Summary:	In which cleanliness is next to godliness.
Source:	“Blood Raining Night” by Reicheru Ketsuekineko-oni.
Continua:	Hetalia: Axis Powers, InuYasha, The Legend of Korra, Hellsing, Princess Mononoke, and Elfen Lied.
Timeline:	2013; shortly after “Secret Agents” and “Cosmic Love.”
Published:	October 12, 2013.
Rating:	R/M - This is Bleepfic, folks. Not Safe For Work, Not Safe For Brain; warnings for gore, violence, rape, and lots of plain old grossness.
Betas:	Phobos, Herr Wozzeck, and Irish Samurai.

Foreword:

---

Part One

Not for the first time, Nume wished his response center door could slam instead of sliding politely shut when he entered. He loved the Star Trek design, but damn if a foul mood didn’t need a good door-slam to go with it.

He had just been to the public shower for the sixth day in a row since he’d come back from his last mission to find a mini-Aragog in his bathroom. The creature refused to budge no matter how he and Ilraen tempted or threatened it, so they had no choice but to call the Hogwarts Fanfiction Academy for an extraction and wait until someone came. Meanwhile, Nume still had to be clean, so he had been forced to dig an old, dark green terrycloth bathrobe and slippers out of the equipment closet and hoof it to the nearest facility every morning. The walk there was bad enough. The return trip, with cold water dripping down his neck and his pajamas tucked under one arm, was even worse. And he could never quite shake the feeling that he was going to pick up a foot fungus or some kind of bizarre glitter-related disease from the shower floor—god only knew what had been in there last! And he didn’t even have a door to slam to make himself feel better when he got home.

That pretty much just left shouting at his partner.

“Ilraen, when are they coming to get that thing out of the shower?” he demanded, dropping his pajamas in the laundry and going to his dresser. “We wrote them almost a week ago!”

The Andalite, who was working on his Character Analysis Device reconstruction project, put down his tools and took a fortifying breath before answering. <I do not know, Nume. I sent them a reminder yesterday, but you know how busy Miss Meir Brin is.>

“Well, it doesn’t have to be her, personally! What are the Order of the Sphinx doing? They don’t even have new releases to contend with anymore now that all the movies are out.” He tried slamming his sock drawer, but it just wasn’t the same. “Never mind. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into the equipment closet to change.

Ilraen shook his head and went back to work. He didn’t have a choice but to use a communal shower to keep clean, since he couldn’t exactly fit into their private one, and you wouldn’t catch him complaining about it. But, then again, he didn’t have a nudity taboo so deeply ingrained in his psyche that it would show up on a CAT scan.

A few minutes later, Nume reemerged in his usual slacks and pinstripe shirt. Today he chose a black tie with silver paisley to complete the ensemble.

As if to comment on his fashion sense, the console went off.

[BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEP! BEEEEEEEEEEP!]

“That’s a long one,” the man remarked with a worried eyebrow-lift. “Ilraen, get it. I’m not done yet.” He still had to fix his hair. Fortunately, he had a mirror above his dresser and didn’t need to go into the bathroom.

<All right.> He pulled up the Intelligence report and started reading aloud. <’Blood Raining Night’ . . . a megacrossover of—oh, dear—at least six continua, most notably Hetalia, InuYasha, and The Legend of Korra.> He swung a stalk-eye toward Nume.

“What was it, Anime Night at the Pit?” His lip curled.

<Well, The Legend of Korra is not anime, strictly speaking. But Nume, I only know a little about it, and nothing about the others. They do all appear to be anime.>

“Don’t worry. My last partner loved that stuff, so I’m sure I can keep up. OCs?”

Ilraen nodded. <One potential Sue, perhaps a few others. The Intelligence agent was not sure the extras aren’t canons from obscure universes, however, so we should be careful. And . . . oh. Oh.> For a moment his whole body tensed, a sort of deer-in-the-headlights reaction.

“What? You sound spooked.”

<It’s . . . well, it’s . . . .> He turned both stalk-eyes back, then forward again. <We are unqualified for some of this . . . content. I think we should get Jenni.>

“What do you mean, unqualified?” Nume finally came to look at the screen. “I know these ’verses, so there’s no reason we should have to bring her into—” He found the passage Ilraen had just read. All color drained from his face. “Oh. I . . . see what you mean. I don’t know if I would say unqualified, exactly, though. I mean . . . I mean . . . you know the, uh, the basics, don’t you?”

They traded hollow stares.

“Oh, god.” Nume buried his face in his hands. “I am going to murder that frelling Lichen.”

<What did you say to make him angry at you?> Ilraen asked. <You never did tell me.>

“I accused it of trying to ruin you. Now it’s trying to ruin me.” He sighed. “Okay. Send Jenni a message, but don’t tell her what she’s coming for. I’d like to put off the inevitable round of ‘let’s poke fun at twentieth-century–man’ for as long as possible.”

Ilraen knew better than to comment. He typed a concise yet vague message, hit “send,” and prepared for a wait. Just a few minutes later, though, both he and Nume jumped when the console [bip]ed for a reply.

From:	Jennifer Robinson [jrobinson.console3114ps94394fp42865.rcC-14.FICPSYCH]
To:	Ilraen-Aroline-Fothergill [ilraen.console349376sn2066720bc102875.rc999.DIC]
Subject:	RE. Please Help!
Megacrossover, huh? Hang on, I’m on my way! Love, ~Jenni

Nume regarded the message with a flat expression. “And I’d half-hoped she’d be too busy, between her job, her kid, and her psycho boyfriend. Great. I don’t know whether to be relieved or horrorstruck.”

<Would you rather contend with the scene yourself?>

He shuddered. “No. Hell no.”

<And I have no wish to see you snap, in which case I would be left to manage on my own and you would have to tell Jenni all about it while strapped to a bed in the Department of Fictional Psychology. So you see, this way is vastly preferable.> He placed a seven-fingered hand lightly on his partner’s shoulder and removed it before Nume could shrug it off. Smiling, he went back to his work table to await Jenni’s arrival.

Nume rolled his shoulder anyway. “Maybe, but she still won’t let well enough alone about it. You’ll see.” He picked up some canon research—Mockingjay, the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy—and dropped onto his chair to read.

Some time later, the door chimed, and Ilraen answered.

Jenni stepped in, looking a little flustered. Her hair was in its usual shoulder-length brown braid, but she was breathing hard and it appeared that she’d dressed in a hurry: the tag was showing at the front of her black shirt.

“Sorry I took so long,” she said, leaning against the door once it slid shut behind her. “I had to let the Nursery know I was going afield, and one of the kids decided to load her rubber-band trebuchet with applesauce and set it off without looking, so I had to run back to C-fourteen and change.” She leaned her head back and took a deep breath before meeting Nume’s eyes. “What are you smirking at?”

“I’m not smirking.” This was a blatant lie. He was leaning back with one elbow hitched over his chair’s backrest, enjoying a rare taste of misfortune that was benefiting him instead of making him suffer. As far as he was concerned, a harassed Jenni was the best kind. “Your shirt’s on backwards and inside out, though.”

Jenni looked down at her front. “How appropriate. Just a sec.”

“Hey!” He cottoned on to what she was about to do. “Hey! Don’t strip here, lady!”

“Oh, for—okay, fine.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll use the bathroom.”

Ilraen’s eyes went wide. He put out a hand to stop her. <Wait, don’t!>

She rounded on him. “What?”

He shrank back, abashed. <It’s just . . . Ronald Weasly. He is quite territorial.>

There was a brief silence, and then Jenni said, “You guys got a mini?” She turned to Nume. “You?”

“Heck no,” he scoffed.

<He came back with me after my last mission,> Ilraen continued. <We have been waiting for someone from HFA to come and remove him.>

“For days.”

<It has made things awkward. I do apologize.>

Jenni shook her head. “Oh, hon, it’s not your fault. I’m sorry I snapped at you. Nume, you can just suck it up and close your eyes for one second, all right?”

“Jesus.” He turned away just in time to avoid being flashed and went to work setting disguises. Might as well do something constructive while decorum was thrown to the wind. “We’re going in as yakuza, by the way,” he said. “I know you don’t care, Jenni, but that means you’ll have to be a man. That’s one thing we have to teach Little Miss OC before we’re done: the Japanese mafia doesn’t take girls.”

“Sure, whatever.” Jenni had been through more than one gender-bending experience in her time. Being female was her preference, but it took more than a change of plumbing to upset her. “What exactly are we going into, anyway? Ilraen didn’t give me any details.”

<We are not entirely sure ourselves. The briefing only mentioned a few continua by name, nearly all anime. We know them—that is to say, Nume knows them—but the story does not appear to be set in any of them, and we may run into more as we go. Your expertise will be most welcome.>

Nume gave his partner a nod behind Jenni’s back. Smooth.

“Hm.” She gave them each a scrutinizing look, stopping at Nume. “So, you know the continua, yet you go out of your way to bring me on board, and you let Ilraen do all the talking while very conspicuously not bitching about my presence. Do you think I can’t tell something’s up?”

Nume gave her his best exasperated over-the-glasses glare. “My god, you must be psychic. How ever do you accomplish these amazing feats of clairvoyance?”

Jenni, who was in fact psychic, snorted. “Sarcasm! My one weakness! That’ll surely put me off the scent of collusion.” She gave a sniff. “Or is that Irish Spring?”

“Look,” Nume said. “Just come along, keep quiet, and don’t get in our way, all right? We’ll tell you when you’re needed.”

Ilraen snatched up his messenger bag, distracting them from what certainly would have become a row. <I believe we are ready to go.>

Nume nodded. “Yeah.” He hit the portal generator button. The familiar blue dot appeared in midair, extended vertically into a line, and widened into an oblong, blue-edged opening in the fabric of reality.

“Just a minute.” Jenni stepped up to Nume, getting between him and the portal and putting their heads as close together as possible with the six-inch height difference between them. In a low voice, almost a whisper, she said, “I’ll play this game if you insist, but you know you’re going to have to lose in the end. This is your last chance not to make things silly and awkward.” With a minute tilt of her head, she indicated her concern for Ilraen in particular.

He looked down at her. “My house, my rules.”

“So be it, then.” She stepped aside.

With Nume in the lead, the agents crossed one by one into the Word World of the story. They found themselves in a Generic Room, featureless except for one window and a bed. They could see through the window that “the sky was blue out.” In the bed, there were two people, one of whom was stirring under the covers. There was nowhere to hide and no canon background to blend in with, so the PPCers clustered in a corner and kept still, relying on their Somebody Else’s Problem fields to keep them from being noticed.

Reicheru had just opened her golden eyes to the morning like she has for the past 17 years of her life. She grogily rubbed her hands on her eyelids and rolled over. She was staring Denmark in the face or as she calls him "Denny."

“I don’t understand the Hetalia fandom,” Nume muttered. He looked much the same as usual—tall, thin, with short black hair gelled into order and gray eyes behind green-rimmed glasses—except for the addition of epicanthic folds, a bronze cast to his pale skin, and a black business suit of the finest quality. “A bunch of borderline-racist stereotypes hardly make for compelling characters, and yet there are people who want to sleep with them.”

“I thought you two were involved in defending its fanfic university.” Jenni’s voice had deepened to a light baritone. Her male body was the same height as before, but broader in the shoulders and slightly more muscular, and her braid had turned black to go with her melanized skin. Her eyes, however, remained green.

“We were. Defending the canon doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“I did not mind it,” Ilraen said, then added, “I did not understand it very well, either.” Of the three of them, he stuck out the most: his fluffy hair was deep blue, and his somewhat androgynous features and large, dark eyes made him nothing short of bishōnen.

Jenni couldn’t hold back a grin when she looked at him.

“That’s because you don’t know anything about the broader historical context,” Nume replied. “Anyway, it isn’t important right now.” He pointed at the characters.

"Denny-Kuuuun," she spoke softly like floating butterflies on the breeze "good morning. I've missed you in my sleep."

"I've missed you too." He took his hand and ran it down to the tip of her soft furry ear. Her ear twitched with delight!

“A cat-girl!” Ilraen remarked. “I have heard of them, but I’ve never seen one in person before now.”

“They’re a cliché and a nuisance,” said Nume. “I don’t know why anyone still thinks they’re a clever idea.”

“The same reason people still think Sues are a clever idea?” his partner responded.

He almost smiled, but the thought was too depressing.

"I get worried about you sometimes, though."

"Really?" Her golden eyes lit up like a light in a lamp on a dark night.

Reicheru’s eyes started glowing with enough brilliance to contrast with the daylight as lamps contrast with the night. The agents winced and turned away. Nume scrawled the offense into his charge notebook, at least partially so he wouldn’t have to look up anymore.

"Yes of course! You work for the Yakuza, how else am I suppose to feel?"

Her eyes gazed downward like as if trying to see something on the floor, "it's good to know there's actually someone who cares about my existence."

"I love you with all my heart, Rei-kun."

"Nya~! You do, I know you do. I love you, Denny-Kun." Reicheru purred.

“Blech, this dialogue.” Nume made a face. “Did anyone bring insulin?”

Jenni and Ilraen shook their heads.

“And already we have the misuse of Japanese suffixes,” he continued, jotting that down, too. “Not to mention her name! Ray-chair-rooo; that’s how you say ‘my name is Rachel and I am a weeaboo’ in fangirl Japanese.”

They kissed passionately like a woman and man that haven't seen each other for forty years but have loved each other all that time. She wanted to drink his blood, really really bad. But, she couldn't, for if she were to suck the life juices out of him, it would turn him into a demon-vampire. Of course, she would never let anything bad happen to him. He was the love of her life, and her only love.

“Oh, I see.” Jenni put her hands on her hips and turned to the other two. “I call steamy love affair by chapter three. Would anyone care to bet?”

Ilraen quickly shook his head. “Not I.”

“So. Rachel here is a demon-vampire-catgirl. And we’re doing the plot of Twilight.” Nume kept scribbling. “Good god, I’m going to run out of ink if this keeps up.”

“Shh,” said Ilraen. “She’s getting up.”

Reicheru dressed in her outfit she wore to the Yakuza and got ready for work. She wore a white school-girls outfit that had long sleeves, a red ribbon around her neck, red trimming that went on her sleeves, a red skirt, her brown hair tied up in a red ribbon red as blood, and a big gun. Her long brown hair with blue highlights in the middle swayed in the breeze so beautifully, she could almost kill someone with her lipswere really red, but she didn't need expected she would have a tough assignment today.

The overall effect of this bit of costume porn was that Rachel looked like she’d been disastrously caught up in the play of a large kitten who’d run off with its owner’s sewing. The nondescript gun of vague bigness manifested as a BFG on the order of certain classic first-person shooters and looked incredibly out of place, even though (or perhaps because) it, too, was adorned with pretty red ribbons.

Nobody had anything intelligent to say to this. It was just as well that a sudden scene shift hit, catapulting the agents into a Generic Forest. Fortunately, they landed softly in the Generic Undergrowth, and they recovered quickly.

Reicheru was out, prowling in the woods when she heard a certain cackling! It was a witch!

“We’ve found a witch!” Ilraen exclaimed. “May we burn her?”

“Burn the witch!” chorused Nume and Jenni. Neither of them could resist a good Python reference.

Unfortunately, Rachel glanced in the direction of the shouting. The agents had to pipe down and duck behind some Generic Bushes for cover, and the moment of camaraderie was no more.

Rachel engaged in a couple lines of banter with the witch, and then attacked.

Reicheru ran toward the hag, her breasts delecately bouncing in the wind.

“Christ, my eyes!” Nume quickly looked away, but he had seen that which cannot be unseen without the use of mind-altering chemicals. He pulled out his trusty flask of Bleepka and imbibed.

Ilraen’s eyes widened and his head listed slightly to one side as he took in the violation of physics unfolding before him. “Um . . . .”

“That . . . is so not natural,” said Jenni. “Stupid anime physics. But where did her top go?”

“Perhaps she did not have one, as such? The description of her clothing above the waist did not explicitly include anything but sleeves and a neck ribbon.”

The witch took out a staff and tried to smite her, but fell short when Reicheru suddenly disappeared and re-appeared behind her. "I told you not to mess with me!" She said slitting the witche's throat open.

Rachel had not brought an edged weapon with her, just the BFG. The wound it created was less of a slit, more of a decapitation by repeated smashing. Ilraen quietly turned around and threw up in a bush.

She put her lips to the wrinkly neck and sucked on it, really really hard. The blood came pouring into her mouth like a waterfall of gore and violence.

Oddly enough, this “waterfall” seemed to be pouring up into Rachel’s mouth, which quickly became bruised and lacerated due to all the violence.

“Okay,” Nume said after a moment, feeling like he was about to lose it, too. “Even anime blood doesn’t account for that.”

Jenni was a seasoned healer and not bothered by blood and guts, but even she had gone a little pale.

Luckily for their stomachs, the scene ended as abruptly as it had begun, and the awful mess vanished when the background shifted to a different part of the forest. Due to the lack of description, though, it looked pretty much the same as the first part. The agents regrouped, Ilraen leaning against Jenni for moral support, and followed Rachel.

She was going home after having killed the witch when she heard an unusual noise coming from the bushes.

He said, "I've come back for you."

Reicheru was astonished “father?” she yelped. “You’re supposed to be dead, why did you come back? Why did you have to come back.” Tears of pain and darkness rolled down her eyes as her worst nightmare stepped towards her.

Her tears turned black and stabbed her eyes with tiny needles as they traversed her eyeballs, top to bottom. They did not touch her cheeks.

“Wow, this is disturbing.” Jenni pulled a face. “What is this thing rated?”

“Mature,” Ilraen answered hoarsely. “But I do not think the author chose it for the same reasons we would.”

“Tears of . . . ?” Nume muttered, reading the offending description. “Right, that’s it, Rachel. You’re not allowed to use figurative language anymore.” He folded his arms and scowled at the OC.

"I'm undefeatable, bitch. You had your chance years and years ago, but you failed. Now I'm back to get you."

"You don't want to fight me, father!" She drew out her long, bloody sword and looked at him in a cruel way.

The BFG warped into a sword. Nume charged for a level three reality distortion, even though he sighed in relief at the introduction of a modicum of sense to this world. Ilraen cringed at the display of negligent blade care.

"I haven't come to kill you right now, but some day. Beware." With that, he threw a smoke bomb at her and disappeared.

They all blinked as the plot tension ninja-vanished along with the shadowy father.

Ilraen regarded the scene with ill favor. “This is how we are introduced to the plot of the story. At least, I think this is the plot. The summary ends with the line, ‘Will she save her relationship and destory her father?’”

“De-story?” Nume raised an eyebrow. “How ironic. I can’t take this guy seriously as a villain. Why would you tell someone that you’re back to kill them and then not do it for absolutely no reason? He didn’t even threaten to make her miserable first!”

“Don’t worry, guys. There’s still the inevitable love triangle to keep us going!” Jenni said with exaggerated cheer.

Nume shot her a warning look.

“Well, that is the end of chapter one,” Ilraen reported, shaking his head. “I think we should jump ahead to Rachel’s training session with Inuyasha in chapter two.”

“Oooh, classic,” Jenni remarked. “We used to get him and Sesshomaru in FicPsych all the time.”

“Good, we’re finally going to get a crossover in this crossover,” Nume said. He nodded to his partner. “Do it.”

Ilraen took out his remote activator and opened a portal. “This way to Rachel’s garden.” He squinted at the Words. “I think.”

The three of them stepped into what might have been a nice garden, had it not been trampled, blackened, and on fire in places. The cause of the devastation was Rachel, now reduced to a glowing figure the bright red color of hot metal. Waves of heat rolled off her, and anywhere her feet touched the ground, things withered. The agents made sure to keep well back.

“See,” said Nume, “this is what happens when you abuse figlang.”

She was hot red with anger and sadness. She decided to train in the garden with her teacher Inuyasha. He wasn't full cat demon like Reicheru, he was also part dog demon.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Jenni protested. “Inuyasha is half dog-demon, half human. No part cat whatsoever.”

Ilraen pointed at the yōkai’s face and said, conspiratorially, “Do you see the ‘hint of love for Rei’ in his eyes? Your prediction seems likely to come true.”

“Stop it,” Nume cut in. “Just watch the—oh, Christ!” A chuckle escaped his throat. “I warned you about figlang!”

Rachel melodramatically declared, “My dead father...he is back!” Then her face crumpled in her hands like a wet paper bag thanks to an unwise application of the word “collapsed.”

“It keeps happening,” Jenni quipped.

Rachel and Inuyasha discussed how to handle her not-so-dead dad. First, Rachel wanted to convince their master in the yakuza to kill him by framing him. She must have been referring to the picture-frame variety, since simply setting him up to take the blame for some unspecified action was unlikely to make him dead in and of itself, whereas nailing some bits of wood to him and hanging him on a wall might. Inuyasha didn’t think that would be allowed, though, so naturally the only remaining option was for Rachel to kill dear old Dad herself.

Inuyasha didn't want her to get hurt, he was worried. He couldn't tell her, though. Because he didn't want her to know his feelings for him.

"Please," he said, "dont' go! He'll KILL you!"

“Subtle,” said Jenni. “Way to not reveal your feelings there.”

The scene abruptly shifted back to Rachel’s house, where Denmark, having witnessed her conversation with Inuyasha, begged her to get a different tutor.

"Why, are you jealous? You don't have to be, I swear. I'd never cheat on you, I love you."

“Oh, for crying out loud! How transparent can you get?” She turned to Nume. “Seriously, when does Rachel bang Inuyasha? There’s a lemon coming, right? I can’t think of another reason you’d bother calling me in.”

“I told you,” Nume replied harshly, “I’ll let you know when the time comes—not before. Stop trying to guess!”

“You’re lucky that’s all I’m doing.” She glanced at Ilraen, who looked quite uncomfortable, and sighed. “This is so stupid.”

She was on the point of letting it go when she looked at the Words.

Their eyes told each other that something was wrong, but they both ignored it. They decided to just go to bed instead of saying anything. The cuddled together- and did some other stuff- then they fell asleep.

Her face contorted in confusion. “Are we really referring to sex as ‘some other stuff’?”

Nume grinned triumphantly. “How do you like your theory now?”

“All right, maybe I’m wrong about there being a lemon ahead.” She shook her head, disgusted. “Typical. It’s fine to detail the gore, but sex? Ohhh, no, that would be sickening.”

The Words helpfully informed everyone that Rachel’s dad was watching her and Denmark sleep, like a voyeuristic Edward Cullen, and chapter three began.

She woke up all alone in a room she'd never seen before. It was pitch black and maniacal laugher could be heard from a distance.

“Is landing in pitch-blackness going to be a thing when I go on missions with you guys?” Jenni wondered aloud. “I have to say, I’m not a fan.”

“I’m not a fan of you coming on missions with us, either,” Nume replied. “Be quiet.”

“What I would like to know,” said Ilraen, “is how she knows she’s in a room she has never seen before if it is pitch black.”

"I have captured you, Rei. There is no escape."

"Who are you?" She was angry. "Are you my father?"

"No..." said the voice mysteriously, "I am Sesshomaru."

There was a pause.

"Inuyasha's brother."

Another pause. Rachel clearly wasn’t making the connection.

"The vampire lord."

Rachel gasped. The agents cracked up.

“He seems so offended that he has to remind us of this,” Nume said. “As if we should just know he’s a vampire lord, obviously.”

“Well, duh,” Jenni said. “Everything is explained so clearly in the narrative. See, it says he must have been bitten by someone and come back as a vampire, because that’s the only way he could have survived being stabbed in the heart and tossed into the ocean by Inuyasha, to avenge their mother. Makes perfect sense.”

“Including the part where half-brothers Sesshomaru and Inuyasha share the same mother in addition to the same father now?”

“Exactly. Makes total sense that half-brothers have two parents in common.”

“Sure, especially since one of them is a half-demon and the other is a full demon.”

“Ah, but that’s explained, too! Inuyasha is half dog-demon, half cat-demon, so the math says they’re both full demons in this—and I guess Sesshy must be half-cat, as well.”

“It really does work out,” said Ilraen, who had been following along with the slightly glazed look of someone who barely knows the subject material. “Sesshomaru just said they’re brothers, not half-brothers.”

Nume blinked. “Christ, the Apocalypse must be at hand if this is making sense. But wait! I can still charge for two counts of making the mother a cat-demon: Inuyasha’s mother is supposed to be human, Sesshomaru’s is a dog-demon. It breaks canon for both of them, and for no good reason.”

Then, out of nowhere, Inuyasha and Kagome flew out of the shadows and picked Reicheru up.

The agents ducked to avoid the flying canon characters.

"Hey," she shouted, "I can take care of myself! I don't need you to help me."

"Yes, you do," Inuyasha looked at her, "I'm here to protect you..."

Her cheeks turned red and as she looked away she saw Kagome try to slash Sesshomaru in half.

"Damn," Kagome screamed, "he's too hard to defeat! What should I do?" Her skirt flew in the air.

There was a beat in which the agents were all too flabbergasted by the events they’d just witnessed to say anything.

“That,” Ilraen said at last, “is the second animate skirt I have seen in my career.” He tracked it as it flew and managed to snag it on its way down. It vanished into his messenger bag.

“Yeah, I remember that!” Jenni grinned, but her mouth pulled into a one-sided frown. “You know, darkness and flying skirts are not good trends, either of them. Though the fanservice might be nice if Kagome weren’t underage.”

Nume, who was not looking at anything in that direction at all, elbowed Jenni in the back. “No ogling the canon characters. I’m charging for nerfing Kagome to the point where she gives up after one swing—and what did she slash at him with, her bow? No wonder it didn’t hurt him.”

Inuyasha joined the battle and all three of them went at it like rabbid dogs. Blood sprayed the room crimson.

The agents, being in the room, were not spared.

“Ahh! Oh, god! What’s in my hair?”

“Ugh, it’s everywhere! Sharding anime blood!”

“Shhh! She’ll notice us!”

Luckily, there wasn’t much chance of that. Rachel was busy.

Reicheru licked the wall like a hungry devil, slurping up the mixture of their blood. Sesshomaru threw his arm out and slammed Kagome against the wall, knocking her out. He flew away with her into the night, and they weren't seen after that.

“What the hell just happened?” Nume demanded in a shocked whisper. “I turned around for one second to avoid an unwanted eyeful, and now I’m soaked! Is this blood?”

The other two, who had taken the blast full frontal, nodded. Ilraen wavered, like he might pass out, and Jenni caught him by the elbow.

“We’d better find someplace to wash up, right now,” she said.

“Sh-she must have a bathroom in her house, yes?” Ilraen suggested. His eyes were wide, and his hands trembled as he lifted the RA and typed. “I hope—” he swallowed “—this is not damaged.”

The portal worked, and the three hurried through to Rachel’s living room. They all looked around. There were four walls, a couch, a fireplace, and a staircase going up, but that was it.

“I do not see a . . . a door.”

“It’s not described,” Nume said. “Hold on . . . I’ve never tried this before, but . . . .” He took a deep breath. “On the north wall, there was a door to the bathroom.” He paused. The north wall rippled a little, as though he were seeing it through a heat distortion, but no door materialized.

Jenni jumped in. “Right idea, but we’re dealing with a Japanese motif here. Let me try.” She closed her eyes. “The back door, a delicate construction of bamboo and rice paper, opened onto the garden where Rachel practiced martial arts with her tutor. A flagstone path led through the lush green lawn to a secret hot spring, tucked away in a thicket of cherry trees and fragrant grasses. Water the color of deepest jade pooled in a natural basin of dark, gleaming stone. Steam drifted from its surface in gentle curls, enhancing the perfume of the pink and white petals that drifted down to kiss the water.” She opened her eyes again.

Nume and Ilraen were staring at her. Nume’s mouth hung open slightly. Jenni nodded at the back wall, and they turned to look.

Sure enough, there was a sliding shōji door.

She smiled. “Let’s go take a bath!” She led the way, a little bounce in her step, which looked decidedly odd in her current blood-soaked, masculine body.

Nume quickly caught up. He stalked alongside her a few steps, scowling at the flagstones. “That was a bit purple, don’t you think?” he finally said.

She chuckled. “Maybe a little. Worked, though.”

“A little too well, if you ask me. You ought to keep an eye on that.”

“Please. You could’ve done it if you’d visualized properly. But never mind, we’re here. Genderbent women and aliens without nudity taboos first.”

Nume spied on the story via portal while Jenni and Ilraen bathed (with much exclamation over each other’s intricate yakuza tattoos), and when it was his turn they took over. They weren’t missing much: Rachel met Denmark in the village market ubiquitous to all period-ish animes and told him what had happened. Denmark completely ignored the fact that a supposed friend had just been abducted by an evil vampire lord who also wanted to kill his girlfriend, and instead whined some more about how much time Rachel was spending with Inuyasha. Changing Sesshomaru’s ethnicity through careless typing (“Sesshomaru the Vampire Lord is black”) went onto the charge list.

Unfortunately for the human agents, although they could use the Disguise-Outfitting Ryticular Kostume System to reset their clothes to look and feel like clean black suits, they couldn’t take additional time to actually wash them. They were still the same blood-soaked pieces of fabric, and the agents were all too aware. There was much uncomfortable squirming as they prepared to get going again.

“Will you two be all right?” Ilraen asked. The clothing aspect of his disguise was a glamour through and through, and he had fully recovered his equilibrium after the bath and a swallow of Bleepka. “Perhaps we could borrow some clothes from the fic?”

“No, it’s fine,” Nume answered, though his nose wrinkled with distaste. “We can’t actually feel it. It’s just knowing it’s there. And it won’t be pleasant when we get back to Headquarters.”

“At least it’ll be dry by then,” Jenni said.

“Anyhow, I wouldn’t want to wear anything from this fic.”

They all agreed on that.

“And now we must proceed to chapter four,” said the Andalite. “Jenni, I am sorry, but your guess was incorrect. Rachel has not slept with Inuyasha.”

“Damn. If I’d known the chapters were this short, I’d have said something different. Lemon or no lemon, there’s a love triangle a-brewing, mark my words.”

Ilraen set the portal to “Home in on Sue.” They hopped through and suddenly felt compressed, as if the air pressure had increased.

“Ugh, what fresh hell is this?” Nume muttered.

"Huuuu-haa!" her black hair wiped around like a black wip. There was a feirce look of constetration on her face as fire and air came out of her hands.
Denmark took Reicheru over to her, "Rei-kun" he said, "meet Korra, your new tutor in learning the dark arts of air and fire bending."

“Where did the paragraph formatting go?” Jenni wondered. “I could have sworn there were double line-breaks before.”

Nume shrugged and loosened his tie a hair.

Ilraen, however, perked up. “Ah, Korra is a canon character from the sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender. We have our third crossed canon.”

"Konnichiwa! Watashinonamaeha Reicheru Ketsueki, sore wa anata ni aete ureshidesu!" Rei bowed, formally, her brown hair falling over like a silky waterfall.
"No, Rei-Kun, she CAN speak English."

Just as quickly, he frowned. “Korra should not speak Japanese or English. She is not from Earth.”

Jenni scanned the Words. “Wait, are they treating English as the default language here? I thought we were in Japan! The fic thinks we’re in Japan!”

“It hasn’t explicitly said that,” Nume pointed out. “Ilraen, you might also be interested to know that air- and firebending are ‘dark arts’ in this.”

He folded his arms. “I did hear that the plot of the second series involves anti-bending prejudice, but that does not make it evil.”

Meanwhile, Korra tested Rachel’s abilities.

Catch, Reicheru!" Korra threw fire at her. Reicheru held out her hands and caught it, instantly freezing it with ice. "My, you are strong. Can you bend fire, too?"
"Of course I can!" Reicheru lit a candle in her hands. "You see, my farther was a demon. My mother was part cat."

“Part actual cat?” said Nume, raising an eyebrow. “Ew.”

Ilraen shook his head. “The fic said Rachel was a full cat-demon earlier. She must mean her mother was a cat-demon, which would give her a partially feline appearance like Rachel.”

Her next sentence did seem to follow from the “my parents were demons” logic.

"I have the demon blood in me, I can start fires."
"THAT'S SO AMAZING! You could be the next avatar."

“That is not how the Avatar works,” Ilraen growled. “The Avatar is reborn into a new body when the old one dies, and Korra is the current one.”

She cupped Rei's hands. "I can feel it within you."
"The power?" Reicheru looked puzzled and confused like a lost boy in the woods.
"No, but, nevermind that. It's tea-time!" Korra pranced off to fetch a tray of tea. 'What did she mean?' Reicheru thought.

“Ooo-kaaay,” Jenni said. “Ilraen, is Korra this much of a ditz in canon?”

He looked sheepish. “I do not know. I have only seen the first series.”

“Oh well. Ooh, look, they’re having bubble tea!” Jenni didn’t prance off, but she did abscond rapidly tea-ward.

Nume rolled his eyes and trudged after her, Ilraen trailing along with him. Minutes later, they were all seated at a table near Rachel and Korra, sipping cold mint tea with dark tapioca-and-molasses “bubbles” through outsize straws. It wasn’t a traditional Japanese tea by any stretch, but hell, it was refreshing.

In the tea room Korra spoke about herself. "You know" she said drinking some mint bubble-tea, "I have a secret, too."
"Oh, and what’s that?" Reicheru looked at her curiously like a cat. Her ears twicthed.
"I'm part angel, really, I am. No one believes me, though." Korra sucked down a ball.

Jenni almost choked on a bubble. She sputtered into a napkin, coughing and laughing at the same time. “What?” she eventually managed, red-faced and grinning.

“It’s not even funny,” said Nume, who had gone rather pink.

Ilraen looked back and forth between the two. “Are we talking about the part where Korra is part angel? Because . . . she isn’t. There are no angels in Avatar. Or perhaps the part where she says only demons can bloodbend? Any sufficiently powerful waterbender can learn to do that.”

Nume turned back to the conversation. “Wait a second, Rachel has a half-sister who’s also an angel? How the hell does that work if Rachel’s parents are both some kind of demon?”

“The sister’s other parent must have been an angel,” Ilraen said. “But . . . .”

“Maybe angelic genes are dominant and demonic ones are recessive?” Jenni offered, still smirking over the ball-sucking.

“Now you’re just overthinking it. And, oh look, the scene is over. This pacing is painful.”

They stalked Rachel on her way home. She had apparently sweated so much during her workout that her clothes clung tightly enough to her body that “her silouette looked like that of a nakid woman.”

Jenni regarded the girl with her head tilted slightly to one side. “Either this is really disgusting and Rachel should see a doctor about her hyperhidrosis, or it just goes to show how little she was wearing to begin with. I’m not sure.”

Nume backhanded her shoulder. “It’s really disgusting either way. Stop looking at it. What would your psychotic man-pet think?”

“Come on, I’m not attracted to adolescent Sues. Anyway, Su knows how to appreciate a shapely silhouette. Probably a ‘silouette’, too.”

“You know what, you’re really disgusting. Both of you.”

Just then, Inuyasha stepped out of a plothole and was enraptured by the clearly outlined crevices and protuberances of Rachel’s anatomy—or, in the fic’s words, “her beauty.” The agents could have sworn they saw him mouth “boobies” before his scripted dialogue took over.

"why did Denmark do this to us? I wasn't doing anything wrong. I wish we could train together again. I-I-I miss...you...Rei-Kun..."
"Did you just say...Rei-Kun?" Her ears perked up.
"Yes, I did," he said boldy, "I have feelings for you, feelings I've wanted to express since the day we met, all those years ago. You have captivated me in such a way no one has. Your beauty,
your intellegance, your passion, it's just amazing to me. We have so much in common and- oh -I have said too much, haven't I?"

“Yes!” Jenni waved her arms in frustration. “Jeez, you suck at this. The real Inuyasha is much better at pretending not to be in love.”

“Speaking of which . . . .” Nume nodded at the continuing conversation.

"Anyway, any luck with retrieving your woman?"
"You mean Kagome? No, not yet. Thank you for reminding me. I better go plan that out." Inuyasha lepted into the air and disappeared into the sky.

“We should get a CAD reading on him the next time he turns up,” Nume said. “Making him forget about Kagome, who has been kidnapped and is in grave danger, is definitely a charge.”

"Goodbye..." Reicheru whispered. She put her hands on her stomach. 'The power within me...' she whispered.

“Nume, the next chapter is coming,” Ilraen warned. “It’s . . . um . . . .” He glanced at Jenni.

She might have missed that, but she couldn’t help catching his tone. “Ooh, is this why I’m here? That sure came up quickly. One might even think it was silly to be so cagey about it.”

Nume looked at the Words, sighed, and rubbed the bridge of his nose above his glasses. “Damn it. Let’s just put it this way: the chapter title is ‘HENTAI WARNING’, and the first sentence has Inuyasha touching himself. What do you think?”

“So there is a lemon! You ass! You let me feel like an idiot back there!”

He said nothing in response to this, just gave her a grim, level stare.

“Ugh. Okay, so, you want me to watch the scary porn chapter for you, even though this story has previously described sex as ‘some other stuff’ and cannot possibly have the imagination required to come up with anything more deviant than maybe oral. Do you think you might be overreacting a little?”

His look turned sour. “See, I knew you would do this.” He turned to Ilraen. “Didn’t I tell you?”

Ilraen looked abashed, but surprised them both by jumping into the argument. “Jenni, perhaps you should consider my perspective. This story is very poorly written, and I have no wish to witness the scene to come when I have no positive experience of my own to offset the mental images. You, however, are experienced with this sort of thing and unlikely to suffer lasting harm. Is that not fair?”

They both stared at him.

Finally, Jenni replied, much subdued, with an expression of mingled apology and pride. “Yeah, when you put it like that . . . that’s fair. When did you get to be so adult?”

“Oh,” Nume huffed, “so he’s an adult if he doesn’t want to watch terrible porn, but I’m overreacting?”

“I have always been an adult,” Ilraen replied, ignoring his partner. “But I suppose it has taken me some time to grow into it.” He smiled.

“All right, enough touchy-feely crap.” Nume handed Jenni his notebook and pen. “Just go get the charges, and we’ll meet you downstairs at Rachel’s house when it’s over.”

Ilraen opened a portal for Jenni, and she entered chapter five. It began with an author’s note:

*This gets pretty graphic! So have fun! ;D 3 Nya on!*

“Okay, author,” Jenni answered. “I’ll try. This had better be worth my while, though. I expect some pretty racy stuff now, like actual penises and maybe even vaginas.” She rolled her eyes.

As promised, the action kicked off with one of the lines Intel had included in their report, which had so alarmed her friends.

Inuyasha took out his big gargantuine dick and touched it. Like all wolves and creatures of the night, he needs loving.

Jenni sighed. “Exaggerating your endowment will get you nowhere, sweetie, especially if it’s misspelled.” She scratched something in the notebook about the compounded failure to realize that Inuyasha was half dog-demon, not wolf, nor cat, nor anything else. Dog.

It was mating season, and he needed to find a female. The first girl that came to his mind was Reicheru.

“You don’t say,” Jenni muttered. “Two chapters off . . . what a jerk.”

She followed Inuyasha to Rachel’s room. He prattled about how he needed to mate and Rachel was the only woman he could ever love, blah blah blah.

"I can't do this, what about Denmark? We love each other very much." She looked into his sparking blue saphire ocean eyes. The lust covered her whole body.

"But I love you more," he nuzzled her neck with his nose and put his thing against her legs. "Let me do it!"

“‘His thing’?” Jenni scoffed. She squinted at the scene, and all she could make out was a long bar of flesh-toned pixelation. “Woo, scary hentai, so graphic!”

She leaned black on the bed and let him into her. They were in love, and they started humping. They screatched and moaned, sending horrible cat and dog noises to their neighbors.

Jenni waited for something potentially life-scarring to happen, but it was apparent that this was as bad as it got after ten minutes, when the sex looped back to the beginning and started a replay. The Words said they kept at it for an improbable three hours. Jenni abandoned her post out of boredom and went downstairs.

Nume and Ilraen looked up in surprise. They were sharing a couch with Denmark, who was completely oblivious both to them and to the indiscretions taking place in his bed. He had apparently gone temporarily deaf so as not to hear the animal sounds echoing through the neighborhood.

“Okay, I got your charges,” Jenni said. She tossed the notebook and pen at Nume’s chest. “There weren’t that many, and the so-called hentai was about as lurid as a See ’n Say, just for the record.”

“Says the libertine,” Nume retorted, revolted. “I know what I saw in the report, and I want no part of it—and neither does Ilraen. You wouldn’t want to corrupt his innocence, would you?” he added with a smirk.

Ilraen looked less than pleased at being used in this manner, but said nothing.

“Ilraen has a good reason. You don’t, unless you’re also a virgin hoping to preserve his chances of actually enjoying sex at some point.” She raised her eyebrows, demanding an answer.

Nume set his jaw and glared. She knew his feelings on the matter as well as she needed to and was just trying to provoke him into revealing something, as usual. Also, his brain was overclocking to scrounge enough Bleepka from his bloodstream to repress the thought of his alien partner and sex.

Finally, she gave up with a frustrated sigh and changed the topic. “So, is that it? I mean, Inuyasha is pretty damn out of character, that’s beyond a doubt. He should be out trying to rescue Kagome, not banging his barely legal former student in the most uninteresting way possible.”

It was difficult to manage a more poisonous look, but Nume did it.

Jenni continued, “And Denmark and Korra have no good reason to be here, either. Can we send them home and be done?”

“I wish,” Nume said through gritted teeth. “Unfortunately, we’re looking for at least three more canons to turn up, and the report didn’t specify when that happens. We can skip ahead a bit, though. God knows I want to get this over with.” He nodded to Ilraen.

They jumped into the next chapter.

Reicheru woke up in the hospital bed after having cut herself alot. There was bandages on her arms and legs.

“Whoa, whoa!” Jenni cried. “What happened? We missed something!”

“Not . . . exactly,” Ilraen said. “You see, we read ahead while we were waiting for you. We would have witnessed Rachel’s delusional version of the events that put her here, and we decided it was pointless to witness—there is nothing to do with anything canonical, just more of the same over-the-top descriptions.”

“Long story short,” Nume added, “she repressed the memory of last night out of guilt, took some evil blue pills that magically make addicts want to take them—as opposed to, y’know, the addiction—and she stabbed herself in the arm until she bled gallons of blood that, I quote, ‘tasted as refreshing as a lemonade Capri-Sun’. Because that’s what you do if you’re an angsty two-dimensional vampire who doesn’t know anything about real cutters or human physiology.”

Jenni blinked. “Lemonade Capri-Sun? Really?”

“Really.”

“Ooo-kay.”

It was difficult not to bond in the face of terrible medicine, something about which Nume and Jenni both had strong feelings. Some of the anger between them faded.

At this point, Rachel’s half-sister the angel was introduced to the story.

"Fear not, dear," Yuki came floating down from the ceiling on angle wings, "I am hear for you."

“What the hell was she doing on the ceiling? And . . . .” Nume squinted at the Words. “Angle wings, huh? What kind of angles?”

“They appear obtuse to me,” Ilraen said. “They are certainly not right.”

Nume stared at him a moment. His mouth twitched reluctantly into a smile. “That was actually pretty good, rookie. Ten riffing points.”

Ilraen preened.

Jenni patted him on the shoulder. “So, do you guys recognize this character from anything?” she asked. “I don’t.”

“No, all the Yukis I know about are male,” Nume answered, all business again. “And none of them have ‘angle wings’. Pretty sure we’ve got another OC here.” He turned a questioning look on his partner.

Ilraen nodded and took his Character Analysis Device from the messenger bag. The reading on Yuki came back:

[Yuki Shinkuchi. Angle, BFF. Non-canon. Original character.]

Yuki, who looked less like a real person and more like a Picasso painting as the story progressed and the word “angel” continued to be misspelled, proceeded to jog Rachel’s memory about the last twenty-four hours, and then Inuyasha arrived with flowers and again professed his incomparable love. The lighting softened, making the scene look like something straight out of a soap opera.

"Reicheru I don't know what I would do without you. You're the only woman I can love."

"NO, SHE IS MINE." Denmark busted into the room with bigger, better flowers. "You rat, devil!"

He kept talking, but all three agents were too busy laughing at the melodrama to hear more.

The two men shouted at each other about who cared about Rachel the most, then stormed off, completely forgetting that they had come to be with her in her time of need. She was left with Yuki.

"They don't get it, I love both of them but my heart can only contain one man in my life." She looked at Yuki, teary-eyed.

“Hey, remember that bit about how Denmark was her only love? She doesn’t. Great consistency here.” Jenni rolled her eyes.

Nume nodded. “Memory of a raisin, this one.”

"Hun, there's something that you need to know," Yuki put her hand on Rei's stomach, "you are carrying Inuyasha's child."

"I'm...the mother of his child?"

The chapter ended on that note. Inexplicably, music began to play. The agents looked around for a source, in the room and in the Words, but found none.

“Is that . . . ?” Ilraen began.

“The second ending theme of InuYasha.”^[1] Nume nodded. “Damned if I know why it’s playing, though.”

“Come on, it’s obvious,” Jenni said. “We just got a dramatic, cliffhanger-y plot revelation right as the chapter ended. That’s classic anime stuff. The world is just trying to accommodate. Roll end credits, y’know?” She hummed along.

“Christ. I hope this isn’t going to be an ongoing thing. And stop that!”

Without ceasing, she stuck her tongue out.

The next chapter jolted everyone back to Rachel’s house, where she was holding a baby shower with Yuki, Korra, a bunch of InuYasha characters, and “Joken,” who looked like the green imp yōkai Jaken, but more funny.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Nume growled. “Isn’t there supposed to be all this drama about Rachel’s father and Kagome being kidnapped by Sesshomaru? Who the hell has time for a cutesy party like this?”

Ilraen nodded. “I would think both she and Inuyasha would be more upset, given their respective feelings for Denmark and Kagome. They are both betraying people they care about for this frivolity.” His fingers twitched at his side.

“Steady, rookie. We don’t want another episode.”

“I am fine, but thank you.”

DING DONG, the doorbell rang and Inuyasha answered it. It was Rin and Shippo, they were 18 and in love with each other. Rin wore a red-rose dress and Shippo wore her cute yellow dress. Every since Sesshomaru turned evil Rin decided she'd rather be in love with a girl than him so she started dating Shippo.

“Wait a minute,” Jenni said. “I know it’s hard to tell, but isn’t Shippo a young boy? I’m pretty sure.”

“Yeah, he is—but he’s also a shapeshifter, so I suppose this is somewhat plausible. However, when was Sesshomaru ever not evil?” Nume shook his head. “Oh well, who cares about the canon, right? Why pay attention to detail when you can just make up whatever the hell you want?”

"I can still feel the power within you" Korra rubbed Rei's belly, "this baby is growing stonger every day and I want to be it's godmother."

Jenni’s brows contracted in confusion, then her eyes went wide. She pointed at Korra and declared, “Shenanigans! This is clearly indicating some kind of relationship between ‘the power’ and the baby, but Korra first felt that power before Rachel slept with Inuyasha!”

“Hmm. Clever plot twist, or timeline failure? I’m gonna guess the latter.” Nume added to the ever-growing charge list.

“On the other hand, we only have Yuki’s word for it that Rachel is pregnant with Inuyasha’s child,” Ilraen said. “Perhaps she was mistaken, and Denmark is the father.”

“Maybe.” Jenni eyed the scene suspiciously.

They had gone on to opening presents. Rachel declared that she was going to name the baby Tenshikuzu, or “Angel Dust,” after its two angelic godmothers, Yuki and Korra. The agents agreed that this was a terrible idea.

“That’s not a name, that’s a designer drug,” was Nume’s comment.

Nonetheless, the characters were thrilled.

"Ohhh thank youuuu!" Korra clapped her hands together and hugged Reicheru.

"Oh yes, thank you." Yuki smiled, her beautiful smile like fresh new snow.

“Lawl, because yuki means ‘snow’,” said Jenni. “Ell-oh-ell, so clever.”

Suddenly Sesshomaru burst through the window and kidnapped Yuki.

As the agents looked on, the window exploded, showering the room with glass. Nobody moved. Sesshomaru landed on the other side and grabbed Yuki. Still nobody moved. It was as though time had stopped. Sesshomaru leaped back out the window and took off with Yuki. Finally, Rachel reacted.

"Noooo!" Screamed Reicheru, "you will never hurt me again, you will have to fight me." She picked up a knife and threw it at Sesshomaru, barely scraping his cheeck.

This was an impressive feat, since he had already successfully kidnapped Yuki and was no longer there. The agents nodded to each other in awe. Or possibly disgust.

"KILL ALL OF THEM!" Suddenly the room went black and everyone screamed in terror. Black mist surrounded them all and a terrible creature started slaughtering people.
When the mist went away the only person that was dead was Joken.

“Oh my, what a slaughter,” Nume deadpanned. “My goodness, the single tiny corpse has sure piled up. Gosh, whatever shall we do with all of the one body?”

It turned out that the solution was for Rachel to bloodbend Joken back to life.

She concentrated her enegery on the blood on the floor and bended it back into his body, bringing him back to life. "I didn't know I could do this." she said.

"It's your gift," Korra explained, "you can bring the dead back to life. No one else can do that, it's very rare and prized.

“It is also not at all how bloodbending works,” Ilraen complained. “Bending cannot bring back someone who has already died.”

“We don’t have to know the canon to know that’s stupid,” Jenni said. “If his heart stopped beating, just putting the blood back into his corpse isn’t going to help. You’d have to make sure the wounds close, then restart his heart, and hope he hasn’t suffered brain death in the meantime.”

Nume nodded. “Not to mention that that can’t be sanitary. It was all over the floor, for Christ’s sake.” He added “magical Mary Sue powers” to the charge list.

The only positive development was that Rachel decided that, with her powers, she could cure Kagome of the curse of being a vampire, so she and Inuyasha finally resolved to mount a rescue. For some reason, Rin and girl!Shippo went with them. The scene shifted, and when it rematerialized . . .

Inuyasha and Reicheru were taking the train to the place where Sesshomaru was hiding.

The three agents found themselves at the front end of a train car, opposite from the characters, crammed into a seat meant for two.

Nume, unhappily squished in the middle, exploded to his feet. “They could have just taken a train there this whole time? What the fuck?”

Jenni just laughed. “Next stop, Sesshomaru’s Hideout! Sesshomaru’s Hideout will be next! Doors open on the left at Sesshomaru’s Hideout!”

In frustration, Nume threw his notepad to the floor with a satisfying slap. “Worst. Hideout. Ever.” He climbed over Ilraen’s legs to get to the seat across the aisle. A moment later, he retrieved his notepad with a warning glower at the other two.

Shippo and Rin were cuddling on the backsheat like hormeonal teenagers.
The tracks on the train screached on the metal train tracks. It was a dark powerful day. The clouds loomed with the hint of everlasting doom and hate.
There was a sharp pain in Reicheru's lushious chest "something doesn't feel right," she said

“Does anyone else get the sense that something bad is going to happen?” Ilraen asked dryly.

Jenni grinned. “Nah, that would be contrived and obvious. Rachel’s probably just having a bit of heartburn. It can happen during pregnancy.”

Inuyasha assured Rachel that nothing bad could possibly happen. He loved her, and that plus the “muscular, sexy arm” he put around her was all she needed to be safe.

Everything promptly went to hell.

The train stopped and the people started screaming in terror! Blood sprayed onto the seats and Rin.

For the second time in one mission, the agents were assaulted with an arterial hosing. All the seat backs between them and the characters protected their bodies, but that just meant they took it in the face.

“For the love of god!” Nume had his teeth clenched tight; otherwise he would have been shouting. He whipped off his glasses and attempted to wipe the spatter off on his jacket. “No wonder it’s called ‘Blood Raining Night’!” His efforts couldn’t clean the lenses, only hopelessly smudge them, so he tucked them into his breast pocket for safekeeping.

“Where did that even come from? I didn’t see anyone get hurt, did you?” Jenni checked the Words and found nothing. She looked to Ilraen to see how he was holding up.

He was pale in contrast with the dark red drops across his face, but looked more resolute than anything else. He shook his head slowly; he hadn’t seen anything. “This is what you call nightmare fuel, is it not?”

“Definitely qualifies.” She put an arm around his shoulders and used her black silk tie to mop the worst of the blood from his cheeks and forehead. “Don’t worry, we’ll go back to the hot spring the next chance we get.”

Suddenly, there were gunshots from the back of the train. The agents covered their heads and hunkered down in their seats. The sounds of shots moved quickly closer, and the rear door to their car burst open.

"GAHAHAHAHA!" Alucard blew at Reicheru but she slapped it out of her way.

Rachel looked quite silly, slapping at the air.

With the gunfire over, Nume leaned into the aisle to squint at the newcomer. The agent’s farsighted eyes could make out the back end of the train car well enough, and he recognized Alucard’s dark red duster and broad-brimmed hat. “Oh, good, we’ve got another canon character. What the hell is he doing here?”

"Your beauty will not stop me from killing you. I have personal orders from Sesshomaru to do away with your ass." He held up a double barrel gun at her face.

The agent, his question unexpectedly answered, blinked. “All right, then. Thanks?”

“I do not think beauty is normally a deterrent to hired assassins,” Ilraen said. “Certainly none that I have met.”

“I’d just like to point out that he could justifiably be called an ass assassin, thanks to that bit of dialogue,” Jenni added.

Nume groaned, but no one could hear him over Rachel.

"Oh fuck you!" She screamed, "I'll kill you in an instant. Nya-on!"

"Don't do it, you're gregnant!"

Jenni sporfled into the back of her hand. “Okay, if she gives birth to Dr. House because of this, I’m going to have a conniption. Fair warning.”

Inuyasha held her tight as if he were to never let go of her again. "You can't die! Let me do it." He got on his knees and howeled into the air.

Since he was holding Rachel in a death-grip, he dragged her down to the floor with him. It didn’t look too comfortable, but at least by moving her face out of the line of fire he had done something useful, however unintentionally.

"My sister is going to come and she will gonna kick your ass!" he howeled again until the blood streamed from his eyes.

Inuyasha briefly morphed from an adult into an eight-year-old, threatening a bully with his bigger, tougher sibling, but changed back again when the ocular bleeding started.

Jenni and Nume exchanged a bemused look over Ilraen’s head, both wondering how Inuyasha could have burst enough capillaries to bleed from his eyes without popping them right out of his skull, but Jenni was fighting to keep from laughing aloud at how ridiculous the scene was getting and Nume was just annoyed.

The skys grew grey and the stars sparkled. She came riding on a white wolf and hoped into the train with her short brown hair.

Since the day had previously been described as dark with looming, ominous clouds, it had to get lighter to reach plain old grey. The stars may have been sparkling, but no one could actually see them; it was too bright and there were clouds in the way. Altogether, the visual effect was about as stunning as dryer lint.

In any case, the agents were more concerned with the arrival of Inuyasha’s sister. People riding wolves didn’t normally phase through train walls with the power of hope, carrying their own hair in hand.

It was Princess Monokoke (her english name is Mary Laceheart.)

“Swell,” Nume said. “Another canon.”

“Are you sure?” Jenni asked with a grin, one eyebrow raised. “I’ve heard of Princess Mononoke, but this appears to be her bald evil clone who also happens to be related to Inuyasha, if the Words are to be believed. And what about this ‘Mary Laceheart’ business? Is that for real?”

“It’s nothing I’ve ever heard of,” he answered. “Her actual name is San. Princess Mononoke is to San as Jungle Boy is to Mowgli.”

At the other end of the train car, Inuyasha ordered his uncanonical sister to kill Alucard, but Rachel told her not to.

"Why not?" Mary snaped.

Mary suddenly shot up in height and took on a sallow, hook-nosed visage, and dark stringy hair sprouted from her head at the speed of time-lapsed film.

"Because he's my cousin! We're both vampire-demons. We have the same mother."

“Okay, time out!” Nume cried. “What the hell is going on with these relations? I wasn’t going to say anything about Mary being Inuyasha’s sister, his family tree’s already frelled, but cousins with the same mother? Just . . . what?”

“I think we would need a diagram to sort it out,” Ilraen answered. “And perhaps a hobbit.”

Nume added the latest insults to canon and common sense to the charge list, holding his notebook at arm’s length so he could read what he was writing. “I’m getting it all down for the record. You can go over it to your heart’s content when we’re out of here.”

"Awww, trying to be nice to your older cousin? A little bit of family niceness? How stupid! I'm going to blow your sorry asshole." Alucard cursed and hissed.

“Ew,” went Nume, looking offended.

Jenni snickered. “Word choice, boys and girls. What is it with Alucard and blowing?”

“I think he is simply restating his intent to ‘do away with her ass’,” Ilraen offered.

“Yeah, but—” Jenni shook her head. “Never mind. The Ass Assassin strikes again!”

"We don't have to do this, Alu-chan. Just because you work for Sesshomaru doesn't mean you have to kill me. You used to love me. You used to love Yuki, too! Where is she!"

"I don't care for our family relations anymore, and Yuki is all fucked up and asleep. I did her alot, and now she's into much pain to fight."" he smiled.

“Ew!” It was Jenni’s turn to be offended. Implied brutal rape crossed even the most formidable of squick thresholds. “Also, incest! Or did she forget that being related to Rachel makes him related to Yuki, too?”

“NOT SO FAST!” Yuki suddenly came bursting through the window and jumped kicked him with Mary. “You asshole! You don’t have sex very well, anyway.”

Ilraen suddenly turned to the nurse. “Jenni, do you have any ointment on you?”

She blinked. “No . . . ?”

The disguised Andalite nodded ruefully. “Alas. Alucard will need some for that burn.”

“What b—?” Halfway to checking the Words, she heard Nume bark a laugh and realized what had just happened. “Ilraen!”

He grinned at her, dark eyes sparkling.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Okay, you got me good. Better than Yuki got Alucard, anyway.”

As she spoke, a previously unmentioned cliff sprouted up alongside the train tracks with a great shaking and rumbling. Yuki and Alucard were forced to bamf to the top, allowing Yuki to use her “angle wings”—definitely obtuse angles at their present extension—to smack the vampire over the edge. Then she bamfed back, “flipped her white hair and smiled.”

"Oh, I love to see them scream!" Mary smiled.

“I’m gonna go ahead and declare Bloody Mary here an unrecruitable OC,” Nume said. “We should probably get a CAD reading to be sure, though.” He grimaced. “Ilraen?”

He pointed the Character Analysis Device at Mary over the top of the train seats.

[Mary Laceheart, a.k.a. Princess Monokoke. Wolfcatdogsnapewolfcatworlf-demon. Non-canon. Bit character.]

Ilraen showed it to Nume, who nodded.

“Okay. We’ll grab her the first chance we get.”

It seemed things were quieting down—Rachel was slurping up the blood coating the inside of the train, sucking enough for two, as it were—when Yuki suddenly shouted:

"Reicheru, we've got a problem!" Yuki sounded scarred. "It's Korra! She's not who we think she is."

"Oh no, that's definately Korra. She can bend fire, water, earth, air, and light."

The agents exchanged baffled looks.

Jenni was the first to admit what they were all thinking. “That . . . was actually a funny line. I mean, as in a deliberate joke, which worked. I’d laugh if I weren’t in shock.”

Ilraen nodded.

Nume rolled a shoulder as if working out a twinge. “It always gives me the willies when a fic riffs itself.”

Yuki delivered the bad news: Korra was actually a bad guy!

"She's the one that kidnapped me, Rei-kun! She's the one that killed Joken. We need to get rid of her!" she looked beautiful as she cried tears of sorrow.

"KORRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" Reicheru screamed.

“KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” the agents yelled in response, Nume giving a particularly heartfelt performance, even tugging the front of his jacket open a bit. It spouted from the geekiest depths of their souls like water from a geyser. A seismic pressure was released, and for a moment they just grinned at each other.

It ended when the Hellsing end theme^[2] began to play. Nume faked a cough and looked at the floor, composing his face back into its usual frown and fixing his suit. “Chapter’s ending,” he grunted. “Good thing, too.” He nodded toward the characters.

Far from noticing the agents’ outburst as they should have, Rachel, Inuyasha, and Yuki were frozen in dramatic end-of-episode poses. Mary Laceheart was beginning to fade out; the wolf she had ridden onto the train was already gone, having vanished once it was no longer needed.

“Looks like she’s not coming back. This reality isn’t stable enough to support anything without someone paying attention to it,” Nume observed. “We should grab her now, before anything else happens. Ilraen?”

He nodded and pulled out the remote activator, but hesitated. “What about Alucard? Should we try to send him home?”

“Sure. Can you drop Mary on his location?”

“I believe so.” Ilraen called up a portal under Mary’s feet, and she fell through. A short recalibration later, and a new portal sprang up in the aisle for the agents.

The three of them crossed into the undefined space on the other side. The train tracks and cliff were to their backs; before them were Alucard, lying in a daze on the Generic Ground where he had fallen, and Mary, who gazed blankly at them through dark, Snape-like eyes. Both characters were blurry at the edges.

Jenni shuddered and hugged herself, shying away from Mary. “Ugh, talk about the willies. Can we make this quick?”

“Right.” Nume reached up to adjust his glasses, business-like, but of course he still wasn’t wearing them. He shook his head instead. “Ilraen, get a reading on Alucard—make sure it’s really him. I don’t think Mary’s going anywhere for the moment.”

Ilraen nodded and took out the Canon Analysis Device. It was heavier than its counterpart, and partially spot-welded to keep it in one piece.

[Alucard, vampire. / Integra would be jealous. / Return to sender.] It went black.

“Was that . . . haiku?” Jenni asked, eying the device.

Ilraen nodded, smiling affectionately at it. “Nume wanted to give it back, but I like it. I think its poetry is improving.”

“Tch, barely,” said Nume. “Still, I suppose it told us what we need to know. Neuralyze him and send him home, then we can—”

“Wait,” Jenni cut in. “Don’t you have to decontaminate him?”

Nume looked offended. “Who’s the disentangler here, me or you? He didn’t ingest anything he shouldn’t have, and I don’t see any non-canon gear, either.”

“But he did encounter a non-canon biological substance here, and I didn’t get the impression he took the time to wash up afterward, if you catch my drift.” She waited for the penny to drop.

Nume stared at her for a moment, then another, before he realized what she was talking about. He immediately flushed, horrified. “You don’t mean him and Yuki?”

She nodded.

“I . . . I don’t think my equipment was designed for that,” he said weakly, rubbing at the back of his neck.

Jenni abruptly clapped a hand over her mouth, evidently trying desperately not to laugh. The off-color jokes practically told themselves.

“Shut up, wiseass!” snapped Nume. “Only you, I swear to Christ. Why don’t you think about something useful instead, like how to fix this?”

“Well, if technology can’t save the day this time, there’s always the old-fashioned way,” she answered. “We were planning a trip back to the hot spring anyhow.”

Nume groaned, covering his face with both hands. “I hate this mission. Hate. It.”

Jenni patted him on the back. “Don’t worry, I’ll handle it.” She suppressed another laugh, then added, “Saving you from terrible, awful squick is what I’m here for, right?”

Sensing the need to get going before another fight broke out, Ilraen quickly charged Mary Laceheart with being the uncanonical sibling of a canon character, wrongfully attempting to impersonate a canon character, and failing at the latter, then restrained her while Nume injected her with about an ounce of concentrated potassium chloride solution. With his impaired vision, he had to try a few times to find a vein, but succeeded just before Nurse Jenni got fed up enough to step in. Mary flailed briefly, then went still. The agents agreed that leaving her in the wasteland of undescribed space around them was a good enough disposal method. With any luck, she’d be eaten by Generic Wolves.

Jenni cautiously lifted Alucard to his feet. He still seemed stunned by the beatdown he had received, but there was no telling when he might bounce back. Normally, he was damn near impossible to damage beyond his ability to recover. If Yuki had been a proper holy angel, it would have made some sense that she could provide him with a challenge, but since she was an angle, it was simply evidence for how out of character he was.

“Come on, loverboy,” Jenni murmured, guiding him through a portal to the spring. “You know you don’t want to go home like this. What would Integra say?”

The tall vampire stirred at the sound of her name. “Integra,” he mouthed. Then, on a sigh, “My true master.”

“That’s right. Now, let’s get you cleaned up. She’ll want her favorite weapon back untainted.”

“Speaking of which,” Nume asked from a few feet away, “is the water going to be safe after this?”

“Of course,” Jenni replied with a half-smile. “You see, the old water continuously flows away through natural fissures in the rock while new water comes up from the spring. See how the petals drift?”

“No.” Nume was pointedly Not Looking.

“Oh, shush. The point is, it’ll be perfectly fine in a few minutes, because I said so.”

And so it was. One pristine Alucard was neuralyzed and sent on his way, and the agents had their turn to clean up. Nume finally got his glasses back and sighed audibly in relief when he slipped them on. Ilraen lingered in the water with his eyes shut, submerged up to his nose. His blue hair slowly collected cherry petals, which Jenni picked out one by one from her seat on the side.

“Time’s up,” Nume said suddenly, startling the others. “We have at least one more canon to find and there’s lots of untangling to be done. Let’s go.”

“He just realized he was in danger of actually relaxing,” Jenni groused to Ilraen. “We can’t have that!” She gave his hair a final brush, freeing it of petals, and grabbed him a towel.

Ilraen nodded. “I think you are right.” He pushed himself out of the water.

“Quit whining. We’re here to do the Duty, not have a spa day. Get a move on.”

Ilraen dried off in a hurry and re-donned his yakuza outfit. Without looking ahead, he opened a portal to chapter nine. Nume hustled them through.

Part Two

They emerged inside a cave and were immediately assaulted by an author’s note:

(SRS VOILENT HENTAI WARNING PPLS!)
The men will find the 2nd sex scene especially sexy!
Nya-on!
-

Chapter 9 - Heavy Rain of Love

Sesshomaru and Korra were having a ball. They were drinking wine and looking into each other’s eyes. They were deepley in love and Korra was his dirty bitch mistress.
She was wearing a tight leather outfit with her breasts peeking out of it. Her hair was tied back and she spoke in a deep voice. She was picking grapes off of a grave vine and feeding it to him.

“What would you like, master.” she smiled at him and kissed him on his dick and he howeled with delight. “I am here to serve you and give you anything you want.”

“I want you to open your silky mocha thighs, bitch.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Nume breathed, his wide, mortified eyes transfixed by the scene before them. “I take it back. Fuck the Duty, I want to go home.”

Jenni firmly turned Ilraen around. “Don’t look, hon. Don’t even read the Words. Just a guess, but would this be the actual citrus fruit you wanted to avoid?”

“It would,” Nume said bitterly. “Intel failed to mention it was Korra and Sesshomaru doing . . . that. I just assumed . . . .” His self-preservation instincts finally kicked back in and he clamped his eyes shut. He also took off his glasses again and covered up with one hand for good measure.

All three flinched when a whip cracked and Korra cried out.

“What was that?” Ilraen asked nervously. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing you want to see. Sweet merciful Powers, Nume, if you had just told me . . . look, I won’t think less of you if you take Ilraen and go hide now. This is a bit much even by—oh, shards, why would you make one of those out of rock?”

“But—” Ilraen half-turned, just enough to catch the pained look on his friend’s face. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes, it’s just—” Her own gasp cut her off as a particularly awful description caused disturbingly semi-solid blood to spurt from an unfortunate part of Sesshomaru’s anatomy “like dhiarreah.” Jenni quickly rebounded and snarled, “Lube, dammit! If you must use a dildo made of rock, at least pair it with good lube, and things like that won’t happen!”

The worst part was that the characters carried on like nothing was wrong.

“Okay, we’re leaving now.” Nume reached blindly for his partner. “Come on, Ilraen, portal!”

“All right, all right!” A blue door to their last coordinates sprang up. He caught Nume’s hand and led him through. “We will meet again in the next chapter!” he called to Jenni before space-time sealed itself again.

Jenni was left to observe the remainder of the debacle that was chapter nine by herself. She felt abandoned for a moment, but that was just because of the suddenness of it. She took a deep breath, trying not to dwell too much on the warm, wet smells in the cave, and steeled herself for the ordeal.

Once she gave him an orgasm through the ass she rolled him over and sucked on his dick.

"Now you're being obedient." He said. He smiled and rubbed her boobs. He took his dick out of her mouth and stuck it between her titties. "Oh yes, I love this. Your beasts are so lovely!"

Korra’s breasts turned into hairy little monsters with beady eyes and cold, wet noses. Jenni’s mouth fell open, and she quickly jammed the back of her hand between her teeth to prevent any outbursts that might draw attention to herself.

Sesshomaru then decided to take Korra doggy-style. Literally. Very literally.

“Oh, now you remember he’s a dog-demon!” Jenni complained into her knuckles.

The two “pushed and pulled” until they finally achieved the mythical simultaneous orgasm. Then they cuddled.

Jenni allowed herself a brief sigh of relief. The characters were just talking now.

"Sesshomaru, do you really love me?" She looked into his eyes in search of an answer of love. They twinkled.

"Of course I do." But he was lieing. He only wanted her for sex and war. She didn't know though. He would never tell her in fear of her leaving.

"I've loved you the most, ever."

"But you made love to Kagome, too."

"Fuck Kagome, I love you. But her breasts are bigger and nicer than yourr- er, I mean -yours are so much better, is what I mean."

Jenni groaned. She didn’t know which was worse, the forced Freudian slip or the transparent cover-up. Even Korra saw through it, brainwashed though she was by the godawful writing.

Korra stormed into the dungeon where Kagome was. "You little bitch. I'm going to fuck you up, big time."

“Yes, please blame the prisoner who was victimized and not the asshole responsible,” Jenni growled. “How very clever.” She supposed it could be some form of Stockholm Syndrome on Korra’s part, but all the evidence pointed to the half-angle being a willing partner.

Kagome was all helplessly chained up and in bondage. "W-what are you going to do to me? Inuyashaaaaaaa!"

"Inuyasha isn't going to help you now, tard. He's knocked up his friend and doesn't give a damn about you."

"He...has?" tears comming from her heart rolled down her cheeks.

“Sadly, it’s true here,” Jenni muttered. She felt an upwelling of sympathy for Kagome, who was almost in-character.

That moment of clarity was why Korra’s sudden, brutal attack on the other girl made Jenni cry out and drop to her knees, empathic pain slamming up into her core like . . . well, like a rock dildo, to be precise. Though she was currently male on the outside, she felt very female on the inside. She gasped for breath, tears rolling down her cheeks, and couldn’t move until it was over.

Kagome should have died from the damage to her internal organs. However, the Words gave the following reassurance, if it could be called that:

Since Kagome is a vampire she can't die and so she lived on.

To add insult to injury, Korra concluded the torture by kissing Kagome on the mouth and taunting her nonsensically.

"there you go, bitch. Enjoy your damn orgasm." She walked out of the room.

It was more than the healer could stand. As soon as Korra was out of sight, Jenni struggled to her feet, green eyes furiously ablaze. She crossed to Kagome and grasped her chains, seeking a way to undo them—a weak point, a carelessly unlocked manacle, anything.

Kagome whimpered and flinched away as best she could. “No! Please don’t hurt me anymore!”

Jenni immediately stopped, overwhelmed with pity. “Oh, no, sweetie. I’m going to get you out of here and take you someplace safe. Look, I’m not one of them. See?”

The girl cautiously raised her head. “You—you’re not?”

“No. My name is Jenni and I want to help you.” She weighed the merits of asking Kagome where a key to her chains might be, but quickly concluded it would waste precious time. She was just going to have to cheat. Eying Kagome’s manacles, she leaned against local probability, and the cuffs popped open.

Kagome gasped as her arms and legs were suddenly freed and looked at the man in front of her with new awe. “How did . . . how did you . . . ?”

Jenni half-smiled. “You could call it magic, but that’s not important. I’d like to take you to a doctor now. Is it okay if I touch you? We’re going to teleport and I don’t want you to get disoriented.”

Kagome was silent for a moment, considering. Then she nodded. “Okay. Please get me out of here.” She held out both hands.

Jenni took them gently, but firmly. “On the count of three. One. Two. Three!”

The dungeon faded away, or maybe they did. Direction and position lost all meaning. Up was down, left was right, clockwise was widdershins. All around them, colors twined together and raveled apart, an ordered tangle of infinite strands ebbing and flowing in the tides of time. Agoraphobics and people who got motion sickness would instantly toss their cookies if it were possible to have a physical body in this non-place. Fortunately, it wasn’t.

In less time than it took to blink, Jenni and Kagome reappeared elsewhere, or maybe it was the white walls and gleaming metal cabinets and tables that appeared around them. Jenni still grasped Kagome’s hands, and she smiled reassuringly into the girl’s wide, dumbfounded eyes.

“It’s okay,” the nurse said. “We’re here. I’m going to get the doctor now. Just wait here, all right?”

Kagome nodded.

Jenni gave her hands a parting squeeze and headed for a door at the back of the laboratory. “Fizz R? Are you in? Tell me I got the right lab!”

She was about to knock, but the door opened. Behind it was a reedy man with wild gray hair, large glasses, and a pointed chin. He wore a lab coat that had probably been white in its youth, but had not aged quite as gracefully as its owner.

“Why, hello!” said Physician Fizz R the Bizarre with a chipper smile. “Have we met?”

“Not formally, and anyway I’m usually a woman,” Jenni replied. “I know you by reputation. I have a patient for you: Kagome from the InuYasha continuum. She’s been turned into a vampire and pretty badly abused, and though it seems she can’t die, I don’t think she has fast healing. Can you fix her?”

Fizz R took a look at Kagome over Jenni’s shoulder and renewed his grin. “Certainly! As a canon character, she can’t really be turned into another species, you understand, just made to think she is one. Can you tell me more about her injuries?”

Jenni described what Korra had done in a low voice, concluding with, “so, massive internal tearing, to say the least. I want you to send her to FicPsych when you’re done, Fizz. Tell them Jenni sent her. I’d stay and help, but I have to get back to the mission.” She grimaced.

Fizz R nodded. “Don’t worry, Miss Kagome is in good hands.”

Jenni went back to her. She took one of the girl’s hands again and said, “Kagome, I have to go now, but this is Doctor Fizz, and—”

“Physician Fizz,” he called, and waved cheerfully.

Jenni rolled her eyes, thankful that he left off his full name. “Physician Fizz will take good care of you, and then you’ll be with some of my friends until I can come back. I promise no one will hurt you here, okay?”

“Okay.” Kagome nodded. (Jenni suspected she was too much in shock to protest anything at this point.) Abruptly, though, she clasped the nurse’s forearm with her free hand. “Jenni? Can you save Inuyasha, too? I . . . I don’t believe Korra that he forgot about me! I don’t! If he couldn’t rescue me, something must be terribly wrong. Please help him?” Tears welled in her dark eyes—regular salt tears, produced in the lachrymal glands.

Jenni smiled. “Definitely. I promise.”

She left Kagome in the care of the Disturbing Acts of Violence Department’s medical miracle man and transported herself back to “Blood Raining Night,” homing in on Ilraen and Nume’s position. She could always find people she knew in the Void.

The two of them, after stopping briefly at the hot spring to chug some Bleepka and collect their wits, had proceeded to chapter ten, which took place at “Akuma No Uta” high school. The name roughly translated to “Song of the Devil” and, had the agents but known it, was also the name of a Japanese experimental rock song.^[3] They were currently sitting in plastic chairs at a Generic Cafeteria Table, as far as they could get from the busiest parts of the room while still keeping an eye on their target. Ilraen had a lunch tray in front of him, empty but for spots of marinara and mashed potatoes clinging to the compartment edges.

“You felt the need to sample cafeteria food, Ilraen? Really?” said an amused man’s voice from behind them.

They both jumped and spun around, startled.

Ilraen grinned in recognition. “Jenni! We were beginning to wonder what was keeping you.”

Nume just glowered.

Jenni’s expression clouded over. “I have to ask: Did you guys know? About Kagome?”

“What about her?” Nume grumbled. “Be specific—but not too specific!”

Ilraen, with far more perception, frowned in concern. “Jenni, did something bad happen?”

She sighed. “You didn’t know,” she concluded. “I could see Intel figuring they’d seen enough after the BDSM and bestiality. At least all that was consensual!”

“Whoa, we had a non-con situation?” Nume sat up straighter.

“We had violation with a foreign object, in fact.”

Ilraen was ninety percent sure this called for horror. “You mean . . . someone hurt her?”

Nume was one hundred and eleven percent sure. His expression went slack. “I was not aware of that.”

“All right. How about we not talk about it anymore?” Jenni said wearily. “Why don’t you two catch me up instead? For starters, why are we in a school?”

That was fine by Nume. He cocked his head at their surroundings. “You know those AUs where all the characters are in high school? It’s like that. Only more stupid. Unbelievable, I know, but that’s badfic for you.”

“You see,” Ilraen added, deadpan, “they were unable to locate Sesshomaru’s secret cave—”

“Despite having a goddamn train going there,” Nume interjected.

“—so they had no choice but to resume life as normal.”

Jenni felt her heart race as a fresh surge of testosterone-amped anger shot through her. “You mean they just gave up on the rescue? Whoops-a-daisy, back to school, just like that?”

Nume nodded. “Just like that. This stupid Sue really knows how to let the air out of a plot.”

“Ah, but wait—there is a very important singing contest today,” Ilraen said. “I am certain we will be captivated by this dramatic raising of the stakes. Who will win? It is a mystery.”

“Ugh.” Jenni sank into a chair and folded her arms. She looked ready to explode, but after a moment, she simply said, “I hate singing Sues. They give all singers a bad name. I’ve been through enough litmus tests to know.”

Nume would have said something, but a clatter and shout from Rachel’s table drew all three agents’ attention. A vague, blurry-looking girl had tripped and accidentally dumped her lunch all over Rachel.

Through the spaghetti and mashed potatoes Rei could see who it was. It was Lucy.

"Hey!" Reicheru screamed, "whach where your going you red haired bimbo."

“Just charming,” Jenni said. “No question why anyone loves her, no siree. Do we know who Lucy is?”

“Not yet,” Nume answered. “She just got here.”

"To be honest I'm not very sorry." Lucy graciously picked up her tray. "You don't want to mess with me, Rei. I'm a blood bender too, and a better one than you. And I can use my horns to ram you like a bull if I want."

"Yeah but you lost your powers." Reicheru smirked. "You cant use your fancy invisible hands anymore not after what I did to you."

The taunt sent Lucy running from the room in tears, “her red hair flowing in the wind like silky blood,” but with Rachel’s line she suddenly resolved as though coming into focus: her horns were bone-white and shaped like cat ears, and her eyes were the same color as her hair.

Nume’s eyebrows shot up in recognition. “Oh. That Lucy. Look alive, folks, we’ve got our sixth canon here.”

Ilraen perked up. “Does that mean we are almost done?”

“Christ, I hope so. Now shush, I wanna hear what charge-worthy things Rachel did to her.”

"She bit her and turned her into a vampire, after seducing her of course." Yuki continued, "now that she's undead she can't use her four arm soles to kill people. Life really sucks for her now."

"No way! Rei is this true?" Minna gasped.

"Yeah..." Reicheru pulled the spaghetti off her pregnant belly. "She had it comming to her. Everyone wants her dead anyway."

“I reiterate: charming,” Jenni said, glaring daggers at the Sue. “Is anyone not a rapey vampire in this anymore?”

Nume nodded. “I wonder what Rachel has against Lucy, anyway. I mean, in canon she’s not exactly a beloved saint, but . . . it’s complicated. She’s a complex character, and she doesn’t deserve this.” He jotted some notes down in the charge list.

The school bell rang, and the agents made their way to the back of a classroom. The student body “flooded in like a pool of blood,” leaving red stains on the floor in their wake.

Ilraen gritted his teeth. “I am getting extremely sick of these blood similes,” he muttered.

“Hear hear,” Nume replied.

The class session was incredibly banal, though Rachel somehow managed to solve the impossible non-equation of 45(x-90)/3 in less than five seconds. Her answer, -1335x, was sure to set any actual mathematicians to scratching their heads for days.

The chapter culminated with the revelation that Rachel’s friend Minna had signed her up for the singing contest, forcing her to participate even though she claimed she didn’t want to.

“Who’s Minna, by the way?” Jenni asked. “Not a canon?”

“Right,” Nume said. “At least, I don’t recognize her—not that there’s much to go on, since she hasn’t been described at all. She’s just a crony for Rachel.”

“Great, because she absolutely needs more people to tell her how perfect she is.”

The next chapter picked up right where the last one left off, so there wasn’t much in the way of a transition—it was akin to a mid-episode commercial break, only instead of These Messages, there was an author’s note.

listen, if you guys are too immature 2 handle the sexy parts of my story then you should just not read it, k?

Nume reflexively shot Jenni a warning look, but was surprised to see white fury on her face.

you guys commenting on chapter 9 should stop pointing fingers at me and telling me there's something wrong with me, I write bad, and those other things.
kthanx :/

A forced smirk thinned her lips. “Nume, can you charge for not knowing the difference between ‘Your Kink Is Not My Kink’ and ‘trying to sell horribly written torture as “sexy” and then getting tetchy when people call you on it’?”

“Your call, really,” he said cautiously. “We weren’t there—and thank Christ for that.”

“Do it, then. That so-called ‘second sex scene’ the guys were supposed to enjoy—well, it’s not entirely clear what she meant by that—but none of the implications are any good. Anyway, we can all cheerfully resent being called immature for thinking the writing sucks.”

“I’ll drink to that.” He took the opportunity to do so.

Ilraen stirred abruptly, alerted by movement in the classroom. “Rachel is leaving.” He made a face. “The teacher has let her out early so she can go practice for the contest.”

Nume coughed, looked at the Words, and mirrored his partner’s look of disgust. “Oh, gag me. What teacher does that?”

The agents followed Rachel into the corridor, where she again ran into Lucy. The two faced off “like two cowboys in the old west getting ready to fight each other to the death” and engaged in a catty fight about who had the biggest psychological problems. The agents, who had already made up their minds on that score, stayed well clear of it and resumed their conversation.

“We already have more than enough charges to take her down, for what it’s worth,” Nume told Jenni, flicking through a few red-covered pages in his notebook to demonstrate. “The story’s a poorly explained, implausible mess, and it definitely needs to be untangled. The only problem is there’s no sign that all the canons and OCs are going to conveniently get together in one place for us. I’m not sure what’s the best way to tackle it yet. I do not relish the prospect of tracking down all bajillion characters individually.”

“If we are lucky,” Ilraen said, “we will at least not need to worry about the original characters. This world is clearly bound to Rachel’s will, so it may cease to exist as soon as she is gone, taking anything left inside to oblivion with it.”

“True. So, just half a bajillion, then, minus Alucard.”

“And Kagome,” Jenni murmured.

The other two looked at her.

“I rescued her already,” she admitted. “She needed DAVD Medical. She’s probably in FicPsych by now.”

Ilraen furrowed his brow. “But you didn’t have a remote activator. How?”

“You cheated,” Nume stated, folding his arms and looking down over the top of his glasses.

“Well, what was I supposed to do, leave her there to get raped and tortured more?” she shot back. “I think not!”

He put up a hand. “Of course not! I’m just saying, you have a massive savior complex and semi-phenomenal, nearly cosmic powers. They’re going to put you through that glitter dialysis thing if you don’t watch it.”

“I always watch it,” she said darkly. “And there were extenuating circumstances.”

“I know. I don’t know if they do, that’s all. But look, this bit is wrapping up.” He nodded toward Lucy.

She walked away, defeated. She was no match for Reicheru and her strong words of passion and truth.

"You can't beat me, I have a heart stronger than anyone's will to eat."

The agents exchanged confused looks as they followed Rachel to her next destination.

“I think she is trying to say her willpower is stronger than the human drive to eat,” Ilraen suggested. As an Andalite who occasionally enjoyed the use of a human mouth, he was well-acquainted with the power of said drive.

“No, she’s clearly saying her heart muscle is so tough that it’ll break the teeth of anyone who tries to eat it, followed shortly by their will to keep chewing,” Nume said.

“I dunno,” Jenni said, shaking her head. “Either way, I’ve known some pretty hungry dudes. A very close friend of mine was cursed with an insatiable ravening for live meat once. Not pretty.”

“Was he turned into a zombie?” Ilraen wondered.

“No, that was the worst part—he was cognizant the whole time and couldn’t do anything about it.”

“How awful!”

They passed through a set of doors.

“Now, hush, you two,” Nume said in a voice rife with sarcasm. “This the library.”

Reicheru was sitting at the library reading a book and practicing singing. She could feel the baby inside of her growing stronger and getting bigger.

More confused looks ensued. The multitasking and violation of library protocol were annoying enough, but the way her abdomen swelled before their eyes was especially off-putting.

“I thought she looked a bit too far along,” Jenni said. “It’s been, what, a few days since Inuyasha knocked her up? We’ve definitely got an unnatural gestation here. Might have to do something about that kid.”

“I have a policy against cosseting Sue-spawn,” Nume warned her. “Just because it’s tiny doesn’t mean it isn’t evil.”

She rounded on him, offended for her own adopted son’s sake. “Guilty until proven innocent, is that it?”

Ilraen also frowned at his partner. “I agree with Jenni. That seems harsh.”

“Give me a break. I’m not saying terminate it on sight, just that we shouldn’t automatically assume it deserves saving, either,” he said.

The conversation was cut short by a scream from Rachel, who had suddenly slipped into complete meltdown mode. The fight with Lucy had evidently dredged up her angsty past.

"WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME DADDY! WHY DON'T YOU LOVE ME?" it was like the world fell on its head and she was transported back into time. There she was sitting there with her fatter as a little girl.

“Ah, the old ‘I was chubby as a kid!’ sympathy ploy,” Nume observed. “Are we supposed to cry now?”

“Nume, I believe it was a typo of—”

“I know. Shush.”

Jenni squinted at the scene playing out before them. “What is he doing?”

A shadowy, masculine figure, presumably Rachel’s father, had squatted down and appeared to be straining hard. To the agents’ disgust, a younger version of Rachel emerged in a gooey blob.

"You stupid asshole," he wa shitting her intensly onto the floor. Blood was on her face and she couldn't get up,

“Oh, ew!” Nume visibly gagged. “Bad typo! Bad, bad typo!”

Ilraen shook his head in disbelief. “Why do they never check their work? So many of these offenses could be avoided.”

“He could have at least done it outside,” Jenni remarked.

"NO, I DON'T WANT TO REMEMBER!" she cried.

Although Nume could have made several scathing responses to that, he wasn’t allowed the time to speak. The scene jolted hard, and the agents were forced into uncomfortable auditorium seats back in the present. Oddly, the seats were arranged two by two in a series of what looked like crow’s nests, raised slightly from the floor. Nume and Jenni were together in one, Ilraen had one to himself.

It was the singing contest and everyone was sitting and waiting for the performers to perform. Students and teatchers were sitting in the crows waiting for the contest to begin.

The performances began shortly thereafter. The agents, none of them big pop music fans, didn’t recognize any of the songs.

“Ow,” Nume grumbled, shifting awkwardly. “I think I glanced off an armrest.”

Jenni raised an eyebrow and smiled at him. “You want me to look at it?” she teased.

“No.”

The lack-of-talent contest wore on, and Nume uncapped his Bleepka flask and passed it around. That made the experience almost enjoyable as a respite from worse insults to their senses, but it was not to last: finally, it was Rachel’s turn to sing. She got on stage and served up some mealy-mouthed platitudes about how it wasn’t her idea to be there, to which the audience responded with forced laughter; apparently they weren’t buying it, either.

"I just wanted to say- I...uh..." her eyes went off into the distance and she saw her father hitting her around like a plastic ball that children play with again. "I..."

“Jesus Christ, get on with it,” Nume muttered. “We know you have daddy issues. We don’t care.”

“At least she finally remembered that part of the plot,” Jenni said. “We last heard about her father, what, five chapters ago? Six?”

“If only she could keep track of more than one thing at a time,” said Ilraen, “this might be a better story.”

“Uh-oh, she’s heading for another meltdown,” Nume warned.

Lost in another flashback, Rachel started babbling about her father again, on stage, in front of everyone. It was clearly meant to be tragic and elicit sympathy, but in reality it was melodramatic and elicited snickers.

"No daddy! No, no! Stop! I didn't mean to kill her! Daddy!-da"

Suddenly. A song from her heart came out through her lungs in a melodic tone. She sang Jar of Hearts by Christina Perri.^[4]

“What,” said Nume.

Jenni and Ilraen looked at each other and shrugged.

A couple minutes later, Jenni said, “I . . . I guess the lyrics fit? Sorta? Pretty sure this is about an ex-lover, though, not a father figure. I think there are actual rules against modern musicians singing about anything besides romance.”

“I do not think this song supports the intense mood she seems to have wanted,” Ilraen said. “It is too slow.”

“Definitely suffers from a lack of accompaniment,” Jenni agreed.

And yet, the faceless audience ate it up.

The song finnished and everybody clapped and gave her a standing obvation. "Thank you." She blushed.

"I think we know who the ewienner is, Reicheru Ketsue-" SPLASH. Blood oozed out of Reicheru because Lucy blood bended her.

“Whoa, what?” Jenni lurched forward in her seat.

The others also sat up straighter.

"So goodbye to your baby, Reicheru. I just gave you an aborition with my mind!" Lucy smirked.

“WHAT?” She was on her feet now, fists balled at her sides.

Nume reached over and grabbed her wrist, yanking her down again. “Shut up,” he hissed, “you’ll draw their attention!”

She glared at him. The lights from the stage glinted eerily off her eyes, making them seem almost to glow. “She gave her an ‘aborition’. With her mind,” she growled. “An aborition.”

“I know.” He wore a sour expression, mildly disconcerted and irritated with her for starting on the enraged ranting before he could. “Just keep it together. Look, the chapter’s almost over anyway. Ilraen, please get us out of here.”

Ilraen regarded them uncertainly for a moment without moving. “I suppose now is a bad time to ask exactly what just happened?”

“Yes. Portal now, questions later.”

He nodded and activated a portal between their crow’s nests. It took them ahead to the next scene, which was back in Rachel’s house. Earlier, Denmark and Inuyasha had spontaneously appeared to argue over who got to take her home. Denmark had won, and he and Rachel had had some cutesy dialogue about how they still loved each other and wanted things to be like they were before. Now, Rachel was in bed, recovering, and Korra had appeared to try and make amends. Despite her explanation that she was part demon as well as part angel (spelled right for once) and unable to control herself when her demonic side came out, Rachel was not immediately receptive to her overtures.

"WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU CAN"T CONTROL YOURSELF? You killed someone and you've been lieing to us this whole time!" Reicheru slapped down on her food tray and it went flying into Korra's face.

The agents sat down and leaned against the wall, completely unnoticed thanks to the argument taking place.

“Ugh,” Jenni groaned, hugging her drawn-up legs and resting her head on her knees.

“Ugh,” Nume agreed. “But at least we don’t have to worry about the spawn anymore.”

“So . . . ” Ilraen started. “So, Lucy killed Rachel’s baby?”

Jenni nodded.

The younger agent’s face turned stony. “I see.” A moment later, “I am not certain whether to feel sorry for her or not.”

“Don’t,” Nume told him. “It’s an underhanded, manipulative attempt to emotionally blackmail the audience into giving her sympathy she doesn’t deserve. You’re not a terrible person for not falling for it.”

He’d managed to say the right thing, and Ilraen relaxed a little.

Jenni suddenly raised her head. “I’m sorry, are those two actually making up right now?”

Korra nodded. "When I'm an angle I'm really good, but when Im a demon Im really bad. So bad it hurts. I wake up and I'm angryw ith myself."

"I wish I could help you, Korra." Reicheru hesitated.

"You can, Reicheru. do what you were born to do...destroy Sesshomaru and all even. Hey i'm really sorry about the confusion. I'm going to take you out for dinner sometime, kay? We owns a traditional mexican restaraunt."

“Why would Korra’s family own a Mexican restaurant? Korra is not Mexican,” Ilraen said flatly.

“No, but seriously,” Nume said. He turned to Jenni. “Hey, guess what? I’m a chronic jerkass with issues relating emotionally to others, but only because there’s an eeevil spirit living inside me, and anytime I do something bad it’s actually him, not me. You buy that, right?”

“Actually, that sounds to me like a convenient excuse not to be responsible for your actions and their consequences,” she replied, raising an eyebrow at him.

“So you don’t want to cure me by going on an epic quest to destroy all evil? Or ‘all even’?”

The barest hint of a smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. “Nah, pass. I’d have to become an overpowered vampire-cat-thing with no grasp of the English language and also not mind that you recently betrayed me and brutalized a friend of mine. No can do.”

Sadly, the actual conversation was far less logical.

Reicheru smiled and shrugged. "sounds great, I'll come and eat with you at your restaurant sometime soon. Bye."

"Goodbyeee~!" Korra smiled and gave Rei a big hug.

“They are actually making up right now,” Ilraen echoed. “This makes no sense.”

“My god, it’s the end of the chapter, too,” said Nume. “Is it just me, or have these things somehow gotten shorter?”

“We did skip half of this one,” his partner answered. “On the positive side, there was no ending music.”

The next chapter picked up with Rachel getting dressed for her girls’ night out with Korra.

she laughed as she put on her black silk kimono. She has her hair tied up in a red ribbon, like she does for the Yakuza. A red obi with neon butterflies on it.

“Ah, ow!” The agents winced and shielded their eyes from the horrifically clashing sash.

Rachel informed Denmark of where she was going. His reply was . . . surprising, to say the least.

"Dont eat anything to spicy, Rei. You don't want to burn the baby!"

Three pairs of eyes went cold.

“Tell me I did not just hear that,” Jenni said.

“I don’t want to believe it,” Nume said. He turned to his partner. “Ilraen, you’re the one who always wants to give these cretins the benefit of the doubt. What do you think?”

The Andalite shook his head. “I cannot think of anything else he might mean. Let us wait and see if more evidence turns up.”

They stalked Rachel to Les Tacos, which was, according to an in-text author’s note, “a very hip and vibe place” despite its stupid name. The Sue and Korra took seats at a booth and started chatting about the delightful topic of racism. The agents slipped into the next booth over to eavesdrop, Jenni in one seat, Nume and Ilraen in the other.

"It's really hard being mexican". Korra sighed.

“Korra is not Mexican!” an irritated voice seemed to say, swiftly muffled as though a hand had been forced over the speaker’s mouth.

"there's a lot of racist people around and I get very tired of it. Sometimes I just want to punch them." she giggled and smiled.

"Don't worry," Reicheru stuck a nacho into her mouth, "I'll beat the shit out of anyone that messes with you."

"Aha!" Korra took Rei's hands, "you shouldn't be doing that you have a baby on board your tummy."

“NO!” cried two other voices, followed by a lone “God damn it!” and then a “Shhh!”

"Agh fuck the baby. I forgot about that."

There was clatter and a thud as a man with a black braid and a nice black suit attempted to launch himself up and out of a booth only to be hauled down on top of the table by his companions. Silverware and water glasses went skittering in all directions.

“Let me up!” Jenni raved, long past caring about secrecy. “I need to give that ignorant little fool a stern lesson about the female reproductive system!”

"Shut up dickface or I'll stuff your sorry ass full of nachos." Reicheru's eyes turned red and her cat demon nearly came out.

"That's enough Rei-Chan!" Korra sweated. "Sir, mind your own business."

“You shut up, Sue!” Nume shouted back. “We’re handling this!” So saying, he crammed a cloth napkin into Jenni’s mouth.

"YOU-" Reicheru stood up but Korra made her sit down.

"Just ignore him, Reiche." Korra spoke softly like a breeze.

Astonishingly, the restaurant quieted down and went back to normal.

Jenni glared daggers at Nume, who only glared back. Ilraen kept a firm pressure on her shoulders, keeping her pinned to the table.

Finally, she went limp, heaving an exasperated sigh through her nose.

Nume nodded for Ilraen to let her go and pulled the soggy napkin from her mouth. “You’re done, then?”

“Yeah.” She sat up and moved back to her seat, working her mouth to generate enough spit to wash the dry taste of bleached linen away. “I’m sorry. I just—this is painfully, offensively stupid. Isn’t still being pregnant after an abortion enough of a reality dysfunction? Can’t we end it now?”

“I’d like to,” he said, tapping irritably on the tabletop. “I really would—believe me, I’m as pissed about the medical fail as you are. But how?”

“I could morph,” Ilraen suggested. “Or just appear as myself. That might distract them long enough for you to capture them, and then we can—”

“Hold on,” said Jenni. “You remember how Korra was going on about ‘the power within’ earlier? And how it’s related to this baby?”

The other two looked at each other.

Nume nodded slowly. “Do you think the story remembers?”

“Yeah.” Her eyes narrowed. “It looks like we’re about to find out what that was all about.”

Ilraen looked at the Words and gasped. “She’s going into labor! Now!”

There was a cry from the next table.

"Oh god!" she said, "it really hurts. God, what's happening?"

"I'm using my angelic powers, I can sense you're giving birth!"

“Come on!” Jenni cried, jumping up from her seat and moving around for a better view.

“Oh hell no, I’m not watching this.” Nume slouched down as far as he could get without actually sliding under the table. “Call me when it’s over!”

She glanced at the Words. “She’s in labor for two hours. Come on, we’ll skip it.”

“Jesus. Fine.”

He and Ilraen got up, and Ilraen portaled them ahead. Nume promptly faced away from the action, arms crossed and head down.

“What do you expect to see?” Ilraen wondered, leaning close to Jenni’s ear to be heard over Rachel’s screams.

“I don’t know,” she responded in like manner. “I can feel something, though—a disturbance in the Force, if you will. Look!”

Reicheru pushed as hard as she could and Korra encouraged her through the whole thing. The baby's head came out first and then Korra pulled her out.

"Reicheru" Korra said, "its a-" A BRIGHT CRIMSON LIGHT SHONE FROM THE BABY AND THE LIGHTS WENT OUT.

Nume saw his shadow thrown out in front of him for an instant, then heard a series of dull thuds all around the restaurant. All the customers had collapsed, and several had fallen out of their seats. “Guys, what the hell just happened?”

No response.

He looked over his shoulder as far as he could without actually turning. “Ilraen? Jenni?”

No good. He had to turn around.

Floating in the air was a young naked girl with long green hair.
She had kind face and a beautiful smile. Her cheeks were rosey and her eyes twinkled. She had brown furry ears comming out of her head and two wigs on her back.

"Oka-San," spoke the little girl "I am Elaine your daughter, this is my true form. Thank you for carrying me all this time. A part of me lie kidden in you and in Inuyasha. When you two came together you made me. For thousands of years I have lied dormant within people waiting for the perfect match to find each other."

The agent retched a little, but he had other concerns: his partner and the nurse were unconscious on the floor, as was Korra, just like the customers. Nume supposed that anyone who had been looking at the initial burst of light had been affected. He knelt down beside Ilraen and gave him a little shake.

“Ilraen?”

He saw that his partner was still breathing, and his eyes were open, but devoid of awareness. Same with Jenni. He was reminded of the neuralyzer trance, though that didn’t normally disrupt motor control so completely. He didn’t know what to do for them, so he turned back to the fic.

"Does that mean I should marry Inuyasha?" Reicheru said. Her golden eyes sparkled and a tear fell off her face.

“Priorities, Rachel! Come on,” Nume groused to himself.

"Oka-San, I can't tell you anymore about your life. You need to figure things out for yourself. I have created you and in return you created me. Before I leave, I shall grant you one withs."

"I dont' know what to wish for! Who are you?" her eyes burned.

"I am god. You are the mother of god."

Nume’s jaw dropped, but only for an instant. Then he was on his feet, bellowing at the top of his lungs: “Bullshit!”

Rachel and Elaine both looked at him, startled.

Now he’d done it. A Mary Sue—Mary, oh the irony—and her divine spawn had him in their sights, and here he was with his backup passed out on the floor. There was only one thing to do.

“Yeah, sorry to ruin the moment, but no. Rachel. In the name of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum, I charge you with the Sueiest of Sue moments I’ve ever had the displeasure to witness. Mother of God? Are you kidding? You have to be so much more special than everyone else that you create God? I swear, this takes the cake.”

She scowled up at him from the floor, eyes shifting to red again. “I don’t know who you are or what you’re talking about, asshole, but my name is Reicheru Ketsuekineko-Oni. Piss off!”

“Your name is goddamn Rachel. Pronouncing it with a fake Japanese accent doesn’t make it different! And by the way, ‘Blood-Cat-Demon’ is a ridiculous mouthful of a name in any language, and your Japanese is as bad as your English, which I have to say is godawful.”

“I’m serious, I will fuck you up!”

“Shut up! You’ve played the helpless victim card so hard I doubt you could even touch me.” And then inspiration struck, and he grinned. “In fact, I know you can’t. You just gave birth. It’s taken a lot out of you. You’re in a lot of pain, and your muscles are about as useful as cooked spaghetti right now.”

And it was true. The world received its instructions and, because they were spoken with conviction and made perfect sense, took them to heart.

Now Rachel started to look worried. “Tenshikuzu, daughter, help me!”

The child-goddess just shrugged, making the wigs she had in place of wings bob comically. “I’m sorry, Oka-san, but you have to figure things out for yourself. That is the way of the world.”

“Turn ye not unto false gods,” Nume said with distaste. “You’re on your own.”

“My friends—!”

“Aren’t here! Also, they’re not your friends and your enemies aren’t even your enemies; you just abducted them from their homes and brainwashed them into thinking they are. You’re too petty and thoughtless to be likable, and you haven’t done anything to deserve anyone’s fear. And another thing!” he shouted when she opened her mouth again. “All your powers are bullshit. You say you’re a vampire-cat-demon-bloodbender, but what have you ever done to prove it?”

“I brought Joken back to life, and I have to drink blood all the time! You don't understand. My cat demon killed my mother! My father wants me dead!”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong! One, you stuffed some blood back into Joken’s corpse without actually healing his injuries and said he was alive again, but he never moved or spoke and we haven’t seen him since. Two, you lap up blood like a dog anytime it’s just lying around, but you never seek it out and never have any trouble suppressing the urge to bite. Three, the only reason you’re a cat-demon is so you can have furry ears, and your father wants you dead because he’s a Stock Shadowy Villain and that’s the gig. But he didn’t even try to kill you when you were alone in the forest in chapter one! Sure, you angst about him when you’re playing for sympathy, but otherwise you throw baby showers and go to school like nothing’s wrong and forget about him for chapters at a time, so how am I supposed to take you seriously?”

“Because . . . because he's evil!” Rachel wailed. “Alls I ever did was love him and want to be his daughter and then when my cat demon killed Mom he didn't love me anymore. I never did anything wrong! Now I live every day bloody and ashamed of my parts that can't control themselves. The parts that need to come out and live. My she wolf. The things that live deep inside of me.” A single tear of blood made its way down her cheek.

Nume raised an eyebrow. “Wow. Can you get more melodramatic? Also, if you’re a cat-demon, how exactly do you have a ‘she wolf’ inside you? Why not a lioness or something? Speaking of which, you’re charged with royally screwing up the gender, species, race, nationality, and/or family tree of damn near everyone you’ve touched, including yourself, but most especially Korra, Inuyasha, and Sesshomaru. I don’t know if you thought you were making improvements or just didn’t care, but either way, it’s a mark against your credibility. If you want to change things, you have to explain the changes, not just do it and hope no one notices how little sense it makes. We noticed!”

“You are going to pay for being the heartless cruel person you are!”

“I’m not finished yet! You’re charged with creating gratuitous new plot threads as quickly as you forget about old ones, employing many, many instances of the most godawful descriptive language I’ve ever seen, causing reality disruptions, and manifesting magical Mary Sue powers for no reason—and those aren’t even the worst of your offenses.”

Here he glanced back at Ilraen and Jenni. They were still out, their eyes open but unseeing, dully reflecting the crimson light emanating from Elaine. Time to end it.

He faced Rachel again, features hardened in cold judgement. “You are charged with the following crimes against writing, taste, and logic: with being a party to horribly written torture porn and trying to pass it off as ‘sexy’, with having an abortion and yet still being pregnant, and with being so bad at anatomy, physiology, biology, psychology—screw it, all the -ologies—that you actually have negative knowledge. I’ve seen some damnably insulting depictions of ‘medicine’, but you have to be one of the most ignorant, insensitive little trollops there is to trivialize abortion. Of all the plot elements to forget! Forget your claim to ‘one true love’ and have a fun little affair; forget your murderous father; even forget poor kidnapped Kagome—but how dare you forget that! And there’s one other thing you didn’t think of. Do you want to know what that is?”

Under the force of his glare, she petulantly spat out, “What?”

“You claimed to create God. You realize that God created the universe, right?”

“Duh.”

“And you’re part of the universe, so God created you, right?”

She nodded.

“But you created God. You’re the Mother of God—and don’t give me any BS about a physical incarnation. You gave birth to God’s ‘true form’. She said so, remember? So, how could God create the universe, and yourself, if she didn’t exist yet?”

“I . . . she . . . what?”

“You heard me. Explain how you can exist if God created the universe, but you only now created God.”

“I create God, then God creates the universe at the beginning of time and creates me so I can create her! It’s a stable time loop!”

“Wrong! If Elaine is present at the beginning of the universe, that negates the causality loop requiring her to be born now. If she’s already there at the beginning of time, she doesn’t lie dormant ‘waiting for the perfect match to find each other’. If that doesn’t happen, you don’t give birth to her. If you don’t give birth to her, she doesn’t exist, and neither do you. The loop collapses, and you—both of you—cease to be.”

The two looked at each other.

“Oh dear,” said Rachel.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Elaine.

Both of them promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

The world gave a violent shake, knocking Nume off his feet. The existence of this world depended on the existence of Rachel. Like an extended slinky dropped from midair,^[5] it was beginning to collapse, starting here and now.

He quickly got to his knees and crawled to his partner’s side. To his great relief, both he and the nurse were coming to.

“What . . . where . . . ?” Ilraen tried to sit up, but another convulsion prevented him. “Ah! Nume, what is happening?”

Nume ignored the question and plunged his hand into the messenger bag, grabbing for the remote activator. “No time! Jenni, grab Korra!”

“You guys have the worst recurring fic trends!” she shouted. With an effort, she staggered over to the Avatar and hauled one of the confused girl’s arms across her shoulders, helping her stand.

By then, Nume had gotten a portal open, and they all threw themselves in as quickly as they could.

They emerged in Rachel’s house, where they found Denmark reading on the couch. The tremors were weaker here, but grew stronger with every second.

“Hey!” Nume shouted, but the personified nation was so oblivious that he didn’t hear. With a snarl, Nume simply grabbed him by his collar and shook him until he looked up.

“Hey, what gives?” said Denmark. “Who the hell are you?”

“Yakuza! What’s it look like?” Just then, one wall of the house dissolved into oblivion and the others began to follow suit. “Come on, there’s no time. You’re in danger, your girlfriend, blah blah blah.”

He opened another portal and practically tossed Denmark through. The rest followed under their own power, and they were in the high school auditorium, where Inuyasha and Lucy had been left to sit on the stage and glare at each other. They were a little quicker on the uptake and didn’t need any encouragement to jump through the glowing blue doorway when the world began to rattle.

This time, they came out in the cave where Sesshomaru had his hideout. The black vampire lord rose to his feet immediately when he saw the intruders in his domain.

“Sesshomaru!” cried Inuyasha. “I will fight you to the death for what you’ve done! I’ll—!” He suddenly crumpled to the ground, unconscious.

Behind him, Ilraen discarded a heavy rock and gave a sheepish grimace in return for the shocked looks he was getting. “I did not think it would be prudent to allow a fight to break out while we are running for our lives.”

Nume nodded. “Quite.” He turned to Sesshomaru and cleared his throat. “You may have noticed that the world is self-destructing a bit right now. Think you can put the card-carrying villain routine aside while we save your life?”

Sesshomaru, who was a fairly intelligent guy when not under the Suefluence, nodded. “That is acceptable.”

“Good,” said Nume. “This should be the last stop.”

Ilraen picked up Inuyasha, and Nume portaled the group to the train car where they had last seen Rin and girl!Shippo. They were still making out on the seat, covered in dried blood.

Nume looked to Jenni.

She rolled her eyes, walked over, and tapped the teens both on the shoulder. When that didn’t work, she reached into a nearby plothole and pulled out a bucket of ice-cold water, then dumped it over their heads. You had to use the right tool for the job.

The two cried out in indignation and looked up. What they saw was a stern-looking Japanese man with inexplicably bright green eyes pointing at a blue opening in the air. This needing no translation, they took their hands out from under each other’s clothes and trooped sullenly through. The rest of the group followed, but an untimely quake tipped them end over end through the portal, and they all landed in a heap in the lobby of the Department of Fictional Psychology.

The last thing to vanish behind them was a pleasant hot spring surrounded by cherry trees.

---

It wasn’t until much later that Nume and Ilraen returned to Response Center 999. All seven canon characters had to be checked into FicPsych, which meant a lot of paperwork for them and Jenni. They completed the task in silence while the on-duty nurses escorted their charges away for examination. They did get to witness Inuyasha being reunited with Kagome, though, and it restored some measure of joy to their souls when, after hugging him and exclaiming how glad she was to see him, she slapped him silly for abandoning her and ordered him to sit several times on the way to his room.

They had their natural forms back, which meant that they were all mussed and variously blood-spattered. Nume and Jenni agreed that the clothes they were wearing would have to be burned as hazardous biological waste.

“This was one of my favorite ties,” Nume grumbled, regretfully fingering the end of the black and silver paisley. “And this means another trip to the showers, too.” He shuddered.

“You can use FicPsych’s if you want,” Jenni offered, her voice back to its normal feminine mezzo. “I promise they’re clean. Consider it . . . .” She took a fortifying breath. “Consider it part of my apology. I should have listened to you after chapter five. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that we were talking about different scenes. We could have figured out what was going on and avoided a lot of drama, and I’m sorry.”

“Huh,” Nume grunted. “Can’t argue with that. When you’re right, you’re right.”

She looked angry, but she held her tongue, and he was glad to see it. However, he could feel Ilraen’s eyes on him, all four of them. He sighed. “All right, I should have told you what was going on up front. I just wish everyone would stop harassing me about this stuff. It’s not just you, it’s like the whole damn multiverse has it in for me.” He ran a hand over his hair and immediately regretted it—he could feel the spots of dried blood.

Jenni was never the type to stay mad for long. She nodded in sympathy. “I’ll stop. I will! I’ll see if I can get a word in with your boss, too. What was that—that mold—even thinking? This was way too much for you guys, or anyone, alone.”

<We would be most grateful,> said Ilraen. <Thank you for all your help. We appreciate it very much.> He elbowed his partner.

“Sure,” went Nume. “Well. Leaving now. Bye. Come on, Ilraen.”

And so they returned.

Nume didn’t stop at his desk chair, or his dresser, or the supply closet. He barged straight into the bathroom.

There was a lot of banging and shouting and hissing. Ten minutes later, a bruised and very irate mini-Aragog was chucked bodily through the response center door by a scratched, bitten, and surpassingly incensed Agent Supernumerary.

“And stay out!”

Then he took a shower. It was hot, long, and partially comprised of Bleepka straight from the bottle. And it was good.

As for Ilraen, he privately resolved once and for all to get himself sex-educated as soon as possible. At least one person in a partnership had to be capable at all times, and so help him, he would be an effective partner! He saw nothing at all hilarious about this train of thought until much, much later.

1. InuYasha’s second ending theme: “Fukai Mori” by Do As Infinity
2. Hellsing’s ending theme: “Shine” by Mr. Big
3. “Akuma no Uta” by Boris
4. “Jar of Hearts” by Christina Perri
5. Can’t picture it? Check out this awesome physics video by Veritasium!

So there you have it, the PPCing of “Blood Raining Night.”

“But wait,” I hear some of you thinking. “There’s, like, a bajillion more chapters!”

Yes, I know—26 total at the time of this posting. But there’s only so much you can do in a PPC mission, and there was just no way I could push it past the point I did. The agents had had enough, and frankly, I had, too.

“But Neshomeh! You left out so much hilarious material!”

Yes, I know. Believe me—it killed me to leave out the second part of chapter five. That’s one of my favorite parts! But seriously, I had to keep things moving, or we would have been here all day. If you want to see this picked apart line by hilaribad line, go find an MST. There have to be plenty of those out there by now—and if there aren’t, why not write one? Alternatively, host a live reading with your friends! I can attest from personal experience that this is awesome.

On a more serious note, I know there is quite a bit of doubt as to whether or not this story is a trollfic. Personally, I’ve never known a troll to put so much effort into anything. If you’re not aware, this author has a deviantART account full of pictures of her OCs, an animated version of the story on YouTube, and her own website, and the quality is all pretty consistent with that of the story. Based on this and her interactions with commenters on dA, I judged that she’s for real.

With that in mind, I have to say I admire her determination to keep writing this fanfic and making art in the face of all the negative and downright mean attention she’s gotten. That takes guts that a lot of people don’t have.

Rachel, if you ever see this, know that I wish nothing but the best for you personally—I just wish you’d learned to use a beta-reader and take constructive criticism early on so you could have avoided or fixed the problems I and others have pointed out about “Blood Raining Night.” I hope you’re learning a lot from this experience and that your next project will be as great as this is cringe-worthy.

EDIT (6.16.2015): Jenni’s hair forgot it was supposed to be black in the scene at the Mexican restaurant. This has now been rectified.