Second Chances
Chapter 2: Strange Bedfellows
The TouchingIn the darkness, a tiny light flickered. Silently. Rhythmically. Blinkingly.
3:34 A.M.
"Mmmmm…oh yes…Kiyone…you're so…mmmmm….mmfpphffssffff…" Mihoshi's drowsy mumble faded as her face planted itself squarely against Kagato's neck. Mihoshi's hot breath pressed unrelentingly against Kagato and the rest of her body soon followed suit.
Kagato lay wide awake, her eyes staring at the unadorned wooden beams of the ceiling. Penetratingly. Unyieldingly. Ready to planet-crunch, if she could just remember where she put that damn ship.
Enough was enough. This was the third time in five nights that Mihoshi had managed to worm her way out of her futon and into Kagato's, and it was time to do something about it.
Irritably, Kagato wondered whether expending the energy it took to teleport the two of them over the lake and dump Mihoshi in would be worth the effort, or if a simple and effective shove would work better.
Suddenly, a warm, moist hand wormed its way into her pajama bottoms.
"Oh Kiyone…"
Seconds later, a faint light appeared over the lake accompanied by a tremendous splash.
"WAH! I'm all wet!" Mihoshi wailed as she bobbed and sputtered in the freezing night water, her bright blonde hair a streak of gold on black, the loosened top of her yellow ducky pajamas floating about her.
"Yes, and that was why I dumped you in the lake." Kagato floated a few feet above the splashing waves, the pale green flame in her hand illuminating the pink bunnies on her pajamas, giving them an eerie cast.
"You're so mean to me!" Mihoshi's lower lip trembled as icy waves splashed across her face.
Kagato's eyes narrowed. "We have had this conversation before, Mihoshi. There is to be no touching, especially in bed."
Mihoshi's lips trembled even more. A glint of moisture appeared in the corner of her eyes that had absolutely nothing to do with the dunking she just received.
"Fine. Let us return to the house." With that, Kagato caught up Mihoshi by the scruff of her pajamas, and the two of them disappeared in a blink.
"Here." As they appeared inside the confines of the house, Kagato tossed Mihoshi a bathrobe.
"Where did you get that?" Mihoshi was astonished.
"Somewhere. Nowhere. I don't know, don't ask me these things," Kagato muttered as she leaned glumly against the kitchen counter. She picked at a pink bunny on her pajamas. How was she to know that these things weren't carnivorous on this backwards hick planet? These had always been her favorite animals back when she was a little boy. Ryoko had nearly busted a lung laughing when they ran into each other in the hallway the other night.
Across the kitchen, Mihoshi shivered pathetically, an occasional sniffle coming from her as she left damp marks and puddles of lake water on the tile.
"Why are you so mean to me?" Mihoshi whimpered. Kagato looked away from her at the floor, mildly disgusted. Though part of her was not sure who she was more disgusted at. The disgust levels rose considerably after that little epiphany.
"Because you're still talking."
"You're an awful, awful person."
"You don't say."
"Why are you so horrible to me?"
"We have already discussed this touching thing before, Mihoshi. I don't like it. You don't do it to me. If you do, I get angry. When I get angry, unpleasant things happen. Perhaps you should ask Ryoko about 'what happens when Kagato gets angry.' I'm sure it would be enlightening."
At that, the floodgates opened, and tears poured down Mihoshi's cheeks.
Kagato winced internally as Mihoshi sobbed into the sleeve of her bathrobe, soaking the only marginally dry piece of clothing she had on with her tears.
"You hate me!" Mihoshi wailed.
"Quiet you…no…wait, I don't hate…ah, damnit." Kagato cursed. If Mihoshi kept up this infernal racket at this hour, half the house would be downstairs in seconds. Kagato racked her brains for clues as to how to deal with the situation. Suddenly inspiration struck in the form of commercial television.
"Listen, Mihoshi. Why don't we sit down and have a nice cup of…cup of…hot cocoa?" Kagato said, as she mentally ran through her limited knowledge of low budget daytime television.
"Really? So you don't hate me?" Mihoshi wiped away the remnants of her tears.
"No, I don't hate you." Kagato began to count prime numbers up to seventeen digits to keep herself calm.
"Can we have hot cocoa together then?" Mihoshi visibly brightened.
"Yes, we may. But first answer me this one question, and then I can see what I can to do about getting you a hot cocoa."
"What is it?"
"What's hot cocoa?"
Hot cocoa appeared to be the very incarnate of liquid hell: hot, sickly sweet, and made with lactose products. Kagato's eye twitched as she forced herself to take another sip. Gods, it tasted bad. She could feel her blood pressure rise and her stomach churn as Mihoshi babbled away happily.
"…So then Kiyone said to me, 'Hey dumbass, watch what you're doing!' And then things started blowing up and, oh my, it was a really big explosion and then later it turns out that we were lucky because I only scraped the paint on Yukinojo but he wasn't too happy about it because he said he wanted to go on a date with this really hot ship that he had met last week and then Kiyone got mad and yelled at me and said something about putting me in the airlock and…"
"…And what an interesting adventure it was." Kagato finished, as she set down her cup of cocoa with a sense of finality. She was beginning to like this Kiyone character more and more. Airlocks. She smiled faintly to herself.
"Exactly! Next time I have to make Kiyone come back with me so you can meet her, because Kiyone's the best partner in the whole wide universe! She's always telling me that if it wasn't for me, she'd be the highest ranking Galaxy Police officer in the whole force!"
"That's lovely, Mihoshi. But you must be getting very tired from telling me your story. Perhaps we should go back to bed." Kagato suppressed a yawn as she looked up at the clock. It was nearly 5 A.M.
"Tired? I'm not really that tired."
"No, Mihoshi. You must be worn out from your little swim."
"Oh, I'm not really that tired. The water must have woken me up or something."
"Just shut up and go to bed."
_____
Washu 101Ayeka sat primly, her hands folded neatly before her, and silently counted backwards from one thousand in Juraian, Galaxy Standard, and Japanese to stay awake. Ryoko yawned massively, and practiced trying to will her soul away from her body without actually doing it. Ryo-ohki squirmed in Sasami's lap, disinterested by the proceedings. Tenchi looked mildly frightened, but took copious notes.
Welcome to Washu 101.
Washu stood at her lectern, pointer in hand, and gestured to her viewgraph projections. Oh, how she loved making them. Pie charts and bar graphs danced merrily on the screen, one colorful image proceeding after the other. "And so you see class, based on my observations I think we can safely assume that…"
"Good morning, Professor. I was not aware that you were still giving classes these days. What a lovely surprise," Kagato said as she stepped into the room through what appeared to be a floating doorway that entered in from the dining room. Behind her a noticeably sleep-deprived Mihoshi peered in quizzically. "You should have informed me so that I could have sat in as your assistant. You were always terrible when it came to grading papers on time."
"You! How did you get in here?"
"I had a little help from my good friend here," Kagato said, gesturing absently toward Mihoshi. "Additionally, you haven't changed your classroom access codes in over six thousand years. How very careless of you."
"Well, either come in and take a seat or leave, because I'm trying to teach class here."
Kagato smirked and strolled in, casually draping herself into a chair that appeared immediately underneath her as she sat, the desk blinking into existence before her. She smiled toothily at Tenchi who turned away, looking embarrassed. Mihoshi followed suit, and promptly hit the floor with a clattering thump.
"Ow!"
"Are you all right, Mihoshi?" Ayeka turned in her seat as Mihoshi rubbed her sore backside with one hand and dragged herself into the desk that blinked into existence about half a foot away from her.
"Ow…I'm okay, but that really hurt."
Ayeka looked at Mihoshi carefully. There seemed to be something different about her this morning, something she couldn't quite place.
"Is that pond-grass in your hair?"
"Anyway, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, I think it's safe to assume that our little *visitor* is most likely a clone based off the original Kagato." Washu signaled for the next slide, which showed a particularly dated image of a younger male Kagato making a particularly obscene gesture, his hair a frazzled puffball about his head. Ryoko began snickering uncontrollably as Washu continued, undaunted.
"However, Kagato's current appearance and lack of a complete memory is probably due to a corrupted signal sent in the final seconds of his death, coupled with the normative error margins expected in cloning. This magnified the allowable percentage of error past the acceptable levels, resulting in what we see today." Emphatically, she set down her pointer.
"Any questions?"
Kagato raised her hand ironically, and then proceeded to speak anyway, much to Washu's chagrin. "Really, Washu. I didn't know you had such an interest in me. I must say that I'm quite flattered," Kagato said as she discreetly crunched a probe underneath the heel of her shoe.
"I wouldn't have to be giving this little class if you weren't so stupid as to build your own damn cloning gear, Kagato. I know that's why you're like this, because you were having too much fun playing engineer to go and buy a real kit. Why did you have to go off and build your own and end up making such a big mess? Oh, I know. Because you're an egotistical moron."
"You make me feel so special, professor."
"Oh, you're special all right. So special that I'd love for you to be my assistant today in our class experiment. I just need you to sit in this chair while I take some measurements." Immediately a chair appeared, bristling with restraints and measuring devices. Tenchi looked noticeably paler.
"But Washu, this isn't exactly the ideal time for fun and games, now is it? To remove all our clothing in front of all these people? And what would our daughter think?" Kagato feigned coquettish, batting her eyelashes appropriately.
"Daughter?" Ryoko was on the verge of an apoplexy.
Washu's eye twitched perceptibly.
"Didn't your mommy ever tell you anything, little Ryoko?" Kagato turned to Ryoko. "Sometimes, when mommies and daddies get very drunk and have access to a fully equipped biogenetic laboratory, they get some masu, they get naked and…"
"…And I think it's time for a certain someone to get the hell out of my laboratory," Washu broke in, furious. Ryoko kept blinking, speechless, as the others looked away guiltily, uncomfortable for having stumbled upon the galaxy's oddest family-like spat. A plain door appeared in thin air as Washu gestured impatiently and slammed open, little markers pointing the way out in a dozen languages, politely informing the user not to let it slam on their hindquarters on the way out.
"Fine. If you don't want me in your laboratory, I shall go to mine. If anyone wants to come along, please feel free to join us. Let's go, Mihoshi." Kagato stood up, and absently swatted a little flying probe into non-existence. Mihoshi quickly stumbled to her feet, glancing back and forth between Kagato and Washu.
"You keep Mihoshi out of this, buster, or I'll…I'll…"
"You'll what, kill me again? You know, dying is always more fun the second time around. Don't think that I don't have any backups, because I always have backups. Always."
With that, a pulsating doorway appeared, a glimmering matrix of black and green energy coalescing together to form a subspace gateway. The darkness beyond was impenetrable.
"Anyone else coming?" Kagato smiled, all teeth and no amusement. Without warning, she stepped through the portal. Mihoshi shrugged and followed suit.
In a flash, Tenchi was at his feet. "You girls stay here. I'll go after Mihoshi."
"No Tenchi, it's too dangerous. You can never trust Kagato. I'll go with you," Ryoko's eyes gleamed dangerously, fueled by a deadly anger.
"I shall go as well. Sasami, you must stay here where it is safe." Ayeka steeled herself as the three of them entered the subspace portal.
Washu turned to Sasami, who just shrugged.
"Well, I guess it's up to me to get them home." Washu said, pulling off her professorial robes to reveal her day-to-day work uniform beneath. Striding up to the portal, she paused for a moment.
"Don't worry, Sasami. I'm sure we'll be back by dinner," Washu said confidently, as she stepped into the portal and winked out of existence.
"I hope they'll be all right, Ryo-ohki," Sasami said to the little cabbit in her arms. Ryo-ohki mewed sympathetically.
Suddenly, Ryo-ohki perked up her long ears. Seconds later, Washu came tumbling head-over-heels out of the portal, which in a near-blinding flash of light, its colors unbalanced into a rainbow swirl before unsteadily coalescing back into black and green.
Washu felt herself over for damage, making sure that nothing was broken. "Ow…damnit! That bitch is going to pay when I…"
Sasami giggled helplessly. "Um, Washu…there's something stuck to the back of your shirt."
Washu half-turned, before reaching back to tear off a piece of paper that had been neatly pinned to the back of her uniform coat.
"You must be at least this tall to get on this ride."
Washu's eye twitched.
_____
Tenchi's first impression was purple. And a lot of it.
"Th…this is Kagato's lab?" Purple bed-curtains were draped above the prominently placed four-poster bed, which was spread with a white-and-purple coverlet. Green-speckled formica-topped tables and countertops provided resting places for books, personal effects, tools, and occasional pieces of artwork. One wall was completely taken up by a pipe organ, though not nearly as grand as the one Tenchi remembered from the Souja. The only things vaguely resembling what Tenchi thought of as laboratory-like were the stone walls and the stainless steel floor, though it was mostly covered with knit purple-throw rugs.
"Oh god, not this…please not this…Anything but this…" Ryoko's anger vanished in a flash of mortification. She tried averting her eyes from the horror, but it was too late. Her cheeks flushed in embarrassment
"Ooooh! Is that velour?" Mihoshi pranced merrily over to a nearby chair. "Oh, it's so soft and snuggly!" she exclaimed as she bounced happily in the cushy seat. She petted the arm of the chair as if it were a cat and rubbed the side of her cheek against a purple throw pillow.
"Oh…my. Where are we?" Ayeka asked, confused. She had expected something a little more along the lines of the interior of the Souja, and had definitely never imaged that they would have ended up in what appeared to her as a boudoir.
"We're in Kagato's room," Ryoko said. "Something wrong must have happened when we went through that portal." She gave Mihoshi a pointed look. Mihoshi ran off to look at the pipe organ that had caught her attention, Kagato following in her wake.
Ayeka nodded sympathetically. "Yes, I see. But did…did he always have these statues?" Ayeka delicately pointed at one of the prominent statues of an unidentified but gloriously naked man.
"Yes." Ryoko winced.
"Were they…always naked?"
"Yes."
"Mmm-hmm. This organ doesn't seem to be nearly as big as I remembered." Mihoshi stated. "No, it isn't nearly as big as it used to be."
"Mihoshi, this is a different one. The big one blew up with the ship." Kagato looked about impatiently as people wandered around her old bedroom.
Mihoshi sat down at the bench, and put her fingers above the keys.
"I didn't ever expect that you'd have such a small organ. How do you get any satisfaction out of it?"
Kagato was momentarily speechless.
Mihoshi put her hands on the keys. "Maybe I'll just give it a little test and see if it's any good."
"Don't touch my organ."
Mihoshi set her fingers down. A beautifully complex chord filled the air with music, startling the others. Kagato's jaw dropped.
"Well, I guess it's okay," Mihoshi said as she began to peck out a simple little child's ditty with two fingers. "It's tiny but you can sort of get something out of it."
Kagato's eye twitched. Seven thousand one hundred fifty-one. Seven thousand one hundred fifty-nine. Seven thousand one hundred seventy-seven…
"So…so he slept here?" Ayeka stepped gingerly, trying very hard not to touch anything or breathe too much. The air exuded a light scent that she could only identify as something Tenchi referred to as 'new car smell.' She averted her eyes from a particularly prominent statue.
"Well…sort of. This was where he entertained." If she recalled correctly, there should be some alcohol around here somewhere…alcohol always made the purple a bit more bearable. Rummaging through the drawers of a nearby dresser only yielded drawer after drawer filled with dozens of pairs of white gloves. Resigned, Ryoko plopped herself down on one of the chairs, and idly wondered where Kagato had kept his main controller unit.
"Entertained?" Tenchi asked as he sat down in the chair facing Ryoko. Immediately, little screens popped out around him, and he half-jumped in astonishment. Afraid to touch any of the screens, he resigned himself to sitting back as far away from them as possible.
"Entertained. He would bring guests here." Ryoko shivered from the memory.
"I didn't think that Kagato would have been the type to have guests," Ayeka said. "What kind of guests were they?"
"Well, let me put it like this. It wasn't business. And they were pretty regular sometimes. And pretty. He liked them pretty."
"Heh, I guess Kagato must have been a real ladies man," Tenchi joked.
"They weren't always ladies."
"Oh."
"Oh my."
"Nope. I don't get it at all," Mihoshi stated firmly. Kagato took another deep breath. Her fingers itched with the desire to throttle some reason into Mihoshi who had somehow managed to access the room's central computer system without actually doing anything that Kagato could detect. Kagato was uncertain as to how Mihoshi did it, as she was almost completely certain that Mihoshi had no augments that could let her access higher-level computer systems like this. Kagato reached over to manually shut the floating screen off. It stayed on, stubbornly.
"What part do you not understand? We are in subspace, and we are not on the Souja. The Souja was destroyed. If this room was on the Souja, then it too would have been destroyed."
"But where are we if we're not in the Souja?"
"In subspace! Subspace! And don't touch that." Mihoshi started pressing randomly on the screen, and immediately, light music filled the air with a whimsical brass beat. Kagato glared at her, and tried closing the screen again. It stayed on, stubbornly. Kagato's hands quivered from suppressed rage.
"Most of the Souja was taken up by systems such as those that power and arm it. What did you think was in the Souja? Kareoke bars?"
Mihoshi thought about it for a second. "I guess not, now that you mention it…" Something out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.
"Oh, what's this?" Mihoshi reached out for a controller discreetly tucked into one of the niches near the organ.
"Don't touch it."
"Ooh, it's shiny. Can I touch it?"
"Don't touch it!"
Suddenly, a three-dimensional hologram flicked into view, catching the attention of all in the room. Unlike most of the small holographic recording devices that were used for quick correspondence, this one had a lushly detailed and textured image. A bountiful and half-clad image. Jaws dropped, eyes bulged, and at least one pair of noses bled.
"Kagato-sama," a sweet voice intoned, "I'm so hot. Do you want me to take off my clothes, or should I just go back in the water like this?" A woman with long loose dark hair in an open water-soaked red embroidered robe coyly touched the clinging fabric that was half falling off her shoulders.
Ryoko had never seen Kagato move faster than when she ran over to wrestle the controller from Mihoshi and attempt to turn off the hologram. It stayed on, stubbornly.
"Kagato-sama," the girl continued, unabashed, her hands straying to her breasts. "Do I please you? Please let me please you, because if you don't, I'll be sad." Her eyes sparkled. Ayeka and Ryoko simultaneously glared at Tenchi, who miserably lowered his eyes to the ground while fishing out a handkerchief for his nose.
"Before any of you asks, I did not program this," Kagato muttered as she fiddled with the controller. Nothing appeared to be wrong with it, but it wouldn't turn off.
"Kagato spent three weeks on it," Ryoko stated blandly. "I know. I was there."
"Quiet."
"He asked me for my opinion on the clothing."
"Will you stop that?"
"I don't think he slept more than two hours a night when he was working on it."
"Damnit."
"Did you know that you can actually change the sexes of the characters in the program? Gimme the controller, Kagato, I wanna show Mihoshi."
"RYOKO!"
"Ryoko?" All eyes turned to the origin of the new voice, and there in the middle of a room, the black and green portal matrix appeared, and a small foot followed suit, on its way in.
"It's time for dinner everyone," Sasami said, as her knee touched the portal, part-way in. But before she could complete a full step in, she found herself suddenly back in Washu's lab, Ryoko and Ayeka flanking her on either side, each one holding one of her arms.
"Um, is everything all right in there?" Sasami asked, as the girls set her down. Mihoshi, followed by a slightly pale looking Tenchi and a very irked Kagato, reentered Washu's laboratory. As they returned, the portal blinked out of existence.
"Everything's just fine! Kagato has all sorts of neat toys. I got to play with them," Mihoshi said, smiling happily at Kagato. Kagato winced.
"Toys? What kind? Were they fun? Did you get to play with them? Do you think I could?" Sasami replied.
"NO!"
_____
Later that evening…"So then, we were in this big, really big spaceship and there were all these tiny little alien things and oh my, I'd never seen anything like them before. Anyway, they were sooo cute, and sooo sweet that I just wanted to take one home, because I thought it would be a really great friend for my man-eating Zoatl that I've got in this cage in my office and…and did I ever tell you about my Zoatl? I named him Shinji because he's just like this one boy I knew when I was in the academy, and he's about four or five inches tall, so when I mean man-eating, I mean he does it really slowly and when he's really hungry and…and…Kagato? Did you fall asleep, Kagato?"
"Huh? Oh, no…I'm…still awake…" Kagato blinked blearily. It had been a really lovely dream. Things had been exploding in a most satisfactory manner, and it wasn't because of Mihoshi. Kagato looked around sleepily, reorienting herself. They had been having after-dinner tea and fruit in the living room, the others having opted to take advantage of an unexpected warming in the weather to take an evening stroll to check for budding cherry blossoms.
It took her a few seconds longer than it should have, but suddenly she realized she had fallen asleep on the couch leaning against Katsuhito. Kagato flinched away from him, almost violently.
"Perhaps it's time for you girls to go to bed," Katsuhito stated. "It is getting late." With that, he set down his emptied mug of tea, stood up, and left the room, leaving Kagato to wonder exactly how much he had noticed or cared. Though it was pretty clear that Mihoshi had done neither.
"I think that sounds like a great idea. Let's go, Kagato." Mihoshi stood, and offered her hand to Kagato.
"I don't think so."
"How come?" Mihoshi's lower lip trembled. "I thought we were roommates."
"The past-tense is appropriate. I will be resting in my own quarters from now on. But I will thank you for helping me find it again."
"But…but…but…" Mihoshi sniffled. Kagato winced, preparing herself for the worst. Instead, Mihoshi gave her one last tearful look, and clattered upstairs.
Kagato scowled, uncomfortable. The cloning system must have inputted more errors and imperfections than she would have previously guessed; these unseemly emotional weaknesses felt so inefficient. It was ridiculous to dwell on such sentimentalism. Useless.
But the insecurity of it made her feel almost just a little bit…just a little bit scared.
She shook her head as if to shake off the feeling. With a small gesture, the subspace gateway formed, and she stepped through into the sparkling darkness.
_____
Three hours later…In the darkness, a tiny sound tapped against the wood of the door. Tentatively. Rhythmically. Then, impatiently.
12:10 A.M.
Mihoshi crawled out of the warm depths of her futon to open the door. Before her stood Kagato in her pink bunny pajamas, her hair a tussled mess, a plush bunny tucked in her arms.
"Kagato?"
"Mihoshi."
"Are you okay?"
"Yes." Kagato paused, as if struggling with the words. Mihoshi waited patiently. "Do you mind…do you…can I…that is…if…if you don't…don't…"
"It's okay," Mihoshi smiled brightly. "I'll help you set up the futon."
"Thanks."
Disclaimers and thanks:
Characters belong to AIC/Pioneer.
Thanks to the following people (in no particular order) for
helping/contributing jokes: Fish (some
of the contents of Kagato's bedroom), Rowsdower ("all wet" and prereading),
Geoduck (new car smell), LittlePriest (pre-reading, etc), Bglanders (white gloves),
SC (pre-reading, etc), Drakstern (for convincing me to use a dating sim) and
whoever else I may have missed. You
know who you are. J
Please feel free join us in #muyoff on Dal.net for Tenchi fanfiction discussion and general chat. http://www.muyo.org/muyoff/muyoff.html
Author's notes (randomly):
In one draft, Afro Kagato (Kagafro!
Afro Kags!) was going to have a more "black power" pose, complete with
hair pick (suggested by LP).
Mihoshi is playing "Chopsticks" on the organ.
The music that Mihoshi turns on in the bedroom is "Spanish Flea" by Herb
Alpert.
The dating sim girl is Akiko.
Mihoshi's post-dinner ramble is very loosely based on Excel Saga, episode 2.
Questions and comments can be sent to cori_ohki@hotmail.com. Thank you
for reading.
Movie night at the Masakis! Is one of the girls pregnant? And what is Ryo-ohki really saying? Chapter 3 is on its way!