Akane sighed as she dropped the manuals, clubs and ribbons on the floor of the dojo and turned to shuffle toward the door before forcing herself to stop — if she left everything in a pile there, Ranma was going to beat her around the head and shoulders the next time they sparred. Of course, with her training with Ryoga that would be at least until after the match in a week, maybe by then Ranma would have forgotten? And do you really want to count on that?
With another sigh, she turned back and bent over, aching muscles protesting as she slowly sorted out the various weapons and neatly placed them along the wall before picking up the books — Ryoga had pushed her really hard in their impromptu training session. Not exactly how she had planned to spend the late afternoon and early evening, but with only a week they had to get in all the training she could get. That didn’t change the fact that she still had homework, though.
Shuffling back toward the house, she caught the scent of Kasumi’s cooking and changed direction toward the kitchen entrance. Kasumi looked up from the stove as she came through the door before turning her attention back to her cooking. “Oh, Akane, you’re back. Are the others with you?”
“No, not yet,” Akane replied. “When we finished my training for the evening, Ranma-kun and Nabiki stayed behind to ...” To discuss how the Amazons could help break the curse on you and Dr. Tofu. “ ... to discuss some magic stuff.” She shrugged with forced nonchalance — as shocked as she’d been when she found out that Dr. Tofu had been cursed, and furious that her saintly mother figure of an older sister had been caught up in it, it was still magic, and it still made her queasy just thinking about it. Besides, she wasn’t sure just how much Kasumi knew. “Nothing to do with me, so I didn’t wait.”
Kasumi glanced up at her youngest sister at the hesitation in her reply, but turned back to her cooking without commenting on it. “I see. In that case you can join me for dinner after you clean up, I’ll but Nabiki’s and Ranma’s dinner aside for them to reheat when they get home.”
“Father, Auntie Nodoka and Saotome-san are out?”
“Yes, Father had a Council meeting, and Auntie got up from her nap and left not long after you three and Ryoga. She said not to wait up, she would be very late. I believe Saotome-san left about the same time, I haven’t seen him since,” Kasumi replied as she lifted a small pot off the stove’s burner. “Now hurry up, before dinner gets cold.”
“Yes, Mother,” Akane said with a teasing grin as she turned for the door, and Kasumi smiled happily.
Ranma floated alongside Nabiki as the two made their way home from the Amazons’ camp through Nerima’s nighttime streets. It had been a productive meeting, at least according to Nabiki — Ranma had been quickly lost in Ku Lon and Nabiki’s freewheeling discussion about their respective methods of breaking curses and how they could be integrated into a single ritual. It had apparently gone over Xian Pu and Pa Fum’s heads as well, and the two girls had excused themselves to “get to know their husband better” (a comment that, along with the accompanying emotions, had had Nabiki smirking and Ranma blushing even as she chuckled (not giggled!) at Ryoga’s sudden panic).
“So I figured if ya offer ta let the people you’ve been blackmailin’ a chance ta help find where the scrolls go that Pop stole an’ I can’t figure out from where,” the succubus said, “any that actually find one can get off yer books without that whatchacallit debt ta the imps kickin’ in.”
Nabiki nodded, turning her head to look at her lover (and taking the opportunity to discreetly check that the imp shadowing them was too far back to overhear their conversation). “Karmic debt, and that’s not a bad idea. Just be careful that you don’t include anything possibly dangerous in what we pass on to them for identification.”
“Right, ya got it,” Ranma agreed.
The two fell silent, simply enjoying each other’s presence — and each other’s enjoyment of that presence — for several minutes before Nabiki sighed. “So, just how well did Akane really do, tonight?” she asked.
Ranma hesitated. “She did ... she did good,” she replied. “She really put a lot of effort inta it, worked hard.”
“But not good enough, is it?” Nabiki pressed, noting the succubus’s uncertainty. “Not when the competition is in just one week.”
Ranma squirmed where she floated along, then slumped with a sigh, uncertainty shifting to dejection. “Probably not,” she reluctantly agreed. “Like I said, she’s really tryin’ hard, an’ Royga-kun’s actually not too bad a sensei. If it was a stand-up fight instead a’ this game Kodachi-san wouldn’t stand a chance — maybe if Akane dropped school fer the week ...”
Her voice trailed off as Nabiki shook her head. “Not happening,” the middle Tendo said, “even if she was willing, Kasumi would never allow it.”
“Yeah,” Ranma agreed unhappily. “An’ as much as you’re insistin’ I study, ya girls probably aren’t wrong. It’s just ... I really hate ta lose. I wish there was some way I could do the trainin’, an’ pass it on ta Akane.”
“So do I,” Nabiki agreed, then stiffened as a thought struck her, stumbling when she missed a step.
Ranma caught her elbow, and found herself getting flung around as Nabiki struggled for balance. By the time the pageboy-haired girl had managed that, her balance was almost as threatened by her laughter at the way the chagrin her fiancé was now radiating matched the look on her face. “Yeah, laugh it up,” the redhead grumbled, “I’ll figure it out sooner or later. What happened, ya okay?”
“I’m fine, just had a thought,” Nabiki replied, then glanced around and lowered her voice, just in case their shadow had sped up to close the distance when they stepped out of sight. “But it would need Akane’s cooperation to work, and since it involves magic —”
The two had passed through the front gates of the dojo, and Ranma glanced through the translucent house — there was Kasumi, cleaning up in the family room, Akane up in her bedroom, and — “Kodachi-san, she’s here!” Instantly, the succubus’s wings flashed out from her back, and she vanished through the door into the house.
Nabiki gaped in shock for a moment before Ranma’s words fully registered, then she was charging for the door herself.
A few minutes earlier:
Akane was feeling much better when she walked into her bedroom, dressed in her pajamas — nothing like one of Kasumi’s dinners and a long soak in the furo afterward for sore muscles to brighten one’s outlook. Not even the homework waiting for her in the bookbag by her bed could dampen her mood. The cool breeze from the open window felt good on her furo-heated body, even through her nightwear. Wait, I didn’t open the window —
The only warning she had was the creak of a loose floorboard behind her, but it was enough. She dove forward as the sound of something smashing onto the floor resounded behind her, landed on her bed, and spun around as she rose to a crouch to find the girl that “Ranko” had briefly tangled with that afternoon standing behind her bedroom door dressed in a purple leotard and sash and wearing a jeweled amulet, the head of a sledgehammer embedded in the floor in front of her.
“My floor! Do you know how much it’s going to cost to fix that? !” Akane screamed at Kodachi.
The raven-haired girl tossed her off-center ponytail back over shoulder as she shrugged dismissively. “Such sordid concerns are a matter for peasants such as yourself, not a Kuno. Now, let us compete in all fairness!” Yanking the sledgehammer up from the hole it had made, she charged forward and swung sideways for Akane’s stomach.
Akane dove up over the swing, hands bracing on top of the gymnast’s head, and flipped up and over her. She twisted as she flew to land by the door facing into the room, even as her use of her opponent as a brace sent Kodachi sprawling across the bed.
“You call ambushing your opponents ‘competing in all fairness’?” Akane demanded.
“ ‘Ambush’, such a nasty way to put it,” Kodachi replied, rolling off the bed and back to her feet, hefting the sledgehammer. “I simply believe in ‘fighting in all fairness’ before the match.”
She lifted the sledgehammer above her head as she again charged forward.
Akane tilted to the side as she side kicked up, her foot slamming into the gymnast’s wrists above Kodachi’s head and knocking the sledgehammer out of her hands to sail back through the open window.
Kodachi stumbled at the abrupt shift in her center of balance and slammed into the wall beside the door. Turning to face her opponent, she dropped, then bounced off the wall again before tumbling to the side as Akane’s reverse roundhouse kick clipped the top of her head.
Akane’s heel imbedded itself in the wall, and she hopped for balance as she yanked it out of the new hole before turning to find Kodachi perched on her bed. “Yeah, right, ‘all fairness’,” she mocked. “You’re as crazy as your brother.”
Kodachi stiffened, fists clenching. “Do not ever compare me to that deluded buffoon!” she snarled. She crouched, ready to leap at Akane, then paused to reconsider as she observed the other girl’s defensive stance. “The rumors are true, you are good, aren’t you?” she mused as she slipped her ribbon out of her sash. “So, I will take my leave, until we meet again, Tendo Akane! Ohohohohohohoho!”
The ribbon swirled out, and with it an explosion of rose petals filled the room, obscuring Akane’s vision. “What? ! Get back here!” she shouted as she charged into the settling cloud of petals, then “umphed” as her legs caught on her bed and she barely kept herself from splitting her chin open on the windowsill. Pulling herself up, she looked out the window Kodachi had to have jumped out of and down into the yard.
Kodachi laughed as she dove out the Tendo peasant’s window, spinning to get her feet underneath her. (Laughed, not cackled. Cackling was a completely different sound, a barbaric hacking of the lowborn — even if it served the same purpose as her own refined, spine-tingling, knees-loosening laughter.) So her little visit hadn’t gone as intended, it was but a minor setback. There would be many opportunities to again seek out Akane over the next week, to once again prove the superiority of the Kuno over the common herd. Nor would that lowborn peasant find it so easy next time to hold Kodachi off from her rightful course!
Then the ground was rushing up to meet her, she braced herself for the impact — and unseen hands grabbed her shoulders and yanked, she spun in the air, and all the air in her lungs blew out as she slammed back first into the ground.
Even with the grass to soften the blow her sight was spangled from her head’s impact, and she fought to suck air back into her temporarily paralyzed chest. Finally she managed to unlock her chest muscles and suck in the fragrant nighttime air, just as she felt someone settle on top of her, straddling her stomach — but there was no one there! Why wasn’t her talisman showing her anything? ! “Akane, you okay?” the same voice she had encountered earlier that afternoon called up to the window she had just leaped out of.
“I’m fine, take out the garbage!” the Tendo commoner called down.
“You got it!” Ranko’s voice shouted back, and a still-woozy Kodachi began to shake as she felt the apparently ample breasts of the spirit press against her own, flesh against flesh right through her leotard even as Akane’s voice echoed down to them again: “Hey, who’s going to clean up this mess? !” Unseen hair brushed across Kodachi’s face, and Ranko’s voice murmured in her ear: “Listen close, you’re gonna want ta get this right the first time. I’m gonna be hauntin’ Akane every minute of every day before yer match, and if I see ya anywhere close ta her before then you’ll hafta forfeit, ‘cause you’re gonna be in the hospital.”
Then the pressure of the spirit’s flesh against her own vanished from on top of her, hands pushed under her shoulders to lift her up, and just as quickly she was lifting up into the air, over the dojo compound’s wall ... and just as suddenly she was in freefall again, barely managing to curl into a roll, feeling the rough surface of the road digging into her shoulders and back and scraping her knees. “An’ don’t come back!” Ranko called out from somewhere above her.
Kodachi staggered to her feet and looked around wildly, and of course saw nothing beyond a normal nighttime Nerima street. Sucking in shuddering breath after shuddering breath, she clenched her fists. “How ... how dare they t-t-treat a Kuno in such a fashion,” she murmured, determinedly ignoring the tremor in her voice. Still, perhaps it would be best to leave her opponent alone until the competition just this once — a Kuno was supposed to be the ambusher, not the victim, after all, and it appeared the Tendo’s spirit ally had the advantage. She would simply have to redouble her training and consider what kind of special tools to bring next Tuesday.
But first, I need to have a ... discussion ... with the tradesman that sold me this amulet.
“Here you go.” Nabiki handed her older sister her bag of rose petals, quickly followed by a still fuming Akane (except when her eyes crossed the hole in the wall she’d punched with her heel, when the anger coming off her in waves was tinged with a large dollop of guilt — Kasumi had visibly flinched when she’d seen it).
Kasumi smiled her thanks as she added them to her own bag. “Will you and Ranma be eating now? she asked.
“Give us a few minutes and we’ll be down,” Nabiki replied. Kasumi nodded and left to warm up the dinners.
Nabiki waited until she heard her sister’s steps on the stairs, then turned back into the room to find Akane pulling text books from her school bag. “Hold up, Akane, there’s something we need to talk about first,” Nabiki said. Then, at Ranma’s questioning look from where the redhead was floating by the window, she added, “The thought I had just before you saw Kodachi-san jumping out the window.”
“Gotcha.” Ranma looked back out over the yard, and Nabiki assumed the street beyond the compound wall, glanced around the room, ceiling and floor as well as the walls, and shrugged before floating away from the window into the center of the room. “Looks like that nutcase isn’t comin’ back, at least right now. I’ll be goin’ ta school as Ranko, though, just ta be sure. Whatcha got?”
Nabiki’s eyebrows rose as she realized just what the determination Ranma had been emoting, the equal of Akane’s fury, had been about. She glanced at her sister and quickly decided that mentioning that Ranma had been standing guard would not be a good idea. Instead, she sat down in the chair at Akane’s desk and motioned for her sister to sit on the bed. Akane and Ranma really weren’t going to like this, but perhaps they were angry enough to go along, anyway.
As soon as Nabiki was seated, Ranma drifted over to settle in her lap, and her arms automatically circled the redhead’s waist and gently hugged her.
Akane plopped down and her bed and pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged. “Save it for your room, you two,” she groused, rolling her eyes, “or better yet a love hotel — the soundproofing is better.” But the emotion she was radiating was resigned affection, and Nabiki smiled softly at her — a smile she’d never show to anyone outside the family — as she reflected that, in spite of the headaches all the fear and hatred at school could give her, being an empath as a good thing. From the feel of Ranma’s chuckle against her chest, she suspected her fiancé agreed with her.
Akane stuck out her tongue, Nabiki assumed at Ranma even if the youngest Tendo couldn’t see her exactly, and asked, “All right, big sis, what do you want to talk about? I really have to get to my school work, and so should Ranma after he eats.”
Right, to business. Nabiki sighed and released Ranma to gently push the succubus off her lap. “You’ll want to be able to see me for this,” she told her. Ranma nodded and drifted to the other side of the room where she could see both Akane and her fiancée.
Once Ranma was settled, Nabiki turned back to her sister. “Tell me, Akane, just how badly do you want to beat the nutcase that just visited?” she asked, then smiled mirthlessly as Akane’s good mood vanished in a wave of fury. “Don’t bother answering, your emotions make that clear, but there’s a problem — you aren’t going to be able to learn enough in a week to pull it off.”
“What!” Akane shouted, and this time her anger wasn’t directed at their recent visitor. She turned toward where she sensed Ranma floating. “But ... but what about what you and Ryoga said tonight? !”
Ranma shifted uncomfortably. Reluctance clear in her tone, she said, “That was mostly Ryoga, but he was right, ya did good tonight. Ya really threw yerself into the training, ya listened, you’re catchin’ on good ... but not good enough — not ta face Kodachi-san in only a week. Especially since it isn’t gonna be a straight-up fight — if it was, you’d mop the floor with her. And d’ya really think she isn’t gonna cheat during the match as much as she is before? Sure, if I let ya compete you’ll put up a good fight, but you’ll still lose.”
“And that will just feed that arrogant bitch’s ego,” Nabiki added.
Akane froze, mouth already open for her shouted rebuttal, then closed her mouth and shook her head. “So what do we do?” she asked, voice sullen. “We can’t just forfeit, that’s just as bad.”
“We cheat,” Nabiki said firmly, “and we do it right — so that no one knows we did it.” Cutting off the gathering protest from both the martial artists, she quickly added, “If it makes the two of you uncomfortable, we can insist that Akane’s name be left off of any awards and presentations. But this isn’t about finding out who’s best, it’s about teaching that Kuno a lesson.”
The other two teenagers glanced toward each other, and finally nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, that’d probably be best,” Ranma agreed. “So how do we do it? Ya said earlier it was magic?”
“Yes, it is,” Nabiki agreed. “Remember how you said you wished there was some way you could do the training and pass it on to Akane? There is ... maybe. I’ll have to do some quick research and talk it over with Mother, but offhand I can’t see why it shouldn’t work if Akane agrees to go along with it.”
Leaning forward in her seat, she continued, “When I was doing my self-training in magic, I came across a ritual for making someone what the gaijin call a spirit warrior or champion. The person at the center of the ritual is offering to bind himself to a god or powerful spirit — the exact opposite of binding a familiar. Just what that means will vary from spirit to spirit; some will insist on codes of conduct, maybe give them missions, while others will give their champions pretty much a free rein. I didn’t pay much attention to it at the time, because it isn’t something our own gods do much. And I wasn’t willing to give up that kind of control over me to anyone.
“But what’s important here is what the champions get out of it — they can summon their chosen spirit, for a kind of possession. A possessed champion is still in control, but he takes on some of the personality traits of his spirit, and a measure of the spirit’s skills — the level of skill determined by the skills of both the champion and the god, and the strength of the link.”
Glancing over at Ranma, Nabiki grinned. “Mind, as wonderful as I think you are, you aren’t a really powerful spirit, much less a god. I suspect that means you can help only one person you’re linked to at a time, and when you do you’ll actually be pulled into the body of whoever is calling on you. But you should be able to refuse any summons if you choose ... and we might be able to break the connection after the match.”
She turned her attention back to her sister to find the raven-haired girl now had her knees pulled up against her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Her anger from before now mixed with uncertainty and fear. Her eyes were shuttling back and forth between her sister and the apparently empty air where Ranma was floating. “Ranma-sensei, do you really think I can’t learn enough in time?” she asked.
Unseen by her student, Ranma rubbed the back of her neck under her free-floating scarlet mane. “Well ... maybe ... probably. Nabs says she has ta research it, so it’s not like we’re gonna do it right away. Nabs, how long will ya take?”
It was Nabiki’s turn to shrug, hiding a wince at the spike of anguished humiliation from her sister. “I’m not even sure it’ll be possible. My book has the basic ritual with suggestions for how to fill in the blanks for various deities, but Mother and I’ll need to see how you fit in.”
“Okay, so why don’t I train with Akane while you an’ Mom do that, then when you get it figured out we’ll see if Akane’s doin’ good enough ta go it alone?” Ranma suggested. “But we’ll need ta have at least a few days before the competition — that whole ‘men don’t move the same way as women’ thing, even if we do end up shovin’ me inta Akane and she gets some a’ my skill, she’ll need a few days ta adjust ta the difference.”
Nabiki nodded thoughtfully, glancing sideways at her sister. She didn’t know if Ranma had stumbled into it or done it deliberately, but Akane had relaxed her grip on her legs and the humiliation she’d been broadcasting had eased off at the suggestion that even with the merger winning would depend on her own efforts. “That sounds reasonable,” Nabiki agreed. “Though it will mean pushing back our first attempt to break the curse on Kasumi and Dr. Tofu another weekend. That might not be a bad idea, anyway, it’ll give me and Mother more time to talk things over with the Amazons. Akane?” When her younger sister reluctantly nodded, she continued, “Now, Ranma, why don’t you head down to the furo and meet me in the family room for dinner? I imagine Kasumi’s waiting for us by now.”
Ranma glanced down at the floor she could barely see and nodded. “Yeah, she is, see ya there.” A moment later she was gone.
Nabiki rose to her feet and strode toward the door, only to pause there for a long moment before turning back and plopping down on the bed beside Akane and pulling her into a brief hug. “You really surprised me tonight, little sis, that took real courage. Kasumi’s going to be proud of you when she hears about it.” With that, she rose and headed off to dinner, leaving her sister behind her slack-jawed with shock.
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(Posted Sun, 12 Feb 2012 00:18)
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