pugbutter

🎖 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 🎖 (feat. @sassy1085)

"Relax," the big lady chuckled. Rosie suspected, being just ahead of her in the chow line, that she would've been due for another one of those thunderous, bone-shattering claps between the shoulderblades, except that those ham-hock-like hands of hers were already clutching an aluminum mess tray. "That's for the whole ship, not just us. With our pay-grades these days, we'll get about ... three and a half percent, I think? Still, that's a few thou to blow on a hotel room and a tight little twenty-something once we're back on Titan, right?"

"And some better room service," grumbled someone further back.

"What, you mean you ain't livin' the dream already?" the big lady called behind her. "Voilà: confits of green bean and dredged chicken, served with a potato purée, a chicken pan sauce, and elbow macaroni béchamel. Bon appetit, everyone."

With every step Rosie took along the counter, another exhausted, bag-eyed cook dropped another scoop of slop into another little squared compartment of her tray. In the end there were a mushy mint-green slop, a lumpy pale-gold slop, a fluorescent-yellow plasticky slop, and an oily, golden-brownish-black slop; each smothered in either cheese or gravy. If she was to believe the presentation, the cooks on this ship had fed the afternoon shift a half-succulent southern dinner, only to reach down their throats an hour later, pull out the masticated, half-digested goop, and spoon it back under the heat lamps to serve again to the graveyard crew, like aproned, paper-hatted robins shoving chewed-up worms down the gullets of their chicks.

Still, although the others grumbled and groaned, they received their ice-cream-scoops of mush and carried them to a table and shoveled them down all without complaint. And as Rose steeled her gut and took her first apprehensive bite, suggestions of an oversalted fried chicken flooded her mouth, and thus her memory, and the other piles—pigfaced effigies of buttered mashed potatoes, mac 'n cheese, and steamed vegetables—proved similarly bearable. (It was no worse than what she'd eaten in cafeterias at private school, at boot camp, or even at her old space-station.) Then again, it was only her first day; she might have ten days, maybe two weeks before she couldn't stomach it anymore, and she'd be thrashing against the ship walls desperate to bore right through the hull, airdrop down to the nearest moon, and chase down the nearest bowl of fresh tonkotsu noodles. She thought back to how desperate she was for a real cup of coffee about halfway through basic, half a lifetime ago, not that instant powdered shit.

As they ate, Rosie noticed her new team paying the window bay no more than a fleeting glance each; even though Neptune was a great blue blob set among the stars as a royal sapphire is set among smaller diamonds; even though her other moons, Hippocamp and Proteus and Triton-3, tumbled along their orbits in plain view of the humble crewmen shoving mashed potatoes and greasy fried chicken into their ungrateful maws; even though, down on the surface of Triton-5, grey clouds and choking black clouds streaked across the pocked surface like the moon wore a zebra-hide cloak, utterly swallowing, in its chaos, the battleground below. She would be there soon. She would fall through that storm, land among its gusts and pressures, and do what the mission demanded of her. For one-sixth of three-point-five percent of the bounty, apparently.

When she came to, ripped away from the yawning expanses of space and returning to her hard little seat nestled among 150 such seats crammed inside the Artaxerxes's fore canteen, the others were still bullshitting; about their one-rep deadlifting records, about the hotties up in the comms room (and about how lucky a "sunnuvabitch" named "Druid" apparently was for getting to work with them), even what they were going to eat tomorrow. (Ana and the shaggy black mullet, arguing for variety, hoped for tacos; pompadour and the big lady put their votes in for chili dogs and grilled cob-corn.) They really weren't noticing this, were they; the way Triton's surface roiled and frothed like a boiling sea? Even Ana appeared to have forgotten all about what she'd shoved her nose to quartz-glass to see.

Street Punk Serenade: Delinquent Days

:(

🎖 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 🎖 (feat. @sassy1085)

"Oh, you know," said the man at the front of the procession, his hands stowed in pockets and his back slouched against the sliding handrail of the escalator, "foie gras, filet mignon, fatty tuna sashimi, oysters Rockefeller ... the usual spread for us rock-sta——ow, shit!"

The big lady struck him, too, but with less of the same joviality and camaraderie as which still rang out from Ana and Rose's spines. Aiming to avenge herself of some inconsolable temptation, avenge herself she did, with a punch to his deltoid which sent him reeling, grimacing, and clutching in his hand a muscle which may just as well have turned to jelly. The others responded in their turns——giggling, scoffing, shaking their heads in pity (they knew, some firsthand, how hard Yrma could hit)——but Rose could not ignore a certain ... forlornness, with which they dismissed this play-fighting. Because whatever childhood dish or haute-cuisine classic it was which came to mind for each of them, it was 2.7 trillion miles away, in the smoky, lantern-lit alleys of Europa, or the idyllic windswept fields of Venus, unattainable and inimitable in the canteens and mess halls of the Artaxerxes. For a single moment they reminded Rose of frontier settlers, weary for butters and creams, custards and wine sauces; the comforts of distant places. But in the next these expressions were gone, smothered under soldierly stoicism.

She couldn't imagine food which was that demoralizing, even if it came from cans and cartons.

"What's the deal, anyway?" asked the big lady, seemingly to change the subject before the dread of breakfast made her grumpy. "We should've been briefed by now."

The commander led the charge off the escalator. Not stopping to wait for any stragglers, she replied with a beefy shrug, "All we've got is a distress signal from a vanadium mine down in the Aronnax Trench. A big megacorp interest, so Streymoy handled the negotiations for us, and ..."

"And here we are," Yrma sighed.

"So what'd it say?" said Ana, hurrying into a trot to catch up and listen in. "And, why did so little intel make its way to us?"

Her gaze tore expectantly from one senior to the next, as if to gauge which one was likeliest to answer her, and aim her question accordingly. It only so happened that Gan, trailing behind the group at a casual pace, had paused by a porthole to quite literally stare into space. His narrow eyes, black as spilled ink, didn't wander; they had settled upon something specific out in the starry sea. He put a fingertip to the quartz-glass. "That."

Ana blinked, processed the reply, and wandered over to the porthole to press her nose to it. "Wh—Whoa!" she exclaimed, breath misting against the window. "Team leader, we're not seriously airdropping into that, are we?!"

"We are if we want our 2.4 million credits," the team leader said plainly.

"Crud," Ana grumbled, "we do, don't we?"

They did.

🎖 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 🎖 (feat. @sassy1085)

Ana stuck around long enough to help Rose from the floor, and hold the door for her. She even had the decency to look remorseful while she did it. And when Rose had finally managed to navigate her way out of their room, dizzy and delirious like it was her first day on a starship, replete with space-sickness and oh-one vertigo, she found the others kicked up in the hallway, waiting for her.

Corking their laughter and smothering their smiles were the two tallest of the group: an older woman with a cybernetic leg, the rest of her sun-bleached and suntanned, whose corded, tatted arms were knotted across her chest; and a leaner, sculpted man, with a ponytail and bangs styled into a heavy cowlick, still teasing the zipper of a flightsuit riddled with patches and insignia as a paper target is riddled with bullet holes. Two more looked less amused: a shorter, leaner man with aviators hanging from his collar and a mullet draping past his shoulders, and a muscly girl in an eyepatch, a fringe bob, and a wifebeater. Rose's hiring manager had warned her about a "cyclops" on the ship, as humorless in R&R as she was ferocious in battle; this must've been the commander whose good side she belonged on. If she had a good side ...

The shorter man shoved a hand through the overflowing abundances of his slightly oily hair. "Making our usual first impression, I see," he said, tinges of a sigh in his voice, and of an accusation in the stare he leveled at Ana. That got a crack out of the two who'd been trying not to laugh.

"Shut it, you," she growled with a shake of her fist. "Me and Rosie are already best friends. Isn't that right, Rosie?"

Rose was finding it increasingly difficult to speak with Ana's arm thrown around her neck, and her fingers pinching her cheek.

The mullet swept across his shoulder as the skinny one rolled his eyes and shifted them sidelong to his NCO. Visibly unpersuaded, his sharp, angular, aristocratic features, rigid as if sculpted from alabaster, only flinched enough for him to ask her: "How long until launch?"

"If the engine people and the nav people all did their jobs last night," eyepatch girl replied, briskly and dourly, "we'll be over the insertion site in four hours."

"Big 'if,'" sighed the big lady, wearing her cynicism as naturally as she wore her scars and her patina, both earned in half a dozen tours-of-duty or more. But if she really had survived that much time among the lowest-bidder contractor work, and the bullshit uniform inspections and the dress-downs, the inefficiency and the mismanagement, then she had every damn right to be jaded, Rose reckoned, as she walked up behind Rose and clapped her and Ana on the backs. "But the rookie's got the right idea: enough yap, it's chow-time."

Chow. As the others turned and marched in quiet, tired solidarity for this, one of their few material comforts aboard a PMC dropship, not all of them were wearing attention-grade articles, but of those who were, Rose saw the fireteam's insignia—her insignia—blazoned there on the backs: a tiger in sinister-rampant, its claws sunken into the nose of an AMM-3 "Cestus" missile with which it wrestled: glowering, grimacing, the exhaust nozzles shoving hard against the hindlegs of its flesh-and-bone opponent, rear claws sinking deep into the soil, exhaust burning yellow-hot. Amidst the pale smoke and the tatters of a banner which had been torn to ribbons in the struggle, read the team's threadbare credentials: "1st Battalion." "5th Airborne Mechanized Armor Squadron." And in red cursive, "Fireteam 9: 'The Fightin' Tigers!'" It was the first time Rose had seen so many of this patch all in one place, but also the first that she'd seen it in motion, and in full resplendence; not hanging from her bedside, not splayed out over her workbench as she sewed it onto the back of her flight-jacket, not even reversed in the mirror as she sprained her neck seeing how it looked on her. She was finally walking among them. As one of them. And the colors proved it beyond any doubt.

Her teammates led down the cramped and labyrinthine corridors to an escalator, which they walked aboard without reading where they were or where it would send them; the Artaxerxes was said to be a hair over three klicks long, and these five men and women were more familiar with Rose's new home than she was, a fact she'd have to avoid overthinking if she didn't want to go crazy getting lost in this place. Still yawning, stretching, and swiping the rheum from their eyes, while trying to salvage themselves from the ravages of sleep, they settled into the guardrails and began to watch the ship go by.

🎖 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 🎖 (feat. @sassy1085)

Ana clip-clopped over to her door and braced herself. If her new bunkie wasn't in the mood for her mission, or she hadn't slept well last night (from all the excitement zapping through her veins, no doubt!), or even if she wasn't a morning person, then Ana would just have to be perky enough for both of them; it'd rub off on the rookie soon! So she braced the door by both her palms, and shoved against the rusty hinges squealing in protest, completely confident in her methods.

"Gooooood MORNI——AH! ROSIE!"

Throwing their door open with all the bombast of a grade-schooler running home to show her parents the A- she got on a math test, Ana learned much too late what awaited her just on the other side. As her bunkmate, "Mowgli," sprawled backward, extremities flailing, spine and skull shuddering across the diamond-plate floor, Ana's instinct was to rush to her and dote. She needed a few seconds to remember she was still holding the hammer and the backplate, which she scampered away to place delicately in their spot in the corner. Then she could hurry over to her bunkie and kneel over her in a panic.

"_{Good going, Ana. Real smooth, idiot!} Rosie baby, are you alright?! Hey, that's a heck of a spill you just took. Tell me where it hurts! Is it here?!"

Like a baboon preening for fleas, small, soft hands patted under Rose's ears, behind her shoulders; no thought whatsoever for how much more it would hurt once she found the site. "Oh. Hey, An ..." Rose was muttering. "I was ju ... did you slee ... ? I didn' ... wa ..." By the time the spinning stopped, and the ache in her skull had receded enough to let her see again, all she could see, hovering over her, was a head of black hair gathered up in a sweatband; soft, narrow shoulders inside a sleeveless white tank; and Ana Calypsi's big, blue, slightly stupid eyes gawking down at her. The hands were pestering her face now, pinching her cheeks and peeling back her eyelids, probing for any life behind the fog of a mild concussion.

🎖 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 🎖 (feat. @sassy1085)

(profiles coming later)

🎖 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐯𝐲 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐂𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐫𝐞𝐧 🎖 (feat. @sassy1085)

109 hangar crewmen, including ordnance and reactor handlers, handling officers, launch & retrieval crew, QA, and UNREP "powder passers." 76 mechanical and electrical engineers, servicing the UFR Artaxerxes's hull, her autosystems, and of course, her flight of warmechs. 44 crane, lift, blast-door, airlock, and drop-gun operators. 36 nuclear engineers. Seven crewmen per gun turret and torpedo bay. Fifteen bridge staff, including the captain and his helmsman. Thirty navigators, airspace traffic controllers, and communications officers. Nineteen physicians, surgeons, dentists, nurses, and cybernetics engineers. Four logistics officers. Sixteen liaison officers. Fifteen clerks. Four chaplains. Twelve cooks. 28 janitors.

Six hundred and six personnel, all laboring day and night to keep two fireteams—that is, eleven 'ADAMAS' warmechs and eleven pilots—in the sky; greased and ready for combat. Gan appreciated the irony: from a certain point of view, he and the other four on his fireteam had 55 crewmen (each) assigned to personally keep them trim, fit, fed, rested, and getting where they needed going; that many maids and majordomos could staff a few bromine-barons' mansions back home. That many miners could keep a quarry open for a year. Each of them practically had an army to pamper them. And yet, when it came time to wake up for these ever-important missions, the best the Artaxerxes could muster for an alarm bell was—

"MISSIONNNNNN!"

—Ana Calypsi, smacking a titanium plate with a ball-peen hammer.

"COME ON, EVERYONE, UP AND AT 'EM! THE MISSION'S HERE! WOOOOOOOO!"

Ripped from the warm, tranquil womb of sleep, Gan found himself cradled, with the same quiet protest as a toddling, afterbirth-slick foal, in a familiar steel chrysalis: the paint on the floor worn down by his invariable flat-footed shuffle from bunk to toilet to sink and back. From the toothbrush in a beer mug sitting on top of the hot water pipe, to the Down with the Dogs poster (the collector's edition released on the album's tenth anniversary—with the band's blonde, buxom mascot straddling a rattlesnake) duct-taped above the porthole, to the crusty old bomber jacket hanging from a hooked locker handle, everything was where he had put it, and seemingly where it would sit forever if allowed, like it had been trapped in aspic and forgotten in the back of a forlorn refrigerator. Gan ached; not because his mattress was thin, or his sheets cold, but because the cold, rigid steel floor waited just beyond them; and beyond that, the cold, unyielding vacuum of space, through which he'd soon be floating in a different, even more cramped chrysalis of steel, glass, and worn-down padding. He groaned, quieter than the neverending groan of the hull and the strain of its copper arteries gushing with coolants and jettisons.

He heard Ana's fist rattling a door across the hall from his. Soon she would be haunting him. And this alone—the spite—would have to suffice once more for motivation. Peeling himself forcibly away from his bunk, he braced, landing on rolled ankles and springy knees. At once the floor began to sap away with his warmth. Tiptoeing over to the door, Gan dared not peek through its rusty, squealing peephole. He only waited to hear the telltale signs: the clang of jump boots on metal grating first, then her fist against iron. Of course, she was still chirping away: "ARE YOU ALL DEAD IN THERE? COME ON, YOU'RE ALL SO GORGEOUS ALREADY, HOW MUCH BEAUTY-SLEEP COULD YOU NEED?!"

Once her auditory assault-and-battery had finally reached his door, Gan knocked right back at her from the other side. "YEAH, YEAH, WE GET IT," he barked.

She only giggled back through the hinges—"Mornin', Gaaaaan!—" and skipped away on inch-thick rubber soles to the next door down. "C'mon, commander, that's enough cat-nappin' for you ..."

Gan propped himself against the wall and groaned a second time. One would think the weight of the world would be easier to bear in such low-gravity places. "How the hell does she do it ..." he murmured.

"She's still in her twenties," grumbled Yrma, who was finally stirring in the bottom bunk. All knotted up in her bedsheet, she freed her left arm, and held it up just long enough to read the digital interface on her clock before letting it drape over the side of the bunk once more.

"Are you implying I'm old?" Gan said.

"Gettin' there. As fast as anyone. Pass me my leg."

Gan picked it up from against her locker, a cruel room's-width away, and handed it to her by its rubber peg. "I dunno about that. Not with your fifteen-year head start on the rest of us. What time is it?"

"It's 0247 Universal. And thanks a lot," she answered, growling and grunting as the muscles ached and creaked in sliding the cup over her stump, and fastening the clasps to her thigh, then threading the metal leg through the leg of her flightsuit. "Hrrk. At least when she wakes us early, she wakes us early enough for MidRats."

"Sugar and carbs are ... one consolation," Gan groggily agreed.

"Careful," she replied. "One day you'll go to bed 'getting old,' wake up the next and learn you're there. That's when all them sugar and carbs catch up to you." She clapped her belly as if to prove she was the cautionary tale, and indeed the impact rippled in her skin. But not much. Under her loose skin Yrma was mostly muscle. Muscle and vinegar.

Yrma's laugh was raspier, huskier, than Ana's. She didn't smoke, and the scars spanning the left side of her leathery, loose torso were shallow, no more than skin-deep, which left Gan to wonder at times whether her dad had smoked, or an invasive cybernetic in her throat had degraded over the years, or if she'd contracted a lung sickness long ago on a faraway strip-mining colony. Not that it amounted to anything more than curiosity in the night; he'd never hold the answer, or the question, against her. Through all the static and the degradation, no matter the mission or the miles, the rasp of her voice was unmistakable. Irreplaceable.

"I think that day will hurt you more than me. What will you do with yourself once you can't call me 'beanpole' or 'noodle-neck' anymore?"

She chuckled again. "I'll just have to switch to calling you 'doughball.' C'mon, Gan, let's get outta here." Quietly they zipped up, laced up, and threw on their leathers, kicking up against the wall out in the corridor as they brushed their teeth and ran fine-tooth combs through their hair. They were the first ones out there save for Ana, with whom they swapped "Mornins," and after they ducked back into their bunk to spit and rinse, Yrma had a question for her. It was the type of question to warrant checking both ends of the corridor for eavesdroppers; leaning in close, close enough to smell the mint oil on Ana's breath; and stoking Yrma's voice down into a low, smoldering pit of coals.

"I've been meanin' to ask: are you okay? You know—with a new bunkmate?"

"Of course!" Ana lilted. But a graveness soon conquered her face, and cast her gaze to the green and yellow lines painted on the otherwise naked steel of the corridor floor. "Or ... I'll get used to her easily enough."

Gan and Yrma didn't have to say anything; their gazes sufficed in squeezing down on her for more juice.

Ana, looking either ashamed of something (how easily she acquiesced to this interrogation, or how she was in some way "betraying" the rookie by saying this), or, at the least, worried that the subject of their illicit dialogue might overhear it, continued quietly: "How do I put this? I don't know. When I'm trying to sleep, and my eyes are closed, I can ... just tell that it's not him. F—For example, when he had a glass of bourbon before bed, he'd always be swirling the glass. The ice hitting the crystal ... clink, clink, clinkle. I got used to falling asleep to that sound, but she doesn't do that with her cup. And ... oh, and her footsteps are lighter, too; I think she puts socks on to walk around during lights-out. So I can't even shut my eyes and pretend that it's him. You know? All the little things like that that she does. Or doesn't do. They make me ... sad. It's like even his memory is being ... no. That's too far. I shouldn't say that."

Yrma stepped closer, her fleshy foot encased in rubber and leather and her sterile, surgical-steel peg alternating on the hard floor, and rested a heavy, callused hand on Ana's narrow shoulder. "If you ever wanna switch bunks—"

"Oh, no, I couldn't!" Ana insisted, shrugging herself away. "Thank you, but you're still mourning, too. Everyone is. It wouldn't be right."

Ana visibly anguished as several raging forces came to a stalemate inside her: should she resort to gratitude or to empathy? Stay on this path of obstinance, perhaps overcoming the grief sooner, if more painfully; or double back on her assurance, take the bunk across the hall, and give herself the sort of time she clearly wanted? Needed. To forget their former teammate and fallen comrade. Seeming ready to sound off her next excuse, Ana's face lit up with a moment's epiphany instead. "... Oh, and no offense, Gan! It's not that I'm avoiding bunkin' with ya! It's just—"

"I know," he said, to spare her from her own explanation. "If nothing else I'm sure she appreciates it. We're all teammates—her included, starting now."

"Right," Ana said, as much to herself as to him, with the glimmer of fresh, newfound determination. She inspired easily. "You're right."

"Besides," Gan continued with an impious smirk, "would Scyto have wanted anyone to be late on his account? You've got three more to muster before we can eat, Ana. Including your new bunkie."

Ana straightened out, bristling. "Ah!" she cried. "Thanks for reminding me! Chlotho! Ke—"

"We're up." Unceremoniously, the two shuffled out: the team leader, who, though grim-faced, her single eye glowering at nothing in particular, looked scarcely worse for wear, knotting the sleeves of her flightsuit around her waist, goosebumps ridging her full-sleeve tattoos. It was Chlotho, callsign Romeo, who emerged like a voodoo-zombie, shambling, groaning—even teasing his hair into its typical cowlick, dual-wielding a comb and a wad of pomade for the purpose, seemed an automated act, performed entirely through instinct and habit. After sliding into his flightsuit, he'd forgotten to zip it up.

Gan scratched his scalp. "I guess that leaves one more. Well," he corrected, eyeing the other dude, "one and a half."

"I'll go wake her," Ana whispered, slinking off toward the last door on the left fore-ways.

That's right; earlier Gan had ruminated on the 46 engineers, seamen, and other personnel per mech pilot aboard the Artaxerxes. But through an instinct and habit all his own, his math had been wrong: it wasn't just the five of them anymore. Despite all their hopes (and delusions) to the contrary, they couldn't leave that top bunk in Ana's room empty forever, as some kind of memorial; they had corporate hierarchies to please. Bottom lines to meet. A fireteam needed six mechs on the ground, not five. And it was this way for a reason.

To Gan, it only seemed a bit ... soon. To be acting like nothing was wrong. Like nothing had ever happened. To replace what they had lost. This rookie ... and insult to injury, she was making them wait for her.

Street Punk Serenade: Delinquent Days

Rad. When should we expect that post?

Welcome back btw!

Street Punk Serenade: Delinquent Days

Recommended Listening

Yūya soldiered along the wall and tried the next door, and the next and the next. He had no choice. Hesitate and he’d start asking questions; questions which would ferment into doubts in his gut, and sit there heavy and leaden like stones; doubts, which would slow-release suspicions, and theories, into his bloodstream, the worst of all poisons for someone like him, just trying to follow orders and get back home mostly intact.

Theories like Tamura ain’t showing up.

Tamura was never supposed to show up.

Ishida made sure you’d be going up against whatever’s in there alone.

This is Ishida’s way of getting rid of you for all your grumbling at his meetings.

He didn’t want anyone getting in the way. Not someone who pities the outnumbered underdog like Toronaga. Not an “ally” like Umeko.

Umeko … if it was an ambush and there were two, three, ten guys in there, was keeping his promise to her even possible anymore? From where Yūya was standing, only if he deserted and didn’t show his face around school for a while. But the entire weight of the mission—whatever the hell it even was anymore—rested on his shoulders now, and his alone. But how could he know in the moment the exact importance of it all? Was he walking into the jaws of death or was he bravely (albeit stupidly) carrying a Sarayashiki torch behind enemy lines? Was he a soldier; or the sacrifice?

Maybe Tamura’d had the right idea after all, avoiding this shit-show altogether. But of course; if she wanted to keep her little Mary-Janes shiny and her white, starched button-up clean, the most efficient way wasn’t to wade out from the scandals and skirmishes in some elegant, blaze-of-glory way. It was to avoid these situations completely.

Suddenly, Yūya, like he was the anchor at the end of a chain, was ripped away from his daydreams and his trance, as his hand enveloped a doorknob which answered in a different language from the rattling rigidity of the others. This doorknob rolled leftward with a heavy click. And it let the door it was attached to whisper open with a creak. Yūya looked up; the gymnasium’s wide walls, high ceiling, and heavy windows glared back at him austerely and menacingly, no longer a place of entrance ceremonies, brass bands, and home games. Soon this place would be a battlefield, where either he, or some other unsuspecting kid or two, would be beaten, broken, and exiled into the night a loser, the lowest of the low, the dregs at the bottom of the dregs.

To believe in the cause, Yūya would have to know what the fuck it was first. So all he had to fight for right now was not wanting to be that loser. For all the naysayers and doubters back at school, that reason for fighting hard, as ignoble as it was, would simply have to suffice.

He hunched himself through the door, and eased it closed behind him.

The weight of the baseball bat on his shoulder proved a solitary source of comfort in its sureness; its loyalty in simplicity. No moving parts which could seize up at just the wrong time. No thoughts of its own which could conspire to abandon him behind enemy lines, or throw him to the jackals of another school. Just a lump of metal at the end of a handle. Yūya wouldn’t find much more kindness in this place; in fact, already he was beginning to hear sounds from the darkness of the wide, empty auditorium, which his brain didn’t know completely how to process. It sounded like … a thumb flipping through a wad of thousand-yen bills? Through the pages of a coloring book? Something frivolous and papery called to him from across the room. He squinted into the shadows behind the tatami mats piled against the wall, and spooled under the bleachers, and spanning deep into the lengths of the room; but the thought of all the enemies laid in ambush among these shadows dizzied him, so he only focused on scanning what he could see, and not getting jumped from behind.

The voices came next.

A male one first, hushed but urgent: “Oy, they’re here. Play your game later.”

“Karuta is done when it’s done.” The replying voice, dripping with the tone of a spiteful, scolded child, was younger, less gruff, and decidedly female.

“Don’t you need a second person? … You know what, never mind. Just have my back when shit goes south.”

“Hey,” said Yūya, “can we get some light so we can do this thing?”

“Huh?” the male replied. “Oh, sure. Sorry, bro.”

As rubber soles, definitely not belonging to uwabaki, squeaked away to a corner by a chain-locked door, Yūya strained his ears for breathing, for shuffling, for the shifting of weight onto another foot; any clue at all that someone else laid in wait under the gym’s most esoteric shadows. A moment later, fluorescent bulbs began flickering awake high in the rafters, submerging the room in a blinding, pale-white hum. There were two of them.

The girl had chosen to stay in her school uniform, one of those newfangled blazer-styled ones with a ribbony cravat. She had her hair up in two more mismatched ribbons, and her gaze slid up, drenched in an annoyed expression, from a handful of playing cards clutched in her tiny hand, and a few dozen more spread out over the floor just before her. Yūya supposed she was cute, as least as far as such a vicious sneer allowed. As for her partner, Yūya wondered whether the scars sliced into his forehead were real, or put there just for show, a trembling hand scooping them out in front of a bloodied mirror. He wore a Cuban chain and a fur-collared jacket, the latter unbuttoned to show off just enough pec through his wifebeater.

Faceclaims

”So where’s the rest of ya?” asked the Scarface wannabe, wringing his knuckles so hard that his leather gloves squeaked as if in tortured protest.

“She’s, uh, on her way,” Yūya replied.

“You see that, Kageura-chan? These Saranasha-whatever pricks are underestimatin’ us.”

Yūya narrowed his eyes, but made an effort not to shift around too much anywhere else in his body, lest he looked ready to lunge into an escalation. “I’ve got a question about that,” he said. “How do you know who we are?”

The wrinkles sent the hereto-unnamed Keiko boy’s forehead, sheened with sweat) and bristly with close-cropped hair, sliding a few centimeters across his skull. He guffawed, and floated in his shoulders. “A real good question, too, champ. Some dumpy little backwater-school like you? Believe me, we wouldn’t know ya if we hadn’t been expressly told to expect ya.”

“Well? Told by who?” Yūya growled. He would’ve glared too if not for how the lights still ached his eyes, forcing them into a burning squint. “And which a’ you is the Diamond, anyway?”

“Bwa ha ha ha! Where do you dumb fucks keep coming from?! No, my friend, they come to you; and the Diamonds got no reason of being here. Not until one o’ you or one o’ me has been … chosen.”

Yūya could tell that the other guy could tell: he’d just struck the perfect nerve. “Chosen for what?”

“My, my. Sounds like someone doesn’t trust you very much.” The Keiko boy effected a great heaving shrug of his shoulders, and an exasperated, damn-it-all sigh. “Tell you what: I'll tell you whatever ya wanna know. That is, if you can beat it outta me.”

Looking him up and down, Yūya searched for a holster, a bulge under his jacket or down his pantleg, anything to betray his opponent’s … methods. When that failed, he asked outright: “Weapons?”

“Not really my style!” The way this guy shrugged and cackled made Yūya think that he and Ikue must’ve taken the same seminar on pushing buttons and, well, overall, being smarmy little shits.

“Rules?”

“The usual gentlemen's engagement: no eyes, and no genitals. Anything else goes. Whaddaya say?” said the Keiko boy.

Yūya released his grip on the bat, a noise which rattled to the gym floor and bounced sharply off the walls in turns. “Fine by me,” he said, running a fistful of fingers through his pompadour. “Just keep that tongue of yours greased and ready to squeal. Don't make me rip it out.”

Scarface took a defensive stance with his ankles spread and his fists raised, his gravity undermined by an unquenchable grin. “Big words!” he giggled. ”But are you the type who’s all words and no action? Please. Try not to disappoint me like the last one.”

“Oh, an optimist!” Yūya said, crescendoing into a roar. “Enjoy it while it lasts, ‘cause there won’t be a ‘next one’ after I’ve finished this!”

Recommended Listening

He sought to close the distance fast, and to get his answers just as quickly. The meters contracted between them as Yūya rushed forward with his chin down and his arms up. Scarface gave less ground than he thought he would, but this didn’t faze the attacker, nor stagger the coming assault; kilograms and kilograms of muscle collided at the crossroads of Scarface’s elbow and ulna, raised just in time to block his neck. He replied with a kick, which if nothing else forced Yūya back a pace, and an early end to the attack as he glanced the torpedo-like foot to the side and away from his vitals, redirecting all his offense toward this, this grinding halt in momentum.

Scarface smiled and winked, and at once Yūya wanted to grind that smug little smile under his boot, so he advanced again and with twice the fervor. The exchange played out a second time, and in much a similar stalemate, including a second kick easily deflected away from Yūya’s organs.

He seems to like those flashy「Hollywood」moves … If I can get him to do that kick again, maybe I can ...

Yūya hadn’t noticed before, but his advances had forced his opponent against the wall. As he moved in again to trap him there, Scarface circled around, and in passing managed to clip Yūya in the head, then skittering backward just in time to avoid retaliation from a wide haymaker.

... But thankfully it’s as I thought: those showbiz muscles of his sure look nice, but they’re not all that powerful. Just can’t let him goad me. Patience.

That smug little bastard, pretending he was so nonchalant and omniscient … that intense, focused gaze, as if he was scouring Yūya’s very brain … He had to stop Scarface from reminding him of someone, else he’d keep rushing into his traps like a fool for sure.

Think; he had to turn the tables on this guy. How? It had to be tied to that jacket he refused to shed in the summer humidity … the phony scars he’d given himself to look cool.

… So he needed to be taken seriously, huh?

As if the revelation galvanized him, Yūya at once straightened out and stiffened. He dusted himself off, and began to preen his messed pompadour back into place. “Alright,” he said, “outta the way. I’m done with you.”

“... Hah?”

“So, little girl,” Yūya said, “think you can put up a better fight than this twerp?”

“‘Little girl’?”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s this bullshit?! Bro! If you wanna chicken out, just say so; none of these excuses, man!”

Yūya suppressed a smile. He’d expected neither the intensity nor the quickness of this reply. “You think you’re gonna get ‘chosen’ like this? You’re a waste of my time, ‘bro.’ Let your baby sister handle this one.”

Scarface opened his mouth to say something, but Yūya had already turned ninety-some degrees to saunter over toward the bleachers; more specifically, the seat where Kageura had perched herself, and splayed out her playing cards how a magpie displays its pilfered bobby-pins and shirt buttons.

“How about it, baby?” Yūya said with a hum. “Wanna have a real go?”

She scoffed, scowled, and averted her gaze to the right. “If this is your attempt at being smooth, maybe land a few more punches first. Oh, and a little less … KIRA, LOOK OUT!”

“Too late.” Yūya didn’t have to turn to look or even listen out for the pitter-patter of his jika-tabi to know that Kira wasn’t going to heed his partner’s warning. He timed it, he watched Kira in the corner of his eye, reeled in the waist and shoulders, and …

Yūya’s body wasn’t much to look at, but unlike one puffed up at the gym, his was sculpted from work; from toil and grime and sweat, earned everywhere from sending splitters to the outfield to gutting carburetors in the forty-degree afternoon broil. “Kira” wasn’t interested in heeding a warning from the very girl he had been spurned for, and when his cheekbone connected with Yūya’s fist, it cracked like a bullet leaving a gun. He didn’t know when he staggered backward faster than his legs could stumble. When he landed ass-first and face-up in the layup section of the basketball court. Or when Yūya finally couldn’t take it anymore and cracked a smile which had been itching to get out for a whole minute before that. The concussion was setting in too quickly, or maybe just the all-familiar rattling shock of having just gotten his own ass handed to him.

Yūya crossed his arms and waited, both watching the girl and letting Kira put himself back together. It wasn’t over, after all, until he spilled everything. Whether he had to lose his blood, his teeth, or his fingernails before he’d start explaining what the hell was going on at this school.

“Had enough already?” Yūya said, though being honest, the arrogant act was superfluous by then; that punch should have more than sufficed in incensing Kira’s honor. He’d want revenge for the rest of the fight, if not the rest of the damn school year. He’d get reckless. Then, if Yūya still hadn’t yielded a haymaker or two to him before they went home, he’d get desperate. “Take your time, ‘bro.’ I’ve got all night to wait for you to recover from one little love-tap.“

“Sh … Shut the hell up.”

“You want me to shut up, then get over here and shut m—whoa!”

“WITH PLEASURE!” Kira swung a right hook which Yūya almost didn’t dodge, eating about a meter of ground just on the backward stumble and recovery alone. And to neither his surprise nor (seemingly) Kageura’s, Kira kept up the assault, chasing right hook with right hook, even resorting to wild haymakers when he just couldn’t put a crack in the Sarayashiki fuck’s armor. Unfortunately, that single punch, stiff and merciless, had already softened Kira’s sense of balance, his speed. And it was Yūya’s turn to play his hotheadedness against him. Every time he baited his prey in, he’d provoke him with a jab; quite worthless in the delivery of pain and injury, but devastating to the pride. And just when Kira had gotten sloppy again, forgetful of what punishment his eagerness had earned him mere moments before, Yūya would remind him; in the ribs, in the stomach, in the throat, in the jaw, he would remind him.

Soon Yūya had earned a few bruises himself, but nothing like Kira, reduced to little more than a sack of spongy, flesh, dead blood, and tender ligaments, seemingly only barely held together by bones and skin. He had to admit: Kira had spirit. Even in certain defeat he didn’t want to back down. And until his fighting partner forced him to, he probably wouldn’t, not even under the screaming protests of his own body.

Speaking of Kageura, Yūya hadn’t heard the shuffle of her deck of cards in a minute or two; and Kira’s eyes had just shifted slightly to the left, as if looking past Yūya instead of at—

Thwump. Like he’d just been gored by a stag or shot by a cannon, the force of a blow to his left kidney sent Yūya gasping, sweating, and tumbling to the side, struggling to stand on his own two feet as if they had turned to bamboo stilts.

C-Crap. Ugh ... Of course. Should’ve seen it soo—oomph!

She was close enough that her skirt brushed against his pantleg, and her breath misted on the back of his neck as she sucked in air and readied herself for attack after relentless attack. So it wasn't a bokken or a bat. And yet when she punched him, it was as if she had peeled the skin away from her knuckles, and she was punching him with raw bone. The power! Brass knuckles, maybe? Yūya was too busy getting his ass kicked, however, to be disgusted with their trickery (“Not my style,” indeed)—or even impressed with how elegantly she’d turned the tables.

By the time the beating was over, all he could do to stop from dying then and there was keep breathing; through the jagged shards which were his ribs, through the sputtering of the blood in his lungs. Though they seemed a kilometer away, he heard them bickering over what may as well have been his corpse.

“Kageura, what the hell?!”

“You said ‘Have my back when shit goes south.’ And shit went south.”

“But, interfering with a man’s duel … !”

“They’re the ones who chose to send this loser by himself,” she said in a cold, clinical tone, apathetic to his indignation. She kicked Yūya over to look into his clenched, already-swelling eyes. And for good measure she aimed such a kick at his jaw, just to make sure he couldn’t get up again and try another trick. “It’s not our fault they underestimated us.”

“I guess, but what do we tell Sachimoto? That we had to cheat to defeat them?”

“The truth: we won, and they lost. That’s all that matters here.”

“... Tch. I guess,” he muttered again, but Kira couldn’t help spitting off toward the bleachers. Heh. If the red strings of fate had crossed differently, Yūya probably would’ve been friends with this guy, conquering the halls of Keiko together, their backs pressed together amidst an overwhelming host of pompadoured, punch-permed rivals.

As they walked away in silhouette, his posture more hunched and limping than hers, and propped against hers for support, too, something unfurled from the girl’s fist. It was a long, thin piece of something, like a chain or a strip of studded leather. She folded it neatly away into a pocket, and closed the door behind her latest victim, locking him in the harsh white burn of the gym lights. Hazily, somewhere in the wine-cellars of his mind, Yūya knew that the school day was only a few hours away, and that he’d better be far away from Keiko Lower High School before even the earliest rheumy-eyed teacher turned up for work. Getting to his feet on sore, trembling legs, with swelled-shut eyes and a pounding head for balance; that was the first emergency to handle, right at the top of the list. As for operating a clutch lever with a busted hand … As for getting home before the old man woke up … As for looking Akina-chan in the eye at school tomorrow ...

Street Punk Serenade: Delinquent Days

Another angle to consider: this is the third person who's dropped out. Inevitable in every Guild game, but always demoralizing to the ones who remain, too. What you're feeling right now is completely normal and not your fault. @Noblebandit

Have we thought about recruiting to replenish the ranks a little? Or are we sure that the 5-6 who remain can proceed faithfully from here?

CC: @TheWendil@Courtaud