savethecitydesu | Discovery?! The disciplinarians discern enigmas?

Entry tags:

takeo,
tsuchi

Discovery?! The disciplinarians discern enigmas?

Who: Takeo and Tsuchi
Where: The Disciplinary Committee Room
What: Reading the scroll Mitsuya dropped here
When: After this thread.

Takeo had a bandage around the wound on his arm. He had made a point of cleaning up, because even when wounded he wanted to look dignified. "Alright," he'd said, as soon as he'd finished putting a safety pin on his sleeve to hold it up, nice and tidy. "Let's see what this is all about then."

He opened the scroll, and to his shock and surprise, words appeared on it-- literally manifesting as the blank paper was exposed, in a burst of purple flame that left behind inked text. It urged him, however, to say in awed tones: "Utazawa, come look at this...."

HELLO,
YOU HAVE CHOSEN THE SCROLL OF SWIFT INITIATION

Before Takeo could finish taking in what was before him, he felt as if he had been punched in the face, and the mysteries arcane being revealed to him.

He also shouted: "MOTHER FUDGECAKE!" because while most people would shout some obscenity when surprised by a punch, Takeo knew that, in his position as head disciplinarian, someone was bound to punch him eventually, so he'd been practicing.

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Tsuchi was so uncertain about how to react to this threat, that from where he was standing he seemed to wink right out of existence. He put himself in frond of his friend, warily. Ignoring somebody he knew when they were in trouble was something he just would not do. The extremely angry boy came towards him and discovered that, in the grand scheme of things, he just wasn't that important.

"Just relax," he said. "If you're this angry, just come back later."

That shouldn't have worked. As a matter of fact, Tsuchi's attempts to soothe the beastly student should have only drawn up a lot of verbal rage from him. And punching in generous amounts.

He was about to start: "JUST WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO, HUU--" he'd said, when his line of questioning simmered down. A glazed look came upon his eyes as a sort of blue glow, visible only to Takeo and Tsuchi, briefly shimmered over him. "UUuuuhhhhh..." he went, prior to blinking, as would someone trying to wake themselves in the wee hours of the morning and finding lucidity a difficult thing to master. "H-huhh... what, what was I... saying again?" he mumbled.

Tsuchi carefully patted his face with his hands. Somehow, it wasn't clean gone. People were not supposed to ignore him; he was used to getting a complaint about rules and prodecure every other day. His skin under his hair seemed to be picking up a sweat.

"Nothing," he said. "So you really can't remember, huh?"

"I... well I know I was mad about something," the boy said. He looked like the frustration was starting to arise, though now it was mostly out of difficulty recalling why he was upset.

That blue glow on him was flickering on and off, now, like a malfunctioning lightbulb.

Tsuchi would have liked to say he had not noticed, but he had. So, before he said anything, he looked at his friend and very carefully nodded his head at the sight. He met those flashing eyes, again, and spoke very slowly.

"Maybe you should just go for a lie down, yeah?"

Takeo was in the process of just staring back and forth between Tsuchi and the other boy. He arched his brows high as he saw Tsuchi's words result in that blue glow returning, steadily, and in the delinquent's eyes glazing up again.

All creases born from aggression and agitation vanished from his face-- and, while he briefly looked muddled, he just nodded slightly. "Y-yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's just one afternoon's detention, right...? Uh... sorry about that," the boy said, turning around and leaving the room. Even when he closed the door, the blue glow could be seen across the walls, as if Takeo and Tsuchi were privy to some x-ray vision of sorts.

Ah. Now he was able to have some breathing room and move freely. It was simply too strange. He stepped back and felt his legs walking into his chair, where he sat looking absentminded and lost.

"I don't know what's got into me," he began saying. "But that was weird."

Takeo slowly rose from his chair. He was still staring at the trail of blue left behind by the delinquent, and arching his brows more and more as his head turned towards Tsuchi.

"Indeed..." he started. "I think we need to get another look at that scroll."

Tsuchi looked back at the desk, a little frightened. The scroll seemed to pulse with life as he stepped towards it, or maybe it was his thought imagining it. He tapped it with some of his fingers and moved it across the table.

"Well, this is stupid."

With that, he was able to gather his strength and attempt to read the thing.

What followed was a swift introduction into magic-- and the call of one's own element. The scroll had a very poetic way of revealing what your element was, going on about how Before it was one whose heart burned, for there was a sun within and one who was like sand at the shore of a vast sea...

Then the scroll informed them that revealing their element would "cause a brief inconvenience." This resulted in both boys sneezing violently.

The only difference is Takeo sneezed fire, all over his desk.

"Hahhg--? Ah? AHH!"

There, on the wooden desk, burned the growing flames. They were crackling and rising up to the ceiling - and that ceiling was not flameproof. How long would it be before the alarm rang? Then its direction shifted, and it crackled, as if it had eaten the most delicious oxygen.

They ate all the paper and deposited more black-orange ashes than Tsuchi could think of. For a long time he was too confused to even collect the fire extinguisher from the side of the room. As he stared, his hand wiped itself on his trousers. He was finding it hard to comprehend what was before his eyes.

"Uh..."

He gave up trying, and strode and tore the extinguisher off the wall. He aimed it with all the concentration he could muster, though using it wasn't his strong point.

"For certainly, someone's talking really bad about you."

If he hadn't been reeling back, his adrenaline-fueled reflex getting him away from the fire, Takeo would've just been too horrified to react. But now his blood was pumping fast, bringing oxygen to his brain to burn at a mean rate, and his confusion shook under a simple fact, which he grasped tightly, as he sought to sort things out: "I... did that? I did it?" he mused aloud, stepping towards his desk, now with scorch marks.

He then repeated himself: "I did that..." he continued. This was no longer a question, but something he accepted. "That fire came from me..." he added, bringing a hand towards his nose, the unlikely source of his new pyrokinesis... and perhaps it was tension, still beating inside, or simply the focus on his flames, but a tiny tongue of flame materialized slightly over his palm. It made him yelp lightly and lower it instinctively but... he wasn't feeling a burn, he wasn't feeling pain from this yellow, curious fire... and so he brought it up again, to gaze with curiosity and amazement at it.

As it burned there was a small moment of peace for Takeo to analyse what he was doing. Because while he was looking at this fire, Tsuchi was watching it with considerable foresight and concern. He was by then too surprised and thoughtful to say anything with strength or power. A bit washed out.

"I hope you think being able to say you're literally hot'll be worth all the trouble," he said.

Takeo knew that his friend was taking refuge in sarcasm, but there was only so much he could manage. With a slight (and almost hysterical) gasp, the last slip of control that he allowed himself, Takeo turned to his friend. "Utazawa-kun, do you realize what this means? Somehow, we've gained powers beyond what is normal for a mere highschooler."

Tsuchi sat down and wrestled with his hands. The idea it gave him to use this power was the very moment he chose to bury his hands between his thighs. There was a moment or two of mental struggling. He hastened to use it hesitantly, as he had never really found himself in this position before - and made sure he never was.

An irritable sigh came out of his mouth. "Yeah, I know. Right now, I wish I didn't."

His hands raised slightly, and he would soon force a sound like hissing steam through his lips.

"Fuck."

Takeo's thrill stopped. His excitable high vanishing as his attention turned to his friend. With it, the flame between his hands died.

Normal, reasonable thoughts were escaping him. He had to abandon them to chase after answers, which at the time were on the other side of the fence of logic. However, he backtracked - with effort - to that kind of sensible thinking, and approached the other boy in the room.

"You're upset..." he noted, blinking slowly. "See, I think I am, but I'm keeping it down. I can't afford to be upset, but you can..." he continued, moving on to a simple question which, despite its simplicity, he found fit the moment. "Would you like to talk about it?"

Talk about it! Tsuchi nearly groaned aloud. For a long time he was too frustrated to hear a sense of tenderness in the other boy's voice. They were waiting uncertainly for each other to speak - before the courage started to rise in him and he spoke, with his eyes still modestly lowered.

"I think so," he said.

There was so much silence. Sometimes he found himself being almost as sweet as his friend. And on how many other times had he been a sort of enemy?

His eyes turned musingly to his friend's hand, where the flame had been. "Say what you like, I have no idea what I should be feeling. I wouldn't even know what to do with... all this."

"I admit I don't know what to do either," said Takeo, in what was a blatant lie. He'd had ideas of what he'd do if he had powers since he was six. In fact, they were coming to him at the time, as he looked at his palms. "But... it seems we have found power... And if we are wise, and prudent, this power could serve us."

He paused. It was a long pause too - he was taking in his thoughts... working hard to digest what was a very, very big idea. For nearly a minute he just stared into nothing in particular, grounded in place only by the warm feeling left on his palm.

"Of course, as soon as we understand where it's coming from..." Ah, yes, he'd read fantasy books, too, enough to know that "There could be hidden strings in all of this, and I am not one to play puppet to them."

Tsuchi shut his eyes. He knew indeed somebody had started something. They had found them on a scroll - something had had to write it. The thought of him using these powers for his benefit almost frightened him, he went to stare out the window. Reason and logic both fell to the ground. It was not that he did not trust himself. It was that he couldn't understand it all.

"Don't worry," he said. "I don't think Oubai-san or even Terumi-san are fiddling with your strings."

This made Takeo pause, his back turned to Tsuchi for a moment. "No... no, I doubt it is them. But, surely," he turned to look at the door, suspicious for a moment, as if expecting either of them to come in any minute, "they wouldn't know anything about this, now, would they?"

He hesitated.

"Oubai wouldn't play with strings. Oubai sets laws. Oubai interprets those laws. He tells you and tries to convince you of what he thinks is good for you-- but he doesn't manipulate. Not consciously. I think he finds satisfaction in getting one to admit that he's right," he said, slipping into this topic, into talking about his classmates, because this whole, crazy idea that they had magic was so hard to tackle that it was much easier to talk about simpler things... "But Terumi, I wouldn't be so sure of. He seems nice, and that's what worries me. I've never met a truly nice person that can be so..."

He struggled for a way of putting it.

"Even. So constant in his niceness. Nice people falter. Nice people have off days. But ever since I met him, he's got a perfect record."

"Well," said Tsuchi, evidently not quite sure, "even the nicest guys leave a paper trail. Perhaps he's just hidden his really well."

He stared out the glass, at the school grounds, in some perplexity. He was quite as puzzled by this as his friend was. He stood in front of the window and dripped, with some wetness, the venom he felt about something that was just off. He would have carried on with it, had he not met Terumi - who was so nice he knew to lave him alone. In the end, he found he disliked this person almost because of how worried it made someone feel.

"But, you know," he started, "The fact you're not abusing some power or other to dig up some dirt is kind of nice, I guess." He pulled up his right hand and his fingers made a spyglass under the same eye. "That's really good of you, Sherlock Holmes."

"My power as school disciplinarian has its purpose... and its limits," Takeo said, coming to stand next to Tsuchi. "Besides, if there's anything underhanded about Terumi, I can't prove it right now. In a manner of speaking, it is merely speculation, and I've no time to chase after such a thing. Not when there's very real problems that need a stern hand to see fixed."

"I know," said Tsuchi. Then he began thinking of what he could do himself. He smiled briefly. "But I know you'll find something. You're that clever."

He tenderly turned and faced his friend. "But you make it very difficult for me to say that you're wrong." He was not any too sure how he would make his point, and it came across as uncertainty. "I mean, if he's hiding something bad and all. It's kind of corrupt, isn't it? That's pretty serious, right?"

Takeo closed his eyes and smiled. In the madness of the last couple of minutes, there was something that he could fall back to, something that made him feel well-- trusty Utazawa. If he didn't know for a fact that the other boy had the personality of a sponge, and generally bent to the greatest will nearby, he would feel like he could take the world thanks to his support. But it still felt good.

"Indeed... but, it's not the matter right now. I think it's--"

Takeo got goosebumps then. Little did he know that it involved someone else talking about putting a curse on him. He decided to believe that "Hmm... all this, this magic business, however, makes things so complicated that my thoughts slip. I don't... know how to deal with it."

He could, however, observe the one thing he knew for sure. "But I do know that you..." he looked up at the other boy, "Can calm others. You... calmed that thug. Just as you calmed me, with no... no supernatural aid, huh."

Tsuchi put his hands down on the windowsill and undid the catch. Then, as though casting out his awkwardness, opened the window. He leaned out and inhaled some air. He had calmed people exactly as his friend had said, from the thuggish to the benign. It was odd and a marvel.

His hair blew as he took a downward peek. "I guess so," he said rather distractedly. "I think we should just stop struggling for an explanation and just roll with it."

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