Plotbunny got me... apologies for slowtagging again.
Title: Starting on a high note
Fandom: Tenchi Muyo Ryo-Ohki
Rating: G
Genre: General/Humor (This part is, anyway)
Part: 1/? WIP
Washuu kicked back from her console and ran a hand over her face. She stared at the display without really seeing it; she'd been working on this volume for nearly a week now. Why oh why had she ever thought an autobiography was a good idea? Twenty thousand years just didn't translate well into book form.
"Besides," she said aloud to the empty laboratory, "it's just a list of my inventions and discoveries. Of course, it's an impressive list, but really. I must have done other things all that time, right?" The empty lab didn't respond, and because it was truly empty, she didn't even get the courtesy of an echo.
She turned aside and brought up another screen to show the first five volumes that she'd completed. With a flick of her hand she turned pages and pages. It had seemed like fun at first. Show the galaxy just how much she'd accomplished in her lifetime so far. But just in the last few days something disturbing had crept into her mind. She was getting bored with her own successes. Oh, in the interest of honesty she'd mentioned some of her failures and dead ends- not many, mind, but some- but it was still becoming a slog.
A huge sigh escaped her. "Maybe I shouldn't have started in the present and gone backwards. Maybe I should start at the beginning and go forward for a while. What do you guys think?"
A tiny representation of Washuu herself, a puppet that had the same pink hair and ancient Science Academy uniform but with the letter "A" on the front of it, popped up on her right shoulder and cheered. "It's only the best idea ever!"
A's identical twin B appeared on Washuu's left shoulder and applauded with its little puppet hands. "You are Washuu, you always know what to do! Yaaay!"
Invigorated as she always was by her personal cheering squad, she leapt up onto her chair and posed triumphantly. "Then that's what I shall do! I shall turn my scientific eye onto a most worthy subject, MYSELF! Ahahahaha!"
Now that she’d re-examined her methodology and re-framed her purposes, she attacked the problem with new enthusiasm. She was still using her research notes as a tool, but they were now from her earliest forays into science, from her enrollment in the science Academy of Jurai. She spent some time giggling at her old yearbook holos before sobering a little. Few of those classmates had lived more than three hundred years, even with Juraian longevity. Oh some of the folks she knew back then stuck around for a millennia or so, but they were aristocrats, royals who were linked to Tsunami and therefore far too noble to pal around with the lowly likes of her. The fact that she’d already been alive nearly a thousand years without an apparent link to Jurai’s Royal Trees only seemed to make the snooty-types more hostile, not less.
Washuu frowned at the screen. If her current life and recent past showed an abundance of science and lack of emotion, the investigation of her earlier years promised to be the opposite. Well, she’d started this and didn’t intend to give up easily.
It wasn’t that she no longer had emotions; she did. It’s just that, well, not much happened lately to trigger them. Ryoko wasn’t the kind to drop by and reminisce; besides, what did they have to remember together besides living with Tenchi? That subject was still a little sore too, since his move to Planet Jurai to become a real prince had left her behind. Washuu’s daughter loved the Earth boy too much to stand in the way of his sense of responsibility, but it was heartbreaking to watch.
Washuu sighed heavily, tipping her head left and right to work some of the tension out. She managed to get a satisfying “pop” out of each side. Suddenly the whole project looked a bit grimmer. Her sixth volume didn’t even touch on Ryoko’s genesis. She’d skirted around it, silently promising that it would get its own volume- when she was ready. Mabe it should come first? No. Not just yet. Too many of the things that happened before came into play and didnd’t deserve to get skipped over.
But how best to pull events and happenings from the dim and dusty past? Well it just so happened she had a solution to that! By the time she’d enrolled at the Science Academy she already had a method for organizing her own mind. All that data could not be contained in a normal human mind that still had so much to learn, so she’d devised some solutions, including external storage of personal data. That way more room could be spent on facts and observations. Oh there were memories that she kept around in a condensed form, but mostly the full mental recordings were tucked away in storage. It was intellectually beneath contempt to contemplate deleting or editing memories, but she freely adimitted to picking and choosing which to carry around all the time.
There was a place in the back of Washuu’s subspace lab- if an non-dimensional space can be said to have a back- that held old storage media. Many of the formats were obsolete but that was hardly a barrier, and a stasis field had kept the data from deteriorating.
Playback was going to be interesting, that was certain. The way they had been recoreded was from within; going back through them would be an awful lot like living through the whole thing all over again. She wrinkled her nose as she eyed the stacks and shelves that held her old experiences. Could she really do that? Many of those memories were put away for good reason.
“Well, I said I would so I’m gonna,” she told no one in particular. “But where do I start?” Some of them weren’t even labeled, which seemed odd considering her obsessive need to organize.
Shrugging, Washuu grabbed an unlabelled drive and tossed it into the Basic Local Universal Replayer by way of a subspace portal. A large screen appeared in front of her at a comfortable distance. The screen made the image look oddly smooshed by taking her three-dimensional sense perceptions and displaying it flattened. It was clumsy, but this was something of a test run and she could work out the kinks in a bit. One needed a bit of momentum on these projects, she reminded herself.
The scene that began playing out on the screen seemed pretty pedestrian; one of the many retirement parties for her professor colleagues at the Academy, judging by the scenery and the decorations. The viewpoint moved around, showing that Washuu was wandering a bit aimlessly with a mostly finished drink in her hand. There wasn’t a visible date stamp, but her height suggested that this was after marriage and forced divorce. She’d remained a professor for a couple of millennia, just waiting for him to return to her- or for her child to come looking for her. He never did.
A familiar face appeared on the screen like a looming thundercloud, snapping her out of her sad train of thought. “Hey, I’d know that octopus-head anywhere!” she exclaimed. It was Clay all right, and he was wearing that ridiculous hairstyle even back then. But look, he still had both eyes! That detail helped Washuu place the particular year, or decade, at least. But really, what happened at this particular party that had made it worth saving? Clay was just making veiled threats and hurling insults at her as usual, and then… and then…
With a lightning quick hand Washuu paused the playback and sat very still for a moment. A slow, incredibly wicked grin spread over her face. This deserved a special viewing. A thought summoned her comfiest cushion- and a bag of popcorn. She settled in, ate a handful of the buttery stuff, then set it playing again, still grinning madly.
Her own voice came from the playback speakers. “You know Mister Clay,” it was one of the things guaranteed to make him wild, “I simply can’t understand what you think you gain by baiting me like this. I try not to retaliate, but someday it might happen.”
His eyes bulged out of his round face, alight with indignation and affront. “You retaliate- I mean, you harass me all the time!”
“I’m not talking about these little skirmishes, you know.” An evil smile was evident in her voice. “I’m talking about things like getting you back for that gift you left in my office.” The view shifted as Washuu knocked back the last swallow of her Seniwan whiskey.
The Washuu watching this unfold winced. She hadn’t thought about that in forever, it seemed. Clay liked to make their professional conflicts personal and the ‘gift’ under discussion was a wedding announcement. Washuu’s granddaughter was getting married to some Juraian noble or other, and the announcement specifically stated “Acknowledged family and invited guests only.”
On screen, Clay flinched visibly from the edge in Washuu’s tone and smile. Then his smile returned, more acid than before. “But my dear Washuu, how was I to know the news was anything but joyous to you? Any expansion of the Juraian bloodline is good for the entire empire!” By pretending ignorance of the other side of the equation, he could almost dodge an official reprimand for the prank if Washuu wanted to make an issue of it with the Academy.
But Washuu had no intention of making anything official. She just grinned at him. “You’ll get yours. Just remember, you started this round!” Very deliberately, she stepped toward him.
Clay instinctively stepped back nervously. “Now really, Washuu, there is no need to get physical! We’re in public for Seed’s sake!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, and your use of Juraian peasant slang is hardly appropriate for this formal setting, you know!” Washuu’s voice carried the menace that her innocent expression was missing. Even though she was slight of frame and stood almost a head shorter than Clay, he stepped backward for every step she took forward. “I am simply going to freshen my drink!” Her glass was empty after all. She gestured with the empty glass and Clay actually cowered back. This made the hems of his robes tangle under his feet.
The watching Washuu started giggling, already knowing what was coming.
Determined not to back up any further, Clay tried to straighten, tried to tower over her now that he knew she wasn’t intending violence. “Now See Here!” was as far as he got. The seams at the shoulders of his robes gave way as he straightened; the pressure was too much for the threads. How had they gotten so weak? In an almost graceful movement, his clothes fell apart around him as if they were flower petals falling free. There he stood, clothes in two piles around his ankles, exposing what were probably his finest undergarments to the suddenly hushed crowd of professors, administrators, grad students and department heads.
It wasn’t Washuu who started the laughter, though Clay probably remembered it that way. She even pulled a tablecloth out of nowhere and handed it to him while the first swell of mirth crashed over them. Was it her fault he’d chosen the landing of the grand staircase to pester her? Could she really be blamed if the first tablecloth that came to hand and he hurriedly wrapped around his waist had a large wet spot on it and was a bit too small anyway? Okay, that might have been something she could have fixed, but really…
In her lab, the Washuu of the present day was laughing until tears streamed down her cheeks. This one needed a special label, and she thought maybe this into the past project of hers might have some real high points after all.