In a land far, far away lies the Kingdom of Fiore, a small, peaceful nation of seventy million, and a place filled with magic. Found in every home, bought and sold in every marketplace. For most, magic is merely a tool, a mundane part of everyday life. For some, however, magic is an art, and they've devoted their lives to its practice. These are the wizards. Banded together into magical guilds, they ply their skills in search of fame and fortune. Many such guilds dot the landscape of Fiore. But there is a certain guild in a certain town that soars high above the rest, one from which countless legends have been born. A guild that will no doubt continue to create legends well into the future. Its name...
...is Fairy Tail.
What? Were you expecting for Ala Alba?
Mashima Hiro and Kodansha created and own Fairy Tail.
Akamatsu Ken and Kodansha created and own Mahou Sensei Negima!
Omake! No Place Like (Other's) Home!
Hello, Chiu-chan here...! Oh, Chiu-chan's summer vacation is turning out such a pain! Chiu-chan got lost in a scary, strange parallel world with an even scarier bullheaded clubmate, and now Chiu-chan's got to work for a guild of crazy mages, without a single yen to her name, and with everyone out there looking for the bounty on her poor widdle head...!
If you are good Chiu Fans, please leave your support messages and likes, okay? Love you, bye! I promise I'll have another update ready as soon as I can...!
Or, that is what I would like to say, anyway.
"Aaaaaahhhh, now that was a tough job to pull off!" yawned the salmon haired youngster in the open black jacket, loose white pants, sandals and scarf, exiting the Fairy Tail headquarters while stretching his arms over his head. Even a certain similarly minded pirate currently sailing one continent away would have admired his elasticity in that movement then. "Hey, Happy, you wanna go for a bite outside? I think we've earned it!"
"Are you serious, Natsu?!" cheerfully asked the tiny, bipedal blue cat skipping behind him, down the sidewalk. "Alright, let's go for some fish! Fish, fish is the best! A must for any celebration, aye!"
"Fish is it, then, yahoo!" Natsu Dragneel pumped a fist up. "We're gonna go eat and drink 'til we're broke again, mwa ha ha ha!"
And off they went, down the streets of the village, heading towards the central square, around which the town's biggest and best bars and restaurants were located. Half hidden behind a tree not too far them, with a glint in her large brown eyes, a busty young blonde woman in a tight top and short skirt grinned at that. "Good, this is our chance!" she told the much less enthusiastic, somewhat shorter and decidedly less busty girl with glasses and long light brown hair standing behind her. "Finally, they've left the homefront open, ufufu...!"
"I don't get it, what's so good about visiting those two morons' home?" Hasegawa Chisame groaned, following Lucy Heartfilia down a small side road leading out of the village proper and into a tiny grove in the nearby woods, where stood a cabin, even smaller and more primitive looking than Evangeline's. "Did they steal anything from you, or what?"
"Well, a few things, but never mind that now," answered the girl who had accepted Chisame as her houseguest once Kikukawa Yukino had convinced Fairy Tail not to deliver Chisame and Haruka to the authorities. Chisame felt herself indebted to Lucy after that, which was the only reason why she was tagging along in this stupid thing the normally sensate girl had talked her into doing now. "It's the principle of the thing! Natsu and Happy are breaking into my house all the time, crashing by without an invitation, it's time I paid them in the same coin! Ah ha ha ha, the time of my revenge has come!"
"You're going to clean the guy's pigpen for him, aren't you," Chisame dryly deduced. "Oh my God, Lucy-san, that's just plain sad..."
"I'm not!" Lucy said.
"Then are you going to break his windows? Egg his walls? I don't know, anything actually involving houses and revenges at the same time?" Chisame asked, as they stopped before the front door.
Lucy gave her a very strange look. "What a violent girl you are. Are you sure you're really innocent of terrorism?"
"You were the one who started talking about breaking, entering, and revenges!" Chisame protested.
"Yeah, about the breaking and entering part," Lucy hummed, rubbing her chin while eyeing the door carefully. "How to get in, I wonder, do you think Natsu's dumb enough as to leave a key under the doormat...?"
Chisame frowned, pushed the door in with a hand, and it easily opened for them, just like that.
"Darwinism just doesn't apply to some people," Lucy decided, walking inside with a far more wary and distrustful Chisame in tow. "Ew, what a disaster!" she said, looking around at the messy living room. The walls were all covered on old sheets of paper taken from Fairy Tail's message boards, and there were several dirt plates and glasses on a small table and the rest of the furniture. A hammock hung lazily by a corner, next to two heavily damaged crudely made dummies, more akin to scarecrows than anything else, with the words 'Erza' and 'Gray' written on each of them. Of course, the Erza dummy had massive amounts of stuffing stuck down its shirt, so its chest bulged up in a way that made Chisame briefly take a hand to her nose.
Lucy noticed this, but decided to pretend she hadn't. All in all, she was fond of Chisame, after all. "Huh," she said instead, looking in all directions with her hands on her hips. "Will you just look at this? If I didn't know them any better, I'd swear this is some weird psycho's hut, and that they have someone buried under the floor, ha ha..."
"That's... not funny, Lucy-san," Chisame said, then took a moment to crouch down, lift one of the wooden planks of the floor up, and look under just in case.
"No, I guess it isn't," Lucy allowed, while also taking a short glimpse under another plank, also just in case. "But it's not like we could've expected anything else, could- What is that?"
"What is what?" Chisame echoed, watching Lucy move towards one of the walls, and intently stare at several framed notice posts. Coming closer, Chisame noticed Lucy was smiling warmly, touching a framed sheet with the tips of her fingers. "Is that an important mission of yours, or...?"
"The first one I did with Natsu," Lucy told her. "See? It says so right here," she added, pointing at some clumsy scrawling written at the bottom. "Ah, so that huge idiot really cares, after all...!"
Chisame scowled, noticing the faint blush on Lucy's cheeks and feeling her own stomach turn around a little, but decided against mentioning that. After all, she, too, respected Lucy enough for it, even if her taste in men completely befuddled and appalled her. Looking around further, the blonde gasped, skipping towards a French maid outfit in display on an old mannequin. "Ohhh! And this is the undercover costume I wore for that job, too! And that!" she pointed at an autograph stuck to the wall with a huge hunting knife. "That's the sign of the false Salamander! Natsu rescued me from him when we first met! And those are pieces of rubble from the time we destroyed the guild's meeting hall, and that's a collar from when we went to Garuna Island, and that's-"
"Lucy-san..." Chisame began to say quietly, growing slightly worried already. "I am sort of familiar with the subject, but I don't know if you are familiar with the concept of a 'stalker shri-'"
"That's soooo sweet of them...!" a completely moved Lucy sobbed, taking her hands to her chest and fully ignoring what Chisame was saying, making the younger girl groan. "Okay, I just can't be mad at them after this! They may be goofs, but they always mean well! Chisame, let's clean this mess so they get a nice surprise when they get back, okay?!"
"See, I knew it! You always were going to end up as their darn housekeeper! Lucy-san!" Chisame angrily accused.
"Well, to be honest, I expect you to pull most of the work off. You are my junior and guest, after all..."
"That's unfair!"
"Hey, in this world, others would have put a maid outfit and a shock collar on you already! This is what I get out of being nice...?"
Lucy pouted as she and an exhausted Chisame sat at the middle of a pristine, so clean it glinted living room, all memorabilia pieces carefully and lovingly organized, all the silverware washed and stored way conveniently, the floors scrubbed and the Erza dummy being given a lovely new bright red wig (this part had been Chisame's idea, actually. She had been oddly adamant about it, and once again, Lucy wisely chose not pushing on the subject.)
"What," the blonde finally asked, in a highly strained tone, "is taking them so long?"
Chisame barely could muster a tired moan. "They're single guys on a spending drinking spree, why should they be home early...?"
Lucy cried out, springing up to point at the moons in the sky through a window. "There's not being home early, and then there's being this late! What if they were mugged?!"
"What kind of thief could ever take on Natsu-san?!" Chisame yelled back.
"W-What if they're being harassed by shady women?!" Lucy asked next.
"What kind of woman would have such awful taste?!" Chisame pointed out, making Lucy wince predictably and stutter.
"W-Well... What if it's not actually a woman?! Huh? Had you thought of that?!"
"... I don't think cross dressers anywhere are that desperate either," Chisame said.
Lucy sighed, letting her shoulders drop. "Oh, whatever. You know what? Waiting for someone to come home, only for them to no-show... it makes one feel just so lonely and miserable. Was ever that way with that boy of yours?"
"Sometimes, I suppose..." Chisame conceded begrudgingly. "A few times, he would disappear for hours because he had run into monsters and was fighting them without bothering to tell anyone, and others, he'd be too busy with his colleagues, but..." she sighed sadly. "By this point, I'm even missing those headaches he always was giving me, already. And being here only makes that feeling worse. Can't we just go back home now?"
Lucy paused, then ended up nodding. "Let's. We'll listen to what they have to say about this tomorrow anyway..."
"SO YOU WERE HERE THIS WHOLE TIME, YOU TWO-?!" Lucy yelled at the top of her outraged lungs, to no avail as Natsu and Happy, still flung all over the couch of their living room, still didn't wake up from their shared drunk and sated stupor, while Chisame facepalmed and shook her head time and time again.
Natsu scratched himself in the taut stomach and mumbled sleepily. "Lucy... c'me back home awwedy..."
"Aye..." Happy hiccuped in dreams.
At that, Lucy blinked, then softened just as quickly, with a goofy grin spreading across her face. "Ahhhh, I don't have the heart to kick them out...!" She turned sharply to her new housemate. "Chisame, you do it. But please do it only after I have turned around."
Chisame was still exhausted, but not enough as to not carry this particular order out.
Finis.
