"So here we are in the Dallas ballroom which along with the Fort Worth and El Paso ballrooms, are where all the dealer displays are set up," Kiyone explained, ignoring the wisps of smoke that still rose from her uniform (Priss had been very pissed). "This is also where you’ll find the greatest number of notable personas at any given time." She stepped around a gaggle of girls in blond wigs and sailor outfits who were giggling with another blond girl who appeared to have her hair coiled into a couple of meatballs.

"What I was trying to say before was that with all those fanfics blowing holes in the dimensional barriers, this particular Holiday Inn became the nexus for a number of accidental inter-dimensional travelers. Although the Holiday Inn wasn’t so happy with the sudden influx of guests, the convention organizers, decided that the best thing to do would be to integrate the unexpected VIPs into the convention. For example, Princess Sasami, Ukyou Kuonji, and Luna Inverse decided to work in the kitchen. Other people took various other jobs, like that nice young man with the scar that's running the child care service; his name was Himura Ken-something. Mihoshi and I, the Knight Sabers, Section 9, and other qualified individuals took jobs working security, which is a fairly important job considering that a lot of old rivals and unstable personalities are now housed under one roof. Everyone else is out mingling with the convention goers, much to their delight, but" she shrugged, "like I said, old rivals and unstable personalities."

"Oh Kiyone, you worry to much. You were afraid of letting Washu keep the galaxy gun-"

"As if I was going to try and take it from her," Kiyone muttered under her breath.

"-but I just saw her taking it apart to show to that nice little goddess."

Kiyone grew several shades paler . "You mean the one who likes to invent impossibly complex gadgets that never work the way they’re supposed too?"

"Yeah, her" Mihoshi said brightly. "She's really nice. She split her sundae with me."

"Nice, right," Kiyone said, pulling out her walkie-talkie. "We have a code 1 in the Dallas Ballroom. A code 1," she explained," is our most common transgression. It means that an insane genius/mad scientist/precocious goddess is doing something that may unravel the fabric of reality." The problem was solved as a quartet of rigidly smiling RDGEs (readily-disposable-generic-extras) lured Skuld away with gallon tubs of ice cream and Washu with bright and shiny scientific achievement awards.

"Hey! No flying in the dealer room!" Kiyone shouted at a small dragon as it zipped above the crowd. She managed to grab it by a foreleg but she could barely keep her grip as it struggled. "Hey Mihoshi, give me a-. Stop signing autographs!"

"Allow me," a deep voice said behind her as a hand reached over her head and snagged the dragon by the snout. "I thought I told you to behave yourself," the voice scolded.

"Thank you for your…" Kiyone trailed off as she saw the man standing behind her. He was tall and although the hair that reached down to his waist was white, he was anything but old. In fact, there was one word that kept going through her mind: buff.

"Dark Schneider, Exploder Wizard, at your service."

"I’ve heard of you," Kiyone said, trying to regain her equilibrium. "A couple of your friends are working security too. The ones with the impressive titles."

"You mean Ninja Master Gara and Thunder Empress Arshes Nei."

"And you had that little boy Luche with you too," Mihoshi said brightly. "He was so cute and he loved to hug!"

"I wonder why?" the wizard asked lecherously, his eyes resting somewhere south of Mihoshi’s neck.

From seemingly out of nowhere, a hand slapped Schneider on the back of the head and Kiyone had to bring her eyes all the way down to the wizard’s waist to see who it belonged to: a red-headed girl was standing behind him, visibly fuming. "What do you think you’re doing?" she demanded angrily.

"Oww, that hurt, Yoko," the wizard complained, his former braggadocio conspicuously absent. "What’d you do that for?"

"You know why," the girl said, grabbing Schneider’s ear (despite the fact that she had to stand on tiptoe to do so) and dragging him off into the crowd. "You promised that you’d behave yourself." The dragon smiled smugly as Yoko continued to give Schenider's hide a verbal blistering.

Kiyone rubbed her temples. "I think I need an aspirin."

"I’ll get you one," Mihoshi said, pulling out her storage cube. She spent several minutes fiddling with the cube but when nothing appeared, she burst into tears. "It’s broken!" she cried.

In a puff of smoke a strange creature appeared on top of the cube. It had a cute little bunny head but its body was red, round, and had way to many legs.

"Get it away!" Kiyone shouted as the rabbit-thing cackled evilly and leapt to the ground, more rabbit-things pouring out after it. They all ran off into the crowd but their cackles quickly turned into screams of terror as girls in robes with brown wigs and mallets seemed to pop out of the wood work, whacking the nasty little beasties with cries of, ‘debug the system!’ and ‘stay out of the Yggdrasil!'"

Pandemonium reigned as the ugly red bugs tried to flee from all the girls with mallets (and Mihoshi, who had gotten a mop from somewhere). Kiyone was standing on a table, blaster drawn, wishing very hard to be somewhere else. The bugs however, noting the presence of a person lacking a weapon of whacking destruction, began swarming the table, trying to escape the legions of mallet wielding ersatz goddesses (and one mop armed Mihoshi).

Kiyone managed to switch the setting on her blaster to ‘slavering-insectoid-beastie’ before disappearing beneath the wave of ATIBs (all-to-identifiable-bugs).

"GET THEM OFF OF ME!" Kiyone screamed, the bugs scattering as she blasted her way free of the pile of ATIBs and started shooting at anything that was red, round, and moved.

"I_hate_bugs," Kiyone panted several minutes later, still twitching, as janitors (assisted by banpeis and other various minor mechas) began sweeping up the malleted and blasted bugs (and helped one girl to the first-aid station; unfortunately, she had come dressed as Hsien-ko, and been shot in each red, round, moving thing).

"The appearance of so many famous celebrities has brought attention to this convention that you usually don’t see associated with anime." Kiyone said as she pushed through a door bearing a sign that read, ‘Jerry Springer Show: taping in progress.’

"The topic of today’s show," Jerry began, "is ‘Unorthodox Relationships’ and our first guests are Miki and Yuu," he squinted at the cue card, "and there seems to be some confusion about their last names."

"Well, that’s part of the problem," Miki explained. "You see, our parents met while on vacation in Hawaii and my mom fell in love his dad and his dad fell in love with my mom."

"So your parents were having affairs with each other without knowing it," Jerry asked, sounding interested (as he imagined the melee that would result when he brought them all out).

"Well, no, not exactly. How it worked out was that our parents got divorced, then my dad married his mom and vice versa and then we all sort of…moved in together.

"Which complicated the situation, since you had a crush on Yuu," Jerry blinked, trying to figure out why that sentence sounded so wrong, "but you couldn’t tell Yuu about it." He blinked again, as if a migraine was suddenly developing.

"Well Jerry, Yuu’s ex-girlfriend still had a thing for him and-."

"Hold it mustard girl," Yuu interrupted, talking over Miki. "It’ll be easier if I draw a diagram."

Two hours (and three pens worth of ink) later, Yuu stepped back. "See, it’s actually pretty simple." The shape on the paper was a mass of lines and dots that only a theoretical geometerist would have understood (and since the number of theoretical geometerists in the average Jerry Spring audience was negative two (give or take one)) all that the audience could do was stare at it and share a collective migraine.

"Hold it Marmalade boy," Miki said testily. "You forgot to include the tennis coach, that weird boy who may or may not be a flaming monkey humper, the-"

"Our next guest," Jerry quickly interrupted, "is Ranma Saotome, who has not one, not two, but four fiancés. Let’s bring out Akane Tendo, Ukyou Kuonji, Xian Pu, and Kodachi Kuno!"

"Hey!" Ranma protested, "Kodachi is not my fiancé."

Jerry ignored him. "It looks like we already have some questions from the audience; you sir."

Jerry pointed to a fat man in a striped shirt and polyester pants who was sweating profusely by the time he heaved himself to his feet. "Ya got all those pretty girls hanging offa ya, but I want to know: how many of them have ya gotten down and dirty with?"

"Huh?" Ranma responded eloquently.

"You know, done the deed?"

"I don’t follow."

"How many of those girls have you BEEP-BEEP-BEEPITY-BEEPITY-BOOP?" the fat man turned to glare at the pale haired girl with triangular markings on her face whose hand rested on a big red button marked ‘Purity Control.’

Ranma flushed bright red and Akane leapt to her feet heaving her chair above her head. "Ranma, you pervert!"

"I didn’t do anything!" he protested, cringing. "He was the one who asked the question!"

"Oh, right," Akane said, setting the chair down. "Sorry, force of habit."

"Whoah thar, jus hol’onna minute," another guy said as he got to his feet. This one only had one tooth and was so skinny that he was almost lost within his dirty wife-beater which was so long that it was impossible to tell if he was wearing anything else underneath. "You trying ta say that you ain’t never been through any of them gals' barn doors? Ah mean, if ah was in your place I’d take that thar chiya-neese gal and BEEP-," he stopped to glare at the girl by the button. "-and just bonkity-bonkity-bonk her all day long!" he finished, accompanying the words with the appropriate motions, promptly losing his last tooth as Xian Pu’s bonbori neatly filled the gaping hole between his nose and his chin.

"Anyone else want ask questions?" she inquired sweetly, caressing her other bonbori.

"Err," Jerry said, sharing a sweatdrop with the rest of the audience, "moving on we have the most tangled romance yet. Meet Lina Inverse, Gourry Gabriev, Zelgadis Greywolf, Amelia wil Tesla Saillune and Naga the err… White Serpent."

Amelia passed a glance to Zelgadis, who passed it to Gourry (kicking the oblivious swordsman to get his attention) who passed it to Lina, who refused to acknowledge Naga’s existence. "I think there’s some sort of mistake. None of us are ‘involved.’"

"Of course there’s a mistake," Naga said, flipping back her cape. "To think that anyone would believe that I would ever associate with a flat-chested, half-sized, no-talent sorceress like you, why, it’s simply unthinkable!" Naga threw her head back and laughed, her entire frame shaking.

"Actually Ms. Inverse, we just wanted to see that," Jerry said, his head (along with the heads of everything even remotely male in the audience) bobbing up and down in tandem with Naga’s chest.

"Hey Kiyone, how come they all know English?" Mihoshi asked suddenly. "I thought they were Japanese."

"No continuity editor," her partner replied.

"Got it, over and out," Kiyone said, clipping the walkie-talkie onto her belt. "There’s a code 3 in progress over at the Galleria. Druken brawl between two possibly super-human parties. Third most frequent transgression."

When she and her partner arrived at the hotel restaurant it was easy to see where the disturbance was, despite the large number of over-inebriated anime types within (she had to step over a man with bushy blond hair in a red duster who had somehow managed to pass out in a pile of bullet casings): Ryoko was nose to nose with a black-haired woman in a red jacket, the rest of their table’s occupants vainly trying to pull the two apart.

"Bullshit your evigelly, ebansmelly, evangeli-whatevers could beat mecha-Ryo-ohki," Ryoko snarled. "Look at her, she’s one of the greatest weapons ever created!" she said triumphantly, pointing to the cabbit in question (who happened to be passed out in a martini glass amid a sea of empty hard carrot juice bottles).

"Miss, miss," said a scruffy looking man, pulling on Ryoko’s arm. "As distinguished ambassadors of our dimensions, we must work to keep our reputations-," he lost his grip and went sliding across the table, landing on the floor amidst a hail of bottles.

"Oh Mr. Fujisawa, you’re so embarrassing," said the boy who had been sitting next to him (and incidentally, was drinking a Shirley Temple).

"I could solve this by destroying the Holiday Inn," the silver-haired girl sitting next to the boy suggested dispassionately (and incidentally, was not drinking anything).

"Ladies, how about we all just sleep this off," suggested a pony-tailed oriental man, who even though obviously dead drunk, still managed to move with a certain amount of grace as he managed to get Ryoko back into her seat.

"Do I know you?" Kiyone asked him.

"I’m Lei Wulong, but you can call me Superpolice," he replied, flashing a drunkenly winning smile (or maybe it was winningly drunken).

"I know you!" Mihoshi exclaimed, bouncing up and down. "You work security too! You’re funny!"

"So I’ve been told," he replied, his head bouncing up and down in time with Mihoshi.

"C’mon Katsuragi," said the unshaven man sitting next to the black-haired woman. "I’m sure that she didn’t really mean it when she said that Unit 01 had a lousy color scheme." He pulled her to her feet. "If you come along quietly," he bent over and whispered in her ear.

"Oh Kaji," she giggled as the two of them staggered out of the restaurant. "That’s not what the entry plugs are for!"

"This next room is probably the most dangerous one in this entire hotel," Kiyone cautioned. "Past this door is where the fanfic contest is being held. You have to be careful, since this is naturally the place that draws the most wackos and-. Mihoshi! Why are you taking your clothes off?"

Mihoshi blinked innocently. "That nice man said he needed me to do it for research for his fruity story."

"Fruity? As in lemon?"

"That was it! You’re so smart Kiyone!"

"Which 'nice' man was this?" Kiyone asked severely.

"That one," Mihoshi said cheerfully, pointing to a fat hairy man dressed as a sailor scout.

"Mihoshi," Kiyone sighed, "what have I told you about listening to fat men in fukus?"

"Umm…don’t?"

"Right," Kiyone said, dragging her partner along. "We’re going to give the humor fanfics a wide birth. They’re not all that dangerous but it’s pretty easy to get yourself into an extremely uncomfortable, yet extraordinarily hilarious situation. The next ones we’re coming up on are the darkfics. " Something squished unpleasantly beneath Kiyone’s foot. "Watch where you step," she said disgustedly, scraping her shoe against the back of a man dressed like a blue hedgehog, "this place in ankle deep in angst."

"Everybody hates me," a voice said from beneath a table. "My father, Asuka, Rei, Pen-pen, that stray dog down the street who pisses on my foot every day. I’m worthless." Fresh puddles of angst came rolling out from under the table accompanied by a sound much like tapioca getting sucked through a vacuum.

"Hey kid, you all right down there?" Kiyone asked.

"I suppose I’m fine, at least, as fine as it’s possible to be in this hellish, terrible, intolerable life that… Could you please tell your partner to put her clothes back on? It’s difficult to angst properly when confronted by a well-formed bosom."

"Pikachu!" a passing electric rat agreed enthusiastically.

"Mihoshi! Stop taking your clothes off! What did I tell you about that?"

"I’m sorry Kiyone. I keep forgetting."

"Hey, wait a second," Kiyone said, drawing up short . "Hey kid, I thought that whenever you saw even the slightest hint of feminine sexuality, you would say, 'I mustn't run away' and start angsting in overtime?"

"It’s not my fault there’s no continuity editor. No, it must be my fault. Everything’s my fault. It’s my fault that Rei XXV died from that hangnail. She would still be alive if I had only taught her the proper use of nail clippers. New Coke is my fault; so is Pepsi One." Kiyone had to step lively to keep her feet out of the rapidly growing pool of angst.

"Moving on, we arrive at the seediest, most disreputable section: the self-insert fics. I’d watch your wallet if I were you."

A man dressed as Evangelion Unit 03 (with a bright red hawk ludicrously emblazoned on his chest) was standing on a table, shouting. "Come one! Come all! Try my amazing self-insert tonic! All you have to do is inject twenty ounces of this miracle formula into your left eye eight times a day and you too will be the pilot the mecha, save the world, and get all the sweet loving! Just listen to the testimony of a man that I’ve never met before!"

The table groaned and sagged alarmingly as (another) grossly obese man masquerading as Sailor Moon climbed onto it. "That’s right brot- err, I mean total stranger. I injected this wonderful stuff into my left eye (incidentally, he was wearing an eye-patch over the right) and two weeks later I was getting the good loving from the entire female cast of Sailor Moon AND Fushigi Yuugi, at the same time!"

The only sounds to be heard were the splashing of drool from fanboys who were actually buying the spiel and everyone else unlucky enough to hear Sailor Cellulite’s boast being violently ill.

"That was disgusting," Kiyone groaned, wishing that she had skipped breakfast for the previous three years.

"Indeed," said a man dressed as Gendou Ikari, pushing his glasses up his nose. "Self-inserts are an author's desperate attempt at self-gratification. They are boring and unimaginative since they are written solely as author wish fulfillment. He sets out only to please himself and therefore…" He trailed off as he noticed Kiyone slide the setting on her blaster to ‘obsequious obnoxious author.’

"It’s equally unpalatable to try and win over the judges by quoting their own works within the context of a story."

"Err…Hey!" he shouted, pointing, "is that a continuity editor?"

"Where?" Kiyone demanded, spinning. She heard a ‘yoinks!’ from behind her and turned in time to see the mock Gendou dash off into the crowd. "I can’t believe I fell for the old ‘is that a continuity editor!’" Kiyone exclaimed, slapping her forehead. "That's the oldest trick in the book!"

An ear splitting laugh suddenly assaulted her ears; or to be precise, three ear splitting laughs.

"I knew that anyone whose laugh was brilliant and distinguished as mine had to be as evil as I am. With your help, I Katsuhiko Jinnai shall finally completely disgrace Makoto Mizuhara and take over the world!" He, Kodachi and Naga all joined in a good, healthy, insane group laugh.

"We have a code 2 in the fanfic room!" Kiyone said urgently into her walkie-talkie. "I repeat, we have insane villains bent on world domination in the fanfic room! We need immediate back-up!" Almost immediately the floor began to shake and the rising chant of ‘bugrom-bugrom!’ could be heard.

"Oh no," Kiyone moaned as the far wall collapsed beneath the charging mass of eight foot insects.

"Ha!" Jinnai crowed. "My loyal army has arrived! Victory will be mine!" Jinnai laughed again, but trailed off as the advancing bugrom failed to slow. "Stop you idiots! You’re going to trample meEEEE!" Jinnai shrieked as he and his compatriots-in-bad- laughter disappeared beneath the mass of great big bugs.

"GET THEM AWAY FROM ME!" Kiyone screamed, as she vanished into the mass of bugrom in a flurry of UBPs.

"Why?" groaned a very battered and bruised Jinnai. "Why did my faithful slaves turn against me?"

A pair of feet planted themselves in front of his face. "Because I told them to."

"Nanami," Jinnai gasped. "My treacherous sister, how did you force my blindly loyal bugrom to betray me?"

"Groucho, Zeppo, Harpo, front and center!" Nanami barked.

Three bugrom stepped forward, chests thrust out with pride, each bearing a big shiny button that said, ‘Rent-A-Bugrom: Mobile Security.’ "I got them all security jobs with better base wages, 401k plans, and retirement benefits than what you were giving them."

"But I didn’t pay them, give them retirement benefits, or a 401k plan!" Jinnai railed.

"Exactly," his sister said smugly. "Company, ultimate omega maneuver!"

As one, the bugrom all turned to face Jinnai and began pelting him with folded pieces of paper. As Jinnai randomly picked through them, his face turned red and veins began popping out along his temples. "You idiots! You can’t give me your resignations! I never hired you in the first place!"

"Company, ultimate omega maneuver revised!"

As one the bugrom raised a digit to their eyes and yanked down the lid. "BBBBIIIIDDDD!"

"Kiyone!" Mihoshi called, poking through various piles of rubble.

Two girls accompanied by a monkey(mouse?) stepped through what was left of the door. "Miss Utena," one began, "I hope that we aren’t to late to-." She gasped when she saw the destruction.

The other gave a low whistle. "Damn, and I thought that the dorm was a mess after the last time your brother threw one of his 'End of the World' bashes."

"Chu," the mouse(monkey?) said in agreement.

"Kiyone, where are you?" Mihoshi cried, on the verge of tears.

One of the piles of rubble stirred as a set of UBPs pulled themselves free and assembled themselves into a very identifiable (if bedraggled) Kiyone. "I…hate…bugs…" she gasped, twitching.

"Chu-chu chu chu chu," the monkey(mouse?) said, neatly summing up the days events, the meaning of life, and Pegnie’s Final Theorem.