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The Mysterious Man now knew more then he had about the three strangers. Asking his questions out loud had been a ruse all along, for the world they had been questioned in had been created with reading their minds in mind. He didn't get a lot from them, but he did know that they had told the truth, not to mention slightly more of their abilities.

As luck would have it, his request for more information was answered and he got all the info he needed from before their entry into his world. However, there was no information from the moment they entered the world.

"Blast my secretive ways......I can't get the locations of more of the shards easily now...."

The Man still read every last bit of info, and started thinking to himself. He now knew what the three outer-worlders were after, but the information he received was oddly brief on DS. Apparently DS kept his intentions secret from anyone and everyone better then most. That would not, however, stop the man from gathering more of the shards himself in the future. He did not want to keep them for himself, but rather he wanted to keep his world from being affected too much. He decided to check on his world while he thought, and saw what had happened to Tatewaki. He knew that the shard would cause havoc in the Tatewaki/Ranma battles that were all too common in his world, but the shard was no longer within his immediate reach. He was sure that Sonic/Rose would know about the shard soon enough, but he didn't have a way to contact Sonic/Rose soon enough anyway.

That is when it hit him. He had been building fail-safes into his curses for centuries; why not re-work a couple of them?

A couple of hours later he had three pendants, one for each of the three outer-worlders. Each had a sort of curse on it, masked perfectly so that no one would detect the curse even when it was triggered. The curse of sorts worked in two ways, one was if the man triggered it and the other if the pendant was hit with a small burst of energy. In either case a small door to another specially designed world would appear, but only for the person wearing the pendant. The world was created so that the Man would be alerted whenever someone entered it. As a failsafe against DS finding out about the contact with Sonic/Rose the man segmented the world into two parts, a dark world that DS would enter and a light world that Sonic/Rose would enter. After a few minutes the man had conjured up three gift boxes, placed the pendants inside, included notes explaining their usage, labeled them "Sonic", "Rose", and "DS", and dropped them in the lockers each of them was using at school.

The Man, not having decided all the details of his plan, did not include any way for one to detect the other pendants. That would keep DS from discovering Sonic/Rose, and Sonic/Rose from discovering DS. The Man also knew that DS would be weary of the pendant, as would Sonic/Rose, but as an incentive he had put one last spell on the pendants: The second one of the outer worlders touched their respective pendant for the first time an exact visual and aural replica of the shard the man held would be revealed to them, and only them, for a second or two. That would be enough information for them to want to resume or begin contact.

The Man was nowhere near an idiot about their powers either, the world he had created for them to enter absorbed any powers they tried to use aside from those that would allow them to leave, or allow Sonic/Rose to communicate with one another. He had done that more to protect himself, but it also served to protect his double-dealings if both sides were in the world at the same time. Since their energy was absorbed by the world the others couldn’t detect them. To top it off, the only way in or out of the world, from their point of view, would appear to be in the moon for Sonic/Rose and in the center of the earth for DS.

As a final precaution, he had put a once a day restriction on the use of their own triggering of the pendan ts, while he could trigger them as often as he wanted. He did this partially because he knew that they would occasionally ignore the call, and partially because he may want to add to what he told them.

And of course, each pendant had the trademark failsafe that would render it useless for any use when the man decided to trigger the failsafe.

The Man sat back, figuring he would have his hands full later on, and found Happosai scheming to get his fix without taking a long trip. Happosai was scheming to invade the female baths, where the females weren't wearing anything. Hinako Ninomiya, on the other hand, was picking up the cursed book on her desk. The Man was torn as to which to watch, so he conjured up another mirror and watched both with interest........