WOOOO! Happy to see more of this! :)

No answer. The alleyway she'd found herself in was empty apart from her.
"CHIYO-CHAN! KAGURA!" Sakaki screamed despite herself. "YOMI, TOMO,
AYUMU! FATHER! MOTHER! SOMEBODY!"

Okay, the last two (before the 'somebody') are a bit of a stretch...

Sakaki checked the pockets of her gakuran. Naturally she didn't have her
purse, though one pocket had about 200 yen she'd intended to put in the
vending machines, and her emergency plasters which she always carried
in case she was bitten.

[Osaka] "Aa, starting inventory..."

She strapped it to her wrist and looked around... and saw something she
really had not expected to see.

"An anthropomorphic dog in armor...and a talking duck?"

Then high winds took down a tree. Not one to waste good wood, the
shrine's priest decided to make souvenirs out of it to sell. It became a
wide selection of good luck charms, love charms, knickknacks and - in
the case of one of the larger boughs - long staffs, for those who wanted
to spend more money and not get something completely tacky.

[Tomo] "Oooh, floral-print wooden dildo!"

A lot of care had gone into these staffs. The wood was perfectly smooth,
well balanced, and at one end a pattern of white petals had been carved
and dyed onto them. But one staff in particular had appealed to the
young Sakaki. By sheer coincidence a cluster of knots in the wood had
come together to make it look like a pair of kittens were playing with
one of the petals.

And not only that, it was +10 to Undead!

And now it was inexplicably with her in this strange, deserted alleyway.
Sakaki picked it up, running her fingers along the smooth wood. It was
as tall as she was now and felt a lot lighter than she remembered -
still somewhat weighty, but bearable. She didn't know how it got here -
hell, she didn't know how /she'd/ got here -

To say nothing of not even knowing where "here" IS...

especially when she saw the cute picture that had attracted her to this
staff in the first place. It lifted her spirits a little and raised her
confidence, even though she had no idea how to use the thing.

"I need to find a training hall and spend my starting allotment of skill
points to learn the basics of Cute-Fu."

As much as Sakaki wished she could do something for Kagura and her
friends, she knew she couldn't, and the guilt was gnawing at her
fingers. But she could still find Chiyo.

But first, she needed to find a microscope.

Sakaki stepped out of the alleyway and looked around. She'd found

"She" rather than "She'd"...

herself in an abandoned street. It was not badly kept, it looked like

kept;

there had been people here recently, but there was nobody else here now.

Minor suggestion, feel free to ignore it:

It was not badly kept; it looked like there had been people here recently,
but there didn't seem to be anybody around at the moment.

The buildings were relatively modern, and there were a lot of signs in
English around - Sakaki was from Tokyo so that was not unusual, but the
signs here were usually correctly spelled and punctuated. A chill wind

Drop the 'usually'. Extraneous.

The girl quietly headed down the street, keeping a brisk pace and
sweeping her eyes around, looking for any signs of life. A figure in a
shop window caught her eye, but a second glance revealed it was just a
cardboard cut-out of a robot, whose speech bubble said he wanted manga
and trading cards. A peek behind it revealed a dingy shop with colorful
manga on the walls and display cases behind a large counter. A shop for
otaku then. Not of much interest to a lost connoisseur of Cute. Then
again, they could have some of that delightful Tokyo Mew Mew manga in
or, Sakaki thought, maybe there could be somebody there who could help
her.

There are a few incongrueties to this paragraph, but I'll leave them to you
to realise for yourself.

She took a look around the shop. Nothing really interested her, although
she did see Mew Ichigo on the cover of a DVD case. It was called
something other than Tokyo Mew Mew though, and it was in the Reduced to
Clear bin with a $1.99 sticker on it.

*SNRK* Nice dig at 4Kids. :)

The computer's screen had a game running on it, one of those shooting
games Westerners seemed to like. The text at the top of the screen
suggested the map had restarted nearly a dozen times without any of the
players scoring a single point, and the last piece of in-game chat was
completely unintelligible to her. "<thrillho> hey hav al U guy5 gon
AFK?"

lol stfu u fag0t :)

Sakaki gulped and her eyes darted around - he had an intensely bad

she, maybe?

Yomi once said [Sakaki does anger as well as Tomo does math] which was
pretty accurate. (She'd know what she was talking about, as Yomi was
accomplished in both subjects)

Heh!

It didn't even wait for her to finish her threat. As soon as it was on
it's feet it ran and leapt for her, claws reaching for her face. She

its feet

There was a dim flash of light and it vaporised, exploding into a shower
of both green balls of energy and yellow and blue orbs. Sakaki stood in
the middle of them, and a rash of conflicting emotions hit her. Dismay
that she'd killed something, satisfaction at destroying one of those
things, amazement that it had been so easy.

And confusion as to why it left a bunch of funny glowing marbles behind when
it died.

They were everywhere, there were a LOT of them, and she remembered she
was afraid of them. Nearly a dozen now, fixing their pale eyes on her,
and more to come. Sakaki noticed these ones did not resemble cats at
all... they were the same size and build as the ones that had appeared
at her school but they lacked the tail and cat ears. Instead they had a
pair of antennae, making them look like insects.

The buggers! Quick, someone find an emotionally unstable six-year-old with
an inferiority complex!

his and it's momentum. He spun, twisted and swung precisely and every

its

Yet even as three, four, five of the creatures were killed so more

Delete 'so', replace with a comma.

Sakaki tried to sit up a little and took a look around. The area
directly around her was clear. A loud repeated crack came from her left
and she looked over to see a man in combat fatigues aiming an assault
rifle at another monster. Small bolts of what looked like electricity
shot from the barrel of his gun - it took a couple of seconds of
repeated fire but the thing was obliterated, bursting into a shower of
those green balls of energy and the hard yellow and blue orbs.

Okay, the magic gun thing is reminding me very strongly of Kaze from Final
Fantasy Unlimited. @_@

Oh, and the inclusion of Stargate characters kinda threw me at first.
Interesting choice.

She looked up and saw her mistake - none of those monsters had worn
jackets, jeans or a green t-shirt. It was a black man, not a monster -
actually the first she'd ever seen in person. It was the man O'Neill had
called Carl, and he looked a little aggravated and offended, but said
nothing.

"GAIJIN SMASH!"

"MOE'S TAVERN"

*groan* I was afraid of that.

The door was opened by grim, broadly built man. He wore a heavy flak
jacket, combat pants and a green bandanna, from which small tufts of
blond hair and a short ponytail peeked out. He was a little younger than
O'Neil but seemed much more serious. He was also aiming a large shotgun
at them.

DRAKE! XD

keeping his distance. And next to him... there was a baby playing on the
bar. A little girl in a blue baggie. She had unruly blond hair with a
blue bow in it and sucked on a red pacifier. She was currently engaged
in a prime example of unsanitary cute - playing with a picked egg. She
was rolling it around on the bar, giggling at the way this slippery,
funny-shaped ball moved. Then she brought the palm of her hand down and
*splat!* Egg went everywhere. The bartender only reacted by getting her
another pickled egg from the jar.

Heheheh.

Because of this it took a while for Drake to get Sakaki's attention. He
eventually got it by clicking his fingers and yelling [Hey, over here!]
He'd seen this kind of behavior before after all, just with a different
fixation.

Heheheheheh. (Nice in-joke, there, BTW...though given the implications, I
can't bring myself to be as amused by it as I usually would.)

"Okay, now I have a question for you," O'Neill said. "Why did you have a
duck in your pocket?"

Better than him just being happy to see them, I guess.

The duck "waaaak"-ed and fell backwards. It sat up and shot a glare at
the baby who, chastised, offered it a peanut from one of the bowls as an
apology. It declined the offer, so the baby selected a better peanut and
offered that instead. No go. Then the baby, in one final offer, pulled
her pacifier out of her mouth and jammed it in the duck's beak. That
seemed to placate the duck, or at least really surprise it.

Eeeeeeewwwwww.

Drake gaped and stared at his weapon for a moment before yelling "Damn!
The materia!" Sakaki was a step ahead of him however and was already
looking around near his feet, searching for the small items he'd
dropped. They turned out to be small orbs, one green and one blue.

Ahhh, they've already been to FF7 world, I see. That explains the magic
gunfire then.

Carl immediately ran off toward a door in the fore wall, and Sakaki
turned to see a man standing near her. He was tall, with longish brown
hair and a serious demeanor. There was a diagonal scar on his forehead,
coming down between his eyes. He wore a white shirt underneath a black
leather jacket and had black pants. An odd-looking sword hung at his
waist - there was something strange about the handle - and a symbol that
looked like a roaring lion hung from a chain around his neck.

...whatever.

"Maggie," the barman replied, and there was a clatter from further up
the room. Drake had dropped his shotgun, and was staring at them with a
haunted look in his eyes.
"Ma, Maggie?" he asked, and then the shock that had overtaken him passed
and his eyes cleared. "No, I'm..." he seemed to be lost for words, and
just added "sorry." He leant down and picked up the gun.
"You okay, Drake?" Moe asked.
"I was just thinking of someone else for a moment," he replied. "Never
mind." And with that Drake got up and left for the back room, unwilling
to continue the conversation.

Poor Drake. ;_;

Sakaki (Azumanga Daioh) - The tall schoolgirl with the granite exterior
and the pink fuzzy interior.

I like this description of Sakaki. :)

RE: Carl - It wasn't my intention to portray Sakaki as racist, just
ignorant but eager not to offend.

Her reaction was very normal for a Japanese teenager, so don't sweat it.

Very good..some would complain about the excess of non-Japanese influences,
but I won't, so long as there's going to be an eventual balance of sorts.

Looking forward to more!

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