Phoenix: Reignited Edition Vol. I (Ranma 1/2)

1.20: Filling In the Blanks

With her hand lightly maintaining contact with the wall, Ranko completed a third tentative lap around her studio apartment. Finally, she could walk well enough that she felt confident enough to brave the stairs. The night before had been the first time she'd been alone since being attacked in the bar three days prior. She'd finally managed to convince Mei to go home a little after four in the morning so she could get some sleep. Ranko loved Mei to death, but boy, that girl could talk up a storm.

She pulled on her gi pants and an oversized pink T-shirt bearing the logo of one of the many idol groups she'd started to cover in her singing, slipping on her black shoes. Standing from the edge of her bed, she walked carefully to the apartment door into the small landing area and gingerly made her way down the steps to the back room of the bar below.

"Hello? Anybody here? Mama?" Ranko turned right into the kitchen, looking for Hana or any of her sisters and finding that she was alone. Maybe up front? She traversed the narrow hallway toward the public area of the bar, but as she passed Hana's office, she found the door uncharacteristically ajar. She stepped into the cluttered room, checking to see if anyone was present and finding no one.

The cramped space looked as if it hadn't been cleaned in a year. Piles of paperwork nearly a half-meter high in places, including dozens of envelopes that had never been opened, dominated the cheap particle board desk and the side table in the corner to its right. Behind the desk, a ratty black office chair with strips of criss-crossed duct tape covering the worst of the rips in the seat cushion awaited an occupant. To the left of the desk, a small gray plastic waste bin overflowed with empty beer bottles. A small orange terracotta planter hung from the ceiling in the corner behind the door; it might have been pretty once, but the succulent that had occupied it was long dead. The reddish carpet was almost brown with ground-in dirt from years of traffic in work shoes. The right wall was dominated by a blood-red leather couch, cracked and worn all over to the point that the seats were more likely mottled in different colors than the cows the material had come from.

A rusty beige metal filing cabinet stood against the left wall, just in front of the desk, with a combination television and VCR atop it. As she turned to leave the room, she noticed a stack of video cassettes piled to the left of the monitor. Each had a date written on the label in Hana's handwriting. She hadn't paid much attention to it before, but Hana had once told her that there were security cameras throughout the bar that recorded everything.

She tried to will herself to walk out of the room, but she could not. I have to know what happened. Hana told me not to worry about it, but I can't get it out of my head.

Ranko rifled through the tapes, finding the one with Wednesday's date and popping it into the slot underneath the black-and-white security monitor. She shifted aside some of the clutter that buried the ragged red leather couch along the back wall, sitting down. After searching between the couch cushions for a small black plastic remote control, she pressed the double-forward arrow on it. Scanning the four small pictures in the corners, she identified the lower-left quadrant as the camera most likely to show the assault. She stared intently, barely blinking as the evening zoomed past her eyes at sixteen times normal speed. Steeling her nerves as she saw herself lean over table six, she swallowed hard and pressed play. It took three pushes of the button before the monitor responded, owing to the failing batteries in the remote control.

There was no audio in the recording, but Ranko heard the events in her mind as they replayed in front of her eyes. The shrieks of the crowd. Mei screaming her name. She watched as her assailant grabbed her necklace. In one of the other quadrants of the screen, the second attacker closed on the table from the direction of the men's room, shoving a young woman in his path to the floor in his hurry to help his friend.