A/N - This is a cookie I promised to my girlfriend, Sylphiel. It's not terribly long, but you have to admit the pairing is funny. This is more likely than not a one-shot. I think writing more would probably drive me absolutely nuts. Also, I'm not a mathematician or a theoretical physicist, so I took immense liberties with space-time theories. In addition, the title bears no relevance to the story other than the neat little pun.
Sued -Kaolla Su looked petulantly at the motherboard in front of her. She scratched her head, examining the faulty item from different angles until she became bored and nearly forgot what she was doing. She flipped into the limbs of the indoor tree above her work desk, and sighed. "Why won't it woooork?" she whined to herself. "Everything else is working right! I don't want to have to start over!"
She jumped down off of the tree and ran downstairs to get a banana. As she munched on it on the way back up, a part of her brain questioned the ethics, morality, and plain common sense of her time machine project, which she'd lovingly dubbed Taimu-kun, which had all started because she wanted a glimpse of the future. The rest of her brain responded with, Bananabananabananabananabananabanana, and eventually hushed the other part up. She plopped back down in front of the motherboard and started making some adjustments. She thought it might be incorrectly calibrated, so she figured she'd check that first.
~~~~~~~~~~
Many years in the future, Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV, or "Ed" as she was known to people who didn't have an hour to spend on her name, fell back against the floor in defeat. Ein, the much put-upon corgi, whimpered in despair as he was once again relegated to the status of "pillow". Ed groaned. "Stupid motherboard. Why won't it work?" Ein didn't seem to have any answers, so she was left to figure it out on her own.
This had all started because she wanted a glimpse of the past, the Earth before the Gate Incident, which was preserved in films and photos online.
She sat back up, much to the relief of Ein, and stared dully at the board. If she'd soldered it in wrong, she'd have to start over, and she didn't like that. She looked over at the rest of her contraption, which was actually fairly small, and decided to recalibrate it before she started all over.
~~~~~~~~~~
In an odd confluence of coincidence, each girl had set her machine on the exact point at which the other was working. The calibrations were completed at the instant of suggested transport on the opposite side, and instead of opening a tiny warp gate, the gates fused to form a gigantic warp gate that sucked them and everything for several hundred feet into a theoretical midpoint, where the realities collided. Both the Bebop and the Hinatasou came to rest on a totally blank world that looked as though it had been made out of cardboard.
Su leaned out over the balcony. Somehow, the transfer had gone off without a single person in the Hinatasou waking up, and she thought that it might be good to keep it that way. More important to her, however, was the enormous spaceship hovering not a hundred feet in front of her. She leapt off the balcony as the ship set down with an oddly muted thud. She skidded to a stop in front of the ship, curiously examining it, when she heard a voice call out.
"Hey! You! Who are you? Where am I?"
Su looked up to see a short-haired girl about her age leaning off the edge of one of the wings, goggles over her eyes. She blinked a couple of times, and said, "I'm Kaolla Su, and we're in Japan? Maybe? I don't know where this is! It's boring, I know that! Who are you? Where are you from?"
Ed hopped off the wing and grinned widely. "'Radical Edward' is what they call me! I'm a cowgirl!"
Su cocked her head. "I don't see any cows."
Ed looked at her for a moment, then spun around on one foot. "I don't think we've ever had to catch a cow. I wonder what sort of crime a cow would commit?"
Su looked thoughtful for a moment, and then said, brightly, "If it ran away, would that be cattle rustling?"
Ed blinked, then nodded happily. "That sounds right!"
Su reached over and tugged her arm. "Want a banana? C'mon back to the house! There's a whole bunch!"
Ed brightened up. "Food! Wai!" She and Su scampered off to the antique-looking building that had unceremoniously settled into the empty surface of the world. When they got there, she surprised Su by devouring them even faster than Su could.
Su grinned. "This is fun, but I don't think everyone here is going to be happy about being in some sort of alternate dimension. The ronin won't be able to take his Tokyo U. exams, and that'll make everyone upset."
Ed frowned. "Yeah, there aren't too many criminals to catch here, either. I don't think Faye would be happy without horse races to bet on."
Su laughed. "Or Kitsune. Same reason. So, what do we do about this?"
Ed looked at Su's machine and said, "Well, you do yours like drawing a line, right? You start from when you are and go back or forward." Su nodded, and Ed said, "Mine, too. We can just use them to go back to our own times."
Su shook her head. "But we need to know when we are. And we don't, because I don't even know if this is a 'when.'"
Ed nodded her agreement. "Well, if we're in an alternate space, perhaps there's some singularity thing going on here?"
Su picked up on her idea and said, "So we're at an infinite time?"
Ed grinned. "Yep!"
Su cocked her head and said, "But how would we enter that using a limited number of digits?" Ed grinned even more widely, and Su read her mind. "Divide by zero? But couldn't that make the black hole itself infinite and warp the entire universe out of existence?"
They looked at each other for a moment, their respective inner voices pleading with them not to try it, and simultaneously scratched their heads and said to each other, "Is that bad?"
~~~~~~~~~~
Su and Ed set their machines up next to each other and programmed in the elements to be returned to the proper times. Bizzarely, the computers understood the arguments "Hinatasou" and "Bebop," so there weren't many problems. They looked at each other and smiled sheepishly.
"Well, goodbye!" said Su. "It was lots of fun! Maybe if this works, you can come visit sometime!"
Ed smiled. "Wai! But how will I know when to come?"
Su thought for a minute, and said, "Well, you still have some of the defense satellites and systems from Earth in my time, right?" Ed nodded, remembering MPU. Su smiled. "I'll just hack one and leave you some info!"
Ed grinned. "Sounds fun! Nice meeting you, Su!"
"You, too, Ed!"
They hit the activation buttons simultaneously.
~~~~~~~~~~
Keitaro woke up the next morning with the distinct feeling that he had traveled a million miles in his sleep. He picked up some of the multitude of banana peels Su had left behind her overnight, and wandered outside. There was a big black scorch mark on the ground, and he blinked at it before realizing that it hadn't been there the night before. God only knows what Su was doing last night.
~~~~~~~~~~
Decades and planets away, Spike Spiegel woke up with the same feeling, and wandered down to the galley to see if there was any food at all. It had been a while since their last catch, and funds were wearing thin. He opened a cupboard, then another, and another.
"Bananas?" he said to himself.
