Waters Under Earth

A Ranma 1/2 Fanfic by Alan Harnum - harnums@hotmail.com

All Ranma characters are the property of Rumiko Takahashi, first
published by Shogakukan in Japan and brought over to North
America by Viz Communications.

Homepage at:  http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/9758

Commentary is welcomed and appreciated, sent publicly or 
privately.

Chapter 29 : The Halls of Night (2 of 4)

     He could find no answer.  He raised a hand slowly, and she
shied back from him.  "I..."

     He slowly forced his voice to steady.  "I am a man of my
word."

     To his surprise, her expression softened, and she smiled.  
"I do believe you are.  I have been asleep for a long time, and I
believe you have been here for a time as well.  You did not harm
me then, when it would have been easier."

     She glanced around the room, and then down at the sheet she
held over her body.  "Would you happen to know where my clothes
are?"

     Herb shook his head, flushing slightly.  Oh, but she was
lovely.  "I fear not."
     
     "Would you happen to know who I am?"
     
     Again, he shook his head.  "No.  Do you remember anything?"
     
     "Not about who I am," she said quietly, leaning back against
the carved headboard of the bed and arranging the sheets slightly
more chastely around herself.  "I..." She paused.  "Roses..."
     
     He leaned forward slightly in his chair.  "Roses?"
     
     "I remember roses, for some reason," she answered, cupping
her chin thoughtfully with one hand.  "I..." Trailing away into
silence, she shook her head.  "I don't remember anything else."

     "Not even your name?" 
     
     She nodded.  "Not even that."
     
     He hesitated.  "Shall I call you Rose, then?"
     
     A thin smile bloomed on her face.  "If it pleases you to do
so."

     "It does."
     
     She glanced around, then cocked her head to one side and
frowned.  "Now can you tell me where we are?"

     He laughed.  "Actually, I'm not sure myself."
     
     Rose shrugged and laughed, a sound that left a warm feeling
in his heart.  "We both seem to be in similar situations."  She
paused, then laughed again.  "Although you, at least, can 
remember your name.  I don't even remember that, or where I'm
from, or anything else."

     "You are from Japan," Herb said.
     
     She stared at him blankly.  "How can you be sure?"
     
     "You spoke it when you first woke," he pointed out.  "And
you have no trace of an accent."     
     
     "Are we not in Japan?"
     
     He shook his head.  "China."
     
     "But you spoke first," she said.  "And you spoke Japanese.
How did you know?"

     He had not even considered it, but she was right.  He had
known, somehow.  "I think it must have been luck."     
     
     She was still staring at him.  "Your eyes."
     
     "Hmm?"
     
     "They're red."
     
     He blinked.  "Of course they are."
     
     "Why?"
     
     For a moment, he considered the question.  "I have a rather 
unique ancestry."

     She was silent, studying him.  "They suit you.  I 
remember... something about eyes.  Something important."

     "What do you remember?"
     
     "I remember history, geography, books that I've read, 
things that I've learned..."  A growing distress showed on her 
face.  "But I don't remember... me.  I don't remember my parents,
or my house, or what I liked and didn't like, or..."

     "I'm sure that you will remember in time," Herb assured her.
     
     Rose nodded.  "I hope so."  She gestured towards a large 
wooden chest of drawers in one corner of the room.  "If you would
turn your back for a few minutes, I shall see if I can find
anything more modest than these sheets."

     Herb suddenly realized he had been holding an actual
conversation with a girl, for several minutes now.  It had been
so easy; so completely natural.  He couldn't remember the last
time he had talked to someone like that.

     She had turned away from him and placed her feet on the
floor.  The sheet she held before her covered her back much less 
adequately than the front.  Involuntarily, his eyes traced the 
slender arch of her spine, before he forced himself to look away.  
He ended up focusing intently upon the only other door in the 
room, opposite the one he'd entered through.

     Behind him, he heard soft footsteps crossing the floor, a
drawer sliding upon, the whisper of cloth.  He realized his heart
was beating fast; the temptation to look back was almost
unbearable.  

     "You can look now."
     
     For all that temptation, he turned with what seemed to him
great slowness.  Rose wore a dress identical to the one his
sister did, soft sable-coloured wool belted with a braided yellow 
cord.  She had tied her hair to one side in a long ponytail with 
a red ribbon; for some reason, it suited her.

     "Well?" she asked.  "What do you think?"
     
     The dress fit her body like a glove.  She was tall for a
woman, long-limbed and slenderly built, and yet there was no
fragility in her, but a splendid, lush beauty.

     "You look nice," he said cautiously.
     
     She laughed.  Somehow, it made him feel good to hear her
laugh.  He rose from the chair and crossed the floor to stand in
front of her.  He did not understand his own ease with the
situation; past a certain point, the inexplicable can only be
accepted and dealt with on its own terms.  In some circumstances,
the centre is lost, and a new centre is forged from which to act.

     "Your clothes are very nice as well," she said, looking him 
up and down.  "I would almost think you are royalty."

     Herb grinned.  "Actually," he said casually, "I am."
     
     She curtsied slightly.  "Your highness."
     
     It was said mockingly.  Not in the way one should talk to
royalty.  He laughed.  "Lady, the pleasure is mine."

     "Let us share it equally then, and keep it at that."
     
     Slowly, he nodded.  She took a step forward and reached out
a hand towards him; Herb felt frozen, as if he were made of ice.

     Lightly, she touched the side of his face, traced a line
from cheekbone to the pointed tip of one ear.  "You do not look
like any man I remember seeing before.  Yet... still, you are
very handsome."

     Suddenly, he could move, and he did, taking her hand in his
and holding it near his face.  Her skin was soft, and the scent
of her filled his senses, cool water and a faint trace of roses.
Again, there was a crackle through the air between them, a
soundless thunderclap.  He could see from her eyes that she had
felt it as well.

     Herb stood and looked into those dark eyes, as if lost
within them.  Finally, he managed to find the words.  "And you
are..."

     The door opened.  As if struck, the two of them each took a
step back, breaking the contact of their hands.  Wiyeed stood in 
the doorway, hand on the knob, her eyes wide.

     She looked from him to Rose, and a slow blush spread across
her face.  "Pardon me, please.  I was unaware that..."

     Herb waved a hand in her direction and gave Rose a slight,
apologetic smile.  "My sister."

     Rose nodded.  "I see the resemblance."
     
     Wiyeed stepped into the room, still blushing and trying not
to look at Rose.  "Brother, we require your presence."

     "Perhaps later?" Rose asked before he could answer.  "We
were... occupied."

     Wiyeed's blush deepened, and she stared at the floor for a
long moment.  Finally, she sighed and waved a hand at Rose.  "Go
to sleep."

     Herb's practiced eyes saw the slight glow of her ki, and
then Rose made a soft, breathy sound and began to crumple.  He
stepped forward and caught her under the arms, shooting a glare
at his sister as he did.  "What are you doing?"
     
     "Now is not the time to deal with this," she said primly,
folding her arms in front of her.  "You can talk to her later.  
She shouldn't be awake anyway; it's dangerous to wake her too 
soon.  I didn't expect you to be awake so early either.  Do you 
remember everything?"

     Herb nodded.  "Of course."  He glanced to the girl in his
arms.  "And why can't she remember anything?"

     Wiyeed winced slightly.  "I'll try to explain later.  Right
now, we all need to talk.  The Dark is rising against us, 
brother, faster than even the Lady had feared."  She sighed
again.  "Put her in the bed and come with me."

     Turning away, Herb carried Rose to the bed and carefully
laid her down.  She murmured softly in her sleep as he did, 
turning slightly away from him.  Her tail of hair fell across her
face with the motion, and he lifted it away.  After a moment's
thought, he untied the scarlet ribbon and took it from her hair;
it came away in his hand with a single long strand of glossy dark
hair.  Hoping desperately that Wiyeed could not see what he was
doing, he tucked them both into his sash and turned away at last
from the sleeping girl.

     His sister looked as uncomfortable as he felt.  "Come on, 
Herb."
     
     She opened the door and stepped out ahead of him, leading
him in silence down a long, narrow, empty hallway.  Often, he 
heard a faint sound, as of voices singing, coming down from 
somewhere far away.  Glass globes like the ones he'd seen before 
threw patterns of light across the polished stone walls layered 
with dust.  Every dozen steps or so, a niche was placed in the 
wall, holding some ancient-looking piece of pottery, or a 
fragment that looked like it might have come from a statue.

     As they turned a corner, Wiyeed paused by one niche.  It
held a jagged half-circle of flattened silver, pure and polished 
so brightly that it cast a perfect reflection.  "All these are 
artifacts that have been found over the centuries in the Desert 
of the Claw, where Wurdsenlin once stood."

     Herb stood and stared.  The Desert of the Claw lay north of
the lands of the Musk, beyond the spine of the mountain ranges,
and was a wasteland of sand and rock where nothing living grew.

     "So easily does beauty fall," she murmured softly, picking
the fragment of silver and tilting it back and forth, making the
light dance across the walls and floor.  Again, a fragment of
singing drifted to Herb's ears, so soft and faint he could make
out no words.

     He looked around, as if seeking the source.  "What is that 
sound?  Singing?" 
     
     Wiyeed smiled, replacing the artifact carefully in the niche
and turning to look at him.  "The home of the Lady and her
Daughters is a mountain at the northern edge of the Desert of the
Claw.  In a room at the very apex of that mountain, one of her
Daughters sings to her glory.  Night and day, song flowing into
song as the next singer takes it up from the tired voice of the
one before, a music that has not ended in fourteen centuries."

     "How many of you are there?"
     
     Her smile faltered.  "Perhaps a hundred.  It used to be that
women skilled in the art of magic would come from all of Asia to 
study with us.  Now, we are all but forgotten.  Many of the 
female children of the Musk come to us, and a few others are 
drawn here."

     "So that explains why everything is so dusty," Herb said,
running his finger across a wall and leaving a long trail against
the stone.

     His sister scowled.  "We have more important things to do
than serve as housekeepers for guest quarters that seldom have
any guests."

     Herb snorted.  "That is what servants are for."
     
     "There are no servants here but us."
     
     "How strange," Herb murmured as they began to walk again.
"There are no men here either, are there?"

     She shook her head.  "The Daughters of the Night were
founded by the members of Fukwan's circle who did not betray the
Dragon Tribe.  They had barely escaped the carnage of Ganziao's
reign, and they remembered well what the men of the Musk had done
to their wives and daughters at his orders."

     Ganziao the Founder.  Ganziao the Mad.  And a third name, 
one that the Musk did not like to speak amongst themselves;
Childkiller.  What the Musk had been in the first three centuries
of their existence was a thing best forgotten, or at least not
spoken of.

     They turned another corner, past a niche holding a dull and
tarnished spearhead of some strange bluish-hued metal.  "Ganziao 
was under the domination of the World-Hater?"

     Wiyeed shook her head.  Another turn, and they were climbing
a flight of stairs that twisted slightly as they rose.  "All that
Ganziao did at first, he did of his own free will.  The evil of 
his actions were so great that it allowed the World-Hater that 
first entrance into his mind, and passed that handhold down to 
all the men of the bloodline."

     "And yet Jinlung defied him, even with that?"
     
     Wiyeed smiled briefly, sadly.  "The child need not always
follow in the path of the parent."
          
     "But how did he..."
     
     Wiyeed shook her head, and he trailed away.  A fragment of
that eternal singing came again, and now he could hear the words,
for only a moment, before they drifted away.

     *Lady of silences, Lady of peace, Lady most fair, cradle us,
hold us, shelter us...*

     His sister gestured to a small wooden door.  "Ranma Saotome
is in there already.  I must go and fetch the woman of the
Phoenix; I shall not take long."

     "Where are Mint and Lime?" he asked.
     
     A brief smile traced her face.  "They will be out for a long
time.  Don't worry about them making any trouble; we have ways of 
keeping them under control."

     She swept off down the corridor without another word.  As
Herb put his hand on the door and began to open it, he remembered     
suddenly that he had never managed to get her to tell him
anything more about Rose.

**********

     Ranma stood at the edge of the balcony, and rested one arm 
on the slender, elaborately curled iron railings as he stared off
into the night.  Stars sprawled by the thousands in the dark sky,
a darkness mirrored below by the blank expanse of dark sand that 
was the desert.  It stretched off to the south to beyond the 
vanishing point of the horizon.  

     The valley that held Jusenkyou, he knew, lay beyond it.
Wiyeed had told him that the lands of the Musk lay in the far
north of the Valley of the Waters, amidst the mountain chain
called the Dragon's Ribcage.  The desert was named the Desert of 
the Claw.  And this place, the mountain that held the Daughters
of the Night and the one they called The Lady, was Chenmo Shan -
Mount Silence - part of the mirroring chain of the Dragon's
Ribcage, the two long strings of mountains that had bordered
Wurdsenlin four thousand years ago.

     Now Wurdsenlin was the Desert of the Claw, and Ranma stood
drinking cool, sweet water from a goblet of ebony glass, his eyes
gazing out across the wasteland where it had once lain.

     Silence, this place was called, but there was not silence.
There was the sound of water rushing down over stone, from the
half-dozen small waterfalls that came down the sides of the
mountain that he could see.  Hundreds of feet down, they 
disappeared under the cover a long, overhanging strut of rock.

     And there was the singing, drifting down from the highest
peak of the mountain.  Wiyeed had explained that to him as well
as they'd walked from her room to this one.  Once, they'd
encountered a half-dozen girls dressed as she was, and they had
shown a large amount of interest in him until Wiyeed had
dismissed them.

     Mount Silence reminded him of Mount Phoenix in some ways;
the long halls of stone shaped from the mountain seemed desolate,
fallen greatly from what they had been.  There was too much 
space, too many empty places.

     He sipped his water again.  The taste was incredibly pure,
sweet as wine and lingering on the tongue.  Lowering it, he
sloshed water against the sides of the cup and examined it.  
Oddly, it seemed unusually dark, shadowy.  Perhaps it was only 
the light.  In the sky above, the moon waned, losing fullness 
with each passing night.  A gust of night air chilled him
slightly, and carried on it the words of the singing:

     *Lady of silences, Lady of peace, Lady most fair, cradle us,
hold us, shelter us, Lady, Lady, Lady of silences.  Calm and
distressed, torn and most whole, end of the endless, journey to
no end...*

     He was interrupted in his listening by the sound of the door
being opened.  He turned to see Herb stepping into the room, his
long golden cape fluttering behind him.  The prince closed the
door behind him with a click, as Ranma walked back into the room
from the large open-air balcony he'd been standing on, brushing 
past the black and gold curtains that might be drawn closed to 
separate it from the rest of the room.

     "Hey Herb," he said, raising his free hand.  
     
     Herb acknowledged him with a nod.  "Greetings, Saotome."
Without a second glance, he sat down on the floor, at the long, 
low table in the centre of the room.  The walls were covered with 
finely-woven silk tapestries - dragons and phoenixes and other 
legendary creatures, legions marching to war, a mountain cloaked 
in mist - and a few folding screens on which peaceful scenes of 
river and forest were sketched in dark ink were arranged about
the room.  A single huge carpet in black and gold, dragons 
twining with dragons, covered the floor.

     Ranma sat down across from him.  Seemingly lost in thought,
Herb poured himself a goblet of water from the fluted glass
pitcher on the table.  

     "Where's Wiyeed?" Ranma asked after a moment.
          
     "She went to fetch your friend," Herb told him, sipping the
water.  From a bowl of fruit on the table, he picked a small 
orange and began to neatly section it.  "Why is she cursed to
look like that... fiancee of yours, wasn't it?"

     "Long story," Ranma said.  He drank the last of his water
and set the glass down with a clink.  "Very long story."

     There was a silence between them.  Herb devoured the orange
with almost mechanical precision.  Ranma broke it at last.  
"Herb?" 

     Herb looked up inquiringly.  He looked very much as if his
mind were on something else.  

     "Don't you ever talk to Kima again like you did before," 
Ranma said in a low voice.  "If you do, I'm not going to be very
happy."

     Herb's eyes narrowed.  "I had my reasons for what I said,
Ranma.  Try and consider them."

     Ranma caught Herb's gaze and matched stares with him for a 
long moment.  "I don't care what your reasons were," he said at 
last.  "The only reason I'm not madder than I am is because I
think you really would have stayed to fight the Ravager by 
yourself if it meant the rest of us could have gotten away."

     "I owe you a life debt," Herb replied quietly and simply.
"My life falls before yours.  I have a similar obligation to my
sister."

     "And would Mint and Lime would have stayed too?" 
     
     Herb snorted.  "Mint and Lime do what I say."
     
     "Would you have made them stay if they didn't want to?"
     
     Herb said nothing for a time.  When he finally spoke, there
was an odd note of uncertainty in his voice.  "If I had asked it
of them, they would have stayed." He paused.  "But if I could
have, I would have stayed without them."

     "You would have died," Ranma said bluntly.
     
     Herb shrugged.  "Every man dies in time."
     
     "True enough," Ranma said.  "But it doesn't mean we gotta
seek it out, does it?"

     To his surprise, Herb laughed.  "True enough."
     
     Ranma cocked his head to one side.  "You okay, Herb?  You're
actin' kinda weird."

     The prince smiled, and brushed a few dishevelled strands of
pearly hair away from his eyes.  "I am well.  Better than I have
been in some time."

     "Your temper's sure better than before," Ranma commented.  
     
     Herb's face darkened, and he stared at the table, his fists
clenched at his sides.  He said nothing.

     "Hey, sorry," Ranma quickly said.  "Didn't mean--"
     
     "It is alright," Herb said slowly.  "While I cannot claim
absolvement from all my actions, I have been having... certain
difficulties for the past few months, since my accident at
Jusenkyou.  Only recently did I begin to understand why."

     Ranma squinted, confused.  "What do you mean?"
     
     "The dragon bloodline of the Musk royalty carries a curse,"
Herb explained.  "It begins as soon as the male of the bloodline 
sees a woman after a certain age.  The roots of the separation of 
the young men from their mothers in our people is in that curse.  
The mind of the World-Hater reaches out into us, from beyond his
prison, and shapes us to his will.  Over time, it grows worse and
worse, until we are nothing but tools of his evil."

     He sighed.  For a moment, he looked very tired, much older
than he actually was.  "It was not always so.  Until the breaking
of the Dragon Tribe, there was no such curse upon my line.  
Ganziao and Fukwan changed that."

     "Huh?"
     
     "Ganzaio began the practice of transforming animals into
human women at Jusenkyou and using them for... his harem, I 
suppose.  Over time, he extended the privilege of doing so to 
the rest of his men.  It became a sort of competition; what
exotic animals would produce the most beautiful wives, what 
strengths the children would inherit from their lineage..."

     Herb reached up and rubbed his temples with one hand.  
"Ganzaio's original and first wife was Fukwan.  She was also 
his sister."

     Ranma blinked.  "That's..."
     
     "There was a great concern with keeping the bloodline of the
dragon pure in those days," Herb muttered.  "Sibling marriages
were common.  Fukwan was a powerful sorceress, and surrounded
herself with a circle of other women, all of them mighty in the
arts of magic.  The human women of the Musk grew jealous of their
husband's animal wives, but they could do nothing to change it.

     "Fukwan used that jealousy, because her heart was dark, and
secretly, she plotted to destroy the male line of the Musk and
rule supreme.  With the aid of some members her circle who shared
her dream, she tore a hole in the protection of the power that 
ruled Jusenkyou, and let in an army of savage barbarians who had 
been hiding beyond the fringe.  They swept down through the land, 
killing all that they encountered.  In the end, it was only the 
surprise aid of the Joketsuzoku that defeated the army and 
Fukwan's traitorous circle.  Fukwan and the leader of the army 
fled from the carnage, and were not seen again."

     Ranma nodded slowly.  "But why the curse?"
     
     The door opened, breaking the conversation, and admitted
Kima and Wiyeed.  The two of them briskly swept in together, side
by side, each with their own sort of regal grace.  Neither looked
happy, though on Kima's face there was a mixture of disbelief as
well.

     Without a word, the two of them came and sat down at the
table, Kima beside him, Wiyeed beside her brother.  Ranma glanced
over at Kima, who presented him with an unreadable mask, and then
turned his head away, stifling a sigh.

     "We need to know all that has happened to the two of you
since you arrived at Jusenkyou," Wiyeed said.  "It is essential 
to our understanding of the situation."

     "Everything?" Ranma muttered, rubbing his hands together.
     
     Wiyeed nodded.  Her eyes, pale crimson and piercing, seemed
to bore into his.  "We must know."
     
     Ranma spent the next hour or so telling that story; as it
turned out, they had to be told everything from the beginning to
understand what had happened after.  Kima filled in the bits he
couldn't in a monotone voice.

     Wiyeed asked occasional questions, sometimes about details
that Ranma considered negligible.  Herb simply listened in 
silence, though when Kima told in flat tones and stark detail of 
her crippling by Helubor, Ranma thought he might have seen the 
Musk prince wince slightly.
     
     When he was finished, Ranma took a long sip of water for his
dry throat, and studied Wiyeed intently.  "Well?"

     "Passages of our books relating to the time after the fall
of the Phoenix are fragmented and sketchy," she said, pushing a
loose strand of white hair back over one ear so that it spilled
down her back with the rest.  "But the signs are there.  'The 
dragon rules in the nest of the phoenix now, and the serpent 
follows in the wolf's shadow, and the lady of darkness in his.'"

     Ranma rubbed the bridge of his nose and sighed.  "I 
understand the wolf.  But what about the serpent?  The lady of
darkness?"

     Wiyeed closed her eyes.  "I don't know.  But I am afraid.
The World-Hater said that one of his servants walked among us 
now.  He called him the one gloried with his blood."

     "I thought the power of the dragon under Jusendo was 
supposed to keep such things out," Kima commented.  She was 
sharpening her sword, pulling it across a whetstone with a soft, 
repetitive scrape.  "And yet the hound entered.  Helubor and Xande 
served the Dark.  And you say there is another now?"

     "The power of She Who Must Not Wake is not without limits,"
Wiyeed answered.  "Some entities of a certain nature may enter
without being detected.  Any who are born within the confines are
not checked either.  And with a great expenditure of power, 
holes may be torn in the protection for a short time."

     Kima nodded.  She put down her sword on the table and 
tapped her fingers together.  "I must get a message to Mount
Phoenix.  The king must be told."

     "Cologne too," Ranma added.
     
     Kima gave him a cursory glance.  "Yes, I suppose she should
know as well."

     "We could find a way, I suppose..." Wiyeed began.
     
     "Wouldn't it be easier if you people had phones?" Ranma
asked.  The two women shot vaguely hostile glares at him, and
went back to talking uninterrupted.

     "You're all sorceresses, aren't you?" Kima asked.  "Don't
you have some kind of magic you could use?"

     "There's no reason to waste power like that," Wiyeed said,
shaking her head.

     "You said yourself we don't have much time," Kima pointed
out.  "Is it not important that we keep communication with our
allies?"

     Wiyeed slowly nodded.  "I'm not sure--"  She stopped 
abruptly in mid-sentence, and Ranma saw a tremble pass through
her body.  She went rigid, and a distance entered into her eyes,
as if she had gone somewhere very, very far away.

     "Wiyeed?" he inquired nervously, leaning forward across the
table.  

     Herb put his hand on her shoulder.  "Sister?"
     
     Very suddenly, another tremble went through her, and she
seemed to come back into focus.  She stared intently into Ranma's
eyes, so intently that he began to feel uncomfortable.

     "The Lady wishes to see you now," she stated.  There was an
almost palpable aura of command in her voice.  It could not be
denied.  As she rose to her feet, Ranma realized he was rising
with her.  His body did not feel his own; fire leaped merrily in
the back of his head.  The singing and the splash of water were
loud as thunder, drowning out all sound.

     Wiyeed looked to Kima and Herb.  "Wait here.  We will
return."  The voice she spoke in was filled with power, with
control.  Kima and Herb slowly nodded in unison.

     The last thing Ranma saw as he walked out through the door
behind Wiyeed was Kima turning to regard Herb with a vague
hostility in her eyes.  "So where are those two savages who were
with you before, prince?"

**********

     Mint and Lime had died and gone to heaven.  Or something
comparable.  They had woken up lying on their backs, surrounded
by about a half-dozen young women, all of them quite attractive.
It would have been a bit better if they could move, but for some
reason, they couldn't.

     "The spells are holding nicely," one the girls said
conversationally to another, her tawny hair spilled out from 
beneath a dark hood.  

     "The big one is strong," the second girl replied.  Her hood
was down, and dark grey eyes studied Lime with a large amount of
interest.  "It's hard to hold him still."

     "So slap a mental lock on him," a tall, slender girl said 
shortly.  "Put him to sleep again."

     "I don't want to," the second girl said with a faint blush.
"I like looking at his eyes."

     "They are rather nice to look at," the third girl admitted.
     
     A fourth girl, the youngest, snorted.  "They're boring," she
said in a slightly whiny voice.  "Men aren't nearly as exciting 
as the older sisters all say."

     "Well, they can't move," a fifth girl said, absently running
her fingers through her short black hair.  "Most things aren't
very exciting when they're paralysed."

-Continued in section 3

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