Description: It does, doesn't it, with all these otherwise fine and upstanding young men suddenly finding themselves weak after that whole... what was it? Wrong Jive King George? Whatever. The fact of the matter is, Frei wants to peacefully meditate, Todoh wants a thousand yen. Are these goals mutually exclusive?
So, you just accidentally kinda sorta communed with what you think is a nature spirit, while in the process of having what amounts to a duel with an old friend. What, exactly, do you DO in that sort of situation? Is there a course of accepted action? Probably not, really. People thinking you're a little bit crazy if you tell them makes, say, posting it on Twitter a bad idea (RT @spiritofmetal thx for everything hit me back on facebook). No, this is the sort of situation that calles for personal time, away from people, in a nice, calm, familiar spot.
Having been raised in Kyoto, Frei is familiar with Ginkaku-ji, the Shrine of the Silver Pavillion. Although not necessarily Shinto by belief, the young sage can appreciate the design of Shinto shrines, particularly the large and important ones like this one, that have become national treasures in Japan. There really is something about rock gardens and meditation pools -- just the raw elements of stuff, out there, sitting quietly, waiting to be looked at -- that gets people in a reflective mind. Perhaps put a little more bluntly, when your major attraction is a large expanse of carefully-raked stones, a viewer either must supply their own mental entertainment, or go insane.
Right now, Frei is sitting on the grass across from the far end of the Ginkaku-ji rock garden, with the trees at his back. Before him is the perfectly conical mount of carefully-maintained sand that's supposed to represent Mount Fuji, and anyone looking right at him might be a little worried about him. Why? For starters, he has a sort of dazed expression in his green eyes. It's as if he's not really even looking AT anything, he's just... looking. As for what's in his head, the occasional tourist observer can't really know that he's trying to figure out exactly what it is that spoke to him in his fight with Mizuki. Although he's a broadly spiritual person, Frei would never have believed that a 'spiritual entity' with its own will could exist.
Despite the evidence of his senses, he still can't, in fact.
And so he sits, and thinks, silently. The setting provides; other than the slightly balmy, slightly breezy weather of the end of summer, there is little here to take his attention away. The sounds of insects and birds fade into the occasional chatter of tourists until both are a faint drone he barely perceives.
Ginkaku-ji has quite the storied history from its construction in the late 1400s into the... later 1400s. Even in modern times, there are many facets of its glorious, beautiful past that imperial Japan shall not let bend to the ways of the west!!
This is one of them. The rock gardens and meditation pools... what you see is what you get. The prefect accessories to meditation. The emptying of one's mind, to cast out all worldly distractions in pursuit of being one with the universe. The universe is full of a lot of nothing. And also rocks. The universe sure is full of rocks. Nobody's sure where humanity got the whole 'pond' thing from, it's like this new-fangled corruption to some old, sensible tradition or another. And the grass! The grass! What the hell is with all this grass, how much grass is there in the entirety of the universe in which for it to have to properly feature in places like this?
Whether these thoughts are shared by some mysterious older man with long black hair scooting around clad in a gi top, those large hakama trousers, or those tabi socks, who knows. Why is it important to even mention a man of that description at all? People see him everywhere, he is surely not worth note out here in the majesty of the gardens.
'I don't see any of it.' The voice comes back... wait... is it really that voice? It seems to favor Frei's left ear. 'Your release of worldly distractions.'
Oh, there's the problem. That aforementioned man has somehow taken it upon himself to lean down far too close, whispering things close by. Said man gives a few shifty glances to the left and right, grinning mischievously.
'Drop a good thousand yen in change!' He whispers.
It's a good thing that Frei is not like his mother. Using the magic of cutaway sequences, we will explain why.
SCENARIO 1: Frei's mother is sitting, watching the rock garden at Ginkaku-ji. Todoh comes up and whispers in her ear, attempting to surprise her.
Zoom in on Todoh's severed head lying in the grass, or perhaps him gripping a katana blade with both hands ninja-style like they do in the animes all the time.
Gruesome.
REALITY: he may look like he's zoning out, but Frei is... well, opening his awareness. That's the true essence of what he's been trying to do by taking up the family sword style again. Not learn to cut people in half, not give himself a mysterious way to get his chi back. It's all been about becoming more aware on the battlefield. Taking it in. Understanding and reacting to it on a level that's so deep as to be subconscious. What this MEANS is that while it looks like Frei is trying to force fractal patterns to appear on the raked sand with the POWER of his MIND, what he is in fact doing is filtering sensory input.
Perhaps it is to Todoh's disappointment, then, that Frei -- without turning his head or changing his expression -- says, in an even tone: "The curators would complain."
For a second, that statement hangs silently in the air, with only that droning sound of a summer day filling the space.
Frei eventually stands up after that, closing his eyes as he does so, leaning forward to brush off his pants and then finally turning to see who it is that actually SAID that. Now, however, Todoh gets his desired look of surprise, because... let's face it, Todoh is about the last person Frei expected to see here. Which might be why his face makes a perfect :O expression as he simply says: "...it's you."
Todoh knows scary moms. He got to know many scary moms and a couple scary dads during his childhood. Now /he/ is the scary dad, here to make children recoil in fear for the first two decades of their lives! (...And also bum some change off of would-be meditators, apparently.)
The illusion is further disrupted when the man rubs his hands together in anticipation for a cool thousand yen or so in change. He did this to one of his cousins all the time in their youth while they were seriously studying becoming a monk, and boy, did he get a good amount of cash out of it. Until his own dad caught the act and... well, let's say there was a lot of pails held. And then his dad went out and got drunk on all that accumulated money anyway.
The hand rubbing stops with that little calm response about the curators, the grin going to a disappointed frown and furrowed brow. What are they teaching kids these days?! Common sense?! Inconceivable! He's about ready to turn around and stomp off with some choice insult cribbed from Takuma's little black book of outdated English insults when the younger of the two (perhaps, only in body) stands and faces him with that look of surprise. The eyebrows go up. /Him./
The older of the two (still likely only in body) crosses his arms. "You. Which one of you were you... ahh... eh, hm! Yes. You were with that dancer."
There is silence as the elder Todoh sizes the young man up and down, like... something's... different. He's not looking at the hair.
It really is amazing how Frei can be relatively adult in age yet have really childlike expressions when the moment calls for it. Expressive as he is, when Todoh says 'dancer' Frei's brow furrows, and he literally mouths the word without saying it, his gaze drifting to the side for a moment, before both eyes open in recognition and he turns back to Todoh with an 'oh!' expression. "Miss Kagura," he says carefully, in the tone of someone who thinks they've got a right crossword puzzle clue but are afraid to write it on the puzzle in pen in case they're wrong. Presuming he isn't corrected, he smiles sheepishly. "Yes, that was us."
Strolheim... that seemed like eons ago. The situation in the Krauser household apparently kept the tournament from coming to a natural conclusion, but his various battles there... left echoes that rippled outwards into the siege of Southtown that followed. It was in Strolheim that Frei first met Ichiro Oe, then a passionate and good-natured lacrosse player... and it was in Strolheim that both Frei and Alma together got a chance to resolve some of their feelings about Igniz, the mysterious head of NESTS... Frei as an opponent, and Alma as his teammate.
What he primarily remembers about his fight with Todoh was the food.
The evaluating gaze from Todoh doesn't go unnoticed by Frei, but the latter seems to think of it more in terms of 'there's some food on your shirt' rather than 'your chi is gone'; he actually looks down and pats his shirt, then his hips briefly, before the light proverbially dawns and he looks back up with an embarrassed smile, patting a hand on his long bangs. "It's the hair," he responds, misjudging Todoh entirely. "It was red when we last met."
Yes, Strolheim. Yes, 'situation in the Krauser household,' and not at all Krauser breaking down into schoolgirl bawling at the flagrant disrespect towards the spirit of the fight as seen in that losers bracket battle where Ryuhaku Todoh couldn't be bothered to fight so much as find some way to catch a couple zeds while Robert jeered and some little girl in black took on the ABSOLUTE FAILURE TO ALL THAT IS TODOH BECAUSE HE CAN'T GET HIS CHI RIGHT and a bear or something. Yes. This is exactly what happened. Maybe. Kinda. Sorta. (...No?)
What did happen was that the servants threw Todoh out one of the higher windows after an unfortunate incident involving a malfunctioning faucet, a pack of sponges, and some roast pig. Nobody should want to anything further. It's one of those... things.
Even with Frei's affirmation of who old Ryuhaku is talking about, he doesn't nod, he doesn't even really give much in the way of acknowledgment he's right. A few leaves blow by for no particularly poignant reason while Todoh still sizes Frei up. Yes. Something is different. Something is very different.
The hair?! The man's eyes narrow ever further. Hmm. "Why if it was just the hair color..." He stops, turning around to think on this. Hair color, hm, why didn't he think of this. "Hm, yes, /that/ one has purple..." He starts to walk away. "And /he/ can't get it right! The shape! He gets the shape. But not what it is! But you! Yes, you!"
He turns with a waving finger. "Is that why?!" Why what? There's that wild look of not an uncivilized man, but a man too gripped around a certain subset of reality that isn't compatible with the rest of it. "Hair color! Pah! No wonder I haven't grayed!"
...How old is he, again?
Let's look at Frei's face:
o_o
That is pretty much it. It's not that the individual words that Todoh is SAYING don't make sense. Each individual fragment of a sentence or idea is, in and of itself, relatively cogent. Taken solely on their own merits as language they are perfectly comprehensible. The problem is that this is not how language works. Words are symbols for ideas; strung together in a sensible order the combination of ideas turns into a synthesis that produces meaning. Frei's brief flirtation with college education involved semiotics, you see. And his brain, filled with that knowledge, attempts to do what anyone would do in this situation: turn the string of ideas into a coherent whole.
This results in, primarily, a blank stare that goes on beyond the level of a comfortable pause.
"I... sorry?" he starts, tilting his head a bit and glancing at Todoh, one eyebrow going down in confusion, the other going up in inquiry. And a TINY part of his consciousness is going: IS it your hair? You thought it was a symptom. Is it a cause? Would dyeing your hair red again fix everything? No, that's stupid. Why would that work? Does that mean going with some strange color like blue or green would change it? No, that's stupid. Mizuki has red hair and your chi wasn't anything alike. Then what the hell is he talking about? Didn't you come here to figure out the voice in your head?
Before he can even open his mouth to say anything again, Frei suddenly squints his eyes shut and pinches the bridge of his nose, taking a breath. When he opens them again, the young sage opts for the simplistic, uttering an incredulous and inquisitive: "...what?"
Who knows, this man may have been sent by one of them Mara demons to distract Frei from his true goals. That, or this man is just the very concept of inconvenience and happenstance rolled into one.
In a total 180 from what Frei or really any sensible person would think, all this is beginning to fall into place for the older man just here and now. "Quiet! Not yet! You're distracting me!" ...What?
The old man starts to pace back and forth. A couple tourists start looking this way. "So I was riding the train that day, yes, yes, and I see you fight that young lady, and... and I see you weren't using something!! And then here you are, here I am... yes, and now... gaaaaaaah why didn't I see this?!"
He clears his throat, turning about to face Frei with arms crossed as he goes over him with a discerning eye yet again. "You, of all people! One of the few young ones who aren't using... that... that... that crap that's!" Tooth grinding. "Not..." Blood pressure rising. "...chi!! And now you're not even using anything! And your hair color is different!"
Obediently (and perhaps surprisingly) Frei shuts up when told he's distracting Todoh. Partly, it's out of a sort of... default politeness that is built in to a good Japanese upbringing. On a more practical side, giving Todoh the quiet and concentration he needs will, in fact, hopefully drive the traditionally-garbed fighter in one of two directions. Either he'll reach epiphany and say just what the hell he actually means, or he'll run off in some insane direction and Frei will know he can give up hope of EVER knowing what hair has to do with anything at all in this context.
Absent-mindedly, he brings a hand up and pulls a lock of hair in his bangs down in front of his eyes, looking at it with an almost crosseyed expression while Todoh gathers his thoughts.
Thankfully for Frei, what Ryuhaku actually says makes... some degree of sense. It does cause the white-haired man to blink in surprise a couple times, but memory soon fills in the gaps. He recalls Todoh's chi as forceful, energetic... maybe a little focused, but versatile regardless. A fiery orange befitting this sort of personality. It would make sense that he could sense something... awry in Frei's aura, after all. Todoh's more oblique references to Psycho Power and, perhaps ironically, former YFCC coworker Zach Glen, go right over his head.
Running a hand through his hair (wrong alt, Todoh) Frei looks to the side, but despite the gesture of apparent frustration he wears a rueful smile... resignation, perhaps? "Something happened," he says simply. Explaining how S.I.N.'s experimental drug burned out his senses and that whole process is... something he doesn't really want to hash out with Todoh, just at this moment. "So I can't... really use chi, right now. I'm not really sure why, or if it'll change."
Frei's upbringing is a natural reflection of the environment he grew up in. So how does this explain Todoh, who presumably grew up within roughly the same cultural expectations and settings? Who knows. Who will /ever/ know the hows or whys of a man going into his twilight years who seems all too willing to leave too many questions and not enough answers.
He stops mid-accusation, mid-yelling, mid-just-about-everything at the mention of 'something happening.' Oh, you don't need to tell him, he knows, there was hair dye involved! Or so one Ryuhaku Todoh has declared to be divine truth deep inside, for it makes a whole lot of things about kids these days, well, make sense!
"Harrumph! Can't? Someone like /you/, waking up one day after... something," he does the little finger quotes, "and you can't?! Poppycock! Why, if I didn't know better," and in all due honesty, he really does not appear to, "I'd say... hrm. Yes."
A thoughtful look-over at Frei for... how many times is it, now? "Perhaps some things can't change. Yes. Some children will do as they will!"
Frei may be in his late 20s, but damn, the way he carries himself physically would probably fool a lot more people than just old Ryuhaku Todoh. Even if, mentally, Frei's probably juuuust about right, if not ahead of the curve.
His eyes dart a little over to the immediate left towards absolutely nothing in particular, as though he were fermenting the delicious alcohol of a very bad idea. (Which is almost every one of his ideas.)
The frustration of not being able to explain the full scenario to Todoh shows on Frei's face as he glances to the side again, running a hand through his hair and breathing out slowly through his nose. The man almost thought -- might still think -- that hair color has something to do with all this. How would the actual FACTS go? 'Well, I was kidnapped by a crime syndicate who gave me an experimental drug that burned out my senses, then I helped kill 27 clones of myself by collapsing a building on them, and oh yes, the CLONES could still use their chi.' He might as well just say 'a wizard did it' which is probably going to cause less argument and, quite frankly, is about as sensible an explanation as the actual *truth*.
Frei turns toward the carefully-raked stones of the garden, and the meticulously constructed cone of the 'replica' Mount Fuji. "That's how I've always felt. Things are what they are; struggling to change things you can't change is only going to lead to unhappiness. But... you can shape things, maybe. Like this garden. The *natural* state of stone is to lie there, in a random shape. But whoever did... this... turned it into something beautiful."
A pause, and then Frei turns back to Todoh with a faint smile. "Well... I don't really know what all that nonsense I just said means. But between you and me, I don't think it's forever."
The old man listens to these words in vague passing as he's assembling his... 'facts' together. His own, of course. Arranging little numbers that exist only Toodohrithmetic that can only make sense if one accepts these particular inane thoughts and ramblings as absolute truth. Which no one will. (Or should.)
"Hm." He murmurs that bit out loud when Frei makes that faint smile, eyes falling back upon the younger man, a darker toned remark quick to fall out of his own lips. "Of course it's not."
"BECAUSE THAT ENDS NOW!!" He yells with the shaking of his fist, most tourists going from 'simple head turning' to 'stopping what they're doing to stare.' "You want something turned into something beautiful?! I'll show you something!" His tone changes to something lighter. "Beautiful. That gets turned into that. The something. I mean. That something that gets turned beautiful AND ANYWAY!"
One hand on his own hip, he pulls a fan from out of his top and opens it with a dramatic flair. "You want to get back in touch with how to use chi to beat the ever livin' crap outta all that stands in your way?! Today's your lucky day!"
...Is it?
In spite of himself, Frei takes a step backwards when Todoh suddenly shouts, blinking in surprise a few times. That... well. His memory of Todoh certainly would label the man as 'vaguely erratic', but these two men have had so little contact, Frei never really had a chance to develop a really robust picture of Todoh's personality. In absence of mitigating experience, fight or flight takes over. What does it say about Frei's personality that he instinctively chose flight? Or does that say something more about Todoh, who is basically an entire Top 40 radio station's worth of fake ambulance for block parties in a gi and hakama?
We may never know.
In spite of himself, Frei tilts his head and looks at Todoh in an expectant sort of way. A lesser man would be either bemusedly dismissive, or an outright bastard. But Frei's fought Todoh, and anyone who dismisses the Kasane Ate as Todoh's only trick hasn't given the technique some actual thought. Look at other fighters, Frei would note. They can fire eye lasers or something, right? Awesome. But that's all. Then look at Todoh, who is a virtuoso. Why *shouldn't* he listen to this man? Why assume he has nothing to offer just because he's a little... well...
Crazy?
"Well," Frei says to Todoh, laughing a little bit. After all, this is a pretty funny scenario, all things considered. "If you have advice, I'm all ears."
The Kasane Ate. Truly a mighty technique in itself that has shook the heavens of multiple pantheons, created mighty canyons, and moved men lesser and greater alike to tears. Or... not.
Todoh was more than prepared to take a 'yes' answer and gets moving the moment Frei gets somewhere around 'advice,' only slightly more red in the eyes for the laughter. It's always been easy to work the old man up into something like this as the fan snaps itself shut. "Wonderful! Smarter than your crowd, I see. Yes! Well then. AND THIS GOES FOR ALL YOU LOLLYGAGGERS OUT THERE TOO!! YES, YOU!" He points at a tree. Nobody's there. But the crowd all about is listening.
"The secret! It's there! It's waiting!" Todoh lowers his stance a little, arms forward, eyes narrowed. "Yours for the taking! My patience is an overdrawn bank! But this, you! This... is yours for the taking! Chi!"
So Todoh holds his hands up. "So you make it yours because it's there to take it! So like I'm doing! I focus on one or two points, see. Efficiency! Beauty! And then..."
There is a brief flash of that blocky yellowish-orangeish chi, three segments, arranged in no particular form other than to just be forcefully called into existence for the whims and convenience of the one who calls it. Guiding his arms down with a mighty yell, the chi construct drifts down onto the ground like a dropped practice sword and fades into the aether.
"Just like that! I make it do it!" The easy primer that underscores the actual amount of practice, effort, and raw talent one actually /needs/ to even really meaningfully manifest anything.
Briefly, Frei can't help but flash back to the first time Hotaru brought Kentou to him, at the YFCC, because she felt her protege would have something to learn about chi from the monk-classchanged-to-sage. When the wide-eyed Chinese youth could only think of the techniques he'd seen as 'Chinese magic' (a belief Frei does not know persists despite Kentou's training) and he was dazzled by what Frei thought of as a relatively simple exercise: making a little ball of colored light in his palm. But it's his own turn to be dazzled, now; he'd seen Todoh do this plenty of times at Strolheim, but through the haze of an ongoing fight... one with four people in it that required a lot of his attention being kinda, well, split. Now he can see it for himself, and despite the fact that he talks a little [pennant with "screw" + "ball" rebus ala "Duck Amok"] it is clear that Todoh's ability to use chi is quite advanced. Highly focused, maybe, but advanced.
In that strange way he has, the white-haired man's head is canted to the side slightly as he observes Todoh's demonstration. In his head, logically, empirically observing what's going on, all the *markers* are there. Physical motion to give a sense of... somatic focus. Concentration. Presumably, ambient chi in the air, even if Frei can't sense it. A swift, smooth gathering of power. After all, what most fighters do is impress their will upon the universe around them, and in this instance a strong personality helps. Todoh's forceful sense of self -- insane as it is -- is well-suited to this sort of endeavor. The weak-willed rarely find chi responds to their subconscious commands.
That thought swims through Frei's head, and when he comes to the end of it, he blinks in surprise a few times. These blinks coincide nicely with Todoh's 'Just like that!', for maximum dramatic effect, and he sits up.
"You know..." he starts, pursing his lips, before turning away from Todoh to look out over the pavillion grounds, and then up and outward at the blue late-summer sky. "It might really be that simple. Or maybe... what you're really saying is that the mechanics never went away. There's something else missing..."
"There's something missing all right!" So speaks the Todoh, as though he is in the know, with some dumb rhymes in tow, and the sentence has no mo'. "And it ain't attention! Believe me, with this... 'economy,'" he does little quotes with his fingers as he raises his hands up from following through this form, "there is a deficit in attention everywhere! But no. You seem to be balancing your attention books. Yes. Hm."
The old 'master' starts to pace across the field, head down to the ground while Frei observes the free summer sky. In every step, it is like a great span of time passes, as though the very motion of Todoh's feet are what defines entire measurements of time. In this case... a month. (Never mind it is something like two seconds between each step.)
Four and a half steps later, he turns about and brings out the fan yet again, a loud snapping noise as it opens and fans itself under the might of his own strength. A nice, cool breeze.
"It is because, young man." He narrows his eyes to little slits. Little, reddened slits like you put movies into in that cheap hellish rental video place. (One would not recommend trying to push DVD cases into his eyes, just sayin'.)
"You haven't made it your bitch."
Word. Uh. Or something.
Just when you think you've got Todoh figured out, there is another curveball coming your way. Example: one does not expect to hear the phrase 'made it your bitch' to come out of the mouth of a man clearly in his at-least-40s, dressed like the Japanese equivalent of a ren faire actor (not even in Excel Saga). Probably of all the people in the world, only Kasumi -- and possibly the equally ridiculously non-sequiturial Daniel -- are used to this sort of behavior. The additional factor is that this is not exactly Frei's way of doing things, not that Todoh could know that. The (former) redhead's style is all about harmony and adaptation. Which isn't to say that making the energy of the world your bitch isn't a viable option. Look at Geese Howard, for example. But it's not how he does things.
As Frei looks at Todoh, there is one of those wonderful moments where the two are separated by only a short distance of space, words spoken, eyes meeting. All is quiet. A single leaf blows through the intervening space and the wind that brings it there is surprisingly loud.
Struggling to find a sensible way to reply, Frei eventually settles on a carefully-selected version of the truth: "No, I haven't." This much is absolutely true. "But I don't think... hmmm. How can I make a good analogy..." There's a pause as Frei says this, his hand coming up near his face and his index finger touched to the tip of his nose, one of his own bizarre quirky mannerisms to indicate 'I'm thinking here'.
Eventually, he looks up at Todoh and says, "Alright. Let me give you a hypothetical. You're going to hammer a nail into a board. You know how to do it, you've done it a million times before. You can see the nail. But every time you go to actually hit it, the hammer disappears. You can't see it, can't feel it, nothing."
It is probably the fault of SNK's 90's localization teams, all things considered, for any verbal confusion and outright inappropriate dialogue. That or this is a man hopelessly trying to keep up to date with all those youngsters and their bizarre hair colors determining whether or not they are using chi or some criminally wrong substitute (it is criminal and wrong... and not a substitute, so it's just criminally wrong like, say, Zach, that wrong criminal, such a criminal man in his wrongs of criminalling wrongly).
It's hard to say how much of the people in Todoh's personal life are, in fact, truly 'used to this' when Kasumi still can't seem to find him more than half the time she's actually trying to get his attention, or even how his wife is able to function with the fact her husband is often an absentee goofball who frequently runs into trouble in trying to pay the bills and not have the dojo fall apart either by poor upkeep or outright violence.
Daniel seems to jive with it, though. Roland might be able to fill in a biography some day. (The less said about Benkei the better.)
"An allergy?!" Todoh makes an outburst. He blinks once. "Oooooh. That's the excuse one of my students used once! PFf, chi allergies, harrumph. Why I sneezed through my entire teenage years!" Probably lost some of his mind through his nostrils at some point (I mean what?).
He fans himself for a while, affording Frei a rare moment of peace to explain his particular predicament through disappearing hammers. Disappearing hammers. Why, that reminds him.
"Hypothetical?!" Todoh asks, as though he doesn't even know the meaning of the word (this is probably the truth). "I don't know where you get 'hypothetical' from, that happened to me all the time, why, when I was a kid I had this... kid who was not named Takuma Sakazaki," he basically lies through his teeth, how does this guy still have all his teeth anyway, "and I would raise my hammer and then he'd take it! And then I'd fuss for it back and he wouldn't give it back because he said I took it from Sakazaki S-- NOT Sakazaki Sr. and then I beat the crap out of him! And then I didn't use the hammer because he had touched it and it was disgusting!"
And not because NOT Takuma Sakazaki trounced him every caper, no. The old man's fanning becomes a little more intense with every little white lie that he could probably use to brighten his teeth, come to think of it.
"So who cared about that dumb hammer that... Not Sakazaki didn't ret-- that I never wanted to touch again?! I got that nail in with my palm! And then I did it again! And again! And again! And again!"
A pause. Followed by slumping.
"It hurt and I had to get shots." Sniff. He straightens out again.
"So are you saying you need shots, or what?"
Flabbergasted though he may be, Frei tries his best to be a good listener. And he's learning a lot here, really. He's learning that you can't use rhetorical language with Ryuhaku Todoh because it will... well. Some people would say that he would 'miss the point' but this is in fact, incorrect. The point will hit him, burrow under the skin, swim to some random location in his body, mutate into sixteen games of Telephone's worth of misunderstanding, then ride synapses back to his brain in a coruscating white lightning bolt of misapprehension that then escapes his mouth like the breath weapon of some terrible, misinterpretive Gamera. Never mind the fact that his hearing appears to be going regardless, so that even getting him to hear the proper words to misunderstand in the first place is a different hurdle entirely.
Never mind that this story about hammer theft not only rings of revisionist history but, to be honest, plays out like a 4-koma comic in Frei's head. Apparently Todoh has the ability to make people's very thoughts turn into Todohmanga Daioh. Suck on that, nerds.
But what he says in the end makes sense, after all, depressing and painful-sounding though it may be. If you don't have a hammer, you use something else. Prrrrrrrrrrrobably not your palm, mind you, but there's got to be something else. You get up, you move on. Hopefully someday you'll find the hammer, but if not, you'll have learned something else. Something important: how to survive without the damn hammer, for starters. Never mind that Frei's initial reason for being here -- trying to figure out why he was hearing voices -- has been effectively evaporated by the relentless tsunami that is Todoh, but in the end there is wisdom to be gleaned from every passing moment, if one knows where to look.
"Well..." Frei says, guardedly, before putting his hands on his knees and then pushing himself standing. Reaching behind him, he picks something up off the ground: an ornate-looking sea blue scabbard for a katana, with a weapon clearly inside. Either he'd been blocking it from view where he was sitting, or he has hammerspace access. Holding it up crosswise, gripped at the center of the saya, he looks at Todoh with a slightly self-deprecating sort of smile. "Well... this is my 'palm', I guess. Until I get ahold of that hammer." A pause, and he ties the sword to his belt loops before looking back at Todoh and bowing. "Thank you, Mis... 'sensei'."
Not even Frei can keep the fingerquotes off that thing. Good thing he's bowing.
Ryuhaku Todoh, the man of many misterstandings (too manly for misunderstandings). When the influence of his generation finally passes on to the public memory and the annals of digital history, it will be a sad time where all understandings become female. And misspelled. Without spaces between words. In fact those kids with their cellphones are probably doing that right about now.
Todoh eyes the 'palm' with a faint amount of suspicion, if only because he understands palms to be two things - the underside of his hand and these awesome huge leaves from some tropical tree or what have you. Or maybe it's young kid slang again, and not some intelligent metaphor in which to best relate Frei's situation (which, in Todoh's mind, could still be resolved largely by manufacturing female dogs, clearly mass production technology has been able to catch up so that it's accessible to everyone, like... hygiene).
"Hrm." The master(?) considers this all the same with a rare moment of contemplation(?) and clarity(?). As though there is something more to this youngster with this differently-colored(?(?)) hair in their little discussions and lectures and issues and... other... such... contemplative things.
The bow is met, as though on cue. He immediately goes back to fanning himself, his face even. People have generally started to get back to what they're doing. The show of crazy disrespectful yelling in the wrong places has, for the moment, appeared to pass. But then again, there is no single spot on Earth that is safe from a potential Todoh appearance.
The moon and Jupiter might be at risk. (Ryuhaku Todoh has come to a gentleman's understanding with Mars.)
"Well then! If you've learned something today, I'm going to... get to... hm, say, enlightenment, yes."
A man some ways away is wearing a well-worn white gi with short black hair. He might be about old man Todoh's age, give or take a few years. He has been peacefully sitting there the whole time and not just suddenly thrust into the setting, yet to be 'graced' by the presence of the 'greatest' martial artist of them all.
The Todoh man closes his fan, rubs his hands and makes an evil giggle that men his age should not be making, and starts creeping over there on his tippy toes to leave Frei in relative peace.
Log created on 14:52:47 09/10/2009 by Todoh, and last modified on 07:35:00 01/26/2010.