CHAPTER 02: "Surprised to See Fred (and Friends)"
The five figures were all gaijin. Or four of them were, at least.
The first was a tall guy with blond hair, broad shoulders and a square jaw. Handsome, if you're into the classic-good-looks type or whatever (Yusuke didn't have an opinion, but something told him Keiko would like this guy). He wore jeans and a white shirt, and around his neck he sported an orange ascot. He was speaking to the other people on the stoop, waving one hand in the air as he smiled brilliantly enough to blind. The group's leader, probably. He had that look about him.
The skinny dude with the goatee, mop of brown hair, and baggy bellbottom pants, meanwhile, certainly wasn't leadership material. He kept glancing at the grinning fu dog door knockers and gulping, throat moving so hard Yusuke could hear it from a dozen meters away. He could hear this guy's knees knocking together, too, legs trembling with fear he didn't bother to disguise. Yusuke suspected the dude might have even fear-sweated through his dark green t-shirt, but he wasn't quite close enough to see (or perhaps smell) for sure.
The girl beside him, meanwhile, wasn't at all scared. She stared up at the house with a no-nonsense smirk on her face, one hand propped on her jutting hip. Her purple and green dress clashed brilliantly with her bright red hair and pink tights (not that he had any right to criticize given his own predilection for mixing prints and colors), but somehow she managed to pull her hip-hugging outfit off. Something told Yusuke she had dressed herself with intention, breaking fashion ground with gusto. Confidence was always sexy, Yusuke suspected, even while wearing green and purple and pink mixed together.
The girl next to her was likewise confident, though in an understated way. The first girl wore fashion like a weapon, but this one didn't give a crap about it at all. She wore a red miniskirt and an orange sweater, hair cut into a blunt bowl, and she gazed at the house with open and determined curiosity—like she might glare the house into giving up its secrets. Yusuke would've pegged her for a nerd even if she hadn't been wearing coke bottle glasses with thick rims, but her glasses definitely sealed the nerdy deal as far as her looks were concerned.
And then there was the fucking dog.
Yusuke at first thought it was a bear or something, it was so big. A really big, knock-kneed, pigeon-toed, trembling bear with knobbled joints and a barrel chest and paws the size of dinner plates. Only after squinting at it for thirty seconds did Yusuke realize it was more likely a badly bred Great Dane and not a grizzly who'd swum the Pacific and landed in Japan. The creature slinked about the heels of the tall guy with the goatee, hunkering down to the ground as its eyes rolled up toward the house above, and if Yusuke hadn't known any better, he'd have said the terrified expression on the dog's face was damned near human-lookin'. The dog's hangdog expression (ha, get it?) mirrored the skinny guy's almost exactly.
But what the fuck were a bunch of teenage gaijin (not to mention their deformed dog) doing all the way out here?
NOTE: Lord mercy I'm actually writing this garbage OH WELL TOO LATE HERE IT IS.