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*...because I wanted to see them covered in paint

Other Sights

Oh, adverbs, how I love you so. XD Painfully unedited, and obviously stops short of any meaningful plot. But mah, there ya go. *flaps hand*

Takeshi stared pointedly at the rolodex on his supervisor’s desk as the man chewed him out. He stared so hard that his vision grew splotchy, and swimmy blobs of black floated around between the rolodex and the pencil sharpener, the paperclip dispenser and the pad of sticky notes.

“Nakazato!” his boss shouted so loudly that he actually managed to penetrate Takeshi’s haze of exhaustion. He jumped slightly, his weary gaze refocusing on the apoplectic visage of Ken Yamada, CEO of First Bank of Gunma. “Are you listening to me?”

“Yes sir, Mr. Yamada. Of course I am!” he responded reflexively.

“What are you going to do about your chronic absenteeism? You’re never here, and even when you are, you don’t accomplish anything. I want an explanation, and I want to know how you’re going to make this better!”

“I wouldn’t call it chronic, Mr. Yamada. It’s only been in the last few weeks, and there’s a perfectly good explanation!”

“Well I’m waiting to hear it!” he bellowed sarcastically, leaning over his desk and glaring at Takeshi with enough fire to melt a steel post.

“It’s just that I’ve had a lot of personal things to attend to lately. But I swear that’s over now! I’ll focus on my work, and I’ll be here,” he promised feverishly, unsure even as the words passed his lips how he would keep his promises.

“Do you like your job, Mr. Nakazato?” his boss queried icily.

Takeshi winced at his tone.
“Yes sir, I like it very much.”

“Then I would suggest you stop letting your personal life interfere with your work. You have a lot of potential, Takeshi, and I’d hate to have to lose you over something stupid like this.”

He nodded with no small amount of relief. At least he wasn’t going to be fired today.
“Yes sir, I’ll try very hard not to disappoint you,” he replied.

Yamada fixed him with a stern look.
“Good. Now get out of my office,” he commanded, reaching for the phone and dialing his secretary even as Takeshi exited the room.

Sighing explosively, he headed back to his office. On his desk were piled stacks of paper so high that he could hardly see his computer monitor. So much to do, so little sleep. He yawned widely and collapsed into his chair. Just as he picked up a sheet of paper off one of the stacks, his cell phone rang.

“What now?” he grumbled. He answered the phone on the third ring.

~Takeshi, honey! It’s your mother, you know, the one you’ve been avoiding for the last month?~

He flushed, guilt gnawing on his already frazzled nerves.
“Of course I’m not avoiding you, Mom! It’s just been really hectic around here lately.”

~Too busy for your own mother, I knew it! Well, if you’re not too /busy/ for your own dear mother who loved you and raised you and sacrificed everything so you could have every opportunity, could you come over and clean out the garage tomorrow?~

Takeshi scowled as his weekend plans to catch up on work and sleep slipped between his fingers like slivers of mercury.
“Can it wait till next weekend?” he asked, praying to as many omniscient beings as he could think of at the moment that his mother wasn’t in one of her more irascible moods.

“It’s already waited three weekends! You’re just making up excuses now! If you don’t want to help me, you should just say so!” she groused. “Go ahead and break your mother’s heart, the mother who gave you life, who gave you everything-“

“Yes, OK!” he interjected forcefully. “I’ll come over and do it Saturday, alright?”

“Oh, you’re such a good son. I knew you could never let your poor mother down-“

“Yes of course I couldn’t,” he interrupted again. “I love you, Mom. I’ll see you Saturday, ok? Bye!” he said quickly and hung up the phone before she could answer him.

In the ensuing silence, the fluorescent overhead lights glared mercilessly off the white papers, the glassy monitor, and the highly polished wood of the desk, assaulting his blood shot eyes with burning intensity. Rubbing his eyes with the back of his hands, he groaned softly.
A high pitched ringing nearly made him poke his eye out. This time, it was his office phone.

~Hey, Nakazato! I’m shocked, you’re actually at your desk.~

“Yeah, right. What do you want?” he asked, unable to even feign enthusiasm.

~What makes you think I want anything? I just called to see how you were, since I haven’t seen you in so long and all.~

“I really don’t have time for this right now, Eikichi. I really gotta go, so I’ll talk to you some oth-“

~I heard about your race last weekend.~ the GT-R driver cut him off. ~I heard you even wiped out.~

“Yes, well, whatever you heard, I’m sure it’s all true. Is that all you wanted, for me to verify the rumors?” he asked acidly.

The voice on the other end sighed melodramatically.
~Takeshi, Takeshi. Are you /ever/ going to win a race?~

He bristled at the insult, his jaw clenching with rage. A vein throbbed dangerously in his forehead as he struggled to keep his temper in check. Numerous encounters with this particular adversary had proven that keeping his cool was the best way to handle him.
“I can’t always lose,” he answered tersely.

Eikichi laughed.
~I’m so proud of you…the little RB26DETT engine that could! Your persistence warms my heart, Takeshi.~

“Right,” he gritted, his face twitching with the effort of curbing his imminent explosion.

~Well, just so you know, those Emperor guys are flaunting it all around. Rumors travel faster than Tommi Makinen around here, but I’m sure you wouldn’t care much about that. You’ve got your persistence…what do you need a reputation for?~

Eikichi laughed again, and this time Takeshi simply hung up the phone mid-cackle.

“What the hell did I do to deserve this?” he growled, shaking his fist at the gray ceiling. “Why are you doing this to me?” he wailed at the various omniscient beings he had been praying to earlier.

His cell phone rang…again. His first impulse was to ignore it, but his conscience forced him to answer it anyway.

~Mr. Nakazato? This is the Asahi Garage calling. Your car is ready, sir.~

“Oh good, thank you.” At least something was going right today. He dared to take a deep breath. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all. At least he wouldn’t have to take the train home. “What’s my total?”

The mechanic told him.

Suddenly, the room began to spin crazily around Takeshi. His vision blurred and his eyes rolled into the back of his head as he fainted onto the floor of his office.

***

“Takeshi? Takeshi wake up!” a voice echoed over a vast distance, muffled as if it had come through three layers of cotton batting. “Takeshi, wake up!”

“Mmm?” he asked incoherently. He opened his eyes and a bright white light pierced into his brain. His eyes watered as he rolled over to hide from it. Confused and disoriented, he risked opening his eyes once more, but there was a big blurry pink object over his face. He gasped and flailed his arms, only to discover that the object was in fact his hand. Relieved yet nauseated from the movement, he crunched into a ball and lay still while his stomach did a few flips.

“Takeshi? How are you feeling?”

There. That voice again. He blinked in confusion. Who was that? Where was it coming from? He raised his head slightly off the floor to take stock of his environment. Obviously, he was in his office. That was good, as he would have been highly embarrassed had he passed out in a public place. But for all the comfort that particular discovery brought him, he still had not located the source of the voice.

“I’m up here, silly!” it said.

Slowly, ever so cautiously, he raised his eyes to the ceiling. And there, hovering about a meter over him, was a man dressed in a pink gossamer tutu, and a glittery crown. In one hand he held a red, pointy, flower shaped wand that sparkled in the fluorescent light. Takeshi blinked. The man was still there. He blinked again…the man remained.

“What the hell?” he croaked.

The man-thing giggled.

Something about this man was very odd, but Takeshi couldn’t quite put his finger on it. It wasn’t that he was floating, wearing a dress, and waving a wand. All those were more than merely odd…those were in a category of weird that his brain was not yet prepared to deal with. No, something else…about the man himself seemed strangely familiar. Ponytail…Mitsubishi symbol wand… Little bits in his brain swam around and connected with some other little bits.

Recognition blind-sided him like a big brown delivery truck, crunching his door panels, smashing his windows, and sending him into an irrecoverable spin. Just before he lost consciousness for the second time, he heard the fairy grumble,

“Crap, not again! My Evo IV is double parked!”

And then there was silence…blessed silence.

~tbc...maybe