Having made his decision, Ranma hid the mask at the bottom of his pack and carefully put the rest of the stuff away without looking at it further. Once it was all safely tucked away, he hid the key and went downstairs, doing his best to act as though nothing new had happened, Ranma managed to make it through the rest of the afternoon without giving the game away, difficult as that was.
Finally, however, night fell and Ranma and Genma both headed to bed. It felt like hours before Ranma was sure Genma was truly asleep, but he didn't dare to stir from his futon until the elder Saotome was snoring softly and dead to the world. Only then did Ranma dare to slip from beneath the sheets and, stealthily as only he could be, retrieve the mask. He took this opportuniy to study it further before he actually used it.
It wasn't really much to look at. A rather crude and simple piece of carved, angular wood laquered in blue and silver. It vaguely reminded Ranma of two elongated triangles, joined shortest point to shortest point, with eyeholes carved just past those points. For a moment, Ranma wondered if maybe this was actually just some goofy-looking mask, then dismissed it. Nobody would pull a joke like that. Slipping the mask onto his face, he laid down upon his futon and, after several seconds of staring at the ceiling, closed his eyes. A strange feeling of weightlessness and numbness began to wash over him, until he suddenly felt a sharp stab of pain that caused him to spring up with a cry.
He wondered for a second how it was he'd avoided waking his father, then realised how things had changed. It was near impossible to describe the visuals that he was seeing, but the closest would be to reduce all inanimate objects to grey sketches, over which a blue fog had been draped. When he looked down, he saw his body -with the mask, which he wasn't wearing any longer- looking like a sculpture of transparent glass. Genma looked the same way, so he figured that was how all "materials" looked from the dream-world. For what else could it be?
Of greater interest than the change to his surroundings was the fact that there was a flat disk of colorless fire hovering in the air above Genma's chest, slowly rotating around and around. Cautiously, Ranma touched it, his finger disappearing into it as though he'd poked it into a pool of water. Hesitantly, he tried putting first his hand in, and then his whole arm, before he figured that this must be the "gate" he'd need to pass through to actually enter a person's dreams.
Speaking of which, he had better start doing that, or it'd be morning and he'd have wasted the whole night. Now, all that remained was one question: whose dream should he enter?
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(Posted Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:02)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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