[Episode 253050] [Episode 253050]Xian Pu stared down at her husband. The muscular teenager was flat on his back, a trickle of blood running from his nose.
Beside her, her co-wife sighed. “I think you got a little overeager,” Pa Fum said, also looking down at the unconscious Ryoga. She glanced up at her Second Wife, blushed, and quickly looked back down.
Xian Pu looked down at her generous bare breasts framed by her open blouse, nipples crinkled tight with desire. Why was her First Wife embarrassed? There was no nudity taboo between warriors at the village, and they often bathed together after workouts so it wasn’t like Pa Fum hadn’t seen many a bare breast before — even a certain amount of caressing when a couple got too eager (usually just before the rest of the women in the tub would dunk the overly amorous pair and insist they find a room out of sight if not out of hearing). Xian Pu had actually shared a tub with Pa Fum a few times, and the apprentice healer had never shown the least hint of embarrassment ... or desire, come to think of it. So why now?
{You know that as Second Wife you’ll be expected to share my bed and ... and see to my needs?}
Pa Fum’s words from the night after Xian Pu’s fight with Ryoga echoed in her mind, and a grin spread across Xian Pu’s face as she realized exactly ‘why now’ — her co-wife was actually thinking about her as a bedmate, and not just for sharing blankets like they had been since the night they’d agreed to share their Husband. She opened her mouth to suggest that the two carry on without him, only to pause as she remembered her great-grandmother’s advice the next morning, on the need to nudge Pa Fum along, not push — how they needed a strong, self-confident Pa Fum, a true First Wife, not a mouthpiece for whatever Xian Pu thought. How above all else, Xian Pu could not dominate her co-wife, in anything. No, she would just have to wait, even if the village Champion had gone from being able to have any unattached boy and many of the warriors in training she wanted (something she’d taken liberal advantage of) to famine, first alone then surrounded by couples, with a bashful First Wife and a Husband that couldn’t even look at her properly.
Xian Pu sighed and began doing up her blouse again. Like the stunt her great-grandmother had pulled on her that afternoon, it was one more lesson in patience that she clearly needed. {Perhaps,} she replied in their native tongue — with their Husband unconscious, there was no point sticking to a Japanese language that had to make her sound like an idiot. {But I just can’t believe our Husband is so ... so damaged. What if he is never capable of giving us children?}
{If time doesn’t cure him, we will think of something else. And this will give us time to ... grow more accustomed to each other,} Pa Fum replied, and to Xian Pu’s surprise there was even a hint of firmness in the tone — though that might be because her co-wife was thinking of their Husband as a patient? She had no trouble being both firm and decisive where the wellbeing of her patients was concerned. Not that that was necessarily a good thing here....
Xian Pu grinned at a sudden thought. {It looks to be a clear night tonight, why don’t we get our blankets and bed down right here? Maybe it’ll help Husband grow more accustomed to us if he wakes up with a Wife on each arm.}
Pa Fum was blushing again, bright enough to be visible in the fading light, but she nodded her agreement. {We’ll need a few more blankets, but it’s a good idea. Let’s do it.}
Still hidden behind by the Umisenken, Genma looked up at the apartment building his wife had just entered. While his cloaking technique hid him from sight and ki-sense (though as Ranma had reminded him a few nights ago, not from all senses), unlike his sometime-succubus “daughter” it didn’t allow him to pass through walls. Or doors, such as the one that had automatically locked behind his ex-wife before he had a chance to get through behind her before it closed. Okay, you can do this, he thought. You were able to sort out No-chan’s — Tatsuno-san’s ki-signature on the train while you were riding on the top, and there are a fewer people here. There were more walls, though, and he’d tracked her on the crowded train by picking up her signature as she exited the car....
Shaking off his doubts, the sometime-panda circled the building, checking out the first floor apartments with lights on in the early evening dusk ... nothing. He leaped up a level, then across the tiny balconies each apartment on the upper levels had. Still nothing — at least, no Nodoka. There were people home, and for long minutes he stared through a glass door at one young woman on her hands and knees, squealing in time to her swinging bare breasts and the wet slap of flesh on flesh as a sweat-coated man hammered into her from the rear. Finally, Genma forced himself to turn away and move on. At least I am moving on, he thought, forcing down a slight spurt of concerned shame. I am not like the Master — it isn’t like I was looking through their door just to watch them, and he would have been through the glass and all over her, everything else forgotten. The balding martial artist ignored the passing thought that it had been awhile since his last woman — since before leaving for China — and if it was a bad idea to try to pick up a one night stand at a bar in Nerima or use some of his earnings to find a prostitute, he could always watch. No one would even know he was there....
Half an hour later, on the third level, he found her (delayed a few minutes by another couple, teenagers that time). Gazing through the glass door leading from the apartment balcony into a bedroom, Genma frowned at the colored powders his former wife and a robed Shinto priest were laying out in a half-circle of lines and symbols he didn’t recognize against a wall. What was No — Tatsuno-san up to?
Nodoka stood and stretched. The summoning circle was finished — or in this case, the summoning half-circle. Normally, she wouldn’t have dreamed of using such a set-up — a wall’s significance as a boundary closed the connection, but would allow anything summoned able to pass through material objects or strong enough to make its own hole to use that wall for an escape route — but this time their target was probably a departed spirit, and with a truly holy priest assisting her it should be safe enough. “That should do it. Kannushi-san, thanks again for allowing me this opportunity before cleansing the echo.”
The Shinto priest also stood, bowing slightly to Nodoka. “It is my honor to help a Scout of your quality in her investigation, especially when it involves an apparent murder. And since the Sasakis don’t know what is involved in an exorcism, I’ll be able to pass off what little of the summoning circle we might miss cleaning up as part of the cleansing ritual when they return from their night at a love hotel. They’ll never know you were here again.”
Nodoka nodded agreement (forcing down an instinctive protest — it had only been a few years, she wasn’t that good), but grimaced. She really hated sneaking around behind that sweet newlywed couple’s backs, especially when it involved their home. If only her contacts inside the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department had been able to shed some light on the apparently murdered young woman she had seen, but they’d come up empty, not a hint in their records that anything had ever happened in the apartment....
She shook off her regrets. Solving a murder took precedence over a little invasion of privacy, especially when she was accompanied by someone — a priest, no less — that did have permission to be there. Picking up her scabbarded katana from where it leaned against the bed they’d leaned up against the wall to make room, she slipped it through her sash, then loosened the blade for a quick-draw. She didn’t expect trouble, but she hadn’t lasted even the few years she had by depending on that particular expectation. And if the spirit did turn out to be both hostile and powerful, the long hours she had spent enchanting her blade would go a long way to changing its mind. She’d learned that lesson when the Scout that trained her had been eviscerated before her eyes by a departed spirit he summoned that turned out to be a revenant. If she had been actually participating in the ritual instead of observing far enough back that she barely had time to draw her blade, she would have been next. “Let’s get started.”
The priest nodded and stepped to his place. “I have to say that I’ve never heard of anyone using an echo in a ritual as one would a photograph or drawing,” he said.
“I can’t entirely take the credit,” Nodoka replied as she found her own place, then spread her hands. “I have a new apprentice that was self-taught for a number of years herself before she found me. While a certain amount of retraining has been necessary, she’s also had some questions and innovations that I’d never considered. It has had me rethinking much of our traditional ways.”
She watched the echo of the young woman sitting with her baby girl until the woman’s head snapped back as if shot, took a deep breath and started chanting as her tension grew (in Japanese, though she was considering learning the Esperanto her apprentice used for the more uncertain rituals — not that it would have been usable with another participant that didn’t know the language).
The priest joined in precisely on cue, and the two slowly lifted their arms, the chant growing louder even as the echo cycled several times through their crescendo until just as the echo’s head snapped back yet again they snapped their hands in front of their chest in loud claps as Nodoka shouted, “Come!”
The echo silently vanished, to be replaced by the translucent image of the same young woman, standing where the echo had been. The spirit’s head whipped around wildly as she took in her surroundings. “What ... ! ? Where ... ! ?” she stuttered out.
Nodoka sighed, both relief and regret. The spirit was just a spirit, so she and the priest were safe enough, but the woman that had made the echo really was dead — Nodoka had never heard of an echo of anyone that wasn’t dead, but one of the things she had remembered in her Nabiki-inspired reassessment was that not all the events echoes reenacted involved death. One echo she knew of was a castle haunted by a pair of little girls playing together, and they had died centuries earlier in a plague; they were actually quite the tourist attraction, the castle drawing visitors from all over the world hoping for a glimpse of the laughing pair. She’d been hoping.... We really need to learn more about just how echoes are created.
Shaking off her momentary introspection, Nodoka bowed low to the confused spirit. “Please forgive us for disturbing your rest, but we have questions that need answering involving your death.”
“My ... oh.” The spirit looked around again, more calmly this time, and seemed to shrink in on herself. “This was my bedroom. But it looks so different now, how long has it been since my murder?”
Nodoka winced, another hope dashed — it actually had been a murder. It hadn’t been likely to be anything else, from what the echo had been acting out, but appearances could be deceiving. Not this time, apparently.
“That is one of the things we need to determine,” the priest replied. “We have been unable to determine even who you are or when you lived here.”
The spirit seemed to shrink even more, her eyes falling. “My name is Mori Noriko and I lived here from 1994 to 1996.” Her voice falling to almost a whisper, she added, “You don’t know anything about little Kaede either, do you?”
“Your baby?” Noriko jerked a nod, and the priest sighed. “No, Mori-san, we don’t.”
“Finding out what happened to your daughter is one of the things I need to do,” Nodoka added. When Noriko looked up, she continued, “I am Tatsuno Nodoka. Please, anything you can tell us about what happened will help.”
“O-Okay, but Kaede is my son, not my daughter,” Noriko said. “It started shortly after I moved to Tokyo. I met Saitou-san in a bar my office’s secretarial pool used. He was a little old for my tastes, but he was handsome, dashing, educated, we were drinking — we ended up spending the night at a love hotel. The next morning he was as kind and attentive as he’d been the night before, and when he asked if he could see me again I was happy to say yes.
“The next few months were magical — intimate restaurant conversations, walks in parks, the cherry blossom festival.... I knew that it wouldn’t last, that he was married, but I didn’t care — I was enjoying living every woman’s romantic dreams too much to worry about the future.”
She paused to wipe at spectral tears, then took a deep breath and continued, her eyes falling. “I first started sensing that something was wrong when I became pregnant. He actually figured it out before I did, and when it was confirmed he practically begged me to have the baby, offered to adopt the child, or to pay for its upkeep if I chose to keep it myself. I wasn’t sure, but he was so ... so understanding about everything, so happy....
“Things started getting weird when he simply assumed the baby was a boy. He never even asked about determining the sex, and when I suggested that I wanted to wait, for it to be a surprise he just shrugged. After that I realized that he’d never actually told me how he earned his living, and from the occasional slip I suspected that he had plans for our baby. I started to get worried. I was glad when Kaede decided to come while he was out of town, on a business trip he said.
“I was back home in the apartment he’d found for me — closer to his home, he said — when he next visited. I’d decided to pretend that Kaede was a girl instead of a boy, it wasn’t like Saitou-san was going to change any diapers, but as soon as he walked through the door he pulled out a gun and ... and ...” She broke off and dropped to her knees within the half-circle, arms wrapped around herself.
“I’m sorry,” Nodoka said softly after a long moment, politely averting her eyes from the translucent young woman and wishing now that she’d brought her son along as she’d considered — Ranma, at least, might have been able to touch ... comfort ... the grieving spirit. “I swear, I will do everything in my power to find your son. But I need to know more. What did Saitou-san look like? What was his full name? At what times was he able to visit you? Were there any odd days in particular he would show up, or couldn’t? What were his favorite foods? Anything you can tell me.”
After a few minutes Noriko slowly stood up again, wiping at her face. “Well, his hair was dark brown and beginning to gray, he had a scar ...”
Still wrapped in the Umisenken’s protective cloak, Genma silently stepped away from the glass door, then easily leapt across the slight gap between the balcony and the next one apartment over before dropping to the street three floors down, so caught up in what he’d seen and heard that he didn’t even think to consider seeing if either couple were still going at it. It looked like Nodoka’s interrogation was going to take awhile, and he needed to think.
Nodoka was not the romantic, naïve (and possibly oversexed) girl he had left behind when he had taken Ranma off on the training journey, he had realized that the moment he first saw her toned body and air of confidence in the Tendo family room. But this ... not only was his ex-wife dealing with forces he’d never imagined before his son’s curse, but with murder and kidnapping.
And where did a balding martial artist of great skill but limited utility fit into that?
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(Posted Wed, 21 Mar 2012 06:40)
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