Since I tend to ramble on, all authorial notes have been
relegated to after the story, except for this: Many of the
characters in this story and their backgrounds were invented by
Hiroshi Aro in his "Futaba-kun Change" (as published by
Shuueisha); he has my admiration, and my sincere apologies for
the abuse I put his characters through.

By the way, this story is nasty in all kinds of ways, and if you
think you might be offended, or are too young to read things
that people who are too young shouldn't read, consider yourself
warned.

* * *

MASTER AND SERVANT
A Futaba-kun Change fanfic, by Ronny Hedin (thark@mangakai.org)

o/~ There's a new kind of game, we like to play you see... o/~

* * *

CHAPTER TWO

There was a dream. A dream of meeting his love, a dream of
meeting her love, a dream of love vanishing, a dream of hate, a
dream of flowers withering, a dream of blood, a dream of cold, a
dream of mud-wrestling, a dream of drowning in mud, a dream of
being stuck under the ice, a dream of a death, and death, and
death.

The dream vanished.

Futaba awoke in a cave, or that was his first guess. He lay
sprawled on an uneven bed that felt more like a patch of
mushrooms than anything else, in a world barely illuminated by
dim greenish light. Sweat had plastered his clothes to his body
and the air smelled of offal.

A man, his face covered by an unruly beard and wearing only a
checkered shirt converted into a loin-cloth, crouched above him,
a wild look in his eyes.

Futaba balanced himself half-upright with his arms against the
rubbery surface beneath him, and said the first thing that came
to mind. "Where am I?"

The man grinned vaguely. "You're in a land of broken dreams and
shattered hopes, and you're next on line for the human
sacrifice."

"Huh?" managed Futaba, but the man simply turned and walked
away.

He stared at the man's retreating bare back. "Thank you very
much, I'd rather be lost."

It took some effort to overcome the intense dizziness he felt
clouding his mind, but he pushed himself to his feet, staggered,
and had to lean against a wall for stability.

He had thought the uneven surface some kind of rock, but it gave
ever so slightly when he pushed against it, and felt somewhat
warm to the touch, like some kind of ... skin.

He looked around as he waited for his head to clear. It did
indeed look on the surface like some kind of cave system; he was
in a smallish "room" which connected to others via irregular
winding pathways, thought the dim light made it hard to tell for
sure.

As his hearing cleared and his ears stopped ringing, he thought
he heard a soft buzzing or humming sound in the background,
without any clearly discernible source; like the bass speaker of
someone in an apartment several floors away, except constant and
even.

He felt something cold and wet rub against his arm, and shied
back; it looked like a glob of some unspecified transparent
slime floating down the skin-like rubbery wall.

Trying to think back, the last thing he could remember was a
symbol like a cross made of red flame dancing on his retina, and
before that vague recollections of a pale-faced legless ghost,
and... Misaki, gods, Misaki!

But only vague images would come to his troubled mind; he knew
that there had been trouble with Misaki, but could not remember
how or why.

He sank down to half-sit again on the mushy surface that had
borne his restless sleep.

Another man came in, this one looking no older than the early
twenties; unkempt and unshaven, and reeking of filth, but at
least fully dressed in a grey business suit that looked dirty
but, when Futaba looked down at himself, was no worse than his
own clothes.

The man tried to smile, but his weary face would not support it,
and he did not look like he would have meant it. "I would tell
you to ignore that guy, but I'm not sure he's wrong. As for
where you are, your guess is as good as ours."

"Ours?"

"As in the rest of us here in, what was it, the land of broken
dreams and shattered hopes? Unless I've missed a count, you make
it an even dozen now." The man managed a wry smile. "I once
carried the name Hiroshi Kanemori with pride; I don't know what
it's worth now, but it's as good as any down here. Or up here,
or whatever it is. Pardon me if a ramble, but that guy before is
the only one who's been here longer than me and I'm starting to
feel it too."

"Futaba Shimeru, of 'those' Shimerus." Futaba coughed. "Any
chance of food or drink?"

"When you're desperate enough for drink you can scrape the slime
off the walls, it's worked for us so far. Food..." Kanemori
grimaced. "The masters are picky eaters and they throw us their
leftovers. I guess you will be revolted at first, but that too
is a matter of desperation."

Futaba stretched out a hand, and Kanemori helped him too his
feet. "And the human sacrifice?"

"Are you next in line? Who knows, but you'll get your turn soon
enough. Turns, maybe, and I can't say which is luckier."

"What do you mean?"

There was a wild look in Kanemori's eyes, echoing those of the
unnamed man earlier. "Ah, but why spoil the surprise? Now come
along and meet the rest of our oh-so happy gang, some of them
almost sane, some worse than me."

* * *

He followed Kanemori through a long series of passages.
Sometimes they sloped up, sometimes they sloped down, sometimes
left, sometimes right, but always it was the same living walls,
the same dim green glow, the same low buzzing noise. He had no
idea how far they went, not which way, and wondered a couple of
times if Kanemori was not simply wandering blindly and just
hoping to end up in the right place, if there was such a thing
as a right place here.

Kanemori babbled as he walked.

"How long I've been here? I don't know if I should wish that I
had an idea, or be happy that I don't. Weeks, I would guess,
unless these surroundings break a man down fast or I'm weaker
than I would have thought."

"The masters? They do not talk to us, but it is as good a name
for them as any, though the loon is the one who came up with
it."

"Family? No, thankfully I don't have one of my own yet, though I
guess my parents will have missed me by now. It is worse for
others, I guess."

Eventually they reached what seemed to be their destination; a
large hall of sorts, or larger cave, or whatever. If Kanemori
had been right about the even dozen, all were not present, as
far as Futaba could tell; the dim light reached barely enough
for all corners of the 'room' to be visible.

Two women sat to one side, talking animatedly with each other,
one of them clad in rags and visibly pregnant, the other
possibly about Futaba's age and wearing a torn school uniform,
eyes red from recent tears. He could not hear their
conversation; some odd property of these - organic caves, for
lack of a better way to describe them - seemed to mute and
distort sound, and the ever-present humming noise obscured more
than it should.

A boy, younger than Futaba and dressed in a strict black school
uniform still buttoned all the way despite the way sweat made it
cling to his skin, leaned against a wall. He paged through a
book of some sort and seemed to be deliberately ignoring the
others, though Futaba found it hard to believe he could read
much of anything in the dim green light.

Off in another corner sat three men, all in shirts but no
trousers, with beards of varying length which Futaba guessed
must indicate they had each been in that place. They laughed as
they discussed something, but it seemed a hollow laugh. The man
in the improvised loin-cloth stood above them peeking down, not
part of the conversation.

A _SMACK_ echoed through the cave, and Futaba saw that the
pregnant woman had slapped the young one hard on the cheek,
leaving a bright red mark. She stood up and seemed to be on the
verge of walking away only to realize there was nowhere else to
go, and sat down again. Soon, their conversation had resumed.

Kanemori cleared his throat, and coughed pointedly. "Ladies and
gentlemen. May I introduce our newest guest here in the
madhouse." They looked up, except for the boy with the book.
"This is, what was it again, Futaba? Ah yes, Futaba Shimeru, who
will be staying with us for... well, I guess that is in the
hands of the masters. This concludes my little announcement, and
I guess you can go back to whatever intriguing pursuits occupied
you before my oh-so-rude interruption."

He flopped himself down on the hard rock-like floor, leaned back
against the well and without warning seemed to simply drift off
to sleep.

The women being closest, Futaba walked up to them and sat
himself down. They stopped talking when he approached and
watched him warily.

"Uh, so... Hi?" he ventured.

The two women looked at each other, then back at him again. The
girl reached out wordlessly, touching his face with her fingers,
slowly tracing its outline. Not knowing how to react Futaba
remained silent.

Eventually she appeared satisfied and spoke up. "Shimeru? Are
you on of those Shimerus?"

"Uh... Yeah."

"Then you're...?"

It seemed silly to hold on to secrets under the conditions.
"Yes, that's me."

Without warning, the pregnant woman slapped him. Hard. "It's
your fault," she hissed. "You Shimerus. You pervert nature, just
like these... masters."

The girl patted the stung cheek softly. "Don't mind her. She
doesn't know what she's talking about."

The woman snorted. "Oh, I don't? You're the one who don't know
what you're talking about. You've been spared so far. You
haven't been taken. Once it's been your turn... You will know."

The girl shuddered at her, then turned back to Futaba. "Anyway,
I'm Fujie Kazama, and I guess I'm the lucky one here, if there's
such a thing. Except maybe the boy, but it's hard to tell with
him."

"Hayakawa," muttered the pregnant woman. "You freak." She did
not volunteer any more information, and Futaba did not dare ask
lest she sparked some form of violent reaction again.

"Soooo," Fujie eventually dared, "Uh, what's it like?"

"What's what like? Oh, you mean..." Futaba hesitated. "Well. I
couldn't tell you how it is for others. Physically... It's
intense. I don't really know what to compare to. I mean the
moment of change isn't really as sudden as it looks, it's
something that's been pounding through your body for minutes
often. But mentally..."

Lost deep in thought, Futaba didn't notice, not until Hayakawa
twitched and glanced to the side with anxious, scared eyes. He
followed her look, and there they were.

Two this time, indistinguishable to Futaba's eyes, hovering
around the sleeping Kanemori. Tall, half again as tall as a
normal man he estimated now with the aid of the greenish light,
with four arms covered in thick black cloth, except for the thin
spidery hands, little more than dry white skin wrapped around
bones.

The hoods blocked their heads from Futaba's angle, but he could
still remember that pale blueish face illuminated by the
pin-point lights of glowing green eyes, green as the sick light
that permeated the caves. They whispered among themselves,
barely audibly, in that sharp spitting language, and seemed not
to even notice the other humans.

The others, Futaba-saw, all huddled back, pressing themselves
against the walls and trying to look small; even the previously
oblivious boy now crouched and pointedly looked in another
direction, wildly scared eyes meeting Futaba's for a fraction of
a second.

All sound had ceased in the cave, except for the 'masters'
muttering and that ever-present buzzing. He felt as if frozen in
place, unable to move.

On of the gestured vaguely in the air, speaking a single
inaudible syllable, and Kanemori's sleeping form seemed to rise
and hover in the air. The other one grabbed it with three of its
four arms, and the turned towards one of the exits.

Something broke through the clouded veil over Futaba's mind.
"NOOOOOOO!" He remembered now, remembered the creature driven
back by his blow, remembered feeling its fragile bones snap
under his feet, and he ran towards the things in a fit of
berserker fury, refusing for the moment to be a silent victim.

But in the end his refusal mattered little. The creature merely
gestured like a slap in the air, a blue light flashing at the
top of its fingers, and still several feet away Futaba felt a
crashing impact against his right cheek swatting him aside.

He fell, the taste of blood thick in his mouth. Blackness danced
over his vision, and he could barely see the creatures leave and
vanish into the far darkness. He spat, trying and failing to
rise on numb arms.

Angling his head, he could see Hayakawa shaking her head. "You
will learn to resign, soon enough," she whispered.

* * *

Hours later, one of the masters came back, or perhaps an
entirely different one; Futaba had no way to tell. It carried
Kanemori's body again, limp and unmoving now.

Nobody dared to move now, not even Futaba; not until it had
unceremoniously deposited the body right down on the floor in
the middle of the cave and glided out again.

Futaba was the first to approach, creeping up ever so slowly
towards the body. The others still huddled in their corners. He
knew what he would find, yet tried to convince himself that he
was wrong, that he had never really seen that except in one of
those feverish dreams before he woke up in this place.

But it had been real before, and it was now. The back of
Kanemori's head had been cracked open, and cleaned out dry this
time, not a trace remaining of what had once been his brain.

Wordlessly, Futaba turned and slowly crawled back to the company
of the two women.

The three men walked up to the corpse, glancing nervously at
each other, and Futaba had to force his eyes closed as they...
began to eat.

"He was lucky," he heard Hayakawa mutter in the background. "He
was lucky."

Fujie grabbed his hand and held on to it, tight.

* * *

Somehow, later, he got to sleep, a dreamless sleep now, hat
could have laster an hour or an eternity, with no way of telling
the difference.

There was one dream, though.

He lay there on the floor, hand still clutching Fujie's as they
lay a few feet apart on the cold rubbery floor, still bathed in
lime-green light that seemed occasionally to pulse or flicker.

Suddenly, one of the masters stood above them. Even in the
dream, if it was indeed a dream, he shuddered at the cold
presence. It looked down on them, horned androgynous bald head
uncloaked, and it muttered something, in what sounded almost
like a disappointed tone.

Then it was gone, and he drifted back to dreamless sleep.

* * *

They came for Futaba next.

Only a single one this time. Perhaps they thought that he had
already learned his lesson. Perhaps there was no deeper reason.

He was telling Fujie the story of that first audition when he
thought he saw a wry smile on Hayakawa's lips and a look of
horror in Fujie's eyes, and a cold draft brushed against he
back.

He turned to stare into glowing green eyes that captured his and
seemed to lull him almost into a passive trance. Long, thin
fingers wrapped against his throat and lifted him up.

He scratched at the arm and at the fingers but the thing paid
him no heed, its emotionless face showing no sign of even
noticing his efforts.

"Now you will know," Hayakawa whispered in a hoarse voice.
"Unless you are lucky, you will know."

Fujie buried her face in her hands. Everybody else looked away.

It carried him like that, silently with a strangling grip around
his throat, through twisting passages, through light that
shifted from green to blue to darkness to green again, past
walls with open throbbing red veins, past a group of the
creatures who stood gathered around some sort of display and
paid them no heed, through the living nightmare landscape to
some sort of secluded cell, passing on the way through some sort
of slimy membrane that Futaba could only guess functioned as a
door of sorts.

It threw him against a wall, and he could feel suction cups
locking against his back and holding him fast, sprawled wide.

The creature tore at his clothes, ripping them off and throwing
the rags aside. Cold sweat bathed him as it looked at his nearly
naked form. He tried to wrench free but the pressure against his
back kept him locked tight and unable to move.

"XACK DRETH!" the creature spat out, in disgust, and it hovered
out of the room, leaving Futaba still spread against the wall,
still wondering what torture awaited and whether he should be
happy that it did not simply crack open his skull and start the
feast.

It returned, minutes later that felt like an eternity, now
carrying in one hand some sort of spiky, thorny plant attached
to a tube of bubbling liquid. It pushed one of the spikes
against his bare chest and Futaba understood that it was a
syringe of sorts as the bubbling liquid left the tube.

He felt it burn as it coursed through him, felt fire in his
veins, felt a very familiar pulsing sensation permeate his
body...

He changed, but this time it was slow and painful, the morphing
of his flesh feeling suddenly like a perversion of nature. He
tried to struggle but his weakened will did not even touch what
was now a purely physical transformation.

The creature nodded as it looked at his bared female flesh, and
he thought he heard a tone of ... satisfaction in its cold, dead
voice. "AXETH ITH NARR!" Was that a smirk on the pale face?

It discarded the black robe, and Futaba stared unwillingly at a
disturbingly human body. Thin, bony, dry, devoid of all hair and
androgynous except for one part, yet apart from the four arms it
looked far too much like a human being.

Her screams filled the cell as the creature ... took her.

* * *

Futaba was male again, and unconscious, by the time it deposited
him back in the cave.

As he woke up, he saw Fujie hover above him, and tried to smile
to reassure her that he was all right, but it didn't work; his
lips refused to form anything but a twisted grimace.

She shook him weakly. "Are... Are you okay, Futaba?"

"Yes," he managed. "Yes, I'll live."

Hayakawa snorted. She grabbed his chin, lifted his face, and
stared intensely into his eyes. "At least you're supposed to be
a girl, Shimeru," she hissed. "So shut up. Just shut up."

But Futaba did not really feel like discussing it, anyway.

Later, when their next meal was delivered, a woman he had not
seen before, he managed to eat some, though the raw meat burned
in his throat and he had to force bile back.

* * *

They came for him again. This time, he knew he couldn't resist,
but he also knew he had to.

He ran, with no idea where he could possibly go that would be
any improvement; just ran, blindly and madly.

And in vain, of course. A triangular motion by the creature with
one hand on each side, a single word, and he flat against an
invisible wall. Another, and unseen bonds restrained him
motionless and held him aloft, a hard gag forcing his mouth
open.

He floated along through the caves; along the same path, or
along a different one. His captor this deposited him in a
slightly larger room, with another of the creatures hunched over
what looked like a book or scroll of some kind, occasionally
glancing at several odd and possibly painful-looking instruments
stacked to the side of the table.

It turned to look at them. His captor raised a hand on each side
in what had to be a salute of sorts, shouting the words "XAKRAH
KHIEVAK THEN RHAH!", and left the room with a bow.

With a complex flutter of the fingers on one hand the creature
sent Futaba to a low table or maybe couch, with the same sort of
mushroomy coating as where he had first arrived, and invisible
bonds restrained him again.

It picked up what looked somewhat like the syringe that had been
used on him before, yet slightly smaller, and Futaba shivered as
it walked up to him. Without warning, it nailed the syringe into
his left thigh just near his groin, and again he felt the fluid
burn through his veins.

It leaned back to await the reaction, and with an odd sense of
embarrassment Futaba felt something that had not happened
without triggering a change for a long time; his penis grew hard
and erect.

The creature noted this, and without more ado removed its cloak,
revealing a body every bit as flat and genderlessly androgynous
as the one that had assaulted him before. It differed in only
one way, which now did not surprise Futaba.

Like the last time, there was not the slightest trace of joy or
pleasure or emotion of any other kind in the creature as it
descended on him.

* * *

There were other times, in either form; more than Futaba would
later ever remember even after the furthest layers of blocks had
been torn down.

One day - or night? - as he awoke from his restless slumber,
Fujie was gone.

He roused Hayakawa, now apparently nearing the end of her term,
but the woman would only shrug. "What's the matter? She's either
gone or she'll be back, and I hope for her sake it's the
former."

"But," Futaba tried to protest, though in his heart he knew he
agreed.

"But what? You have more strength than I imagined, boy, to have
not gone the way of the loon long since. But in this place, what
does it matter?"

And it didn't.

Hours later, Fujie returned, stumbling into the cave on her own
unsteady legs. She said nothing as she managed to hobble up and
flop herself down next to them, and after that, she never spoke
again.

* * *

How much time had passed in that world of eternal green
twilight, that nightmare with no waking up, she did not know.

But there was a before and after, and that day marked the
dividing line.

He was, as so many times, led back into the main cave after
another session of what he would think of only as his torture,
and as some many times he stumbled back to drift off into sleep
in the same spot again, since even with the nightmares that now
always tormented him, sleeping was better than waking in this
place.

Before he could do so, Hayakawa prodded him with a foot, and he
looked up at her. They had hardly spoken since Fujie fell
silent. "What?"

There was a smile on her lips, the first in a long time; the
smirk of someone taking pleasure in another's suffering, in
absence of other joys. "So, Shimeru," she said, "I see your
still a girl. Starting to take a liking to it?"

Confused, Futaba looked down on herself and saw to her surprise
that she hadn't changed back yet, despite the good hour that had
passed by since her tormenter injected her with the chemical
that forced the change.

A drop of cold sweat trickled down Futaba's forehead. "It's...
nothing. I'm sure."

"Sure." Hayakawa leaned back and closed her eyes.

But Futaba couldn't sleep now. She started doing the meditative
exercises she had learned to use to calm down when the change
back needed to be triggered fast, but it didn't help. She breathed
in, and breathed out, and her pulse became slower and slower,
but in the end, even when she felt like her heart barely beat
at all any more... her body remained unchangingly female.

* * *

AUTHOR'S NOTES
--------------

The usual stuff: Any and all comments are welcome, and I really
mean that (some people don't, I know). Basically, unless you
start making remarks about my mother, I will pretty much NEVER
take comments on the story as attacks on my person. All comments
are not necessarily USEFUL, but they are nevertheless welcome.
If you hated it, say so.

You know, I have a wacky Ranma alternaverse which I've been
struggling on and off to write for well over a year now. Then I
get THIS idea, and it almost writes itself. Figures.

(Though booze and depression have helped too...)

In the next chapter, things will get less nasty. I think. No,
really. Honest. I promise.