Youma Blues 7
Studying magic for fun and profit.
Getting Catlinite cleaned up was a chore that took me around an hour;
and by the time I had her wounds mostly dressed, and her settled down on my
bed, my apartment was thoroughly toast.
Take it from me: Nothing is as nasty as Dark Kingdom mud.
Of course, by that time I was ready to take a *long* cold shower, to.
Instead I took a short one, and collapsed on the couch. I still
had to get
beaten up by Kunzite in the morning.
Of course, I missed half of sword practice - slept through it - but I
decided that I would just have to miss it. Kunzite didn't care, in any
event. He
hates training others. Takes it out on his students, too.
Still it was a skill I needed to learn, if I was to live long in
Beryl's relm.
After yet another cold shower(my apartment didn't have hot water,
actually. Great location, lousy accommodations. Sort of like the Dark
Kingdom
in that respect..) I decided that breakfast was in order, after I checked
on my
guest.
Moving as quietly as I could, I headed into my bedroom, and checked
her over - But I must not have been quiet enough, because she started to wake
up. I smiled down at her as her eyes opened.
She tried to rip my throat out.
Temperamental lady, Catlinite. Though I didn't even know her name
yet.
"Hey! Not the claws!" I had to jump back to avoid the first swing,
and
she tried to throw herself out of bed at my throat for a second one.
Didn't get far, though. She was still weak, if healing fast. Of
course,
she chose that moment to notice the general lack of clothes about her person.
That seemed to lend her extra energy to spare, and I retreated to the
kitchen. And barricaded the door while she ransacked my room. Maybe food
would help her temper.
Around half an hour later I had a good portion of food ready, for a
Youma, anyway. Most of us eat like Sayiajin's if we have the opportunity.
Of
course, it all goes into our powers, strength and speed, regeneration, that
sort of
thing. Gaining weight is not generally something Youma worry about. Anyhow,
I was just flipping another pancake onto the stack when there was a cautious
knock at the kitchen door. (Okay, so she tried to batter it down. Happy?)
I smirked. This time I had the superior position. "Come in only
if you
don't intend on trying to kill me." I called, and used a simple bit of force
projection to unbar the door.
Cat threw it open and walked in wearing a set of my clothes
(tee-shirt
and jeans; they fit pretty well..), and carrying my sword. "You're a bit
confident
for the one who's weponless, wouldn't you say?"
I grinned at her as she eyed the food, obviously split between it and
keeping an eye on me. "Not really. I have all the food."
Our stomachs simultaneously growled, ending all conversation.
The lady in the house had spent the entire meal eyeing the food
oddly,
and making appreciative sounds, so it was an easy surmise that she'd never
had
earth food before. Which gave me a number of other weapons to use in a fast
upcoming confrontation - you see, she kept the sword.
"So." She growled as she wiped a milk-smile off her lip and hefted
the
sword, "What's to keep me from cutting you down and heading out right now?"
Cuts straight to the point, Cat does. Very direct. "Well, there's
my
excellent company - " She growled. I warned myself to cut back on the
lechery. "- or the fact that I don't think you can teleport back to the dark
kingdom on your own." She blanched at the implications. I smiled.
"How can I tell what you imply is true? It isn't very light out
there, we
could still be in the dark relm- a stronghold of yours.." Paranoid, but
smart.
Uneducated, though - but then that's Beryl's fault. She never bothered to
tell
the younger generations that Sunlight only lasts half the day on earth.
"Of course it's dark - it's night. About - ", I looked at the
clock,
"Three 'oclock. Sun doesn't come out for five hours yet. But please, do
go -
The Senshi will have a grand old time chasing down a wounded Youma.
Besides, where in the Dark Kingdom do they have lights like -" I pointed out
the window to the streets of Tokyo, "-that?"
Cat wilted. "Nowhere." It takes a lot of work to not look that
scared.
I count myself officially impressed.
"Got it in one. But, as it were, I'm headed back to the Dark World
in -"
I had to take another glance at the clock, and do some quick figuring
(still hadn't
got used to the time differential..)"- half an hour - sorry, a candle's
width or so."
Archaic Dark Kingdom terminology that- you measure time by how far a candle
has burned down, in a place with no sun.
She (finally!) put the sword down - well mostly down, the asked, "How
much will it cost me to go with you?."
The look in her eyes did something to me - I don't know what it was,
but well, hell. What she was expecting me to ask for was obvious. And
that
pissed me off.
"Just to know your name, and what the deal is with a talented person
like you trying to hook up with a bunch of losers like the Dark Agency." She
looked like I'd given her a keg full of mana storage crystals, for free.
It made
me feel really good.
"Ah..My name's Catlinite. Call me Cat. And you're right - without
lots
of energy, I can't teleport that far...I guess I should thank you for
saving my life
back there - that is earth custom, right?" I smiled. She's cute when she's
nervous..Of course, she's cute anytime..(Stop it, boy. Control yourself..)
"Guess so. Only for some people, mind. And you're welcome." Cat
smiled at me, and I very carefully did -not- fall over.
I realized even then that I was in over my head. Just not how
far...
Generally, I love magic, which only goes to show that you should
never
teach people like me spellcasting.
I mean, a Nephrite may be a scientist-like mage, but he takes the
whole
mystical bit seriously - no matter what Beryl did to him, there were always
things that you Just Don't Do, for him, while with Psycho-babe herself, she
may
not have considered anything sacred - but she wasn't much of a
scientist-type:
superstitious and psudoreligious mumbo-jumbo has always been more her style.
No system to it at all, just tradition and guesswork by someone who has a
serious over-powered problem.
Making someone like me- a Science fiction nut and child of the
twentieth century - a Mage is like giving god's erector set to Dennis the
Menace.
There are two reasons: I don't believe in impossible, forbidden, or
another of that crap, and because my general response to 'we can't do that'
is
'let's find out how'.
Nephrite caught on to this in about a day and a half. It was at
that point
that I think he started editing his lessons to me, but by that point the
damage had
been done: I was already thinking of starting a particularly ambitious and
foolish
project.
I was going to derive a programming language for spellcasting - a
set of
simple spells that could be used recursively to manipulate magic-energy
without
the mage's direct attention - or intervention.
I eventually did, but that's a story for a later date.
At the moment I and Neph were considering an enigma that would
eventually be a driving force in my life, but at the time, confused the
hell out of
both of us: My sword.
Yes, that sword. The one I've mentioned and never explained. The
one I picked up out of a ruin during the 'let's see if the new recruit dies
easy'
trial.
I do admit, it's a nice blade: a slightly curved, single edged
thing with a
sharp point and around four and a half feet - that's 54 inches, or around 137
cm, for you metric people, of blade, and another half a foot (or 15 cm) of
hilt.
It was lightweight, durable (I've never been able to so much as scratch
it), and
*very sharp*. It-cuts-through-stone-like-air sharp. No adornments, no
pretties, just a serviceable hilt and that blade. No inscriptions or
crests of any
kind - this was very obviously a sword for using, not showing off.
Knowing what I do now, I think it predates Atlantis, and by a good
bit.
Back then I just knew it was slightly magical.
A few words, then, about magic items.
When a magic item is made, there is generally one of two functions
it is
intended to serve:
One, it can be a 'hard-copy' of a spell that the user doesn't have
the skill
or power capability to cast normally. This type is given to others by the
more
skilled mages, so they can have the nifty spells to - all the lesser mage
need do
is provide a good source of magical energy for it, or have it charged in
advance.
Or two (and more commonly, at least in the dark kingdom), it serves
as
an auxiliary mana source, augmenting the amount of energy you have. The gems
I'd been using to store energy are an extremely simplified version of that
- most
such 'sources' convert the energy for you, from the 'raw' state to something
matching your aura, making drawing off them almost effortless, while mine
don't
- but I'm very good at conversion, just as I am at sensing, so it isn't as
important. (Though I can still exhaust myself fairly quickly on such stuff,
as my
misadventures with Sailor V can attest.)
Almost all the Senshi items are exceptions.
At first glance, the sword seemed to be an empty type 2 magic item:
there were no obvious spell structures attached to it, and it accepted magic
readily enough.
Here's where it breaks down: once it absorbed energy, the energy
*vanished*. As in gone, vamoose, nada. You couldn't get it back out. The
sword didn't even radiate more background energy - that's the energy sensing
powers pick up on by the way. Which was very odd (at least according to
Nephrite) normally, you would be able to sense and draw upon the energy you
provided the sword regardless of what the intent of it's enchantment was -
type
one items could easily serve as two in a pinch.
This sword was different. If you gave it energy you got nothing back.
I wished I could have Cat's opinion on it, but she'd amscrayed
(*with*
half a dozen of my energy crystals, fully charged.) as soon as we got back
to the
Dark Kingdom. Sans explanation.
Not that I hadn't expected it - paranoia is a survival trait, here,
and it
was to much to hope that she'd trust me.
After my third lesson with Nephrite (who'd switched from teaching me
basics to teaching me rote spells), I went on a (short and very covert)
rampage
through Dark Agency territory, stealing enough energy from them to teleport
back to Juban.
Cat had managed to somewhat inconvenience me, in that respect.
I wasn't the only person inconvenienced, though, as a very upset
young
lady on the roof across from my apartment could likely attest.
Sailor Mars shook her head angrily, and wondered just *why* Luna
was so suspicious of the new guy that she had to have his apartment spied on.
It had been a long, cold, and very uncomfortable night that had
netted
only a split-glimpse of an odd-looking gajin who apparently shared the
apartment with him (dashing her, and everyone else's hopes of a romance), but
no *serious* evidence of dark kingdom activity. It was also to far away for
her to sense much in the way of dark energy.
Rei did wonder, though, how Sora-kun got away with having a woman
share his apartment when only one of them was paying rent, and there was a
strict 'no double occupancy' rule for this particular building, something
that she
would have to take up with Mercury later.
Mostly, however, she just wondered how she'd lost the Jan-ken-pon to
that bubblehead Sailor Moon, and wound up spending the night up here.
Of course, the glimpse of Tuxedo Kamen she'd caught had been worth
it - apparently Luna wasn't the only one suspicious of the new student.
Ironically, her hunk-gazing had been timed perfectly to miss the most
interesting part of Sora Aoi's nighttime activities.
Tuxedo Kamen, it might be noted, was more observant.
Getting back to Juban after a very unproductive day of squinting at
uncooperative metal items, I decided that it was time to move my operation
into
the information age.
That would have to wait until the weekend, however. For now, it was
back to my favorite hazardous past-time: Senshi watch.
I also noticed that I was getting seriously low on energy - it
would be
time to restock my reserves soon.(a hazardous past-time in and of itself:
These
annoying sailor persons tended to show up around halfway through, forcing me
to run away - again.)
I really had no further problems that week, other than a close call
while
I was gathering energy - Mars nearly barbecued my Glamour based 'monster'
form when I overstayed my welcome at the fifth dance club I hit.
Oh, and I did notice a few very interesting sorts of lower-class
Youma
following me around, discrete-like - Catlinite amongst them.
But come the weekend, I was in for a change of pace: I went shopping.
By the time I lugged the 150,000$ Us worth of computer equipment to
my apartment(spending the last of my 'perk' money), my boss had been
summarily evicted from his latest scheme, and I was in trouble.
I mean, how was I to know that the Senshi would pick that day to go
to
the amusement park?
Jadeite, of course, didn't see it that way - I was supposed to be
warning
him of approaching Senshi, after all. Bad day for me.
What with one thing or another, I spent all sunday teleporting around
the Dark Kingdom trying to avoid his royally pissedoffisness.
This, of course, is when Catlinite's merry band of lunatics choose to
contact me.
I was hiding in the ruins of a flying castle (such things were fairly
common over the skies of Atlantis during the Silver millennium) when I heard
someone on the other side of the wall hiss at me.
"Hey. You with the funny hair." That by the way, had become the
Youma watch phrase for me - Grey is a fairly rare color in hair here. Most
tend to neon colors, making subdued people like Nephrite and me somewhat
odd.
I, of course, was somewhat annoyed. "Hey, get lost! Find your own
hiding place!"
"Heh. Cute." It took me a moment to place the growl, but I did -
Catlinite. "You want that explanation, or not?"
"Shure, as long as it doesn't take to long. I figure the boss is
going to
catch up to me soon, and I'd rather not be *here* when that happens." I
frowned. I'd rather -she- wasn't here either, but Cat could take care of
her self.
Short explanation is like this: Not everybody is in the army. Some
of us
who aren't don't like Beryl. Now that we're back in contact with Terra, we
can
do something about it. Care to help?" Oh. That was a wonderful recruitment
pitch. I liked it.
"So you are with some sort of underground, right? And you want me to
join?" Standard revolutionary test no 1: get them to put it in writing. Or
in this
case, words.
"Something like that." By this time I'd finally figured out where
she was
- three alcoves over, with her four friends, all of whom had the sort of
control
over their energies I'd come to associate with skilled fighters. I guess I'd
impressed the lady, because she brought along a *lot* of bodyguards.
"I'll think about it. Meantime, my boss is catching up with me, so
I gotta
go. We'll talk again later." I teleported. If nothing else, I was
getting much
better at that, and fast. I'd also noticed just how the peasantry lives in
the dark
kingdom: a lot of it doesn't. Beryl is no kind of ruler, when it comes to
such
things as providing for her people - as far as she was concerned, anyone who
didn't survive was one less mouth to feed, and one less body to share the
glory
with.
You see, test no 2 is to see how they sweat. Amateur
revolutionaries in
a situation like this would be a slaughter.
I figured if they tried to kill me to keep me quiet, they were
trustworthy
- or at least, not a disloyalty test from Beryl, and if they just spied on
me quietly,
they might be serious. If I decided they had a chance, I just might join
the
rebellion. Of course, I'd have to learn more about it first.
This was well before I learned about self preservation, you may
notice.
Gamlain@airmail.net
Gamlain, transuniversal courier & Hero for rent
Sorcerer to the three great Anime demonesses: Ryoko, Marller, and Ifruita
"So then I shot a goon and I cut the head man's throat, and after that
things got violent." - Tarnkep Protree
Of course, my homepage is at
Http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/8762/index.html