This is an open-ended story, so I might continue it at some point or not. Title: Une Fois Authorial Credit: Sophonisba (iac@si.umich.edu) Warnings: Nose-cola Une Fois Marimeia was bored. She was in between nannies at the moment, which meant that Lady Anne had found no practical choice other than to bring her ward back to the office with her after physical therapy. And the Preventer offices were... Marimeia was quite sure that if any of its members actually left the building to go home at the time he or she was supposed to on paper, her or his coworkers would gather immediately, asking "are you sick?" and "are you *sure* you're all right?" Moreover, while Preventer did all sorts of valuable and necessary work, none of the valuable and necessary work at its headquarters was the sort that is interesting for someone else to watch. A person can only watch someone else read messages, for instance, for so often before becoming heartily bored with the whole situation. Marimeia was heartily bored. She had done her homework. She had read ahead all the way through her language arts textbook -- and been less than impressed with the general quality of the stories in it. She had even done her *math* homework. Marimeia held math to be on the same level as physical therapy -- necessary evils, true, but with no other redeeming value. They were not fun. They were boring. Physical therapy HURT. She did them, of course. She had to do the math if she wanted to go on with the accelerated schooling. She had to do the physical therapy if she ever wanted to walk again. But it didn't mean she couldn't complain. Loudly. Except when Anne was in a meeting. As she was now. Having left Marimeia to sit in her office and stare at the indifferently healthy potted plant. Marimeia was booooorrrrrred. Anne did not like to be disturbed during meetings, unless it was something Direly Urgent. Asking "Can I wander around the building and see if Mr. Chang or somebody has time to speak to me?" was almost certainly not Direly Urgent. So Marimeia didn't bother to ask before laboriously turning her wheelchair around and taking off. She could actually get a pretty good speed going in the long straight hallways, too. It was too bad that she had the folding wheelchair and not the automated one -- the combination of long deserted corridor and miniature "car" would have been irresistible. She slowed down to a "decorous pace" well before reaching Mr. Chang's door, of course. Anne was... maternal, Marimeia had decided. Relena-nee had said once that Lady Anne was a fairly autocratic brand of maternal, but Marimeia couldn't really recall anyone who'd been maternal to her before, so she didn't exactly have anything to compare Anne-maternality with. Marimeia rather liked it. Relena-nee was big-sisterly, if that was a word, or older-female-cousinly, which almost certainly *wasn't* a word but ought to be. Often a rather distracted sister or cousin, of course, one who didn't always have time for her --- but she was used to people not having time for her. Relena-nee, at least, did her best to *make* time to talk to her, to listen and commune without letting her own job suffer. "Even if they only expect you to be a figurehead," Relena had said over one hurried dinner of leftover turkey casserole -- Anne had let her cook go the first or second time Preventer had had to slash its budget -- "they drop all the tools in your lap, and you can't help but learn how they work as you go through the motions of using them. And once you learn just what you can do with them -- just how much total idiocy and stupid senseless accidents and unintentional mistakes you can smooth over and almost make disappear -- just how much you can HELP -- well, how could I ever put them down?" "I should hope you at least do for long enough to eat and sleep," Anne had said tartly. "Human beings were not meant to function on a twenty-eight-hour workday." "I thought you said my father did that a lot," Marimeia had said. Anne had looked even more like the pre-Rocket Age usual picture of a librarian or lady schoolteacher, even without the hair buns. "Treize-sama should not have been doing so, either. If it hadn't been for the war, he would probably have had a nervous breakdown." "Is that when you think you're a banana tree?" "No, Mari-chan, of course not. It's when you collapse and your hands are shaking too badly to hold a pen and you look at words and they don't make sense, and you have to go away for a long time and rest because you feel like a rubber band that's been stretched far too tightly for far too long." "Have *you* had one, Anne?" "Three. And they didn't get better as they went along." The following weekend they had taken the day off, all three of them, and gone to a metropark to sit by the lake and feed the ducks and gambol over the playground as if all three of them were Marimeia's age. They'd even had a thing there called a tire swing, and Relena-nee had pushed her around and down and up and sideways until the young woman had declared that she'd be sick to her stomach if she had to *watch* Marimeia for ten more seconds. Poor Relena-nee; it must be awful to have such an oversensitive stomach. But Mr. Chang wasn't like them -- well, he was a man, of course, but it was more than that. He didn't treat Marimeia like a daughter, or a sister, or a cousin. Mr. Chang was *impressive*. He was brave and honorable and loyal to people instead of principles and a good fighter with a sword, and he respected her, Marimeia. She would have forgotten all about walking ever again and chewed the fingers off her left hand before doing anything to lose that respect. She could have watched him for a whole hour -- even if he were doing boring office stuff, he had his own habits of doing it. He never made extra movements -- just smooth, flowing ones that got the job done, probably something he'd learned in sword practice. He tapped his seal against the surface of the ink pad, rather than press it deeply in. Every so often, he slid two fingers under his pigtail and rubbed them in small circles, probably to keep from headaches -- Marimeia had tried it once, and it really did make her head feel better, less tired. And so she rolled herself very quietly to his doorway, raising a hand to knock before realizing that the door was already partly open and that voices were coming from it. "You don't know." Mr. Chang sounded disgusted and as if he didn't believe it. Whoever else was in the room, their answer wasn't loud enough for Marimeia to hear anything more than a murmur. "Well, find out!" Mr. Chang had made a whip of his voice. "Presumably that is within your *limited* capabilities?" The murmur this time sounded Small and Sorry, like Rabbit when Tigger finally found him. Obviously Mr. Chang was busy with *important* stuff, and wouldn't have any time for her, Marimeia. She sighed and rolled on down the hall, hoping to find somebody who wasn't too busy. Two corners, one awkward flight up in an elevator that really wasn't big enough for a wheelchair to turn around in, and half a corridor later, she heard music. The song sounded as if it was moaning "Livin' in the fridge," which was perfectly ridiculous, so she rolled closer to see what it really was. As she drew nearer to an open door, she could hear that the singer was crooning "Can't stop the mold from growin'... LIVIN' IN THE FRIDGE," which still didn't make sense. So she peered around the door, and was treated to the sight of Duo Maxwell somehow managing to lean back in one of those uncomfortable one-legged wheeled chairs (although having his feet up on the desk was probably helping), tapping one heel in time to the music, crumpling up paper into balls, and tossing them in the general direction of the wastebasket. "What on earth are you doing?" He almost doubled up, nearly fell off the chair, and only kept himself from doing so by some very jerky acrobatics that involved his hands and hair flailing like wild things and made Marimeia very glad she wasn't in the room, much less range. "Sh-eesh, Mari-chan! Give a guy a heart attack, why don't you?" "I'm bored," Marimeia said, more in explanation than apology. "What a coincidence," Duo said. "So am I." "I don't have a nanny yet and I have to wait in the office and Anne's in a meeting and Mr. Chang and everyone are busy." "They called us down here to interview us and keep putting it off and rescheduling it and thinking of more stuff after the meetings are over and Hilde's convinced that the salvage yard will magically convert itself into The Utter Chaos Under My Bed if she isn't there *every second* and decided to go buy picture frames -- do you have any idea how boring picture frame stores are?" "They can't be boringer than Anne's office." Marimeia rolled into the office. "That's not a word, and yes they can." "How do you know?" "Words ending in '-ing' are actually verbs disguised as nouns," Duo said mock-pedantically, "and you can't stick '-er's onto verbs. Oh, this one's not as good." He tapped a button on his computer, and the song obligingly changed from the eminently forgettable whatever-it-was that had replaced the fridge thing to a chorus of "Harvey, Harvey, Harvey the Wonderhamster." "I *meant* about the stores." "I've been there." Duo was -- he was rather like Uncle Freddy in the book about the summerhouse, Marimeia thought, or maybe Hakubi Washuu, except for being a guy -- a large obstacle, but not one that couldn't be gotten over. He wasn't respectable. Wait, that sounded wrong. He was grown up, but he wasn't a grown-up grown-up. He was fun. He was interesting. He -- he Thought of Things. "Duo?" "Yes?" "Tell me a story." "A story?" Duo shut the music off, swung his feet down, and straightened up, laying a finger beside his lips. "Hmm.... okay, this is the story of Prince Dorothy and the Dear Little Valkyrie." ------------- Prince Dorothy and the Dear Little Valkyrie Once upon a time, there was a king named... um.... Milliard. One day, when King Milliard was out hunting in the woods, he chanced upon a Clue. Having this clue, he realized that it might be an idea to seek the lady Lucretia's hand in marriage, and he set out for her manor posthaste in order to do so. Unfortunately, there were a few obstacles to his suit. Firstly, he had acted like a total jerk to the lady for years, and secondly, five minutes before he knocked on her door, the lady Lucretia fell into a deep sleep and could not be wakened for love or money. The king tried to wake her. He tried calling her name. He tried shaking her. He tried yanking all the covers off. This let him see her cute pajamas with ducks and bunnies on them, but it didn't wake her. He tried dripping cold water onto her face. He tried putting her sleeping cat on her chest. He tried kissing her. Despite half the fairy tales he had read, this didn't wake her up either, although the piece of his head where he was carrying the Clue noted that this was very nice indeed and he should have done it earlier, preferably when the lady Lucretia was awake and participating. Racking his brain for more fairy tales, he thought that perhaps if he took the kiss further and went all the way she might wake up. However, the lady Lucretia's best friend, Dame Sally, promptly informed him that if he dared take advantage of the lady in her sleep, she would give him a physical with the Anal Probe of Doom, which is three feet long and has razor-edged spikes. So he quickly thought better of *that* notion. At last, he realized that this situation called for a quick mind and an intelligent, innovative way of looking at things. Unfortunately, he did not HAVE a quick mind and an intelligent, innovative way of looking at things. Fortunately, he knew someone who did. And he forthwith dispatched five messenger pigeons to the castle of Treize Khushrenada, carrying a full description of the problem and everything he had tried, thoughtfully numbered one through five for the Count's convenience. One pigeon came in return, carrying a short message. "Step on the cat's tail." This didn't make much sense to the king, but he always did what Treize said, except when he was operating under what he thought his dynastic constraints ought to be or when he was just plain nucking futz. And so he walked into the lady's bedchamber without even taking his boots off, walked to the corner where Dame Sally had put the cat -- after she pulled it off the lady Lucretia's chest before one of them stuffocated -- and STOMPED with all his might on the poor cat's tail. The cat let out a yowlwhowl, leapt three feet into the air, turned into the God of Death, and glared at him. "Fine, you can marry the lady Lucretia -- IF she'll have you -- " the God of Death growled; despite not having a tail anymore, he was still very sore -- "but when you have a kid, they'll have the Freaky-Ass Eyebrows From Hell. And until the kid says 'I've got the Freaky-Ass Eyebrows From Hell,' they'll HAVE the Freaky-Ass Eyebrows From Hell! Bye!" And the God of Death teleported into Another Dimension (TM) in order to indulge in his favorite game of Bait-the-Stoic. The lady Lucretia did in fact marry King Milliard -- gods above know why -- and in time got pregnant and had a baby, which was a wonderful experience akin to shoving a package delivery truck through an inner tube, and was further marred by the fact that the king had mislaid himself in a space battle three weeks earlier, so she couldn't reach up and strangle him for getting her in that situation. The baby was named Dorothy, and in due course proved to have Freaky-Ass Eyebrows From Hell. Queen Lucretia felt terrible for her daughter, and decreed that everyone had to wear Vulcan-makeup eyebrows as well as their real ones so little Dorothy wouldn't feel like a freak. So Dorothy grew up believing that Freaky-Ass eyebrows were normal, and learned all the stuff befitting the heir apparent to the kingdom of Lake Wobegon, except that when she was eight she decided that the word "Princess" was sexist, and declared herself a Prince. Besides, princes get to do all the fun stuff anyway, unless you're Xena or Jiliora. She also grew up very sarcastic, to the point where Queen Lucretia finally put out advertisements that anyone who could make Prince Dorothy non-sarcastic for a while could name their reward, up to and including half the kingdom or the prince's hand in marriage, if they were feeling exceptionally brave or very stupid. Now the Valkyrior, who had long since switched from horses to spiffy motorcycles, were riding through that part of the world when one of the motorcycles stalled. The Valkyrie it belonged to, who was as cute as a button and whose name was Hilde, kicked the stupid thing, waved to her sisters to go on without her, and examined it. Being not only cute as a button but also smart as a whip (and short into the bargain), she quickly figured out that it needed a new spark plug. So she hauled the motorcycle into a hollow, threw a camouflage tarp over it, and hiked into town to see about finding spark plugs. When she got there, all these people were standing around occasionally moving forward in a big line, so she fell in with them, assuming that it was the opening of a store or a restaurant or something. Three hours, two granola bars, and five drinks of water from various water fountains later, the portion of line Hilde was in finally made it into the throne room and sight of the Prince, Queen, and Dame. "Drat," the Dear Little Valkyrie said. "I thought this was a store." "Well, *that's* a new one," Prince Dorothy remarked, turning to look at the new arrival. "I don't think I've seen you around before, either." "Um... I'm a Valkyrie, and -- " "You're not wearing your eyebrows!" the queen gasped. Hilde blinked, then remembered the relevant portion of Fodor's Guide. "Oh, CRAP!" She clapped her hands to her face. "I... uh, forgot?" "Leave this place at ON--" "Actually," Prince Dorothy interrupted her mother, "I rather like them." As soon as everyone had scooped their jaws off the floor and put their eyeballs back in their sockets, Hilde the Dear Little Valkyrie found herself shoved to the front of the room, almost in Prince Dorothy's face. "Heredity?" Dame Sally wondered, looking from the Dear Little Valkyrie to Queen Lucretia. "Single eyebrows don't look that bad at all," Dorothy said, ignoring her mother's best friend. "Why don't you take yours off, then?" Hilde suggested. Prince Dorothy blinked. "How?" "Like this!" the rest of the room chorused, taking the topmost ends of their Vulcan eyebrows and peeling them off. Dorothy pulled at the topmost ends of her eyebrows, but all that did was pull out a few hairs that ought to have been thinned anyway. "Mother -- " she began. "I didn't want you to feel different," the queen said helplessly, peeling her own extra eyebrows off. "I'm already different," Dorothy snorted. "Why didn't you TELL me I had the Freaky-Ass Eyebrows From Hell?" And as soon as she said this, not only did her eyebrows become just like anybody else's, only pink, she was instantly transformed into Tenjou Utena. "Okay, that's GOT to have cured her of the constant sarcasm," Dame Sally said. "What would you like as your reward?" "A new spark plug for my motorcycle!" Hilde said at once. So the queen found her a spark plug in the drawer in the bottom of her throne, and Prince Utena said "Valkyrior have motorcycles?" "Of course!" the Dear Little Valkyrie said. "We upgraded ages ago! The requirements for joining are basically that you have to be able to ride to an inch, to kick ass with grace and style, and to carry brave men's souls to the world of the dead while looking really damn cool during all three!" "Oh, *hey*," Utena said. "Where do I sign up?" "I'll take you there," Hilde offered, and the two of them walked out of the palace of Lake Wobegon, spark plug in hand, never to return. "Oh, I give up!" Queen Lucretia exclaimed. And she turned the throne over to her sister-in-law, dyed her hair red, and, together with her best friend Dame Sally -- who'd dyed her hair black -- changed their names, joined Triple-Double-A as Trouble Consultants, kicked ass, blew shit up, checked out cute guys, made themselves known and feared on zillions of planets, and kept a weather eye out for King Milliard in case they ever actually found him. So everyone lived happily ever after, even the new queen, because every evening when the paperwork got to be too much for her she Snarked Out along with the God of Death and Sylvia Noventa. ------------- "What's 'snarking out'?" Marimeia asked, getting her breath back. "That's when you sneak out late at night and go see movie double features at the Snark Theater, which never really gets around to checking IDs. They have the most interesting ideas of what to pair up -- last night it was the Utena movie and *Sandy Cooper, Superdragon*. Tonight's going to be *Pete's Dragon* and *Bride of the Monster* -- you wanna come?" "Bride of the Monster?" she repeated. "Yeah, it's this really bad flick Bela Lugosi made late in his career. See, this is the one where at the end, his character, the mad scientist, is supposed to be crushed to death by an octopus. And the director actually went out and got a mechanical octopus. Unfortunately, nobody could find the motor that made the thing move." "Okayyyy..." "But the show must go on. Lugosi did his best. He threw himself down on the octopus. He yelled and screamed and wrapped the tentacles around himself." Marimeia pressed her hands to her mouth again. "The cameras rolled, recording this epic struggle between man and utterly unmoving monster." "All right," Marimeia finally said when she had stopped wheezing. "I need to see this. How do I go about sneaking out?" "Oh." Duo stared at her wheelchair for a moment, obviously not having remembered it was there until just then. "Since tonight's the first time, I'll sneak in and help you." "Okay! Thank you!" She thought for a moment, and added "And thank you for the story. It was very funny. I hope Hilde and Utena found whatsherface, the purple-haired one, and they all lived happily ever after together, because from what Relena-nee said it seems -- Duo, are you paying attention?" The smile on his face looked like the one on that guy, the one Anne had said was called 'vapid.' "Hilde... Utena... Anthy... car..." Huh? She hadn't said anything about a car. Wait a minute. "Anthy? What sort of name is that?" "I think it's short for 'Chrysanthemum,'" Duo said. "... oh." She looked at the clock. "Will you please tell me another story?" "Okay. "Hmmm." "Oh, I know. This one is called 'Who First Speaks...'" ------------- Who First Speaks... This actually happened. I swear. Some time back, there was a certain group of terrorists. Actually, they'd have to do some serious social climbing to reach the terrorist level -- the only cause they had was to create as much havoc as possible, until people paid them to go away and bother somebody else. Preventer assigned one of their top agents to the task, mostly because it was a slow month. Since his cover was of someone meeting his absolutely inappropriate lover, they wanted to assign him a teenage boy as backup. The guy they'd normally have sent had the flu, and a free agent known to them happened to be following up the same trail for reasons of his own, so one of the Preventer admins told them to work together. Now, if they had asked one Relena Darlian, or perhaps a certain Lucretia Noin, or even a particular Duo Maxwell, they'd have heard that it was a really, really stupid idea. Anyway, the surveillance tapes tell their own story. The gang of ruffians wandered back to the apartment building where they were making their headquarters for the moment, half of them high and most of the rest of them drunk, and in the mood to have some of what they thought of as fun: namely, scaring the sh -- crap out of people and beating them up. So they roistered down the halls of their apartment building, and came upon the open door of a lighted room. The room turned out to be divided in half as neatly as if a line of tape went down the middle. On one side, a few woodblock prints hung in the company of ink sketches, the latter mostly of the school known as "1980s Japanese animated series character designs." Below them, shelves were lined against the walls, containing books, discs, and various knickknacks. On the other side, the walls were absolutely bare except for a tall cupboard. The top had doors, and the bottom was shelves with computer disks, a few meticulously labeled privately-made discs, and a laptop. Against the back wall, matching tiny chests of drawers flanked a small microwave-fridge unit. A larger laptop sat on top of the microwave; on top of one chest of drawers were plastic cups, bowls, and flatware, and on the other various microwaveable dry goods. And against the left and right walls were matching twin beds. On the left bed, a man in a red cardigan with long silver-gilt hair sat, arms crossed, staring across the room with a faintly bored expression. On the right bed, a youth in a green tanktop with short dark hair sat in the same position, face an absolute deadpan as his eyes met his roommate's. "Well, look what we have here," the gang leader drawled. Neither of the room's occupants said anything. "Terrified, are you?" Silence. "You should be. We're the Rache Bruderschaft!" No response. "Yoo-hoo," another gang member half-sang. "Anyone home?" He waved his hand in front of the blond's face. The man tracked the hand motion with his eyes, but otherwise remained motionless. "A couple of retards," the gang leader concluded. "There anything to eat here?" The ruffians raided the fridge, pouring wine and Scotch into plastic cups -- sometimes both together -- warming up the remains of a roast chicken and the back half of a small Virginia ham, eating peaches without regard to where the juice might drip, and throwing the rice all over the floor because they were manly men who didn't eat pansy stuff like *rice*. The room's tenants didn't say anything. A couple of the gang members began pulling the drawers out of the little bureaus, tossing some of the clothes to the floor, grabbing some of the nicer stuff to keep for themselves, making rude comments over a picture of a woman with short dark hair in the left-hand bureau, and turning up a paper bag containing several tin boxes of Flavigny violet pastilles and two expensive bars of bittersweet chocolate in the sock drawer of the right-hand one. One of the ruffians tore open a chocolate bar, took a big bite, and then spat it out in disgust. Bittersweet chocolate is usually about fifty percent chocolate liquor, and if you can develop a taste for it very few people will ask to share your chocolate more than once. "See if there's anything worth taking on the disks," the leader ordered. "These are all ancient cartoons or black-and-white flatscreen movies," the ones who had checked the left-hand shelves reported some time later. "Nothing worth the metal foil they're printed in." "If half the stuff the labels claim are on these," the guy on the right said, "this is some good sh -- stuff. Password-crackers, viruses, antiviruses, worms -- of course it's all mixed in with some theramin crap and some stuff with names like Lair della miseer and Alavolont dew poople and Dulsanee-a." The people on the beds didn't move. "Well, that's plenty. Trash the place and go," the leader giggled. The guy over by the cupboard threw the doors open hard enough that he tore one of the doors right off, and then blinked. It was divided into a lot of small cubbyholes, and in nearly every one was a small stupid-looking stuffed animal of some kind filled with beans, neatly labeled in the same hand as the compact discs. The guys at the left-hand bookshelves swept all the books and knickknacks off of one shelf, and were reaching for the next when they ran into a fist.   "Get your filthy hands," the blond snarled, silver-gilt hair swirling and settling as he drew himself up to his full height, "OFF my 1/144 scale Red Comet model." He caught it up and cradled it protectively before setting it down gently on the bed. Like I said, these guys were so not even deserving of the name terrorists -- if they met a real one, they'd wet their pants. The one at the cupboard DID when he turned and found that the boy on the bed had pulled a gun out of nowhere, was aiming it at him, and, after a swift glance at the blond bouncing two would-be toughs off the floor, spoke. "Look, you can have the CD collection." He absently kicked out, catching one of the braver (or drunker) ruffians under the chin and knocking him out as well as any uppercut might. "You can have my candy stash." He stood up, caught yet another man over his hip with his non-gun-holding hand, and threw him across the room. "But touch my beanie babies, and I will hunt you down and stuff your still-bleeding heart down your throat." The guy at the cupboard, having wet his pants already, soiled them into the bargain and then fainted. The boy spun, shot the knife out of the third-to-last gangmember still active's hand -- sending the bullet through the leader's arm in the process -- and then reholstered his gun and helped the blond immobilize or render unconscious all of their uninvited visitors. Not a sound could be heard in the room save deep, rhythmic breathing. The blond had just carefully moved the 1/144 scale model back a bit farther, in case vibrations should disturb it, when his companion broke the silence. "You spoke first," Hiiro Yui said. "YOU go shut the door." ----------- Marimeia blinked. "They were trying to out-silence each other," she said faintly, "over who had to shut the DOOR?" Duo nodded. The small redhead tried to hold it in for about half a second more before spasms of laughter racked her, wheezing and rocking back and forth, and nearly sending her flying out of her wheelchair. "They had us in to review the record," Duo finished once he was assured she was not going to suddenly choke from lack of breath, "and we all stared at each other for a moment before Noin finally said 'They're idiots.' "And then Relena said 'They're IDIOTS.' "And I said 'Damn' skippy. Want to go see a movie?' and we went. It was the third remake of *Superman vs. King Kong*, with guest appearances by Mothra, Alucard, and Rocky and Bullwinkle, and we had a ball. Too bad Hilde couldn't make it, but we have the second one on tape, the one where they added in Cutey Honey and Torgo for no reason that fits into the plot whatsoever." So that, Marimeia thought with some distant clear corner of her mind, was what was meant by the phrase "The mind boggles." She had finally scooped her jaw off the floor, put her eyeballs back in their sockets, and begun thinking of some new topic of conversation when the public address system crackled to life. "Marimeia, please report to Number One's office. Marimeia, please report to Number One's office." "Anne's looking for me," Marimeia said regretfully. "Better let her know you're not lost or kidnapped or causing mass destruction," Duo agreed, picked  up the telephone on his desk, and hit a few buttons. "Hi, Anne, I've been keeping your munchkin entertained... well, to be more precise, we've been fighting off boredom together... " "Mr. Chang was busy," Marimeia said loudly, leaning forward, "and I didn't want to disturb you." "Got that?... yeah, I'll walk her down... you're welcome... bye." "I don't need to be walked down," Marimeia declared. "Of course not, but I thought we'd discuss the logistics of your first Snark Out... when to expect me, that kind of thing." "Oh." She carefully manuevered herself in a circle, only making a little face when she found that he'd hopped up and was holding his door firmly open. "Thank you, Duo." "'S nothing. Hey, Mari-chan?" "Yes?" "How come Wu-chan's 'Mr. Chang' if I'm 'Duo'?" "Because... because you are not enough respectable," she managed as he locked the door behind them. "Struck!" He elaborately smote his forehead. "Wounded to the heart! Or at least the ego." They proceeded in an elevatorwardsly direction, he cutting his step short to match her pace. "By the way, Mari-chan?" "Yes?" "You owe me two stories." "Maybe if I write them down for you? I'll have the whole weekend." "And I might be gone by then, if I'm lucky... how do we manage this?" "Wait for me to get in, and then see if you can fit in the side or something." "That works..." All the short ride down in the elevator, he had a weird smile on his face, as if he were thinking about something. "Mr. Chang, hmm?" Marimeia bapped him. ************************** I'm planning a few more Marimeia-centric ones, but they're refusing to be pinned down and written at the moment. Sincerely, Luriko-Ysabeth, hon otaku | member in good standing of #WEIRD# | GDI Kendappa Clan | Sosai/Pooh-Bah for life of the Washuu-sensei Rules club GSI of Washuu-Skuldism | member of too many organizations to list here "As a busy author, I've hardly slept in three days, so forgive me if I act a little strange." --Nanohara Sei, *Juubei-chan* http://www-personal.umich.edu/~iac/weird.html   (or ~iac/me.html)