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Azuringu Dai-O!


Azumanga Daioh! is owned by Azuma Kiyohiko, Media Works
Ringu is owned by Koji Suzuki.
Ringu/The Ring, Asmik Ace, Dreamworks SKG.


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---
Wednesday, September 17
Day 6 
 

 
Four girls exited the hotel, various degrees of surprise etched on their 
faces. The youngest looked around incessantly, taking all of the new 
city into her head and wishing they could stay a while longer after this 
whole nasty business was over. The tallest looked on with mild 
disinterest, as if she had been here once before; while the others gushed 
loud enough to attract attention, she merely took out her notebook and 
checked the address she had been given. The one with the shortest hair, 
like any regular tourist, was already hoping she could get pictures of 
temples and stadiums.

The last one, however, was about to bring the nice men in white coats
upon her head.

"Uoooh!" Tomo bellowed, her eyes as wide as they would go. "It's full 
of Osakas!"

She quickly broke free from the group and stood on the curb, pointing 
madly at random passerby. "Osaka Prime!" she called a girl with long 
brown hair, who took a look at her before running away in terror. 
"Osaka Number Two!" Tomo pointed at a little girl right on her face. 
"Osaka-X!" it was the turn of an elderly lady who turned to her and 
walked away, muttering loud expletives to herself.

"Quiet!" Yomi whapped Tomo. "This is where we have to go: 
Takayama Road #15. That's the address she gave us over the phone."

"You think she'll be there?" Kagura asked, dubious.

"I hope so," Yomi said. "Her grandmother didn't say a thing about her. 
At least, I hope we can clear up some facts about the tape."

Tomo pointed at yet another person, "Osaka Beta!" Both Yomi and 
Kagura slapped her hard across the nape.


-			O!			-


The taxi dropped them off outside what seemed to be a refined bakery, 
shining white in the daylight and proclaiming itself to be the "Kasuga 
Pan-da!" The girls stared at it.

"You sure it's the right address?" Kagura asked.

"Does that answer your question?" Tomo pointed to the side of the 
sign, which had a caricature of Osaka herself, disguised as a panda bear
and welcoming guests and customers. A speech bubble was painted beside
it: "It's bread!"

The group, even Chiyo, stared at it silently.

"Come on, we're on a schedule," said Yomi finally, and the four of 
them entered the store. What they found inside, in direct opposition to 
the sign on the building, was a rather elegant and fancy eatery. Waiters 
and waitresses hurried to and fro among the tables, most of which were 
taken by snobbish-looking twenty-somethings. At the far end of the 
bakery, a haggled-looking woman was politely but firmly chewing the 
heads off passing staff, almost as if completely unaware that she was 
breaking them in half with a few choice words.

"I think that's her," Yomi noted. Despite the graying-hair and wrinkles, 
the woman was a dead-ringer for Osaka. They navigated their way 
through the restaurant and towards the back of the room.

"Aa, the customers at table 3 complained about service..." they 
overheard the woman say as they approached. "Now they'll leave and 
tell all their friends about how service here is a trip to the inner
circles of hell, and then they'll tell their friends too, and by
tomorrow we'll be out of business and who will provide for my grand-
daughter's wedding and fish store?" The abused waiter stammered and
scurried away, offering apologies all the way. "A, that's good service,"
the woman said.

"M-Mrs. Kasuga?" Yomi was the first to approach.

The older woman turned to them, eyes wide, "Oh, such fine and pretty 
girls! Do you have a table? Is the green tea okay? Have you tried our 
new melon bread?"

Yomi smiled nervously under the sudden flurry of questions. "Ah, 
actually, we're the ones who called yesterday. We're Osss..." she paused
for a second as she almost stumbled over the "Osaka" nickname. "We're 
Ayumu-san's friends."

Mrs. Kasuga smiled widely, "A! You're Umu-chan's classmates! I've 
heard so much about..." her eyes wandered for a bit, then focused on 
the smaller auburn-haired girl that stood nervously behind the one with 
glasses. She stared at her as if in shock.

"A-Aaah!" Mrs. Kasuga slipped between Yomi and Kagura and stood 
in front of Chiyo, the shocked expression never leaving her face. "Um, 
good morning!" Chiyo offered, feeling strong deja vu about this. "I'm 
Chiyo Mihama!"

"Wait, don't speak to me now," Mrs. Kasuga said in a serious tone, her 
look turning to one of concentration. Then, out of nowhere, she took 
one of Chiyo's pigtails in her hand and weighed it, bouncing it in her 
palm. The other girls stood stock still and stared.

Then, seeing that the other pigtail did not respond to its brethren's 
motions, she took it in her free hand and bounced it up and down as 
well, trying to work out a rhythm between both pigtails. Chiyo began to 
shake from standing still for so long.

As a final test, Mrs. Kasuga took the tip of each pigtail with her own 
fingertips, then pulled them that way and that in perfect 
synchronization. After a few seconds of this, she pulled them both to 
the right, then the left, then started waltzing with them.

Chiyo would have fallen over if she had had the chance. Her friends, 
fortunately, were not impeded from doing so.

"Aah, Kasuga-san..." Kagura said, "We're... in a bit of a hurry?"

Mrs. Kasuga stopped dancing with the pigtails, and turned to face them. 
"A? Oh, right, right." She let go of Chiyo, who smoothed out her 
pigtails, and asked, "You're here to see Umu-chan, aren't you?" The 
girls nodded, and she bowed, "I'm sorry, she's out of town for a while. 
She said she had a very important project to work on." She blinked at 
the various winces that came from the girls. "Is something wrong?"

"Actually," Yomi said, trying to find the best way to put it, "We're 
looking for her. We haven't been able to speak with her in about a 
month."

"We think she might be missing," Kagura said.

Tomo then put in her part, "We think she's been running around killing 
people with a videotape, Granny Osaka!"

As Yomi and Kagura used strangleholds on their tactless friend, Mrs. 
Kasuga said, "Aa, that's not a good career goal. And videotapes must 
leave such ugly bruises, too..." She turned to face them, "Well, if you're 
looking for her, feel free to look around her old bedroom. You might 
find something useful there."

"Ah, thank you," Yomi said, embarrassed. "We'll, uh, try not to make a 
mess."

Mrs. Kasuga smiled that vacant yet knowing smile she shared with her 
granddaughter. "My Umu-chan's friends are my friends too. Or was it 
my friends are Umu-chan's friends? Aaa..." she rubbed the side of her 
head, deep in concentration, as she idly led the girls into the house 
behind the bakery.

Osaka's former room awaited at the end of a long corridor, flanked to 
the sides by her grandmother's and what had been her parents'. There 
was a crude wooden nameplate on the door, shaped roughly like a 
galloping horse, which read "Umu-chan." Upon entering, they saw 
what at first glance looked like a stereotypical girl's room: a Western-
style bed with frilly covers and bedspread, a vanity with several dozen 
photographs obscuring the mirror completely, and even a little girl's 
rocking horse. So far, so good.

But a second glance revealed things that did not go hand-in-hand with 
the stereotype. Like the three small TV sets stacked on top of one 
another in the far corner; or the bizarre-looking X-ray plates left
casually on the dresser, containing not pictures of bones but rather
of stone wells and horses; the rocking horse itself was incredibly
old and worn, and covered by a fine layer of dust.

Of course, the proverbial cake was taken by the monumental poster of 
an eggplant right above the bed's headpiece.

"Weird," Tomo commented.

"It's not weird, it's... different," Chiyo defended, though the eggplant 
looked like it was about to eat her whole.

"Hey, guys, look at this!" Kagura called urgently. She had in her hands 
a wide but thin picture book, the kind filled with blank sheets of paper 
for a child to draw on.

Mrs. Kasuga, who had been watching the raid with an amiable smile on 
her face, said, "A! That's Umu-chan's picture diary. She never let it out 
of her sight... not before she moved away."

"Huh..." Kagura flipped through the pages as the others looked over (or 
under) her shoulder. The book was almost filled with drawings, their 
style denoting the artist's age easily. It often had notes to the side, 
written in very simple kana, but the bulk of the work was in elaborate 
drawings that, presumably, represented the day's events in Osaka's 
mind. It was rather sweet, really.

"Look, look!" Tomo pointed at one of the more recent entries, "She's 
talking about us in that one! She's still using it!"

"'I like Chiyo-chan even if she can't fly yet, but she'll learn soon'?" 
Chiyo read aloud, blushing. "Osaka-san..."

"'Tomo-chan is always full of energy and always has something to 
say,'" Kagura read, "'I bet, if you cut her open, there'd be a thousand 
hamsters with lots of little coffee cups in there.'" She laughed out loud, 
particularly at the accompanying picture, while Tomo just fumed.

"Maybe it says something about the tape," Yomi said. "Look at the last 
entry."

"OK," Kagura nodded, then flipped through the pages again. However, 
she suddenly lost her grip on the book and it fell onto the carpet, 
spreading itself open on a page relatively close to the beginning. All 
four girls gasped. Since it seemed like the trendy thing to do, Mrs. 
Kasuga gasped as well.

The book was open on a pair of pages that read, at the very top, "Umu-
chan age 6." The drawing on the left wasn't very remarkable, just an 
image of a little girl riding a horse; the picture on the right however... 
was a TV set, drawn almost with absolute perfection, with a ring of 
light dominating the screen.

"That's... impossible," Yomi stammered. "That would mean she saw the 
tape twelve years ago!"

"Ah, twelve years ago, you said?" Mrs. Kasuga asked. They turned to 
face her, and she spoke, "She went on vacation with her mother and 
father... to America, I think. Wah-sing-tunnel?"

"Washington," Chiyo corrected.

"Yes, yes..." Mrs. Kasuga's eyes glazed over for a second. "She 
changed during that trip..." The girls looked at each other as if a great 
veil had been lifted from their eyes, and they chorused, "Aaaaahhh..."

"Tell me," Osaka's grandmother continued, "Is she still afraid of trees 
that burn for no reason and black garbage bags?"

Only Chiyo did not fall over at the question. "Eh, I think so," she said, 
grinning nervously.

"Ah. Anyway, she made a friend during that trip," the woman 
continued, "Some other little girl she called S-chan. I think there's a 
picture of her here..." she took the picture book in her hands and flipped 
forward one or two pages. She then said, "Here," and pointed at a little 
girl, looking lonely and miserable inside what looked like the bottom of 
a well. The girls swallowed hard when they recognized the picture of 
long hair completely covering all but the left side of her face.

Yomi took the book from the woman's hands, looking over the pictures 
in the following page. "'Mommy and Daddy watched S-chan's funny 
cartoon too, and they were really scared,'" she read out-loud, "'But I 
made friends with S-chan...'" she pointed at a picture that showed both 
the long haired girl and Osaka, at the bottom of the well, cheering 
happily at each other. "'So Mommy and Daddy were okay. And S-chan 
taught me a new trick!'"

They saw a picture of a tiny Osaka holding a piece of paper with the 
drawing of a horse on it. She was happily cheering the word, "Nensha!"

"Nensha?" Kagura and Tomo repeated. Even Yomi faltered for a 
moment, then turned to Chiyo for answers.

"'Nensha' is when you project words or images onto something with 
your mind," said Chiyo. "Like using your mind to draw something or to 
show your thoughts to other people." Yomi seemed to understand, but 
Kagura and Tomo just looked at each other and blinked. Chiyo was 
about to explain the word further when her pigtails stood up and a look 
of shock spread across her face. "Oh no! Osaka-san is using nensha to 
make the video! She's making it with her mind!"

Tomo and Kagura looked at each other again, then burst out laughing. 
"Right!" Tomo said, crying from laughter, "What does she do, swallow 
the tape and then spit it back out?"

"Does she have a timer?" Kagura followed Tomo's lead. "Does she get 
cable too?"

"Um, you two..." Yomi said, serious. The pair ceased laughing for a 
moment, chuckles still shaking their bodies. Without a word, Yomi 
took one of the X-Ray plates from the dresser --it showed a picture of a 
flying Chiyo.

"You HAVE to be kidding!" Tomo pushed Yomi far away as she 
snatched the X-Ray. It showed Chiyo flying in the middle of the image, 
with hundreds of smaller Chiyos in the background. She shuddered.

"Uooooh! She really IS making the video with her head!"

"We have to find her!" Chiyo cried. "I've read that people who do 
nensha all die very young!"

Yomi nodded. "And now we know how she's doing it. The original 
video must have been made by this 'S-chan' here..." she glanced at the 
drawing of the little girl. "And now she wants to make a new one!"

"Osaka's possessed by S-chan?" Kagura blurted out.

Yomi compared the rocking horse in the room with a picture of the girl, 
happily riding the same toy in one of the pictures. But the picture was 
still missing a piece...

"Kasuga-san," she said, "Do you know Yukari Tanizaki?"

"Oh, that funny lady with the banged-up car?" The girls nodded. "She 
stayed with us for a couple of days. But she and Umu-chan left about 
two weeks ago."

"Did they say where they were going?"

Mrs. Kasuga shook her head, "I'm sorry, they left in such a hurry... 
They only said that they were going to a hotel called 'Yamamaya' or 
something."

The girls looked at each other, grimacing. There were dozens of hotels 
with that name just in the vicinity of Tokyo alone. Chiyo whimpered 
softly, "They could be anywhere by now..." 


-			O!			-


The group was once again at the hotel, poring over Osaka's picture 
diary as well as Yomi's own notes. However, try as they might, they 
couldn't find an answer to the two most vital questions in the 
investigation: where was she making the video... and why.

Kagura had excused herself to the adjacent room she shared with 
Chiyo, noticing the others were too focused on the work at hand --or, in 
Tomo's case, focused on the free video games provided by the room. 
Meanwhile, Chiyo was reading one of the diary's entries out loud.

"'I looked for S-chan a couple of days after we saw her cartoon. I found 
her under the house, she was waiting in a well. She was really angry, 
she said she could never sleep, and that her daddy hated her. She said 
she made the cartoon because she wanted everybody to feel the same 
way.'" Chiyo flipped a page. "'But I made friends with her, and she's 
not angry anymore. She says the horses let her sleep now, and she 
wanted to see her daddy.'"

"This must be where S-chan taught Osaka about nensha," Yomi said.

Chiyo nodded, "But the last entry doesn't say anything. It just says that 
she was going on vacation with her parents, and it was a surprise." The 
small girl sighed, "If only we knew where they went..."

"Right," Yomi said, "That's probably where the whole mess got 
started."

"Maybe the video can tell us something?" Chiyo offered. Yomi nodded, 
and stood up. "Hey, Tomo!" she said. "Leave that alone for a moment, 
we're going to watch the tape."

"Just a second!" Tomo replied, twisting and squirming in front of the 
TV. "Just one more level to-- AAAAGH!" She stared in shock at the 
silent blue screen on the TV, then at Yomi, who was holding the 
console's power cord in her hand. "AAAH! Stupid Yomi! Just when I 
was rappin' awesome!"

Yomi sighed. "Whatever. Now hand me the tape." Grousing, Tomo 
looked around for Yomi's bag, then took out a black box out and 
forcefully handed it to her.

Yomi inserted the tape into the VCR. It ran its length just as in the 
video rooms, with the odd cat suit appearing as a new addition. They 
paused, rewound, fast-forwarded and replayed many times during its 
course, but they found no answers to their conundrum. Most of the 
images could be attributed to events and premonitions that had already 
come true, or plain old Osaka weirdness.

"Ah! Wait!" Chiyo called. Yomi handed her the remote wordlessly, 
allowing the genius to work.

"I bet she found out about the bread," Tomo teased, "Yoooomiiii... 
eaaaat meeeee..."

"Silence, mortal!" Yomi backhanded her onto the bed.

"Actually, I was looking for this," Chiyo paused the tape precisely at 
the scene with the landscape filled with Mayas. A human figure flashed 
quickly through the screen, but they had a hard time identifying it. 
"There!" Chiyo yelped, then rewound the tape again.

It took a couple of tries with the pause button, until, at last, they 
scanned frame by frame through the video. Then, just as all of the 
Mayas "lost" their faces, a man appeared. In his dress shirt and tie, and 
creaseless trousers --not to mention the absurd Dad Hat on his head-- 
he was instantly recognizable as...

"Kimura-sensei!" Chiyo said, pigtails standing on end.

"Kimura-sensei?" Tomo crawled closer to the screen for a better look. 
"You sure, Chiyo-chan?"

"Now that I think about it, he does look a lot like him," Yomi nodded. 
"What is he pointing at?"

"Um..." Chiyo looked closely around the screen for clues, but aside 
from the faceless cats there was nothing in particular that he could be 
pointing at.

Then, by some miracle of weather, lightning struck nearby. All lights in 
the room died for a fraction of a second, the TV among them. But 
Kimura stayed, stretching eerily from the TV and still pointing 
sideways. When the lights returned, the tape unpaused itself and went 
on to the next image on the video. The three girls stared at Kimura's 
after-image in stunned silence.

"He was... pointing at something *here*..." Yomi said, awestruck. As 
one, the trio followed the line of Kimura's finger across the screen, 
outside the TV, over the dresser, and finally onto Osaka's picture diary.

"Mine!" Tomo launched herself at the book, coming up short and 
slamming herself on the floor... but her flailing hand just barely slapped 
the corner of the book, sending it tumbling through the air until it 
finally embedded itself on Yomi's head by one of the corners, spreading 
itself open at the very last page.

"Huh?" Chiyo glanced at a photograph, which had been stuck between 
the last page and the hard cover, as it slowly floated down straight into 
her hands. But then she had to wait for Yomi to finish her daily 
wrestling practice on Tomo.

"What is it, Chiyo-chan?" a more serious Yomi asked.

"I don't know, it looks like a photograph of a hotel..." the girl replied. 
Yomi took it in her hand, and gasped.

"To-To-Tomo!" she said, twisting her friend's head around to face the 
photo. "Look!"

"Ow! What?! It's just some stupid outdoors resort!"

"But look!" Yomi pointed at the picture. It showed a winding path 
through a small forest, apparently leading to a group of cabins in the 
distance. Osaka stood happily next to the hotel's sign --it was cat-
shaped, looked rather new, and read, "Yamamaya -- Kimura's Family 
Inn."

"That's where they went!" Chiyo said. "Yomi-san, do you know this 
hotel?"

"I..." Yomi stammered, "It couldn't..." She quickly rifled through her 
bag, coming up with Sakaki's pictures of the trip to Iriomote. She 
quickly arrived at the picture of the "Yamamura" hotel's sign.

"Ah! They're the same!" Chiyo exclaimed. Indeed, Sakaki's photo 
showed the exact same sign --however, Yomi thought, it must have 
been burnt or struck by lightning, as there was a deep scorched mark 
right across the "neko" and "Ki" syllables of the name.

"Chiyo-chan, go get Kagura," Yomi said. The smaller girl nodded and 
headed off for the adjacent room. "Now we know where we have to 
go," Yomi thought, looking at the pictures in her hands.

"Maybe we shoulda stayed there the whole time!" Tomo offered.

Yomi growled and decided to ignore the comment. "Very funny, now 
hand me the tape."

"Aw, no sense of humor at all..." Tomo groused. She crawled over to 
the VCR, ejected the tape, and handed it to Yomi.

"Huh?" the taller girl stared at the tape. "This is the copy? Where's the 
original?"

"I dunno," Tomo replied, then dug into Yomi's bag. After a few 
moments of rummaging, she came up empty and said, "Not here."

"What do you mean, it's not there?" Yomi stomped over to her bag to 
look for the tape herself. But sure enough, the original video was 
missing.

Her mind was already racing through possibilities of the tape getting 
lost somewhere along the way, possibly falling into innocent hands, 
when the room's door opened, showing a dejected-looking Chiyo and 
Kagura.

"Um, Yomi-san..." Chiyo started.

"Uh, hi guys," Kagura rubbed the back of her head. She lifted the 
familiar black slab in her hand, and said, "I... I thought I could help out, 
you know..."



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Azuringu Dai-O!

End of Day 6
One day left

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Jorge A. Pratt
jorgepratt@prodigy.net.mx
terbril@rocketmail.com