Hello out there in ficland.
Yes, I am doing more Youma Blues. Gomen for the rather extended delay.
For some time life has intervened in my freetime.
No more. Guns of the dark kingdom is on schedule now, and forthcoming
parts should show up with some regularity untill Nephrite Days starts.
It's past time I cleared some things up about my 'relationship'
with Catlinite. We did not have, nor will we likely ever have,
'True love' or any of that puerile nonsense Serenity so often spouts.
No matter what Venus says.
On the physical side, mutual lust resulted in our sleeping
(ok, not sleeping) together as often as we dared, starting a few
nights after Jadeite was glassed. Other than that, we did share
a kind of mutual respect, as a pair of totally ruthless, heartless,
and amoral bastards with powerful ideals not so much as a shred
of ethics between us. Call us a pair of kindred spirits, if
you will. And of course, we trusted each other about as far as
we could throw Beryl - well, probably not that far, judging
from the number of times we tried to enslave one another.
Love. Sure.
Right.
Anyway, the whole bloody mess with the guns started out with a
scene that went somethingloosely like this..
The grey man was across the table in an instant - in
fact he wasstanding on it before the others in the room had even
seen him move.
And he had Hanson by the throat.
"Awkk..I..can't...Breathe.." Hanson choked as the other's
suddenly blazing eyes bored into his.
"You sold them to WHOM?!" The force of the voice
pressed the gunrunner's bodyguard back as if it were a physical
thing.
The Department of energy presents
Sailor V has vanished...
A John Wu Fanfiction
In London, three men are found dead in a supposedly empty warehouse...
Super Soldier Sailor V special:
In Chicargo, a fortune in guns goes missing...
A crossover with Keichi Sonada's Gunsmith Cats
There are supernatural forces abroad...
Youma Blues
And only the Gunsmith cats can stop them!
Gunsmith Cats/Sailor V:
Guns of the Dark Kingdom
Part 1: Love and Bullets.
Aoi tossed the body to the ground and swore. Then he
reached out telepathically for his partner.
"Catlin. We have a problem."
And after that things got...busy.
Pardon me if I skip a bunch of boring $#!^ here, but Catlin
always told me that I tend to linger to much on totally
inconsequential things, like the trivial who, how, and where
of buying guns from the mob and how easy it is to intimidate
non-supernatural types.
It helped that Tethys (a rather nice girl once you got to
know her) was running interference for us in the Dark Kingdom, and
that I'd thoughtfully raided Jadeites' quarters right after he
became a paperweight.
His spell books were very interesting. The Leyline maps
were outdated, of course, but things hadn't changed that godawful
much in the new world, so I was able to make do, which made things
much easier.
Finding a decent place to cross over with the 'cargo' was a
bit more difficult, but a little telepathy while Beryl was distracted
got me Jadeite's aid (in exchange for being able to share Tethys's
eyes from his prison), and I was able to locate a bit of Atlantean
ruins that could anchor a gateway spell for as long as, oh, thirty minutes.
As for how I was going to get several thousand tons of firearms
and ammo through that gate in that short of a time, that was a simple
process of diverting resources.
I figured on taking the train.
The officials on Crete were most cooperative with my request
to redirect the rails.
Well, they were after I zombified the lot of them with a mind
control bit.
Of course, this did get me noticed, but I didn't realize that
until later.
His devotion to his queen is absolute, and that is the most
paramount of things. It is, after all, the way he measures his
worth in the world.
The perfectly loyal servant, surpassing even the Generals.
He has sought and strove and warred towards that goal for years.
Only, by all appearances, to have it snatched out from under
him by an outlander. Others in the ranks of the Youma could only
wonder at the self control it must take for him to remain serene
in the face of Beryl's favor of Jadeite's servant.
Sinhalite knelt softly before the cocoon of Mettilla and
prayed, coming here for his meditation the single habit of defiance
that would, if any could realize what it ment, show the lie in his
devotion.
Beryl was not his queen. She never had been.
His prayer lasted a indeterminable time, the newfound heat
of the cocoon chamber plastering his black hair to his head and
causing beads of sweat to run down into his blood colored eyes,
but at the end, as so rarely was the case, he was rewarded.
Mettilla stirred in her slumber, an uneasy, incoherent shift
in the currents of ebon hatred that pulsed in the room. A surge of
desire, a will to take for herself from her enemies, all that they
might covet. A twisting, black hearted overtone that carried a
surge of raw darkness into his soul, strengthening him to the
rigors of Dimensional travel - and carried one other thing. A sense
of the meaning behind this stirring.
It was a command.
"As my mistress desires, so shall it be. Tenshino Aoi
shall die." Sinhalite's whisper was very, very, soft.
London sped by on overdrive as the 'man' - using that term
very loosely - ran past a startled detective and hurled his (it's?)
self three stories up without pause. Alan barely had time to
breathe a startled oath as the being known as 'spring heeled jack'
passed him by without a seconds pause.
And then, even before he could catch his breath, a second
impossibility -followed it-, as a young blond girl in a somewhat
abbreviated sailor suit and mask spun around the corner at an
absurd velocity, shouting, "You won't get away creep!", and then
jumped as if she had wings up to the second story roof jack
was running along.
Minako Aino, Sailor V, didn't bother to note her current
crush's appearance there. She had other things on her mind.
The Youma ahead of her bounced off a chimney and jumped back
at her, striking out with what would have been blinding speed once
upon a time. The blow seemed to materialize from empty air as the
Youma - A thing of insect like plates and springlike legs - lashed
out at her with a double kick designed to remove her head.
It was no longer quite sufficient. And she was no longer
quite there, features blurred by a soft aura of golden light as she
drew upon her powers to move far faster than anything human had a
right to, letting the strike pass harmlessly though the image of
where her head had been as she lashed out with a fist that struck a
body built very much like a brick wall.
'move faster v-chan'. A soft whisper that seemed to follow her
wherever she went, these days. It was her own voice, but the face
it conjured, while it shared her blue-beyond blue eyes, wasn't
hers. A sea of bodies spread around it, in a city far away, a
reminder that she had failed once.
People had died there. Of shock, and weakness caused by
the enemy she'd allowed to escape.
She wouldn't fail again.
In that instant she was not quite precisely human. As she
did things like this, pushing herself to the limits of even her
ancient powers and beyond, she ceased, quite being Minako Aino,
nor was she completely the Sailor Venus of old.
She was stronger than either. She was Sailor V.
The Yuma was thrown twenty meters by her strike, though she was
sure she hadn't seriously damaged it, and she immediately followed
its flight path, then it's tracks, great leaps following it to
its resting-place. Jumping swiftly through the broken window to
land on the floor of the warehouse it had fallen into, she landed
with some difficulty - even for v-chan a unexpected four story
drop wasn't the easiest landing.
As she recovered she found herself looking up into the
raising barrel of a gun clutched by something that had been a
man in cheap, liquor smelling clothes.
There was no thought - there was no time for that. Her own gun
was out and pressed against his Adam's apple even as she pulled the
trigger.
He never even got a chance to scream before his spine was
severed. She drank in his eyes, as both the growing dark enchantment
and life left them, the moment of his falling stretching out into
eternity...
Then she was moving again, pausing only to firmly seal away
that moment for later hysterics. Right now she couldn't afford to
slow down. This enemy might not leave most of his victims alive.
Or her for that mater. There were a dozen more of them waiting
for her in the next room.
So, that was the situation when all hell began breaking
loose, and, for the first time since I'd become 'Spiritually
compromised', I saw red. I suppose I was a bit hard on Don
Antinio's guys, I mean, after all, business *is* business, but
at that point, selling Catlin's guns to someone whom I suspected
was actually Sinhalite was an unpardonable sin.
All of which brought me to be hiding in the rafters and
cursing my bad luck when the police barged in. I could have
teleported, but I wanted to conserve energy as much as possible.
After all, I suspected that I'd be dealing with a highly annoying
fellow Youma rather soon, if he was still swiping guns from the
other warehouse, as my departed friends had graciously informed
me.
This is, of course, how I met Rally Vincent, who was also
hiding in the rafters. Apparently she'd been spying on me or
on the mob, and had just called the cops on us somewhat earlier.
She's also very, very fast with that gun of hers, but you
knew that.
Having just met the lady, I tried to be smooth, and flashed
her my most charming smile as I turned to jump out of the skylight.
I guess I'd forgotten about the fangs by then, because my
attempt to reassure the bounty hunter failed miserably, and she did
something we would both live to regret.
She shot me. Several Times. The shock of it was almost
enough to keep me from teleporting away.
But only almost. I had an appointment in London, after all.
Sometimes I hate my luck.
Not as much as Minako hates my luck, but still...
Sinhalite had just started teleporting when I blasted in
the doors to the other warehouse. Luckily backing out of a
teleport is pretty much impossible or that likely would have
been the end of me.
I was only five minutes late, but that was more than enough
time for Sinhalite to finish up and clear out of this location.
I'm pretty sure now (as I was then) that I could have caught up
with him then, had not certain circumstances intervened.
Said circumstance being Sailor V's freshly dead body.
It's intervention was probably best for the both of us - having
several holes through me did nothing to improve my combat
ability, although none of the wounds was likely to prove fatal.
She wasn't very messed up - just one simple, fast killing
blow to the heart, and that's it. Largely because that's
Sinhalite's shock troops had the time for once they had immobilized
he - and over a dozen of them had died doing just that, judgeing from
the bodies.
I sound very calm about that. At the time, I was in a state
of extreme panic, because Sailor Venus dying threw half my anime-
gleaned foreknowledge right out the window. Besides, I liked her.
Still do, even if she hates my guts now.
Had I thought about it at the time, I probably wouldn't have
done what I did, but I needed a living Sailor Venus, not a corpse.
I won't go into extreme detail about what I decided to do - Actually
'decided' is a little...off. I didn't have time to really think
about the situation. If I had, Minako would have slipped from the
'sort of dead' state she had been collapsing into when I entered,
and gone straight past 'Mostly dead' to 'Definitely deceased' in
just a few seconds. And as I only know one way to heal massive
chest wounds fast, that's what I used.
Mind you, the ritual the boss used on me is usually the
cause of the massive chest wound, but I didn't have time to
quibble: I cast the ritual, summoned the diamon and introduced
Venus to the ranks of the Youma.
If this seems to be as much a bad idea to you as it does
to me, well, I admitted to the fact that I am a fool years ago.
Not so much the fool that I didn't realize that Sailor Moon
wasn't likely to accept a Youma Sailor Senshi, though.
I tried, I really did. Stopping the Diamon from
spreading completely through her body was hard, and killing
it's will harder - all the more so for the fact that something
inside me didn't want to, but once the magic had mostly dealt
with her wound, I did manage to stop it. (or so I thought.)
Once I got her stabilized I left her my coat and headed
after Sinhalite.
Leaving her alone like that was not my best move.
Gamlain, transuniversal courier & Hero for rent
Sheldon Burnham gamlain@airmail.net
Of course, my homepage is at
Http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/8762/index.html
"I Find that all this fighting for my life is quite exhilarating!" - Linn
Suzaki
Gamlain, transuniversal courier & Hero for rent
Sheldon Burnham gamlain@airmail.net
Of course, my homepage is at
Http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Bay/8762/index.html
"I Find that all this fighting for my life is quite exhilarating!" - Linn
Suzaki