Project: Gamer Ver. Error, File Not Found
Anime Adjacent Entry: 029
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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16/06/1993
So. Been a week.
Ryoko confirmed for me that, yeah, a woman inexplicably showed up in the house. Vacuumed the rug. Apparently dusted the living room, too. Which needed it, I know, but still.
And then she walked into the bathroom and disappeared. I've been doing my best not to freak out since I don't even know what I should be freaking out about.
The wards? Intact. I checked. I mean, if the disappearing maid just appeared in my house, without actually intending to, they might not have worked. Or she might be some kind of Brownie.
Look, I'm working with no hard facts, here. Either this woman has the most unusual luck in the world, she's a spirit of some kind or she's an alien that just happens to look like a human.
Aliens aren't real?
I'm sharing housespace with a seven-hundred year old ghost from the heavens. I'm a dragon from a species that can originate from the collision of cosmic powers between outer gods. Or we are literal, living genius loci of those same powers, born from the corpses of those same outer gods.
I'm an alien. Of course we're real.
So. Lady shows up again? I'll try asking her some questions. Figure I'll start soft and skip asking her name. If she's some kind of spirit, that could be a big insult. At least figure out where she's from.
I've thought about jumping into space from time to time. Even without any equipment, I can use Accelerator. I'd probably be able to get to Mars in four or five hours. Less if I time it right and head there when it's at its closest point. After that, I could just leave a Mark to teleport there whenever I want to.
...Might go ahead and do that to the moon again. A couple different countries have drones up there, right? That'd be a helluva thing to see on the news.
Something to think on, anyway. Today, though, I've got a few hours before the usual evening rush (Four or five orders on a good night. It's so hard to get everything to everyone when you can literally teleport~) so I'm going to go and take a look around Furinkan. Hand out a few more flyers. If I can get a few more sushi restaurants or another order like the Nekohanten, that'd be a nice feather in my cap.
I'm sure someone will slip up. The only way for two men to keep a secret is if one of them is dead is an old saying for a reason.
Well. Just need to grab a face mask, grab a hoodie and disguise my hair. Bandanna or magic?
Magic. Do something about my eyes, too. Oddly enough, I don't get too many comments about yellow eyes. Thankfully they aren't slitted between forms anymore.
-----
Areru's disguise worked better than he expected. Obscuring his facial features and making his hair look straight and black instead of frizzy and brown and people were completely uninterested in looking twice at him.
Yay. Conformity.
Areru didn't go straight to one of the businesses he'd already solicited. Instead, he started on a completely different road and basically just wandered around the Furinkan section of Nerima.
He was actually in a convenience store, a Seven-Eleven where one of his earlier flyers had been torn down by someone throughout the last two weeks. The cashier hadn't noticed anything and, really, it was a piece of paper on a corkboard. Areru wasn't about to throw a fit.
The teen was actually in the process of paying for a small meal, a couple of tea eggs and a baked potato, when something... strange happened.
"Rrreow!" a... cat? screamed as something blitzed its way past the large glass window, common to the various convenience stores in Japan.
It looked like the Ranma guy. Running on all four limbs.
"Is that normal?" Ginji asked as he added a box of milk tea to his order.
"It seems like it," the clerk, a young-ish woman named Himiko, told him. "It seems like it happens once every few weeks, ever since the Saotomes started to live with the Tendos. And your order comes up to two-hundred and forty yen."
"Hmm," Areru quietly hummed as he paid the woman.
If that wasn't a clue then Areru's name was Charlie.
And it's not.
Thanking the woman, Areru accepted his meal and left the convenience store to follow the mayhem. It wasn't particularly difficult, really. Catma was gouging clawmarks into the infrastructure and leaving behind martial artists that were left... barely disabled but covered in cat scratches with their clothes ripped to shreds?
Al... right?
Well. Plus side. The nearly-naked men and women weren't dead!
Yay!
Areru was about halfway through his potato when he caught up with the mayhem, where a quartet of martial artists were fighting in a storm drain. There was a perfectly good sports field on the side of the drain. Freshly manicured, ready for some kids to play a pickup game of football or baseball or whatever it was that groups of children got up to when they weren't bullying nerds with eroge fetishes.
But no. Catma was down in the storm drain, fighting with sword-boy, pig-boy and what's his name, Honkler the man shaped goose.
Areru didn't live in the area, alright? Local celebrities just weren't his thing.
"Foul demon!" sword-boy shouted as he stepped into a rigid kendo stance. "The magics you hold over the fair Akane will be dispelled by my blade- I strike!"
Down below, Catma, quick as a pissed off kitty, juked to the side to avoid the telegraphed overhead strike from sword-boy's katana-
Katana?
The nutjob was using a bokken, a wooden training sword, last time Areru saw him!
Areru stuffed the rest of his potato into his mouth and started to make his way down the storm drain.
A couple of guys wanting to beat each other black and blue? That's their business.
Some lunatic swinging live steel? That's a murder waiting to happen!
Chewing thickly, Areru was nearly to the bottom of the storm drain with the four-way free-for-all when the quartet of idiots paused at hearing a girl's voice.
"Ranma!" a girl with black hair in a mushroom-cut shouted. "Don't let them get to you!"
Well. That was absolutely useless.
"Girl!" a gruff voice interrupted as the fighting picked back up. From behind the girl a man, a fairly hefty man in a thin, stained martial arts gi, grabbed the girl's arm and held her back from running down to the fight. "You cannot go down there! In the throes of the Neko-Ken, Ranma does not know friend from foe! It is a forbidden martial arts style, one that drives those who use it into a berserk rage where they will act only as their inner cat commands them! Like this, Ranma is so far gone, he would even attack his own father!"
That was... convenient?
Did this guy just go around tossing out exposition whenever his kid went berserk and-
Turning to check over his shoulder, Areru confirmed that sword-boy had been stripped down to his boxers and was nursing dozens of thin, bloody cuts.
-started wailing on anything he saw as a threat?
Areru cleared his throat and then used a weak spell to imitate the Akane girl's voice to ask "But, why would Ranma learn such an art if he can't control it?"
"That's my fault," the man in the gi said. He crossed his arms and closed his eyes before nodding somberly. "I found the forbidden tome of the Neko-Ken when Ranma was young and I was so sure it would be a valuable addition to Ranma's growing mastery of the art. The instructions were grim and horrible, demanding that I dig a pit and fill it with all of the cats that I could find. Then, after three days without food or water, I bound Ranma in fish sausages and lowered him into the pit. There, the book claimed he would learn the fury of the feline and be shown the mastery of their rage! But my son failed to master the art and now this, this berserker, this beast is all I have to show for my efforts!"
Areru pursed his lips and looked from left to right for a moment.
This guy just... admitted that. Out loud. With very, very little prompting.
Areru ran his tongue along the back of his lower teeth.
Once upon a time, Areru had been tracked down by a two-tailed cat that led him to the northern reaches of Japan. The creature, enigmatic and silent, had shown Areru to a pit, filled with malice and hunger. A spot that was soaked in a grudge, primal and primordial, where something had suffered.
Once cleansed, Areru had found it full of bones. Cat bones. Kitten bones.
Areru had thought it was the limit of the horrors he would see there.
Areru had been wrong.
The dragon took a deep, shuddering breath as Pig-Boy slid over rough concrete until he came to a stop at Areru's side. The mage turned, his eyes meeting the wild, slitted blue gaze of the grudge-fueled purrserker that was rushing him.
Watching him, properly paying attention, Areru finally saw that the way Ranma moved wasn't like a panther or lion or anything similar. He was wavering, slightly. Arching his back up high as he closed in, if he had a tail it would have been puffed up as Ranma spat and hissed like a kitten that was absolutely terrified.
Ranma's hands came down towards Areru's face, light glinting off of claws that didn't exist-
And Areru snapped his fingers, freezing Ranma, mid attack, in place in the air.
"What?" the man in the gi asked from up above. "What's going on? Boy!"
Areru reached out and gently cupped Ranma's cheek, critically looking into the boy's unnaturally slitted eyes.
Physiological changes.
Areru's gaze slid over to the hands, to the ephemeral claws in the fingers.
Spiritual changes.
"Boy!" the man in the gi shouted. "Stop standing there and fight!"
Ranma, Areru determined, had empathized with the primordial cat spirit. Or at least the gestalt of such a thing on the spiritual plane. The differences of such a thing would be academic at best, really. Regardless, Ranma had connected to it whilst in a concentration of suffering and hunger and fear. Tainting whatever connection had been formed, forever marking the way the two would communicate with each other.
It wasn't something that could just be 'fixed'. Ranma would need to connect with that spirit again and the both of them would have to make peace with each other. It would be a slow, difficult, uphill battle-
A heavy thump from Areru's left drew his irate gaze as the disgusting human being parading itself as Ranma's parent landed nearby.
"You!" the man shouted as he pointed one finger directly at Areru's face. "Undo whatever wicked spell you've cast upon my son!"
Areru blinked, slowly, as the martial artist settled himself into a stance.
"...Cute," Areru said, his word curt and short.
Black, wicked magic settled into Areru's hand as he looked over the martial artist. He didn't know the man's name and, truthfully, Areru didn't want to know his name.
There was a tiny change, an insignificant shifting of the martial artist's foot-
And Areru disappeared from his position, Teleporting to the man's side. The martial artist twisted, his reflexes phenomenal-
But he wasn't fast enough to avoid the grapple as Areru's hand latched on to the martial artist's face. And the magic Areru channeled, the disgusting power of a godborne demon, Soulsucker grabbed at the strength, at the talents the man had cultivated and ripped them free.
The martial artist's screams, far louder than anything that should have been possible coming from a human, cut off abruptly when Areru lifted the man by his face and then slammed him into the ground, on his back.
"Get off of him!" a voice- the girl- screamed. Areru looked to the side and had to duck low, pressing himself against the martial artist underneath of him as she swung a mallet at his head.
"...You missed," Areru said as he released the former martial artist and stood up.
He cracked his neck to the left, then the right and stepped back as the girl recovered from her missed swing. The man in the gi, his limbs shaking and gasping for breath, struggled to get to his feet.
Looking him up and down, Areru felt a sort of grim satisfaction. The man's arms were thin and frail where once they'd been thick and strong. His gaze, cunning and arrogant before, had gone dull and dazed.
And Areru... did not feel any stronger. He wasn't any faster, he didn't feel. Whatever the martial artist had been before?
It hadn't been enough to matter.
Snapping his fingers, Areru dispelled the Stop spell on Ranma. He half-expected he'd need to dodge, again, but the cursed teen beelined directly into hammer-girl and started purring instead.
That... worked?
"...What?" the man asked as he blearily blinked through the glasses strapped to his face. "...What have you done? What did you do to me?!"
The martial artist placed his feet into an awkward pose, as though he were trying to imitate something he'd seen, once, but didn't know how to properly do.
"...Mister Saotome?" Hammer-girl asked, a confused and concerned look on her face even as Ranma curled up at her feet and purred. "What's wrong with your stance?"
Areru's false-brown eyes crinkled at the edges as he smiled under his mask. He bowed, one arm out in a theatrical fashion-
And disappeared.
