A short time after I acquired my first Japanese Anime tapes (was it really over a decade ago?), I got interested in Rumiko Takahashi's masterpiece, Urusei Yatsura... and when I eventually found out how it ended, I started writing a fanfic story (which escalated into a series, known as the Final Urusei Yatsura Season, or FUYS for short.  One of the puns I came up with while writing was USA Yatsura... When I mentioned this to one of my fellow UY fans (this was long before the days of Internet access) he told me that someone else had already used that pun, and that it was the name of one of Miss Takahashi's American-based fangroups... and that they published a bi-monthly Amateur Press Association fanzine with that title, U.S.A. Yatsura... (Those interested in more info about the USA Yatsura APA, click here.)
 
    Well, to make a long story short, one of the fans who was writing stories of his own in the USAY APA was Fred Lee Cain, a very nice guy who had some ideas of his own concerning the UY characters...  And since a given rule of Tomobiki is that you rarely ever get what you want, Fred decided to apply this axiom to Megane, one of his favorite UY characters (Okay, how many of you out there wear glasses???  As a matter of fact, out of the 2 dozen or so hard-core Anime fans in the Dayton area, only one of us doesn't wear glasses... so he promptly got tagged with the handle, 'Megane'...)

    Anyhow, Fred (and some of his fellow APA-members who assisted in polishing the original character concept) introduced a new character into the UY pantheon... A cute, bubbly, possessive bundle who fixates on Megane after an accidental confession of love on his part.  She's turned out to be quite popular among a lot of UY fanfic writers (myself included, causing a massive series of changes in my own storyline in the FUYS...)

    During his later stories, Fred came up with a perfect partner and a hilarious Takahashian relationship for the girl I had originally intended for Megane, and in return, during our discussions I came up with the reason Megane has been fixated on Lum from the beginning of the series (besides the fact that she is a doll...) and gave Megane an honorable way out of his devotional dilemna, torn between his duty and affection for not one, but two Oni-girls... but I get ahead of myself...)

    Sugoi's popularity among the UY fans in Dayton, caused us to name our local annual Anime convention Sugoicon, and as we post this article (Aug 1998) we are currently in the midst of Sugoicon 6...  And Fred Lee Cain, Sugoicon's Guest of Honor, is the person who transmitted this webpage master HTML index file, making the first of his stories available to the public via Internet access.

    In the near future (I'm scanning and editing it now...), we intend to E-Pub his classic UY fanfic story "Never, Never Leave Me" where several of the UY regulars (including Ataru) get the mistaken impression that Lum has only a week left to live, and they take a solemn vow to do anything at all needed to make her last week a happy one...  as well as his recently completed Magnum Opus, "When You and I Were Young..." which deals with quite a few of the UY couples' relationships during the course of this massive ongoing story which was published on a bi-monthly basis for over 2 years in 40-100+ page sections... (Hmm, maybe that's how I should release it on the Web...)

    After giving the idea some thought, due to the fan requests for the "true" story of how they met, Fred wrote a "short" (for him) 100 page two-part fanfic which was published in the APA last year...  I hope you enjoy it as much as I do...