Remix of solesakuma's "Shoot the Shaggy Dog"
Title: I Have to See a Man About a Dog (The Shooting the Shit Remix)
Rating: PG-13, for swearing
Group/Pairing: Toma, Arashi, KAT-TUN, Yoko, and Jin
Warnings: copious amounts of nerd humor (lovingly written, I assure you)
Notes: I adore gothic horror and Lovecraft in particular so I was excited to use this story. I... took it in a decidedly different direction. I hope you enjoy it, solesakuma!
Link to Original Story: Shoot the Shaggy Dog
Link to Original Writer: Archive
Toma felt like he had been wandering for hours; he should be getting close. He checked his watch - well, minutes anyway. Toma shouldered his backpack and tapped out a quick message on his iPhone.
Where exactly are you guys again? This park is huge.
A moment later a link popped up that took him to a map. He followed the little green trail to the little blue dot that represented his friends. All hail modern technology - a boon to all lazy people.
Ironic considering their chosen activities for the day. Last time it had been Junno's turn to pick the setting for their monthly live action gaming session. He had gone full fantasy with an old-school style dungeon crawl through the basements of a local university. This time Jun had chosen a Victorian horror setting based on the Lovecraft canon. Toma was pretty sure Jun wanted an excuse to make a waistcoat. But he liked a good rubber band pistol as much as the next guy so it was fine with him.
He wondered who they had conned into running the session this time. He had done it a few months ago and to say it was a challenge was a gross understatement. It was kind of like herding cats. In the dark. But instead of a dog and crook you had... something less useful than those things. Actually, a crook probably wouldn't bother cats much either. A spray bottle would be the best thing. The spray bottle thing might work on a few of their members - a couple of them were well known for being overly invested in the state of their hair.
Toma's question was answered a minute later by voices drifting through the trees.
"No arguing with the GM. What I decide goes, ok?"
Yoko. Toma smiled, this should be interesting. Last year Yoko had sworn loudly and publicly on his Elendil replica that he would never again run one of their games. Toma couldn't imagine what sort of dirt they had conjured up to make him change his mind.
"Can we discuss the finer points between arguing and merely disagreeing on solid, logical ground?"
Nino, of course. He didn't intend to follow the rules either way; he was probably just giving Yoko shit on principle.
"No! No, we cannot. There will no bargaining, bartering, discussing, or debating of any kind."
"Keep talking buddy, and I will make sure everyone knows exactly where Maruyama got that incredibly questionable DVD."
He rounded the corner just in time to see Yoko snarl at Nino's cat-grin. The Arashi guys were already assembled; they tended to travel as a pack. Toma was never so serious about the hobby that he had gone and joined a dedicated group with a name and crap. But he had known these guys forever and was always tacitly invited to their events.
"Hey guys."
Sho, Jun, and Aiba turned to give him waves, smiles of greeting, and in Jun's case - a dramatic swirl of his leather coat. Ohno seemed to be slumped against a tree, snoozing until they were ready to go. Aiba and Sho had managed outfits that looked vaguely Victorian though Sho's boots were bordering on American west. Nino's outfit seemed to be leaning toward the 'heavily armed' school of style. He had at least three different rubber band guns that Toma could see. And probably plenty of concealed weapons. Guess they knew where all of his stat points went.
The rest of the group arrived while Toma was digging his equipment out of his bag and putting the finishing touches on his 'dapper but slightly shabby PI' look. The guys who made up KAT-TUN (just the initials of their names stuck together because apparently there had been a knock-down-drag-out over more original names) were pretty cool. Junno was a hard-core gamer of all varieties, and he was always good for small details - random facts and rule checks. Ueda was odd and laid back, Koki and Nakamaru were funny and Kame... well, Kame was like Jun. He lived for the drama of it all.
Speaking of Kame, he and Jun seemed to be in kind of a Mexican standoff, regarding each others' outfits. They looked remarkably similar from the cut of the coat to the identical pocket watches, though their waistcoats were made from different brocades.
The whole group fell silent - conversations dying off as they waited for the inevitable screeching accusatory meltdown. Three long, tense seconds passed before Kame grinned like the sun coming out and demanded to know exactly how Jun had finished the hem on his coat. Jun smiled back and they were off and running in a rapid-fire exchange of sewing terms. The rest of them heaved a collective sigh of relief.
It was then that Toma noticed Jin hovering around the edge of the group. Akanishi Jin used to hang with them all the time when they were younger - hell, he used to be the A in KAT-TUN - but he claimed to have outgrown all of this 'geek shit' and moved on to the world of hip-hop and clubs. Apparently he was still sort of friends with the rest of KAT-TUN but it had been years since Toma had seen him at a gaming event.
Jin caught his raised eyebrow and smiled sheepishly, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. "Hey."
Jun turned from his conversation with Kame long enough to give Jin a withering stare. "Jin, you know this is a Victorian setting. Why on Earth are you wearing jeans?"
Jin grinned back, totally unfazed. "Jeans were invented in the 1860's! Suck it, bitches."
"It's true, and Lovecraft lived from 1890 to 1937," Junno added helpfully.
Ueda chuckled quietly, "That may be but you can't deny that 'suck it, bitches' didn't come into popular use until muchlater."
Yoko nodded sagely, "I'll allow the pants at least. Pants are essential. But more importantly, what are you even doing here, Jin? Not that's not good to see you but I thought this wasn't really your scene anymore."
"He lost a bet to Kame and had to come play Kame's 'assistant'," Koki crowed jubilantly.
"Specifically a drinking contest," Nakamaru added.
Yoko's eyebrows shot up, "You lost a drinking contest to Kame?! You deserve everything you get today, dude."
Kame just smiled archly.
Yoko clapped his hands once and made gathering motions. "Ok, people, let's get this show on the road. Everyone have their character sheets handy? Have all of your equipment? Phones on silent? Right. Let's do this."
An hour later they had made a disheartening amount of progress in the storyline Yoko had prepared for them. Arashi and KAT-TUN were bands of hunters who tracked down treasure and demons respectively. Toma was a free-agent - a PI for a supernatural agency tasked with tracking the hunters down and preventing them from letting a horrible-evil-beyond-the-ken-of-man loose on the Earth.
They had all managed to get their characters to meet up, in the coastal New England village. But they hadn't gotten much farther than a few interactions and a skirmish or two. Mostly because the majority of them were difficult to deal with in drastically different ways.
Kame and Jun spent a good deal of time nitpicking the accuracy of people's clothing, weapons, accents, and phrasing while others didn't seem to care at all. They were currently waiting for Jun and Nino to finish debating Nino's beverage choices.
"Where did you get that can of Diet Coke?! They had no cans in Lovecraft!"
Nino just shrugged and gave a long, loud slurp of his soda. "Whatevs."
"You're not going to make me get rid of my Jolt, are you?" Junno piped up worriedly, "Because I had a raid last night and I really need the caffeine."
Ueda shrugged one shoulder with a small, unconcerned sound but Kame rounded on the taller man immediately. "Yes. No plastic either!"
"And change your shoes, those are totally aren't in complia-" Jun's rant was cut off with a small clang as a Coke can hit him squarely in the back of the head. His voice went all soft and menacing that made Toma take a step back even though he had been nowhere near them. "Who threw that?"
Nino schooled his features into his best wide-eyed innocent look, "Must have been a wayward bolt."
Aiba, who actually was innocent sounded distraught. "Did I cast magic missile too soon?"
"We should do something about your premature missile problem," Sho responded, patting his friend on the shoulder.
The tension broke as the entire group took a moment to snicker loudly.
Sho just looked slightly baffled, "What did I say?"
Yoko wandered over to Aiba. "You shouldn't even have magic missile - this platform doesn't use that kind of magic, let me see your character sheet. " Aiba handed it over and after a few seconds of looking it over Yoko heaved the loud, blustery sigh of put-upon administrators everywhere.
"Aiba-chan... this is just your wizard from last month's D&D campaign with stuff scratched out and some other shit written in. I mean, you literally crossed out your dagger and wrote 'a handgun or some other shit'."
Aiba's frowned indignantly, "Hey, there was a Firefly marathon on TV last night. I meant to do my character sheet but I got distracted. That was an awesome knife though. It was an ogre-slaying knife; it had a plus nine against ogres."
"Well there are no ogres here and you can't catch magic missile, ok?" He turned back to the group, "Right, slackers, are you ready for the next instance? You're about to walk into the dark, dark, seaside cave, right? Oh for fuck's sake, Nino. Why are you and Junno fucking around with your DSs?"
Nino seemed caught off-guard for once, clearly expecting Yoko to have been slightly more distracted. "We're not fucking around we're.... "
"Rolling for initiative," Junno offered.
Yoko's disbelief was palpable. "With Mario Cart?
Nino and Junno didn't blink an eye as they chirped simultaneously, "Yep."
"Seriously, if you guys want Coke and video games and breaks for fashion checks and whatever the crap Ohno has been off in those bushes doing for twenty minutes, why didn't we just play the table top version. Then we wouldn't have to be out in so much-
"-nature? " Jin cut in miserably, visibly sweating under the cape Kame had forced him to wear.
"-public." Yoko finished, hands on his hips and a glare that encompassed the whole group. No one appeared to have a sufficient response for him.
"Ok, that's it. Toma, you're up - jan ken pon. Now."
Yoko's tone brooked no argument so Toma stepped up to battle for their fate. With fists. A children's game involving fists anyway. Unfortunately for them Toma's scissors were inevitably crushed by Yoko's rock.
"Right, you go into the cave and witness some horrible, unknowable, tentacley evil from beyond that blows everyone's minds but especially-" He paused to roll a twelve-sided die before pointing at the unlucky soul "- Jin's. Jin, you end up as a permanent vegetable. The rest of you wind up.... idk, in the Himalayas or something. Good luck finding your way back. The end."
The group was, for once, rendered completely silent.
Yoko just sighed again, "Seriously, guys, it's hot as balls out here. Let's go to someone's house and play Biohazard or something."
Toma was pleasantly surprised when the suggestion was met with unanimous agreement. They all puttered around packing up their stuff when Kame asked about their next event.
It was Toma's turn to pick the setting, he had been thinking about it for a while and settled on something that would make everyone in the group equally uncomfortable. He couldn't quite keep the grin off his face. "We're going with a good, old-fashioned Barbarian fantasy setting. Eye of Argon, baby!"
He figured they would all bitch no matter what, he might as well give them something legitimate to complain about. "Remember, no more than one vowel per name and the guy with the biggest ax wins!"
Another day, another adventure.
Rating: PG-13, for swearing
Group/Pairing: Toma, Arashi, KAT-TUN, Yoko, and Jin
Warnings: copious amounts of nerd humor (lovingly written, I assure you)
Notes: I adore gothic horror and Lovecraft in particular so I was excited to use this story. I... took it in a decidedly different direction. I hope you enjoy it, solesakuma!
Link to Original Story: Shoot the Shaggy Dog
Link to Original Writer: Archive
Toma felt like he had been wandering for hours; he should be getting close. He checked his watch - well, minutes anyway. Toma shouldered his backpack and tapped out a quick message on his iPhone.
Where exactly are you guys again? This park is huge.
A moment later a link popped up that took him to a map. He followed the little green trail to the little blue dot that represented his friends. All hail modern technology - a boon to all lazy people.
Ironic considering their chosen activities for the day. Last time it had been Junno's turn to pick the setting for their monthly live action gaming session. He had gone full fantasy with an old-school style dungeon crawl through the basements of a local university. This time Jun had chosen a Victorian horror setting based on the Lovecraft canon. Toma was pretty sure Jun wanted an excuse to make a waistcoat. But he liked a good rubber band pistol as much as the next guy so it was fine with him.
He wondered who they had conned into running the session this time. He had done it a few months ago and to say it was a challenge was a gross understatement. It was kind of like herding cats. In the dark. But instead of a dog and crook you had... something less useful than those things. Actually, a crook probably wouldn't bother cats much either. A spray bottle would be the best thing. The spray bottle thing might work on a few of their members - a couple of them were well known for being overly invested in the state of their hair.
Toma's question was answered a minute later by voices drifting through the trees.
"No arguing with the GM. What I decide goes, ok?"
Yoko. Toma smiled, this should be interesting. Last year Yoko had sworn loudly and publicly on his Elendil replica that he would never again run one of their games. Toma couldn't imagine what sort of dirt they had conjured up to make him change his mind.
"Can we discuss the finer points between arguing and merely disagreeing on solid, logical ground?"
Nino, of course. He didn't intend to follow the rules either way; he was probably just giving Yoko shit on principle.
"No! No, we cannot. There will no bargaining, bartering, discussing, or debating of any kind."
"Keep talking buddy, and I will make sure everyone knows exactly where Maruyama got that incredibly questionable DVD."
He rounded the corner just in time to see Yoko snarl at Nino's cat-grin. The Arashi guys were already assembled; they tended to travel as a pack. Toma was never so serious about the hobby that he had gone and joined a dedicated group with a name and crap. But he had known these guys forever and was always tacitly invited to their events.
"Hey guys."
Sho, Jun, and Aiba turned to give him waves, smiles of greeting, and in Jun's case - a dramatic swirl of his leather coat. Ohno seemed to be slumped against a tree, snoozing until they were ready to go. Aiba and Sho had managed outfits that looked vaguely Victorian though Sho's boots were bordering on American west. Nino's outfit seemed to be leaning toward the 'heavily armed' school of style. He had at least three different rubber band guns that Toma could see. And probably plenty of concealed weapons. Guess they knew where all of his stat points went.
The rest of the group arrived while Toma was digging his equipment out of his bag and putting the finishing touches on his 'dapper but slightly shabby PI' look. The guys who made up KAT-TUN (just the initials of their names stuck together because apparently there had been a knock-down-drag-out over more original names) were pretty cool. Junno was a hard-core gamer of all varieties, and he was always good for small details - random facts and rule checks. Ueda was odd and laid back, Koki and Nakamaru were funny and Kame... well, Kame was like Jun. He lived for the drama of it all.
Speaking of Kame, he and Jun seemed to be in kind of a Mexican standoff, regarding each others' outfits. They looked remarkably similar from the cut of the coat to the identical pocket watches, though their waistcoats were made from different brocades.
The whole group fell silent - conversations dying off as they waited for the inevitable screeching accusatory meltdown. Three long, tense seconds passed before Kame grinned like the sun coming out and demanded to know exactly how Jun had finished the hem on his coat. Jun smiled back and they were off and running in a rapid-fire exchange of sewing terms. The rest of them heaved a collective sigh of relief.
It was then that Toma noticed Jin hovering around the edge of the group. Akanishi Jin used to hang with them all the time when they were younger - hell, he used to be the A in KAT-TUN - but he claimed to have outgrown all of this 'geek shit' and moved on to the world of hip-hop and clubs. Apparently he was still sort of friends with the rest of KAT-TUN but it had been years since Toma had seen him at a gaming event.
Jin caught his raised eyebrow and smiled sheepishly, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. "Hey."
Jun turned from his conversation with Kame long enough to give Jin a withering stare. "Jin, you know this is a Victorian setting. Why on Earth are you wearing jeans?"
Jin grinned back, totally unfazed. "Jeans were invented in the 1860's! Suck it, bitches."
"It's true, and Lovecraft lived from 1890 to 1937," Junno added helpfully.
Ueda chuckled quietly, "That may be but you can't deny that 'suck it, bitches' didn't come into popular use until muchlater."
Yoko nodded sagely, "I'll allow the pants at least. Pants are essential. But more importantly, what are you even doing here, Jin? Not that's not good to see you but I thought this wasn't really your scene anymore."
"He lost a bet to Kame and had to come play Kame's 'assistant'," Koki crowed jubilantly.
"Specifically a drinking contest," Nakamaru added.
Yoko's eyebrows shot up, "You lost a drinking contest to Kame?! You deserve everything you get today, dude."
Kame just smiled archly.
Yoko clapped his hands once and made gathering motions. "Ok, people, let's get this show on the road. Everyone have their character sheets handy? Have all of your equipment? Phones on silent? Right. Let's do this."
An hour later they had made a disheartening amount of progress in the storyline Yoko had prepared for them. Arashi and KAT-TUN were bands of hunters who tracked down treasure and demons respectively. Toma was a free-agent - a PI for a supernatural agency tasked with tracking the hunters down and preventing them from letting a horrible-evil-beyond-the-ken-of-man loose on the Earth.
They had all managed to get their characters to meet up, in the coastal New England village. But they hadn't gotten much farther than a few interactions and a skirmish or two. Mostly because the majority of them were difficult to deal with in drastically different ways.
Kame and Jun spent a good deal of time nitpicking the accuracy of people's clothing, weapons, accents, and phrasing while others didn't seem to care at all. They were currently waiting for Jun and Nino to finish debating Nino's beverage choices.
"Where did you get that can of Diet Coke?! They had no cans in Lovecraft!"
Nino just shrugged and gave a long, loud slurp of his soda. "Whatevs."
"You're not going to make me get rid of my Jolt, are you?" Junno piped up worriedly, "Because I had a raid last night and I really need the caffeine."
Ueda shrugged one shoulder with a small, unconcerned sound but Kame rounded on the taller man immediately. "Yes. No plastic either!"
"And change your shoes, those are totally aren't in complia-" Jun's rant was cut off with a small clang as a Coke can hit him squarely in the back of the head. His voice went all soft and menacing that made Toma take a step back even though he had been nowhere near them. "Who threw that?"
Nino schooled his features into his best wide-eyed innocent look, "Must have been a wayward bolt."
Aiba, who actually was innocent sounded distraught. "Did I cast magic missile too soon?"
"We should do something about your premature missile problem," Sho responded, patting his friend on the shoulder.
The tension broke as the entire group took a moment to snicker loudly.
Sho just looked slightly baffled, "What did I say?"
Yoko wandered over to Aiba. "You shouldn't even have magic missile - this platform doesn't use that kind of magic, let me see your character sheet. " Aiba handed it over and after a few seconds of looking it over Yoko heaved the loud, blustery sigh of put-upon administrators everywhere.
"Aiba-chan... this is just your wizard from last month's D&D campaign with stuff scratched out and some other shit written in. I mean, you literally crossed out your dagger and wrote 'a handgun or some other shit'."
Aiba's frowned indignantly, "Hey, there was a Firefly marathon on TV last night. I meant to do my character sheet but I got distracted. That was an awesome knife though. It was an ogre-slaying knife; it had a plus nine against ogres."
"Well there are no ogres here and you can't catch magic missile, ok?" He turned back to the group, "Right, slackers, are you ready for the next instance? You're about to walk into the dark, dark, seaside cave, right? Oh for fuck's sake, Nino. Why are you and Junno fucking around with your DSs?"
Nino seemed caught off-guard for once, clearly expecting Yoko to have been slightly more distracted. "We're not fucking around we're.... "
"Rolling for initiative," Junno offered.
Yoko's disbelief was palpable. "With Mario Cart?
Nino and Junno didn't blink an eye as they chirped simultaneously, "Yep."
"Seriously, if you guys want Coke and video games and breaks for fashion checks and whatever the crap Ohno has been off in those bushes doing for twenty minutes, why didn't we just play the table top version. Then we wouldn't have to be out in so much-
"-nature? " Jin cut in miserably, visibly sweating under the cape Kame had forced him to wear.
"-public." Yoko finished, hands on his hips and a glare that encompassed the whole group. No one appeared to have a sufficient response for him.
"Ok, that's it. Toma, you're up - jan ken pon. Now."
Yoko's tone brooked no argument so Toma stepped up to battle for their fate. With fists. A children's game involving fists anyway. Unfortunately for them Toma's scissors were inevitably crushed by Yoko's rock.
"Right, you go into the cave and witness some horrible, unknowable, tentacley evil from beyond that blows everyone's minds but especially-" He paused to roll a twelve-sided die before pointing at the unlucky soul "- Jin's. Jin, you end up as a permanent vegetable. The rest of you wind up.... idk, in the Himalayas or something. Good luck finding your way back. The end."
The group was, for once, rendered completely silent.
Yoko just sighed again, "Seriously, guys, it's hot as balls out here. Let's go to someone's house and play Biohazard or something."
Toma was pleasantly surprised when the suggestion was met with unanimous agreement. They all puttered around packing up their stuff when Kame asked about their next event.
It was Toma's turn to pick the setting, he had been thinking about it for a while and settled on something that would make everyone in the group equally uncomfortable. He couldn't quite keep the grin off his face. "We're going with a good, old-fashioned Barbarian fantasy setting. Eye of Argon, baby!"
He figured they would all bitch no matter what, he might as well give them something legitimate to complain about. "Remember, no more than one vowel per name and the guy with the biggest ax wins!"
Another day, another adventure.