Neither Tenchi Muyo nor the International House of Pancakes is owned by the author, who may not make any profit from this story in any way.
"Did you hear?" Ayeka asked Ryoko. "Tenchi's finally made his decision! Who will it be?"
"I've heard that one before," Ryoko crossed her arms and pretended not to care. "He waffles so much that he should work for the International House of Pancakes!" The cyan-haired space pirate couldn't believe that Ayeka couldn't hear the beating of her heart. It must have been as loud as a bass drum.
Ayeka's little sister Sasami passed by with a full basket of laundry. The little princess couldn't have been older than ten, or eleven at the most, but since inhabitants of the planet Jurai age slower than terrestrial earthlings, it was hard to tell.
"You're just afraid because you know he won't choose you!" Ayeka gloated. "You know that he would rather choose a princess than a pirate!"
"Like he'd really think that you were wife material," scoffed Ryoko, trying to act cool. "He's not interested in being a prince on planet Jurai, and you don't know how to take care of a doll house, let alone this one."
Sasami whistled happily as she swept the front porch, her skirts switching in time with her broom.
"Ha!" Ayeka pointed her finger at Ryoko, her insecurities making her normally musical voice shrill, "Like you would be a decent spouse to anyone! You've never worked a day in your drunken life, and you're such a horrible cook, you could burn water!"
Ryoko's cool started to dissolve, but she continued to cross her arms and hoped that the purple-haired princess wouldn't see her trembling. "Yeah? Shows what you know! Unlike some little stuck-up brats I've had to live out in the big bad universe! I know how to take care of myself, and I know how to take care of Tenchi! As for you, I'm surprised that you know how to dress yourself without a servant showing you what goes where!"
In Tenchi's bedroom, Sasami got out the boy's clothes for tomorrow and hung them in his closet so he wouldn't be late for his job interview in the morning. Ryo-ohki, a small furry feline/rabbit hybrid, played with the shoelaces of the black dress shoes that the girl had shined for him.
"How dare you!" Ayeka's crimson eyes flashed dangerously. "You are rude, vulgar, reckless, and chaotic! Tenchi isn't interested a wild creature like you! You would make a terrible wife and a worse mother! Face it! The best thing you could be is… 'the other woman'!"
"Oh yeah?" Ryoko's golden eyes combined with her wild spiky greenish-white hair made her look like a fearsome bird of prey. "He'd never want to marry an overgrown child like you! He'd have to take care of you and any offspring you whelped! Your marriage wouldn't be a partnership, it would be a joke! Face it! The best you could be is… 'the trophy wife!' Nice to look at but nobody to spend time with!"
In the kitchen Sasami had to stand on a stepstool in order to cook for the family. With the freshest ingredients in the known galaxy, she didn't need a lot of spices and could simply let the delicious meal speak for itself.
"You sloppy drunken savage!" Ayeka cried.
"You prissy, lazy good for nothing!" Ryoko retorted.
"Hi everyone," Tenchi Masaki, a teenage Japanese boy and perhaps the humblest yet most desirable man in the universe, waved as he and Sasami entered the family room. "I'm sorry to interrupt but I have something really important to announce. Is everyone here?"
"Here we are," Kiyone announced as she, her partner Mihoshi, and the red-haired scientist Washu came out of the door under the stairs that led to Washu's lab. "We just went to get Washu after you told us that you wanted a family meeting. What's up?"
"Yeah, don't keep us in suspense!" chirped the cheerful Mihoshi. "What's going on? Is it someone's birthday? I didn't get them anything, but we could chip in and take them out to dinner, what do you say?"
"Dinner!" Sasami gasped. "I better check on lunch! Just a minute, okay?" The pink-eyed princess dashed out of the room. The blue-haired princess looked so cute in her outfit with the carrot symbolled apron. Her huge sky-blue ponytails and her pink oven mitts made her look adorable, like a little doll.
"That's okay, Sasami," Tenchi called after her. "I'll just stall until you get back, okay?"
"C'mon Tenchi," the emerald-eyed Washu grumbled as she sat on a cushion that appeared in midair to support her. She crossed her legs as the cushion floated under the diminutive supergenious in defiance of all of Newton's laws. "Cut to the chase. I've got a lot to do, ya know. Brilliant breakthroughs don't discover themselves."
"Yes, Tenchi! Mihoshi rocked on the couch next to Kiyone like a child on Christmas morning. "Tell us! What's so important? Tell us! Tell us!"
"Yes, go on Tenchi," Ayeka's soft calm voice was completely at odds with her trembling, pale face. The lavender-haired lady smiled weakly and pretended that she wasn't feeling faint.
"Yeah, go on," Ryoko was harder to understand, because she was speaking through clenched teeth. Her heart was beating so loud that she could hardly hear anything past the blood pounding in her ears.
"Well, okay," Tenchi smiled nervously as he rubbed the back of his neck. "Sasami should be right back. I know that we've all lived together for a while now, and we've all loved each other, each in our own special way…"
Ayeka and Ryoko's eyes moistened with tears as they smiled nervously, nodded, and trembled where they stood.
"So far in the name of universal peace, I've been afraid to take it to the next level," Tenchi continued to scratch the back of his head as he glanced away and blushed. He took a breath and focused his gaze on the five exotic interstellar beauties before him. "Well, I've done a lot of soul-searching and a lot of growing up, and I'm ready to make my choice."
The collective gasp from the ladies sounded like a chorus of birds on the first day of spring.
"Well, it's about time!" said a flutelike voice. Ayeka put her hands over her mouth. She couldn't believe that she was the one crass enough to say that. She had secretly been worried that Tenchi would take so long that Sasami would grow up and become a rival that none of them could beat.
Tenchi laughed self-consciously. "Yeah, you're right," he agreed. "You are all too important to me for me to keep stringing you all along like this. I will always love each and every one of you like my own family, but there is only one of you that I want to, no need to! Spend the rest of my life with. As soon as Sasami returns I'll tell you who it is."
"Don't keep us waiting!" Ryoko growled as she brandished her fist. The look of fear on her face made it look like the entire Galaxy Police was in the room to arrest her for her crimes.
"Yes! Tell us!" Mihoshi pleaded. "You can't make us wait like this!"
"Please!" Ayeka sobbed. "I can't take it anymore! I've got to know one way or the other! Who is the woman you want to marry?"
"Okay," Tenchi blushed beet red. "I'll tell you. The woman I love and cherish is…"
"I managed to save the fried rice!" Sasami announced as she dashed into the room carrying a huge pot of steaming brown rice. "Whoops!" Her slipper caught on the carpet and the pot sailed into the air. "Look out!"
BAM! (tweet-tweet)
Stars flew in front of Tenchi's eyes as his knees collapsed from under him and he fell to the floor. The heavy pot had bounced off his head and spilled its contents all over the room.
"Tenchi!" Ayeka put her hands over her mouth in horror.
"Tenchi!" Ryoko's body strained to be near him, but she couldn't get her legs to move.
"Tenchi!" Mihoshi gasped in horror. "Oh no!"
Sasami ran over and put her arms around the stricken boy. "Tenchi! Oh no! I'm so sorry! Wake up, Tenchi! Please don't die!"
"It's going to be all right, Sasami," Washu announced in her 'command voice'. "Kiyone, help me get him into my lab and help me set up the medical bay, all right? If we work fast, we may be able to prevent a concussion."
The world faded out for Tenchi Masaki, and when it returned, he was laying down in a bed. The first things he saw were Mihoshi's big blue eyes staring down into his.
"You're right!" she exclaimed. "He isn't dead! Oops!" the blonde giggled nervously when she realized that you should never mention death to a patient. "Hi."
"Get out of his face and let him breathe Mihoshi," Kiyone gently pulled her partner away. "Tenchi, are you all right?"
"Sure I'm--ow!" the boy winced in pain as he clutched his bandaged head. "What happened to me?"
"It was my fault, Tenchi," said a tearful Sasami as she stepped away from Ryoko and Ayeka. "I shouldn't have been running in the house with that big heavy pot in my hands."
"It's okay, Sasami, accidents happen," Tenchi smiled as his strength returned. "I may be in terrible pain, but it would be worse if I didn't feel anything, wouldn't it?"
"Oh? Yeah, it would!" Sasami giggled in relieved laughter.
Ryoko and Ayeka exhaled the breath they had been holding.
"So um, Tenchi…" Ryoko brushed a strand of her wild hair back in a vain attempt to appear calm. "Y-you, you said that you had an announcement for us, something you wanted to get off your chest?"
"Really?" Tenchi asked as he sat up in bed. "What was it about?"
"It was about which one of us you were going to choose!" Ayeka exclaimed. She abruptly held her breath and then let it out slowly. "You said that you had finally made a decision."
"About the woman that you wanted, no needed, to spend the rest of your life with," Ryoko nodded, not willing to trust herself to move.
"I said that?" Tenchi gasped. "I'm nowhere ready to make a decision like that! How long have I been out? Did I miss any school? What's wrong?"
All of the girls were staring at him with mouths open in horror. All but one that is. Washu, who looked quite striking in a Lolita kind of way, was clad in her white nurse's uniform. She remained calm and told him in an emotionless voice. "You graduated two years ago."
For the rest of the day, tests were run. Then more tests. Then even more tests. They all came out the same. Tenchi wasn't faking.
"You've got amnesia," Washu announced. "You've lost a few years of your life, but that's okay. Thanks to your Jurian heritage, you don't age as fast as normal earthlings and can simply take up where you left off with nobody the wiser. Mentally, you are as old as you look."
"I can't believe it," Tenchi sighed, "and I finally came to a decision? I finally figured out who I really love?"
"That's right," Washu nodded. "You were just about to tell us when Sasami accidentally hit you over the head with that cooking pot."
"Oh wow," he breathed. "I sure hope the rest of the girls aren't mad at her. Maybe I wrote it down in a diary somewhere. Do I keep a diary?"
Washu shrugged. "Sorry Tenchi, I'm too absorbed in my work. You all could have become nudists and I wouldn't know."
He sighed as he nodded ruefully.
Meanwhile, outside of the trans dimensional wonder that was Washu's laboratory…
"Ryoko!" Ayeka called. "It's your turn to take out the garbage!"
"Don't worry, Ayeka," Sasami answered. "I'll get it!"
The little blue-haired girl smiled brightly as she lugged out the bulging bags of refuse to Washu's enviro-friendly recyclable trash dumpster and climbed the stepstool to dump it in. With all of the roommates at the Masaki house, an ordinary garbage can just didn't cut it. After she dropped the trash into the dumpster, she furtively looked around and then bent over to pull a dog-eared journal out of her skirts. She sighed with relief as she threw the offending diary in and closed the lid of the dumpster. "That's that," she said as she clapped the dust off her hands. Smiling, she went back inside to wash her hands and cook dinner.
She was glad that she could count on Washu's medical expertise to insure that Tenchi didn't suffer brain damage. It wasn't Tenchi's fault that Jurians don't grow up as fast as Earthlings. Tenchi needed more time to make up his mind, and Sasami needed time to grow up some more. In a few years, it should be easy to see which member of the Masaki family was 'marriage material.'
END