Case Closed Fan Fiction ❯ The First Woman In The World ❯ 8 ( Chapter 8 )

Five Hundred Years Ago

“Long live the king,” Ushi muttered boredly. “They always say that, but they never last...”

Eta looked around curiously. They had returned to what could no longer be recognized as their homeland after hearing rumours of a man who claimed to have something that he called “The Philosopher's Stone”, a blood-red stone which supposedly created gold and produced the elixir of immortality. It had transpired to be a mere charlatan in possession of a rather inferior ruby, but the rumour had been so hopeful that Eta couldn't blame Ushi for killing the man.

“It's so strange to be here- so much has changed,” Eta mused. On returning to the land now styling itself “England”, it was their first time speaking their native language for some centuries, although the language had changed so much in those few centuries, never mind the millennia, that Eta doubted that they would ever be able to truly speak their original tongue to anybody but each other ever again. The thought saddened her, as though they were only posing as people of their own land, as if their homeland was long gone- an island washed away irreversibly by the passage of time, leaving them adrift in a flow that could not affect them.

The flow of change was flowing all the faster all the time, no doubt about it. She remembered the venerated wise woman of five centuries ago. Barely two centuries ago, across the ocean, had the practice begun of tormenting men and women alike for engaging in very similar practices of medicine and visions. Eta herself had been burnt twice already as a witch and expected more in the future, without much joy- she still felt pain, and healing from burning hurt enough to make her want to die. Plus, the second time, she had awoken to find that Ushi had butchered the entire small farming town in retribution for the offence. She wasn't sure how she felt about that. Being burnt hurt, yes, but she didn't feel that it justified mass-murder; if it had, she would have done it herself. They were just stupid, scared people, turning to their religion's dictates on what they did not understand, and unfortunately their religion, as religions often seemed to these millennia, dictated the utter destruction of what they did not understand.

Eta wasn't really fond of mass, organised religion, as one who viewed it as a recent thing that had caused nothing but death and destruction, but then so had the star, which Eta had taken to calling “Pandora”, remembering the old Greek woman's words. She wasn't sure how her views on religion as a brain disease reflected on her continuing belief that her elders were still watching over her from the stars, but since the elders of her tribe, to the best of her perfect recall, had never advocated death for anything other than bears, deer and fish, she figured that it wasn't the same thing. Simplistic, perhaps, but nine and a half millenia's worth of knowledge and experience required some compression.

Ushi's feelings on religion were different. He had once talked about the subject to Eta, pronouncing it a fantastic way of breeding loyal subjects, from childhood indoctrination to the dictating and controlling of all adulthood thoughts through combinations of fear (he had worked for the Inquisition in Spain for a couple of decades a while back, particularly taken with their inventive interrogation methods and the kind of results that could be procured by them) and temptation, something which he had been watching the development of with some fascination for several centuries.

“Look at the massive reach and scope of some of these things,” he'd remarked. “Christianity's even heading across the ocean, and Islam and Judaism are all over the place as well; you can't move for Buddhists and Shinto practitioners in the east. You know with that much scope and influence, if only I could become the head of one of these things, I just need to order a hunt for the star and I'd have people worldwide searching for it, we'd find it in no time. Maybe that's how we'll find it, eh? I'll just create a religion, we just need to give it a few centuries to mature, and then we'll find it in no time.”

Of course, starting a religion was precisely what he seemed to have done, Eta mused. With the growth of civilisation had come the growth of crime, and no matter what country they went to Ushi had no trouble homing in on and insinuating himself into the upper echelons of the local crime outfits, whether it was at the head of some thugs breaking into houses or an elaborate and government-sanctioned outfit like the Inquisition. If anyone was going to find the Pandora, Eta couldn't help but put her money on some sticky-fingered rats with a nose for nice things over a herd of fearful sheep any day. The criminals, for their part, quickly worked out which side their bread was buttered, particularly when the other side was stained with the blood of their former boss.

Eta quietly went along with Ushi's decisions; after all, he was her husband, and he was trying to get the star. She was long desensitised to blood and death, and had long given up caring that those were the methods that Ushi was most inclined to use; or at least, she was well-practiced at putting it out of her mind. What she was not desensitised to- what seemed to only grow stronger over the centuries- was the children. Whenever she slept, she either had the strange dream with the falling coin and the angel, or she dreamed of her children- and whenever it was the latter, she always spent days thereafter looking for her children in any child that she passed in the road, couldn't resist dropping some of the more valuable coins to any begging urchin that they passed. In her darkest hours, she would see all those who had died at hers or Ushi's hands, see them as children, and- but she always forced those thoughts down; that way madness lay, and with her immortality there was no escape from such feelings.

Through these rings, Ushi had organized everything from coups to quiet assassinations, sometimes to ease the looting of some prospective hiding-place, and sometimes simply because he could see the means and opportunity. Because he could. Because it gave him power. He already looked down on the rest of humanity- if indeed he and Eta could be considered a part of it for any longer- for their lesser strength, experience and lifespan, so what better for a godly figure like himself than to bring death as he pleased, to control the fates of nations at will?

Well, his power was not quite that extensive, and fluctuated depending on where he was and how high into their local crime webs he had insinuated himself, but he waited and planned and dreamed. He dreamed of a future where he brought death to the world at will.

Eta would nod and smile and agree when he told her of these plans, but in the end, still she dreamed of life.

And on the other side of the planet, a desperate shogun oversaw the burying of his riches far below the earth, before the approaching forces of the enemy army could loot them. A fortune in art, fine cloth and jewels was buried, among them a large, clear stone, not to see the light of the sun or the moon for five hundred years.

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This was released alongside chapter 73:Déjà Vu.

The rest of the story will be released alongside chapter 78:Pandora.

Yes it was, Pretztailfan95… I didn't say they were going to talk every chapter, they just talked to her a lot…. Ushi does see it as a blessing. He sees it as something that makes him more than everyone else. It's Eta who's coming to see it as a curse.

It's difficult to figure Eta out, Mel72000… remind you of anyone? ^_-

Probably, Kolidescope XD Seriously? I'm not certain I could win a lawsuit like that anyway since, frankly, it's not like I own any legal rights to the characters or anything in the first place… I'd simply be chuffed that my mind was as twisted as Aoyama-sensei's… XD

We're getting into recent history now, KageNoNeko… (which, for the Americans in the audience, is how the SQA seems to refer to anything happening within the past five centuries… XD)

I do not claim to own any of the characters in Meitantei Conan. They are the intellectual property of Aoyama Gosho. All characters, couples and locations, if Canon, will be faithful to the manga, so if you're into fics with weird pairings like Shinichi and Heiji, the back button is at the top there. The fic may not make sense if you have not read up to chapter 698, which you can do at a site called (read between the lines) O/n/e/ma/n/g/a, but I advise you to buy the official Tankoban novels (up to volume 30 are out in English at the time of writing) so that Aoyama-sensei can afford to continue gracing us with his imagination. Now, I hope you enjoy the fic! (If you don't, please see my previous comments re the back button).