The Cult of Chaos Presents:


Until I Wake Up
Chapter 1


A Love Hina/Amber fusion-fic by Berk Watkins
With apologies to Mr. Zelazny and Mr. Akamatsu...


There's a rhyme and reason behind everything, nothing happens without 
reason.  Cause and Effect are two very important principles that stretch
everywhere and touch everything.  Take for instance, a child who is
unable to sleep at night unless she's with someone else, on the surface
a relatively innocuous thing.  Of course, there might also be a reason
for that need to have someone near, in fact there probably is.  Dreams,
for one, are always a good reason to want someone close in the dark of
night...

A strange yet familiar tongue issued from the dreamer's lips in the
depths of the dream.  Not the Farsi of her homeland or the Japanese
she'd come to learn (albeit badly) from the residents of her new home.
"It won't be much longer now," she said in the odd tongue she somehow
could understand, though she couldn't recall ever having learned it. 
"Only a couple more hours and I'll be going away..."

"We'll be waiting for you to come home," a woman's voice remarked just
out of her line of sight.  The voice sent a strange feeling down her
spine, with it's hauntingly familiar tones.

The dreamself turned to look at the creature who had spoken, not human
at all, but rather something more like a conjuration from the depths of
myths of the Underworld.  The dreamer giggled softly and might have
smiled as she hugged the beast and mused, "I'll be home before you know
it, Mama..."

It was somewhere around that point in the reoccurring dream, that little
Koala Suu snapped wide awake, her emerald eyes wide in shock and
confusion as she lay in her futon.  Thousands of questions danced in her
mind as she tried to figure out what the imagery meant.  A soft whimper
escaped from her as her mind whirled over the edge and a comforting hand
rested itself on her shoulder.

"Go to sleep, Suu, I'm here to watch over you," Motoko's gruff Japanese
voice murmured softly, not sounding sleepy from the abrupt awakening
she'd gotten from Koala's sudden lurch into consciousness.  The voice
was soothing, even though her own accent was more archaic than anything
else.

The sounds of the night in the Hinata District descended on the room as
Suu's worried sounds began to wane; the modern day samurai keeping watch
over her.  It was a vigil she was accustomed to, Suu having been plagued
by nightmares since she first came to the Inn from whatever odd country
it was she claimed nationality to.

She still hadn't been able to find it on any map...

The breathing of the small child in the futon next to Motoko's gradually
slowed and ultimately settled into a normal sleeping rhythm.  The older
girl soon followed her young charge back into sleep, though her
attention never entirely strayed from the task at hand, and she would
awaken at the first sign of troubled sleep from Koala.

                         *     *     *     *

"Ne, Keitaro..." Naru purred, poking the dozing manager of the Hina Inn. 
"Wake up..." she continued, a feminine giggle coming from somewhere near
her.

Keitaro opened an eye to regard the faintly hazy forms of Mutsumi and
Naru, his nearsightedness not severe enough to let him know that neither
were wearing much of anything.  Soft, soft pink skin and lots of it
teased Keitaro's straining eyes as he fumbled around for his glasses to
get a better look.

"We just wanted..." Naru murmured, slinking up along his futon, swaying
in an inviting manner.  She leaned down, resting her head on his
shoulder.

"To let you know..." Mutsumi continued, flanking the by then wide-awake
custodian on the other side.  She soon took up a complimentary position
on the custodian's other side.

"Tha hot water's busted!" Kitsune's drawl shouted from the other side of
the apartment door, smashing Keitaro's oh-so-pleasant dream like so much
crystalline glass.

The erotic visions of the dreaming world fled from Keitaro's grasp,
leaving him alone on his futon with an uncomfortable lump in a location
somewhere other than his throat.  The former Ronin had rapidly
discovered that passing your entrance exams for Toudai wasn't a ticket
to success with the opposite sex.  He had the bruises to prove it.

"Jus a minute..." he mumbled, a hand fumbling around for his glasses as
he sighed.  Yet another typical day in his life, which had developed an
amazing talent for handing him exactly what he wanted with one hand
while pounding his skull in with the other.  It had gotten to the point
where he wondered if he'd done something truly vile in a past life that
warranted the amount of trouble he'd put up with.

He shuffled out of his room after getting dressed, rubbing the sleep out
of his eyes.  "Where is the water heater anyway?" he asked of his aunt,
who was waiting just outside the door.  Why was she over anyway?

"Downstairs, I think," Haruka replied, "but it's been years since I was
down there last."  She paused, removing her spent cigarette from her
mouth and depositing it in an ashtray she was carrying with her.  "I
seem to remember hearing something about it being.. special..."

Oh he really didn't need to hear that...  "Special?" the stricken
manager inquired as he slouched a little in sheer surprise, "How?"

"Damned if I know..."

The manager/custodian sighed as if burdened with some throughly
undeserved task and trudged towards the basement with a toolkit.  Why
did this have to always happen to him?  He'd done everything that was
expected of him, he'd passed his entrance exams, he'd gotten into Toudai
and he'd even managed to narrow down the possible girls he'd made that
oh-so-sacred promise to from the entire female population of Japan to a
pair of pretty girls.  Of course, one girl was as accident prone as he
was and the other one had a tendency to put his poor, aching skull
through walls.  Then again, 'No beautiful thing is ever perfect,' as the
old proverb went.

He paused at the ominous door that led into the bowels of the old inn,
almost afraid to ponder what evils may lurk in the depths of the place. 
The Hinata-sou was a decidedly unusual, old hotel after all; anything
could be down there.  Anything.  A shiver of pure, unbleached terror ran
down Keitaro's spine as he tentatively reached out for the doorknob,
hand shaking; palms sweaty in the old mammalian reflex to get a better
grip on a branch whilst hanging on for dear life.

The portal opened into the yawning darkness beyond, a gust of stale, hot
air fogging up the custodian's glasses.  Huh?  Keitaro fumbled for his
glasses and wiped at them, nose wrinkling at the smell coming up from
the depths.

"Whab's da snech?" a blob that sounded like Kitsune remarked from
somewhere behind him.  The blob resolved as Keitaro returned his glasses
to his nose and revealed that Kitsune was holding her nose, she then
pointed at the door, "Dat reeks.."

Keitaro, also holding his nose peered down the stairwell into the
choking darkness below with the aid of a flashlight and caught the dark
ripple of water lapping at the bottom of the stairs.  "Jus wunnaful.."
he mumbled.  Before he could get shoved down into the depths by someone,
the manager headed downstairs as soon as he'd taken stock of the
situation.

One hand over his nose and the other holding a flashlight, the
spectacled building superintendent made his way into the darkness,
pausing somewhat fearfully at the bottom step, mere inches above water
of an unknown depth.  It was just one, simple step.. off into a vast,
unknown void.  He gulped spasmodically and carefully stuck one foot out,
checking the depth of the water carefully by where it rose against his
galoshes.

Not too bad...

He gagged a little at the foul smell emanating from the water, carrying
gods only knew what dissolved within.  "Ah gak..." he choked out,
clamping his fingers back over his nose, "Bad idea..."  He proceeded on
along his way, more careful about not breathing through his nose and
trying hard not to think about how nasty a cleanup this was going to
become.

Upstairs, Kitsune closed the door to seal the foul reek of the basement
below.  "Uk..." she muttered crossly as she wandered back away from the
door to the rooms down below.  "I don't envy him..." she remarked as she
rounded the corner and promptly put the poor fellow out of her mind.

Meanwhile, in a place on the property neither deprived of hot water nor
provided with a truly inventive, foul odor, Naru was enjoying a nice
quiet soak in the spring after jogging around the neighborhood.  One of
the great advantages to the Hinatasou was that even if the hot water
went out in the main building, the baths would always be nice and warm. 
It was a nice relaxing soak until, of course, something interfered.

That something began as a rumble underground.

The rumble became a localized shake.

"Eh!?" spake the brunette genius eloquently as the localized shake
turned into a powerful blast of water in the middle of the springs,
flinging a throughly drenched and quite surprised Keitaro high into the
air.  She boggled a bit as the custodian sailed high into the air and
then, in strict obedience of the laws of gravity, began to come back
down.  "Oh...." she murmured.

"Nooooo!" finished Keitaro as he landed in the water with a spectacular
belly-flop, that tossed up a huge wave, inundating the area.

Thus.. Did peace return to the onsen, the water stilling as the sound of
the insects and birds returned to their normal cycles.  In a matter of
moments it was as if no-one had ever bathed in the onsen before; Naru
and Keitaro were nowhere to be seen.  Several long seconds passed of
this tranquil and total silence passed before the typical madness that
gripped the inn returned with the surfacing of Naru as she gasped
desperately for air.

She coughed for several moments evacuating the mouthfulls of water she'd
inadvertently breathed in from her lungs and getting her breath back
before realizing there was still someone else unaccounted for. 
"Keitaro?" she asked, peering around with a squint.  She didn't
typically wear her glasses in the bath, though she kept them handy
looped over her towel for emergencies.  It seemed both they and her
towel had gotten lost in the inundating wash, but that wasn't
immediately important.

It was about that time she thought to look down and in strict obedience
to the law of dramatic irony found Keitaro bobbing face down in the
water, face drifting mere centimeters from her crotch.

Five seconds.  Naru's left eyebrow twitched slightly.

Four seconds.  Her face flushed with pure unholy rage.

Three seconds.  Keitaro's heretofore lifeless body stirred a little as
he recovered a bit of consciousness.

Two seconds.  Naru hauled the manager up by the back of his shirt.

One second.  Eyes blazing with white-hot fury, Naru cocked her fist
back.

Zero seconds.  Keitaro once again offered up his body to the study of
unpowered flight.  The battered body of the inn's manager described a
nice parabola up over the main house and began to descend towards the
next building down the block.  He descended though a thankfully open
window to crash land, face first, into a chair sitting at a table being
cleaned by his aunt, Haruka.

"She ought to go into boxing..." Haruka observed after taking a puff off
of her cigarette.  She ground the thing out in an ashtray and picked the
unconscious body of Keitaro up out of the chair and half-dragged him
into a seated position.  "I'll go get you some dry clothes and tea.."
she said as she wandered off shaking her head.

                         *     *     *     *

#Incomplete Scene Edited Out Temporarily#

                         *     *     *     *

The hot water heater.. if you could really call the mechanical
monstrosity he'd been forced to work on a heater.. was fixed, so Keitaro
had decided it might have been best for everyone concerned if he laid
low for the rest of the day at his aunt's tea shop.  He'd helped around
there quietly for the afternoon before making the trip back to the Inn
for the evening.

What a throughly lousy way to begin a day that had been...

At least, soon, classes would begin and he would finally be able to see
some sort of true progress in his life.  He as free of the vestiges of
his ronin status and was at last on his way to having a real life.  If
only he could find some way to drive off the doom and gloom that seemed
to follow him around as if he'd done something in a past life to deserve
torment.

The business district was quiet as sunset approached.  Being an older
community, most folks closed up their shops a little early and made
their way home to relax.  Earlier closing times made for nearly deserted
streets as the streetlamps flickered to life.

How much longer did he have before he had to report to Toudai for
registration?  Not much longer.  A whole phase of his life was ending,
and he wasn't entirely sure what he wanted to feel about that.  He'd
left everything behind to reach for this old promise of his, abandoning
friends, his parents and just about everything else that he'd once
valued.

All for a girl whose name he couldn't even remember at the time...

He had choices ahead of himself that he had to make as he went from
being 'Keitaro the Ronin' to 'Keitaro the Student'.  New people from all
over the nation were about to get thrust into his otherwise quiet,
little world and it was going to turn his social circle on its ear
again.  In a masochistic sort of way, he rather liked the way his life
had become.  Sure, he was surrounded by violent, insane women who liked
to foist nothing but trouble off on him, but it was a predictable sort
of grief that one could get used to after having it inflicted on him
long enough.

He paused in his walk back home and propped his elbows up on a bridge
overlooking pools and streams of steaming water below, heated by the
volcanic activity deep under the ground.  For all its strangeness, the
inn had become his home and the residents therein had become, in a
deranged and often painful way, his new circle of friends, replacing
those he'd grown up with in school.  Or.. could it be more like he was
returning to his old friends after being away for a very long time?

Upstream a ways, a certain samurai was reminding herself that there was
nothing quite so refreshing as a nice evening's trip to the hot springs
behind the inn.  To Motoko it was typically the highlight of her day, at
least in theory.  It seemed as if every time Motoko went out to relax in
the toasty warmth of the springs she never managed to stay alone for
very long.

"BATH TIME!" crowed Kitsune as she and the rest of the boarders
descended upon the spring like a small, towel-clad army.  This
particular trip was turning out to be no exception to the rule.

The samurai stepped carefully to the side, narrowly avoiding a
cannonball from Suu as she dove into the water at full tilt, the little
Arabian's towel sailing up to find it's way onto a bush, the same bush
it always managed to get tangled in.  Also as usual, Suu didn't notice
as she swam around in the water making Jaws-inspired sounds.

It might almost have been construed as rude if Motoko hadn't gotten used
to such things thanks to a steady diet of them.

Suu surfaced after a few minutes of swimming around and shook her head
back and forth rapidly in an effort to dry it after getting it wet by
going underwater.  "Hi, Motoko!" she cheered as she slid up next to the
samurai and took up residence.  "Whacha doing?"

"Soaking..."

Suu oh'ed softly and nodded up and down, shaking her entire frame in the
process and churning up waves in the water.

Thus was the tranquility of the springs shattered as the residents of
the inn descended on the area, set up shop and commenced to chatting
about the day's events and comparing notes.  It was, perhaps, as much a
social event as merely bathing and relaxing from the events of the day. 
A way to reinforce the community bonds.

Motoko, with the faintest of sighs, made her way to the other side of
the spring to finish her evening's relaxation with some modicum of her
shattered peace and quiet.  She closed her eyes and closed down her ears
and focused herself inward in search of her inner peace, a precious
commodity since the environment around her was typically bedlam. 
Surrounding herself in a blissful Void, shutting the world around her
out for a time, she commenced a long-overdue meditation exercise.  A
simple exercise, really, closing off the outside world and focusing on
the world within.  Under normal circumstances she was more than capable
of assuming such an attitude on a moment's notice so as to more
effectively channel Chi in combat.

Lately, normal circumstances hadn't really applied and she felt her
control had been slipping.  A reassuring feeling drifted along the
surface of the Void as she assumed the appropriate mental posture
instantly.  Confident that she was properly separated from the universe
so as to become an outside observer able to manipulate events without
being drawn along by them she opened her eyes and allowed sensory input
to resume.

The primary source of her discordance over the past several years was
the greeting her eyes were given when she reopened them.  Koala Suu was
hovering round her general position like an odd little tan creature
trapped in a state of perpetual motion.

"Ne, ne, ne, ne..." the child started, pitching her voice as if asking a
question as she circled round the swordswoman at a rather impressive
RPM.  "Um.. Could I sleep with you tonight?" she asked after a moment's
deliberation, her expression oddly as unreadable as it always seemed to
be.  Unreadable because Koala had an amazing talent for generating a
look of manic blankness that never seemed to leave her.

Silence for a moment as the words of the child danced across the edge of
the emotional vacuum the lady samurai had wrapped herself in.  She
regarded the child's unreadable, somewhat alien, face and pondered the
question seriously for several breaths before simply nodding.  "If you
require my presence to sleep.." she mused, "I shall endeavor to be of
assistance..."

Suu took the offer at face value instantly and went about her business
quietly, paddling around in the spring without a care in the world. 
Motoko, on the other hand, went back to her meditations.  The child had
been getting better, gradually, over the past year.  The manager, damn
his eyes, was in some ways a welcome influence on the girl, since he so
resembled someone she knew back in her homeland.

Wherever the hell it was that the strange little girl was from...

Recently though, especially after the comedy of errors that had been the
trip out into the Pacific to retrieve Keitaro in time for him to submit
his application for Toudai, her nightmares and homesickness seemed to be
returning.  She could always tell.  She would wake up and try very hard
not to cry out, not wanting to wake her up.  The samurai could make out
a change in breathing pattern just as readily as a blood-curdling
scream, especially in the middle of a still night where the most common
sounds were the burbling of hot springs and the prowling of stray cats.

She couldn't really read the odd little girl, but Motoko was certain
that Suu was holding something back.  She hated to use the term 'woman's
intuition' but it was just about the only thing left to her to explain
the slightly.. off.. feeling she'd been getting from Suu.  She valued
other people's privacy was much as she treasured her own privacy, and as
much as she didn't enjoy prying in the private lives of her neighbors,
she was genuinely beginning to become distressed over Suu's dreams. 
Every morning lately she had woken up with the most haunted look she had
ever seen on another human being, yet she would quickly drift away from
her and into whatever bizarre reality it was she spent much of her time
in.

Ultimately, something would be done...

Something had to be done...

Motoko stood up from the bath and, with a cautious check to make sure
Keitaro wasn't about to drop out of a tree.. or orbit.. or roll out from
behind a strategically placed rock, she quickly changed from her
dripping towel to dry off and threw a robe about herself, wrapping her
hair up in a towel to dry the rest of the way.  About halfway back to
her room she heard the normal sounds of the inn become briefly
interrupted by the opening of a door, by its sound and direction the
front door.  "Just in time..." she remarked to herself drily as she
turned and made her way into her own little refuge.

The manager came in through the front door and deposited his shoes in
the foyer.  "I'm home!" he announced, getting muted, feminine giggles
from the direction of the springs in reply.  "Oh.. never mind.." he
replied tiredly as he made his way into the inn proper and made his way
to his room.  It'd been a long, tiring day and he made it as far as his
futon before collapsing bonelessly upon it and veering sharply off into
unconsciousness.

Liddo-kun sat passively on the piece of scrap plywood that covered the
hole joining Keitaro's apartment from that shared by the two main
competitors for his attention.  He'd been sitting there quietly for
ages, as stuffed animals are wont to do if nobody picks them up to move
them around.

Liddo-kun was rather good at that.  He was a stuffed animal after all,
and being a stuffed animal of little brains meant that about the only
thing he really did well was sit there and listen.  It was a proud
tradition among stuffed animals to listen to the woes of children
everywhere, and provide a source of silent comfort for the unfortunate.

On the subject of the troubles of youth...

"The truce is over now, you know..." Naru observed as the sounds of the
night settled down on the room.  The creeking of insects and the
settling of the wooden-frame building as the air around it began to
cool.

Her rival sighed a little and nodded.  "I hate making a competition out
of it," she mused in reply.  She shifted a little under the covers and
continued.  "Too bad there doesn't seem to be any other way to settle
this..."  She yawned and then peacefully nodded right off to sleep, a
rather impressive trick to manage in the middle of a conversation.

"I guess...." Naru began, then finding herself cut off by a nice
rumbling snore from Mutsumi.  "Oh, never mind..." she finished.

Through it all, Liddo-kun watched the conversation and listened quietly
and patiently.  They didn't run to him for a hug as often as they once
did, but a stuffed animal doesn't really mind that.  At least they still
confided in him, which was what made his simple life complete.

Down the hallway, in Motoko's room, things were on a similar level of
discomfort.  Motoko herself had fallen asleep the instant her head had
reached a horizontal position, though there was little doubt her body
would spring to action the instant any sort of problem occurred within
several meters of her.  Her sword wasn't far from her side, as was her
habit.

Her occasional roommate, however, had much greater problems involved
with achieving a state of sublime unconsciousness...

It was time for sleep again and Koala was terrified of the notion. 
She'd been running around all evening, steadfastly trying to keep
herself up and alert so she wouldn't fall asleep.  All she'd succeeded
in doing was wear herself out; leaving her huddled up in her futon, eyes
all but propped open in an effort to stay awake longer.

Which means she held out for all of five minutes longer, of course.

It was a sensation somewhere between something entirely unlike having
her brain beaten out by a gold bar wrapped in a lemon peel and having
her eyes seeped in gasoline and lit alight.  A writhing network of
strands of.. something.. twisted round her with her at its center.  A
cacophony of sounds echoing in her mind increasing in pitch.  The
dreamself threw back her head, unfurled her wings (wings!?) and
screamed, the shriek echoing off of the unseen walls of the cavern
around her.

When Motoko awoke to Koala's strangled cry, she found an empty futon by
her side.  It took the samurai all of three seconds to be out the door
in search of her missing charge...


++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Surprise, surprise.. I ain't dead afterall...

- Berk Watkins
  Student of Quantum Bogodynamics
  http://plaza.ufl.edu/jrandom/

	     .---Anime/Manga Fanfiction Mailing List----.
             | Administrators - ffml-admins@anifics.com |
             | Unsubscribing - ffml-request@anifics.com |
             |     Put 'unsubscribe' in the subject     |
             `-----http://ffml.anifics.com/faq.txt------'