Yuffie's week proceeded peacefully for several days. She slept a lot, avoided completing her homework whenever possible, and spent a substantial amount of time tweaking the appearance of her GNOME desktop - in short, nothing disturbed her from her usual routine.

That was, until she awoke one day to the sensation that her bed was no longer stationary. She tried to pass it off as a bureaucratic snafu on the part of her inner ear, but a second shift made it impossible to deny that something was causing its bed to relocate itself rapidly across the room. Curious as to the cause of this disturbance, the girl opened a single eye. Light immediately bombarded her unprepared pupil, and she snapped it shut again.

She tried again, more slowly, this time, and saw Selphie standing over her, pushing her bed across the dorm room she shared with Chu-Chu. "Good morning, Yuffie!" Selphie grinned cheerily.

"Gawd, what the hell are you doing?" Yuffie sat bolt upright. Something drastically wrong had happened. All of Chu-Chu's bishounen pin-up posters had been placed on her side of the room, two chairs had been randomly stacked on top of each other in one corner, and Yuffie computer's was nowhere to be seen.

"Chu-Chu said you guys were redecorating. We tried to wake you up, honest!"

Yuffie's stare demanded an explanation from Chu-Chu. "You didn't say anything about this!"

Chu-Chu did not appear to feel the least bit guilty. "Our room had bad feng shui," she explained. "That's why we weren't getting any." She gestured towards the iMac sitting on Yuffie's desk. "I even bought chu a new computer, see? It's 'lime green.'"

"Gawd, you bought me an iMac?" Yuffie howled. "What were you thinking?"

"But Yuffie! Guys we'll think we're hot! Girls too." Chu-Chu struck what would pass for a suave pose among three-foot-tall anthropomorphic rodents. "Who's the little pink missy that's a sex machine with all the bishies? CHU-CHU!"

Yuffie was disgusted. She wanted her room back the way it had been, and she wanted it back now. She slipped out of bed and started hunting for some sign of her most prized possession. "Gawd, what have you done with my Linux box?" It was not anywhere in plain sight, nor it did appear to be stashed underneath anything...

"It's in the closet with all chu-our other things," Chu-Chu explained. "I guess chu can use it if chu want, but you have chu promise to paint it green, okay?" Still facing a look of utter incomprehension from Yuffie, she tried again to explain. "See, that's the 'mountain' corner of the room; we have chu have balance between the 'earth' and 'sky' colors there if we want the Turtle of Good Fortune to bless us."

"Gawd, this is, like, the dumbest thing ever." Yuffie plodded sleepily to the closet, where she quickly located her old computer in a heap of her other belongings. She carefully extricated it from the mess. "There, there, it'll be all right," she said, patting the computer on the side. "The bad women didn't hurt you, did they?"

Selphie giggled. "Yuffie, you are so weird."

"Whatever."

* * *

"And they were being, like, totally immature 'n stuff, and I was all, like, I don't have to take this, 'cause, you know, it's, like, my room too, right?" Yuffie complained to Fujin as the two sat side-by-side on a SeeD bus. Instructor Aki's physics class was taking a field trip to the new planetarium at the Balamb Museum of Natural History.

Fujin nodded. "COMPREHENSION."

"And, like, at least I have my computer back, but Chu-Chu made me paint it all green," Yuffie said. "This feng shui stuff is totally retarded."

"SUPERSTITION."

The bus rolled up to the museum. Students swarmed out in a completely disorderly mass that tried to assemble itself into enough of a line to fit through the open doorway. Oblivious to the whole situation, Yuffie opened the other half of the double doors and she and Fujin walked on in unimpeded. "Anyway, like, we still have the Dreamcast, so if you want to come over this evening, we're all going to be playing ChuChu Rocket! 'n stuff."

"ACCEPTANCE."

Yuffie opened up her sack lunch and retrieved an ice cream bar and a bottle of Sunny Delight. She tore the wrapper off the ice cream bar and poured the Sunny Delight over it, spilling half the bottle onto the carpet. Then she took a big lick of the dripping bar. "Mmmm."

Fujin stared piercingly at her.

Yuffie looked up from her ice cream bar. "What?" she said defensively. Gawd, why did Fujin have a problem with something like a snack? "Ice cream just isn't the same without Sunny D©."

"DISGUSTING," Fujin asserted, marching on towards the planetarium. Yuffie jogged after her, leaving a trail of Sunny Delight on the floor. To an uninformed passerby it might have looked like some experimental new corporate-branded species of slug had gotten loose in the lobby.

The class filed into the planetarium and took their seats. The lights soon shut off, leaving them with a dome of stars and nebulas, planets and comets hanging over their heads. It was easy to forget that they were only looking on a projection, not at the real thing.

"DARK."

"Ho ho hooo!" Bugenhagen's voice floated out of the darkness. "Welcome to the Plern Memorial Planetarium at the Balamb Museum of Natural History! I know what you're probably thinking: Why should I care about stars? But what you really should be asking is: Why should the stars care about me? After all, they were here long before you! Ho ho hoo!"

"Oh, Gawd, not this old geezer again," Yuffie muttered.

"Ho ho hoo, yes, until we take the time to study the stars, it is easy to forget just how much there is in the universe. The stars we see at night may seem as close as the ceiling of this room, but they are millions of miles, thousands of years away! There is more in this universe than we could ever hope to comprehend, let alone understand. We are tiny complared to all that is on this planet. But fear not, we are all part of the great scheme of things. Even the flight of a tiny butterfly can change everything about the universe."

Gawd, who cared about butterflies? This was supposed to be an astromony presentation. Why weren't they learning about how many days there were in a year on Jupiter, or how Uranus was tilted on its axis? Although Bugenhagen seemed a little tilted on his axis himself.

Bugenhagen putzed about the room, continuing to speak. He seemed to have already gotten distracted, however; his speech had degenerated from a presentation into a stream-of-conscious ramble. "Yes, I don't know what you kids have been taught, but anyone really trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe knows that the most important principle is that we don't know everything. That's what science is, pushing into the unknown. Ho ho hoo!"

With the last "hoo" his head snapped up like he had awoken from a brief sleep - but he had really just remembered what he was supposed to be talking about. "Ah, yes, stars! Yes, just look at them! They seem so immediate, so bright and bold, and yet the light that illuminates the night sky today was released long ago. Those beams of light may blast through space at 186,000 miles per second, yet they have still traveled across light-years and countless time to reach us."

"Gawd, this is stupid," Yuffie whispered to Fujin. "Look, I'm gonna sneak out of here, so let me know later if there's anything important we need to for class. The new 'World's Most Exciting Napkins' exhibit is opening for the first time downstairs so I gotta go rip it! We're talking 0-day museum warez here!"

"???"

"You've never heard of museum warez? See, it's, like, you get museums for free over the Internet! Someone goes and takes pictures of all the exhibits and uploads them to an FTP, right? It's cool 'cause way more people can see 'em 'n stuff, and you don't even have to pay for it!"

"HOW?"

"I hid my camera in my pants." Yuffie slipped past Fujin, darted up the aisle, and ducked out the door.

"How can ever know where the light that lets us see today originated?" Bugenhagen continued. "Our where the light being released now will someday end up? As I said, there is always great mystery in the universe." He looked up at the artificial sky, still gleaming with planets and stars. "But sometimes it is enough to appreciate the beauty we can see, no matter what creates it. I see beauty in lots of places. I feel the workings of the planet in the smell of the wind. I also feel the greatness of humanity's wisdom and knowledge in the smell of machinery... ho ho hoo..."

Fujin smiled. She thought presentation was nice and poetic. A pity Yuffie's five-second attention span couldn't handle it.

Struck by fancy again, Bugenhagen bounced from one point in his web of thoughts to another. None of the students were now really sure what point he was trying to make, and it seemed unlikely that Bugenhagen himself did either. "Ho ho hoo, yes! Light is an interesting and wonderful thing. It enables to live and to see the world around us. A fantastic creation, and one that has no real opposite! You see, darkness does not exist the same way as light. Take care to remember - the vast darkness between stars is naught but a void! It is an emptiness, not a substance, do you see? Ho ho hooo! I felt I should clarify because popular opinion tends to hold light and darkness as a duality of equal, opposite strengths. In actuality, however, there are only particles and waves of light. If you are looking for waves of darkness to oppose waves of light, you will not find them! Darkness is simply a comparative absence of light. Ho ho hooo!"

Someone pounded on the door. Fujin went to open it but found it immovable. "SEALED."

"Well, gawd, how'd they do that? With super glue?"

Fujin stepped back. "CAREFUL." She delivered the door a mighty kick with her steel-toed boot and it flew open.

"Thanks."

"Time is another fantastic thing," Bugenhagen said. "We see it all around us; include it in every thought of ours. And yet what it is? A blessing or a curse? There are many ways to look at time. The wounds of the past, the crises of the present, and the promises of the future... ho ho hoo!"

An interesting question indeed. Fujin wasn't sure how she thought about time. "OPINION?" she whispered, turning to Yuffie. But by that time her friend had already fallen asleep.

* * *

"Gawd, wasn't that the stupidest presentation ever?" Yuffie grumbled when Fujin finally arrived at her dorm room. Yuffie, Chu-Chu, Selphie, and Zell were already gathered around the television, engaged in a heated game of ChuChu Rocket!. That was to say, Chu-Chu, Selphie, and Zell were playing a heated game; Yuffie was staring at the screen with a look of vague disgust as she watched herself fall yet again to a distant fourth place.

Fujin shook her head. "FASCINATING."

"No, it wasn't!"

Fujin seated herself cross-legged on the floor beside them. All four controllers were already taken, so she could only watch the mice scurrying around the television set.

"Could chu scoot over that way a little, Fujin?" Chu-Chu waved her paw. "I think the dragon of good fortune is having trouble breathing." Fujin rolled her eye, but complied.

Selphie frowned. "Do you want to take my spot...?"

Chu-Chu offered her controller. "Ooh, you can have mine," she said. "I've Chu-Chu's got a date with Hello Kitty anyway. The new Casper the Homosexual Friendly Ghost dojinshi came today! Casper gets molested by his uncles!" Chu-Chu was clearly quite excited about this.

"Gawd, Chu-Chu, we don't need to hear about that. And don't do anything, you know, gross in here. Please."

"Okay." Chu-Chu said. She retrieved a few items from her dresser and ambled happily out of the room while rapping quietly to herself. "I'm the queen of yaoi / There is none higher / I get myself off writing NORG x Seifer."

Fujin took Chu-Chu place as the console. As the games continued, Selphie kept up her winning streak, while Yuffie -- as usual -- came in dead last. "Gawd, why do I always lose?" the ninja girl whined. "You guys are, like, so good and, like, it's so unfair."

"Winning isn't everything, Yuffie," Zell said.

"C'mon, another game," Yuffie whined. "I'm getting better 'n stuff!"

"Well... okay," Selphie said. "It's getting kind of late, though."

OOPS! A forgotten train of thought finally caught up with Fujin and smacked her with panic and fear. She was probably supposed to be somewhere else already! How could she forget? She craned her head to look around the room. "CLOCK, WHERE?"

"Under the bed, 'out of the way of the wind tiger.'" Selphie tried not to lose her concentration.

She lifted up the quilt and peered under Chu-Chu'd bed. Shoot! Her top-secret meeting of an underground network had started fifteen minutes ago. "LATE," she said. "DEPARTURE." She set her controller down and marched out of the room.

Yuffie threw herself across the floor and seized Fujin's controller in a violent tackle. Her eyes dashed to the screen as she tried to take over Fujin's position mid-game. Using her minimal playing skills, she managed to keep the green side from dropping completely to last place. Her eyes lit up when the round came to an end. "Look, guys, I came in second! I actually didn't lose! Um, right?"

* * *

Fujin pushed open a heavy steel door and slipped into a dark meeting room somewhere in Balamb Garden's MD level. She slipped unseen through the shadows filling the corners of the hall and sat down in the only empty chair. "CHUCHU," she explained her absence. "SUGOI."

"Good, I think everyone's arrived now," Dominia said from the head of the table. She cleared her throat and addressed the crowd. "Thank you for coming. I know you all come from many different games, but we all have much in common. We've all served as members of a squad of bumbling recurring minor villains at one time or another." The members of the Turks, Elements, Disciplinary Committee, and Team Rocket all nodded. "And we deserve a more dignified position than this."

"Dominia, you're using too many big words!!!" Seraphita complained. "I don't know what you're talking about!!!"

"We train hard, we develop our own special moves, and what do we have to show for it? The same thing happens every time! All we do is show up occasionally when they can't find another boss, take a few hits from the heroes, and run off again! Then under an extreme circumstance, we always have to help the hero out, showing we're not entirely bad. Sure, we go back fight, but soon comes the worst part of it all! We always turn good! Come on, who here has been portrayed as misguided and good at heart?"

A unanimous show of hands went up.

"Exactly!" Domina thundered. By now she was on her feet, pounding her fist into her palm. "We've been reduced to nothing more than walking stereotypes! But we're people!"

"Meowth!"

"Well, okay, most of us are people," Domina continued. "But none of us are the bumbling, honorable-but-incompetent special agents that our employers try to portray us as! And it's time we forced them to acknowledge our contributions! A vote against unionization is a vote to allow the management to remain our pimps forever! We have nothing to lose but a steady income! Now is the time to throw off our chains! Viva la revolución!"

In the midst of the thunderous applause, Seraphita nudged her sister. "Tolone, what's a pimp?" she whispered.

* * *

By the time Chu-Chu returned to the room, Selphie and Zell were long gone. Yuffie, however, was still staring vacuously at the television. Her fingers flicked back and forth across her Dreamcast controller, guiding her mice to safety.

"You're still playing, Yuffie?" Chu-Chu said. "Chu know, you're supposed to take a break every two hours or chu might get Dutch Elm Disease!"

Yuffie remained transfixed by the little mice dancing across her television. "Earth to Yuffie! Earth to Yuffie!" Chu-Chu leaned over and waved a hand in Yuffie's face. "Come in, Yuffie!"

Yuffie bit her.

"Ouchu!" Chu-Chu quickly withdrew her limb.

"ChuChu," Yuffie mumbled. "My precioussss ChuChus. I WANT THE SEXY CHUCHU."

"Uh, I think this might be a good time chu to take a break for a while, Yuffie."

The only sound she got out of the Yuffie/Dreamcast/TV collective was an announcer crying, "Mouse Mania!"

Oh dear. Yuffie seemed to be addicted. Maybe it was time to call Dr. Kadowaki. She inched across the room.

Yuffie's current game concluded with the ninja girl managing a respectable second place. She immediately started a new game and, while waiting for it to begin, risked a quick glance over her shoulder. "Hey, would you, like, not move around so much. It's distracting and I'm concentrating here 'n stuff." She turned back to her precious ChuChus and engaged in yet another furious online battle.

Dear Mambo. She couldn't say one thing without getting in the way of Yuffie's game. What was so much more compelling about those mice? Chu-Chu even had a hyphen in her name - could those mice claim to have that? It was probably time to pull the plug. She stepped towards the television. But before Yuffie could stop her, time slowed and a pale haze spread over the room.

"Oook no! Chu-Chu thinks she's caught in a sappy montage!"

The pair found themselves jumping through a series of stilted scenes: Yuffie enduring training round after training round. Yuffie winning her first online game. Chu-Chu watching Yuffie triumph again. Chu-Chu waving good-night. Chu-Chu kneeling on her bed, hands clasped in prayer to the Wondrous Mambo God, while Yuffie continued to rack up more wins. Yuffie receiving a challenge from <=¤m3g@=f£å®ê666=> and _prometheus, the Internet's best ChuChu Rocket players. Yuffie handily defeating both of them while the theme from Rocky played in the background. And, finally, Yuffie crawling into bed at 5 AM.

* * *

Yuffie was not the only one staying up past her bedtime. Quistis found herself still reading about history and waiting alone in bed well into the night. Where was Mengshi? This was getting out of hand. She resolved not to let her unspoken acceptance of Xu's work habits continue.

Xu finally came home shortly after at 2 AM and dragged her weary body through the front door. She crept up to their bedroom, figuring Quistis would be asleep by now. Being early to bed and early to rise must be at least part of how she got so healthy, wealthy, and wise. But she found the light still on and, when she poked her head up the stairwell, Quistis still up and reading.

"Oh! Good evening, dear," she said. "Sorry I'm so late. I did get through a lot of applications..."

"Good evening, Mengshi; glad you make it," Quistis said with only a slight touch of bitterness.

Xu frowned. "I didn't keep you up, did I?"

"It's okay; I'd be sad if I missed you. I do think you're working yourself too hard, though."

"Well... of course I'd rather be spending time with you too, it's just..." Xu hesitated. "I said I'd do this and I don't want to let anyone down."

"I know, but you have to take care of yourself too," Quistis said.

"I suppose." With a heavy sigh, Xu threw herself down on the empty side of the bed, beneath her large poster bearing the complete text of Lord Avon's Tidus Andronicus in admittedly tiny print. She exhaled deeply. Hyne, she was tired. Now that she was lying down, she didn't know if could get back up. Ugh, her whole body felt like lead. And there was still more, more work waiting for her tomorrow.

Quistis mussed her girlfriend's hair affectionately. "You should talk to the Kramers," she suggested, with an airy confidence that this would solve everything. "You know they're nice people; they'll find a way to take some of the work off your shoulders. You don’t have to do admissions and HR and take care of the Garden Network all the same time, you know."

"No, that's not fair; someone else would have to do it."

"I'm sure they'll find an agreeable compromise," Quistis said. "They can split your duties with someone else, give you a vacation..."

Xu's silence belied her lack of confidence in this statement. She had already started to fade out of reality and into her fantasy world, her eyes fixed on her poster. That was the kind of the world she wanted to live in. One where everything was interesting, where there was a plot that made everyone's life crucial. Oh, there might be lots of poisonings and stabbings and Qus baking people in pies, but at least they'd die noble, meaningful deaths. Xu doubted she'd ever really amount to anything significant in this crummy overpopulated world. She'd probably just slowly work herself to death instead of drinking poison in a fit of noble passion.

"Please?" Quistis repeated. "Just ask them? I don't want you to hurt yourself. It's great that you care so much about other people, but you have to take care of yourself too."

"Okay. I will, I promise," Xu said. But it was not okay. She was completely disgusted with herself. She had let down yet another person. Was once again not being as good to someone as she should be. And this time it was her beloved Quisty. Was there no end to her failings? She sometimes worried that it was only a matter of time before Quistis too realized this. Quistis, after all, was perfect. Graduated at the top of her class, the youngest instructor ever, King of the Card Club -- she did everything, was everything that Xu wanted to do and be without even trying. How could Xu ever really hope to face her as an equal?

But the show had to go on, she conceded, and it probably wasn't her place to ask such questions anyway. She dragged herself back to her feet to get ready for bed. She'd worked hard today, and would work even harder tomorrow. That meant she deserved to stay up a little later - even if she was a few minutes late tomorrow - talking to Quisty and reading. Lord Avon, of course ... one of the comedies. The Taming of the Shoopuf, perhaps, or The Merry Wives of Winhill. That sounded nice.

Nice, but not good enough.

Next chapter: Down the Rabbit-Hole