<![CDATA[Drunkard's Walk Forums - Stories]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/ Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:32:28 +0000 MyBB <![CDATA[2017-02-15: Up in the Air]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=15003 Tue, 14 Apr 2026 07:16:50 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=15003 This story can be read on AO3, or on the wiki]]> This story can be read on AO3, or on the wiki]]> <![CDATA[2017-02-04: 5 vs 5]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14993 Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:38:30 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14993
Chapter 1 of 5 vs 5, "The New Kids in Town", went up last week.

Chapter 2 of 5 vs 5, "Getting to Know You", went up today.


Yes, this is the story that I didn't finish before we rebooted the franchise...]]>
Chapter 1 of 5 vs 5, "The New Kids in Town", went up last week.

Chapter 2 of 5 vs 5, "Getting to Know You", went up today.


Yes, this is the story that I didn't finish before we rebooted the franchise...]]> <![CDATA[2016-10-25: Doujin Panic!]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14989 Tue, 03 Mar 2026 05:19:28 -0500 Labster]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14989 This short story can be read on AO3

... and of course on the wiki too

... which I feel I should mention because AO3 was down most of yesterday.  All of our stories eventually make it to the wiki, but multi-chapter stories aren't moved into the public space until they're complete.]]> This short story can be read on AO3

... and of course on the wiki too

... which I feel I should mention because AO3 was down most of yesterday.  All of our stories eventually make it to the wiki, but multi-chapter stories aren't moved into the public space until they're complete.]]> <![CDATA[2017-01-17: Learning to Be Yourself]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14988 Tue, 17 Feb 2026 08:02:21 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14988 Chapter 1 of this story is now available on AO3.]]> Chapter 1 of this story is now available on AO3.]]> <![CDATA[2017-01-13: On Thin Ice]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14980 Wed, 28 Jan 2026 08:20:39 -0500 Bob Schroeck]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14980 Chapter 1 of this story is available on AO3.]]> Chapter 1 of this story is available on AO3.]]> <![CDATA[2017-01-12: Five Years to Live Again]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14975 Tue, 13 Jan 2026 08:34:19 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14975 This story is available on AO3]]> This story is available on AO3]]> <![CDATA[2017-01-01: New Year's Dreams]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14964 Sun, 28 Dec 2025 12:30:21 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14964 New Year's Dreams
A KanriKyara story

Evernight Visitor
1:15 AM, January 1, 2017

It was when Harry noticed that he was surrounded by red crystal walls, of a shade much closer to magenta than to ruby and glowing faintly from within, that he first realized he was dreaming.

It was when Harry felt the unfortunately familiar touch of Voldemort's emotions that he realized just what kind of dream he was having. He focussed his attention, to remember as much as possible when he awoke.

He could feel Voldemort's dismissive sneer of superiority and his unformed eagerness as he was led through a hallway that seemed more grown than built, guided by a mountain of a man nearly as big as Hagrid. He was dressed in browns and greens, and unlike Hagrid his beard and hair were neatly trimmed. For all his size, he moved with a surprising grace and silence, and would glance at the wizard he escorted with obvious suspicion. Harry could see a powerful intelligence in his eyes, one that recognized the danger that Voldemort represented.

For his part, Voldemort dismissed the man as a subhuman half-breed for his size, unworthy of any true consideration. Once he took control here — and the Dark Lord had no doubt he would — he would commemorate the event by subjecting the brute to the Cruciatus and testing his endurance. The black, bone-faced creatures that inhabited this land were disappointingly unaffected by the curse, and Voldemort's desire to inflict pain had not been sated properly in some days — not since the village whose inhabitants had pointed him to the hidden borders of this dark land with its red sky.

Harry tried to sift as carefully as he could through Voldemort's thoughts for a sense of where he was, to no avail. All he could pick from the Dark Lord's mind were brief glimpses of lush green jungle, oppressively hot, and then a barren, broken landscape of black stone and red skies that looked like no place on Earth he was familiar with.

The hallway abruptly ended in a pair of great black doors that looked as crystalline as the walls. Voldemort's guide gave him one last, inscrutable look, then pushed them open; silently they swung wide to reveal what could only be a throne room. And in it...

Although Voldemort hid it perfectly, Harry could feel the Dark Lord's shock and disgust, and his own surprise. Upon a throne of even more crystal was a woman — but not a human woman. She was human-shaped, yes, but her skin and hair — the latter tied into a bun from which a half-dozen or so bound locks almost like dreadlocks sprung — were bone white. Her eyes were gleaming red against black sclera, a black diamond shape decorated her forehead, and a web of black veins spread across her face, almost artistic in its symmetry. She was dressed in what looked like a cross between a dress and wizard's robes, with a cutout that to Harry's discomfort showed off the valley of snow-white flesh between her breasts.

At her side was a... thing. It looked like a ball of glowing red glass partially covered with small plates of what appeared to be bone, sitting on a black base ringed with downward-pointing claws. Harry almost thought it was a decoration or device of some sort until he spotted the waving red tentacles, each tipped with a blade of more bone, hanging beneath it. It bobbed slowly up and down in the air, and Harry had the strangest sensation that it was looking at him. Not at Voldemort — at him.

Harry took some private delight that the woman studied Voldemort with the same kind of look Voldemort would turn on those he felt were beneath him — which was to say, everyone.

Voldemort also noticed this, and his ego and anger both began to boil.

"My lady? The lord Voldemort," the huge man rumbled in a tectonically deep voice.

"Thank you, Hazel," the woman said. Harry was surprised at how... pleasant she sounded. "You may go." It struck Harry that they weren't speaking English, but some other language. How he could understand it, he chalked up to dream logic — or was he somehow piggybacking on Voldemort's understanding?

Voldemort glanced at his escort, who nodded respectfully to her before backing out of the room and closing the doors behind him. Then he turned his gaze back to the woman who studied him as though he were nothing more than a curious insect. "Lord Voldemort?" she asked with a raised eyebrow, and Harry could feel his growing fury at what he perceived (probably correctly) as a lack of respect. "And what would you be lord of?"

"I am Lord of the Wizarding World, woman!" Voldemort snarled. That definitely hadn't been in English, so maybe he was borrowing Voldemort's knowledge of whatever language it was.

Harry spotted a flicker of irritation cross her face; he wondered if Voldemort had. "The Wizarding World?" she asked. "And where might that be?" She rose from her throne and glided across the room to come face-to-face with the Dark Lord. And "glide" was exactly the word for how she moved — if Harry hadn't seen the slight movement of her legs under her ankle-length skirt, he might have sworn she was on wheels. "Another universe, I would wager. You are no more a native of this... Earth than I am, and the very fact that I find you on my doorstep tells me that whatever power and resources you may have once possessed were left behind in the world you came from."

"Silence, woman!" Voldemort roared. "You will bow before me and hand over this castle to your rightful lord!" He brandished his wand, which the woman ignored. He'd never been the most patient or diplomatic of men in Harry's opinion, but Voldemort could be charming when he needed to be; this immediate escalation to demands and threats was new and different, as if Voldemort had completely lost the ability to be anything but angry.

"My rightful lord?" The woman smirked at Voldemort, which drove him to even higher levels of fury. "There is no such thing. You certainly aren't it — you are no more than a homeless wanderer with delusions of grandeur."

"I am Lord Voldemort, the greatest wizard history has ever seen!" he thundered. "I have defeated death, and no one can stand against me!"

The amusement on the woman's alien face was obvious to Harry — and to Voldemort. "You claim to be immortal?"

"I claim nothing! I am immortal!"

To both Voldemort and Harry's shock, she laughed. "You know nothing of immortality, little homunculus," she said. "What shred of a soul you have left to you is not even yet a century old." Her eyes flashed. "I have seen millennia come and go. I have been worshipped as a goddess by generations of humans." She sneered at him. "Your pretensions to superiority would be amusing were they not tedious. You will not make demands of me."

"So be it," Voldemort snarled, and raised his wand in a flash. "Avada kedavra!" he spat, and Harry felt the unclean miasma of his hatred as the green bolt of the killing curse shot across the few feet between the two to strike the woman cleanly in her chest.

Harry shared Voldemort's shock when the woman did not fall dead, but instead simply looked down at her unmarked breast and then back up at him. "Was that supposed to do something?" she asked, utterly unimpressed.

Voldemort didn't bother to reply. "Crucio!" he barked and again the spell struck her.

The woman merely rolled her eyes and sighed. "Tiresome," she said as if disappointed, and made a careless gesture. Voldemort found himself lifted into the air and rendered both silent and motionless.

"Arrogant fool," she continued. "You believe yourself immortal because you've managed to cling tenuously to the mortal realms after the death of your body, but I am truly immortal. Nothing short of an act of the gods themselves can end my life." She walked around the Dark Lord as she spoke, disappearing from Harry's view and reappearing once again. "You wield a pittance of power using a crutch and think yourself invincible." She snorted in obvious amusement. "You aren't," she added as she took the wand from his frozen hand. She examined it for a moment, then tossed it over her shoulder. The thing that hovered by her throne snapped out a slender red tentacle and snatched it out of the air.

"Now... what to do with you? You are quite unsuited to join my loyal servants." She tapped her chin with a fingertip while studying him, like a bug pinned to a board by an entomologist. "I know. I could always use another hound."

She made another careless gesture.


Harry woke abruptly. The echoes of Voldemort's screams as the tattered remains of his soul were ripped from his spell-born body still rang in his ears. He launched himself from his bed. Professor Dumbledore needs to know about this right now, he thought as drew on his shoes and robe.


The Once and Future Dreamer
1:27 AM, January 1, 2017

Harley was in a mall. Not in Pensacola; back home in Daytona Beach.

"'Go buy some spark plugs, and then I'll help you tune your bike.' I can tune it myself, dad."

"You shouldn't talk to yourself out loud, kid," the guy behind the counter said.

Kid? Harley wondered before noticing the reflection in the counter jockey's eyes. No beard. I haven't seen that face in years.

Then there was a tug at Harley's sleeve. "Mister Waters?"

Mister? "Mr. Waters is my father. I'm Harley." Turning to look at whoever was holding the sleeve, Harley saw a kid. Preteen. Asian. With red eyes and blue-white hair.

"Mister Harley, please help me get to Pensacola Beach."

"That's all the way on the far end of the Panhandle, kid."

"We need to get there, even if it takes a lifetime." The little girl — and Harley was sure she was a girl, despite the unisex clothes and haircut that she wore — looked into Harley's eyes, with all the solemnity a preschooler could gather.

Strange thing for a kid to say. As the wind blew past them while they stood on a walkway near the city's namesake beach, Harley asked, "You got a name, kid?"

"Zero."

"Weird name." Then Harley noticed his beard was back. "Why'd you need to get to Pensacola, Zero?"

"To find myself. And you need to find yourself, too."

Then the penny dropped. White hair. Red eyes. Not Zero. Rei.

"I thought all the Ayanami clones shared a single soul," Harley said while looking over the railing at an Olympic-sized pool twenty feet below them.

"I thought that, too," chibi-Rei said before jumping off the edge of the ledge and making a perfect dive into the pool... which turned orange.


As Harley woke up to a dark bedroom, he thought, Maybe I am here to find myself. Rei certainly has changed since she moved in back in September. Have I?.


Silence and Song
2:09 AM, January 1, 2017

Rei Hino looked around, only to see a barren land and statues of her four closest comrades.

No, not statues. They were her teammates, but nobody was moving. And there was dust around their feet.

"Didn't we defeat the Silence?"

There was no reply.

Then she saw the other figures. Seven, lined up to face the seven Sailor Senshi.

Seven Senshi? she wondered. But she was carried by the wind so that she was removed from the line.

Yet there were still seven Senshi facing the others, including Sailor Chibimoon and Sailor Saturn. Usagi was not there; she was clearly visible at the shrine at the summit of Mount Fuji.

"Usagi is our luck," she heard from behind her in a chorus that reminded her somehow of sultry childlike bells. While Rei knew that she'd heard at least part of that voice before, she didn't know all of it. And she couldn't turn to see who had said that. She was too enraptured by the view from the window in front of her and her teammates - a view of her home back in Roppongi.

Then the window shattered, taking the scene with it, revealing a scene that was not the same despite being identical.

Rei knew that there was no place for her in that second Roppongi. She could see that she was already there.

Their opponents, still unmoving, could not take advantage of her distraction. But she couldn't move either.

As Fuji-san crumbled, Usagi stood beside Rei. In a voice that rang out like a whisper, she told their opponents, "Stuck in that same position; You deserve so much more."

Alas, Usagi was not one for singing.

And the others were not five for listening. With eyes closed and hands over their ears, they replied, "If you're here to make amends, just leave; Find yourself another dream to believe."

Usagi dropped to her knees, alone, crying at the lost chance. The chance for what, Rei wasn't certain... but the glow of the Ginzuishou told her softly, "They have lost their chance for Love and Justice."

Everyone left... but not everyone. Rei remained, with a crow perched on each of her outstretched arms, and so did Usagi. And there was no dust to be seen anywhere on the barren landscape.

Two of the others stayed as well. Two who had not cast her closest friend into despair. They both looked at Usagi, a picnic spread out on the grass between them and her.

They said nothing.

But their shadows, orange and purple, declared, "No more quiet in the corners of my soul, No more stories left untold; Even if it hurts, even if I fall, I’d rather lose than never live at all."


And, with the realization that those lyrics — and they were lyrics — would not be written for another decade, Rei awoke from her dream.

"No more quiet in the corners of my soul," she repeated to an empty bedroom. As she reached for the pen and paper that she kept beside her bed so that she could record what she remembered of her prophecy, she said, "If quiet means Silence, then they had to have been the Witches 5. But what were they quoting? And why did their shadows say it, and not them? Whoever they were. I'm already forgetting the dream."

Once she finished writing down what she remembered, she went back to sleep... but, if she dreamed again, she didn't remember it.


The Bearoness
5:01 AM, January 1, 2017

Tomo was back at her high school, walking through the lush gardens surrounding the campus. «Wait,» she thought, «Is this really my high school?» She stared up at the elegant, triangular school building. "Oh, right! I'm a baroness now!" she said, as if it explained everything. Of course nobility would go to fancier schools.

A tall, aristocratic looking girl with long French curls was passing by. «Ooh la la! She's also my type.»

The girl began to walk towards the fountain, where Tomo was sitting. "Sorry to make you wait."

"I didn't wait long," Tomo said, automatically. She thought, «How do you greet a rich girl again?», then spoke, "Gokigen yo!" She wondered if that was right, but then looked up to the sunset in the sky and realized a morning greeting wasn't right.

But if Tomo was meeting this girl in a place like this after school, then she decided it must be a romantic meeting. Then she suddenly remembered this was her girlfriend. Well, one of her girlfriends, anyway. Things like that happened at all-girl schools, after all. After the blonde joined Tomo sitting on the edge of the fountain, Tomo said, "Hey there, Ojou-chan. Did you miss me?"

"M-miss you? Why would one do such a thing?" Ojou dodged.

«So tsundere, so sexy.» Tomo scooted closer and said, "So there's nothing about me that you want?"

"Um, well..." the blonde blushed.

Tomo leaned in for a kiss, and Ojou closed her eyes. It was hot and sweet. Ojou's breasts pressed up against Tomo's, and Tomo could feel herself starting to get wet. Ojou began to get more aggressive, thrusting her leg between Tomo's.

Suddenly, from behind the trees, someone called out, "Hold it right there!" The girls froze in their embrace, as the other woman stepped out from cover, a hunting rifle aimed right at them.

The light shone off her glasses, and for a second Tomo was afraid the woman was Yomi. Or maybe she wanted the woman to be Yomi after all? She couldn't make up her mind, but it turned out the girl with the gun wasn't Yomi at all. "Tomo-sama, you almost became her next victim."

"Victim?" Tomo didn't exactly feel very victimized.

The new girl, Eiko, didn't flinch as she pointed her gun at the blonde, who was now standing a few feet away from Tomo. "She's not your girlfriend," the bespectacled girl said, "she's a bear!"

Tomo gave a blank stare. "Huh?"

— Shock! Kuma Shock! —

She looked back to Ojou, who had transformed into, well, mostly herself but with bear ears and kigurumi claws for hands. "Whoa." «Well... still my type, I guess.»

Ojou lamented, "I'm sorry that Tomo-sama has to see my secret."

"Step away from the bear! Before she eats you!"

Tomo said, "Um, that was kind of the plan."

"She's a bear," Eiko said. "A bear! You know, claws your back, always after honey, chases the birds and the bees."

"You know these are all metaphors, right?"

"Nevertheless, she must be taken to trial as an enemy of mankind. Move!" she ordered, her rifle prodding them up the spiral stairs to the top of the school. The stairs went up and up and up, and Tomo began to wonder how long the stairs would go on, because they seemed like they stretched on forever.

But as soon as she had that thought, she was already on top of the roof of the school. All of her classmates from her new high school were arranged around in a big circle. And at the center, tied up in the defendant's box, was Ojou-chan.

"Ladies of the jury," Eiko presented, "This bear was caught in the act, about to consume the lovely, pure-hearted maiden, our beloved Tomo-sama. For this crime, this utter failure to read the mood, we can only reach one result: guilty! So I will now hear your verdicts."

The verdict came down as one person after another in a line declared, "Crimibear," and the next "Crimibear," and another "Crimibear."

Tomo cried, "Objection! Doesn't the defendant get to speak?"

"What right does an animal who invaded our planet have? None."

"Eh?" Tomo didn't feel like an ace attorney now.

Eiko pushed her glasses back up her nose a bit, raised her rifle, and pointed it at the defendant. "I will now carry out the sentence on this crimibear."

Ojou whimpered.

Tomo had to do something. She couldn't let a single one of her girlfriends die, not even at the hands of that violent Yomi knock-off. «What would Usagi do? Probably something cool and wise,» she thought. «And I'm just a fool. Well, I know what fools do.»

Tomo rushed into the firing line, "Stop! Ojou is a good bear who did nothing wrong. Why can't we be together?"

"This is obstruction of justice!" She gripped the rifle tighter.

"You call this love and justice?"

The fake Yomi's mood darkened, "You really can't read the mood, can you? You're one of those girls who can't read the mood, aren't you? And not reading the mood, that's called evil. Isn't it time to exclude Tomo-kun for evil, everyone?" Eiko moved forward, and pushed the end of her rifle right against Tomo's heart.

Tomo didn't back away. "What? That's stupid. Wait, no, that's really dumb!" Tomo considered herself an expert in stupidity, but it always astonished her how stupid people could be when they were not even trying to be stupid. It was time to take these girls to school. Tomo school.

"I am Baroness Lady Tomo von Takino of the Moon Kingdom, and I will not forgive this! Tearing apart two maidens in love is just too cruel, even if one of them is a bear-girl. Everyone in this world has a right to love and beauty!"

The crowd of girls around the trial was clearly moved by Tomo's amazing and stunning speech. But Eiko was not. "How can you promise love and beauty to everyone? You're nothing but a fraud."

Tomo said, "Oh, I get it now." She pushed her body closer to Eiko, the barrel of the rifle pressed hard against her chest, and stared into Eiko's eyes. "I wasn't reading the mood. I'm sorry." And then she French kissed her too. Sure, Eiko was annoying, but she reminded her of someone else she liked. The crowd of girls went squee in the background, as Eiko kissed Tomo back.

"That wasn't... I mean..." Eiko stammered. She stammered a couple times before admitting, "I guess... we can have peace with the bears."

"All right, now we're talking!" Tomo sat down at a long shiny wooden table that was helpfully on top of the school roof, and began writing a peace treaty. Because she was a noblewoman Tomo knew this stuff really well and it didn't take all that long. Of course she mentioned rights to the strategic honey reserve because treaties always have things like that.

Eiko sat down and signed the treaty with an elegant fountain pen, followed with Ojou applying a big hanko that left an impression like a bear print in red. Everyone around cheered the new era of peace!

"Thank you Tomo-sama, we couldn't have done it without you," Eiko told her.

And Ojou came over with those gorgeous curls and cute little bear ears, "My people and I owe you everything, Tomo. How can I ever repay you?"

Tomo smiled, "Well... I have an idea."

Just then, another girl came up to her. A little bit shorter than Tomo, with pale skin, and with glasses as round as her black bear ears, she spoke with a soft voice. "Tomo, can I speak with you? Alone?"

"Sure! What's up?"

She gestured with her paw to follow.

She led Tomo through the door into the stairwell, but it didn't lead in inside the school at all. Instead, Tomo found herself on a brightly-lit mountaintop. In front of her was a massive crater lake filled with deep, deep blue water. And all around the lake were jagged little peaks, covered with patches of snow. Tomo glanced behind, and saw the other mountains and valleys below, carpeted in lush forest, and spotted the village with the white castle.

The girl stood to her left, next to a shrine. Tomo wasn't sure how she knew it was a shrine, because she had never seen a building like it before, but she knew. It looked like the crystal was growing out of the wood. She would have kept taking in the sights, but the other girl spoke.

"Are you really from the Moon Kingdom?"

"Yeah, Baroness Tomo Takino of Ameno Uzume."

"I heard it was lost, long ago."

"Yeah, it was. There was some reincarnation involved, but yeah, they're real. We're real. They're back."

"Oh, thank Heaven!" Her search was finally over. She wasn't sure at first, but dreams are always a funny business, where people work out things about themselves. But she could feel Tomo's fear when she stepped in front of the gun, and knew what kind of person she was. Her breathy voice sounded like it had steel behind it, "Please, you have to have to help my planet!"

"Who are you?" Tomo asked.

The girl withdrew a honey dipper from the pocket of her school uniform jacket, inexplicably decorated in gems with bands of pink and gold along the dipping end. She shouted, "Kumaria Planet Power, make up!" She was surrounded by pink light; her clothes faded away and she was briefly nude. Another uniform materialized on her body: a sailor suit in white with pale yellow, and a big ribbon of Tyrian purple tied in a bow at her breast. Beneath her dark round ears, star-shaped barettes decorated her hair.

"You're... you're —"

"Sailor Kumaria, pretty guardian of the forest planet, sailor-suited soldier of love and fidelity."

"Wow!" Tomo was impressed by all sailor senshi, but she knew she couldn't just sit around dazed by the beauty. As the Moon Kingdom's number one ambassador extraordinaire, she would never sit still at a time like this. She would make... small talk! "Your planet is beautiful."

"Mmm. Lilywhite Shrine is one of my favorite places." Sailor Kumaria's tone changed, her voice soft but firm, like Ami-chan, "But all of this is at risk. Please, if the old alliance still means anything, please help save our world!"

Tomo didn't know anything about an alliance, but she couldn't imagine her boss Usagi refusing a plea like that. "Of course we will help! What do you need?"

Parts of the scenery began to fade into white, as the mountains evaporated into mist, then the lake vanished, too. Tomo began to feel like she was shaking back and forth.

Kumaria pleaded, "No, not yet! Please come to the forest planet, before—"


The light flooded into Tomo's eyes so fast she immediately closed them again.

"Come on Tomo! You're the one who wanted to do the first sunrise this year." Yomi shook Tomo's bed once more.

Tomo mumbled, groggily, "But I have to save the bears..."

"Get up!"

The fog in Tomo's mind cleared, "All right, getting up."

As she dressed, she pieced together part of her dreams. She thought it was cool she got to be on Mt. Fuji for the good omen, but sad that the sexy part didn't have time to get good. All in all: four stars, would dream again.


They waited for the sunrise in the rooftop garden, on one of the wooden benches, as the twilight ever so slowly gave way. Brent emerged from the stairwell, and came over to greet them.

"He wears pants," Yomi said.

"You've seen me wear pants before." He did wear shorts a lot, though.

"Have I?"

"Not that I recall," Tomo added.

Brent rubbed his hands together, "It's too cold."

"Eh, this is nothin'," Tomo dismissed him. "It doesn't even snow here."

Brent asked, "So did you have any New Year's dreams? You guys are kind of famous for it."

Tomo hopped on the question first, "Yeah, my dream was great. It turns out I'm even more awesome than I thought. Go me!"

Yomi said, "I don't even want to know."

"But it turns out Brent is wrong."

"I'm what?" Brent muttered.

Tomo continued, "You make a terrible attorney, Yomi."

"Don't want to hear it."

"This is gonna be a great year!"]]> New Year's Dreams
A KanriKyara story

Evernight Visitor
1:15 AM, January 1, 2017

It was when Harry noticed that he was surrounded by red crystal walls, of a shade much closer to magenta than to ruby and glowing faintly from within, that he first realized he was dreaming.

It was when Harry felt the unfortunately familiar touch of Voldemort's emotions that he realized just what kind of dream he was having. He focussed his attention, to remember as much as possible when he awoke.

He could feel Voldemort's dismissive sneer of superiority and his unformed eagerness as he was led through a hallway that seemed more grown than built, guided by a mountain of a man nearly as big as Hagrid. He was dressed in browns and greens, and unlike Hagrid his beard and hair were neatly trimmed. For all his size, he moved with a surprising grace and silence, and would glance at the wizard he escorted with obvious suspicion. Harry could see a powerful intelligence in his eyes, one that recognized the danger that Voldemort represented.

For his part, Voldemort dismissed the man as a subhuman half-breed for his size, unworthy of any true consideration. Once he took control here — and the Dark Lord had no doubt he would — he would commemorate the event by subjecting the brute to the Cruciatus and testing his endurance. The black, bone-faced creatures that inhabited this land were disappointingly unaffected by the curse, and Voldemort's desire to inflict pain had not been sated properly in some days — not since the village whose inhabitants had pointed him to the hidden borders of this dark land with its red sky.

Harry tried to sift as carefully as he could through Voldemort's thoughts for a sense of where he was, to no avail. All he could pick from the Dark Lord's mind were brief glimpses of lush green jungle, oppressively hot, and then a barren, broken landscape of black stone and red skies that looked like no place on Earth he was familiar with.

The hallway abruptly ended in a pair of great black doors that looked as crystalline as the walls. Voldemort's guide gave him one last, inscrutable look, then pushed them open; silently they swung wide to reveal what could only be a throne room. And in it...

Although Voldemort hid it perfectly, Harry could feel the Dark Lord's shock and disgust, and his own surprise. Upon a throne of even more crystal was a woman — but not a human woman. She was human-shaped, yes, but her skin and hair — the latter tied into a bun from which a half-dozen or so bound locks almost like dreadlocks sprung — were bone white. Her eyes were gleaming red against black sclera, a black diamond shape decorated her forehead, and a web of black veins spread across her face, almost artistic in its symmetry. She was dressed in what looked like a cross between a dress and wizard's robes, with a cutout that to Harry's discomfort showed off the valley of snow-white flesh between her breasts.

At her side was a... thing. It looked like a ball of glowing red glass partially covered with small plates of what appeared to be bone, sitting on a black base ringed with downward-pointing claws. Harry almost thought it was a decoration or device of some sort until he spotted the waving red tentacles, each tipped with a blade of more bone, hanging beneath it. It bobbed slowly up and down in the air, and Harry had the strangest sensation that it was looking at him. Not at Voldemort — at him.

Harry took some private delight that the woman studied Voldemort with the same kind of look Voldemort would turn on those he felt were beneath him — which was to say, everyone.

Voldemort also noticed this, and his ego and anger both began to boil.

"My lady? The lord Voldemort," the huge man rumbled in a tectonically deep voice.

"Thank you, Hazel," the woman said. Harry was surprised at how... pleasant she sounded. "You may go." It struck Harry that they weren't speaking English, but some other language. How he could understand it, he chalked up to dream logic — or was he somehow piggybacking on Voldemort's understanding?

Voldemort glanced at his escort, who nodded respectfully to her before backing out of the room and closing the doors behind him. Then he turned his gaze back to the woman who studied him as though he were nothing more than a curious insect. "Lord Voldemort?" she asked with a raised eyebrow, and Harry could feel his growing fury at what he perceived (probably correctly) as a lack of respect. "And what would you be lord of?"

"I am Lord of the Wizarding World, woman!" Voldemort snarled. That definitely hadn't been in English, so maybe he was borrowing Voldemort's knowledge of whatever language it was.

Harry spotted a flicker of irritation cross her face; he wondered if Voldemort had. "The Wizarding World?" she asked. "And where might that be?" She rose from her throne and glided across the room to come face-to-face with the Dark Lord. And "glide" was exactly the word for how she moved — if Harry hadn't seen the slight movement of her legs under her ankle-length skirt, he might have sworn she was on wheels. "Another universe, I would wager. You are no more a native of this... Earth than I am, and the very fact that I find you on my doorstep tells me that whatever power and resources you may have once possessed were left behind in the world you came from."

"Silence, woman!" Voldemort roared. "You will bow before me and hand over this castle to your rightful lord!" He brandished his wand, which the woman ignored. He'd never been the most patient or diplomatic of men in Harry's opinion, but Voldemort could be charming when he needed to be; this immediate escalation to demands and threats was new and different, as if Voldemort had completely lost the ability to be anything but angry.

"My rightful lord?" The woman smirked at Voldemort, which drove him to even higher levels of fury. "There is no such thing. You certainly aren't it — you are no more than a homeless wanderer with delusions of grandeur."

"I am Lord Voldemort, the greatest wizard history has ever seen!" he thundered. "I have defeated death, and no one can stand against me!"

The amusement on the woman's alien face was obvious to Harry — and to Voldemort. "You claim to be immortal?"

"I claim nothing! I am immortal!"

To both Voldemort and Harry's shock, she laughed. "You know nothing of immortality, little homunculus," she said. "What shred of a soul you have left to you is not even yet a century old." Her eyes flashed. "I have seen millennia come and go. I have been worshipped as a goddess by generations of humans." She sneered at him. "Your pretensions to superiority would be amusing were they not tedious. You will not make demands of me."

"So be it," Voldemort snarled, and raised his wand in a flash. "Avada kedavra!" he spat, and Harry felt the unclean miasma of his hatred as the green bolt of the killing curse shot across the few feet between the two to strike the woman cleanly in her chest.

Harry shared Voldemort's shock when the woman did not fall dead, but instead simply looked down at her unmarked breast and then back up at him. "Was that supposed to do something?" she asked, utterly unimpressed.

Voldemort didn't bother to reply. "Crucio!" he barked and again the spell struck her.

The woman merely rolled her eyes and sighed. "Tiresome," she said as if disappointed, and made a careless gesture. Voldemort found himself lifted into the air and rendered both silent and motionless.

"Arrogant fool," she continued. "You believe yourself immortal because you've managed to cling tenuously to the mortal realms after the death of your body, but I am truly immortal. Nothing short of an act of the gods themselves can end my life." She walked around the Dark Lord as she spoke, disappearing from Harry's view and reappearing once again. "You wield a pittance of power using a crutch and think yourself invincible." She snorted in obvious amusement. "You aren't," she added as she took the wand from his frozen hand. She examined it for a moment, then tossed it over her shoulder. The thing that hovered by her throne snapped out a slender red tentacle and snatched it out of the air.

"Now... what to do with you? You are quite unsuited to join my loyal servants." She tapped her chin with a fingertip while studying him, like a bug pinned to a board by an entomologist. "I know. I could always use another hound."

She made another careless gesture.


Harry woke abruptly. The echoes of Voldemort's screams as the tattered remains of his soul were ripped from his spell-born body still rang in his ears. He launched himself from his bed. Professor Dumbledore needs to know about this right now, he thought as drew on his shoes and robe.


The Once and Future Dreamer
1:27 AM, January 1, 2017

Harley was in a mall. Not in Pensacola; back home in Daytona Beach.

"'Go buy some spark plugs, and then I'll help you tune your bike.' I can tune it myself, dad."

"You shouldn't talk to yourself out loud, kid," the guy behind the counter said.

Kid? Harley wondered before noticing the reflection in the counter jockey's eyes. No beard. I haven't seen that face in years.

Then there was a tug at Harley's sleeve. "Mister Waters?"

Mister? "Mr. Waters is my father. I'm Harley." Turning to look at whoever was holding the sleeve, Harley saw a kid. Preteen. Asian. With red eyes and blue-white hair.

"Mister Harley, please help me get to Pensacola Beach."

"That's all the way on the far end of the Panhandle, kid."

"We need to get there, even if it takes a lifetime." The little girl — and Harley was sure she was a girl, despite the unisex clothes and haircut that she wore — looked into Harley's eyes, with all the solemnity a preschooler could gather.

Strange thing for a kid to say. As the wind blew past them while they stood on a walkway near the city's namesake beach, Harley asked, "You got a name, kid?"

"Zero."

"Weird name." Then Harley noticed his beard was back. "Why'd you need to get to Pensacola, Zero?"

"To find myself. And you need to find yourself, too."

Then the penny dropped. White hair. Red eyes. Not Zero. Rei.

"I thought all the Ayanami clones shared a single soul," Harley said while looking over the railing at an Olympic-sized pool twenty feet below them.

"I thought that, too," chibi-Rei said before jumping off the edge of the ledge and making a perfect dive into the pool... which turned orange.


As Harley woke up to a dark bedroom, he thought, Maybe I am here to find myself. Rei certainly has changed since she moved in back in September. Have I?.


Silence and Song
2:09 AM, January 1, 2017

Rei Hino looked around, only to see a barren land and statues of her four closest comrades.

No, not statues. They were her teammates, but nobody was moving. And there was dust around their feet.

"Didn't we defeat the Silence?"

There was no reply.

Then she saw the other figures. Seven, lined up to face the seven Sailor Senshi.

Seven Senshi? she wondered. But she was carried by the wind so that she was removed from the line.

Yet there were still seven Senshi facing the others, including Sailor Chibimoon and Sailor Saturn. Usagi was not there; she was clearly visible at the shrine at the summit of Mount Fuji.

"Usagi is our luck," she heard from behind her in a chorus that reminded her somehow of sultry childlike bells. While Rei knew that she'd heard at least part of that voice before, she didn't know all of it. And she couldn't turn to see who had said that. She was too enraptured by the view from the window in front of her and her teammates - a view of her home back in Roppongi.

Then the window shattered, taking the scene with it, revealing a scene that was not the same despite being identical.

Rei knew that there was no place for her in that second Roppongi. She could see that she was already there.

Their opponents, still unmoving, could not take advantage of her distraction. But she couldn't move either.

As Fuji-san crumbled, Usagi stood beside Rei. In a voice that rang out like a whisper, she told their opponents, "Stuck in that same position; You deserve so much more."

Alas, Usagi was not one for singing.

And the others were not five for listening. With eyes closed and hands over their ears, they replied, "If you're here to make amends, just leave; Find yourself another dream to believe."

Usagi dropped to her knees, alone, crying at the lost chance. The chance for what, Rei wasn't certain... but the glow of the Ginzuishou told her softly, "They have lost their chance for Love and Justice."

Everyone left... but not everyone. Rei remained, with a crow perched on each of her outstretched arms, and so did Usagi. And there was no dust to be seen anywhere on the barren landscape.

Two of the others stayed as well. Two who had not cast her closest friend into despair. They both looked at Usagi, a picnic spread out on the grass between them and her.

They said nothing.

But their shadows, orange and purple, declared, "No more quiet in the corners of my soul, No more stories left untold; Even if it hurts, even if I fall, I’d rather lose than never live at all."


And, with the realization that those lyrics — and they were lyrics — would not be written for another decade, Rei awoke from her dream.

"No more quiet in the corners of my soul," she repeated to an empty bedroom. As she reached for the pen and paper that she kept beside her bed so that she could record what she remembered of her prophecy, she said, "If quiet means Silence, then they had to have been the Witches 5. But what were they quoting? And why did their shadows say it, and not them? Whoever they were. I'm already forgetting the dream."

Once she finished writing down what she remembered, she went back to sleep... but, if she dreamed again, she didn't remember it.


The Bearoness
5:01 AM, January 1, 2017

Tomo was back at her high school, walking through the lush gardens surrounding the campus. «Wait,» she thought, «Is this really my high school?» She stared up at the elegant, triangular school building. "Oh, right! I'm a baroness now!" she said, as if it explained everything. Of course nobility would go to fancier schools.

A tall, aristocratic looking girl with long French curls was passing by. «Ooh la la! She's also my type.»

The girl began to walk towards the fountain, where Tomo was sitting. "Sorry to make you wait."

"I didn't wait long," Tomo said, automatically. She thought, «How do you greet a rich girl again?», then spoke, "Gokigen yo!" She wondered if that was right, but then looked up to the sunset in the sky and realized a morning greeting wasn't right.

But if Tomo was meeting this girl in a place like this after school, then she decided it must be a romantic meeting. Then she suddenly remembered this was her girlfriend. Well, one of her girlfriends, anyway. Things like that happened at all-girl schools, after all. After the blonde joined Tomo sitting on the edge of the fountain, Tomo said, "Hey there, Ojou-chan. Did you miss me?"

"M-miss you? Why would one do such a thing?" Ojou dodged.

«So tsundere, so sexy.» Tomo scooted closer and said, "So there's nothing about me that you want?"

"Um, well..." the blonde blushed.

Tomo leaned in for a kiss, and Ojou closed her eyes. It was hot and sweet. Ojou's breasts pressed up against Tomo's, and Tomo could feel herself starting to get wet. Ojou began to get more aggressive, thrusting her leg between Tomo's.

Suddenly, from behind the trees, someone called out, "Hold it right there!" The girls froze in their embrace, as the other woman stepped out from cover, a hunting rifle aimed right at them.

The light shone off her glasses, and for a second Tomo was afraid the woman was Yomi. Or maybe she wanted the woman to be Yomi after all? She couldn't make up her mind, but it turned out the girl with the gun wasn't Yomi at all. "Tomo-sama, you almost became her next victim."

"Victim?" Tomo didn't exactly feel very victimized.

The new girl, Eiko, didn't flinch as she pointed her gun at the blonde, who was now standing a few feet away from Tomo. "She's not your girlfriend," the bespectacled girl said, "she's a bear!"

Tomo gave a blank stare. "Huh?"

— Shock! Kuma Shock! —

She looked back to Ojou, who had transformed into, well, mostly herself but with bear ears and kigurumi claws for hands. "Whoa." «Well... still my type, I guess.»

Ojou lamented, "I'm sorry that Tomo-sama has to see my secret."

"Step away from the bear! Before she eats you!"

Tomo said, "Um, that was kind of the plan."

"She's a bear," Eiko said. "A bear! You know, claws your back, always after honey, chases the birds and the bees."

"You know these are all metaphors, right?"

"Nevertheless, she must be taken to trial as an enemy of mankind. Move!" she ordered, her rifle prodding them up the spiral stairs to the top of the school. The stairs went up and up and up, and Tomo began to wonder how long the stairs would go on, because they seemed like they stretched on forever.

But as soon as she had that thought, she was already on top of the roof of the school. All of her classmates from her new high school were arranged around in a big circle. And at the center, tied up in the defendant's box, was Ojou-chan.

"Ladies of the jury," Eiko presented, "This bear was caught in the act, about to consume the lovely, pure-hearted maiden, our beloved Tomo-sama. For this crime, this utter failure to read the mood, we can only reach one result: guilty! So I will now hear your verdicts."

The verdict came down as one person after another in a line declared, "Crimibear," and the next "Crimibear," and another "Crimibear."

Tomo cried, "Objection! Doesn't the defendant get to speak?"

"What right does an animal who invaded our planet have? None."

"Eh?" Tomo didn't feel like an ace attorney now.

Eiko pushed her glasses back up her nose a bit, raised her rifle, and pointed it at the defendant. "I will now carry out the sentence on this crimibear."

Ojou whimpered.

Tomo had to do something. She couldn't let a single one of her girlfriends die, not even at the hands of that violent Yomi knock-off. «What would Usagi do? Probably something cool and wise,» she thought. «And I'm just a fool. Well, I know what fools do.»

Tomo rushed into the firing line, "Stop! Ojou is a good bear who did nothing wrong. Why can't we be together?"

"This is obstruction of justice!" She gripped the rifle tighter.

"You call this love and justice?"

The fake Yomi's mood darkened, "You really can't read the mood, can you? You're one of those girls who can't read the mood, aren't you? And not reading the mood, that's called evil. Isn't it time to exclude Tomo-kun for evil, everyone?" Eiko moved forward, and pushed the end of her rifle right against Tomo's heart.

Tomo didn't back away. "What? That's stupid. Wait, no, that's really dumb!" Tomo considered herself an expert in stupidity, but it always astonished her how stupid people could be when they were not even trying to be stupid. It was time to take these girls to school. Tomo school.

"I am Baroness Lady Tomo von Takino of the Moon Kingdom, and I will not forgive this! Tearing apart two maidens in love is just too cruel, even if one of them is a bear-girl. Everyone in this world has a right to love and beauty!"

The crowd of girls around the trial was clearly moved by Tomo's amazing and stunning speech. But Eiko was not. "How can you promise love and beauty to everyone? You're nothing but a fraud."

Tomo said, "Oh, I get it now." She pushed her body closer to Eiko, the barrel of the rifle pressed hard against her chest, and stared into Eiko's eyes. "I wasn't reading the mood. I'm sorry." And then she French kissed her too. Sure, Eiko was annoying, but she reminded her of someone else she liked. The crowd of girls went squee in the background, as Eiko kissed Tomo back.

"That wasn't... I mean..." Eiko stammered. She stammered a couple times before admitting, "I guess... we can have peace with the bears."

"All right, now we're talking!" Tomo sat down at a long shiny wooden table that was helpfully on top of the school roof, and began writing a peace treaty. Because she was a noblewoman Tomo knew this stuff really well and it didn't take all that long. Of course she mentioned rights to the strategic honey reserve because treaties always have things like that.

Eiko sat down and signed the treaty with an elegant fountain pen, followed with Ojou applying a big hanko that left an impression like a bear print in red. Everyone around cheered the new era of peace!

"Thank you Tomo-sama, we couldn't have done it without you," Eiko told her.

And Ojou came over with those gorgeous curls and cute little bear ears, "My people and I owe you everything, Tomo. How can I ever repay you?"

Tomo smiled, "Well... I have an idea."

Just then, another girl came up to her. A little bit shorter than Tomo, with pale skin, and with glasses as round as her black bear ears, she spoke with a soft voice. "Tomo, can I speak with you? Alone?"

"Sure! What's up?"

She gestured with her paw to follow.

She led Tomo through the door into the stairwell, but it didn't lead in inside the school at all. Instead, Tomo found herself on a brightly-lit mountaintop. In front of her was a massive crater lake filled with deep, deep blue water. And all around the lake were jagged little peaks, covered with patches of snow. Tomo glanced behind, and saw the other mountains and valleys below, carpeted in lush forest, and spotted the village with the white castle.

The girl stood to her left, next to a shrine. Tomo wasn't sure how she knew it was a shrine, because she had never seen a building like it before, but she knew. It looked like the crystal was growing out of the wood. She would have kept taking in the sights, but the other girl spoke.

"Are you really from the Moon Kingdom?"

"Yeah, Baroness Tomo Takino of Ameno Uzume."

"I heard it was lost, long ago."

"Yeah, it was. There was some reincarnation involved, but yeah, they're real. We're real. They're back."

"Oh, thank Heaven!" Her search was finally over. She wasn't sure at first, but dreams are always a funny business, where people work out things about themselves. But she could feel Tomo's fear when she stepped in front of the gun, and knew what kind of person she was. Her breathy voice sounded like it had steel behind it, "Please, you have to have to help my planet!"

"Who are you?" Tomo asked.

The girl withdrew a honey dipper from the pocket of her school uniform jacket, inexplicably decorated in gems with bands of pink and gold along the dipping end. She shouted, "Kumaria Planet Power, make up!" She was surrounded by pink light; her clothes faded away and she was briefly nude. Another uniform materialized on her body: a sailor suit in white with pale yellow, and a big ribbon of Tyrian purple tied in a bow at her breast. Beneath her dark round ears, star-shaped barettes decorated her hair.

"You're... you're —"

"Sailor Kumaria, pretty guardian of the forest planet, sailor-suited soldier of love and fidelity."

"Wow!" Tomo was impressed by all sailor senshi, but she knew she couldn't just sit around dazed by the beauty. As the Moon Kingdom's number one ambassador extraordinaire, she would never sit still at a time like this. She would make... small talk! "Your planet is beautiful."

"Mmm. Lilywhite Shrine is one of my favorite places." Sailor Kumaria's tone changed, her voice soft but firm, like Ami-chan, "But all of this is at risk. Please, if the old alliance still means anything, please help save our world!"

Tomo didn't know anything about an alliance, but she couldn't imagine her boss Usagi refusing a plea like that. "Of course we will help! What do you need?"

Parts of the scenery began to fade into white, as the mountains evaporated into mist, then the lake vanished, too. Tomo began to feel like she was shaking back and forth.

Kumaria pleaded, "No, not yet! Please come to the forest planet, before—"


The light flooded into Tomo's eyes so fast she immediately closed them again.

"Come on Tomo! You're the one who wanted to do the first sunrise this year." Yomi shook Tomo's bed once more.

Tomo mumbled, groggily, "But I have to save the bears..."

"Get up!"

The fog in Tomo's mind cleared, "All right, getting up."

As she dressed, she pieced together part of her dreams. She thought it was cool she got to be on Mt. Fuji for the good omen, but sad that the sexy part didn't have time to get good. All in all: four stars, would dream again.


They waited for the sunrise in the rooftop garden, on one of the wooden benches, as the twilight ever so slowly gave way. Brent emerged from the stairwell, and came over to greet them.

"He wears pants," Yomi said.

"You've seen me wear pants before." He did wear shorts a lot, though.

"Have I?"

"Not that I recall," Tomo added.

Brent rubbed his hands together, "It's too cold."

"Eh, this is nothin'," Tomo dismissed him. "It doesn't even snow here."

Brent asked, "So did you have any New Year's dreams? You guys are kind of famous for it."

Tomo hopped on the question first, "Yeah, my dream was great. It turns out I'm even more awesome than I thought. Go me!"

Yomi said, "I don't even want to know."

"But it turns out Brent is wrong."

"I'm what?" Brent muttered.

Tomo continued, "You make a terrible attorney, Yomi."

"Don't want to hear it."

"This is gonna be a great year!"]]> <![CDATA[2016-12-31: The Blossoming of a New Year]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14954 Tue, 16 Dec 2025 09:44:44 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14954
Chapter 1 (of 2) is available on AO3.]]>
Chapter 1 (of 2) is available on AO3.]]> <![CDATA[2016-09-30: There has to be something better]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14943 Tue, 25 Nov 2025 08:36:50 -0500 Bob Schroeck]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14943 This story is available on AO3.]]> This story is available on AO3.]]> <![CDATA[2016-11-11: A Day to Remember]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14939 Tue, 11 Nov 2025 06:19:18 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14939 This story contains formatting that cannot be duplicated in BBCode. Please read it on AO3.]]> This story contains formatting that cannot be duplicated in BBCode. Please read it on AO3.]]> <![CDATA[2016-10-11: The Girls They Already Knew]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14928 Tue, 14 Oct 2025 09:14:52 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14928 This story is available on AO3]]> This story is available on AO3]]> <![CDATA[2016-09-25: Diary of a Montreal Shopping Trip]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14914 Tue, 16 Sep 2025 07:02:57 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14914 Diary of a Montreal Shopping Trip
By Brent Laabs
Chapter 1: Ante Meridiem


Montréal, QC, Canada
Sunday, September 25, 2016


Artoria Pendragon, summoned to be Shirou Emiya's Saber, was up on the roof training for a war she dearly wished for, but was indefinitely delayed. A Grail War couldn't happen, not with the wyrd placed upon herself and the other servants, not here.

But now she was stuck here, with no battles to worry about, no goals to meet, no quests to seek and pursue. No peasants to assign to fields, no patricians to cozy up to, no armies to feed. No friends to talk to, but that wasn't a new state of affairs. Not since she lost those two. It wouldn't make sense to befriend those she might one day need to kill, if it ever started up again, and then find herself unable to do it.

So she found herself stuck in her own thoughts. To keep herself from going mad, raking herself across the coals of the past, or bracing against phantom winds of the future, she focused on being in the present, on establishing something that resembled her old routine.

So she stood atop the apartment's flat roof under the morning sunshine, and swung a found wooden broom handle through the cool breeze to quiet her mind. It wasn't working particularly well, though you couldn't tell that by looking at her. But with a real, living body rather than a magical construct, at least she was getting good exercise.

She didn't use her own sword, since she didn't want to reveal it — or anything about it, not even its weight – to the nearby prying eyes. Which she was sure there were. Indeed, Archer had spent the last couple of minutes watching her cut imaginary targets with a stick. She presumed he was investigating her, and pretended not to notice. But his reasons were much simpler than that, though Saber wouldn't have believed them: he looked at her out of admiration, along with good helping of the normal reasons for the male gaze.

After a few moments passed, he said, "Saber! The manager is looking for you."

"Oh?"

"She wants to take us shopping for new clothing today, remember? You're coming, right? Everyone else is." Archer asked.

She turned towards the tall, prematurely gray-haired man, thinking about her answer. Artoria was a veteran of the past Grail War, so it did make some sense to join, if only to to scope out her competition. Any clothes would do, but she could certainly do with more than those on her back. "Of course."

"Good. We're leaving in an hour. Just enough time for you to get ready," he said, right before he hopped back down into the apartment's courtyard.

How impertinent, she thought, a Servant is always ready! And then she took stock of herself, smelled under her own arm, and decided that she needed a shower. Servants with magical construct bodies might be ready at a moment's notice, but in this universe she had a real human body, and it came with its own positives and negatives.

A moment later, Saber followed with her own leap into the courtyard. Cassiopée Bright, the apartment manager, caught sight of her out of the corner of her eye, muttering, "Tabernac!" The shock wouldn't last, though. Over the next few weeks, she got accustomed to a certain resident leaping three stories like it was a totally normal thing to do, and would barely gave it a second thought.


At the appointed time, everyone assembled, and walked the half-kilometre or so down-slope to an entrance to Montreal's Underground City, a network of tunnels connecting buildings and shops. Collectively, they form one of the world's largest shopping malls, with an ever-changing design aesthetic depending on which building they were under.

The tunnels are a lifeline for the city in the cold winter months, but on a cool but pleasant morning like this one, no one really minded being outside. It was a good deal warmer than the winter in Japan the participants of the Grail War had just left behind — if slightly disconcerting to see the leaves of maple trees just starting to fall, for a second time in a row.

"RÉZO, the Red Mall," said Shirou, as he rode the escalator down.

"No," corrected Cassiopée, "RÉSO the underground mall. Though a lot of the shops are actually above ground. Anyway, I know a few boutiques where we can start out, but I want you all to be on the lookout for new clothing. Especially you, Archer, you look like a cosplayer in that coat."

"She's wearing a flashy red coat too," Archer muttered.

Rin countered, "But mine is fashionable."

"Just so. Though you won't need it inside."

Inside were a host of stores, selling clothing, linens, electronics, jewellery, beauty products, and food, on different levels, above and below ground. The corridors were wide and mostly straight, with the underground passageways intended to provide for foot traffic over a long distance, connected to multiple metro stations. Rin had visited the shops crowded beneath Shinjuku Station, but those were best described as "a twisty maze of little passages", not like these walkways.

The servants were the most impressed by the building, having never visited any indoor shopping malls before. Even the idea of pre-made clothing in particular sizes was novel, but it made the whole affair much more fun. Instead of relying on the skills of one's tailor, one could just try on the outfits to see how they looked. True to her word, Cassiopée led them to some of her favourite places.

The problem was that many of her favourite places were a bit too expensive for the group's budget, allotted by Funtom for Cassiopée to manage. That was no matter, as trying a garment out was free. Sakura, in particular, seemed to enjoy using Rider as a dress-up doll. The outfits Sakura chose for her were all over the map — formal gowns, riding leather, punk chic — the only common thread was that Rider had the figure to pull them off, where Sakura's short, flat frame meant that she had to stick to simpler, more covered up outfits. Which was fine for the upcoming winter.

Saber, fortunately, had Shirou Emiya as a master, and the men spent the lion's share of the morning in various menswear sections, and not dressing her up. Saber tried picking out her own wardrobe, but it didn't really bring her the joy it did the other girls, and she didn't really trust her own taste. Of course, Rin and Cassiopée picked up the slack, and dispatched Artoria to a changing room to try out various outfits for their approval.

After trying on a few dresses that didn't quite fit, Saber stepped out of the changing room, wearing a royal blue evening gown, high-cut and backless save for two straps, with a cutout below the breasts and plenty of space for necklaces above.

"Wow, you sure clean up nice!" Rin remarked.

"Whoa. I'm going to have to work a little to compete with that," Medea commented.

"Are you sure this is appropriate dress for me? Perhaps a simple tunic or two would suffice until we resume battle—"

"No good! Saber, you need to keep up with modern fashion or you'll let everyone else get ahead. Not that I'm helping you in the Grail War, understand? I just can't have you looking like a fashion victim."

Caster noted, "As Heraclitus said, 'Everything changes, nothing stands still'."

Artoria relented, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."[1]

"Rome?" Medea asked, "Where's that? Good quote, though."[2]

Cassiopée split off from the men — who, unsurprisingly, needed the most help — to check on the women. "C'est magnifique, Sabre! I see I'm not truly needed over here. But alas, I think you should concentrate on everyday wear. And something a little warmer than that, with winter just around the corner."

"Hey! That looks too good on her to leave it on the rack." Rin protested.

Cassiopée tugged at Artoria's sleeve, and glanced at the tag. After a moment of thinking, she pronounced, "Of course, it would be a crime for her not to take it home. Carry on!"

Medea instantly picked up a dark violet velvet dress off a rack, and carried it into a dressing room in her attempt to outclass Saber. Something about that woman reminded her of Morgan — on second thought, most everything about that woman reminded her of Morgan.

Rider seemed relatively uninterested in going that route, instead asking, "What do people wear now when riding horses?"

Rin led her over to the jeans section, populated with long trousers made of a durable weave called denim predominantly in blue. After a bit of back and forth, Rin managed to convince Rider to purchase some form-fitting jeans with rips already included in between the seams and joints, ultimately with the words, "Just trust me!"

Saber selected some jeans that looked more practical and brand new, that had been richly and uniformly dyed with woad.[3] She knew that hardly anyone rode horses in this future era, but as a king she should have the option to be a cavalier, and that obviously meant not wearing garments that could belong to a pauper. Even if the ripped jeans were more expensive, and somehow more fashionable, Saber's dignity was worth more.

Sakura seemed to favour dignity as well, as all of the outfits she chose seemed quite conservative and feminine, or so Saber thought, based on her own observations from the previous Grail War, for what little they were worth. Of course, with winter coming, it made sense to cover up, but on the other hand, Sakura had no problem dressing up Rider in all sorts of showy costumes. Well, that was perhaps not so odd for a girl of her age. People never really change, even across the millennia.

Saber was quite right that Sakura had body issues, but as she learned later, quite wrong about the reason for them.

The party moved on to a different building, passing through the hallways below ground to reach a smaller boutique clothing store, on Cassiopée's recommendation.

Kuzuki-sensei trudged behind Caster, dutifully holding all of her purchases. Shirou saw this, so he offered Artoria, "Can I take your bags?"

"No, thank you. I can take your bags if you like," Saber offered in return.

"A girl shouldn't have to carry everything, Saber. I can carry them—"

"I am your servant, you should rely on me instead."

Another voice chimed in, "Here you go, I thought you were never going to ask," Rin said while jamming her purchases into Shirou's hands.

"Thanks, senpai!" Sakura smiled as she placed another set of plastic bags of clothing into his unsuspecting hands. "You're a gentleman."

He eventually shook off the dumbfounded look from his face, and returned her smile. "So it turned out this way, huh? No problem." At this, Archer just tsked at Shirou. "What?" he asked with a bit of irritation.

"Oh nothing. Perhaps you want to carry my clothes as well?" Archer suggested innocently.

"Oh come on, do it yourself!"

Once they found the store, Cassiopée realized that there was nothing in there for the men, and decided to lead them on a ways further to a bigger department store, leaving the women behind. They were too absorbed in the fashion to pay much notice to her absence.

"How about this coat, Saber? Doesn't it look très chic?" Rin held it up in front of her chest, so she could see it reflected in the store's full-length mirror: a white wool coat, piped with sea green trim and large, shiny gold buttons.

She thought about it, and supposed that it was flattering on her. More flattering than it would be on Rin herself, with her darker hair and complexion. And somehow less feminine than Rin's wardrobe. The whole morning was proof of Rin's fashion sense.

Artoria had no idea of the local fashion sense, but it didn't matter too much. She liked it. She stared at the mirror and, with the smallest of smiles, decided, "This will be acceptable."

"Oooh, high praise!" Rin teased. It was high praise from Saber, after all. "Let's find a few dresses to match."

Cassiopée, "And she'll need a winter coat; that one will only be warm enough for the autumn."

Certainly, if there were a Grail War of fashion, Rin and Cassiopée would be battling it out, and they'd all be left in the dust. Just like war, fashion is eternal, and some people are just better at it.

If Artoria had had some knowledge of local fashion provided by the Grail's magic that summoned her, it was lost to her now. All of that synthetic knowledge was lost. She could figure out some things from gift of language that had been bestowed upon her. She had seen Cassiopée pay for some items with a small card, which she somehow knew as called a credit card. And she knew that "credit" was a loan taken from a "bank", and banks were something of a treasury. She could learn just from following the threads of words in her head.

Fashion, however, was opaque to such methods. People looked somewhat different than what she remembered of Japan, but not so different as to feel like a different era. Honestly it was so weird that there was so little difference between dress on the other side of the world — men's styles in particular seemed remarkably uniform.

And yet, there were still ways for the men to fail. When they left to rejoin the men, they found they should perhaps not be left to their own devices. "Now we need to find Kuzuki-sen–" Rin paused, and raised her voice, "Hey Emiya, put that back. It's not going to work. No, not you Archer... actually yes, you too, both of you are hopeless."

On the bottom level of the Centre Eaton, the tunnel opened up into a food court. Now, this wasn't the type of court that Artoria was expecting, having no courtiers or lord. It resembled, more than anything, the chaotic scene surrounding the food wagons on market day, where commoners would gather to partake in a warm meal before returning to field or farm. But it did resemble a court in one important way: it was a place where people of many cultures would come and feast together.

From one of the side entrances, a young man with a high forehead and glasses called out, "Cassiopée!"

"Ah, Grahame! Glad you could make it!" They met and shared a quick peck on the lips. "You need to shave!"

"I only made it because your text woke me up. No, I'm fine, I just needed to catch up on sleep a bit." The past week had been spent in crunch — in fact, pretty much every week was 'crunch time' these days, as their game crawled its way through development hell.

"My love, they need to take better care of you."

"I can't argue with that. It looks like you're faring better than me at work."

Cassiopée related, "Oh, it has its challenges, but shopping has been rewarding so far." She reached into her bag, pulling up an article, "I found this lovely two-piece–"

"Save it, I'd much prefer to see you wearing it first."

She grinned, "All right!" then turned from her spouse to face everyone else. "Okay, there are a lot of choices here, so everyone can pick out something they like. Let's meet back up in a few minutes." She handed a few bills out to everyone, enough for them to pay for their own food, and went off with Grahame to pick up some pad Thai.

Saber was, at this point, more confused than she had been all day. The paper money was odd, sure, but money had been around in different forms since before civilization, and it was clearly marked in value.

No, it was all of these unknown options. The amount of choice here was bewildering. There was Italian food — they seemed to be as crazy about tomatoes now as they had been about garum back in the old days. The Greek restaurant had foods that Medea didn't appear to recognize, like gyros. And places that were even further out, like Thai, Korean, or Mexican, whoever those people were. Artoria knew that India and China existed, but had no idea what people actually ate there, aside from a few spices. The Chinese food seemed somewhat like the food she saw in Japan, based on the rice, at least.

And none of them claimed to be a British food place, which wasn't terribly surprising.

Variety like this, she had never been offered in any court before. "Does anything sound good to you, Saber?" Shirou asked. He seemed to realize that she was at a loss.

"Whatever you think is best. Perhaps... something simple."

"Simple, huh? I'll try my best."

"I will remain here, and secure us proper seating." She did just that, walking around the centre of the court until she found a large, circular table which could host the entire group. She sat down to claim it, and found herself in a metal chair which wobbled unevenly with her weight — un siège petit périlleux. She moved to another chair.

Cassiopée and Grahame soon joined her, with container of noodles that smelled spicy, though Saber thought she caught a hint of something that smelled a little like garum in there too. Caster, Rider and Soichirou tried the lamb gyros, which Caster quite enjoyed, but Rider felt lacked some authenticity as Greek food. Sakura had one of her cravings for raw meat, and picked up a mix of sushi and sashimi. Rin and Archer were feeling more adventurous, and tried out some tacos. Rin liked them well enough, but Archer made an offhand remark, "Well, I guess we can't expect too much, this far north."

With no meshiya offering simple Japanese food, Shirou decided to go with sandwich shop fare, picking up couple of sandwiches and bags of potato chips for each of them. "Which do you want, turkey or ham?"

"Hmm. Ham, please." She would only find out later that he had in fact managed to bring her modern-day British cuisine. She took a bite, and found the ham shared the bread with cheese, fresh vegetables, and a tangy mustard. Not bad. Many of the foods on their table today used bread to allow one to hold the food cleanly, which she thought was a pretty neat invention. She aped Shirou as he opened his small bag of crisps, and tried it. Ooh, salty, crunchy, starchy!

Then she noticed that Shirou's bag of chips bore the writing "sour cream and onion" Why those foods?

Shirou noticed her staring, so he explained, "I didn't know what flavour you wanted, so I just got plain ones for you."

"There are flavours?"

"Here, try one." She took the thin slice of potato from his hand, and placed it in her mouth. It was like the first one, but with a bit of milkiness, and a kick of onion. She liked onions. Very nice!

Sakura saw this, stared at his little bag of chips, and then gave Emiya the puppy dog eyes. "You too?" he said.

"Ahwwn," she intoned, her mouth open. He deposited a potato chip therein, much like a priest with a communion wafer.

Rin said, "So this is what you get up to without Sensei at your meals, Emiya-kun?"

"I mean..."

"Eh?"

Shirou offered, "You want one too?"'

"Flirt." She turned her face away, to the other end of the table. The view didn't get much better though.

Caster said, "Aren't you going to offer me a bite of yours, darling?"

"We both have the same thing," Souichirou replied, confused.

"So?" He didn't react, so Medea pressed on, pita in hand, "Here, I'll give you a bite of mine first, and we'll be even!"

Rin expected better of her high school teacher, so she called across the table, "Missus Manager, can you please do something about hormone central over here?"

Cassiopée replied simply, "Honestly, I doubt it."

  1. BL: This quote is attributed to St. Ambrose, which should make it old enough for Saber to have known. We're assuming that Artoria comes from sub-Roman Britain, c. 500, rather than the time of high chivalry c. 1100.
  2. BL: The Argonauts sailed before the Trojan war, a few centuries before "ab urbe condita" reckoning. Even if you accept the theory that Romulus was Aeneas's grandson, Rome would still be founded two or three generations after Medea's time, c. 1150 BC. That said, the archaeology indicates still earlier settlement, most continuously on the Capitoline Hill — but still only amounting to an unremarkable backwater set of hilltop villages outside of the Greek sphere.
  3. BL: Britons were once known to paint their skins with woad, mixed from a dye which makes the same pigment as indigo. Today, the same dye, produced synthetically, is mainly used to dye blue jeans.
]]> Diary of a Montreal Shopping Trip
By Brent Laabs
Chapter 1: Ante Meridiem


Montréal, QC, Canada
Sunday, September 25, 2016


Artoria Pendragon, summoned to be Shirou Emiya's Saber, was up on the roof training for a war she dearly wished for, but was indefinitely delayed. A Grail War couldn't happen, not with the wyrd placed upon herself and the other servants, not here.

But now she was stuck here, with no battles to worry about, no goals to meet, no quests to seek and pursue. No peasants to assign to fields, no patricians to cozy up to, no armies to feed. No friends to talk to, but that wasn't a new state of affairs. Not since she lost those two. It wouldn't make sense to befriend those she might one day need to kill, if it ever started up again, and then find herself unable to do it.

So she found herself stuck in her own thoughts. To keep herself from going mad, raking herself across the coals of the past, or bracing against phantom winds of the future, she focused on being in the present, on establishing something that resembled her old routine.

So she stood atop the apartment's flat roof under the morning sunshine, and swung a found wooden broom handle through the cool breeze to quiet her mind. It wasn't working particularly well, though you couldn't tell that by looking at her. But with a real, living body rather than a magical construct, at least she was getting good exercise.

She didn't use her own sword, since she didn't want to reveal it — or anything about it, not even its weight – to the nearby prying eyes. Which she was sure there were. Indeed, Archer had spent the last couple of minutes watching her cut imaginary targets with a stick. She presumed he was investigating her, and pretended not to notice. But his reasons were much simpler than that, though Saber wouldn't have believed them: he looked at her out of admiration, along with good helping of the normal reasons for the male gaze.

After a few moments passed, he said, "Saber! The manager is looking for you."

"Oh?"

"She wants to take us shopping for new clothing today, remember? You're coming, right? Everyone else is." Archer asked.

She turned towards the tall, prematurely gray-haired man, thinking about her answer. Artoria was a veteran of the past Grail War, so it did make some sense to join, if only to to scope out her competition. Any clothes would do, but she could certainly do with more than those on her back. "Of course."

"Good. We're leaving in an hour. Just enough time for you to get ready," he said, right before he hopped back down into the apartment's courtyard.

How impertinent, she thought, a Servant is always ready! And then she took stock of herself, smelled under her own arm, and decided that she needed a shower. Servants with magical construct bodies might be ready at a moment's notice, but in this universe she had a real human body, and it came with its own positives and negatives.

A moment later, Saber followed with her own leap into the courtyard. Cassiopée Bright, the apartment manager, caught sight of her out of the corner of her eye, muttering, "Tabernac!" The shock wouldn't last, though. Over the next few weeks, she got accustomed to a certain resident leaping three stories like it was a totally normal thing to do, and would barely gave it a second thought.


At the appointed time, everyone assembled, and walked the half-kilometre or so down-slope to an entrance to Montreal's Underground City, a network of tunnels connecting buildings and shops. Collectively, they form one of the world's largest shopping malls, with an ever-changing design aesthetic depending on which building they were under.

The tunnels are a lifeline for the city in the cold winter months, but on a cool but pleasant morning like this one, no one really minded being outside. It was a good deal warmer than the winter in Japan the participants of the Grail War had just left behind — if slightly disconcerting to see the leaves of maple trees just starting to fall, for a second time in a row.

"RÉZO, the Red Mall," said Shirou, as he rode the escalator down.

"No," corrected Cassiopée, "RÉSO the underground mall. Though a lot of the shops are actually above ground. Anyway, I know a few boutiques where we can start out, but I want you all to be on the lookout for new clothing. Especially you, Archer, you look like a cosplayer in that coat."

"She's wearing a flashy red coat too," Archer muttered.

Rin countered, "But mine is fashionable."

"Just so. Though you won't need it inside."

Inside were a host of stores, selling clothing, linens, electronics, jewellery, beauty products, and food, on different levels, above and below ground. The corridors were wide and mostly straight, with the underground passageways intended to provide for foot traffic over a long distance, connected to multiple metro stations. Rin had visited the shops crowded beneath Shinjuku Station, but those were best described as "a twisty maze of little passages", not like these walkways.

The servants were the most impressed by the building, having never visited any indoor shopping malls before. Even the idea of pre-made clothing in particular sizes was novel, but it made the whole affair much more fun. Instead of relying on the skills of one's tailor, one could just try on the outfits to see how they looked. True to her word, Cassiopée led them to some of her favourite places.

The problem was that many of her favourite places were a bit too expensive for the group's budget, allotted by Funtom for Cassiopée to manage. That was no matter, as trying a garment out was free. Sakura, in particular, seemed to enjoy using Rider as a dress-up doll. The outfits Sakura chose for her were all over the map — formal gowns, riding leather, punk chic — the only common thread was that Rider had the figure to pull them off, where Sakura's short, flat frame meant that she had to stick to simpler, more covered up outfits. Which was fine for the upcoming winter.

Saber, fortunately, had Shirou Emiya as a master, and the men spent the lion's share of the morning in various menswear sections, and not dressing her up. Saber tried picking out her own wardrobe, but it didn't really bring her the joy it did the other girls, and she didn't really trust her own taste. Of course, Rin and Cassiopée picked up the slack, and dispatched Artoria to a changing room to try out various outfits for their approval.

After trying on a few dresses that didn't quite fit, Saber stepped out of the changing room, wearing a royal blue evening gown, high-cut and backless save for two straps, with a cutout below the breasts and plenty of space for necklaces above.

"Wow, you sure clean up nice!" Rin remarked.

"Whoa. I'm going to have to work a little to compete with that," Medea commented.

"Are you sure this is appropriate dress for me? Perhaps a simple tunic or two would suffice until we resume battle—"

"No good! Saber, you need to keep up with modern fashion or you'll let everyone else get ahead. Not that I'm helping you in the Grail War, understand? I just can't have you looking like a fashion victim."

Caster noted, "As Heraclitus said, 'Everything changes, nothing stands still'."

Artoria relented, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."[1]

"Rome?" Medea asked, "Where's that? Good quote, though."[2]

Cassiopée split off from the men — who, unsurprisingly, needed the most help — to check on the women. "C'est magnifique, Sabre! I see I'm not truly needed over here. But alas, I think you should concentrate on everyday wear. And something a little warmer than that, with winter just around the corner."

"Hey! That looks too good on her to leave it on the rack." Rin protested.

Cassiopée tugged at Artoria's sleeve, and glanced at the tag. After a moment of thinking, she pronounced, "Of course, it would be a crime for her not to take it home. Carry on!"

Medea instantly picked up a dark violet velvet dress off a rack, and carried it into a dressing room in her attempt to outclass Saber. Something about that woman reminded her of Morgan — on second thought, most everything about that woman reminded her of Morgan.

Rider seemed relatively uninterested in going that route, instead asking, "What do people wear now when riding horses?"

Rin led her over to the jeans section, populated with long trousers made of a durable weave called denim predominantly in blue. After a bit of back and forth, Rin managed to convince Rider to purchase some form-fitting jeans with rips already included in between the seams and joints, ultimately with the words, "Just trust me!"

Saber selected some jeans that looked more practical and brand new, that had been richly and uniformly dyed with woad.[3] She knew that hardly anyone rode horses in this future era, but as a king she should have the option to be a cavalier, and that obviously meant not wearing garments that could belong to a pauper. Even if the ripped jeans were more expensive, and somehow more fashionable, Saber's dignity was worth more.

Sakura seemed to favour dignity as well, as all of the outfits she chose seemed quite conservative and feminine, or so Saber thought, based on her own observations from the previous Grail War, for what little they were worth. Of course, with winter coming, it made sense to cover up, but on the other hand, Sakura had no problem dressing up Rider in all sorts of showy costumes. Well, that was perhaps not so odd for a girl of her age. People never really change, even across the millennia.

Saber was quite right that Sakura had body issues, but as she learned later, quite wrong about the reason for them.

The party moved on to a different building, passing through the hallways below ground to reach a smaller boutique clothing store, on Cassiopée's recommendation.

Kuzuki-sensei trudged behind Caster, dutifully holding all of her purchases. Shirou saw this, so he offered Artoria, "Can I take your bags?"

"No, thank you. I can take your bags if you like," Saber offered in return.

"A girl shouldn't have to carry everything, Saber. I can carry them—"

"I am your servant, you should rely on me instead."

Another voice chimed in, "Here you go, I thought you were never going to ask," Rin said while jamming her purchases into Shirou's hands.

"Thanks, senpai!" Sakura smiled as she placed another set of plastic bags of clothing into his unsuspecting hands. "You're a gentleman."

He eventually shook off the dumbfounded look from his face, and returned her smile. "So it turned out this way, huh? No problem." At this, Archer just tsked at Shirou. "What?" he asked with a bit of irritation.

"Oh nothing. Perhaps you want to carry my clothes as well?" Archer suggested innocently.

"Oh come on, do it yourself!"

Once they found the store, Cassiopée realized that there was nothing in there for the men, and decided to lead them on a ways further to a bigger department store, leaving the women behind. They were too absorbed in the fashion to pay much notice to her absence.

"How about this coat, Saber? Doesn't it look très chic?" Rin held it up in front of her chest, so she could see it reflected in the store's full-length mirror: a white wool coat, piped with sea green trim and large, shiny gold buttons.

She thought about it, and supposed that it was flattering on her. More flattering than it would be on Rin herself, with her darker hair and complexion. And somehow less feminine than Rin's wardrobe. The whole morning was proof of Rin's fashion sense.

Artoria had no idea of the local fashion sense, but it didn't matter too much. She liked it. She stared at the mirror and, with the smallest of smiles, decided, "This will be acceptable."

"Oooh, high praise!" Rin teased. It was high praise from Saber, after all. "Let's find a few dresses to match."

Cassiopée, "And she'll need a winter coat; that one will only be warm enough for the autumn."

Certainly, if there were a Grail War of fashion, Rin and Cassiopée would be battling it out, and they'd all be left in the dust. Just like war, fashion is eternal, and some people are just better at it.

If Artoria had had some knowledge of local fashion provided by the Grail's magic that summoned her, it was lost to her now. All of that synthetic knowledge was lost. She could figure out some things from gift of language that had been bestowed upon her. She had seen Cassiopée pay for some items with a small card, which she somehow knew as called a credit card. And she knew that "credit" was a loan taken from a "bank", and banks were something of a treasury. She could learn just from following the threads of words in her head.

Fashion, however, was opaque to such methods. People looked somewhat different than what she remembered of Japan, but not so different as to feel like a different era. Honestly it was so weird that there was so little difference between dress on the other side of the world — men's styles in particular seemed remarkably uniform.

And yet, there were still ways for the men to fail. When they left to rejoin the men, they found they should perhaps not be left to their own devices. "Now we need to find Kuzuki-sen–" Rin paused, and raised her voice, "Hey Emiya, put that back. It's not going to work. No, not you Archer... actually yes, you too, both of you are hopeless."

On the bottom level of the Centre Eaton, the tunnel opened up into a food court. Now, this wasn't the type of court that Artoria was expecting, having no courtiers or lord. It resembled, more than anything, the chaotic scene surrounding the food wagons on market day, where commoners would gather to partake in a warm meal before returning to field or farm. But it did resemble a court in one important way: it was a place where people of many cultures would come and feast together.

From one of the side entrances, a young man with a high forehead and glasses called out, "Cassiopée!"

"Ah, Grahame! Glad you could make it!" They met and shared a quick peck on the lips. "You need to shave!"

"I only made it because your text woke me up. No, I'm fine, I just needed to catch up on sleep a bit." The past week had been spent in crunch — in fact, pretty much every week was 'crunch time' these days, as their game crawled its way through development hell.

"My love, they need to take better care of you."

"I can't argue with that. It looks like you're faring better than me at work."

Cassiopée related, "Oh, it has its challenges, but shopping has been rewarding so far." She reached into her bag, pulling up an article, "I found this lovely two-piece–"

"Save it, I'd much prefer to see you wearing it first."

She grinned, "All right!" then turned from her spouse to face everyone else. "Okay, there are a lot of choices here, so everyone can pick out something they like. Let's meet back up in a few minutes." She handed a few bills out to everyone, enough for them to pay for their own food, and went off with Grahame to pick up some pad Thai.

Saber was, at this point, more confused than she had been all day. The paper money was odd, sure, but money had been around in different forms since before civilization, and it was clearly marked in value.

No, it was all of these unknown options. The amount of choice here was bewildering. There was Italian food — they seemed to be as crazy about tomatoes now as they had been about garum back in the old days. The Greek restaurant had foods that Medea didn't appear to recognize, like gyros. And places that were even further out, like Thai, Korean, or Mexican, whoever those people were. Artoria knew that India and China existed, but had no idea what people actually ate there, aside from a few spices. The Chinese food seemed somewhat like the food she saw in Japan, based on the rice, at least.

And none of them claimed to be a British food place, which wasn't terribly surprising.

Variety like this, she had never been offered in any court before. "Does anything sound good to you, Saber?" Shirou asked. He seemed to realize that she was at a loss.

"Whatever you think is best. Perhaps... something simple."

"Simple, huh? I'll try my best."

"I will remain here, and secure us proper seating." She did just that, walking around the centre of the court until she found a large, circular table which could host the entire group. She sat down to claim it, and found herself in a metal chair which wobbled unevenly with her weight — un siège petit périlleux. She moved to another chair.

Cassiopée and Grahame soon joined her, with container of noodles that smelled spicy, though Saber thought she caught a hint of something that smelled a little like garum in there too. Caster, Rider and Soichirou tried the lamb gyros, which Caster quite enjoyed, but Rider felt lacked some authenticity as Greek food. Sakura had one of her cravings for raw meat, and picked up a mix of sushi and sashimi. Rin and Archer were feeling more adventurous, and tried out some tacos. Rin liked them well enough, but Archer made an offhand remark, "Well, I guess we can't expect too much, this far north."

With no meshiya offering simple Japanese food, Shirou decided to go with sandwich shop fare, picking up couple of sandwiches and bags of potato chips for each of them. "Which do you want, turkey or ham?"

"Hmm. Ham, please." She would only find out later that he had in fact managed to bring her modern-day British cuisine. She took a bite, and found the ham shared the bread with cheese, fresh vegetables, and a tangy mustard. Not bad. Many of the foods on their table today used bread to allow one to hold the food cleanly, which she thought was a pretty neat invention. She aped Shirou as he opened his small bag of crisps, and tried it. Ooh, salty, crunchy, starchy!

Then she noticed that Shirou's bag of chips bore the writing "sour cream and onion" Why those foods?

Shirou noticed her staring, so he explained, "I didn't know what flavour you wanted, so I just got plain ones for you."

"There are flavours?"

"Here, try one." She took the thin slice of potato from his hand, and placed it in her mouth. It was like the first one, but with a bit of milkiness, and a kick of onion. She liked onions. Very nice!

Sakura saw this, stared at his little bag of chips, and then gave Emiya the puppy dog eyes. "You too?" he said.

"Ahwwn," she intoned, her mouth open. He deposited a potato chip therein, much like a priest with a communion wafer.

Rin said, "So this is what you get up to without Sensei at your meals, Emiya-kun?"

"I mean..."

"Eh?"

Shirou offered, "You want one too?"'

"Flirt." She turned her face away, to the other end of the table. The view didn't get much better though.

Caster said, "Aren't you going to offer me a bite of yours, darling?"

"We both have the same thing," Souichirou replied, confused.

"So?" He didn't react, so Medea pressed on, pita in hand, "Here, I'll give you a bite of mine first, and we'll be even!"

Rin expected better of her high school teacher, so she called across the table, "Missus Manager, can you please do something about hormone central over here?"

Cassiopée replied simply, "Honestly, I doubt it."

  1. BL: This quote is attributed to St. Ambrose, which should make it old enough for Saber to have known. We're assuming that Artoria comes from sub-Roman Britain, c. 500, rather than the time of high chivalry c. 1100.
  2. BL: The Argonauts sailed before the Trojan war, a few centuries before "ab urbe condita" reckoning. Even if you accept the theory that Romulus was Aeneas's grandson, Rome would still be founded two or three generations after Medea's time, c. 1150 BC. That said, the archaeology indicates still earlier settlement, most continuously on the Capitoline Hill — but still only amounting to an unremarkable backwater set of hilltop villages outside of the Greek sphere.
  3. BL: Britons were once known to paint their skins with woad, mixed from a dye which makes the same pigment as indigo. Today, the same dye, produced synthetically, is mainly used to dye blue jeans.
]]> <![CDATA[2016-09-13 ff. School Daze]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14911 Tue, 02 Sep 2025 07:13:58 -0500 Bob Schroeck]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14911 School Daze
By Robert M. Schroeck
Franklin High School
Franklin Township, New Jersey, USA
Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Clarisse Sherrel looked up from her desk at the sound of a knock to see Samuel Franks, one of her vice principals, standing at her open door with a handful of student file folders. "What's up, Sam?" she asked.

"Something a little odd I wanted to bring to your attention," he replied as he stepped into her office. As soon as he got close enough, he handed her the folders. "We've got five new transfers."

"So? The only thing odd about that is how close to the start of the school year it is," she replied. It hadn't even been a week yet since the first day of classes for 2016-2017.

Sam gave a sort of half-smile. "No, there's a bit more than that."

She just raised an eyebrow.

"Five girls," he went on. "All Japanese, as in fresh from Japan, not just ethnically, on student visas yet. Ui Hirasawa, Azusa Nakano, Nao Okuda, Sumire Saito, and Jun Suzuki. They all have perfect fluency in English and don't require EFL[1] classes." He laughed. "Saito's originally Australian. Has the accent and everything. The others sound like they grew up here in Jersey. Anyway, they're all transferring in from an all-girls school called Sakuragaoka."

Clarisse perked up at that. "Sakuragaoka High School? I recognize that name. The new music teacher, Sawako Yamanaka, used to teach there." Frowning, she began paging through the folders. "Quite a coincidence, that."

Sam nodded. "Yeah, well, maybe not. Yamanaka is the guardian of record for three of them." Clarisse's eyebrows shot up. "Nothing formal like a fosterage, just documented requests from their parents to watch over them while they're in the States. Knowing that, it's probably not a surprise that all five girls and Yamanaka live together for all practical purposes — in the Douglass Gardens Apartments complex on Hamilton Street. What's odd is that they're in almost sequential apartments, basically starting at apartment one."

She looked up. "Taken all together, that's kind of getting into Twilight Zone territory, isn't it? Let's keep an eye on the six of them for the next few weeks."

He nodded. "I'll spread the word."


Monday, September 19, 2016

Clarisse was hip-deep in the new and completely unexpected plan to expand the high school before the start of the 2017-2018 school year. Forget about where the money had come from — the multi-million-dollar grant from the state, specifically earmarked for educational facilities, seemed to have appeared completely out of nowhere. The question gnawing at her was why the state had decided that Franklin Township suddenly needed facilities for another two to three hundred middle and high school level students above and beyond anything they expected from census data and the existing enrollments. That and why they were so insistent it had to all be done by next September.

It was enough to give her a migraine.

A familiar rap on the metal frame of her office door had her look up to see Sam standing there with three student files in his hand. "Good morning, Sam. What's up?"

He held up the folders. "Our Twilight Zone girls just got some friends."

"What?" Clarisse immediately forgot about the paperwork in front of her.

Sam tossed the folders onto the pile of papers and she quickly scanned the names on them: Hikaru Shidou, Umi Ryuuzaki, and Fuu Hououji. "More Japanese transfer students?"

He nodded with a humorless smile playing on his lips. "Three freshmen, again with the perfect English."

Clarisse picked up Shidou's folder and opened it. "All from Sakuragaoka?"

"Nope, not this time," he said, shaking his his head. "Three other schools. But, and here's the thing, they're all living..."

"At Douglass Gardens Apartments," Clarisse finished for him. "Sequential apartments again?"

Sam chuckled. "They're all in the same apartment." She just stared at him, and he held up his hands. "I am totally serious."

"Who're their guardians?" she asked as she searched through the information.

"A couple named, um, Shrohk I think it is," he replied. "Turns out they're the managers of the apartment complex. Apparently all three girls' parents know them well enough to appoint them."

She shook her head. "There's something odd going on here."

"I thought so, too, so I made a few calls and had the Sakuragaoka girls' paperwork checked," he said. "Absolutely perfect and completely aboveboard, all the way up to the State Department and INS. I suspect our new students' will be exactly the same."

Clarisse sighed and closed the folder, before gathering all three up and handing them back to Sam. "Like before, keep an eye on them. If any of them step the least bit out of line, I want to know."

He nodded. "Will do."


Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Two mornings later, Sam didn't have the chance to knock before Clarisse said, "No, don't tell me. More Japanese girls."

He snorted. "Just one this time, but you're going to want to see this. Atsuko Natsume, transferring in from a Kyouyou High School. Pretty girl, very bubbly. Again, perfect English, although her transcript is a bit less impressive than most of our other recent transfers. Again, living in Douglass Gardens — this time with her entire family, no odd guardianship arrangements." He opened the folder and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers held together with a black binder clip and handed it to her. "But this is the really interesting part."

Clarisse began flipping through it. They were medical records and doctors' letters, mostly in Japanese but with translations attached. She hadn't gotten far in before her eye was caught by the words "quadruple amputee". She frowned and went back to the beginning. "What the hell...?" she muttered. She spied a photocopy of a TSA notification card, of the kind carried by persons with significant quantities of metal implanted in their bodies. Then she came upon a set of surgical reports. She'd averted her eyes from the graphic color photographs illustrating them, but not before one phrase leapt out at her: "extensive experimental prosthetic systems". She read on for several more pages before looking back up at Sam with an expression of shock on her face. "Seriously? She's basically The Bionic Woman? How is that even possible?"

Sam shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. But if that's for real, then why they even let her out of Japan is beyond me — if I've read that right, she's a treasure trove of medical technology beyond anything anyone in the States thinks is even plausible."

She threw the medical paperwork back into the folder and snapped it shut before shoving it back into Sam's hands. "Take her over to Security and have them test her with a metal detector. If these records are on the level, she couldn't give a stronger positive if she were wearing a suit of armor." She shook her head. "And if she does, well, we'll just have to hope she doesn't want to join any of the sports teams, because the poor girl is a walking performance enhancement."


Friday, September 30, 2016

"More?" Clarisse asked when she spied Sam with a handful of the now-dreaded student files.

He nodded. "Just like before. Native Japanese. Absolutely perfect English with Jersey accents. Living in Douglass Gardens, in near-sequential apartments. Four girls this time: Eimi Ohba, Chisa Tsukamoto, Asahi Sakurai, and Ikumi Tachikawa. All their paperwork in absolutely perfect order."

"Any more bionic women?" Ms. Natsume (whose entire body, head to toe, had registered very strongly indeed on the metal detector) had quickly fit in (and well) to the student body — her neighbors had helped her there — and to Clarisse's relief had shown no interest in any sports or teams. (The cheer squad, though, was very interested in her.) Somehow, though, her medical details had leaked almost immediately and she had picked up both a following and the nickname "the Six-Million Dollar Girl".

"Fortunately, no. Just a band of relatively ordinary girls."

Clarisse sighed. "I'll believe that when I see it."


Monday, October 17, 2016

"Not again," Clarisse groaned when Sam showed up at her door with yet another handful of files. "And it was such a good month, too."

"Hey, it's different this time!" he said with false cheerfulness.

"How?" she demanded.

"One of them is a boy!"


Friday, August 11, 2017

Clarisse leaned back in her chair and stretched. Her first year as principal of Franklin High School was just about over, and except for all the strangeness with the students from Douglass Gardens right at the start it had been a good year. She'd even been able to navigate the bizarre circumstances around the rush-job expansion of the high school mandated (and totally funded) by the state a year earlier. She still had no idea why anyone thought it had been needed — the school was going to look like a ghost town come the start of September.

Or so she thought until Sam staggered into her office with a stack of student files easily two feet tall clutched in his arms.

"Oh, fuck no!" she yelled. "What the hell is going on with Douglass Gardens?"


  1. RMS: English as a Foreign Language.
]]> School Daze
By Robert M. Schroeck
Franklin High School
Franklin Township, New Jersey, USA
Tuesday, September 13, 2016

Clarisse Sherrel looked up from her desk at the sound of a knock to see Samuel Franks, one of her vice principals, standing at her open door with a handful of student file folders. "What's up, Sam?" she asked.

"Something a little odd I wanted to bring to your attention," he replied as he stepped into her office. As soon as he got close enough, he handed her the folders. "We've got five new transfers."

"So? The only thing odd about that is how close to the start of the school year it is," she replied. It hadn't even been a week yet since the first day of classes for 2016-2017.

Sam gave a sort of half-smile. "No, there's a bit more than that."

She just raised an eyebrow.

"Five girls," he went on. "All Japanese, as in fresh from Japan, not just ethnically, on student visas yet. Ui Hirasawa, Azusa Nakano, Nao Okuda, Sumire Saito, and Jun Suzuki. They all have perfect fluency in English and don't require EFL[1] classes." He laughed. "Saito's originally Australian. Has the accent and everything. The others sound like they grew up here in Jersey. Anyway, they're all transferring in from an all-girls school called Sakuragaoka."

Clarisse perked up at that. "Sakuragaoka High School? I recognize that name. The new music teacher, Sawako Yamanaka, used to teach there." Frowning, she began paging through the folders. "Quite a coincidence, that."

Sam nodded. "Yeah, well, maybe not. Yamanaka is the guardian of record for three of them." Clarisse's eyebrows shot up. "Nothing formal like a fosterage, just documented requests from their parents to watch over them while they're in the States. Knowing that, it's probably not a surprise that all five girls and Yamanaka live together for all practical purposes — in the Douglass Gardens Apartments complex on Hamilton Street. What's odd is that they're in almost sequential apartments, basically starting at apartment one."

She looked up. "Taken all together, that's kind of getting into Twilight Zone territory, isn't it? Let's keep an eye on the six of them for the next few weeks."

He nodded. "I'll spread the word."


Monday, September 19, 2016

Clarisse was hip-deep in the new and completely unexpected plan to expand the high school before the start of the 2017-2018 school year. Forget about where the money had come from — the multi-million-dollar grant from the state, specifically earmarked for educational facilities, seemed to have appeared completely out of nowhere. The question gnawing at her was why the state had decided that Franklin Township suddenly needed facilities for another two to three hundred middle and high school level students above and beyond anything they expected from census data and the existing enrollments. That and why they were so insistent it had to all be done by next September.

It was enough to give her a migraine.

A familiar rap on the metal frame of her office door had her look up to see Sam standing there with three student files in his hand. "Good morning, Sam. What's up?"

He held up the folders. "Our Twilight Zone girls just got some friends."

"What?" Clarisse immediately forgot about the paperwork in front of her.

Sam tossed the folders onto the pile of papers and she quickly scanned the names on them: Hikaru Shidou, Umi Ryuuzaki, and Fuu Hououji. "More Japanese transfer students?"

He nodded with a humorless smile playing on his lips. "Three freshmen, again with the perfect English."

Clarisse picked up Shidou's folder and opened it. "All from Sakuragaoka?"

"Nope, not this time," he said, shaking his his head. "Three other schools. But, and here's the thing, they're all living..."

"At Douglass Gardens Apartments," Clarisse finished for him. "Sequential apartments again?"

Sam chuckled. "They're all in the same apartment." She just stared at him, and he held up his hands. "I am totally serious."

"Who're their guardians?" she asked as she searched through the information.

"A couple named, um, Shrohk I think it is," he replied. "Turns out they're the managers of the apartment complex. Apparently all three girls' parents know them well enough to appoint them."

She shook her head. "There's something odd going on here."

"I thought so, too, so I made a few calls and had the Sakuragaoka girls' paperwork checked," he said. "Absolutely perfect and completely aboveboard, all the way up to the State Department and INS. I suspect our new students' will be exactly the same."

Clarisse sighed and closed the folder, before gathering all three up and handing them back to Sam. "Like before, keep an eye on them. If any of them step the least bit out of line, I want to know."

He nodded. "Will do."


Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Two mornings later, Sam didn't have the chance to knock before Clarisse said, "No, don't tell me. More Japanese girls."

He snorted. "Just one this time, but you're going to want to see this. Atsuko Natsume, transferring in from a Kyouyou High School. Pretty girl, very bubbly. Again, perfect English, although her transcript is a bit less impressive than most of our other recent transfers. Again, living in Douglass Gardens — this time with her entire family, no odd guardianship arrangements." He opened the folder and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers held together with a black binder clip and handed it to her. "But this is the really interesting part."

Clarisse began flipping through it. They were medical records and doctors' letters, mostly in Japanese but with translations attached. She hadn't gotten far in before her eye was caught by the words "quadruple amputee". She frowned and went back to the beginning. "What the hell...?" she muttered. She spied a photocopy of a TSA notification card, of the kind carried by persons with significant quantities of metal implanted in their bodies. Then she came upon a set of surgical reports. She'd averted her eyes from the graphic color photographs illustrating them, but not before one phrase leapt out at her: "extensive experimental prosthetic systems". She read on for several more pages before looking back up at Sam with an expression of shock on her face. "Seriously? She's basically The Bionic Woman? How is that even possible?"

Sam shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. But if that's for real, then why they even let her out of Japan is beyond me — if I've read that right, she's a treasure trove of medical technology beyond anything anyone in the States thinks is even plausible."

She threw the medical paperwork back into the folder and snapped it shut before shoving it back into Sam's hands. "Take her over to Security and have them test her with a metal detector. If these records are on the level, she couldn't give a stronger positive if she were wearing a suit of armor." She shook her head. "And if she does, well, we'll just have to hope she doesn't want to join any of the sports teams, because the poor girl is a walking performance enhancement."


Friday, September 30, 2016

"More?" Clarisse asked when she spied Sam with a handful of the now-dreaded student files.

He nodded. "Just like before. Native Japanese. Absolutely perfect English with Jersey accents. Living in Douglass Gardens, in near-sequential apartments. Four girls this time: Eimi Ohba, Chisa Tsukamoto, Asahi Sakurai, and Ikumi Tachikawa. All their paperwork in absolutely perfect order."

"Any more bionic women?" Ms. Natsume (whose entire body, head to toe, had registered very strongly indeed on the metal detector) had quickly fit in (and well) to the student body — her neighbors had helped her there — and to Clarisse's relief had shown no interest in any sports or teams. (The cheer squad, though, was very interested in her.) Somehow, though, her medical details had leaked almost immediately and she had picked up both a following and the nickname "the Six-Million Dollar Girl".

"Fortunately, no. Just a band of relatively ordinary girls."

Clarisse sighed. "I'll believe that when I see it."


Monday, October 17, 2016

"Not again," Clarisse groaned when Sam showed up at her door with yet another handful of files. "And it was such a good month, too."

"Hey, it's different this time!" he said with false cheerfulness.

"How?" she demanded.

"One of them is a boy!"


Friday, August 11, 2017

Clarisse leaned back in her chair and stretched. Her first year as principal of Franklin High School was just about over, and except for all the strangeness with the students from Douglass Gardens right at the start it had been a good year. She'd even been able to navigate the bizarre circumstances around the rush-job expansion of the high school mandated (and totally funded) by the state a year earlier. She still had no idea why anyone thought it had been needed — the school was going to look like a ghost town come the start of September.

Or so she thought until Sam staggered into her office with a stack of student files easily two feet tall clutched in his arms.

"Oh, fuck no!" she yelled. "What the hell is going on with Douglass Gardens?"


  1. RMS: English as a Foreign Language.
]]> <![CDATA[2016-12-25: Melancholy Dreams and Dream-Coloured Sweets]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14909 Sun, 17 Aug 2025 12:20:47 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14909 Melancholy Dreams and Dream-Coloured Sweets
By Rob Kelk

Chapter 1

Appartements Mont-Royal Sud, Montreal, QC, Canada
December 25, 2016


"Santa-san, I've been a good girl all year, and I'm an isekai character now. Could you give me some powers, please? The dress was nice, but I felt like a little girl playing dress-up when I wore it."

Konata Izumi sighed deeply. She'd been an isekai character for two whole days now, and she still didn't have any powers, or a boyfriend, or a quest to undertake. The lack of powers rankled her in particular; she'd seen Guru Clef at the Christmas party the previous night but she never got a chance to ask him to cast Bestow Magic on her. She'd also seen Belldandy, but Megami-sama was too busy to grant anybody a wish. Konata was certain that she'd earned one... hadn't she? She didn't consider, or even imagine, that anybody who's certain that she'd earned a divine wish probably hadn't.

And getting a boyfriend was just as fruitless as getting powers. Mind you, the only available guys in the apartment building were Shirou Emiya and Archer. Considering what it meant to be Shirou Emiya's girlfriend, she'd probably be better off chasing after Shirou Takamachi in Philadelphia instead. Even considering Shirou Takamachi was happily married and had children her age. Archer... had the same problems as Emiya.

"Who else might make a good boyfriend?" she said to herself in Japanese while standing on a footstool and looking through the kitchen cupboards in search of something to make for breakfast the next day. Grahame Bright was married to Cassiopée, her landlady, and Souichirou Kuzuki was both too old for her and engaged to Caster. Then she thought about the residence in Ottawa, a couple of hours away by train or a couple of steps away by portal. Accelerator was even more dangerous to date than Emiya was, Touma Kamijo was clueless, Rob Donaldson was way too old for her, Tuxedo Kamen was definitely spoken for no matter which version of Sailor Moon he was from, and Artemis was a talking cat. And while there were others like her in Canada, she had no desire to even speak with any of the Nerima Wrecking Crew, let alone date any of them... or to date Tenchi Masaki, either. She liked having unbroken bones. She sighed again. "There are way too many people from shonen stories in this world. Where are the people from all the shojo stories, with their crowds of hot available guys? It looks like I'll have to find a boyfriend somewhere else, maybe in the States... or somebody who isn't in on the whole 'displacee' thing." Switching to English because she thought it more appropriate for what she was about to say, she continued, "I wonder who might want a girlfriend in Canada?" She grinned at the reference, then she closed the cupboard doors. "And we don't have much to choose from for breakfast tomorrow."

That was her first quest in this new-to-her world: Discover what her apartment-mate, Miyuki Takara, wanted to eat.

Calling it a quest made her feel better about it.

Heading out to the living room, Konata said, "We don't have a lot in the kitchen, Miyuki-san. I'm making a shopping list; do you have a pref..." she trailed off when she realized her apartment-mate was crying. "Never mind food. What's wrong?"

Miyuki looked up, used a tissue to dry her eyes, and replied, "We're never going home, are we?"

"Oh, Miyuki-san, why do you think that?"

"So many of those people we met yesterday have been here for months. They haven't gone home."

Konata knew exactly what to say. As she sat down beside her roommate, she replied, "They haven't started their quests yet. All we need to do is find out what our quest is and complete it, and we'll be able to go home!"

"But those girls from Okanoue Girls' High School went on a quest to reach their home, and they're still in this world..." Miyuki forced herself to not cry again. "Also, if somebody like Guru Clef was able to give us quests, he would have been giving people their quests yesterday. I hope I'm wrong... but I think there aren't any quests for people like us. We're never going to see our families again, or Minami-san, either."

Konata realized that just because she thought she was starting the adventure of a lifetime didn't mean her friends thought that way. Miyuki was homesick. And Konata admitted to herself that her apartment-mate was right; she was beginning to miss her father and Yui-neesan and Yutaka... and her own friends. "Or Patty, or Tamura-san, or Kuroi-sensei." Konata sighed deeply as she sat down beside Miuyki on their sofa. "You might be right. But if we give up hope, we'll never know for sure. And that's why I know I have to find my quest in this world." She refused to give up hope.

"You're going to quest for a quest?" The recursive thought brought a smile to Miyuki's face.

Konata smiled just as widely; her apartment-mate wasn't crying any more. "That's the Miyuki-chan I'm used to seeing! Now I can ask: what do you want me to add to our grocery list?"

"Didn't Mme. Bright say that she was making a big meal for everyone? Maybe we should just have a light snack if we have anything at all."

"That wasn't what I meant, but you're right; Bright-san told us to bring an appetite."

"Ah." Miyuki thought for a moment, then added, "Even so, could we get something from Mlle. Tennouji's bakery and coffee shop?"

"You just want something sweet, don't you?" Konata said with a grin. "You'd better be careful that all the strawberries you eat don't go to your waist." Miyuki gasped and put her hands over her midriff to hide her figure. "Sure, we can go get some tarts or something from Tennouji-san if Patisserie Belge is..."

After a moment, Miyuki said, "I'm sure they'll be open."

Konata shook her head. "How could I have missed it? A blonde young woman named Tennouji-san working in a patisserie. Miyuki-chan, did you read Ribon while you were in junior-high?"

"I read a few issues... oh! Now I remember! What was the story called... Yumeiro Pâtissière?"

"Exactly. I'll bet you a strawberry tart that she's a displacee, just like us. Let us start our quest to find out more about our neighbours!"




"We're going next door to get a snack."

Kagami looked up from where she and Medea were setting tables for lunch. The tables had been pushed together to form a long communal-style arrangement that all fourteen of the building's residents could share. "I wouldn't if I were you. Tsukasa, Cassiopée-san, Grahame-san, and Shirou-san are all working in the kitchen, and they're all busy doing different things. I think we're going to have a lot of food in an hour or so."

"In that case," Konata replied, "we're going next door to say 'Merry Christmas' to our neighbours." Seeing Miyuki's disappointed reaction to her comment, she added, "Okay, fine, and we're getting a small snack."

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

"Oh, let them spoil their appetites," Medea said. "As Socrates said, each person is the final authority for himself. Or, in this case, herself. And the less they eat, the more there will be for the rest of us."

Konata turned to Miyuki and repeated, "A small snack." Since they immediately headed for the door, they both missed seeing Medea smile at that comment.

It took them less than a minute to reach the bakery. As they opened the shop's front door, the girl behind the counter — a brunette teen with her hair in twin buns — looked up from the cookbook she was reading and smiled. "Merry Christmas, and welcome to Patisserie Belge!"

Miyuki replied, "Merry Christmas! Two strawberry tarts and two bottles of sparkling water, please."

"I'll take two strawberry tarts, too," Konata added with a grin.

"I thought that you insisted that we get a small snack."

The girl behind the counter hid a giggle behind her hand, then said, "We only have two strawberry tarts left. We didn't make very many because we knew business would be slow today. One strawberry tart and a bottle of sparkling water each?"

"Yes, please," Miyuki replied.

Konata and Miyuki were seated at one of the patisserie's tables in less than a minute. "Thank you for the food," they said in unison, then took a bite from their tarts.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Miyuki was the first to speak. "Oh, my."

"Yeah," Konata added. "I didn't know that strawberries could taste like this." [1]

"Where have these been all my life?" Miyuki asked rhetorically.

Konata answered anyway. "In a different reality altogether, just like us." She turned to the girl behind the counter. "Isn't that right, Amano-san?"

And that surprised the pâtissier. "How did you know my name?"

"I read it in a manga. You are Amano Ichigo, aren't you?"

"Yes..." she said with some suspicion.

"And you found yourself here, not knowing where you were or what day it was?"

"Three and a half months ago, yes.  How do you know that?"

Miyuki replied, "Because the same thing happened to us the day before yesterday. My name is Takara Miyuki, and my friend is named Izumi Konata."

"Izumi Konata... Wait here, please." And Ichigo headed into the patisserie's back room. Switching from French to Japanese, she said, "Mari-sempai! Makoto! Vanilla! Everybody! There are other people like us here!"

"We'd better finish our snack while she's back there," Konata said just before taking another bite of her tart.

"Yes, it would be a bad idea to tell them what we did say and then leave." Miyuki replied before enjoying her own tart.

Just after the women finished their sweets, the entire staff of Patisserie Belge — two young women and three young men, that Konata and Miyuki could see — made their way out of the back of the shop. The blonde woman said, "I'm Mari Tennouji, although Ichigo says you already knew who we are. I remember seeing you yesterday evening. What's all this about being from a different reality?"

"That does sound preposterous," the blond boy added. "Oh, and I'm Makoto Kashino."

"And I'm Konata Izumi. It may sound crazy, but how else would somebody who doesn't make desserts at all know about Sweet Spirits?"

That gave the staff pause. Finally, the boy with glasses said, "You could have heard about Sweets Spirits from somebody else." He emphasized the plural 'Sweets' slightly. "And I'm Sennosuke Andou."

"Well, yes," Konata said. "And that somebody else was Natsumi Matsumoto, the mangaka who wrote Yumeiro Pâtissière. That's the story that you're all in."

"I'm inclined to believe these young ladies," the other boy said. "They do look like the characters from the Lucky Star manga."

Miyuki turned to Konata. "I thought Kazari-san said we were from an anime."

"I wouldn't be surprised if both of our stories were turned into anime," Konata replied. She turned back to the others. "And I'm guessing you're Satsuki Hanabusa, right?"

"I am, yes."

"Are your Sweets Spirits here, too?"

"You can't see them?" Ichigo asked in reply while gesturing toward what Konata and Miyuki thought was empty air.

"No, I can't. Darn it."

Miyuki mentioned, "Neither of us are pastry chefs. Why should we be able to see them?"

Konata muttered, "Because I was hoping that might have been my power here. We're isekai characters now, we should have powers."

"We don't have powers," Mari pointed out.

Konata replied, "But you do have Sweets Spirit allies."

"Well," Ichigo said, "you have perfect fluency in French. The rest of us, even your friend Takara-san, have Japanese accents."

"You do, don't you? I wonder why that is. Maybe Cassiopée-san knows why. Oh! You have to meet Cassiopée-san! Come over for lunch!"

Before the others could reply, Miyuki said, "Are you sure you should be inviting them over? Mme. Bright was planning something special."

"You heard what Kagamin said. There's going to be plenty of food."

"Still, we should bring something to help out if we're dropping in unannounced," Mari insisted.

"That sounds like we're accepting their offer," Makoto commented.

"We are. They seem to know more about what happened to us than we do." Mari turned back to Konata and Miyuki. "How many people will there be at the dinner table?"

"There were fourteen of us before Konata invited you," Miyuki replied.

Mari looked at what was left in the display case, then turned to the other pâtissiers. "Ichigo, select gâteaux moka for two dozen people. Sennosuke, put the 'closed' sign in the window, draw the blinds, and lock the front door. Makoto, make sure the ovens are turned off and the windows are closed. Satsuki, you and I will put what's left of today's stock in the refrigerators. Let's not keep our new friends waiting!"




After locking the back door behind them, the group made its way to the back door of the apartment complex.

"Bright-san?" Konata asked as she opened the door. "Can we squeeze in five more displacees for dinner?" She walked into the dining room, letting Miuyki guide their visitors behind her.

Cassiopée replied to Konata without looking up from the bottles at the dining room's bar. "Displacees are always welcome. If it were any other day, we might have had a problem, but today we should have enough food to go around. We simply won't have as much food left over for tomorrow. Five more for dinner, and since I'm making the [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribou_(drink)]cariboo[/url] right now, I'll mix an extra pitcher."

"Ten more," Medea said quietly while she and Kagami moved to add another table to the long row of tables, "and you five are the cutest eidolons I've ever seen."

"You can see us?" Honey asked in amazement.

"Of course I can," Medea replied matter-of-factly. "I am a master mage."

Cassiopée wondered why Medea appeared to be talking to empty air, but assumed there was a reason for it and didn't interfere. Instead, she turned to the displacees who she could see... and gasped in surprise. They weren't newcomers.

"Mlle. Tennouji, you're a displacee?"

"Is that what people like Mlle. Izumi and Mlle. Takara are called?"

"Maudit d'esti," Cassiopée muttered. Then she said in a more normal tone of voice, "Yes, anyone who has been displaced from their home worlds to this one is called a displacee."

Ichigo said, "We were wondering why we couldn't find any trace of St. Marie Academy. Is that because we're in another world?"

"Oh, yeah," Konata replied.

Marie said, "Then we're displacees, yes. Can you explain what that means, please?"

While she continued mixing the pitchers of drinks, Cassiopée gave Mari and the others the quick description: Something or multiple somethings had happened to put various realities at risk, some people were being displaced from their home worlds to the world that displacees had begun to call Refuge when talking amongst themselves, and various divine and infernal beings were working together to end the crisis and provide housing for the displacees while the crisis was ongoing.

At the end of it, Makoto said, "I'd think you're delusional, except that Mlle. Izumi and Mlle. Takara know who we are and we know who they are."

Konata grinned. "We can show you chapters of the manga you're in, if you want. As soon as I find copies."

Cassiopée smiled at Konata's eagerness to help out. "Or we can show you the anime that you're from, later. It's too close to the start of the Christmas feast to do that now. And before you ask the same question that Rin did, no, we won't be serving fried chicken. Where are you living? I know you've been in this world for at least a couple of weeks, and if you're close enough, we might be able to entertain you with a story from your own lives before you have to go home today."

"We've been so busy getting and keeping the shop going that we've been sleeping on bunk beds in the back room," Makoto replied. "And we've been here since... when was it, again?" He looked at what seemed to be empty air, then said, "Thank you, Chocolat. We've been here since September 10."

"Depuis le 10 septembre..." She poured herself a shot of rye whisky from the bottle that she was using to make the cariboo, drank the shot in one gulp, carefully put the empty glass onto the bar, then said, "Crisse de câlice d'esti de tabarnak de sacrament de trou viarge!"

Caramel covered her ears in dismayed shock, which showed on her face; she had always been the most innocent of the Sweets Spirits. Of course, only the other Sweets Spirits, the pâtissières, and Caster could see her. Saber, who was just walking into the room with Rin, scowled in deep displeasure at hearing her landlady taking the Sacraments in vain.

Graheme immediately came running out of the kitchen. "What's wrong?"

"Mlle. Tennouji and her friends are displacees, they've been living here since the day before we moved into the building, and nobody told me about them!"

He sighed in relief. Yes, this was a problem, but not one that rated such an extreme reaction. Quietly and calmly, he said, "Calm down, Cassie. We know now."

"Don't call me 'Cassie' in public."

"Ah, yes, sorry. Relax, dear; it's Christmas. This isn't a time to be upset."

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then said, "You're right." Still upset but not acting on the emotion, she turned to the pâtissières to see Sennosuke trying to comfort what she still thought was empty air. "I'm sorry that I never asked my employers about what I needed to know about all of you, I'm sorry if that caused you any inconvenience," then she addressed that spot in the air, "and I'm sorry if my language offended you."

"Oh, think nothing of it," Mari replied.

"And Caramel accepts your apology," Sennosuke added.

Mari continued, "And we hope that you don't mind that we've been sleeping in the back of the shop for the last three months."

"That's something that I can do something about," Cassiopée said, eager to make amends for something that was never under her control. "We have empty furnished apartments above your shop, complete with bedrooms enough for each of you and good-sized bath tubs in the bathrooms. And I'll let you have the first month for free as an apology for you not already living there, if you want to move in."

Ichigo smiled widely. "You have a bath tub?! I've had to make do with showers since we got here!" The brunette turned to her blonde companion. "Mari, they have a bath tub. And we can have bedrooms of our own instead of sharing a bunk bed. And..."

Mari held up one hand in a "stop" gesture. "Ichigo, she had me at 'bath tub'." She turned to Cassiopée as she lowered her hand. "Throw in a bottle of bubble bath and you have a deal."

"I think I can see my way to do that," Cassiopée said with a smile as she offered her hand to Mari. "It's a bit late, but welcome to Appartements Mont-Royal Sud."

"Please take care of us," Mari replied as she shook Cassiopée's hand.

"We're planning on buying basic wardrobes and household sundries for the ladies from Ryouou tomorrow," Cassiopée told her new residents. "You're welcome to join us, should there be anything you'd prefer we buy for you."

"Thank you for the offer, but we do have to work in the shop tomorrow," Makoto pointed out

Mari smiled. "It's Christmas break at McGill and the local offices. Business is slow right now and should remain slow until the new year, unless we get orders to be filled on New Year's Eve. We'll take turns taking time off to go shopping for clothes and household goods. Makoto, since you just volunteered, you, Satsuki, and Sennosuke can keep the shop running tomorrow while Ichigo and I join Mlle. Izumi and Mlle. Takara at the stores."

"My sister and I will be shopping with you, too. I'm Hiiragi Kagami; happy to meet you."

"Tennouji Mari. I'm pleased to meet you, Mlle. Hiiragi." Mari turned back to her co-workers. "And the Mlles. Hiiragi as well."

Grahame smiled and commented, "That's probably for the best. You ladies go have fun shopping tomorrow with my wife; I'll take the young men shopping on the 27th. Now, I do have to get back to the kitchen. Give us another half-hour or so before sitting down."




  1. RK: This is canon for Yumeiro Pâtissière, and it's also true in the real world. Wood strawberries are subtly different from other strawberries. Should you want to taste-test for yourself (and I recommend you do), the French company Bonne Maman makes both strawberry jam and wood strawberry jam. RMS:  Count yourself lucky if you can find their wood strawberry jam.  It doesn't seem to be available in my area. RK: Then I'd best provide links, at least to their Canadian website: Strawberry jam and Strawberry and Wood Strawberry Spread.
]]> Melancholy Dreams and Dream-Coloured Sweets
By Rob Kelk

Chapter 1

Appartements Mont-Royal Sud, Montreal, QC, Canada
December 25, 2016


"Santa-san, I've been a good girl all year, and I'm an isekai character now. Could you give me some powers, please? The dress was nice, but I felt like a little girl playing dress-up when I wore it."

Konata Izumi sighed deeply. She'd been an isekai character for two whole days now, and she still didn't have any powers, or a boyfriend, or a quest to undertake. The lack of powers rankled her in particular; she'd seen Guru Clef at the Christmas party the previous night but she never got a chance to ask him to cast Bestow Magic on her. She'd also seen Belldandy, but Megami-sama was too busy to grant anybody a wish. Konata was certain that she'd earned one... hadn't she? She didn't consider, or even imagine, that anybody who's certain that she'd earned a divine wish probably hadn't.

And getting a boyfriend was just as fruitless as getting powers. Mind you, the only available guys in the apartment building were Shirou Emiya and Archer. Considering what it meant to be Shirou Emiya's girlfriend, she'd probably be better off chasing after Shirou Takamachi in Philadelphia instead. Even considering Shirou Takamachi was happily married and had children her age. Archer... had the same problems as Emiya.

"Who else might make a good boyfriend?" she said to herself in Japanese while standing on a footstool and looking through the kitchen cupboards in search of something to make for breakfast the next day. Grahame Bright was married to Cassiopée, her landlady, and Souichirou Kuzuki was both too old for her and engaged to Caster. Then she thought about the residence in Ottawa, a couple of hours away by train or a couple of steps away by portal. Accelerator was even more dangerous to date than Emiya was, Touma Kamijo was clueless, Rob Donaldson was way too old for her, Tuxedo Kamen was definitely spoken for no matter which version of Sailor Moon he was from, and Artemis was a talking cat. And while there were others like her in Canada, she had no desire to even speak with any of the Nerima Wrecking Crew, let alone date any of them... or to date Tenchi Masaki, either. She liked having unbroken bones. She sighed again. "There are way too many people from shonen stories in this world. Where are the people from all the shojo stories, with their crowds of hot available guys? It looks like I'll have to find a boyfriend somewhere else, maybe in the States... or somebody who isn't in on the whole 'displacee' thing." Switching to English because she thought it more appropriate for what she was about to say, she continued, "I wonder who might want a girlfriend in Canada?" She grinned at the reference, then she closed the cupboard doors. "And we don't have much to choose from for breakfast tomorrow."

That was her first quest in this new-to-her world: Discover what her apartment-mate, Miyuki Takara, wanted to eat.

Calling it a quest made her feel better about it.

Heading out to the living room, Konata said, "We don't have a lot in the kitchen, Miyuki-san. I'm making a shopping list; do you have a pref..." she trailed off when she realized her apartment-mate was crying. "Never mind food. What's wrong?"

Miyuki looked up, used a tissue to dry her eyes, and replied, "We're never going home, are we?"

"Oh, Miyuki-san, why do you think that?"

"So many of those people we met yesterday have been here for months. They haven't gone home."

Konata knew exactly what to say. As she sat down beside her roommate, she replied, "They haven't started their quests yet. All we need to do is find out what our quest is and complete it, and we'll be able to go home!"

"But those girls from Okanoue Girls' High School went on a quest to reach their home, and they're still in this world..." Miyuki forced herself to not cry again. "Also, if somebody like Guru Clef was able to give us quests, he would have been giving people their quests yesterday. I hope I'm wrong... but I think there aren't any quests for people like us. We're never going to see our families again, or Minami-san, either."

Konata realized that just because she thought she was starting the adventure of a lifetime didn't mean her friends thought that way. Miyuki was homesick. And Konata admitted to herself that her apartment-mate was right; she was beginning to miss her father and Yui-neesan and Yutaka... and her own friends. "Or Patty, or Tamura-san, or Kuroi-sensei." Konata sighed deeply as she sat down beside Miuyki on their sofa. "You might be right. But if we give up hope, we'll never know for sure. And that's why I know I have to find my quest in this world." She refused to give up hope.

"You're going to quest for a quest?" The recursive thought brought a smile to Miyuki's face.

Konata smiled just as widely; her apartment-mate wasn't crying any more. "That's the Miyuki-chan I'm used to seeing! Now I can ask: what do you want me to add to our grocery list?"

"Didn't Mme. Bright say that she was making a big meal for everyone? Maybe we should just have a light snack if we have anything at all."

"That wasn't what I meant, but you're right; Bright-san told us to bring an appetite."

"Ah." Miyuki thought for a moment, then added, "Even so, could we get something from Mlle. Tennouji's bakery and coffee shop?"

"You just want something sweet, don't you?" Konata said with a grin. "You'd better be careful that all the strawberries you eat don't go to your waist." Miyuki gasped and put her hands over her midriff to hide her figure. "Sure, we can go get some tarts or something from Tennouji-san if Patisserie Belge is..."

After a moment, Miyuki said, "I'm sure they'll be open."

Konata shook her head. "How could I have missed it? A blonde young woman named Tennouji-san working in a patisserie. Miyuki-chan, did you read Ribon while you were in junior-high?"

"I read a few issues... oh! Now I remember! What was the story called... Yumeiro Pâtissière?"

"Exactly. I'll bet you a strawberry tart that she's a displacee, just like us. Let us start our quest to find out more about our neighbours!"




"We're going next door to get a snack."

Kagami looked up from where she and Medea were setting tables for lunch. The tables had been pushed together to form a long communal-style arrangement that all fourteen of the building's residents could share. "I wouldn't if I were you. Tsukasa, Cassiopée-san, Grahame-san, and Shirou-san are all working in the kitchen, and they're all busy doing different things. I think we're going to have a lot of food in an hour or so."

"In that case," Konata replied, "we're going next door to say 'Merry Christmas' to our neighbours." Seeing Miyuki's disappointed reaction to her comment, she added, "Okay, fine, and we're getting a small snack."

"Don't say I didn't warn you."

"Oh, let them spoil their appetites," Medea said. "As Socrates said, each person is the final authority for himself. Or, in this case, herself. And the less they eat, the more there will be for the rest of us."

Konata turned to Miyuki and repeated, "A small snack." Since they immediately headed for the door, they both missed seeing Medea smile at that comment.

It took them less than a minute to reach the bakery. As they opened the shop's front door, the girl behind the counter — a brunette teen with her hair in twin buns — looked up from the cookbook she was reading and smiled. "Merry Christmas, and welcome to Patisserie Belge!"

Miyuki replied, "Merry Christmas! Two strawberry tarts and two bottles of sparkling water, please."

"I'll take two strawberry tarts, too," Konata added with a grin.

"I thought that you insisted that we get a small snack."

The girl behind the counter hid a giggle behind her hand, then said, "We only have two strawberry tarts left. We didn't make very many because we knew business would be slow today. One strawberry tart and a bottle of sparkling water each?"

"Yes, please," Miyuki replied.

Konata and Miyuki were seated at one of the patisserie's tables in less than a minute. "Thank you for the food," they said in unison, then took a bite from their tarts.

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

Miyuki was the first to speak. "Oh, my."

"Yeah," Konata added. "I didn't know that strawberries could taste like this." [1]

"Where have these been all my life?" Miyuki asked rhetorically.

Konata answered anyway. "In a different reality altogether, just like us." She turned to the girl behind the counter. "Isn't that right, Amano-san?"

And that surprised the pâtissier. "How did you know my name?"

"I read it in a manga. You are Amano Ichigo, aren't you?"

"Yes..." she said with some suspicion.

"And you found yourself here, not knowing where you were or what day it was?"

"Three and a half months ago, yes.  How do you know that?"

Miyuki replied, "Because the same thing happened to us the day before yesterday. My name is Takara Miyuki, and my friend is named Izumi Konata."

"Izumi Konata... Wait here, please." And Ichigo headed into the patisserie's back room. Switching from French to Japanese, she said, "Mari-sempai! Makoto! Vanilla! Everybody! There are other people like us here!"

"We'd better finish our snack while she's back there," Konata said just before taking another bite of her tart.

"Yes, it would be a bad idea to tell them what we did say and then leave." Miyuki replied before enjoying her own tart.

Just after the women finished their sweets, the entire staff of Patisserie Belge — two young women and three young men, that Konata and Miyuki could see — made their way out of the back of the shop. The blonde woman said, "I'm Mari Tennouji, although Ichigo says you already knew who we are. I remember seeing you yesterday evening. What's all this about being from a different reality?"

"That does sound preposterous," the blond boy added. "Oh, and I'm Makoto Kashino."

"And I'm Konata Izumi. It may sound crazy, but how else would somebody who doesn't make desserts at all know about Sweet Spirits?"

That gave the staff pause. Finally, the boy with glasses said, "You could have heard about Sweets Spirits from somebody else." He emphasized the plural 'Sweets' slightly. "And I'm Sennosuke Andou."

"Well, yes," Konata said. "And that somebody else was Natsumi Matsumoto, the mangaka who wrote Yumeiro Pâtissière. That's the story that you're all in."

"I'm inclined to believe these young ladies," the other boy said. "They do look like the characters from the Lucky Star manga."

Miyuki turned to Konata. "I thought Kazari-san said we were from an anime."

"I wouldn't be surprised if both of our stories were turned into anime," Konata replied. She turned back to the others. "And I'm guessing you're Satsuki Hanabusa, right?"

"I am, yes."

"Are your Sweets Spirits here, too?"

"You can't see them?" Ichigo asked in reply while gesturing toward what Konata and Miyuki thought was empty air.

"No, I can't. Darn it."

Miyuki mentioned, "Neither of us are pastry chefs. Why should we be able to see them?"

Konata muttered, "Because I was hoping that might have been my power here. We're isekai characters now, we should have powers."

"We don't have powers," Mari pointed out.

Konata replied, "But you do have Sweets Spirit allies."

"Well," Ichigo said, "you have perfect fluency in French. The rest of us, even your friend Takara-san, have Japanese accents."

"You do, don't you? I wonder why that is. Maybe Cassiopée-san knows why. Oh! You have to meet Cassiopée-san! Come over for lunch!"

Before the others could reply, Miyuki said, "Are you sure you should be inviting them over? Mme. Bright was planning something special."

"You heard what Kagamin said. There's going to be plenty of food."

"Still, we should bring something to help out if we're dropping in unannounced," Mari insisted.

"That sounds like we're accepting their offer," Makoto commented.

"We are. They seem to know more about what happened to us than we do." Mari turned back to Konata and Miyuki. "How many people will there be at the dinner table?"

"There were fourteen of us before Konata invited you," Miyuki replied.

Mari looked at what was left in the display case, then turned to the other pâtissiers. "Ichigo, select gâteaux moka for two dozen people. Sennosuke, put the 'closed' sign in the window, draw the blinds, and lock the front door. Makoto, make sure the ovens are turned off and the windows are closed. Satsuki, you and I will put what's left of today's stock in the refrigerators. Let's not keep our new friends waiting!"




After locking the back door behind them, the group made its way to the back door of the apartment complex.

"Bright-san?" Konata asked as she opened the door. "Can we squeeze in five more displacees for dinner?" She walked into the dining room, letting Miuyki guide their visitors behind her.

Cassiopée replied to Konata without looking up from the bottles at the dining room's bar. "Displacees are always welcome. If it were any other day, we might have had a problem, but today we should have enough food to go around. We simply won't have as much food left over for tomorrow. Five more for dinner, and since I'm making the [url="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribou_(drink)]cariboo[/url] right now, I'll mix an extra pitcher."

"Ten more," Medea said quietly while she and Kagami moved to add another table to the long row of tables, "and you five are the cutest eidolons I've ever seen."

"You can see us?" Honey asked in amazement.

"Of course I can," Medea replied matter-of-factly. "I am a master mage."

Cassiopée wondered why Medea appeared to be talking to empty air, but assumed there was a reason for it and didn't interfere. Instead, she turned to the displacees who she could see... and gasped in surprise. They weren't newcomers.

"Mlle. Tennouji, you're a displacee?"

"Is that what people like Mlle. Izumi and Mlle. Takara are called?"

"Maudit d'esti," Cassiopée muttered. Then she said in a more normal tone of voice, "Yes, anyone who has been displaced from their home worlds to this one is called a displacee."

Ichigo said, "We were wondering why we couldn't find any trace of St. Marie Academy. Is that because we're in another world?"

"Oh, yeah," Konata replied.

Marie said, "Then we're displacees, yes. Can you explain what that means, please?"

While she continued mixing the pitchers of drinks, Cassiopée gave Mari and the others the quick description: Something or multiple somethings had happened to put various realities at risk, some people were being displaced from their home worlds to the world that displacees had begun to call Refuge when talking amongst themselves, and various divine and infernal beings were working together to end the crisis and provide housing for the displacees while the crisis was ongoing.

At the end of it, Makoto said, "I'd think you're delusional, except that Mlle. Izumi and Mlle. Takara know who we are and we know who they are."

Konata grinned. "We can show you chapters of the manga you're in, if you want. As soon as I find copies."

Cassiopée smiled at Konata's eagerness to help out. "Or we can show you the anime that you're from, later. It's too close to the start of the Christmas feast to do that now. And before you ask the same question that Rin did, no, we won't be serving fried chicken. Where are you living? I know you've been in this world for at least a couple of weeks, and if you're close enough, we might be able to entertain you with a story from your own lives before you have to go home today."

"We've been so busy getting and keeping the shop going that we've been sleeping on bunk beds in the back room," Makoto replied. "And we've been here since... when was it, again?" He looked at what seemed to be empty air, then said, "Thank you, Chocolat. We've been here since September 10."

"Depuis le 10 septembre..." She poured herself a shot of rye whisky from the bottle that she was using to make the cariboo, drank the shot in one gulp, carefully put the empty glass onto the bar, then said, "Crisse de câlice d'esti de tabarnak de sacrament de trou viarge!"

Caramel covered her ears in dismayed shock, which showed on her face; she had always been the most innocent of the Sweets Spirits. Of course, only the other Sweets Spirits, the pâtissières, and Caster could see her. Saber, who was just walking into the room with Rin, scowled in deep displeasure at hearing her landlady taking the Sacraments in vain.

Graheme immediately came running out of the kitchen. "What's wrong?"

"Mlle. Tennouji and her friends are displacees, they've been living here since the day before we moved into the building, and nobody told me about them!"

He sighed in relief. Yes, this was a problem, but not one that rated such an extreme reaction. Quietly and calmly, he said, "Calm down, Cassie. We know now."

"Don't call me 'Cassie' in public."

"Ah, yes, sorry. Relax, dear; it's Christmas. This isn't a time to be upset."

She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, then said, "You're right." Still upset but not acting on the emotion, she turned to the pâtissières to see Sennosuke trying to comfort what she still thought was empty air. "I'm sorry that I never asked my employers about what I needed to know about all of you, I'm sorry if that caused you any inconvenience," then she addressed that spot in the air, "and I'm sorry if my language offended you."

"Oh, think nothing of it," Mari replied.

"And Caramel accepts your apology," Sennosuke added.

Mari continued, "And we hope that you don't mind that we've been sleeping in the back of the shop for the last three months."

"That's something that I can do something about," Cassiopée said, eager to make amends for something that was never under her control. "We have empty furnished apartments above your shop, complete with bedrooms enough for each of you and good-sized bath tubs in the bathrooms. And I'll let you have the first month for free as an apology for you not already living there, if you want to move in."

Ichigo smiled widely. "You have a bath tub?! I've had to make do with showers since we got here!" The brunette turned to her blonde companion. "Mari, they have a bath tub. And we can have bedrooms of our own instead of sharing a bunk bed. And..."

Mari held up one hand in a "stop" gesture. "Ichigo, she had me at 'bath tub'." She turned to Cassiopée as she lowered her hand. "Throw in a bottle of bubble bath and you have a deal."

"I think I can see my way to do that," Cassiopée said with a smile as she offered her hand to Mari. "It's a bit late, but welcome to Appartements Mont-Royal Sud."

"Please take care of us," Mari replied as she shook Cassiopée's hand.

"We're planning on buying basic wardrobes and household sundries for the ladies from Ryouou tomorrow," Cassiopée told her new residents. "You're welcome to join us, should there be anything you'd prefer we buy for you."

"Thank you for the offer, but we do have to work in the shop tomorrow," Makoto pointed out

Mari smiled. "It's Christmas break at McGill and the local offices. Business is slow right now and should remain slow until the new year, unless we get orders to be filled on New Year's Eve. We'll take turns taking time off to go shopping for clothes and household goods. Makoto, since you just volunteered, you, Satsuki, and Sennosuke can keep the shop running tomorrow while Ichigo and I join Mlle. Izumi and Mlle. Takara at the stores."

"My sister and I will be shopping with you, too. I'm Hiiragi Kagami; happy to meet you."

"Tennouji Mari. I'm pleased to meet you, Mlle. Hiiragi." Mari turned back to her co-workers. "And the Mlles. Hiiragi as well."

Grahame smiled and commented, "That's probably for the best. You ladies go have fun shopping tomorrow with my wife; I'll take the young men shopping on the 27th. Now, I do have to get back to the kitchen. Give us another half-hour or so before sitting down."




  1. RK: This is canon for Yumeiro Pâtissière, and it's also true in the real world. Wood strawberries are subtly different from other strawberries. Should you want to taste-test for yourself (and I recommend you do), the French company Bonne Maman makes both strawberry jam and wood strawberry jam. RMS:  Count yourself lucky if you can find their wood strawberry jam.  It doesn't seem to be available in my area. RK: Then I'd best provide links, at least to their Canadian website: Strawberry jam and Strawberry and Wood Strawberry Spread.
]]> <![CDATA[2017-06-02: As the Woods Turn]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14894 Sun, 29 Jun 2025 09:11:32 -0500 robkelk]]> http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/showthread.php?tid=14894 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
June 2, 2017
4:44 PM


The water pitcher on Rob's desk started glowing. He immediately moved it to the floor. After the glowing stopped, Rob asked, "To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit, milady Skuld?"

"I suspect you won't think it's a pleasure once I've told you what's wrong." She did, in detail.

"Oh, gods. But isn't that something you could just swat with your hammer?"

"Ordinarily, yes, but they have a barrier up that's hiding the exact location, and we're too busy to devote the necessary effort it would take to break through it. Somebody needs to actually go in and switch on a beacon." She handed him a device that resembled the cellphones she had provided when the displacees started showing up.

"I see. When do I leave?"

"You don't. They need to be young."

"Oh, right. I only watched the movie once. I'll go call for volunteers. Where are they going?"

Skuld handed Rob a tablet displaying Kazari's customized version of Open Street Maps. "If the team gets to that gas station -" she pointed at a particular spot on the map "- at 1:47 PM tomorrow, they'll be able to head off the five people who have been manipulated into making that trip."

"Can we have Dr. Tam on call? If I remember the movie correctly, at least two of them have been drugged, and who knows whether those intelligence depressors will ever wear off."

Skuld smiled. "You're settling into the role of the Hero nicely, Rob. Thank you for thinking of saving them as well."




June 2, 2017
8:21 PM


As the movie's ending credits rolled, Usagi excused herself to make a dash for the washroom. A moment later, some obvious sounds came from where she'd gone.

"Are you going to be okay, Usagi?" Rob asked as he turned off the Netflix feed.

"Oh, gods... How could somebody do that?"

"In story, they thought they were doing what they had to do. Not that I agree." Rob sighed. "Out here, the movie was marketed as entertainment, but it was really a statement on what had happened to the genre."

"Please tell me people listened to that statement."

"I'd rather not lie to you, Hyoga."

"Oh. Is this why you never watch horror movies?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Are you still willing to do this, everyone?"

"Yes..." Usagi replied weakly as she came back into the room, wiping her chin with a wet cloth. Mamoru, Hyoga, and Mii just nodded. Makoto said, "This'll give me a chance to field-test some of the techniques Mii and I have been working on."

"Who fills which role?" Mii asked.

Rob looked quickly at everyone. "Usagi's the only blonde in the group."

"I don't want to die first!"

"I don't want any of you dying at all. Head off the students, take their place, get in there, and get this done as fast as you can. But you asked about roles. Mii, you're wearing glasses; take a thick book with you." She nodded. "Mamoru, you get to be the jock who's dating the blonde."

"I don't need to pretend to be dating Usako."

"But you do need to hide your intelligence. Makoto, can you pretend to be a ditz?"

"For a while, I guess. I'm not going to take any drugs, though."

"Thanks. Hyoga, you need to be the virgin." Hyoga giggled at that.

Mamoru raised an eyebrow. "Playing favourites?"

"No. If Usagi dies, only Hyoga has the raw power to even try to hold the gate closed until Skuld gets there."

Hyoga frowned. "I don't like the way you said that."

"Neither do I."




At the side of a quiet road
June 3, 2017
1:47 PM


Mamoru pulled the van up to the gas station's pump island just as the driver and passengers of the RV already parked there stormed out of the building. One of the male college students was talking to the blonde by his side. "The nerve of him, calling you a - Oh." He noticed they weren't the only ones at the pumps.

"Hi, there," Mamoru said with a smile as he, Mii, and Hyoga got out of the van. Mamoru stopped at the pump while Hyoga walked around the RV and Mii headed into the station. "You're going camping, too?"

"No, my cousin's lent me his cabin. We're going there for the weekend."

"That's a kind cousin you've got. We have to pitch a tent somewhere in a public park. What's your cousin do for a living, that he can afford a vacation place out here?"

"He's a... he's... I don't remember." The boy looked puzzled.

"You must remember his name, at least."

"Of course I do! It's... it's..."

Mamoru looked him straight in the eye. "Do you even have a cousin?"

He blinked a couple of times as a shadow fell across the fuel pumps. "No?"

"Then you're the people we've been looking for. You've been drugged. So has your girlfriend."

From the back of the van Mamoru had been driving came the cry "Moon Healing Escalation!" The effect went through the van's wall without affecting it, hit the students, then went through the RV without marking it.

The blonde shook her head once, then let go of the boy's arm; she suddenly seemed to be more alert than she had been. "What the hell have I been doing? And why did I get a dye job?"

Mamoru leaned to the van's window. "I hope you limited that, Usako."

"She didn't," replied Hyoga as she folded her wings, letting the sun shine on the pumps again, "but I absorbed the excess energy, and it looks like Mii kept the man in the building from noticing us."

"Who are you? Are you an ... angel?"

"We're friends," Hyoga replied. "And volunteers to take your places in the horror you were driving into. And I'm only an angel part-time," she finished with a grin.

"I ... see, I think. How can we thank you?"

"You can give us the keys to the cabin, so we don't have to break in. Oh, and we know a very good doctor who can probably counteract those drugs you've been given; here's his card."




June 3, 2017
1:55 PM


The phone rang once before it was picked up.

"It's about time you called. Did you warn them?"

"Yes, I did, and they ignored me. But then they changed their minds! The boys and girls are going home!"

"Oh, shit."

"Mind your language! All is not lost! There's a second group that they gave the cabin key to!"

"Maybe we can still make this work. How many?"

"Five little slant-eyed sacrifical lambs, and they match the roles. Although the whore is younger than most."

"There's something wrong there... but we don't have time to be choosy. Did you warn them?"

"I did, and those heathens refused to listen! They are on their way to the slaughter!"

"Fine."




June 3, 2017
2:33 PM


"Well, here we are." Mamoru held the van's door open for Usagi, then let the others make their own way out of the van.

"Nice place," Makoto nodded. "Lots of windows. And a roof!"

Mii barely looked up from her book. "As long as it has an Internet connection."

"No such luck," Mamoru answered with Usagi hanging off his arm. "We are off the net. But we aren't off the grid."

"As long as we have some place to put the groceries," replied Hyoga with her hands full.

Usagi nodded. "Right - let's go put the food in the fridge."

"Then we can explore the cabin! I bet it has rooms! I wonder whether it has a basement?" Makoto asked.

Hyoga leaned over to Makoto and whispered, "You're getting a little too much into your role."

* * *

"Isn't it too early in the day for them to go to the basement?"

"Some of the traps work better in the daytime. Maybe we can get this done quickly for a change, and go home early."




June 3, 2017
2:58 PM


"Well, here's the basement."

"It's hot in here."

"You could take your coat off, Makoto."

She pouted. "But it's my coat."

"Look at all this stuff!" Usagi exclaimed.

"How much of it is cursed, do you think?" asked Hyoga.

* * *

"Oh, shit! Do they know?"

* * *

Mii looked around while wearing the glasses Skuld had given her. "You see that end table over there? The one with the puzzle box on it?" Everyone else nodded. "The table itself doesn't have any magic. Everything else does."

"What do you want to choose, then? The merman, maybe?" Mamoru gestured toward a figurine.

Usagi shook here head. "No, there isn't enough water here."

* * *

"Awwww..."

"We have more important things to worry about than them not picking the God-damned merman! How the hell do they know what's going on?" The technician stopped ranting, then sighed. "I knew there was something wrong."

"There's no time to worry about that. They're reading from Buckner's diary."

"No! They shouldn't! They know what's going on!" The director glanced at the red phone on the wall, but didn't move toward it. "Or should they?"

"Sir. We. Can't. Stop. Them."

* * *

"Your accent is impeccable, Hyoga."

"Thank you, Mii. How soon will it be before the pain-worshiping redneck zombies show up?"

"I think we have to coax them out by somebody having sex," Makoto pointed out.

"That's our cue, Mamo-chan!"

"Usako!"

She pouted. "I'm just staying in character."

"Usagi -"

Mamoru held up one hand in a 'stop' gesture. "Mii, if they don't know by now that we know, either they aren't watching or they're idiots."




June 3, 2017
3:37 PM


"That isn't something I want to watch." Makoto and Hyoga were outside, standing on either side of an open window and trying to ignore the sounds coming from inside.

"I agree - I feel like I'm intruding, even with the curtains drawn. But at least it sounds like they're having fun."

"Are they really ..."

Hyoga nodded. "The only way for it to seem real enough is for it to be real. But I don't think they're going all the way."

"Then my friends are really-- Supreme Thunder!"

A bear trap sparked and bounced twice on the ground as the zombie that was wielding it as a weapon collapsed into a pile of ashes.

* * *

"What the hell did she do?"

* * *

Hyoga shouted, "Mii! It's showtime!"

Mii's answer came from across the clearing behind the cabin - it sounded like she was running. "I've found the graves, and three zombies have found me!"

"We're on our way! Makoto, destroy or capture? Maybe Usagi can heal them, if she and Mamoru are finished."

Usagi and Mamoru stepped out of the cabin's front door, adjusting their clothes. "Ewww... I don't want to heal the pain-worshiping redneck zombies, but I guess I should at least try. Oh, and whoever was watching better not have tried to record what Mamo-chan and I just did, because I'm not 18 yet, and we kept our clothes on anyway!"

"Too much information, Usagi," Makoto said as she finally took her coat off... to reveal she'd been in her Sailor Jupiter form all along.

"Sorry, Mako-chan. Moon Cosmic Power, Make-up!"

All Tuxedo Kamen said was, "Let's go."

* * *

"Oh, shit! Fucking magical girls! Fucking Sailor Soldiers!" The technician grabbed the red phone. "Come on! Answer!"




June 3, 2017
3:43 PM


There weren't any pain-worshiping redneck zombies left for Sailor Moon to heal. A rose by any other name would go through their heads just as quickly... and so would a lightning bolt.

That just left them with how to get underground - but they knew they needed to act fast. "Mii, any luck?"

She nodded. "Over here, Usagi. There's a control panel inside this grave."

"Ick." Hyoga frowned. "Well, let's see what we can do."

Makoto ripped the cover off the control panel, Mamoru hot-wired it, and the group was on its way underground, passing dozens of different transparent boxes holding as many different monsters.

"Hey, look! Elves!" Usagi waved at them through the clear front of their box as they passed by. The elves bared their teeth and jumped toward them, hitting the clear front of their box.

"I doubt they know Ail and Ann."

"Probably not, Mamo-chan."

The box continued on.

* * *

"I recognize three of them - Sailor Moon, Sailor Jupiter, and Tuxedo Mask. ... Yes, exactly like in the cartoon. ... How should I know? I don't even know where we get our slashers from. That's your job. The other two, I don't recognize, but it's obvious that one of them has some sort of psychometry or penetrating vision. ... Because she knew what was cursed and where the elevator controls were. ... No, ma'am, the 'virgin' hasn't done anything yet to hint what her magic is. ... Yes, they are. My assistant already sounded the alarm."




June 3, 2017
4:00 PM


The box stopped.

The door opened up.

So did the guards.

Their bullets hit only Tuxedo Kamen's cape.

Their submachine guns ran dry. As the troops moved to reload, Makoto shouted "Jupiter Taser Blast!"

Lightning arced through the antechamber, and the troops collapsed like puppets with their strings cut.

Hyoga blinked. "I didn't know you could do that!"

"No more chatter," ordered Mii. "Assault now, talk later. And keep your eyes open! We can't count on the others being this sloppy with their tactics."

The five took off down the corridor, leaving the monsters locked up in the boxes behind them.




June 3, 2017
4:09 PM


They reached the control room ... only to find it deserted. Papers were spread across desks, coffee was cooling in cups, and a jacket was half-draped on the back of a chair, but all of the people were gone.

"I guess they knew we were coming."

Mii sighed. "You can drop the act, Mako-chan."

"But I wasn't ..." She was cut off by a phone ringing.

Hyoga was the first to reach the red phone. "Hello! Do you have a paranormal infestation? Do you need expert help? We're ready to believe you!"

"What is she going on about?" Mamoru asked.

Usagi put her hand on Mamoru's arm. "We all know who's on the other end of that call. Remember who played her in the movie?"

"Oh. Right." Mamoru sighed and shook his head once. "Hyoga's been hanging around Ruiko too much."

Hyoga ignored them. "We know exactly what's going on here. Give us a reason to let it continue, and we might go along with it, or we might not. ... No, not over the phone. In person, where all of us can hear you. No side deals with only one of us. ... Or we destroy this place and banish all your monsters back to wherever they came from. You know we have the power to do that."

Mii leaned over to Usagi. "Do we have the power to do that?"

"Hyoga says we do. Don't you trust her?"

Hyoga hung up as a door unlocked and opened on its own. "She's agreed to explain things in person. Let's go." As they moved toward the door, Hyoga stopped Usagi. "You need to be in the middle of the group."

"Okay, but why?"

Mii smiled. "According to their plans, you have to die first, remember? Let's not make it easy for them by putting you at either end."




June 3, 2017
4:17 PM


The five walked into a cavern, large enough to hold them all without stepping into the mystic circle that was inlaid on the floor. The place was dark, and malevolent, and waiting for death - they had the feeling that it didn't care whose death, as long as the sacrifices were young.

Hyoga stopped the group from going any farther. "Here we are, now. Entertain us."

"That's supposed to be my line, or, rather, the line of the Beings who we guard against," came a voice from the shadows. The woman who had spoken stepped out where they could see her.

"Wow. She actually looks like Ms. Wea-"

"Not important, Usagi!"

The woman raised an eyebrow. "Usagi? Not Serena?"

With genuine anger, Usagi shouted, "Don't call me Serena!" She calmed down a bit before adding, "It's bad enough Kris calls me that."

The facility's director ignored her comment. "It appears I was misinformed. Are you all Japanese?"

"We are," Mii replied.

"Then you might be too old. But the ritual here requires students, not children. Your friend said that you knew what was happening here. That means you know that the fate of the entire world depends on your sacrifice. At least you three have been willing to die for the world in the past." She gestured toward Sailor Moon, Sailor Jupiter, and Tuxedo Kamen. "Will you die for us here? Please?"

Usagi's voice was like steel. "We are willing to die in combat, but not as helpless pawns for some entity's amusement."

"Then you will condemn us all. There are only two options: You can die for us, or with us."

Hyoga reached into her pocket, and smiled the smile that she had seen on the face of the Best of Hounds when she was still a collection of forces so many months ago. "We choose a third option." Withdrawing her hand from her pocket to reveal Skuld's Beacon, she switched it on.

It shifted shape into a teacup, which filled with water on its own.

And the room was filled with a divine radiance.

"What is that?" the woman asked. "What are you doing?"

"I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED."

And above the teacup was the Valkyrie who is a Norn, the Keeper of the Future, the Divine Debugger, the Raven-Haired, Skuld. Clad in her finest armour and wielding her warhammer, she stepped forward to face the woman who spoke for the Entities below them. "YOUR TIME OF JUDGMENT HAS COME. YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED AND FOUND UNWORTHY OF VALHALLA OR NIFLHEIM. TO HEL WITH YOU."

And she swung her hammer.

And the woman collapsed, her head staved in.

Skuld turned to the five who had been her proxies in the search for the chamber. All but Hyoga were shocked to see someone who they thought of as a kind person commit violence so casually. No longer acting as an avatar of Death, Skuld said in a more normal voice, "It's time for most of you to leave. Hyoga, would you stay behind and assist me?"

"I have experience with fighting cosmic horrors," Usagi mentioned, thinking of Pharaoh 90.

Skuld turned to look at her. "I can use your help as well, then. Thank you."

Hyoga asked, "How much of my power do you need to borrow?"

"All of it, please."

Hyoga turned to her other friends. "Run."

They ran for the door, as fast as they were able, barely outracing the light that filled most of the corridor behind them, not stopping until they reached the control room with the red phone.

Nine minutes later, Hyoga and Usagi followed them out, leaning on each other for support... until they collapsed at their friends' feet. "I never want to do anything like that again," whispered Hyoga.

"Are we ..."

"We're safe, Mii," Usagi replied quietly. "The portal is sealed. Skuld locked it herself. Only a Norn or Hild could get through it now." She sighed deeply, then grinned and asked, "So, do you want to stay and enjoy the rest of the weekend in a cabin in the woods?"

Everybody else stared at her.

Finally, Hyoga replied, "Let's get the Hel out of here."]]> Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
June 2, 2017
4:44 PM


The water pitcher on Rob's desk started glowing. He immediately moved it to the floor. After the glowing stopped, Rob asked, "To what do we owe the pleasure of your visit, milady Skuld?"

"I suspect you won't think it's a pleasure once I've told you what's wrong." She did, in detail.

"Oh, gods. But isn't that something you could just swat with your hammer?"

"Ordinarily, yes, but they have a barrier up that's hiding the exact location, and we're too busy to devote the necessary effort it would take to break through it. Somebody needs to actually go in and switch on a beacon." She handed him a device that resembled the cellphones she had provided when the displacees started showing up.

"I see. When do I leave?"

"You don't. They need to be young."

"Oh, right. I only watched the movie once. I'll go call for volunteers. Where are they going?"

Skuld handed Rob a tablet displaying Kazari's customized version of Open Street Maps. "If the team gets to that gas station -" she pointed at a particular spot on the map "- at 1:47 PM tomorrow, they'll be able to head off the five people who have been manipulated into making that trip."

"Can we have Dr. Tam on call? If I remember the movie correctly, at least two of them have been drugged, and who knows whether those intelligence depressors will ever wear off."

Skuld smiled. "You're settling into the role of the Hero nicely, Rob. Thank you for thinking of saving them as well."




June 2, 2017
8:21 PM


As the movie's ending credits rolled, Usagi excused herself to make a dash for the washroom. A moment later, some obvious sounds came from where she'd gone.

"Are you going to be okay, Usagi?" Rob asked as he turned off the Netflix feed.

"Oh, gods... How could somebody do that?"

"In story, they thought they were doing what they had to do. Not that I agree." Rob sighed. "Out here, the movie was marketed as entertainment, but it was really a statement on what had happened to the genre."

"Please tell me people listened to that statement."

"I'd rather not lie to you, Hyoga."

"Oh. Is this why you never watch horror movies?"

"Pretty much, yeah. Are you still willing to do this, everyone?"

"Yes..." Usagi replied weakly as she came back into the room, wiping her chin with a wet cloth. Mamoru, Hyoga, and Mii just nodded. Makoto said, "This'll give me a chance to field-test some of the techniques Mii and I have been working on."

"Who fills which role?" Mii asked.

Rob looked quickly at everyone. "Usagi's the only blonde in the group."

"I don't want to die first!"

"I don't want any of you dying at all. Head off the students, take their place, get in there, and get this done as fast as you can. But you asked about roles. Mii, you're wearing glasses; take a thick book with you." She nodded. "Mamoru, you get to be the jock who's dating the blonde."

"I don't need to pretend to be dating Usako."

"But you do need to hide your intelligence. Makoto, can you pretend to be a ditz?"

"For a while, I guess. I'm not going to take any drugs, though."

"Thanks. Hyoga, you need to be the virgin." Hyoga giggled at that.

Mamoru raised an eyebrow. "Playing favourites?"

"No. If Usagi dies, only Hyoga has the raw power to even try to hold the gate closed until Skuld gets there."

Hyoga frowned. "I don't like the way you said that."

"Neither do I."




At the side of a quiet road
June 3, 2017
1:47 PM


Mamoru pulled the van up to the gas station's pump island just as the driver and passengers of the RV already parked there stormed out of the building. One of the male college students was talking to the blonde by his side. "The nerve of him, calling you a - Oh." He noticed they weren't the only ones at the pumps.

"Hi, there," Mamoru said with a smile as he, Mii, and Hyoga got out of the van. Mamoru stopped at the pump while Hyoga walked around the RV and Mii headed into the station. "You're going camping, too?"

"No, my cousin's lent me his cabin. We're going there for the weekend."

"That's a kind cousin you've got. We have to pitch a tent somewhere in a public park. What's your cousin do for a living, that he can afford a vacation place out here?"

"He's a... he's... I don't remember." The boy looked puzzled.

"You must remember his name, at least."

"Of course I do! It's... it's..."

Mamoru looked him straight in the eye. "Do you even have a cousin?"

He blinked a couple of times as a shadow fell across the fuel pumps. "No?"

"Then you're the people we've been looking for. You've been drugged. So has your girlfriend."

From the back of the van Mamoru had been driving came the cry "Moon Healing Escalation!" The effect went through the van's wall without affecting it, hit the students, then went through the RV without marking it.

The blonde shook her head once, then let go of the boy's arm; she suddenly seemed to be more alert than she had been. "What the hell have I been doing? And why did I get a dye job?"

Mamoru leaned to the van's window. "I hope you limited that, Usako."

"She didn't," replied Hyoga as she folded her wings, letting the sun shine on the pumps again, "but I absorbed the excess energy, and it looks like Mii kept the man in the building from noticing us."

"Who are you? Are you an ... angel?"

"We're friends," Hyoga replied. "And volunteers to take your places in the horror you were driving into. And I'm only an angel part-time," she finished with a grin.

"I ... see, I think. How can we thank you?"

"You can give us the keys to the cabin, so we don't have to break in. Oh, and we know a very good doctor who can probably counteract those drugs you've been given; here's his card."




June 3, 2017
1:55 PM


The phone rang once before it was picked up.

"It's about time you called. Did you warn them?"

"Yes, I did, and they ignored me. But then they changed their minds! The boys and girls are going home!"

"Oh, shit."

"Mind your language! All is not lost! There's a second group that they gave the cabin key to!"

"Maybe we can still make this work. How many?"

"Five little slant-eyed sacrifical lambs, and they match the roles. Although the whore is younger than most."

"There's something wrong there... but we don't have time to be choosy. Did you warn them?"

"I did, and those heathens refused to listen! They are on their way to the slaughter!"

"Fine."




June 3, 2017
2:33 PM


"Well, here we are." Mamoru held the van's door open for Usagi, then let the others make their own way out of the van.

"Nice place," Makoto nodded. "Lots of windows. And a roof!"

Mii barely looked up from her book. "As long as it has an Internet connection."

"No such luck," Mamoru answered with Usagi hanging off his arm. "We are off the net. But we aren't off the grid."

"As long as we have some place to put the groceries," replied Hyoga with her hands full.

Usagi nodded. "Right - let's go put the food in the fridge."

"Then we can explore the cabin! I bet it has rooms! I wonder whether it has a basement?" Makoto asked.

Hyoga leaned over to Makoto and whispered, "You're getting a little too much into your role."

* * *

"Isn't it too early in the day for them to go to the basement?"

"Some of the traps work better in the daytime. Maybe we can get this done quickly for a change, and go home early."




June 3, 2017
2:58 PM


"Well, here's the basement."

"It's hot in here."

"You could take your coat off, Makoto."

She pouted. "But it's my coat."

"Look at all this stuff!" Usagi exclaimed.

"How much of it is cursed, do you think?" asked Hyoga.

* * *

"Oh, shit! Do they know?"

* * *

Mii looked around while wearing the glasses Skuld had given her. "You see that end table over there? The one with the puzzle box on it?" Everyone else nodded. "The table itself doesn't have any magic. Everything else does."

"What do you want to choose, then? The merman, maybe?" Mamoru gestured toward a figurine.

Usagi shook here head. "No, there isn't enough water here."

* * *

"Awwww..."

"We have more important things to worry about than them not picking the God-damned merman! How the hell do they know what's going on?" The technician stopped ranting, then sighed. "I knew there was something wrong."

"There's no time to worry about that. They're reading from Buckner's diary."

"No! They shouldn't! They know what's going on!" The director glanced at the red phone on the wall, but didn't move toward it. "Or should they?"

"Sir. We. Can't. Stop. Them."

* * *

"Your accent is impeccable, Hyoga."

"Thank you, Mii. How soon will it be before the pain-worshiping redneck zombies show up?"

"I think we have to coax them out by somebody having sex," Makoto pointed out.

"That's our cue, Mamo-chan!"

"Usako!"

She pouted. "I'm just staying in character."

"Usagi -"

Mamoru held up one hand in a 'stop' gesture. "Mii, if they don't know by now that we know, either they aren't watching or they're idiots."




June 3, 2017
3:37 PM


"That isn't something I want to watch." Makoto and Hyoga were outside, standing on either side of an open window and trying to ignore the sounds coming from inside.

"I agree - I feel like I'm intruding, even with the curtains drawn. But at least it sounds like they're having fun."

"Are they really ..."

Hyoga nodded. "The only way for it to seem real enough is for it to be real. But I don't think they're going all the way."

"Then my friends are really-- Supreme Thunder!"

A bear trap sparked and bounced twice on the ground as the zombie that was wielding it as a weapon collapsed into a pile of ashes.

* * *

"What the hell did she do?"

* * *

Hyoga shouted, "Mii! It's showtime!"

Mii's answer came from across the clearing behind the cabin - it sounded like she was running. "I've found the graves, and three zombies have found me!"

"We're on our way! Makoto, destroy or capture? Maybe Usagi can heal them, if she and Mamoru are finished."

Usagi and Mamoru stepped out of the cabin's front door, adjusting their clothes. "Ewww... I don't want to heal the pain-worshiping redneck zombies, but I guess I should at least try. Oh, and whoever was watching better not have tried to record what Mamo-chan and I just did, because I'm not 18 yet, and we kept our clothes on anyway!"

"Too much information, Usagi," Makoto said as she finally took her coat off... to reveal she'd been in her Sailor Jupiter form all along.

"Sorry, Mako-chan. Moon Cosmic Power, Make-up!"

All Tuxedo Kamen said was, "Let's go."

* * *

"Oh, shit! Fucking magical girls! Fucking Sailor Soldiers!" The technician grabbed the red phone. "Come on! Answer!"




June 3, 2017
3:43 PM


There weren't any pain-worshiping redneck zombies left for Sailor Moon to heal. A rose by any other name would go through their heads just as quickly... and so would a lightning bolt.

That just left them with how to get underground - but they knew they needed to act fast. "Mii, any luck?"

She nodded. "Over here, Usagi. There's a control panel inside this grave."

"Ick." Hyoga frowned. "Well, let's see what we can do."

Makoto ripped the cover off the control panel, Mamoru hot-wired it, and the group was on its way underground, passing dozens of different transparent boxes holding as many different monsters.

"Hey, look! Elves!" Usagi waved at them through the clear front of their box as they passed by. The elves bared their teeth and jumped toward them, hitting the clear front of their box.

"I doubt they know Ail and Ann."

"Probably not, Mamo-chan."

The box continued on.

* * *

"I recognize three of them - Sailor Moon, Sailor Jupiter, and Tuxedo Mask. ... Yes, exactly like in the cartoon. ... How should I know? I don't even know where we get our slashers from. That's your job. The other two, I don't recognize, but it's obvious that one of them has some sort of psychometry or penetrating vision. ... Because she knew what was cursed and where the elevator controls were. ... No, ma'am, the 'virgin' hasn't done anything yet to hint what her magic is. ... Yes, they are. My assistant already sounded the alarm."




June 3, 2017
4:00 PM


The box stopped.

The door opened up.

So did the guards.

Their bullets hit only Tuxedo Kamen's cape.

Their submachine guns ran dry. As the troops moved to reload, Makoto shouted "Jupiter Taser Blast!"

Lightning arced through the antechamber, and the troops collapsed like puppets with their strings cut.

Hyoga blinked. "I didn't know you could do that!"

"No more chatter," ordered Mii. "Assault now, talk later. And keep your eyes open! We can't count on the others being this sloppy with their tactics."

The five took off down the corridor, leaving the monsters locked up in the boxes behind them.




June 3, 2017
4:09 PM


They reached the control room ... only to find it deserted. Papers were spread across desks, coffee was cooling in cups, and a jacket was half-draped on the back of a chair, but all of the people were gone.

"I guess they knew we were coming."

Mii sighed. "You can drop the act, Mako-chan."

"But I wasn't ..." She was cut off by a phone ringing.

Hyoga was the first to reach the red phone. "Hello! Do you have a paranormal infestation? Do you need expert help? We're ready to believe you!"

"What is she going on about?" Mamoru asked.

Usagi put her hand on Mamoru's arm. "We all know who's on the other end of that call. Remember who played her in the movie?"

"Oh. Right." Mamoru sighed and shook his head once. "Hyoga's been hanging around Ruiko too much."

Hyoga ignored them. "We know exactly what's going on here. Give us a reason to let it continue, and we might go along with it, or we might not. ... No, not over the phone. In person, where all of us can hear you. No side deals with only one of us. ... Or we destroy this place and banish all your monsters back to wherever they came from. You know we have the power to do that."

Mii leaned over to Usagi. "Do we have the power to do that?"

"Hyoga says we do. Don't you trust her?"

Hyoga hung up as a door unlocked and opened on its own. "She's agreed to explain things in person. Let's go." As they moved toward the door, Hyoga stopped Usagi. "You need to be in the middle of the group."

"Okay, but why?"

Mii smiled. "According to their plans, you have to die first, remember? Let's not make it easy for them by putting you at either end."




June 3, 2017
4:17 PM


The five walked into a cavern, large enough to hold them all without stepping into the mystic circle that was inlaid on the floor. The place was dark, and malevolent, and waiting for death - they had the feeling that it didn't care whose death, as long as the sacrifices were young.

Hyoga stopped the group from going any farther. "Here we are, now. Entertain us."

"That's supposed to be my line, or, rather, the line of the Beings who we guard against," came a voice from the shadows. The woman who had spoken stepped out where they could see her.

"Wow. She actually looks like Ms. Wea-"

"Not important, Usagi!"

The woman raised an eyebrow. "Usagi? Not Serena?"

With genuine anger, Usagi shouted, "Don't call me Serena!" She calmed down a bit before adding, "It's bad enough Kris calls me that."

The facility's director ignored her comment. "It appears I was misinformed. Are you all Japanese?"

"We are," Mii replied.

"Then you might be too old. But the ritual here requires students, not children. Your friend said that you knew what was happening here. That means you know that the fate of the entire world depends on your sacrifice. At least you three have been willing to die for the world in the past." She gestured toward Sailor Moon, Sailor Jupiter, and Tuxedo Kamen. "Will you die for us here? Please?"

Usagi's voice was like steel. "We are willing to die in combat, but not as helpless pawns for some entity's amusement."

"Then you will condemn us all. There are only two options: You can die for us, or with us."

Hyoga reached into her pocket, and smiled the smile that she had seen on the face of the Best of Hounds when she was still a collection of forces so many months ago. "We choose a third option." Withdrawing her hand from her pocket to reveal Skuld's Beacon, she switched it on.

It shifted shape into a teacup, which filled with water on its own.

And the room was filled with a divine radiance.

"What is that?" the woman asked. "What are you doing?"

"I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED."

And above the teacup was the Valkyrie who is a Norn, the Keeper of the Future, the Divine Debugger, the Raven-Haired, Skuld. Clad in her finest armour and wielding her warhammer, she stepped forward to face the woman who spoke for the Entities below them. "YOUR TIME OF JUDGMENT HAS COME. YOU HAVE BEEN JUDGED AND FOUND UNWORTHY OF VALHALLA OR NIFLHEIM. TO HEL WITH YOU."

And she swung her hammer.

And the woman collapsed, her head staved in.

Skuld turned to the five who had been her proxies in the search for the chamber. All but Hyoga were shocked to see someone who they thought of as a kind person commit violence so casually. No longer acting as an avatar of Death, Skuld said in a more normal voice, "It's time for most of you to leave. Hyoga, would you stay behind and assist me?"

"I have experience with fighting cosmic horrors," Usagi mentioned, thinking of Pharaoh 90.

Skuld turned to look at her. "I can use your help as well, then. Thank you."

Hyoga asked, "How much of my power do you need to borrow?"

"All of it, please."

Hyoga turned to her other friends. "Run."

They ran for the door, as fast as they were able, barely outracing the light that filled most of the corridor behind them, not stopping until they reached the control room with the red phone.

Nine minutes later, Hyoga and Usagi followed them out, leaning on each other for support... until they collapsed at their friends' feet. "I never want to do anything like that again," whispered Hyoga.

"Are we ..."

"We're safe, Mii," Usagi replied quietly. "The portal is sealed. Skuld locked it herself. Only a Norn or Hild could get through it now." She sighed deeply, then grinned and asked, "So, do you want to stay and enjoy the rest of the weekend in a cabin in the woods?"

Everybody else stared at her.

Finally, Hyoga replied, "Let's get the Hel out of here."]]>