Full Metal Mutants: Round One
Mar. 19th, 2006 03:06 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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xp_logsBackdated to Sunday the 19th, early afternoon Japan time. Shiro and Clarice are spending the weekend at a ryokan inn in Hakone, and are enjoying themselves very much. Until they encounter scouts from The Hand. Then their vacation is ruined.
Clarice was one of the few people who was lucky enough to see Shiro smile regularly, but this weekend was abnormal. He was near giggles at some points. It was as if being back on Japanese soil had made him a child again. Even his accent, which was normally barely noticeable, had thickened.
"Let us go walk," he suggested, pulling on his t-shirt after buckling his belt. "Too beautiful a day to spend inside, ne?"
Clarice nodded before running a brush through her hair. She was willing to agree to nearly anything just so long as Shiro stayed this happy. He needed it. And well, it was something different. Even if he was speaking more Engrish than English.
"The cherry blossoms are gorgeous," she agreed, making a mental note to buy Terry a cherry-blossom themed souvenir. She thought her roommate would love it. "Lemme go find my shoes," not wearing shoes inside the ryokan was playing havoc with remembering where she left them.
Shiro nodded, and headed outside to wait for her. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the sweet, fresh scent of spring in the Japanese countryside. The whole weekend had this far been wonderful. And no evil armor-clad samurai had ruined it.
He needed to break the rules more often.
Knowing when and how to break the rules was something that Clarice worked on. It wasn't that she didn't understand it per se, but doing it without getting in trouble was the key and that was a very fine line that was easy to miss.
"Okay!" she sang, skipping down the stairs in a pair of platform sandals. Contrary to common belief, she did own and wear shoes that were not knee-high black docs. And in Japan, platform sandals seemed to be the norm. "I want to see if we can find some touristy shops!"
Shiro scoffed. "Tourist shops? There is a trail through the woods here. I think we ought to walk down there. It will be like an anime, walking through clouds of cherry blossoms." He grinned at Clarice, slipping an arm around her waist to pull her close. "Romanchikku yo."
Why was it that the guy in the relationship was the more sappier of the two of them? Although that did sound pretty, "Okay..." Clarice rested her head on Shiro's shoulder, was she almost as tall as him now? "That sounds romantiku desu."
Her Japanese was a pathetic pidgin of words learned from Shiro, Leyu, and anime with no grammar, but she would at least say "it is romantic." Arabic was more her thing.
Luckily for her, this ryokan was close enough to civilization that the staff spoke decent English and Clarice didn't have to rely on her paltry understanding of Japanese to get a cup of tea. Not like that stopped the staff from laughing at the silly American behind her back. Shiro's evil glare of d00m stopped that.
As they walked down the path gazing up at the trees, Shiro spouted off some random trivia he'd learned from his cousin Mariko about the history of the cherry blossom tree. Not because he thought Clarice really cared, but it was an attempt to impress her. As the whole weekend had pretty much been.
Sometimes, it didn't take much to impress Clarice, which is why she'd been oohing and ahhing over everything in Japan - and Shiro. She was relatively easy to please and the trip had been a welcome distraction from waiting for college acceptance letters. Not to mention that spending some alone time with Shiro, in Japan no less! was a more than welcome treat.
"Mmmhhmm," she nodded, holding Shiro's hand as they walked through the trees. "We need more cherry blossom trees at school. Maybe we should talk to Ms. Munroe....I don't know if they would live very well in our cold."
"They grow well in DC, and the weather is cold there," Shiro pointed out, picking a flower from a nearby tree and tucking it behind Clarice's ear. He didn't care that it clashed with her skin. "And what is the use of having a weather manipulator if we cannot use it to cultivate exotic flora?"
"Good point," Clarice conceded, carefully adjusting the cherry blossom before it fell out of her hair. As she did so she noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye, but turning around to get a better view revealed that they were the only ones walking in the woods. Odd. "Did you see something?" she asked.
Shiro looked over to where she was looking, but shook his head. "No. Why, what did you see?" It was probably just some little kid from the ryokan running around and being a nuisance. Or a tanuki.
"I dunno....probably nothing, a tree or something," Clarice reasoned, "I'm just being stupidly paranoid."
Which made Shiro a bit paranoid, too. Harada hadn't found them, had he? He couldn't have. Shiro was paying in cash and hadn't even used his family name. No one knew he was in Hakone except for the folk back home in Westchester.
He walked over to the trees at the side of the path and looked behind it. Nope, no one there. Shrugging, he was about to admonish Clarice for watching too many slasher movies when he found himself surrounded by three young men who'd apparently dropped down from the trees.
"~Yakuza swine!~" one of them shouted in Japanese, bringing the backs of his knuckles together, joining thumbs and interlocking pinkies. A mudra, Shiro recognized, a sacred hand gesture. He just barely jumped out of the way of a powerful gust of wind that would have slammed him into the tree and knocked him prone.
"Oh hell no," Clarice said forcefully, dropping into a defensive stance. She hadn't understood what the men in front of them said, but she was betting that they weren't asking for the way to grandmother’s house.
As one came at her, she teleported away, not wanting to actually try to take on a ninja. "Shiro!?" she shrieked, dodging again, "What is going on?"
Shiro jumped to his feet, his fists coated in golden flame, and deflected a fireball from one of the ninja with a plasma blast. "They are called The Hand," he told Clarice. "They do not care much for my family." That was an understatement. But how the hell had they recognized him? "Clarice, we need to get out of . . ."
Or not. A kick in the gut sent Shiro staggering back, and he growled and fired off another plasma blast that the ninja effortlessly dodged. "~What do you want?~" he demanded, blocking another kick and returning the favor, followed by a blast to the chest that knocked the wind out of one of them.
The apparent leader, the one who'd made the mudra, brought his palm together and spread his fingers, forming another gesture that conjured a wheel of blindingly white energy that launched itself at Shiro. He just barely managed to get out of the way, and the wheel neatly bisected the three behind him.
"Fucker!" Clarice teleported above the ninja that had attacked Shiro nealy 'falling' on him, hands wrapped around his neck. "You did not seriously expect us to lie down without giving you a smack down in return!?"
The other two ninjas pulled her off their leader, although she kicked and clawed at their faces, ripping one ninjas mask and part of his cheek before teleporting all three of them into the trees and leaving the ninjas up there to find their own ways down. It was only a temporary distraction for them, but she was only barely holding her own against them.
"Shiro! We gotta stop them for more than a couple seconds!" it wasn't good tactical advice and something Shiro probably knew, but keeping it to non-deadly force and using her powers was difficult while maintaining the offensive. She was certain that Scott would be so proud of her thinking and use of strategic thinking.
Well, if any good thing could come out of this, it's that maybe they'd impress the team leaders and garner some extra brownie points. It's the least they deserved, really.
Engulfing himself in solar flame, Shiro shot up as fast as he could, making contact with one of the ninja in a Dragon Punch-type uppercut. At Shiro's speed, the ninja was hit with so much force that nearly vomited in his mask. He fell to the earth, knocked out cold. Then Shiro charged another, taking a page out of Cannonball's book. He wrapped his arms around the ninja's waist and slammed him into another tree. A roundhouse knocked him out.
Shiro grabbed the last one, who was climbing down, and threw him the rest of the way. Landing next to his prone form, he placed a foot on the man's neck and applied a little pressure, enough to hurt and to keep him from running, but not enough to do any serious damage. "~Well? Would you like to enlighten us?~" he asked.
"~Fucking Yakuza spies!~" the ninja spat. "~Where's your honor, huh?~"
"You don't," Clarice put her face just out of biting distance and grinned evilly, speaking very slowly as if to a child, "I will teleport your arms to Africa, your legs to Europe and your torso to Brazil. Your head I will send back to your family...in half."
She was completely bluffing but she hoped he'd buy it. There was none of this good-cop bad-cop shit like on TV. It was just bad-cop bad-cop.
Shiro had to hide a smile behind a vicious grin. He liked it when Clarice talked dirty like that. He pressed down just a little bit harder. "~You understood her, yes?~" he asked. The ninja tried not to look scared, but he'd just been bested and threatened by two teenagers. He couldn't help looking like he was about to mess himself.
Shiro nodded, releasing his hold but kicking him in the face for good measure. "Asshole." He turned to Clarice. "We need to get out of here now," he said softly so the ninja wouldn't hear him. "With The Hand, this is just the beginning."
Clarice nodded, "We have enough time to get our stuff or should I get it later?" Hopefully they were paid up with the ryokan. She didn't want to stiff the nice family housing them just because of stupid ninjas.
"'Port us back to the ryokan so we can pack and pay, and then we are out." He looked at the three fallen soldiers and told himself again and again, like a mantra, not to just burn the whole damn forest down. That might be a little much, but if it eliminated the ninja, then damn it, it should be done.
Nodding, Clarice did. What a way to fuck up their vacation. "Fuckers," she muttered, casting a hateful glance back at the one still-conscious ninja. "This sucks."
Clarice was one of the few people who was lucky enough to see Shiro smile regularly, but this weekend was abnormal. He was near giggles at some points. It was as if being back on Japanese soil had made him a child again. Even his accent, which was normally barely noticeable, had thickened.
"Let us go walk," he suggested, pulling on his t-shirt after buckling his belt. "Too beautiful a day to spend inside, ne?"
Clarice nodded before running a brush through her hair. She was willing to agree to nearly anything just so long as Shiro stayed this happy. He needed it. And well, it was something different. Even if he was speaking more Engrish than English.
"The cherry blossoms are gorgeous," she agreed, making a mental note to buy Terry a cherry-blossom themed souvenir. She thought her roommate would love it. "Lemme go find my shoes," not wearing shoes inside the ryokan was playing havoc with remembering where she left them.
Shiro nodded, and headed outside to wait for her. He inhaled deeply, breathing in the sweet, fresh scent of spring in the Japanese countryside. The whole weekend had this far been wonderful. And no evil armor-clad samurai had ruined it.
He needed to break the rules more often.
Knowing when and how to break the rules was something that Clarice worked on. It wasn't that she didn't understand it per se, but doing it without getting in trouble was the key and that was a very fine line that was easy to miss.
"Okay!" she sang, skipping down the stairs in a pair of platform sandals. Contrary to common belief, she did own and wear shoes that were not knee-high black docs. And in Japan, platform sandals seemed to be the norm. "I want to see if we can find some touristy shops!"
Shiro scoffed. "Tourist shops? There is a trail through the woods here. I think we ought to walk down there. It will be like an anime, walking through clouds of cherry blossoms." He grinned at Clarice, slipping an arm around her waist to pull her close. "Romanchikku yo."
Why was it that the guy in the relationship was the more sappier of the two of them? Although that did sound pretty, "Okay..." Clarice rested her head on Shiro's shoulder, was she almost as tall as him now? "That sounds romantiku desu."
Her Japanese was a pathetic pidgin of words learned from Shiro, Leyu, and anime with no grammar, but she would at least say "it is romantic." Arabic was more her thing.
Luckily for her, this ryokan was close enough to civilization that the staff spoke decent English and Clarice didn't have to rely on her paltry understanding of Japanese to get a cup of tea. Not like that stopped the staff from laughing at the silly American behind her back. Shiro's evil glare of d00m stopped that.
As they walked down the path gazing up at the trees, Shiro spouted off some random trivia he'd learned from his cousin Mariko about the history of the cherry blossom tree. Not because he thought Clarice really cared, but it was an attempt to impress her. As the whole weekend had pretty much been.
Sometimes, it didn't take much to impress Clarice, which is why she'd been oohing and ahhing over everything in Japan - and Shiro. She was relatively easy to please and the trip had been a welcome distraction from waiting for college acceptance letters. Not to mention that spending some alone time with Shiro, in Japan no less! was a more than welcome treat.
"Mmmhhmm," she nodded, holding Shiro's hand as they walked through the trees. "We need more cherry blossom trees at school. Maybe we should talk to Ms. Munroe....I don't know if they would live very well in our cold."
"They grow well in DC, and the weather is cold there," Shiro pointed out, picking a flower from a nearby tree and tucking it behind Clarice's ear. He didn't care that it clashed with her skin. "And what is the use of having a weather manipulator if we cannot use it to cultivate exotic flora?"
"Good point," Clarice conceded, carefully adjusting the cherry blossom before it fell out of her hair. As she did so she noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye, but turning around to get a better view revealed that they were the only ones walking in the woods. Odd. "Did you see something?" she asked.
Shiro looked over to where she was looking, but shook his head. "No. Why, what did you see?" It was probably just some little kid from the ryokan running around and being a nuisance. Or a tanuki.
"I dunno....probably nothing, a tree or something," Clarice reasoned, "I'm just being stupidly paranoid."
Which made Shiro a bit paranoid, too. Harada hadn't found them, had he? He couldn't have. Shiro was paying in cash and hadn't even used his family name. No one knew he was in Hakone except for the folk back home in Westchester.
He walked over to the trees at the side of the path and looked behind it. Nope, no one there. Shrugging, he was about to admonish Clarice for watching too many slasher movies when he found himself surrounded by three young men who'd apparently dropped down from the trees.
"~Yakuza swine!~" one of them shouted in Japanese, bringing the backs of his knuckles together, joining thumbs and interlocking pinkies. A mudra, Shiro recognized, a sacred hand gesture. He just barely jumped out of the way of a powerful gust of wind that would have slammed him into the tree and knocked him prone.
"Oh hell no," Clarice said forcefully, dropping into a defensive stance. She hadn't understood what the men in front of them said, but she was betting that they weren't asking for the way to grandmother’s house.
As one came at her, she teleported away, not wanting to actually try to take on a ninja. "Shiro!?" she shrieked, dodging again, "What is going on?"
Shiro jumped to his feet, his fists coated in golden flame, and deflected a fireball from one of the ninja with a plasma blast. "They are called The Hand," he told Clarice. "They do not care much for my family." That was an understatement. But how the hell had they recognized him? "Clarice, we need to get out of . . ."
Or not. A kick in the gut sent Shiro staggering back, and he growled and fired off another plasma blast that the ninja effortlessly dodged. "~What do you want?~" he demanded, blocking another kick and returning the favor, followed by a blast to the chest that knocked the wind out of one of them.
The apparent leader, the one who'd made the mudra, brought his palm together and spread his fingers, forming another gesture that conjured a wheel of blindingly white energy that launched itself at Shiro. He just barely managed to get out of the way, and the wheel neatly bisected the three behind him.
"Fucker!" Clarice teleported above the ninja that had attacked Shiro nealy 'falling' on him, hands wrapped around his neck. "You did not seriously expect us to lie down without giving you a smack down in return!?"
The other two ninjas pulled her off their leader, although she kicked and clawed at their faces, ripping one ninjas mask and part of his cheek before teleporting all three of them into the trees and leaving the ninjas up there to find their own ways down. It was only a temporary distraction for them, but she was only barely holding her own against them.
"Shiro! We gotta stop them for more than a couple seconds!" it wasn't good tactical advice and something Shiro probably knew, but keeping it to non-deadly force and using her powers was difficult while maintaining the offensive. She was certain that Scott would be so proud of her thinking and use of strategic thinking.
Well, if any good thing could come out of this, it's that maybe they'd impress the team leaders and garner some extra brownie points. It's the least they deserved, really.
Engulfing himself in solar flame, Shiro shot up as fast as he could, making contact with one of the ninja in a Dragon Punch-type uppercut. At Shiro's speed, the ninja was hit with so much force that nearly vomited in his mask. He fell to the earth, knocked out cold. Then Shiro charged another, taking a page out of Cannonball's book. He wrapped his arms around the ninja's waist and slammed him into another tree. A roundhouse knocked him out.
Shiro grabbed the last one, who was climbing down, and threw him the rest of the way. Landing next to his prone form, he placed a foot on the man's neck and applied a little pressure, enough to hurt and to keep him from running, but not enough to do any serious damage. "~Well? Would you like to enlighten us?~" he asked.
"~Fucking Yakuza spies!~" the ninja spat. "~Where's your honor, huh?~"
"You don't," Clarice put her face just out of biting distance and grinned evilly, speaking very slowly as if to a child, "I will teleport your arms to Africa, your legs to Europe and your torso to Brazil. Your head I will send back to your family...in half."
She was completely bluffing but she hoped he'd buy it. There was none of this good-cop bad-cop shit like on TV. It was just bad-cop bad-cop.
Shiro had to hide a smile behind a vicious grin. He liked it when Clarice talked dirty like that. He pressed down just a little bit harder. "~You understood her, yes?~" he asked. The ninja tried not to look scared, but he'd just been bested and threatened by two teenagers. He couldn't help looking like he was about to mess himself.
Shiro nodded, releasing his hold but kicking him in the face for good measure. "Asshole." He turned to Clarice. "We need to get out of here now," he said softly so the ninja wouldn't hear him. "With The Hand, this is just the beginning."
Clarice nodded, "We have enough time to get our stuff or should I get it later?" Hopefully they were paid up with the ryokan. She didn't want to stiff the nice family housing them just because of stupid ninjas.
"'Port us back to the ryokan so we can pack and pay, and then we are out." He looked at the three fallen soldiers and told himself again and again, like a mantra, not to just burn the whole damn forest down. That might be a little much, but if it eliminated the ninja, then damn it, it should be done.
Nodding, Clarice did. What a way to fuck up their vacation. "Fuckers," she muttered, casting a hateful glance back at the one still-conscious ninja. "This sucks."
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