[JE] Skirting Peril
Title: Skirting Peril
Pairing: Akame
Rating: PG
Genre: Fluff, humour, crack
Word count: 6,440
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Summary: One day, Johnny handed the members of KAT-TUN transformation lockets and said, "From now on, YOU will fight the forces of evil." But being a magical boy isn't as easy as it looks on television.
Skirting Peril
"This isn't working," Koki said. "Everyone knows magical girls operate in teams of five."
"But we're magical boys," Kame pointed out. "So we can have a team of six if we want. Who's going to complain? The people we save from doom, disaster and certain death?"
"We've already had one complaint." Ueda spun round in his chair to face the desk, pulling up a log on their team laptop. "A Mr. Shirota Yuu, angry because we accidentally blew up his favourite nightclub last night when we saved Roppongi from that water dragon."
Everyone turned to look at Jin, who had been responsible for said explosion. "It was my favourite club too," he said through a mouthful of chocolate. "I didn't mean to use that much power! I'm still getting the hang of this."
Nakamaru gave him a reassuring smile. "We all are."
"Really? Because I think I'm a natural at it." This was from Junno, who was toying with his transformation locket.
"Only because you get to attack the bad guys with a billiard cue," Jin muttered. "Of course you're good at that."
In the two weeks since the members of KAT-TUN had added 'protecting the world from evil' to their list of occupations, life had become extremely chaotic. Kame, in particular, wasn't sure he had the time for his new career, what with the band's usual activities, plus taking Ran-chan for walks, cleaning his apartment to within an inch of its life, and making time for (and with) Jin. Magical girls, he remembered from his Sailor Moon marathons, were supposed to fall in love with tragic, brooding heroes who had a touch of darkness about them.
Magical boys, fortunately, were free to fall in love with each other, though Kame was pretty certain that hadn't been part of Johnny's plan when he'd handed them all transformation lockets and said, "From now on, YOU will fight the forces of evil."
They'd gone along with his directive, because they figured they couldn't possibly get out of it and they were all really curious about their transformation sequences. Besides, fighting evil was cool. All the best anime characters did it.
What they hadn't banked on was the costumes - hence the meeting in their secret headquarters, which was actually just a sparkly, pink-painted office in the corner of the building.
"Let's forget about the attacks for now," Kame suggested, passing Jin another chocolate bar to keep him quiet. "We don't have much time to talk, so we have to figure out what we're going to say to Johnny when we have our first progress review."
"We should make a list of the things we're not happy with," Nakamaru said. "Then we can approach him calmly and ask if he can have his scientists change the costumes associated with each locket."
"Easy for you to say," Koki said. "You get to fight evil in a suit."
Nakamaru shrugged. "Yeah, but have you ever tried fending off a trio of jumbo marauding squid while keeping your shirt from getting creased?"
"No, but I bet it's more fun than leaping from building to building while not letting the bad guys look up your skirt," Koki said darkly. "In high heels."
"At least you get high heels," Ueda said. "I get combat boots. And I don't get magical long, blond hair, either."
"That's because you already make a pretty girl." Junno's cheery grin faltered for an instant when Koki kicked him in the back. Ueda nodded his thanks.
Kame's hair didn't grow either. Nor did Jin's. Junno, however, got a cute blond ponytail to go with his pink-and-white dress, plus some completely unnecessary stilettos, a faux fur stole and enough pearl jewellery to sink the Titanic.
Jin licked the last vestiges of chocolate from his lips, sending Kame's hormones into overdrive, and it didn't help when his contribution to the list of complaints was that his skirt was too tight.
"How am I supposed to kick fiendish monsters into the middle of next week when I can't even take two steps without feeling like it's going to split?" he said.
Kame struggled to suppress the mental image. "Just don't kick anything. In fact, don't even move. Stand at the back and throw the damned soccer ball."
"But I don't play goalkeeper..."
Before Jin could launch into a lengthy explanation of the rules of soccer, the siren went off.
"All or nothing, now or never, we can make it happen we can make it all right," it trilled on repeat.
Koki groaned and clapped his hands to his ears while Ueda turned back to the laptop to check the location of the alert. His fingers flew over the keyboard as he narrowed it down, using the powerful network of satellites Johnny had at his command.
When he turned back to the others, his face was grim. "Ikebukuro station. East side."
Kame got to his feet, despair already setting in. "We'll never find it. Especially not if it goes into Seibu."
"Worry about that when we get there," Jin said. "Everybody ready?"
He clutched his silver fairy locket to his chest, prompting the others to follow suit with their own unique jewellery, and yelled the trigger word to begin the magical transformation.
"ME-TA-MORPH-OSIS!"
Even after a fortnight of transformation sequences, Kame was still wondering where the music came from. They all got instrumental versions of their Real Face solos - with the exception of Kame himself, who got Hanasanaide Ai. It didn't seem to matter that they were all changing at once; he could only hear the music for one at a time.
It was a bit like being at one of their concerts, only with more crossdressing and no backdancing Juniors. There were thick, multicoloured ribbons swirling to provide a modicum of modesty as their everyday clothes vanished in a haze of glitter, leaving all six temporarily bare save a few strategically-placed ruffles.
Kame watched Jin's hips sway to the chorus of 'Pinky'...right up until they were enveloped in a tight, black, leather miniskirt and couldn't move anymore than a few millimetres in any direction. The white T-shirt and matching black vest followed, along with fishnet tights and artfully-scuffed white trainers, and the locket in Jin's hand morphed into a long, silver wand with a star on the end.
Junno backflipped his way through his transformation, somehow landing gracefully even in five-inch heels and a tight pink-and-white dress, and his locket became a gleaming pearl wand.
Ueda spun languid circles on the spot, raising his arms over his head in a lazy stretch while a faded denim skirt and loose white blouse formed round his body, topped off by trailing scarves and the aforementioned combat boots. His wand was amethyst, a perfect match to the scarves.
Koki's emerald wand matched the trim on his long, black skirt and high heels as well as the buttons on his white, silk blouse and the earrings that weren't quite covered by the long, blond hair spilling down his back.
Nakamaru, the only one of them to avoid the skirts, nevertheless stood out a mile in his elegant black suit, complete with matching fedora and a purple tie that hung loosely round his open collar. His onyx wand was edged with gold.
"I feel like a pimp," he complained. "Especially round Kame. He looks underage."
Kame couldn't all very well argue on that point, given that he was wearing a schoolgirl's uniform - a neat, blue and white sailor suit with a red scarf, knee socks and black Mary Janes. It was most unfair, he thought, that he didn't get to wear heels, since he could've used the boost in height. His hair was tied back in a tiny ponytail and his wand was a brilliant sapphire with a small crescent moon on the end.
Transformations complete, the six of them made for the lift. They could leap from low rooftop to low rooftop, but throwing themselves out of eighteenth-storey windows and expecting to land on their feet was more than they were willing to try right now.
After all, they'd only been magical boys for two weeks.
-----
"Try not to break anyone else's nose," Kame pleaded with Jin as they emerged in Ikebukuro station. "We're supposed to be protecting the public, not beating them up with the blunt end of our wands."
Jin scowled and tucked his wand back in his vest pocket. "He deserved it. That guy'll think twice about groping people on the train again."
"Yeah, him and the two dozen people who watched you smash his nose," Koki said. "We should've driven."
Nakamaru gave him an incredulous look. "To the station?"
"It's all right for you," Jin said. "You don't have anyone trying to reach up your skirt."
"Nobody can get up your skirt," Kame said with a grimace. "I've tried."
Jin shrugged. "Hey, I told you it was too tight."
Not having much interest in Jin's skirt, tight or otherwise, Junno was helping Ueda locate the cause of the disturbance. It didn't require a lot of effort on his part - the crowd of screaming people running away from the JR ticket machines provided an excellent clue.
"Over there!" he yelled, pointing over the heads of everyone not wearing stilettos.
Kame had to backtrack up a couple of stairs so he could see for himself. "Under that Suica poster!"
They all turned to look. Sure enough, under the big, green poster was a big, green monster with big, green teeth (currently taking a chunk out of a wheelie case) and big, green tentacles, which were reaching for a group of screaming schoolgirls.
"Not *another* tentacle monster," Nakamaru groaned. "They keep trying to steal my hat!"
"You're lucky that's all they want to steal from you." Ueda stomped on one of the vicious crabs that had formed from the monster's trail of slime, not stopping till he heard that satisfying crunch. "Come on, we've got to save the girls!"
Junno pointed to a tall girl who was clutching a DS and wearing a Zelda T-shirt under her uniform blazer. "Save that one for me!"
"Do it yourself," Jin said as he shuffled past. At this rate he was going to have to get roller skates if he wanted to move quickly when transformed.
Of course, Junno took him at face value. He spun his wand thrice, blinding everyone around him with the reflected light, and when the light died, the short, thick wand had become a long, slender billiard cue.
Ueda, who'd put his hands up to shield his eyes, had done so while holding his own wand. When he brought his hands back down, they were encased in purple boxing gloves, the alternate form of his amethyst wand. He was more than ready for a fight - the sooner it was all over, the sooner he could transform back. The scarves were beginning to itch.
"Get the girls clear!" Kame yelled. "If I take a shot now I might hit them!"
He twirled round, holding his wand in both hands, spinning faster and faster, teetering dangerously close to the edge of the steps. When he stopped, it was with a baseball bat of brilliant blue, poised and ready to hit a billion home runs. It was too bad magical boys weren't allowed to play professional sports. Especially magical boys who wore schoolgirl uniforms.
Koki strode past, heels clacking on the floor, skirt swinging with a freedom Jin envied. His walk was unhurried, confident - that of a successful career girl who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to go after it. But there was nothing girly about the emerald chainshot in his hand.
Having had magical powers for only a fortnight, KAT-TUN hadn't yet managed to work out any successful strategies for defeating monsters. Hell, it had taken them years to learn to work together in the first place, and when life and death were on the line, things became that much more complicated.
The one thing they had been able to establish was that Nakamaru's beatboxing was a crucial first movement of any offensive. Using Koki for cover, he simply waved his fedora over his wand to turn it into a gold-trimmed microphone - no speakers necessary. His sonic attack was still a little shaky, but by and large it was good enough to wipe out insect armies and leave some larger enemies temporarily stunned.
Unfortunately, he hadn't managed to get the hang of targeting specific creatures yet, which meant he stunned the schoolgirls as well. They collapsed to the floor, squashing a few of the remaining crabs as they fell.
"Kame said to get them clear, not knock them out!" Jin yelled.
Obviously if they were going to get out of this one without getting slapped with a lawsuit, he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. Jin tossed his own wand up in the air in a shower of sparks, and when it came down, he stopped it with his foot. It was a soccer ball, ordinary black-and-white.
Deceptively ordinary. When kicked by Jin, the ball had enough power to level a building, as a nightclub in Roppongi had had the misfortune of finding out. It was a terrific attack, but there was just one problem...
"Don't," Kame advised. "You'll split your skirt again and probably bring the roof crashing down on us!"
Ueda, who was engaged in sparring with a couple of the tentacles, wouldn't have appreciated this one jot. He was trying to get close enough to take a better look at the monster's core, to see if he could determine how it had managed to squeeze its bulk into the station in the first place. The doorways were the right size for humans, but woefully inadequate for a fiend of this magnitude.
The mystery was solved when, after one of the thicker tentacles was speared by Koki, it retracted into the body - dragging Koki with it.
Like hell was Koki letting go of the chainshot. If anything happened to his precious transformation locket, he might never get his own hair back. Given his elegant, girly attire, the loud, aggressive, and ever-so-slightly obscene yell he let out would've shocked the crowds at the station - if they hadn't been too busy running for their lives, anyway. The creature was shrinking, changing form from giant green monster to slender, silvery serpent, with a tail as deadly as its fangs.
Said fangs were perilously close to sinking into Koki's silk-clad shoulder. Ueda was too far away to save him, Nakamaru's attack took too long to build up, Kame didn't have a ball ready and Jin couldn't move.
It was all down to Junno.
He plucked one of the pearls from the string round his neck - the necklace snapped back into place to prevent the rest from falling - and held it in the palm of his hand. The pearl glowed faintly pink, a few shades lighter than Junno's dress, and grew to the size of a billiard ball, whereupon it took to the air as though it weighed not an ounce more than a feather. Junno took aim with his cue, drew back, and shot the ball straight at the serpent's mouth.
Koki only just managed to duck in time to save his head from the impact as the ball whizzed past him, striking a fang so heavily that it snapped, leaving jagged, poison-coated remains. The serpent reared up in pain; as it did so, Koki took the opportunity to recall the chain to his weapon and run for cover.
"We're not doing very well, are we?" Nakamaru said, now that the floor, in addition to being covered in trails of slime and crushed crustaceans, was acquiring a thin sheen of deadly poison.
"Don't you think it was a good shot?" Junno used his cue to vault backwards when the serpent spat venom at him, coming up cheerful as ever and completely undaunted.
Jin applauded sarcastically. It *was* a good shot, but Junno had the unfair advantage of being able to move in his costume.
Cheated of its target, the serpent morphed again, this time into a giant wolf with one broken canine and a growl that shook the ceiling. It looked, if possible, even less friendly than in its previous incarnations, but at least it was no longer dripping poison.
Now it just wanted to eat unconscious schoolgirls for lunch.
"I'll lead it away from them!" Kame yelled, hoping it couldn't understand human speech. "It seems to have a thing for schoolgirls!"
He ran across the beast's line of sight, flashing legs considerably hairier than any real schoolgirl possessed, trying to draw it away from the girls and towards the rental lockers to give the rest of the group a chance to stab it in the back. Not terribly sporting, perhaps, but being in the entertainment industry, they knew all about backstabbing.
Koki tried with his chainshot, missing by a mile as it sank into the screen of one of the ticket machines. Junno added the damaged item to his notebook of potential deductions from their salaries - he had no intention of being charged for things he didn't break - and stuffed the tiny pink book down the front of his dress.
Nakamaru brought his microphone to his lips again, but Ueda gave him a warning glance. "Don't push yourself," he said. "You'll hurt your throat if you attack again so soon. Leave it for someone else - like Jin, because he hasn't done anything yet."
"Because I can't move!" Jin protested. "It's not like I'm being lazy!"
From Ueda's expression, it was clear Jin was looking in the wrong place for sympathy.
"Fine," he grumbled. "Watch me make an idiot of myself." He shuffled forwards another couple of steps, dribbling the ball as he went. Kame couldn't tell him not to do it this time, being preoccupied with keeping the wolf from catching his cute little skirt with its claws, so if Jin saw a shot, he was going to take it. Of course, he wasn't used to trying to kick a ball at a moving target, especially when he couldn't move his legs above the knee...
"Kame, can you try to keep it still?" he yelled.
"Not without getting eaten, no!"
Luckily, Kame's habit of throwing himself wholeheartedly into physical roles had given him a great deal of stamina. He could run around one of the largest stations in Tokyo, even in unsuitable shoes, for as long as it took. That didn't mean he couldn't play it smart, though.
Playing hide-and-seek round a pillar with a creature five times your own size was something he'd only seen done in epic fantasy movies featuring very small, curly-haired people, but it worked just as well in real life and when the wolf came too close, Kame slugged it round the muzzle with his baseball bat. The wolf howled as though Kame had half-killed it, drawing back just enough to give him some breathing room.
"Jin! Now!"
Jin didn't need Kame to tell him twice. Not about this, anyway. He drew back his leg as far as he could - not very far - concentrated all his power into this one kick, and sent the ball flying towards the wolf.
Who promptly turned around and caught it in his oversized jaws.
Jin's wail of anguish didn't quite bring the roof down but it was a close call. The beast had his transformation locket, which meant that if Jin couldn't get it back, he was going to be stuck wearing the same outfit for the rest of his life. The damned thing didn't come off - even when it got torn, it just fixed itself...eventually. Being a magical boy was only fun on a short-term basis.
Perhaps launching himself at the wolf wasn't the brightest thing Jin could've done, either for himself or for his skirt, but he did it anyway.
Kame groaned, swung the bat again and tried to knock the ball from its prison, because he figured letting Jin anywhere near those giant teeth was a bad idea, but it refused to budge. Jin crashed into the wolf from the side, rocking it without knocking it over - just as well, since Kame was standing on the other side.
"I knew we should've watched more magical girl anime when we got those lockets," Koki muttered to himself as he and the others tried to move the unconscious girls out of harm's way. "We need to learn strategies!"
Ueda overheard him. "Already thought of that - I've got all five seasons of Sailor Moon being delivered tomorrow. We should study the classics first."
"Somehow, I don't feel like that's going to help me much," Nakamaru said mournfully, waving his microphone.
Junno nodded sagely. "I think Pokemon might be more useful for you."
Jigglypuff aside, Jin was doing his best to throttle the wolf, but since he couldn't even close his arms around its shaggy neck, he wasn't having much luck. Furthermore, unable to use his legs to get a proper grip, he had trouble just keeping in place.
Kame took pity on him. With a quick twirl, he transformed his baseball bat back into a wand, then used the extremely sharp crescent moon on the end to slice a slit up the side of Jin's skirt.
"Ow!"
"Sorry!"
"Only the costume repairs itself in five minutes - my skin takes a lot longer, Kame!"
"Quit complaining and try not to bleed on me!"
Relishing the sudden freedom of movement, Jin scissored his legs round the wolf's neck and leaned over its head to try to wrestle the ball from its mouth. For his part, Kame kept jabbing it in the side with his wand, hoping to irritate it enough to make it drop the ball - and not swallow it instead.
Even the wolf's hide wasn't up to dealing with sharp, pointy objects. It howled once more, the sound becoming liquid, like water gurgling down a drain, and transformed again. Kame had to backflip out of the way to avoid being swamped.
Koki took one look at the new form and pulled a face. "That's disgusting."
"At least it doesn't have tentacles," Ueda pointed out.
The creature didn't have anything, in fact. No facial features, no limbs, no armour...and no mouth, which meant that Jin's soccer ball was now trapped inside the massive blob of gel. Jin lost his grip on the slippery surface, sliding forwards till he crashed to his knees on the station floor.
"Now what?" he asked as Kame helped him to his feet. "We poke it till it transforms again?"
"There's no guarantee we'll get your ball back that way, Jin. Let me think about this."
"Think fast," Nakamaru said. "The blob seems to be up to something!"
While it displayed no obvious signs of intelligence, the blob, indeed, did appear to have a plan in mind. It quivered, humming faintly to itself as its colour lightened from navy blue to turquoise, and the jelly-like consistency of its body loosened to a translucent, near-liquid state, revealing a glimpse of the stolen soccer ball inside.
"Doesn't it look like it's going to explode?"
Everybody shushed Junno on the grounds that the monster was unlikely to commit suicide, having invested so much time and effort in making a nuisance of itself.
Still, whatever it was up to, it couldn't possibly be good news for the magical boys of KAT-TUN.
"I've got it!" Kame burst out. "We should combine attacks! It's the best way to defeat powerful enemies!"
"We already tried that," Nakamaru said. "It didn't work."
Kame shook his head. "No, we didn't. We tried attacking at the same time. There's a difference."
As the members of KAT-TUN were not known for their ability to work in perfect harmony with each other at the best of times, each one having his own distinct style, this made sense to them.
"So how do we combine attacks?" Jin asked. "Especially when you consider where mine is."
"Maybe we should try it with five and you should go back to LA?" Kame suggested, but he gave Jin a smile to show he was only kidding. "I don't know, but I think there's supposed to be rainbows involved."
"Those guys from Arashi are never around when you need them," Jin complained.
Koki had an idea. "Let's try touching our wands together."
Everybody except Jin transformed their weapons back to wands, then held them together as though they were about to drink a toast. There were no rainbows, though. There wasn't even any pink.
"We could try yelling something enthusiastic and heartfelt about the moon and the power of love?"
Ueda's suggestion was met with varying degrees of disbelief and disgust.
"Do we look like we're in NEWS?" Koki said.
Kame smirked. "Don't answer that. Maybe you should all try giving me your power or something and I'll channel it all myself."
He regretted this suggestion almost immediately as everyone decided that the best way to transfer power was to hit Kame over the head with their wands until something magical happened.
"Bad idea," he panted after fending them off. "Forget that one. I thought all this magical boy stuff was supposed to be intuitive!"
While all this was going on Jin was busy with a tissue, wiping the thin line of blood from his thigh and cursing Kame's pointy crescent moon. Even if their transformation lockets had come with an instruction manual, he doubted it would've helped. If they were magical girls, maybe, but guys never read the manual.
"We have to think like girls," he said.
Koki shook his head and looked at Kame. "Not my department."
"Says the guy wearing stockings." Kame flipped the hem of Koki's skirt with the tip of his wand. "Hey, I didn't know you were wearing lace panties under there..."
"It's one of the things I want to complain about when we get back," Koki said, batting Kame away. "You should see what Ueda's wearing."
"No, he shouldn't," Ueda said firmly, and there was no more to be said about it.
"Does this seem strange to anyone else?" Nakamaru asked.
Junno looked thoughtful. "That we're all wearing women's underwear except you? Yeah, that's a little strange, even for a Johnny's group..."
"Not that. That." Nakamaru pointed to the giant blob, which was quivering so fast that it was starting to vibrate its way across the floor.
Jin didn't care for the way the turquoise was turning hideously puce. "It doesn't look so good, does it? Do you think I gave it indigestion?"
Kame suppressed the response, "You'd give anyone indigestion", and shaded his eyes to take a better look at their enemy. It did look kind of ill. Having magical sporting equipment taking up residence in its belly clearly did not agree with it. If only they could...
"Jin! Change it back!"
"Change it back?" Jin wasn't sure what Kame was asking him to do. "How?"
Kame rolled his eyes. "It's still your transformation locket, Jin. It doesn't matter where it is - it still belongs to you. You can control it."
"Pretend you've got a Playstation controller," Junno suggested. "You can manipulate the ball with it."
Jin ignored him. "How am I supposed to change it back when I'm not even holding it?"
"Concentrate," Kame said. "Like when you're..." He leaned forward to whisper in Jin's ear; the others strained to catch Kame's words but they were not only inaudible but unrepeatable, relating largely to certain acts best saved for the privacy of one's apartment. Faint colour rose in Jin's cheeks - Kame could be *extremely* eloquent when he wanted, even when he was being licentious - and he pressed himself against the arm that wrapped round his waist.
"We're supposed to fight evil using the power of love, not the power of lust," Nakamaru said. "Aren't we?"
Kame shrugged. "Whatever works."
And work it did, because Jin's concentration improved tenfold when he had sufficient motivation. He thought about the wand he'd held in his hand, about how the thin stem of silver felt cool under his skin and about how shiny (and pointy) the star on the end was, and imagined he held it still.
Moments later, he was - though it was covered in gel and didn't feel nearly so nice anymore. The ball had transformed back into wand mode while inside the giant blob and forced its way out, pointy star in the lead, slicing through the weakened interior and breaking free from the slippery outer membrane to fly straight to its owner's hand. Jin discreetly wiped it off on Junno's faux-fur stole, hoping he wouldn't notice but not really caring if he did.
He didn't. Junno was too thrilled about Jin's apparent telekinetic ability to worry about the sanctity of his costume.
"It's leaking!" Kame exclaimed.
"It's not leaking, it's just a bit slimy," Jin said, but Kame interrupted him.
"I mean, the monster's leaking! It can't seal the hole!" In that second, Kame had a revelation. "We have to attack it from inside!"
The smugness in Jin's voice was almost unbearable. "You'd never have realised that if I hadn't given you the idea."
"By getting your weapon swallowed," Ueda pointed out. "Stop trying to take credit for dumb luck."
"How do we attack it from the inside?" Koki wanted to know. "We're outside."
Kame grinned. "It doesn't look like the monster can heal any damage done from the inside out. I'm going to try something."
Unlike Junno, Kame didn't have a string of pearls at his disposal. What he did have was world's largest collection of cell phone charms, all shaped like baseballs, that weighed down the pockets of his skirt. He plucked one from the chain, held it up and watched it grow. Once full-size, it hovered in the air; Kame took up a batting stance and drove forwards, smacking the ball so hard that it shattered one of the lighting fixtures.
"Oops. All right, I'm going to try that again..."
The second ball connected, disappearing into the wound with a terrible sucking sound that made them all feel slightly ill, so Junno got in on the action, sinking shots that would no doubt have earned him a lot of money on the tables.
Ueda, whose attack was close-range only, busied himself with taking notes on the strategies they'd tried so far, if only so he could compare them against those used by the Tokyo Mew Mew girls. It was just unfortunate that despite Kame's sudden wave of inspiration, the new plan didn't seem to be working.
"It doesn't look like it's getting any worse," Jin said doubtfully. "Maybe only pointed things hurt it."
"What kind of logic is that?" Koki scoffed. "Kame's probably doing a lot of damage, but we're up against a worthy opponent."
Kame thought otherwise. "It may be a shapeshifting monster, but right now it's a giant blob. We might have to watch a lot of old, low-budget movies to figure out how to kill it."
"Or we could just use fire," Junno said, sounding most proud of himself. "Which one of us has the power of fire?"
"It doesn't work quite like that," Ueda said gently. "We don't get elements."
Jin checked his pockets but to his dismay, his lighter had disappeared when he transformed. "So much for fire. Anyone else got a light?"
"No," Kame said, "and even if I did, I don't want to risk burning the station down. Do you know how many years we'd be in debt for that?"
Nakamaru was, understandably, bleak about the situation. "Long enough that our great-great-grand-Juniors would still be wearing ruffles to pay it off - if we survive to have any."
"We could try teaming up again now all six of us have our wands back?" Ueda suggested.
They tried this, to no avail. Not so much as a spark.
"Maybe we'll get lucky and this'll turn out to be one of those big, bad things that we're too new to defeat and our senpai will step in to save the day." Koki's optimism quickly disappeared when the others pointed out that none of their senpai - to the best of their knowledge - were magical boys, and anyway, did he really want to be saved by the members of TOKIO in high heels?
It was fortunate for them that the blob wasn't inclined to move much, other than its constant wobbling, and didn't seem to have any means of attack save sitting there and being an eyesore, which was the only reason they hadn't been killed mid-argument yet.
As the useless discussion continued, Jin's agitation increased. Nobody was doing anything. He had to get them moving somehow, because his skirt was starting to repair itself and it was pressing painfully against his cut.
"Guys, we don't have time to sit around and talk about this, okay? The longer we do nothing, the more people we put at risk." Jin swept his wand round to indicate the handful of gawkers who were beginning to peek from behind pillars and shop windows. "Just because we're wearing skirts doesn't mean we're a bunch of little old ladies who take a year to make a decision. We're not like that. We're..." he paused for inspiration, finding it in the five guys standing next to him, "we're KAT-TUN!"
"Tell us something we don't know," Kame said, irritated.
Undaunted, Jin kept going. "K! A! K! A! K! A!"
His attempt to raise the mood didn't exactly light a fire under the others, but they knew where he was going with it and so they joined in, albeit half-heartedly and at considerably lower volume.
"T-TUN..."
The resulting bursts of light from their wands took them all by surprise. Six colours shot out, merging into a single white beam that sliced straight through the gelatinous creature, bisecting it at the middle. The two halves quivered in place for a moment, then fell apart, shrivelling like a deflated balloon.
Kame flashed a double peace sign at the station in general. "I knew we could combine our attacks!"
"We're going to have to shout it every time?" Nakamaru wasn't too thrilled by the prospect.
Junno thought it was quite amusing. "Our ultimate attack is Peaceful Days?"
"There's something dreadfully ironic about that..." Ueda muttered.
Jin high-fived Kame, stealing his hands away from Koki's attempts to do the same, and found himself joined at both hips and lips to his schoolgirl boyfriend. They weren't worried about being spotted by the press. It was one of the more extraordinary aspects of being a magical boy - when they were transformed, not even their own families recognised them.
"That's the biggest enemy we've defeated yet!" Kame said happily when he came up for air. "I wish I could tell my niece about all this. She'd think we're so cool."
"About how Uncle Kazuya dresses up like a schoolgirl and fights monsters with his magical baseball bat? I'm sure it'd make a great bedtime story..."
"Shut up," Kame said, "or I'll tell her that Uncle Jin runs around in a tight leather skirt and he *likes* it."
"Uncle Jin would like it a lot better if he had some breathing room..." Jin shifted uncomfortably in Kame's arms, trying to find an angle where the padded bras the two of them wore wouldn't crush each other.
Kame looked down. "Please tell me that's your wand digging into me?"
"Trust me, with this skirt, the wand's the *only* thing it could be."
While Jin and Kame celebrated their victory in a fanservice-heavy manner guaranteed to satisfy the schoolgirls, who were just beginning to wake up to the delicious sight of two pretty men in skirts making out, Ueda was checking out the remains of the shapeshifting monster.
It wasn't the first shapeshifter they'd encountered. Last Friday, they'd fought off a shining gold robot who'd transformed into a towering pillar of marshmallow, immune to physical attacks, and finally into a python, in which form it would've escaped had Koki not speared it with his chainshot. The creature had exploded instantly, allowing them no opportunity to learn its origins. Ueda didn't want to pass up this chance.
Rummaging in the gel was unpleasant to say the least, but he persevered, conning Koki, Junno and Nakamaru into helping him search for clues - he knew he'd be wasting his breath on the other two - until at last Koki came up with something, dripping green goo all over his silken shirt but grinning nonetheless because he was holding a tiny microchip.
Ueda patted his "volunteers" on the back (carefully) and pocketed the chip for later study. Surely, with all the resources at his disposal, there was no mystery Johnny Kitagawa couldn't solve with time?
-----
One relatively quiet week later, a few days before their first progress review, the magical boys of KAT-TUN were in their secret headquarters, still trying to finalise the list of complaints they intended to make to management.
"Forget that for now," Ueda said, interrupting Jin's rant on the torture of wearing leather skirts in summer heat. "We've just got an email through from the lab. It's about that microchip."
Hushed silence fell over the room. Ueda was pleased.
"I told you all my suspicions earlier, that all the monsters we've fought so far have had the same point of origin, that there are certain constants in every attack. Somewhere out there is our villain, our fiendishly evil mastermind who's trying to destroy Tokyo by creating shapeshifting monsters in his secret laboratory and letting them run loose in public places.
"Let's see what our scientists have to say about that chip, shall we?" Ueda opened the email, skimming down to the parts that weren't written in jargon. "Ah. Engraved in miniature on the back were a single kanji and two English letters."
"Well?" Jin demanded. The sooner they got this part over with, the sooner he could get something done about his costume.
"Oh." Ueda turned pale. "The kanji was 'arashi', and the letters were 'A' and 'M'."
Kame's mouth dropped open. "Our fiendishly evil mastermind with the secret laboratory is..."
"Yeah." Ueda rubbed a hand over his brow as if he could ward off the impending migraine by doing so. "Aiba Masaki."
-----
Location: a lab somewhere in Tokyo
Aiba takes his latest creation out for a walk, never knowing that Nino has deliberately sabotaged the chains on all his leashes...
Pairing: Akame
Rating: PG
Genre: Fluff, humour, crack
Word count: 6,440
Disclaimer: Not mine, damnit.
Summary: One day, Johnny handed the members of KAT-TUN transformation lockets and said, "From now on, YOU will fight the forces of evil." But being a magical boy isn't as easy as it looks on television.
Skirting Peril
"This isn't working," Koki said. "Everyone knows magical girls operate in teams of five."
"But we're magical boys," Kame pointed out. "So we can have a team of six if we want. Who's going to complain? The people we save from doom, disaster and certain death?"
"We've already had one complaint." Ueda spun round in his chair to face the desk, pulling up a log on their team laptop. "A Mr. Shirota Yuu, angry because we accidentally blew up his favourite nightclub last night when we saved Roppongi from that water dragon."
Everyone turned to look at Jin, who had been responsible for said explosion. "It was my favourite club too," he said through a mouthful of chocolate. "I didn't mean to use that much power! I'm still getting the hang of this."
Nakamaru gave him a reassuring smile. "We all are."
"Really? Because I think I'm a natural at it." This was from Junno, who was toying with his transformation locket.
"Only because you get to attack the bad guys with a billiard cue," Jin muttered. "Of course you're good at that."
In the two weeks since the members of KAT-TUN had added 'protecting the world from evil' to their list of occupations, life had become extremely chaotic. Kame, in particular, wasn't sure he had the time for his new career, what with the band's usual activities, plus taking Ran-chan for walks, cleaning his apartment to within an inch of its life, and making time for (and with) Jin. Magical girls, he remembered from his Sailor Moon marathons, were supposed to fall in love with tragic, brooding heroes who had a touch of darkness about them.
Magical boys, fortunately, were free to fall in love with each other, though Kame was pretty certain that hadn't been part of Johnny's plan when he'd handed them all transformation lockets and said, "From now on, YOU will fight the forces of evil."
They'd gone along with his directive, because they figured they couldn't possibly get out of it and they were all really curious about their transformation sequences. Besides, fighting evil was cool. All the best anime characters did it.
What they hadn't banked on was the costumes - hence the meeting in their secret headquarters, which was actually just a sparkly, pink-painted office in the corner of the building.
"Let's forget about the attacks for now," Kame suggested, passing Jin another chocolate bar to keep him quiet. "We don't have much time to talk, so we have to figure out what we're going to say to Johnny when we have our first progress review."
"We should make a list of the things we're not happy with," Nakamaru said. "Then we can approach him calmly and ask if he can have his scientists change the costumes associated with each locket."
"Easy for you to say," Koki said. "You get to fight evil in a suit."
Nakamaru shrugged. "Yeah, but have you ever tried fending off a trio of jumbo marauding squid while keeping your shirt from getting creased?"
"No, but I bet it's more fun than leaping from building to building while not letting the bad guys look up your skirt," Koki said darkly. "In high heels."
"At least you get high heels," Ueda said. "I get combat boots. And I don't get magical long, blond hair, either."
"That's because you already make a pretty girl." Junno's cheery grin faltered for an instant when Koki kicked him in the back. Ueda nodded his thanks.
Kame's hair didn't grow either. Nor did Jin's. Junno, however, got a cute blond ponytail to go with his pink-and-white dress, plus some completely unnecessary stilettos, a faux fur stole and enough pearl jewellery to sink the Titanic.
Jin licked the last vestiges of chocolate from his lips, sending Kame's hormones into overdrive, and it didn't help when his contribution to the list of complaints was that his skirt was too tight.
"How am I supposed to kick fiendish monsters into the middle of next week when I can't even take two steps without feeling like it's going to split?" he said.
Kame struggled to suppress the mental image. "Just don't kick anything. In fact, don't even move. Stand at the back and throw the damned soccer ball."
"But I don't play goalkeeper..."
Before Jin could launch into a lengthy explanation of the rules of soccer, the siren went off.
"All or nothing, now or never, we can make it happen we can make it all right," it trilled on repeat.
Koki groaned and clapped his hands to his ears while Ueda turned back to the laptop to check the location of the alert. His fingers flew over the keyboard as he narrowed it down, using the powerful network of satellites Johnny had at his command.
When he turned back to the others, his face was grim. "Ikebukuro station. East side."
Kame got to his feet, despair already setting in. "We'll never find it. Especially not if it goes into Seibu."
"Worry about that when we get there," Jin said. "Everybody ready?"
He clutched his silver fairy locket to his chest, prompting the others to follow suit with their own unique jewellery, and yelled the trigger word to begin the magical transformation.
"ME-TA-MORPH-OSIS!"
Even after a fortnight of transformation sequences, Kame was still wondering where the music came from. They all got instrumental versions of their Real Face solos - with the exception of Kame himself, who got Hanasanaide Ai. It didn't seem to matter that they were all changing at once; he could only hear the music for one at a time.
It was a bit like being at one of their concerts, only with more crossdressing and no backdancing Juniors. There were thick, multicoloured ribbons swirling to provide a modicum of modesty as their everyday clothes vanished in a haze of glitter, leaving all six temporarily bare save a few strategically-placed ruffles.
Kame watched Jin's hips sway to the chorus of 'Pinky'...right up until they were enveloped in a tight, black, leather miniskirt and couldn't move anymore than a few millimetres in any direction. The white T-shirt and matching black vest followed, along with fishnet tights and artfully-scuffed white trainers, and the locket in Jin's hand morphed into a long, silver wand with a star on the end.
Junno backflipped his way through his transformation, somehow landing gracefully even in five-inch heels and a tight pink-and-white dress, and his locket became a gleaming pearl wand.
Ueda spun languid circles on the spot, raising his arms over his head in a lazy stretch while a faded denim skirt and loose white blouse formed round his body, topped off by trailing scarves and the aforementioned combat boots. His wand was amethyst, a perfect match to the scarves.
Koki's emerald wand matched the trim on his long, black skirt and high heels as well as the buttons on his white, silk blouse and the earrings that weren't quite covered by the long, blond hair spilling down his back.
Nakamaru, the only one of them to avoid the skirts, nevertheless stood out a mile in his elegant black suit, complete with matching fedora and a purple tie that hung loosely round his open collar. His onyx wand was edged with gold.
"I feel like a pimp," he complained. "Especially round Kame. He looks underage."
Kame couldn't all very well argue on that point, given that he was wearing a schoolgirl's uniform - a neat, blue and white sailor suit with a red scarf, knee socks and black Mary Janes. It was most unfair, he thought, that he didn't get to wear heels, since he could've used the boost in height. His hair was tied back in a tiny ponytail and his wand was a brilliant sapphire with a small crescent moon on the end.
Transformations complete, the six of them made for the lift. They could leap from low rooftop to low rooftop, but throwing themselves out of eighteenth-storey windows and expecting to land on their feet was more than they were willing to try right now.
After all, they'd only been magical boys for two weeks.
-----
"Try not to break anyone else's nose," Kame pleaded with Jin as they emerged in Ikebukuro station. "We're supposed to be protecting the public, not beating them up with the blunt end of our wands."
Jin scowled and tucked his wand back in his vest pocket. "He deserved it. That guy'll think twice about groping people on the train again."
"Yeah, him and the two dozen people who watched you smash his nose," Koki said. "We should've driven."
Nakamaru gave him an incredulous look. "To the station?"
"It's all right for you," Jin said. "You don't have anyone trying to reach up your skirt."
"Nobody can get up your skirt," Kame said with a grimace. "I've tried."
Jin shrugged. "Hey, I told you it was too tight."
Not having much interest in Jin's skirt, tight or otherwise, Junno was helping Ueda locate the cause of the disturbance. It didn't require a lot of effort on his part - the crowd of screaming people running away from the JR ticket machines provided an excellent clue.
"Over there!" he yelled, pointing over the heads of everyone not wearing stilettos.
Kame had to backtrack up a couple of stairs so he could see for himself. "Under that Suica poster!"
They all turned to look. Sure enough, under the big, green poster was a big, green monster with big, green teeth (currently taking a chunk out of a wheelie case) and big, green tentacles, which were reaching for a group of screaming schoolgirls.
"Not *another* tentacle monster," Nakamaru groaned. "They keep trying to steal my hat!"
"You're lucky that's all they want to steal from you." Ueda stomped on one of the vicious crabs that had formed from the monster's trail of slime, not stopping till he heard that satisfying crunch. "Come on, we've got to save the girls!"
Junno pointed to a tall girl who was clutching a DS and wearing a Zelda T-shirt under her uniform blazer. "Save that one for me!"
"Do it yourself," Jin said as he shuffled past. At this rate he was going to have to get roller skates if he wanted to move quickly when transformed.
Of course, Junno took him at face value. He spun his wand thrice, blinding everyone around him with the reflected light, and when the light died, the short, thick wand had become a long, slender billiard cue.
Ueda, who'd put his hands up to shield his eyes, had done so while holding his own wand. When he brought his hands back down, they were encased in purple boxing gloves, the alternate form of his amethyst wand. He was more than ready for a fight - the sooner it was all over, the sooner he could transform back. The scarves were beginning to itch.
"Get the girls clear!" Kame yelled. "If I take a shot now I might hit them!"
He twirled round, holding his wand in both hands, spinning faster and faster, teetering dangerously close to the edge of the steps. When he stopped, it was with a baseball bat of brilliant blue, poised and ready to hit a billion home runs. It was too bad magical boys weren't allowed to play professional sports. Especially magical boys who wore schoolgirl uniforms.
Koki strode past, heels clacking on the floor, skirt swinging with a freedom Jin envied. His walk was unhurried, confident - that of a successful career girl who knows what she wants and isn't afraid to go after it. But there was nothing girly about the emerald chainshot in his hand.
Having had magical powers for only a fortnight, KAT-TUN hadn't yet managed to work out any successful strategies for defeating monsters. Hell, it had taken them years to learn to work together in the first place, and when life and death were on the line, things became that much more complicated.
The one thing they had been able to establish was that Nakamaru's beatboxing was a crucial first movement of any offensive. Using Koki for cover, he simply waved his fedora over his wand to turn it into a gold-trimmed microphone - no speakers necessary. His sonic attack was still a little shaky, but by and large it was good enough to wipe out insect armies and leave some larger enemies temporarily stunned.
Unfortunately, he hadn't managed to get the hang of targeting specific creatures yet, which meant he stunned the schoolgirls as well. They collapsed to the floor, squashing a few of the remaining crabs as they fell.
"Kame said to get them clear, not knock them out!" Jin yelled.
Obviously if they were going to get out of this one without getting slapped with a lawsuit, he was going to have to take matters into his own hands. Jin tossed his own wand up in the air in a shower of sparks, and when it came down, he stopped it with his foot. It was a soccer ball, ordinary black-and-white.
Deceptively ordinary. When kicked by Jin, the ball had enough power to level a building, as a nightclub in Roppongi had had the misfortune of finding out. It was a terrific attack, but there was just one problem...
"Don't," Kame advised. "You'll split your skirt again and probably bring the roof crashing down on us!"
Ueda, who was engaged in sparring with a couple of the tentacles, wouldn't have appreciated this one jot. He was trying to get close enough to take a better look at the monster's core, to see if he could determine how it had managed to squeeze its bulk into the station in the first place. The doorways were the right size for humans, but woefully inadequate for a fiend of this magnitude.
The mystery was solved when, after one of the thicker tentacles was speared by Koki, it retracted into the body - dragging Koki with it.
Like hell was Koki letting go of the chainshot. If anything happened to his precious transformation locket, he might never get his own hair back. Given his elegant, girly attire, the loud, aggressive, and ever-so-slightly obscene yell he let out would've shocked the crowds at the station - if they hadn't been too busy running for their lives, anyway. The creature was shrinking, changing form from giant green monster to slender, silvery serpent, with a tail as deadly as its fangs.
Said fangs were perilously close to sinking into Koki's silk-clad shoulder. Ueda was too far away to save him, Nakamaru's attack took too long to build up, Kame didn't have a ball ready and Jin couldn't move.
It was all down to Junno.
He plucked one of the pearls from the string round his neck - the necklace snapped back into place to prevent the rest from falling - and held it in the palm of his hand. The pearl glowed faintly pink, a few shades lighter than Junno's dress, and grew to the size of a billiard ball, whereupon it took to the air as though it weighed not an ounce more than a feather. Junno took aim with his cue, drew back, and shot the ball straight at the serpent's mouth.
Koki only just managed to duck in time to save his head from the impact as the ball whizzed past him, striking a fang so heavily that it snapped, leaving jagged, poison-coated remains. The serpent reared up in pain; as it did so, Koki took the opportunity to recall the chain to his weapon and run for cover.
"We're not doing very well, are we?" Nakamaru said, now that the floor, in addition to being covered in trails of slime and crushed crustaceans, was acquiring a thin sheen of deadly poison.
"Don't you think it was a good shot?" Junno used his cue to vault backwards when the serpent spat venom at him, coming up cheerful as ever and completely undaunted.
Jin applauded sarcastically. It *was* a good shot, but Junno had the unfair advantage of being able to move in his costume.
Cheated of its target, the serpent morphed again, this time into a giant wolf with one broken canine and a growl that shook the ceiling. It looked, if possible, even less friendly than in its previous incarnations, but at least it was no longer dripping poison.
Now it just wanted to eat unconscious schoolgirls for lunch.
"I'll lead it away from them!" Kame yelled, hoping it couldn't understand human speech. "It seems to have a thing for schoolgirls!"
He ran across the beast's line of sight, flashing legs considerably hairier than any real schoolgirl possessed, trying to draw it away from the girls and towards the rental lockers to give the rest of the group a chance to stab it in the back. Not terribly sporting, perhaps, but being in the entertainment industry, they knew all about backstabbing.
Koki tried with his chainshot, missing by a mile as it sank into the screen of one of the ticket machines. Junno added the damaged item to his notebook of potential deductions from their salaries - he had no intention of being charged for things he didn't break - and stuffed the tiny pink book down the front of his dress.
Nakamaru brought his microphone to his lips again, but Ueda gave him a warning glance. "Don't push yourself," he said. "You'll hurt your throat if you attack again so soon. Leave it for someone else - like Jin, because he hasn't done anything yet."
"Because I can't move!" Jin protested. "It's not like I'm being lazy!"
From Ueda's expression, it was clear Jin was looking in the wrong place for sympathy.
"Fine," he grumbled. "Watch me make an idiot of myself." He shuffled forwards another couple of steps, dribbling the ball as he went. Kame couldn't tell him not to do it this time, being preoccupied with keeping the wolf from catching his cute little skirt with its claws, so if Jin saw a shot, he was going to take it. Of course, he wasn't used to trying to kick a ball at a moving target, especially when he couldn't move his legs above the knee...
"Kame, can you try to keep it still?" he yelled.
"Not without getting eaten, no!"
Luckily, Kame's habit of throwing himself wholeheartedly into physical roles had given him a great deal of stamina. He could run around one of the largest stations in Tokyo, even in unsuitable shoes, for as long as it took. That didn't mean he couldn't play it smart, though.
Playing hide-and-seek round a pillar with a creature five times your own size was something he'd only seen done in epic fantasy movies featuring very small, curly-haired people, but it worked just as well in real life and when the wolf came too close, Kame slugged it round the muzzle with his baseball bat. The wolf howled as though Kame had half-killed it, drawing back just enough to give him some breathing room.
"Jin! Now!"
Jin didn't need Kame to tell him twice. Not about this, anyway. He drew back his leg as far as he could - not very far - concentrated all his power into this one kick, and sent the ball flying towards the wolf.
Who promptly turned around and caught it in his oversized jaws.
Jin's wail of anguish didn't quite bring the roof down but it was a close call. The beast had his transformation locket, which meant that if Jin couldn't get it back, he was going to be stuck wearing the same outfit for the rest of his life. The damned thing didn't come off - even when it got torn, it just fixed itself...eventually. Being a magical boy was only fun on a short-term basis.
Perhaps launching himself at the wolf wasn't the brightest thing Jin could've done, either for himself or for his skirt, but he did it anyway.
Kame groaned, swung the bat again and tried to knock the ball from its prison, because he figured letting Jin anywhere near those giant teeth was a bad idea, but it refused to budge. Jin crashed into the wolf from the side, rocking it without knocking it over - just as well, since Kame was standing on the other side.
"I knew we should've watched more magical girl anime when we got those lockets," Koki muttered to himself as he and the others tried to move the unconscious girls out of harm's way. "We need to learn strategies!"
Ueda overheard him. "Already thought of that - I've got all five seasons of Sailor Moon being delivered tomorrow. We should study the classics first."
"Somehow, I don't feel like that's going to help me much," Nakamaru said mournfully, waving his microphone.
Junno nodded sagely. "I think Pokemon might be more useful for you."
Jigglypuff aside, Jin was doing his best to throttle the wolf, but since he couldn't even close his arms around its shaggy neck, he wasn't having much luck. Furthermore, unable to use his legs to get a proper grip, he had trouble just keeping in place.
Kame took pity on him. With a quick twirl, he transformed his baseball bat back into a wand, then used the extremely sharp crescent moon on the end to slice a slit up the side of Jin's skirt.
"Ow!"
"Sorry!"
"Only the costume repairs itself in five minutes - my skin takes a lot longer, Kame!"
"Quit complaining and try not to bleed on me!"
Relishing the sudden freedom of movement, Jin scissored his legs round the wolf's neck and leaned over its head to try to wrestle the ball from its mouth. For his part, Kame kept jabbing it in the side with his wand, hoping to irritate it enough to make it drop the ball - and not swallow it instead.
Even the wolf's hide wasn't up to dealing with sharp, pointy objects. It howled once more, the sound becoming liquid, like water gurgling down a drain, and transformed again. Kame had to backflip out of the way to avoid being swamped.
Koki took one look at the new form and pulled a face. "That's disgusting."
"At least it doesn't have tentacles," Ueda pointed out.
The creature didn't have anything, in fact. No facial features, no limbs, no armour...and no mouth, which meant that Jin's soccer ball was now trapped inside the massive blob of gel. Jin lost his grip on the slippery surface, sliding forwards till he crashed to his knees on the station floor.
"Now what?" he asked as Kame helped him to his feet. "We poke it till it transforms again?"
"There's no guarantee we'll get your ball back that way, Jin. Let me think about this."
"Think fast," Nakamaru said. "The blob seems to be up to something!"
While it displayed no obvious signs of intelligence, the blob, indeed, did appear to have a plan in mind. It quivered, humming faintly to itself as its colour lightened from navy blue to turquoise, and the jelly-like consistency of its body loosened to a translucent, near-liquid state, revealing a glimpse of the stolen soccer ball inside.
"Doesn't it look like it's going to explode?"
Everybody shushed Junno on the grounds that the monster was unlikely to commit suicide, having invested so much time and effort in making a nuisance of itself.
Still, whatever it was up to, it couldn't possibly be good news for the magical boys of KAT-TUN.
"I've got it!" Kame burst out. "We should combine attacks! It's the best way to defeat powerful enemies!"
"We already tried that," Nakamaru said. "It didn't work."
Kame shook his head. "No, we didn't. We tried attacking at the same time. There's a difference."
As the members of KAT-TUN were not known for their ability to work in perfect harmony with each other at the best of times, each one having his own distinct style, this made sense to them.
"So how do we combine attacks?" Jin asked. "Especially when you consider where mine is."
"Maybe we should try it with five and you should go back to LA?" Kame suggested, but he gave Jin a smile to show he was only kidding. "I don't know, but I think there's supposed to be rainbows involved."
"Those guys from Arashi are never around when you need them," Jin complained.
Koki had an idea. "Let's try touching our wands together."
Everybody except Jin transformed their weapons back to wands, then held them together as though they were about to drink a toast. There were no rainbows, though. There wasn't even any pink.
"We could try yelling something enthusiastic and heartfelt about the moon and the power of love?"
Ueda's suggestion was met with varying degrees of disbelief and disgust.
"Do we look like we're in NEWS?" Koki said.
Kame smirked. "Don't answer that. Maybe you should all try giving me your power or something and I'll channel it all myself."
He regretted this suggestion almost immediately as everyone decided that the best way to transfer power was to hit Kame over the head with their wands until something magical happened.
"Bad idea," he panted after fending them off. "Forget that one. I thought all this magical boy stuff was supposed to be intuitive!"
While all this was going on Jin was busy with a tissue, wiping the thin line of blood from his thigh and cursing Kame's pointy crescent moon. Even if their transformation lockets had come with an instruction manual, he doubted it would've helped. If they were magical girls, maybe, but guys never read the manual.
"We have to think like girls," he said.
Koki shook his head and looked at Kame. "Not my department."
"Says the guy wearing stockings." Kame flipped the hem of Koki's skirt with the tip of his wand. "Hey, I didn't know you were wearing lace panties under there..."
"It's one of the things I want to complain about when we get back," Koki said, batting Kame away. "You should see what Ueda's wearing."
"No, he shouldn't," Ueda said firmly, and there was no more to be said about it.
"Does this seem strange to anyone else?" Nakamaru asked.
Junno looked thoughtful. "That we're all wearing women's underwear except you? Yeah, that's a little strange, even for a Johnny's group..."
"Not that. That." Nakamaru pointed to the giant blob, which was quivering so fast that it was starting to vibrate its way across the floor.
Jin didn't care for the way the turquoise was turning hideously puce. "It doesn't look so good, does it? Do you think I gave it indigestion?"
Kame suppressed the response, "You'd give anyone indigestion", and shaded his eyes to take a better look at their enemy. It did look kind of ill. Having magical sporting equipment taking up residence in its belly clearly did not agree with it. If only they could...
"Jin! Change it back!"
"Change it back?" Jin wasn't sure what Kame was asking him to do. "How?"
Kame rolled his eyes. "It's still your transformation locket, Jin. It doesn't matter where it is - it still belongs to you. You can control it."
"Pretend you've got a Playstation controller," Junno suggested. "You can manipulate the ball with it."
Jin ignored him. "How am I supposed to change it back when I'm not even holding it?"
"Concentrate," Kame said. "Like when you're..." He leaned forward to whisper in Jin's ear; the others strained to catch Kame's words but they were not only inaudible but unrepeatable, relating largely to certain acts best saved for the privacy of one's apartment. Faint colour rose in Jin's cheeks - Kame could be *extremely* eloquent when he wanted, even when he was being licentious - and he pressed himself against the arm that wrapped round his waist.
"We're supposed to fight evil using the power of love, not the power of lust," Nakamaru said. "Aren't we?"
Kame shrugged. "Whatever works."
And work it did, because Jin's concentration improved tenfold when he had sufficient motivation. He thought about the wand he'd held in his hand, about how the thin stem of silver felt cool under his skin and about how shiny (and pointy) the star on the end was, and imagined he held it still.
Moments later, he was - though it was covered in gel and didn't feel nearly so nice anymore. The ball had transformed back into wand mode while inside the giant blob and forced its way out, pointy star in the lead, slicing through the weakened interior and breaking free from the slippery outer membrane to fly straight to its owner's hand. Jin discreetly wiped it off on Junno's faux-fur stole, hoping he wouldn't notice but not really caring if he did.
He didn't. Junno was too thrilled about Jin's apparent telekinetic ability to worry about the sanctity of his costume.
"It's leaking!" Kame exclaimed.
"It's not leaking, it's just a bit slimy," Jin said, but Kame interrupted him.
"I mean, the monster's leaking! It can't seal the hole!" In that second, Kame had a revelation. "We have to attack it from inside!"
The smugness in Jin's voice was almost unbearable. "You'd never have realised that if I hadn't given you the idea."
"By getting your weapon swallowed," Ueda pointed out. "Stop trying to take credit for dumb luck."
"How do we attack it from the inside?" Koki wanted to know. "We're outside."
Kame grinned. "It doesn't look like the monster can heal any damage done from the inside out. I'm going to try something."
Unlike Junno, Kame didn't have a string of pearls at his disposal. What he did have was world's largest collection of cell phone charms, all shaped like baseballs, that weighed down the pockets of his skirt. He plucked one from the chain, held it up and watched it grow. Once full-size, it hovered in the air; Kame took up a batting stance and drove forwards, smacking the ball so hard that it shattered one of the lighting fixtures.
"Oops. All right, I'm going to try that again..."
The second ball connected, disappearing into the wound with a terrible sucking sound that made them all feel slightly ill, so Junno got in on the action, sinking shots that would no doubt have earned him a lot of money on the tables.
Ueda, whose attack was close-range only, busied himself with taking notes on the strategies they'd tried so far, if only so he could compare them against those used by the Tokyo Mew Mew girls. It was just unfortunate that despite Kame's sudden wave of inspiration, the new plan didn't seem to be working.
"It doesn't look like it's getting any worse," Jin said doubtfully. "Maybe only pointed things hurt it."
"What kind of logic is that?" Koki scoffed. "Kame's probably doing a lot of damage, but we're up against a worthy opponent."
Kame thought otherwise. "It may be a shapeshifting monster, but right now it's a giant blob. We might have to watch a lot of old, low-budget movies to figure out how to kill it."
"Or we could just use fire," Junno said, sounding most proud of himself. "Which one of us has the power of fire?"
"It doesn't work quite like that," Ueda said gently. "We don't get elements."
Jin checked his pockets but to his dismay, his lighter had disappeared when he transformed. "So much for fire. Anyone else got a light?"
"No," Kame said, "and even if I did, I don't want to risk burning the station down. Do you know how many years we'd be in debt for that?"
Nakamaru was, understandably, bleak about the situation. "Long enough that our great-great-grand-Juniors would still be wearing ruffles to pay it off - if we survive to have any."
"We could try teaming up again now all six of us have our wands back?" Ueda suggested.
They tried this, to no avail. Not so much as a spark.
"Maybe we'll get lucky and this'll turn out to be one of those big, bad things that we're too new to defeat and our senpai will step in to save the day." Koki's optimism quickly disappeared when the others pointed out that none of their senpai - to the best of their knowledge - were magical boys, and anyway, did he really want to be saved by the members of TOKIO in high heels?
It was fortunate for them that the blob wasn't inclined to move much, other than its constant wobbling, and didn't seem to have any means of attack save sitting there and being an eyesore, which was the only reason they hadn't been killed mid-argument yet.
As the useless discussion continued, Jin's agitation increased. Nobody was doing anything. He had to get them moving somehow, because his skirt was starting to repair itself and it was pressing painfully against his cut.
"Guys, we don't have time to sit around and talk about this, okay? The longer we do nothing, the more people we put at risk." Jin swept his wand round to indicate the handful of gawkers who were beginning to peek from behind pillars and shop windows. "Just because we're wearing skirts doesn't mean we're a bunch of little old ladies who take a year to make a decision. We're not like that. We're..." he paused for inspiration, finding it in the five guys standing next to him, "we're KAT-TUN!"
"Tell us something we don't know," Kame said, irritated.
Undaunted, Jin kept going. "K! A! K! A! K! A!"
His attempt to raise the mood didn't exactly light a fire under the others, but they knew where he was going with it and so they joined in, albeit half-heartedly and at considerably lower volume.
"T-TUN..."
The resulting bursts of light from their wands took them all by surprise. Six colours shot out, merging into a single white beam that sliced straight through the gelatinous creature, bisecting it at the middle. The two halves quivered in place for a moment, then fell apart, shrivelling like a deflated balloon.
Kame flashed a double peace sign at the station in general. "I knew we could combine our attacks!"
"We're going to have to shout it every time?" Nakamaru wasn't too thrilled by the prospect.
Junno thought it was quite amusing. "Our ultimate attack is Peaceful Days?"
"There's something dreadfully ironic about that..." Ueda muttered.
Jin high-fived Kame, stealing his hands away from Koki's attempts to do the same, and found himself joined at both hips and lips to his schoolgirl boyfriend. They weren't worried about being spotted by the press. It was one of the more extraordinary aspects of being a magical boy - when they were transformed, not even their own families recognised them.
"That's the biggest enemy we've defeated yet!" Kame said happily when he came up for air. "I wish I could tell my niece about all this. She'd think we're so cool."
"About how Uncle Kazuya dresses up like a schoolgirl and fights monsters with his magical baseball bat? I'm sure it'd make a great bedtime story..."
"Shut up," Kame said, "or I'll tell her that Uncle Jin runs around in a tight leather skirt and he *likes* it."
"Uncle Jin would like it a lot better if he had some breathing room..." Jin shifted uncomfortably in Kame's arms, trying to find an angle where the padded bras the two of them wore wouldn't crush each other.
Kame looked down. "Please tell me that's your wand digging into me?"
"Trust me, with this skirt, the wand's the *only* thing it could be."
While Jin and Kame celebrated their victory in a fanservice-heavy manner guaranteed to satisfy the schoolgirls, who were just beginning to wake up to the delicious sight of two pretty men in skirts making out, Ueda was checking out the remains of the shapeshifting monster.
It wasn't the first shapeshifter they'd encountered. Last Friday, they'd fought off a shining gold robot who'd transformed into a towering pillar of marshmallow, immune to physical attacks, and finally into a python, in which form it would've escaped had Koki not speared it with his chainshot. The creature had exploded instantly, allowing them no opportunity to learn its origins. Ueda didn't want to pass up this chance.
Rummaging in the gel was unpleasant to say the least, but he persevered, conning Koki, Junno and Nakamaru into helping him search for clues - he knew he'd be wasting his breath on the other two - until at last Koki came up with something, dripping green goo all over his silken shirt but grinning nonetheless because he was holding a tiny microchip.
Ueda patted his "volunteers" on the back (carefully) and pocketed the chip for later study. Surely, with all the resources at his disposal, there was no mystery Johnny Kitagawa couldn't solve with time?
-----
One relatively quiet week later, a few days before their first progress review, the magical boys of KAT-TUN were in their secret headquarters, still trying to finalise the list of complaints they intended to make to management.
"Forget that for now," Ueda said, interrupting Jin's rant on the torture of wearing leather skirts in summer heat. "We've just got an email through from the lab. It's about that microchip."
Hushed silence fell over the room. Ueda was pleased.
"I told you all my suspicions earlier, that all the monsters we've fought so far have had the same point of origin, that there are certain constants in every attack. Somewhere out there is our villain, our fiendishly evil mastermind who's trying to destroy Tokyo by creating shapeshifting monsters in his secret laboratory and letting them run loose in public places.
"Let's see what our scientists have to say about that chip, shall we?" Ueda opened the email, skimming down to the parts that weren't written in jargon. "Ah. Engraved in miniature on the back were a single kanji and two English letters."
"Well?" Jin demanded. The sooner they got this part over with, the sooner he could get something done about his costume.
"Oh." Ueda turned pale. "The kanji was 'arashi', and the letters were 'A' and 'M'."
Kame's mouth dropped open. "Our fiendishly evil mastermind with the secret laboratory is..."
"Yeah." Ueda rubbed a hand over his brow as if he could ward off the impending migraine by doing so. "Aiba Masaki."
-----
Location: a lab somewhere in Tokyo
Aiba takes his latest creation out for a walk, never knowing that Nino has deliberately sabotaged the chains on all his leashes...