concoursec | that's not the sound of desperation or anything (closed)

Entry tags:

that's not the sound of desperation or anything (closed)

Characters: Maria Cyphert, Yosuke Hanamura
Location: Training Centre
Rating: Let's say PG-13; probable eventual warnings for language, weapons and Yosuke
Open/Closed/Finished: Closed!
Summary: If she asked to see him again, that means she likes him, right?

The idea of being the one to decide when and how to train, of needing to do it at all, is a weird one to Yosuke. Even if he was back home, he's not sure it would sit any better with him. He's settled in pretty well, or at least he thinks so, but there's too much of the past year tangled up with it in his mind for stuff like this to be completely comfortable - or something like that, except harder to put a finger on.

He has to get used to it sometime, though, and he's already put it off for a little while. That's why he's here, trying not to let the humidity make him lose his grip on his weapons before he finds anything to whale on, kicking up the leaves underfoot as he walks because it's an improvement on the silence.

Now that he thinks about it, he could have come down here earlier, huh? That girl he ran into that one time... Sure, it hadn't been his idea of a date, but maybe he should have taken her up on the offer, pushed himself a little. He hadn't been certain that she was completely off her rocker and just going to use him as target practice, after all.

Well, what's done is done. He wonders for a moment if she's around here anyway, and then laughs a self-mocking laugh aloud to himself. "Yeah, what are the chances? There's nobody in here..."

...But never mind that. Time to focus.

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"Maybe you're a natural," Maria said as she stepped up, a wicked almost-feral grin on her face as she hefted her gunblades, "but you still need a bit more training!"

On the last word, she spun both her gunblades vertically, shedding light as she did, then charged the monster with a howl of bloodlust. As its head lunged down for her, she practically skipped sideways, lashing out with a blade as she did. When it impacted, she pulled the trigger; the shockwave racing down the blade reversed its momentum, and she used its force to twist and bring her other gunblade down hard on its neck. The momentum of its trigger-pull and her own leg strength flipped her up onto the T-Rexaur's head. She thrust both blades into its skull, on either side of the wound left by Yosuke's own Limit Break, then pulled each trigger half a dozen times each till the T-Rexaur was jerking and thrashing mindlessly on the ground from the shockwaves racing through its brain.

She yanked both blades free, then brought then down crosswise, hammering them home with enough force that the trigger sent her into a forward flip off the monster's skull. She landed a good ten feet away from it, then spun to face it, lifting both blades again. This time, she didn't shed light so much as absorb it, her body glowing a brilliant blue-white until she was nothing more than an outlined figure. That figure shifted abruptly, swelling and growing until a massive lion of light towered above both monster and ally. With a roar, the lion hammered one mighty paw into the T-Rexaur, a devastating blow that made the ground tremble.

It vanished like a snuffed candle, leaving Maria to stumble slightly for her balance. No real fear that the T-Rexaur would take advantage, though; it seemed uninclined to move ever again.

Yosuke was quick to rush towards her, and just as quick to encounter a rather stark reminder of how he'd been dragged into this in the first place. Yikes, her clothes were in even worse a state than his shirt by now. ...And the clothes weren't really the important part, huh.

"Uh, you okay? Sorry, I shouldn't have asked you to cover me like that... But whoa, Maria-san, that was brutal!" He wasn't even exaggerating, although he did have to wonder exactly how impressed he was allowed to sound without it reflecting badly on him. That last shockwave had nearly floored him as he stood by, never mind Maria.

But it was pretty emphatically over, too. Once that had sunk in, another realisation that had been vying for Yosuke's attention in the fray finally grabbed hold of it: he was only holding one kunai, and this time a cursory glance around the grass nearby didn't turn up anything that looked like the other one.

"Oh, right..."

He began to pick his way over to the fallen dinosaur - hopefully it had just knocked the weapon away in its dying throes, and not, say, landed right on top of it - but after one too many wobbly steps, stopped and crouched, his breathing heavy. "Geez..." he managed to say after a few seconds, opening one eye. "I forgot how much that always takes out of you."

"What does what now?" Maria, of course, was perfectly fine, barely even breathing hard. She brushed at her clothing absently, then even more absently dug another Cure spell out of stock and cast it on herself, mending her wounds. "And what are you doing?"

She hadn't registered the loss of his kunai during all that; she'd had other things to pay attention to. Hopefully he wasn't counting on her to have seen where it went...

"Uh... N-Nothing." Man, this was getting seriously embarrassing.

Once he'd mustered the energy to stand back up, still somewhat pale compared to how he'd looked just after Maria's first Cure spell, he made his way over to the T-Rexaur, looked down, and groaned. He couldn't be completely sure the suspiciously handle-like shape he could barely make out between the monster's scaly side and its blood on the ground was what he thought, but he was pretty damn positive he wasn't going to be able to pull it out from here.

"Oh, don't tell me..."

Just on principle, he reached out with both hands to give the dinosaur a shaky push. It met with about as much success as if he'd blown on it.

"Hey, look out."

Maria stepped forward deliberately, then lashed out with her other leg, hard. All that jumping and darting around she favored, plus the simple mechanics of proper swordplay, meant that she had much more strength in her legs than anyone might suspect... plus a Strength Junction didn't hurt. Hammering all of that into one blow was enough to knock the corpse back just a little.

"Oh, thanks." Yosuke didn't seem fazed. In fact, apart from a small grimace at the stickiness of the monster's already cooling blood, he had an almost absent look on his face as he finally tugged his unfortunate weapon free. Maybe coming down from his earlier adrenaline rush was part of it, but that wasn't quite the only thing on his mind.

"Hey, what did you call that just now? A limit break? And... everyone can do that here, huh?"

She nodded. "Learning how to perform one is a compulsory class, so you can channel them reliably and effectively. But anyone can do them, if their emotions hit just the right peak, you just showed that yourself." She flipped her gunblade back into the holster, so she could give him a comradely slap on the back. "You might turn out pretty good once we polish you up a bit, y'know."

She might have been a little too gungho about that slap, which immediately prompted Yosuke to gurgle and pretty much topple over again.

"That... That's not a euphemism for anything, is it...?" he said weakly, standing back up for what seemed like the millionth time today. "Nah, I was just - I mean, that thing you summoned, that was part of it, right? Does that mean everyone here's got one of those, too?"

That didn't have much to do with what he'd really just begun to wonder, though - why was he starting to feel, of all things, a faint twinge of disappointment?

"It wasn't a summon, actually -- that was just chi. You know, internal energy," she said, tapping her fist against her chest. "Everyone has one, but everyone's is more or less different. It depends on your nature, how you respond to stress... a lot of little things."

Steady up, boy. She held out a hand to grab his shoulder; he was taking the adrenaline crash hard, huh? "Think you're done for the day?"

And now, the tiniest spark of something like relief. On second thoughts, Yosuke wondered if he could guess why. Ugh, what was with him today? Hadn't he gotten over that particular hurdle a long time ago? Persona aside, he was an ordinary guy talking to someone who was apparently a freaking martial arts nut right out of the cheesiest of movies, on top of all the other stuff she'd been happily slinging around... Feeling like this about it didn't even make any sense!

He nodded his head, trying to clear it, or at least to push his annoyance to the back of his mind - this kind of bullshit had a way of feeding itself, after all. "Y-Yeah, probably," he said, with a little self-deprecating laugh. "Man, if I knew how lame I'd look afterwards, I would've patched myself up while it lasted. You couldn't, uh, give me a hand? If we don't need to clean up. Just as far as the exit..."

The obvious, naked hope in his last question had nothing to do with any deep-seated psychological issues, but nevertheless everything to do with Yosuke being himself.

She was totally a gunblade freak, not a martial art nut. The whole chi thing was practically a footnote in a world like this one.

Maria laughed again. "Yes, you definitely need more practice, but I'm not gonna just ditch you in here to get it the hard way. Let's get you out of here."

But what kind of help did he want? She let him make the first move, though if it was to leap into her arms to be carried, she was gonna drop him in the garage.

Yosuke looked over at her expectantly, down at his feet, and back up at her, his sudden silence growing heavier with every passing moment.

Eventually, with a very small sigh, he gave up first. Maybe his chances would be slightly better with an actual raging lion. "On second thoughts, I can probably walk..."

This he did, taking care to step over the T-Rexaur's tail - if not quite as much care to walk in the right direction, since he'd forgotten it.

"You sure we're okay leaving this thing just lying here?"

"Come on, you," she said, mildly annoyed and yet amused at the same time. She had no idea what he was playing at, but she stuck close as he walked, just in case he stumbled. "It's fine to leave that there. The Training Center's pretty efficient... fake jungle territory that it is."

She looked at him as she pondered. She might have gotten him in just a bit deep, even though he'd been in here to start with... "I suppose I probably owe you some sort of reward for surviving a T-Rexaur fight," she said finally. Not satisfied to not tease him, she added, "How about a subscription to Weapons Monthly? Best damn magazine in the world!"

"Hey, what's wrong with mine?" Yosuke looked far too affronted to be completely serious. "Even you had to admit I looked pretty cool just then!"

True to his word, he was managing to remain steady on his feet, although the going was slow. Once or twice, mostly unintentionally, he began to walk a little closer, only to remember that his life was worth living after all and immediately snap back to a less suggestive distance. ...Hopefully she hadn't noticed.

Luckily, Maria had used the part of her brain that ought to be used to pick up on subtle clues like that for gunblade trivia, so she just figured he was a little wobbly and though nothing more of it. "For a moment or two, you did all right. Clearly you just need some practice facing down monsters four times your height! Soon we'll have you glaring at them in a manly fashion, right up till where they chew you a lot."

Yosuke pulled a face. "How am I not manly!?" The indignant little squeak in his voice there might not have helped his case, though. "And I've totally had practice! I'm... just a little rusty, that's all."

At some point, he figured he'd have to admit that he had no idea where the exit was and was picking his way through the trees and bushes more or less blindly in the hopes of tripping over a landmark he recognised before the end of the year. Right now, however, didn't seem like a good one. A man had to have some semblance of pride, dammit.

"Still... if I can summon it normally in this world too, I wonder what was stopping it before..."

"The wobbling," she pointed out. Which, don't get her wrong, she totally understood, but there was a huge gap between wobbling away from a battle, and confidently striding away from it. As the two of them were demonstrating just now.

Luckily, the Training Center is a big circle, and Maria had guided him down the shorter circuit back. The entrance branched off before them and she headed for it.

"Your Limit Break? What do you mean?"

Yosuke jumped. He'd been a bit too lost in his own thoughts, not to mention literally lost until a second ago, to have realised that he'd said that last part out loud.

"Umm... how do I explain it?" He frowned a little, trying to think. "The way people seem to talk about it, everyone from off-world who ends up studying here has some freaky power and a story to tell, yeah?" Not that he'd ever gone out of his way to listen. Sure he hadn't.

With the exit in sight, he figured they were basically home free, so he gave his kunai one last wipe down on the front of his clothes - eh, he'd have to go get changed the moment he was out of here anyway - and carefully began to tuck them away.

"That thing I summoned, that was mine, I'm sure of it. It's not really like your mystical kung fu or whatever - it's just another me. But normally, either it works or it doesn't... It doesn't switch on and off by itself like that. Hell if I know what's going on there." Hesitant as he sounded, he didn't look particularly unhappy as he shrugged. "Then again, that goes for a lot of things..."

But he still had one hand in his pocket when his attention was drawn to something else. He stopped short. From his expression alone, Maria could have been forgiven for thinking he'd just spotted a whole vengeful horde of T-Rexaurs behind her or something.

"Shit, my wallet!"

She probably could have offered some insight or helpful questions directed towards his musings on his summon... but all her thoughts were chased out of her head by his plaintive cry and her ensuing epic facepalm.

"Not manly." She pried her fingers away from her eyes to look at him and judge his current status. It promised nothing good, she decided, and she wasn't even sure she wanted to send him up against a grat right now.

"...Hey, you're sure you brought it in, right?"

"I know I brought it in! Sheesh..." He'd landed on it when the T-Rexaur first hit him, for god's sake! ...And he definitely wasn't going to say that part out loud!

Cursing his failure to take the stupid thing out of his pocket before marching in here under his breath, he was already moving as if ready to dash straight back into the trees for it, but as he took the first step, yet another twinge of realisation hit him. Actually, it was a literal twinge in his side, and a minor one, but the kind that threatened to become decidedly worse decidedly quickly if he tried to ignore it for now. He thought he could recognise the type.

The look on his face was one of pure torment - until, taking a deep breath, he mustered the energy for the brightest possible smile in all existence.

"Say... Maria-san? I, uh, don't suppose you could maybe think about doing me a really, really, really huge favour...?"

"You get out of here," she said, a step ahead of him both mentally and literally. She gave him a small push towards the door -- really small, so he didn't fall over or anything. "I'll go find it."

She'd assumed she'd be doing that from the moment he said he lost it.

"Really!? Um, it's black, but the zipper's kind of orange..."

She may not have pushed him over this time, but the bow he threw himself into as he shuffled backwards out the exit was low enough to achieve basically the same thing.

"I'm really sorry! I'll... buy you lunch later, I swear! ...Somewhere!" he added hastily, remembering a second too late both that the cafeteria here existed and that, partly as a result, he still didn't have much of a clue where else to go.

"I have expensive tastes!" she called back, not really serious at all as she turned to head back into the Training Center once again.

Strange guy. Nice enough, but he sure wanted to be cooler than he was...

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that's not the sound of desperation or anything (closed)

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