Resurrected from
here.
Emerald Tengu-
or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Danmaku.
------~*~-----
One peaceful morning, you abruptly appear roughly two-hundred feet above the outskirts of Tokyo, accompanied by six tonnes of stonework, a rowboat, a large amount of seawater, a very confused fifteen-meter shark, six glowing balls of energy, and a very pissed-off Cyberknight.
Not in any particular order.
"
Jet Tengu!" you roar, restoring your recently-disrupted flight spell.
An emotionless voice that you are
really getting ticked off at intones the thing you've been dodging for the last half-hour-
"Blast Cannon" - and a coruscating beam of orange-white blasts from the Cyberknight's left arm.
Seeing you have no room to dodge- that skyscraper is rather inconvenient at the moment- you instead choose to block.
"
Ageis!" you shout in the split-second you have before the beam impacts, and a green-glowing shield springs up in front of you, taking the impact.
The Cyberknight re-ignites its jets, trying to bring its broadsword into play.
"oh
hells no!" you say, darting to the left on the green wings of
Jet Tengu, avoiding a sword-slash that would have neatly bisected your torso.
The sword instead slashes into the skyscraper, and sticks on something.
"
YES!" you crow in triumph as the Cyberknight attempts to free its sword, giving you the time you need to finish it off.
You point your right arm at the knight, green rune-circles springing up as you charge your
pece de resistance.
"
Charging complete. Ready to fire."
a slightly feminine robotic voice intones with just a hint of smugness.
As one you roar out the name of your most powerful single-target spell-
"
Disruptor Beam!"
-and a two-foot-diameter beam of molecule-rending emerald fury smashes into the unprepared Cyberknight.
Your crow of victory as the knight disintegrates into its component molecules is interrupted by the helpful voice of your Device-
"warning-mana reserves a point-nine percent. Unable to maintain Jet Tengu"-and the sudden secession of your flight spell.
You experience a brief moment of panic before you hit the water, then a rush of relief that your battle with the Cyberknight appears to have brought you to ground-level, preventing you from becoming a smear on the ground.
You swim to the shore, and climb out sputtering, dripping wet, and mildly irritated.
Then your Device informs you of
more "good news:"
"
Dimension shift detected. Unable to locate D-beacon. Co-ordinates unknown."
your eye twitches, and you undertake the only appropriate action for someone just informed that they've gotten lost in the Dimension Sea:
"FUUUUUUUUUUUUU-"
[X] Assess Device Status (check inventory)
-[X] a little retrospect on how have we ended up in this situation.
------~*~-----
You shake the last of the water out of your shirt, cursing every god, demon, and force you can think of under your breath. Re-donning your now (mostly) dry shirt, you stop for a moment, wondering what to do next. While it is tempting to wait, you decide that action is a better choice. You need shelter, food, and sleep- not necessary in that order. That said, going haring off into the unknown while low on Mana and out of backup is a good way to get mulched.
You decide that before you do anything, you should assess your remaining assets.
"Rumble," you begin, addressing your Device, "what have we go left, resource-wise?"
"Mana reserves at .8% master." the effeminate and robotic voice is one of the few constants in your life.
"Emergency power is available, but you would be wise to avoid use for a few days yet." that is as expected, but it is the next bit that floods you with relief
"your Disaster Kit is intact and ready for use. Further, most of your stored items are available."
you let out a breath you didn't realize you were holding. With the things stored in your Device intact, you can get set up relatively quickly.
You suddenly feel very tired.
'
mana exhaustion' a detached part of your brain thinks.
'or just plain old regular exhaustion. At least I'm away from-'
"
I can't shake him! I can't shake him!"
-you shake your head to clear it. You know you're coming off of the adrenalin you've been running on for the last hour. You need to get to cover and spacing out-
"
This is Hammer actual! We're- {Whoomp!}-tting pounded by artillery! Where the Hell
is our air support?!"
-isn't going to help. You need to slee-
there is a brief impression of red and black, an impact, and then unconsciousness claims you.
As you swim in and out of semi-consciousness, moments from your past play before you:
------~*~-----
a little girl wanders a desolated city, shell-socked gaze passing over everything. Another would cry out- but the girl is mute from the horror inflicted here.
------~*~-----
The hoodie is only the start- there's the piercings, the tattoos, and enough semi-rotten cyber-junk to build a small car. "No wonder she was robbing people," the officer thinks aloud. "With all that cyber, she likely owes every underground modshop in the city just from repairs! Poor kid."
------~*~-----
"
YOU LITTLE PISSANTS THINK YOU'RE BADASS ENOUGH TO BE AIRCORPS? YOU AIN'T NOTHING TILL I SAY
YOU ARE!"
------~*~-----
"
YOU CALL THAT RUNNING?! MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER RUNS FASTER THAN YOU SORRY SACKS OF SHIT! MOVE!"
------~*~-----
"
Congratulations, Lieutenant. That action on Kalidyne-"
"
I was just doing my duty, sir."
------~*~-----
"
ALLRIGHT, LISTEN UP! The marines are hitting dirt at 0800 local, which means WE are out the bay by 0750! get your asses in gear and mount up! We may not be at war yet, but the Combine's pushing farther every year! So stay sharp!"
------~*~-----
"
SCRAMBLE, SCRAMBLE, THIS IS NOT A DRILL. ALL FORCES SCRAMBLE. MASSIVE INCOMING ATTACK-"
"fuck."
------~*~-----
"
Blast Ca-Skztrrrk*"
"
Nice shot Red Two!"
"
I can't shake him! I can't shake him!"
"
I've got you, Green four. Slippery devils, aren't they?"
"
This is Eagle's Roost! We are going down! Repeat, We are going down! All Hands brace for-Kssshhhh"
"
The Roost! The fucking toasters nailed the Roost!"
"
This is Hammer actual! We're- {Whoomp!}-tting pounded by artillery! Where the Hell
is our air support?!"
"
Gold wing inbound, Hammer! Just hold on!"
"
This is Red Five! Red Leader and Red Three just bought it! Requesting permission to withdraw!"
"
Negative Red Five! If you pull out before we can get more troops in, this whole flank will fold like wet tissue! Green wing, what's your status?"
"
Green leader here! We are engaging fifteen- repeat, one-five, Whiskey Tangos and cannot assist!"
"
This is Blue leader! I trust we're fashionably late?"
"
Gods and demons you flyboys sure took your sweet time! Hammer-two reporting, Hammer actual just got hit by the mother of all ortillery strikes! The hell are the spacebrains playing at!?"
"
this is Striker-one! Requesting immediate
CAS, danger-close! Repeat-"
"
Green three here! Me and Four are inbound, if you'd be so kind as to mark who needs an ass-kicking from above?"
"
Rodger that Green Three! Designating primary targets!"
"
alright four, let's blow these jumped-up dishwashers back to the stone age!"
"
what the- OHSHI-{SLUTCH}"
"
OH FUCK CYBERKNI-KSSHHHH"
"
Green three! What is your status?"
"
KSHHHHHH"
"
Green Three, Report!"
"
KSHHHHH"
------~*~-----
crossover is- well, okay, some other things will show up later (as the Plot demands,) but the first 'lucky' recipient of my particular brand of mayhem is possibly the only place where an extra-dimensional magical girl/airforce jock with MASSIVE ISSUES isn't the weirdest thing you ran into today.
Welcome to Nerima, Tokyo, 1990.
Welcome to...
------~*~-----
Emerald Tengu
or, how I learned to stop worrying and love Danmaku
Part One: Main Engine Start!
------~*~-----
[X] alert- (this isn't my bedroom...)
you start to groan "five more minuets, mommy" but only get to the first 'o' when the Smell hits your nose. It is a Smell that bypasses such crude things as your nerves and goes directly into your pleasure centers, whispershouting promises of ambrosial deliciousness.
It is the best damn home cooking you've ever smelled, and it takes you a good five minutes to stop drooling long enough to notice your clothing- or rather, your lack thereof, and the red-faced boy frozen in the doorway.
You are many things: Mage prodigy, soldier, cyborg, flight leader, ex-convict- but right now, you are a naked twentysomething girl, and some instincts even Air Corps training can't suppress.
The resultant banshee shriek of anger and embarrassment is predictable, really.
------~*~-----
all was not well in the Tendo Dojo. This could be inferred by anyone with a brain, as normally one could not put Chinese amazons, Happosai, and either, much less
both, male Saotomes in the same vicinity without a fight breaking out in short order.
Frankly, the fact that it had now been almost twenty-four hours without so much as a
major argument had just about half of Nerima heading to the hills or basements, since
Happosai being
actually serious was surely a sign of the End Times.
They weren't that far off.
------~*~-----
Ku Lon had seen many things in her long life. She'd seen Martial Arts Tea Ceremony. She'd seen a boy, not even yet twenty, fight an immortal demigod of fire and
win. She'd seen more Jusenkyo curses than she could shake a stick at (and she was quite a good stick-shaker, at that.) she'd seen (and
used!) magical artifacts that hundreds would
kill to possess. But she'd only seen Happosai get serious twice before, and both times had been just before battles that, for all her knowledge and skill, had nearly killed her.
She'd also never seen an artifact this
potent without a massive guardian beast sitting on top of it.
It was also quite
plain, for something that radiated power to her magical senses- a simple green gem, semi-transparent, cut in a equally simple square, about an inch and a half to a side, and barely a quarter inch thick. It was mounted in a perfectly ordinary leather band, the kind meant for the upper arm.
It was also utterly flawless. She had thought it a simple decoration, until she'd touched the thing, and her breaking-point-enhanced senses reported that the small stone
had no breaking point.
Which was
impossible, since anything that was made of
matter had a breaking point, though only a tiny handful ever gained the control to sense the breaking point of living things though the interference of their own Chi.
Her musings on the subject were cut short by the familiar sound of a scandalized girl, which reminded her of the main reason she'd stuck around in Nerima: she needed some entertainment in her old age!
------~*~-----
Katsumi Tendo was Worried. It followed her like stormclouds, in the faint, flat set of her face, and the other residents
swore she'd put out
battle aura for a moment when she'd been giving the poor girl Ranma had accidentally clobbered a wash.
Everyone would have been surprised to learn that she
had. No-one attributed any martial-arts prowess to the eldest Tendo sister, and she liked it that way. But that girl...
her body had been a mass of scar tissue. Some were obviously from tattoo removal, but others...
she'd had a massive line of white tracing her spine, the unmistakable y-shape of her entire torso being opened up, one of her arms had been burned almost to a crisp at some point- burn scars were distinctive, really- and the other arm, which had looked untouched, had turned out to be an advanced prosthetic of some kind.
And that wasn't even counting the road-map of small scars that littered every inch of her body. Some she recognized as surgical, but all too many were jagged things caused by blades or the star-like craters left by bullets.
Katsumi Tendo had only one thought:
where had this girl come from, to have worse scars than RANMA?
------~*~-----
Happosai shivered. There was only one (okay,
two,) times in his three-hundred years he'd ever felt the kind of magical power that radiated off of the strange girl. The first had been when he was a young man, in his first trip through china, when he'd gotten the better of the woman seated three places to his left, and spent the next four hours dodging everything from house-sized fireballs to arcing crescents of energy that coated whatever they hit in marshmallow. The second had been years later, when he'd been experimenting with a curious artifact capable of traveling an hour forward or back in time, and the green-haired woman who'd come to collect it had radiated the barely-leashed power of a hungry tiger and enough Killing Intent to make his knees go out.
This girl was not quite as powerful, perhaps, but Happosai had been around much longer than his students. He knew a soldier, and a blooded one at that, when he saw one. He knew quite well that it changed you, irrevocably and permanently. For all his usual silliness, he made sure to somberly pray that none of his current students ever had to learn that lesson.
His unusually macabre thoughts were interrupted by a sound he'd heard at least four times a day for the last fifty years: a feminine shriek of outrage and embarrassment. The sound of Duty calling!
------~*~-----
YOU are RANMA SAOTOME, martial-arts prodigy, chaos-magnet, the Boy-With-Way-Too-Many-Fiancees, and gender-challenged Jusenkyo cursee. You are also frozen in terror at the enraged and
very naked woman who just let off a truly impressive shriek. Having been in this
exact position
far too many times in the last year and a half of your life, you know that you have almost
no time in which to come up with a response that won't get you either pummeled, hammered, or stuck in the middle of a Fiancee War.
Quick, Ranma's Brain, we need a response!
[] it's cool, bro (be cool like a popsicle and give her some privacy)
[] OH MY GOSH SORRY (apologies with alacrity)
[] LOLNOPE (save Tomboy the trouble and pass out now)
[] write-ins always welcome (yeeesss, your rampant speculation means I can
shamelessly stealget Ideas from you! Ah-hahahaha...ha...ha- I said that out loud, didn't I.)
------~*~-----
Yeessss, eets behk! and don't worry, plot will be happening shortly.....