Daily Story 69: Bulwer-Lytton Can Suck It

For a moment Edith was distracted as she noticed - in an offhand kind of way, like you might note a spelling error on a billboard even though the advertising company presumably has some sort of quality control or editors or whatever - that several of the ninjas were out of breath even though in movies they were notoriously relentless, although she was forced to admit to herself that almost none of the things she had seen in movies - or the sort of movies that involved ninjas, at any rate - could be thought of as particularly accurate; often cars would explode at the slightest provocation and the women were all in fantastic shape and never covered in sweat or grime unless it was artistically applied grime, a sort of camouflage makeup that could never happen in the real world, although Edith was aware that she did indeed look better and sweat less than your average girl assuming, of course, that you were speaking in terms of real-world girls rather than the aforementioned women in movies since in those circles she would be slightly below average despite her many qualities; in addition to her physique and lack of sweat she could cook, do minor electrical repairs, and design web pages that were almost professional in quality - thereby setting her apart from the unwashed masses that slapped together a mess of flashing text and animated 'under construction' images (for this story takes place in 1997 when those things were at epidemic levels and the mass use of templates had not yet cut down on this horrible and obnoxious trend) or even fonts that were downright unreadable - and she sometimes thought to herself that these diverse skills along with her general intelligence and beauty would have led to her being criticized as a 'Mary Jane' character - someone who was a bit too perfect - if a story was ever written about her life, though this was only because it seemed unlikely that a story about her would find a way to work in her obsessive and disturbing love for those creepy little 'Precious Moments' figurines - a love that had ruined her credit and caused several men to break up with her even though in at least one of those cases the relationship was going quite well on all other fronts and he had even survived meeting her mother, a terrible woman whose sole pleasure in life came from making others uncomfortable; she would sometimes greet her daughter's boyfriends at the door wearing nothing but a skimpy nightgown - bought for her by her late husband as an anniversary gift the June before he died of a mysterious and rare medical condition thought to be linked to the eating of human brains (although no evidence was ever uncovered to suggest he was a cannibal, much to the confusion and dismay of his doctors who had been hoping to write a paper on it) even though their actual anniversary was in May - just to watch them squirm and try to figure out where to look, but even though she had tried that tactic with the man in question he had simply smiled and looked her in the eyes and deprived her of any victory, making Edith extremely happy and subsequently that much more depressed when he left over the figurines, though she continued to think of that as more of a footnote that would go unread or more likely unwritten in any story about her, since there would be no relevant point to anchor the footnote to; after all, any story would likely spend all of its time talking about far more interesting events such as those that led the ninjas to be after her in the first place - if ninjas they even were, since Edith was uncertain about not only the lack of stamina she was noticing but also the previous clues she had picked up including a receipt from a local party and costume supply store for a dozen ninja costumes; though the costumes would have come with plastic swords if anything and while the ninjas facing her might not have authentic katanas (this being one of the areas Edith was less educated on she was unable to be certain on what made a katana authentic or not, let alone whether it was something you could determine at a glance) they were absolutely not plastic.