Once more she was placed upon a pedestal, resting against bunched up cloth that held her still. At her lord's request, she formed an eye and turned it upon him.
"You have learned to reshape yourself, to a degree. Indeed, you learned this faster than I expected," he told her and she felt a warmth grow within her at the praise, even as she tried to recover her startled wits. He actually complimented her? Her father had been quick with the insults, but he had never been free with support or congratulations. "Last night you learned to locate and manipulate the different elements that compose you. Today, we will take that further." Beside her on the pedestal he placed a ring, wrought of gold and silver braided, with a diamond set in a claw of gold. "Examine this however you wish. Take its form." He sat back on a chair in one of the alcoves to watch her.
She turned her eye upon it first and tried to match it, not changing her whole self, but merely extruding an extension of silver and gold and attempting to wind them about each other.
She winced as she compared the two. Her attempt looked scarcely like a ring at all. She absorbed it and tried again. Her second try was hardly better. She felt a shiver of irritation go through her as her mind played back insults as if Genma were there berating her inept efforts. She realized then that she had not heard anything from her lord. Why was he not saying anything? Had he just given up on her? She turned a worried eye in his direction but he was merely sitting and watching. Grumbling at Genma to get out of her mind, she redoubled her efforts. She would show him that she could do this. "After all," she smirked to herself, "I am the best."
"Sight is not enough," she mused, "or enough for me, anyhow. I ain't no artist." That thought gave her the key though. She was skilled with her body and hands, perhaps if she felt it, instead, she might do better. He had, after all, said to examine in it whatever way she wanted.
Flowing outward, she engulfed the ring in her most sensitive substance, which her eye could finally see and identify as what he had called quicksilver, highly reflective, like a funhouse mirror as its shifting form twisted and warped her reflection.
Her confidence grew as the quicksilver seemed to pour information into her about the ring and it was almost without effort that she grew fine strands of silver and gold, weaving them into a perfect ring, grasping a translucent jade stone. The last bit proved the hardest, for no matter how she tried, she could not convince the jade, which she had chosen as the closest she had to a clear stone, to take on the shape of the diamond. It simply did not want to form the same angles.
Finally she gave up on the jade, tried onyx briefly, then turned to mithril. The mithril formed the diamond's shape readily, for though it did not naturally form those flat planes and precise angles, neither did it resist being formed into them.
Pleased, she lifted the ring up to show her lord. He stood and strode to her. "Very good, Ranko. Now draw all of your substance within the ring, hidden within the gold and silver."
She blinked in acquiescence before unforming her eye. The strands of gold and silver grew in length and thickness as she poured herself within them, stretching them into a thin veneer over her twisted surface. Soon she had the appearance of the ring once more, but sized to fit a giant.
"Very good. Now, I am going to introduce you to another of your normal abilities. It is a very common attribute of powerful magical items, that they resize themselves to fit their bearers. It is a little more complex for you, in that the magic will consider both your form, your wielder, and your wielder's intent when sizing you. Since you bear the form of a ring at the moment, when I take you in my hand, you will resize so that you might fit upon my finger. I want you to concentrate on how this feels. It is possible that you might be able to control this yourself."
With that said, she felt the warmth of his hands upon her once more. Almost instantly vertigo swept her and she fought to focus as the touch of his fingers seemed to swell tremendously. Confusing as the sudden change was, her will forced the confusion away and even as the size change slowed, she caught the mechanism for the change and forcibly halted it. It felt like a pendulum, or a weight between springs, trying to get to rest. She pushed against it. She felt the touch of his fingers shrinking more than she sensed her own increase in size, but she also felt the increasing pressure of the springy resistance. The touch of his fingers left her and she felt the rap as she landed once more on the pedestal. The weight of the spring vanished. She was able to move it easily now, though she could not sense the change in size except in the changing texture of the pedestal as her surfaces moved across it.
"But," she protested uncertainly, "when I am a sphere I am much smaller than the human form you gave me. I don't remember feeling this change then."
"Ah," he said, "That is a matter of density. In that form--which is not human, incidentally, but drow, though you need not concern yourself with the distinction just yet--you have a great deal of empty space within you. For example, your bones are riddled with holes in the marrow, your lungs are empty space, your stomach and digestive system are empty. More to the point, your capillary system, the veins and arteries that run throughout your body to carry blood are filled with but empty space, for you are bloodless.
"You are mostly empty space in that form. Furthermore, you shrunk before you regained consciousness, when I lifted you as a sphere to bring you down here. I think in your natural state, given the volume of the materials that went into your creation, your drow form would be a bit of a giantess. Actually, you are even now larger in that form than a normal woman by three-quarters of a foot or so."
Ranko thought about that. She didn't understand much of his explanation, but thinking back to when she had tried to take on the form herself, she realized that without thinking about it, she had ended up as basically a single hollow shell. She had focused on the outward form and had ended up empty. That was probably why she had moved so strangely.
"Well," he said, "now that you know how to adjust your size appropriately, take on your drow form again."
"Uh, well, I tried that last night," Ranko admitted. "It didn't work well."
"Hmm. Granted, you weren't in the best shape to notice what I was doing last night, though you caught on with the eye quickly. I'll make the change for you this time, and I'll try to go slowly so that you can follow."
She felt his hands on her again, lifting her up and placing her on the floor. Even as he did so she shrank rapidly. Leaving her on the floor, he began her transformation once more. She concentrated on the sensations of the change. As she had, he began with the overall size and outward appearance. This time he was more aware of her appearance than he had been the first time he changed her and so her skin was the smooth black of adamantite from the beginning.
She was focused inward until he completed the process and when she redirected her attention outward she was startled to find that her eyes were level with his knee. She looked down at herself, half expecting to look as she had when she had eaten the mushroom that had reduced her age, that he had deliberately made her a child. Her body was not that of a child's, however. Her proportions, though small, were those of a mature woman.
She stared at up at him for a moment then reached for that spot in her mind that had moved when she changed sizes the first time, and lifted. She stopped instantly, fighting vertigo. Her eyes were expanding and it made the world seem to rush in toward her. Forcing down her unease, she lifted again, fighting the dizziness caused by her increasing size until she was looking at his shoulder. She raised her head slightly, a challenging glint in her eye.
"That better?" she asked. She knew that men tended to prefer to look down on women and she had no intention of revealing that she was actually a man. He had offered the body and the chance to save her family and friends to her, Saotome Ranko, and she wasn't going to take a chance on his mind changing if he learned that she was really Ranma.
He nodded then turned away and strode back to his seat in the alcove. "You need to learn to take this form on your own. I suggest you start piecemeal. Focus on one limb or organ and study it until you understand it, then try to recreate it."
Ranko nodded and dropped to the floor sitting cross-legged, unconcerned about her nudity. Focusing her attention on her hand, she soon had a second hand projecting from her wrist. When it looked and felt right, she absorbed both it and her original hand, then reformed and flexed it. Nodding in satisfaction, she moved on.
Her attention returned to her lord when he stood, after she had successfully formed an entire additional right arm. "Continue this," he told her. "I will return for you later."
She nodded and watched him leave then returned her attention to her task. Her focus and concentration were not entirely due to the fact that she'd been ordered to do this. She did not want to experience trying to walk around looking like a lumpy clay doll ever again.
He had still not returned when she had compressed herself back into a sphere and successfully regained her form, complete in almost every detail. Remembering a video game she had once seen, she stood and formed two additional arms, increasing the height of her torso to accomodate them and decreasing her overall height and size, and began trying to move them.
She found that she could switch the mental connection controlling each arm from one to another, but try as she might, she could still control only two arms at a time. Moving the upper arm on the right and the lower on the left, or vice versa, was also quite a challenge. She could manage it but it felt strange and it threw off her reflexes.
Finally she gave up on that, retracting the extra arms. Closing her eyes, she tried creating an eye in her palms, similar to a picture she had seen in a manga once. It worked, somewhat to her surprise, but she found that she could only reasonably look through one of her palms at a time. Looking through both gave her a terrible headache, though it faded quickly when she returned to looking through a single eye.
Removing the extra eyes, she glanced toward the door her lord had left through. "Still not back yet," she muttered. "What else can I do?" The question triggered a memory of the night before, when she had experienced how sensitive her quicksilver was. Feeling into her eyes, she realized that he had used jade to form the back of the eye and she had followed suit when creating her own.
Closing her eyes against the vertigo she had felt so often, she slipped quicksilver in place of the jade and opened her eyes. She staggered back in shock at the initial brightness but it quickly became tolerable. Though the room was basically poorly lit, with most of the illumination coming from the soft colored glows of the statues above the alcoves around the walls, it now seemed to be lit by bright sunlight.
"Definitely more sensitive," she murmured. A sudden noise caught her attention and she spun to see her lord striding into the room. He paused and stared for a moment at her eyes then closed the door behind himself and walked to her.
Taking her face in his hands, he tilted her head from side to side, staring into her eyes. She felt a momentary surge of anger as a blush warmed her cheeks. "I haven't got blood, why the hell am I blushing," she thought furiously.
"What is it like?" he asked, still looking into her eyes. His obliviousness to her discomfiture calmed her and she replied.
"It's brighter... and I can see a bunch of glows around you."
"Oh?"
She nodded and began pointing to different items he was wearing and telling him how they glowed. "You appear to be seeing magical auras, both of wizardly and priestly magic," he informed her.
"How are you coming with your shifting?"
"I went all the way to a ball and back," she told him. He held her back at arm's length and then turned her about, examining her both with his eyes and his mind. He stopped several times to point out an error she had made but throughout he was nodding and murmuring to himself and he seemed pleased with her work.
"All right, that is enough for today," he said and placed his hand on her shoulder.
She guessed his intention and put her hand on his. "Let me?" she asked.
"You know how now?"
She nodded. "You want to go back to your chamber, right? Through the shadows? I've done it once already, last night."
He nodded and she reached for the black fabric, grasping its power and wrapping them both in shadow. When the shadows receded, they were standing by his bed.
Turning to look at her, he inclined his head for a moment then seemed to come to a decision. "You look close enough and you've got the size right now. You can take the form yourself, and flee through the shadows if necessary. You have progressed sufficiently, I deem, that tonight you can sleep in the adjoining servant's quarters. I've had clothing prepared therein." He noted her grimace of distaste and guessed at its cause. "The clothing is appropriate for a warrior, I don't think you will find cause to object to it."
She relaxed, reminding herself that he had shown no surprise that she, a small female, was a warrior. She remembered his shows of deference the day before. If this was, as she had feared, some sort of Amazon society, then their clothing might be acceptable. On the other hand, if he offered her a Chinese cheongsam like Shampoo had worn, she would scream. Then again, maybe not. She was supposed to be a woman now, after all. She could not refuse female clothing if it might risk losing her chance. That was her reason to exist now and she dared not lose it.
She followed him through his chambers into an adjoining set of chambers, rather smaller but still nicely appointed. She stared for a long moment at the bed, realizing that she had not mentioned her inability to sleep. He had moved past her and was opening a large closet.
"I found out last night... I can't sleep. I tried all night to fall asleep. It didn't work."
He turned to face her, a tunic in his hands. "What? I wasn't aware of that side-effect. Curious. Do you feel tired? Irritable? You've experienced long stretches without sleep before I'm sure; do you feel now like you did then? Like you need sleep?"
She thought for a moment then shook her head. "No, nothing like that. Just... kinda frustratin', I guess. I used to really like to sleep. It made me think, last night..." She paused, uncertain as to whether she truly wanted to know the answer to this question or not. "Can I still eat?" she asked in a rush.
He set the tunic down on a table and sat on the bed, his eyes steady on her. "I'm not sure, actually. I'm sure you can masticate, that is. Chew, I mean. You've a full digestive system, physically, but it hasn't any of the liquids that are normally involved in digestion. You should be able to taste, still, and foods should travel through normally, but I don't know if you'll actually take any of it in. More to the point, anything that you ingest that isn't properly absorbed would be in the way when you tried to shift."
He frowned thoughtfully. "Though, you wouldn't need to wait for it to pass all the way through to get rid of it, either. And I don't know how that would relate to your potential appetite for magic items, either. Are you feeling hungry?"
Ranko looked down and placed her hand on her tummy, stroking its surface as she considered how unusual it felt to have not eaten for several days and yet feel no hunger. She raised her quicksilver eyes to meet his, which for the first time she noticed were a startling crimson, and shook her head. "No, I don't feel any hunger."
"Good. Well, we'll see about letting you eat something tomorrow. For now, you can spend the night getting familiar with your chambers and your clothing. Whether you need sleep or no, I must have my rest. An exhausted wizard is not safe to be around. If anyone comes, make sure you aren't seen."
After waiting for her nod, he left her there. As he had suggested, she first explored her quarters. The bed was quite soft and made her feel almost sad that she could not sleep. It looked quite comfortable, a definite step up from her usual futon. There was a mirror above one of the dressers that rather forcibly reminded her of her nudity. She stared at herself for some time. She had been cute. Now she was beautiful, with a face that equalled any of her fiancees.
In the dresser she found women's undergarments. "At least I won't need these," she smirked to herself. It was not likely her breasts were liable to sag. The closet contained a variety of clothing and as her lord had implied, much of it was well-suited to fighting.
She pulled out a few pieces and went to sit on the bed. Her mind wandered to Shampoo and Ryouga. They had had to deal with suddenly getting engulfed in their clothes when cold water found them unexpectedly, or having to scramble to find clothing after obtaining hot water. Now it seemed she would have to do the same.
She stared at the clothing for a long while, feeling as if there were something she ought to be thinking of or realizing, tickling the back of her mind. Shaking her head when she could not think of it, she tried on the clothing. It fit well enough, she supposed, not that she was any expert.
She was back in the closet rummaging through other clothing when the idea that had been percolating in the back of her mind finally came to the fore and she remembered the fabric that was part of her substance. She hurried back to the bed and shrugged out of the clothes then stared at them for a long while. Finally she picked them up again. From her hands a flood of quicksilver poured forward as she took a sudden drop in height.
Nudging her internal weight upward, increasing her size to make up the mass of the quicksilver she had stolen from her current form, she duplicated the form of the clothes with the black fabric. Keeping it attached where it would normally rest on her skin, at the shoulders, around the hips, and so forth, she left the remainder free to move just as normal clothing did. Retracting the quicksilver she balanced the weight to keep her normal height, trying to move the weight as she reabsorbed the quicksilver. "I'm gonna be able to do that without changing size at all, one of these days," she promised herself.
Striding over to the mirror, she admired herself in it for a while. The only problem she could see, other than the basic fact that her clothing would not protect her from feeling the cold or someone's touch, was that it was so uniform in appearance. "I look like a ninja," she said, smirking at herself. The feel of the cloth sliding against her skin was not quite what she half-expected. More like rubbing her thumb against her fingers, she decided. It was strange, to sense both the cloth rubbing her skin and her skin rubbing the cloth.
Having nothing better to do with her night, she sat by the table and began working with her elements, weaving first one and then another into tiny fibres, thicker strands, and finally woven material. The jade and onyx stubbornly refused to behave, of course, and she could not form any significant amount of fabric from the gold or silver, though they worked well as highlights. She was able to get a number of shades between black and silver by using strands of both adamantite and mithril in varying quantities. There was a significant quantity of a metallic red substance but it behaved strangely and resisted her manipulations.
"He mentioned absorbing stuff, magic and things. I wonder if I can get some other colors later?" It occurred to her that if the chance arose, she should obtain something that would match the blue of her eyes. If she could get that red material to behave properly, it would work for her hair. Not that even those changes would really make her new form look much like her old one had.
Bored, Ranko poked about her room a bit more and then looked at the door to her lord's chambers. "I wonder if...," she thought about what she'd done the night before, trying to ease her lord's sleep. "Nah, that's probably why he gave me my own room so quick. Shoulda' known I wouldn't be any good at stuff like that."
"What else," she mused. "Oh, wait, he told me to memorize that knife from before. I should practice it."
She spent much of the night forming different weapons and practicing with them in the limited space she had available, doing her best to remain quiet. One of the first things that occurred to her, as she held the first dagger in her hand, was that this solved one of the problems her art had with weapons; their ability to be separated from their wielder.
Of course, it was a bit strange working with weapons that were a part of herself. It was actually faster, she found, to withdraw the sword and reform it in her other hand than to physically pass it. She couldn't simply toss it, of course.
Not to mention the slight additional attention required to handle reforming the hilt as it came into and out of contact with her hand was rather distracting. Working on the speed of the changeover led her to trying to improve the speed of her shifting in general.
She was still practicing absorbing and reforming her sword, dagger, an eye in her palm, and other weapons, while smoothly moving her mental pendulum about to retain her size, when her lord entered her chambers the next morning.
She stopped when he entered but returned to what she was doing when he asked her to. He watched her for several minutes before commenting.
"You are learning very quickly," he commented.
Ranko smirked. "I'm the best," she said, raising an eyebrow, her confidence beginning to return as the idea that she would be able to change what had happened slowly sank in, "I've always picked up techniques quick." She rotated in place. "Like the clothes?"
He nodded but stepped forward to look more closely. "Not familiar," he muttered then smiled. "Well done indeed. I suppose I needn't worry about maintaining a wardrobe for you then?"
She grumbled inwardly at his having realized what she had done so quickly but nodded happily nonetheless. It felt good to have someone willing to acknowledge her achievements, instead of constantly deriding them.
At his request, she took them both to the training hall. There, she demonstrated what she had learned the night before. He commented favorably on her speed, and the ingenuity she had shown in crafting metal fabrics to relieve the steadfastly black fabric that was the only one she naturally possessed. She demonstrated some weapons kata, with which he seemed suitably impressed.
Finished with the short review, he brought her a dagger. "This is a non-magical dagger." He handed it to her. "Try to absorb it, try to make it part of you."
Nodding, she concentrated on it as it lay on her palm. Nothing happened and nothing continued to happen until she finally tried enveloping it in quicksilver. It was then absorbed in only a few moments. He seemed pleased, but she could still feel it within her. Though it was responding to her will, reshaping and taking its place within her, it still felt separate, she could still tell exactly where it began and ended.
"I can still feel it," she said, frowning. "I can reshape it, but it doesn't really feel... I don't know how to say it." Her frown deepened, her mouth turning down in an unconscious pout as she sought for words.
He sighed. "I wondered if that might happen. Try to let go of it." He gestured at the pedestal on which she'd spent so much time. Stepping over to it, she formed the material into a sphere and pushed it along until it passed out of her hand. To her surprise, it readily dropped away, separating completely. It lay there as she stared at, a small ball of steel, gold, and leather.
"Take it back up and try to reform it into a dagger."
Nodding, she sucked in a breath and bit her lip as she put her hand on the sphere and drew it back in. Sorting out the materials, she straightened the steel back into a blade and gave it as sharp of an edge as she could manage, then turned her attention to the hilt. Finally a well-formed dagger, looking nearly, if not quite, identical to the one she had been given, dropped out of her palm and onto the pedestal, where she glared at it in frustration. Why had it not worked properly?
"Don't look so disappointed," he advised her, touching her shoulder. "You were able to reshape it even without being able to truly absorb it. More to the point, you were able to reshape it and then release it, which is a better thing than you might realize. You could make a fair living just using that ability to repair weapons or jewelry, or even make original works."
She shook her head in protest. She was a martial artist not a jeweler! It might have potential though. "Ah... well, I guess I could keep some metal around to make throwing knives with."
"Right." Beside the dagger he now placed a clear gemstone. "Now try to absorb this."
Ranko could see that he expected something different from this attempt, so she did not begin with the quicksilver. Instead she started with the adamantite, as she had the first time. She picked up the stone and immediately it vanished into a pool of adamantite on her palm, showing none of the resistance the dagger had. Feeling the substance and testing its properties, she looked up in surprise. "This is the same thing that was on that ring yesterday. The jade and onyx wouldn't match its angles, but this seems to prefer those angles."
"It's a diamond."
"Oh." Ranko pushed at it for a moment then glanced up, a startlement widening her eyes. "It's not staying separate," she said. "It feels like it's really part of me now!"
A slow smile swept across her lord's face. His eyes glittered and she noticed that he was rubbing his hands together. "I was right! The difference, Ranko, is that the diamond you just absorbed has a spell on it. You can absorb magical items completely, as I had hoped!"
She looked at her hand, allowing the diamond to float to the surface, the center of her palm taking on a clear, crystalline quality. "What kinda spell?"
"Oh, a very simple one. It is merely a light spell, that allows the gem to act as a light source. See if you can activate it. Ordinarily it would require a command word, but it is part of you now." She noticed that he seemed curiously intent and eager and wondered about it briefly. Feeling through the stone, she found the same tingle that she had felt in the gold and several of her other elements, including the black fabric. Trying the same technique she had used on the fabric had no effect.
Sighing, she felt it more gently, looking for anything that might affect it. Finally she found it, a tight little bundle of energy which, as she looked more closely at it, seemed to have a very definite pattern to it. Examining it she seemed to quite suddenly know how to trigger it and she did so.
Light spilled forth from her hand, a glow that lit the room as well as a torch might have, deepening the shadows. She closed her hand, bemused as she stared at the light escaping through her fingers.
She glanced at her lord. Her hand fell to her side and her jaw dropped. He was dancing, capering about like a madman, chortling! "Uhm... what are you doing?"
He finally stopped and staggered over to the chair in the alcove, collapsing into it, sucking in ragged gulps of air. "Sorry, sorry, just couldn't help it. You can't imagine what a marvelous feeling it gave me to watch you do that. You absorbed a magic item and without knowing anything more about than that it was magic and cast light, you successfully triggered its effect! You have no idea, I'm sure, what an achievement that is."
"Uhm... right... how do I turn it off?" Ranko was looking at her hand as she asked, wondering if she was going to have a permanent built-in flashlight. She pulled the diamond back and slid a thin sheen of jade over it, casting a green light into the room.
Her lord leapt to his feet, startled. "Green?! How did you do that?" He grabbed her hand in his excitement then stopped suddenly. "Oh, jade, of course." He sighed. "It has a second command word to shut off the light. Without that it will continue to glow until the crystal is completely used up, at which point it will crumble into carbon dust."
Ranko nodded absently and looked into the diamond again. After a short search she found it, a second tight pattern of energy. She looked at it until she realized how to trigger it. Everything seemed to go dark for a moment as the light vanished, before her eyes adjusted once more to the dim lighting.
Her lord seemed to have completely regained his composure and she was about to question him regarding parts of her turning into dust when she suddenly realized that she still did not know his name. She stopped and stared at her hand as she tried to remember. She went over each minute she had spent with him, but for the life of her, she could not remember him introducing himself.
Looking up at him with puzzled eyes, feeling embarrassed, for surely he had told her at some point, she tentatively questioned him. "Uhmm... I... What'm I s'pposed to call you, again?"
His eyes widened and he laughed suddenly. "Oh! I didn't even realize I hadn't told you. I am Distanfae Vitrue... or Vitrue Distanfae, I think, in the style of your speech."
"Okay... Uhm... Lord Vitrue, if I use this light, will it hurt when it crumbles? It won't make the rest of me turn to dust with it, will it?"
"No, no, no worries there. Remember, you are basically indestructible. It won't overload the diamond, that is no longer possible. You may use that spell freely."
"Oh... okay... Uhm... so... why did it make you so happy?"
He turned away to sit once more in his seat. Looking up at her, he said, "You want to be remembered, don't you?"
"Well, yeah, I guess."
"You want to be remembered as the best, right?"
"Of course. I am the best."
"So do I, Ranko, so do I. Not the best warrior, of course. I am no great fighter. The world of wizards has its names as well, though, names every wizard knows. Creating this form for you was a masterwork I may never succeed in surpassing, not that I won't try. A rune weapon that can act on its own, that can take any form appropriate to its situation, that by itself was an achievement! My name will go down in history for that alone!" He grinned at her. "I am young for such an achievement, though I've little doubt I'm much older than you, for drow have very long lives. Many centuries a drow can live, even a thousand years or more, though I'll not likely last another thousand. But I've done even more than that! I hoped it might be so, I tried to do all I could to let that possibility remain. You see, many weapons of great power have been created over the years. Very few of these ever change afterward though, much less increase in power as time passes.
"You, on the other hand, not only will you continue to grow in knowledge and skill as long as you live, you can also increase in power directly! You can take other magical items into yourself, gain their power for your own use, even if you have little or no idea what they do or how they work.
"I'm not sure about the quicksilver... it can absorb things itself, without respect to the spells I've placed, as you saw when it absorbed that non-magical dagger." He tossed another gem, a small yellow stone, onto the pedestal.
"That is another light stone. Try it with your quicksilver."
Ranko placed her left hand over it this time, not picking it up. Strands of quicksilver dripped from her palm to cover the gemstone. She felt a minute surge of energy from the stone, then it melted as the dagger had. It, like the dagger, refused to bond with her. Looking into it, she searched in vain for the trigger to the spell. "It is not mixing," she said, "and I can't access the spell."
He stepped up and held out his hand. The quicksilver retracted into her palm then released the stone, returned to its original form, and she handed it to him. He murmured something then said it again, louder, a word that did not translate to her understanding. "You could not access it because the spell is gone," he said raising his eyebrows.
"I wasn't certain it would work the same, but I wasn't expecting this, all the same. At a guess, I'd say the quicksilver absorbed the magical energy from it. If the spell was gone because of the crystal's deformation, it should have destroyed the crystal." He looked up at her. "Did you feel anything when you absorbed it?"
"Yeah, like a little jolt."
"Exactly," he muttered. "I think, from my understanding of the behavior of the quicksilver, that anything that you absorb and leave in contact with the quicksilver will be drained of magic first, beginning with the simplest magic, then more slowly it will itself be dissolved and absorbed, becoming more quicksilver. That, at least, is how it seems to behave in the wild."
The sound of a door opening caught their attention. Ranko turned to see a man much like her lord enter the room. His eyes lit up when he saw Distanfae. "So, brother dear, you've finally left your laboratories!"
In her mind Ranko heard Distanfae hiss, "Make a sword, quickly, but where he cannot see."
She turned slightly so that her right hand would be out of the new man's sight. Behind her interposed body, a hilt rippled into being and a katana like her mother's honor sword formed from it.
"Finally given up on that foolish human magic, I hope? Disappointed though our mother would surely be." He turned his attention to Ranko and his eyes widened slightly. "Or just here for a quick dalliance, perhaps?"
"Neither!" Distanfae snapped irritably. "For your information, Laermornan, Ranko here is helping me test an... unfinished.. hmm... prototype, of the final product. Perhaps you'd care to see it in action?"
Ranko's eyes narrowed at the implication that she was unfinished, though she was more disturbed by the thought that she was supposed in some way to fulfill Distanfae's mother's expectations. "He better not want to marry me," she growled mentally.
The man she now knew to be Laermornan, Distanfae's brother, turned towards her and raked her up and down with his eyes, eliciting an unconscious growl from her. "Certainly, I'd be delighted to help you test it."
He crossed the room quickly and from another alcove along the wall he retrieved a single curving sword. Unlike Ranko's katana, which at Distanfae's signal she held in front of her in guard position, it was not a consistent breadth along its length. Rather, it had a rearward swell about four-fifths of the blade to the end, where the taper reversed until it came to a point.
When her lord's brother stepped up to face her, he gave her sword a long look then glanced at Distanfae. "Why did you make the blade so unusual?"
Distanfae growled, throwing Ranko a glance she couldn't interpret. "It's human magic, Laer, it works best with human weapons. This is close enough to a scimitar."
Laer shook his head disbelievingly then moved fluidly into an attack. To an average fighter he gave no indication of his intent, but Ranko read him more easily than she could any book. She deftly turned aside his attack. He recovered readily, blocking her attempt to relieve him of his sword for a quick win, but she could not hold back her smirk. Though he moved with a speed that many of the races that held the enmity of the drow feared, it was nothing to her own speed, she who even before learning the chestnut fist had been able to move faster than a normal human's eye could follow.
She did not want to end her first chance at plying her art too quickly, but it was not long before she was receiving a dark glare from Laermornan. He leapt backward finally and did not move in again when she failed to follow. He turned his glare to Distanfae. "Where did you find her? She's toying with me! I, who can win one fall out of three with Vitrue's weaponmaster, and I can't even make her sweat!"
He glanced back at her then at Distanfae's smirk. "It's the blade, isn't it? The weapon you created, it is more than merely indestructible, it is increasing her skill." Ranko wanted to protest but she did not even have to look at Distanfae to know that she should keep silent. For whatever reason, her lord wanted his brother to believe the sword she held was what he was creating. True enough in its own light, but if she were to claim that her skill was her own and he demanded she prove it; well, it would prove no easy thing to cast her sword aside. Once more the memory of her past and her fear for her future proved able to hold the tongue that nothing else had ever stilled.
Laermornan did not wait to hear confirmation from Distanfae. Wiping his forehead with a cloth, he bowed quickly in her direction. "Good fight," he said, then strode towards the door, swearing softly.
"Say nothing of this, elder brother. It is not yet ready," warned Distanfae.
Laer glanced at him and nodded then exited the room, closing the door with a resounding crash behind him. Ranko turned to Distanfae to see what he thought of her performance.
"That was well-played, Ranko. Now he is convinced that I've created a perfectly normal rune weapon."
"What..." Ranko paused, uncertain whether she should bring it up, then went ahead regardless. "What did he mean about your mother?"
"She is the one who obtained the quicksilver golem for me. She is the one who charged me with making a rune weapon. She doesn't need to know all the details. If necessary, you can be just a sword long enough to demonstrate, but I think we'll be able to work in a challenge. You, wielding an ordinary weapon, demonstrate that you are a more capable fighter than this House possesses... and your performance against Laer makes me think that that will be no great challenge; and after a test of loyalty, I expect they'll make you weaponsmaster, and designated bearer of the rune weapon. We should be able to pull it off, if we play our cards right."
---
Ranko stood poised in the center of the room, the blade of her katana directed to the floor. At the end of the room within his accustomed alcove Distanfae was chanting softly. Ranko forced herself not to react as he completed his chant and a number of glowing arrows of light sprang from his fingertips. They flashed across the room and slammed into her.
To her surprise, though she felt the impact as they hit her, she felt no pain, nor had she been knocked off balance. She nodded to Distanfae's questioning glance and as he began chanting again, she readied quicksilver just beneath the surface of the blade.
Once more arrows of light streaked across the room. Her katana flashed out to intercept. She was too slow on the first two, and though her katana blocked the arrows, the quicksilver was not there to meet them and she suffered the full impact.
The third hit square on a patch of quicksilver newly risen to the sword's surface but again she was too slow and had not yet begun to focus on the quicksilver and she felt only the impact. The fourth seemed to flow into her without obstruction as she focused on the patch of quicksilver, sending a surge of pleasurable sensation like the taste of rich food singing through her.
Another volley followed close behind and Ranko caught them all. That first successful taste had given her a hunger for the sensation, though even with the number of bolts she was catching, it was as a faint appetizer, barely touching the edge of the hunger she had been previously unaware of.
"Very well done," Distanfae spoke into her mind. "It certainly appears that I was right about the quicksilver, and the fact that you can absorb spells rather than merely drawing magic from enchanted items makes it far more useful. Now let's try something a little stronger."
He picked up a bow that had been leaning against the wall behind him, beside a sword and a crossbow, and began chanting. He did not fit an arrow to the string, though he placed his fingers on it as if they were encompassing the butt of an arrow. When his chant ended he drew back the string and a glimmering line of red appeared between the bent string and the bow. The bow twanged and an arrow of fire leapt through the intervening space.
It was met by Ranko's katana, impacting on hungry quicksilver. Immediately she noticed two things. First, the flavor was different, spicy and hot, and second, it was more filling.
She said as much and Distanfae nodded thoughtfully. "Neither spell is particularly strong, but I think we have enough now to begin to test. I've not seen what the quicksilver can do in this respect, but it should be possible for you to tap into the energy it has obtained. I'm not certain what you'll be able to do with it..." He trailed off and looked at her expectantly.
Ranko nodded, thinking to herself that he might be surprised. He had not yet made mention of ki and she did not think that he was really aware of the full extent of her prior capabilities. She was not exactly inexperienced at wielding energy, even if this was a different sort than that to which she was accustomed. She slipped her sword into the sheath hanging from her belt. After the near discovery by his brother, Distanfae had ordered her to keep the katana present whenever she wore this form, so that he would not find himself unable to present it when it was requested.
Reaching inward she focused her mind upon the quicksilver. Her awareness of the rest of herself and her immediate surroundings faded and then she became quite suddenly and very strongly aware of the energy flowing through the quicksilver. Slowly her perceptions became more in tune with the flows of energy and she was able to detect a deeper mass beneath the swirling upper layers. As she watched she could see that the mass was slowly assimilating the freer upper flows, which she realized were somewhat distinct.
Concentrating on that difference her perspective seemed to warp and shift suddenly, so that instead of looking at the flows from without, she was feeling them from within, as if her very consciousness had moved into the quicksilver. From this vantage point, the inner pool seemed quiet and still, peaceful but with a quiescence like that of a sleeping cat, though the thought made her shiver, as if it held a power that could be terrible when roused.
About it flowed the myriad energies she had recently absorbed. There was little remaining of one stream, a soft glow that tasted and felt like cool water. Another felt solid and thick, moving with sluggish power, reminding her of Ryouga, slow-moving but forceful. The last was spicy and swirling rapidly, touching a deep pain within her as she compared it to Akane's fiery rages.
They were slowly being absorbed, feeding the deeper, still pool, and the comparison of two of the flows to the feelings of his long lost friends put Ranma suddenly in the mind of his erstwhile English teacher, Ninomiya Hinako. There were definite similarities to the absorption of these energies and her ki-draining ability, leading Ranko to wonder if she might not be able to find a way to drain that energy away before a wizard had managed to shape it, the way that Hinako had drained their battle auras.
Reminding herself that Distanfae was waiting, she ignored the outer flows, expecting that like emotionally charged ki, they would be resistant to being shaped contrary to their nature, and drew instead from the quiet pool of neutralized power.
Her awareness expanded as she drew the power out, encompassing her whole self once more even as she became aware that she had drawn the conduit of power out of the quicksilver and into her adamantine element, though not yet outside of herself.
That she could cause that power to move at all was promising. Cupping her hand she guided the flows and smirked as Distanfae's eyes widened. Slowly and then with greater speed, streamers of purple flowed into the space between her hands, coalescing into an amethyst ball. It seemed to become easier as she collected it, responding ever more readily to her will, and she realized with a sudden start that it was more responsive than even her ki had been.
She cut off the flow when the ball was six inches across, focusing on maintaining the power and not allowing it to leak away into the air. Its responsiveness was giving her ideas. She had never really learned any really powerful ki moves. She knew from her experience with Prince Herb that the few she knew were barely the tip of the iceberg. However, she had had an idea for powering up her Moko Takabisha, though she had never accomplished it. She knew that there was ki all about her and she had occasionally wondered if she could gather that ki to fuel her attacks. She had never managed it, but this energy was responding far more easily to her demands, perhaps with it...
She glanced at Distanfae but though he had a look of curious attention, he made no sign so she decided that she was free to experiment as she would. "Control first," she whispered to herself. She concentrated on the sphere, slowly moving her hands apart. A broad grin grew on her face as the sphere swelled, lengthening into a sausage like shape. The center thinned, pinching inward, then the energy split into two balls, one following each hand.
A double Moko Takabisha was something she had accomplished before but she was still startled at how easy it had been to divide the ball. Holding her hands still she pulled the two spheres apart again, dividing them into four. Laughing softly at how remarkably easy it was to control she started them moving in a circle, orbiting about an invisible central point, then brought the four back into a single sphere.
How much further could she go? She knew that under the influence of the Neko-ken she formed claws of ki, though she had not succeeded in duplicating that feat while conscious. The sphere between her hands wavered for a moment then thinned, flattened, and extended. Smirking with delight, she delicately reached out and touched the blade, then absorbed it back into her arm. Concentrating, she drew up a bit more power, channeling it into her arm to join the first, then held up her hand.
Five elegantly curved and paper-thin blades of deep purple flashed into existence just beyond the tips of her digits. She waggled her fingers and the blades moved in precise correspondence.
She was absorbed in her own achievement now and did not notice the look of blank astonishment on Distanfae's face. She had only just accessed that energy for the first time and already she could control it with a precision that astounded him.
Banishing the blades she summoned a ball of purple fire into her open hand and then gave it a sharp push. It streaked towards the wall in front of her. A smirk appeared on her face at how easy that equivalent to the Moko Takabisha had been. The smirk widened when a questing thought stopped the sphere cold just before it impacted the wall and then brought it arrowing back. She noticed as she absorbed it that it had lost some of its substance, though hardly a worrisome amount. Of course, the fact that she had fired it off with such a light thought that she had not even begun to say the words did little to subdue her pleasure. While she had no real desire to learn to be ninja, in spite of the shadow powers she had been given by Distanfae, there was no harm in having an attack that could be initiated silently.
She felt a sudden pressure on her mind as the sphere vanished and realized that Distanfae had just exerted his control. "A scrying spell just activated. We're being watched. Draw the sword and prepare to defend. Don't absorb, just deflect."
She drew the sword in a single fluid motion and immediately entered the first steps of a basic kendo form. With her senses still attuned to the strange energy she could actually feel him casting the spell and it was a simple matter to interpose the blade between herself and the arrow of fire, dispersing it in a flash of sundered magic, the move made so smoothly and precisely that it seemed but an ordinary part of the kendo form.
It continued thus as he sent a wide variety of distance attacks at her, her blade intercepting them without seeming to disrupt the pattern of her motion in the slightest. Through the quicksilver, she felt the build up of each attack as he began it, then the coursing path of the attack as it crossed the room. Adjusting the kata so that her sword would intercept it was child's play.
Without the aid of the quicksilver, the attacks pounded into her, sending shockwaves through her, though none were strong enough to move her, nor did she feel any pain from them.
"Deflect, he said," she mentally muttered to herself. Carefully she drew up the quicksilver power again, holding it ready. She was taking a risk, she knew. If she guessed wrong about how to manipulate the quicksilver, she would end up absorbing the attack, which she had been ordered not to do. But she needed to try, because allowing the spells to impact against her, while resulting in flashy detonations that made it obvious she was not absorbing the spells, was not 'deflecting' them.
Again she formed a blade of amethyst, within the katana, concentrating on it in her mind, picturing a mirror sheen on a hard edge. As the next attack came, she allowed the amethyst energy to surface on the katana's edge.
An explosion flared against the wall to her left, courtesy of the bolt she had deflected into it. She felt like crowing in triumph but held it in, knowing that her lord would be displeased if she did anything that revealed too much to whoever was watching them.
The idea came to her suddenly that she ought to be able to sense whoever was watching. Distanfae had said it was a spell, well, she was able to detect his spells through the quicksilver, and even absorb them. Should she not be able to detect and neutralize this other spell?
"No!" Distanfae caught the current of her thought and quickly interposed his objection. "If the scrying spell ends prematurely, they will know we discovered them."
They continued their farce until Distanfae signaled that the scrying had ended. "Laermornan," he growled. "I told him to say nothing! Well, there's no help for it."
Ranko looked at him expectantly but he shook his head. "I've used too much magic as it is, putting on that show for them. I had to use several of my items to supplement my spells. I'll be able to do no more until tomorrow." He looked down in seeming thought for a minute then raised his head again. "Stay, if you like, and practice. I do not think they will bother to scry again. Return to my quarters when you finish, through the shadows."
He strode from the room and she watched him leave, thinking to herself that he was exhausted but hiding it, as she had done so often. She shook her head, dismissing him from her mind. He knew better than she how to take care of himself and he had shown no inclination to having her serve him in any more personal matter, for which she was profoundly thankful. He would doubtless be better after getting rest.
She immersed herself once more in the pool of energy then drew some out and into her adamantite again. Trading quicksilver for jade in her eyes once more, she looked at her hands and saw the glows. She had a sort of glow, all over, doubtless because she was magical, through and through. The presence of the extra energy from the quicksilver was noticeable as a deeper, richer color above the submerged substance. The energy she had freed from the quiescent pool was even more noticeable, the glow being brighter and richer. As well, it led her to notice that there were variations in the base glow as well, veins and flows that moved and shifted slowly, while in the brighter glow of active power, they flashed and crackled like lightning, the flows warping and twisting energetically.
Forcing a portion of the energy out of her body and into the open air, she returned her attention to her environment. Immediately she noticed that the area around her was heavily laden with energy, the residue of the innumerable spells, slowly fading. A slow grin quirked the edges of her lips as she contemplated the ambient glow that surrounded her.
She began breathing deeply and very slowly. Her breath grew ragged though, as frantic concern flared in her mind. Why was her ki not building below her stomach, in her hara? She felt nothing from the breaths. A slow feeling of despair swept over her as she realized that she had lost her ki. All the feeling of achievement and confidence seemed to drain from her. The purple energy that had at first so excited her now seemed little more than a fool's prize.
Her ki was a part of her, built up through pain and suffering of years, most of her life, in fact. This was not the first time she had suffered its loss. When under the effects of the Weakness Moxibustion, her ki had been useless to her, and the despair of those first few hours after Happosai had crippled him returned to her now with overwhelming force.
Through great strength of will Ranko eventually roused herself from despair to learn once more to control the quicksilver energies, but her heart was no longer in it. Dully, mechanically, she shifted quicksilver around in her body as she breathed, seeking some way of positioning and using it that would let her take advantage of the skill she had in manipulating her ki. If those skills could not be applied then all of that ambient energy might as well be so much hot air for all she could get from it.
Eventually she gave up. Her breathing continued to have no discernable effect on the energies. She sighed, dropping her hand and reabsorbing the quicksilver energy. A moment later she slapped herself on the forehead with a disturbingly metallic thunk. She had never succeeded in the drawing in of environmental ki because she had never really been able to feel it. Feeling someone's battle aura was easy as it made a sharp contrast to normal experience. But nature's ki she was ever bathed in and it always eluded her.
But why was she even trying? After all, she had felt the surrounding magical energies as soon as she immersed herself in the quicksilver energy? Purple energy flared about her hand and a dry sob cracked her throat as with startling ease, streamers of energy became visible as they coalesced from the surrounding air, swirling and settling into the amethyst ball.
Maybe she had lost her ki and maybe not... but she had a thousand years to master this new form of energy. "I'll be ready for you, Saffron," she hissed. Using the amethyst sphere as a conduit, she began siphoning off the external energies she was collecting, drawing them back within the quicksilver where they could be absorbed.
It required little concentration, though the mental image of Kasumi wandering around with a vacuum cleaner wafted through her mind. She walked about the room, absorbing the ambient spell remnants and thinking about what she had seen and heard that day. She had been created under orders by Distanfae's mother. He had spoken of her as a weapon, and had her pretend to be holding a sword for his brother.
"...after a test of loyalty..."
How did daimyo test their samurai's loyalty? How would this dark-skinned family's matriarch test her loyalty? What would Cologne have done?
She felt a sudden stab of painful realization and was almost surprised that it was not accompanied by clenching stomach pains. She would be asked to kill someone, she felt suddenly certain. It would probably have been someone close to her, had there been any such person.
"I can't sleep," she said softly, "but that doesn't mean I can't meditate."
Wrapping herself in shadows, she reappeared in her quarters. Her clothes shifted, largely vanishing, until she was garbed in what seemed to be a singlet and boxers. She sat on the bed and drew herself up onto it, settling into a lotus.
She focused on the Soul of Ice, having little general experience with meditation, and knowing, in spite of the loss of her ki, that she needed that emotional distance.