"Step aside. This fallen star belongs to the Iron Shogun and will be used to forge new katana for new samurai," a firm and masculine voice came from behind Sachiko's back, prompting the terrified girl to turn away and stumble back after confirming the fact that a trio of samurai had her and Ichi cornered. All of them wore full armor with helmets except for one balding veteran samurai with a rectangular eyepatch and a scarred face.
"Ichi, you must run! If these men get their hands on you–they'll kill you!" Sachiko cried out, spreading her arms out and standing in between the confused, floating sky-fairy that came down to Earth in a cartoon rocket ship and a row of peerless samurai warriors.
"Tsk… Insolent peasant whelp!" a two-meter-tall armored samurai behemoth approached the girl and push kicked into a frantic and speedy roll. Sachiko slammed against the rocket ship wall, coughed up, and slumped lifeless with rolled-back eyes and a limp, hanging jaw.
"Sachiko!" the girl's father called out before having the balding veteran samurai stomp his back into the ground to shut him up before his resistance got rolling. A backhand smack that broke the jaw of Sachiko's mother and knocked her out shut off her shrieking wail at the sight of their daughter's death.
"Look at what you've done, Oda-san, you've got peasant blood all over the fallen star," another, shorter samurai with Aegean-blue hair spikes sticking out from the sides of his helmet. "Since you can't control your temper, you may as well be the one to remove that unsanitary little mouse off of our present to the Shogun."
"Whatever, when we forge a fine new blade from this shooting star, it will bathe the blood of rebellious peasants. May as well baptize it early…" Oda shrugged.
"Kill?" Ichi blinked a few times, leaning his head to the side. "What did you mean by that?" Ichi turned to the lifeless body of Sachiko that drooled blood from her hanging lip that pooled on the ground.
"Don't worry, fiend. I'll give you a personal lesson in death!" the samurai Oda drew his sword which was almost as long as the man was tall and raised it over his head. With a resounding battle cry, he slammed the sword down upon Ichi's head, but it was as if he swung a featherweight balloon. The massive sword even lightly bounced off Ichi's head without raising as much as a tiny gust that could rustle the dust of the gravel underneath their feet.
"This is not very nice," Ichi noted. "I also already told you that this is no shooting star. This is my rocket ship. I don't like numbskulls and I definitely don't like stiffersons…"
"You…!" Oda's face became red as he slipped his helmet off and slammed it into the ground. He began ripping his armor pieces off and rolling his sleeves back in preparation to gouge the little monster's eyes out and then smash his face in with his own bare hands if his sword stopped working. Wobbling it in his hand, Oda realized his sword turned into a blow-up sword and could hardly hurt anything. The stalwart samurai froze in place and twitched, looking down toward a light sizzle. The dropped helmet turned into a roll of dynamite sticks that all detonated at once.
With a tail of black smoke, screaming and char-faced, Oda took off into the air, howling. It didn't seem like the explosion had physically hurt him at all, but the explosive force sent him soaring into the air as if he was the one riding a rocket ship. Stunned, the other samurai saw their massive colleague shoot off into the air and turn into a starry blink in the night sky as even his howling voice was snuffed out by the distance he had traveled.
"The fallen star is possessed by some vengeful spirit!" the blue-haired samurai stumbled back, adopting a defensive sword-fighting stance. "We need to take the Yakuza scum and retreat to the castle! We might need reinforcements to eliminate this spirit!"
"Our orders were to capture or slay the Yakuza at all costs, Yoritomo-san," the balding, scarred samurai noted. "Even if I do not doubt for a second that the Shogun and Kotetsu would appreciate this fallen star so Kotetsu could forge new swords and increase our military power, ultimately, the fate of this star is not up to us. We have no orders about it. Dragging these beaten and injured Yakuza scum would be a hassle. Let's just execute them and be done with it."
Approaching the unconscious Kazuto, the veteran samurai Kusunoki wound his sword back, intending to thrust it into Kazuto's neck and through his carotid. Instead, his sword bent as if it was rubbery. Distraught, Kusunoki thrust the sword harder, failing to notice how an oversized cartoon pin was taped to the dulled-out and round end of his sword which ended up bending and sticking Kusunoki right in his still-healthy left eye. The howling samurai turned blood-red from anger as he began jumping all around the place, shocking everyone beholding this curious scene as the blinded man jumped hilariously tall distances, as if he was leaping on the moon and gravity did not affect him at all.
Ichi laughed it up, rolled over, and with his arms wrapped over his torso. Wiping his tears, he turned to the limp body of Sachiko, looking baffled why his new friend wasn't enjoying herself more. Kusunoki stumbled around, trying to get a feel for his environment, but something felt off. As he blinked his skewered left eye, he realized that while it hurt like he had indeed stabbed a needle through it; it was actually just teared up and sore, but in no way was it hurt.
"Hey, girl, what's wrong? Isn't this funny? I thought we became friends, and I just wanted to make you laugh…" Ichi scratched his cheek, pointing his fingers at all the mean samurai. A hilariously oversized glass bottle labeled "Catching Z's Drops" appeared out of thin air and slammed over Ichi's back. The hovering toddler flew over the spiky-haired samurai and unscrewed his helmet and opened up the man's head like it was the hood of a car, pouring down the liquid straight into his open head while snickering into his open hand like the little toon-force imp he was. Yoritomo's eyes rolled around like slot machine slots before ringing in a whited-out picture that spelled out "Catching Z's" in both of his eyes. Like a ton of wooden boards, Yoritomo slammed down on his back and began snoring up with the volume of an exploding volcano.
Chuckling to himself, Ichi hovered closer to the fallen samurai, pulling his lip far longer than a human lip could normally stretch as if it had turned into rubber, and playfully ringing them like he was playing a string instrument. Ichi pinched the samurai's nose and pulled it back, extending it and swelling it until it slammed back and settled into the shape of a round, red clown's nose.
With hopeful eyes, Ichi turned to his newly met Earth Clan friend, but the girl was still limp and lifeless by his cartoon rocket ship. Just where the samurai's kick that snapped her neck and spine and made powder of Sachiko's ribs last left her.
Distraught, Ichi pointed his finger at the beaten and kneeling Yakuza, producing a string of hand-drawn rope that tied around them and then assembling a railway line out of thin air. A train's tooting could've been heard far away in the distance as the train pumped and puffed coal into the air with cartoonish black clouds while rolling up toward the bound Yakuza goons. It slammed into the pair of bound goons laid out on the rail tracks with toon stars, and jagged, elementary cartoon explosion effects.
Almost at the point of crying, little Ichi pointed his elongated fingers at the teary-eyed samurai, dropping a beehive in his hands with a plastic straw stuck inside it and inches from his mouth. The beehive began going ballistic in seconds, bloating Kusunoki's head into an exaggerated lump of swellings to where the samurai's head eclipsed the rest of his body and the perturbed samurai began jumping around and coughing up bees. Occasionally Kusunoki jumped so high that he hit his head against the sky, which became solid and cracked like a glass panel, knocking the bee-drinking samurai back down and leaving him to flee the scene of his humiliation in excruciating pain.
It was during times like these that Kusunoki wondered if what he had previously perceived as the sky-baby's weakness–the inability of his cartoons to truly cause grievous bodily harm and kill anyone, was truly a weakness for he would have preferred being permitted the levity of death over fleeing the scene while coughing up swarms of bees from his mouth.
"She's… Not laughing…" Ichi turned to Sachiko and hovered over her slouched and white-eyed body.
"She's… Dead," Sachiko's father collapsed on the ground, shaking his busted-open head in disbelief. "Our little Sachiko… Dead."
"What does that mean?" Ichi turned to the grieving father who laid in shambles by the side of his unconscious wife and refused to even look at the dead body of his poor daughter.
"It means she's not alive anymore. Her soul has left her body. She'll never be able to laugh or cry again!" seething over the fact that this oblivious cartoon rocket ship pilot made him scream it out loud, Sachiko's father teared up and began wiping his tears at his bloody, dirty, and torn robe. "There's no point in living anymore. All this… This inn, this town life. It was all for her!"
The man dropped and began searching the knocked-out bodies of the Yakuza for a short blade they usually carried stuffed behind their kimonos. The man pulled out the knife, collapsed to his knees, and plunged it into his gut. When he turned and dragged the knife across his torso, however, his open torso looked like cut salami and spilled-out candy soaked in corn syrup.
"You…!" Sachiko's father barked out, looking at Ichi, who had one finger extended in his direction and drew this scene like a finger-painting artist as opposed to what usually would have occurred under such conditions.
"You poor, poor people. Now I think I understand more why Mom doesn't want me to visit Earth. You just don't like to laugh and be happy. Even when you feel sad, you keep trying to make everything even sadder…" Ichi sighed and turned to Sachiko's limp body, swiping his hands around and ripping through the fabric of reality itself, smearing its colors over the pillows of his fingers as he got to work. The girl's heart hadn't been cold for long. Instead of the stopped, dead heart, Ichi drew a ridiculous heart-shaped red toon organ and surrounded it with white lines meant to symbolize the girl's ribs. Pulling out a box of a toon pack of band-aids, Ichi pulled one band-aid out, pecked it with his lips, and stuck it to Sachiko's forehead.
The girl blinked a few times. Her vision returned to Sachiko, but it was blurry and all the light seeping into her squinted eyes hurt like having a flood of needles sticking into them all at once. Grunting and shaky, Sachiko stood back up and looked at her own body, wondering just how she could have still been alive. Stranger still, she remembered things that had happened when she was dead. Almost like her dead body was just a character in a cartoon strip and she was reading it from afar. All those miraculous things that this visitor from the Moon could do…
"See? No one can really die in a cartoon!" Ichi cheered with a toddler-like clap of his ridiculously large hands meant solely for himself.
Absolutely blown out of his mind, Sachiko's father felt his torso that he had just split open a moment ago and realized that the salami body had stuck together perfectly as if it had never been cut.
"You two, though… You seem to be making my new friend sad. You two can go…" Ichi pulled a skyscraper-sized pencil out of thin air and began rubbing its eraser head against the two unconscious Yakuza goons.
"Wh-Where did they go!? Did you… Delete them out of existence!?" Sachiko shrieked out, pulling her silver hair.
"Nope. They'll just wake up when the next episode of their lives starts. I told you already, you can't… Kill someone… In a cartoon. Well, you can do all sorts of hilarious stuff, like shoot them out of a cannon, cook them on a pan, turn them into a vase, and smash 'em… But all of it is just for good fun," Ichi laughed and waved Sachiko's fears away. "Hey, wanna be friends and fly on my rocket ship?"
"I don't know… I'm worried that the samurai will come back, I don't think we can just leave my parents like this," Sachiko pressed her hand to her chest, turning her eyes from her parents to Ichi with a worried look.
"Hmm? You mean you're actually scared of those stifflers?" Ichi squinted and dragged his fingers out in front of him, aiming them at the sad image of little Sachiko's abused and beaten-down parents. With each drag of Ichi's finger, injuries vanished from their faces and they looked down to see themselves restored to perfect health. The color in their robes seemed far too flashy. They looked exactly as if someone had scraped a picture off, then inked and brushed over something they liked better in its place. When little Ichi wanted to put some focus into it, his cartoonish reality manipulation was difficult to tell from the real thing.
Sticking his tongue out and turning serious for a moment, sprinkling drops of sweat the size of a human eyeball, Ichi began painting over the Tanogen Inn. The surrounding yard became a moat surrounded by giggling, two-legged cartoon alligators with shades, wearing sleeveless leather jackets and wielding axes, maces, mallets, and other crude arms. The entire inn rose on top of a balloon castle, angry cartoon bulldogs with puffed-out chests and dressed as actual bouncers growled in front of every entrance while chirping canaries carried sizzling black bomb balls far larger than their own selves, circling around the vicinity. An entire zoo of toon animals sat behind ballistae with a handful of cats in pressed striped suits wielding automated kunai dispensers and squinting with cigars in their mouth at anyone near the precious inn.
"There you go. This should be safe enough…" Ichi nodded to himself, content with the sights he had produced. "Now…" he mumbled while sketching what he saw - an identical version of himself, except somehow even more outlandish-looking and far goofier. The doppelgänger had crossed eyes and a large tongue sticking out from the side of his mouth, hanging loose and drooling. "Normally, I can't leave too far without losing focus. Your home would stop being part of my cartoon, but with this little guy standing guard here, he'll serve as a beacon to keep this place family-friendly."
"You should go…" Sachiko's mother cradled her daughter's hand while nuzzling it. "You're in for a magical trip, unlike anything anyone has ever seen. There's nothing else for you here. Tyranny is all you've ever known. Broaden your horizons… See happiness and good life so you know what you're working to live for."
"I can see why you're so eager to protect them," Ichi snickered with a sheepish grin, hovering between the loving pair. "I wish my mom was this understanding. Come on, let's hurry! I wanna see you smile and laugh if it's the last thing I get to do on Earth!"
Scratching the back of her head and anxious about what Ichi meant by it, Sachiko followed the hovering Sky Clan toddler into his cartoon rocket ship. Ichi grabbed a shovel placed by something that looked like the frame of an oven, except it had no ventilation system and was utterly unattached to anything. Ichi stuffed the shovel into a straw basket of colorful sketched candy and puff and began stuffing it into the oven. The fact that this would make the rocket ship grumble and shake was the last thing on Sachiko's mind.
"H-How does this work… Exactly?" she whined out while the rumbling rocket ship began spilling reflective soap bubbles by the billions out of its exhaust pipes. Flames of every color matching the whole basket of colorful candy and puff shot out, sending the rocket ship soaring through the skies. "This burner isn't attached to anything. What even fuels this thing?" Sachiko cried out, distraught and covering her ears from all the ruckus.
Distracted by his mission of drawing a pair of eyes on the oven and shushing it quietly with his finger, Ichi took a while to respond. "Imagination…" he answered with a shrug and a tone that suggested that he wasn't sure how he did whatever it was he was doing either.
"Wait… What's that!?" Sachiko gasped, walking up to the window only to see nebulae shrouding with green foam and lions made of red novae and burning stardust prancing over them.
"Oh, those are space mice hunting the space cats. They're sick of being chased on the ground so when mice go to space they take up slingshots and go hunting space cats," Ichi waved his hand at the sight of a horde of quasar mice that appeared to be finger-painted on the canvas of black, desolate space putting on safari hats and chasing after supernova lions made out blazing, red stardust atop the prairie of emerald nebulae. "Don't you think that's just hilarious?"
"My parents never told me about anything like that! Don't lie to me, you made all that stuff about space-mice hunting space cats up and sketched them just to make me laugh," Sachiko pressed her hands to her hips, leaning over Ichi who just shrugged.
"Can't blame me for trying. Space is actually really boring. Nothing but a black canvas to paint funny comic strips on, don't you think?" Ichi leaned back like he was planning to go to sleep in the middle of their cosmic trip. "Before we're done, I'll get some inspiration for something that'll make you laugh. You'll see…"
Sachiko shook her head. It seemed like her newly met friend was ready to defy all logic and challenge the horizons of the human imagination, for better or worse, just to prove something to himself. The white-haired girl had no clue why it was so important to Ichi to make her laugh, but she wondered if he wasn't causing more trouble to the whole universe by going rogue and painting with nebulae, supernovae, and quasars like that just to have her smile.
"Maybe there's beauty in the tranquility of space? If everything's high-octane action all the time, nothing is going to surprise you anymore. Sometimes the comic strips in the newspapers will seem like they're telling an ordinary day-to-day story, but the punchline will be so ridiculous that it flips the whole concept over on its head. That can really crack a person up…" Sachiko pointed out.
"No way!" Ichi twitched his cosmic brush fingers. "I can't leave comedy up to chance! I've got the greatest imagination among all the Sky Clan ninja! It'll make you laugh for sure, you'll see!"
"Ichi…" Sachiko leaned over the porthole and looked at her companion.
"Yeah?" Ichi turned to the girl with raised eyebrows.
"What did you mean back then when you said that making me laugh might be your "last thing on Earth"? You're not going somewhere in a moment, are you?" Sachiko wondered. "Because if you're dying or something…" her eyes squinted into a longing gaze and turned moist for a few blinks.
"Ha!" Ichi clapped his knee with a chuckle. "That's why you're my No. 1 Best Friend in the Whole Universe! No one else makes me crack up like that! I'm just 321 years old!"
"Wh-Wha!?" Sachiko shrieked out, turning pale. "You're not lying to me to make me crack, are you? Because it's only making me scared if you are! You look just like a big baby, though!"
"Well…" Ichi rolled around in a hover. Sachiko began kicking and wailing her arms around after realizing that she too could levitate in Ichi's rocket ship just like her companion though she was far more respectful of Ichi's rocket ship, refusing to roll and prance about and kick off the ceiling and the doors with her boots like Ichi did when he was getting impatient. "We are as old as we want to be. I've never seen anyone age backward, but I can be 321 years old and turn 3210 years old in a second if I want to. Time, like space, is just a distance, and we can all walk it as fast or slow as we want to. Can't you?"
"No… We turn a year older after a year passes and we can't turn older in one year and we definitely can't turn any younger…" Sachiko scratched the side of her neck. "So… You could just choose to become an adult right now? If you're so scared of your mom, why not become an adult already and stop being reliant on her care?"
"It's not that simple. That's how I turned 300 years older in a blink, you know. We don't get to mature until we've truly matured, no matter how old we turn. I don't quite get what that means but… I guess that's why I'm still a brat, you know?" Ichi rolled over with a healthy chuckle.
Sachiko shook her head in disbelief. Something told her she was in for a wild cosmic ride, for however long it would last. She only hoped that her newly met best friend wouldn't take her the rest of her life, oblivious to the effect time had on ordinary human girls like her. Space was pretty vast and may have taken a while to see it all. With Ichi's refusal to take it slow and mind his timing, it may have taken him a while to get a laugh out of Sachiko.