Post by Kimitsu Zombie on Jul 4, 2017 0:34:57 GMT -5
The dojo was a din of yells, thuds and slaps but to Kimitsu Zombie it was a welcoming static of noise. She looked around and marveled at all the students getting ready and you could almost see the sense of anticipation in the room as everyone keeps stealing glances at her table. She sits at the end of the table with some older men in suits and gi. She looks elated and notices the cameraman focusing on her. She whispers.
“Fuck off. Do the panoramic view… You did that? Well… I’m just excited. I didn’t grow up going to a proper dojo. Tokyo was kind of like a private sensei since he figured I wouldn’t get on with people. Well look at me now! A judge. Gave me a clipboard and everything. Anyway, we’re in Baltimore and this school is affiliated with Tokyo’s Puroresu Karate. They wanted a Zombie to help with things but Siberia and Kowloon were busy. They had to settle with me. Look at the little fuckers. Some of the juniors are getting ready to test for their belts today and we got some other stuff going on for the teens and adults.”
Kimitsu looks around and notices more of the people staring at her especially two of the judges next to her.
“Uhm, I need a smoke.”
She walks outside and quickly lights up a cigarette. She exhales twice before noticing a younger girl standing next to her. The girl has short purple hair and two nose piercings. Her jeans have holes at the knees and the text on her shirt is sarcastic. She stares at Kimitsu through a thick slab of eyeshadow.
“What the fuck!” Kimitsu rounds on her and she flinches and holds her hands up.
“We didn’t think you would come!” The girl holds her hands up and Kimitsu stops.
“Why not?”
“They think you're a bad influence.”
“What! Listen, Kimitsu is for the children. I brought the Union Battleground cameras so the fans could see what I do outside work.”
The girl looks at her quizzically.
“Ok. Fine. I know I ain't the best candidate but I'm here. Now. Why are you not in there? The yaburi is a good tradition.”
The girl leans back against the wall and crosses her arms. ”I don’t care about that. I don’t want to be here. Hey… can I have one?”
Kimitsu smirks and looks at the girl. She is only slightly younger but holds herself like a young woman. “How old are you?”
“Six-”
“Forget it, I don’t give a shit. Here.” Kimitsu hands the girl her cigarette. The girl takes a drag and exhales with a relief of a seasoned addict. Kimitsu turns back to the camera and the girl leans on the wall. “This girl here is why we got these schools around everywhere. It’s to prevent more people like me from being without guidance. Even though this girl acts like she doesn’t care about what’s going on in there, I know it’s because she’s afraid of failing.”
“It’s not.”
“Sure it ain’t, Hot Topic. Let me explain something to the people. In this little building they sometimes teach Puroresu Karate. It’s just a mix of jiu jitsu, karate and catch wrestling and forms the basis of what the fighting Zombies use. Today they are doing a dojo yaburi. You can challenge anyone else in the dojo to try to rise up in the rankings. The wooden boards you might have seen on the walls, the nafudakake, are changed afterwards to reflect this. I noticed My Chemical Romance’s here board all the way at the end.”
“How did you know that was me? You don’t know my name.”
“It was the one in all black, right? Right. Anyway, this yaburi and being at this shit in general reminds me of my next opponent in Union Battleground, Saint Saito. This is a woman who is so like me but so unlike me. She would know all about yaburi and I want to introduce this concept in UB since it’s what I do every time I fight. Fuck with the rankings. I want my name to go up and over my opponent when I beat them and leave no doubt who was the better fighter. That’s what I’ll do in a few days time. The Zombies will go up and the Saitos will go down. Puff pass, Arashi.”
She motions for the teen to give her back her cig and the takes a long smug pull and hands it back.
“I figured that was the only way to get this Saito’s attention since she’s so fucking above it all that she doesn’t care about titles and shit. This is something weird for me. I know about her past. The kid was in the news back home and my father is a fan of her parents. I wonder how he feels about me facing their daughter. The fucker would probably still cheer for her. So all I have to do is take down her name. She goes on and on about her being Saito, the New Ace, like that means anything. We get someone proclaiming to be the future of pro wrestling every six hours on social media. Saint Saito can back it up though so I’ll give her that. She’s proven it already so all I have to do to get my nafuda over hers is to surpass her.
“If you look at us you would think that it would be no easy task. She has been fighting professionally her whole life. While she was making money and getting titles I was rolling around on a bike and stealing. What kind of weak fighter loses a belt to a fucking kid. I may not come from such a prestigious lineage as she does but mine is as rough as hers is pure. She’s been given all the tools to succeed and all she’s had to do is maintain that level. That’s what she’s been doing. Staying her brutal Saito self kicking and punching her way to mediocrity. She’s been at this same level so much that she’s fucking so bored of fighting. Me? I improve.”
“I’ll give our precious Saito a challenge. I come from the world of bosozoku, street gangs and Zombies. In my world you aren’t born with a name and a silver spoon. You earn this shit. Like that class in there today, I have to fight to improve myself and I care. The only way Saito cares about anything is if it doesn’t match up with her image of being an asshole kicker. Well it’s time to smash that image. I learned in the streets to be unpredictable, savage and just pain mean. People like Saito look down on on people like me like we’re rats, but I also learned how to survive. She can come at me with whatever she wants and I will take it and give it back with a little more gusto. It won’t be the same as a trained and honed attack of a legacy. It’ll be the wild chaos of a rebel.”
She pauses and laughs as the girl sheepishly passes back the cig so she could finish it.
“Good. Now, these yaburi things used to be a lot more serious. They used to be when a stranger shows up at your school’s door and challenges everyone. If he beat them all then he could fight the sensei. If he beat them then they took the sign of the school with him and it would close down. Now some people just held the sign until they received payment for it, but others just broke it and ended it all. Tokyo-sensei used to do this in Japan to kill off some McDojos but he never broke them completely. He had a whole room of signs of broken dojos. It was a learning experience.
That is what I’ll do to the Saito name. Saint Saito needs to see that she isn’t the toughest beast in this jungle. All that bravado and talk that comes from experience won’t mean shit when it comes up against the roughest diamond in the Zombie Clan. I’ll tear that image apart… oh and speaking of images this is for Britain Jade’s pretty ass. Saint Saito is my quarry. You can do whatever you want before or after the match but if Saito shows up for me I want her all to myself. If you interfere you will end up in the gutter with that ex of yours.”
Kimitsu suddenly reaches over and grabs the girl by the hair and blows smoke in her face.
“Now I didn’t work my way up as a Zombie by acting like a brat. Once I decided to grow I stuck with it. Now you go in there and give a fuck! Make senpai notice you.”
Kimitsu pushes the girl back and she bows and runs inside. Kimitsu laughs.
#ooc Life's been a right bastard for me lately so I had to work on this a little bit at a time, but ah well, what's important is that it's done and I didn't no-show, lol. Best of luck to Kimitsu Zombie--in spite of, well, life, it's been good RPing with you!
Google docs has this down at 1500 words. I hope you enjoy! ^__^ So, the one-sided beatdown on stupid name guy was a bust. Victory snatched away by an opportunistic coward, but he was only half the problem. The other half being someone who seems to either not learned her lesson yet or just has a death wish. I’m betting on the latter. Ah well, no point in crying about it: both of them’ll get what’s coming to them in due time, I promise it. I shouldn’t let the likes of them bring me down, not when I’ve got a match against one Kimitsu Zombie.
Finally. Somebody worth killing.
****
“My name...is Sara Yoshiko Saint,” began Saito, speaking in her native English. She stood leaning against a dark, featureless wall, her arms crossed against her chest as she regarded the camera in front of her with disdain, as if that were her default emotion, which, in fairness isn’t too far from the truth. “You all know me as Saint Saito. And if any of you watching this video made the time to do a simple Google search you’d find a lot written about me: my accomplishments, my career all the way back to the age of thirteen, all that jazz. I’ve main evented at the Tokyo Dome and I won my first championship title when I was fourteen years old. I’ve done more in six years than most of all those other assholes in this business has ever done in their whole careers...but I’m not here to brag about all that shit. No, no, I’m here...to talk about heritage.”
She gave the camera a short, quiet laugh before she continued speaking.
“Now, I’ll bet you’re all wondering to yourselves: ‘Hey, Saito, we all know about your heritage! You’re a Japanese-American and blah-blah-'go fuck yourselves,” she said mockingly. “No, dumb shits, I’m not talking about being Japanese-American. No, no, I speak to you of wrestling heritage.”
Saito paused for a brief moment, and then, “See, those of you who made that Google search would know that I’m a multi-generational wrestler, but it’s more than that,” she said. “I’m more than that. I’m the scion of two wrestling families, as celebrated now as they were before my time, and I carry both their names into battle so I can honour them. Now, you might laugh and wonder what the hell does a girl like me know about honour, but it might surprise you that my family--my heritage--is important to me. Roll footage!”
The dark featureless wall suddenly sprang to life, as a projection filled the room Saito was standing in. The projection was old black-and-white footage of a wrestling match from the fifties, perhaps even early sixties. A large, burly man with dark hair and wearing (presumably) white wrestling trunks grappled with another man in a ring, making short work of him.
“The man you’re seeing here is my grandfather: Jack Saint, a proud ‘Murican of the greatest generation,” explained Saito, who now wore a faint smile on her face as she watched the footage. “Before he became a wrestler, grandpa here fought at Guadalcanal...probably trying to kill my hiiojiisan. Shit, he probably did kill my hiiojiisan, but, ehh, what’s a little squabble like dubya-dubya-two among future family, hmmm? Anyway, going off track, but look at this guy! He was a pretty good! Mat work’s not really my style...but you should never forget where you came from, and it was here, with him that my heritage began. Next!”
The projection changed to footage of another wrestling match, from the eighties. Featured chiefly was a tall, handsome man with dyed blonde hair and a muscular frame, working the crowds after bodyslamming his opponent.
“Daddy...” Saito said proudly, before she cleared her throat. “Ross Saint,” she added, more firmly. “The youngest of...a shitton of boys, let’s leave it at that, all of them wrestlers. He also had an amateur background: wrestled in high school, college, that whole she-bang. The dude was a total coke hound back in the eighties, but he had a list of championships that’s about as long as my leg, and he was famous across the Texas and California territories until he finally decided in the mid-nineties he wanted to wrestle in Japan...where he could find the toughest bastards in wrestling he could find.”
She then added, “And it’s a good thing too, considering who he eventually nutted into…” Saito realised what it was she had just said, and fought the urge to gag. “...Aaaaaand I need me some brain bleach after thinking that,” she told herself, and then coughed awkwardly before shouting, “Next!”
Next came footage from the nineties, of a young Japanese woman, dressed in a black wrestling singlet and white boots, silently screaming at her cowering opponent as she savagely kicked and punched her, beating her until the referee was forced to intervene.
“Emi Saito,” she told the camera. “One of the original dragons of the Saito Clan. She and her sister--my Aunt Sumie--were the terrors of joshi wrestling. She had it rough growing up: ran with more bad crowds than people on my hit list: yankii, bosozoku, short of the Yakuza you can name it. She and my Aunt Sumie, they were true delinquents. True Kamikaze Girls. And they brought that attitude--that violence--to the ring. My mom punched, she kicked, she beat people down into bloody pulps and with her sister straight-up murdered anyone and everyone who got in their way on their rise to the top of their game, and it was through my mom, through my aunt, that the Saito Clan was born and through the Saito Clan...I was born.”
The footage shut off, and the wall was back to it’s previous dark, featureless self. Saito turned around and leaned against the wall, staring into the camera lens as she spoke.
“I am who I am because of my heritage,” said Saito. “Just as Kimitsu Zombie is who she is because of hers. Sure, compared to mine, hers is simply that of a dirty little street rat, but she’s from the same world my mother used to live in: the world of gangs and violence. From her experience, I know what a bosozoku is capable of, and I can respect that. What’s more, I know that Kimitsu can fight...and the thought pleases me. It’s what I’ve been searching for ever since I stepped in a UB ring: a worthy opponent.
“You know, when I first read the match-up, my first feeling was happiness: Finally! Somebody worth killing! After weeks upon weeks of being forced to face mediocrity, I would savour this challenge like it was sweet strawberries and cream. The thrill of a good challenge is why I keep fighting. You can even say it’s the air I breathe, and believe me: I intend to breathe deep during this fight. And so...out of respect from one joshi to another--one who is worthy of that title--I say this:
“Kimitsu, you and I are from totally different backgrounds, but deep down we’re cut from the same cloth. You and me; we’re fighters. Fuck Nemesis and Emery Layton. Fuck Devereux and that piece of shit He-Man woman hating SOB, and the rest of those UB wannabes--it’s people like you and me, who live for this kind of shit, that are where it’s at. They say that you’re like a wild beast: savage and unpredictable, as quick to tear the other person’s throat out with your teeth as you are to say ‘Kon’nichi wa’. They say the same about me, too: Saint Saito, the New Ace of Pro Wrestling, a walking time bomb just waiting to explode, and God help anyone caught in the blast. Our match has the promise to be the one people talk about when they watch the next ten UB shows. Forget about the next big title match between...who-the-fuck-ever! Forget those ‘Oooh! Tag Team championships!' It's our fight that’s the real deal; a good, old fashioned fight between two batshit insane joshi...and win, lose or draw...the thought of that excites me!
“Now, that said…” added Saito with a playful smirk, before she bowed before the camera. “I look forward to killing you.”
Saito raised her head, and said, “Now, a warning for a certain blonde hooker with a death wish. On any other day I’d be happy to kill you, Jade, but a I warn you now: Stay the fuck away from me, and stay the fuck away from this fight...or you’ll know rage the likes of which drowning you in a toilet would feel like a wet dream in comparison. If you interfere, I will come after you and everything you care about with all the wrath of a dragon. ‘Kay? ‘Kay.”
Saito turned and was about to walk away, but then she suddenly stopped short of view, and returned back to her place and once again smirked into the camera.
“Oh, and Zombie,” she said, “Zonbi sai mo shinu koto ga arimasu.”
