Snippet #1910834

"'Ayu-chan?' Alright, I'm going to make one request, and that's never call me by that stupid nickname again!" Ayumu exploded, glaring at Miki. Being called a trout by this scatterbrained nutcase was just insulting.

She might have fumed a while longer if she hadn't seen Niki rushing over to a small crate in the corner, then repeatedly making exclamations of "ouch!" Wandering over, to Ayumu's surprise, she found a rather large pile of weapons lying around. What the hell was that doing here? Most of them were rather strange. Daggers, spiked chains, and so forth, but one of them caught her eye. It was a curved pole made from black wood, about five feet in total length. About a foot and a half of this length was made up by its rather oversized hilt, while the remaining portion was a skillfully crafted wooden imitation of the curved blade universally affiliated with Japanese swords. She knew what the blade was - a Nagamaki, or at least a wooden imitation of one. While she hadn't specifically trained in that weapon, even in her past life, she had learned enough Aikido to use both a Jo staff and a Bokken. This weapon was sort of like a mash-up between the two, which meant that maybe - just maybe, she might have been able to use it.

"Well, what have we here? Someone clearly doesn't know enough about the sci-fi genre to realize that you don't leave potentially dangerous weapons in the same room as your God-person prototypes," Ayumu said sarcastically, picking up the weapon. To her surprise, when she grasped it by the hilt, a metallic sound greeted her ears, and a blade slid partially out of the wooden sheath which she had previously thought to be the blade itself. This surprised her even more. A real weapon? And of this craftsmanship?

Gently, she removed the weapon from its sheath, looking at it in the faint blue light of the Shikenkan. She smiled approvingly. This would do just fine, if it came to violently breaking out and escaping the compound. Although, she noted, a stark naked girl battling her way out of a secret research facility using an antiquated bit of Japanese weaponry seemed too much like something from some anime to be plausible. Come to think of it, only in fiction would something like that ever work! Whatever guards this place had must have been armed with the latest in weaponry, and given that the current year was decades beyond when she had "lived," there was no way of knowing whether or not they had carbon-freezing death rays, or something cheesy like that. Even if they were still using normal projectile weaponry, a likely muscle-atrophied girl - she'd been suspended motionless in a tank for 15 years! - wielding a nagamaki wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell!

She sighed. In short, she was still shafted. She sheathed the blade again and continued looking through the pile. A small object slipped into her hand as she brushed aside a small dagger, careful not to cut herself as the manic klutz before her had done. Raising it, too, into the eerie light, she examined it. It looked to be a small vial of some enigmatic black substance. Glancing up, to her surprise and amazement, she saw Miki sucking up almost all of the liquid inside her own Shikenkan, storing it somehow inside her own tiny flask! Ayumu looked at the small black container with a newfound respect. It must have contained some sort of pocket dimension inside it that would allow it to store possessions related to its owner, or something. Well, hey, it was the only explanation Ayumu could come up with, and she supposed it would just have to do.

It looked like the water from the Shikenkan had some sort of restorative property. So, without much other practical choice, she quickly and nimbly clambered up on top of her own Shikenkan, and, avoiding the electrified edge, dipped her own dark vial into the glistening waters below. Just as she had suspected, the liquid swiftly sucked itself inside the small bottle, until the tube where Ayumu had slumbered for the past decade and a half was entirely empty. There was no telling when this mysterious liquid would come in handy, after all, nor could she predict how much she would need. Deftly dropping from the tube, she picked up her nagamaki and glanced around.

"Well. I honestly don't know what to think anymore. First weapons, then physics-defying bottles. In any case, I suppose we should just arm ourselves, fill up these weird vials, and see if we can't slip out of here without alerting any of the guards like the one we all just heard outside. And, if that fails, we can always make a berserk rush for whatever exits there might be. I doubt they'd just gun down the precious little experiments they've worked for so long on. I wouldn't bother with the lights, though. There are obviously people in this building, and carrying around a big light would just tip them off."