Chapter 1: Netscape Version Pi "So when we saw the fangs, we knew we'd finally met real vampires" --Overheard in KU computer center at 1 am. May 8, 1996 John looked around carefully. It was two AM, and the computer lab STILL had people in it. Finals week is like that. However, the lab assistants were long gone. That was the important thing, since he was about to violate school policy and download the latest version of Netscape so he could view David Kelk's Ultimate Sailor Mercury Shrine without crashing Netscape for the 200000 time in a row due to all the in-line sound files. Not that he could hear them since the sound capabilities of the computers had been crippled by the labbies, but hey, at least he could SEE the page. Not really knowing what he was doing, but certainly unwilling to ask anyone for help, especially those two annoying people who always come in the lab everynight and play Risk using Netscape, which is somewhat like playing chess with yourself by mail, but less efficient. At least tonight the girl wasn't prattling about her vampire friends. Once again, John wondered if she patronized 'the Freak Line', where "real life ghosts and zombies talk to you". However, that wasn't important right now. What was important was that when he went to the Netscape Home Page, he found a little icon that announced "Netscape Version Pi," the experimental beta upgrade of 3.0, with QWERTYUIOP capabilities. Among other things, this meant it could run Expresso and Decaf, as well as Java. Not really having much of a clue what any of this meant, but operating on the principles that new=better and if you can't understand it, it must be good for you, John decided to upload it. If it caused the computer to explode...well, it wasn't his computer. Normally, John operated by a much higher moral standard, but normally John didn't have to cope with a web page crashing his favorite web reader over and over and over. By now, John would have been willing to sacrifice those two idiots over there, but this was a simpler and more humane option. Also, the guy weighed about five times John's weight...in his arms. Any effort at human sacrifice would have ended with John as the sacrifice victim or maybe as a blood doll for those "vampire friends." It loaded quickly, too quickly, a truly paranoid person would have thought. However, given that John is almost as good at waiting as a turtle is at outracing nuclear missiles, he didn't notice, or maybe he just didn't care. Was it destiny? Was it fate? Or was it the fact that when there's less people on, the computers respond faster? Well, you're not gonna find out. Soon, Netscape Pi was locked and loaded...well, loaded anyway. John prayed it would work correctly without him having to rewrite some configuration file that was completely beyond his comprehension. Sure he had minored in computer science, but that didn't mean anything. Given that nothing SANE is written in Ada, that he didn't feel like writing his own compiler, that anything he could do with Pascal had already been done better by someone else, and that Prolog is probably the computer language used by Hell's computers, John had come to the conclusion that his computer science degree was primarily useful in that he was not afraid of computers like many people, so as a result, he could find a way to fix problems where most people just cried and said, "HELP!!!!!" John thought this was what caused people to come to him for help with computers instead of the computer labbies who were being paid to help people. He was unaware that he had actually been blessed at birth by the patron saint of computers, who had inscribed. "Ask him for help with your computer problems" on his forehead in letters that only the computer-illiterate could see. What, you say you can't see these letters? Well, the very fact that you managed to get a copy of this story without having your hand held disqualifies you. However, this entire aside is irrelevant to the story, so we'll just be moving on now. John clicked on Netscape Pi, activating it, and this story finally started to go somewhere. John quickly loaded up the long awaited web page. It was at this point he disabled the little menu that keeps asking you if you "REALLY, REALLY, Honest for god, actually want to download something that could cause pure EVIL to infest your computer, devour your soul, wreck your credit rating, and call down the wrath of beings from beyond space and time on your family for generations." Unfortunately for John, he didn't bother to read this little warning, since it looked like the normal warning that just tells you that you might download a virus or give away credit information or whatever. Big mistake, but hey at 2:15 AM, few brains operate at max efficiency. The web page finished loading...almost. A final menu clicked up. This one said simply, "Activate Expresso attachment? [Yes] [No] [Maybe] [Freunleven]" John blinked. He clicked on Freunleven, just to see what would happen. ************************* * Activating VR mode * ************************* John blinked. Wow, Netscape is getting pretty fancy, he thought. I just hope the file doesn't take an hour to load like that Sailor Jupiter .mov. It didn't. Everything goes faster with a little Expresso... The screen blanked, then transformed into a 3-d set of images, similar to say Castle Wolfeinstein 3-D, Doom, Duke Nuke-em, Heretic or that bogus "unix" screen from the Jurassic Park movie. The Netscape menu still ran across the top, but the page itself had become a 3-D gallery. John blinked. WHOAH! He clicked on the image of Mizuno Ami floating in the center of the gallery, and the speakers clicked to life. "Hi, I'm Mizuno Ami. Welcome to David Kelk's Shrine to me." John was in shock. He thought for a moment he must be dreaming, but then realized if he was dreaming, there would be wombats somewhere, or she'd step off the screen or something. Ami kept talking while he did a quick VIFW*. It came up negative. It was at this point that John realized she was talking in English...but it sounded like the Japanese voice actress. *VIFW: Visual Inspection for Wombats. Either David Kelk is actually God, I'm dreaming, or I want to kidnap him and find out how he did this, John thought. He dismissed the first, abandoned the third for lack of funds, and concluded that despite the complete absence of wombats, probably he was dreaming. Well, if I'm dreaming, I can do anything, he concluded, drawing on his stock of common incorrect beliefs about dreams. Examing the screen, he saw a new command option on the command line. "Activate full VR mode." He clicked on it, and the world blinked out around him. He was inside the gallery. This is FREAKING IMPOSSIBLE! he thought, then remembered he was dreaming. Well, if I'm dreaming...then I want a Dr. Pepper. NOW! A Dr. Pepper appeared in his hand. Ami smiled. "Inside the VR enviroment, your will is law. You'll be thirsty again once you leave, though." John nodded. That made sense...wait, did she just talk to him? "Yes, I did. I...Oh, I'm sorry, I'm reading your thoughts. I'll stop." John stared. "I...you...what?" "We're all just data inside the machine, you see. Your thoughts are data, and my computer keeps picking them up." "I'm...inside the computer?" "Just a portion of your consciousness. You're not about to star in a TRON remake. Don't worry. " John relaxed. Maybe someone put LSD in the air conditioning again...again? Wait, that never happened. He looked around at the environment. "But how can my computer...do this? I mean, the lab computers are okay, but they're not so great...Don't I have to stick things in my head or something?" I'm not even using temp trodes, John thought, making a Shadowrun OCR. "Netscape Pi is the first computer program to use illogic to its maximum potential, you see." She began to blather on in increasingly technical language, causing John's brain to promptly shut down to protect his sanity. However, it then had to come back up or he would have dropped dead. Instead of actually paying attention, he reached out and touched Ami's shoulder. She felt solid. "I can...touch you." "I'm as solid as you, here. This is VR, remember?" John nodded, then yawned. "Great, all this effort and now I need to sleep. Umm...how do I get out?" Ami pointed to a nearby door. "Right there. Just open it and step out." "What happens if you step out?" "Me? I can't step out. I'm only VR." John smiled. Hey, it's a dream. Can't hurt to try. "Go ahead and try." He opened the door. "Ladies first." "Here, I'll show you." She stepped out through the door and vanished. John, having decided this must be a dream, wasn't surprised at all. He stepped out the door himself. Suddenly, he was back in reality...with Mizuno Ami sitting in his lap. Some people would take this as a cue to make out. Others would pass out from fear. A few might pray to God, others would swear off drink. John simply accepted this. Hey, when you're dreaming, anything could happen. "Ami, can you search for wombats while I see what this does to my Sailor Shrine?" Ami nodded and looked around, too confused herself to actually ask why she was looking for wombats. John loaded up the Sailor Shrine, cackling to himself as he did so. It loaded up, and Ami could soon see John was in a VR trance. I've never seen this from the outside, she thought, then realized she had no idea where she was, other than with some guy named John. She sat down to try and sort out her identity. She snapped out of her contemplation when John shouted, "DEEP HURTING!". It quickly became clear that the reason for this was his chair had collapsed, he had knocked his head against a nearby table, and Usagi, Makoto, Minako, and Rei were sitting on him. John quietly passed out. *************************************************** ********************************************** Chapter 2: The Morning After "I went to bed at two with a ten, and woke up at ten with a two" --Willy Nelson. John slowly achieved a sort of groggy consciousness sometime the next morning. Some people use the term night owl for people like him. The more honest among them simply use the term "morning zombie". Despite the airconditioning, he felt rather warm, and also somewhat uncomfortable. For a moment, he contemplated the weird dream he had had. Several things hit his awareness at the same time. The first thing was the snoring coming from the floor. The second thing was the fact that he wasn't wearing his pajamas, but was in fact wearing his usual t-shirt and slacks combination that he wore most days, but never at night. The third thing was that something fairly heavy was lying on top of him. The fourth thing was the deep, regular breathing coming from just off to the right side of his head. I'm in bed with someone, John logically enough concluded. A few seconds later, he remembered that the only person with even a 1% chance of getting into his bed was 1000 miles away or so. Wait, maybe this is a flashback. He opened his eyes. Everything did look kind of blurry. About twelve seconds later, he remembered that whenever he wakes up, it always looks like a flashback since he can't see very well without his glasses. Maybe I've got amnesia...that would explain why I don't remember getting into bed with someone last night. The snoring from the floor cut through his reverie. Someone mumbled something about kisses. It was a female voice. John blinked. TWO women? This has to be a dream, or relatives came to visit and I forgot...maybe I've blanked out years of my life and that's my daughter down there or something. Increasingly silly scenarios flew through his head. He did a quick VIFW. Nope, no wombats. Must be awake...unless they're hidng under the bed, just trying to trick me. John finally risked looking to see who was lying on top of him, hoping she wouldn't turn out to be the wombat. She wasn't. It was Mizuno Ami, wearing his deep blue pajamas, which matched her hair nicely. John's mind gibbered, then came up with another possible solution. Ahah! I've jumped like Samuel Beckett...no wonder I'm confused. My memories have been swiss-cheesed...I wonder when I volunteered for the Quantum Leap project. Now if only I had a mirror or Al would show up or something... He risked turning slightly so he could see the floor. Just about every sheet and blanket he owned was scattered all over the floor, and all his junk that normally littered it had been pushed to the walls. His spare pillow was in use, although the sleeper was so swathed in blankets, sheets, and other big cloth things that only a few blonde strands of hair could be seen. However, he/she/it/they was snoring loudly enough for five people. The fact that this room rather strongly resembled his put the first dent in the Quantum Leap theory. The second dent came from the fact that his picture of his family was sitting on the desk across the room from him. The third dent came when Al failed to appear to tell him what was going on. Heck, he didn't even qualify for Ed McMahon to walk in. Instead, the door opened for real and Makoto walked in, wearing some of his clothing. It didn't fit tremendously well, given that he was 5'6.75 (5'7 in his wild moments when he needed to brag about his height.), while she was around 5'10. The T-shirt fit okay, since he habitually wore shirts several sizes too large, so it was able to accommodate her ample figure. The jeans, however, were a living example of why they make women's jeans and men's jeans. Only the fact that he wore wide cut jeans had probably enabled her to get them on. They were several inches too short as well. John's first thought was to wonder why she was wearing jeans that didn't fit. His second thought was the realization that she was wearing HIS jeans. The third thought was the realization WHO she was. The fourth thought was that maybe the Quantum Leap idea wasn't such a bad theory after all. Makoto flicked on the light. "Come on, sleepy heads! Up and at 'em!" John flinched from the light the way vampires flinch from garlic. Ami stirred, shook her head and opened her eyes. The only response from the thing in the sheets on the floor was to roll over and further bury itself. John was now able to stop trying to understand what was going on and simply try to deal with someone insisting he get out of bed before he was ready. "Turn off the light. It's EVIL!" he said. Ami sat up, then realized she not only was in the same bed with someone, but people were watching her. She blushed slightly, and tried to disentangle herself from John, which is not easy when you're in a bed barely big enough for one person and his stuffed animal. As it was, Mr. Bunny was being squished between Ami and the wall. Luckily, he had not yet achieved true sentience, so it didn't hurt.* Mr. Bunny, for those of you who have not met him, ie, virtually everyone reading this, is John's stuffed rabbit he's had since he was smaller THAN Mr. Bunny. *Operative word being "yet". Makoto said in Japanese, John stared mindlessly, since the only Japanese words he knew were "cute", "Die!", "uncute", "idiot", "one", "father/mother/grandmother/uncle/aunt/big sister/big brother/ and a few other family terms", "of", "college student", and "mountain mama". Oh, and "cat." He cleverly responded, "Huh?" Ami muttered, "She said breakfast is ready." Few things get a member of the Biles family out of bed faster than the offer of food. Well, the offer of a million dollars will, but that hasn't happened yet.* So would pointing a gun at their head, but that hasn't happened yet either.* *Operative word being "yet".' Enough foreshadowing. There is some vague semblance of a plot we need to be attending to. Anyway, John bolted out of bed, only to discover he'd stomped on the blanket thing. That shocked the blanket monster awake. It shed its protective shell and screamed so loud that John fell down and almost knocked himself out. That honor was reserved for the two long blonde streamers of hair that the girl in the blankets began whipping around. They both collided full force with John, who promptly demonstrated his award-winning* low pain threshold by passing out. *I lied. Who'd give out awards for low pain thresholds anyway? The United Masochists of America? John eventually woke up in the living room, where he had been hauled to the card table that sufficed as the general dining table for John and Steven. Unfortunately, there were only three chairs, so several of the people in the living room had to sit on the floor. Rei and Makoto had taken the other two chairs, while Usagi, Minako, and Ami were sitting on the floor. The TV was on, and everyone seemed to be watching the Price is Right, even though half of them didn't seem to have any idea what was going on. John thought for a few seconds, and concluded this must be a dream, even if the VIFW wasn't turning anything up out here either. However, it did show that Minako was currently wearing his bathrobe, Rei was wearing his white pajamas, and Usagi was so swathed in blankets that she could have been wearing anything or nothing and no one would know. Breakfast was bacon, eggs, toast, and fruit, which he wolfed down happily until he suddenly realized he didn't have any eggs in the refrigerator...or butter, which meant he was eating Steve's food. "Well, now I owe Steven some money for his eggs." Makoto simply smiled at him and said, "You like?". John said, "Yeah! Thanks for cooking breakfast. You used some of my roommate's food, though." She cocked her head and contemplated his statement. Ami said, "Her English isn't very good." Ami translated for John, then translated Makoto's reply. "She says she is sorry and she didn't know." "Well, it's not a big deal. Steven only rarely kills those who anger him. Probably he'll be satisfied if he breaks a few limbs," John said, trying to be funny. Unfortunately, Ami translated it without realizing it was a joke, since she knew as much about Steven as the readers do, ie, nothing.* Makoto looked somewhat worried, especially when Steven walked out in his bathrobe, opened the refrigerator and announced, "Hmm, no eggs." *For those who have read Symphony of the Planets, no, John does not live with Steven Grant. He did however, at this time, live with Steven Sulaski, who might be watching you through a satellite at this very minute...watch the skies. Trust no one. Keep your laser handy... "Hey, Steven, I hope we didn't wake you up," John said. "Sorry about the eggs." "No problem. They're bad for you anyway." Ami told the others this was Steven. Makoto started to apologize in Japanese, but before Ami could translate, Steven wandered off into his room. John blinked, and wondered if Steven had even noticed the five women scattered around the room in his clothing. With Steven, it was equally possible that either he hadn't seen it as worth commenting on or that he simply hadn't noticed since he was even more nocturnal than John. The girls started commenting on how cute Steven was. Luckily for John's ego, they kept it in Japanese, so he couldn't tell. John ate quietly and pretended he knew what was going on, a skill that comes in handy in graduate school. Eventually John was full and could no longer put off trying to figure out what was going on. The appearance of Steven had finally convinced him this had to be reality or a very good simulation. The memory of the previous night was coming back to him, but he wasn't quite ready to believe that. "So...um...This will sound weird..." Ami smiled. "Not as weird as some things I've seen, I suspect." "Umm...where did you all come from? Are you staying? I'm not going to end up as youma fodder, am I?" Ami said, "You don't remember last night?" "No, I remember last night quite clearly now...So that really happened?" Ami nodded. "Yes. You released us from our VR state and brought us over to the other side." "The other side of what?" "Do you have a PH.D in dimensional physics?" John blinked. "Do you?" "No. But we'd both need one for me to fully explain it." Rei got up and went to go shower while the others all tried to crowd around the sink and wash dishes. Well, actually Minako and Makoto washed dishes, while Usagi went back to go sleep in the real bed. John added his dishes to the pile. "Can you try it in simple terms that the readers...I mean I can understand?" "Hmm. How about if I just make it up as I go along?" "That'll work. Just don't use strange emissions. That's been done to death." Ami nodded and pulled out a blackboard. She started sketching on it. "We can think of the cosmos as a tree that branches over time. Each branch is a timeline of past history, forming a seperate universe at semi-random intervals, determined by important events, randomly selected events, cosmic games of bingo, and the periodic Conjunction of a Million Spheres." "Wait, isn't that just something from Moorcook?" "Shh, someone will notice. The Conjunction is a time when the walls between the timelines thin and things more easily cross between worlds. Think of it as a wind stirring the branches so they collide with each other." "What if the wind gets so strong the tree falls down?" "There are beings who seek to do just that." It was at this point that John realized hearing such a thing virtually guaranteed he would meet such beings. Why else would a cute girl from another universe be sitting in a chair, wearing his pajamas, giving him a lecture on dimensional physics? This had to be more foreshadowing. I'd better get some mad passionate sex out of this before I die, he thought, then whapped himself for being hentai when the universe was probably at stake. Ami just kept talking. "During the Conjunction, the gods themselves war. Anyway, getting back to the point. The program you used uses furry illogic as part of its programming." "Don't you mean fuzzy logic? Where you have yes, no, and degrees of maybe as possible states?" "Furry illogic is the next step, where you have possible states with no actual meaning, like freunleven or fahrvegnugen. It taps the raw power of human stupidity, a force barely measurable in known units of energy. An average idiot could power Manhattan if only the power could be properly tapped. Jesse Helms alone could power the world...if only his idiocy could be put to safe use. Anyway, Netscape Pi taps the stupidity of people who believe computers can do absolutely anything if you only program it cleverly enough, as well as the inflated expectations of VR technology. As a result, it can induce a branching of the tree and create a universe that corresponds to a VR version of the web page you read with it. As we discovered, apparently, those who exist in the VR universe can get out." "So if I used it to view a Dirty pair homepage, I could get Kei and Yuri running around the University of Kansas?" John asked. "It's been done, twice, with different reasons, " Ami began, bending the fourth wall near the point of annhilation. "Yes, yes, I've read both." John then snapped back into character. "Kei and Yuri are too destructive, anyway. Wait..." A realization struck him. "We left this running at the lab...right?" Ami nodded. "You needed to get home and we were all sleepy." "It was on my sailor Shrine...which includes a Dark Kingdom page." Ami stared at John for a moment. "Which means...." "If anyone got curious and browsed instead of shutting it down..." "Beryl escapes..." A look of horror slowly spread across Ami's face. "Worse. I also had links to the Sailor Senshi Omnipaedia and Hitoshi Doi's Sailor Moon page." Ami stood up. "We've got to get to the computer lab and shut down that program before it's too late!" "First you all need to get dressed...unless you want to sprint across campus in my pajamas." Ami blushed faintly. *************************************************** *********************************************** Chapter 3: The Computer Center and Beyond. "Howard, go save the girls while I finish reading this" --Randolph Carter, the MOVIE version of "The Unnamable" (The original story had NO women, nor did the monster do anything but appear in a window and scare them.) John sprinted into the Computer Center, with the five senshi close behind him. They quickly located the computer. Someone was busily writing a paper on it. "Umm, excuse me...was Netscape running on this machine when you started working on it?" John asked. "They just finished reformatting it...it had a virus or something. Also, someone had downloaded an unauthorized program. I hear they're gonna slowly torture him to death with hamsters if they find him." John shivered slightly. "That's a joke, right?" "Yeah, they actually were going to use him as human insulation or something..." John decided not to press the issue. He turned to Ami, who had simply put her dirty clothing back on, as had most of the others to save time. "I'm going to go disable that page and email Netscape and tell them how dangerous Netscape Pi is." Ami nodded. "Good idea. We'll head back to your room and try and find some clean clothing for everyone." John nodded, his mind already turned to Internet affairs. Well, we don't have to worry about Beryl getting loose as soon as I move that web page out of the public_html folder, he thought. Sadly, John didn't think of the possibility that anyone else might be using Netscape Pi... ***************************** The havoc was not as bad as it COULD have been. A formerly unknown corrolary of the Exclusion Principle states that only one version of a given person can actually exist in a given universe at a given time. In addition, only a limited number of people managed to download Netscape Pi before Netscape got John's letter and pulled the link off their page. To reveal all of them would give away too many secrets and violate too many copyrights, so we'll restrain ourselves. The most important, from John's perspective, was the poor unfortunate Ted Hsu. Ted is a decent person who didn't deserve what happened to him, but as is usual in this sort of thing became the innocent victim of EVIL.* Like certain people who will remain nameless to simulate suspense, Ted had downloaded Netscape Pi, and was now engaged in his periodic ritual of checking John's web pages for anything new and interesting. *Like the random murder victim in the start of Halloween (the movie, not the holiday ^_^;) He clicked onto a new option off John's home page and was impressed by how nice it all looked with that neat VR option. It was silent since John had no sound files, but it did look neat in 3-D. Unfortunately, as he moved down the page, he clicked on the incomplete Dark Kingdom page... A few seconds later, Ted had the unpleasant experience of suddenly having Queen Beryl, Jadeite, and worst of all, her staff with the orb she uses to watch Melrose Place from her evil kingdom all land on him. She cackled. "AFTER 10,000 YEARS, I'M FREE! TIME TO CONQUER...EARTH!" "That's nice, can you get your elbow out of my eye, my queen?" Jadeite said. Ted's chair collapsed, dumping all three of them in a pile on the floor. "Who the heck are you people?" The door flew open to Ted's room. It was another woman with no taste in clothing, carrying a staff. Rita Repulsa said, "Beryl, you slut! Stop stealing my lines!" "Or you'll what? Make more empty threats? Sick your stupid putty men on me? Make your monster grow? Merchandise me?" Rita laughed. "Who'd want to buy a doll of an ugly dried up bink like you who looks like she uses bleach to bathe?" "Take that back!" Queen Beryl shouted. Ted slowly crawled out from under Jadeite and Queen Beryl. Great, two evil masterminds are about to have a catfight in my room, he thought. Rita thumbed her nose at Queen Beryl and gave her a bronx cheer. Queen Beryl turned beet red and waved her staff. "That's it! I'm going to balefire you so far back your show never happened in the original Japanese!" Jadeite tapped Queen Beryl on the shoulder. "If you know how to use balefire, why didn't you use it on Sailor Moon?" Queen Beryl said, "Well, after I died, I had a chat with the Dark One and..." "Carl Macek isn't dead!" Rita said. "The other Dark One." "Richard Nixon?" Queen Beryl sighed and decided to skip the explanations and go straight to mayhem. "Right. Prepare for destruction." She gathered her energies and prepared to blast Rita. Rita cackled and pulled Goldar out of Minionspace and threw him into the path of the balefire. He evaporated. Rita reached into Minionspace again and unleashed an army of puttymen. "I don't suppose I could convince you two to take this outside, could I?" Ted asked. "NO!" They both shouted, blasting at each other and taking out most of the rest of the floor in the process, as well as killing all the puttymen, who as usual, had accomplished nothing but to gibber annoyingly. The scene cuts to an outside shot of the dorm with parts of the walls exploding outward, then cuts back to a shot of Ted's university. We cut back to Jadeite and Beryl glaring at Rita, all of them glowing with battle auras, while Ted tries to get his computer out of the room. The scene cuts back outside as a massive fireball engulfs the university, destroying it entirely...or so it seems.* *Yeah, right :) *************************************************** ********************************************* Chapter 4: John hate shopping. "Taz...HATE...WATER!" --Taz, Taz-mania. STILL May 9, 1996 The crisis averted*, John and the senshi returned to his room to decide what to do next. John said to Ami, "Well, now we need to get you people some clothing...Mine doesn't really fit you and I suspect it isn't quite your style either..." *Not really. We need some kind of vague long-term plot, maybe. After all, John has to save the world at some point, or we'd break genre. Ami nodded. "You wouldn't happen to be fantastically rich, would you?" "Take a look at where I live. Does this look like fantastic riches?" Ami and Minako looked around. No one else knew what he was talking about, so they didn't. Usagi and Rei wandered off to read John's comic collection. Well, look at the pictures. Hard to read something in a language you don’t know very well. Makoto searched the refrigerator to see what she was going to have to buy for food. "I guess if you were rich, you might have a TV that wasn't ten years old," Minako said. Ami smiled. "I have a clever plan to deal with that." John's "warning, warning, DANGER, WILL ROBINSON, DANGER" sense went off. When people say they have a clever plan, it almost always means something horrible is about to happen, although usually to them. Some people cause collateral damage though.... "Clever like what?" Ami got out her computer and started typing. Minako and John tried reading the monitor over her shoulder, but given that neither of them was familiar with Silver Millenium programming languages, they gave up after the twentieth or so line that that looked like BGTZ 56 TYUIOP (FOO, FLAP, A COW*). *For the trivia lovers out there, there is a chapter of the Koran whose title translates as "A cow" in English. I'm not kidding. John sat back to talk to Minako, who was wearing his Otakon T-shirt, and finally took a REALLY good look at her. He had been so distracted, he had hardly looked at any of his new guests. She seemed subtly different from what he remembered her looking like when he had...created her? Pulled her out of another dimension? Suddenly, it came to him. She looked older. Or maybe it was just how her eyes were now a normal size for an ordinary human. Some of it was his clothing...it seemed a little odd on her, since it was subdued in hue, compared to her. Her skin, her eyes, her hair, all of it was in sharp, bright clearly defined colors. Those things had not changed. She looked like a very well drawn, realistic living cartoon. Her proportions were normal, and at a distance she probably wouldn't stand out too much, but up close, you could tell something was unusual. Her hair had gotten a little bit longer as well. She smiled back at him as he looked her up and down, then said, "So you like what you see?" John blinked, then blushed slightly. "You, um...look a little bit different." He looked over at Ami. She looked subtly different too. They both looked a little less animated and a little more like an ordinary human. Ami also looked a bit older, and so did Makoto when he looked at her. Ami nodded and kept typing. "Protective adaptation." "What, like the way arctic foxes turn white in winter? Or was that rabbits?" John said. Ami nodded. "Somewhat. It also relates to some extent to the principles that were used for the purpose of energy transfer in Asimov's 'The Gods Themselves'. In that book..." "What, the pseudo-scientific stuff about laws bleeding over between universes due to the interaction between it and material that defied its laws? So that as we bring more Nickel 202 over, it slowly weakened the strong force so that eventually our sun would nova?" "Exactly." "So now the sun is going to go nova?" Minako asked, trying to follow the conversation. "No, but the laws of our universe will start bleeding through into this one, especially if a large number of people used that program before we sent Netscape the warning letter." Ami said. "Especially effecting those people who were responsible for it and thus had the most exposure." She kept typing. "What, I'm gonna turn animated?" John asked. "Who knows what might happen. It should be interesting to see what happens. However, not all of what has happened to us relates to that. Some of it appears to be a set of favors from the Cosmic Credit Agency, drawing on the credit we're going to earn karmically for some future deeds." "What deeds?" "I don't know. It's a phenomena known as precognitive karma, in which what you do affects you before you do it." "But how does this credit agency know we're actually going to do..uh, whatever?" John asked, leaning forward. "It's their job. As far as I can tell, we should stabilize around nineteen or so, physically and mentally." She typed some more. "Well, that should take care of our money needs." "What should?" "I broke into the systems of twenty universities that charge for laser printing and altered their accounting to divert the difference between the actual cost and what they charge to our new Swiss bank account. I also made it look like the athletic departments of those schools were embezzling the laser printing funds." "Can you also break into the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles and divert all their funding into the salaries of their janitorial staff?" "I already did that," Ami said. "You reading my mind again?" Ami smiled. "I remember it all from when we met." John blushed. "E...Everything? As in you read all my memories and..." "Well, I can't remember EVERYTHING. Just a lot." John blushed even more and tried to forget everything. Luckily for him, this didn't actually work. "Even the time I..." Ami nodded. "Yes." John screamed and ran out of the room. Ami leaned over to Minako and whispered, "Actually, I hardly remember any of it. I wonder what he thought I meant." Minako fell over laughing. YES, IT'S STILL May 9, 1996 Afternoon Someone once said that hell is other people.* He was half right. His statement omitted the phrase "who want to go shopping." Men traditionally hate to go shopping with women, and while he violated many other male sterotypes, John was unable to escape his genetics or his nurture, whichever was responsible. He hated shopping with the passion that most people reserve for hating being kicked in the groin, or hating having their head chopped off, stuffed with holy wafers, and their bodies set on fire.^ Unfortunately, he was faced by five insistent females, all of whom really did need new clothes, and none of whom had a car, a driver's license, or the knowlege of how to drive properly, while he had all three. *Especially when that other person is Jean Sartre, who wrote that in the play No Exit, which is almost as boring as he was. ^Or being gut-shot and thrown off of a ferris wheel onto an iron spike fence. Or being faced to dance the cotton-eye joe butt naked in a kicker bar. OR...well, you get the picture. The car trip was short, but somewhat uncomfortable, given that John's car comfortably seats four, can barely hold five, while six ought to be right out. After much bickering, they decided to perch the lightest person across the laps of the people in the back and pray no cop stopped them. This, unfortunately, necessitated an argument over who was the lightest. This is the sort of argument no one REALLY wins. At best, blood doesn't get shed. Well, not MUCH blood. After a stimulating intellectual discussion of whether Usagi or Rei had a bigger mouth, who had the largest butt, and other important questions like whether or not hair weight should count, they finally put Makoto up front next to John in the front passenger seat, and strung Ami across everyone's laps in the back. All too soon, but still not soon enough for John, they reached the warehouse outlet mall. John had never actually been here before, but he figured it would be cheap.* They parked into the parking lot, which in the hours to come, John would think of as Limbo.^ The minutes blurred into hours as they dragged him store to store to store. Slowly, his brain turned into mush as he tried to guess over and over whether he was supposed to give a favorable opinion of various outfits, and was usually wrong, since his idea of fashion was that it had buttons in it, and that you pick your clothing in the morning by two standards: 1. Is it clean? 2. Is it on top of the pile/front of the clothing rack? *John's knowlege of warehouse outlet malls largely derived from watching one episode of the Simpsons where Marge found an expensive outfit there for $90, having been marked down from $2800. ^The first circle of Hell in Dante's Inferno. NOT Dante’s Peak. If this was a movie, we'd now string a montage of images of John being dragged by force from store to store to store with a look on his face like "Will Kill Self To Get Out Of Here". The only compensation was that it was cheap. However, it seemed to him they could not rest until every article of clothing in every store had been tried on. By lunchtime, John was starting to stagger. The walls were closing in. Everyone seemed to be staring at him, thinking "Who let this MALE in the building?" The rats were laughing in the walls. Cthulhu was rolling over in R'yleh, cackling in his sleep. The clothing racks were moving when he wasn't looking at them. Finally, he snapped and took off running, trying to find some place without any price tags. Minako blinked. "Hey, where are you going?" The others turned. Usagi sighed and said in Japanese, "He's overdosed on mallcrawling! Get him before he hurts himself!" The five senshi turned and sprinted after John, who was running wildly aisle to aisle, trying to find his way out, breathing heavily. Minako and Makoto were the fastest runners, so they circled around John to cut him off. John responded by leaping onto a sales counter, slipping, falling down, falling off the counter, screaming a lot, then running off, leaving a stunned clerk trying to figure out who the insane white boy was. The clerk never did find out. John sprinted off into men's clothing, and calmed slightly.* Some dim remnant of his mind remembered that they were looking for women's clothing, not men's. He was safer here. Usagi and Rei rounded a corner and came face to face with him. *In the same sense that someone who kills five people a day can be said to have calmed slightly if they cut back to four a day. Usagi held out her hand and said in broken English, "We not hurt you. No need shop more." Once again, she wished she spoke English as well as Minako. The only English she could always get right was "This is a yellow pen" and "Where is the mall?" She felt like she was Tarzan speaking to Jane, but it was the best she could do. John ducked inside one of those circular clothing racks. This one had a bunch of button shirts. Usagi made soothing noises and held out her hand again. Finally, John peeked his head out, looking warily. Rei stood, her hands on her waist, getting impatient. "We haven't got all day, Usagi. Why don't we just grab him?" she said in Japanese. "Hey, I'm experienced with this sort of thing. Mamoru does this all the time," she replied in Japanese. Rei blinked and once again didn't feel quite so bad about losing Mamoru to Usagi. She started laughing at the mental image of Mamoru hiding inside a clothing rack. John heard the laughter and ducked out of sight. Usagi turned to Rei. "Don't laugh at him! That'll only make it worse!" "I've had enough of waiting for you to play Jane Goodall, Usagi!" Rei strode forward and grabbed John, pulling him out. He started screaming incoherently about Calvin Klein and John Calvin being the same person. "Will you SHUT UP AND SNAP OUT OF IT?" Rei shouted in Japanese at John. Too bad he can't understand Japanese even when sane. Everyone started to stare and Rei blushed. "We're only trying to help him," she said in Japanese, but no one understood except Usagi. A growing crowd began to flock around them, staring at the two odd looking girls with a raving maniac in tow. Usagi tried to explain to the crowd, "He shop too much. Must rest." By this point, John had moved on to shouting about how no really understood the backward masked messages in Alfred Thayer Mahan's writings but him. He twitched and kept curling his hair around his fingers. Makoto shoved her way through the mob, grabbed all three of them and dragged them out to where Ami and Minako were waiting. They hustled John out of the mall into the open air and he stopped shouting. Rei pointed a finger at John and started lecturing him, in Japanese, "Whaddya make such a crazy scene for? Do you Americans have no dignity? If you did that in one of our malls, you'd be in a lunatic asylum by now!" Rant Rant Rant. John stared blankly at Rei like she was from Mars. Ami tapped Rei on the shoulder, but she ignored Ami. Rei poked John in the chest. "SAY SOMETHING!" He simply breathed heavily, then hid behind Usagi. Rei stepped forward, then Ami said, "Rei...He doesn't speak Japanese." Rei blinked. "I knew that," she bluffed. Usagi worked on calming John down with Minako translating for her, while Ami and Makoto made the obligatory faces of disbelief. Ami said, "The three of you are really going to have to work on your English if we're going to live here." Makoto sighed. "What are we gonna do, anyway? Our lives...don't exist here. There aren't even any monsters for us to fight." "We'll start college in the fall. That should keep you busy. I guess we'll have to improvise until then," Ami said. "Wait, we're going to start COLLEGE?" Rei said. "We haven't even finished high school!" "Well, I'd already done all my reading for the first year of high school, anyway," Ami said, then continued, ignoring the fact that everyone facefaulted, except John, who couldn't understand what they were saying. "Also, this way, we don't have to try and help Usagi pass her college entrance exams." Everyone nodded, remembering what the high school exams had been like. "The language barrier will be the hardest part, but we have all summer for you to work on your English. American colleges are easier than our high schools, anyway. Also, the adaption effect should help." "The what?" Makoto said. Ami repeated the pseudo-scientific nonsense from earlier in this chapter for their benefit. She then repeated it a second time, because Usagi hadn't been paying attention the second time, then a third time, because Rei had interrupted the second explanation by ragging on Usagi...well, eventually they all sort of half-understood it. By this point, John was fairly calm. Ami said to John, "Do you feel any better?" "Now I remember why I had never come here before...Umm...Did you actually buy any clothing? I can't remember anything after the first fifteen minutes or so. Rei was yammering at me about some dress...and then it's all a big blank." His stomach rumbled. "Let's go get some food." He paused. "Wait, how did you guys pay for all your purchases?" Ami waved a credit card. "We all had one of these in our purses, along with a note saying, "Credit Limit: $1500". John looked at the credit card. It said, "Cosmic Credit Agency Visa. Official sponsor, 1994/1996 Myth Drannor Olympic Teams." Under that was Ami's credit card number, with a hologram of the god Mercury next to it. The Visa logo was under the hologram, while the bottom line read, "Good since the beginning of time. Good until Eternity passes away." John blinked and said, "Interesting...I guess they probably take that just about anywhere...I wonder where they'll send the bill...On second thought, they probably know where you are at all times and it just appears in your wallet like the card did." Ami nodded. "No doubt." John's stomach rumbled. "I think that's the cue for lunch." Usagi nodded at another English word she knew. "Lunch good." John smiled. "Too bad we can't just send away for a Acme Instant Language Instructor. We could use something like that." "A what?" "Sorry. That's American cartoons. Happens in Warner Brothers all the time." John looked over and saw a mailbox. He couldn't resist trying...couldn't be any weirder than anything else that had happened today. He scribbled on a piece of paper, "Order for one Acme Instant Language Instructor, and appropriate supplementary materials for Japanese, English, German and Spanish instruction." He then scribbled down Ami's credit card number, popped it in an envelope, stamped it, and addressed it to Acme. Seconds after he popped it in the mailbox, a mail truck rushed up, a postal person took the mail out of it, then rushed off. About twenty seconds after that, another truck rushed up and dumped a huge package at John's feet. "Acme Instant Language Instructor" was scribbled on the label. John blinked and felt a cold chill, then picked up the package and hauled it over to the trunk of his car. "We can play with this when we get home. Let's go get some food..." John left the car parked in the free parking lot at the mall and they tromped two blocks to the nearest restaurant John knew of, Free State Brewery, which is a restaurant and micro-brewery. It's a two level restaurant with a nice glass front, perfect for throwing people through if you were in a cyberpunk story, or leaping through yourself. John got a table for six on the top level. The waitress brought out menus, and the half of the group that spoke little English smiled and pretended they understood what she said. They then tried to read the menu, pretending they understood what it said, and John listened to them yammer, pretending he understood what they said. Rarely has so much been said at one table, and yet so little of it understood by all present. With much effort, they finally managed to order some food. The waitress delivered their order, and for once in the Senshi's lives, they managed to get more than ten minutes of screen time without a monster showing up. They were unaware this was because the opposition was saving up for later. Well, okay, actually the opposition wasn't aware the Senshi had come into existence in this universe either. Right now, Queen Beryl was still trying to clean the rubble of Ted Hsu's dorm out of her hair. The weight of the rubble was causing it to lean at a fourty five degree angle, completely ruining the effect. John prevented the author from rambling any further by saying, "Why is Makoto staring out the window, Ami?" Ami looked over at Makoto and talked to her for a moment then laughed. "That guy over there reminds her of her old boyfriend, apparently." John looked curiously and saw a tall, handsome blond fellow who will reappear later in this story but is currently not very significant. "So her old boyfriend was a blond?" "Well, I could list at least 60 people who remind Makoto of her old boyfriend, including four women,"* Ami said. "including your roommate." *She decided not to mention the cat. John smiled. "Well, you can tell her he's taken." He paused. "I dunno WHERE we're going to put all that clothing you bought. My dresser drawers are full of my gaming stuff and my clothing racks are, well, full of my clothing." Minako said, "We'll just buy a house! Your dorm room is too small anyway." She winked. "Unless you want ALL of us to pile in the bed with you. That could be fun." John and Ami both blushed. Usagi would have blushed, if she'd understood more than half of it. Well, also, she would have had to divert attention from eating, which was right out. "You think your scheme will bring in enough revenues for a house, Ami?" She paused a moment, then started typing on her computer for a few minutes. Finally, she smiled. "There. I just predicted the next winning lotto number for the Kansas Lottery. Let's go buy a ticket." John smiled. "Can you rig my TV to balefire annoying talkshow hosts?" "I'll see what I can do." *************************************************** *********************************************** Chapter 5: Lazy, Hazy Summertime May 15, 1997 John gave a great sigh of relief. The semester was over. The last test was graded, the last paper written. He wandered across the living room of the group's new house and sank down into it. He had let them handle buying it, since he had been busy with schoolwork. They were going to have a housewarming party tonight, which he was supposed to be helping decorate for, but all he really wanted was sleep. Naturally, he wasn't going to get it.