"So what's with all the clothes?" Winry asked.
"Oh, I am with child," Kodachi said with a proud smile.
"Well, congratulations," Winry said as she picked up a pink-leather jacket meant for teenagers. "But, do you expect them to come out fully grown or something?"
"Not far from it, I suppose," Kodachi said. "OhhhHOHOHOHOHOHO! Children do grow up so fast I hear. HOHOHOHOHO!"
Winry sweated a little at the woman's unusual behavior, but she'd met weirder people.
"No, we might be cut off from the better colonies soon," Kodachi noted. "It is best to stockpile when you can."
"I hope you get the sizes right," Winry said.
"Oh, sizes at least are slightly mutable," Kodachi assured her with a smirk.
Winry turned around from loading the jacket onto the cart and looked at Kodachi nodding. She was about to turn around again to put something else in the cart when a fact about what she'd seen registered briefly.
Whipping about, she took in the strange woman's figure and noted that it was as slender and small-chested as she had originally thought, still, she couldn't help but vocalize her confusion.
"Were your breasts...bigger...just a moment ago?" she asked.
"Oh don't be silly," Kodachi responded with an easily visible twinkle. "Who can change their measurements on a whim?"
"Right, silly of me," Winry said. "Anyway. Where will you..."
Kodachi's demeanor had shifted from casual and quirky to silent and grim in a brief moment.
"Something wrong?" Winry asked.
"Stop right there!" a man shouted, coming about with a plasma rifle pointed directly at Kodachi.
Several other men bearing an assortment of rifles and other weapons started slipping out of the alleyways.
"This is a mistake," Kodachi warned, moving Winry behind her as shopkeepers scattered for cover.
"Everyone make sure not to damage it too much," the man with the plasma rifle insisted. "If these are synthetics, we'll want top salvage rights."
"Synthetics..." Winry asked.
"I repeat, you are making a mistake," Kodachi noted again.
"One of you 'tourists' tossed about me and some of my men like they were children," the leader said. "If you're not synthetics, there's something else about you that might be worth a few credits. Bring it up."
One of the thugs stepped forward carrying a large box of some sort.
"An EMP platform?" Winry said.
"Don't worry," Kodachi said, holding a tight rein on her anger and waiting for a distraction. "This will be fine."
Quickly, the box was set down, some knobs were twisted and a blast of electro-magnetic energy pulsed outward invisibly. It shut down lights and displays as it went, but Kodachi only smiled.
"Shit, she's shielded!" the leader said, looking off to the side. "Try again!"
And in that moment, Kodachi moved.
The shots fired around her, only one or two grazing past her skin. Primarily, she was a weapon-user, but recent instincts made her more than competent as an unarmed fighter. More so than Nanami who didn't have training of any sort to back up her instincts, to hone them into a directed weapon rather than a random flailing.
It didn't take long for her to rip through the thugs as they tried and failed to follow her motion. She'd never been a strong chi user, but that didn't matter, the "bio-electric" abilities granted by the mitochondria in her system worked differently.
Probably why Ranma hadn't yet reproduced all his chi abilities yet and she had. Kodachi had fewer tricks to recreate.
And speed and agility were amongst the first she relearned. She wasn't faster than a bullet, but she was faster than the average person could aim.
"Well," Kodachi said, dusting her hands with a superior smirk. "That takes care of that. I told you it would be..."
Unfortunately, she was still somewhat reckless. Bullets that didn't hit the mark had to go somewhere.
The girl, Winry, was leaning against their cart of goods with three gaping holes in her torso. The shoulder, the left-hand chest and the abdomen. At least one of the holes came from the discharged energy projectile of a plasma rifle rather than a bullet.
Kodachi swiftly moved to the girl's side and her understanding of anatomy and biology, a martial artist's view, told her that the girl did not have long to live. Certainly not long enough to get to a hospital.
She was staring up and struggling to retain consciousness as long as possible. Blood trickled out of her mouth, coughed up from what had to be a damaged lung.
Unlike Nanami, Kodachi had no compulsion about converting someone at need such as this.
The change came swiftly, and the tail was already commanded to move when it finished jabbing the stinger into Winry's undamaged side. Genetic material and empowering mitochondria flooded from Kodachi into Winry.
Slowly, the girl's eyes and nails shifted to black and the wounds gradually started to close.
As the girl coughed up the last of the blood choking her throat she finally managed to speak.
"What are you?" she asked.
"We'll discuss that elsewhere," Kodachi said quickly, turning back to human and looking about, hoping no one had seen her. "Let's go."
Winry weakly nodded as Kodachi lifted her up and set her into the golf cart before driving off with as much speed as possible to the Beagle.
"I'm feeling hungry," Winry muttered, healed but still weak from a sudden expenditure of energy.
"You'll have food when we get to the ship," Kodachi assured her.
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(Posted Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:08)
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