Urusei Yatsura/Those Obnoxious Aliens*Lum [The manga ran 9 years,
the TV show from 1981-86.] Was created by Rumiko Takahashi; along
with such later manga/anime as "Ranma 1/2"
The First Ranma: A Really Twisted Tale
By Ron Dow75
It was a typical day at Tomobiki High School: "A boy went into
the girls' room!!" a long raven-haired girl yelled in the hall.
"A-ta-ru!" Lum yelled, giving off lightning flashes within her
long blue sailor suit, and flying off for the door.
There was a cheer from the by-standers, both female and male
commented:
"Mohoboshi is going to get zapped!"
"Mohoboshi always gets zapped!"
"And somehow he always survives."
"That pervert only has one thing he's lucky at, surviving!"
"Ataru! This is too much, even for you!!" Lum declared as she
flew over the stalls.
The girls within yelled their displeasure with Lum looking down
on them while they were in the awkward positions they were in.
The alien with the long green hair and the two small yellow horns
sticking out from it ignored all else but her hunt for the
Greatest Lecher in the Galaxy, her husband! It didn't take long
for her to find somebody dressed in the boys' black plebe uniform
squatting over the Japanese toilet in the floor!
"Dahling!! How many unforgivable things do you think I can
forgive you for!!?"
The boy in the stall first tossed up his leather book bag, then
the toilet paper up at the space princess; but with the speed of
one born and bred to self-defense, he snapped off the end the
latter. By the time Lum had knocked the bag out of the way, and
burned the roll to ashes with her lightning attack, the black
haired boy had wiped his crotch, from front to back, and tossed
it in the toilet bowl. Then, the bolt of lightning got through.
He stood up. Unsinged. "What ya do that for, Lum!?!"
"Ryuunosuke??" Lum blinked at her unhurt victim.
"Ryuunosuke's in here?!" a girl asked.
"Now, look what you did," the mild mannered student of Tomobiki
High frowned, zipping up his pants.
"The thought that I'm in the next stall!" another girl said.
"I'm sorry, Ryuunosuke!" Lum said. "But a girl said-"
"(HmmH!) She must be new to the school." Taking a breath like a
martial artist would give himself just before meeting a
challenge, Ryuunosuke opened the stall door, and went out.
"Ryuunosuke is in here!"
"Should he really be allowed in here?"
"Who cares! Just the thought of it makes my day!"
"Oh-woo! I have to go back into the stall!"
Lum looked down at all the silly human girls, and yelled,
"Ryuunosuke is a girl!!"
"I don't care," one girl giggled.
"That makes him the perfect boyfriend!" declared another.
Lum flew down so she didn't have to see what the girl who'd gone
back into the stall was doing. "I'm sorry, Ryuunosuke!"
"(HnH!)" The brunette with the dark mood grunted, putting his
hands in his pockets as he ambled his way past the girls looking
at him with goo-goo eyes. "It happens all the time."
Lum found that she had to get in front of him, because the girls
wanted to close in around, and follow in his wake. "Ryuunosuke,
may I ask a question?"
"You're not going to ask me for a date, too?" If it was a joke,
he asked it without any humor.
"I just want to know how come you weren't electrocuted?"
The one, whose life had left her looking like a cute, disengaged
boy in the semi-long, barely combed hairstyle of the day, said,
"Your attack has one flaw. Your adversary has to be grounded."
Lum stopped. "I knew that." But not too many on Earth seemed to.
If they, now, started doing things like wearing shoes with
insolating soles...
+++
Ataru Mohoboshi looked around, up and down the school hall. The
brown haired, rather homely looking boy cackled, "I don't see Lum
anywhere. (He, ha, hah!) I escaped from your fangs again!" Of
course, he knew she would be in his next class; she was in all of
his classes (even gym!). But it was the principle of the thing!
He didn't ask to be married (Not to her, anyway). He saved the
world single-handedly from alien invasion! He should have gotten
a reward, not this life sentence!
A door opened, and he knew which one it was without having to
look. And what did he see when he did look? A parade of five
girls led by one boy.
That wasn't a boy; that was: "Ryuu-chan!!" Ataru grinned, rushing
for her.
Lum was the last to leave, and was just in time to see what
happened.
Ataru went crashing through the second floor hall window, while
Lum zapped her husband for good measure.
He had the further misfortune to fall on a small alien with one
little yellow horn who had just happened to be toddling along
over the school.
All Oni had one special power. Jariten's was fire-breathing.
+++
"Ten!!" the smoldering Ataru yelled from the now smoldering,
defoliated bush he'd landed in. "If I hadn't been singed already
by your cousin Lum, that'd hurt!!"
Looking up at the broken window: "That was Lum-chan's lightning
flash I saw?" asked the very little kid (his yellow tiger-striped
swim trunks were often called diapers) who was her most loyal of
kin.
"What did you think it was?!!" he shook a fist at the second most
obnoxious of the aliens he'd had the misfortune to meet. Maybe
the most obnoxious: Lum, at least, looked like a beautiful girl.
And she liked to wear that tiger-striped bikini. If she didn't
insist she was his wife, he might actually chase her.
"With you around, I though something had happened to a science
project, or school projector."
"I'm not that unlucky!!"
"You are the unluckiest boy in the world," Cherry, the short,
chinless, frog-faced Buddhist monk with the huge lobes
pronounced.
"YAAA!!!" both of them cried.
Ten breathed fire on him; then Ataru hit him over the head with a
very large wooden mallet. The later only served to break the char
off of the mad monk. Which left the potbellied gnome in just a
loincloth.
"Don't you want to mitigate your bad luck, or not?" the monk
asked, still on his feet, despite the large lump on his bald
dome.
"A man makes his own luck!!" Ataru told him.
"Exactly."
+++
"Lum-chan! Lum-chan! Wait up!" asked a very kawai schoolmate with
very long, naturally curly maroon hair and a narrow ribbon in its
side. The sailor scarf under her middy collar was red, not yellow
like Lum's.
Ryuunosuke stopped at the sound of her voice, "Ran."
The human girls saw his reaction, and, grumbling, walked as
gracefully away as their hurt pride could. They knew they could
not compete with the most girlish of girls.
"Ryuunosuke! Remember, you're a girl!" Lum said, coming down next
to him.
"I know I'm a girl," Ryuunosuke frown, as he turned to look upon
Lum's oldest and dearest childhood friend.
Breathing a little hard from the short jog, Ran was still able to
speak, "You promised to have tea on my UFO!"
"When did I promise that?" Lum asked, her eyes with as much of
that vacant, slightly cross-eyed innocent look she'd practiced so
hard to get.
"Oh," she sounded disappointed. "Then I guess I'll just have to
find some other amusement. Perhaps a date with your Ataru!"
"Ran! You leave my husband alone! I'm the only one he can date!"
"Er, Ran, uh," Ryuunosuke stammered. "If you want to do
something, that is, uh..."
"I'd love to, Ryuu-chan!" Ran beamed. "That is, if Lum objects?"
"I object!" Lum told her.
"Good!" Ran's said, delighted.
"Ran-chan, why won't you believe Ryuunosuke's a girl?"
"Silly Lum! Have you realized that Ataru cannot return your love?
Is that why you're staking your claim on the only real man at
this school?" And she fluttered her eyelashes at her target,
"Perhaps in all of Greater Tokyo."
"This is not about me, Ran!" Lum nearly cried in frustration.
"Ryuunosuke, why would you want to go out with Ran?!"
"Nobody wears a sailor suit better," Ryuunosuke said, lost in
admiration.
+++
Somehow, the penniless monk had managed to produce and put on a
new robe. "This is an unusually long break between classes,"
Cherry noted.
"Do you think Lum-chan may have blown some fuses?" little Ten
asked, looking up at the windows as he hovered five feet above
the ground.
"If the bells don't tell me to, I'm not going to classes," Ataru
cackled, leaning against a wall, his black plebe coat was
completely unbuttoned and open, now, revealing his red T-shirt.
"You are just delaying the inevitable," Cherry said.
"Death is inevitable. But I live for the moment! If I live enough
moments, then I won't die."
Ten frowned, "Is that how you've been able to survive?"
"It is a logic worthy of a mystic," Cherry said.
"If there are no classes, Lum-chan can play!" Ten smiled, put-
putting up towards the broken window.
A passing jet stream caused the little boy to spin like a ball in
mid-air.
"Ataru!" Lum cried, swooshing down from the busted window. "Ran
and Ryuunosuke are going on another date!"
"Ran-chan and Ryuu-chan!!?!" Ataru cried, suddenly erect and
alert. "Girls should not date girls!! That is against all of
morality! Against the very Laws of Nature! Without the proper
functioning of Nature, where would the World be! Were would Japan
be!?!! It threatens to upset the very foundation of our national
security! For the sake of future generations, we must rescue them
from their misguided straying from the path of virtue, and set
them on the path of righteous love!"
Cherry's staff with the bells tripped the boy before he'd made
two steps. "They do not need your luck. Let Ryuunosuke's luck
handle this."
"Luck!?! Luck!!?" Ataru yelled, shaking his fist at the most
obnoxious human of all time. "If poor Ryuu-chan had any luck,
would that girl who had every right to be a vision of loveliness
be bound by the lie that she's not a girl!?!!"
"Cherry's right, Dahling! You will only cause more trouble; like
you did on their last date," Lum said, hovering above him.
"And what of Ran's own luck, Lum," Cherry suggested.
"I don't know what you're talking about, Cherry," Lum said,
trying not to let any guilt show.
"Since you were little girls, she's only had bad luck when she's
near you."
"Ah-HA!!" Ataru was up on his feet to accuse, "Lum's a carrier!
She's the reason for all of my bad luck, too!!"
"You were bad luck before Lum showed up!" Jen told him, floating
down to nearly an arm's length to him, ready to spit fire on him.
"Human weird luck when added to alien weird is Super weird!!"
Ataru told him.
"Cherry is right," Lum admitted her guilt. She hung herself in
the air. "No wonder my best friend in the universe hates me while
she loves me."
"Ran has a real Jekyll and Hyde personality disorder," Cherry
said.
"Stop spreading lies about fair damsels!!" Ataru cried as he
kicked the monk so hard he landed in a tree.
Still slumped over in mid-air, Lum said, "Perhaps we should
listen to Cherry, and stay out of it this time."
"Listen to Cherry!? Never!! Not when it involves cute girls like
Ran-chan and Ryuu-chan!" Ataru declared, his eyes afire.
Lum became less of a dishrag: "Now I know we should stay out of
it! The only reason I told you was because the last time they
went on a date, we went on a date."
"It wasn't a date!!" Ataru yelled at her.
Ten finally made it up to the level Cherry was draped over some
tree branches. "Why did you interfere to stop trouble? That's not
like you."
"I'm a mysterious monk with motivations beyond the reasoning of
the uninitiated."
"The only motivation you have is, 'what can I do to get something
to eat'?"
"That reminds me: Lum! If you're not going on a date, which means
you'll be eating at the Mohoboshi's, right?! It is a good deed to
give a bowl of rice to-"
Lum's response was to scream, and send out such a massive bolt
from her body that the charred, again, monk was sent falling down
the split that had opened up in the tree.
+++
As soon as the last bell of school had rung, Ryuunosuke rushed to
the one-room apartment in the back of the school store. "I'm
going out with Ran! I have a second chance!" He dropped the blue
wool plebe coat that buttoned up the neck as soon as he got in
the door, "This time! This time!" He headed straight for the
alcove with the deep cement sink, pulling up his white T-shirt,
"This time: I will do it! I am prepared, now! I know what to
expect!" He tossed the shirt away "This time, I Will ask her! I
won't take no for an answer!"
In his haste, he fumbled at the knot that kept the long cloth
bandage strip in place "Girls! Girls, they're... Girls are...
Girls are Wonderful!" he told himself. "Girls are the most
wonderful things there are..." he smiled at the thought of them,
as he pulled out the ends of the bandage from where they'd been
tucked in to further tourniquet them. "And Ran is the cutest: The
most Girl of Girls!" Ryuunosuke, at last, could unwind the strip
of cloth that was so tightly wound around his chest that day as
one had been everyday for five years. If anybody asked about it,
his father would say his son had injured himself. Anybody who
knew the Fujinami family at all knew that the way father and son
yelled and fought each other (everyday, in every way) it was no
wonder that Ryuunosuke would be injured. "A guy'd have to be a
fool not to get what he can from her."
His ardor took sudden flame: "Yes! With her, I do it! I will be a
girl!!" he said holding the bandage in a hand while his good size
tits now swung free in the daylight coming from the long window
in front of him.
"Ryuunosuke! Ryuunosuke! You dog, you! You, Don Juan! You, chip
off the your Old Man's block!!" declared a craggy and weather-
beaten man in the white pants and shirt of a beachcomber, and a
woven virility belt around his waist.
In his haste he'd left the sliding double doors open! "Stay out
of the lav when I have nothing covering my chest!!" he ordered
his father, as he put his right arm across his tits, the hand in
a tight fist, like the other.
"Men do not have to be modest among each other!"
"I am not a man!!" he roared in a monotony that echoed his whole
life. "I'm a girl!!" he cried, lashing out with all the power his
left fist possessed at the man who'd ruined his life.
"Nonsense!" his father easily got out of the way on tiptoe. "Your
dating proves that you're, at last, a man!"
"We were through this crap the last time I went out with Ran!" he
turned around after the momentum had carried him out of the
alcove in the one room apartment. "I don't date!! I'm doing this
to get the straight skinny on how to be a girl!!"
"Just like an inexperienced boy! Say what you want, you always
make your father proud of you, Ryuunosuke! You leave a callow
lad, but you'll come back a man!" And he held up two white
Japanese rooting fans with the red circles on them: "Score!
Score!"
"Why you!!!" Ryuunosuke screamed with all his might, running at
the demon with his left fist out stretched, his right cocked over
his chest.
"Do you think you can score?" his father smiled, challenging him
to get a blow to him.
At the last possible moment, Ryuunosuke unleashed his right punch
while replacing it with his left to cover his tits.
At the last possible moment, Fujimi Fujinami moved his chin to
the side.
Ryuunosuke fell back into the lav area.
The Old Man looked in past the door. His son was bent over the
sink, his right holding onto the rim, his left arm still over his
chest, and his cheek against a cracked pane. "You should've freed
your hands!"
+++
Ataru came into the apartment from the school store, "Ryuu-chan!
Don't do this! Only men and women belong together! Let me show
you what dating a man is like!"
"My son will never date another man!" Fujimi Fujinami declared.
"What do you think he is!? A pervert?!"
Ataru's girl-trained senses quickly found, on the paper panes of
one of the sliding double doors across the alcove, the silhouette
of a girl's form. Form!! It looked like she wasn't wearing any
clothes!! "Ryuu-chan!!" he cried, racing at the door, ignoring
her fight-crazy father.
The father simply smiled under his thick eyebrows.
A fist broke through the door and Ataru ran into it. He fell
unconscious to the green tatami-mat floor.
"See!? See, my son!?!" his father said, coming over. "This is
what happens when you let boys think you're interested in boys!"
"I never let him think I'd date him! I don't want to date boys!!"
Ryuunosuke cried, ripping a hole in enough of the paper door
panels to stick his head through. "The thought makes me want to
puke!"
"Spoken like a true man!" his father said, reaching down and
picking up Ataru.
"I'm A Girl!!" his years of conditioned reflexes forced him to
scream and lash out at the man. He broke through the sliding
door, and into the room.
He really was naked.
His father was leaving with the pervert Ataru over his shoulder.
Ryuunosuke hurried back through the door to finish cleaning up.
He didn't have the time to go to a public bath, so he had to do
it this way. He ran enough water to wet the bar of soap, and then
lathered up his body; he would then go back over the area with a
damp cloth.
It was always strange when he got to his tits. He was used to
feeling them tightly, even painfully squashed up against his pecs
(and with the amount of upper body exercise his fighting gave
him, they were well-developed muscles). Unbound, the tits dangled
and rolled like something unreal...even ethereal. They were not
really a part of him, but the ghostly, the haunting reminder of
what he could-Should-have been!
He knew he could not stay there any longer; he moved down to his
hips and butt. This was only body he'd know; puberty was slow
enough, and his dad had provided enough distractions, for him to
get use to curves. He wasn't all that round; even in the T-shirt
and shorts he'd wear at the Hama tea shop on the beach, he would
be mistaken for a boy.
When his hand moved to his groin... He did it as quickly and
matter-of-factly as he could. He sometimes wondered what it would
be like to have a cock. He knew they bulged in swim trunks and
pants in many different ways. But every time he'd had a chance to
actually see one, he'd turned away in shame and disgust. That's
how he felt when he thought about having one as a man. While,
when he thought about having one as a girl... would mean coming
to terms with what he did have in place of a cock. Ryuunosuke was
very careful around his own tiny, little cock; he was afraid of
what his fantasies might reveal.
+++
"There you are, Ataru!!" Lum said flying over to the just
awakening boy who'd been put out with the school garbage. "Are
you ready to give up this interference, and come home with me?"
"Never!" he sat up in the garbage from a couple of busted plastic
bags. "For the sake that is all righteous and virtuous, I, Ataru
Mohoboshi, must save those girls!"
"You just want to date them yourself!" she tried to burst his
pretentious bubble.
"Of course! That would prove they were saved!"
"Then we'll end up going through what happened the last time,"
Lum sighed.
"History does Not repeat itself! That is a bald-faced myth!" he
declared getting up and out of the garbage.
"No, it doesn't. They say that the second time is a farce."
"The first time was a farce!"
"Then, what will it be this time?" Lum asked herself with that
cross-eyed innocent look.
"There's not going to be a next time!"
"Dahling!!" Lum threw her arms and herself around him. "You have
given up!"
"No! I'm going to learn from history!" Ataru smiled with great
determination in his eyes. "I'm going back in time, and Not do
what made my noble mission a failure!"
"I was the reason you couldn't go through with your plans!"
"Exactly!"
"And how are you going to go back in time without me?"
Ataru wanted to scream; instead he smashed his fists down onto
thin air, as he bowed his head.
+++
Ryuunosuke was now in front of the dresser. "(Hunh!) We can't
even afford a towel large enough to cover my body," he grumbled,
pulling up his boxers. "Just small Japanese towels."
"You better hurry up! You don't want to keep the girl waiting!"
his father said, seeing that his son'd rewrapped his chest in the
bandages.
"I'm hurryin' as fast as I can!" he yelled, holding up his T-
shirt for emphasis as he nearly looking over his shoulder. "Tea
parties are supposed to begin at four!"
"Tea parties? You're not actually going to a tea party,
Ryuunosuke?!"
"I am," he stated, as he pulled on the fresh T-shirt.
"What kind of a date is that for a man?!"
"It's not a date! I'm not a man! I'm a girl!!" he spun around,
ready for another attack.
But his father only had a gleam in his eyes. "I'll save this
fight until after I find out how your date went."
Still not trusting the man, Ryuunosuke decided to put on his
white oxford shirt first; he wouldn't want to have his legs
caught in pants when his dad did attack him. "Why're you goin' to
wait?"
The father sat down at the only other piece of furniture in the
room, a small low Japanese table. "It'll be horrible, if the girl
gets turned off because your body got beaten up right before your
sate."
"It's not a date," he said, yet again, having put his arms in one
at a time. "And you said that the last time I went out with Ran."
"See!? I am consistent in my views!"
"I wish you weren't," his frown deepened, buttoning the shirt,
now. "Then I would've had some chance to know what it feels like
to be a girl."
"(Ha! Ha! Ha!) That's what a date is for!"
"I said "feels like to be a girl" -Not what a girl feels like!! I
already know that!!" He hadn't even finished buttoning his shirt,
and here he was ready to get into that fight he didn't want to
get into. Not now. Like his dad said: Wait until he saw how his
time with Ran went!
He went back to buttoning, "But that's exactly why I am goin'
out. There is no girl who knows more how to be a girl than Ran."
+++
Lum had her own personal yellow tiger-striped UFO saucer levitate
Ataru up inside. Everywhere he looked there was equipment (all
without square corners) straight out of pre-Star Trek sci-fi
shows or comic books. If it did not look high tech alien, it did
not belong in view, he thought.
"I knew you'd have a time machine! You have a ray gun for
everything! If it's not a ray gun, then its something so weird,
nobody in their right mind could think of it!"
Lum, now in the yellow tiger-stripes that were the national
colors of the Oni race of Uru (the bikini-style reflecting the
fact that she hadn't been officially recognized as married),
explained, "I am a space princess. What would it look like, if
another space princess had something I didn't have?"
"Why couldn't those other space princess think the same way, and
want me!?" he wanted to sulk.
"Because you're somebody only somebody who loves you could want?"
Lum said, kneeling in front of a piece of equipment that looked
like a one-legged metal table coming from the floor-deck. In the
middle of it was something that looked like a teacup.
Ataru walked over to the table. "Don't I get any tea?"
"This tea isn't for drinking. This tea is for time traveling!"
"What?" Ataru said, dropping down to sit Japanese-boy-style,
knees wide out. "Are you saying all we have to do go back in time
is to drink some tea?"
"Of course not!" Lum smiled at the idea. "The tea is to provide
the time tunnel swirling effect as we go back in time!"
"What??" Ataru asked, clueless.
Lum pulled out a little doohickey from the bikini top. "This is
the time machine!"
"That little thing's going to open up time for us?"
"The real time machine is already at the time between time. This
is like a doorbell button! It's keyed to me, personally!" Lum
smiled. She wasn't about to tell him she had more than one time
machine, each working under different principles. (Like she'd
said, a space princess had to have one of everything!)
"Well," Ataru eyed it, "At least it's a machine, not some stupid
tea. But you sure I can get in?"
"If you're with me!" she smiled, and dropped the doohickey into
the cup.
Before Ataru could ask, now what? he found himself slurped in,
and going down the drink! "LuMUUUU!!!" he screamed.
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ran was in her UFO saucer. She was out of her school sailor suit,
and in her normal Earth attire: A twirlable midi dress (this time
white with pink trim) with petticoats, a wide bow behind her
waist, and some simple frills to soften the edges, and (pink)
heels.
Unlike her fellow Uruan, Lum, Ran did not like to display all of
her technology. Her spacecraft had been modified by a program
labeled "Euro-kitsch, Japanese Translation". Kitsch, kawai,
girly, or cutesy, whatever a local called it, that's how she
wanted the world to see her. That's what she felt like: And it
was all Lum's fault!!
Unbidden, an old childhood memory resurfaced: They were very
little girls at school. There were rows of tables, and Ran and
Lum were sitting at a middle one; they were just about the only
humanoids in the class. The rest were what the humans would call
monsters, but that wasn't why Ran and Lum sat next to each other.
Ran's mothership was parked within a flying-scooter ride of Lum's
mothership. And there were hardly anybody else on the planetoid
they lived on. (Lum's father was "Mr. Invader", and Ran's mother
was "The Enforcer". And though she did not understand it at the
time, her family was key to the alliance of the Oni and Gaki
races; their Gestapo tactics carried over to the way they raised
their child.)
Lum was in her yellow tiger-striped short strapless shift, and
she was in her opaque angelic gossamer one. (Did they ever have
hair that short?) "I'm almost finished with my temporal transmat
for arts and crafts!" she said merrily.
"I'm adding something extra to mine!" Lum said, her little tongue
out as she worked with only the molecular manipulation tools they
allowed kids to play with. "A Random Access Memory!"
"Oh, no, Lum! Don't you remember what they said about Chaos
Theory?!"
"A little chaos is fun! Oops!"
"What did you do, Lum!?!!" Ran cried, worried about the end of
time.
"My hand just slipped," Lum told her worrywart friend.
"Slipped!!?!" Ran went very pale at the thought.
Suddenly Errp the Anuran inflated its throat, and croaked at her,
"This is all your fault!!" This surprised Little Ran so much, she
cried.
"Sensei!" Ocho the Octopian said, as he embraced Errp with all
eight of his arms.
The whole class began to chase each other, all saying they loved
this monster, or that monster, but few saying it to the monster
who said they that loved them. They didn't care if Ran was in
their way, they'd run right over her, even as she sat at the
table. And if somebody got caught, they fought them off as they
tried to get to the one they said they loved. Again, they didn't
care if Ran got mixed up in their frays. And the worst part, what
made her cry even more was: Nobody said they loved her!!!
No one trampled Lum; who was laughing and clapping her hands,
thoroughly amused.
In the middle of this, the Mrs. Janus, the Siamesean humanoid
female with two fronts and no back, stormed over to Ran, and
yelled at her: "You leave my Dahling alone!! I won't let you suck
the youth out of him!!"
The teenage face of Ran's present being was anything but cute, as
rage filled every fiber of her being: "I see, now, that was the
future Lum that yelled at me. Traumatized me because I thought
the teacher was yelling at me for something I hadn't done! If
that hadn't been the feedback tension of the quantum string from
around the nexus point that chaos might've lasted longer than a
few minutes!
"Lum..." Ran's voice took on a terrible tone, "I have always been
at the wrong end of your reckless pranks. One day, one day: I
Shall Get My Revenge!!! Bwa-Ha! Ha! Ha..."
+++
Ataru saw that he Was in a swirling of something that was tea
colored. It would have been more dramatic if cream and sugar had
been added. But this was traditional Eastern tea, not the Western
stuff that came in a bag; there were tea dregs everywhere. If he
knew how to read tealeaves, he would have had an idea of just how
bad his luck was going to be this time.
"Dahling! Hold my hand!" the bikini-clad alien said to him,
reaching out her hand for him.
"Why should I!?!" he asked, keeping his hands to himself.
"If we don't stay together, we might get separated!"
"Good!" he told her, putting both hands behind his back, and away
from her. "Then I can change time without your-" And just like a
skater spins faster with his limbs in, so, now, too, did Ataru!
"Lum!!" he wanted her to hold his hand now: Any hand! A foot,
even! He fought against momentum and put his limbs out until he
was spinning less quickly. But now he was no longer spinning
smoothly; his thrashing about was sending him out of control,
deeper and deeper into the teacup of time. "Lu-Ummmm!!..."
"Ataru!!" Lum yelled, using her flying power to try and reach
him.
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ryuunosuke was dressed in his best clothes, the same clothes he'd
worn the last time he'd gone out with Ran. He had on black,
polished oxford shoes, and a white oxford shirt, his slacks were
navy blue, and his sweater-vest was gray; he even wore a
correctly noosed red tie. Maybe it was a little stupid wearing
this when he wanted to know how to be a girl; but you dress up
for a girl like Ran, right? After all, he was going out with
somebody special, and these were the best-his Only best-clothes
he had.
"Once I know how to act like a girl, people won't ever think of
me as a guy, again! I can wear dresses, and nobody'll stare, and
point, and say I'm just a stupid guy in a dress! I can relax, and
be the girl I was meant to be! I could then... I could then
wear..." and a mirage, like the kind that pull men lost in a
desert after them, appeared before his thirsty spirit, "...a
girl's school uniform... sailor suit... fuku!"
The problem with this fantasy vision was that Ryuunosuke wasn't
in it; Ran was.
He at last came to a vacant lot. There on top of its grass knoll
was the pink UFO saucer. The ramp was down, as if welcoming him.
+++
Ataru felt like a drip as he fell back into time.
"Ataru! Ataru!" It was Lum's voice! She had followed him. He
could even get rid of her in time! Maybe what she'd told him
earlier was all a lie!
"Shinobu! Shinobu!" a preschool little boy who looked more than
just vaguely familiar called out.
The little dark brown haired girl ran from the little boy.
But he caught her. Only to be shocked by the cloth Lum doll
holding onto the back of his head.
But that didn't stop him: He immediately chased the teenage
beauty Sakura.
And got shocked again, while the real bikini-clad Lum flew
overhead. "Ataru! When are you going to learn your lesson?" she
said as she watched the little boy glom onto every girl, teen,
and pretty woman he came upon, only to be shocked again and
again.
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ran looked at the mega-huge close-up of the one and only true
love of her life, the Oni Rei, arguably the handsomest male
humanoid in the universe. She set the tray with her daily
offering of food before the shrine, "Don't look at me that way!
No! No! It's you, and only you, I wish to date! There is no other
in my heart!"
She crawled up on the table, getting closer to her idol, "But
you're not here! A girl can't sit home and wait every evening! I
need to keep in practice, for when you do call for me!"
"Oh, yes, I know! I wish I wasn't stuck on this primitive planet,
too! But, soon, soon, I promise, there will be no more Lum for
you to love, and you can give me all of your attention!" Ran
kissed the picture of the giant screen.
"Yes!! Yes!!" she hopped down, and kept on hopping. "You do
understand!"
The doorbell chimed.
"Until after the date, when I tell you all about it!" she said,
pressing a button to have the screen draw a curtain over the
picture. ""That will prove you have nothing to be jealous over!"
+++
"What kind of monster are you, electrocuting little kids!!" Ataru
screamed.
"I wasn't electrocuting you! I was trying to condition you not to
chase after girls!" the second bikini-clad Lum, the one he'd tea
traveled with, defended herself.
"Well, you failed! I still chase girls!" he stabbed himself his
thumb, proud of his words.
"I could try it again!" Lum brightened.
"No you can't!!" he ordered.
"You're right," she sighed.
"I am?" he looked at her suspiciously.
"History cannot repeat itself. We cannot do the same idea over
again without a significant change in plot."
"Is that why we're back way before Ran's and Ryuunosuke's first
date?"
"We're back here because you wouldn't hold my hand when I asked
you to!"
+++
In still unaltered time:
"Uh,... Hello, Ran," Ryuunosuke stumbled.
"Ryuunosuke!" Ran greeted him with good cheer. "You really
shouldn't have met me at my place. And not so early! It's not
something a gentleman should do!" she was serious, but her tone
told him that she forgave this boy so very na?ve about dating.
Even though she was thinking: This guy's seriously horny!
"I am no gentleman!"
"What?" Ran lost her mood of forgiveness.
"Ran! Before, when you asked Lum to join you -Were you really
going to have a tea party!?!"
That's an approach she hadn't expected. "I always have a tea
party on stand-by. Tea parties give me the excuse to eat all
those foods I shouldn't eat!" she giggled at the girlish
admission she'd made, deciding to continue with the role she was
most comfortable with.
"You, you get to Eat at a tea party?" he said with big, eager
black eyes.
"Oh, yes! There are all sorts of cakes and pastries, and canap?s-
and chocolate!"
"It, it, it all sounds so girlish! So indulgently feminine! Ran!
May I, perhaps, have tea with you?!! I beg you!" he was
practically down on one knee!
Ran was a little startled and confused by this response. "I told
you I don't want you in my house. What would people say? It's not
proper. Especially, for a girl living alone."
"Then, then, we'll eat outside! Like a picnic! But I must, I must
know what a tea party is like!!"
"Eat outside, with the insects?!" Ran-chan said, showing her
displeasure with the idea.
"Yeah," Ryuunosuke wave had crested, and his spirit was ebbing
away. "My Old Man probably followed me, and would ruin everything
to keep me from really enjoying myself. He has a long list of
things I can't do, because they're things only girls can do."
"Tea parties aren't just for girls!" Ran-chan said as if it were
a silly idea. She looked at the young man; she actually believed
he wanted a tea party, and not her.
"Okay!" she said. "We shall have a tea party! And all that
scrumptious food! Come in, please!"
"Re, really..." Ryuunosuke looked at her with big, wide, hopeful
eyes.
But no sooner had he crossed the threshold, than: "ALERT! ALERT!"
+++
Ataru was passing cars on metal roller skates he'd "borrowed".
"Why can't your time machine just take us there!!" he screamed.
Lum was behind him, pushing him, "Then where would the UFO
Company be?"
"What does unidentified flying objects have to do with
anything!?!!" he yelled through his fears.
"A Uruan Flying Object can always be identified!" Lum said
sounding a little insulted. "Daddy owns a lot of stock in the
company!"
"That still doesn't explain why you can't just zip us there!!!"
"If time machines could place you anywhere you wanted to go in
time, then, by being in the future, you could go anywhere you
want to in the present, because it would be the past: Then, why
would people need vehicles!?!" she said as if it were all too
obvious.
"That's not the reason you're doing this!!" Ataru shook his fist
up in the air (and nearly lost his shaky balance). "You've become
a Buddhist, and want me to suffer so much I'll give up my desire
for girls!!"
"Oh! We're coming to the end of this hilltop," Lum announced.
They had; and it was steep: You could practically see the sea in
the distance. "Time to let you coast; I'll take the shortcut by
air, and meet you when you run out of momentum!"
"No!! Lum!! Don't do this..." But she did. As she hovered, a
little worried that he might not make it safely, he yelled, "I
will not become a practicing Buddhist!!!"
+++
In still unaltered time:
"ALERT! ALERT! Security scans shows that this is an impostor!"
Ran's computer announced.
"What!?!? You're Not Ryuunosuke Fujinami?!!" the glaring Ran
said, stepping significantly back from the imposture.
"I am! I am Ryuunosuke! That computer is wrong!" he protested,
seeing his hope of being feminine again about to be dashed.
"Data on this culture shows that "Ryuunosuke" is a male's name,
and only a male's name. This is a female."
"WHAT!!?!!" Ran screamed!
Ryuunosuke ran-And slammed into the closed airlock.
"What did you do with the Real Ryuunosuke!!" she screamed at the
fake boy. The cutesy girl was gone; a de-manic personality had
taken her place. "Lum put you up to this, didn't she?!! She was
jealous that the most thoroughly manly and honorable boy in all
of Japan was interested in me, the most popular girl in all of
the Pacific Rim, and not her-So she had her computer find a girl
that looked like Ryuunosuke so she could substitute her, and make
a fool out of me again!!!"
He was down on his butt, his back up against the airlock: "What
are you screaming about?!" Ryuunosuke yelled only because she was
yelling. "I don't follow you at all!"
"Or Lum really showed her twisted evil!! Maybe she used a sex-
change gun to turn you into a girl!! Is that what she did to
you?!!"
"Lum had nothing to do with making me a girl!" Ryuunosuke rose
up. Standing with as much dignity as he could muster, he said,
"I, Ryuunosuke Fujinami, have always been a girl."
"Always!?!!" Ran studied Ryuunosuke, deciding if she should make
the fraud her next victim.
"It was my dad's idea. The only property he owned was the Hama
teashop on the beach. He claims it was the original, and had been
in the family for three generations. But under Confucian Law, a
girl cannot inherit anything herself. So, he decided to make me a
boy. If your computer looks, it'll see plenty of Eastern stories
with variations on the theme. Though, I bet, nobody ever tried to
so hard to make the girl into a real man."
"Confirmed," Ran's computer said.
"A very long explanation," Ran said, still frowning hard at
Ryuunosuke. "But understandable, even by Uruan standards."
"I'll leave, now. I'll never ask you to go out with me again," he
said, turning to do just that.
Only the door still had not opened, "Hey, Ryuunosuke, why did you
want to date me? This had better be good. Every Uruan has a
special power of their own. You don't want to find out what mine
is."
"I... I... I wanted to learn to be a girl," he finally admitted.
"A girl? You don't know how to be a girl?" she looked at him very
skeptically.
"No," he hung his head, his back to her. "My dad did every single
dirty trick he could think of to make sure I acted like a man.
And ever since I got... breasts, I knew I could not be like real
girls. They are the most wonderful beings there ever was, and I
was like them only in my black and blue body." Suddenly,
Ryuunosuke turned around, desperate for this one last chance,
"Until I saw you, Ran!! You're the most wonderful of all girls!
No one knows how to be more feminine than you! You're perfect!
You're my ideal-You're my idol! If I could be just a fraction of
the woman you are, I know I would have what it takes to overcome
my training in the manly arts!!"
The demon was gone, "Me?!" she smiled with delight. "I am your
most perfect feminine idol?! (Tee, hee). You want to be just like
little me?!"
"No!! I could never be as wonderful as you, Ran! No one could! I
just want to learn from the sensei-sama!"
"Sensei-sama! Sensei-sama!!" she bounced around, her hands to the
sides of her face. "Nobody's ever called me a Teacher-Mistress,
before!"
"Then... then, you will be?!" Ryuunosuke almost dared to smile.
"Am I more wonderful than Lum?"
"I'm in the same class as Lum. I came to you for my Guru!"
"Yum!! Mm-Mmm!" Ran said, having an orgasm with the thought that
one of her fantasies was, at last, fulfilled.
+++
Ataru was still screaming. Instead of slowing down to a stop, a
car had caught up with him going almost at the same speed. Now,
its grill was pushing him along.
"Do something!!!" he cried when the very alien girl was within
yelling distance.
"Hm! I guess I'd better," she said. She flew down to the level
Ataru's body was pressed up against the car. She pushed him ahead
of it enough for her to get between the two. She then used her
booted feet to push off them off the grill and speed them on
their way.
Ataru realized that all she'd done was substitute herself for the
car. "Why'd you do that for!?!!"
"I saw it using its turn signals! I'm going to have to be the one
to get you up this next hill."
"Another hill!!?!"
+++
In still unaltered time:
"The, uh, closet?" Ryuunosuke said, pushing his thumbs and fists
together as he became very bashful.
"Part of the whole reason for a proper tea party is to have an
excuse to dress up!" Ran-chan smiled, and did a little curtsy in
her own frilly frock, modeling it.
"Eh, I am dressed up."
"You are dressed up. For a man! Listen to your Mistress-Teacher.
Or, don't you think little me can teach you anything?" Ran-sama
looked like she wanted to pout from hurt feelings.
"No! No, if anybody can teach me how to be a girl, it's you!!"
Ryuunosuke raised his hands, and tried to reassure her. "It's
just that, that before I wear nice things, I want to feel nice! I
don't want to be some stupid dude in a dress! If people say the
wrong thing, I get into fights. Bam! Automatic!"
"As your Mistress-Teacher, you must not question my methods. Go
to the closet. Mh, Mh!" she shook her locks.
"Yes, sensei-sama," Ryuunosuke relented. He gazed at the door.
Throwing his shoulders back, and screwing up what courage he had
left, he marched himself to the closet.
He was just reaching for the door, when he hesitated, "It's not
going to be too girly, is it? What kind of dress are you going to
put me in?"
"Oh! I'm not going to put you in anything!" Ran-chan smiled
impishly.
The door opened; giant mechanical, white-gloved hands reached out
and pulled a yelling, struggling Ryuunosuke inside the closet.
+++
When they'd gotten to the top of the hill, Ataru and Lum could
see the beach below. Ataru could also see how far down the bottom
of the hill was. And it was getting further away!
"Lum!! What are you doing?!!"
"I'm adding as much momentum as I can after I've launched you!"
she said sweetly.
"Launched me!!?!" Yes, the hill was several meters, even
decameters below! And as his arc peaked, it was approaching a
hectometer-a hundred yards!
"I just have to make sure you're pointing in the right
direction," Lum said, aiming through one eye, her slim tongue
out.
"LuMUUUU!!!" Ataru yelled as he began his trajectory down towards
the beach.
+++
In still unaltered time:
The giant mechanical hands gently placed the girl who looked like
a girl outside the closet.
Never in his life had Ryuunosuke had fantasized about wearing a
metallic pink alien bikini and long, high heel boots.
"Uh, Ran, I, uh, think there's something' wrong with your
closet," he said, trying to cover up with his own hands.
"There's nothing wrong (Tee, hee!). You're not my size, and Earth
clothes do not shape themselves to fit their wearer."
Ryuunosuke looked down and saw, as if for the first time, that he
had cleavage. No longer was his tits flattened; the bikini top
had not just wrapped itself around them, they lifted and
separated, making his rather ample bosom more ample! "Uh, they,
uh, 'fit'. Alright."
"Mm, hm! It's made with a simply marvelous "living metal". It
tunes itself to your own electrical patterns, and adjusts itself
to keep itself and you at your most comfy level! The E-M field it
puts around me makes me feel all snuggly, like when I first wake
up in my cozy bed in the morning!"
"That's not what I feel," Ryuunosuke muttered. His hands had gone
from trying to cover his top, to pulling down on it: It wanted to
raise his tits too high!
"Oh?!" Ran said, getting a dirty look in her eyes. "If you're
'married', then it can make you feel like you're in your
'husband's' embrace!"
"Husband!?" Ryuunosuke yelped.
"A-l-l over your bo-dy..."
Suddenly his top flattened his tits flat against his chest,
compressing them as much as he'd ever done with his bandages.
"I'm not married: And I'm not Ever going to have a 'husband'!!"
+++
Ataru was still screaming as the he approached the beach sand
head first, going at what must be the maximum Earth speed limit
for falling: Why would I want to remember my Physics at a time
like this!?!!
His momentum disappeared just inches from the solid sand.
"At last!" Lum said, delighted, clapping her hands. "I overrode
the overrides!"
"What!?!!" Ataru asked still hovering upside down in thin air.
"Since our tea is inside my UFO, I was able to get it to direct
the levitation beam into the cup!"
"You could have done that all the time, Couldn't you!!?!!" he
yelled his accusation.
"I could have; but it would have been dangerous," Lum said with
all her sincerity.
"I don't believe you!!! What makes now any different!?!!"
"If I hadn't broke the rules of time travel, you would've been
hurt!"
"What rules!?!!" he yelled as the beam lowered him softly, but
face first, onto the beach. "Ppph! Pthu! Ptu!"
She flew down to within an arm's reach to him. "We are disturbing
time by being here. Because of the Chaos Theory, we have no idea
what changes might happen just by our being here. By adding an
outside force, like my UFO's levitation beam, that cuts through
time from the what was-will-be to the what is-could-be we stir
things up even more!"
"I have no idea what you're talking about!!" Ataru yelled, most
of the sand out of his mouth now.
Lum took on a differential wifely tone, "I'm just saying that
every time I have to use anything I didn't bring with me there's
just going to be more chance for bad luck."
"Bad luck is for losers!!" her 'husband' declared. "That's how
I'm able to, to-" he rubbed his throat. "I need something to
drink."
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ryuunosuke saw that the short time he'd been in the closet with
that molesting machine, a one-legged table with a glass-like top
had risen from the floor. Besides the flowery table setting and
teapot and cups, on it was laid out the most glorious banquet of
snacks he'd ever, in his entire miserable life, seen!
He ran over to it in the bikini and boots, and stood (with his
legs bent out at the knees) and gaped, "C... cakes! And coo...
cookies! And little sandwiches! And, and..." he dared not say the
what they were, afraid that they might be taken away from him
just by his speaking the taboo word.
"Chocolates!" Ran-chan said it for him, enjoying the taste of the
word on her tongue.
"I've never! Ever had chocolate!! Or cakes! Or cookies! And
little sandwiches! Those are all things my Old Man calls 'girly
food'! He says that if I eat that kind of stuff, I'll turn into a
girl!"
"Well, isn't that why you're here?" Ran-sama smiled.
"Yes! That's why I'm here." Then the light bulb went on: "Yes!!
That's why I'm here!!" And he started grabbing all the food he
could, loading up like he was a starving man at an all-you-can-
eat buffet. "I'm going to eat all of this girly food, and turn
into a girl!!"
Ran slapped his wrists. Whether she knew what she was doing, or
he reacted from conditioning, Ryuunosuke immediately had to let
go of all of the food. They fell all around him. "If you eat all
of that food, you will not be the kind of girl that can get the
most out of being a girl. You must think of your diet."
"I've never been on a diet!" Ryuunosuke said. "Except the
starvation diets my dad's put me through! Damn it! We ran a Hama
teashop! We sold junk food! You'd think I'd get to sample the
inventory!!"
"None of that yelling!" Ran-sama reproved him. "A proper lady
knows when it's appropriate to yell."
"You were yelling at me earlier!" Ryuunosuke told her.
"I'm a proper lady, and know when it's appropriate to yell. And
when it's not. You do not yell at tea parties. You have pleasant
conversation and chitchat."
"Er, do we hafta? I'm not big on small talk."
"Are you smaller than guys?"
"Only in my size!" he said as if some guy had challenged him.
"Girls are smaller than guys, and talk about smaller things."
"That doesn't sound right," Ryuunosuke mumbled.
"While guys talk about the big things, we girls take care of the
little things." Ran-chan said; then some of her Gaki-self
appeared, "So we can fly in under their radar, and bomb them into
submission!"
+++
Ataru, walked the beach. Lum, instead of flying, was walking with
him. Ataru thought: She must think she blends right in with that
bikini of hers. It's made of fur! And so are the boots!
He glanced over at him, and pulled his arm away when she wanted
to hug it to her. He added, in his thoughts: Blend in!? She has
green hair and horns!!
Up ahead was a typical open restaurant-sized shack. It had the
signs any typical Hama beach teashop had. He'd be able to by a
Coke there, and get the grit out of his mouth and throat. Maybe
he'd get a raman, too.
"(He, he, he!) Then it's settled, my old friend!" said a rather
round-faced man with a moustache who looked something like a
hippy with sandals, yellow pants, red T-shirt, and a bandana worn
like a cap. He had Eastern-style glasses, looped around his ears.
The unseen man inside the teashop laughed, "(Mhya! Ha! Ha!) That
it is, Shiowatari! A toast to the contract!"
"That voice! That loud, obnoxious voice!" Ataru said.
"Ryuunosuke's father!" Lum agreed.
+++
In still unaltered time:
While the table disappeared beneath the floor, and the nearly
silent robot vacuum cleaner cleaned up the spilled food, Ran-sama
taught Ryuunosuke, "Tea parties are one of the best things about
diets! After starving yourself to keep your (tee, hee!) girlish
figure," and she ran her hands down along her own curves, "you
indulge your cravings with only the most delightful, and
delectable delicacies! (Oh! Yum!!) The pleasures are, then,
multiplied!" It looked like to Ryuunosuke that memory and
anticipation were among Ran's pleasures, nearly physical ones,
too. "And all without guilt, because you were such a good girl,
and had kept on your diet! (Mmm...)"
"Unh, hunh," Ryuunosuke nodded. Not for the first time did he
wonder if he could ever get himself to think the way girls think.
They were just so weird.
"And by keeping our talk on matters we do not have think about,
we can turn our minds over to enjoying the food and all the other
things that make being a girl a joy!"
"Oh! That's why girls talk," Ryuunosuke said, thinking he may've
gotten it this time. "It's to keep them from thinking."
"We think," Ran-chan said, emphasizing the "we", smiling. "But we
think about our bodies."
"Eh?" he hadn't gotten it.
"Sit down," Ran-sama told him.
He sat down on the floor.
"There!? See?! That's what I was talking about."
"What?" he frowned looking down at squashed-in cleavage, and legs
bare from the bikini bottom to the boot tops.
"You're sitting like a Japanese guy! You should be sitting with
your knees together, and your ankles under you."
"Okay," he said, repositioning himself. Sitting on his heels,
now, he fidgeted, trying to get comfortable. "Girls like to sit
this way?"
"Yes!" Ran-sama said, still standing herself. "That is the whole
point of teas. It's like a Japanese tea ceremony; only the
spirituality is yang, female. We remind ourselves how we can act
and behave to get the most femininity out of our lives!"
"'Femininity'?" Ryuunosuke repeated the magic words.
The table rose from floor, laid out as it was before, with no
item on the previous menu missing.
But the floor beneath Ryuunosuke was also rising. "Hey!" he
looked down. He was now on a chair, not the floor.
"Teas are a European concept, and rightfully belong on chairs."
"Then why didn't you give me a chair before!?!" Ryuunosuke almost
yelled in his old boyish manner.
"Watch how I sit," Ran-sama said.
Ryuunosuke looked through the glass-like surface of the table.
Ran ran her hands under her butt and down the back of her thighs;
she then sat with her knees pressed together under her long
skirt, and with her ankles crossed and under the chair's seat.
"Same idea?" Ryuunosuke guessed more than knew the answer. "Only
on chairs?"
Seeing the look on Ran's face, Ryuunosuke felt that he, at last,
had gotten one idea right. One by one, he pulled his lower legs
out from under his thighs, and put his knees together, and his
ankles under himself.
+++
Sure enough, when Ataru and Lum were at the proper angle, they
saw a younger, but, even then, craggy, weather-beaten, version of
Fujimi Fujinami, Ryuunosuke's father. He was even dressed the
same. "How old are his clothes?" Ataru said in a low voice to
Lum.
He was toasting another man with a bottle of Beer. "To the
marriage!"
"To the marriage!" the hippie-looking man with his own, more
ornate, virility belt returned the toast with a clunk of beer
bottle against beer bottle.
"What marriage!?!" Ataru demanded.
"Dahling! Stay out of it! This is among family! We have no
business interfering!" Lum told him, trying to pull her own
husband away.
"Then why did you bring me here!!?"
"Listen to the weird-looking girl! Marriage is only something
between two families!" Ryuunosuke's father told him. "It's too
important to be left up to children! And anything really
important should be left up to men!"
"Arranged marriages are an ancient tradition," the other man
pronounced.
"Arranged marriage!!?" Ataru cried. "Who is Ryuunosuke going to
marry?!! Tell me! I'll fight him for her! I'll make my own bid!
I'll save her from a loveless marriage!"
"So you can date her," Lum said looking up at nothing, knowing
what his fancy words always meant.
"That's right! If she's not engaged, then anybody can date her!
Let her practice for when she finds somebody she does love!! By
practicing on me, Ryuunosuke'll finally get it right! A girl's
place is next to a guy!"
The two men looked at each other, frowning. Then, Fujimi called
out, "Ryuunosuke! Come over here!"
"Yes, Daddy!" came the reply.
Boing! Went Ataru, burying his head down between his shoulders.
"Ryuunosuke is still a little girl?"
"My son is a boy! And will grow up to be a real man," Fujimi told
the impudent teenager. "Unlike I see you are."
"Even now," Lum sighed, feeling sorry for the little girl in a
tank top and shorts running up to them.
"I beat you!" she laughed.
"You had a head start!" the brown haired boy in just trunks she
was with said.
The little girl pulled a lower eyelid down, and stuck out her
tongue, "You just don't like losing, Ryuunosuke!"
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ryuunosuke sat up straight in the chair, knees together, ankles
crossed, feeling the hips of her legs jut out. Even her back was
arched, pushing her flattened circular cleavage out. "Sitting
like this does emphasize my body," he conceded. "I'm even more
aware of my thighs and butt."
"Please! You don't talk about body parts, you experience them!"
Ran-sama told him. "During tea, you have the chance to exaggerate
all of your gestures, and make them completely feminine. Watch
what I do, and do the same. Feel the way you move, and get in
touch with the woman that you are."
"Alright!" Ryuunosuke said with a sharp nod of his head,
determined to do just that.
+++
Ataru squatted down to the little girl's level, "Aren't you
confused, Ryuunosuke?"
The girl looked back at him, "My name isn't Ryuunosuke. It's
Nagisa."
"Nagisa??"
"Nagisa has just become my son's fianc?e!" Ryuunosuke's young
father said, coming out of the snack shack.
"Hai!" the other man nodded, looking ready to back up that claim.
"Ataru," Lum asked, "isn't Nagisa only a girl's name in
Japanese?"
"That's because I'm a girl," she smiled, under no pressure to
deny it.
"It's better to be a boy!" her playmate told her.
"It is not! Girls get to do things boys can't do!"
"Who wants to do things girls want to do!" the little boy teased
the girl.
"I'll show you what girls can do!" she said running at him.
"You'll have to catch me, first!" the little boy said.
"Now, who's got the head start, Ryuu-chan!" the Nagisa said,
already catching up.
"I'm confused," Ataru said. "Ryuunosuke really is a boy?" He then
pulled his hair, "Then way doesn't he look like that girl!?!!"
Suddenly Lum became very apprehensive, "The other end of a
quantum string! Random Access Memory!! I was their age when I-
This may be all my fault!! Ataru we must separate those children
at once!!!"
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ryuunosuke sat as still as she could in this unfamiliar posture,
and watched Ran-sama act like the perfect example of femininity
there was.
Ran-sama was putting on little white lace gloves.
There were some beside Ryuunosuke's fancy china plate, too. She
picked them up, and tried to remember how Ran had put on her
gloves. Ran saw this, and pretended she had to adjust her left
glove; she took it off, and put it back on one lady finger at a
time.
"Ah, Ah! Slowly!" Ryuunosuke said. "Take the time for each
finger! Then pull the whole thing at the wrist!"
Ran waited as long as she could while Ryuunosuke fumbled putting
on the gloves in her nervousness. "We are having a nasty spell of
weather."
"Hunh?" Ryuunosuke said, pulling two fingers out of one finger
hole. "It hasn't been bad."
"I'm talking about the humidity," Ran-chan informed him.
"What about the humidity?" Ryuunosuke was still distracted; he
was pulling so hard at the left wrist now, his middle finger
poked a hole in it.
Ran-sama rolled her eyes, and tried to not comment on any
possible Freudian meaning behind that accident. "Humidity is bad
for the hair."
"It is?" Ryuunosuke said, deciding to be satisfied with how well
the gloves fit (they felt crooked). "Don't aliens have something
for that?"
"Ryuu-chan! This is not about hair. This is about weather.
Weather is the number one topic of small talk."
"It is? Even among aliens?" Ryuunosuke wondered, now that he had
the gloves on, what he was to do with them. Why were they wearing
gloves?
"Ryuunosuke, forget I'm an alien. This is Earth, and while on
Earth you do as the most Earthly feminine do! That is the task I
set my computer to define, and, then, program into me."
"You know how to be the perfect female because of a program!?!"
Ryuunosuke was shocked. "Ran... Ran, I, I, --I want to be
programmed, too!!"
"Ryuu-chan, it isn't that easy. You see you're not an alien."
Crushed, Ryuunosuke lost his erect posture, and slumped back in
the chair. "I feel like an alien."
+++
Little Nagisa had caught Little Ryuunosuke, and immediately
turned to run away, "Tag! You're it!"
"Am not!" Ryuunosuke cried, but chasing after her anyway.
"You leave my son alone, you pervert!!" Fujimi cried, trying to
play a form of catch of his own with Ataru.
"I'm not that kind of a pervert!!" Ataru protested, almost
catching the boy-before he saw how close the kid's father was to
catching him.
"Leave my daughter alone, pervert!" the other kid's father said,
chasing Lum.
"I'm not any kind of a pervert!!" the alien said catching the
girl.
--Only to have Nagisa's father snatch his little girl out of her
hands.
"You are, too!!" Ataru told her, leaping up in the air to avoid
Fujimi's karate blow. He pushed the man over when he used the
man's back to leap away, "You're an exhibitionist in that
bikini!!"
"I'm not an exhibitionist!!" the alien with more flesh than fur
showing protested as she zapped the sand in front of the man
trying to escape from her with his child. "All unmarried eligible
women in space wear this style!"
Nagisa's father slipped on the glass the sand under his feet had
turned into. The rest of his body fell on sand. But he made sure
his little girl was raised as high up off the ground as he could
keep her.
"C'mere!!" Ataru ordered the boy, just missing him as he zigged
at the last moment.
"Tag! You're it!" he told Nagisa, still in her father's hands.
"Am not!" she said, jumping out of them to continue their game.
+++
In still unaltered time:
Ryuunosuke sat limply back in the chair, watching
unenthusiastically what Ran was doing. She had taken a fancy
napkin (A "serviette" she called it) and used it to hold the
handle of her fancy china teapot with it. But that wasn't enough
of a ceremony. Ran had taken another of those napkins, and used
it to push the front bottom of the teapot back so that the tea
poured gently from the pot as it was tipped over the first of the
fancy teacups.
At last Ryuunosuke spoke, "Why can't your alien computer program
me to be a real girl?"
Ran-sama held out the saucer with the cup of tea she'd just
poured on it. "Because," she said. But did not finish.
Ryuunosuke looked at Ran sitting politely frozen with the cup
beginning to shake in her hand. He sighed, and sat forward so he
could receive the cup from her.
She then waited for him to adopt the posture again. Ryuunosuke
put his knees together, and arched his back, feeling his
flattened tits become even flatter.
Only then did Ran-sama give Ryuunosuke the teacup; she smiled,
satisfied that the proper etiquette was being maintained. "My
computer's set up to my own specifications. I'd have to change
all of its silly 853,000 or so parameters. That would be after
we'd done scads of tests to find out what your parameters are.
And then, and then..." she got the look of somebody who was
trying not to think of something that she'd rather not think
about.
"...And then, errors as simple and as awful as noise might've
gotten into the original program that told the computer who I
really am. No! No!" she shook her head like a girl frightened of
the Boogie Man. "I might never become who I was again!"
"All this technical stuff wrapped in sugar and spice is giving me
a headache and a toothache," Ryuunosuke said.
"See?" Ran-sama said, pouring her own cup of tea. "Small talk is
better. What do you think the weather's going to be like this
week?"
+++
While the two fathers tried to chase the two pervert strangers
away from their kids, and Ataru was trying to not get hit by one
of Lum's electrical discharges ("I'm a pervert because I hang Out
with a pervert!!?!") Nagisa and Ryuunosuke exchanged "its" back
and forth; no sooner would one tag the other, than the other
would turn around and tag the one who was turning around.
"Tag! You're it!" they both said to each other at the same time.
"Ryuunosuke!! What did you do!?" Ryuunosuke cried.
"Me!!? You tagged me with your girl cooties!!" Nagisa cried.
"You wanted me to be a boy!!"
"Not if I had to be a girl!!"
"Liar!! Girls are better!!" said the boy.
"They are not!!" said the girl.
"What did you two damned perverts do to our kids!!?!" the fathers
howled.
Ataru and Lum had another reason to run.
+++
In still unaltered time:
"One lump or two, Ryuu-chan?" Ran-chan asked Ryuunosuke. She had
taken the lid off her fancy sugar bowl