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