Out of Time Chapter 27¾: Deus Ex Machina

1865

For the first time he could remember since that Thursday after his wedding night, Saito was at a loss for words. Various incomprehensible sounds made a valiant attempt to make their way past his lips, but nothing resembling actual articulate words. He was so off kilter that he had actually forgotten to scowl.

Saito had erroneously assumed that knocking his short nemesis off the bridge would nicely send him back to the past where he belonged, and give him a good laugh to boot. He hadn't been prepared in the least for being sent back himself, and was now quite unsure on how to proceed.

"Kuso, de gozaru," he heard the rurouni beside him mutter under his breath.

"Aa," was all Saito could say in reply.

"Now what, de gozaru ka?" Kenshin asked him.

Well, if that wasn't the billion yen question of the hour; how was he supposed to know? "I could try stabbing you again," he offered.

"I don't think so, de gozaru."

To this, Saito gave a non-committal shrug, and started clambering up to the street above. "We should probably move quickly—the third squad won't be far behind, and I would rather not have to explain all this," he said, gesturing vaguely in Kenshin's general direction as the rurouni made an effort to drag himself up to street level.

"Saito, has it occurred to you that maybe we've got this all wrong de gozaru ka?"

"Ahou. If we knew what we were doing, then we wouldn't be in this mess, now would we?" Saito replied somewhat testily.

"All sessha is saying is that there must be something we're overlooking... there must be a way to get back to the future de gozaru!"

"Well of course there is!"

Kenshin and Saito turned to see an odd, short man with greying hair and dark western clothes standing in front of what looked suspiciously like an elevator... except without the rest of the building. It was adorned with various flashing lights and was emitting a copious amount of smoke that screamed "cheap 80's sci-fi film". Obviously, either of them had ever seen a cheap 80's sci-fi film–that line was more for your benefit than theirs.

"Do you see that, Battousai?" Saito asked in what he hoped was a casual manner, despite the growing sense of confusion.

"Hai," Kenshin replied just as casually.

"Damn."

By this stage, Kenshin and Saito had ceased to be surprised, but still hadn't quite gotten around to working out how, exactly, to deal with this. The elevator, and the man standing in front of it, were summarily filed in their mental "weird crap I don't want to deal with" list for future reference.

"Hope I didn't startle you," the strange man answered in a mostly passable imitation of the Japanese language as spoken by a Portuguese sailor. "Allow me to introduce myself: I am Brown."

"Actually, you seem more pinkish..." Kenshin helpfully pointed out, desperate to find some sensible, normal frame of reference.

"Not to mention that jacket is clearly black," Saito added, still attempting to look nonplussed. Then he remembered who he was, and tried scowling instead.

"Not my clothes—my name! My name is Brown!"

"Do names have colours de gozaru ka?" Kenshin asked the now furiously scowling man beside him.

"I believe," Saito began, carefully considering his words, "that he means his name is Brown, not that his name is Brown."

"I see," Kenshin said, not entirely sure if he did, but merely wanting the hurting in his head to stop. Being beaten up, stabbed, and dropped in a freezing river will do that to a guy.

"Well," the Brown person asked, "are you going to stand there all day, or are you going to come along? We have to get you two back to your own time!"

"Back?" Kenshin asked hopefully, finally recognizing a simple concept he could latch on to.

"Of course!"

"Back where I belong and not, say, in the middle of the Heian era de gozaru ka?"

"Right back where you belong," Brown said, smiling congenially. Saito continued scowling.

Kenshin visibly cheered up at the thought of going back to Kaoru (oh, and his other friends, too) until a frown crossed his face. "How?" He didn't particularly feel like being stabbed again. Or falling of the bridge. Or in fact, having anything else to do with bridges if it could be helped.

"With my time machine!" Brown exclaimed excitedly, gesticulating at the bizarre contraption behind him. He said it in the tone of voice of someone who fully expected his audience to be impressed and clap and cheer and make "oooh!" noises.

Kenshin blinked. Saito sniffed in a manner that conveyed a generalised sense of annoyance.

Brown held his pose for several more seconds, hoping the two temporally displaced men would get the hint, but eventually gave up and shuffled into the elevator without ceremony.

Kenshin and Saito duly followed. They were not ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if it was standing on its hind legs dressed in a Kabuki costume and singing a loud drinking song. At this point, they really didn't care what it was doing.

Once inside, Brown pushed a button marked "Fourth Floor, Lingerie" and the doors began to close. "You may wish to hold on to something," he nonchalantly mentioned. Saito held onto the rail attached to the inside of the elevator. Kenshin chose to sit and pray he would live to see Kaoru again.

The doors closed, a pleasant "ding!" was heard, and then the elevator's occupants got to feel what it was like to have your organs rush madly down to your feet only to discover it was all some horrible trick gravity was playing on them and there was no free concert. This sensation lasted only a scant second or two before it was replaced with an uneasy feeling of moving very fast indeed without really knowing just how fast.

"What was that?" Saito asked, hoping against hope the unpleasant feeling he'd had moment before wasn't him further ruining his pants.

"Zero to eighty-eight in one and a half seconds!" Brown answered enthusiastically, seemingly unaffected by the sudden acceleration.

Kenshin, meanwhile had recovered nicely and was having an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable sit, when curiosity got the better of him.

"Do you know why all this happened de gozaru?" he asked plainly.

"Fanfic authors," Brown declared, as if that explained everything.

"Fa-nu-fi-ku?" Kenshin tried (with some success) to ask. Saito resumed scowling.

"Yeah... they're losers with no life whatsoever who write these droll stories about other people's characters because they're so lacking in creativity that they..."

At this point, a bolt of lighting shot down from the ceiling, and a loud voice boomed "watch it...".

"Ahem. What I meant to say is that fanfic authors are creative individuals who enhance a fictional universe, and bring new characters and diversity, and uh..." He realized he was rapidly losing Kenshin's interest, so he tried a different tack. "Anyway, the problem are all these bloody time-travel fics they write. They're almost all done with no forethought to temporal mechanics whatsoever! In some cases, they aren't even consistent with their own timeline...

"Its gotten so bad, that holes have starting popping up in random fanfics, causing characters to drop through the space-time continuum like rocks through a wet paper bag." At this, he leaned over towards Kenshin and harshly whispered, "I hate wet paper bags," into his ear before resuming.

"That's why I'm here. I'm from the Brown League for Temporaility Society.

Somewhere, in a fic far, far away, a beheaded ghost suddenly exclaimed "BLTs! We shoulda gone with BLTs! That's so much better than Poor Bastards Killed by..."

"Our mission is to go through space and time and correct all the little hiccups caused by careless authors. The society was formed by my great grandfather, and has kinda run in the family ever since." He leaned against the wall and patted what Kenshin and Saito could only assume was a control panel. "We've each built our own time machines. This one is, as you can see, a modified 20th century elevator from Harod's in London. My grandfather's was a police phone box, and my great grandfather made his out of a passenger train, although at one stage he also had a DeLorean..."

"Umm... what does this..." Kenshin attempted to ask, but not before Brown continued reminiscing.

"My father made his out of his closest. Imagine his mother's surprise when one day her son's closest went shooting out of the wall of her house at eighty-eight miles per hour before disappearing moments before hitting the lawn. Two weeks later, it reappeared and promptly exploded in flames!" Brown laughed a moment, before turning to his passengers. "You should probably grab hold of something again."

Having learnt their lesson the last time, Saito made sure to very securely grip the handrail without looking like he was worried of losing bladder control. Kenshin decided that sitting had worked well enough last time, but that he very much wanted to get off now.

"Ding," went the elevator.

1878

"Whump" went Kenshin's head as he hit the ceiling at almost eighty-eight miles per hour.

"Wow. That's really gotta hurt," Brown mused as he watched a small geyser of blood spurt from the rurouni's head. "Will she be alright?"

"He's been training for this sort of damage for the last few months," Saito nodded sagely before he resumed his scowl. "He has a personal instructor who beats him over the head day in, day out just for occasions such as this."

"I see... what's that noise she's making?" Brown asked as Kenshin began oro-ing in much the same way a wounded kitten would mewl after being stomped on by a confused hitokiki.

"I think it means he's still alive. Kind of like 'itai', but much more annoying," Saito threw over his shoulder as he dragged the unconscious rurouni out of the elevator and onto the bridge.

Before Saito, frozen in time was himself in his old Shinsengumi uniform, and a large Kenshin-shaped splash in the river below. Saito had to admit, his posture really was better back then; but he definitely looked better in black. Light blue was such a sissy colour.

Pulling something out of a small cupboard inside the elevator, Brown stepped out and turned to Saito. "Well, here's the tricky bit... I have to put you two in the correct spot, then take those two back to where they belong. That's where this comes in handy."

The object he held in his hands was one of the oddest things Saito had ever seen. It looked as if someone had started by designing a gun, but then decided after the hilt was finished that a cannon would be more fun, had then gotten very hungry and decided to weld a wok onto the end, before finally coming to the conclusion that four pointy claw-like things on the end would just look wicked-awesome. "Zero-point energy field manipulator," Brown winked, as if that was supposed to mean anything whatsoever.

Brown pointed the contraption at Saito's younger self, and pulled the trigger. The device began humming, and Saito (1865) suddenly jumped up into the air. Brown then casually swung the device back towards the elevator, taking Saito (1865) and placing him gently inside.

He repeated the process with Kenshin (1865), before picking up Kenshin (1878) and dumping him in the river where his younger (1865) counterpart was moments (13 seconds) before. Saito (1878) would never admit to this, but watching Kenshin (of whatever year) get dumped into the same freezing river again was one of the most satisfying moments of his life.

"Why is sessha in the river again de gozaru ka?" a small voice asked plaintively from inside the cloud of inanimate water.

"Just hold still—we're almost done," Brown responded before unceremoniously picking Saito up, and depositing him in the correct place. A few minor adjustments of his various limbs, and Brown stepped back with a pleased expression on his face. "There! Back where you belong! Now all I have to do is erase your memories, and restart time."

"Oh good," Kenshin sighed, "sessha was beginning to... wait... erase our memories?" he exclaimed, suddenly worried.

"Of course! I can't have you going around telling people you were rescued by a time-travelling elevator!" With this, Brown pulled what looked exactly like a gun from his pocket. "Now don't worry—this is going to hurt an awful lot, but at least you won't remember any of it!"

Taking one last look at the desperately scowling Wolf of Mibu and a soon-to-be-drenched-yet-again rurouni, a stray thought crossed his mind as he pulled the trigger...

"Wait a second... he's a guy!

As Kenshin lay suspended in the water, he felt a sharp pain building in his head as if something was attempting to burrow in through his skull. He slowly felt his grip on the now slipping, and one thought that had been pushed to the back of his mind by the recent turn of events flared up in his confused mind. Reaching out he grabbed it and held it, even as he felt the water around him begin to flow once more, and darkness enveloped him...

Kaoru...

2005

Author's Rambling

When one posts a review comment as a ficlet, one would logically expect a few passing comments to the effect that it doesn't really qualify as a fic by itself, and should probably have been left in the reviews where it belongs. One does not expect to be attacked by such phrases as:

"I'm rolling on the floor and out of breath!",

"Funny... too funny...", or

"now all you have to do is write more stuff".

One also should not refer to oneself in the third person.

I never really gave any thought to continuing this silly little thing, but I figured if I nailed the coffin shut, that would stave off any requests for me to rewrite Sirius' fic in my own style (eek).

As you can no doubt guess, Chapter 27¾ leads directly into Chapter 28 of Out of Time, and neatly undoes everything Chapter 27½ did. Hence the title.

I have to admit, that I didn't really put that much effort into this. I basically just wrote it as I went along. At the moment, I'm swamped by work, and the few hours I spent fiddling with this was very relaxing and maybe I should do it more often.

One note: the elevator button was originally going to read "Tacos", but I found "Fourth Floor, Lingerie" to be funnier for some reason. Bonus Scowling Saito Cookie to whoever works out that reference .

Regarding that last paragraph, whilst it's fun doing parody and humour, I'm a sucker for WAFF at heart, hence why it gets all serious at the end. That, and I wanted to (hopefully, since I haven't seen it) segue nicely into the next chapter of Out of Time.

Also, if you happen to see a few more stories pop up on my account over the next few days, blame SiriusFan13. It's all her fault...

Finally, my apologies if I've stuffed up Kenshin's sentence-enders. I only really used them in this fic because if I didn't, "Kuso, de gozaru" wouldn't have been nearly as funny .

Anyway, I have work to get back to, and I've taken up enough of your time as it is. Thanks for reading.

Ja, ne

–賜狼審神

2nd September, 2005