#*shakes fist at sky* MONGOLS!!!

[hamletthedane]

I miss her (the Baghdad House of Wisdom)

[castellankurze]

A Completely Normal Wake-up Call

More of the anime stuff.  I’m gonna stop the tagging cause it just gets posted in the relevant discord anyway.  Had to rewrite the whole damn thing because my hard drive died when it was 80% done. Most recent story regarding Shouko Kogawa and the Completely Normal Study Group, taking place in...March...2019? . . . maybe?

You’ll see.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The first few moments after their arrival were pure hell.

It was so dark that one couldn't see a hand in front of one's face, genuine pitch-blackness.  Shouko instinctively closed her hands around thin air and her daggers ignited with a snap-hiss of flame, throwing everything into view in a flickering red-orange light that, while it made things visible, did nothing to help with the mood of fear and panic.  Fortunately, Reika was quick to pick up on the idea, and the softer, steadier glow of her spear helped to further illuminate things, as did Shizuka's katana when she drew it and brought forth the blade's simmering eldritch shimmer.  

Then there was no time to think for awhile.  Erika was crumpling to the ground, unable to stand on her remaining leg, and Miyumi was clutching her shoulder and Kanako struggled to help Erika with her good arm.  Saika rushed to Erika first, trying to help Kanako staunch the bleeding and try to get her healing to patch her back up.  Shouko stood by to support...and occasionally to give quiet thanks that her daggers emitted flame.

A couple of phones came out, but there seemed to be no reception wherever they were, and so they got pressed into service as extra lights until the group could move somewhere they could call for help.  As things began to settle, Shouko forced herself to turn away from her injured friends, trying totake a look around.  They were in a cave, as far as she could tell - bare, craggy stone curving up into a wall high above them, while a yawning blackness reached off into a pair of directions.  A few stalactites hung from the ceiling like giant teeth, a handful of stalagmites reaching up likewise from the cave floor, but whatever dripping water had created the stone formation had long ago dried up - everything was gritty and dry.

A set of snapping fingers pulled Shouko's attention back towards the group to where Reika was kneeling with her younger sister's head cradled in her lap.  As she caught Shouko's gaze she stopped snapping her fingers and waggled them in her direction.  "You, knife girl.  You're the least beat-up, take the swordswoman here and find out where the hell we are."

Shouko's temper briefly flared, but she brought it under control quickly.  Reika wasn't going to leave Miyumi lying there, and her spear was needed for Saika to see what she was doing.  And she was right - they really did need to find out where Count McFuckface had thrown them off to.  So she nodded and briefly stepped close to whisper a few words into Saika's ear, prompting her to look up and smile weakly, mouthing a few words back.  Then she turned to Shizuka, who as per usual refused to meet her gaze head-on and instead had already taken a few steps towards one of the openings.

The pair walked for a few seconds down the tunnel, but found their efforts soon stymied as the cave narrowed further and further, until it was little more than a crevice that even Miyumi at her best would have struggled to squirm through.  It did serve one purpose, though, as Shizuka quietly noted feeling a breeze, and when Shouko held up one dagger she could see the flames drifting slightly towards the crack, meaning the wind was coming from the other way.  So the other way they went, passing by the others and warning them of the dead end.

Shizuka's shoes and Shouko's boots crunched on the scrabbly stone with every step, echoing hollowly back at them, and as the darkness of the cave swallowed the light from Reika's spear and the phones, the oppressive darkness and craggy rock closed in around the pair.  Shouko had to swallow a rising fear as images flashed through her head.  What if they'd ended up miles below the surface and they never found a way out?  What if the cave just branched, and branched, and branched and they never found the right passage back?

"Sh," she hissed at herself.

"Hm?" Shizuka asked, pausing briefly.

"Nothing," she said, and the pair moved on.  Shizuka, characteristically, hadn't even turned to look back at her, her face hidden behind her veil of dark hair, inky-black, as black as the cave ahead of them-

Shouko bit her lip.

It probably wasn't more than two or three minutes, really, but buried by stone and with their friends hurting, not knowing where they'd ended up, it felt like forever.  But then a breeze strong enough to stir Shouko's hair passed over them, and finally they turned a bend and spied a glimmer of light ahead of them.  Shouko could have cried, and immediately broke into a jog that carried her past Shizuka, and she heard the would-be shrine maiden quicken her own step behind her.

They emerged from the cave to see a starlit sky, a glorious full moon hanging over them.  The cave, it turned out, was nestled in a series of craggy foothills dotted with scrub brush that sloped gently downwards from a mountain range towards a forest.  Nearby was a running river that must have carved out the rent in the stone at some point in the past, but had since been diverted to a new course.

"That isn't Fuji," Shouko pointed out as she dismissed her daggers, knowing she was stating the obvious but feeling compelled to say so anyway.  Shizuka likewise sheathed her sword, leaving the pair of them bathed in the moonlight, and Shouko blinked her eyes a few times to get adjusted.

Wherever they were, it wasn't Japan.  What could be seen of the forest made that clear.  The tall trees didn't look like evergreens, or regular leafy trees, but more like massive palms, the fronds of which formed a solid canopy.  Was it a rainforest?  Were they even on Earth?  No, wait, the moon's markings looked the same, yes, they were still on the same planet.  Were they in Hawaii, or California, or Brasil somewhere?  Had Count Chucklefuck really thrown them all the way across the Pacific?

As they stood there and pondered, there came a sound from the distance, a loud, gruff snort like a donkey had started to bray and then gave up halfway through, except the donkey in this case sounded like it weighed a couple tons.  There was an answering bellow of similar tone, and then some of the trees started to shake as if something massive was shouldering through them.  Shizuka's hand went back to her blade, and Shouko's fingers closed, ready to summon her daggers back.  Had the damn Tatsu-varag followed them somehow?!  No, no, hell no, they'd killed the damn thing, killed it dead, burned it to ashes, there was no damn possibility it had survived again.

There was a crunch of branches and some kind of animal shouldered its way out of the trees.  Shouko at first thought it was some kind of rhino, a really big one, grey in the moonlight with a heavy, pebbly hide.  But the rhino had a weird crest at the back of its head, a solid one like bone, and it seemed like it had extra horns-

Shouko felt her heart jump into her throat.  There was no way that what she was seeing could be real, she was hallucinating, or imagining, or, or something.  She tried to speak and couldn't, she had to swallow and try again a couple of times just to manage a tiny, stuttering, "Sh-Shizuka...is...i-is...-is, is that..."

"A triceratops," Shizuka whispered through her lips, sounding likewise all but dumbstruck at the sight.  Ignorant of the two girls in the foothills, the creature lumbered towards the river and ducked its head to drink.  As it reached the water a rock formation suddenly shifted and edged away with a distant snort of exasperation.  It was another dinosaur, one of the ones with an armored back - Shouko's brain was too busy screaming itself hoarse to try remembering the name.

When Count Dickhead had pulled his stunt with the guns and the freaky magic clock out of nowhere, Shouko had expected a couple of things.  She'd half-expected they'd show up in the Edo period and get thrown into a battle with Nobunaga, or maybe all the way back to the Kamakura, fighting the Mongols.  Or maybe he'd pitched them into the future, somewhere they wouldn't bother him.  Then, when they'd emerged in the cave she'd had to shut down thoughts that maybe he hadn't thrown them back in time at all, but maybe imprisoned them in some kind of twilight realm.

Of all the things she'd expected, dinosaurs had not been one of them.

"Holy shit," she breathed, and even as she did so she watched a serpentine creature emerge from the canopy, bending itself about to munch at the leaves, and Shouko realized it had to be one of the long-necked kind.

Beside her, she was dimly aware of Shizuka raising her hands to her mouth.  "This," she heard her murmur, "this...this is my..."

Shouko snapped her head around, dinosaurs suddenly forgotten as she got her first good look at Shizuka's face since they'd popped out in the cave.  Her red eyes were wide, frightened, her face paler than even usual, and the hands that hovered in front of her mouth with shaking, her lip likewise trembling.  Gone was her usual steely calm, her seen-it-all-twice chill, and Shouko was taken completely aback.  "What?" she asked.

Shizuka didn't look back at her.  "This is my fault," she whispered.  "I did this.  If I hadn't defied him-"

A sudden explosion seemed to snap Shouko's chest in half and filled her with a giant, raging fire.  Without thinking about what she was doing, she put out both hands and grabbed Shizuka's blouse in her fists, turning the other girl towards her.  Shizuka didn't even fight - normally Shouko wouldn't have gotten away with so much as a finger laid upon her.  "Don't you dare," she snarled.  "Don't you dare say such a thing."  She had to struggle not to shake Shizuka wholesale.  "If you hadn't come along, we wouldn't be patching ourselves up in a cave, we'd be too busy being dead.  We scraped by on the skin of our teeth, and that was with all seven of us there!  If it had been six, there's no way we would have made it!"

Shizuka seemed not to notice Shouko's deathgrip on her shirt, staring into her eyes like she'd woken from some kind of nightmare.  "You could have run away," she pointed out.

Shouko felt the rage ebb, remembering the emergency beacon Kanako had held the whole time.  "Yeah, we could have run away," she agreed, before the fire suddenly welled back up inside her, and this time she actually took a step forward to put her face right in Shizuka's own.  "We could've run away, and you know what would've happened?  A couple nights later some set of parents somewhere would be staying up all night wondering what happened to their child.  Then a few years later some little kid would be getting told nobody could find their big sister or brother.  We could've run away and that bastard would have gone right on killing kids beneath everyone's notice while the Court and the Vanguard argued about who should do something.  But that's not going to happen, because we killed it.  We did that.  All of us.  Together.  No more nightmares.  No more kids like Kana growing up without a mom and dad.  We broke that chain.  A bunch of kids.  Because you know what we are, Shizuka?"

Those wide red eyes blinked.  She'd never seen Shizuka so nonplussed in the whole time she'd known her.  "We...are hunters of the dark-"

"No we're not!" Shouko cried out, and this time she did go so far as to give Shizuka a shake, her fists trembling with emotion.  "We're highschool seniors!  We're a class president, a star athlete, a math whiz, and a...a damn juvenile delinquent!  And you.  And Saika.  And Reika.  A bunch of girls who oughta be looking at what university they want to go to had to go out and become dragonslayers.  Dragonslayers," she emphasized.

"Dragonslayers...?" Shizuka echoed.  She dropped her gaze, the fringe of her bangs obscuring her eyes.

"Yeah.  All of us."  Shouko breathed in, breathed out, breathed in, short and sharp, as she debated with herself, and decided since she was already in this deep, she might as well.  "Shizuka, I never thought I would say a thing like this six months ago, but you're like my best friend, you know?"

Shizuka jerked back slightly, and only the hands still clenched in the material of her blouse stopped her.  "I...?" she said, eyes wide as she looked back into Shouko's face.

"Yeah," Shouko said, finally relaxing her grip a little bit.  "Saika's my girlfriend and I love the shit out of her, even if I still kind of suck at saying it, and Kanako and Erika and Miyumi are all great, but...it was you and me, all those weekends with the bokken and the wakizashi, and that fight with the onryo when we..."  Shouko took in a breath that shook in her lungs.  "When you got me to put myself out there like that."  She met Shizuka's eyes, though her vision swam as moisture clouded her gaze.  "I don't know what's gonna happen, but, I wouldn't give it up for anything.  That day back in September, I felt like...I felt like I finally found a piece of myself that had been missing the whole time, that I hadn't really been me until I brought those daggers out.  You're such a fucking edgelord, but you gave me that," she blurted, feeling liquid running down her face.

"Shouko," Shizuka said softly.

"So I don't wanna hear it," Shouko went on, her fists clenching once more.  "You hear me?  I don't wanna hear this noise about how this is your fault.  Because it's not.  It's not, you hear me?  You're not responsible for the shit people pull because they're too busy playing politics to remember what the hell they're supposed to be doing to begin with.  It's not your fault for what Co- what he did to punish you for standing up with your fucking friends.  It's not your fault when someone decides to spite you instead of standing up for you.  It's not your fault when your dad treats you like a fucking scandal and he's too goddamn stupid to stop pulling the same dumb crap over and over no matter how many times it blows up on him."

Shizuka's eyes narrowed, a shadow of her usual mien reasserting itself.  "Taliesin is not my father," she said, an edge returning to her voice.

“Huh?” Shouko blinked, stopped cold by the non-sequitur.  Why the hell was Shizuka pointing out-

Then she shook her head angrily, heat flooding into her face.  "Never mind, you know what I mean."  Shizuka started to arch an eyebrow and open her mouth to speak, and Shouko squeezed her eyes shut and ducked her head until her brow thumped into the heels of her hands.  "Don't psychoanalyze me, Shizuka, you know what I mean!"

There was a long, breathless moment, until Shouko felt a hand softly pat her hair.  "I do know what you mean," Shizuka said softly, and Shouko looked up into her face to see a familiar, barely-there smile on Shizuka's features.  "You may let go of me now."  Shouko slowly opened her hands - slowly, because her fingers were aching from being clenched for so long.  "I will take everything you've said under advisement," she said, as if Shouko had offered her a pointer in the classroom - fat chance! - and laughed softly.  "Your passion befits a Dauntless Heart indeed."

Shouko felt the blush that had been fading come rushing back, and she turned away, scratching self-consciously at her hair.  "Thanks," she mumbled.  

"We should go back and tell the others what we've seen," Shizuka said after another moment.  "They will start to worry if we do not return soon.  And they deserve to know."

"You start back.  I'll join you in a second," Shouko said, wiping at the tracks left on her face.

Shizuka nodded.  "I will walk slowly."  She paused.  "Thank you, Shouko."  Then her shoes crunched softly on the rock, receding back into the cave once more.

Left alone under the moonlight, Shouko Kogawa the 'Dauntless Heart' breathed in and out slowly, fighting to contain the tumult of emotion that had all come bursting out.  As she did so, she instinctively rifled through her jacket pockets, scowling at the tears and the now-dried saliva left from the thing that had tried to munch her during the battle - this had been her second-favorite biking jacket, dammit.

She found her pack of cigarettes intact and pulled one out, placing the butt between her lips.

Then she plucked it out again and stared at it.  Then looked down at the pack and counted, in a rush, twelve more.

She was sixty-five million years or whatever out of her own time and she had barely half a pack of cigarettes.

"Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhit," she hissed, and thrust the one she'd picked back into the pack before she followed Shizuka back into the cave.