thenearshore | Daylight licked me into shape [OPEN]

Who: Gojyo and anyone who wants to join him!
What: Various and sundry (see prompts below the cut)
When: Between April 2nd and April 6th, in-game time (any time between the sakura party and the July intro log)
Where: Various places in the Near Shore
Warnings: Will update
Format: I've posted these prompts in past tense prose. If you'd prefer present tense and/or brackets, please feel free! I'll match your formatting.

Prompt 1: The Park
Wine hangovers were markedly different than beer hangovers, Gojyo was discovering. While the beer hangovers tended to settle in the gut (yeah, he got the farts after too many beers, but who didn't?), the wine ones seemed to like to sit right in the middle of his head, stabbing behind his eyes.

Beer hangovers could be appeased by a big greasy breakfast and a lot of black coffee. So far, the best thing Gojyo had found to cure the wine hangovers was simply time. Time, and a bit of heat. And that's why he was in the park that morning, arms draped over the back of the bench and face to the sun, idly working his way through his pack of cigarettes.

Being dead wasn't so bad after all, some days.

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Prompt 2: Downtown
Why couldn't the little bastards attack in the middle of the night?! But no, they had to decide to come out of hiding in the early evening, when all the offices were closing. So there was a sea of dark suits as roughly eleven million salarymen and -women shuffled off to their trains, and there was a swarm of glowing puffball ayakashi, drifting towards the residential area on the other side of the train tracks... and there was Gojyo, a bright spot right in the middle of that weary ocean, blood red hair and leather pants and waving an old Chinese sword like a crazy person. Good thing mortals didn't tend to see them, huh?

"Get th'fuck out of my way!"

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Prompt 3: The Liquor Store
This whole not-being-seen-by-mortals things was really starting to get on Gojyo's nerves. It had been cool at first -- he could pretty much steal anything he wanted to, whenever he wanted to (not that he took advantage of it or anything. A couple packs of cigarettes, a bowl of ramen from a booth... but it just didn't feel right). So if he wasn't going to steal stuff from the Near Shore, he was going to have to buy it, and buying things took money. Which meant a job.

The bell on the door chimed, and Gojyo turned apathetically toward the incoming customer. "Welcome to Lawson Station," he droned, slouching in his itchy uniform shirt. Hating his uniform visor. Hating everything about the job, really. But there were only so many jobs available to an unskilled foreigner, and, unlike a factory job, at least working at a convenience store gave him the freedom to chase after ayakashi whenever they appeared. Not like any of the customers seemed to notice he was there anyway. Not even when they were standing right in front of him. Yelling for him. In his face. "Please enjoy your shopping experience."

There had to be a better way to earn cigarette money than this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Well, swinging a chinese sword around like crazy was bound to get someone's attention, and that someone was a 5'7" angry shinki with a tuxedo kitten on his shoulder.

"How fitting you look like a drunken fool." Did he walk in the way of where Gojyo was swinging his sword? Yes. Did he care? Not really. The people just parted around him as Kishi on his shoulder meowed loudly at this loud angry guy.

And then some brat-with-a-cat almost walked into his sword.

"Watch where you're going!" Gojyo swore, pulling the strike at the last second. The ayakashi he'd been aiming for bumbled up and out of reach, and Gojyo swore again. At this rate he wouldn't get them all before they made it past the train station, and then he was going to have to spend his whole night hunting through all those damn apartment buildings looking for a handful of tiny little monsters. That was not how he planned to spend his evening.

(He planned to get just this side of stumbling drunk and then go to his job, where he'd sell booze to underage kids with terrible fake IDs and shout at Pan the homeless guy for at least an hour about why the chips-and-crackers aisle wasn't an okay place for him to sleep. This was his life now. Goddamn.)

The kid looked familiar, but Gojyo couldn't place him. Probably some new shinki, he determined, shrugging him off almost immediately. He moved to sidestep Hibari, already focusing on his next ayakashi puffball-target. "I'm workin' here, kid, get out of my way."

"Why should you bother? These things aren't even a threat." One of them bounced up behind him and Hibari swung one of his tonfas to whack it away without even glancing towards it. If he didn't touch them, he didn't get blighted; it was easy.

"Besides, I have a score to settle." The look he was giving Gojyo now was anything but friendly, especially with his tonfas out and ready to spread fresh blood. The main reason he hadn't jumped forward right now was the meowing beast on his shoulder, now sniffing the air this new man to see who the hell it was.

Gojyo spotted the ayakashi just a split second before Hibari batted it away. God dammit, Hibari! He was gonna kill that thing! Now it was floating some twenty feet above his head, completely out of range.

"A score?" He looked away from the ayakashi (drifting ever higher, thanks a lot, fight nugget) to regard Hibari with an uncertain expression. The kid looked somewhat familiar... but the only kids he remembered pissing off lately were brats who were trying to buy beer with the worst fake IDs Gojyo had ever seen. "Look, I don't care if you're dead or not, if you want to buy alcohol you need an ID."

Congrats Gojyo, that earned an almost baffled look on Hibari's face. First of all, he hated alcohol, and second, why the hell would he buy it from this asshole in the first place?

"I have no idea what you are talking about. I'm here to bite you to death for the crime of tossing me into a duck pond." And now he was pointing his tonfas at Gojyo's face with a pissed off look in his eyes. Familiar yet, maybe? If not, well, he was about to attack either way.

"I what."

Okay, so he knew that he'd been gloriously drunk a couple times since arriving in heaven, and he knew there were a couple holes in his memory from that. But apparently he'd been dropping surly little brats into duck ponds?

Damn. He really wishes he could remember doing that.

Meanwhile, the remaining ayakashi were drifting further and further out of reach. At this rate Gojyo would have to scale the train station itself to cut them down. Shit. He didn't have time to play with some kid. "Not interested," he said dismissively, already ignoring Hibari in the interest of trying to visually plot a path up to the roof of the train station. If he jumped from the fence to the generator to the overhang on the east window, maybe...?

What annoyed Hibari the most was a hard question, but it was a tie between Gojyo paying more attention to the ayakashi than him, or forgetting entirely what he did. This is why he hated drunk people.

Hibari, being the graceful stray cat that he was, was already hopping his way up to the nearest roof via said fence, small size making him able to go faster. It felt oddly natural, like he did hop around like this, but that wasn't important right now.

What mattered was he was on the roof, probably before Gojyo was, and a chain was already swinging out to knock the ayakashi down to the ground. He couldn't touch it, but maybe he'd get lucky and it would bounce off of Gojyo's head or something.

...Or he could just sit back on his ass while the kid bounced up onto the nearby roof and knocked the little angry puffball down into his range! Gojyo flicks his sword out, slicing that final ayakashi in half before it can escape again -- the little shit's given him enough trouble -- before turning to Hibari with a puzzled expression.

"Thought you were gonna bite me, not help me."

Just as gracefully, Hibari landed like a cat, his jacket billowing out behind him, before standing up and answering. "I don't like distractions when I'm fighting."

He only wanted to get rid of the ayakashi because Gojyo was paying more attention to it than him. So now, Hibari raised his tonfas again, pointing one of them at the taller guy's chest. "Now you don't have any more excuses."

Oh. So that's how it was. "You're kidding." On the one hand, he could respect that the kid had a grudge -- it wasn't one Gojyo remembered being a part of, but dropping an annoyance in a duck pond certainly sounded like something he'd do!

On the other hand... the kid had a cat on his shoulder. It was kinda hard to take sombody like that seriously. "I'm not gonna fight you, brat," he stated, slinging his sword over his shoulder and stuffing the other hand in his pocket. "Whatever grudge you've got with me, take it as a learnin' experience or something."

Daylight licked me into shape [OPEN]

2-downtown

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