Oh! My Brother!

All Oh! My Goddess (Ah! My Goddess, Aa! Megami-sama, whatever) characters
owned by the people who own them.  I'm poor, don't sue me.

***

Did I mention I really hate Mondays?  I don't mean like some people hate
lima beans, I'm talking a full fledged, beserker rage, MUST KILL kind of
hate.

With my job, you'd think I'd get over it.  I mean, they don't care when I
work, just as long as they get their 40 hours a week out of me and I'm
there for every meeting.  Nice, hey?

Unfortunately, my PRICK of a manager sets our weekly meetings at 8:30
Monday morning.  That means I'm up at 6:30.  I used to get a kick out of
seeing the sun rise, now it just pisses me off.

Anyway, enough with the ranting.  So there I am, sitting at my computer,
wishing death upon my manager and the corporation in general while I read
my email.  At my side is my ever-present bottle of Diet Coke.  Most people
snicker at it, but when they realize that I drink about two liters a day,
they shut up.  Some people have coffee, I have my cola.

So I'm looking at my mail, and I find this message:

   Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1997 08:18:36
   From: Goddess Relief Office <helpme@relief.heaven.gov>
   Subject: Your Request
   To: Christopher J Angel <cangel@comtel.ca>

   Your request for aid has been granted.  A representative 
   will contact you at the earliest possible convenience.

   Goddess Relief Office

I read it a few times, and then did the same action I reserve for all goofy
email messages.  I filed it with the delete key and promptly forgot all
about it.

Not the wisest action, now that I think about it...

***

The true meaning of that little message didn't hit me until later that day,
when I was trying to make my dinner at home.  Emphasis on trying.  I'm a
pretty lousy cook at the best of times, and I tend to eat out alot to
compensate.  The one thing I can make, however, is pasta.  And what do you
need for pasta?  Boiling water.

Needless to say, I was pretty damn suprised when a barely teenaged girl
climbed out of the pot and fell into my arms.  I was even more suprised
when she screamed and hammered me on the head with her overgrown croquet
mallet, knocking me out.

I woke up a few minutes later, laid out on the couch.  The shrimp was
screaming into the phone.  The first thing I wondered was how the hell a
five-foot-nothing kid who probably weighed 100 pounds at worst got a
six-foot-four, 250 pound giant like me from the kitchen to the living room.
 My second thing I wondered was if that call she was making was local.  My
third thing I wondered was why my head felt like someone had been using it
as an anvil.

The kid was cute, I'll give her that.  She was wearing some weird red and
white clothes that looked like a cross between formal clothes and a lab
coat.  She had these wierd markings on her face, a blue-yellow oval on her
forehead and two similiar marks on her cheekbones.  Her hair was long and
blackm and ran down to the small of her back.  The cowlick she had going
was a riot, though.

Me, being the rational and eleoquent guy I am, groaned and said, "What the
hell is going on?"  The kid saw I was awake and said something into the
phone, and hung it up.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said.  "I was suprised!"  She looked
disgusted and muttered something that sounded like "I've got to stop doing
that." 

I put my hand to my forhead and winced at the round bruise I felt. 
"Umm...before I call the cops, who the hell are you and what the HELL is
going on?!"

"I'm the Goddess Skuld, and I'm here to grant you one wish," she said
formally.

A bit of my mythology classes came back to me.  "Skuld?  As in Urd,
Verthidandi and Skuld?  The Norns?"  I was shocked.  I was amazed.  I still
hadn't clued into that wish portion.  What can I say, sometimes I'm dense. 
"You've got to be joking."

"That's BELLdandy," she corrected pointedly.  "One cough and everyone takes
it as gospel.  So what do you want to wish for?"

Like I said, sometimes I'm dense.  "Wish?  Oh...yeah."  I thought for a few
seconds.  "What can I get?"  Hey, I'm no idiot most of the time.  I was
doing to avoid the 'w' word like the plague until I decided.

Skuld sighed.  "Anything you want.  You could wish to be rich, or to be
popular with women, you could even wish to end the world."  She paused. 
"But if you're that kind of person you wouldn't get a wish."

The concept stunned me for a moment.  "Well, I wouldn't want to end the
world, that would kind of include ending ME, wouldn't it?"  The idea of
criteria for wish-getting was kind of intriguing, but something else
bothered me.  "Hey, if you're the goddess of the future," I still hadn't
quite got the handle on that, "shouldn't you have better things to do? 
Like worrying about creation or something?"

Skuld smiled brightly at me.  "Nope, we've got Yggdrasil to do that, it's
got more than enough processing power."

If I was a dog, my ears would have perked.  "Processing power?  The
universe runs on a computer?"  I liked that idea.  It seemed somehow
comforting to me, until I remembered computers crash.  "What happens if it
crashes?"

"Bad things," Skuld said simply, in a tone that suggested she didn't want
to talk about it.  "Now what do you want?"  She asked impatiently.

I was silent for a long time.  What do I wish for?  I mean, I had to assume
it was real, it's not every day a kid jumps out of a pot of water.  I kind
of felt that I should be careful, since what I wish for could change my
life.  The idea of being irresistable to women appealed to me.  I wasn't
exactly a date magnet after all.  But the romantic in me made me stop. 
Something to improve myself?  I dismissed that just as quickly.  If I
became better in some way, I'd want to do it myself.

I finally shook my head.  "I don't know.  I can't really decide."  An idea
occured to me.  "Maybe you can tell me about some of the wishes you've
seen, that might help."  Hey, if you can't come up with an idea, steal
someone else's.

Skuld smiled.  "Who could it hurt?" she said.  She started to tell me of
various wishes she had seen people make.  Some of them were ridiculous,
some of them made far too much sense (although the concept of Bill Gates as
a wish recipient still gives me shivers).  Skuld finished by telling me
about Keichii Morrisato, and the wish he made with her sister, Belldandy.

Let me tell you a little something about myself.  I like kids.  Especially
the ones between the ages of around 8 and 14.  (No, not that way you
sicko.)  They're fun people at that age.  I mean, older than that and you
have to start treating them like adults, younger and they're too little to
understand you.  But that age is fun.  As Skuld talked, I found myself
forgetting her godhood (or goddesshood?) and just treating her as a young
girl.

NOT one of the wisest things I've done.

When Skuld finished, I couldn't help but ask her some questions.  I guess
'big brother' mode had kicked in.  "You really care for your sister, don't
you?"  Skuld nodded wordlessly.  "You're afraid that this Keichii guy is
going to make her unhappy?"  She nodded again.  "Skuld, you respect your
sister alot, let her make her own choices.  From what you tell me, she and
Keichii love each other a great deal.  Think of it as gaining a brother,
not losing a sister."  Skuld smiled at me, and not thinking, I said the
words that changed my life.  "You know, I wish I had sisters like you."

Skuld almost screamed as she suddenly began to glow with a brilliant white
light.  She floated of the ground, energy flowing around her and through
me, filling the room.  The energy shot from her straight up into the
ceiling and into the sky.  Must have been quite a shock to the people in
the apartments above mine.

Skuld floated back to the ground.  "Wish approved," she said disbelief on
her face and in her voice.

I did the most logical thing for me to do at that time.  I fainted.
--
Christopher Angel
cja124@mail.usask.ca      http://www.engr.usask.ca/~cja124
-The road to hell is paved with good intentions. -Old proverb.
-People forget that the same road leads to heaven. -Response