"You're shorter than I thought you'd be."
Those were not words Tatanka had thought he'd ever hear from anyone, let alone a Japanese woman.
But there she was, looking at him appraisingly, head tilted ever so slightly down to look into his eyes.
"That's because you're wearing high heels, Onishi-chan," the girl with the intense eyes sighed in Japanese.
The girl - Onishi-chan - looked at him for a moment, head tilted slightly, and reached down and took off her heels. She was still very tall, but suddenly she was almost two inches shorter than him, enough that he could look down at her and know that at least not all of it was the fact that he was still wearing shoes.
"Onishi!" Another girl - this one wearing a leather jacket over her tank top in an apparent bid for heatstroke - yelled at the girl standing in front of him, stomping over to her in a huff. "How dare you-"
"Can't you see I'm busy?" Onishi demanded imperiously, one hand on her hip as she turned to face the other girl.
The other girl paused, looking suitably irrate, and stomped over to where Onishi was, taking off her massive leather boots. Shoving Onishi out of the way, she stood in front of him, barely over an inch shorter than him. "Now what?" The girl in leather demanded of Onishi.
"You idiot! Don't you even know what I was doing?" Onishi demanded.
"Well it's not like you told me!" Other-girl retorted.
Very suddenly, Tatanka found himself looking at a cat fight between two barefoot members of Team Japan.
"Don't their feet hurt?" the blonde girl asked the one with the piercing blue eyes.
"From standing on the tar in the sun? I don't think they notice," the other girl replied, looking at the two girls. The blonde girl was busily unbuttoning her shirt, and as she worked on the third button, Tatanka realized with a jolt that she was apparently planning to take it off.
The blue-eyed girl, not even turning around, reached to the side and did up all three buttons, straightening the girl's collar almost absentmindedly as the blonde pouted at her.
"Ah!" the two girls barefoot on the tar exclaimed at once. "Hot!" Dancing around, they raced back to their shoes, shoving at each other as they tried to put their shoes on faster. He thought leather-girl was going to go down when Onishi elbowed her in the gut, but the other girl, one boot on, put her in a headlock and pushed her down. Unfortunately, since she was only standing on one foot, she went down too.
Tatanka thought it was time to end this. "You're going to lose the World Cup," he told the girl with the intense eyes in his best attempt at Japanese.
She blinked back at him, and suddenly the blonde burst out laughing, and the two tall girls roared, "What did you just call Kakei-sensei?!"
When Panther told him the next day he looked like he'd been mauled by a wildcat, he replied, "Two."