Mihoshi’s Mix-up
Where the Greatest Scientific Genius in the Universe realizes she isn’t covered for Acts of Mihoshi and our twisted little tale begins…
"MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I've done it!!"
"Of
course you did, Washu!!" exclaimed puppet A-ko from one of her shoulders.
"You're
the greatest scientist in the universe, Washu!!" puppet B-ko chimed in
from the other. Washu only continued
laughing triumphantly.
"What
is it?" Mihoshi asked, staring up in wonder and awe at the machine before
them all.
"It's
a Trans-Dimensional Integer Variant Arranger...or something like that. I haven't found the perfect name for it
yet," Washu admitted. "But
it's what it DOES that is so extraordinary!!"
"What
DOES it do?" Tenchi asked, curious.
It was a lot easier to pay attention to the new invention of Washu's than
to try to divide his attention between Ryoko, on his left arm, and Ayeka, on
his right. Thankfully they hadn't
started tugging on him like a rag doll...yet.
"It
alleviates Sentai Syndrome." Washu
nodded as if that explained everything.
"Sentai
Syndrome?" Sasami piped up.
"What's that, Washu?"
"Well,
technically ‘sentai’ means ‘team’. But
in American anime fandom, at least, it’s come to mean your standard team of 5
heroes. It's getting very overdone of
late, and so I've created This Machine to stop it." With only a slight pause, she added,
"It's obvious that a show should have Lots and Lots of main
characters...like, say, 7 or so."
"Or
8," Sasami added, stroking Ryo-Ohki, who meowed her agreement.
"Exactly! This machine will get rid of not only the
obvious quintets but also deal with shows where you just see the same 5
characters over and over again. The
core group may be larger or smaller but 5 seem to get the spotlight."
"How
does it work?" Mihoshi asked, walking over to the machine and bending over
to examine all the pretty buttons and lights and levers and things.
"Well,
it's quite simple..." Washu
launched into a complicated description of exactly how this machine worked,
going through Quantum Physics, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, and the
Unspoken Laws of the Anime World. By
the time she was done, everyone was asleep except for Mihoshi, who had ignored
the entire lecture in favor of continuing to oooh and aaahh over the shiny new
machine.
"I
wonder what these buttons do?" And
of course, being the blond-haired, blue-eyed, tanned twit that she is, she
started pushing them.
"Aaaaaahhh!!!
No!! What are you doing??" Washu
rushed towards the machine but not before Mihoshi had pulled the Activate
lever. The Greatest Scientist in the
Universe skidded to a halt as the machine began to glow and hum.
"Ooooo,
pretty!" Mihoshi declared, giggling.
Washu
watched, half worried about what this idiot had managed to do this time and
half excited that her machine was working.
Suddenly,
smoke began to rise from the vents on the machine. Fire and sparks flew from the back and the machine, with one last
brilliant flash of light, died.
"Uh
oh..." Mihoshi mumbled. "It
broke."
Washu
instantly looked around...but nothing had changed at all. Everyone was still sound asleep and seemed
unharmed. She brought up her little PC
laptop (not that it ever really sat on her lap...) and punched up a scan on the
surrounding reality.
"Huh. Nothing here appears to be changed. Wait a minute!!" She did some more calculations. "Yes! That's what happened!! MIHOSHI!!"
"Hm?"
Mihoshi asked nervously. It always
seemed like people were yelling at her.
"Do
you have ANY idea what you've DONE?!?"
Pause. "No, of course you
don't, nevermind."
"Huh? What happened?" Kino Makoto examined herself, but she wasn't
injured and didn't appear to be different at all. Well, at least, not different from the way SHE usually was. Most people, however, didn't go around
dressed up in green, pink and white sailor fuku. She got groggily to her feet and looked around her. She still seemed to be in Shinjuku, and
everything seemed normal. Except her
friends were gone and in their places lay four strangers. Two of them were VERY strange: one seemed to
be encased in a suit of blue armor. She
couldn't make out much more than that from where she stood. The other, a girl, had long orange hair and
was wearing a long black cape, a pink tunic and leggings, and had a sword. She, like the other three, was still knocked
out cold.
One
of the other three people moaned and Makoto spun around. This was another girl, with short black
hair. She was wearing a gi and, judging
by her belt, was very highly ranked.
She did not appear to be awake yet though.
The
other two were both boys, she saw as she approached. One of them seemed to be Chinese. His black hair was slicked back into a small ponytail at the base
of his skull and he was wearing some strange uniform she'd never seen
before. She examined it and saw
something that said, "OZ."
She doubted it was the same one from the American movie.
As
soon as she caught sight of the other boy, the one in the armor, her breath
caught. "Suteki!!! He looks just
like my old boyfriend!!" she whispered excitedly. "Well, except for the blue
hair..." She shook her head,
clearing her thoughts. "I wonder
what they're all doing here? And where
are the other Scouts? Something isn't
right here at all..."
Duo
Maxwell shook his head, somewhat unsure of what had happened. Yeh, he'd been tired last night, but he
normally didn't fall asleep at his post.
What was going on?
Nothing
seemed to have changed though, so he must've just dozed off. He sat back down with a huff, once more
examining the uniform that had allowed him entry into the OZ installation.
Ickth, he thought, OZ needs a new designer. He
envied Heero, Trowa, and Quatre; they'd been let in by the two primary
infiltrators, i.e. Wufei and himself.
THEY didn't have to wear these things.
He wished he was back in his own clothes; he'd be sooo much more
comfortable than in this itchy, icky uniform.
He
thought about trying to contact Heero on the walkie-talkie, but remembered that
Heero had said emergencies only use.
Sigh. Anyway, reporting to Heero
that he had nodded off for a bit did NOT seem like a good idea.
Suddenly
static from the radio hissed into life and a strange voice asked, "Where
am I?"
Duo
blinked. Not even Quatre sounded THAT
feminine. Something must be up. "Um...am I using this thing right? I've
never seen one before..." Duo hesitated
to pick up the radio. It had to be some
weird sort of trap. That meant that OZ
had either found their frequency or one of the other guys had been captured.
"If
you're talking on it, you must be using it right," came another,
definitely male but still unrecognizable, voice.
A
different male voice from the first responded, "This isn't the Tendo Dojo,
is it??"
Tendo Dojo?? Some kind of code?? I do NOT understand what's happening.
"It's
not the Youjakai either," the first male voice replied.
Youjakai?!?! WHAT?!?!
"I
don't think it's the Negaverse...," a new female voice answered. "But I want to know what's going
on."
You're not the only one, sister. Screw it.
If I get caught, I get caught, but I HAVE to know what's going on. He picked up the radio.
Lei
Fuan Shu yawned as he sat up. Touma was
the sleepy one, not him...but looking around, Touma wasn't there. Neither were any of the other guys. Shu was still in his armor, but the other
Samurai Troopers and their respective armors were gone.
"What
the...?" Shu removed the Kongo
helmet and scratched his head as he stood.
There were four other people he didn't know laying around him. One of them, a girl, was just coming
to.
"Huh?
Where am I?" She was wearing a red and white sailor outfit and red high
heels. I thought the armor was bad sometimes...at least I don't have to wear
THAT. "It looks like Shinjuku,
but..." she was saying. She caught
sight of him. "Who are you?"
she asked, instantly on the defensive.
Shu
held his hands up in the Universally Recognizable Sign of "Hey, I'm a Good
Guy, Don't Blow Me Up."
"I'm
Kongo no Shu. And this IS
Shinjuku. Uh...I don't suppose you know
who the rest of these people are and what happened to my pals?"
"Your
pals?"
"Yeh. Four other guys wearin' armor like
mine. Well, kind of like mine."
She
shook her head. "Have you seen
four other girls wearing outfits like mine?"
"No,
I'm sure I would've remembered that," Shu commented, taking in just
exactly how short that skirt was. He
was REALLY glad they didn't have to fight in anything embarassing like that.
They
looked at the other three. There were
two more girls and another boy. One
girl had a large spatula and was dressed sort of like a boy; the other was
wearing a short sleeved tunic, pants, and boots. Medieval-y sort of clothing.
"Maybe
she's in a play or something?" the girl, who had introduced herself as
Sailor Mars, suggested. Shu could only
shrug.
The
boy was wearing a loose green tank top and black spandex shorts. Sailor Mars looked down at him, still
sleeping soundly.
"Boy,
I'm glad I don't have to wear something like THAT," she said.
"Ranma? Ranma?" Shampoo looked around uncertainly. "Ranma, where you go??" Shampoo had noticed that Ryoga and Ukyo were gone when she had
woken up. Also, with a certain joy,
she'd noticed Akane was missing. At
first delighted at the thought that she would have Ranma all to herself, she'd
been dismayed to discover his absence.
There
were apparently substitutes left behind.
Poor substitutes, in her opinion.
There was a man who appeared to be made of stone, a girl with long
blonde hair put up in little balls from which the rest of her pigtails
depended, and two blonde boys. One of
them had green armor of some sort on; the other was wearing a pink shirt and a
dark purple vest.
"This
no look good. Where my Ranma?" she
asked aloud, rather put out. She was
answered with a moan and a yawn as two of the strange people woke up. One was the stone man and the other was the
blonde boy in the shirt and vest.
"Where
am I?" the stone man asked in a voice that demanded an answer.
"This
isn't the OZ installation," the blonde commented, looking around and
standing. "Where's Trowa? And
Heero and Duo and Wufei??"
"I
not know these people," Shampoo confessed in her broken Japanese. "I have heard of OZ, movie from
America, but I not know these people you speak of. You in Tendo Dojo. I not
know why. Now you tell me what you do
with my Ranma!"
"Your...who?"
they both asked.
"LINA?!?!" Gourry Gabriev scratched his head, confused. "LINA!!! IT'S ME, GOURRY!!! WHERE'D YOU
GO???" For that matter, where had
Sylphielle, Amelia and Zelgadis gone?
Instead there were four VERY different people. There was a boy with black hair in a braided pigtail, a girl with
short blue hair, a boy wearing light blue armor, and another boy with brown
hair that had long bangs covering half his face. The girl was wearing a sailor suit with a VERY short skirt. He made a mental note about THAT right
away.
Kneeling
down, he shook one of the boys, the one with the red-brown hair. "Hey.
Hey. Wake up."
The
boy woke and rubbed his eyes.
"Huh? Where am I? Who're you??"
"I'm
Gourry, a traveling mercenary. Who are
YOU?"
"Oh,
I'm...," he yawned a little, "Suiko no Shin. Where did you say we were?"
"I
didn't. We're in a field just a little
west of Atlas City."
"Atlas
City? What happened to Shinjuku? And where are the rest of the guys?"
"You
mean them?" Gourry gestured to the other two boys.
"No,
I don't know them. I meant other guys
in armor like mine."
"Nope,
haven't seen any. It's nice armor
though."
"Oh,
thank you." Shin smiled. "I take it you don't know any of these
other people either then?"
Gourry
shook his head. "Uh-uh. Never seen 'em before."
Shin
stood and looked them over.
"Hm. Bet Touma'd like
her," nodding at the girl.
"They've got the same color hair...well, sort of."
"Where
am I?" a quiet voice asked. Quiet,
yes, but the tone required an answer.
Shin and Gourry turned to the boy with the long bangs who had awoken
without fuss or announcement. "Are
you OZ agents?"
"OZ? Like the American movie?" Shin asked.
"OZ? America??" Gourry asked, confused
beyond belief. "Movie???"
"You've
mixed them all up, Mihoshi!!" Washu continued. "Five groups of five people each all got mixed up and
switched around, and it's all your fault!! They don't have any idea where they
are or what happened!
ARGH!!!" Making a mental
note to create a Mihoshi-proof barrier for all subsequent devices she invented,
she set about fixing things.
Mihoshi
seemed on the verge of tears.
"But...but you can fix it, right? They'll be okay, right??"
"Maybe,
maybe. It'll take me some time to
repair the damage you've done. If they
can stay alive for a day, maybe less, I can fix the machine and send them all
where they belong. Right now, GET OUT
OF MY LAB!!! I have to notify them about their predicaments and let them know
I'm working on the solution. Now GIT!!
And take them with you!!" She
nodded at the slumbering other occupants of her laboratory.
Mihoshi
tearfully woke the others and explained the situation. Instantly they began chewing her out (well,
Ayeka, Ryoko, and Kiyone did).
"TAKE
IT OUTSIDE!!" Washu howled.
"HOW CAN I WORK WITH ALL THIS NOISE?!?!"
Everyone,
suddenly fearful of the enraged Super Scientist, tiptoed from the lab.
"Finally."
Everyone
was finally waking up and they were trying to sort out what happened when a
hologram appeared in front of them of a strange pink-haired woman.
"My
name," said the hologram-woman, "is Dr. Washu. I'm the Greatest Scientist in the
Universe. I created a machine to
alleviate Sentai Syndrome and it would've worked wonderfully if an idiot hadn't
found it and started playing with it.
Because of her goofing around with MY wonderful device, you are now in
the situations you find yourselves in."
"What
happened to my friends?" everyone asked at once.
"You're
all safe. Here's what happened near as
I can tell:
"One
person from each universe was left there.
Be thankful; they can tell you what's going on. The rest of you are each from a different
universe. You're going to have to learn
to get along and cooperate with each other for the next 24 hours at least. It'll take me that long to fix the
machine...AT MOST. Most likely I'll be
able to fix it sooner than that, but that's the worst case scenario. Really.
So survive for a day where you are and I'll send you home, okay?"
"But...we
were about to kick MAJOR Nega-Sleaze rear end!!”
"...we
were facing off against Xellos!!"
"...we
had to battle the Youjakai!!"
"...we
have a Dojo Destroyer to beat up!!"
"...we
were in the middle of a mission against OZ!!"
"OZ?
Like the movie?" Washu asked.
"NO!!!"
“Well
then,” the self-proclaimed Super Scientist sighed, “you’ll just have to make do
with who you have. You still have a
team of five and all. It’s just…a
different team of five, is all. I’ll
work as quickly as I can…and hopefully Mihoshi will camp out in front of the TV
and Stay There!!” The hologram-Washu
faded out, leaving 25 very confused people to wonder how they were ever going
to manage the next 24 hours.