WANTED: Full-Support Priestess!

[nefasturis]

Wanted: Full-Support Priestess!

Summary: The life of a typical college student turns upside down when a high priestess from the game accidentally ends up barging into his world because of an experiment gone wrong. An interdimensional story of friendship and realizations.

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Prologue: Ghost

High Priestess Celestine Edencourt,

This is to inform you with utmost regret that your request for transfer to the Geffenite Frontier has been denied by the Sanctuarian Council due to task prioritization. We know how eager you are to join in our thrusts against the forces of Glastheim but we also considered the fact that you are invaluable to your current post. After much deliberation, we find it best that you stay as Head Matron of the Dovin Orphanage.

Best Regards,
Cardinal Lorin Rimbaugh
High Seer, Sanctuarian Council

The morning rays coming through the small window sill of the wooden cabin spotlighted the dancing dust motes floating between the parchment and its recipient - a young lady in her late teens with flaxen locks that glinted with the sunlight and flushed skin highlighted by ornate crimson wardrobe that flowed down a very voluptuous shape of a goddess.

The high priestess leaned back on the wooden chair behind the fine-grained desk, gripping the parchment ever harder. The third time, she thought. How could they keep Sactuary's youngest ever High Priestess in a Payonese Orphanage just because her Grand General Crusader of a father forbids her to see any action more dangerous than changing diapers?

Celeste took a deep breath. A passing thought that need not be highlighted, the priestess said to herself as she watched a child running towards her office from the front window. Celeste smiled, gently folded the letter and slid it under her desk along with the other denied requests.

Another dog day morning at the orphanage.

"Matron Celeste! It's Jasn - the caves - we need your help!" shrieked a kid who looked more like a swamp abomination with his mud-crusted face from all the day’s playing.

By the way the young boy said it, Celeste knew something was up. There was tensile truth in the boy's anxiousness. Maybe she was needed there after all. She took no time in darting out of her office as she was led by the boy into the darkness of the forest.

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

Her deepest fear was confirmed when the boy stopped smacked dab in front of the Payonese cave and pointed towards it with a shaky finger. "We were playing in the caves when... when..."

The priestess needed not even hear it. The Payonese cave was unholy as it was structurally unstable. Perhaps its notoriety was the cause of many a child or childs at heart getting lured into the caves and meeting bad circumstances.

"Stay here," Celeste said as she took out a baroque heirloom arcwand from her side belt.

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

A few meters into the cave and she already heard the lost boy's sobbing. She waved her wand across her face once and watched its opal centerpiece glow with white light. Like a torch, she used it to guide her way into the narrowing caverns.

She found the boy in no time, sobbing helplessly slumped beside a stalagmite.

"There you are, Jasn," Celeste said in a very calm, comforting undertone while reaching down with her left hand,” your friends were looking for you at the lunch table."

The boy sniffled and looked up to the sunny expression of Celeste as highlighted by the glow of her staff. He grew a weak smile, nodding once, stifled by remnants of sobbing.

Then, a cold gust of air from behind the priestess gave her a split second chance to recognize thread. With one fell sweep of her arc wand, she demonstrated to whoever or whatever was behind her why she was given the title of High Priestess five years earlier than all her peers.

The ghoul never saw it coming. The radiant light of holiness pierced through the decaying flesh and turned bone to ash on contact. Jasn began to cry again as Celeste picked him up with one hand.

"We need to get out of this place."

The High Priestess turned to the exit but found it crawling with more zombies that exhumed themselves from the soft soil of the cavern. There was something about that scene that screamed at Celeste that it was not her day.

Finding herself out of options, she gave Jasn a blue gemstone and put him down to the ground. Celeste clasped her hands with her wand and uttered a gentle prayer. White light filled the cavern for a brief second, after which, she found herself alone among the ghouls.

"Now that I don't have anybody to worry about, shall we dance?" she said with an entertained expression.

Then happened something even she couldn't explain with all the knowledge of the Pronteran ministry. The arcwand slipped from the fingers that were gripping it and fell to the soft soil. Shocked and in disbelief, the High Priestess looked at her hands - translucent. She tried picking up the wand again but in vain. It was like she was turning into a ghost.

And perhaps, in the strangest kind of way, she already was.

Five seconds later, High Priestess Celestine Edencourt, Head Matron of the Payonese Orphanage, vanished from the world of Midgard.

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Chapter 1: Disconnected

The familiar, melodious ring of the phone sounded a lot like the coming of Ragnarok for the wakened Christian Mendez. Cold wind coming in from the window made it twice as hard to get up and pickup the handset from his bed at three in the morning. He was wishing the call away from his half-sleep.

But the ringing wouldn't go away.

"Who the hell calls up people at three in the morning?" he grumbled to himself in a familiar grump he used to confront almost everything else. He gave his pillow a frustrated squeeze and finally rose from the bed.

Morning clothes marked the man’s well-build frame as he bent down put on his box-type glasses and combed his ebon shoulder-length hair with his fingers once.

"This better be good," he said.

Christian picked up the phone on top of his dresser. After a few seconds, let it slip from his hands, making it swing towards the closet cabinet and hit its side with a bang.

In his face was a reaction of disbelief, as though something had happened that shouldn't have, or something that should have happened didn't.

He knew which one it was.

Christian listlessly glided from the side of his bed to the window of his seventeenth floor condominium unit overlooking the rain-soaked university grounds - face distraught and breathing heavily.

"Lord, have mercy on us all."

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The Science and Technology Research Center was the pride of the University when it came to advanced academic research. From within its halls, only the best minds and the most modern equipment coming from university, government, and philanthropic funding – constantly producing research thrusts that could rival those of much more modern facilities. Agriculture, civil works, bacteriology, and alternative medicine - the studies were as varied as the people who worked there.

Most of the research findings found themselves posted in various journals that were sent out to academic archives all over the world for the betterment of mankind.

Well most of it, anyway.

Of the many projects housed in that complex, there was one hardly notable project located in a nondescript room in basement of the facility labeled as "maintenance room". It belonged the very few research projects will never get published.

And that night, that project was about to hit climax.

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Christian sprang the final four steps that led to the basement of the complex and landed his leathers with a solid thud. He weaved through the steamy piping and damp, cracked flooring to get through the western end of the place. He panted a bit and checked the drab plate sign of unpolished bronze that graced the sidewall of a metal door that resembled a fire exit more than a maintenance room.

Maintenance Room, it says. Heh, Christian chuckled for a second. He dipped his thumb on the last letter of the signed the same way one would when imprinting a thumb mark on some medical record. A motorized whir came from within the wall. In an instant, his finger was bathed in green light.

A pleasant elevatorish ding and an unlocking sound gave him the signal to proceed.

Inside the room was anything but a janitorial maintenance complex. It was what you would normally see in a highly sterilized scientific environment where everything is white. The computers cascaded in a descending stepped terrace setup with glass panes overlooking an observation area for a holding chamber were still on - most of them screen-savered.

Christian briskly walked towards the holding area. Halfway through the aisles of computers, a perturbed-looking young man in a lab gown with hair that looked uncombed for weeks blocked his path. The silvery folder he handed over to Christian reflected glint into his thick eyeglasses and pearly-white grin.

"The logs of the last run we did fifteen minutes ago, sir."

Christian grabbed the folder and squinted at its contents without trying to understand everything. "I came here with the knowledge that somebody in the phone told me that LAZARUS has started up, Jeeves."

The young man referred to as Jeeves almost jumped back, startled. He swallowed his saliva and replied in a half-shaking voice, "Well sir, we followed all standard procedures for this run and everything had been approved by you yesterday evening and..."

Christian closed the folder and shoved it back to Jeeves, effectively cutting the young man's attempt at a formal oral report. The irritated Christian forced his way to the observation deck where he could see the core of the whole Project as Jeeves apparently tried to stall him.

"Just tell me what happened, damn it!"

Jeeves took one deep breath and looked at Christian who looked hurriedly dressed in jeans and plain white shirt.

"She got activated for a few seconds, Sir. But at the last possible moment the Sentience Generation Code failed to interface with her neural structures. Against the standard protocol, I had to reroute the processing unit to the nearest possible source of SeGenCo."

"You should have notified me then," Christian replied while pushing the nosepiece of his eyeglasses and once again going through the printout logs from the folder.

Jeeves went back to his workstation a few steps away from the glass window where a much more relieved Christian was still reviewing the papers with the misty holding area as background.

"Her synaptic rate was dropping quickly, sir. I felt compelled to act outside authorization but within the limit of my jurisdiction. We want her alive but we also want her to be capable of intelligence."

Christian sighed and felt more relaxed this time. LAZARUS wasn't working as he had expected after all. And the snag of a critical program not working almost sounded like a good thing. And though he didn't know why, he felt that there was some justice in not giving life to something that wasn't made the same way men should be.

Project LAZARUS, as the name would suggest, was a project directly sponsored by the Government and the University to create the first human being completely in vitro, meaning, a living thing that would never enter or exit a human womb. The technology that went into the project had come from various sources from all over the world, some of them directly from US Government archives. The moral aspect of the LAZARUS project made the whole thing strictly confidential. That is, among a great many other secretive things.

Raising an artificial human from a basement room was a far-fetched idea that was being crushed by the pressure coming from the benefactors of the project. Christian, as tech lead of the project had already decided that the project should fail for a lot of reasons. Deep inside, he wanted LAZARUS to work out but he also wished it would never.

"Is she dead then?" Christian stared at the gleaming metallic human-containment capsule located of a tiled holding pen another story below the observation area, still swamped with white smoke. He remembered the first time he saw the damn thing coming in from Korea, it was still like a large metallic thermos as much as it was to him then.

"No, sir. It doesn't look like it," Jeeves replied with a deadliner baritone as he pressed switch for the vents of the holding area.

Christian watched eagerly as the white smoke cleared and the containment capsule's door swung open. The lucid blue liquid that used to fill its insides was all over the normally sterile floor. The visorless helmet connecting the subject to the encephalon programming devices hung lazily inside the capsule. A bit further around the metal container were footsteps from dainty feet and at the end of the trail, a circular mark on the tiles - darkened as though something had burnt it. The young man couldn't believe his eyes.

"She's gone," followed up Jeeves in a calm tone. Christian's mouth, still agape.

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Behind the two was Jeeve's workstation. A makeshift wired network connection could be seen from his desk to the capsule's support system boxes below the observation deck. On it's screen, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game called Ragnarok Online was still running.

At the center of the screen was a message around a white window. It read:

-Disconnected from Server-

[bhl88]

Is this real world and Ragnarok merging?

[nefasturis]

Originally Posted by bhl88

Is this real world and Ragnarok merging?

Something like that. ^__^ Let's just see what happens in the next few chappies.

[Ivalice.]

Wrong section.

Very nicely written, altho i never liked the sound of RO and RL mixed together.

[Demon Sakura]

The name is possibly the best name I have ever seen.

[Haitani]

Nice! rune midgard and earth merging together! xD that would be really cool.

[mcklyde]

If Rune Midgard and Earth were to merge, R.M.'s citizenz would be at a disadvantage coz we got guns behbeh yeehaw.

[Terrain]

Originally Posted by Ivalice.

Wrong section.

Very nicely written, altho i never liked the sound of RO and RL mixed together.

If your talking about the story, no it's in the right place. It's just real life, and connections to Ragnarok online, it's not totally unrelated.

[Demon Sakura]

Originally Posted by Terrain

If your talking about the story, no it's in the right place. It's just real life, and connections to Ragnarok online, it's not totally unrelated.

I guess only I got the joke. First time I saw the thread I thought he must've posted a party request in the art and fiction thread. Kinda ingenius title, but at the same time kinda eh.

By the way everytime I see that sig I think crystal penis.

[HolyLance]

A very promising story, I can't wait to read more.

[Ivalice.]

Originally Posted by Demon Sakura

I guess only I got the joke. First time I saw the thread I thought he must've posted a party request in the art and fiction thread. Kinda ingenius title, but at the same time kinda eh.

By the way everytime I see that sig I think crystal penis.

At least someone understands what im saying.

[nefasturis]

Wow, thanks for reading guys. About the title, I just wanted a title that's something all RO players can recognize. Anyway, it's time for another update. Hope y'all enjoy it.
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Chapter 2: Burglar

Rayner SantaCruz bit his No. 2 Mongol pencil's eraser and leafed through another page of his sketchbook. He checked the time from the idle wall clock hanging from the top of the cafe. It read two in the morning. Not too far away, the deep, booming sound of orcs screaming and spells being cast from a few games of Warcraft gave the almost deserted Internet cafe a strange middle-earthly feel to it.

Rayner leaned forward from his shopkeep's seat and peeped from the glass shelves that protected him often enough from the rampage of kids desperate to find open slots on Byte Zone, the internet cafe he was supposed to be running for only eight hours per shift. He swept his vision across the room and found that there was still a group of college boys playing Warcraft. Directly in front of him was his best friend, Elenore Santos who was lazily clicking away at her favourite MMORPG from one of the terminals.

It wasn't the best sideline job in the world to Rayner, but the pay was just right and the workhours tend to get overextended whenever addicts opt to stay till the wee hours of the morning. Nobody forced him to keep the shop open when they do but he somewhat liked staying there anyway. Having to live alone in an apartment as a college student isn’t really as exciting as it sounds.

And besides, he thought to himself as he looked at Elenore playing at terminal eight, he always had good, sensible company with him whenever he overstays.

"You know Ellie, you should at least pay for half of your gametime."

But he already knew her boilerplate reply. She was the type who knows her cards and how to use them. And she has never failed him in that department.

"Put it in your tab, loves," she teasingly replied while twirling her kinked shoulder-length hair, as she went back to the mindless clicking of Ragnarok Online.

He never did understand what Ellie, and several thousand others like her found in Ragnarok Online. He was no gaming connoisseur but it took him no time to realize that the graphics was nothing to brag about. The game itself looked bland, repetitive to him. What it was to him was a waste of money.

But there wasn’t much sense in fighting the futility of asking her to pay for the game. It was his shift anyway, and nobody's paying him for overtime. Her game might as well be the payment for his work. A funny arrangement, but he couldn’t care less. Whenever he overstayed, he wasn't in for the money anyway. Rayner reclined once more in the shopkeep's seat, fixed his baseball cap, and continued sketching away.

While sketching though, it was his habit, albeit a bad one, to listen in on the mostly mindless talks of the players who could spare enough wits to jabber away and score kills at the same time. That night, the Warcraft players were actually talking about something that hit Rayner in a different way.

"Did you hear about that incident I heard in the news, dre?"
"Which bit?"
"The one where a cafe got robbed."

At this point, Rayner had already stopped sketching and was listening in intently. Of course, anything he needed to know had to be sifted from a wad of useless game talk.

"Dammit, I couldn’t take the tower down. I need more creeps."
"You should go play Neopets instead, Mark. You're really pathetic at this."
"Anyway which cafe was it? The one that got jacked, I mean."
"I don’t remember. All I know is that it was done during the weehours of the morning and that the shopkeep was sent to the ICU after he got stabbed with an ice pick."
"Oh yeah, I think I've heard of that. Some escaped criminal did it, they say. He waits till the shop gets cleared then he strikes."

Rayner swallowed hard. He stopped listening and tried to concentrate with his drawing. It was not a distant thought that he had no way of defending himself should any crime be done in his cafe. He was a nerd in every sense of the word and nerds are notoriously bad when it comes to self-defense.

He kept to his thoughts, but he unconsciously dozed off - sleeping at the right place at the right time wasn't one of his better qualities.

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Three in the morning was the time when he woke up to the feeling of being pelted with crumpled paper lodged by the Warcraft players. Early morning drizzle glazed the transparent windows facing the street.

"Hey shopkeep, we need to go home too. Not everybody wants to sleep inside this cafe of yours," said the more agitated of the group.

Rayner winced a bit and proceeded with work. One by one he logged their terminals off and gave them their IDs used to register terminals, most had university IDs that had a batch number of those a year younger than him. They were seventeen year-olds after all, he thought.

"Feh, and I still look two years younger," he said to himself half in frustration, “I should grow a moustache.”

He looked around after the players had left. It appeared to him that Ellie had gone home unceremoniously too without even bothering waking him up. He saw a note lying beside his chair. The cover read "To Rayn" and it had a drawing of a very cute, well-drawn Persian cat with its tongue sticking out.

He read it out loud with a tone of sarcastic frustration, "Thanks for the game. You should make your work hours like this standard."

The wastebasket was half a room away but when he crumpled the note and threw it, it landed smack in the middle of the trashbin. He gave out a muffled "oh yeah" and then proceeded with the locking of the now empty cafe. Thanks Ellie, but no thanks. He switched off all the PCs that were left switched on and then proceeded to shut of the lights one by one.

Then, just when he had turned off all forty-two PCs and all five light switches, lightning flashed outside, followed by thunder with a second's delay. He almost cringed from the loudness of it. But after that, he heard something more fearful.

Footsteps.

At first he thought he was imagining things. He crouched behind one of the rows of computers and traced where the sound had come from. The sound felt as though it had come near the counter. And it reminded him of the earlier conversations.

Burglar.

Criminal.

Ice Pick.

ICU.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness he sighted an outline of a person near the counter. He couldn't believe his eyes, or his racing heart. He wished it was only his imagination.

The sound of footsteps echoed across the cafe again. They were a bit heavier than Ellie's and much lighter than those of the players who had been there earlier.

Thoughts ran around Rayner's head as he listened in on the intruder from a corner of the far side of the shop. And though they were many thoughts, they could have been summarized as a representation or the consequence of these four words: Burglar. Criminal. Ice Pick. ICU.

Rayner clutched his chest a moment and decided that he should at least give the burglar the preemptive punishment. He took one deep breath and made his move.

The silence of the cafe and the loudness of the raging storm outside was enough the give the situation a cinematic flavour of suspense. He crept up to the wandering shadow while staying near the darker sides of the powerless cafe and silently lifted the first thing that he had his hands on - his metal-covered sketchbook.

He aimed for what appeared to be a silhouetted nape, swung down as hard as he could, and closed his eyes. He heard a loud thump and then a slight grunt. Rayner's frail body shriveled, expecting a counterattack of sorts. But it never came. He opened his eyes and saw the figure had stopped moving.

After a few more moments, it lost balance and crashed to the wooden matting of the cafe.

"Wow, that was cool," he said to himself as he looked with a look of surprise at the bent metal frame in his hands and the body of an unconscious burglar in front of him.

Victory.

[janzki]

...sounds good... Reality and fantasy merged... but lacks originality.. sorry

[Pirotess]

Excellent job. I really find this story pleasant to read, and I wanted to note that I like the spacing. It's not this one huge chunk that I just don't read because I don't want my eyes to hurt afterwards. =P

[nefasturis]

Thanks for reading everybody. Here's the latest update, with more developments from the laboratory scene. .

Chapter 3: Hindsight

Christian wiped the sweat from his forehead using his handkerchief and puffed another from his half-consumed Marlboro. Smoke danced along the naked fluorescent lights of the lowered ceiling of the LAZARUS project operations room like the nimbus clouds of November, ominous and foreboding. Things had just turned from bad to infinitely worse.

"I'm sorry, I didn't seem to get the logic of what you just said Jeeves. Can you repeat it for me?" he said to a preoccupied Jeeves tinkering his workstation.

"What I have been saying for the last thirty minutes is that I didn't know where else to plug the brain-programming function during the startup of the dummy so I routed it to the program with the most logic incorporated to it at that time, and that would be the neural-control Ragnarok Online client on my machine. In lay man's words, I used Ragnarok Online to give her the personality and consciousness she needs."

Christian looked at Jeeves. He could buy the nerd's explanation of using a game to give something intelligence, but he wouldn’t buy that a multi-million dollar project could just vanish into thin air. More plausible was the idea that if he couldn’t produce an explanation for this disaster he would be the one to do the vanishing. "And how the hell does this relate to the disappearance of LAZARUS?"

Jeeves stopped banging on the keyboard and swiveled his chair towards the perplexed Christian. "To a limited extent, LAZARUS has the power to take on any ability that the sentience program etches into its brain. She could have used some unknown power upon waking up. Either that or she self-combusted on first contact with the air."

Christian stared at the screen of the workstation, client of Ragnarok Online still running on the background. "So there's a chance that she's dead?"

"I'm thinking that she's not. See, that's why I called you here," replied Jeeves while jotting a few notes on his journal from a standing position.

"Get to the point, genius."

Jeeves scoffed at his superior, almost to a wondering note why he has to be of higher rank than him in the first place. The first thing you have to learn when working a technical field after all is to be forgiving of ignorance.

"Look at my workstation, Christian."

"What about it?"

"After the incident last night, its power consumption went triple, almost putting the power circuit of this lab on overload. This box was the last thing I connected to LAZARUS before she woke up. Power levels spiked to a high during her disappearance and then maintained a very high power signature afterwards."

"Are you trying to say this workstation here is somehow linked to her?"

"Yes, and it seemed to reflect her status too, but after a few minutes its activity minimized."

"So she's dead?"

"No; the program's still running. If the host specimen, the LAZARUS dummy girl, dies, this symbiotic program should stop with it, and vice versa," said Jeeves as he highlighted the monitoring functions of the high-end computer.

Christian leaned back, immersed in his deep thoughts. There was more to this accident than he had hoped for.

"I don't know. But if you ask me, she's not exactly dead," Jeeves read out the readings from the idle server, "if she really is out there, she should be either weakened or unconscious because of some external event."

"Then," Christian replied while taking a deep breath of gray smoke, "if that's the case, we find her before anybody else finds out."

[HolyLance]

Very Exciting. Always keeping me guessing.

[tetron]

nice nice ^^

[nefasturis]

Sorry for the late update. The author got stranded in a deserted island last weekend. >.< Anyway, enough of the technical stuff, this chapter we return to the internet cafe...
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Chapter 4: Mistaken

Behold, the victorious.

Like a triumphant gladiator, Rayner marched with a proud strut towards the burglar. His head, spinning in circles in a haze of fear, excitement, and bewilderment. Not only had he protected the shop, he had also managed to capture the criminal!

Rayner prodded the dimly outlined body slumped on the floor, there were traces of water everywhere, probably from the rain outside when the intruder came in. It was during those moments that Rayner realised that the battle might not be over yet, that the burglar was just waiting for him to get near. With his right hand at the ready with his notebook, he backed towards the wall by the cafe entrance and flipped the light switch open.

From a 120 mile-per-hour heartbeat, Rayner's heart screeched to a grinding halt and left him partly groping his chest. His bent, metal-bound notebook fell to the floor with a clang.

It was a sight less terrifying than it really was, had fate not been so playful with him. Drenched in yellowish fluid lay on the cold matting. The body of a lithe young woman, face down on the floor, with long black hair outlining an unblemished skin tone of her exposed shoulders and legs. Towards the back of her head was a very nasty black mark at the back that if inspected closer could have yielded the etched mark of Rayner's hardbound notebook.

Rayner didn't know what or why there was an unconscious girl wearing a bathing suit inside his locked cafe but he was quite confident of himself, to a terrifying conclusive degree, that she was no burglar.

And that he may have actually killed her in the process.

From hero to murderer in one minute flat.

"Why me??" blurted a very frustrated Rayner as he dropped to his knees beside his unexpected visitor. "What the hell is going on?" Rayner grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her twice.

No response.

He shook the girl a third time and let her roll to her back. Rayner took a quick look at the girl, her full lips were pale and her eyes, wide shut. Her chest didn’t appear to be moving, showing no signs of even weak breathing. At least to Rayner, it wasn’t.

"Wake up!" he shouted to the girl but in vain.

Rayner paused and slumped himself into the cold floor. He couldn't possibly have done this to her with just one hit. That's it! He thought, she must've drowned!

Inside a cafe.

Without any water.

Everything that night was beyond illogical. It was insane. Rayner checked for her pulse. It was still there. He was not murderer just yet but if she didn’t start breathing anytime soon, he might as well surrender himself to the police.

Sweat drops started gushing out of every pore on his forehead that cold night.

It was then he remembered all his training from high school military training. Well, not really, just one in particular that seemed practical at that time, for more reasons than just one.

Mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Rayner reassured himself. This isn't a kiss. Just something to help somebody not die, right? There was a voice inside of him screaming, "There's goes your chastity!"

Rayner closed his eyes, gently lifted her nose to open a small gap between her lips and slowly bent down for the resuscitation.

"Here goes!"

[HolyLance]

Ah Dang! Another cliffhanger, Can't wait to see what happens. Nice Update.

[YEZZIR]

Originally Posted by nefasturis

Rayner didn't know what or why there was an unconscious girl wearing a bathing suit inside his locked cafe but he was quite confident of himself, to a terrifying conclusive degree, that she was no burglar.

wtf?!?! a bathing suit in the rain and isnt it hella early in the morning

[nefasturis]

Originally Posted by YEZZIR

wtf?!?! a bathing suit in the rain and isnt it hella early in the morning

Hmm.. in the original draft the girl that appeared was naked. I've decided to give her an ounce of decency by putting her on a bathing suit. I'm still thinking of giving it a good revising sometime in the future but it really wont have much bearing on the main story.

^__^

[Terrain]

I thought it wasn't a bathing suit, but a fancy weird outfit that she was meant to wear, kinda like from Neon Genesis. Love the new updates!

[nefasturis]

Originally Posted by Terrain

I thought it wasn't a bathing suit, but a fancy weird outfit that she was meant to wear, kinda like from Neon Genesis. Love the new updates!

Haha something like that. My bad for not really putting emphasis on the descriptions for that scene XD. Anyway, here's the next chapter.

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Chapter 5: Rain March

It was dark outside, even amidst the company of the street lamps - the air possessed the silhouetting power of heavy rain. Shattering cold winds created a wave of precipitate every now and then, bringing with it shivers that seeped down soaked clothing.

Rayner slowly trudged his way along a puddled sidewalk adjacent to the University's fenced boundaries with a bear-faced smug stretching cheek to cheek. He swung from side to side like a shoddily balanced pendulum, bearing weight with movement. Every step from his Chuck Taylor sneakers landed uneasily along the cobbled walkway while his shadow danced counter-clockwise with the passing of each vehicle along the road beside him.

The young man's wet cloth-enveloped body arched while he lurched slowly but surely. Piggy-backed behind him, the limp stranger, face buried into Rayner’s broad back, wearing the black Adidas windbreaker, edges mapping her white, slender legs glossed by the night rain supported by Rayner's arms. That jacket would have protected Rayner from the cold rain, but he figured, she may need it more, given that she was wearing nothing more than those sleek black skin suits that may have well been designed for Olympian-level swimming.

So the mouth-to-mouth didn't work as well as he had hoped. It was embarassing even to think about it. What in the world was he thinking, thought Rayner. The girl was still unconscious and she couldn't possibly be left behind at the cafe. The next best thing? Take her somewhere she would at least be remotely safe.

His house, perhaps?

Rayner thought about what he had done a few minutes earlier. Despite her unconsciousness, her lips were warm and supple - nobody ever mentioned that in mouth-to-mouth recussitation training. For a moment, his wet cheeks flushed with heat from within. He swallowed hard, kept any other ideas from coming into his head ,and trudged on.

Then he thought of him carrying her to his house. The young man shook his head, now's not the time for after thoughts. For Rayner that night, there was no other option.

His walk was very slow, making the short distance from the internet cafe to his apartment seem to be the span of a marathon, or maybe even a monsoon Collin Mcrae rally, without the cars and with more mud.

And with the rain, came the realisation of consequence. He had just attacked an innocent girl and had caused her to suffer concussion. His heart beat wildly along with his aching lungs as he exerted even more effort to carry her farther. To top that off, he had landed his lips on her - on a very philanthropical nature of course but it hardly mattered at that moment. How he would explain himself and what had happened to her was something beyond him.

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After what seemed to be a hundred years of walking, Rayner finally got to the stairs leading to his second floor single-room cubist apartment situated in a bourgeoisie patch of neighborhood lorded over by the monolithic central administration building of the university a good block away. It wasn't exactly the perfect place to stay but it was roomy enough to house two people - and it was dry inside.

Each step climbing the stairs enervating and calculated, but it was the final mile so Rayner hardly even noticed it. Rayner bit the chain of the keys hanging by his neck and dexterously inserted it to the doorknob. A short tug from the chain and a nudge from his knee opened the door.

With seemingly one last exertion of effort, he half-threw the girl into the faux-leather sofa, soft wet body bouncing into the cushion with almost a splash, He then got towels from the rack beside the singles bathroom at the far right of the darkened room, and wrapped them into his unexpected visitor.

"Now to get myself dry," the young man muttered to himself. He took one step away from the sofa but was no longer able to continue. His vision blurred and fever came down faster than any event that night. A few seconds later, his weakened knees buckled from exhaustion.

"Not good," Rayner said as he collapsed to the tiled floor helplessly.

[HolyLance]

Another Great Update like always, He sure caught that fever fast

Originally Posted by nefasturis

Rayner thought about what he had done a few minutes earlier. Despite her unconsciousness, her lips were warm and supple - nobody ever mentioned that in mouth-to-mouth recussitation training.

Lol, during my first aid training, nobody mentioned that either

[nefasturis]

Originally Posted by HolyLance

Another Great Update like always, He sure caught that fever fast

Lol, during my first aid training, nobody mentioned that either

Nobody mentioned that in mine either, mainly because we had to practice with members of the same gender. Iwwwwwwwww.

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Anyhoo, before I post the next update tomorrow, I just want to share the unfinished opening animation (or presentation, whatever you call it) for this series. I never got to finish it because I havent found the time to do so.

http://cc.domaindlx.com/redkinoko/FS.html

@Everyone, thanks for reading