Shampoo didn't know that. All she had known was that her airen had just killed her.
What the formerly perky Amazon had known was that her day had gone bad with Mousse pursuing her yet again and being terribly annoying, while escaping him she'd gotten splashed by a ladle lady, while grumbling about the feeling of wet fur she'd found herself picked up by Ranma, she'd been thrown in a sturdy cardboard box that had been sealed, and her best efforts had chewed an airhole into the cardboard. Then things had gotten even worse as her box had been buried under literally tons of other boxes and she'd used up her available air trying to enlarge the hole again.
Now she was dead. And Shampoo was coming to a conclusion that others had over thousands of years.
Being dead sucked.
It was not, however, as boring as she thought it was.
"That you, Shampoo?"
Shampoo looked around and spotted a familiar form. "He got you too?"
"Yeah," said Akane. "Why's everything black and white and looking so weird?"
"I don't know, I haven't been dead before either," said Shampoo drily. "What we are seeing, hearing, feeling - it's all jumbled up. Like smelling colors. Too bad dying doesn't come with an instruction manual."
"Oh. Good point," conceded Akane. "Your speech has improved."
"I suspect that's another side effect of being dead," said Shampoo after awhile. "So what do you think? Is he possessed, insane, or what?"
"Ranma?" Akane pondered briefly. "Can't say. What are those moving lights?"
"Living things," said Shampoo. "It would fit. That's why ghosts are drawn to the living, to devour their light."
"Kuei? That idiot." Akane sat down in the general vicinity of a crate. "Any idea on how to get out of this situation?"
"Not yet. I'm working on it." Shampoo gestured towards something that looked cold. "That's probably the water surrounding the ship. We can't cross it if I'm right. So what we've got to do is wait for our bodies to be unloaded. Then we can try to find our way back to Nerima - unless we're bound to the general location of our bodies."
"You two are here too?"
"Hello, Ukyo." Akane said, making room for another to sit there.
"I just saw Kodachi," said Ukyo as she sat on nothingness. "Until I saw you I figured it was some Amazon trick gone wrong."
"Might have been," agreed Shampoo. "Great Grandmother doesn't go with that sort of thing herself, but Mousse has been known to try measures like that on me. Never works out of course."
"Ah," said her two companions, having a workable theory making things a lot more bearable.
"Is it getting lighter in here?" Akane asked.
"Well, that's probably our ride." Shampoo got up. "It was nice knowing you. I wish things had gone better."
"Yeah, me too. Funny, I've never felt this calm before," said Akane.
"Probably because we're disembodied," suggested Ukyo. "No hormones or biochemical in our grey matter. No grey matter for that matter."
"I had come to a similar solution," said Kodachi as she approached the three.
"This is definitely a case where I want to hit 'Restart' or 'Do Over'," said Shampoo, drawing curious looks from the other three. "What? I like video games. Especially the Final Fantasy series. I'm going to miss that."
"Now I really wish I'd known that, Miss Kitty," said Ukyo, shaking her head. "I prefer some of the old Dragon Warrior stuff myself, but I've got the series."
"We might as well get this over with," Akane said, heading into the light. "I never got into that sort of thing. Now I wish I had. I guess it's true what they say about things you regret in your last moments."
"I suppose," said Kodachi. "I regret never being punished. No matter how bad I was-"
Akane stopped and stared at the former gymnast. "THAT was why? The poisons, the bad girl attitude, all of that?"
"Yes," said Kodachi, moving past her. "Why?"
Akane chuckled, giving it up when it sounded ghastly. "Why do you think I let my temper go off like that?"
"Or why I acted the way I did?" Shampoo smirked. "At least I was honest about wanting a strong man. I'd have preferred less clueless. That's for sure."
"Why didn't you just marry Mousse?" Akane asked, beginning her walk again.
"Why didn't you marry Kuno? I would have thought you'd understood the similarities," shot back Shampoo. "Mousse has spent most of his life annoying the hell out of me. One of the reasons I kept the chase of Ranma's girl form going as long as I did - it got me away from him. Hmmm. We've left the ship."
"Yeah," agreed Akane, the odd form of the ship in wraithspace now behind them. "So that's why you missed him as much as you did."
"Yeah, at one time I had half a dozen arrows sticking out of his backpack. He never did figure it out." Shampoo shook her head, now transparent. "So as we continue we fade away. If only you had said yes that one time."
"What time was that?" Akane was puzzled but the calm they felt as the recently dead seemed to eat away even at that emotion.
"When Ranma was trapped as a girl by the Cat's Tongue pressure point. One of the reasons that had been done was to see if you would be suitable as a co-wife." Shampoo continued on, not aware that everyone else had gone to a complete (even dead) stop.
"Say what?" Akane asked.
"If you had agreed that you found Ranma's girlform attractive, or done anything to indicate that sharing was a possibility, you would have gotten a Kiss Of Marriage and I would have cooperated to get Ranma to marry you. That way he would have had you as his Japanese wife and I would have been the mistress in your laws, and the roles would be reversed as far as my own village's laws and philosophies were concerned." Shampoo shrugged. "Great Grandmother was right. Right after meeting you and Ukyo she said of both of you that you had the fire of spirit necessary to be an Amazon. Not the skills, but she felt skills could be learned. I wasn't sure."
Akane stared at her transparent rival briefly. "Why couldn't you have just come out and said that!"
"Would it have made a difference?" Shampoo asked. "Besides, my village is a secret Chinese village - the laws are also mainly secret. I wonder how long it will be before Kodachi's brother and some of the others show up."
"Probably not long," said Akane.
"Here we are," said Shampoo, stopping just short of the disc of light. "Do you suppose this is reincarnation, some form of heaven, or is this something else."
"It is the great unknown. The last mystery that awaits all that live. Shall we all go together?" Kodachi had mainly been silent but broke that silence now.
"Yeah," said Ukyo. "I just wish..."
"Agreed," said Akane. "I just wish it could have all turned out different. On three? One. Two. Three."
They leapt together. Everything turned blinding white. Akane could swear she saw her mother briefly.
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(Posted Thu, 26 Dec 2002 01:27)
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