Monsoon Season - Sailor Moon Flash!

From Sailor Moon Flash!

Featuring:	Kenrou, Chikara, Trin
IC Date:	May 2002
Status:	Completed
Summary:	Trijntje van Montrëen has been tasked with observing how people react in times of crisis; after seeing two of Kogarashi Dojo's senior students react, she takes a particularly personal interest.

Light filtered down through the carefully tended trees of the sprawling conservatory settled among shining steel and glass, casting a pale green scatter onto immaculately kept tiles of the newly-completed Financial Management building. Jade Dragon Enterprise employees had been going to and fro all day, preparations for the ribbon-cutting ceremony nearly complete, when a single moth was buffeted around by the sudden commotion and slipped in through the massive front entrance, wobbling uncertainly above lighting crews and television cameras. Finally, it settled on one of the perfectly manicured plants centered in the plaza, resting its wings, and undoubtedly unaware that it was now trapped in a miniature indoor replica of actual nature.

Of course, not a single person in attendance seemed to notice this, except Trijntje Van Motrëen.

Writers and photographers for architectural digests jostled around, one of them striking her elbow and setting the lens of her camera off-aim.

"So sorry," the young man said quickly, and then locked eyes with her and froze at the sight of the most bleach-white gaijin he'd ever seen.

She blinked, watching his mouth move and spew gibberish, and then turned her back on him without reply - the Director of Finance was coming down the stairs to talk to the media. She positioned the viewfinder lens in front of her eye. The director began to speak at length, syllables flowing over her uncomprehending ears like dull elevator music, punctuated only by the clear, reverent tones of "Jaado Doragon Entaapuraizu", or at least that is what it became by the time it reached her senses.

One shot, then two, then wider angle, then not. The assembled press pushed in closer for the dedication of some plaque, some commendation from the Prefecture, but she had already ceased to pay it any mind. In the entourage of assistants flanking the director, one young woman was obviously distraught, her cheeks splotchy beneath her makeup, her face a barely coherent mask over some supreme embarassment. She was muttering some apologetic words to an older woman. Probably fresh from a private verbal lashing, for misplacing some report or mis-scheduling some meeting on a hectic day.

She had been crying, and now she was in front of cameras and dozens of people, trying to disappear. But she couldn't, or she would lose her job. She would briskly run off, most likely, cry in the ladies' room and try to hide it.

One click, then two, then three. The Director had finished his speech, and Trijntje was peripherally aware of a light smattering of applause. The young executive's assistant made a horrible face, quelling a quivering lip, as she caught a disapproving glance from a second coworker, as news of her failure spread. The exposure would be perfect. The light was dappled all around her, but nowhere touching her.

The pager clipped to the belt at her angular hip buzzed and buzzed, but Trin paid it no mind.

It took every ounce of Li-Nian's self-control to avoid pacing the elevator floor. She'd been calling Trin's pager for HOURS and HOURS and also HOURS but there hadn't been a single return call; to say that she was worried was something of an understatement. Obviously, something horrible had happened, because no one would deliberately avoid a page from the main office.

She was trying so hard not to pace as she rode the elevator to Trin's flat, all the while her mind cycling through every one of the possible reasons why her numerous pages had gone unanswered for nearly four hours -- not to mention that they had a meeting in half an hour, and one should never be late for one of Daddy's meetings. Ever.

When the doors slid smoothly open on the forty-ninth floor, her worry was suddenly replaced by a sinking feeling of horrified dread. The door from the lounge into the main living quarters was open, and she thought that if she looked at it more closely, she'd see that the door was hanging on perhaps half a hinge. Gone were all of the little designer touches she'd painstakingly installed -- all of the silk plants and statuary were gone, and the feng shui mirror on the far wall was, for some reason, no longer in its frame.

She walked in, careful of where she stepped, and just stared in wide-eyed shock. The television was on a channel with no signal, and Trin sat on the floor, inches from it, just staring at the static. "You n--never returned your pages," Li-Nian stuttered brokenly, looking completely heartsick. "I was afraid something happened. You have a meeting -- Daddy wants to see you." She tried desperately not to stare at the state of the apartment she'd spent days painstakingly decorating -- oh god, those were hypodermic needles on the floor -- or review all of the reasons Trin might have had for not returning her calls.

Trin lifelessly unfolded herself from in front of the television and grabbed her small bag. "Sorry." Li-Nian forced herself to ignore the fact that Trin did not, in fact, sound anything even remotely similar to sorry -- and actually, sounded rather like nothing at all.

The elevator ride all the way to the top was more than Li-Nian could bear.

Trin seemed inclined to do nothing but watch the floor numbers tick by, her features flinching at every electronic 'ding!' as though the sound were too loud for her ears.

Li Nian's self restraint remained intact for exactly one and one-half floors. "I called you and called you I thought you had been crushed under a bus wheel, oh god I was SO WORRIED!" she gushed, slim shoulders shaking with the sheer force of her outburst. She couldn't even continue on into the part where she began thinking about how this tall, angular westerner must loathe her with such personal depth to ignore all the calls just to make her worry; instead she clung desperately to Trin's willowy arm, silently grovelling for forgiveness.

As the elevator pinged to announce floor fifty-two, a slow, deliberate sigh finally seemed inclined to move Trin to slide her cloudy gaze down at the top of Li-Nian's bowed head. "I was just... busy," she said, devoid of apology as much as when she'd said she was sorry. She didn't pull her arm away from the new fixture that was Li-Nian, either, though when the girl looked up at Trin with hopeful desperation, she found she was being regarded the way a doctor might examine an x-ray. Interesting, but certainly not something you form a lasting bond with.

The Lord and Master was waiting in his mahogany-panelled office when Li-Nian all but drug Trin in by the arm. The former was nigh-unto panting, staring at her watch with panicked glances; the latter showed absolutely no change at the scenery whatsoever. Yu-Huang was seated behind his desk, hands clasped together so tightly his knuckles showed white. "You," he intoned like giant copper kettles of doom weaving through his strange multilingual speech, "Are late."

Li-Nian thought she might die.

Trin didn't particularly care.

"There was something wrong with Trin's pager, Daddy," Li-Nian cried with wringing hands. "She didn't know there was a meeting. We rushed all the way here. I'm so sorry." She thought, very irrationally, that Trin could at least pretend to be at least a little apologetic.

After a few very tense seconds in which Li-Nian was absolutely certain that she was going to become a smoking crater very shortly, Yu-Huang magnanimously allowed the grave infraction of courtesy to pass. "Henceforth, Li-Nian will schedule our meetings within a wider window of opportunity, in case this should happen again." He didn't wait for her agreement, which was a good thing because she probably wouldn't have been able to speak through her relief from abject terror. "Trijntje. We require reconnaissance in your ... particular style."

Again, Li-Nian thought Trin could at least pretend to look interested. As it was, she was staring fixedly at a knot on the wall with an intensity that was more than a little unnerving.

"We would like to see how people react in times of ... certain crisis. Photographs will be effective documentation. We will expect your report, typed and double-spaced, on Our desk within two weeks."

The most peculiar thing happened, then; Li-Nian saw it as she darted her attentions in horrified haste between Trin's mask of utter boredom and Yu-Huang's perfectly formed look of polite interest.

The washed-out gaijin woman straightened up, shook her head as though to clear it, briefly, and reopened her eyes. "You... need me? Y-yes, of course. By two weeks," she repeated back quietly in her peculiar accent, and Li-Nian was both shocked and relieved she had assimilated her whole task on one iteration of the directions.

And though later she might wonder if she was projecting wishful thinking onto her worrisome new sister, Li-Nian could have sworn in the moment of clarity, Sui let a flicker of an awestruck smile cross her colorless lips.

"Isn't that nice?" Li-Nian chattered amiably as they walked back through the hallway to the elevator. "We were late and we were forgiven that's so nice and I'm so glad you're well, I was so worried." Trin made a vague noise of noncommittally grunting answer, but Li-Nian was never to be dissuaded. "Your first assignment! Isn't that exciting? I can't wait to see your pictures. I always knew you were a great artist. I really did. How exciting." Her voice kept going up in pitch with every gleefully uttered phrase, but she wasn't paying much attention to it.

When the elevator stopped on the ground floor, she was still chattering away. "Trin, can you please remember to answer your pager this time? I'll call you if Daddy has any other instructions. They have your camera and film waiting at the front desk." She didn't exactly shove Trin out into the lobby, but did propel her with vehemence. "Bye!" she waved cheerfully. "I'll type your report for you, if you want!"

Trijntje stood in the exact place where Li-Nian had nudged her to, looking on as the smiling girl vanished back into the recesses of the executive floors. Finally she turned, drifting past the front desk and lifting up the familiar bulk of the camera case without bothering to converse with the smartly dressed attendant on duty -- only a belated flick of her company badge stopped the woman from chasing her out the door crying thief.

She was standing on the street of Tokyo's most affluent business district, the evening crowds swirling around her on bikes and in taxis, all foreign babbling and a dull sort of pulse of humdrum activity.

As she took her first leisurely step off of the immaculate marble steps of the JDE Executive tower, the first tiny drops of rain began to come down. By the time she was to the corner, people began to scurry for awnings, overhangs and umbrellas. The crowds parted, as she made her way up a street whose name she could not begin to decipher, hardly a soul remained to fight sheet after sheet of torrential downpour, and certainly not a soul gave pause when a rain-drenched gaijin passed among them unfazed, water pooling and eagerly trailing along at her heels.

Kenrou had given up attempting to compose verse about this rain two days into its savage reign over Tokyo. There were, he reflected, some rains that cried out for poetry, washing away the stultifying heat of summer and bringing calmness to the sweltering city. There were some rains that brought little peace, but did carry with them a certain joy in the fierceness of nature and the inexorability of time and forces: sabi in action, as it were.

This rain was nothing more (and nothing less) than sheets of water falling from the sky, for days upon days upon DAYS. The calendar alleged that it had been only six days from the first downpour, but according to Kenrou's internal timekeeper, it had been approximately seventeen years since last he had seen blue skies.

He preferred to think of himself as an even-tempered man, one well-suited to and by the tranquility of Zen, but there came a time when even the August Kenrou had to admit that endless torrents of rain were not soothing, in the slightest. Not soothing, but it did make him want to sink a sword into something.

He glanced at the clock again, and began to smile. It was nearly time to meet Chikara at Kogarashi. Surely that would make the day better. Surely seeing Chikara for the first time in eight hours (of endless, tiresome, soul-blighting rain) would restore his equilibrium.

Normally she was a very good teacher of both the mental and physical arts, Chikara reflected. But that morning, she'd sent two girls weeping out of the classroom for a completely minor infraction of the rules that usually never bothered her, and she believed that the next time Takiko-san dropped his bokken just because she happened to be looking at him, even Zen would not be enough to save him.

It had to be the awful weather. It just had to be. When the rain started a week ago, it had been a moderately pleasant spring change. But then it went on, and on, and it continued to sour her mood and the mood of everyone around her. The weather reports were making vague excited noises about possible flooding and mudslides, so the grocery stores were out of milk and bread and tea.

She looked at the clock and sighed. Soon the intermediate classes would be over, and Kenrou would be there to work paired kata with her. And the rain had to stop sometime. Didn't it?

There was only so much that umbrellas could do, especially when the wind picked up and suddenly the rain was slanted sideways. It was, he told himself, a great lesson in humility that no matter how August one might happen to be, nature did not care one whit and would soak one to the skin if one happened to be so foolish as to venture two blocks on foot from a train station to a dojo in the middle of a torrent. Kenrou furled his umbrella and placed it along with other dripping specimens in the rack, glancing into the main hall as he did so.

Chikara appeared to be finishing up her intermediate classes, and there had been no casualties aside from one slight youth who appeared on the verge of tears. He nodded. Just so. His lady was obviously as displeased by the weather as he was. At least the purity of the forms and the stillness of muga-mushin would be able to drive it out of them. Who knew, perhaps the tranquillity of the kata would discipline them into seeing the balance in even this most distressing blanket of water over the world.

He had just come out of the changing rooms, with relatively non-dripping-wet hair and the simple luxury of a dry gi, when the young men and women of the intermediate classes began filing past him, on their way home for the day. He caught Chikara's eye over a student's head and smiled at her. Her return smile was decorous enough to have been for anyone; the glint in her eyes made it all his.

They had just retired to the larger practice hall and had made their bows when they heard the first screams of panic.

The screams had been a high-pitched precursor to what happened next, a low rumble that shook the immaculate floors of the practice hall, and finally a sickening groan and the sound of wood splintering not far away. They exchanged a meaningful glance, then, realizing at the same moment that practice would indeed have to be postponed indefinitely.

Following the stream of chaos was not difficult, and at a hurried pace Chikara and Kenrou were upon the source of the confusion -- a good portion of the southern outermost wall had been crushed in, and sideways rain and mud now gleefully oozed in through the holes in their cherished building's defenses.

One of aforementioned students who had just made his exit came scrambling back in behind them on rainsoaked knees, desperately trying to keep shoes from befouling the dojo floors, even in his panic.

"Ishino-sensei! Oh god, it's -- there's been some kind of a landslide, it came right over the shrine two doors down. We don't know how many people are trapped, it's--"

He was cut off just as quickly as he'd begun, a sudden cacophony of newly-arrived students arguing over whether or not the police had been called, how long it would take them to arrive. The dojo had escaped the brunt of the damage, but nobody knew how far in the other direction the destruction had spread.

Outside, thunder rumbled directly overhead, as though some large cloudbound animal were roaring its triumph.

"A landslide?" Chikara managed to sound neither panicked nor confused, a feat for which she'd surely congratulate herself later. She didn't, however, manage to suppress the extent of her concern. "Can we patch up the holes? Use the spare gi, they'll wash. Anything to mop that up before it gets worse." She grabbed three of the students by the shoulders, spun them toward the changing rooms, and delegated the task. "Go! Nakamura-san, call the police. I -- no, I don't care if you think they've been called already, you are holding your cell phone, just do it."

The sound of more screams was almost drowned out by a deafening crash of thunder and the ominous groan of support beams outside trying not to give way. "Well," she said quietly, "I suppose practice must wait. We should go see how we can help out there."

Kenrou nodded, and cleared a path through the mass of (more or less) quietly panicking students by the simple expedient of being himself and walking forward to the doors. He had a very uneasy feeling about the creaking architecture; anything that could so distress buildings designed according to the post-war earthquake codes was bound to be worrisome.

Upon reaching the door, his worst apprehensions proved correct. Chikara coming up beside him voiced it, calmly and flatly. "We're stuck here for the duration." She was looking directly outside, at the flooded street and the eddying waters. It was difficult to see more than five feet in any direction, as not only was the rain falling in such literal sheets as to refract light in opacity, but the great dark clouds overhead had choked out any hope of illumination from the skies.

Kenrou glanced over to the left, where the landslide had apparently happened. He couldn't see anything, but Chikara grabbed his arm and began heading in the directions of the screams.

He caught up in half a step, and together they approached the beleaguered shrine, in rain and thunder and cries for help.

"Do you have any emergency training?" he murmured. He didn't. Aside from his default solution to any problem, which had always worked before: being himself, holding to Zen, letting outside irritation flow over and through him as he bent the world to his will.

He did not think that would necessarily apply here. He looked ahead to the shrine, and tightened his grip on Zen. He needed to, against what he saw.

Much of the wooden framework of the temple had been toppled like a child's building blocks by the sheer force of the loosened earth that had come crashing into it. Already some of the dojo students had come to the aid of those who had been trapped in the low-lying mire of water and mud, but there was still no way to determine how many lay entombed in the crushed portions of the building, suffocating and unable to call for help.

As the most recent of a cascade of thunder-rumbles finally subsided, however, one high-pitched cry for aid did reach their ears. In the midst of the chaos, students trying to fight the loss of signal as they called for emergency workers, or dug through the mud or pushed splintered boards aside -- a piercing wail coming from the back, where mud now threateningly pressed down on a sagging piece of roof, causing it to groan under the stress.

Someone small was clearly inside, but any moment the whole thing would come crashing down, the rain that pounded into it every second only speeding the inevitable.

Chikara snapped back flatly in small words that she would not otherwise excuse except under the circumstances that she did not, in fact, have emergency training, but that didn't much matter considering that there was just as much chance that someone with emergency training would make it in as they had of making it out.

She started for the back of the shrine after a moment or two had allowed it to sink in that, in fact, there was a kid back there who needed help; she climbed nimbly through the wreckage and muck, trying to take care not to dislodge anything that might be important -- physics had never been one of her great skills, so she just played it safe. She took it for granted that Kenrou would follow her, and so wasn't particularly surprised when he pointed out the sagging roof with a warning tone.

"Can you brace it with anything? We have to get in there." The shrieking hadn't stopped, and it was making her tense. She wished she'd thought to grab a flashlight. "If you can't, I can just go in alone while you keep watch. I'm smaller than you are."

Kenrou glanced at the space she was pointing out, then looked back to the uncertain roof. His first thought - to brace it himself - was instantly discarded; there was no way that any one person could hold back the weight of that much waterlogged earth. Very well; other options. He could already see two sturdy-looking posts lying off to the side. If he could anchor them securely and cross them fairly high up, it would probably suffice for Chikara to go in and out safely. The roof would not make it through another hour, given that the rain seemed to have gotten worse (if such a thing were possible), but the posts bracing the already-present supports would at least keep the inevitable away for as long as Chikara needed.

"I will not let it fall on you," he promised Chikara. "If you can go in and bring out the child, I will take care of the roof."

As she nodded at him, and prepared to duck into the dark opening, already calling out to soothe the crying child, Kenrou spied something that made him feel more hopeful. Other students were picking their way over here to this dangerous corner.

He had always been at his best focusing and directing groups. He called out to them, and they had already wedged in the longer post as a support strut by the time Chikara called out, from within the enclosed space.

"Hold it just ten more minutes!" Chikara called back through the murky gloom. It didn't really much matter if it would hold or if it wouldn't, because she wasn't leaving until she found the source of that cry anyway. Besides, going back would be giving up; giving up would be failure; failure was unacceptable.

When she found the little girl cowering under a slanted wall, she wasn't entirely sure that she was real. She couldn't have been any older than five, and took most of Chikara's remaining ten minutes to be convinced that it really was indeed safer to leave. Luckily, she was exactly old enough that Chikara introducing herself as a teacher convinced her that she was, indeed, an angel sent from on high for her rescue. Any younger and she might have been skeptical; any older and she would have actively disbelieved.

It was a lot harder getting out than it was getting in, through a combination of factors that consisted primarily of keeping the grips on a wriggling child and also the rapidness with which the shrine's structural stability was being compromised. When the rest of the roof caved in, Chikara had exactly half a second to be violently, brutally angry that her resolve was tested in such a fashion; she never once considered that she might actually die there.

When she and her small charge fought their way through the sagging archway, the building collapsing into rubble not more than inches behind them, it was obvious that the group of students bracing the remaining beam had, in fact, considered it and indeed expected it, judging by the looks of relieved shock on the faces she saw once she wiped mud from her eyes.

She'd scarcely finished wiping the girl's face with the last remaining inch of vaguely-clean cloth on her gi when she felt a hand on her shoulder. "I never doubted," Kenrou murmured for her alone, "But I worried just the same." She smiled up at him and nodded, and the two of them carried their rescue to the paramedic van on the street.

She was smiling -- covered in mud, copper hair plastered down by the rain, adrenaline bleeding from her in nearly visible waves. But she had not hesitated.

With a practiced delicacy, thin and nimble fingers made adjustments to the lens, the focus impressive at such a range. Another nod to Yu-Huang's all-encompassing power, he had excellent taste. The equipment had been his purchase.

Trijntje did not know the woman's name, nor where she lived, nor anything about her livelihood save her martial arts clothing and her stately -- albeit bedraggled -- companion. But she knew her face. Without her knowledge or permission, Trin had her face and had captured her moment, filed it away as a keepsake. It was both violating and vaguely amusing, and with the general chaos that now descended in swirls on the destroyed shrine and the decimated neighborhood, it was downright entertaining, as she looked on, the telephoto lens providing a convenient substitute for opera glasses, watching the little scene unfold.

The woman who had become her new fascination, however, was turning to leave. Close to her, protectively, though seemingly hesitant to put a hand to her shoulder, was the male companion with the streaked hair. He leaned in close, speaking only to her. Something passed between them, a look of warmth, that sent a pang through Trin unbidden, turning her insides. Condescending amusement vanished as quickly as it had come. She let the viewfinder fall from her eye.

The rain that had been repelled away from her through force of will now drove against her, chilling her to the bone. It was all she could do to salvage the camera -- worth more than she'd ever seen in a year -- from the water damage.

Two days after the collapse of the shrine near Kogarashi Dojo, Amakusa Kenrou sat at his studio table and felt that perhaps the current weather was even worse than the torrents of the previous two weeks. The sheets of water falling from the night-black clouds had been bad enough, but ever since the nigh-flooding of the streets two days ago, the rain had relented... seemingly. Before, the skies had been outright malevolent.

Now, this morning, Kenrou looked out at the dark gray skies, and felt that it was not an improvement. The heavens no longer raged, but now they loured and glowered in sullen hostility, instead.

He did not think he would be writing poetry about this sky, either.

"HEY, BOSS."

He turned his attention back to the inside of his studio, the stack of mail that had just been stacked in front of him in particular.

It was not Kenrou's custom to sort through his own mail. This was for many reasons, but the main one was that his assistant flung herself gleefully at the day's offerings before Kenrou could raise any objection.

"OKAY," announced Tsurian, adding a few more cards to the small stack. "Five proposals from Shassoran, two pieces of official notification junk from Bokuteki-kai, some random fanmail with shiny stickers on it, and this." She held up a thick padded envelope with an ... interesting... assortment of stamps on it.

Kenrou, staring at them, realized that there were no postal markings on it. Just the stamps, and the building code and suite address for the studio in blocky romaji.

He nodded his thanks to Tsurian, and opened the padded envelope.

What slid from the package was a series of large, glossy photos done up on high quality paper, and one tiny box wrapped in plain paper -- definitely not a commercial product, the likes of which Kenrou found himself inundated with on a daily basis.

The first pictures he came upon were of students entering and leaving the dojo, then of Ishino-san leading her class through a series of exercises. He had to suppress an outward smile at Chikara, being captured here in exquisite detail in her element, however he did not recall ever approving any media treatment in regards to the dojo - such a thing seemed out of place, if not wholly improper. He was just about to call Tsurian back into the room to review the matter, when he turned over the Chikara-at-kata image, and froze at what he saw.

As if the dramatic events of the day of the landslide had not been harrowing enough, here they were again, recounted in eerie detail by a photographer Kenrou had absolutely no recollection of seeing. There he was, throwing his weight into the sagging support, then students, coming to his aid. Himself, and Ishino-san, heads close together, a moment for them, and them alone.

Kenrou stared at the photographs once more. He forced himself to do so, coating his mind in Zen. In particular he gazed at the last photograph, this stolen moment of himself and his beloved frozen in time where anyone might look upon it.

He deliberately blinked, and shut out the images from his mind; he opened his eyes again, and looked at the small box.

Carefully he slit the wrappings; carefully he let the contents slide out onto his desk; carefully he lifted the small lid.

Inside, there was a small, cheap, pink plastic barrette.

It was very familiar.

Two days ago, he had seen it in the shiny black hair of the girl that Chikara had brought out of the collapsed shrine.

Kenrou noticed with interest that his hands were beginning to clench, and made himself stop.

Very well. He was reacting unusually - he could not remember the last time he had been even close to this affected, save by his Chikara alone - and so he did what he always did whenever he noticed something unusual or of interest: he reached over to the small cell phone by his table, and called Chikara.

Chikara was just about to start dialing when her phone rang. She would have thought the timing eerily coincidental, except that the number registered on the display as Kenrou's, and he always seemed to know when something was bothering her. Though, she thought as she surveyed the reason for her current disquiet scattered over her desk in the teachers' workroom, he might have waited just a moment more for her nerves to settle.

She didn't actively avoid cameras like Kenrou seemed to; the picture of him framed on her desk was a likeness clandestinely stolen by Yoshinaga-san's camera phone at her request. Nevertheless, the glossy photographs of herself among her fellow Kogarashi students was striking, and the meticulous composition of her emerging from the collapsed shrine covered in mud and filth was almost physically invasive. But even more disturbing than the pictures was the box that had accompanied them: it held a shattered splinter of the torii, the red lacquered gates that marked the shrine's boundaries.

Having that on her desk was rather like being held personally responsible for the collapse of a part of the otherworld, of rending the neighborhood's harmonious balance into tatters. She wasn't entirely sure she wanted to touch it to remove it, and she was still staring at it when she answered the phone.

"I ... have been presented with very strange package," she said by way of greeting into the phone, unwilling to waste time on pleasantries. "And I hope that you can help explain this to me."

She listened quietly as he related the contents of his own package, absently tucking the phone between her ear and her shoulder so her hands were free to methodically rip each photo into neat, even squares and scatter it like evil confetti into the wastebasket. She still didn't touch the fragment of torii. He was obviously as rattled as she was, which in turn bothered her more; nothing rattled the August Kenrou. Ever.

In the end, it was a mutual agreement to set thoughts of their anonymous gifts aside that finally settled her nerves. She managed to convince herself that it was just someone's idea of a twisted joke, and Kenrou promised that he would make dinner -- steadfastly according to recipe -- and they could discuss what to do with these ... things, or not, as the mood desired.

After she hung up the phone, Chikara carefully replaced the torii splinter in its box and hid it at the very back of her desk. By the time she'd finished the day's classes and was on her way home, she'd managed to block the entire event from her mind.

They didn't speak on the pictures over dinner after all.

It would have been easy enough for either one to put the whole incident out of mind...

...only the strange deliveries did not stop.

Students at the dojo also seemed to be object of the stalker's attentions, photographed leaving their daily lessons -- some of them followed to their lives, their homes, private lives violated somehow, bundled in neat packages and sent to them days -- sometimes hours -- later.

Chikara and Kenrou, however, were the favored two subjects. No note was ever enclosed, no definitive statement was ever made to try to frighten them, the photos were simply there. And continued to come, regardless of whether or not the previous envelopes had been opened.

It was Kenrou who was first to suggest alerting the postal authorities -- it was Chikara who noticed that some time over the last few unsettling days that the correspondence was no longer postmarked.

By that day, the weather lady who normally beamed her way through her morning report was unsteadily relaying something about experts assessing the situation over the Tokyo area, the El Nino phenomenon, global temperature changes. There was no end in sight to the clouds that pressed in like a suffocating wool blanket over the city, staunchly refusing to move out to sea.

"I think I might almost like it better if they'd come with a letter, or something," Chikara said darkly from her post at the kitchen table. She was painstakingly shredding each of the day's latest photographs into pieces that could then be scattered into the trash. It was early evening, and the window shades were open to let in what little natural light could be gathered in the cloud-covering gloom.

Every day for the last week there had been a new envelope full of pictures; one left on her desk at Chuo, one dropped in his studio mail. The first few had tended toward copies of the same pictures; the last few days, they had each received different sets, though the photos had obviously been shot at similar times. They had become more and more frustratingly invasive for such normally private people: close-up shots, long-distance shots, it didn't matter; they captured working moments, captured personal moments, captured their lives without permission and then flaunted it.

Chikara stared at the last picture from her stack again, a shot of the pair of them in a moment she remembered vividly from the day before, when a conversation about the current happenings in Parliament had evolved to a discussion on poetry, which had then evolved into something more intimate. She realized, with a sinking feeling of general dread that was vastly unfamiliar to her normally unshakable confidence, that she wasn't misremembering; they had been in the living room when they held that conversation.

She very carefully and deliberately got to her feet and drew the window shades, leaving the room in dimness. "We have got to do something about this."

He had been staring into the depths of one of her curio cabinets, lost in his own thoughts, when she had spoken for the first time. He came back to the here and now slowly, focusing his gaze on a small statuette that purported to represent Tenacity.

"I agree," he said, realizing at once why she had closed off the windows to the outside. It did not sit well with him. Having to barricade themselves against an unseen tormentor grated against every nerve and every neuron; that he, the August Kenrou -- that she, his perfect and indomitable Chikara -- should be under siege and at the mercy of an unknown photographer. He did not care for having his picture taken under normal circumstances, which these most certainly were not; to have his privacy threatened to the point of sealing himself away from potential further thefts of likeness rankled.

Control was something he would voluntarily relinquish only to Chikara, and at that only under carefully-delineated circumstances. This ... theft of control over his movements and privacy was going to end badly, he could feel it.

"I agree," he said, once more, and rose to stand by her, reaching out to touch her shoulder. "The first step, obviously, lies in identifying the photographer."

His first thought had been that perhaps this had something to do with his family -- surely hahaue had a valid reason, in her own mind at least, to harass Chikara and himself. He had rejected this idea as quickly as it had occurred; the anonymity argued against it. His honored mother's ego would demand that her name and family crest adorn each and every photograph as a declaration of war, and surely even hahaue would balk at sending hair-clips and torii splinters.

Very well; if not his mother, then no one else in his family. No one in Amakusa-ke or Tanagora-ie would wish his attention drawn to them in so uncouth a manner, if only because he held the power of discomfort, shame, and disinheritance over them.

"Chikara, is it possible," he wondered aloud, "That we are being blackmailed for something?" It was impossible, no matter his wondering; it was impossible for either of them to have done anything that anyone might perceive as shameful enough for them to want to cover. And yet nothing else, nothing else, seemed to fit the situation.

"Blackmailed?" Chikara repeated with a skeptical arch of her eyebrows. "I can't even begin to think why that would even be considered. There are other, much better targets out there -- you know, ones who have actually done shameful things, and ones who make more money than a schoolteacher." She made a face and frowned at the shaded windows. "You know what? I am not going to lock myself up in here -- OR your place, which is an admittedly much nicer area for extended stays -- because I'm afraid someone is taking pictures. Honestly, this is absurd."

Kenrou knew that tone: it was the same tone she used once she had finally decided that she wanted to win, the tone she'd used whenever she'd had enough and was done. In the dojo, this was when she was at her most dangerous. He wasn't entirely sure what it meant here.

"This last envelope was at the dojo half an hour ago. I'm going downstairs to look around." She grabbed her jacket and her absurdly overlarge umbrella, pocketing her house keys on the way. "Are you coming?" Whether he thought this a clever idea or not, it didn't look like she was intending to wait; he wasn't about to let her go alone. When she stepped into the elevator, he was right behind her.

Kenrou at first followed behind, but as she paused in the doorway, hefting the umbrella up a few notches to accommodate his height with an expectant look, he obligingly slid to her side without a word.

As they set foot on the street, rain gushed over the awning of the apartment entrance and rattled the top of Chikara's huge, somber umbrella. The pouring of heavy buckets of liquid over plastic was deafening, so it was only after he squeezed her arm lightly did she realize Kenrou was trying to say something to her.

"Look," he repeated more clearly over the din, leaning closer and gesturing as subtly as he could, "there."

The hideous weather had driven away nearly every sane body from the normally bustling sidewalks, whose gutters now swirled with dangerously high waters, storm drains clogged with debris. So it stood to reason only the desperate and the less than sane would remain. A schoolgirl with a cat-eared umbrella darted past them, head bowed and face contorted in dismay as the high waters clung to every fiber of her socks, rushing to fill the soles of her shoes. And there, across the road where Kenrou had pointed, tracking the child with a much delayed sort of interest, was a pale figure with a camera to its eye.

The disgusted schoolgirl gone, whoever it was straightened up, undisturbed by the near-torrential rain that threatened to soak through the skin, and began to cross to their side several yards up at a leisurely, slogging pace.

It was the side of the building Chikara's living room window faced.

The wind was beginning to rise as the stranger hit their side of the street. Various bits of sodden rubbish and debris actually managed to stir from the stabs of air; the rain kept pelting grimly straight downward.

Kenrou remembered, later, that his first and second reactions to seeing the pale girl with the obviously expensive camera were shock and then pity. He had never seen anyone that pale (the term "washed-out" occurred to him, for obvious reasons); he had never seen anyone that ... ... ... he sifted through several more-or-less polite terms for the reaction she drew from him, and settled at last on "fey". She had no umbrella. She did not seem to care. Oddly enough, her camera was still dry.

She was only shorter than he was by a few inches, which meant that she would have been much taller than Chikara, had only her posture permitted; as it was, she slouched and swayed so much that the top of her head was level with Chikara's eyes by the time Kenrou, his lady, and the gaijin converged on the pavement two buildings away from the Asakusa Views.

"Excuse me," Kenrou said, instinctively stepping forward and placing himself between the pale woman and Chikara. He reflected that "have you by any chance been taking pictures of us? We are most displeased" was going to sound slightly ... abrupt; it certainly was not covered in any of the laws of etiquette. Very well; there was no one more suited than the August Kenrou to insert a new set of laws and forms.

"Young lady, We would like --"

A leaf -- a wet, grubby leaf -- came out of nowhere and hit him in the face.

Kenrou stopped talking, and reached up, slowly, to remove the leaf from his eyes. Just as his hand touched it, the wind whisked it away again, leaving behind a grimy marring over his eyelids, cheekbones and the bridge of his nose.

Even from behind him, he could still sense Chikara's incredulous stare.

The flat expression of the pale gaijin never changed even slightly.

Kenrou gathered his dignity around him, erased the wandering leaf from the past five seconds of his personal timeline, and began, again, "Miss, a word with --"

This time, the leaf actually flanked him and came in from the side to slap him on the cheek, sticking to his face and adhering even further with every drop of rain that hit it.

There were only two options, when faced with something like this: to accept the wisdom of the kami that perhaps one's August self-image is preventing one from properly performing the task at hand, and smile graciously in thanks for the warning; or to lose one's temper and rage at the inanimate until one's dignity is in shreds in any case.

Kenrou chose the former, and maintained his smile and grip on Zen. He grasped the leaf --

Except that the wind plucked it right out of his grasp.

And the flash that nearly blinded him alerted him to the fact that the pale gaijin apparently found his trial-by-leaf most worthy of preservation.

Zen closed around him utterly. He reached out and took the leaf of its dance on air, and closed his fist around it. A few moments later he would drop it in shock, but for now he held it securely, and looked again at the gaijin girl.

"Miss, We take exception to your activities towards Us -- " and here he stepped back, including Chikara in his plurals -- "over these past weeks. We insist that you stop."

In the loose cage of his hand, the leaf stirred, but was held firmly.

The young woman blinked at him, slowly, still unperturbed by the wet hair that clung steadfastly to her forehead, rain running down her cheeks in tiny rivulets. She watched his mouth move, though his emphatic request seemed to go either unnoticed or thoroughly dismissed. She fiddled with the camera some more, which still seemed immune to the downpour, as though she had already forgotten they were there.

Kenrou was just about to speak up again, this time with more insistence, when she straightened to her full height, utterly dead-eyed gaze fixed on him. "S.. sessha wa Nihongo wo hanasu koto ga... deki... shimatteimasen kedo." She hesitated, briefly, as though she had forgotten where she had been going with her statement, and the perfectly constructed syllables of the utmost humble, formal language were tinged with what may have been the strangest accent either of them had ever heard.

Having announced to them both that this humble and unworthy soul did not speak the most exalted language of Japan (regrettably), she promptly went back to ignoring Kenrou's edict, turning her disturbingly cold attentions back to the camera, preparing for another snapshot of him under his beloved's umbrella.

Chikara's eyes widened with every progressive syllable, and her eyebrows arched so high they were momentarily lost under the fall of her hair. She had lithely stepped up beside Kenrou while he spoke, far more interested in finding out what exactly was the purpose of this strange rainy camerawoman than in being shielded behind her occasionally overzealous companion. "English, then?" She asked, and reflected that it was unfortunate Kenrou had never bothered to learn to speak it; she'd just translate later. "What -- " She paused, and tried to keep a handle on politeness; she mourned that English had no levels of formality. "What are you doing?" Well, she reasoned, that was close enough.

Though she still wore the completely dispassionate look of someone who understood none of the language, this merited a very monotone response. "Watching you," she said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. "...waiting to see which of you would come, really." The sighed, and the slow exhalation moved her shoulders visibly, as though the conversation's pointlessness exhausted her.

That having been said, she slowly slid her gaze between the two of them, trying to decide. "So, which of you is it, or do I have to find out myself." It wasn't a threat, per se, just another weary declaration.

Kenrou understood none of this; he was still trying to parse out the gaijin's earliest response, which he had belatedly realized was actually Japanese. To hear keigo of the utmost formality contrasted with such an ... interesting ... accent caused him very near physical pain in the regions of gut and sinuses.

"Chikara, what does the young lady say?" he requested, in low tones. She had come forward to stand actually ahead of him, closer to the pale girl than he liked. He knew better than to protest this, but he adjusted his own stance that he might be able to step between her and any harm more quickly.

He glanced again at the girl with the camera. The look and the feeling of her misliked him, which was understandable, given that she had apparently been stealing bits of them over the past two weeks -- and yet, to look at, she was something that would not last two seconds against either of them. Her ma-ai was nonexistent, a camera was not a good physical defense against a sword, and even without a blade Kenrou felt certain he could tuck her neatly into a package without exerting himself.

He found himself moving closer to Chikara, anyway, and again requested enlightenment as to what was going on.

"I -- am not entirely sure," Chikara answered Kenrou lowly over her shoulder. "She said she was waiting." She didn't like being confused; it was, in fact, one of her least favorite feelings. At least she could possibly attribute some of her confusion to the language barrier.

She looked back over the strange pale woman, returning to English. "Do you need help in some way? Are you lost?" Gaijin were always strange; maybe, Chikara reasoned, sending the photographs was her way of communicating. Anything was possible.

The woman made a sound that would be considered universally rude, a sound of dismissal. "Tch. Not from you," she said, again coloring English with a strange accent that was neither British nor American -- not even Indian. Had Chikara been a less rational person, maybe she would have speculated that their strange stalker actually was from Mars. She certainly seemed to regard them in the same way.

"I need you... to tell me..." she pronounced each syllable carefully, "which of you is the brilliant soul." She flicked an apathetic gaze to Kenrou. "Tell him." Nothing in her posture or her body language belied the awkward meeting coming to blows, and her hands never left the small Nikon camera, a thing that looked to cost more than the rest of the slightly ragamuffin girl put together and multiplied several times over. She did not step towards them, either, but she did not seem inclined to walk away. As though responding to the tension, the rain kicked up with a snap of wind and changed direction, driving against the two of them, and against the gaijin's back.

Chikara stared at the woman for a few moments, and again her eyebrows were lost in the fall of rain-damp hair. "...What? Are you... unwell?" She half-turned toward Kenrou so she could relate what was happening, but still keeping her eyes on the freak with the camera. "I know not all gaijin are this weird. She must be hallucinating -- do you have your phone on you?"

Kenrou shook his head, his eyes for once not on Chikara. He did not like the utter lack of expression on the gaijin woman's face. Surely if she was, in fact, hallucinating as Chikara thought, she would not show such a calm face to the world.

He studied the pale foreigner's features again, and inevitably a metaphor came to him, as one did for nearly everything that passed under his notice: the lack of affect struck him as the other side of Zen, the blackness outside the steady white of muga-mushin.

"I left my phone in your apartment," he confessed. "I felt that, as I was with you, I would not be expecting a call from you. I will ... rethink this policy in the future, I promise." He offered another option: "Perhaps we might lead her to the police-box two blocks over? Surely We the August Kenrou and the August Chikara could present her to the proper authorities."

"Right then," Chikara said in a clipped tone, stepping forward as their slack-postured tormenter made no movement towards or away from them, still watching them in silence.

"You didn't do what I asked," she said slowly to Chikara as she approached, looking neither disappointed nor even terribly suspicious, just tossing out a vague hypothesis.

Chikara cleared her throat, reaching out tentatively to lead the taller woman by the arm, though Kenrou watched every motion from where he stood like a three-piece suited hawk.

Her hand never touched the girl's skin, though not for lack of trying, and not because she jerked away, but rather because all of physics and all of reason itself ceased to function at that moment.

The rain that had been coming down at an angle over the both of them suddenly snapped out in all directions, actually stopping in mid-fall and then shooting out in all directions as though struck by a large paddle. The force of it drove Chikara backwards before she could bolster herself for the blow.

When it seemed reality was about to set back in, two things prevented it from finalizing so that each of them could dismiss the sudden atmospheric backhanding as a mutual hallucination of their own -- for one, the rain still hung in midair, bobbing faintly, as if in anticipation.

And second... Chikara put her hand to her cheek where the water had stung her, to find that a small drop of blood had welled up there. Somehow a tiny drop of water had lashed a hairline cut into her skin.

Kenrou stared at his beloved. The rain he dismissed as unusual, but irrelevant at this specific moment. All of his attention focused squarely on that thin line of red scored into Chikara's cheek.

Without his consciously willing it, his left hand dropped to his right hip, where the hilt of a katana might have rested were they in the dojo. The long-conquered leaf dropped from his grasp and lay quiescent on the wet ground.

"Chikara," he said, looking at her through a pattern of static raindrops. He was interested to note that he still held Zen, still felt only calm acceptance of the world; he did not stop to consider that perhaps even the August Kenrou was capable of shock, when it was Chikara the sharer of his center of the universe who was injured.

Likewise he did not stop to consider that this strange, fey, frail-looking gaijin woman could have had anything to do with something powerful enough to draw blood from his indomitable Chikara, and so he was doubly unprepared for the rest of it.

Chikara stared wonderingly at the redness of blood left on her fingertips after touching the scratch on her cheek. Rain... had cut her. This was not physically possible. The rain had actually pushed her backwards -- she knew she had moved backwards, because her feet were definitely not where she had last put them -- and cut her.

"Kenrou," she said very quietly, still staring at the blood on her fingers. "Perhaps you should go call the police."

The mottled-haired girl did not understand Chikara's words to Kenrou, though their action -- or some lack thereof -- seemed to annoy her. "I'm tired of asking," she said flatly, and knelt slowly to tuck her still impeccably dry camera into the bag that had slid off her shoulder the moment they'd intercepted her.

Though she hadn't moved from that spot, somehow it took on sinister new meaning that she had both hands and all her attention free.

"If it is not one of you two, then we have no use for you..." she said with a sigh, a heavy, hollow-sounding proclamation, as though she were a government bureaucrat dismissing them, her tone utterly blase. "...but I'll find out... whether or not you tell me."

The rain held in stasis began to swirl slowly back upwards, circling the shadow-eyed girl. This, too, was not physically possible. Appropriately enough, the gaijin woman seemed not to care.

Kenrou had no idea what the gaijin girl had said, nor did he much care. The only thing in the world that occupied him at the moment was the fact that his beloved had been injured. Somehow. Somehow she had been injured, and yet the only thing that had touched her was ... a drop of water.

With the realization that natural laws no longer applied, relief settled over him. Of course. The worlds above and below touched on this one. Zen and Shinto both taught this, and he had been raised with the knowledge of the influence of the kami and the very real dangers of goblins and demons.

The only real obstacle to his belief, he reflected, was the sure knowledge that he, the August Kenrou, and his beloved, the August Chikara, could not possibly have performed any action to have displeased heaven, and therefore this attack... this incident that had drawn blood from the sacrosanct skin of Chikara... was wrongfully directed at them.

"We will not be separated," he murmured to Chikara, and wished for a blade. "We the August Kenrou are quite as qualified as the Tokyo Police to deal with water-demons."

He glanced again at the gaijin pale girl, who was still speaking monotone gibberish, and found it in himself to be slightly surprised that a demon would choose to manifest itself as an outlander, but then, the vagaries of demons were historically odd.

For Chikara, Kenrou's words had an almost immediate calming effect. Of course, she thought as she considered the individually halted raindrops, of course this was the work of a water-demon, though she remained just as lost as to why a demon would be attacking them.

At the look of dispassionate disdain on the otherworld-demon's face, Chikara reached instinctively for a sword she wasn't carrying and keenly felt the loss of its presence; she had to settle for merely ducking into a defensive posture instead. She didn't bother answering the other woman or even translating her questions to Kenrou -- she was obviously mad in some fashion, and her words were like inconsequential gibberish.

"Since the police cannot help us, you may stay," she told Kenrou magnanimously, her mouth a thin line.

The alleged water demon yawned, unrepentantly, in front of them both. "Fine," she said, impatient with their conversation, which seemed wholly lost on her. "I'll start with you, yes."

Rain that held in the air, seemingly on her whim, was wordlessly bidden down to the pavement, where it rapidly coalesced like a thing alive -- tiny droplets flying into one another with an audible staccato. Water flowed in reverse from the storm drains that eagerly drank it up, feeding the new, flotsam-filled life until it was nearly the size of an automobile. As it seemed to tip some critical mass, it heaved into motion, a cresting wave with no ocean, driving towards Amakusa Kenrou with all the rage of the sea on a city street.

Now that he had adjusted himself to the fact that this fiend in the shape of a woman was in fact a demon of water and weather, Kenrou was unsurprised by the actions of the rain and the groundswelling.

As he stared at the wall of water crashing toward him, though, he was extremely impressed.

He had barely enough time to get out of the way, and even so felt the sheer force of the tsunami roaring past him. He heard the impact of it on the building behind where he had been standing, and had he been more inclined to pointless speculation might have spared a few seconds to ponder the damage done to him if he had not moved in time.

He was not given to pointless speculations. He was more concerned with stopping this water demon by any means necessary. He was still unsure as to why she had been targeting himself and Chikara -- taking pictures of them had surely been a tactic designed to lure them out in the open so that she might attack directly. A brilliant tactic. After all, it had worked.

It might help stop her if he knew why she was attacking them. He had never gone out of his way to offend any of the forces of the land; he must assume that this demon wanted something of them. It must be something she could obtain from their crushed bodies, if she was willing to fling such huge masses of water at them.

He glanced over to Chikara, and saw that she had furled her umbrella... and was holding it, her face calm and determined, in chugen stance.

His heart stopped beating for a second. He would die if anything happened to Chikara.

Very well. He would really have preferred to have withdrawn for a while and watched the demon a bit longer, in order to tighten his tactical awareness and focus his chi, but Chikara was forcing his hand. Were he to wait any longer, she would likely attack on her own, and while he was second to none in his estimation of her abilities and quickness... ... there was no denying that she was able and quick with an art form, and not the combat forms he had been trained in.

He had no sword, and his knowledge of kenpou was strictly theoretical; however, he did know the common mythologies of water demons all agreed that their single weakest point was their eyes. Could he blind the demon, she would be confused and unable to harm Chikara.

Kenrou cast a wary glance at the tsunami that had crashed, and reassured himself that it was spent.

He went forward to confront the demon.

It was, then, the most unthinkable breach of honor, and indeed of the nature of waves, for the water that had crashed forcefully into the wall behind him to regroup, and then come flying at his back in a violent surge, an unnatural sideways slap against his body. It drove into him and propelled him not only with brutal force, but sucked away all hopes for traction, for feet and hands finding purchase against the earth.

The water-demon woman looked on, blinking slowly, as though Kenrou's suffering, the reason for which he could not begin to comprehend, were a particularly dull television program playing out before her eyes.

He was still held in the grip of the water, tumbled by the wave against the smooth unforgiving surface of the street, when he saw Chikara begin to move forward. Just what he had feared: his beloved was determined to make a reckoning for the demon's sheer gall in drawing her blood.

He could not fault her for that; vengeance was a moral imperative, and it could not be borne that someone had dared to harm Ishino Chikara, demon or no.

And then he realized that his beloved was not moving towards the demon.

She was coming to him.

Chikara was not panicking, because she never panicked.

She was, however, perhaps a little bit concerned.

Before the wave had slammed into Kenrou, she had been prepared to use her enormous umbrella as a sort of makeshift shinai; it was the reason why she'd bought something so absurdly huge in the first place, but she'd never expected to actually have to use it for anything other than keeping dry in the rain.

Then he had been carried into the wall and borne down to the pavement, and she forgot the water-demon and her umbrella in the urgent need to make certain that he was safe.

The cascade of water swirled fitfully around her, but she paid it no mind until she had slogged her way to Kenrou's side and helped him regain his footing. She studied him, soggy and waterlogged, to ensure that he was unbroken. Her relief at finding him both breathing and reasonably hale, considering the circumstances, was a dangerous focus; she was not paying nearly enough heed to the regathering water.

Just as soon as she'd reached Kenrou to confirm he still drew breath, the swirling currents around her now creeping up towards knee-level, she became aware of this miscalculation. A column of forceful water surged up between them, shooting into the air and hanging, again, as though gravity had given up enforcing its rule over the floods.

While at first, this only served to put some distance between them, as Chikara extended her free hand somewhat blindly towards Kenrou, but then a much more sinister threat became apparent. She caught sight of the water demon creature, through a blur of swirling chaos, standing unaffected some feet away.

She made a cutting gesture with two long, spindly fingers.

The column came crashing down directly over Chikara with every intention of driving her down into the pavement with bone-breaking force.

Perhaps later, when Chikara had time to take stock of the situation, she would be able to look back and determine exactly where she had forgotten to plan, and what she had done so incorrectly -- but that would be later, because at that moment she didn't have time for much in the way of thought.

The water-column barreled down on her with a noise like thunder and a force crushed her first to her knees and then staggering downward, beating her mercilessly into the pavement face-first. It seemed like it might never end; luckily, it had hit her with such force that the pressure with which it hit the pavement scattered the water rather than recreating the knee-deep lake -- Chikara still had air to breathe, once the column was spent.

For what seemed like an eternity, she stayed pressed flat to the pavement, unable to do anything but gasp shakily for her breath and wait for the next onslaught.

Kenrou kept his eyelids open by sheer force of will, as they would have slid closed on their own if he had left them to their own devices. He was fairly sure that nothing was broken, and that he was not injured, simply because that was not how the world worked. This being the case, he ought to be able to stand up, because his body absolutely had not been battered against the pavement as badly as it was insisting.

He kept his eyes open, and focused them on Chikara, who was reaching towards him. He smiled at her, and raised his arm to clasp her hand in return, except that his arm did not in fact move at all.

He was still looking towards her when he saw the water drop and crush her, obscuring her bright hair and her beloved face with a solid column of force.

For a moment, there was nothing in the universe at all but white water.

It cleared. He saw her lie unmoving on the pavement, and the water just around her was vaguely pinkish. She breathed, in shaking gulps and gasps, so she still lived, and it was good that he saw this right away, as it made his choices much easier.

He could get up and help her, check her for injuries -- he would not think about the fact that pink was watered-down red -- and ensure her safety so. This was a valid choice.

Or he could get up and destroy the demon, making certain that she would no longer have a chance to hurt Chikara further.

He glanced up. There was no water gathering in the sky above Chikara's still body. It hurt him to see her still, she who was always in motion.

He got up and went to the demon to disable her, and it had been so long -- perhaps never -- since the universe in general and his own self in particular disobeyed what his will decreed that it was a few seconds before he realized that he had not, in fact, moved.

As the remnants of the column scattered away from the three of them, their grisly task finished, the water seemed to drift off in the air in free-floating globs, now liberated from its mediocre existence in storm drains and puddles. A handful of moments later, however, their unlikely master called them back, as she shuffled casually over to her two victims, until she was less than three meters away.

Water repelled from her threadbare jeans as though she were Moses in the shape of a tired, waifish girl.

"Isn't there more to you than that," she said flatly, face only twitching with some barely perceptible hint of disappointment. "Stop fawning on each other and do something useful." Her tone was so bland that the admonishment almost sounded gentle; however, the utter lack of understanding or compassion in her eyes showed her antagonizing for what it was -- remorseless.

With an unconscious upward flick of her tiny demon wrist, she had Chikara pushed back upright like a rag doll, feet slipping away from the earth as the waters forced her up off the ground and dropped her again, more or less on her knees. As she struggled to stay upright, Chikara saw the purpose for the rough assistance -- a spray of rain honed into long, sharp darts was being forged by the unseen powers around their gaijin tormentor. Barbs pointed at her heart, glittering in the weak light that came in through the clouds. The sky churned angrily overhead, feeding the water demon with a relentless supply of weaponry.

"I could just kill you," the demon said again in her peculiar English. "I'm clearly given the way to do it..." she glanced down at her own hands briefly, as though her own capacity for unnatural power were new to her, as well.

There was some dim corner of Chikara's mind that registered the extent of the danger she was in, but it was drowned out by sheer unadulterated rage and stubbornness. She was bleeding -- visibly, the scratch on her cheek had been sliced open anew, and another cut over her browbone bled fiercely -- but refused to allow herself to be broken. She struggled to her feet, pushing against the water that tried to hold her down. "I kneel to no one," she hissed out between clenched teeth as she staggered upright. "I will never die on my knees."

Kenrou watched his beloved, and concentrated on moving. Merely having a tonne of water bear one down into the pavement was nothing. Chikara, whom he outweighed by thirty kilograms, had been hit by the same amount of water, at far closer range, and she was on her feet.

Oh, gods of all his ancestors, she was bleeding. There were needles of water aimed at her.

He concentrated. He was the August Kenrou, and nothing in his life had ever stood against the power of his focused will.

On his knees now, good. He realized hazily that he could see skin through rips in his clothes, and found room to tuck away the thought that he had been fond of this suit.

On his knees, on one knee. Chikara was saying something about dying, which was ridiculous, as Ishino Chikara would live forever, with him, at the center of the universe.

He was on his feet, and there was something in his hand.

He focused on it.

It was Chikara's discarded umbrella.

He stood two meters from the water demon who was tormenting his beloved, the other half of his soul.

Kenrou hefted the umbrella and assumed jogen kama-e. Two meters. The demon did not appear to be paying attention to him at all.

Very well. Could he but take the demon in the eyes, Chikara would be safe, and the world would be working properly again, and he would have no more of this talk of dying from Chikara.

The woman did not seem to be aggravated or even amused by Chikara's proclamation. She seemed... interested. Her long fingers curled and uncurled, and her dead-eyed stare seemed to take on a look of clarity.

"Alright then," she said quietly, shrugging. "Die on your feet."

One needle flew towards her, clipping her arm. Another came past her on the other side to match, making an innocuous "plip" sound as it tore through her sleeve like paper.

There was one fateful moment, then, where it seemed Kenrou's strategy would succeed: his motions fluid like the now-receding waters as he charged purposefully into the demon, his improved weapon bared and driven with a force that could easily blind once it hit its mark.

The sky had been churning so heavily, the rumbling sound that accompanied Kenrou's practiced movement was hardly different. And as Amakusa Kenrou was propelled through the pain that wracked his bruised body by the singular, absolute force of revenge for the most heinous assault on his beloved, to him it was of no consequence at all.

As his umbrella-blade came down in a wide stroke, however, the sound of angry skies took on new importance. The blow did not meet malnourished body as intended; rather, the demon seemed to... bend, as though expecting a swipe. She nearly went to one knee in the process, swaying gently away from the force of his assault, and though it had not struck her nearly so hard as Kenrou would have liked, he knew he could take the advantage of her defensive posture.

Except... she held the end of the umbrella.

Of course it was no trouble to yank it away sharply to strike her again, but as Kenrou recoiled to press his attack, she mouthed a single word at him, just as the world seemed to tip to one side against his every fervent wish, and despite his aversion to the English language, Kenrou still strongly caught the gist of the single syllable "no".

Chikara regained her footing just in time to see Kenrou dragged away from his attempts to come to her aid, by an undertow of current not yet half a meter deep, and yet bearing down on him with all the force of the deepest river.

The sudden pull whipped the umbrella cleanly out of the demon woman's fingers with a force that seemed to unexpected even to her, as she returned her attentions to Chikara, and the countless projectiles that still awaited a command to be driven into her battered body.

Were she given the opportunity to consider her situation, Chikara would undoubtedly have been a little more concerned about the precariousness of her life. Unfortunately, she had not been given much in the way of time, either to reflect on why the demon had attacked them or even to determine exactly what, in the grand scheme of physical impossibility, was actually happening.

What she did know was that Kenrou was drowning.

The water pulled him down and held him there, even though it didn't seem deep enough to have a current so swift; she tried to rush forward, heedless of the water-barbs that still waited to slice at her, to help him to his feet -- except, when she tried to move, she couldn't. The demon had taken her at her word: she would die on her feet, and the water whipped around her calves and held her fast to ensure that she would not only die there, but she would die there while watching Kenrou's vain struggles for breath.

Chikara didn't cry out when more of the barbs flew at her singly, slicing at her clothing and the skin underneath; she didn't cry out and beg for her beloved's life, because doing so would dishonor them both. She knew, sinkingly, that the pain reflected on her face just the same.

Kenrou gave up struggling after the first few panicked seconds. It did no good; there was nothing against which to direct his strength, only the inexorable press of the demon's malice from above, with the weight of water, and only the relentless pressure of the undercurrent from below. He was trapped between two masses of water and there was no way for him to push back against either one.

He composed himself in Zen, and bade himself stop thinking of how ignoble it was to have failed in his attempt to have removed the demon. Surely he had distracted her enough that Chikara had done something by now. It was impossible for the pair of them combined to have made no difference in the flow of the universe; after all, the universe existed with them at the center of it.

The air in his lungs was beginning to burn. He kept still. Chikara still lived -- he knew this for certain, because surely his heart would cease to beat if Chikara ... were no more -- and so Chikara was doing something, and he would trust in her.

He was drowning, and could not move, and could not even shift his head to the side to see Chikara, but he knew that she lived, so he would place his trust in her.

He opened his eyes, and discovered that he had to move, because conserving his strength and his air served no purpose when he had just seen a water shard pass through Chikara's body, just to the outside of her waist.

Impossibly razored shards flew past Chikara, into her, clipping at her sides and coming closer and closer to the center of her being. Her tormenter began ticking them off in twos and threes, tiny bundles of pain.

The blows were difficult to anticipate, but Chikara held her ground either by her own force of will or that of the thick currents holding fast around her legs -- through the haze of pain it was difficult to say which force was dominant.

The water demon glanced off to the side where Kenrou struggled for breath. Some barely perceptible flicker of reassuring emotion passed over her features as the two lovers desperately sought some sign from the other that they still lived.

But just as quickly, it was gone, replaced with a disgusted noise of dismissal. "I'm bored with you both now," she announced just loudly enough to be heard over the rumble of the sky. "Die."

And without any pretense or gesture, she unleashed the fury of a thousand raindrops, each honed into a deadly blade with a hair-fine edge, towards the woman, it seemed, she had arbitrarily chosen to dispatch.

Chikara knew, though the haze of pain, that the demon was inexorably taking her life. What she had not realized until she saw the onrushing forest of needly projectiles was that she wasn't afraid. It wasn't even the Zen calmness of accepting the end of this present cycle of her existence -- she was just completely and utterly unafraid.

Instead, she was angry.

She wasn't even displeased that her last thoughts in this life were anger, because it wasn't a result of frustration or even a loss of her temper: it was pure unadulterated rage. Who was this creature to have stolen their privacy, their time, and their lives? What right had she -- it -- to have done these things to her, to Ishino Chikara, who had done nothing to provoke it? No right. No right at all.

If she were any other woman she might have screamed out her rage: instead, she merely stared, wide-eyed and unblinking, unwilling to meet the end of her life any other way -- and had not noticed the blue haze that slowly surrounded her, gradually growing in brightness. "No," she said lowly, just once.

Then, a thousand needles that had once been raindrops stabbed into her -- and fell pattering to the ground when they struck not flesh, but an impossibly bright shape of golden light. The light pulsed with its own heartbeat, so bright that looking at it burned and left a hazy white afterimage with every movement. When the shape shattered into fragments of light, the water that had held her splashed away with it, leaving a strange, momentarily dry place on the pavement.

"No," repeated the soldier in gleaming yellow and bright, bright gold who had taken a schoolteacher's place.

She no longer bled from her myriad wounds both large and small; it was if these scratches had never been. Dagger-shaped blades in a metal kilt chimed like small, angry bells as she posed there with the same stubborn confidence that she had used when she dragged herself up from her knees earlier.

Smiling thinly with smoldering eyes, she was heedless of the water rushing back from her explosion to flow over her polished metal boots. "Be wary, little demon," she laughed without humor. "I am too much for you."

The water in which he was held functioned as a lens through which he could see his beloved dying.

Except that she didn't die.

She ... changed.

Kenrou was so surprised that he forgot he was drowning.

He stared at the golden, glowing soldier through the water that was crushing and suffocating him, and abruptly felt the pressure release. The water around him crashed to the ground, taking him with it; he fell to his hands and knees on the pavement, and could concentrate not even on Chikara as he gasped in his first breath in far too long.

Kenrou knelt there, drenched and bruised in body and pride, and watched, speechless, as his beloved stood in glory to challenge the demon.

The water demon, who until now had seemed unflappable, at last seemed moved, and with it, the spell of her otherwordliness seemed broken.

She took a step back, shielding her eyes from the residual glare of the sudden metamorphosis. "....well fokol," she muttered softly. Whatever concentration it had taken to keep the floodwaters at her beck and call, it seemed to be broken, as now all of her was devoted to this, a most unexpected turn of events.

She took another step back, turning slightly, as though to leave. "I think I've seen what I need to, right." There was no fear in her voice, though she seemed... aggravated, as though she were at a loss what to do next. Her eyes swept sharply over the golden kilt, the perfect poise of the woman before her, now wholly restored.

"See you again, I suppose," she said, addressing Chikara -- now Sailor Galaxia -- though she lowered her eyes to the just-barely-spared Amakusa Kenrou in what was almost an invasive leer.

A threat.

That being said, she turned to collect her camera bag, the rain now pouring from overhead as it should, coursing down onto pavement where it swept away into the storm drains, blissfully obedient to nature once more.

Galaxia dispassionately watched the demon try to take her leave, and might have considered letting her wisp off whence she came until she saw the look Kenrou was given while still trying not to splutter for breath. She recognized the threat for what it was, and there was a flash of Chikara in the soldier's angry eyes. "Oh, I don't think so," she said in a tone that could've been taken as dry amusement.

This creature had humiliated them in almost every way it had been possible to do so, and now, in her attempt to flee, was threatening to do so again. This simply could not be allowed to continue. Galaxia brought her palms flat together at chest-height and then drew them slowly apart, leaving a trail of shimmering blueness behind that solidified, when she dropped her arms to her sides, into a western sword that settled into her right hand of its own accord. "I will not let you run from me."

She smiled as she slipped into an offensive posture, the gleaming sword held diagonally upright in preparation for an offensive strike. A surprising realization came to her, and her smile widened into predatory and confident: she was enjoying herself.

Kenrou stared at the golden soldier glowing with her own light, and then back at the demon, who had seemed to shrink in malice and looming presence even as Chikara had seemed to grow in power and majesty.

When the shining sword appeared in his beloved's hands, he smiled despite himself and the bone-deep aches that hovered just outside of Zen. The day after he'd met her he had called her ken'you, a hero of the sword. Of course he had been right.

He didn't care much for kneeling when not in meditation or in kata; he rose to his feet, and poured his concentration into not trembling or sinking back down to the ground. Chikara not only stood on her own but glowed with radiant light, a bright sword in her hand; although he didn't think he'd be able to manage anything like her splendor now, he felt that it would be unworthy of them both if he failed at least to stand.

There appeared to be nothing he could do at the moment, but at the least he might support Chikara by his presence. He watched, devoting equal halves of his attention to not falling over and to watching Chikara, secure in the knowledge that -- whatever the reason for this strange and wonderful apotheosis -- she would prevail.

The woman-shaped demon tilted her head as though she were slowly grasping what she had heard, eyes narrowed to thoughtful slits. "You won't... let me?" Her arms hung slack at her sides, while she regarded the resplendent warrior in gold as though she were a curious clockwork toy. "Hm. Come on and do it, then."

And, in a move that was either grossly overconfident, or simply totally ignorant, she turned her back on Chikara's new form, and began to walk away.

Galaxia followed warily, her sword still held upright -- though a little awkwardly; the grip felt natural enough, but the shape was so vastly different from everything she was used to. "What are you? Answer me!" Her tone had the easy imperiousness of one used to answers to her commands; the fact that the creature had dishonored her so seriously by turning her back still rankled. "You are not a demon. Demons have honor, in their own way." They also, she considered, probably did not speak English.

The woman slowed, and finally paused, rocking to and fro on her heels, though she never could be bothered to turn back and face Galaxia. "Demon... .... hunh. I never said I was," she murmured, almost conversationally. "I thought only crusty old Boers and tribesmen were so superstitious..." she glanced down at her well-worn shoes. "I have to go now, so uh... bye."

With that she continued her trek away from the both of them, leaning down to swoop up the remainder of her gear with one long, emaciated arm.

Kenrou still could not follow what the gaunt woman with mottled elflocks said; he could pick out snips of English here and there, although her accent remained as atrocious as it had been in Japanese, and hence even those few words of spoken English that were intelligible to Kenrou were barely so.

He was beginning to conclude, reluctantly, that it wasn't a demon after all, which was puzzling. -- More than puzzling, it was demeaning. Being soundly pummeled by a demon was nearly acceptable; demons operated by their own (strange) rules.

Being so thoroughly struck by a human outlander who felt free to ignore natural laws .... was not acceptable.

And a human gaijin was certainly not worth the time of the small, radiant god wearing the face of his beloved, either.

Kenrou forced himself to stop, and carefully think about this. He, the August Kenrou, had not fared well in either of his two previous tilts against the hollow-cheeked, hollow-eyed woman. This was painfully clear from the mere fact that she was the first person in all his days to cause him actual physical damage of any degree whatsoever. Going to confront her again would smack of foolhardiness.

He set his jaw, and walked forward, willing himself not to tremble from exhaustion, strain, or fear. Oddly enough, he felt none, of any of the three, although he could sense at least the first two hovering somewhere outside his Zen.

There was nothing to fear when saving face for another, and this pitiful, pitiable, scrawny child was truly not worth his beloved's time.

Whether the sound of his footfalls or some other, more ethereal sense alerted her to his approach, the woman, still only slightly raindrop-mottled for her trouble, sighed and leaned against the nearest streetlight, practically swayed into it like an ailing plant.

"Do whatever you want," she said, though it was only Chikara who would understand her. "If you're trying to be brave, or tell yourself who won or who lost, I don't care. But I only came to find out..." she glanced, briefly, at the golden-clad woman who had demanded she declare herself. "...about people like her."

For a moment, she noted Kenrou's approach, but at last the sight of Galaxia in her battle-ready glory seemed to evoke some sentiment from her, or at least some thought that brought focus to her dead grey eyes. Her gaze traveled down the length of the blade. "Very odd indeed," she murmured, more to herself than either of her two reluctant companions.

She reached into the small satchel over her shoulder, which still lay open and mysteriously dry, retrieving some camera from her collection. "Come to think of it, how about one for goodbye," she said in her unconcerned drawl, her long fingers casually flipping some switch as she prepared to gather one last memento of the diminutive history teacher's metamorphosis.

Kenrou stared at the woman in complete incredulity, and a certain amount of exasperated admiration.

Even now, after everything else had happened, she still sought to capture their images on film.

This was single-mindedness somewhat above and beyond the most dedicated of Japanese enthusiasts.

Kenrou stepped in front of the camera's lens, and wordlessly blocked her shot of the radiant Galaxia. She would not steal this image of his transfigured beloved.

The flash went off just as he stepped into her path, obscuring the golden woman from the camera's dispassionate theft of her likeness.

The would-be demon dropped the device from her line of sight swiftly, but smoothly, her face still a smooth, unfettered mask of apathy. She did not berate him, nor did she even frown. She gently set the camera down a few handspans from her, on the sidewalk.

If the sky seemed to blacken at that precise moment, Kenrou noted, surely it was that his artistic sensibility was putting a dramatic flair into the proceedings where only coincidence existed. In the next moment, however, a shadow passed overhead that was too thick to ignore, though he scarcely had time to contemplate the matter.

A flicker passing between the densely swirling clouds provided no more than a eyeblink of warning, before a white-hot streak materialized just inches from Kenrou, narrowly missing what would have no doubt been a fatal contact of deadly energy and unprotected flesh.

However, there was the troublesome fact that Kenrou was still holding his umbrella at the ready.

The razor-sharp line of electricity was drawn to the metal of his improvised weapon, as was its nature, and coursed through him with enough force to drive him back several feet, flung by a most unceremonious, invisible hand.

Then, and only then, did the pale woman who had the storm at her beck and call fold her arms neatly over her abdomen, the very barest hint of a pleased expression touching her features.

Kenrou landed flat on his back, stunned. Remotely he thought that this was so far worse than even the day hahaue had informed him that his failures of duty and obligation shamed the entire empire.

And then it got worse, as he discovered that his left hand, which still gripped the umbrella's handle (what remained of it), was utterly numb.

He could smell something burning, a sickly sweet odor. He wrinkled his nose, and sat up. A headache was beginning to squeeze his skull in a vise, and he wasn't quite sure if his entire left sleeve was supposed to be shredded like that.

As the golden glow of Galaxia got even more brilliant, he realized that the odor of burning flesh was coming from him.

He made up his mind that, yes, it was officially the worst day of his life when the feeling screamed back into his left hand, as if he had pressed it to the surface of a furnace and held it.

He was very proud of himself for not screaming. He had saved face for Chikara, or at least for the golden lady who wore Chikara's face, and surely this was worth the only pain he had ever suffered in his life, administered at the hands of a scrawny gaijin sorceress.

When Kenrou flew backward, Galaxia was faced with the agony of a miserable choice: crush her opponent into char upon the pavement, or run to him to ensure he was whole and unbroken. The former allowed her to inform her enemy in no uncertain terms that no one crossed Galaxia and lived; the latter was the more important task, but also would leave her open to further attack.

In the end, she decided that she had to accomplish both, as near as she was able. The sorceress had proven able to attack from a distance with her command of the sky; Galaxia thought that her best bet was to perhaps increase that distance. She held out her sword, the blade flat before her, and drew the point in a horizontal semicircle. "Wave Arc!" she called, and at her words golden light flew forth from the blade and pushed outward, the heat of it steaming when drops of the still-falling rain hit it.

With the sword's light-beam giving her the time, she hurried through the standing water to Kenrou's side and ensured that he still lived; she drew him as carefully and gently out of the water as she could, her white-gloved hand on his shoulder. She found herself wanting to say something, anything, and couldn't find the words; she contented herself with standing guard over him in her kneeling crouch, sword still angled ready.

The golden light that flew from Galaxia's blade cut a swath through the moisture hanging in the air with its intense heat, and whipped across its intended mark. The not-demon-woman actually faltered, this time, stumbling back a few steps, long and emaciated hand clutching her shoulder.

For a long moment neither party moved -- Galaxia standing at the ready, blocking the direct path of any further lightning strikes to Kenrou with her body and her poised sword, the pale gaijin woman slouched slightly over, face obscured by limp hair, hand covering her shoulder.

Finally, the woman straightened, removing her hand and inspecting the damage the way one would to a dinged car or a tree that shed a branch. There was a small, slightly smoking rent in her shirt which she probed idly with thin fingers, and after an agonizing lull, she looked back up, remembering, finally, that Galaxia and Kenrou were there.

"Like I said I got what I came to see," she muttered softly, picking up conversation where it lay before they had come to blows, unsurprisingly, without batting an eyelash.

She looked long and hard at Galaxia, even over her shoulder as she turned again to leave, a final invasive stare through her body with those dead eyes, before she vanished into the downpour.

Kenrou was pouring all of himself into Zen, holding it against anything else that requested his attention -- be it his bruises, burns, or headache. He stared fixedly at his still-clenched, crisp-skinned left hand, and only peripherally registered that the demon, or sorceress, or demented gaijin, had conceded the field to his transfigured beloved. Again he thought, staring at the various hurts incurred in his two bouts against the strange woman, that this was the first day in all his life that the world had behaved improperly, refusing to turn as he willed it to.

Perhaps, he considered, it had all been for the sake of Chikara and her transfiguration? He could bear that. Far better to think of that than that this demon, or sorceress, or demented gaijin, had picked them at random to torment.

Gradually he became aware that the rain was slowing. As he looked up, the rain came to a halt altogether.

Chikara stood by him, looking down with intense, fierce concern. Her clothes were torn and drenched, as were his own, but she was safe, and whole, and there.

The golden light was still fading around Chikara as she knelt in what remained of the standing water, the afterimage burned into the air spiraling away with the last drops of rain. "Can you -- can I help you stand?" she murmured, her expression twisted in pained concern. She hadn't registered exactly when she'd diminished to herself; one moment, the sword was there in her hand, and then, when the sorceress had gone and the rains stopped, it was gone and she was herself again, battered and bruised but none too much the worse for wear.

Kenrou reflexively reached up with his left hand, then reconsidered, and adjusted himself to offer his right hand for her to pull him up.

As his beloved braced herself and helped him to stand -- and then refused to relinquish his arm, obviously intending to support him or die in the attempt -- he glanced up and noticed that the sun was beginning to peer out from behind a rapidly-disappearing blanket of clouds.

"Amaterasu emerges," he murmured, still trying to form coherent thoughts through his grinding headache and the distinct suspicion that he did not have all of the facts about what had just happened. The sun was coming out again, after more than two weeks, and he and Chikara still lived. Surely this was enough for the moment; anything else could wait.

... The sun was coming out. Kenrou could not quite shake the sudden idea that the gaijin sorceress had actually blanketed all of Japan with rain and only her retreat from the field of battle had permitted Amaterasu's return.

Kenrou sighed, and banished the thought, and leaned on Chikara.

"I think," he murmured, "that, the field being ours, we might perhaps retire with full honor and face being saved for all parties."

Chikara nodded without speaking, and they walked together, slowly and soggily, back to her building, as the sun shone down on them.

Near-dusk sunlight streamed through the parting clouds timidly, creating picturesque rays that shifted and gently rolled past the giant plate glass windows that lined the floor of Jade Dragon Enterprises' executive offices.

Picturesque, and cheap, of course. A thousand pictues on a thousand idiotic cards or insipid films. "Heaven". Trijntje closed her eyes and exhaled a long-held sigh, turning a corner and drifting slowly past a handful of employees, ignoring their prolonged looks at her back as she, gangly and still damp, singed and slightly bloody, shuffled through a sea of crisp, pressed suits. She hit the elevator button, slid into the chrome doors the moment they began to open, and rode up to the topmost floor.

The Heaven you wouldn't find on a vapid greeting card.

Li-Nian was poised as primly as ever at her desk in the lavish lobby area of the suite, fingers dancing over the keys of a sleek, silent computer. She looked up as she heard soggy feet approaching on the expensive carpet, locking eyes with the bleached pale girl at first with surprise, then with relief, then with bubbling gratitude. Trin watched each emotion play out in turn, reflecting absolutely nothing back. She gently deposited a stack of glossy photographs on the very edge of Li-Nian's desk without a word.

"Oh, you're back!" Li-Nian fairly glowed with pleased surprise, and all but wiggled in her chair. "I've missed you so much!" She carefully flipped through the pictures, stopping every now and then to beam her lovely, pleasant smile. "Oh, these are terribly interesting. Daddy will love them." She stopped on one, the bedraggled couple standing in front of the destroyed temple, and gazed at it intently. "Are they important? You have lots of pictures of them."

She went on that way for what might as well have dragged on for hours, chattering inane questions about each individual shot as she went through the stack. The girl might as well have been a particularly fine-plumaged bird singing gleefully on a branch for all the sense her words made -- or mattered.

"So, what happened?" Li-Nian leaned forward over her desk, propped up on her elbows and smiling conspiratorially like a girl about to hear a secret at some insipid slumber party. "The rains were you, weren't they? Daddy was so proud, I'm sure you did a wonderful job." She giggled, still sounding terribly pleased. "Do you need anything before you see him? Or do you just want me to take them in?" She beamed so brightly at the idea of being able to assist with something useful that it was almost tempting to deny her utterly.

Trin considered withdrawing her offer of the prized documents, or seemed to, in that she slowly reached for the photograph of the drowned-looking lovers underneath Li-Nian's manicured fingers. Her hand fell slack to her side.

"I... don't.." she began, in her usual mumbling drawl.

"Yes?" Li-Nian urged with a look saturated in compassion and eagerness.

"Type," she said shortly. "I can't... would you, uh--" Fumblingly she pulled some of the arranged photos back towards her, her one solid concern in a swirling cloud of apathy. It was likely the first time Li-Nian had ever seen her focused enough to be concerned over a material thing -- to show even a flicker of fear that it might fall out of her grasp.

Li-Nian glowed with pleasure and poised her hands over the keyboard she'd pulled out of a sunken drawer. "I would love to type up your report for you! Do you have one written, or would you just rather dictate?" She smiled up over the desk, the perfect picture of an attentive secretary, and it was quite likely that she would write the thing in blood pricked from her fingers if she were asked.

Trin puzzled for a moment, and the look of actual devotion to one of her fleeting thoughts cast her features into a look quite foreign, at least to Li-Nian, and to the rest of the JDE employees. Trin's impassive face had become such a permanent fixture on her, that for her to frown over something long enough to create deep lines on her brow transformed her into another person entirely.

"...it, uh..." she began slowly, fishing into one damp pocket. "I thought I had... notes, but."

She sighed, letting her head tip down until she was inspecting what remained of her ratty shoes. Damp locks of parchment-colored hair fell toward and dripped, lightly, onto the designer carpet.

She took a deep breath, and anchored herself in the exquisite office of Yu-Huang's assistant.

"I started with the flood to draw out the heroes, or what it is you want to call them. Several people tried to help one another, but only a few were strong, like what He is looking for." She sat, with an unceremonious squish of denim on antique wood, on the edge of Li-Nian's desk.

"Only a few of them were special."

She went on, in her calm, vaguely Dutch-sounding English drawl, unfurling the story that surrounded the pictures in a coherency that it took all of her will to maintain. Everything about the battle, the lovers, and the woman who appeared with a sword, and with strange powers -- a minion, it seemed, of the Chosen. Some small piece of the Power Yu-Huang had described.

Everything, that is, except for the name. Ishino Chikara. If someone were to find her, squeeze her until she revealed the location of the Chosen... well, Trijntje concluded in a moment of wonderful clarity, if that time came, then the someone would be her.

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Sailor Moon Flash! : Monsoon Season

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