| closed |

[ninjaweaselgirl]

[ WHO ] : Misao [ninjaweaselgirl], Heine [bulletcarnage], and Badou [smokeeasy]
[ WHERE ]: Room 704
[ WHEN ]: June 1
[ RATING ]: (PG for swearing?)
[ WARNINGS ]: Potty mouths ahoy? XD
[ NOTES ]: This takes place after Heine invites Misao to stay over at his place.

Comments

[smokeeasy]

Badou's very first impression was not that he had let a teenaged girl (and certainly NOT a ninja) into the apartment, but instead that he had let in a vibrating ball of energy, the sort that, once it was released would ricochet unceasingly off of every available surface until someone bodyslammed on top of it taking one for the team...kind of like that thing in Men in Black that caused the 1977 New York blackout.

He glanced over his shoulder at Heine who--and he couldn't fail to miss this--had actually stood up. And then back at Miaso. If she was older he might offer her a smoke. Or a shot of whiskey. If she was younger he supposed he could have offered her a hug.

As it was, the best he could do was to place a hand on her shoulder, steady and (he hoped) reassuring, but also fleeting. When it came right down to it, he really wasn't much better at this sort of thing than Heine was, albeit for different reasons.

"Think whatever else these ghosts like they like messing with our heads better than anything. Come have a seat. I could, uh, make some coffee." He paused and seemed to reconsider the wisdom of that offer. They didn't have any decaf. "...Or not."

[bulletcarnage]

The suggestion of coffee made Heine raise an eyebrow at Badou but he seemed to relax when he amended his idea.

At the offer to have Misao sit, the white-haired boy took a couple of steps back, making space but also allowing enough space for him to be able to at the very least have the coffee table between himself at the little ninja.

It was awkward as hell, but what else could he really do? He kept his eyes on her the whole time, not like he was hunting her or anything but he was certainly on his guard and alert around her. He really couldn't tell how much different he must seem in the flesh rather than on the communicator.

"... didn't run into any trouble on the way up here, right?"

[ninjaweaselgirl]

The touch upon her shoulder--however fleeting--was reassuring . . . even if all she wanted to do was to was cry. Just like when she'd thought Kaoru-san had died . . . she'd cried in secret, sobbing herself to sleep . . . and no one had known. She was her usual energetic self the next morning, and no one had known.

But those . . . things . . . outside her window . . . they weren't real. Not fucking real, and damned if she'd let them be real.

"Coffee?" she asked quietly. "What's that?"

The small girl finally faced the two men, giving them a tilt of her head to one side and a bit of a smile. She wasn't gonna wallow.

She shook her head in response to Heine's question. "I just ignored them, hehe." A shrug of her shoulders.

[smokeeasy]

"Side dish for smokes," Badou answered evenly, trying to deflect her interest now that he'd realized that coffee was probably quite ill-advised. He wasn't exactly lying--after all, damn near everything for him was a side dish for smokes. Coffee just had the benefit of complementing the taste of his cigarettes. Black coffee especially.

"That's probably your best bet anyway," he offered in response to her latter comment. "Ignore 'em or just accept that they're hanging around." He gestured over to their own window where two pale apparitions were floating outside.

The smaller was a petite young woman, blond haired and with hauntingly eerie pale eyes that seemed to shine out of the too-deeply shadowed sockets. She had blood trickling from her nose and mouth and a bit matted in her hair. The other was a middle-aged man with white hair and what might once have been a neatly-trimmed beard. He appeared to have been garroted by the black and white silk scarf around his neck and has deep bloody gouges all along his chest and stomach. "That's supposed to be Mimi and Mihai--we know them from home."

<--has delay fail orz

[bulletcarnage]

Heine's eyes closed as he rolled his shoulders in a shrug.

"Mimi normally makes an effort to turn up looking better. Mihai... He looks about the same."

He gave the faintest of smirks. This was about as good as it got when it came to him attempting to be social and humorous. He was, on some level, aware that his sense of humour did not always match up with other peoples. In fact, he was very accustomed to it not matching up by default. Badou was one of the few people who he could kick his humour around with and have it not only returned but shared on some level. Otherwise, he really was a poor excuse for a host or entertainer, especially of girls.

He continued to hang back a fair way, not speaking for a few moments before he nodded to the couch impartially. 'Sit if you wanna' was what that said, but Heine was known for almost expecting people to be near mind-readers when he couldn't be bothered to actually vocalise what he wanted them to do and then puzzled over the frustration caused when they didn't get what he was trying to communicate.

*petpet* no worries :3

[ninjaweaselgirl]

"Smokes?" The tiny girl wrinkled her nose at that. "You're like that cop from back home." Even the thought of that made her want to go home, she realized, and her mouth twisted in a slight frown before she raised a hand in a nonchalant wave, speeding it off.

She fixed green eyes onto the ghouls hanging outside her companions' window, and once again, her shoulders seemed to shake before she composed herself. She was accustomed to the sight of death--she was born and raised in an era of war, amongst ninja, no less. Still, it was never any more pleasant.

"Bet it would be better to actually meet them, and not those . . . whatevers . . . outside," Misao quipped, rolling her eyes. At Heine's nod, she grinned--already regaining her spirits--before plopping down onto the couch. Let it not be said that she was a shy, dainty girl.

"Thanks for lettin' me stay," she repeated, giving them both smiles.

[smokeeasy]

"Cop?" Badou cocked his head questioningly at that. Not that he had any problem with cops--he knew a few from back home and they'd always done all right by him, he supposed out of deference to his late brother with whom they'd been friendly. It was just that he couldn't really see the similarity between himself and any cop he knew of.

If anything, it just made him curious, so after she'd dropped herself into her seat (he kept an observant eye on Heine as she did this, not like he thought he was gonna need to do anything, but just because it was always best to take notice since Heine's body language almost always said more than his words anyway), and he'd taken the spot at the other end of the couch leaving his buddy to take the chair opposite, Badou threw a line out to what he figured was as good a topic of conversation as any: "So what's it like where you come from? You hadn't ever seen a communicator first time we talked, so it's gotta be pretty different than our home is."

[bulletcarnage]

For the time being, for Heine, the physical distance between himself and Misao was acceptable. She was in a place that made him feel a little more comfortable about shifting himself around slowly to take a seat on the arm of the remaining standalone chair opposite.

He wasn't good at conversation in general let alone small talk, so when Badou struck up a subject for general conversation he was quite grateful and rather content to listen to whatever was being said between them at that point. It was pretty shitty of him really, to ask the kid up and then leave Badou to do all the work but he hadn't done it as a social move, she'd just seemed like she needed to be somewhere other than her room on her own. The other fact of it was that he wouldn't have asked her up there unless Badou had been present as well. He just didn't trust himself enough.

[ninjaweaselgirl]

"Yeah, he smokes cigarettes too. He's the only one I know who does." She made a face as she remembered him. "He called me weasel too!" A twitch of her lips into an annoyed frown. "Ew, right?"

Sighing, she leaned back onto the chair, tilting her head inquisitively at Badou's comment. Yeah, where she came from, all conversation had to be done through written stuff. "I'm from Japan. The year's 1878, and it's the Meiji era! Everythin' we had to say had to be written or ya had to go and tell the person yourself. We were just gettin' pictures too, so I didn't know that pictures could move like in the picture boxes! A friend of mine's scared of pictures, heh heh."

Misao was chatty as ever, and her face lit up at the mention of her friend from home--Sanosuke.

"What about you?"

Misao was used to quiet people--Aoshi-sama was a prime example--so she didn't mind Heine's silence.

my turn for delay fail nao orz;;

[smokeeasy]

Badou couldn't help it--though he knew she probably wouldn't appreciate the reaction, a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth and he had to bite back a laugh (not completely successfully) when she said she'd been called a weasel. Not like he was going to say this to her, but he thought he could see why the comparison had been made--it was kind of cute.

When she said the year she'd come from he raised an eyebrow. Not like most things here weren't already hard to believe, but for some reason the idea that they were sitting in a room with a girl who came from a time more than a hundred years in their past--well, that was kind of a mind trip any way you cut it.

"Wow, that's a long time ago. For us, anyway. Our home's got the kind of technology this place would have if everything here was working right--TV's, cell phones, computers. Not really any ghosts, least not the literal kind, and most of the stuff that goes bump in the night in our city is stuff that you can bump right back at if it gets too loud.

"There's an underground and an overground, and anyone who wants to live a long healthy life stays away from the former."

[OOC: Selective info is selective because DOGS canon never gives the year or even the name of the city or country they're in--it might be somewhere in Germany, but it's not very clear either way. Boo.]

[bulletcarnage]

Unlike Badou, Heine quite wasn't so sparing of little trivial things like emotion and he gave out a rather obviously amused snort at the comparison to the little mammal.

"Weasel, huh? I can see it."

He says it with a small smirk, his head tilted to the side and then he falls silent again as Badou talks about their world.

Oddly, he didn't feel much sense of homesickness. Sure, he missed the familiarity of home, of the streets they knew, the couches and other vaguely comfortable surfaces he frequented and slept on, Buon Viaggio, the church-- which had mixed feelings for him for the time being-- but aside from that he didn't miss it.

Usually, the apathy about such things didn't bother him in the slightest, it was just how he operated. But the fact he didn't miss it compared to the haunted apartments?

He raised a hand and lightly touched his middle and forefinger to the back of his neck.

"And sometimes things from the underground come up to the overground, so it doesn't matter how hard you try and stay away from the former." He added, almost off-handedly.

[ninjaweaselgirl]

Misao saw their reactions and glowered at them, puffing out her chest and bracing her hands on her hips, looking like a bristling . . . weasel.

"Heeeeeeeey, don't laugh!!!" She pouted, looking petulant for a moment before relaxing. She was easy to rile up, but also easy to forgive. She was just the eternal ray of sunshine that way. "I do not look like one!!!"

A glare at both of them for good measure.

"Underground? Whoa. We don't really have that, though we've got dangerous places . . . You gotta be careful of the yakuza, bandits, stuff like that," she said, looking up as she remembered said places. "I used to travel around a lot by myself, and I'd beat up their asses if they tried doin' anythin' funny to me."

She looked self-satisfied at this, grinning with confidence. She'd spent many a night beating up bandits and all sorts of other shady characters on her journey.

"A long time ago? Whaddya mean? Are you from . . . 2009, like the other person said?" A tilt of her head to the side. "Though, ya know, all the newspapers in this place say it's around 1970.

"What the hell's up with everyone comin' from different places here? How's that even possible?"

Her brows scrunch together.

"But hey, guess that's a good thing so we can help each other out, and I got to meet you two, right?"

Misao was always happy to meet new people, and she beamed at them both.

[smokeeasy]

Cocking his head a little to look at her sidelong, Badou shrugged and then spoke to the air. "I always thought weasels were kind of cool." He said it with the kind of neutrality that made it hard to tell if it was meant as a compliment or just as a plain old non sequitur, and he didn't seem inclined to elaborate.

To her next question he gave a vague nod. "1970," he mused with an interested glance over to Heine, "That's more than 30 years ago for us. I don't know how any of this stuff's possible at all. Nothing about this place makes any damn sense."

Like Heine, Badou didn't feel much in the way of homesickness. In fact if he had to be completely frank with himself, what with just about everyone he knew stuck in this place too--Heine, the Priest, Nill, Naoto, even one of those crazy twin girls who'd nearly killed them not so long ago, plus the two psycho stalker freaks that Heine knew from the underground--Badou thought he'd be more lonely and "homesick" if he wasn't here.

He wasn't exactly the type to dwell on that sort of thing though, so he focused instead on what Misao was asking about how they could all even be here, answering that (what he presumed to be) rhetorical question a musing of his own: "Kinda makes you wonder what else might exist out there if something like this can just happen one day. But it does keep a body occupied." He gave Misao a crooked smile, "Don't usually meet so many...er, different people at home anyway."

And then, almost as an afterthought he added, "I do kind of wish we had, like, a video game console here though, or something. Not a hell of a lot to do in this place besides get freaked out by spooky things."

[bulletcarnage]

With all the subjects that were floating around, the curiosity about different times and vastly different lifestyles to question, the matter of whether or not Misao really was or was not like a weasel, the newspapers apparently giving a date that was over thirty years old, the nature of the apartments bringing people from not only different places and time but seemingly different worlds in some cases, in all that the thing Heine felt inclined to actually contribute to was -

"Yeah, a console would sure as hell help pass the time in this place. I mean, I doubt the ghosts would want to play, but even if they did I bet they're sore losers anyway."

[ninjaweaselgirl]

"Really? I think they're cool enough if people don't call me one!"

Misao scowled at the idea once again before sighing and flopping back.

The idea of people from home did make her miss home. She missed Kyoto's bright, sunny, and dusty streets, teeming with hawkers and vendors and passersby. Colorful pinwheels blowing in the summer breeze, the musical tinkling of wind chimes in the paper-paneled doorways, and the laughter of her family and the customers of their restaurant and inn floated in her mind, and she sighed, missing Jiya, Ochika-san, Omasu-san, Shiro, Kuro, and . . . of course . . . Aoshi-sama.

She also missed everyone in Tokyo. Himura, Kaoru-san, even the rooster head and the brat, Megumi-san. The sights of Japan--at least, the Japan she came from--were different from the dingy hallways and the gloomy apartments of this place she was stuck in.

Still, she saw what bits of hope and happiness that she could, and this made her smile at her two new friends. She was always happy to meet new people.

"What's a video game console?" she asked, tilting her head to one side. Another strange new thing, like those picture boxes?

[smokeeasy]

"Good way to waste time," Badou mused absently, which wasn't really much of an answer. The idea of video games had got him thinking though.

People had stuff they did to pass the time before there were video games to play. Hell, when he was a kid he'd done stuff besides sit around the living room and play games on the PS2. Sure there had been video games, but mostly they were things he played in arcades. And his brother, who'd all but raised him, had kept him occupied in other ways.

It made him think of the kinds of stuff Dave used to do--lightly-barbed jokes he'd liked playing on him. Half the time the "games" that his elder brother had chosen to teach him were ones that confounded Badou as a boy, ones that frustrated him with little tricks and trip-ups so that he felt they were all stacked in his brother's favor, and so that he wound up spending hours practicing them on his own, just so he could prove to Dave that he was every bit as good at them as he was.

It was only years later that he'd realized what a clever tactic this had been on his brother's part for keeping a little boy occupied and out of his hair.

"Got an idea," he said suddenly, standing up and heading to the kitchen without any further explanation.