[FFML] [Xover][Teaser] Ginban Alice

[Henry J. Cobb]

[Xover][Teaser] Ginban Alice
By Henry J. Cobb.

This is a teaser from a future section of a story I'm working on and
contains a few spoilers for that story.

This section includes characters, situations and spoilers from Ginban
Kaleidoscope/Rink of Glory, Kodomo no Omocha/Child's Toy and Gakuen
Arisu/Alice Academy which some changes to get everything to work together
as the first two don't have the concept of Alice to wrap all the strange
bits up together.

==============================

Misaki was waiting for me after class.  She looked at my new bracelet,
then up to my face, "They really did it to you.  They're always coming
down on us Special Ability types.  Come on, I've got somebody you can talk
to about this,"  She grabbed my arm that didn't have the bracelet.

"Us?"

"You're not the first one to have to deal with that thing."

We soon came to the auditorium then down the stairs to the basement.  It
was mostly a single large room with a skating rink.  At that moment there
was only a single skater on the ice, a senior-school girl with violet eyes
and long blue hair tied back in twin ponytails, much like my own
hairstyle.  Next to the rink there was a golden eyed brown haired
elementary school girl I thought I recognized from my new class.

The elementary school girl looked up as we walked up and turned off her
boom-box which had been playing "My Heart Will Go On", "Hey Tazusa, it's
Misaki and Sana!"

"Huh?" Tazusa stopped her ice dancing routine and skated over to us,
"You're that girl with the TV show aren't you?  My sister Yoko is a big
fan of yours," she nodded towards the younger girl.

"You were on TV also, in the Olympics..."  I stopped as I noticed that
Tazusa wore the same sort of bracelet that I did.

"It's great that you two already know each other.  I'll leave you two to
talk about Sana's little problem,"  Misaki waved and vanished.

"She's always doing that," Tazusa turned to me and looked at my bracelet,
"Alice problems?"

"It's Babbit, he won't shut up, so the teacher shut him up with this."

"A voice you can't get away from?  I can see why Ms Harada sent you to me.
 Yoko, this is serious stuff so I don't think you should..."  Tazusa
looked at her sister, who had already picked up the boom-box and started
walking away.  "Could you at least wait for me to finish my request?"

"I know when you don't want me around," Yoko said over her shoulder, "Just
get me Sana's autograph please."

"The telepaths say they're frightened by the empaths.  At times like this
I see what they mean," Tazusa turned back to me, "Let me get my skates off
and we can talk.  But first, do you frighten easily?"

"No."

"Are you scared of ghosts?"

"No, no, I'm a big girl."

"That's strange," Tazusa smiled evilly at me, "because everybody I've
explained my Alice to around here has gotten very very afraid.  I've only
had to say something like ``Let me show you how it works'' twice."

"D - don't you have an Alice for skating?  What's so frightening about that?"

"That would be great wouldn't it.  No, I'm afraid that I don't have an
Alice for skating, at least not anymore.  It's a long story.  I'll give
you one last chance to bail before unloading it on you."

"I can handle it, but I know you now.  You're that figure skating champion
with an angel's smile and a devil's soul who failed to win a single
medal."

"People who live in the public eye shouldn't quote the tabloid press."

"I don't have to worry about that here.  The media is shut out by the
government."

"None of the other students understand how that is the single best thing
about this Alice Academy,"  she smiled gently, "Follow me and I'll tell
you the Tazusa Sakurano story.  You've had your Alice all of your life?"

"Babbit showed up when I was eight.  I had drawn pictures of him for a few
years before then, but I didn't think he was real until people started
responding to him."

"And you managed to evade the Academy all these years?  In my case I had
no idea I was an Alice until I was sixteen.  I had been figure skating for
most of my life, on my mundane talents and had even gotten to
international competition.  It was during a match in Canada that I fell
over and hit my head."

"On the ice?  That must have been painful."

"Unlike the hockey players, figure skaters don't get helmets or sticks to
steady ourselves with.  Everything seemed fine when I woke up in the
infirmary but over the next several hours I started hearing a voice in my
head."

"You've got a telepathy Alice?"

"No, well kind of, in an odd sense.  Here's where it gets scary.  The
voice in my head was a dead boy."

"What?"

"I've got the ghost capture Alice.  His name was Pete Pamps and he had
died just as I was falling onto the ice.  I had never heard of Alices so I
was sure I was going mad, except that he was helping me in things like
English and my other subjects.  He also had an Alice, but I didn't notice
that until he was gone."

"Gone, gone where?"

"Wherever dead spirits go I guess.  But that's getting ahead of the story.
 When I first found out there was a boy inside my head, seeing and hearing
and feeling everything I did I freaked out.  I was literally beating my
head against walls to hurt him.  Then I found out that tomatoes really
freaked him out."

"Tomatoes?"

"Pete couldn't stand the taste of them and for a while I was on an almost
entirely tomato diet, but still he was helping me out all he could.  He
helped me redo my entire routine not once but twice and for the first time
I found I could visualize an entire routine and the moves I could do. 
Well, just let me show you."

I looked up at the senior school dorm, "Couldn't you show me on the ice?"

"Not anymore.  Come in, I've got a video in my room."

Tazusa first showed me a video of another skater, "What do you think?"

"It was very nice I guess."

"It should be, It won her a gold medal, now here's mine."

I was puzzled for a few minutes then pointed at the screen, "You're
skating with somebody invisible."

"No, it's all in my head."

"But look, there he just picked you up!"

"Sorry, it's a jump.  I went over this video with my coach and we
determined that it was just physically possible for me to do all of these
moves.  In my head I was skating with Pete and on the ice I was borrowing
his Alice of visualization, balance and location to pull it off.  The
judges didn't know what to think of it so I didn't get a medal, but now
most of them have signed a petition to have me awarded a special honor
from the International Skating Union for my performance."

"You borrow Alices?"

"Only of the ghosts I capture and only while I have them.  I'm a
meta-Alice like your sister.  I'm not sure if I could capture a non-Alice
even if I wanted to."

"Wait, I thought you said you accidently used your Alice.  Where's the
want in that?"

"No, looking back at it, it's always been my choice, but now I can't trust
myself to even take this bracelet off, in case some idle whim triggers my
Alice again."

"But if you could have any Alice you wanted, why wouldn't you use it?"

"Not all ghosts are as happy as Pete was.  Getting back to the story it
was during the awards ceremony that Pete passed away.  I mean he was
already dead, but his ghost stopped working or passed on to the next life
or paradise or whatever.  Knowing Pete, I like to think he was taken up to
Heaven.  So I whispered something to myself and him and he didn't respond.
 I figured he was playing a little game or something and I let it slide. 
After a week of silence in my head it wasn't so funny."

"Did you go crazy?"

"Even worse, I went back to Canada.  I latched onto some dinky little
match there and begged and begged my coach until he took me there.  The
day before the match I ran off.  Pete's parents found me sobbing at his
grave, begging him to say just one word, even if it was goodbye."

"Ouch."

"I knew them from Pete's dreams, so I told them I was a friend of Pete's
from Japan and they assumed that I had met him while he was a student in
Japan.  We had gone to schools just a half mile from each other.  I had
probably passed him on the street a few times and never knew it.  Not that
I would have paid him any attention at the time.  I was a pretty stuck up
little girl."

"His dreams?"

"A side effect of my Alice.  I get to visit the ghost's dreams and a lot
of them are about their previous lives.  I started out as a voice in his
head, as he was a voice in mine while awake and after a while I started to
have a physical presence in his dreams.  It was getting pretty intense
there at the end, but you're too young for that."

"Did you ever kiss him?"

"Never while awake.  Like I said, I met Pete's parents at his grave and I
went back to their house and we talked about Pete.  They gave me that
picture of his."

"Who's the girl in the other picture frame?"

"My second ghost.  I'm just about to get to her.  I collect these like
campaign medals, at least I guess that's what Pete would call them.  After
I went back to my hotel room that night I felt charged up for the first
time since losing Pete.  The next day I won the match, unfortunately."

"Unfortunately?"

"That's where that girl comes in.  She won second place and felt that her
life was over so she went back to her dressing room and threw her life
away.  At that very moment I was feeling empty, consumed by grief and I
reached out for somebody who would understand my grief and captured my
second ghost."

"So you choose the ghost you want?"

"Yes, I grabbed Pete as I knew I was falling and desperately wanted the
power of perfect balance, and I got it, along with Pete.  Her Alice and
personality weren't so pleasant."

"Oh."

"The Academy was already tracking me down after my Olympic performance and
they helped a lot with the second ghost, but still it was a hundred days
and nights of hell.  The bracelet turned off her Alice, but I still had to
deal with her voice.  At the end I think I managed to talk some sense into
her, but she was never happy about being undead."

"A hundred days?"

"Yes, I've had two ghosts and each time they went away a hundred days to
the minute after they died.  One of the boys in my class joked that I
should make my senior project being a detective who solves murders a
hundred days after they've been committed.  I asked him if he'd volunteer
to help me test that and it shut him up."

"Senior project?"

"You won't have to worry about that for a few years, but every student has
to come up with a plan to use their Alice in the real world outside the
gates before they graduate.  The joke in the senior school is that the
students who fail to come up with a project are condemned to remain at the
school as teachers."

"In that case I already know what mine will be, I'll just summon up Babbit
and we'll have a TV show again or do puppet theater or something.  Just as
long as he'll behave."

"I'm not sure I'm the right student to help you then.  I can't imagine
what I would be like if I had never used my Alice, but I dread the thought
of inviting another stranger into my head.  I am frightened half to death
of everything that I am."

-- 
Henry J. Cobb
http://www.io.com/~hcobb/