Cheshire Smile by 2nd Star to the Right
Disclaimer: Nothing to do with the Gundams belongs to me (but Karu and Ari's souls are mine!) Also, none of the songs, or groups or shows tunes I mention belong to me… you'd have to be fairly removed from society to think that they did, but I'm into not being sued…
Dedicated to Hitokiri Tora (my first reviewer) and the awesome people who road tripped to ocean city w/ lance last fall, proving it is entirely possible to sing for 11 hours straight- but you will get a sore throat…
'thinking' "speaking"
CHAPTER TWO… of brain scanning and singing
Karu came to in a sterile white room. She could tell it was sterile because it smelled like Lysol, astringent, and lemon.
Unlike the characters in most stories, she came into consciousness fully aware. She remembered down to that stupid evil laugh what had been said the night before.
"Actually," interrupted a smooth tenor," it was four nights ago."
'What? How did he know…'
"We borrowed your technology"
'The brain scanning! - I created that!'
"Yes, well, we stole it- some one had to, it's quite brilliant"
'Thank you… how did you get through my codes and viruses- I'm sure you figured out I'm a protection freak…'
"We wouldn't of been able to, except for the fact that two days before we borrowed you, we borrowed the kid of the best hacker between the world and it's colonies. Her name is Ariella Yuy, I'm sure you know her…"
Ari was shoved in through a door in the corner. Karu could tell by the bruise that wrapped around her arm and another one below her left eye that she had not hacked into her laptop voluntarily.
"Got that right," the tenor sounded annoyed," we had a harder time getting her to hack than she did hacking into your computer."
Of course it made sense, Ari was the one who had taught her hacking, and she had picked it up from her father the great soldier Heero Yuy.
When Ari was born he set up a fund, education, and care for her, and returned to the war. It wasn't that he didn't care about her; he visited whenever he could and always had long discussions with Ari. Some were about his war; others were about her life. He was always interested in her opinion and Karu knew that Ari's dad loved her and definitely would not be long in finding her.
Fortunately, it didn't take Karu very long to beat her own brain-scanning technology. First of all, the closer the brain is to delta waves, the easier it is to read.
(quick psychology lesson: the brain goes through three or four cycles a night, the cycles are made up of waves which can be measured to tell how deep the sleep is, Delta waves are the deepest sleep, you don't dream in Delta and you are next to unconscious. However, everything I say about brain reading is written under authorial license. ie- reality is stretchy)
Since a person is in a very deep sleep when emitting Delta waves there is no conscious efforts to block a scanner, thoughts are there for the picking and reading.
But Karu woke up quickly and by the time she though about Ari's dad finding them her thoughts were just barely recognizable from static.
And of course, Karu's thoughts are usually unrecognizable from static, so there wasn't much difference there. The guard slammed his fist on the fuzzy, buzzing computer screen and screamed at Ari.
"Fix this thing, brat, it was created by a teenager, it can't be that hard to get through!"
Ari's sarcasm filled the room, "It was created by Karu! The thing is practically indecipherable… along with her thoughts! I fixed it fine; it's not my fault her brain never evolved all the way!"
Karu turned her attention back to her friend, "excuse me?"
"You heard me!"
"WHAT DID YOU SAY!"
"I said you heard me, static-brain! You're a monkey! You never evolved all the way! Look, I can see your tail!" She gestured at Karu's braid, curled on the floor.
"What? I've told you to leave my hair alone! That's it! You're a dead girl!"
Karu struggled to get out of the ropes tying her to the chair, and Ari fought the guards that had rushed the room to prevent a catfight.
The tenor filtered through the speaker on the wall, "take them both away. And stick 'em in the same cell, no use bringing food to two cells, and they obviously aren't such great friends as thought."
Five minutes later Ari and Karu grinned hugely at each other in the gloomy darkness of the second to last cell on row G.
"You know I meant none of it, right?" Ari mouthed at Karu knowing that there were listening bugs in the cell and that any camera couldn't record well enough to read her lips in this dark.
Karu nodded and bobbed her head, "of course, of course! I love it when that works!"
"Me too!"
"Any ideas?"
"On how to get out of here?… none.
"No, i meant about breakfast, I'm hungry!"
Four hours later the guards of row K were begging command central for earplugs. The new girls in cell 29G were on the fifth verse of "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy," an apparently unending country twang song.
Worse, neither of the girls could pull off a country twang. In fact, they sounded exactly like someone was stuffing a cow down the garbage disposal.
That would have been bad enough, except that the sexy tractor song wasn't their first choice. They had been singing for the last 11 hours and showed no sign of stopping. They were even taking requests from the other prisoners.
They ground out rap, top 20 radio hits, and country before spending half an hour on Enya, howling her ethereal notes, and three hours on the Numa Numa Song (Dragosta dinea). There was a Christmas carol special, followed by hits from the 80's, theme songs to every show between Batman and Gilligan's Island, and then they got to the opera, oh the opera.
They had butchered all the songs, but the opera, the opera had put half a squad on medical leave. Finally the guards had enough. They held an emergency meeting and decided that the girls were insane and they properly belonged in an asylum, preferably an asylum with sound-proof rooms.
The meeting lasted about two minutes and ended with the guards playing rock, paper, scissors. The loser drove the howling girls to the asylum. He didn't even have to complete the patient entrance forms.
The nurse took one look at the girls waltzing together in the back of the truck to "Who Let the Dog's Out?" and swept them inside.
There's more coming, thanks for putting up with my reality stretching, please feel free to review if you liked or didn't… Star!