And here's the second part of this chapter...are all you Ranma fans
anxious?  Read on...and remember, don't be afraid to C&C or MST the thing.

------------------------------------------------------------

After Sakura left, she waited for a few minutes, thinking
of what to do. 

Then, her stomach kicked in. 

Yes, she'd had a pretty good breakfast, managing to finish
off about three-quarters of the fridge's contents by
herself, so all she needed was a light snack. Trouble was,
there wasn't anything left that she really wanted to snack
on. For that matter, there wasn't much left. So, she tried
searching the rest of the house. 

She hit the Slumber Party Food Jackpot. 

A couple of hours later, Mihoshi saw the note to Sakura's
mom on the last bag of potato chips: 

              "Mom - 

              This food's for the slumber party - don't put it
              with the food in the kitchen. 


- Sakura

Mihoshi went into conclusion-jumping mode: She ate all the
food for the slumber party that Sakura had bought. Sakura
wouldn't have any food for the party. Her party guests
would be unhappy. Sakura would be unhappy. Sakura would
hate Mihoshi. Furthermore, Washu, who was going to be one
of the guests at the party, would be unhappy. Washu would
hate Mihoshi. 

Sakura could swear she heard Mihoshi cry. Nah, must be my
ears ringing from this morning. There's no way you could
hear her all the way from home inside a classroom in the
middle of the building. Could you? 

Meanwhile, Mihoshi wondered where she could get more
food. The Galaxy Police had trimmed her credit use for
expenditures considerably since the last time she went to
the Intergalactic House of Pancakes. Not that the credits
would do her any good on Earth, anyway. Her Earth currency
was on the ship - 

The ship! It had food to spare, plus it had that weird thingy
Washu made for cloning - perhaps it could even make more
food! 

Having forgot completely about Washu's specific
instructions not to go near the ship, she took the floatation
device Washu had used to get them out of the crater where
their ship was parked and went down to get some more
food.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Mihoshi quickly deduced that there wasn't enough food to
make up for what she'd eaten. No surprise, since she'd eaten
most of the food on the way to Sakura's house. So, she was
just going to have to clone some. She gathered what food
she could find, set it down on a little pad in front of the
cloning machine, hit a few buttons, and paused for a
second. 

The pause was Mihoshi's memory trying to kick in. Doesn't
Washu always tell you not to touch any of her experiments
and stuff? 

Eh, she won't mind. 

Rationalization, ladies and gentlemen, accounts for many
of the world's problems today. But it alone often does not
bring about the strife we have; instead, a combination of
factors come into play. Like the fact that cloning makes
replicas of the cells involved, creating a living being (and
thus the creation of new potato chips directly through such
a method is impossible, although it would allow for the
cloning of the potatoes and most ingredients except
minerals such as salt necessary to make them). Or, the fact
that Mihoshi had instead placed the food on the platform
Washu opened to dump genetic waste into a holding
cylinder for later disposal. For that matter, it might have
even helped if Mihoshi actually knew how to use the
controls to the cloning machine. But, perhaps most
importantly, there was the issue of using the controls for
the correct device, instead of the portable dimensional
gateway that was on the opposite side of the ship's
laboratory. 

A voice from a transporter pad on the other side of the
room blurted, "What the - how'd we end up here?" 

Mihoshi didn't quite know how to explain, so she decided to
blame me instead. "Um, I don't know, the writer wrote this,
and suddenly you're here, and I don't know how I'm going to
get food for Sakura's party, and she'll be mad at me because
I ate it all, and she won't like me, and -" 

The next few seconds involved the following: Mihoshi
screaming; Sakura blinking again, wondering if Mihoshi had
followed her to school or something; the writer running for
dear life; and some person stepping out of the portal
swinging a hammer and somehow yelling over Mihoshi
"WRITER NO BAKA!" 

Well, she had to arrive sometime, didn't she? Okay, now, no
need to be upset, don't you guys start throwing hammers,
ow, ooh, watch it... 

------------------------------------------------------------

I must love punking myself or something.

Anyway, that's the chapter, which coincidentally took less than a day to
write, which surprised me - my normal rate is 1 section a day, which means
I usually write a chapter in four consecutive days, providing I can get
into Fortunecity to type it up and do so.  That, along with the name 
issue, had me holding this chapter back for a while to make sure it came
out okay.  That way, you'd be more likely to consider it worthy to be
ripped into shreds in C&C.  ^_^  Again, both that and MSTings are
appreciated...and noted later on.  Hope you liked it!

Nicholas Eckert
vidstudent