Sailor Moon Fan Fiction ❯ Boil and Bubble: A Tale of Two Witches ❯ Eudial at the Wheel ( Chapter 3 )

A/N: WARNING: Some minor swearing in this chapter. Read at your own risk. Author not responsible for loss of childlike innocence, righteous anger, limb mutations, or the Cold War.

 

Chapter the Third: Eudial at the Wheel—In which two witches drive each other crazy and the author makes yet another bad pun, all the while glaring menacingly at the little known third wall.

 

“Erm, hello?” said Mimete, wondering how she was going to explain this.

 

“What is it?” snapped the good doctor, “Aren't you supposed to be on the plane by now? Cell phone calls are discouraged on airplanes, you know.”

 

“Well, actually, no.” Mimete twisted a lock of hair around her finger, “We're not on the plane. The thing is…the thing is Eudial lost track of the boarding passes.”

 

“What?!” yelped Eudial, trying to wrestle the phone away from her orange compatriot, “There's no way you're pinning this on me!”

 

“Let go!” shrieked Mimete.

 

“Dr. Tomoe,” Eudial yelled into the receiver in Mimete's hand, “Don't listen to her! She's the one that -

 

Mimete cut Eudial off by wrenching the phone away from her. She held it high above her head as Eudial's hands slapped at her sides, reaching for it.

 

Around them, travelers began to stare. A mother walked out of the restroom with her small child, took one look at the disgruntled pair, and promptly ushered the child back into the safety of the stall.

 

“What was that?” came Tomoe's voice.

 

“Nothing, nothing at all!” squealed Mimete. “Just a little …(arg get off get off you idiot)… static!” She kicked Eudial square in the stomach.

 

“I am very busy. What is it that you need?”

 

“We need to book another flight. Ours already left because of Eudial's stupidity. I tried to stop her, Dr. Tomoe, I really did! She just wouldn't listen to me!” Caught up in her performance, Mimete draped one hand dramatically across her forehead, tearing up. Big mistake.

 

As soon as Mimete's hand was otherwise occupied, Eudial saw that she had an ideal opening to dispatch of the other witch. She tackled the treacherous, lying creature to the ground and dove for the cell phone.

 

“Mimete,” Eudial said, panting heavily into the receiver, “is lying, doctor.”

 

“Is there a point to all this or are you two bent on wasting my time even when you're thousands of miles away?”

 

“We missed the plane. Because of Mimete,” Eudial said. (Mimete, of course, screamed her protests in the background.) “We need to book a new flight,” Eudial soldiered on.

 

“I see,” said Tomoe. “However, I'm not paying the expensive fees to fly you two idiots out to California twice.”

 

“You can't mean…” Eudial trailed off in horror, aghast at the possibility of actually having to pay for her own flight. For a work-related trip. Mimete would die. No, wait—Mimete would die, Eudial would find some way of bringing her back to life, and then she would kill her again. Violently. Preferably, it would involve snakes. Big venomous ill-tempered snakes.

 

“Yes,” said Tomoe, with what Eudial felt was far too much pleasure, “I'm not paying for your plane tickets. I'm booking you a rental car instead. You pay for gas.”

 

“What?!” That was even worse than paying for her own flight! “You can't do that!”

 

“Of course I can. Some togetherness will do you good—promote team spirit. Enjoy.” The phone clicked and the dial tone droned on into Eudial's ear.

 

Tomoe would die.

 

Eudial was going to kill him with fire.

 

“Well, did Tomoe fix the error caused by your stupidity yet, Snail Lady?” Mimete snapped.

 

Right after she found some snakes for Mimete, that is. Eudial didn't know much about snakes, but she wondered if there were any that could both squeeze their victims to death and inject large quantities of slow-acting poison at the same time. Whether such a reptile existed or not, she thought that anything with the words `hissing' `fiery' or `painful writhing demise' in its name would do nicely.

 

With this pleasant thought in mind, Eudial stomped off to wait for the car.

 

~

 

As anyone who's tried to book a rental car on short notice knows, you don't get the pick of the litter. (Hell, sometimes you can't manage to get something halfway drivable if you book it months in advance.) However, the car that the attendant tossed Eudial the keys to actually didn't look that bad.

 

It was a somewhat faded shade of brown, not exactly what one would call attractive, but tolerable. The windshield appeared to be intact and relatively dead bug free. There were no visible bullet holes.

 

When they had picked up the keys, there had even been talk of air-conditioning.

 

There had also been talk of a working radio. (Eudial, however, knew that this was a lie. The gods had never been that good to her and they wouldn't suddenly start now.)

 

“Well,” said the attendant, “everything seems to be set up here. Now, your employer has already paid for two weeks of rental. There will be a small fee charged for every day that the car is late.”

 

“Fee? What sort of fee?”

 

The attendant told her.

 

Eudial gasped at the figure. It cost more than an arm and a leg; they wanted her soul too. I'll get you for this, Tomoe! And your little Kaoli, too. Eudial could perhaps be forgiven for this uncharacteristically witchy thought (and the author can perhaps be forgiven for this totally characteristic pun and subsequent fourth wall breach) because, at that point she realized that Tomoe was just plain evil.

 

Well, okay, Eudial may have had an inkling of this before but the cheap bastard had only paid for a measly two weeks? Two weeks to drive across this giant stinking dirt clod of a country, apprehend their target, and drive back? The man had to be out of his mind.

 

Or, still more disturbing, he had to be bent on forcing Eudial to pay for her own transportation in some form. The mere idea of it made Eudial want very badly to cause lasting physical harm to someone in her vicinity, preferably Mimete. But sadly, this particular course of action had been heavily discouraged by the Tomoe-ordered anger management instructors. (Which Eudial also had to partially pay for! Why hadn't she destroyed Tomoe earlier? She thought a moment and supposed that there was always the matter of her salary. That could've been it.)

 

While Eudial seethed, the attendant had wandered away, apparently assuming that the transaction was over.

 

“Are we going or what?” Mimete snapped, arms crossed.

 

Eudial grunted in response and slid the key into the car door. “You'll be riding in the trunk if you don't watch your mouth,” she said. Suddenly a beautiful idea snapped into Eudial's brain like an overstretched rubber band or an overextended postal worker who comes in to work one day and does horrible things to his co-workers. Eudial smirked at Mimete as the orange-haired witch made her way to the passenger seat.

 

“And by the way,” she called, swinging into the driver's seat, “You're paying for gas.”

 

“What?” Mimete sputtered, but all protests died in her throat as she made contact with the seat. “Arg! What in the name of Gustav Valcignione is that smell?”

 

Eudial felt her olfactory senses staging a full scale revolt complete with guillotines while her nostrils attempted to recede into her nasal cavity.

 

“Ah—damn!” She pushed open the door full force. It swung on its hinges, almost banging into the side of the car.

 

And thus Eudial and Mimete discovered the reason that they were able to acquire this car on such short notice.

 

Something, or perhaps several somethings, had clearly died in there. And it/they had not been well at the time, make no mistake.

 

Gasping for air, Eudial and Mimete leapt from the car in tandem and ran back into the airport.

 

~

 

“This is unacceptable!” Eudial growled, banging her fist on the rental car company's customer service desk.

 

“I'm sorry ma'am but it's the only one we have available.” The attendant fiddled with his standard issue tie, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

 

“I want to talk to your manager!” Eudial pounded her fist again, this time with more emphasis.

 

The manager, a portly older man, scurried out from the office and listened to Eudial's tale of woe (delivered in the form of an angry spit-flying rant that was nonetheless filled with woe.)

 

Soon enough, Eudial had managed to squeeze an extra week out of the company for free. The portly manager also provided them with free air-fresheners from the airport gift shop. They were shaped like pine trees, but smelled a bit like wintergreen mints.

 

All this just went to prove what Eudial and Mimete both thought of as their personal philosophy (although they would each be shocked to learn that the other subscribed to it as well): if you yell and complain a lot, you generally get what you want.

 

~

 

On their way back to the car, a strange man flagged them down.

“Hey there you guys are! I've been looking all over for you!” he said. He was carrying two familiar bags. This would have been very creepy if Eudial had failed to recognize him as the official who had failed to find their boarding registrations in time for them to catch their flight. (The fact that the plane had already been taking off the runway less than two minutes after they came up to him was irrelevant, in Eudial's mind. His sorry face was still permanently imprinted on her ever-growing `People Who Have Pissed Me Off and Will Not Survive the Transition to the New World Order Should I Become Dictator' list.)

 

“Guess what?” he said, bobbing up and down with barely contained joy. “We found your bags! They were accidentally put in the hold of a cargo flight, isn't that funny?”

 

Eudial's expression remained blank. It was about as funny as a root canal without the benefit of anesthetic.

 

“So, yeah, and I remembered about you guys leaving your bags and I just couldn't let you leave without them. Then they'd just sit around cluttering up the lost and found for a few weeks. The people at the facility told me that I have such a bad reaction to clutter—they think that's why I acted the way I did when I passed that melon display in the supermarket where that old woman was just moving all the melons around, taking them out of their perfect rows and I got so angry—” his face began to redden disturbingly.

 

Acting quickly, Eudial grabbed their bags, cutting him off. “Yes, that's all very interesting, but we have to go now…” Motioning to Mimete, she booked it to the car.

 

Quite often Eudial felt that she just wasn't paid enough to deal with all these lunatics.

 

Speaking of lunatics, Mimete tried uselessly to hang the mint-scented air fresheners over the rear-view mirror. They really weren't helping. The air fresheners only succeeded in mixing with the foul odor, so the car smelled like dead-vomit-covered cat with a hint of refreshing wintergreen mint mist.

 

The combination made Eudial feel sick, and feeling sick made Eudial angry. More angry than usual, anyway.

 

So it was completely understandable when she put the key in the ignition, started up the car … and floored it.

 

They were on their way now, and the faster they got there, the better.