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The Zu presents

black wind


a many-things-x-over (mostly Ranma/NGE/Nausicaa) by Rain Man:

authorschtuppff:  This took a lot of time and work.  And missing classes.  
You have no idea.  Really.  Apologies to all the folks who own these 
series.  And to Stephen King, who is the source of a couple of the nifty 
lines in this.  Frank Herbert too of course.


Prologue:  the sound of his voice
---

      The hangar was set in the mouth of a cavern at the base of a 
mountain in the desert.  Beyond it, there were endless sands in every 
direction, an endless sea of dunes and the drumming sound of the shifting 
sand.  From the western horizon came the buzzing sound of a dozen ships 
and the rumbling of some vast, distant shape.

      The cave was empty except for the airship within it.  The biplane 
must have taken great skill to pilot into the chamber as its wings almost 
brushed the sandstone walls of the cave.

      "I must speak with the Princess Regent now!  My people are being 
killed and - "

      Shinji's hands, still in those worn black gloves, closed on her 
shoulders.  "She's doing what she can, Princess."

      Akane whirled, jabbing an index finger into his chest.

      "I thought you cared!  They're your people, too, now, aren't they?  
Why are - ?"

      The woman beside them outfitted in black armor laughed, drawing a 
glare from the young girl.  The red cross on the black field of her helm 
looked sinister, but there was a genuine warmth in those wide, dark eyes.  
She had a lovely laugh, and her cheeks were fine-boned and attractive 
despite the three narrow parallel scars that adorned the right cheek.

      And she was tall at six feet, and knew that the young Princess must 
dislike having to look up at her.

      "Forgive me!" she said, "Please!  There will not be time for you to 
speak with her highness.  Right now, I have to deal with a rather 
difficult war that began long before your precious Valley was attacked, 
with much higher stakes than the lives of a few hundred people."

      Before Akane could burst out with a suitable retort, she was 
stunned into silence by the older woman's gently lifting the young girl's 
chin with her ceramic armored palm.  The gesture and the way she looked 
into Akane's eyes, the manner, the aura, it was just like - 

      "I see in you, Akane, the effects of the teachings of dear Lord 
Tofu, the Master.  Call me Misato.  Please have patience - you will 
understand when you finally see.  Follow me, if you would see just what 
it is that attacks us."  

      At that moment, Akane could see the compassion in her eyes and was 
mollified.  The Gift in her flickered briefly, letting Akane know the 
laughter had not been at her at all, but at an old memory (though Misato 
still concealed the what of that memory behind well-fortified mental 
barriers).  Perhaps, Akane thought, she might be worthy of trust after 
all.

      Misato let go, and turning on her heel, marched out of the bright 
white room.

      They followed her through twisting tunnels and passages deeper and 
deeper down as she spoke into a device built into her left gauntlet, 

whispering just soft enough to keep Shinji and Akane from understanding 
the words.

      Far beneath their echoing footsteps, there was darkness, warmth, a 
womb.

      And in that womb was a boy who could not have been a day older than 
fourteen, his legs and arms restrained by straps he could not see as he 
floated in a luminescent green fluid as thick as blood.

      "Ranma, are you ready?"

      "Yes."

      "Commencing ignition of Malkuth."

      He closed his eyes, and relaxed as, one by one, he stretched out 
with the Gift, and took possession of hundreds of new nerves and muscles.  
The awareness of a vast strength filling him was physically exhilarating, 
but that excitement meant nothing to the boy.

      It was only duty.

      Or at least, that is what he told himself as he closed his eyes, 
waiting.  Ranma felt them coming, felt the pressure their Gifts generated 
in his thoughts.

      To Akane, time was a distorted, twisting confusion as they wandered 
down in near complete darkness.  Disorienting was the sudden flare of 
bright lights down a corridor through heavy, armored doors that sang like 
fine bell chimes when they opened (were they ohmu shell doors, she 
wondered, baffled at the thought of such huge chunks of insectoid armor) 
to reveal what was obviously the command center.

      The room was huge, yet the presence of row after row of machines 
and pipes and wires and gears and glowing red control jewels and other 
devices beyond recognition left little room for the two dozen officers 
and technicians within it.  Akane felt boxed in with her first step into 
the operations center, and wondered why it seemed more difficult to 
breathe.

      Behind her, Shinji's soft steps were oddly comforting.  But she 
wished that he would be angry, wished that he was not so quiet and 
patient.  She wished he would show some emotion beyond the dim regret 
behind his eyes.

      How deep beneath the mountain were they?  Had it taken an hour to 
reach that place or half an hour?  Had it been the breath of guards she 
had heard, hidden in the darkness they had walked through, or were those 
just soft breezes sucked down from the entrances of the caves?

      She realized then that they were deep enough so that machines were 
needed to keep the air breathable; the air was stale and musty and must 
have needed recycling over and over and over.  Akane decided that much of 
the air on the way down was static, and that the sounds she had heard 
must have indeed been the sound of guards waiting in ambush.

      A blond woman, whose flinty eyes glinted behind wire-rimmed 
spectacles, frowned when she saw Akane and Shinji following Misato.  
"General, should they really be here for this?"  She sat behind a massive 
desk of gray steel, and Akane nearly gasped at the sight of the cables 
from the machines plugging through the very skin on the woman's forearms.

      "Doctor, they have a right to see the truth of why they are here.  
How is Ranma?"

      Misato sat behind a table similar to the Doctor's, and spoke softly 
into the microphones built into the surface of the table.

      A speaker squawked into life in response: "Misato-san?"

      "Yes, Ranma?"

      "The Dragon.  He speaks with me..."

      The General turned a concerned look to the Doctor.  "I thought you 
were able to repair the shielding."

      She shrugged.  "The shielding was not perfect even at the 
beginning.  He must learn to construct his own."

      Beside them, Akane's eyes wandered across the plethora of glowing 
screens and instruments, and the dozen white-coated men and women who sat 
before those quietly murmuring machines.

      Shinji whispered, pointing at one of the monitors, "Great Wind, 
Akane!  Look at the size of that GuyMelef!"

      Akane whispered as she saw it: "That is no mere GuyMelef."

      "Ignition complete," Ranma said, and though it was still dark in 
the womb, he saw through another set of eyes, eyes that peered into a 
vast, vast hangar, looking down on an army of tiny men who scurried along 
his feet.

      "Launching."

      A gigantic black humanoid figure, two hundred feet tall with an 
ominous, pale, skull-shaped head between its massively armored shoulders, 
stepped forward, smoky red orbs for eyes blinking.  Tremendous black 
wings spread wide, and with the sound of shrieking hurricane winds, 
propelled the immense darkness of it into the air.  Flight through the 
huge tunnels blasted into the depths of the mountain was difficult 
despite the size of the tunnels, due to the currents of air pulled 
through them by the machines that kept the air breathable.  Soon, sand 
began to fall upon him as he flew, and then he burst through a waterfall 
of sand, spraying particles of it everywhere as he smashed his way into 
the night sky.

      He saw that the enemy ships had reached the mountain, and he sped 
out of the range of the bomb that he sensed them dropping.  The Dragon's 
eyes did not need to close despite the intense flash of heat and light 
and thunder.

      There was no time to call out a warning to the General, barely time 
to snap his wings into their most stable configuration as he struggled to 
stay in the air despite the tremendous pressure wave slamming into 
Malkuth.

      In the heart of the mountain, the shock of the explosion threw them 
all off their feet, and the rumbling made the very air seem to pound at 
their chests.

      Alarms rang everywhere, and Misato pressed a hand to the side of 
her head, shouting orders.  It was chaos in the confines of that room, 
pipelines bursting, spewing steam or something like it at various 
locations along the walls and floor.  One of the attendants was burned 
horribly from a leaking line of steam, still moaning as others dragged 
him out.  The stench of burning skin and hair was thick in the air.  
Static filled the monitoring screens.

      "Damn it!  An atomic!"

      But Akane did not notice the scurrying white-coated attendants 
anymore, or the pressure of Shinji's hand on her shoulder, or the words 
shouted across the room.  Only watched as needles on dials placed all 
over the room fluctuated wildly.  The shrieking sounds of the machines 
and the loud groaning of metals creaking and bending were deafening as 

the echoing thunder from an enemy bomb slowly died down.  It left only 
the constant pounding of pistons and generators and things she did not 
recognize.

      "Damage report," Misato called out.

      "The bomb was a weak one, it only punched through the outer layers 
of the fortress armor," someone to one side of the room said.  "The 
radiation filters are compensating."

      Shinji muttered something about madness, about the Seven Days of 
Fire returned.

      The black-armored woman was suddenly beside Akane, and just for a 
moment, she was afraid, but she bit her lip and stared back at this 
unhappy-looking woman with the scars on her cheeks and those wide brown 
eyes.  "I want you to see something."  

      Her hand closed over Akane's as she said to woman wired into the 
machines, "Bring up the map on the screen and superimpose the coordinates 
of Malkuth, the SandRock Fortress, and the God-Soldier."

      Akane gasped when she heard the last, and thought of the stories in 
the legends... and remembered the fear in the handful of radioactive ash 
once shown to her by her old teacher.

      A screen of shiny, reflective material descended from the ceiling, 
and projected onto it were a series of moving green dots on a contour 
map.  Akane recognized the great spines of the desert mountains where 
this fortress must have been located, and deducing the scale of the map 
from the distance of the mountains to the Valley of the Wind in the 
North, and the Torumekian capitol of Tolas to the East, she realized that 
this underground base must be gigantic indeed, as the outline of the base 
in the diagram extended all along the Serpent's Teeth Mountains.

      Misato drew Akane's attention to the large, blinking triangle on 
the map.  "That, Akane, is Ranma, piloting the Black Dragon.  You and 
Shinji will meet him soon.  Yes, that is the Black Dragon of legend, the 
one that slept beneath Tolas.  The smaller dots approaching him are Nazi 
planes."  The voice was old, older than the woman herself looked, soft 
and weary with something Akane did not recognize.  "One of those planes 
dropped the bomb that struck this base just now.  A forbidden weapon of 
old.  But we were prepared; great as that weapon is, that is not the 
threat at all."

      As more and more of the small dots disappeared, Akane felt her 
throat closing up, as she thought of the pilots that must have been 
dying.  She knew that a GuyMelef that could fly would slaughter any 
conventional airforce with ease.  But even as the sensation of those 
deaths began to press on her mind, this stranger's touch kept her from 
crying out with the pain of it.  And she felt Shinji in her thoughts, 
murmuring, 'You must learn to direct the pain away, Akane.  Or the Gift 
will destroy you.'

      There was a gasp, and Akane thought it was hers for a moment. 

      "General, is something wrong?"

      "I, I don't..." she grimaced, clutched at her temples.  "Open 
communications with Malkuth," she rasped out.  "Turn on the external 
cameras!"

      Akane would never forget that sound, as the speakers built into the 
desk of the stranger beside her came to life, and she heard a horrible, 

horrible sound.  The pilot of the black giant was screaming, screaming as 
if his throat were being torn away, and Akane hid her face against 
Shinji's coat, covering her ears.  The sound Ranma made, it was horrible, 
more horrible than the sounds her mother had made as she was shot in 
Akane's dreams, the pain of it manifesting itself in her thoughts across 
the hundreds of miles between them just a week before.

      "Akane, look upon the face of your enemy.  The true enemy of 
humanity, not just the Nazi and the allies of the Vai Empire."

      And on the screen was projected a face, a monstrous face, a picture 
in vivid color - a picture of something terrifyingly beautiful, and 
serene, a face of white light and purity.  And anger, and all she could 
feel was shame as its eyes seemed to bore into her.  White rings of 
energy formed a halo about the horn-like projections from its back and 
shoulders, and it sped through the superheated air over the desert.

      Then the black giant they had first seen on one of the smaller 
monitors loomed huge on the screen as it closed with that other giant 
gird with Light.

      "That view is from some of our robot drones escorting the Black 
Dragon," Misato said.  "Some of them carry extra weaponry; mostly, they 
are there to maintain communications with it.  The armor weakens ordinary 
transmissions a great deal."

      Then the white monster's mouth gaped wide, impossibly huge as it 
seemed to scream in response to the black winged one, and brought to bear 
a sword of flame.

      In her mind, Akane was screaming as the shock of the pilot's 
thoughts crashed into hers, as suddenly she and Shinji and this stranger 
were sucked by their Gifts into a storm of jagged colors and the 
sensations of being in a body that was powerful enough to shatter 
mountains and the sensations of controlling a slave that hated them, 
hated them all, but hated the white-garbed giant even more.

      On the screen, they saw the Arbiter of Light stab its hundred- 
fifty-foot burning blade through the black giant's heart, and they felt 
the agony of it as they collapsed to their knees, felt the pain of it 
through the pilot and in each other and from the giant itself.  Black 
blood burst from the wound, rivers of blood.

      It was too much!  Far too much!

      And Akane wanted to faint, wanted desperately to get away.

      But she heard the voice of the pilot calling out to her and Shinji, 
a faint voice that wept, "Help me, help me please it hates me, oh 
please..."

      But she did not know how...

---

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