From Sailor Moon Flash!
| Featuring: | Ebba, Arumi, Chikara |
| IC Date: | June 2002 |
| Status: | In Progress |
| Summary: | "Ishino-sensei? ... A giant worm is attacking me." |
"Ishino-sensei? ... A giant worm is attacking me."
Chikara stared at her cell phone for several moments, unsure for a moment how her number had gotten passed around, and how in the world someone had known it to call her on a Saturday morning. "Utakou-kun?"
"Well, maybe it's a giant sna--EEK--no, no, that was definitely a worm."
She hurried to the door, grabbing her keys and slipping on her shoes with only one brief, mournful thought for the BBC News special she was sure to miss and all the papers she had left to grade. "Tell me exactly what happened." Utakou-kun started to babble, and Chikara was forced to cut her off. "Yes, I remember your cellphone. Yes, it's good that you have it with you. No, Utakou-kun, stop. Tell me exactly where you are, then tell me exactly what happened. I'm on my way."
"Nisshin Pet and Aquarium Emporium, you know, the little one in Ginza?" She scrambled backwards, unceremoniously wedging herself between two metal shelving units just in time to avoid a deluge of 10-kilogram dog chow bags and splinters where the worm -- for it was indeed not a snake -- had slammed its head through the too-small shop door.
"Please hurry," she added as respectfully as she could, but made sure to add before hanging up, "I am very sorry for the intrusion on your weekend Ishino-sensei. I have to go now, it's lookingrightatme."
If Utakou Arumi had gone back in time some thirty minutes and told herself that she would be attacked by a giant worm, and would then call Ishino-sensei's emergency cell number because her only recourse seemed to be falling back on the elementary school adage about Being in Trouble and Telling an Adult, she might not have believed herself. Also, she would have told herself not to wear flip-flops, because for all their charming beadwork they weren't very good for running away. It had started out as an oh so typical day...
She entered the shop largely unaware of the electronic PIN-pon sound that signalled the arrival of new customer, headphones piping an album by an achingly indie Dutch group, handed to her by a very kind man at the train stration hub who she supposed was the lead singer or the drummer. Nisshin Emporium wasn't her store of choice, precisely, as they were situated in the commercial part of town and thus overpriced, but they were the only place that stocked Fancy Fish Antibacterial Water Treatment, and Mister Gills was coming down with a case of the don't-feel-goods, possibly even the beginnings of ick. She made the sign of the cross before remembering she was in no way Judeo-Christian religious.
Crossing to the medicines aisle, she hummed softly along with snippets of the harmony, having heard the song once it was already embedded in her mind (in lieu of remembering her home phone number, her aunt had once soberly informed her). There was a gaijin woman -- a tourist, maybe -- standing right where Arumi needed to be, and so she very politely avoided first eye contact and first greeting, instead pretending she needed something from the plastic plants display. The melody doubled up and changed key in a particularly clever manner, causing her to spontaneously pick up humming again -- it was just as well she couldn't understand the Dutch.
Ebba, on the other hand, understood some of what was bleeding over the headphones, and shook her head. Hopefully the girl failed to understand the rather... descriptive lyrics. She smiled a little inside, contemplating finding a copy for Sui. It would be worth the trouble of finding a way to get Tacey to install the music where the waifish banshee would be unable to avoid it.
Her eyes searched the wall in front of her with no small amount of irritation. The store clerk had given up on trying to understand what she was asking for, waving her away with profuse (but not exactly sincere) apologys, pointing in the general direction of a wall full of bottles. She stared intently at the labels, but the chickenscratch that these people insisted was writing failed to transform into something legible.
Poor Katzenfutter was going to become toilet treats if she didn't find him something soon for his ick. He looked so folorn, swimming slowly around his tank, looking at her with his pleading, sad fishie eyes. His new tankmate, on the other hand, was starting to look almost predatory. She promply decided to name him Fischenfresser, and made a mental note to pick up some bloodworms to keep the carniverous goldfish at bay.
She glanced out of the corner of her eye at the girl standing next to the artificial plants whose body language was declaring rather loudly that she was Not Noticing Ebba, while humming along with something obnoxious. Well, that was too darn bad. Katzenfutter was more important than avoiding conversation, even with annoying young snips. Time to put on a pleasant, engaging face and try to get some assistance.
"Forgive, small flower, there is misgivings about writings, while help is required. Where is succor that is targeting ick?"
Arumi tilted her head like a dog looks with vague comprehension at a television screen. She understood 'Forgive', and she understood 'ick', but everything else was only vaguely representative of the Emperor's own Japanese. She pulled the headphones out and let them dangle, the Dutch lyrics now more clearly filling the air between them. "Oh, you want... OH. Yes, for ick? That's what I wanted too." She edged very cautiously around the personal bubble of the foreign girl -- who upon closer inspection was not too much older than herself -- and thumbed through the cardboard-mounted medicine bottles hanging from a nearby rack.
"Ick-Be-Gone, Aqua-Cure-All... okay, these are your choices," she said, holding up two packages as she chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. She'd put the other, discarded items down on a lower shelf as they had been in the way, but seemed destined to forget them there, out of their place. "This," she wiggled the yellow one, "is for ick and fin rot." She shook the purple one. "And this kind of also works on ick and preventa..." she trailed off, feeling suddenly very self conscious about not knowing if this girl spoke nearly enough Japanese for the word preventative. "This is... um... you put it in before, too. Either one is okay." The idea of losing any of her three to the dangers of ill-treated tap water was enough to make her stomach twist, and she supposed this girl must be going through the same thing AND was trying to navigate a foreign pet store to do something about it. She gave a slightly pained, empathetic smile. "...sick fishy friend?"
"No, kitten this does girl is not currently holding," Ebba murmered, trying to decide between the ick bottle and the... ick bottle. She supposed she should grab the first, since she was sure she heard "fin rot" in there somewhere. "Kittens are evil."
She straightened and flipped the bottle over, looking for something resembling the price. Of course, the sticker was missing, and it happened to be the last bottle. She took it from the girl with a muttered "appreciation of helping", and walked over to shake the bottle at the cashier.
"What reduction in funds is consequence of bottle?"
The cashier raised the magazine to block Ebba's face, muttering under his breath.
"Pardon." Ebba tapped her fingers on the counter. "PARDON."
She turned back to the girl with a growl. "Hearing has evaporated. Forgive advanced burden, small flower, is there cost?"
Arumi was trapped in the web of her own politeness' devising, and could not escape no matter how much the strained but eerily poetic manner of the foreign woman put her on edge. She had Agreed To Help, and by making this tacit agreement she could not feign ignorance of her plight and walk away. She smiled as reassuringly as she could. "Cost? Would you like me to see how much it costs?" she spoke slowly, still baffled as to how the woman knew so many words of her native tongue and yet seemed physically incapable of stringing them together. If she wasn't getting the heart-fluttery nervous feeling so badly she would have listened to it with utter fascination all day long; the gaijin was like some kind of angry, random free-verse generator.
She glanced over the woman's shoulder at the bottle, but found no sticker or label for a price. She ambled back over to the shelf, and again found nothing marking the cost, between "Scale Conditioner Plus" and "Betta Pellets", the label had gone missing.
"Ahhh... I don't know? It doesn't look like it has one," she offered apologetically to the girl, who looked... thoroughly perturbed even before she uttered the words. "Excuse me, how much for this?" she piped up in the direction of the clerk, who reluctantly peered at her over the top of his newspaper.
"Prices are marked as is," he said rotely.
"But it doesn't have one, I'm terribly sorry," she said, and this finally roused him from his seat.
"I'll check with the manager," he said, disappearing into the back, leaving Arumi to smile as placidly as she could at the back of his head.
When he was gone for an inordinately long period of time seeking the manager in the back of a store roughly the size of a broom closet, she ventured to speak to the angry girl. Maybe she was just having a rough time of it, surely it couldn't hurt to extend some friendly international chitchat.
"Are you vacationing here?" she asked, the lilting voice in her earbuds now switching to a more upbeat tune. "Have you been to Akihabara? Your Japanese is fantastic!"
Ebba half-ignored the girl's chittering as she monitored the cashier. The odious man had actually gone to the TOILET and was continuing to READ, nevermind the lie about another person being present. Well, then.
"Locations such as that I personally frequent with distaste not at all." Ebba turned and smiled at the girl, her eyes taking on a purple hue. "Fish store is distaste and Earth aborts violence."
Her smile never faltered as the back of the store abruptly caved in.
Chikara being Chikara, she ran the ten-odd blocks from Hibiya Park to the western outskirts of Ginza and the Nisshin Pet Emporium therein. She briefly considered taking a taxi, since she wasn't exactly decked out in jogging gear, but traffic was snarled up even more than usual and the sidewalks would have been quicker in any event. Once she got closer, she discovered the reason for the traffic jam: there was a wall where Harumi-Dori went over the platform for the Hibiya-Ginza line, and really, it made no sense to put a wall where traffic should go (and indeed *had* gone until just recently before).
That was when she saw the worm, which apparently had no compunctions against putting walls where traffic went.
Chikara had never considered that Utakou-kun might be lying; however, seeing a giant squiggly wormy thing knocking buildings over was quite a different thing altogether. "Utakou-kun!" she tried to make her voice carry over the flurry of honks and stampeding passers-by.
"Ishino-sensei!" came a tiny voice over the chaos of flying bricks, squealing tires, and distressed cries of onlookers as the worm -- or whatever it was -- reared up and blindly crashed its head forward into the remains of the Nisshin Pet Emporium, glass bouncing harmlessly off its unsettlingly uniform skin.
Where the building had its whole eastern side almost comically shorn away to expose the insides, Chikara could see the young Chuo student hanging from a piece of track lighting that only kept her above the shattered-glass zone by the grace of her mysteriously low body weight. Wherever all that candy went, it seemed it did not stick around on her person for long.
She yelled something else out across the roar of destruction, something that sounded suspiciously like, "I was just trying to help the gaijin get the fishy medicine."
On the other side of the new entrance to the building, Ebba tapped the bottle against her chin, wondering what to do. She obviously couldn't pay for the bottle, but she wasn't aware of any other pet stores in the area. Time was of the essence, though. Her poor fish wouldn't last long, especially if she didn't satisfy the bloody appetite of his tankmate.
Ebba picked her way through the rubble and set the bottle back down on its shelf. She looked around briefly, trying to spot the helpful girl in order to query her as to the location of another pet store that would carry the necessary medications, but didn't see her standing around anywhere. She pictured the girl for Tentacle-chan, who helpfully turned its head to gently nudge at the girl's shoes.
"Excuse me," she called up to the charmingly decorated purple flip-flops, "is there ano... gomen nissei, matte sakana no kusuri o hent ai suru sakura no basho ga aru ka?"
Arumi, to her credit, only shrieked a bit at the massive, incomprehensible monster pushing against her sandals. "I'm very sorry ma'am!" she wailed piteously amidst distant sirens and still-shuddering infrastructure, "But you shouldn't address the fishy medicine in such derogatory terms, it's ru-- AHHOHGOD falling now!"
She scrambled back up the sliding metal track lighting as it started to slip her towards the remainder of the storefront window, now a portal of jagged glass shards directly beneath her. She was grateful, for once, that she'd been forced to do all those chin-ups in gym class -- though heaven help her, she didn't think she'd tell anyone she was thankful to Coach Nakamura even if she did survive. Another fixture keeping her aloft snapped loose with a loud tang sound, and she yelped, legs kicking wildly and knocking the monster-worm-thing in its eyeleass head as she tried to hang on.
Ebba watched impassively as the giant worm pushed up against the dangling girl as if to support her. Perhaps the Japanese were right about schoolgirls and phallic-shaped creatures. She wondered how the girl would react if she dismissed the worm just as the girl was letting go to stand on it. Instead of taking the creature's offer, however, the girl merely squealed some more and curled her knees up towards her chest.
Just as she was preparing to send the worm back through the singularity, she felt someone approaching at a rather rapid run. Since that usually heralded the appearance of one of those damn senshi, she took the precaution of locking down the new arrival's feet before leaving the ruined shop.
Even after having had to exert her superiority over the foul Edoko demons in the recent past, Chikara was caught slightly off-guard to find herself stuck fast to the pavement, and even more nonplussed to have to pinwheel her arms ridiculously in order to maintain her upper-body balance over legs that were suddenly unmoving after having sprinted for ten blocks.
She regained her composure quickly, as a good Nihonjin should, and surveyed the area; however, she couldn't see much beyond the giant wormy demon-thing, its poorly linguistic friend, and Utakou-kun clinging precariously to the wreckage above them. Well, that simply wouldn't do. "Get away from my student!"
Ebba couldn't translate everything the small woman yelled, but she figured that the giant worm parked in the building was the cause of her outburst. She stared into the woman's eyes. Such a pretty shade, really. She would have to try to find a pair of shoes that color.
On to business. Ebba backed away as she mentally informed the worm that it was time for a snack. She watched it clumsily turn and take out the back of the building, sending another wave of debris into the street. A bright yellow bottle bounced towards her, and as the worm lunged open-mouthed at the woman, she bent down and inspected the label.
"ICK", it announced in bold red letters. Ebba smiled at her luck and stood, pocketing the medicine.
"Please be careful, Ishino-senseiAIEEE!" Utakou-kun's voice rose in a high-pitched panic that actually managed to clear the sound of shattering glass and the distant beginnings of sirens approaching the scene of the very localized natural disaster.
The force of the giant worm's turnabout sent a shower of bricks and cheap ceiling tiles down in the general direction the dangling girl, threatening to drop her onto its head. ...or was that its rear end? When a huge maw suddenly opened in front of Chikara, it very quickly settled any debate about two outstanding matters: firstly, which end was which, and secondly, whether not it was simply a misunderstood (and highly clumsy) hideous monster who wanted to be friends.
In one lurching motion, the worm's eyeless head came crashing down on top of the diminutive history teacher, leaving her helpless student to shakily whisper yet another contender for understatement of the year.
"Oh, no."
The rubble splashed up by the worm's mouth-first diving was incredible, and Chikara vanished underneath a pile of hideous monster and pieces of pet store. For a few heartbeats the dust and grit in the air created an unearthly silence, broken only when the monster righted itself, leaving just more rubble and broken pavement almost leaning over where Chikara had been standing.
The worm started to turn its attention back to Arumi, but it froze, stiffening as a shudder ran down its length. Then a second quake, then a third -- and then the top of what must have been its mouth slid aside in a shower of golden light: gritty, dirty, covered with otherworldly slime, Galaxia shone nonetheless. Sword in hand, she lept from falling worm to precarious building, scanning for other monsters -- or the monster's master. "Utakou-kun, run!" she shouted.
to be continued
