Excel Saga Again
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Summary: "Hell hath no fury like a militant feminist with a sense of outraged justice." Ilpalazzo is about to learn the bitter truth in this slightly adapted quote as the seventh member of the ACROSS Six appears on the scene. Yes, folks, it's another 'what happened after' story!
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It was a dark and stormy night. One hooded and cloaked lone woman of indeterminate age, though clearly neither particularly old nor particularly young, in a secluded cave deep in the mountains noted the crack of thunder and nearly simultaneous illumination of the scene by a jagged streak of lightning with a nod of satisfaction. So, those idiots from the special effects department had managed to do something right for once. A pleasant surprise, indeed.
Still, this was no time to be dwelling on such things.
She had a plan to be set into motion, and it was far too important to be trusted to an underling. After all, when one wanted something done right, one needed a woman on the scene.
Because of course her underlings were all men. The career of an underling was far too demeaning a career for the goddess that dwelt inside every woman.
It was at this point that the mysterious cave-feminist realized that she had gotten sadly off-track once more, and returned to her plotting.
"Mark my words," she murmured, crossing the thickly carpeted floor of the surprisingly nicely-decorated cave, and seating herself gracefully on an old Lazy Boy recliner upholstered in deep purple velvet. "The idealistic organization of ACROSS is going to undergo some drastic changes in the near future. Those ridiculous men that called themselves my brothers and my superiors are no longer an issue since their mysterious death some time ago which, disappointingly, I had nothing to do with. However, the men directly below them in the chain of command who never learned of my existence, kept a dark secret by the chauvinistic six with whom I shared a womb and a childhood, will find that women cannot and will not be kept down and oppressed forever! I, That Woman, the seventh member of the ACROSS Six, will see to it!"
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"Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaail, Lord Ilpalazzo!" Excel Excel and Hyatt shouted enthusiastically, the latter amid a series of wracking coughs and the former with eyes shining as adoringly and adorably as ever they had in the recently ended anime series – er, in recent events, that is. Heh-heh-heh…hey, hold on; this is Excel Saga! We can refer shamelessly to the fourth wall!
Pointedly ignoring the narration, Ilpalazzo sipped his coffee and then set the mug down on the table within the small-but-part-of-a-massive-trillion-dollar-corporation-those-damn-capitalist-pigs-that-nevertheless-sure-brew-damn-good-coffee coffee shop, and sighed in annoyance, glancing around to see if anyone else in the nearby vicinity had been distracted from their severely overpriced beverages by this.
"I asked you two not to call me that during this special relocated restructuring meeting of ACROSS," he grumbled.
When Excel and Hyatt merely remained in front of the small circular wire-and-ceramic table, frozen in their salute position, hands raised triumphantly into the air, he made an irritated noise.
"Now, will you two ladies kindly take a seat?"
Hyatt pulled out one of the other two chairs at the small round table and seated herself slowly and gracefully.
Excel made an energetic leap over Hyatt and into the other chair, landing head-first.
"Hey, someone dropped two-hundred yen and a pair of pink lacy underwear under here!" came her muffled remark.
"Ah! Excellent," Ilpalazzo said, pleasantly surprised. "The money will go toward our funds for the rebuilding of ACROSS. The underwear, you may keep, Excel."
"But, Lord Ilpalazzo," Hyatt began hesitantly, "doesn't ACROSS disdain the filthy, capitalist currency of the ignorant masses?"
Before Ilpalazzo could reply to this in anything more than a glare at Hyatt for drudging up old fine-sounding phrases and trying to infuse ACROSS with actual continuity, Excel gave an excited squeal.
"I can really keep them?! Thank-you for your great generosity, Lord Ilpalazzo! Excel has always wanted a pair like this! Actually, she hasn't, because they look kinda small and they feel really itchy, and the little bow on the front is a little much, and bows in your hair are one thing, when they're where people can see 'em, but putting a bow where n one can see it unless you walk around with your pants around your ankles, which not a lot of people do anymore, although there was that one really scary week last year when mooning became a real fad for a while, seems kinda silly. Still, setting all this aside as irrelevant and really kind of a waste of breath and valuable energy and time which can never be replace, just transformed into a different state – the energy, that is; not the time – Excel will try on her new underwear right now! Just have to take my shorts off first," she finished, returning to her seat after several high-energy laps around the coffee shop, spinning at top speed.
After this, she set about wriggling about in her seat in a manner that released a heavy flow of blood from the nose of every young man within a five-mile radius, and definitely within the coffee shop, which made a mess of no scant size, and quite annoyed the employees who would, as they said petulantly, "have to clean that up, y'know…if we feel like it".
"I just told you two not to call me that here," Ilpalazzo grumbled.
"But then…what are we to call you instead?" Hyatt asked.
Ilpalazzo considered this for a long moment.
"A typically brilliant question, Agent Hyatt."
"Thank-you, sir."
"Whoa! These pink lacy underwear fit perfectly!" Excel proclaimed joyfully, jugging sugar packets. "Really, its kind of uncanny that the last person who sat at this table was exactly the same size as me, but I guess when you stop to consider that every single girl in this city is shaped exactly the same because it is an anime, after all, and any differences from one girl's body to another's are either perceived only by that girl or are in place only for the purpose of a plot device or to spawn a hopefully entertaining moment of dialogue, and usually vanish by the next frame, it's not such a big, weird, Twilight Zone coincidence after all."
"Hey, hey, how's about you model 'em for us?" a young man nearby called with a suggestive laugh.
Ilpalazzo shot the boy…a murderous glare, that is.
Excel shot the boy a look less murderous than confused.
"Well, I guess I could, but I don't really see why," she shrugged, standing up in her chair and reaching for the zip on the front of her shorts.
Hyatt looked on curiously. She was quite interested in what sorts of undergarments people left in coffee shops.
Ilpalazzo stood up quickly and caught Excel's arm, dragging her back into her chair, at which point she stayed there for all of twenty seconds before getting bored with this whole business of 'staying still' and leaping from her chair to whirl about the table.
"A typically useless and pointless bit of meandering, thanks to you, Excel," he huffed, shooting the boy a few tables away another death-glare, just for good measure. "Now. Back to the important issue at hand."
"You mean, why the heck we're meeting in a coffee shop?" Excel asked from her position on hands and knees, peering at the floor carefully and noting curiously that the tiles were really oddly shaped, and that they kinda put one in mind of a chicken reading a book and playing hockey with a cow if you looked at it long enough.
"No! I've explained that, but shall do so again for the sake of providing the reader with useful exposition. We have assembled at this coffee shop because ACROSS's underground headquarters were destroyed, along with almost everything else, by the sea of blood that enveloped the planet some time back."
At this, he glared again at Hyatt, who shrank back and looked down at her hands, folded in her lap, sheepishly.
"I apologize, sir."
"I guess your insurance policy wouldn't cover claims for damage caused by an employee with way too much blood," Excel said thoughtfully.
"Actually," Ilpalazzo said grandly, "the policy did cover damage from large quantities of blood. As a member of ACROSS, I was prepared for every eventuality. However, as a member of ACROSS, I am also above paying my insurance premiums, and thus my policy was cancelled several months ago in what I consider to be a show of extreme unfairness and discrimination."
Hyatt raised one hand timidly.
"May Hyatt ask, discrimination on what grounds?"
"That insurance company has been against those with ambitions of conquest for years!"
"I…see," Hyatt murmured.
The other girl's hand shot into the air, only the tips of her fingers visible over the edge of the table.
"Excel has a question!"
Ilpalazzo closed his eyes briefly.
"I know I will regret this heartily, but go ahead."
"Where did Lord Ilpalazzo find a coffee shop for ACROSS to relocate its restructuring meeting to, if the entire globe has been covered with a sea of blood? It seems to Excel that if everything really has been destroyed in a sea of blood, which it obviously has, since we were just talking about it and no anime has ever been known to abandon continuity when it's convenient to a gag or somethin' silly like that, and especially not from one second to the next, unless you're watching an anime based on one of them kicking-punching-ripping-heads-off-and-removing-spleens-through-noses fighting games, there shouldn't be a lot of coffee shops around in which to hold restructuring meetings of secret, ideological organizations like ACROSS."
"You really ought to be more observant, Excel," he said with a tiny, cold smile. "This is a Starbucks. There are already twelve others completed. They were the first step in the rebuilding of civilization."
"That's kinda sad, isn't it?" Excel commented.
Ilpalazzo bristled.
"Do NOT talk that way about Starbucks!" he commanded furiously, reaching for something directly to the left of him that only he could see.
When it failed to be there, he pouted.
"Of course. We aren't in our old headquarters. Naturally, the rope wouldn't be here."
"Although, I did get dropped down the pit in our apartment a few days ago," Excel added, scratching her head. "The guy who lives a floor below us wasn't too happy when Excel fell through the roof and landed in his bath with him. He said my cute roommate and I would have to come back sometime and wash his back for him to make up for it, but thankfully, that was off camera and easily ignored, and Hatchan, if some weird guy with greasy hair and a tattoo on his arm that says, "I Luv Tentacles" comes to our door, don't let him in, okay?"
"Consider that an early birthday gift," Ilpalazzo smirked. "I had it installed while you two were on your last mission. Oh, and Agent Hyatt, be very careful to only sit at the other end of your table from here on out."
"But…our table, like our apartment, was destroyed," Hyatt pointed out hesitantly. "Thus, it would stand to reason that the strange man in the apartment below us, as well as that apartment, would be gone, too."
Excel stared at her oddly.
"What're you talking about, Hatchan? We just came from our apartment!"
Hyatt blinked, then began to flounder helplessly, searching desperately for a log of logic in the ocean of disassociated chaos, praying desperately that signifier might bump into signified and form a concept before she lost her grip and drowned. And before she could think anything further in literary theory terms used sadly out of context.
"But…but…I thought that everything had been wiped out in a sea of blood, Senior."
Excel and Ilpalazzo exchanged disbelieving glances.
"Yeah, when it's a plot point," Excel said very slowly, as one might when talking to a remarkably dense child. "Not when it actually adversely affects the day-to-day action. Geez, Hatchan, what are you thinking? There's continuity, and then there's a big, huge, heaping, gaping, sharp, prickly pain in the ass."
"And whose fault was that sea of blood, anyway?" Ilpalazzo added.
"Holds a grudge, doesn't he?" the young man a few tables away, the only extra in the coffee shop to be given a speaking role, called jovially.
Ilpalazzo turned to glare at him.
"Yes, and don't think I don't remember you clearly. Just be warned: if you ever, ever hit on my loyal follower Excel – whom I myself am not at all interested in, of course," he added hastily, "you will come to a very painful end."
"Lord Ilpalazzo's being possessive," Excel sighed dreamily, hands clasped, eyes wide and starry. "I feel all warm and fluttery and squishy…but that could just be because I sat in something. I think someone left a piece of cake on this chair. I really wish I'd noticed before I sat on it. Now I'm gonna have to was these when I get in, and I ruined a perfectly good, probably only partially-eaten piece of cake," she added sadly.
"Hey, don't look at us," one of the employees called angrily. "We're not getting paid to clean up other peoples' garbage!"
"Uh…yeah, we are," another employee muttered to her.
She blinked.
"Shut up!"
With an annoyed noise, Ilpalazzo turned pointedly away from the two coffee shop employees, who were by this point playing a heated game of hockey with two stir sticks and a sugar packet.
"As fascinating as that little interlude of conversation with the ignorant masses was, we have important matters to discuss."
"Does Lord Ilpalazzo refer to the matter of what Senior Excel and I are to call him?" Hyatt asked.
"Yes, it does. And after much thought, I have decided—"
The door of the coffee shop slammed open, breaking off the end of the statement.
"I don't suppose there's any chance of your giving them your real name, little boy," the hooded and cloaked, neither-old-nor-young woman in the doorway commented nastily.
"Little boy?!" he repeated disbelievingly, standing up with enough force to send his chair skittering back into the one directly behind it.
"Ow! Jerk," the man in said chair spat as the impact caused him to spill his piping hot coffee down the front of his shirt.
"Have you any idea who I am?" Ilpalazzo continued, ignoring the man behind him as stonily as he tended to ignore anything he didn't feel like acknowledging at the time.
The woman pushed her hood back as she approached the table, to reveal a face neither particularly pretty nor uncommonly ugly, nor memorable at all in any way. Her longish thick black hair was fastened behind her head in a tight bun.
"Do I have any idea who you are?" she repeated. "Well, we have files on you from the age of three, back when you were just a little arrogant yet charismatic idealist with ambitions to dominate the toy box of your pre-school."
She withdrew a thick manila folder, pulled a small snapshot from it, and shoved it at him. As he looked at it, he shook his head with a fondly nostalgic smile.
"Ah, sweet memories of carefree childhood. Back then, my shoulder guards were only a foot and a half across. Every week, my parents would receive complaints about their son or daughter – usually their daughter – being dropped down a mysteriously appearing pit in my sandbox by that 'strange little grey-haired kid with the big shoulders'."
"Hey, ya got any nude photos in there?" Excel asked the woman eagerly, slithering from her chair, under the table, and up behind the woman and trying to peer over her shoulder.
She laughed, ruffling the blonde girl's hair fondly.
"Poor little misinformed fool….thinking that a man will offer you true happiness."
"Uh…does that mean 'no'?" Excel asked, pulling away from the woman as one long, cold finger began to toy with her ear.
The woman rolled her eyes and sighed.
"Yes, it does."
Then she turned to Ilpalazzo as Excel slunk back to her seat, disappointed, but only until the distraction of seeing how many sugar packets she could fit into her mouth at once presented itself.
"As you can clearly see, we have every idea who you are. Perhaps the better question is, do you have any idea who I am?"
Ilpalazzo considered this very carefully for a moment, adjusting his glasses.
"No, I'm afraid I haven't the vaguest idea," he finally replied carelessly, setting his chair upright and taking his seat once again. "Now, where were we, ladies?"
"Hey!" the woman exclaimed in annoyance, banging on the table. "I'm the mysterious, unknown character in a cool hood and cloak who breezed into the first scene with detailed information about you, you shmuck! Aren't you curious as to where I've acquired it?"
Once again, Ilpalazzo stopped to ponder this.
"Not especially, no," he finally replied. "Excel? Hyatt? Are either of you curious?"
Everyone looked first to Hyatt, who had flopped face-forward onto the table, and was now surrounded by a most unhygienic pool of her own blood.
"I see," he sighed. "Excel?"
"If the mysterious lady don't have nudie pictures of Lord Ilpalazzo, Excel don't care," Excel replied as airily as a mouthful of sugar would let her, before returning to the task of repeatedly poking Hyatt with a spoon.
"You realize, of course, that you will be dropped down the pit once for every time you've called me that while here, Excel," he told her absently. Then he turned to the older woman. "There you have it, Miss. It seems as though no one here could care less who you are or what you may or may not know. Therefore, if you would leave us in peace, I'm certain we would all appreciate it."
The woman's face twisted with anger until it became almost memorable.
"Oh, no!" she barked, dragging a chair from a nearby table and pulling it up to the table occupied by three very bewildered people. "Now that I have seen just how sad the current state of affairs in this branch of the idealistic organization of ACROSS has become, I will not leave until I have seen a change! And anyway," she continued, sounding nearly hurt, "after I came all the way here, I'd damn well better get to enjoy imparting the great revelation of my identity."
Ilpalazzo sighed impatiently.
"Very well. Please impart what you wish to impart and leave quickly. We have important, very confidential business to – hold on; if you've traveled from outside of F-City, what do you know about ACROSS?"
The woman's expression was openly triumphant.
"For one thing, I know that a certain foolish little boy who believes himself to be very grown-up and very powerful indeed has planned to take advantage of the recent deaths of the ACROSS Six to seize control of the entire organization while no one was looking."
Excel leaned over to Hyatt, who had just sat up weakly.
"Hey, who do you think the ACROSS Six are? Excel knows that she doesn't pay a whole lot of attention all the time, but she's pretty sure she'd remember a name like that, particularly if Lord Ilpalazzo was the one mentioning them, since Excel remembers not only every word that Lord Ilpalazzo has ever said, but the tone and inflection he used to say it, and the day of the week he said it on, all filed away in the well-organized cabinet that is her mind!"
"I would suppose that they are the six men who are in charge of ACROSS at the global level, Senior," Hyatt replied, wondering if it was safe to giggle at the comparison of Excel's mind to a well-organized filing cabinet, which her Senior had obviously meant as a joke.
"Global level?" Excel repeated, arm going oddly bendy as she scratched her head in confusion.
"So, this is the level of ignorance you keep your staff members in!" the newcomer snorted. "Or are these two just remarkably uninformed? Perhaps you have given your others an indication of who and what ACROSS is?"
"Others?" Excel repeated to Hyatt. "Did we just sorta miss them being around, too? Does she mean all the octopuses and squids and tentacle monsters and alligators and things that live in the pit?"
The dark-haired woman overhead and stared at Excel in disbelief.
"Don't tell me that you two are the only officers in this branch of ACROSS!"
"Of course not," Ilpalazzo hastened to say uncomfortably.
"Yeah! We also have our cute, cuddly emergency food supply, Menchi!" Excel added. "Somehow, no one remembers Menchi unless she's right in front of us, even though she's really really really super important! And she loves Hatchan and me with all her heart! She whimpers with joy whenever we come home, and we always find her waiting for us by the window! Once, we even found her trying to open the door so she could run to meet us outside!"
"I…see," the woman muttered, rubbing her eyes wearily. Then she straightened up abruptly. "Very well! I see now what must be done! From this point forward, I will directly control our F-City branch!"
Ilpalazzo's eyes narrowed into golden slits.
"Exactly who are you?"
"I am That Woman, the seventh member of the ACROSS Six, kept ruthlessly hidden and oppressed because ACROSS is really a shamefully chauvinistic organization. But no more!"
She thumped the table for emphasis.
"Excuse me!" Excel called out, raising her hand.
"Excel, be quiet. We haven't got time for your idiotic questions right now," Ilpalazzo snapped.
That Woman glared icily at him.
"Don't you think you've denied these two poor lovely and innocent young girls of necessary information for long enough?" She beamed stead at Excel. "Go ahead, sweetheart."
"Excel knows she's not too bright, and she occasionally and maybe even often misses things that are really obvious to the rest of the world, and that's not even including things that exist of a metaphorical or metaphysical level instead of just plain old reality and the physical universe around her, but she doesn't understand how there can be a seventh member of a group called the ACROSS Six, unless the name is just a name to sound cool and doesn't really describe the group at all."
That Woman smiled tenderly, reaching across the table to take Hyatt's cold hand in her right hand, and Excel's very confused hand in her left.
"I can understand how this is very bewildering for you both. It is happening very fast. Basically, girls, my brothers usurped the organization that I helped to found and referred to themselves as the ACROSS Six to hide the involvement of their sister."
"Excel thinks she gets it now!"
"That would be a miraculous occurrence," Ilpalazzo muttered, crossing his arms petulantly at how neither girl seemed inclined to pull her hand away from That Woman and come to his defense. So, this was the kind of loyalty he could expect!
"No one asked you," That Woman snapped. Then she smiled a smile much like a gooey chocolate cake laced with arsenic. "However, you were correct before when you said that Lord Ilpalazzo is no longer a suitable name for you."
"Actually, Miss That Woman," Excel broke in, "he only meant that we should call him something else while we're here so we don't draw attention."
That Woman rolled her eyes.
"Because, of course, going out to a coffee shop in a long cloak and four-foot shoulders that you punched a hole in the doorway with, is a marvelous way to remain inconspicuous."
"So, Miss That Woman," Hyatt began, typically soft and sweet, "are Senior Excel and I to understand that, as officers of the F-City branch of ACROSS, we are now under your direct command?"
Excel froze, metaphorically and then literally. Then she began to melt slightly, due to the warmth in the air stemming from all the brewing coffee typically found in a Starbucks, and was soon dripping messily all over the table, her face never shifting from its aghast expression at the idea of no longer working for the ultra-yummy center of her universe.
That Woman smirked.
"Yes, girls, if you wish to remain with ACROSS. You two, as well as little Ilpala here."
Now it was 'little Ilpala's' turn to freeze, and he too made a bit of a mess melting all over the table due to the high temperature of the coffee shop. His expression, though, was more furious than aghast.
"You are surely joking."
"Actually, I'm deadly serious. You are entirely welcome to remain with ACROSS, if you wish. Under my command, naturally, and your current position dictates that you will be working more closely with these two girls than you may have previously."
"You don't mean…"
That Woman nodded.
"Yes, I'm afraid I do; you'll actually have to leave headquarters every now and again. By the way," she added offhandedly, "since you won't have the time for it, might I borrow your dating simulator?"
"What would That Woman want with a game whose objective is to score with chicks?" Excel whispered to Hyatt.
"Perhaps Miss That Woman simply enjoys the challenge and strategy of romance?"
Excel stared.
"That's sick, Hyatt."
Meanwhile, Ilpalazzo had continued, sounding almost tearful.
"You do realize, of course, that you are compromising the infectious chaos and sex appeal of a devilishly good-looking man and the two loyal and beautiful young girls who serve him unwaveringly."
"And a puppy," Excel chimed in.
"I believe that is a compromise we can deal with," That Woman said gently. "Even the puppy. Of course, you may walk away from ACROSS right now, if you wish. Given your recent ambitions of a surreptitious take-over while no one was paying attention, I believe I'm letting you off easily. Now, what is your answer?"
Head in his hands, Ilpalazzo thought carefully through the choice before him, weighing up the positives and negatives. Life without ACROSS! What would he find to do with his time? What else would there be for him?
Still, would aching emptiness and severe boredom really be any worse than spending his days playing boot-licker to this obnoxious woman and her horrid 'mysterious tough girl' routine?
I wonder just what my life without ACROSS would be…
Suddenly, the music of several harps filled the air and the scene began to blur, as though viewed through a window streaked with rain.
"Oh, boy," he faintly heard Excel say as he drifted off. "It's a flashback sequence!"
"Um…actually, Senior…"
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End Notes: Whoo! First chapter, and I'm already resorting to the Parallel Universe gimmick for the next one! :o)
Anyway, I do hope this is as amusing to someone else out there as it is to me. It'll probably turn into a fairly long project. Call it sick wish-fulfillment and gleeful Ilpalazzo-torture, call it desperation for a new idea, call it whatever you want. Just call it when dinner's ready; it's hungry. Being a story is hard work.
Um…anyway…I'm a little uncertain about how to develop That Woman. If I make her too badass and all-powerful, I've got a Mary Sue on my hands, and I refuse to deal with that. However, if she's just some random lady with no special characteristics, it becomes ridiculous to think that she is the "seventh member of the ACROSS Six" who are all extremely bad at math, it seems. So, I'm trying to strike a balance, but I haven't had much time to develop her any way yet.
And I apologize in advance, but yes, there will be a probably massive amount of 'shippiness in this. And no, none of it will be with That Woman! She's not there to be happy! She's there to be obnoxious! :o)