A/N: Yay for weird and disturbing! This is actually, possibly, the most normal of several stories produced by me, Hanjuuluver, and Jane Austen Girl as a round robin game - the one where each person writes a few lines of a story and then passes it to the next person. Fun and excitement! All I can say is we have twisted little minds.

Disclaimer: I do not own FMA! Or Ranma 1/2! Or any other anime or novels that may, or may not, appear in this fic! But Mara is mine! All mine! (Evil laugh)!

A Sword in the Deer Head

This time it wasn't her fault. Amarantha, known as Mara, had nothing to do with the fire, the flood, the briar, the ditch with the purple thingy, or the mouse elephant hybrid, which had wings. The fact that she was currently riding a 20-ft radioactive trout that had been a human at one point was neither here nor there.

What was rather significant, at least in terms of Mara's continued existence, was the giant chocolate bunny chasing her down the river. The rabbit was, perhaps, her fault – not that it had been intentional, but she should have considered that an animation spell might ricochet off a metal suit of armor. That is more or less irrelevant for the moment.

Right now, all that really mattered was that if she didn't deliver her large pepperoni pizza within the next three minutes, she would never be able to buy that Ed plushie toy in the window at the anime shop.

Which she didn't really want, anyway. What she wanted was the attention of the handsome clerk at the anime store, who might notice her if she bought the expensive toy. What she didn't know was that he had already noticed her…and was following her at that very moment.

Actually, quite a large crowd was following her along the bank of the river, she noticed suddenly. Apparently, this had now become a spectator sport. She even saw C.M.O.T. Dibbler running through the crowd, shouting, "Sausages! Inna bun! Get 'em while they're…sausages!"

"What flavor are they?" Sue asked.

"We have turkey, apple and cloud flavors today," he responded, displaying two kinds of sausages and a rather large gap to the left side of the box.

"Ah. Cloud flavor is invisible. That makes sense," Mara mused. "Oy! Anyone got a love interest for me? Other than the once-human trout and the anime store clerk? It's bo-o-o-ring!" She fell over a waterfall into a churning pool and was lost to the sight of all and sundry, but did not die, so the story continues with her and NONE of the other characters unless they are vampires or otherwise hot, because she's a romance novel heroine on a radioactive trout who likes run-on sentences. She doesn't need any more problems.

Except, of course, that life is cruel, and GOD HATES MARA! As she climbed out of the pool of water, she felt peculiar, and was horrified to determine that several key areas of her anatomy were distinctly…different.

"Oh no!" cried a ludicrously accented voice. "You fall in legendary Spring of Drowned Lad! Terrible story about young man who drown there one thousand, three hundred year ago. Now anyone who fall in spring take body of same boy."

Suddenly, a previously unnamed character jumped in and said, "I am incredibly confused! Can someone please explain what is happening!"

"Curse it! Hell and Damnation!" she shook herself dry and turned back into a girl. "So there – magic resistance. Idjits! Now – 'You'll fail the quest if you don't do the lads?' Eh?" The sign was peculiar and disturbing.

"What lads?" she pondered, until she saw that the only way out of the hot springs was through a small bordello. 'Oh dear," said Mara. "This could be a serious problem."

And then Edward Elric popped out of nowhere, dressed as the Good Witch from the Wizard of Oz, and began to sing, "I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts, there they are, standing in a row…(1)"

"What a weird hallucination," Mara said as the strange apparition wandered off into the mist. She walked into the bordello and stole some abandoned male clothing that she found hanging from a chandelier, and a sword from the deer head mounted on the wall to protect herself with.

Then she hurried on her way - hopefully the rule about doing the lads only applied to members of the female sex, but she didn't want to stick around and find out she was mistaken. Where would she be when she came out? The question was answered as she stepped through the door. Texas! Oh God no, anywhere but Texas! I'd rather burn in the fires of Hell, Mara thought in a tortured wail. Then the strange vision vanished, and she was confronted with the sight of...Geneva? Ooookaaay.

Hmm, what language they speak her, I wonder, she thought as a man yelled at her in Polish.

"Italian," said a mind-reading bug flying past in a bizarre twist of fate.

"That short blond boy is definitely speaking Japanese," said Mara in Swedish. "How do you explain this!"

"I try not to think about it too much," said the small dog watching her. "I'd shove off if I were you; I think those scumbags have an eye on your purse," the dog said, pointing to a massive array of hamsters.

"Tu esta un mono azul con queso! (2)" shouted one of the hamsters in Spanish.

The indubitable end

1: this is a line from the song "Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" by some person, not me, named Fred Heatherton - Yay Fred! And thank you Crazy Person for getting that song stuck permenantly in my head.

2: You are a blue monkey with cheese (in Spanish, duh!)