>> Question: Anime Marllar/Marller/Mara or manga ...heck with it...
>> Mara?
>> If the latter, from when in the series? (Early Mara was more a
>> trickster than current Mara is.)
>>>> Good luck, you'll need it.
Speaking of, here's the first installment...
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Team Lovely But Dangerous - 2007
Part the First
Magical Girls: The Gathering
The gadget still felt odd in my hands - smaller and lighter than I
expected. But this was the first time I had ever used one of the
general-access units; by my own choice, I didn't have administrator
privledges any more. I double-checked my choices and pressed the
"commit" button.
There was the familiar sparkle in the air, and I felt the air displace
as Readman-san, Hasegawa-kun, and Kinomoto-chan appeared in front of
me. "Not again..." moaned Sakura.
"Hello, Kinomoto-chan, and Happy New Year. I trust you've been well?"
"It's only been a few hours, Kelk-san. Of course I'm still well."
That's right - it *had* only been a few hours for her. "There's some
homemade shortbreads in the kitchen. Readman-san, I picked up a few
dozen books this year ..." I stopped talking to Yomiko when I noticed
she'd already picked up my brand-new facsimile softcover of Downing's
"The Architecture of Country Houses". (It's 484 pages, plus tipped-in
illustrations; I expected her to be finished it in a half-hour.)
Sakura had already made it to the kitchen and back with the tray of
cookies by the time I turned to Chisame. "Hasegawa-san, I apologize
for pulling you out of your home reality without warning. Considering
what's going on there, though, I suspect you'd appreciate the chance to
catch your breath."
"Home... reality? No, I shouldn't be surprised. Negi-sensei's shown
me that the world's stranger than I thought it was - this is just more
of the same, isn't it?"
"Well, yes ... What the?" The air sparkled and displaced again, and
two people I didn't expect but recognized instantly appeared beside
them. "Oh, my. Wishbringer-sama, Morisato-san, to what do I owe this
unexpected visit? Not that I'm complaining - you're always welcome
here - but this is New Year's, and you know what that ... oh, dear.
You're one of the Challenges, aren't you, Wishbringer-sama?"
"Please, call me Belldandy. I believe I might be related to your
'challenge', Kelk-san; Kami-sama asked me to deliver a note to you, and
I felt a disturbance remarkably like a demon escaping its prison when I
arrived." She offered me a scroll.
"B... B... Belldandy? As in the Norn?" Oh, dear - Chisame was already
losing it, despite what she'd said earlier.
I took the scroll, then turned back to my other guests.
"Kinomoto-chan, I assume Eriol-dono told you what happened last year,
er, week. Would you explain what's going on to Hasegawa-kun, please?"
"Hasegawa-kun?" asked Keiichi.
"They're probably not related," I muttered as I read the note.
Wonderful - they were here for a week. "Ladies, I'm sorry.
Kinomoto-chan, Readman-san, you're going to be here for a week again,
but at least this time you're not going to be alone. Hasegawa-kun,
your breather is going to be a bit longer than I expected..."
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Part the Second (a.k.a. the Easy Challenge)
Whenever You Bring Real Physics Into A Discussion About Anime...
Explanations and introductions went faster than I expected. It helped
that most of the people involved had been through the process before.
Once those pleasantries were over, though, there was still a question
to be answered.
"What's the situation?"
"Well, Readman-san..."
"Yomiko. If she's Belldandy, then I'm Yomiko."
I looked around "Is everybody comfortable with being on a first-name
basis? If you aren't, then say so now." Nobody replied. "Aside from
bodyguarding Belldandy-sama and Keiichi-san from the demon that
Belldandy-sama noticed, I don't know. We'll find out soon enough, if
we turn on the radio - it's time for the hourly news."
I did, and didn't like what I heard. Some nutbar had kidnapped
everyone cosplaying as nekojin at NewYearCon, and was threatening to
spay or neuter them. (When Sakura-chan asked what "spay" and "neuter"
meant, I asked Belldandy-sama to explain the words to her. If anybody
could answer Sakura's questions without destroying her innocence,
Belldandy could. Besides, it kept Belldandy too busy to offer to solve
the problem - she was my guest, not my teammate, so asking her to help
that way would have been rude.)
"That wasn't much to go on," commented Yomiko as she closed the back
cover of "The Architecture of Country Houses" and picked up Diamond's
"Guns, Germs, and Steel". (518 pages, plus tipped-in illustrations; at
this rate, I was going to run out of new books before the day was up,
never mind the week.)
"It never is, on the radio. Chisame-kun, would you check the 'net for
more information, please? The computer in the corner is set up for
dual-boot Win2k/FreeBSD, the guest account on both sides is
'eva_mcdowell', underscore instead of space, all lower-case, and the
password is her usual companion's name, English order, no honourfic,
underscore instead of space, all upper-case."
She sat in front of the computer and logged in to the Unix partition.
"The fact that you know that I know who Evangaline and Chachamaru are
is more frightening to me than anything else I've learned all year,
Rob-san. Ah, it's already in your RSS aggregator - 'Crazed Terrorist
Takes Hostages at Local Convention'. He's demanding ... Oh, ick."
"Belldandy-sama, would you and Sakura-chan please start making dinner?"
What I left unspoken was "and keep her from reading this webpage".
"Of course," replied Belldandy. (With Belldandy and Sakura cooking
tonight, I knew whatever it was would be good.)
"Yomiko-san..." But she was already reading the screen, over Chisame's
shoulder. So was I. I pointed to one line and smiled, and saw her
smile in return. I picked up a pen and a pad of sticky-notes and
quockly wrote on the top sheet. "Chisame-kun, here's my cellphone
number. Yomiko-san and I are heading out for a couple of hours."
Our first stop was the stationery store, where we bought their entire
stock of photo paper. Then we headed to NewYearCon, where Yomiko and I
flashed our authentic-but-should-have-been-useless-in-this-situation
government IDs (mine Canadian, hers British) to get past the crowds of
gawkers and into the Con Suite. It's amazing what a bit of official
documentation and a determined stride will do in a crowd situation.
Once in, we discussed what we had planned with the staff and police
while opening all the packages we had just bought. Luckily, one of the
Con staff was familiar with the concept of the Challenges, so we let
him explain things to the police while we made our way to the hostages.
"Hello!" I shouted at the door to the cosplay area. "We have the
photos you wanted!" I held up one open package of photo paper. "Will
you release some of your hostages in exchange?"
One of the people inside yelled back, "No way! All the demands for all
the kitties!"
That was all we needed to identify the nutbar. "We'll give you the
pictures now anyway. Yomiko...?" And suddenly all of the paper Yomiko
had been holding was flying through the air, zigzagging its way to the
terrorist and wrapping him up tighter than Mirror Man in Yomiko's
family's country house.
We left as the SWAT team secured the terrorist and the crisis team got
the hostages out in an orderly fashion. The police debriefed us for a
half-hour, then let us go - apparently, somebody sent them an order
over their computer system to release us...
When I got home, I deliberately did not ask Chisame whether she'd
hacked into the police computer system to get us out of the debriefing
early. It was dinner time, after all, and it simply would not do to
keep Belldandy and Sakura waiting.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Omake
The Delete Function Never Completely Erases The File
Well, I was in trouble - Chisame had found my "Negima scanlations"
directory. More specifically, she had found the file
[AQS]_MSN_c152_Extra_03.jpg in my "Negima scanlations" directory...
"What the *_Hell_* is *_THAT_*???"
"Well," I said meekly, "the hair colour's wrong, but..."
"That's not what I meant!"
"You're an internet idol, so I thought this picture would have been
okay with you. It makes you look pretty..."
"It makes me look like I'm not wearing any panties!"
Oops... "These pictures are just make-believe, Chisame-kun. You didn't
do that, and you didn't do this either, right?" I called up the file
[AQS]_MSN_c150_Extra_07.jpg
"That's... that's just wrong! No! I didn't do that! Get rid of
those! Now!"
"Okay..." I selected the offending files and hit the delete key,
carefully failing to mention the off-site archive copies I had...
elsewhere.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Next up - the Hard Challenge, then the Medium one (since it's going to
take the longest).
As for the omake, the images in question can be found in the zip files
of the AQS scanlations of chapters 150 and 152, available at
<
http://homepage.mac.com/sp831/lovehina/downloads.html>.
- --
Rob Kelk <
http://robkelk.ottawa-anime.org/> e-mail: s/deadspam/gmail/
"I'm *not* a kid! Nyyyeaaah!" - Skuld (in "Oh My Goddess!" OAV #3)
"When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear
of childishness and the desire to be very grown-up." - C.S. Lewis
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