Disclaimer: If I owned Tai Chi Chasers, we'd see Laura transformed. That way, we wouldn't need a dub or sub to be able to tell once and for all if she's a Tigeroid or Dragonoid.

Thank you to Alumina and Plasma57 for reviewing.

About ten minutes after I had thrown myself onto my bed and screamed my sheer terror into my pillow, I heard my mom come into the house. I still hadn't been able to go back to normal. Had I ever been normal? This sort of stuff didn't happen to normal people. What was I saying? This sorta stuff didn't happen, period. Well, not in real life. It happened in books and cartoons and video games. It didn't happen to normal kids like me. And again, was I even normal?

I heard my door open, and I quickly attempted to make it look like I was studying rather than fretting over my appearance. "Rai," she said, "thank you for picking up the bread and bananas on your way home. Would you mind telling me why there was blood on them?" I didn't answer. "And why are you wearing your hoodie? It's 89 degrees outside!" I still didn't answer. Mom somehow snuck up behind me and pulled it away from my head, despite the fact that I now noticed pretty much everything. It wasn't just a change in appearance, but also a change in... well... everything. All of my senses were on alert, and even then it felt like I had gained a sixth.

I quickly tried to hide my mutations from her, but it was no use. She yanked my hands away from my cheeks, and I opened my eyes to see nothing but concern in hers. "Rai, what happened?" she asked, panic rising behind her concerned tone.

"I'm not a freak I'm not a freak I'm not a-" I rambled before Mom cut me off.

"Rai, I know you're not a freak. I'm asking why there's a bloody cut on your cheek."

"I took a shortcut home and I got attacked by some gang because I didn't feel like giving them the groceries and then stuff happened."

"This is why I've told you to not take shortcuts, especially through the bad parts of town."

"Is this even important? I look like a freak and I can shoot fire from a card! There has to be something wrong with me! Were you and Dad involved in any sort of weird military experimentation when you got pregnant with me?"

"No, neither of us - wait, did you say you could activate the power of a fire character?"

"A what? Mom, what is going on?"

She looked away. "I knew I should have told you sooner." The way she said it, I'm not even sure if it was meant to be said aloud. Rather than give any more explanation, she simply narrowed her eyes and sighed. A blue light emanated from her body as her hair grew slightly longer and scales grew from her cheeks and the undersides of her arms. She began to awkwardly look away before she stopped herself and looked directly into my eyes. From that I could see her eyes had more severe slitted pupils than mine. When she spoke, I could see that her fangs were slightly longer and sharper than mine. "Your father and I aren't, well in his case wasn't, from this dimension. Don't hyperventilate, you'll pass out."

Barely being aware I was hyperventilating in the first place, I took a deep breath before letting loose. "You know, if a bunch of freaky stuff didn't just happen, I wouldn't even chance believing you right now. I mean, not from this dimension? What does that even mean? And why haven't you told me before?"

"You're right, I should've told you earlier. I guess I shouldn't have shielded you from the fact that your very existence is illegal." Her words may as well have cut through me like a knife. Despite the hint of sarcasm placed on the words "guess" and "shouldn't", those were the most serious words she had ever said to me, even more serious than how serious she sounded in the memory of when she had told me that my dad was dead.

"Let's get you bandaged up, and I'll explain. Everything." Her voice was calmer now. A blue light seemed to travel across her body as she returned to normal.

"How did you do that?" I asked.

"Do what?"

"Change back to normal?"

"Oh, that. It's basically the affect of losing adrenaline and gaining acetylcholine, to put it in human terms. Try to calm down. You'll find it much easier to change back." And as I calmed down, focused on my heart rate as I had been taught to, I could feel my hair get shorter, eyesight get blurrier, and hearing get muffled. My arms had neither stripes nor scales. My entire body hurt, just like it did when the adrenaline wore off after a martial arts match with anyone other than Kio. Seriously, that guy had never been able to land a hit.

As my mom cleaned and bandaged my wounds, she spoke. "Your father and I came from a parallel dimension to this one, one called Suhn. It's inhabited by two constantly warring races - the Tigeroids and the Dragonoids. I'm a Dragonoid; your father was a Tigeroid. We lived in a neutral town - one that was neither affiliated with the Tigeroids nor the Dragonoids. We weren't allowed to have fallen in love, but we did.

"That was completely forbidden, mostly out of fear that a hybrid would be born. The most famous hybrids have, throughout history, been quite powerful. And due to the stigma towards them along with other reasons that I don't know, many of them have unleashed pure destruction upon both races. Out of fear of this happening, people have been hunted down if they have had mixed ancestry within the past six generations."

"Past six? What does that mean?" I asked.

"Basically, if you and your descendents either only had children with either Tigeroids or Dragonoids, then your descendents in the seventh generation and afterwards would be legal. They would still be ostracized, but they would be legal. That's because it takes six generations for the power to control either races set of Tai Chi Characters to die."

"Tai Chi? Isn't that a martial art?"

"On Earth, it is. Back on Suhn, Tai Chi refers to 1000 symbols that hold immense power in them, if you have the ability to use them. They were split the equivalent of millennia ago between the Dragonoids and Tigeroids, in hopes that it would ensure piece."

"Equivalent of millennia ago?"

"Unlike Earth, which is a sphere orbits a star with people living upon its surface, I guess you could say that Suhn is like the inside of a shattered eggshell, each of those shards having it's own sense of up and down, and each of them having their own gravitational pull. A day is measured by our star making an orbit around all of Suhn. what may as well be our equator. Years are the measurement of time from one specific circumference to that exact same specific circumference." It made no sense to me, but I didn't interrupt.

"But anyways, it didn't ensure peace. Even when there was no total wars, there were high tensions between the two races. Your father and I lived a generally cosmopolitan town, so there weren't /too/ many fights. But they did happen. The man I used to call my father was in the Dragonoid military and by extension the police for the town, and let's just say he turned a blind eye upon the hate crimes committed towards the Tigeroids.

"There was talk of allowing marriages between the two races if both people consented to being reduced to infertile around the time your father and I met. That was probably the reason why I didn't try to force myself to not love him." Her eyes shone, both with the beginnings of tears and with passion, like she was reliving memories of when she met Dad. If I hadn't been born, would my mom be living a normal life? Does she ever wish that I was never born? "In the five years that it took to go from having crushes on each other to the two of us knowing that we'd be unable to spend our lives without each other, those opinions had reversed. The last straw had been when the man I once had called my father tried to kill me when he learned that your dad was a Tigeroid.

"We then escaped to Earth, where we constructed false identities, got married, and had you three years later." So it wasn't because of me.

She took a deep breath, and looked me directly in the eyes. "I have no proof of this, but I'm pretty sure that your father was murdered. Or as they would have put it, justifiably executed for the possibility of - I'm sorry that I'm about to say this, but pretty much most of Suhn unfortunately considers you to be this - allowing an abomination to come into existence."

"An... abomination?" I asked. She hugged me, and then pulled back to continue cleaning the last of the cuts.

"Rai, back on Suhn, people would want you to be killed the second they heard of your existence. You have the ability to use both races' Tai Chi characters, and that makes people scared of you, because you have always had the capacity to be more powerful than them. If the authorities there found you, they'd either kill you or attempt to use you as a weapon." We were both silent for several minutes afterward.

"I wonder how a Tai Chi character managed to get to Earth," I said, taking the card out of my pocket.

"I don't know," Mom replied, her eyes dark, "but that worries me, due to how there's Tigeroid activity in the area."

"How do you know that it's Tigeroid and not Dragonoid?"

"About a 'millennium' or so after the Tai Chi were created, they were split evenly between the Tigeroids and Dragonoids. The fire character you're holding, called Hwa, is a Tigeroid character. Or it was, last I checked. There may have been a war in the past 16 years in which it may have changed alignment." She didn't even have to tell me what changing alignment meant, because I knew the meaning the second the word exited her mouth.

Her brow furrowed slightly. "How did you activate the card?" Mom asked.

"Well the first time it just came to me, and the second time I held it up and shouted out its name and..." I trailed off, seeing her eyes widen.

"Rai, what you did should be pretty much impossible. It may be different due to how you're naturally more powerful than most, but at least for a pure-blooded Tigeroid or Dragonoid, Tigeroid in this case, using the card without an activator would require years of specific training. Your father could use cards without an activator, and he told me it took him seven years to master that skill. He was a prodigy, though. Most people take anywhere from fifteen to thirty years to be able to activate a character unassisted-"

"Unassisted?" I asked. The term felt both familiar and foreign.

"Most people - myself included - rely on pieces of technology called /activators/ to be able to activate a character's power. But as I was saying, the people who do manage to use a character without an activator are always naturally quite powerful. However, they have to be trying to use the character, the Tai Chi don't just act to protect people," she said, her voice an uneven mixture of agitation, excitement, and confusion. Her warm brown eyes met my more than likely confused crimson ones. "Rai, I think you managed to break all of the scientific laws governing the Tai Chi - you basically did the equivalent of turning off gravity.

"However, you're going to need to train to fully use your powers and find your limits - yes, you probably still have limits. We'll start tomorrow. I'm proud of you for being able to defend yourself, despite doing this by disobeying my direct orders, but your life is going to become far more fearful."

Mom left me to go place my bloodied clothing in the wash. Once I had clean clothes on my body, I attempted to do homework that now seemed more meaningless than it had when it was assigned. Somewhere between studying the periodic table and the lack of any adrenaline to keep me awake, sleep overtook me. In my dreams, I escaped a coffin only to find an inferno.