Argh! My class finals are coming! That's not good! This means I have to switch classes next week... and I really don't want to do that. I like me classes... except for math. I've never really liked math. I do not own Slayers, Major League baseball and apologize for the general shortness/cheesiness of the chapter in advance. The Olympics are coming! -squee- Sorry, I just had to say it.

San

An Unexpected Outcome? You're More Trouble Than You're Worth!

"Miss Lina!" Amelia called down the empty hallway. "Miss Lina! Where did you go!" It was useless for Amelia to yell. She had circled the stadium five times already looking for Lina and had not even caught so much as a glimpse of her friend. It was cold in the open-air stadium, for there was no place that she could get into that had heat. Utterly exhausted from searching, Amelia sat down on a bench and sighed. At this rate, she was not going to find Lina until sundown.

"Hey Amelia! Over here!" a familiar voice called that made Amelia's ears perk up. She turned her head to see Lina run up to her, about as happy as pig in slop.

"Where have you been Miss Lina?" Amelia whined. "I have been looking for you forever. What happened?"

"I'm in!" Lina squealed. Amelia stood up and looked her friend straight in the eyes.

"You are in? What do you mean by that you are in?" she asked questioningly.

"I'm a member of the Portland Slayers!"

"No..."

"Yes!"

Amelia could barely believe her best friend as she stood there, ready to bounce off the walls. Lina was capable of pulling some fairly mean jokes, yet nothing like this.

"Are you sure that you are not pulling my leg Miss Lina?" Amelia asked, quite suspicious.

"Amelia, I play tricks on Sander, not you. This is the real deal! I am going to play in the Major Leagues! Old Man Graywords just signed me!"

"No way..." Amelia said in awe.

"Yeah, some other guy, Kurt, he was signed too and I get to play Major League Baseball! Well, I'm gonna play under the name 'Liam', but that is not important right now... I MADE IT!"

Lina gave Amelia a tackling bear hug and laughed. She could barely keep in how excited she was to have finally been signed to a Major League team. Racing Amelia out to the car, she wondered how everyone back home would take it.

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Sander sat behind the counter of the cash register and sighed as he put his feet up on the counter top. It was a slow day, being that Sundays were always sluggish for the hardware store, particularly during the early evening hours. Most of the time, a lost motorist would pop in and ask for directions to the nearest interstate highway and be the only customer for a few hours. The bell on the door barely phased Sander as it rang, signaling a customer.

"Hey," a familiar voice said nonchalantly. Sander recognized it at once as his little brother's best friend Dalton.

"Martin's up in the rafters," he replied, pointing to a ladder that went up to the ceiling. The dark haired, athletic teen ascended the rungs and joined Martin in his hideout to begin their playing card game tournament.

At least they are not bothering me, Sander thought to himself. Martin and Dalton had the habit of preforming very cruel pranks on him whenever they were on the same floor as each other. The more space Sander put between him and the high school boys, the easier it was for him to stay sane. Hmm... I wonder how Lina dared at the open-tryouts. Heh. She was probably turned away from the very start and so then she would have to have started a one-woman riot. Poor Amelia's most likely trying to scrape together bail money.

Just then, the door to the store slammed open, causing Sander to jump and fall out of his chair. He quickly got up and stood in the middle of the store's open spaced used for strolling, only to be tackled to the ground as if he were in a freshman P.E. game of football once more.

"I made it Sander! I made it! I made it! I made it! I made it!" Lina said happily as she sat on top of her friend. "I made the team!"

"Lina..." Sander moaned. "Do you have to tackle me every time you make some sort of team?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do," Lina replied frankly. She held down Sander's shoulders so that she knew he was paying attention. "Do you realize what I had to go through to get this far?"

"A fistfight and evading the screeners, that's what," Amelia sighed as she walked in after Lina and sleepily looked around the store. The scene of Lina and Sander did not even seem to phase her one single bit. She was absolutely exhausted after driving the entire way to Portland and back in the same day and headed straight towards the back room where she knew that there was a cot that she could rest on.

"Hey Lina?"

"Yes Sander?"

"Please get off of me."

"No," Lina replied with a grin.

"Why not?" Sander whined.

"I still need to tell you how much I'm gonna make playing baseball."

"You greedy little..." Sander started. Lina cut him off by whispering in his ear. "That much?" he whispered back. The highly amused girl shook her head in reply, still keeping close to his ear. Both Lina and Sander then started to laugh hysterically.

"Hey will you two keep it down over... whoa!" Martin yelled from the rafters. Lina and Sander looked up to see him and Dalton staring down at them with wide, semi-frightened eyes.

"What are you two doing?" Dalton half-gasped.

"None of your business," Lina spat.

"You are on top of my brother, of course it would be my business. Now get off him," Martin demanded.

"Uhh... no."

"...and why not? That is really not the best thing for a customer to see when they first walk in," Martin said.

"I'm comfortable," Lina said. "I think I'll take a nap." She tried to playfully curl up and go to sleep, but Sander shoved her off with a disgusted look on his face.

"I'll never get those two," Martin sighed as he and Dalton went back to their card game of poker.

"Ha! Sander, you should have seen your face!" Lina laughed as she sat on the store floor. Sander went back to his chair behind the counter and fumed.

"Lina, I know that we are just friends and all, but you really shouldn't do things like that."

"Do things like what?"

"Try to sleep on me for one."

"You are positively no fun," Lina huffed, folding her arms and turning away.

"Now Lina, I am not going to have you take advantage of my oldest son like that," a voice said. Lina turned towards Aisle Eight to see old Mr. Farquain standing there, chuckling to himself. He did not appear to be one that once tried out for the Major Leagues like Lina had mentioned right before she first heard about the tryouts, being that he was a very grey and wizened man, but his eyes that were full of laughter told an entirely different story.

"Mr. Farquain! Mr. Farquain! I made it! I made it! I made it!" Lina cheered as she went up and hugged her employer.

"...and I believe it too!" Mr. Farquain laughed. "You have not hugged anyone with that much enthusiasm since your father was still alive."

"Did you see her tackle me?" Sander curtly snapped.

"Every second of it," his father answered.

"Then why didn't you stop her?"

"You appeared to have everything under control."

"I made the Portland Slayers!" Lina butted in, wanting the attention back on her. "I made it into the MLB!"

"That's great Lina!" Mr. Farquain said, forgetting all about teasing his son. "How did you accomplish it girl?"

"Well, I got into a fight with the manager-person-thing and when I pinned him to the ground..."

"Who'd you beat up?" Martin asked from the rafters, poking his head out into the store below, his gaze followed shortly by Dalton's. Lina just gave him a mocking glare and continued.

"Anyways, when I was finally able to pin him to the ground, he said that I passed some weird test that he had that would pick who he was going to sign. This other guy would not leave, even though he was told to go home, and he was given a contract as well!"

"Wonderful! Wonderful!" Mr. Farquain said cheerily. "Oh Lina, I know that your poor old man would have been proud of you. Did you give them a false name?"

"No, my real one," Lina smirked. "The whole world is going to know me as 'Liam Inverse' though. They're never going to know what hit 'em."

"Liam? Now why would you want a name like that?" Sander asked. "If you want a false name, then why don't you pick something random and out of the ordinary instead."

"Hey, Liam and Lina sound enough alike, don't they?" Lina snapped. "At least I won't have to learn to answer to something totally different, like Michael or Nick."

"That is true," Mr. Farquain said thoughtfully. "When do you leave for spring training?"

"I don't know. I have to go back there tomorrow and find out," Lina replied. "Ooooh! This is so exciting! Look out baseball, here comes Lina Inverse!"

"You mean 'Liam' Inverse?"

"Shut up Sander!" Lina said, going after her friend again. This time, she ended up slamming him into the wall in a fierce bodycheck. Mr. Farquain sighed, knowing that this venture of Lina's would be more trouble than it was worth.

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"I did it," Lina said into her tape recorder with a huge grin plastered across her face.. Without a sound, she sat down on her bed in the new apartment she was renting in Portland. "I am officially a member of Major League Baseball.

"I am not anyways. My male look-alike, Liam Inverse, is the one who is in on everything. So much attention is brought upon me, as well as my fellow local rookie Kurt, that I am not sure how long I can keep up this masquerade. It is true that I have the backing of Kurt, my creepy manager, Old Man Graywords and Amelia, but how would the rest of the team do with keeping such a secret? Not well I suppose. It is already bad enough that I am getting a good portion of the attention.

"...the worst part about that is that I like the attention I get. I wonder how much attention I would recieve if I revealed that I was a woman let's say... midway through the season?

"That would be disastrous. Everything that Old Man Graywords worked hard for would be thrown back at him like the catcher always tries to return the ball to the pitcher. In an instant he would be the butt of all jokes. 'Graywords's Folly' is most likely what everyone would call me. I could quickly become one of baseball's more infamous athletes. Worse than Shoeless Joe Jackson and the Black Sox for their gambling and worse than Ty Cobb for his bitter disposition. I do not want to become a women's lib pioneer, just a baseball player with great stats.

"Why does being a female have to constantly suck?"

The smile from Lina's face was gone now, a stern look replacing it with grim solidity. She stopped the tape and put it in her dresser. After the tape recorder was safely tucked inside the dresser drawer, Lina found some scissors and went to the bathroom, knowing that she had some business to take care of.

Things To Know

The Lina/Sander Moment: No, this is not the start of a romance. These two are best of friends and therefore, are able to do things like, pin the other to the ground in a highly compromising position.

Shoeless Joe Who...?: "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (who did wear shoes) was a player on the Chicago White Sox waaaay back from 1915 to 1919. He and some of his buddies on the team accepted some money to lose the 1919 World Series and they were banned from baseball because of it. Many people nowadays think Joe was taken advantage of since he was not very well educated... but it is in the past and the man's long dead, so there is nothing we can do about it now.

Ty Cobb: A man who was phenomenal on the field, behind the plate, wore a Detroit Tiger uniform for 22 out of 24 years of his career, voted into the first class of inductees to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY... yet he was still a huge jerk-off who was not very happy or well-liked.

Wait, Did the Author Pull Another Time-Warp?: Yes. The last scene with Lina is after Spring Training, but not before Opening Day.

Nehszriah, Was This Chapter Necessary?:Yes, it was. I know it was a bit... filler-ish, but I had to do it. Do not question please. The short length is so that I can simply move on to the next stage in my plot to... TAKE OVER THE WORLD! -evil laugh- Wait, did I just say "take over the world"? I meant to say... ah, forget it. This chapter's similar to my math homework: I don't wanna complete it, but I gotta do it in order to go forward. The only difference is... I don't do my math homework. -sweatdrop- I need to go study.