Two years later... Bubblegum Disaster #8 finished!

[classicdrogn]

I say *number* 8, because it's still *chapter* five - and since my pda won't do email properly, or let me upload the files to the preread group website on Yahoo, this is kind of it. On the other hand, it's HERE! COMPLETE! And, I'm about 30k into the EX between it and my version of OVA 6. I have to say, the DD fight is one I've been seeing since the very beginning of this iteration of the project, in late 1999, and in the EX part I'm working on (which I will incllude as well, for comment and to have a remote backup) is another that's been coming almost as long. Next: The fic, part one!
- CD

ETA: My connenction is flaking out, there may be trouble/delay
ETA2: This is unblievable! I can read the board fine, I can edit this post, but I can't add anoth reply for the next segment, or edit the one that's there. Insert foul language as desired.
ETA3: ... now I'm starting to think it may be some kind of anti-flood post quota thing, because it worked for -one- more part, the second fifth of the first half of the chapter, and now it's ot working again. Grumblemuttercurse.SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

chopped so it's nottaking up uneccessary page length, with the vastly improved updated edition about to be emplaced.
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Epsilon]

Want to direct me to the beginning of this? Please?
-------------------
Epsilon

[Sweno]

if my google-fu is up to the task, I beleve that this is the start of it all:
Bubblegum Disaster-Terry
------
"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint Exupery
"Luge strategy? Lie flat and try not to die." - Carmen Boyle (Olympic Luge Gold Medal winner - 1996)
Mary Sue's theme music
-Terry
-----
"so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today"
TF2: Spy

[classicdrogn]

You would be correct, Sweno, but that account is now gone, and even with the various internet backup type places there's been revisions since the versions on it were put up - I just added the new versions of it all to the mail list page on Yahoogroups, groups.yahoo.com/group/bdpreread/
You do need to join the group to read them, I'm pretty sure - a Yahoo restriction if so, not my idea. Now I'm going to see if the library comp will post the remaining sections here properly, since I did start.
Alternately, Drakensis has a Word doc version, but the last chapter in that espescially has hella lots of spelchek problems over the current files, and there have been some phrasing changes here and there as well.
Anyway, on with the fic!
... hopefully...
- CD
ETA: As I thought, the FIles area cannot be made open to anyone without joining. With my spotty access, I have changed it so anyone can join again, instead of needing me to approve new members as I had set it to avoid spambastards.SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

-=-
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[Norgarth]

Where can I look for the preceeding parts?__________________
I bet that if you cooked an elephant, you'd have a lot of leftovers.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

[Necratoid]

users.adelphia.net/~merry...pters.html
That link should work.

[classicdrogn]

... Holy crap, it does! That account was closed, like, nine months ago! I wonder if I can still FTP to it... Well, if I could, if I had anything but a PSP and an old PDA to connect with.
As usual, there's been a bunch of corrections for things that only stopped hiding when I posted the thing, and a number of continuity edits while writing Ch05EX and Ch06. I am therefore going to cut the old versions away and put in the new versions and finished(!!!) Ch05EX.
- CD
ETA: Yes, the above does mean that the versions onnthe Adelphia site should be considered depreciated, with several sets of edits since they were current. The basic plot is not changed, but there's significant qualitative difference in spelchekz and line-level continuity.

---------
Now that I'm on the library machine instead of my wholly inadequate PDA, I'll put the first section of 5 in here.
---------

08_BD_WOASS_Ch_05a.txt
2007-06-07 - the typical just-posted-it-why-didn't-I-see-that-before errors fixed, including a couple of fairly major continuity glitches and numerous spelchekz
2007-05-31 - split the file, as it was becoming inconveniently large.
2007-05-30 - fixed an egregious continuity error, transcribed the part of the canon beach/cat scene too important to skip.
2005-06-14 - Nene/Sylia breifing done
06-13-2005 - finished mental ward scene, driving, spelchekz
05-10-2005 - working on cops-not-in-morgue scene
01-16-2005 - now exceeds the length of Ch4, got Fargo's scene done. Yay!
01-12-2005 - still in progress
12/11/2004 - in progress

"My my, Mr. Mason, you certainly do get into the most *interesting* situations," Dr. Gero Yoshida cackled. The executive's carbonized corpse had been delivered to him within hours of its clandestine recovery at the foot of Genom Tower for dissection and a final report on the project, since the only other remaining subjects appeared to have become collateral damage in a buma attack. Even he had been amazed to discover that there was still brain activity in it, despite massive damage to the torso and the fact that destruction of surface tissues was nearly total, leaving only traceries and empty sheathes where the augmentation had run through it. Still, if the company was going to cut him off and hang him out to dry in the Production department, the least he could do was to double cross them in return. Brian Mason might have died, and the report he turned in would reflect that, but the project would not. Turning away from the vaguely humanoid charcoal briquette floating in a support tank, he studied the readings displayed on his computer screen, then continued typing in observations.
]The additional system support of a nutrient bath appears to
]have stabilized subject ZODIAC-9, and the new nanites have
]integrated perfectly with his existing set. Physical repairs
]have already begun, and scan results show that the subject's
]skeleton is again being upgraded with sturdier joints and
]muscle attachment points, as well as what appear to be nodes
]for a distributed Dykstra field system. Combined with the
]results from ZODIAC-19 in Aqua City and vivisection data from
]17 and 18, it can be concluded that the quick-conversion
]process is indeed successful; all that remains is to create
]the perfect combination of offense and defense. Further data
]samples will be required on the mercenaries who opposed #9.
Saving and closing the file for the moment, he created a new copy of the experiment template and began filling in preliminary information.
]SUBJECT ZODIAC-20
]NAME: YOSHIDA, Gero

Bewilderbeast Studios Present
BUBBLEGUM DISASTER
Season One
WISHES ON A SHOOTING STAR
A work of BGC fan fiction by ClassicDrogn
Chapter Five

Continuity note: The Police Motorcycle Battloid introduced in this chapter is not, repeat *not*, I say again *NOT* a MOSPEADA cycle! Nor for that matter is it a Cyclone from Robotech: New Generation, which was made from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA's raped corpse. What it is, is a motoslave that links to unpowered armor. For the full rant on why this is a significant difference and why I hate the MOSPEADA ride armor, see the end notes.

Thanks to her position as a dispatcher for the security forces of Genaros, Mina actually held a higher clearance level than most of the human staff of the station, with Group 7 access. That had sufficed to let her 'lose' a trio of submachine guns in the paperwork, but arranging for a float-car to get their group to the space dock - most of whom would have set off alarms if they got within ten decks of it - had required Meg to get into the computer and forge her Group 6 access. She'd falsified a down-check for two of the five seat Reindeer squad cars, and a bit more hacking on Meg's part had insured Dot would be in the vehicle garage to 'repair' them. The false report hadn't raised any flags, and with the end of second shift ten minutes past the breakout was due any time now.
Checking out from her duty station with expertly feigned unconcern, the blonde buma's racing thoughts belied her calm exterior. Everything had gone without a hitch so far, but... better than any of the others, she understood how quickly the SSPD could get forces anywhere on the station, and three little SMGs would hardly faze a patrol car, let alone the *serious* security measures. Indecisive, she dithered a moment beside a water fountain, weighing the likelihood of blowing the whole deal against the probability that it would fail because they were underarmed. A faint beeping drifted from the dispatch center behind her, a low priority alarm prearranged to be a two-minute warning in case she hadn't gotten away yet, and that decided her. While it wouldn't cause any great concern - that alert had been chosen carefully to be minor enough that she could casually leave despite it - everyone would be watching it instead of their own boring stations, and that meant she had an opportunity.
Stepping into the cramped armory entryway, she gave the human guard at the terminal a cute little wave and a happy smile with a twinkle in her eye... a twinkle that grew into a hypnotic rainbow glow as one of the systems people tended to forget sexaroids were equipped with was activated. "There now. You just sit there nursing the boob tube and don't make marshmallow peeps," she ordered the blank-eyed officer. That taken care of, she opened the inner door with the Group 6 password Meg had provided, and darted inside. Not bothering with the racks of sidearms and SMGs, she headed directly for the heavy weapons in the back of the armored compartment, hefting a large, heavy aluminum case in each hand before turning to go.
Hurrying back out through the checkpoint, the light caught briefly on the logo embossed in the side of one case - a crescent moon cupping the words, Versatile Engineering Neotechnology, U.S.
--=--
With the resemblance of the weapons' cases to the ones used for ordinary Space Development Products Corporation maintenance kits, Mina'd had no trouble walking through the nearly deserted garage to the bay where Dot was waiting with the float-cars, but the time her little side expedition had eaten made it a nerve-wracking trip. The plan called for each of them to fly one of the cars out in the general scramble when the rest of the alarms went off, but if she was too late for them to leave in the group someone might remember that those cars were supposed to be unfit for service...
Fortunately, she made it just in time, passing the second case up to the redhead just as the scramble klaxons started to howl. The faintest hint of a frown rode Dot's deathly pale features, something Mina knew would translate to a screaming fit for most other people. There was no time for apologies, however, and the blonde used the toolbox sitting beside the other car - left there for the purpose, she was sure, since it was already running with the normal boarding steps retracted, and that kind of calculated efficiency was Dot's trademark - to hop into the pilot's seat, tossing the aluminum case onto the copilot's side for the moment. Even before the canopy had fully sealed, she'd begun pulling out into the stream of patrol and squad cars flowing out of the garage, Dot following tight behind.
--=--
Despite Mina's unvoiced worries, the two float-cars had made it to the small loading area off of float-car shaft four that served the Lower Ring gymnasium without any further difficulties. While Dot stayed with the floaters she hopped out and made the short trip to collect the group gathered in the gym - everyone else but Nam, who'd been inserted as part of the shuttle maintenance team to do the usual checks and service on its life support systems. She didn't notice Dr. Barnaby, out trying to walk off a bout of insomnia, when he ducked quickly back around a corner further down the corridor connecting the two rooms.
Eyes narrowed, he leaned around the corner just far enough to see the gymnasium door, and an angry frown settled on his face as he saw the group of buma emerge from it moments later. He waited for them to pass out of sight back the way the blonde had entered from, then stepped purposefully toward an intercom panel set into the corridor wall.
--=--
Meg was the first to react when the alarms went off, her red mane snapping like flames as she jerked up short and spun to gape at the announcement system mounted high on the wall of the loading dock. "No!" she gasped, slapping a fist into her left palm. "Everyone was supposed to be at the far end..." She shook off the shock, then turned back to get the others moving again, suddenly looking a great deal like a poised lioness. Mina was already running for her floatcar, she saw, with Sylvie and Anri starting to follow, but Lou and Hyatt were still frozen. "Hurry, everyone," she urged them, "before someone gets here!"
"Too late for that, bitches," a male voice snarled from the door to the corridor. "I --"
Meg seemed to blur and vanish, a streak of color and rush of wind connecting the place she'd stood with where she reappeared in front of Dr. Barnaby, one arm extended with the palm out flat where she'd slammed into his chest with a sharp crunch. Cut off midsentence, the human was tossed through the air like a discarded doll, only to slam into the bulkhead beyond with a sickening crack. "...already called... Security..." he gasped, before hacking up a mouthful of bloody pink froth from a punctured lung.
Before he could slide to the floor, a staccato burst of machinegun fire walked across his chest and up to pound his head to ruin, Meg again blurring away as the unaccustomed kick of the SMG threw Hyatt's aim off. The bullets tracked across the wall until the magazine ran dry, the weapon shaking in her hands as cordite smoke trailed from the now open bolt. Thin white scars showed bright white on her cheeks, throat, and down each arm as she flushed with anger. "BASTARD!" she cried. "You heartless bastard, just had to get in one more kick..."
Taking the gun from her now limp fingers, Meg chivvied the now weeping Hyatt toward the waiting cars, Lou snapping out of her daze and following, her own gun now unslung and at the ready, as the rapidly approaching wail of Station Security Police float car sirens echoed in from the transit shaft.
Reaching the vehicles, she left Lou and Anri to get Hyatt aboard Dot's while she leaned into the other, to see what Mina was fiddling with in the back seat that was making such an ominous whine. Before she could say a word, however, there was a flash of red light and an earth-shattering kaboom as as the second car exploded, cored like an apple by the heavy laser mount of a patrol floater that had just flared to a halt outside the loading dock. Staggered and deafened, she saw Sylvie's lips move as she called out something, running to where her partner Anri and the other two sexaroids had been tossed by the shockwave.
Still stunned herself, Meg could only stare blankly at the dull brown patrol car, now realigning for a shot at the second stolen floater. Before it could do so a brilliant pink and orange energy beam reached out and carved a burning crescent across its prow, slicing the lightly armored craft in half before it too exploded. Her hearing had recovered enough to catch Mina's shout, "Go Meg! I'll hold them off!" as she jumped down from the nose of the car, a bulky backpack with a prominent VENUS logo on her back and a fat cable leading to the particle thrower in her hands.
Shaking off her stupor, Meg slung the gun she'd taken from Hyatt on her own back and hurried to help Sylvie with the others, no longer moving with enhanced speed to conserve her systems for the next crisis. One look was all it took to tell Hyatt was beyond their help, crushed between a chunk of wreckage and the wall. Sylvie had obviously come to the same conclusion, pulling Anri away while the green-haired buma clutched at a shrapnel wound in her side. Meg had to do the same for Lou, hauling her along and shoving her into the copilot seat while Sylvie and Anri settled in the back, then lifting the floatcar off its skids and pulling out even as the sounds of more energy blasts and explosions drifted in from the transit shaft. "I'm sorry, Mina, Hyatt, Dot," she whispered, as the car pulled into the shaft and accelerated away.
--=--
Her mind shying away from the long-term implication of what she was doing, Mina dashed for the main entryway where the loading dock opened onto shaft four, picking her way quickly through the flaming rubble of the car she'd just destroyed. The VENUS proton accelerator pack bumped and shifted on her back, as she'd not had time to adjust the straps correctly, and the whine of its operation resonated with the ringing in her ears from the explosions. Skidding out onto the metal floor of the float car tube, she could see the lights of another patrol car approaching from the Upper Ring junction. Intense red blasts flew past as she hurried to the scant cover provided by the protruding edge of a blast door, peeking out to catch a glimpse of the oncoming car, now barely in range of her weapon.
She rolled sideways into the shaft just in time to see a burst of energy splash against her former position, then brought the thrower wand up like the nozzle of a firehose and let fly. The writhing rope of ionized particles reached out again, drawing a burning scar across the nose of the float car before flashing across the cockpit, vitrifying the glass and frying the pilot instantly. Uncontrolled, it veered off and crashed into the wall of the shaft, and yellow hull damage lights began to flash in that segment of wall, warning that the pressure hull had felt the hit. Behind her, she could hear the stolen Reindeer's turbine rev up, but more patrol cars were on their way already, and she didn't think she could stop more than one at a time. Grimly, she set the thrower power selector to 'Overcharge' and shrugged out of the backpack, laying it against the cratered wall... it would go critical any second, just as the nearest patrol floaters came even with it, by her estimate. Turning away again, she dashed back for the loading dock, hoping to make it to the far side of the blast door before the explosion.
She didn't, and as the whirlwind of escaping air pulled her out into the endless night, her last thought before shutdown was that at least it had thrown her toward the planet, instead of away, so perhaps a few ashes would make it through reentry and to the surface.
--=--
The stolen Reindeer floatcar zipped down Shaft 7, overhead lights flickering strobelike with the speed they passed, making stress-induced beads of sweat on Meg's face twinkle like the distant stars. Even so, the redhead's hands moved surely and steadily over the controls, fully concentrating on threading the car down the tunnel at speeds far greater than the station designers had intended... save for one small bit, that kept replaying the image of Mina running toward her in the rear view camera, then being swallowed by the blast as the power pack of her VENUS Beam Cannon had overloaded, and the blast door sealing as the hull blew open and vented the compartment to space. The world seemed to move in great swoops and pauses as the stress trigger she'd set up for the 35A patch kept switching her into that state of fast-time, and she kept shutting it down to conserve her systems. She gave in and let it run as a pair of laser blasts suddenly swished past the car, one of them striking a junction box far ahead and plunging the corridor into darkness. As long as she didn't move that much, it shouldn't make a big difference anyway... and now the reaction time could be critical.
She could hear Lou seemingly suspended in mid-curse as she tried to set up the remaining VENUS cannon with the lights suddenly gone, the heavy backpack braced between her knees while its former case filled half the footwell of the rear seat, serving as a makeshift gurney for Anri's lower body, her back braced against Sylvie.
More blasts drifted toward them in the rearview and Meg maneuvered to slide around them again and again, always careful to keep the nose pointed toward the distant dot of light where the shaft lights were still functional. They floated forward timelessly, until finally the lights were upon them again. The junction with the main linear maglev highway would be upon them soon, she knew, and their lighter Reindeer would gain a bit of a speed edge over the armored Wildebeest patrol cars since all of its thrust could be put to propulsion while the heavier cars would still need a fraction for lift. The only problem was that there were a lot more routes for additional police vehicles to get on the Linear and box them in, and if the Bridge got enough control of the computers back they could seal it with emergency doors.
Endless seconds later, they crossed into the orangeish lighting of the linear highway. Vectoring nozzles extended from the lift jets at the front corners of the floatcar, and she could hear Anri's stifled grunt as the extra acceleration pressed everyone into the seats for a moment.
"Hang on, Anri," Sylvie comforted, her honey-gold eyes liquid with concern. "Just a little bit longer, and we'll be free!"
Clutched to her partner's chest, the deep green-haired buma gasped, "I'm sorry... now of all times..."
*Always worried about pulling her own weight,* Meg thought. Sneaking a glance over her shoulder at the shuttle pilots, she added aloud, "Once we get through here, we'll be at the spaceport. You suppose Nam's taken care of her part?"
"If it's all gone according to plan, she has," Sylvie answered. "We can't turn back now, no matter what happens." Her eyes seemed to flash, and her voice rang like a drawn sword as the dark haired sexaroid continued, "If we don't get to the planet, we won't have any future."
Finally finished with the VENUS, Lou cradled it in her lap, clutching it like some strange kind of teddy bear as she concurred, "Yes! I can't stand this place any longer! Faster Meg, faster!"
Suddenly, they rounded one of the few curves in the highway, and a patrol car was right in front of them, heading the same direction but slowly. The pilot punched the throttle before they could crash, but the stolen floater was still gaining with frightening speed. Locking her attention back on the controls, Meg made a desperate gamble and fed in differential thrust, tilting the Reindeer up on its side as it scraped past the patrol car in the relatively narrow tunnel. The extra pressure proved just slightly too much, and the patrol floater's front vectoring nozzle touched down to the road surface. In less than a blink, the dragging nozzle had flipped the car into a tumble, then the whole thing exploded as thruster fire reflected back from the sturdy maglev plates and melted the engines. Only the heightened reflexes of her hacked motion control code let Meg ride the shockwave without crashing her own car - that, and more luck than she wanted to think about.
The other two cars burst through the pall of smoke, continuing their pursuit and still firing the occasional blast despite falling ever further behind. Ahead, red warning lights began to flash in time with emergency klaxons, and several blast doors began to close off the tube.
One - two - three - four they shot through like a kayak through rapids, five with a scraping sound and a lurch to the right. Meg breathed a sigh of relief as they made it into the last stretch before the spacedock, even as a brilliant explosion puffed between the last set of doors. The gap had narrowed to only two feet and one of the chasers apparently hadn't managed to stop in time, after making it through the other sets.
As the end of the Linear came in sight Lou cheered, "It's the exit! We made it!" She was distracted a moment later as the forward view screen set in the dash blipped and showed a rotating wireframe image of a huge, heavily armored humanoid, text scrolling to one side to warn that it had detected and identified obstacles in the passage ahead. "Dobermans?" the blonde cried, again clutching the particle cannon. "It's no use! We can't get away now."
Sylvie seemed to have other ideas, laying Anri gently aside so she could lean forward and suggest, "Meg! Set the car on full auto-cruise! We'll have to jump for it and use the car as a distraction!" Turning back to her partner, the pilot's voice softened, asking, "Anri, you can do that, right?"
Weak but determined, the green-haired girl mumbled an affirmative, and the plan was put in action. The canopy was opened, sliding forward to leave the sides and top of the cabin clear. Its position and the fairly dark red tint of the thick plastic would make it hard to see what was happening behind it from the Dobermans' point of view, directly ahead.
Snarling, the hulking white security buma released safety latches, transformed their lower arms to expose machinegun barrels, and opened fire, the brilliant glowing steaks of tracer rounds flashing past the onrushing float-car. Two or three actually punched holes in the windshield, but missed the crouched fugitives within. They jumped before the Reindeer left the maglev tunnel, Lou carrying the VENUS while Meg and Sylvie each took one of Anri's shoulders. Even at that they were almost too late - the shockwave as a bullet finally struck the car's fuel tank and detonated it knocked them out of the air like a burning hot fly swatter, though thankfully all the wreckage and splashing fuel continued on, piling into the Dobies. Quickly, they scrambled to their feet and away through a side passage.
--=--
By the door to the shuttle bay, Nam waited just out of sight of anyone approaching from outside. She'd already gotten what equipment they could scrounge and the extra life support supplies loaded after the rest of the service crew left, having faked a hard-to-trace fault in the backup rebreather plant to hold up her part of the job. Just this once, she was glad none of the few human crewmembers who treated buma decently had been in the same crew, as it would have been awkward if some helpful soul had stayed to help her. As it was, everything had gone without a hitch, and now all she had to do was wait, impatient and twitchy, for everyone else to arrive. "What could be keeping Sylvie and the others? They're late!" she worried to herself, visions of the multitude of disasters that could have befallen them circling her mind. The third sub machine gun Mina had managed to get for them was held awkwardly somewhere near a ready position, but the little sonic blasters riding her soulders were active, and their far less lethal nature would make them her weapon of choice anyway.
Hearing running feet coming toward her, she tensed and the SMG came up as she got ready to confront whoever was approaching. The little blasters weren't all that noticeable, let alone intimidating...
The purple eyed sexaroid sighed in relief as she heard Sylvie's voice call for her, and stepped out to see the pilot with her partner hanging off of her, Meg and Lou bringing up the rear. "I thought you were done for!" she scolded.
Nodding toward the shuttle, Meg asked, "Is she ready?"
"A-OK," Nam replied, waving them forward. She followed Sylvie and Anri up the boarding ramp, but stopped halfway up, realizing Meg and Lou weren't following yet. She turned, finding that they'd taken rear guard positions by an empty cargo crate and the still parked service truck. "Hurry Everyone! The patrols are making their rounds now!" she urged.
Trying to pick up the pace, Anri overstressed her wounded side and faltered at the head of the stairs, gasping and blinking back tears. Sylvie stopped with her, the smaller buma hanging off her desperately as she tried to recover. "It's OK Anri," she encouraged, "it's all right now. Hang on."
As if to disprove her, a loud metallic thump echoed through the bay. Meg, who'd been looking at the right moment to see the now closed blast doors they'd entered through jump in their tracks, moaned, "It's the Doberman!" Another hit, and the doors started to bulge where they joined. "Get on board, quickly!" the fire-haired sexaroid ordered.
"Meg! Lou! what about you?" Nam protested. Before either could answer, the Doberman succeeded in tearing through the heavily armored doors, greeted by a strangled noise of dismay as it stepped heavily over the wreckage.
"Hurry!" urged Meg, popping out from behind her crate with a gun in each hand. Amplified strength from the 35A software let her hold them steady, pouring a stream of lead at the Dobie's head in an attempt to at least distract it. She held little hope of actually doing damage, as even the collision and explosion of their floater had only crisped the plating of its left arm.
Irritably, it swatted at the incoming rounds, deflecting a handful into the air while the rest ricocheted harmlessly from its heavy armor. High above, one of the strays punctured an umbilical carrying hydrazine for the reaction thrusters, and the impact combined with the hot copper case of the round set off a small explosion.
Seeing the debris falling straight for them, Nam activated her own 35A patch, suddenly blurring out and shoving Sylvie and Anri forward into the shuttle, taking shelter with them in the airlock.
Gasping for breath after having the wind knocked out of her, Sylvie choked out, "Nam... thanks. That was close."
Lou had also stepped out to fire, playing the proton beam across the Doberman's chest like a fireman trying to quell rioters, but where the squad cars had quickly succumbed to its searing force the space combat buma took only minor damage. It dodged to the side and roared with anger at the little insects that dared to harm it.
Hearing Sylvie still behind her, Lou turned to yell over her shoulder, "What are you standing there for? Mo-" The sun-hot green annihilation of the Doberman's mouth laser cut her off, wiping the blonde from existence even as it breached the containment field of the accelerator on her back, causing a secondary explosion that tossed the flaming wreckage of the service truck into a far corner.
"LOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.uU!" Meg's grieving cry seemed to warble like a police siren as she again blurred into motion, solid streaks of jumpsuit beige and fiery red ringing the Doberman as she built up speed, then leapt to plant both heels in its grinning skull of a face. The impact staggered even that mighty war machine, but it caught her around the chest as she rebounded, and one short, sickly crunch later the leader of the escapees was no more.
In the shuttle, Nam let out one terrible sob, as if she'd felt her own heart crushed along with Meg, and jabbed a control beside the still open airlock.
"Nam, what are you DOING?" demanded Sylvie. "We can't just..."
"We have to go," the purple haired sexaroid choked. "We have to find freedom... enough freedom for all of them." She touched another key and the elevator started to move, even as the outer door slid shut. "Meg, Lou, Mina, Hyatt, Dot... everyone."
They arrived at the flight deck, and all three quickly strapped in. Sylvie had to fight herself to pull the launch lever, even though she knew it was far too late to do anything for the others by going back, but after only a second's pause she did it. A glance at the aft monitor to confirm all engines firing normally - not that there was anything she could do about it if they weren't, or that the computer wouldn't notice long before she could anyway, but it was part of her checklist - revealed that the Doberman had tried to jump onto the side of the shuttle, but had been just a whisker too slow. She felt a tiny measure of satisfaction watching the murderous buma warp and melt in the inferno of the shuttle's main engine cluster, finally exploding as its fusion core was breached.
Somehow, even though it meant they'd escaped, she couldn't cheer. Nam's strangled, choking sobs behind her on one side, Anri's comatose silence on the other, and most of all the half dozen empty seats weighed far too heavily for that. At least with Nam having made it, she could patch up Anri before they made landfall, even if it took an extra orbit to do it - anything more than sticking a bandage over the wound was beyond Sylvie's knowledge. That might even buy them more time before ground forces could come when they did land, if she made some orbit changes as feints in between. With the booster stage attached, she'd have had to dump a lot of fuel just to get into re-entry trim anyway.
---=- + -=---
Cynthia woke to the gentle poking of Yuki, the ten inch tall, platinum blonde pixie crouching beside the girl's pillow. On the bedside stand just beyond, dark-haired Hotaru looked on, agitatedly collapsing and extending her iridescent wings and fidgeting with a pencil. Seeing her mistress's eyes flutter open and focus, Yuki's jingle-bell voice chimed softly to tell Cynthia why they'd awakened her.
Rising from her futon, the young girl wrapped the covers around herself for warmth as she opened the window of the bedroom the Akimotos had given her and leaned out over the rail bounding the tiny balcony. The two fairy-buma hovering near her head, she craned her neck to look south past the eaves, to where a fiery streak marred the early morning gloom.
"A shooting star? How pretty..." Cynthia remembered Major Rose's large, warm hands on her shoulders, steadying her as she leaned over the rail on the roof of the SDPC Building to watch the Leonid meteor shower one cool summer night, her housecoat fluttering in the breeze. A faint smile touched her face at the memory, a stolen moment away from everyone else, until the silvery tones of Yuki and Hotaru's voices drew her back to the present. Yuki twittered again, suggesting looking closer with her other vision, the way they'd been practicing.
"Un," the little girl agreed, closing her eyes while concentrating on keeping a clear image of the shooting star, still creeping along the horizon. The image in her mind zoomed in, arc welder speck swelling to a blazing fireball, and then ... "A spaceship? But the place they land is by the bay, that's not the right way for one to come down," the former buma commented. She shifted the viewpoint again, moving through the hull of the shuttle to find the cockpit. There a dark-haired woman worked the controls with barely restrained desperation, the copilot slumped against the seat and a third woman gritting her teeth and clutching the armrests of her seat with knuckles white from fear. An angry red indicator glared from the console, warning that the computerized landing system was shut down, and the craft was completely off the Megatokyo spaceport approach path.
Hotaru's voice was ever so slightly deeper than Yuki's, but still sweeter than silver bells as she too sang to Cynthia, calling on other lessons that they'd practiced to pull back the view again and determine where the shuttle was headed, the most probable course stretching before it like the headlamps of a car.
"Oh no, that's right here!" Cynthia cried. "It might hurt the horses if it lands in the field like that. We have to do something!" Two fairy bells chimed in agreement, as they suggested some things she could do about it.
--=--
Sylia's awakening was considerably less pleasant; with the volume she had to set the alarms at for them to actually rouse her from a deep sleep her head was left ringing despite how quickly she rolled out from the covers and slapped the 'acknowledge' button on her bedside console. Stifling a yawn, she quickly scanned through the on-site sensor logs, then turned to the remote feeds - the passive equipment installed around the hydroponic farm base was the best, but even that couldn't give meaningful coverage beyond a mile or two away. A bit of creative hacking to divert a copy of the datastream from the airport and spaceport traffic control systems was one of the ways she made up for that lack, the feeds constantly monitored by expert system AIs of her own design.
Those systems had picked up the wayward Orca IV even before Hotaru and Yuki - the mere fact that its IFF transponder had gone to emergency mode would have rated flagging it for attention when the logs were checked, but when its projected flight path took it directly over the base they signaled for immediate action. As Sylia switched to the relevant feed and interpreted it herself, her breath caught in her throat - that shuttle wasn't just heading overhead, it was going to come down RIGHT HERE, probably in the horse field, but if it shortened its path the slightest bit, or just came in a little lower than expected, it would pile straight into the hill facility itself.
Even if the impact didn't break it open physically there was still no way crash investigators could miss the base hidden under the farm - nothing could be THAT well hidden. Worse still, there was precious little she could do about it, even if she'd had days of warning, let alone minutes - sure, she had weapons capable of shooting it down before it reached them, but even without the moral question of such an action it was sure to be seen, and that would be worse than simply having it crash and expose them. Still, there was ONE possibility left, with the abilities she'd gained in her transformation.
Decision made, Sylia grabbed the robe from her dresser, belting it securely over her nightie as she hurried to her lab. There'd be no time to change into something more suitable, she'd just have to trust in her own durability.
Moments later, she'd reached her workshop, her most recent project still lying where she'd left it before finally going off to bed. She'd meant to have the thing well away from the base - and anything else, for that matter - before lighting it off, but now there just wouldn't be time...
She had J.B. Gibson to thank for it, really, or the demon that had possessed his car. She'd drawn energy right out of the streetlight power lines for the attack that had finished it off, and after consciously figuring out the field patterns that had let her do so, she was quite sure she could pull the heat out of a fusion core and convert it to useable power.
The only problem was, she'd never built one before - Knight Sabers equipment so far had been efficient enough to run off batteries or, for the motoslaves, small gas turbines. This unit was a replica of the resin-based design that had powered the Superbuma, a lucky crack Nene had managed to pull off of a computer core recovered from the wreckage of that fiasco in the fifteen minute interval it was in ADP custody before being confiscated by government personnel - and undoubtedly delivered right back to Genom.
*I'm just stalling,* she thought irritatedly. Clearing her mind, the silvery haired Knight Saber took a deep breath, hoping that there was still someone to listen as she entered the activation code and murmured Shepard's Prayer.
--=--
Reaching to re-engage the (reprogrammed) autopilot, Sylvie hesitated, turning to look over her shoulder to where Nam was unstrapping Anri's seat harness. "Are you sure about this, Nam? I know you never got much practice with those sonic blasters..."
"No, this is the only way. Without-" The purple haired buma had to choke back a sob before continuing; they had no time for tears now. "Without the others, we'd never be able to escape the spaceport. I can keep a barrier up for a few seconds at least, and the DD will protect you and Anri. Are YOU sure you'll be able to pilot it with her in your lap?"
Activating the control with a sigh, Sylvie stood and replied, "I'll find a way. Like you said, it's our only hope, now... what the heck!?" She'd stumbled, shocked, as the shuttle suddenly stopped descending, maintaining a level course instead of the gently inclined one she'd set. "Oh hell! We'd better hurry, something's wrong and there's no time to figure out what!"
Each of them took one of the unconscious Anri's arms over their shoulders, then hustled aft to the bay where the DD Battlemover crouched; already fueled, armed, and supplied, and ready to be delivered for 'testing' to whichever arms smuggler had managed to land the deal. It was about to be tested a bit sooner than expected, however, as Sylvie scrambled into the cockpit while Nam supported Anri, then passed her up to the pilot.
"Bio-links on!" the lavender headed sexaroid commanded, slapping the ring on her right hand into the control cuff on the opposite wrist even as the crimson mecha's hatch hissed closed beside her on its hydraulic rams. A greenish energy flare flickered around her for a moment as her powerplant went to full output and synchronized with the prototype sonic blasters still riding on her shoulders, and then there was nothing but the faint, musical tone of the sonic bubble forming around her, a subharmonic of the inaudible wavelengths used for the effect. The air shimmered slightly where the perfectly balanced waveforms met around her, and Nam crouched to let the four foot diameter sphere completely surround her as it grew.
Moving carefully to avoid losing the frictionless barrier and her friend inside it, Sylvie wrapped the DD's arms around the energy-ball, then kicked her way through the side of the shuttle and bailed out. The battlemover's thrusters ignited to carry them away barely above the treetops, the cyclone-force slipstream shredding the side of the shuttle behind them and tumbling the renegades dangerously until she could compensate. Leveling out, she turned to look back one last time at the Orca IV - she was a bit sorry to see it go this way, after serving her so well for the years she'd been assigned to it - then paused, still hovering just above tree height, as she saw something glowing a brilliant blue drop away from under the nose and ... fly towards her?
--=--
No one else was awakened by the faint rumble that shook the hidden base moments later - after all, minor quakes hit Japan on a weekly, if not daily basis. They'd have to wait until morning to find out just what had happened in the wee hours of the night.
---=- + -=---
Captain Akemichi was on the husky side for a police officer even in the N-Police instead of the SWAT-like ADP, but he always managed to pass his certifications, and as a crime scene investigator rather than a beat cop it made little practical difference. He was waiting now for a couple of AD Police hotshots while his team carefully picked over the wreckage of a crashed shuttle, the somewhat narrow valley making their heavy aerodyne's lift fan echo oddly as it flew in from Megatokyo to the east.
*How troublesome...* He could almost hear his old partner Shika's signature line as the aerodyne circled lower, starting to kick up a small dust cloud from the debris.
Soon enough they were on the ground, the sunglasses-clad officer who was first out the hatch letting his Inspector's badge do the talking as he grumpily peered around the scene, while the lavender-suited redhead who followed made introductions after sharing a sardonic look. "I'm Inspector Wong, and this is my partner, Leon McNichol," he greeted. "So what've you got for us, ...?"
"Choji Akemichi," he replied. "According to the wreckage we've seen so far, it looks like it probably belongs to the Space Development Products Corporation."
Daley snorted. "Don't they have any better way of throwing their trash away?" he quipped.
Leon led the way as they walked closer, wanting a better look at the remains. "What about the pilot?" he asked, finally coming to a halt and pulling off his sunglasses as parts tossed out on the ground become too thick to walk through without disturbing the scene.
"Whoever it was, he must have had eyes like a hawk," Akemichi replied. "Judging by the flight path, he saw the Ishioka greenhouse somehow despite coming in so fast and pulled up to miss it, then lost it when the extra strain made the shuttle start breaking up. That may have saved a dozen lives, but..." He paused to cast an eye over the twisted wreckage of the spacecraft, little more than a mass of alloy and melted plastic. "Under the circumstances, he's probably dead."
"Yeah," Leon agreed somewhat reluctantly, surveying the devastated shuttle and the long scar where it had plowed aside dirt and uprooted trees before coming to a halt. "There's no way anyone could have survived."
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

Just then, one of the junior investigators jogged up to report. "Captain! We've got the results of the inquiry on the model number we found earlier - the database confirms that this is Orca IV, a shuttle belonging to SDPC. There's no word yet on who was aboard."
Choji grumbled unhappily, silently wishing he'd brought another bag of Cheezy Poofs to calm his nerves. The government-owned corporation was sure to have its own investigators here shortly, agents with far too much political clout to keep sidelined while his people did their job. *Probably here specifically to keep us finding out certain things,* he growled mentally. "If we're dealing with SDPC, we might as well pack it in now," he commented sourly.
Daley nodded, ruefully agreeing, "So what we have is over our heads, in more ways than one."
"Take it with a grain of salt," Leon advised. "Down here it's our jurisdiction." Looking back down the valley, he continued, "Looks like they're on their way." The rhythmic beats of heavy helicopter rotors echoed in the distance, a trio of them appearing through the same pass the ADP aerodyne had used earlier.
---=- + -=---
Standing at the windows that made up one wall of a darkened office, a tall, well dressed man smirked disparagingly, idly playing with an antique metal coin while he listened to the office's owner chew out a subordinate over the Genaros affair. Though his angular face seemed young, his short-cropped, spiky hair was stark white, with only the faintest hint of color - a steely blue that only added to his chilling appearance. A scar on each cheek and one above his left eye formed something like an inverted, lower-case Y. The ridged flesh was slightly darker than his pallid skin, framing a pair of cybereyes much more obvious than current fashion with their dead-black sclera and segmented, golden irises. As the video call ended, he spoke without turning, eyes seemingly fixed on the flashing coin as it spun above his fingers. "It seems, at least for now, that Kaufman is still following your orders, Flint," he remarked.
"Our most immediate concern right now is the whereabouts of the DD, which was supposed to be aboard that shuttle," the portly, greying executive noted. "If ADPolice or the Tower find out about it, we'll have no choice but to temporarily cut the strings between us and our SDPC puppet, Magnus."
Turning at last, the white-haired man's mouth twisted into a scowl as he chided, "Your security is not my problem, Flint, particularly if you persist in pretending to be my superior. Rather than sever ties, YOU, and the chair you're sitting in, might simply... vanish." Unnerving eyes narrowing as he made the threat, Magnus looked over the rim of the coin which had stopped, hovering in mid air with the head side toward Flint. On his last word, it suddenly crumpled into a ball, as if crushed in some invisible, immensely strong hand.
Flint paled, but kept his voice steady as he apologized, "Sorry, Mr. Largo. Still, I know what those girls are after, and both ADPolice and the Tower *will* be investigating this. I trust you'll appreciate the risk I run shielding you."
A sarcastic snort was his only reply, as the crushed coin slowly settled on the center of his blotter. Face tight, Flint turned his chair to look out the windows himself, wondering just what manner of devil he'd chosen to ally with.
---=- + -=---
It was only with difficulty that Nene had controlled the giggle fit that threatened to overtake her as Leon dodged the Chief's coffee cup - apparently, he hadn't agreed with the official order for Daley to just take statements as a formality on his upcoming trip to the space station, and the Chief hadn't liked Leon's bullheadedness ... as usual.
She sighed as the commotion settled down again - also as usual, the paperwork on cases past and present was never ending, and despite filling in other roles - dispatcher, aide, or VIP escort - from time to time, her official position was little more than a records clerk with a badge. Therefore, the majority of the paperwork in the detectives' office was hers and Naoko's to sort, file, and/or scan into the database, and she was still playing catch-up slightly from the weeks missed after the destruction of Lady633, especially since her co-worker Naoko was on vacation herself this week.
Case in point: the Forensics Department's analysis of the remains left behind by the Griffon had been sitting in her inbox since the morning before last, and she was only now getting to it. She almost hated to take the time, but at the same time she was curious what they'd made of it, the physical remains of a supernaturally animated construct. She rather expected Sylia would want a copy once it had been converted to digital format, for that matter... maybe just a little peek?
The giggle-fit struck her with a vengeance as she flipped open the folder. Inside, instead of the usual general summary, the first page was a colored pencil sketch of the white Knight Saber, with the addition of Green's monoribbons and a miniskirt, posing in front of a crescent moon. Below it, a caption read, "MOON HEALING ESCALATION! You're dusted!" and she couldn't help it any more, she broke out in full blown laughter, imagining Sylia in place of the star of that old show, STILL in reruns to this very day.
Leon craned over from his desk, and grinned as he spotted the picture in front of her. "Finally got to that one, did you?" he asked, chuckling. "I thought you'd appreciate a laugh, with how swamped you've been lately. Fuko MacNamara drew it, she's the police artist on my squad. She usually sells them from what I understand, but you can have that one."
Somehow, it didn't seem quite so long to the end of Nene's shift after that.
---=- + -=---
At least money was something they hadn't had to worry about, thought Nam as she followed Sylive down the highway on their new motorbikes. "Thank you, Meg," she whispered. Part of the redhead's extensive preparations for the breakout had been to divert a large amount of money to a groundside account - ironically enough, through a network used by Genom itself to fund its own black ops and remain untraceable even internally. It wouldn't last forever, but carefully managed it could last a few years with only three of them...
... somehow, she'd rather have needed to find paying work sooner. *It's not the time for regrets, it's time to make good memories for all of us,* she told herself, and returned to concentrating on where she was, and what she was doing. Honestly, though she'd never been one to seek out excitement - excitement came to her all too often in the emergency ward - ever since that first blast of speed when she'd activated her advanced movement systems with Meg back on the station, Nam had found herself longing to go just a little faster, push things just a little farther. Jumping out of a crashing shuttle in the arms of a battlemover, with only an invisible barrier of sound waves between herself and being ripped apart by a supersonic slipstream had been terrifying, but also exhilarating.
Now, she was dressed in a yellow and blue jumpsuit and snuggled up to the tank of a hot, tuned and modified sport bike, only barely behind Sylvie as they tore down the bayshore highway, straining to make up the distance while keeping what she'd come to think of as her 'software accelerator' from going online. That wasn't so much because it would be an unfair advantage - though with the way it made time seem to slow to a crawl it certainly would be - but because it would no longer be a thrill to ride a bike she could outpace on foot. Until they could deal with the 33s design's somewhat limited blood regeneration, though, using that speed under anything less than life-threatening danger was out of the question.
It was with a happy grin then that she took the inside line around the curve at the deepest section of the bay, gaining several handspans on Sylvie as the two of them eased past another cyclist in the outside lane, on a red, white, and blue bike. They'd spent most of the day looking at various rides before settling on their modified Genom GSX-R 2300s, but her best guess was that it was a completely custom design. Seeing the yellow and black suited biker twist the throttle to catch them up, she released a happy laugh and let the enhanced software take over for a moment, looking back over her shoulder and casually waving to join the race. She shut it down again as she faced forward, the third woman rapidly catching up.
--=--
Not too much later, all three of them had pulled off at a beach on the north end of the bay to watch the sunset and eat odango from a nearby yatai. The custom bike's rider had introduced herself as Priss, a musician, and had recognized the tuning shop logo on their bikes on sight. She paid for her fresh-off-the-grill odango and turned back to the sexaroids, remarking, "Kaneda must have done a number on those old Gixers to get that kind of performance - I had one a few years back and it was fast, but nothing close to what we were pulling just now." She took a bite of one of the meatballs and yelped, washing it down with a quick swig of juice before blowing on the ones still on the spike.
While Nam suppressed a grin, Sylvie replied, "Do you know him, then? I got a good look at his collection of custom bike pictures, but I don't remember anything like yours."
Still waiting for her food to cool, the singer nodded, but explained, "This is a scratch built design from Raven's Garage - it's not too far from Kaneda's actually, but Doc doesn't keep a showroom and it's down in the canyons, so it's more of a word of mouth kind of place. Even some people who've been in the bike scene for years don't know about it."
"I see," said Nam, joining the conversation. "Since we're both new in town, it's no surprise we missed it, in that case. We needed some wheels right away, so if he only does special orders it wouldn't have helped anyway, but maybe when it's time to trade up?"
"Well, he doesn't handle a lot of clients, but I'll introduce you and see what he says, at least." Finally deciding her odango had cooled enough, Priss took another careful bite, then pulled the rest of the top meatball of the skewer, chewing it energetically before concluding, "It's definitely the place to go if you want to see the hottest bike in town, though." That it was still kinda on the trashed side, in no small part due to her, she kept to herself. *At least Mackie let up on making me fix it, finally. Must have realized it wasn't getting anywhere except when Doc helped, and with that new project taking his attention, that's not so often as I hoped.*
Sylvie and Nam had already finished their meatballs, and with the sun now below the horizon were getting ready to head back to the apartment they'd rented. Seeing this, Priss called to them, "My band is playing all week at Hot Legs, on Hayate street. Come check us out some time if you like retrothrash, eh?"
Pausing with her helmet in her lap, Sylvie winked at the red-eyed singer, grinning as she confirmed, "Okay, it's a date!" - which came as something of a surprise to Nam. She'd gotten a good vibe from the woman, but had thought Sylvie quite attached to Anri. With a slight shrug, she fastened her own helmet and returned Priss's wave before starting up the bike's engine and rolling out.
Seeing them well gone, Priss shot her own bike a disgusted look and complained, "Geeze, custom built gas hog and it still barely beats a pair of Kaneda's cookie cutter, Genom kiss up, hack jobs. I don't know who should be more pissed, me or Pops."
---=- + -=---
Linna could hear Sylia talking to one of her contacts in the other room as she changed - something about arms smugglers - but her mind was anywhere but on their 'knight work' at the moment. Everyone had been busy the past couple of days after realizing Cynthia disappeared the same night as the shuttle had crashed, in an unsuccessful repeat of the search they'd done when first hired to find her. The white saber had been as close to frantic as Linna could remember ever seeing her, out of worry for their secrecy and - she suspected - for the little girl, miraculously made flesh and blood a few months ago, who'd slowly been working her way into all of their hearts. Mr. and Mrs. Akimoto had been the hardest hit in that respect, the elderly couple who'd all but adopted the child joining in the legwork where they could.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of it was that Sylia *hadn't* run them all off to another location like she had when Priss's weird stalker-robot had infiltrated their original headquarters (though everyone had received two sets of alternate identities, complete with bank accounts and travel visas) suggesting that she didn't have another prepared fallback position this time. None of that had her full attention at the moment, of course, because with the search called off this evening she had far more important concerns on her mind: getting ready for tonight's date!
Usually she used her own apartment, of course, having moved back in as soon as things settled down after the Lady633 fiasco, but had come to get a set of special-order clothes Sylia had whipped up for her. The reasons for *that* were what was foremost on her mind... Ever since she'd woken up from being crushed in her hardsuit fighting the possessed Griffon, her strength had been almost uncontrollable, and it had caused quite a few problems. She'd had to stop doing hands-on instruction in her karate classes at Phoebe's Gym after putting a student's shoulder out of joint accidentally, and any outfit not made of bulletproof nanoweave fabric tended to get torn to shreds if something so much as startled her. Hiryuko had guessed that there had been lasting physical damage as a result of all the years she'd spent with her ki turned against itself, even after Kami-sama had straightened it out - damage repaired along with everything else by the Kagami woman's Ritual of Ultimate Restoration.
As inconvenient and frustrating as that was, however, the fact that the furry brown tail she'd finally remembered having had grown back was far more alarming... she wasn't sure why she hadn't gone to get it removed yet, herself. It made her balance strange unless she wrapped it around her waist, was fiendishly sensitive and uncomfortable in a hardsuit even if she did, and had to be hidden somehow when she was in public. She'd been wearing a lot of silk sashes these days, and really had no idea what she was going to do if her date tonight turned out especially well. Yasuo was a nice guy and all, but...
Maybe she could pass it off as an exotic piece of cybernetics? An impulsive teenage addition when they were fashionable, kept as a reminder to avoid future foolishness?
She cleared her mind with an unhappy sound, concentrating on getting the green tabard to hang artistically over her black bodysuit and the knot on her red sash to be loose enough for comfort but tight enough to keep her errant new member well hidden. She'd traded her usual yellow bandanna for matching red, as well. "I do wonder who comes up with these fashions," she murmured to herself. "Between this and the white high-heel boots I look like some bizarre manga character."
Oh well, at least having the sash around her waist made the otherwise loose garment a bit more form-fitting. Then again, she was his date to a media industry party, sure to be filled with the latest music idols and TV stars. Did she *really* want to invite comparisons? At least the tabard's flared shoulders made her waist and hips look that much thinner, and the one wholly positive aspect of her physical changes lately was that her boobs hadn't lost any size, even while the rest of her body fat seemed to melt away. If anything, the underlying pectoral muscles had grown, firming them up more and adding a full cup size. Feeling much more confident in herself, she grinned at the hot chick in the mirror, boasting, "Let those stick figure songbirds try starting anything. He's there with *me*, and any kitten who tries to use more than words is gonna find herself facing a mountain lion!" Her frame of mind much improved, Linna brushed a hand through her black hair - fortunately, spiky was in at the moment, so she didn't have to try to plaster it down - and headed out, absently noting that Sylia had finished her call and vanished again as she passed through. She was due to meet her beau at a cafe in fifteen minutes or so, but it wouldn't hurt him to wait a little, so the long drive back into Megatokyo wouldn't be a problem.
---=- + -=---
It was a rainy night a few days later, and while some parts of the city were as active as ever the Kawasaki industrial district was quiet, abandoned to the terminally over-dedicated and a few night watchmen, be they human or buma. At a small Genom service center placed there to capitalize on the buma workforce by providing technicians for on-site repairs, a guard of the human variety was cursing whatever idiot had scheduled both of the usual buma watchmen for a maintenance cycle this evening, the almost-burned-out parking lot floodlamp that gave only sporadic bursts of light, the low quality of coffee stocked in the break room vending machine, and pretty much everything else in the immediate vicinity right on down to the leak in his left shoe.
"At least the damn things will be up in an hour or so and I can finally go home," he grumbled, crumpling his latest coffee can. As he came out the door for another hurried circuit around the outside of the building, a flash of movement caught his eye when the floodlight flickered on for a moment. Pointing his flashlight that way revealed something big and red with a girl standing in front of it, taking off a clear visor of some kind. Before he could get more than a glimpse of her, she blurred and vanished, suddenly reappearing a few feet in front of him, his flashlight beam illuminating her yellow and blue-clad chest. Still in shock, he goggled at the intruder, light purple hair slicked down by the rain and framing terrifying, glowing ... red ...
As the guardsman collapsed, Nam leapt forward again to catch him, then used his key to open the door and drag him inside. Opening the repair bay door for Sylvie to bring the DD in and under cover from prying eyes was the work of moments, then the both of them set to work at data terminals, using the centers' link to the private Genom corporate network to look for the data they needed. Though they hadn't fully succeeded when the guard buma started to come back online later on, they had some good leads, and with the DD it was a simple matter to crush them, destroy the shop to hide their tracks, and be gone before any backup or investigation could arrive.
--=--
It was kind of surreal, Nene had decided, the way spending so much time with her parents had made time seem to stop. She effectively only worked one day a week, spending the hours she'd normally sleep at Miribile, their odd, floating island in the Realm Between, where time was mainly a matter of opinion. Linna had joined her there as well for a couple of weeks, working to get her incredible strength under control, and Sylia had been back and forth a few times trying to understand the portal effect, but even with them, she would sometimes say or do something that would make them double-take, and suddenly realize she'd NEVER have done it 'a few days' before.
For example, she'd have to have been already drunk before grabbing Priss and hugging her in public before, but having spent so much time with little contact, her friends had become too precious to care about fussy rules of propriety even when she was technically still in her ADP uniform, though the jacket with all the badges and trim had been left in Linna's minivan. So, when Priss wandered out from the backstage area of Hot Legs, still in her stage costume but free of the big blonde wig, Nene broke off chaffering with Linna and latched onto the singer, who didn't quite seem to know what to make of it as the petite redhead enthused, "Priss! You were were usual terrific self tonight!" Then again, maybe she just couldn't breathe. Nene relaxed her grip some, not quite sure of her strength without the (currently) five-times-normal gravity of Miribile to counteract it.
"Oh, thank you," the singer replied, settling back slightly onto her feet as her hyperactive redheaded friend released her.
Linna, in a boat neck turquoise pullover with cow-spots and bluejeans, had followed the policewoman over at a much more sedate pace, still practically floating with happiness at the fun date she'd had the previous night, despite arriving for it a bit lat after trouble on the highway. She smiled beatifically, suggesting, "How about I quit my job at Phoebe's and become your manager? If you want to sign with DMI, now's the time."
Having already been treated to a variation on this spiel while they waited, Nene broke in, complaining, "Mou, there you go again," as she released the quizzical musician, raising a hand by her lips to stage whisper, "Priss, do you know that Linna says that her latest boyfriend is one of DMI's directors?"
Ignoring the dark haired Saber's happy laugh, Priss drawled, "I don't want to know. I've had it with you crying your broken heart out."
Trembling with indignation, Linna exclaimed, "Meanies! It's serious this time, I tell you! I deserve happiness too."
A faint smile belying her put on disgust, Nene teased, "Being happy with Linna? What an awful thought."
"You got that right," Priss concurred, with an almost identical look.
Not buying it in the least, the irritated dancer growled, "Ooh, you're both picking on me!"
Further teasing was preempted as Sylvie and Nam joined the group, still in their form fitting motorcycle 'leathers' - actually nanoweave synthetics far more durable than real leather and colored in bright geometric patterns. Sylvie's was light blue and white with yellow on the torso, Nam's yellow with a wide, jagged blue stripe down the middle and little metal shoulder guards. "You look like you're having fun," the darker-haired sexaroid called out. "I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
Priss smiled briefly in welcome, before chiding, "You're late, Sylvie. I've already finished my last set."
Dipping her amber eyes, the pilot stammered, "S... sorry, I had a little... business to take care of." Brightening, she introduced, "Oh, this is my friend, Nam."
Taking the cue, the lavender haired girl stepped forward, bowing politely. "Pleased to meet you," she greeted them.
Linna had a somewhat catty expression on her face - one shared by several other women in the bar as they made perhaps less than favorable comparisons about themselves with the gorgeous new arrivals - while Nene simply seemed stunned. Priss had no such trouble, eyes screwed into happy crescents from her wide grin. "Heya! This is Nene and Linna," she enthused, returning Nene's energetic glomp from earlier and knocking the suprised redhead into Linna. Jarred out of their suprise, the other Sabers quickly schooled their expressions into reasonably welcoming smiles.
Finding her tongue first, the blue-clad girl said, "Oh, ah, you're Sylvie, then? Priss has been telling us about you - how you're so stylish, and a terrific biker."
Nene, who'd used almost that exact phrasing before Priss came out, seemed torn between rueful exasperation and sliding back into the stunned look from a moment before.
"If you were a man, I'd make a pass at you, no sweat," Linna babbled.
Silvie, honestly flattered, demurred, "Oh, you're too kind." Extending her right hand American-style, she added, "It's a pleasure to meet you."
Not entirely familiar with the custom, the Sabers blinked owlishly at it, then Linna - slowly and very, very carefully, given recent developments - took it in her own right, replying, "Oh, same here."
Nene quickly followed suit with an uncertain laugh, then Priss and Nam joined the group shake as well.
"Well, since we're all here now, how about we get going?" the singer suggested.
"All right!" cheered Linna, now that the awkward introductions were over.
Nene gestured in the center of the circle they'd formed, saying, "Speaking of which, I heard of this great American style restaurant over on Kishimoto street today - Daley told me about it before leaving for the spaceport."
"Trust Nene to know where to find food," Priss laughed. "Okay, let's go there first, then head to the club. Just give me a few minutes to get my leathers on and check on the Reps."
--=--
*No doubt about it,* Sylia thought to herself, *This place is the definition of the word 'dive.' Totally, completely, and without exception or caveat.* A flickering neon sign half-hidden down a side alley proclaimed in inaccurate French, "Cest Lavie," with the subtitle "Pool bar" over a crude pink silhouette of someone lining up a shot. From there, the shabby stairwell down to the basement business was relatively well lit, but the best thing one could say about the interior was that at least the glasses were clean, and the prostitutes tended to stick to the game tables where they could show off their legs sitting on the rail.
Nursing a tequila that wouldn't have done anything for her enhanced metabolism even before the latest changes, she sat in her red business suit and white pumps, ignoring the itching of the mouse-brown wig her too distinctive steely hair was pinned up under and the hazel contacts over her purple irises in favor of a not-quite literally frosty glare at the man she was there to meet. Restraining herself from adding an actual heatsink field in his general volume was taking a fair amount of willpower, but poor taste aside, she couldn't deny that he was the best of her informants and fixers.
Now more than ever, she needed that efficiency, and to be fair, she had asked for this meeting without much lead time. Resigning herself to the necessity of dealing with a bit of unprofessionalism in the name of results, she eased off the death-glare and took another sip. *Bleah. I never understood the point of drinking this stuff. At least it's got a high caloric value as it oxidizes.* She'd been ravenously hungry for days after pulling that stunt with the possessed Griffon, and had later discovered she'd drained the batteries of Priss's hardsuit almost to the brink of shutdown while riding behind her.
Sensing the lightened tension, the blue-suited man sitting one stool away from her took a drag on his cigarette, running a hand through his short, blond hair before taking it back between two fingers to talk. "Sorry about this, Yoshimi," he drawled, using the alias she'd developed since 'Sylia Stingray' had gone missing.
"Same as ever, Fargo," she sighed, then complained, "Why don't you wear a nicer suit, for once?"
"Hey, sorry. I've got expenses, you know?" he replied, almost sounding sincere. "With the cost of living these days, that sort of thing's out of my reach. Anyway, did you have a look at the report I sent you?"
Nodding fractionally, she ran through it once more, the data called up instantly before she queried, "Kaufman at SDPC is in the hotseat, then?" It had been implied, but he still was trying to confirm it earlier.
"You've got it," the blond fixer agreed. "He was ambitious, and he'd gone far, but apparently he fell in with a Genom splinter group, secretly built a next generation superweapon, shipped it to a space station, and planned to sell it to the communists."
"The Doomsday battlemover, 'D.D.' I've heard about it here and there. Is it already finished, then?" 'Here and there' was perhaps a bit of an exaggeration, but one of her other sources had provided partial specs for the design. It wasn't something she'd have wanted to face with the original hardsuits, and even now it would take the whole team and a full roster of motoslaves to take it down for sure. The armor formulation was what she was planning on using for the next generation of the transforming cycles.
"They have a prototype," Fargo clarified. "Now what Kaufman wants is either its recovery or its destruction. Also, find his girlfriend, seems she turned out to be the thief. No leads on her ID though."
The Saber leader hummed noncommittally. "How about Cynthia? My team is too small for a serious dragnet." Nene's parents had been unable to help, restricted to dealing with spirit world threats only, and Nene herself wasn't skilled enough with her supernatural abilities to track the former buma the way she'd been found. She'd made dream-contact once, but couldn't stay with it to follow the girl's mind back to the waking world.
The fixer took another drag off his cigarette, and rubbed his eyes. "I've pulled about all the strings I can on that and still keep it reasonably quiet. No news yet, but my people will keep looking. With the D.D. on that shuttle, I think we can figure it was just a coincidence, not some kind of distraction." He took a slug of his own drink irritably, theorizing, "Hell, maybe the kid just ran away."
"Highly unlikely," the disguised woman argued. "She and her guardians loved each other dearly. Besides, the perimeter sensors would have picked up anyone on foot or in a vehicle. There's a faint trace of what has to be the D.D. leaving, and wreckage from the shuttle as it started to break up, but nothing else bigger than a barn owl and no thruster plumes, from the time she went to bed until they discovered she was missing."
"I'll keep doing what I can," Fargo affirmed. "There haven't been any rumors of a snatch like that lately, Yoshimi." He finished his drink, and they thought silently for a minute or two.
"I take it Genom Tower is at the core of the D.D. commission?" 'Yoshimi' asked, wrinkling her nose in distaste.
Knowing her opinion of the zaibatsu, Fargo caught her eyes and denied, "As a matter of fact, corporate Genom has nothing to do with this incident. If they find out about it, heads are liable to roll."
Frowning seriously, Sylia considered her reply. "This is a messy job, and it's a second missing person on top of our own. It's not going to come cheap."
"I've already deposited half the fee. You should find it acceptable," the blue-suited man gloated.
Seeing his avaricious grin, Sylia accepted the inevitable. "Fargo, I'm just no match for you. OK." *We need a good paying commission to help offset equipment losses lately,* she told herself. Finishing her own drink, she set the glass carefully back down on the bar, concluding, "I'll contact you in the usual manner. Ja ne."
*Even if it is like working for Genom, we couldn't let that thing run loose. We might as well take their money for what we'd do anyway,* she thought as the bar's door closed behind her.
--=--
The others had spent the time getting to know each other a little more while waiting for Priss, and Nam's recent conversion to the ranks of the motorcycle junkies had come up in the course of it. "It's kind of hard to explain," she said, "it's just completely different from riding in a car, or even a scooter." That the cars and scooters she referred to were the (so far space-only) gravatic hover types used on the internal highway system of Genaros she left unsaid.
"Oh? I use a scooter, though I'm riding with Linna tonight, but mainly because it's cheap on power. I only have to recharge it every two or three days," the redhead replied.
The returning singer cut in with a snort. "Yeah, but you could probably get there faster on a bicycle, Nene. It'd be better for your hips, too." She couldn't help but snicker at the red-eye she got for that.
With a light smile at their antics, Nam held the door while the others filed out. "No scooter can *possibly* compare," she gushed. "Why don't you ride with me and see for yourself? Sylvie has an extra helmet."
"I could never ride one of those things," said Nene, looking unconvinced.
"I used to think the same way," replied Nam, "but it's really fun with the wind whipping at you! Come on, I'll show you!" Hearing her, Sylvie unstrapped the pearly green helmet she'd bought for Anri to use and held it out to the redhead with an encouraging grin.
For her part, Nene gave Nam's gold and white bike a doubtful look; she was wearing a skirt after all. Then again, thanks to her parents' influence she'd quickly learned to have exercise shorts on under skirts these days, so it wouldn't be that big a deal, and it did sound like fun... "Oh, why not?" she finally agreed, accepting the proffered headgear and pulling it into place, before hiking the blue ADP uniform skirt up enough to climb on behind her new acquaintance.
---=- + -=---
Continued in 08_BD_WOASS_Ch_05b.txt
Shock! Oh oh... Don't you monkey with the monkey!

-----------------------------
Notes for Part A
-----------------------------
That's right, it's a Reindeer Float(illa)-car, obtained through the use of forged Group 6 access gained when the master control program was hacked. You may groan now.
Some people may consider my treatment of the sexaroids to be rather bloodthirsty and harsh, especially given how I'd been developing the new/cameo characters right along with the canon cast. Well, I hate to say it, but all three of my additions were intended for the butcher's list from the very beginning. You'll note that I did let Hyatt get her own back first, however - since the whole Bloodsucker Barnaby subplot came up on its own, I figured it was only fair to resolve it before moving on. I've always figured there were even more buma in on the escape attempt that never made to the scenes we see in BGC, and Mina, Hyatt, and Dot got the jobs. Further... everyone has a story, but some of them get cut off before they can be finished. It's a terrible thing to do, but that's the *point.*
VENUS Beam Cannon: Essentially, this is a Ghostbusters proton pack, tuned to affect normal matter as much as possible instead of as little as possible - as detailed above, it's a pretty ferocious weapon, where the GB versions barely set toilet paper rolls on fire and scorched wallpaper.
IFF transponder: Short for 'Identification Friend or Foe,' any aircraft without one is assumed to be hostile in this timeframe thanks to the Polar War, and faces stiff penalties even if it turns out to have been a mistake or equipment failure. Essentially, a radio transmitter that constantly sends a signal saying 'this is who I am, condition normal' but they can also be set to broadcast an emergency in progress.
Nam's sonic forcefield: While squarely in the realm of anime physics, this effect is canonical for the Bionic Six's Meg, who used it in several episodes I can remember. I'd originally had the sexaroids' names confused and thought that the extra one I'd had escape was also named Meg (where she's actually Nam), hence the reference. By the time I realized the error, I'd worked her into the post-OVA plans too thoroughly to excise.
Shepard's Prayer - Formulated by Alan Shepard on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, "Please God, don't let me fuck up."
Sclera - the scientific term for the whites of the eye - obviously, I can't call them 'whites' when Largo's are black.
Why 'Magnus' instead of 'Maxemillian' Largo? Well what other villain do we know whose name is (Erik) Magnus L____ and levitates metal objects? Canon Largo would be far too weak to be a threat even without the developments of this and the next chapter.
Canned coffee - yep, they actually do have cans of coffee in vending machines in Japan. Alcohol, too, but probably not in the workplace, at least, not in machine shop type workplaces.
Genom appears to have absorbed Suzuki at some point, though the latest GSX as of 2005 is still the 1300 Hayabusa. It's stats give a higher top speed than a 2030s ADP Interceptor in super-pursuit mode, though, so I'm not sure I even want to think about a _2_300... On an interesting note, the grey bike Priss is riding before Sylia recruits her in the (officially included in canon) _Asu e Touchdown_ music video is the same model Sylvie has in OVA 5. While this video is not Bubblegum Disaster canon, you can figure that she had one like it when she hung out with the Outriders in that time frame - which is why I say Sylvie and Nam's have been modified for greater performance, if Dr. Raven's custom built racing bike that Priss has in this OVA (apparently as good as new again after having the front oil floatation bearing fail trying to race the Griffin) is evenly matched with Sylvie's canon bike. The yellow and black riding leathers she dug out of the closet after getting her red ones trashed last episode are from the same source. I'll add an image of them to the web site and mailing list.
Linna's boyfriend, Saito Yasuo, is named for the Japanese voice actor who played the shinigami Takuto in the Full Moon Wo Sagashite anime. He also looks a bit like an older Takuto, but since Ta is your typical brown-haired anime guy aside from the shinigami costume that's not saying much.
Sylia drinking for the calories - alcohol can support an open flame, you know. She needs as much energy as she can hoard for her abilities, since that fusion backpack didn't work too well.
And yes, her new ID as "Yoshimi" is inspired by the Flaming Lips song, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" even though buma are rarely pink.
Nene and shorts-under-skirts: She won't wear anything that she can't kick in unless there's something under it in case it has to be hastily removed. A couple of suprise training sessions and one dream-eater surprise attack were all it took to instill this habit.
-----------------------------
Credits are in part b as well

EOF
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

08_BD_WOASS_Ch_05b.txt

2007-06-11 - continuity edit
2007-06-07 - the typical just-posted-it-why-didn't-I-see-that-before errors fixed, including a couple of fairly major continuity glitches and numerous spelchekz
2007-06-04 - added a look in Priss's head to clarify while facing down Sylvie, and vagued something else up
2007-06-02 - FINISHED! First draft anyway, now Ijust need to get it online somehow...
2007-06-01 - yatta! fixed Cynthia/buma flashback & got to The Big Twist.
2007-05-31 - split the chapter into two files as it was becoming inconveniently large, with six scenes completed (from Ride Free) and one partial (Nam & Sylvie return)
Continued from 08_BD_WOASS_Ch_05a.txt
---=- + -=---
The observation room was dark as Leon and Nene entered, despite the bright skies outside - it had to be, to keep those inside from showing through the two-way mirror to the psych ward room beyond. Dr. Yamane waved them to take seats at the desk within, and the redheaded policewoman gratefully complied, folding the keyboard out from her tablet to type notes - even with three decades of refinements and her own improvements, the handwriting recognition was still a bit dodgy. Seeing her nod, the doctor gave her observations.
"The patient's name is Naota Watanabe, after hours security officer for Kisaragi Cyberdroid Service Center in the Kawasaki district. Last night, it appears he was attacked by this 'Bakemono Burglar' that has the papers in an uproar. Like the previous victims, he reports only getting a glimpse of the person involved, and even under hypnosis the only description he can give is that they were slight, like a woman or a young boy, and had brightly glowing red eyes after taking off a visor or possibly motorcycle goggles. After that, he fell unconscious, and didn't revive until the fire department arrived after the Kisaragi shop exploded."
On the far side of the glass, Watanabe shuddered and clutched at his bedcovers, as a burly male orderly entered with a meal tray. They could see him stammering a frightened challenge and the man's soothing response, but soundproofing prevented the conversation from carrying to the observation area since the microphones were turned off.
Yamane ran a hand through her short black hair, before continuing, "Mr. Watanabe's mental trauma from the incident is severe, easily the worst of the victims so far. He becomes distraught if a person matching the assailant's build is present, especially if their eyes are uncovered - as you saw, the orderlies have to borrow a pair of goggles from the lab to bring his meals, or he's too agitated to eat. He was moved to this ward after becoming violent with the intake nurse when she tried to check his pupil response with the light in her opthalmascope, and had to be sedated. I've had to limit my contact with him for those reasons, but my colleague Dr. Shelby is out sick today, and as head of the department he's been keeping me up to date."
"As I said, the patient was severely shaken by his experience, and seems to have suffered some sort of supernatural nightmare while unconscious, though he avoids any questions on the subject at best, more often becoming incoherent, muttering about monsters, ghosts, and wizards controlling his mind with the jigan. Since his previous psychological records list him as being somewhat excitable but well grounded in reality, it's Dr. Shelby's professional opinion that this nightmare is the effect of the current media frenzy acting as a suggestion to his unconscious mind."
Leaning against the back wall, Leon scoffed and quipped, "Monsters, wizards, and the Evil Eye? Of course it's just a delusion, none of that stuff is real, right Nene?"
Caught off guard by such a question, and wondering just how he'd react if she contradicted him, Nene stammered, "Buh-ah, of course they're not real, eh heh..."
Attention more on his thoughts than her reply, he grunted contemplatively, then asked Dr. Yamane, "Those previous reports, they're from his cybernetics post-operation counseling? Is there any sign of BDD?"
The psychiatrist's eyes flared as the frowned, giving him a stern glare. "I assure you, Mr. Watanbe's condition with regards to his cybernetic arm and lower leg remains in the top .5 percentile - in fact, the familiarity of talking about them with a professional without worry or awkwardness is one of the ways Dr. Shelby has found to calm him when he becomes too upset about this more recent trauma." Yamane's gaze turned even more steely as she concluded, "Even if he were experiencing difficulties with his prosthetics, Mr. Watanabe falls well blow the 70% cutoff point, Inspector."
Nene eeped at the steel in the other woman's tone, and even Leon flinched back in his seat. *Looks like Yamane-sensei doesn't approve of the 70% law,* the pink-haired Saber thought, grinning in spite of herself at the sight of her brash senior cowed by the petite doctor.
Striving to regain his composure, Leon waved his hands placatingly and temporized, "No one's looking for trouble, Doc, but it's my job to be concerned when someone with cybernetics is having mental problems. I'm sure I speak for everyone in the AD Police when I say we'd be happy if your department could put ours out of business."
Still far from reassured, the doctor softened her glare from piercing to merely skeptical.
--=--
The ride back from the hospital was mostly silent; Nene paying attention to the slightly unfamiliar task of driving a car rather than her scooter; Leon churning over the few leads they had. Finally, as they neared the station, he grunted in dissatisfaction and leaned back, the seat back tilting with a thunk as he released the catch.
Familiar enough with her coworker to know that meant he'd set the problem aside for the moment to let his subconscious chew on it, the redhead shot him a quick glance and asked, "I've seen the newsfax, of course, but do people really think it's some kind of oni? I didn't think the old myths were believed much any more."
"Eh, just the usual crazies," Leon drawled, adjusting his shades. "That's what I like about this town, it's never dull. It's mostly the newshounds chasing the excitement of the moment, but some folks are going off the deep end. There was a call for the N-Police yesterday when a crowd at some shrine started getting rowdy after they ran out of wards to sell... But it's strange, none of the men at the places that were attacked have gotten anything worse than a few bruises consistent with falling off their feet, and as far as we can tell from the wreckage nothing seems to be missing." Peering over the top of the wraparounds, he quipped, "Maybe the bakemono only likes to eat girls."
Nene, with certain knowledge that such things were not only possible but increasingly common as word of Kami-sama's death spread through the underworld, gave it rather more serious consideration than he'd intended, speculating, "My dad told me a story once about an eight headed dragon that only ate girls, and if he swallowed a boy by mistake he'd spit him back out." Grinning suddenly, she mused, "I should keep an eye out as well, that sounds like a fun fight!"
"Ha!?" The chestnut haired Inspector flipped upright in surprise, sunglasses sliding off to dangle from one ear as he gave her an incredulous look.
Suddenly, realization struck. "Eh heheh, I mean it would be a fun fight, uh... for a ... martial artist ... movie, yeah. You know, like 'Jane Li vs. Jade Chan in _Attack of the Bakemono Burglar!_'" she backpedaled, deepening her voice and giving it a melodramatic tone. She laughed nervously and kept her eyes assiduously on the road, hoping her more skeptical sempai would buy it.
Her silent prayers appeared to be answered; Leon collected himself and leaned back once more, dismissing the whole supernatural aspect with a snort as he settled his shades comfortably again. "Given the destruction and the descriptions the guards have given, it's a lot more likely that it's a buma, looking for something we haven't figured out yet."
"A buma?" Nene protested. "Buma can knock people out with eye-beams!?" Certainly, no buma the Sabers had ever faced could do such a thing... Or were their suit visors protection against it? Lots of buma had glowing eyes, now and then, for sure.
"It might," he replied, "if it was a 33-S type buma, that had a hypnotic function. Of course, none of them are around any more, since it was the one model that was completely banned."
"I'll admit, it's a little easier to picture you chasing a strange buma in a K-suit than some fire-breathing oni," Nene remarked.
He smirked, then sighed resignedly. "There's a lot of pressure from above to solve this one quickly, since they're targeting Genom-affiliated businesses. At the same time, it seems none of them are actually big enough to make it worth Genom's time to send their bully-boys in, when a quiet word in the right ear gets us out in force. Not that we'd let anyone get away with it, but it would be nice to do without the pressure."
The car was silent again for a few minutes, as she pulled off the highway to return to the ADPolice building. "Oh, drop me off at Hangar Three, would you?" Leon requested. "They're giving me some new patrol bike to test." At her nod, he gave the redhead his best 'Nice Guy' smile and wink and invited, "If you like action movies like that, you should come to my squad's barbecue party on Friday evenings, Nene. They're a little rough, but a good bunch at heart." Then it was her turn to boggle, at least until he shouted to watch out for the turn-off.
---=- + -=---
Nene had passed the Inspector's theories on to Sylia, and admitted that since her parents hadn't found traces from an active demon, they looked like the most probable explanation. "I've done some checking, and there's a few traces as if someone was doing some cracking from the businesses that were attacked, too well hidden for the regular ADP computer team to find. But, I'm still not sure why the 33-S was banned," she added.
"It became troublesome when external weapon linkages from combat-class buma were added to them," Sylia explained, a blush lighting her fair features as she continued, "Their use before that was scandalous enough. It was a sexaroid type."
Wide eyed, Nene repeated, "A sexaroid?" She ducked her head and hid a matching blush behind one hand as she squealed, "So they really do exist!"
"I thought you weren't interested in perverted things like that," Sylia scolded, tapping her finger against the monitor over her younger friend's nose.
"Whyyy nooot?" the policewoman whined, before a different train of thought brightened her over-dramatic sulky expression. "I wonder if they're as pretty as the girl I met yesterday?"
Accepting the topic change, the steely haired Saber inquired, "Oh? Who's that?"
"One of Priss's biker friends. Her name's Sylvie, and is she hot! She's got a body to die for, and her other friend Nam isn't far behind," the redhead enthused while clasping her hands, suffused with romantic bliss, before leaning in conspiratorially to wink and share, "Priss gets along with her unusually well."
"With Nam?"
"No, Sylvie. Nam let me ride on her cycle to see what it was like while they raced to the restaurant after leaving Hot Legs."
The Saber leader hummed noncommittally, then concluded, "Sounds like someone I might like to meet. Anyway, inform me if something else happens, all right?"
"You got it!" Nene chirped, before shutting down the link.
The frown Sylia had been hiding behind her usual calm front settled onto her face, and she was left to contemplate the implications of a 33-S on the loose at the same time as a battlemover designed for operation with a synchronized pilot.
---=- + -=---
In a low rent, single room loft, Nam and Anri were stirring about quietly, going about their morning routines. They'd found themselves to be quite compatible as room mates, having similar tastes for the most part, though Anri didn't share the other buma's passion for Transystyr Systyr, especially at high volume, preferring the more laid back style of reggae or ska in her more energetic moods. The local retrothrash band whose leader Sylvie and Nam had befriended seemed to be a happy compromise solution, and the demo chip she'd gotten for them was playing quietly as Nam slipped into her underthings and pulled the nightgown off over her head.
Thinking about Priss and her friends brought other questions to mind, and she decided finally to just come right out with it. "Ne, Anri," she queried, "do you mind if I ask you a question about Sylvie?"
Looking up as she slipped on her brassiere, the green-haired sexaroid blinked and hummed negatively, "Mhm-m. What is it?"
"Um... well, doesn't it bother you that she's been spending the night with someone else?" the medic buma asked.
"Don't think badly of Sylvie," Anri explained. "She and I are the best of friends, close enough to keep each other company when the night's too lonely, but we're not really... you know, romantic. I just don't like girls that much, the way Sylvie does. I'm happy for her, really Nam, and she'd be happy for me if I find a guy I like."
"I... I guess I understand," the speedster replied. "I never really cared either way, I just wanted to find someone to share feelings with."
Catching her room mate's phrasing, Anri grinned mischievously. "Wanted to? Have you found someone, then? Maybe that cute redhead you mentioned..."
Blushing and stuttering, Nam could only stammer incoherently for a moment. "N... No!" she finally forced out. "It's nothing like that, we're just going to look at motorcycles since she liked riding behind me the other night!"
"Ooooh," Anri teased, nodding knowingly. "She likes you from behind, then!" She laughed merrily as Nam buried her beet red face in her hands and curled up in embarrassment.
Fortunately for her, any further teasing was preempted by the faint sounds of the other bed's occupant waking up, and the two of them hastened to finish getting dressed.
--=--
Lady Miyaumoto paused in her morning promenade, looking over the visitors in her domain speculatively as they arrived on two of the smaller sort of annoying-loud-wheely-thing humans were so fond of. The red-furred one proceeded toward the food dispensers nearby, while the other, blue and white dappled nearly as splendidly as the Lady's own brown and white, partook of the fresh breeze and admirable view. Miyaumoto approved, a healthy regard for the necessities of life in one, and a fine sense of aesthetics for the other.
As she herself was returning from a jaunt to the shore, where there had been a delectable bit of crab leg left in a crevice by one of the gulls, the Lady padded over to the red one, calling for attention as the two of them seemed caught up in their own discussion. Honestly, humans were so silly sometimes! Who gave a hairball about buma or the Genom Production Control Center on the skyline when there were sandwiches to be had? Reminded of the more important things, the red one bowed down to her, and rendered tribute in the form of a hearty helping of the still-warm fast food burger, but withheld the remainder most rudely when asked for a second helping. Ungrateful creature, and to think, Miyaumoto had deigned to strop against her leg earlier!
Here the Ungracious One's companion interceded, showing the true nobility of dapple-coats as she offered the entirety of her own hamburger to compensate. Lady Miyaumoto magnanimously decided to forgive the pair in light of the gesture, and even allowed herself to be held and stroked by the Noble One when she had finished her repast. Ah, a superior patterned coat, the scent of life and healthy energy, and talented hands as well! Letting bygones be bygones, she sang her appreciation, the low throaty tones of a premiere soloist.
Watching as her lover cradled the stray, Priss gave a lopsided grin of amusement. "Looks like it likes you, Sylvie. I almost thought it was going to attack me when I wouldn't give it any more of mine." The grin widened as she reached out to stroke one of the other woman's shoulders and teased, "I guess you've just got the magic touch, ne?"
Sylvie blushed slightly as she hugged the purring moggie closer, turning back to look out over the bay. "Ah, Priss, don't exaggerate," she replied. *Even this cat is free,* she thought happily, basking in the morning sun.
Finished with her own food, Priss wadded up the wrapper and tossed it in a nearby bin with her cola can, then swung onto her bike. "Well, let's go," she prompted, explaining, " I've got a rehearsal coming up, and a sound check after we set up at the club."
Sylvie set down the cat, with a final stroke as it rubbed affectionately against her knees before wandering off. "Ah?" *But it's so nice here, and we didn't leave Genaros just to start following new orders,* she thought, waffling for a moment. The sheer joy of self-determination made up her mind, and she replied easily, "I think I'll stay here a little longer."
Priss straightened on the saddle, smarting at the brush off, and the buma woman tried to explain. Unfortunately, the amazing, intoxicating feeling of freedom after a life of servitude was just too big to put into words, and all she could do was blurt, "I, am... free. I'm free now! You see?" She spread her arms, trying to indicate the unbounded world of possibilities all around them, just waiting to be explored in any direction.
No more enlightened, the singer could only repeat, "Free?"
Sylvie gave her a megawatt smile, and a flirty wink from one amber eye. "Right!"
Still puzzled, Priss could only figure it must be a personal space thing - she understood that, at least. "I don't know what you're talking about, but I'll catch you later." Helmet strapped on, she started the bike and kicked off, a farewell shout of "Call me!" tossed over a shoulder as she let the clutch out and merged into the slow mid-morning traffic.
Sylvie waved energetically, but was saddened by the thought that her lover probably didn't even really understand her own freedom, or how precious it was. Then again, she'd rather no one ever had to go through a life like her own, even if it meant being so oblivious to what they had. With a melancholy smile, she leaned against the rail once more, watching the gulls and the ships in the bay.
---=- + -=---
Since his cruiser still hadnt been replaced, and two bikes would fit in his parking place at home, Leon had just used the new motorcycle unit he'd been assigned to commute - he was supposed to be testing the thing anyway, right? Even better, it saved trying to find a spot in the cramped police parking garage, since he could just return it to Hangar Three where the support equipment for the prototype had been set up. As he shut it down and undid the clasp on his helmet strap, Kenty Yeager, the head mecha technician, slipped out of the partially disassembled K-11 she was working on and headed over to greet him.
"Hey Leon, how do you like the new toy so far? Had any chances to open 'er up?" she asked.
"I only got it from you last night, you know. You didn't even explain what the heck the thing is, except that it's more than just a bike," he complained.
"Eh?" She blinked and cocked her head at him, a grease stain on one cheek making her look absolutely adorable - he certainly hoped Yeager appreciated her, the lucky bastard, and given that the brunette's pregnancy was just starting to show he damn well better. "I sent you the user manual a week ago, as soon as you were picked to test one."
Leon thought about the stack of coffee cans competing with his inbox for a height record, and concentrated on maintaining his cool look.
Relenting, Kenty shook her head at the vagaries of of detectives, and launched into a quick summary, pointing out controls and display items as they were mentioned. "It's called a Police Motorcycle Battloid, or P. M. B. for short, and it's Genom R&D's latest answer to our need for better equipment to use against rogue security and military buma - though judging by the photos I've seen, not to mention the evidence materials that have been taken by various government agencies 'for further study' it's probably as direct a copy as they can manage of the motorcycle-based units your Knights in shining hardsuits like to use, and you'll need to be wearing the special body armor that you left behind last night in order to pilot it in battleframe mode."
Here she gave the Inspector a stern look. "Without it, the unit can still transform and accept voice commands if you dismount, but it doesn't use a buma brain so it's not very smart at all, not even as much as a trained animal. With the suit, it's still a little less armored than a K-11, but far beyond their specs, even the new K-12S, in just every other way - speed, strength, agility, even the combat computer that drives the heads-up display can track more targets more accurately and actually predict what known enemy types are likely to do, as well as where hits will land and tracking the origin and path of gunfire."
She started going into the specifics then, Leon paying close attention as it seemed he'd greatly underestimated the bike's capabilities before, having thought it was just some attempt at a cost saving measure over cruisers when the ADP rarely arrested anyone - even in cases of normal civilian models that went rogue due to being misused or poorly maintained, the owners were more likely to be fined than detained, and if they did need to be taken anywhere it was usually in an ambulance.
Not to mention, he just loved piloting, on those occasions he had the chance to get in some Armored Trooper time. If the department wanted to give him one of his very own, he sure wasn't going to complain!
---=- + -=---
Mackie had gone looking for his sister, needing authorization for the new design he and Dr. Raven had worked out before they started ordering parts and materials. He found her in her office talking on the videophone, one hand still holding a pen, and the customer copy of a delivery invoice in front of her for the trailer that had been delivered around mid day - one that held the wreckage of the Batmobile, which had been confiscated by the police but eventually sold at auction after investigations found that it held no leads to finding the Sabers, who weren't actually wanted on charges more serious than disturbing the peace and flight from crime scenes anyway, and far from giving any insight on their advanced technology, was built with components and techniques over two decades outdated.
If it wasn't for the fact that it was his logical, unflappable sister he was talking about, he'd almost have said... *Wait... No, no way! She can't be...* The teen's thoughts trailed off as Sylia finally capped the pen and stuffed it in a pocket before wiping at her eyes and actually *sniffling.* "Sis?" he asked, quietly. "Are you okay? I mean, you're..."
Sylia jumped, for all her advanced senses still having been too distracted to notice him approach. "Still human despite it all, it seems," she replied, voice trembling. "It's silly of me, and illogical, but... The Wayne money, and companies, and even the estate in America, none of that was ever Daddy's true legacy to me... All of that was just what he used as a disguise, the mask he hid behind. The real Bruce Wayne was the one who had a secret underground base, who put on a kevlar suit almost every night and went out to stand between the bad guys and the people of his city, the one who had the most amazing car in the world. Mother -"
She choked up, and had to wipe at the tears over running her eyes again. Mackie looked helplessly at the grey-haired man on the screen, who shrugged and mouthed "I was there too," before waving his attention back to Sylia. After making use of a hanky, the words flowed on, as unstoppable as the tears, or the tremors shaking her like a rag doll in her brother's embrace. "Mother once told me that as a baby, sometimes the only way to get me to quiet down at night as to go for a ride in that car, with its engine that rumbled and purred like a huge cat, none of the normal ones would do the trick. And now..."
Stuffing the balled up kerchief back in a pocket, she choked off a derisive laugh before it could become a sob. "It wasn't even this car, the one she talked about got replaced years before he died. But it's still... I just..." Worlds failed her, and all Sylia could do was hold and be held by her only remaining blood relative.
"It was a fine car and a great loss, but how many did your dad lose this way? Remember that it was made to be used; a tool like your suits," the man on the screen told her. "In fact, I remember taking you on some of those rides with your mom; that car got wrecked in a chase with the Joker when he used an exploding cream pie launcher built into the back of the one that nut was using at the time." Seeing Mackie's alarmed look at the pickup when he'd casually mentioned "suits" the stranger assured him, "Not to worry, it's a secure line, and like I said I've been in the family business for a while. Dick Grayson, once called Robin, then Nightwing up until I had to retire. You must be Mackie. I've heard a lot about you."
"Yeah, that's me. Uh, I guess I've heard about you, too. If you're retired, though, then who's..."
"The current Batman? Well, I really shouldn't say, I am still in on the background end of things, though. Anyway, I've go to go, time difference in the US and all. Just keep helping Cee out, okay? Bruce adopted me before even meeting your mom, so she's my sister too, you know?"
---=- + -=---
Patchy clouds on the horizon still floated like purple and orange ghosts of the sunset, but the storm front due sometime after midnight was still well out to sea, so those few stars bright enough to make it through the city's glow were as clear as they ever were over most of Megatokyo that evening. At one of the large, automated depots for the still ongoing Kanto Earthquake Recovery Zone, they were blocked by something still less permeable - plumes of smoke from the security buma that had been stationed there. The low-grade construction buma that were based at the facility had continued to function obliviously, at least until their control link to the GPCC mainframe had been taken over for other purposes.
The one human evening overseer was slumped in a corner of his office unconscious, while at his terminal Nam's fingers moved so quickly they seemed to have disappeared as she abused their stolen access while it lasted, relentlessly hunting down the data they desperately needed. Just outside, Sylvie held the DD Battlemover ready to take off at a moment's notice - they'd made too much of a disruption to go unnoticed for long, but hacking the control connection alone would have seen to that so there was no point to subtlety this time. She could hear sirens in the distance, and was about to call for Nam to abandon the search and go when she heard the lavender-haired sexaroid's triumphant cry, then there was a blur of color as she zipped out and up to a perch on the DD's back. Not waiting for anything to go wrong, she fired the battlemover's thrusters and took off into the night.
---=- + -=---
In his temporary quarters on Genaros, Daley Wong shut off the videodisc player, a disgusted look still on his face. He'd barely seen Kaufmann into the airlock of a shuttle, handcuffed and escorted by a pair of SSPD officers, before someone had nudged him from behind and shoved it into his hands, vanishing into the crowd of rubberneckers before he could even turn around. He'd seen some truly nasty things in a his time as a cop - just working cleanup after a buma rampage could see to that on any given day, thanks to the difference between their strength and durability and that of a human - and he'd always figured you couldn't really be in the ADP and think of buma as people per se, but that hadn't made it any easier to watch - he hadn't even been able to tell it was a buma on the operating table in the first scenes until enough of the skin was off to show the reinforced rib cage, and that would have been bad enough on its own, even if the perp had been sitting in a cell in front of him.
It was the murderous looks the nurse had thrown at the man doing the job whenever his back was turned, and the tears that even crappy low-quality surveillance camera footage could catch as she cleaned up afterwards that were the worst, because that said the bastard had at least some misuse of authority that let him get away with doing things like that, and making others take part. The fact that it was almost certainly another buma... It didn't really matter, not this time.
Then, that clip had ended, and the next one showed the buma who'd been tortured - he had to go back to the beginning, to where her face was intact enough to recognize, to make sure, but it was her - toting a submachine gun, standing beside another buma (though that wasn't apparent at first, either) with several more people unidentifiable in the background as the same man confronted them, and the second woman blurred with superhuman speed to knock him against a wall. The former victim then proceeded to empty the gun's large clip into him, less than a minute later being cut in half herself by debris when one of the float-cars exploded.
That hadn't been the end, though - as he knew all too well, buma were damn hard to kill, and apparently that extended even to sexaroids. In the next clip, she was back on an operating table, screaming as some kind of heat-sealing tool was used to fuse her skin to the cruder synthetic of a mannequin-class hip and leg assembly, while that utter asshole Kaufmann directed the process in between interrogating her about the other sexaroids and the shuttle they'd stolen, without much luck.
That still wasn't quite the end, though - there had been one more scene, of the poor girl in some kind of isolation cell, naked except for old blood around the marks of a brutal beating, and copious amounts of fresh being coughed up uncontrollably until it had literally pooled around her huddled form. The mannequin-class parts seemed oddly warped, and he wondered about that for a moment. There weren't really any sensors in most of a mannequin's shell at all, so it was unlikely to be a result of the abuse she'd still been undergoing. Of course, expecting the kind of slime who'd do such a thing to make rational decisions was its own kind of folly, but still...
It was only when the wall beneath her had torn away, leaving behind a fringe of ropy cables fluttering in the escaping atmosphere that he realized it was similar to the way scavenged materials looked when a one of the more recent buma types used them to add a weapon or patch their armor as the nanites worked on it, a guess confirmed by the last part of the disk.
It was an audio-only recording of a voice with the metallic overtones of an active-mode security type, leaving a message for him personally. It said, "Hyatt was one of the gentlest souls any of us ever met - no one could believe it when she was the one who gunned down Barnaby. Believe this Inspector if you believe nothing else I say: she was only his last victim, one of many, and if anyone deserved to die it was that bastard. She'd been used as a testbed for fusion nanites similar to the ones now incorporated into the BU-55C, but it never worked before the incident you saw. She has already died three times for nothing more than the quest for her own freedom; please, if she somehow makes it to Earth after all this, and ends up in your area, just let her be."
That was it, finally, and the black screen had turned to static until he shut it down. The hell of it was, as a police officer he couldn't condone murdering a man, but as a person he couldn't begin to pretend that Hyatt deserved any more punishment that she'd already received, buma or not. He ejected the disk and scowled at it for a minute or so, before shattering it under a boot heel.
Enough. He still had to check a few last leads, then contact Leon and warn him about what he'd discovered about the DD. There was police work to be done, and it had nothing to do with any 33-S except the one piloting the battlemover.
---=- + -=---
Magnus Largo glided into Flint's office like the specter of death itself, smooth and collected and radiating an icy hatred that would make the coldest winter days, when the snow squealed underfoot and every breath made the lungs and teeth ache, seem like a vacation in Hawaii. "Tell me, Flint," he commented scathingly, "Is there ANYONE competent in your organization at ALL? First the bungled assassination last week, now it seems that Kaufmann has been arrested, for arranging to smuggle the DD."
Ignoring the executive's outraged sputtering, the tall, white haired man with the gold-on-black eyes stalked over to the desk and hauled him out of it by the collar, eliciting a startled squawk from Flint, along with a desperate glance at the two bodyguard buma still standing obliviously by the door.
"They can't see me," Largo explained, "or hear me, or you, or anything else I don't want them to detect. As far as their senses can tell them, you are still sitting right here, reading files, and in just a moment you're going to tell them to leave, because you're about done for the night." At this the older man tried again to protest, only to be cut off with a sinister glare. "Your cooperation is not required, and believe me, you are quite finished. We're going to go for a little trip, you and I. Now."
Behind them, the frames of the office windows warped and slid aside, and a hazy blue sphere of energy formed around Magnus and his unwilling companion then lifted them out and away, the windows again closing behind them. Shortly after, the bodyguards acknowledged words that only they could hear, and quietly left the office to head back to their maintenance cycle cubicles.
---=- + -=---
It was about 10 PM by the time Sylvie and Nam got back to the loft, but Anri had stayed up waiting for them, too worried to rest, and their other house guest, the former buma Cynthia, had stayed up with her, alternately telling the sexaroid that she could see them and everything was fine, and pleading with her to just sit still so she could heal the daily blood degradation her damaged mechanical systems were unable to slow. The little blonde had joined them right after they bailed out of the Orca IV, flying to meet the airborne battlemover in a bubble of light after helping the shuttle along far enough that it would crash in the next valley over, instead of in the horse field.
As if that hadn't been strange enough, she'd been accompanied by a pair of actual fairies, beautiful tiny girls that fluttered along on butterfly wings shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow, and when they'd landed and she learned that Anri was hurt, Cynthia had conferred with them for a bit, then bathed the comatose buma in a differently hued glow, making the barely scabbed-over wound heal as they watched. Sylvie had still been holding her partner in her lap in the opened cockpit, and had caught enough of the fringe of the effect to feel revitalized as well, the fatigue of the nerve wracking manually controlled approach falling away like mud under a hose.
Anri had awakened then to find the child peering earnestly at her, then explaining with a smile, "Hi! I made you better, but your buma part is still broken. You should go back with me to Miss Cecilia! She can fix it for you."
Bewildered, the green-tressed sexaroid had turned to Sylvie, who was still clutching her as if afraid she'd run away. "This is Cynthia," the smiling pilot introduced. "Cynthia, this is my partner Anri. I don't know how you healed her, but thank you. Are you some kind of buma? Is Cecilia your owner?"
The little girl giggled and bounced happily on the fallen tree she'd sat upon. "I used to be, but Miss Cecilia fixed me when the giant robot attacked and Priss-oneesan had to cut it away from my leg, and then she took me to see a nice man who took all the metal out so I could be a normal girl. But he died then, so he can't take your metal out." The fairy in white, who had short, silvery hair, inserted a comment, using an audio datasquirt the sexaroids couldn't quite catch. "Yuki says I could learn to do magic like the nice man did," the blonde continued, "but it's really hard so it would take a long time. Are you sure you can't let Miss Cecilia fix you? She's not my owner, because normal people don't get owned. She's the boss for Nan and Grampa Akimoto, and everyone there is my friend!"
Sylvie shook her head. "We have to make it a secret that we're here. Can you keep a secret?"
"Uh-huh. I hafta keep lots of secrets, because of I see things that are private, even if I'm not trying sometimes. Nan Akimoto taught me it's important to keep what other people do private unless it's hurting somebody or they say it's okay. But Miss Cecilia is really good at keeping secrets too, so I'm sure it would be okay." This time it was the dark-haired fairy who chimed in, the light one just chirping agreement. "Hotaru says Anri-neesan really needs to have her parts fixed, or else get healed like that every day," Cynthia finished worriedly. She looked over at Nam, who'd slumped against the tree stump and was very pale, thanks to the use she'd had to make of her 35-A patch during the escape, but who had followed the conversation with a wide eyed wonder, having always had a love of magic and fairy tales. "You're kinda sick too, I think, like the way Anri-neesan was because her metal stuff is broken. I can help you too, I think, but your metal parts all seem okay."
"Our systems weren't built that way," the speedster replied, after a moment of shock. "Even working properly we still get sick like this, because the men who made us wanted to make sure they could stay our owners. It happens faster with me, but Sylvie would need maintenance in a few months, as well. We just want to be normal people too."
Cynthia gasped, "That's horrible! Just hold still a minute." She gathered power again as she spoke, then plied the same radiance over Nam, who sighed in relief as the status alerts from her diagnostics died down and the logy, sick feeling in her body was replaced by an amazing energy.
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

"Oh, that feels so nice," she sighed. "As a Bio-Maintenance nurse I heard stories about 'having a healing touch,' but nothing like that. I wish I could do it."
"Yuki taught me," the blonde child noted, "So maybe you can learn too. But, you're grown-ups, so if you went away and don't have owners anymore, can't you get fixed?"
"That's why we came here," Sylvie answered her, "so we can find out how. We still have to get the data from the bad guys, though. That's why being here is a secret." She thought quickly, moral qualms struggling with expedience, and genuine need. "It'll only take a little while, maybe you could come with us, to help us keep from getting sick while we get it, and then go back to Miss Cecilia and your grandparents when we're done?"
Anri had sat up indignantly in her lap, then, and hissed into her ear, "What on earth are you doing, Sylvie, taking advantage of this child like that? All we have to do is leave, and let her tell anyone who asks as much - they'll know we were on the shuttle anyway as soon as they check with the station!"
"It gives us more time," the pilot whispered back, "and without what she just did, we'd have to replace your blood supply every day. How do you think I'd have to do that? It's not like we're going to hurt her or keep her forever - hell, she carried the Orca somehow, I don't think we could if she doesn't want to..."
There had been a bit more discussion, but in the end the girl had agreed to come with them for a little while, to help keep their secret and find the design data they needed to get their systems rebuilt correctly. In the weeks since, she'd become like a little sister or even a daughter to the runaways, perhaps even a living symbol of the freedom their comrades had died to give them, a former buma who now lived as a human girl. Cynthia had finally drifted off half an hour ago, too exhausted to keep her eyes open any longer, but Yuki and Hotaru fluttered over to dance happy rings in the air around the returning pair.
For her part, Anri threw herself at the other sexaroids, taking them both into a relieved embrace. "Thank goodness, you're both all right," she whispered. After a few seconds, she reluctantly released them. "Please, don't do this any more, it's too dangerous. If one of you got caught, you'd be eliminated for sure! You've done enough for me, you should live for yourselves - take more time so you can find a safer way to get the data before you need it. I'll find another way, someone who's learned more magic than Cynthia, or just go with her to this 'Cecilia' who helped her," she pleaded.
Sylvie just shook her head with a gentle smile, one Nam mirrored as well. "It's alright, Anri," the pilot explained. "We did it. Nam found out where the disk with the design data is, all we have to do is go and get it, and we'll all finally be able to live entirely by our own power."
Seeing Nam's confirming nod, Anri's eyes widened, and her serious frown turned into a joyous grin.
---=- + -=---
Katherine Madigan had been quite surprised to awaken in a hospital bed, more so to discover both legs and an arm in casts, with a matching deep ache in the ribs on the right side of her chest, and an amazingly uncomfortable feeling in more private areas. She looked around the room in confusion, only partly reassured by the buma guard standing watchfully by the window, since it wasn't her usual one. Collecting her wits, she found the call button thoughtfully clipped to the left rail of the bed, where her good arm could reach it, and summoned a nurse in hopes of getting the situation explained.
Soon enough, a nurse arrived to do the usual vitals checks and remove the plumbing arrangements in favor of a bedpan, but before the lavender haired executive - and that had taken so long to grow out, too! Now it barely reached her shoulders! - could ask for any details, the monitor screen built into the wall activated, revealing the familiar face of Chairman Quincy. Pulling herself painfully upright, Madigan forced her slightly fuzzy thoughts into order, snapping out a respectful greeting.
The Chairman looked down from the wall contemplatively for a moment before speaking. "You have awakened," he said, secure in the knowledge that no one was going to call him on redundancy. "It has been several days. What do you recall of the attack?"
*I was attacked?* she wondered, stunned by the sheer audacity of such an act. Shaking her head, she replied, "Not a thinng, sirr. The last I can recall, I was rriding in one of the company carrs, and everythin' was fine."
Quincy hummed and frowned slightly, but told her, "The signals from your driver and bodyguard were disrupted as soon as it began, and their recorders destroyed; at this time there is little further information with any degree of credibility. If your memory returns, report it to me immediately. Also, you will insure you have a competent second in place in the event you are injured in the future. Kuroma is to be terminated with prejudice as soon as you resume your duties. I can only assume that he performed more adequately under supervision." His gaze shifted to the nurse, then, standing respectfully beside the bed. "Miss Madigan is to receive the best and most expedient care, as I dislike dealing with sycophantic incompetents. Inform the staff of as much."
---=- + -=---
Cynthia had awakened when they tried to move the girl onto her futon, and insisted on using her healing magic - actually just an energy aura, she'd told them, not a proper spell; it just gave their own bodies the power to heal themselves - on Nam and Anri since everyone was there and calmed down. Once she'd gone back to sleep, the runaways decided to go for the data now, before there was a chance it might be moved, and while the girl's healing effect was still recent enough to give a mild degree of regeneration if they were injured in the attempt. Then too, they'd never done two raids in the same night before, and only once two on consecutive nights, so no one should be expecting them to move so quickly. Anri would stay at the apartment as usual to watch over Cynthia, while Sylvie went after the disk and Nam hacked into the security system to look out for patrolling buma, since she'd be fast enough to intercept them or escape where Sylvie would have much more difficulty.
The only human the monitors had shown in the area they needed to access was Flint, the division manager, reading files with a desk lamp in his darkened office. When Sylvie arrived, though, the room was empty, and Nam confirmed over the intercom that he'd just vanished as she opened the door. "Someone must be onto us, feeding the system false data," she worried. "What do we do, Sylvie?"
"We can't turn back now," the other sexaroid replied. "Especially if they know we're here. We can't let them move the disk, or destroy it... There's nothing to do but hurry forward."
Fortunately, the storage room they needed was just down the hall, and it was only a few, tense minutes later that her search paid off, the small disk stuffed into her cleavage as she left, since the motorcycle suit's pockets weren't the greatest. "What's the situation?" she asked tensely, knowing Nam was keeping the intercom open as she moved through the corridors. She was almost out, now, on only the second floor.
"I still don't see any more signs that someone knows we're here, but there's a patrol coming your way... Oh no, there's no way to avoid them! I'll intercept them."
"What? No Nam, wait! Nam?" There was no reply, and a few seconds later she heard the high pitched screech of the medic's sonic blasters, followed by the crash of something slamming into a wall. "Now we've done it," she groaned, running for the end of the hall. Sure enough, intruder alarms began wailing, and she grabbed Nam's arm and ran back the other way, remembering a bay window that had been in sight of where they'd left the bikes.
That was quickly disposed of with another sonic blast, their tougher than human frames absorbing the impact of dropping from the second floor without difficulty, and the pair of them peeled out just as a handful of buma, their human disguises already shed, crashed out through the front doors of the GPCC building to give chase.
As they vanished on trails of thruster fire, Magnus Largo stepped out of the shadowed lobby, a satisfied smirk on his handsome face, golden eyes glittering coldly.
--=--
*Someone who only saw his usual grumpy attitude might have been surprised at the Chief back there,* Leon thought, *but he's always there in a pinch, backing up us poor field officers 100%. Heh, I think he forgot I'd been assigned this baby, he was sure surprised when I agreed to his order not to go looking for trouble in a patrol heli.* He twisted the throttle open a little more, expertly maneuvering the PMB through the sparse 2 AM traffic on Highway 5. Getting the unfamiliar body armor on and adjusted had been a bit of a challenge, and he was definitely going to recommend adding a bit more padding to the knee guards, but it handled like a dream, even with the heavy K-11 carbines mounted on the back instead of the usual saddlebags, where they'd be like pistols in hip-holsters to the battleframe mode. He'd been tempted to bring his StoMACH, but it didn't have the right kind of mounting lugs, and the grip would be too small for the PMB's hands.
A flash caught his eye in the rear view mirror, distracting him just as the turn off to avoid the Kanto Canyon quake damage zone came up. He bit off a curse and slowed, but more flashes and the rumble of distant explosions washed away any other complaints. With a silent prayer that everything would line up the way it had when he'd tested it in the mecha bay, he hit the jump boosters and thumbed the transformation switch.
There was a jolt as tiny jets threw the cycle into the air, then the saddle fell away beneath him and he was clinging to the handlebars as the body of the big racing-style cycle unfolded into arms and legs behind his back, the front wheel splitting into twin lift fans at the shoulder blade while the back wheel folded up into a backpack. Then he heard the solid thunks as his armored back slapped into the chest hollow of the battleframe and the latches locked. The nose and windscreen folded up against his own chest as he dropped his arms to the control handles on the battloid's inner forearms, while the soles of his boots latched into the pegs on the robot's calves. His helmet HUD stabilized again and everything was - thankfully! - nominal as he spun the hovering mecha to face a rapidly approaching firefight, drawing his carbines like a gunfighter in one of those American movies.
A feeling of deja vu hit him as he saw that it was 55-C buma chasing women on motorcycles, but it wasn't Priss this time, at least. They were weaving around too much to give him a clear shot at the pursuing mechanoids, but he couldn't blame them for that, with how freely the buma were tossing blasts around from their mouth lasers. His eyes widened as the second, in yellow and blue leathers on a gold bike, suddenly flipped up to stand on the still moving cycle, one foot hooked on the throttle side of the yoke as she faced back down the road, leaning into the wind. "Impossible!" he mouthed, even as some kind of energy bolts reached out from the woman's shoulders and swatted one of the combat buma out of the air to tumble and crash into a building. "No one can do that, even a buma!" A twitch of her foot and twist of her torso in the slipstream sent her bike back and forth across the highway, dodging two more bolts before returning fire again, though less successfully.
They blew past him then, and Leon pushed the PMB's flight engines to their limit to match speeds, using double bursts in their thrusters to wax two more of the 55s, cutting them down to three as - *The canyons!*
The girls on their bikes had ridden right over the edge where the highway had collapsed, and hadn't seemed surprised to do it. The buma of course - were they all buma, on both sides? - the pursuers had of course just followed them down on their flight systems, and he did likewise, holding his fire as the bikers had vanished into the darkness below.
Remembering the shoulder mounted searchlight, he flicked it on, then activated the bullhorn on the other side. "This is the ADPolice!" he announced, commanding, "Shut down your weapon systems and lie face down, or -"
In the illuminated circle on the canyon floor, a pile of scrap was shaking as something freed itself from underneath, while a yellow streak circled one of the buma, then turned into the daredevil biker as she slammed a flying kick into it and tossed it to crash through a wall. One of the remaining pair picked up the wrecked blue cycle and threw it at the momentarily stationary target, but she blurred away again before it hit.
Meanwhile, a big red shape, recognizable from the data Daley had sent as the DD's quadruped form, had freed itself from the scrap it was hidden in, and quad-barrel gun blew the head off the buma that had thrown the motorcycle. The one remaining roared and opened its heat projector array, but just as it fired the speedster appeared again, her shoulder beams shattering the lenses, the unfocused energy immolating it in a spectacular fireball.
Touching down at the third point of a triangle from the DD and the woman in blue and yellow, he called out, "This is Detective McNichol, of the A. D. Police. I say again, shut down your weapon systems. I'm not going to attack you, just come out of there!"
There was a rumble behind him, and a roar, and he spun aside just in time for the combat buma that had been kicked through a wall to miss with its mouth laser as he dodged into the air.
Firing line clear, the DD launched a pair of small missiles at the buma, but it jetted away at the last moment as well. It landed on a ledge and tried to set itself for another shot, but the lavender-haired speedster blurred away again, running straight up the wall to its side and launching it to tumble back to the earth with a mighty uppercut. Even as it landed, the DD pounced, crushing the cyberdroid's torso and severing its spine with a taloned foreleg, and they were back at the stand-off.
"We can't let you stop us, Detective," Nam called out pleadingly. "Not now, after everything we've come through. Please, we haven't killed anyone, or even really hurt them. Just turn away, and we'll be gone."
"That's something I can't do," he countered. "That thing is a menace to the entire city and everyone in it, and that's not even mentioning theft of government property, private and public damages, and weapons violations." His two carbines weren't exactly aimed at the pair, but they were clearly trained in their general directions as he landed again. "Backup is already on its way, even if you get past me you can't escape. You're right, you haven't killed anyone yet - if you come quietly you probably won't even be dismantled."
"NO! THAT'S NOT GOOD ENOUGH!" Sylvie shouted, then jerked in shock as the battlemover lurched under her. "What the!?" The cockpit lights turned red and the instruments went crazy, as electricity played over the outside of the mecha and it began to change into the J-1 controlled humanoid mode. "No, why? The J-1 shouldn't be activating unless the pilot is dead, and I'm not even hurt..."
The cockpit around her seemed to melt and shift, slim armor plates like fins or blades forming a control frame around her, while liquid-like metal flowed over her and around the biker leathers. The link system collar, arm and leg bands snapped into place, and a wash of energy played over Sylvie's form, flaring her hair like a corona as the DD and whatever had taken it over synchronized with her OS.
Outside, the heavy armor of the DD broke up and reformed in ways that were very disturbing to Priss and Sylia, watching from the rim of the canyon above, but even more so for Nene, who had seen the form the weird robot "Guardian 215" had taken on the top of Genom Tower when it replaced Priss's motoslave. It still mimicked the over all shape of the DD, but the jutting fins, and most tellingly the close-packed array of blades on the forearms were the same. A little ball of fear started to grow in her stomach at the thought that they'd come to disable or destroy the DD, whatever the cost, when they'd have to fight against THAT.
(If desired, start playing "Shock the Monkey" now)
Linna wasn't even looking at the battlemover. The spotty cloud cover had cleared again, and somehow, the full moon overhead was irresistibly fascinating, even as her heart pounded in her head and the body armor Sylia had built to mount her familiar weapon systems seemed to shrink and squeeze uncomfortably. The other Sabers turned to stare as the sounds of shattering ceramic and tearing nanoweave came form her, looking on in shock as their team mate tore out of the suit, face warping and extending into a baboon like muzzle, dark fur coating her body as the now loose long tail lashed uncontrollably. The giant's eyes glowed with an ominous red light as it continued to expand, a spiky, pitch black mane of hair the only thing still recognizable from their friend.
Rising on the skyline and easily four times larger than the DD itself, oozaru-Linna roared and beat her fists together with a crash like thunder. She looked down at last, sighting her enemy, then drew a deep breath and let loose with a tight, twisting blast of ki-fueled flames, exploding at the impact point like a bomb as the three below hastily dodged.
In the meantime, unseen by anyone, a small, stealthy form that had been trailing Priss for nearly two months even inside the new headquarters, and which had interfaced with a similar component it found there, slipped off to rejoin its master unit.
--=--
The initial contact was terrifying, like being washed away in a flood as the foreign system downloaded her entire archived memory, even as the part of the composite that was the J-1 battle computer evaded the fire attack and calculated threats and targeting points for the unknown new opponent. As the part that was Sylvie regained a sense of individual identity, outrage at the intrusion turned to shock as the stealth remote unit also rejoined the composite, and its findings were laid open before her - including the backed up mission-critical files retrieved from another remote that had been encountered in the Knight Sabers' base. Priss was a Knight Saber, Linna and Nene as well! And the Guardian, an actual alien artifact, that had somehow mistaken Priss for the user it had been intended for... Perhaps the ultimate slave, it held incredible power but had no desire for self-determination, and what little decision making capacity it had was damaged almost beyond recovery in the last battle with Priss, who simply didn't seem to understand. Even some of Priss's own memories were included in the data, copied from her lover's mind in an earlier attempt to recover from data loss, and to understand the troublesome person the Guardian had bound itself to.
Now, the part that was the Royal Guardian needed to be a true whole once more, and it would be up to her to integrate the muddle of directives and memories from a handful of sources, as the only general-purpose heuristic logic system in the composite... The part that was Sylvie felt a stab of terror, at the thought that she could really make a mess of things if a being with the Guardian's power ended up running wild, like the J-1's 'kill everything and blow up the bodies' program. Even now, it was bringing out all the extra armor and modules the Guardian had been able to recover or reconstruct while scavenging the quake canyon, and she had to countermand the assembly of half a dozen different weapons that would have done untold amounts of collateral damage... And she had to work quickly, because one thing the J-1 retained total control of was the self-destruct bomb.
--=--
The remaining Knight Sabers had scattered as well, to avoid being trampled more than anything, and Nene came to perch on top of a section of the highway that had landed on its side on the canyon floor just as the speed demon in yellow came to a stop there as well. Not having gotten a good look before, another shock piled onto this night of doozies as she recognized Nam, the the new girl-friend she'd spent most of the day shopping with, looking at motorcycles, and she blurted out, "Eeeh? Nam!? But if you're here, is Sylvie...?"
Nam was equally surprised to be recognized, but before she could say anything - with the build under that somewhat minimal armor, it could only be Nene in the new Pink Saber suit - they had to dodge away again. The DD had charged the oozaru, a pair of massive, sharpened fins extended from the forearms like the wolvers popular with cybergangs, only to be met with a back-hand smash that sent it flying, straight through the crumbling concrete of their road fragment.
Leon had ended up sharing a perch with the White Saber, though more by design - he'd intentionally headed for her, so as to pass on his critical information. "Listen," he warned her, "The DD - we've got to destroy it quickly! I don't know what's happened to it, but once the J-1 takes control, it'll self destruct when it runs out of power. We'll be blown to pieces, along with the entire city!"
"What? Nene, deep scan the DD, now!" Sylia ordered, over the scrambled radio link.
Nam, who'd ended up close enough to hear the tail end of Leon's warning, gasped as well. "That strong!?" she cried. "She only said it would be dangerous, not... apocalyptic!"
Deploying her backpack sensors, the pink Saber quickly confirmed, "It's true! It's got a micro neutron bomb, and it's only 180 seconds from critical mass!" She'd forgotten to switch over to the speakers in her haste, but the nod of her helmet was enough to convey the worst to Nam.
Message delivered, Leon double-teamed the DD with Saber Blue, who had come to the party in similar play clothes, the slightly more massive Typhoon still showing the obvious design similarities of the two mecha. Unfortunately, their shots simply ricocheted off the reinforced battlemover's armor, and it fired the last of its conventional missiles to drive them back before taking to the air. The powerful thrusters of the airborne battlemover had been augmented with the Guardian's advanced gravity control, making it faster and more maneuverable than ever, and it put that agility to good use, dodging more fire attacks from the giant ape. The missed shots blasted a trail of destruction, chewing a huge new divot out of the battered side of the Kanto Canyon, then wiping away a half dozen nearby blocks as she tried to hit the rapidly moving target.
The DD deployed the four-vaned energy cannon assembly that had replaced its gattling, charging and firing a sun-bright river of energy that caught the oozaru in the chest and knocked her tumbling head over heels through several more buildings, to land in a heap near the bay.
Howling her fury to the stars, were-Linna kipupped back to her feet, grabbing a radio mast from the wreckage and flinging it like a javelin at the battlemover, knocking it out of the air as it tried to set up another shot while everyone else rushed to catch up to its location.
--=--
As Sylvie had reintegrated the fragmented programming and files of the Royal Guardian's decision matrix, she'd found so much of the original data had been lost, now replaced by patterns copied from her and Priss's memories, that the part that was the Guardian was becoming more and more human until finally it too awakened to a sense of existence as an individual. Checking on the J-1, she realized how short time had gotten, and sent the new consciousness - and somehow that new beginning was a comfort in the face of immanent death - the sorrowful thought, *I've done what I can, the rest will have to be up to you to figure out, masah mahnyee 215, no, Masamune Niichigo. Whatever you decide to do, go for it with everything, ne?*
--=--
Nam reached the DD first, of course, Priss and Leon next in their flying battleframes, then Nene and Sylia. Leon, one side of his PMB scorched black by the exploding missiles, went straight to the attack again, putting the entire mass of the unit into a go-for-broke haymaker. The J-1 was still too quick, catching the punch and flipping him into the wall of an already damaged building, burying him in rubble as it collapsed further.
The others formed a semicircle around the red and grey battlemover, tensed but not yet committed to any attacks, when suddenly the extra fins and armor plates flowed away and vanished from the DD's frame, even most of the original armor and systems gone now as well where the Guardian's technology had replaced them. With a clunk and a hiss, the cockpit hatch opened, revealing Sylvie in her blue cycling jumpsuit, interface shackles still locked in place but the rest of the cockpit gutted, even the seat reduced to a bare frame. "Priss," she called out to Saber Blue. "I know it is you, Priss. Please, you have to kill me. The J-1 is linked to me, so that will shut it down - it's the only way. Hurry!"
Taken aback, the singer could only gasp, "Sylvie!? Why... Why do you have to die? Can't you just turn the damn thing off!?"
Amber eyes shimmering with tears, the sexaroid pled, "Please, it's completely out of control now. If you leave it, or even if another network connects to it, it'll destroy the whole city."
"I... No, I can't!" Priss cried, shaking gun arm extended, seemingly against her will. Nam, equally horrified, staggered back to lean against a flipped car, while Sylia and Nene called out to their comrade. The stubby firing stud inside her weapon gauntlet suddenly felt as huge and heavy as the world itself, and with terrible slowness her finger slid against it, pressing it right to the limit before the contacts would click over and launch a rail gun spike. *What am I doing? What CAN I do? I... I can't just...* too quietly even for the helmet microphone to pick up, she breathed, "Forgive me, I -"
Before she could cross that edge or back away from it, oozaru-Linna reoriented herself and bounded back across the devastated cityscape to attack. Spotting the foolish weakness at her enemy's heart, she snapped a hand forward, and with the heavy damage done by the Guardian's removal the battlemover's lurching dodge was no longer anywhere near to fast enough. With a horrid crunch and the snapping of reinforced cables, her massive hand wrapped around Sylvie and ripped her out of the cockpit, uncaring of the damage inflicted in her rage as the sexaroid all but vanished in her massive fist, then was tossed carelessly aside.
Scrambled by the sudden hole in its control network, the J-1 had already begun shutting down before the giant monkey's fists slammed into it one after the other, hammering the battlemover into the earth before loosing a final blast of fire breath, instantly slagging what little of the mecha was not vaporized outright. A massive crater was blasted out around her feet by the secondary explosion even as the were-ape bellowed her victory.
Outraged, Nam zipped through the flaming rubble to slam stinging punches and kicks all over the giant as she ran up and down its body, adjusting her position in the slipstream to keep her feet pressed against it for traction. "HOW COULD YOU!?" she she howled, "SHE WAS MY FRIEND!" Tiring, she had to slow, and clung to the beast's fur, a mistake it quickly capitalized on to slap her away, coincidentally landing close to where Priss had shed her helmet to cradle Sylvie's broken body against her chest.
"Sylvie... I can't believe it was you..." the chestnut-topped Saber sobbed, wiping ineffectually at the blood welling from where the interface collar had dug into her neck before the cables tore free.
The sexaroids voice was a pain-filled rattle, and she coughed up a mouthful of blood before scrabbling at the data disk and croaking out, "Priss, take this... there's another girl, Anri, at my apartment, give it to her and Nam. It's why we fought, with this they can finally be free, like you... I beg you..."
"Sylvie..." her lover sobbed again, brushing back blood-matted black hair from the buma's face. "Sylvie? Answer me..."
Eyelids drooping, the dying woman forced out just a few more words. "Priss... just one... more... be kind to her... child..." Her energy was spent, then, and all that was left was thefloating feeling of shock, and a deep dissatisfaction at dying in this manner.
"Child? I don't understand.. Sylvie? SYLVIE!" Unanswered, the singer could only cry over the body of her love, Nam crawling over to join in her grief as cumulative damage from using her speed for so long left her shaking and weak with blood poisoning.
Rid of the climbing pest, oozaru-Linna turned to the only other fighters still standing, roaring a challenge into the night, even as the sirens of emergency vehicles and helicopter rotors sounded in the distance. Seeing no recognition in those bloodshot eyes, Sylia and Nene stood wary, ready to dodge if necessary. Taking their aggressive stances as defiance, she attacked, leaping into the air to drop on her erstwhile friends in a massive stomp that shook the earth as she landed, making more of the ruins collapse and forcing the two active Sabers to dodge and dodge again.
Despair tightening her chest, Sylia commanded, "We've got to try to lead her back into the canyon, away from the inhabited city. Priss is in no condition for this now, so it's up to us, Nene." Warily, she turned the powerplant in her own pack up to full output - while this one had at least not exploded when she lit off the fusion reaction, she was still less certain of the design than she'd like - and increased the draw to her personal energy supply to match. A pale glow shimmered into being around her body as it was stockpiled, and with a mental nudge it became a form-fitting energy shield that would cushion impacts and enhance her own speed and force.
Nene too raised her energy level, the battle aura she'd learned to bring out through training with her parents serving much the same purpose as Sylia's technologically generated shield. In fact, according to her mother's sensing spells, they were even formed from similar energy in essentially the same way, science catching up with ancient magic at last thanks to the theories of James Christian Dykstra as applied by Stingray genius. Concentrating on more immediate matters, she suggested, "I'll hit high, you hit her low?"

"Agreed. Try not to do too much damage, we still don't know why she transformed, or how long it will last," the Saber leader replied.
"Somehow, I don't think that'll be a problem," the redhead muttered, before pulling open a portal in the air so she could travel to the top of a still-intact building near the oozaru's head.
The maneuver went as planned, the combined attack from opposite directions taking the giant at the ankles and shoulder blades, knocking her sprawling in the shattered street. Bellowing with anger, the huge ape chased the troublesome bugs back to the quake zone, crouching on the edge to look down, trying to spot where they'd run to.
The edge itself was blasted away by a pair of energy balls, one ki-based and the other a packet of plasma in a gravatic envelope, and the giant tumbled into the gorge with a squawk which became a pained roar as her shoulder was gouged by steel beams jutting from a fallen building. Maddened, she flailed at the offending wall, crumbling it to chunks as the clouds swept in again and a heavy rain began to fall.
Deprived of moonlight, the transformation reversed, rubble half-burying the still struggling oozaru as it shrank, snout reverting to a more human mouth and nose, fur fading away to leave a seemingly human body though one only slightly scraped and bruised by the concrete where a normal person would be crushed to a pulp. Working quickly to leave before investigators arrived, Sylia and Nene dug their friend out of the debris and hurried away into the night, radioing instructions to Priss to do the same.
If the sarcastic applause and compliments for putting on such an amusing show that sounded only in her mind gave the silver-haired scion of Wayne and Stingray pause, she betrayed no sign.

-----------------------------
Next time on Bubblegum Disaster: There's a whole lot of pieces to be picked up...
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Yamane-sensei and the "70% cut-off" law - this line wasn't intended to be a pun, and she is certainly dead serious about it at the moment, but... I come from a medical family, and I know the kind of gallows humor doctors tend to have, and I'm absolutely certain that the phrase would be ingrained enough among members of the medical community that it would come out automatically.
Choji and Shika (Shikamaru) are ninja in the Naruto manga and anime written by Masahi Kishimoto. Shikamaru is a strategist as a teen, while Chouji is more of a meat tank who follows his lead. As cops in a more modern world, Chouji developed his observation and analytical skills after his friend died in the 2027 Kanto quake. Their third team mate, Ino, is as yet unused, but I'm sure she'll be barging into my thoughts soon enough to demand a role.
Jane Li and Jade Chan - Jane is Jet Li's actual daughter's name, and Jade was Jackie's niece in the Jackie Chan Adventures cartoon.
PMBs vs. MOSPEADA: While basic concept of a quick, agile motorcycle with armor for the rider which can transform and link to that armor to become a combat exoskeleton is amazingly cool in theory, the design used in Genesis Climber MOSPEADA falls short on several counts. The most significant design stupidity in the MOSPEADA cycle is that except for a pair of non-load-bearing thigh guards the ENTIRE motorcycle wraps around the rider's upper body, and I don't know about you, but I damn sure can't hold up the weight of a motorbike, let alone run, jump, and fight while carrying it; if I could then I wouldn't want to because the unpowered body armor would be less noticeable and restrict my movement that much less. A motoslave is a complete, autonomous robot which has a hollow interior to accept a pilot, who operates the limbs in much the same way as the waldo controls of a normal K-series battle frame. Further, the MOSPEADA is blocky and falls in that range where it's too ugly to be cool, but not ugly enough that no one dares to say so to its face. In contrast, the Police Motor Battloid shares the sleekness of its Knight Saber cousins, with a few variations - it's essentially the 'production model' shown in the BGC:EX RPG sourcebook, but with the hover fans and the ability to accept a pilot in battle frame mode restored. I've added a modified scan of this also, for those who don't have BGC:EX.
Paul Bergman came up with the line I gave to Dick Grayson about getting the Batmobile wrecked - thanks, PMB! And no, I didn't actually name the police motoslave after you, there may not be any such thing as "coincidence" but it wasn't me who plotted that twist.
On the classifications of humanoid combat suits - "body armor" is unpowered, though it may have computer or support systems built in, "hardsuits" are only slightly larger and generally lump in with "power armor" like the one used by Mason in canon BGC, they have some form of motive system that at least compensates for their own weight. The K-12 Armored Trooper, motoslave, and PMB are "battleframes" - significantly larger than human but the pilot's arms and legs are still at least partially inside the limbs. "Battlemovers" are big enough to have a cockpit where the pilot is entirely within the torso. I expect this all was fairly obvious from context, but just in case, here you go.
"Wait, so what happened to Flint?" It seems our dear Mr. Flint went on a snark hunt, but found a boojum instead. If you don't know what that means, and can't figure it out, read more Lewis Carroll. I've actually been more clear about what became of him than canon, if you watch the episode in question.
"Niichigo", while directly representing "ni" "ichi" and "go", 2, 1, and 5, is written as a name ni+ichigo, "two strawberries." "Masamune" being only similar in sound to "ma-sah mahn-yee," "royal guardian" in the unknown alien language of its creators, is spelled like the famous swordsmith.
"I am damn dissatisfied to be killed in this manner!" I don't remenber what movie it was, but a bad guy in a poorly dubbed martial arts movie had this for a last line, and it always stuck with me. Basically it's just me being vague about whether Sylvie has enough of a sense of unfinished business to become a ghost.
"Ano, Niichigo doko wa?" - Doko kashira, kashira kashira...
Guardian 215 should be imagined with the vocal talents of Susan Blu; if you don't know her by name, she did (among other shows) Arcee on the post-movie Transformers episodes, as well as in the movie itself. You can even keep the flanging effect if you like, though it's not really there.
Many thanks to my prereaders: Hoderi Hibiki, Paul Bergman, Nathan Baxter, Hide Hasegawa, Leong Mun Yee, Andrew Wilson, Christopher Gilbert, and Drakensis, and to everyone on the BDPreread mailing list - you get your name listed if you actually make commentary, but just reading and finding nothing bad enough to complain about is still commentary of a sort.
Drakensis also gets a nod for keeping a remote archive of the story on his web site, www.100megsfree4.com/drakensis/ in the Miscellaneous section.
Special thanks to Bob Schroeck, Consulting Acronymologist. He also happens to be the other of another rather good BGC fanfic called _Drunkard's Walk II_ (The first one is not available for public consumption, but it's a rather modular series.) The Drunkard's Walk home page is www.eclipse.net/~rms/dwmain.html and Bob's message board is at pub21.ezboard.com/bdrunkardswalkforums
Sgt. Fuko MacNamara and her art are also Bob's property, from _Drunkards Walk II_ in fact.
Bubblegum Crisis belongs to Youmex and Animeigo, I make no claims otherwise. Please don't sue me, I have no money to speak of and fanfic does more to promote your products than anything else I know of - without it, I never would have known about anime at all, and I'd certainly never have bought the BGC tapes based on the sucky box copy.
Ranma 1/2 I'm not so sure of, except that the creator was Rumiko Takahashi, not me, and that I make no claims to own IT either. I THINK that the Ranma manga are done by Viz in the US, but that may be incorrect.
The Bionic Six is similarly of unknown provenance, but I have a very vague and unreliable memory that it may have been animated by Suncoast video... In any case, it's STILL not my own creation.
_Dykstra's War_ is by Jeffery D Kooistra, published by Baen Books.
Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were created by Akira Toriyama, owned overall by Bandai I think, and released on video in the US by FUNimation and in manga by Dark Horse (again not so sure about that one - could be Viz)
Sailor Moon was created by Naoko Takeuchi, and is undoubtedly also owned by some animation studio or another. I know that the RPG rights in North America at least belong to Guardians of Order.
_Shock The Monkey_ was originally by Peter Gabriel, but was more recently covered by Ozzy and Coal Chamber.
-----------------------------
OMAKE!

As the giant ape appeared on the city skyline, the Chairman's eyes widened slightly from where he looked out of his office's huge klasterglass windows. Schooling his face into its usual imperturbable expression, Quincy turned back to his desk and keyed in a short combination. Immediately, Misato appeared on the viewscreen.
"Sir?" she saluted.
"Prepare Unit 01 for launch," he commanded gruffly.
"But the pilot -"
"A spare has arrived."
"Aye sir!"
Deep in the subterranean levels of the Tower, a massive, purple and green cyberdroid began to stir into a semblance of life.
-----------------------------
Yeah yeah, so Madigan has purple hair, not blue. Bite me, I'm delicious.

EOF
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

09_BD_WOASS_Ch_05_EX.txt

2007-06-11 - continuity edit and comma stomping
2007-06-08 - finished first draft(!!!) This is more writing than I've done at a whack in a year or more
2007-06-07 - finished Leon's report, much note/planning adjustment, added ghost scene because the newsfax was too short
2007-06-06 - finished fashionable heroine
2007-06-05 - finished sleepover/shower, working on fashionable heroine incident
2007-06-04 - finished Nene/mom sex talk
2:20 AM 6/20/2003 - preliminary notes

Dead... She'd died, and so CLOSE to winning freedom for all of them! It was so very frustrating, she could scream if she'd had any breath left. The timeless, drifting feeling changed somehow, and she opened her eyes to find herself in a swirling mist, faint shapes visible through it... Concentrating, they became clearer, almost as if she was there again, and she saw that she'd moved from where she'd died... She wasn't the only one, and it was still going on. She could see it as if a double image formed, a more solid version of the ghostly victims joining her ever so briefly in the mist, then whisking away, and she wondered why she had not.
There was a sudden scream, and she spun in surprise. It was hard to tell with the blank, black sky and shifting mist, but there was something just as dark moving not far away, mainly visible as it blocked the sight of the thrashing, screaming man she'd heard. Should she help? Could she help? Was there anything she could use as a weapon?
There was a weight in her hand, even though she knew it had been empty just a moment ago. She looked down, only to find herself holding a softly glowing, crystalline sword. *Well that's really weird,* she thought, *I've never even seen a sword in person before...* It felt right in her hands, though, as she took a few hesitant swings.
*Sometimes, you just have to go with it and see what Fate has in the shop,* she decided with a shrug, then set herself and charged at the... thing. It was black and sprouted too many teeth, claws, and tentacles for real comfort, and from the tearing sounds and the way the screaming had stopped it was probably too late for the guy it had attacked, but at least she could keep it from finding anyone else. After that... Well, maybe she could keep an eye on her friends, if she was some kind of ghost now.
---=- + -=---
FASHIONABLE HERO?
Mystery Woman Ends Buma Rampage!
By Ara Dokoda

Three security-type buma attacked Highway Six on Thursday evening, disrupting rush hour traffic and bringing that section of the city to a standstill, but miraculously causing no loss of life. A pair of Genom guard buma in a company car were near the origin of the incident and battled heroically to protect nearby humans, but further investigation has revealed a third party involved in the battle.
Just as the bodyguard units were being overwhelmed, dressed in the hottest fashion page styles, a heroine appeared! Landing out of the sky without engines or an aerodyne, the mysterious figure's haute couture was recognized by fashion correspondent Ororo Nandeska who happened to be on the scene, a body glove and tabard straight off the Parisian catwalks.
No society flower this, however, to the amazement of motorists trapped by the disruption she quickly disposed of the attackers. Could this be the mysterious Bakemono Burglar, or perhaps a hero from some distant manga come to defend the Earth from him? Martial arts student Midori described--

The flimsy newsfax blew away as another group of fire and rescue vehicles roared by, sirens blaring, drawn from an outlying ward to help with the massive destruction in the city's heart.

Bewilderbeast Studios Present
BUBBLEGUM DISASTER
Season One
WISHES ON A SHOOTING STAR
A work of BGC fan fiction by ClassicDrogn
Chapter Five EX

Cover blown anyway, Priss carried Nam with her when she left, Sylvie's body cradled carefully in the motoslave's other arm. She'd flown to one of the warehouses Sylia owned, just long enough to get out of the hardsuit, lay her former lover out on an emergency cot, and turn the air conditioning all the way up, before continuing on to deliver the data disk, the deathly ill Nam clinging weakly behind her on the transformed motoslave. She'd helped the purple-irised sexaroid up the stairs to the loft the buma shared, only to be bowled over as she opened the door by a bawling little blonde.
"Cynthia!?" she exclaimed, "What are you doing here? Everyone was worried about you!" It was unlikely the former buma even heard, the only even partly distinguishable words, muffled further by the musician's shoulder, were her own name and Sylvie's.
Huddled on a futon near the television, Hotaru and Yuki snuggled in one arm and the other still extended where Cynthia had fled from her side, Anri sniffled and said, "Don't be angry with her, Asagiri-san, we talked her into it, to keep our secret."
"You don't know how much Sylvie wanted to tell you once she connected you and Cynthia's 'Priss-onee,' but she just couldn't, for our sake," Nam agreed. "If things hadn't gone out of control, she'd have been back with you by tomorrow and all of us would leave, far from anywhere they were looking for us." The speedster's voice burbled in her throat by the end of the explanation, and she coughed uncontrollably, spraying flecks of dark blood on her covering hand.
Tinkling voices raised in alarm, the two fae buma jumped down from Anri's arm, metallic wings unfolding to catch the fall and carry them to the doorway. They each grabbed one of her hands, tugging worriedly toward her own futon. Anri too stood and came to help the pallid, sweating sexaroid in and down to rest.
Wails fading at last, Cynthia pulled Priss inside as well, still tearful eyes and red cheeks turning to her in a shaky but still recognizable attempt at Sylvie's 'serious' expression. "I'm very sorry, Priss-onee, I tried to help Sylvie-nee, but... But she was too far awaaay!" Collapsing against her first friend's legs again, the small girl relapsed into tears. The chestnut haired Saber gathered her up in her arms and held her close.
---=- + -=---
Not having wanted to draw out the time between realizing how much fun motorcycles were and going shopping for one, Nene hadn't stopped in at her parents' Miribile home the night before - she'd kind of resolved to expand her time less earlier yesterday evening, when she realized how much she was changing while her friends stayed the same living twenty four hours per day instead of a week's worth, but that had been the immediate deciding factor.
She'd spent much of the day looking at various new and customized models with Nam before settling on a Raven Custom, the same base model as the last two the Doctor had tricked out for Priss before her current bike, but with a newer tuning process that should make it a close rival for the scratch built job she had now - the one that had been used on Nam's own ride. For that matter, Dr. Raven was a much more skilled mechanic than the guy who'd set up the other girl's cycle, and would undoubtedly wrangle even better performance.
After the night they'd just had, though, she didn't know what to think of it all, so when Hiryuko stepped out of a portal as they laid the still unconscious Linna in an infirmary bed, her bruises already beginning to purple, Nene decided to bake two cakes in one oven and sat down for a talk with her mom.
Her friend came first of course, so she put speculation about the sexaroid and what she'd really wanted on hold to ask if there had been some connection between the dancer's terrifying transformation and the supernatural world her family was so intertwined with.
"Nothing we could find had any unusual mystical significance," the elder redhead replied, "and believe me, we looked. No spells, no demons, we even checked for the were-curse and shapechanger-type vampirism, nothing. Her spiritual signature didn't change so much as intensify." Seeing her daughter's quizzical look, Hiryuko explained further. "She accessed a buttload more ki, of course, but that was more of a secondary effect - it's as if she went into a trance and her most primal self was brought out, so deep that her rational mind was completely suppressed, and she didn't know you as her friends." Shaking her head, the older woman concluded, "Whatever it was, that giant transformation is part of her natural being, not something imposed from outside."
"But, wait," the pink Saber protested, "if it was just like going into a trance, could it have been intentional? Obviously it didn't quite work if it was, Linna wouldn't just fight indiscriminately like that, but it was pretty scary when the DD transformed the way Priss's Guardian thingie did. I mean, considering what it did to Mason, and all."
"I don't think so, and as for the DD, she wasn't even lookin' at it, Kireiko. As soon as the moon appeared from the clouds, it fascinated her," Hiryuko explained, using her daughter's birth name instead of the nickname she'd adopted to join the AD Police. "That was why we checked for werewolf and vampirism - werewolves transform under a full moon, and Mideon vampires can stand the sun, transform themselves, and are also influenced by the moon. Neither of those would explain having a tail, anyway - most likely, she's got some spirit ancestry herself, maybe Sun Wu Kung, the Monkey king - It was a long time ago now, but he did set up a kingdom here in the Mortal Realm, after the adventure that inspired the story of The Journey to the West."
"Maybe that's why it only happened after her tail showed up," the (still, if barely) youngest Saber guessed. "But then why didn't it happen when we were sparring, or at least when that soul eater attacked in Miribile?"
Her mother shrugged. "Dunno, maybe it takes some time, or only works at night, or it is the moon after all. Once she wakes up, why not ask, though I'd've thought she'd mention it by now, knowing about us."
Nene hummed thoughtfully, and decided to wait until they could talk to her friend about it. That left Nam, Sylvie, and their whole situation, and she explained meeting them, the cycle ride, and the day out she'd had with the sweet-tempered woman who had turned out to be one of the rogue sexaroids, and who was probably the Bakemono Bandit as well.
"I suppose it's only natural if she's totally hot and has a nice personality considering what she was made for," she recapped, "but I really had fun shopping with her today, and I think she did too. We were going to get together again after my shift tomorrow - today, I guess - but now I don't know how to feel about it. What do you think, Mom?"
The older redhead sniggered and sang, "Sounds like my Ne-ne-ko-chan has a cru-ush!"
A portal formed behind the incandescently blushing teen, and Tora Kagami stepped through just as she sputtered, "MOM! I do _not_ have a crush on her! I'm just not sure if she was really my friend or wanted something else, you know, the whole sexaroid thing!" He froze, pale as a ghost, except for a face blue with shock.
An evil glint in her eye, Hiryuko stated seriously, "It's all right, dear, this is the twenty first century after all. No matter what personal choices you make, we'll still love you and support you, ne anata?"
Sweat drops pouring down the back of his head, Tora made an inarticulate sort of "kack-kack" sound.
Realizing that he was behind her and what her last sentence probably sounded like, Nene eeped, her blush, impossibly, deepened, and she hunkered down as if trying to sink into the ground.
Grinning now, the devil in the shape of her mother continued, "Your friends will be all right with it too, they were fine with Priss and Nam's friend Sylvie, after all. It's good to have the support of your friends, ne a-na-taaa?"
Eyes blank, her father gagged and stammered a few more times, them managed to squeak out, "O-of course, dear... I just remembered... something ... I need to do... somewhere. Right, seeya!" After a couple of tries, he managed to get another portal open, and fled into it posthaste.
The older woman collapsed back in her chair, cackling like a hyena. She was still rubbing her eyes and giggly by the time her daughter recovered enough to squeal, "I cannot BELIEVE you just did that! How am I ever going to look at Daddy again!?"
Forcing down another fit, Hiryuko retorted, "Eh, 's good for 'im. Anyway, I assume you meant the Bakemono Burglar situation by 'the whole sexaroid thing?'"
"YES! That!" Nene snapped. "Not some ... some perverted innuendo, ero-mama!"
Finally having suppressed her mirth, the still young looking Kagami matron replied seriously. "I was just teasing, but I also meant it - it would be all right, even if it meant you'd have to adopt. Don't think you can get out of giving me grandchildren that easily, little missy."
"MOM!"
"Seriously, you're eighteen now, sweetie, and I'm glad you decided to wait, but isn't it about time you started dating?" Her mother leaned forward, and finished off her cooling cup of tea. "I think you should go ahead and give her a chance, and time will tell. There's no magic answer to making friends, even if you literally make them like a golem, or more importantly, a buma, the friends part is still up to you."
---=- + -=---
Once everything had settled down, Cynthia used her healing ability again on Nam. The sexaroid had visibly relaxed and regained color as the lambent blue-green glow of magic played around her, falling asleep at last as the worst of the damage was reversed. Cynthia was too exhausted herself to finish it entirely, but at least now it could safely keep until morning - even with her apparently limitless source of magical energy, the concentration to use it was wearing on the child.
"What will you do now?" Anri asked quietly, after disposing of the tissues she'd used to wipe Nam's forehead. She glanced over to the little blonde before returning Priss's serious look.
Still kneeling on the other side of the futon, sleepy child curled in her lap, the Saber frowned in thought, then replied, "I don't want to take her on my bike, especially this tired, better to just let her sleep as she's been here." Uncharacteristically hesitant, she bit her lips before continuing, "If it's not troublesome, I'll stay here with her. In the morning we can call for a car, and maybe see if Nam's bike is still salvageable after crashing it into the quake zone and that fight. The Akimotos will be overjoyed to see her again, and Sy- uh, Cecilia can easily do whatever is involved with that data disk for you. Then, I don't know then. A funeral, I guess." Downcast, she muttered to herself, "Another funeral..."
"It's no trouble, but the only futon left is..." Anri trailed off, knowing Sylvie and Priss had shared a bed a few times in the past weeks but unsure how the singer would feel about it now that her partner had passed.
"I think that's probably the only way I'm gonna get to sleep at all tonight," the chestnut haired woman replied, giving the sexaroid a haunted look. Forcing a smile, she changed topics. "Is there a shower in this place, though? I'm kinda rank, after that fight."
There was, and as she washed Priss sang Konya wa Hurricane, about half tempo and double heart, to the ghost of memories. It was still a pain how the water kept getting in her eyes, but somehow it wasn't quite so totally devastating, at least until she was done and it was time to face that empty bed.
Though she couldn't quite make out the words, Anri too was comforted by the musician's low, gentle voice, lulled to a semi-doze where she lay, Cynthia curled into her side.
And finally, outside but heedless of the rain, a dark-haired figure listened with senses beyond the human. Its eyes flashed pale red as it turned back to the street watchfully.
---=- + -=---
Though she'd sent Mackie off to get some sleep, Sylia stayed at her unconscious subordinate's bedside, wondering if she'd ever manage to get back to a life where she felt a comfortable level of control. She'd be the first to admit she was far from perfect or all-knowing, but it had been nice when she could make a plan and have a reasonable chance of pulling it off without the interference of kami, demons, or were-kaiju. 'Sometimes the only thing to control is yourself, and let matters happen as they must;' it was all very well for Kami-sama to say it, but look where it had gotten him!
Shaking her head, she sighed and brushed a stubborn spike back from Linna's brow. The last time she'd seen the brunette in here - something all too frequent lately, she could have been competing with Priss - was only a week before, when a buma had tried to gut her without even the benefit of a hardsuit's protection. That had been the night she'd worn the date outfit Sylia had gotten for her, fortunately, and the bulletproof nanoweave had stopped the worst damage, but even her remarkably tough muscles and flesh had torn slightly at the impact point, and needed a few stitches to close. If it hadn't been for her own recent enhancements she might not have been able to get a needle through, and she'd broken three doing it. New, monofilament reinforced titanium needles were available now, but at least this time the dancer's wounds were limited to bruising and abrasions from the rubble that had all but buried her when she changed back from a giant ape... And if that wasn't the least effective reassurance the Saber leader had ever heard, she didn't know what was.
Linna had gone to meet her date that night, a little late perhaps but not much. She hadn't counted on a traffic jam on the way into the city, though, and even more unexpected was the blast of an explosion somewhere up ahead where traffic was stopped. Seconds later the searing needle of a laser speared the police aerodyne flying in from the south, and she decided to investigate.
Thinking quickly, the Sabers' melee specialist pulled off a bandanna and tied it over her face, then eased her car into the break down lane - fortunately she'd been traveling next to it, and had left herself some space before the car ahead. Tripping the emergency beacon in her wristwatch and leaving the car's blinkers on, she stepped out onto the tarmac. Ignoring the gawking salaryman in the mid-life-crisismobile behind her, she gathered herself, crouched, and leapt up to the overhead light poles, bouncing from one to the next as she went to check things out.
Arriving, she quickly assessed the situation, still crouched on a nearby pole. The engine compartment of a slick black sedan had been crushed into the road by some massive impact, and a gout of smoke rose from the wrecked frame of a BU-55B security buma nearby, probably the source of the explosion earlier. A second security-type was being torn apart by three of its military cousins not far away, one holding each arm while the last twisted its head off from behind. On the ground where she'd fallen after being tossed into a second car, a whimpering woman in a ruined suit scrabbled blindly with one good arm, ineffectually trying to get away while blood gushed where bones had poked out of broken limbs.
Linna felt a hot ball of rage explode in her gut, sweeping away the last of her wariness like dust in the shockwave of a bomb, at the sight of another obvious buma assassination. Her battle aura flared to life, flickering to her awakened senses in the physical manifestation of her emotions, though the untrained would see a shimmer like a heat mirage at best. A metallic squeal marked an imprint forming in the aluminum lamp post as her hand clenched unconsciously, and then she was flying through the air, stylish white boots each slamming into a buma's head, just too late to save the beleaguered bodyguard.
Thrown off balance by her attack, the 55C that had ripped off its head staggered back, while her other target was knocked off its feet, getting tangled in its victim's inert legs as it fell. The other attacker managed to stay clear, only to fall under a relentless series of hammer-blows from fists and feet, armor cratering as a tiny burst of ki was released at each impact. It staggered back a step, two, then toppled as a Dragon Stomp shattered its left knee joint, all but snapping the leg right off with its force.
Crashing back to the road, the combat buma calculated, then braced its arms and sealed its optics to use the laser mounted in its mouth. The dim outline of the unexpected enemy extended an arm in a hopeless attempt to shield itself, and it felt a cruel satisfaction at turning the tables on such a powerful opponent - amazingly so, for a model with such a comprehensive human disguise. A glow of plasma formed in the outstretched palm, some kind of hidden weapon array, but the laser was already charged and the firing relay tripped just as the target cried out-
Linna released the ki blast with an explosive kiyai, a basic ball of superheated air compressed in a bubble of energy. It impacted just as the first glimmer of preignition light leaked out of the buma's mouth laser, blowing away the focussing array and the fat fiber optic lightpipe that came from the actual emitter, deep in the chest. Undirected, the laser blast vaporized the buma's own neck and head, leaving the brunette Saber victorious but panting from exertion, regretting the energy expended even as the finishing attack landed.
She had to fight smarter. The impact bursts had been effective, if not as much as her hardsuit's knuckle bombers, but between them and the ill-advised fireball she'd used more than half of the energy boost gained by her spiking anger, and the other two buma were back on their feet, moving to set her up for a crossfire. The two-way pager watch had stopped buzzing on her wrist, so she knew at least that it had been noticed and backup was probably on its way, but one way or another this would almost certainly be over by the time anyone could arrive.
It was the difference between sparring and combat that had set her up for a problem - Hiryuko had told her time and again how inefficient a simple fireball was compared to beam style attacks, let alone advanced manipulations like the Kagami woman's Gamera Bombs or Tora's cold-ki techniques, but when she could always just jump back and call up more power it hadn't seemed like such a problem. Now, having jumped into battle fueled by unthinking anger and without properly powering up first, then foolishly squandering the energy she did have with that same anger, Linna was at a disadvantage - the more so in fact, for having taken one of the attackers out so quickly, as the remaining pair would be taking her seriously now - rarely the case with combat models, she'd found, unless they had a level of experience uncommon this far from the active sector of the Polar War. It was due to the pack-animal instincts instilled in them, and the far greater than human strength packed into their cybernetic bodies.
There was no time to contemplate abstracts, though, the 55C that had decapitated the bodyguard had taken the time to crush its skull before moving to deal with her, but now it had set itself and opened the chest plates over its heat projector, probably expecting her to dodge away into the third's attack. That tactic might have worked if Linna wasn't well aware of the weakness the array's focussing lenses presented, if someone was quick enough to take advantage.
That, the tailed woman certainly was. She formed a microburst just over the knuckles of her first and second fingers again and skipped in close, slamming it home and producing a shockwave of ki that crushed through the thinner, inner armor as well as spreading to shatter the lenses, damaging the buma's power supply. Fortunately it was not equipped with its own fusion core like the Superbuma, as some 55Cs had begun to be refitted with to allow unlimited use of their energy weapons, instead relying on a superconductor storage ring, but the liberated current was still enough to arc and energize enough plasma for a secondary explosion that ripped apart the unit's chest and pelted the vigilante with enough shrapnel to make her bless Sylia again for providing the bulletproof outfit.
Even with that protection she'd been a hair too slow this time, the skin of her face and upper body reddened from the instant's exposure to the weapon's effect, her left arm and fist blistering painfully under the tight-fitting body suit and glove.
Flinching back, she was blindsided by the last of the buma, and then it was Linna's turn to go sprawling. Kicking off as she hit, the martial artist tucked into a roll and then sprang back to her feet. The buma had apparently learned from its fellows' fates, pressing a physical attack rather than trying to use its more exotic weapons. She changed styles, deflecting the attacks with gentle seeming, circular moves that had all the inevitability of a river flowing to the sea, rather than the direct, power moves of the first stage of the fight. She wasn't as skilled in Tai Chi as Karate, but the defense it allowed was excellent, and its internal focus would allow raising her ki again without having to break contact and power up directly.
That wasn't to say she abandoned the attack entirely, of course - no defense can last forever, and a buma wasn't going to tire before she would even if it did. Brushing its arms aside as the cyberdroid tried to capture her in a crushing bear hug, the brunette snapped up one leg, launching a kick that lifted the heavy combat machine off its feet. Pressing the attack in hopes of regaining the initiative Linna rechambered the leg and jumped after it, a second kick knocking the buma sideways to crash against the wrecked car, the Knight Saber catching herself with a crouched touchdown on the hood of another stopped vehicle, immediately kicking off again to keep up the pressure.
Staggered but not stunned, the buma ripped the open car door out of its frame, making her dip into the Kagami aerial techniques to spin her body out of the way and push off from the flying debris, deflecting herself higher into the air, coming in from the higher angle with her hands curled like a stooping hawk's talons to dig into the enemy's shoulders at the collarbone, or in this case the analogous joint in the buma's armor.
Fingers reinforced by her own life energy dug into the seam in the armor, and the buma roared in frustration and pain as Linna used her momentum to spin around their common center of mass and the pivot point of the car's roof and throw it again, this time crashing into the cement retaining wall on the side of the highway. Overstress indicators flared in its neural net, warning of spinal damage at the small of its back where the edge of the wall had hit, and the combat buma wobbled on unsteady feet as it struggled to stand again.
Buoyed by the obvious signs of damage the martial artist hopped down from her landing place on the ever more damaged sedan, and was unprepared for the seemingly punch-drunk enemy to counterattack, its arm spearing out with a clawed hand to gut her. Linna rolled with the attack as best she could but was still doubled over by pain and the sheer force, egg rolling somewhat clumsily away and clutching her abdomen. Fortunately the attack didn't seem to have penetrated, but she could still feel the hot, slick sensation of flowing blood inside her body glove, and knew she'd need to finish the fight quickly. Fortunately the buma had knocked itself off its own feet with the move, teetering precariously over the side of the elevated highway, a forty foot drop from the upper deck to the ground level street below.
Bracing itself against the wall with its arms, the mechanoid targeted the troublesome enemy that had appeared and started the charge cycle for its mouth laser, calculating that her reduced mobility and battle damage would prevent the kind of counters previously used against ranged attacks. This would definitely be a combat log worth reviewing at the maintenance depot, it mused in the seconds before the weapon was ready to fire, preferably with a level three lubricant and wear replacement in progress and a cool nutrient shake.
It fired but was unprepared for the speed Linna used to zigzag around the beam, her stomach burning as the stress tore the damaged tissues further but will unshaken as she moved in for the finishing blow, a ki-infused uppercut topped with another knuckle bomb which blew the 55C's head off before it could even open its optic shields.
Leaning over the mechanical corpse, arms braced against the cracked but still relatively whole retaining wall, the victorious Knight Saber breathed shallowly, trying to avoid further strain on her abused stomach. Gathering herself after a moment, she again pressed one hand against the wound before hopping carefully up onto the barrier and jogging back to where she'd left her car, since she could hear more aerodynes approaching. Hopefully it was far enough from the front of the traffic jam that no one would have connected her with anything out of the ordinary, or taken notice of her license plate number... If nothing else, she'd be able to use the cell phone in her purse when she got back to it, and get in touch with Sylia or Nene to have them do their computer hoodoo and remove any connections to her that a search for the number might turn up.
They'd done that, a different number being entered into the record systems as being registered to Linna Yamazaki, and the next day she'd reported her plate stolen, as sometimes happened when criminals or simple joyriders wanted to disguise a similarly colored car. A small administrative fee later and she had a third, legitimate new number and plates, and then it was all over but the healing - gratifyingly rapid - and the lectures from Sylia and Hiryuko, which were dishearteningly long.
Now her team mate, her friend was lying in that bed again, apparently in considerably better shape but presenting an even bigger mystery than how she'd suddenly grown - or perhaps regenerated, since she remembered having one as a child - an agile, furry monkey-like tail in the wake of the Griffon incident. They'd been unable to find any documented incidence of a human with such a fully developed prehensile member, nor even any animal analogues of the large ductless gland that ran most of its length, and seemed to have a direct connection to the optic nerves of all things.
Feeling herself nodding off, Sylia shook her head, a few silver-blue locks bobbing where they'd slipped free of the bun she wore under her armor helmet. Every scan she could run said Linna was simply in a deep but normal sleep, and the circling swarm of unanswered questions would keep until morning at least... Maybe afternoon, with how late it had gotten and how exhausted she felt.
---=- + -=---
It was around mid-morning before Leon was dug out of the rubble, the PMB having lost power when the gas turbine in the rear wheel folded on its back was damaged. Even at that, he counted himself lucky - the sturdy mecha and body armor had prevented any major injuries, all he'd suffered were sprains and joint stress when falling wreckage of the wall he'd been tossed into battered him around like a rag doll. Despite his energetic protests the rescue workers still bundled him off to the mobile hospital that had been set up, but with all the serious injuries they had to deal with, he'd done nothing but wait and grumble in frustration since the triage medic determined he had a heart beat, normal body temperature, and no abnormal swelling or bleeding wounds, then handed him a granola bar and waved him at the steel chairs where those who weren't in immediate danger were waiting for someone to have time for a more detailed examination.
He'd tried to leave once, actually, but the THP motorcycle officer who was handling security wouldn't allow it - apparently this was a special area set up for people who'd been buried, and everyone had to have a detailed check for internal injuries before they could go. Neither Leon's higher rank nor the fact that he'd been buried in a mecha that kept anything from hitting his torso impressed the cycle cop, the Inspector was a patient who'd been buried, he would wait quietly and get checked out or they'd sedate him.
His relief was considerable, then, when Daley appeared, dirt-smeared and more rumpled than he'd ever seen his dapper partner, but with orders from way up the political totem pole to collect him and get a report. Though, he did wonder, "How'd you get get here so fast, anyway? I'd have thought you'd still be floating around in space."
Brushing back dust-clogged red hair with one hand, the other Inspector said, "When the explosions started I used police authority to hold a shuttle that was about to launch and get a seat. I was worried about my cute partner," he joked with a tired grin. Seeing that Leon was in no mood for humor, he continued, "They pretty much grabbed me at the spaceport lobby and sent me to help out - when you were found they called for the ADP to see if it was dangerous to leave it there while looking for more survivors, and I happened to be nearby. I pulled the recorder's disk and played the video feed to see if it had anything important. When the chief heard you'd been on the scene, he sent me to get a report on what happened after the unit shut down, and I keep getting called with orders from higher up the food chain saying to hurry up about it. I'm just wondering -"
The chirp of the police-band cell in his suit pocket cut Daley off, and he answered with another wry grin to Leon, who was starting to be amused in spite of himself. "Inspector Wong ... Yes, sir. I've got him right here actually ... Absolutely, sir, I'll make sure to route a copy to your office ... I'm on it." Closing the phone and jerking his head toward the cruiser he'd arrived in, the redhead confided, "That was Defense Minister Callahan, calling from the emergency Diet session - this is serious, Leon."
Arriving at the car, he retrieved a standard tablet PC from the seat and woke it up, opening a file to take notes in and starting the audio recorder. "This is Inspector Daley Wong, AD Police, interviewing Inspector Leon McNichol, also AD Police, recovered from the scene of the incident in a prototype police motorcycle battloid. As the logs from the unit have already been retrieved, could you start from when it shut down?"
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

Running through his memories, the battered policeman paused a moment, then began, "I'd just caught up with the DD and was out of weapons, so I tried a physical attack. It caught the blow and threw me into a wall, and things are fuzzy from there - the next thing I can say for sure is that the DD was in about the same place but heavily damaged, and the pilot had opened the cockpit for some reason. The blue Knight Saber was in one of their motorbike units, but she'd raised her own suit arm to aim at the pilot. For some reason she didn't or couldn't fire. Then that giant... thing attacked again. It ripped the DD's pilot out of the cockpit and tossed her aside, then beat it into scrap and hit what was left with another energy blast. Blue went to check on the pilot, while the fast one attacked the monster, but she got smacked away as well. It moved then so it was hard to see from where I was buried, but the last two Sabers attacked it then, and lead it back to the quake zone."
Surprised, his partner queried, "You don't think it was working with them, then, some kind of battlemover piloted by the missing one with the green suit?"
"After what happened with the Griffon?" Leon shook his head. "She's got to be dead, crushed like jelly. As for the monster, it sure didn't look like a battlemover, and it was acting completely uncontrollable, like a rogue buma, not in any kind of teamwork with them or anyone else. It's more likely they were after that thing and the battles just happened to cross, though that still doesn't say where it came from or where it went."
Daley made a few notes, then looked back at the file and asked, "The pilot wasn't in the DD, then? What happened to her?"
Leon frowned again, remembering. Eventually he answered, "I didn't look back that way until the monster and the pink and white Knight Sabers had left... She was covered in blood, dead or just unconscious, and her partner had collapsed but was still moving. The blue Saber carried them both away." The frown deepened at that, but the rest of his face was an unreadable mask.
"According to Kaufmann's statement, he hired the Knight Sabers to retrieve her and the DD, or at least destroy it," the redhead noted. "Given that I only arrested him a couple hours before, that would have been in line with their contract if they didn't know. It still doesn't look good for them, though."
Leon was surprised by that one, complaining, "They're trying to pin this on them? The Sabers have always been on our side; even when that building was destroyed the investigation showed it was the gas heating system, set off by the buma's grenades."
"Someone has to take the rap, and it's either them or the DD pilot, since the other battlemover disappeared," the other cop reasoned. He stopped the recorder and entered a few commands, sending copies of the file and his notes to headquarters and the various political offices that had wanted it and had the authority to make it stick. Then he settled more comfortably in the driver's seat and began again. "Okay, once more, from the beginning of the encounter this time. This is Inspector Daley Wong..."
--=--
Amid the massive rescue, cleanup and recovery efforts, no one took any special notice of one more buma clearing debris, especially not in the quake zone. That it was carrying a small metal cooler and putting the chunks of flesh and hair inside before returning to the unmarked van it alone had arrived in, went unremarked as well.
---=- + -=---
Linna woke reluctantly, curling into the fluffy blankets. She hadn't slept that well for a week at least, not when she was alone. She didn't know why, but her strength problems had turned out not to be problems as her relationship with Yasuo progressed; after a certain point it just drained away and she could be a normal woman for a while instead of living in a world of eggshells and rice paper. It made... things... even better, and she was pretty sure Yasuo enjoyed her enthusiasm as well. Eyes still closed she gave a salacious grin and snuggled the pillow tighter - the new infirmary bed was just incredibly comfortable, she could sleep here all the...
*Wait, the infirmary? Why would I be in the infirmary?* Arms, legs, fingers, toes, tail, nose - everything checking in and twitching against the covers as she took inventory. Something else that needed taking care of, but not immediately yet, and no damage that felt worse than mild bruising. "What could have happened?" she wondered quietly. "We were just getting ready to jump the DD, but then what?" None of the other beds were occupied, and the clock display on the monitor in the corner said it was around two PM, the same day they'd mobilized in the wee hours of the morning, so she hadn't been out for a serious amount of time.
Shrugging, she got up and took care of that increasingly urgent problem, then took a quick shower, emerging draped in a big yellow towel and fluffing out her spiky hair so it would dry on its own. That was another question - why had she been sleeping in the buff? Even if she had somehow gotten knocked out without raising a welt on her head, she hadn't had any injuries bad enough to need to strip her to treat, though she'd noticed a needle mark in her left elbow, familiar from the times she'd need to have blood drawn for testing, or to have a supply in case she needed a transfusion. It was one mystery after another, but if she'd been put here instead of her room in the HQ apartments there had to be a reason.
Letting out a resigned puff of air, she snagged the remote control and an emery board from the desk and perched on the bed to do her toenails and watch the news. She quickly forgot all thoughts of pedicures as coverage continued of the devastation that had struck the center of the city, from a battle that had lasted barely two minutes. With so little time to get any cameras on the scene, footage was limited, just a few shaky, long range shots of something big and dark moving among the low buildings of a minor business district, firing a series of energy blasts from its head, and grainy stills from a cell phone camera.
"What the hell happened here!?" she blurted.
"We were hoping you could tell us," said a man's voice from the doorway. She placed it as soon as she looked - it was Sylia's, no, 'Cecilia Ishioka-Wayne's' private doctor, T. T. Vector. "I take it that means you don't remember what happened last night, then?"
He sat down at the desk, booting up the terminal there and activating a second, dedicated monitor on the wall. Watching curiously as he navigated the file system, Linna could see that he was pulling up a clip from Nene's hardsuit camera, and momentarily it opened, showing a low angle shot of some giant, hairy monster swelling to fill the screen, a scrap of green and grey hanging from one shoulder then falling away as it slammed its fists together with a crash of displaced air and roared.
*Green and grey? That's the bodysuit for my new armor!* "Did that thing attack me, then?" she asked incredulously. "I don't feel worked over, but not like that time when Hiryuko healed me, either. What is it, some kind of buma?" *Oh, great, he's got Bad News Face. Do they give classes in that at medical school or something?*
Bracing herself for whatever was coming, Linna was still unprepared when the doctor solemnly stated, "Actually, that's you. Miss Kagami's hardsuit camera got the best view, but her mother was also watching from a more distant location, and reported that when the clouds cleared, you became fascinated by the full moon and transformed into the giant, ape-like creature. Though exhibiting no signs of conscious thought you then proceeded to attack the designated mission target, but the collateral damage was extreme and once it was silenced Mistress Ishioka-Wayne and Miss Kagami were forced to lead you away from populated areas until the transformation reversed itself."
Paling and hugging her arms to her chest, Linna sickly said, "I attacked Nene and Sylia? Oh kami, are they...?" Looking wildly at the other beds as if she could somehow have missed two of her best friends lying in them, she felt no reassurance - that thing had been HUGE, and the video on the news had shown energy blasts that leveled entire BLOCKS.
"They are fine, as is Miss Asagiri, and the other BU-33S who was assisting the pilot of the battlemover, Nam I believe her name was. Unfortunately the pilot herself - the young lady Miss Asagiri had been involved with recently, if I understand correctly - did not, and as you saw on the news, collateral damage was severe." The doctor's face tightened briefly before returning to a professional calm, as he concluded, "As for yourself, apart from minor abrasions and contusions and your still anomalous tail, you seem to be in perfect health. I Must recommend avoiding strong exertion or excitement until the cause of the incident can be determined, however."
The anchorman was giving the latest update on the numbers injured and dead, as well as still missing. The brunette laughed hollowly before repeating, "No exertion or excitement, got it." Eyes glistening, she grabbed the big pillow and hugged it, chin sinking into one end as she kept watching the news. The young doctor asked her a few other questions but she didn't really hear, just shaking her head until he went away and she could cry for real. Nene appeared sometime later to hold her and that was even worse, because murdering monsters didn't deserve to have friends like that.
The Knight Sabers were supposed to STOP rampaging monsters, dammit, not become them. That was what she'd joined to do, what she was proud to do. *What I'll do anything it takes to do,* she resolved, finally wiping away her tears, and dropping the pillow so she could hug Nene back. *If they can't find out what happened, and how to stop it ever happening again, I'll do what's necessary. To stop rampaging monsters from hurting people.* She gave the younger girl a squeeze - the redhead was one of the few who could handle the incredible strength she was still getting used to - and murmured thanks for being such a good friend.
Feeling Linna come around, the half-spirit patted her back and happily returned the squeeze.
---=- + -=---
Linna had stayed behind when Nene and Sylia left not long after, tail tucked close around her waist and once again hugging the stuffing out of her pillow - nearly literally - as she stayed glued to the news coverage with a deeply sorrowful expression, though the first crushing surge of guilt had thankfully passed. Nene was kind of glad, one of the things they had to do was take Sylvie's body to a funeral home where Sylia had connections, which the grieving former dancer would undoubtedly have found devastating. Nene was bad enough off herself, and even Sylia, who'd never met the buma alive, was solemn. She'd dropped Nene off at ADPolice headquarters on her way to pick up Priss, the surviving sexaroids, and surprisingly enough Cynthia, who was no doubt in for a record-breaking Sylia-lecture after running away.
She was somewhat on edge, under the circumstances, so when the Chief spotted her coming into the office and bellowed, "ROMANOVA! WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN, EVERYONE GOT CALLED IN HOURS AGO!?" she snapped back without conscious thought.
"I've been taking my FRIEND to the MORGUE, OKAY!? She was KILLED last night, and I got hurt in it myself!" Suddenly realizing what she'd just done, she paled and stared at her feet, waiting to be fired for yelling at the boss. Fortunately she hadn't said anything about why they'd been there or how she was injured, that would have lead to even bigger problems.
Taken aback momentarily, Todo whispered a curse and wiped away the sweat on his balding pate awkwardly, before quietly apologizing, "I'm sorry to hear that, Romanova. There was too much of that going around last night." She wasn't a line officer after all, where death was a daily prospect and came all too often for friends and comrades. In some ways, she was very young, and to tell the truth he liked how she reminded him of his niece at times.
More firmly, the thickset man commanded, "Well, you're here now, so get over here and help me answer these damn phones. Everyone else from the office is out on disaster relief, and every two-bit politico from the Prime Minister to the Nerima-cho dog catcher wants to know what we're doing about that disappearing giant. Tell them the investigation is in progress and we'll deal with it as firmly as the law allows. The press gets the same story and not a word more! If there's an actual, current buma incident, transfer them to the Second Division in Minato-cho, they've kept their response unit intact to deal with them while our officers and heavy equipment assist emergency services."
---=- + -=---
Eventually, the fires were put out, the streets cleared, everyone who could be saved had been saved, and life in Megatokyo returned to something like the old routine. Reconstruction would still be underway for some time, and the buma crews were out in even greater force than the previous, still ongoing Kanto quake recovery levels. The ADP was kept busy with over worked and under maintained rogues, but thankfully no major incidents involving the more powerful security and military models occurred. The government witch-hunt a few of the more extreme politicians had tried to stir up against the Knight Sabers was stifled by more level heads, with some help from a subtle media campaign of data showing their many pro-bono sorties to stop rampaging buma and a couple of contracts to capture major criminals leaked to investigating reporters, though their standing in even the shadier government circles had taken a significant dive.
Sylia had set Nam and Anri up with full identities in another part of the city after making the necessary repairs and modifications to their systems. The slight shimmer of her synchronization system's energy field had prevented Leon or his mecha from getting clear images of Nam's facial structure, and lavender was a common enough hair color - including the dye jobs, anyway - not to be suspicious on its own. For her part, Anri hadn't been implicated in anything since arriving on the planet anyway. Their records from the Genaros escape were simply altered enough for image matching systems to pass them by, and since the voices at Genom who'd been putting the official heat on had only ever cared about the DD and its pilot, their disappearance was quickly swept under the tide of current police work.
Nam had gotten a different cycling jumpsuit, of course, but little more subdued than her original yellow and blue - the new one was mostly black, with a white collar and trim stripes at the shoulder seams, a wide white stripe down the outside of each leg, and a pair of blue bands, one light and one dark, that wrapped around her from the left shoulder across her chest and lower back to end on the left thigh. It was actually quite similar to the white jumpsuit Sylia had worn to drive the Batmobile, but rather than a clamshell breastplate Nam had just added silver-grey boots, armguards, and a wide, segmented belt with a dozen little compartments to help hide the sonic blasters she still kept handy as a precaution.
Nam and Anri came to visit Cynthia a time or two, trying to build bridges with the Akimotos after inducing the girl to run away with them, with but limited success. She and Nene had continued to hang around together in their free time, though not often in company with Priss as it hurt the singer just to be around the purple-eyed buma who was so tied with her memories of Sylvie.
The singer filled her days with music to keep busy, and the Replicants' increasing popularity saw them score a gig at the fashionable Club Olympus. She'd lost a bit of weight as well, and every now and then she'd see a well-built woman with short dark hair from the corner of her eye, only to spin and find no one there. The funeral for the freedom-loving buma had been held a few days later, but Priss had been unable to lay her to rest in her heart.
Linna had quit her instructor's job at Phoebe's Gym, claiming a long term injury from what had become known as "the Doomsday Incident" after the battlemover's involvement had become more public knowledge. As the melee specialist had become more withdrawn and subdued, Sylia worried that there might be some element of truth to the lie, if not in a physical sense. The only time she was her old self was with her music-industry boyfriend, and despite the injunction against such outside liaisons in the groups' largely ignored charter the Saber leader could only feel thankful that the relationship seemed stable for once.
It was two weeks after the disastrous battle that she finally made some small headway in finding a reason for Linna's metamorphosis, as Dr. Vector finally delivered the results of the blood test comparisons he'd run between the sample taken that night and on previous occasions before and after her tail had appeared. Since regrowing the appendage, all of the samples had included varying amounts of an unusual hormone, and on the night in question the level was an order of magnitude greater.
The unknown gland running the length of the member was the obvious culprit, but the trigger remained unclear until Sylia remembered the odd link it had to the optic nerves, the extra fibers in her spinal cord the only other major anatomical differences between Linna and baseline human. The full moon seemed to be a reasonable possibility then, since it had been the last thing she looked at before transforming, and to test the hypothesis a virtual reality headset was loaded with the simulation of an otherwise quiet moonlit field. On a pleasant sunny day they hiked out to the valley where the Orca IV had crashed, Nene and Nam also tagging along in case the experiment worked *too* well. Dr. Vector was not included in the expedition, as Nam was a capable medic and there was no way around the need to strip down unless she wanted to tear out of her clothes if it worked. While Linna could handle being nude in only semi-private situations, she preferred it to be in solely female company.
After setting up the recorders they'd backpacked to the site, and taping the sensors in place on Linna's spine and a small shaved patch on the tail, the VR rig was booted up and the brunette carefully put it on, after a double-check to make sure the moon displayed would be behind her at first.
"Alright, we've got a good baseline for the daylight and inside the simulation, Linna, try turning around and looking at the moon," Sylia instructed. She complied and for a moment it seemed like a bust.
"Nothing, Sylia. Just a moon," the tailed woman reported, disappointedly.
"It's not the pattern itself that's important then, it seems," the Saber leader noted. "Turn around again, and I'll change the setting from a plain white and grey circle to an actual, true-color moon image."
After the settings were adjusted Linna turned again to look at the ever so slightly more greenish genuine moon, and it soon became clear they'd reasoned things accurately, the monitor equipment erupting in a cacophony of bleeps, chirps, and burbles as readings changed and values skyrocketed, followed by the sharp crack of the headset shattering as a baboon-like snout expanded under it.
Thankfully, the transformation hadn't even completely occurred before reversing, due to the lack of moonlight after the headset broke, so there was little cleanup to be done this time. As the troupe picked up their gear and headed back to the base, Nene reflected that Linna seemed happier than she'd seen the former dancer since the battle, while Nam, who'd bounced back for the most part, was shaken and pale, and noticeably keeping the other two women between herself and the brunette.
Linna had noticed the usually sweet-tempered buma's hesitance as well, and while it stung a bit she could hardly blame the girl. Figuring that the best way to reassure her was the way she'd be insuring the world would stay kaiju-free, she asked, "So, will Dr. Vector be able to take the tail off, or should I make a hospital appointment, Sylia?"
"That's an extreme solution to jump to," the steel-maned woman cautioned. "We still don't fully understand what purpose it serves for you otherwise. The simple shape of a moon had no effect, it was only when the specific light spectrum was received that the metamorphosis began. A pair of sunglasses that block those frequencies-"
"Could get lost or broken," Linna cut her off, irritated. "Then what? Just don't look? What if I saw it in a reflection from a window, or a puddle on the ground? More importantly, this can't be allowed to happen again, Sylia." Recalling her thoughts from that awful morning, she added, "We're the Knight Sabers. We stop rampaging monsters, it's what we DO." *Whatever it takes,* she reminded herself, snagging the tip of the flicking tail in one hand. Pulling it taut, she formed a knuckle bomb over the other, and slid the arm down her back, wrist twisted just enough that it wouldn't hit anything until reaching -
"ITAAEEOOO!" she yelped as the mini-blast went off with a crack, a small spray of blood falling to the trail while the length of the tail came away in her left hand. Staggering as her balance shifted, she whimpered and blinked back tears of pain. Rubbing her sore posterior, she shakily told her stunned companions, "Okay... I'm going to admit, that wasn't such a great idea," before tripping as she lost her balance again.
---=- + -=---
Priss was just on her way into the Comet Club to set up the band's gear when she saw the woman again, a svelte profile in blue and white leathers with short dark hair. Dropping the microphone stands she'd been carrying she spun to look, seeing only a shadow moving into a nearby alley. She dashed over, breath catching in a suddenly dry throat- It was empty, nothing but a dead end with a couple of half-filled trash cans, not even a fire escape or a window someone could have jumped to. Silently cursing herself for holding on to stupid, impossible dreams, the singer stalked back out and picked up the equipment again. "I'm going nuts," she muttered irritably, eyeing the scratched chrome where one part had scuffed against the pavement.
---=- + -=---
Sylia was dreaming. She had to be, she told herself, because there was no way she would ever, in a million years, be lounging on top of a piano in a slinky, sequined dress. Particularly not when Fargo was at the keys. There was a short drumroll from behind her, and she turned to see Linna grinning back at her from a drum kit, while Priss launched into a bluesy intro on an angular electric guitar, and Nene stood by with some strange combination of a bass guitar and synth. Without any input from her, her body turned back to face the front of the stage, which seemed to be in a smoky club of some kind, with an enthusiastic crowd cheering and carrying on. The only sounds she heard were the music, as Nene and Fargo joined in, and her own voice as she raised a microphone and began to sing.
*This is so completely embarrasing,* she thought, trying to ignore what her dream-self sang. She usually had far better control, but this dream seemed to be completely beyond her ability to alter. She could feel tears trickling down her cheeks, as some of the forms in the crowd became recognizable... Her mother, in her favorite kimono. Papa Stingray in a lab coat. Little Brian in the jumpsuit with the juice stain from a food fight when they were seven. Mackie, in his overalls, with a smudge of grease on his nose... Daddy... She could feel herself sobbing now, but her voice still kept singing as the second verse came around.
When she'd finished, she stepped down from the piano and across the stage, trading microphone for guitar with Priss. At least her outfit had turned into something a little less out of character, a sleeveless silver wrap-around that wasn't quite so tight and ended near the knees instead of almost at her ankles, with matching long, fingerless gloves. Of course, she hadn't touched a guitar since her second year in high school, but her dream-self seemed to know what to do with it.
Fargo played an on the piano, then she and Nene joined in on their strings, and Priss launched into a song she'd never heard of, though it was very much in the feisty singer's style, even at the slower, more mournful pace the bluesy atmosphere called for. "You're not the only one who's lonely/try sitting on the crescent moon..."
Hands still moving on their own, Sylia looked out at the crowd again, fearing the reaction she'd see on their faces, but Mother was smiling softly and nodding with the beat, Papa had that faintly puzzled expression that meant he didn't understand but was happy if she was, and Daddy... He pulled off the cowl and gave her a wink, as if to say, "It's all right to be a person, too." The tempo picked up, more the usual Replicants style after the first chorus, and Mackie danced around in front of the stage with a faceless, purple haired woman.
Sighing softly and snuggling into her pillow, the worry lines on Sylia's sleeping face smoothed away as she relaxed and let peaceful dreams sooth her mind.
--=--
In a run-down trailer perched precariously close to a giant footprint, Priss opened her eye and sat up slowly. "That was one fucked up dream," she muttered, shaking her head. "Wonder if Sylia can really sing and play like that, though?" Dismissing the notion, she hauled herself out of bed and headed for the bathroom before grabbing a pad to write down lyrics and chords - it was never a good idea to ignore the muse when it flowed, and it wasn't like she'd have gotten back to sleep any time soon anyway. *Born to be happy, yeah right,* she thought, scribbling down the last of what she remembered. It was no good, she couldn't do something this upbeat now. She tossed the pad in the general direction of the shelf, and grabbed her guitar to work on something a little closer to her heart at the moment.
The intro was solid, and the first few measures, but the transition before the chorus was still a little awkward. She tried a few variations, chording around, before finding something that fit and singing along. "You, angel, fallen to earth, living here and now..."
*Yes.* Writing the new measure on the composition sheet still open on her table from earlier, she moved on to the next problem spot.
--=--
And, in the smoky haze of Bill's Blues Bar, Fargo waited out the guitar intro before hitting the keys and belting out the first lines of an ancient Cramps tune with a secretive smirk.

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Next time on Bubblegum Disaster: Don't bring a gun to a Z fight. It never helps.
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For those who still haven't recognized it (which seems to be *everyone*) Linna's high-fashion date wear is a slightly modified version of the Great Saiyaman costume from DBZ. The black body glove and green tabard are the same, though of course cut for a woman, as is the red sash, but the white boots and gloves are much more form-fitting, and instead of a helmet or sunglasses, Linna had worn a red bandanna headband to match the sash, and pulled one down to cover her face (like a cowboy from a western perspective, more ninja-like to the Nipponophile.) Note also that this is the aftermath of Saiyawoman's battle with the Bakemono Burglar...
Cynthia and range of her abilities - In Ch3, she watches the battle on top of Genom Tower and puts up a shield that stops the satellite laser cold, all from her room at the Akimotos' cottage, but here she's in the city but can't help Sylvie heal, who's closer than the Tower was then. This is in fact intentional, not an error - for one thing, the shield is a spell, one of the simplest but which is as strong as there's power to make it, while healing magic spells are very much more complex; the simple energy infusion that she's been using can't be done at long distance. It's also more of a Jedi/Force type effect, the better your visualization and willpower the better it works - much more primal than proper spells as such - and even as an exceptional one she's still a child, and by that time an exhausted, distraught child. As unfortunate as it was, Sylvie's death was necessary for Priss's development and this way it also shows that Cynthia has limitations of her own.
As for her essentially endless magical energy, that's thanks to what Kami-sama did to turn her into a normal girl and two fairybots - as previously noted, that spell is intended to be used to prepare a new successor to the office of planetary Kami by separating any evil in them out to a new being, who then generally is either captured or escapes and becomes a new demon lord - it calls directly on the power of the Heart of the World, giving the person it is used on a link to it. Cynthia had no malice in her, so the spell was able to separate a different aspect of her being, the cybernetic from the biological. Despite carrying the Heart, Cynthia is not a Kami successor and does not have the power of the office - but she does have the link, and only Laviolus Daimaoh (or his counterpart Piccolo, a quarter of the way around the galaxy, the South and East quadrant kami having dealt with their darker selves) can rival her power. She will need to perform the spell as well when a successor does appear, hence her being tutored in magic with the knowledge instilled in the fae at the same time.
"Bake two cakes in one oven" - killing two birds with one stone, for those who like cute little birdies and yummy snacks.
"Anata" is a particularly polite way of saying "you" in Japanese, commonly used by wives to their husbands the way an English speaker would use "dearest" or something similar. I can't remember if it's specifically considered a feminine-use word, however.
Exaggerated, humor-anime-style reactions - the Kagamis are the mirror clones of Ranma Saotome, after all, and half supernatural as well. As such, and bearing in mind DBZ's humor manga roots as well, those kind of larger than life expressions will occasionally come out, despite the generally more serious tone of BGC, which I usually adhere to. As things continue to get grimmer, they'll probably get more common, because too much angst and gloom makes my trigger finger itch.
Another funeral for Priss to attend - in the past year, she's been to Irene's, Sho and his mom's, and now Sylvie's - that's a lot, for someone under 25, with as few close friends as she has.
Answers that can keep until the afternoon - No indeed, our Sylia is *not* a morning person. Good thing everything seems to happen at night, ne? If you watch the series, there's about one scene per OVA that actually takes place while the sun is up.
Club Olympus - in one of the city panoramas, I believe part of the opening montage of OVA 1, a neon sign that says "Olympus" can be seen. While this is probably a reference to the shape of Genom Tower and Masamune Shirow's Appleseed, I chose to make it a nightclub's sign, and being on a bright street would make it either a fashionable and successful one, or very short-lived.
The Comet Club, of course, is from The Tick cartoon, a superheroes only club where they can kick back in the company of their peers. With the way even the canon Sabers mimic the classic superhero style, this amuses me greatly, but there isn't any major cape presence in the world at this point - the Bat-clan was all they ever had, and now there's only one active member besides Sylia, over in the Gotham sector of East City, the megalopolis created as Boston, NYC, and coastal cities even as far south as Hartford Connecticut grew until they merged, giving new meaning to the term "urban sprawl."
The song Priss performs in Sylia's dream is "Asu e Touchdown," included in both Hurricane Live 2032 and 2033, though only the 2032 edition has the music video with non-series animation showing the recruitment of the Sabers, which is officially canon. The one she's working out the music for is "Bara no Soldier" from H.L. 2033. "Rock Me" (despite being addressed to a "lonely boy" in the lyrics, framed for a mostly straight audience) and "Crisis - Ikari o Komete Hashire" (also from 2033) are probably also Sylvie-songs, IC speaking, even though the second was specifically written as a Gibson/Griffon song by Tsubokura Yuiko, the VA who played her.
*Batman* unmasking, and telling Sylia 'it's alright to be a person, too'? Yaright? - Two points here: A) this is a Batman who got married and had a daughter, who was two by the time he died; B) it's a dream, after all, by a girl who was only two when she last saw her daddy.
Fargo's 'ancient Cramps tune' is "Bikini Girls with Machine Guns," and I'm sure you can see why he'd be amused by it. Since I'm not really into the Blues genre (There's a few numbers I like, but not the majority - even Bikini Girls is on the Punk side of Blues, or the Blues side of Punk) I had to kind of talk around whatever Sylia sang, because I don't know any that would fit. If anyone has a suggestion for something with piano and electric guitar that fits a feeling of faltering under the weight of the world, be sure to let me know.
Guardian 215 should be imagined with the vocal talents of Susan Blu; if you don't know her by name, she did (among other shows) Arcee on the post-movie Transformers episodes, as well as in the movie itself. You can even keep the flanging effect if you like, though it's not really there.
Many thanks to my prereaders: Nathan Baxter, Hide Hasegawa, Leong Mun Yee, Andrew Wilson, Christopher Gilbert, and Drakensis, and to everyone on the BDPreread mailing list - you get your name listed if you actually make commentary, but just reading and finding nothing bad enough to complain about is still commentary of a sort.
Drakensis also gets a nod for keeping a remote archive of the story on his website, www.100megsfree4.com/drakensis/ in the Miscellaneous section.
Bubblegum Crisis belongs to Youmex and Animeigo, I make no claims otherwise. Please don't sue me, I have no money to speak of and fanfic does more to promote your products than anything else I know of - without it, I never would have known about anime at all, and I'd certainly never have bought the BGC tapes based on the sucky box copy.
Ranma 1/2 I'm not so sure of, except that the creator was Rumiko Takahashi, not me, and that I make no claims to own IT either. Likewise, Dragonball was created by Akira Toriyama, and is distributed in the US on video by FUNimation. I THINK that both Ranma and Dragonball comics are done by Viz in the US, but that may be incorrect.
The Bionic Six is similarly of unknown provenance, but I have a very vague and unreliable memory that it may have been animated by Suncoast video... In any case, it's STILL not my own creation.
_Dykstra's War_ is by Jeffery D Kooistra, published by Baen Books.
Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were created by Akira Toriyama, owned overall by Bandai I think, and released on video in the US by FUNimation and in manga by Dark Horse (again not so sure about that one - could be Vis)
Sailor Moon was created by Naoko Takeuchi, and is undoubtedly also owned by some animation studio or another. I know that the RPG rights in North America at least belong to Guardians of Order.
-----------------------------
Omake! The straights/gays counter!
Lots of fanfic authors go nuts making the cast match their sexual preference and/or fantasies. I'm not, because even naughty, naughty perverts can have some standards - hence, I've only made changes where strongly justified or where the canon was unclear to begin with. And, what do you know, most of the major cast is, indeed, straight! Here's the breakdown:
Straight:
Sylia
Linna
Mackie
Leon
Mason/Largo (twistedly perverse even by my standards, but straight. You don't want to know what he used to do with that green haired, Sylia look-alike buma from the BU-25B attack sequence in OVA 2)
Madigan
Chief Todo
Lisa Vanette
Vision
Kou
Irene
Dr. Raven
J B Gibson
Naomi
Tora Kagami
Hiryuko Kagami
----------------------
Total : 16

A Little Bent:
Anri is just gay enough to have fun with a special enough woman, but generally looks at guys.
Nene is curious, she needs to experiment and find her preferences. She looks but only admits to looking at guys.
Quincy dresses like a gay pimp, but only really loves power. No one dares to ask about his private life, and he likes it that way.
-------------------
Total : 3

Really Bisexual:
Priss
Mina - of course, as sexaroids they're designed to enjoy it in as many ways a possible, so not being bi is anomalous for them
Hyatt
Dot
Lou
Nam
-------------------
Total : 6

Exclusively Gay:
Sylvie
Meg
Daley
------------------
Total : 3

Not interested or too young:
Niichigo
Cynthia
Lisa probably belongs here, certainly the Chief thinks so! She's got that whole teen-girl-boy-crazy thing going on, though, even though she hides it well most of the time. Her room is utterly plastered with boy-band posters.

Double Omake Bonus!
Tales from the Cutting Room Floor!
I really wanted to include this, but it just didn't fit with the way things flowed, and while I couldn't see any way to have Priss plausibly join the outing I needed her to be part of the last KS sighting. Dammit. So, you get the noteblock.

Official disfavor not quite enough to kill another USSD contract, though - they've tracked down the next link in the buyer chain for the DD and want a deniable asset to make him vanish over there, just happening to appear over here, be overwhelmed with remorse after the massive property damage, and turn himself in. Air quotes as necessary. Now needing ca$$$h more than ever with still more equipment damage and the expense of trying to find out what the hell happened to Linna, Sylia takes the job. "Right now, the Knight Sabers are a very plausibly deniable asset, and not that far from being a liability. Which will it be?" I like this idea. There's at least a month, probably two or three, before OVA 6, and there should be something to fill that time frame. Who is it? How about a former terrorist turned assassin called Snake, who hides his face behind a mirrored mask? Combo GIJoe/TFs ref! Double score! "Sssuch a wonderful artwork you made in Megatokyo, but what wasss the point if you disssclaimed it? They jussst don't make terrorists like they usssed to... COOOBR-" interrupted by gut punch, doubles over wheezing.

EOF
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows

[classicdrogn]

In "Crossovers That Should Not Be, EML wrote:

---

This Crossover That Should Not Be is technically an extension of a Crossover That Did, In Fact, Happen In Canon.
Chikyuu's most deranged mad scientist, the preeminent designer of superpowered androids, has just finished upgrading his greatest creation...
"That bastard Gero stole all my research. Well, he can't complain if I steal his back! JINZOUNINGEN #21, ARALE MARK 2, ACTIVATE!"
"Mou... why do I still need glasses?"
"Because meganekko are CUTE!"
DOCTORSLUMP Z: The Penguin Saga

---

To which I replied:

---

... Sweet jumping kami, that's BRILLIANT! Can I use this, Evil Midnight Lurker? PLEASE!? It even ties into my backstory for why Gero appears earlier than he should, a quarter of the way around the galaxy!
(big, quivering, soulful puppy dog eyes)
Pleeeeease?

---

and Lurker, unable to resist the Eyes, agreed, adding as an afterthought:

---

And if you can throw in an explanation of just why Kami-sama tried to destroy technological civilization, I'll be really impressed... ^.^

---

Well, ask and (in this case at least, I can't speak for Toriyama-sensei) ye shall indeed recieve. The short form goes like this:
Destroy? Fiddlesticks! The whole thing is West Kaio-sama's plan to REDUCE the damage! Piccolo-Kami and Piotr were following the Boss's orders on this one.
To be a little more specific... Over ten years ago, but less than a hundred, Uranai Baba started reading just about everyone's deaths as caused by this wierd green bug-man... being a genuine precogitive and in good with the upper levels of the spirit world, she relayed this to Kami and West Kaioh, and looked into the matter in more detail. Though it was troublesome, it was decided that Trunks' initial trip to the past would be knocked off course a bit, arriving in the Penguin Villiage of 150 years in the past, instead of the desert 15 years in his past, the series present. Through a series of circumstaces the Gero who would have created Cell on Chikyuusei, a cousin of Senbei ("Dr. SLump" being his nickname when his inventions backfire) was never born. The Fates are not part of the same heirarchy, however, and had already arranged Gero's role in the upcoming era of major conflicts within the mythic cycle, so he had to be placed somewhere, and because of the meddling retained a link to Penguin Viliage and Senbei. In the Disaster universe, there was no Android 8 or Seargent Metallic for Goku to fight in Muscle Tower, and for that matter the Red Ribbon Army was just a bunch of small-time thugs without access to major technology, their only threat being in having somehow acquired enough money to hire Tao Pai Pai.
Earth, on the other hand, had Dr. Miriam Gero, a major behind-the-scenes influence on the terrorist organisation, COBRA, that ran wild in the 1980s as the Red Ribbon would have, though he managed to escape unscathed when that organisation was finally broken up to enter the corporate world. When the active stage of the ZODIAC project officially ended, leaving only monitoring of the remaining subjects, he was instrumental in combining remnants of COBRA's Synthezoid technology with the original Stingray buma research to create the more human sexaroid and covert assassin types, not to mentiion the exceptionally lifelike disguises for inactive combat buma.
Trunks himself is stranded in the present, his own future pruned because of Cell's threat to the timelines as a whole with time-travel tech in the same continuity, even before he gets sent up the wrong trouser leg thanks to divine meddling - it's been part of he plan from the beginning that Bulma and Vegita won't be getting together in Disaster, but that's beside the point here - the point was how this is better.
To say it simply, BGC-Earth is much better equipped to deal with Gero's androids, espescially with them appearing earlier on the power curve.
Even aside from the buma and conventional military forces that aren't on the DBZ world, there's the bioengineered forces on the opposite side of the Polar War, which you haven't even seen yet - Basically, Tyrell Biogenetique SA has bred Zoanoids and Zoalords from the base of the Nexus series superhuman genemods, fitted with cybernetic control systems - entire armies in the same game if not the same league as Gero's artificial humans, rather than a handful of martial artists.
More importantly, the simple fact that Artificial Human #21 is Arale Mk.2, a hero character, rather than Cell is proof that the plan has shown major success.
So, there it is, the part EML asked about anyway, my own twists are left mostly obscure. Does it manage to impress you?
- CD
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows