Mahou Sensei Negima and all related elements and characters are the property and creation of Ken Akamatsu, and the autor of this piece has made no material profit from it, and never will do.
Any similarity between the characters and events of this story and anyone or anything ever actually seen in real life is a pure coincidence.
A special thanks to Finalage, and to my fellow posters at the Comic Book Resources Boards and the TV Tropes Forums, for their input and suggestions on this story. Your feedback is always greatly valued.
UNEQUALLY RATIONAL AND EMOTIONAL.
Prologue:
One Year Ago.
"You can go in without any fear, Hasegawa-san. There's nothing wrong in there".
A bigger lie had never been told before.
But trusting the busty woman's voice, since it was as sweet as honey and as trust-inspiring as an angel's, the young Chisame had nodded and walked in first. Only to stop immediately and yelp in horror at the sight of the scene waiting for her instead.
There was a naked mannequin of sorts over the room's main table, laying on its back with its vacant green eyes fixed on the roof above. The weird thing was the mannequin blinked at random intervals, and its chest rose up and then came down in a blasphemous imitation of human breathing, and its hands wiggled their long thin fingers as the girl looming over the doll's body worked on its mechanical entrails, her face covered by a wielding mask that barely allowed to see her black pigtails poking out of the back of her head.
"Sh-Shizuna-sensei!" Chisame screeched, rushing back to clash against the tall blonde's stomach. "What's that girl doing there!?"
"Oh my!" the woman looked in, contemplating the delirious situation for a moment before calling out, "Hakase-san!"
"What?" a muffled question came from inside the mask. The masked girl's thin frame, hunchbacked over her awfully messy work, covered all over by large and smelly spots of grease, oil, and some substance eerily similar to thick, crimson blood, didn't move away from her labor at all.
"Hakase-san!" Minamoto Shizuna insisted. "Stop that immediately, or else you'll be reported to the Dean! I thought we had agreed you wouldn't bring your experiments here! You already have your own laboratory for that!"
Finally, that had made her to turn her welder off and lift the mask off her cute, bespectacled, dirty face. She gave the mature female a somewhat wounded look.
"B-But I'm almost reaching my deadline! If I want to finish before—"
"No excuses," Shizuna said, gentle but firm. "It's just rude to use the dorms for that, especially now you have a roommate."
"I'm not going to be her roommate!" Chisame had quickly protested.
"Now, now," the blonde had calmly pushed her forward, towards the other girl and the robot thing. "Like I said before, there's no need to fear, Hasegawa-san. She is a girl your own age, and not too unlike yourself. Hakase-san, this is Hasegawa Chisame, the student I mentioned to you earlier. Hasegawa-san, this is Hakase Satomi, your fellow student and roommate for the rest of the year, and hopefully beyond."
Chisame cringed while looking at the freak's face. And the freak looked back, with large and curious black eyes, full with an eccentric spark not too unlike that of a drunk monkey. Eyes that were pretty much the only clean thing in that face splattered all over with ill smelling chemical leftovers.
The freak was the one to break the awkward silence with an unfazed, "When did you mention a roommate?"
"Last week," Shizuna fought the vein threatening to pop up into her forehead back down.
"I don't remember that," the Hakase girl replied.
"I even left you a reminder note over your fridge," the sensei stated.
"You did?" the strange girl craned her neck back towards a door and into her kitchen. "Oh, it's true! Yes, I think I do remember now."
Chisame gave another imploring desperate stare up at the tall and attractive female. Sadly, she seemed unmoved by her plight, despite her soft smile and her patting on the poor girl's shoulders.
"She needs someone close around at all times to remind her about such things," Shizuna whispered. "She is a good girl. You'll get along well."
The mannequin chose that moment to creepily rotate her eyes towards Chisame, scaring her even more.
"Eeek!"
Shizuna barely could hold her down by the shoulders enough to prevent her from running away. "Oh dear, I forgot to introduce her! I'm terribly sorry. Hasegawa-san, that is Karakuri Chachamaru, another one of your future classmates at 1-A."
"What? She's the anatomic display for the class, you mean!" the brown haired girl quickly corrected her.
"Pleased to meet you, Hasegawa-san," the thing spoke with a soft, polite, but perfectly inhuman and sterile voice. "I will be glad to help you with anything I can."
Then it reached up with a hand, grabbing one of Chisame's to give it a gentle and feminine shake.
"Kyaaaa!" Chisame screeched, scared out of her wits. It was so cold! Like a corpse's!
She let the heavy handbags she was carrying to fall down and still attempted to escape, only to immediately stumble into the conveniently placed and firmly planted shapely body of Minamoto-sensei. "Please, you can't do this! You have to reassign me!" she begged.
"I'm afraid all other rooms are full by now," Shizuna commented, now almost sounding sympathetic, passing a hand through Chisame's hair. "Don't worry. Karakuri-san won't be spending most of her time here. She sleeps at the workshop."
"Actually, I haven't programmed her to follow sleep patterns yet," the dirty weirdo piped in. "I don't think I will, actually. Too bothersome, and there are more efficient ways to recharge energy. Oh, sorry. My manners."
She walked briskly to Chisame and quickly took her hands into a much firmer, almost tomboyish, rather clumsy handshake. "Excuse my forgetting you! I have been in an absorbing nonstop finishing procedure for Chachamaru for the last few weeks, and I haven't had the time for much else, I'm afraid. Want to watch?" she offered.
"Hakase-san, I think I have just told you to stop doing that here," Shizuna repeated herself.
"Oh, yes. That..." Hakase sighed, disappointed.
Chisame made a face, looking down at the prone object they seemed to be trying to pass as some sort of human being. "What... what is this... Why are you..."
"I am an artificial intelligence developed under commission of the Mahora Robotics Club," the mannequin informed flatly. "I am going to enlist in this year's first grade class A as a test of my capacities regarding interaction with Japanese modern society. As such, I eagerly look forward my continuing intermingling with your gracious person, Hasegawa-san."
"S-Stop that!" Chisame gasped. "The fact you're being so polite just makes you scarier!"
"Um, maybe I should readjust her speech patterns. Less flowery, more concise and to the point, okay? Okay. I got it," the Dr. Frankenstein wannabe absently stated while wiping her hands clean with a towel that had been laying over a nearby chair. She then handed it over to Chisame, who only then noticed her own hands were just as dirty after the mad scientist's handshake. With a disgusted grimace, she was fast to wipe them as clean as she could.
The whole living room was an absolute mess, as a matter of fact, and she was sure the rest of the dorm would be even worse. Would she have to clean all of that up? She couldn't set a webcamera and allow her just started community of fans to watch... THAT!... around herself. Her wonderful web project would die on its crib!
But of course, the girl with the messy pigtails who was looking at her face couldn't care any less about any of that, could she? She was just there, smiling as a dumb frat boy who had just farted.
Finally, Chisame dared to make the question she had been dreading for the last few minutes.
"Umm... where is the bathroom, please?"
"Well, heh heh" Hakase Satomi scratched the back of her neck sheepishly. "I don't think you should walk in there just yet. You'll see, I was testing Chachamaru's water endurance there a few hours ago, and—"
Chisame bit her lower lip, whimpering under her breath.
That would be a hideously long school year.