#68 -- Lightning GW/Power Rangers Dino Thunder
Title: Swish
Author: silvercaladan
Fandom: Gundam Wing/Power Rangers Dino Thunder
Word Count: 1844
Challenge: #68 -- Lightning
Rating: PG-13ish, because of language.
A/N: I adore Conner. For once, nothing unusual happens. Just character interaction, a little competition, and setting the stage for future fics. Limited POVs are fun!
Swish
Mass media spreads the illusion that a big city is the easiest place to lose yourself in. After all, places like Los Angeles have what seems like an infinite number of people; what’s one more fish in a pond that big? Rent is supposed to be cheap, no one is supposed to care, and people can supposedly just disappear in the crowd.
That is such bullshit that I feel the urge to fall down laughing every time I watch a movie where someone “escapes” to the city. Big cities mean substantial police presence. Substantial, shoot-first-ask-questions-later police presence. The cops have a lot of ground to cover and even more people to protect, and in a large metropolis, crime is everywhere, all the time. If I even looked a little suspicious, a cop could toss me in the back of his car and haul me off to “questioning” for twenty-four hours. That’s plenty of time for someone smart to figure out that I look a lot like that pixilated, mutilated picture of Gundam Pilot 02 the fax machine spewed out. Needless to say, that would be a bad thing.
Even worse, there are so many homeless, criminal people in cities that no one but no one provides any help or care for their fellow man. The guy renting an apartment next to mine is more likely to steal my shit when I’m sick than bring me flu medicine. That’s another thing that sucks about large cities. OZ could find me, quietly have me whacked, leave my body in an alleyway, and no one would notice. Murders happen all the time in the concrete jungle. Why should the cops care about the death of some nameless hoodlum?
Suburban, small-town cops, on the other hand… they know almost everyone in town personally, or on a professional level. Murders don’t go unsolved in a small town. It uproots everyone, makes them all scared, and the cops work extra hard and bring in experts to solve it. No way would OZ risk such a stir. They’d have to kill off an entire police department to cover their asses, and then find a foolproof way to have terrorists kill off an entire town to further cover their asses. Yea, far too much effort.
This reasoning is precisely what has me hiding my lily white American ass in a small coastal California city to lick my wounds. Literally. The suit I stole from Une needs some serious fixing after the fiasco that was Edwards. I’m not going to find the parts in a dinky place like this-if there are any-as cleanly urban as it tries to appear, but I can’t go somewhere else to find them until the furor dies down.
I’m stuck in a place that screams of quaint suburbia… except for the weekly monster attacks.
Yep. Monster attacks. The one place in the United States that has weekly appearances of a Japanese cartoon in their streets and skies.
Its so wrong how everyone in town is utterly calm about it. I mean, they have fucking tentacle things tearing apart their carefully sculpted downtown. I think they’d have a tendency to be just slightly more chaotic. Yet these people evacuate more orderly than the Alliance regulars could ever hope to aspire to. Oh, sure, there’s the obligatory screaming, running backwards, and falling down of random pedestrians when the monster pops out of thin air. Here’s where the real weirdness starts. These things-I hesitate to call them people-colorfully somersault out of nowhere and proceed to royally fuck over the monster of the week, screaming pedestrians forgotten. The Power Rangers are here, everyone says.
I’d admire their style if it just weren’t so goddamn bizarre.
Hell, even the high school gets its fair share of monsters. Specially these pathetic little drone things that one of my science classmates said were Tyrannodrones. They don’t look so hard to kill, and apparently they disappear afterwards, so there’s no cleanup!
I’m hoping that today Reefside High will not be the site of one of these wonderful supernatural attacks, because I have found a far better fight than those stupid entities could ever possibly give me. This fight consists of four words: Conner McKnight, speed demon.
Some lovestruck girls felt the need to inform me of this jock’s prowess during first period. They were ecstatic when they discovered the fact that I had PE with him. I was disturbed by the fact that they knew his schedule. I think they were plotting to skip class to better watch us sweat outside in gym shorts. Teenage girls are weird that way.
Supposedly, Conner is the king of all high-school Californian soccer teams, and undisputed ruler of this entire school. He can kick harder, run faster, and control the ball better than professional players. He single-handedly secured the gold trophy in the national tournaments.
Sounds like quite the competitor, yea? He’s nothing next to Mister Perfect Soldier of the Year.
Fortunately for my ego and my boredom, Conner is most definitely not all-star at other sports, and this PE class consists of basketball, my favorite. We’re on opposing teams, of course. There might as well not be teams, for all we’re playing one-on-one.
He steals the ball from one of my teammates in a move too fast to follow, sprinting lightning quick down the court towards the basket. He knows that if he can get closer, he’ll make the shot with ease. Luckily for me, what McKnight always fails to take into account is that he absolutely sucks at dribbling.
I scoop the ball off the ground, dodging an inept attempt to recover it from a bare-chested dude. Come to think of it, shirts ‘n skins sweaty basketball games might be the reason those girls wanted to watch. Daydreaming aside, McKnight stops teleporting from spot to spot long enough to block what was a perfect three-point shot. Man, that one would have been nothing but net, I could feel it. Asshole.
Dammit all to hell and back, we have been playing this fucking game for what feels like the whole period and neither one of us has scored. If Heero were here, we’d wipe the court with McKnight’s ass. But nooo. My stupid pride demands that I beat some pathetic high school speed demon in something that isn’t even his best game. I really need to find myself a new sense of pride. One that won’t put me in awkward, deadly situations. Maybe I’ll find one at a garage sale around here. One sense of pride, lightly used and definitely not teenage male: 10 bucks.
I swear I’m going to have an asthma attack from all the running.
SREEEECH, and I’m back at Edwards, searching frantically for the backup exit, dodging soldiers and their bullets, alarms deafening. Pain blossoming, blood-tinged darkness, disembodied screams.
Then McKnight trips over me, and we go down in a totally undignified crash of limbs, the flashback having frozen me unexpectedly in place just barely long enough for speed-freak to slam into me. “Alright, boys, hit the showers! Good game, McKnight, Maxwell! Game’s over, kids, back to class!”
Coaches should be shot. Their perkiness and general paranoia-inducing methods of gathering attention deserve punishment. That’s it. That stupid whistle is getting destroyed. Nothing is going to ruin my underground vacation, least of all stupid sense memories.
“Hey dude, you alright?” McKnight is crouched over me, a totally unbecoming look of concern screwed onto his features.
“Perfectly fine. Why, did I break an arm or something?” I look dramatically at my arms and bend them with flair. “Nope. Darn, now I’ll have to give up on a career as Raggedy Andy.”
My misdirection rewards me with a chuckle, but McKnight is nothing if not tenacious. “You sure? You weren’t lookin’ so good a sec ago.” Ah, so this one has a little bit of tact, at least enough not to call me on being shit scared. “All pale and stuff.” He elaborates. Maybe he’s just too stupid to recognize utter fright when he sees it, cause I’m pretty sure that’s what my face looks like. S’what it normally does, after the night terrors.
It’s an effort to smooth the fright out of my bearing. The dream is bad enough, but being subjected to it unexpectedly in bright daylight is a little much. I hate my subconscious, sometimes. McKnight offers me a sweaty palm, and proceeds to haul me to my feet. Oof. “I’m peachy keen, except for, ya know, almost suffering an asthma attack trying to keep up with you.”
He looks abashed, of all things for a puffed up jock to be. “Yea, I get caught up in the competition and don’t watch what I’m doing.”
Can we say non-sequitor? “Riiight. Whatever. You may be the Flash on the court, but bejeezus you utterly suck at dribbling that ball.”
“Just because the ball bounces everywhere across the court except where I want it to doesn’t mean that I’m hopeless. I think.”
At that moment, the utterly insane sprinklers decided to turn themselves on. Its weirdly fitting that everything in this town from the gigantic Godzilla monsters to cheap plastic sprinklers has its own chaotic agenda. The girls who had been standing to the side caught the water full in the face, causing them to shriek in decibels unhealthy to the human ear and run frantically into each other. Bwahha! The Three Stooges have nothing on these morons.
The semi-cold water feels better than standing in the blistering heat, and most of the semi-retreating basketball teams seem to be enjoying it.
McKnight lets out a burst of laughter and leads me on a playful romp though dew-soaked fields back to the resplendent baths. If two sweaty guys sorta jogging through sprinklers towards school showers can be called that, anyway.
Before entering the gym, McKnight shakes off water like a dog, splattering it everywhere. If I couldn’t tell he was a bit of a dumbass, I’d say he was doing it to make the females swoon, scraggly hair and all. “Man, remind me to thank Ethan. I’ve almost let him forget what a dork he is.”
“Huh?” Mister Communication, I am today.
McKnight answers me, somewhat distractedly, trying to wring out what water he can from the shorts he’s wearing. “Ethan’s this computer geek I hang out with. Dude wired the sprinklers to go off at odd times on our first day back, and he forgot to undo it. I’m going to get weeks of teasing out of this.”
“Bet he’d kill you if you touched his laptop, yea?” Haha, we even associate with the same people. That’s creepy.
“No kidding. I swear he’s married to that thing, sex-life and all.”
Ew. So did not need to know that, even if it has Heero down to a t. What is it with guys and their computers? Granted, for a year or so there, you’da thunk Deathscythe was my lover. “Nice mental image ya got there, McKnight.”
“I try not to think about it.”
Author: silvercaladan
Fandom: Gundam Wing/Power Rangers Dino Thunder
Word Count: 1844
Challenge: #68 -- Lightning
Rating: PG-13ish, because of language.
A/N: I adore Conner. For once, nothing unusual happens. Just character interaction, a little competition, and setting the stage for future fics. Limited POVs are fun!
Swish
Mass media spreads the illusion that a big city is the easiest place to lose yourself in. After all, places like Los Angeles have what seems like an infinite number of people; what’s one more fish in a pond that big? Rent is supposed to be cheap, no one is supposed to care, and people can supposedly just disappear in the crowd.
That is such bullshit that I feel the urge to fall down laughing every time I watch a movie where someone “escapes” to the city. Big cities mean substantial police presence. Substantial, shoot-first-ask-questions-later police presence. The cops have a lot of ground to cover and even more people to protect, and in a large metropolis, crime is everywhere, all the time. If I even looked a little suspicious, a cop could toss me in the back of his car and haul me off to “questioning” for twenty-four hours. That’s plenty of time for someone smart to figure out that I look a lot like that pixilated, mutilated picture of Gundam Pilot 02 the fax machine spewed out. Needless to say, that would be a bad thing.
Even worse, there are so many homeless, criminal people in cities that no one but no one provides any help or care for their fellow man. The guy renting an apartment next to mine is more likely to steal my shit when I’m sick than bring me flu medicine. That’s another thing that sucks about large cities. OZ could find me, quietly have me whacked, leave my body in an alleyway, and no one would notice. Murders happen all the time in the concrete jungle. Why should the cops care about the death of some nameless hoodlum?
Suburban, small-town cops, on the other hand… they know almost everyone in town personally, or on a professional level. Murders don’t go unsolved in a small town. It uproots everyone, makes them all scared, and the cops work extra hard and bring in experts to solve it. No way would OZ risk such a stir. They’d have to kill off an entire police department to cover their asses, and then find a foolproof way to have terrorists kill off an entire town to further cover their asses. Yea, far too much effort.
This reasoning is precisely what has me hiding my lily white American ass in a small coastal California city to lick my wounds. Literally. The suit I stole from Une needs some serious fixing after the fiasco that was Edwards. I’m not going to find the parts in a dinky place like this-if there are any-as cleanly urban as it tries to appear, but I can’t go somewhere else to find them until the furor dies down.
I’m stuck in a place that screams of quaint suburbia… except for the weekly monster attacks.
Yep. Monster attacks. The one place in the United States that has weekly appearances of a Japanese cartoon in their streets and skies.
Its so wrong how everyone in town is utterly calm about it. I mean, they have fucking tentacle things tearing apart their carefully sculpted downtown. I think they’d have a tendency to be just slightly more chaotic. Yet these people evacuate more orderly than the Alliance regulars could ever hope to aspire to. Oh, sure, there’s the obligatory screaming, running backwards, and falling down of random pedestrians when the monster pops out of thin air. Here’s where the real weirdness starts. These things-I hesitate to call them people-colorfully somersault out of nowhere and proceed to royally fuck over the monster of the week, screaming pedestrians forgotten. The Power Rangers are here, everyone says.
I’d admire their style if it just weren’t so goddamn bizarre.
Hell, even the high school gets its fair share of monsters. Specially these pathetic little drone things that one of my science classmates said were Tyrannodrones. They don’t look so hard to kill, and apparently they disappear afterwards, so there’s no cleanup!
I’m hoping that today Reefside High will not be the site of one of these wonderful supernatural attacks, because I have found a far better fight than those stupid entities could ever possibly give me. This fight consists of four words: Conner McKnight, speed demon.
Some lovestruck girls felt the need to inform me of this jock’s prowess during first period. They were ecstatic when they discovered the fact that I had PE with him. I was disturbed by the fact that they knew his schedule. I think they were plotting to skip class to better watch us sweat outside in gym shorts. Teenage girls are weird that way.
Supposedly, Conner is the king of all high-school Californian soccer teams, and undisputed ruler of this entire school. He can kick harder, run faster, and control the ball better than professional players. He single-handedly secured the gold trophy in the national tournaments.
Sounds like quite the competitor, yea? He’s nothing next to Mister Perfect Soldier of the Year.
Fortunately for my ego and my boredom, Conner is most definitely not all-star at other sports, and this PE class consists of basketball, my favorite. We’re on opposing teams, of course. There might as well not be teams, for all we’re playing one-on-one.
He steals the ball from one of my teammates in a move too fast to follow, sprinting lightning quick down the court towards the basket. He knows that if he can get closer, he’ll make the shot with ease. Luckily for me, what McKnight always fails to take into account is that he absolutely sucks at dribbling.
I scoop the ball off the ground, dodging an inept attempt to recover it from a bare-chested dude. Come to think of it, shirts ‘n skins sweaty basketball games might be the reason those girls wanted to watch. Daydreaming aside, McKnight stops teleporting from spot to spot long enough to block what was a perfect three-point shot. Man, that one would have been nothing but net, I could feel it. Asshole.
Dammit all to hell and back, we have been playing this fucking game for what feels like the whole period and neither one of us has scored. If Heero were here, we’d wipe the court with McKnight’s ass. But nooo. My stupid pride demands that I beat some pathetic high school speed demon in something that isn’t even his best game. I really need to find myself a new sense of pride. One that won’t put me in awkward, deadly situations. Maybe I’ll find one at a garage sale around here. One sense of pride, lightly used and definitely not teenage male: 10 bucks.
I swear I’m going to have an asthma attack from all the running.
SREEEECH, and I’m back at Edwards, searching frantically for the backup exit, dodging soldiers and their bullets, alarms deafening. Pain blossoming, blood-tinged darkness, disembodied screams.
Then McKnight trips over me, and we go down in a totally undignified crash of limbs, the flashback having frozen me unexpectedly in place just barely long enough for speed-freak to slam into me. “Alright, boys, hit the showers! Good game, McKnight, Maxwell! Game’s over, kids, back to class!”
Coaches should be shot. Their perkiness and general paranoia-inducing methods of gathering attention deserve punishment. That’s it. That stupid whistle is getting destroyed. Nothing is going to ruin my underground vacation, least of all stupid sense memories.
“Hey dude, you alright?” McKnight is crouched over me, a totally unbecoming look of concern screwed onto his features.
“Perfectly fine. Why, did I break an arm or something?” I look dramatically at my arms and bend them with flair. “Nope. Darn, now I’ll have to give up on a career as Raggedy Andy.”
My misdirection rewards me with a chuckle, but McKnight is nothing if not tenacious. “You sure? You weren’t lookin’ so good a sec ago.” Ah, so this one has a little bit of tact, at least enough not to call me on being shit scared. “All pale and stuff.” He elaborates. Maybe he’s just too stupid to recognize utter fright when he sees it, cause I’m pretty sure that’s what my face looks like. S’what it normally does, after the night terrors.
It’s an effort to smooth the fright out of my bearing. The dream is bad enough, but being subjected to it unexpectedly in bright daylight is a little much. I hate my subconscious, sometimes. McKnight offers me a sweaty palm, and proceeds to haul me to my feet. Oof. “I’m peachy keen, except for, ya know, almost suffering an asthma attack trying to keep up with you.”
He looks abashed, of all things for a puffed up jock to be. “Yea, I get caught up in the competition and don’t watch what I’m doing.”
Can we say non-sequitor? “Riiight. Whatever. You may be the Flash on the court, but bejeezus you utterly suck at dribbling that ball.”
“Just because the ball bounces everywhere across the court except where I want it to doesn’t mean that I’m hopeless. I think.”
At that moment, the utterly insane sprinklers decided to turn themselves on. Its weirdly fitting that everything in this town from the gigantic Godzilla monsters to cheap plastic sprinklers has its own chaotic agenda. The girls who had been standing to the side caught the water full in the face, causing them to shriek in decibels unhealthy to the human ear and run frantically into each other. Bwahha! The Three Stooges have nothing on these morons.
The semi-cold water feels better than standing in the blistering heat, and most of the semi-retreating basketball teams seem to be enjoying it.
McKnight lets out a burst of laughter and leads me on a playful romp though dew-soaked fields back to the resplendent baths. If two sweaty guys sorta jogging through sprinklers towards school showers can be called that, anyway.
Before entering the gym, McKnight shakes off water like a dog, splattering it everywhere. If I couldn’t tell he was a bit of a dumbass, I’d say he was doing it to make the females swoon, scraggly hair and all. “Man, remind me to thank Ethan. I’ve almost let him forget what a dork he is.”
“Huh?” Mister Communication, I am today.
McKnight answers me, somewhat distractedly, trying to wring out what water he can from the shorts he’s wearing. “Ethan’s this computer geek I hang out with. Dude wired the sprinklers to go off at odd times on our first day back, and he forgot to undo it. I’m going to get weeks of teasing out of this.”
“Bet he’d kill you if you touched his laptop, yea?” Haha, we even associate with the same people. That’s creepy.
“No kidding. I swear he’s married to that thing, sex-life and all.”
Ew. So did not need to know that, even if it has Heero down to a t. What is it with guys and their computers? Granted, for a year or so there, you’da thunk Deathscythe was my lover. “Nice mental image ya got there, McKnight.”
“I try not to think about it.”