"I'm sorry," Chiyo said by way of greeting, "I must look a fright."

And true, it was obvious she'd seen better days. Her cheeks were sunken and her skin pale, a light red sweater billowing out around her thin body. The hand she raised to them was bony and almost gray, while even her hair, blowing free in the hot summer wind, seemed to lack its normal color. However, her eyes were as bright and clear as ever, and her warm, easy smile made their worries evaporate.

Her friends closed in around her, full of happy babble and enthusiasm, the traumas and difficulties of the past few days vanishing. There was a round of mighty hugs, any one of which should have snapped her like kindling, and Tomo even seemed to forget her mission of Chiyo-abuse.

When the Wildcat Idiot closed in on her, she grinned and lowered her head to be bopped. "For old times' sake!" the prodigy offered merrily. "I'll even yell agaa!" (The trip to Okinawa was still in the girls' future, but Kazuki had kicked off Tomo's interest in that particular bit of Uchinaguchi early.)

"Oh, I'm that predictable, am I?" Tomo asked, regaining her balance. "Well…" With that, she grabbed Chiyo in a crushing hug just as the others had… and then made off with her! "Waaaughh!" Chiyo laughed like a lunatic even as Tomo blindly plowed them both into Yomi.

The whole gaggle of them moved together up the steps of Chiyo's home, practically arm-in-arm, Mr. Tadakichi whisking happily between and around them as they celebrated their reunion. After all of the strangeness and terror they'd endured, they were finally together again, and safe.

Yasuhiro was just leaving as their formation narrowed into a sort of ragged line to enter the house. He stood aside for them with a friendly, "Hey, girls!" And was greeted in turn by each of them as they passed, except for Chiyo, who paid him all the notice she would to a coat rack. Sakaki paused and looked to him curiously. "I'm still in the doghouse with her," he explained ruefully, tipped his hat, and left.

He'd come to this conclusion when, upon her triumphal return, Chiyo had hugged her mother, stooped to hug Mr. Tadakichi and then run right past her father to hug Alphonse. She hadn't even said 'hi' since returning, and when she occasionally deigned to look at him, he could see something hard, brittle and completely out of place behind her eyes. The whole arrangement would have stung a lot less if he didn't know that he totally deserved it.

Given the circumstances, he and his wife had decided that his planned business trip didn't need to be postponed.

Chiyo's friends were full of questions, of course, and she was happy to give what answers she could. Sakaki gazed down at her frail form, concerned and uncertain. One could almost hear the worried 'are you sure…' before she asked, "Are you feeling all right?"

"Never better!" Chiyo chirped, and it would have been impossible to doubt her.

"Do they know what happened to you?" Yomi asked, referring not to the obvious giant monster attack, but to the bizarre not-quite-coma she'd fallen into after.

"Nuh-uh. They don't know why I woke up, either."

"Did ya have any dreams?" Osaka asked.

"You know…" Chiyo's eyes drifted to the side as she thought back. "I don't remember any… but I must have, because I feel a little sad when I try to think about it."

"Those're the best kind…" Osaka nodded, satisfied.

By this time they'd gathered in a sitting room, perched on various items of furniture, lying or sitting as was their preference. By accident or design, Sandra and Kaori found themselves more on the periphery, watching and listening rather than actually taking part in the happy interrogation.

"You know," Kaori commented, suddenly at Sandra's elbow, "It looks like they're complete without us, doesn't it?"

Sandra jumped a little; she was used to pulling that trick on other people, not being on the receiving end. "Yeah. You still down about… well…?"

"Eh."

The celebration rolled on without them for the moment as they spoke softly. "I'm sorry about Ms. Sakaki…" Sandra said, "But what can ya do?"

"Oh, it's not that. I always knew I could never, you know, have her. It's just the thought that it'll be some loser like Sanada…"

"Two things: one, I think he's an alright guy, and two, I don't think Sakaki would fall for him in any case."

"Really?"

"Yeah… Sanada strikes me as… um, too convenient. He's like, the one she'd end up with if somebody who didn't know any of us came in and paired off all of Class 3-3."

"Huh…"

"Ice cream!" Tomo jumped to her feet and yelled, "Who's up for ice cream!?"

All eyes went to Chiyo, and when she simply grinned and raised her hand, completely unbothered by the fact that Tomo was offering her hospitality, the ice cream was swiftly procured.

"This is all very unsettling," Osamu growled, setting one of one foot up on a bench and leaning over that knee. His long black coat, which he bought for this specific effect, flowed dramatically in the wind. "Cover ups and conspiracies everywhere we look. You can't say something strange isn't going on over there, right?"

"Well…" Kazuki walked up next to him and followed his gaze to where unmarked vehicles surrounded the roped-off aquarium's entrance. "I guess it is kinda strange… but they'll take care of it, right?" He still wore a Hawaiian-style shirt and a lei of white flowers, remnants of his short stay on Okinawa.

"Oh, they'll take care of it… but not in the way you're thinking. There's some plot brewing to turn this to their advantage… this is so like them…"

"Who's them?" Kazuki asked. He rather enjoyed asking Osamu this question; the answer was always different and usually entertaining.

"I'm not sure at this point… I think it might be a corporation, maybe even Mihama Industries, under contract by the government…"

"Oh, the government and a big company, huh? Sounds like the devil incarnate."

"I know you're not taking me seriously, Kazuki, but I would appreciate if you didn't mock me." Osamu turned back towards the aquarium, longish raven hair whipping about his face. "Do you know about that research project Yomi Mizuhara was involved in? I was following it through the University webpage, but just a few days ago, Mr. Ogawa disappeared and the site was removed. With me?"

"Sure." In point of fact, Kazuki was distracted by watching a couple seagulls fight over some bit of detritus they'd found in the road.

"Yesterday, Sanada's father told me about the… incident in there, and it was almost exactly like the flash-video I saw of Ogawa's micro-oxygen demonstration. Somehow, micro-oxygen ended up in a public aquarium after an incident in the micro-ox lab that led to a gag order and the teacher's disappearance."

"…so?"

"Oh, come on! You don't see the conspiracy in all that? Jesus, I'm talking to a bloody wall, here. Of all the guys, I expected you to see my logic."

"So…" Kazuki looked at the ominous cluster of vehicles. "What do you plan to do, huh? Are we just gonna stand here and gawk? 'Cause that sounds pretty good to me."

Osamu grabbed his sleeve. "We're going in."

"I'm hungry," Kazuki said randomly.

"We're going to McDonalds. I'm treating. Then we're waiting for night to fall, and when their guard slackens, we're going in."

"Sounds good," his coconspirator agreed, still stuck on the McDonalds part. "Wait, what?"

"You got nothing! You got nothing on this!" Tomo squared off against Kagura, basketball thumping rhythmically between her hand and the pavement. There wasn't a proper hoop at the Mihama residence, but the Bonkuras had improvised one with a defunct laundry basket at some tape above the garage door.

"Oh, yeah?" Kagura countered. She stood almost stock-still; her opponent was faking back and forth so fast that it really didn't matter. "I got nothing, huh? What about… this?" The athlete took one graceful step forward and swept the ball out of under Tomo's hand, took one more step to reach the imaginary half-court line, turned, and sank it beautifully.

"Yayyy!" Osaka called from the sidelines, "Touchdown!"

Kagura bowed and spiked the ball. "Shut up, you!" Tomo cried. "I woulda had that!"

"You woulda had nothing!" Kagura laughed, apparently deciding grammar was for sissies. "Where you goin'? This game isn't over yet! You get back here!"

"I just need a running start," Tomo explained.

"For?"

"YAAAAARRRGH!" Unfortunately for her, Kagura saw the Takino Flying Tackle Technique coming a mile away and simply sidestepped, much to the hilarity of everyone but her opponent. "OW! AHG! OW! I'll get you!"

"You'll get served, is what you'll get!" Kagura laughed, dribbling quickly.

"Oh, how I missed them…" Chiyo sighed, shaking her head. She took a sip of lemonade and sighed again. "Wow…"

"What's wrong?" Osaka asked, leaning on the patio table opposite her.

"I'd actually started to take all this for granted," Chiyo said, smiling. "God, you're all so wonderful…" she cleared her throat sharply. "Um. Better not get too sentimental. I just… scary experiences like this make you notice these things, don't they?"

"Yeah," Osaka agreed, for once on exactly the same page—for the moment. "Yayy! Touchdown!"

"Shut UP, Osaka!!" Tomo wailed.

Sakaki took a seat at their table, stirring her own glass of lemonade absently. She still stole occasional, worried glances at Chiyo, but as the day progressed, she seemed to accept that her diminutive friend was, against all appearances, just fine. She gave a soft little sigh and settled in to enjoy the unscheduled wrestling match that was going down in place of the basketball game.

"Oh…" Osaka murmured, suddenly distressed. She'd wondered why Chiyo wasn't wearing her evil alien pigtails, and the answer had just come to her. Pushing Chiyo's orange bangs back with one finger, she saw a series of extremely faint, round scars along her jawline from when the monster's roots had been torn away. "I… that…"

"Don't worry about it, Ms. Osaka," Chiyo said kindly, brushing her hair back into place. "It isn't your fault… nothing that happened is. Please don't worry about me."

"It's true," Sakaki added simply, recognizing logically that it was either agree with Chiyo or drown in a sea of self-recrimination. Not that it made her feel much better, but that would surely come later.

"Yeah, but…" Osaka faltered. "But… Yayy! Touchdown!"

"This means nothing, Kagura!" Tomo yelled. "We're in a weird parallel universe where you don't suck! Shut up! Arrrrgh!"

Behold, the Golden Realm, that bizarre and wonderful world that defies description, stupifies the senses and purees the human mind! And behold its lord, the Eldest of the Elder Ones (behind Cthulu), that most magnificent and benevolent ovoid ball of feline goodness that we know as Chiyo-dad!

"And this is where we get off!" he pronounced.

"What?" his assistant protested. "But there's still much to do!" Looking at him, Chiyo-dad felt a faint stab of pity; this dark, armored figure had once picked fights with Bruce Lee and nearly won, but was now reduced to haunting the nightmares of children and running errands for him.

"And none of it can be done by us. Get me some red stuff, will ya?"

"That's what he's here for," his assistant said, jerking a stone thumb towards the penguin standing obediently at their side.

"He's spaced out right now, and I'm surely not getting my own damn red stuff, so hop to it!" The assistant sighed and tossed his master a bottle of V-8, which was mysteriously caught by his fingerless flipper. With a faint, astral pop, the cap flew off, hit the ground, and burst like a tiny firework. "Thank you. Now you see, everything is in order, and there's nothing we can do to improve the stiuation… especially since Mothra won't intervene, that lepidopterous hypocritical pile of--" He changed colors rapidly, which evidently meant he was bleeping himself.

"She won't? Isn't she the Guardian of Earth?"

"That's what I thought, but since the Earthlings brought this on themselves, she refuses to help them out of it."

"I could go twist her wing."

"That's always the first thing you suggest."

"It works."

"It didn't work with Ms. Takino and it won't work with Mothra. Still, I shouldn't talk… even my plans don't always quite pan out. For instance, my daughter wasn't supposed to intercede for Godzilla. I'm still not sure why it happened that way."

"Well, didn't that nonexistent schlep you sent say that Biollante was going to destroy the one thing that could protect Earth?"

"Of course not! He doesn't exist! How could he have said anything?"

"You know what I mean… she probably thought that he meant Godzilla."

"Why would she think that? Biollante was trying to eat her, too."

"But she doesn't see herself as that important. Might I add that Biollante almost succeeded, and wouldn't that have been embarrassing?"

"Biollante was never close," Chiyo-dad said dismissively. "It was a very interesting and dangerous creature, but it could never have stood a chance…" He paused for effect in spite of the fact that his assistant already knew exactly what he was going to say. "…against a Goddess."

"This is stupid," Kazuki sulked. "You're gonna get us both killed."

"Shut up and take off that ski-mask," Osamu returned without a hint of anger or impatience. "We'll be fine. Act natural."

"Act natural? There's a natural way to duck under police tape and--?"

"Keep it down!" They walked together towards the dark and silent aquarium, unconsciously matching their stride. Osamu was dressed as theatrically as ever, and since Kazuki didn't own many black clothes, he'd been shoved into one of the taller boy's spare jackets. It was almost the right size, though the sleeves hung past the second joints of his fingers. "We're not doing anything wrong."

"If we're not doing anything wrong, then what's the tape doing there?"

"It's just for our own safety."

"Oh." He was silent until they finally reached the tape and stopped. Incredibly, there didn't seem to be any scientists, military men, special forces or anybody else around. Not even a rent-a-cop (all respect to Sanada's father) or janitor! "Wait… our own safety? And we're…?"

"You have to take risks when the Truth is at stake," Osamu said easily, ducking under the tape. "See? That wasn't hard."

"But what if it's poison or something? Inside, I mean," Kazuki followed reluctantly.

"I didn't see any haz-mat suits, and people were going in and out all day."

"You had this place staked out all day?"

"Well of course! I had to learn if it was poison or something, right?"

They ascended the steps together, and slowly, dramatically, Osamu pushed the door open. The interior was a sea of shadow, utterly silent and still. This first impression exploded when the boys' flashlights stabbed into the room and illuminated the floor.

"Cool!" Kazuki cried, "Hey, guys!"

"Why'd it have to be spiders?" Osamu moaned.

It was a warm, still night beneath a nearly-full moon that managed to compete with the glow of Tokyo. It was the sort of night that was made to run around outside and do stupid things under the cover of darkness. This was probably why Tomo was having such trouble sleeping.

She lay on the floor, the carpet digging into her cheek, a nice, heavy blanket weighing down on her, the soft breathing of her friends surrounding her. Yomi lay a few feet to her right, curled up so adorably that Tomo had almost woken Chiyo to find a camera… after all, nobody gets away with blackmailing the Takinator! Osaka lay awkwardly on her back in the other direction; she didn't seem to be sleeping either. Sakaki's form loomed gigantically just past her, obscuring Sandra, who lay holding a large plush dragon. ("Lay off! It makes me think of home!" she'd snapped before anybody even had the chance to look at her.)

The only people actually sleeping on furniture were Chiyo (because she was the host, after all) and Kagura (Tomo had called the chair, but then foolishly wagered it in their basketball game). Lousy bourgeoisie! Tomo grumbled mentally, even though she couldn't define bourgeoisie, let alone spell it.

Restless, she rolled over to face Osaka, and was unpleasantly surprised to see the spacey girl's eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling with a troubled expression. "You're up?" Tomo whispered. "What gives?"

"Night owl," Osaka reminded her, just as softly. "What's your excuse?"

"Dunno. You okay? You don't look so hot."

"Eh," she turned her head away. "Nightmares."

"Of?"

Shrug. "I get the feelin'… it can't last. Us together. Like somethin's gonna… like…"

Tomo's first impulse was to tease her, but then she ran up against the entirely unexpected and unfamiliar feeling that her first impulse wouldn't do at all. She hadn't seen Chiyo the day of Biollante's attack, but judging from the way Sakaki and Osaka were acting, it must have been horrible. And to rewind yet further, Osaka had been the first to encounter the strangeness afoot and the last to recover when the aliens had invaded… given that history, it must've been hard to accept that they were safe now.

There was only one course to take. The Wildcat Idiot reached into her soul, sinking deeper and deeper until at long last she found the mythical, cube-shaped world where Bizarro Tomo lived. She'd better appreciate this, dammit!

"Hey," Tomo reached out and took her hand. "Look, it's all over. The monster is dead and we're fine. Nothing's gonna happen to us, Osaka."

"Ya think so?"

"I'd bet my life on it! Absolutely nothing is going to hurt us," Tomo whispered positively, though she unfortunately failed to knock on wood, throw salt over her shoulder or sacrifice a small goat. In response, Osaka gave her hand a squeeze. "I been angstin' all over ya lately, haven' I? Sorry."

"Eh, it's nothing."

I'm losing my edge! Tomo fretted in the darkness. I gotta find a way to be badass again! I'll… beat Kagura in arm wrestling! No, tried that. I'll… kick Sakaki in the head! No, she's still on edge. I think she'd kill me. Not flexible enough anyway. I'll… steal Sandra's dragon! Aw, man, how is that badass? I must be losing my touch!

So passed the night.

"Wow, they're all over the place! It's like we're walking on fortune cookies!" Kazuki crowed, "This is amazing!" He ran along one of the corridors, skipping and turning pirouettes. "What do you think they are?"

"Nnnnhehhh," Osamu replied miserably. He saw that they weren't actually spiders, but they were close enough to set off his phobia. Based on the precept of 'know your enemy,' Osamu had done quite a bit of spider research, but he'd never seen arachnids that looked like this before.

"They're Precambrian!" Kazuki suddenly called back to him.

"What?" Osamu tore his eyes from the armored swarm beneath his feet with an effort and looked disbelievingly at his coconspirator. "Pre-who?"

"Precambrian, man! Like… from before the time of the dinosaurs!"

"Y'think so?" He remembered now that Kazuki's youthful fascination with dinosaurs had never quite died out. If there were such a thing as Prehistoric Trivial Pursuit, he could go punch-for-punch with any paleontologist. "But, uh, if I remember right, there wasn't any—YAAAGH! GET OFF OF MY LEG!" he flailed and panicked for a few seconds, finally collecting himself and throwing a crescent kick that sent the stowaway on his pantleg flying into a concrete wall. "Uh…" his dark gaze dared Kazuki to laugh. "Anyway, there wasn't any oxygen back then, right? So how would these…?"

Click. Yomi's project. Click. Micro-oxygen. Click. Oxygen Destroyer. Click. Conspiracy. In his thought process, that last link was more of a boilerplate than anything else. "I think… I think we'd better go."

"But these little guys are so cool!" Kazuki protested. "Don't you wanna see if there are any other kinds?"

"Not really. No, I think you were right. On further reflection, this is a very stupid idea, and we should go home and let the authorities…" by this point, Kazuki had gone around the corner and let a loud whistle at whatever it was he saw. Drawn unwillingly by his own curiosity and yearning for the Truth, Osamu followed him. "Piece of…!"

They stood at the end of the hall where Sanada's dissolving-shark incident had taken place. It… looked a little different now. Before, only the very lowest of its lengths had been flooded, but now the misty water lapped menacingly at the very top step.

"Smells like a thunderstorm," Osamu observed.

"And a slow, painful death," Kazuki added.

At least he wouldn't try to go wading, which was always a possibility with someone like him. The tiny arachnids scuttled much more thickly here; they couldn't set down their feet without crushing four or five, but the little creatures declined to try climbing on them, much to Osamu's profound relief.

"Aww, look at that," Kazuki said, showing none of his partner's squeamishness as he knelt by the edge of the (was it even really water anymore?). There were a few struggling creatures at the edge of the water, malformed, most with far too many legs. It was almost as if they were trying to… no, Osamu dismissed the notion out of hand to preserve his sanity. "What do you think happened to 'em?"

"What I'm more concerned about is how the water got so deep," Osamu said. "There's a lot more than one tank's worth down there. It's almost as if…"

T-chink! That sound effect wasn't in his head. Both boys turned as one to see an arachnid, larger than any they'd yet encountered, biting into the Pleixiglas of the tank next to them. The water within started to rush free, flowing down the wall and streaming into the gray soup beside them. T-chink! Chink!

"Umm…" Kazuki started, "Maybe we should…" Then an armored, knife-like leg the length of a compact car reached out of the evil water and set down between them, striking cracks into the linoleum. He didn't have to finish his sentence.