!!!ICHI BAN!!! KATAMARI FAN FICTION !!!ICHI BAN!!!

If you are not familiar with what Katamari is, I recommend you Wikipedia it. I'll put the link right here, lazy ass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari

Shigeru Okanawa, one of Japan's leading geneticists, gazed admiringly at his creation. The happy little multicolored tennis ball-sized sphere that rolled about so gaily in the plastic hamster cage was officially the first multi-celled organism to ever be engineered completely from scratch. "Any questions?" he asked the reporters.

"What's that he's doing there?" asked a woman. The Katamari was rolling along a bed of wood shavings, except that they were sticking to him as he went along. Eventually they wound up covering him completely, to such a point that the creature's previously smooth, slick body now looked very fuzzy and more adorable than ever before.

"Ah," said Dr. Okanawa, smiling, "I believe he's eating."

"Eating?" said the reporter incredulously, "He eats wood?"

"Well, no. We've been feeding him a diet of diced vegetables, which is what we designed him to eat. However, every now and then he seems to attempt to ingest objects that he can't metabolize. The shavings will just drop off when he realizes they're inedible. Who else has a question?" Another reporter raised his hand.

"So, what exactly does he do?" asked a man in the front row.

"Pardon?"

"Yeah, what does he do? How is he useful? What's the point of his existence?"

"Well..." Okanawa trailed off. "You've got me. I guess that's a question for the guys in corporate. They say 'splice me up a multicellular critter' and I go ahead and do it." There were a few chuckles around the conference room.

"No really, though. What does this... Kator-"

"Katamari."

"What purpose does this Katamari serve?"

"Frankly, so far he mostly just rolls around in there. He eats vegetables and grows bigger. There really isn't a point to him as far as I know. The suits in Tokyo just wanted him as a publicity item. You can count on seeing more organisms with more practical purposes out of us in the future, I assure you. And that's all the time we have. Thank you!" The press agents snapped a few more pictures and begin to shuffle out of the room.

------

"He's growing much larger than we anticipated." said Hiro, stating the obvious. Two weeks later, the Katamari was already the size of a basketball and much too big for the hamster habitat he used to live in. "And with these results, there's no denying it anymore. He's definitely eating his wood shavings." Okanawa knew his lab assistant was right. Just as the creature did with his chopped vegetables, he was rolling up his shavings until he was thoroughly coated and then gradually absorbing them into his rubbery body.

"So he eats wood." said Okanawa. "Certainly worth looking into, but nothing to worry about."

"Normally I'd agree. But I think you should look at this." Hiro reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin and a rubber superball, the kind his kids loved to ricochet off the walls, floor, and ceiling of his house when he wasn't home. Both these objects were about an inch in diameter. He dropped them into the rabbit hutch. It was feeding time, and the Katamari was especially hungry. He rolled over, and both items stuck to him immediately. "I've introduced two objects, completely non-organic, and I guarantee he'll have them fully 'digested' in an hour."

"What are you doing, Hiro? He could poison himself!"

"Clearly not. Remember the habitat thermometer that mysteriously went missing? And the minicams that disappeared the other day? We've reviewed the footage. He ate them all in the middle of the night. This little guy is a regular billy goat."

"Okay Hiro, thanks. I need to make a few phone calls. You can head home. I appreciate you staying late."

"See you tomorrow, Doc." said Hiro, exchanging his lab coat for one to keep him warm and heading out the door. Dr. Okanawa went into his office and took a seat behind his desk. This whole thing was becoming more troubling to him every day. Clearly the Suits knew something he didn't. It was obvious, or at least it should have been the day that a huge hard drive arrived in the mail containing a few terabytes of unknown genetic code.

"What do you want me to do with this?" he had asked Kenji Yamamoto over the phone. Yamamoto was director of R&D and one of the Tokyo Suits.

"Just integrate it into you're project. You'll be able to make it work."

"I don't even know what this is."

"I'll put it bluntly Dr. Okanawa: It isn't your business to know. "

"But I-"

"As stated in the... ah... fourth clause of your contract."

"Oh."

Yamamoto's tone softened a bit, "Shigeru, I know this all may seem a bit disconcerting, but I'm quite confident you're up for the challenge, and far more than capable of pulling this off. We're going to set your deadline back a year. We're all rooting for you over here. You pull this thing off and you'll be a hero."

Flash forward about three years to present day and Okanawa was calling his boss again for what he could only imagine was a reason directly related to that distant phone conversation. Yamamoto had gone home for the day, but upon insisting to his assistant that the call was an emergency, the doctor was routed to his home. "Shigeru, this is unexpected. I trust things are going well?" Dr. Okanawa could hear Yamamoto's kids playing in the background.

"Not really." said Okanawa bluntly, "I'm going to get straight to the point, because I have a really bad feeling about what's going on over here. I'm calling to report some strange behavior in the animal, and I can only assume it has to do with the extra genetic information you had me tie in." There was a pause on the other side of the line.

"What kind of behavior?"

"The Katamari is consuming things that it shouldn't be. We planned it to be purely herbivorous, but it seems to be able to eat... well... anything." This was followed by an even longer pause. "Hello?"

"Is the Katamari secure?" asked Yamamoto.

"Secure? Well, its locked in the rabbit hutch where we typically keep it"

"Your lab has a cold storage unit, right?"

"Yes..."

"Okay, I want you to move it there immediately. We'll send someone over tomorrow to take care of this. Until then, keep the specimen on ice."

"We have no idea what kind of tolerance the creature has for freezing temp-"

"Well, we do. Do as I say. Someone will be there tomorrow. I have a few phone calls to make." Yamamoto hung up.

"Shit." said Okanawa to himself. He got up and headed back to the lab. When he arrived, he discovered that the rabbit hutch was minus one Katamari and plus one Katamari-sized hole in it's mesh walls. "Shit!" said Okanawa again, spinning on his heel and scanning the lab. Nothing.

Then a rustling from behind a counter. Dr. Okanawa grabbed the Katamari Net down off the wall and gingerly stepped towards the noise. Edging around the corner of the counter to get a look, he could see that the Katamari had broken through the glass door of a floor cabinet. The sound of beakers and lab equipment being rustled around was quite audible from within. Then with a crash it burst through another cabinet door and rolled right into view.

The creature was caked in... stuff. Bits of broken glass, beakers, tools, petri cultures, even a microscope; all this junk just seemed to stick magically to it, giving it considerably more volume and mass. It appeared to not have noticed Okanawa, and proceeded to wheel away from him towards the live specimen containers. Okanawa continued to attempt to stalk it. Before he could even get close, the Katamari lept up onto a counter, and knocked a cage of mice onto the floor. With a crash the cage burst open. A flurry of tiny animals, suddenly freed, scattered across the ground. The creature, whom it became apparent had done this intentionally, zipped off the counter and managed to land on a few of the fleeing rodents.

To Okanawa's horror, the mice stuck to the creature just as easily as anything else. As if locked to the Katamari by an invisible vice, the animals twitched and struggled, attempting fruitlessly to free themselves. The Katamari remained still, clearly stunned by this sensation, as it was the first time it had preyed on anything more than celery. The mice' struggling became more erratic and spastic, then finally stopped. The Katamari shuddered, and Okanawa, frozen where he stood, witnessed something even more horrific.

Greasy, disgusting flesh seemed to grow out from the center of the creature, partially absorbing all the objects, formerly alive or otherwise, that had now become a part of it. Slick little tendrils protruded from this skin and wrapped themselves around the less secure items, particularly the mice, digging in and drawing nutrients. What Okanawa had was no longer the cute little multicolored tennis ball that he used to feed baby carrots.

Then the creature noticed him. Okanawa had no time to react, it was coming at him fast. It smacked into his leg, but then bounced off just as quickly. The impact knocked him over, and for a moment he could feel the unexplainable stickiness of the Katamari; it felt like an absolutely unbreakable force, unlike anything he'd ever experienced. The only thing that kept them apart was Okanawa's considerably greater mass.

The Katamari would have to wait if it wanted to make Okanawa part of it's collective. The scientist climbed to his feet, his shin terribly bruised, and picked up his net. The creature sped away, gaining speed across the floor, neatly scaled a wall, ripping out an electric outlet in the process, and broke through a window. The Katamari had escaped.

-----------------