Ranma had been wracking his brain desperately, trying to remember details of those stories.
All of the stories had some common threads when dealing with the Store Of Doom. They tried to tempt you in, often with some sort of magic that acted like the sirens in those old Greek stories of sailors being lured onto jagged rocks. Once in, you were faced with a lot of odds-and-ends like some curio shop, or food with suggestive names, or something like that. Whatever the case, it wasn't straightforward at all. If there were warnings, the warnings were in teeny tiny print in little signs - usually in some language that nobody had spoken in thousands of years.
Once one had been snared by the magic and actually bought something, the true hell began and you'd end up paying with not only the price of the item in question - your life, soul, sanity, and credit history were all gonna be flushed down the toilet like some express elevator to a personal hell.
The monstrous being behind the counter was either a) a victim like oneself gradually being corrupted under the pretense of trying to get out of the horrors already inflicted on them, or b) some hideous monster of a being wearing a human shape - kind of like a used car salesman, or c) a guy in a bathrobe who was actually an insane and insanely powerful wizard, or d) the being who gave rise to all the legends about a Devil or Satan or Ultimate Evil. The last being the kind of guy who picked his teeth to remove the last screaming bits of some poor sucker's soul before he went on to plan truly diabolic acts the sort of which mere mortal minds shy away from.
This store was slightly different.
In the back behind the counter was some blonde gaijin guy with facial tattoos and bright white wings, reading a newspaper. He looked up, nodded with a faint smile, then returned to reading his newspaper.
The store itself was small and consisted of two sections. To the left it was helpfully labelled "Second Chance On Your Own Life", while the right-hand section was "Second Chance For Someone Else."
Ranma glanced to the left, seeing what looked like one of those really really old movie viewers and a stack of discs. The movie viewer was one of those they had had back at the turn of the last century, except it was hooked up to some kind of disc reader. The disks themselves had titles like "Arrival At The Tendos" and "Cat Fist Training" visible.
Ranma nodded, putting this together. While normally he might have difficulty with non-martial arts things, there was something in the faint vanilla-scented atmosphere here that seemed to help him think. Another bit different from typical stories about Stores From Hell as the opposite effect had seemed indicated.
To the right there was a large set of books. Each book had thousands of pages, and there were dozens of them. Some bore titles like "Dead Before Their Time" or "Doomed By Forces Beyond Their Control" or "Truly Didn't Deserve To End Up Like That." Other bore titles like "They Tried."
Ranma nodded. "So people who deserved a Second Chance?"
The guy behind the counter glanced up, smiled, and nodded again.
Ranma glanced out the window, shuddered, and decided to investigate:
Go back - Go to the parent episode.
Wed Apr 20 09:25:15 2005