<<That's bad, isn't it.>> Lina's words were less of a question, more a statement, as she watched the rift visible in the Astral plane from a safe distance perched upon a floating hunk of rock. The rift looked nothing less than like a rip in a piece of fabric, but this fabric happened to be the very stuff of the Astral plane. And what lay between the edges of the rip was the two sides of Ryoko, blurring and melding, being pulled apart and slowly loosing themselves as they tried to hold the rift together on some primal level of their existance.
Zel swooped up, his wings beating in a steady beat as he landed beside Lina. <<Quite bad. If she keeps trying to fix the gap with herself, it's going to kill her body, then her.>> His wings folded in towards his body, one of them unconsciously curving protectively around Lina. A few seconds later, a rock hit his wing where her head had been moments before.
<<Um, Zel, how did you know that rock was coming?>>
Zel blinked in surprise, his wings tucked close to his back now. <<What rock?>>
<<The one you deflected with your wing.>>
<< . . . So that's what that was. Sorry, I wasn't paying much attention.>> He gestured towards the rift. <<Any ideas as to how we can get her out of there?>>
<<Other than diving in ourselves and pulling her out? No.>> Lina shuddered, wrapping her arms around herself. Zelgadis's face went grim, his eyes lost in thought. <<It seems that's what we'll have to do.
This was painful. Very painful. While he had no idea how he had man aged to screw the gate up this much, or heck, how he even opened the thing, he k new that he was now trapped inside of it. And so were six others.
That was the puzzling part.
He knew that the explosion and resulting rift gate had originated in his lab , but he had no idea how it had snagged what seemed to be quite a collection of othe rs, including his twin sister. And it seemed that one end of the rif t gate was being stabilized in preperation of being closed. As he and the others were dragged towards it, he quickly realized that 'painful' had been a rather mild word to describe what he felt.
It was both more and less than Lina expected. She had expected chaos, mind-numbing pain and pleasure at once, to feel pulled between worlds. That was there. What she had not expected was to feel vaguely nauseated, slightly dizzy, a faintly fuzzy feeling all over her skin, and for the work of stabilizing the rift to be so monotonous. The work itself was a mix of complex and simple. A pattern of motion, repeated over and over, gradually becoming more complex, a series of words repeated over and over again. She could feel the warmth of Zel's power not far away from her, moving as closely to the way she was as possible. And around them, being slowly drawn from the raw energy of the rift, was Ryoko.
You never told him
Never told him anything, did you
We are you
You are us
Who are you
Yes
You do love Tenchi
But your love for Tenchi stems from
a deeper love
Oh?
Then what about Washu
isn't she your mother?
Then what is she
Is she your mother
can you give her that title?
Or will you break her heart again
and deny her
Feel better now?