--G.]

Monday, June 14, 2410
Otonashi Mountains, Tomodachi

The relentless pounding of the rotor blades drowned out the usual jungle noises as an Mi-24 Hind helicopter eased into the courtyard of the castle at the top of a tropical mountain miles from anywhere. Built in the style of a French château-fort, the structure was a bit out of place in the middle of a mountainous jungle, doubly so because Tomodachi had originally been a Japanese colony, but there it stood, all the same.

The Hind settled on its landing gear, enormous rotors still turning. It bore the markings of the International Police Organization's Class A station in Nekomikoka, the planetary capital. The side door opened and two figures jumped down - one a man of average height and stocky build, the other a slim, petite woman. The man thumped the side of the chopper with the flat of his hand as soon as they were down. The turbines revved, the rotors beat the air, and the Hind lifted away, its downwash making the woman's long, midnight-blue cloak and the tails of the man's dark green trenchcoat flap furiously for a few seconds... and then they were alone.

Benjamin Hutchins, also known as Gryphon - or simply "the Chief" to much of the IPO - looked around at his surroundings for a moment, getting his bearings.

"Wow," he said. "Takeshi wasn't kidding."

Raven flopped back the hood of her cloak and swept the courtyard with her dark gaze, pausing nowhere long, but missing little.

"I guess not," she agreed, her voice low.

All around them, scattered on the flagstones of the courtyard like discarded toys, lay the corpses of men and women, all dressed in black. Many still clutched weapons, most of them broken, in their dead hands. An entire clan of ninja... wiped out in what looked like it had been one hell of a battle.

"What could do something like this?" Gryphon wondered rhetorically as he walked from body to body, examining the way they sprawled, the rents in their uniforms and their flesh, the damage to their weapons.

"Quite a few things, actually," Raven mused. She walked carefully to the middle of the courtyard, clasped her hands before her, and bowed her head in concentration. Shadows seemed to gather around her, though it was mid-afternoon on a brilliantly sunny day. She murmured a few words in a language like the mutterings of ancient gods. The ring of shadows that had started racing across the stones at her feet wavered, seemed to rise a few inches, then dissipated. Raven dropped her hands and opened her eyes.

"No lower-plane activity," she said. "Whatever did this, it wasn't infernal. I do sense something... but I don't know what it is." She shook her head. "Only what it isn't. It's not infernal... it's not any kind of sorcerous construct I know the traces of... " She looked across the carnage and met Gryphon's eyes. "... and it's not friendly."

Gryphon nodded. "Let's see if we can find the tac team."

They scouted the rest of the area outside the castle, finding nothing, then regrouped at the entrance. Gryphon drew an old-fashioned .45 automatic pistol from a holster on his belt, carefully opened the massive timber door with his free hand - it swung easily and silently on well-oiled hinges - and slid into the entrance hall.

There were more bodies here. A few were ninja. The rest were dressed in the blue coveralls and light body armor of IPO Tactical Division troopers. As with the ninja, they were scattered around the room as if they'd been hurled about by something huge and angry. Broken weapons littered the floor. Gryphon crouched and examined one, a DC-15 blaster carbine.

"Look at this," he said, gesturing. "This isn't broken, it's been -cut-. Look at how bright the edges are. A duralloy blaster chassis, cut into four pieces."

Raven examined the cut edges without touching the weapon. "If I didn't know better, I'd almost say Logan had been here," she observed.

Gryphon straightened up and looked around. "It does resemble his style a bit." He rubbed at the back of his neck and looked up at the hall's vaulted ceiling. Sunlight slanted from the windows, moving slowly down the wall. Night would fall within a half-hour or so.

"I don't like this at all," he admitted. "If I were a Jedi, I'd say I feel a disturbance in the Force."

"What were the ninja doing here?" Raven wondered.

"This castle was their headquarters," Gryphon said. "They were a small clan, but making a name for themselves... " He looked around the room again. "Fifteen... sixteen... seventeen. We've got a man missing."

At the far end of the entrance hall, another tall door - probably the door to the great hall - stood partially open, only darkness visible beyond it. Without audibly discussing it, Gryphon and Raven moved toward the door, then through it.

The great hall was as trashed as the entrance, but without the mass casualties. Tapestries were torn down, dummies wearing suits of Japanese-style armor lay overturned, and weapons both ceremonial and practical were scattered everywhere. The long table in the center of the room was broken in the middle, as if something very heavy had landed on it and snapped it in two, the halves leaning sharply toward each other on their still-intact legs. Wind whispered in through shattered windows.

Sprawled in the middle of the room was the eighteenth member of the tac team, the commanding officer, still clutching the remains of his blaster in one hand and a fighting knife in the other. Well, half of him was in the middle of the room. The other half was a dozen yards away, against the wall under one of the windows.

"Damn," Gryphon muttered. "What the hell happened here?"

Before Raven could hazard a guess, something up in the shadowy vault of the ceiling, perhaps 30 feet above them, hissed and shifted, a black shape moving in black space. Gryphon faded back a half-step, raising his weapon - and whatever the thing was came diving down at him.

He had a snap impression, like a mental flash photograph, of a vaguely humanoid shape with leathery wings and a hideous, fanged face - glowing scarlet eyes - a deafening, monstrous screech. He shot it three times, twice in the chest and once in the forehead, but it kept coming, kept keening. It had talons, the fingers of its hands hugely elongated to sharp points, and they reached for him as the creature, whatever it was, dove toward him. He set himself to dive underneath its strike -

Another figure suddenly appeared, smashing into the room through the remains of one of the windows. Time, already slowed, went into a complete freeze-frame for a moment. Sparkling glass fragments and spinning chunks of mullion formed a little cloud of debris, the glass catching the dying orange sunlight. Gryphon's mental snapshot this time was more detailed: a human girl, somewhere in her late teens, with black hair and very white skin, dressed in a white blouse and black pleated skirt, with a viciously curved sword in her hands. She yelled what might have been a challenge and intercepted the monstrous beast in mid-dive.

Time snapped back to normal as all three hit the floor, diving one way while the creature and its attacker smashed down and tumbled the other. Gryphon rolled to his feet, spinning to face the action as Raven appeared at his side.

"What the crap was that?" Gryphon asked.

"My guess is 'high school senior'," Raven replied, deadpan.

"No, the other thing," Gryphon said.

"Chiropteran," Raven told him. "It's a kind of vampire. I've read about them. Never seen one before."

"Damn," Gryphon muttered. "They grow them big around here." He put the .45 away - a gun was obviously not going to do any good at all in this situation - and drew his own sword from his back.

The girl with the sword knew how to handle it, which surprised Gryphon a little; he had known some prodigies in his time, but she was very small - almost frail-looking. The sword - Ō-dachi-like, but with a weird jog in the blade near the hilt - was almost as long as she was tall. Still, she wielded it with authority, not to say ferocity, and kept the monstrous vampire at bay despite its huge reach advantage. It fought cannily for a creature of such clearly feral disposition, though, and didn't give her a decent opening for a counterattack.

She feinted to her right, spun with incredible swiftness, and struck, but the chiropteran anticipated the move and caught her with a backhanded swipe. She rolled with it, managing to avoid being cut to pieces by the beast's talons, but the blow still hurled her across the room. She hit the far wall and rebounded, her sword falling from her hand and bouncing toward the corner, then fell to the floor and lay face-down, stunned - or worse; Gryphon couldn't really tell.

He looked at Raven; she nodded and disappeared, her own shadow rising up from the floor to consume her. The chiropteran, seeking to capitalize on its advantage, leaped across the room toward the girl, then snarled in consternation as Raven suddenly sprang up from nowhere, her cloak flying around her like the wings of her namesake. Standing firm in the monster's path, she drew a line in the air in front of herself with a hand. The charging chiropteran smashed into nothingness, its talons inches from her, then reeled backward and regrouped for another assault. Before it could launch that assault, Gryphon jumped onto its back - the thing had to be ten feet tall - and drove his blade into the top of the monster's skull.

The chiropteran wavered, staggering, and fell to one knee, but then it flailed violently, flinging him from its back. He landed hard but rolled to his feet, ready to meet it as its charged. His blade struck home twice more, opening wounds in its chest and abdomen that would have been fatal to any normal lifeform, however hardy.

On this thing, they just closed up again in a few seconds, leaving it none the worse for wear. Cutting it up just seemed to make it mad.

"Crap," Gryphon observed as he backpedaled, fending off claw strikes. Just as the chiropteran was about to gain the upper hand, it was suddenly engulfed in a storm of broken sword blades, chunks of masonry, discarded throwing stars, and other detritus, all animated by Raven's will and sent hurtling against the beast's hide. That gave Gryphon the moment he needed; gathering his concentration, he forced his ki into the blade, making the edge of the steel glow with a white light. He kept on the defensive for a few more moments, then reversed a parry and sliced the creature's fingers off at the first knuckle.

The chiropteran recoiled, roaring, smoke pouring from its hand. Gryphon took advantage of the opportunity to disengage and fade back toward Raven. The chiropteran stayed where it was for a few moments, clutching at its maimed hand, staring at him with seething hatred in its glowing eyes. Then, as both Gryphon and Raven watched, the damaged hand started to writhe and pulsate, growing new fingers with remarkable speed. The gashes and abrasions caused by Raven's barrage were already vanishing as well.

"Hum," Gryphon remarked. "That's inconvenient."

Behind the two IPO agents, unnoticed, the dark-haired girl pulled herself to her feet. She wobbled slightly for a second, then regained her composure and took in the situation.

"Fools," she spat, causing both Gryphon and Raven to glance at her in surprise. "Who do you think you are? Amateur monster hunters, I suppose. Know a few tricks and think that qualifies you to go into the dark places." She shook her head, her whole mien conveying a world-weary disgust decades beyond her apparent youth. "You're too stupid to live."

"Says the schoolgirl with a sword," Raven replied acidly.

The chiropteran, its recovery complete to its apparent satisfaction, hissed and spread its wings.

"Get out of here," the girl snarled, picking up her sword. "I won't warn you again."

Then, without waiting for an answer, she threw herself back into combat, racing past Gryphon to meet the chiropteran's lunge. This time the two passed each other in mid-air, and each wounded the other; when they landed, the monster's side was bloody and the girl's white blouse was going crimson at the shoulder. Gryphon noticed as the chiropteran turned that the wound she had just opened in its side was closing, but not nearly as fast as the ones he'd inflicted had done.

Gryphon and Raven didn't hesitate further; they moved in to support the girl, whether she wanted their help or not. Months after their transforming experience high over Muspelheim, their cooperation was honed to a razor's edge. The two seemed to be everywhere, each moving to support the other at exactly the right moment. The only problem was that they had to adjust their pattern to allow for the unknown player in this particular version of the game - which they were able to do easily enough, for their part, but the interloper didn't know them and couldn't properly read them. An unfortunate outcome was inevitable.

It came soon enough, when the mysterious girl moved to flank the creature at exactly the wrong time. Raven, moving in for a flanking attack of her own, had to check her lunge at the last moment to avoid ending up in the sword's path herself, and when she did, she made herself a perfect target. The chiropteran capitalized, twisting around the sword-wielding girl's strike and nailing Raven with a backhanded blow that threw her nearly half the length of the great hall, demolishing what remained of the table with her hurtling body.

Teeth gritted in a furious snarl, Gryphon ducked its attempt to do likewise to him, came up from the floor with all the strength in his body, and ran the monster through, smack in the middle of its chest. That seemed to get its attention; it shrieked, nearly deafening Gryphon, and then reared backward, flailing. He hung onto his sword for dear life as he fell backward, but the blade caught on something inside it and was jerked from his hands. The beast howled, clutching at the embedded weapon. Gryphon hit the floor, skipped backward, barely avoided falling flat on his ass, and then recovered his balance.

Too slowly. The chiropteran, still transfixed by his sword, roared and leaped. "Aw, crap," he said before its outstretched claws punched straight through the middle of his body and out of his back. Still conscious - after as many years and as many battles as he'd faced, getting impaled tended just to focus the mind for the first minute or so - Gryphon bared his teeth and reached for his sword, which was still jutting from the monster's chest.

The girl with the Ō-dachi appeared, bloodied but still very much in the fight, and severed the chiropteran's impaling hand neatly at the wrist. Gryphon noticed two things with a sort of detached interest: that the flesh actually blackened and shriveled, as if burned, at the edges of the cut; and that the girl had red eyes, eyes that seemed to glow from within with the same kind of strange light as the chiropteran's.

Suddenly released from the bulk of the creature, he fell backward, the katana's grip slipping away from his fingertips. He hit the floor hard, grabbed hold of the severed hand, and yanked it out of his body, grunting from the fresh nova of pain that brought him. Then he slumped, gathering his concentration.

The sword-wielding girl backed the raging chiropteran a few yards away, but her own injuries were starting to slow down even her remarkable reaction speed. The chiropteran accepted a glancing wound to its arm in order to lunge, seize her with its remaining hand, and hurl her with all its might against the wall.

Raven regained consciousness quickly; only a few seconds had elapsed by the time she got to her feet. In an instant, she saw that her partner was badly wounded, kneeling on the floor with blood all around him. While she was still taking that in, she heard the interloper scream and looked up to see her smash into the wall. Whether by design or just blind luck, the chiropteran had thrown her against the point of a ten-inch-long wrought-iron lamp bracket, pinning her gruesomely to the wall. The point of the bracket jutted bloodily from the right side of her upper chest.

"That looks like it hurt," Raven growled. She threw her cloak back over her shoulders and uttered an incantation, sending another fusillade of sharp things and bits of rubble hurtling at the chiropteran. It keened, swatting away missiles, and began charging toward her, slowly at first but with rapidly increasing speed. Chunks of masonry and damaged weapons punched holes in the leathery membranes of its wings, slashed at it, bashed it as it charged.

Raven stood her ground, hands open at her sides, not slackening the bombardment for a moment. With the room in the condition it was in, there was certainly no shortage of ammunition. The chiropteran bulled through the barrage, reaching for her with its remaining hand and its slavering jaws. Raven waited until the last possible moment, then ducked under its sweeping claws, seized the grip of Gryphon's katana, jerked it from the monster's chest, and threw herself forward and down. She passed under it, raking it as she went with the reversed blade, then rolled to her feet and whirled as it crashed to the floor behind her.

Howling with fury, the chiropteran rolled over a couple of times, got to its feet, and turned to attack again.

Raven's eyes were slashes of featureless white light in the deep shadow of her cowl. She levitated, cloak fluttering, a few inches from the floor, and spread her hands in ancient signs, intoning in an eerily polyphonic voice, "Azarath. Metrion - "

With a howl, the chiropteran scooped up a chunk of the floor and flung it at her. Aborting her spell, Raven deflected the missile instead. The monster raised itself to its full height, let out another hideous shriek, and charged her again.

"That's it. I'm through with you," she snarled. Instead of starting the spell again - not enough time for that now - she dropped back to the floor, transferred Gryphon's blade to her left hand, and reached into the folds of her cloak with her right.

The hand emerged an instant later gripping a weapon unlike any of the primitive ninja tools or cutting-edge military hardware scattered in pieces around the room - a chunky, rounded handgun festooned with deco protrusions, a couple of small whip antennae, and what looked for all the world like a truncated test tube full of some glowing blue liquid attached to the back of the main body, pointing upward at a jaunty angle. The round barrel sported a row of cunningly machined cooling fins set back from the inch-diameter muzzle.

This unique weapon, a gift from a fellow IPO agent, emitted a deep electrical growl as it powered up, blue light flashing through vents in the sides of the body and between the cooling vanes -

- and the Teslamatic Tri-Polar Atomic Dissociator Ray-Pistol raved forth azure destruction, spitting a beam of brilliant blue light capable of reducing an armored fighting vehicle to smoke and slag in seconds. It punched a massive hole through the chiropteran's center of mass, instantly vaporizing a manhole-sized chunk of its torso, and passed through to wreak havoc on the wall beyond. Part of the room collapsed as a swath of the wall, and the entrance hall beyond that, was instantly disintegrated.

The chiropteran writhed, arms flailing - but incredibly, it still didn't seem to be going down. Raven was shocked. The few other times she'd actually fired the Teslamatic at anything, the target had pretty much ceased to be entirely.

What in Azarath is this thing made of? she wondered. The hole in the monster's chest, though gigantic - she could clearly see the night sky beyond the fallen wall through it at a few dozen paces - wasn't putting it down, and was even starting, very slowly, to shrink. The beast staggered, the light in its eyes dim but not going out, and then lunged forward as if determined to take Raven down with it when it fell.

Gryphon appeared behind her, snatching his sword from her hand as he passed, and took advantage of the chiropteran's much-reduced reaction speed to sever its head with a passing cut. Head and body went their separate ways, the head bouncing across the room to wind up near the wreckage of the table, the body crashing to the floor and sliding to rest at Raven's feet. As Gryphon, still kneeling in his strike's follow-through, cleaned his blade and put it away, the chiropteran's carcass finally crumbled to dust.

The Chief remained where he was for a moment, then opened his eyes, looked up, and took in the destruction wrought on the far side of the room. Turning around to regard Raven with a wry grin, he said,

"Teslamatic got away from you a little, huh."

Raven put the weapon away and gave a small shrug.

"The power selector stuck again," she said. "I have to have Nikola look at it when we get back to Headquarters."

"What happened to - oh," Gryphon said, his voice becoming subdued, as he saw what had become of their mysterious interloper.

With a creak, the lamp bracket bent under its unaccustomed burden, allowing the girl to slide off and fall face-first to the floor. She lay motionless for a moment, blood slowly pooling around her - and then, impossibly, began to stir.

"My God," Gryphon blurted. He rushed to her side, arriving just a few paces ahead of Raven, and knelt by her. "Don't try to move," he said. "We'll get - "

Suddenly, with quick, almost angry-looking motions, the terribly wounded girl raised herself up, first to hands and knees, then into a kind of crouch. Then she raised her head and looked with wild scarlet eyes at Gryphon, whose clothes and face were still spattered with blood from his regenerated wounds. As he watched, startled, her pupils contracted to near-invisible points. Her face (which, now that he got a good look at it, would've been pleasant enough under normal circumstances) took on a look of utter animal madness -

- moving so fast he couldn't even consider doing anything about it, she lunged at Gryphon and bit him. He had just the most fleeting glimpse, the impression of wickedly elongated canines, before her teeth sank into the side of his neck.

"GAAAH!" he observed.

Raven started to intervene, then realized that there wasn't much she could do - if she struck the girl or tried to pry her off, she'd probably just end up making her rip Gryphon's throat out. Gryphon had apparently reached the same conclusion in the nick of time; though he'd seized the girl's shoulders, he'd managed to stop himself from shoving her away.

A moment later she took care of the problem for them by recoiling with a guttural cry that sounded like equal parts surprise, pain, and fright. Writhing as if in anguish, she fell to the floor again, face down, back arched, arms crossed over her belly. Gryphon took a couple of scrabbling half-steps backward and sat down hard, a hand pressed to his neck, blood oozing between his fingers.

"Jesus!" he blurted. "What the crap!"

"Are you okay?" Raven asked, moving to his side. "Move your hand."

"Not yet. Give it a few seconds to finish closing," Gryphon replied. "Ow! Fuckin' A, that was nothing like it says in the manual." Keeping his hand on his neck, he sat and watched the girl thrash around, making awful noises, her hands now clawing at the stone floor. Before his and Raven's startled eyes, she seemed to shrink slightly, as though reverting in age.

After a few more moments the pain seemed to subside. She stopped writhing, rolled into a huddled ball for a few seconds, and then slowly dragged herself to hands and knees. Though her clothes were torn and bloody, there was no sign of the wounds that had marred her body just moments ago. She looked up at Gryphon again, this time with a look of tremendous confusion on her face. She was younger now, he realized - she'd regressed perhaps four years, from late to early high school age - and her eyes, wide with shock, were brown now that the crimson light had gone out of them. She crawled hesitantly toward him, reaching out a quivering hand. Raven bristled, ready to take action if she tried to attack again, but Gryphon gently put a hand on her arm. This girl had no fight left in her now.

"... what... did you do... to me?" she whispered, then lost what little strength she had left and fell toward him. Gryphon caught her, barely registering her slight weight in his arms. She was trembling violently.

"Easy," Gryphon said, trying to sound soothing. "It's okay. You're safe now. We're not going to hurt you. Who are you?" he asked. "What's your name?"

"... Saya," she said. "I think... my name is Saya."

"Where are you from?" Raven asked. "How did you get here?"

Saya turned her head and looked at Raven as if the simple movement cost her the last shreds of energy in her body.

"... I don't know," she said in a frightened voice, and then she slumped, unconscious.

Gryphon considered this turn of events for a few moments, then slowly gathered her up in his arms and got painfully to his feet.

"Raven," he said after a pause for thought, "why do these things always seem to happen to me?"

Raven cracked a tiny smile.

"Some guys just have it," she said.


Friday, June 18, 2410
Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense
Avalon County, Zeta Cygni

Gryphon stood next to the hibernation chamber a couple of the BPRD's paratechnicians had constructed for his mystery girl, wondering if it were an actual requirement of the design that made the thing shaped like a coffin, or just the builders' perversity.

"She's a true vampire, all right," BPRD Director Tom Manning reported, looking through a file folder one of the techs had just handed him. "The most impressive intact specimen we've ever had here, in fact. The guys in Paragenetics are still looking over her genome, but right now indications are that she's first-generation, whoever she is. Turned into one of the undead by the Lord of Blood himself."

"Why is she in a coma?" Gryphon asked.

"That, we don't know," Manning replied, shrugging. "True vampirism isn't very well-understood, medically speaking, because examples are rare and don't usually volunteer for study. Our best guess is that she had a weird reaction to the Detian factors in your blood. Triggered some kind of partial cellular regeneration. Sort of like what happens to Time Lords, near as our guys can figure. It must've been quite a shock. She's gone into a deep suspension - pretty much all cellular functioning stopped, no metabolic activity, nothing. The only reason we can't call her dead is because she's already undead. I couldn't tell you if she'll ever come out of it - or what she'll be like when she does." Manning looked around, then added in a confidential tone, "We, uh, could finish her off if you want. It's pretty easy when they're not fighting back."

"No," Gryphon said, giving Manning a hard look. "We don't operate like that. She's no danger to anyone in her present condition... and she was fighting the other one."

"Different breed. Your high-class bloodsuckers like this one think of chiropterans pretty much the same way you and I think of mad dogs. They spook the game. Meaning us." Manning eyed the chamber warily. "I don't like the idea of keeping one of these things around this place. You remember what happened when we all thought that freak Krönen was dead for good."

"She's not a 'thing', Tom," Gryphon said sharply. "But if you're uncomfortable with monitoring her condition, I'll transfer her to one of the biolabs at Headquarters. Maybe I should do that anyway, just in case you get antsy and decide you'd better 'finish her off'."

Manning held up his hands in surrender. "All right, I'm sorry," he said. "That was out of line. I just... " He sighed. "Okay, okay, fine. I got used to Hellboy, I got used to Abe, I got used to that acid-freak datatech you sent me... I'll get used to this. We'll look after her. Really. You have my word."

Gryphon held his eyes for a moment, then nodded. "All right. Call me the instant anything about her condition changes."

"Okay." Manning turned to leave, then hesitated in the doorway and turned back. "Oh... listen... can you at least take the weapon with you?"

Gryphon nodded again. "Sure."

"Thanks. That'll put my mind a little at ease, anyway." So saying, the director left the room.

Gryphon picked up the girl's sword from the table where it lay and examined it, then went and looked at her face through the window in the hibernation chamber's lid. Below the window was a label, blank except for the BPRD specimen tracking number assigned to her.

Gryphon looked at her face, then at the weapon he held and the object that contained it. Then, smiling, he reached into his pocket, pulled out a Sharpie, wrote a single word on the chamber tag above the tracking number, pocketed the marker, and left.

"Saya" - A Future Imperfect Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
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