Part One
Hi! Mouri Cye here! I suppose you’re wondering why I’m not in Mia’s mansion anymore. Well, this is the Ronin’s new home. We’d graduated from High School and we just moved into this house near our college. So anyway... on with the story.
I concluded a long time ago that if I had a choice to live anywhere my heart desired, it’d be by the sea. I suppose it must have been some of the vestigial effects of having the power of Torrent in my blood; but I have put more money on being raised by the sea. You figure, I was born in Nagasaki and grew up near Dartmouth in England.
For a long time it was a childhood fantasy of mine (though admittedly probably borne of reading too many Excalibur comics) to live in a lighthouse. I don’t know why, but it seemed like the height of awesomeness to make my home in a lighthouse.
However, nothing prepared me for when Mia’s uncle offered to sell us what he called a "small beach-front cottage" and a "fixer-upper" for an amount that wasn’t too terribly expensive. Now, I knew beach-front, I knew cottage, and I knew "fixer-upper."
This blasted money-pit fit only ONE of those definitions without exaggerating.
It wasn’t anywhere near a wee cottage... hell, it was almost bigger than Mia’s mansion! It was nice and roomy, though. The type where we could house all nine of the Ronin Armors, plus Kayura, and still have room for all four Guardians, any number of our families, Mia and Anubis and their growing family, and a partridge in a pear tree. It had two floors, with enough rooms for everyone to finally have their own. The lighthouse only extended about a floor and a half above the normal roof, but had enough floor space to make a nice sun-room.
However, I think Kento summed up the "fixer-upper" part when he said: "HOLY SHIT!!"
The beautiful old lighthouse/mansion had long since been abandoned and neglected. Parts of the hard-wood floor had rotted through in places while others had met with termites. The cellar: a haven for a colony of rats. (Though it was funny to see the street-hardened Shiranui scream and tear up the stairs like a demon was on his tail.) The roof leaked water like no tomorrow and Rowen promptly reported was a real copper roof on the lighthouse needed a major cleaning.
Luckily it’s summer and the weather has been nice for a while, so we were able to camp outside and avoid sleeping in the house.
And... well, I’m probably boring you, so I’ll get on with the rest of the story.
So anyway; we spent the last couple weeks fixing things. Though it wasn’t as bad as I thought. With a total of eleven people working to fix things, it’s going pretty quickly.
Just yesterday, you were able to walk through the house without having to watch the floor, thanks to a minor temper-tantrum from Kento. (I’ll explain that in a moment.) And the rats... well, Shiranui took the rats' presence as an insult to his ego and blasted them into next week as soon as he recovered from his scare.
So now, I’m sitting here out of the way of the professionals as they work on making this place our home. In fact, all of us guys are out here on the just finished, brand-new porch, trying not to be bored out of our minds.
The ladies just bailed on us; armed with Danie’s credit card and Sharra’s jeep. Ryo keep complaining every now and then that we should be doing something. I never realized crickets could chirp so loudly... (Sorry, bad joke.)
I do have to admit, it’s nice to play it lazy.
Yesterday, Kento got his thumb caught in one of the windows that refused to close. It slammed down on his thumb. It was gross; his thumbnail split and blood went everywhere. We hadn’t even had his thumb bandaged before our royally pissed-off warrior of Hardrock had called in the contractors. A few minutes later, we had plumbers, a roofing company, electricians, and a floor and tile company all scheduled to come and tackle our new house.
"Hey, Cye?" Rowen mutters sleepily from the hammock we just strung up on the far end of the porch.
"Yeah, Rowen?" I ask, stretching.
No answer.
"He’s back out, Cye," Ryo says with a grin from his seat on the steps.
Shiranui looks up from where he’s teaching Kento, Sage, and Alex how to play poker with an annoyed look on his face. "Damnit, can’t he fucking stay awake longer than a few minutes?"
"Hey!! Get off his case, he’s taking summer classes!" I snap, irritated. I’m so sick and tired of the Guardian of Wind’s attitude. He’s a nice guy, but his attitude sometimes leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth.
"Well, I don’t see him going on fucking missions that make X-Files look like Care Bears! He’s a lazy-" The green haired man snarls, glaring at me.
"C’mon, guys, let's just drop it... we’ve been jumping down everyone’s throats lately," Sage says, interrupting him as his throws down his cards.
For a few minutes there’s silence. Finally Shiranui turns back to his cards and takes his glare off from me. Until I met him, I thought the Sanada twins were the only ones who could make their blue eyes look like fire. Shiranui proved me wrong.
I sigh and lean back against the wall.
Well, right there’s the major things about having all Ronin and Guardians together. We tend to get on each other's nerves. I sincerely doubt we’ll be able to stand each other for very long if this is the type of stuff that keeps coming up.
As Ronin, we haven’t had a battle since the mess with Zanaton got cleared up. The Guardians, though, handle the oddities that come with having had gates to Dessan open for so long. Sharra and Danie keep records of what they do. Both girls are pretty good writers, and it’s an interesting -but VERY strange- read.
"Phone," Alex mutters just loud enough for everyone to hear.
I get up and wander into the house to grab Ryo’s cordless. "Hey, this’s Cye."
{"Hi, Cye,"} comes Yuli’s voice through the phone.
"Hey! How’re you!! What’s up?" I ask, heading back onto the porch.
{"I guess I’m okay... Tia and Keeley’re really annoying, though."}
I laugh. Poor Yuli, stuck in the house with a toddler and a newborn. He got along with Saen and Morgan well enough, but the two youngest were a pain.
{"It’s not funny!!"} Yuli’s voice exclaims through the phone.
"Sorry!" I snicker, trying to get control.
There’s a long silence that makes me wonder for a few minutes if the phone had gone dead. Then: {"Cye... if I told you Morgan and I saw a monster, would you say I’m lying?"}
I really don’t know what to say. Yuli always has had a habit of exaggerating things, but that’s been happening less and less as he gets older. But since we left, he’s been getting into the habit of lying and stretching the truth. We all know it’s because he wants not Mia and Anubis’s attention anymore, but ours.
My uncertainty kinda vanishes as Yuli’s voice takes on a tone that makes me doubt he’s lying. {"I-it got Mr Suzuki’s dog! It attacked it!"}
"Got it?" I ask. This was starting to worry me. Mr Suzuki’s dog was no small beast; in fact was a rather large, mean-tempered bull mastiff.
{"...It ate it,"} Yuli whispers over the line, his voice sounding small and frightened.
"Hey... shhhhhh... if you want, one of us can head on over there and check it -"
{"IT ATE IT WHOLE!!"} Yuli nearly screams into the receiver, cutting me off.
"Hey, Cye... what’s wrong?" Ryo asks, making me jump nearly through the ceiling. I hadn’t noticed that everyone had gone silent to listen to me talk; even Rowen’s awake now and staring at me.
I hold up a finger to tell him just a second. "Yuli, calm down... how long ago was this?"
There’s another long silence, then Morgan says. {"Cye? I-I-it was a-about a half hour ago..."}
"Hey darling... okay. Between you and Yuli, can you describe this thing?" I said, shoving Ryo’s sketch pad into his hands. I put my hand over the receiver and mouthed, "Don’t speak, just draw..."
With those words, I hold the phone up between Ryo and I.
About forty-five minutes later, Ryo had a picture of a rather nasty looking beast sketched out. It was part reptile, that was for sure, but beyond that... there wasn’t much left to compare it to. It had what looked like the hard carapace of a beetle, but had the features that looked like a cross between a dinosaur and Draco from Dragonheart, but that’s where all Earth-comparable things ended. I felt more doubtful as the picture took form. When Yuli and Morgan had a small argument over some details, I grew even more hesitant to believe them.
Yuli and Morgan didn’t know how many legs it had, or how it walked. They knew it smelled pretty bad. Ryo had finally gotten it more or less pinpointed down to what he said was probably "rotting meat" and that all big-time predators had that odor.
"What are you freaking about? It sounds like their normal load of bullshit to me," Shiranui says suddenly.
I have to admit, for once I chose to side with him. I mean, if I saw it in a sci-fi movie I would have been more convinced; but this was slowly sounding like a Yuli and Morgan production to make us come and rescue them from the crying baby.
Finally Ryo tells them to stay inside for the night and talk to Anubis about it.
{"But it was EVIL!! There was something dark about it!!"} Morgan protests just as Ryo hangs up on her.
We kind of forgot about it after that. We needed to get off our butts and help with things around the house.
Shiranui went back to putting down the stain-resistant hard wood floor with Ryo up where the contractors had just removed the rusted remains of the light housing in the "tower." Kento went back to trying to make the yard look more like a yard and not a hay field. Sage, Alex, and I went back to building the steps that would eventually take us down to our section of beach. Rowen went back to steaming the gross-looking wallpaper off the kitchen walls.
It wasn’t until Sharra’s forest green jeep pulled into the driveway in between Sage’s jeep and Kento’s van that anyone said anything about the picture. The ladies came in and looked a little surprised at all the work that had gotten done today.
Since it was beginning to get dark outside, we went into the kitchen because that was about the only inside area that was anywhere near done. Sage hit the lights as we came in, and the room was bathed in the bright glow from the track lights overhead.
"So what do you think?" Danie announced. "Ta-da!" She pulled out some white sheer curtains out of her bag and held them up as if they were something exciting.
I think if this had been an anime, I think almost all of us guys would have had sweatdrops running down the back of our heads.
"Ummm... no offense, but the house isn’t even ready for those..." Sage mutters, rubbing his temples.
"Where the hell are we going to use THOSE?" Kento blurted, his jaw hanging wide open. Danie gave him The Look and he promptly shut up.
"Whipped," Shiranui snickered, sitting on the counter.
Kento gave him a pleading look. "But if she does that, I won’t get to have fun tonight!"
The room went dead silent in less than a second. Even the other two couples looked stunned. Shiranui, in his normal and highly annoying fashion, crowed with laughter. I felt my neck and ears start to feel very hot.
Danie blushed. "Kento, WAY too much info!!"
Ayame gasps suddenly, dropping her bag. Most of the room didn’t notice as they continued laughing at Kento as he babbled that he did not mean what we thought he meant.
I looked over to see her staring at the beast on Ryo’s sketchbook. She had a look of complete and utter horror on her face. She lifted a shaking hand to her mouth and shook her head in denial.
Now, something you have to understand about Ayame is that she used to be one of Talpa’s best assassins. She’s also the Guardian of fire and a full-blooded Dessanin. Basically what I’m saying is that she’s seen it all. For her to be scared about something isn’t a good sign. The she looks closer at it and seems to calm down.
"What is it?" Rowen asks.
Ayame takes a deep breath and blinks her crimson-colored eyes. "For a moment I thought it was a Daraco. A ‘Sand Dragon’ from my world. But that’s not it."
"Oh," Rowen said.
"SOMEBODY’S GONNA GET LAID!!" Shiranui crowed at Kento and Danie.
"Urusai!"
"God, all of Japan is gonna know before too much longer!" Sage chuckled, his own face becoming an embarrassed red.
Shiranui was suddenly leaping away from Sharra, who was wielding the old mop that we’d used to clean the rat feces off the floor with deadly accuracy.
As those two tore out of the room and then out of the house, the rest of us cleaned up the kitchen so maybe I could get some dinner going.
Just when I was wondering what had happened, I heard the sound of something wooden being tossed in the dumpster outside, and soon Sharra wandered into the room with a satisfied smirk on her face.
I shook my head and continued to work on dinner. Maybe we can get along... the Guardians weren’t that cohesive either.
The rest of the evening went just the same way, even through dinner. Danie spent most of the evening chewing Kento out for his comment.
When I finally wandered outside to my tent, the memory of Morgan’s words hit me. "There was something dark about it."
I laid down and pulled my nice, warm sleeping bag up over my head and made ready to sleep. But unlike normal, I couldn’t drain my mind.
Saen had always told me things that were from the evil side of the Youja Realm were "dark" ...could it be?
He hadn’t been able to explain it until just recently. He said it felt like you trapped under a bitterly cold, wet blanket only it would press in on you; eroding your courage, stealing your will to fight...
Back when I was Talpa’s prisoner, right after Sekhmet captured me, I used to have nightmares of some giant beast. It would eat flesh because it liked blood, hunt because it liked a challenge. In my dreams it would chase me across my old yard back in England; and somehow I knew that it had gotten my family. I never saw the beast in my dreams... but suddenly Ryo’s drawing was seemingly to grew and change in my swell of fear.
I had another nightmare after my energy had been drained to make Dala’s sword and in creating Inferno for Ryo. In that one I’d been suspended over a pool of black liquid. Slowly a small area right under me had lightened to a light cream color. Then two slits appeared in it’s surface. They opened and two yellow eyes rolled open. To my horror, they’d searched their surrounding until they found me. They stared balefully into my own...
In real life, I’d seen neither... but what if?
Dark.
I clutched the sleeping bag with shaking, white-knuckled hands and waited for dawn to come.
I didn’t sleep that night.
Hi everyone! Well, I finally got it done! Hope you enjoy! Please send all questions, comments, or death threats to DSJ_Warlord@usa.net I'd love to hear from you!! Thanks! - Jasson
Take care and may the Ronin Force be with you! ICQ#: 31295446!