Well, here's the first part.
I played fast and loose with the fourth wall here, I hope it doesn't wear thin too quickly.
"I don't get why we have to do housecleaning for that old bastard," Ranma complained as he followed Tsukune down the neglected underpassages of Youkai Academy.
"The Headmaster said that the things we need to organize are too valuable and dangerous to leave to students on punishment detail or cleaning staff," Tsukune reasoned as he swept a flashlight from side to side ahead of them.
The corridors were largely unlit, what with most of lights having failed due the light bulb burning out or the wiring having corroded. Perhaps one in every five lights in the corridor was even remotely functional, and these usually flickered and sparked frequently, adding more to the horror-movie atmosphere than they took away.
Moka, Chopper, and Tobaki followed the pair of human boys, being the only members of the Committee who were either unwilling or unable to come up with a good excuse to avoid an afternoon of digging around in a magical closet.
"I don't know why Keito didn't want to join us. She might have family down here," Ranma said as his eyes followed the light. As it passed over the water-damaged walls and shattered flooring, the flashlight beam crossed no few number of giant spiders nesting in the perpetual darkness.
"Big sis has always been a tad lazy," Tobaki laughed, reaching out into the shadows to pet one of the tarantulas clinging to the walls.
"Anyway, I know this is a bother, but there's a reason the headmaster gave the job to us rather than his clone army, or whatever those guys dressed as priests are," Tsukune said, "so let's just get this over with so that we can get back to doing important things."
"I guess it just bugs me that we've become the Headmaster's errand boys," Ranma grumbled, stopping as he felt something poke at his ankle.
In the dim light of the hallway, Ranma could barely make out a creeping, eight legged shape jabbing at his leg.
"What, you wanna ride? Fine, crawl up here," Ranma said, standing still as the hand-sized spider leapt up onto his calf on command.
"I can't believe how many of those things you've trained," Moka mused, her own eyes having no difficulty seeing in the darkness, "where do you find the time?"
"Hm? I don't train most of them," Ranma said, completely ignoring the fanged monstrosity settling on his back, "I've never even seen this spider before."
"Huh? Then why does it listen to you?" Moka asked.
"Your guess is as good as mine," Ranma admitted with a shrug, "every spider on campus pretty much follows my commands now, even though I haven't even seen most of them before. It's really weird."
"All right, looks like this is it," Tsukune said as he pointed the flashlight at a half-broken wooden door. It had loose strips of caution tape hanging from it, and the hinges were little more than scraps of rust.
"So this where the Headmaster keeps his stash of incredibly powerful and dangerous magic items, eh?" Ranma asked, stepping up and knocking his knuckles against the door.
He managed that precisely once before the hinges crumbled and the door collapsed completely, very nearly disintegrating on the spot into a pile of rotting splinters.
"I really, really, REALLY hate that man," Ranma said under his breath as he entered ahead of the others, a small following of arachnids skittering after him.
Tsukune found a light switch next to the entrance, and taking a deep breath first, carefully switched it on.
Much to his surprise and satisfaction, some fairly strong ceiling lights blinked on with only a few bursts of sparks, and hardly any of those sparks bounced into the pile of leaking red barrels with "Warning Flammable!" signs plastered on them.
"He has a stash of explosive barrels," Ranma mumbled, scratching the back of his head.
"They go in the gratuitous explosives storage bank, which we passed on the way here," Tsukune said, jabbing a thumb behind him.
"Is that the one conspicuously situated beneath the student alchemical labs?" Tobaki asked as she put her glasses on in preparation to work.
Tsukune sighed a sigh of utter resignation. "Yes, that's the one."
As Tobaki picked up a barrel and started her task, Moka looked away from that corner and studied the rest of the room. The storage room was massive, with several adjoined storage vaults for safely storing magical items, although all of those vaults lay open. Piles of furniture, boxes, barrels, and chests littered the storage room, most of them covered with old sheets, dust, and cobwebs.
"All right, first things first," Tsukune said as he stretched his arms, "Ranma, can you get all the spiders in here out of the way? I'd rather not end up stepping on one or disturb a nest on accident."
"You heard the man! Let's go!" Ranma shouted firmly, clapping his hands, "get outta here! All of you!"
Tsukune honestly found it as mesmerizing as it was terrifying to see numerous - perhaps more than a hundred - spiders emerge from their hiding places simultaneously and scuttle onto the floor. One of the pieces of furniture in front of him, a dusty armoire, burst open and almost smacked him in the face as an arachnid larger than most dogs crept out and joined the fanged river converging toward the doorway. Most of the beasts were larger than his hand, which led Tsukune to wonder uncomfortably what it was they ate down here when they seemed to be the dominant species.
"Can I have one or two of 'em?" Chopper asked as he stared down at the orderly line of spider traffic, "I'm a little hungry."
"We'll eat lunch after this," Ranma said, shaking his head as he plucked a smaller spider right out of its web near the ceiling and tossed it into the tide of hairy legs, "the sooner we get started, the sooner we'll be done."
"All right. We have four categories other than explosives, so the rest of these things have to be sorted into the vaults here," Tsukune said, pointing to each of the vaults in turn, "magical weapons and clothes, magic mirrors, eggs and seeds, and plot McGuffins."
Ranma winced. "Magic mirrors, eh? Be careful to keep the sheets over those things. They are a PAIN if you look into them."
Tsukune nodded. "Good advice. Chopper, I want you to focus on the plot McGuffins. Since you're a minor character, there's a much smaller chance of you triggering an adventure."
"So, we DON'T want an adventure?" Ranma asked as he approached a barrel covered by a cloth.
"Not before lunch, we don't," Chopper said as he gathered up a trio of golden triangles.
Ranma peeked under the cloth over the barrel, seeing that it was being held up by several swords and spears that had been dropped into it in a cluster.
"Oh! Hey! Nice to meet you, buddy! I'm-"
Ranma quickly dropped the cloth and then moved to pick up the barrel. "Magic weapons."
"Yeah, I am! Listen, I've been stuck down here for quite a few years, and was wondering if you would like to-"
Ranma put the barrel down in the furthest corner of the vault and then turned around, completely ignoring the talking weapon.
"Smooth moves, Derflinger"
"Oh, shut up Longinus."
Moka frowned as she looked up at the numerous eggs that littered one corner of the storage room. Each of them were just bigger than a man's head and riven with veins, and they were a dull green color near the base that darkened to a black ebony near the top.
"Tsukune, some of these eggs look like they've hatched," Moka said nervously as she started picking up the intact ones to haul into the vault, "what if there are some kind of baby creatures in here?"
Tsukune stopped pushing a large dressing mirror into the appropriate storage vault, glancing at Moka. "Oh. I was wondering what all those spiders had to eat down here." He idly batted aside a dark, withered tail that hung from a cobweb's coccoon, and finished moving the mirror.
Chopper stared carefully at a thick golden ring he had found in an otherwise emtpy chest, then shrugged and flicked it into the McGuffins vault.
After that, the troll started rifling through the contents of a dusty old desk when he suddenly heard a petite voice speak to him.
"Hey, you! The big guy! Over here!"
Chopper turned his head, and the wrestler quirked an eyebrow when he saw that there was a hummingbird-sized fairy sitting atop a small disc covered by a cloth.
"Hi! I'm Lilith! The spirit of this mirror here!" the fairy said enthusiastically, pointing to the covered item.
Chopper rubbed his considerable chin, his eyes narrowing. 'So does it go in the McGuffin room, or the mirror one?'
"You must be my new master!" thr fairy chirped, "I can grant you a wish!"
"I wish I had a snack," Chopper said immediately.
A sweatdrop almost as big as the fairy appeared behind her. "Uh, are you sure you want to wish for something as mundane as that?"
"That wasn't a wish, I was just thinking out loud," Chopper said as he reached out and took the fairy between two fingers.
"Oh, then what do yo-hey, WAIT! STO-"
Chomp!
Moka placed another batch of eggs down, and then returned to the area she was clearing, pulling apart a veritable curtain of cobwebs that were blocking her path.
She frowned as she saw a massive, spike-encrusted egg settled in the corner, its shell a bright purple color with dark spots.
"Uh, Tsukune, this one looks kind of dangerous..."
Tsukune finished taking the carefully wrapped hand mirror from Chopper, and then turned toward Moka.
"What, just because it's bigger?"
Moka shook her head slowly. "Not just that. I can feel... a deep, deep malevolence inside it. Like... a hunger that can never be satisfied."
Tsukune walked up to the vampiress as she shuddered. "Is it that bad?"
Moka nodded slowly. "It sounds like its trying to... escape. A force of destruction that cannot-"
"YOINK!" Richard siad happily as he dashed past the teenagers and grabbed the side of the egg, pulling it toward him so that it started a slow, uneven roll.
Moka and Tsukune watched silently as the warlock quickly stepped behind the egg and then started pushing to pick up speed toward the exit.
"You were waiting for something like this, weren't you?" Tsukune asked blandly.
"Well, I would have taken the One Ring, but I still owe Sauron money," Richard admitted as he smashed the egg through the doorway, easily ripping through the walls surrounding the small passageway without any apparent damage to the egg, "toodles!"
Tsukune shook his head. "Let's just hurry up and get these things locked up before he tells the other teachers about this."
"Hey guys! Check this out! This star has a face!" Ranma said, laughing as he poked at a giant glittering star shape the size of a truck tire.
"Come on, no time to play!" Tsukune said, clapping his hands, "let's finish sorting this stuff before something dramatic happens!"
"Aw, you're no fun."
Hr
Nearly an hour of extremely uneventful work later, Tsukune wiped the sweat from his forehead as he finished hauling the last of the mirrors into magic mirror storage, the sheet still wrapped safely around its presumably reflective and probably dangerous surface.
"There! All done here! And not a single incident!" the imminently doomed human said happily right before the screeching began.
Hr
About one minute before that, Ranma frowned as he looked at some kind of high-tech cylinder that he had found in a chest full of power swords and a giant metal claw with a gun mounted over the wrist.
"It was put with a bunch of weapons, but is this a weapon too?" he asked aloud. "Looks like some kind of flashlight..."
Curious, he held the device out in front of him and started jiggling the switch on the side just as Chopper passed by in front of him.
Hr
About thirty seconds before that, Moka beckoned Chopper over to an object stuffed in a large crate. It was a large glass cylinder with metal devices on either end that flashed and beeped while displaying information on a small LED display, all of it meaningless to the two monsters. Inside the tube was a small, bizarre creature about the size of Moka's head. It kind of resembled a jellyfish, but had hooked teeth rather than tentacles, and inside its translucent head were a few big red nerve spheres.
"What should we do? It's kind of like an egg, I guess... but not really," Moka admitted.
Chopper shook his head. "Looks like a plot device to me. I'll take it to my pile."
The troll picked up the containment unit, heedless as the Metroid larvae inside trembled and screeched within.
Then he hefted it onto his shoulder and walked toward the vault right as Ranma switched on a lightsaber.
FSHYEWWWW! "WHOAH!" Ranma shouted in surprise as a shaft of red light burst from the cylinder in his hand, stabbing into the side at an angle and carving out much of the device as Chopper shouted in surprise and tried to pull the containment unit away.
Within seconds, the screeching alien within the canister burst into the air, spilling stasis gel all over the dust-covered floor as it hovered shakily near the ceiling.
"Damn! It's free!" Chopper growled.
"SCREEEEEEE!" screeched the metroid, quivering in the air.
"We have a loose plot device!" Tobaki said, dropping an armful of fireworks as her hand seemed to liquefy into yellow sludge, "all main characters, get down!"
"Aw, hell," Ranma grumbled as he dove next to an armoire and covered his head with his hands.
Then he noticed Moka huddled under the desk next to him.
"Wait, why are YOU hiding?" the pigtailed boy asked, surprised.
'This isn't canon storyline, right? We can kill him here, right?' Evil Moka asked as a vein popped up on Moka's head.
"Gotcha!" Tobaki shouted as she lashed her arm out, her fingers forming a lance that speared toward the young alien.
The Metroid jerked to one side, avoiding the tendril, but in its rush to dodge it smacked into a ceiling light, prompting another burst of sparks on top of the needlessly bespectacled treasurer.
"That's right, RUN!" Tobaki taunted as her arm snapped back, and then she turned around as the metroid floated toward the vaults. "You won't get... What's that hissing noise?"
The yochlol looked down, her expression darkening as she saw the fuses on the scattered fireworks burning away toward their fiery and colorful conclusion.
She briefly adjusted her glasses. "How spontaneous and unexpected."
Boom! Pop! Spee-yoo!
"Guys? What's going on in here?" Tsukune demanded as he poked his head out of the storage vault.
He was only somewhat surprised to see a haphazard battery of roman candles spitting multicolored fire across the room, setting several large cobwebs aflame while Ranma, Moka, and Chopper all took cover. Tobaki was surrounded by spinning sparklers as she tried to stamp out the exploding fireworks, but he could see that the pyrotechnics were clearly spreading faster than she could stop them.
"What are they doing?" Tsukune mumbled, stepping out into the room in preparation to get the others to help out and put out the fires.
"Screeeeee!"
He halted as he heard some kind of high-pitched shriek from above him, and then he glanced up to see a floating alien menace swooping in his direction.
"Whoa! Hey!" Tsukune stumbled backward as the metroid stopped just a few feet away, quivering as it hovered at head level.
Then it suddenly tilted its hooked mandibles in his direction and burst forward, screeching all the while.
"Stop that! Go away!" Tsukune demanded, diving onto the floor to avoid the lunging alien.
The metroid missed him completely, snagging a sheet with its mandible and pulling it along.
Tsukune quickly moved into a crouch, and then looked up to check where the floating predator was setting up another lunge.
All he could see, however, was himself.
At least, it looked just like him, although the Tsukune in the mirror was wrapped in bandages and seemed to be mumbling to himself.
As it dawned on him that he was staring into one the previously covered magic mirrors, his eyes were drawn to a sheet of paper taped to the top with something written on it.
"Dimensional Prism," he read aloud as the polished glass surface started to glow, "Warning: may cause epileptic seizures in children and quantum seizures in adults. Do not use if you are pregnant or may become pregnant, because you might not be pregnant in the alternate universe you're about to be sucked into, and that would be SUPER awkward."
The surface of the mirror flared with light, and Tsukune flinched before he felt his surroundings fall away from him as his senses were overwhelmed. "Really, I should have expected this."
Hr
Ten seconds earlier, in canon...
Tsukune splashed cold water over his face as he leaned over the restroom sink, shivering slightly as the water ran down his neck and soaked the bandage wrappings underneath his shirt.
It really did figure. After so many struggles and so many surprising, unlikely victories, it turned out that the "gift" of vampire blood had a price after all. Just after he had gotten used to the idea of losing his humanity, after coming to terms with the reality that in order to survive, he would have to change, it turned out that the "change" in question would strip him of his sanity and turn him into a flesh-eating ghoul.
"And now Moka's run off, thinking it's her fault I'm like this," Tsukune mumbled to himself, inadvertantly pinpointing where in the canon timeline he was, "first the monstrels attack us, and now this. I have to find her quickly, before something ELSE happens."
Then he looked up and saw the sink mirror glowing as his reflection adopted an annoyed expression that didn't match the one on his face.
"Oh. I guess I'm too late," he mumbled weakly, right before an arc of white lightning burst out of the mirror and blasted the young human.
After a brief flare of light, the wet, standing Tsukune was instantly replaced with a dry, crouching Tsukune.
Tsukune froze only for a moment, and then shot to his feet, immediately turning toward the nearest mirror and staring into it.
"... C'mon, c'mon," he grumbled, reaching out and tapping on the bathroom mirror with his kunckle. Not that he had any reason to expect this to matter in any way, but he had no better idea what to do when one had just been shunted out of a magic mirror.
When nothing happened, Tsukune growled and pounded a fist against the mirror surface.
Crack! The old, weathered screws keeping the mirror in place on the wall promptly buckled, and it fell down behind the sink, bouncing off the piping and smashing into pieces on the floor.
"... Huh. Well, it was a pretty hopeless attempt anyway," he admitted to himself before taking the Protection Committee armband off his arm, "I guess it's time to go exploring, then."
Hr
Meanwhile, in a much better storyline...
"Gugh!" Tsukune grunted as he appeared in the middle of the magic mirror storage area, almost falling from the shock of instantaneous transport.
"What? Where? How?" the hapless human looked around him in a panic, being extremely confused as he saw nothing but pieces of furniture covered in dirty sheets and a single full-size dress mirror.
He was about to read the note attached to the top of the mirror, when he heard a voice behind him, startling him.
"Yo, Tsukune, you all right?" Ranma asked, poking his head into the room. "I saw a flash of light in here." He dropped an empty fire extinguisher on the floor next to the entrance, wisps of white powder still leaking from its nozzle. By now he had taken to carrying them with him, on account of how often he was called upon to help put out fires.
Tsukune whirled around, seeing a boy he'd never met before with a pigtail. "Huh? Me? Yeah, I'm okay, I think."
Tsukune shook his head, wonder what had just happened. "Sorry, but where am I?"
"You're in the Headmaster's stupid storage room for all his magic crap," Ranma said, surprising Tsukune somewhat with his unusually rough and casual speech, "you didn't get zapped by any of it, did you?"
"I think I did, actually," Tsukune said uneasily, stepping out past the unfamiliar boy. Tsukune was a class representative and rather famous thanks to various rumors throughout the school, so it didn't bother him so much that this guy apparently knew him when they had never met. He did wish the fellow would recognize they at least weren't on a first-name basis, but unsurprisingly many monsters weren't as polite as Japanese humans.
"What? What happened?" Ranma asked, following Tsukune out, "does it have something to do with all the bandages?"
Tsukune shook his head. "Look, I don't have time. I have to find Moka."
"Oh, okay," Ranma said before waving his hand over his head. "Hey, Moka!"
To Tsukune's surprise, the vampiress was standing just on the other side of the room, talking with some other girl he didn't know and...
Tsukune did a double-take as he recognized the other figure, and his face paled. What on Earth was Chopper Rikishi doing talking to her?
Moka heard her name being called, and glanced behind her. "Just a minute!"
Then she planted her fists on her hips and stared up at Chopper, frowning. "I think you should go after it. What if it hurts someone?"
"That was clearly a ghost, not a space jellyfish," Tobaki said, adjusting her glasses, "I don't like fighting insubstantial creatures, so I'm not going after it."
Moka let out a tired sigh. "No, I think it was the creature with a sheet over it. If it wasn't, then where did it go?"
"MAYBE," Chopper said, crossing his arms over his chest, "the space jellyfish died, and that was its ghost that just left."
"Troll, either there's a draft in here, or you just BLEW MY MIND," Tobaki said, giving the larger monster a high-five.
"Moka?" Tsukune asked, walking up to the trio uncertainly.
"Yes? What is it?" Moka asked, blinking.
"I... uh..." Tsukune was acutely aware of everyone staring at him as he crossed the room, and he tried to avoid making eye contact with Chopper as he spoke to the vampiress, "listen, I need to talk to you."
Moka blinked. "All right, what is it?"
It perturbed Tsukune greatly that Moka made no move to leave the room, despite the fact that two strangers and a student who had once threatened to snap her head off were clearly listening in right next to them.
"Can I speak to you alone?" Tsukune said, urgently stressing the last word.
Ranma, Chopper, and Tobaki all quirked eyebrows.
"Well, since we're done, we should report to the Head Jackass before you two start making kissy faces at each other," Ranma said, causing Moka and Tsukune to blush badly and stammer uselessly in response. He then headed into the hallway leading out of the storage room, and to Tsukune's surprise Moka quickly followed after him, apparently trying to hide her expression.
Tobaki sighed as she stepped up next to the confused human. "I wonder if I'll ever have a sweet teenage romance like that?" the demon asked sadly, staring up at the ceiling.
"Probably not if you insist on using the tentacles every time you're with a guy," Chopper noted as he lumbered forward.
"Hey, don't knock 'til you try it!" Tobaki countered, following the troll, "there are a lot of unique positions you can use with that kind of suspension and reach! Some of them even make your partner feel good, too!"
Tsukune stood rooted to the spot in front of the shattered entryway, completely confused. Why was that psycho Chopper chatting people up like they were all buddies? Who were these other two weirdoes, and why did they talk about his relationship with Moka so casually? And most importantly, WHY was Moka letting them lead her away like they were friends of hers? She had always been shy and rather awkward around people other than him, especially boys, and he was almost certain that she didn't have any friends he didn't know about, if only because they were almost always together during school hours. When had that changed?
"All right guys! All clear! You can go back in now," called Ranma, only confusing Tsukune further.
Things weren't helped one bit when a veritable river of spiders emerged from the gloom beyond the storage room, pouring toward the entrance like a flood of hairy legs and glittering black eyes.
Tsukune felt his heart stop as he froze in place, completely shocked by the horrifying sight. He was equally shocked, though also quite relieved, as the arachnid swarm inexplicably parted before him, the scuttling beasts quite obviously avoiding the young man as they crawled back to their homes.
It all happened so fast that Tsukune remained stunned for several more seconds, wondering what had just happened.
"Oi, what's the problem, man?" Ranma asked, walking back a ways to find out why Tsukune was lagging behind, "are you still dazed or something?"
"N-No, I..." Tsukune shook his head to clear it, recovering quickly from the scare; he was already used to facing down malevolent horrors, though never something quite like a living carpet of poisonous fangs and creeping legs. "Never mind. Like I said, I need to speak alone with Moka right away."
Ranma frowned, sensing a kind of desperation from his roommate that suggested he wasn't just making time to flirt with the vampiress. "All right, that's fine. Tobaki can report back to the Head Moron. We'll just head back to the office."
Tsukune nodded hesitantly. "Okay... Uh... What office, exactly?"
"Your office, of course," Ranma said, walking on ahead as Tsukune hesitantly followed after him, completely bewildered.
"I... have an office?"
