Forcibly United

oOo

A Weekend With Eda

Chapter 3

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"We're not eating before we pack up why?" Ranma questioned as he repackaged the large tent they'd put up, prompting their blond leader to flash him a frank look.

"Chili isn't just a random collection of ingredients, it's a work of art. It needs to cook on a low heat for the proper length of time before it's anything but a fucking glorified spaghetti sauce," Eda replied with a shrug as she collapsed the table on which she'd been plotting their course. One eyebrow raised. "I didn't pack any pasta, so I'm not serving pasta sauce for dinner. It cooks until it's chili. Even if it means waiting for another couple of hours."

"Man, this stuff better be the best freaking thing I've ever tasted," the pigtailed boy snorted, sighing as he began to pick up the bags at his feet.

"It'll be worth the wait, Saotome," Eda confirmed with a grin. "In fact, I guarantee that this will be something you boys have never experienced before."

"That sounds ominous," Ryouga noted, shrugging the large bundle of equipment on to his shoulder.

"Don't you trust me?" Eda asked with a pout, flashing both boys a soft look.

"You're the tomboy's best friend," Ranma replied with a grin. "Do you trust you?"

"Good point. I can't wait for you two to experience dinner," the blond finally admitted with an evil smirk.

oOo

With a muted thud which caused her head to bounce off the lid, the coffin Rip van Winkle was laying in hit the sand of the beach with a thud. The German sniper quickly opened the lid, glaring at the man who'd dropped her. He flashed her a frightened, apologetic look in return and handed her her flintlock as she glanced across the water towards the boat.

As a vampire, she had a distinct problem with large bodies of moving water. It was hard to describe in explicit words, but it was almost like a magnetic pull when she was above it. Trying to forcefully leap across a moving river had once bounced her back as if she'd struck a solid wall. Whatever force governed that weakness seemed to be capable of being fooled if she was on a large enough craft. Beyond that, she was forced to be confined in a coffin which contained dirt from her homeland. Without it, she would not be able to return to the boat.

She glanced up towards the rising moon. Sunlight, despite the popular belief in media, would not kill her or even overly harm her. It would only rob her off her vampiric strength and speed, leaving her more or less mortal for the duration of the day. This weakness seemed proportionate to her exposure to the sun's rays, growing less pronounced in within a building or on especially cloudy days. Her talent for manipulating the bullets she fired from her gun, on the other hand, did not waver a single bit.

Still... It wouldn't do to risk things overmuch, she concluded. From the account given by the fresh recruit, she knew she was dealing with a pair of vampires. Perhaps they were, like her, turned during the course of the second World War. It would explain their confidence in taking on a heavily armed group like Heinrich's squad had been. A vampire could be injured by enough bullets, and if their hearts were destroyed they couldn't regenerate from the damage, no matter how much blood they had on hand.

She shouldered the backpack containing her supplies: A GPS, several vials of blood, additional ammo and powder for her gun, and a long, hooded ghillie poncho adapted for use in tropical terrain. During the night she had little need for such cover, but if she were forced to hunt her counterparts during the daylight the garment would allow her to strike from afar undetected, allowing her to direct her bullet towards the pair of vampires without giving them means to return fire.

"Cover the box, and make sure that it is kept safe," Rip informed the soldiers on the beach with a nod. Without waiting for them to acknowledge the order, she moved quickly and silently along the path Heinrich's squad had chopped through the dense undergrowth.

With the underbrush blurring past her, Rip wondered if this would be the battle that she died... Though she thought perhaps she would instead forestall Zamiel's hand by sending two more in her place.

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"Holy crap!" Ranma swore, frantically tearing at his side. If he didn't get hold of it soon, he'd-!

"Needs a little less peppers. All of the hotness takes a bit away from the spicy," Ryouga commented quietly, taking another spoonful of the chili in his bowl, pausing to dunk a bit of bread into the bowl and chew on it.

"Might be the peppers I picked up," Eda admitted, quirking an eyebrow. "I tried to pick up some Red Savinas at the store like my mother's recipe calls for, but they only had some Indian ones. The owner of the store called them 'Ghost Peppers', said they'd put the ones I wanted to shame. I'm happy to see he was right."

"Ah, man! Why does the water make it burn more?" Ranma coughed from the side as he finished draining his canteen, prompting a grin from the blond teenager.

"The 'hot' in a pepper can't be put out by plain old water," Eda explained, shrugging. She smiled and ate some more of her food before contuining. "All it does is swish it around to the parts which aren't burning... yet."

"How do I stop it?" Ranma whimpered, eyeing his empty canteen pitifully.

"It should stop burning in a couple of hours," Ryouga informed his partner with a feral grin. He pointedly took another spoonful of the chili, earning a dirty look in response, before he turned his attention back to their current employer. "So did you make any progress?"

"Yes and no," Eda admitted, glancing towards the table where the map lay spread out. "I've figured out roughly where we've got to be to find the bunker, but I won't be able to tell for sure until tomorrow. I've got some geological survey equipment which will help us find it, but we need to be pretty close in order for it to work."

"How clothse?" Ranma panted, attempting to look serious while sticking his tongue outside his mouth and failing miserably. He glared at the blond American as she quirked an eyebrow.

"I've only got a small scanner, something I can more or less carry. It lets me scan through the ground and read the density of objects, a radar that goes through the ground," Eda mused, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. "The ground penetrating radar I have can read up to four meters through the ground reliably, and the bunker is supposed to be buried five feet underneath the ground..."

"So we're going to have to be within two meters of where it's buried for you to find it," Ranma groaned, having abandoned his attempts to make the burning go away. "So if we've gotta be that close, aren't we going to be able to find the door anyway?"

"It's buried," the girl reminded him with a chuckle. "Once the Nazi commander buried the gold, he didn't want anyone to find it. I guess he either hid it on direct orders or because he wanted a nice little retirement package for himself when the war was over and he had a chance to get it back."

"So how come nobody's claimed it until now?" Ryouga wondered, setting aside his empty bowl. "If he had the resources to build a bunker instead of just leaving it here, surely some of his men must have known about it. That much gold doesn't just go missing."

"And that is where you underestimate my genius," Eda crowed smugly, finishing her meal with a flourish before continuing. "The documents which linked the gold and this island were pretty much unrelated. The island's location came from a recently-acquired Chinese report detailing a German ship which was sank in the vicinity. The same ship which was confirmed to have disappeared with all of that gold sometime during the middle of the war according to a separate, German report."

"So how'd you figure out where on the island this bunker is?" Ranma wondered, glaring at the full bowl of chili in his hands.

"A few of the Germans who were on the ship which delivered the cargo managed to hide themselves in Bangkok after surviving the sinking, and one of them was a crewman who happened to keep a diary which somehow made it off the ship with him," the blond said, pulling a worn, leather notebook from the pocket of her pants. "One of the entries has him complaining about some of the features of the island. It's been fifty years, but there's only a few spots on this island which could possibly match what he described."

"And if we check each of those spots, sooner or later we're going to find the buried bunker," Ryouga concluded with a nod. "Sounds fairly easy."

"There's nothing easy about anything I do," Eda informed him, and then her voice became light and teasing as her eyes travelled across Ryouga's torso. "Except..."

"Um, is there more chili?" The Lost Boy coughed, prompting a throaty laugh from the blond American.

oOo

"Fools," Rip van Winkle whispered, keen eyes into the camp. Curiously, the three seemed to be eating actual food, leaving the vampire to conclude that Heinrich had merely been frightened by two competent men trained as commandos. While both of the boys were clearly young, they were not soldiers. The young blond girl with them looked no older, but was clearly in charge.

They had only moved their camp two kilometers after the attack. Though they had no fire, the small lamp which lit their section of the forest illuminated them well enough. They'd been absurdly easy to track down and would be absurdly easy for her to kill. She readied her rifle, shifting one foot to steady her balance.

She thought she heard a silent laugh when a stick that couldn't have possibly been underfoot snapped loudly, drawing three sets of eyes in her direction.

Rip fired, a solid lead slug encasing in a flash of blue energy racing towards the pigtailed one's head.

oOo

Author's Notes:

Like I said, I'm importing Rip for a broad-strokes sort of filler villain. Her backstory here won't match up precisely with her backstory in the Hellsing manga, and neither will the specific weaknesses she has as a vampire. I covered those in a bit of an infodump there. Yes, she was still a sniper in World War II and in between then and the present, she was somehow turned into a vampire. You can still count on her to use a flintlock musket which fires a wacky direction-changing bullet, and have an unhealthy obsession with Der Freischütz.

I'm enjoying this cameo villain thing, almost as much as I'm enjoying writing the interactions between the trio above. I find it incredibly easy to write smooth-flowing, natural banter for them. Regarding the cameo thing, I'm certainly going to have to do it again sometime. It's certainly been fun.

Fun facts: The Ghost Pepper (aka the Bhut Jolokia pepper) which Eda used are literally the hottest in the world, being twice as hot as Red Savina (the previous world record holder). To give it a better sense of perspective, it is roughly half as potent as the average civilian-grade pepper spray. Ground-Penetrating Radar is also, in fact, real. The device I've described is far more potent than an actual hand-held GPR device would be.

That said... Expect at least one chapter (if not two or three) before Christmas. It depends on my work... I made the poor choice of grabbing a retail job. Sociopathy is looking more and more reasonable by the day.