Welcome to Gaia! ::

six minutes and eighty miles later, Asako slowed down entering city streets, waving offhandedly to a different biker with an even more customized motorcycle....

"We'ere almost there...."

Exactly two blocks later, she turned up an alley and parked against a back door.

"It's small, but I hope you don;t mind the scenery... the old lady enjoys her bonsai... and the place is a sort of garden and tea house combination that defies all laws of logic."

She opened the door to what looked like... well... a drying room strewn with bundles of.... all kinds of plants.

"You can put your bag anywhere, I just need to grab my apron and I'm set."

She set her messenger bac in a cubbyhole near the door- of the dozen or so cubbies there, two others were unoccupied. The rest held copies of books in dozens of languages- it looked like special editions- with a repeting theme. A number of them had miniatur stylizations of a number of ronin armos on the spine.

"Oh yeah, feel free tp pick through the book selection to find a languiage you like. I almost forgot about her collection back here."

Asako had stepped throguh the swinging door, giving Dannin a chance to see some of the titles.

"Obaasama, I'm back and I brought a friend"

"Water the bonsai in the window first, and serve tea, you know the deal."

A good-natured groan and Askao grabbed a small watering can... the tea house had small round tables, a dozen, no more, that could comfortably seat four or five, and the centerpiece on each opf them were three small bonsai plants. The window was filled woith six shelves of the miniatures, and creeper vines climbed trellises along the walls near the big wondow. Every pice of greenery sat in a pot ultimately. A small patio through a glass door held three more tables, and there were even bonsai scattered around the register. The place looked like an indoor garden. And it was... and there was a distinct presence of *magic* floating in the air that made Dannin;s nose itch slightly, she could sense it because she wore an armor. It was a calm place, and seemed to have weathered a lot.

Asako turned, and her simple black apron proclaimed the name of the place to be simply, "All Teas" with a small teapot above it.

"Pick a seat, and pick a tea. Any kind of tea. I promise, we have it somewhere. It's Obaa-sama's guarantee."

She set the pot down and rummaged ini a basket behind the counter.

"Here we go, a menu. Ignore the prices, it's on the house."

She offered the menu to Dannin with a smile.

"We won;t get our first regulars for another few hours."

"From what I've heard, the writer creates the pictures. Thing is, nobody knows who the author is, and the name "Kage" is genderless."

(I know a lot, and that is a kind of tea ^_^ )

She scooped some... stuff... into a ceramic teapot and added water.

Five minutes later, the tea was made, and Asako served them.

"What do you know about them, they are certainly interesting, ne? things like mystical armors sound lile little more than a myth to me."

Asako snorted.

"I can see why. Most people thing anything less than ordinary is, well, enough for the loonybin. It seems like a lot of hocus-pocus to me. I *wish* magic was real... but it hasn't been for long enough for it to be legends. You really know of it being real?"

She seemed very interested.... too interested?

"So there really is magic? Like what?"

She took a sip of her tea, silver-grey eyes almost seeming to gleam in the soft light let in through the bonsai out fromt and the overheads.

Cantonese. A language he should not have known, but did. Batrias, after all, was thousands of years old and had learned just about everything there was to learn about history. Most of the stuff he knew was stuff he forgot. Languages, however, found a way to stay. He had counted off fifty before he threw up his hands and decided that he knew a whole lot. But he had never been in China. He could cast his mind back, let his life pass before him in one long procession (this took hours by itself) and he could write down every place he had been. But China? Never. Nor did he remember learning the language anywhere else. He wasn't sure it was even taught anywhere else. Strangely enough, he had opened the book in the university library, saw the symbols and knew what they meant. This might have disturbed him, had he not been in the middle of a search for another text like the first one.

After being snickered at by students who thought he was a homeless man or, worse, a crazy guy who had managed to stay under the radar, he found what he was looking for. A book written in English described ancient Egyptian hieroglypics, worthy of note because the characters had never been deciphered. The Rosetta Stone had allowed linguists to unlock the mysteries of Egypt; Batrias knew because he had been a part of the team that found it, under one of his many identities. He had never even heard of characters in ancient Egyptian which no one knew about. The archaelogical world had apparently dismissed it as being unimportant.

Batrias noticed there were three symbols.

The Inferno Armor, the Soul Swords of Fervor, and the Jewel of Life, he thought. He, of course, had no way to confirm it.

Dannin tries not to smile. Her face looks for a moment like a child asked to recite something important, but that face fades when a memory comes to mind that shatters her child-like peace.

"I'm not sure I'm the one to tell you," she says, "you see, the Clan I hail from was wipped out long ago. My sister, my brother, and I were the only ones left. I don't know what happened to my sister, I think she died a long time ago, and my brother's death was only recently. They would have been the ones to tell you."

Rowen's mind could not quite cope with the fact that his armor was trying to tell him something. Teaching ancient history in Tokyo had distracted his mind from everything he had done with the Armor of Strata, fighting the netherworld and its master, Talpa. Now, the pricklling in the back of his mind, as if static electricity had gently made itself a home in his brainstem, made him pull the blue orb out of its pocket. The kanji on it, representing Wisdom* made him remember. It also made him think that the netherworld, while defeated, had never really been destroyed. The thought of fighting the large, green soldiers again poured frustration into his heart as if from a waterfall into a ravine. He had to fight again. He knew it, and there was no getting around it.

As he pedaled his bicycle through away from his apartment, he wondered where Ryo and the rest of his friends were. He wondered also about the wanderer through time, Batrias, the man through whom all time, (literally, he thought) was connected. If battle were to come, he would surely meet one or the other or all them eventually.

The thought did not please him.

***I'm using the Japanese kanjis