One moment, Nabiki had been enjoying an ice cream sundae with her friends as she went to go eat a cherry. And the next she was being conked in the back of the head and smelling something awful as the cherry pit lodged itself in her throat and she blacked out, falling forward.
"Everybody, stand back!" a woman near the scene yelled.
The speaker was a foreigner dressed in a green medical scrubs and was at Nabiki's insensate side in moments. Without the middle Tendo awake to hold herself upright, getting the air passage cleared was just a tiny bit more involved, but the woman was clearly a professional and soon the pit was flying out of Nabiki's mouth.
"Is she going to be okay?" Ryonami asked cautiously.
With the girl still not breathing clearly, the apparent nurse laid her on the ground and bent down to start giving mouth to mouth resuscitation. After the second repetition, Nabiki started breathing up on her own again and more besides.
Reaching up dizzily, Nabiki grabbed hold of the nurses head and started kissing back passionately.
Her savior's response was a muffled combination of surprise and exasperation as she gently pushed Nabiki down and sat up.
"Why is it I always get the kissers," she muttered to herself. "Miss, miss. Focus on my voice, are you feeling okay?"
Nabiki blinked dizzedly and tried to shake her head.
"What happened?" she asked with a slightly drunken tone.
"You were hit in the back of the head by an object that came off of a moving van," the woman said. "Can you tell me your name?"
"Uhh…." Nabiki said, blinking. "It begins with an Na, I think."
"Okay," the medical woman said with a smirk as she looked up to the girls around her. "Can one of you tell me her name?"
"She's Nabiki Tendo," Kikuko said before looking down at her friend. "Boss, don't worry, Akane went after the people in that van for you."
"Boss?" the nurse said before shaking her head.
"Thank you, Koko," Nabiki said drunkenly reaching out to pull her friend down into a kiss.
She didn't quite get the surprised other girl all the way down, however as the nurse interrupted the grab and pushed Kikuko back.
"Why the heck is she acting like that?" Ryonami asked. "Did the hit like, uh, make her gay or something."
"She has a mild concussion and was deprived of oxygen for a few seconds," the nurse said. "She's probably just a little loopy."
Not the girl had bad taste in kissing girls, however. Her friends were pretty attractive in the nurse's opinion, though she shook that thought out.
"Did someone call the ambulance?" she asked.
"I did," Kikuko said quickly enough.
"I can ambulate just fine," Nabiki said, trying to stand up.
"That's fine Miss Tendo," the woman said, gently reaching out to push back to a seated position.
"I think I will sit down," Nabiki said, blinking.
The sound of an ambulance siren carried through the air behind them and the woman reached for her purse on the table she'd been sitting at and grabbed a card.
"If you can get to her family," she said. "Tell them to come to this hospital and ask for Dr. Kinnesy, can you do that?"
"You're a doctor," Ryonami said, surprised. "I thought you were a…"
"A nurse, I know," she said as she started to meet the ambulance crew. "Most Japanese people think so at first. Tell them there isn't any problem, but we're just taking her in to be on the safe side."
"Okay," Kikuko said. "It'll probably be her older sister coming."
Then it was just a matter of helping Nabiki walk carefully to ambulance and letting her lay down on the bed with an oxygen mask. It didn't take long for her, lying there with a flow of oxygen before things started clearing out in her head.
For the most part.
"Ohhh," she said finally. "What was I doing?"
"You were reaching out to kiss just about anybody in reach," Dr. Kinnesy said with a smirk. "How do you feel?"
"My chest feels tight, and my legs are itchy," Nabiki said.
"No wonder," the EMT said as he caught her hand before it could reach back to the rear of her skull and scratch at the small cuts there. "I can see through your shirt that you're wearing a bra at least one size too small. I'm surprised the doctor didn't take that off you right off."
Dr. Kinnesy frowned as she took a closer look at the imprints of Nabiki's bra against the fabric of her shirt. She hadn't noticed it was so tight before.
Nabiki herself frowned and looked down at her chest. She gained a rather pensive look on her face as she glanced at her chest and tried to breathe through the constricting bra. After a moment, she reached down and pulled her shirt up and off, uncovering the breasts and the ill-fitting bra before reaching back and unclipping the item and pulling it off to the supreme embarrassment of the EMT as Nabiki's chest was allowed free up to when she decided to pull her shirt back on, at a sort of casual rate.
Dr. Kinnesy, however, found herself also appreciating the view, but without as much embarrassment as the EMT. She was vaguely reaching up to put a finger to her lips, when she realized that she was actively ogling a teenaged girl, and, worse than that, a patient.
As for Nabiki she frowned as she pulled her shirt back on, not because she was irritated at being watched, but rather because she wasn't annoyed. Actually, she hadn't even stopped to think about it and it was a thrill to watch the EMT and the doctor watching her.
That wasn't normal for her.
Just for an experiment, she paused in pulling the shirt over her chest and poked her fingers into her nipples and twisted them around for a moment.
"Okay," the EMT said. "Maybe you're not quite clear-headed yet."
Nabiki shrugged and finished pulling her shirt on.
"This is really embarrassing," she said. "I'm from a martial artist family and I get knocked out by a piece of debris to the back of the head. Maybe it's time to get back to practicing."
"Well, at least the martial arts explains how…healthy you are," the doctor said with a smirk.
"Oh, this is nothing," Nabiki said, pulling up the edge of her shirt again to show her abs. "I run, that's all, smooth belly, no extra pounds. Now, there are girls in this town that are flat out perfectly toned. Not over defined, not under."
"Okay, Ninja Godiva," the EMT said, delicately reaching out to pull Nabiki's shirt back down, then turning her head around. "I didn't see this before."
"What?" Nabiki asked.
"It looks like you have a feather stuck in the back of your head," the EMT said.
"I have a what in my head?" Nabiki asked.
"Let me see that," Dr. Kinnesy said, twisting Nabiki's head gently. "Yeah, that's what it is."
She reached out to grab the small black feather and started to twist it.
"Oww!" Nabiki snapped. "That hurts!"
"There's a couple more here," the EMT said.
"I don't think these got there from the accident," the doctor said.
"If you're going to be poking around my body, can you make it enjoyable?" Nabiki asked.
By the time they got to the hospital, it was clear that the feathers in Nabiki's hair weren't embedded, but growing. They'd grown out to a foot extending below her hair and looking, at least from a casual perspective, like a shoulder length hairstyle.
That, oddly didn't worry Nabiki that much next to the itching, cramped sensation she had in her feet and ankles.
"What style does your family practice?" Dr Kinnesy asked as they helped Nabiki into the emergency room.
"Anything Goes," she answered, limping along in her ever tighter seeming shoes. "It's a style practiced by only two fam…I have to sit down, my feet are killing me."
"All right," the Doctor said, holding her arms over her chest. "Right here."
She and the EMT let her sit down at a bench and walked a couple of feet away talking quietly.
"Okay," Doctor Kinnesy said. "My breasts are bigger, my feet are starting to kill me, and I keep wondering what people are like in bed. This is an infection of some kind, blood work, isolation…"
Nabiki watched them talking for a moment before bending over to rub at her feet, pulling off her shoes and saw that her feet looked nothing like she remembered them being. For one thing, it looked like she had three toes instead of five, and they were clawed toes, with kind of orange coloring.
Her feet turning into some sort of bird's claws probably should have been terrifying, and she understood that from an intellectual point of view, but all she cared about was that her foot was no longer killing her. She sighed and looked up to see a woman in talking on the phone.
She wore her arm in a sling, but other than that, Nabiki had to say that she was probably one of the better looking people, men or women, that was in the room at the moment. And she certainly seemed to know it the way she held herself in her designer clothes.
It took a moment, but eventually Nabiki recognized the woman as an actress in a few day time shows that Kasumi recorded for her.
"No, no, I'm fine," she was saying quietly, swinging about. "Really, there's nothing to worry about, it barely hurts at all. Fell down the stairs, that's all."
The woman's eyes moved over to meet Nabiki's and she smiled back at her.
Nabiki set her foot down on the ground and folded them back behind her as the woman put her phone away and walked over to bend over into Nabiki's face, smiling politely.
"Do you need something?" she asked.
"Do you?" Nabiki returned tartly.
"I'm sorry, little girl," the woman said, brushing through Nabiki's hair with a catty look. "I out grew playing games with other girls. But I love the feathers."
"Maybe you shouldn't outgrow us so soon," Nabiki said, smiling. "And maybe you should tell whoever that was on the phone to go to hell if he or she ever hurts you again."
The woman's smile turned strained then.
"You're cute," she said, leaning to give a subtle, brief kiss across the lips. "But you don't know the way things are kid."
And with a smirk, the actress turned and started walking out the emergency room.
Nabiki smiled at the memory of the kiss and then looked down at her feet, watching them finish their changing into a bird's talon. Which was about when Dr. Kinnesy and some other medical people showed up.
"Okay," the woman said, just a few minutes behind Nabiki in the completion of her transformation. "Miss Tendo, I think you and I have to be contained. We don't want any of this getting out into the populace."
Nabiki stretched back, making her newly larger chest do interesting things and frowned at the other woman.
"This?" she said. "Do I have some sort of disease?"
"We're not sure what exactly is going on," the doctor said. "But it's best we take no chances. As fast as this thing develops, if one person got it out to the population, it could be everywhere in no time."
Nabiki thought about the actress that had just left and decided to just say nothing.
"Will you and I be sharing a room?" Nabiki asked.
"Actually, that sounds…" the doctor stopped and thought through. "…like something I won't be doing."
This is the martial artist virus, and the connected mythical creature are the Tengu who supposedly taught some of the first warriors.
Hence crow's feet and feathers in the hair.
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