Apologies for not being able to update, recently, and apologies, in advance, for not being able to update in the near future. Rest assure, this fic will go on till the very end, I just have some business to attend to. You can expect more chapters after the beginning of February.
Enjoy this one, meanwhile.

Comedy: 50 pt
Drama: 40 pt
Descriptive: 10 pt

Well, let's on with it!

Star-crossed

Echoes of murmurs wafted through the air, going about their own business in their own cold, indifferent ways. Hazy, diffused, suspended and sustained; the mumbling nothings parted and regrouped, sifting passively around those others, who were passing through their world. The hums were diluted in this world. The ones who pass through would feel but a small, continuous buzz of vibrations, occasionally catching only those small, undissolved utterances that drifted here and there in this soup of the irrelevant.
One, insoluble phrase that managed to work its way through was this, "Hey, baby, wanna- ugh!"
The last syllable froze the concoction for a brief moment before letting it resume, as the echo dissipated to the next realm of nothingness.

Down the mall, a fluffy tail and the back-side of a large bunny costume swayed minimally as it walked to the porn shop. The people who passed Rei by and noticed her were, consequently, looking in the other direction - assumably out of embarrassment, disgust, respect or those that range between the given three, and even in combination. Those that were not - and there was only one instance of that as Rei walked down - were quickly decked and placed in a dark, convenient corner.
Such was life.

Kaworu wasn't in the best of moods as he tagged along. He hung his head sulkily as they walked to the porn shop. "Oh, this is cruddy. I should be the one walking in that costume..."
Rei wasn't in the best of moods as she led the way. She rigidly walked, with an agitated look, pressing her lips together. "It was not I who asked to dress up in this costume, either..."
"Oh, but think of the money."
"Then shut up."

Kaworu winced, hearing this from Rei. He recalled how, once, Rei's attitude was like this when he first came to meet her in that dream. There was only just a small flicker of it revealed as Rei had that dream - What'ya gotta know is when to keep your mouth shut. The First only lasted a few years, stupid kid. Hah! He recalled how he explained it as Rei loosing self-control. Then, was this what Rei is like, underneath? he wondered. And what, then, was that other Rei in Happy Smile? Nonetheless, something told him that, to a certain degree, that dream may be beginning to come true...

The next thing that came to his mind was that he was pseudo-standing in front of the porn shop. And it was also, infamously, entitled "The Porn Shop".
"Let's go," Rei said, suddenly, and bravely walked right in, bunny-tail slightly wagging.

She was immediately attended to by the shop assistant. "Ah! There we are!" He said, as if expecting Rei. "We've been waiting for you, baby!" Rei was ushered hurriedly to the back of the store. "The photo-shoot started ten minutes ago! Let's go, let's go!"
Rei was entirely unprepared for this, and her automatic decking-reflex did not register this sort of thing as a threat. (There must be a "come" in the sentence.)In a blur, she was shoved into small room with lights and a black backdrop, and a photographer waiting impatiently. The door closed as she staggered to balance herself into the middle of the shooting-grounds.

"So, we're here, are we?" he said in his professional photographer's voice. "Okay, Micchan, let's start with the full suit on, first, then..." Flash.
Rei blinked.

"Okay, good. We gotta loosen up, a bit; pull back the hood by the ears, shall we?"

Flash.
Rei, at that point, became super-uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, Kaworu pseudo-stood there, with an appalled face, looking at this photo-shoot.
He though to himself, That should be me posing, there.
Kaworu, Rei's thought intruded, what should I do?
"Well, should we play along...?"
No!
"Well, what can we do?" Kaworu struggled to think, then looked about for something. "How much are we making?"
He glanced around for a cheque-book and spotted one with some figures already scrawled across it - ¥8,000.
"Well," Kaworu told Rei, "they sure do rip you off. Let's get out of here."

Satisfied with this course of action, Rei walked off the job.
"Hey, hey, hey, where're you going?" The photographer lowered his camera. "Come back, here- Ugh!"
Rei's decking-reflex was back.

"Perfect," Kaworu nodded as they came back out the door. "Let's get to work..."

The porn shop did not have many customers. Chances were, they were unlikely to meet any person in the next isle. This was, of course and contradictorily, one of the reasons why the store was popular among customers. This also allowed Rei and Kaworu plenty of room to conduct their search for the missing 7,788,656 yen.
"Let's walk about and look," Kaworu had said. In fact, "browse..."
Rei gave a weird pseudo-look at Kaworu.
"We must not look conspicuous," he replied.
Putting aside that there were not many people around, Rei shot back, "The bunny suit is conspicuous enough."
A smile came from Kaworu. "Well, I did tell you to put that brown paper bag on, didn't I?"
Rei grumbled.
True. A brown paper bag was not considered conspicuous in The Porn Shop.

Amongst other sections, Rei and Kaworu explored the Vintage Porn section - no-one around. The Pokémon section - no-one either. The Top 100 section - well, no-one suspicious. After this much, Kaworu needed to slightly alter the course of action. "You know, I think we need to start off from where we last saw the guy. That is, uh, the gay section."
Rei felt like squeezing her temples in frustration. "I suppose so."

And thus, they entered the unholy domain of what is really a small corner of the store. As they silently slid into the isle, Kaworu was instantly zapped, inexplicably, into a weird state of silence. He was frozen on the spot.
Rei looked back to him, "Kaworu, are you coming?
"This..." Kaworu begun. "This place is sort of... affecting me..."
Of all places, not this, Rei sort of prayed. "Please, Kaworu, focus."
"What, with these guys around?" Kaworu gestured to all the masculine skin that managed to make their way to the front cover of each magazine. "What do you take me for? Even an angel has- whoah! would you look at that one!"
Despite being essentially angel - for that is what he is - Kaworu, in his mind, was, first and foremost, still a man. Or, at least, a boy. At the same time, Kaworu appeared shamelessly homosexual - not that there was anything wrong with that for Rei. However, this combination was one of the reasons why Rei found it hard to work with him in her (newly reformed) daily life. Rei shook her head. "Kaworu..."

There was a rustle, and then sharp silence behind Rei.
Rei turned around to see what it was.

He was a regular at the store. Simple, but weird. Obsessed? Partly. Otaku? No, since the term would imply he would have spent the most of his life at home, and that wasn't the case. Unusual? Definitely.
He was a fat man, wore crappy glasses, and was an intense browser. He was socially incompetent since childhood, and had developed a strong paranoia to all people on Earth. Only those that he had the good fortune to meet on flat, printed paper and TV screens was he ever marginally comfortable with. And so, it is now that he had the misfortune to have a close encounter of the third kind with Rei, talking to her invisible friend.
This stole ever single nerve he ever had in him.

Rei turned to see a fat man wearing crappy glasses standing at the end of the isle, stiff and unmoving like a rabbit staring at two speeding headlights coming right at him, not that rabbits still existed during that day and age. But that wasn't what Rei was concerned with. What she was concerned with was a black bag hanging, strapped around the man, held by him like a five-year-old would a blankie. This was exactly what she was looking for, or at least, what originally Kaworu was looking for.
Rei approached him.

"Excuse me..."

The fat man was startled to almost certain death. He had an untrusting fear in his eyes, which here wide open. He was frozen.

"That is my bag."

Now it was worse. He jumped into further tension. He held the bag closer to himself, showing nervous jerks of terrified shaking. His mouth were pressed, flattened together with pure terror. Beads of sweat rolled down his ugly face.

Rei lifted one arm towards him.

This was the stuff of nightmares. The fat man jerkingly backed up, still stiff as a board. He was uncontrollably shaky. His look of terror went beyond all boundaries of description.

"When all else fails," Kaworu said, "use brute force." Rei walked up to the fat man in an attempt to take it off him.

The terror was so great that short utterances of horror was expressed. "No. No. No. No, no; no..." His shaky way in backing up caused him to collide with the selves behind him. He shook there, unable to get away, about to be approached by this crazy woman in a bunny suit to take away his bag of treasures.

Rei tugged at the bag, as Kaworu had suggested. However, it seemed that the fat man's grip on it did not let it loose.

"No, no. No."

The fat man didn't seem to be putting too much effort into keeping hold of his bag - it was more of an iron-grip reflex. It seemed the most of his energy was put into shaking and holding that expression of horror on his face. The shaking was worse than a space shuttle lift-off, causing the surrounding magazines on the shelf to jitter and fall off.

"No. No, no, no."

"Damn, this guy is relentless," Kaworu remarked, looking at this fruitless situation.
What do I do?
"Well, I'd say the best thing to do would be to reveal to him that this is not his bag." The rest would take care of itself, was what Kaworu rightly figured.
As you say.

Rei pulled open the zipper. "This bag is not yours."

The fat man went crazy at this. As crazy as a man like him could have gone.
His eyes gaped wide open. As bank notes fluttered out, the fat man dropped to the floor in disbelief.

"No! No! No, no! No!" he cried as if the world was ending.

Rei looked on this with a sweatdrop.
"Hey, not bad at all."
"Sorry?" Rei turned around to see what Kaworu was on about.
"Your sweatdrop," Kaworu pointed. "It's just that, I've never saw you sweatdrop before. Nice one you got, there."
As Rei's sweatdrop fell, she caught it on her hand, and looked at it. "Sweatdrops? Is this me sweatdropping?"
That, which she had in her hand, was a first. Ground-breaking, in terms of Rei. The sort of thing that would be reap the big "wow." with a capital full-stop. It proved that Rei had the capacity to do something as deep as sweatdrop. Yet, she wasn't able to figure out why or how it was.
Another sweatdrop formed, and rolled away.
She wasn't able to understand it, then...

The glass doors let in the bright light of the Saturday afternoon sun from outside, briefly blinding in contrast to the KABUKI interior. Rei walked towards the light with the black bag strapped around her, on her shoulder. She was finally about to abandon the KABUKI for a long while after today. The light, outside, seemed to cry out to Rei Freedom! Or was that Rei crying out to it?

Suddenly, something else emerged, flying out from within the dazzling, dense mist of sunlight. It flew through the doors, and right into Rei.
A pair of bunny ears and a fluffy silhouette was all that could be seen before the collision.

"Kya!"

It sent them both lying on the ground. A few moans of discomfort, and a great effort to get up later, Rei saw what it was that came through those doors. She had to look twice to be sure.

It was a girl in a bunny costume. Much the same as the costume Rei was wearing. She also seemed to be about early senior high school age, much the same as Rei. She had pink, curly hair. She carried a large, paper shopping bag, which laid a distance from either girl. That wasn't the problem, though.
The girl was Michiko.

Finally, this triggered the name Rei had heard earlier.

"'Micchan'?"

Next time:
"Micchan" exposed! The two girls come to terms with each other over a cup of coffee! This is a great time to finally escape the bustling of the mall and enjoy the later part of the day before the party. But will Rei get more coffee that she bargained for? And why does Michiko look at Rei in... that way?
All and more will be revealed in the next, strange chapter: Coffee
Fan service, anyone...?

(Send in a review, and the world will suddenly make a lot more sense. That is, for the author... Onegaishimasu!)