I have two more tests, and then I've graduated college. Two.

I'm almost free.

I blink my eyes open to find myself in an endless expanse of white.

Hah, The Fixer must not have liked me telling everyone on the ship about him. Although, now that I'm looking around, I don't actually see him.

I've only been here twice before, after all, and there doesn't seem to be shadows in this plane of existence.

I wonder, is this U-2 or is this some other universe that The Fixer settled in? I have a hard time figuring out why anyone would choose to live in an endless expanse of white, but then again The Fixer was able to see into lots of dimensions from here. If I could do that, maybe I'd stay here too.

Instead of getting up, I flop back down and stare upwards into the white nothingness. Honestly, this place is a lot like I thought heaven would look like when I was young. All it would take is a set of giant golden gates-

Hello.

Somehow, as impossible as it would seem, I had missed a thirty foot tall set of gates, made of gold, shaped like harps with a small lock in the center.

I look around me again, but this gate is the only thing that's changed. I can even see past the bars to see that there's still just a white expanse beyond the gates.

As I think that, I can see a city forming out of nothing behind the gate, carved out of the nothing to resemble one of those central american cliff villages, buildings built into a cliff face.

Which means, something here is reading my mind and reacting to that. It might be the environment itself, since I have no idea how this world works.

Time to test some things out. "Gun" I whisper to myself, reaching a hand out and imagining a standard 1911. And there it was, shiny and fresh out of the box.

"Ammo." A green container of bullets had sprung up behind my feet.

"Computer"

"My computer"

"My desktop" Ah, that worked.

"Bed."

I close my eyes tight.

"Home."

When I open them...

Wooden floor under my feet. My bed, my computer. Closet, drawers... that pile of clothes I hadn't actually put into the hamper. A desk covered in not quite finished paperwork. Posters on the walls, from various shows I've watched. A collection of soda cans I hadn't throw out yet.

A bottle of sleeping pills, lying sideways on the desk.

Said sleeping pills spilled all over the floor.

A body, lying still, head down on the desk. Not breathing.

Right. I take a deep breath and tug on the corpse's shoulder. It falls over, and when it comes to rest on its back on the floor, I recognize the face as my own.

I sit down next to my corpse.

"You're an idiot." The corpse's mouth moves.

"So are you."

Somehow, I'm not surprised the corpse can talk.

"You killed yourself."

"You keep trying to kill yourself."

"You had a future as an engineer."

"So did you."

I glare at the corpse.

"What would you know?"

"I'm you."

I decide to ignore the thing.

"Mom will be distraught."

"Yeah, well, I can't exactly go back and fix it." I snap.

"And, knowing you," The corpse opens its eyes, and looks right into mine. "You wouldn't go back if you could. You coward."

That irks me. "I'm not a coward. I'm pragmatic."

"I'm just a manifestation of your thoughts, I don't think you're a coward, you think you are."

The corpse fades away, but my own voice doesn't.

"You decided to run. From responsibility, from pain, from your life. A life that was good, all things considered. And you continue to run, from everyone trying to get close to you."

"If you're truly me, you'll know why." I mutter. "And I'm working on that."

"Why do you hate yourself so much?"

"Because I don't get it!" I yell, only to be met with resounding silence. Calmer, "I don't get it. I don't get love, I don't get why everyone seems to think I can do things that I can't, I don't understand anyone else does what they do. I don't get why any of this is happening to me." I sit down on the edge of my bed. "Why doesn't my head work like everyone else's?"

"It does, you think you're special, but so does everyone else." The room fades and is replaced by one of the classrooms at college. "You just hate yourself for being so normal, so you decided you weren't normal."

"Right, decided." I shrug and look at the whiteboard. On it, scribbles of calculations, I don't quite get, yet should have learned some time ago... Mostly Fourier transforms. At bare minimum, I can follow the math, but I can't tell what it's supposed to be calculating.

"Decided."

"Then why can't I decide to be normal again?"

"You became the mask." The scene shift again to another room, my old karate dojo. "You wanted to be something different. Something special."

"And I couldn't." I hold my hand in front of my face and watch as the flesh grotesquely bubbles and melts into a sharp blade extending from my ulna. "So I ran."

"Ran from everything that mattered."

"God, I am a wuss."

"If you weren't, you wouldn't have taken the easy way-"

Suddenly, the environment collapses back into a white expanse and my other voice is cut off mid sentence.

"Ah, it's one of the humans."

I turn around to find two gray faces looking back at me. Neither of them are recognizable, with one being female and the other male, but past that completely... ordinary. Forgettable.

The female takes a step forward. "You must be confused, but all shall be answered in time."

The male steps forward. "You are in a new universe from your own."

"You have been sent here by a glitch of sorts."

"We're here to find you a suitable place to go."

"Before you ask, you can't go back."

"It would disrupt too much."

I can feel a headache forming. "Can you drop the Lutece twins act? I don't want to kill future me because he stole my future daughter. In the past." Yeah, I'm going to get quite the headache. "Uh, I've been here before. I've already been put into a different universe from my own. Of course, it wasn't to make it better." I murmur the last sentence to myself.

The two glance at each other. "I have no record of you being sent to any universe." Says the female one. "Which means that our rogue agent sent you there."

"Uh, yeah, that sounds about right." I sigh. "Apparently, I was sent to cause as much damage as possible to a universe."

"Damage?"

"How can you damage a universe?"

The two look at me like I'm talking nonsense.

"Uh, by utterly destroying fate's given path?" I ask.

"Fate isn't a real concept, despite how much you humans like it."

"So there is nothing to destroy."

...What? "That's not what the Fixer told me."

"Ah."

"That explains it."

"The Fixer is our rogue agent."

"He was exiled here for tampering with universes for entertainment."

"It seems he was able to draw from a new source."

"This universe is surprisingly malleable."

...Okay, are their brains wired together, or did they practice this beforehand? "Okay, so you're saying that The Fixer is lying to me?"

Two identical nods.

"If that's true, what else am I missing?" I narrow my eyes. "Because I just realized I took all his words on blind faith, and that's a cardinal sin for a man of science."

I, Meia, wake up in a cold sweat. Something is wrong. I don't know what, but something is wrong.

It's like an itch in the back of my mind. It wants me to do something, but I don't know what it could be.

I throw on some robes and exit my room. The hallway is empty, and the lighting is set to low for the night hours. The itch isn't going away.

Somehow, I feel like I need to do something.

I walk outside the dorm area into the halls and continue to move, not quite sure where my feet are taking me. Sure, I recognize the walls, but I don't know where I'll end up when my feet stop moving me.

Eventually, I stop in front of the drive core.

A big blue sphere, a remnant of older humans. Or some sort of inter-dimensional traveler. John insists it's called the Paksis, though I don't know where he got the name.

I open the door.

Inside, two faces I recognize even in the dim light.

Jura and Dita.

"Look, Meia's here too." Dita says as she sees me.

"Which means that all of us that got affected by the Paksis are here." Jura mutters.

"Mister Alien isn't here."

"He'll come." I say. But a small bit of uneasiness creeps into the back of my mind.

The Paksis sits in the center of the chamber, pulsing slowly.

"So, you both got an itch, huh?" Jura says. "I don't know why, but I felt I had to do... something."

"Yeah!" Dita hops onto one of the desks and starts swinging her legs. "But I asked Bel if there was anything on the radar, and I asked Gasco if there was anything she needed help with-"

I blink. "I thought Gascogne was on the day rotation."

"Yeah, I had to wake her." Dita replies. "Once I realized that it wasn't an attack, I figured it had something to do with the Paksis, seeing as it's so important."

A silence descends for a minute or two as we gaze at the sphere.

"It's a bit hard to accept that we're a cartoon for someone." Jura says thoughtfully. "It makes me feel like giving up."

"Giving up?" I eye the blond woman carefully.

"I mean, there's an end." Jura says, raising her hand to block out the light of the Paksis. "If we know we will succeed, I don't even feel like trying."

"But we don't know we'll succeed." Dita pipes up. "John says he screwed up a lot of things."

"Yes, but we're all alive, yes? And we overcame every challenge we've faced so far." Jura points out. "John said that was consistent. So, maybe things aren't that different."

I shake my head. "We have to keep trying, Giving up would let the harvesters win."

"And who even are those?" Jura asks. "For someone on our side, John sure is secretive." Before I can interject, Jura cuts me off. "Yes, I know he's a bundle of issues unto himself, but let's be realistic here. It's our survival."

"..."

Dita frowns. "But, he has to have a reason. He generally does things with a reason behind them."

"Generally, maybe. But he clearly doesn't feel some things are worth telling us." Jura grumbles. "I think we need to get him to tell us everything."

I sigh. "Just tie him down and interrogate him?"

"Of course not!" Jura crosses her arms. "Just ask him nicely. You two like him, don't you? Just sleep with him or something."

I can feel my face heating up, and Dita has the decency to blush for once. "He... is resistant to the idea." I say.

"Oh, whatever." Jura yells. "Where even is our resident inter-dimensional whosit?"

"Mister Alien sure is late." Dita pokes her head out into the hallway. "He's not eavesdropping."

The itch comes back. "I'm going to check on him."

Dita and Jura fall in behind me with barely a nod in acknowledgement.

Because the Paksis and the prison section are both in the male section of the ship, it doesn't really take long to find John.

He's tossing and turning on his bed, moaning about betrayal.

Jura catches my eye and sighs.

Dita disables the bars and kneels down beside John. "Mister Alien, wake up." She grabs his shoulder and starts shaking. "Please wake up."

If anything, John starts struggling harder.

Jura also moves over to assist Dita, and I scan the room.

John's not really a neat person. Everything's relatively clean, but there's piles of stuff lying around. In one corner, there's a pile of clothes. In another, his bags.

John throws his arm to the side and something falls from his bed to the floor. I bend over and pick it up.

"...Vandread?"

"So." I cross my arms."You guys don't do the 'transport heroes to other worlds' bit."

The male shakes his head.

"And you don't do course correction for universes headed for bad ends."

"No." The female answers.

I drop my head into my hands. "I've been played pretty hard."

"The Fixer, as you know him, is very manipulative. He decided to interfere with other universes rather than chronicle them as we are supposed to."

"Great." I rub at my eyes. "You guys make a much more compelling case than he does, that's for sure."

"It is because we have the truth."

I shake my head. "So, how destructive is it to have the parent media in a universe?"

"Parent media?" The male asks.

For the first time, the two act as if they don't share a brain.

"He means the book on which this new universe he finds himself is based upon, but I fear that is backwards."

I roll my eyes. "Okay, I mean, how bad is it to have the entire story inside itself?"

The male shrugs. "Not bad at all. What is distressing is that he is recording history from one universe to put into others, namely U-3."

"Put into?" I ask.

"Yes. It appears that he has been influencing U-3 by giving it stories of other universes."

"He will be punished, once caught."

Once more back in sync, I see. "Alright, then I guess... Can you send me back to the universe I was in?"

The two raise their eyebrows in unison. "I thought you would have liked to go back home."

I laugh slightly. "Yeah, but I'm a bit... dead over there."

"Ah."

"That would put a damper on things."

"We could fix it so he survives."

"We do not meddle, we observe and record."

"Yet, our hand has been forced. Any way we choose to act, we interfere." They turn to look at me.

"...For what it's worth, I think I should go back to the Vandread universe. I feel I owe them for screwing up their happy ending."

"As you wish."

"We shall send you back."

"Er, and one last thing." I hold up a hand. "How did I get here this time?"

The male looks me in the eyes. "Your grip on your universe has been severed. you don't belong anywhere. Sometimes, driftwood ends up in the current between oceans." Then he snaps his fingers, and darkness envelops me.

Near darkness, at least. After the brightness of U-2, anything short of an operating theater would look kind of dark.

"Mister Alien! Wake up!" Dita practically yells in my ear.

"Ow! What's the matter with you? It's... What are you looking at me like that for?"

Dita tackles me into a bear hug. "You wouldn't wake up! We kept trying to wake you up, but you were stuck in your dreams."

"Uhg. Yeah, that was-" My eyes finally adjust enough to see that Meia and Jura are both in here as well... And Meia is holding a familiar DVD case.

"So, you lied to us again." Meia says, her eyes blank. "I thought you weren't going to lie to us anymore."

"I didn't! I didn't have that until today..." I cough, and Dita releases her death grip around my waist. "I just found it."

"Uh huh." Meia looks at the cover. "Of course you did."

"Look, remember that Fixer guy? Turns out he's the guy who sent me here, and he likes screwing with people. I bet he sent this." I say desperately.

"John."

"...Yes?"

"I'm going to take this. Tomorrow, we are going to sit down, and we are going to discuss some things."

I droop my head. "Yeah."

"Are we gonna watch the show?" Dita asks, excitement replacing her fading concern. "I wanna watch the show!"

Jura looks down at the cover of the DVD case. "That's what I look like when drawn as an anime character, huh? And there's Barnette too."

"How can you tell? The only similarity is the green hair." Meia states.

"And her favorite uniform! Plus, She and I are together just like in real life!" Jura smirks.

Meia squints. "I suppose we should watch it. We need to decide who we're going to share this thing's existence with."

Oh, this is gonna be so much fucking fun.

It ended up being six: Aside from the core quartet, Zan and Barnette had joined. I don't exactly know why Zan got invited, but I find that arguing doesn't do me any favors.

Right now, Dita and I are soldering wires to a projector. Since my laptop isn't exactly large, Jura had suggested the screen in her room, since it's a good four feet wide and she has those sofas.

The room smells of popcorn.

"John, hurry up." Jura says. "I want to see my big screen debut!"

Barnette is staring at the DVD case. "This doesn't look like me at all, aside form the hair color and the clothes."

Meia sighs. "John said that was you."

Barnette shoots me a glare. "Are you up to something again?"

I set down the soldering iron carefully. "Barnette, if I was, then would I be slaving away over this stupid projector?"

"What's taking you two so long?" Zan asks.

"Well, this 'ancient' projector," I grumble, picking the iron back up. "Is the only one that has a connector I can pretend to recognize."

"It seems that the curse of backwards compatibility actually helps for once."

I shake my head. "I still can't believe that you guys are still only on HDMI 4."

"We're not, this is an old projector!" Dita raps my forehead gently with her knuckles. "HDMI is too limiting with it's bandwidth. That's why we eventually dumped it."

"Again, surprised you actually kept it for as long as you did." I carefully solder another strand onto a pad. "But at least we have the start of a theater." My poor HDMI cable isn't going to be useful for anything but this projector from now on anyway, so might as well make it into something, right?

"And, done!" Dita announces. Sure enough, as she plugs the other end of the cable into the port on the side of my laptop, the projector springs to life. The DVD menu screen is playing and the triumphant music starts playing. Dita moves over to the couch, and I press "play all."

...The only seat left is right between Meia and Dita. Once I sit down, they both scootch a bit closer to me, and Zan leaves her seat to sit on my feet. It would be adorable, but now I can't move.

It's been set to Japanese audio, and the subtitles are off. The pure experience.

Of course, the opening rant against women immediately sets everyone's teeth on edge, and Barnette is even glaring daggers at me.

After that, Hibiki does the whole climbing into the spaceship thing, there's a party, and he gets caught.

"Wow, Hibiki is really..." Meia says.

"...Awkward?" Jura finishes.

"Yes."

"He gets worse." I try to roll my shoulders, but they're trapped.

We end up watching the first three episodes, in which time There was four exclamations of "I don't look anything like that", Meia got irked even more than her animated counterpart at Hibiki, and Zan kept giggling to herself each time she thought of me attempting to act the same way as Hibiki. Dita also decried that she wasn't that clumsy, and tried to go leave to apologize to Bart for almost taking his head off when crashing into the Ikazuchi, but those were both shot down rather quickly by Meia.

"Well, I can see why you remembered everyone else's names so quickly." Zan mumbles. "They say them every thirty seconds."

Jura sure seems to be enjoying herself though. "That was entertaining! It is glorious to look upon myself, even rendered in such low detail as that."

I can't help myself. "But Jura, 2D is better than 3D."

She looks at me in confusion. So does everyone else, and suddenly I realize how much trouble I'm in.

"Er, it's an in- its a joke from a community I used to belong to. They say that 2D girls are better than 3D girls."

Dita puts her index finger to her cheek. "But then you can't talk to them, right? So what's the point?"

"Well, most of them don't have girlfriends, and a 2D image can't say no." I say.

Zan narrows her eyes. "You say you belonged to this community?"

"Uh."

Meia also narrows her eyes. "John..."

I hold my hands up in defense. "I wasn't one of them! I didn't do the whole waifu thing!"

"Waifu?"

Keep digging yourself a deeper hole, idiot. I take a breath and buckle down to explain so very odd things.

A day later, and some news had spread around the ship. Not anything critical like the fact that their lives were the subject of a TV show or that said DVD was onboard the ship, but something that still mattered to me.

At home, we have this thing called a permanent marker. It's not actually permanent, but it does take some scrubbing to take off.

Apparently, someone in the Vandread universe decided to fix it to make it really permanent with some special solvent, which I don't have access to. Also, the five women who had watched the first three episodes with me hadn't liked the explanations I had given about Otaku culture, each time I opened my mouth it seemed a new line formed on Meia's forehead.

This is why I'm currently walking around with two (painted) black eyes, the word "Pervert" on my forehead, and a handlebar mustache that no amount of scrubbing will remove. I'm told that the ink actually attaches to cells and penetrates the skin a few layers, so I'd have to rub half of the skin on my face off to get rid of it. Also, who's the pervert here? Dita watches friggin mermaid overdrive or whatever. Why doesn't she have pervert written on her forehead?

Or, I could just transform it away, but I figure I'll let them have their fun.

Today I'm eating with Bart, for what's probably the first time since he moved out of the cell. He doesn't seem to mind the face paint.

"So, you know the future, huh?"

I glance around, but nobody else is in easy earshot. Partly the nanites thing (apparently, the ability to spontaneously eat people is frowned upon) and partly my new facial tattoos, I'd wager. "Not particularly. I know a way that this could go, not how it is going."

"But you still know a lot about what's going to happen, right?"

I look at the blue eyes of desperately hopeful boy and sigh. "I guess, but I reserve the right to not tell you even if I do know."

"You're no fun." He says, but his face lights up nonetheless. "So, do I have a chance with BC?"

Well, I guessed his motives right. "Maybe."

"Aw, come on. You must know I'm planning on confessing to her!" He pleads. "I'm gonna ask her out at the Christmas party."

"...At bare minimum, work on your handwriting." I mutter, and take another bite of sandwich.

"Handwriting...? Do I need to write a letter as well?"

I glance at him. What? "Aren't you going to ask her out?"

"No, I was thinking of giving her some pellets from my company."

It takes me a second, but I eventually remember. Oh! The seven pellet set. Well, I don't know what happens when you give it to her, especially since this time we had more than a day to prepare." I say around my bite. Then I swallow. "Something I did affected the crew enough to hang decorations early, or at least tell us early."

Bart looks around at the paper chains decorating the hall. "I don't think I'm dumb enough to miss those."

"Definitely decorating early." I take another bite. Mmm, Mayonnaise.

Duelo sits down next to Bart and stares at me. I ignore him in favor of my sandwich, but I have a feeling that's about to change.

"John, I wish to speak to you about your knowledge of the future." Duelo say calmly.

Amusingly, Bart looks around furtively this time as if he hadn't just asked himself. "Jeez, Duelo! What is someone heard that?"

"Like I said to Bart," I begin, shooting the blond a look. "I'll answer what I can, but I reserve the right to hold back information that I don't want you to know."

"Fair enough." Duelo leans over his tray and folds his arms on the table. "I would like to inquire about Parfet."

I take another bite, and notice that I'm running dangerously low on excuses to ignore people, and I'm still hungry. "What about her?"

"I want to know what I should get her. It seems that everyone exchanges gifts on the 25th, and I'd like to give her something." Duelo's eye that I can see is boring into mine.

"...And?"

"I had an idea, but I asked Pyoro and he started yelling at me, saying it was unromantic. I wanted to ask what romantic was and how to make my gift qualify." Duelo finishes.

I swallow and lean back slightly. "Okay, visualizing blood cells in a stream isn't romantic." Duelo blinks, which means I guessed how present right at least. "Romantic stuff is supposed to give a person happy fluttery thoughts. You know, like you feel around Parfet."

Rather than blushing, Duelo nods.

"Anyway, try to think of a way to express those feelings. All else fails, paint the blood picture. She'll probably like it as long as it's from you. Probably."

"Hmm." Duelo starts mechanically eating his food.

"So..." Bart get a mischievous grin. "What are you getting your lovely ladies?"

I raise my free hand and pull down a finger with each item in the list. "I'm making a small drone for Dita shaped like a UFO, singing something for Zan, and for Meia... I still haven't decided. I might offer to spend some quality time with her, she doesn't really seem the type for material gifts."

"Why don't you ask her what she likes?" Bart taps his knife on the table. "You hang out with her enough that should have plenty of chances."

"That's suicide." I smile slightly. "Never try that, they'll kill you for just upright asking."

"Really?"

"Yep. And if a woman says either she doesn't want anything, you better have something really nice come Christmas."

Bart sinks down in his chair. "This is hard."

I reach over and pat him on the shoulder. "Welcome to living with girls."

Next episode: Christmas!

Hopefully I'll have it written before Christmas day, but I make no promises.

Correction: I make lots of promises, I keep none of them.;