"I hate training," said Mika, tears streaming down her face.

"Doesn’t everyone?" asked Kei. "I’m fairly sure it wasn’t meant to be fun. Practice for the wonderful world of badfic, and all that."

"What does chopping onions have to do with badfic?"

"To be honest, I have no idea. Come on, home sweet home beckons."

Walking into Response Center #471, the two trainees were almost deafened by the blaring of the console. Mika curled up on the threshold, her fingers stuffed into her ears. "Turn it off! Turn it off!" she yelled.

Kei didn’t move. "Turn it off yourself!" he yelled back. "This is probably a training exercise! Remember the not being a doormat thing?!"

"Oh! Right!" Mika staggered to the console and slammed her hand down on the ‘Mute’ button. Kei took his fingers out of his ears and relaxed. He shouldn’t have bothered. "Ano, Azumi-kun? It’s not a training exercise."

"It isn’t? You mean—but we haven’t even finished training yet! Let me see that!" Kei rushed to the screen and read off the message there. " ‘Memo to Agents Kei and Mika: Did we mention your basic training is complete? You are now officially authorized to protect all continua in need. Enclosed find your first mission. The Sunflower Official.’" He slumped his shoulders. "Great. That’s just…great."

Mika patted him on the shoulder. "It’ll be fine. We’ve been trained for this, and they wouldn’t spring something really awful on the new kids. Can you set up the disguises, please? I want to wash my eyes out."

"You aren’t the only one," said Kei. "The Sue does too, if the title is any guide."

"Please don’t compare me to a Sue," Mika said over the sound of running water. "What’s it called?"

" The Girl With the Tortured Eyes," Kei told her as he shoved his CD player into his pack. "Do you think I could bring my guitar?"

Mika came out of the bathroom and started filling her own pack. "I don’t think so. It wouldn’t be very easy to carry." She picked up what looked to Kei like a lump of pale orange fabric and stuffed it into her bag, following it with a cheerleader's baton. Kei looked at her curiously. "I weighted it with lead," she explained. "I’m just bringing it in case. What disguises should we use?"

Kei looked at the Words. "That…could be a problem. The prologue—sorry, ‘prolouge’—and first chapter take place in a mundane, Earth-type setting, but it switches over to Narnia at the end of the first chapter."

"Hmmm…" She tapped her chin. "Would it be possible for us to disguise ourselves as dryads? We would look enough like humans to pass in the real world, and we would still be able to get into the Narnian camp." She looked at Kei nervously. "Or is that a bad idea?"

He grinned. "It’s a great idea, Sachiho-san! I'll set it up." He did so, and the two assassins stepped through the portal. Just before the portal closed behind them, Kei's hand reappeared and grabbed his CD player off of the console. Then they were gone.

* * *

"Oh, my…" Mika breathed, looking around at the undefined space. "Where are we?"

"Not sure," said Kei as he waved his CAD around. "The story doesn't say. We just go straight in, with no introduction."

"I could be wrong, but I think we're in the next room," Mika said. "I can hear the dialogue through the wall."

"Sounds about right," Kei agreed. "She can't see us, but we can hear her moaning."

"That doesn't sound like a British accent to me," commented Mika as she looked at the Words. "Surely no one sounds so different when they're drunk?"

Kei looked at her. "How do you know what a British accent sounds like?"

Mika blushed. "Eriol-kun…when we were, you know, dating, in That Fic, he used to help me with my English." That Fic referred to the Card Captor Sakura fanfiction from which both Mika and Kei had been rescued. Mika had been written to fill the role of Other Woman, and her affection for her former boyfriend had yet to fade completely. As for Kei's affection for his own former girlfriend…well, there was a reason he wasn't going to be PPCing Card Captor Sakura any time in the near future.

"Ah." Kei glanced around. "Hey, look! Description!"

Mika wrinkled her nose. The small room was filthy. "I think I preferred to go without. So, would you like to keep the charge list?"

"Sure. I warn you, though, my handwriting's not the neatest, even when my fingers aren't branches." Kei pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil and started to write awkwardly. "Inaccurate British accent, being an abused orphan, having a long self-regarding descriptive scene--"

"Having 'slanted dark brown eyes with forest green rings and golden specks'," Mika contributed, one eye on the words. "It seems the golden specks are ringed with dark lashes, as well. That's not possible, is it?"

"Sachiho-san. Assertiveness."

"Oh, right. Sorry." Mika looked back at the scene in front of her. "I do not think I like this Lorelei Shrine very much. She is making herself quite unnecessarily abused. And--is that a mini-Sue-dragon?"

It was. "Loral" scampered out of the story and started prancing around, looking for attention.

"Not even being able to spell her own name," Kei noted. "We should kill it."

"Your hands are full. I'll take care of it." Mika stepped out into the hallway, bent carefully down by the mini-Sue-dragon, grabbed its neck, and twisted. Loral's neck snapped. Mika stood up, sniffling a little. "It's doing it a kindness, really," she said thickly. "The other minis would never let it live."

Kei patted her awkwardly. "I'll get the Sue, if you'd rather."

"Oh, I don't mind the Sues," said Mika brightly. "They deserve it. I'll get rid of her."

Lorelei Mary Sue Shrine angsted about her dead mother ("Her mother was a philosopher?" "You can actually get paid for that?") and then cried herself to sleep in the great wangst tradition.

"I think that's everything," Kei said. "We've got some time before she wakes up, I think. It's hard to tell."

"Well, I'm certainly not sleeping here." Mika looked around at the squalid room. "You can if you want to."

"Thanks, I will," said Kei. He stretched out on the floor and fell almost instantly asleep.

Mika looked at him pityingly. "Boys are so strange…"

* * *

"Azumi-kun?" whispered Mika. "Azumi-kun?" He didn't wake up. Mika sighed, then yelled into his ear, "Azumi-kun!"

He still woke up slowly. One of the signs of a new PPC recruit is that they do not catapult out of unconsciousness with a scream. "Wha's goin' on, Sachiho-san?"

"Well, Lorelei talked about how she has no friends because all the children in the orphanage are British and think she thinks she's better than they are, which I think is quite a fair point on their parts, and all the boys think she's attractive, and they saved her no food. I think they're trying to starve her." Mika looked pleased. "Even the Uncanon is against her."

"Grand. I guess that explains why she didn't talk to us. She should be headed to Narnia soon, let's just--oh, nooo." Kei had finally opened his eyes enough to look at the scene in front of him. "Sachiho-san? Don't look behind you."

Human curiosity being what it is, Mika immediately turned around. She squeaked and clawed at her eyes with her hands. "Kyaaa!"

The two agents had arrived at a rape scene--to be more precise, an attempted rape scene--to be even more precise, an incredibly poorly-written attempted rape scene. They had not been ready for the experience.

"I'm not watching this," muttered Kei. "Not for what we get paid."

But nothing could prevent him from hearing. "Stop fightin’ you lil’ scrubber"

"That is punctuation abuse on several counts," said Mika with unnatural calm. "I am now going to portal directly to Narnia. We will miss the Sue running into an uncanonical wardrobe, but I think that is a price we are both willing to pay."

"You do that."

* * *

It was cold, wooded, and blissfully canonical. The assassins relaxed. As Kei had already discovered, that was never a good idea. The Sue came running through the woods on bleeding feet. "Unnatural pain tolerance," Kei noted, "and we missed the bit where Professor Kirke's house is still standing and became an orphanage. I didn't know the wardrobe allowed you to travel in time."

"The whole point of some of the books was that Narnian time and outside time run at different paces," Mika disagreed.

"Yeah, sure, but it was always in order. You could go forward a year or a thousand years, sure, but you never went back. She's gone to the Witch's Narnia from a time after the destruction of the world. Temporal distortion."

Mika looked down and giggled. The effect was interesting on a rowan tree, giving the impression that there was an extremely local breeze. "Is it just me, or did Aslan ask her to forgive the snow? What has the snow done wrong?"

"Haven't the faintest idea." Kei looked down with interest. "Aslan's carrying her off to…ack!" With a strange sensation of twisting, they vanished and reappeared outside Cair Paravel.

Trees cannot throw up, a fact for which both the assassins were very thankful. "Azumi-kun…charge…spatial distortion…please," said Mika.

"Way ahead of you. It can go with…huh, guess it was just a regular winter, not The Winter…flowery description, lusting after the High King, and creation of mini-dragon 'Narian'. C'mere, Narian." The small creature trotted across the clearing and curled up around Mika's roots. "Oh, and making herself Aslan's special charge. And creation of a centaur named 'Eli', by all that's canon."

"I get him, too," Mika said. She looked disturbingly happy about it. Yes, Mika Sachiho was fitting into the PPC just fine. "And charge her for making Peter angry about not getting to help her. That is, if you don't mind."

Kei grimaced. "And the assertiveness was going so well, too. But, yes, urgh. We're up for a time shift, I think. You want to portal ahead, or spend a few weeks--three, I think--wandering around Narnia?"

"Portal, I think, unless you'd rather not. I hadn't realized how strange it felt not to be able to bend down."

"Hey, you're a bendy kind of tree! Try being an oak; I can't even twitch my knees!"

* * *

Three weeks later (and also ten seconds later, by the wonder that was the Remote Activator), two dryads walked stiffly into 'the clearing by the hills' where Lorelei-Sue had been taken so that she could train.

"Aslan was never this involved with the lives of the monarchs," Mika noted. "And--he gave her a mirror?!"

Kei glowered at the Words, which clearly showed the Sue admiring herself in a full-length mirror. "And she has it in a tent, no less. I'm charging, and--oh, look, long-winded self-aggrandizing description. Bah."

"That," said Mika, "is not a tunic. A tunic is much longer than that. That is a poor approximation of a modern shirt. Also, the sleeves cannot both be long and stop at her forearms. I do not like this clothing description. I do not like it at all." Eventually, it dawned on Mika that she had heard nothing from her partner for some time. "Azumi-kun? Is everything all right?"

"Belly shirt…" Kei mumbled, his eyes wide and glazed. "Must…lust…" He started walking toward the tent where the Sue was still getting dressed.

"Azumi-kun, I really think you shouldn't do that."

"So beautiful…an angel…"

"Azumi-kun, I'm really very sorry about this." With a 'THWACK!', Mika's lead-waited cheerleader's baton hit Kei on the back of the head…er, leaves. He fell straight forward, in the manner of the best class of drunks and, as it transpired, Sue-influenced assassins who had been turned into dryads.

The remaining agent put her baton away and turned her unconscious partner over onto his back. "I'm sorry, honestly I am. I just didn't want you to get into trouble for lusting after a Mary Sue. Don't worry, I'm sure the Medical Department can make it better." So saying, she turned back to the story and was forced to run--well, stride quickly--after the Sue, who was being taught self-defense by Eli.

"Wouldn't it be a better idea for her to be taught by a biped?" Mika wondered to herself. "After all, a centaur can't demonstrate many 'new moves' that would be suitable for a human. Also, numbers in a text should really be written out in full."

The Words said they kept practicing for half an hour, so Mika waited patiently until they had finished and were eating lunch. Sign of a new agent #23: still retains some vestiges of patience. She did, however, feel her calm wavering as she watched them eat and remembered how long it had been since she had eaten herself. Still, there would be time to handle things, when Canon could be officially declared broken.

It was not long in coming. At the moment Mika thought this, High King Peter came meandering through the wood, humming 'a favorite narnian festival jig'. The new mini-dragon 'narnian' followed at his heels, humming along.

"Excuse me?" Mika exclaimed. "A chapter ago, Eli was a centaur. Is it so hard to remember these things?"

Peter tried to get closer to see who she was, and Lorelei…attacked him. Mika blinked.

"I do not think that is a good idea. After all, attacking one's monarch constitutes high treas-" Mika's eyes lit up halfway through the word, "-on. Hmm. That does present possibilities."

Lorelei knocked Peter and herself off a ledge and had a flashback when he pinned her down to stop her attacking him. Mika was not in the mood to appreciate it, especially when the suddenly-lovestruck Peter noted that her eyes were 'a strange gray, almost silver with black specks that continued to draw him in'.

Mika flipped hurriedly through the charge list. "Now, that's just wrong! At the beginning of the story, her eyes were brown, green, and gold. That's not the kind of thing you forget very easily. So, that's color-changing eyes, then, and--"

With a jolt, the chapter shifted as Eli introduced Peter to Lorelei, to the accompaniment of an unattached fragment of story, "Even though Lorelei loved being with". Mika scribbled it down for the record, then continued to list charges as the scene continued.

"Being rude to your monarch; requiring an apology from your monarch for walking through the forest, which does, after all, belong to him; anti-British discrimination without capitalization, to whit, 'brit' used in a derogatory manner; being needlessly judgmental; finding enemies attractive; declaring your monarch your enemy; referring to the High King as arrogant without cause; causing a Cute Nickname, to whit, 'Lore'; in-text author's notes; and annoying me profoundly." She decided not to bother with an OOC reading on Peter. For one thing, the requisite CAD was still in Kei's pack, which she had placed under his head as a pillow. For another, she wasn't willing to wait.

Yes, indeed. Mika Sachiho had lost her patience. The PPC being what it was, she might never find it again. So she was very pleased when she looked at the Words to find that she had 'at least three weeks' before another chapter was scheduled to begin.

Gathering her things, she instructed Narian and narnian to stay with Kei until she came back, then ran into the clearing, doing her best impression of a hurried dryad messenger.

"Please, miss!" she gasped. "You have to come! And Eli too!"

The Sue looked up sulkily. "Why should I?"

"I don't know, miss, I'm just the messenger. I was sent to bring you--"

Before she had to come up with a plausible location, Eli interrupted her. "Did Aslan send you?"

"Oh, no, sir," said Mika. "It was his father's order, sir. You have to come with me now."

"Aslan doesn't have a father," Lorelei said. "You're just lying to get me off by myself, aren't you, so you can--"

"Miss Lorelei, I am a female tree, you know," said Mika, trying not to grimace and largely succeeding. The Sue, unable to wrap her mind around the concept of 'lesbianism', subsided. "Besides, you won't be alone; Eli needs to come with you. And Aslan certainly does have a father, though not many people have met him. It's a great honor to have come to his attention."

This combination of truth, canon, and misdirection finally worked. Lorelei and Eli followed Mika into the wood, where Mika opened a portal. "If you would just step through here, miss, sir."

They did so. Mika followed. While the two Uncanons were looking around them at the winter wood, she hit them both very hard with her branches. This was harder to do than it may sound, since Eli was flickering back and forth from centaur to faun. Still, she had long branches, and she managed.

By the time they came around again, Mika had managed to tie them up, or at least to the ground. Since fine motor control was not a noted skill of trees, dryad or otherwise, the process had featured a staple gun and thin lengths of chain, but it would do.

"Eli the centaur, or possibly faun," Mika said clearly, "you are charged by the Protectors of the Plot Continuum with the following offenses: being of unknown species, to whit, either centaur or faun; being overeager; being young and yet entrusted by Aslan with a task of such apparent import as taking care of a Mary Sue; training the Mary Sue; calling the Mary Sue by a cute nickname, to whit, 'kid'; and conspiracy to commit matchmaking between the Mary Sue and High King Peter the Magnificent of Narnia. You are also charged with sundry spelling, grammar, and punctuation offenses. The punishment for this is death. My apologies."

She picked up a rock, shook the snow off, and hit Eli repeatedly in the head. It was not a neat process, but Mika would not have survived in the PPC long if she minded too much. His body might be found, but it would be put down to execution of a suspected traitor--difficult to prove otherwise, with his face so smashed up. This was, after all, the White Witch's Narnia.

Satisfied, Mika turned to the Mary Sue, who was looking at her with mingled rage and terror. It was almost enough to make Mika smile.

"Lorelei Shrine," she began, "I do not have the full charge list, as my partner was managing it before you took control of him, but you are charged by the Protectors of the Plot Continuum with the following: having a tragic past; being abused and universally hated; causing an attempted rape scene; being important enough for Aslan to care about you; having unnaturally high pain tolerance; various apology-related offenses, to whit, causing Aslan to apologize for the snow and causing Peter to apologize for walking in his own woods; crimes too numerous to name against grammar, spelling, and punctuation; misrepresenting a British accent; anti-British discrimination without capitalization; failure to spell your own name correctly; creation of the mini-dragons 'Narian' and 'narnian'; creation of the mini-Sue-dragon 'Loral'; having a full-length mirror in your tent; having impossible eye color; employing fragmentary non-sentences, to whit, 'Even though Lorelei loved being with'; having color-changing eyes; committing urple description and cruelty to clothing; being rude to your monarch; causing cute nicknames, to whit 'kid' and 'Lore'; in-text author's notes; conspiracy to commit Petromance, conspiracy to create and humiliate a generic Other Woman character; causing a PPC Agent to have a lust-related reaction to your clothing; and, finally and most relevantly to your ultimate end, attacking your sovereign monarch.

"This qualifies as High Treason, which, taking place within the confines of Narnia and against a monarch of that realm, is subject to the penalty established by the great C.S. Lewis in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Shall I read the relevant passage for you?"

The Sue, unable to think of anything to say, glared at Mika with unnaturally-colored eyes. Mika produced a book from her pack, opened it to a marked page, and began to read.

" 'You at least know the magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belong to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill.' That's the White Witch speaking, by the way. Do you see where this is going?"

Apparently Lorelei did. She started to struggle. "You can't do this! Aslan won't let you!" she shouted. "He'll save me!"

Mika smiled, a bit sadly. "Aslan died to save Edmund from the Witch. Somehow, though, I doubt he would do as much for someone who's twisted him so far out of character so many times. Come along, Mary Sue. We have somewhere to go. It's the Emperor's orders, after all."

Some short time later, the White Witch found a dark-haired human girl tied up in chains outside her palace door. The note attached to her forehead with strange metal pins read:

* * *

"Ah," said Doctor Fitzgerald, looking over Kei's test results.

"Ah?" Neither Kei nor Mika liked the sound of that, on general principles.

"It seems, Agent Azumi, that you have an extremely specific allergy, almost certainly resulting from pre-recruitment badfic exposure to Pseudocanonica Propoetida Promiscua, also known as Slut!Possession!Sue, in her most toxic form. To put it simply, you suffer a luster-like reaction to the presence of a teenage girl in a midriff-baring top."

"So…I'm allergic to girls in belly shirts?"

"Broadly speaking, yes. I prescribe Anti-Lustin, to be carried on your person and injected when you encounter an allergen. If symptoms persist, your partner can knock you out again. Good job, by the way, Agent Sachiho," he added with a nod in Mika's direction. "Very neat."

"Thank you," she squeaked.

Something on Doctor Fitzgerald's desk beeped. He glanced at it, waving a hand at them. "Run along now, the pair of you. I've got a tortured Elf coming in."

* * *

As soon as the tired (and, in Kei's case, mildly concussed) pair reached their Response Center, Kei went out to pick up some Anti-Lustin. While he was out, the console beeped. In all innocence, Mika read the summary provided.

Kei returned, armed with Anti-Lustin, to find the console shuddering slightly from side to side. Further investigation showed that the console was shaking because Mika, cowering under it, was shaking. She was also whimpering.

"Make it go away, make it go away…"

"Ah, Sachiho-san? What's wrong?"

Suddenly, Kei found himself being hit with one hundred and fifteen pounds of wailing assassin. This is not a common experience, so he could be excused not knowing what to do. "There, there?" he tried, patting her on the back.

"The Uncanon! It burns! Like the eye of Sauron!" Mika wailed.

"New mission?" She nodded. "Don't worry, Sachiho-san," Kei said, maneuvering himself around so that he could read the console display without testing the strength of Mika's death grip. "I'm sure it's not…that…"

An epi-pen fell from his nerveless fingers and clattered on the floor. Kei stared at the display, mouth agape, eyes wide.

"Aslan preserve us…"

[Author's Note: Pseudocanonica Propoetida Promiscua is a semi-scientific term derived from: A) 'Pseudocanonica', an established term for Possession!Sues; B)the Propoetides, known via Ovid as 'the first to prostitute their bodies with fame' (translated by me); C)the Latin word for 'Promiscuous', in the feminine form.

Kei and Mika were recruited in the second mission of Agents Cygna and Janet, Mary Sue Department. They seem to be settling in nicely.

The quote in this mission comes from The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, which I do not own. All punishments and laws behind them are accurate as described.

The story PPC'd herein, The Girl with the Tortured Eyes, belongs to wide eyed dreamer, not to me. I do not want it.]

Next time on Nova: Some pairings just should not be. A geographic location cannot rule Narnia. A human bearing a centaur's children is not a happy human. All these obvious truths and more, ignored next time on: The PPC.