When Lloyd decided he wanted to learn Spinjitzu, the first order of business had been finding somewhere to train. Ordinarily, he would have trained at Darkley's, but for Spinjitzu, this was not an option.
Spinjitzu was, as far as his teachers were concerned, only practiced by heroes. Yes, Lord Garmadon could do it too, but he had mastered it before becoming a villain. And with his teachers already fussing over Lloyd's moral compass, feeling it was too "light" for the dark boarding school, he didn't want to add to their concerns. If they ever found out he was trying to learn Spinjitzu, they might just kick him out.
Even knowing he couldn't train at Darkley's though, Lloyd had not been worried about finding a place to train. He already knew a place he could train.
Ever since the practical experience units had started, Brad's father had been renting an apartment for his son's private use. Apparently, Mr. Tudabone was fine with sending his son to a violent and hostile boarding school but couldn't stand the thought of him roughing it out with some common low-level criminals. Not that either Lloyd or Brad were complaining. It was a wonderfully expensive condo called the Hero Suite and it had floor-to-ceiling windows, an in-house training facility, a wall television, state-of-the-art game consoles, (a dragon keep for some reason), eight bedrooms…
Being Brad's best friend had finally paid off, as Lloyd was the only person that Brad had given a spare key to and a bedroom for his own private use. Lloyd mostly used the Hero Suite for whenever he needed a break from Darkley's. He and Brad regularly spent their weekends there now, complaining about school, playing games and being ordinary teenagers together, pretending that they weren't being trained to lie and steal and murder.
Unfortunately, although the Hero Suite was a very comfortable place with a private training facility, Lloyd soon realized he couldn't use it. He had learned not to trust Darkley's students and even though he knew that Brad was a reliable ally… They were both still Darkley's students. Backstabbing was part of the package deal. If Brad found out that Lloyd was learning Spinjitzu, he could easily go to the principle and rat him out. Or he could blackmail him, which might be worse.
Once Lloyd realized he couldn't train there, he also realized that finding a place to train might not be that easy. He considered getting his own apartment but had to scrap that idea too. With the "income" he was getting, Lloyd could barely afford a one-bedroom studio apartment with space enough for a single bed. Never mind actual training space.
So, he had turned to Ninjago City at large. He visited many dojos, sports' centers and training facilities, but for one reason or another, he had to walk away from them. Either the owners were too curious about him, or they wouldn't let an (in their eyes) untrained child use their facilities by himself or they simply refused to get involved with him without a guardian present. Legal ramifications, curious questions, price tags; it all made finding a suitable place to train difficult.
Lloyd had just begun believing he might have to train in the Hero's Suite after all, risks be damned, when he had come across "Grand Sensei Dareth's Mojo Dojo". He hadn't even been looking for it, hadn't known it even existed. He had kind of stumbled upon it, while wandering aimlessly around the city. But the place was perfect.
No. No, it wasn't. It was awful. Subpar didn't even begin to describe it in comparison to the training facility in the Hero Suite. It was a cheap, horrible place with terrible, useless equipment. But it came with privacy and an owner that didn't ask nosy questions like shouldn't you be at school or where are your parents or do you know what a shower is. Lloyd didn't even have to pay for anything!
Upon entering, the owner had initially refused Lloyd's application, but when Lloyd had argued with him, Dareth had challenged the thirteen-year-old to a fight. If Lloyd could beat him, he could use the place as he pleased, for free. If he couldn't, then he would either pay fees and accept Dareth's training or leave. To any onlookers, it would have looked like an unfair fight, Dareth a full-grown, "qualified" adult, Lloyd a child who hadn't been training for more than three years. But then Lloyd had wiped the floor with him and any concerns over fairness had been put to bed. Lloyd had learned a lot in three years, enough to beat an adult that didn't know what he was getting himself into.
After that, Lloyd could train there whenever he liked and Dareth never tried to instruct or train him. Well, he did brag a lot and frequently tried to teach Lloyd moral or philosophical lessons, but he never treated Lloyd like he was one of his actual students. If anything, he treated Lloyd like a glorified assistant, occasionally asking him to help train the kids, if he had time. In exchange for his assistance, Dareth gave him free meals and snacks, which Lloyd was more than happy to accept.
So, the location and equipment was awful, but it had a lot of upsides too. Literally no one knew about the "Grand Sensei" Dareth and his dojo. And Dareth never pressed Lloyd for answers. He didn't question the boy for training in the middle of the night, he didn't ask Lloyd what he was trying to learn. He didn't even ask him about school or family. The only thing he ever really asked was "when did you last eat?", which was usually followed by free food, regardless of what he answered. It took a while, but Lloyd eventually figured out that the free food thing was a big deal. Dareth not only respected Lloyd's privacy, but was even kind to him. And after what had happened to Uncle Wu, Lloyd made sure to let Dareth know how much he appreciated it (you know, sometimes).
The dojo was horrible, cheap and occasionally cramped, but it was also a private, secret and safe place. So, as far as Lloyd was concerned, the mojo dojo was perfect.
The next order of business was trying to find someone to teach Lloyd Spinjitzu. Which had quickly led to a dead-end. As it turned out, the only people that had actually ever taught anyone the technique were the First Spinjitzu Master, Uncle Wu… and his dad, Garmadon. In other words, there was literally no one in Ninjago that could teach anyone else Spinjitzu.
Well… There were the Ninja, but they had only successfully taught Nya so far. They had repeatedly failed with Morro, so that implied that they were awful teachers (Nya was really smart, so she probably made up for a lot of their shortcomings). And even if the Ninja were actually competent at teaching, Lloyd would first rot in his grave before ever asking them for help.
But he had to learn it somehow. It was important that he did. He remembered how bitter and helpless Nya had been, when she had been unable to protect her brother. When she hadn't been able to help the Ninja. When she had been left behind to wait for them. And Nya was Samurai X! Well, she used to be anyway. The point was that Nya was probably the best samurai in all of Ninjago and even that hadn't been enough to get Kai back.
Spinjitzu was key.
That left Lloyd with little other option than to watch clips of the Ninja doing Spinjitzu and copying them in a vain hope of somehow learning through observation alone. Being thirteen years old, he didn't realize how absurd that plan was.
Dareth, again not asking questions, was kind enough to let Lloyd use his television at the dojo, where Lloyd replayed the clips over and over, trying to figure out how they were doing it and copying as best he could. Lloyd didn't realize that it was impossible to learn Spinjitzu from watching alone. And he never would realize it either, because bit by bit, he did start figuring it out. He eventually managed to master Spinjitzu by watching recorded news broadcasts. It just took a very, very long time.
Several months after he had started using the mojo dojo, Lloyd met Harumi. She was a year older than him and when she walked in, the first thing he had noticed about her was that… well. She looked really pretty. Which was weird, because he literally trained alongside femme fatales, so he shouldn't really respond to things like prettiness anymore, but maybe Harumi was pretty in a way that, say, Jenny, wasn't.
Harumi had just started a multi-year process to become a member of the Explorers Club, which had (according to her parents) put her a little on edge. Learning some martial arts should help her channel that frustration into something productive. Or so the theory went. Since her parents didn't have much money, they had sent her to the cheapest place they could find. Which was naturally enough, Dareth's mojo dojo.
Lloyd was not embarrassed to admit he had at first been a little intimidated by Harumi. She was the type of person that could achieve anything she set her mind to and was even on her way to becoming the youngest member of the Explorers Club ever. Meanwhile, Lloyd was a barely average bad guy at best and had repeatedly failed to achieve anything of real value. And he was supposed to be the son of the greatest villain ever. Next to her, he just looked like an embarrassment.
But Dareth outright couldn't deal with Harumi. She was the only one of his students that actually saw how… well, incompetent he was. So, at Dareth's request, Lloyd ended up being the one to train her. She was a fast learner, which made up for how terrible he (admittedly) was at teaching. Unfortunately, the age gap at first made the two rivals. Harumi couldn't stand being taught by someone younger than her and Lloyd… Actually, he was used to being treated like dirt, so he just kind of rolled with it.
The bitter rivalry thankfully did not last for long. Over the months, they encountered struggles that they worked through together. The more they helped each other, the more the rivalry changed into a friendship. Sometime after turning fourteen, Lloyd realized that he actually trusted Harumi more than Brad. Cared for her more, depended on her more. Lloyd hadn't intended on becoming that close to someone who (by all means) was an ordinary Ninjago citizen, but…
It kind of made sense that it had happened. Up until then, his best friend had been Brad, but the two had never been able to be that close, what with Darkley's policies hanging heavily over their heads. But Lloyd could be open with Harumi, because she wasn't associated with Darkley's. She couldn't rat on him. She couldn't betray him. He could tell her things that he could never tell Brad. She understood him in a way that Brad never could.
Her parents liked him too, frequently inviting him over for dinner, even though they couldn't really afford to feed four mouths on a regular basis. (By the time the invitations had become frequent, Lloyd was fourteen and had been around Dareth long enough to pick up some basic manners, such as polite refusal.)
Lloyd had eventually learned that her parents liked having him around, because Harumi didn't really have any friends. She was too obsessed with whatever caught her attention to actually maintain friendships. So, her parents really appreciated the one friend she did have, actively encouraging the friendship by any means possible. Before he knew it, Harumi's home was almost like a second home to him. Not quite a real home, but it was a near thing.
No one at Darkley's knew about them. Not even Brad.
Dareth, Harumi, her parents… They had become his new friends. The closest thing he had to a family. They weren't quite family. They could never be family the way Uncle Wu had been, and they never could be family the way the gang had been. But they were still the most important people in his life. And he needed to protect them. From all bad guys. That included all of Darkley's students. And to protect them, Lloyd also made sure they didn't know too much about him. They didn't know where he went to school, they didn't know what he got up to and they definitely did not know that his surname was Garmadon.
Sometime, when he was fourteen years old, something had happened to the master of lightning. It was something that had made Jay nicer towards Lloyd (on their chance meetings). Lloyd didn't know exactly what it was, but he had an idea.
Around the time that Jay's opinion of Lloyd had changed, Gene claimed that he had detected sudden chrono-energy spikes. No one knew what had caused them, but the prevailing theory was that the timeline had been rewritten.
It didn't take long for Lloyd to theorize that somehow, Jay had been at the center of the alteration, eradicating an alternate branch that now never happened. It explained the chrono-energy anomaly and it explained Jay's sudden change of opinion in matters regarding Lloyd. Of course, Lloyd couldn't prove this, and he sure wasn't going to ask Jay about it. They weren't friends.
But he knew something had happened. An alternate timeline that only Jay could remember. What had Lloyd done in that timeline to make Jay see him differently? Was it something he could still do in this timeline? Lloyd had no idea what he could have possibly done to earn Jay's trust, but it freaked him out. It wasn't like Jay was now friendly or anything, but there was more of this hesitation now, like he didn't want them to be enemies.
It made Lloyd very uncertain on how he should approach Jay.
Mix in Lloyd's already ambivalent feelings towards Kai and Nya and suddenly, Lloyd discovered that he didn't actually despise the Ninja anymore. Which was a deeply troubling thought. They had literally fought against his dad; they were basically who he was being trained to hate. How had he ended up feeling… neutral towards them instead? They were his dad's enemies! He should hate them! But he kind of didn't…?
The worst part of this sorry affair was that Lloyd still owed them a favor. It was a year later, and he still owed them. In the end, Lloyd blamed the debt forced upon him by his Uncle Wu's death. That was the reason he was ambivalent towards them. Because he knew that he still owed Uncle Wu and by extension, them. He owed them for what they had done against the Anacondrai warriors. The debt owed made him… sympathetic towards them.
Once he had paid back the favor, he was certain the feelings of hatred would take over again. All sympathy for them would die and he could go back to focusing on cool stuff, like explosions and snakes and getting his dad back. So Zane made the best cookies ever. So Kai had been nice to him at Uncle Wu's memorial. So Nya had made sure he left the Monastery clean and fed! So there was an entire mystery timeline where he somehow earned Jay's trust!
He could turn his back on that, easy! Those tiny moments meant nothing! They definitely hated him, because hello, he was their greatest enemy's son! Of course they hated him, just as much as he hated them! What else were they supposed to think of him?
Maybe you're not as bad as we think you are. Maybe you're not as bad as you think you are.
I'm the spawn of the most evil man in Ninjago!
That doesn't make you the next most evil person.
Man, how he hated them.
When he was fifteen years old, Lloyd finally mastered Spinjitzu. It wasn't fancy or colorful like the Ninja and he couldn't keep it going for long, but it was still more powerful than any other move he had learned at Darkley's.
He had been exhilarated. He felt that now, he could protect his family.
He then realized that if he ever used Spinjitzu against the Ninja, he would be the first villain after his dad to do so. That thought made him happy, like finally, he had achieved something to make his father proud. Having finally mastered Spinjitzu, Lloyd returned his attentions to finding a way to get his dad back.
Me: Hm. They probably won't even like the smallest hint of llorumi. I should give them a vague warning.
Readers (seeing vague warning): FSM, she's gonna murder someone.
You know what, from now on, I won't say anything about the next chapter. ._.
A few notes:
I know Spinjitzu is not just a good guy thing. BUT. Bad guys that have actually used it are Aspheera, Doubloon, the Overlord, Yang, the Bizarro ninja... And, uh... Yang was technically once a good guy, Aspheera is still in a pyramid, Doubloon is stranded in another realm (and it's unclear what his moral standing was when he learned Spinjitzu), the Overlord is a forgotten myth and obviously, the Bizarro Ninja never existed. So, as far as the people of Ninjago are concerned, Spinjitzu is a good guy thing.
Now to Harumi: In the show, she's presented as someone who could have been any random person, and like... Now that I think about it, no? She's very resourceful, she is able to obtain knowledge that most can't (such as knowing dark magic and that the Garmadons are part-Oni) and she is very much goal-oriented (obsessive, lol). Once she has something fixed in her mind, she doesn't let go. So, uh... I think if her parents had never died, she would have still been a remarkable individual. :I idk, you can fight me on this if you want. I won't fight back, lol.