me."

She merely blinks and says, " Where's Kenji and Uriko?"
Yugo taps his ears and says, " Sorry, Shina. I'm deaf- Kohryu busted my eardrums."

Shina nods and then thinks for a minute. Finally she hunkers down on her knees and begins making small symbols in the dirt. She makes the Japanese sentence for " Where's Uriko and Kenji?" with her finger, then stands up.

Yugo shakes his head. " Over there, somewhere," he says, pointing vaguely in the direction of the scent he has been following for some time now. " I think they're okay. I don't smell blood, anyway."

Shina nods up at him from her position on the ground and then looks down again. On the dirt, she erases her previous letters and writes " Head home. I'm sending them to your house."

Yugo nods and begins walking slowly out of the park, relying on his familiarity with the place to get him away from here without getting lost in Tokyo's almost subterranean streets. Shina heads off in the direction of Uriko and Kenji's scent trail, with nary a look back. She will find the two sleeping, tap them lightly, and ignore their slight, adolescent embarassment at being caught napping with each other in favor of giving them direct orders to head to Yugo's house. Both will comply, and spend the rest of the night safely there.

Now our attention wavers, and our journey goes towards a different place... Alice's, where Stun will catch a sudden glimpse of something that will make him head towards the center of town, where something horrible is being summoned on a dark rooftop far away in the rain-soaked night...

We fly.