Author's Note: This is only my third try at fanfiction...so it's probably not terribly good. Also, it's one of my first serious tries at something vaguely humorous (at least my first try on purpose), and I'm not sure how well it will work. But, I just couldn't leave this idea alone...so here it is...
I'm putting this in the Gravitation section because it will mostly focus on Gravitation. I will be throwing in some non-Gravi characters and worlds occasionally, though... They will not be terribly major, as I got this idea from a Gravitation ML. Also, please be warned that there is quite a bit of original-type material in this story, especially at the beginning. It will take a little while before the Gravi characters really start showing up (as Ryuichi is the only one in chapter 1, and then only slightly...). But don't worry, there will be more later, I promise!
DISCLAIMER: I don't own Gravitation, or any of the characters in it, unfortunately. They were created by Murakami Maki, the wonderful, wonderful person she is, and I worship her for providing me with yet more shounen ai to entertain myself with. I am just paying homage to her work by borrowing her characters for my own twisted purposes *evil grin*
Reah (the main character, pronounced Ray-ah), Yuu (not the one from Marmalade Boy, I just like his name), and Tatsu are mine, as are five out of seven of the stuffed bunnies who show up in the first chapter (Kumagoro being part of Gravitation, and Bunni-sama being a purple rip-off of Kumagoro). The bunnies all exist in real life, though they are unable to act as magical batteries here and have had their names changed for their own protection.
WARNING: Shounen ai-ness ahead! This should be obvious, as it is a Gravitation fic, but I feel I should warn anyway. If you are for some reason uncomfortable with boys who like to kiss other boys with hentai/romantic intentions, I would suggest you not read this fic (and leave the Gravitation section in general, as that is what a good bit of the actual story is about).
chapter 1: Definitely Not Ryuichi
"It's done!!!!! Mwahahahahah!"
My cry of triumph and joy, accompanied by sufficiently evil sounding laugh echoed through the room (and that was quite an accomplishment in itself, seeing that Yuu had had the walls, floor, and ceiling padded after the last time I had thrown a non-functioning piece of equipment at the wall in frustration and then cried over it for the next several hours because it was in much worse condition than it had been before I threw it). Then seeing Yuu and my collection of stuffed bunnies, who were usually quite inanimate, cowering, wincing, and covering their ears, I realized I had overdone it just a little and stopped laughing. Well, that, and if I was being that loud I might ruin the equipment again...
"Um, yeah...too loud," I commented. Yuu just directed a glare in my direction and nodded. I gave him a weak smile back. "Gomen ne..." Then I turned to the bunnies, who were also glaring at me. "Gomen ne, Usagi-kun, Rabittsu, Koneho-chan, Bunni-sama, Bunni-san, Bunni-chan!" I got no acceptance of my apology, but that didn't really bother me.
"It is done, though!" I exclaimed happily when I noticed that Yuu was still glaring at me. "It'll work this time, I promise!"
"I won't believe that until I see it," Tatsu commented from the doorway, which should have been locked. He wasn't supposed to be in the workroom. Only Yuu and the bunnies were allowed in the workroom. (And me too, of course.) The bunnies had to be there, as did I. Yuu helped me, so he had to be there too. But all Tatsu did in the work room was distract me, or distract Yuu, and I had inadvertently destroyed several delicate pieces of equipment because of him. Tatsu had caused the project to be delayed by almost a whole year, so he wasn't allowed in the workroom.
But that didn't mean he couldn't tap into the magic running through the house and unlock the workroom door whenever he wanted, which would explain why he was standing in the open doorway staring at me and implying that it wouldn't work, again. Since it was already done, I decided to let it slide, and just pouted at him.
"I got it right this time," I said. "I really did! I checked the equations over at least a million times, and I was extra careful putting everything together. And I even got Bunni-chan to make sure things couldn't go wrong! It has to work this time!"
Tatsu sniggered. I glared, and pouted a little more. Yuu decided it was getting to be a good time to considering hiding and decided to place my wonderful creation between himself and the door, and thus also between himself and me, and himself and the smirking dragon-boy standing in the doorway.
Luckily for Tatsu (as he really didn't want to be stuck as an uke until I got to be in a better mood), I cared much more about playing with my new toy at the moment than taking my revenge on him for his lack of faith in my ability to fuse science and magic in ways that shouldn't even be possible to think of. I really shouldn't have blamed him, anyway...seeing as I had been working on the stupid thing for five years already and hadn't even gotten close to a working design yet.
I was sure it was going to work this time, though, so I ignored the smirking Tatsu and walked over to my "baby." (Baby being a very, very loosely applied term, considering it was actually a couple tons of metal, lots and lots of tubing, and a pod with a conveniently fogged up window that was vaguely reminiscent of a sci-fi movie cold sleep chamber... Oh, and the tank full of gallons of pink...fluff that vaguely resembled whipped shoujo sparkles and bubbles that it ran off of when the bunnies got tired. And the attached monitor, keyboard, and mouse.) Then I pressed the button, and the screen came to life.
"Whaddaya want?" the purple smiley face on the screen (purple because yellow was just too overdone and boring) asked, sounding almost hostile.
I made a note to myself on a scrap piece of paper. "Change OS personality...this one scares me already. Don't know why I let Tatsu talk me into going aggressive in the first place..."
"You know what I want," I said, smiling at it. "I want my bishounen."
"Yeah, well, I just want to go back to sleep," it said, and I underlined my note four or five times as Tatsu snickered. "You know where the off switch is, Lady, so get with the pressing."
I pouted. "Not funny!" I said.
Yuu chose that moment to step in. He emerged from his hiding spot behind the surly machine, sat down, and took the keyboard into his lap. About fifteen seconds of way-too-fast typing later, the purple smiley face looked like it was actually smiling, and not just programmed to do it. Of course, it still sounded mean when it talked.
"Ya know, I kinda like you," the smiley face said to Yuu, who proceeded to turn bright red and glance over at Tatsu. "Wanna go on a date sometime?"
It then became my turn to stand between my creation and one snarling, angry pretty boy with lots of claws and teeth. Specifically, one dragon boy who was trying to kill my not-quite alive creation very dead for daring to hit on his bishounen. I couldn't let that happen, of course, though I was seriously considering letting the whole protection thing drop right up until Yuu decided to stop his very, very unbalanced boyfriend from mauling me to get at the machine.
Yuu had to shout over the enraged yells of "He's mine! How dare you try to steal him from me! If you dare lay one hand...or wire, or anything on him I will dismantle you as slowly as possible and use your parts to build a Mac! Damn you!" jut to be heard, but as he dragged Tatsu out of the room, he managed to give one instruction to the slightly scared looking smiley face on the screen.
"You might want to listen to her," he yelled. "She created you, and she's a lot worse than Tatsu is." Oddly enough, it worked, since the next time I looked over at the screen, the smiley face had faded to a pale lavender, and the smile on its face was decidedly weak and frightened looking.
"Fine," it finally muttered. "Whaddaya want?"
"I already told you," I said. "I want my bishounen."
"You know, even I need a little more information than that," it said. "Like which bishounen you want. What series. You know, something I can look up in the database."
"I want Ryuichi," I said, smiling as I picked up Bunni-sama, the almost identical purple clone of Kumagoro. "Sakuma Ryuichi from Gravitaiton."
"Care to use the keyboard?" it asked me.
I sighed, but picked up the keyboard from where Yuu had carelessly dropped it on the floor. Then I slowly and deliberately typed in S-A-K-U-M-A R-Y-U-I-C-H-I. The smiley face, long since returned to its original shade of purple, flickered for a moment.
"ERROR, ENTRY NOT FOUND," flashed across the screen in red.
"Sorry to burst your bubble, Lady, but I can only do guys who are actually in the database," said the purple face in front of me.
I just stared. I knew that Ryu-chan was in the database. I had put him in there myself four months ago when I started compiling the huge list of bishounen who I wanted to own some day. In fact, he was the first one I put in, followed closely by his apparent clone, Shindou Shuuichi.
"You sure?" I asked.
"Yep."
I let out a very long string of curses that were totally inappropriate for anyone to hear, especially the poor bunnies sitting not too far away from myself. Actually, I shouldn't have heard them either, but I was just a little pissed off, as it looked like my project was going to fail yet again. I even managed to make the smiley face look a little worried.
"Well, who do you have in the database?" I asked it peevishly.
It started listing off names, all bishounen I remembered putting in the database. I let it talk for ten minutes, when it announced "Sakuma Ryuichi," and I called it to a screeching halt.
"You just told me Ryuichi wasn't in the database!" I exclaimed angrily.
"Didja spell his name right?"
"Of course I did!" I fumed. "I don't make mistakes spelling Sakuma Ryuichi's name!"
"Well, I couldn't find any matches with what you typed in, so you musta spelled it wrong. Or maybe you did when you put it in."
"..." I did my best impression of a depressed girl, not that I needed to try, as that was what I was at the moment.
"I could display the entry for you," it suggested. I nodded.
さ く ま り ゅ い ち flashed across the screen. Seven Japanese characters...I recognized the "ku," but that was about it. My guess was that it read "Sakuma Ryuichi," but I had no way of telling. Besides, I knew that Japanese characters went by syllables, and there were only six syllables in Sakuma Ryuichi, not seven. (Little did I know that the syllable "ryu" is two characters.) Not only was it in the wrong language, but I figured that it had somehow been misspelled as well. Needless to say, I kinda blew up at my poor creation.
"It's in Japanese!" I yelled. "Why the hell is it in Japanese? I didn't do that. I don't even know Japanese! That's why I created you to run in English!" I growled in frustration. "Does it even read as Sakuma Ryuichi?"
"Yeah."
"If I just tell you to use that profile, will you make me type it all in?" I asked it. My tone of voice was the very special "if you say yes I will make it so Tatsu never has a chance to take you apart, because I will already have melted you down and turned you into a trash can" tone, very hard to master, and really quite useless in most situations.
"N-no way!" I never knew computers (or really large magical machines with computer interfaces built into them, if I wanted to be completely accurate) could stutter. Just goes to show that you learn something new every day.
"Good," I said, smiling. "I want him, then. Are you going to need me to put Bunni-sama back, or can I keep him with me?"
"Five is plenty," it grunted.
I waited.
And waited.
And waited...
Finally, after about a half hour in which absolutely nothing happened, I started to get a little annoyed. "Are you actually doing anything?" I asked the machine, trying to keep from sounding whiny.
"No."
"Why not?" I asked it.
"You never told me to start."
I swore, again, under my breath. Then I had to restrain myself from throwing Bunni-sama at it. "Fine then, start making my damned bishounen!"
...
Another half hour of silence and seemingly nothing later, I began glaring at it again. "Are you still not doing anything?"
"Yep."
"Why this time?" I growled.
"Turn around," it told me. The purple face on the screen had turned more of a pinkish purple.
"What?" I asked.
"It's embarrassing," it said, the face turning fully pink.
I just stared at it for almost a full minute. I couldn't quite grasp the full reality of what it had just said. My machine, the one I created specifically for this purpose, thought that what I was asking it to do was embarrassing! I had to have heard it wrong.
"You can't be serious," I said.
"Would you want someone watching you while you're giving birth?" it asked.
"I wouldn't have a choice!" I retorted.
"Well I do, and I say I'm not making this damned bishounen for you unless you turn around!" it exclaimed.
My desire for bishounen won out over my annoyance at the machine in the end, though it took me another minute to decide so. I turned around, still clutching Bunni-sama to my chest in a tight hug. The instant I was facing away from the machine, it started making whirring noises, humming noises, and other noises like that, noises that said my machine was actually doing something.
I pulled out the same piece of scrap paper from before, which had since been absently shoved into a pocket and was looking far worse for the wear. The first note was scribbled in purple ink, so I pulled out a green pen to add to it. "See if there are any shrinks who deal with AI's."
This time I only waited for two minutes before a ding sounded. It was the sound of a bell, and it sounded exactly like my old microwave (which no longer worked)...enough that I suspected that Tatsu might have cannibalized the poor food-heating machine just for the bell. After that sound, all the "working machine" noises stopped.
"Can I turn back around now?" I asked.
"If you really feel you have to," the machine responded. It sounded less than happy about it, but I didn't really care how it felt by then. I just wanted my bishounen.
I turned around to find that the window on the cold sleep chamber look alike had unfogged. I could see in it, and there was a person inside. Not only that, but that person was definitely Sakuma Ryuichi. I recognized the bunny sitting in his arms.
Of course, he was much shorter than Sakuma Ryuichi...only half my own height, or less... And though Ryu-chan did not look anywhere near his thirty-one years of age...he didn't quite look that young. Nor did he have red ovals on his cheeks, except when he was...
I facefaulted as I realized that my "perfect" clone of Sakuma Ryuichi was a chibi.
But, oh well. Better to have a chibi clone than no clone at all. Besides, chibi Ryu-chan was so cute! And I could always try for a big one later.
I squealed to myself as I reached forward to open the door for my kawaii little copy of Ryu-chan. He stepped out of the chamber looking confused. He stared at me with a slightly vacant look on his face for a few moments. Then he stared at the Kumagoro (properly pink, unlike my Bunni-sama) in his arms.
Then he tossed aside Kumagoro and approached me.
That should have been my first indication that something wasn't quite right. Unfortunately, I didn't quite notice because the general direction he tossed Kumagoro in was towards the machine. I figured he was just a little annoyed with the machine. I didn't see anything weird in being annoyed with such a frustrating piece of metal.
Of course, then my chibi Ryuichi decided to speak.
"Hi, I'm Ryuichi!" he said brightly. "What's your name?"
"Reah," I said.
"That's a pretty name!" he exclaimed. "Do you like bunny rabbits?"
I nodded, clutching Bunni-sama closer.
"I don't. I like Yu-Gi-Oh cards! My deck is really weak, but I wanna become the best Yu-Gi-Oh player out there someday! Maybe I can even get a Blue Eyes White Dragon!"
I chose that moment to faint, before I could listen to the person who looked just like a chibi Sakuma Ryuichi but wasn't babble on about Yu-Gi-Oh cards. I just couldn't take it; it was too wrong.
I woke to Yuu waving both the not Ryu-chan's Kumagoro and my Bunni-sama in my face. He was leaning over me with a worried look on his face. I came back to consciousness just in time to feel him press Kumagoro's pink face against my lips.
"See, Kumagoro, I told you a kiss would make her wake up na no da!" he exclaimed as I opened my eyes.
"Why are you pretending to be Sakuma Ryuichi, Yuu?" I asked him.
He just sighed in relief, handed me Bunni-sama, and then dropped Kumagoro. "I thought it might make you feel better," he said. "Since the one who's supposed to be him isn't." He nodded over towards the door, where Tatsu was trying to look like he was listening to the childish babble of the chibi not Ryuichi, who was now talking animatedly about fire trucks and construction workers.
I had almost been able to forget about that awful experience... Seeing the not Ryuichi again reminded me of it, though. That, in turn, made up my mind as to what my next move would be. I picked Kumagoro up off the floor and stalked over to the table where the other bunnies all lay, then placed both Kumagoro and Bunni-sama on the table next to the other bunnies. Then I poked at the nearest part of my mechanical creation.
"Hey, you," I called. The monitor actually swiveled to turn in my direction.
"Kumagoro Miracle Beam!" I exclaimed, picking Kumagoro back up and throwing it right at the monitor. My aim was actually on for once, and the pink bunny hit the screen right in the middle of the smiley face.
"What was that for?" the machine asked me, sounding hurt.
I picked up Usagi-kun and threw him at the monitor, again hitting dead on.
"THAT!"
I repeated the act with Rabittsu.
"IS!"
Koneho-chan missed the middle of the screen, but at least hit the top of the monitor.
"NOT!"
Bunni-sama was dead on.
"SAKUMA!"
I missed the monitor completely with Bunni-san, who then landed in the vat of shoujo fluff.
"RYUICHI!"
Poor Bunni-chan actually ended up ripping as my throw went even more wild than with Bunni-san and went flying by one of the rather sharp looking pieces of metal. She left a trail of stuffing behind as she continued to sail across the room, and actually landed on the chibi not Ryuichi's head.
"Don't complain to me about that!" the machine protested as soon as I had stopped foaming at the mouth. "I did everything the way you told me to! His entry said that he's thirty-one, but he acts like a child. My research tells me that young boys like Yu-Gi-Oh and fire trucks."
"But that's not Ryuichi!" I protested. "You were supposed to give me Ryuichi, not some kid who looks like him!"
"Well what did you expect me to do with what you gave me to work with?" it snapped. "You expect me to make a person out of nothing but some bunny power and the barest amount of knowledge about them? You didn't even give me a picture for half of the entries! How the hell am I supposed to know what each of them is like?"
"You're the cloning machine, not me!" I yelled back. "You're supposed to figure these things out! That's what I made you for!"
"Well, news flash, but I'm not all powerful! Or all knowing! And I really wish you would stop treating me like I am! I've only been awake for two hours, and so far all I've heard are yells, demands, and threats! And why I try to be nice to the only person who's been nice to me so far I get sentenced to be made into Mac parts! It's really quite stressful!"
The machine then burst into very noisy tears. That was not something I had planned for when I created it, so the face on the screen was still very much a smiley face, but the rest of the structure was heaving with its great sobs. To be completely and utterly honest, I had absolutely no idea that computers could cry...and it was really a very disturbing thing to watch.
So, wordlessly, I went around the room and gathered up all the bunnies. After replacing most of them on their table, I took Kumagoro, Bunni-sama, and the poor, injured Bunni-chan with me and left the room. I slowly closed the door behind me, then walked over to the nearest wall, leaned against it, and slid down to the floor.
Then I took a deep breath and proceeded to scream as loud as I possibly could until my lungs protested from lack of air.
Then I burst into my own tears.
A moment later, Tatsu walked out of the room, the not Ryuichi following behind him, still babbling on and on about things that just weren't right. He paused a moment, looked at me, and then flashed me his brightest smile.
"That went well, didn't it?" he asked me. I stared at him in disbelief, but he just smiled at me.
"Kumagoro Miracle Beam!" I yelled, throwing the poor Kumagoro at him. Then I fled to my room and locked myself in for the rest of the day.
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