All Purpose Negima Fanfiction Thread

"And so, once protection of the areas surrounding the city is guaranteed," Saber added, proudly tapping with chalk borrowed from Chamo on the chalkboard she had placed before the commonal table, "the locals will be able to go work the fields for produce without need to fear for the Heartless. Then we all will have a steady food insource and will be able to fully focus on larger scope, albeit no less important, subjects like returning to Japan so we can reassume mutual annihilation or annihilation of the Holy Grail, depending on the circumstances."

Then her royal stomach roared with all the majesty and power of a rampaging lion and she stuffed into her mouth the piece of bread she had been holding in her other hand.

All those sitting before her could agree on something. "..."

"However!" she cautioned, a mighty finger held high. "For that to happen, first I need the most important part of any good campaign!"

"An assesor?" Shirou asked.

"A publicist?" Misa questioned.

"Someone to run your budget?" Ayaka inquired.

"A well paid loyalist who can sweep your scandals under the rug while providing you with more little sinful indulgences?" Haruna wanted to know.

"I need an opponent!" Saber decided, slamming a fist on a palm. "Even when I was King, I couldn't prove myself worthy of the throne until I disposed of enough adversaries and pretenders! Modern politics aren't that different, it's just less swordplay is used," she reasoned. "And after long and careful consideration, I have concluded only one person in this city can run against me and prove my validation!"

She dramatically spun around and pointed at one of the females at the table with a majestic finger. "Caster!" she called out. "As the single Servant left in this War to oppose me, you must become my rival!"

"... I pass," a non-impressed, frowning Caster said, dipping her piece of bread into her meager salad and then taking it to her mouth, polite and refinatedly. While normally she wouldn't need to eat, distancement from the World Tree meant, even while resting and avoiding any and all confrontations, she still had to resort to all available alternate energy sources to keep herself alive. A visibly drained, occassionally twitching Akashi-sensei sat by her side, slightly pale and agitated.

"What?!" Saber gasped. "Do my ears deceive that! For a Legendary Spirit to forfeit the call of battle...!"

"Why would I want to compete against you here, Saber?" Caster asked, wagging a finger at her like a mother chiding her child. "There is no available Grail to struggle for, so what is the point? Besides, I've been a princess, and believe me, I've got no hurry to return to the chains of power forced upon me. Much less after achieving true happiness in my domestic bliss!"

"Domestic... bliss..." Yuuna muttered lowly while Makie slow and carefully edged away from her sitting, brooding and darkened form.

"But, but, as long as Legendary Spirits coexist, we must measure ourselves against each other!" Saber protested. "That is the reason of our existence! If not in a bloody war, then in a grand prix, a game show, a majoral race! The point is that's why we are in this world! Besides, I only could call a fellow Servant a worthwhile contestant!"

"I still pass, thank you," Caster declined her again.

"So, let me see if I understand this right," Madoka said, "if that Berserker guy happened to be here instead of Caster-san, you would be offering him to run against you instead? Seriously?!"

Saber nodded emphatically. "Why wouldn't I? Berserker lacks the oratory, but otherwise has the makings of a competitive politician. Mind, I'm not admitting he would be a competent administrator, but I see him launching a surprisingly efficient and challenging campaign."

"These are other times," Chisame sourly reminded her, "we don't run campaigns based on the slogan 'vote me or I'll smash you dead' anymore!"

"You obviously haven't ever been to Mundus Magicus," Cocone quietly commented.

"Or read much news on the Third World's happenings," Chizuru added.

Negi sighed. "I'm sure you will find yourself a suitable replacement, Saber-san, and in the meanwhile, I'm glad we can count on a take-charge, experienced King like you to hold the home front. Now, I've been thinking about our next expedition to look for my father's whereabouts..."

All looks around the table fell on him. Even Pluto's.

"... and before anyone accuses me of obsessively worrying over a strictly personal matter in times of common need," the young teacher continued, stoically, "I'd like to remind you King Mickey himself told Naba-san, Ku-san, Mikado-sensei and Akashi-sensei finding Father was one of his priorities as well, so we can safely assume locating him has also grown very important for everybody's sake..."

"Okay, that's reasonable enough," Chizuru nodded, "especially after what Ayaka has told me concerning your father, Sensei. What have you just decided on, then?"

"I think," he replied, "I've decided on whom I'd want to come with me to meet Master Yen Sid at his homeworld. Chamo, Miss Gadget, I'd like to count with your company again, if I'm not asking for too much."

"Aw, you know I'll be with you always, Bro!" the moved ermine quickly answered. "Now matter where, we're two peas in a pod, two amigos against the world, two—"

"I'll be glad to go as well!" Gadget interrupted, nodding vigorously. "I'd be honored to meet Master Yen Sid at last! Granted, he's no scientific, but if the King spoke so highly of him, there must be some merit to his research!"

"Thank you, I'm truly indebted to you two," Negi awkwardly smiled and nodded their way. "I'd also like for company from someone with peerless steering and piloting skills, and someone who is not only strong but acknowledgeable on space travel. So... Morisato-san, Lala-san, what do you say? Do you mind helping me out, just this time, please?"

Nodoka gathered her strenght, pushed herself back up to her feet, and, feeling around, supported herself on a cold metallic surface at hand. She looked at it, and realized her fingers were wrapped around the open door of a large white containment pod. It was empty, but it was easy for Nodoka to deduce who had been inside moments ago.

"I can. Thanks for asking," she said, rather coldly, as her eyes took on the rest of the pods lined up along hers, all across the same wide, perfectly white wall. Sure enough, Nagase-san was in one, eyes as closed as ever, suspended in some sort of quiet, placid sleep. More startling was the presence of Illya-chan in the next pod, although Berserker was nowhere in sight. A much smaller pod had Kero inside. Nodoka repressed her first urges to try and pry it open, since even if she could, the figure looming ominously over him surely would not allow it. She had to think intelligently, controlling her emotions, her—

There were three more pods: the first of them held a tall and lanky black bipedal dog in a mostly green suit and yellow pants, both adorned with a myriad of buckles and pouches. He also seemed to be wearing clown shoes, which naturally came to Nodoka, just like it would have to any other normal person, as a disturbing additional detail of the already unsettling particulars.

Another pod contained a white duck donning a blue hat and heavily buckled shirt, but no pants. The other one, which was tiny, held some sort of greenish insect in a black suit and shoes. All three animals seemed to be either dead or in a state of suspended animation even deeper than the girls', since Nodoka couldn't read their breathing at all. However, they also lacked cadaveric rigidity, so she only could hope...

"Welcome to The World that Never Was," Number Seven told her. Nodoka's eyes scanned the rest of the room, but she couldn't see anything else in it, and no sign of the person Seven had addressed before, either. "Consider yourself fortunate. You have been chosen for active surveillance, instead of the fate awaiting your fellow captives."

"What do you mean?" she asked, standing straighter and finally mastering the swagger of her knees, forcing herself to look up, into the shadowy folds of that unreadable hood.

"You are a prisoner of Organization XIII, selected to be our main test subject," Seven informed her. "Your reactions and emotional development will be carefully measured and analyzed for the purposes of our research. Of course," he raised a hand gloved in black before she could speak again, "resistence and escape attempts would be futile and only result in your elimination and replacement. The Book of Clow has been taken away from you and filed in storage where you never will be able to find it, and you lack any other means to fight us."

"Just give me a book. Any book," Nodoka not asked, but challenged, channeling the trained library survivalist in her and forcing the shy wallflower back as best as she could.

"You will have plenty of material to read, that's part and parcel of your intellectual and emotional stimulation," the man reassured her. "But even with all the books in all the worlds, there is no way you could stand to a single one of us, much less all thirteen, and even if you could manage the impossible and escape these facilities, you never could make your way out of this world."

"What are you saying?!" Nodoka gasped.

"You aren't in your world anymore, Disciple of Clow," Number Seven told her. "You are a literal universe away, and nobody here can or will help you. The best you can do is find solace in the fact you won't be hurt, as long as you behave properly, and as long as you are of any usefulness to our investigations."

"Useful, me? Why?" Nodoka asked, after quickly maesuring the pros and cons of formulating the question. On the one hand, she shouldn't risk making her value doutbful, but on the other, she needed as much information as she could get, and quickly.

"You still have a Heart, and you are in an age where emotions and hearts alike bloom and develop as fast as they can go," the man answered. "You are a prime material source of what we are lacking, and how— and even if—- we could and should recover it."

"I'm afraid I don't understand yet," Nodoka had to confess.

"Yet," he nodded, turning around and briskly starting to walk towards a door that only became apparent now it was opening apparently on its own. "Come with me. And don't be left behind. This is the first stage of your analysis."

Nodoka doubted, looking back at the still inhabitated pods, before silently swearing a promise and hurrying to catch up to the deceivingly quick moving stranger.

Despite of how unnerving and inhuman his presence, especially his proximity, felt.

The red-haired woman in armor had asked the bartender for more tables, at least according to what Yukino explained, and several of the patrons had been all too happy to retreat quickly to provide them with the requested sitting room. Kazumi got the impression this shapely female and her team (an almost as curvaceous young blonde, the two handsome yet dense looking boys, and some blue cat who hung around the dumber looking guy's feet eating fish without a care in the world) were rather feared and not completely liked, yet just as respected either way.

Being a member of Class 3-A, Asakura could feel a budding empathy with them, just for that.

"It could be worse, I suppose," Yukino sighed, sitting across the table assigned to her, Asakura, Natsumi, Yue, Hirano, Saya and Tate. "Lina Inverse could have been hired to pick you up, instead of us."

"Lina Inverse?" Natsumi echoed, while nodding her thanks at the waitress bringing her a large cold beer glass, except because the beer had been replaced with foamy milk in this case. Mana had been adamant on the minors under her care not being given liquor, although Katsuragi-san was already chugging glass after glass of the local beverage of choice all too happily over at the next table, to Kyoko-sensei's amusement and Asuka's growling discontent.

Yukino nodded. "We've never met her ourselves, but everybody at the Guild paints her as some sort of hideous ogre-woman even dragons are scared of. She's supposed to take any kind of job, no matter how vile and twisted, for a high enough payment, and she's always leaving trails of corpses behind..."

The few remaining patrons and the bar's staffers quickly whispered to themselves and each made quick, fearful gestures to bring the blessings of their respective gods upn themselves.

Natsumi and Yue blinked at that and shared a worried look before Ayase asked Yukino, "So, um, Sempai, if we could speak about how and why you arrived here in the first place..."

"Sorry, but first I need to know something!" Yukino urgently said, brushing Yue's question aside and grabbing Saya's hands before she could move them away. "Please, Takagi-sempai! Tell me how's Haruka-chan doing?! Is she okay?! Is she, is she—?!"

Saya sighed heavily. "Suzushiro's been doing fine, really," she muttered, inwardly cursed, far from the first time, having been charged with the Vice President of the Student Council as her roommate. "She was a nervous wreck the first few days after your disappearance, but later she coped remarkably better than I expected. I always thought she couldn't even handle her everyday routine without having you to babysit her around, but..."

"It helps," Asakura grinned impishly, making Yue and Natsumi frown already, "she's found such great support in Negi-kun's English Research Society!"

Yukino gasped. "Haruka-chan... Are you telling me she, she's joined that club in my absence?! She, well, she never seemed to think too highly about it, sorry, but that's the way it was..."

Kazumi chuckled, ignoring the subtle kicks Yue and Natsumi were giving her legs under the table. "Oh, she's one of its steadiest and most devoted members now, though... But, enough of that," she grew more serious, realizing inducing a stress panic on Yukino by telling her Suzushiro had declared herself to be Negi's fiancee would only delay the answers she wanted. Even if it might prove being amusing. "Why are you hanging with a guild of... mages in this fantasy RPG world?"

"I could also ask you what are you doing here in the first place," Yukino argued.

"You arrived way before, so you get to explain before we do," Kazumi hummed, and Yukino had to accept that was a valid point. "Most importantly, how did you know we'd be here?"

"Odds are," Yue said, "they have simply mistaken us with an actual group of tourists from Earth."

Natsumi narrowed her eyes at Ayase. "You knew a lot more about these things to begin with than I did, didn't you, Yue-san?"

"Guilty as charged, please forgive me," Yue admitted, with a hand on her own heart and the other on her large glass of oddly rainbow-colored juice. "I promise I'll also explain myself properly as soon as we've sorted the most pressing matters first."

Yukino exhaled. "Well, I might be explaining this backwards, but our Guild, even though technically we're just interns while we gather enough money and resources to continue our quest, as I was saying, our guild got a strange, mysterious mission offer on its message board last weekend. It promised fifty bars of solid gold to any team of the Guild who could take some tourists from here to Canterlot's Palace in Equestria..."

"Say what now?!" Hirano said, his glasses growing foggy and slightly askew.

"What's more," Yukino added, "whoever posted the message left fifteen bars of gold as an advance payment, and by the looks of it, that little fellow as well," she pointed at the small white animal Hikaru kept on her lap at the other table, the short redhead constantly petting and caressing it while also cooing playfully at it. "No one can figure out what kind of animal he is, or she, I'm not too sure, but all he or she can say is 'Fou! Fou!', so... we call him or her Fou," she shrugged her shoulders.

"Okay..." Tate said, scratching himself on a cheek.

Yukino paid more attention to the cold, subdued discussion between Mana and the armored redhead two tables away. "Tatsumiya-san and Erza-san are reaching an agreement, it seems," the bespectacled secretary informed. "Now, I don't understand yet why the school would plan something like this for you, especially when most of you apparently didn't even know this world existed, but—"

"Believe me, Kikukawa. this was a totally unplanned thing," Tate sighed. As the errand boy of the Student Council, he and Yukino were familiar enough he didn't bother talking to her with honoriffics. "By the way, why are you carrying a copy of Captain America's shield on you?"

"Out of all the things we should be asking, is that the first one you can think of?" Saya scolded him.

He shrugged indolently. "Gimme a break, this situation's insane enough I might as well just start with the craziest questions I can think of."

"That makes no good damn sense at all!" Takagi snapped at him.

"Um, actually, this isn't a copy, it's the actual shield of the real Captain America," Yukino awkwardly said, holding the large round shield before her chest. "At least that's what Presea-sama, the weaponsmith who gave it to me, said, but I couldn't ask her how she'd gotten it in the first place. She... She was killed shortly afterwards..."

"Oh... Oh dear. So... So sorry about that, then..." Natsumi replied, unsure of what else to say.

"Hm," Hirano adjusted his glasses, "I must say I'm impressed, Secretary-san! You're so small, and yet you can lift it around so easily!"

"Oh, it's not that heavy, actually, I believe it's forged from some ultra light alloy, see?" Yukino explained, bringing it up and down with a hand. "Besides, I've been training on how to use it while we've been traveling across the lands. I still can't throw it like a frisbee or anything, but I've grown better at blocking with it... and since I don't have magic like Hikaru-chan, or a magical sword like Kiryuu-san, it's all I've got to defend myself with, really..."

"I, I see," Natsumi nodded stiffly, trying to proccess that info before daring to ask more on magical swords, guilds, or—"

"Now it is MY turn to ask another question," Yukino's tone grew colder and more business-like right now, the shield's edge resting on the table's surface as she held the instrument of war in a hand, almost casually. "Where is Haruka-chan right now?"

Natsumi, Yue, Saya, Hirano and Tate all fell into an extremely tense silence and then began moving their chairs away from Kazumi's, giving her the full center of the stage.

Asakura had to laugh falsely. "Ah-ha-ha-ha, that's a good one, guys... Seriously, though, why me?!"

"You've always liked to give news, Asakura-san, as I recall," Yukino leaned closer, her glasses shining threateningly and her voice growing increasingly eerie. "So why won't you now make good use of your freedom of speech to inform your public in need of truths, hmmmm?"

Kazumi gulped, still clenching her smile. "Maybe I should've taken up to ballet like Mom wanted me to?"