Chapter Three

The transition back was a bit of a shock, to say the least. One minute he was talking to Ryouga, while ghosts of the family played out their lives in the background; the next, he was suddenly part of that background again, and it was Ryouga who was pale and transparent.

But his first reaction to anything was to the scalding hot water that he was now drenched with. “Yeeeouch!” he exclaimed, jumping back. “Too hot!” He backed away further, trying to put the action under the pretext of cooling himself down. Truth be told, he was quite possibly more frightened than he had been before in his entire life.

“Honestly, Ranma, you are such a baby sometimes…” Akane derided him, still absently petting the metal pig she held like a pet.

Ranma just removed himself farther from them. The wraith-like Ryouga followed hesitantly, and for some reason the thought of him following was reassuring, whereas the mere presence of any of the currently ‘solid’ people made his hands sweat and hair stand on end. He wasn’t afraid of them, though, so much as merely… creeped out.
“I’m gonna… um… go… now…”

“But we don’t have to leave for another half…” Ranma, not hearing, jumped over the wall surrounding the backyard and ran. “…hour.” Akane finished.

“He’s acting even weirder than normal, today.” Nabiki commented. 

“Oh dear, he forgot his school bag…” Kasumi said, holding up said item. “Akane, would you…” 

“I’m not leaving early just to follow him around.” Akane said forcefully. “I’ll take it with me when I leave, though. He just better have a good reason for running off…”

***

Ranma ran until he found the small patch of woods behind the high school, Ryouga close behind and not getting lost for a change. 

“What the hell do I do now?” he wondered aloud, as much to vent frustration as to elicit an answer. Not that there was anyone around who could or would answer. He looked at the phantasmal Ryouga, who didn’t move. “Well, buddy, it seems that you’re the only other one aware of this…” 

Ryouga didn’t answer.

“Hey, didja hear me?” He waved a hand in front of the ghost’s face. “Hello? Oh shit, don’t tell be that you’re zoned out again…” 

No response. Ranma thought for a moment, then bellowed, “Snap out of it!”

Finally, Ryouga moved, even it was only a blink. After another pause, he looked up, slowly, at Ranma, and moved his lips as if he were speaking. Ranma heard nothing, and he couldn’t lip-read well enough to make out more than his name.

“I can’t hear you.”

A bit of annoyance flashed over Ryouga’s face, and he lifted one arm to point at the ground around Ranma’s feet. 

<You can’t see it?> he mouthed, slowly enough so Ranma could decipher the words.

“See what?”

<Look at your feet.>

Confused, Ranma looked down, but there was nothing there. “What? Is there something there?”

<It’s that ****** thing.> Ranma couldn’t decipher the middle of the phrase.

“It’s what? I didn’t understand.”

<Your girl form.>

“The robot?!” Ranma jumped back. He still couldn’t see anything, but if that… thing… was there…

Ryouga shook his head. <It’s not… active. It followed you.>

“So it tags along with me until I get splashed with cold water. Then it becomes real, and I… go away. But I was always in control, before, when I was a girl. Wouldn’t I have noticed if my body was some weird robot?”

Ryouga shrugged. <I don’t know. I’ve never noticed anything.>

“Somehow I don’t think that we were supposed to.”

Ryouga looked at him curiously. 

“Well, it’s pretty obvious that Jusenkyou’s not what it seems. /Someone/ must have built the robots to be our cursed forms.”

<I guess. But who?>

“The guide? The Amazons?”

Ryouga looked doubtful.

“Okay, so maybe not.”

<Aliens?>

Ranma laughed. “Maybe! But it seems pretty clear that we have to go back to China.”

<How?>

“Good question.”

***

Ryouga was frustrated. And confused, but if he let that take over he wouldn’t be able to do anything, so right now his dominant emotion was frustration. He’d thought that his life was already weird enough, and now most of the strangeness had been exchanged for something that was possibly weirder, and just plain creepy as well.

The female-shaped android, lifeless and dark, that seemed attached to Ranma’s translucent feet didn’t help calm him down, either. Of course, the fact that Ranma’s feet were translucent wasn’t reassuring anyway, but he could deal with that. Robots… as much as he’d seen, none of it had come close to that.

He tried speaking again. “The robot is solid to me,” he said, speaking slowly and clearly so that Ranma could decipher his words. That was another frustration, but he supposed it was better than not being able to communicate at all.

<It is?> Ranma answered. His words were hard to make out, although they were loud and clearly audible. But Ryouga had found that unless he concentrated, he just didn’t listen; his attention had a tendency to just slide away whether he wanted to hear or not. <Can you pick it up?>

“I don’t know. I’ll try…”

He attempted to touch it, and his hand met cold metal. He shivered at the feel of it. “Yeah, I can touch it at least.” Gingerly, he pulled on the limp form. It was heavy, and resisted moving away from Ranma, but with some effort he was able to separate it from its host. He picked it up. It seemed a lot lighter now that it wasn’t attached to Ranma anymore.

“I’ve got it. What should I do with it?”

<I don’t know.>

“Well then I’m going to put it back down. I don’t think there’s much of a point in holding onto it.”

***

Ranma saw Ryouga lower the nothingness that he held cradled in his arms to the ground and shivered, knowing that the thing had reconnected itself to him, even though he felt nothing, still couldn’t even see the lifeless duplicate.

“I wonder if any of the others are like this,” he said idly.

Ryouga, who hadn’t been listening, looked up. Something had been said… <What did you say?>

“I wonder if the other cursed people are like this too.”

<Probably.>

“Maybe we should talk to the Amazons about this, then. With two of them cursed, they’d have to listen to us.”

<Unless they’re the ones behind this.>

“I’d rather not think about that possibility.”

***

~Mordain

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