Introducing several more characters, most of them important. You'll know who they are. *wink*
Shinpi-tekina Docha (Part 2)
After a few hours of rummaging through Basho's lab back at the lair (only slightly lengthened by Basho's relentless nitpicking over how the search was conducted), the turtle bros were back at Matsushima Park's baseball field, standing in front of the tall concrete spectator stand where the mysterious portal used to be – where Uzuki jumped into before it closed.
"You know, a few hours ago, I would've thought we were young and crazy for trying this," Basho barged in, "Now I just think we're crazy."
"Say what you want, Basho. Hiro can do this," Mon refuted, "After all, if he doesn't, well…Uzuki, nice knowing you." Hiro tensed.
"Mon, don't say that. You know Hiro buckles under pressure," Hoku lightly chastised. Hiro began to sweat.
"Hoku, he gets even more nervous if you bring that up," Basho heavily chastised, and then lowered his voice into an ominous whisper, "and then you can smell his fear…"
Hiro yanked himself around to face his brothers, having had enough. "Osore akushū o hikiokosahen!" he exclaimed with a plosive burst of breath. His three little brothers just looked at him.
"Okay, so how do we make it open?" Hoku wondered aloud for everybody. Hiro only looked intently at the wall as the others carefully observed him.
"Working on it," Hiro answered in a whisper, concentrating more on holding the trinket up to the wall and hoping something would happen, the same way the two armored thugs did it with only a raised hand. Nothing happened. Hiro held the trinket a little closer to the wall, and even closer to the point of touching the wall when he still got no reaction from it. The utter lack of anything happening was grating on the big turtle's nerves, and in a short time, he was punching the wall with the trinket held inside his closed fist.
"Come on!" he grunted as he pounded, paying no mind to how unimpressed his brothers looked at the moment. On the other hand, he could already feel himself cracking before the wall he was punching did. "Baka kabe!" In a fit of frustration, he threw the trinket at the wall itself, though he didn't count on the thing bouncing off the surface and smacking back into his head just as hard, knocking him onto the ground again.
Fortunately, Mon caught the trinket in his hand before the thing could fall onto the sand with Hiro. "How about we let the artist of the group take a poke at it?" he asked with a jesting politeness.
Hoku stepped closer to his little brother's side, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Atarimaeyaro? All I can say is that we can't do any worse…" he bowed his head a little bit in Hiro's direction, "…respectfully."
"Yay," Hiro droned from his position on the sand.
Mon stepped around his big brother and walked right up to the wall, holding the trinket between a finger and thumb. With a delicate hold, he slowly moved the trinket towards the wall in a manner indicative of precision, and it was what happened next that put his brothers into a state of awe.
The concrete wall that held up the spectator seats glowed, but it wasn't like that of before. Instead, a web of polygonal lines formed, each one crawling over the stone like water until it formed a complex circular work of art. It was reminiscent of a Tibetan mandala, but also combined with a manhole cover. Mon smiled at the sight of it; it was just like he hoped. Without further delay, he moved the trinket across the concrete wall to redraw the M-symbol, even jumping a bit since the original symbol was so big. The M-symbol gave way to the portal reopening, exposing the vertical tunnel lined with walls of digital crisscross lines. Mon laughed a little at seeing his innate ingenuity once again working in his favor, as it did more than plenty of times before in the past.
Basho was already praising the little artist. "By the Hair-Comb Princess, it worked!"
"Huh! All I had to do was believe in myself," Hiro quipped, equally amazed though not addressing the little one who made it work in place of him.
Hoku turned to Hiro, elbowing the bigger turtle with a soft nudge. "So leader, what's our next move?" Hiro looked back at him.
"…" Hiro took one look at the whirlpool of light at the bottom of the tunnel, and then took a big leap into the portal. He curled his knees up to his chest and held them up with his arms, bracing himself. "Kyanonbōru!"
"Kyanonbōru!" the rest of his brothers cried as they followed suit, with Mon retracting his head and limbs into his shell, Basho crossing both his arms and legs over each other, and Hoku doing a somersault.
All four turtles couldn't hold back their yells as they were swept down the grid-like tunnel. They eventually arrived at a light at the end, passing through the wormhole back into the physical realm. Inconveniently, they somehow exited the portal from a higher-than-desirable altitude. Hiro yelled incoherently as he flailed his limbs through the air while falling, landing flat on his front on a flat stone floor with a smack. Basho didn't have any time to react to the fall to use his jetpack, on his shell with a thud. Mon wasn't any better as he mostly hit the ground on his front with a splat, his backside sticking up a little. As for Hoku…
"Anzen'na chakuriku!" he boasted out loud as he touched the ground on one foot with the rest of his body posed like a Shaolin monk. He did wobble a bit but readjusted his stance accordingly with a brief double-arm spin. It was when he fully balanced himself that he took the time to react at what he saw before him. "Whoa…" he gasped, his mouth hanging open as he found himself looking at a fantastical landscape. His brothers couldn't help but parrot that same sentiment.
The four were standing within a cavern of towering heights. The ceiling of the cave stretched as high as any office building they saw on the surface and the bottom was far enough down that the boys would have thought they were on a mountain. Said cave floor was lined with structures of all sorts of design, most of them reminiscent of feudal Japan, but others appearing like architecture recognized as being from other parts of the world while some others appeared as plainly as multistory buildings in a typical human city. Winged creatures of all sorts of shapes and sizes flew across the cavern, alone or with riders, alongside hot-air balloons of faces and other assorted round shapes. Giant creatures with the height of high-rise apartments strolled across the landscape in the distance. Every building on the cave floor was made of different colored materials and awash in bright lights that highlighted its various physical measurements and dimensions. In the furthest distance, a lake could be made out with even more buildings lining the other side of said lake.
As far as the boys could see, Osaka was already a colorful city, but this place was the same thing but dialed up to eleven. "I can already smell Hiro's kyōi-akushū," Hoku uttered. The others were collectively letting out gasps and words of wonder and awe at the totally not-mundane sight. At the very least, they had a good feeling it was unlike any human civilization they ever knew, thus wondering in the back of their minds how hard it would be to find humans in a place like this at all.
"Min'na, kotchi kotchi!"
That familiar voice calling from behind snapped them out of their stupor, prompting them to turn around to see Uzuki herself standing only a few meters away. Their sense of wonder was instantly replaced by elation. "Uzuki! We missed you!" they all cried joyfully, running up to her and topping with a leaping hug, all four of them surrounding her with their own arms. They stayed like that for a few seconds before parting to get back to business.
"So, Basho, where are we?" Hiro asked his smarter brother his first question.
Basho took a moment to type something on the gadget braced on his left forearm. "Well, according to my calculations, we're likely in a tertiary metaverse."
"Actually," Uzuki energetically cut in, "I've been exploring, and it turns out we're in a mystic underground city deep below Osaka."
"That was my second guess," Basho backpedaled.
Hoku decided it was a good time to get back on track. "So where's the dog-cat-thing?"
"He's in there," Uzuki answered worriedly, turning around and pointing at a dome-like structure standing on a hill-sized plateau made of rocks similar to the Giant's Causeway in the distance. It took a bit of time, but the five made it to a door on the second level that Uzuki found earlier. The boys couldn't help but marvel at what the interior looked like once they walked inside.
"Wu-ho! Look at the setup!" Hoku commented.
"Man, that's big and complicated," Hiro seconded his younger brother's opinion.
"I'd so love to do my lab in that layout!" Basho shakily held in his glee with starry eyes.
The group had made their way to the edge of the second level-walkway they stood on, facing a towering round chamber. The room appeared to have a circular disk-like platform of stone surrounded by a moat of the same shape filled with pale green globules of an unknown slime. In the center of the platform was a column that stretched up close to an open ceiling at the top of the structure's apparent dome, all sides of it lined with orange pill-like light bulbs.
Hiro took a glance at the center of the room below. "There's the cat-dog!" he said to the others, glancing at the aforementioned creature contained inside a cage made of vines and lined with an orange energy field. The creature tried to teleport again and again, but could only reappear inside his prison, going nowhere. Hiro glanced a second time to find another vine cage next to the critter's, one that didn't have the glowing field like the former. "And… there's someone else too." He, along with everyone else, looked at the second occupied cage, spotting a human male sitting inside it. The male appeared to be rather young, likely in his late teens.
Hiro couldn't get much from that fact other than knowing that a human was in trouble alongside the cute critter they came to rescue from the start. "Let's get 'em out!" He was about to take another step forward when Uzuki lifted an arm in front of him.
"Shh! Wait!" she whispered fiercely to him. "Someone's coming!"
Coming through another doorway on the floor below, a tall imposing masculine figure was walking regally towards the two prisoners. He was dressed predominantly in dark blue and cyan, wearing a pale blue mask that had a pair of golden tusks attached to it. He had a dark blue loincloth attached on the central front of his belt and a single cloth of the same color attached behind the belt fluttered as he walked. He had a breastplate covering his chest that was also held together by cyan armored parts around his waist. Beneath his helmet was a pair of eyes of orange sclera surrounded by dark pink eyelids and long magenta hair hung out from below it, trailing just like his pseudo-cape. He also had two dark blue guard casings on his forearms and two little black-skinned and red-eyed imp-like gargoyles rested on both his shoulders.
Once he approached his two prisoners close enough, he stopped, standing in front of them wordlessly. The human guy locked in the cage next to the little teleporting animal felt the need to break the uncomfortable silence. "Um, sir?" he spoke up warily to be as polite as anyone in his city could be, "If you're the one complaining about our kushikatsu, fine then. It's all chicken liver. But we didn't skimp on the yakiniku!"
The tall blue sheep-like stranger wasn't too impressed by the young human's explanation, not even bothering to continue the topic. "I can assure you that I have no interest in your…scraps on sticks and yucky fingers."
The human found himself shortly startled by one of the figure's shoulder pad-gargoyles flying off the shoulder he rested on and dove right for the cage bars, landing and grabbing onto them and sticking his head in a little bit like a hungry falcon. The gargoyle with his single smooth beak took a turn to speak, on behalf of himself and his other gargoyle compatriot, "But we would like to know more about the chicken liver."
His fellow gargoyle, one that had a skinny snout of serrated teeth, also swooped onto the cage with a devious chuckle, scaring the human again. "Hey Muninn," he snickered, "Looks like this guy's got the goods on chicken liver right here!"
"Come on, Huginn. You know a tasteless joke's worse than any lazy human food," the other one lightheartedly chastised.
Paying no further attention, the tall blue sheep-man turned to the forcefield-modified cage containing the dog-cat and stuck his arm in. The little creature tried to run, but the hand reaching after him reached his collar soon enough, taking hold of the little green vial between a finger and thumb and yanking it off the string.
"How nice of you to return my vial," the sheep-man remarked with a tone of lorded superiority as he looked over the tiny container briefly in his hand. He turned to head to a control console that sat at the base of the central column, but gave an extra glance towards the human prisoner. "You're about to become part of an experiment that may change the very nature of humanity." The whole time he said that, he seemed rather intent.
Opening a small port in the console, he inserted the vial into it like a memory stick, the green fluid then draining from the vial into whatever laid beyond the console. A translucent tank that stood above the console and supported the rest of the column above began to fill up with a skittering cloud of luminescent green insects which appeared to be a cross between fireflies and mosquitoes. The green liquid taken from the vial earlier traveled up a time that wound around the tank to another segment on top, draining into what seemed to be like a convertor of sorts. A glowing green pustulant mass grew inside the convertor, sparks of electricity flying around as the process went on.
"This guy looks like trouble," Uzuki shivered quietly.
"Me too," Hiro whispered in agreement, "and if I learned anything from watching 'Kunitsu Katsuro' movies, it's that green stuff usually means something sketchy."
The insects contained inside the glass tank flew up to where the glowing green mass was. Upon landing on its surface, they each inserted a proboscis into the thing's surface and began to drink like a mosquito would, filling their abdomens with the same green fluid until they swelled slightly. The armored sheep-man released one of them out of the tank, coaxing it into perching itself onto his hand. He turned to head towards the cage holding his human prisoner. Without any verbal commands but a single wave of an arm, the vines composing the bars of the cage unfurled and wrapped around the guy's limbs, pulling him upright until his feet hung just above the floor.
"So, is this, like, gonna hurt a lot?" the human asked, his casual tone not changing despite his current circumstance.
The sheep-man answered him curtly, "Yes, it will…if I'm doing it right." He gently plucked the mutated insect from his hand with the other hand, extending and holding it out just inches from his captive. "By the way, what did you say your name was?"
"Kanji Irie, delivery guy at your service," the guy answered nervously. "Why?"
"Oh, nothing. Just satisfying a need." The sheep-man prodded the mosquito to fly towards the guy, waiting until it landed on his face. Without any other intervention, the mosquito stuck its proboscis into his skin, not letting up until its green-filled abdomen drained itself of the liquid it drank earlier. Once it finished pumping every last drop into the guy, it then flew off.
"Hey," the guy named Kanji remarked with seeming relief, "that wasn't so ba–"
A visceral reaction retired inside his head, instantly making him feel his eyeballs popping out a little, accompanied by the sounds of bones cracking and tendons tearing. Painful twisting changes were happening all over his body, each one accompanied by him vocally expressing the obvious pain he felt behind them all. As if it weren't bad enough, the transformed areas that had shifted with such loud cracks and tears were rapidly beginning to liquefy.
Up above, the eyes of Uzuki and the turtles were glued to the scene, each one unnerved and repulsed but simultaneously drawn to the phenomenon with morbid curiosity.
"What is happening right now?" Hiro gaspingly whispered.
"That is just messed up," Uzuki winced.
It didn't take long, though it felt like it went on for hours, but the guy's transformation finally stopped. He was no longer the human he once was – now he looked more like a walking jellyfish, though he still kept his clothes on.
Uzuki, Hiro, Hoku, and Mon were aghast at this unnatural phenomenon, unsure what to make of a human undergoing such a forceful change to his own body. Basho, at the same time, made his observation. "Hmm, looks like Echizen-kurage was the culprit after all." His comment earned him disappointed stares from his brothers and Uzuki.
The delivery guy-turned-jellyfish still had a reaction that trumped the gang's. "NIKIBI NI NARETA BAKKARIYAKEDO, IMA KORE!?" he cried before running out the front ground-level door screaming and flailing his tentacles, slithering and bouncing on the ground along the way.
The little gargoyle with the big beak snickered from his perch on his master's shoulder. "Should we go after him, bosu?"
The sheep-man paid the question no mind, instead focusing on the results of the human-jellyfish transformation. "Totsuzenhen'i wa nan-nen mo mae to on'naji yō ni umaikotodoshita," he quietly expressed his positive reaction to the results of his trial experiment.
Hiro's eyes widened slightly at hearing those words. "Wait, did he say totsuzenhen'i? Mutation? As in, like us?"
Hiro, like his brothers, knew what he really was for all his life. He knew and understood what turtles around the world usually were: they were small, walked on all fours, and they never talked nor understood human speech. He knew that he and his brothers, despite being turtles too, were none of those things. For them to be the only turtles that were the way they were, it had to be… He gasped. "Could we be –"
"Part-Echizen kurage!?" Mon blurted in horror.
Everyone else would have seconded Mon's realization if they hadn't heard Basho's scoffing laughter next to them. "Haha…" he said with sarcasm and amusement in his voice, but noted everyone looking at him with a pause, "…you are not kidding, are you?"
The sheep-man took a knowing glance at the dog-cat, which still glowered at him from inside the cage. "I'll deal with you next after I'm done." He walked away without any extra consideration.
Up above, Uzuki was crouched on her knees but planted her hands down with earnest resolution. "We can't let that sheep-horn-weirdo do anything to the little guy!" she told the guys adamantly. The slightly wavering and pained tone in her voice told them she was just as scared at the thought of the cute critter undergoing the same painful and forceful transformation in just a little while.
Hoku was the first to turn a proverbial stone. "But how are we gonna do that? We don't have any weapons except for Basho."
"Well, note to you: Next time, make your own weapons out of high-grade titanium," Basho remarked indifferently, bouncing his staff on the palm of his hand.
Hiro stood up and got in front of everyone else. "Guys! Are weapons really all we got? We're ninjas. Hoku, you got your mad skills. Mon, nobody flips better than you. Basho, we wouldn't have gotten far without your big brain. As for me, I got –"
"– a friend who knows where to find a secret stash of weapons!" Uzuki finished for him, interrupting his little speech with a sideways slide that ended in her bouncing off his side a bit. In one hand, she already held a weapon of her own, one that was colored in a deep green and looked suspiciously similar to a golf club.
"Oh, thank goodness. We were so dead," Hoku whispered to Basho and Mon in relief.
Uzuki made her way over to a nearby lever that hung on the wall nearby. Pulling it, a trapdoor opened under the group, driving the four turtles to yell in fright from the sudden fall, though Uzuki remained confidently silent. Following the curvy chute was almost like traveling through the wormhole back on the surface all over again. As soon as they reached the end at the bottom, all four of them landed flat on their faces and piled over one another, only finished by Uzuki coming down after them and somersaulting over them all and landing on her feet upright.
The sight of this new towering chamber reignited the guys' verbal awe and wonder once again, even when they already expressed it twice over a short while ago.
"It's like magic and science had a beautiful baby!" Basho offered his latest high praise to everything he saw.
Hoku and Mon were already going through the shelves of bladed and chained weapons like kids on Christmas morning, with the former finding himself an identical pair of katanas and the latter pulling out a different-looking pair of nunchakus. They would have been all set, except that Hiro called their attention towards another rather cooler detail.
"Hey guys, how about we get those glowy ones over there?" Hiro pointed to a rack of weapons that emitted auras of dim lights of differing colors that conveniently matched that of the turtles' individual masks. The sight of them caused Hoku and Mon to look starry-eyed, dropping the weapons in their hands and skipping over to the magical weapon rack in long bounds.
"Dibs on the sword!" Hoku exclaimed in delight as he jumped up and grabbed the single blue-handled Ōdachi blade off the highest hooks. He took a celebratory swing to feel the sharpness of the sword zinging in the air. "Up swinging!" he tested out the blade in delight.
Mon grabbed the orange Kusari-fundo that hung on the next hook set, giving it a great big circular swing. The long chain-like cord curved around like a whip, the saw-laced orb at the end of it seemingly buzzing to life. "Hotto sūpu!" he whooped with a bounce in his step.
Hiro settled for grabbing the pair of red-glowing wooden Tonfā. He clacked them together in a manner like a double-fist pump. "Boom baby!" he expressed his now supercharged mood.
Uzuki looked over to Basho who stood at the side examining something else. "What about you, Basho? Aren't you gonna grab a glowy weapon?" She held to him the purple-wrapped staff that had a hooked blade on one end and a chained mace on the other.
"Nah, I'm good," Basho relaxingly declined. He cradled his current tech-packed titanium staff close to him, putting it against his cheek while rubbing it with his other free hand. "Te ~e hanasu ko tte wa zettaihen," he whispered tenderly to it. His eyes wandered to a little purple glowing crystal on a nearby stand, which prompted him to pick that up. "That looks interesting though."
Hiro, Hoku, and Mon stood together in a superhero stance, the new magically-powered weapons in their hands giving them a new energy they felt to be stronger than they ever experienced. Uzuki thought the little spectacle was silly but so very much a true display of the friends she knew for years. Basho didn't react with much fanfare; after all, he lived with that kind of behavior all his life.
As usual, Hiro took charge of his newly armed brothers' fighting spirit. "Let's go save the dog-cat!" Everyone else couldn't agree more.
Fun Facts:
Basho's expression about a 'Hair-Comb Princess' is a reference to the Shinto rice goddess "Kushinada-hime" (クシナダヒメ, also 櫛名田比売 or 奇稲田姫).
Kushikatsu (串カツ), or Kushiage (串揚げ), is a dish involving deep-fried meat/seafood and vegetables on a skewer. It's a bit like shish-kebabs.
Yakiniku (焼き肉 or 焼肉) is a style of cooking where meat (usually beef) and vegetables are fried on a griddle in the center of a group table. It's based off the Korean-style barbecue. Not to be confused with hotpot.
Echizen-kurage (エチゼンクラゲ), or Nomura's jellyfish, is one of the largest species of jellyfish in the world. It's usually made into ice cream, though it's prepared carefully to remove all harmful components. Most other kinds of jellyfish are prepared as salad.
Dialect terms/phrases:
Osore-akushū o hikiokosahen (恐れ悪臭を引き起こさへん): "Don't trigger my fear-stink!" | Standard Japanese: Osore-akushū o hikiokosanai (恐れ悪臭を引き起こさない)
Baka kabe (バカ壁): "Stupid wall!"
Atarimaeyaro (当たり前やろ): "Why not?" (interjection) | Standard Japanese: Atarimaedesho (当たり前でしょ)
Kyanonbōru (キャノンボール): "Cannonball!"
Anzen'na chakuriku (安全な着陸): Safe landing
Kyōi-akushū (驚異悪臭): Wonder/amazement-stink
Min'na, kotchi kotchi (みんな、こっちこっち): "Guys/everyone, over here!"
Nikibi ni nareta bakkariyakedo, ima kore!? (にきびに慣れたばっかりやけど、今これ？): "I just got used to acne, but now this!?" | Standard Japanese: Nikibi ni nareta bakaridesuga, ima kore? (にきびに慣れたばかりですが、今これ？)
Bosu (ボス): boss
Hotto sūpu (ホットスープ): Hot soup
Te ~e hanasu ko tte wa zettaihen (手ぇ放すこってはぜったいへん): "I'll never let (you) go." | Standard Japanese: Tebanasu koto wa kesshite nai (手放すことは決してない)
**** Did you know that the sentence "Totsuzenhen'i wa nan-nen mo mae to on'naji yō ni umaikotodoshita" (突然変異はなん年も前とおんなじように上手いことどした) is NOT in the Osaka dialect? It's actually in the {{Kyoto Dialect!}} It means: "The mutation succeeded just like it did all those years ago."
[Standard Japanese: Totsuzenhen'i wa nan-nen mo mae to onajiyōni seikō shita (突然変異は何年も前と同じように成功した)]
**** There are two ways to call a person from Osaka (or the Kansai region) stupid:
One is "Aho" (阿呆), which is used casually or as a joke that's taken in stride - you're most likely to hear that in a regular local conversation.
The other is "Baka" (バカ), which is reserved SPECIFICALLY for people who've made SINCERELY unintelligent or unwise mistakes - being called "Baka" is a much bigger deal to a Kansai person than to a Standard speaker (because Standard speakers use that term liberally for all manners and contexts).
If you want to stay on an Osakan's good side, stick with "Aho" and never use "Baka" unless you really have to.