A Visitor

I fell backward and nearly fell onto my butt before someone caught me. The man with bright green eyes and short brown hair pushed me up onto my feet and smiled politely. I turned my head at the sound of a gun being cocked and found myself face to face with the barrel of a pistol. “Strange, I thought I was on my way to the bathroom,” I said.

“This isn’t a bathroom,” the blond man holding the gun said around a cigarette. He wore a white dress… okay; it was a yellowish robe… with a wooden Japanese-style breastplate strapped to his front and a roll of paper resting on his shoulders. He looked like he was having an aggravating day, quite a bit like the day I’d been having before this. He had beautiful amethyst eyes that at the moment radiated irritation and apparent anger.

“Yeah, I kind of noticed,” I grumbled. Suddenly finding myself in alternate realities or some such like that was happening more and more frequently, and it was starting to bother me. Normally when I traveled through time and space there was an obvious cause, like a large explosion or a wormhole or something. These occurrences were random and without any warning whatsoever. Obviously, that wasn’t the case this time. “Where am I?”

“You’re in my room,” the gunman stated in an irritated voice.

“Which country am I in?” I asked as I rolled my eyes. “Which city is this? What is today’s date? I’ll need the month, day and year.”

The green eyed man and the blond exchanged mildly confused looks as the gunman lowered his arm. No matter how small the gun is, it still worried me when one was pointed directly at me like that. I’ve been shot often enough that I know I don’t like it at all.

“Hey, Sanzo, get this stupid monkey something to eat, will ya? He’s bugging the hell outa me,” a man said as he burst into the room. He had red hair and eyes, which reminded me of blood red roses. When he saw me standing between the blond and brunette he stopped suddenly. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“I’m Max,” I said. The brown haired guy’s annoyingly fake smile got a little wider. This guy was wearing a monocle and a green tunic that brought out the green of his eyes. If he hadn’t been freaking lying to me with that false expression on his face I would have found him attractive.

“Hey, if you guys are busy I’ll come back later,” the redhead said suggestively. The one with the gun pointed it at the redhead and snarled, but the taller man seemed completely at ease, as if that gun got pointed at him a lot. Just from looking at the blond I got the feeling he was a bit trigger-happy.

“Um, I’ll leave you guys to sort out this tiff,” I said and headed toward the door. The redhead moved aside to let me pass and a brown streak crashed into me, making me fall into the redhead and break the door. As I fell to the ground I kicked my feet over my head and did a flip so I would land on my feet. It was something I did completely without thinking; it was such a habitual motion. The brown streak – who was actually a teenage-looking boy with brown hair and gold eyes – had stopped in the doorway and stared at me in open-mouthed amazement.

“Cool! How’d you do that?” he asked with excitement.

I debated briefly on weather or not to give him the technical/biological explanation on how to perform a flip of that nature using all of the technical jargon for specific muscles. Then I realized that those were all big words and I really didn’t want to draw too much more attention to myself than I already had. So I simply said, “I kicked my feet over my head and landed on them.”

Then I hurriedly tried to walk past the short one, but a buxom brunette woman walked past me and grabbed me by the hair. I had just cut my hair short again, so the fact that her clawed hands found purchase in my hair meant that my scalp got scraped. Then she pulled me backward toward the redhead and started brandishing me at him as she screamed. This was definitely not my day.

I’m not sure what she was yelling about exactly – the pain and irritation that I was feeling made it hard for me to concentrate on the spells that made hearing possible for me. It was more the irritation blocking my ears than anything else, actually, since I never had to concentrate on the spell which gave me back fifty percent of my hearing. “Let go, Bitch,” I said forcefully as I pinched the butt that was shoved in my face. Hard.

She screamed and spun away from me, releasing my head at the same time. “I can’t believe you would choose this whore over me!” she screamed as she ran down the hall, crying.

“Why’d I get attacked for something you did?” I asked halfheartedly as I checked my head for signs of blood. There was a little bit smeared on my hand and I quickly rubbed the scratch and healed it, simultaneously purifying the poison in my blood.

The redhead shrugged his shoulders and leaned back onto the doorjamb ever so casually as he said,

“Hey, babe, sometimes a man’s just got it.”

“That doesn’t mean that I have to get involved,” I said.

“Allow me to heal those scratches on your head,” the man in green offered.

I smiled politely, but I had already fixed up the problem discreetly. “It’s fine. I’ll be… what are you doing?” The man had stepped up to me as I spoke and had captured my head in his hands and was examining the sore area.

“That’s strange: you’re head’s all healed. I could have sworn I saw blood on your hand,” he mumbled.

My hand twitched because I wanted to look at the blood that was still smeared there, but I resisted the temptation. The blond one, however, grabbed my hand and raised it so that he could see. I balled my hand in a fist and raised my middle finger at him. Unfortunately, I didn’t use my power to remove the blood from the finger and the golden-eyed boy saw the blood on it. Why is it that my brain always shuts off at the most inconvenient times?

“Look, there’s blood there!” the short one said and pointed. I raised my other hand and flicked him off with that one. He didn’t seem perturbed at all. Of course, he probably was on the receiving end of worse gestures than this one on a daily basis with these men than he was likely to receive from me… unless things got really bad. I am completely fluent in over fifty languages – reading, writing, and speaking. I can speak another two hundred, and I can swear in seventy more. I am the master of invective if the mood ever strikes me.
The blond one cocked his gun at me and snapped, “Who the hell are you?”

“Quit pointing that thing at me,” I ordered, glaring past the pistol and meeting his purple gaze with my most fierce and commanding expression. We maintained eye contact for several long seconds before he lowered his gun. “What can I call you?” I asked quietly, yet forcefully. His friends looked surprised that he had submitted to my order. I’m used to ordering tough guys around, though. I usually get my way.

“Genjyo Sanzo,” he said with rebellion in his eyes. This one was not going to comply with my will for very long unless I gave him a very good reason to.

I turned my head to the boy with golden eyes and asked him kindly, “And who are you?”

He smiled brightly and said, “I’m Son Goku!”

I looked at the one with green eyes and sighed. “You must be Cho Hakkai and this guy here,” I pointed at the redhead, “is Sha Gojyo, right?” Their surprised looks were enough of a confirmation to irritate me more. “Why does this kind of thing always happen to me?” I asked the world in general. “How is it that I found myself in the world of Saiyuki?”