Posts
1
Elsewhere Accepted / Johnny Kazama
« on: 05/06/2019 at 16:47 »
E L S E W H E R E A D U L T
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Character Name: Shinnosuke “Johnny” Kazama
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Blood Status: Pureblood
Education:
Mahōtokoro, age 7 - 17
Hogwarts (Gryffindor), age 17-18
Residence: Hogwarts -> London
Occupation: Delinquent Hogwarts Student
Do you plan to have a connection to a particular existing place (for example: the Ministry, Shrieking Shack) or to take over an existing shop in need of new management? No
Requested Magic Levels:
- Charms: 8
- Divination: 10
- Transfiguration: 6
- Summoning: 8
Please list any other characters you already have at the site: Ic, Rafa, Dol...
Biography:
With a scowl so deep it scratched itself into his soul, Shinnosuke watched her backside shrink away along the platform. Rage and betrayal moved in like bacteria to the wound, cheeks heating (attack! attack!) to purge to rile to wrestle the beast that beastly seized him, grip like jaws around his chest.
She promised.
“Yeah?” he shouted her down, edged with a scream. “If that’s how it’s gonna be, then don’t come back!”
Of course she’d said as much of her plans only moments ago.
“I don’t even need you!” He did. “And I don’t want to see you again, I don’t want you! I never did!”
He did not notice the swell of her shoulders as she sighed, the stitch in her step before faster she went. He did imagine her voice on the breeze, a sweet stern sound to the tune of goodbye, Shin— and that was all.
Whatever god or monster he had to thank for her refusal to turn around, he would never come to offer it; there was too much shame and pride in his tears that he would never acknowledge this moment again.
The curse he threw landed instead in the empty soda bottle tight in his fist. It would scream at Junko Nishimori, trapped in thick brown glass, until it found its way with him to the forest.
The trees were his refuge, his therapy the moss. They wicked away all that clung to his mind. They were forgiving. People, less so. He liked it that way. He could rip to shreds his mother’s heart, his father’s honor, his sisters’ respect, and smile knowing they would always think of him. The forest, he thought, tended to forgive and forget. The only act of violence he had ever shown the trees was the strength of his arm, the weight of the bottle, the impact against a green trunk that shattered the glass in between.
It was here that Junko Nishimori had saved his life when Shinnosuke Kazama had been stupid enough to lose it. He would almost swear, if he believed in that kind of thing, that some part of it remained in the center of the forest, over the edge of a slick mossy drop. There were times he even wondered if that was how it had always been.
He sat firmly on the roots of a maple. The fine moss did little to cushion him, but showed its affection instead by leeching the dew through black denim.
Stupid America. Stupid girl. How dare she go back when this was her home? How dare she get married to anyone but him? Stupid age and stupid husbands and stupid stupid stupid Shin—
He pulled a gnarled length of dogwood out of his boot, holding it like viciousness did a blade. Quietly, he summoned a shard of the bottle to his hand and dug the edge into the thick black sole of his boot where her name was carved with a penknife in Hiragana: a vow to her then, and a vow to himself now. Forget her. And never use Hiragana again. And don’t miss her. Whatever you do, Johnny, don’t miss her.
She laughed like a wandering stream in the springtime, grew stern in the thunk of the shishi-odoshi somewhere in the garden nearby. Impishly, he grinned, legs swinging over the edge of the engawa.
“Johnny!”
(It righted again as the bamboo filled with the clear cool water, with the brightness of his eyes on her.)
“You can’t distract me, we have to go over your wandform!” Junko puffed her cheeks in patient frustration, and reached for the length of dogwood he held backward, and tight. He kept it well out of her limited reach. “Funny though you may be,” she tried and failed again, “it’s my responsibility that you get it right. Now, you are not a ninja, you are a wizard: there is no such thing as backward wielding. It’s not a sai.”
On her third attempt they grappled, and the student used his cloth-wrapped knee, caught in his robe still pale blossom pink, to gain the advantage over her. The both of them laughed until he pinned her to the dark wooden porch.
“You used to be so little,” Junko said in a sober retreat, too soft to shun the forwardness and strength in his arms. “I carried you up that hill.” He had been dead weight.
Shin, nearly serious, leaned a little further in. “How could I forget?” How could he remember?
“Don’t kid about stuff like that, that was a really hard time for all of us. And you’re lucky! You’re lucky for it, because if I hadn’t been out there too and seen that kappa, you might still be in that ditch.”
“I—”
“Maybe your sisters let you get away with your antics because they’re all too traditional to speak up, but you’re going to listen to the person who saved your life, Shinnosuke Kazama, and hold your wand like a wand,” she said firmly, pushing him easily back to his own, “or I’m going home.”
He didn’t think she meant it like that.
He called himself Johnny because she wanted to call him that too. Her American accent when speaking Japanese was intrusive at even her greatest effort; her predilection to calling him Shinny over Shin-chan led only naturally when he paid attention to her lessons only to transfigure the pants of his gi into blue jeans. If it meant he was trying, she let him.
It got him trouble at Mahōtokoro, but there was very little about him that didn’t. Junko did her best to explain away the antics of the underclassman she was paid to tutor, but their instructors were all much wiser than entertaining the attempts of either. They called him by the name his parents gave, and he argued about the magic of choice and of will, and Junko all in gold bowed so deeply the tips of her hair dragged on the ground while Johnny made even pink look macho as he combed his pompadour higher. Both earned detention, but for how she heard him defend himself, beneath her shame she was so, so proud.
They were a little harder on her while she attended the school, in part because of her heritage (she was a halfblood, born and raised in America) and then because of a bit of fear. Her family’s return Japan was said to be suspicious, having neatly fit within events of the war. Shinnosuke never listened to the whispers behind hands; he was too busy using his own against her heartless detractors. Whatever the story of her family had been, Junko never did anything wrong.
The professor’s quarters would be crawling with stink beetles come sundown.
He called himself Johnny to be like her, because he wasn’t. Not at all.
Maybe she was right about him. She was right about everything else.
His room presented her evidence on each surface. Trophies for racing from innocence forgotten; the old broom mounted above the door like a sword; a plush kappa worn to its threads, its indented head sagging, void in its dull black eyes; frames of bugs stuck through with pins, iridescent wings spread in false flight. Only mended wounds in the paper wall declared its boy’s real age, torn in the size of adolescence’s fist.
Maybe he did need to—
No. There was no such thing.
Johnny Kazama lay smoking on the ground, bootlace knots still tight as secrets. With his bottom half splayed on the soft tatami, shoulders pressed flat on the engawa with his hair extending toward heaven, he reached lazily for the distant sky beyond the garden wall. He imagined his fingers touching hers, somewhere across the sea.
That night took him along a path he had been so often before, but he could not possibly have guessed where he would stand at the end.
He’d been to yelling, to the silent treatment, to pretending the other wasn’t there at all. He’d been to the temple, all its steps up the hill, with a mind he could not clear of emotions he did not want, no matter how hard the clap on his shoulder. It sounded through the grand red room, rattled through the lanterns as if they felt it too, the burl of his unrepentant rage released. He’d been to goodbye in all that running away.
“You want to call yourself ‘Jo-ni?’ Speak ‘English?’ Wear ‘blue jeans’ and leather?” The derision in his father’s voice around the foreign words on his tongue were bilious and ugly, his agitation viral. “Perhaps you will be better behaved in an environment that tolerates these behaviors and ridiculous hairstyles!”
His mother disguised her fretting with nonchalance. “For your own good, Shinnosuke, and for our family, we won’t have you being some delinquent.”
“Fine! Send me to America!” Heels lifted as his voice raised.
“So you can hunt her down and ruin her marriage?” the old man barked. “You think we don’t know you, Shinnosuke. You think we’re all fools!”
“You can’t be certain it’s safe yet anyway, dear. I’m not about to lose you again.”
“You’ll go where I say, you’ll finish your education, and that’s all I’ll hear from you about it.”
“No!”
It was more than the accent he struggled to understand. It was the grey sky, the seasonless rain, the fish without soy sauce, the summer without cicadas, that was all so frightening and so very very new.
He lit a bummed cigarette off a wall torch, and ignored the emptiness when he drew a breath.
No one could make him go to Charms ever again.
Roleplay (Option 1):
He hadn’t been paying attention to the people who moved in their self-saved throngs around him, preferring to place his energy in enjoyment watching some owl in a cage. As it preened (he watched it for tips), the way its beak emerged from the fluff of feathers that belied its form beneath fascinated him sickly. Were it plucked and roasting, how much meat—?
“Merlin’s fog watch, my heel is broken! Help!”
Johnny had two thoughts when the shout broke the murmur of the crowd. No, he had two and a half, with the half being that people didn’t usually yell and it was kind of annoying, and the other two diverging rapidly from there. The first of these was that none of this made sense whatsoever. Perhaps his English English was in need of improvement, because watching fog and breaking heels were nothing he could translate— you would break a foot, wouldn’t you? Or maybe she meant a watch that was run by fog, or timed the fog? What was the use in any of this?
Secondly, were these people really just not responding to a cry for help in the crowd? Johnny Kazama would never be known as a humanitarian, but even he was offended by this. It just didn’t seem right. Unless this nonsense was actual nonsense... A diversion for thieves? He couldn’t see the woman through the bodies after all (though it wasn’t as if he was really looking) so…
“Yeah!” he shouted in obnoxious return. “Somebody do something!”
Like he was going to be dragged into this and robbed or something. No way.
OTHER
How did you find us? strawgoh
