Chapter Three

Ryouga didn’t know what, exactly, had come over Nabiki, but he didn’t argue when she stated, no-nonsense, that they – the ‘they’ surprised him somewhat – were going back to her home, and *right now*. She was angry, but not at him like he had half expected. Who the target of this fury was, he had no clues.

She asked him a few questions on the way back. He couldn’t answer any of them, and didn’t even understand what they were about for the most part, but she seemed satisfied with the non-answers she received.

Why she wasn’t surprised to find her identical twin (triplet?) at the house when she arrived, though, Ryouga had no clue.

***

Nabiki, as it turned out, knew exactly what had happened. She still didn’t have her memory back, but she remembered the events through her own eyes anyway, just not through her own mind. That would give her one up on Rai, she knew. Rai couldn’t possibly know how Nabiki had gained the knowledge, especially the extent of the knowledge she did have. She didn’t know everything that Rai knew, but it was still one hell of a trump card. Particularly since Rai would *not* want to share everything, but Nabiki had no such compunctions… except where it would serve to ensure that Rai kept to a line of action that Nabiki agreed with.

There were a possibly solutions that Rai had thought up on the frantic flight out of her world that she knew of. None of them were very well thought-out, and most probably wouldn’t work.

There was one exception that had a very high chance of success, however. It would also set an alien psychopath loose on earth, but what were such considerations to a race that used the planet as a jail?

Nabiki ran faster than she thought herself capable.

***

Kasumi was surprised, to say the least, when a second Nabiki came home, about an hour after the first who had immediately retired to her room.

“Where is she?” the second Nabiki demanded, breathlessly.

“Who?” Kasumi asked. An idea emerged that perhaps she’s left via the window, but that wasn’t exactly her sister’s style.

“Rai.” When Kasumi didn’t recognize the name, she thought for a moment, and continued, “The girl that looks like me.” It seemed most likely that she would have taken her form…

“Oh!” Kasumi’s face cleared up. So it hadn’t been Nabiki to fall mysteriously in the koi pond, it had been this person Rai. Thinking back, the oldest sister remembered that she had never actually said she was Nabiki, after all… “She’s in your room, waiting I suppose.”

“Thanks!” And Nabiki was off, dashing up the stairs. It was then that Kasumi noticed Ryouga standing confused behind the spot where Nabiki had been.

“Oh, hello Ryouga! Won’t you come in?”

***

Nabiki bolted up the stairs, running faster than she knew was really safe. She felt outraged, angry, more intensely then ever before in her life, but she forced herself to a stop. The instinct to tackle Rai and pound the doppelganger into a bloody pulp was quelled. She took a few deep breaths. Undoubtedly Rai already knew she was here; her flight up the stairs hadn’t exactly been quiet. But Nabiki knew that the outsider was limited in her choices of action. Running around earth looking like her wouldn’t solve any problems, and Rai wasn’t interested in delay; she wanted to clear the problem up as quickly as possible.

The breath that Nabiki drew as she stood before her own bedroom door was deep and steady. She smoothed out her skirt and turned the knob.

***

Rai heard the door open and cracked open one eye. She knew who it was, of course, and no surprise registered on her stolen face as she saw the origin of the problem enter.

Rai sat up from her relaxed position on Nabiki’s bed to watch its rightful occupant enter, a wary look on her face. That immediately set off warning bells in her mind. The words that she spoke – words that should have been filled with surprise, confusion – were clipped, almost businesslike, instead.

“Rai.” Beat. “You’re not welcome here again.”

She knows. How in the hell… She said as much out loud.

Nabiki only smirked, darkly. “I’m far too pernicious for you to dispose of that easily.”

This was impossible. Rai’s mind refused to work, and in the unfamiliar environment, she went blank for a moment. Then recovery instinct set in, and with it came the answer. Simple, really. “The virus…” she breathed. “You’re the virus…”

“No.” Nabiki was firm in her denial, although it was only a half-truth. “I’m the real thing. How I know what I know… that’s info that will cost more than you could ever afford, Rai.” No tricks here. There was too much at stake…

“What do you know?” Rai asked, cautiously.

“More than you want me to.” Nabiki didn’t quaver.

“Good.”

Nabiki was almost – almost - surprised at that one. After a second she figured it out. “You need my help.”

Rai shook her head. “Not really. But it’s convenient that you know.”

“Are you going to give the others their memories back?”

“No.”

“Going to do things the hard way, huh?”

“Easy way.” Rai retorted, preparing. It wasn’t simple, exactly, but it was the best way… “Can I assume that you won’t cooperate?”

“You got it.”

Rai attacked before she finished her statement, but Nabiki had also been preparing; a quick step backwards, and the door was slammed shut between the twins.

The fake one of the pair cursed at her failure. How could she have escaped so easily! But her anger over being thwarted so simply was short-lived.

***

Ryouga hadn’t been *meaning* to spy on them, he really hadn’t. But he found himself up there, in front of the open door, and a few words caught his attention. Well, not so much the precise words but the fact that Nabiki was having the conversation with a duplicate of herself made him stop and listen. When they mentioned giving memories back it began to interest him or more than just the bizarre factor.

He was aware of having lost his memory, of course. The last clear memory was of arriving at the Tendo Dojo as P-chan, then it got blurry. After that the next clear memory was of standing in the park. He was soaking wet with hot water, although there was no kettle or other source of it nearby, it wasn’t strange enough to really register as such with him.

Forgetting the day made him a bit uneasy, but not as much as it probably should have. Little half-memories kept floating to the surface, vague enough not to tell him anything but plausible enough to quell his nervousness. Besides, while he was generally pretty good at keeping focused when he traveled, he’d lost days or even weeks often enough that it wasn’t something to get too upset over. And sometimes anger could make his memory fuzzy too. Memories could acquire a certain haziness if colored with enough emotion  … this was different; erasure rather than haze, and he could remember no strong emotion other than the confusion that he felt afterwards, which was fleeting. But considering Ranma’s presence, it was easy enough to assume that there had been a fight even if no one remembered one. That had been the unspoken consensus when they had realized that no one remembered anything, or very little. None of them – other than Nabiki – had really wanted to know what had happened. Why, he couldn’t say.

There were a few odd things, like the strange, almost giddy happiness over simply *being*. He didn’t understand why, but he’d felt remarkably upbeat all day since. He was also quite tired. Not the fall-over-asleep kind of tired, but a deep ache, the need too… not rest, but… refuel. He was running low on energy, although he knew that he didn’t need to sleep any more than usual.

How all of this added up to the need to eavesdrop on Nabiki’s conversation was something that would have to wait until afterwards to be discovered. All he knew was that it could be important, and after the line about “giving them their memories back” he listened all the more closely. So someone had deliberately taken away their memories? And it had been… Nabiki? Or… not-Nabiki… or the third one, if he counted the one that had vanished earlier… his thought process came to an abrupt halt and tumbled down the steps of logic that he had been slowly building to explain things ever since coming to that afternoon. But before he recovered from the domino cascade, Nabiki – one of them at least – darted out of the door and collided headlong into Ryouga, who was caught off-balance in the moment of confusion. They went tumbling towards the stairs.

***

At the sound of some sort of commotion upstairs, Ranma peered around the wall, in the general direction of the steps to see what was going on. Ryouga had managed to catch both Nabiki and the rail, a good three feet before hitting the top step. He was trying to stand and help Nabiki up, but she ignored him and scrambled to her feet, almost falling over herself and the confused lost boy as she darted for the staircase. She reached the first floor and took up a defensive posture at the bottom. It was the first time, Ranma noticed, that he had seen her use any of the martial arts training that she must have received when she was younger. He refrained from making any comments, waiting, instead, to see what happened next.

Which was, apparently, nothing. Strange – Nabiki wasn’t easily provoked.

Ryouga opened Nabiki’s bedroom door. Another girl – who looked just like Nabiki, incidentally, but this was but a detail in Ranma’s mind – tumbled out. Ryouga caught her, somewhat clumsily because he obviously hadn’t been expecting to have to do so. Her arms continued falling for a moment before hitting the limit of their rotation and swinging back, changing direction with a jerk that made her entire body shift a little. Ranma was watching to make sure she really was unconscious, but he noticed something else in the meantime. A small, sparking object slipped off her hand during this motion – a ring – and hit the second-story hallway’s wooden floor with a loud clunk and bounced. Its new trajectory was aimed between the railing and towards the first floor entryway.

The other two were more worried about the Nabiki clone and Ranma would have been, too – was, actually – except for the simple fact that the ring distinctly did not land on the lower level floor. He made a note of it then turned his attention back to the larger situation, asking the obvious question. The other two nearly jumped with surprise, not having noticed him.

“What’s goin' on?”

***

~Mordain

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