"Ugh! I give up!"
Kyo sat down with a defeated grunt. I plopped next to him. Yuki sat on my other side.
"We can't give up yet. We've only been at it for..." Yuki said.
"Three hours?" I finished. Yes, it was true. We had been searching for three hours and there was absolutely no sign of Tohru anywhere in the city. We had asked everyone we saw if they had seen her. No luck.
"There has to be a place we can put a sign. This way, if Miss Honda sees it then she will know where she can find us."
"Ha! Fat chance," I said. "New York is a HUGE city. Even if we put a sign somewhere she could be on the other end of town and never see it. We're just going to have to keep our eyes open.
As we walked back to my house, I thought I saw something in the sky. It seemed familiar, but I figured it was my imagination. But as we continued on and the object got closer to the ground, I started to recognize what it was.
The meowth balloon.
"You stupid twerps better remember that this is only until we find the head twerp and find our way back to the Sinnoh region!" a female voice yelled.
"Like I'd want to spend extra time with you people!" said another female who sounded younger.
"Please! Break it up!" yelled three male voices, one with a heavy New York accent.
"I don't believe it..." I just kept staring as the balloon started going down faster and faster. "They're out of control...as usual..."
"Who are they?" Kyo asked.
"Team Rocket and the Twerp Troop missing the head twerp, Ash Ketchum," I replied. The balloon-riders started screaming as the vehicle came crashing down. That's when the reality hit me: they had come from the portal too! This means there were other anime characters who were being dragged from their shows to the third dimension. When I processed this I started to run in the direction of the crash. I heard Kyo and Yuki hard on my heels.
At the crash site, the deflated balloon was burrying the Pokemon stars as they struggled for freedom. Yuki, Kyo and I started to lift the balloon off of them. Once it was out of the way, I faced my heroes...and the Twerp Troop minus one.
"Wow! You're Team Rocket!!"
"Finally, a person that isn't afraid to cheer for the baddies!" said the blue-haired James.
"Tank you, tank you," Meowth bowed.
"Would you like an autograph, little girl?" Jessie asked, her red hair as long and strangely styled as on the anime.
"Well, actually-"
"Hey! What about us?" Brock yelled, his eyes tightly shut but still enabling him to miraculously see.
"Yeah! We're the good guys! You're supposed to root for the protagonists!" Dawn shouted at the top of her voice.
"Whatever. That's not what's important right now. What's important is why you're here and how you got here!" Kyo interupted what was about to become a large dispute.
"Mime, mime!" There it was! Mime Jr.! The cutest pokemon of all time!
I ran up and squeezed Mime Jr. to death and James started to tug at my arms to let go. I then introduced everyone.
"Yuki and Kyo, these are Jessie, James, Meowth, Dawn, Brock and Mime Jr. They are from the anime series Pokemon which is centered around a kid named Ash Ketchum who is on a quest to become the greatest pokemon master of all time. Jessie, James and Meowth are Team Rocket, the bad guys, and Brock and Dawn are Ash's friends"
"It's the truth," James agreed. "We've always known we were on TV."
"And Pokemon stars, these are Yuki and Kyo from the anime Fruits Basket. Fruits Basket is about a girl named Tohru Honda who finds out that Yuki and Kyo's family is cursed and every time they are hugged by someone of the opposite gender who is not a member of their family, they turn into the thirteen animals of the Chinese zodiac."
"Wow. She's really got us covered," Meowth said.
"May I ask what you are doing here?" Yuki asked.
"It all started with our latest plot to capture Pikachu," Jessie began. "The three of us, Team Rocket, were hiding in the shadows of some flora while the Twerp Troop was trying to catch a pokemon. Just as we were going to grab the poke-twerp and run, this swirling hole in the air comes from nowhere and inside is a picture of a pokemon that I, and apparently the twerps, had never seen before.
"Being the twerp he is, Ash went after it and Pikachu followed, along with the rest of the twerps. Not wanting to let Pikachu get away, we followed and ended up here. We couldn't find the twerp or Pikachu at all and when the other twerps found out that we were here too, we decided to team up for the time being to find Pikachu...and a way back to Sinnoh."
Another portal seeming to call to another person. Strange that Ash and Pikachu had been so easily tricked into following the vortex, just like Tohru, and then wound up disappearing, just like Tohru, but the rest who went through the portal, like Yuki and Kyo, wound up here. My grip loosened on Mime Jr. and James fell backwards.
"This is an odd chain of events," Yuki said. "Strange that a similar thing to us has happened to you." After voicing my thoughts so clearly, Yuki suggested that we should all go back to my secret base and figure out a plan.
--
"Huh...What...Where...?"
Blue-green eyes fluttered open and looked around the dark room. First left, then right, up, then down to see her body, tied to a wall at the wrists and legs. Next to her, a boy in a hooded T-shirt and jeans with dark hair, in the same position, was still unconscious. On her other side seemed to be empty places for others. Across the room was a strange creature in a glass tube. It was like a large yellow mouse with pointed ears browned at the tips, red cheeks, and a zig-zag tail in the shape a a lightning bolt, half brown, half yellow. Its eyes were closed and its ears were drooping as though it were too exhausted to move.
"What's...going...going on?"
"I see you have woke up," a mysterious voice said from the shadows.
"What's happening?" the girl asked more alert. "Where am I? How did I get here? Where are Yuki and Kyo?"
"So many questions but only so many answers I can give you, Miss Tohru Honda."
"How do you know my name?"
"I have my ways. When Ash over there wakes up maybe you and him can chat. For now, I'm off to find my final prize. And once I get the last of the collection of Pure-Hearts, I shall find the antidote of goodness and the world shall be swallowed by evil!"
"You can't do this! Someone will stop you!"
"Oh really? You think so? Then I guess I'll have to take care of that...later." Then the voice started laughing, pure evil ringing throughout the sound.
Tohru just stayed in her place, knowing that somehow or other, Yuki and Kyo would find her.
But would it be too late when they did?