Kim studied the neat touch-screen control panel that was set into the wall of 'Holographic Dojo 645' with no little anticipation. She had already been surprised, as she walked into the cavern, to see a robot vacuum cleaner, and a robotic floor washer-polisher suddenly stop work, bleep apologetically and scurry away to Kim knew not where through a small hatch in one wall of the cavern, but the holo-dojo control panel itself was really intriguing. Initially it had been blank, apart from a large icon in the centre of the screen with a caption that seemed to change with each flash, cycling through different languages but presumably saying the same thing in each; "Touch Here to Begin!" it said, when the English version of the caption briefly appeared, so she had done just that. Instantly the screen had changed to say 'Good Morning Kim Possible', in English. Presumably it had read her fingerprints or scanned her DNA or something in order to identify her, and of course Lo Pin had a record of her language preferences already so there was no magic involved. Still, Kim felt uncomfortable enough at the amount of data Lo Pin now held about her to make a mental note to ask Wade to retrieve and erase her records on his systems, after this tournament was over, just to be on the safe side!
After she had touched the panel again to tell the cavern's systems that she was ready to proceed, the wall panel had asked her to stand still with her arms akimbo while it scanned her and calibrated itself, and Kim had watched a trio of high resolution cameras on gimbals in the ceiling rocking back and forth in sync as they 'mapped' her. Now it was asking her about her preferred opponent. She quickly selected 'All Out Combat' on the touchscreen, pushing the slider all the way along a scale that started at 'Gentle Sparring'. Then she selected 'Any & All Styles' from a picklist that in theory allowed her to chose a 'cultural root' for her virtual opponent's fighting skills, and even an individual style. To begin with, she selected 'Weapons: None', just to get going. And then she could select a number of opponents, from one to ten; Kim wasn't being conceited when she selected ten simultaneous opponents, merely realistic, since it simply wasn't conceivable to her that any single opponent, let alone a hologram, might be a match for her...
'Touch here to begin!' flashed a large red lozenge shaped icon on the display. So she did.
Immediately, a great web of what looked like a hundred or more lasers mounted all around the cavern sprung into action, with a concerto of whirring stepper motors, and ten 3 dimensional granite-grey but slightly luminescent humanoid shapes with only very vaguely sculpted facial features were apparently painted into existence around the holo-dojo in random locations and poses, where they stood in impassive statuesque immobility. Looking again at the touch screen, it now bore a message "Bow to begin!".
'Wow! That's incredible!' thought Kim involuntarily, as she began to walk around the cavern, marvelling at the very convincingly solid looking virtual statues. It was only when she reached out to touch one of them that her hand went straight through the illusory grey humanoid, the touch screen on the wall behind her changing with a bleep to a warning lozenge saying 'Cannot begin while you occupy the same space as an opponent!'. When she pulled her hand out of the grey humanoid's torso, there was another rather friendlier beep as the "Bow to begin!" message re-appeared on the screen.
Kim decided that it was time to see whether this was all gimmickry or whether you really could train this way...
She was already nicely limber after her warm-up run up the stairs carved into the cliff face, but she did a few final stretches anyway as she positioned herself optimally in the crowded cavern, and not knowing what to expect, bowed formally towards the nearest grey statue.
Instantly, ten statues sprang to life, twin glowing points of blue light appearing where eyes would be on a human being, and formally returned her bow, before starting to move around as if they really were a gaggle of well trained assailants aiming to do her harm. Meanwhile, for her part, Kim found herself instinctively moving to close angles and reduce the number of opponents who were simultaneously able to attack her, just as she would in a real fight against ten goons. When the first grey hologram with the glowing blue eyes leapt at her with a very well executed flail kick, it looked and felt real enough, as Kim dodged, sending the grey holographic foot barely half an inch past her left ear - perhaps only the lack of breeze from its passage would have revealed that it was not a real foot - and countered with a simple yet powerful Shotokan Karate Mawashi Geri (roundhouse kick) to the midriff, which made firm contact with thin air, but looked like it hit its target square on. Her reward was the grey hologram turning red and then vanishing entirely.
And then there were nine.
If you are a student of chaos theory you will know that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rain forest can be blamed for all manner of consequential events in the world. Nevertheless, you would have been hard pressed to guess that upon Kim's next seemingly innocuous arbitrary decision would later rest the survival or extinction of almost the entire human race...
Kim decided that Shotokan Karate was working for her, despite the fact that she rarely used many pure Karate techniques when she was fighting. The option on the touch screen to handicap the holographic opponents to just one style or group of styles had given her an idea; if she stuck to just one style for an entire fight, especially a style that she rarely used, it might give the holograms a little much needed help, while enabling her to practice skills she never or rarely used in actual combat.
Two of the grey holograms appeared to chose that moment to launch a co-ordinated attack, and Kim was forced to backflip away, clonking one of them under the chin with a viciously whipping Mae Geri (front kick) as she went. Except there was no clonk, although the hologram did turn red and then evaporate.
The fight continued, and Kim was totally immersed in the experience, it felt very real, apart from the lack of actual fist or foot on flesh impact, and the holograms weren't half bad opponents. They were certainly better than 95% of hench-people she found herself engaged with, but of course they weren't good enough. Ten of them at once was certainly giving her a work-out though. Make that eight now. Or six, as she jumped between two assailants to administer a Sokumen Morote Tobi Geri, or a jumping double sidekick to their left temple and bridge of the nose respectively in old money, sending them red and then vapourising them. Then four, as she dropped under a co-ordinated three way attack to viciously leg-sweep two of the holograms so as to smash them into the ground head and face first. And funnily enough, she wasn't missing the delicious jolt of the impact of a well delivered strike half as much as she would have imagined she would.
Soon, there was one left, and Kim's curiosity about the technology temporarily overcame her natural compulsion to win. She faced off against the last holographic opponent, but rather than dodging his… it's... attacks, she tried blocking them. Proper, well executed blocks stopped the incoming blows in their tracks, but even as her body was involuntarily bracing for the brutal impact of fast moving kick onto braced inside block, there was nothing; no sickening jolt, no pain, and no bruises later either. She wondered whether she even needed to strike with power, given that she was hitting fresh air rather than a real opponent, so she tried a rapid but deliberately ineffectual waft of the hand at the grey humanoid hologram. Her hand went right through the hologram, as you'd expect, but instead of flashing red, it flickered yellow, and a sad sounding electronic 'bongle' made it very clear that if you didn't strike the holograms with proper power, then you didn't strike them at all.
Finally, she threw an arm sloppily into the way of a whipping spinning heel kick; it took every reserve of nerve and self control she had not to dodge the strike, nor to block it properly; had she thrown her arm so sloppily into the path of such a powerful kick in reality, it would undoubtedly have shattered both her radius & ulna, and probably irreparably ruined her elbow joint. Instead, Kim had to watch a foot moving at great speed right towards her head and not react as her instincts screamed, knowing that her head in reality wouldn't come flying off her shoulders under a great impact.
In fact what happened was that the holographic kick went straight through her deliberately ineffectual block as if it wasn't there, and then the statue froze at the moment when it's heel connected with her head, as a sound that sounded remarkably like a jingle serenading failure played in the cavern.
The last hologram, now glowing green and not grey, remained frozen in the air at the moment of impact for a good few seconds, as Kim waited for the next 'game' or 'round' or 'session'. to begin, or for something else to happen. Eventually, she realised that nothing much was going to happen unless she prompted it, so she sauntered back to the touchscreen control panel again, to find that it was showing a lozenge that said 'Touch for replay!'. So she did. And instantly, the green frozen hologram evaporated, to be replaced by ten luminescent grey holograms, painted into the exact same positions they had been in at the start of the round. Ten luminescent grey holograms, plus one additional humanoid figure… a blue one, which was, lack of features notwithstanding, clearly a holographic representation of herself! The three dimensional action replay started at the point where she had bowed, and she was able to watch herself in action from any and every angle, walking through the fight and around it, raising her left hand to rewind a little, her right hand to slow the action down, as per the instructions on the touch screen.
Kim found working with the replay utterly fascinating.
She well understood, to her great chagrin, that her greatest challenge as an instructor was relating to, mentoring and teaching skills to people who simply couldn't do what she could do. She had long struggled to transfer some of her skills to others without leaving them feeling confused, disheartened, alienated, patronised or frustrated. She had very early on learnt that when somebody who wanted her help with their technique asked how an 11 year old girl could punch with the speed & power of a steam hammer the way that she did, they looked at her with blank incomprehension when she explained the order in which she engaged the individual muscle groups in her arm to give the punch optimal power, and yet didn't respond well to being told that they wouldn't ever really understand, either. It was the main motivation behind her taking up cheer leading. It wasn't the physical challenge, not least because cheer leading really wasn't any kind of physical challenge for her - it was the far more terrifying prospect of trying to develop and communicate ideas for successful routines and moves that ordinary gymnastically talented and athletic teenagers could understand, learn and perform, without ending up on her own in a squad of one!
It remained a work in progress, although she felt she had come a very long way over her Middleton Mad Dogz Cheer Team career. So far she had even managed to keep Bonnie Rockwaller on the team and contributing mostly positively, despite her early clumsy mis-steps that had soured their future relationship probably irreparably. This was an achievement she sometimes considered more impressive than occasionally saving the world, despite the many angry tooth marks in her tongue.
But she had never before had the opportunity to coach somebody who did have her gift, for the obvious reason that as far as she knew, she was uniquely gifted. Which made being presented with a millimetre perfect holographic action replay of a fight she had just participated in incredible exciting for her, as Kim quickly busied herself being hyper-self-critical of her tactical positioning decisions and strike selection, with the benefit of hindsight. Although she did have to admit to herself, after rigorous slow-motion analysis, that her execution of the Shotokan techniques she had selected was utterly flawless. So flawless, indeed, that she decided to switch from solely using Shotokan Karate techniques, to exclusively using Mantis Kung Fu techniques for the next 'fight'...
Eventually she had seen and learned enough. The replay ended at the moment when the last remaining hologram had kicked her in the head with her acquiescence, and she raised both hands at that point to end replay playback and to start the next battle.
At that moment, a computer generated 'Bingle Bongle' resonated around the cavern, and a holographic tableau appeared in the centre of the cavern, with a somewhat cartoonish hologram of a figure who was obviously Lo Pin standing between one of the grey figures and the holographic blue figure. The Lo Pin hologram held up and then flourished a fan in suitably dramatic fashion, awarding the win to the grey figure, which promptly jumped for joy like an over-excited pedigree pekinese, while the blue hologram representing Kim looked dejected and trudged away, head down. Clearly it was meant to be a humorous interlude, a little homage to those chop-socky arcade games that Ron had spent so much time playing when he was a kid, while Kim watched over his shoulder. But by the time the little tableau had faded, and a glowing '1-0' had appeared in the air in mid cavern by way of a scoreboard, Kim's eyes were blazing as she irrationally regretted letting the computer win. "That's your one… there won't be another!", thought Kim, knowing how ridiculous her need to win purely for the sake of winning was, even as she was unable to help herself.
Walking back to the touch panel, she opened the options up again, and flipped the 'Weapons?' option from 'None' to 'Any'. Then she saved her change, and tapped the screen. Immediately, the stepper-motors whirred once more and ten grey figures were painted seemingly randomly into the space of the cavern, but this time each of them held a red holographic weapon of some description. There were swords, staves and knives of all types in the hologram's hands, all rendered in the same eye-catchingly contrasting colour, Kim noted as she cracked her knuckles with grim determination and strode out into the middle of the crowded cavern.
"Game on!", she said, half to the faceless grey holograms, and half to herself, as she positioned herself amongst her computer generated opponents. Closing her eyes, she took a moment to centre herself. Then, opening her eyes, she took a final look round, and bowed…
oOo
"OK, I'm definitely getting a headache now...", said Dr Director. "Let's just go back over what we think we know. We are all agreed that she would have wanted to get off that island as soon as possible, if not before, in case anybody came looking for her, yes?".
The two tired and unkempt looking scientists both nodded in the affirmative.
"So if we assume she escaped at the earliest opportunity, where could she have gone?"
"Well that's our problem, isn't it...", lamented "Digger" Hawke. " According to the Lloyds Register, there were three commercial vessels that departed Ilha de Santo Antão for off island destinations in the 36 hours after we know she was hobbling around on the beach there, but one of them was boarded and checked by the CIA because it sailed through the area where the plane went down, and the other two haven't yet made landfall, which would make them a poor choice of transport for an injured fugitive worried about staying off the grid and one jump ahead of any pursuit. Not only that, Shego's going to be the world's worst anonymous stowaway. Both ships are still in normal communications with their owners and other vessels, and neither has used any duress codewords, so it's really not very credible that she's aboard either ship. In fact, I can't see any way she could expect to get away by sea without a trace! In short, her best option would have been to have flown, if she could, to somewhere she could lose herself. Somewhere in Africa, or Europe. Even here in the Americas. The problem there is, there is an airfield on Ilha de Santo Antão with a theoretically useable runway, but it has been shut down and abandoned for a few years now, dangerous cross-winds in the approaches apparently, so there was no exit there for her! Her next best escape option would have been finding and provisioning a fishing boat or some other small vessel that she could take to West Africa without anybody reporting it missing, however unlikely that may seem. And then she'd have needed to navigate 400 miles of treacherous ocean, some of which was at the time the most intensively surveilled area of ocean in on the planet, without being spotted by the CIA. Frankly, if I was her, I wouldn't have liked the odds of that working out well for her. I wouldn't have liked the odds of staying put without being discovered much either, but unless she found an escape route we haven't yet, that was her best option. But if she is still on the island she's hiding herself very well, and I don't know what she's eating or drinking... "
"Well I suppose it's possible that she's holed up in a cave in those mountains in the interior, eating whatever small reptiles she can catch, but if she is we'd better find out, in case she reverts to type and does make an escape attempt! But I assume we all agree that the smart money says she isn't on the island, for the obvious reason that she's too much of a survivor to beat impossible odds, swim ashore, then crawl into a hole and wait for starvation and thirst to finish her off, so I have to assume that she has gone somewhere else, we just don't know how or where yet!", mused Dr Director, her brow furrowed. Then she glanced at Mike, who was giving more attention to his Global Justice laptop than he was to the discussion. "You've been very quiet, Mr Jones. What's on your mind?".
Without looking up from the screen, or unfurrowing his brow, Mike Jones rather distantly replied "Tracks. The tracks…".
"What about the tracks, Mr Jones?", Dr Director asked sharply, pulling him back into the discussion.
"Oh...sorry. I'm looking at the tracks Mr Load found for us. Shego's tracks. You remember she headed North West along the beach, until she turned inland onto solid ground, and we gave up any hope we had of tracking her by satellite…"
"You've spotted something?", prompted Dr Director, her one good eye lasering him intently.
"I… think… so. So, from where she came ashore, to where she left the beach, is about two and a half miles. She hobbled along the sand and shingle, across some fairly nasty rocks in some places, wading through the sea in others, bare feet and improvised crutch and all. But she didn't have to. She could have made her way up to the cliff top via an obvious path about half a mile along the beach, and had a much easier time of it on the cliff top. In fact there were half a dozen places where she could have left the beach, but she chose not to. And the more I've learnt about Shego, the more I understand that she does things for a reason. She might be mistaken, she might make poor decisions, but she didn't hobble all the way along a rocky foreshore for no reason, and she didn't head inland where she did for no reason either!"
"OK, that makes sense. I assume you have you drawn some more specific conclusions?"
"I think she stayed on the foreshore because she didn't want to risk being seen by anybody. We worked out earlier from the tracks that she left those tracks on a tide receding from high water, so just after midnight, but it would only have taken one person to get even a glimpse of a naked green woman hobbling around and everybody would have heard about it within a few hours, and the game would have been up. So she stayed on the foreshore where even the small chance of that happening was minimised. Which means that something must have tempted her to leave the beach when and where she did…"
"Maybe daylight? Maybe she needed to lay up before sunrise?", hazarded Professor Hawke.
"Yes, that would have been the obvious explanation, but it doesn't fly. See those footmarks there?", he asked, pointing at the screen of his laptop which was filled with Shego's footprints, some of them partially washed away by the sea; "That was the tideline when she passed that point, and that puts her 50 metres from where she left the beach at a little after 3am. So it wasn't daylight. And it wasn't the first human habitation she had passed either - she slipped past a couple of isolated houses and a small hamlet to get that far. But just at the point where she left the beach, you could see this restaurant from the beach…"
"Restaurant?", asked Dr Director.
"Yeah… it could be just a café bar, actually. Anyway, something about that place, something she could see from the water's edge, drew Shego off the beach. And then she vanished into thin air. But maybe working out what she saw could help us work out where she went...", said Mike.
"A vehicle?", hazarded 'Digger' again.
"I don't think so….", said Mike Jones. " There were several accessible vehicles visible from the foreshore that she could have boosted between where she came ashore and this restaurant. But if she wanted to stay dead, then she wouldn't have wanted to steal anything within a thousand miles of where that plane came down. Maybe she saw a truck she thought she could stow away on, but at 3am, that's hardly likely. And anyway, see, the car park is the other side of the building from where she was looking from before she changed direction, so…",
Professor Hawke suddenly jumped up and half yelled "The Dumpsters!" .
Mike Jones & Betty Director both looked at him expectantly.
"Sorry…", he said apologetically, "It may be nothing, but.. can we see the same spot from the satellite photo 24 hours earlier?".
There was a brief tapping of keys, and Mike Jones pulled up the other satellite photo, and then arranged the two images side by side.
"Bingo!", said a breathless Dr Hawke.
"Enlighten us, please…", prompted Dr Director…
Mike Jones stole 'Digger's' thunder. "They're the other way round!", he observed. The one with the black lid is on the left in the first picture, and on the right in the second… "
"I'm none the wiser!", said Dr Director testily.
"These dumpsters in the little paved alleyway at the eastern end of the building… they are visible from the foreshore. I worked for a few months driving a municipal garbage truck in Melbourne to pay the rent while I was completing my Doctorate, and anybody who knows anything about dumpsters knows that these ones are designed for mechanical handling. It means that Ilha de Santo Antão has garbage collection for commercial waste. They have those trucks that have a big hydraulic lift at the front. Well, I assume they do, otherwise they've bought a bunch of very expensive specialised dumpsters, and shipped them out to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, just for laughs! Anyway, the only reason somebody would wheel those big heavy dumpsters out of that alleyway and then wheel them back in the other way round would be if they had been emptied in the meantime. So they were emptied some time between the two pictures. And if Shego had seen that they had been wheeled out of the alleyway ready to be emptied by a dump truck, and if she had climbed inside one of them before it was emptied, then she'd have gotten a free truck ride under a pile of stinking waste to wherever trash is dumped on this island!", explained Professor Hawke.
"OK, that's an interesting theory. But can you prove it happened? And how does it help us work out where Shego went if you can?", asked Dr Director.
"Let's find out what happens to the island's garbage, and then maybe we I can answer both questions…", replied the Antipodean, sheepishly.
Dr Director sighed, in the way that only somebody resigned to being forced into doing something they really don't want to do can sigh, and hit the isolation switch to reconnect her office to the grid once more. "Oh well, I suppose I needed to speak to Mr Load again today anyway. Perhaps after he has patched me through to Kim Possible, he can tell me all about the waste disposal arrangements on Ilha de Santo Antão…."
oOo
Monkey-Fist glared angrily at the immobile green hologram, one of six remaining of the ten he had been fighting. When the mystical monkey power surged through him, ten holographic opponents were but a mere bagatelle, to be swatted contemptuously aside. The problem, frustratingly for Lord Fiske, was that the power that made him feel all but invincible when it flowed, had a nasty habit of ebbing at times. Times not unrelated to moments when he failed to resist the temptation to gloat at his own perceived invincibility, mainly. Although he didn't understand it himself, while he'd spent significantly longer basting in the magical field created by the four idols than the blonde kid had managed, it was still nowhere near long enough to ensure that his inner mystical monkey was 100% reliable; nothing seemed to send his monkey spirit scurrying away to hide behind the metaphorical mental furniture like hubris did. Which was unfortunate for poor old Monty, given that hubris was one of his defining traits.
It certainly helped that, through years of intense and diligent training and study, he was already a master of Tai Sheng Pek Kwar before he obtained the mystical monkey power. Two, three or at a push four of the translucent grey foes would stand no chance against a man of his undoubted skill and training. Sadly, six was one or two too many. The moment he had paused, after taking out the first four holographic foes with a single stunningly quick, expertly timed and placed 'Wooden Monkey Frenzied Feet of Fury' , to sneer smugly at the remaining sextet of assailants, he was entirely on his own as the monkey magic fled from the grasping fingers of his psyche. He held the horde at bay for best part of a minute, desperately defensive, frantically blocking and dodging their attacks while equally desperately trying to reconnect with his inner supernatural simian, but eventually he had had nowhere to go as three of the slightly translucent avatars with glowing blue eyes triple-teamed him. One foe went high with a spinning back-fist that he was forced to block, one simultaneously went low with a vicious leg sweep that he was able to jump over and the third, the one that MonkeyFist couldn't dodge or block, came up from underneath a split second after he had left the ground avoiding the sweep, with a powerful sidekick into his midriff; it was this last hologram that was now glowing a victorious green, frozen in time and space with an outstretched leg apparently impaling his stomach.
He was already in a less than stellar mood, after his admittedly somewhat tenuous hope of obtaining the Lotus blade once again, and defeating his nemesis once and for all, appeared to have been dashed; when his sources in Japan had told him that Stoppable was training at Yamanouchi, and that the School would be sending somebody to represent them at the tournament, it had never even occurred to him that it was remotely possible that they could conceive of sending such an unworthy young fool to represent them, mystical monkey power or no mystical monkey power. But when he was further informed before he headed for the reception centre himself that Stoppable had caught a flight to Hong Kong, he had almost convinced himself that Stoppable, and therefore probably the Lotus blade, would be at the tournament representing the school! It was quite a disappointment, upon sneaking a look at breakfast time, to discover that some great oaf he didn't recognise was representing Yamanouchi, although that did beg the question 'Where is Stoppable?'. Probably lost in Hong Kong. He had already seen that accursed Possible girl here, perhaps he had flown to Hong Kong merely to wave her off? However, he had noticed that they were rarely far apart for long, and if he was somewhere on the island, then if he was a little patient, he would soon have the forces at his disposal to locate the blond usurper, kill him and claim the Lotus Blade for himself! And Mystical Monkey Power would once again be only his!
Angrily, he dismissed the replay before it had even begun, scowled his way impatiently through the little 'Winner' tableau, then stalked over to the touch screen to tell it to start another round. He had already stomped back to the middle of the cavern, and adopted a Tall Monkey Waits For Angry Chimpanzees stance, before a smidgin of good sense overcame him, and he paused, sat down cross legged to meditate and attempted to clear his clouded mind.
Ten minutes later, he opened his eyes, which sparkled momentarily with the faintest hint of blue, and then sprang back into the Tall Monkey Waits For Angry Chimpanzees stance, before bowing formally. Moments later, with a screech that sounded almost other-worldly, he unleashed Mystical Monkey Power once more upon the holographic phalanx that was ranged against him. This time, he didn't pause to gloat or sneer mid-fight, partly because the memory of his recent ignominious defeat was too fresh, but mainly because there wasn't time, as within a dozen seconds the last holographic opponent was turning red and then, instead of blinking out like the other nine, exploding into thousands of little red cubes that flew to all corners of the cavern, as an electronic fanfare serenaded his victory.
Unfortunately for his overall score, though, the little holographic tableau that followed MonkeyFist dismissing the chance to watch a replay of the round, the one where a holographic Lo Pin awarded his triumphant avatar the victory over the dejected grey opponent, proved too much for any faint vestige of humility that might have been restraining him, and as he cackled smugly once again at his own peerless skill, his inner magical simian sloped off into the spiritual undergrowth, probably out of sheer embarrassment as much as anything else.
The next round... wasn't going to turn out quite so well for him.
oOo
Shego finished the last sequence of her modified Wing Chun dummy form in absolute agony, pain as horrendous as any she had ever endured, made worse because this time it was deliberate, clinical and self inflicted, without the benefit of the flood of adrenaline that accompanied real jeopardy; instead she was forced to endure, tears stinging her eyes, teeth clenched, head swimming occasionally, stomach occasionally threatening to revolt. Her pain threshold was high, but even so, excruciating did not remotely cover it, and all without the benefit of any pain relief; not only did her effective immunity to most pharmaceuticals prevent her getting buzzed on biblical quantities of booze, but she couldn't even take anything to 'take the edge off' before doing something agonising like re-breaking and re-setting a bone that had broken and then healed imperfectly, or indeed something like mashing a badly scarred muscle to hamburger so that it could re-heal from scratch in a carefully controlled therapeutic environment, without the scar tissue.
Twenty five times she had run through the entire dummy form, and during each run through she had sickeningly slammed the most severely injured and already painful parts of her recently terribly abused body into the unyielding stainless steel training form numerous times, with as much force as she could muster. The result was that the soft tissue of her left thigh, and of her right bicep, were now mulshed to an agonising pulp, the flesh an angrily throbbing black and purple mess rather than the pale green it would normally be, the muscle all but obliterated. However, that was the point of the exercise; she had effectively pulped all the soft tissue of one thigh and one upper arm, but more importantly from the perspective of her recovery, she had pulped the troublesome scar tissue that was previously a source of continual pain, restricted mobility and risk of a catastrophic muscle re-tear!
Stiffly, painfully, she hobbled to the centre of the terrace, her left leg threatening to collapse at every limping step, her right arm hanging almost like a limp noodle. And then, after a deep breath, she began the rehabilitation process. A slow, graceful, Tai Chi form. Her eyes still glistened behind the White Ninja's mask, and her teeth were still gritted against almost unbearable pain, but as she began the smooth, gentle, continuously sinuous movement of the first form, if you could have seen behind the mask, you would have seen the beginnings of the ghost of a smile forming.
oOo
Ron awoke with a start after his impromptu post-breakfast nap. He was laying spread-eagled atop the large, comfortable bed, wearing only a pair of the incredible shrinking black 'pyjama trousers', and despite blazing sun outside, signified by the eye-searingly bright patches on the wall, the trickling cooling water running through the suite seemed to be doing its work well; he was warm but not sweltering. Having said that, if he had been in the bed rather than on top of it, he suspected he might have been rather less comfortable. He was suddenly conscious that he might well be being watched, an uncomfortable feeling whenever he allowed himself to think about it. Uncomfortable, and for what he had planned later on, quite... problematic! It was a problem he hadn't yet come up with any solution for, either.
He stretched lazily, yawned expressively, and then flipped out of bed athletically from prone, landing nimbly alongside the bed on the balls of his feet in a tall monkey stance, but he instantly slouched, self consciously scratching his nuts in an 'I've just woken up and had an urge to scratch my nuts, then I realised that I was on teevee and that scratching my nuts would look gross and uncouth to the security guy watching, but then I further realised I wanted to maintain my cover and that I needed to pretend that I definitely didn't know I was on teevee and so I decided to make myself scratch my nuts anyway in an entirely nat-ur-al stylee' kind of way.
He hoped fervently that his faux-naturalistic nut-scratching was convincing, as he sauntered towards the door of the bug & camera-free bathroom. When he opened the door, he was assailed by a hot, humid wall that hit him in the face like a warm, wet flannel. He quickly stepped beyond the portal and closed it behind him.
It was only the acutely tuned ears of a true Monkey Master that could detect, amongst the other sounds of the bathroom of suite 137 (and beyond it the many sounds of Lo Pin's island and its temporary inhabitants), the sound of a Naked Mole Rat snoring contentedly, concealed in his little nest up on the shelf. Indeed it was only when Ron drained his lizard with much watery splashing in the bowl, and then flushed, that Rufus awoke, and peered out over the side of his nest with a mixture of caution and indignation. He had been sleeping off a truly epic breakfast, before his slumber had been disturbed, courtesy of the Ron Stoppable doggie bag delivery express, and hadn't really appreciated the interruption, although he was pleased to see that it was Ron rather than anybody else using the facilities.
"Hi, little buddy!", said Ron, cheerily, as he washed his hands at the sink under Rufus' high perch. "Are you OK with being left on your own here while I go and show my face for a bit? I don't think I can spend the entire day in bed, or hiding out in the bathroom, more's the pity!", he lamented.
"No problem!", chittered Rufus happily, "I can!". The little pink rodent grinned from ear to ear, to indicate that he was entirely happy to finish sleeping off breakfast. A momentary frown crossed his little pink features; "Bring me lunch?", he enquired hopefully.
Ron grinned. "Of course! But I'm glad one of us can spend the entire day sleeping, I think I'm going to have to take you with me tonight…", said Ron, his tone slightly more downbeat.
"Why?", asked Rufus, apparently a little incredulous.
"Because I'm going to be 'in the bathroom' for an awfully long time tonight, and not on camera in bed, and if they send some of those security guards to investigate, especially if things kick off wherever I am, then I don't want them finding you. These are not very nice people, Rufus little buddy, and I shudder to think what might happen to you if they found you and realised that I wasn't here. I think I'm going to have to run a serious risk of discovery tonight to find out what I need to know, and I'm probably going to have to improvise a lot if I do get discovered. But I'm a lot more confident about protecting you if you are with me than if I leave you here!" he explained, unhappily. " I just hope I don't trip over whatever Kim is working on in the process. Or put her in any danger!", he added even more unhappily.
"Danger?", asked Rufus, surprised.
"Yes. If I go out on the prowl tonight in this body, then I'm definitely busted, because they'll know exactly who is sneaking around, one look at me will tell them that, I'm the only person this size & shape on the island. And I won't be in bed, which will be something of a double giveaway. If I go out 'as myself', then if they realise that Saru Chonoryouko has gone missing from his room, that will suggest that there is some connection between the spy creeping around the island and the representative of the Yamanouchi school, and with Lo Pin's sources, that would very quickly point him straight to me . And that in turn would point him straight to Kim. Perhaps I should try to find a way to warn her?", worried Ron out loud.
"Oh…", chittered a suddenly deeply concerned Rufus, whose brow immediately furrowed in deep thought.
Rufus wasn't concerned for Ron's personal safety . Not after what he had seen of Ron training at Yamanouchi, but especially not after what had happened in Hong Kong. Rather he was concerned for his sanity. The episode at the slum in the quarry had been deeply, deeply shocking for Rufus. It wasn't that he was squeamish, in similar circumstances he was sure he would have done the same thing given the opportunity, irrespective of mystical monkey power; a naked mole rat defending its life, its burrow or its queen would go to the most brutal lengths to prevail, without a moment's hesitation, but Ron wasn't a naked mole rat, and humans, or at least some humans, or at least his best friend Ron, certainly couldn't walk away unscathed from utter carnage feeling like it was a job well done under any circumstances, nor as Rufus had observed at first hand, could Ron dodge crippling feelings of guilt just because there hadn't been any alternative less brutal path to his own survival. Ron had been recruited to this task by Yamanouchi as an undercover spy, not as a one man army; the Ron Stoppable Rufus knew and loved like a colony mate would never have signed up for a mission if he had known that it would entail him unleashing the kind of violence that made the Terminator look like the Easter bunny. If he was discovered tonight or tomorrow, Rufus was terribly afraid that the result would be another charnel house, with Ron standing atop another growing pile of dismembered corpses. If he found himself in Ron's place, Rufus knew he could treat that potential outcome with equanimity, but he wasn't in Ron's place. Could Ron cope with that? Could Ron cope with Kim's reaction to seeing Ron do that? It would be awful enough all round when Ron had to explain what had happened in Hong Kong to Kim, without her seeing a similar gore-fest first hand as it happened. And if the mayhem actually consumed Kim somehow, if she was killed or maimed in the unstoppable meat-grinder of mystical monkey-power unleashed, Ron would surely take his own life, so unbearable would the mental anguish be for him. Or perhaps, turn to the dark side, and unleash a terrible revenge on Yamanouchi; Zorpox had to be in there somewhere, and Zorpox with full-force mystical monkey power might just be the literal end of the world!
Actually, Rufus had no idea what would happen if Ron's spying mission turned into another blood-soaked clusterfuck, but he was pretty sure that it would be nothing good. Because it could be nothing good. The terrifying thing was, after Hong Kong, he wasn't sure that he could imagine exactly how bad it might get!
"You need to be two places at same time!", chittered Rufus, thoughtfully. "But if you leave this here…", he said, indicating the tiny backpack device that he had earlier used to sweep the suite for bugs, but which could also be used to auto-hack the digital security cameras to rebroadcast a particular image rather than what was actually in front of their CCD detectors at any given moment, "...then you'll defintely be spotted!".
Rufus was right, although he was stating the blindingly obvious; the little device could be used to fool the spy cameras in the suite by rebroadcasting a loop of Ron in bed for as long as he was absent, although if the moon went behind a cloud in real life but not in the looped footage, an alert camera operator might spot the discrepancy and notice that something was up. However, Lo Pin's island was much more comprehensively covered in security cameras and sensors than either of them had hoped it would be, with the result that even getting to the lower levels without using the device would be almost impossible without appearing on camera, or tripping a laser grid, or an Infra-Red detector, or a motion sensor, and once he was spotted, of course all hell would break loose. In the public areas it might be possible to map the cameras and detectors during the day, so at least one knew what one was trying to avoid, but the moment Ron went into the dark underbelly of Lo Pin's island, it was quite likely that the first he'd know about his being detected without the protection of the device would be when a couple of dozen crossbow-toting Dragon-Fist guards came for him.
How to square this circle?
"You need decoy…", Rufus chittered, thinking about what it would take to make a lifelike full-size mannequin that could be left in bed to fool the cameras. How would they get the raw materials into the bathroom here where they could work? That would be impossible, he realised. Could he turn the toilet paper and hand towels around him into a convincing enough life-size papier mache model of Toshimiru?
No, he realised, deflated. He might just be able to run to a model of Ron, with the torso and limbs bulked out under the covers using all of his spare clothes and all of the bathroom linen, although he doubted it would fool anybody who looked at it critically even on a CCTV screen; Toshimiru was just far too damned big. If only somebody else could wear the cuff… of…. Sosumiha…
"Decoy! Decoy!", chittered Rufus excitedly!
"Huh?" said Ron, confused.
Rufus pointed to himself and said "Decoy!" again, then pointed at Ron's wrist, before miming donning a heavy belt, then expanding like a balloon.
Ron suddenly understood what Rufus was suggesting. "Woah, Rufus, no way little buddy, we've no idea what would happen if you tried the cuff on. No idea at all. You could end up some hideous half man half naked mole rat with all your insides on the outside or something. It could kill you!"
Rufus frowned. "My life, my choice!", he chittered with some irritation. "Alternative? Lotus blade always seem hungry for more blood….".
Ron was brought up short by the last comment. "Low blow, Rufus. I'd hate for anything bad to happen to you."
"I'd hate for anything bad to happen to you. To me. To Kim. To everybody else on island. Worth a try!", Rufus shot back quickly.
Rufus had him, he knew. It was the answer. With a living, breathing Toshimiru in his suite, in his bed, then even if Ron was spotted as he skulked in the shadows of the bowels of Lo Pin's island, he only had to make his escape from the immediate contact and there was nothing to link him to Saru Chonoryouko, Yamanouchi, Kim or anyone else. He could effectively vanish into thin air leaving nobody any the wiser as to his identity, without having to kill anybody. Against that, the risk that donning the cuff would turn Rufus into a giant mole-rat burger was quite a small one. At least, he hoped it was; his knowledge of multiple-millenia old magic was limited to say the least. He sighed, a sigh heavy with resignation. Then, with a pop and an inrush of air, he was Ron again, as the heavy cuff fell from his wrist into his cupped hand, the incredible stretch pyjama pants plummeting under gravity to mid-butt level before the elastic fabric found flesh again with a slightly painful sounding slap.
Rufus smirked. Then smirked again when a slightly pouting Ron offered him the cuff, pointing instead towards the middle of the bathroom floor. "Oh... yes…", said Ron, who had clearly not thought through the implications of 290lb of chiselled muscle materialising on the small shelf above the sink; he helped Rufus down to the floor, and then handed him the cuff, before backing up against the door to the bedroom to give Rufus the room to 'grow into'.
The little pink rodent looked around warily, shuffling himself equidistant from the bathroom fittings to give himself maximum clearance from some kind of plumbing related injury, and then he hefted the heavy cuff up around his midriff in his two tiny pink paws, looked at Ron and chittered "Here goes nothing!". Then he slammed the cuff closed.
Ron's inner monkey, still boosted by the cuff, felt the giant explosion of magical energy that occurred in the middle of the bathroom floor, while Ron himself felt the massive change in air pressure that accompanied it, as a three inch rodent instantaneously expanded to fill a volume several orders of magnitude larger. The pop left his ears ringing, and rattled the door in its frame, but there standing in front of him, grinning from ear to ear and chortling in amazement as he carefully studied his enormous hands both front and back then ran them slowly over his massive torso, was a butt naked Toshimiru, in the flesh!
"Well what do you know, little buddy? It worked! It actually worked!", said an excited Ron, careful to keep his voice down nonetheless such was his paranoia that the bugs in the bedroom might pick something up through the door or wall.
Rufus grinned happily and mouthed something that could have been "Wow!". Except that absolutely no sound came out. Rufus looked confused, and mouthed something that might have been "Hello?". Then he frowned and looked like he was trying to shout something. Then he successfully chortled, hummed, whistled tunelessly at the second attempt, and finally, after mouthing something else that Ron couldn't decipher, he looked Ron in the eye and mouthed something that he definitely could decipher.
"Awww… Fuck!"
oOo
The shaman, Xi Xe, sighed, as the brooding warrior stomped away. People had no appreciation of the amount of effort that went into the enchantments behind a magical project this complex. Toshimiru was clearly increasingly impatient, and recently had started muttering more loudly and pointedly about estimates and delivery dates and blown deadlines, but he was here, and he was doing his best, wasn't he?
Not that he had had much choice.
His life had taken a very odd turn about a decade and a half ago. He had learnt everything he had known about magick at his supposed father's side. Mostly that there was no such thing, save what you could convince the gullible of to help you separate them from their goods and gold. Well, 'Shaman Shu' always said he was his father, but he had many reasons to be sceptical as he got older. Many reasons, but never enough reason. As a result, he criss-crossed Northern China from village to village until he was about 15 or 16 years old , and for as long as he could remember he had walked ahead of the cart, leading the horses, while 'Shaman Shu' rode aboard the cart. When they stopped, it was his job to make camp, start a fire & cook food, while 'Shaman Shu' did 'important spellcasting' in the back of the cart. By the time he was a teenager he had just started to figure out that he was as much a mark as all the people 'Shaman Shu' conned on his travels, but much stupider because he had fallen for it for hundreds of times longer. Nevertheless, he was still there, because until he figured it all out, what the hell else was he going to do?
And then karma caught up with 'Shaman Shu', when a squad of soldiers protecting a tax collector arrived in a village that he never been back to discover the name of from one direction as he and Xi Xe arrived from the other. This alone wouldn't have been any problem, had the county magistrate not been escorting the tax collector, and the wife of the district chief of police not been a previous 'beneficiary' of Shaman Shu's magical flim-flam some years before. Suddenly Xi Xe was running for his very life, chased across the countryside by foot-soldiers and angry peasant farmers , having seen Shaman Shu surrounded and being beaten by soldiers and peasants alike, prior surely to an inevitable trip to the executioners block.
That should and almost certainly would have marked his retirement from any and every involvement in anything to do with 'magic'. It might well have marked the enforced end of his involvement in being alive, given the fact that his pursuers weren't about to give up, and that the soldiers tasked to bring him back to face justice were armed with crossbows with which they only had to be lucky once to end the chase. However, fate lent a hand as he ran over a crest and promptly fell off the edge of the world, legs flailing in space. Before he had had time to realise what had just happened, he had found himself tumbling down an extremely steep, rough, scree slope, like a boulder gathering pace, soon being chased by rocks and stones as they were dislodged by his passage until there was a full scale landslide all around him. Then, just as he thought the end was nigh, he had fallen though a hole into blackness.
Some time later he had awoken, head throbbing, to find himself laying on a stone floor in a dark hole, illuminated only by a shaft of sunlight coming from a jagged patch of blue sky above him. And sitting cross legged, opposite him, was… a monkey. Not that he exactly knew what a monkey was at the time. In any case, this monkey had glowing golden eyes that matched the golden armour he was wearing, he also carried a staff over his shoulder ringed by golden bands. He was also more generally luminescing, and grinning cheerfully at him.
When Xen Xi moved, the glowing monkey spoke, in a very impressive, very powerful, very commanding tone of voice; "Ah, Xen Xi, what brings you to my altar?".
"Wh… who are you?", asked Xen Xi timidly.
The monkey put on a great show of looking visibly shocked; "You don't know? You are the first person to set foot in this temple since it was buried by an earthquake almost 700 years ago, you pay your respects at my altar by landing on it head first from a great height, and you don't even know who I am? Perhaps I should call those soldiers who were chasing you and ask them if they know who I am…".
"I know you are a trickster clothed in an animal pelt, and more than that I need never know. Run tell your tales, I say it's a matter of luck which of us ends up on the executioners block, if not both of us. Now leave me be, I have a headache that you are making worse…", Xen Xi had contemptuously responded.
The monkey man had laughed, seemingly delighted. "I should really have introduced myself, shouldn't I. How rude of me. My name is Sun Wukong, but you may also know me as the Handsome Monkey King, or the Great Sage Equal of Heaven, or perhaps most relevantly, given that you have just now desecrated my altar by cracking the stone with your head and then bleeding all over it, the Buddha of Victorious Battles. Before I left the earthly realm behind I was already invulnerable and immortal, so I'd not be hugely afraid of an executioner blunting his axe on my neck, even were I still flesh and blood. And I've defeated all the armies of heaven in battle single handed, so I think half a dozen of Lord Hung Tai's militia might have a little trouble arresting me. And anyway, you… are a fine one to be calling anybody a trickster, Xen Xi. Why, the very rags on your back were bought with the sweat of the honestly gullible, be they desperate or merely greedy. What say you to that?"
"My father is a trickster, not I!", Xen Xi had said heatedly, admitting explicitly to himself as well as the monkey man what he had known for a few years by unspoken implication for the first time.
"He's no more your father than I am. He bartered you as a small child in exchange for some herbs that he said would cure your father's cancer and a scroll that would save your mother and sisters from starvation. Of course, your father died of his cancer and your mother and your siblings did all starve to death. When she gave you up to 'Shaman Shu', your mother was desperate enough to try anything, even though in her heart she knew he was a fraud, but she was right when she calculated that with him you had a chance to live, with her you would surely die!", the monkey man with the golden glowing eyes had replied, the golden eyes twinkling.
"That's not true, trickster!", Xen Xi had exclaimed, angrily.
"Is it not?", had asked an amused monkey man. "Let me bestow upon you the gift of second sight and divination, that you might better be able to answer that question and understand the world you live in! In fact, since you insist that you are no trickster, and that Shaman Shu is your father, from whom you are about, in two days time after his sudden but not unexpected death , to inherit the family trade, the only thing I can do is give you the magic your 'father' has long claimed to possess so that you can ply your trade honestly! "
There had been a blinding flash of white light, and then Xen Xi had found himself waking up again on the stone floor of the dark hole, head throbbing to an evil beat, this time looking at moonlight above him. Confusingly, though, there had been rubble and debris on top of him that suggested that he had been laying there immobile since he landed, when he had felt sure that he had in fact sat up earlier to chat to the monkey man. He immediately assumed it had all been a vivid hallucination. He had been desperately hungry and thirsty, though, so he had wasted no time in rolling over to stand up… and promptly discovered that rather than laying on a stone floor, he was actually laying atop a raised altar. Meaning the glowing monkey man he had obviously imagined had been sitting three feet off the ground.
Fortunately he had landed on his feet rather than his head.
Immediately he had realised something shocking; the moon was illuminating the side of the altar he had just rolled off the edge of, into which was carved a great deal of adulatory text about the Buddha of Victorious Battles, and Xen Xi could read it; hitherto he had been entirely illiterate, never having been to school nor even having seen much of the written word. He realised now in a flash that the 'magical scrolls' that 'Shaman Shu' had sold to the ignorant and gullible had contained nothing more than random squiggles and pen strokes, presumably because Shaman Shu had also been entirely illiterate. And yet somehow, he, Xen Xi, could now read, and write, numerous languages.
He had emerged from the hole in the ground he had fallen through to discover that three days had passed while he lay unconscious on Sun Wukong's altar in the abandoned temple ruin. As he had experimented with strange techniques and ideas that had almost immediately popped into his oft throbbing head, like scrying and divination, he had discovered that 'Shaman Shu' had met an abbreviated end before Xen Xi had even woken up, and he had also realised very quickly that his entire understanding of the world & what was real or not real lay in pieces . Soon his experiments in scrying had told him that what Sun Wukong had said about his family, and how he came to be dogsbody to a bunko artist, had been entirely true. They had also told him that he needed to put distance between himself and the regional authorities hereabouts that regarded him as a criminal if he wasn't to suffer the same fate. Thus it was that he had headed southwards, initially aiming for somewhere that he was sure 'Shaman Shu' had never preyed upon during the Xen Xi's time as his dogsbody.
The next few years revealed a frustrating truth to him; it was far easier for a charlatan with a polished line of flim-flam, a wagon load of props and no shame to sell fake 'magick' to the gullible and desperate than it was for an itinerant tramp to sell real magic to anybody. He therefore eeked out an existence for the next few years, selling divinations to those wishing to have decisions they had already taken validated, curing the occasional pestilence, ending the odd drought and stopping the odd flood. Mostly he lived hand to mouth, but he discovered another problem; when people did start to believe the evidence of their own eyes, word always spread, and before long somebody felt threatened. Whether it was the local Taoist abbott, the local civil authorities or the local gangster kingpin, any fleeting measure of success was always followed by another knife-edge escape from some terrible fate or other, in just the clothes he stood up in. Thus it was that he had found himself, a decade and a half or so after 'Shaman Wu' lost his head, plying his own small scale mystical trade in Manchuria, casting a few spells to pay for food and lodging, never giving the right name, always moving on from village to village in a couple of days.
And then the headaches had started. Not that they had ever really gone away entirely after he had cracked his head on that stone altar, but now they had got fierce. Really fierce; like somebody had put a giant vice round his head and squeezed so hard he thought his head might explode.
After three days of this agony, during which he hadn't slept and had started wishing for the sweet release of death, the pain suddenly receded and he was soon sleeping like a baby on a hammock slung between two trees in a secluded grove. Whereupon he received a nocturnal visitation from an old acquaintance he hadn't seen for 15 years; The Monkey King, golden armour and all. This time, Xen Xi recognised him and knew all about him. Indeed, several times he had cursed the golden eyed simian, on those rare occasions when he decided that the conversation he had had in the ruined temple was real rather than a hallucination, for giving him some of his extensive knowledge of magic without giving him any of his martial prowess to stand alongside it, something that bothered him most when he was running for his life from people trying to do him harm, as happened all too often. Sun Wukong chided him with a smile for his alternating lack of faith and lack of gratitude. And then he asked Xen Xi about the headaches. Of course Xen Xi asked the annoying simian what he knew about it, and with a twinkle, Sun Wukong replied that he knew how to make them stop. Left unspoken was the implication that he had started them in the first place.
It had turned out, at least the way Sun Wukong explained it, that the headaches would stop for good, if Xen Xi merely enchanted 4 stone idols to contain some aspects of Sun Wu Kong's essence and implant them into those who came near them, since the Monkey King had become bored with the affairs of heaven and looked for a way of influencing affairs on earth to make them more amusing for him now that he was no longer able to participate directly himself, what with the whole 'ascended to Buddhahood' thing. When Xen Xi angrily protested that enchanting 4 idols with so much complex magick would take months, during which time he would surely starve or be driven away from the site of his work, Sun Wukong had smirked, pulled a handful of whiskers from his luxuriant sideburns, blown on them theatrically and thrown them into the ether. The next thing Xen Xi knew he was being shaken awake in his hammock, two days after he had gone to sleep in it, by a nondescript young man who responded to the obvious question by informing Xen Xi that he had been sent to help the shaman with his onerous task.
Within a couple of days, there were 36 of them. More interestingly, when Xen Xi examined their auras and divined their origin, all of them had existed on earth for no more than a couple of days, and none of them had what you could describe as a human essence; they were constructs, magical avatars, each a single aspect of Sun Wukong's own essence. They weren't, strictly, alive at all, even though they were apparently living and breathing human beings. Xen Xi knew of the legend, knew that Sun Wukong could according to the ancient tales make an army of magical avatars to do his bidding from the hairs that grew on his body. Were these they?
In no time at all, Xen Xi put them to work. Most of the avatars seemed to be skilled martial artists, although they seemed to his inexpert eye to have a range of different fighting styles, and many of those he tasked to defend him as he worked on the most ambitious and complex spells and magicks he had ever constructed. Four of them seemed like inveterate drunkards, never without gallons of rice wine that they had acquired from Xen Xi knew not where, but yet they had seemed the fiercest fighters of them all, judging by the lumps they spent all day knocking out of each other. Four of them had told him that they were best placed to forage for him, and indeed when he tasked them to bring him various magical components he required for his spell casting or just to find provisions to feed and water the small army he had overnight acquired, they came through in spades. Typically, three of them would forage diligently and locally, each protected by a bodyguard, while the fourth stunned Xen Xi by summoning a cloud down from the sky and flying off aboard it to gather the rarest components he needed from places far beyond the horizon, and there were four who were apparently highly skilled troubadours, who earned money for the project working the local villages as entertainers, playing music, and the fool. When the need for expensive components grew greater, he sent some of his fighters to work as mercenaries for local warlords and they returned with armfuls of gold and coins with which almost anything that was purchasable could be obtained, from both near and far. Of course in due course his antics had come to the attention of people who decided he was a threat to them and needed to be dealt with, but his army of expert warriors had kept the barbarians from the gate very effectively, and the final four members of his magical army, two men and two women, had performed services of a more... personal nature, making Xen Xi very very happy, and teaching him things about the arts of love that he would never have learnt otherwise, but also earning him more gold and coin for his project than even the most richly rewarded of his mercenaries ever managed.
For months, Xen Xi had worked diligently putting together a vast toolbox of spells and enchantments, which he could use in turn to make more complex spells and enchantments, and then with those make more complex enchantments still. His resolve to complete this great work had been stiffened, whenever he had allowed himself to think about abandoning it, by the sudden return of the crushing headache that had led him to start the project in the first place, but as he neared the eventual completion of his task, he had been forced to face up to the fact he had been aware of since he had initially sketched out the high level design for this magical tour de force, that his army of thirty six magical avatars, aspects of Sun Wukong himself, were far more than assistants, they were vital components of the final spell, and that each of the four stone idols he had to construct would contain the nine distinct magical essences, currently contained within the magical avatars. He had known it, and he had been certain that the avatars themselves knew it, but the prospect had never seemed to concern them in the slightest; they seemed to view it as their purpose and destiny.
Come the day, therefore, when he had fired up the magical sculpting table he had constructed, which had in turn begun to magically sculpt the four differently coloured jade monkey idols while he had begun casting pre-prepared spell after pre-prepared spell, thirty six magical avatars queued patiently to await the end of their physical existence, although not before they had slain a company of the local Lord's militia men that had attempted to disrupt proceedings. As the spell casting proceeded, in sequence, each avatar had evaporated into a ball of glowing blue energy, and nine of them had been absorbed into each monkey idol.
In no time at all, Xen Xi had been alone again with the smoking wreckage of his magical sculpting table and a flock of buzzards feasting on the recently slain corpses of the militia men. Then within the hour, he had been running for his life with just the clothes on his back and four monkey idols barely cool enough to carry, each wrapped protectively in the discarded clothing of Sun Wukong's 36 avatars and slung over his shoulders in sacks.
Sun Wukong had rather unfairly left it to him to decide what to do with the four idols. He had hoped that having directed him to spend months of his life making these powerful artefacts, Sun Wukong would have popped back and told him why, and who to give the power to. The one thing he would have liked to have done, which was to absorb the power they radiated himself, wasn't an option; as the spell caster who had made them, he was immune to their effect. Failing that, and knowing that whenever he had even fleetingly thought about destroying the idols, the crushing headache returned, he had been faced with a horrible dilemma. He had known he would never be safe, and always be looking over his shoulder, and he had known that for most of the people who were after him, the power of the idols would have been used first to kill him more efficiently, and then to do great evil. Since even thoughts of spreading the idols to the four winds and hiding them had brought on the blinding head pain again, he had known he needed to find somebody to pass the idols on to who wouldn't have immediately used the power they contained to eviscerate him and then establish a new brutal all-powerful dynasty to rule the world.
The dilemma had resolved itself, three months later. He had been running headlong down a ravine, being chased by a mob of cutthroats and thieves who wanted to steal the apparently valuable jade idols, when he had encountered a group of warrior pilgrims dressed in the strange garb of a foreign land. Rather than setting upon him themselves and attempting to rob him, they had unquestioningly waded into the pursuing thugs, suffering some injuries in the process of killing most and driving off the remainder. Xen Xi was by now entirely unsurprised that he could speak their strange alien tongue with perfect fluency and was thus able to thank them for selflessly saving him, and then refusing any payment or reward; when their leader, Toshimiru, had told him that they were questing for something called mystical monkey power that he had first heard about in a dream, and that they would be taking it back to Japan with them when they found it, Xen Xi had been ecstatic; he could offload the jade idols without getting a headache, to somebody who had just saved his life and probably wouldn't immediately kill him, and then the guy with the monkey idols would be heading off across the ocean never to return, so he wasted no time in introducing the pilgrims to the jade sculptures, sharing mystical monkey power with all of them. He had barely bundled up the monkey idols after exposing the pilgrims to their incredible power and witnessing the flow of the essence of nine aspects of Sun Wukong into each of them, before the robbers who had escaped from the fight earlier had came back for a return fixture, this time bringing all their friends. Xen Xi had gotten to see mystical monkey power in action up close and personal, and had immediately decided that he was quite glad it would be on the opposite side of an ocean from him. He had also felt doubly personally indebted to Toshimiru, who had saved his life yet again. And, much as he wanted to see the back of the four idols and the foreign pilgrims, he realised that without them sticking around for a while to protect him he would probably be dead very very soon, because the few surviving bandits seemed to have assumed that Toshimiru & his mystical monkey powered disciples all worked for Xen Xi, which meant that pretty soon so had everybody else, and that had made him a prime target for everybody within 100 miles who could raise a body of fighting men, all at once.
Xen Xi had decided that he could combine rewarding Toshimiru for saving his life yet again, with a cunning ruse that would keep his force of supernaturally skilled bodyguards around him for long enough to ensure that they could finished off all the people trying to kill him, which - having seen the way Toshimiru's mystical monkey warriors fought, he had been certain they would. He had offered to forge Toshimiru a magically powered indestructible shape-shifting sword of incomparable power, an offer Toshimiru had accepted readily and gratefully. Only then had Xen Xi started to try and work out how on earth he could possibly deliver on such an ambitious promise.
Days had turned slowly into weeks, as Xen Xi had researched and designed and drawn magical architecture diagrams and cast spell after spell to build up libraries of the most complex enchantments yet known to man or even magically gifted non-human being. Every day the hilltop he was working on had crackled and fizzed with powerful magic, and at least every other evening the funeral pyres had burned tall and bright as the latest crop of attackers were disposed of before the smell of rotting flesh became unbearable. The magicks he would need to forge the sword he had decided to call The Lotus Blade, after the key component of one of the most complicated spells in the library of enchantments that he would later use during its forging, were coming together nicely, although there was precious little to show for his efforts yet beyond a sulferous smell, a lot of scorch marks, a handful of scrolls and several glowing talismans that contained stored spell energy awaiting release. However, his theory that eventually the magically enhanced pilgrims would exhaust the supply of bandits, militia men, mercenaries and soldiers attacking them was proving to be complete bunkum.
By the time he had fired up the magically powered forge in which the Lotus Blade would be cast, aligning the monkey idols around it, and begun the climactic final spell casting where all the components he had so far manufactured were brought together to build the finished product, the attacks were still coming every couple of days, though now at the scale of small armies, from much further than 100 miles away, and he had realised that actually the more power Xen Xi was perceived as having, the more people would learn of him and consider him a threat; hanging with Toshimiru had made him infinitely less safe rather than more so. He had occasion to rue not acting on his original instinct which had been to get the pilgrims and the jade monkey idols the hell out of China! Instead, he had handed a still smoking, freshly cast Lotus blade to Toshimiru, thanked him profusely for his protection, wished him a safe passage back to his homeland, and then late that night, had magically disguised himself as an old woman and snuck out of the camp, aiming to get as far away from the pilgrims as possible before dawn.
He made it away from ground zero, and over the next few days as the pilgrims made their way back towards the coast, the circus (and it's attendant trail of corpses) followed them. In due course they must have found a ship, and sailed away from China, because the furore faded and things returned to something roughly approximating normality.
With one shocking difference, that became clear over the following few months,
Wanted posters started appearing with quite a good likeness of his face on, and a huge, huge reward detailed underneath it, dead or alive, posted by a General of the Imperial Army.
Pretty soon he had only been able to sleep with one eye open if at all, had barely been able to keep himself fed, and had been perpetually on the run, with every village he went into and everybody he met a potential mortal enemy who might suddenly kill him for a reward that constituted riches beyond the dreams of avarice to anybody outside the upper echelons of the urban political & military elite in China.
To be honest, it had been a blessed relief when a small group of Toshimiru's disciples had caught up with him as he skulked, paranoid and scared, in a muddy ditch somewhere in Manchuria and begged him to come to Japan with them, to solve Toshimiru's unfulfillable but unbreakable promise problem. He had done his best not to seem too eager, but it really had been his only option for survival.
And now, he was designing and magically building something that made the Lotus Blade look like a cheap party trick.
But it was late. Many months had passed, like many deadlines, and Toshimiru was impatient to leave the village to go and set up his school, but was tied there by his debt of honour and the fact that Xen Xi hadn't managed to get the magicks quite right yet.
The problem was the sheer complexity, and the need to cast a huge list of pre-prepared spells to make this magical 'Cuff of Sosumiha' bracelet work, while the metal was still semi-liquid on the magical forge, before it cooled. Too many spells, and they took too long to cast, meaning that the bracelet stopped taking magical input before the spells were complete, and was, in effect, 'just' a bracelet that might leak magical flux into your arm and cause all your teeth to fall out. To fix this problem, Xen Xi had been going over all the spells he had already written, including those spells that he had already built as part of 'The Lotus Blade' project and was re-using on the bracelet, and worked to pare them down, make them more efficient, combine multiple components into a single spell, make them quicker to cast. At the beginning this had been easy, yielding huge improvements in efficiency, but the more he worked on making the spells tighter, smarter, quicker, the less inefficiency there was still to find, and he was now in the position of making major changes to the magicks and enchantments to gain tiny reductions in spell casting times.
Another side effect of the complexity was that in order to make the time constraint, he was using a number of pre-cast spell components for each run, where he would store the energy from a very complex and long-winded spell in a magical vessel (usually a rock) until he could release it during the main spell casting effort. The issue there was that after a failed forging session, all those pre-cast component spells needed re-casting to prepare for another run; a failed casting meant a minimum three week delay to the project while he re-charged all the necessary talismans, even if no other changes were required, but of course other changes were required otherwise the spell casting wouldn't have failed in the first place!
Xen Xi knew he was close. Very close. If he was very lucky, he thought he might get away with it, the last activation spell might just hit the bracelet before it cooled too far and ended up being 'just' an ugly bracelet with unfortunate side-effects. But he didn't want to be lucky. He wanted to deliver without luck being required! Toshimiru's look of visceral disappointment after the last run had failed saw to that. He really needed to shave just a tiny bit more off the build process, and do it quickly. He wasn't going to find the ten minutes of spell casting time he thought he needed to be safe, in a nine hour solid enchantment process, from efficiency improvements in the spells he had already prepared at this late stage without spending weeks on the job, but perhaps he could take some unimportant things that were currently in the build out of it?
However, he knew he had to be careful - there was a lot of apparent fluff that he had discovered the hard way he simply couldn't leave out, otherwise the final activation spell failed, just returning a foul cloud of black smoke and a burning pictogram hovering in the air telling him which part of the spell was missing. All that stuff about the sexual function of the Toshimiru avatar, for example; it took screeds of hideously complex re-entrant self-modifying spell-casting to get all that working, and Xen Xi really couldn't see any of the mystical monkey masters he had yet met getting it on with anybody any time soon, since they seemed far to interested in the whole 'killing people in vast numbers' thing. And yet, when he tried to drop any of the spells that supported and made the avatar itself a master of all nine forms of mystical monkey power, the whole build process failed.
On the other hand there were a number of ancillary 'nice to have' spells that perhaps he could do without.
There was a complex set of spells that enabled a mystical monkey master without hearing to use the Toshimiru avatar's ears to hear, even if they had been deaf since birth and had no concept of sound whatsoever. However, complex as it was, it only took 30 seconds to add to the bracelet, because it was one of the pre-cast spells stored in a glowing talisman and added to the main spell with a single word of command.
There was a monster spell that enabled a blind monkey master to use the Toshimiru avatar's eyes, even if he or she had never seen anything in his or her life and had no concept of vision, no optic nerve, no visual cortex; this was a good twenty minutes of intense spell casting, even with the pre-cast elements, but the problem with dropping that function was that there actually was a blind monkey master amongst Toshimiru's disciples, and he could do without having to explain to an irate Monkey Master the difference between a bug and a feature...
Then he saw it; a piece of very clever enchantment to allow somebody born without vocal chords or any concept of how to use vocal chords to use the Toshimiru avatar's voicebox to speak, even if they had never spoken before.
"That's not ever going to happen!", thought Xen Xi, even as he sighed at the elegance of the beautiful enchantment he was about to rip out of his giant magical masterpiece. "And if it does, they can damned well use use sign language!".
