Chapter Six

Hinako Ninomiya knew something had happened even before she heard the commotion upstairs. So did the two adults she was talking to, because she was very obvious about it.

Now that she knew what had happened to her in the incident at school, she could tell it for herself. She could feel the weight of Ryouga’s consciousness in her mind, and it wasn’t exactly a pleasant sensation. It was crowded up there now, although she also had the nagging feeling that there was another place, somewhere else that he could go to have plenty of room. But for now they were crowded, so close together, actually, that when he started screaming inside her head as if his legs were being sawed off with a dull knife it overwhelmed her for a moment, making her crumple on to the ground as if she had fainted, clutching her head as if it was exploding, her entire body aching with sympathetic pain. Only when the scream abruptly cut off did she notice that she had shrunk down, taking the body of a little girl once more. 

A little girl, who couldn’t control her emotions very well, but who /knew/ that something was wrong. 

“Ryouga? Ryouga? What happened? Are you alright?!?” she asked anxiously, ignoring the looks that Genma and Soun were giving her. Frantically, she dug around in her mind, looking for some trace of his consciousness. She knew that he was supposed to have gone – but somehow, she also knew that if he had gone, he was dead. Death was bad – and the dead person would be in her /head/. How’d that be for a gruesome Halloween story? 

She found him, and literally cried with relief when she felt the tiny trace of his mind, barely alive, but at least there. His chi, which had been keeping her in her adult form, was gone - he had latched on to her own energy, draining it away slowly to keep alive. He wasn’t even using enough to keep conscious, much less control a body, but now she felt a new sort of panic – she didn’t have very much, and even the little that he was using was enough to severely threaten her own existence. Who could she drain… 

The anti-climactic commotion from upstairs was the only thing that prevented Soun and Genma from becoming the needed targets. Her attention was, luckily for them, diverted.

“Ranma? What’s going on?!?” Undoubtedly, as an adult she would have been able to retain much more poise, but as it was she was just a child, and a worried one at that. It didn’t help when she saw Ranma slumped in the hallway, two broken walls showing how she had gotten there. He wasn’t unconscious but was certainly hurt.

“What *happened*?!?” she cried, running to make sure he was okay.

“I happened, little girl.”

A figure stepped through the holes in the wall. He looked familiar, but little Ninomiya didn’t notice; she could feel his chi, and it was Ryouga’s! Somehow this… person… had stolen Ryouga’s energy, right from her own body! He approached her slowly, menacingly.

Instinct took over. Hinako knew how to handle a bully. First, get far enough away so that he couldn’t reach you fast enough. Then:

“Good girl’s exercise step one!” The small coin had slipped into her hand almost of its own accord, and the rest was just pure defensive reflex.

“Ja! Byo! Tsu! Aku! Ma!”

A series of quick movements and a blinding blast of green light later, the little girl was back in her adult form, the menacing attacker was unconscious on the floor, and Ryouga, in Hinako’s mind, had been reunited with his chi and was stirring from unconsciousness.

Ranma just looked back and forth between the two. “What’d you do that for?”

“He was attacking you,” she answered evenly. “That, and he had stolen your friend’s energy. Why?”

“That’s just Ryouga! He was pissed at me, but…” He trailed off, looking thoughtful. “Or is it…”

She looked down at the drained person. Now that she was no longer being attacked, she could spend time trying to place the face; indeed, it did seem to be that of the Hibiki boy, who she had seen once or twice. 

But even as she looked at him she could feel Ryouga stirring awake in her mind. It made sense to her – since Hibiki hadn’t had a body when she had drained his chi, someone else must have been occupying it. What she couldn’t figure out was why Ranma hadn’t realized this yet.

“That is merely his body. His soul in still with me.” And it’s getting crowded in here… 

Ryouga was conscious now, and starting to blindly grasp for control of the body he was occupying. Hinako graciously ‘moved over’ and let him have access to her physical senses. He radiated relief when he could hear and see again, and she was relaxed as well. He stumbled a bit when he saw the body he was in and the fact that there was another mind there with him, but he managed to calm down, remembering. She let him speak. It wasn’t difficult, except restraining the impulse to speak herself. She remembered how bad it was when they both attempted to speak at once.

“Ranma? Wha- what happened?”

“Ryouga? So ya really are still there. I think that you’re a bit possessed right now…” he motioned down to the body on the floor, which hadn’t moved yet. Hinako wondered about that, but let Ryouga have his say first. This concerned him more than her, at the moment.

“Yeah, I’m here. I… could feel it when you put that thing in the hot water. It ripped my chi away from me, and tried to get me, too, but I couldn’t leave this body.” He paused, uncertain. “I don’t know how…”

***

Ranma was confused, not that that was unusual recently. But something especially odd was going on now – and he had no idea what it was. Even if he had been inclined to think that his teacher was lying, he couldn’t – Ranma was pretty certain that it was impossible to fake the strobe-light of emotions that were constantly flying over her face; one second, she was calm and collected, the next, groggy and bewildered. The cycle repeated itself until it made anyone intently looking at her a bit seasick.

“I think I have a theory.”

“Miss Hinako?” 

She nodded, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Sure enough, the two parents had followed her upstairs. “You need to get back to school, young man.” She grabbed his arm and led him outside, giving him only the opportunity to pick Ryouga’s body up and take it with them. 

He threw off her grasp on his shoulder as soon as they reached the street. “So what’s your theory already?” he asked, a little annoyed. “Why isn’t Ryouga in his own body?” He shifted the unconscious form he carried slung over his shoulder slightly. 

“I think I’m more worried about that than you right now, Ranma!”

That’s gotta be Ryouga. It wasn’t terribly difficult to tell who was speaking. The tone usually gave it away. “I know that. But you aren’t the one having to lug your heavy possessed carcass around, so let teach explain what’s goin’ on so that we can get you outta her and back where you belong!”

Hinako/Ryouga blinked. Twice, because they were both taken by surprise by that particular statement, and the particular tone in which it had been said. 

“Well,” Hinako started, meanwhile revising her opinion of Ranma, “I have studied chi at considerable length, for obvious reasons.”

“Trying to cure yourself?”

“Something like that. Anyway, I have become quite well acquainted with the idea of chi, and other theories that involve or explain it.” She started to walk, motioning for Ranma to follow. “Listening to your explanation of Jusenkyou curses, I can see that those who are cursed somehow acquire an additional body. Cold and hot water are the triggers in which your consciousness transfers between the two bodies. Recent events have convinced you that these cursed bodies are mechanical constructs, rather than actual living beings, which, when active, are somehow disguised as the living thing that they are supposed to resemble.”

Ranma thought. “I guess that’s as good an explanation of what we already know as anything,” he agreed. “But who…”

“I can answer that with a single question,” she answered before he could even finish. “Did you ever consider that, with two bodies, you could also house another soul?”

Ranma actually stopped walking for a second to think about that question. Digested it. It tasted terrible, but… “It… makes sense, I s’pose… but wouldn’t we have noticed before?”

Hinako shook her head. “Not necessarily. There are – theoretically – ways of making one will subservient to another. But more importantly, this new consciousness that has taken control of Hibiki’s body does not seem to have any chi of its own.”

“So it’s helpless.”

“For now. Hibiki’s body produces chi, however, so if it learns to use that, it could regain consciousness. That would likely be very difficult to do, however.”

“That’s such great news,” Ryouga interrupted. It had to be Ryouga. “But what about the little task of getting me back into my own body? Ain’t I gonna die in here if I don’t leave soon?”

“Do you feel any weaker?” Hinako asked. It was weird, Ranma mused, watching her argue with herself, and funny in a way that made him wish that his teacher was back to being her normal vampiric self again. “Besides your little misadventure just now? I use up stolen chi rather quickly, I assure you you’d be feeling quite weak by now if I was using it, which I’m not.”

“How does -”

“Does it /matter/, Ryouga?” Ranma interrupted. It was just one less problem to worry about if he wasn’t in imminent danger of death. He said as much. Ryouga didn’t seem to be happy about this, but Hinako cut off their argument. I was amazingly easy to do so when you could reduce one of them to incoherence merely by speaking.

They’d reached the park by this point, and Ranma had dumped the body he was carrying onto a bench. It’s chest rose and lowered minutely in a slow, regular rhythm. Ranma presumed that it was a good thing that it was at least alive, as long as it didn’t try to move any further before they wanted it to.

“As much as I hate to say this, I think we should try asking the old ghoul for help.”

Ryouga and Hinako had gotten much better about talking in turn so that their responses were coherent for others besides themselves.

“Who?” 

“Cologne, the old Amazon,” Ryouga explained. “Runs the Nekohanten. She’ll probably know something, he’s right. Whether she’ll tell us without making Ranma promise to marry Shampoo is another matter.”

“That wouldn’t work and she knows it,” Ranma interjected, feeling a little miffed. “She has just as much reason to want this figured out as I do. Shampoo’s cursed, and even if she doesn’t like him, Mousse is too.”

“This is assuming that she’s not somehow involved in it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep bringing that up…”

***

~Mordain

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