It is a well-known fact now that legendary bounty hunter Spike Spiegel disliked three things above all the other things in the world. These were: children, pets, and women with attitudes. Two out of the three dislikes were presently being stretched to their capacity as he stood there, taking sass from a ten-year-old girl.
Some days even legendary bounty hunters got up on the wrong side of the bed. Earlier that day, Spike had flubbed a routine bounty, made minced hash out of the contents of a convenience store, and caused an innocent hostage to be shot point-blank in the head. The correct response to such a situation would generally be to crawl off into a dark, seedy bar and drink himself into oblivion. Instead, Fate had decided he needed to take an urgent trip to a bright, sweltering desert planet.
Sand dunes stretched in all directions. The blinding sun reflecting off them was giving Spike a headache.
Legendary bounty hunter Spike Spiegel disliked children, pets, and women with attitudes. He wasn't particularly partial to sweltering desert planets either (unless they had a nice beach somewhere), or to blinding headaches.
So as a karmic punishment for his miserable performance that night, instead of drinking himself into oblivion in a darkened bar, he was presently standing on a bright, sweltering desert planet taking sass from a ten-year-old girl.
The sudden heat and illumination must be messing with my head, he thought to himself wearily. I'm pretty sure I've considered that line of thought already.
Sure, there were countless worse tortures to be endured in the known galaxy, but none of them were quite so specific to Spike's particular preferences. The only way to top this misery, Spike reflected, was if he'd also been forced to hold a yapping puppy or something.
Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond
Prologue the First – T Minus Four Years
Standard Disclaimer: Sailor Moon, Cowboy Bebop, and Star Trek are all copyrighted to their respective owners, i.e. not myself. This derivative work thus falls in the usual gray area occupied by fanfiction. In the end, the purpose of fanfics is to enhance appreciation of the original works, not supplant them – please support the creators of the originals!
Further Disclaimer: also, don't ever load a gun with chewing gum. Do I really have to tell you this? Chewing gum is not a substitute for dummy cartridges.
Some days, even legendary bounty hunters just get up on the wrong side of the bed.
Maybe Spike was missing the necessary nutrients to think straight. All he'd been eating the past few weeks was the pile of eggs they'd got as consolation for being curbstomped by that brick of a man Appledelhi. And even those ran out days ago. Maybe if Spike had procured and eaten some fresh veggies or a nice steak, the situation would have turned out differently.
Maybe Spike was in a bad mood because he'd been forced to skip his nap to chase a small-fry bounty head. Holding up a convenience store? Definitely a guy with no ambition. Chasing after a guy who held up convenience stores? Now that it was just the two of them bounty hunting again, Jet seemed to have even less ambition these days.
But regardless, Fate had decreed that this evening would all go to hell. What was taking Jet so long anyways? Just sneak into a side alley and peer through a window already! Finally, Spike's phone rang. He picked it up and listened to Jet's game plan.
"There's three guys inside, Spike. I'll go in the back, you go in the front. By the way, kick the leader in the jaw for me. He was wasting everyone's time giving a damn annoying speech and firing his gun into the air pointlessly."
"All right." said Spike wearily. Nothing he couldn't handle. He put on a pair of headphones and walked leisurely towards the front entrance. A big black guy was blocking the door. Well, a quick kick in the nads would put him out of commission.
The greasy, disgruntled ex-security engineer, now smalltime bandit, had just about wrapped up his speech and was instructing the frightened clerk on how to transfer the contents of the store's cash register to his account, when the doors opened and some hapless jerk with a poofy hairdo and headphones sauntered towards a stand of potato chips. Apparently not noticing that there was a hold-up in progress.
Wasn't the guy standing outside supposed to prevent exactly this sort of ridiculous scenario? Had the man got bored and walked or something? The bandit supposed that next time he took on extra muscle, he'd have to try the kind that took money in advance. For now, this just meant one more bystander to deal with.
"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing? You! Are you deaf or what?"
The intruder had finished contemplating the potato chips and continued to a stand of plastic knicknacks. Probably blaring Metallica or something similarly mind-numbing on those headphones, because he certainly didn't react when the bandit walked up right next to him and pointed a gun.
"Yo, headphone boy! Take 'em off, or I shoot them off!"
"Hey, how much is this?" the poofy-haired fellow calmly asked the man pointing the gun at him, holding out some sort of party favor.
"Huh?"
The party favor exploded in the bandit's face. A couple of blows to keep him off his feet. Then, as promised, a kick to the jaw. Several more disabling blows left him passed out with his head in the coffee machine. Chaos ensued as the remaining thugs scrambled to take down the sudden attacker.
So far, one thug (the one standing guard outside) and one bandit down. Correction: two thugs down. A mean-looking bearded fellow with a prosthetic arm had emerged from the ventilation system and decked the second one, knocking the contents of aisle two all over the floor.
The remaining occupants of the store: the clerk, an old lady grasping a bag of dog food like it was a security blanket, and a foreign-looking salaryman fellow near the back, with wife and kids (probably just tourists dropping in to buy food as they returned from a late night of sightseeing), regarded this new development pessimistically. Bounty hunting duo Spike and Jet quickly polished off the remaining thug, and things seemed to quiet down.
Jet, the bearded fellow, did a tally of the bodies and gauged the damage to the shop. Not too bad; they'd probably have enough left in the bounty after paying for this stuff to buy some good, nourishing food. That meant they wouldn't have to jump a border to get away from a cleanup bill like the last two times he'd brought Spike bounty hunting.
"Right, looks like it's all clear. Spike?"
"Yeah?" answered Spike around a mouth full of some unidentified junk food off the shelf, which he was busy stuffing down his throat without the barest attempt at chewing. "Bydeway, lady, put my donut on their tab, wouldja?" he pointed to the unconscious bandits as a second baked object disappeared down his capacious gullet.
As for Jet, he didn't get to finish what he was saying. A flushing sound came from the store's bathroom and someone with a five-o'clock shadow, no fashion sense, and a toque came out and stared at the scene of destruction and ruin.
Spike stared back. Was this a fourth thug, or just some constipated trucker with a bad sense of timing? he thought frantically.
The "trucker" was the first to realize what was going on, and grabbed the nearest person to him, the frightened salaryman. He held a gun to the poor man's temple.
"Okay, nobody move here or Mr. Family Man here gets it!"
He checked to see if this was sending the right message.
Okay, the bearded guy with the prosthetic arm was looking suitably horrified at this.
But the one with the poofy hair just looked at him like he was a hamburger clerk that had made him the wrong kind of hamburger.
"Excuse me, Jet."
Everyone stared at each other awkwardly for a moment.
"You said there were three thugs. Not four!"
"Throw down your guns, now!" the thug reminded.
"Disinformation is sometimes necessary for enemies and allies.." Jet countered feebly.
"Don't pull that Art of War crap on me, Jet!"
"DROP THEM!"
"And you, you take too long to take a shit!"
What kind of bounty hunters were these people? wondered the thug idly. Here he was with a hostage and they were just arguing about it like they couldn't figure out which way to load a washing machine. Out loud, he yelled for them to drop their guns again, for the third time already.
Jet dropped his gun. Spike just took his and pointed it straight at the thug.
"Don't you get it?" he screamed. "Drop your guns now or it's cleanup on aisle four!"
"Well that's a real shame, but I'm not here to keep this man's skin intact. You think I'm an ally of justice, you think wrong. Sorry sir, I'm not here to protect, or serve, just in it for the money. Same as these other bastards that were robbing you. My plan is to grab these guys, dump them at the police station, and get a big fat check for the trouble." Spike proclaimed to the salaryman, with his gun still trained on the remaining thug.
"Cowboy scumbag.." hissed the thug. They were making this really difficult for themselves.
Jet tried to stammer a dissenting opinion to Spike's, but didn't get very far.
There were two options that Fate could choose right now.
(A) Spike was a cool and awesome bounty hunter. Jet was an idiot who worried too much and couldn't shut his stupid mouth even in a hostage situation.
(B) Spike was being a hard-headed impulsive idiot and Jet would chew him out about it for years afterwards. By the way, the hostage? He was dead meat.
Fate hesitated for a while and chose option (B), because in the long run that option would eventually save the known universe from annihilation, whereas option (A) would have just given Spike an inflated ego and maybe got him killed one day.
"YOU HORRID BASTARD!" screamed the salaryman at Spike, suddenly deciding to try struggling free of the thug's grip.
Spike flinched a little at this point. It turned out that the doughnut, what was left of Mr. Appledelhi's eggs, and Spike's digestive juices had decided that they didn't really like each other and were now duking it out in his stomach.
The flinching and the struggling were too much for the thug's itchy trigger finger, with the result of putting a bullet through the salaryman's head. It was a horrible sight and the two children nearby would probably end up scarred for life. The man was now quite unmistakably dead.
Well, great.
Spike weighed his options, decided that he wasn't in a good mood. After a momentary pause, he decided that the best way to incapacitate the stupid hostage taker would be to shoot him somewhere near the gut. Not in any place that would kill him, but to guarantee that the thug would have a long and painful recovery. The thug groaned and collapsed backwards into a pile of stupid, stupid junk food.
There was a long pause.
The convenience store clerk gasped in horror. "You.. just stood there. And watched him die."
The small girl in the corner was somewhat less restrained. "WHAT KIND OF PERSON ARE YOU?" she screamed, rushing towards Spike, long pigtails trailing behind her.
Spike surveyed the carnage he had just caused. Somehow, his usual line of "just a humble bounty hunter, ma'am" didn't really cut it this time. Were you even supposed to say "ma'am" to small girls? Okay, take a deep breath. Let's do this one step of a time. Ignore the screaming girl trying ineffectually to beat him up. Pick up the bounty heads (what's left of them) and dump them at an out-of-the-way police station. Get the thugs identified, get the dough out of the police station's automatic arrest machine and split it with Spike. Then get to the Bebop and hightail it off the planet. Fortunately, having to jump a border after each bounty was a bad habit of theirs, so they had the routine all down.
The gas giant of New Jupiter had a lot of moons. If they made it to a different one, that was good insurance against some zealous Spacefleet officer tracking them down and blaming them for the dead bystander. When that was no longer a possibility, Spike could do what bounty hunters usually did in this sort of situation: find a bar. A very ugly, dirty, dark bar where no one would ever track him down. Spike would find the bar and get drunk and then all would be well. A little whiskey sometimes helped the contents of his stomach get along better, and helped his head forget all of the troubles in his stupid, stupid life.
"Excuse me, sir."
It was a little girl's voice, plaintive, out of place in this ugly neighbourhood. Spike froze on the doorstep of the bar. He took in the girl and her somewhat distracting haircut. Maybe ten years old. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Wearing a black dress, of all things. It didn't really suit her really weird hair – two round buns, like blond meatballs, with pigtails trailing from them nearly to the girl's feet. Who decided styling her hair that way was a good idea? Looks very upset – probably lost her way. Now what could a girl like that...
Spike froze even further. He was pretty sure that four hours ago this exact girl had been in a convenience store two planets away. She had screamed "What kind of person are you?" and took her best shot at pummeling Spike into a pulp. Then she'd been restrained by her mother, not that it had been particularly necessary. Now she was here.
This was entirely impossible.
Maybe this was just some other girl with the same weird hair, who was lost in a bad neighbourhood and thought Spike looked trustworthy enough to help her get to the train station. No, it was even more entirely impossible for two sets of parents around this gas giant to have decided that the meatball-head look was a sensible hairstyle. So it must be the same girl. Spike considered the basic requirements for such an event carefully.
To get here from there, the girl must have tracked him here somehow. This was odd, because they'd made sure to skip the planet in such a way that even Spacefleet would take a while to trace them; and since there was a catastrophically botched bounty somewhere in this solar system every single day, Spacefleet wouldn't even have bothered to check after Jet and Spike. Unless they held some bizarre grudge on them that Spike hadn't heard about. Maybe Jet had somehow been very, very careless in covering their tracks – but Jet wasn't careless. Spike, well, he didn't care to admit it, but he could have been careless. He had sure been careless about other things today.
Moreover, to get from there to here, the girl must have hitched a ride with someone. Maybe the whole debacle in the convenience store had been a setup, and he was about to get beaten into the curb by something far more frightening than a small girl. Spike considered all the people he knew who might be trying to set him up and pondered which of them would use a dead salaryman and a small girl with weird hair to do so, but he came up blank on question two.
Finally he decided to just ask her.
"What do you want?"
Tears welled up in the girl's eyes and she lost it again.
"YOU'VE GONE AND KILLED MY DAD!"
Great, and start crying right in front of the entire street. Now Spike would probably have to go find a different bar to collapse in. At least his most obvious hunch was now confirmed. How do you get a crying girl to shut up again? Hitting a small child in front of witnesses was completely out of the question (this was one of the reasons Spike hated dealing with children). Maybe if he raised his voice that would shock her into silence. Then they could finish this conversation in the bar while Spike was sipping his first whiskey.
"OKAY! I GET THE PICTURE ALREADY! You don't have to scream it so everyone can hear!"
Okay, that got her to quiet down for now. Hopefully Spike could get this over with quickly. He waited to see what would happen next.
"So..." the girl wasn't quite sure how to proceed after her accusation. "My name is Tsukino Usagi..." she sobbed. "My dad.. was taking us on a tourist trip... then he got shot."
"Okay, what? Did you want to arrest me or something?"
"... you've got to help me! What if... what if something like that happens again?"
Spike puzzled over what exactly she meant. He then came to the wrong conclusion.
"Look, Tsukino.."
"Usagi."
Right, he should have realized from the sound of the name that she's from the moon of Nippon. Last name comes first, then.
".. Usagi. I'm a bounty hunter. Protection isn't in my line of work. How about we talk about this in..."
"... I know – let's head over that way!" she interrupted.
Spike feared to disobey, on the off chance that it would somehow make the girl cry again. They started walking in the indicated direction.
"Take my hand, okay? Like you were taking me for a walk."
Did she suddenly think this was some kind of twisted date? Spike noticed a strange, faraway look in the girl's eyes. Good, she was probably calming down. Either that or she was in shock and was about to explode into hysterics. He looked at the girl's proffered hand. A sudden image played in his mind of a hand like that ripping matter from nebulae at huge velocities, assembling dust into strange multicoloured planets, sweeping a bright kitchen clean of dust with a broom (wait, what?), incidentally crushing the Bebop under the broom's bristles like a tin can. What was that about? Was his unhealthy diet causing strange hallucinations? He tottered unsteadily, as though he were about to fall off a tightrope stretched over an abyss. Maybe he'd already been in the bar and got so drunk that instead of forgetting everything he'd now be treated to hallucinatory confrontations with all of his past mistakes, in reverse chronological order. Boy, was he not looking forward to that.
She was still looking up at him expectantly, probably wondering why he'd stumbled.
He took the girl's hand and was greeted for his troubles with a sudden spray of blisteringly hot sand.
Spike Spiegel was standing on the side of a sand dune, wondering how in the Nebular Hells he'd got there. Tsukino Usagi was on top of the dune, looking down at him. She still looked about ready to cry her eyes out, but there was also a desperate determination in them. To do what, God only knows. Based on previous behaviour, she was just out to put Spike through his personal hell.
Blinking sand from his eyes, the bounty hunter weighed the situation carefully. This sort of thing didn't usually happen when he got drunk. So he was probably sober and awake right now. Okay, somehow he'd been teleported somewhere else entirely, very far from where he'd originally been. He was quite sure that New Ganymede didn't have any sweltering hot deserts that stretched as far as the eye could see. At least this explained how the girl had chased him down, if not how she'd tracked him. That left the question of what kind of sick bastard was pulling the strings behind the girl. Who had a working implementation of (as far as he knew, theoretical) long-range teleportation technology, a dozen fusion reactors lying around to power it, and a grudge against bounty hunter Spike Spiegel that necessitated messing with his head in this manner?
Maybe Spacefleet, but if those guys had a grudge that big they usually just sent a SWAT team instead of breaking out the surreal. More plausibly, he could have been abducted by some race of aliens. No, less plausibly. What could aliens want with a cowboy? Hmm... that left exactly no one on Spike's list with the necessary qualifications.
"In case you haven't figured it out," said Usagi, "I'm a planet-hopper. This is three moons over from where we were before."
Okay, now instead of twelve fusion reactors she's asking me to believe in that vague urban legend of people who can engage in short-range interplanetary travel without the help of a spaceship, thought Spike. I give up already.
"I'm just going to ask you again: what do you want from me?"
Usagi put on some sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat against the sun. Together with the black dress (which would actually generate a convection current, cooling her down, Spike knew) this made for workable protection against the desert, though it really looked odd on her. So she'd come carefully prepared, he mused. Probably wearing sunscreen too.
"You're right." she began. "You're not an ally of justice. I'm ..."
She had difficulty finishing the sentence. Great, this was going to take a while, wasn't it?
"I'm sorry I said you killed my dad. That wasn't really fair..."
Well, being forcibly brought to a desert planet just hear an apology like that certainly fit Spike's definition of "taking sass".
"Look, you're wasting your sympathy on me. I assume you're here to punish me. Get it over with! Even if I didn't kill your dad, I did get him killed. If you'll excuse me, if you're going to beat about the bush like this I'd at least like a drink of water while I wait."
Spike started pulling out a large assortment of things he had concealed on his person, most of them pilfered from the convenience store. (Spike could probably have made better money as a stage magician or even a small-time shoplifter, but neither occupation had quite the glamour or the complete lack of anything resembling a work ethic that the life of a cowboy offered, particularly when hardworking sap Jet Black was your partner.) He finally found the water bottle and took a long, greedy drink. Ah, better.
"Want some?" he waved it at the girl.
"I brought my own."
"So you were going to punish me?"
"I'm not here to punish you! I want your help! I realize you're not an ally of justice.. you probably could have saved my dad if you'd tried.."
I probably could've, Spike reflected, if I'd dropped the gun. And then I would've starved five days later because the bounty heads could then hammer me into the floor and walk free, leaving me without any bounty to collect. No, there was a reason why you only looked out for yourself in this business.
"That's horrible! Do you really just think about when you'll next eat? Don't you care about anybody? I can't believe you're such a monster..."
Spike was generally unwilling to divulge information on what he cared about. He particularly didn't want to divulge anything to this person.
"Well fine then. But you know a lot of different tricks, don't you? You could have done something, if you'd actually loved anyone enough to try!"
"What do you think I could do, Little Miss Manners? The thug had a gun. He was pointing it inches from your dad's head. There was no time for anyone to react. Then he shot your dad, and your dad died!"
The girl winced visibly, probably remembering what that had looked like. Spike had had just about enough of this.
"DEAL WITH IT! That's how the world works. If you can't handle it, I really don't know what to tell you!"
"IF YOU'D JUST CARED YOU COULD HAVE SAVED MY DAD AND GOT YOUR STUPID BOUNTY!"
Great. Now they were going to start arguing about the right way to nab a bounty head. Was this really the time? He was pretty sure the wind was picking up, and with it came a steady flow of airborne sand. And incidentally, what did love have to do with it, of all things? In Spike's world, loving someone meant that they would then be shot to hell, or exiled, or you'd never see them again for some other reason, all of which would just lead you to regret having bothered with the emotion.
"But still... I realize you just don't think about how to help people, so you didn't think of anything today. But still, you know a lot of things... maybe you could... teach some of them to me..."
Some ancestral memory stirred deep inside the small girl, and the silly idea she was pursuing seemed like the most natural thing to ask. She suddenly spoke with a different voice, as though she were giving Spike a command.
"And then I would become an ally of justice in your stead! And no one would have to suffer again!"
The request sure sounded ridiculous and petulant to Spike, though.
"Good God!" he yelled. "You just want me to teach you? You picked a hell of a way to ask me! The answer, incidentally, is NO, I do not do teaching! I don't do protection! I don't do babysitting! Just get me back where I came from, or at least kill me already!"
"Figure something out! You could probably teach me something. Please be reasonable!"
"I'm being about as reasonable as a man standing in the middle of a desert could possibly be!"
"All right! I'll get you home. But then you have to decide if you're going to teach me or not."
...
"What are we waiting for, exactly?" asked Spike after a long pause.
"About ten more minutes until I have enough energy to jump again." Usagi replied, with the tone of a student who couldn't remember the answer on a math test. Maybe her expression would have been cute, Spike thought, if there wasn't hot sand in his eyes right now and Usagi were doing this to one of Spike's enemies instead.
It took a while for Spike to rest from the exposure, find something to calm down the epic battle still raging in his stomach, then sniff out an abandoned warehouse where no one would bother them. He fished for a pen and some paper among his copious belongings and gave them to Usagi. Both of them were now in a more reasonable mood.
"I think I've figured out a good solution. Namely, you'd learn what you wanted to learn and I could bug off to my spaceship and never have to deal with you again. I have to warn you that this bounty hunting thing, it's not really what you're looking for. You've seen that we don't pay a lot of attention to keeping bystanders safe, for one thing. Even if you could learn all the moves, it probably won't make you happy, because all I've ever used my moves for is to hurt people and get quick cash. You'll have to learn how to do this ally of justice thing on your own, since I certainly don't know anyone that could teach you, or even anyone that knows how to do that."
"I don't care." Usagi said simply. "I don't really know anyone else I could ask. I'll take it."
She thought for a moment before continuing.
"It's not like the tooth fairy is going to come and hand me some magical power that can always be just be used to help people and not hurt them, or anything."
Well then. Spike gave Usagi a brief, severely edited, outline of his own life, and the particular way he had become a bounty hunter. (Condensed summary: it wasn't anything that a ten-year old girl would be likely to try.) Announced that he would give Usagi a list of people who could teach her the skills necessary to be a good bounty hunter. Martial arts, intelligence gathering, maybe even some psychology were certainly among the things you needed to know in this game.
"If they balk at teaching a small girl, tell them that Spike Spiegel owes you a life-debt. It's not strictly true, because after today is over I'm not going to owe you anything, but I think we can stretch the truth a little on this one."
He rattled off a list of people he knew who were good teachers and not likely to kill random strangers that approached them. People you couldn't find in the classifieds, who would probably be able to keep the girl from doing something stupid. Who knew, maybe they'd even teach Usagi something useful.
Near the top of the list he mentioned the last known whereabouts of Radical Edward, one of the best people he knew who did "intelligence gathering". Maybe Ed could drive the girl nuts as payback for teleporting Spike to a desert planet. Or the girl could drive Ed nuts as payback for Ed having tagged the Bebop with a smiley face so big it was visible from orbit, with some kind of red industrial paint that took ages of toil to scour off. One hell of a way to say goodbye, Ed.
Oh yes, the list.
"Got all that down? Now listen carefully. I'm only going to teach you one lesson on my own. And I'm only going to teach it to you once. So while I'm talking you are going to pay attention, you are not going to whine about how I'm unfair or how life is unfair, you are not going to act like a crybaby.
"One day a man on New Venus asked me to train him, just like you did. I didn't want to, but he insisted and eventually got the best of me. Long story. As a first lesson I decided to teach him how to beat up an enemy that was rushing at him, by using their own momentum against them. He learned the lesson and soon applied it to beating up his very first crook, hand to hand, like a champ. Mere seconds later, the crook's buddies showed up with submachine guns. And so my very first student died, just like that.
"So now I think that instead of trying to teach you about martial arts so you can be a danger to yourself, I'm going to teach you about not dying."
He took out his gun and made some unusual adjustments. He wasn't sure if it was completely safe. He fired it at the wall to check.
*BANG*
It fizzled and sort of spat a glob of molten goo at the wall. Well, that was convenient. Something to brag about to Jet when he got out of this. Jet had been of the opinion that Spike couldn't fix his way out of a paper bag.
"Observe that I am pointing a gun at you. I'm just loading it with a fraction of the normal explosive charge and some chewing gum, but use your imagination and pretend I'm about to shoot you with a bullet. Now imagine instead of a small crybaby girl, there's a bounty hunter standing there in those shoes of yours. There are at least seventy-two ways I can think of, off the top of my head, that I could use to not die."
What proceeded was an exercise so ridiculous that Spike was thoroughly amazed at himself for concocting it. Maybe the recent events had really driven him unhinged. Essentially, Spike would make up a situation in which Tsukino Usagi was about to die, mostly involving the gun, and Usagi would have to try to escape it. If she failed, Spike would knock her down onto the floor or...
*BANG*
... give her a wad of chewing gum in the shoulder.
"Pretend I shot that into your heart, so you're dead now! Let's try again."
Actually Usagi never did get to try the same situation again. Whenever she failed Spike would always add more conditions to the situation that made it even more difficult. Suddenly there would be men with machine guns looking down on her from a catwalk. Or Spike would find some soap, spill it all over the floor and watch as she slipped in it and fell over. Some of these were based on actual difficult scrapes that he himself had survived. After about five hours of this, his memory was down to particularly unpleasant scrapes he wasn't in the mood to re-enact, and even his imagination began to run dry. Then he switched to inventing completely ludicrous and impossible things. Like asking her to pretend half the room was covered by a field that would age her into a ninety-year-old woman for as long as she stayed in it.
Fourteen straight hours of Tsukino Usagi alternately "dying" or (far less often) not dying later, Spike noted that the girl looked severely bruised and exhausted and would probably let him off now if he asked, instead of teleporting him somewhere unpleasant again. It was sort of surprising that she was still awake and lucid at this point.
"And that's it." Spike said hoarsely all of a sudden. "Remember what you learned today and practice it along with all the other things you'll learn. With what you've seen now, if you had been the hostage at that convenience store you could have easily distracted the bounty head just long enough for me to shoot the bastard in the shoulder and get you to safety. Instead of struggling uselessly and getting a bullet in the head for your troubles. I'm..." it only now occurred to him to say this "... sorry for your loss."
Usagi nodded glumly, too tired to speak.
"Now I will walk out that door and" Spike hoped to God "you will never see me again, ever."
He yawned loudly. Skip the darkened bar and the hard liquor, what he needed now was to crawl back to the Bebop and get at least seventy-two hours of shuteye. That was the one single way he could see to avoid dying of exhaustion right now. It was, what, close to that amount of time since Jet had dragged him away from that nap and into that stupid convenience store? Sure felt that way. Oh, and he needed to mention one more thing before he went. Something that had particularly annoyed him.
"By the way..." he turned to look back at the girl. He wondered what would become of her after this lesson. To be honest, he'd sort of been making it up on the spot.
"... don't rely too much on that teleporting trick of yours. If the other person is prepared to fight, they'll be prepared to fight you anywhere you take them. But really, if you use tricks like that too much, you won't have no style."
Usagi stumbled into the hotel room at 3am, and breezed past her grieving and worried mother to the nearest bed.
"Busy. Not dying." she mumbled by way of explanation, collapsed on the bed, and slept a dreamless sleep.
A mere three months later, working under an assumed alias, she nabbed her very first bounty head. "Moon Rabbit" thus went on record as (allegedly) the second youngest bounty hunter in the known galaxy.
And that was just her supposedly "normal" childhood. Shortly after she turned fourteen, Tsukino Usagi's career took yet another entirely unexpected turn.
BONUS OMAKE: The next day, Spike gets home to the Bebop.
When Spike got back to the Bebop, he was exhausted and certainly looked the part. Jet was worried and curious about where he'd been and where he could have got sunburned, but decided that clearly he'd have to let the sorry bastard sleep before he could get anything coherent out of him.
When Spike finally woke up, though, Jet grabbed him, threw him against the wall to show that this time Spike had crossed a couple of lines he hadn't crossed before, and demanded an explanation of where he'd been.
So Spike calmly gave him an explanation.
...
Jet wasn't the sort of person who twitched his eyebrow when bewildered. Instead, a servo in his robotic arm came loose and twitched back and forth, making a small, high-pitched whirring noise. Jet slurped angrily at his bowl of cold noodles from the large supply he'd bought with his share of the bounty, then finally found the presence of mind to say something.
"Spike."
"Yes, Jet."
"Are you sure you didn't just get really drunk and pass out in an empty warehouse?"
"I'm not just sure. I'm positive." said Spike, stretching out on the couch.
"Really? Because this story about the ten-year-old girl from the convenience store turning out to be a planet-hopper, teleporting you to Europa, then to a warehouse where you proceeded to spend fourteen hours shooting chewing gum into her with a gun as some kind of training that you didn't explain very well, it's..." he gesticulated with his chopsticks in search of an adjective to describe what he'd just heard. "Pretty implausible." he concluded lamely.
"It certainly is," Spike smiled. "But I have three pieces of evidence that show I didn't just spend the night passed out in a warehouse. Exhibit A: my current state of sunburn."
Slurp. On the spur of the moment Jet decided that if Spike wanted cold soba anytime during the next six months, he'd have to buy it and cook it on his own. Jet wasn't sharing anymore.
"Which could easily have been acquired by abusing the services of a tanning salon."
"Jet. Why the hell would I go to a tanning salon?"
"I don't know, Spike. Why the hell would a ten-year-old girl with pigtails show up and teleport you to a desert planet?"
"So she could ask me to shoot her full of chewing gum to train her to become a bounty hunter?"
Jet was speechless.
"Exhibit B is the gun I modified to do just that. You see, I load it like this with the standard Shrigley's brand I have in my pocket, point it at something, and..."
Jet looked horrified now.
*BANG*
The sizzling lump of chewing gum was now burning a hole in the computer's keyboard.
"Oops. Guess I put too much gunpowder this time..."
Jet scrambled with his chopsticks to fish the red-hot gum out of the keyboard, then waved the stringy lump at Spike, livid with rage.
"SPIKE! ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT? Just how the hell do you come up with these things? Just what kind of sick bastard decides to MacGyver a gun to shoot molten chewing gum? And the girl just stood there and let you shoot her? You probably got her seriously hurt. Was one dead hostage just not enough for your conscience today?"
"Well, she was just slightly bruised, even after fourteen hours of it."
"SLIGHTLY BRUISED? Are you sure? You better have checked for gaping third degree burns afterwards! I sure hope she was smart enough to get medical attention when she got h... GODDAMN IT, SPIKE!"
Now Jet's chopsticks were sizzling instead of the keyboard.
"And here I was thinking I'd impress you by modifying a piece of technology slightly more advanced than a paper bag." said Spike, gazing wistfully up at the ceiling. "Well, sorry for trying."
Jet calmed down, slightly.
"I don't think I'd even trust you with a paper bag anymore. You'd probably figure out some way to horribly maim innocent bystanders with it. All right. You said three pieces of evidence. What's exhibit C?"
"Exhibit C" yawned Spike. "is that if I'd spent all this time passed out in a warehouse, I wouldn't be so sleepy right now. I think I'll have another nap. Then some food. I'm in the mood for green spinach for some reason..." He went to sleep right then and there, sweet dreams of food both healthy and not so healthy.
Jet couldn't think of a response to that, and instead stomped off to the kitchen to get a clean pair of chopsticks, grumbling "Great. Gets a hostage killed. Disappears for over twenty-four hours without any warning. Shoots a small girl with molten chewing gum. Ruins the computer keyboard. Just great, Spike. Ruined my favorite pair of chopsticks too. I need another dose of soba."
Next Time on Sailor Moon: Small Fish in a Very Big Pond
Prologue the Second – T Plus Four Months
James Tiberius Kirk, Spacefleet commanding officer, is a highly illogical person. Five human girls in short skirts showing up in hard vacuum, landing on the hull of a pirate ship, then taking said ship to pieces with energy beams? A highly illogical situation. After careful deliberation, we have concluded that assigning the one to resolve the other would be a logical course of action to attempt.