This chapter gets into the show's familiar territory, complete with bringing back a character I've introduced two chapters ago along with a couple more guys you might also recognize. (but it's okay if you don't...)
Have fun!
Shinpi-tekina Docha (Part 1)
"Hey guys, look who it is!"
The guys and Uzuki were just about to leave Chiyozaki for their next planned evening outing. At least they would have, but due to Hiro having just spotted something while passing by the baseball field in Matsushima Park, the other four had to stop to look at what the red-masked turtle found. In fact, it wasn't so much a new discovery as it was more like an impromptu reunion.
"Him again?" Uzuki remarked with a tone in her voice that implied a combination of amusement and serendipity. "Looks like swimming around in Samondo wasn't enough."
The five were currently face to face with the yellow and blue-furred dog-cat-thing that they first encountered back in Nishiyodogawa ward a little while ago. Since the critter had ditched them first, they assumed they weren't going to see him again, at least for a long while, but here he was, shivering and all by his lonesome in the middle of Nishi ward.
"Hey there, little buddy," Mon greeted the critter with his signature warm-hearted greeting, "What are you doing this far in town?"
"You here for more fish?" Hoku added, "Because if so, you're out of luck and second time's not the charm."
At the same time, Hiro crouched down with his hands on his knees to talk to the critter. "Hi again!" he greeted it in his cutesy voice once again. "Wat'cha doin' here now, huh?" He watched the animal blink without making a peep, not even fidgeting once. "You scared? Want me to hold you, keep you from the big bad danger?" In a gesture of goodwill, Hiro lifted both his hands to scoop up the little animal off the ground. "Come here. Let me be your Hiro."
Hiro's hands inched closer to the creature until it was within reach of his fingertips. Once that happened, the animal hopped up and bounced onto his palms…and then went straight for his face, scratching at it relentlessly with a hiss. Within that same moment, the creature then made a beeline for Uzuki, leaping into her arms.
"Aww, now I'm pretty sure this ain't because of the fugu from earlier," she giggled from the critter licking her cheeks with its forked tongue. Hiro could only say nothing, except that he briefly ruminated on how he got rejected and scratched up by a little cute animal twice in a row.
"So Basho, any idea what he is?" Uzuki looked to the purple-masked turtle who carefully approached the little animal.
Bash leaned in to take a closer look at the creature held in Uzuki's hands, even examining the little luminescent green brooch tried around its neck. "Maybe it's a new breed of Corgi, or Angora, or something?"
"Funny. I thought you were gonna call it a nuclear St. Bernard," Hiro remarked with a mutter. To his surprise, it earned him a droopy-eyed look of disapproval from the others.
"Dude, no… Just no," Hoku sighed. But his attention was immediately grabbed by the sound of a gruff voice cutting the air behind the group.
"Hey! You kids!"
Everyone turned around to face the source of the rough masculine voice that caught their attention, seeing a pair of imposing men in jogging suits with a couple puppies secured over their chests with harnesses. One was stocky, bald, and had a tiny goatee, while the other was thin, had a moustache, and had a full head of long hair. Despite the conventionally cute look this stylistic combination gave off, their faces told otherwise, with the grim and joyless expression wrinkling their features marked by eyes so squinted that they may as well have been walking around blind.
"Uh oh, we got company!" Hiro whispered harshly to the group. "Do the thing!"
All four of the turtles immediately zipped apart from each other and faced the two men with their backs straight and their hands behind them. They put on their best innocent smiles. "Pardon us, good sirs," Hoku spoke up first, putting his practiced ventriloquist skills to work, "Can you direct us to the nearest expo building in the city for a sci-fi convention we are currently dressed for?"
"Tricky turtle outfits and makeup, right?" Mon added, playing around with the badge on his plastron.
"Yeah," Basho 'enthusiastically' added, "We're just a bunch of turtle costumers who are totally not real turtles pretending to be fake ones!" Uzuki tried to cover for him with an overdone smile of her own, ignoring how Basho whispered to himself about 'nailing it'.
Hoku could only feel disappointment towards his older brother's performance. "Dude, you really gotta take your character more seriously," he whispered to him offhandedly.
The group didn't have to wait long for the two men to respond. "We're not here for your dress up interviewing. We are here for that little creature you have. Hand it over…how do you say…'kanari onegai'…or we punish you."
"Uh, p-punish us?" Mon stammered. "This ain't your dog…cat…pet-thing, is it?"
"Hey now," Hiro butted in with a more scolding tone, "I don't know what your deal is, but I'm pretty sure I know a danger-stranger when I hear one!"
"Meaning?" the other man growled.
"Meaning, uh…" Hiro scrambled his brain for the best smackdown answer, "meaning you're not the guys this little fella belongs with! You back off, busters!"
Uzuki felt more confidence from Hiro making the first line of defense. "Yeah!" she tried to be fierce, hugging the critter hanging in her hands closer to her chest. "And if you think of stepping to my friend to step to this little guy, you're gonna have to…step to me!"
The two men's scowls didn't change at all. "Very well. You kids don't scare us with your clumsy fashions and nerd voices. Give us the creature and run along before you make us destroy you."
"Nerd voices? This is my actual voice," Basho objected.
"Well you better be scared, 'cause if you're not, you'll wish you were!" Hiro rebutted, taking an aggressive stance.
"What's wrong with my voice?" Basho earnestly wanted to know. Inconveniently for him, he wasn't going to get his answer any time soon.
The two men's squinty eyes suddenly snapped open, exposing pairs of piercing neon-pink lights which simultaneously set their bodies aglow with that same color. Holographic globules of dark blackish-purple circled around their limbs and torsos in tendril-like streams, followed by their bodies gradually enlarging to the point that they began appearing more and more muscular and segmented.
"Whoa!" Hoku gawked at what he was seeing.
"Sonai!" Mon exclaimed in concurrence.
"Sweet Umbra Witch!" Hiro gasped in his own expression of disbelief.
The little puppies initially held in harnesses changed too, being released onto the ground and rapidly growing larger, most notably looking more adultlike, feral, and beastly until they now took on the forms of scraggly bear-sized wolves.
The five kids were in complete shock, having witnessed the transformation of a couple men with puppies into a pair of beast-riding violet-armored swordsmen – Hiro swore they reminded him of samurai, only except for their long teeth and bug-eyed helmets. There was also the fact that they both were wielding different weapons, with one holding a double-pronged sword and the other a halberd with a double-pronged blade shaped like a Chinese paper fan.
The kids blinked, staring wide-eyed at the two unusually large and threatening riders. "So…you guys from Kanto?" Hoku asked them.
Everyone else seemed to deflate even further from hearing what he said. "Seriously, Hoku?" Mon chastised his older blue-masked brother.
"What? I'm not allowed to joke about the craziest thing I've ever seen? That's how I stay sane!" Hoku protested nervously.
"Well, either way," Hiro interjected, pulling out his pair of twin sais from his belt and held them at the ready while in a battle stance, "This is perfect! Now's our chance to use these babies!" Taking his queue, the other three turtles took out their weapons too – Basho readied his metal-plated staff, Hoku drew out his twin katana swords, and Mon held his pair of nunchakus. "Whip out the wakizashi!"
"Uh, we agreed to reserve 'wakizashi' for samurai-based adventures, okay?" Basho casually reminded his elder brother.
The turtles didn't have any time to make a first move, as the two bug-eyed warrior riders charged at them first, their bladed weapons held up at the ready. The doglike beasts snarled as they ran across the sand of the baseball field.
"Kamehen, guys" Basho said confidently. With a twirl of his staff, said staff unfolded at both ends to deploy twin rocket turbines. "Hanshin maul!" he shouted and threw his staff, causing the weapon to spin through the air like a throwing knife thanks to its own firing rocket power. In one second, the staff would smack into the approaching mook as a twin-rocket hammer should.
The staff arced straight up in the air, passing by the armored rider completely as it slowed down and sputtered. "Oh no! No! Oh, come on!" Basho exclaimed in dismay. Everyone, the two riders included, gawked at the surprisingly unimpressive display.
However, before the thing conked out completely, Uzuki noticed the dog-cat-thing jumping out of her arms as it watched the flying staff and instantly blinked out of sight in a flash of blue light. With everyone watching what was happening above, the critter reappeared in another flash of light and clamped its teeth around the staff, then flashing away again. Then the creature flashed right into Basho's arms and dropped the staff into his hands.
"Whoa, hey, it plays fetch!" Basho remarked in amazement as the critter simultaneously flashed out of his arms back into Uzuki's embrace once again. "And it teleports – Nante kotteya! It teleports!" Basho went from amazement to startled shock in the blink of an eye. He was too wrapped up in his excitement-induced stupor for a second too long by the time he noticed one of the armored riders pointing his sword at him, charging up and discharging an energy blast directly into his plastron. The impact sent the purple-masked turtle gadgeteer flying into the sideline benches with a crunching crash.
"Basho! Daijōbudakka!?" Uzuki cried.
Basho raised a pointed index finger above the mess of shattered wood. "Pro-tip: Bad guy's inexplicable glowing sword blast – extremely painful." A grunt of pain could be heard from him as he let his hand drop back down again.
Hiro and Mon got right into the fray. "Okay, Mon! Here's the plan! You get the guy that looks like a Gundam knockoff! I'll take care of the guy that looks like an EVA toy!" Both the red and orange-masked turtles had to move fast as they narrowly avoided a sword strike.
Mon, at the same time, was already off to a rough start with one of the giant wolves immediately chasing him and snapping at his shell. "They look exactly the same," he frantically clarified, "and they don't look like either one of those things!"
"Oi! Doko ni ikunnen?" Hoku called to them both. He, however, noticed the armored rider with the purple halberd approaching him from behind and turned around. He sighed. "You just had to be a Colonel Sanders, didn't you?" He readied his sword and instantly made a mad dash for the guy. With a spring-loaded leap, he commenced with a circular double-bladed slash. "And Sutoraiku! You're out!" he swung, ready to come down hard on the guy like a batter to a pitcher's ball.
*CLANG*
"Stuck the landing," Hoku thought confidently. After a couple seconds, he expected to hear a thud indicative of a fall or collapse, but it was eerily silent. He snuck a peek, only to sweat in nervous disbelief as he saw himself holding only the hilts of his swords, said swords now bladeless. He took a glance at the rider's mount clenching the two snapped off blades in its teeth, then shattered into many more pieces in one bite. "My swords!" Hoku groaned in lament.
"Hahaha –" was all the halberd-wielding rider was able to mockingly utter before he was interrupted by a thrown sword hilt to the head, making him growl in hostility.
"I don't need swords to beat you!" Hoku boasted. He ran to the tall metal-wired fence that lined the perimeter of the baseball field. He went fast enough to run up the fencing until he was above the rider's head. "I got my mad skills!" He finished his boast with a leap off the fence. He promptly landed face first into the sand, having sailed right over the rider and his mount without even touching either of them. The rider had no words for what he just saw.
Meanwhile, Hiro was batted away by the sword-wielding rider with no luck in landing a hit on him at all. He was hit hard enough to feel his shell colliding with and bouncing off the metal mesh wiring of the surrounding fence. Hiro thought of something else. "Okay. Mon! Ninja mode." He and Mon jumped up and bounced off the main poles connecting the fences as they ascended above and out of the rider's reach, retreating into the darkness of the night sky.
The rider, no longer on his mount but now standing on the ground with his own two feet, growled as he scanned the top of the baseball field's bordering fence. After only a couple seconds, he pointed his sword to the top of one of the field's giant metal poles outside the fence, outing Hiro and Mon hiding behind the cluster of lightbulbs positioned on top of the metal pole. Apparently, they both forgot that the lights were still on.
"Okay," Hiro gulped, "there's a…chance he…might…still see us." Both turtles leapt off and back down to dodge another blast shot from the rider's sword. "Okay, 'new' new plan!" With a nod, Mon jumped into the air and retracted his head and limbs into his shell. Hiro grabbed him in one hand and prepared to launch him like a football. "Turtle wind!" the red-masked turtle let out a battle cry and threw Mon as hard as he could. Mon's shell hurdled towards the armored warrior…and the guy caught him in one hand.
Mon immediately came out of his shell and went into stage 2 of him and his brother's planned attack. "HHWWAAAAAAHHH!" he yelled as he brandished his nunchakus and spun them, flailing them in the direction of the swordsman's face.
All the guy did was silently watch as Mon bonked himself in the head with the nunchakus one after the other, not a single hit landing on his adversary. He only stopped at last when he felt he had too many painful bumps and lumps to keep concentrating. "Mō jūbundakka?" the little turtle moaned through his accidentally self-inflicted pain. The bigger guy only responded by levitating him in a field of dark purple light and throwing him aside, sending him crashing onto the sand. At the same time, he caught Mon's chucks midair and crushed them in his hand.
"Oi!" Hiro interrupted angrily, readying his twin sais. "Why don't you pick on someone my size?" He growled at the enemy with as much ferocity as his usually friendly self could muster and sprinted right at him with his sais directed at the guy with the center tips first.
The swordsman didn't bother raising his own weapon to defend himself. With his free left hand, he snapped his fingers and his canine mount immediately descended upon Hiro, chasing the larger turtle as he ran the other way screaming. Hiro was practically jumping as he ran, just to keep from getting his shell caught by the beast's snapping jaws. The wolf-like monster chased him across the baseball diamond, from home base to second base to third base, even skimming the outfield the whole time.
While the beast didn't bite Hiro in the shell upon catching up to him, it did slam its jaws around his head, shaking him around in the air like a ball, bone, or chew toy. The beast then threw him into the air, sending him on an arc that had him crash-landing onto a set of sideline benches on the opposite side of the diamond. Hiro coughed from the kicked-up dust as he tried to regain his senses after impacting, just in time for the other bug-eyed warrior to walk right up to him and stomp on his sais, crushing them into useless pieces. Hiro was aghast at witnessing the sudden crushing loss of his only weapons. He also looked up just in time to see the armored warrior swing his halberd like a baseball bat and send him flying once again. He landed right on top of the pile made of his other three brothers stacked atop one another.
The two bug-eyed armored warriors advanced on the incapacitated brothers who laid dogpiled on the sand and got ready to finish them off. But they were swiftly interrupted by wads of sand hitting them in their eyes and breastplates.
"Hey! Fake-Gundam and EVA-toy!"
The two, each raising an arm to shield their eyes, turned their heads up to look directly at Uzuki, who was grabbing handfuls of sand off the baseball field and throwing them while simultaneously holding on to the little dog-cat-critter. The teen human girl yelled at them again. "If you know what's good for you, you'll leave my friends and this little guy alone!"
She got ready to throw another wad of sand when one of the armored thugs raised an open hand. Said hand began glowing with the same purple bubbling energy. Uzuki noticed too late that a transparent purple bubble formed around the little critter she was carrying, trapping it inside. "What the –" she gasped, watching as the little critter tried to teleport out of the bubble repeatedly but found itself reappearing inside the spherical energy field each time, unable to get out. As if it couldn't get any worse, the bug-eyed warrior responsible for the critter's current predicament flexed his hand, causing the bubble entrapping the critter to be pulled towards him.
"No! NO! Hanashite!" Uzuki grunted as she tried to pull the orb in the opposite direction away from the two thugs, but it was no use. Even when she dug her heels into the sand, she was still pulled along with the orb until it was encircled in the caster's hand. Once his grip was secured, he knocked Uzuki away with another burst of energy.
The armored guy who currently held the trapped critter in his hand used his other hand to hold up a flat piece of translucent crystal. He spoke into it like a walkie-talkie. "Danshaku, this is Gāmu. We have the agent and the vial," he reported, paying no mind to the critter snarling at him inside the purple bubble but instead emphasized on the green brooch around its neck, the greenness apparently made clear to be some kind of contained liquid. He turned to his partner. "Furekkī, time to leave!"
His partner turned around to lift his hand towards a concrete wall separating the field from rows of elevated spectator stands above it. With circular hand motions, the wall gradually became engraved with an M-shaped insignia made of light, a little dash cutting through one side of the M. The M-symbol was immediately swallowed up by a circular opening, twisting the concrete from a solid flat face into that of a gargoyle-like Oni, a toothy and fanged open mouth exposing a tunnel of a digital crisscross texture within.
"Whoa!" the turtle bros marveled at what they were seeing after recovering and getting off each other. No doubt that those two mysterious assailants could do such a thing – they could already transform and toss the guys in the air without touching them, so they surely couldn't get any less weird.
Without any delay, the two armored riders spurred their mounts to run straight into the magically created entrance. The entrapped dog-cat-thing remained in their grasp as it was taken into the portal with them.
"Nekoinu-mon!" Uzuki exclaimed as she took off running after the critter's kidnappers. Going as fast as she could to stay on their tails, she ran even faster upon noticing the portal begin to rapidly close behind them as soon as they passed through. She braced both feet and tensed the muscles in her legs once she felt she got close enough.
"Uzuki! Hold on!" Hiro called to her, hoping he could make her wait, but the girl had already jumped through the portal right as it closed. Hiro followed right behind her and jumped for the portal too. He jumped…right as the portal closed completely, and the big turtle bonked headfirst into a flat concrete wall. He then landed on his shell back in the sand.
"Ow," Hiro winced as he rubbed his sore noggin, pushing himself upright on the elbow of his other arm. But he quickly snapped back to his senses. "Uzuki!" he called again, print his hands on the cement wall and scanned the vertical surface with his eyes as though he were checking for something left over.
"I think she's okay, 'cause I think the stands have space under them," Hoku warily gave his opinion.
"Uzuki!" Hiro tried to call for her again, knocking on the cement wall and putting his head on its surface to listen for an echo, his other three brothers following his gesture. "Are you under the seats?" No answer. Hiro looked to Basho. "How do we get her out of there?"
"Well, more importantly," Basho clarified, "Where is 'there'?"
Hiro, Basho, and Hoku decided to try looking around the spectator stands, each one going around the foundation corners and jumping up onto the seats themselves. Mon, however, was preoccupied with examining the concrete wall with his own eyes, scanning for any traces of the former portal. He managed to spot the faint traces of the M-insignia the two armored cat-dog-nappers previously summoned a little while ago.
"Hey!" Mon gasped. "I've seen this before!" His three elder brothers regrouped around him to see what he was referring to. "In fact, I think we all have."
"…" The older turtles wondered what their littlest brother was even saying. "Well, care to remind us where we saw it?" Hoku asked first.
Mon didn't waste a second obliging. "Remember when Hiro discovered that same symbol on a brick alley wall a few nights ago? This one looks exactly the same."
Hiro thought about what Mon said, his eyes widening at the realization. "Yeah. Yeah! Omahan ga tadashī ya, Mon! But…if there was a portal for that symbol back then too, how do we get in now? I couldn't do it then either."
Basho took an extra look at the M-symbol which was now beginning to fade and lose its light. "Well guys, I think you should hurry up if it's anything like last time." He pointed at the symbol for the others to see for good measure.
Hiro looked like he was about to panic, but Mon spoke up again to calm him down. "I'm pretty sure we have something like it back home. Remember when we tried to borrow something from Pops that had the same thing?"
"Hmm…yeah, honma ya," Hoku confirmed as he recalled those events, "though I'm also pretty sure I remember Hiro's plan for that being a failure." He didn't seem to notice Hiro looking a little irate from hearing that. All he and his brothers needed back then was a vase, one simple vase that had the same symbol on it. And of course, they didn't get it, thanks to getting anything past their dad being virtually impossible.
"Well, maybe it didn't work then, but I'm sure it'll work now!" Hiro rallied up his brothers, then gathering them together. "Alright! Here's what we're gonna do. We'll need 10 chickens, a gallon of rubber cement, and –"
"Hitsuyō nashi," Basho interrupted without giving his big bro a heads-up first. "Pops already gave us a trinket with the exact same symbol."
The other three looked at their brainiac brother with wide eyes. "Honma ni? How do you know that?" asked Mon.
"It's in my lab," Basho replied in a deadpan tone.
Fun Facts:
A "wakizashi" (脇差) is a blade donned by samurai warriors that never leaves their sides. It mainly functions as a backup/emergency sword for the samurai's primary weapon, the katana.
Basho's attack line "Hanshin maul" is a reference to the "Hanshin Tigers" baseball team (阪神タイガース).
Hoku's "Colonel Sanders"-quip is a reference to "The Curse of the Colonel" (カーネルサンダースの呪い), a Japanese urban legend surrounding the Hanshin Tigers that began in 1985. It involves a statue of KFC's founder, Ebisu Bridge, Dōtonbori Canal, and an 18-year-long losing streak.
Hiro's battle line "Turtle Wind" when he throws Mon is a pun on a Japan-specific term originating between 1939-1945.
Hoku asks the two armored Yokai riders – Gāmu and Furekkī – if they're from the Kanto region. It's a reference to how Japan's capital city (you know its name), which is in that region, is often the main setting for almost all sorts of local weirdness happening in the country, more than Osaka anyway.
Nishi ward (西区) is one of Osaka's central wards, sitting just west of the city's actual center, hence its name. While mostly flat, 80% of what it used to look like was levelled by bombs during World War 2 and only started rebuilding by the mid-1960s. At the time, it was regarded as a model area for urban planning and was the subject of a land readjustment project.
Chiyozaki (千代崎) is an area of land in Osaka's Nishi Ward. There's not much to say on it other than its most notable landmarks being baseball-related: "Matsushima Park" and "Kyocera Dome Osaka".
Matsushima Park (松島公園) is a community park that's mostly known for its baseball field. If some school team needs practice or any other people simply want to play the game on their leisure time, that's what it's for.
Kyocera Dome Osaka (京セラドーム大阪), or just Osaka Dome (大阪ドーム), is a baseball stadium of a futuristic design with an enclosed dome ceiling that not only hosts baseball games, but also doubles as a concert arena. It's the home field for the "Orix Buffaloes" baseball team (オリックス・バファローズ), though it also served as the 'second home'-field for the Hanshin Tigers.
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Dialect Words/Phrases:
Kanari onegai (かなりお願い): "Pretty please"
Sonai (そない): "You gotta be kidding me!" (disbelief) | Standard Japanese: Sonna (そんな)
Kamehen (かめへん): "It's fine", "I got this" | Standard Japanese: Kamawanai (構わない)
Nante kotteya (なんてこってや): "Oh my gosh!" | Standard Japanese: Nante kotoda (なんてことだ)
Daijōbudakka (大丈夫だっか): "Are you alright?" | Standard Japanese: Daijōbudesuka (大丈夫ですか)
Oi (おい): "Hey!" (used to call out someone)
Doko ni ikunnen (どこに行くんねん): "Where are you going?" | Standard Japanese: Doko ni iku no (どこに行くの)
Sutoraiku (ストライク): "Strike"
Mō jūbundakka (もう十分だっか): "Had enough?", "Is it enough?" | Standard Japanese: Mō jūbundesu ka (もう十分ですか)
Hanashite (はなして): "Let go!" (as in 'release your grip')
Danshaku (男爵): baron
Neko (猫): cat
Inu (犬): dog
Mon (もん): thing (general term) | Standard Japanese: Mono (もの)
Omahan ga tadashī ya (おまはんが正しいや): "You're right" | Standard Japanese: Omae ga tadashī da (お前が正しいだ)
Honma ya (ほんまや): "That's true" | Standard Japanese: Hontō da (本当だ)
Hitsuyō nashi (必要なし): "No need"
Honma ni (ほんまに): "Really?" (asking for affirmation) | Standard Japanese: Hontō ni (本当に)