Sixth day, happy new year to all involved...
Title: The One Without An Ending
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh GX (yeah, I've stooped that low *shoots self*)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, contains some shipping, Japanese names.
Summary: Despite being one of the world's best duellists, Judai Yuki does not know how to tell a bedtime story. So he winged it.
It had started with the daughter of Asuka and Jun Manjyome asking her 'uncle' Judai for a bedtime story. Since Judai had absolutely no experience with bedtime stories, he decided to make one up. After all, it wasn't like she'd know the difference, right?
"Okay, once upon a time, 'cause all fairy stories start with once upon a time, there was a young man. Now this young man wasn't a prince, a king, a knight or any other type of noble that you can think of, he was just a normal kid. Not that much older than you are now. Now, this kid got sent to a school, where he met a beautiful woman, the crown princess of her land. But she was sad."
"Did the man end up with the princess? That's the way these stories usually go."
No-one had ever told Judai that. Well...okay, maybe Fubuki had mentioned it once, but everything Fubuki ever said while possessed -and most of the things he said when he wasn't, for that matter- had to be taken with more than a little scepticism. Especially when it came to romance.
Maybe the reason why Jun had ended up marrying Asuka instead was because he had listened to Fubuki more than Judai had.
"Um, no. The princess eventually married one of the knights from another realm, after said knight challenged both of his brothers to a fight for her honour and won."
This was not entirely true. However, if either of the older two Manjyome's had ever dared to say anything derisive about Asuka, Jun would have spent a while toying with them before he completely humiliated them. Of course, this would have been in the event that neither Fubuki nor Asuka herself heard the insult first, in which case, Jun would laugh and taunt his brothers from the sidelines while they either got slashed to ribbons by Asuka's Cyber Blader or toasted like marshmallows by Fubuki's Red Eyes Darkness Dragon.
Possibly both at the same time.
"That's nice. So, why was the princess sad?"
"The princess was sad because her older brother had disappeared about two years prior to the beginning of the story. The people of her kingdom wrote him off as being dead, but she was so sure that he was still alive, somewhere."
"Did she find him?"
"Don't rush me, I'm getting to that."
The girl yawned.
"I'm tired, Uncle Judai. Finish it next time?"
He grinned. That was one story that could never be finished.
"I'll try, but you haven't heard about the evil sorcerers and the cursed dragon yet."
Title: A Story of Us
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: G (hey, that's not a rating I'm used to using!)
Warnings: One mild spoiler for Season 3 (that's only barely noticeable, really).
Summary: Several years down the line, neither of them will remember the exact events, but Ando and Hiro first met at the age of five...
Before the eclipse, before Sylar and before Pinehearst Industries, there were two little boys in a class in Tokyo. Neither of them could have any idea that they were special, or even that they would one day become friends.
In fact, Hiro Nakamura (aged five years, three months and two days) didn't actually expect that he'd ever have any friends at all. He wasn't bullied, because he was too quiet and too shy for even the bullies to notice. He was just ignored. And so, every lunchtime, he would hide in the library, take out a comic book from his bag and just read in peace and quiet until lunch ended. When the teacher insisted on group work, he would meekly go into any group he was assigned and do his share of the work quickly, only talking the bare minimum to his partners and no more.
Meanwhile, Ando Masahashi (who was a bit over five, but couldn't tell you how much) couldn't seem to stop talking. On occasion, he had tried to keep quiet, but something would just set him off and he'd only barely ever stop to breathe. It drove the teacher mad, especially as Ando just happened to have one of those voices that carried from the other side of the room. It wasn't even that he was rude -because he wasn't, particularly- he just never seemed to know when to shut up.
So one day, the teacher decided to solve two problems with one solution. He paired Ando and Hiro together and hoped that they would balance each other out.
"Hello. Haven't talked to you before. You're Hiro, right?"
A nod, and Ando took it as a sign to continue. Of course, Ando took everything as a sign to continue.
"I'm Ando. You don't seem to talk much, are you shy? I promise that I don't bite. Well...there was this one time when I fell over on top of one of the boys and my teeth hit his arm, but that was an accident, I swear!"
"Why do you want to talk to me?"
"Because we're a team. For this maths sheet, anyway. You any good at maths, Hiro?"
Hiro nodded, starting to smile.
They finished the sheet with time to spare, and to Hiro's surprise, Ando kept talking to him in that same tone of voice, even when a quite nervous Hiro only answered with a nod or a shrug. Most of the other children in their class would have stopped talking by then, convinced that Hiro didn't actually want to talk to them and had given up trying, but Ando kept going until the end of the school day on every subject from the weather to the events in the shows that he watched (unlike Hiro, who was addicted to Star Trek, Ando sat down every week to watch The Twilight Zone with his parents).
It was on the way home that Hiro realised that Ando actually wanted to be his friend.
His very first friend.
He spent the rest of that night with a happy grin on his face.
Title: The Unmentioned Hospital Stay
Fandom: Beyblade V-Force
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers for quite a bit of the Team Psykick arc, happens several years after G-Revolution ends.
Summary: Salima tends to avoid discussion of her teenage years.
Sometimes, after looking at her medical records, potential employers ask her about the three weeks that she spent in hospital getting the back of her head and her neck checked out -she had a mild concussion, multiple contusions and two chipped vertebrae, but it could have been worse- and she tells them that she fell down the stairs.
It's not true, of course.
She could tell them the truth, but she convinced herself a long time ago that they wouldn't believe it, so she lies and they tend to accept the lie as truth anyway. Even though the angle of the injuries is more consistent with being thrown into a stone wall than falling down the stairs. It doesn't matter, because they never tend to mention it again.
Besides, what would she tell them?
That she got the injuries from being telekinetically slammed into the wall by her best friend, who had been taken over by a malicious and insane AI residing in his spinning top? That she had been (temporarily) possessed by a similar entity a few hours previously? And, of course, this would involve going off into the subject of bitbeast lore, which she knew absolutely nothing about, due to the fact that (apart from the aforementioned insane AI) she'd never had a bitbeast -although, with the exception of the bladers at the very top, her team used to be able to beat pretty much anyone, bitbeast or not- and from there into her decisively less than comfortable relationships with both Rei and Kane, which were perfectly understandable considering that not only had she chosen one set of loyalties over the other, but her choice had tried to kill her after she told him to stop.
Then again, she has always wondered why Takao wasn't used to everyone trying to kill him by then, after the Demolition Boys' attempt the previous year.
She guesses that was one of the benefits of not having a bitbeast, apart from not going psycho and trying to kill everyone in sight; that people didn't try to kill you either. She doesn't blade anymore, though. She had kept going for a while (Goki and Jim stopped after the whole incident with the Cybers, so her and Kane formed a tag-team for a bit. Reasonably successful too, but they didn't allow the pair of them in the World Championship because they didn't use bitbeasts like everyone else), even ended up giving most of their spare blade parts to kids as part of the rebellion against the BEGA controversy, but she just got tired of it in the end and went to a real school, studied psychology and went back out into the world to get a job that didn't involve secret evil organisations or spirits in spinning tops.
A normal job.
Title: The Dancer's Tale
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Rating: G (yay, another one)
Warnings: Spoilers for both the main game and Revenant Wings (this would be the sequel, for anyone unfamiliar with the franchise).
Summary: She wants to put her story down in writing. Unfortunately, the hardest thing about stories are the beginnings.
She had decided to put down some of her exploits as a story form (with bits missed out, as some of the more complicated political complexities hadn't quite been suitable for children, and besides, she hadn't understood most of the games being played there herself), but Penelo had no idea where to start.
Once upon a time...
She crossed that out. After all, she could do better than that, couldn't she? She was the partner to the sky pirate Vaan, and had helped save Ivalice from the threats of Vayne, Illua and Feolthanos. She didn't like to think about the last one much. Between Velis, the Feol Viera and the Aegyl...no, it was better not to write that part down at all.
She would be a lot happier if she never had to think about that part of her life again. She knew -from the way Kytes never wanted to go on a trip with either of them anymore and often pretended that he had no ability to do any Black Magick besides a basic Fire spell, the way Filo always started to cry a little whenever she saw a Scion being summoned, even if they were the ones doing it; and the way Tomaj never seemed to mention that the ship that they had recently stole was actually the second of Vaan's airships that he had opened up a shop on- that she wasn't the only person that feels that way. It had damaged them all in different places.
She started the story again.
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
No, that wouldn't do either.
Balthier -being both somewhat theatrical in his perceived role as the 'leading man' and having the background to sustain that amount of drama and intrigue- could get away with that rather over-the-top beginning to their story. She, having started her part in history as a dancer on the streets of Rabanastre, and having always been one of the more sensible members of their group, just couldn't make that fit with the tone that she was trying to aim for while writing this piece, and anyone that knew her that read it would think that she was being somewhat insincere, which wasn't her intention.
It was a pity too, since it had a certain ring to it.
She sighed and tried again, sticking to the basic facts for the time being. Who she was, where her part was in the story of the liberation of Dalmasca and, to some extent, the liberation of the entirety of Ivalice, what exactly had she been doing for most of her life.
My name is Penelo. Back before everything else happened to me, before I met emperors, queens, knights, sky pirates and pretty much every kind of monster that you can think of -and some that you can't- I was just a girl trying to keep her best friend out of trouble...
Title: Training a Replacement
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense. Mizuho is also something vaguely resembling sane in this. *awaits horrified gasps and shouts of 'Burn the Heretic!' at that one*
Summary: If she wants Mizuho on her new team, Hirono is going to have to take a different approach than she's entirely comfortable with...
Notes: Okay, this links in with both 'Murphy's Law' from Day 3 and 'Rebuilding and Renovation' from Day 5, and happens a little after both of them, but still in the future that got changed. *rolls eyes* I swear, at some point I'll stop with the future!fics, but...not for a while. :D
Unlike Hiroki, who just left his coin with someone else, Hirono had a more hands-on approach at finding someone to take over as Yellow Ranger while she took over Shinji's role (that still hurt, but it wasn't like Shinji was coming back to challenge her for it now) as leader of the team.
Namely, she knew exactly who she wanted for the role, and she was pretty sure as to how to convince her too. Mizuho didn't believe anything that couldn't be put into a fantasy story, delivered in the appropriate terminology of the genre. Which meant that Hirono, who talked to everyone in the rough and down-to-earth language that they tended to expect from a spiky-haired delinquent and used their expectations to manipulate them into thinking what she wanted them to think about her, would have to take a different approach than she was used to.
So she left a number of bits of paper in places where she expected Mizuho to look, all written with a part of a fictionalised version of their story as Rangers (she didn't change it that much, just worded it a little differently) and putting a note on the back of each piece with what page it was. The last one had a note on the end telling Mizuho to meet her in the library at a specific time.
She had also, quite deliberately, left out the ending. She would tell Mizuho that part in person, while warning her thoroughly about the drawbacks of being a hero in a country that wasn't particularly heroic -and in her point of view, was pretty damned villainous, but she accepted that she may be a little biased on the subject- although she doubted that Mizuho would say no.
She had the horrible feeling that, unlike Hirono herself, Mizuho had been waiting for the chance to be a hero all of her life.
***
Mizuho found the first one in her bag after her PE lesson. Thinking it was a joke being pulled on her by one of the demons that constantly hounded her steps -after all, one of them had already murdered Megumi, her sister in righteousness- she almost put it in the bin without looking at it.
There were six of them, right at the beginning...and the two flipped a coin to see who would lead the team. The woman suspected that the coin had been rigged against her, but said nothing, as if she was wrong, the other members of the group would call her a sore loser. So, then, did the man with the sword take the role of team leader, and a new band of heroes were formed...
If this was a joke, it was a well constructed one, and Mizuho had ran out of stories to read anyway, so she might as well play along, for now.
The story kept going.
She found one in her locker, all about a time when a monster in the water attempted to kill one of the heroines -there were three heroines to the three heroes, all of which spent more time fighting and less time getting captured than she was entirely used to, but she was getting a little tired of looking for role models who were there for more reasons than just to look pretty for the heroes, so she liked that about this story- and another one of the heroines risked her life to pull her teammate out of the water.
This reminded her of the time that they went to the beach on a school trip and Megumi disappeared mysteriously, only to reappear, four hours later, soaked through and coughing water out of her lungs, claiming that she got lost and then got caught in the current. Oddly enough, Shimizu -who Mizuho hated almost as much as Kaori did, and had the horrible feeling that she was secretly (or not so secretly) a succubus in disguise (although she had always assumed that succubi actually had to be attractive, and Shimizu wasn't, in the traditional sense of the word)- had been in a similar state when they had met up with the rest of the class.
The next one that she found (in her lunchbox, of all places) was about the lengths that the main villain -she wasn't entirely sure, but she assumed that from the way the two main protagonists (the reluctantly heroic leader of the team and his slightly more amoral second-in-command, who was also the main heroine) acted, that it almost had to be the government- would go to hurt the heroes, going so far as to turn the hero's civilian friend into a weapon to be used against him. This one stopped at the hero making a deal with his god to return the civilian to normal, after a battle climaxing in the heroine running down that villain with a chariot that she had stolen from the lord of the realm in order to stop him from killing both her and the hero.
This also rang a bell. Hadn't Nanahara (one of the students that she was fairly confident was at least mostly human and therefore could be trusted) said something about Seto cosplaying as the Green Ranger and getting attacked by someone cosplaying as the Yellow one? It may have actually been the Yellow Ranger, actually, she couldn't remember that part very well. She'd heard that the Yellow Ranger had borrowed Mr Hayashida's car to run Seto over with, but that was probably just a rumour that the writer had used to help the story along.
She had found yet another in her maths textbook. By now, she didn't want it to be a joke, because she was actually getting really involved in the story (although, she had noticed that all of the characters seemed to hate each other, which was a little jarring). This one detailed the distrust that was starting to grow between the team members and ended with them splitting up to form two smaller teams of heroes (with the main hero leading one and the second-in-command leading the other).
The final one broke off halfway through the final battle between the main hero, who had been controlled by the same villains who had turned his friend evil, and the main heroine, who was not particularly impressed by this development (the word 'shenanigans' had been repeated several times).
She had found it in her figurine case, and it was different than the others. The writing was the same, and the letters weren't blurred or smudged, but the texture of the paper was odd.
It almost felt...like it had been cried on and allowed to dry out.
There was also a place and time written on the back, in the same spiky handwriting. At this point, Mizuho almost felt that she had to go to find out how the story ended. Although, in a strange way, she already knew.
Title: The One Exception
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense.
Summary: Hirono was going to tell her past self and former team everything, but along the way, things just happened to get left out of her account.
Notes: This happens...after future!Hirono goes back to the present timeline, and therefore happens both after and before all of the previous fics in this series. But you should read them first. *shot*
She went into this plan fully intending to tell her former teammates everything. Not spare them any details, not give them any reasons to be misled by her story. If she horrified them, then it meant that they were listening. If any of their friendships broke over it, then at least they would be alive in order to fix it. If they didn't believe her, then she would just have to stop the whole thing from happening herself.
While she was talking, however, there was one thing that she missed deliberately, besides her feelings about the entire thing, which were none of their business anyway.
She didn't tell them how Yutaka had died. She told them that she knew, and -after some coaxing by the others, said that the people responsible for all of this had told her before they died- but that was the one detail that she left out.
Originally, she wasn't going to -she was going to tell them that she was told that Shinji and Mitsuru beat him to death and let them be awkward around each other for weeks- but...she couldn't bring herself to say it. Not while Yutaka and Shinji were right there, sat next to each other and giving her matching worried looks. Besides, she remembered how the team used to work.
She had to tell them about Megumi -because that was the one final straw that had pushed her to kill Shinji herself- but she didn't need to say anything about Yutaka's death. If they were as smart as she thought they were, they would eventually figure it out for themselves.
Besides, it wasn't lying, really -or telling 'fairy stories' as Hirono's dad had used to say back when she actually still had a dad- it was just omitting a little thing for the sake of not forcing Shinji to give Yutaka the same slightly apologetic glances (they didn't look all that sincere, but it was Shinji, after all) that he had started to give the younger Hirono and Megumi while she was trying to tell her story.
It was for the best.
Really.
Fandom: Yu-Gi-Oh GX (yeah, I've stooped that low *shoots self*)
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: AU, contains some shipping, Japanese names.
Summary: Despite being one of the world's best duellists, Judai Yuki does not know how to tell a bedtime story. So he winged it.
It had started with the daughter of Asuka and Jun Manjyome asking her 'uncle' Judai for a bedtime story. Since Judai had absolutely no experience with bedtime stories, he decided to make one up. After all, it wasn't like she'd know the difference, right?
"Okay, once upon a time, 'cause all fairy stories start with once upon a time, there was a young man. Now this young man wasn't a prince, a king, a knight or any other type of noble that you can think of, he was just a normal kid. Not that much older than you are now. Now, this kid got sent to a school, where he met a beautiful woman, the crown princess of her land. But she was sad."
"Did the man end up with the princess? That's the way these stories usually go."
No-one had ever told Judai that. Well...okay, maybe Fubuki had mentioned it once, but everything Fubuki ever said while possessed -and most of the things he said when he wasn't, for that matter- had to be taken with more than a little scepticism. Especially when it came to romance.
Maybe the reason why Jun had ended up marrying Asuka instead was because he had listened to Fubuki more than Judai had.
"Um, no. The princess eventually married one of the knights from another realm, after said knight challenged both of his brothers to a fight for her honour and won."
This was not entirely true. However, if either of the older two Manjyome's had ever dared to say anything derisive about Asuka, Jun would have spent a while toying with them before he completely humiliated them. Of course, this would have been in the event that neither Fubuki nor Asuka herself heard the insult first, in which case, Jun would laugh and taunt his brothers from the sidelines while they either got slashed to ribbons by Asuka's Cyber Blader or toasted like marshmallows by Fubuki's Red Eyes Darkness Dragon.
Possibly both at the same time.
"That's nice. So, why was the princess sad?"
"The princess was sad because her older brother had disappeared about two years prior to the beginning of the story. The people of her kingdom wrote him off as being dead, but she was so sure that he was still alive, somewhere."
"Did she find him?"
"Don't rush me, I'm getting to that."
The girl yawned.
"I'm tired, Uncle Judai. Finish it next time?"
He grinned. That was one story that could never be finished.
"I'll try, but you haven't heard about the evil sorcerers and the cursed dragon yet."
Title: A Story of Us
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: G (hey, that's not a rating I'm used to using!)
Warnings: One mild spoiler for Season 3 (that's only barely noticeable, really).
Summary: Several years down the line, neither of them will remember the exact events, but Ando and Hiro first met at the age of five...
Before the eclipse, before Sylar and before Pinehearst Industries, there were two little boys in a class in Tokyo. Neither of them could have any idea that they were special, or even that they would one day become friends.
In fact, Hiro Nakamura (aged five years, three months and two days) didn't actually expect that he'd ever have any friends at all. He wasn't bullied, because he was too quiet and too shy for even the bullies to notice. He was just ignored. And so, every lunchtime, he would hide in the library, take out a comic book from his bag and just read in peace and quiet until lunch ended. When the teacher insisted on group work, he would meekly go into any group he was assigned and do his share of the work quickly, only talking the bare minimum to his partners and no more.
Meanwhile, Ando Masahashi (who was a bit over five, but couldn't tell you how much) couldn't seem to stop talking. On occasion, he had tried to keep quiet, but something would just set him off and he'd only barely ever stop to breathe. It drove the teacher mad, especially as Ando just happened to have one of those voices that carried from the other side of the room. It wasn't even that he was rude -because he wasn't, particularly- he just never seemed to know when to shut up.
So one day, the teacher decided to solve two problems with one solution. He paired Ando and Hiro together and hoped that they would balance each other out.
"Hello. Haven't talked to you before. You're Hiro, right?"
A nod, and Ando took it as a sign to continue. Of course, Ando took everything as a sign to continue.
"I'm Ando. You don't seem to talk much, are you shy? I promise that I don't bite. Well...there was this one time when I fell over on top of one of the boys and my teeth hit his arm, but that was an accident, I swear!"
"Why do you want to talk to me?"
"Because we're a team. For this maths sheet, anyway. You any good at maths, Hiro?"
Hiro nodded, starting to smile.
They finished the sheet with time to spare, and to Hiro's surprise, Ando kept talking to him in that same tone of voice, even when a quite nervous Hiro only answered with a nod or a shrug. Most of the other children in their class would have stopped talking by then, convinced that Hiro didn't actually want to talk to them and had given up trying, but Ando kept going until the end of the school day on every subject from the weather to the events in the shows that he watched (unlike Hiro, who was addicted to Star Trek, Ando sat down every week to watch The Twilight Zone with his parents).
It was on the way home that Hiro realised that Ando actually wanted to be his friend.
His very first friend.
He spent the rest of that night with a happy grin on his face.
Title: The Unmentioned Hospital Stay
Fandom: Beyblade V-Force
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Spoilers for quite a bit of the Team Psykick arc, happens several years after G-Revolution ends.
Summary: Salima tends to avoid discussion of her teenage years.
Sometimes, after looking at her medical records, potential employers ask her about the three weeks that she spent in hospital getting the back of her head and her neck checked out -she had a mild concussion, multiple contusions and two chipped vertebrae, but it could have been worse- and she tells them that she fell down the stairs.
It's not true, of course.
She could tell them the truth, but she convinced herself a long time ago that they wouldn't believe it, so she lies and they tend to accept the lie as truth anyway. Even though the angle of the injuries is more consistent with being thrown into a stone wall than falling down the stairs. It doesn't matter, because they never tend to mention it again.
Besides, what would she tell them?
That she got the injuries from being telekinetically slammed into the wall by her best friend, who had been taken over by a malicious and insane AI residing in his spinning top? That she had been (temporarily) possessed by a similar entity a few hours previously? And, of course, this would involve going off into the subject of bitbeast lore, which she knew absolutely nothing about, due to the fact that (apart from the aforementioned insane AI) she'd never had a bitbeast -although, with the exception of the bladers at the very top, her team used to be able to beat pretty much anyone, bitbeast or not- and from there into her decisively less than comfortable relationships with both Rei and Kane, which were perfectly understandable considering that not only had she chosen one set of loyalties over the other, but her choice had tried to kill her after she told him to stop.
Then again, she has always wondered why Takao wasn't used to everyone trying to kill him by then, after the Demolition Boys' attempt the previous year.
She guesses that was one of the benefits of not having a bitbeast, apart from not going psycho and trying to kill everyone in sight; that people didn't try to kill you either. She doesn't blade anymore, though. She had kept going for a while (Goki and Jim stopped after the whole incident with the Cybers, so her and Kane formed a tag-team for a bit. Reasonably successful too, but they didn't allow the pair of them in the World Championship because they didn't use bitbeasts like everyone else), even ended up giving most of their spare blade parts to kids as part of the rebellion against the BEGA controversy, but she just got tired of it in the end and went to a real school, studied psychology and went back out into the world to get a job that didn't involve secret evil organisations or spirits in spinning tops.
A normal job.
Title: The Dancer's Tale
Fandom: Final Fantasy XII
Rating: G (yay, another one)
Warnings: Spoilers for both the main game and Revenant Wings (this would be the sequel, for anyone unfamiliar with the franchise).
Summary: She wants to put her story down in writing. Unfortunately, the hardest thing about stories are the beginnings.
She had decided to put down some of her exploits as a story form (with bits missed out, as some of the more complicated political complexities hadn't quite been suitable for children, and besides, she hadn't understood most of the games being played there herself), but Penelo had no idea where to start.
Once upon a time...
She crossed that out. After all, she could do better than that, couldn't she? She was the partner to the sky pirate Vaan, and had helped save Ivalice from the threats of Vayne, Illua and Feolthanos. She didn't like to think about the last one much. Between Velis, the Feol Viera and the Aegyl...no, it was better not to write that part down at all.
She would be a lot happier if she never had to think about that part of her life again. She knew -from the way Kytes never wanted to go on a trip with either of them anymore and often pretended that he had no ability to do any Black Magick besides a basic Fire spell, the way Filo always started to cry a little whenever she saw a Scion being summoned, even if they were the ones doing it; and the way Tomaj never seemed to mention that the ship that they had recently stole was actually the second of Vaan's airships that he had opened up a shop on- that she wasn't the only person that feels that way. It had damaged them all in different places.
She started the story again.
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
No, that wouldn't do either.
Balthier -being both somewhat theatrical in his perceived role as the 'leading man' and having the background to sustain that amount of drama and intrigue- could get away with that rather over-the-top beginning to their story. She, having started her part in history as a dancer on the streets of Rabanastre, and having always been one of the more sensible members of their group, just couldn't make that fit with the tone that she was trying to aim for while writing this piece, and anyone that knew her that read it would think that she was being somewhat insincere, which wasn't her intention.
It was a pity too, since it had a certain ring to it.
She sighed and tried again, sticking to the basic facts for the time being. Who she was, where her part was in the story of the liberation of Dalmasca and, to some extent, the liberation of the entirety of Ivalice, what exactly had she been doing for most of her life.
My name is Penelo. Back before everything else happened to me, before I met emperors, queens, knights, sky pirates and pretty much every kind of monster that you can think of -and some that you can't- I was just a girl trying to keep her best friend out of trouble...
Title: Training a Replacement
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense. Mizuho is also something vaguely resembling sane in this. *awaits horrified gasps and shouts of 'Burn the Heretic!' at that one*
Summary: If she wants Mizuho on her new team, Hirono is going to have to take a different approach than she's entirely comfortable with...
Notes: Okay, this links in with both 'Murphy's Law' from Day 3 and 'Rebuilding and Renovation' from Day 5, and happens a little after both of them, but still in the future that got changed. *rolls eyes* I swear, at some point I'll stop with the future!fics, but...not for a while. :D
Unlike Hiroki, who just left his coin with someone else, Hirono had a more hands-on approach at finding someone to take over as Yellow Ranger while she took over Shinji's role (that still hurt, but it wasn't like Shinji was coming back to challenge her for it now) as leader of the team.
Namely, she knew exactly who she wanted for the role, and she was pretty sure as to how to convince her too. Mizuho didn't believe anything that couldn't be put into a fantasy story, delivered in the appropriate terminology of the genre. Which meant that Hirono, who talked to everyone in the rough and down-to-earth language that they tended to expect from a spiky-haired delinquent and used their expectations to manipulate them into thinking what she wanted them to think about her, would have to take a different approach than she was used to.
So she left a number of bits of paper in places where she expected Mizuho to look, all written with a part of a fictionalised version of their story as Rangers (she didn't change it that much, just worded it a little differently) and putting a note on the back of each piece with what page it was. The last one had a note on the end telling Mizuho to meet her in the library at a specific time.
She had also, quite deliberately, left out the ending. She would tell Mizuho that part in person, while warning her thoroughly about the drawbacks of being a hero in a country that wasn't particularly heroic -and in her point of view, was pretty damned villainous, but she accepted that she may be a little biased on the subject- although she doubted that Mizuho would say no.
She had the horrible feeling that, unlike Hirono herself, Mizuho had been waiting for the chance to be a hero all of her life.
***
Mizuho found the first one in her bag after her PE lesson. Thinking it was a joke being pulled on her by one of the demons that constantly hounded her steps -after all, one of them had already murdered Megumi, her sister in righteousness- she almost put it in the bin without looking at it.
There were six of them, right at the beginning...and the two flipped a coin to see who would lead the team. The woman suspected that the coin had been rigged against her, but said nothing, as if she was wrong, the other members of the group would call her a sore loser. So, then, did the man with the sword take the role of team leader, and a new band of heroes were formed...
If this was a joke, it was a well constructed one, and Mizuho had ran out of stories to read anyway, so she might as well play along, for now.
The story kept going.
She found one in her locker, all about a time when a monster in the water attempted to kill one of the heroines -there were three heroines to the three heroes, all of which spent more time fighting and less time getting captured than she was entirely used to, but she was getting a little tired of looking for role models who were there for more reasons than just to look pretty for the heroes, so she liked that about this story- and another one of the heroines risked her life to pull her teammate out of the water.
This reminded her of the time that they went to the beach on a school trip and Megumi disappeared mysteriously, only to reappear, four hours later, soaked through and coughing water out of her lungs, claiming that she got lost and then got caught in the current. Oddly enough, Shimizu -who Mizuho hated almost as much as Kaori did, and had the horrible feeling that she was secretly (or not so secretly) a succubus in disguise (although she had always assumed that succubi actually had to be attractive, and Shimizu wasn't, in the traditional sense of the word)- had been in a similar state when they had met up with the rest of the class.
The next one that she found (in her lunchbox, of all places) was about the lengths that the main villain -she wasn't entirely sure, but she assumed that from the way the two main protagonists (the reluctantly heroic leader of the team and his slightly more amoral second-in-command, who was also the main heroine) acted, that it almost had to be the government- would go to hurt the heroes, going so far as to turn the hero's civilian friend into a weapon to be used against him. This one stopped at the hero making a deal with his god to return the civilian to normal, after a battle climaxing in the heroine running down that villain with a chariot that she had stolen from the lord of the realm in order to stop him from killing both her and the hero.
This also rang a bell. Hadn't Nanahara (one of the students that she was fairly confident was at least mostly human and therefore could be trusted) said something about Seto cosplaying as the Green Ranger and getting attacked by someone cosplaying as the Yellow one? It may have actually been the Yellow Ranger, actually, she couldn't remember that part very well. She'd heard that the Yellow Ranger had borrowed Mr Hayashida's car to run Seto over with, but that was probably just a rumour that the writer had used to help the story along.
She had found yet another in her maths textbook. By now, she didn't want it to be a joke, because she was actually getting really involved in the story (although, she had noticed that all of the characters seemed to hate each other, which was a little jarring). This one detailed the distrust that was starting to grow between the team members and ended with them splitting up to form two smaller teams of heroes (with the main hero leading one and the second-in-command leading the other).
The final one broke off halfway through the final battle between the main hero, who had been controlled by the same villains who had turned his friend evil, and the main heroine, who was not particularly impressed by this development (the word 'shenanigans' had been repeated several times).
She had found it in her figurine case, and it was different than the others. The writing was the same, and the letters weren't blurred or smudged, but the texture of the paper was odd.
It almost felt...like it had been cried on and allowed to dry out.
There was also a place and time written on the back, in the same spiky handwriting. At this point, Mizuho almost felt that she had to go to find out how the story ended. Although, in a strange way, she already knew.
Title: The One Exception
Fandom: Crossover, Battle Royale (manga) with Power Rangers elements.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Severely AU, will make absolutely no sense.
Summary: Hirono was going to tell her past self and former team everything, but along the way, things just happened to get left out of her account.
Notes: This happens...after future!Hirono goes back to the present timeline, and therefore happens both after and before all of the previous fics in this series. But you should read them first. *shot*
She went into this plan fully intending to tell her former teammates everything. Not spare them any details, not give them any reasons to be misled by her story. If she horrified them, then it meant that they were listening. If any of their friendships broke over it, then at least they would be alive in order to fix it. If they didn't believe her, then she would just have to stop the whole thing from happening herself.
While she was talking, however, there was one thing that she missed deliberately, besides her feelings about the entire thing, which were none of their business anyway.
She didn't tell them how Yutaka had died. She told them that she knew, and -after some coaxing by the others, said that the people responsible for all of this had told her before they died- but that was the one detail that she left out.
Originally, she wasn't going to -she was going to tell them that she was told that Shinji and Mitsuru beat him to death and let them be awkward around each other for weeks- but...she couldn't bring herself to say it. Not while Yutaka and Shinji were right there, sat next to each other and giving her matching worried looks. Besides, she remembered how the team used to work.
She had to tell them about Megumi -because that was the one final straw that had pushed her to kill Shinji herself- but she didn't need to say anything about Yutaka's death. If they were as smart as she thought they were, they would eventually figure it out for themselves.
Besides, it wasn't lying, really -or telling 'fairy stories' as Hirono's dad had used to say back when she actually still had a dad- it was just omitting a little thing for the sake of not forcing Shinji to give Yutaka the same slightly apologetic glances (they didn't look all that sincere, but it was Shinji, after all) that he had started to give the younger Hirono and Megumi while she was trying to tell her story.
It was for the best.
Really.