What Really Happened to Yui

(Or, "A Cautionary Fable")



Jenny Finkelstein sat alone in the computer room at midnight, all by herself in the house. Her parents had gone out to see a movie, and her yucky little brother had gone to spend the night at his friend's house. The only noises audible were the distant hum of the heater and the clicking of the keyboard beneath Jenny's fingers.

'Gosh, it's so nice to be alone in the house! I can finally work on my fanfic for once!' thought Jenny.

As Jenny typed, she heard a faint rustle, like a scratching noise, underneath the window. 'I bet it's just the wind,' she thought to herself, and kept on typing. A few seconds later, it repeated, more grating and loud this time.

"Oh, my god! What IS that?" Jenny asked aloud, pulling away from the keyboard and standing up. "Gawd, this is too scary! I'm getting out of here!"

She bolted from the room, leaving the computer on and the file open, and dashed into the kitchen. Panicking, she wrung her hands, grabbed the telephone receiver, and quickly dialed her best friend's number.

"Jenny?" came the sleepy voice over the phone. "Is this, like, important?"

"Yeah! Oh my god, it's terrible! There's something outside my window! I don't know what to do!"

"Hey! Calm down! I don't think it's, like, anything bad..."

"Oh, gawd!" shrieked Jenny, coming to a sudden realization. "And I left my Backstreet Boys CDs in that room too! What if something happens to THEM?!"

As the line crackled with static for a few seconds, Jenny heard a sharp, grating squeal from her bedroom, followed by a rattling noise and a clunk. "Oh, no! Oh no! Cindy, I'll talk to you later! I bet there's a mass murderer in the house or something!"

Dropping the phone on the floor, Jenny followed the only course of action she could think of for a person in her situation: she went back down the darkened hall and looked into the bedroom.

"H...hello?"

Sitting at the computer chair was a figure dressed entirely in flowing white robes, focusing with apparent intent on the screen. The window was half-open, the curtains flapping aimlessly in the cold breeze.

"Hello?" Jenny called again. The figure looked up, and she repressed a shriek: it had no facial features save for two dark eyeslits staring out of an ivory-white, smooth, nearly flat visage.

"It's just a mask," came a muffled, androgynous voice from somewhere inside that ghostly face.

"O-oh. Gawd, you scared me there for a minute!" breathed Jenny. Then she came to a sudden realization: 'Wait a minute, I'm STILL scared.'

"D-d-do you like my fanfic?" Jenny offered, trying to grin.

The phantom face turned toward her again. "Fan... fic?"

"Yeah, my Xenogears fanfic!" Jenny fluttered her eyelashes, trying to look cute and innocent. She chanced a few steps closer to the figure in the chair.

The intruder's gaze returned to the screen. "What is it about?"

'Wowo! This, uh, thing likes Xenogears too? What if he turns out to be a cute guy under the mask? That would be the greatest!' thought Jenny to herself. Trying to contain her excitement, she managed, "It's about Citan."

"Citan... and Yui?" The intruder assayed the screen once again, sounding strangely curious.

"Er, no... Yui dies in my story," explained Jenny, tucking a fold of hair behind her ear and trying to appear casual. Fearful now of incurring the wrath of the intruder, she quickly amended, "But Citan falls in love with someone else, so don't worry."

"Someone... else?"

"Er, yeah," Jenny explained, blushing a little with a mixture of pride and the increment thought that this person really might turn out to be a cute guy. "He falls in love with a character I made up."

If that featureless face had any eyebrows to raise, it certainly would have done so. Or at least that was the impression Jenny somehow got.

Flashing her most fetching smile now, she went on, "Er, yeah, I made a character named Mary Sue for the story. She's Kislev's strongest warrior, and they all find her after the defeat of Deus, because somehow her Gear still works and she can still use Ether, and they find out that her Ether rating is even higher than Fei and Elly's."

"That is impossible." The intruder's voice sounded oddly stiff and mechanical now. "Fei and Elly have infinite Ether capacity ratings. You cannot exceed infinity."

"Well, er..." Jenny felt herself beginning to blush. 'What if it isn't REALLY a cute guy? What if it's some gross robot or something?' She clasped her hands and smiled, and went on, "Well, see, in my story, Citan finds out a way to make a machine that can measure Ether ratings at really really high levels, even ones that are supposedly infinite, and Mary Sue's turns out to be the highest of anyone he's ever tested. Then later on, Miang gets resurrected and starts making Deus 2, and they all have to stop her, and Mary Sue is the only one who's powerful enough to fight Miang, and--"

"Stop!" The intruder's voice rose to a high pitch, and with a whirl of white robes, it rose from the chair.

"But, but, I'm not finished!" Jenny gasped. "See, in the end, after they defeat Miang, Citan and Mary Sue get married, and she becomes Midori's new mother and she can talk to her 'cause she's also telepathic, and she and Citan have a son named Citan Jr., and later on I'm going to make him the hero of his own story, called 'The Quest for General Leo and Aeris--'"

"Silence! You shame the name of my husband!" Jenny's mouth fell open, but before she could produce so much as a word, the intruder pulled a large wooden mallet out of a fold of its robe and bonked the wide-eyed girl soundly on the head. She fell to the ground in a heap.

"Hmph." Yui Uzuki sighed and tucked the wooden mallet back inside of her robe. Exhaling slowly, she pulled the mask off her sweat-damp face, feeling the sword holstered at her side knocking against her ankle. This one, fortunately, hadn't been troublesome enough to necessitate the use of the sword. She'd be out for a good ten minutes.

Bending over the computer, Yui clicked on the file labeled "MarySue.txt" and deposited it in the Recycle Bin.

Drawing a sheath of folded paper out of her robe, Yui borrowed a pencil from Jenny, scratched out a paragraph near the end of a long list, and winced, noticing that the pencil had the Backstreet Boys logo on it. 'Oh, well, better than nothing,' she thought. She still had a long night of work ahead of her.

Her eyes skipped down past the crossed-out paragraph labeled "Finkelstein, Jenny" and went on to the next name. "Bricker, Tiffany. Wrote a story where Fei and Citan became lovers and Fei, upon seeing Yui kissing Citan, turned into Id and killed Yui by ripping her heart out of her chest, leaving Fei and Citan free to marry." Below that was a printed address.

Tucking the papers back inside of her robe, Yui clambered out of Jenny's window, shutting it firmly behind her on the way. It wasn't easy being an avenger of bad fanfiction. It made it a little easier, at any rate, to know that her husband would always be at her side no matter what she chose to do about it.

~Fin.~