As soon as the combined Diggers-Nerimian group left, an elderly figure stepped out of the shadows and lit a cigar. "This…was not part of the plan."
And then he was gone. The message had been confirmed.
[Experiment 089G completed. Unlycanthropic strain confirmed in four test subjects.]
The Diggers's camp turned out to be an ultramodern assembly of self-setting tents and portable appliances of improbable size and complexity for two women to carry. The three youths (and Genma, who had somehow unpretzeled himself) lounged in the larger tent. Genma was playing with a tire…no one was sure where he got it. The Nermians knew better than to ask. Ranma sat between Akane and Ryoga, with Ryoga as far away as he could be without being completely out of the conversation.
Gina walked into the tent with a tea set. "Um, I suppose I should play a gracious host," she said, setting the tray down before her 'guests.' She turned to Britanny. "And as for you, we need to do something about you not understanding what anyone is saying."
"Gina, if you try to shove a fish in my ear, I will give you a wedgie like you have never dreamed possible," Brit warned.
Gina rolled her eyes and tossed Brit what looked like an oversized cellphone earpiece. "I put that together while the tea was brewing."
Brit looked it over suspiciously and clipped it to her ear. "And what is it?"
"Hey, I understood that," Ranma said.
"You what?" Brit asked. "Wait, when did you learn to speak English?"
Ranma sulked. "My grades aren't that bad."
"That device," Gina interrupted, "contains enough of a Japanese-English dictionary to see you through. At least for now."
"Well why weren't you using it earlier then?" Ranma asked.
"I just built it," Gina said reasonably.
Ranma stared. He knew very little about electronic technology and computer programming, but he had a healthy respect for how hard it was to learn a language, and this woman had just taught two languages to that little box in what had to be five minutes at most.
For her part, Gina just shrugged. Voice recognition and synthesis were old hat, so really all it took was borrowing that code, duplicating it, creating new syntax and vocabulary files for Japanese, and linking them together. If she had had a few more minutes, she would have installed a camera for translating text, too. Nothing any super-genius couldn't do. "Anyway, I imagine you three have a lot of questions."
"I have a bunch too," Brit muttered.
"And so do I," Gina admitted. "In any case, I serious doubt we have all the answers, but if we share what we do know, we might get a few steps closer to them."
"What spring did you fall in?" Ranma asked Brit.
"Spring?" Brit asked, confused. "You mean like a pool of water?"
Ranma blinked and gestured at Brit's body. "You didn't pick up that fur at Jusenkyo?"
"Jusenkyo?" Gina asked. She reached to her wrist. The bracelet device wasn't designed to be a computer terminal originally, but after all the encounters with the dragons' strange phantom rings, she had rebuilt it to serve as a terminal with a hyperwave link to GinaCom. "I think I came across something about that when I was studying Asian mages. It's somewhere in China, right?" A hologram popped out of her wrist, a screen and keypad combo. She typed away at the air.
"Er, yeah," Ranma said. How many gizmos did the girl have, anyway?
Gina paused. "Um…a thousand cursed springs? Oh, your gender thing. So are you originally a guy or girl?"
"I'm a guy!" Ranma yelled.
Gina winced slightly. "Sorry. Touchy subject?"
"You have no idea," Akane muttered.
"I take it that your father isn't a were-panda, then?"
"What's a were-panda?"
Gina sighed. "We have a long way to go it seems. I guess we'll start with lycanthropy 101."
Akane rubbed her temple, trying to ignore the fur on her fingers and forehead. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had the puffy look of someone who had been crying a lot (even through her fur), but her voice was steady. "So you are a were-cheetah, but you don't have the ability to make new were-cheetahs, which your father stripped from you because he thought you'd accidentally make slaves."
"Yes," Britanny said.
"And this ruin belonged to the guy who made were-cheetahs?" Ranma asked, sounding equally pained.
"I don't think so," Gina said. "What I've been able to figure out is that he was working on weres that were already in existence, not making new breeds."
"And somehow whatever gunk Panda-baka tossed on me and Ranma made us were-cheetahs," Akane said dubiously.
"It was probably a factor," Gina agreed. "Ryoga was hit by different potions and his curse clearly influenced his transformation."
"So how do we cure this?" Ryoga asked gruffly, trying to get the conversation off his curse.
Gina sighed. "It's…not that simple. This isn't a disease; I've been able to prove that conclusively. I don't think it's a curse, either, since none of you are beholden to Britanny."
"Don't tell me," Akane breathed.
"No one knows any way to turn a were into a human. That's what this ruin was devoted to, and as far as I can tell it was a miserable failure. Maybe because of your unique means of transformation it can be peeled away, but it's just as likely that the magic is even more tightly woven on you because it's such a tangled mess."
Britanny sighed as the three lycanthropes froze like stone statues again. "Maybe we should call Dad."
"Magic is his arena," Gina agreed, pulling out her phone.
"Never be human again?" Ryoga whimpered. All his worries about being locked as a piglet were coming true.
Britanny tilted her head. "Well, if you are a were-pig, you should be able to take human form again."
"WHAT!?" the three teens all yelled, the shock blown away. "You said there wasn't a cure!" Ryoga accused.
Britanny rolled her eyes and concentrated a moment. She collapsed in on herself, leaving a slightly scrawny girl with dirty-blonde, brown-spotted hair and slightly pointed ears, but otherwise identifiably human..
Ranma and Ryoga felt their jaws drop while Akane just felt relief.
"Were-creatures have three forms," Britanny explained. She shifted again to full cheetah form…and froze. Gina said not to go cheetah in front of Ranma! She slowly looked towards the boy.
Ranma didn't react at all. "Huh. So human, cat, and halfcat?"
Ryoga stared. Akane stared. Britanny nodded. "Righ'," she growled crudely.
"Ranma," Akane said weakly.
"Yeah?"
"You're…you're in the same room as a cat."
Ranma blinked a few times. "Hey." He looked at Britanny. "You're right. She's a cat. She's a cat!"
Gina looked over from her phone call. "What's the yelling about?"
"No more nekoken!" Ranma cheered.
"O…kay…" Gina turned back to her phone. "Dad? Yeah, the sooner you could come the better. Things are getting stranger. Yes, I said stranger. Great, see you soon." She clicked off the phone and looked to Brit. "Dad will be here in about five minutes…and you shredded your clothes again."
"Rrr?" Brit looked herself over. "Oos."
Gina pushed a few buttons on her wrist terminal. "Right, one change of clothes coming…up?" A blinding flash and loud KRAK sounded as space and time were bent over Gina's knee and paddled into submission to teleport…a small metal dome shaped thing with eyes and a tail.
"Chu?"
"Peebochu, I did not choose you!" Gina pushed another button.
"CHUUU!" The peebochu vanished in another flash that deposited a neatly folded set of Britanny's clothes in the tent.
Brit took them in her mouth and trotted off to get some privacy. "Than's."
"You're welcome," Gina called. She looked at their guests. The three teens and the panda were all staring at her. "What?"
"Where do I even begin?" Akane muttered.
"You pull hammers out of thin air and a little hyperspatial storage tech freaks you out?"
"But you didn't manipulate your ki at all," Ranma protested.
Gina smiled and held up one of her gadgets. "I'm not really that good with stuff like that, so I build tech to help me along."
Genma's beady panda eyes roved through the technological mockery of a campsite with new appreciation. Rather than useless toys used by soft, weak foreigners, suddenly he saw valuable machines that could make martial arts better. Or fetch a nice sum of yen in a pawn shop.
Ranma had more important things to worry about than his father's greed. "So what was that about turnin' back to normal?"
Gina shrugged. "I'm not a werecheetah. You'll need to wait for Brit to get back."
Ranma was half out of his chair when Akane's hand grabbed his shoulder. He turned and looked into a glare of doom that had nothing to do with werecheetah enchantments. "You are not going to barge in on a naked woman," she growled.
"Yes ma'am," Ranma agreed meekly.
Britanny returned a few moments later. "So much for theory. You can probably figure out some shifting by yourselves, but…" she trailed off and watched Ryoga and Ranma develop mildly constipated expressions. "BUT! You haven't built up enough lunar energy shift instinctively. You can only do that once every day."
Ranma winced. "That sounds restrictive."
"Which is why there's a technique to tap energy freely," Britanny said with a wink. "Now, I've never taught this to anyone, but it all comes together and becomes really easy when you do it right."
A few minutes later, Theodore Diggers teleported into the ruins. The old aura-mage was wearing his mage suit and a curious expression. "Hello, Gina. What was getting so strange?"
Gina pointed.
Theo turned and…stared. And stared. And stared, utterly dumbfounded by the sight before him.
Three cheetahs were…apparently playing. Understandably a trained eye with cheetahs, he quickly identified one as male, one as Britanny, and all of them as werecheetahs. The male and his daughter were keeping the other female werecheetah from reaching (and probably snacking on) a small black piglet. There was also a trained panda waving signs in Japanese. Theo didn't read the language, so he ignored it. Well, as much as someone could ignore a panda waving signs around.
Gina reached over and closed her father's mouth. "Careful daddy, you'll catch flies like that," she teased.
Theo spared Gina a withering glance before returning to watch the absurd spectacle. "I think you'd better fill me in."
"Sounds good," Gina agreed. She pulled out a forcefield projector and caught Akane in a bubble. The neowerecat yowled in rage and clawed at the field. "Britanny's never been able to claw through one of my forcefields," Gina warned. "Don't waste your energy. Just calm down and change back, and I'll let you out, Akane."
Akane roared something that would send sane men running for the horizon. No one so much as flinched. "I think calming down will take a while," Theo observed. "Shouldn't we just give her the piglet?"
"BWEEEEE!!"
"That's Ryoga," Gina explained. "He's a werepig."
Theo blinked once. "What."
A few minutes later Akane was calm(er) and the neophyte werecreatures were in their human forms. Ryoga's skin was darker by several shades, and he sported a somewhat flatter nose than he used to, but he was otherwise unchanged. Akane and Ranma's ears were pointed and their hair was dirty blonde with brown splotches. Ranma was taking more care than ever to stay between Akane and Ryoga; Akane's emotions were still raw and they didn't need her to snap a third time.
"Well I can see why you called me," Theo said, hands and eyes glowing with mana. "This is not lycanthropy at all."
Ranma and Akane sighed in relief. Thralldom didn't appeal to them, thank you very much.
"In fact," Theo mused, "I can't find a lycanthropic enchantment in their auras at all. But there's…something else. Something filling the hole I created in Britanny when I stripped her lycanthropy."
"A replacement for lycanthropy?" Gina asked.
"Possibly," Theo agreed. "I'll need to explore an unmodified werecat aura to be sure."
"Which means going to Jade," Gina surmised.
"That's right," Theo agreed.
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(Posted Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:24)
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