next chance to move on [open]

[windbreak]

Characters: A newly arrived Yosuke and whoever wants to bump into him!
Date: 17th March (and onwards?)
Location: See prompts! Or wherever - if you want another scenario, feel free to let me know / bring your own.
Situation: There's a new kid in town, and it's painfully obvious just looking at him for half a second.
Warnings/Rating: Nothing but mild swearing for now.

[A: The Hotel]

It turns out Yosuke wasn't hallucinating last night, but he knew that. Since last year, he's stopped expecting anything he sees to be the literal kind of unreal when figurative will do.

And in the meantime, this unreal new world seems to have gone on ticking without him. When he makes it back down to solid, non-magically-activated ground, he wonders just how out of it he must have been to not notice the construction work going on around the ground floor. Workers hurry back and forth - uhh, not workers, kedan...? Dammit, he got a crash course, but what he needed was a cram school. Whoever they are, their hustling and bustling gives him the nagging feeling he should tiptoe past, or at least obligingly flatten himself against a wall.

So he does the latter. It isn't the most efficient way for a person to walk to the lobby, but he's edging along somehow. Preoccupied with it, even.


[B: a street in Metal Sector]

"Uhh... sickness? Cursed land...?"

The one really dream-like part, he thinks, is his perception of time. It took him a million years to drag himself across the fields into the city proper yesterday, a geological era to dismiss the unhelpfully colourful mental images buzzing through his head when he woke up late this morning, and a nanosecond after stepping out of the hotel doors to get lost. ...Although the last one isn't that dream-like, loath as he is to admit it. And the persistent grogginess weighing down his eyelids even after he hauled himself upright might not be helping.

For what it's worth, the gaggle of bulky-looking kedan glowering at him from the sidewalk don't seem interested in anything he could admit; every time he opens his mouth, they seem to take it as an insult. That predicament is pretty familiar to Yosuke outside of dreams too, but it can't be the same here, surely? He's thinking before he talks today. He kind of has to. There's nobody else around to do it for him.

He tries one last time. "Sorry, I honestly don't know what -" he starts to say - cuts himself off, flinches, instinctively shields his face -

- and stares, dumbfounded. The almighty splash catches the front of his already distinctly grimy shirt, but he hardly notices the chill yet. Was there always a banana peel there, in exactly the right place? ... Has he seen anyone in town carrying bananas around so far? Wha...

The two kedan who'd tried to round on him pick themselves up, shoot him a stereo glare at least as icy as the puddle they'd careened into, and finally the group pushes past him before he can hit a wall backing away.

Only once they all seem to be out of earshot does Yosuke relax. "S'one other thing you don't get in the sticks," he mutters, none too quietly. Then he shivers, shakes his head, and starts to wring out the hem of his shirt.

Which draws his attention to the shiny blue card that had insinuated its way into his palm the moment he flung up his hand. Which startles him all over again. Which might not be so sensible, with the offending banana peel from a minute ago still serenely sitting a step away.

Comments

[windbreak]

Yosuke sure is being talked at at length, to the point that he has to stop and re-orient his mildly exasperated train of thought when he realises the kid finally expects an answer. It's for once a good thing that his own mouth is used to speeding on ahead without checking in with his brain. "Oh, my name's Yosuke," he says, brightening up a bit more. "I just went to work yesterday and woke up falling out of the sky instead, nothing special. So we're in the same boat, huh? You know how many of us are around out here? It's a few, isn't it?"

Who knows, they might all be equally chatty. That would suit Yosuke just fine.

[strokeofgenis]

If there's one thing that's rubbed off on Genis, it's that he's one to now ask for names first before giving his own. Not that there's any reason to it, but it's his own private joke with Lloyd... and perhaps to annoy him slightly. "I'm Genis, nice to meet ya," he answers.

"Well, I don't know really have an exact count of how many of us there are," Genis answers, thinking back. "I haven't even met everyone yet, much less talked to them on the network, but I'd guess there are somewhere between 25 and 50 of us? Give or take, of course. But yeah, otherwise, we're kind of in the same boat, trying to figure out this world. I just popped up at the University in the centre of town. Thankfully not as embarrassing as your situation, falling out of the sky."

[windbreak]

Yosuke sighs, briefly forgetting himself. "It seriously is, isn't it...? If it happens again, I'll have to start ranking them. And that's even more worrying."

Which is something else that this Genis kid doesn't care about, of course. Looking away for a moment, he chances a glance up and down the street. It's wide, with more shops dotted around nearby than shady corners. If those shapeshifter thugs are still lurking just out of sight, they're doing it exceptionally well.

"But man, those guys totally killed the mood," he says eventually, idly tapping a finger on the card he's holding. "I was just trying to look for some stuff... Then again, if there's only that many of us in a whole city, they can get away with it, huh? That's pretty messed up."

[strokeofgenis]

"Yeah, there's a handful of them that just absolutely hate us for no good reason," Genis says. "Although I've been told that there actually are a good few reasons here and there, but it's only because of what a few people have done a while ago. It's no excuse to hate everyone."

But it seems that this Yosuke guy certainly seems worried about wherever those guys went. "Well, if you're worried that they're going to come and jump you again, I can be your bodyguard until you get back to the Hotel or wherever it is you want to go. They've got no chance against my magic!"

[windbreak]

"B... Bodyguard!?"

Yosuke finds he can't hold back a brief burst of laughter, and belatedly realises he might be giddier from that close encounter than he thought. The mental image isn't even that funny, and honestly, he isn't inclined to be sceptical of anything right now.

"Um... thanks for the offer, I guess, but it's okay. I've got a couple tricks up my sleeve too, you know!" In his hand, in his head, same difference. "Anyways, I really don't think making that kind of scene would help convince them we're not worth worrying about. ...You haven't seriously gone after guys like that before, have you?" he adds, with a faint note of trepidation.

[strokeofgenis]

Genis' first reaction: rote annoyance.

"What, you're going to laugh at my magic before you've even seen it? Nobody can take me on with that!" Well, technically speaking, it's not exactly accurate, but Genis' magic is better than almost everyone and everything he's so far come across. "Though for what it's worth, my friends and I have gone stood up to guys like that before. Maybe not here, but back in my Aselia, yes. In fact, I helped save my world."

[windbreak]

Oh boy, one of these... is a thought that flits into Yosuke's head and out of it before he can catch it to check where it came from. Huh, that's a little strange. Then again, so is getting all grandiose for a kid in their situation.

He surreptitiously coughs. "Uh, glad to hear it," he says, "but isn't that stuff a little different from handling those kind of thugs...?"

[strokeofgenis]

"Uh, not really," Genis says as he gives Yosuke a rather withering expression. "I mean, how is that any different than taking out the bandits who try to con people on religious pilgrimages out of their Gald? Or taking out Desian Cardinals who are running entire human ranches dedicated to making humans suffer? I think I'm pretty qualified in that department."

[windbreak]

"Um - well, in that case, sorry," Yosuke says quickly, not because he's convinced, but because on the off chance this kid really is packing enough magic to brag about and finds it this hard to grasp a totally (totally) intelligible hint about scale, it wouldn't be wise to get on the wrong end. Anyway, he's not just killing time out here; even the thought of picking fights shouldn't be entering his mind before said mind has gotten itself more settled. ...Regardless of how cool he knows his Persona to be.

"... I guess I just don't see it helping much. If they're that chafed already, there's bound to be another crowd of guys like them popping up five seconds later."

[strokeofgenis]

Well, in fairness, Genis is only 12 years old, and that puts him decidedly in the middle of being entirely too youthful and entirely too mature. If it weren't for him bragging, perhaps he might have caught the hint a little bit better.

"Well I guess you have a point there," Genis says, shrugging his shoulders. "I just figured that if you wanted someone for the day, I could help you out. But I guess that won't help you tomorrow, I don't suppose. You just didn't look exactly ready for them when they came the first time. What exactly happened to send them running anyway though? I couldn't quite tell what happened from where I was."

[windbreak]

Yosuke, to whom grade school age is a mist-choked period of time surpassed in distance from the present only by whatever the heck he's going to do after senior year, shrugs in turn. "Honestly, me neither. ...And, okay, maybe I panicked a little too." He gestures vaguely downwards. "It looked like one of those guys tripped before I could do anything, and then the other one hit his... uh?"

But the suspicious banana peel he'd thought he was indicating is nowhere to be seen. By city standards, the sidewalk is spotless. You can even see your face in it, although that's largely because of the puddle.

"Slipped, I mean. In the water. That... must've been it." Yosuke looks disconcerted, which already is nothing new, but there's a crease of frustration in his slight frown as well. "Yeesh, I coulda sworn..."

[strokeofgenis]

Genis hadn't seen the banana, but he had seen the splash of water, though he hadn't pieced together why that would have made the duo bungle away as if their lives depended upon it.

"Well, I guess that just means you must have met the most inept duo of muggers this city has ever seen," Genis speculates with an amused grin. "Lucky you that they were scared away by a puddle of water."