Disclaimer: All things I write now or in the future will involve characters, settings, and other items from an original author's imagination. I cannot lay claim to them, nor can I buy or inherit or trade anything for them. And let us hope that I take care to treat their creations better than the one thing I can lay claim to as my own--my car, which I abuse on a daily basis.

This is an idea I started writing while bored in class. I decided later to use an exercise we did in Scriptwriting class as a guide for this fic. We had to write a story with no dialogue that communicated an emotion visually. Re-reading this reminded me of that assignment, so I decided to keep going with the idea. There is no dialogue, but there is more than just visual ideas communicated. I decided to just explore the sensory perceptions of the little adventure. Enjoy the three different endings. It was more of an equal love than an indecision thing that led to that.

A Trip for the Senses

—dedicated to Mr. Charlie, my Media Scriptwriting teacher, who makes us write things like this. He's cool.

Vash woke up from a gentle slumber. He groaned at the thought of opening his eyes to the harsh sunlight and being pulled into the conscious agony of reality. His eyelids twitched as the energy in his body fought the captivating wonder of going back to sleep and dreaming again. Now his arms twitched, now his legs, now his nose. That smell? What blissful scent now encompassed, now evaded his olfactory sense? It drifted past his nostrils, now and then, teasing inhalation. It was faint, but as it grew, so did his desire to be truly awake. A great blast of the inviting scent brought him springing out of bed to find his overcoat. He put it on with a flourish and the sweeping of its ends seemed to gather the scent up through the drafts the motion had created and into his nose, which could no longer wait to find the source of this stimulus. Where was it coming from? Such a scent... here in this house... on a dusty desert planet?

He grew anxious as he started to enter the downstairs rooms of the humble home he shared with the two insurance girls and his catatonic, comatose brother. There was a ruckus coming from the kitchen that would have awoken said brother if not for said, uh, comatoseness. What could Millie and Meryl be doing?

He crept down the stairs in true cat-like fashion, but for tripping over the cat. A tumble of limbs and fur and clothing brought the disturbance level up and, not to mention, right past the door of the quite-out-of-it madman. As a swirl of black and red and blonde landed in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, the noise in the kitchen quit abruptly. Vash felt the aching of the day's untried and now bruised arms and legs as they sought to untangle themselves from the cat and the clothing. He winced as he heard the cracking of firepoppers… ahem, the popping of firecrackers…and realized both were accurate descriptions of the exercise in which his neck was engaged. The noise from the kitchen became quite hurried and animated. A last cupboard was slammed shut just as…

What deceit had befallen his eyes? It was not possible. Plastic. They had to be. Vash suddenly realized that plastic does not smell quite that pungent, or heavenly. Vash's eyes drunk in the wonder, which is ashamed, because if his mouth were doing the drinking, like it should have been, he would have caught the string of drool that threatened Meryl's newly cleaned floor. The floor was not the least of the cleaned objects upon which Vash would've gazed if not distracted by the glorious construction in the middle of the counter. Among the sparkles that danced off the gleaming countertops and the eyes of the two bright girls standing behind the tower of magnificence upon which Vash had set his sights and hopes, was the tower itself—the one of magnificence, that is.

The creation of and subsequent clean up from this tall, piled-high mass of wonder was, of course, the source of the clamor heard only moments ago. A perfect round layer of a golden brown cloud sat atop another of the same moist, fluffy consistency with equal golden-deliciousness, and another, and another. The now identifiable aroma wafted in and out of Vash's nostrils, causing his head to sway in perfect rhythm. The single drop of sunshine on the top of the delightful concoction began to drip luscious rays down the sides of the stacked clouds and onto the floor. Vash drooled in syncopation with the drops, head swaying with the scent of promise, oddly in time with the various dripping liquids. Millie absently hummed "Heart and Soul" along with the strange rhythmic dance as Vash made a serpentine line for the counter holding the object of his desire.

Meryl watched the goofy gunman with annoyance and her friend with a renewed awe. As the dance reached its dénouement, the hair on the back of Vash's neck, more out of alarm than actual enjoyment of the performance (neck hairs can be so finicky), did a standing ovation. They were promptly seated by the back of a frying pan. Vash himself was seated as well, or rather flattened against the clean kitchen floor. Blackness threatened the man-in-red with the sleep he had desired earlier. He forced an eye open and saw…

The next three chapters each contain a different ending.