Wow! Only slightly over a week late for this one:
I've had this finished for over a month now, but was hoping to make more
progress than I have on Chapter Thirteen before releasing it. My
obsession
with Utena has prevented that, however.
Yes, but since it is Utena, that's all right.
* * *
Like the crucible of Dis
In which those sinners offensive to God
Are burned eternally with righteous fires
That is how fierce burns brothers' hatred!
Which places it slightly below that of teh rage you get when standing up
your girlfriend. Believe me, I know both and which is worse.
I knew those lines before my consciousness was born in the
So, utilizing first person for this chapter for Mardruk. The change works,
in this case.
forges of the Sanguis Mekhos. Even before I could think, learn,
feel pain,
get a poker face so I wouldn't keep losing all of my cash at cards
In me is the memoriam of Dasim. Whatever may have been
preserved, far more has undoubtedly been lost. I hold the songs
and poems and stories of Dasim, the images of their painting and
sculpture and architecture, the secrets of their technology...
not of the creation of hierodules such as I, though, for my
mothers and fathers did not see it fit
Don't know is I'd use the 'it' there. Used to seeing 'not see fit' I
suppose, since the other doesn't seem grammatically wrong.
I wrote that. I do not think it is very good. I have never
shown it to anyone. When this is over, I will share it with my
Makoto.
Ah, so he was created to be independently minded enough to create poetry.
Helps to understand why Lethiaphan was able to be corrupted as well if he
too was that far along with an artificial intelligence.
I am reminded of the warring brothers, and of the songs that
sing their tragedy, because I am trying at this moment to kill my
own brother. If I may call him my brother any longer, this mad,
faceless thing that drips darkness that burns in the sun.
Lethiaphan: It's not my fault. Society's to blame.
Both of us are in our elements in this battle; he in water,
I in air. My lightning is absorbed by shields of water; I cannot
reach him. Yet I am more maneuverable, and he cannot reach me
either. He makes few attacks; what ones he does would fly wide
of me even if I did not dodge.
Afura: Darn. Now why didn't I do that when I attacked the oversized hunk of
metal?
Does some remnant of my brother remain, trying to keep me
>from harm? Or is there some other purpose to these tactics? We
are both damaged, but I far less than he; all that keeps him
moving, I believe, is whatever rides him. I must conclude that
the strategy is not a conflict between my brother and his captor;
it is a concerted effort to change hosts.
Oh? Why would he assume that? Because Lethy isn't coming close to hurting
him?
In Makoto's mind--our bond cannot be broken so long as we
both exist--I can see that he has never thought of my brother as
a him. Only as a faceless it. I will not become an "it" to him.
I will not let that happen.
'"I'll redesign my outer casing to look like Ifurita. That'll do it."
To the left and the right, I hurl my searing bolts; my
brother raises his shields. But it is a feint; down the centre,
directly towards him, my net comes hurtling. Lightning bound
momentarily into the shape of a net by the same manipulations of
air and electricity that allow me to fly.
Seems like a run on there. Perhaps 'hurtling: lightning bound' or something
like that.
The prey is caught; he stands upon the waves, helpless, as
the lightning writhes around his body in a burning web. A flat
keening fills the air--he is trying to scream, but no longer has
the ability to express pain.
All he had left was the ability to give the finger, and even then he could
only do it with the non-trident hand.
I do not have my spear any longer; where it is now, I cannot
say, if it even remains at all. So I form a spear of cogent
lightning from the blade on my remaining arm;
Shoot. Been so long since I read the physical description of him, I forgot
what Mardruk looked like. Forgot about the blade on the arm.
Oh, Leth,
I don't know as I care for abbrieveating the name like that. It just
doesn't sound right coming from the Mardruk.
oh my brother, youngest, fairest, most beautiful
of us all,
"Or so you would have been if you had had a face instead of a videoscreen
and had something other than seweed looking stuff as your hair. In
hindsight, I suppose you really weren't much to look at. Downright ugly, in
fact. I guess I was wrong about you. But I've been out of commision for a
number of years, so I suppose I can be forgiven for that."
you have always been a slave will always be a slave,
Even with this being a steam of consciouness bit, I'd still throw in a
comma between 'slave, will' but it's more a style thing than anything else,
I guess, but it reads better to me
The blade sings my brother's
death-song in my hands
What will the sage's say,
sages (I think)
Samm? How will they explain
how brothers, once so close,
Could come to such a state?
Like this:
Sage: They just didn't get along after a while. Nossir. Not one little bit.
See? It's easy.
The poet Othya, whose name is unrecorded, who is called by
the name of the city in which his great saga was composed;
Which, by some sheer coincidence, was his real name.
The lightning hums death's harmony upon my arm;
"Curiously, it sounds a lot like an Enya song. Coincidence? I wonder."
My spear wavers, and the darkness leaps out of my brother
for me. Too close; no chance to avoid it. And when it touches
me, I am gone.
Oops.
What do you need the most, my love? What do you desire?
Not the songs of Dasim; no, not them. Take this, my last gift to
you. My love. The lightning spears towards the dark clouds
above. My love and his friends are far away, they have reached
the shallows now--they are in no danger.
However, Mardruk's ability of prophecy was just as crappy as Afrua's was
earlier, and Makoto and the others stepped on a bunch of poisonous sea
urchins, killing them all instantly.
The blackness touches me. It licks against the stump of my
arm and find entrance.
finds
I can feel it invading every part of me.
It is fast. Not fast enough.
SELF-DESTRUCT MECHANISM ENGAGED
Oops. And here I thought Mardruk might last a little while. Oh well.
He felt the surging pain of Mardruk's dying, and, the last
thoughts of love rushed into his brain; riding on them were
numbers and equations and diagrams, facts and figures and
theories... he couldn't hold them all, his skull was going to
burn out and explode into fragments that would litter the
all-pervading whiteness of the lightning strike...
Hmm. Downloaded something useful. Not about units like him though. I wonder
what.
Thunder clap,
I think that's one word.
than steel and lighter than wood, he knew a hundred thousand
shining things, lost fragments of ancient knowledge hurled into
his brain by Mardruk that they not be lost forever, ready to be
called up again from the abyss into which they were--to preserve
his mind, his very identity--already vanishing.
Ah. I see
Lethiaphan bobbed to the surface. What little flesh
remained upon it was blackened by lightning; muck and fish skins
and seaweed still draped it in places. Most of its surface
seemed taken up by the burning, oily substance. Makoto knew that
it was... alive. That it had been Lethiaphan's rider and
Mardruk's killer. It was the cold darkness he had felt earlier;
the great devourer.
Perhaps capitalized 'Great Devourer'?
A psychic scream of agony and hate battered at his mind;
then, in a flash, the dark shape had concentrated itself into a
downward-pointing arrow, and fled into the cool, dark, oceanic
depths.
Bummer. Now it can come back again and harrass them later. (possibly)
"No more." He looked from face to face. "Not one more, if
we can prevent it. Katsuhiko was my friend once, but he isn't
any more. He has to be stopped, whatever it takes."
About time
He expected Shayla to express some enthusiasm; instead, she
turned an agonized gaze upon him. "Makoto..."
"Take the boat to shore, Alielle," he said, almost a
whisper.
Curious. Why is he trying so hard to avoid her?
"Hey! Hold on!" Fujisawa frowned. "That's dangerous,
following that thing on your own."
"This whole expedition hasn't exactly been safe so far," Miz
said soothingly. "Besides, you'll come with me to protect me."
The teacher blinked. "I will?"
"Yes."
And that will be two less characters to deal with in the main group. ^_^
Makoto shook his head. "I didn't take nearly the battering
you two did, and you're still standing."
"We," Shayla said, "are Muldoon Priestesses. You are not."
The lack of breasts is the dead giveaway.
Because he hated forests, Perra was, of course, currently
leading them through one. A short albeit precarious journey
short, albiet precarious, journey (I think)
A heady mix of pine and spruce irritated Jinnai's nostrils,
and he let out a resounding sneeze every few minutes.
Heh. Figures.
The trees
themselves had the same familiar-but-alien quality common to most
of the flora in El-Hazard (the fauna, too, for that matter); it
all seemed a little too colourful, too exotic. Little blue and
white puffball flowers grew amongst the roots of the tall trees;
Jinnai had irritably kicked at one soon after entering the woods,
and it had left an ugly stain on the cuffs of his trousers which
made his mood even worse.
Come to think of it, unless the bugrom have been washing his clothing for
him, his clothes should be pretty crappy by now with what he's been
through, unless he changed to El-Hazard garb.
It didn't help that no one else seemed to be as miserable as
he was. Deva and her bugrom had an almost childlike fascination
with the unfamiliar sights: the pale-barked trees with their
jagged, spiky leaves, the long-bodied three-tailed squirrelish
rodents that leapt from branch to branch high above their heads,
the tiny, flitting birds with pitch-black tails three times the
length of their bodies
that seemed drawn to hitting him with white droppings as they flew over
him.
... To him, it was all more of the rather
tedious exoticism of El-Hazard. Everything was so wondrous and
unique that approached
that it approached
>
Even the catatonic Nahato, firmly ensconced beneath the arm
of the largest Bugrom, didn't seem to be having too bad a time.
Yeah. Right. When was the last time he relived himself without his clothing
on, I wonder. He's going to be pretty rank before too long.
At least the mountains were the same;
except for the lime colored snow.
"Thank you, God," he murmured, "for this, the opportunity
that you have seen fit to give your humble servant. I am worthy
of it." He looked up from his brief prayer. "Hey! Wait up!"
Heh.
"Of course she's worried about me," he growled quietly.
"She's enamoured of my
'of' or 'by'? 'of' sounds a bit off, but it could be just me.
"She's worried about you because you're her brother.
Otherwise she wouldn't.
She
cares for you."
"Then why does she oppose me? Why does she side with my
enemies?"
Perra: You're an egotistical madman that even a dog wouldn't like?
Jinnai: I mean besides that.
The certainty that his eternal foe was no longer in any
position to be his eternal foe left him feeling... nothing. It
was something he'd long ago prepared himself for, as soon as he
realized Makoto was his adversary; every adversary must
inevitably be vanquished.
I like that. Very Jinnaiish.
"Don't you serve the Bugrom Queen?"
"For now," he replied, casting more furtive glances at the
distant Deva.
Eh? Why? I thought Deva acknowledged that she served him.
Nanami, closer but still not within earshot of
their quiet talking, stuck her tongue out at him; he scowled
fiercely back at her, and returned his attention to Perra. "I
need her right now; her strength, and the strength of her Bugrom.
But she's merely a machine, a tool; you're
I think you're really overusing the semi-colons now. I'd really split the
'tool; you're' into two seperate sentences
human, like me. You
can understand, can't you?"
With his old adversary gone, a new adversary would no doubt
emerge. No man, after all, was great without a great foe, and
he, Katsuhiko Jinnai, was undoubtedly a great man. Could it be
Deva? Perhaps; he would have to watch her closely...
Ohh. Paranoid now, is he? That's going to be fun.
"This sucks," Nanami muttered as she trudged behind them.
"Sixteen years of sibling rivalry, and my double already has a
better relationship with my brother than I ever did."
Nanami makes it sound as thought that's a bad thing. :)
Further back, Deva paused in her examination of the flora.
"The sun, the earth, the scents of the air... why are they so
unfamiliar?
Because you've never seen or smelled them before?
The membrane of the diving bubble was so thin that the
filtered sunlight turned into rainbow swirls within its wall;
Fujisawa had to suppress a perverse desire to reach out and poke
a hole in it. It would remain watertight, of course; a scant day
earlier, he'd pushed his entire body through one, when Miz had
come to retrieve him after Lethiaphan had nearly killed him.
Ah, back to them. I thought we wouldn't see them for at least a chapter.
Should have killed him, by all rights; but for the changes
made in the passage from Earth to El-Hazard, he'd be fish food
right now.
Of course if not for the changes, he'd never have confronted Lethiaphan in
the first place.
Well, this is nice, he thought. You've done pretty well for
yourself, Fujisawa, much better than you ever did back on Earth.
A nubile young girlfriend (fiancee? They had to have a talk
about that whole marriage thing), super powers, no more pangs
when you can't get a drink, no more desperate cravings for
cigarettes... So why don't you feel happier? Why aren't you
enjoying this more?
Probably going to die soon. That's why. ^_^
They descended into the black. As sunlight from above
became more and more diffuse, the glow of the diving bubble
began to seem
'began to seem' sounds awkward. Not sure how I'd rephrase it, though.
"What's out there?" Fujisawa asked, breaking a quiet that
had listed long minutes of their slow descent.
"Sea dragons, probably," Miz murmured. "Perhaps a kraken or
two at these depths."
"Oh. Are they dangerous?"
"Not at the moment."
Wait until the black stuff gets them, though.
Metal glinted, cold and ancient and untarnished, from
beneath a seaweed mask.
Miz stared, then whispered softly: "My God."
Not, after all, a cliff-face. A door.
Oh, fine. End it there. The ole' 'Doorway coming out of nowhere suddenly
leading to who knows what' gimmick was always a favorite of mine. :)
Have to admit, not much of a drop off after Lethiaphan's final hurrah. I
thought there would be some downtime or feeling of accomplishment over
eliminating one of the major bad guys and primary muscle in this fic, but
things pretty much rushed on without a second thought about it. Just didn't
feel like that much of an accomplishment, I guess. Still, it makes sense
from the story's perspective, and chasing the giant inkstream to the
mysterious doorway was a bit of an unexepected twist. Jinnai and company
moving right along too. Hope to see more of this soon.
Nice work.
D.B. Sommer