The Harem Objects
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Summary: In which Yomiko and her harem of two Nancies and a Nenene meet to launch a complaint regarding events to come. Exceedingly Silly Spoilers for ROD the TV. Set pre-series, but post-OAV. Was previously A Sex-Bomb's Complaint (which was, in turn, a companion piece to A Secretary's Complaint), which I strongly suspect didn't come near doing justice to the concept. It still probably doesn't, but I think it's better now. Wholehearted and fervent thanks still go to Yue Ryong - Shadowborne for the idea. :)
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"I suppose you know why I've called you all here," Nenene said with a tone that brooked no disagreement, pacing back and forth before the round glass-topped coffee shop table around which sat her Yomiko, as well as two identical blue-haired girls who could not possibly have looked or acted more different.
"I know why I'm here," the blue-haired girl clad in low-cut, form-fitting black leather retorted with a smirk. "And a promise is a promise, little girl, so let's have them."
Nenene ground her teeth, one hand tightening instinctively around the envelope tucked into her pocket.
"If I give them to you now, you won't pay attention."Nancy-Without-Barrettes gave an impatient sigh.
"Why do I need to pay attention? I'm dead, remember?"
Nenene looked shocked.
"What? Still? They didn't, like, bring you back in the end, give you a triumphant return, anything like that?"
"Nope," Nancy-Without-Barrettes replied boredly. "Still dead."
"What a load of--" Nenene cut herself off, perhaps recalling that this could only work to her advantage. She shook her head. "Well, that kind of crap is why we're all here in the first place, remember?"
Yomiko raised her hand timidly.
"Em, Nenene, I know that you aren't happy with the developments to your character--"
"Damn right, I'm not happy with them!" the little brunette snarled, rounding on her. "I have to spend the next five years moping and angsting – actually angsting – because you're too busy playing in a pile of books to call me back!"
"I'm sorry, Nenene," Yomiko sighed, eyes growing a little wet. "But I didn't write it."
Nenene sighed, too.
"I know you didn't right it, Yomiko. So we'll bitch out the people who did."
"Oh, that'll go over great," Nancy-Without-Barrettes said flatly. "Tell the creators they're full of it. You know what happens when you second-guess the script? You get shot up into the sky in a rocket."
Yomiko, Nenene, and Nancy stared incredulously at Nancy, which, despite the odd-looking structure of the sentence, was not, in fact, a typo.
"Is that why they did it?" the pink-and-denim-clad Nancy asked, horrified. "What did you say to them?"
The leather-clad woman's eyes darted about sheepishly, and for one bewildered moment, Yomiko could have sworn that she saw the beginnings of a blush. On Nancy! Her Nancy!
"I—I kind of complained about the lack of...uh, action," she finally muttered.
Yomiko and Nancy-With-Barrettes blinked, exchanging confused looks.
"I remember quite a lot of action," Yomiko confessed. "We had that fight with Genjo, and then we had a fight with Gennai Hiraga, and then we had a fight with you--"
"Wrong kind of action," Nenene snickered.
Yomiko's eyes widened, and she started slightly.
"Oh!" Then she frowned. "But...Wendy complained about that, too."
"And that's why she's the villain's hench-wench now," Nancy-Without-Barrettes shrugged indifferently. "I was just a little pushier about it."
"But now you have these," Nenene grinned, slapping an envelope down on the table in front of her, "so at least your death is not completely in vain."
With a sound of joy, Nancy pounced on the envelope and half-tore it open. A huge grin spread over her lovely face as she perused the first image, that of the dark-haired girl to her right clad in a school uniform very similar to Nenene's, long legs shown off to beautiful advantage.
"Somebody makes a very pretty little schoolgirl," she purred happily, one hand meandering up to gently massage the back of Yomiko's neck.
"Nenene!" Yomiko exclaimed, horrified. "When did you take those?"
"I didn't," the teen shrugged. "It was some guy in the apartment across the street. I beat him to death with a spoon and stole the negatives."
"And why are you giving them to Nancy?"
Nenene cackled, draping one arm over Yomiko's shoulders as well as she could without disrupting the neck rub.
"I had to make her show up somehow."
"And believe me," Nancy added fervently as she reached the photo of Yomiko in a bathing suit, "they are worth every second."
"I want to see!" Nancy-With-Barrettes announced, nearly crawling across the table to peer at the photos. "Ooh, Yomiko, you look so cute!"
"Th-thank-you, Nancy," a beet-red Yomiko muttered, shrinking down in her chair.
"Alright, time to put them away," Nenene said firmly, snatching the little stack of photos from Nancy and Nancy, and tucking them back into her pocket. "For now," she added, rolling her eyes, as four outraged blood-red eyes promised certain death if she didn't qualify the statement, and quickly. "We just have more important things to discuss."
"I still say you're not going to get anywhere," Nancy 1 said mildly. She laughed as a piercing green glared attempted to drill twin holes in her forehead. "Okay, do what you want. But if you all end up getting killed off, don't come crying to me."
Nancy 2 blinked.
"But...if we were dead, we couldn't go anywhere or cry to anyone at all, right?"
Nancy 1 looked close to tears herself.
"This is what we'll be reduced to."
"Nancy, that isn't very nice," Yomiko protested.
"Neither was giving us a kid!"
"Junior's cute!" Nancy 2 chirped happily. "He has our eyes. And Wendy raised him – um, will raise him – to be a very polite little boy."
"Poor thing," Nancy 1 sighed, purposely leaving the statement ambiguous that only she should ever know for sure if the poor thing had been Junior or Wendy. "For God's sake, we don't even get to wear the cat suit again until the very end of the series!"
"Don't you find that demeaning?" Nenene demanded incredulously.
Nancy 1 smirked.
"Honey, the only women who find it demeaning are the ones who don't have the body for it. Which is most of them. But not me. Just so you know." She shook her head. "Wow, that sounded a lot cooler before I said it..."
"Hey, if it makes you happy," Nenene shrugged, dropping to her chair and pulling the stack of papers in the middle of the table closer. "Okay, let's start from the beginning. Why the hell do I have roommates? Crazy roommates? Three of them?"
"Well, they need somewhere to stay, don't they?" Yomiko pointed out very seriously. "You've always been nice that way, Nenene, offering a home to us poor souls, getting nothing in return except the assurance that you'll be rescued the fifty-seven times you get kidnapped a week."
"I'd tell her to stop being a smartass," Nenene muttered, rubbing her eyes wearily, "if it wasn't for this terrible feeling that she's not being sarcastic."
"Sarcasm isn't Yomiko's strongest point," Nancy 1 yawned.
Nenene glared.
"I know that! I know Yomiko way better than you do!"
"Me too!" Nancy 2 piped up.
Nenene gritted her teeth again, making a mental note to see her dentist when this was all over.
"Okay, next point of business. My FOUR FRICKIN' YEAR ANGST-FUELLED WRITER'S BLOCK! What kind of stupidity is that?"
"Isn't it because you're upset about Yomiko?" Nancy 2 asked, blinking big, serious eyes.
"Oh, come on! Why would I do that? I write because I'm upset!"
"You must be upset a lot," Nancy 2 commented with absolutely no thought of being malicious, recalling the volumes upon volumes Yomiko had showed her of Miss Sumiregawa's work.
"Yeah, well, you would be, too, if you ended up living with a bunch of strangers. Weird strangers."
"Hey! We were raised to be mistresses for the closest thing we had to a father! Both of us!" Nancy 1 snapped. "Don't tell her about bad circumstances!"
"Em, should we get back to the series now?" Yomiko suggested hesitantly.
"Okay, Yomiko, why don't you tell us what you thought?" Nenene suggested in a tone that indicated not so much a suggestion as a do it now or I'll take more embarrassing photos.
Yomiko pondered this very carefully.
"W-well, we don't seem to be in it much..."
"Yeah, that's what I said," Nancy 1 said emphatically. "It takes fifteen episodes for us to appear, and even then, everything revolves around her--" Here, Nancy made a rather disgusted gesture toward Nenene. "--and that Anita kid."
"I hardly got to read at all, in twenty-six episodes." Yomiko noted, crestfallen. "Not only that, but my voice is strange. I sound like Junior, and I want to know why!"
"You know, she kind of does!" Nancy 2 exclaimed with an air of great revelation.
Amid Nenene's wild snickering, Nancy 1 rolled her eyes.
"Yeah, that's the biggest problem here. But seriously, fifteen episodes, just to show up! Fifteen! And when we do show up, we still spend the whole time playing second-fiddle to those Paper Sisters!"
"I think the two older ones are mostly ignored in the end," Yomiko pointed out, flipping through the script again.
"Great," Nancy 1 huffed. "Maybe we can all go have a big We're-Getting-Shafted-For-Screen-Time party somewhere, while little Anita saves the day and Nenene yells at everyone."
"I do?" Nenene interjected excitedly, lunging for the script and flipping hurriedly to the end. "Where?"
"I think I had to do quite a lot in the end," Yomiko said thoughtfully. "I was quite a large part of the showdown with Mr. Joker and Wendy." She shook her head sadly. At least now, the almost incoherently angry phone message she'd received from the little blonde made a bit more sense. "Wendy's not very happy with this, either."
"I sure as hell wouldn't be," Nancy 1 said emphatically. "Getting stuck with Joker? Brr…the blood runs cold, just thinking about it."
"She likes him," Yomiko pointed out very seriously, shuddering slightly as she recalled the last time she had walked into his office without knocking. At least, she recalled, consoling herself with the fact, she had managed to walk quickly back out before she had accidentally seen anything that might give her nightmares.
Nancy 1 shrugged, lamenting the fate of a poor, fallen sister, while Nenene made a disgusted face as she found a photo of Joker, reflecting that she may have been a bit too bubbly, but Wendy hadn't been stupid or blind, and Nancy 2 squealed delightedly as her hot chocolate finally arrived.
"Well, there's no accounting for taste. But for God's sake, at least she gets some screen time."
"You get lots of screen time, Nancy! W-well, Nancy gets lots of screen time, anyway..."
Nancy 2 looked up, head tilted to the side in confusion, utterly unaware of her whipped cream mustache.
"Huh?"
"Oh, come on, Yomiko! You and us, we were the stars! Now we're just side-characters! The only distinction We've got anymore, besides being the token blue-haired chick and some cutesy bubble-head besides, is they're trying to use our kid as a Gentleman-suit!"
"That…that's an interesting way of putting it," Yomiko noted, trying to curb a terrifyingly vivid imagination honed by nearly two and a half decades of reading.
"We don't even get to wear our leather until the last ten minutes of the last damn episode," Nancy grumbled. "I spent good money getting that thing dry-cleaned, for ten minutes." She glared at Nancy 2. "You'd better enjoy it!"
"It looks really comfortable, at least," Nancy 2 noted dubiously, peering in deep consideration at her "big sister's" outfit.
Nancy 1 looked very much as though she was resisting the urge to bang her head on the table.
"You wore it! You kicked ass in it!"
"I still like my jumper much better," Nancy 2 said airily.
"You know, if the biggest problems you two have are wardrobe--" Nenene began angrily, pushing up from her seat at the table.
"The biggest problems we have!" Nancy 1 broke in incredulously. "I'm dead, you idiot!"
"Oh, yeah; the death thing," Nenene grinned. "Sorry about that."
"No, you're not," Nancy 1 shot back disgustedly.
Nenene's grin widened.
"No, you're right; I'm not."
"But at least I know my Yomiko is well taken care of," Nancy 1 continued, a grin of her own forming slowly. "I trust my little sister to take good care of her. You know, make sure she's happy, make sure she's satisfied... I'm just worried about them getting bored. All alone together, in a library, for five years? However will they entertain each other?"
"Grrgh," Nenene said pleasantly.
"Oh, did you think of something?" Nancy 1 asked with a devious cackle.
Nenene glowered darkly.
"I hate you."
Yomiko looked up.
"Nenene! You promised that you would try to get along with Nancy and Nancy!"
"Easy for you to say," Nenene pouted. "You're not the one getting totally shafted in the series."
"No," a strangely metallic and echo-ey voice agreed from behind them. "She's not. And neither are you."
Four sets of wide, shocked eyes watched as a jar on wheels, containing what appeared to be a brain and little bits of what had presumably once been a person, and labeled Donny Nakajima rolled up to the table.
"Okay, man," Nenene said lightly. "You win.
