When I hear so much as the utterance of her name, the first thought that comes to my mind is the little orange coil of her hair that sticks up over the rest of her head. The thoughts immediately proceeding that usually the grinding and clashing of steel, and after that are some boinging sounds that would make my mother spring up and shield my eyes.
Admittedly, Mom hasn't been quite so obsessively protective of me now because I'm a twenty-one-year-old man and she's been dead for two years.
What was I making noise about before? Blast it! I've forgotten already. Ever since I was a wee boy, I've had a bad habit of letting my mind wander about, like a lost kid in a shopping mall. It's like my mind is a subway, but I always get off my train of thought at the wrong stop. It's something that only seems to get worse the older I get. I can remember my mother telling me- Was it my mother we were talking about?
"Mr. Wolffe?" I was just about to step into my newest train of thought when my love interest comes running up to me at the last minute of the movie to hold onto my shoulders, begging me to stay with her. "Mr. Wolffe, it's time to go. We've got a schedule to keep."
No such luck here. I'm actually single, and the kind lady who played my other half in the motion picture of my mind just a second ago goes by XSEED – always capitalized. She's actually one of my escorts for the time being, and my eyes don't seem to be open. I think I might not be fully awake.
I open my eye to see the darling face of XSEED, staring at me with that look of hers that tells me she's not currently giving a fuck. Her blue eyes, while some of the prettiest eyes I've ever seen, looked down at my only just awakened face with an unblinking coldness. While cold, she is not expressionless. Her mouth is shut and crinkled towards its left end, like she just popped in her mouth a sour candy or smelled the repugnant stench from flesh of a durian. Her blonde hair lightly brushes against the tops of her shoulders. She's taller than me, though that's not saying much considering I'm 127 cm tall, but XSEED here has to be at least five feet in height.
She is dressed in uniform – that being a short-sleeved white collared and buttoned shirt with a black collar. The line of her buttons as well as her two breast pockets and the cuffs of her sleeves were similarly colored, black and with white hemming. She wore a pleated black skirt from her waist rather than around her hips as most people do nowadays. Around her collar was a thin blue ribbon which was tied into a neat and tidy bow. Neat and tidy was the word to use concerning XSEED actually. Her shirt was perfectly ironed with two creases stemming from her breast pockets down, and another three creased to the back of her shirt. Two of them mirrored the creases in the front, and one other one parallel to the line of her spine. The pleats of her skirt looked like they had just come off the rack at a supermarket.
Most notably, XSEED's pupils had somehow suffered some kind of mutation that caused them to separate and elongate to form an equality sign, "=", in each of her eyes. I thought that it had to be some sort of trick, like some sort of weird contact lenses to help hide her identity. Her name, "XSEED", was supposedly some sort of codename to begin with, so wearing contact lenses to help hide her identity even further didn't seem so farfetched.
"Mr. Wolffe, we should leave immediately." Though the urgency in her words seems to have risen, her tone of voice was as flat and unaffected as the icy deserts of the Antarctic. Only, that simile doesn't work because this is Gamindustri, and I'm not even sure if there is an Antarctic region. I'm not even sure if there are poles, let alone Arctic or Antarctic regions. "Mr. Wolffe, time is being squandered. For the sake if expedience, please comply."
My inability to stay focused is already wearing on poor XSEED, not that I particularly cared because XSEED has a bit of stick up her ass. However, for every joyless child with sticks so far up their rears that their gastrointestinal acids can reach it, there is almost always someone whom that stick is meant to represent…. No, I'm not sure what I meant by that, but my point is XSEED probably wouldn't be this way if not for a certain special someone.
*Boing! Boing!*
Speak of the Devil's volleyballs, the dull bouncing sound of two heavy exercise balls alerts both XSEED and I to a new face to this scene, but by no means a new face to either me or XSEED. This was XSEED's special someone, under whom she was subordinate.
"Exy, I thought I told you to get Robbie out of bed." Said the not very modestly named Marvelous, who I happen to like a whole lot more than Ms. Seriouspants here.
She wore the same uniform as her junior, and she even used similar contact lenses as XSEED, sporting orange musical notes in her eyes rather than equal signs. She was taller than her junior, and much more pleasingly built, but I'll get into that later – I can only dream. Her orang hair was voluminous and bouncy, cutting off just short of her shoulders and giving her head the vague silhouette of a bell. Poking out somewhere from atop her head was an outgrown orange cowlick that looped twice. I question why anyone would let their hair grow this way rather than just cut off the resistant spiral, but I'm currently entertaining the thought that there might be some function to Marvy's cowlick. Perhaps she uses it as skull-mounted third arm, or more likely is that she uses it to help cultivate the mystical energies for her special attacks. Or even more likely that that is the possibility that I'm full of crap.
Because I can still see XSEED here, let me get one crack in about how her chest is so flat that I could sit my head upon her lap and see naught but the clear blue sky when looking up. And just so I don't look like a complete pig for saying that, let's talk about Marvelous and how she's built like two cantaloupes tied to the bit of mast above a ship's crow's nest, and still there was almost no difference in the size of her uniform from XSEED's to compensate for her world cradling boobage. Honestly, she was one frustratingly placed button away from calling down the angels to sing hallelujah as the gates to paradise open and scorch the mortal world by exposing it to the radiant beauty which lies just beyond them.
Getting away from her tits because I'd probably die of asphyxiation amongst the peach colored mou– she has wrapped a grey cardigan around her waist and three blades lay sheathed or otherwise not in use on her left side. Seamless segue. Two blades appeared to be very traditional Japanese swords, though they did not appear to have been forged as twin blades. One both were black at the hilt, but one was sheathed in an orange scabbard while its slightly larger counter part was sheathed in black. The third weapon she kept at her side was a much broader, much heavier looking sword, though the blade was also the shortest of the three.
"I'll be out in a minute, Marvy. XSEED and I were having a chat, and I think I started to ramble on." I almost forgot, I've developed this bad habit of lying at the expense of other people for a laugh.
This a fact which poor XSEED has yet to adapt to. "Wait, what?" Said XSEED, looking rather dismal in her own quiet way.
"It's no problem, Robbie. XSEED, you should know better than to waste time when we've got a schedule to keep." Marvy scolded XSEED, which I at least thought was funny.
This little joke was truly made worth it by the look of discontent on XSEED's face that told me she and I would never become friends.
…
After a quick douche in the collapsible shower I found my outfit for this Wednesday and then got dressed. I say it's my Wednesday outfit, but all my clothes are the same, really. With no mirror, I've only the reflection off the water of the pond I drained for my shower earlier to tell me how I look. And because the pond is not the most eloquent of speakers, she quite plainly tells me that I look like the unholy spawn of Shotaro Kaneda and a leprechaun.
"Well fuck you too, pond. I don't gotta take your shit. I pay my taxes, thank you." I said, taking a piss in the water immediately after.
Though I'm talking mess now, I'd probably back down were I talking to a body of water with connections to the ocean because pissing off the ocean is a good way to get your ass killed. Not the rest of your body, mind, just your ass. This is especially problematic for me because my shota buns are my best feature. How am I supposed to pick up all the would-be-cougars if I don't have something behind me to fill their hearts with questionable desires as I walk away?
Now that I think about it, I do sort of live in the shadow of Shotaro Kaneda. He isthe ur-shota, after all. While I am content to take full advantage of my faux-prepubescent looks to score honeys in the bars, I can only do it because of the legacy which my predecessor, nay, my Daisenpai left behind. Indeed, I would not have scored so much choice tail in were it not for him, after whom the complex is named.
Going back to the pond, I, now with a new lease on things, look back at my own reflection…. "Well, I'm still short…." I though aloud. I guess I should consider myself lucky to have made it over four feet. My hair's still that shade of red that looks like I fell asleep on a pillow made by H. J. Heinz Company. So I'm short, I'm a redhead, and to top it all off my shirts are always green. Granted while my shirts are sleeveless, and while my gold lies in the shimmering thread of my hemming rather than at the termination of a rainbow, I guess I do make a pretty good leprechaun. It's the brown knickers that really kill the ladies, tho.
"I'm a shota/leprechaun…. It's like I'm multiclassing." Incidentally, shota/leprechaun sounds like the name of an alternative to BABYMETAL made to appeal to all the Shotacons out there.
"Are you done primping?" I could hear XSEED's unfeeling voice scolding me from a distance of no more than ten paces. "Vain." Says the one who has math symbols in her contacts, and yes I am still going with the idea that those are contacts because what else could they be?
"Where's Marvelous? I like her a lot more than you." I said, as directly as I could because beating around the bush is bad for the word count.
"Sempai is scouting the path ahead. She will notify me if the level of threat before us requires that we plan an alternate route." She said,
"Threat? What threat? The monsters here don't grow far passed level twenty." Seriously, you'd think a traveling party of three would be able to cover ground more quickly.
Between XSEED's bullheadedness when it comes to protocol and my inability to keep my mind off of Marvy's tits, it takes us two days' time to travel half a day's walk.
And I'm not going to get more mature anytime soon, so XSEED has to learn to cut loose a bit.
Over two thousand words in now, and I have just begun to realize how much time I've spent talking and how little I've managed to say. Now that I've engaged in an argument with XSEED over the point of her and Marvelous's misplaced meticulousness, I suppose now is as good a time as any.
My name is Robert Wolffe, lead logistics planner and spearhead in Lastation's Vita Revitalize project, and yes the italics are entirely appropriate for there is a slight forte in the pronunciation of the project's title. Vita Revitalize, itself is Lastation's effort to increase the morale of Lastation's populace after some… over ambitious projects did not meet the expectations set out for them. My job is to manage personnel, equipment, and most pressingly the location for which the project will operate from. As of yet, no location has been settled upon, but I'm currently wading through the wilderness with my guard party of Marvelous and XSEED in search of a remote area out of range of any possible foreign aggression…. Not that we expect for the other three nations to attack us, but if they do challenge us, we will meet them with an appropriate response.
Admittedly, I probably would have much less trouble in this assignment had I chosen to travel alongside a caravan, rather than on foot with two broads from some paramilitary ninja school that I'm not entirely sure exists at all. However, if given the choice between a caravan with lobster stocked fridges and a pair of sexy ninja girls with whatever food they can carry on their backs, I know what I'd rather eat.
"Whatever!" I shouted because talking to XSEED was like talking to a brick wall that also hates you. "You broads are the ones in charge of security. I leave it to you.
And I'll leave the fighting to you, too."
"Such is preferable." Said XSEED.
Off in the distance, we could see an orange flare explode in the sky above the trees. If all was going as planned, that was Marvy's all clear signal, which I didn't much care for for reasons you'll see later. In response, XSEED produced her own flare gun from out of nowhere. Raising it high above her head, though I suspect that she'd rather aim it at me, XSEED fired a blue flare into the open sky to assure Marvy that things were fine on our end.
"Mr. Wolffe, sempai has given us the all clear signal. We should go to her at 'once'." XSEED's emphasis on our expedience was not lost on me, but traveling anywhere at this point would be problematic. "Is something wrong?"
For a ninja, and for such a serious one at that, XSEED lacked an eye for detail. I'll give her the benefit of the doubt since she appears to be younger and probably lacks field experience. In my line of work, having a trained eye is crucial, and knowing how and why something ends bad is equally so. You see, flares are loud, they leave a trail, a scent, and more than anything they produce a fair amount of light. Anyone who's ever been out in the woods with creatures ready to stalk and kill causing such ruckus will only invite danger.
It's no surprise, to me at least, when I start to see the nasties poking their heads out at us from between the trees. Some of them mean looking with their fangs exposed, while others were cute. The CPUs are also cute, but I'm not about to get into fights with them either.
"We're surrounded." Said XSEED, to my back. "Wait. Where are you going?"
"I'm booking it, sweetheart." I am not a warrior. I am a logistics planner. Furthermore, my AGI stat is my second best feature, right behind my buns.
And there you have it. Two ninja girls with one pair of breasts between them, and me with all my shotaro goodness. Right now, all I want to do is collect a paycheck and maybe a little motor boating. XSEED is having a time I'm sure, but she's trained to fight. She'll be fine, and I'll just keep running until I see Marvy.
