Tears
Chapter 3: Beginnings of a Triangle
"Alright." Ryaine exclaimed angrily as she sat down next to the other girl who looked so similar to her. "Who are you?"
Ranma's little cook pot sat above a makeshift fire with some rice and water inside it, boiling. She sighed again and looked at her sister. "Well, to start off with… apparently you're my little sister." Ranma said calmly.
"But… My mom told me I have a brother!" Ryaine burst out, almost angrily.
Ranma glanced around at a few stares in their direction but said nothing. Then, she turned to her irate sister and said simply, "I am what I am."
Ryaine looked at her skeptically. "I think my mom would know if she had a baby girl instead of a boy!"
"I'm a gi-…" Ranma began but then stopped abruptly, shoving her hand over her mouth, violently. "I almost just said it…" She whispered, to herself in a frightened, terrified tone.
Ryaine raised an eyebrow at Ranma's odd behavior. "Ah… hey are you ok?" She asked.
Ranma chuckled in a slightly mad way. "Heh… heh heh… o… kay…? I haven't been okay in two years!" She exclaimed.
"Wha-what is wrong?" Ryaine asked, frightened.
Ranma shook her head madly and then slapped herself in the face, painfully, a few times. After that she appeared to look somewhat normal.
"I… I'm fine… I'm sorry. I'm… well we, me'n Pops that is… we're not… what we used to be…" Ranma said sadly.
As Ranma again, began to tend to the rice, Ryaine stared at the girl, confused by her sudden lapse into what appeared to be insanity.
"Are you sure you're ok?" Ryaine asked, concerned.
"Not until I'm normal again…" was Ranma's solemn reply. "I… well… I can't ever accept it but I'm… getting used to it"
Suddenly someone approached.
"Hiya! Um… Ryaine, I was wondering if you were planning on sitting with us or just… staying here?" Akane asked, trailing off as she noticed Ranma's red eyes. "Miruka can… come too, if you want?"
"I… I'm okay here." Ranma replied and then turned back to the rice, which appeared to be done finally.
"Suit yourself. You coming Ryaine?" Akane asked.
Ryaine, who had never taken her eyes off of Ranma, said, "You go on… I'll catch up."
"Kay! See ya!" Akane exclaimed, and then rocketed off towards another tree where a few girls were gathered.
"Y-you should go." Ranma said as she finally began to consume her meal. Ryaine only now noticed that the meal Ranma was cooking appeared to be for at least four people. "Are you… eating with someone else?"
"N-no… pops can take care of himself." Ranma replied.
This answer only made things more confusing for Ryaine. Normal Again? Pops? I am what I am? What did it all mean? Nothing was making any sense!
"I'm not leaving till you tell me what it is that you're edging around!" Ryaine said in what she thought was a defiant tone.
"You won't believe me." Ranma replied.
"Try me." was Ryaine's sharp retort.
…
"Well?"
"No." Ranma replied.
The bell rang.
It was late night… somewhere between the hours of eleven and four. All was covered in shade… all was dark. Nothing could be seen or heard for miles in this region at this time, save for the crickets, buzzing their hereditary tunes.
Far above this, miles upon miles into the sky, a luxury airliner was flying. Its passengers were asleep, and the flight was smooth.
The flight was bound for somewhere in Australia, but at the moment, was headed for Hong Kong to re-fuel. The Pilot was awake and alert as he always was when on a flight. He truly disliked auto pilot and, unless his co-pilot was not flying the plane, he would not sleep.
This night, his alertness did not help him.
Miles below lay something that had not touched Earth's soil before. It landed there three weeks prior to this time. It lay there within that foggy, dreary region.
It was a seed.
However, it was not just any seed. This seed was special… It had fallen three weeks previous and been imbedded into the ground through a sort of… pollination.
This seed came from the tear of a young, red-haired girl. And what was soon to grow from it… would belong to her and her alone.
Suddenly the darkness and gloom below the plane brightened with a blinding white flash. The pilot, miles up in the sky, was blinded. People hundreds of miles away saw the light but fortunately it was in a rather remote place.
What happened next would awe the eyes of the world.
Suddenly the plane's back end was buffeted upward, causing he front end to point downward. This, in itself, caused a stall, leaving the plane rocketing downwards. The pilot was scared shitless. Before him, was not open air… no… he was falling through branches… tree branches. Thousands of them, millions crushed under the mighty weight of the plane. Branches that were not a mere hand width thick… These were a foot to two feet thick at least, and the plain floated through them, sliding off each enormous branch and onto the next. Suddenly the plane burst into free air again after almost two minute of bumpy, branch crunching flight.
Both wings had been ripped away, and they were still over a mile high.
"Oh my god…" Said the co-pilot as he felt a crawling sensation in the pit of his stomach as the last of their lift left them.
An explosion occurred in the Quing Hai Province of China that night. It wasn't as bright as the burst of light had been. However, it did mean something important. It signaled the world of something that was about to happen. Something… was about to change…
Ranma walked away from the school building, angered at her slips. Today had been a horrible day. The sister she had was now angered at her for being illusive. She had cried again. Damn it all! Why did that stupid girl have to talk about having a brother like that?
Now Ranma felt like she'd let her sister down.
Suddenly, something different happened.
The ground rumbled.
Ranma wobbled about for a moment, unsure of what was going on. Then the ground rumbled again.
Ranma teetered around for a moment on the sidewalk, wondering why in the hell the ground was moving. Did Japan have earthquakes?
Suddenly, a crack formed in the sidewalk. It was an odd bulge at the far end of the side walk, next to the road. The cracks split upward, shifting the stone and cracking the concrete.
"What the...?" Ranma thought.
And then, all hell broke loose.
It happened faster than Ranma could see. It erupted like a volcano. It appeared to look just like wooden, brown, solid lava bursting forth from the ground as fast a lightning.
The concrete was lifted up around it, and Ranma who stood atop the concrete, was lifted with it, which sent her catapulting away from the middle of the eruption, flipping under the piece of concrete. The concrete tile, which flew away with her earlier, rocketed over her, pushing her into the ground. Ground which, unfortunately for Ranma, was also concrete. Ranma landed on her shoulder and scraped along the rocky ground until she slammed her burned back into a wall.
"AAAH!" came her cry.
She winced and moaned at the gut splitting pain in her right shoulder and upper back. Looking back she knew that much of her skin had been "rug burned" off.
Suddenly what was happening registered to Ranma. It was a tree. A gigantic tree. It was already as high as at least seven stories and climbing higher. Leaves were popping out all over it and it was growing wider at the top. Hundreds of branches… no… thousands… The leaves, some normal sized and some the size of stop signs appearing, were all colored an eerie looking blue. The tree grew higher still, blasting forth at a speed Ranma didn't think possible.
It was then that Ranma noticed something horrible.
"AAHHHHG! WHAT THE HELL!" came a horrified scream, barely audible as the sound of creaking and expanding wood ensnared Ranma's ears.
"Oh no…" Ranma thought.
Ranma didn't even think about it. She jumped into the sky with a speed that at the very least, matched that of the climbing tree. She landed on the lowest branch but that quickly changed as the branches moved upward with more expanding below.
Ranma leapt again to another higher branch.
High above her, miles it seemed, Ranma just saw a body disappear within the mass of growing leaves now clogging her vision.
"H-HELP! OH God HELP…!" The voice screamed, this time horribly loud to Ranma, as she was moving upward fast enough for the sound to perfectly reach her ears.
Ranma was now high in the sky… higher than she ever had been, yet her target was higher still. She jumped to the next branch. It was simple to do since the branches were at least foot thick… at most three or four. She leapt and leapt, ever higher to reach the person stuck in the tree.
As she climbed the branches began to get smaller, the fast speed at which she was traveling up caused her to slip on one of the branches.
"Eek!" She exclaimed. She caught to another branch and was immediately stung by the whiplash of being instantly pulled upward into the air.
Breathing at her slip, Ranma happened to chance a glance back downward.
She was at least two miles high and could not see around the base of the tree…
"God… this thing is…" Ranma muttered in awe.
The tree was at least fifty feet wide in diameter from the spot where she was looking directly at the trunk! How wide must it be at the bottom?
"Oh my god…" Ranma thought as she looked down. She couldn't see past the endless downward spiral of branches.
"STOHhhh…! STOHhhh… STOHhhp STOP! I WA… OFF! Le… lemme down!" Came the scream. It sounded hoarse, creaky… as if there was a problem with the person's breath.
Ranma was much closer now, she knew. Suddenly her breath left her. She sucked air in but it did not appear to be entering her mouth!
Choking for a moment, Ranma got a few small gulps of air and continued traveling upward, breathing with difficulty.
She looked up again. The wind rushed down beside her, blowing into her eyes as she squinted to see.
There it was. Her target. It was a boy, taller than her. But he was squeezed around a tree branch so tightly; Ranma didn't know what she would do to get the boy off. He appeared to have a large gash on the left of his forehead and had experienced multiple bruising.
"Probably from falling from the very top of the tree…" Ranma thought.
Ranma jumped eleven or twelve more branches up to where the boy was, landing next to him on an abnormally small branch, when compared with the rest of them.
"HEY! Huhh, huhh…. ARE YOU eeshp… huhh… sssiip, huhh O-OK?" Ranma shouted, trying to make herself heard over all the wind rushing past them, whist also trying to breathe. Something was wrong with the air up this high, and It was becoming colder… much colder… Ridding herself of the fear in her stomach when she looked down, Ranma shouted again, "ARE YO… huff… YOU… OK?"
The boy opened his eyes for a moment and glanced at her.
"H… help me..!" He sort of, stuttered and screamed.
"Let go…. Huhh… sssiip… of the branch!" Ranma breathed. "You got… huhh… sssiip… you gotta let go!" Ranma exclaimed, her breathing becoming more ragged.
The boy opened his mouth and instantly began sucking for every last drop of air. The air pressure was leaving them… just how HIGH were they?
Suddenly the tree picked up speed, making Ranma feel heavy under the increased upward pressure. To her it felt exactly like being in an elevator only a hundred fold.
Ranma grabbed the boy and pulled.
"Insah… Insane!" The boy screamed at her, though it came out as more of a barely audible whisper.
Ranma gave a hard yank, which proved to be the wrong thing to do… The tree came to a screeching halt and Ranma and the boy, with Ranma's yank, were ejected even higher into the sky blasting out like a cannon ball, tearing through the slim branches of the top and flying out and over the tree line.
She hurtled upward, away from the tree which was now, not growing up, but expanding outward. But she was moving far away from the tree… miles away from it.
Ranma looked as they rose, moving at just under the speed of sound. Her ascent was smooth and fulfilling though her breath was ragged. Air was not present here. But the site was the view of a lifetime…
Above her was, not the sky, but it was blackness. Sparkling stars littered the look of the night in a celestial beauty that had never been viewed save for sparse moments in a space shuttle. The stars were bright, brighter than stars had ever been to her before, even in the middle of China in the darkest of night.
Almost a six miles below her lay an ocean. It stretched around her, as far as the eye could see! Clouds. A sea of clouds. It seemed like an endless ocean of white puffy clouds, completely covering the entirety of the ground from Ranma's sight.
Behind her there was an island. It was not truly and island but it was the Tree that had just propelled her to this height. It swayed gently… a smooth, green tree top, just above the clouds, at least in the sky, expanding every further, growing outward to make it wider… Ranma could not possibly know its diameter but her guess would have been that the tree was over four miles wide… and growing. It was enormous.
To her front was the sun, appearing as a brightened, yellow causeway, lighting the beautiful sea below her with visible rays of shine and glimmer that caused the clouds below her to sparkle with a hazy, misty glow. It hung with half of it beneath the clouds, as the clouds went on in a curved formation circling the globe, making the sun appear as if it were setting into the horizon, when truly it was only three hours past mid-day.
Ranma, between her awe and her desperate battle for the tidbits of oxygen in the air, not to mention the frozen state of the air she move in, wondered just how HIGH they truly were.
Ranma and her companion reached the peak of their accent in a sort of awe that had never truly crossed their faces in their life times. The air to scream with was not present; both held their mouths shut as the wonders of the highest point in nature were revealed to them.
And then began the decent.
A hellish downward travel into that sea of clouds.
They fell fast and they fell hard, like cement blocks.
"WHOOSH!" Hurtling downward, this time at well over the speed of sound, they felt the frozen air scarring their skin, freezing their clothing, and stiffening their bones. Ranma tried to scream but no words came out as decompression and the freezing air of well over fifty thousand feet between her and sea level swirled around her.
Ranma did not notice the sea engulf them as they fell into the clouds, flailing about like two fish out of water. But she did notice when it became colder. The freezing it was before was nothing to now, the completely artic desolation that surrounded her every cell.
Ranma did her best to find some way… some possible way to keep herself alive. But she knew there was no use. There was simply no way she could survive this tremendous fall. She would be dead, long before she hit the ground.
She would be dead before she could see the ground. The skin on her shoulder burned like wildfire. The blood that had previously been there was now frozen and the wind rushing, causing freezing friction, scraped her skin like a million razor blades, slicing every inch of her body.
Her clothes were destroyed by the wind, ripped off her body, leaving her and her companion free to the razor like winds to slash them to bits.
As she fell, slowly, her eyes closed, consciousness on the verge of leaving her.
"I'm going to die…" Ranma thought as the last of her consciousness began to abandon her.
And suddenly two warm arms wrapped around her…
Ranma was too cold to see what in the world was going on. Her eyes were frozen shut… her heart frozen to a halt and she had no way of telling what in the world was happening to her.
Consciousness did not leave her, yet, however.
Her mouth moved as she still fell, feeling ever colder. She asked, through a shivering and frozen voice, "Who?"
Ranma's reply was a chuckle. "Ryaine! Don't you know your own boyfriend? And… have your breasts gotten bigger?"
Had Ranma been in a state where her every thought was not concerned with the warmth the person was providing, she would have realized that she was not Ryaine.
He appeared to be freefalling with his feet pointed towards the ground without a care in the world. Had Ranma been in a state where her every though was not on getting rid of the hellish stinging of free falling from several odd thousands of feet into the air, she would have realized that this should be impossible.
The man forced her into a warmer, curled position in his arms, with her knees to her chest, her entire body cuddled into his. Had Ranma been in a state where her every thought was not concerned with fighting off the hypothermia, stopping the glacial numbing from freezing her very blood and bones, she would have cared.
Unfortunately that was not the case. She had no chose but to move as close to the man as she could.
"S…sso… so c-c-c… cold…" Ranma whispered, begging the artic chills to abate and finding a small bit of solace in the warm strong arms that caressed her. Air returned to her, and it began to feel warmer. Truly it was no longer so cold that she could not survive but the frozen airs of thirty thousand feet above were still stinging her.
Ranma didn't know how but she could feel the man smile at her as her teeth chattered endlessly.
"Mma- mm- maa make it… st-sto… stop…" Ranma begged.
Her solace finally reached her in the form of unconsciousness.
The young boy, whom Ranma had tried to rescue, froze completely on his way down… Upon impact with the concrete, he shattered into a million, icy, frozen fragments. Ranma, however, never touched the ground.
Ranma awoke slowly, her muscles sore and still enormously chilled. Her back ached, her neck ached, and she had a headache… not the most pleasant way to awake.
-Blink-
Damn it was bright… Headache just got worse…
-Blink- -Blink-
"Soo… bright…!" She muttered angrily.
Slowly, she finally managed to open her eyes entirely. She tried to rise, which proved to be a big mistake as her shoulder burned like hell.
"Finally awake, beautiful?" Came a most definitely male voice, though from where the voice came, Ranma couldn't tell. The ringing in her ears made it seem like the voice was everywhere.
Ranma merely moaned. She glanced around and saw that she was in what appeared to be a living room. She lay on a bed that was actually a pulled out couch. All in all she was very comfy… or at least, she would have been if she didn't feel like she had just been through a washing machine.
"Is that a yes?" The sarcastic man said.
"Yeeees…" Ranma moaned, making it clearly evident that she wished her answer was no. Suddenly, sense came back to her numbed skin. And her sense told her that something was around her. The man who'd been speaking to her was lying with her in the bed. "GAK!" She exclaimed angrily as she jumped up. "Get offa me, freak!" She shouted though it came out much more hoarsely than she wished.
Suddenly she realized just how sore she was as her back creaked and her sore bones made her legs give out under her weight. "Ee!" She exclaimed as she fell towards the floor backwards.
The man moved as fast as her father, catching her with a skilled ease that should not have been possible. His hand snaked around her back, holding her facing up to him.
"Ryaine? Ah… I um… I'm sorry?" The man said.
Ranma's eyes came into focus as he cradled her, looking up towards the man. Broad face and shoulders, well toned and very… very… used to fighting. His arms looked as strong as Ranma remembered hers to be when… when she was not a she. His eyes were a hazy green and his hair was dark black.
She was shocked. What was this? What… what… was happening? Her heart rate picked up… her knees felt weak… what in the fucking hell was she doing!
Yet even so… she didn't respond... Nor did she even glare at the man.
Her brain was working miles a minute trying desperately to figure out why this man's head was not three feet into the ground. "Kill him! Break his head open! Punch him into the stratosphere!" Her mind told her.
The more rational side of her mind gave her the reason. "He saved your life from said stratosphere and then again from an even more massive headache when he caught you!"
"… DAMN! KILL HIM NOW!" screamed the male half of her mind, at her body.
It wasn't meant to be, however...
"Ryaine?" The man asked.
"Uh… I'm… I'm not… I… eheh… I'm not…" Ranma replied nervously under his gaze...
"What the hell are you doing? Stuttering like some girl!" she mentally berated herself. Then she looked in his eyes again and again felt the same nervous feeling. Weakness in her knees and an uncannily fast heart rate.
"This is sick..." She screamed at herself. "You're a guy!" Yet still she could not bring herself to move.
"Nathan!" Came an excited voice.
Ranma blanched. This... wasn't good.
"NATHAN come out here! Come out here NOW! You HAVE to see this! You have to…" And Ryaine appeared right around corner and stared directly at her boyfriend… who currently held Ranma from falling to the ground… A very naked Ranma.
"… wha…?" the man, now known to Ranma as Nathan, muttered looking back and forth from the girl in his hands to the girl in his arms.
"Uh… Ryaine?" He asked Ranma.
Ranma blushed, all the while, mentally begging herself to clobber this idiot. "Eheh… I'm Ranma… Ranma Saotome… sorry bout' this…. Heh…"
End Chapter
And there, my good friends, is your desired cliffhanger. Like? Heh.. Yes I know this was a dramatized skydiving scene. Well. I hope you enjoy! Oh and by the way.
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