I'm on a roll. Three fics posted recently! Yufic, Clayfic, and Hellfic!
Yes. This is the infamous "Hellfic", ladies and gentlemen. If you know what it is, see what you think! If you don't know what it is, then fasten your seatbelts (assuming there are still seatbelts on those ancient artifacts called "cars") and hold on tight, because this is going to be quite a ride.
WARNINGS: pairings of all three major sexual orientations. Violence, questionable behavior, and eternal damnation. Bizarre setting. Not your average mythology contained herein. Potentially offensive to very, very, very religious people, but not meant to be taken seriously. Humor and confusion and weirdness.
PAIRINGS: all sorts. Major pairings are Garu/Ernest and Zero/Erts. Other pairings vary wildly, but include Rio/Phil, one-sided Tune>Ernest, past Gareas/Leena, Azuma/Rill, Kuro/Teela, Tukasa/Yamagi, Yamagi/Roose, Roose/Wrecka, and Roose/Wrecka/Yamagi. (I know by now I'm certainly getting weird looks from everyone.) Potential pairings include Kizna/Ikhny, Leena/Tune, Clay/Saki, Hiead/Wrecka, one-sided Rome>Erts, if you must Yu/Kazuhi, pretty much EVERYBODY/Roose-and-or-Wrecka... probably a few I'm missing...
Good luck.
WALKS AMONG THEE
almost a fairy tale
by Kay Willow
THE TALE OF THE BOY WHO DIDN'T FIT IN
Once upon a time, there lived a young boy, in a village called Serenity.
Serenity had been formed many ages ago by a group of religious cultists
who worshipped God with all their hearts and believed in peace, unity,
and tolerance. They formed a community that they hoped the world would
model itself after; even though in the years since their hope had proven
false and they had long died out, their values and beliefs remained in
the hearts of the people who lived there.
Serenity was a village that hovered between a world of technology and modernization and a world of sorcery and ancient legend. The young boy, perhaps, had the best of both worlds: his family had made magic into a career and grown wealthy from it, allowing the boy to live in comfort; yet he also understood mechanics and took advantage of his knowledge to make his life simpler, for he had no magic of his own, the "black sheep" of the family.
In more than one way. For the boy was violent, conceited, and thoughtless; he stood out among the gentle and tolerant people of Serenity with his dark, unpleasant nature. He had a sharp mind but a sharper tongue, and was not easy to get along with. Fortunately for him, his position and influence often made friends for him.
There was also a girl in Serenity. (Well. Technically there was more than one. But only one who mattered.) The boy had grown up with her, and she was different from the others in the village as well: she was not intimidated by his name or status or rages or insults, would often talk back to him, as rude or even ruder than he himself had been, and refused to let his jibes at her less than affluent family or unfeminine ways bother her at all. In spite of himself, the boy found that this behavior was far more appealing to him than the simpering of his fans or the endless competition with the other boys. More and more, as they grew older, they began spending time with each other.
By the time the boy had turned seventeen, he had decided that he was in love with the girl, and she reasoned that she probably loved him too. For all that this was not very romantic, they had both come to the conclusion by a not-very-romantic line of thought: basically, that they hated just about every one of the idiots in Serenity except for each other, and so it seemed quite natural that what they had was love. This line of thought was helped to its final conclusion, despite the lack of warmfuzzy emotions or burning passion or never-ending devotion, by a couple of really good bouts of sex in the woods behind her father's house, and eventually getting caught by her father himself.
So before the boy turned eighteen, he made it official by asking the girl to marry him. After a few days of deliberating, she agreed. Their village was overjoyed, and they tolerated the admiration and good wishes of the people they had always hated, because they could count on each other to understand.
But such happiness, in fairy tales, rarely lasts for very long.
Shortly before the wedding, the boy was approached by a stranger, someone he had never before seen in the village. And the stranger warned him that his beloved was marked for death: within six days, she would be killed in her own home by a freak accident. The boy asked, bewildered, who the stranger was talking about. So the stranger clarified that by "beloved" he meant "fiancee". Once that had sunk in, the boy became outraged at the presumption of this nobody, to try and challenge his happiness with unlikely premonitions of death.
Then the stranger revealed himself in truth: no ordinary mortal, but a demon in disguise. He had looked within the Book of Fate, this demon, and seen within its pages the death of the young man's wife-to-be. And he had come to offer a bargain: in exchange for the boy's soul, the demon would prevent the destruction of their union -- allow them to be together forever.
The boy considered his dilemma long and hard. His soul was a large price to pay, but how empty would his life be in the middle of nowhere without his ever-present companion, the only person who had understood him? How long could he stay sane without someone to serve as a foil to the relentlessly good people of Serenity?
He had to agree to the demon's offer, but he was unwilling to sacrifice his entire soul. So the boy consulted what little lore he had actually acquired from the books that he had been forced to read, and recalled one of the foremost laws of treating with demons -- to never accept a bargain as presented. All demons would be willing to barter. Seizing upon the wisdom of the ages and applying it to his own situation, the boy managed to convince the demon to accept only half of his soul for the same prize.
But the boy had not studied hard enough. The first law of treating with demons was to not treat with them at all.
CHAPTER 1
"Nope! Sorry! Still negative." The demon narrowed slit-pupiled gray eyes and smirked in undeniable triumph.
Gareas fought the urge to shred something, like the demon's throat. It had wicked-looking claws that he would bet could shred much better than his hands. "So. Thing," he said, snapping out the insult in the hopes of making the demon flinch or falter. It only looked even more smug. "Explain to me how my balance is negative again."
The demon snorted and stalked from one end of the room to the other, moving like a magic-touched panther that had evolved upright, and whipped around to seat itself on a chair -- sitting on the back of it, long tail not hanging limply off the other side but whipping about fiercely, again like a great cat despite its physical similarities to a lizard's tail, toying with its prey. "It's really quite simple, Garu," the horrible thing said, calling him by his nickname and baring long needle-sharp fangs in a gesture only a blind man would mistake for a smile. "You gave me half of your soul. But it's not gone now -- it's just automatically negative. So you are half-and-half before we even start the tally! Then add on all your many sins--"
"Shut up now," Garu snapped, disgruntled.
"--like impatience, disrespect, uncharitable behavior, violence, abuse, casual sex--"
"Shut up!" he repeated louder, not caring as he noticed it bristling at his tone. "I get it. But I still don't think you fulfilled your half of the bargain!"
There was a long moment of utter stillness, the calm before the storm, and then the demon reacted. It stood with infinite slowness and in one fluid motion stepped from the chair to the floor and began stalking forward. And -- as happened every time Gareas entreated it -- only now that it was menacing did he take stock again of how scary it really was.
The demon was composed almost entirely of long and beastlike limbs, huge leathery wings, and smooth, hairless gray skin. Muscles flowed and bunched under that thick surface, redundant: with those immense clawed hands and powerful haunches it was unlikely that pure strength would ever be an issue for this being. Wild hair crowned its skull, tamed only where it was tucked behind long, almost horizontal pointed ears -- like those you might see on elves in fairy-tale books -- and animalistic gray eyes with pupils mere slits against the flat coldness.
It was some great nightmarish medley of lizard and jaguar and man, compressed malevolence wrapping lovingly around every feature to make it something truly out of a nightmare. "Demon" scarcely covered all the evil that this thing radiated.
"I?" the demon began angrily, spitting the word. Garu barely kept himself from flinching at the sound of it. "I haven't fulfilled my part of our bargain? You dare suggest that I am being neglectful, I, the crown prince of Hell, son of The Rebel? I who battled Romulus founder of Rome, who convinced Louis XIV to build his palace of gold, who saw the rise and fall of the greats: the Soviet Union, Japan, America... You claim that I have been cheating you?"
Garu had no idea what any of that meant -- Rome? Fourteen Louises? Soviet Union, Japan, America; were those even all people? -- but it sounded very intimidating. He refused to be intimidated anyway; for all he knew, the thing was making it all up. "Yeah, well, none of that makes you anything other than what you are," he sneered, trying to sound as offensive as he could with the nervous sensation that any moment now he was going to get his intestines torn out. "You're a demon, and everyone knows what liars demons are."
"We never lie," it said immediately, eyes narrowed. "Not when it comes to a contract. We may lead astray, deceive, and manipulate -- but lying in such a moment is against all our principles."
Principles? Something like YOU has principles?> But even Gareas knew better than to say that aloud. Mama Elidd had raised a jerk, not a fool. You don't say things like that to a demon proven touchy about honor, was one of her favorite sayings. Instead, he pointed out, "But Leena is dead."
The demon snorted, within a second losing its tension and folding its arms with amusement. "That's because you're too stupid to read between the lines, not because of my dereliction," it retorted easily. "The terms of the contract were your soul for her staying with you... always by your side. Nowhere was her continued living made mandatory!"
Gareas had heard this explanation before. He had asked the demon to explain it to him every Sunday, when normal people were in church, for the last two years. He hated it even more every time. He wasn't too fond of himself either, hearing it again and again like that, but he hated the demon more for thinking that this was at all fair.
It continued, "And she's still with you, has been with you each moment of each day except when you're with me, ever since her horrible and untimely death!"
"But she shouldn't have died at all!" he exclaimed, unable to help himself. "I made that bargain with you to save her life -- and you warped it!"
"I followed it to the letter!" the demon returned, with near-criminally overdramatic indignation. "But the facts are, Garu, that your brilliant bargaining saved half of your soul, but said absolutely nothing about your girlfriend's head! All you specified was keeping her with you. Well, she's with you! You saved her, all right! Saved her from Heaven! Nice job, wonder-boy; do you do encores?"
Garu choked on a snarl. He was quite sure the demon wouldn't be impressed by it, and could do much better itself. But one more time, just one more time...
"You thought you could haggle with me, you pathetic little mortal; I've seen more generations than you've seen days, and you tried to outsmart me without any sort of preparation or training. You didn't go and do research, or enlist the aid of a professional theurgist, or even ask for time to think about it before signing my contract. You only barely knew what I was talking about by making a contract at all!" The thing snorted, as though trying to imagine the sort of stupidity it would take to not realize the portent of such a bargain. And it was right, too, which made Garu's mood worse. "Then you thought that my only trick was in the price I demanded. You didn't even think to look at the wording of my payment to you!"
It circled lazily, taunting him. "And you know what? Even if you hadn't been so dumb as to miss the obvious, I would've gotten you anyway. Even if your half of the bargain was the totally selfless 'I want her to live out her life until she dies a full and natural death of old age, having lived a completely happy life and totally content with her part in the world', I would've ruined it. Even if you'd managed to be so clever, I would have found the loophole. Even that, a perfect request, wouldn't have been good enough. There's nothing in it that says she has to be the way she was before, right? Maybe instead of getting impaled on a piece of scrap metal when that furnace blew in her house, she was merely clipped by a falling support beam, and got amnesia and forgot about everything that had brought you together, and Serenity raised her back to health like one of them? Or maybe the debris damaged her brain in exactly the right way and she found herself retarded, or had been the victim of an accidental frontal lobotomy?"
This was new. This was very new. The demon had never said this to him before. Gareas could only stand dumbly as it paced around him and the implications sank in. They'd never had a chance bargaining with this being; half of his soul, Leena's very life, had been doomed from the moment it had waltzed into Serenity and enlightened the more unusual member of the most unusual couple living in that dinky little hamlet that his partner wouldn't live to see the end of the week.
The demon -- that damned demon -- leaned in from behind and whispered in his ear, "You know, I wasn't the one who killed her. That accident really had nothing to do with us; I just happened to see it in The Book. But I'm so glad that you so readily helped me to fuck up a fucked-up situation even worse. Humans like you are the reason my job is so easy."
"You son of a BITCH--" Garu hollered, whipping around to launch himself at the demon, hands first.
He never got the chance to connect.
With a movement he couldn't even see, its claws were wrapped around his neck and an arm more solid than marble had lifted him off the ground.
"Tsk tsk. I wouldn't talk about my Mother that way. She has good ears, and if She hears you, She'll make you sorry for the next several epochs."
It watched him flail as he dangled helplessly and tried not to choke against the firm grip on his throat. Its teeth were bared again -- this time an actual, real grin of amusement.
"You've wasted hours and hours of my precious time since your little girlfriend died," it commented amiably. "You call upon me once a week... not even summoning me, because you've got roughly the same magic distribution as especially dead forms of rock, so I don't get any power from the ritual since you don't actually cast anything... And every week it's the same damn thing. You whine, you bitch, and you complain because you can't get a good lay with the woman you deluded yourself into thinking you loved, on account of her being incorporeal and all. I tell you the same thing all the time, and it never sinks in. Tell me, are you really fucking dense, or is it just that you enjoy my company this much?"
Garu had several offensive things to say to that, but his jaw was held tight and his windpipe was closed up and he had no way to speak. It took all his devoted effort not to just pass out.
The thing shrugged gracefully and added, "Don't forget who's the boss here, buddy. You amuse me, so I've allowed you to remain alive, with your bitterness and dissatisfaction and constant avoiding of responsibility. But the moment you cease to amuse me, I can have you killed, and your soul will come straight to me in the afterlife. So don't get too ahead of yourself."
It dropped him to the ground.
"See you next week," it almost chirped.
And when next he looked up to sputter a furious rebuttal, the candles he hadn't lit had gone out again, and the incense he hadn't burned had dissipated, and the magic circle he hadn't drawn had vanished.
"Zero!" he howled.
The demon was already gone.
He emerged out into blazingly pure sunlight that stung his eyes and assaulted his senses nearly as much as the woman who had been waiting for him.
"Garu! You look pale -- did Zero say anything to you? Did it threaten you? You're not out of the negative yet, are you?" Leena bombarded him the moment he stepped out of the doorway. The sun made her cornsilk-blond hair explode into a riot of golds like the aura of a holy creature, and he wondered if she had really been destined for Heaven in spite of her own sins before he had ruined things for her.
That thought, of course, pissed him off all over again. "No! No, I'm not!" he snapped. "And I don't want to talk about it!"
Her eyes narrowed, and she folded her arms crossly over her chest. "Oh, you don't, do you?" she drawled. "Well, might I remind you that you're not in this alone? Your fate decides us both, bubba, and I'm not going to sit around and watch you stew in anger and then eventually snap so you can assault somebody and screw me over as well as yourself!"
She knew him too well, was the problem. "I wouldn't do something that stupid when I'm already slanted downwards!" he hissed at her, even though they both knew he was lying. "Anyway, don't talk so loud; the people here will have me lynched if they find out that I'm Hell-bound and demon-contracted to boot."
"The people here can't hear me," Leena pointed out, pointing at a random bystander who was carefully avoiding eye contact with Gareas. "Nor can they see me." As if to prove her point, somebody walked straight through her outflung arm and then gave Garu an odd look.
She was only a bitch because she was always right, Garu decided, and ignored her.
That didn't work for long; she followed him when he started walking. "We have to make a coherent effort to raise your balance somehow. We can't keep wandering around the countryside, getting expelled from every law-abiding village along the way, with you sticking out like a sore thumb, for the rest of your life. And it won't be a long life, mind, because eventually we'll stumble on a hamlet large enough to have its own paladin, and they'll sic him on you and then that demon will own you. You don't want that, now do you?"
"Of course not! I'd like to see it butchered!" he snapped back.
"Then for Heaven's sake -- literally -- help me think of something to save your pathetic soul!"
"You just want to save your own!"
"Yes! But you tied it to yours without ever giving me any say in the matter, so now I'm going to redeem you whether you want it or not, because I don't want to go to Hell!"
He felt bad for a brief moment. This was his childhood friend, his longtime lover, his intended wife -- and all he'd ever done for her was fail to save her life, curse her to an unlife wandering between the worlds, and then give her grief as she tried to save them both.
Garu slid a glance at her out of the corner of his eye. Leena walked beside him, brow furrowed and arms folded across her chest. She was clad in a violet dressing gown that she had been wearing when the incident had occurred; her blond hair glistened in sunlight that technically shouldn't have been able to touch her at all, and her eyes glowed like sapphires when the rays fell on them just right. She had never been able to explain to his satisfaction why she was still affected by things like the sun and the wind, but they only served to make her more beautiful.
And he hated that. What good was a beautiful thing if you couldn't touch it?
"Maybe we could start a kind of charity auction," she mused aloud. "We'll sell you off to the highest bidder as a torture toy, and all the proceeds go to some noble cause. That way not only are we being charitable, but you're making a martyr of yourself, and we all know The One God loves martyrs."
Especially if you had to put up with its attitude.
"So sorry, I'm not for sale, unlike your ethics," he snarled at her.
"Nobody'd want you anyway," she added practically. "You've got that damned attitude."
They were very alike.
"What's there to do in a loser town like this anyway?" he demanded, waving at the scenery. "There's nothing here but do-right types and good-natured civilians. We're not exactly going to nab demons trying to steal holy artifacts in the middle of Good Samaritansville."
Basik wasn't really a town -- it was actually a fair-sized city, complete with tourist attractions. But there was nothing there to lure true evil: the people were all loving and pure of heart, there was no site of power, and no wild magic had touched it in generations. With no one to corrupt, no power to leech, and no Chaos to take advantage of, Basik had remained shockingly absent of real trouble for a town of its size.
Like Serenity, the city had been founded by religious cultists after the Collapse. (In the years immediately following the Collapse, cults had been more prolific than humans by a long shot.) The Basikos had rejected the technology of the old world, and also the magic of the new world, but they believed in tolerance and followed a policy of "live and let live". As long as there was peace and all was right with the world, the Basikos didn't care what you did -- as long as you kept it to yourself.
Leena had told him all that; he seemed to remember his textbooks saying something of the sort as well, but he had mostly used his textbooks for surrogate pillows during classes. That had been, at any rate, her justification for taking them to Basik. They were less likely to stone him to death there.
But they looked close.
"Leena, they're staring at me," he snarled, glaring at the group in question.
"Gareas, they're sixteen-year-old girls and you are wearing skin-tight leather pants. They're not staring at you, they're checking out your ass." She rolled her eyes. "Besides, you're hardly making any effort to be inconspicuous."
"What do you mean by that?!"
She stomped a foot. "Garu! Maybe you haven't noticed that you don't quite fit the dress code here!"
This was also true. Dressed in extremely well-fitted tan leather pants and a clingy dark green tanktop, Garu was a punk surrounded by modestly-attired adults. It almost was as though Basik really did have a dress code: nearly everyone was dressed in varying assortments of black and white and demure gray; most of the men wore slacks and respectable jackets -- light, in deference to the warm spring weather -- and most of the woman wore blouses and long skirts -- with the occasional dressy pants on the more daring of them. Even the children looked like they were prepared, at any moment, in the case of an emergency, to attend someone's funeral.
So Gareas wasn't only getting stares because he was talking to the thin air inhabited by an invisible dead woman.
Leena commented thoughtfully, "I feel some chances around here. Minor chances, but we can hardly expect to get you a chance to salvage one of the relics in the Sanctified Grounds or anything."
"Of course not," he snorted. "The miasma there would kill me in seconds."
"Well, you know what they say about a fella with a pure heart!"
"He's never been laid?"
"That he'll salvage all the Sanctified Grounds. Don't be an asshole." Leena paused, and then her hands twitched and flew to her face. "Oh, Garu!"
He knew that tone well.
"Look at that poor little girl! She's desperately in need of your help!"
Garu looked at the little girl in question. She didn't look very poor -- on the contrary, she looked positively rich. She was dressed almost entirely in technogear, from the gleaming metallic tiara around her forehead (used to communicate over long distances, although who a six-year-old would need to communicate with so desperately with in another city was beyond him) to the tips of her glittering multi-purpose boots (which Garu recognized as being the latest kind, possessing both wheels and jet propulsion, but only when the wearer felt like it). She must be a visitor to Basik; as said, the people here tolerated technology but disapproved of it loudly, especially when in needless excess like this.
She was also looking more bored than desperately in help. "How so?" he demanded.
"Her cat is stuck up in that tree!"
A second glance confirmed this: the little girl was bored, yes, but also staring up at the branches of a tree in which trembled a tiny kitten adorned with a metallic collar that was also some sort of advanced technology, so it was obviously the little girl's. Probably she had already called someone for help and was merely awaiting the arrival of that person. Garu said as much to Leena.
Leena scowled at him. "Don't be heartless," she scolded. "Besides, this is your chance! Doing a good deed of any sort will pick up your balance at least a little!"
The one thing Gareas had never been able to force himself to get used to about Leena -- even back when he was sleeping with her and could forgive most of her more obnoxious qualities -- had been her extremely overactive maternal instincts. And there was no avoiding them. No matter what he did or said, once Leena had decided on taking up a cause (no matter how inconsequential, no matter whether it was herself or someone else she inflicted the cause on), there was no talking her out of it.
I could stand here and shout at her all day, and that little girl could be ages gone with her cat, and she wouldn't let me alone until I agreed that I should help them,> he thought wearily as he headed over to the scene.
He patted the little girl on the head briefly as he walked by. "I'll take care of this," he growled at her. Then, catching Leena's glare and realizing how evil he'd sounded, he turned back and forced himself to smile at the narrow-eyed child, although he suspected that the smile was rather sickly and pathetic. Without further ado, he began the climb.
Gareas liked to pride himself on being fit and in shape, but this wasn't much of a tree to show off his athletic prowess on. It was maybe twenty feet tall, and the lowest branches were only just above his forehead. For the little girl, it was a daunting height; for a full-grown adult man, it was a simple matter to grab the branch and swing himself up.
He acquired a few scratches and a splinter -- which he cursed roundly, to Leena's disapproval -- before reaching the branch where the cat had settled. It cringed away from him, ears flattening against its skull, fur taking on a bristled quality as it hissed.
Oh, great.>
But it was small enough to crush in the palms of his hands, he figured, couldn't weigh more than the average apple. What harm could it do?
Mama Elidd had always told him, never underestimate a tiny but offended feline.
The hand he extended towards it was seized by claws that had to be at least an inch long each, digging all the way down into the meat at the base of his thumb. He shouted in pain and tried to jerk his hand away and succeeded in dragging the razor-sharp blades through his palm before the kitten, screeching, leaped from the branch directly into the girl's arms.
Garu tried not to rail at the heavens. He knew all too well that when they listened at all, they found his suffering dreadfully amusing. He took the other, lesser-wounded hand and grabbed it tightly around his wrist to staunch the bleeding. After a long, long moment that he used to get control of his temper, he called down to the little girl, "Sorry about that, it doesn't appear to like me. You okay?"
She clutched the monster to her chest and cried, "Don't you talk to me! Pervert!"
Gareas stared blankly as she ran off. "What the fuck?"
Leena hummed and looked up at him. "I think she misinterpreted your pat on the head."
Garu turned his stare on her. Words failed him for a long moment. "Are you trying to tell me," he said thinly, "that my kind gesture was ruined because... her parents are neurotic?"
"Well, something like that..."
"This is so not my day," he growled as he dropped to the ground, somewhat awkwardly with only one hand.
He patiently followed Leena's instructions on how to properly bandage the wound, using what little supplies he had in his knapsack. He had been, repeatedly over the last several years, grateful that Leena had forced him to bring along a first aid kit, although he'd sooner kill himself than let her know.
"Let's see what other brilliant notions you have today to help in my redemption," he gritted.
Ignoring that with the ease of long practice, Leena closed her eyes and tried to feel out a situation. She'd tried to explain it to him before, but it had gone right over his head; all he knew was that every now and then, when something major was about to happen, Leena would be able to tell in advance.
But apparently there was nothing happening; she opened her eyes again and looked around at the physical scenery. Once again, she didn't find whatever she was looking for; she started moving forward determinedly, muttering under her breath, "Nothing here, we're out in the domestic area, maybe out in the city proper we can find a robbery or something to foil..."
"What's with this 'we'?" he grumbled, but followed anyway. He didn't have much choice -- if either of them strayed too far, Leena would be snapped right back to his side like a rubber band, and then she would snipe at him until he went wherever she wanted to be.
Oh, how he cursed the name Zero.
"In some universe," he commented casually, prompting Leena to give him a strange look, seeing as how she hadn't been privy to the first half of the topic, "in some way, I will be Zero's superior, and I will take a lesson from its book and enjoy making it suffer."
"Now how is that possible?" Leena asked, reasonably. "It's always going to be a demon and you're always going to be some punk nobody, right?"
Garu drew himself up, dignified. "In a parallel universe, it's possible."
"But--"
"Leave me my dreams, would you, woman?!"
Leena perked up. "Look, Garu! That old woman at the intersection? You can help her across the street."
Gareas stared at her, dumbstruck. "...help an old lady cross the street? Who the fuck do you think I am?"
But that look had come into her expression again. She wouldn't let Gareas leave until he had satisfied her wishes.
He made a token protest anyway. "What precisely is she in danger from? A horse-drawn carriage?"
"What if a car comes by?"
"Leena! If somebody was rich enough to own an artifact like a car, what would they be doing HERE? Driving it, no less, like it's some sort of toy!"
Leena's eyes narrowed.
That was the line, right there, and if he crossed it, then he could look forward to the next several weeks of endless griping, complaining, and arguing. Which was pretty much all he got from her anyway, but it was the principle of the thing. So Garu threw up his hands in exasperation and walked over to the old woman standing by a street-lamp.
"Excuse me, lady?" he said stiffly.
She was a short, round woman in a bright orange-and-green dress -- practically a muumuu -- that was much too thin for outdoor wear, because Gareas had the sickening feeling that he'd be able to see her underthings through it if he really wanted to. She wore enormous horn-rimmed glasses and a huge red hat with a feather sticking out of it, and leaned on a thick pearl-handled cane. At the moment she was gazing at him suspiciously.
"Can I help you?" she demanded.
He forced on a bright smile that he suspected was exceedingly unctuous, especially compared to the one he'd used on the little girl. "No, ma'am, I was wondering if I could help you," he said in a tone that would have professional suck-ups writhing in shame. "I saw you waiting here and wondered if you wanted some assistance in crossing the street?"
She glared at him warily while he tried not to count the seconds he was grinning pleasantly. "Okay," she said after a minute and twenty-one seconds.
What the hell kind of a response is that?!> He extended one hand in a gentlemanly fashion and helped her from the curb to the cobbled street.
It seemed like every step was a mile running. After her initial reticence, Granny opened up and started babbling on a mile a minute. Gareas wasn't sure he could stand the excitement of it.
"I was waiting for my grandson, you see, and he said he'd meet me in front of the City Hall but he always mistakes the library for City Hall, he's a bookish sort and it's the only building he really knows in all Basik except maybe my house. I'm so excited to see him again, he's such a dear boy, he really is, but he lives all the way in Meralyn and he never gets any vacation time. He goes to the College there, you know, Pelet, and it's very prestigious, so we're quite proud of him even if he never comes to visit anymore. But he wrote me and said that he was going to come and see his dear old granny again, and he told me where and when, and the first thing I said to myself was, 'There he goes again, I bet he's thinking City Hall when he really means the library!' But I went out anyway, and I put on my nicest dress for the occasion..."
"You call that nice?" Garu gritted as he practically hauled the old woman up onto the curb. "I call it blinding."
They stared at each other for a long moment, Garu unable to believe that he'd let that slip out, and Granny trying to process the sentiment entirely.
Then she wound up and smacked her cane across his head with the kind of force that would render a less thick-skulled man comatose. As it was, he staggered backwards, and his arms flung up instinctively to shield himself from the rain of blows that followed.
"You horrible man!" she shrieked, making passing riders slow from a brisk trot to get a better glimpse. "You wretched, wretched, wretched soul! Saying such a thing to a kindly old woman like me!"
"You are definitely having some sort of problem with description!" he shouted back. "That dress is not nice, and you are sure as hell not kindly!"
She rapped him hard across the kneecaps suddenly, sending him sprawling to the ground. While he howled out invectives and nursing his injured limbs she stalked off, bearing herself proudly in her voluminous neon sundress. She retained this elegant posture even when he managed to shove himself to his unsteady feet and holler more curses at her back.
Leena sighed, behind him. "Nicely done, Garu."
Garu snarled soundlessly and exited the other way, trying for the same dignity the old woman had attained -- or even just not limp away from the scene. He failed miserably. It was like all of Basik was watching him go and laughing behind their hands, remembering their religious goodness and kindness even in the face of... that.
I wonder what I would have to sell to Zero to convince it to shatter this city down to its individual air particles?>
Then -- "Wait, Garu!" Leena said urgently.
"What?" he snapped.
"All of a sudden -- just now -- everything changed! The whole aura! Something went wrong, a demon is here--"
"A demon!" The involuntary exclamation was unfortunately-chosen; instantly, half the street turned to level him with glares in varying degrees of accusation.
"--the sheer randomnity of its appearance after so many generations of unrest made a swirl of chaos that bent the threads of fate all around Basik," Leena reported, tense.
That meant absolutely nothing to him, but her next words did.
"Gareas! Someone is going to die, right here, any moment now!"
Instantly on the alert (words like "death" triggered something almost like optimism in his heart -- if someone was going to be killed and he stopped it, he was practically guaranteed a shift in alignment!), Gareas looked around carefully. "Who is it? Can you pick out who it is?"
"Not... not precisely here... Near here..."
But Garu had been distracted by a young man wandering around, calling out to people. "Ah, Marca! Have you seen my grandmother around here? Meredith? She's about so tall, really bad dress sense..."
A reedy woman called back, "Yes, I just saw her head down that way. But why was she was waiting for you here, at the library?"
"I don't know," the young man said crossly. "I told her to meet me at City Hall, but she has convinced herself that I have the library and City Hall confused. I swear she's gone senile--"
Hah! I knew it!>
At that moment, a sudden sound like a gunshot rang through the air. Everyone froze to listen -- guns were highly illegal all across the land, ownership punishable by life imprisonment. It couldn't have been a gun. So what was it?
An unearthly squeal heralded a deep, consistent roaring -- and then, suddenly, in a silver-dark metallic streak, the source of the noise was right there, in the streets, racing down the cobblestones at ridiculous speeds.
It was a car.
Gareas was so bewildered by the sight of a car in Basik, of all places, that he nearly didn't think about the sounds that had come from it earlier.
"Garu," Leena said hesitantly. "I think that car hit someone a little further down the road."
He broke into a run almost before she'd finished speaking.
There was a crowd at the site; he had to shove and elbow his way to the front and then nearly recoiled when he saw the limp, bloodied form lying there. Refusing to allow himself the disgusted reaction, he turned back to the crowd and shouted, "Hey! Hey! HEY!"
After a bewildered moment, everyone paused to give him expectant looks, clearly waiting for him to give them some kind of order. That meant, he realized blankly, that he had to actually think up an order to give them. And since when had he been a paramedic?
Wait, that's right -- medic.
"Has anybody fetched a doctor?" he called.
The entire crowd, as one, shook their heads. But nobody moved. They frowned and muttered amongst themselves and directed disapproving gazes at the body and Gareas' clothes. He distinctly heard mutters of 'demon' in there, which made him extremely nervous about drawing attention to himself this way.
"Well? Why not?" he gritted through his teeth.
One of the bolder women in the crowd pointed out, "Well... he's not one of us."
"Yes," said an elderly man, "he's just a visitor."
Gareas turned around and forced himself to look at the victim. The poor man -- couldn't be any older than Gareas -- was indeed wearing a long, extremely intricate black robe. There was a silver sash tied around his shoulder, and he was much too pale and narrow to be a native of Basik, where most people were golden-blond and full-fleshed.
"Those robes are of Astutia Academy," Leena whispered in his ear, gazing down at the crumpled figure without being affected by the bloody corpse-like quality of it. "He's from the mage school, Garu; he's a sorcerer of some kind. And he's wearing a silver sash..." She frowned. "I can't remember what branch of sorcery uses silver..."
"Is he still alive?" he asked under his breath. He couldn't look that close. He didn't mind carnage, but this was just... pointless. Nobody got anything from this man's suffering.
"Yeah," said a fearless boy in the crowd, assuming Gareas had been talking to him and not the invisible dead woman who was his partner. The boy wandered up and kicked the sorcerer in the arm, earning him a feeble groan. "See?" he said proudly.
"Get away from him, you little monster!" Garu snapped. Then he turned around to the mob of Basikos and demanded again, "Why hasn't anybody called a doctor?!"
Some of them chuckled, as if this were of course perfectly obvious. "Why," one of them repeated, shaking his head. "Why, he's one of those heathen magic-users. And a demon summoner to boot."
A demon summoner?!>
"We should pray for his soul," a woman said, and the others nodded, clearly under the impression that this was the best they could do for such a misguided youth.
Garu tolerated this for about five seconds before they actually started kneeling instead of fetching someone who could save the guy's life. "Fuck this prayer shit!" he hollered. (A little girl screamed from within the crowd at this blasphemy.) "He doesn't need blessings, he needs help!"
More silence. Leena sighed behind him.
"Don't you people have any doctors?" he asked thinly.
"Well... no," one of them said cluelessly.
For a stupefied moment he could only stare at them. Then he tried again. "How about a medic?"
"...a medic...?"
"No... no, not one of those either."
He twitched. "Do you have," he said very slowly, "a healer?"
Someone in the back of the mob brightened. "Oh, yes!" he said enthusiastically. "We have a healer! Three, even!"
"Three aren't necessary, thank you," Garu told him, almost shaking with the effort of not killing someone. "Just go get one of them -- quickly, please -- that would be splendid."
"Well, I'll be more than happy to help such a polite person," the bystander said with approval -- making Garu's eye twitch again uncontrollably -- and ran off.
Leena muffled a snicker, but not very well. "At least you're learning how to handle them," she volunteered.
Garu gritted his teeth again and ignored that. "Can anyone tell me exactly what happened here?" he demanded of the remaining crowd.
They stared at him, like he was the crazy one. At length, a girl said, "Um... a big blackish blur came out of nowhere and hit this guy?"
"I'll bet it was a pegasus!"
"No, don't be silly, would a pegasus be killing people? It must've been a Touched panther."
"What if it was a cerberus loosed from Hell?!"
"We're all going to die!"
"SHUT UP!" Garu screamed. It felt really good, got rid of some of his tension, and made them all stop babbling hysterically. He cleared his throat and informed them coolly, "That was a car."
The Basikos looked at each other with increasingly awed expressions.
"A... a car?"
"You mean, like, forbidden technology car?"
"The kind of car that could be found in the Sanctified Grounds?!"
"What would such a thing be doing here?"
That's what I want to know!> Gareas asked, "It was a black car? You're sure?"
Everyone nodded as one. They didn't know what on earth it had been, but it had certainly been black.
"Did anybody get a good look at the driver?"
Pause. Then, "...driver?"
"Yes. Somebody had to be driving the car," Garu pointed out. "They don't move on their own."
"Oh." Another pause. "I didn't see anyone. Did you, Rin?"
"No, I didn't."
"We didn't see anyone either."
Garu was about ready to give up on this whole detective/investigator thing when Leena murmured, "Garu. Remember that there's a demon involved in this. Do you think it might've possessed the car to run over the summoner?"
That hadn't occurred to him before. But the moment the idea began to sound feasible, someone piped up, "Wait. I think I saw someone."
Eagerly, he turned to the young man. "Really? Who? What did he look like? Did you recognize him?"
"Well..." The man in question turned to his obviously newly-wed wife -- Garu hated newlyweds -- and then after a brief whispered consultation, nodded and said, "On the left side of the car, right?"
"Yes!"
"There was this... boy, I guess. He was really short, which is probably why nobody saw him," he opined. "I remember he had ragged purple hair, and was wearing really strange clothes."
"What do you mean by 'strange'?"
"Well... He wore red. But there was, like, a black buckle around his shoulders... and lower, I think."
...what the...? A safety belt? A car with a safety belt survived to this day and age?> For a brief moment, Gareas was thankful that Uncle Harre had been such a huge fan of the ancient automobiles. Otherwise he'd have no idea what a clue that was. Cars were manufactured ages and ages ago -- before the Collapse, and possibly WAY before the Collapse, and the Collapse was generations ago. All those little not-quite-leather seatbelts ought to be long eroded away. And what sort of joyrider would wear a safety belt anyway?!>
He considered asking if they'd noticed the make of the car, but that was obviously pointless.
Leena was musing, "A demon summoner was the target, so I can't believe that the demon's appearance had nothing to do with this. If that was the demon's car, and the demon was driving it, then perhaps it was rebelling against its master, and struck at the demon summoner while there was no protective circle to--"
"The correct term, actually, Miss, is theurgist, not demon summoner."
Gareas whipped around to tell off whoever was picking apart their political-correctness, for crying out loud, but found himself stopped short. He'd somehow lost the use of his voice box.
The villager who'd run off to fetch a healer had instead returned with an angel. A slender young man, elegant and graceful, stood before them, form draped with long folds of white cloth that almost glittered in the sunlight. His appearance was similar to Leena's in coloring -- golden blonde hair, sapphire blue eyes, milk-pale complexion -- and yet so, so much more.
While Gareas stood there, unable even to breathe lest the angel find some fault in it, the vision said serenely, "I am Ernest Cuore, son of the Cuore healer's clan, and I am here to help you."
~tsuzuku~
~to be continued~
Heh. Well, everyone, what did you think?
--Kay, almost feeling happy about this one
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