Author's Note: Bold means that the characters are speaking english, but this only really applies to characters who try to speak both languages at certain times, like our girls and two of the new characters introduced in this chapter. Yeah, yeah.
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The sun rose unsteadily over the small nation of Darcia, as though it were not exactly confident about being there. To be fair, the small nation of Darcia had seen better days, and right now its tiny face was not the sort of place where celestial bodies would be pleased to play upon.
Darcia was a small nation among small nations. It was a country that could be described only as "meh." The nation wasn't exceptionally rich, but the Darcian people were not poverty stricken. The leaders weren't the greatest people in the world, but they were by no means despots. Darcia had friends, Darcia had enemies, Darcia was more or less entirely unremarkable as a country.
That is, it was unremarkable until only recently.
Recently, something had come into the sky which had the capacity to rival the sun in terms of unsteadiness. This rival was no celestial body, and to be fair, it would be pretty hard to mistake it for one, as it flew like a cross between a fledgling bird and a helicopter with a drunken pilot. It whirled about the sky, making it perfectly clear that it didn't belong and didn't care that it didn't belong. As if to punctuate its point, it did a flip and then a barrel roll for the sheer unadulterated joy of it.
This flying atrocity was, of course, none other than the BAD headquarters, soaring around the Darcian skies, looking for another small town from which to extort cheese, crackers, and booze.
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"Um... Tomo..."
"Yes, Sakaki?"
"This is a Japanese restaurant, but..."
"I thought I'd explained that! I've been stranded away from traces of the motherland for longer than I can remember, and if you're gonna try to keep me from it, then I'm going to punch you with my ring."
"It's not that. This isn't just a Japanese restaurant... it's a bar."
"Better!"
"Oh... dear... this is a sushi bar, isn't it?" whispered Chiyo.
"Yeah, why?" asked Sakaki.
"Because... you'll see."
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General Gomeran frowned at the sky. To be more specific, he frowned at what was in the sky.
Miles and miles away from the Kyrzygstanian front, and still we've got no peace? No, of course not... we've got to deal with this... thing! It's an atrocity!
He watched dejectedly as another missile arced into the sky, only to find its target doing a back-flip in an entirely different region. Frustrated, the missile self-destructed.
We're never gonna hit that thing by aiming at it. It doesn't move with any rhyme or reason!
There's a reason that Gomeran was placed far from the front lines of the battlefield. Gomeran was not exactly a stellar general. It would be a stretch, even, to call him a good general. While he wasn't particularly stupid, he was short-tempered, and things like that generally lead to things like this.
"To hell with aiming! Just fire a curtain of missiles at it! One of them's bound to hit!"
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Kaori Aida stood with her fellow astrophysicists on the ballroom floor of the flying hotel that had become the BAD headquarters. The love of astronomy which had existed since high school eventually translated itself into a physics degree and work at a minor scientific institution in southern Japan. While she had not exactly stood out in high school, in college she'd shown a tremendous aptitude and devotion to the field she loved. As a result, she had eventually distinguished herself enough that the BAD decided to send her an invitation.
She sipped her drink quietly, looking out the window expectantly, watching a small cloud.
The cloud spun madly and then raced out of the window.
That is to say, the BAD building spun madly and turned in an entirely new direction, likely for no reason.
Kaori sipped her drink again, which hadn't spilled. She glanced over at her colleagues and grinned. Their recently invented gravity generator was doing its job marvelously, and the members of BAD could never be happier. After all, drinks stayed where they were, nobody fell out of their impromptu thrones while brooding, and best of all the pilots didn't have to listen to anyone complaining about spilled drinks or spoiled moments.
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"So anyway, how's everyone been doin'... romance-wise?" asked a grinning Osaka.
Sakaki blushed slightly. "Ah, a little here and there, but nothing ever came of it."
"Nothing or nobody?"
"Ah, not much here either," Kagura added, saving Sakaki from the heat of the moment. "Too busy, what with the training and all." Kagura noted the sparkle in Osaka's eyes and decided to cut her off before she could make any embarrassing comments. "But what about you and Chiyo?"
"Ah, here an' there, y'know."
"Hey, don't sell yourself short, Osaka." started Chiyo. "There's something about Osaka that just seems to draw in a lot of people of all kinds. I'm not sure what it is, but she conducts herself with a kind of grace and elegance that's... I don't know, otherworldly."
"So then, does she have a boyfriend?" asked Yomi.
"Not at the moment. I think the fact that she lives with me, coupled with... er... Osaka's uniqueness of mind drives them off after a while."
"But what about you, Yomi?" asked Osaka, switching the subject away from her.
"I... ah... erm... Damnit! It's not fair that Tomo gets to skip out on this just because she went to the bathroom!"
"Skip out on what?" Tomo said with a grin, switching her cloak's display to a bright yellow happy face which was both frighteningly adorable and offensive to the eyes.
"Love life discussion!" shouted Osaka, reveling in the fact that aside from the restaurant owners, it was unlikely that anyone would understand their conversations.
"Oh, right. So, Yomi, what were you saying about yours?"
"Ah... erm... Wait, where's our waitress? We've been here for a while, haven't we?"
"Oh, that's right. I saw her coming on my way to the bathroom, so I took the liberty of ordering for you guys. Saves us all time, don'tcha think?"
"Tomo... what did you order?"
"Food! Delicious food!" she glanced at her friends a bit, then added, "And booze."
Their waitress arrived at that moment as though she were simply summoned for the convenience of some Tomo-favoring god, carrying hot plates filled with delicious food. She started setting down the various dishes at the table, smiling a polite little waitress's grin, and then reached over to the drinks and placed them down as well. She paused and looked at Chiyo for a few seconds.
"Are you sure you should be drinking this stuff? Can you show me an ID?"
Chiyo sighed and flashed her ID card.
"Oh! Ah, sorry, Doctor Mihama!"
The waitress left in a fluster, fearing for her tip.
"Before any of you ask," Chiyo said. "No, my love life isn't exactly flourishing. I suspect that it's for more or less the same reason as my being carded."
Osaka burst out in laughter. "Bwahahaha!"
"It's not that funny!"
"Ahahaha! It's not that, Chiyo, it's... it's... Ahahaha!"
"What is it? What's so funny?" asked Tomo.
"You don't want her to tell you." Chiyo replied.
"Bwahaha!"
"Sure I do! Osaka, what's so funny?"
"Sushi rolls! Bwaaahaha!"
"Sushi rolls?"
"Bwehehe," Osaka giggled, wiping the tears from her eyes. "It's a roll, right! Well, with a Japanese accent, we get the 'L' and 'R' sound mixed up, right? Sushi Lorr! Sushi Lore! It's a Fish Tale! You... you know... and these things are little fishy tails! Bwahahaha! They're... they're fish tail fish tales! Fwahahah!" Osaka concluded by pointing and laughing at her sushi some more. "Heheheh!"
"I think that those kind of jokes are funnier when they're intuitive." concluded Sakaki, prompting a nod from Kagura, Tomo, and Yomi.
"Bwehehehe!"
"This is why we can never return to the same Japanese restaurant. They'll probably spit in our food if we do." Chiyo concluded.
"Hey, in that case, don't leave a tip." added Tomo.
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Kaori grinned at the man running towards her. He was an engineer, and she'd learned a few things about engineers in her short stay at BAD. The eccentric engineers in the Dominion were quite fond of taking good ideas and then ratcheting them up a few notches. Kaori's good ideas were, of course, no exception.
"Hey, Kaorin-kun! Gotta see what with your invention done was!" he shouted in fairly mangled Japanese.
"She love to see that, yes!" she answered in equally mangled English.
"Er, right. Anyway, would you like to come and watch?" he asked her, switching back to English.
"Sure Leo, I would love to."
Leonardo was one of the few friends Kaori had actually made in BAD. He had run up to her one day and tried to speak some very mangled Japanese at her, and she laughed at him and decided to reply with her admittedly shoddy English. After all, engineers and physicists had little need to study foreign languages past high school. The meanings got through, of course, and they'd managed to forge a friendship that was entirely unrelated to work.
She followed the childlike engineer to the windows. He beckoned her closer, and so she went right up to them. He pointed down, and she followed his finger.
There was a curtain of missiles rising rapidly towards the BAD headquarters.
"Holy shit!" Kaori exclaimed.
"He's just a few long bombs, Kaorin-kun."
"That's not just a few missiles, Leo! That is a veritable wall of explosive doom, and we are in its path!"
Then, as she watched, the missiles began to curve somewhat away from the Headquarters. Then they curved somewhat more. After a while, they were spiraling in on a point, and as they collided with each other the missiles exploded in a brilliant but mostly harmless display.
"Leonardo... what just happened there?"
"We started tinkering with one of your gravity generators, right? Yeah, fun things, those. So we messed around with them a lot. Cranked up the power a lot, and we had a lot of fun making things heavy for no reason, but after a while that got boring. So we started working on projection. These things can now project gravity somewhat. You know black holes, right? Well, just imagine that your machine can now create one of those things at, say, a hundred meters away from the Dominion Headquarters. Of course, it's not nearly as strong as a black hole, but it's substantial enough to deflect projectiles, and if we were feeling really mean, we could probably drop it on top of a plane or something."
"Run that by me again in Japanese."
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General Gomeran stared up at the brilliant fireball in the sky and watched it vanish even faster than it had appeared.
He considered it an apt metaphor for his military career.
Some of his more cynical colleagues would note that Gomeran never had a period in his career that could be considered brilliant.
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"I think is her eyesh," whispered a rather drunk Chiyo to Yomi.
"Her... eyes?" Yomi looked at the little prodigy sitting across from her, noting that with her small frame, it was likely that she didn't handle alcohol too well.
"Yah, yah. Y'look at 'em, and yeh suddenly notice that somthin's not totally righ abou' em. Ish like they're peerin' intah another worl', or somethin'. Shih, I betcha that they're tha reason that she'sh so good with tha boyz. Jush' looks at 'em with them big brown eysh, and bam! gotcha bish!"
"You mean Osaka, right?" Yomi whispered.
"Kashuga!"
"Gesundheit!"
"Yah, yah, whatever. Seeh, I'm somewha jealus of 'er. Sur, sur, I gots the brains of da operation, righ? Yeh'd say tha, but she's really tha brains. I jus' make stuff from good idears, but she's tha one wif the actual good idears! Ish that damnedable dreamin' thing!"
"But it's a good relationship, isn't it? That's what you told me."
"Yah, but shtill, it feelsh pretty bad to be dependen' on someone, even if they're alsho dependen' on me."
"Can you do anything about it?"
"I tried, Mizuhara. I tried har'. Shee, I gots this hat, y'know. 'cause she likes hats, so there mus' be somethin' about hats. You kin' extrapolate everything' in the univershe from any bit o' matter, right, becuz' by an' large matter's mosly made o' the same shtuff. So I puts a piece of cake in the hat's gizmos, and blammo! It shud help me shee the univershe. Not tha' it kin' create the univer' or anythin', buh it can enhance mah viewsh of it! It's like some kinda dream enhancer, or somethin'. I calls it Imagination Cake, y'see?"
"Did it work?"
"No."
"Oh."
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Rémy Beaufort poked at his sushi impatiently, because one can only idly play with food for so long before becoming impatient with it.
He watched the commotion several tables over, worrying that the girls would leave before his impromptu agents would arrive. His fears were confirmed when the six got up and started to leave.
No!
He watched the girls finish off their meals, the one with the cloak nearly blinding him with its ridiculous colors. One of them, one who stood out despite not having any terribly distinguishing features, started to accost nearby guests with a piece of sushi, waving it at them and saying things that Rémy could not hear.
Where are you whelps?
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Author's Notes: I have no idea what being drunk is like, so I'm simply trying to type as much like a 12 year-old MySpacer as possible. This may or may not be accurate.
Language jokes are haaard to come up with. Haaard. So hard that they should probably have a new word designed specifically to describe language jokes, only using hard consonant sounds to help define the difficulty of writing them. Something like Tigbigotet, except even harsher.
As for anyone reading both this fic and Endeavors (my god, I'm terrible at coming up with names), I'm going to alternate updates for them. One day I'll update this fic, and then the next day(assuming I'm a good little writer and keeping on schedule) I'll write an update for the other fic. This allows ideas to ferment in my mind, simply because after they've aged they tend to get a little zanier and more fun to write about.
