Author's Note: I liiiiiiive! Like Frankenstein's Monster, yo. That's right, we're going OLD SKOOL, getting' all up in yo countenance (it's funny if you've read Frankenstein, just trust me on this)!
Ahem. Well, I'll try to keep this brief, since the wait has certainly been long enough already. It's not really an abnormally long break from uploading anything for me, but suffice it to say applying to college sucks. I'm in where I most wanted to get in, which is a relief, but now come the scholarship applications… Also I've been trying to work on more serious stuff. But really, I've just been uninspired. Which is why this chapter ends where it does. If I had wanted to end it there I could have done so at least a month ago—but I wanted to have this story arc be all one chapter. But I have no idea how long that would take, it was at an okay breaking point, and frankly, I've been staring at the same point of this story trying to think what to write next for far too long. I need for my own sake to have the sense of starting something fresh, or I'll just keep opening the file, looking at it for a few minutes, and then giving up. And as a writer, I have to stop doing things like that if I ever want to improve (and besides which, it leaves all of you guys in the lurch as well).
On that note, thank you for the support you've given this story. It's more than I was expecting from a fairly inactive fandom. I suppose that gives me the benefit of being one of very few people actually writing new stuff, but even so, my experience with inactive fandoms would suggest that I'm doing pretty well here. I'll try to take that as a responsibility to pull my act together and not let this thing sit untouched for another six months. After all, no lesbian threesome crackfic should ever have to go that long without bein—yeah okay, that's uh… yeah.
All seriousness aside, let's get on with the show!
Three's Noir-y, Too!
It is the Name of a… Seven-Month-Old Crackfic
By Duo Himura
OP: A Houseful of Assassins (To the tune of the Full House Theme)
Whatever happened to predictability?
The foreshadowing, the flashbacks, girls with guns (and tea).
They never missed a single grunt, but
They didn't bleed anyway…
Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)
There's some guy (there's some guy) who's probably trying to kill you.
Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)
There's some girl with a blatant crush on you.
When you're lost out there, and you're all alone
Some blatant symbolism, will mess up the rhyme scheme…
Everywhere you look.
Whatever happened to predictability?
Love triangles resolved by killing one of the three.
How did they get to living here? Well, it's a little thing called crack.
This whole world's pretty messed up.
Story as dark as you've ever seen,
And an author who throws it out.
And a little voice inside you whispering,
"This'll be crazy, without a doubt…"
Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)
There's a plot device coming from nowhere.
Everywhere you look (everywhere you look)
There's a pop culture reference, that nobody else will get.
So when you're alone out there, where you don't know
Just look 'round for something from The Rocky Horror Picture Show!
Everywhere you look.
Noir…
It is the name of an ancient fate… which we've pretty much been ignoring.
And then the Queer Eye guys showed up.
Maybe it's karma.
"Bad things happen to people who stop doing the bad things they've been doing?"
Well… karma by our incredibly twisted standards.
I think it's just The Great Law of the Plot in action.
What's The Great Law of the Plot?
"Content people are boring."
Wouldn't that mean we can never… win?
Well, yes. But we can probably still have sex in between various periods of things going horribly awry.
Eh, good enough.
((Sound of flame being slashed in two))
Wait, why didn't I get any lines this time?
Chapter 3: The Long, Dark Division of Love
"Nnnngg…" Mireille Bouquet grimaced at the touch. She hadn't expected it to be this painful… and she had been stabbed in the leg recently. In fact, her not-very-healed leg wound wasn't helping matters.
"S-sorry…" came Kirika's voice from behind her.
"No, don't stop," Mireille commanded, feeling the younger girl withdraw.
"Um… a-are you sure…?"
"Yes, I'm sure, now just—aaagh!" Caught off-guard this time, the blonde assassin couldn't prevent herself from crying out. Still, if there was one thing Mireille was good at, it was regaining her composure in short order after completely losing it. She hastily bit down on the noise, shutting it off, and even managed to utter a quick sentence without her voice cracking: "Don't you dare stop again." Kirika complied dutifully.
Mireille flinched as the small, delicate hands went about their task. And all at once, a question occurred to her, one which, for the life of her, she couldn't think why she hadn't asked. "Um… Kirika… have you done this before?"
Silence.
"Oh. Right. Sorry."
Whether the sudden increase in pain she felt shortly thereafter was simply part of the process, or was the amnesiac girl's response to the rather insensitive question, Mireille couldn't say. This was because she found herself clenching her teeth for all her jaw was worth (approximately $150. On a related note, she needed to stop randomly browsing Craig's List). At this point she was pretty much willing to swear that being stabbed in the leg had been less painful, but she knew if she could just endure this for a minute more—
Crack.
"Ahhhhhh…" Mireille let out a sigh of relief and exhaustion, as behind her, Kirika eased her leg back onto the bed.
"Better?" she asked.
Mireille experimentally flexed the leg in question a few times. "Much. Thanks," she said, rolling over and grinning at Kirika, who stood at the side of the bed. "But seriously, where did you learn chiropractics?"
Kirika frowned.
"I'm kidding! Kidding!" Mireille said hastily, wishing she meant it and hadn't just forgotten again.
"Okay, you're better, now it's my turn! Hurry up!" Chloe said, her voice somewhere between anger and pouting.
"Right, sorry…" Kirika said, walking around to the opposite side of the bed, where Chloe lay, trying to put as much space as possible between herself and Mireille as she could without actually falling off. "How did you both manage to injure yourselves like this anyway?"
"It's a long story…" said Mireille, getting up from the bed to make sure everything was in proper order with her leg (also to avoid having to share it with just Chloe). "Which you were there for. So you're asking… why?"
"It was a rhetorical question," said Kirika, as she began bending Chloe's left leg back, pushing it carefully beyond its normal range of motion. "Plus I thought it'd be a good lead-in for a flashback."
"It wasn't a very good rhetorical question," Mireille muttered. "And what we're doing right now is called…?"
"…Chiropractics?" Kirika offered.
"Sexual innuendo?" suggested Chloe, through clenched teeth.
"No! That was earlier!" snapped Mireille. "It's 'in medias res!' When you start in the middle of the story and then flash back to the beginning!"
"But aren't we at the end?"
"There could be more!" shouted Mireille. "Do we know for sure?"
"Well…" said Kirika.
Well… well… well… well… And all at once everything went all ripple-y.
"See, I told you. Flashback."
The previous day…
As awkward silences went, the one which presently permeated the apartment was neither the most awkward nor the most silent. However, while it might be lacking in those areas, the silence more than made up for it with sheer heart. Where other silences might give up when a person coughed, or commented on what an awkward silence this was, this one refused to surrender to the very end. It never said "die," or… anything else, for that matter, being, you know, silent. It went on and on, as if it were the Rocky franchise of silences, and thus, though it may fade, this silence would live on forever in the hearts and minds of all who bore it witness.
"Well…" said Ted Allen, shattering the silence. "This is awkward."
"I've seen worse," Mireille said with a shrug, her roommates nodding their agreement. After all, as assassins they were well trained in all forms of silence, even "In space no one can hear you scream," although that one tended to be rather fatal, so now they just simulated it. Why a couple of the fab five nodded as well she didn't know, and wasn't sure she wanted to.
"I don't understand," said Carson Kressley. "Why are you two naked?"
"Guess," said Mireille.
"But didn't anyone tell you that we were coming?" Kressley asked.
"No… why are you here?"
"Yeah, when I tried to figure out what was going on earlier I just got a dramatic introductory speech," said Chloe.
"Isn't it obvious?" Kyan Douglas asked what is possibly the most useless question on the planet. "You've been selected to be subject of the next Queer Eye for the Straight Guy!"
"But we didn't sign up for anything!" Mireille said. "And we're not guys. Or straight."
"Kirika, nobody's answering my questions, and I'm bored…" said Chloe in her best five-year-old voice (about 3 years younger than her default tone), pulling on the hem of the other girl's tunic, which, you will recall, was dangerously high. "Can we go back to screwing like bunnies?"
"I'm not sure that's appropriate," said Kirika. "I think it only works if you actually produce children as a result. But sure."
"Wha—Are they really going to—?" Ted Allen said, staring after the two girls, who had headed off in the direction of the bed-alcove.
"Kirika! Chloe!" Mireille shouted. "Not while we have company!"
"Oh, thank God," said Allen. She may be naked—and really, as times when he was glad he was gay went, this one was fairly high on the list—but at least this one seemed to be pretty rational.
Slam!
Ted Allen stood, staring at the closed door to the apartment. And blinking. He did quite a bit of blinking.
That was a joke… right? This kind of thing wasn't supposed to happen to him! He was on TV! He was solely responsible for teaching America that homosexual people were just like everyone else only better at fashion! He was Ted-fucking-Allen!
He was pondering how to reword that last sentence when the door opened again. Well, opened in a loose sense of the word—the space between the door and the frame was little more than a crack, through which could be seen the blonde woman he'd been speaking with before.
"Oh, you're still here?" she said.
"Of course we're still here! We have a show to do! Now, are you going to cooperate or—"
"Whatever the second option is," she said, nodding. "But if you're going to hang around anyway, could you go into town and pick us up some light bulbs? We've been out for days. Oh, and some clothes, I guess. Thanks." And with that, she disappeared inside the room again, closing the door. But not before poking one hand into the hallway to hang a small, off-white "Do Not Disturb" sign from the doorknob.
Thus was Ted Allen left alone in the hallway, to resume his staring and blinking at the door, and for all that the "Do Not Disturb" sign added a splash of color variation, it did not heal the aching sense of "What the hell just happened here?" in his heart. However, there comes a time when even Ted Allen cannot stare and blink any longer, when he has to take matters into his own hands. He knew what had to be done. He took the doorknocker into his own hands, and slammed it down several times, quite loudly.
"The sign says—" called a voice from within.
"I can read!" shouted Ted Allen.
"Really? That's weird when you consider that you're a star in an American reality show reading the sign in a French apartment occupied by a Corsican, a Japanese girl, and… whatever the hell Chloe is."
"I'm special!"
"Sure, we'll go with that."
"I'm not going to go shopping for you! We're not your lackeys!"
"…Isn't you shopping for us basically the premise of your show?"
He had to think about that one. "Well… yeah but… you're not supposed to like it! Or at least… you're not supposed to pick…"
"Look, Ted—can I call you Ted?" came the voice of the blonde woman again. "Ted-chan. Yes, I think we'll go with that. Ted-chan, we're about to go to bed here, if you catch my drift. Please take your camera crews and kindly GTFO."
"GTFO?" came another voice; he thought it was the purple-haired girl.
"We'll tell you when you're older, Chloe."
"I know what it means! Why did you say something in chatspeak?"
"IDK, my BFF Jill?"
"…Mireille, please stop watching those cell phone commercials. I'm starting to worry," said the third girl, the one who had actually been clothed, though he was beginning to doubt that that description applied anymore.
"Look, we've got a show to do here, and if we have to film you guys going at it we totally will," chimed in one of the camera crew, causing the fab five to turn as one and glare at him. Really, you just couldn't get good straight-help these days.
"We really would appreciate if you—" began Ted.
It was at approximately this moment when the entire group in the hallway had a sudden revelation. The reality of what they'd been doing wrong came out of the woodwork, leaping into the air and very nearly smacking them in the face with its clarity. They shouldn't force themselves on these girls—the show would quite simply never work if the people involved weren't compliant. Rather, they should agree to do the show on the terms of the trio, and so not have to explain to their various bosses why they were returning empty handed after flying to Paris to shoot.
Thus the Fab Five and co. decided to call it a day, and return tomorrow with a fresh perspective, fresh patience, possibly some fresh orange juice, and a fresh camera without a bullet in it. In the meantime, they had some light bulbs and clothing to pick up.
In life, the times when a person honestly has no idea what to expect are relatively few and far between. For the most part, logic is the same for everyone, and while things like emotions, quantum physics, and whatever one would term the black murmurings which spill forth from the mouths of politicians, seemingly without end, don't necessarily have anything to do with logic, the basic elements of cause and effect can be seen in almost everything. No, although human beings face uncertainty about the future every day, usually there are several possibilities that are held above the others. It is thus most rare to find oneself in a situation where one truly believes that anything could happen, and just may if you're not careful.
When he knocked on the door of the three girls' apartment the next day, Ted Allen found himself in such a situation.
Ted Allen and his compadres had arrived in Paris intending to do another run-of-the-mill shoot for Queer Eye. Although the City of Lights was certainly a wonderful backdrop, and a nice change of pace from New York besides, there had been nothing to indicate that this show would be different from any other. Since that arrival, he had learned that the subjects of the show were a) plural, b) female, and c) lesbians. They were also d) armed, e) naked, and f) … well, you get the idea.
And now, as he knocked on the door of the only people who had ever shot out one of the show's cameras, like, with a gun, he couldn't help but feel as if there were an almost infinite number of possibilities awaiting him within. It also occurred to him that Murphy's Law suggested an infinite number of possibilities wasn't necessarily a good thing to have.
However, there was no time for further stalling, as Ted's knock was promptly answered by voices from within.
"Ugh… what the hell? Oh it's probably those queer guys."
"Mireille! That's not a very nice way—"
"Wait, I thought you were allowed to use slang to refer to your own minority?"
"Well… it's still kind of insensitive."
"Oh who cares? Anyway, speaking of sensitive…"
"…That's not me, Mireille."
"Oh… Oh!"
"Wait, you mean that wasn't—that whole time it was… EEEWW!"
"So… Chloe's the one with the ticklish ears?"
"STOP TALKING ABOUT IT!"
"Hey, I'm not any happier about this than you are."
"I SERIOUSLY DOUBT THAT."
"Is anyone going to answer the door?"
"You're the one who's actually got clothes. Also the only one who hasn't been traumatized… for once."
"Fine, fine."
There was some further grumbling, and something that sounded like someone rhythmically chanting, "Must forget must forget must forget," and then the same voice continued: "All right, you two stay here, just don't try to kill each other while I'm—" There was a pause. "Chloe… put down the alarm clock. And Mireille, stop trying to chew your hand off. Your teeth are not that sharp—I would know. Now behave yourselves for five minutes, or I'll have to ask our guests to leave." Another pause. "I mean… I'll have to… not ask them to leave. I'll ask them to stay. FOREVER."
There came a series of noises which Ted Allen could only liken to those of a kicked dog, but in two-part harmony. Then there were some quick footsteps, and finally the door was opened, revealing a sleepy-eyed, brown-haired girl in a ridiculously gold tunic.
"Um… hi…" said Ted Allen, suddenly wondering if eavesdropping on someone who'd recently fired a gun in his general direction was rather unethical, and besides which stupid. "Er… I couldn't help but overhear," he said, suddenly wondering if telling someone who'd recently fired a gun in his general direction that he'd been eavesdropping was… you know. "Are you… having some sort of problem…?"
"What? No! Everything's fine! Why would you ask that?" the girl said, snapping upright the way some people snap off fish heads.
"It was just that—"
"Shut up! You're a very suspicious person! We may not be a 'normal,' family, and we may have our quirks, but we don't need your PITY! Good day, sir!"
Thus, for the second day in a row, Ted Allen found the door to this particular apartment abruptly slammed in his face, leaving him with little to do aside from blink and stare.
The only sound was that of angry, rapid footsteps growing gradually softer and softer… and then louder again.
Ted instinctively flinched away as the door opened, expecting swift death, or, at the very least, lengthy, drawn-out death. Instead, he was greeted by the same girl in the golden tunic, smiling pleasantly. A little too pleasantly. For someone who had just told him to get lost. "I'm sorry if I was a little on edge a moment ago. Please, won't you come in?" she said, with a look on her face of such sincerity and kindness that Ted Allen knew at once that he was doomed.
Nonetheless, as he stared and blunk, trying to think of an escape route which would allow him to fake his own death and so deter pursuers, he quickly remembered that none of those things were what he was paid for. Masterfully, he recovered by… accepting her invitation inside. Still, something didn't quite seem right… "Um… wh-what's that you have there?" he asked, as he stepped over the threshold.
"Huh? Oh this?" the girl raised her hand, in which was clutched a narrow, pointed object. "Nothing. A bookmark. Why, what does it look like?"
"Kind of like a shiv made out of a mattress tag and a hair scrunchie," Ted Allen admitted.
"Oh, that's silly!" said the girl, tossing the object in question over her shoulder. "Why would I have something like that?"
"Um…" began Ted Allen, several reasons springing to mind like springs. Mind springs.
"Anyway, did you happen to pick up those clothes we asked for?" the girl said before he could voice any of his theories, all but shoving him in the direction of the sofa. "Not that it's anything you haven't seen before at this point but—"
"Y-yes, I understand…" Ted cut her off. "Um… Carson…?"
At the mention of his name, Carson Kressley stepped forward into the room, leading the rest of the slightly confused crew. As for Kressley himself, he wore a particularly baffled expression, which was focused upon the several plastic bags he held. "Well… I went to the hottest fashion stores in Paris, assembling elegant, stylish outfits that would suit all of your complexions, body types, and hair colors—which, you might appreciate, was rather difficult for your purple-haired friend—but… for some inexplicable reason they seem to have morphed into a red top and black skirt, a hoodie with a t-shirt and miniskirt, and a black bodysuit with a green cloak as soon as I walked through the door."
"Like how any cassette left in a car long enough morphs into a 'Best of Queen' album!" said Jai Rodriguez.
"Actually, that's perfect," Kirika said, snatching the bags from Kressley. "We're already used to wearing these, so—"
"But that's not how the show is supposed to work!" cried Ted Allen. "We can't do a makeover show if we don't actually change anything!"
"It's almost as if there were some great, immutable law at work, dictating that nothing changes, at least, not permanently…" mused Kressley. "As if it was just easier and far less complicated if they always wore the same clothes, thus avoiding the need for anyone to try and envision new outfits for them."
"Yeah, that's just kind of how things go around here," said Kirika, shrugging. "You get used to it." And, with that bald-faced lie, she turned and strode from the room.
When the three Noir girls reappeared in the main room of the apartment, they were clothed in their traditional attire. This, unsurprisingly, made quite a lot of people unhappy.
"Wait, wait, you mean the cloak was for… um…" stammered Carson Kressley.
"Chloe."
"For Chloe?!" Kressley finished. "You have magenta-colored hair! Why would you wear green?"
Chloe seemed to think about this for a moment. "Um… camouflage?"
"But your hair is magenta!" said Kressley.
"There's a lot of things that don't make much sense about Chloe," Mireille said. "For instance, did you know her ears—"
"BITCH I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!" screamed Chloe, lunging at Mireille from about 3 feet away, which, incidentally, isn't a distance where lunging is especially necessary. In any event, she was frozen in mid-lunge—quite literally—by a glare from Kirika, and promptly crashed to the ground, robbed of her momentum in a completely inexplicable fashion.
"…Was that one of the things that doesn't make sense about her?" asked Ted Allen.
"No, no that one was new…" Mireille said.
"Anyway, now that we're all here," began Jai Rodriguez, "let's get down to business! To defeat… the Huns!"
This time it was the Noir girls who stared blankly across the room at its other occupants, as if an explanation might be forthcoming if they simply emoted "What was that…?" hard enough.
"Oh, right…" said Ted Allen. "Um… Jai is sort of… our version of Chloe, I guess you could say. He's the show's pop culture expert. Our 'Culture Vulture,' if you will. He speaks in references."
Mireille sighed. "Why does that seem so very, very typical?" No one really had an answer to that, although they did find that they shared the feeling to an almost eerie degree. After a moment, Mireille continued, "Anyway, I hate to disappoint you, but I really don't think there's much point to doing this. You're all experts on men's fashion, and we're… well, you were here yesterday."
"Yes, but you're also not straight," observed Ted Allen.
"Right, so it doesn't work twice."
"Actually, I think that means it cancels out," said Ted. "It's like multiplying two negative numbers. Normally, we, as gay men, give advice to straight men, which is, by the transitive property of sexuality, sort of like a girl giving advice to a guy on how to dress in a way to be attractive to girls, so… with you… um…" he paused, scratching his head. "Okay, wait. I can't do this in my head. Do you have any graph paper?"
"Well, we had some…" said Mireille. "But I somehow doubt we'll be able to find it… we were just cleaning the other day, you see."
It was at that very moment that a full ream of graph paper, and an assortment of writing implements, suddenly came dislodged from the ceiling and fell to the table with a muffled thud. Everyone spent a good few seconds eying each other suspiciously, decided it simply wasn't worth the effort, and seated themselves for some intensive… sex-math. Which is a lot less fun than it sounds. For the record.
What followed was a period during which the only sound in the apartment was the furious scribbling of pens and pencils on paper (Mireille does math in pen. This is usually a bad idea, but, rather like fighting in high-heeled shoes, she refuses to be broken of the habit no matter how many times it causes her to fall off of a ledge. There's a story behind that particular incident, but it is a tale for another time), and the occasional muttered phrase: "So five gay men, carry the four…" "But then, by the transitive property of transsexuals…" "Then you divide the combined weight of the threesome by their height standing on each other's shoulders…" "And so you get three x-squared plus five x times y, divided by the time it took to do all this math…" And so on and so forth.
Finally, after perhaps a good fifteen minutes of this, Ted Allen exclaimed, "I've got it!" and leapt up from his seat. "It's all really quite simple—our sexual preferences run along the lines of heterosexual women, while yours run along the lines of heterosexual men, therefore the basic dynamic of the show's premise remains the same!" The other members of the fab five nodded their agreement.
"I hate to admit it, but he's right… X equals Y… and Y equals X," said Mireille, dejectedly tossing down her pen (her third—she had snapped several for failure to not make a single mistake. Somehow she'd managed to not get ink everywhere doing this, although she had been forced to endure several "maidens with black hands" jokes). "Kirika?"
"Oh, yeah, I got the same…" said Kirika. "Although I have an imaginary number for the percentage of how applicable their advice is… And I think you end up dividing by zero if you account for us all being pretty decidedly feminine."
"Huh…" said Mireille.
Kirika looked at Mireille expectantly for a moment, the latter returning her gaze with a quizzical expression. After a moment of this, she asked, rather louder than was necessary, "So, how did you do, Chloe?"
"Huh?" said Chloe, looking up from her paper for the first time since they sat down. "Oh… well… I didn't really know what you were all talking about, so I just drew a picture of a kitty," she said, smiling and holding up a crayon drawing of an orange and white cat.
"That's wonderful, Chloe!" Kirika said. "We'll have to put it on the refrigerator."
"R-really?" asked Chloe, her eyes shining with a kind of glee normally reserved for when she had just shanked someone in the kidney.
"Of course! It's a beautiful picture. I mean, your perspective may be a little basic and two-dimensional, but the sun smiling up in the corner there definitely makes up for it," she said, with a definitive nod. "Right, Mireille?"
It should be noted that, having lived as partner-assassins whose very lives depended on their ability to work as a team, and also as room/bedmates with a tremendous degree of unresolved sexual tension, Kirika and Mireille were quite practiced at reading each other's expressions, and could have entire conversations without exchanging a single word. In fact, so precise was their ability, that they once debated the relative merits of the various seasons of Star Trek in such a manner. The series of glances that were rapidly fired off in the time after Kirika said, "Right, Mireille?" played something like the following:
Kirika: Hey, back me up on this, would you?
Mireille: … Yeah that's not happening.
Kirika: Mireille! I know you don't like Chloe, but could you at least try to be a little nicer, for me?
Mireille: I am. I'm not going for my Walther.
"Hey I heard that!" said Chloe, who the others seem to have forgotten was also able to instantly communicate with a glance, and probably better at it than Mireille, but what else is new? "You wanna go?!"
"N-now Chloe, don't—" said Kirika, only for Chloe to rush past her, charging at Mireille with reckless abandon. Kirika sighed, and grabbed the end of Chloe's cloak, jerking the other girl to a halt. "Come on, let's go put your picture on the fridge," she said as cheerfully as circumstances would allow, dragging her captive towards the kitchen.
"I'll CUT YOU!" screamed Chloe, still running forward in a blind fury, her feet slipping uselessly along the floor, her arms flailing out in front of her, as she was pulled away from the scene by the makeshift leash about her neck.
"I-is that… normal?" asked Ted Allen, ever the first one to recover from stunned silence.
"If you don't know, I certainly don't anymore, Ted-chan," Mireille answered.
"R-right…"
And for a time, all was Silence II: The Unrequited Requieted. Well, all except for the occasional disgruntled murmur from the other room, but that's pretty much par for a sequel.
Next Episode:
With the arrival of the Queer Eye Guys, will all things just keep getting better? Can our heroines become absolutely fabulous? Or will they be doomed to be merely abnormally pretty but with no fashion sense (which is to say, they'll be anime characters)? And will their pad be stylin'? …People still say that, don't they? Oh God, I'm too young to not be sure if slang is still in use and have too much self respect to keep up with it!
Ahem. On the next Three's Noir-y, Too these questions… may actually be answered. Sorta like we didn't do in this chapter. Kinda. Also we'll get back to the present whence began this flashback.
Next time, Three's Noir-y, Too: Confessions of an Interior Decorator. The Noir girls aren't the easiest people in the world to get along with, you know!
Ending Note: Okay, so first off, some things from the past chapters…
Mireille: So… Mireille swaps between being aghast at/angry about the open-air bath kiss between Kirika and Chloe and… seeming to not know about it. We're just gonna say that she keeps forgetting… I didn't make any contradictory jokes! I don't know what you're talking about! Mireille's just that fail!
"Who designed that outfit, Aurelia Maximus?": A total nerd pun, because Aurelia is a Latin name derived from the word for gold, so it effectively means "golden (haired)." And maximus is Latin for "biggest," so… it's a joke because Kirika's tunic is, like… solid gold… yeah…
On to this installment!
Opening Theme: For those interested, there is apparently a long and short version of the Full House theme (I did at one point blow a portion of my life watching the show, but I only ever saw the short version)—this parody uses the short version and then follows it with the long version after the point where that one would end.
Why didn't I get a line?: Just sort of… poking fun at how I haven't identified speakers in those little "Noir…" bits at the beginning. I may begin to do so next chapter.
Ted Allen: Yeah I know very little about the fab five, so I'm inventing personalities to go with what's called for by the story/what seems funny, and Ted Allen became the group leader for no particular reason. It's nothing South Park hasn't done before, which, frankly, is my excuse for half of what's in this fic.
"Any cassette left in a car long enough morphs into a 'Best of Queen' album": In keeping with Jai Rodriguez speaking in references, this is a reference to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens in which this is precisely what happens to the Vivaldi recording a demon on his way to pick up the anti-Christ was hoping he could use to calm down. It is, suffice it to say, probably far funnier than anything I've written, and so alluding to it may not be in my best interest, but…
"Three x-squared plus five x times y": This would read 3xx + 5xy. As in the CHROMOSOMES of the people in the room at present! Yeah! Math humor! All right!
And that about wraps it up. I promise I will not sit on the next fully completed chapter for months without uploading it, though really, HtGGRC needs some love about now, and that may get priority. But spring break is coming, so we shall see. Either way, expect a needlessly serious author note ramble about my turning 18. Hey, I've got to shove this stuff off on SOMEONE. It's the only way I can get back to being funny! Thanks for reading, and Happy Easter to those who celebrate it (and for my fellow Jews…at least Passover's only a week, right?).
