"Let's turn here." Frank looked at the back of the walking mass of muscle skeptically. "Are you sure of that?" Josh turned to answer him. "Definitely. This ki sensing is a little tricky to manage, but I definitely sense a couple of people ahead of us." He grinned in excited anticipation of an upcoming showdown, while Frank frowned about the whole thing in general. Since running into the martial artist, Frank kept getting a rather bad feeling about the guy that wouldn't go away. A reporter's instinct was usually correct, and Frank's instinct had aided him in many a bad situation, save for when he was drunk. At this point in time, his instinct was basically telling him that he was about to run into a four-alarm fire drenched in gasoline. Josh noted the expression, and frowned. "Relax Frank. Even if Eugene is very powerful, it's not like I can't handle him." "Maybe," Frank started. "But that still doesn't settle my stomach. I'm very worried about Katie and Rosa, and I don't want to take any chances running into those lamp things again." Frank rubbed his head in painful remembrance of the fight in which Katie had been kidnapped, and Frank had been left behind to fend off several very ferocious bedroom lamps. The experience left him very bitter, and wanting to take it out on the nearest furniture store. "That's just the feeling that comes with being in a dangerous, world-saving situation." Josh said puffing out his chest and looking hero-like, which not only failed to impress Frank, but began to make him worry more about Josh's mental state. "You just have to suck it up, since it just comes with the job." "You weren't always like this, were you?" Josh looked at the man in confusion. "Like what?" "Like you enjoy the fact that you could be walking into a definitely dangerous, hostile, and possibly fatal situation with as much enthusiasm as someone walking into their dream job of five years." "Well, not really," Josh shrugged. "But since becoming such a powerful martial artist, it's just the way I do things." He smiled. "It's not like there are many things out there now that can stop me, not even that puffed up SUPERYOGURTGENERAL." Frank's eyebrow twitched, and he turned to his reporter skills to try to get his mind off the fact that Josh was starting to strike him as a unstable person. "Well, how did you get like that in the first place?" "I mixed together that formula that your Katie used to become a Super Deformed character, except I used Dragon Ball Z tapes instead of some of the stuff she used." Frank stared at Josh for a moment, his jaw working, but no words coming out for a moment. After another attempt to find his voice, he spoke. "You mean Otaku Force gave out that formula? What were they thinking?!" Josh shrugged. "Anne mentioned something about hiding the obvious in plain sight, but I guess it didn't work that way. Been the greatest thing in my life though, except for one drawback." "Drawback?" Josh looked at the curious man, and waved it off. "It doesn't matter. Right now, I've got to focus on my upcoming duel with Eugene." Frank looked to continue it, but decided to let it drop for fear of learning something else unhinging about the boy. They turned the corner, and headed into what seemed to be a massive room, filled with... lamps. Lots and lots of lamps, and of all varieties; from desk lamps, to annoying strobe lights, to those really tall room lamps that really hurt your eyes if you look at them directly. Strangely enough, Frank felt the menacing presence in the household illuminators, though he couldn't explain for the life of him how. "Um, you think this is what you were sensing?" Josh seemed occupied for a moment, and nodded his head. "Yes, this would be the life energy I was sensing earlier." He cracked his knuckles, and grinned evilly. "This shouldn't be much of a problem. I'll take three minutes with this, tops." Frank paused. "You know, I just thought of something. Maybe we would have heard them coming if you had said SUPERYOUMAGENERAL correctly earlier." There was a tremendous lightshow, and a loud thunderclap as the lamps all reacted in unison. Josh blinked. "I thought I did." Out of the dozens and dozens of lamps, one of them, an older lamp with plastic still on its shade, stepped away from the masses, and began blinking its lightbulb in short and long sets. The two men blinked at the display, until Frank suddenly nodded in understanding. "It's morse code." "What'd he say?" Frank studied the blinking in hard concentration, and began translating. "Eugene-sama welcomes you to his great fortress, Katie's boyfriend, and Demented Stalker Josh." Frank blushed and stopped to look at Josh, who looked very angry. "Just continue the message," the boy growled. "Um right. He, er, it says that Eugene-sama has figured that you could get past all of his minions with your semi-nifty martial arts powers, and has planned for such an occasion..." Frank was interrupted when a splash occurred soaking both men. He looked at the now female Josh, and then up at the ceiling lamp with an upended bucket right over them. "That would be the problem you ran into, wouldn't it?" Josh sputtered angrily, while the lead light continued to blink its message. "It says that Eugene-sama knew that with your inconvenient curse, you might still be powerful, but not even near to the level of power in your male form." All at once, every lamp in the room began to cackle and shake with pent-up electrical energy. "And with you being wet now," Frank continued nervously, "It should be child's play to handle the both of yo-" Frank never got to finish his sentence as all of the lamps in the room discharged their energy into both him and Josh, knocking them unconscious, and making them smell really crispy. *** ^_^; *** Project Chibification Thunked of by Lady Brick This Part Murdered by Kenji Murasaki Part Ten: The Plot Thickens and Congeals *** ^_^; *** Rosa let out a strangled cry, and made a beeline for Deedee, pushing the others back as she passed them. Deedee, seeing she was about to be the first on Rosa's hitlist, rolled into a ball and screamed, only to be saved by a lunging tackle from Anna, who knocked her out the way and onto the couch with Katie. Rosa stopped her momentum and pivoted, turning a 180, and targeted the other two. "SADISTIC BARRAGE!" She pointed her arms, and two small gatling turrets appeared on her forearm, and let loose with a horrible wail of a gun being used. Cecil tried to leap away, but he was caught in the blast, and forced into the far wall. Hard. "Ahh! Cecil!" Deedee screamed. "Ouch," mumbled Cecil, head spinning from the impact, and dotted from head to toe with paintball colors. Brett, still being pelted with the technicolor arsenal, ducked his head and charged the chibi mecha taking a swipe at her with his katana and slashing off one of the gun turrets. Rosa looked stunned, and Brett slammed the hilt of the blade into her metallic skull, which echoed off with a loud 'clang'. Rosa crumbled slightly, and punched him in the gut, crumpling Brett completely, and held him up for a finishing blow. "Stop! This has continued long enough!" Anna gathered her senses about her after taking the dive into the couch, and was standing up looking on with a sick expression on her face. "This isn't doing anything but getting people hurt, and I didn't come for that. All we came for was to help Katie and Eugene." Katie for he part, was bouncing up and down at the scene of waiwaiviolence, but stopped and got a curious look on her face at Anna's exclamation. "Um, I thought you wanted to take me back to Otaku Force headquarters so you could experiment on me and poke me and probe me and make silly postcards that I won't get paid off of?" "Well, the experiment are kinda necessary if we're going to cure your problem, Katie." Deedee spoke up from Katie's side on the couch, still having not moved from where Anna had pushed her. "As it is, you're already losing control on yourself, and we need to get you stabilized so you don't stay that way." She pulled a patch-like device from her pocket, and Katie 'eeped' and bolted to the other side of the couch. "Help me?" Eugene, who was enjoying the show until this point, was currently glowing an angry red aura. "Help me? Let me see if I have this straight: you want to help me? Or would you rather lock me back up until you can come up with some silly ineffective little solution for my evilness?" Cecil would've said probably the latter, if he wasn't currently knocked out from the impact with the wall like a good little human. Eugene's aura disappeared, and he smirked. "Sorry to disappoint you Anna, but I'm a SUPERYOUMAGENERAL now," A peal of lighting, a crack of thunder, and a squeal of pain sounded, to which everyone sweatdropped. "And I'm afraid I have no need or desire to change myself to normal. Of course, if you're so stuck on converting people, we could-" "Ukyuu?" Katie said. "Yes my Dark Queen?" Eugene said, turning around. "Ano, if your supposed to be a SUPERYOUMAGENERAL," Lightning. Thunder. Squeal. "Then why do you just look like a youma?" "Um, huh?" Eugene intelligently answered. "She's right," Deedee said, still sitting on the couch and holding her little device. "Even the super strong youma have human bodies. If you have all that power, why look like that?" "Um, they didn't look like that in Devil Hunter Yohko." "That doesn't count, those were mamano, not youma." Rosa looked puzzled from where she was still holding Brett in the air. "Isn't that the same thing?" "No, mamano fight to kill, and cause terror on the masses," Anna, strangely enough, added in. "Youma usually just suck energy from people and follow the bidding of their superior." Katie continued to look puzzled. "Then why doesn't he do the same? All he does is cackle and plot evil things, drink that nasty Worchestershire stuff, and be mean to all of those cute lamps!" Eugene looked sheepish, while Anna arched an eyebrow in confusion. "You mistreat your minions of evil? Don't you know that that can bite you in the end if they decide to turn on you?" "Osamu and the others would never desert me!" Eugene proclaimed, then shook his head and started growling. "This is pointless! I have no further use of any of you, so it's time for you to die." Deedee paled. "You wouldn't!" Eugene smirked, and aimed a glowing fist at her. "And why wouldn't I? Consider it revenge for what you've done to so many others, and what you did to my Dark Queen." Deedee whimpered helplessly, and Eugene took super-careful aim, and was fought back by the one forgotten thing in the room, the furry of a famished feline. "Skip out on giving me my meals will you? Take this you git!" Commander Fuzz leapt at his face with all the ferocity of a frustrated tiger, clawing and gnashing and biting and doing other things that were generally not pleasant. "Ah! Get it off!" Eugene, not truly accustomed to being savagely attacked in the face by a cat, did the only sensible thing any red-blooded American would do, and began running around the room screaming in a falsetto voice, and waving his massive arms around, knocking away anything in his path. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on what side you saw it on, he knocked straight into a wall, through the wall, and down a hidden corridor that seemed to lead lower into the ground. The gang looked at the departing SYG, and sweatdropped, before a *Ka-Click* brought their attention to Rosa, who was now holding her other gun turret to a nervous Brett's neck. "Don't think this is over, cause I'm still here, and I still want revenge for what you've done to me, and who knows how many others." Anna stared on, trying to figure out something to do to save Brett, Cecil stayed slumped on the wall in dreamland, and Katie was currently looking very scared of Rosa. "You really wouldn't hurt Brett, would you?" Rosa wavered, having looked into Katie's eyes, and loosing her nerve, but shook her head clear of it. "Don't you see Katie? They're behind everything that's happened! If we just continue to let them go unchecked, more people will suffer!" "Please Rosa, please don't hurt the bishounen." Katie's dinner-plate eyes were now shimmering, and her bottom lip quivered in rhythm. She didn't want this to end with someone getting hurt, it was just wrong. What did Brett-kun ever do to her to get her to put him in such danger? "What has he ever done to you?" "He," Somehow, the pink mecha was able to blush. "He, and that plug suit, and the stupid 'simulation LCL', and all those other hentai things... He deserves it more than any of them!" Katie found she couldn't argue with that, and furrowed her brow cutely, trying to think why Brett shouldn't be hurt. "Be that as it may," Anna spoke in, "We still can't let you just hurt him. He's still got a couple of pics I want for my Men of FY collection." Katie Wai'd at the mention of the fated anime, while Rosa looked generally menacing. "That won't matter, since you're next." "Put. Him. Down." All turned to their heads to look at Deedee, who was scowling, and glaring at Rosa with hardened eyes. "Put. Him. Down. Now." The cold tone did much to shock everyone in the room, but Rosa remained outwardly unfazed. "And if I don't?" Deedee got up from the couch, and walked to Rosa to where she was only a foot away from the chibi mecha. "I won't repeat myself again. Let the hentai go." Rosa stared at the pink-haired girl in defiance, or tried to with her being in mecha form and all, and raised her gun arm to shoot. "Dil Brand." The resulting ground explosion sent both the mecha, and the nervous-looking Brett, into the ceiling, through the ceiling, and back toward the ground in a heap of two unconscious bodies. Katie UBERblinked. "Deedee-chan?" Deedee took a step back, and started crying. Anna went to her, while Cecil, who had just woken up, stared at the scene in a mix of awe and confusion. "I...didn't mean to...she just made me so angry...Oh Anna-sama!" Deedee clutched Anna's shoulders, and sobbed into the girl's shoulder, while Anna simply held her wordlessly, and stroked her back, attempting to soothe the shaken girl. Katie shook her head, and tried to take in what she had just seen. Deedee had mumbled something, then Rosa and Brett were airborne, and there was a big boom. Then they both landed, there was a hole in the roof, and two crispy people, rather one hentai bishounen and a pink mecha, on the ground in dreamland. After putting two and two together to come up with the square root of 56, Katie moved as close to Anna and the sobbing Deedee as she dared, her heart going out to the girl, but still deathly afraid of the device she still had clutched in her hand. "Um, Deedee-chan? How did you do that?" Cecil stood up, finally registered what had occurred, and put a hand to his forehead. "Well, this is a fine mess. Will she be alright Anna?" Anna didn't even look up. "She should be. It's not as bad as it could have been, so she'll recover pretty quickly." "All she ever did was whine and blame us for everything that happened, especially me!" Deedee continued between sobs. "No one ever told her to sign up for the damned experiment! I would have been fine doing it myself; why does she always blame me?! I tried to help her, and she wouldn't even let me do that right and went and got innocent people hurt too!" For a moment, the only sound in the room were the moans of the wounded, Deedee's crying, and Anna's soothing tones. After a moment, Deedee cried herself into an impromptu slumber, and Anna motioned Cecil over, and pointed to Brett, at which the boy nodded, and went to check on him. "Ukyuu?" Katie said in cute confusion. "Well, what do we do now? We've got two unconscious officers, one rogue mecha, a captive chibi, and two super-powered nuts running around here." Cecil huffed and hauled Brett's body toward Anna. "There's no way we can possibly fix this mess. It's gotten out of hand." "Um, hello?" Katie helloed. Anna sighed, cradling Deedee's head in her lap. "The best thing we can do right now is get our bearings together and attempt to go after Eugene. We can't leave him like he is at the moment, and if he runs into Josh, lord knows what could happen. We'll take a break for a moment to get ourselves together. Find whatever can be counted as pink in this room and chuck it; we don't need her trying to kill us or something. And find some rope." "EXCUSE ME! WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!" Anna and Cecil turned to look at a very big Chibi Head, red with frustration, and primed to maim if not satisfied soon. Anna made a mental note to stop ignoring Katie, and turned to the girl. "You mean with Deedee?" She asked, maintaining a perfect calm, very opposite to the heart-attack Cecil was experiencing. "It's a long story, and we don't have the time to talk about it now. Safe to say that Deedee isn't good to be around when she's mad, and Rosa's past with her doesn't help with that." Anna waved to Cecil to get back to searching, and went over to the unconscious mech, picking up the singed and discarded sword. She gave it a look over, and turned to Katie, who went from very curious to very scared. "Um, Anna, what are you going to do with that sword?" Anna moved to Katie's position, seemingly judging something, nodded, and brought the katana above her head. With one quick swipe, she broke through the chain holding the young girl captive on the couch. Katie opened her eyes and looked at the bisected chain, then to the shackle still on her ankle, and then up to Anna, who had put the sword down, and was helping Cecil chuck a vase out the window. It dawned on her that this person was the same who aided in her captivity, and now had freed her? Didn't she want to take her back to Otaku Force headquarters and put her under a microscope? Didn't they all just want to keep her as a lab rat? Katie got off the couch, and scrambled for the hole in the wall, leading into the corridors below, intent on not finding the answer to that question in person. *** ^_^; *** Okay, first of all, lemme say hello and glad to be in this wacky place called 'Improfanfiction.' Second, as my first real statement with the adding of this fic, I'd like to fully apologize. I didn't plan to take up the slack on this part of the story, but it happened, and I'd say I could've done much better. I didn't get to a LOT of the stuff I wanted to, and no one is to blame except me, and old man time. I promise that my next one will be much better, and just to help sort this mess, the next author should have all of my notes (that would be you, LB-sama) Much thanks goes to my friend Hpackrat, for being as persistent as usual in making sure my fiction gets done. Sharyna-san gets the award for prereading, Rutt-san gets an award for attempted prereading (thought that counts, ne?), Yonjuuni for assisting me will all the plot ideas that did and didn't show up. Apologies go to LB-sama (for having to clean up after the newbie), Bard-san for not fully taking his suggestion (though it was damned close), and Dayglo-san for not being able to respond to her in time. I WILL be doing better next time. Mistakes are to learn from, and that's how I enter Impro, a learner. Back to the Hack I go. K. Murasaki 12/28/00 P.S. Thanks to oneechan for leaving me with so many errands to take up potential Writing time. BIIIIIIIDA!