Mistaken Identity

When we last left our heroine, she was fighting a pack of wily ninjas on an assassination mission. You'll recall that they attacked her in a case of really mistaken identity, believing her to be the Princess Nobuko, who had fled home to escape a loveless arranged marriage to a man twice her age and to find out the truth about her mother's mysterious disappearance, and had taken the Emperor's wife's (her stepmother's) prized jade necklace.

The necklace, if you remember, was a gift from the Emperor to Empress Mizuki, who had coerced it out of him through a combination of feminine wiles and mickeys slipped into his before-bed glasses of warm milk, which, as you know, was how she got him to marry her in the first place.

Of course, you remember that the necklace really belonged to Princess Nobuko's mom, Empress Saika, who had mysteriously disappeared a mere three months before the Emperor and Empress Mizuki's nuptials.

If you kept reading, you would have learned that Princess Nobuko chased a lead on her mother's whereabouts to a Northern California metropolis, having learned from the man who sold fruit from a cart at the gates to the Emperor's city that the word on the street was that an unknown man of high rank and nobility (who, as you know, was acting on behalf of Empress Mizuki) paid the pirates of the Good Ship Gyoza a handsome sum to ferry away across the Pacific a woman bound up in burlap and screaming like the dickens. Though no one was sure who she was exactly, they could tell she was educated, and from the clothes that hung below the burlap sack, that she was a fine lady indeed. No one thought to help her, though, as you'll recall, because who in their right mind would mess with the Gyoza boys? No one, that's who.

If you probe your memory, you know that the fruit vendor told Princess Nobuko that he wasn't sure where exactly the ship would dock, but that there was tell of a man in a Northern California metropolis who would take the fine lady off the Gyoza boys' hands for a nominal fee, and put her to work in one of his sweatshops.

If you read further, you would recall that Princess Nobuko then hopped the next ferry to the Northern California metropolis, and when Empress Mizuki got word of what she saw as Princess Nobuko's treachery -- which threatened her own treachery -- she sent the pack of wily ninjas after her.

Of course, the ninjas, although silent and deadly, were fantastically confused. They had never seen Princess Nobuko -- she was unmarried and a princess, after all -- and so had no idea what she looked like. They got what would have been a passable description from Empress Mizuki, but her Elmer-Fuddian speech impediment made their grasp of that description tenuous at best.

It didn't help that the Emperor's description varied greatly from Empress Mizuki's, largely due to his heavy medication at Empress Mizuki's hands, nor had anyone a recent picture of Princess Nobuko, again because she was an unmarried princess.

You'll remember that the ninjas argued, silently, deadly, the whole boat ride over about whether she was short or tall, fair or brown, coarse or fine, coming to no conclusion other than they all seemed to agree that the Empress' court's intel put her at a certain address in the Northern California metropolis.

Which was how our heroine came to be fending off an attack by a pack of confused ninjas.

Needless to say, the Empress' court's intel was waaaaaay off. But the ninjas, having committed to an attack, ignored the fact that Pancha didn't really look like any of the descriptions of the princess that they had received and didn't even speak their language.

Still, our heroine had no choice but to fight back, and even though she had no beef with the ninjas, she was picking them off one by one with her mad judo skillz.

So that's where we left off, and really, nothing has changed. Check back later to see how Panchita fares against the wily ninjas.

Then again, you may never know.