The annual usenet tradition continues...
This year, I chose two teams: the usual Team Lovely But Dangerous (Yomiko Readman, Sakura Kinomoto, and Chisame Hasegawa, from ROD the TV, Card Captor Sakura, and Negima, respectively) for the Medium and Hard Challenges, and Team Dangerous But Lovely (Nancy Makuhari, Meilin Li, and Nodoka Miyazaki, from the same three stories) for the Easy Challenge.
I posted the story in two parts - I've passed the Easy Challenge, but haven't heard back yet for the other two.
Without further ado, here's the Challenges, followed by my entry.
Once again, it was New Year's Day. Time to find out what Fate had in store for us this year.
(No, not Fate Testarossa. Although she might be a good recruit for next year...)
I glanced at the most recent chapter of Negima, then took my time reading it, twice, then got my bathrobe from the bedroom closet. (Akamatsu-san sure loves drawing pretty girls in an onsen, and the lack of towels was a bonus... but I suspected Chisame would be upset if I didn't have something ready for her to wear.) Then I hit the "summon" button.
Then I noticed the Low Battery indicator was on. Oops. Thinking "better late than never," I plugged it in to recharge while the summoning cycle was in progress. Very Oops.
When the summoning effect faded, I was in a room with six attractive females instead of three. And two of them were naked, instead of one. "Oh, my. Excuse me; I have to go get some clothes for miss..."
"Miyazaki Nodoka. And what is your name?" She was wearing her new ring and pointing at me.
Cute and quick-thinking - I can see why Negi likes her. "I'm Rob Kelk. Pleased to meet you, Miyazaki-kun. Your ring has no doubt told you my full name, and your pactio item can fill you in on anything Chisame-san hasn't already told you." I couldn't help but think how pretty she is, which caused her to blush.
A few minutes later, Nodoka was wearing one of my T-shirts, Chisame was already sitting in front of my computer (looking for recent Negima scanlations, no doubt), and the two I hadn't yet been introduced to were talking about the effectiveness of martial arts styles in actual combat. Should a pre-teen be discussing that?
Anyway. The others were Meilin Li and Nancy Makuhari, two of the prettiest fighters I was aware of. Meilin's the same age as Sakura, but Nancy... My tastes run towards more pert women, but even I was drawn towards Nancy. "H...hello."
"Hiiiii... So you're Rob. Yomiko's told me about you."
"Good things, I hope," I managed to say without tripping over my own tounge. Just then, the doorbell rang. (Saved!) "Sorry, I'd better get that..."
And it was a good thing I did, because it was the letter with the year's Challenges. I opened it, read the stack of papers inside, and passed them around. "How are we dividing this up?"
Yomiko grabbed the largest stacks of papers (the ones with "Medium Challenge" and "Hard Challenge" stamped on the front page), then walked over to Chisame and Sakura. "We'll take care of these. We are used to this, after all."
"Which leaves us with this," added Nodoka. "But shouldn't Readman-san be taking care of folding the cranes?"
I shook my head. "That wouldn't help. We need photos of people dressed as Colonel Sanders to go with the cranes. Besides, Yomiko-san always deals with the first Challenge; it's time somebody else had a turn at it."
"Why does the convention organizer want to see people dressed as Albireo-san?"
I smiled for a moment. "That's the wrong Colonel Sanders, Miyazaki-kun." Then it hit me. "And I just figured out how to get the photos and the cranes. Will you help me draw up a flyer, please?"
"What do you want us to do?" Meilin asked.
"You get to relax, Li-chan. Makuhari-san, I'm going to need your help..." I told her what I wanted her to do. She thought about it for a moment, and smiled. "Sure, why not? It sounds like fun. And I went farther in some of my missions, before I met Yomiko-san. This'll be easy."
The next day, the flyer table at NewYearCon was covered with the handout that Nodoka and I had written. "For the third year in a row, some actual anime characters walk the halls of the convention! But this year, you can actually have dinner with one of them! Prove you know enough about Japanese culture to follow these directions: Have somebody take a photo of you dressed as Mister Chicken and holding 1/1000 of a wish for health, paperclip the photo to the origami, put your name and telephone number on the back of the photo, and drop the package into the contest bin at the front desk. One photo will be drawn, and the lucky person in that photo will get to have a private dinner with Nancy Makuhari! Limit one entry per person."
Within an hour, the con's wi-fi connection was overloaded from all the Google searches. Within two hours, there wasn't a white suit, string tie, or false goatee to be found anywhere in the city.
By the end of the day, we had 1,200 entries. (Considering that there were only 1,100 males attending NewYearCon this year and there weren't any duplicate entries, I wondered briefly whether Nancy had some sort of metahuman ability to attract people. Then I remembered who she really was. D'uh.) We got Meilin to draw one entry, just so she didn't feel left out. The rest of the photos and cranes went to the hospital where the con's founder was hospitalized.
And I still think the fix was in, but how in the world did the con's AMV contest director convince Meilin to draw his entry from the bin?
Well, the two of them had fun (and Nancy said that Dav... the AMV contest director was a perfect gentleman during dinner - but not a Gentleman, if you get my meaning), and the summoning device sent Nancy, Meilin, and Nodoka back home once it was back up to 30% charge.
Which left the usual group for the difficult jobs.
"So, what do we need to worry about?"
Yomiko handed me the sheaf of papers marked "Hard Challenge", a cross look on her face. "Somebody's planning to duplicate Michael Crichton's State of Fear."
"That's not good. How do we stop it?"
"The first attack's already stopped. Chisame's tracked down the bombs that would have calved off part of the glacier over Mt. Terror, hacked the timers, disarmed them, and sent current overloads through them so that they can't be re-armed."
"It was child's play," Chismae added from in front of my computer. "They were the only radios active anywhere near Mt. Terror."
I sighed in relief. "You said that was the first attack. So, how much time does that give us to thwart the next one?"
"A couple of days, at best," replied Yomiko. "But that should be long enough for us to get to the coast of Brazil where the storm-seeder rockets are being launched, if I can get enough paper to make a good-sized airplane."
"And what good will getting close to the rockets do?"
Sakura sighed. "I need to be able to see the rockets before I can Erase them. I'm sorry, Rob-san."
Ah - they've already worked out a plan while the other ladies and I were busy with the paper cranes. "That's fine. After that, what's next?"
Yomiko flipped through the sheaf of pages. "A hurricane, being aimed straight at Houston. I'll be flying Sakura there so she can conserve her strength."
"Now wait just a minute, ladies," I complained. "Even if Sakura uses the Windy card at full force, there's no way she can push a hurricane away from the coast."
"Not if she hits it full-on," argued Chisame, "but that isn't what we have planned. Ever heard of 'precession'?"
"Okay, I'm an idiot. That was grade-school physics when I attended school." I could feel the blush. "You don't need me here for this operation, do you?"
"Actually, we were hoping you'd have some idea what to do about the final attack," Yomiko said worriedly.
I looked at the description. "Silence would damp out the vibrations, but Sakura would have to actually be on the island to use it. And the natives there..."
"...aren't friendly," Yomiko confirmed. "I suppose I could be her bodyguard."
"No, you're going to have to plunge a paper stake through the vibration device's guts while Sakura has it silenced and non-functional."
"Too bad we can't distract the natives somehow," Chisame sighed.
"I can distract them," offered Sakura while holding the Illusion card.
"Right," I decided. "Draw them off with an Illusion, then Silence the vibration device until Yomiko-san destroys it. But act fast, ladies."
Which left Chisame and me alone at my place for nearly a week. She was happy to research what was popular with net-idols' fans over the last decade; when I asked, she said knowing the trends ahead of time would guarantee she'd be the top-ranked net idol for years.
(By the end of that week, we also came to the conclusion that our personalities made us better friends than anything closer. Which is a good thing, since she's 14 and I'm ... not.)
Finally, Yomiko and Sakura were back. "We brought you some souvenirs!" They handed each of us a small package, while keeping a larger one for themselves. Chisame and I both got "My friends went to Rio and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" t-shirts, Houston Library cards with our names on them, and pressed orchids from Honiara. (Three guesses which souvenir Yomiko got for us.)
"Thanks! I'm almost afraid to ask, but now what?"
Yomiko glanced through the papers stamped "Medium Challenge", then sighed. "Now, we have to do three impossible things."
I groaned. "You two just removed some rockets from existance, pushed a hurricane away from Texas, and visited a cannibal-infested island and lived to tell about it. Isn't that enough?"
Yomiko and Sakura answered in unison. "'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"
"You've both been reading Through the Looking-Glass again, haven't you?" I sighed. "Fine, we'll do three more impossible things. I suppose there's a list of options...?"
There was.
The first one we picked was paying off the mortgages that were about to be foreclosed. Modern money, except for what's in people's pockets and such, is merely information stored on computers. And Chisame, using her pactio card, could make those computers sit up and beg... so she did. We didn't simply erase the debts; that would have been too obvious, and the mortgages would have been restored from the banks' backups. Instead, we set up dummy accounts at some smaller banks, used those accounts to buy the debts from the other banks, and conveniently fail to record the debts as they came into the smaller banks. The larger banks' computers knew that the mortgages had been paid for, and the smaller banks' computers never recorded their new properties. Then she dissolved the accounts that she'd used to buy the mortgages, leaving no trace of what she'd done.
(There are supposed to be safeguards in the systems to prevent people from magically conjuring money out of electrons. When I asked Chisame, she just pointed to her pactio card. Magic really does allow impossible things...)
Next up was getting airtime during the Super Bowl. "Is there anything in the spec that says we have to buy the airtime on the US network airing the game?"
"No," replied Chisame, "but anybody can buy time on any of the other networks. It's pretty obvious that this is what Bill wanted us to do. Back to the computer?"
"No need," Yomiko said while unwrapping the larger package she had brought back from the Solomon Islands... to reveal an old-fashioned display of some sort.
"What is that?"
"It's the radar console from the USS Chicago." From my talks with various military otaku and my readings on the subject, I knew that the Chicago was one of the first ships to have radar and that the gear had gone down with the ship during the Battle of Rennell Island. "I've already contacted the US Navy; they're willing to give us a finder's fee large enough to pay for three and a half minutes of airtime during the Super Bowl in exchange for this."
That was long enough for Bill to show a short-but-good AMV. (I had to remember to recommend the one that took Best in Show at Anime Boston 2006; it would fit nicely. If he could get permission from the copyright holders... but that was his impossible task, not ours.) "Okay, that's two. What's the third impossible thing we're doing?"
"Actually buying time during the Super Bowl," Chisame suggested.
"No, that's part of the second impossible thing," Yomiko interrupted. "We're buying the US armed forces' blocks of time that they were going to use for recruitment commercials."
"And I suppose somebody at the network was kind enough to put those commercials into a single block?" Chisame asked sarcastically.
I tapped my computer monitor a couple of times, and grinned. "Thanks so much for volunteering to be 'somebody at the network', Chisame-san."
"My big mouth..." But she seemed to be happy while she played with the schedule for the commercials.
That left the third impossible thing. Apparently, since we had taken two off the list, we had free choice as to the third... as long as it was "impossible". It took us a few hours to come up with something as difficult as what we'd already accomplished.
Then we went into space. Without help.
Sakura un-Erased the rockets that were going to be used for storm-seeding, and we attached them to Yomiko's paper airplane. Then we put a large ball on the airplane and got inside. Yomiko got us through about half the atmosphere, the rockets got us the rest of the way, and Sakura's Shield card kept the air in. I took my camera to prove we'd made it, and took photos of the International Space Station as we went past on our third orbit; Chisame uploaded those to the 'net almost as quickly as I took them.
Then I noticed, through the camera's zoom lens, that there was an extra capsule attached to the ISS... Bill had been waiting there for us. (Don't ask me how he got there!) We docked with the station and showed him the photos, the receipts for the transferred mortgages, and the address to send the AMV he planned to air during the Super Bowl. Then we all piled into the capsule and headed off for dinner... which was another adventure altogether. (And not up to what I expected. Some annoying guy in a bathrobe was at three of the tables around us, and none of him could see any of the others. Stupid heavy-handed aversion of temporal paradoxes; he wasn't inconvenienced from being seated beside himself, but we sure were...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
This year, I chose two teams: the usual Team Lovely But Dangerous (Yomiko Readman, Sakura Kinomoto, and Chisame Hasegawa, from ROD the TV, Card Captor Sakura, and Negima, respectively) for the Medium and Hard Challenges, and Team Dangerous But Lovely (Nancy Makuhari, Meilin Li, and Nodoka Miyazaki, from the same three stories) for the Easy Challenge.
I posted the story in two parts - I've passed the Easy Challenge, but haven't heard back yet for the other two.
Without further ado, here's the Challenges, followed by my entry.
Quote:Easy Challenge - Two Requests:
This year's New Year Con seems to be going off just fine, however the founder of New Year Con is in the hospital. He's been diagnosed with a rather dreadful illness (not immediately life threatening, but still bad), and being the Japanese culture enthusiast he is, he's gotten hold of you for a special request. He knows that giving someone 1,000 paper cranes is the ultimate get-well gift, but he wants something extra... a picture of each crane with a different Col. Sanders look-a-like. He's going to be in the hospital for a month and a half (45 days), so your deadline is the day of his check-out, since a get-well gift is in poor taste once he gets out of the hospital...
-----
Medium Challenge - Three Impossible Tasks Before Dinner:
With all the depressing news going on in the world, you and your team are being treated to a meal with the Challenge Issuer, Bill, at a restaurant recommended to him by a gentle-alien from Betelgeuse. You will meet Bill at a pre-arranged place, hop into the nearby time-capsule, and have dinner at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Milliways. However, Bill knows of Milliway's reputation, and asks for proof of 3 impossible taks, since Milliway's says "If you've done three impossible things today, top if off with dinner at Milliway's."
The following are options that Bill will consider impossible enough for consideration:
1) Either obtain a block of 20 seats on the front row at the 50-yard line for the Super Bowl or buy a complete nation-wide commercial time block during the Super Bowl to air an AMV of Bill's choosing.
2) To alleviate the "credit crunch" and get the U.S. economy back on track, pay off EVERY outstanding, within-90-days-of-foreclosure mortgage.
3) Successfully bring a dinosaur to life from fossil remains.
4) Successfully raise the Titanic's pieces and make it seaworthy again.
5) Find and capture Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban buddies, and hand them all over to the proper authorities, live or dead.
If you can do at least 2 of the above, and can prove to Bill that you can do another, just-as-impossible feat, then do so, this list is not all the possibilities available to an imaginative otaku.
-----
Hard Challenge - State of Fear:
Environmental activists are getting fed up with the United States government not doing enough in their opinion, to help protect the environment. Certain activists decided eco-terrorism would be a good idea and might force the uninterested consumers into action by instilling a sense of immediate dread. Over a year ago, they started in motion a series of events to be combined within a one-week period to coincide with an environmental conference they planned to see the final attack, up close and personal-like. You and your team happened to come across the information about the attacks by accident, and the nature of the information was that it required some action.
The first attack is centered at Mt. Terror, Antarctica where the eco-terrorists have planted a series of cavitation devices (devices which use sonic waves to make cavities in solid matter) to cleave off the largest glacial piece in history, to force the issue of man-made global warming.
The second attack is scheduled for a day or two later, but the location is much more flexible. Through the use of metallic filament lines and miniature rockets, they will amplify the number of lightning strikes which amplifies a storm and they hope to cause a flash flood somewhere in the southern hemisphere, hopefully during a group outing which they hope will even cause a few deaths.
The third attack is another flexible location one, and scheduled a few days after the second attack. They experimented on the seeding of certain chemicals to help steer a hurricane, and since they successfully steered Gustav towards New Orleans, successfully steered Hanna away from the Gulf region, and drove Ike straight into Houston. While a hurricane in the southern hemisphere would not be newsworthy on its own, when coupled with the other events, it would show a pattern of extreme weather.
The fourth and final attack is the most complicated. Centered in the Solomon Islands around a cove where they are using the cavitation devices and a private submarine to line the cove's floor to force cavities to amplify an earthquake. They've also brought in several gigantic vibration devices (approximately as big as a box truck) which are normally only sold to governments, and if something falls onto the plate on top of the device (by the time you get there would be at ground level as the device will be buried), it would be vibrated into its individual molecules within a few seconds. With the vibration and cavities, they hope to create an underwater earthquake which will cause a tsunami which based on the cove's topography will hit somewhere in southern California. The local tribes have been brought in for the protection of the Solomon Islands operation, and they're confirmed cannibals, and some sociologists with very-high-powered lenses have seen that these cannibals sometimes eat their meal while it's still breathing and bleeding.
Partial wins awarded to those who can stop at least 2 of the attacks.
Complete wins awarded to those who stop all 4 attacks.
Extra credit awarded to those who can gather enough evidence while stopping all 4 attacks to bring the masterminds to justice in a court of law.
--------------
Okay, now onto comments, for the medium challenge, if you wish to substitute your own "impossible" task, please run it by me before you write the fic to see if it is acceptable.
For the Hard challenge, people with bibliophiles on their teams (summoned members or fic writers) should recognize Michael Crichton's "State of Fear" as the source of these attacks.
Official deadline for submissions is Jan. 8, unofficial deadline is Jan. 11, since I know some people are busy and only have the weekends to do it, so 2nd weekend's end should do. If you need an extension beyond this, let me know, I understand things can happen.
And Rob, don't you wish you hadn't taken Yomiko away from the easy challenge? A paper-master could do the 1,000 cranes in what, 5 minutes?
Okay, seriously, good luck to everyone, you WILL need it!
Once again, it was New Year's Day. Time to find out what Fate had in store for us this year.
(No, not Fate Testarossa. Although she might be a good recruit for next year...)
I glanced at the most recent chapter of Negima, then took my time reading it, twice, then got my bathrobe from the bedroom closet. (Akamatsu-san sure loves drawing pretty girls in an onsen, and the lack of towels was a bonus... but I suspected Chisame would be upset if I didn't have something ready for her to wear.) Then I hit the "summon" button.
Then I noticed the Low Battery indicator was on. Oops. Thinking "better late than never," I plugged it in to recharge while the summoning cycle was in progress. Very Oops.
When the summoning effect faded, I was in a room with six attractive females instead of three. And two of them were naked, instead of one. "Oh, my. Excuse me; I have to go get some clothes for miss..."
"Miyazaki Nodoka. And what is your name?" She was wearing her new ring and pointing at me.
Cute and quick-thinking - I can see why Negi likes her. "I'm Rob Kelk. Pleased to meet you, Miyazaki-kun. Your ring has no doubt told you my full name, and your pactio item can fill you in on anything Chisame-san hasn't already told you." I couldn't help but think how pretty she is, which caused her to blush.
A few minutes later, Nodoka was wearing one of my T-shirts, Chisame was already sitting in front of my computer (looking for recent Negima scanlations, no doubt), and the two I hadn't yet been introduced to were talking about the effectiveness of martial arts styles in actual combat. Should a pre-teen be discussing that?
Anyway. The others were Meilin Li and Nancy Makuhari, two of the prettiest fighters I was aware of. Meilin's the same age as Sakura, but Nancy... My tastes run towards more pert women, but even I was drawn towards Nancy. "H...hello."
"Hiiiii... So you're Rob. Yomiko's told me about you."
"Good things, I hope," I managed to say without tripping over my own tounge. Just then, the doorbell rang. (Saved!) "Sorry, I'd better get that..."
And it was a good thing I did, because it was the letter with the year's Challenges. I opened it, read the stack of papers inside, and passed them around. "How are we dividing this up?"
Yomiko grabbed the largest stacks of papers (the ones with "Medium Challenge" and "Hard Challenge" stamped on the front page), then walked over to Chisame and Sakura. "We'll take care of these. We are used to this, after all."
"Which leaves us with this," added Nodoka. "But shouldn't Readman-san be taking care of folding the cranes?"
I shook my head. "That wouldn't help. We need photos of people dressed as Colonel Sanders to go with the cranes. Besides, Yomiko-san always deals with the first Challenge; it's time somebody else had a turn at it."
"Why does the convention organizer want to see people dressed as Albireo-san?"
I smiled for a moment. "That's the wrong Colonel Sanders, Miyazaki-kun." Then it hit me. "And I just figured out how to get the photos and the cranes. Will you help me draw up a flyer, please?"
"What do you want us to do?" Meilin asked.
"You get to relax, Li-chan. Makuhari-san, I'm going to need your help..." I told her what I wanted her to do. She thought about it for a moment, and smiled. "Sure, why not? It sounds like fun. And I went farther in some of my missions, before I met Yomiko-san. This'll be easy."
The next day, the flyer table at NewYearCon was covered with the handout that Nodoka and I had written. "For the third year in a row, some actual anime characters walk the halls of the convention! But this year, you can actually have dinner with one of them! Prove you know enough about Japanese culture to follow these directions: Have somebody take a photo of you dressed as Mister Chicken and holding 1/1000 of a wish for health, paperclip the photo to the origami, put your name and telephone number on the back of the photo, and drop the package into the contest bin at the front desk. One photo will be drawn, and the lucky person in that photo will get to have a private dinner with Nancy Makuhari! Limit one entry per person."
Within an hour, the con's wi-fi connection was overloaded from all the Google searches. Within two hours, there wasn't a white suit, string tie, or false goatee to be found anywhere in the city.
By the end of the day, we had 1,200 entries. (Considering that there were only 1,100 males attending NewYearCon this year and there weren't any duplicate entries, I wondered briefly whether Nancy had some sort of metahuman ability to attract people. Then I remembered who she really was. D'uh.) We got Meilin to draw one entry, just so she didn't feel left out. The rest of the photos and cranes went to the hospital where the con's founder was hospitalized.
And I still think the fix was in, but how in the world did the con's AMV contest director convince Meilin to draw his entry from the bin?
Well, the two of them had fun (and Nancy said that Dav... the AMV contest director was a perfect gentleman during dinner - but not a Gentleman, if you get my meaning), and the summoning device sent Nancy, Meilin, and Nodoka back home once it was back up to 30% charge.
Which left the usual group for the difficult jobs.
"So, what do we need to worry about?"
Yomiko handed me the sheaf of papers marked "Hard Challenge", a cross look on her face. "Somebody's planning to duplicate Michael Crichton's State of Fear."
"That's not good. How do we stop it?"
"The first attack's already stopped. Chisame's tracked down the bombs that would have calved off part of the glacier over Mt. Terror, hacked the timers, disarmed them, and sent current overloads through them so that they can't be re-armed."
"It was child's play," Chismae added from in front of my computer. "They were the only radios active anywhere near Mt. Terror."
I sighed in relief. "You said that was the first attack. So, how much time does that give us to thwart the next one?"
"A couple of days, at best," replied Yomiko. "But that should be long enough for us to get to the coast of Brazil where the storm-seeder rockets are being launched, if I can get enough paper to make a good-sized airplane."
"And what good will getting close to the rockets do?"
Sakura sighed. "I need to be able to see the rockets before I can Erase them. I'm sorry, Rob-san."
Ah - they've already worked out a plan while the other ladies and I were busy with the paper cranes. "That's fine. After that, what's next?"
Yomiko flipped through the sheaf of pages. "A hurricane, being aimed straight at Houston. I'll be flying Sakura there so she can conserve her strength."
"Now wait just a minute, ladies," I complained. "Even if Sakura uses the Windy card at full force, there's no way she can push a hurricane away from the coast."
"Not if she hits it full-on," argued Chisame, "but that isn't what we have planned. Ever heard of 'precession'?"
"Okay, I'm an idiot. That was grade-school physics when I attended school." I could feel the blush. "You don't need me here for this operation, do you?"
"Actually, we were hoping you'd have some idea what to do about the final attack," Yomiko said worriedly.
I looked at the description. "Silence would damp out the vibrations, but Sakura would have to actually be on the island to use it. And the natives there..."
"...aren't friendly," Yomiko confirmed. "I suppose I could be her bodyguard."
"No, you're going to have to plunge a paper stake through the vibration device's guts while Sakura has it silenced and non-functional."
"Too bad we can't distract the natives somehow," Chisame sighed.
"I can distract them," offered Sakura while holding the Illusion card.
"Right," I decided. "Draw them off with an Illusion, then Silence the vibration device until Yomiko-san destroys it. But act fast, ladies."
Which left Chisame and me alone at my place for nearly a week. She was happy to research what was popular with net-idols' fans over the last decade; when I asked, she said knowing the trends ahead of time would guarantee she'd be the top-ranked net idol for years.
(By the end of that week, we also came to the conclusion that our personalities made us better friends than anything closer. Which is a good thing, since she's 14 and I'm ... not.)
Finally, Yomiko and Sakura were back. "We brought you some souvenirs!" They handed each of us a small package, while keeping a larger one for themselves. Chisame and I both got "My friends went to Rio and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" t-shirts, Houston Library cards with our names on them, and pressed orchids from Honiara. (Three guesses which souvenir Yomiko got for us.)
"Thanks! I'm almost afraid to ask, but now what?"
Yomiko glanced through the papers stamped "Medium Challenge", then sighed. "Now, we have to do three impossible things."
I groaned. "You two just removed some rockets from existance, pushed a hurricane away from Texas, and visited a cannibal-infested island and lived to tell about it. Isn't that enough?"
Yomiko and Sakura answered in unison. "'Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"
"You've both been reading Through the Looking-Glass again, haven't you?" I sighed. "Fine, we'll do three more impossible things. I suppose there's a list of options...?"
There was.
The first one we picked was paying off the mortgages that were about to be foreclosed. Modern money, except for what's in people's pockets and such, is merely information stored on computers. And Chisame, using her pactio card, could make those computers sit up and beg... so she did. We didn't simply erase the debts; that would have been too obvious, and the mortgages would have been restored from the banks' backups. Instead, we set up dummy accounts at some smaller banks, used those accounts to buy the debts from the other banks, and conveniently fail to record the debts as they came into the smaller banks. The larger banks' computers knew that the mortgages had been paid for, and the smaller banks' computers never recorded their new properties. Then she dissolved the accounts that she'd used to buy the mortgages, leaving no trace of what she'd done.
(There are supposed to be safeguards in the systems to prevent people from magically conjuring money out of electrons. When I asked Chisame, she just pointed to her pactio card. Magic really does allow impossible things...)
Next up was getting airtime during the Super Bowl. "Is there anything in the spec that says we have to buy the airtime on the US network airing the game?"
"No," replied Chisame, "but anybody can buy time on any of the other networks. It's pretty obvious that this is what Bill wanted us to do. Back to the computer?"
"No need," Yomiko said while unwrapping the larger package she had brought back from the Solomon Islands... to reveal an old-fashioned display of some sort.
"What is that?"
"It's the radar console from the USS Chicago." From my talks with various military otaku and my readings on the subject, I knew that the Chicago was one of the first ships to have radar and that the gear had gone down with the ship during the Battle of Rennell Island. "I've already contacted the US Navy; they're willing to give us a finder's fee large enough to pay for three and a half minutes of airtime during the Super Bowl in exchange for this."
That was long enough for Bill to show a short-but-good AMV. (I had to remember to recommend the one that took Best in Show at Anime Boston 2006; it would fit nicely. If he could get permission from the copyright holders... but that was his impossible task, not ours.) "Okay, that's two. What's the third impossible thing we're doing?"
"Actually buying time during the Super Bowl," Chisame suggested.
"No, that's part of the second impossible thing," Yomiko interrupted. "We're buying the US armed forces' blocks of time that they were going to use for recruitment commercials."
"And I suppose somebody at the network was kind enough to put those commercials into a single block?" Chisame asked sarcastically.
I tapped my computer monitor a couple of times, and grinned. "Thanks so much for volunteering to be 'somebody at the network', Chisame-san."
"My big mouth..." But she seemed to be happy while she played with the schedule for the commercials.
That left the third impossible thing. Apparently, since we had taken two off the list, we had free choice as to the third... as long as it was "impossible". It took us a few hours to come up with something as difficult as what we'd already accomplished.
Then we went into space. Without help.
Sakura un-Erased the rockets that were going to be used for storm-seeding, and we attached them to Yomiko's paper airplane. Then we put a large ball on the airplane and got inside. Yomiko got us through about half the atmosphere, the rockets got us the rest of the way, and Sakura's Shield card kept the air in. I took my camera to prove we'd made it, and took photos of the International Space Station as we went past on our third orbit; Chisame uploaded those to the 'net almost as quickly as I took them.
Then I noticed, through the camera's zoom lens, that there was an extra capsule attached to the ISS... Bill had been waiting there for us. (Don't ask me how he got there!) We docked with the station and showed him the photos, the receipts for the transferred mortgages, and the address to send the AMV he planned to air during the Super Bowl. Then we all piled into the capsule and headed off for dinner... which was another adventure altogether. (And not up to what I expected. Some annoying guy in a bathrobe was at three of the tables around us, and none of him could see any of the others. Stupid heavy-handed aversion of temporal paradoxes; he wasn't inconvenienced from being seated beside himself, but we sure were...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012