Go West! by Eline

Index

Chapter 1: Introducing a cast of misfits
Chapter 2: In which there's a lot of implied stuff

Chapter 1: Introducing a cast of misfits

Go West

By Eline (Kanzeon on ff.net)

The Uncut and Uncensored Author's Edition: http://www.theparapet.net/max/shite/go01.html

(Behold the power of the strikethrough function!)

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Warning! This fic:

- Is angst-free! (Imagine that . . .)

- Has absolutely no original plot!

- Is chock full of empty carbohydrates! (In other words, it's the fictional equivalent of junk food.)

- Is artificially flavoured with lemony yaoi! (Because Eline, yaoi-addicted fangirl that she is, wouldn't have it any other way.)

- Has references to a bunch of popular anime that you may or may not have watched before!

- Is rated "R" for "Ridiculous"! And the MPAA PG-13 rating, if that sort of thing actually applied to fanfics . . .

- Was written by someone who didn't know the definition of the term "noun" until she was 18. (Honest.)

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A not-so-long time ago, in a world not-really-so-alien from our own, humans and youkai lived in harmony. If you believed the press junket, that is. Humans can barely even get along with each other, much less another *species*.

Anyway, no one was really that surprised when the youkai decided to break away and form a coalition under the leadership of Prince Kougaiji of Tenjiku. At the beginning of this fanfic, the two species are at war and something had to be done . . .

"I have to do everything around here," Kanzeon Bosatsu muttered and did what people in-charge did all the time--delegate the work to people sitting on the lower rungs of the celestial hierarchy.

"Darn, shoot and blast," Heaven's emissary on earth swore when the problem landed on his lap. (As hierarchical rungs go, a Sanzo was technically at the bottom of the ladder and so he was always stuck with the least enviable tasks.) There were other things Genjo Sanzo wanted to do with his life--like brood in peace. And brood some more. And brood on rainy nights. But there was nothing for it and together with his runty--I mean trusty--simian sidekick, Son Goku, he set off to the west to stop the youkai menace. He carried with him the Oh-So-Important-Infernal-Land-Sutra and a reinforced fan along with his gun because only a blithering idiot would venture out into the great unknown armed with only a hungry monkey. Genjo Sanzo had survived a great many scrapes by not being the blithering idiot at the wrong end of a deadly weapon.

Yes, the route was dangerous and fraught with icky things like yaoi fangirls and tentacle monsters. And other parties were interested in the Sutra as well. Namely Homura and his band of renegade Heavenly lackeys--mostly Heavenly malcontents who had got tired of being ordered around all the time and wanted a revolution so that they could be ordered around under a new regime because they were actually victims of a caste-system who could never get out of the box they built around themselves.

Now the matter of changing the world and getting a revolution done was pretty easy because there were loads of ways to do it in the wonderful world of anime/manga. Homura had *liked* the idea of Otohori Academy and the Duelling Platform, but couldn't quite fit into the size-three sailor fuku uniform despite his very trim and *tight* tushie. So there was nothing for it but to destroy the world and start from scratch with the power of the Firmament Foundation Sutras. (No one said being a megalomaniac with ambitions to be the god of a new world would be *easy*.)

Our story begins in somewhere in the aftermath of an epic battle between Homura and Son Goku, who was protecting Sanzo and the Sutra. Incidentally, all this happened atop a very high cliff--for dramatic effect and another reason that we'll find out about soon enough.

"Yaaarrrgghhh! Take that! And that!"

Much macho grunting, etc, etc . . . It's hardly worth the effort of describing the fight properly, so we might as well forget about it and get on with the fic.

"You've got to be stronger than that!" Homura jeered in Seductive Yet Challenging Voice #3 while kicking Goku's butt. "Any obnoxious girl with weird-coloured hair and colour-changing-eyes can do better!"

Goku tried Cliché #17. "You'll never get away with this!"

"That won't work on me--I read the Evil Overlord List!" Homura said triumphantly. "Show me your tennis!"

And there was a most terrible disconcerting pause in the flow of the story--if it had any flow to begin with.

"Wha?"

"Sorry--wrong anime. I mean--show me your real strength!" Homura said, picking up the slack and pummelling Goku halfway to next Tuesday. "Whoops, overdid it again . . . Oh well, guess it's just us now, *Konzen*," Homura said, using Special Emphasis #16 that he had saved up just for this occasion. "Hand over the Sutra. And maybe we could do dinner on Wednesday . . ."

"Get the name right first," Sanzo said, pretending to be bored as he tried to find his nemesis' weakness--that didn't involve doing anything that required him to drop his pants. Unfortunately for him, the Kami seemed to be entertaining other ideas.

It had occurred to him that Sanzo--against all odds--could have an even trimmer and tighter gluteus maximus than he did. Homura was thus distracted, and did not foresee the following chain of events. (So he maybe didn't read the Evil Overlord List very thoroughly after all . . .)

"Fuck this," Sanzo muttered, ignoring all efforts at censorship and kneed Homura in the scrotum (not-so-biological term: balls). He shoved the Sutra into Goku's belt before kicking him off the cliff, figuring that since Goku was a stone monkey, he would survive the fall. The purely physical question of whether or not Goku would have survived the fall was rendered moot when Goku landed in the convenient river below and was conveniently swept away.

Meanwhile, Homura managed to get up to latch onto Sanzo again while privately reminding himself to get one of those protective codpieces one of these days. "All right, Konzen--enough playing around. Hand over the Sutra, or else."

"Or else *what*?" Sanzo sneered.

"Or we could find new ways of utilising a lot of whipped cream."

"But I don't have the Sutra anymore," Sanzo pointed out, blanching a little.

"So? Give me one good reason why I shouldn't ravish you anyway."

"Variation of #26 of the Evil Overlord List," Sanzo countered.

"See #10."

"Whatever the hell you're thinking about doesn’t fall under the definition of 'interrogation'!"

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Meanwhile, down river, we come across another character in this fanfic . . .

The said character was happily traipsing down to the river with a bucket, but stopped to wave at the readers. (You'll have to excuse her--it's her first time in a fic and you know what it's like with newbies . . .)

Her name was Mari Su and she was moisture farmer. As in she collected water from the river, bottled it and sold it to tourists for a living.

"Hey, Evian does it, so why can't I?" Mari Su said before heading down to the dam for the day's work--she had not learned to ignore the narration as yet. Unfortunately for Mari Su, there was already someone there.

"There's a body jamming up the filters! Oh drat," she said, striving to comply with the censorship rules because she wanted to leave a good impression. "This is gonna be hard to explain to the FDA--"

The body chose that moment to move. "Nnnggghhhh . . ."

"Crap--live bodies are just as likely to carry pathogens and disease," she muttered. Left with no other choice, Mari Su lugged the guy out and administered the Heimlich manoeuvre because she had been brought up to believe that nice girls would never risk mouth-to-mouth with someone who may have an infectious disease.

Whether or not the Heimlich manoeuvre was successfully applied or just to plain old bullheadedness, the guy she rescued revived in short order.

"Uurrghh," he muttered incoherently. "Sanzo . . . Sanzo . . ."

"What to do? What to do?" Mari Su hemmed and hawed before dragging the semi-conscious and rather short guy back to the house where she lived with her Auntie Em and Uncle Henry.

"Auntie Em! Look at what I found in the river!"

"Mari Su! What did we tell you about bringing home strange young men?"

"Well, it was supposed to be a good deed, Auntie Em . . ." And then Auntie Em said that yes, what a good girl Mari Su had been and promptly forgot about it because Oprah was on the telly.

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Goku came to with the most unsatisfactory feeling that all was wrong in the world. His stomach was most definitely empty and Sanzo--

He bolted upright to discover that he was most definitely not fighting Homura and was currently Sanzo-less. Which was, in Goku's vocabulary, a Bad Thing.

"Oi--you're finally awake." There was this girl with her hair in braids hovering over him.

"Er, where am I?"

"Were'am-mai," Mari Su answered.

"No, I asked you where am I?" Goku said slowly and loudly in case the girl was daft in the head.

Mari Su rolled her eyes--as if she didn't get enough of this from the tourists every day. "Were'am-mai. This is a village of Were'am-mai--the most godforsaken spot on earth."

"Oh. You didn't happen to see a blond guy in priest robes in the river too, did you?"

"Huh? No, man--you were clogging up the dam filters."

"You sure? He smokes and drinks a lot! And he looks like this!" Goku fished out a picture on a laminated card and waved it in front of her.

(If anyone wants to know, it was the backcover of volume 3 of the manga. Yeah, *that* one.)

The first though to re-enter Mari Su's mind after a few minutes was "Fuck, but that guy is hot!" Followed closely by "Phwoarrrrr!" And what came next could not be safely mentioned without upping the rating.

Mari Su instantly regretted that she hadn't been able to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre for drowning on the blond guy instead.

"So, could you, like help?"

Mari Su snatched at the card to get a better view. "Hey--there's something on the back of this card . . . This monkey is registered to Genjo Sanzo, formerly of Chou An and currently moving to Tenjiku. Please return if found."

"And could I have some food *please*?"

Of course, Mari Su was hardly listening to him. The wheels in her head had started spinning at an alarming rate and while she wasn't ever going to be nominated for a Nobel Prize, she *could* spot opportunity knocking--or clogging up the dam.

"I should help you find your friend!" Mari Su declared, even though she did not even know Goku's name or what the heck she was doing at this point.

"That's nice of you, but could I have some f--"

"Let's go now!"

"Wha?" Goku asked, surprised. "What do you--"

"I mean we go now and I'll return you to your friend!" Mari Su said cheerfully, hauling out the hand-luggage she never thought she would ever use.

"B-but--" Goku would have asked her about leaving behind her family, her friends and her village, but need won out--and there wouldn't have been a really good reason for her to leave anyway. "No food?"

"I'll get you takeout! Now let's go before I start having second thoughts about this!"

Goku tucked away the lami card with a small smile. That picture never failed to work with the girls . . .

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Mari Su dragged Goku to the Stinkin' Codfish--the only bar-and-grill-cum-inn in the godforsaken town of Were'am-mai--for the surf 'n' turf special. Goku wolfed down the first portion down so fast that they had to stay and wait for more food while he "refuelled".

To while away the time, Mari Su had the Basque of Fries and a gin and tonic--the only way to survive the Stinkin' Codfish's cuisine. Goku, however, seemed to have a cast-iron stomach--he had survived the clam chowder and was going for the Seafood Surprise. (And all the while never questioning why the godforsaken village of Were'am-mai, six hundred miles from the nearest ocean and landlocked on all sides with only one river flowing from the mountains, would have any seafood at all . . . Surprising, no?)

What would have been a nice quite dinner was interrupted by a plague of salesmen who had got lost and wandered into the godforsaken hinterland north of the godforsaken township of Were'am-mai and had been rescued by well-meaning hikers. The well-meaning hikers had left them in the nearest town they could find and promptly fled from all the travel insurance forms.

"Yo, lady, could I sell you some upriver real-estate?" asked a smarmy guy in a checked suit who had slid up to her at the bar.

"Get lost--your real-estate isn't even real!" But the salesman was persistent. So persistent that she had to stomp on his fingers and yell bloody murder before he would let go. Or rather, get pulled off by a tall, red-haired guy in a vest and really fugly baggy pants.

"Bloody salesmen," she muttered and received a nod from the guy who had tossed the salesman headfirst out the door.

"Scum of the earth," the other guy agreed. "Name's Sha Gojyo and this is my travel buddy Cho Hakkai," the redhead said, pointing at a brunet with a monocle and three ear-cuffs in his left ear. By the stack of bottles on their end of the bar, they had been drinking an unearthly amount of sake. "Wanderin' adventurers."

"Temporarily stalled adventurers while our vehicle . . . undergoes refuelling," said the one named Hakkai.

"A vehicle--no one else here has a vehicle," Mari Su said as the hard realities of undertaking a trip to Tenjiku hit her like a thrown brick. "Can we hitch-hike? If you're going to Tenjiku. In the direction of Tenjiku--whatever that is."

"Sure babe, but what's in it for us?" Gojyo leered. Then again, one got the impression that he would have hit on anything that moved that that point and if he was shown three fingers, he would say it was thirteen.

" I dunno? The warm satisfaction of helping someone else?"

"Oh I know where to get that too," Gojyo said, nudging and winking at his companion in a way that broke all the rules about fictional innuendo.

"I'm returning a monkey to his owner."

"So?"

"Uh, the guy's a priest, so it's only right to help him!" Mari Su said, waving the picture in front of their noses.

"And he's got a credit card," Goku supplied helpfully.

"Hmmm, I bet there's a *fine* ass on that one," Gojyo whispered to Hakkai, who smiled at him as they played footsie under the table. Neither of them were particularly sober at that point, though Hakkai was actually capable of walking in a straight line. "Why don't we?"

"Why not?" Hakkai said with a suspicious twinkle in his visible eye.

Mari Su looked on warily because in the godforsaken hamlet of Were'am-mai, they always said that "guys with earrings were queer". Now these guys were kind of weird, it was true, but they seemed friendly enough, so Mari Su decided to trust two complete male strangers of questionable character to take her to Tenjiku.

"S'right! We'll get a move on tomorrow--meet us down here, girlie," Gojyo said before leaning on Hakkai and they staggered in unison to their room.

"Ano . . . er--what are we going to do in the meantime?" Mari-Su looked around, saw Goku shovelling away at it and shrugged. Maybe she could find some accommodations . . . Or ask those guys if their vehicle was available for crashing in for the night.

She would have knocked on their door. Except for the creaking noises, the moaning noises and the assorted sounds of two people thoroughly engrossed in each other.

And Mari Su did a one-eighty and marched back to the bar because there were some things in life that needed explaining, but Mari Su wasn't about to ask.

But on the bright side, it seemed that a young girl would be *perfectly* safe travelling with that pair . . .

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Yeah, really. If we can get Hakkai as Anthy, Gojyo as Utena, then Sanzo can be Saionji, Homura can be Touga and . . . Why do I get the feeling that someone is pointing a gun at my head? -_-;;

For anyone's reference:

The Evil Overlord List: http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

The Heimlich Maneuver (with diagrams): http://www.heimlichinstitute.org/maneuver.html

Back to index

Chapter 2: In which there's a lot of implied stuff

Go West

By Eline (Kanzeon on ff.net)

Dedicated to my PC, Elektra T_T

The Uncut and Uncensored Author's Edition: http://www.theparapet.net/max/shite/go02.html

(Know the power of the strikethrough function!)

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After an uncomfortable night on the floorboards of the Stinkin' Codfish, Mari Su woke up groggily and told herself that things would look up as soon as they left the godforsaken surrounds of Were'am-mai.

"Ughhh . . . I think I must have ate something bad . . ." Goku swallowed some antacid and frowned at his belly. "Was that fish last night fresh?"

Mari Su raised an eyebrow, too tired to be helpful. "You want know *why* they call this place the Stinkin' Codfish?"

"I'll pass. Where's our ride?"

"I don't know," Mari Su said truthfully, though she had a faint idea that there had been much riding going on upstairs last night.

Their new travel companions emerged later and consumed two jugs of hot coffee before they deemed themselves awake enough to leave. Wise to the ways of the inn kitchens, they did not touch any of the breakfast victuals except for the toast.

"Eh, where's your transport?" Mari Su asked after they emerged out onto the only road wide enough to be called a street in the godforsaken settlement of Were'am-mai.

"Ah, here he is now . . ." Hakkai held up an arm and allowed a small white lizard-like-thing with wings to land. "This is Jipu--our transport."

They stared at the small white dragon for a moment. It squeaked cutely at them and preened.

"Erm, it's kind of small for a dragon, isn't it? That kind of dragon can't even lift a coconut! Not even in pairs," Mari Su exclaimed when she saw their "transportation".

"Kyuu!" their transportation squeaked indignantly.

"Now you've gone and upset Jipu," Hakkai said, stroking the little white dragon like it was a pet. "There, there--she didn't mean it *that* way . . ."

But before they could get to the part where Jipu turns into a jeep like we all knew he would, trouble arrived in the form of an average-sized mob of youkai.

"We're looking for . . . uh, Sha Gojyo!" the leader of the mob called after referring hastily to a scrap of paper. "The employer, hereby known as 'Boss', wants your head on a platter together with a few choice bits, if there are enough pieces of you leftover. However, the Boss will just settle for a great deal of grievous bodily harm visited upon your person."

"Ah . . . that last man you swindled was more persistent than we thought," Hakkai said to Gojyo.

"It was a fair game--some people are just sore losers," Gojyo said with a shrug. "Besides, if he had enough money to pay this lot to follow us here, he's too rich by half."

"Yes, but what do we do about *them*?"

"Oh easy . . . Hired muscle, brainless as doorknobs."

"But they outnumber us ten to one . . ."

"We've been in tighter spots," Gojyo said, ignoring the mob entirely. "Remember that time about a year back? You, me, a jar of sake and two hundred youkai out for our blood . . .."

"Indeed," Hakkai said with a fond smile.

Goku cleared his throat. "Ano . . . this is all very nice--"

"--and romantic and everything, but don't you have other things to worry about right now," Mari Su said, waving her hands desperately to get their attention.

"Yes, yes . . . I'm sorry, but we're all rather attached to our body parts at the moment," Hakkai called out. "And I cannot let you take pieces of Gojyo away because I have dibs on him first."

"You and what army?" some youkai asked, emboldened because they did, in fact, out-number our intrepid travellers ten to one.

And because they really weren't that bright, they did not know that the narrative imperative always favoured the hopelessly outnumbered in fics like this.

"Charge!" the lead youkai shouted. It should be noted that he managed to wind up at the *back* of the aforementioned charge he was supposed to be leading. This was an integral part of being the leader of a mob--the leader always has slightly more IQ points and knew that being in front of a charging mob was the fastest way of being demoted without any red tape involved.

"Let Hakkai deal with this," Gojyo said with a lazy wink.

"Oh dear, I don't really want to see anyone hurt," Hakkai said in a regretful tone as he unbuttoned his shirt. "Well, I apologise in advance . . ." Something in his stance and the glint in his monocle gave them pause.

Predictably, someone said, "He's only one guy!"

Gojyo lit up a cigarette, the perfect picture of someone supremely unconcerned about the potential carnage that was about to happen in front of them. "Saaa . . . just watch."

So they watched as Hakkai took his rather cool limiter ear-clips off and faced down the mob.

"Well, I think we're all done here . . ." Gojyo said after two minutes and a lot of screaming later.

"Yargh . . ." Goku and Mari Su said incoherently. They had been standing too far back for the spray and the . . . other bits to reach them, but they had received a full-colour preview of What Happens When Hakkai Takes Off His Limiters.

"Unless he totally forgets himself and doesn't put his limiters back on . . ."

"Yargh!?!"

"Then I've gotta resort to Plan B . . ."

"Yargh?"

"Strip naked so that he'll drag me into the bushes for crazed youkai sex and I can get his limiters back on. Usually afterwards."

"Yargh . . . Yeesh."

"Aw, you didn't lose it completely," Gojyo said when Hakkai came back, buttoning up his shirt neatly.

"Gojyo--not in front of minors," Hakkai said with a wink. "Jipu--it's time to go."

"Kyuuu!" *poof and pretty lights* And a jeep occupied the space where the dragon used to be.

"Oi, stupid monkey and weird girl!"

"Yargh?"

"Let's get going."

So Mari Su, Goku, Gojyo, Hakkai and Mari Su's impractical luggage piled onto the jeep and they chugged out of the godforsaken hick-town of Were'am-mai.

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There was a knock on the door. It was the kind of knock that seemed to imply that the knocker did not want to knock on this particular door but was forced by extenuating circumstances to do so.

"Homura . . ." Shien's soft voice, not entirely ideal for this kind of job, floated through to the room beyond. There was a stirring from within as the knocking continued from without.

"Homura!" Zenon, in his militant and loud style, produced better results.

"Eh?"

"We're supposed to be getting on with the Plan," Shien said delicately.

"You know, the Plan? The Big Plan we've given up practically everything to pursue?" Zenon said, rolling his eyes at Shien. "The Plan that you said would work and create a new Utopia in which you would never be uk--"

"Right, right," Homura said hurriedly. "Give me a minute!"

"Honestly," Zenon huffed, "we're about an hour late starting this revolution already . . ."

"Homura has been distracted of late . . ." Shien pointed out.

"Yeah--I can imagine why . . ." Zenon and Shien looked distractedly into the distance. "Hmmmm . . ."

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About nine hours later, the jeep stopped outside a gas station in the heat of the afternoon sun. They were no longer in the godforsaken hinterland surrounding Were'am-mai. Unfortunately, they did not know where on the face of this wretched fanfic universe they were either.

"I thought we were supposed to be going somewhere," Goku said.

"I thought you knew the way?" Mari Su complained as they topped up Jipu's petrol tank with Diesel for Dragons.

"I thought you knew where you were driving to?" Gojyo said to Hakkai.

"Ah ha ha . . . Sumimasen--"

"You lost the map, didn't you?" Gojyo asked, tactfully refraining from banging his head against the petrol pumps.

"So we will buy a new one," Hakkai said calmly, heading for the small shop attached to the gas station.

"Food too!" Goku chanted, bouncing along behind.

"More cigarettes. And a drink--make it a big cold drink."

"The toilet!" Mari Su sighed in relief. It wasn't easy, being the only female on the trip. For one thing, she couldn't go out in the middle of a desert. There hadn't even been any convenient bushes along the road in this fanfic.

Five minutes later, they were at the cashier with a pile of beer, snacks, two maps and four hot dogs.

"That'll be eighteen ninety-five," said the cashier, obviously bored out of her skull.

"Oh dear . . ." Hakkai patted his pockets apologetically.

"Just how large was the bill back at that inn?" Gojyo whispered.

"Quite large . . . we spent most of it on the sake that night . . ." Hakkai whispered back.

The cashier looked up, fully intending to tell them to pay up or clear out. That was before she was momentarily stunned by the redhead and the brunet in front of her.

A quick whip-around produced five dollars and thirty-five cents in spare change.

"That much alcohol, huh?" Gojyo said thoughtfully. "No wonder I don't remember a thing . . ."

"I spent almost everything I had back on food at the inn," Mari Su said, rolling her eyes.

"Oi, Monkey Boy--still got that card?"

"What, this?" Goku pulled out the lami card.

"Yep, thanks." And Gojyo turned back to the drooling cashier with a disarming smile. "Hi, miss, we're just a bunch of poor travellers . . ."

(Kids, please don't try this at home--I'm pretty sure it's illegal.)

If the cashier had been quietly drooling at Gojyo and Hakkai before, she was drooling overtime as Gojyo turned on the charm. And the crowning touch was the card he held up in front of her.

"We need to help . . . a friend," Gojyo said, moving the card ever so slowly from right to left. The cashier's glazed eyes followed it--she was totally gone. "And isn't he pretty?"

"Pretty . . ."

"We don't need any money to pay for this."

"You don't need to pay for this," the cashier said, nodding along.

"Or for the gas."

"Or for the gas," the cashier agreed and they had to leg it before she could wake up from her trance completely.

"I can't say I approve of this . . ." Mari Su muttered as they walked out with three paper bags.

"Of course not, it's wrong," Hakkai said, popping open the regional map. "But then so is killing, cheating at cards and hitting on people who are not your SO."

"Er . . ." Mari Su glanced from Hakkai to Gojyo and back again.

"But I love him anyway. Jipu, are you done?"

"Kyuu!" the jeep squeaked and burped gently. Hakkai removed the petrol nozzle and stowed all their illegally-obtained goods onboard.

They hit the road and made it to a decent-sized town where Gojyo hit a few bars in quick succession. Two hours of hard card-sharping later, they had enough for motel accommodations and several meals.

Which led up to another impasse just before dinner in the their motel room . . .

Gojyo took a deep breath. "Let me get this straight . . . You don't cook, you don't clean and you don't know how to do laundry?"

"I know how to do laundry!" Mari Su said indignantly. "Only we used to do it in the river at home. None of this stuff with machines . . ."

"Ah . . . and in your town, the people used to drink the river water too--that explains *a lot*." Gojyo flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette. "Let's start again . . . Do you have any pertinent skills to speak of? Any contribution to this road trip at all?"

"Um . . ."

"Thought so. Which leaves doing the shopping. Take the ape and the shopping list out and be back for dinner, okay?"

And though Mari Su knew that Gojyo wasn't actually going to be helping Hakkai with the cooking, she seized on the chance to get out of the way. "Just don't do anything gross with the cooking utensils--"

"Hai, hai . . . get going and I'll teach you how to use a washing-machine later."

Removing themselves from the motel as fast as their legs could carry them, Mari Su and Goku were still able to hear the beginnings of something *very* hot being cooked up in the kitchenette.

"Hentais," they muttered and headed into town for more groceries, beer, sake, cigarettes and a few extra things on the bottom of the list that sounded pretty exotic and strange.

Mari Su found that most vendors gave up bargaining with her quite quickly. Goku didn't have the heart to tell her that she had the most annoying voice in the known universe and besides, he was hungry.

Fully intending to spend at least two hours out of sight and out of hearing range of their motel room, they bought takoyaki and walked *really* slowly as they asked shopkeepers for directions to the elusive items at the end of the list.

"I didn't know there were speciality shops," Mari Su said when they finally reached their destination. Several people had been very helpful, pointing the way to this rather hard-to-find store amidst the various . . . interesting establishments in that particular district.

"It's a big city," Goku said, mentally making notes and stowing them away for later, preferably when he was in the company of a certain blond priest.

An instructive half-hour later--fifteen minutes of which had been spent reading the labels in an aisle where one could find things called "Astro-glide" and "Jelly Pocket Rockets", the rest of the time had been spent gawking at the goods on display--they walked out with their purchases in plain white paper bags.

"Well . . ."

"Well, well, well . . ." Goku said bemusedly.

"I never . . ." Mari Su muttered, fascinated despite herself.

"Saw that much leather without cows in one place before?"

"That too."

"At least that was . . . educational," Goku had to admit. "I'm still hungry and there's half an hour more to go."

They stopped at a small corner-shop to get more pre-dinner snacks. And Mari Su bought herself a clue when she purchased a copy of Be Boys Gold from the magazine rack.

A thoughtful while later, they were back at the motel. Dinner, consisting of curry and saffron rice, was just ready and everything looked oddly spick-and-span.

"You're sure you didn't do anything funny with the utensils?" Goku asked, looking suspiciously at his spoon.

"Oh perish the thought . . ."

"There are much better things found around the kitchen to use," Gojyo informed them with a smirk.

"TMI!"

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All apologies to Monty Python and Jipu . . .  

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