• Published 1st Apr 2016
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Group Precipitation - FanOfMostEverything



Stories set in the Oversaturated World, some silly, some less so.

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Arc-D, by FoME

Oppressive stillness dominated Agent Heartstrings’s office, and not just because the gym storage room had no ventilation. Both occupants stared at each other as the clock ticked. Finally, the agent sighed and said, “You know, I really thought this would be a simple assignment.”

Ditzy Doo rolled her eyes, arms crossed. “That only reveals the depths of your ignorance.”

Agent Heartstrings narrowed her eyes. “You really shouldn’t take that tone with me, young lady. Especially not now.”

Ditzy shrugged. “I really don’t know what you expected.”

“I expected you to help defuse tension in a multiversal war that happened to dovetail with one of your specialties.”

“Then you should have told me that from the start. All I got as a mission briefing was, ‘Hey Ditzy, want to take a break from being a magical girl?’”

“It was more in-depth than that,” Agent Heartstrings said flatly.

Ditzy threw her hands into the air. “Not by much!”

“Look, just…” The agent trailed off, sighed, and massaged her temples. “For the purposes of the after-action report, I have to ask. How exactly did you manage to antagonize every faction in the war in under an hour?”

“Soon after I got into the target universe, I met the local Rainbow Dash, and she asked me where I was from. Synchro Dimension, Fusion Dimension, Xyz Dimension.” Ditzy sneered as she dragged out the penultimate word. “I told her I was from the Card-Game-with-an-Actual-Resource-System Dimension.”

“Ditzy.”

“You told me I’d be taking some time off from being a magical girl. You didn’t tell me you were just sending me into a different anime.” Ditzy scowled off to the side. “Yugi-Hime may be a fun source of bombastic theatrics, but it’s a game design disaster.”

Agent Heartstrings held back a groan, if barely. “That doesn’t mean you can insult the locals like that. Is that what did it?”

After a few moments, Ditzy shook her head. “Not exactly. She didn’t really understand what I meant, so she challenged me to a duel, because of course she would. I asked if we could play without the dumb wrist-mounted hologram projectors. You know the holograms actually have mass in that world?”

That got a nod. “That’s how they’re fighting a war with them.”

“So dumb. Well, she just looked at me like I’d switched to a different language midsentence. Didn’t move for a solid minute. Then everyone nearby with a Duel Device, which was most of them, came charging in with death in their eyes. Dash tried to strangle me. I fell over, spread my wings, and booked it out of the universe.” Ditzy absently rubbed at her throat. “I think it may have been some sort of cosmic immune response to someone trying to make sense.”

Agent Heartstrings permitted herself an eye roll. “Something like that.”

“Hey, you’re the one who sent a Hocus-Pocus player into that pile of stupid.”

“Ditzy, it’s a big multiverse out there, and there’s a lot of stupid in it. If you start antagonizing the locals every time you hit some hackneyed contrivance baked into the local laws of reality, you’re going to be miserable and make everyone around you miserable in turn.”

“Fine.” Ditzy got out of her chair. “Maybe I should just focus on the GALAX-E Girls for now.”

“This isn’t a dismissal,” said the agent, “Everyone has some early mistakes in the Office of Parallel Timelines. And given your talents, it would be a tragedy to see you confine yourself to one worldline. But you need to have more of an open mind.”

Ditzy said nothing, fidgeting for a few moments before sitting back down. Agent Heartstrings let her mull it over until she could voice her thoughts. “It bothers me, seeing something that should just be fun turned into a weapon. It’s not just cruel, it’s really inefficient. It’s like all those movie and video game plots where they want to turn dinosaurs or zombies or something into weapons. You have guns and bombs and stuff. They do the job very well. You don’t need holograms of clockwork golems to punch enemy cities into rubble. It takes a really twisted mind to go through that many steps just to make a way to hurt people.”

The agent nodded. “There are extenuating circumstances there, but I understand. Still, that doesn’t excuse poking the soft bits of that reality. We don’t want another Anon-a-Miss on our hands.”

“No, ma’am,” Ditzy droned.

Lyra smirked. “And I’ll be sure to let my superiors know that not all collectible card games are created equal.”

Ditzy returned a grin. “I appreciate it.”

“And I’ll appreciate one of our most promising field agents acting like it. Dismissed.”

Author's Note:

I've heard good things about Yu-Gi-Oh Arc-V, but I can't imagine a certain ersatz planeswalker would like the idea.

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