$PLUG$: When filling out YOUR CBFFA nomination form, please remember the Inhuman Condition's own LEGION when choosing a candidated for "Best Original Character". Because, y'know, it might piss him off if you don't, and Steel and Tenchi might not find YOU before it's too late...

Clean-Shaven Diclaimer: This story features Superman, which is a trademark of DC Comics, and the cast of the Tenchi Muyo! OAV series, which is a trademark of AIC/Pioneer LDC, Inc. This is an unauthorized work, and no profit is being made off this work by me, as the penalty would be certain DEATH. This story is copyright of me. Download if you like, but please don't archive it without my permission, as the penalty would be reasonably certain DEATH. Don't be shy.

Genetically Mutated Continuity Note: This story takes place between ACTION COMICS #773 and SUPERMAN v. 2 #165. And it also takes place some time after OAV Episode #13. I been reading the manga since I started this little shindig, but so far I've come to the conclusion that Hitoshi Okuda is just doing the same "fit it in around the OAV" trick that I am, so I don't feel any pressing need to establish continuity there. But hey, I wrote Gleek the Space Monkey in, so he could still surprise us all.

Note to my Dad: Superman doesn't have blue hair. AYEKA has blue hair. Of course, I can't PROVE it, since Ryoko used all the colorization budget to buy booze... so maybe Superman needs to take up drinking and everything'll look OK. Yeah. Yeah... I think I need my medicine...

Original Tenchi Muyo! concept by Masaki Kajishima and Hiroki Hayashi
Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster

It felt like thunder, only that was ridiculous given his position in the high vaccuum of space. A status report provided the only logical alternative that could explain the turbulence around him. Something was hitting the station from the outside. Something deliberate, as it was making sure to strike in exactly the same point every time.

He sat in the master control room and watched. Alarms sang shrill songs to inform him of a hull breach that was being investigated by the robot sentries, and he did his best to ignore them. After all, he was well aware of the situation. He'd built the station. And the robots. And the monitor that displayed what was happening at the location of the incident.

It was a ship. The nose of it was unceremoniously shoved through the bulkhead like a finger through wet tissue paper. Four figures climbed out of the visible opening on the fore of the craft and he leaned in closer to the camera and watched them intently.

Intruders.

The robots were already in position to repel this invasion. "Attention, unauthorized personel!" the lead sentry announced. "Surrender at once to the master of this station, or you will be neutralized! Surrender, by the order of Legion!"

The four of them simply stood where they were and made no move to comply with the robots' demands. As dictated by their programming, they responded to this by opening fire. He watched the spray of bright red laser fire wash over them until a crimson light was all he could see on the screen. When it finally subsided, he expected to see nothing left of them.

Instead, the only change was that the second one from the right--a humanoid female--lowered her arms and a series of small wooden objects flew around them in a circle, drawing back towards her until they disappeared entirely.

"I guess that makes it our move. Let's fight the good fight, people."

The large one followed up on his words by raising his left arm and firing a potent looking weapon on his wrist. In seconds, a pair of projectiles had torn through two sentries in the line of fire, then turned at a ninety degree angle to rip apart two more. The drones refused to take this lying down, however, but when three of them piled on top of the large one, he simply shook them off the way one might shrug off a heavy overcoat. They fell to the floor and didn't move.

Another male from the group rushed the defending forces head on, brandishing a small object in his hands. Suddenly, a flash of blue light sparked out of one end and there was a dagger of brilliant energy left behind that he swung like a sword, cutting down his robot gaurd like so much ripe wheat. Not that he himself was an accomplished fighter by any stretch of the imagination, but it was plain even to him that this boy was more than just a strong arm with a powerful weapon. He struck at his foes with practiced motions as if he'd done this his whole life, as if that was what he'd been born to do. Admittedly, the gaurds weren't designed to engage an enemy in a prolonged battle like this, preferring instead to exhaust most of their power supply in the act of incinerating an enemy. So against this sort of onslaught, they fell most predictably in four minutes.

To underscore the ease with which they'd won the first battle, the fourth intruder simply remained where she stood, and clapped her hands. The pinnacle of arrogance.

He smiled in spite of the situation. It was perfect.

"Did we have to do it that way?" the male asked. "I mean, I'm all for the direct approach, but ramming the ship into the hull like that? Wasn't that kind of risky?"

"Well, I suppose there WAS a small chance my apprentice might have slipped up and cracked the entire station in half, Tenchi," the clapping female replied. "Fortunately, his mastery of the adjustments I made to his primitive spacecraft is nothing short of adequate. Maximum penetration without comprimising interior pressure. Smartly done!"

"That's very passive-agressive of you, Profe--Little Washuu," the big one grumbled. From his vantage, it was hard to be sure what he was looking at. It appeared to be a robot of some kind, although its exterior frame looked strangely familiar. "Anyway, Tenchi, I got us here, and my new 'mentor' got us inside, so why sweat the details? What else could we do? Unless your enemies are in the habit of leaving engraved invitations to their hideouts."

"Heh... now that you mention it--" Tenchi smirked.

"I DO hope we've been performing to your liking, Miss Washuu!" the taller female broke in. "Heaven forbid you should need to lift a finger while we carry out this master plan of yours!"

"Plan? I thought Tenchi was in charge of this little outing," the one called Washuu snickered. "Ah, well. How hard can it be? Everyone you don't recognize is a bad guy, right? Punch, kick, repeat."

"Uh, maybe we need to broaden our mission statement, folks," the machine-man suggested. He was looking up at the ceiling to see the massive divider coming down between them. It was an added security measure to cut off a hostile force from certain parts of the station, but in this case it worked quite well to split their numbers and whittle them down. Only one of them had noticed it, and even that awareness had come too late to stop it.

"Legion's trying to seperate us!" Tenchi cried out.

The machine man grabbed the taller girl and pulled her to his side of the divide. "You seen the Wizard of Oz, Masaki?" he shouted.

"Well, yeah, but what does that--?"

"We'll meet you there," he said just as the wall slammed shut between them. From separate camera angles, he watched each pair of invaders stall for a moment, then rush off in opposite directions deeper into the facility. He leaned back in his seat and held his hands together at the fingertips in contemplation.

They had come, just as expected. This would work out even better than he'd hoped...

As the two of them ran down the hallway, she looked back at the massive wall behind them. "I don't understand," Ayeka objected. "Shouldn't we be looking for Tenchi?"

"He can take care of himself from what I've seen," Steel said. "But you'd know that better than me, right? Not that I'm an expert on martial arts or anything, but I've never seen anything quite like those moves of his. Who taught him?"

"My brother," Ayeka answered, still glancing back at the massive barrier that had cut their team in half. "At one time he was considered the finest swordsman on Jurai--"

"Multiple targeting array," he said brusquely.

"What?"

Instead of responding, Steel simply threw his hammer and adjusted the glasses on his face, as if trying to get a better look at something. Impossibly, the hammer flew down the corridor and curved its path to steer itself around the corner. There was a couple of loud crashes, and then a new machine came flying from around the bend, the electronic whine of its motors intensifying in pitch as it approached them.

"Stand back!" Ayeka shouted, rushing ahead of Steel and summoning a force field to surround them both. The flying instrument fired a red laser at them a few times, and then the hammer came zooming back where it came from, smashing head on into the device, crushing it instantly. Astonished, Ayeka dropped her field and watched the hammer continue on its path.

"Stop." Steel commanded, and the wondrous tool ceased its motion and hung in midair. "Return," he added, and the hammer flew down to its master and into his outstretched hand.

"Amazing," Ayeka gasped. "I had no idea there were such advanced weapons on the Earth."

"Unfortunately, the responsibility to use them wisely isn't always so advanced," Steel explained. "In case you were wondering why Earth doesn't have a whole armada of spaceships like mine manned with hammer-throwing armored crewmen."

"You keep your inventions to yourself rather than risk them falling into the wrong hands," Ayeka mused.

"Well, I'd like to say I always had that attitude, but after I had to fake my own death I was sort of soured on contractors, yeah," Steel said."

"Hmmph. Washuu chose you well," Ayeka said. "It seems as if she understands the people of Earth far better than I ever will."

"I take it you're not another satisfied customer?" Steel asked, resuming his march down the corridor.

"It's not that," she answered. "It's just that... I came to your world to find my brother. In the process, my sister and I decided to stay there and be with him and the family he'd started while he'd been living there. They seem so at ease with being on Earth. Tenchi grew up there, and almost all he knows about Jurai is how to fight, as you've seen. It's not that I'm not happy there, but I just don't seem to understand how to find my place, as if--"

"Something's coming," Steel said as he stopped dead in his tracks. "Fast."

[interlude four]

"Your methods are inefficient, Superman," Legion mocked. "I don't care if you can shatter mountains with one finger, or if you can inspire ordinay humans with that gaudy costume of yours. The fact is that you fail to consider the larger picture. But don't take my word for it."

All Superman knew was that he had been trapped in some kind of illusion by Legion. Why was becoming slightly clearer, as it seemed that Legion wished to weaken his resolve in order to further some big plan of his. To that end, he was generating simulations of Superman's worst enemies to confuse and demoralize him. So far Lex Luthor, Conduit, and the Cyborg had taunted Superman over his refusal to kill, and now it seemed to be someone else's turn.

"Milton Fine, humble carnival mentalist," the new arrival announced. And yet when I used my fledgling telepathic powers to contact other worlds, I found myself possessed by a presence far superior to my own. I was forced to kill humans to use chemicals in their brains to subdue the mind of the alien influence, until you flew in and saved the day. And in doing so, I wound up in the custody of Luthor here, which only gave the alien the opportunity to further his evolution of my body into--"

"Vril Dox! Better known to the world as Brainiac!" he smiled as he suddenly transformed into a green skinned man with a blonde beard. "Not to be arrogant, but I dare say I was your most relentless opponent, Superman, but when this body was destroyed in a battle with you, I attempted to suffuse my consciousness into a more potent vessel--"

"Doomsday!" he explained, as his body shifted into a seven foot tall hulk of a creature, bones protruding from every joint of its body. "My plan seemed infallible, until you interfered as always and managed to free the creature of my control! Forced to inhabit a robotic host, I swore revenge, using my newfound technological prowess as Brainiac 2.0 to take control of Metropolis' computer systems... but when a freak accident ocurred, I was upgraded into--

"Brainiac-13!" the figure was now a gleaming computer-rendered hologram, towering above everyone else in the room. "And admittedly, you defeated me once more, but in doing so, you allowed untold changes to be wrought across your precious city, and now it remains in the form of a futuristic city of tomorrow. How much simpler things might have been, I wonder, had you simply stayed home one evening and allowed Milton Fine to snack on the brains of a few worthless transients."

"And that's about where I come into the picture," another voice added. Superman grimaced and looked around to see a small red-headed girl enter the scene with a broad smile on her face. "After all, it was YOUR presence that made Uncle Milty pick Metropolis, and that was what got MY attention when I decided to do some field work, remember, Kal?"

"I remember putting a stop to your antics, Washuu," Superman shot back. Without killing you or making things violent or unecessarily brutal."

"Oh, you might have ME taken care of, but that just fit right into Legion's plans, dinnit?" Washuu taunted. "I must say, looking at all the gang around here, I may not be the deadliest person in the Superman Rogue's Gallery, but I'm darn sure the CUTEST, aren't I? That must be why you cut me loose and then went off into space so you could save my little girl, huh?"

"Indeed, Superman," Legion said calmly, "for someone who tries to do the 'right thing', you seem to go about it a different way each time. I wonder if Zod would have been amenable to cleaning toilets for the rest of his life..."

"I never claimed to be perfect, Legion!" Superman shouted. "Somehow, I think that no matter what I did to stop Washuu, we'd still be having this discussion one way or another. If you're expecting me to lose confidence in myself because I've made a few mistakes, then you've got another thing coming. As long as I'm alive, I can take whatever you dish out."

/YOU SPEAK ERRONEOUSLY, KAL-EL./

He looked up in the sky and his eyes widened at what he saw. Descending from above was an object that burned as bright as a star, save for the single portion of shadow that held a glistening blue orb in place. It stared down on him intently through its unblinking eye and the only reaction from the gathering below was a self-satisfied snort from Legion.

"It--it can't be!" Superman gasped.

"Yep, definitly the cutest," Washuu nodded as the giant fireball came just meters away from them all and hung menacingly above them. Despite the apparent absence of a mouth, its words rang out with perfect, mechanical clarity.

/THE DAY WILL COME WHEN YOU ABANDON YOUR ADOPTED WORLD OUT OF EMOTIONAL TURMOIL, SUPERMAN. AND ON THAT DAY YOU WILL LEAVE THE PLANET EARTH VULNERABLE TO THE STRATEGIES OF SOLARIS, THE TYRANT SUN./

[interlude ends]

It was a pretty simple combination. Steel picked her up and started barelling down the corridor with his flight boots and she held out her arms to generate the personal force field provided by her body fortifications. The commpany of robots he'd seen coming were just as fast and deadly as he'd said, but as they rammed through their numbers like a missile, any threat they posed was quickly neutralized.

"Good, they're getting tangled up as they try to turn around to follow us," Steel explained. His face was once again shielded by the extendible face-gaurd on his helmet, so when Ayeka was able to catch a glimpse of his head, all she saw was her own reflection.

"How did you even know they were coming?" she asked.

"My glasses," he answered. "My latest invention. X-Ray specs that really work. Heh. I'm bringing childhood fantasies to life and you have a force field that runs on wood. I guess that makes some sense, once you figure out a way to control an electrical current sent through the xylem... assuming Jurai trees are anything like Earth trees--"

Ayeka squirmed to ease the discomfort of the metallic grip around her waist. "I'm probably not the most qualified person to explain it, Mr. Steel," she admitted. "Besides, you seem to do quite well for a sculptor devoted to metals. I just wanted to thank you again for helping us in our time of need."

"'Smith' is the word you want," he said. "Well, 'engineer' would be the more accurate term. Anyway, it's no trouble. I became Steel to master the machine--use it to help people however possible. From the looks of things though, it seems like the rest of the universe has expanded that philosophy to everything else. Trees that fly, inventing your own children, fuzzy spaceships that run on carrots--I'd never pass up a chance to experience such alien technology."

Ayeka looked up at him in amazment. "But--but when we met you in your workshop!" she countered. "I mean, you seemed so disinterested in our problems. For a moment I thought that grudge between your city and Miss Washuu would be the end of us!"

She heard a sigh from Steel's external speakers and his helmet nodded slightly. "Yeah, well... I wasn't the only one putting on an act. I read the papers after Washuu hit Metropolis, and of course Superman consulted with me while he was dealing with the situation. In fact, I supported his decision to release her to other authorities because I helped upgrade Stryker's Island Penetentiary to make it escape-proof, and by my estimation she'd be running the place in three hours if we tried to go by the book. She's brilliant, immature, and totally lost on the most basic tenets of human civilization. Dumb as it sounds, I can handle that.

"What threw me was when you all explained to me that one of the missing was Washuu's daughter, a artificial life-form that just happens to double as a weapon of mass destruction. I take family pretty seriously, and the proper use of my technology is almost as important to me. She treats it like a big joke, and well... I had to be sure, you see."

"What convinced you?" Ayeka asked.

"The concept of combining your offspring with your inventions is completely... foreign to me," he said. "But there was this one point where she looked me in the eye, and I saw... You see, my brother, Natasha's father, he faked his own death when I was just getting out of college. Turned out he'd gone into the Witness Protection Program so he could testify against some bad men he used to run with. I never saw him again until he resurfaced as a crime-lord trying to exact revenge on the gangs who had killed the second family he'd raised while he was in the Program. Part of his plan involved stealing the designs for my flight boots so his men would have an advantage over the competition. When I finally caught up to him, I had to tell him that Natasha had been hurt by another of my enemies, and she needed a blood transfusion to save her life. Washuu had the same look in her eyes as he did when he handed me his gun and agreed to surrender himself to the authorities to save my niece.

"By the same token... maybe Washuu and the people of Metropolis will never be friends, but if I can relate to her situation and help her out--well then maybe at least we won't have to be enemies. It's funny. I learned about technology to help my family, but the longer I go on in this business, the more I start to see that family doesn't just end with a bloodline. Or a political border. Or a species."

"So far it seems like the opposition has died down," Ayeka noticed. "Perhaps we should conserve our powers?"

"Hmmm? Oh, of course," Steel replied, powering down his rockets and lowering his feet until he was standing upright. He set Ayeka down on the floor and released her. "Sorry, I didn't mean to blather on like that. Last thing you need in a situation like this is to hear me bore you with my life story, right?"

"Why, no," Ayeka assured him. "Actually, I find it rather... familiar..."

"This is all my fault."

Tenchi leaped over her head and slashed open a robot behind her. "That's one way of looking at it," he said, kicking the disembowled machine over to send it toppling over in the path of another droid, causing it to trip itself up in the others legs. "After all, if you hadn't created Ryoko, she never would have attacked Jurai and my mother never would have been born." Another robot fired a laser at him and he stopped to deflect the beam with his energy blade, ricocheting it back at another mechanical guardian. "So yeah, anything that happens to us you're indirectly responsible for." Two more robots rushed at him from opposite directions, and he ducked out of the way at the last second, then cut them to ribbons after they collided with each other. "Don't tell me you're having regrets, Little Washuu." he smirked.

"That's not what I meant," she pouted. "If I hadn't been so headstrong, I never would have left that big ape in my lab to begin with, and even if I had, I shouldn't have let Ryoko bruise my ego so easily, and I shouldn't have silenced the link to her thoughts. If I hadn't been ignoring her, we wouldn't even be in this mess right now."

Tenchi spun around and caught a robot in the face with the hilt of his sword, then whirled about to decapitate it before it could regain its balance, wounding three others as he swung the blade. "Little Washuu?"

"Yeah?" she said.

"Don't get me wrong, it's big of you to own up to all that, and I know it's hard for you to say, but I kind of need you to keep your mind on the present, OK? Do you have a fix on the command signal yet?"

She held up a small box in her hand and looked at the readout it gave. "Yeah, sure. Thirty meters, dead ahead. Might have to hack through a bulkhead, but I think you can handle it. Sure you don't want me to jam it? Save you some trouble."

"No... I want to find the transmission source and shut it down from there," Tenchi said, carving off a robot's arm before it could strike him in the face. "Trust me on this."

"Sure, whatever," Washuu sighed. "Some genius, huh? At least I know where to find others who can clean up after me, I suppose."

"You know what calorimetry is, right?" Tenchi asked, picking up a piece of a robot and throwing it at another to knock it over.

"Of course," Washuu replied.

"Back in my old high school--before Ryoko blew it up, anyway--we did that one in chemistry class. Eighteen students in groups of two. Eight calorimeters. So the teacher gave me and my lab partner a pair of styrofoam cups and told us to make do."

"Huh. Resourceful," Washuu noted. "That'd work in principle, due to the insulative properties of the material, but the results would be nowhere near as accurate as you'd get from a proper instrument."

"Come on, just a little closer..." Tenchi muttered as a group of robots gathered around him. Finally he swung his sword all around and cut them all across the middle. "And that's what our teacher told me to put down in the report. He said science wasn't about obtaining a desirable outcome. It's about learning from the results no matter how they turn out. Washuu, you're just as entitled to make mistakes as anyone else. The way I see it, you wouldn't be half as smart as you are if you didn't screw up once in a while. Point is you're here, you convinced Steel to help us, and we're gonna do what we can to make it right. That's all that matters to me."

He saw a robot sneak up behnd Washuu, and he started to head after her to intercept, but she casually struck it in the face with one of her small fists, knocking its head off with one blow. "You've got a point. Thanks, Tench. Y'know, you're the only one I can talk to about stuff like this. The others, they kinda put their own problems on me, and... well, you know how it is with Ryoko."

"We'll get her back," Tenchi vowed, feinting a droid to the left, then cutting it in two once its weapon was pointed away from him.

"You make it sound so convincing," Washuu observed.

"I'm still breathing," Tenchi replied. "And the only way Legion keeps them is over my dead body..."

Visual Two was dead. Apparently robots weren't the only thing to fall victim to that sword.

And so he turned his attention to Visual One. They were just outside the master control room, and he'd been forced to withdraw to a backup installation to keep them from finding him. From there, he looked on as the door to the main room began to crumple and fold as the machine-man broke it down with a few strikes from his hammer.

"I know how you feel," he said as the two of them entered. "It's like you're trying to fit in to one culture without letting your own slip away in the mix. I can relate."

"You've traveled to other places?" his companion asked.

"I was born in Texas," he asnwered. "Grew up in Indiana, then Washington, D.C., earned my dregrees in Michigan, then Metropolis, back to the Beltway, New Jersey, then back to Metropolis.

"I don't believe I've ever heard of those planets," she noted.

"That because they're parts of Earth," he explained. "I don't know how it is on Jurai, but Earth is kind of a divided planet. All the land is split up into different governments, and all of those political divisions are divided further to make them easier to run."

"I see," she said. "I had noticed something like that in my experience. Getting from one place to another on your world is rather difficult. Not unlike ancient Jurai before the primordial tribes were united under the first King."

"Sure," he said. "Of course, after a couple of world wars and the invention of the internet and the telegraph and aeronautics and what-not, we're starting to gel as a global community, but the divisions are still there, for better or worse. You might not think so, but to me, Washington, Jersey City, and Metropolis might as well be in different solar systems, except for the fact that they're not even a thousand miles apart from one another. And yet somehow I seem to hold on to a little piece of each one when I go to another. Along with everything else."

"How?"

"For one thing, you look at the upside. Being from that many different states, I'm always guarenteed at least three teams to root for when the NCAA tournament rolls around. After that, it's just a matter of finding outlets to express those different facets of yourself. My hammer... I could have built a much smaller model than this, and put some of the sensory equipement into my armor. But I didn't."

"Why not?"

"Because things are bigger in Texas. Anyway, I bet it's the same thing with Tenchi. It's not so much that he only thinks of Jurai when he fights as it is that he can express that side of himself openly when he gets into messes like this. After all, he can't write a term paper in your language, and he can't exactly wear that outfit of his to soccer practice or whatever he does in his spare time."

"It wasn't that conspicuous when we were in your city," she teased.

"Yeah, but in our neck of the woods, people dressed in circus tights and tinfoil is a day-to-day thing," he smiled. "Why do you think I live there?"

Earth... Jurai... He stood up from his seat and checked the connections on his own armor. It was just as he suspected. Steel was with them. Well, that would work out just fine. He looked down at the monitor as they appraoced the primary switchboard.

"Just as I thought," Steel muttered as he leaned over the console to examine it. "According to this, every robot, drone, and automoton in this place is wired to this control room. If I can shut it down, we'll have free reign of the entire facility, and plenty of time to locate Superman and the others."

"What are you saying?" she asked. "When you acted as if you knew where we were going, I'd assumed you'd already found them. If they're not being kept here then what are we doing here?"

"Washuu was only able to trace them to this general area, remember?" Steel explained. "And she didn't want to bring Ken-Oh-Ki along because of that toxin affecting his powers. As for my part, I realized it'd be a lot easier for me to lock my sensors onto the robots' command frequency and follow it back to the source. I was hoping to find our sociopathic host when we got to the end of the road, but maybe Washuu can ferret him out when they get here."

He did a double take and looked closely at the monitor. Washuu? He'd been watching them closely before the second monitor gave out, and he'd seen no sign that they had managed to regroup. Apparently Steel's partner was just as confused, but before she could ask, the far wall began to blister in one spot as a thorn of blue-white energy began to tear through and slowly move around in a circle to cut a large hole in the bulkhead. At last the rest of Steel's party stepped through.

"Put up yer dukes, put up yer dukes!" the female called Washuu cheered.

"But how--?" Ayeka asked.

"Global community," Steel explained. "When I realized Legion was trying to seperate us it occured to me that he must be an alien himself... well, that's pretty obvious given where we are now, but anyway I figured he wouldn't count on us being able to work together without direct communication, so I fed Tenchi a reference only another Earthling would be able to understand, and that way we worked out a pincer move on the master control. I was nervous that Tenchi might not pick up on it at first, but it's a pretty famous movie."

"Yeah, well the hard part was explaining it to Washuu while I was up to my elbows in kill-bots," Tenchi smirked, scratching the back of his head. "Otherwise, nice work, Steel."

He slapped himself in the head. Of course. He'd forgotten to consider human comraderie. Not that it mattered at this point. He prepared his weapons and headed for the door to deal with them personally.

"Of course it's nice work!" Washuu gushed. "He's MY apprentice, after all. Security iiiiisss disconnected! Now all we have to do is check this place stem to stern and we're home free!"

As the door slid open to grant him access to the master control room he heard the shift in her voice from the electronic feed of the monitor system to the crystal clear tone of the real thing. As his bright red and gold armor clanked into position he raised his arms and held out his palms to the four of them. "I think not, ladies and gentlemen!" he announced, making sure to bring all eyes upon him.

"What in--?" Steel asked, raising his hammer for action. He activated the weapons mounted to his gauntlets and in seconds Washuu fell to the floor where she stood. He then focused his attention to Steel and for a moment he seemed to be resisting the effect.

"Legion!" Tenchi snarled, igniting the energy blade of his sword. "I don't know who you are or what you want, but this ends HERE!"

"Tenchi!" Steel admonished him, "Stop! He's using--" and then he fell to the floor with a loud clang. Ayeka brought up her trusted force field, but as soon as he pointed his hand at her she fell unconscious as well.

Now he turned his full attention to the boy. "Last man standing," he said flatly. "Give it up. There's nothing you can do now."

Tenchi blinked repeatedly as he was exposed to the hypnotic strobe, but for some reason he didn't fall, almost as if he simply refused to let himself succumb to the effect. He dropped to one knee and grabbed the edge of the console to hold himself up, dropping his sword as his arm hit the table. "I... won't let you... win!" he growled in protest.

"You don't have a choice in this matter, boy," he said, trying to maintain his detached composure. Inside the armor, however, he was beginning to feel the perspiration bead on his forehead. The boy was resisting the effect somehow, and that was supposed to be impossible. His physiology was well within the standard range for this, unless something unforseen was going on in his body... he began a full-spectrum scan of this Tenchi to find out.

And when the readings finally came in on his viewscreen, he saw the impossible literally happen before him. Electromagnetic interactions lit up like an aura around the boy as he began to slowly rise to his feet. Readings that would have been baseline twenty seconds ago were suddenly off the scale. Finally the entire display crashed and he swtiched back to normal view as his only hope of understanding what was going on.

Now the boy's costume had changed along with everything else, and three blades of light manifested in front of him. He grabbed onto one of them and somehow it took the form of a shield. Before he could even react Tenchi ran at him with the newfound weapon and sent him falling over when the shield made contact with his armor.

He found himself lying motionless on the ground and he looked on in horror as his diagnostic readouts began to flicker and fade one by one as his armor's systems crashed from the unknown energy that had struck him when the shield made contact. All he had left now was main visual, and from that all he could see was the face of his foe standing over him menacingly as he grasped onto a second blade of light, and it transformed into a massive sword.

"Last chance, Legion!" Tenchi shouted. "Return my friends to me, or so help me I'll--"

"Suh-stop...!"

Through his viewscreen he saw Tenchi's menacing glare soften with confusion as he looked away to address the source of this other voice. "Steel!" Tenchi exclaimed. "You're still OK? But Legion here got you with some kind of--"

"'Swhat... trying... tell you, Masaki!" Steel's voice crackled over his speakers. "This... CAN'T be Legion... can't be... because I... know him!"

NEXT: COGITO ERGO BOOM!