When you live a double life, it’s best to keep them completely separate.
Failing that, your best bet will instead become finding the most convincing way of tying the two together.
Well, actually your best bet is probably to come clean and stop living the lies, but if that isn’t in the cards for you, then, yes, learning how to weave them together is a valuable skill to hone.
It was a skill that Ryuna was quite comfortable with, having employed it several times throughout her life. It was how she was able to qualify for and win martial arts tournaments despite being too poor to afford the entrance fees and not having been trained and vouched for by any schools. It was how she was able to beat down rival gangs from noon to sundown and be her parents’ darling little angel from sunset to sunrise. It was how she was able to enjoy lavish meals and be Mr. XYZ’s arm candy at his fancy birthday party one week and skipping out on meals to cover hospital bills the next.
So when she made her way into the village of Welca once more, this time sporting several noticeable wounds while simultaneously coming face-to-face with Bron and a squadron of villagers heading out to the forcewells, she knew it was time to start word weaving.
“Hey, guys….” she said with a wince, tossing in a slight limp to her footsteps and pressing a hand against the side of her stomach.
Several of the men dropped their bags and rushed over to her, taking note of the injuries on her, as well as the hair she had purposefully ruffled up a bit with some dirt just before arriving in the village.
“Are you okay?!”
“What happened?!”
“Oh no! Poor Ryuna!”
Bron cut through the circle of men, bearing a textbook “concerned father” look on his face. “What happened to you?!”
Ryuna let out the kind of empty chuckle meant to mask one’s discomfort that never succeeds, but of course, that’s exactly what she was going for. “I, um….kinda ran into some monsters….”
She tossed in a convincing sudden stumble, bringing her hand up to one of the men’s shoulders to steady herself at the last second.
Bron moved beside her and placed her arm around his shoulder. “Let’s get you inside.” He nodded his head at one of the accompanying wellers. “Mik, go get Keri! Send her to my house. The rest of you, head to the wells.”
“Thank you,” Ryuna said, her voice low and whispery. For an audience, it would have been a touch too dramatic a performance, but Bron wasn’t able to see that.
* * * *
ULTRA DRAGON
* * * *
Keri was one of the resident doctors of Welca, and currently the only one not working a shift at the forcewells. As soon as she arrived in Bron’s home, she was escorted to Ryuna and Kizzy’s room to check up on the former. The latter had been ejected from the room by her mother, much to her annoyance, and decided to sit in the backyard, grumpily reading another magazine.
“Mik told me you were attacked by monsters,” Keri said as she began to analyze the various wounds spread across Ryuna’s body.
“Y-yeah….I was on my way back from my hike when they jumped me….”
“You poor thing!” said the doctor. She lifted one of Ryuna’s arms up to examine it.
After a few more moments of visual inspection, Keri then said, “Well, fortunately it doesn’t seem like you’ve been too badly hurt, but you definitely need to get lots of rest.”
Ryuna, elated at her good fortune, smiled brightly and totally genuinely. “Really? Oh, thank the Mother Dragon!”
Just as Keri started to get back to her feet, Ryuna’s stomach let out a heavy growl. While the injuries were wildly exaggerated, her fatigue had not been. The trek to and from the monastery, the three-way battle against Zhen and Tang Lung, the massive burst of chi she had decided to channel; it had all legitimately taken a toll on her energy levels, and she was ready for a big meal and a good night’s sleep.
Of course, since Welca was currently in the midst of a fasting in order to save food for the wellers, getting that bedtime meal wasn’t exactly a guarantee. Before returning to the village, she’d even considered going hunting in the mountains, but almost all of the monsters she’d come across were golems of some sort, and there was no way to turn rocks into anything remotely enjoyable to eat.
Normally, Keri would not have paid the stomach rumble much mind; the villagers were used to the forcewell fasting, so it was just an inevitability that was ignored. However, because Ryuna was a foreign visitor, her case begged for a bit of attention.
She leaned in closer to Ryuna with a concerned look on her face. “Did anyone tell you about the fasting?”
Ryuna nodded. “Yeah….you guys save food for the wellers, right?”
When the doctor returned her head nod, Ryuna gave her a weak smile and shrug of the shoulder. “I was actually gonna help out tomorrow evening….” Her eyes slowly trickled down to her body. “But….”
Keri gave her hand a comforting squeeze. “Let me speak with Lina for a moment, okay, sweetie?”
* * * *
ULTRA DRAGON
* * * *
The talk seemed to go well, as showcased when Lina entered the bedroom with a sandwich in hand.
“Make sure you eat up and get some rest, okay?” Lina said with a smile.
“I will! Thank you so much, Lina!” came Ryuna’s response in between bites. “I promise I’ll be good to go to help out with the forcewells tomorrow!”
With Ryuna’s assurance seemingly calming her unease at giving out more food, Lina bowed her head and left the room, just as Kizzy returned.
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“Lucky,” the girl muttered as she tossed her magazine onto the nightstand and dragged herself into bed, burying herself in the covers.
Grinning, Ryuna reached for the other end of the sandwich and tore off a chunk of it. “Here. Have some.”
Kizzy stared at the outstretched food with a look of disbelief, but soon relented, tossing it into her mouth. “Thanks.”
Ryuna’s eyes moved over to the magazine on the nightstand. She hopped out of bed and snatched it up. “‘All About Alttaelim: Traveler’s Guide to the Libertan Capital.’ Travel magazine?”
“Ugh, shut up….” Kizzy grumbled, squeezing her pillow over her head.
As always, Ryuna ignored the girl’s complaints. She moved over to Kizzy’s bed and sat down, flipping through the pages. “Did you wanna visit the capital? How far is it from here?”
“I dunno.”
Ryuna chuckled. “How do you not know? You’re in the same country, dude. Bet it ain’t too far.”
Kizzy removed the pillow and sat up, although the grumpy look on her face remained. “We are?”
“What? Of course you are. Libertas.”
An arch of the brow was the only thing Kizzy gave in response.
Ryuna frowned. “Do you….not know where Welca is?”
The girl shrugged. “Not really. The mountains, I guess?”
A giggle escaped from Ryuna’s lips. “Well, yeah, but….” She swiveled around on the bed, folding her legs. She took hold of Kizzy’s blanket, flattening it across the bed. She didn’t have a pen and paper on hand, but luckily the blanket was the right kinda material that it could be “drawn” on by manipulating the surface. “Okay, so this is the Vorga Mountains. And this is Welca.”
“Okay….”
Ryuna’s finger moved further down the blanket, where she doodled a little blip. “This is Ermina. It’s a big city with tons of airships. Do you know what an airship is?”
Kizzy nodded. “Yeah. They’re flying boats, right?”
“Close enough!” She then began to draw a rough outline of the edge of the continent. However, it turned out that she herself didn’t really remember what that looked like, so she gave up part way through and instead moved to the opposite direction of the mountains.
She tapped at another spot. “This is another city called Redvein. I dunno much about it, buuuut….” She drew a thick patch of darkness right beside where she’d marked the city. “There’s this forest called the Rosso Woods right outside it. All the trees and grass and shit are red. It looks beautiful in all the pictures I’ve seen. I’ve been wanting to check it out.”
To the surprise of both girls, Kizzy let out a snort of disbelief. In an attempt to fight off the encroaching embarrassment, Kizzy ignored it and said, “That sounds made up.”
“It’s not, it’s legit!”
“Suuuure.”
“If I could get a signal here, I’d show you.” Ryuna’s eyes wandered over her amateur diagram. She’d actually run out of room on the blanket space, so rather than draw it out, her finger just hovered over the space beyond where the bed ended. “I think Alttaelim should be somewhere around here. I know it’s in the ocean to the northeast of the mountains. Somewhere.”
Surprisingly, Kizzy seemed to be taking the blanket map somewhat seriously, her eyes scanning over it with genuine interest. “What about in between?”
“Hm?”
“There’s all this empty space in between the cities. What’s in it?”
Ryuna shrugged. “I don’t really know. I mean, from Ermina to the mountains, there’s pretty much nothing. Just a really long stretch of road, and lots of grass and cows and unicorns. It’s pretty, but not much else.”
“U-unicorns?!”
Ryuna’s eyebrows went up at the sudden outburst. “Uh, yeah. There were a whole bunch in the pastures while I was riding up here on the bus. Maybe they’re native to here?”
She watched as Kizzy once again dropped her gaze to the blanket map, most likely at the stretch of emptiness between the Vorga Mountains and Ermina.
“Wanna go see them?”
That question seemed to bring the Welcan girl back to her senses and usual demeanor. She shook her head before dropping it back down to her pillow. “No. We can’t leave the village, remember?”
“You guys sure are closed off from everything….” With a sigh, she stood up from Kizzy’s bed and returned to her own. After a moment of silence, she decided to start up a different conversation. “How’s the fire breathing going?”
“What?”
“The Energizer training. Have you been doing any of it? Has anything cool or weird happened?”
“Oh, right…. I tried that breathing thing you showed me.”
“Attagirl!”
Kizzy scowled. “Nothing happened.”
“It takes time. Plus, you’re probably not doing it quite right.” With a yawn, Ryuna stretched her arms and pulled the blanket over herself. “I’ll practice with you again soon, okay? We’ll try to make sure you can do it on your own properly.”
“….Okay.”
“Night Kiki!”
“Yeah….good night.”
* * * *
ULTRA DRAGON
* * * *
It was not a good night for Ryuna. After a mere hour or so of sleep, her body suddenly convulsed itself into awakening, rolling violently off of the bed.
The darkness of the room was immediately bathed in a glowing yellow light as the chi from within Ryuna began to soak itself into the air. It flashed brightly for half a second, then faded into a barely-visible dim the next.
Ryuna’s hands reached for her throat as she heaved her chest trying to simultaneously find a breath and expulse something that wasn’t really even there.
The sudden fit woke Kizzy up too, and as soon as she saw Ryuna coughing and gagging on the floor, she kicked out of bed in a panic. “R-Ryuna?!”
A guttural howl escaped Ryuna’s throat. Sweat was building up on her forehead, but it didn’t soothe the heat that was coursing through her body, it only made it worse. Each bead felt like the tip of a hot knife slowly slicing open her skin.
Her eyes started to rapidly shift in color from their usual green to the bright yellow that matched her chi energy signature. But with each transition, she temporarily lost vision entirely, and neither eye’s color switching was in sync.
She slammed her fingers against the floor, opening five small holes in the ground. With her other hand, she tried to grab for something to squeeze tightly, and ended up settling for the blanket that had followed her on her descent to the floor. The instant she gripped on the thing, she opened tears in the fabric.
And then, just like that, the golden light died down, and Ryuna’s body fell limp and returned to slumber.
* * * *
ULTRA DRAGON
* * * *
When Ryuna awoke the next morning, her head was on fire, and her eyelids refused to open up. She pushed herself off of the bed with a groan, pressing her palms into the sides of her head. “Holy shit….”
On the other side of the room, Kizzy sat upright in her own bed. She hadn’t gotten much rest herself, having spent an hour before and after sleeping keeping an eye on Ryuna in light of the incident from the previous night. “Are you okay?”
Ryuna groaned once more, albeit with a little more deliberate drama mixed in. “No….this feels like the worst hangover ever….And, like, a dragon keeps stomping on my head as hard as possible.”
Kizzy pushed herself up out of bed and made her way out the door. A moment later, she returned with a cup of water. “Here.”
“That’s not gonna do anything,” Ryuna grumbled, although she took the cup anyway. “But thanks, Kiki.”
“Sure….”
After downing the entire cup, Ryuna said, “Did anything weird happen to me last night?”
“Yup.”
She would have chuckled at the matter-of-factness of the answer, but was in too much pain to manage it. “That’s, uh….that’s what happens when your energy signature’s all wonked up. Chi is especially bad.”
“Sounds like you need training,” Kizzy said, a slight smile cracking open on her lips.
“Yeah, I’m working on it,” came Ryuna’s response. “I’m real close, too.”
As she pressed her palm into her forehead to try and massage the pain away, Ryuna couldn’t help but feel anxious about the incident. While bad chi outbursts had affected her a few times throughout her life, that had to have been the worst one she’d experienced so far, and she couldn’t even remember it properly.
Was it normal for them to get this bad? Was this caused by the chi channeling she had done at the end of her last match?
With a shake of the head, she pushed the worries out of her mind. Just two more matches to go. Then she’d be Master Kirin’s disciple, and Master Kirin would help her solve all of these chi issues.
Just two more matches to go!