Edo Village, Sengoku Jidai
Crimson fluid seeped through Kikyou's kimono as she collapsed from her final exertion. The wound was deep, the exposed wiring and structural metal sparkling with blue lightning. Kikyou always knew she was different, what with the strange lines around her arms, her super strength, and funny symbols across her vision she strangely understood perfectly. And the fact that her first memories was in a metal coffin with a window blocked by funky hard water.
But this was quite unexpected.
Characters scrolled across her vision. She knew what it meant: her power core had been damaged and she was very close to shutting down. She didn't know precisely what a power core was, nor did she know what shutting down meant, but she knew that her condition was terminal.
Her wounded sister, Kaede, pushed through the gathered crowd. Kikyou gathered up some cloth folds around her wound, hiding the coruscating wounds. "Ane-ue…" whispered the distraught girl. Kikyou did not slacken her grip on the hand over her wound. She didn't want her seeing this new evidence of her inhumanity. "Ane-ue," repeated Kaede, Pleae, we have to get you to a healer to tend your wounds!"
"It is far too late for me, dear Kaede," struggled Kikyou, rapidly losing strength. Besides, I doubt a healer would even know where to begin with healing my body. She knew this much from those symbols across her view. It was for the best, as Kikyou didn't want to see the shocked looks on the villager's faces when they found out she was even less human than they thought. She held out her prize to the younger sister. "Listen well, Kaede, take the Shikon no Tama... and burn it with my remains on my funeral pyre."
Kaede reverently took the Shikon jewel in her tiny hands, gazing at it with her remaining eye.
It must never fall into the wrong hands again! I shall take this wicked jewel with me to the world beyon—
*EMERGENCY SHUTDOWN ENGAGED*
Kikyou slumped forward, leaving a small village in the Sengoku Jidai the quite tricky task of holding a funeral for a deactivated saber-class marionette.
Tokyo, 1997
"Souta! Souta! What are you doing? Get your butt out of the mini-shrine!" cried Higurashi Kagome, standing with arms akimbo just outside the small shrine built around the bone-eaters well. "You're going to make both you and me late for school!"
The little boy, Higurashi Souta, sniffed. "Like you need to go to school, robot-girl! What with your isolinear memory and computer brain."
Kagome twitched. "Don't call me that!" she growled. It was the boy's favorite insult for his dear big sister. Okay, so what it was true — so what if she was made of metal and pseudoflesh, and so what if she had to be maintained by an engineer rather than examined by a doctor? She was still human where it counted! In her maiden circuit.
And she did need to go to school. There were some aspects of human interaction that still puzzled her, and she'd gone to school to learn about them.
"So what are you doing down here?" asked Kagome.
"It's Buyo! He's in the well-house!" said the little boy, concerned. "Buu-yoo!" called Souta from the upper level of the mini-shrine. "He's somewhere down here."
"So, get him out," replied Kagome, moving up beside him.
Souta started at the scratching noises from within the well proper. He clutched at Kagome for support. "There's something in there!"
"What. Like a cat?"
"I'm scared."
"C'mon. Have some guts. You're a boy, no?" asked Kagome teasingly.
Souta looked up at her with scared, but serious eyes. "And you're a super-powerful android robot-girl! Git down there!" commanded the little boy with a firm, trembling voice. (Yes, I know that's a contradiction...)
Kagome tsked in annoyance. If anyone was equipped to get out of any messes —no matter how minor— that might crop up down there, it was her.
Kagome was feeling a bit spooked herself as she poked around on the lower level around the well itself. Sometimes her maiden circuit could be a pain. Heck, the maiden circuit caused her sensations of pain (as well as fear, as she was feeling now); it was the maiden circuit that interpreted the damage reports as pain, it was the maiden circuit that interpreted the absence of visual information as a spooky scene.
It was also the maiden circuit that made her scream out when something purry and furry rubbed up against her calf. Souta let out a sympathy scream.
"Don't do that, sis!" wailed Souta shakily.
Kagome was calm by that time. "Souta..." she sighed.
A board shifted on the surface of the well. From his position, Souta saw it. Kagome didn't.
"Kagome!"
Suddenly, the covering on the well busted open, and a triple-pair of white arms grasped at Kagome. Off-balance and surprised by the sudden jerk backward, was pulled off her feet and into the well. Buyo, released from his mistress's grasp on him, leapt to freedom, unconcerned about his mistress's fate. Typical cat.
At that moment, behind all the religious spots in the temple, a frail old man in priest garb was tweaking a sophisticated piece of equipment when suddenly, another sophisticated piece of equipment started beeping at him. This caused him to over-tweak the first sophisticated piece of equipment a bit to much in startlement, causing it to blow up in his face.
*BOOM!*
"BWAH—!!" yelped the old man in shock. He emerged from the smoke, slightly carboned, and cursing his luck, stomped over to the second sophisticated piece of equipment that was still beeping. "This better be good, Mr. Temporal Tracker!"
He glanced at the readout. It was good. "Oooh!" gasped Grandfather Higurashi in pleased surprise, "I'm picking up an active time corridor! It's coming from..." He adjusted a few controls. "…the Bone-Eater Well?"
Japoness, Terra II, 300 AC
Tamasaburo narrowed her eyes. "What did you say?"
The two marionette engineers bowed low, their heads contacting the imitation tatami mats covering the floor. "Forgive us, Ue-sama!!" the more senior engineer pleaded, "We thought that… the other marionettes didn't seem to be—"
"You thought wrong," said Tamasaburo sternly. The saber marionette currently housed the encephalographic profile of Tokugawa Ieyasu XV in an active matrix. That was the Shogun talking just then, the news so grave as to elicit a bona fide emotional response in the marionette frame he was residing in. "This is very serious! Not only did you secretly use the maiden circuits Petersburg entrusted to us for safe-keeping to construct a further triplet of maiden-circuit enhanced saber marionettes... Not only were you developing a time controller even knowing how unstable the technology is..." the saber marionette palace guard rumbled as she stared down the engineers, "…but then you have the nerve of losing both the sabers and the head engineer in the accident resulting from your time experiment. Finally —and this is the rice around the sushi— you were directing this time controller at Old Earth, probably doing irrepairable damage to the timeline in the process! Do you realize how serious this is?"
"That is not all, Ue-sama!" pleaded the engineer. "We also equipped the sabers with the prototype phantom-light drives!"
Tamasaburo's eyes filled with even more fire, if that were possible. "YOU DID WHAT?!!"
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(Posted Thu, 16 Dec 2004 06:26)
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