River of Stars ch 3 bit – Memories of Bluff

The chant wasn’t important, really, according to Koumyou. It was just a guide into trance, to shape :listening: into :you will hear!:

“Oh, now you start… praying…?”

“On kirikiri. On kirikiri.” You will not use me. You will not touch me.

The youkai procurer’s stride faltered, steps turning glacial-slow. Cat-slit eyes widened, incandescent with thwarted rage.

“Untara takanman….” No creature has the right to claim me!

Kouryuu could hear her outraged snarls, the whimper of the damaged waitress. He could feel the youkai’s hot breath, as she strained to get even a hair’s breadth closer. None of it mattered.

No one forces me where I don’t want to go. No one makes me what I don’t want to be! I live as I choose. Then. Now. Forever!

“Makai tenjyo!” Koumyou’s voice rang out.

The sutra’s power struck, and only Koumyou’s fierce pride in him remained.

 


“I held her off,” Sanzo stated, “Koumyou destroyed her, and we got the waitress to a healer. It took three rounds of surgery, and last I heard she was going to need to see a healer every month for a year until her immune system got enough of a kick in the pants to take over all the way. And Shangri-La’s year has a few more months to it.”

:Interest,: from the colonel and archaeologist. :Worry. Hope-:

Damn. He hadn’t meant to raise false hopes. “She was lucky,” Sanzo went on, as if he’d noticed nothing. “If she’d been implanted with a larva, if we hadn’t been able to get her to a healer within hours… wouldn’t be anything anyone could do. Except take her to one of Kanzeon’s temples and hope she chose to live with the goddess.” He glanced at the colonel. “They call her the Merciful Goddess, but most people would rather suicide than live with the shame of having… become Jaffa.”

“So how’s Kanzeon find enough people to raise her snake babies?” O’Neill said dryly.

“She keeps the kiddies in a lotus pool, like koi,” Sanzo shot back. Oh hell no, not again…. “Or so the legends say,” he bluffed.

Damn. Damn, damn, damn they’d better not have noticed. Sometimes he just… knew things. And not the stuffed-in-your-head-for-later kinds of things Koumyou had used to put together a warp-speed apprenticeship. Things nobody on Shangri-La ought to know. And it hadn’t started with the chakra.

A river of stillness, catching fire….

It was the rage that still shook him, far more than the close shave ever had. That blinding moment when he had denied the youkai’s will to act, utterly, because no mortal had the right-

Yeah. And exactly what did my cracked brain think I was?

12 thoughts on “River of Stars ch 3 bit – Memories of Bluff

  1. Oh boy . . . knew that past life stuff had to come up somehow somewhere sometime. Won’t be Saiyuki without it in some fashion. And when and if the memories of those lives surface, strong emotions will follow. Like how and why Goku got imprisoned . . .

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  2. ROFL! I’m never going to be able to see Kanzeon’s koi pond as a normal koi pond again…

    And it looks like Sanzo is remembering what was his past incarnation’s memories in canon… and that really makes me wonder if Kanzeon is more the host or the snake or if there’s even a difference anymore between the two…

    I find the idea that Sanzo might have been a goa’uld at one point hilarious though…

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  3. Well, Sanzo does have anomalies in his DNA… And as I recall, in Upon a Fiery Steed, Hiiro had bits of Go’auld woven into his DNA, which messed him up socially but the scientist didn’t help but also gave him access to bits of the Go’auld memory. (Which makes *much* more sense for harcesis then canon’s explanation. *Because unless magic is involved, hereditary traits DON’T WORK like that.* The Animus from the Assassins Creed games makes more sense. And that nearly breaks my suspension of disbelief sometimes. Apologizes for yelling.) So, if we posit that Go’auld used to come as a family unit, and that Kanzeon never really left that mindset behind and has access to DNA from family, we can suppose that Kanzeon and/or Kyoumyou meddled in that way with Sanzo. Forget aging in fast forward, someone make sure the only memories in his DNA came from his life!

    Not sure how Gaiden would work for Gojyo in this verse though. Everyone else is plausible, at least if we follow on from the above hypothesis and combine the fact that Sam is the way the writers got around needing Tok’ra abilities without messing up the party line of Satus Quo is God with Jolinar, Hakkai would be regretful about Gonou’s death, and Sanzo would be beyond furious that Hakkai is upset. As a clan lord, anything that upsets his clan needs to have it’s acute lead deficiency fixed. (The War God’s Own verse has some very good looks at the, don’t have the right words, the difference between a King/Prince of a hereditary kingdom title versus a clan lord. Dang it, I’m loosing a lot in translation from head to fingers here. English is so limited…)

    And now I’m analyzing the Sanzo-ikou as a clan and how the power structure gets laid out. Sanzo is the clan lord, he’s in charge and takes ultimate responsibility for the clan. Hakkai is second in command, he’s the enforcer and the second nastiest person in the clan. (I think Hakkai might be able to squeak first if he tried, but he doesn’t want to be in charge.) Goku is constantly fighting for third with Gojyo, but it’s a very brotherly relationship. If they were more than four, well five counting our darling dragon, then Goku would get a status boost for being Sanzo’s ward, but Gojyo is Hakkai’s er, I want to say enforcer but that’s wrong. He’s got his link to Hakkai, which is a boost, but not as much of one as Goku’s because it’s to the second in command instead of the clan lord, but Gojyo is older and more experienced which *waves hand* It’s just a good thing the two of them are content to remain in a constant state of squabbling.

    And all of that is going to go right over ninety nine percent of the SGC’s head for the first bit I’m guessing. Daniel will probably intellectually get it, and maybe he’ll grasp it a bit emotionally, but he won’t grok it for awhile. Teal’c might be the first to get it, depends on how much he relates it to politics which as a First Prime I am betting he had to deal with a lot. It can’t be *just* fighting prowess that gets the spot, and since he had shaky loyalty to Apophis it can’t be zealotry. Most everyone else will be playing catch up. Because even in cultures that have leftover tight family units, that is way different from having a clan be all that stands between you and death. Clans are just tribes by another name, and as you said in Embers, never mistake tribal for nice, they can’t afford it.

    Wow, I’ve drifted from my original point here….

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    1. No, Gaiden probably couldn’t have gone exactly as canon in this AU. But Kanzeon’s plan mostly covers the important bits.

      Daniel has gotten some of the “clan ties” bit, and SG-1 is working hard at trying to figure out what they’ve got. I think, given the assumptions canon tends to have them making, they’re actually getting reasonably close to a lot of it.

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  4. Ack, I already had a feeling you’d find some way to make Gaiden work here, but is it wrong that I’m feeling simultaneously terrified and gleeful? Because, from the look of things, your AU take on the boys has already put them through hell – and the events of Gaiden, even if they aren’t exactly in line with canon, are bound to only make things worse.

    But man, I’m so curious to know how you interpreted Tenkai in this SG crossver… If *all* the Gods and beyond-mortal characters are Goa’uld… I think I just felt my brain break. Just a little.

    The Makai Tenjyou’s role/usage is starting to look really interesting, though! i want to insist that the SGC wouldn’t detain Sanzo just to study him and the ‘alien technology’, but something tells me I shouldn’t be quite so trusting…

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    1. Re the detaining – it all depends on who’s in charge at what moment. *smirks evilly* And who sneaks in under the radar. *smirks even more evilly. Chp. 4 is interesting, in the Chinese curse sense of the word.

      And heh. Kanzeon has an interesting method with regard to her offspring and their hosts. The SGC might very well approve, once they actually internalize what they’re going to be told on the matter….

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    2. I have to admit when I first wrote this fic I didn’t know much of the Gaiden backstory. But if Tenkai Sanzo in canon was the youkai Sanzo who held the Maten Sutra before Koumyou – no reason that needs to change at all. 😉

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  5. You know, I can imagine Kanzeon as an Ancient, who perhaps took pity on a goa’uld. And I kinda think ancients, what with their habits of ascending to avoid death… Might be a bit more aware when it comes to reincarnation. Maybe.

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