Stripes of Justice
Terry's time at Bakagaijin High School had been going well despite the occasional disaster. The week after his dad got stationed in Japan and brought him along for the senior year, he'd struggled to fit in, but when a giant squid rose from the sea and everyone had to cower in the basement shelter, he'd made some friends.
What first turned things around for him, after moving so far away from his old friends in America, was being introduced to the Element Masters card game. Everybody played it, even the teachers. The Student Council used their elite card skills to stay in power and arrange free subway travel for all Bakagaijin students throughout the city, so long as students promised to hand over any ultra-rare cards they found while traveling. It was said that anyone who collected a full set of ultra-rares could unlock the lost vault of the game's genius creator, a collector of Sumerian artifacts rumored to have magical powers.
Terry didn't much care about winning the game, though, so much as getting to spend time after class with his fellow students. There was Mako, the girl who had a complete prosthetic body that gave her superhuman fighting skills and no boyfriend. Ray was usually depressed even though the government kept pulling him out of class to pilot a giant robot. ("I don't even like robots.") There was also a long-eared rabbit-girl claiming to be a princess from another star system, a guy with four cute yet vicious pets that taught the school bullies or some criminals a lesson every week or so, and a billionaire lawyer/ninja who'd been turned into a teenager again by a curse a few years ago. The only one who was just a student, it seemed, was Terry.
One Friday, someone challenged the teacher to an Element Masters game that won them a reprieve on Monday's science test. Terry sat around after school eating hamburgers with Ray and Mako and Himura. Terry said, "Himura, can you teach me to fight?"
Himura was well into his fifth burger. He'd spent gym class demonstrating his Whirlwind Strike Style, and still wore his martial-arts gi with its seven black belts. "No. Fighting comes from the heart."
"Oh, come off it," Ray said. "Everybody tells me it's all about emotion and fighting spirit, but whenever I have to go fight angels the scientists keep arguing about whether being happy or scared makes my robot more powerful. All you have to do is punch or shoot energy beams until you win. I just ignore the scientists when they start going on about biblical prophecies and stuff."
Terry said, "But there's got to be something you can teach me. How about you, Ray? Can you teach me the punching part, so I can be a martial artist someday?" It wouldn't be as cool without a robot, but who knew? Maybe he'd randomly find one like that girl in the cross-town school, and end up going to Mars like her.
Ray slumped in his seat. "If I'm allowed. But you really wouldn't want the kind of lessons I get; they're just depressing."
"Maybe I should get a cyber-body like you, Mako. How do you sign up for that?"
Mako wasn't even pretending to eat; she had a power cord plugged into the wall. She held up two fingers. "Two ways: tragic, or wacky. In my case I had a broken arm from thinking I could jump off the roof and fly. Since my dad is the security boss for Nakatakimurasana Corp, the company doctors went a little overboard and replaced my everything. They wanted to send me off to uncover a global conspiracy with my cyber-powers, but then they found out it was just a couple of the managers stealing money for a fake charity. They didn't even go to jail or anything."
"That's rough," said Terry.
She shrugged. "The other option was to get this body by almost dying in a car crash that killed my parents or something, so I like wacky better."
Himura tossed aside another burger wrapper and chugged a big mug of root beer. "Oh yeah! Did you hear about that kid who got flattened by a meteor last week? He got better and now he shoots energy blasts from his hands."
"Cool." Terry didn't sound enthusiastic about that, though. That guy really was just a kid. If Terry was already almost out of high school and didn't have anything cool going for him yet, would he ever? He could end up as just another salary-man corporate guy, and not the kind who jumped into cyberspace to fight hackers. "What about the field trip next month? Did the principal decide yet if we're going to the magical fox shrine in Kyoto?"
Mako grinned. "Nah, we're touring the Museum of Ancient Samurai Relics. Rumor has it that Amaterasu's mirror is going to be on display for once. Why, were you hoping to meet a fox spirit?"
Himura said, "Those are no fun. This one time, before I got into martial arts, a two-tailed fox offered to swap places with me and send me to his world of talking animals for a year."
Terry stared at him. "And you said no!?"
"Well, yeah. Do I look like a furry?"
"I wish that'd happen to me."
"You'd abandon your family just go on a magical adventure?"
Terry threw up his hands. "It'd only be a for a year! And it always works out so that your family is fine with it. I mean, nobody at this school has up and vanished without some good explanation."
"What about Ienaga?" said Himura.
"He turned into a suit of living armor."
"And Satori?"
"She turned into a spaceship. Why am I the only normal one!?"
Terry realized he'd stood and rapped his fists on the table while shouting; everyone was staring at him. He sat back down, blushing.
Mako put one plastic hand on his. "That's what this is about? You want to get caught up in some mad science thing?"
"Or magic. I don't care."
"How about training really hard at Element Masters?"
Terry was skeptical. "Don't you need the power to make whatever card you need show up right when you need it?"
"That's called 'cheating'."
Himura said, "Unless you have a level six Unstoppable Frog card, since that lets you --"
Terry's eyes glazed over at the explanation. He didn't think he'd ever master the game. Still, there was a chance he could find one of those ultra-rares that created holographic monsters, and try to keep it a secret from the Student Council, and then they'd hunt him down and he'd end up somehow engaged to a girl who was also a sword, or something weird like that. It'd be cool. "You know what? Let's try it. Can we go card-hunting, and play a few games along the way?"
They boarded the subway, flashing their student IDs to pay only a token "land" card that you got several of in every Element Masters pack. To go card-hunting meant looking for places where the trash cans near the card-selling newsstands weren't closely watched, because half the garbage in there was from the game. Along the way to the nearest station like that, Terry and friends grabbed the big table in the center of their subway car, so they could play while zooming across the city. The speed made the trip and the game itself seem to go faster. Terry tried to play by instinct, laying out lands and dragons and elemental bursts wherever they'd fit on the board. He got whipped.
Terry groaned. "Is there actually strategy to this game?"
They left the train car to reach a newsstand that was part of Glowing Blue Pearl Station. Around them the walls were glass, showing them the bay. Mako turned invisible and kept watch while Terry and Himura raided the trash bins for over a dozen card packs, and then they retreated to a cafe table.
"All right!" said Terry, rifling through their harvest. As usual, a lot of customers bought cards, checked for ultra-rares, then threw away the rest without checking them thoroughly. As often happened, somebody had overlooked a rare mixed in with the commons. Terry could now add a Rampaging Naked Giant to his deck along with some ordinary cards he didn't have before.
He rebuilt his main deck (since like most students he carried his in a holster everywhere he went) on the ride to Ultimate Tower Station, which was a mostly vertical trip. The train's gravity generators were a little unreliable, so everyone kept to their seats. The students got out carefully and raided the trash, two hundred stories up. They didn't find anything except some discarded power crystals from a wrecked spaceship; nobody even collected those anymore. What a boring side trip.
He got back to the school dorm without incident, and spent hours practicing Element Masters. "Don't worry," said Ray the pilot. "You'll get heroically good at it eventually."
Terry wasn't so sure even with his upgraded deck.
The next month, he muttered curses all the way back from the museum trip. He'd been so close to the Mirror of Amaterasu when it picked the teacher right next to him as its chosen bearer! "Why not me?" he said to Mako.
Mako shook her head, motors whirring faintly. "Have you ever thought that maybe your destiny is to avoid all the stuff we go through? If a meteor ever crushes Japan, you'll somehow end up right under one of the craters on it and you'll survive."
"A lot of good that'll do if I'm the only one!" Terry said, sulking atop the "hump seat" on their bus.
"But then you'll find some secret government bunker that lets you rebuild civilization. Look, anything can happen. Have you had any strange dreams lately, maybe?"
Terry groaned and slumped lower in his seat. "Yeah, a dream about being behind the counter making sandwiches at a sub shop."
"Then if the card game thing isn't working, maybe what you need is something more personal. Maybe you can take a day off and just wander the city. Say you're hunting for battle monsters and the school will let you go, no questions asked."
Terry sat in the principal's office, red-faced. He'd blushed with guilt when he tried lying about having a dream that he was fated to catch a legendary monster.
The principal sighed and folded his hands, staring at Terry over his intimidating shiny glasses. "All right, you can go. Not that I believe you, but the Student Council has firm rules about allowing time off for quests. Just don't make a habit of it if there's no evidence."
Terry nodded and slinked away, hoping he'd have some evidence of being important or special before long.
He wandered off the school grounds without a real plan. He tried the downtown shopping district first, and was a little breathless as he rounded each corner hoping to find one of those mysterious curio shops run by a wizened old man from a far-off land like Kentucky. Some robots were brawling in the electronics market but none of them asked for his help, or anything like that.
How about the botanical gardens? Terry rode out there and tried challenging the ticket salesman to an Element Masters game to get in for free, but he lost. Grudgingly Terry paid double for admission.
It was a calming trip, anyway. There was a huge set of glass domes and multi-story greenhouses roomy enough to support the occasional kung fu brawl, and productive enough that the farming section fed a good part of the underground district of Tokyo. There was a nice wolfsbane display and some fragrant garlic growing in the anti-monster section. Still, nothing really unique.
He wandered through the indoor gardens, then out to the park area where some college varsity teams were having a tennis tournament. It looked pretty serious. The Nippon Industrial Institute Unicorns were fighting a heavily cyborged team sponsored by an evil mad scientist. The Unicorns' captain was caught up in some kind of love triangle with the cyborgs' fur-bikini-clad cavewoman coach/mechanic. There were nearly as many harsh looks and one-liners getting launched as actual serves and volleys.
Terry was about to turn aside and leave, since after a while the players were standing there shouting and powering up their battle auras. Just then, a stark white helicopter landed right next to the tennis courts, scattering papers in its wind. A dozen men jumped out, wearing scary theater masks with white sweaters and tennis shorts, and brandished rackets.
Terry backed away from the commotion in spite of his vague hope that they'd start flinging magic around or something. The cyborg players and the college guys alike confronted them, saying, "Shoo! What's the big idea? Who dares challenge us?"
The masked men charged at them, swinging ferociously. A brawl broke out while the few onlookers stared or ran away. One of the watchers tried instead to steal the helicopter, but a tennis player whacked him so hard he flew into the sky. "You got served!"
Terry just shook his head. In another minute the masked men had claimed the area. Their leader, who had the preppiest sweater of all, shouted, "Listen up! We are the new masters of tennis across the land: the invincible gang of Noh Love! First the tennis courts, then the law courts. Does anyone else dare stand in our way?"
Terry wasn't entirely sure how you could take over the legal system through tennis; something like that had only ever happened with bowling's Final Strike Tournament, and only for a month or so. Still... He was decent at tennis. Maybe now, he could at least be involved in something important, even if only in a minor role, and not get smashed into the sky so long as he played fairly.
He stepped forward, taking a deep breath, and said, "I challenge you! Against me, I'll teach you to Love-All!"
The leader was masked and he still managed to look unimpressed. "You know that only means being tied 0-0, right?"
"Whatever!" Around Terry, the crowd parted. It was awesome. He hadn't even noticed there was a crowd at his sides. "Somebody lend me a racket."
The evil tennis gang sent forth a huge guy called Astynax to face Terry across the court. Bits of greenish clay crunched under their feet as all else went quiet. Terry waggled a borrowed racket in his hands and gave the foe his best intimidating stare.
Astynax's serve actually caught fire on the way to Terry's side. Terry swung wildly but was more concerned about not getting hit with it.
"How about I serve?" said Terry.
"Alternating games only!" The rules were sacred on that point. Astynax's next serve made a little crater.
That game ended quickly, but the Noh Love gang declared best out of three. Terry's cheeks burned with humiliation. He launched the ball this time with his best slicing serve. There were no special effects, but it hit the dirt and bounced with a wicked spin. Astynax lumbered over to it but misjudged the angle. All right!
Terry shifted position and fired off a fast serve that slashed right past the big guy, then another perfect spin. He could actually win this one. Being three points up or at Forty-Love was dangerous, though, since it made the other guy look like the underdog despite being two feet taller and his racket apparently being made from a shimmering meteor. Terry served cautiously this time. The foe bellowed through his mask and leaped into the air to counter it. Terry charged the net and volleyed -- and won. He could actually save the day!
Unfortunately, the tiebreaker game put Astynax back on offense. Terry couldn't just stand there, so he worked up what courage he could and ran to meet the serve. He managed to nick the ball the first time, bounce it back the second time enough to stave off defeat for a few seconds, then the third time get into a cool rapid-fire volley sequence where he could swear dramatic music had kicked in. For him!
But then Astynax did a super serve that involved spinning around three times and shouting half a dozen words of power in the tongue of dragons, and it burned Terry's racket to ashes.
"How can that be legal?" said Terry, dropping what remained before it could do more than singe his hands.
The masked leader strode onto the court and a Latin choir began chanting faintly somewhere. "All things are legal under the reign of Noh Love." He lifted his arms to the suddenly stormy heavens. "From this day forth, the only laws are our whims! We shall begin with a demonstration: the death of all who dare face us in court. Seize this upstart!"
Terry stood surrounded by the evil tennis gang. With no powers to call on, no secret techniques to deploy, he did the most sensible thing: dive between the nearest players and run away.
He dashed away from the courts, kicking up bits of clay as he ran. They were trying to cut him off from the subway station. He'd have to lose them in the greenhouses. He charged at the nearest doors leading into them, where a helpful and stoic butler opened a door so he wouldn't break the glass.
The greenhouse was big enough that Terry had a chance to run or hide. He racked his brain for the best route to the second-closest subway station. If he was lucky the loony gang members would set off an alarm or one of the -- wait a minute; why hadn't the butler done anything to help?
Well, that was obvious: unlike Terry, the man knew better than to get directly involved with anything weird.
Terry heard sneakers clinking along glass floors on the upper level. A big carnivorous plant roared and attacked somebody in the distance, which was a good sign, but not enough to stop the whole crew. Terry fled through rows of alien flowers and past the robots guarding the Peaches of Immortality.
An owl hooted as it leaped from a tree and chased him. "You there! Take this!" It clutched something in its talons and dropped it deftly on the edge of a fountain, right in Terry's path. Terry skidded to a stop and froze, though the gangsters were no more than a minute behind.
The owl had put a wand there. An elaborate shiny rod wreathed in stylized green vines and tipped with a strawberry design.
"Well?" said the owl, peering at him.
Terry looked back over one shoulder and saw masks approaching from across a little maze of corn. He could just run and be done with this nonsense, back to his friends' sympathy.
Instead he snagged the wand and waved it as dramatically as he could, saying, "I'll take what I can get!"
A whirlwind spun him into the air and everything around him got drowned out by sparkles and a cool violin theme. Some kind of magic, finally! He could be a druid or wizard gardener or tree-golem, and finally fit in! The masked men reached him but paused at a respectful distance, staring up. No doubt they were intimidated by the wind and the scent of... musk?
Terry stopped twirling for a moment, and felt something long and fuzzy stretch out from his spine. Then his torso pulled longer, too, and he flailed in the air with his hands. No, wait, the limbs in front of him weren't his hands or feet, but a set of white-furred paws in between! It was about then that his clothes seemed to disintegrate into a mass of colorful ribbons and reform as a long green thing that didn't even come down to the paws. He grabbed at the fabric and at the same time spotted the white fur and claws on his actual hands, and the cute pleated pattern on the new outfit.
A ribbon wound itself through his hair and another along the mass of fur behind him, tickling him and making the big thing flick into view. A tail with black fur and white stripes. His nose seemed to be sticking too far out in front of his eyes. He tried to focus on it, and glanced down. The top of his new vine-decorated blouse pulled tight as his chest swelled out to fill it.
Terry yelped and flailed in midair. The wind set him down on four fuzzy paws with a whole second torso behind him.
"A centaur... skunk?" said the nearest gangster, stepping forward like he expected a vicious volley.
The leader yanked him back, saying, "You fool, that's a magical girl! If we attack now she'll crush us like an easy lob. Fall back!"
Terry stumbled on his new paws, feeling shocked. He was still holding the wand. He told himself not to worry about exactly what had happened; the gangsters were getting away. He jabbed the wand in their direction and staggered forward, saying in a too-high voice, "Strawberry... Smite!"
Curls of red and green energy swirled around him and lanced toward the fleeing tennis guys, becoming a hail of thousands of strawberries that pelted them and knocked them to the now-slippery glass floor.
"We'll have to work on your attacks," said the owl, perching on a nearby statue. "Do something entangling."
"How?" said Terry.
"Same way."
Terry advanced on the gang, walking on four feet without thinking too hard about it, and lifted the wand skyward. "Vines, seize my enemies! Entangling Strike!"
Obligingly, phantom vines of light erupted from the floor and grabbed the gangsters. It worked for several seconds before the glass floor shattered, cracked by magic roots.
Terry shrieked as he crashed along with the whole crowd into the first floor's giant indoor rice paddy. He stood up and felt heavy, weighed down by a whole lot of soaked monochrome fur. The vines had vanished but the whole tennis crew moaned and struggled to stand.
It was about then that the cops showed up. Not just the regular ones, but the Special Police, a registered B-Rank Vigilante who looked like a samurai pro wrestler, and an agent from the Section 8 Law Division of Underdressed Cyborgs. Terry put his hands up, accidentally raised his new forepaws too, and splashed facefirst back into water that tasted like rice and frogs.
The Special Police cop (they had snazzier uniforms than the poor regular kind) took the lead by pulling Terry out of the muck. "Ma'am, did you capture these criminals? There's no record of you."
A helicopter whirred in the distance. "Somebody's getting away!" Terry shouted, seeing a flash of its white blades rising past the greenhouse. The other police were busy handcuffing people.
The cop said, "Tanaka, get them!" The vigilante ran off and out of sight. Presumably he could jump onto the helicopter and take it down. "Have we got witnesses?"
The butler said, "Yes, sir. Origin story."
"Ah, one of those," said the cop. To Terry he added, "If you're a new magical girl and not just some random idiot, that'd help explain why you're the only one not shredded with broken glass. This must be your animal companion. Has it got a name?"
Terry looked around and spotted the owl. "You! You did this to me!" He wasn't sure whether to be furious or grateful.
The owl flew down to perch on Terry's shoulder. "Nice to meet you. The name is Kayda, and no, I didn't do this."
"No?" His new tail lashed back and forth, stirring swampy water. "Do you know how hard I wished for a giant robot, a spellbook, a mystical guitar? Anything? Now you're going to tell me 'the power was in me all along'?"
The owl shrugged his wings. "Well, no, it was mostly the Wand of Mephit. Partly you, though. These things almost never happen to someone who doesn't try."
The cop said, "Are you just going to stand there hooting and making chirpy skunk noises at each other?"
Terry blushed. "Uh, Officer, he says his name is Kayda. Am I under arrest? This is... I'm kind of in shock right now."
"Understandable. We'll have to take you to the station for processing and some initial testing of your powers, but then you're free to go."
The owl shifted on its talons and turned its head back to stare along Terry's new lower back. "I must say this isn't quite what I expected the wand to do."
Terry stamped the pond, splashing everywhere. "Why me? Am I stuck like this? Why a skunk?!"
The owl rubbed around his eyes with one wingtip as though cleaning a pair of spectacles. "I'll save a full discussion of magical theory for later, but I was empowered as the guardian of a... cast-off artifact from the divine forge. I believe the Wand was intended as a joke or a way of testing unusual powers. I was offered the gift of intelligence for accepting a role of working with its owner, and I accepted rather than spend my life eating raw mice. As for changing back, of course you can. You need only to learn the appropriate transformation phrases. Assuming, of course, that you don't immediately reject your bond to the Wand."
Terry held the berry-themed magic wand in both hands, shivering through his fur. "I could throw this thing away, still?"
"If you act quickly, yes. Before it becomes nearly impossible to steal or lose."
The Special Police man tapped one foot while a regular cop ran up with a pile of towels. "Can we save whatever drama you're going through for later, miss? The Martian Lives Matter people are looting downtown again."
Terry looked down at his ridiculous green blouse/skirt thing, his extended body, and the magic wand responsible for both. He sighed.
He'd gathered Mako and Himura, and Ray showed up after he got done killing some kind of apocalypse seraphim rising from the sea. They all grabbed a booth at their favorite restaurant, where Terry paid for a round of burgers and frothy root beer. He sat there with no fur, two legs, while his owl companion was busy falling in love with Mako.
Mako looked over from feeding french fries to the owl. "Congratulations, Terry! I saw it on the news. You've got a scary masked nemesis, even."
"Yeah, some of them got away. Of course." Terry was starved; his appetite was apparently enough for his larger form.
Ray said, "I was too busy to hear the details; what kind of powers did you get?"
Blushing over his food, Terry muttered, "Magical girl."
Ray snorted. "Better than nothing."
Terry said, "Yeah. So. I finally belong."
"Don't say that," said Mako. "You were always our friend. Isn't that so, everyone?"
Himura joined in with the reassurance, but he said, "You're right, though, Terry. You were always going to be jealous."
Terry hadn't done much to earn this fate, but he'd done something. He put down his food and stood. "I admit it. I don't want to learn the lesson that it's okay to be ordinary. Even if it's ridiculous, I'd rather be out there with you guys, doing cool stuff."
Mako smiled. "I like that attitude. Will you show us the whole transformation sequence and your powers?"
Terry stepped away from the table. "Sure. Stand back." He gestured toward the wand, making it float into his hand, and waved it with such enthusiasm that he spun around and sparkled even before the magic fully activated. "Power of Mephit, I call upon you! Stripes of Justice!" The whirlwind raised him up and he began changing. He'd only started training with his companion and his new powers, but he'd already decided: they were totally worth it.