In another parallel with the other act vying for attention in his hormone-soaked brain, his escape from the enveloping armchair left him naked and exposed. The makeshift drapery-toga he had been wearing was still snagged on something deep in the confines of the cushions. For a few moments he knelt on the polished wood of the floor, trying to comprehend the events of the day that had brought him to this point. Then a hint of red light coming from outside convinced him that finding Natsume-sensei (and the sword hilt that had kept the demon bound for 700 years) had priority over contemplation, and he slipped silently down the hall. It had been a long day, but even though the sun was down, it wasn’t over yet.
It had been big day for Ryoko, the one she had been waiting for all those years. Patience wasn’t her strong point, but she thought Tenchi must me one of those good things in that saying about waiting. Since then it had been so much fun playing with him. He had good legs for running, and his hands and kisses were even better.
Turning away from the fountain she had used to clean up, Ryoko floated towards the house. She was a space pirate, she took the things she wanted, and there were three gems and one young stud in there to be claimed. Halfway there she turned around once to wave at the crowd. They were subdued, compared to their previous behavior, but Ryoko attributed that to a lack of action on the field for the last few minutes. Then she saw something that might serve to stir things up again. The evening was going by fast, but she wasn’t ready for it to end just yet.
Arisa wasn’t coherent enough to remember much of her day. She was still working on remembering how to breathe. The experience of being decapitated by a red-hot rapier will do that to a person. Technically it had happened to her armor, and not her, but the interface had inflicted a muted echo of the sensation on her nervous system. She had suffered no actual physical damage, but the psychological trauma was likely to leave scars of a different sort. That she had not been able to move or act for a few minutes after the experience was understandable. That she had not quite blacked out was a testament to her fortitude and willpower.
Shock was not the only things impairing her ability to function. The removal of the head did not physically impair the armor itself, but it did create some problems in her interface with the armor. Arisa was used to having a body with two arms, two legs, and a head on top. The head was where her eyes and ears would normally be. The golem armor did not actually see out of the sculpted eyes or hear through the ears of its head, but that was where Arisa expected to receive her sensory input from, so that was the perspective provided by the armor. With the head missing, Arisa’s vision fractured and reformed as if the number of eyes she possessed and their placement on her body were continually changing.
Then she saw the glowing sword again, a swarm of red energy blades in the kaleidoscope that her sense of sight had become. That jarred her into motion, instincts and a dread that could not be expressed in words stepping in for the training and intellect that hadn’t reformed yet.
She tried to get up, to fight or run away she wasn’t sure, but only managed to lurch to a kneeling position before toppling over and crashing back into the dirt. The blades dancing in her vision danced closer, and Arisa, who could barely remember her name let alone how to talk, tried to crawl away. The attempt was hampered by some confusion about which way her eyes were pointing, as the sword seemed to be in front of her no matter which way she turned.
Ryoko watched the headless red mecha curl up in a ball as sobbing sounds came out of the neck hole. Most of it was wordless fear and anguish, but the sob of “Master. Please, Master,” could be heard from time to time. Glancing over at the blue one that hadn’t moved yet, she could see that if there was any fun to be had here, she was going to have to make her own.
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(Posted Fri, 08 Apr 2005 00:18)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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