By Todd Fan
Disclaimer: "You spend one day with the hippies, and you realize how truly refreshing and unpretentious, hard core, New York degenerates are"
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Ooooh my first crossover fic, I am so proud!. It came to my realisation that alot of characters I adore are, indeed, hippies. Considering I'm a hippie myself, this is not suprising. Let the karma and madness commence!:
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Hippies. The very mention of the word usually makes people think of long hair, drugs, peace signs and...well..more drugs. Of course, this isn't the case with most hippies....okay, some of them, but not all. Hippies have spanned our planet for years, they are the people who stand up and say 'hey, instead of following the masses like a sheep, I'm going to voice my opinion, and I don't care who hears it'. Yes, if it weren't for the hippies, bigotry would no doubt be a thousand times worse than it is. What was not known about hippies was that every few years, a group of some of the more famous of their number congregated together to swap their wisdom of spreading peace around the globe. Though THIS years crop suggested that maybe someone had messed up the invites....no one owned up to it.
"Hello, fellow hippies, I'm Neil", said a young man with scraggly brown hair and a permanent look of depression on his face, "the...err...people have told me that I'm chairman this year of the annual meet....okay?"
He looked at the faces in front of him, 2 female, living human beings, one cartoon character human, a anthropomorphic cartoon rabbit and one dead man who was looking suprisingly well for someone without a pulse. They said nothing.
"...Okay", said Neil with a miserable sigh, "don't all, like, jump with excitement".
"I'm excited", piped up one of the women, a short-haired-blonde, "woooo!"
The dead-man shifted away from her slightly.
"You know", he said, his accent strongly British, "I don't think I quite qualify for this meet. I mean, I haven't been in the hippie game since I...err..died".
"You're DEAD?", asked the woman, wide-eyed, "wow, that is SO cool. I know another dead-person, GO ME!!".
Neil blinked. He'd seen some weird things in his student flat, most of it coming from his rather..odd flatmates. But this, well, this was rating pretty high of the strange-o-meter.
"Dead...that must bite, Dude", said the Native American teenage cartoon character.
"Not really", replied the Brit with a shurg, "I don't have to fear death anymore. And I can be a raging alchoholic without worrying about what it does to my body"
"That's....interesting", said Neil, "okay, why don't you start with the introductions...Dead-Man".
The Brit gave a disguntled sigh.
"Fine, I'm Mason. I died in 1966. I'm a 'grim' reaper", he said, "I like drinking and stealing from the dead people who's souls I reap".
"Good for you, Mason", grinned the 'excited' blonde woman, patting his back, "it's GOOD to admit things, it lets go of all that clingy weight".
"Clingy weight is SO bad", agreed the other woman, a long-haird blonde.
The short-haired blonde nodded, then waved at the room in general.
"Hello, I'm Dharma, I love my husband. Greg, and I think my mother-in-law is a hellbeast from the nether-worlds", she said.
"Who doesn't?", laughed the other woman, "MY husband’s mother is a posh, hypocritical witch".
"Mine too!", said Dharma in amazement, "we are SO mother-in-law-soul-mates".
"We ARE!", agreed the long-haired-blonde, hugging Dharma.
"And YOU are?", asked Mason, rather anoyed the only two women in the room were both married...damn.
"I'm Phoebe", replied Phoebe, "I'm married to Mike, my friends are, like, my life, and my mother killed herself when I was a kid".
"I killed MYSELF", said Mason, then smirked, "you want to see the hole in my skull? It's still there!".
Phoebe blinked.
"Maybe some other time", she said with a fake smile.
The cartoon Native American cleared his throat.
"Okay, I guess I'll go then", he said, "the name's Forge, and, despite apperances, I'm not a teenager, I'm a 36 year old man that had a bit of a..err..science accident".
He gave a nervous laugh.
"And I'm a mutant".
"Groovy!", said Neil with a nod, then blinked at the rabbit....the rabbit was slumped in a corner, snoring loudly, "eerr...hello, Rabbit-Dude?"
"Zzzzzzz", replied the rabbit.
Dharma walked over and gave him a poke. The rabbit gave a snort, opening one half-lidded eye.
"Hi", said Dharma, "we're introducing ourselves, want to join in?"
The rabbit yawned, before sitting up.
"I'm Dylan", he replied in a sleepy, British accent, "I, like, live in an enchanted land powered by a Magic Roundabout.....what am I doing here again?"
"....The meeting", said Neil patiently.
"Okay, cool", rpelied the rabbit sleepily, "rock on, man"
His ears began to droop as he dozed off again. Forge had backed himself into a corner, giving a whimper.
"Rabbit!!!", he squeaked, "big, big BIG rabbit!!!!" (1)
"You got a bit of a phobia?", smirked Mason.
"Bite me, dead-man", snapped Forge.
"Okay, okay, people", said Neil, raising his hands, his face bearly visable under his long, brown hair, "we have to remember we are not of the angry race. We are hippies, and proud of it"
Mason and Forge glared at him, before sighing, falling silent.
"That's better", smiled Neil.
"So...what now?", asked Dharma, raising a hand.
Neil blinked. That was a good question. He hadn't really been given any instructions on running this.
"Well", he said at length, "maybe we can share stories about our work..."
"Ooooooh, I can play a song!!!", grinned Phoebe, pulling out a guitar, strumming a chord.
The sound produced seemed to have a magic effect on the snoozing rabbit. Dylan sat up suddenly, giving a buck-toothed grin.
"Great sound, Phoebes", he said, pulling out his own guitar, a dis-proportioned object if ever there was one, "I, like, play by ear".
"Oh great...music", groaned Mason, covering his ears.
"Know anything from the seventies?", asked Forge, still keeping a GOOD distance away from Dylan.
"Yeah...right", snorted Phoebe.
"What's wrong with the seventies?", asked Dylan, "those and the sixties were my best years".(2)
"I've got something better", grinned Phoebe, strumming on her guitar, begining to sing, "Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, What are they feeding you?, Smelly Cat, Smelly Cat, It's not your fault". (3)
"Please don't sing that again", said Forge.
"Agreed", said Mason, grabbing both guitars.
"Don't touch my guitar or I'll pound on you", growled Phoebe.
"I've mastered several martial arts", added Dylan, "please don't make me use them, I don't believe in violence"
"I'm dead, you can't do anything to me", said Mason.
"Guys, we're getting all angry and clenchy again", said Dharma.
"She's right", sighed Phoebe, then added in a volume of voice that only Mason could hear, "I'll get YOU later".
Neil sighed, okay, that didn't go well.
"I know", he said, "why don't you say how you showered the world in karma and love?"
"I let a Native American spend his last days in my appartment", said Dharma.
Forge arched a brow.
"That must have been fun"
"Oh, it WAS", grinned Dharma.
"I joined the police once", said Neil.
Everyone looked at him with a gasp of terror.
"My friend Vyvian got pregnant", explained Neil, "I had to do it to support him and the unborn child"
Neil paused.
"...And then it turned out to be, like, gas.....I had to raid my friends party because of the oppressive pig-orders".
"That is so sad", said Phoebe, patting his back, then grinned, "I made sock bunnies!!!".
She pulled some bedraggled objects out of her purse. They were, indeed, socks, a large sock with smaller socks sewn onto them, button eyes and shoelace whiskers finished off the effect.
"ARGGGHHH!!!", screamed Forge, ducking behind a chair.
"...Those are the ugliest things I have ever seen", said Dharma, "and I've seen some nasty things".
"Hey, they look just like cotton-butt!", snorted Mason
Dylan blinked at the sock rabbit, before sniffing.
"Whatever, dude, you obviously don't know your rabbits", he muttered, choosing to go back to sleep.
"Okay, okay", said Neil with a defeated sigh, "any more buisness?"
"Yeah, can I go home now?", asked Mason, waving a post-it-note in the air, "I got an E.T.D in an hour"
"E.T.D?", asked Forge, peeking out from behind the chair.
"Estimated Time of Death", grinned Mason.
"You're going to kill someone in an hour?", asked Dharma.
"I don't kill people", said Mason pointedly, "I take their souls before they die. The Gravelings do the whole chain-of-events thing".
"I'm not even going to ask", said Phoebe with a shudder.
"It's best not", said Mason with a pleasant smile, then clapped his hands together, "Rube gets pissed when I don't reap before they die, so can I go?".
"Fine, go", said Neil, then sighed, "not like we've actually acomplished anything here anyway"
"I'm going home too", said Forge, edging past the sleeping rabbit, "my nerves can't take much more of this".
Phoebe and Dharma looked at each other, then smiled at Neil.
"Going home to the husband", they said in unison, before making for the exit.
Dylan opened one eye, watching everyone leave. He yawned, getting to his feet.
"Like, Time For Bed, dude", he said, then paused, "it's just not the same as when Zebedee does it" (4)
He shook his head, leaving the room. Neil looked around miserably.
"I suppose I have to go home too", he said, then sighed, "I really hope Rick hasn't boarded up my room again"
He walked from the room with a sigh, ending yet another of the meetings of the minds....as odd as the minds involved may be.
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Okay, for thsoe who don't know your hippies:
Phoebe - From Friends. Hippie buddy of Chandler, Rachel, Joey, Ross and Monica, well known for her bizare guitar songs.
Neil - From a 80's British show 'The Young Ones', a student of Scumbag College, lives with Vyvian, Rick and Mike.
Dylan - A rabbit from a 60's stop-motion French-British show 'The Magic Roundabout'. Dylan was the prime subject in the whole 'drugs debate' with MR. Narcoleptic, stonned and a guitar player, re-named after Bob Dylan.
Forge - A character originally from the X-Men comics. He was changed from a solem bearly-cracks-a-smile type into a time-displaced hippie in the cartoon show 'X-Men: Evolution'. A Native American mutant with the ability to invent anything he wants.
Mason - A Brit from the show 'Dead Like Me'. Mason is a grim reaper, yes, he harvests souls for a living. He died in 1966 of Trepanation...he drilled a hole in his skull chasing a permanent high.
Dharma - From Dharma and Greg. She married her husband, Greg, the day she met him. Comes from a proud hippie family.
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(1) - If you're unfamiliar with my Evo fan-works, I gave Forge a numbing phobia of rabbits.
(2) - When the Magic Roundabout was both created and became a public favorite..at least in Britian and France.
(3) - Smelly Cat, one of Phoebe's more famous songs.
(4) - The words uttered by one of the characters of the Magic Roundabout at the end of every show. It sent millions of British children to their beds.