REVENGE [Alpha Draft]
by Christopher Willmore
Tentative release date October 31st


	Ryouga shook his head to clear it.  The time had come.  Try as he might,
he still couldn't shake the feeling of dread that accompanied this operation.
It had been carefully planned, prepared, plotted, even fantasised over, and
everyone from Cologne to Kasumi had helped to set it up, in three different
centuries, but still...
	This was Willmore they were dealing with.
	Willmore, who had turned Akari into a cannibal,
	Willmore, who had roasted Ranma and fed him to the Tendos,
	Willmore, who had cursed the lives of Hibikis and Gosunkugis for generations
yet to come...
	He would pay. Tonight.  But... They had to be careful.
   What Skywise thought of as warped reality PALED next to this person's...
Evil.
   If he was going to face this person, he had to have his ki at full strength.
	<Think, Ryouga, what else has he done to you?> Tap the depression, gain its
strength. <Death, an unstable marriage to Ukyou> Not dark enough.  Everyone
dies,
and Ukyou was... Well... <Better stop that before I get a nosebleed.>  He tried
harder.  He HAD to be at his peak.  What else had he.... <Eternal wandering.> 
That's right... He'd not only died, but he'd come BACK, doomed to be alone,
doomed
to never rest, to never have the POSSIBILITY of resting... At least with 
Takahashi-sama he had the dojo, but in WILLMORE'S world...  In WILLMORE'S world,
Akane had killed herself.
	That did it.  The Hibiki gnashed his teeth and closed his eyes, partly out
anger and partly to avoid being blinded by the blue aura that suddenly
surrounded
him.
	He then let out an odd sound, in between a sob and a laugh, a cry and a scream.
Finally, it was all going to be FIXED.  No more of this! No more people in
pieces,
no more deaths and resurrections, no more emotional and physical torture...
	The eternal lost boy looked up, with fire in his eyes. "No more."  He took
a quick look at the door in front of him.  A message
board, reading 'Join the Anime Liberation Front!', a postcard with a
squirrel on it,
and... A picture of the 2096 Gosunkugi girl?  How... Ironic... He tapped his
comm
badge, given to him by one of the future Hibikis.  "Is the backup team in
place, 
Ranma?" 
	"Yep.  Want me to join you?"
	"I'll be fine."
	"Just be careful, ok?  Don't do somethin' stupid, or nothin'. Remember, he can
write."
	"I know."
    "Don't let 'im get near that computer."
	"He won't.  Over and out."
	It felt nice to be in command.  They'd voted, and it seemed that Ryouga and the
Hibikis, in general, seemed to have benefited the most from Chris's...
Attentions...
And so it was decided that he should head the strike team.  Ranma was second in
command, representing himself and the Tendos, and they were keeping one ace
up their
sleeve, a member of another family who had been touched by his mental plague.
	<Enough delays.>
	Ryouga pressed a finger to the door. "Bakusai Ten-ketsu!"  He and Ranma
raised their
arms against their faces to protect against the splinter shrapnel, then
looked into
the now-accessible room to face a very startled writer at his keyboard.
	Or rather, a writer who SHOULD have been very startled.
	Instead, he looked rather calm.
	A grin spread across his face as he stretched his arms and pronounced,
	"I've been expecting you."
	"You... You have?"  This had NOT been part of Cologne's plan.
	"Of course I have.  I wrote this."
	"But... I... But..."
	A wider smile.  But... Wait... Was that a twitch?
	"Don't listen to him, boy!" called Cologne from his badge. "He's trying to
fool 
you!  Blast him while you can! If he gets to the computer -"
	"Too late, Cologne. The file's been written, and will be posted just as soon
as I have my fun with lost boy here.  Let's see... I've killed you, had you
eaten,
brought you back to life, destroyed your chances with Akane... Hmm...
There's always
that Franken-P-Chan idea that was floating around at Otakon..."
	"Oh, no you don't!"  He slipped off one of his bandannas and tossed it towards
the boy, who dodged it and picked it up from the floor.
	"Much better than the one I made myself. Mind if I keep it?"
	"DIE, WILLMOOOOOOOOORE!"  The following seconds were only a blur. Ryouga's
battle
aura burned the room with its azure fire as he put his fists together and swung.
He'd practised this, but never fully, and if he didn't make it...
	He made it.  His handball connected with Chris's stomach, and at that very
moment
he released all his pent-up depression, all his anger and frustration in a
massive
second-movie Shishi Houkodan.
	Willmore never even resisted.  He grinned the whole time, as his body was sent
flying against the three-foot thick concrete wall;  even his skull kept the
impression
of a smile as his facial flesh was burnt off and his bones imbedded into the
grey,
artificial stone.
	The menace was no more.
	All that remained were, quite appropriately, bits and pieces. Fragments of
bone,
half of the cranium, and burnt mounds of flesh spattered the room, and
Ryouga could
still see the afterglow from his ki-blast as it...
	<That's not an afterglow...>
	Each of the individual parts that had been Willmore was emitting a soft light,
and these pinpoints of luminescence were levitating, and moving towards each
other,
coalescing into an almost coherent-
	"Deity..." The Hibiki tapped his comm badge. "Ranma? The old ghoul was right!
He's not staying dead!"
	"WHAT?!?"
    "You heard me!"
	"I guess we should have expected that..."
    Ryouga backed away a few steps as the shining white figure, as the features
gained resolution. It was Chris, all right. And still smiling.
	"Ranma, send her in NOW!"
	"Send WHO in?" A pause. "Oh, right."
	In just a second the glass from the window blasted inwards, and ghost and
warrior
turned alike to view the new arrival.
	A girl sat crouched on the wide sill.  Long brown hair reached well past her
shoulders, and was accented by a white stripe down the middle. Her black
bodysuit
had probably hidden her from view earlier, while her leather jacket would have
kept her warm as she kept watch over the window...  Her lilac eyes were now
fixed
on a tri-metal object which she was fingering with interest.
	At length, she gripped the artifact and hopped onto the ground, smiling
wickedly
and looking straight at the apparition with her lilac eyes.
	*Gosunkugi Skeride...*
	"One and the same."
	*I haven't done anything to -*
	"You've died, and no longer belong with the living. Isn't that what you wrote
me out to be? A merciless killer of the dead?"
	*But... I never thought... I...*
	"How NICE of you to leave the P'ur-bu lying around for me, too..."
	The shade backed a few steps, almost running into a speechless Ryouga.  It was
hard to believe that one of Gos's descendants was going to be the one to end
this terror... Then again... She DID have Akari's blood in her... <Akari and
Hikaru... The mere THOUGHT of it sent a shudder down his spine...> And -
Hadn't she 
almost exterminated HIS ghost in a story?
	 "That's right," continued Skeride, in a somehow inappropriately sweet voice.
"You didn't THINK.  Oh, you PLOTTED well enough, filling in the gaps, making
sure it
was plausible..." She held the anti-demon dagger in front of her. "But you never
THOUGHT how it would AFFECT us, did you?  You never THOUGHT that perhaps
some of us
would enjoy a HAPPY ENDING once in a while..."  She raised the weapon above her
head. "Good-bye, Willmore."
	The P'ur-bu came crashing down.
	Surprisingly, it took very little force to send it through Ryouga's braincase,
which was a blessing in disguise since it meant that he felt nothing as he
fell lifeless to the ground.
	"Oh, no..." moaned the Gosunkugi.  She'd always seen ghosts as fully solid, and
this had backfired, this time, allowing Willmore to melt through Ryouga just
behind
him in just enough time to... "Oh, no..."
	But - where was he?
	A sudden mental jerk, from within her.
	<<I'm inside of you.>>
	"What???"
	<<Ask Childra about it sometime. She'll find the double angle brackets quite...
Familiar.>>
	<Posession...>
	"Get out of me!"
	<<Not a chance. Now... Let's see... What was that attack of yours? Oh, yes...
The 'soul-trap-bubble'...>>
	"You wouldn't..."
	<<I would, and I could.>>
	"It only filters out the soul that DOESN'T belong in the body."
	<<I created you.  You are a PART of me.  Doesn't the WHOLE deserve the body
more
than the FRACTION?>>
	"You're bluffing."
	Against her will, Skeride began to glow lilac.  The aura intensified in
brightness,
if not in size, and flickered as she struggled to subdue it, but Chris had
been right.
Her body and that part of her mind which was not her soul were acting as if they
were HIS, not hers...  Her spiritual energy finally gave out, and the blast
that had
been accumulating now turned inwards in a searing purple fire.  It sifted
through
every atom of her being as it shrunk down to a point event, taking with it
everything
that was her, everything that was not HIM, until...

	Chris shook his character's head and ran a hand through his body's hair.  
"I guess it worked." He tested out his functions.  Arms, legs, eyes...
Everything
seemed to work well... And the ki-abilities were his, too, obviously.  He looked
at the floor.  A shame about Ryouga, and his old body... Well... Nothing to
do about
that now.  At least Nutkin's personality could be recreated anytime.  It was
all 
THEIR fault, anyway.
	The comm badge on the lost boy's bloody shirt buzzed to life.  It was Ranma.
	"Is everything all right?"
	"I...  Define all right."
	"Is Willmore ali... I mean, is he..."
	"He's gone." Kodachi laughed in the background. "So's Ryouga."
	"What???"
	"There was an... Accident. He had to make a choice, and he sacrificed himself
to save y- us."
	Silence.
	"I'll be up in a second."
	"I'll be waiting, Ranma."
	Chris plucked the p'ur-bu from the broken braincase of the HIbiki and wiped it 
clean of gore on her sleeve. 
	<Revenge is a delightful business,> she thought to herself as she slipped 
Beethoven's ninth into the CD-Player and sat back to wait.
	By morning, it would all be finished.  
	How delightful of them to all gather together at once.  Funerals were cheaper
by the dozen.
	Only one question remained:
	How would she explain it to ResLife?



For information on Skeride, go to:

http://qlink.queensu.ca/~4cw6/skeride.htm (NOT .html)

	


Interfector beluam Ecclesia Ryougis.
Custos tabula nomina Franka Ecclesia Azusis.
C.A.S.K.E.T. | http://qlink.queensu.ca/~4cw6/
4cw6@qlink.queensu.ca