The gray water rippled peacefully, smelling faintly of ionization and a slow, painful death. There was a soft, deep hum in the air, but apart from that, the Aquarium building was silent. Kaori and Sakaki huddled together on the corridor above their staircase, lost in their own worlds.

To be honest, Kaori could have stayed there forever, with Sakaki's strong, soft arm about her, raven locks brushing her face, and breathing her faint, lilac-y scent. Kaori was in heaven. "Er… Kaori?"

Her eyes snapped open. "Wha-?" She realized at that moment that she'd been… hm… perhaps the best word for it was nuzzling Sakaki the whole while. She turned slowly and met her idol's deep blue eyes, which were a little embarrassed, a tad uncomfortable, and, worst of all, pained. In that look, Kaori finally saw what she'd known all along. "I'm s-sorry…"

Sakaki groped for something to say that wouldn't do her further injury, but was clearly coming up dry. That's what the catastrophic look had said: I can't. I'm sorry, I don't want to hurt you, but I can't.

"It's okay, Ms. Sakaki…" Kaori said, sliding yet further away. "I shouldn't expect you to… I mean, it wasn't right of me to put it to you like… well…" While both of those statements were true, neither was what she was really trying to say. "You… you deserve better, anyw-"

"No." Sakaki's voice was soft, her tone gentle, but there was a freight-train's worth of force behind the word. "I'm not that great. Why do you think I am?"

"Because… well, because…!" Kaori turned back to her. There was about a meter between them on the top step, but it might as well have been another forty-meter lake of acid. "I always… you're so tall, and strong, and gallant. I can't help but… oh, hell, do I even need a reason?"

Sakaki looked down at the water. "Nobody does," she said with faint, bitter humor.

Kaori looked back at the water as well, and, to her complete shock, felt absolutely no urge to fling herself into it. Late in anxious, sleepless nights, she would imagine the final, crushing moment when it became clear that Sakaki could never return her love, and she could never imagine anything after it. Would her broken heart just stop on the spot?

Thup thup thup… nope.

Now that the dreaded moment was here, Kaori's emotional reaction could be summed up thus: "Huh." She watched the sluggish, lethal ripples and waited for the hammer to fall, for her heart to collapse, for the final cataclysm to end her miserable existence.

…nope.

"Ms. Sakaki?"
"Mm?"
"Are we still… are we still friends?"
"Of course!"

With that, a huge weight lifted from her. Oh, she was still sad, but… "Because, you know what? That's all I really need. As long as you count me as a friend, I have the world!" Kaori stood. "Hey, you wanna throw some stuff in there and see if it dissolves?"

"Uh-?" Sakaki blinked. She was already bad at reading other people, and this sudden turn would have challenged Dr. Phil. (Or Dr. Phil's irritating Japanese counterpart. You know he exists.)

"Aw, come on! It'll be fun!" Kaori turned back up the corridor. "There's this nifty water cooler down the… oh. Hello. How did you get here?"

"Er… the back entrance?" the rescue worker answered. Thoroughly embarrassed, the girls trooped after him, and thus were long gone when the tiny arachnid broke the surface of the evil water. It scuttled up onto the stairs, waving its feelers about, thoroughly baffled by this strange, oxygenated landscape it had discovered.

Yomi sat blearily at the kitchen table, staring at her pancakes and wondering why they weren't making it into her stomach by sheer force of will. The sun gazed benignly through the windows across from her, mild for the season but far, far too bright for her tired eyes. This was an abnormally bad morning, probably due to aching-rib-induced sleep deprivation.

The doorbell rang obnoxiously. Yomi glanced at the clock apprehensively and saw that it was exactly 7 AM, which could only mean… She rose faster than was probably wise ("ow!") and called, "I'll get it," to whoever happened to care.

She opened the door, dismayed to find that she was right. Kagura stood on her doorstep in a light jacket and windpants, a sweatband pushing through her jagged hair. Yomi looked her up and down, then down at her own pajama-clad form. "You're kidding, right?"

"What?" Kagura spread her hands.

"I'm just out of the hospital, woman!"

Some background might be in order. For many months, Kagura had observed Yomi's frustration at controlling her weight, and urged the Bespectacled One to join her on regular jogs. Yomi had given it a shot but found she just couldn't keep up with the athlete; no surprise there, but beyond that it just wasn't any fun.

Then came the trauma of the previous fall and the resultant break in Yomi's constant dieting. She would probably have returned to the grind after a time if not for Kagura's intervention. After a nice, long jog in a quiet evening just before winter fell, Yomi realized that she had a lot more energy for some reason…

So ended the Age of Deprivation!

But now…
"Well, I thought you'd want to go for a walk or something…" Kagura trailed off.
Yomi stared at her for a few seconds. "Do you want some pancakes?"

"Do I!" On their way in, they passed Osaka and Tomo sleeping on the floor. Osaka was spread-eagled on her back, snoring away under a quilt and a sign that read Injured! Please don't step on me! Tomo had tumbled out of the couch without awakening, and her tossing and turning had landed the two of them in a slightly compromising position.

Kagura snickered, but Yomi just straightened her glasses and said, "Those two had a strange night."

"Oh… oh! Aw, man, they haven't gone Kaori on us, have they?" The idea wouldn't even have occurred to Kagura if not for Osaka's occasional joking insinuations.

"'Gone Kaori?'" Yomi raised an eyebrow at the term. "No, I don't think so. They've gone somewhere, I think, but not there."
"That's a relief. You know, I wouldn't be that sur…"
"Shut up and eat your pancakes."

After they'd gone through, Osaka half-awoke and examined the ceiling through slitted eyes. Way too early, she decided. Before drifting off again, she lifted Tomo's hand away by its wrist and dropped it on the carpet next to her. "We gotta do somethin' 'bout that fixation o' yours, Tomo," she mumbled.

About one-fifth of Tomo woke up and looked at her stupidly. "Whuh…?"
"Ne'mind. Go back to sleep."
"'kay." Thump.

The anti-Bonkuras lay in peace for about ten seconds before a sonic-boom slammed through their bodies and shook the house about them to its foundation. Osaka sat bolt-upright, clutching her chest. "Ah! Oh, my heart!"

"The… the hell?" Kagura rushed to a window, but all she saw overhead was a cluster freakishly large contrails. They were intriguing, but mere strips of vapor, however thick, had nothing on pancakes. "Eh, whatever."

Yasuhiro Mihama wasn't kidding when he promised an insane ass-whooping for Godzilla. And soaring over the mainland towards Okinawa was the colossal, gleaming agency of that ass-whooping. Behold, 100 meters of space-titanium awesomeness, loaded down with the most powerful and creative weapons Earth's technology could devise, slung beneath a tremendous airframe as though hang-gliding at Mach 1.3!

Behold: MECHAGODZILLA!

Yes, it had taken some doing to create a method to airlift the 165,000 ton monster. Much speculation was made on how this was managed, but only the most wild-eyed tabloids came anywhere near the truth. In spite of the fact that the world had suffered an honest-to-goodness alien invasion not six months before, most seemed eager to forget this.

As it turned out, the Big MG's maiden whooping would not be against its (his?) organic counterpart. Instead, the mighty machine was doomed to the undignified role of industrial-sized Veg-o-Matic. Well, in theory anyway…

For it seemed that as improbably fast as Mechagodzilla had been deployed and borne towards his target, the Real McCoy had beaten him there!

"RARRGH! GROAARRRR!" Godzillante said, the petals that formed his absurd fez waving about his head. "RARRARGH!"

"I know it's upsetting!" Chiyollante cried, waving her arms in a way Chiyo found creepily familiar. "Please, hear me out!"

"RAGHARRRGH!" Godzillante retorted.

"It makes perfect sense! Please, calm down and listen!"

"Grahr," he relented.

"Thank you." Chiyollante collected herself, running fingers through her astonishing red hair and taking a few deep breaths. "This young lady is Chiyo Mihama… she's one of the three that we need to become whole. But I've been…"

"RERGH?" Godzillante asked.

"That's right, I haven't consumed her, and I'm not going to. And you're not going to take your other part, either."

"RARRRARGH!"

"But we aren't the originals. Don't you see? If you just think for a moment, you'll realize that…"

"ROGGH!"

"Yes, I know that's what I'm for, but I'm asking you to please stretch yourself. I mean, look at Chiyo, here! Er, excuse me." Chiyollante took her counterpart by the arm and pulled her forward. "She's whole! She's not a fragment of anything, least of all some part that was broken off of us. She's so different from me that there's no way we could be fused… if anything, I'm a part of her, fused with something else! And besides, I saw when I bit her that her spirit has aged more than mine, so she has to have come first!"

Godzillante saw a few holes in her theory, and outlined them thus: "RARRGH! GROARR! HORRAG!" Horrag? That's a new one. Chiyo thought numbly. She'd long since given up on being scared or amazed; after so long, it was just too tiring.

"Yes, but…"

"GROARR!"

"I'm sorry, but what do you mean, 'he's here'?"

Just that. Godzilla was just pulling himself ashore on Okinawa as they spoke, examining Biollante's new form with shallow, brutish curiosity. This time, though, he was careful to stay well out of the other monster's reach.

Biollante was even taller than before, and far more massive. His (yes, he's a he now,) broad, bark-coated base was almost lost in the heavy, mossy growth hanging from his hunched body. Hundreds of tendrils, from the fragile, whip-like sort that had attacked our heroines to huge, barky limbs thicker than Godzilla's arms, spread out beneath his most disconcerting feature: a face. It was a broad, crocodile-like snout beneath a pair of eerie amber eyes, and mostly inert, though sometimes it looked like he was thinking.

The tiny seaside town that he'd set down next to didn't like this aspect one bit. Just imagine one of those dolls that always seems like it's staring at you… just you… and magnify it by about four-thousand times. Earlier in the day Biollante had made a cursory exploration of the coast, but after his vines were struck by vehicles, hacked off and set alight by overacting citizens, he seemed to decide that it wasn't worth the effort.

Godzilla stared for a minute or two, because even the King of the Monsters knows that you can't kill something without knowing that you ought to, then finally let out his dreadful, full-throated roar. If the civilians needed any more urging to head for the hills, this was that.

He plodded forth cautiously, declining to use his atomic breath. Though he'd never be able to manage algebra, the beast was smart enough to realize that the use of his terrible ray last time had led to this; he could taste the faint radiation on the air. His advance went on for a few minutes, but just when he seemed ready to plunge into his attack, history repeated itself, but on an even grander scale.

Biollante's mighty body reared up from his base and slowly turned towards the saurian, vines lashing towards him and wrapping swiftly about his meaty limbs and stout torso. Godzilla was having none of that, however. He tore free of their embrace as quickly as they caught him, lurching closer, ever closer to the point where his brutal strength would end their enmity.

But there was a new wrinkle this time around. When he was about two Godzilla-lengths off from his foe, a new sort of tentacle attacked. They were capped by round pods, almost like eyeless heads with woody teeth that snapped forth and dug viciously into the Monster King's tough flesh.

Godzilla's yowl of surprise quickly became a snarl, and he paused to tear these new annoyances from his hide. While he was distracted, more rose from Biollante's mass, but didn't close to attack like their fellows. Instead, they held off, weaving like vipers, until Godzilla was nearly free… then sprayed glowing, acidic sap over his body.

Two great limbs as thick as his legs wound about the King as he flailed, drawing him inexorably closer to that hideous maw, now yawning wide…

"You've got to stop! Please! We can't do this, it isn't right!" Chiyollante wailed. "We were made to destroy them but that doesn't mean we have to!"

"Mr.… Mr.…" unlike your clever narrator, Chiyo hadn't figured out what to call the astral representation of Biollante's Godzilla aspect. "Mr. Green," she decided lamely, "Please listen to her! There has to be another way! Please understand, this is import—!"

Godzillante wasn't inclined to put up with two adorable astral projections crying to him, and snatched her off the ground with one terrible hand. Chiyo was jerked into the air over his head, where he let her have his firsttruly inarticulateroar since they'd met. "RAAAAAAAAARR!"

She cringed away from him, head spinning from the oxygenon his breath, about as scared as she'd ever been. It looked like her soul (or whatever this was) would be eaten by Biollante after all. But as Chiyollante cried out and the real girl prepared to die, her form seemed to flicker for an instant. Godzillante realized that he wasn't holding what he thought he was. Something… purple…

Like his reptilian namesake, he wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he had a certain primal wisdom that more complex creatures tended to lack. He dropped her hastily and backed away with sudden respect.

"What…?" Chiyollante helped her up. Chiyo shrugged, also at a loss. She hadn't sensed anything. For his part, Godzillante turned away, profoundly troubled.

Godzilla didn't really notice the lapse in Biollante's attack, coated in acid as he was. He continued to roar, howl, twist and flail, his spines flickering with atomic fire but held back by the force of his potent will. Torrents of light green sap/blood/juice flooded down around him as his claws tore great chunks from his verdant nemesis.

Biollante might have pulled back, if he were capable of movement.

Just when it seemed like the property value of this little town couldn't get any lower, Mechagodzilla made landfall. The flying wing left him to fly (or fall with style, rather) under his own power. His skidding landing kicked up a wall of spray almost a kilometer long, and would have been quite a sight to anybody who hadn't fled in panic long ago.

Godzilla noticed the shining titan from the corner of his eye and pushed away from Biollante, shaking himself like a dog. The acid had mostly burned away, and still his impervious hide stood intact. The plant monster's abortive assault had had little effect except to piss him off royally. In calmer times, he might have tried to get the measure of this newcomer, but all he saw in his robotic counterpart now was a fight.

Unfortunately, Mechagodzilla's young, hotshot pilot didn't see much of a fight at all. As the rampant saurian charged towards him, he ran up against the long twin barrels of a weapon mounted on MG's forearm. B-THUD! THUD! THUD! Godzilla tumbled back, the unhappy recipient of several Kaiju-scale railgun rounds.

"Okay!" the pilot announced. "I'm in position! Commencing Operation: V8!" This prompted a few snickers back at Control, but fortunately, most of them didn't get the joke. A long needle (okay, it's more of a spike, but on this massive scale it can be considered a needle) issued from above Mechagodzilla's other wrist, and, holding the twin railguns on Godzilla's fallen form, he moved on Biollante.

The plant monster wasn't attacking Godzilla any more, but he didn't have any compunction about defending himself. Unfortunately, MG was now advancing through a billowing wall of steam as his armor glowed with terrible heat. The tendrils that tried to take hold of him vanished into flame.

Godzilla regained his feet in a fury, but—THUD! THUD! THUD!—shells cracked into his face and chest, throwing him back down. Biollante was having similar luck—instead of doing any damage, the acid just sluiced off the mechanical terror's armor, bursting into glowing clouds that made him even scarier.

The needle plunged into Biollante's mass and hydraulic motors drew assorted Biollante juices into a reservoir in MG's upper arm. The two heavy limbs grabbed Mechagodzilla, sizzling angrily but holding together, as the plant monster's mouth gaped sluggishly towards him.

The needle retreated and a long blade crackling with deadly energy deployed. With one incredible sweep, both of Biollante's "arms" tumbled free, geysering sap. Engines in bionic monster's legs burst, hopping him free of the entangling hybrid.

After checking to make sure that his Biollante-juice was secure, the pilot started hitting switches and pressing buttons. The lasers mounted on Mechagodzilla's shoulders swung into place, the railguns on his forearms clunked menacingly, ports in his chest opened, and multicolored energy crackled about his mouth. Presumably rockets would fire from somewhere; that's just a Mechagodzilla thing. "Operation: V8 completed," the pilot announced. "Commencing Operation: Coleslaw."

"She cannae take it no more, cap'n!" the vine bundle monster cried, "She's gonna blow! Ach, thee dilithium cryst--!"

"RARRRGHH!" Godzillante said.

"Faith an' Begorrah! We're finished!" the monster wibbled for a moment. "It was… it was nice servin' with ye, cap'n."

"GRARRRARRRH!"

"Right away, cap'n!" It swarmed over the edge of their platform and vanished into the astral Biollante's innards. "That's it, then…" Chiyollante stood next to her male, radioactive dinosaur aspect. "We're done for, aren't we?"

"RARRGH!"

"Um, excuse me?" Chiyo asked. "Couldn't you just…?"

"We could disperse again, yes…" Chiyollante shook her head sadly. "But we'd keep attracting the brute. Godzilla will hunt us across the world until one of us dies—better it be the fake than the original."

"So you're going to…?" Chiyo realized that this was the ultimate awkward moment: so, you're gonna die and I'm not. Anything I can do for ya, then? "You're…?"

"Yes." Chiyollante pressed herself against Godzillante and put a small hand on his chest. This made Chiyo yet more uncomfortable, but she wasn't here to question the lifestyle choices of her vegetable demon clone. "I'm glad you convinced him to spare his other part, however you managed it…"

"GROARR!"

"Oh, is that it? How interesting…"

"Er, what…?"

Chiyollante plucked the leaf from her left collarbone and presented it to Chiyo. "You still look a little peaked. Here, for the road."

Chiyo snatched it gratefully and had eaten about a third of it before she remembered to say, "Thank you very much. I… fell a little funny, though."

"There shouldn't be any side-effects…"

"ROAARRRARRRGH!"

"Oh, no! Really? Goodness! I didn't realize! Sorry, Chiyo-chan."

"Side ef…?" Beneath them, the terrific mass of Biollante shifted. One of the sail-like blue petals fell and drifted tremendously down to the Carrot Mountains, who hastened to get out of its way. The green beings before Chiyo seemed smaller, somehow… she realized she could see golden mist rising from them and spiraling into the sky. "And you're… you're okay with this?"

"Well…"

"RARR!"

"Wow, I never thought of it that way! You're very deep when you want to be." Chiyollante laughed. "Yes, we're totally fine with it. Please don't worry about us. Now that I think about it, we have a pretty sad excuse for survival drive. It's amazing what you did when you were facing death."

"Uh, thank you." Chiyo looked down. "I guess… I should leave?"

"It probably isn't a good idea to stick around," Chiyollante agreed. She stepped forward and they hugged briefly. Chiyo yelped and jumped back when the other nipped at her ear.

"For the road," Chiyollante explained sheepishly. A profound, awkward discomfort slid over both of them until Godzillante broke it up by putting a hand on the head of his feminine, adorable little child aspect and drawing her back.

"Time to go, then, luv?" a familiar voice asked.

"How long have you been here?" Chiyo cried, turning in spite of the cosmic futility of the gesture. When the nonbeing answered, "Strictly speaking, I was never here," she growled softly and slapped her forehead.

"Who… who are you talking to?" Chiyollante asked.

"Voice in my head," Chiyo answered.

"I'm not even there! Ha ha ha haaaa!" If he was right, then the arms that closed around Chiyo and bore her to safety didn't exist either, and she must have died. Oh, but who says the universe has to make sense?

Godzilla stood once more, and seemed surprised when no more railgun rounds pounded into him. He looked at the flaming ruin of Biollante, then over and the robot that had brought it about. Having no knowledge of copywrite law, the being's likeness didn't particularly bother him, though he was aware of it.

"He might just go into the ocean," a man from Control said. "If he doesn't want a fight, don't risk losing the—snrk!—V8 juice."

"Roger," the pilot said reluctantly. And sure enough, Godzilla turned away from the imposter taking a step towards the ocean… and his tail, swinging around behind him, struck MG upside the head. BLANG!

Before the pilot could react, Godzilla was on top of him, wrenching Mechagodzilla's head this way and that. When something in the neck broke, Godzilla moved to bulling the machine to the ground, tearing into sheets of Space Titanium with his bare claws.

In his office, Yasuhiro put a hand over his eyes, listening to Control's frantic cries of, "Play dead, play dead!" He shouldn't have been surprised, really.