"Ricooooo!" the youth yelled as he kicked open the door to the chemistry lab. The boy he was addressing, who happened to be wearing a heavy, black wool overcoat in the middle of June, looked up from his work with only partial interest; he preferred not to be disturbed when he was making explosives.
"Ya gotta help me!" the youth continued as he stumbled across the room, carrying with him a terrific stench of many days of missed hygiene.
"Now what?" Rico asked as he struggled to keep his lunch and the proper proportions for his patented death potion. Meanwhile, the youth had begun clutching wildly at Rico's clothes and face.
"I've offended the entire Internet otaku community!"
Rico raised an eyebrow as he thought of his own piles of tapes at home, containing dubbed episodes of obscure Japanese animation unknown even to the indigenous population of Japan. "How'd you manage to do that?"
"I was at a message board, and I was trying to, you know, adjust, so I started a conversation about Sailor Moon."
Rico cringed, knocking several test tubes into a sink, where they promptly reacted, sending flames and a toxic cloud up into the air. "You posted about mainstream anime?! You fool!" Rico roughly pushed the youth back.
"I know, I know! They told me all about it, but you have to help me! I'm getting death threats in Japanese!" With this, he produced a handful of papers, many of which were sinisterly bespeckled with drops of red food dye, and with a sigh, Rico began flipping through them while the youth continued gesticulating wildly.
"Well, they were kind enough to provide drawings of what they're going to do to you. Hey, look at this one: an innovative use of chopsticks. Yes, I'd say you're really mixed up with the wrong crowd this time, Timmy." At this the youth began wailing. "I will say, though, that I'm impressed by how graphic and, well, well-drawn these are."
Rico was just about to hand the papers back when his brain made a sudden connection. "Wait a minute...these aren't e-mails! What, did you post your full name and address on that board?" Timmy nodded. Rico choked. A girl carrying a frisbee and wearing a shirt covered in characters decipherable only by her walked by the room.
"It's you!!" she shrieked as she stopped short.
"Ahh!" Timmy shrieked as he wet himself.
"I got your moon tiara magic right here!" she called as she whipped the frisbee into the room, where it sailed directly into Timmy's forehead.
"Ahh!" Timmy shrieked as he collapsed to the increasingly slippery linoleum.
"This is serious," Rico said as he inched away from the puddle. "We can't have you soiling yourself and everything around you whenever people throw things at you. There's only one way to solve this." Timmy blinked a few times. "Cross-dressing!" Rico finished with a flourish as he flung his arms out sideways in a pose not entirely unlike that of the Christlike figure everyone knew he thought himself to be.
He proceeded to remove a neatly folded pile of fabric from somewhere in the depths of his coat. "I'm not wearing that!" Timmy squeaked from his place on the floor. "No, you're not," Rico replied. "You're much too filthy and soaked with excrement. This privilege is reserved for me." With that, he crouched down and waddled behind his work desk, only to emerge on the other side a few minutes later, still wearing the coat over his stylish new attire.
"I know, you don't have to say a word," Rico quipped as he swaggered around the room. "I look, how you say, 'fab'. Now, I have a clever plan, so mop that up, grab a video camera, and meet me at the computer lab in twenty minutes. And hurry, before these fumes claim us all."
No one ever really knew what Rico was thinking, which was fortunate, yet it was always something that would instill questionable morals in impressionable minds. It was for this reason entirely that most people kept their distance from him; usually not so much for the sake of avoiding a conflict of ideals as for avoiding corruption.
The computer room was, of course, where the otaku club met after school. Most would not have been so daring as to rush into the lion's den, but Rico was a sado-masochistic lunatic on the warpath who happened to be wearing a very fetching Sailor Mars costume, and so the prospect of being sodomized with traditional oriental eating utensils did nothing to phase him. He wasn't sure whether those utensils were Chinese or Japanese, or both due to cultural diffusion, but he was insensitive enough to cultural diversity that it didn't phase him much, either.
As planned, the two met outside the computer room. Timmy was carrying a video camera under his arm, and seemed to be struggling with it at that. He had around him a putrid, sour aura of stink, much worse than his usual, but this was still fitting, as the situation was beyond the usual. This is why Rico, quite to people's surprise as he passed them in the hall, was not wearing his coat. Yet that surprise certainly could be attributed at least in part to the fact that he was wearing a skirt, and that he actually looked quite charming in it.
Rico signalled to Timmy to start filming, and the youth brought the camera up onto his shoulder. He was flimsy and weak enough that he struggled to keep the comparably light equipment steady. For him it brought terrible memories of struggling to bench press twenty pounds in seventh grade gym class, but Rico was looking toward the future and what glory he would achieve after this mission was over. He was also adjusting his impressive new endowments.
With that, Rico flung the door open and entered with grandeur, or at least what he could manage while wearing high heels. There was a sudden swishing sound as everyone in the room in unison turned to look at him. He politely curtsied, then abruptly reached down his blouse, and produced a lighter and a bottle stuffed with a rag.
"Mars fire, ignite!" he called as he set fire to the rag and threw the bottle across the room. The bottle shattered upon impact with a table, sending flaming liquid splattering across the surface and onto the carpetted floor. Rico was almost immediately tackled from the side and pinned to the floor, yet he would not be held. He flailed around and twitched randomly, succeeding only in kicking file cabinets and table legs and chairs, knocking random items to the floor: candy, pencils, markers, and cheap porn drawn on the backs of math assignments. Rico managed to get an arm free, and he grasped at the nearest item on the floor. By this time his attacker had managed to flip him over and remove Rico's wig.
"Rico!" the boy said with sudden and unpleasant understanding. "You're one sick, fruity freak."
"Fruity?" Rico looked over at his hand, and recognized the opportunity for freedom. He brought the bag of candy up to his face and tore it open with his teeth. "Taste the rainbow!" he hissed in a voice reminiscent of the needlessly artistic Skittles commercials he had seen. It was a clever pun, as well, which would have elicited a few snickers if not for the fact that both of them were fighting for their lives. With a jerk, Rico sent the colorful assortment of elliptical candy into his attacker's face and eyes. The subsequent reaction allowed Rico to free himself.
The room, meanwhile, had become enveloped in pandemonium and, to a lesser extent, fire. Random people darted randomly around the room, some of them yelling and flailing their arms about randomly in the air. Rico hurled himself into this frenzy, shouting, "Mars star poweeeeer!!" He reached into his blouse and took out the remaining bottle. He was deflated, but not defeated, not until the flames consumed his arm and the bottle, and the concoction exploded in his face.
It wasn't until the next afternoon when he awoke in the hospital, surrounded by a doctor, Timmy, a police officer, the otaku club president, and several reporters. He turned to Timmy.
"How'd the video come out?" Timmy only shook his head.
"I didn't get a clear shot because I kept shaking. Then I ran away when the fire started. Then I tripped and broke the camera. Then I saw the lens cap had been on the whole time. Then I remembered that I forgot to put a tape in the camera. Then the police took it all away."
The two blinked at each other for a while.
"So...are you off the hook with the Internet otakus now?" Timmy nodded, and the school club president spoke up.
"Yeah, so I blacklisted you yesterday on all of the major anime mailing lists. They'll be too busy hunting you down to worry about Timmy here, who, by the way, is the newest member of the school otaku club." Timmy nodded again.
At that exact moment, a girl carrying a frisbee and wearing a shirt adorned with characters intelligible only to only her and one other person in the room passed by. She stopped short.
"It's you!!" She shrieked. "I got your Mars star power right here!" She flung the frisbee, which sailed into the room and slammed directly into Rico's arm. Rico winced.
"Oh, your arm was badly burned," the doctor suddenly said. "And when the ceiling collapsed a nice chunk of concrete snapped your elbow back the wrong way. You'll be laid up for another two weeks, at least!"
"And after that," the police officer added, "you have a little trial waiting for you. You'll be locked up for ten to twenty!"
Everyone in the room started laughing; light-hearted laughter.
"Well, at least some people were kind enough to send me these 'get well soon' cards," Rico sighed, glancing over at a stack of papers on the bedside table. "Only...I can't read a word."
"Oh, those aren't cards," the club president said. "Those are death threats. It seems the otaku community didn't take kindly to your going to a meeting dressed as a character from mainstream anime."
There was a long, awkward silence. "So, do I get my dress back?" Rico asked.
"Nope, it's been submitted as evidence," the officer said.
At that exact moment, seven miles away, a tattered red and white dress was unfolded on a wooden table in an office. In the following moments, a man rushed down the hallways of the building and burst into the room.
"Sir, we have a robbery in prog--Chief!!"