Kitty: Yup! I felt extra peppy today and put up my first official chapter! Yays! But, it’s kinda boring (no action) and is meant for character development (no Mews yet). So this is more like a novel, really, then a fan fiction. Ah wells! I just wanted to get it onto Fanfiction and waste it’s precious space! (is kidding, of course)

Disclaimer: Kit-Kate Bar does not own Tokyo Mew Mew. Any references to ‘The Mew Mew Project’ and ‘Dr. Shirogane’ are not hers, they belong to Mia Ikumi. However, Dustine Grün is really, truly her character.

Chapter 1: A Sudden Discovery

The door of the attic was stuck. Of course, nobody had used the attic since her grandfather died, so there was any number of possible reasons why the door could be stuck. But standing up there on that spindly wooden ladder, pounding away at the door cut into the ceiling, Dustine Grün was wondering if she should have gotten paid for this.

Dustine was 15 (going on 16, she liked to say) with hair like caramel and eyes like the sea. After her grandfather died, leaving her alone with her mentally deficient mother, her grandmother (who had divorced her husband six years ago and promptly moved back to Tübingen) had immediately returned to the town of Treuchtlingen, Germany (where Dustine and her family lived) and had started packing things up and taking them away. She had left the job of crawling around the dusty attic of the small house to Dustine, a job she was thinking she might never get to do.

But to her relief (and slight disappointment) there was a creak and an unstick-ing (Kitty: I know, that’s not a word, but bear with me) sound and the door flew open and hit the attic floor with a thump, raising a grey cloud of dust above her. Coughing violently, and hoping dust didn’t stain, Dustine heaved herself through the small door and into the attic above.

There was more stuff in that little attic then could be piled across the Great Wall of China. There were bookshelves lining the walls, regal looking paperbacks and hard covers half eaten away by dust and time. There were chests, and cardboard boxes, and piles of paper shoved in the corner, where it looked like there had been a steady leak for the past two years. Dustine sighed. Her friend Evanna had invited her to go skiing with her up in the mountains but her grandmother had insisted she clean the attic first. Dustine had been hoping for a little dust, some mess, and she would have been out of there by 4 o’clock, at least some time left to watch T.V. or something, to prove the day wasn’t a total waste. Dustine gave another sigh (she’d been doing a lot of that lately), placed her hand on her hip, closed her eyes and pointed at a random section of the attic she’d do first.

The water logged papers in the corner. Wonderful. Dustine pulled them into the center of the attic (the only floor space that was clear) and started reading through them.

Taxes, bills, business letters, love letters (oh gawd I didn’t need to see that…), taxes, bills, taxes…what’s this?

Dustine pulled the thick pile of stapled papers toward her. At the top of the heading it simply read ‘M.E.W. Project’.

Dustine furrowed her brow and looked down the page. There were about a dozen pages following filled with complicated-looking formulas, scribbled in the margins, crossed out with one line or scribbled out furiously, in blue pen, red pen, pencil, crayon, charcoal…the overwhelming math made her head spin so she flipped past those. Her grandfather, Dietrich Grün, had been a brilliant scientist and she was guessing that this had been his notes from the college he taught at. She was just about to discard it in the read pile when the word ‘aliens’ jumped out from the text, and she just HAD to read this…

Her grandfather’s handwriting was flowery and spirally and it took her awhile to comprehend the sentences. This is what she read:

‘M.E.W. – Maintainers of the Environmental World. Five girls from Tokyo, Japan were injected with the DNA of endangered species to protect the world against an alien invasion. This was the Mew Mew project, started by a Dr. Shirogane and finished by his son Ryou Shirogane. With the help of a substance called Mew Aqua, the aliens were appeased and the DNA subsided in the girls’ systems and was successfully repelled. Seeing the failure in the first alien attack, a group of other beings named Wanderers (so called for their bizarre scouting of seemingly random planets until one with potential can be found), have noticed that the planet Earth is valuable and can be used in the harvesting of resources and energy. Scouts are currently on our planet, observing the people in discrete fashions as to not arouse human attention to their presence. But after a recent slip up I have become aware of them and their intentions and have made the M.E.W. project, a spin off of the Shirogane Mew Project. Five girls have been carefully chosen at random, spread over a general area so as to not alert the Wanderers and injected with DNA of the endangered species that follow:

‘Nectarinia prigoginei, Caprolagus hispidus, Lipotes vexillifer, Dasyurus viverrinus, and Liophus ornatus.

‘The names of the chosen girls are given below:

‘ us i e r n – Tr tl ng n, er an

‘C rm a o et – ris, F a ‘ e yl G ge – A l ti C y, w J y ‘ ve i a S e – Ki r y, I l d

‘M n M – B h, Eng a d ‘

Although the pages were slightly wet, damp, and mildewy, it seemed the page with the names of the supposedly ‘injected’ girls had been placed directly under the spot where water dripped down from the ceiling, wearing away certain letters of the names. Afterwards, the report continued. ‘WARNING: the powers cannot be activated unless the girls are placed in immediate danger, at which point their transformed body will react as such to save them. Until further notice, will develop machines to accommodate injections in order to safely activate DNA insertions.’

‘Guess he never did that.’ Dustine thought, a little bitterly as she continued reading.

‘Weak microchips included in DNA injection. M.E.W. finder located in box on top shelf, will narrow down search for M.E.W.s when the time comes.

‘Signed (Dietrich Grün)’

Dustine had never thought her grandfather crazy (if not a wee bit eccentric) but just by looking at this she knew he was a loony.

“I guess that’s what happens when you’re brilliant,” she sighed, and with a thump and a cloud of dust she threw the clump of papers to the side into the read pile.

“Gekommen unten! Dustiiiine, gekommen unten! (Come down! Dustiiiine, come down!)”

Dustine rolled her eyes. “Ich komme Gramma! (I’m coming Gramma!)” she shouted back down through the door. That said, she stood up, brushed off her pants and slid herself through the door again.

Dustine’s Gramma was a sour looking old woman, who was actually quite nice. But due to the fact that she had been on a train for the past few hours to get to Treuchtlingen, she was irritable now as she slammed a plate of green things in front of her granddaughter.

“So? Did you find anything?” she asked, leaning against the countertop with her arms crossed. Dustine shrugged as she poked the stuff on her plate. “I found some papers. I was sorting them.”

Her Gramma threw her hands up in the air in over-dramatized exasperation. “Uahh, your grandda, always keeping those papers around! Even when they weren’t needed! I told him, I said, ‘Dietrich, you clean these papers up, or I go! And you know what – ”

“You went Gramma, I know.” Dustine sighed.

Every time someone mentioned Dietrich around Gramma, she would throw her hands in the air and rattle on about some fault that he had, how she told him to change or she went, and always ending with the same line; ‘And you know what? I went!’

“Well, there’s probably just junk in that old attic anyways.” Her Gramma remarked, shooting a glare at the ceiling. “So you just put those papers away properly and you can go outside, okay?”

Elatedly, Dustine shoved the papers into an unused trunk, gave her Gramma a kiss and ran out the door.

To Be Continued…

Kitty: See? A very boring chapter! But uhm…here’s a preview for the next chapter!

“Look out!” a voice from her left shouted. Dustine’s eyes widened as she saw the metal beam jerk loose from its holdings, and start to fall in slow motion towards her. Well, it seemed like slow motion. Then it was like her brain just shut down. She could only stare blankly at the looming bar of steel as it fell rapidly through the air. A voice inside her head, squished way at the back of her mind, suddenly screamed, ‘No! Are you crazy, I don’t want to die!’ and it was like another mind was inside her as she bent her knees and sprang into the air…

Kitty: Teehee! Nifty! Yep, the next chapter will start the ball rolling!

Uhm…’til next time!