Taking another puff of her cigarette, and wanting to get her mind of her current task for the moment, Nabiki looked out the window to her left and down to the street below. To anyone from the 21st century, it would of looked like some corny scene from an American old west movie. Well, apart from the fact that some of the horses tied to the hitching posts were completely mechanical, and about one out of every fifteen people on the street below were either some kind of alien, or obviously reconstructed cyborg that was either too inhuman t hide his bionics, or just didn't care who saw them.
Not for the first time since being transported to this... -alternate world? future? Nabiki still wasn't clear on that, and quite frankly she could care less considering her chances of getting home were pretty much zilch- place, she thanked whatever gods had been watching out for her ass that she had been so lucky as to run into the Jabberworks organization. But even with that good turn of fate, among several others, she would of sold her soul to go back to where the biggest problem she had to worry about was her family being run into the poor house from the freeloaders known as the Saotomes and other trivial problems of that nature.
As far as Nabiki could piece together from various books written by historians, a hard thing to find in this day and age, she and the others had been taken at least one or two thousand years into the future; give or take a couple centuries. About 500(?) years ago on this planet a big war a broken out, a nuclear war, than ended up killing almost everyone on the face of the planet. Then about ten minutes later, sorely after the final bombs completely demolished modern civilization, holes in reality like the one that dropped her and the others here opened up to let in demons, oni, monsters, aliens, and whatever the hell else decided -or was forced- to come to Earth and started staking their claim on whatever they could sink their teeth into.
All in all Nabiki figured the human race did a pretty good job of fucking itself over.
After leaving the Jabbberworks group, Akane had talked Nabiki into helping her look for a way home, and since their living conditions at the time had been about 500% worse than anything in Nerima, Nabiki foolishly agreed while Akane's friends, Yuka and Sayuri, stayed behind. After half a year of wandering around, Nabiki was wishing she had done the same.
After only two weeks on the road, Nabiki had figured out the one law that ruled this world: the strong live, and the weak die. More than once she and her sister had come across small villages, even towns that had been completely decimated, or just plain empty thanks to some of the inhuman monsters roaming around the convenient.
Then of course there were the human monsters.
The United States of America, what had once been the strongest nation of her time, was a dark shadow of its former self. The land of the free and the home of the brave had become the land of the obsessed and the home of the moronic bastards that shot to kill anything that didn't walk on two legs and looked slightly out of place. Nabiki herself had been arrested on three separate occasions simply because of her Asian features, although thankfully Nabiki hadn't been involved in any illegal activities at the time and a short bio-scan as well as a surface mental probe later she was let go after proving she was just a poor Japanese girl who got pulled into a rift accidentally and ended up in America.
Sortly after that horrifying week she and Akane -Yuka and Sayuri choosing to stay with the people who had provided her with that mechanical arm- moved out west where the 'champions of humanity' didn't hold as much sway. It was during that time, while staying at a small town in the middle of nowhere the mayor's son had tried to force himself on Akane.
That's when Akane's psychic powers had manifested. Shortly after the thug had grabbed Akane's ass it was as if she summoned up her usual battle aura, only instead of her usual red, fiery glow, it really was fire. A second later the mayor's son quickly had his hand turned to ash from Akane's flames, and three seconds after that the Tendo girl's had a quickly formed mob out for their heads.
Akane was a specially classified psychic people had classified as a burster, due to their ability to spontaneously combust anything at will, including themselves. I.e. to ‘burst’ into flame.
However even a super strong girl that seemed to be the equivalent of the human torch was no match for an angry mob of people carrying pistols that were the equivalent of 21st century rocket launchers. So the two Tendo sisters found themselves on the run again.
That had pretty much been the routine for the past four months. Akane and Nabiki had long given up hope of going home and were now just two people fighting to survive like everyone else in this hell on earth. Every once and awhile they'd stop at a town to try and find work of some kind or another, although with Akane's abilities it usually ended up being something that she figured Ranma would of ended up doing. Then after collecting their pay, which was usually less than half than what was offered, they had to go out in search of something new to do in order to keep themselves clothed and fed.
Damn, she had almost started thinking about Ranma again. When they had first arrived on this world Nabiki had figured that Ranma's luck had finally run out when Akane left his unconscious body at the mercy of the Coalition. But now she knew better, Ranma and Ukyo were the lucky ones... they were dead.
Taking another puff of her cigarette, Nabiki looked at the stick of lung cancer causing poison, and then to the liver destroying liquid on the table. Before, Nabiki had been one of those people that would of distained such things thanks to what they did, and the fact that she did want to take good care of her body even if she wasn’t a martial artist. But now, who in the hell wanted to live in the shit-hole the world had become?
Besides, if she ever did make it big, there were always those bio-systems. Oh wondrous science, what a magnificent world you’ve given us, Nabiki sarcastically thought before looking back to her sister asleep on the room’s one bed.
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(Posted Tue, 27 Apr 2004 06:08)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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