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 Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2012 5:11 pm
Mayumi tugged the knots on her skates tight to keep them on her feet and stood up carefully, then shifted her feet slightly before pushing off the floor to start skating. It was just a practice, and so she was dressed up in a pair of short athletic shorts and one of her five different St. Mags gym t-shirts instead of the over-the-top plaid and fishnets that made up her actual roller derby uniform.
She had meant to get here a bit earlier, because this half of the gymnasium was only available for skating for so many hours each week, but a late night of Red Bull and an essay had made it difficult for her to wake up before about 10:30. Still, though, Mayumi could still get some indoor skating in, which was fortunate since it sounded like it would be raining outside for another day at least.
Once she was up to a nice easy pace, Mayumi went with the flow of the others in the rink. It was not too crowded, which was nice, especially with what she expected with the rain. There were some people on the other side of the court, too, shooting baskets, so the grey-eyed girl could watch them without having to worry too much about the other skaters getting in her way.
It would be a nice way to de-stress before she had to go to class. Even after staying up an extra hour and a half to finish that essay for her English class, Mayumi still sort of hated what she had written (she had hated the stupid book she'd had to write about) and just wanted to blow off some steam roller skating in circles before she had to turn it in.
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Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2012 8:17 pm
Keren Della-Blue wasn't afraid to play basketball with boys. Why would she be? She was taller than most of the boneheads who played at this gym - it didn't even seem worth it to get all worked up over the gender difference when she could out-dribble them six ways to sunday. If someone was going to get hurt, it wouldn't be her - the purple-haired girl was vicious.
Keren threw an elbow at her guard and raced towards the basket, leaping for an easy two-point shot. A cry from behind her was satisfying, but it also made Keren roll her eyes when one of the boys called for a time out. "You play too rough, DB," complained the teenager who was cradling his jaw in his hands. Keren shrugged at him and went to go watch the skaters.
She was wearing her Crystal Academy gym shirt ironically, with a scrunchie tied at the waist to cinch it in. Horizon didn't have a gym program, or else she'd likely be making similar mockery of its uniform. Languidly, Keren leaned against the wall of the rink and tried to decide if she wanted to look for crashes or babewatch or both.
Maybe neither. Spotting a familiar face, Keren did her best to flag down the Japanese speedster. If Mayumi Kobayashi were a car, she'd be some kind of tricked out Toyota with twenty-inch rims and a street-illegal engine, hot purple pearl custom paint job and an obscene bumper sticker. Not like Keren gave this serious consideration or anything.
"Yo, Mayumi!" she shouted. "These wimps won't play with me anymore. Wanna go get smoothies?"
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Posted: Sun Mar 11, 2012 8:42 pm
Except Mayumi would have been more careful were she driving a tricked out Toyota than she typically was during her derby matches. The remains of a bruise marred her left upper arm, mostly shades of green and yellow, but still visible, and she had a band-aid on the back of her other hand where some b***h had actually scratched her with some crazy fake fingernails by mistake.
The sound of squeaking sneakers held the Japanese girl's attention, and she caught sight of her friend Keren among the crowd playing basketball.
Keren, who played that sport rather like a monster truck.
Smiling back as she came around the loop, Mayumi waved to her friend, then glanced back over her shoulder before pulling to the outside edge of the track and stopping along the wall beside the purple-haired girl. "I would love smoothies, but is it cool if I do like another twenty laps or so? I just got here and want to get a little exercise indoors since it's supposed to keep pouring outside."
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Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 8:26 am
Keren shot a rueful look over her shoulder at the basketball court where play was resuming with out her. After the number of fouls she'd racked up in the last quarter alone, it was unlikely she'd be welcome to resume play. The girl shrugged to Mayumi. "Yeah, go ahead," she said, deciding she was feeling kind of grody, anyways. "I'm gonna go wash up."
They both had to get back to school soon, after all, and Keren didn't want to sit through all her afternoon classes reeking of sweat and other people's old spice. "Meet me at the snack bar in like fifteen minutes?" she asked, batting her eyelashes sweetly at her friend. She didn't think she was being unreasonable.
"So, I'm gonna hit the showers, and when you see me again I'm not gonna smell like Armpits McBacne over there," declaired Keren, jerking a thumb over her shoulder towards an awkwardly overweight boy in an oversized shirt lumbering down the court. She swore he'd picked to guard her just to try and wrangle a grope, and wanted to go wash away her disgust.
Waving cutely at Mayumi, she declared, "Ta!" and hurried towards the locker room.
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Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 2:55 pm
Mayumi glanced at the guy Keren pointed out, and made a face that indicated her disgust, and nodded. Really, there was no correlation between sweatiness and how nice a guy was, but well, the small-framed Japanese girl was pretty sure this guy was not one she wanted to try.
"Yeah, sure," she replied, turning away momentarily to glance at the nearest clock, high on the wall above them. So this would be a good cardio workout. Mayumi at least had the luxury of one more free period after lunch. Bathing in her own dorm's shower sounded more appealing than doing so here, because at least she knew she shared the bathroom at Saint Mags with only four other people.
As Keren headed off, Mayumi waved back to her and pushed off with one toe, calling out, "See you in fifteen!"
And she was a minute or two early, even, when she turned up at the snack bar, a towel over her shoulders, her gym bag in one hand, and her skates in the other. She glanced around for Keren, then focused on the snack bar menu. Smoothies sounded amazing, so the only question was whether or not Mayumi wanted something to eat, too. Maybe if Keren got something, she would, too.
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Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 3:17 pm
Keren was already in line, waiting impatiently behind a suburban housewife tennis champ with an obscenely narrow waist. Based on stereotyping, Keren could assume this woman had three kids under the age of seven - where had she put them? It was lucky Mayumi turned up before she could work up the gall to actually ask.
Turning to her friend, Keren said, "I think I'm just gonna do a smoothie, I get a lunch break after chem lab." On forensics lab day Keren would have probably picked up a sandwich and worked through lunch, but she wasn't in the middle of any huge chemistry projects right now - unlike forensics, where she was almost always occupied with something. Tapping a finger to her lips, Keren studied the menu board, peering over the housewife's dyed blonde head.
"Can't go wrong with kiwi-strawberry," she said, after some deliberation, and watched with faint disgust as the woman in front of her ordered some power-boosted laxative-laced banana-flavored monstrosity. Well, that explained the tiny waist. The housewife swiped a platinum credit card and Keren stepped forward to place her order.
That done and now with nothing left to do but wait, she turned to Mayumi. "So how's St. Mags?" she asked. "Did I dodge a bullet with Horizon or not? Because I'm pretty sure my days were numbered at Crystal."
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Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 4:58 pm
The moment before she spaced out, Mayumi noticed Keren in line already, and moved to join her. There was no one behind her friend to complain, fortunately.
Just as she opened her mouth to ask about food, the other girl answered the question for her. Mayumi nodded, and grinned. "I don't mean to copy you, but I think I'll get a kiwi-strawberry smoothie, too."
She chewed her lip, hanging the laces of her skate off of one shoulder while she pulled out her wallet as Keren ordered. "It's not bad, but it's not great, either. I always thought Crystal sounded worse, but then I never went there like you did." Mayumi laughed slightly. "It helps that I think the nuns consider us like God testing them, so most of them only try so hard with the manners thing."
Mayumi herself was hardly one of the problem children, preferring to keep quiet and fly under the radar more often than not. But from what she had heard of all of the enforcement of being "ladylike" at Crystal, she strongly suspected she would have snapped eventually had she ended up at the private school.
It came her turn to order, and the grey-eyed girl stepped up to the counter. She placed an order for a smoothie and a basket of fries. If Keren changed her mind about the food, she would share.
"How is Horizon? Better than Crystal, I guess?"
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Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2012 7:34 pm
"Sooooo much better," said Keren, flopping into a booth, smoothie in hand. Truth be told, the only thing she missed about Crystal was the basketball team, and being surrounded by science instead of bimbos more than made up for it. She slurped her smoothie and leaned towards Mayumi, grin spreading across her face. "We have a forensics lab."
Keren practically lived in the forensics lab these days, if her glee in discussing it wasn't apparent enough. The joke around school was that it would be a spring wedding. She'd already tried sleeping there, as it was. Micah might be able to claim being in a relationship with Keren Della-Blue, and she might spend her nights flirting with Acubens, but the truth was that her first and truest love was the Horizon Institute forensics lab.
She leaned across the table and stole a fry from Mayumi's basket. "Seriously, I didn't realize how stupid all my classmates at Crystal were until I left." All Crystal prepared you for was an MRS Degree, in all honesty. Keren rolled her eyes. "I think you got off easy with Saint Mags," she added. "At least it's interesting. Crystal was boring."
Although it may have been a case of sour grapes - Keren dimly remembered wanting nothing more than to be back at earth and back at school when she was on the Surrounding.
"Hey," she said, stirring her smoothie, "You believe my abducted by aliens story, right?"
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Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2012 5:58 pm
"Yeah," Mayumi conceded, "But on the other hand, a lot of the girls at Saint Mags are there for actual reasons. Unlike me, where my parents are just crazy." She smiled with one corner of her mouth. "Although I take some small pride in knowing that I'm probably one of the least messed-up people there. No criminal record, no drug charges, both my parents are still alive ... I just have horomones and am a teenager." She batted her long eyelashes.
She was pleased that her friend had a lab to hang out at. Mayumi considered herself more of a people-person than a science person, but she still thought it was cool that Keren was into it.
And because the thougth Keren was so smart in that regard, the Japanese girl felt she had no reason to doubt Keren's story. She nodded immediately, as she took her tray over to one of the small round tables by the snack shop.
"Of course. I mean, with all the weird stuff going on lately, it's all certainly possible, and I mean ..." she trailed off and shrugged. "Why would you lie about it? Why would anyone?" The obvious answer involved talk show spots, book deals, and tabloids, but again, with so many weird things going down here in Destiny City, there was no shortage of victims. Too much supply!
Unless they wanted to do a reality show like Super Hero Big Brother or whatever.
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Posted: Thu Oct 31, 2013 5:51 pm
"And, I mean, there were a lot of other people there," said Keren, watching Mayumi sit down. She hadn't seen anyone try to cash in on the story yet, but then she'd recently discovered there were much weirder things going on in Destiny City and no one seemed willing to talk about them! It was sort of... frustrating. She'd had this huge exciting adventure and no one believed her!
"A lot of my online friends think I'm nuts," she said. "Like I'm just trying to make up excuses for not tagging any of my games. And I am like guys, seriously, there were aliens and I almost died like six times. My parents are threatening therapy. I'm totally fine, though." She grinned at Mayumi. It was nice to have at least one person who didn't think she was making the whole thing up for attention. At least - someone outside the whole stupid Magical Warriors game. Which Keren still wasn't totally convinced wasn't just a figment of her sleep-deprived imagination. But, well, she'd figure that out later. Run some tests. You know - do science to it.
Keren leaned forward across the table towards Mayumi, a conspiratorial grin crossing her face. "Do you ever think about getting into any kind of trouble? Like your classmates?" she asked. "I mean. It would show your parents right for being such tight-asses. If they think you're such a bad kid anyway!"
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2013 9:04 pm
Mayumi winced at the mention of therapy, and nodded to agree with Keren. There were so many weird stories floating around the City the last several years that she did half-wonder if the whole population might belong in therapy, though. Keren seemed like Keren, so far as Mayumi could tell, at least, and that was good enough for her.
She chewed on her straw a little and laughed lightly at her friend's next suggestion. "Well, I'm not eighteen yet, and I don't want them to completely disown me, you know? Sending me off to boarding school for having a boyfriend could only be the beginning of my mother's madness, you know?" Her lips closed on the straw and she took a drink of smoothie, grey eyes turning upwards as she thought. Then she continued, "I did get into roller derby, though, which is something I'm sure my folks wouldn't really approve of even if it isn't illegal. I get out all my frustrations on the rink as 'Miso Vicious', and that kind of satisfies my need for trouble, you know?"
Going back to her smoothie, she watched Keren across the table for a long moment, then leaned slightly towards her to ask, "Why, did you have something in particular in mind?"
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Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2013 10:51 pm
Keren shrugged. All of Mayumi's reasons for not getting into worse trouble made sense - and it wasn't like she actually had any ideas. "Nothing in particular," she said. "Miso Vicious is a completely badass name, by the way." Which she told Mayumi on a regular basis, but who was counting? It needed to be pointed out as often as possible. "You're right," she conceded, after trying and failing to think of anything compellingly awful. "Best not to test fate." Checking her watch, Keren shot Mayumi a disappointed look. "I'd really better head to school. But let's make plans, yeah? I'll text you about next weekend. We could catch a movie."
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Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2013 12:07 pm
Mayumi laughed. "Thanks. My one small clever and witty contribution." Then she added, "You should come to one of our matches sometime."
Her smile faded to a look of sympathy at Keren's words, and she nodded. "Yeah, I guess I probably should, too, since the bus likes to run late in the rain," she replied. "We can definitely do a movie next weekend." She shot a look at her backpack, and then, as though in defiance, remained seated and took another long drink of smoothie instead of moving to get up right away. Then Mayumi flashed another quick smile at Keren. "Definitely text me, though. It was good to see you!"
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