OH MY GODDESS: META-MATICS 

		    CHAPTER TWO: STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK



Old friend, Charity
Cruel, twisted smile
signals emptiness for me
Starless and bible black

Cold, blue-silver sky
fades into grey,
to a grey hope that
oh, yearns to be
Starless and bible black

	Song "Starless" by King Crimson

------------------------------------------------------------------


    "Kosukeeeeeeee!" Megumi screamed.  Her eyes had strayed for but 
several seconds and yet the child she was supervising had inexplicably 
vanished from the bathtub.  Her pulse quickened and the blood pressure rose
threatening to burst vessels on her forehead while she frantically 
overturned a wastebasket and opened cabinet doors.  Now on her knees
scanning the floor, the feeling of intense nausea permeated the pit of her
stomach, and she cursed herself for letting down her sister-in-law.

    The child's mother burst into the room, expecting the worst.

    Kosuke giggled and playfully splashed the bath water.

    Megumi stared, wide-eyed in disbelief, at the child.  She looked away
quickly, then looked back.  He was there.

    "What's going on?" asked Belldandy.

    "He..." Megumi began, "Kosuke vanished but..."

    "Megumi, I'm sorry.  I really appreciate all the help you've given 
You're just over-worked.  That's all,"  she suggested, kneeling beside her 
with a consoling hand upon the shaken woman's shoulder.

    "But--"

    "Everything's fine," the goddess reassured.

    Urd and Keiichi, overhearing the commotion, arrived to find out what it
was all about.  Belldandy looked up and her eyes briefly made sharp contact
with her husband's before she fainted.

    "Belldandy!" he cried.  He enclosed her inert body and gently picked 
her up, looking at her soft, affectionately molded features.

    Approaching Megumi, Urd asked her if everything was all right, but
there was no reply.  So instead the eldest goddess looked toward Keiichi. 
"We'll take my sister to bed.  Megumi, will you be okay with Kosuke-chan?" 

    A shaken Megumi, straining to put on a brave face, nodded.



    In the master bedroom, Keiichi conscientiously tucked his wife into
bed.  Urd, looking with concern at her sister, stood at a distance next
to the dresser-drawer.  She looked down and saw a framed photo of
Belldandy and Keiichi: he was placing an engagement ring upon her
delicate, white finger.  Tears trickled down Belldandy's shiny blue eyes
and her radiant smile expanded to joy.  The nanking cherry tree, guardian
of the temple, loomed above them; it's cherry blossoms danced with the
wind, teasing the two lovers.  Keiichi and Belldandy, looking past the
photographer--who was Skuld with her invention, the Banpei SLR-100
Photo-Mech--focused their gaze towards the powder-blue sky, towards the
future.  The committed couple stood preserved within a moment of frozen
time, washed in the golden rays of an approving sun.  The day was
perfect.  The cherry blosoms were even unseasonably early.  Urd looked
away and moved in front of the picture. 

    Keiichi looked at the sleeping goddess and felt guilty for what he'd
caused.  Why did he strike her? He could've blamed it on the alcohol, but
he knew, alcohol or no, that deep beneath his mental defense-mechanisms
he blamed Belldandy for their lack of communication.  He shut this out of
his mind.  "What went wrong?" he murmured.  "Why did everything have to
change when we got married?" 

    The slumbering Belldandy did not answer.

    Keiichi, sitting at the edge of the bed, leaned down to give her a soft
kiss on the forehead before gently getting off the bed, though the goddess 
did not look at rest, her body tensed as if being pinned down.  He hoped 
Urd could provide some insight.  "About the wedding..."

    Urd looked at him and her worn face briefly cracked a smile.

    "Weren't you there?" he asked.  

    "Of course I was.  Why?" 

    "Then why aren't you in any of the wedding photos?" 

    "I, uh..."

    He crouched to the floor to pick up the book of wedding photos he had
dropped when Megumi thought his son had vanished. He opened it up to the
first page where the bridal party portrait was stored. He meant to point
out her absence but noticed that Urd indeed was present. 

    "See, I was there," Urd affirmed, looking over his shoulder.  Sure
enough, the photographs showed her with the bridal party, having her face
smothered with cake, and dancing with some boyfriend of hers, one of many
in an infinite parade. 

    Keiichi sat back down the edge of the bed wondering if he was over-
stressed from work.  Urd, sensing he was troubled, sat next to him.

    She asked him if everything was okay.  "It's my business 'cause that's 
my sister you're married to."

    Keiichi sighed. "I don't know why but the passion has gone. 
Belldandy and I were beginning to drift apart so we decided that maybe a
child in our life would be the answer.  I was confident that my job hunt
would be successful so I felt having a child would easily be within our
means.  But after so many failed attempts to get pregnant we gave up." 

    Looking over at her sister, Urd felt a deep sadness that was slowly
engulfing her soul.  

    "Things did not improve, but a year later we received news that
Belldandy was pregnant. So miraculously one day we were blessed with
Kosuke-chan. I was so completely caught off-guard, still without regular
work and all. Even so, it was a happy day but once we fell into our daily
routines, our drifting apart continued." 

    "Were you ever intimate with her again?" Urd asked.

    "Not since pregnancy. Before she gave birth, I understood--she didn't 
want to harm the baby."

    "That's nonsense!" 

    "I realize that but you know how sensitive she is," Keiichi reminded
her, "but it was okay with me.  But afterwards, she continued to put it
off complaining that she was always tired from looking after Kosuke-chan." 

    "It happens."

    "I didn't know what to do, how to get the fires of romance burning," 
Keiichi said looking at Urd, knowing she was always the one to make such
suggestions. 

    Unable to bear her brother-in-law's gaze, Urd looked at her wrinkled
hands and tried to sound cheerful.  "Hey, don't look at me."  She did her
best to smile.

    "I wanted to help ease her load but I had to work long hours," 
Keiichi said guiltily, "had to..."  Was he escaping something?  "I don't
understand, Urd.  She's... distant." 




    As the sun struggled to rise and begin the day, clusters of dark grey
clouds hovered above the city, suffocating its source of life-giving
rays; their shadows glided over still and silent rooftops.  The homes of
Nekomi buried their faces into the army of trees, while its residents,
stone-faced and inert, evacuated down the streets for the daily race. The
neighbourhood birds, in spite of their exposure to dim, diffused
lighting, chirped and whistled the morning start. 



    Already gorging himself quickly on his first meal of the day, Keiichi
hurriedly approached the door with his shirt untucked and his suit jacket
thrown over his shoulder. Megumi, interrupting her meal, got up to say
good-bye.  As they got closer to each other their pulse rate quickened
and their hormones surged into overdrive. 

    "I wish you didn't have to go that awful place," begged Megumi as she 
put her hands around her brother's waist.

    "I have some important work to do before everything's ready for the 
conference tomorrow," he explained, placing a tender hand on his sister's 
cheek before he added, "I'll be back as soon as I can."

    "Oh, Keiichi," was all the trembling Megumi could say before she 
yielded her lips to her brother; the passionate kiss would not be 
sufficient to douse the burning in her nether-region.

    Keiichi, longing for the ultimate expression, loved his sister so.

    "You forgot your lunch, Dear," a frosty Belldandy interrupted.  The
same time she handed her husband the bagged meal, she did a curt wave of 
her free hand, casting a light glow around the now-divided kissers. She
glared at Urd who knew too well to say anything.

    Keiichi relaxed, the fire gone, and, seemingly unaware of what
happened, he left.  Megumi, also forgetting the entire incident as if her
mind had been reset, remembered that she had to help Kosuke-chan in the
bathroom. 

    Belldandy became all too aware that she was alone with Urd again.

	

    In the temple living room, Skuld, still in her silk pyjamas, sat by
the television.  She nonchalantly smoked a cigarette, despite temple
rules to the contrary, expecting the wisps of smoke to readily mingle
with the aroma of breakfast that Belldandy had been producing in the
kitchen.  She used a pop can as an ash tray. A newscast told her about
recent events involving collapsing stars and disappearing galaxies,
reassuring the viewer that this natural phenomenon happened all the time. 

    Skuld wasn't so sure. "Yeah, right.  Not at this current rate of blue
shifting!" she said aloud, but not really caring at all--not when her own
personal world was collapsing.

    Over the din of the TV set, Belldandy's lilting voice floated across,
informing Skuld that breakfast was getting cold.  She extinguished the
stub of rolled tobacco, poking the butt into the can before discreetly
disposing the crumpled aluminum into a wastebasket.  She stood up and her
clothes began to blur into an incandescent glow that continued to distort
the material until it became a fluid mass to be reshaped at will.  As the
light subsided, the garment had reformed into a simple black dress. 

    The television, now alone, continued its incessant barrage of 
radiation.



    Urd, whose skeletal physique hid itself in an over-sized brown
sweater, pleaded with her younger sister who had decided to busy herself
with the washing up.  "I'm being punished by Kami-sama, cut-off from
Yggdrasil.  Why can't you forgive me? The past is past." 

    "Your job is with the past, please stop messing with the present." 
Belldandy grided as she abraded the soiled dishes. 

    "Look at me!" Urd pleaded, trying to show her premature aging and
that her own life-force was nearly drained.  To the trained goddess eye,
it was quite clear that Urd's aging was caused not naturally due to
genetic programming or from lack of thyroid hormones--since she was not
originally a three-dimensional human being--but by rapid cell/matter
degeneration.  "I have to convert my own mass into energy just to exist." 

    Still facing the sink, Belldandy hugged her housecoat around her before
she continued with the purification.

    "I'm dying."
    
    Bell fought back her tears. "But it's your own damn fault.  Why must
I feel responsible for you."  She tried running more water into the sink,
louder, hoping to drown the sound of her escaping tears, losing them in the 
torrent. 

    "I'm not asking for pity!"

    "Please..." Belldandy struggled to say it but could only change the 
subject.  She pulled out a white card that was magnetized to the 
refrigerator, pausing to read it before speaking again. "Do you know 
that Kenji will be getting married next week?"  She held out the 
invitation, a dead ringer for the card that Kenji had sent Skuld.

    Not bothering to wait for a response, Belldandy continued. "How it will
be a beautiful ceremony...like my own," she predicted, "and a good time 
will be had by all."  Her smile lied.

    Skuld walked in but nearly turned away at the mention of Kenji.

    "Good morning, Skuld.  You're coming to the wedding, right?"

    Skuld saw the the white card for a moment before it caught the light,
reflecting it sharply into her eyes.  She blinked, only to involuntarily 
shiver.  She said nothing.

    "Everyone in the family has been invited of course," added Belldandy

    Urd raised an eyebrow.

    "We didn't know where you were, so he couldn't invite you," she 
explained as she turned to dry the porcelain, making sure to remove any
evidence of taint.

    Urd was fed-up with the guilt trip. "Like you didn't allow me at your
wedding?" 

    "Could we talk something other than weddings?" Skuld requested as she 
sat down by the breakfast table. 

    Belldandy accelerated her cleansing ritual, polishing every visible 
surface with intense travail, before finally collapsing from the overwork.
Urd grabbed her, softening her landing. "She's fainted again!"

    "Big Sister!"  the youngest cried. But before any further action could 
be taken, they heard Megumi scream and they rushed to the bathroom where 
she was with the child.

    "I'm going crazy" blustered a shaken Megumi, kneeling by the toilet. 
The toddler was nowhere.  

    He then suddenly reappeared again before their astonished eyes.

    "It's happening again," Urd said.

    "Again?" both Skuld and Megumi cried in unison.

    Urd looked with concern at Keiichi's sister.  "Megumi, it happened at 
the bath tub, remember?"

    "When?" she replied, puzzled.

    "Last night!" Urd barked.

    Megumi scratched her head. "Uh, last night? I... don't recall..."

    "This is the second time Kosuke has momentarily vanished?" Skuld 
attempted to confirm.  She wondered why she always missed out in the 
action.

    "Sister," Urd said to Belldandy, now standing out in the hall, having
recovered sufficiently to come over.  "It wasn't your spell, was it?"

    She hesitated, not sure of the situation. "N-no.  It was a light 
spell.  This shouldn't happen."

    Kosuke ran out into the arms of his mother as Megumi, Skuld and Urd 
followed.

    "It might be an anomaly caused by bugs," Skuld deduced.  Good old bugs,
she thought. She could always count on them as the object of blame.

    Belldandy knelt beside Kosuke-chan and waved her hand above him.  A 
warm glow permeated the child.  "No, he seems fine." 

    "Maybe there is some sort of magic portal in there?" Megumi said as she
got up to return to the bathroom but found herself re-entering from the
other side of the hall, entering from a different door.  The three 
goddesses looked on puzzled.  

    "Um," she said, miffed.  Megumi promptly turned back and re-entered 
from the bathroom door.  Refusing to be defeated, she stood in that doorway
and looked in.  Instead of the bathroom, Megumi saw the other end of the 
hall, past the three goddesses who were looking not at her but at the back 
of someone looking into the doorway.  It was her.  She looked back from 
where she was standing to see the goddesses looking at her and, behind 
them, another Megumi was standing in the doorway with her head turned away.

    "Holy shit!" she exclaimed.  




    At the offices of FTIC, in walked a towering figure, a pretty man
with short, platinum blonde tresses. He wore a candy-red trench coat that
flowed with his every graceful movement like a cape.  His business suit
was a matte black which only enhanced his glaring fruit-basket coloured
tie.  Without effort, he majestically approached two office ladies. 

    "Good afternoon, Mr. President," they said in unison.

    "We must prepare for the conference tomorrow at 8 am, the worldwide 
link-up where thousands will connect to experience our newest technology."

    The two secretaries maintained their smiles.

    "And with our exclusive satellite, we'll monopolize the internet so
Birugeitsu multimedia project 'Portals 99' will become the one true
operating system." That is the media-friendly explanation, he thought, as
our various VR devices for the internet have been promoted as improving
the humans' way of life but they are in reality designed to ensure the
dependence, and the longevity, of FTIC.  "How I love a monopoly,
especially when it's me!" 

    The red cape glided into his office.

    One of the secretaries commented to the other, "Must be gay." 

    "All the handsome ones are."

    "Too bad," the first one giggled.

    He popped his head out of his office. 

    The ladies abruptly cut their bantering and resumed their polite 
posture.

    "Oh, and put me in touch with our test pilot--Kenji." This program has 
one bug that neither Kenji nor his little goddess friend can fix, he 
calculated.

    Then he laughed out loud.




    Urd, Belldandy and Skuld whipped their heads back and forth to assess
the phenomenon as if they were spectators at a tennis tournament.  Skuld
moved towards Megumi--the one whose back was turned--and thoughtfully
examined the door.  She pulled out her calculator and began depressing at
hyper-speed a sequence of keys.  She pondered for a moment. 

    "What is it?" Belldandy asked.

    "Something has twisted this area of space," Skuld figured. While 
facing her two sisters, Skuld causually shoved Megumi through the 
doorway so she would reappear again behind them.

    "Hey!" the abused one complained. She turned around gave a fierce kick
into the doorway.  Skuld, on the other side, yelped in surprise.

    "Oy!"

    Urd was getting tired of the shenanigans.  "What exactly is going
on?  Why is there a twist in space?"

    Skuld soothingly rubbed her heinie.  "The space that this room 
occupies has been twisted back into itself so that it's become a closed 
system with an inside but but no outside."

    "Oh, a geometric transformation undertaken in space," Urd understood.

    "Geometric...?" Megumi interjected.  "Oh, topology?"

    "Yep!" Urd grinned.

    Skuld grabbed a scrap piece of paper and tore off a thin, long strip
which she then folded into a cylinder.  She held it out for Megumi to see.
"Ignoring that the paper has thickness, how many sides has it got?"

    Megumi glanced at Urd who rolled her eyes.  Belldandy smiled as she
continued to hug her son.  Uh-oh, Megumi thought, here she goes again. She
decided it was best to humour her.

    "Well, there's an inside and an outside; two," she felt stupid stating
the obvious.  However, she saw Skuld unfold the cylinder and proceeded to
put a twist in the paper before rejoining the ends with some tape.  The end
result was a warped loop, looking nothing like a cylinder.

    "How many sides has it got now?" Skuld asked again.

    "Uh, still two?" she answered stoically.

    Skuld handed her the strange object.  "Try drawing a continuous line 
until it joins up at the end."

    Megumi did so and, too her astonishment, drew an unbroken line that
covered every visible surface area until the line returned to the point 
where she started.

    "So, how many sides?"

    "One?" Megumi replied. "Is this what happened to me?"

    "That conundrum," the goddess explained, stretching her arms out 
towards both doorways, "involves more dimensions than you can possibly
handle, but my analogy of the Moebius Strip, as this loop is called, I
think gives you the idea."

    "A Moebius strip?" Megumi wondered, glancing at the doorway. "The mind 
reels!  So what do we do?"

    Urd laughed.  "I'm glad you said that before Ms. Physics here got into
discussing the Doppler Effect."

    She's more right than she realizes, Skuld thought before deciding
against bringing that one up.  "No doubt there's a bug in the system, but
where?" 

    As the goddess looked about the room, Megumi had a brainstorm.  "Is 
this what caused Kosuke-chan to vanish?"

    "Possibly," said a concentrating Skuld, while she investigated her hair
before grabbing the cowlick protruding from the top-centre of her head, and
absently pulling it down her forehead.

    Belldandy, who had been hugging her son on her lap, noticed that he
was playing with a small furry creature.  "A bug!" she cried, snapping
Skuld out of her trance; instantly, she snatched the octopedal creature
from Kosuke-chan's hands. 

    "That mine!" he cried, helplessly reaching out as his mother held onto
him.

    Skuld looked at the innocuous entity in her hand with intensity. She
briefly held it up before twisting it's neck with a nauseating crunch.  Its
existence cut short, the white-furred bug sublimated into a smoke cloud.

    Horrified at what he had seen, Kosuke screamed.

    His mother was also unnerved by her young sister's callous display.
"Skuld!  How could you be so thoughtless?"

    "You know I had to destroy it," Skuld protested.  "Besides, it's not
a real, living animal--just a symptom!"

    "A child doesn't know that!" Belldandy screamed back. She tried her 
best to calm her wailing child.

    Skuld was silenced.

    The eldest goddess went to the doorway where Megumi had been 
standing, and walked into the next room without reappearing back through
the other door, local space having been reset to normal parameters.  Urd's 
voice could be heard in the next room.  "Where is she?"

    Skuld jumped.  "Megumi?"

    "She was standing in the doorway."

    "She was..." Skuld started, "standing in the--?"  She couldn't finish
her thought while the grave peril became obvious.

    The aging Urd could discern the panic in Skuld's eyes.  She knew.

    "Maybe she's somewhere else?" Skuld prayed.

    The eldest sister began to boil. "Skuld! Tell me what happened--don't
say you don't know!" 

    "Sh-she must've been caught in the flux.  When space re-formed, the 
bridge between the two ends disconnected, throwing Megumi outside of space/
time altogether."

    "There must be something we can do to save her," said Belldandy.

    "How?  There's no way a three-dimensional human being can survive as a 
five dimensional object. She's everywhere but nowhere," Skuld mourned. 
"Megumi is dead."



END OF PART TWO


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