Twitch.

"Well, I guess that settles that."

Twitch. "What do you mean? That didn't settle anything."

"No matter what you do you're surrounded by someone. You'll have to make a sacrifice."

"No! Naota, don't listen to her! She's playing with your head!"

"What else is new? Anyway, you're not supposed to really talk about your strategy during a match, are you?"

Raharu cackled. "But that is my strategy."

Blink. "What?"

"Elementary, my dear Watson. The more you talk about something the other person doesn't understand, the more you confuse them. If you lie over and over, they're bound to believe you."

"You just gave your whole reasoning away. Now you're the loser."

"Hehe. Not true. Your head is already scrambled."

I could see the vein above Eri's ever-twitching eyebrow grow larger and larger as she listened to Raharu's tricksy tactics explained. I thought she was going to burst into an uncontrollable rage and kill us both, but instead she slammed her fist on the table, making the pieces jump, and started flipping through the book she had found on how to play chess. Yeah, our spaceship had a game closet. I guess the designer knew the feeling of long trips with nothing to do but gawk in wonder at your opposable thumbs.

"Checkmate."

"There's gotta be something…"

"There's nothing you can do! It's already over! THE WORLD AS YOU KNOW IT HAS ENDED! ALL IS LOST!!! BWAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!"

"Cut it out, you mind-control freak! I'm trying to concentrate!"

Raharu went meek. "Oh, sorry. Are you ready for your sacrifice?"

"Sacrifice, my big toe," I muttered before knocking out her queen.

Raharu blinked at the board for a moment. Her voice caught in her throat somewhere between a gasp of horror and "Oh, would you look at that?" Eri looked up from the chess book, her eyes wide with surprise. I hadn't been making plays independently for the entire game until now, and I'd turned the tables in one fell swoop. I was about to do a victory dance and wiggle the "sacrifice" in front of my opponent's face, but before the opportunity arrived I dove face-first into the chessboard. Looking up and wiping the spit off my chin, I saw that all the pieces had gone flying onto the floor. Raharu sat up from the front of the room where she'd landed, rubbing her head. Eri stood, blinking blearily and adjusting her glasses (which were still cute). "What happened?" I asked rhetorically.

Raharu opened the door to the cockpit and peeked through the window. She'd had it on autopilot (which was pretty advanced compared to ours, since it had a feature making the ship incapable of crashing into other objects) while we were playing chess. When she shut the door again, her face was a certain shade of red. "It looks like we've stopped."

I blinked. "Stopped? But why so suddenly? It's like someone just slammed on the brakes!"

The red turned deeper. "We ran out of gas."

Eri leaned her head on the unturned table. "Oh, don't start telling me that this ship runs on gas…"

Raharu nodded. "Yeah… I think there're a couple extra litres in the back; that'll get us as far as Feirus…" She made her way to the back of the ship, leaving Eri and me without so much as an explanation.

"Where in the heck is Feirus?" Eri wondered.

"I guess we'll find out when we get there, eh?" I sighed while attempting to put the chess pieces back in the box. My endeavor was cut short when the ship gave a lurch and the back of my head was introduced to the card table. Eri knelt in front of me, collecting the white pawns and the black king and queen, ignoring my predicament. If I knew her, she was thinking I could get out of it myself. She had been trying to make me more independent from other people's help for a few years now. I loved her, but it drove me to the brink sometimes. That's why I had to snicker a little when the ship jolted again and started moving and she fell forward with a cry of surprise. Lifting my head out, I smirked and wiped away the blood from my nose. "Guess she found those two extra litres, huh?"

Raharu came out from the back whistling and dusting her hands off. "We'll be there soon enough, no worries. Uh," she stopped and looked at us, "are you two okay?"

"Dandy," Eri muttered.

"Swell," I grumbled.

"Oh, good! We're all ready to get off, then?"

Looking out the window, I saw that we were landing on an airstrip. I couldn't tell because we were going so fast, but it looked like everything was… so two-dimensional…

As we came to a halt, I realized I was right. "Everything here is made of paper."

Raharu led us off the ship and looked around very seriously. "Yep, this is Feirus. As two-dimensional as it cares to get. We're a rare treat here, us 3-D people, you know?"

"This reminds me way too much of A Wrinkle In Time," Eri commented as she looked around, "when they warp through the atmosphere of a two-dimensional planet, except nothing is happening to us here."

"Yeah, and on this planet, there are no wrinkles," Raharu added.

My head started hurting. Wrinkles…

"Don't you see?! You're doing exactly what Medical Mechanica wants! They'll iron out the wrinkles so you can't think…"

Amarao…

"It's empty. There's no brain."

"Your head's the only one that works, Tak-kun."

"You're just her latest victim."

"Don't let her use you! FIGHT BACK!"

"You should know about your own head!"

"You're the one I saw first."

"Naota?"

So this is what it feels like to be the only one…

"Naota! You in there? Let's go get some gas, okay?"

I was vaulted back to the present world, the world that would have been mine if Medical Mechanica had triumphed. This was that world. The embodiment of my failures. Eri was talking to me and dragging me along with her to go to a gas station somewhere in the paper city. I was in a daze. I didn't want to go. I didn't want to meet anyone who might be 'thinking smooth.' That would be too much. I think I would have overflowed, like Mamimi. I didn't want that to happen, especially on a planet where I didn't know what anyone would do if it did occur, so I decided to stay by the ship instead.

I was there for a few hours. It was kind of boring after a while, so I tried to play chess against myself. White beat black to a pulp. It showed which side I favored very obviously. So that started to get boring, and I tried to find a phone so I could call home. That search bore no results, so I eventually went to sit out in front and stare at the depressing paper landscapes around me. There was nobody there, or if there was I couldn't see anyone. "This is really stupid; where are Raharu and Eri anyway?"

"You mean your two friends who went to go get some gas?"

I froze. Someone was talking to me…

"They'll be back soon. If they aren't, it's probably the clerk who's holding them up. Everyone thinks smooth in this place, but I'm sure you know that by now. Pretty bad, huh? They decided to iron out the bodies, too."

I looked around, hoping not to see anyone, because I knew that whomever I saw would be flat, and they might even look like me. It gave me the creeps just thinking about it, so I buried my face in my arms instead. "Whoever you are, I don't want to talk to you. I can't talk to someone who doesn't think."

"Hey, no worries. I'm just like you, and I think you're just like me, too. We can relate. Open your eyes and look at me, bro."

I reluctantly did as the voice told me to and looked up. I was relieved to see a boy my own age with dark hair and freckles and a mischievous grin. He was three-dimensional, like me. "Oh, good," I sighed. "I thought you were a flat person."

"You probably won't see any of those around here," the boy said as he kicked a little flat stone across the runway. "They don't come out much except for when there's something important." He looked back at me and extended his hand. "Name's Nero. Like the crazy emperor of Rome."

I shook his hand shyly and leaned back against the wall of the ship. Then I stopped and thought about what he'd said. Rome…

"Are you from Earth?"

Nero kicked another pebble. "Yeah. I came from Brooklyn in New York City. My whole family's Italian, so they named me something Roman. Go figure, huh? I was kidnapped by Medical Mechanica and brought here. They discovered my head was right for this kind of job."

I choked in surprise and nearly fell over. "You've got N.O., too?"

"Yeah. They channeled a pretty big robot through my head that activated the plant here pretty easily, but they didn't bother to pull out the guitar. Shame, really. It was a nice one."

"They've got a plant here, too?"

Nero dragged me around the side of the ship and pointed up to the top of a smooth green hill, where there was a giant red iron emitting beams of crimson light. "You'd recognize it. You're probably here because your head works, too, huh?"

It was my turn to introduce myself. "I'm Nandaba Naota. I came from Mabase in Japan."

Nero smirked. "Mabase. I remember hearing that name on the news because a satellite almost hit the city, and a little later there were attacks by giant robots. You sprouted them, right? You know the feeling."

Yeah, I knew. But unlike him, I'd foiled the plans of Medical Mechanica for Earth. They'd succeeded here. I turned to him again and looked at his face. "So what do you do now that your purpose has been served?"

Nero didn't answer me at first, but lifted up his shag-cut bangs to reveal the symbol of Medical Mechanica on his forehead. "I work for them. I did what they wanted, so they let me keep the wrinkles on my brain. I'm one of the people who keeps everything in order that needs to be kept in order, but can't be done by the smooth-thinking people. You could say they consider me a genius." He laughed. "Isn't that crazy, calling an 18-year-old who didn't even finish high school a genius?"

I had to laugh. "If you're such a genius, then can you play chess?"

"Chess… oh, I was the master back in New York. Yeah, I'll play chess. Let's go inside."

And so we did. I was relieved to finally get away from the paper world, and back to something we could both control the outcome of. Games were a big relief, a system you controlled in a world with everyone else trying to control you. Now I finally had someone who understood that as well as I did, someone else who knew how it felt being a pawn.

"So, do you know Raharu?"

Nero almost dropped the bishop he was placing so meticulously. "Raharu? Atomsk's rival? Is she really the one who used you?"

"Yep. Raharu, also known as Haruhara Haruko. She came to Mabase and posed as a housekeeper so she could free Atomsk and get his power using my head. She even used my cat to communicate with her station."

"That's what mine did too, except she posed as a charming, homeless double bass player that my parents were only too kind to take in."

"Double bass? Yow."

"Yeah, and it really hurt when she hit me with it. That thing must have been made out of titanium; it never broke once! She said it was a Juzick, which must have been really rare."

"How old were you?"

"Fourteen."

I opened my mouth to say something else… and so did the door to the ship. "HONEY, WE'RE HOOOOOOOME!!!!!!!!"

I whirled around in my seat. "Where have you two been? I was bored stiff until a few minutes ago!"

Eri eyed me coolly. "You really shouldn't complain. We were in line for an hour. The clerk couldn't even count money. We had to get the manager, and even he didn't know much."

"But we did manage to get a full three tanks worth of gas aaaaaaaaand…" Raharu shuffled around in her bag and pulled out… "an entire jumbo pack of Little Prince Curry! We can have it every night now!"

I moaned and sank into my chair. I still hated curry.

Nero grinned behind me. "I've never tried curry."

Raharu just now noticed Nero as she waved the pack of curry over her head. "Nyo? What's your name?"

"Name's Nero. I'm from planet Earth."

Eri blinked. "Nero? Who would name their kid that?" She suddenly changed her position as Raharu waggled the large and rather heavy pack of curry overhead. "Uh, I mean, cool! You're named after a craz—uh, well, an emperor!"

Nero sweatdropped. "Just say it. I'm named after the man who played the fiddle as Rome burned to the ground, and then built his palace over the ruins."

Raharu rushed past into the kitchen, cackling madly. "Heeheehahahaha! Rome is burning, but not the curry!"

"Not yet, anyway," I mumbled.

Eri rolled her eyes. "You still don't like curry, Naota?"

"I hate spicy stuff."

"But you should have gotten over that a long time ago. You're not a kid anymore, you know. People are actually supposed to develop their tastes over time."

"I could care less, okay?"

"At least be willing to try it!"

"We're going to be having curry for the next few weeks with the size of that thing, so it's not like I have a choice!"

"So are you two going out or something?"

We both shifted our glances over at Nero, who had his feet propped on the table. He lifted an eyebrow at us. "Well, are you?"

"Uh… yeah."

He started pushing around chess pieces like it was no big deal. "I could have guessed, the way you argue. Might as well be married."

Eri and I didn't have a moment to be embarrassed, because just then Raharu burst out of the kitchen wearing a maid outfit and carrying a plate full of flaming hot curry. "Dinner's ready!"

I stood up. "I'm not eating that nasty curry!"

Before I knew it, they had duct-taped me to a chair that was nailed to the floor. I knew now what I had not known before when they called me Tak-kun and made me eat curry: that I was being oppressed. I ranted about this and other aspects of true democracy for a good 15 minutes before they duct-taped my mouth shut as well. At least I didn't have to eat the curry.

They were all making a big racket after dinner while they cleaned up (I think they were bloated), and I went to take a shower. I heard laughing a few times and groaned as I shampooed my head. "They're in a good mood."

I suddenly felt hungry and resolved to sneak into the kitchen after everyone had gone to bed and find something non-spicy. For the rest of the evening we played chess (it was a perpetual stalemate between Raharu and Nero) and Eri and I argued over their strategies and how they related.

At about midnight Nero went home and we all tucked in for the night. It was almost kitchen time… the only problem was that Eri was still hot about chess when we finally got to bed.

"It was the rooks… that was her weakness, the rooks. Don't you tell me it was the queen; that was only when you played with her."

I sighed deeply. "Aren't you tired?"

"Maybe, but you were wrong anyways."

"Eri, go to sleep."

"Don't try to change the subject on me, Nandaba!" she half-yelled from the bunk bed above me.

"I'm not; I want to get a good night's sleep. Is that so unreasonable?"

"I'm not finished with you!" she growled.

"Well, I am," I retorted, "and I need to go to the bathroom, so be patient. You can fuss me out later."

Without another word, I headed for the bathroom. If I couldn't make her go to sleep, she could do it on her own. After about twenty minutes sitting and reading an old magazine, I pressed my ear to the door. I could barely hear Eri's deep, slumberous breathing. She was finally asleep, or she was really mad and wanted to trick me. I'd soon see. My stomach was growling like a beast in a pit, so I cracked the door and, seeing her asleep, sneaked past into the kitchen. Once there, it was like being out of jail for the first time in an eternity. I sucked in that thick, aromatic air and smelled spice. It was enough to make my mouth water. "Now," I said to myself, "the FOOD…"

A few spare minutes later, I was down the airstrip in my bathrobe, shivering and muttering to myself, about as mad as a cow.

I arrived at a gas station (which was also flat) and hesitated, recalling my ideals of sticking with the 3-dimensional scenery and population of the planet.

But was it really worth starving…?

I puffed out a cloud of cold air and furrowed my brow. "To hell with it," I muttered through gritted teeth, "if I'm going to live through this trip, I'll have to make sacrifices in my own name." Man, I wished Canti were there…

As I marched into the gas station, I tried to forget the vision I'd seen inside Medical Mechanica and pretend to be an innocent, simple-minded earthling. I went through the paper doors and into the paper room. I saw nobody moving in there. I smirked. Maybe just steal something… you'll be off the planet by tomorrow morning.

And so I resolved to do just that. I opened one of the cabinets inside the store, only to choke on a stench so thick that I stumbled back—right into a rack filled to the top with different-flavored curry powders. I turned around and saw the bottles in the cabinet to be filled with curry sauce! I opened one after another after another cabinet; all were filled with every kind of curry thing you could imagine!!! My brain gave a blink and my body gave a shudder, and I fell… straight into my worst dream for my planet. I looked up, and there it was. No dimension, just standing over me like a cardboard cutout. I did not move when it smiled at me, showing its unbearably perfect paper-cutting teeth, and raised an arm with a crinkling sound. It opened its mouth, leaning over me, ready to devour me bit by bit. I screamed, but as I screamed it said something. I backed away, gasping, but managed to squeak out a "WHAT?!"

"Everything is 5¥."

I calmed down a little bit. Maybe he could think for himself a little bit. "Well, um… do you carry anything that isn't curry-flavored?"

He stared at me dumbly for a few seconds before he smiled his paper smile again. "Curry? We have plenty of that. Yes, we also have bottled curry sauce and curry-covered beans and Little Prince curry with chocolate icing. We have curry powder over there, and liquid curry—"

"I asked if you had anything that was NOT curry."

"Notcurry? Curry with nots! That is a good idea! And buy some curry cheese while you're here!"

"I DON'T WANT ANY CURRY!"

"Curry! We have curry! Buy curry! Eat curry! Curry curry curry! Sticky curry! Frozen curry! Super-spicy curry BREAD! Even… furry curry, for the ones who like fuzz!"

I froze.

Furi Kuri.

The paper man could say nothing more before I ran out of the store screaming, spit flying from my mouth, empty-handed. I was going back to the ship to hide from these monsters.

I was almost home free when I ran into something else… something sticky. I realized with horror that this was a sticky curry spill. The spice was gagging me, my eyes were watering, I might have been blacking out…

"Naota! Hang in there, man!"

I looked up and realized I was on solid ground. Nero was standing over me. We were in the ship. Had it all been a dream?

"Dude, when I found you, you were drowning in some weird jelly stuff. Smelled like some kind of spice. You all right?"

"What a nightmare…" was all I could say, even though it hadn't been a dream after all.

Nero grinned his signature grin. "Your girlfriend just went to the store. She felt bad that you had nothing to eat except that Little Prince stuff that you don't like, so she's getting you non-spicy food."

I should have been glad and thankful that Eri cared enough after being mad at me all day before, but I moaned and thunked my head against the bedpost repeatedly. My nightmares were over, but I had gained nothing for my courageous efforts on the paper planet except for clear sinuses and one perpetual headache.

Okay, this chapter was kind of random. I just felt like writing it, and Nero is a new character; make him as bishonen as your mind tells you to! Sorry it took so long. Thanks for the reviews!