Chapter 13
Dredging up the Past
Tomoyo knew Sakura better than anyone else in the world, or so she told herself. But, of course, Sakura wasn't perfect, and there was nothing wrong with that. Sometimes she got so flustered she couldn't see what was right in front of her. That's okay, Tomoyo thought: that's why I'm here.
From below her volant friend, Tomoyo cheered, "You can do it, Sakura-chan! You can stop her fire!"
All at once, Sakura felt confident again. It was never about what Cinder said, it was about her disregard of everyone else. As she dodged out of the way of another attack of blades, she said, "Watery, let's put out the fires on the houses." The aquatic figure smiled in approval, then poured itself across the air extinguish a nearby building.
It quickly doused a spot on the roof, and let itself flow down the side of that house to extinguish a burning trellis. But it's much easier to put out a fire when someone else isn't adding more flames.
Sakura called out to Watery again, sending out more power as she did. The spirit surged in front of her, and flowed towards the house in front of her, cutting back the flames. This worked for all of five seconds. Cinder Fall let loose another barrage of flame toward Sakura, instantly turning half of Watery's back into a cloud of steam.
"Is this all you can do, little girl?" Cinder sent forth another burst of flame, and from this one the girl felt the blistering heat from inside the shell of her shield card.
Sakura was holding out against the Fall Maiden, just so. So close to an ocean, and there was just not enough water. Not enough to tackle the conflagration, or the living magical inferno creating it. The thing that disturbed Sakura the most is that these were people's homes being destroyed, every object that they held dear being destroyed by this woman's blind wrath.
She needed more water, and needed it fast. The Wave would probably hurt more than it helped — nobody needed a tsunami in the middle of town. She was running out of options.
"Last chance, kid. It would be a shame to lose a promising young magician like you. Stop letting that boy tell you what to do, and come with me."
"No way. I'm going to stop you, and your fire!" the cardcaptor declared, knowing that everything was going to be all right.
"You wish." Cinder shot another blast towards Sakura, wreathing the force field around her in flames.
This was the neighborhood of Venice's oldest canals, now filled in to become the street on which she stood. A canal's worth of water be enough to fight the conflagration, for sure. But the past would stay in the past... or maybe not, she thought?
"Not my wish, Akari's wish!" In the center of the inferno, Sakura held two cards in front of her, and invested all her hope in them. "Make her wish come true! Return these streets to their original form," she turned the cards face forward and shouted their names: "EARTHY, RETURN!"
The first card materialized as a brown-skinned woman with an angular face, an updo rivaled only by Centauri noblewomen, and jagged crystals growing out of her body. The other card briefly appeared as an elven youth in a hood, holding a clock. Return then disappeared into black mist, his cloak draped over Earthy, his clock expanding into a spell circle of rotating blue lines interspersed with Greek letters. After a split-second look to her mistress, Earthy raced off to the south like a temblor rippling across the ground as the spell circle faded away.
Mercury laughed at the departure of her spirits, seeing that even Sakura's allies had deserted her. He yelled from across the street, "Finish her, so we can get out of this stinking place!"
But Cinder paused. Not since her investiture as Fall Maiden had she felt so much magical power, and this time the power wasn't even flowing through her.
A few of the residents of Aria House had gathered on the roof thereof to watch the massive fire burning a ways up the coast from them. It wasn't close enough to be afraid for one's own safety, more just a disaster to stare at, and wonder what was happening. If things got bad for some reason, they could always scamper onto the beach at a moment's notice.
The dry Santa Ana winds which normally accompanied such fiery disasters were absent. It was, in fact, a calm night. The flames that were erratically jumping between buildings and trees, were sending a column of dark smoke straight up, as illuminated by all of the city light.
"Is your country extra flammable?" Osaka asked.
"Extra...? Yes, the hills are, but usually the houses are normal flammable." Brent stared at the city. "I do wonder what is going on over there, though. There's no reason the fire should—" Brent took a step backwards, "Whoa, did you feel that?"
Yomi was quizzical. "Feel what?"
"Like the whole world shook."
"I felt it," Fujitaka confirmed. It felt powerful, but strangely familiar to him.
Yomi dismissed it, "That's just Tomo jumping around." She certainly didn't feel anything unusual. Then the rumbling sound of the earth being rent apart thundered past, and of course everyone could feel it a couple seconds later when the building rattled on its foundation. A wall of water rushed down the long canal to fill the open chasm. "Huh, maybe she's put on weight."
Tomo squeaked, "That's the last time I take diet advice from you!"
"Sakura!" Fujitaka said quietly, "I hope she's okay."
Brent said, "For Sakura, everything will surely be okay. I just hope there aren't any undines out in the water right now."
Down on the canals, Alice was conveying Akari and Aika back home from dinner at a quick clip. The fire going on downtown was nothing to take lightly, so she was going as fast as she could back to the safety of home.
They were just about back when Akari felt something funny and indescribable, it was like it was at the back of her mind and the pit of her stomach at the same time. Something had moved past her. She looked down towards the ocean outlet of the canal, and spoke one of the few words of Japanese her friends understood. "Tsunami."
A torrent started rushing up the Grand Canal. The boat lurched backward, and the Single undines had a white-knuckled grip on the side of the boat. Aika screamed, "Alice, get down!"
It was prudent advice, but at the same time, a gondola without a gondolier at the stern is useless. Alice couldn't protect anyone that way, only a useless undine couldn't keep her passengers safe. Alice, more than anything else, did not want to be a useless undine. So the Pair did the only thing to be done: brace herself against the stern and slip her oar into the roaring canal.
She used it as a rudder, turning the boat about and keeping her going straight up the canal. As the turbulent canal threatened to sweep them ashore, she thrust the butt end of her oar against the trunk of a magnolia tree to keep afloat. Whitewater gondola rafting is not an Olympic sport, but Alice certainly made a compelling case that it could be.
Back among the burning embers of a neighborhood, Tomoyo was capturing every minute of Sakura's adorable determination with her camcorder. Tomoyo supposed Kaorin had a point, and that maybe keeping her camera with a laser focus on Sakura-chan was not the best way to record her magical activities. Certainly the anime had made Sakura's battles look much more heroic — if less cute-filled — than her own videos. So when the ground started to sway beneath her feet, she reluctantly turned her camera towards the source of the noise at the far end of the street.
In her viewfinder, she centered on a blue glow that raced through the smoky street, disintegrating the blacktop and leaving a 30 foot chasm in its wake. And right behind it, a wall of muddy seawater rushed in to fill the once and future canal.
Tomoyo's camcorder panned past Shaoran, parrying Emerald's twin blades, just as he said, "Sakura-chan, now!"
"Right!" With Shaoran behind her, she felt like she could do this. Sakura pulled even deeper into her heart, and lent more power to her friend Watery. The magic card pulled a current of water up, forming a whirlpool in the sky. The stream of canal water cut though Cinder's wall of flame, and forced her to jump back to avoid the maelstrom.
Cinder tried throwing molten daggers through to at her opponent; the lava cooled and shattered before it even came close to Sakura's shield. She glanced around to see the rest of her team. Mercury getting pressed on both sides by the pair of winged fighters. Emerald was holding out well against the boy, with both sides engaged in high-mobility martial arts, but she didn't exactly have him at an advantage. There was a grimm in a cage with an uncharacteristically smug expression, and that kid with the camera, too.
Cinder's own adversary, the magical girl, was directing her efforts towards extinguishing the fires around her, evoking jets of water from the canal to nearby houses. Which made it an opportune time to leave. At least, with her objective still in hand, she might be spared the wrath of her mistress.
She threw lava blades across the former street, now a roiling canal, right in Shaoran's path. He aborted his charge at Emerald to avoid them. On the near shore of the canal, Cinder iced Kerberos' wings. It didn't take him out of the air — magical flight doesn't quite work like that — but he did lose control so that his momentum crashed him into a terracotta tile roof.
Next, she withdrew something from her pocket with her good hand. A massive portal appeared behind Cinder, writhing like the flames engulfing the neighborhood, but in a much deeper, darker red. "We have what we needed, let's go!" To turn a phrase, only a fool fights for a burning house, and Cinder Fall is nobody's fool.
She backed off, levitating the cage bearing the beowolf alpha with a swift motion. It snarled at her as whipped past, sensing her sudden fear, but she took no heed. The real monster was the eleven year old girl in front of her.
Emerald called back, "Let's spar again, kid!" Shaoran was more than happy to let her go. Mercury leapt, using his leg guns to launch himself through the portal — and take a final potshot at Yue. He blocked the shots with his broadsword.
Cinder held a shrinking flame wall in front of her as she casually walked towards her portal, pretending the deluge of water was not a threat. One thing you learn from living with Grimm is how to mask fear with confidence. She turned back and said, "I'd love to stick around, but we'll have to finish playing later. Ciao." And as she stepped into the portal, it collapsed behind her.
Sakura gave out one more burst of effort, and Watery unwound from the whirlpool into her mermaid appearance. She swam through the skies, a wake of water pouring into the burning buildings, extinguishing them immediately, then drawing out the water to move onto the next building. She was a bit of a mischievous card, but she could feel her master's will to save people's precious belongings. She ran up and down the neighborhood, putting out fires wherever she went. Shaoran even joined in, casting on his ofuda to bring the water dragon.
Watery was feeling extremely proud, helping out her mistress so much! She was about to handle the last four houses still ablaze, when she felt herself being drawn suddenly back into her card form.
As Sakura collapsed onto the wet grass of someone's front yard, Kerberos cried, "Sakura-chan!" He landed on all four feet at once, rushing to her side. And all of the rest of her friends quickly did the same.
Yue looked down with uncharacteristic tenderness, and gently lifted his mistress up. She was no monster now, her angelic sleeping face perfectly complimenting her undine costume.
Dredging up the Past
Tomoyo knew Sakura better than anyone else in the world, or so she told herself. But, of course, Sakura wasn't perfect, and there was nothing wrong with that. Sometimes she got so flustered she couldn't see what was right in front of her. That's okay, Tomoyo thought: that's why I'm here.
From below her volant friend, Tomoyo cheered, "You can do it, Sakura-chan! You can stop her fire!"
All at once, Sakura felt confident again. It was never about what Cinder said, it was about her disregard of everyone else. As she dodged out of the way of another attack of blades, she said, "Watery, let's put out the fires on the houses." The aquatic figure smiled in approval, then poured itself across the air extinguish a nearby building.
It quickly doused a spot on the roof, and let itself flow down the side of that house to extinguish a burning trellis. But it's much easier to put out a fire when someone else isn't adding more flames.
Sakura called out to Watery again, sending out more power as she did. The spirit surged in front of her, and flowed towards the house in front of her, cutting back the flames. This worked for all of five seconds. Cinder Fall let loose another barrage of flame toward Sakura, instantly turning half of Watery's back into a cloud of steam.
"Is this all you can do, little girl?" Cinder sent forth another burst of flame, and from this one the girl felt the blistering heat from inside the shell of her shield card.
Sakura was holding out against the Fall Maiden, just so. So close to an ocean, and there was just not enough water. Not enough to tackle the conflagration, or the living magical inferno creating it. The thing that disturbed Sakura the most is that these were people's homes being destroyed, every object that they held dear being destroyed by this woman's blind wrath.
She needed more water, and needed it fast. The Wave would probably hurt more than it helped — nobody needed a tsunami in the middle of town. She was running out of options.
"Last chance, kid. It would be a shame to lose a promising young magician like you. Stop letting that boy tell you what to do, and come with me."
"No way. I'm going to stop you, and your fire!" the cardcaptor declared, knowing that everything was going to be all right.
"You wish." Cinder shot another blast towards Sakura, wreathing the force field around her in flames.
This was the neighborhood of Venice's oldest canals, now filled in to become the street on which she stood. A canal's worth of water be enough to fight the conflagration, for sure. But the past would stay in the past... or maybe not, she thought?
"Not my wish, Akari's wish!" In the center of the inferno, Sakura held two cards in front of her, and invested all her hope in them. "Make her wish come true! Return these streets to their original form," she turned the cards face forward and shouted their names: "EARTHY, RETURN!"
The first card materialized as a brown-skinned woman with an angular face, an updo rivaled only by Centauri noblewomen, and jagged crystals growing out of her body. The other card briefly appeared as an elven youth in a hood, holding a clock. Return then disappeared into black mist, his cloak draped over Earthy, his clock expanding into a spell circle of rotating blue lines interspersed with Greek letters. After a split-second look to her mistress, Earthy raced off to the south like a temblor rippling across the ground as the spell circle faded away.
Mercury laughed at the departure of her spirits, seeing that even Sakura's allies had deserted her. He yelled from across the street, "Finish her, so we can get out of this stinking place!"
But Cinder paused. Not since her investiture as Fall Maiden had she felt so much magical power, and this time the power wasn't even flowing through her.
A few of the residents of Aria House had gathered on the roof thereof to watch the massive fire burning a ways up the coast from them. It wasn't close enough to be afraid for one's own safety, more just a disaster to stare at, and wonder what was happening. If things got bad for some reason, they could always scamper onto the beach at a moment's notice.
The dry Santa Ana winds which normally accompanied such fiery disasters were absent. It was, in fact, a calm night. The flames that were erratically jumping between buildings and trees, were sending a column of dark smoke straight up, as illuminated by all of the city light.
"Is your country extra flammable?" Osaka asked.
"Extra...? Yes, the hills are, but usually the houses are normal flammable." Brent stared at the city. "I do wonder what is going on over there, though. There's no reason the fire should—" Brent took a step backwards, "Whoa, did you feel that?"
Yomi was quizzical. "Feel what?"
"Like the whole world shook."
"I felt it," Fujitaka confirmed. It felt powerful, but strangely familiar to him.
Yomi dismissed it, "That's just Tomo jumping around." She certainly didn't feel anything unusual. Then the rumbling sound of the earth being rent apart thundered past, and of course everyone could feel it a couple seconds later when the building rattled on its foundation. A wall of water rushed down the long canal to fill the open chasm. "Huh, maybe she's put on weight."
Tomo squeaked, "That's the last time I take diet advice from you!"
"Sakura!" Fujitaka said quietly, "I hope she's okay."
Brent said, "For Sakura, everything will surely be okay. I just hope there aren't any undines out in the water right now."
Down on the canals, Alice was conveying Akari and Aika back home from dinner at a quick clip. The fire going on downtown was nothing to take lightly, so she was going as fast as she could back to the safety of home.
They were just about back when Akari felt something funny and indescribable, it was like it was at the back of her mind and the pit of her stomach at the same time. Something had moved past her. She looked down towards the ocean outlet of the canal, and spoke one of the few words of Japanese her friends understood. "Tsunami."
A torrent started rushing up the Grand Canal. The boat lurched backward, and the Single undines had a white-knuckled grip on the side of the boat. Aika screamed, "Alice, get down!"
It was prudent advice, but at the same time, a gondola without a gondolier at the stern is useless. Alice couldn't protect anyone that way, only a useless undine couldn't keep her passengers safe. Alice, more than anything else, did not want to be a useless undine. So the Pair did the only thing to be done: brace herself against the stern and slip her oar into the roaring canal.
She used it as a rudder, turning the boat about and keeping her going straight up the canal. As the turbulent canal threatened to sweep them ashore, she thrust the butt end of her oar against the trunk of a magnolia tree to keep afloat. Whitewater gondola rafting is not an Olympic sport, but Alice certainly made a compelling case that it could be.
Back among the burning embers of a neighborhood, Tomoyo was capturing every minute of Sakura's adorable determination with her camcorder. Tomoyo supposed Kaorin had a point, and that maybe keeping her camera with a laser focus on Sakura-chan was not the best way to record her magical activities. Certainly the anime had made Sakura's battles look much more heroic — if less cute-filled — than her own videos. So when the ground started to sway beneath her feet, she reluctantly turned her camera towards the source of the noise at the far end of the street.
In her viewfinder, she centered on a blue glow that raced through the smoky street, disintegrating the blacktop and leaving a 30 foot chasm in its wake. And right behind it, a wall of muddy seawater rushed in to fill the once and future canal.
Tomoyo's camcorder panned past Shaoran, parrying Emerald's twin blades, just as he said, "Sakura-chan, now!"
"Right!" With Shaoran behind her, she felt like she could do this. Sakura pulled even deeper into her heart, and lent more power to her friend Watery. The magic card pulled a current of water up, forming a whirlpool in the sky. The stream of canal water cut though Cinder's wall of flame, and forced her to jump back to avoid the maelstrom.
Cinder tried throwing molten daggers through to at her opponent; the lava cooled and shattered before it even came close to Sakura's shield. She glanced around to see the rest of her team. Mercury getting pressed on both sides by the pair of winged fighters. Emerald was holding out well against the boy, with both sides engaged in high-mobility martial arts, but she didn't exactly have him at an advantage. There was a grimm in a cage with an uncharacteristically smug expression, and that kid with the camera, too.
Cinder's own adversary, the magical girl, was directing her efforts towards extinguishing the fires around her, evoking jets of water from the canal to nearby houses. Which made it an opportune time to leave. At least, with her objective still in hand, she might be spared the wrath of her mistress.
She threw lava blades across the former street, now a roiling canal, right in Shaoran's path. He aborted his charge at Emerald to avoid them. On the near shore of the canal, Cinder iced Kerberos' wings. It didn't take him out of the air — magical flight doesn't quite work like that — but he did lose control so that his momentum crashed him into a terracotta tile roof.
Next, she withdrew something from her pocket with her good hand. A massive portal appeared behind Cinder, writhing like the flames engulfing the neighborhood, but in a much deeper, darker red. "We have what we needed, let's go!" To turn a phrase, only a fool fights for a burning house, and Cinder Fall is nobody's fool.
She backed off, levitating the cage bearing the beowolf alpha with a swift motion. It snarled at her as whipped past, sensing her sudden fear, but she took no heed. The real monster was the eleven year old girl in front of her.
Emerald called back, "Let's spar again, kid!" Shaoran was more than happy to let her go. Mercury leapt, using his leg guns to launch himself through the portal — and take a final potshot at Yue. He blocked the shots with his broadsword.
Cinder held a shrinking flame wall in front of her as she casually walked towards her portal, pretending the deluge of water was not a threat. One thing you learn from living with Grimm is how to mask fear with confidence. She turned back and said, "I'd love to stick around, but we'll have to finish playing later. Ciao." And as she stepped into the portal, it collapsed behind her.
Sakura gave out one more burst of effort, and Watery unwound from the whirlpool into her mermaid appearance. She swam through the skies, a wake of water pouring into the burning buildings, extinguishing them immediately, then drawing out the water to move onto the next building. She was a bit of a mischievous card, but she could feel her master's will to save people's precious belongings. She ran up and down the neighborhood, putting out fires wherever she went. Shaoran even joined in, casting on his ofuda to bring the water dragon.
Watery was feeling extremely proud, helping out her mistress so much! She was about to handle the last four houses still ablaze, when she felt herself being drawn suddenly back into her card form.
As Sakura collapsed onto the wet grass of someone's front yard, Kerberos cried, "Sakura-chan!" He landed on all four feet at once, rushing to her side. And all of the rest of her friends quickly did the same.
Yue looked down with uncharacteristic tenderness, and gently lifted his mistress up. She was no monster now, her angelic sleeping face perfectly complimenting her undine costume.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto