Shadows Under Starlight
                              
                          Episode 3
                              
                     "Tragedy Part III"

By Adam Christopher Leigh
Distributed by Tempest Creations

A Crossover of Epic Proportions

***

     Mihoshi was lost.

     Now, this in and of itself is not a remarkable event.
Mihoshi is lost about 95% of the time she's conscious and
probably 100% percent of the time she's asleep.  So her
being lost wasn't that far from normal except for the fact
that she was currently wandering through Washuu's lab.
Again, not a totally an unusual event due to the size and
complexity of Washuu's sub-space pocket beneath Tenchi's
staircase, anyone could get lost in there.  But Mihoshi was
on her way from the bathroom to the kitchen when she ended
up there.

     Now *that* was strange.

     "Hello?" Mihoshi called out into the inky blackness.
"Is anybody out there?"  The silence was foreboding and the
strange swimming experiments around her made it seem like a
hundred tiny eyes were all watching her at once.

     "Help," she squeaked.

                             ***

     "Good morning, Sasami," Aeka said, following her
nostrils to the delightful smell of breakfast she only now
confirmed was being made by her younger sister.

     Sasami turned around from the stove and waved to Aeka.
"Good morning, Aeka!  Did you sleep well?"  She idly stirred
the medley of vegetables and noodles on the stove with a
wooden spoon.

     "Yes, quite well, Sasami," Aeka responded with a smile.
"Have you seen Lord Tenchi this morning?"

     "Uh-huh," said Sasami with a nod.  "He went out to do
his morning chores, he should be back any minute now.  Could
you set the table for me?  Breakfast is almost ready."

     "Of course," replied Aeka.  She gracefully slid over to
the cabinet, pulled out some dishes, and took them into the
dining room.  Eyeing up the proper spacing for the amount of
people who were eating, she began walking around the table,
placing a dish every few feet.

     "Wake up Ryouko, too!" Sasami called from the kitchen.

     "All right, Sasami," Aeka called back.  She grumbled,
"That Ryouko gets up later and later every day, you would
think there would come a point where a person couldn't
possibly get more slovenly."

     Aeka climbed the stairs slowly and walked down the hall
to Ryouko's room where she proceeded to bang on the door.
"Wake up, Ryouko!" she called.  When there was no response,
she rapped on the door again.  "Come on! You can stay in bed
all day!"  Again, silence.  Aeka breathed deeply, placed her
hand on the door, and quickly slid it open, expecting to see
Ryouko doing *something* bad.

     Instead she found a room devoid of life.  Aeka blinked
and checked the hallway.  It was the right room, but where
was Ryouko?

                             ***

     "No, NO! Ryouko! STOOOOOP!" Tenchi yelled.

     "Huh?" Ryouko turned to Tenchi with a quizzical look,
holding the hoe in her hands like a sword.  "What's wrong?"

     Tenchi peered between his fingers at the once orderly
and highly efficient fields before him.  The tidy, straight
rows were now a disorderly mess of zigzags, crosshatching,
and circles.  Seeds were strew all over with little regard
for the rows of soil they were supposed to be put in.

     "Ryouko ... what have you done?" he exclaimed.  "The
field... its all a mess!"

     "I thought this would look a little better than your
boring straight lines," Ryouko said with a smile, resting
the hoe on her shoulder.

     "You can't plant a field like this!" said Tenchi.

     "Why not?"

     Tenchi opened and closed his mouth a few times before
sighing.  "All right, lets get back to the house, I'll deal
with this later."

     "Yay!" Ryouko cried, throwing her hands up in the air,
accidentally releasing the hoe from her hand.  It sailed
into the sky like a patriot rocket, then, quite like a
patriot rocket, it turned about and hit an unintended
target: Tenchi's forehead.

     "Uurrpp," he blurted before falling to the ground in an
unconscious heap.

     "Oops!" said Ryouko demurely.  "Sorry."

                             ***

     The screen glowed dimly in the darkness.  At the
moment, it displayed meaningless equations and perplexing
algorithms, but shortly, very shortly in fact, it would be
giving quite a show for anyone who would be around to watch.
Washuu didn't want to miss it, so she hadn't left her seat
in front of the monitor in the last few hours.

     Unfortunately, simply waiting around had begun to get
very boring.  She'd exhausted her supply of buttered popcorn
as well as her preferred drinking solution a long time ago
and had been forced to gnaw on a piece of chewing gum for
the last forty-five minutes.  That, as well, was beginning
to lose it's taste and become bland, despite the
`enhancements' Washuu made on the gum to make it last
longer.

     Washuu was so desperate for action she wanted to
scream.

     "Ohh.. where am I?"

     She nearly did scream.

     "Ah-ha! Miss Washuu!" Mihoshi's high pitched and
annoying voice echoed through the infinite arena of
subspace.  Washuu's head turned mechanically to face the
source of her disturbance.

     "Mihoshi!" she said, still startled despite the fact
that she'd figured out who it was from the voice alone.
"What are you doing here?"

     "Umm... well..." Mihoshi wracked her brain.

     "Don't hurt yourself," Washuu muttered.

     "I was on my way to find out if breakfast was ready yet
when... umm.. gee.. I don't know!" Mihoshi giggled.

     Washuu blinked with incredulity.  She still found it
difficult that someone could be so observant yet so brain
dead at exactly the same time.  Few things had ever
perplexed her, the Gems were one thing, Tenchi was another,
and Mihoshi was the last thing.

     "Well... get out of here!" Washuu yelled loudly without
really trying to sound vicious.  "I'm in the middle of a big
experiment and I can't afford to have it go wrong!"

     "Oh, well, I'll just sit here then and wait until
you're done," Mihoshi said simply, producing a chair out of
nowhere and sitting.

     "What are you waiting FOR?"

     "For you to finish with your experiment, of course,"
said Mihoshi with a smile.

     "No! I mean, what do -- oh forget it," snapped Washuu.
She turned to face the monitor again.

     A small red digital display was counting down until the
event was going to occur.  Washuu checked over her
calculations one last time.  All the equations seemed to be
right, the conditions were perfect, the capture tubes were
primed, the vocal synthesizers were in place, everything was
right.  Now all she needed was for the proper entities to
pass by her.

     "What'cha doing?" Mihoshi asked.  Washuu grit her teeth
and turned slowly back around to face Mihoshi.

     "I'm monitoring a sub-spacial event that will probably
not reoccur for a thousand years.  Four entities in energy
flux are going to pass right through my sensor range and
this is the perfect time to catch them so I finally get a
chance to talk to them.  But I'll miss them if you keep
bothering me with inane questions, so please, be QUIET!"

     "Oh..." came Mihoshi's reply.

     Washuu was about to go into another bout of yelling
when the alarm on her computer went off, alerting her to the
upcoming phenomenon.  She spun around, quick as lightning,
and keyed in the final commands of the capture routine and
watched as her sub-space net was deployed.

                             ***

     "Tenchi!" Aeka called.  "There you are!"  She rushed
down the staircase to greet the brown hared boy who was
entering the living room.  She stopped suddenly when Ryouko
stepped in behind him.

     "Hey Aeka," Tenchi struggled through, rubbing his
forehead which was very red at the moment.

     "Tenchi," Aeka breathed, sounding worried.  "What
happened?"

     "Don't about it, princess," Ryouko interjected.
"Tenchi just had a rough encounter with me and he's a little
sore from it."  She grinned.

     "Why you!" Aeka scolded.  "How dare you say such things
that are so untrue!"

     "Well, actually Aeka," Tenchi started.

     "What?" she said, taken aback.  "You mean it's true?"

     "Well, no, not entirely," Tenchi stammered.  "Wait,
that sounds worse than it is..."

     "Ooohh!" Aeka wailed.  "How could you Tenchi!" She
turned a fled down the hall.

     "Wait! Aeka!" Tenchi called after her and followed
before Ryouko came up behind him and grabbed him in a bone
crushing hug.  "Ryouko! Let go of me!"

     "Aww, come on Tenchi, let the bratty princess go."

     "Ryouko! I--"

     A sudden flash of light interrupted Tenchi's shout.  He
and Ryouko turned to face the door to Washuu's laboratory as
it suddenly glowed a strange green color.  Ryouko tilted her
head just before the door swung open, exploding with energy
that extended into the hall, snaking along the ground and
walls until it touched everything.

     "What the--" Ryouko managed to let out before the
energy struck her through the chest and she collapsed on top
of Tenchi.

                             ***

     There was no time, no substance, no movement, simply
thought.  Four minds were careening through the endless,
formless void.  The first two, a man and a woman, were
silent in their thought.  They had purposefully created the
void in order to take their entities to another land.  They
were simply waiting.

     The second two, also a man and a woman, slightly behind
the first two, were screaming.  Well, screaming as well as
one can without vocal chords or a body, which, with minds as
strong as theirs, was pretty good.  The woman's mind was
creating a high pitched tone, in the upper bands of human
hearing, directed to no one at all.  The man's mind was
creating a low soothing tone, soft and low pitched, directed
at the woman.  Together they formed a most discordant
melody.

     Normally, these sounds are heard by no one, since no
one has ears or a brain to interpret them.  But when the
silvery blue tendrils of energy formed a web around the four
entities, their screams reverberated through the net and
sent the painfully sounding tone back to the source of the
energy field, and, unfortunately, right into the ears of two
humanoid beings.

     Despite this, the net continued to contract around the
entities, all of them suddenly panicking and letting out
painful screams, pulling them towards the creator of the
energy.  All four beings had almost been successfully
entrapped, when the net suddenly disintegrated and the four
beings, now conjoined into one mass, flew wildly away with
two more energy entities in their wake.

                             ***

     "Uughhh," Washuu moaned, feeling very woozy.  She sat
up suddenly, throwing a cloud of black dust all over her
lab.

     Strike that, what used to be her lab.

     Anything that wasn't firmly bolted into subspace had
been thrown across the room and shattered.  Displays had
exploded outward, machinery had been charred black by heat,
and Washuu and Mihoshi were covered in dust, sitting in the
middle of it all.

     Washuu looked over to the computer which was displaying
the energy entities.  It was wrecked, although it hadn't
exploded like everything else, the panel had melted into a
pool of gray, and the monitor, while still intact, had the
last image burned into the screen.  Washuu looked over the
ghostly image and tried to figure out what had happened.

                             ***

     "Aaakk!" Washuu screamed, clutching her ears as the
computer's processes sped up to a furious rate, emitting a
high pitched noise.  She looked over to the tubes as they
glowed a dark shade of green.

     "Miss Washuu! What's wrong?!" Mihoshi screamed over the
noise.

     The green glow began to coalesce into the shapes of
people.  Two in one tube, two in the other.  They were only
vague shapes, without enough detail to make out a face or
gender (assuming they had gender).

     Washuu turned back to the console to see Mihoshi
standing over it with an inquisitive look.  A formula for
disaster if Washuu ever saw one.

     "MIHOSHI!" yelled Washuu.  "Don't.  Touch.  Anything."

     "Whaaa?" Mihoshi responded as her hand rested on the
console, simultaneously pressing several buttons at once.

     That's when the tubes exploded.

                             ***

     Nobuyuki yawned as he walked up to the house.

     "Oh my," he said.  "What a particularly exhausting
day."

     "Nobuyuki!" came a coarse voice.  He turned to see
Katsuhito walking over to him from the staircase leading up
to the shrine.

     "Oh, hey dad!" Nobuyuki said stopping to wait for him.

     "Rough day at work?" asked Yousho.

     "Oh yeah, it's always something."

     "Care to join me for some sake tonight, my son-in-law?"
Yousho said.

     "Oh sure," Nobuyuki said with his goofy grin.  "I don't
think there's anything else planned for tonight."

     "Ahh--" Yousho started, but whatever else he had to say
was drowned out by the deafening explosion that came from
the direction of the house.  The both turned to watch as a
plume of smoke was expelled from the roof of the house where
no hole had previously been.

     Yousho blinked as Nobuyuki's jaw dropped.  "Perhaps
another time," he said and returned to the shrine.

                             ***

     Washuu emerged from subspace through the door beneath
the staircase to see the damaged the explosion had caused.
The whole foyer had been destroyed with black scorch marks
across all the remaining walls.  A few pieces of the wall
had fallen and now lined the floor with the exception of the
area right in front of the door where a misshapen char mark
lie.

     "Hmm..." said Washuu.  "This could be bad."

     "Little Washuu!" Sasami said and ran over to Washuu.
"What happened?"

     "Just an experiment gone awry," Washuu said.  "Nothing
to worry about."

     "What about the house?"

     "Hmm, it's going to need a redesigning."  Washuu put
her hand to her chin and looked down in contemplation.

     "Tenchi's not going to be happy," Sasami said almost
solemnly.  "Hey, where is Tenchi?  I thought I heard him
come in."

     "Tenchi!  Tenchi! Where are you, Tenchi?"

     "Aeka!" Sasami called out and she came over to the two
girls.  "Are you okay?"

     "Yes, Sasami, I'm fine," replied Aeka.  "But how are
you?  Are you hurt?"

     "Nope, I'm okay."

     "That's good," Aeka said but she was obviously
preoccupied.  "Do you know where Tenchi is?"

     "No," Sasami shook her head.  "I was just wondering
about him."

     "He was right here when I left him," Aeka said,
sounding even more worried.

     "Hmm..." Washuu hummed loudly and bent down to the
floor, sliding her hand over the char mark.  "This could be
very bad."

     "What's wrong, Miss Washuu?" Aeka said.

     The fiery haired scientist stood up again with a long
furry object in her hand.

     "Very interesting," she said to herself.

     "What is it, Washuu?" Sasami asked.

     "It's Ryouko's tail," explained Washuu as she looked
back down at the char mark on the floor that might just be
big enough to have been made by two people lying on the
floor.  She looked up suddenly.  "This is going to require
some more study.  Goodbye."  She turned and stepped back
through the doorway into subspace.

     "Wait! Washuu!" Aeka called.

     "What's wrong?" Sasami chimed.

     "Here," Washuu said flatly handing the scorched and
twitching Mihoshi over to Aeka.  "Take care of her for me.
I'm not to be disturbed."  The door swung shut automatically
before disappearing completely.

     "What isn't she telling us?" Aeka wondered aloud,
holding onto Mihoshi.

     "Come'on, Aeka, we need to get Mihoshi help!"

     "Alright, Sasami," Aeka said picking up the charred
woman and bringing her over to a less damaged section of the
house.

     "What's going on!?" Nobuyuki called from the doorway,
surveying the damage done to his house.

                       -End Chapter 3-

Authors Notes:

     Ugh. I didn't like this chapter, I don't know why, but
I just had the worst time writing it.  Oh well, at least
it's done.  Onto Chapter 4, which features the return of the
main characters and the beginning of the actual reason I
wrote up these first three setup chapters.

     By the way, this is OAV continuity, just in case you
were wondering.

     "Tenchi Muyou! Ryo-ohki" was created by Masaki
Kajishima and is Copyright by AIC, Pioneer Entertainment
LDC, INC., and the Tenchi Muyou Committee.  Manufactured
for, distributed, and dubbed by Pioneer Entertainment (USA)
L.P.  While this story contains characters and situations
from this anime and used without permission, this work is
c1999 Adam Leigh.  Not for sale or trade.  All Rights
Reserved.

Adam Christopher Leigh
Omicron@sprynet.com
http://dogbert.simplenet.com/shadows