Code Geass: The Demon and The Dragon
Omake: The Origin of 'The Coffee'
- The Dragon -
Japan, Tokyo, Ashford Academy
February 1st, 2014 A.T.B
11:32 A.M.
Everything was a blur. Images of grinning cats and flying hats flew through his mind, as Learme slowly came to...
The sight of his Biology teacher standing over him with a faux-imperious glare while Lelouch rapped on his head. Without much more than an exasperated glare, Lelouch handed the drowsy Learme a mug of coffee and a couple of pills.
Later
"Alright. Enough of this." Lelouch hissed at Learme, after class and in their lair composed of the remnants of the Ashford Foundation's factory. "It's trouble enough keeping our identities intact without you falling asleep all over the place just like you did back then!"
"Oh come on Lelouch, narcolepsy isn't all that uncommon." Learme muttered back. "Just because I fall asl-" In the middle of his statement, Learme fell off of his chair and collapsed onto the ground, sleeping soundly.
Sighing, Lelouch palmed his face and grabbed some smelling salts from Learme's desk, getting up and waving them under his sleeping twin's nose. Then, for good measure, he slapped Learme with his free hand several times. Moments later, blinking rapidly, Learme jerked back up into a sitting position.
"Wake up and listen!" Lelouch ordered, his brother's spine stiffening in response to the trademark royal tone. "You need to solve this problem. If you cannot solve this problem, then our plans will be set back by a large amount of time. That is patently unacceptable."
"Alright, alright." Learme whined. "Sheesh! Just give me some time and I'll figure it out." Tromping to his computer, Learme powered the horrendously over-engineered scrap heap up, muttering to himself. Eying him, Lelouch picked up his chair from his desk and set it next to Learme's, sitting down to keep an eye on his twin.
Several Hours Later
A repetitive thud sounded throughout the base, as Learme banged his head against his desk successively. For hours, he had sought a placebo, if not an outright cure, for his specific class of narcolepsy, that being Lamperouge inOpportune Lachrymal Narcolepsy (LOL Narcolepsy), a genetic variant that obtained its name by striking at inopportune times, and often being the source of following tear-inducing incidents, generally fatal and involving dismemberment and/or natural and unnatural disasters.
"Ugh. It's getting late." Lelouch noted. "Pizza?"
"Sure." Learme groaned.
"Hmmm...Pizza Hut has a discount on mushroom toppings..." At that moment, Learme had an idea. In other contexts, it would have been a laughable and ridiculous idea, but with Lelouch threatening via tone to go all Darth Sidious on his ass, it was as good a solution as any.
"Lelouch, on the subject of the cure for my condition..."
"Yes?"
"I'm gonna need a half-liter of Liquid Sakuradite, a sun lamp, two cases of Earl Black coffee, a dozen hallucinogenic mushrooms, a kilo of powdered magnesium, a rubber ducky, thirty grams of fertilizer, a daffodil, and the well-preserved corpse of an Irish polka dancer. Oh, and on the subject of the pizza, a meat-lovers please."
Lelouch paused, phone resting on his shoulder and number halfway dialed.
"Well...the Liquid Sakuradite we have enough on hand. The Earl Black, I have about twenty cases of that in the cupboard, and I believe you keep five kilograms of magnesium dust under your bed, ever since that incident with the spider swarm two years ago. There's a rubber duck in the bathroom. I'll buy the sun lamp and the fertilizer while I'm out tomorrow. As for the Irish polka dancer-"
"Well-preserved corpse."
"- yeah, sure. I'll call Tony. It's right up his alley." Lelouch commented offhandedly as he finished dialing Pizza Hut. "Hello? Yes, I'd like to order a large meat lover's pizza..."
- The Demon -
A Week Later
I hate to admit it, but I suppose Tony is a good merc. Lelouch thought to himself as Learme dragged the coffin containing the corpse into the area he'd walled with curtains off for this...experiment. Frankly, he'd been surprised Antonio had not only agreed to the strange request, but managed to locate and acquire a suitable specimen within days and ship it express to Japan.
Which actually added to the creep factor the short Italian sported, already enhanced by his disturbing tendency to collect finger bones.
They were conducting this experiment inside of one of the warehouses they used to store some of their black market products. It was small for a warehouse, and relatively secure, guaranteed by the high cost of the rent.
"Okay, we have everything we need." Learme noted, crankily. The week had not gone well for him. "Now, I already set the experiment in motion, and it should commence right...about...now." There was an enormous pink-red flash from behind the curtains, followed by a series of popcorn pop sounds with some kind of buzzing in the background.
This continued for half an hour, before Learme went back behind the curtains, and the sounds ceased. For a few minutes, Learme tinkered behind the curtains before emerging...clutching a handful of small black mushrooms.
"Now to grind these." He said, walking over to his desk where there was plugged a homemade coffee bean grinder, resembling an inverted pyramid set on top of an empty aluminum can, and a coffee machine. Dumping the mushrooms into the grinder, he held the top down and hit the button, whereupon the machine shook violently as it's internal mechanisms, modified from a chainsaw motor and using knife blades of various sizes, revved up and started slicing the mushrooms into smaller and smaller portions, until fine sand-like portions of them dumped out into the can. After he was sure the mushrooms were good and powdered, Learme took the can and emptied it into the coffee maker, took a three-liter container of water and poured it into the machine, closed the lid, and hit the brew button.
Then he keeled over, falling asleep before he even hit the ground.
Lelouch sighed, and waited a few seconds until the coffee cup was half-full. Taking it, he poured the oil-black liquid into a mug until the mug was half-full, before replacing the cup back in the machine. He took four cubes of sugar and dumped them in the hot coffee, followed by creamer until the mug was full. Kneeling down, he lifted Learme's head and poured a small amount of the experimental fungus-brew into his mouth.
His twin's eyes snapped open, pupils dilating and irises widening.
Two Minutes, Thirty-Seven Seconds Later
The walls were decorated with craters, as though cannon balls had slammed into them at full speed. Gashes in the metal of the walls, no less than two meters long, arced over and under each other, occasionally crossing. The frame of the door, in the corner of the warehouse, was partially pulled out, with identifiable finger gouges in it. The shelves, stacked with containers of everything from precious gems to deadly munitions, were scattered to and fro, the containers cracked open and their contents spilling on the ground.
Learme was sitting, back to the wall, twitching and gibbering and cornered by his brother. Lelouch stood tall, bloodied tissues shoved up his nostrils to stem the flow and face populated by bruises and bumps, his left eye blackened and swollen shut. And he was grinning.
"Dis may proob to be our adbatange." He lisped. "But firtht..." he trailed off, reaching for a syringe.
- The Brits -
The Next Day
Britannian Army - Tokyo Primary Munitions Storage Facility
It was a pretty normal day for Private Jorge Alwinski. No one really came to this place, a storage facility for the army located on the far outskirts of the Tokyo Settlement, connected to the latter by a single road and separated by a rather large area of barbed wire and chain-link fence, along with a rather robust minefield and a few watchtowers outfitted with snipers and machineguns.
Officially, as a place wherein ammunition and weapons for everything from assault rifles to main battle tank cannons to Knightmare rifles were stored, it was a very important facility. Unofficially, as was the case for many such facilities in the past, it was a dumping ground for the unfavorable, those who somehow managed to curry disfavor with their superiors, or tweak the noses of those better connected than them.
Personally, Jorge and his fellows at the base considered themselves the only sane people left in the Britannian Army forces in the entirety of Area Eleven. The single point of clear-minded military efficiency against the backdrop of the mind-boggling insanity that was noble nepotism and bureaucratic bullshit.
At the moment, Jorge had lookout duty on the outermost gate, along with the rest of his squad. Unlike those imbeciles that could be found at the other outposts, they did not slack off, they didn't converse with each other. They did not remove one iota of their attention from their surroundings. Thus, they noticed the black-and-gold motorcycle long before it approached their post. Alec, manning the watchtower closest, trained the machine gun on it.
The rider was dressed in a black ensemble of clothing, including a thin jacket lined with gold thread, a shirt, jeans, black combat boots and a black and dark purple helmet with asian-looking designs around the faceplate. He drove the bike right up to the gate, next to Jorge with the soldier's rifle barrel practically pressing up against the helmet, before he dismounted, walked around to the sidecar, and checked a slip of paper attached to a crate in the seat.
"Ummm...Let's see...I have a...oh, this is weird...a 'coffeegram' for Commander Sykes from Brigadier Hark..."
Jorge stared at him.
"...Are you serious?"
"Hell man, I'm just paid to do deliveries. Some guy phoned me, and said Brigadier Hark wanted me to deliver this crate of coffee grinds to Commander Sykes at the Munitions Storage Base."
Jorge looked over his shoulder to make sure Alec was still watching, before moving over to the crate. After a brief visual inspection, searching the box over for any obvious traps, he cracked open the lid. Inside was perhaps the blackest coffee grinds he'd ever seen, but it was coffee.
"Looks clean. Alright, we'll take it from here." Jorge said. The deliveryman nodded, standing aside to let two other soldiers lift the crate out of the sidecar before driving off.
- The Dragon -
Learme, whistling a rather old Army tune about the trenches and foxholes of the Great War, drove his bike back down the road towards Tokyo. Far behind him, the soldiers were lugging the crate past the checkpoints. Once out of sight, he braked and parked the bike by the side of the road, where Lelouch waited.
"No complications?"
"Nope. We should see some effects by tomorrow."
Two Days Later
The base was empty. It still bore the marks of it's previous inhabitants. As it turned out, the entirety of the base had been coffee-drinkers, a bit of an anomaly among the Britannian army, which for all Learme guessed could have been one of the reasons they'd been stuck in this rather low-priority positions. This, however, had been accounted for in Lelouch's plans.
Now, in the aftermath of the absolute devastation caused by the fungus-coffee, Learme piloted his mother's Ganymede, modified for power from a prototype miniature Yggdrasil Drive, out of the water, and towards the base. The defenses were devastated, gaping holes through which one could drive an entire G-1 through.
Which made it rather easy to strip the entire base down of weapons and the such. They had to leave the vehicles (which were actually somewhat out-dated anyway) but the twins still could make a hell of a lot of cash off of the Knightmare weapons alone.
- The Demon and The Knight -
Present Time, Saturday
"And that is why I cut his coffee with tea leaves when he's not looking." Lelouch finished, sitting at the table with Suzaku. On the table were the remains of lunch, with teacups still present and being drunk.
"Wow...I'd hate to see what would have happened to Ashford if you didn't." Suzaku commented with all seriousness, remembering his earlier escapade with Learme's coffee.
"It'd look like a bombed-out husk." Lelouch replied, sipping at his tea. Suzaku shuddered at the thought.
That haul, Lelouch remembered, was probably one of the most important ones in their lives. Without it, they probably would have had to make do with substandard equipment for the Black Knights, and none of the Reikokus, Sakanades, or the Ryūō would exist. It was just that lucrative.
Learme sauntered in from his room, carrying a mug of his coffee, and set it down when he sat next to Suzaku.
The Honorary Brit scooted away from that thing like it was Armageddon in a mug...really, it was more like a Horseman in a mug.
- The Author -
Sadly, I don't think I did as well with this Omake as I thought I could...
Sorry for the delay. Things have...broken down. Actually, my computer damn near melted down. I don't know why everyone likes tropical climates. It rains too much, blows your air-conditioning, and let's the house heat up to the point where stuff starts over-heating. At least in somewhere like Alaska your electronics can still run even without fans. Here, I can't even use the TV.
ManaHeart2: That was actually in the original episode (I think) so it's actually due to Sunrise...doesn't make it any less funny though.
rosa: Thank you
lordmarik: I dunno...the stories kind of getting weighted down with OCs as is.
Teucrian: Your initial review has the air of a vague insult, and is also rather vague in the details of in what manner the numbers are wrong.
Why not?
Knightmare Gundam of Ni