Chapter 1: Oni, Oh My, Oh No

"We did it, Darling! We won~!"

Lum half-tackled her husband Ataru in a flying leap, her feet not bothering to touch the ground as she spun his body in a circle. Once she softly touched down and her long, shimmering hair came to rest after her, Benten strolled up, holstering the bean-pelting gun she had brought for the Setsubun festivities.

"Hey, not bad, ya lousy oni." she said with a smirk, giving Ataru a friendly punch to the shoulder that would probably need an x-ray. Turning to her fellow alien, her face brightened as her smile morphed into something slightly more innocent. "This was a great idea, Lum! I had a blast! Feels good to have a Setsubun fight without all the old farts and their rules draggin' the whole thing down."

"You're right!" Lum agreed. "I can't remember the last time I had so much fun!" She gave her husband a squeeze. "We simply must do this again next year, don't you agree Darling?"

Ataru glumly surveyed the aftermath of the fight between the forces of the gods of luck (students who Benten had conscripted into her army to fight the oni, who initially consisted of Lum, Ten, and him after Lum stuck some false horns onto him) and the oni (largely the same pool of people, only Ataru had stuck horns onto their heads in order to draw fire away from himself). Half the student body lay stuck in a sticky, natto-like goop that Lum had fired at Benten and her forces, while the other half were tugging at horns that had been glued onto their heads and making their way grouchily towards Ataru.

"I think I'll be lucky if I live to see next year…" he mumbled.

"MOROBOSHI!"

Ataru groaned. There was no mistaking the gruff tones of his homeroom teacher, Onsen Mark. Lightly battered from the enthusiastic beating several students had given him earlier and with the back of his namesake-emblazoned suit covered in footprints from the whole-class stampede out the door, the short man advanced across the schoolyard as fast as his small legs would carry him.

"Oh, you're really in for it now, Moroboshi." he fumed, standing up onto his tiptoes and almost meeting Ataru eye-to-chin. "Organizing an illicit Setsubun festival during school hours, disrupting class, leading your entire class out to participate while school is in session, assaulting Tomobiki faculty, and worst of all, gluing these STUPID horns onto my head!" Onsen Mark gave the offending protrusions a tug and winced.

"Yeah, Ataru!" said his friend Kosuke, giving his own temporary horns a poke. "I mean, I like a day free of learning as much as the next guy, but how do you get these things off?"

"Well, Lum said that my horns were covered in a time-release glue that would last until the end of the Setsubun battle…" Ataru began.

There was a ripping sound and a shriek of pain as Mendou confidently gave his own horns a hearty yank.

"...but I just used superglue for all yours."

"(Sigh). Of course." Onsen Mark grumbled, while grabbing the collar of Mendou's shirt to prevent the rich boy, family katana in hand and face a contorted mask of apoplectic rage, from dicing Ataru into chunks. "Come on, everyone, nurse Sakura should have some acetone…"

"I'll get you for this, Moroboshi!" yelled Mendou, waving his katana in one hand and holding ginger fingers to one of the fresh and perfectly circular bald spots that now decorated his cranium. "How dare you harm a single HAIR on my beautiful head!"

Sighing, Ataru shrugged and turned back towards the two alien girls. "So, you think that mine are about ready to come off, Lum?" he asked. She had stuck them on him the previous night, making him the first recruit in her and Ten's oni army, and the damn things were irritating.

"Uh, well…" she said, touching her finger to her chin in thought. "I didn't exactly know how long the battle would take, so I just set them to release you at midnight!"

Ataru, frowning, scratched at the horns that were to be firmly attached for another 11 hours. "They feel itchy…" he whined, wondering how Lum had managed to fit them so perfectly on his skin and not trap any of his hair. There barely even seemed to be a seam where his forehead met the prosthetics.

Grumbling, he set off back towards the doors of Tomobiki high. "Guess we'd better get back to class. C'mon, Lum."

"Coming, darling~!" she called, before giving Benten a quick, excited wave.

After a short glance at Ataru's retreating back, Benten gave her friend a smile and a quick thumbs up before Lum flew after her husband.


Class, when it finally resumed, was not exactly an environment conducive to learning, despite Onsen Mark's best efforts.

This was, in part, due simply to the adrenaline rushing through the veins of the students fresh from the melee that had just taken place, mixed with the exhilaration of managing to skip out on some amount of school.

For Ataru in particular, however, there were two additional sources of distraction. One were the horns, still very much stuck to his head, and getting more uncomfortable by the second. It practically felt like the damn things were burrowing in. He gave one a probing tug, encountering stiff resistance and a shocking amount of pain.

"Owwww…"

"Moroboshi, I will remind you to be quiet." Onsen Mark snapped, vein on his forehead bulging dangerously enough that students in the front row were considering hiding behind their book bags for when his head finally popped.

Ataru rolled his eyes and gestured towards distraction number two. "Why? Ain't like 'Twerpy' Ten's being quiet."

Ten, who had been floating out of easy swiping range and poking Ataru's head with a stick, suddenly hid the instrument of annoyance behind his back. "I'm a good boy!" he chirped, in the face of all evidence.

"Lum's… precocious cousin is not my student, Moroboshi." Onsen Mark said through gritted teeth, a single bead of sweat rolling down his forehead as his eyes slid towards the oni toddler. He did not need "immolation" to be added to his list of injuries for the day. "You are."

Shooting Ataru a smug look, Ten stuck out his tongue at his human cousin-in-law. "Nyyyeeeaaahhhh!" he teased, taking care to hover far out of range of Ataru's fists. "That's right, you dummy! Pay attention in class!"

"You...little...runt!" Ataru growled in-between his attempts to jump up and reach the pint-sized target of his aggression. Each time he jumped, however, Ten bobbed up towards the ceiling of the classroom, out of reach and cackling.

"Darling, please!" Lum pleaded. "He's just a child! Don't be so rough with him!"

"HE… BROUGHT THIS… UPON… HIMSELF!" replied Ataru, making one last herculean effort to nab the little flying bastard.

Which, surprisingly, was successful.

"Gotcha!" he hissed triumphantly.

"Wh-" gasped Ten, momentarily at a loss for words. "How'd you get up here?"

The question managed to puncture the bubble of blind fury that Ataru had been inhabiting, as his eyes lost some of their furious zeal and he blinked, looking down a solid eight feet to the ground. "W-whoa!" he shouted, as slowly his hands seemed to be gripping onto the small child less and less with the intent to throttle and more and more with the sort of desperate clinginess one might associate with a first-time rock climber. "How did I get up here?" He gripped Ten even harder and curled around him, as if he had been weighted down with stones and then offered a life preserver ring after hours of treading water.

"You're… heavy… dummy!" Ten groaned, straining to keep himself and Ataru in the air. Rather than exert himself any more, he decided the time had come to unleash his favorite weapon against his assailant. Taking a deep breath as students next to Ataru scurried away in a by now well-practiced evacuation maneuver, his inflated chest started to glow a deep red as if lit from within. After just a moment, he let loose a gout of flame that engulfed Ataru entirely.

Ten, clapping his hands together as if to mark the end of a job well done, approached the familiar sight of a char-broiled pervert for one last taunt while he was still conscious. To his surprise, however, Ataru seemed even less the worse for wear than usual, and was brushing soot off of his school uniform.

And he.

Looked.

Furious.

"Tennnnnnn…" he snarled, eyelid twitching. "You've been a very, VERY bad boy!"

Tears began pooling in the corner of the young oni's eyes. He wasn't sure why, usually Ten couldn't care less about what the moron thought, but something about the look he was giving him was… frighteningly familiar…

"Waaaaahhhh!" he cried, before flying out of the classroom as fast as his tiny body could manage. "Scary, he's scary!"

"Hey, not so fast, you little twerp!" Ataru shouted before bounding after him out what remained of the classroom door.

There was a moment of relative silence after his departure, as the entire class processed what had just happened.

"Did… anyone else see that?" Shinobu asked.

"What, you mean Moroboshi jumping more than 6 feet straight up and stayin' there?" said Ryuunosuke from her seat in the back.

Shinobu nodded slowly. "Y-yeah, that."

"Has he been training in secret or something?" Mondou asked.

"And the fire." Megane chimed in, slamming his hand on the table in a dramatic attempt to get all eyes on him. When only the few people closest to him turned their heads, he adjusted his glasses and continued. "Ataru is surprisingly resilient, sure, but it looked like Ten barely singed him!"

"...Maybe he's been scorched so much he's developed an immunity?" another student ventured.

"To FIRE?!"

"I dunno! I'm at least pitching!"

"What's going on, Lum?" Mendou demanded.

"Wh-what?" the oni girl asked, startled. "What do you mean?"

"Please. You have unrestricted access to him and for some reason you love him." continued the rich boy. "Are you using some kind of alien technology to make him stronger?"

"No! I would never!" she protested, standing up from her desk. "Um, Onsen Mark, sir?" she asked while floating closer to the door by sheepish inches. "I know it's still the middle of class, but I was wondering if I could go and check on darling and Ten? Just to make sure they're both okay."

"Fine." came her teacher's terse response, muffled by virtue of his face currently being buried under his arms atop his desk. "Just… go, please."

"Thank you!" Lum said with a midair bow, before zooming out into the hallway.

After the papers stopped rustling from the draft formed in Lum's wake, from the general grumbling of students who didn't see why they had to stick around came a louder and more pointed complaint.

"Come on, sensei!" Mendou said. "Moroboshi's going to use whatever's going on to cheat at sports or something!"

"Is he even on any sports teams?"

"Well… no." Mendou faltered. "But suppose he was!"

"Well if he were to, that would be a problem for the gym teacher, not me." Onsen Mark replied in a weary tone. "Now sit down."


Lum was almost singing as she flew home, buoyed so much by her own giddiness that she felt like she barely even needed her powers to fly. So soon, so soon! she thought as she raced around a corner, grabbing onto a streetlight to keep the turn from going wide. While happy, her head was beginning to be suffused with a hint of worry, like a drop of food coloring in a glass of water. She had expected a few days to prepare for things, and had wound up getting less than one. As the Moroboshi household came into view, Lum could only hope that Ten had led Ataru far, far away from home. At least far enough to buy her a couple hours.


A panicked whisper made its way down the line of outdoor shopping stalls and food carts that lined the street. The proximity to Tomobiki high school afforded the vendors considerable foot traffic when school let out, and they were grateful enough for the business that their usual response to suspected truancy would be to shrug and ask if the young customer would prefer a paper or plastic bag. That would be the usual response, that is, all except for the case of one…

"Moroboshi?!"

The hawker of porcelain figurines gathered up her wares in a frantic hurry, placing them in their protective foam inserts while glancing nervously down the street. She had heard about his approach from the takoyaki seller in between gasps as he shoved piping-hot free samples into his mouth rather than let them be mooched by the oncoming high schooler. She was not going to lose a whole shipment due to the boy's clumsiness again.

"He shouldn't be here yet! School isn't out!" she wailed.

"Yeah! (Aah! Ow!)" her fellow prepper agreed, eyes watering with a mouthful of scalding cephalopod. "We need more time to prepare!"

"I'll say." said a periodical seller to his left. Unlike everyone else who was battening down the proverbial hatches, he was simply looking morose. "My delivery guy doesn't get here until 2! I can't sell Morobosi last week's nudie mags! He's already got those!"

Before they had the chance to roll their eyes, they heard a rapidly-approaching voice that sent a chill down their spines and turned their blood to ice. The figurine seller, casting one last indecisive look at her remaining merchandise, settled for wrapping her arms around the statues like a brooding hen.

"TENNNNNNNNNNNN!"

Ataru's scream paused for a moment as he caught his breath and he looked around for the object of his ire. Whipping his head around in search of Ten, he eventually growled in irritation and took off again to continue the search.

Blinking, having expected a more destructive experience, the stall owners breathed a collective sigh of relief (or a plaintive sigh in the case of the magazine man) and began to return their displays to their normal state.

"Well that could have gone worse, all things considered." the Takoyaki vendor said while nursing a slightly uncomfortably full stomach.

"Speak for yourselves!" came an agitated voice from up the street. The three people present turned to look at an older man cradling a cheap plastic radio like it was his own deathly ill child. "Just look at what he did to my merchandise!"

"Looks fine to me." said the newspaper and magazine man. And it was true; from the outside the radio seemed completely intact.

"This was my display model!" the man said. "It was playing just fine for hours! Then that Moroboshi kid runs by, and-" He pantomimed an explosion with his free hand. "POOF! Thing just fizzles out!"

"...Maybe it was a freak accident?" the porcelain seller ventured without much conviction.

"Tested another one! And then another! None of 'em worked!" He said, his face screwing up into a mask of confounded anger. "Every damn radio I got had their circuit board fried!"

He opened it up, and sure enough, the interior of the device had been reduced to a misshapen blob of plastic, copper, and lead.

As a unit, the three vendors gulped in unison. Eventually, the takoyaki seller broke the uneasy silence. "Thing looks like a lightning bolt went through it…"


Eventually, Ataru found himself stalking through a supermarket where, after failing to find Ten anywhere, he eventually began to cool his head. Noting a certain empty feeling in his stomach, he figured that with all the excitement (and the leaving school in the middle of the day) it was probably around lunchtime.

"Wonder if this place has any free samples…"

It did, with several smiling employees standing behind tables covered in trays of cubes of cheese, slices of deli meat, and tiny plastic cups filled with soft drinks. Ordinarily, Ataru would be snapping up these morsels left and right, then putting on a hasty disguise and looping around for a second pass. But for some reason, nothing he saw there today really… grabbed him. Oh, he ate a few bites to sate his hunger, sure, but the food was curiously bland on his tongue, as if it was missing something.

Suddenly, he came upon the last table, which had an assortment of small glass bottles and sleeves of saltine crackers on it. In an instant, Ataru knew exactly what it was that he'd been craving.

Spice.

Now, normally Ataru didn't consider himself a very big fan of spicy food. Sure, he'd enjoy some spicy curry every now and again, but he was usually pretty quick to grab for the milk. He never sought out spicy food. But right here? Right now? He NEEDED spice.

"Hello, sir!" the young lady behind the table said as he approached. "Are you interested in a free sample?"

"Yeah… yeah, I am." Ataru said, eyeing the bottles hungrily. "What have you got here?"

"Well, we have a range of hot sauces available," she said, gesturing at the bottles in front of her. "...ranging from a jalapeño-based sauce, to tabasco sauce, a habanero-based one, to, uh…" The employee gulped as her hand hovered over the last bottle, which prominently featured a skull-and-crossbones emblem on the label, which was also on fire. "W-well, frankly I don't recommend you try the last one."

Ataru's hand, which had been inching towards the tiny bottle on the far end, suddenly snapped back. "R-right. Um," he moved his hand towards the jalapeño hot sauce. "Could I try this one?"

"Of course, sir!" the employee chirped, returning almost at once to her pleasant retail demeanor. Unscrewing the cap on the bottle and shaking a couple drops onto a saltine, she proffered it to Ataru with a smile. "Careful, even if it's the least spicy sauce here, it is still hot!"

Barely even nodding an acknowledgement, Ataru shoved the entire cracker into his mouth and crunched down. It was good. It was scratching the itch in his tongue, the yearning deep within his taste buds, and the way the spice mingled with the salt of the cracker was incredible.

But it wasn't enough.

"Could I, um, try the tabasco?" he asked.

"Certainly!"

Another cracker, another couple drops of a deep red liquid, another crunch. It was better, there was definitely more of a burn, but…

"Not enough…" Ataru muttered to himself.

"I'm sorry, sir?" the employee asked.

"Oh, uh, I was wondering if I could try the habanero one as well?"

"My, we certainly like our spicy food, huh?" she asked with a smile. "Here you are, sir."

*Crunch, crunch*

"Still not enough…" he said, before his eyes landed on the forbidden sauce again. "Um, ma'am…" he began.

"Yes, I think I know where this is going." The young woman sighed. "If you'll wait here, there's a waiver I believe I need to have you sign…"

"What?" Ataru was affronted. He wanted to eat that hot sauce now! "Aw, c'mon, I'll be fine!"

"I-I'm sure you will, sire, given your enjoyment of the other sauces. But still, I must insist that I-"

"Aw, forget that!" Ataru said, swiping the bottle and unscrewing it before the employee could stop him. Shoving the neck of it into his mouth without a second thought, he drained the whole thing in one go as the color drained from the girl's face at roughly the same rate it did from the interior of the bottle.

"Aaaahhhh…" he sighed contentedly as the poor employee collapsed to the floor in front of him. Something about her reaction made him pause, despite how good he was feeling from finally sating his sudden craving. Vaguely, he was aware that he shouldn't be feeling so good. This was the sort of sauce an insane masochist with jaded taste buds would apply a drop at a time into whole pots of soup, probably from behind a welder's mask. Steam should be coming out of his ears, and that's if he was lucky.

Shrugging it off (though with some considerable difficulty, he reassured himself by half-remembering a fact he had read once about how your taste buds only last a few weeks or so. He probably just had some now that were big into spicy food, that's all.

Nodding, he made his way out of the supermarket. It was probably about time to head home, anyway.


Hastily, Lum set up her communication device in Ataru's empty room, constantly stealing glances out the window for any sign of her husband.

The device whirred to life, with a "V" shaped set of prongs extending out from the top and a translucent holographic screen appearing in the valley formed by the prongs. On the blue-tinted display, after a moment of static, a face appeared. Said face belonged to an oni who, while older than Lum, was still quite youthful, and who had a curiously androgynous appearance. They were wearing large, round glasses and their opalescent hair was moderately long and tied up in a ponytail, but the face beneath had features that most would define at a glance as "masculine".

The face, whatever the gender of the owner, immediately lit up when they saw Lum on the other end of the line. "Ah, Lum! How are you? I have to say, this is a most unexpected call."

"Hi, doctor Kei!" said Lum, beaming at the screen. "I just had something I needed to tell you about."

"It's not a problem with your horns, is it?" they asked. "Those should be good for another few years, but if you're worried, I'm sure we could arrange a check-up for sometime next-"

"I did it."

The doctor paused. "Hm?"

"I did it." she repeated, staring down at her wringing hands. When she looked her doctor in the eye once more, she had the nervous grin of a child who was about to explain to you why the sink was full of tadpoles. "You know, the uh. The thing we talked about."

In an instant, doctor Kei's relaxed demeanor disappeared as a notepad and pen seemed to materialize in their hands, their glasses gleaming as an excited smile appeared on their lips. "You did? You gave your husband your spare pair?" Scribbling excitedly, their pen nearly ignited the paper it was writing on. "How'd he take it? Was he excited?"

Lum bit her lip anxiously. "See, that's what I wanted to talk to you about." She glanced out the window again. "Darling could be home at any time, so I have to ask. How good are you at acting?"


As Ataru ambled home with his relaxed, bow-legged gait, the events of the day preyed on his mind. Things seemed… strange. Pausing as he remembered that he was technically married to an alien who regularly invited cosmic chaos into his life, he adjusted his thoughts accordingly.

Things seemed stranger than normal.

Of course, it wasn't like things were hopeless. The real sign that shit was about to hit the UFO was if-

Wait.

The hairs on the back of Ataru's neck stood up, and as he perked his ears he swore he could hear the "flip, flop" of sandals approaching from behind. The footsteps were very close together, indicating that whoever owned the legs that were making them was very short.

Oh, no.

Ataru turned around just in time to catch a roasted soybean in the eye, while dozens more pelted him down his whole front.

"OWWWWW!"

"Oni out! Fortune in… oh." Cherry said, pausing mid-throw once he got a good look at his victim. "Well if it isn't young Moroboshi! What're you doing dressed as an oni on setsubun, boy? Good way to get a facefull of beans."

Ataru, rubbing at his newly watering and bloodshot eye, simply glared at the monk. "I didn't exactly choose to wear this today. Lum 'recruited' me to fight for the oni in her stupid fight with Benten."

"Ahhhh, yes, that would explain why your features seem even more unfortunate than usual." said Cherry as he nodded sagely, gesturing at Ataru's horns. As the teen grimaced, Cherry stroked his chin thoughtfully. "...Though, that doesn't explain the strange energy hanging about you, my boy."

"The what?" Ataru asked, getting to his feet. "What are you talking about?"

The diminutive monk nodded again, more vehemently this time. "Yes, yes, there's no mistaking it! Not when you've got spiritual powers as well-honed as I have, boy! There's a supernatural force filling you up, spreading through your veins! And, unless I'm much mistaken, it's coming from…" Cherry waved his khakkhara up and down Ataru's body, eventually coming to rest on his forehead. "...HERE!"

Ataru reached a hand up and brushed the horns that Lum had stuck on him the night before. "D-don't be ridiculous…" he said as his mind provided a helpful replay of all the weird things that had been going down today. "These are just fakes, there's nothing they could possibly be-"

He gasped. As his fingers inspected his new horns more carefully, Ataru felt a change from how they had felt that morning. Instead of an almost seamless join between horn and forehead, he instead felt a ring of flesh around the pointed protrusions, as if his skin was establishing a grip on them. He gave them a yank and was rewarded with unbelievable pain for his trouble.

"ARRRRGH!" he yelled.

No. Ataru began to hyperventilate. No no no no I don't WANT to be an oni! An image flashed through his mind of Rei, dumb as an ox and looking like one too the moment his base desires overtook him. Ataru was self-aware enough to know that he was almost all id, it'd be cow town for him for sure. He shuddered, trying desperately to think of a different possible outcome. Inevitably, the only other male oni he knew began to fill his thoughts full to bursting with his sheer presence. Mr. Invader. Lum's dad, leader of the oni people, was many things, but the ones sticking in Ataru's mind at the moment were that he was 10 feet tall and half as wide, and nearly as hairy as Rei's beastial form.

Neither of these options appealed particularly much to Ataru.

As he stood there, hands still gripping his horns as his eyelid twitched, Cherry waved a hand in front of his face. (Or, more accurately, waved his hand as close to Ataru's face as he could manage, which wound up being somewhere around the stomach region.)

"I say, are you alright there, boy?"

*Cracka-THOOM*

Slowly, cautiously, Cherry looked to the sky, which had previously been mostly clear and streaked with occasional wisps of thin cirrus. All of a sudden, and quite against any weather forecast, a dark, angry thunderhead was gathering. As it began to twist itself like great rope a mile wide, he looked to where it seemed to be centering itself.

And then, wisely, took a step back from Ataru, who was practically glowing in the suddenly darkening afternoon. Faint and hard to see, small questing sparks were working their way upwards, bit by bit, until-

*KRA-KRAKKK!*

"LUMMMMM!"

In a blind rage, Ataru pushed himself off the ground at a 30 degree angle without even thinking. And, while his anger fueled him, he did fly in a beeline towards his home. Frothing, apoplectic fury, however, was soon replaced by confused panic as he found himself skimming over streetlights and telephone lines, and pretty soon all Cherry could see of him was a cloud of dust floating on the breeze as he impacted the ground

"Such terrible misfortune…" Cherry mumbled, before noticing a small figure bobbing along at slightly above head height.

"Hey mister! What's going on?" Ten asked as he floated over.

"Oh, Ten. It was young Moroboshi." he responded. "He was just on his way home." He allowed himself a slight pause as Ten glanced in the direction of the dissipating dust cloud. "He seemed quite upset."

The young oni's face lit up with excitement. "Really? This should be fun! Thanks, mister!" he called back as he flew off.

Solemnly, Cherry shook his head and tutted. "Nothing to be done for them but pray." he sighed as he clapped his hands together beneath his chin.


"LUMMMMM!"

Ataru carried on screaming that single syllable for so long that you could pretty easily track his route through the house, barreling through the genkan without bothering to remove his shoes and thundering up the stairs (though, a very careful listener might note that he seemed to be taking the steps three at a time, and the half impacts were on the ceiling). Slamming open the door to his and Lum's shared room, finishing his hoarse scream, his entire body was surrounded in a halo of electricity. Errant sparks coruscated across his skin and arced at random into the air around him. His hair, no longer content to lay flat as per the laws of gravity, stood on end and each strand distanced itself far away from its neighbors.

"Y-yes, darling?" Lum asked nervously.

"DON'T YOU 'YES DARLING' ME!" he shouted, stomping a foot and shorting out his stereo in the process. "YOUR DUMB HORNS ARE TURNING ME INTO AN ONI!"

"You're half right, mister Moroboshi." came a voice from Lum's communication device.

"Hm?" Ataru said. The voice was pleasant and soft, reminding him of a doctor he had went to as a child. At the very least, it succeeded in calming him down slightly. "What do you mean, 'half right'?" he asked, the angrier tendrils of lightning receding back into him and his hair ceasing to stand on end. "Who are you, anyway?"

"I'm a doctor of Lum's." said the voice. "Doctor Kei. She was describing your symptoms to me. And you're correct insofar as you're aware of the situation." There was the non-sound of Kei adjusting their glasses. "Ask yourself, mister Moroboshi: would it make sense for an oni alien to own something whose purpose is to turn other races into oni themselves?"

"W-" Ataru sputtered, suddenly finding himself off-balance, mentally speaking. "W-well no, but-"

"It's turning you into an oni, mister Moroboshi, because it's designed to work on oni. So it's making some adjustments as it goes about it's intended task." Barely audible, there was the sound of a swallow on the other end as Kei paused.

"Which is to, ah, turn you into a female oni."

At first, there was silence. You could almost be forgiven for thinking that Ataru was talking the bombshell in stride. This would of course be before you noticed his hands, clasping and unclasping in sudden, robotic staccato, and how the lightbulbs nearest him seemed to be glowing slightly… brighter than usual.

Ten, whose flight, while it outclassed Ataru's, was still painfully slow, finally huffed and puffed his way through the doorway. "What did…" he panted. "...I miss?" Eventually, however, he looked around the radiant room and squinted. "Geez, what's with the lights?"

"...Darling?" Lum asked cautiously, reaching a hand out towards Ataru before a sudden pop made her shriek.

The lightbulb in Ataru's desk lamp had burst.

Slowly, expanding in a circle around him, lamp after lighting fixture died violently, with the fluorescent bulb in his closet being the last survivor. The hum of its phosphorescence intensified as it pumped out more and more lumens, before there was an ear-shattering crash as it exploded into a cloud of glass shards and mercury vapor. After a pause, there were muffled yells from downstairs as the lights in whatever room Ataru's parents were currently inhabiting doubtlessly failed explosively.

There were a couple loud pops as the streetlights closest to the Moroboshi household went, and Ataru's hands travelled slowly upward to grip his face as if to hold it in one shape. His mouth was open, but no sound was coming out, save for the hiss of a nearly silent scream passing over his lips like gas from a stovetop burner. The sudden bang of an overloaded transformer across the street shocked him out of this state and brought him to his knees on his bedroom floor.

"This can't be happening…" he mumbled to himself. "Not again."