Thanks to Makari and Neshomeh, who bravely betaed this mission fighting with my not-so-good English and headaches.
As usual, if you find errors, tell me.
“And the rack is done. What about helping me put all the weapons on it?”
Sergio turned his head to Corolla. She was playing with Nanoha Takamichi, a mini they had recently adopted.
“You’re the one that uses them. And I’m only six inches tall, I can’t do much.”
“That’s right, but ammo boxes aren’t that big. Besides, you’re still able to transform into human size, aren’t you?”
“Er… you win. I’ll help you, but I’ll keep my small form. I don’t have much mana. And we still have to find a way to keep this little devil quiet.”
As a mini, Nanoha had her strength toned down, but she was still a little “White Devil”(Nanoha’s most common nickname), so while her Divine Busters did little more than tickle, her Starlight Breakers actually were able to do damage to all the stuff inside the response center, and also hurt quite a bit. The two agents gave her some plushies to play with… that the mini recognized as targets.
“Divine Buster! Divine Buster!”
Sergio observed the little mini-Berserk shooting pink beams at the toys. “Well, until she tries a Starlight Breaker we should be safe.”
“It’s unbelievable how good she is at using a pen as a magical Device.”
“Well, we’re in HQ,” Sergio stated. “Until she realizes it’s only a pen, it will keep working.”
The two agents finished loading the rack with Sergio’s collection of firearms from various canons, and then sat on the sofa. Their RC wasn’t very big, but they had managed to turn it into a sort of small house: a small kitchen unit, a sink, a fridge, a table with four chairs, some overloaded shelves, two beds, a big wardrobe, and obviously the console. They also had managed to transform the restroom into a full bathroom with a water heater, quite a luxury in HQ.
“Starlight Breaker!”
Nanoha blew up a plushie, and the pink beam continued straight to the console. Sergio immediately got up. “Oh, no. Bind her, I’ll check if the console still works.”
Corolla used her binding spell to immobilize the mini while Sergio checked the console.
“Good, it seems OK. The guys at DoSAT wouldn’t be happy if we had to make them repair it. The little devil has cooled down?”
“She’s laughing, but maybe I can persuade her to have a nap.”
About twenty minutes later, Nanoha was asleep. Corolla sighed in relief.
“At least we can relax a bit now. What about reading some Wild Mass Guessing on TvTropes?”
“Sounds OK to me.”
Sergio opened the TvTropes page on the console and went straight to Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha‘s WMGs.
“Corolla, read here. Somebody thinks that Nanoha Takamachi is an Alternate Universe version of Sakura Kinomoto.”
“It’s quite reasonable; the first half of the first episode was almost identical. Where is it?”
Sergio pointed his finger on the screen.
“Here, it says: ‘Nanoha is an Alternate Universe version of Sakura Kiminoto’? Wait a minute, it’s Kinomoto!”
“Let’s edit the page before it spawns a mini.”
“Hoe?”
The two agents turned their heads to the source of the voice. A small, winged Sakura was floating next to the console’s screen.
“… Too late,” Corolla said. “Houston, we’ve got a mini-Guardian here.”
“I wonder how it works. However, she’s cute. We can keep her.”
“I knew you were going to say that. After all, Sakura is your Lust Object.”
Sergio wasn’t quite amused.
“What’s the matter with her?”
“You’re hugging her.”
“Hanyan.”
Sergio released the mini, but before he could say anything to Corolla the console beeped.
“A mission. I hope it isn’t anything too bad, I’m already tired from assembling the rack. Stupid IKEA furniture.”
“This badfic is quite short, but I don’t think it will be a pleasant job.”
“Don’t tell me. Painfully bad grammar?”
“You got it. And it’s also a first person one with multiple POVs. And the author seems to neglect the existence of commas.”
“What’s the rest?” Sergio asked.
“Smashed canon pairings for all the canon characters involved, and there is also a rape.”
“Bad. Very bad. What canon is it?”
“You won’t like it.”
“Not Card Captor Sakura. Please.”
“I’m afraid it is.”
Sergio sighed. When they got a mission to a very bad fanfiction, it was always a CCS one.
“Who gets raped?”
“You don’t want to know. Really.”
“WHO?”
“Her.”
Sergio didn’t say anything. Instead, he took a Benelli M4 Super90 from the rack.
“Let me think about the right cartridges. Buck 00? A classic, but not painful enough. Dragon Breath? Sounds good. Oh, wait, I’ve got the right ones. Uncommon Comma Special.”
“Uncommon Comma Special?”
“Yes, I think they were made for the Department of Technical Errors. They’re loaded with special comma-shaped shot instead of the normal, ball-shaped ones. The accuracy is bad, but I think they’re the right ones for this fic. Poetic justice.”
Sergio loaded the shotgun and chambered a round, while Corolla set up the portal and the disguise generator.
“Disguises, Sergio?”
“Don’t know. Are there Mary Sues or Author-Wraiths in the fic?”
“Let me see… only one Author-Wraith, I think. It possesses Syaoran just before making him…”
“Don’t say it. I think I’m quite trigger-happy today. Anyway, we shouldn’t need disguises, but better use them.”
“Er… there are a lot of police here, so I think we should be policemen.”
“Good thinking, Corolla. But what about something like SWAT? This gun is from the video game SWAT 4.”
“Agreed.”
Corolla opened the portal.
“Can you throw in a Crash Dummy? It’s Sakura’s POV when she… well… you got it?”
“Of course. But I’m going to kill this thing before that. Doesn’t matter if we don’t get enough charges and that makes Upstairs angry.”
Sergio looked like he was going to start A-Team firing once he entered the fic.
“You know you’re scary when you get angry?”
“I know. And if Flowers get to know it, better.”
Sergio took a copy of the Card Captor Sakura manga and put it into his backpack, then threw a yellow cube into the portal.“Now it should be safe to go in.”
The two agents stepped through the portal.
“It’s quite weird to see, don’t you think so, Corolla?”
The crash dummy, once inflated, morphed into Sakura and sat on the bed near Yue.
“Well, this is even weirder.”
Sergio was going to ask what was weirder when he noticed that Corolla was still six inches tall and floating. She was quite like a SWAT Barbie with brown hair.
“What the hell happened, Corolla? You’re still a Unison Device!”
“I think the disguise generator was damaged by Nanoha’s Starlight Breaker. It gave us the right clothing and gear… but not the right bodies.”
“That’s not good. I hope this won’t interfere with your CAD. We need the switch-back-to-past-tense function.”
“Don’t worry, it’s fully working.”
Sergio and Corolla followed Sakura and Yue into the kitchen. On the TV news was announced Syaoran’s death.
“What? The fic just started and Syaoran already got killed?”
“And why would Japanese television talk about a homicide that happened in Hong Kong?”
“And why is there an improbable phone number where there shouldn’t be any?”
The two agents were interrupted by Sakura’s sudden decision to go to Hong Kong.
“If we don’t care about the bad grammar, she seems quite in character for now.”
“I hope,” Sergio said. “But why didn’t Fujitaka say anything about it? He’s here in the kitchen.”
Actually, Fujitaka wasn’t there.
“I think it’s because he’s no longer here, Sergio. He must have been put away in a plothole.”
“Well, at least he’s safe from OOCness.”
Soon the two agents almost forgot about it, because there was even worse news for them: Sakura apparently was engaged to Yue. He was acting quite jealous, too.
“Whaaaaaaaaat? Corolla, OOC readings, now!”
“Sakura’s quite bad. She’s already over 35%. Yue… 50%, still rising… wait, it’s already over 60%… CHARACTER RUPTURE! CHARACTER RUPTURE! CHARACTER RUP… 404!404!CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR! CRITICAL SYSTEM ERROR! …”
The small Unison Device began to slowly fall to the ground, but luckily Sergio caught her.
“Oh, crap! Corolla, you’re OK?”
“Bip…”
“Oh, no. Now what am I supposed to do?”
Sergio read the Words to check how much time he had to find a solution. Sakura was going to get to the airport by taxi, and he didn’t have a remote activator, since the only one the two agents had was part of Corolla’s body.
“I’ve got to have an idea, and fast. And that horrible grammar isn’t helping me.”
Badly linked paragraphs made Sakura literally teleport into a taxi. With no other choice, Sergio borrowed Fujitaka’s car to follow it, postponing Corolla’s reactivation.
“I hope Upstairs won’t get mad about this. But Fujitaka’s nowhere to be found, Touya doesn’t drive, and the car is never mentioned in the fic. And I need to get to the airport.”
Later, at the airport, Sergio was both relieved and quite astonished when he saw Sakura running through security without being stopped. It was a charge, but the fact that security personnel was nonexistent helped him. A guy in combat SWAT gear with a shotgun and a doll attached to his belt running in an airport would have been noticed by all background characters, with or without the SEP field. Sergio sat in a seat two rows behind Sakura only seconds before the plane took off.
“And only ten minutes ago we were all at her house. This thing has so many charges it hurts! And I still need to reboot Corolla! Can things possibly go even worse?”
Sergio started to examine his tiny partner.
“OK, where’s the reset button on a Unison Device? Does she even have one?”
Sergio began tapping Corolla’s head with his index finger, initially gently then with more strength, in an attempt to make her wake up. After a bit it worked.
“Wha… what happened?”
“You crashed after using your built-in CAD on Yue. Now we’re on a plane to Hong Kong. Sakura’s two rows ahead. Are you OK now?”
“Yes, I think… I hope I didn’t give you trouble.”
“Well, I had to use Fujitaka’s car to follow the taxi Sakura used to get to the airport. This won’t make the Flowers happy.”
“Sorry…”
“No problem. It’s not your fault.”
Two hours later the aircraft landed, and the two agents began chasing Sakura in the streets of Hong Kong.
“At least the author made her book a room in a hotel and change her money.”
“Yeah, but two things right don’t make this story any better,” Sergio stated. “And I’m almost out of breath.”
“Me too. Sakura’s got quite an amazing stamina today.”
Sakura entered a pub to ask where Syaoran got killed, but before obtaining the information, a background character tried to persuade her to date him. He failed, and when Sakura got away Sergio pulled out his knife and cut the throat of the man.
“We’re not supposed to kill every background character, they will disappear when the fic’s killed!”
“This one deserved it. And it made me feel better.”
“I hope that the SEP field was strong enough…”
Nobody seemed to care for the recently slain man. Instead, the whole pub vanished for a second, and then came back.
“Corolla, do you have any idea what that was?”
“Don’t know, but it was not in the Words. I’ll do a scan.”
Corolla opened several holographic screens and checked the parameters of the badfic. A lot of them were red.
“The fic is going to be deleted, but we have still enough time to finish the work.”
“Good. Or maybe not. I don’t know if I prefer ending it myself or letting it disappear. However, let’s move. We’re losing her.”
Sergio and Corolla followed Sakura into a place where there were a lot of “csi and police.”
“Another charge.” Sergio frowned. “I don’t know how crime scene investigation units are called here, but that’s surely not CSI. The author saw too much of the homonymous series.”
“Crossover time! Yay!”
“Well, I think not…”
“Look there.”
In front of the two agents was Horatio Caine.
“What the hell is the guy from CSI: Miami doing here?”
“Probably he was accidentally brought here when the author mentioned CSI,” Corolla explained. “We can let Sakura go and deal with him; we’ll find her at the morgue tonight. That will probably be in the next hour, or less.”
“OK. Let’s make him put away those sunglasses, neuralyze him, and portal him back to his continuum. Stay here and close your eyes.”
Sergio went straight to Caine.
“Good morning, I’m Captain Sergio Turbo from SWAT. What happened here?”
“A boy was stabbed. We know only that he refused to marry a girl a few days ago…”
Caine took his glasses off, but before he could say one of his one-liners Sergio neuralyzed him.
“No time for Quip to Black today, buddy. You never went to Hong Kong, and you don’t know anything about Syaoran Li. And you never saw us. Corolla, can you portal him?”
“Sure.”
Corolla opened a portal under Horatio, who literally fell into his home continuum.
“Shouldn’t you have portalled him in a less dangerous way?”
“Sorry, the portal opened in the wrong way. ”
“Maybe it’s Rule of Funny. Corolla, where is the morgue?”
“Don’t know, but we should go ahead a bit. I feel like this fic works in a manner similar to HQ.”
“You mean walking without thinking where we have to go? OK, let’s try that.”
Less than five minutes later they were in the front of the morgue, and a few meters from Sakura.
“What is she doing?”
“Waiting for the night.”
“Oh, yes.” Sergio frowned again. “It’s supposed to be morning still, so she will keep waiting for, like, twelve hours? I don’t think she should be physically able to do that. And, besides, she could accelerate time with the Time card.”
In a few seconds the morning became night. Without the Time card.
“I hate badfic time flow.”
“Well, this gives us more time,” Corolla told him. “If it keeps doing so, in less than half an hour we will finish this mission.”
“Very good. But it still gives me a headache.”
“Me too.”
Sakura flew into the building with the Float card.
“Another charge. The right one is the Fly card,” Sergio explained. “Float would probably work, but Sakura wouldn’t use it anyways. Do we have to follow her?”
Corolla checked the Words again.
“I think not. By the time we get in, they will already be out. However, Sakura uses the Hope card to bring Syaoran back to life…”
“I don’t think it should work. However, if it actually does, better.”
“It worked, somehow. And now Sakura somehow found some clothes for Syaoran. Some kind of suit for workers, it seems.”
Sergio nearly began headbanging on the nearest wall.
“Another thing that shouldn’t be there.”
“They’re going out now.”
“I see them. What’s that blur around them?”
Sergio pointed a sort of white thing, partially transparent, that was around Sakura and Syaoran.
“The Words say that they’re flying home… but not how.”
“So the fic is simultaneously trying to make them fly by Fly card, Float card, and airplane?”
“Yes. And they’ll get there in a few minutes, so we should portal to…”
“The airport. I have to get Fujitaka’s car back to their house.”
After parking the car where it was meant to be, the two agents stared at the sky, which was both day-like and night-like. Somehow.
“That’s painful to watch.”
“The author messed up the time so badly that the fic isn’t even able to decide if it’s night or day,” Corolla explained. “The fact that this badfic is being deleted doesn’t help.”
“How much time do we have left?”
“Before deletion, more than half an hour.”
“Before the other bad thing, Corolla.”
“Oh. A couple minutes.”
“Open a portal to right outside the room they’re in.”
“Sure.”
Sergio and Corolla stepped into the portal and appeared in front of the door of Sakura’s room.
“OK, let’s listen and get in when Syaoran tries to rape her.”
“Agreed. But don’t go Rambo, please.”
“There is no choice.” Sergio frowned. “The Author-Wraith manifests himself only when Syaoran decides to have Sakura.”
The two agents listened to the conversation between the two canons. Syaoran was trying to win back Sakura’s affection, but she was still engaged to Yue.
“No, Sakura. You’re not. CLAMP says that you have to love Syaoran only. The whole CLAMP multiverse has it as a written rule. Making Sakura NOT love Syaoran not only averts the canon ending, but also can prevent Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle‘s plot from starting. With Tsubasa, they linked together all their works. And, besides—”
Sergio didn’t have the time to end, because Syaoran started shouting in a worrying way.
“Crap, he’s going to do it!”
Sergio kicked the door (that was never fully closed) and took advantage of the confusion of both canon characters to hit Syaoran on the head with the stock of the shotgun, knocking him out.
“I think I swatted him.”
“Cool one.”
Syaoran woke up, but by the time he was standing again he was immobilized by rings of magic energy.
“Your binding spell works as well as usual, Corolla.”
“Thank you.”
Sakura stared at the two agents with a very confused look on her face.
“Who are you? Why did you attack Syaoran?”
“Er… we forgot to introduce ourselves. I’m Agent Sergio Turbo from the Protectors of the Plot Continuum, and she’s my partner Corolla. We’re here because Syaoran got infected by an Author-Wraith, that makes him behave very badly.”
“I see… he wanted to…”
“He did not want it. It’s all the Author-Wraith’s fault. We’re going to get rid of it.”
“RELEASE ME! I LOVE SAKURA, SHE’S MINE!”
“Oh, shut up.”
Sergio took out the Card Captor Sakura manga and slapped Syaoran unconscious again. Then the agent turned on the flashlight on the shotgun and aimed it into the possessed canon’s face. Corolla closed her eyes, and a small magic circle appeared at her feet.
“In the name of Nanase Ohkawa, Mokona, Tsubaki Nekoi, and Satsuki Igarashi, leave this body, Author-Wraith, and go away from this canon. Now!”
Something similar to a human-shaped mist left Syaoran’s head, and began yelling at the two agents.
“THIS IS MY FICTION AND MY COUPLES ARE THE BEST AND I WILL HAVE SAKURA AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO CHANGE IT!”
Sergio stepped in front of the Author-Wraith.
“I think you’re WRONG.”
Sergio aimed his shotgun at the mist and continued.
“Author Wraith, you’re charged with disregarding grammar, forgetting about the existence of commas, putting Fujitaka in a plothole, broadcasting improbable TV news from Hong Kong in Japan, messing with the flow of time, generating a lot of places made of Generic Surface, disregarding how pretty much EVERYTHING works in airports, making Sakura book a room and change money and then forget about it, creating a crossover by referring to crime scene investigation units from Hong Kong as “csi,” ignoring how Sakura Cards truly work, smashing every canon pairing, making your own and so harming Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle‘s existence, driving a lot of characters so OOC that my partner’s main system crashed, annoying PPC agents, and TRYING TO MAKE SYAORAN RAPE SAKURA. The sentence is death, but in my personal opinion you deserve something worse.”
Sergio pulled the trigger, destroying the Author-Wraith with comma-shaped shot.
“Corolla, how much time we have?”
“Not much. And we have to find the plothole in which Fujitaka is imprisoned and neuralyze everybody.”
“He disappeared from the kitchen. The plothole should be there.”
Sergio turned his head to Sakura and a quite confused Syaoran.
“You two, find Touya and Yukito alias Yue, and then you all should get into the kitchen.”
The two agents went into the kitchen.
“OK, where’s the plothole?”
“Don’t know. But it should be here.” Corolla looked around, and continued. “I mean, Fujitaka can’t accidentally close himself into the fridge, right?”
“You gave me an idea.”
Sergio opened the fridge, and pulled Fujitaka out of it.
“As I thought. The plothole was in the fridge.”
“Why the fridge?”
“Rule of Funny, Corolla, as always.”
“Oh. Anyway, there are the others.”
“Good. Everybody, look here.”
Sergio activated the neuralyzer, stunning all the canon characters.
“Syaoran never died, Sakura never went to Hong Kong, and basically nothing happened today. Oh, and you didn’t see us. Corolla, the portal.”
“Right.”
The two agents literally jumped into the portal, and found themselves lying on the floor of their RC.
“This one was the worst of all the missions I’ve done,” Sergio sighed. “I absolutely need rest.”
“Not right now. There’s a message on the console.”
“How did you…?”
“I’m a Device, remember?” Corolla explained. “I’m linked with the console.”
“Oh, right. What does it say?”
“It’s from the Floating Hyacinth. She wants us in her office.”
“I’m not quite in the mood now. Corolla, can you send a reply stating that we can go later, or we can go now… with a flamethrower?”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
Corolla sent the rather explicit refusal to their Department Head.
“I think we should use a bit of Bleeprin for this. Sergio, you look like one who is going to either commit suicide or kill somebody, and I’ve had a hard time too.”
“Good idea. What about a Sonic Screwdriver?”
“Agreed.”
Sergio poured the liquid into two glasses, then they toasted and somehow gulped the whole cocktail in less than half a second.
Wings Of Canon 