chapter 2

-the middle of the Konan imperial capital-

Leigh wasn't quite sure what had happened when the world went red to her. She had the impression of some bird, though the only thing she could see was red, and she thought she was falling, or flying, one of the two. She wasn't quite sure which though. Whatever the sensation was, it lasted for what seemed like an eternity of just red and falling/flying.

Finally, she saw something besides red, a light. It grew brighter and brighter, eventually getting bright enough that she had to close her eyes or be blinded. As soon as she closed her eyes the falling/flying sensation disappeared, and she fell onto a hard surface. Then the brightness faded, and she decided it was safe to open her eyes.

The scene surrounding her was definitely not school. It wasn't even inside, and didn't quite look like any place she'd ever been before either. Of course, it didn't quite look like it even belonged in the US, or in the present. As Leigh was realizing this, a thought popped into her head that it kinda looked like a city in Ancient China.

This disturbed Leigh, because she had no idea what Ancient China was like. She hadn't paid enough attention in her world history class the year before to remember what had been mentioned about China in any time period. So when it occurred to her that wherever she was looked like Ancient China she wondered just where that thought had come from.

She couldn't figure out where the thought had come from though, not even after stopping and thinking for a few minutes. So, she figured that something weird was going on, which certainly fit with the changing text in the book, and the red light, and going from the library to this strange place. And if something weird was going on, that was most likely where the thought had come from. And, of course, something weird was bound to be less boring than a normal school day.

So, with that in mind, Leigh made a plan of action. First, she needed to find out if this place was close enough to China that they didn't speak English, and in that case hope that the something weird included some sort of way for her to understand and be understood. And, of course, she needed to get familiar with her surroundings as well. After that she could start trying to figure out why this weird stuff was happening to her.

Leigh started to look around again. The first time she'd looked around she'd only noted that it wasn't home, and she hadn't really paid any attention to what her surroundings were. So, when she looked around for the second time, she noticed a guy around her age, maybe a little older, standing on the other side of the clearing.

He was cute, a little shorter than she liked usually, considering she was just about the same height as he was, and kinda skinny, but still cute. He looked just a little underfed, and his clothing looked very, very worn and dirty. But he had a head of hair that definitely didn't fit with his poor, dirty look, just as his golden brown eyes shone with a defiance that didn't fit either.

His hair looked healthy, and very well cared for. It was a very, very vibrant orange color, more or less the same color as flames. It was grown fairly long, almost as long as her own hair, but pulled back in a loose tail. It looked out of place with his obviously poor clothing, but it certainly added to his attractiveness.

"What the hell are you?" he asked, glaring at her untrustingly. "Some kinda demon?" And that answered her question about whether she could understand whatever language the people in this "Ancient China" spoke. To her, it sounded just like English, so she didn't even know if it was some other language or not.

"Last time I checked I was just a normal girl," she replied. "I don't think I'm a demon."

"Well normal girls don't just appear out of thin air!" he exclaimed.

"That doesn't make me a demon!" she shot back. "I think I'd know if I were a demon. Anyway, I'm not sure what was up with the appearing out of thin air either!"

The two of them glared at each other for a while. Meanwhile, a few people who had hidden nearby when they saw the red light went off to find someone to deal with the "demon." They sought one of the guardsmen who were patrolling the city, watching for trouble (something the emperor's grandfather had started to keep down crimes in the city), and told him about the strange girl who had appeared out of nowhere in a burst of red light.

The guard, who was a very superstitious man, decided it would be better to go to his commander on this one, instead of checking it out himself. He didn't want to get on the bad side of a possible demon. And after all, General Saihitei was well known as one of the bravest men in the land; he'd be able to handle a demon.

About ten minutes later the guard had General Saihitei on his way to investigate the demon, which made him much more comfortable with the situation. Leigh and the boy had stopped glaring, and were yelling at each other instead. Most of his comments were about her being a demon, though the language was much more colorful than that. She kept insisting that she was human, but no matter what she said, he didn't believe her. Then, finally, Saihitei arrived, along with two other guards just in case he needed their help.

"Exactly what is going on here?" he asked, watching the two arguing teenagers, who were both right around his own age, with a disapproving glare.

"This...thing appeared right out of the damned air!" the boy exclaimed, pointing at Leigh. "She was even surrounded by some weird red light. She's gotta be some kind of demon, but she says she ain't!"

"I'm not a demon!" she yelled back at the boy. Saihitei raised his eyebrow at her.

"And what would be your story?" he asked her, glaring at the boy as he tried to get a word in.

"I don't know what's going on," she said. "I was at school when some light surrounded me and some weird stuff happened. Then I was here, though I'm still not sure where here is." She paused, then continued, her voice growing huffy. "And the first, and only, person to talk to me besides you called me a demon. I am not a demon. I can assure you of that."

The boy glared at Leigh, not seeming to notice that Saihitei was glaring just as much at him. Saihitei, who was afraid that a fight was about to break out, finally decided that he needed to get the two off of the street. He motioned to the two guards to take hold of the arguing teenagers and escort them to the palace. They started walking, making the boy and Leigh lose their balance.

Leigh pulled her arm out of the guard's hand roughly and glared at Saihitei. "If you wanted me to come with you, you could have just asked. I can walk by myself."

"Leggo of me!" the boy was yelling at the same time. He was struggling fiercely, and the guard who was holding him made sure to keep that hold, since he wasn't being calm like Leigh was. The guard was afraid that the boy would bolt if he let go, and he was pretty sure that General Saihitei would be less than happy with him if that happened. Either that, or the boy would go for the girl, which would also get him in trouble. General Saihitei, while not being a cruel man, was quite strict when it came to things like his subordinates following the rules he set down for them. And one of those rules was that if there was something they could do to avoid trouble while on the job, they were expected to do it, even if it was not something that had been specifically mentioned. General Saihitei expected a basic amount of intelligence from his men, provided it didn't conflict with their ability to follow orders.

So the guard holding the boy kept his grip firm, but not so tight that he would injure the boy. After all, he must have outweighed the not-quite properly nourished street rat by at least fifty pounds, maybe even a hundred. Unless the brat was a trained fighter there was no way he would be able to break the guard's grip without doing something drastic, and the guard was not about to let his guard down that much. No, that boy was going to the palace with General Saihitei and the girl, whether he liked it or not.

The walk to the palace took a while, mostly because the city of Konan was at that point in history quite a busy place during the day. The markets were open every day, all day long, and most of the major routes to the palace led straight through the busy streets lined with temporary stalls set up by farmers, craftsmen, and merchants come into the city to sell whatever they had with them. Making his way through that sort of crowd was slow going, something that Saihitei realized. And it wasn't made any easier by the fact that he had someone who looked like he knew the streets far better than Saihitei, or his guards, ever would in tow. Someone that would have to be watched carefully to make sure he didn't slip away and disappear into the crowd before the guard holding him even realized that he had lost hold of the boy.

It would have been quite a bit easier to make their way back to the palace had Saihitei ridden to the scene in a cart or carriage in the first place, as his advisors were always suggesting. But that would have taken a significant chunk of time just to get the contraption ready, and would have been far too much of a waste for a simple little problem like a fight close to breaking out on the streets of the city. Saihitei hadn't expected to be returning to the palace with a girl who might or might not be a demon and a common street thief in tow. Besides, it was lazy to be riding around the city, when he had a perfectly good pair of legs that could carry him almost as quickly, if not always with the same amount of authority. So they walked.

This, of course, was not a happy thing for Leigh. She was used to trying to shove her way through crowds. The hallways of her school were more than crowded during the seven minutes they had to travel from class to class, full of teenagers standing around chatting until the last possible moment before making their ways reluctantly to classes that they didn't really want to be at in the first place. And not only were they crowded, they were dangerous, as anyone who had accidentally gotten a face full of key chains, attached to a nearby backpack of course, to the face could tell you. In her two and some odd change years at the school, Leigh had become quite good at threading her way through the halls without getting stuck or hurt.

But, that was nothing compared to the crowds that they were trying to fight their way through at that point. Things were maybe a little less crowded than they were at school, if only because the streets were a bit wider than the halls at school were. But many of the people on the streets were armed, some with swords over half as long as Leigh was tall. The guards and their leader were armed as well, but Leigh noticed that none of them were drawing their weapons to fight their way through the crowd, which caused most of the people around them to simply ignore them in favor of keeping an eye on those who were.

And the odor... If she hadn't already guessed that things were quite so advanced in this "Ancient China" as they were back home, Leigh would have been convinced by this alone. She saw quite a few horses on the streets, and even if she hadn't seen them, she would have known they were there by the stench of their refuse that lay scattered around the streets. And she had never quite experienced the full power of a massive crowd of mostly unwashed bodies before... It was almost enough to make her pass out, except that she was afraid that if she did they wouldn't notice until she had already been trampled by the people surrounding them.

She didn't complain, though. The guy in charge of the group looked important, and she didn't want to get in trouble with someone important right away after appearing in a place that she wasn't familiar with. That was never a good idea. So even though she didn't want to keep trying to shove her way through the giant, smelly crowd of people at marketplace and did want to know what was going on as soon as possible, she kept quiet and followed the person in front of her, who at that moment was the leader of the group, since the guard who had originally taken hold of her arm had decided to stay behind her to keep as much between her and the still struggling boy. That, at least, she was grateful for, since she didn't outweigh the boy the way the guard who had a hold of him did, and she didn't expect someone who thought she was a demon to be satisfied with just hurling insults for long.

Instead of complaining, which was what she wanted to do, Leigh spent the trek to the palace looking around her, while being sure to keep straight on track at the same time. It would be a bad idea, she decided, to start wandering off to the side because she was staring at something off to her right and not paying attention. She doubted the guards would believe her if she said she was just distracted, and not trying to make a subtle exit. But, even knowing that, she couldn't help but watch, and try to figure out a little more about where she had arrived.

Because of this, she noticed that most of the people in the street who weren't too focused on what they were doing to notice the people marching down the middle of the street were staring at her. It was the leader, and the other guards, who caught their attention in the first place, and most of the people on the street seemed to recognize the leader, as she heard several people mentioning what seemed like a name to the people next to them while pointing out the spectacle. It kinda sounded like Saihitei, but she wasn't sure. But she was the one that they were paying attention to after the initial surprise and excitement.

She heard more than one person remarking on her strange clothing, or her "foreign" look, though she couldn't see how, aside from the clothing, she looked any stranger than the flame haired boy struggling behind her, or the powder blue haired guy she saw turning the corner a little bit ahead of them. Her hair was much the same color as many of the people around them (9), and the style wasn't too much different from some of the others. And it wasn't that she didn't look Chinese, since even if the strange information in her head told her it kinda looked like Ancient China, not too many of the people really looked Chinese. So it was really just her clothes that made her different... except that everyone was still staring and whispering.

This, Leigh noticed, did not make Saihitei happy. He frowned as the whispers about Leigh continued to multiply, and finally he started to increase their speed, almost to the point where the guard holding the boy was having a hard time keeping up and keeping hold of the boy at the same time. Leigh just followed, more than a little happy when she realized the fact that, even if it was a little less than comfortable, the faster pace would get her out of the scrutiny of the public that much faster. That wasn't to say that she was sure she wanted to look forward to whatever would happen to her once they were off the streets and at their destination, wherever that might be.

Finally, after almost a half hour of determined fighting with the crowds and such, they arrived at the main gates of the outer wall of the palace. Leigh could only see the top of the building, and she wasn't quite sure that it was a palace, but the idea had stuck in her head, and wouldn't go away, so that was what she decided to think of it as until she knew for sure it was something else. Besides, it was a very large building, with what looked to be quite a bit of land surrounding it but inside the walls separating her and the others from the grounds. Leigh wasn't really surprised at the size of the building that was their destination, but that was only because she had been continuously trying to avoid coming to any conclusions throughout the entire trip, since she was sure that whatever she decided was in store for her, it would almost certainly be wrong.

The guards at the gates greeted Saihitei with a salute, accompanied by a stiff "Shogun." This struck Leigh as slightly odd, since she had been working under the assumption that shogun was a Japanese term, not Chinese, for years. She immediately shook her head and reminded herself that even if it seemed like Ancient China (according to that strange conviction in the back of her head), that didn't mean that everything would be Chinese. Particularly not if the people didn't look Chinese, and they didn't. Not that they looked Japanese either, at least, Leigh didn't think they did. She wasn't really able to tell the two peoples apart in general, but few of the people she had seen so far looked Asian...except for they way they dressed.

After greeting him, the guards at the gates opened said gates for Saihitei without even being asked, and stood at attention while he marched through, guards, Leigh, and boy in tow. And Leigh then realized that, even if she had already figured out that there was a lot of land inside those walls, nothing she could have imagined could have prepared for what kind of land it was. What it was was...extravagant. The single building that she had seen rising above the walls was definitely reminiscent of all of the oriental (not PC...but she couldn't come up with a better way to refer to the concept at the time) architecture she had ever seen, and it was huge. Not very tall, but it sprawled, branching out in every direction and filling its given part of the grounds inside the walls (10).

There were other buildings, but they were quite a bit smaller, all arrayed to the sides of the grand walkway leading from the main gates to the front entrance of the palace. There were people running here and there, from building to building, all of whom looked to be in a hurry to the point where they had no time to care whether there might be anyone else in the way. Off to the right there was a larger building, though still nothing to rival the main palace, with a flat, empty space just outside, where Leigh could see several men all dressed in the same outfit, most likely a uniform, doing what looked like a weapons practice, a conclusion that Leigh came to after comparing the reality to what she had imagined while reading countless fantasy stories. She figured she was probably right, since she saw no other reason for a bunch of men to be waving sticks around like they were attacking each other. She also suspected that might make them soldiers, especially given the uniform.

They spent no time dawdling outside of the buildings. The moment he was sure the gates had been closed behind the group, Saihitei made a beeline for the large building off to the right. He passed right past the practicing soldiers, eliciting a few friendly comments from the man in charge of them, comments to which he responded with a noncommittal "I'd love to stay and chat, but I'm a little too busy at the moment" gesture toward Leigh and the (still struggling, though a little less actively now that they had entered the palace walls and were surrounded by soldiers) boy. He led them into the building and around until they reached a series of "rooms" with a single wall each made out of bars which could have been nothing other than jail cells.

Saihitei motioned to the guard following Leigh and then muttered a few things, too low for Leigh to hear them, to the man. After that, he motioned over another guard who had been in the room from the beginning, standing at attention just by the door, and that guard unlocked one of the cells. Leigh's guard placed a hand at the small of her back and pushed her into the cell before she could realize what was going on. As he pushed her, she stumbled forward, into the cell, and then fell to her knees, having been caught off guard enough that she lost her balance. Then the other guard locked the door behind her.

"Hey!" she said, scrambling to her feet and then around to face Saihitei, the guards, and the boy, who hadn't yet been put in a cell. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Dealing with you while I get the story from this one," Saihitei replied, indicating the boy, who had started laughing the moment he realized that Leigh was being put in the cell, and he wasn't.

"Is this how you deal with all visitors to your land?" she asked, even as she realized that it probably wasn't a good idea to argue with the guy in charge, who just so happened to have a sword at his side.

"When they cause problems and have, from all I can tell at the moment, appeared in this land under suspect conditions, then yes," he said. "I will return to hear what you claim happened later. For now the safest route for the empire would be keeping you locked up or watched until we decide whether you will be a threat to the emperor or not."

"Emperor? Why would I want to do anything to him?"

"That is what I plan to find out," Saihitei said, smiling at her. It wasn't a mean smile, though it probably would have been on most other people in a similar position. It was a surprisingly kind smile, one that made Leigh feel a little better when she saw it, even though the person smiling at her had just announced that he thought she might be a threat to his emperor, which could not be a good thing.

She didn't say anything, except to mutter something about how the situation sucked, before retreating from the front of the cage and turning to survey her surroundings. Saihitei seemed to take this as a sign that she was going to behave and left the room, leaving only the guard who was originally there, the one with the keys, to watch Leigh, who was busy trying to find somewhere to sit other than the frighteningly stained pile of straw in the corner. Of course, it was a dirt floor, so she wasn't having much luck.

"Yeah, this sucks..." Leigh said to herself as she gave up and sat on the part of the floor that looked like it was packed down the most. "I just hope this isn't all because I commented that life should be more like a book," she thought, pulling her legs up to her chest as she stared at the room outside of the cell. "Anyone should have realized that I wasn't serious when I said that. At least, not completely." She smiled to herself, and then proceeded to wait for Saihitei to get done being convinced that she was a demon by the boy. She probably wasn't going to come out on top of the situation, but there wasn't too much she could do about it.