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No Need for Masculinity	By : Richard_Priapi Category: +S to Z > Tenchi Muyo Views: 501 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own the various Tenchi Muyo properties, nor any of the characters herein who may be found within that canon. Originally posted to AO3, I'll be posting more proofread/edited versions of the chapters here.

Chapter List
- 13
- 14
- 15
Crunch, crunch, squelch, gurk. Crunch, crunch, squelch, gurk.
Ayeka grimaced into her breakfast. How could that woman stand to eat so loudly?
Ryoko’s metal chopsticks clinked against the ceramic of her plate as she reloaded her arsenal. Tink tink scrape, crunch, crunch, squelch, gurk.
Ayeka inhaled a deep cloud of fragrant steam from her roasted barley tea. Easy. Easy now. But nobody else was talking, so this guerilla warfare on the senses could not stand. Ryoko’s tail lifted a mug of tea to her mouth. Sluuuurp ulp, tink tink scrape, crunch crunch, squelch gurk.
Ayeka’s cup touched the table with a sharp tap.
“Ryoko, just what are you doing?”
“Aib eeding brebbis,” came from her stuffed cheeks, along with a jet of regurgitated sauce. She swallowed with an effort. “What’s it to you?”
Grandpa and Sasami eyed each other, evacuation and cleanup plans shooting between them unspoken in a series of glances and head-jiggles.
“Must you eat so loudly? It pains my heart to see our dear Tenchi embroiled with some… some mannerless baboon!”
Ryoko leapt to her feet, planting one foot an inch past her plate.
“It’s a compliment to the chef, princess. I can’t imagine how you can sit there and take such prissy nibbles. Anyway with a figure like yours I’d be trying to pack on a little extra. Who do you think you’ll bring home with those pinched-in hips?”
Ayeka’s foot joined Ryoko’s on the table with an authoritative stamp.
“This coming from the woman with a beer gut?”
The leaned towards each other, claws out.
“I do not have a beer gut!” Ryoko slammed her foot on the table, cracking the cheap wood like matchsticks. Leaned over their front feet, both she and Ayeka lurched towards each other in an agony of slow motion, eyes flashing in panic and outrage at the inescapable conclusion. Their lips touched, the scant second before they could get a grip on each other’s shoulders and get their weight centered enough to stand stretching hours. Worse, the spark that passed between them was as palpable as it was unwanted. Ayeka’s heart fluttered. Ryoko’s smoldering eyes held Ayeka’s for a moment. Their hands stayed knotted in the sleeves of unfamiliar fabrics.
“Oh wow.” Sasami cooed with a dreamy smile, her hands clasped together. The loss of a few leftovers and the indignity of another trip to the furniture store was forgotten in the glow. Her enthusiasm broke the spell, sending Ryoko and Ayeka spinning away to face opposite corners of the room.
Katsuhito chuckled as Ayeka primly covered her blushing face with a sleeve and Ryoko scoured at her lips and spit onto the carpet. It wasn’t quite how he had imagined it would happen, but he still owed Nobuyuki a thousand yen.
“So what do we tell Tenchi?” Sasami chirped. For a moment there was silence as the women twitched in private tension. Then a quick splintering of wood as they crashed through the door in a screaming tangle of fists.
--
Washu leaned over a microscope, its powerful beam of scanning electrons showing her the fuzziest details of the molecule-sized protein robots she was working on. Inter and intra-dimensional travel had become passe to her by now- surely any drunk with a labcoat and a bucket of plutonium could come up with something similar given enough time- so she had to turn her eyes to a greater challenge. Time travel. But consistently generating the power needed to break the limits described by planck’s constant wouldn’t leave much juice left to power the device’s interfaces or the stabilization fields that would make the process reversible. Hence, semi-living, low-maintenance proteins bots integrated into the sentient circuity. If she could just-
A pink light flashed, accompanied by chimes. Washu’s groan verged on tearful- business hours already? She took a longing look around the gloomy lab. She could see dust- dust- gathering on her beloved machines. Her hand lingered on the eyepiece of the microscope as she dragged herself to the seemingly ordinary door propped up in the floor. She cracked open a can of coffee secured to the door by tape marked “for emergencies,” letting the sweetened liquid fill her with bracing strength for the road ahead.
“Good morning, please sign in and have a seat. I’ll be with you shortly,” she called out flatly, tugging her labcoat gingerly from hat rack in the office’s back room. As she opened the door to the reception space, a square-faced girl in a baggy pastel sweatshirt waved cheerfully to her.
“Good morning, Doctor Washu! So good to see you again. I don’t know if you like lemon bars, but I left some on the check-in counter for you.”
“Miss Takeda, you seem well.” Washu droned. She compared her to the hunch-backed boy who had entered her office last week; his anxious eyes sunk in deep bags had spent most of their meeting checking the door or glued to the floor. Now they beamed at her.
“Takeda, did you have green eyes last week?”
The girl’s smile disarmed her. “They’re contacts,” she admitted sheepishly. “But your eyes are just so pretty I had to try them out, you know?”
Washu grinned, her chest puffing out a hair.
“Want me to add green eyes to your treatment set? No extra charge.”
“Oh could you?”
The morning wore on that way. One by one, clients lined up in neat rows, buzzing with excitement. As they did, so too did the mountain of offerings grow- cards and candies, baked goods, fruit baskets, beef jerky for some reason, wines, spirits… By half-past nine she’d opened half of it to share, and the festival attitude only built further.
With every flash of her little blue light came a polite round of applause. Some came with friends and lovers who kissed them, hugged them, spun them around and squealed in glee with them. More than a few of them had hugged Wash as well, from anxious little wraps to heaving bear hugs that lifted her off the ground, legs flailing for terra firma. As she set down for her lunch break- the jerky was turning out to be an unsung hero of the gift hoard, actually- she rested her aching feet and reflected that maybe it wasn’t so onerous a use of her time after all. Although if she could get an assistant in, send in some of the files to make running the clinic a well-oiled machine, she wouldn’t complain. Even if it meant she had to share some of those golden little moments with someone else.
“Hey, Doctor Washu?” a man’s voice called to her from the door.
“Come back in a while, please, I’m eating! Hangry scientists don’t do their best work,” she warned.
He came in anyway, closing the door behind him and pressing his back against it. His mouth was a thin, grim line.
“You might need to see this, Doc. It looks like trouble.”

--
Flashes of electricity crackled around Ayeka, the discharges of energy whipping the fabric of her dress in a frensy as she summoned a small squad of wooden guardians. Thunderbolts arced into the air where Ryoko flew graceful loops, swatting them aside with thrumming slices of her energy saber, her sea-foam hair streaming behind her. In return, baseball-sized bolts of red energy wobbled down from her to Ayeka, splashing off the edges of her shield.
“Two-timing hussy!”
“Slutty prude!”
“That’s an oxymoron!”
“Well it takes one to know one.”
Each woman shouted to wake the dead. Katsuhito leaned back on the veranda and observed. To a connoisseur of alien catfights, it was easy to see there was no punch behind any of the blows; why, the ground was hardly rumbling in the slightest.
Ryoko landed on the ground legs akimbo with shimmering pools of plasma in her hands.
“You can’t blow this out of proportion. You can’t let Tenchi know our lips touched,” her voice lowered to a hiss as she added, “Or that we liked it. Ayeka you cant.” Her voice strained with the effort it took to hold back the stab of tears prickling behind her eyes.
“Rest assured I have no intention of tarnishing either of our reputations. Besides, Tenchi would understand- it was an accident, after all.”
“But what if she doesn’t understand?” Twin bolts of energy discharged high into the air.
Ayeka rocked uneasily on her feet.
“It would break her heart if I told Tenchi that I… that you… no,no matter. Not even as an accident will I tell her! This never happened, and that’s that.”
Katsuhito felt a rock in the pit of his stomach dissolve. The plasma in Ryoko’s hands blinked out in a puff of hot air. She scratched her head gently with a warmed finger.
“Ayeka. Do you realize what you just said?”
The princess’s shield dissolved.
“Of course I do, Ryoko. Don’t be silly.” Her resolve failed- the tears behind her eyes were fat, wet blobs that could not be dammed.
“But I am,” Ryoko sobbed. She and Ayeka staggered together, gripping each other tight enough to squeeze the souls back into their bodies, blubbering their hearts raw in honest vulnerability.
The small, tight smile on Katsuhito’s face qualified as a grin. It was as pretty a conversion of enmity to amity he’d ever seen. If all it would have taken to settle things with Kagato were an accidental kiss, he’d have tried it himself. Katsuhito would have loved to stay and watch the tender scene unfold, but Yosho froze. There hadn’t been a breeze a moment ago. A change in air pressure pained his thrice-broken rib. And that faint hum, quiet enough you could mistake it for the cicadas… He lunged forward, hands raised to seize the girls and bring them into shelter. If they could just make it into Washu’s lab!
An ink-black cloud blocked out the sun, plunging the valley into sudden night. An artillery salvo stabbed the ground with golden claws perfect for shredding soft targets. The ship that followed them through the cloud was a mean, ugly thing; a fat gunmetal shark made of trapezoids and triangles that squatted in the sky over the Masaki home like a fortress. Its upturned pug-nosed brow bristled with formerly hidden guns.
--
The bright eyes of her neon sign hid security cameras; through them she analyzed the dozens of people who had gathered around the clinic. Washu grimaced. Going out to meet them was off the table. Usually she didn’t mind public speaking, but she’d been chased out of enough planets to know an angry mob when she saw it. They didn’t exactly have torches or pitchforks, but the signs several members of the crowd carried looked like they were lashed to some very solid pieces of wood. Worse, they stood between the doors of her building and a growing crowd of patients already queuing for the afternoon shift. Adrenaline tickled her brain, tightened her muscles. Not her babies! The deep breath she took did nothing to sooth her worry. Was there time for another? With the push of a button, hologram projectors along the sign’s back showed what she wanted them to see: her walking out the front door.
“There she is!” A bald-headed man in a black leather motorcycle jacket stabbed a sausage finger accusingly in her direction. Shouts of “freakshow, quack, fag-hag and butcher” rippled through the crowd. Washu’s hair stood on end. Primitives.
“This woman is breaking the law!” cried a woman dressed for business in a blazer and knee-length skirt. “She alters these people’s bodies without even the mandatory psychiatric evaluation!”
Jeers came from the mob. Washu unclenched her jaw enough to speak.
“Why would they need a psychiatric evaluation? There’s nothing crazy about wanting your body to match your mind.” The cries of support from across the back were cut off by the mob’s outrage.
“She doesn’t deny it!” barked another shaved-headed man. Washu’s attention flicked to him. Two’s a coincidence. She looked around: there. Three’s a pattern and four is enemy action.
“What about our declining birth rates? Isn’t our population aging away quickly enough without you sterilizing and mutilating our young people?”
Washu opened her mouth, but a tall woman’s rich vibrato boomed from the string of clients.
“When I was a salaryman, my office and thousands just like it worked its men eighty hours or more a week. When was I going to have a family anyway? Where was your concern then?”
Some of the protesters spared a thought for the mixed band of queers behind them. One of the men in the crowd pointed at a short, baby-faced figure and shouted “You see? She’s corrupting our kids! This could be your son! This boy should be in school.”
“Hey, I’m thirty-two, jackass!” the man shouted back. He gave a forlorn rub at his beardless chin.
Now both bands were shouting at each other, the wall of noise drawing the sort of attention Washu was not keen on enduring. Nearby doors and windows were opening. Phones came out of pockets and purses. One of the protestors wound back with his sign, about to take a baseball swing at a client she recognized as a former national judo champion.
“Everybody, everybody, STOP.” As her image spoke, the fifteen-foot sign above moved its lips as well, speakers casting her voice across the streets. Nervous glances shot between the common rabble- should it be able to do that?
“I provide a service to consenting adults that makes them happier people. A non-invasive process that is completely reversible if needed. Doesn’t that satisfy you at all? Can’t you take a shred of reassurance in their joy?”
She had her eyes on the four bald-headed men in black flanking her from around both sides of the mob.
“No, huh?”
The tallest member of the mob, a salt-and-pepper haired gentleman with a large sign saying “Men are men, deal with it!” sneered at her.
“We don’t take kindly to people playing god.”
Washu laughed. The mirthless sound trailed off into a dark chuckle. Atop a carefully practiced smile, her eyes were deathly serious.
“Didn’t anyone tell you? I am god.”
There was a scream as the four men drew their guns. Some of the mob realized they had pressing business elsewhere and ran to get to it. Somebody fainted; guiltily Washu prayed it wasn’t a client. One of the four got off a shot; a solid-state bullet known to have led to the cashing in of more than a few FXP life insurance policies. The slug whipped through her image and splashed harmlessly into the wall behind her.
“Damned holograms!” snarled one of the men.
Inside, Washu swept her hand fluidly across the screen, its HUD isolating targets. The sign puffed out its cheeks and spat: blobs of the liquid silver impregnated the barrel of one gun after the other, nanobots chewing their internals to Swiss cheese. Her hologram flickered into a mist that seemed to recombine with the sign above, leaving only her Cheshire-cat grin behind.
The eyes of her fifteen-foot neon caricature glowed crimson, its smile growing knifelike fangs.
“What’s the matter, boys?” it called, “Can’t shoot more than one load for a pretty lady?”
One of the men picked up a protester’s forgotten sign, slinging its wooden handle at the billboard, where it bounced off and clattered harmlessly to the ground.
The sign gave them a cupie-doll-pout. “Now that wasn’t very nice.” Her tone turned sing-song: “My turn!”
Lights shot from the sign’s crimson eyes- even the bravest of bystanders left the remaining assailants to their fate, as wild, trilling laughter and the sound of discharging energy weapons filled the air.

--
Ayeka drew shaking breaths as she leaned into the forcefield that surrounded her, Ryoko, and Yosho. Though covered in dust, they were still whole. The clouds spoke with a dreary monotone.
“That was a warning shot. Surrender the heir and her sister immediately.”
“No ‘or else?’” Ryoko muttered, earning withering glances from her comrades. She winced an apology.
“Five. Four. Three.” Pinpricks of light grew to suns as the weapons charged.
“Come, Ryo-ohki!” with a snap of her fingers, Ryoko flew forward, leaving the safety of the shield as her ship unleased a blood-curdling yowl, sprouting into the air out of a second-story window.
“Ryoko, wait!” Yosho barked. It was too late. Ayeka had already dropped her shield to follow towards the ship and its promise of tough armor and heavy firepower. The fuzzy light of the tractor beam was far easier to see without a luminescent shield in your eye.
Ryoko spared a backwards glance; Ayeka was racing upwards, working her arms in vain to do something to break free. Ryoko skittered to a halt. She could make it to the ship, or she could do something really stupid. Sasami’s scream from inside the house clinched it. Ryo-ohki could harass the ship on her own. Ryoko charged full-speed towards the tractor beam as the cannons roared again.
- 13
- 14
- 15
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No Need for Masculinity