Operation: Flaming Fanblade Pt. IV

The young man called Chase slowly woke up expecting to see little more than the familiar surroundings of his bed on the Xcalibur, but instead found himself lying on a beach. He slowly picked himself up, and tried to shake some of the sand out of his suit, but found it difficult, so he simply pushed the release valve on his chestplate and watched as the two halves of his Xtacle torso fell on either side of him. He thought he heard the voice of a man muttering some curse at him, then something about getting a drink, but he could not  see. At least now he could get the sand out of his body.

“Chase-sannnnn…” A soft, womanly voice called out to him, “Chase-sannnnnn…”

Chase looked around, but could not see who the voice belonged to.

“Are you the legendary warrior, sent forth from far off lands to destroy the evil giants?”

Chase still couldn’t find the source of the voice, but just replied to the wind, “Ummmm, yeah? I guess I am?”

“That is wonderful news, Chase-san!” A beautiful, petite Japanese woman appeared behind him, clad in a loose red dress. “I knew that you would be the chosen one! It is said that the hero would carry a clear horn and a brave heart into battle with him!”

“Clear horn? What is that supposed to mean?”

“You will find out in due time, Chase-san! Now go, the trial of the wind awaits you!”

“Okay, but first…do you think you can do a little favor for me?”

_____________

“Chase? Are you okay? Chase?” The helmeted Xtacle was about to try performing CPR when Chase unceremoniously grabbed the Xtacle and started making out with the helmet, only to realize a few seconds later that it wasn’t the face of the beautiful Japanese woman from before.

“UGH! What the hell, man?”

“Thank God you’re alive. I thought that flaming windmill almost got you!”

“Hey, I don’t interrupt your wet dreams with real, life-threatening situations, do I?”

“Chase?”

Chase pointed an accusatory finger at the helmeted Xtacle and said, “You are like my least favorite Xtacle! Just go and find your damn roommate, I’m going back to the Xcalibur myself.”

“Chase?”

“Stop talking to me, dammit!”

The helmeted Xtacle was about to warn him about his lack of fuel when Chase fired up his rocket boots. Instead, he just dismissively threw up his hands and walked in the opposite direction. After a few more minutes, Chase suddenly felt the rocket boots start to taper down.

“Huh, maybe I should’ve asked him where we are.” Chase thought out loud before the rocket boosters shut off from lack of fuel.

Meanwhile, inside a Tokyo office building…

<Folks, we have a problem.> One man spoke in Japanese, <those damn gaijin managed to figure out a way to travel to Japan for relatively low money. Now they are at our doorstep.>

<Oh no! How could this fate have befallen us?> A second Japanese man asked, <All we wanted to do was give the American audiences what they wanted! Is it our fault that their networks were afraid of publishing our glorious material?>

<I think I understand the problem here.> A Japanese woman spoke up.

<Quiet, Keiko Tsundere! You’re a woman! How could your tiny brain possibly understand the intricacies of the Japanese cartoon industry?>

<For your information, I’m the head of your character design department!>

<Get out Tsundere, there are men conducting Serious Business in this room.>

Keiko stomped over to the desk and smashed her fist down hard upon its surface, <Do you think I enjoyed drawing all those…those hentai pictures of Nookie-chan? There’s a reason that your shows are being pirated in the United States instead of bought: because no so-called otaku gaijin would be caught dead with our product on the street!>

<Well then, Tsundere, what do you suggest?>

<We need something that the American youth will eat up and spend money on. Something with bulky men with big guns and swords in  robot suits! They love those!>

<Are you crazy? Such a design would never work!>

Keiko sighed, <Well, at the very least it would serve to get rid of those gaijin protesting outside our building.>

<But how can we get someone in a bulky robot suit out there to drive these gaijin away in such a short time?>

Just as Keiko Tsundere was about to answer, Chase suddenly appeared in the window, quickly falling down to the street in his Xtacle armor sans helmet. Finally, he crashed down to the street, his fall broken by the bodies of several protestors clustered outside the office building.

<I think I have our answer,> Keiko said as she smiled evilly.

At first, the protestors were horrified by the sudden appearance of the strange armored man with what appeared to be a piece of glass stuck in the top of his head, but then they slowly inched closer and started trying to ask questions. However, Chase had slipped back off to dreamland.

_____________

“Chase-san! I thought I had lost you!”

Chase’s spirits perked up. The hot Japanese girl had returned!

“Now Chase-san, you must undergo the first step of your training!” The woman began to step on his bare back, expertly massaging it with her own bare feet. “Do you think yourself ready to undertake the task set before you?”

“Hey babe, if it means spending some more time with you, I’d jump naked through a ring of fire while strapped to a Filipino midget.”

“I am so glad to hear that, Chase-san!”

“Hey, why do you keep saying Chase-san? You know my name’s Chase, right?”

“I know, it’s just…I find you so damn irresistable.”

“Hey, I didn’t say to stop.”

“My apologies, but it appears that your time may come sooner than you think. You are a hero trapped between two worlds, yet while you are a hero within one, you will be thrust into another. I am sure you will do fine.”

Chase felt the woman squat on his back, and then suddenly leap up into the air. Chase turned around and found himself facing another hot Japanese woman, except she was totally ignoring his hotness and was speaking to…

Chase blinked his eyes. He was in a city, and the woman was speaking in broken English to a bunch of nerds. Chase looked down at himself to find that he was actually still in his Xtacles-issue battle armor, sans helmet. The woman wasn’t exactly as hot as the other one he had been having dreams about, but she still had nice tits in his opinion, and his opinion was the only one that mattered.

_______________

At the outside of the ring of protestors, two helmeted Xtacles watched as Keiko Tsundere, the head character designer of Nage Hentai Nookie-chan, was holding up Chase Fontaine as the hero of some brand new series. The various nerds who hadn’t been crushed underneath Chase’s armor applauded the announcement.

“What?” The helmeted Xtacle called Newman shouted, “I’ve been a fan of Tsundere’s work since before I joined the Xtacles! How come he gets all the fame? He doesn’t know the first thing about anime!”

“Newman, let’s just go home.” The other helmeted Xtacle said, “The Commander’s going to chew out all our asses if you stay here longer.”

“But we don’t have any spare fuel for our rocket boots!” Newman protested, “How are we going to get home?”

“Well, maybe Mr. Ford knows some…hey, where is Mr. Ford anyways?”

Where is Mr. Ford? And what does this have to do with the rest of the story? Find out…next time!

All I wanted was a drink

There we were, the beast that called itself thirst was circling itself like a damn vulture and all of our glasses were dirty. Not only the drinking glasses, but even the glasses I use to see everything. I needed a bottle of soda, like maybe one of those 20 oz. cokes.

“Hey bro,” I said, “You wanna get a coke?”

“Why do you drink that shit, man?” My bro said as he continued to play on my XBOX 360. He didn’t even bother to avert his gaze from the screen. “Why not just get some water?”

“Well, the glasses are dirty.”

“So wash them.”

I was about to, but then I realized something else: We were out of soap.

“Dude, seriously, what’s wrong with just drinking from the tap with your hands?”

“After that hardcore session we just had? My palms are more sweaty than a Cuban in Miami, and the various acids would hurt the purity of the water. Fuck that, I’m getting a mass-produced, carbonated beverage”

“Whatever, man. Just bring me a slurpee or something.” As I picked up the keys and prepared to leave the house, I heard him shout, “How sweaty is a Cuban in Miami anyway?”

I really have to stop making these off-hand similies.

So I drove all the way down to the 7-Eleven off of Georgia and hopped out the car. As I walked towards the entrance, I saw a strange homeless man with one tooth grinning at me. Why was he grinning at me? Maybe he was staring off into space and I just happened to be walking past his field of vision.

So I walked into the store, looked over the shelves, and went to grab a coke. But with the sheer amount of choices available in this little 7-Eleven, I started wondering if maybe I should go for a pink lemonade? Or perhaps a Sprite? Or even pay a few cents extra and get the brain-uncurling goodness of Red Bull?

In the end, I decided to go with the classic option of a classic Coca-Cola. I went up to the Indian gentleman working behind the cash register, who seemed annoyed that he actually had to deal with a paying customer at this time of night. He was even more annoyed when I actually decided to pay for that bottle of coke with exact change. Nonetheless, he took the money and wished me a nice day as I opened the coke and took a sip on my way out.

I got into the car and put the coke in the somewhat large cupholder and drove home with my prize. But I was only halfway home when tragedy struck. In my haste, I had forgotten to secure the cap on the coke. The bottle’s contents spilled on the passenger’s side of the floor. I reflexively bent down to retrieve it, and ended up crashing my car into a light pole.

All I wanted was a drink.

Democracy In-action

So once upon a time, I was in my totally cool government office, doing many important things. Things like going to awesome parties and voting to name post offices in Dish, Texas after famous dead people. Y’know, shit like that.

All of a sudden, this guy bursts in my office, his clothes are all ragged and his face is dripping with sweat. Dude needs to take a few chill pills, y’know? I was gonna offer him a drink, maybe a few tequila shots, but the dude is all like, “No! Your totally uncool staff tried to stop me from getting the message out! I need you to listen for a few seconds!”

I played it totally cool, like I always do. So I says, “Dude, I’m listening.”

And he’s all like, “Dude, they’re gonna be voting on that horrible, awful, terrible, no-good, very bad bill!”

And I’m like, “Which one, bro? They all suck!”

And he goes, “The one that’ll give the telcos retroactive immunity for all the illegal shit they’ve done!”

And I’m like, “How is that bad, bro?”

But I don’t get an answer, because the boss lady decides to bust in the door while men in black suits drag him away. The dude keeps screaming, “Don’t tase me bro! Don’t fucking tase me…ahhh!” He’s screaming in pain as someone puts, like, 10,000 joules of electricity or something into his body, thus interrupting the flow of electrical signals to his brain and causing his muscles to convulse for a minute while the men in black drag him out of my office. But hey, I don’t claim to be smart or nothin’.

So it’s just me and that boss lady in my office. If she were, like, 20 years younger, I would totally hit that. But she didn’t seem to agree with me that one time I said it to her. So we agreed to keep our relations totally professional.

“I’m sorry, we tried to keep him out, but he was surprisingly flexible,” The woman says before handing me a sheet of paper with a speech on it. “I typed it all out for you, just like you wanted. All you have to do is read the sheet and then vote yes when the bill number on the top of that sheet comes up.”

And I’m like, “So, what’s this bill about?”

And she’s all, “It’s about keeping our country safe from terrorists who want to kill our children.”

“So if I vote yes on this bill, our country will be safe from baby-killing terrorists?”

“Yes.”

“But that bro you tased,”

“You mean, ‘That bro who violently barged into your office and resisted arrest.'” She said in her stern old lady voice. I mean, what was she, my mother?

“Whatever, lady. Anyway, he said it, like, lets some corporations walk free after breaking the law.”

“They never broke the law, Congressman. They were simply assisting the government in handling classified information to protect us from evil terrorists.”

“Oh, well when you put it that way, it totally makes sense.”

“I’m glad you see it my way. I’ll see you on the floor…good luck, Congressman.” The lady winked at me before she walked out of the office. I stared at the speech, and tried practicing it, but then crumpled it up. Nah, that speech sounded so boring. I know the boss lady doesn’t like it, but I was gonna write my own speech this time, one that would totally make those terrorists afraid of me.

It was gonna be so awesome.

The Odd Couple

“So, Jasmine, that cape gives you access to a pocket dimension?”

“Indeed it does.”

“Then why do you hate it so much? I’d love to have a place to stash this crossbow I’ve been carrying.”

“My father meant it as a chastity cape. I can’t even take the damn thing off without his say so.”

“Or until he dies, right?”

“Well, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Because it would be an easier way to free you from that cursed cape.”

“Arkady, I told you before, we’re not getting married.”

“What? I thought you loved me?”

“The only reason we’re still together is because you said you’d help me find my friend.”

“Hey, I got you a ride into the next town!”

“Arkady, we had to hitch a ride with this circus troupe just to get to the next town. And that clown’s been saying crazy things.”

“Ah shit…Jasmine, you might wanna get your enormously large set of throwing knives out. We’re being attacked by monsters now.”

“You have a crossbow, why don’t you just shoot them?”

“Because that bastard in the armory I stole it from only had four arrows lying next to it. We had to escape before the king’s guards found us, remember?”

“Fine, here, take this knife and wave it around if the evil puppy tries to bite you.”

Ninja’d!

Ayane didn’t understand the bodysuit they asked her to wear for her mission. Sure it was light, and she could easily move around the location, but on this chilly night she could swear her nipples were poking through the fabric.

The outfit was probably an attempt by her village elder just to spite her for wanting to train as a real ninja, and not just a kunoichi. But whatever his motives, Ayane planned to get this assassination over with and prove she could be trusted with tasks like any real ninja.

Allowing her ki to flow throughout her body, Ayane became one with the world around her, manging to feel out a position that would allow her to slip past the guards, slip a poisoned needle into the target’s throat, and slip out. She hopped across the stepping stones leading up to a nearby koi pond, kicked in the head of a nearby guard and used it as a springboard to jump up to the top of the second story building. And when she leaped through the window into the room of the evil lord, she came to find a naked man standing over her target, closing his eyes with his fingers.

Ayane wasn’t quite sure what to make of the situation, so she planned to strike at the naked man first until he turned around and revealed his face to be awfully familiar to someone she knew from her clan. The naked man said to her, “Ummm, it’s not what it looks like.”

“Why are you naked and standing over the evil lord, Hayate?”

“The elder received some intelligence that the evil lord–how do I say this in a way you can understand–swung another way, played for the other team, preferred the touch of a man to a woman.”

“What?”

“At least I got some free food out of the deal, but dear God, I had to spend hours, Hours! talking with that bastard until the poison I slipped into his tea finally killed him.”

“He was supposed to be my target, not yours!” Ayane fumed.

“Well, I’m sorry. We’ll just have to talk it over with the village elder. At least you didn’t have to sleep with him.” As Hayate put on his pants, he continued, “Maybe you should try the kunoichi thing. You’ll probably get more assignments that way.”