Oh! My Brother! Chapter 1 All Oh! My Goddess (Ah! My Goddess, Aa! Megami-sama, whatever) characters owned by Kosuke Fujishima. I'm poor, don't sue me. *** Did I mention I really hate Mondays? I don't mean like some people hate lima beans, I'm talking a full fledged, berserker rage, MUST KILL kind of hate. With my job, you'd think I'd get over it. I mean, they don't care when I work, just as long as they get their 40 hours a week out of me and I'm there for every meeting. Nice, hey? Unfortunately, my PRICK of a manager sets our weekly meetings at 8:30 Monday morning. That means I'm up at 6:30. I used to get a kick out of seeing the sun rise, now it just pisses me off. Anyway, enough with the ranting. So there I am, sitting at my computer, wishing death upon my manager and the corporation in general while I read my email. At my side is my ever-present bottle of Diet Coke. Most people snicker at it, but when they realize that I drink about two liters a day, they shut up. Some people have coffee, I have my cola. So I'm looking at my mail, and I find this message: Date: Mon, 25 Aug 1996 08:18:36 From: Goddess Relief Office Subject: Your Request To: Christopher J Angel Your request for aid has been granted. A representative will contact you at the earliest possible convenience. Goddess Relief Office I read it a few times, and then did the same action I reserve for all goofy email messages. I filed it with the delete key and promptly forgot all about it. Not the wisest action, now that I think about it... *** The true meaning of that little message didn't hit me until later that day, when I was trying to make my dinner at home. Emphasis on trying. I'm a pretty lousy cook at the best of times, and I tend to eat out a lot to compensate. The one thing I can make, however, is pasta. And what do you need for pasta? Boiling water. Needless to say, I was pretty damn surprised when a barely teenaged girl climbed out of the pot and fell into my arms. I was even more surprised when she screamed and hammered me on the head with her overgrown croquet mallet, knocking me out. I woke up a few minutes later, laid out on the couch. The shrimp was screaming into the phone. The first thing I wondered was how the hell a five-foot-nothing kid who probably weighed 100 pounds at worst got a six-foot-four, 250 pound giant like me from the kitchen to the living room. The second thing I wondered was if that call she was making was local. The third thing I wondered was why my head felt like someone had been using it as an anvil. The kid was cute, I'll give her that. She was wearing some weird red and white clothes that looked like a cross between formal clothes and a lab coat. She had these weird markings on her face, a blue-yellow rounded triangle on her forehead and two similiar marks on her cheekbones. Her hair was long and black and ran down to the small of her back. The cowlick she had going was a riot, though. Me, being the rational and eloquent guy I am, groaned and said, "What the hell is going on?" The kid saw I was awake and said something into the phone, and hung it up. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said. "I was surprised!" She looked disgusted and muttered something that sounded like "I've got to stop doing that." I put my hand to my forhead and winced at the round bruise I felt. "Umm...before I call the cops, who the hell are you and what the HELL is going on?!" "I'm the Goddess Skuld, and I'm here to grant you one wish," she said formally. A bit of my mythology classes came back to me. "Skuld? As in Urd, Verdandi and Skuld? The Norns?" I was shocked. I was amazed. I still hadn't clued into that wish portion. What can I say, sometimes I'm dense. "You've got to be joking." "That's BELLdandy," she corrected pointedly. "One cough and everyone takes it as gospel. So what do you want to wish for?" Like I said, sometimes I'm dense. "Wish? Oh...yeah." I thought for a few seconds. "What can I get?" Hey, I'm no idiot most of the time. I was going to avoid the 'w' word like the plague until I decided. Skuld sighed. "Anything you want. You could wish to be rich, or to be popular with women, you could even wish to end the world." She paused. "But if you're that kind of person you wouldn't get a wish." The concept stunned me for a moment. "Well, I wouldn't want to end the world, that would kind of include ending ME, wouldn't it?" The idea of criteria for wish-getting was kind of intriguing, but something else bothered me. "Hey, if you're the goddess of the future," I still hadn't quite got the handle on that, "shouldn't you have better things to do? Like worrying about creation or something?" Skuld smiled brightly at me. "Nope, we've got Yggdrasil to do that, it's got more than enough processing power." If I was a dog, my ears would have perked. "Processing power? The universe runs on a computer?" I liked that idea. It seemed somehow comforting to me, until I remembered computers crash. "What happens if it crashes?" "Bad things," Skuld said simply, in a tone that suggested she didn't want to talk about it. "Now what do you want?" She asked impatiently. I was silent for a long time. What do I wish for? I mean, I had to assume it was real, it's not every day a kid jumps out of a pot of water. I kind of felt that I should be careful, since what I wish for could change my life. The idea of being irresistable to women appealed to me. I wasn't exactly a date magnet after all. But the romantic in me made me stop. Something to improve myself? I dismissed that just as quickly. If I became better in some way, I'd want to do it myself. Every time I came upon a wish I liked, something held me back. I finally shook my head. "I don't know. I can't really decide." A solution occured to me. "Maybe you can tell me about some of the wishes you've seen, that might help." Hey, if you can't come up with an idea, steal someone else's. Skuld smiled. "Who could it hurt?" she said. She started to tell me of various wishes she had seen people make. Some of them were ridiculous, some of them made far too much sense (although the concept of Bill Gates as a wish recipient still gives me shivers). Skuld finished by telling me about Keiichi Morisato, and the wish he made with her sister, Belldandy. Let me tell you a little something about myself. I like kids, kids like me. Especially the ones between the ages of around 8 and 14. (No, not that way you sicko.) They're fun people at that age. I mean, older than that and you have to start treating them like adults (usually), younger and they're too little to understand you. But that age is fun. As Skuld talked, I found myself forgetting her godhood (or goddesshood?) and just treating her as a young girl. NOT one of the wisest things I've done. When Skuld finished, I couldn't help but ask her some questions. I guess 'big brother' mode had kicked in. "You really care for your sister, don't you?" Skuld nodded wordlessly. "You're afraid that this Keiichi guy is going to make her unhappy?" She nodded again. "Skuld, you respect your sister a lot, let her make her own choices. From what you tell me, she and Keiichi love each other a great deal. Think of it as gaining a brother, not losing a sister." Skuld smiled at me, and not thinking, I said the words that changed my life. "You know, I wish I had a sister like you." Skuld almost screamed as she suddenly began to glow with a brilliant white light. She floated of the ground, energy flowing around her and through me, filling the room. The energy shot from her straight up into the ceiling and into the sky. Must have been quite a shock to the people in the apartments above mine. Skuld floated back to the ground. "Wish approved," she said, disbelief on her face and in her voice. I did the most logical thing for me to do at that time. I fainted. *** Now, one of my favorite things to do is sleep. Well, that's not quite true. I like GOING to sleep. Sleep itself is no great hell, it's just an 8-hour blank spot with commercials. Waking up is kind of fun too, except when you're woken up by loud noise. Like oh, say, an alarm. Or in this case, two women and a girl arguing. I cracked open my eyes. There was Skuld, involved in a shouting match with two of the most beautiful women I'd ever seen. After all I've gone through I'm still struck by that every once in a while. The first one my eyes focussed on I figured had to be Belldandy. She was shorter than me at about five and a half feet. She had light brown hair, and wore what was, well, housewife clothing. The whole nine yards, from the apron to the pretty frilly dress. She had beautiful blue eyes and similar marks to Skuld on her face, but the one on her forhead was a long diamond. The hair spikes that looked funny on Skuld worked on her. The first word that came to my mind was 'angel.' She was purity personified. The first word that came to my mind when I saw Urd was 'hot.' Other words quickly followed that one, but I don't think they're for public consumption. If Belldandy was purity personified, Urd was sexuality personified. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and somehow looked nude at the same time. She was built like a model, correction, like a model WISHES she was built. She had dark skin, silver hair, and her forehead marking was of an inverted triangle. That cowlick thing the girls had looked, well, erotic on Urd. Suffice it to say Urd could make the Pope think impure thoughts. While I was watching the shouting match, this shrimp of a guy showed up. I'm secure enough in my manhood to say the guy was pretty handsome. Hell, if being as short as him was a price to pay for looking that good, I'd have paid it in a minute. To be truthful, he looked like he was in his mid teens. He had black hair. I figured he was that Keiichi guy. Now, don't get me wrong here, I'm not obsessed with height. It's just that when you're as tall as me you get kind of used to having a crink in your neck from having to look down at people. As a result, your first observation on meeting anyone is their height, especially in relation to your own. (But then, almost everyone's shorter than me. I'm the only person to get away with calling Thor 'Shorty'.) Back to the arguing trio, who had stopped and were looking me over. Time for some witty reparte from yours truly. "Uh...hi?" Urd gave me a kind of sulty grin. "At least he's cute," she said to Skuld, who shot her venomous look. That one rocked me. Let's be honest here, Fabio I wasn't. I was white like a sheet and freckled all over. My nose was too big, my ears stuck out, and I wore some THICK glasses (which is why I wore contacts all the time). I've had girls tell me I'm kind of handsome, but cute never came into the conversation. Not to mention the fact that I was pretty overweight. I didn't have some big beer belly, but I'd say roughly 20% of my body mass was fat. So what did I do? I laughed. I guess it was hysteria. Well, give me a break. I just discovered gods exist, quite a shock for someone in the 'not sure' camp like me. Not to mention I just met Norse gods, of all things, hot ones, and that I just saw a pretty impressive light show. Add on to that the fact I just woke up somewhere I had never been before. Add to that the fact that the hottest woman I had ever seen in my life just called me cute, and you'll have a general idea of what I was going through. The goddesses watched me, shocked, as I continued to laugh, eventually running out of breath and silently shaking. Eventually Urd sighed and slapped me, bringing me out of it. "Thanks," I said as I caught my breath. "Someone mind telling me where the hell I am? And what's going on?" I asked, barely containing the hysteria. Urd answered me. I could tell from her tone she wasn't impressed with the concept. "Congratulations, Chris. You're a god." I fought down the laughter that was rising up in me, and my ribs thanked me for it. Keiichi, I noticed, gaped. I opted for confusion. Hey, when all else fails, be an engineer. "Wouldn't that fall under the same heading as 'ending the world'? A wish that would be not approved?" Skuld scowled at me. "Yeah, but with your stupid slip of the tongue, it got through the approval process." I was in her bad books again. I didn't notice, the engineer in me was still focussed the problem in front of me. "It scares me that a wish like that got through the process." I shook my head in dismay. "That means either someone programmed Ydggrasil shoddily, something is very wrong, or it wasn't a mistake." Let's just say, at the time, I knew quite a bit about programming very complex systems. More on that later. "It's not the programming," Belldandy said sharply. Urd looked at her with a bit of surprise. I didn't find out till later that the current version of the code was Belldandy's last project. I guess someone was a little defensive, hey? Engineer Chris was still on a roll. I'm a bit single minded at times. Nobody's perfect. "And since people aren't supposed to be able to wish for godhood, so..." "Something is wrong," Skuld concluded. Like her words were a cue, there was a bright flash of light from outside, and thunder rolled. The goddesses and Keiichi ran out to the back yard. Curious, I followed. They were standing around what looked like a plaque on the ground. As I got closer I realized the words were burned into the ground. "What's it say?" Keiichi asked. "Notice to Urd, Belldandy, and Skuld: Return to Heaven immediately and report to Me upon arrival. Bring Christopher Angel with you. Signed, Kami-sama," Urd read. She suddenly grinned. "PS. Yes, Belldandy, you can bring Keiichi." Belldandy blushed. Skuld grabbed my hand and began dragging me into the house. She was pretty strong for a kid. She took me into the bathroom, where a bath was drawn. "Come on, let's go." She jumped into the bath, and disappeared THROUGH the water. Surprised, I toppled forward. I've travelled with a lot of gods and goddesses, but no one's medium bothers me as much as Skuld's. It's the most terrifying and uncomfortable experience I've ever had to go through. If you ever want to know what it's like, go find a swimming pool, find the 5 meter diving board, and jump off feet first. There's a moment of almost complete weightlessness right after you hit the water and right before you come back to the surface. To me, anyway, it's disorienting. Travelling with Skuld is like feeling that for five minutes straight. My surroundings were not big on my list of concerns when we got to Heaven. Keeping my lunch down, however, was. Belldandy, Keiichi and Urd appeared beside me. Urd gave me a look of sympathy. "Next time grab a lift with Belldandy. It's easier on the stomach." "Thanks for the advice," I said, and regained control of my stomach. I finally decided to look around, and was stunned by what I saw. Belldandy tells me He must have been trying to impress me, since I've never seen Heaven look like that again. It makes sense, I suppose, since it's not every day a new god shows up. For my part, I think He was trying to impress Keiichi. Dads always want to impress (and terrify) their daughter's boyfriends, right? He won't confirm or deny either theory. The popular opinion is it's both. Words just can't describe what I saw that day properly. Imagine a great city, each building made of the purest platinum, glowing with a light just shy of blinding. Gods and mortal spirits mingled with abandon. Everywhere I looked, there was happiness and beauty. We stood on a wide road, and Valkyries lines the street. At the end of the road, there stood a great golden palace which gave off a warm, cleansing light. Well, words can't describe Heaven, but they can describe Valkyries. Take your perfect woman. Put her in shining silver armor that's anything but protective and just shy of indecent. Give her a big, nasty looking halberd. That's a Valkyrie. What can I say, Heaven was a NICE place. We walked down the street, and reached the palace almost instantly. We were greeted by Valkyries at the gate, and led through halls lined with great works of art. (Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Norns' is still one of my favorites.) After a few minutes of walking, we were finally brought to Him. Whatever Heaven may look like, the Head Office always looks the same. Take a 20 meter by 20 meter room. Paint the walls white. Put a picture of the earth from space on the wall away from the door. Put a plain ash desk in the room, with a computer terminal at one side, and a gumball machine on the other. (Don't ask, I don't know, and He won't tell.) Put a big, comfortable looking velvet swivel chair behind the desk. That's the Head Office. In the chair sat Him. Kami-sama. God. Jupiter. Buddah. You name a supreme being, that's Him. At that time He was in His Odin form. He reminded me of an offensive lineman. He had a long, bushy, grey beard, that flowed into His long hair. He wore stained battle-leathers, and an eyepatch. His craggy face was neutral. I expected someone taller. OK, maybe I AM obsessed with height. "Greetings, my Norns. Greetings, Keiichi Morisato, beloved of Belldandy." I noted Belldandy blushed again, and there was a twinkle in Kami-sama's eye. Keiichi was speechless, awed by the being before him. Hell, I was speechless. "Greetings, Christopher Angel, God of Moments, brother to the Norns." "God of Moments? What does that mean, oh Lord?" Kami-sama's eye sparkled at my words, and I grimaced in embarrasement. There I was, making a fool of myself in front of the most powerful being in creation. Not the type of first impression you want to make. "Forgive me, do you have a prefered form of address?" Kami-sama smiled. "Please, whatever you are most comfortable with, Christopher." I don't know what made me say the next thing I did, but apparently, it was something right. I just suddenly grinned and said, "Sure thing, Boss." Yep. You heard me. I just called Him 'Boss'. Belldandy and Skuld gasped, and Keiichi looked an inch from fainting. Even Urd paled. Kami-sama laughed, long and hard. "Boss!" he roared. "Excellent. 'Boss' it is," he said, and slipped back into his calm demeanor. "You, Christopher Angel, are the God of Moments. That period between Past and Present, Present and Future, Future and Forever." Sounds neat, don't it? It probably would have had more of an impact on me if I wasn't an engineer. Not thinking, I blurted out, "Isn't that kind of impossible, Boss?" He smiled a bit wider at 'Boss.' I think He gets a kick out of the way it scandalizes the other gods. I humor Him. Obsequeousness probably grates on a guy after a few millennia. "I mean, the Present is precicely that, the crossover from what will be to what was." Kami-sama's smile shrank a little, and He sighed. "You're thinking like a mortal." *Shut up and play along for now.* I shut up and played along. Did I mention He's telepathic? He turned to the others. "You will be responsible for training him with his powers. For this reason, I have lifted your suspension, Urd." He gave her a stern look. "Do NOT disappoint me." He turned to His terminal. "You are dismissed." The goddesses bowed, and I emulated them. Keiichi was still frozen. Just before we left, He called out. "Belldandy, please stay for a moment." She helped Keiichi out of the room and re-entered. We waited for a few moments until Belldandy exited the office. She was blushing furiously, and was trying not to look at Keiichi. I figured it was one of 'those' talks. The Valkyries started to lead us out of the castle. As we passed a mirror, I caught my reflection. What I saw was the straw that broke the camel's back, and I screamed in horror. The person looking back from the mirror wasn't me.