My breathing was abnormally slow, yet I felt relief spread through me quickly.
“Although I advise against revealing our hand too soon, I stand ready to disable the necklace upon your command.”
I agreed with Ghost. Now wasn’t the right time to unleash me, yet surely that time would soon be at hand. Surely an opportunity would present itself sooner rather than later. All I had to do was be patient until then.
“Princess, there is more that I must quickly tell you. Firstly, your body is a Master-Grade Simulacrum, very expensive and of high quality. From its inception date and expected lifespan of twenty thousand hours, it would appear you were given this body with a long-term goal in mind since Simulacra rarely last beyond ten thousand hours. In other words, I believe the Sanreal Family have your long-term interests at heart. I find it difficult to consider they would wish you to come to harm now. That being said, I do not understand why you are being subjected to such physical torment. I do not understand her motivations.
“This brings me to the second point. I have affirmed her identity as Clarisol val Sanreal, youngest daughter of the Sanreal Family who a century ago founded and continue to control the Telos Corporation. For the Sanreals to have dispatched their daughter to bring you in, it is fair to say that they have a highly vested interest in you. Having spent considerable resources on both you and Mirai, I cannot see why they would choose to harm you. For that reason, I believe you are not in danger. You are far too important to them to risk harming you. And yet, once again, I do not understand why she is going to such lengths to torment you.”
I blinked slowly while listening to the ghost.
“However, there is something else I have ascertained and I owe you a heartfelt apology. I have been lying to you. I cannot take full credit for the changes to your appearance. When I chose to assist you in your quest, I initiated a program that I discovered in the Simulacrum’s wetware that was designed to alter your appearance to that of a girl of equivalent age and height. Your perfection is thus not by my hand.”
Perfection. He calls this perfection? Wait—is he ashamed for not being responsible for my looks? That’s what he’s apologizing for? What the Hell?
The ghost continued after a brief lull. “While I am guilty of hording credit where it was not due, unfortunately there is one more sin I have unwittingly committed.” The ghost hesitated for a long moment, and I waited on pins and needles. “Princess, I made the mistake of believing that at any point in time I would be able to reverse the changes implemented by the program. I was wrong. I have been unable to stop it, and I regret to say that the program has yet to run its course.”
Run its course? Oh no. Don’t tell me.
The ghost sounded regretful. “In an hour or so, the program will have completed…and by then you will be completely female in appearance.”
With my awareness functioning at an accelerated rate, I was able to recognize the precise moment my heart stopped…and then started up again.
“I am sorry, Princess. I am truly sorry. I can only beg your forgiveness….”
The passing scenery outside the car picked up speed as time resumed its normal pace within my mind.
That son-of-a-bitch. He set off the program that turned me into a girl. This is all his fault. I’m going to kill him….
I felt a tear roll down my cheek, and hurriedly averted my face from Clarisol and the girls, intending to wipe it away discreetly. However, I realized I’d failed when out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed delight swim across Clarisol’s face. Anger flashed through me, and I met her amused eyes with a glare.
“Why?” I asked her. “Why do you hate me so much? I’ve never even met you before. What have I ever done to you that would make you hate me?”
She looked genuinely surprised. “You have it all wrong, Princess. I don’t hate you at all.”
My mouth fell open in disbelief. “Then why…why do you enjoy making me suffer?”
“That’s simply the way I am. I’m a sociopath. I relish in people’s suffering, but that doesn’t mean I hate you.” Clarisol smiled at me with unexpected warmth that shocked me to the core. “Quite the opposite Princess. I look upon you and I’m overwhelmed with the desire to make you mine.”
“What…?”
“I wish to devour you. To consume you. To seduce and to dominate you. I want to make you give me your all. I want to become your world.”
Aghast, I lost my voice while beside me Tobias sounded more or less how I felt. “Clarisol, you’re sick.”
“I’m sick?” she questioned him under raised eyebrows. “You have feelings for a boy, you have a crush on your adopted sister—”
“I don’t have a crush on Giselle!”
“—and yet you deign to call me sick because I adore girls.” Facing me once again, she smoothly concluded, “I only wish that you were born a girl.”
Struggling with my voice, I managed a hoarse whisper. “Why? Why a girl?”
The warmth in her smile faded as she grew solemn. “Because you were never meant to be a man. But you were meant to be a girl.”
She knifed through me with those words, and I could do nothing but renew glaring ineffectually at her. For several seconds I debated calling upon Ghost to release me from the necklace so that I could launch myself at this hateful young woman, but the angel on my shoulder extolled the virtues of prudence…though I could have mistaken it for a demon in disguise doing Clarisol’s bidding. In the end, I turned away and looked out Shirohime’s window, the latter either oblivious or disinterested in the verbal exchange between Clarisol and I.
As the Fates would have it, those would turn out to be the last words any of us spoke for many minutes. Clarisol’s reflection visible in one of the windows continued to smile but it had lost its luster, and like Shirohime sitting beside me, her gaze too was distant.
Outside the moving vehicle darkness was gently descending upon the city, chasing away the crimson sky deep into the horizon. I didn’t recognize the scenery but I realized that we were now travelling east on a multi-lane highway that paralleled the harbor shoreline, well away from the towering megascrapers of the city-state. This part of shoreline had yet to be overpopulated though I’d heard it was only a matter of time before greed overwhelmed the efforts of the city-state planners and megascrapers began to rise high over the undulating hills. I wondered why it was that wherever people went, they eventually marred the beauty of the landscape. I could understand why the aliens viewed people as a plague upon the cosmos.
Sometime later I saw a vast collection of lights in the distance to the south of the road, and the driver spoke into the passenger cabin through hidden speakers.
“Mistress Clarisol, we’ll be arriving shortly at the marina.”
Clarisol continued looking out the window beside Felicia. “Thank you. Are they expecting us?”
“Yes, Mistress. The ship is powered up and ready for immediate departure.”
“Good to hear,” she said though I noticed her tone was lackluster, and when she sat back in the seat she appeared weary.
The limo and lead vehicle turned onto a looping exit that passed under the highway then straightened southward toward the harbor shoreline. Through the long side windows, I could see the wide sprinkling of lights ahead of us and assumed this was the marina mentioned as our destination. A minute or so later, and the two black saloons passed through a grand military style checkpoint with krono-steel boom gates – not the kind of structure I expected at civilian marina – and then drove slowly through the complex. They turned down a wide permacrete pier and soon came to a stop adjacent to one of many jetties branching out from it.
I leaned forward to peer around Tobias at a boarding ramp that stretched over the water to the fantail of a sleek superyacht lying low on the water.
Releasing a heavy sigh, Clarisol abruptly straightened her posture on the seat and then slapped her cheeks loudly a number of times before shaking herself free of whatever had been weighing down
her spirits.
“We’re here,” she declared with child-like enthusiasm that sounded a little too forced to be genuine, then straightened an arm toward the yacht visible through the windows on the left hand side of the car. “Welcome to my boat.”
- IV -
To call Clarisol’s vessel a boat was a stretch.
It was better to describe it as a cross between a trimaran, a superyacht, and stratospheric passenger liner.
Tobias and the girls stepped out of the limo, yet I had to be carried out – lest I call upon Ghost to disable the necklace incapacitating my body. So for the time being, I swallowed down my embarrassment and shelved the remains of my male pride as Tobias carried me princess style out of the car. As anticipated, he couldn’t resist staring down the top of my dress, so I reached up and pinched his cheeks until he promised to behave.
To my surprise and relief, I found a wheelchair waiting for me, delivered by a tall man in a pitch-black suit who retrieved the contraption from the boot of the lead car, rather than the saloon we’d travelled in. The hubless wheels reminded me of another wheelchair I’d seen days ago, shortly before my life took an abrupt excursion off the beaten path into a Hellish unknown. As Tobias carried me over to the contraption, I read the words Telos Corporation imprinted on the side of the backrest. Once my backside was deposited on the chair, I felt it come to life around me. The armrests automatically adjusted their length to fit me, and the ovoid shaped controls under my palms had depressions for my fingertips to rest upon.
Shirohime casually walked up to me while I was getting comfortable in the wheelchair. For a moment I thought she would say something, but she only regarded the wheelchair quietly for a little while before walking away with arms folded under her breasts, her school carry-bag hanging from her right shoulder. While everyone else had abandoned their belongings back in the classroom during the mad dash to the car, Shirohime had remembered to bring her bag along with her. That quiet thoughtfulness of hers bothered me. It hinted she was always thinking in advance, thereby keeping one-step ahead of us, hiding her motives and agenda from those around her.
I watched the beautiful girl cut a lonely figure as she stopped to regard the surrounding scenery, and realized that I couldn’t get a handle on her at all. Whenever I believed I had her figured out, she changed the setting and became a different person, and I had to start all over again.
Sitting in the wheelchair, I reluctantly chose to leave the enigma of Anri Shirohime aside, and took a moment to consider my surroundings as well.
In the distance to the west, the city skyline was visible above the intervening low-lying hills, glowing brightly with the strength of a billion dots of light that pushed back the night, and formed a phantasmal photonic aura that silhouetted the megascrapers. Using it as reference point, I gauged the marina was located within the northern shoreline of the horseshoe shaped harbor, and some thirty to forty kilometers away from the city-state’s central business district. Unbidden and perhaps wanting to shed some of the awkward silence between us, Tobias explained that the marina was constructed within an artificial lagoon excavated out of it by machinery almost too large to imagine. From what I could see, the marina berthed more than a hundred boats, a few on the scale of mid-sized luxury cruise liners thereby necessitating an area of the marina all to themselves.
The black saloons had parked at the entrance to a wide jetty. Moored to it, Clarisol’s boat floated gently on the waves, and I observed a number of security personnel in dark suits guarding both ends of the boarding ramp bridging the distance from the jetty to the sleek vessel’s open-air fantail.
As I’d mentioned before, the boat was something of a chimera, resembling a cross between various other craft, resulting in a vessel that possessed an arrowhead forward superstructure that blended into an ovoid main body that tapered off into a flat fantail. Short, thick stubby wings projected from the main hull and these were connected to pontoons that resembled aircraft wings. I guessed the overall length at sixty to seventy meters, and though it floated on the water, I didn’t believe it was designed for sailing through heavy seas. In fact, I was convinced the craft could either fly or submerge below the ocean waves rather than sail upon them.
Clarisol waved to us like a guide trying to keep her flock of tourists together. “Come along now,” she instructed, and marched on her high heels ahead of the group, passing by the security guards at the boarding ramp to the boat.
Since I had no practice with the wheelchair, I chose not to tempt fate. I had no intention of accidentally triggering something like Turbo Mode and rocketing off the jetty and into the water. Considering it was a Telos Corporation device, it might transform into something that floated on water but I had decided to play it safe. Remembering to button up my blouse, I swallowed my pride yet again, and asked Tobias to please push me along before him. His job was made easier by the silent motors that drove the wheels, and the contraption appeared to respond to the pressure he placed on the handlebars.
Shirohime walked beside me with a faintly downcast and preoccupied air. I chose not to ponder what troubled her. In truth, I didn’t really care. Regardless of her motivations, she had deceived me and then ensnared me with the necklace. As such, my feelings toward her were not kind. That is to say, there was no love between us and I resented her presence.
I felt more or less the same toward Angela and Felicia, both of whom walked ahead of us while trailing behind Clarisol. Occasionally, the girls glanced over their shoulders as though making sure we obediently followed.
I kept my silence and avoided meeting their eyes.
Even if Ghost could disable the inhibitor sapping my strength, I was under no illusions regarding my chances. It seemed their Simulacra bodies and mine were of the same Master-Grade – whatever that meant – but I lacked the martial arts training Felicia and Angela possessed so my chances of victory against them were non-existent.
However, there was one ray of hope.
I’d surmised from the conversations around me that I was to participate in a demonstration, one that most likely involved my Gun Princess, the aforementioned Mirai. Though it was possible she had restraints placed upon her, Ghost had described her as a Simulacrum like no other, so she nonetheless presented an opportunity to literally power up. Perhaps, I could do something with her.
I shook my head inwardly, and decided that I would most certainly make good use of her.
The first item on my agenda was beating the crap out of Clarisol.
While I thought this, I noticed how calm I was at the prospect of literally changing bodies. Before today, I would have thought it pure fantasy, the realm of science fiction. However, that wasn’t the case anymore. After all, I was living in a temporary body so why should I find it surprising any longer. Undoubtedly there would be more shocks, twists and turns lying in wait, but I decided that to keep an open mind was the best approach to remaining sane and on the prowl for opportunities. So for now I made no effort to fight my circumstances.
As they say, all good things come to those who wait, and with that in mind I looked up at the sleek yacht floating on the water ahead, the name Carnal Sin proudly emblazoned on the side of its fantail in swirling gold cursive writing. Although I was quietly envious Clarisol for owning such a ship, I felt the name left something to be desire. A heartbeat later, I thought of my sister aboard the Telos Corporation’s research ship, and I was surprised I hadn’t spared her much thought considering all that had happened to me today.
With a soft sigh, I followed Clarisol, Felicia, and Angela up the ramp, with Tobias gently pushing my chair along, and Shirohime choosing to lag a short distance behind us. Arriving at the yacht’s fantail, I looked about quickly and noticed the open deck was deserted of chairs tables, or other lounge furnishings. The phrase ‘batten down the hatches’ came to mind, and I involuntarily looked east at the now quickly darkening sky.
“Mat, is that a storm?”
Standing behind me, Tobias must have gi
ven himself a moment to regard the eastern horizon before replying. “Yeah, and it looks like a big one.”
“Where is this Proving Ground she spoke of?”
“Northeast of Ar Telica, on an island.” He seemed to hesitate before saying, “On an island surrounded by a storm.”
It sounded as though Shirohime was reluctant to cut in, but she did so out of necessity. “Tobias, they’re waiting for us.”
“Yeah, whatever…,” he muttered and then urged the wheelchair toward the wide doors leading into the sleek, streamlined yacht, the interior of which turned out to be surprisingly spacious and boasting the opulence of a luxury hotel. Besides the guards waiting at the top of the boarding ramp, there was only one crewmember on hand to greet us, a tall, slender middle-aged man in uniform – perhaps the captain of the ship – with whom Clarisol spoke to in hushed tones. Upon our arrival, Clarisol spared us all a glance and then dismissed the man. He bowed and departed smoothly, and Clarisol led us deeper into the vessel.
Forgetting myself for the moment, I looked about in awe as we travelled down a wide corridor that appeared to run much of the length of the yacht.
“Wow,” I whispered. “Sure is amazing what money can buy.”
Tobias snorted. “You haven’t seen my brother’s boat. Now that’s a monument to avarice.”
I frowned inwardly. “Mat, do you have a blood brother as well?”
Tobias snorted loudly. “I have a brother and he’s not much better than my sister. He goes through women as fast as women go through a pair of shoes. It’s a different one on his arm every month. All of them trophy girls he picks up and then tosses away.”
Gun Princess Royale: Awakening the Princess, Book One Page 34