Hello my splendiferously awesome readers and welcome to Comma's first ever crack fic!
It's got L. It's got Chuck Norris. It has muffins. It has L investigating a Chuck Norris-Flavored Muffin mystery.
Is it random? You bet your ass it is.
Many thanks to my coauthor Sparanda, who has been and will be helping me out with ideas for the fic, including the entire creation of the original character in this story (more info about him is located on my profile under the OC's section).
Now, I give you... a summary! Not a shrubbery - Sorry Knights of Ni and fellow Monty Python fans -, just a summary. And you don't even have to cut down a tree with a herring.
Anyway, moving on from the Monty Python references and onto the previously mentioned Summary:
When Yagami Light disappears and leaves nothing interesting behind in his room except a snackcake wrapper with a picture of Chuck Norris on it, what could it possibly mean for the Kira case, for which Light was the main suspect? Furthermore, when more people, not just in Japan but across the entire world, begin disappearing for unknown reasons and leaving behind the same wrappers, it ensues in panic for the investigation team - even L has trouble finding any links between the disappearances except that all of the people ate radioactive muffins that had pictures of Chuck Norris on their wrappers, muffins that should not exist according to L's own extensive research. What could Matsuda, Ryuk, and a gamer by the name of William Thomas Burr know about this case that no one else does?
Tokyo, Japan – Yagami Light, 17, a teen widely regarded as Tokyo's best student, was reported missing on January 26. What might have happened remains a mystery, but his father, Yagami Soichiro, who works as a police detective, is doing all he can to find his son and bring those responsible to justice.
"My son has been a lead suspect in the Kira case for some time now," Yagami told reporters. "I hope this is enough to prove that he has nothing to do with Kira and wants nothing more than his downfall. According to L himself, it could prove either that or the exact opposite. Only time will tell his opinion, but I for one am dedicated first and foremost to searching for my son."
It is indeed a devastating event to have occurred in the quaint suburban area of Tokyo where the Yagami family's home is located. Nothing like this has happened in that area for years. Those who know Yagami Light doubt he ran away, but there is no evidence anywhere indicating that a struggle may have occurred within the home Light so mysteriously disappeared from.
"He came downstairs, grabbed something out of the cupboard, and went back up to his room to study," his tearful mother told reporters. "He was always studying. I checked on him later, and he didn't answer. I opened the door and he wasn't there. He hadn't come downstairs, the window wasn't open, everything seemed in place, except for my son."
The family is (Continued on page 5A)
L blinked at the front page of the newspaper in utter annoyance before tossing it over his shoulder. He then held an opened lunch cake wrapper a few inches from his face. He looked down at a photograph of Yagami Light's room. The boy had been so insufferably clean that it annoyed L just to look at the pictures of the crime scene. It also annoyed L that it looked less like a crime scene than any other scene he had ever seen in his life. All that was on the floor was a lunch cake wrapper, the very one L was holding by a pair of tweezers in one hand. He looked at it again.
It was indeed unique. It had no writing on it. There was only a picture of Chuck Norris's face on the front of the plastic and a pair of crossing bones beneath, a mockery of the skull and crossbones symbols that marked pirate ships and poison. Below, in bold red capital letters, were the words "EAT AT YOUR OWN RISK". On the back of the muffin wrapper, in tiny print along the side, was a copyright symbol with the strangest statement of copyright L had ever seen in his life written beneath it: "All warnings and images are copyright and trademark of Chuck Norris. Your mom is copyright to Chuck Norris. Any attempt to sue Chuck Norris will fail miserably."
Upon questioning by her own husband, Mrs. Yagami had claimed she had never bought anything that looked like that. Yagami-san himself had investigated the cupboards and found no boxes that could have held the wrapper. There were crumbs in the wrapper itself, however.
L found it odd that, upon touching one of these crumbs, his fingers had been burned. If Yagami Light had eaten the original contents of that wrapper, then he had to have been either extremely brave or extremely stupid.
Nonetheless, L had the crumbs forensically tested, and they came back as muffin positive. Those weren't the exact results, but they had most certainly come from a muffin of some kind. A radioactive one, specifically. Why anyone would want to buy, much less eat, a radioactive, Chuck Norris flavored muffin was absolutely baffling to L. However, it was somewhat intriguing, and the muffin wrapper did seem connected to the death of Yagami Light. It would have to be looked into further.
"Ryuzaki?"
L looked back over his shoulder at the afro-clad police officer who had spoken up. Aizawa and Matsuda were the only two detectives in at that moment. Ukita and Mogi were both back at the police department with Yagami, answering questions posed by news reporters about the incident.
Muffin-induced chaos was an entirely new sort of chaos for L.
"Yes, Aizawa-san?"
"Umm…" Aizawa scratched the back of his head awkwardly. "Is there a reason you keep examining that lunch cake wrapper?"
"Aizawa-san, the muffin crumbs were radioactive," said L flatly, going back to the wrapper. "If these are being sold somewhere, they could be dangerous. We need to contact whoever is in charge of making them, but there isn't an address…"
"But Chuck Norris doesn't have an address," Matsuda pointed out. "He's everywhere at all times in all ways."
"Shut up, Matsuda," Aizawa said impatiently.
"What? I like reading Chuck Norris jokes…"
"Yes, but Chuck Norris jokes aren't going to help at all, Matsuda-san," said L exasperatedly. "Please keep them to yourself."
"But there was one about –"
"Shut up, Matsuda, we don't need to hear anything about Chuck Norris!" Aizawa half-yelled.
Matsuda crossed his arms indignantly. "All right, but you'll probably regret it," he mumbled. Aizawa glared at him, but ignored this, figuring it to be another of Matsuda's idiocies.
"I highly doubt Chuck Norris himself had anything to do with this," said L. "He is a multi-millionaire and could easily be tracked down by anyone, so it would be pointless. Besides, I doubt he was in Japan around the time Yagami Light would have disappeared, and what point would have been served in killing someone he didn't know?"
"But Chuck Norris knows –"
"Matsuda-san, I'm going to lock you in the connecting room if you don't stop talking about Chuck Norris," L said, also growing impatient with Matsuda.
Matsuda gave an exasperated sigh and decided to stare at the ceiling to stop himself from saying anything. If they would listen to him, then they would have a location of the maker of these "muffins," which would definitely be a good start. They would also know the exact effects of the muffins and why Light hadn't been found, why he wouldn't be found ever. Light wasn't just missing. No, he was gone. That was the best way to put it. As it was said in that movie Highlander, "There can be only one." As it was with Chuck Norris, there could be only one.
And L was right to believe that Light definitely shouldn't have eaten that muffin.
L looked up as the hotel room door opened. Watari entered with Chief Yagami, Mogi, and Ukita following him. L was now typing away at the keyboard of his laptop, frowning, and typing something else. He looked slightly frustrated, and he kept glaring down at the empty muffin wrapper with utter disdain every time he stopped typing. Watari stopped by the insomniac only for long enough to pick up an empty coffee cup. L strummed his fingers on the table, staring at the computer screen.
"According to every search engine I've checked," L said slowly, "there is no corporation making any sort of muffins with a depiction of Chuck Norris on their packaging." His fingers strummed a bit more. "How could that be possible?"
"Ryuzaki," said Yagami, approaching the table L had his computer sitting upon. L didn't look up. He kept his thumb pressed to his lips, contemplating the lack of results Google had given him on any relation between muffins and Chuck Norris except a few jokes Matsuda might find amusing. Yagami continued anyway.
"We're searching for a teenage boy, for my son, not for the creator of prank muffins," said Yagami. "I think there are more serious matters at hand here."
"The muffin crumbs were radioactive," said L. "If these are being distributed to and sold in any stores, then there could be a number of people in danger." L couldn't help but think along the lines of Good riddance to bad rubbish regarding anyone that might want to buy or eat a muffin with a picture of Chuck Norris on the front. Those were the people like Matsuda.
And apparently, the people like Yagami Light.
L was pulled roughly out of his own thoughts when Yagami slammed a fist on the table L's laptop was set upon. "Goddammit, my son is missing and the only thing you can talk about is snack foods! What kind of detective are you?!"
"Yagami-san, please remain calm," L said stoically, standing from the couch and picking up the muffin wrapper. "Growing angry will only make matters more complicated. Right now, there is no telling where your son could be, but there are police detectives out all over Japan looking for him. At this moment, with as little information as there is, I can do nothing about Light. I can, however, attempt to stop radioactive muffins from reaching the shelves of any more grocery stores. Regardless of whether or not your son actually ate this muffin, they are dangerous."
"What if they weren't ever on the shelves?" said Matsuda. "Someone could be planting them or –"
"Matsuda," Yagami said, "do you know of anyone who might attempt to plant… radioactive muffins in random homes in Japan?"
Matsuda, who wasn't particularly keen on evoking the wrath of a father whose son has just gone mysteriously missing, shrugged and looked intently at his own feet. He wasn't going to utter another word for the rest of the meeting, not one. He had indeed read a joke about Chuck Norris flavored muffins online, but could it really be relevant? If it even was, the team would just brush it off as another of Matsuda's idiocies, just like they always did, and not know until the end that it actually did have something to do with the case. Matsuda sighed inwardly and continued to stare at his feet in a helpless manner, listening to the rest of the team discuss possible actions to take regarding both Light and the muffin problem.
Yagami was growing increasingly angry with each mention of the word "muffins."
"So if we get the muffins off the shelves before anyone else happens to buy one, then we won't find an abundance of people dead from radiation poisoning," L was saying, still examining the Muffin wrapper. "However, if the muffins stay on the shelves and we don't act quickly, the hospitals are going to overflow with cases of radiation poisoning. I believe there are definitely more than enough Chuck Norris fans in the world for that to be a major problem regarding the overall world population."
"I never thought I'd see the day when I had to help work a case about radioactive muffins," said Aizawa, shaking his head.
"Or Chuck Norris," Ukita added, and Aizawa half-shrugged in agreement.
Everyone glanced at Matsuda at this comment. Matsuda looked back from his chair off to the side of where they were gathered, then looked back at his feet in a mixture of boredom and slight irritation. They were expecting him to make a crack about Walker, Texas Ranger, no doubt, but he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction. They always expected him to say something random, something that they could yell at him for. He was not a stress reliever. Matsuda would hold in his comments, even if doing so was bound to turn him into… into one of them. He would try not to let that happen – he would – but it was bound to happen eventually. Hopefully the case of the muffin maker would be a short one and he wouldn't have to worry about that. He did not want to turn into Aizawa.
And not just because he didn't want an afro.
After a few more minutes of muffin talk, Yagami had quite obviously had enough. L sensed the danger in the room just before Yagami spoke up in an eerily calm voice.
"Ryuzaki," he said. They all looked at him. "I understand the importance of this… these radioactive muffins – completely." He sounded as though it took quite a bit of force for him to allow the words radioactive and muffins to come out together. "But I have to find my son. I can't work like this. I'm aware I'm biased in this situation, yes, which is why I'm resigning from this case before it can begin to go back to the police force and take the position of chief investigator for Light's disappearance."
L waited for Ukita, Mogi, and Aizawa to stop attempting to talk him out of his decision. He was busy contemplating something else, something not-so-muffin related, but definitely just as puzzling as any radioactive Chuck Norris muffins.
Matsuda wasn't talking.
He had taken notice of it before Ukita made a comment about it being abnormal to work a case involving Chuck Norris, when Matsuda hadn't said anything then. Matsuda had actually shut up when Yagami asked him who would plant the muffins in random houses in Japan. That wasn't normal behavior at all for Matsuda. It also wasn't normal for Matsuda, of all people, to be staring at his own feet in annoyance. Normally he had something to say about everything, some sort of joke that made everyone glare at him or made Aizawa tell him to shut up and get focused. However now, he had actually done as they told him to. Matsuda had stopped talking.
Not to say that this didn't make things more peaceful. It was quite nice to be able to have a serious discussion of a serious case without any moronic, juvenile interruptions from the local peanut gallery. However, it was even eerier than the eerie calmness with which Yagami was using to speak about his resignation (which was, incidentally, the voice of a person hiding the fact that he was considering murdering everyone in the room with him if they didn't all stop talking about muffins). Matsuda just wasn't a quiet person. Even when he was trying to hide something, he wasn't quiet. L saw him as the type of person who no one should tell a secret, the type who would accidentally blab it to everyone and it be an honest accident. Matsuda was the type of person who meant well but never did well.
And those types of people never obeyed a command that involved them being quiet without good reason.
"I'm sorry," Yagami said finally, over the protest of the others, "but I'm not going to sit around talking about radioactive baked goods when my son's missing. For all I know he could already be dead, and the longer the case is left cold, the more likely that is. I'd rather that not be true."
"Yagami-san's son is more important to him than anything else," said L, cutting off any more protest before it could begin. "I understand that. Feel free to go back to the police. If you choose to join the case again after he is found, then I will have no protest."
"Thank you, Ryuzaki."
And on that note, Yagami indeed left. And also on that note, L was left to deal with the uproar it created from Aizawa, Ukita, and Mogi – though not Mogi so much, as he rarely ever said a word about much of anything – and to ponder why Matsuda wasn't joining in on the uproar.
A pair of long-fingered, midnight black hands picked up a muffin in a plastic wrapper between its forefinger and thumb. The hand held it up in front of an eternally grinning clown face in order for the Shinigami to examine the thing. Ryuk had never tried a muffin before, and – after seeing what had happened to the previous picker-upper of his Death Note – he had absolutely no intention of trying one in the future.
It was all rather amusing, though. People ate muffins every day, but these muffins were apparently special. For some reason, their creator (who currently held Ryuk's other Death Note) called them "fummins," but Ryuk assumed that was just part of the offhand college student's personality. Anyone who created Chuck Norris flavored muffins was a bit offhand, particularly radioactive ones that made their eater disappear. Ryuk had gotten to watch it all from Light's room. Light hadn't yet realized that his Death Note was missing when he took a bite of the "fummin," and he might not have ever eaten that muffin had he known that little fact. But in the end, the universe had to do away with Yagami Light by sucking him into a black hole, no questions asked. Light had eaten the muffin and the Gods had disagreed with such an act. Had Chuck Norris himself known, he probably would have disagreed with it as well, maybe even gave Light a good roundhouse kick to the face before the universe disposed of him. Now that, Ryuk thought with a cackle, would have been amusing.
Of course, none of that could have been done without the Death Note. This kid was a videogame obsessed college freshman, computer wiz, and Chuck Norris joke expert in North Carolina, going to a school called CNU, located in Union Mills of the previously mentioned state. So, how had Ryuk come across him, having been in Japan not that long ago at all?
Why, because Yagami Light and William Thomas Burr had an online Guitar Hero battle that Ryuk was witness to, of course! It had apparently been the first Guitar Hero battle of any sort that Tom had lost, and Tom had been angry. Not just angry, no, but murderous.
And wherever there is a potential murderer, there is amusement for Ryuk.
Ryuk cackled before putting the muffin back on the computer desk. The entire prospect of killer muffins was quite a bit more amusing than just criminal killing. Yagami Light was ambitious – he had plans to wipe out all crime and become the God of the New World, but what then? Ryuk wouldn't have anything to do then. Tom, though, planned to kill not for the good of the world, but for the benefit of himself in the world of online gaming. As more and more people would play online games as they grew in popularity, this would last quite a bit longer. When Tom gave up on this, Ryuk could just move on to some other unsuspecting gamer and offer them the most efficient way to finally get rid of their rivals. There would have only ever been one Kira, but there would be thousands of Toms throughout the years. Ryuk would never have to worry about being bored again.
And a thought that splendiferous, Ryuk supposed, most certainly deserved to have an apple on the side. Still cackling to himself, Ryuk picked up an apple from the bowl sitting on the computer desk and flew through the wall to look over his current new home, Carolina Night University.
This entire thing was inspired by AIM conversations revolving around Chuck Norris jokes and a mistype of the word muffin as "fummin" by my coauthor.
And, before anyone asks, a few things:
1. I know there was no online GH in 2007. I had to AU-ify things a bit, and that was one of the things.
2. This story takes place based on the anime timeline rather than the manga, as GH wasn't even out in the manga timeline (which began in 2003).
3. This is meant to be random. Hence why it is a crackfic.
4. I'll take suggestions, comments, etc etc.
5. Flamers amuse me, so feel free to set anything on fire that you like. Except my computer. That would make me angry enough to send you a Chuck Norris flavored fummin.
Now, feel free to review away!