After Zwolf diced the severed arm Alita had been using for a weapon against Sechs, Ranma just couldn't sit by and just watch anymore. "Hey, don't you two have any shame!? You don't butt in on a serious duel like that!" he yelled down at the flirtatious pair in irritation. Then, without waiting for a response, Ranma used his new powers to teleport down to where Alita was and cut away the near invisible cutting wires with his new ki-blade, as he called it.
"Ranma, you don't understand! This is something personal between the three of us and her!" argued Zwolf as soon as Ranma cut down their wire trap. She almost sounded like she was pleading for Ranma not to jump in
Unfortunately it was too late for that since Ranma had already made up his mind about this. "Maybe it is, I wouldn't know, Zwolf. What I do know is that Sechs challenged her and you two didn't! So that means that if you want to fight her yourselves then you're just gonna have to sit back and wait your turn to challenge her yourselves. Otherwise you're gonna have to deal with me and Alita!" Ranma warned them, still holding his energy-blade in one hand.
"Ha, ha! That doesn't make a bit of difference to me, you guys; the more, the merrier, I say!" Sechs laughed, pointing a large gun at Ranma and Alita that used to be her right arm. "Now let's see if either one of you can dodge ultra-supersonic bullets!" she challenged them. That single barked question was all the warning Sechs gave before firing too.
Alita on the other hand didn't wait for Sechs to finish talking before ripping up the stage's floor with her foot and dropping into the crawlspace below. Ranma escaped in a different direction entirely, teleporting just in time to be immaterial when the super-sonic bullet reached him. The bullet continued on to pass through several walls and exited Tiphares altogether, still moving at two thirds velocity.
All Ranma knew was that he did not want to be in front of that weapon a second time, the noise it made alone was ear rattling. Before he could reorient himself Ranma found himself fighting with an annoyed Elf and Zwolf. "Ooh, Ranma! You made Sechs miss her!" Elf complained as she attacked him in a dizzying whirl of attacks.
"Yeah! If Sechs had beaten Alita then, we could have been just as real as her!" agreed Zwolf, mirroring and complimenting her partner's moves. Only Ranma's new enhancements allowed him to keep up with the two android girls without hurting them, even if he'd only been training to use these powers for two days now. Letting an attack phase through him was a really good way of getting past someone's defenses if Ranma timed it just right. Not only that, but it was a pretty good defense all on it's own, and Elf and Zwolf were giving Ranma plenty of practice at both right now.
"Hey, what's all this junk about beating her making you guys real anyway? I mean all three of you seem pretty real to me," Ranma countered the girls’ complaints. He also chose that moment to shake them up a little bit by physically deflecting an attack or two instead of phasing out of the way to avoid them; Ranma didn't want to get rusty with his other skills after all.
"Don't you get it, Ranma. All three of us were created using Alita's personality and fighting skills! Unless we can beat her, we'll never be anything more than copies of her!" Zwolf argued as her partner was thrown off by his deflecting her instead of avoiding her.
"Ha! You guys sure don't act like copies of her, heck you barely even fight like, Alita. Sure it's the same fighting style and everything; but you two are the only ones I've seen using it the same way as each other, and that's only because you trained yourselves to work as a team. So how can any of you honestly say that you're nothing but copies of her?" Ranma argued, bracing for a follow up blow that never arrived. His last comment seemed to have stopped the two of them cold.
Before anything could be said to fill the stunned silence between them, an explosion was heard from the other side of the auditorium as something, or someone, blew up. "Sechs!" Zwolf and Elf whispered in mild shock before racing over to find out what they'd missed.
"So, are you two next?!" Alita asked Elf and Zwolf as they approached her, with Ranma following a short distance behind. Alita had been confident before now, but with her defeat of Sechs she seemed even more confident of her abilities than ever.
"N-next for what?" responded Zwolf, bringing her hands to her face in mock panic.
"Like, I don't know!" Elf added in a cutesy voice, wrapping her arms around Zwolf's neck as she did. Alita didn't look like she was buying it, but it was obvious all the same that the two undamaged androids didn't want to fight anymore.
"Besides, we're not just copies of you anymore! Ranma said so!" Zwolf explained, once they were sure Alita wasn't going to attack them next. Ranma caught up to them at that point, having not teleported this time, and suddenly found both girls practically grafted to either side of himself.
Alita raised a skeptical eyebrow at that. "So this guy friend of yours just tells you that you're not copies of me anymore and that's it? No more battle to the death or any of the rest of that stupid garbage?" she asked the two of them skeptically.
"Well, he did have a pretty convincing argument. But basically. . . yeah, that's it!" Elf countered, snuggling up to Ranma even more, despite the way it embarrassed him to be held like that.
Ranma got the skeptical look this time. Shrugging self-consciously, Ranma gave in and answered Alita's silent question. "Heh, all I did was point out that they don't really seem to act like you, and that despite using the same basic style, none of you fight the same way either. I mean, I don't really know you at all, Alita, but that's what it looks like from my point of view," he explained with a confused shrug.
Then an odd sort of idea occurred to Ranma and made his eyes light up in amused surprise. "Hmph, you know what. I don't know why I thought of this; but if these three have the same bio-chips for their brains that the Tiphareans use, and their 'original' personalities were copied from yours . . . doesn't that kinda make them your daughters in a way? I mean in a normal human family the kids start out like their parents, but they almost always grow up to be their own unique person later on, don't they," Ranma told them with a light chuckle in his voice.
"Kya ha, ha, ha! That's a very interesting idea, Mr. Saotome! A bit sketchy on the details perhaps, but very interesting just the same! It definitely explains how androids like the AR series could conceivably produce true offspring of their own!" Interjected Prof. Nova as he rejoined the group.
"Tee, hee! Hey, Elf, let's see what Alita does if we call her 'mommy'!" Zwolf suggested to Elf conspiratorially, both of whom were still grafted tightly to Ranma's sides.
"Hee, hee! Ooh, let's!" Elf agreed with a mischievous smile. The two of them had actually been whispering to each other, but since he was caught in between them, it was kind of hard for Ranma to miss what they were saying to each other.
The next thing anyone knew, the two android girls had released their grip on Ranma and leapt at Alita, crying out "mommy!" as they tackled her with a pair of hugs. Everyone except Elf and Zwolf sweated nervously at the unexpected antic.
"If I had both arms right now, I think I'd spank both of you for this," Alita complained as the two glomped her, rolling her eyes to the heavens for patience. Ranma tried to force down a laugh at her reaction, but failed. Elf and Zwolf were giggling at the threat even harder than he was though. "This is all your fault, Ranma, or whoever you are," Alita accused Ranma with a withering, but half hearted glare.
"Eh, heh . . . you're welcome?" Ranma countered uncertainly, hoping that Alita wasn't as upset with him as she looked. Alita held the glare a few seconds longer, but finally deflated in resignation at her 'daughters' attentions, causing Ranma to sigh deeply in relief.
"Grrr! This is all stupid! Absolutely stupid I tell you! I don't care if she's our original or our mother! It doesn't make any difference, I should have won that fight!" Sechs growled, finally coming to. Either that, or she had finally gotten tired of being ignored by everyone. "This just isn't right! My abilities clearly surpass yours . . . How did you win?!" Sechs demanded to know, in spite of her broken body.
"Simple, really. Do you have any memories of Mars, Sechs?" Alita responded in a slightly patronizing tone. Of course Alita's attempts to look wise and knowledgeable were severely hampered by a pair of mischievous growths on her body named Elf and Zwolf. Although both haves of the conversation did do a pretty good job of ignoring the twin distractions all the same.
"What?!" Sechs demanded angrily as Alita's response made no sense to her. Not that Ranma had any idea what Mars had to do with anything either.
Alita seemed to gain a far away look, as if remembering something as she began to explain herself. "You only know the immature Panzer Kunst–the one from my past. But I . . . I know more! I've met master's far stronger than I can even hope to be . . . That's what made the difference, Sechs," Alita explained, pulling off the wise master routine pretty well despite the 'distractions' involved.
"But your Sechster Angriff? Pretty good! Could use some work on your defense though," she added as an after thought. Thinking it over for a moment, Ranma found that he more or less agreed with the assessment of Sechs's personal fighting style. But at least she didn't have any of the absolutely gaping holes in her defenses that Ryoga never seemed to notice.
Sechs on the other hand didn't take the criticism very well. "Are you gonna LECTURE me?!" she screamed angrily. Her angry outburst caused Elf and Zwolf to go from harassing their mother with affection to hiding behind her in partial fear.
"No, Sechs. Just like Ranma told these other two, your not some simple copy of me anymore. I don't know about that mother/daughter bit," Alita began, getting a playful "aw!" from her other two 'children' in the process. "knock it off for a second, you two! . . . as I was saying, I'm not so sure about this mother/daughter thing. But you've already earned the right to live your own life, Sechs; you're not my shadow anymore," Alita finished, with only a brief interruption from her so-called daughters.
"Well then, a happy ending! How wonderfully unexpected! I hope that this makes you happy Sechs; after all, you did get to test yourself against Alita like you wanted to. Those two certainly seem happy with the way things turned out," Prof. Nova added, an unexpectedly friendly smile on his face. Sechs refused to respond to the professor's implied question, but at least she didn't seem quite as upset as she'd been before and during the match.
"So that corpse in the lab . . . was that a fake you?" Alita asked Prof. Nova as Elf and Zwolf released her to pick up what was left of Sechs along with her fallen Titan blade.
"No, that was the real me all the way. You see . . . the first thing I did when I got back to Tiphares as to perfect my backup. Codification Technology–a practical application of Karma Theory . . . allowed me to implant my Body's compositional information, including my memory, into the molecular motion of the very atmosphere! That way it can be extracted at any time!" Prof. Nova explained, going into his 'mad scientist' mode for the umpteenth time since Ranma had met him.
"When the Nova body dies, the Nano-machine network in the atmosphere is immediately activated . . . constructing a precise duplicate, exactly as I was. In other words . . . " he continued on, pausing for dramatic affect. "I have become the closest thing to immortal in all of human history," he finished dramatically.
"And the biggest jerk!" Alita countered angrily, not that Ranma blamed her. Yet he did wonder what her reason for not liking Prof. Nova was. "Do you think I've forgotten what you've done on the surface?!" she demanded, pointing an accusing finger at Prof. Nova as she all but spat the words out at him.
Professor Nova's expression became grim beneath his face mask, yet he didn't deny or make excuses for anything. "I wouldn't want you to. That's what I call . . . Free Will," was all he said in reply to Alita's accusation. He then turned to Ranma and the rest of his bodyguards. "Okay, we're off! A quick tour of the Medical core along with taking care of the killer robots like our Mr. Saotome insisted upon. Then once we've finished some other business I wish to do there, it's on to the orbital elevator–and then from there it's on to space city Ketheres!" he announced excitedly. He then turned to Alita and asked, "would you care to join us?" He asked her friendly enough, but the question was still a bit of a surprise to Ranma, and it seemed to be an outright shock to Alita.
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(Posted Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:45)
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