When Touya Kouyo was seven, his parents died in front of him. He was heartbroken, and he was furious beyond words. He spent days at his goban, alone, with the last, uncompleted game still on the board. Endlessly, he played it, move for move, until- again, always- it came to the point where his mother had called them away.
Touya grew up to become a go player. He was a good go player, a fantastic go player even, and rose through the ranks to become one of Japan's best go players. Some said he was probably one of the best in the world.
But he never forgot his parents' deaths. He trained himself, testing and forcing until he was the pinnacle of man's achievements in both brain and brawn. He was rich from his father's go winnings, and he was later rich in his own right from his own go winnings.
(He always had room on his schedule, despite all the tournaments and pro games- he had a lot of clout with the older members of the Institute who remembered his father.)
-
Sai of the Fujiwara clan was brought to the present time by an occult ritual. As a consequence, he found himself attempting to take on the guise of a modern man (and failing, since he lacked a fundamental requirement of modern man: a continuously flightless body), and eventually taking on a protégé by the name of Shindo Hikaru.
It was a tiring story to be told of an evening, and Fujiwara no Sai, who was not, in fact, a go pro; who lived in a mansion given to him by the occultist who had brought him to the present day, and was alternately grateful and dismayed by this; who retained many aspects of his Heian life and upbringing; always took the time to tell it to his protégé, whom he had found one night as the subject of a different occult ritual when roaming the skies to watch over the city.
"Hikaru," he would say, "I was only twenty-seven when I thought my life was over…"
-
As Shindo grew, he met, and often clashed (although it rarely escalated beyond verbal violence), with Touya Akira, son and sidekick of the man secretly known as the Batman.
One such encounter follows:
At a 'masked' get-together, both the heroes Batman and Superman exchanged perfunctory and cordial greetings.
Their sidekicks did not.
Robin elected to greet Superboy by pulling out a portable magnetic goban and declaring, "Let's play." Superboy immediately accepted the challenge.
Eventually it fell to Fujisaki Akari, the girl many knew only as Wonder Girl, to end their altercation by bodily pulling them apart. (The adults had inclined themselves to focusing their attention to other junior heroes, pretending the arguing pair didn't exist, looking for the twain's guardians or sneaking off with the booze.)
Robin, having lost his cool, was cursing Superboy's obstinacy and shortsightedness, and Superboy was returning the favour.
Once Wonder Girl had separated them, it fell to Ogata Seiji, Plastic Man, to deal the punishment in lieu of their suddenly missing guardians (as well as the magnetic goban, a crate of booze, a pack of cards and most of the senior heroes).
After about half an hour, when he judged that the twain had had more than what was required of his pornographic shapeshifting, he stopped and left the traumatized two (and, unwittingly, some junior heroes, too curious for their own good), and sneaked off to simultaneously join the poker game and watch the go game between Superman and Batman.
The get-together ended with several junior heroes unable to properly fight crime for at least two days due to mental trauma, Ashiwara, aka Green Lantern III, leaving with the emptiest pockets, and an even split of the pot by Kurata (who, under the name of Oracle, preferred cyberspace these days, since his spandex was getting tight) and Ogata.
-
It was a long, cold, snowy day, and Ogata wasn't grateful at all for all the pretty snowflakes falling from the sky. In fact, he was downright pissed.
One of these days, he mused, he really ought to get his costume redesigned, preferably so he would have somewhere to store, in no particular order, cigarettes, a lighter or matches, his wallet, and condoms (no, scratch that last one, he could be his own condom).
He couldn't see at all why that thrice-damned green hero could insist on his being on top of a cold rooftop in broad daylight with the snow falling heavily. And in his regular skimpy costume with the v-neck almost reaching his navel and mere briefs rather than leggings- it was fine for summer, but damn if he didn't rue the day he'd made it come winter.
He was half considering just migrating to a nice warm country- heroes were welcome almost anywhere, especially JLJ members- when Ashiwara landed beside him.
"It's about time, you tadpole," Ogata muttered as best he could out of his frozen mouth. In fact, he was almost completely frozen in the twisty pretzel shape he'd made while waiting, so bored had he been.
"Sorry, Plastic Man-san," Ashiwara said with a lilt and a grin that made Ogata feel like a dirty old man when he definitely wasn't *that* old. "Here, let me warm you up."
While his words triggered firstly fantasies and secondly 'damn I *am* a dirty old man' thoughts in Ogata's mind, Ashiwara was wrapping him in a ring-generated field of warmth.
A few hours later, in Ashiwara's apartment, the first thought Ogata had when he woke up was of Ashiwara's innocent face and supposed inexperience. Inexperienced, his foot.
-
Sai was doing his usual daily patrol, watching out for anything out of the ordinary, when the cry rang out: "Help! Superman!"
Immediately he was off, long hair streaming back, to catch the young woman-
His arms went straight through her, and for a moment he thought her a youkai, and then he was trapped in a force-field. (Therefore, Sai thought, she had been what Hikaru says is a horoguramu or whatever-it-was, made of light and not real.)
He beat on the walls for about five minutes, finally deduced that it was futile to continue wasting his efforts, and then sat down and waited.
In the meantime, he went over his latest game with Hikaru. Really, that boy was improving by leaps and bounds.
Finally Kuwabara turned up.
Many in the hero community had secretly theorized that the reason for Kuwabara's enmity with the great and powerful Sai was the hair. Kuwabara, another juggernaut in the go world, and a powerful and well-connected man in his own right, with many sons, daughters, nephews, nieces and grandchildren in high places, was lacking in the hair department, and many secretly observed how long his remaining hair was- possibly an attempt to compensate for his balding pate.
Either way, what usually occurred when Sai and Kuwabara clashed was that Kuwabara attempted to kill Sai, or cut off his hair, or some combination thereof.
This occasion was no different. Kuwabara, on his floating platform, had a pair of gobans set up, in such a way that a move on one goban would be reflected on the other. They would, he said, be competing for his hair (as usual, thought Sai with a sigh).
The game was long, complex, intense and enjoyable (I don't get to play anyone other than Hikaru-kun and Touya-san much, Sai observed, and this is a truly worthy opponent). It ended with a half-moku win on Sai's part, and Sai was genuinely sorry that the game was done.
Kuwabara sulked, smoked his cigarettes, and finally released Sai.
Sai went home and duplicated the game for Hikaru, who whined and moaned about having to go over a stupid go game when he'd much rather go out and play soccer with the rest of his grade schoolmates.
-
Perhaps it was wishful thinking for Akari to continue this line of thought. Perhaps not. Either way, she was fairly certain that that stupid looking Arrowette (What kind of a dumb name was Isumi, anyway? Really, wasn't naming their child 'tomorrow's beauty' wishful thinking? What if the kid turned out ugly?) really didn't need to giggle over how good Hikaru and Akira looked together.
Not. At. ALL.
The sheer number of yaoi doujinshi containing highly sexualized versions of Robin and Superboy being shoved at her by Kaneko, who really didn't suit the spandex look very well, was irritating her further. She wasn't *blind*. She *knew* what was going on.
It was just that while those two were blind to what was really going on between them, everyone else was blind as to how she felt about the situation.
Hikaru was her friend, yes, and she *had* had feelings for him once, but it seemed that the public hadn't gotten over how compatible Wonder Girl and Superboy had looked long after she had gotten over him. The high stacks of Wonder Girl/Superboy doujinshi selling so quickly at cons were testament to that.
It just pissed her off that everyone seemed to think that she was a completely oblivious, blithering idiot.
Even that green monkeyboy Mitani patted her shoulder every time he saw her, trying to sympathise with her. Honestly, Tsutsui really had to keep a rein on him. Maybe with some steel wire. And that dratted big-boobed Ichikawa *kept* calling her up to regale her with all the little details she had noticed about the ~*frisson*~ between Akira and Hikaru. Akari was pretty sure she was more interested in the nuances of Akira's butt in those green briefs than the nuances of Akira's relationship with Hikaru.
She almost wanted to set the two of them up herself so they would get together and take the spotlight off her *poor*, *heartbroken* self.
-
Mitani was a natural joker. It was a defensive mechanism, to protect him from people who cared to make light of his green skin and hair. They wouldn't mock him if he already mocked himself.
Tsutsui was one of the few that didn't just see him as a capering fool. But then, Tsutsui was worse off- he had had his arms and legs amputated, and was now a melding of man and machine. So they were both abnormal. So what?
Mitani got off easy. He refused to allow people to ridicule him, so he wasn't ridiculed (much). Tsutsui just stood back and let them do it.
Mitani always stood up whenever someone in earshot made mock of Cyborg and let them have it. It always started off with how rude it was to make fun of a quadruple amputee, worked up to the fact that he had lost his mother in the same accident and finished up with the exclamation that he had accepted the mantle of a hero thrust upon him by his father, even though he could have quit and been a (relatively) normal person long since.
Tsutsui had caught him at it just once, and told him, "Stop it." There had been a long argument about who was in the right, but eventually Mitani stopped. For a while.
-
Ashiwara wasn't a particularly brave man.
He still wasn't entirely clear how he'd gotten the ring- he'd been drunk far worse than was usual for him- but he did know that he had a lot to live up to, as quite a few of his new peers had told him.
He did wish they wouldn't group him with the junior heroes, though. He outclassed most of them in terms of ability, and he *was* older than many of them.
Then, in an apparently misguided attempt to evoke some sense of camaraderie, someone (Ashiwara thought perhaps Superman) decided to organize a go tournament amongst the 'junior' heroes, which, it now seemed, included himself. He objected on the grounds that he was himself a go pro- although his heroics now affected his attendance record, if something major was going on- and would outclass the other, younger, much more inexperienced players.
That was before he found out that many of them already played go on their own. Even Robin and Superboy were go pros too- and now he knew that, he could guess who they were.
He didn't win the tournament, in the end- that was an intense battle between Robin and Superboy both on the goban and afterwards when they discussed the game- but he did manage to find out that quite a few heroes were go pros. He speculated on who was who.
It was fairly easy to work out that Ogata was Plastic Man, though.
-
Akiko was a nimble, sly young lady, and while slyness was useful for a thief, it wasn't considered a good trait for a young lady.
So it was that she found herself on a rooftop, standing with a bag full of stolen statues, figurines and jewellery at her feet, returning the Batman's stony glare with a grin of her own. She had made an attempt to contact him, and he had answered her call.
"What is it, Catwoman?" he asked, his gravelly voice sending shivers down her spine. She shook her head, to clear it. Kouyo should be the one in her mind now.
"I'm quitting thievery," Akiko announced with a flourish, pointing to the bag full of stolen goods. "That's all the swag I haven't managed to fence yet."
"And you think that's going to stop me from catching you?" he growled, taking a step closer. "You've yet to pay for all the valuables you *have* fenced. And even if you returned all that, you still have to serve time for what you did to get your hands on them in the first place!"
"Always the pessimist," she purred. She stepped back, ready to flee should he attack.
He didn't. He stared at her for a few seconds, then turned his back on her. "I'm going to trust you," his voice came, soft and wary. "When I turn back round, I should only see that bag. Not you."
A chance. A chance to leave, and start over. A chance to start a life with Kouyo, a domestic, non-adventurous life.
Of course, he was also giving her a chance to escape- again- with the loot.
But that was exactly what he was trusting her *not*to do, wasn't it?
"Thank you," she said quietly, and left, empty-handed.
(Of course, the shit later hit the fan when she discovered old scars on Kouyo that matched clawmarks she remembered scratching on Batman- but that's another story altogether.)
-
Hikaru had been eight when he was kidnapped. He had been lured away from the playground by a kindly-looking old man with promises of sweets and toys and such wonderful things that little boys love. (In retrospect, he later thought, he had been a very gullible child.)
The sweets had been drugged (of course), and when he woke, he was cold and naked in a cage, which was liberally splashed and splattered with vomit, faeces, and- he gagged even at its memory- blood. The latter had the largest splashes of the three and indeed was apparent on the faeces and vomit as well.
Still, he was a spunky boy, and when the red-cloaked men came, with knives and chains and handcuffs, he bit at anyone that was in reach of his teeth.
He managed to delay the ritual in which he was to be eviscerated, but only by about an hour. That hour was enough for him, he later thought, because its extra time meant he would live longer.
In that hour, he accomplished nothing, except prayer to any listening deities, and deciding to make it as difficult as possible for them to kill him.
The apparent chief of the ritual, nose still dribbling blood from Hikaru's headbutt, was about to bring the wickedly sharp, rusty and still slightly bloody knife down into Hikaru's stomach when, quite suddenly, Hikaru was no longer locked in the now broken shackles. He wasn't, in fact, in the room any longer. Just as suddenly, all the knives in the room were broken and useless.
Although Sai managed to capture all the red-cloaked men, the ritual went on within the enchanted circle, and with no one to focus its intended power on, turned back on the almost-victim.
When Sai came to retrieve Hikaru from the safe place where he had placed him, he saw that Hikaru's bruised, battered body was daubed with strange glowing marks, which Hikaru had apparently been trying to scrub off, futilely.
It was only three months later that Sai officially made Hikaru Superboy. It was better, he rationalized, to keep an eye on the boy and his new magically-induced powers, than to leave the boy to experiment on his own and cause trouble. (He had had to intervene too many times, and the incident with the Tokyo Tower had been the last straw.)
-
Touya Akira had been trained as a superhero since his birth. His predecessor, Kurata, now Oracle, had told him, when he was seven, "You've got a lot more to live up to than I did, kid. Good luck."
And it was true. Kurata had been picked up off the streets and adopted while Touya Kouyo was still a bachelor, and had stumbled into becoming Robin almost by accident. Akira, on the other hand, had grown up from day one in a loving home with Batman for a father, Catwoman for a mother, Robin for a big brother, and a man from the Heian era, supernaturally endowed with flight and superspeed and superstrength and all those other superpowers, for a godfather.
Compounding this was the lineage of go players he had been born into. He couldn't *not* play go or fight crime. It was in his blood. It was his *life*.
He was nine when his father first took him out on patrol. He had already been raring to go since he was eight, when his beloved godfather took on a sidekick with *stupid* powers that *he* didn't have and the attention span of a hummingbird. (No, not a hummingbird. That was that impulsive Waya. Shindo was more like a monkey.)
In any case, it was that boy who lorded his sidekick status over Akira every chance he got. When Akira discovered how poor he was at playing go, he used this discovery to shut that stubborn fool up for once.
(After that incident, Sai was pleased to note a marked and positive change in Hikaru's attitude towards go.)
As both grew, they developed a sort of partnership in terms of crime-fighting, often aiding each other in capturing Clayface or Manga Maniac. Unfortunately, this amicability didn't extend to the goban, and whenever Hikaru was at the Touyas' house, Akiko was forced to pull out her old claws to intervene.
Sometime in their junior high years, one of them came up with the idea of playing blind go while they were doing their vigilantism. They kept having to start over in the early days, having lost the shape of the stones in the course of detective work or bomb-stopping.
Eventually they managed to work their way up to the middle of chuban before losing the shape.
Of course, when they tried it with Waya, he mocked them for not being able to get up to yose like he could. But then, that was blind go, and the three were almost even on the goban.
-
Batman was busy with the Riddler's puzzle. This one was particularly difficult to take apart, and he was enlisting Robin's help in figuring out the code. It was quite heavy, too, so there was no question of taking it back to the Batcave.
"Got it," Robin said triumphantly, and his fingers punched in the numbers on the pad.
The box opened, to reveal an oversized goban, with a game on it in the late stages of yose. On closer inspection, it wasn't a true goban, since the stones were pegs, instead, and so wouldn't slide around.
Batman considered the board, carefully, and then had Robin place the white pegs while he placed the black, completing the game.
Once complete, the goban fell apart, this time to reveal an electronic chess board.
While Robin let out a groan of frustration, foreseeing that he wouldn't get back to play with the baby anytime soon, Batman reached for the white queen.
-
Waya was buzzing around Isumi again. Isumi wasn't very sure why- after all, Isumi wasn't a superhero like Waya- but he liked Waya's company.
The constant movement, the constant nattering, the constant impatient urgings to "getamoveonandputthestupidstonealready, you'retakingforever!" … these were music to his ears.
Waya, he considered, was something like a puppy on a permanent sugar high.
"I*su*miiiiii!" came the familiar whine. "C'mon! Let's play blind go! Me first! 10-17!"
Isumi wasn't sure how Waya would ever have the patience to become a go pro, but he responded
anyway: "5-13." Besides, playing with someone whose mind was stuck on speed go was helping him to think through the moves faster.
---
Written for blind_go round 007 for the ID teratani. Can you guess all the superheroes?