It was a modestly bright, moonlit night on the outskirts of Tokyo proper as a lone but hefty figure walked the all but empty streets. It was late, and most of the city’s residents were either asleep in their beds, or they were enjoying the nightlife somewhere down town. Few, if any, were actually around to notice the man’s passing. But those that did gave the man wide berth as he passed by them.
Something, it seemed, was chasing the man as he hurried along. “Damn it, old man! If you don’t give me back that stupid amulet right now, I swear I’m gonna kick the crap out of you for this!” a young, female voice shouted at the fleeing man. The speaker herself was nowhere to be seen however.
Strangely though, despite openly running from the pursuing voice, the man openly baiting the unseen girl, rather than frightened by the disembodied voice. “Nya, nya! Catch me if you can, boy!” he shouted back at the invisible specter chasing after him, despite its obviously feminine tones.
“Argh! I said give it back you stupid jerk! This ain’t funny, I’m telling you!” the angry voice shouted back at him again. Male or female, whoever or whatever they were seemed to be easily keeping up with the man, yet couldn’t quite seem to close the distance between them for some reason.
Things might have continued on like this for a little while longer, had the heavyset man paid a little more attention to his surroundings. One moment, he was just turning tilting his head back to taunt his pursuer yet again. The next he’d caught his foot on a raised crack in the pavement and was angling for a painful nosedive into the path ahead.
He only just managed to avoid the running face plant into the sidewalk by tucking his large body into a tight ball. However, the large travel pack strapped to his back prevented him from completing the reflexive maneuver smoothly. So, rather than recovering himself just over a meter later and resuming his run, the man slid on his back in a crooked spin across the ground instead.
As a result, he eventually slid to a stop in a disheveled heap almost four meters farther down the roadside because of that. His final resting point was at the bottom stair of a modest hotel for the city’s more budget conscious visitors. Worse still, his uncontrolled spin had the added effect of dislodging several objects from the unfortunate man’s possession as well.
Most of those items were fairly mundane, a can of beans, some cup-ramen, a bottle of shampoo, a toothbrush, and similar necessities. However, while almost everything that spilled out of the man’s now open travel pack was fairly mundane in one way or another. The smallish, hexagonal amulet dangling from the fingers of his right hand was anything but mundane, even in appearance. Carved out of some form of crystal that vaguely resembled ice, it seemed to glow ever so faintly in the combined light of the moon and the surrounding streetlights.
Stranger still, however, the carved crystal amulet mysteriously lifted itself out of the man’s insentient hands of its own accord. Or, at least, it appeared to do so of its own volition, rising up into the air until it was about 1.4 meters in the air. There, the silver chain it was attached to spread wide and moved itself as if being placed around someone’s neck.
As soon as it completed the motion, a petite, redheaded girl suddenly became visible and dropped to the ground just a few centimeters below her. An irritated, yet smug expression adorned the teenager’s face as she glared down at the man on the ground before her. “Stupid jerk, got what you deserved, if you ask me. Steal this stupid thing from me again before I’ve found a cure for it, and I swear you’ll be eating through a straw for at least a week! Ya got that?!” she snarled angrily, just before kicking the man in the head with a slippered foot.
The blow didn’t seem to do very much to the disheveled man, aside from knocking his glasses askew. But it did seem to appease the mysterious girl’s temper just a little bit. Afterward, the vertically challenged teenager seemed perfectly content to simply fold her arms over her chest, and wait irritably for the man to recover his wits again.
Behind her, a tall Caucasian man who’d been unloading the trunk of a taxi until just then stared in open fascination at the pair, even as the taxi itself sped away from the scene. He had dark brown hair with poofy bangs and a set of matching, bushy eyebrows behind a set of thick framed glasses. The man also wore what looked like a long white lab coat of some sort.
Yet, despite all of that, the obviously strange foreigner probably wouldn’t have rated much more than a second, curious, glance from most people. No, what really set the man apart from most visitors to the country was the odd little device he suddenly pulled out to wave in front of him like some kind of warding device. It had a single handle attached to a vertically rectangular frame. To either side of it the device had these strange little arms lined with a series of equally strange blinking lights.
He held it vaguely like a Christian preacher holding out a cross to ward off evil spirits. Except that for some odd reason, the Caucasian man’s eyes were visibly locked onto the device in front of him instead of the mysterious girl that he was aiming the device at. Whatever it did, the device beeped and flashed its lights faster and faster the closer he brought it to the mysterious girl on the sidewalk in front of him.
Its flashing arms rose up as the unknown foreigner approached the redheaded girl as well, until they almost resembled antennae they stood up so high. By then, the man himself was well within arms’ reach of the petite girl. His outstretched hand waving the odd device all around the irritable girl’s immediate vicinity for some unknown reason as he approached her.
For her part, the girl appeared to be doing her level best to ignore the unusual intrusion. But the moment the man swung himself and his device around to inspect the amulet currently nestled under her shirt, her patience with him quickly evaporated. “Excuse me, mister. But do you mind backing the heck off?” she snarled at him. One of her hands grasped the amulet currently hidden beneath her shirt in a defensive grip, while the other clenched into an angry fist at her side.
He didn’t immediately acknowledge her request, assuming that he’d heard her at all, or that he could even understand her for that matter. In fact, the towering Caucasian poked the girl tentatively in the shoulder instead, as if checking to see if she was even really there. Stranger still, he actually looked somewhat surprised to see his finger meet solid resistence rather than passing through the girl.
Yet despite his surprise, the strange fellow waved the device in his other hand over the girl’s clasped hand several more times before acknowledging her verbally. “I apologize for the intrusion, ma’am,” he began, in perfect yet thickly accented Japanese. “But my equipment is telling me that you are cursed somehow. Is this true?” he asked her politely if a little bluntly, only just then giving the girl the extra space she’d demanded moments ago.
She rolled her eyes openly at the rather obvious question, as if to question the man’s intelligence for asking such a thing. “Oh really? And what exactly gave me away, do ya think?” she drawled back at him with bitter sarcasm.
Somehow though, her sarcasm was apparently wasted on the foreigner. “Well, these readings here indicate a very strong, yet highly contained emanation of paranormal energy coming from that necklace you’re wearing, ma’am. If I’m not mistaken, it seems to be resonating with your physical body in a way that I’m not quite familiar with at this time.”
The girl’s expression faded from open irritation to incredulously surprised at the man’s unexpected answer. “Really?” she asked him reflexively. “Any way that you can maybe make this stupid thing turn me back to normal so that I can finally be rid of it?” she added just a heartbeat later, growing visibly excited over the news.
The man shook his head disappointingly at her in reply. “Not at this time, ma’am, no. With a little time, I could possibly figure it out, maybe even help you out somehow. But I’m afraid that the bulk of my equipment is still back in the states, in New York. I’m sorry, but you’d most likely have to go all the way back to New York with me in order for me to be of any real help to you,” the man replied with a helpless shrug.
“Hmmn, that’s definitely farther away than I was counting on having to go to get rid of these stupid curses . . . But just about anything beats what the old man’s got in mind right now,” the girl muttered under her breath, seeming to think aloud without realizing she was doing so. “So what’s it going to cost me to go along and give you a shot at curing me of this stupid little problem, mister . . . ?” she added more audibly.
“Egon. Spengler Egon,” he replied back after a short, but awkward pause, belatedly realizing that she was fishing for the man’s name. At least he seemed to be paying enough attention to remember the local custom of giving his sir name first instead of last. “As for the exact cost of services rendered, well . . . that’s not exactly something that I can determine at this point in time. However, if you can afford the plane ticket to accompany me back to New York where I work, I’m absolutely certain that something agreeable can be arranged between us in that regard. So how does that sound, miss . . . ?” Egon replied back as he fished for the girl’s name in return. His tone only slightly hesitant as he attempted to reassure her about the costs of trying to help her out.
“Ranma, Saotome Ranma,” she supplied with a vague shrug as she turned around to face the man on the ground. The heavy set man was only just now beginning to recover from his tumble to the ground, a previously unnoticed knot on the back of his head just now beginning to swell up visibly. An almost blindingly fast fist to the face interrupted that ongoing process however, pushing back the man’s return to full awareness by several hours at the very least.
Once she was certain that he wouldn’t try to resist her, Ranma stooped down to reach inside the largish man’s gi and pluck out the man’s wallet. Once in hand, she quickly removed any and all cash from its possession and tossed the remainder onto his unconscious face. “And I’d say you’ve got yourself a deal, there, Egon,” she announced, as if finishing her previous reply while pocketing the stolen cash.
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(Posted Sun, 22 Aug 2010 02:44)
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