"So…" Saiko glanced around the room awkwardly, head bobbing up and down slowly in the ridiculously mindless manner she had come to call 'the mildly dumb ape I–am-not-brainwashed-I'm-just-stupid' mode. She cocked her head and opened her mouth to speak.
Hoshika cut in before she could start rambling and putting each of the trivia show ponies of her mind through their pace in an effort to engage her impassive friend in any manner possible.
"Please don't start rambling about how penguins have small organs above their eyes that change salt water to fresh water, because you've already told me that and," she paused and glanced at Saiko who, having been just about ready to interrupt, closed her mouth and shrank back in fearful compliance, "don't try the story about how exactly you got that scar on your cheek, because I knew you were 'attacked' by falling blinds and not the most terrifying monster your messed up mind could ever dream of and could you please learn some subtlety, or at the very least, understand what it means so that you may realise just how loudly you are breathing and maybe, learn to breathe through your—"
"Don't tell me to breathe through my nose, because I've tried and it is by no means any quieter than breathing through my mouth," Saiko finished with a loud and deliberate sniff, turning her nose up at Hoshika and proceeding to breathe very, very loudly through her mouth.
Hoshika pulled a distasteful face and turned away, still speaking as calmly as she could, obviously making a great effort to not strike out at Saiko and her detestable attitude.
"Well before you march out of here wearing that ridiculous expression and the guise of a fat man who thinks too much of himself, you might want to be aware that morning breath does exists, and that it has done much to earn such notoriety."
Saiko scowled and shot back a reply. "Well your breath smells too, and the saddest part is that you've been breathing that insalubrious crap for so long that you don't even realise it anymore!" She grinned suddenly, and took a mock bow "And, my dear friend, with this terribly witty repartee, I do now take my leave from this mock battle of wits."
Hoshika gave her a doubtful look, already feeling weary and burned out by way of her room-mate's spontaneity and apparent rapid flu through vastly different moods. She filed through all the possible come backs in her head but found nothing that was likely to have any impact on the now almost obscenely cheerful Saiko she now had to deal with, and sighed. "Does this mean you'll untie me?"
Saiko twisted her mouth and surveyed the product of her rising with the sun (by accident): Hoshika wrapped in her very own super thin but also super strong blanket on the floor, said blanket secured in place by masses of duct tape winding around and around her body. Though it'd been awkward holding the blanket in place while she reached for the tape with her foot, it had worked, and now all she had to do was wait for the sweet, sweet sound of victory.
"All right, you win this round, Kira."
Saiko grinned. There was her victory, now for the celebration.
--
Forest stretched out before them and disappeared into its own darkness within a few metres. Gnarled roots could be seen dividing the greyish earth into misshapen squares. Branches stuck out at random, rendering the barely visible pathway through the forest not quite impassable, but it was certainly not your average stroll through the wood. Rocks too did their part, inconvenience the thoroughfare of any unlucky soul who found themselves needing passage through it, whatever their reasons, and it was almost as if the forest had rendered itself so nearly impassable just for kicks.
It was for these reasons that this forest was to be the site of a challenge. And really, who else but Hoshika and Saiko would ever take a rivalry so far?
They stood side by side, gazing at this formidable forest, hands resting warily on their swords.
Saiko looked over at Hoshika and grinned. "Well, this is a pretty damn awesome place for a race, eh?" And when Hoshika failed to reply within a second, she elbowed her in the ribs and spoke with unjustified camaraderie, "Aww, come on Bakawaka, you gotta admit, it's awesome. Look at all the obstacles! What's wrong? Afraid you'll lose again?" Sensing a moral victory, meaningless but still a victory, her grin grew wider until it seemed more the embodiment of manic glee than anything else.
Hoshika leaned away, a disdainful look on her face. "Of course I'm not scared I'll lose, or do you forget who didn't want a race in the first place? 'But that's unfair, my legs are shorter than yours, that's an unfair advantage'," she sneered. "Only the desperate would try to escape with such a weak argument, don't you think, Kira?" She smiled smugly at the look of dismay on her rival's face and waited for the oh-so predictable reply.
"Yeah, well screw you, Wakanao, because I'm going to win this one, and you know it!" She turned and walked away, but took only a few steps before turning around and saying, "Ready, go!" Then, she sprinted towards the forest.
Caught by surprise, Hoshika stumbled, but only momentarily as she settled into her stride and soon ran side by side with Saiko.
"What the hell was that? Anyway, you were right, your short legs are a disadvantage," she sneered and began to lengthen her stride.
Eyes looking only ahead, Saiko allowed herself thesmallest of smiles. Seeing this, Hoshika began to feel uneasy, because Saiko suddenly smiling could only mean that she had something up her pushed up sleeve.
"Alright then, what's your trick? What have you got planned?"
Saiko's face remained unchanged, still smiling in that horribly childish and gleeful way, and only allowed Hoshika two words.
"You'll see."
Her grin brought back memories of Saiko sprouting nonsense just long enough for Hoshika to not have enough time to step over the pothole, or asking her to hold a curious object while she opened a door into Hoshika's face, and remembering what always happened after Saiko started grinning like this, turned her attention to whatever danger was approaching. Her eyes widened and as she tried to stop, she bellowed at Saiko.
"Saiko, you little—" Her scream was cut off by the clunk of a branch colliding with her head.
Saiko stopped and jabbed Hoshika's forehead with a finger before turning and continuing.
"That was for calling me short, sucker!"
Hoshika rubbed her temples with both hands and squinted up at the sky where the boughs of the trees marked the border of the forest's dominion and muttered, vexed, "But I didn't even call you short."
--
An unspecified amount of time later, the two girls found themselves in much the same situation: jumping particularly gnarly roots and with no reprieve, ducking to avoid the branches that hung just low enough for them to hit the tops of their heads. Though it would seem perfectly logical to simply run while keeping one's head down, one could also find that it was not all that easy to jump logs and ruts whilst keeping ones head down and so they gave up after five very uncomfortable minutes of running steeplechase with their heads down.
Despite their comic attempts to overcome these difficulties, it was clear that they both had only one goal; to reach the clearing first and maybe strike a pose that radiated awesomeness and superiority. It was this objective and goal that they each held in their minds and the prospect of claiming victory over their greatest rival drove them on even as their legs burned with every step.
They ran for what seemed like hours, but it couldn't possible have been, as not even that ultimate prize of proven superiority could boost their endurance to such heights. Eventually, they sighted, perhaps eighty metres ahead, a patch of light that, by some unknown grace, was free of the evil, twisted old trees that had marked the furious path they'd torn, and undoubtedly meant the clearing and the end of their race. Though by no means the end of their rivalry.
They each pushed themselves harder now that the end was in sight, and felt in themselves a small rush of adrenaline.
Straining their bodies to the limit, they broke out into the clearing and then broke out into cheers and whoops of pure exhilaration, each fully believing that it was she who had won.
"Yes! Yes, I bloody won it! You see that, bakawaka?! I beat you!"
"Oh, that was it! There can be no more argument as to who is superior now, Kira! You and I both know I had won!"
Ignoring her, Saiko fell to the ground, and lay there, content with lying on the rough, dusty ground whilst Hoshika leant against a tee, grinning. Their looks of content vanished as they each realised that the other had been celebrating their own victory and they quickly broke into more quarrelling. However, their argument ended just as quickly when Saiko suddenly took off into the trees again, calling 'Race you back!'
She had almost disappeared out of sight by the time Hoshika had managed to understand Saiko's garbled hollering and upon realising what she'd said, followed after Saiko into the trees, this time merely hacking away what branches she could with her sword.
--
Saiko could hear branches cracking and crashing down, and occasionally, a muted sting of angry words. She grinned to herself; it had to be Hoshika and, judging by the racket she was making, she was not having an easy time of it. She soon settled into a comfortable rhythm of run, jump, duck, run, head left lest you run into that tree, duck, duck, jump that ditch, run, duck, hey look a snake, run, run, run, She felt almost robotic, not even having to think as she made her way through this veritable obstacle course of a forest. She could hardly hear Hoshika behind her as she made her way with unnatural ease. It was all good she thought to herself. "Yes, it is indeed all good."
"Would you still think so after you hear this?"
Saiko's head snapped back and forth as she looked around wildly, searching for her rival behind this tree or that one, and past her immediate surroundings, to her right, left and back. Still, even as she looked around her, she could not spot Hoshika among the trees and rocks and tangled greenery.
"Never thought I might be ahead of you, did you?"
She suddenly saw Hoshika in front of her, standing clear of any trees.
"Can you hear that?" Hoshika tilted her head knowingly, smug smile gunning for the position of default expression on her face. "Well, if you can't hear it, then surely you can smell it?
Saiko stood still and gave her a dubious look. "Smells like dirt."
"Which also smells like…?" Hoshika looked condescendingly down at Saiko.
She nodded with the resigned air of one who has just realised the obvious, "Which smells like rain. Great. Your point being— whoa shit!" she stepped forward as she spoke and tripped on a conveniently placed rock. She fell onto more rocks, though they were more pebbles than rocks. As she picked herself up, groaning and cursing the whole way, the biggest and fattest droplet she'd ever seen, or rather, been hit by, landed smack bang in the middle of her pissed off face, followed by a full-fledged downpour. She looked around her and at Hoshika, who was also now paying much more attention to their surroundings.
"You know how there are sometimes dry riverbeds that lie around, unnoticed until it happens to rain…" Hoshika glanced up at Saiko's face which, as she continued to speak, changed to her oshit face, "yeah, I'm thinking this might be one of those."
Right on cue, they heard the distant rumble of tonnes of water rushing down the creek bed to meet them and carry them away to their next major plot point.
"Kira," Saiko turned away from the water to face Hoshika, "it may be worth noting that I can't swim."
Saiko frowned and pulled a face. "Well that might be a little problem." She turned back and faced the wall of impending watery doom. "And this might just make that into a big probl—"
Rushing water hit her body like a tonne of bricks and however much she tried to get control over her situation, the force of an ever increasing torrent of water was clearly too much.
She was washed away down the river, still kicking her legs and sticking a hand above the surface of the water in what would have looked like a physical cry for help had her other three fingers and thumb also been up.
--
Saiko woke up to the rustling of leaves. Her left eye opened, then her right, only to be almost immediately blinded by the sun, shining down through a wonderfully convenient gap in the canopy far above her body. She groaned and rolled over, burying her head in the leaf litter. Something dug into her side and she groped around with one hand, looking for the offending object. After her hand had fallen upon far too many of the less desirable products of nature it found something solid and thankfully not of a similar nature to everything else. She pulled it away from her side, turning her head to get a look at whatever she was holding, but froze when she heard a blade being unsheathed.
She rose slowly, trying to make as little sound as possible, brandishing whatever she'd picked up off the ground. However, as like most people who wake up at the foot of a gargantuan (and smelly) tree after being knocked out whilst caught up in a flash flood do, she didn't exactly feel her best and lurched to the left, only just managing to grab onto the tree's trunk to avoid falling. While her head didn't feel as bad as it could have, it still felt stagnant and sluggish, topped off with a garnish of nagging pain at the base of her skull.
Despite this, she did her best to stay upright, leaning on a blessedly smooth tree as she looked all around her, watching the bushes for movement, waiting for something to jump out from behind the enormous buttress roots that this and all the surrounding trees stood on. She looked down at her makeshift weapon and was pleasantly surprised. She'd pulled out her very own zanpakuto, which happened to be all she needed to hack any assailant to small, bite size chunks for whatever scavengers lived in this forest.
Even as she waited for the assailant to appear, nothing happened. The forest was quiet and there seemed to be no surprise hiding in the woods today. Her eyes began to wander and she found herself turning her sword over and over. It was a bit dirty, marked with the patches of brown dust that turbid water leaves behind. She looked at its sheath and tilted it up with her hand. It was still the same as always, standard blank, carbon copy style (oh, the irony), completely devoid of the quirks and deviations that meant real style.
She slid her sword back into its sheath and then pulled it out quickly, swinging it across the front of her vision and played with it. Slashing at an invisible enemy, she dispatched them with a thrust through their nonexistent heart. She did not stop, and instead whirled around and struck the tree trunk hard, lodging the blade firmly into the timber.
Leaves fell to the ground, landing lightly with a pitter patter sound then rustled as the wind picked them up and threw them into a weak whirlwind. She watched the natural spectacle as the leaves rustled and flew about. She smiled, then facepalmed as she thought, it's both amazing and ridiculous that leaves can still distract me like that. Suddenly, she was shaken out of her musings by the appearance of a sizeable snake which had draped itself over a huge root big enough to act as a bench in any park.
The snake's body and head together were at the very least six metres long. Diamonds marked its back, and she knew it was a diamond python, and that they weren't venomous but were still intimidating. Furthermore, they could still bite and crush prey with their bodies. Yeah, that too.
Still, it slithered towards her, apparently disproving the old line 'They're probably more afraid of you than you are of them'. Yeah, right, and snakes show their fear of people by approaching them with utter confidence.
It came closer, all the time keeping its dull eyes fixed on Saiko. She stepped backwards slowly, sword now held out in front of her body, though she was not quite sure if it would really be of any use against a huge snake that seemed so intent on having lunch at present. She began to stomp her feet as she moved backwards, trying recall any trivia she happened to know about snakes.
Desperately trying to convince herself that she was not in too much danger, she muttered to herself over and over again 'They're probably more afraid of you than you are of them', and it became a sort of panicked mantra as she continued to try, ineffectually, to make her escape.
"What a load of bullshit." Someone was clearly not given to tactful speech.
"Ack!" Saiko froze and looked around frantically for the source of the voice until comprehension finally dawned on her face. She looked down. "Sorry?"
The snake seemed to sigh then looked back at her. "Does it say something about you that you'd naturally come to the conclusion that if you can't see anyone else, it must be the snake talking to you? Not a hidden ninja?"
Saiko stared dumbly at it, mind working furiously to process what it had just said. She finally opened her mouth to respond, but was cut off by the snake, who was clearly enjoying the look of enragement on the girl's face.
"Anyway, it is a load of bullshit. Think about it slowly. Why should I, or any other snake, be afraid of you. Look at me. I'm a 20 foot long snake, and I could kill you by squeezing your guts out."
It spoke with a self-assured air that was more likely than not fuelled by a never-ending superiority complex and as it finished speaking, the snake reared up so it could look at Saiko on the same level. It leaned back, looking her up and down.
"They really are letting in the full regiment these days, aren't they? Mind you," it paused, matching the look Saiko shot at it with equal parts of snark and gravity, "the situation doesn't look too bad for it. After all, you've been able to find your inner soul without too much of an issue, even if it took a flash flood and a conveniently placed overhanging tree branch to make the final distance," it added, tilting its head away from Saiko pre-emptively.
Saiko's eyes widened as the snake's speech confirmed her thoughts. "Fuck you! You're my magical, inner, deepest, whatever part of my soul that even I'm not fully aware of, right?!"
The snake rolled its eyes and nodded, letting her inarticulate rage wash straight over its head.
"Yes, yes, yes, yes!" she pumped her fist in the air, "I did freaking beat Hoshika, that sly, inferior loser! She can't even hold a match to my incredible superiority!" She broke off into laughter, basking in the entirely imaginary glory of her accomplishment, coasting straight past the fact that she had still yet to actually gain her zanpakuto.
The flat and obviously bored voice of the snake cut through her jubilation and reminded her of this fact in much the same manner that a tired teller at the grocery store asks 'cash or card', 'credit or debit', and finally, 'pin or sign'.
"You haven't even started on getting your zanpakuto, so stop celebrating. And yes, I am here to continually burst your bubble." The serpent proceeded to mime pulling a note out of its non-existent coat and spoke as it reading from this note, all the while deadpanning at the still grinning Saiko.
"You would do well to know, and if you already do, consider this a handy recap: a) I am your zanpakuto. This," it gestured with its tail at the forest around them," is your inner world. I am a reflection of your inner self. Therefore I am part of you, but not. Any questions?"
Saiko stood staring blankly at her 'inner self'. After at least a minute of her staring blankly and the snake staring amusedly, she slowly put up her hand.
"Could you possibly explain—"
"No," the snake cut her off abruptly, turned and began to slither away before looking back at her, "I suspect you'd do better if you dived straight in, head first, regardless of the risk"— it raised an eyebrow at the face Saiko pulled— "of cracking your head on the bottom, because you dived in at the shallow end." Again, it rolled its eyes, and sighed. "And yes, I do know that you've done that before, because I live in your mind. Dumbass. Now let's go."
It turned away and continued to slither.
Behind it, Saiko threw her hands into the air, frustrated by the snake and followed after. It was hard arguing against someone who knew every part of you. It continued to extol the virtues of maintaining a calm exterior, while Saiko pulled an overdramatic face and mimicked it talking, complete with flick-y gestures and a snooty face.
"By the way, your theatrical skills are terrible," the snake spoke, slithering around and up the trunk of a nearby tree then looking down at Saiko amusedly.
Saiko looked at it for a moment, then set her jaw, "However offended I am, it probably won't help to try and wring your neck, right?"
"Right. Mostly because you'd never catch me, but I am willing to allow you that particular delusion of grandeur."
She ignored its last remark. "So I'll just go along with whatever it is that I need to do to get my zanpakuto. Fine. Shall we start?" She looked at the snake with a smile, though it was impossible to tell whether she was faking it, or just had an insane mood swing. Though, the snake noticed, her smile was taking on a rather insane and not entirely sound quality as she waited for a reply.
Instead of backing away slowly and trying to escape from the mad child, it put on an insane grin of its own and began. "Right you are. So, first, you have to catch me by the neck and keep your grip." Besides, it reasoned, why not fight fire with fire? "Ready? Ok go."
Saiko lunged at it, right arm outstretched. It quickly slithered further up the tree, and hung from a branch, daring her to climb up. The clumsy human. Saiko tilted her head to side and though her mouth remained largely still, her eyes gave her amusement away.
"You know," she said, grabbing onto the first branch, "you may have wanted to pay attention to what I do in my spare time."
"And what would that be?" it asked, slightly disconcerted by her sudden grin.
Said grin grew wider and Saiko grabbed another branch and pulled herself up with her feet wedged firmly into the gap between branch and trunk. She continued her climb upwards, and the snake continued to slither away. It eyed a nearby tree and began to make its way along a branch and Saiko, with her stubborn refusal to give up or acknowledge the existence of gravity, followed it along the branch. Soon, they reached the point where the branch became too thin for Saiko to continue. Seeing this, the snake smiled (it would seem that now, its scaly face did facilitate such movement).
However, its small victory was indeed small and also short-lived and it could feel its smile drop as it saw Saiko reach forward again and begin to pull sharply at the narrow branch that the snake happened to be curled around. Her grin grew wider as she shook the limb harder, and the snake's grip loosened with each shake,
Try as it might, the snake's head and upper body were swung off the violently juddering branch, and then its tail, though it did try to catch the small twigs that grew off the branch's tip.
It fell, writhing madly as it did, and Saiko watched it fall with a smile. Suddenly, she remembered why she'd tried so hard to cut off the snake's escape and, laughing inwardly at how easily her mind was distracted, she began the descent from the heights of the tree tops because however much she enjoyed sitting in the swaying, vertigo-inducing zenith of a magnificent black fig, she had to catch that snake first.
The way down was much harder, as it often is, than it was going up. Many times she'd had to lie to herself and say there was nothing dangerous about falling several feet and needing to make a precision landing on a slippery smooth bough. Of course not. Despite the trouble and time she'd taken in getting down, Saiko still found the snake unconscious, making it almost far too easy for her to reach over, and clamp her hand firmly around its neck.
She smiled smugly and waited for the wail of despair that would surely sound when her dear zanpakuto realised it had given to her the first challenge on a silver platter by falling out of a tree. It did not, however, happen quite that way. Though she did stand there for a considerable amount of time waiting for her moment of triumph, it never came, and she sat down in the cavity created by two enormous buttress roots extending out from one of many such trees in that forest. After a moment's thought on how exactly she could keep the snake incapacitated, she pressed it belly up to the ground and found a forked branch and drove each prong into the ground on either side of the snake's neck until the cusp touched its scales.
Apparently satisfied with her handiwork, she stood up and dusted her hands off and then promptly sat back down again and, remembering why she'd bothered trapping her zanpakuto, slouched back into the hollow and relaxed.
She had dozed off by the time the snake regained consciousness and did not stir at all, even when it realised its situation and began to thrash and writhe in a poorly conceived plan of escape. It quickly gave up and laid perfectly still, save for the tip of its tail, which twitched irritably.
"Stupid human. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!" It whipped its head around at Saiko and screamed at her.
This did manage to wake her up, albeit very slowly. She kicked out vaguely in its direction and her eyes opened slowly. For a moment, she didn't realise where she was and looked around at approximately the same speed as a sloth on morphine. She did however, open her eyes properly when she saw the snake, and, noting that it had not managed to escape the bonds of her cunningly constructed shackle, grinned and called out with a cheery, 'Good morning, my dear asshole-y friend!' then got up and planted her hand firmly on its neck and pulled the branch away.
She grinned triumphantly and held it up at eye level, "So does this mean I've finished the first challenge? What's the next one? Collect two different types of leaves?" She spoke in an alarmingly condescending way, alarming in that when she began to speak like that, she usually decided she could also do anything.
"No, actually," her zanpakuto spoke slowly and hesitantly, "you're done."
Her eyes widened, "What?"
It nodded dejectedly. "That was the only challenge. See, I had a bet with someone that you wouldn't finish within before midday and would you look at that," it glanced at the sky, "it's still morning. So you now have your zanpakutou. Hold it up to the sky and laugh, because I'm damn awesome."
Saiko grinned, and reached for her sword, but it wasn't there. Not hanging from her hip, she glanced around and no, it wasn't on the ground or even in a tree. She groaned and smacked herself in the face with her palm and began to trudge around, looking for her newly gained (and newly lost) zanpakuto.
After what seemed like hours of searching for the reward of chasing after a huge snake, Saiko found herself back at the foot of the biggest tree in the entire damn forest. She turned and leant her back against its trunk, allowing her torso to scrape down its fortunately smooth bark to come to a jolting stop in contact with the ground. She inhaled deeply and collapsed her diaphragm suddenly, forcing all the air out in a deeply resigned sigh.
Something dug into her leg as she leant on a root. She reached down and pushed it away, then kicked it further away. It didn't skid all that far, with the two rows of angular spikes digging deep. Her eyes widened as she took in the handle wrapped in black and red canvas and the straight, long steel blade. She grinned and almost giggled to herself as she reached out her hand and grasped its handle, then winced and readjusted her grip so that the spiked hilt was no longer pressing into the flesh of her hand.
As Saiko swung it around her, delighting in the noise it made as she whipped it back and forth, something moved in her peripheral vision and she swung around, zanpakuto held in front of her body squarely in her right hand. She relaxed her grip when she saw that it was only the snake, her zanpakuto, and she smiled as she toyed with the mind-screw that was the impossibility of her zanpakuto being both the sword in her hand and the snake that she saw in front of her.
"That was just an extra challenge," it said, slithering towards her.
Saiko grinned, "Well that was completely within the rules, wasn't it, oh wise and powerful snake? Anyway, how do I get out of here?" She pulled a face and looked around for faults in the fabric of her inner world.
"A bit like this, I suppose." She turned back to the snake only to be met with a heavy tail being swung straight at her head.
--
"Okay Kira, what the hell do you think you're doing with this in your bed?"
Saiko woke to the significantly taller figure of her roommate looming over her bunk. She looked at what Hoshika held in her hand and grinned. "Nothing."
Hoshika raised an eyebrow and then sighed. "First, you almost drown me— you know I had to freaking shunpo like a lunatic to get out of there— and then, I have to carry your wet, dripping corpse back here, avoiding the mad dogs we call friends only so that I don't get strapped to a stretching rack where they learn of what happened by torturing it out of me!" She tried to contain the flood of loathing welling up inside and continued. "It's like you're trying to give them more things to interrogate me about, keeping this sword in here! Go and put it back where you found it, or I will burn that stupid stash of ramen to ashes."
Struggling to keep up with all the new information, Saiko instead stood on her bunk and snatched her zanpakuto out of Hoshika's hands and pointed it to the sky. "Well now, my dear friend, I believe it was another quick to anger fool who once said 'Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them', right, Hoshika?"
Shaking her head slowly, Hoshika replied with the same wary tone that nurses in institutions for the infirm used constantly, "No, I don't know what the hell you are on about, Saiko."
"Well isn't it obvious?" she grinned. "I've gotten my zanpakuto while you're still poking around with that little stick! Of course it was only to be expected, seeing how I'm so much better than you. I mean, really, who the hell do you think I am?! The little pansy whose place of rest happens to be higher than yours for no particular reason? No! It's merely because I am—"
"Just so damn annoying. Yeah, I know." Hoshika dropped down the ladder and sat on her own bunk. "Like it's the real thing anyway."
Saiko stuck her head under her bunk and said gleefully to Hoshika, "Then why don't you prove it? With a duel."
"What?"
"Not to the death, of course, just until one of us manages to nick the other. Deal?" She grinned and stuck a hand out.
Hoshika shook her hand reluctantly, fully aware of what would have happened if she'd refused. "Flats and backs of blades only." She shuddered. An entire day of pestering. Hoo boy.
"Okay then! This afternoon, we'll go to the banks of that river, I don't really know or care what its name is, but that's where it'll be done." Having finished talking, Saiko rolled back over and promptly fell asleep, leaving Hoshika sitting on the bunk below,
"Oh, and I just can't wait," she muttered, her voice oozing sarcasm where ever possible and barely audible.
Hoshika stood up, taking care not to bump her head and wake up a newly enraged Saiko, and walked out as quietly as she could.
She looked up and down the corridor, and saw Mochi at her own door, trying to be equally stealthy. She nodded a hello at her and set off down the corridor and Mochi smiled her all-knowing smile before entering her own room. She sat on her bed and leant against the wall, listening intently.
She smiled, when she heard the door click open, and a pair of feet padding quietly down the wooden boards close to the wall where the joins were still sound. Another door clicked, and she heard metal clink against the side of the doorway, and a muted cuss.
It was quiet for a moment, and her smiler grew wider. Then she heard shouting and a panicked shriek.
"Hi guys!" Saiko's voice rang out into the corridor.
"Who are you?! Don't kill me, plea—"
It was quiet for a moment. Mochi heard a slap, then a thump and the sound of Tifa groaning. She stood and walked to the door of Tifa and Shioru's shared room and opened it and found herself looking at Saiko standing dumbfounded but still smiling uncertainly at Tifa where she lay in her bunk on her side, hand still planted on her forehead.
Moments later, Hoshika walked in, "All right, what the hell did you do this time—" she stopped and looked at the scene. Mochi watched her turn back around and walk away. Hoshika's footsteps stopped and a door opened, she walked into her room and sat down on her bed.
Hand slapped against forehead with a resounding crack.
"Now that Saiko has her Zanpakutou... I don't even want to think about what she was about to do to Tifa."
A/N: Lol. Soo by my watch this is somewhere around 121 days late. Half of it is written on 11 pages of note paper.
Additionally, there are so many inaccuracies and plot holes and I use that term loosely because plot? Ha, what the hell is PLOT?! Ahhh I'm not making sense it's too late to be making sense you know what, I think I'm going to send this, then sleep kthxbye
This chapter was kindly written by failermon.