Only You Can Save the World! – A Death Note fanfic
Light raised the potato chip up to his mouth, letting the light catch his teeth before viciously chomping down, throwing his head to the side like a crocodile and spraying crumbs across the room.
"Again!" cried his trainer. "You've got to be more photogenic! You think chip-eating comes naturally? Quality chip-eating takes years of practice! And you want to cram it all into a two-week session? I couldn't even teach you the basics of chip-eating in two weeks! Ah, my job gets harder every day. What are you staring at? Again, again!"
Light narrowed his eyes and turned back to the camera. He raised the chip to his mouth again, this time leaning over to keep his eyes out of the shot, and crunched down again, this time finding a fault point on the edge of the chip and making it shatter into a hundred pieces.
"What is this crap!" cried his trainer again. "Is the potato chip gonna injure you? Are you afraid of the potato chip? Hi (here he spoke in a high-pitched voice), I'm Light Yagami and I'm afraid of potato chips. You think this is a support group or something? Again!"
Frustrated, Light whipped his arm across his face and bit in the opposite direction, utterly sundering the bits of chip from each other. Potato chip flew all over the desk, all over Light's suit, all over the piece of paper that was supposed to be his homework. His arm followed through, for the sake of the thing, and he bent his head, looking for all the world like a ninja having executed a complicated technique.
"Now, now, let's not get overconfident," said his trainer, but more calmly this time. "You've gotten the basics down, even though you have a long road ahead. Well, let's see how it looked on the slow-mo."
Further down the hall, unbeknownst to Light, L was sitting in a chair in his usual way, eating ice cream. Suddenly an alarm blared, and he dropped his spoon in surprise.
"NO!" shouted his trainer. "No no no no NO! What are you doing? You dropped that spoon like you didn't even care about it! You need to feel the spoon dropping! DROPPING! TO THE GROUND! You need to feel its pain! You gotta make them CRY, 'cause the spoon's so sad! MAKE 'EM CRY!"
L picked up the spoon again, grimacing, and kept eating his ice cream. His trainer flipped the switch and made the alarm go off again. Stiffening for a moment, L allowed the spoon to slip from his fingers and fall gently to the . . .
"No! Not sad enough!" cried the trainer. "Where did you learn to drop spoons? Are you all self-taught? YOU THINK SPOON-DROPPING IS SOMETHING ANYONE CAN DO? My God, the kids they send in here these days are – what, are you picking up the spoon again? You trying for another time? I don't even know why I'm bothering to teach you. I should send you out to shiver and die in the cold. But I won't. You know why? BECAUSE IT WOULD BE AN INSULT TO SPOON-DROPPING!"
L tried to avoid the major drops of spittle.
"Well, I'm out of ice cream," he said.
"OH! WELL NOW! OUT OF ICE CREAM, ARE WE?" roared his trainer. "SPOON-DROPPING NOT INTERESTING ENOUGH FOR YOU, EH? Well, then, HAVE SOME CAKE!"
And only L's hours playing video games allowed him to react quickly enough to catch the bowl flung at him.
He stared at the cake. He suspected the cake was staring back. He carefully carved a piece of cake from the body, making sure to get a small bit of all the layers, then delicately placed it on his tongue. Then the alarm blared – he jerked back, allowing the spoon to drop, with a slight amount of torque, head-first into the carpet.
"WELL!" shouted his trainer. "All high and mighty now, EH? YOU THINK YOU'RE SO GOOD AT SPOON-DROPPING, EH?"
"Should I do it again?" asked L.
"Nah, you're good for today. Run along now. Same time tomorrow."
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"Plot Device is like a tiger. You ride it along the track, and it devours your enemies, but forget to feed it and it turns on you."
"Yes, sensei," said Light.
His eyes were closed, but he could feel his sensei's leather boots padding back and forth across the room. At the Plot Device Incorporated Special Protagonist/Antagonist Training Center (he had heard that they were planning to expand and move the Protagonists to a different location, and that, had he come later, he wouldn't have gotten the scenic Alpine view he was experiencing now), potential protagonists were trained by retired successful antagonists. Normally, custom called for anti-heroes like himself to be trained by anti-villains, but staff was a bit short at the current juncture and the man training him now was reportedly one of the best in the business.
"As an anti-hero, it's likely that you will experience the short end of Plot Device more than once. In fact, it will quite possibly be your undoing. But you must learn to rise above it."
"How, sensei, if my defeat is guaranteed?" asked Light.
"There is a technique known as a Xanatos Gambit. I will teach it to you when you are ready. As for now, we begin sparring practice."
Light stood up and took the sword that his sensei offered him. His sensei was a man with a slight build but murder in his eyes, which were green-blue and shaped like a cat's. His hair was waist-length and grey, the same color as his metal shoulder guards. He wore a black leather longcoat, open at the chest. While not particularly masculine, like some of the employees running around the Center, he looked like he would kill you without a second thought. In fact, the first thought along might have been the cause of death.
Light took a stance with his sword, a bamboo stick on a rubber hilt. His sensei held his sword loosely at his side. There was a pause as they looked at each other, waiting for the other to make a move. Light shifted his weight to his back leg and blacked out.
"You blinked," said his sensei, slapping him back into consciousness. Light immediately became aware of a large bruise across his chest. Breathing was like leaning over a hot grill.
"How the hell am I supposed to learn sword fighting from getting knocked out the first time I blink?" Light coughed.
"Move faster," said his sensei. "I'm a villain, after all."
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"Keep swinging," said L's sensei, a man wearing a trenchcoat with inkblots for a face. "Not trying hard enough."
L kept swinging, but his enigmatic sensei blocked every blow and then swept his legs out from under him with an admittedly cinematic kick.
"Aren't thinking," he growled, pointing his sword at L's throat.
L blinked, then rolled, swinging the bamboo sword at his sensei's feet, then whirling around to bring the sword around at head height. His sensei easily dodged both attacks and dealt a savage blow across L's chest.
"I think tactics are my strong suit," mumbled L.
"Tactics are absolute," said his sensei in his voice of gravel. "Tactics always apply. Even in brawling."
Afterwards, L sat on a cushion while his sensei taught.
"At Center, anti-heroes train potential anti-villains. Anti-villains need to be sympathetic. Learn that best in contrast with anti-heroes."
L nodded uncertainly. His sensei's strange manner of speaking was somewhat hard to follow, even if the basic ideas were clear.
"But often Plot Device helps. Thinking that learning Plot Device more useful use of time. Need sympathy for when tide goes other way."
He left out the articles and most pronouns. That was it.
"Need victory more than sympathy. So will teach you how to win."
That one was simple enough. L grinned.
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"And . . . go!"
Light's trainer drew back a curtain, behind which was a poster with a man's face and name. From the other side of the room, Light quickly bent over his paper and wrote the name on the poster, then slammed his pencil down and hit the buzzer on the desk.
"Two seconds," said his trainer, shaking his head in a disappointed manner. "If you were in a helicopter with your nemesis, he'd see you before you got halfway! C'mon, faster!"
A new poster. Light got it down to one and a half seconds.
"Better," said the trainer. "But nowhere near good enough. Wait – what's this?"
He held up the paper, then slammed it down on the desk and roared at Light: "A SPELLING ERROR? DO YOU WANT TO GET CAUGHT AND DIE?"
"I'm sorry, but the poster is all the way across the room –"
"Damn right it's across the room!" shouted his trainer. "What if the news uses small text for the victim's name? What if you have to hide a mini-TV in a bag of potato chips? Are you gonna come crying to me, 'Help! Help! The name's too small!' "
"I'll do better next time," said Light, gritting his teeth.
And he did. No spelling errors, and a 1.4 second writing time.
"Blech!" yelled the trainer from over his shoulder. "You make me want to puke. You have the most uninteresting penmanship I've ever seen, and I used to clean out prep school recycling bins! Write with a passion! Write like you want to kill someone! Don't give me this (and here came the high-pitched voice again) ah, ah, ah, my hand feels limp and I can't write interestingly! Show the paper who's boss! I want to see dents in the desk! Write, write, write!"
Light wrote the name again, recycling his ninja pose from the chip-eating session once he had finished.
"ANOTHER SPELLING ERROR!"
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L stacked another sugar cube on top of the others, taking care not to disturb the stack. He reached for another one, placing it on top of the pile, but accidentally knocking the whole thing over when he reached for another one.
"No!" shouted his trainer. "You lose all your ethos when you go and knock over the stack! Never knock it over again! Ever! And it was too perfect," he said, shaking his head remorsefully. "Don't ever make them line up. I want to see a bit of variety in the alignment, something that looks just as quirky as you do! Put some character into your sugar cube stacking!"
L was a man of nearly infinite patience, but he was running out quickly. He tried again, and on the thirty-first cube, his trainer shouted at him again, making him knowck the whole thing over again.
"No! No no no! It was aligned the same way as number sixteen! Redo it!"
"It wouldn't have balanced otherwise!" he shouted back.
"Well, you should've thought of that before you went and put number sixteen where you did, shouldn't you?" jeered the trainer.
L saw his sensei in the doorway and remembered his lesson from the day before. He suddenly knew how to pass the test.
"What's the matter, too high 'n' mighty for cube stacking, eh?" roared the trainer.
L grabbed his coffee mug and poured the hot coffee on his trainer, scalding him, then beat him to death with the mug.
"Good," said his sensei, nodding. "You win."
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"Well, the killings have all stopped. I guess we'll never know who Kira is," said Matsuda.
"Well, L is taking his time," said Aizawa.
"Perhaps Kira is waiting to see how to react?" said Mogi.
"Possibly," Chief Yagami offered. Perhaps Kira is biding his time, he thought. Perhaps he's taking a vacation. And maybe he's going to come back, more powerful than ever. But we'll see. We'll see.
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The plot thickens! Join us for the next issue! Dancing bears! Jenova cells! L breaks the fourth wall!
The trainers, especially L's trainer, were both based on John Cleese's character in the Monty Python sketch called "Self-Defence." A Youtube search should be sufficient to find it.
As always, please write reviews. If you have advice, or if you think anything at all while reading this, it's best just to write it down and hit the 'Submit' button. Ahem.
-Gonzalez
