“Glad everyone is here,” stated the dark-skinned man, wearing sunglasses and a high-quality suit, as he looked around the table.
“Who are you?” asked Nabiki, staring at him. “You look like Sisko from Star Trek: DS9,” Nabiki stated.
The new Djinn just twitched.
“No; that’s not right,” Kasumi stated, tilting her head slightly. “He looks like Hawk from Spenser: For Hire,” she spoke.
The Djinn smiled at her. “Finally, someone gets my style. You have no idea how irritated I got from people calling me Sisko; like I’m a Trekkie.”
“Well, to be honest,” Kasumi offered, “the two did resemble each other towards the latter half of the Star Trek series.”
The bald black man with a goatee shrugged. “Not my fault he realized there was only one cool style,” he replied with a smile, eyes hidden behind mirrored shades.
“Now then,” he started, snapping his fingers, as the space to his right was replaced with a blinking Mihoshi, instead of empty space, “we are here for more important issues.
“By the way, I owe you a wish for understanding the Rules of Cool,” he stage-whispered to Kasumi.
“Huh?” Mihoshi stated as wisely as she usually did, looking about. “Why am I here?”
“Do you really have to ask that?” Hawk asked.
“… Employee of the Month?” Mihoshi asked with glee.
“… NO!”
As she shrank back, the Djinn Head looked at the assembled group of fiancées and family. “We are here because Mihoshi violated a lot of rules.”
“She/I did?” many asked.
Nabiki just snorted. “No shit, Sherlock; I could have told you that.”
“What?” demanded Akane. “Why didn’t you!?”
“I wasn’t paid to,” Nabiki said with a careless shrug.
Sighing heavily, Hawk turned towards the soulless form of Ranma Saotome. “Body, what is your status?”
The figure replied with the same emotionless tone it always had since Ranma’s soul had been wished away. “Body efficiency has decreased by seven-point-nine percent.”
“Time till failure?”
“No more than three weeks,” the figure replied.
“What does that mean?” demanded Ukyo, still glaring at Akane.
Nabiki had sold what had happened, after all.
“It means that without his soul, Ranma’s body is decaying,” Hawk answered. “As you heard, within three weeks or less, the body will cease functioning, a version of what you humans term as ‘death’ will occur.
Turning slightly, he caught the look of the ancient Amazon leader, and as if reading her mind, stated the next fact directly to her. “Without a soul, the body cannot create life, Elder Cologne.”
The Amazon Elder’s eyes narrowed, before she sighed. “So even stripped of existence by the Tendo he cared for, his body cannot be of any use to us.”
Snapping his fingers, Hawk used enough magic to bind the moves of the other prospective fiancées. They stopped mid-lunge, a red glow surrounding them as they tried with all their might to break free and harm the one they considered the main reason their love was gone and his final form about to die.
Akane just sat there, eyes wide, still processing what had occurred, what she had done, and who was to blame. If she had noticed the fact she was about to be slaughtered by her peers/rivals, she gave no indication of it.
All she could do was turn towards the soulless form. “That can’t be true!” she gasped.
The body turned towards her. “It is entirely true; no matter how much you would desire it not to be so. This shell cannot continue to function without its soul. The three week period I stated was only due to the lack of physical activity this form is currently under. Fights that are usually encountered would drastically decrease the viability of this form, thus quickening the exasperation of it.”
Nabiki shrugged, eyeing Nodoka slightly as the fathers tried to ‘scam’ a way around what had occurred. “No reason to cry, Akane; you got what you wanted.”
“I DIDN’T WANT THIS!” Akane yelled.
“Oh?” Nabiki drawled. “You were given a chance and you took it. Ranma even offered you his wish, and in the end, you turned it on him.”
“How was I to know the damned genie was real!?” Akane demanded.
Nabiki just arched an eyebrow. “Yes; because a genie would be insane, like Jusenkyo curses, possessed paintings, cursed mirrors, bird people, ghost cats, wishing swords, battle dogi, aging mushrooms, and—”
“OKAY!” Akane yelled, before deflating, falling next to the low table once more. “I … I didn’t mean…”
Had the other fiancées been able to even talk, they would have called the youngest Tendo on her words.
They couldn’t.
“Really?” Cologne asked.
The Elder was under no such enchantments, knew she wouldn’t be unless she made a move to attack. “You once more allowed your irrational anger to cloud your mind, knowing the consequences.
“Like the fathers of yourself and Son-in-Law, you ignored the consequences and acted with only what you considered right and just.”
“How dare you!” bellowed Soun.
The Elder showed no outward sign of caring about his reaction. “By the laws of your own land, if they recognized what she had done, she would be seen and found guilty of murder. Do not presume to voice anger at me, simply because you failed to teach her such.”
“I just asked him to stop being a jerk and listen to me!” Akane cried out, tears dripping down her face. “I didn’t want … THIS!” she bellowed, hand waving as the soulless Saotome.
Gripping her silk-wrapped bundle tightly, Nodoka fought hard not to jump up and start slicing heads off. They’d been having this argument for over two hours before the dark-skinned Djinn had appeared. Turning to said dark Djinn, she opened her mouth, hoping for a good answer. “Is there a way to fix this?” she asked.
Hawk nodded. “As I said, we are here because Mihoshi broke the rules.
“First, even if Ranma wanted to give the wish to someone else, there is a standard protocol for that. His words never stated point-blank he was giving Akane Tendo his wish. As such, Mihoshi was never to grant any wish from her.
“Second, what she granted is technically ‘killing’ and also violates the rules we have laid down for all Djinn to follow.”
“WAAAA~AAAAH!” cried the tanned blonde, almost approximating the Tendo elder. “I’M SORRY!” She didn’t personally see how it was her fault, since the System shouldn’t have allowed it in the first place.
Of course, Mihoshi was ignorant of her own lineage, and thus had no clue that just being who she was could force any wish through the system.
This was also why Hawk was about to make Mihoshi clean up her own mess. First, they certainly didn’t want her to know—or anyone else for that matter—that because of being related to Washu, Mihoshi was the only Djinn exempt from those rules. If she knew, she’d tell someone else or even stop following them. And since being related to Washu would mean trouble if they tried to punish her, it was decided training was the best, along with ignorance.
Second, and also just as important, was that because of what Mihoshi had done—Nine Hells, none of the Council could even figure out how Mihoshi had taken a simple personality change spell and ended up stripping a soul away—the System was down for them. If they ever wanted to grant another wish or even continue to use their own powers in the long-term, she needed to fix this mess and fast.
The Djinn Council certainly didn’t want to have to approach Kami-sama and explain this!
Taking another deep breath, he turned towards her. “Then you had best try and mitigate your damage and fix this!” Hawk yelled. “No matter whom you are related to or powers in your corner; this offense will result in some heavy punishment! If you don’t want to spend all of eternity as a speck within a black hole in some backwater reality where no life exists; then damned well fix this now!”
If not for the ancestor of Mihoshi, the girl would have already been bound for oblivion in some unknown and uncaring universe. It was only for those reasons that she was even being given a chance to fix her mistakes. The Council may be hard, but they weren’t stupid; they knew what would occur if they lowered any punishment on the girl, and thus needed a method to say it was dealt with … and quietly chain her pert ass to a desk for the remainder of her existence.
“Right!” Mihoshi stated, tears gone, as she closed her eyes…
Hawk waited patiently for several moments, wondering when she would actually start gathering her power to recall Ranma’s soul.
After several moments of sensing nothing—except for the wonder if Mihoshi was about to pop a blood vessel with how hard her face was scrunched up—Hawk opened his senses further, wondering just how slow this power-up was taking. Surely the boy’s soul hadn’t been dissipated enough for her to have this much trouble trying to bring it back.
Nothing.
Blinking behind his shades, he opened his senses even further, maxing them to their limits to try and sense if Mihoshi was even trying.
Then he felt it, eyes going wide as he called out to her. Her power wasn’t slowly rising.
She was using way too much, and even now, he was losing his sense of how much she was using—meaning it was exceeding his ability to even sense! “Mihoshi!” he yelled out. “That’s too much po—”
*POP!*
“… wer,” Hawk muttered, as he looked around.
Mihoshi was gone.
Ranma Saotome’s body was gone.
Kodachi Kuno, Ukyo Kuonji, Shampoo, Akane Tendo, Nabiki Tendo, and Kasumi Tendo were gone.
“Um, what just happened?” Genma asked, looking nervously around. After all, many of his and Soun’s plan to save their retirement marriage pact required Ranma’s body.
Hawk just rubbed his forehead. “Mihoshi overpowered her spell to fix this.”
“Um, how overpowered?” Soun asked. “WAAA~AAAAH! MY BABIES HAVE BEEN VAPORIZED! NOW THE SCHOOLS WILL NEVER BE JOINED!”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I can get that information,” Hawk replied, standing up. “See you in a day while I get that,” he stated quickly, before vanishing. He had whatever idiot who had recruited Mihoshi in the first place to personally send to hell … and a few interns to get off their overworked asses to find out if what had happened really did.
Mihoshi hadn’t summoned his soul back.
She had done the opposite.
When Mihoshi’s first wish at the Tendo Dojo had been used, it left a trace, a trace that could only be viewed if one looked at reality in eleven dimensions, the dimensions of the Choshin and some suspected, of Kami-sama and Hild, if they went fully unsealed and unrestricted. As such, even with what Botan had done and how Yggdrasil acted—many versions of it to transfer a soul from one reality to another, as Yggdrasil was 10D and the multiverse was 11D and more—the trace followed.
In effect, the chaos behind Mihoshi’s act could have been used to track Ranma from his old universe to his new one.
As such, her overpowered spell continued along that path, coming from one universe to another, entering Soul Society. But as if the chaos that is Mihoshi, it could not locate what had been used the last time, the Hōgyoku of Kisuke Urahara, to grant the heart’s desires of someone near it.
Sousuke Aizen’s Hōgyoku, on the other hand, was able to be located.
Now, a normal Hōgyoku can only grant the desires of someone on two conditions: they have the power for it, and they desire it enough.
Of course, Mihoshi’s spell had more energy than most quasars combined. And luckily, Aizen was away, so he never witnessed his Hōgyoku flash as it performed several acts to complete the tasks given to it.
In the past, shortly after Kisuke, Yoruichi, and Tessai escaped…
As Mayuri left his lab, wanting to relax a bit as his creation/new second-in-command finished waking up, he thus failed to notice as Nemu’s eyes opened for a second.
“OH HOHOHOHO!” she laughed out, before her dainty hand came up to her stomach in curiosity, wondering where that had come from.
Retsu Unohana paused in her walk, having had hoped to consider the recent revelations of only a few days ago, to put her hand on her lower abdomen. “Oh my,” she muttered with a smile, as she instantly knew that somehow, she would have a bundle of joy in several months.
“Captain?”
Turning slightly, she saw her lieutenant, Isane Kotetsu, rubbing her own stomach.
“Oh, just thinking, Isane,” Retsu replied. Her seren faced turned to one of confusion, however. “Isane?”
“Yes, Captain?” the tall female shinigami asked.
“Did you just punch that support column?”
Blinking, Isane turned to her right side, noticing that her hand, which had been by her side earlier, was now somewhat embedded in the nearby support column … which was about ready to snap in half from the damage she had done. “Um…”
Toshiro looked up from his watermelon to his friend before him. “Huh?”
“Just try it, Shiro-chan,” Momo Hinamori stated with a calm smile, holding the plate before him.
“What is it?” Toshiro asked. “And don’t call me, ‘Shiro-chan’!”
“It is called, okonomiyaki ,” Momo replied.
“… When did you start making that?” Toshiro asked.
Momo just shrugged, wishing her stomach would settle down for a bit. At least the okonomiyaki didn’t upset it further.
Actually, it calmed her stomach down for some reason. Perhaps it was time to make an appointment with Squad Four when she got back to the Academy.
“Ah, Rangiku,” Gin spoke with a slight smile, looking at his friend before him in her Shinigami Academy robes. “How are you—”
*WHAM!*
“Gin help Rangiku, yes?” the teen asked with a smile, her kendo sword in her hand, having smacked her best friend in the head, nearly driving him to the floor.
“Um … sure,” Gin replied, trying to keep from screaming out in pain, wondering if this newest personality quirk in Rangiku was once again due to whatever Aizen’s men had taken from her.
“Gin tell Rangiku why dried persimmon now make Rangiku feel too-too bad!” she demanded, eyes almost insane as she glared at him, rubbing her stomach.
Suì-Fēng rubbed her stomach, cursing her nerves as she prepared to take her test to become Captain of Squad Two and break the tradition of having a member of the Shihōin Clan as head of the Onmitsukidō.
Taking a sip of something from the World of the Living called ‘coffee’, her stomach settled for a bit. However, it did make her wonder why she considered acquiring blackmail material on the squad member who brought it to her, to ensure he was faster in getting the needed beverage for her.
Back into the ‘present’
Opening his eyes, Ranma discovered he was no longer within the reiryoku masking barrier with his mother, but now sitting on a tree stump, surrounded by woods, and a simple dirt path before him.
Standing u and scratching the base of his pigtail—a trait he rather liked from his previous life, Ranma started along the path. If this was indeed the Inner World of his Zanpakutō, then he should probably start looking for the spirit.
Looking up, he had to marvel at how … complete the world was. He could make out wispy clouds in the sky, gentle breezes that he could feel on his skin and see in the waving leaves.
But there were also flaws. He could hear no animals, birds, crickets, anything in the woods, as far as he could tell. Looking about, he noticed no sun, but also no movement of shadows along the ground to show even a moving light source.
As he continued down the path, having walked for what seemed like hours, something … glittering in the sunlight caught his attention. “Hmm,” he muttered, edging closer to the boundary of the path in hopes of finding out what it was. His mother had insisted during his training for this, that he should investigate everything and ignore nothing, as there was no telling what form his Zanpakutō spirit might take.
But what he found was something he hadn’t expected. The glimmer had come from the side of an exposed rock in the ground, but not covered with granite or any other such rock.
It was silvery, reflecting, and before his eyes, it began to play a scene from his past.
“I remember this,” he replied, watching as he saw his mother once again demonstrate how to perform Shunpo.
He also winced as it showed how his first attempt went; his first Flash Step taking him into a tree.
Taking a deep steadying breath, he hesitantly reached out, wanting to see if he could touch the odd projection, wondering if it would let him instantly relive the memory…
“What are you waiting for?”
Snapping back to his surroundings, Ranma looked about, hand on the handle of his Zanpakutō.
“Why have you stopped moving forward?” the voice asked again, seemingly coming from everywhere. “If you are here for me, why have you stopped your search?”
“Well, where are you?” Ranma yelled out, before returning his eyes to the memory-displaying rock.
“I am not in the past,” the voice spoke once more, as if reading Ranma’s thought that maybe he needed to touch the memory to meet the spirit. “Follow the path, keep moving forward, until you reach your goal.”
Waiting several seconds for further instructions—and receiving none—Ranma released his Zanpakutō and made his way back to the dirt path, pushing forward towards his possible destination. “Could have at least told me how long I have to walk,” Ranma muttered, as he resumed his course. Though he did pause for a moment, looking into the blue sky. “I just hope I don’t have to do this every time I want to chat with … er, him,” he finished.
Well, it had definitely sounded like a man’s voice.
After following the path only a few minutes more, Ranma was once more shocked to see more of the memory displays. They were in the sides of trees, rocks, a few on large green leaves from bushes. The bits and pieces he saw shocked him, as they were not all just from his life as Ranma Shihōin, but even those of Ranma Saotome.
The ones within the nature around him, surrounded by deep shade and what looked like an unmoving rain cloud above them were steadfastly ignored. He had a good idea what memories might lay there, and was not interested in seeing those events once again.
The fact he spotted several other ‘dark areas’ along his way didn’t fill him with a good feeling. “No idea I had that much emotional baggage,” he muttered.
Finally, the path shifted, becoming wider. Ahead of him, he spotted where the path forked. On either side of the split was a wooden post, three in total. The path on the left was open, while the one on the right had a rope across it.
For Ranma, it was the first sign aside from the voice, that he was going the right way, and headed for the left, passing by a large rock behind the middle post, displaying a memory of him and Mother Shihōin, eating at a local curry restaurant earlier that day.
“Almost there, mom,” Ranma said with a smile, continuing on.
As such, he didn’t notice when darkness started to shroud the rock, the memory no longer displayed as a pair of yellow eyes formed in it, staring at his retreating form, or the way sharp teeth showed under them, allowing a long tongue to slide out and lick its lips.
But as he disappeared down the path, the being in the dark mirror retreated backwards, as did the darkness, and soon, the memory resumed.
Finally, the path ended before a small lake, fed by a waterfall about a hundred meters away. Where all the water came from or drained off to, he wasn’t certain, but he was certain of one thing: in the middle of the lake, on a nearly smooth rock surface just jutted out from the calm water, sat a cloaked figure in meditation.
“Hey!” Ranma yelled out, wondering if this was the representation of the spirit of his Zanpakutō.
The figure made no move, no sign he had heard Ranma, or even if he cared Ranma was there.Blinking before narrowing his eyes, Ranma’s left sandal snapped towards a loose rock, kicking it into Ranma’s waiting hand.
Well, let’s see if I can get your attention. With a familiar smirk from both his lives, Ranma launched the rock against the calm waters of the lake, skipping it towards the meditating figure. He didn’t purposely aim for the man, but wanted to at least strike the rock he was meditating on and perhaps garner his attention.
*WHAP!*
But he was close enough for the cloaked figure to snap his left arm out and grab the skipping rock before it touched the one he rested upon.
“Was that really necessary?” the booming voice asked, as the figure looked towards Ranma. The cloak covered all of him, except the hand now holding the rock, and a glowing blue light he assumed was the figure’s left eye.
“Well, you weren’t exactly paying attention,” Ranma offered.
“All you did was yell, ‘Hey!’ to me,” the figure stated. “You did nothing to ask for or even demand my attention.”
Ranma just twitched. “Whatever,” he waved off.
“Now, are you my Zanpakutō’s spirit?”
“I am,” the figure stated, standing on top of the rock. “Why are you here?”
“To learn your name, maybe your Shikai as well,” Ranma commented with a smile.
The figure merely tilted his head somewhat.
“So, how do we go about doing this?” Ranma asked. He had hoped to get some advice from his mother about it, but she was also currently complaining that her Zanpakutō was angry at her for not using it within the last few centuries.
The spirit simply turned its head, looking towards the left of Ranma. “I hate those clouds.”
Blinking at the change of topic, he turned as well, spotting several dark clouds, a mist falling from them. He was somewhat shocked, as he hadn’t even realized he was ascending a hillside when he was walking up that path to the lake. But the clouds seemed to be lower than the sky, barely above the trees, and scattered about the lower field.
“Do you know what they are?” asked the spirit.
“Guessing my darker memories and things left buried,” he replied.
The spirit nodded. “I hate those clouds, they bring the entire place down, threaten to grow and eventually wash this all away.”
Ranma could only wince at that, not liking where the topic was going. He’d prefer not to dwell on certain actions of his past, dredge up memories of before he came to his newest incarnation. “Is that my test?”
“An observation,” the figure returned. “Such things should be dealt with, before a flood arises that cannot be turned. They will drag your soul down, and swallow the power you wish to wield to protect.”
Even Ranma understood that: if he did not deal with the memories that haunted him, it would harm his ability to fight, to defend, perhaps even his power levels. At the very least, they would prevent him from achieving Bankai.
Taking in a deep breath, Ranma nodded. “Yeah, I’ll get on that,” he said with utmost seriousness. He knew some of those memories from his previous life could be very harsh—he still shivered at times when he recalled just small bits of the Nekoken Training.
“Very well,” the figure responded, walking across the lake’s surface, as if it was solid, and approached him.
Even with barely a meter separating them, Ranma still couldn’t see under the hood of the cloak, nor even an iris within the glowing blue eye, let alone if a second eye was under it.
“Then I shall lend you my power for now,” the figure replied, looking deep into Ranma’s eyes. “My name is—”
Yoruichi stood up, cracking her back, as she looked at the hanging pendant. The reiryoku masking barrier would come down in a few minutes, and it would be best if they were back inside their gigai beforehand, allowing a nice safety barrier of time for them.
“Sorry, son,” she spoke with a light smile. “Looks like you’ll need a bit longer to connect with you—”
Her voice cut out as her son exploded in a shower of power, his reiatsu pulsing from him, actually pushing her backwards a few meters.Forcing herself to stare forward, she struggled to make some headway, worried that if he didn’t stop, they wouldn’t be able to make it to their gigai before the reiryoku masking barrier came down and exposed them to Soul Society like a giant beacon.
So focused before her, and with Ranma’s reiatsu flooding the area, she failed to notice a small opening into the Dangai, allowing a mote of light to exit, a mote that had become time-displaced within the Precipice World, but had finally found an exit and was finally completing its mission.
With a streak of action, it struck the unguarded gigai of Ranma Shihōin. For a brief moment, the gigai’s eyes opened up, a smile on its face, before the waves of reiatsu started to cover it in light. The last sight of it before it was buried under the light was the hair turning red for a split second, and then reverting to black.
Yoruichi saw none of this, her mind focused on approaching her son.
“Illuminate and cover,” came her son’s voice, as she noticed he was no longer in Jinzen, but standing, his hand on the hilt of his Zanpakutō.
“HENSHOU!” Ranma screamed, as his blade erupted from the sheath and changed. The blade glowed even brighter than Ranma, before it or a moment, before it dulled enough to reveal itself once more. Floating about the sword now were several bars of varying length in distance, orbiting the blade in a dance that both drew and distracted the eyes, refusing to allow one to focus on a single bar or even the blade.
Yoruichi could only stare as the waves of reiatsu receded, showing her son with his Zanpakutō in hand, a smile on his face, and only one thought on her mind.
It sucked that she couldn’t immediately go to Kisuke and inform him her son just break his record.
In the past, ten months after Kisuke, Yoruichi, and Tessai escaped…
The 21st Head of the Shihōin Clan stared as the doctors presented the newest member of the clan before him, the newest daughter of a very distant cousin of his.
The newborn had their usually dark skin, although he did wonder how she got the blond hair and odd ears, when it wasn’t present in either of the little one’s parents…
Lowering his head, he looked as the child was returned to her parents. He still could remember the day his lone daughter had been born, the joy he had felt.
But his daughter was now a traitor to Soul Society.
And for now, it looked like the distant cousin might be the one to inherit the title as the future 23rd Head of the Shihōin Clan.
Turning slightly to leave the family the joy of their new birth, he headed out the door and back to his own home.
Unless his daughter changed her ways, and had somehow produced an heir—and it better not be by that Kisuke-bastard or he’d save the Central 46 the effort and gut the man himself—it looked like the future heir of the Shihōin Clan … would be Mihoshi Shihōin.
Well, unless his daughter could bear a son, but then he might have to marry him to Mihoshi anyway to secure the lineage and keep the Elders from complaining about the heir being the ‘son of a treasonous dog’.
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(Posted Mon, 05 Sep 2011 04:42)
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