Chapter 2: You Will Believe A Perv Can Fly

Ataru stared at his hands, small tendrils of electricity arcing between his fingers as his charge receded. He was on his knees in the middle of his dark bedroom, having just rushed home to confront his wife about what she had apparently done to him.. His burgeoning electrical powers, combined with his previously heightened emotional state, had overloaded and shattered every lightbulb in the house. Now the only illumination came from the pale blue glow of the holographic screen on Lum's video communication device.

"What's going to happen to me?" he half-wondered, half-asked.

"Really? You're unfamiliar?" Doctor Kei asked, not quite reading the mood. "How backwards is the education on this planet? I can send over some books, but I would hope you'd have at least noticed that we Oni adhere to the same sexual dimorphism that you humans do." They allowed themselves a genial chuckle. "For the most part, of course. And naturally, sex is not the same as gender, as I or L-"

Suddenly, in a way that looked very much like it could have been accidental, Lum rested her hand on the base of the communicator, hitting the power button.

"Oh, oops." she said, before fishing out an emergency light from her bag. It was spherical, about the size of a baseball and perfectly smooth aside from a hairline crack separating its hemispheres. Lum gave it a quick twist, causing the orb to burst into light like a miniature sun and begin floating towards the ceiling. Standing up, she tiptoed over to Ataru, who hadn't moved since he fell to his knees, and gave him a gentle shake. There was no response other than a weary groan.

"I'll, just… go light up the rest of the house." Lum said, floating towards the door. "Alright, darling?"

"Huh?" Ataru asked, snapping out of his fog somewhat. "Oh, y-yeah, good idea."


Lum left her spouse in the bedroom with Ten as she pulled out more emergency lights, giving each one a twist and watching as they spread themselves throughout the house to maximize light distribution. Nodding, she then quietly made her way to the bathroom, opened the window, and glided softly into the evening air. Once she was hovering safely out of earshot of the ground, she dug one more device out of her bag. It was large and heavy, like a brick; and featured a long rubber-coated antenna and a Motorola badge, very much un-like most bricks.

She began dialing, face scrunching up as she found herself frowning at the state of human technology. Push-button interfaces, REALLY. But she couldn't let herself get too distracted, or else risk messing up and needing to start over. And she had already been punching in numbers pretty rapidly for a couple minutes now. When she finally finished, instead of the ringing of another phone on the other end there were a series of curious pings and beeps as her signal was piggybacked on the carrier signals that kept Earth's satellite array in neat orbits, until-

"This is Oniboshi starship OGR-09 responding," a bored voice said. "Please identify yourself."

In order to send messages across interstellar distances without it taking several thousand years each way, any planet that wanted to contact their galactic neighbors would need at least one ship on hand to serve as a relay station. And while they were all equipped with sophisticated low-pass filters in order to quiet the roar of electromagnetic radiation used by terrestrial communications, Lum happened to know that if you had the right codes, you could make them pay attention. Just one of the perks of being the princess of an entire planet, she supposed. While using primitive mobile telephone technology to contact an Oniboshi spacecraft staying just out of range of Earth's various space-facing telescopes and radar dishes as opposed to a piece of Oni tech may have seemed like making a surgical incision with a broadsword, it had one chief advantage.

Nobody in the Oni military or government was going to bother to monitor it.

"It's me." she said brusquely. "Patch me through to Doctor Kei, would you?"

"P-princess?" the voice on the other end of the line said, immediately swapping his bored tone for one of panicked deference. "Wh-why are you hailing us?"

"Doctor Kei, please." she repeated. "It's urgent, and I'd rather not involve my father."

"...Wait, you're not using that telephone thing again, are you?" the poor comms officer asked. "It's just that, I think some of the companies on Earth have noticed? And they're saying something about 'long distance fees'..."

"Well then you'd better make this quick, then." she snapped. As the poor man on the other end yelped and began patching her through, Lum tapped her foot impatiently (an impressive feat when there's no ground to tap your foot against) and thought about what her parents' reaction to her plan would be. It's not that they'd be bigoted about it, far from it. In fact, from personal experience Lum was worried that they'd be far too enthusiastically supportive.

And so, the secrecy. And speaking of secrecy, a voice was speaking on the other end of the line.

"...reached Doctor Kei, endocrinology, may I ask who's calling?"

"Hello, Doctor Kei." Lum said with a syrupy false sweetness. "It's me~!"

"Oh, Lum!" Kei said. "What happened back there, did you lose connection or something?"

"Noooo, I didnnn't." Lum said, and Kei could practically see the fangs in her smile through the phone. "I hung up on you before you could out me to my darling~!"

"Wh- he doesn't know?!" the doctor asked, dumbfounded. "B-but you two are married! Surely he must have noticed something! Do you think he actually needs those books I mentioned? I was joking before, but-"

"Darling doesn't know that there's anything amiss with my anatomy because she's never seen me naked." the Oni princess replied through gritted teeth. Though, as she gave herself a second to consider how their engagement had gone, she admitted: "...from the waist down, at least."

Doctor Kei "hrm"-ed as they noted the pronoun Lum used. "You're… absolutely sure about your feeling, then? About Ataru being, how to put it… like us, but before we realized?"

"In Earth parlance, I believe the term is 'egg'." Lum said. "I started looking into this sort of thing when I first had my suspicions about darling."

"Egg, hm?" Kei mused, letting their more lyrical side take over. "How… apt. Beautiful, even. Something developing, hiding itself from the world within a shell because it's not yet ready to face the light of day."

Lum, who had assumed that the turn of phrase simply meant that the person being referred to had a chick inside of them, gave an awkward titter. "R-right, yeah." She sighed. "I just hope this time goes better."

"Yes, I heard Ataru talking about this happening 'again'." Kei said. "What's that about?"

Lum bit her lip guiltily. Her endocrinologist wasn't going to like what she had put her darling through.

"I… may have tried to get Kurama and her people to help."

Though she couldn't see it, Lum was certain that Doctor Kei's face was draining of color as they spoke. "Kurama? Y-you mean the Tengu? You asked them for help? Dear god, Lum, why? Yes, they have the tech, but their utilization of it is so… barbaric."

Lum winced. It was harsh, but they weren't exactly wrong. The Tengu had what was nearly caste-based speciation, though it also by and large doubled as extreme gender dimorphism. A planet full of intelligent, 8-inch-tall crow men, and precisely one humanoid monarch who was nearly always female. But even when the punnett squares were as rigged as a mob-run bingo game, genetics was never the most exact science. Even if it was a million-to-one chance, it was a chance.

The problem with galactic empires that spanned thousands of millenia was that one-in-a-million chances became more or less a certainty.

And so, some number of millions of years ago, when the entire Tengu race found themselves in a panic due to the crown princess being a boy, the scientific might of an entire planet became focused on one thing:

The sex-change gun.

It wasn't a very holistic solution, but the Tengu didn't need it to be, not when the survival of the species depended upon it. The Tengu were able to survive another generation, and the prince found himself saddled with a set of genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics that left him remembered by history as "Queen Kuranosuke the Morose".

It reminded Lum of a moving line from an Earth science fiction program she had seen in her time on the planet, but with its meaning twisted from noble self-sacrifice to callous self-interest. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Or the one.

"The first time, when Kurama came to Earth, was an accident." Lum said.

"Good, great." Kei said with a sigh. "Love the use of 'first' there, it implies multiple uses of Tengu gender technology."

Lum curled her lips into a snarl, but continued. "The first time, darling woke Kurama from her cryo-sleep. In an attempt to curb her more… lascivious tendencies, Kurama hit her with the… the Anima laser."

The word curdled on her lips and left a sour taste in her mouth. On the other end of the line, she heard a sharp intake of breath at the mention of the device. It was to be expected, considering its purpose.

A charitable reading would be that, through a particular type of backwards reasoning, the Tengu were being kind when they invented the Anima laser. After inducing it in poor Kuranosuke, his attendants recognized that he was suffering from gender dysphoria in his female body.

And so, they proceeded to solve the problem rather than treat the patient.

"The Anima laser." Kei croaked. "The god damned ANIMA laser? That affront to decency? Ataru got hit with that?" Through the tinny speaker, Lum could hear a cabinet slam accompanied by the clink of glassware and sloshing of liquid. "Listen, Lum, I'm- I'm very sorry, but if your spouse was hit with the Anima laser, well… I mean, the Tengu only ever needed that device to go in one direction, if you follow me. I-I mean, by all means, I'll help Ataru continue to transition properly now that her gender identity has been forcibly bent out of shape like that, but I'm just… ethically concerned about your excitement to have a bride, given the-"

"It didn't do anything to her."

After a full minute spent choking on whatever liquor they had been drinking, Doctor Kei managed to cough out a "What?"

"Oh, she acted more stereotypically feminine for a while, but that faded on its own." Lum said, calmly inspecting her fingernails in a piece of pantomime that was entirely for her own benefit, given the audio-only nature of her current conversation. "As you said, it's not like the Tengu had any reason to have an Animus laser on hand. And the reason she used it in the first place, to put a stop to darling's obsession with women?"

"Yes?" Kei asked, absolutely engrossed.

Lum giggled. "It didn't work! Everyone figured that Ataru was simply so obsessed with girls that 'turning him into one' rendered her a lesbian!"

At this point even the Doctor was laughing. "Of course! God. Of course. Nothing fundamentally changed about her because… Hah!"

"Yes, this all kind of… colored my perception of darling pretty early on in our marriage." Lum said. "And that's why I may have encouraged Kurama's servants to present Ryuunosuke to the princess as her perfect match." She smiled. "I simply left out the part where Ryuunosuke was a girl."

"And you knew they'd get the sex change gun."

"'Knew' is a strong word, Doctor. I would say 'hoped'." Lum replied. "Though even if they'd had the backbone to tell Kurama the truth about her 'groom', she'd have probably gone to get the thing herself. She's that type of girl when it comes to what she wants."

"Darling got hit before school, and when the Tengu men showed up again to hit poor Ryuunosuke and make her the perfect groom, Ataru, she…" Lum smiled at the memory. "She crushed the sex-change gun beneath her foot before they could turn Ryuunosuke into a boy! It really seemed like darling was going to embrace being a girl, for a while."

"...Well, what happened next?" Doctor Kei asked.

"Hm?"

"Ataru." they elaborated. "Why are they physically male again?"

"Oh." Lum said, deflating a bit. "That. Ryuunosuke's father tried to get a shot off on her, to make her the son he insists she is, but darling wound up getting hit instead." She sighed. "Obviously I didn't want Ryuunosuke to be turned into a boy against her will, but when I asked darling if she was happy to have been changed back, she… She just avoided the question. Asked Ryuunosuke if she was happy she wasn't forced to become a boy."

"...Wow."

"Yeah. I know it's not… great, trying to trick darling into realizing she's a girl like this." Lum, having flown to the outskirts of town during the call, settled down to rest in the dish of a disused radio telescope. It had belonged to a group of wealthy UFO kooks, who had spent years searching for signs of alien life, and had now spent nearly as long completely abandoned. No one from the group ever showed up again after her people had arrived on Earth. "I just don't know what else to do. I want her to be happy."

"Well, the hormones from the artificial horns will take a bit longer to change her body." Kei said. "More like a normal puberty. That might help her get comfortable with things." Lum heard a gulp from their end, and the soft click of glass gently touching glass. "At least, we can hope."


"What'cha doing?"

"OW!" Ataru yelled, sucking on a bleeding finger and glaring at Ten, who was floating over his shoulder. "I'm trying to clean the glass off my floor, you twerp!"

"Why don't you just fly?" the toddler asked. "Then you wouldn't have to worry about it!"

Ataru regarded the young Oni nervously. "F-fly? D-don't be ridiculous. I can't fly."

The enfant terrible grinned, which is to say he bared his sharp teeth at Ataru. "Why not?" he asked. "You did before."

"I was angry before." Ataru said, picking up the metal screw that made up the largest single piece of lightbulb on the floor. Idly, he considered beaning Ten with it, but experience told him that the young Oni would just dodge. And then blast him with his fire breath. "Do you want me to be angry, runt?"

"N-no!" Ten yelped, before clearing his throat and trying to save face. "I mean, you don't scare me!"

"Oh yeah?" Ataru asked with a smug smile. "Then what happened at school earlier today?"

"Th-that's different!" Ten huffed. "You just reminded me of my mom before I knew what was going on, that's all! Hey, you okay?"

Ataru, who was busy sucking on another bleeding finger, waited patiently for his heart to settle down. "F-fine, fine. Just cut myself again."

"You should really stop doing that." Ten supplied helpfully.

"Shut up." he responded. Then, after a lengthy pause, added, "...thank you."

"What're you thanking me for?" asked Ten, unaccustomed to those words coming from Ataru's mouth. The sound was almost novel.

"Well, uh." Ataru began. "Your mother is just a uh…" Ataru cursed his mouth as his face went beet-red. "...Just a very pretty lady." Oh, none of THAT should have been out loud.

"Whaa?" Ten asked, floating almost imperceptibly further away from Ataru. "What's that got to do with anything, dummy? You're not a lady like her, those horns are just making you look like one, Lum's doctor said so! And that's why I'm not gonna be scared of you anymore!"

*crunch*

Fixing his eyes on Ten, Ataru glared at him as he registered, at a level of detachment, the feeling of crunching glass and spreading, wet warmth in his clenched fist. His eyes darted to his hand as a drop of blood hit the floor with a soft "plap", before quickly refocusing on the toddler floating above him.

Hyperventilating. Clutching his wrist, pain was coming. Anger was still dominant though, still white hot, still laser-focused. So.

First thing's first.

"GET. LOST. TENNN!" Ataru bellowed, grinning with humorless satisfaction as the Oni cried out in fear and flew out of the room. Ordinarily the act of terrorizing the little brat would noticably improve his mood, but Ataru still felt upset, something that he chalked up to his injured hand which was now throbbing with pain.

"Gaah, fuck." he muttered, trying to angle his hand so as to stop more blood from staining the carpet. His eyes scanned the floor, but he couldn't be sure of if there were any small shards hiding beneath the thick fibers beneath his feet.

And he was pretty far from the door, with more busted bulbs ready to greet him in the hallway to the bathroom.

He tried to remember what the feeling had been like, during the brief moments he'd been airborne. There was the rush of anger, sure, but that couldn't have been necessary. Lum and Ten managed to fly just fine without being constantly furious. Peeling away the anger and confusion and adrenaline that was common to his time spent flying, what was left was a sort of…buoyant feeling. Something within lifting him up, keeping him aloft, something that was, if not the genuine article, then very close to happiness.

Hmph. Fat chance of getting that to work. Ataru thought. But, he also really didn't want to cut up his feet as well, so he decided to give it a shot using what limited imagination he had at his disposal to think of something that would spark enough joy in him to lift off. Something to really get his heart racing.

Simple enough, he figured. Standard two-girl fantasy should do good enough. Only question is who…

Flipping through his mental rolodex containing the (frankly ludicrous amount of) women he knew, he landed on Sakura and… you know what? Why not, Ten's mother. She was a remarkably beautiful woman, after all. Ten was just a kid, it only made sense that he didn't understand why what he said had counted as a compliment. I mean, thought Ataru, getting distracted from his sexy world of fantasy, if you had the choice, who wouldn't want to look like-

*thunk*

Knocked out of his reverie, Ataru opened his eyes to see that the floor was now several feet below him. Cautiously, he raised his hand to confirm that yes, he did indeed just hit his head on the ceiling.

"Weird," Ataru mumbled to himself. "Didn't even get to the good part." Still, he knew better than to look a gift flying horse in the mouth, and now prepared to tackle the problem of how to make his way forward through the air.

Initial attempts to swim to the bedroom door as though air could be treated as exceptionally thin water proved unsuccessful. As did frantic arm flapping and just sorta… trying to shove his body forward? Like spinning in a revolving chair without touching the floor, only forwards instead of sideways. Eventually, Ataru resorted to pushing off from the ceiling, and resolved to let himself collide with the door instead of figuring out how to stop.

"Owww…" he moaned, rubbing his head where it had hit the door. There had to be a better way to do this. Hell, Ten could do it, and he was a baby!

Maybe I'm overthinking this, he thought. After all, Lum never seemed to exert any effort when she wanted to fly around. She just… did it, and she went where she wanted to. Well, right now I'd REALLY like to be upright. Through the heat and pressure of the blood rushing to his head, Ataru tried his hardest to manifest verticality, and was amazed as his body slowly spun like a wheel on an axle until he found himself hovering a few inches off the ground, bobbing slightly.

Beginning to smile, he turned the doorknob and, rather than push off against the door frame, simply thought about moving backwards. His smile only grew wider as this actually worked, and he was having so much fun that he hardly even cared that doing this resulted in him closing the door on himself. He pushed the door back a bit to give himself some room, and then, sticking his tongue out in concentration, tried to maneuver himself in the curve necessary to face the hallway. It was clumsy, and he wound up spinning a full rotation more than he needed to, whipping his arms out as instinct took over and he tried to "catch his balance", but it was exhilarating. Unable to suppress a giggle, Ataru made his way out into the hall and sailed towards the bathroom to finally clean the blood off his hand.

"Man, mom and dad are going to freak when they see what I can do." he said as he dried off his hands. For a moment, there was no sound except the rustling and scraping of the rough fabric, but as he caught a glimpse of the horns that were apparently now a permanent fixture on his forehead, he couldn't help but laugh at the absolute farce that was his life. Here he was, embroiled in some fresh alien nonsense, of the sort that probably wasn't going to be swept under the rug by next week, and he was worrying about what his parents were going to think about it.

Stopping at the top of the stairs, Ataru hesitated for a moment, teetering over the edge as he debated if he really wanted to do this. He had touched down to wash his hands, and the constant, treacherous thought of "what if you fuck this up" was proving difficult to dislodge. He shook his head, it wouldn't do any good to think like that. He could do it, he had done it, and it had come so easily once he knew he could.

And so, with a call of "Hey mom and dad, check this out!", Ataru Moroboshi waited until he heard the sound of their approaching footsteps, and then proceeded to swan dive off the top step.


As Lum flew back to the Moroboshi home, the first thing she heard was the screaming.

This wasn't wholly out of the ordinary, though usually the screams were more frustrated and less… terrified.

Though, the shrieks heavily featuring the name of her darling was familiar enough.

Opening the front door, Lum found Ataru's mother screaming herself hoarse on her hands and knees at the foot of the stairs, while her nebbish husband had collapsed against the wall into a stammering mess. Above their heads, where both of their gazes were firmly locked, was-

"Ataru, get DOWN from there!"

Mrs. Moroboshi, having realized that her son was not in fact going to crack his head open on the floor, was now fully prepared to crack it open herself. Ataru, meanwhile, was responding to her attempts to grab him by hovering higher up, out of reach.

It was an impressive display of control for someone who a couple hours ago was crashing into walls and ceilings uncontrollably, and Lum couldn't help but swell with pride. Her darling had found her happy place!

"Aw, c'mon mom! Why would I do that? This is great!" Ataru said, flipping over in a less-than-graceful loop. "...As far as the weird alien stuff that keeps happening to me goes, anyway." He hovered towards one of the blown light bulbs, still in its socket. "Here, look. You can just hand me replacement bulbs, we won't even need the ladder!"

Though Ataru's father actually looked like he was considering the idea (at least, once he got past the shock of his slacker son actually offering to help with chores), his mother simply shook her head, staring at Ataru with a look that verged on disgust.

"No. Ataru, I don't know what… she did to you this time," Mrs. Moroboshi said, giving a sidelong glance at Lum. "But I won't have the neighbors thinking you're some kind of alien freak on top of everything else. They already assume you two are busy making… hybrids."

Slowly, sadly, Ataru sank down to sit on the stairs, looking ashamed of himself. It was a striking change from his previous excitement, and it was positively breaking Lum's heart.

"Mrs. Moroboshi, please!" She said, flying up next to Ataru and grabbing a hold of his shoulders. "There may have been an… accident with some of my technology, but darling is not a freak! Please don't treat him like this!"

Ataru's mother stared angrily at her, but held her tongue. Lum knew that she only barely tolerated her Oni housemates, her anger and frustration at Lum's upending of her comfortable middle-class existence and transformation of her family into the locus of all gossip in Tomobiki only just barely outweighed by her fear of reprisal from the literal army that Lum theoretically had at her disposal.

"Is there a way to get rid of those fool things?" she asked.

Lum shook her head. "No, I'm afraid they're fused with darling's skull and blood vessels by now. Removing them would be extraordinarily painful."

Ataru gingerly rubbed the base of one of his new bony protrusions. "She's not kidding." he said with a grimace.

Mrs. Moroboshi took a long, slow intake of breath through her nose, before an equally slow and deliberate exhale via the same route. "Very well." she said, before tossing a hairband at her son. "If you leave the house, cover those up. And if your wife would be so kind as to help us replace the lightbulbs…"

"Wh- HEY!" Ataru yelled, jumping to his feet. "Why can't I help too? You saw me just now!"

"Because, son, Lum was born to be able to do this." she explained. "And in any case, she should take responsibility for this whole mess." She handed Ataru a box of lightbulbs.

"Now go… go change the lights in your room. I'll call you down for dinner when it's ready."