DARTS!!!

by Koko-chan and The Blue Spanch





Aya sighed and shifted his katana to a more comfortable position. It had been a quiet several months in the business, with nothing more serious than a serial chainsaw murderess running around town, and that little adventure was over in a night and a half. All this had changed when Manx had dropped in with a message from Persia saying that Crawford and Schuldich had returned from California, and that Farferello had disappeared from the asylum again. Well, that explained Nagi's mysterious disappearance, at least. Now if only Omi could get over it...

Ken ambled into the room, sporting a new set of bearclaws and a White Sox baseball cap that he'd dug up from God knew where. "Hey Aya?" He said, "Could you give us a hand with something? We're having some trouble with Omi."

"Oh, now what?" Aya moaned disgustedly. Since Omi was well below the legal age for alcohol consumption, he'd settled for trying to drown his sorrows in other ways, such as yogurt, video games, ice cream, and beans. (This last binge had been cut forcibly short by his teammates for obvious reasons; bean-binges are bad things when the house has only one bathroom and weird ventilation quirks.) There was a crash and a squeal from the other room.

Aya and ken rushed in to find Yohji hiding behind the overturned couch, watching Omi bounce off the walls. "Darts! Darts! New mission! Darts!" Omi chirped cheerfully, waving a handful of darts around and vibrating hard enough to register on the Richter Scale. "Darts!! (poing poing poing) Darts!!!"

"Ye gods!" Aya said, jaw dropping. "What did he get into this time?"

"Coke Slurpee." Yohji said, ducking as a dart whizzed over his head.

"You let him drink a Coke Slurpee?!" Aya growled.

"I didn't let him drink anything!" Yohji shot back. "He'd already crumpled up the cup when I got here! Where the hell did he get it, is what I want to know."

"DARTS!!!"

"Oh, jeez, we aren't out of the house yet, and I'm already embarrassed." Ken groaned. "Can't we just leave him home while we go beat up Schwartz?"

Aya made a face. "Nope. Persia insisted that we all go, or we don't get paid."

"Where did he say that?" Yohji yelped.

"In the fine print of the briefing folder. I don't like this any more than you do, Yohji, but the rent's coming due on the shop and so's the next payment on your car's repair bill."

"All right, all right. Just give me a hand with this maniac, will you?"

"Darts!"

"Shut up."

It took all three of them and a sofa cushion to get Omi into Aya's car.

************************************

Meanwhile, over in a certain secret hideaway (but not so secret that they didn't get junk mail with all their names misspelled), the Schwartz crew were undergoing similar problems.

"SPWINGY!!!"

"Holy shit!"

CRASH!!

"What is going on in here?" Crawford shouted over the noise as he cautiously entered the kitchen.

Schuldich was flat on the floor surrounded by the entire contents of the pots and pans cupboard while Farfie hung giggling by his knees from the ceiling fan. "Oh." Crawford said sourly. "What did he get into this time?"

Schuldich pulled a colander off of his head and threw it at Farfie, who bounced down from the fan, screaming "Spwingy!" several times as he cartwheeled out of the room. "He got the last of Tot's rock candy. Three pounds again, I think."

"How the hell did he find that?" Crawford exclaimed. "I hid it under the floorboards in the basement of that abandoned building two blocks away under a broken-down forklift! And he was in the nuthouse at the time!"

There was the sound of a large Boston fern being whanged repeatedly with Schuldich's bronze bust of Elvira. "SPWINGY!!!"

Schuldich winced. "Nagi, would you get that away from him, please?" He called to the team's fourth member. "Thank you."

There was a yelp of indignation from the living room, and then a more distant crash. Nagi walked into the kitchen, handed Schuldich the bust, and sat down on a stool. "He's just defenestrated your fern, Brad. You know better than to leave the window open like that. Why didn't you just throw away that candy?"

"I happen to like a nibble once in a while." Crawford said, slightly huffily.

"What, mine aren't good enough for you anymore?" Schuldich grinned evilly at him.

Crawford snorted. "You're more of a tart than a sweet, and you know it. Either way, we've got places to go tonight, people, and we all have to be there, or we don't get paid. Any ideas on how to deal with our lunatic?"

Nagi frowned. "What happened to his straitjacket?"

"He ate it." Crawford said glumly. "He shoplifted a bottle of chocolate sauce last night, doused his jacket, and ate it."

"What, the buckles and everything?"

"No, he spat those out. The velcro gave him some trouble, too."

They looked at Nagi suggestively. "Alright, already," Nagi sighed, rolling his eyes, "Take advantage of the telekinetic like you always do. I'll keep him still in the car, but don't ask for quiet."

********************************

Both teams were used to mysteries; the Weiss boys usually solved more mysteries in one week than most people did in ten years. The Schwartz team were usually the ones behind the mysteries, and were equally good at them. But this little escapade? Neither of them had a clue of just what was going on. All the Weiss team knew was that Persia insisted that they all go to a small antiques shop on the north end of the city to surprise a group of notorious criminals. No other information was given. They wouldn't have taken the job, but the rent was indeed coming due, and since the Hunter had blasted through the neighborhood like a box of prunes through a short grandmother, very little in the way of evil was going on. This mission had a huge bonus tacked onto it, no questions asked or answered.

The Schwartz team had a similar arrangement. An allegedly previously unknown Takatori relative had called up Crawford's psychic hotline and offered him an enormous sum of cash to get the old crew back together, head back into the cities of Japan and accept a payload of rare contraband (he never said just what the stuff was) to deliver to a certain Mr. Hong the following week. The meeting place was a small antique shop on the north side. Well, the old psychic business wasn't pulling in quite enough cash to get Schuldich that new air mattress he wanted, he'd recently gotten a badly-spelled letter from Farfie complaining about how boring this new nuthouse was, and he hadn't heard anything from Nagi at all. Why not? Those Weiss guys were probably being a bad influence on Nagi anyway.

Farfie had been easy; they just went in and busted him out. Prying Nagi away from Omi had taken considerable persuasion, and the promise of a full quarter of the take. He was still sulking about the separation, and griped at Crawford every chance he got, too. Screw it. To work, withal! With Nagi's help, they managed to wrap a happily whooping Farfie in every seatbelt the car had and set out for the antique shop. They got there first, disabled all the alarm systems, and slid in carefully through the back door. This was no easy task, as their pet maniac was going through the "vibrator" phase of the sugar high. Nonetheless, Schuldich managed to get him pinned in a headlock, and they managed to disperse themselves in the shop's comfortable clutter without anything untoward happening. Fifteen minutes later, the front door was opened very carefully. It was obviously not their contact, since the people who met with them in darkened rooms did not usually vault over threadbare loveseats while shrieking, "DARTS!!"

"Weiss!" Crawford snapped.

With a curse, Aya and the others burst into the shop. "Schwartz!" Aya barked.

The Schwartz team came out of concealment to face their foes, just as Omi dropped his entire kit into a box of old silverware. "Darts? Ooops! (snort, giggle) Darts!" So saying, Omi snatched up something that gleamed out of the box and threw it with deadly accuracy at Schuldich, who wasn't paying much attention; Farfie had just bitten his arm. He soon had something else to occupy him.

*Poing!*

"Aaargh!" Schuldich shrieked, releasing Farfie and clutching at his nose.

"Why, Schuldich, do you know what that is?" Crawford asked in evil glee.

"Oweee!" Schuldich moaned, trying to dislodge the object that had lodged itself in his snoot.

"That is a genuine sterling silver Charter Oak pattern salad fork! Have you any idea how much those are worth?"

"Crawford, stop making learned comments about silverware and get it out! I'm sorry about the eels, okay?"

Yohji leaned over to Nagi and whispered, "Eels?"

"Don't ask." Nagi sighed. "Just don't."

Farfie, on the other hand, was horrified. As any number of people could attest, he loved his knives. He had met, used, and played with every single variety of edged weapon known to man, and then some. To see a fork used for a purpose to which a dagger would be more appropriate struck him as horribly wrong. "No!" he whimpered, yanking the fork out of Schuldich's face, holding it in one trembling hand. "Fork!"

"Yahhh!" Schuldich howled.

"Darts!" Omi chirped happily, bouncing up and down.

"No! Fork!"

"Darts!"

"Fork! Fork! Fork!"

"Darts! Darts! Darts!

"Ngh! No, look! Knife!" He fumbled one out of his shirt and waved it at Omi, who didn't care. "Knife! Fork!"

"DARTS!!!"

The others were too embarrassed to fight. Aya resheathed his sword with a sigh. Yohji rolled his eyes to the ceiling and offered Schuldich a handkerchief for his streaming nose. "Our oddball is weirder than your oddball."

"No way." Schuldich replied stuffily. "At least you don't have to keep yours on a leash."

"Yeah, but yours acts like this all the time. Ours is usually sane."

"Point. So, what did Omi get into?"

"Coke Slurpee. Farfie?"

"Three pounds of sugar candy. Damned if we know how he got into it."

"Same here. Ah, it looks like they're winding down, now."

Indeed they were. Farfie was showing genuine signs of strain, and Omi definitely wasn't poinging as hard as he had been. "Fork!"

"Darts!"

"Fork! Fork! Fork!"

"Darts! Darts! Darts! Darts! Darts! Darts! Darts!"

Farfie looked around desperately for any way at all to end this. Only one presented itself to his sugar-ravaged brain. Heedless of the danger, he plunged his hand into the silverware box and pulled out a: "SPOOOOON!!!" He wailed, and fell over with a thump as the sugar crash set in. "Land.... Shark."

Omi suddenly gurgled and toppled over as well. "Web.... Shark."

The two teams stood there for a few minutes, avoiding each other's eyes. "Well," Ken said eventually, "I'm officially too embarrassed to continue. How 'bout you guys?"

There was murmured assent on all sides. "Look," Nagi said huffily, "how about we all go back to our bases, tell our employers to stuff their money up their asses, and go back to our normal lives?"

"Our lives? Normal?" Yohji laughed.

"You've got a point. But I like my abnormal with a lot less running around and yelling 'spwingy'! Why did I let you talk me into this, Brad?! I could have been curled up on a beach with Omi whispering sweet nothings in his ears, but nooooo, I have to help lug a dribbling sugar-crazed maniac back to a crummy apartment somewhere far away from a certain boyfriend, who is also dribbling maniacally into the rug! This sucks!"

"You think you're upset?" Crawford growled, picking Farfie up by the scruff of his neck and heading for the door, the others following behind. "I was living the sweet life back home in California, screwing gullible idiots by day and screwing Schuldich by night--" The door slammed on the rest of the sentence, which was just as well.

Aya looked down at Omi, who was indeed in the process of ruining a rather ugly Persian carpet. "Let's go home." He sighed, picking the groggy hacker up and draping him over his shoulder.

**************************

The following evening, Persia got in touch with the Weiss crew again with another assignment. This time, they were to interrupt a drug shipment at a nasty little greasy-chopstick restaurant downtown. Yohji was rather less than enthusiastic about this. "Are you freaking nuts?!" He shouted over the phone, which unfortunately was being held by Ken at the time. "Tonight?! Omi came down so hard from that coke slurpee last night that he's been flat on his face all day, when he hasn't been in the bathroom with the screaming shits! He can barely walk, and you want him up and about by dark?"

"I don't think that'll be a problem." Aya said, coming into the room.

There was a crash from the kitchen. "Darts!"

"He didn't." Ken said, aghast.

"He did." Aya replied. "A two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. God only knows where he found it."

"Nevertheless, he must be there." Persia said calmly.

"Persia, you suck!" Yohji said fiercely. "And you still haven't paid us for last night's fiasco!"

"You'll be paid double the figure I quoted yesterday." Persia replied.

"Well, all right, but you still suck." Yohji slammed the phone back down on its receiver and steamed a bit. "Aya, if we get out of this next job with our egos intact, you are so going to bed with me."

"And if we don't?" Aya asked.

"You're still sleeping with me."

Aya shrugged. "I could use a lie-down."

"That's not what he meant, Aya." Ken said. Yohji was not taking the stress well, he noted.

"Oh, I know what he meant, Ken." Aya replied, stretching out his shoulders. "But what makes you think I'm going to do anything else?"

"We'll see about that." Yohji growled, cracking his knuckles.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah!"

"Darts!" Omi said, leaping over the couch to land in Aya's arms.

"Oh, shut up and get your kit."

*******************************

Meanwhile, the Schwartz team was undergoing similar circumstances. Crawford turned off his cell phone as angrily as anyone could press a button, and tossed it into the potted plant. "Well?" Schuldich asked.

"The prick's done it to us again." Crawford grumped. "Since we spwingied out last night, we have to try again tonight."

"Why didn't you just tell him to stick it where the sun don't shine?" Nagi asked.

"Because he offered us double the money."

Nagi snorted and levitated the coffee table. "He never paid us for last night. Where now?"

"That little chop suey restaurant over on the west side. The one with the big fishtank inside that never has anything in it but sludge."

"That place?!" The coffee table hit the floor and fell over with a crash. "I've been there before. They've officially been closed down three times by the Board of Public Health for serving rat meat in the chow mein! If you want me to come anywhere near that dive, I want half the reward, or you're out a telekinetic."

Crawford glowered at Nagi for a moment, and then shrugged. "Why not? Even so, we'll still have enough for two tickets to California and a really big air mattress."

"Air mattress? What happened to the last one?"

Schuldich grinned. "We popped it."

"I just bet you did." Nagi muttered, somewhat enviously.

There was a sudden series of crashes from the bedroom, and a gleeful yodel of "SPWINGY!!!"

"Shit!" Schuldich cursed, hopping up from the couch. "I thought he was being too quiet!"

They all rushed to the bedroom to stare in horror of what had happened in there. Two square feet of the mattress had been carefully sliced out of the exact center of the bed. The pillows had been slit open to clog the air with feathers. The ceiling fan had been torn from its place and now lay crumpled in the hole in the mattress. Scattered all over the place were dozens of brightly colored paper tubes, and there were several holes in the walls and ceiling. Poinging madly through the mess was Farfie, higher than the Hubble and loving it. "Spwingy! Spwingyspwingyspwingy spwing-geeee!!!!"

"What the blazes brought this on?" Crawford said, stepping into the room and treading on something that crinkled; Farfie had found a Bible in what was left of a bedtable and had spent some time ripping out pages and folding them into paper airplanes.

"Aw, shit, how'd he find my stash?" Schuldich groaned, picking up an empty tube.

Nagi picked up another tube, and gave Schuldich a funny look. "Pixie Stix?"

"Well, yeah," Schuldich said, "what did you think lets me move so fast all the time? Just one of these things puts me in fast-forward for the whole day. Better than espresso, almost."

"Just how much did he have?" Asked Crawford, grabbing Farfie by the ankle as he sailed past overhead.

"All of it. About a month's worth."

"SPWING-GEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!" Farfie yodeled cheerfully, dangling upside down from Crawford's grip. "Oop-oop-wogga-wogga-grunt-grunt-tweet!"

Crawford and Schuldich looked at each other with mingled disgust and dismay. "Well, look at it this way," Schuldich said weakly, "If the Weiss guys show up with Omi sugared to the gills, we can knock off early and go get drunk."

"True." Crawford said. "Hey, Nagi, do you think you could--"

Nagi had seen what was coming and slipped out of the room some minutes previously. He was sick and tired of babysitting Farfie; let one of the other two risk bitemarks on their fundament this time!

*****************************

This time it was the Weiss crew that arrived first. The restaurant had become slightly more upscale since the Inspectors had last closed it down; the rug sucked at their shoes only in certain spots, most of the stains on the walls and ceiling had been spraypainted over, and there was a very large and suspicious-looking sea slug inhabiting the sludge in the fishtank. A greasy buffet table half-stocked with eating utensils and roaches stood to one side of the room. Ken set a twitching Omi down in a sticky spot near the buffet, effectively gluing him to the floor.

"Darts!"

"Yes, darts." Ken said patiently. "Nice darts. Lovely pointy darts. Now shut up, please."

"Darts!"

"Yech." Yohji grumbled, glaring at the sea slug, which glowered back. "I wonder how much these guys bribed the inspectors this time? A guy could get food poisoning just by standing across the street from this place."

"More'n we make, I bet." Ken sighed, pulling his foot out of another sticky spot. "I met Manx last week in the deli down the street and she told me that this building is actually a front for the Yakuza's minor dope-running operations. That was going to be our next project, but then this one came up."

There was a sudden commotion by the back door, and a muffled shout of "Spwi-mrff!".

"Dammit, Schuldich, can't you keep that idiot quiet?"

"You want to do this, Brad?" Schuldich retorted angrily. "Quiet is one thing, but right now, I could use him for a pogo stick-- OW! That was my foot!"

"Spwingy!!"

"He's getting away! Stop him, Nagi!"

"Screw you."

Farfie sailed out of the kitchen entrance, whooping with glee, followed by the rest of his team. "Spwing-geee!!!"

"Oh, no, not again." Yohji moaned.

"Daaaarts!" Omi caroled by way of greeting, waving wildly and dropping a handful of darts all over the buffet table. Perplexed for a moment, he picked up the nearest pointy object to hand and threw it with his usual unerring accuracy. Farfie managed to dodge it. Crawford didn't.

*Poing!*

"Aaargh!"

Schuldich grinned nastily. Ah, sweet revenge! "Why, Crawford, do you know what that is?" he asked as his wounded comrade groaned and clutched at his nose.

"Giant splinter!" Crawford moaned.

Unperturbed by his teammate's sufferings, Schuldich continued cheerfully, "That's a genuine bamboo chopstick! Have you any idea how much that's worth?"

"Three yen a dozen, you evil-minded moron!" Crawford retorted, somewhat stuffily, "Get it out!"

Farfie was way ahead of him. Once again, his professional standards had been violated. He had come to terms earlier that day with forks as a weapon. After all, they were made of steel and they could be sharpened up nicely, but this? Blasphemy! Infamy! The horror of it! Trembling with sugar-fueled outrage, he wrenched the offending object out of Crawford's nose and held it up in a shaking fist. "No!" He sputtered furiously. "Chopstick!"

"Darts!" Chirped Omi, who thought this game was fun.

"Ow! Nasal splinters!" whimpered Crawford, who wasn't having any fun at all.

"Chopstick!"

"Darts!"

"No! Look! Knife! Chopstick!"

"Darts! Darts! Darts!"

In a rare show of sympathy, Aya offered Crawford a handkerchief for his streaming nose. "Ours had two liters of Mountain Dew. Yours?"

"A month's worth of Pixie Stix." Schuldich said ruefully. "I know, I shouldn't keep stuff like that in the house, not with the effect it has on him."

"Let this be a lesson then." Ken chuckled. "So, you want to hit them now, or just let them run down by themselves?"

They all looked over at the cutlery argument going on in front of them. Farfie was already showing signs of strain, and Omi was losing perkiness by the second. "Just let 'em run down," Yohji said, leaning back against the wall. "It's easier just to pick up the pieces afterwards."

"Sez you." Crawford grumbled. "Farfie nibbles on things when he hits sugar crash. He's already eaten half the upholstery in my car."

"So stop by a pet shop and get him one of those big rawhide dog toys." Ken suggested.

"That might work. I'll try that."

Meanwhile, Farfie was experiencing real distress. He was no closer to winning the argument than he had been last time, and he could feel the sugar crash approaching like a glacier on roller skates, chill and glittering in its headache-causing awfulness, and still that little dartslinger wouldn't give in. There had to be some way of ending this gracefully, but what... Oh yeah!

With the air of one unveiling his secret weapon, he reached inside his shirt and pulled out his trump card. He held it up high, much as beleaguered warriors of ancient yore must have held up their swords in defiance one last time, and yelled: "SPOOOOOONN!!!"

Then he fell over backwards.

So did Omi, who had watched him pull out the spoon in half-crazed awe.

"Land... Shark..."

"Web... Shark..."

The Weiss team and the Schwartz team looked at each other wearily. Yohji checked his watch. "Guys," he said, "it's two in the morning, something really stupid has just happened right in front of us for the second time in a row, and I've got a headache coming on. How 'bout we take a rain check on tonight's epic battle?"

"Fine." Crawford agreed. "It'll take me the rest of the night to get these splinters out, anyway. Coming, guys?"

"Under protest." Nagi grumped, helping Schuldich haul Farfie out of the sticky spot he'd landed in.

Crawford frowned. "You didn't used to be this outspoken."

"Omi's been a good influence on me." Nagi replied.

Schuldich snorted. "That's debatable."

********************************8

The Schwartz team went out and got drunk.

The Weiss team went home and Aya, after much persuasion, got laid.


Omi spent the night in the bathroom.

Farfie really liked his new rawhide bone.


They both got a phone call late the following afternoon, and none of them were happy about it.

This time, Yohji not only slammed the receiver back down on the phone hard enough to crack the casing, but spent a few minutes making hex signs at it as well. "Telemarketers again?" Ken asked, coming into the room.

"I wish." Yohji grumped, making a face at the battered telephone for good measure. "Compared to this, I could happily sit down and listen to someone trying to sell me double-glazing for an hour or two."

Ken's eyebrows nearly lifted right off his head. This was serious! "Who did call? Satan?"

"Worse. Persia. You'd better get the others in here. I'm not going to sully my lips with this news any more than necessary."

Aya came up quickly from repotting a dahlia without complaint. Omi, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. What the hey, tell him when he gets back. "Persia says:" Yohji began, "We blew it last night. We've got one more chance to pull this thing off, and the time is tonight. At a gardening shop fifteen miles south of here. You know, that place where we got all that mushroom mulch from? He says that if we succeed this time, we get triple the original pay."

Ken flopped down on the couch and crossed his arms. "There's incentive enough. Oh, stop smouldering, Aya, look at it this way. There's no forks or chopsticks or anything over there, and Omi told me this morning that he's never going to touch anything sugary again."

Aya opened his mouth to offer a reply, but it fell flat as one of Omi's elephant-killer darts blasted through the ceiling and into the phone, which disintegrated. "DARTS!!!" Someone bellowed from above.

The three assassins looked at the phone's pitiful remains in horror. "That came from my room." Aya said.

They nearly jammed in the doorframe in their haste to get up there.

Aya's room was a shambles. All the furniture was either overturned or otherwise broken, and on the bed, bouncing wildly up and down, was Omi. They had never seen anything so hyper, not even the time when some kid had let his three pet ferrets loose in the shop. "Darts! Dartsydartsydartsydaaaarts!!!" He whooped in ecstasy. "Wharble-whoop-percolate-obba-honk-tood!"

"Percolate?!" Aya said anxiously, and then started searching frantically in the wreckage for something. He came up a minute later with a round plastic box with one single, solitary, fragrant bean-sized object inside it.

Yohji recognized the smell of it immediately. "Espresso beans?!" he gasped in real shock. "Aya! Chocolate covered espresso beans! I love these things! Why didn't you tell me you had them?!"

Aya looked ashamed of himself. "It was going to be a surprise."

"It's a surprise, all right." Ken groaned, gazing worriedly at Omi, who was busy digging a hole in the bed and giggling. "Please tell me that box wasn't full."

Aya just looked even more worried.

"Aw, shit."

*****************************

For the third evening in a row, Crawford, Nagi, and Schuldich were in a similar pickle, although they got two phone calls instead of one. The first, and rather hysterical, call came from the local convenience store, concerning a certain team member. Since Schuldich had come down with a case of the grumps and refused to get up off of the couch, Crawford and Nagi went down to the store to sort out the trouble. What they found surprised even them, who knew Farfie's little quirks better than anyone.

"I don't believe it." Nagi said, looking up at the ceiling. "I thought I was the only telekinetic around here."

A frighteningly calm giggle trickled down from above.

"You still are, although that's really impressive." Crawford agreed. "That's not telekinesis, Nagi, that's being beyond high. Mental euphoria, yes, but physical?"

"What I want to know is who's going to pay for all this?!" The store owner demanded.

They were standing in the baking aisle, which was a shambles. Bags of flour and spices were ripped open and strewn everywhere. There were sugar bags too, but they were empty. The reason for this was laminated to the ceiling, smiling gently down at them.

"That was my entire stock of powdered sugar! And I'd just restocked this morning!" The store owner continued.

"Spwingyyyyyyy...." Farfie murmured softly.

"Oh, ye gods, Nagi, would you please...?" Crawford sighed.

Nagi knew better than to argue with Crawford, and pulled Farfie down, along with several ceiling tiles which were stuck to the maniac's backbone. It took quite a large fistful of money to calm the shopkeeper down, but they managed to leave without further trouble. Well, not much.

"Nagi, are you still levitating him?"

"Nope, he's doing that on his own. He is *really* high, isn't he?"

"Yeah. The crash may actually hospitalize him. C'mon, let's get back to base before something else happens."

Unfortunately for them, it already had. When they got in, they found Schuldich in the bathroom, doing something like the Macarena at the toilet. "Schuldich, what the hell are you doing?!" Crawford said, propping Farfie against a wall. "And why is my cell phone in the john?"

"I'm doing a ceremonial cursing ritual at that freak-face Takatori who just called us up for another of these fuck-up assignments." Schuldich growled, making an extremely rude gesture at the toilet. "What?! Look, I've never actually seen a real hexing dance, before, so I have to improvise."

"Let me guess." Crawford said wearily. "Since we blew it last night again, we have to show up at some other place tonight, right? With one member so high on powdered sugar that a blood test on him would register as sucrose? And we have to get it right or we don't get paid?"

"At least he's promised us three times the loot, this time." Schuldich said, flushing the toilet a couple of times. The meeting spot's at a gardening place a couple of blocks from here. No silverware or any sort of eating utensils at all."

"There's a blessing." Nagi said, tethering Farfie to the sink so he wouldn't float away.

"Spwingyyyyy...."

"Shut up."

******************************

This time, both teams showed up at exactly midnight, and neither team made any effort at stealth. It would have been a wasted effort anyway; Farfie was poinging harder than the entire inside of a superball testing facility, and nothing of Omi could be seen but a sort of blur. Omi was, in fact, so messed up that he'd forgotten the right battlecry, and greeted his foe with the wrong one. "Spwingy!" He cried happily, flinging his arms out in a gesture of welcome.

"Daaarts!" Farfie answered; he wasn't any better off.

Schuldich gave the Weiss boys a somewhat bloodshot glare and leaned wearily against a stack of lawn booster. "Somehow, I expected this."

"Same here." Yohji said. "I see you've taken all of Farfie's knives away."

"After an entire shipment of powdered sugar, would you let him anywhere near anything sharper than a rubber chicken? I notice that you've removed Omi's darts, too."

"A pound of chocolate-covered espresso beans down the hatch. Who wants to be a dartboard? Not us."

Meanwhile, the others were standing by, watching their respective oddballs poing madly off of the walls, the ceiling, and each other. "Looks like they're having fun." Ken observed.

Nagi blew him a raspberry. "Oh, you just wait fifteen more minutes. With the caffeine and sugar loads they're carrying, they'll both be flat for a week. Can I stay with you guys and help out with Omi? These two aren't very good company."

Ken laughed. "That's not a nice thing to say about your teammates."

"It's true, though." Nagi growled peevishly. "After this is all over, I'm gonna find the guy who set us up for this and knot his socks around his pancreas."

Ken blinked. "You think this is all a scam?"

"Sure thing. You know how it goes: Once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence, third time's a conspiracy. Mark my words, there's a guy from Candid Camera around here somewhere, I just know it."

There was a crash as Omi mistimed a jump and landed squarely in a bin of gardening tools. Giggling madly, he grabbed the nearest object and hurled it. "DARTS!"

Ken and Nagi hit the floor as a large trowel sailed overhead to thunk firmly into a sack of lawn booster a half-inch from Schuldich's ear. Farfie was, of course, outraged. He dropped down from the rafters onto Schuldich's shoulders, yanked the trowel out, and hopped down to confront the blasphemer. "No!" Farfie screamed. "Trowel!"

"Darts!"

Schuldich fell over with a thump, the shock having caught up with him.

Aya and Crawford looked at each other with almost identical expressions of weary exasperation. Aya pointed wordlessly at a stack of fifty-pound bags of fertilizer. Crawford nodded, and they walked over, picked up a couple of bags, and then set about putting them to the only proper use under these circumstances.

*Whack!*

*Whack!*

Both maniacs hit the floor, dead to the world. Crawford, who was feeling much better, chuckled to himself. "The Biodegradable Sandmen strike again." He muttered.

Aya just gave him a funny look and edged away.

"So, what happens now?" Ken asked, watching Nagi peer around the lawnmowers, looking for hidden cameramen.

Schuldich hauled himself up off the floor. "Rock-Scissors-Paper." He stated firmly, holding out a fist.

Ken nodded, and the fight began. Two minutes later Ken won the fight, because even Schuldich had to agree that Zap Gun beats not only Paper and Scissors, but Rock as well. Honor having thus been satisfied, the two teams picked up their loonies and went home.

*******************************

It was two days later. No calls from Persia, no more sugar attacks, nothing but peace and quiet, if you didn't count that kid with his ferrets again. Everybody was in the den. Omi, well wrapped in a blanket, was taking up most of the couch; Aya sat on what was left over and sipped at a soda while he watched the last few minutes of a really crummy chop saki movie. Ken and Yohji were on the floor piecing out a jigsaw puzzle. A tranquil scene, but something about it made Aya's instincts twitch; there was a definite feeling of "calm before the storm" for some reason. He found out what it was after the credits had rolled and the commercials were over.

"And now for our special presentation!" Burbled an announcer. "For this night only, we bring you a truly original show! Get ready to laugh yourselves sick, people, because here it is at last: 'Japan's Funniest Assassin Videos!'"

Aya sprayed his soda across half the room. There was a clatter as Ken and Yohji dropped the jigsaw. Omi, still wrapped in his blanket, squeaked like an outraged guinea pig. All of them watched, frozen in shock, as the events of the past week unfolded on the screen; not only the events on the job, but at home, too. It also showed the events over at Crawford's end of things, and of special agents slipping things like coke slurpees and bags of rock candy into certain kitchens. Every last little detail was captured lovingly on video.

At the end of it, the phone rang. Ken shook himself and picked it up. "Hello?"

"Did you guys just see what we just saw?" Crawford asked.

"TV!" Aya suddenly shrieked. "SHINE!!!"

"I'll take that as a 'yes'." Crawford said wryly. "Schuldich, Farfie, and Nagi have just dumped their portable TV into the toilet and are doing the Satanic Macarena at it. You?"

"Satanic Macarena?" Ken shouted over the noise-- Aya, Yohji, and Omi were getting Medieval on the TV.

"Well, they've never seen a real hexing dance, so they have to improvise. Sounds like your guys are doing a Spanish Inquisition on your set."

"Oh, yeah," Ken shouted, "complete with the rack and the iron maiden!"

"So, who set you guys up for this mess?"

"Persia! You?"

"Dunno. Some Takatori guy. Jerk never paid us."

At that point, Ken had a revelation. "Crawford," he said during a lull in the uproar, "Persia is a Takatori."

There was a pause as that bit of information sunk in.

For the first time in history, both teams shouted, as one: "TAKATORI! SHINE!!!!"

"Tell you what," Aya huffed, grabbing the phone, "we know where Kritiker is. Wanna come and help hospitalize a certain boss?"

"And loot their strongroom!" Schuldich yelled in the background.

"And wrap his socks around his spleen!" That was Nagi.

"Beating up Persia hurts God!" Farfie bawled.

"Glad to have you along." Yohji cackled. "Okay, here's their address..."

************************88888

Two quite unremarkable cars drove up to a quite unremarkable office building and parked neatly in the lot outside. Eight dark figures got out, conferred briefly, and then advanced on the well-lit front entrance. They found the door to be locked. One of the figures chuckled softly. "Think they know we're coming?

"You betcha. Stand back." Another figure replied.

The doors suddenly crumpled violently, spraying shattered glass all over the hall inside. The combined forces of Weiss and Schwartz strode in to confront the terrified receptionist.

"Persia." Aya grated. "Where is he?"

The receptionist, who had been chosen for her post more for her cup size than her ability to handle a crisis, decided to cooperate. "Th-th-third floor, in the north office. But you can't disturb him now, he's in a meeting!"

Omi gave her the stoniest glare this side of a basilisk. "No, he's not. But he will be."

And with that deadly threat, they made for the stairs. "And don't even think about calling for security or trying to warn him or anything foolish like that." Schuldich called over his shoulder. "I can hear your thoughts, and can find you anywhere."

Once safely out of earshot, Yohji asked him: "Can you really find her anywhere?"

"Of course not." Schuldich said. "But she doesn't know that."

"Damn. If you could do that, I'd have hired you to find this blonde I met last week for me."

"Oh-ho! Playing hard to get, is she?"

"Nope. Stole my wallet."

********************************

Downstairs, the receptionist gathered her courage and decided to risk the wrath of the redhead by calling the boss. Of course, she got Manx instead. "Manx here, what's wrong?"

"Oh, Miss!" The poor girl wailed. "You'd better tell Mr. Persia to get out quick! Both the Weiss and Schwartz teams are here, and they're cranky!"

"We'll take care of it." Manx said grimly. She'd known this was a stupid idea from the start. Dammit, you just can't trust a Takatori-- any Takatori-- to stay completely sane from one week to the next!

Quickly, she alerted Birman to their problem, and they positioned themselves carefully near the top of the stairwell, guns drawn and at the ready. Before long, they heard footsteps and voices; eight people from the sound of it, and someone had just finished telling the punchline of a dirty joke. The chuckling was making Manx nervous. Ye gods, the two teams working together? This was bad... Persia may have overstepped the line this time.

Aya and Crawford came up over the last step, only to look down the barrels of two very businesslike revolvers. "Stop right there!" Birman said.

"There's just one thing we want you to know," Manx said, shifting her grip nervously, "we had nothing to do with this at all, so..."

Crawford and Aya simply smiled at them. The guns were abruptly snatched out of their hands by an unseen force and hurled out a window. Nagi, leaning on the banister, smiled at them. With a cheerful whoop, Omi and Farfie leaped out from behind their team leaders, grabbed Birman and Manx by the arms and swung them into each other hard enough to knock them out. "'Nothing to do with this'." Farfie snorted. "Hah! 'Spwingy', my ass!"

Schuldich and Yohji then stepped forward to complete the event. Yohji opened up a broom closet and arranged the unconscious women inside, and then Schuldich went to work. "You will sleep deeply," he murmured to them, "and when you wake up, you will not remember any of this. Instead, you will remember that one should indulge in narcotics *after* having steamy sex in the closet, not before. You will go around for the rest of the day bitterly disappointed that you never even got inside each other's shirts." Having finished, he shut and locked the door to a chorus of strangled snickers from behind him. "Right!" He said with a broad grin. "Shall we go on to the main attraction?"

Persia's door lay ahead, a heavy oak number unobtrusively bound with steel reinforcements. It was also locked, barred, and bolted from the inside. Big deal. With a casual gesture, Nagi made the hinges pop from their sockets, and the entire door flopped over into the hall, its armor useless. Inside, Persia looked up from hastily packing a briefcase full of secret documents. Fixing them with a glare that was just this short of being terrified, he said: "If you kill me, you're out of a job."

Aya smiled almost gently. "Oh, we won't kill you."

Crawford echoed his grin. "You're much more fun alive."

*******************************

A short period containing much incident later, Yohji, Ken, and Schuldich left the room carrying a strongbox combination and several large sacks. They returned fifteen minutes later with their sacks bulging with cash. The room had gone quiet. "They done in there?" Yohji asked, lighting a cigarette.

Ken peered in. "Um. It might be wise to call an ambulance. Nagi wasn't kidding about wrapping Persia's socks around his spleen."

"Yes, but are our fearless leaders done yet?" Schuldich asked.

"I think so. Omi, Nagi, and Farfie are taking turns shoving lemon drops up Persia's butt. Guys," Ken called, "C'mon, we've got the loot, let's go."

With only token protests and mutters of "spwingy!", they left the building, telling the terrified receptionist to call the hospital, for the boss had become dreadfully ill during his meeting.

*******************************

Epilogue

The Koneko Flower shop was closed three days later, much to the disgust of the young ladies that frequented it. It was closed the day after that, and the next, and so on, all completely unexplained and unprecedented. Finally, some two weeks after the closeout, a group of highschoolers managed to catch the shopowner on her doorstep one afternoon. "Oh, the boys have all gone on vacation for the month." The little old lady answered their anxious questions, stroking her cat. "A group of their friends came over, and they spent a whole night arguing over places to go."

No matter how they pleaded, Momoe-san refused to tell them where the Weiss boys had gone, not that it would have done much good. Aya and Yohji had vanished into the city, looking for some privacy. Omi and Nagi might be found on a beach in Honolulu, whispering sweet nothings into each other's ears and carefully avoiding sugary things. Farfie had been restored to his biker girls, and they'd celebrated his return in a way that had incited a riot on the south side that had won them the whole front page of the local newspaper, and the centerfolds of certain naughty magazines, too. Crawford and Schuldich had taken their amusements more quietly, opting simply to buy the biggest air mattress available anywhere and then flying home to California to give it a proper workout. Ken, finding himself at loose ends, had gone to Australia. He'd sent Momoe-san a picture even; it showed him partying at the beach, with his beautiful girlfriend on one arm and a kangaroo on the other. An inscription on the back read: "Dear everybody: Having a great time, food's great, beer's great, everything is great. Wonder why we didn't do this sooner; sure beats the heck out of killing for a living. Have run around for the whole week and haven't been shot at even once. Tell Aya there's no Takatoris in Australia at all. Happy me! Cheers! --Ken". That, thought Momoe-san, pretty much said it all.



THE END


Send Koko-chan and the Blue Spanch feedback!

Read more fics by Koko-chan at her homepage, Yu Yu Hakusho Paradise.





[That's it for now!]