His boxers and socks, although woolen for the latter, were ordinary. The rest of his clothes, for a heavy day, were weighted. The slacks weighed a hundred pounds a pair. The shirts were another fifty pounds. The boots weighed two hundred and fifty pounds apiece. And his wrist bracers were an additional twenty-five pounds each. That made seven hundred pounds of extra weight to move around in. It was a colossal amount, made worse by the conditions in the training facility.
Ultimately, it was the training facility, that marvelous work of engineering, which gave rise to his great strength. The air was a quarter the thickness of air at sea-level, and the gravity could be raised to more than ten times normal gravity. That level of gravity, combined with the weighted clothes, made it so that he was carrying an extra 7,000 pounds. When he felt like **really** pushing himself, he had an 800lb. suit of armor that he could don. Under ten-fold gravity, it brought the extra weight to 15,000 pounds. When combined with the thin air, the clothing made his workouts more like torture sessions.
But it had been necessary. He had needed to rebuild himself from the ground up.
This man, this mountain of a man, who now called himself K2, had once been a dying nobleman by the name of Wolfgang Krauser.
He thought back to ten years before, at the events that led to his “rebirth”.
He had been desperately ill, he remembered. It was a cancer, the doctor told him, which was causing his strength to ebb and his body to waste away from within.
He remembered, for probably the only time in his life, being afraid. But he thought he knew of a solution.
He journeyed to the mountainous nation of Tibet. He had heard, once, offhandedly, about an ancient healer - more of a sorcerer, really - who lived alone in the mountain wilds. He sought out this man, and did find him, after a year of searching.
The healer had worked the miracle Krauser needed. But somehow, though it had certainly been successful (for the cancer was gone), it had been too effective by half. Wolfgang Krauser had been restored to full health and power, but in the body he had possessed when he was a mere scamp of barely twelve.
A twelve year-old’s body could not possibly contain the reservoir of battle ki that Wolfgang Krauser had formerly commanded. That tempest of energy threatened to burn him away. So he had been forced to constantly make use of it, until he could bring it in line.
It took a year. When the year finished, he was left with his ki reserves larger than they had ever been, but they were fully under his command.
He had by this time returned to his castle, and issued the command to some of the world’s finest scientists and engineers to build a high-gravity training center, which would eventually grant him a body worthy of the even more extraordinary power he now possessed. Knowing (or at least believing) that nobody would ever believe he was the original Wolfgang Krauser, he took the nickname of K2, and for a while pretended amongst some of his retainers that he was Wolfgang Krauser’s eventual heir, whilst the real man was away on personal business. Building the training center took another year, by which time he was physically about fourteen or fifteen, where a nearly seventy year-old man should have been. Once it was built to operating condition, to his specifications and satisfaction, he had the blueprints and the engineers destroyed, so that the facility could not be duplicated.
After two extraordinarily difficult years, he was physically about seventeen, and appeared to be nearly twenty. It was time to make himself known to the world. He had abandoned the practice of pretending he was Krauser’s heir, but by this time the nickname K2 meant a great deal to him: it seemed more like an identity.
His reduction in age from the healing of his illness had granted him a new lease on life. Effectively, he had been gifted a second life. He had taken the name from a mountain. K2 was the tallest mountain in the world. Mountains were imposing. Mountains were mighty. Mountains endured.
So he kept the moniker. He set himself up as the sponsor of the coming year’s King of Fighters tournament, and had announced his presence to the world when he annihilated one of the mountains of the Andes range in South America, and defeated every single opponent he’d faced in the tournament, winning a team competition without a team at his side. He had not incurred so much as a bruise in doing so.
He found it especially ironic, fittingly so, that it had been Terry Bogard who had asked him who he was, after the tournament had concluded.
Three years ago, two years after the tournament, he had completely leveled Ayer’s Rock with a single, fully-powered ki-enhanced punch. A man had faced down a mountain, and won without so much as a token struggle.
Wolfgang Krauser was gone. In his place was K2, Wolfgang Krauser rebuilt.
~_~
< “I’ve never heard anything that scary”, Nabiki Tendou said, her voice trembling slightly. To anyone who knew her, at least in passing, just that display of emotion would have come as a big surprise. Internally, Nabiki fought desperately to retain what little composure she could, but it was a futile struggle.
Ranma Saotome just continued to shiver. “That was the second time for me. I’d thought the first thing was worse than anything I could imagine, but now I know for sure: the only thing worse than hearing him laugh **once**, is hearing it again.” Carefully, she stood up, cursing her adoptive father for ever finding that booklet, and insisting they train at Jusenkyou; and also cursing himself, currently herself, for going along with it.
She hoped nobody else, for there were many people watching, had remembered that she’d been a boy only minutes ago. The last thing she needed right now would be her curse becoming known to the general public. She carefully made her way off the ice rink, her fiancée following close behind.
Yagami had schooled his features into the typical emotionless mask by the time Ranma and Nabiki got to the door. Demonstrating better manners than Ranma Saotome would have expected of him, the redhead held the door open for Nabiki and Ranma to walk through.
“Nabiki, let’s go back to your place. Both of us need to shower and change. Yagami, you’ll just have to wait. I’ll explain everything there.”
Yagami said nothing. He simply followed along.
Under ninety minutes later, he was sitting in the dojo, as Ranma and Nabiki sat down in front of him. Yagami noticed that Ranma was male once again. This was definitely one of the strangest days of his life.
“Explain”, he said, his tone brooking not the slightest argument.
Saotome nodded. “It’s a curse. Cold water changes me into a girl. Hot water changes me back.”
Yagami nodded. “Where’d it come from?”
Saotome shook his head, frowning. “I fell into a spring in China. The place was called Jusenkyou; I think the name means ‘Pools of Sorrow’. Pop also fell into a spring, before you ask. He becomes a panda. Same conditions apply.”
“How long have you had it?”
“Almost a month. Worst month I can really remember.” He looked slightly sad at this. Yagami wondered about it, but decided he didn’t really care.
“I can imagine”, Yagami said, his voice deadpan. “I’ve never heard of that place. I can ask dad if he knows about it, but chances are he doesn’t, else he and I might have trained there ourselves. Where is it and what’s the place like?”
Ranma shrugged. “It’s in a valley, some mountain range in China; I can’t remember the name. The valley has more than a hundred springs, each with its own curse. The place has been around for thousands of years; I think the guide said that the drowned girl spring was 1500 years old, and the drowned panda spring was 2000 years old. The springs are small but deep, and the water is pretty cold. The pools have long bamboo poles sticking out of them; the way Pop and I figured it, the place was for balance and jumping exercise. I don’t know what the curses are for. Anyway, an animal or person drowned in each, and whichever pool you fall in is what you become when you get splashed, if you don’t drown.”
Yagami thought about this for a few minutes, in silence. “Is there a cure?”
Saotome shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t had time to look for one.” He scowled. “There better be.”
Yagami nodded again. He stood up. “I’m out of here. I’ll see you two Monday. Sorry for getting you wet then, Saotome, I won’t do that again without a reason.” He found his own way out, chuckling softly to himself on the way home.
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(Posted Fri, 26 Mar 2004 02:26)
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