At 01:10 PM 4/20/99 -0700, you wrote:

Remember how I said there'd be three parts of this?  Remember how
I insisted on it?

I was wrong.  -.-

You weren't wrong, you were merely mistaken.  An error that results
in more of this is hardly a sin, after all.

Hopefully so.  :)

Four parts.  I swear.  

"Four!  Four!  Do I hear FIVE!"  :)

Brevity is NOT beyond me!  I swear!

And any commentary would be welcome.

You asked for it, you got it... still from my omphalos, of course.  :)

S'good word, omphalos.

Grammar corrections or suggestions clipped, except where I had specific
comments on 'em.

remains of long-dead plants.  As he walks by the last temple, a
woman fair as twilight beckons from the shadows of a Doric
column; her lips are red as roses.  Ranma ignores her, and 
departs the city of the dead gods at last; the phantoms of that
place have no power except within their sanctums, and they must
tempt rather than compel men to come within to their alien
mercies.

{Oh, my.  I read that three times, once aloud, just because.}

Paragraphs like that are the reason I write.  :)
 

walked.  Distorted images of himself paced alongside him through 
the mirrors, shifted and changed their form as they passed from 

{Ordinarily I'd suggest "shifting and changing their form", but for
some reason I like "shifted and changed" better.  It's... um... wrong
in the right way?  Gaah.  Something like that.}

Yeah, that was my feeling on the matter too.

     He ran down the list mentally in his head.  Find the glass
that held the goddess's soul.  Break it.  Go home.  Get back at 
Cologne for doing this to him.  

{heh.  Silly Ranma.  He asked her for this, and she warned him as best
she was able.  I suppose the day Ranma stops blaming other people for
his misfortunes will be the day he grows up...}

Hmm... for some REALLY strange reason, this gave me an image of Ranma as
Peter Pan.  :)

     With a slow rasp, a door on the other side of the room began
to swing closed.  The others stood open still, silent dark maws
open in silent dark laughter.  On impulse (which had caused him 
so much trouble so many times before), Ranma sped across the 
room and leapt through just as it slammed completely shut, nearly 
losing the end of his pigtail as he did.

{heh.  He takes a hint, at least.  :) }

Or walks into a trap on a whim.  :)

surface of glass.  At that, as if it were a trigger, the light
came back in a gradual process of fading dark.  At first there

{"Fading dark."  I like that.}

So do I.

terribly, terribly wrong.  His eye caught his reflection in the
mirrors, and the stunning horror of the realization that caused
dried all the saliva in his throat in an instant.  He was neither 
male nor female; the full, rounded breasts that strained beneath
his shirt were contrasted by the sudden existence between his 
legs of something that most certainly affirmed his masculinity.

{Eeek.  Yeah, that'd get to Ranma, all right.}

I think it would get to most people.

     "My--"
     
     "--love"
     
     Tatewaki and Kodachi were nearly upon him now, eyes filled
with lust.  But it wasn't Tatewaki and Kodachi; it was something
else, he realized, something that had reached down into his mind
and pulled out their images and thrown them on like masquers at a
ball throw on their costumes.  Terrified as he was, he realized
that whatever lay beneath would be infinitely worse.  If they
touched him it was over, it was the end of everything, it was the

{Is the menace singular or plural? It or they?  Both?  Neither?  :)
This sort of writing is bloody difficult to "correct", because I
never know whether an "error" is intentional or not... up to you.}

Ranma doesn't really know whether it's singular or plural; he's failed his
second SAN check here - :) - and is currently having a fair bit of turmoil
in his thoughts.

     Consider a mirror.  The purpose of it is the deception of
the eye, the creation of entire worlds in flat silvered glass.     
But even the most perfect mirror does not reflect true; left is
right, right is left.

{You know the solution of this conundrum, yes?}

Another mirror behind you.  :)

have believed that a mirror can steal the soul.  Whether they can 
or not, there is a power in reflected images that we cannot deny.  
Narcissus saw his face in the mirror of the waters and was 
captured by it; Amaterasu was drawn out of the safety of her cave 
by her own reflection.  Even the gods are not immune to the power 
of vanity.  Imagine then that there may be mirrors more complex, 
more distorting, than any that men have yet discovered.  Most
terrifying of all might be the thought that we ourselves might be
mirrors; that all actions that we think are the functioning of 
our own free will are merely reflections of the movements of
forces we can never hope to glimpse.

{I like this digression that is not a digression.}

S'not digression if it's meaningful.  :)
 

     There are a lot of worse ways to wake up then in bed next to

than

a beautiful woman.  This was one of them.

{Heh!  I like echoes... or, perhaps, reflections.  :) }

Yup.  :)

     Yeah, he was definitely gonna get Cologne for this.  This
place was colder than Hokkaido, and he'd had clothes then.  The
only advantage of his relocation was that he appeared to be very
far away from the malformed monstrosity, that impossible 
challenge to sanity that had pursued him through the maze of
mirrors.  He found it hard to recapture the image of it in his
mind, or even to remember much of his terrified flight from it.
That was fine; he didn't want to remember it if he didn't have
to.

{Good example of Ranma's mental fitness to explore the Dreamlands.}

To an extent.  The Lovecraftian hero is always terrified by his loss of
memory; Ranma isn't really all that worried by it.  :)

     There was another splash.  This time, he turned, to see a
silver figure rising from the mirror-sea.  It looked like a
beautiful, androgynous child; where the identifying genitalia 
should have been, there was a blank expanse of flesh.  The skin 

{Suggest omitting "of flesh"; it mars the image for me.  BTW, what
happened to the "small child"?  (Actually the Mirrorlord?)  Dropped
off the floe into the water?  Just poofed out while Ranma wasn't
looking?  Decline to state?  :) }

The first splash that Ranma hears (the one he doesn't look at) is the
"small child" diving into the mirror-sea.

     It didn't answer.  Even the eyes were silver; it looked like 
a Grecian statue, perfectly proportioned, but blank of all 
pigmentation.

{heh.  The funny thing is, evidence is mounting that our concept
of Grecian statues is different from theirs; many of them appear to
have been pigmented.  Irrelevant side note...}

Yeah, the evidence is there that the Grecian statues (and their Roman
copies) were painted, but that the centuries have simply worn this all away.

I'm aware of this.  Ranma isn't.  :)

     He had never seen anything look quite so bored as the
Mirror-Lord did in that moment.  

{hee hee!}

I watched "Taxi Driver" recently.  This brought home for me the incredible
menace that can be conveyed when one participant in a conversation simply
does not respond.
 

     Slowly, like the ripple of wind across water, a flicker of a
smile appeared on the flawless silver face.  

{Uh oh.}

At least he got its attention.  :)

     The Mirror-Lord said, "Look."
     
     Ranma looked, and saw, and then he began to scream.

FIN THREE

Gaah.  You could have made Chapter 3 longer, and kept to your
initial word, but no, you just HAD to have another cliffhanger,
didn'tcha?

Well... it's more to do with the fact that Chapter 3 would have been about
twice as long as 1 and 2 if I did that.  I like symmetry.  :)

I have every expectation that this will be worth it.  :)

May be a while. I'm putting Eidolons away until WUE37 is finished.  :)

Thanks for writing and sharing!

And thanks as always for the commentary, Vincent.

Ciao,
-Alan Harnum