Foxglove wa otaku desu

By: Stainless Steel Rat

Authors Note: (This fan-fiction assumes the Babel effect. All animals understand each others meaning, irrespective of language, and by extension animals can understand any spoken human language. It also assumes the time is early 1990s, not present day. Where non-English words are spoken, but the Rangers automatically hear the translation, the real words will be in [square brackets] )
What if Foxglove felt she had a good reason to stay away from the other Rangers? Some dark secret that she felt would alienate her and make her outcast if anyone apart from Dale knew. A secret to terrible that she would hide it completely… Okay enough with the build-up. Presenting…

It was a great day for the Rangers and Dale in particular. They had a new member, Foxglove, and were finally going to visit her place. Dale and Foxglove had been meeting up away from the RRHQ for several months after the moon-rock incident, ‘for hang glider lessons’, but she’d been curiously reticent about hanging around headquarters or the other Rangers. At Dale’s urging, she’d joined in on a couple of missions and quickly proved a valuable team member, with her sonar and ability to fly while carrying someone (as long as no-one reminded her she couldn’t).

It quickly became a matter of when she could become a team member, not if. Her outgoing personality and good cheer was quick to win her friends. However all her talk was about the others and their interests, not herself. The team had noticed this and done their best to make her feel welcome, and now it had paid off. She had finally agreed to let them see her place, somewhere that had been off-limits to anyone but Dale. So now the Ranger Plane was following Foxglove, and Dale’s bat glider, which he was using, to quote him, ‘to give her some company out there… aw shucks.’

The lady bat was clearly nervous. A couple of times she started to veer off, only to be called back by Dale. "Maybe I should just bring stuff to the Treehouse myself…"

"Don’t worry Foxy, the guys will love your place, you got real talent." Dale side-slipped in close. Despite his complete ineptness with any larger vehicle (flying mind controlled tanks aside), the rarely shown determination that had surfaced for Double O Dale and Ram-Dale had made him a very good glider pilot.

"But, Dale-cutie [chan], they’ll see… Chip in particular… And they’ve all been so friendly…"

"Don’t worry, Foxy. If they can cope with having me around, you’ll be fine." Dale might not be as technically intelligent as Gadget, but he’d quickly found out the easiest way to stop Foxglove worrying over something else was to get her to worry over him.

"But you’re brave and funny and sweet and helpful. Besides you’re so good at Ranger work.."

Dale grinned. "I used to goof up a lot more. Like that inventor guy said ‘Maybe I just needed a better reason to succeed.’ "

"What inventor guy?"

The retelling of the unintentional kidnapping of Gadget by Clyde Cosgrove, the superstitious inventor took up the rest of the flight. As they reached their destination the pair drifted back level with the Rangerplane. Dale pointed down and swooped, Foxy matching his moves

"Golly, it’s the City University." Monty said, then realised he’d picked up the wrong script.

"Golly, It’s the City University." said Gadget as they spiralled down after the two flyers.

Dale, headed for the roof of a two-story building with metal lettering on one wall. ‘Faculty of Art, Media Studies Department’ He sailed over the flat asphalt roof and stalled his glider to drop for a neat landing. Foxy back-winged to land beside him and seconds later the Rangerplane’s shadow swept overhead.

The other Rangers joined the pair, Dale almost bouncing with eagerness as he lead them to the edge, Foxy almost being dragged by the cheerful chipmunk. An arrangement of ladders and tubing provided a safe route over the edge of the roof and under the eve.

Dale explained. "We had to install this before I got good enough to glide straight in."

"Straight in where?" Chip asked, and the others looked equally puzzled.

"You’ll see. This is gonna be great!" They quickly did. The roof overhung the building and underneath it there were a series of ventilation gaps leading upwards into the roof space. They realised that to fly in you’d have to dive and swoop up at the last moment, stalling as you rose over the inner edge. Suddenly Dale’s proficiency with a glider was a lot less mysterious.

The ventilation gap led into the space over a room with a drop ceiling. A grid of support wires suspended a metal grid holding polystyrene tiles. It was dark, lit only by light leaking through the ventilation gaps and occasional cracks in the tile layout. Barely glimpsed, occasional bundles of cabling and a couple of conduits interrupted the open space. Foxy flew out and up to hover near the roof and switched on a pocket torch, which was secured to the ceiling. It illuminated what was obviously her living space.

It had a somewhat schizophrenic feel it, having being created for a creature that was as used to being inverted as upright. Suspended cross wires had been made into perches by padding and string. Below, a polystyrene tile had been reinforced by pieces of cardboard, laminated together with glue. It supported a couple of beanbags and a silvered cardboard stand that supported a bottle top full of water and some personal grooming gear. Some suspended slings next to it acted as storage compartments. Nearby, one of the vertical stays had been more heavily wrapped with padding that looked rather lumpy and worn. A stack of paper cut down to A6 size (notepad) and a plastic box full of pencil stubs and stationary completed the furnishings.

Every thing else was decoration. Some carefully angled silvered card mirrors on the floor reflected light from the torch up onto the edges of the area, where dozens of suspended pictures hung. Some were clearly cut from the covers of magazine advertisements, the small ‘inset style’ pictures making a decent small animal sized posters. Others were obviously hand drawn and painstakingly coloured in. A few were A6, which made them practically bed-sheet sized for a rodent, but most were halved or quartered. Some of the top row were upside down

But it was the subject matter that stopped the Rangers in their tracks. Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee rubbed shoulders with Ninja Science Team Gatchaman, Sailor Moon and Moldiver. One series of ‘posters’ showed Miyazaki films such as ‘Laputa – The Flying Island.’, ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ and ‘Naussica of the Valley of Winds’. But most of all it was the hand drawn sketches. Anime style humans in outlandish costumes rubbed shoulders with more realistic animal studies, some equally oddly garbed. All showed the same competent ‘hand’, or as they quickly realised, ‘wing’.

A few showed the Rangers or Foxglove herself. One showed the entire Ranger team, minus Foxglove, in the birdlike Ninja Science Team Gatchaman costumes, in an action pose against a starry galaxy. Another was an image of Gadget, in a floating ribbon swathed robe, a curious mark blue mark on cheek and forehead and carrying a staff surmounted by a hex nut. One of the full length ones was an image of Foxy and Dale posed in from of a thin crescent moon, she in a sailor suit and wearing big gold and ruby ornaments on her ears, and him in an immaculate black tuxedo and top hat and wearing a white domino mask.

Foxy was still hovering up by the light switch, unsteadily because her wings were shaking. She looked nervous enough to bolt.

"Wow!" "Golly and a half!" "Zu zaid id!" "You did all this lass?"

"You like them?" Foxy asked, still nervous.

Chip got his words out a fraction of a second before the others. "Are you cuh-razy? They’re amazing."

Dale grinned broadly, "See, I told ya they’d be impressed."

Foxglove stopped dead in midair with an almost pathetic expression of relief and dropped down onto one of the beanbags. "I’m so happy!" She bounced up off the beanbag and started practically skipping around the room, hugging each of the Rangers. "I wanted to show everyone, but I was so afraid, especially when I drew you all without permission, but you’re team fits the G-Force so well, and anyone who doesn’t meet Gadget for 5 minutes and think of Belldandy, with Skuld’s talent for gadgeteering…" She sighed deeply. "So now you know… I’m an o-ta-ku." She spelled out the word.

Non-plussed expressions had clearly been on sale, because everyone except Dale and Foxy had one. A spelled out word didn’t automatically translate.

Monty spoke first. "I thought you were a bat, Foxy-luv."

Foxglove giggled, "No, silly, it means a fan of Japanese animation styles, cartoon movies [anime] and comics [manga]. I’m also into Hong Kong action movies, but anime is my first love… I’d better tell you the whole story." Foxy gestured to the beanbags. "Sorry you have to share, but until Dale I was the only one here."

When everyone was comfortable, she perched and started her tale. "As you can guess, I’m not from around here. I grew up in another city, I couldn’t tell you which one. I was the odd one out in a family of… stiffs is the only word for them. I was always asking questions that didn’t need asking, in their opinion and generally was a nuisance in their well-ordered lives. I wasn’t particularly happy, and as soon as thought I had a chance of making a go of it on my own, I left. I went to the rail yard and caught the first train going anywhere but there. I think they were glad to see me go."

"Ohhh, Foxglove!" Gadget was almost in tears at the matter of fact account, and the others didn’t look too happy either. Dale, who was sitting on the beanbag by Foxglove, put his arm around her. "Foxy, you never said."

Foxglove paused and hugged him one wing in return. "I didn’t want you to feel sorry for me. Don’t feel sad. It was the first decision I ever made for myself, and even if it proved to be a bad one at first I ended up here, with you cutie, and everyone else. That makes up a thousand times what I went through. So, I quickly found out that independence wasn’t as easy as I’d thought. It was the end of autumn and I was pretty far down on my luck, cold tired and hungry when I found a roost in the loft of the Art House cinema down on 24th and Jackson. It was warm, there was plenty of food, and I spent the first few days recovering."

"Then I got interested in what exactly the humans were doing below. It turns out they were just starting a season on Japanese . That first night I saw Laputa – The Flying Island and Lupin III – Castle of Cagliostro, and I was hooked. I’d only ever seen even TVs in shop windows and to see it like that… over the next couple of weeks I saw everything they showed, all the Miyazaki canon, the uncut version of Akira, Project A-ko, Macross – Do You Remember Love. The stories, the fantastic pictures, the music… When it looked like finishing I was devastated, until I overheard some students who’d been to one of the last showings talking about CUACS."

"Quacks?" asked Chip, not wanting to make the obvious remark about ducks.

"The City University Asian Cinema Society. They meet one evening a week in the classroom below. Officially it’s one of the Media Studies classrooms, but effectively it’s their clubhouse. Of course I quickly made my way here. At first I just watched, they even have a laserdisc player that can handle stuff straight from Japan. But then I wanted to do more. Fortunately they keep a small library of books in there, ‘How to draw’, Japanese dictionaries and guides to their writing, and I had plenty of free time."

"Golly, and you managed to draw all these?"

"It was hard at first," she held out a wing, "After all I’m not exactly built for dexterity. But I persevered, and eventually I made it work. I even managed to make friends with some of the humans, in a way."

Their were more expressions of shock, which Foxglove quickly stalled. "Not directly… But the university, and this building has an excellent computer network, connected to the Internet. I managed to set up a hidden account, easy enough when you can hide in the ducting and watch the Sysop at work. I spoof all my messages through a server in Tokyo so they don’t realise I’m right here. They know me as Digital Ice." She paused for a second and Dale, surprisingly, was the one who reacted first.

"Ohh… Foxy. I’m the one who does the bad puns." He looked around. "Digital Ice, Digitalis, the medical name for the foxglove plant… Oh yeah, you guys never watched that late, late show on herbal medicine."

The lady bat rewarded him with another hug. "They believe I’m a Japanese media student, specialising in English. I make all my posts at between 2 to 4 in the morning, evening time in Japan. I scan in some of my pictures and help them with fan-subbing."

The non-plussedness was once again evident. "Anime comes from Japan, mostly, and has sound tracks in Japanese. English speaking humans don’t understand, so they commonly add sub-titles. It’s done mainly by fans, using dictionaries and hard work," (she used the word otaku again, and this time they understood) "and so it’s called fan-subbing.

"Of course for us it’s different. We can understand each other, even though each species has it’s own language. So I speak in Battish, you listen in Mousese or Chipmunk or Flyan but you still understand me. But a human would just be listening in Bewilderment.

"At first I didn’t understand that humans speaking different languages couldn’t understand each other. It took me some time to realise that the words at the bottom of the screen weren’t just for the hard of hearing, and didn’t match up to the way the words were being spoken. When I did, I started to help, sending transcripts by e-mail. After all, for me, it just means sneaking down at night, putting a un-subtitled tape on and transcribing what I hear."

"That makes sense." Gadget was thoughtful. "I didn’t realise you knew so much about computers. But why hide it?"

Foxglove hesitated. "I had a… bad experience." She bowed her head, then looked back up. "I didn’t get along with the few other bats I met. They seemed to think I was weird, I guess to them I was. But there was this one bat, Victor, He was willing to hang out with me, said nice things, and I was happy to let him stay here, share what I had, and generally took care of him."

"Sounds a mite like he was using yer, lass."

"Maybe I realised that on some level, but I didn’t mind, it was so good to be finally needed. But then he started getting more demanding, insisting I stop playing around with all this," she gestured with a wing at the surroundings, "and spend more time on more important things, in short, him. I tried to do more, to provide what he wanted, but it was never enough. One day he finally lost it. He called me… some terrible things, screamed that I was a hopeless little fluff brain who might as well put myself in one of my pathetic scribblings since I had no chance of making it in real life. Then he started tearing down some of my favourite drawings and ripping them to shreds."

She gulped, obviously remembering, and started sniffling. "I never told anyone, even Dale that part…"

The aforementioned chipmunk held her comfortingly, looking uncharacteristically fierce. "Hey Foxy, don’t worry, if he ever shows his face around here again I’ll…" he paused, at a bit of a loss for words. "… well he’ll be sorry he did!"

Foxglove gazed straight at him, managing a smile. "It’s okay Dale, when he started wrecking things I got sort of mad and kicked him out."

"But…"

"I mean I really kicked him out… as in flying kick. I do watch the live action movies too, and I came up with a few ideas. Flying kicks are easier to do when you really can fly, and open handed strikes, well a bat wing is a big webbed open hand with muscles that can lift a bat’s bodyweight. That translates to quite a powerful strike. I do practice." And at this she glanced sideways at the vertical stay with the padding. "I don’t like to use them unless I have to, but they come in handy."

Monty smacked his one paw into another. "Too roight luv, Capone’s goons found that out."

"Wowie Zowie! I knew you were a really good artist, but you never said you were a kung fu babe as well! That’s so neat!"

Foxglove blushed. "I didn’t want to scare you off. I’ve worked out a few tricks, but I’m no martial artist."

Dale was the one who looked subdued. "But you can do so much, why’d ya end up with Freddie? Not that I’m complaining, ‘cause it meant I met you."

Foxglove shook her head. "I guess I’m the sort who can’t help but make fumble winged mistakes. After Victor I didn’t want to see much of anyone. I sort of took his words to heart. Then I found Winifred, and decided if I couldn’t be a good person I might still be a good familiar." She got up and walked over to the poster for ‘Kiki’s Delivery service.’

"This was my first introduction to witches and it was as the good guys. It’s about a young witch who goes out into the world with her familiar, a little black cat called Jiji, to find her destiny. However she’s no good at spells or potions, just at flying her broom. So when she finds a town without a witch she starts a delivery service. That was the sort of thing I was thinking when I met up with Winifred, flying that vacuum cleaner. Maybe it was because she was a witch, but she understood me.

"I asked, practically begged to be her familiar. This was before Bud or Lou, and I tried to help her get better at magic and act as her voice of reason, just like Jiji. I found out soon enough she wasn’t a nice or reasonable person, but I stuck it out, even when she got other familiars who would do some of the nasty things I wouldn’t touch. I guess I still saw it as my responsibility somehow."

"Then came that night we were collecting lightning bugs at the drive-in. I was torn between helping out and stopping the others so I just sort of hovered in the background. Then I saw your Rangerplane. It was amazing, like the flaptors out of ‘Laputa’ and I wanted to find out more. Then you all got into that mess with Bud and Lou and I was scared to show up in case they identified me as part of their group and you thought I was an enemy, and I didn’t want that."

Dale looked puzzled. "But you acted all cuddly with me right from the start. What’d I do?"

"Well I couldn’t help overhearing you when I was observing. It was sweet of you to offer some of your food to everyone, the way your bubblegum saved everyone, but I guess it was really the way you fell. You were a little chipmunk Jackie Chan, and I guess I just couldn’t help falling too, in love. It was like something out of a girls comic [shojo manga] where the girl; meets the boy by some ridiculous accident. I couldn’t help myself."

Dale looked embarrassed, "Gosh, I’m sorry it took me so long to stop pushing you away. I just couldn’t figure what you saw in me, I thought it was all some game."

Foxy cuddled up to him again. "It’s okay Dale-cutie [chan]. It’s also a regular thing in shojo that the guy doesn’t want to know at first, thinks there’s some trick or something wrong, but the cheery girl perseveres and wins his heart in the end."

Monty whispered to Chip. "Looks like our little lady Foxy is even more stuck on comics than Dale-lad."

Foxglove’s face fell, and Monty remembered how good her hearing was. "Oh, no, please don’t tell me I’ve ruined it!"

"Now lass, don’t get yerself all twisted up. None of us Rangers is your regular type. If we were, we probably wouldn’t be Rescue Rangers." The others quickly agreed.

Dale added, "Yeah, Don’t worry Foxy, everything will work out fine."

Foxy sighed happily. "Thank you, everybody! It’s just after so many false hopes, I’m still scared that all this is some wonderful dream. I have friends who are willing to accept me, and a wonderful guy who can share my interest. I feel as if I was in a shojo manga and this was the happy ending."

Dale smirked. "Uhuh, this Foxy, this is the real thing. Hey, maybe someone will make a cartoon about us someday. Foxy and Dale, Rescue Rangers."

"Hey, aren’t you forgetting some people?" asked Chip, his open paw including the rest of the Rangers.

Gadget giggled. "Don’t worry Chip, who’d make a cartoon about us?"

And there was much good humour.

&&&&

Authors closing notes: This was not so much a story as a monument to an idea that got out of hand. Foxglove is the one character who is something of a mystery. This tries to resolve that. Thanks for reading.

With many thanks to ‘aika.ru’ for the wallpaper ‘Oh My Gadget’ and to Marc Baker for the image ‘Spaceranger’ both of which inspired pictures attributed to Foxglove in this story. As for the ‘Sailor Foxglove, Tuxedo Dale’ image described here, I haven’t seen it but if someone wants to have a go…
Update - It inspired an excellent piece of fan art, and all props to Toni, the artist.

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