Chapter Twelve

It was a confusing few seconds for Ryouga. The robotic body was entirely different from the organic one, yet still strangely familiar; it was creepy to remember that this was essentially the same as every time he had been transformed into his so-called ‘cursed form’. But he didn’t have much time to get used to it, because he was immediately attacked by who could only be Elrii. She danced around through the electronic components, zapping him almost constantly as he tried to do the same. There was no real sense of time, trapped in existence as nothing more than a burst of energy that had been converted at least partially to electricity or alien equivalent thereof. Finally he found a place that was more familiar than the rest – the brain, he realized – and he settled there, although it was painful. Elrii wouldn’t let him be; her barrage of attacks only grew worse once he settled in the brain. He was still unaware of the outside world. None of the input he was getting was like anything he had ever experienced before; it was… pure sensation, not even filtered through any senses. He didn’t even /have/ any senses. It was rather familiar, though, similar to his time spent in Miss Hinako’s physical body, yet different as well because of the different nature the robot form. Everything moved quickly, so very very quickly… and he wasn’t bound to the brain. In fact, at first he couldn’t even find that crucial portion of the body, and covered just about every other circuit in the body at least twice before finding it.

Even moving at only a fraction of c, which was itself only a fraction of Elrii’s speed, the entire process took only a few microseconds. And once he got there, it only grew more difficult. Elrii was powerful, she was more experienced… he managed to entrench himself in the artificial brain, and gain some rudimentary sense of location and time, but that was about it. Within half a second he had barely even that much, and while he made a slight recovery two seconds later, it only prolonged the torture. It was as if he were battling every martial artist in Nerima at once – while blind, deaf, dumb, and half-paralyzed… able to operate only by some strange equivalent of the sense of smell and retaliate only by lashing blindly out while frantically trying to hang on to any sort of place at all, desperate even for the crutch that allowed him some sort of action… but he was slipping, even as he adapted, even as he learned how to fight and actually managed to counterattack occasionally…

Ten seconds after being sent in a beam of pure chi to this body – ten seconds that felt like a million times that and a millionth of it – he lost his place, and was cast out of the brain, weak and helpless, into another part where he could not interfere with Elrii.

It happened to be the body’s left middle toe, but that didn’t matter much. It wasn’t as if he were aware of much for the five picoseconds he was there, or could do anything but begin to flex angrily before all of a sudden everything changed. The fact that he didn’t notice a transition of any sort was rather impressive, as his mind was currently operating at nearly one-half of c, even banished as he was.

***

Hinako came to a sort of blurry awareness a few seconds after the three bursts of light came out of her fingers. She had time to notice that one had apparently struck Elrii’s robotic ‘Ranma-chan’ body, and the second that had hit Cei – who also mysteriously dwindled down to his own robotic form, the tiny body of ‘P-chan’. The third had vanished… into… the… water gun?

She was unconscious before noticing that something had affected her, as well.

The blackness was comforting, though.

***

Rai let Nabiki Tendo’s hand fall gently from the child’s shoulder and stumbled back a little, feeling very drained. That had taken more energy than she had expected; she supposed that she should’ve gotten there sooner. If Ryouga hadn’t tried to transfer himself to Elrii’s body, it would’ve been simpler… of course, Elrii might also have escaped if she hadn’t been preoccupied with him at that crucial moment.

Nabiki, still conscious at the back of their shared physical mind, commented that she wasn’t surprised that the situation had been that screwed up. If anyone could make a situation worse – no matter how bad it already was – it’s Ranma. Ranma and Ryouga… worse by an infinite factor… I mean, just look at what they’ve already done!

Rai shook her head to clear it and dismiss the nagging voice from her thoughts. It was irritating; almost no one was able to do that. Nabiki had a surprisingly powerful will. She looked back up at Elrii and Cei, frozen stiff and essentially unconscious courtesy of the standard lockout security program hardwired into every Jusenkyo cursed body.

She took a moment to just look at them, and let herself feel a bit of pride. This was quite likely the most difficult job she’d ever done… those three – six actually – bursts of energy had been more complicated than they seemed. Well, five of them were complicated. The other was just what it seemed on the surface – pure energy, no programming instructions at all. To excite the molecules of a certain substance… she calmly picked up the water gun – and carried it over to the two frozen figures, but didn’t shoot either of them yet. That would be too simple… besides, there was one more thing she had to do.
“Unit Oh-Oh-Oh-One-Two-Seven-Beta, activate transfer conduit.” She spoke clearly, speaking with a slight artificial inflection that the program would recognize as being her signature. Otherwise, it would pick up only the voice of Nabiki Tendo, and ignore the command.

Active. The word came from Elrii, but it was in a deep voice that was heard more on a subconscious level than anything else.

She gave it its instructions, and then closed it back down again to wait until she left. Then everything would go back to normal… well, as normal as ever at least. Clean up was quick enough – the virus that Elrii’s unnamed companion had released into Ranma’s bloodstream during the night and attached like a radar tag to his consciousness was a remarkably clever one, but still just a virus. It was quickly blocked from both Ranma and Ryouga’s consciousness, and just for good measure Akane’s and Hinako’s as well.

Then she left. The final irony was that she did so through the transfer mechanisms that Elrii had so obligingly left powered up for her…

The first thing Nabiki was aware of when she suddenly found herself in the park was that for some odd reason she had just snapped her fingers. Her first conscious thought was to kill whoever had just drenched her with hot water… and what the hell was she doing in the park with these people anyway?

***

Ranma blinked. And winced in pain from a sudden, unexplainable cramp in his foot… then he blinked. And looked around, feeling groggy and disoriented for some reason.

He spoke the name of the first person he happened to see. “Ryouga?”

The lost boy looked up at him, a bewildered expression on his face. “Ranma?” he spoke the name about as intelligently as Ranma had spoken his.

“Delinquents! Skipping class!” the announcement nearly made Ranma – and Akane, although she hadn’t spoken yet and was suffering from a splitting headache for a reason that she couldn’t quite remember – jump in surprise and turn to look curiously at their teacher.

“Miss Hinako?” Ranma didn’t understand. “Why are you here… and if you’re here, doesn’t that mean that you’re skipping too?”
The little girl’s face of their teacher grew even angrier. Ranma sweatdropped, almost worried about what would come next, but then suddenly she stopped glowering. “Why are we here again?”

Ranma searched his mind for that answer. It felt as if he should know… as if there were a very, very good reason for it, but one that was just out of the reach of his memory. “I dunno,” he finally answered truthfully. Then he noticed Nabiki. “What are you doing here? You know why we’re here?”

The middle Tendo simply shrugged, a faint smile playing around the edges of her mouth for some unfathomable reason. “Field trip?”

After a few more minutes of confused discussion, the five of them returned to the school (Ryouga followed out of unwillingness to get lost again. He was the only one to take the occurrence in stride [other than Nabiki, who didn’t show any emotion in regards to it], used as he was to winding up in strange places for no apparent reason), where they were greeted with a mixed welcome. A few people asked Nabiki why she had left, and for some odd reason Akane and Ranma’s class seemed very interested in their teacher’s current state of mental health…

***

In a remote region of China, a European traveler ignored the largely incomprehensible protests of a Chinese guide who barely knew enough English for his speaking to be recognized as an attempt at using that language and bent down to wash muddy hands in the inviting, clear waters of one of the many ponds in the valley he had found after getting separated from his tour group. The back of the spring was muddier than he thought, though, due to the recent rainstorm, and he slipped in, going completely underwater before resurfacing.

When he finally emerged, it was as a rather panicked-looking large brownish red rabbit. The guide sighed, and pulled him out, carrying him into his hut to explain yet again what he had been trying to say earlier…

The guide had absolutely no idea of what had really happened that day, or why. It didn’t matter much, though. Two weeks later, the man returned to his home, now the not-so-proud bearer of the one hundred and ninety-ninth Jusenkyo curse. It made quite the stir in his family, once they found out… his nineteen year old daughter thought it was the cutest thing she had ever seen in her life.

***

Rai marked his location in a little booklet, then in the official file that such information was recorded in, and rolled her eyes. Almost two hundred, in Jusenkyo cases alone…

Rai had to leave. Her job was over, at least until the next one. She hoped desperately never to have to deal with a Jusenkyo cursed again. Gimmie a plain old SP anyday… she shivered involuntarily, startled and more than slightly disturbed by that thought. She reminded herself that she didn’t like the practice of creating SPs… she didn’t care for the whole idea of using a planet as a prison, but SPs… she knew why it was done, but that didn’t mean that she had to agree with it. It paid well… she had to keep reminding herself of that.

***

~Owari

AN: c is the speed of light. Roughly 300,000,000 meters/second in a vacuum… about ½ that in glass and I have no clue as to what it is in the metal that the robots are constructed of. Pretty damn fast, anyway.
    Picosecond – 0.00 000 000 000 1 seconds. Not a lot of time, to say the least. A microsecond is 100,000 picoseconds or so.

Oh, and major points to anyone who figures out what SP stands for.

~Mordain

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