Disclaimer: I am a poor college student who has without regret spent 4 hours of her precious study time reading "Snow Crash" which is a good, believable SF. It does not belong to me. I am expanding on a small footnote of the world the author created. That idea does not belong to me either. I make no money off of this. Neither do any of the works of all the authors mentioned in this work. Those who haven't read the book may still get some enjoyment out of this.Minekura Kazuya and Konomi Takeshi are the authors of Saiyuki and Prince of Tennis, respectively. Yuu Watase and Koyasu Takehito are the authors of Fushigi Yuugi and Weiss Kreuz. Just in case someone cared

Marked

Megumi Hanako knew she could not go to school today. It was a deep- freezing certainty somewhere behind her ribs, an icy weight dangling from her nerves. That would explain why her hands were shaking. Carefully nondescript notes in rose pink pen with dotted i's were promptly dropped on the floor. She sank down slowly until the back of her head banged on the dresser knob. Here was safe for now.

Any words she could manage came in hisses. "Shit, shit, shit..." in a curious litany of prayer until the word lost its fury, became small, and faded.

It was a raspy hiss. The Clink had been cold. She had lucked out and the one they'd stuffed her into was a fluffy-happy deluxe version specifically pre-ordered for proximity to the burbclave. It was a sort of cozy holding cell, where the parents of New Revivalist Nippon could pick up their barely-manhandled darlings and take them home in the warm womb of some bimbobox, whispering sweet nothings about how the charges could be dropped with a right word to so and so and how that slut girl had probably asked for it. As the testing ground for idiot young male juicers, it had been mercifully sterile and automated. Also absent was the usual assortment of horny old Jeek perverts. Clink Inc.'s favorite cheap labor source hadn't made the cut with burbclave admin. For this she could be thankful as any fuku-clad girl of seventeen can be when she's hung up and handcuffed in all her jailbait glory. Her parents hadn't a clue. Of course they had ceased having any sort of clue since the start of their world tour. Yes, while darling Gumi-chan was getting ankle-cramps in jail they were probably busy sipping MaiTai's in Tahiti.

This was perfectly acceptable.

The sudden presence of middle-aged me-generation schmucks in a house Megumi had blissfully had to herself for almost three years would be mega-hyper remix uncool. It would signal the start of 'family time', most of it probably in therapy. Suddenly, the old folks would be seized in a mercurial torrent of guilt for talking off on cruises during most of her childhood and would likely attempt to get to know the person she is now all the better to 'shape who she'd become.' Teh lame.

In short, their return would herald the beginning of hell. Not to mention throwing a big fat twobyfour into her well-oiled machine of a plan. Roasting their brains on tropical beaches, the folks abroad seemed remarkably likely to forget that soon, very soon her eighteenth birthday would roll around and control of certain funds would be hers. The voyaging pair would then, on their annual return from Maui or wherever would find the wind playing with their open door, Megumi's bank account clearer than the Mafia's tax record, and Megumi herself noticeably absent, probably on her way west with a jeep and a gun, Saiyuki style.

Except now, that plan was crashing. The Clink had been easy to explain. Hanged by the chain between her slender Asian-girl wrists, contorted to keep the device cupped between ear and shoulder, she had cheerfully spouted out some utter BS about a slumber party into the pink(with no less than 3 dangly cat charms) aperture of her cell phone. They had bought it, manga, series and OVA, and hadn't even bothered to trace the location. The other thing, the reason she was currently curled in a fetal position, would be harder to explain.

Dammit! She had been too careless. First rule of burblcalve living; know your cops. Theirs were the MetaCops brand: male racist misogynist white homophobic pigs, hardly sympathetic to her kind.

But she had gotten lonely.

The location for the meeting had been a Burger Park, anymore anonymous and they would have all had to come in wearing ninja masks ala Tarantino. Hi! We're just some good God-fearing kids hanging out over crushed cow- imitation soy in ketchup. Honest injun... The only remotely suspicious thing had been the private booth. That had been a bit problematic actually, but it would have been too risk otherwise, with the material going around.

It had been her first time seeing any of them face to face.

Everyone brought something. Some, a doc DL'd on an ancient public terminal and read from a disk, tentatively titled "English homework" just in case anyone back-checked the records. The burb's crackdown on non-religious wordage was severe. Others, a picture file on a mobile notebook, rigged to self-delete five seconds after viewing, or maybe the name of someone who'd trade actual media files for a wire's worth of diverted burbclave power.

RabuRabu452 lived closest to the fence. She had the best access to dealers and couldn't resist the chance to share the wealth. The meeting should have been better planned, but they had all been too eager. "Paper format!" Rabu had promised. Something they could hold and pass around. The chances of independently getting their hands on anything solid were miniscule. Anything they managed to leech off the net through their fake ID's had to be digital and destroyable.

It had been bliss; a cream-colored copy of "Crown of Sand" had been lying under Megumi's hand, wonderfully solid and promising. And then the cops burst in.

They hadn't gotten anything, thankfully. But she had had to surrender "Liar Liar" and some other gems into the coarse impersonal arms of the Happy Efficient Trash Incinerator. It was better than having them taken. That would have jeopardized the whole collective. Instead of one node of a network, her case had come off as a solitary germ. Something to be isolated, quarantined, and tagged for follow-up studies.

Bloody incompetent MetaPigs! It had taken the chiefpig five minutes to OK, her ID as a no-molest, no-permanent-bruises, bound-for-the-Clink resident, and by then the damage had been done. As an un-ID'd with the possibility of not making Clink-fee, 'immediate punishment' it was. Apparently they did have her kind on file. There was even an official tag. It was short and sweet too, none of that 'apprehended for socially damaging material declared mentally unsanitary by franchise standards' crap. They'd have had to put that on her leg or something. Wouldn't fit anywhere else.

She had been farthest from the backdoor in the seating arrangement. So as RabuRabu and IKgurl and the rest had split, she alone had ended up, at shitcreek.source. How un-freaking cool. She alone had been dragged out of the safe burrow of anonymity. The spotlight was on her now and the spotlight fisking burned.

There were many of her kind, she knew, each with their own reasons. They started out as poor young pedobait with their heads crammed so full of Happy Revivalist Bible School that somewhere a leak has sprung and all that yummi goodness about the seven sins and God punishing love went down the meta-drain. And then someone had lent them Gundam Wing and they had and shook their heads and said "Wait a bloomin' minute. This ain't right! There's gotta be someone better for Quatre than that creepy Dorothy!" Then, the seasoned meat: older women too tired after too many men, pouring unashamed over lemons at public terminals, laughing their revenge. There were the virgins, blushy or non-blushy. Guessing, or all too aware that jock juicer Joe may have pretty muscles and nice hair but he'd still fuck them against a wall and compare it unfavorably to drinking a cold one. And the non-virgins, who knew it. There were many kinds; the gleeful ones, the collectors, the shy sniffers who skipped paragraphs, and filtered the rougher stuff but still came back for more. But it was she who had been picked. Megumi Hanako, 17 years old, member of five fic archives, three fake over-18 accounts, left-clicker, browsing style: all rounder. Today it mega-sucked to be her.

And she was still doubled up by the dresser, listening to the clock chip away at time til' first bell.

Dammit, she needed a fix right now. Anything, but fluff preferential. The heavy stuff might tip her over at this point. Yes, waff, she need Get Backers waff, needed to see some clever sister's (or brother's) masterful orchestration of 'the way things should turn out'.

She would really like to meet a Creator one day. Just walk into their chic little office in the nth building of Tokyopop. Pick them up by the scruff of their shirt shake them until the idiots finally understood what they were doing. She'd show them, the drawing where they stood too close, the seemingly innocent line that just festered with what dared not speak its name. She'd rub their face in it, those hypocrites, she'd flay them of their denial. "Look! Go and look you bastards at what your stories are trying to tell you! Look what your subconscious screams out of every freshly inked page! Look at what you really want but are too damned chickenshit to do!!!" But she was a chickenshit phony too, apparently.

How could she face them, then? How could she righteously trounce Minekura Kazuya and Konomi Takeshi when here she was, dealing with her own demons Winnie the Pooh style? "If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. If I pull a blanket over my head, it can't see me."

She still couldn't see it. Problem was that now everyone else could.

And maybe, that's what she needed. It would be easy to say "I just found it accidentally" or "my friend lent it to me, I had no idea what it was", to feign proper mortification, to repent as a lost lamb when she knew exactly where she was going. This was her test of faith. If she was going to take on Yuu Watase and Koyasu Takehito she had to take down the cardboard cutout or herself that she paraded around in the real world.

The doors of Happy Jesus Revivalist Nippon High School had been open for 10 minutes now. Megumi Hanako walked in. Her uniform was immaculate. Her red bow was perfect. Her boots gleamed. There was a small, unobtrusive, terrifying smile on her face. Her bangs were pulled back to display her latest accessory: a row of industrial-font block letters across her forehead; a penalty tag. Two words, eleven letters "Yaoi Fangirl"

The teachers raised Cain of course. But there had been light brushes; a surreptitious pat on the shoulder in the hall, a sly squeeze of the hand. "TezuFuji forever" had mysteriously appeared in the girls' bathroom right next to 'justin is hot.' As she absently twiddled her thumbs in the chair next to the principal's office, the class president and appointed delinquent guard had, after an agonized minute of feet shuffling, softly asked out of the side of her mouth weather she knew any doujin dealers.

Megumi was not alone.