"However, may I present Son Goku."

“Sir, Mr. Goku is here.”

Jeeves stressed the first syllable sniffily, indicating his disapproval of the late, unannounced nature of the visit. “Shall I tell him you have gone to bed?”

Bertie, who hadn’t, cocked his head to one side, considering the ceiling. “It’d be jolly rude, wouldn’t it Jeeves?”

“Yes, sir. I shall tell him to go, shall I sir?”

“No, no, no that won’t do Jeeves. Send him in!” Bertie stood, dusting off the front of his trousers. Mr. Goku was a member of the nouveau riche that was slowly worming its way into Bertie’s fine city–usually he rejoiced in a little new blood, especially Americans, with their flat affects and amusing neologisms, but Mr. Goku was something else entirely. His mannerisms were like those of a child with the power of some old world deity coursing through him. Bertie imagined for a moment that this was probably a metaphor for something or other concerning this gala age, but a tune was crowding out whatever the meaning might have been. Likely it hadn’t been very incisive at all. He lowered himself onto his piano bench and tinkled out what bits he knew of “The Entertainer,” leaning into its lopsided rhythms. After a few minutes of this, he felt Jeeves’s silent presence drift back into the room, followed by the heavy clomp of the man who could only be his new houseguest. Bertie declined to look up.

“Jeeves,” he said, “I just stumbled on a crackerjack of an idea. Have you ever wondered why the Yanks call it ragtime?”

“I can not say that I have, sir,” Jeeves answered in his liquid tones.

“I read a book,” Bertie began.

“Indeed?” Jeeves interjected, keeping his tone as flat as always.

“Droll, Jeeves,” Bertie continued, keeping his hands on the keys. “I read a book, and in it there was the most vivid description of the state of sanitation in some of America’s more populous cities.”

“Um,” a loud, rough-edged voice called from the same general direction as Jeeves, but Bertie was on a roll.

“And so it occurred to me that, perhaps, ragtime is something of a lament, a cry for help from the sanitation departments on the part of all of America’s urban residents. As one cleans, I am sure you know, with a rag. What do you think?”

“Just so, I am sure,” Jeeves said. “However, may I present Son Goku.”

Bertie kicked his feet, turned around, pressed his hands on his knees, and smiled widely. “You may, in fact!”

Bertie had been warned by his uncle George by way of George’s gambling partner, an old mystic of a lecher named Roshi, that Goku was rather large. This was, in something of a proud English tradition, a bit of an understatement. The man was, in fact, a titan. He was well over six feet tall, and the biceps under the sleeves of his threadbare woolen suit jacket were at least as big around as a slightly undernourished orphan. His chest, however, was at least four orphans in width! Still, Bertie was a man of letters, a man of breeding, a Drone man, and he would not let his intimidation stop him from demonstrating his hospitality! He coughed once, nodded for Jeeves to see himself out of the room, and walked stiffly over to the Yank.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Bertie said, proffering his hand and immediately noticing the way it was dwarfed next to the other man’s. “Bertie Wooster, at your service.”

“Hi!” the man said, with the enthusiasm of a very large dog. He took Bertie’s hand in his own and, to Bertie’s surprise, did not rip it off with the ease of a Geat with an audience. In fact, he was as gentle as a gorilla with a grape or a suitably adorable kitten as he shook it. “I’m on a quest to save my friend and become the world’s strongest fighter! Thanks for letting me stay here!”

Bertie wondered, as the handshake wore on, if this fellow ended all of his sentences in exclamation marks, or merely most of them.

***

Bertie was vexed. He had, in the manner of a true gentleman, done his level best to see to his guest’s luggage. There had been a fair bit of it too; two steamer trunks, a messenger bag, and a large barrel that smelled like it was full of something dead and salted. Each piece of luggage was nightmarishly heavy — or so Jeeves had reported after Bertie had sent him down to carry the things up. So Bertie had gone to the trouble of having Jeeves go to the trouble of sending away for a truck and then proceeded to mix a drink for himself, only to discover, half an hour later, that the luggage had somehow hauled itself into his kitchen. This would undoubtedly interfere with his ability to take advantage of Jeeves’s ability to prepare his supper. Bertie was squatting atop one of the steamers, leaning down so that he could mix himself another drink, when it occurred to him that he might have to have a conversation about manners with his new guest. How dreadfully gauche.

Bertie was going to need some music to ease the process. It was, however, at just that moment, as he turned to climb down off the luggage, that he heard an odd, foreboding clanging coming from his sitting room. He rushed to investigate and there, as real as matter, time, and Tories, was a desecration of everything Bertie held dear.

Goku lay shirtless on his back on Bertie’s floor, his large, stone-cut hands clasped to either side of Bertie’s piano. The muscles in his arms barely even flexed as, in a steady rhythm, the American lifted and lowered the instrument over and over, counting off to himself. Bertie watched in horror for a few moments before finally rushing forward.

“No! Sorry! Dreadfully sorry! No! Sorry!”

“What?” Goku said? He lifted the piano above his head with one hand, stepped out from under it, and dropped it to the ground with a gut-wrenching crash that made Bertie suddenly sympathize with Juliet as she watched Romeo die. “What’s up, Bertie?”

“I…” Bernie began, but he could not bring himself to chastise his guest. Word would get back to this Roshi character, and through him would reach uncle George, and then what would Bertie do? And besides, he had his character to consider! So he took a deep breath, reached up to pat Goku on the shoulder, and exhaled through his nose. “Come sit with me. Let’s get to know each other.”

“Okay!” Goku said. Thankfully he pulled on a tank top before sitting down in one of Bertie’s chairs. For his part, Bertie leaned over and played a few bars of “47 Ginger-Headed Sailors,” wincing as two out of three notes turned sour.

“Have to have that tuned later,” he muttered.

“Oh!” Goku said. “Sorry about that!”

“Think nothing of it old man,” Bertie said. He sat down across from Goku, crossed his legs, and sipped absent-mindedly from the drink that had somehow found its way back into his hand. “So, my good fellow, tell me a little about yourself. My uncle mentioned you’re something of an adventurer?”

“I’m the world’s strongest fighter!” Goku said. “I died of a heart attack a year ago while fighting a ginger robot Prussian and then a super powered mass of living demonic bubblegum ate my only son! I would normally bring him back using the dragon balls, but hasn’t quite been a whole year since I was brought back and they’ll take a little while to find, so I’ve been sent out to find a man who can teach me a technique that can bring back the dead without dragon balls.”

“Indeed?” Bertie said, placing one hand on the wrist of his drinking arm to conceal the severity of his nervous shaking. “And who might this fellow be?”

“Well, Master Roshi told me his name, but I wasn’t paying very close attention. I think I might have been eating at the time! He said it was something like Lobster Crawley.”

“You don’t mean Aleister Crowley?” Bertie said.

“Yeah!” Goku replied, nodding fiercely.

He means Aleister Crowley, Bertie thought. He felt the color draining from his face.

“TIME FOR BED,” he declared, in a voice he realized was far too loud. He shot up and marched, stiff-legged, toward his bed room. “The guest room has been prepared for you! Good night, sir!”

“But it’s still light outside,” Goku said.

“‘Early to bed,’ or so the American saying goes, ‘early to wise…dom.’ Never trust American axioms, dear boy!”

“But we haven’t had dinner!” Goku called.

“You’re welcome to my larder!” Bertie howled, just before slamming his bedroom door and crawling into bed.

***
Bertie was vexed. He stood in his kitchen, hands on his hips, and looked at a disaster the scale of which had not been seen in Europe since the assassination of archduke Ferdinand. Every drawer, cupboard and pantry was open wide, and every one was empty. The luggage was also gone, of course, but that was a Faustian bargain Bertie hadn’t even had the pleasure of agreeing to. This was not going to do.

“Good morning, sir,” Jeeves said from behind him.

Bertie turned and found the valet, dressed immaculately as always, standing at attention in the door to the kitchen. Jeeves nodded once and made no other motion.

“Where have you been?” Bertie asked.

“Here, mostly,” Jeeves said, his eyes half lidded in their malevolent, sleepy way. He strode past Bertie and calmly began sweeping the crumbs and wrappers left over from the previous night’s raid.

“And where were you when all this–” Bertie gesticulated wildly, encompassing the entire kitchen, “–happened?”

“I felt it prudent to run an errand.”

“An errand?”

“For the good of the house, sir.”

“Ah, well, that’s all well and good, but the welfare of the house is under greater threat than might be circumvented by something so pedestrian as an ‘errand’!”

“One would think so, sir.”

“The luggage was one thing, Jeeves.”

“I actually have more than one vertebrae, sir.”

“The piano was another. But I grant we can not all be true students of music. In the words of our lord, ‘Perhaps he knew not why what he did broke my piano’.”

“Harpsichords were as advanced as they got in what you might call ‘Bible times’, sir.”

“But to consort with that warlock, Bertie. That libertine. That heretic! That…that…”

“Bisexual, sir?”

“That bisexual, Jeeves!”

“I imagine it must be too much to bear, sir. That is why I took the liberty of running my errand. I called in a favor with an old friend.”

“It wouldn’t be that Alforth fellow you’re always on about?”

“Alfred, sir. He currently works for a certain American playboy in Gotham, but he owed me a favor. I had him send a message to…a friend of his employer’s.”

“Does this friend have a name?”

Just then there was a ring at the door and Jeeves slipped by silently. There was a short exchange in the hall before Jeeves returned with another titan of a man, this time with a respectable haircut and a set of sturdy, trustworthy horn-rim glasses.

“Clark Kent, sir,” Jeeves said.

“Wh-who?” Bertie replied, feeling the shaking return to his hands.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Kent said, giving Bertie a corn-fed smile as he stepped forward, hand out.

Well, Bertie thought, at least this one has manners.

It was at that moment that the bathroom door opened and Goku, his lower regions wrapped in a towel, emerged from a bank of steam. Bertie noticed in a distant, traumatized sort of way that he was using Bertie’s tooth brush. Before he could notice anything else to lament, however, Goku and mister Kent made eye contact. All of Goku’s muscles flexed at once and a terrible wind whipped through the flat, tousling Bertie’s hair but leaving Jeeves’ untouched. A golden glow touched the walls as Goku’s hair began to float up from his head. At the same time, mister Kent launched himself into a vision-blurring spin only to come to a stop just as suddenly. Where before there had been a sensible suit and a pair of respectable glasses there was now a ghastly blue and red leotard.

“YOU!” both men howled at the same time, and a reverberation of past enmities rumbled between them.

“Am I dead, Jeeves?” Bertie asked. “Is this some strange Hell concocted by the God of our new century?”

“Not quite, sir,” Jeeves said. He took a step to the side and placed two hands on the handle to the oven door. “Might I suggest, however, that sir grab on to something sturdy and not let go?”

Bertie scrambled to comply, wrapping his arms around the sturdiest thing he could think of. Jeeves, for his part, did not seem to mind the contact.

There was a flash of light and a clap of thunder, followed by an awful, creaking, tearing of wood and shattering of glass. Bertie screamed in too high a register and, in some part of his mind that still had the energy to worry about proper forms, he thanked heaven for the fact that Jeeves had secrets of Bertie’s far more embarrassing than one womanish scream.

And then, he realized, it was over. Bertie opened his eyes and saw, to his infinite relief, that Goku and Kent had both vacated the premises. Granted, they had done so by ripping a hole in the wall of his sitting room, but ‘dentists and gift horses make poor bedfellows,’ or so the saying went. He took a deep breath and walked over to the hole, pointedly ignoring the crunch of glass under his house shoes, to stare out at the London skyline. Jeeves appeared beside him after a moment, somehow not crunching any glass underfoot.

“Shall I call for repairs?” Jeeves said.

“No,” Bertie said. “I’ll need a tuner first.”

————-

This story was done during Slashfic Sunday #1 on 11/27/11, with the following prompt:

This story was written by Quiz and Eliza Gauger, with Eliza providing only the opening few lines, and some editing, and Quiz doing the vast majority of the work.