Disclaimer: Characters and concepts from "Tenchi Muyo!" were created by Kajishima Masaki and Hitoshi Okuda, and are Copyright AIC and Pioneer LDC. This work is a parody and not to be used for any commercial purposes.
Tree and Infancy
The morning sun touched the two guardians standing patiently at the gate.
"It looks like another beautiful day," Azaka remarked.
"FIRE IN THE HOLE!" came Sasami's shout.
"Perhaps . . . but I believe I see some approaching clouds." demurred Kamidake.
Kablaaam!
"It seems odd that we are here to protect Princess Ayeka, and yet she is allowed to handle explosive devices." pondered Azaka.
The child-size Ayeka came skipping out of the house, followed by the toddler form of the second generation of the battleship that had devastated the Juraian capital.
"That is what you find odd about the situation?" asked Kamidake.
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"What about our game of volleyball?" Sasami asked.
"That's right." Tenchi frowned. "We don't have an even number of players now."
"Oh . . . I was really looking forward to it." Mihoshi sighed in disappointment.
After a few disastrous episodes, a weekly game of volleyball had become a favorite activity in the Masaki household. The key was to put Ryoko and Ayeka on the same team, and Tenchi on the opposing side. This kept the two rivals from escalating the conflict beyond what normal humans could handle. (Not that there were any normal humans in the game, but Tenchi said it was the principle of the thing.)
"I don't suppose we could get your grandpa to join?" Ryoko suggested. She had already retreived a volleyball from the storeroom.
"Not a chance." Tenchi shook his head. "He won't participate in anything that isn't at least three centuries old."
"Myaa, mya." Ryo-Ohki piped up.
"What?" Washu looked at the toddler-cabbit. "All right, give it a try."
Ryo-Ohki closed her eyes and concentrated. For a moment, nothing happened, and then she expanded to the size she had been when she first took over the humanoid Masses.
"Wow! Well done, Ryo-chan!" Sasami applauded. The rest of the group joined in, except for Ayeka.
"I think she'll need some new clothes, though." Tenchi pointed out. And in fact, Ryo-Ohki's toddler outfit no longer covered below her stomach. Fortunately for Tenchi's blood pressure, she wasn't anatomically correct, at least by human standards.
Sasami turned to Ayeka. "Can she borrow your volleyball gear, sister?"
For a long moment Ayeka couldn't say anything. But she saw the eagerness on the faces of Ryo-Ohki and Sasami. " . . . okay." She managed.
Tenchi realized that Ayeka was going to be left out. "Thank you, Ayeka. Tell you what, I'll play a game of go afterwards, just with you."
Ayeka's face lit up. The next moment, there was the sound of a small explosion. The group turned, and saw Ryoko with the limp remains of a volleyball drooping from her rigid fist.
"A new record." Washu commented. "We didn't even have the first serve." She trotted off to retrieve a spare volleyball from the large stockpile they had learned was often needed.
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Later in the day, the afternoon chores had been completed, and Sasami had readied most of the dishes for dinner so that they only needed heating. A wonderful interval of freedom was at hand. Time for exploration. Time for discovery. Time for . . . swiping her sister's tiara.
But her energetic rifling through the cylindrical containers in the bedroom was having no success. It seemed to Sasami that she had dug through a mountain of brushes, combs, curlers, elastic bands, and hair covers with no sign of a tiara. Finally she came to the last item, with no different result than before. It seemed to be a bottle of conditioner, marked with red crab logos. In front, someone had drawn a skull and crossbones over the label. Sasami puzzled over it for a moment, and then turned to put it back.
"Can't find what you're looking for, eh?" Ryoko's head appeared through the wall.
"Yeeek!" Sasami jumped back from Ryoko's sudden appearance, and the bottle went nearly to the ceiling.
"There's a guilty conscience." Ryoko phased the rest of herself into the room, and deftly caught the bottle on its way down.
"Well, you startled me, sister Ryoko, and I was just . . ." Sasami's voice trailed off as she realized she wasn't going to fool someone with many centuries of experience helping herself to what didn't belong to her. "Okay, how did you know?"
"I heard the same sounds that I was making when I was looking for Tenchi's sword." Ryoko smiled. "So what are you after? Wait, let me guess -- Ayeka's tiara, right?"
"Well, it's not fair." Sasami said unhappily. "Brother Tenchi and sister Ayeka have tree keys, but I'm never going to get one. I just wanted to know what it's like."
Ryoko looked sympathetically at Sasami. The little princess had a point. And anything likely to annoy Ayeka was a good thing in her book. "You know, Sasami, you're right. And we should help Ayeka grow by sharing her stuff. After all, she can't use it for the time being."
"But, I can't find it." Sasami began closing the containers she had searched.
Ryoko handed her the bottle she had saved. "You need to think more like a pirate. We're good at figuring out where people hide things. Now let's see . . . Ayeka's body was shrunk to child-size, and her tiara no longer fit . . . she couldn't have hid it from Washu when she went to see her . . ."
"So she probably hid it in Ryu-Oh's unit before she left!" Sasami exclaimed.
"There you go." Ryoko approved. "Now, when Ayeka found out she might stay child-size for years, she would have written the location down somewhere."
"That makes a lot of sense." Sasami agreed.
"But where would she hide the note?"
"Hmm. . ." Sasami furrowed her brows in thought, then snapped her fingers. "In the pocket of her formal robes! You know, the outfit with the cowl that she wore on the Ryu-Oh's bridge. That would remind her where it was."
"That's it!" Ryoko floated over to the closet. "Sasami, you would've made a great pirate." She opened the closet door and searched through the pockets of the robe with an experienced hand. "Aha!" She displayed a folded piece of paper with a flourish.
"Let me see!" Sasami hurried over. Ryoko unfolded the paper. "Ohh! It's a treasure map!"
On the paper was a drawing of the floor plan of Ryu-Oh's unit. A dashed line started at the entrance, heading towards one of the pools. It turned and went towards the plot of soil with the tree at its center. There was a large "X" about half-way from the edge of the plot to the tree. At the bottom of the page were some notes with numbers.
"She buried her tiara. . .well, well." Ryoko mused. "Tricky, but not tricky enough."
"We're going on a buried treasure hunt!" Sasami ran over to her side of the closet. "Just give me a few minutes and I'll make some pirate outfits for us!"
"Uh . . . pirate outfits?" Ryoko looked bewildered.
"Well, you said I should think like a pirate, didn't you?" Sasami started gathering scarves, leggings, a ruffled blouse, and other items.
"That's not quite the kind of . . ." Ryoko began, and then stopped. Sasami seemed so enthusiastic. "Okay, but I'm not wearing a peg leg."
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A short time later, Sasami and Ryoko were making their way quietly through the darker corridors of Washu's lab. Sasami had done a good job with their outfits, even getting a piece of plastic that Ryoko's infra-red vision could see through for her eye-patch. "Are you sure this way leads to Ryu-Oh's unit?" whispered Ryoko.
"I'm pretty sure," answered Sasami in an equally low voice. "But we usually take another route."
"As long as we get there soon." Ryoko said nervously. Now that the Souja had been destroyed, there was no scarier place in the known universe for Ryoko than Washu's lab.
"Don't worry. This place is huge. What are the chances of anyone coming to this spot?"
"Hello, girls!" came Mihoshi's voice. "What are you doing?"
"Yeeek!" Sasami and Ryoko both appeared to levitate, though only Ryoko actually did. Two shovels clattered to the floor.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Mihoshi was her usual bubbly self, "I didn't mean to startle you."
"Mihoshi--" Ryoko began, but got her voice under control. "What are you doing here?"
"Well, Washu and Ayeka are playing doctor again, and they both yelled at me to get out when I walked into Washu's examination room--"
"I prefer to call it the Chamber of Horrors," Ryoko interposed.
"--anyway, Ayeka has a really high-pitched shriek now, so I left in a big hurry, and I kind of got turned around. So if I could just follow you out of here . . . Oh, are you playing pirates?"
"Uh . . . yeah." Ryoko answered.
"That sounds like fun!" Mihoshi became even more cheerful, which Ryoko wouldn't have thought possible. "Can I join you?"
"Sure!" Sasami answered while Ryoko was trying to think of a good reason to turn Mihoshi down.
"But I don't have an outfit." Mihoshi realized. "Can I borrow your eye-patch, Ryoko?"
Both Ryoko and Sasami thought of how much tripping Mihoshi did even when using both eyes. "Why don't you just take the three-cornered hat." Ryoko suggested, handing it over.
Three minutes later, the trio had entered the large but brightly lit unit that housed Ryu-Oh.
"All right." Sasami held the map up close to read it. "We need a marker on top of the hill. I guess that means the little dome over there."
"I'll stand on top of it." Ryoko flew over to the hemishpere that housed the water system for the unit.
"Okay, Mihoshi," Sasami resumed, "from the door, thirty paces directly towards Ryoko."
Mihoshi aimed herself at Ryoko and stepped off thirty paces.
"Now, turn towards Ryu-Oh, and take twenty paces." Sasami instructed. "And that should be where to dig."
Mihoshi turned, and started walking. But at only eleven paces, she passed over the tiny tree, and by twenty paces she had gone completely off the plot of soil. "Oh, no! What did I do wrong?"
"You didn't do anything wrong." Ryoko said. This time, she added silently.
"I know!" Sasami slapped her own forehead. "You took Mihoshi-sized paces. We need paces the size of Ayeka's new body."
"Oh . . . this is Ayeka's map?" Mihoshi asked.
"But how are we going to get paces the right size?" Ryoko paid no attention to Mihoshi. "Even your body is bigger than hers, Sasami."
"That's a good point." Sasami admitted.
"We'll do it the direct way." Ryoko flew over to Ryu-Oh's plot, and hovered just a bit off the ground. Reaching down, she phased her arm into the ground, reaching almost up to the shoulder. She began to fly in a slow circle, starting at the edge of the plot, and then spiraling inwards. " . . . rock . . . rock . . . ewww, Juraian worm . . . "
"I didn't think of using your powers that way!" Sasami enthused.
But as Ryoko reached a point half-way to the center, lightning seemed to erupt from the ground, sending shocks all through Ryoko's body. "Yeeoowwch!"she yelled, yanking her arm out of the ground and hastily leaping to the side. "What was that?"
"Ooops." Sasami hurried over, closely followed by Mihoshi. "I forgot that the tiara is a key for a Royal Tree. It won't allow anyone not of Juraian royal blood to touch it, just like Tenchi's sword."
Ryoko took her scorched fingers out of her mouth. "We must try to think of these things sooner from now on," she said in a strained voice.
"Wait -- the treasure is Ayeka's tiara?" Mihoshi caught on. "But that's like stealing!"
"I think of it as unconscious sharing," Ryoko said.
"No, I can't!" Mihoshi shook her head. "I'm a Galaxy Police detective. What would the G.P. say if they found out?"
"No one's going to find out." Ryoko declared.
"Avast, ye scurvy knaves!" roared two voices from behind.
"YEEEEK!" While only Sasami truly was a little girl, the screams of Mihoshi and Ryoko sounded remarkably like hers. Sasami grabbed Mihoshi in a panic-clutch. Mihoshi grabbed for Ryoko, but the ex-space-pirate had already zoomed back up into the air. Mihoshi overbalanced, and both she and Sasami toppled into the pool at the side of the plot of earth with an impressive double splash.
They surfaced, streaming water, and looked at where the voices had come from. Washu and Ayeka stood there. Washu had clearly used her transmuter to create costumes also matching the occasion. The redheaded genius wore a navy captain's uniform from the age of sail, complete with an officer's hat and jeweled sword. Ayeka wore a seaman's outfit remarkably like a schoolgirl's sailor fuku, except that she had shorts instead of a skirt, and small boots.
In the air, Ryoko gritted her teeth in embarrassment. Caught red-handed by a pint-size Ayeka -- and worse, she had a better-tailored outfit! Ayeka, you are sooo toast!
"We'll teach you ruffians . . . heh-heh . . ." Washu was attempting to continue her law-and-order speech, but the sight of Mihoshi and Sasami was too funny to keep a straight face. " . . . to ply your dark trade . . . hee . . . in our waters . . . ha ha ha!" The pint-size scientist had to double over and slap her knees.
"And boy, are you ever . . .ho ho. . ." The even-smaller princess started rolling on the floor, " . . . in our waters!"
Mihoshi and Sasami started to glare at Ayeka, but there is something very different about being laughed at by a cute four-year-old in a sailor outfit, rather than by an adult-size person. They turned to look at each other, noticing their water-bedraggled hair and Sasami's soaking pirate costume. And then they burst out giggling as well.
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"I still say we shoulda hanged Ryoko from the yardarm." Ayeka gave her opinion to her fellow diners at the table a little later.
"You and whose navy?" Ryoko retorted.
"What's a yardarm?" Mihoshi asked.
"It's where the sail hangs from on a sailing ship," answered Washu. "So we didn't have one available. But maybe I'll try a cat-o'-nine-tails on Ryoko during her next exam."
"Ah, there's nothing like a mother's love." Ryoko's voice had a double helping of sarcasm.
"Are you saying I'm a bad mother?" Washu demanded.
"Oh, no, I wouldn't say 'bad'," Ryoko was unfazed, "just the worst in the galaxy."
Tenchi focused his attention on his plate. Do not get involved, he thought. Do NOT get involved . . .
(To be continued . . . )