Ranma let out a puff of breath as he settled back into the bed he shared with his wife. The Meiohs had just finished yet another lovemaking session, leaving him feeling pleasantly sated. Still, sometimes he wondered about his wife—he knew that new couples tended to have more sex in the beginning of a relationship, and that said sex tended to peter off as the relationship allowed two people to develop non-romantic love (either that, or they got bored with each other). Furthermore, he also knew that the three month delay in their consummation would naturally lead to a desire to “make up for lost time” (though for some reason, Setsuna always gave an odd smile when saying this phrase, like she was enjoying a private joke of some kind). But this was almost ridiculous; since his return to Japan, they’d only gone one night without sex—and Setsuna made up for that by managing to coax little Ranma into playing extra innings the following night. I know she said that she hadn’t had sex for a while before she met me, but this is nuts!
Not that Ranma was complaining, mind you. After all, he was a hormonal teenage male, and the fact that he got to have sex with one of the most beautiful women he’d ever met on a nightly basis probably wouldn’t going to elicit any protests from him. Heck, even if Setsuna had been a boring lover, he wouldn’t have complained, but fortunately for him, Setsuna was far from boring. It almost seemed like she knew everything there was to know about sexual contact between a man and a woman; her knowledge was that broad. And so far, she’d been approaching their lovemaking sessions as a instructor tutoring a neophyte in the ways of carnal bliss. This made sense, as her husband was a neophyte, albeit an extremely gifted one. He had already made it past “the basics” and was now starting to learn about some of the more specialized areas of sexuality. For example, to celebrate the events of that evening, tonight’s lesson was Introduction to Oral Sex, a subject which, after this night, Ranma looked forward to learning as much as possible about.
Still, this had been a very eventful night, in which a lot of his expectations had been thrown out the window. Again. Ranma sighed quietly, hoping that he wouldn’t disturb his wife.
Setsuna, however, was still paying quite a bit of attention to her husband’s actions, so the sigh didn’t go unnoticed. “What’s wrong, Ranma?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s nuthin’.”
If there was one thing Setsuna knew about her husband’s psyche, it was that whenever he tried to dismiss anything out of hand, it usually was something that he really needed to talk about. “You’re a horrible liar, dear.”
Ranma scratched the back of his head as he answered, “Yeah, I guess yer right.”
“Well, I have a lot of experience in that area. Now, you have a problem, and unless I miss my guess, it’s been bugging you for a while. Care to tell me?” By “Care to tell me?” Setsuna of course meant “You will tell me.”
“It’s just… never mind.”
“Ranma, you’re not going to just dismiss whatever is bothering you. I care about you far too much to let you do that. Now, what’s wrong.”
“It’s just… meetin’ up with my Mom… an’… an’ what she’s doin’ with Tissue….”
“Ranma, do you have a problem with your mother being married to another woman?”
“What?! No! Of course not! I ain’t homophobodobo….”
“I didn’t say you were homophobic. After all, you obviously don’t have a problem with Haruka and Michiru. And besides, your mother did point out that her relationship with Tissue isn’t physical.”
“But… but… I haven’t seen her in so long… an’ she’s my Mom…”
“Ranma, just because you can accept homosexuals on an intellectual level, and even have some of them as really good friends, doesn’t mean you’re immune from being uneasy about their lifestyle.”
“I guess…”
“But I don’t think that that’s really your problem.”
“It ain’t?”
“Not if my suspicions are correct. It might be loosely connected, but I think your uncertainty about your mother’s sexuality is really just a defense you’ve come up with to allow yourself to avoid your real problem.”
“And what’s that?”
“You tell me.”
“But I don’t know what you mean!”
“That’s why you have to be the one who figures it out.”
Ranma paused and allowed a subtle grin to return to his face. Somehow, he and his wife were back to their old “counseling” routine. “Okay. Can ya talk me through figurin’ this out? Been a while since we did this sort of thing.”
Setsuna returned her husband’s smile. “Certainly… but first, I think we need to get rid of some potential distractions.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“Like the fact that both of us are currently in the nude, for one.”
Ranma blushed—he’d forgotten about that detail. “Uh… yeah. That’d be good.”
Bob let out a huge breath as he finished the last of the day’s paperwork. it had been unusually busy that day—a lot of demons were being shifted in the new management structure, and several youma were being prepared for active duty. As a result, a lot of paperwork needed to be handled, which meant that he had to work late; he’d sent Harriet home so she could tend to the care of her beloved demonlings. Whatever the next step in Anthracite’s plan was, it was clear that he was getting ready to take it.
However, that was not what Bob was concerned with at the moment—no he was searching into Anthracite’s past. Under normal circumstances, this would be quite an undertaking simply because investigating the boss tended to cause a large amount of suspicion—at the Demon Resources Department an act generally implied internal power plays and shrewd maneuvers in interoffice politics, which were similar to their counterparts in the human world, except that nobody blinked when such actions were connected with mass murder instead of embezzlement. As a result, he had to make sure that the wrong people didn’t find out about his little investigation, or else he’d be terminated—in a manner appropriate to a morbid pun, of course.
But even if it weren’t for the hostile work environment that Bob had to deal with, figuring out just how Anthracite ticked would still be an undertaking, due to the lack of readily available data—there just wasn’t very much information available on Endymion’s fifth general. Much of the information the Negaverse had on Anthracite consisted of the things he did in his official capacity as a General of the Planet Earth, and one couldn’t easily deduce a person’s character from actions which that person carried out under orders from his superiors.
Anthracite’s personal life was even more difficult to research. He’d always been the least visible of Endymion’s generals during the Silver Millennium, constantly keeping a low profile eschewing the public spectacles (and thus, the public controversy) that normally came with being a member of the nobility. Very few people, even those who worked with him closely, knew that his real name was “Maxil D’raal.” Hell, if Anthracite hadn’t put it in his contract, Bob would likely have never discovered what his boss’s real name was. This, in itself, had some disturbing implications, as Anthracite never gave away information without a good reason. Could it be that he wants me to find out about his past? Why would he do that? Is it some sort of test? If so, what is he testing?
However, Bob shunted that aside for now. He finally had a rare moment of privacy, and he intended to use it. He turned his attention to the computer on his desk, and accessed the Negaverse’s archive. He would have logged in under his own name, but as was mentioned before, the subject matter in this case was somewhat dangerous, so instead he logged in using the name of that jerk in Marketing who was constantly hogging the Xbox in the break room, Llobewu.
Bob decided to start by reviewing what was most commonly know about his boss.
Input search query: Anthracite
It probably wouldn’t turn up a lot insightful information, but it would be good to know just how much information he had to uncover.
Searching…
127 Results found.
For most people, having that many hits would imply that there was a lot of information on them, but Anthracite hadn’t been most people; he’d been a public official, and they usually had ten times the information on them in the database. Besides, a quick glance at some of the summaries told Bob that several of these hits were about coal, rather than his Fearless Leader—case sensitive searches did have their limits, after all.
The purple youma sighed as he clicked on the first entry. He had his work cut out for him.
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(Posted Sat, 06 May 2006 23:29)
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