Chapter III

In which Gin Quixote turns out not to be the only stupid character in the story

So, Gin Quixote was given a room for the night. However, the idea that he had not yet established his character properly was still weighing heavily on his mind. Even as he continued drinking at an amazing rate, and despite the fact that he was soon about two drinks from going on a sexual harassment rampage that would leave him thinking he had gotten with five girls and one MADAO in the morning, Gin never lost sight of his goal, or at least not for more than an hour or two. And so, inebriated beyond belief (which was about his normal level of intoxication), Gin Quixote made his move.

"Oi, shensei," Gin slurred, punctuating every few words with a slosh of his drink, "you 'aven't been doin' yur part. I 'aven't got one order ta disobey. What the hell kinda dojo iz'is, huh?"

As previously mentioned, Otose was entirely used to the drunkest, loudest, and stupidest patrons in all of Spain, and so was not the least bit flustered by her patron's behavior. She would almost have been amused, if his uncontrolled movements weren't soaking her (admittedly filthy) bar with low-quality beer. However, because she liked to uphold at least an illusion of comfortable cleanliness, she decided it would be best to remove the rowdy otaku before he further decorated the establishment with his drinks, and, later, puke.

"If you want an order so badly," she replied, "then how about you clean up the mess you've made."

"Heroes dun clean bars, shensei," Gin Quixote replied, in what might have resembled a condescending tone from a more sober man.

"So now you realize it's a bar." Otose sighed and began to search for something that would appeal to her client's otaku sensibilites. Luckily for her, her barmaid Tama was much more well-versed in Japanese culture (or at least in anime tropes). She slammed the end of her broom onto the ground and yelled, in a voice that managed to be both monotone and commanding, "Students don't get drinks until they scrub the dojo floors spotless!"

Gin immediately straightened up and shouted, "Yes, sensei!" He flew to the floor and, bent at the waist with his hands pushed against the ground, began running back and forth, in a drunken imitation of the students in a Buddhist dojo, which was only made weirder by the fact that he had neglected to pick up a rag first. On his first pass, he managed to knock over a chair, two barstools, and, at the end of the room, himself, but after righting himself he managed to run back and forth across the room with miraculously few collisions. Tama, ascertaining that the problem had been resolved, immediately returned to her waitress duties. Otose, who was slightly less confident in her "student"'s ability to not ruin anything he touched, stared at the adventurer for a few minutes to ascertain that he wasn't actively destroying any more of her property. Once she decided that his current activity was distracting and annoying but otherwise harmless, she risked moving on to her other, somewhat more reputable patrons. She had taken a couple orders and served one drink to a particularly intoxicated Muleteer when she realized that the sounds of running feet, hands being dragged across the floor, and the occasional clatter of an overturned stool being once again bumped had stopped. When she turned to look at Gin, all she found was a note with "Rules are for suckers! BA-KA!" scrawled on it. Underneath was a crude drawing of Otose with bug-eyes, a giant mouth, and devil horns.

She used it to put out her cigarette.

Gin laid on the roof with his hands behind his head, looking at the stars as innocence (and a very strong scent of alcohol) radiated from his face. "Nohbuddy undershtands me…" he drawled mournfully. In his mind, he was the picture of teenage angst. To a passerby, he would've looked more like an (very persuasive) advertisement for Alcoholics Anonymous.

His childhood friend, Zura, was luckily understanding. He nodded gently from his position sprawled out to Gin's right. "Don't worry, Gin Quixote," he said, his voice full of the confidence of youth. "One day, we'll change the world, just you and I." He turned to look into his friend's eyes and extended his hand, palm up, to Gin. "Promise me that one day, together, we'll create a better world and overthrow the fascist Bakufu government that has soiled this country and its citizens." Gin and Zura stared meaningfully into one another's eyes, reveling in their mutual rebellious idealism and optimism.

"...WHAT THE HELL, ZURA?!" Gin screamed, immediately sobered by the sudden need for a straight man. "YOU ALREADY GOT A CHARACTER IN CHAPTER 1! What about Ezurako, huh? Who's gonna be my maid now, eh? What do you think this fan fiction is, bastard?!"

"It's not Zura, it's Katsura-"

"You were introduced as Zura, idiot-"

"-and I refuse to submit to the authority of any unjust rule, be it from the government, the author of this fan fiction, or Opr*h W*nfrey."

"YOU'RE MISPLACING YOUR PATRIOTISM! And what the hell does that last part mean, anyway? What do you have against Opr*h?"

"Her recommendations are based on what is easily consumable rather than on actual quality, she has little to actual content to contribute to society, and her fans follow her whims like sheep to their shepherd, forming a de facto dictatorship that a committed revolutionary such as myself cannot abide by the existence of. Plus," he continued, his face darkening as he averted his eyes away from Gin's, "I hear she sometimes doesn't reply to mail from her fans even if they're really cool and nice and sent a lot of letters."

"SO AFTER ALL THAT IT'S JUST BECAUSE SHE DIDN'T REPLY TO YOUR FAN MAIL?"

"Hey, some of us are trying to get on the good side of the lovely Tama right now!" a Shinsengumi officer yelled, poking his head out of the bar to look up at the rowdy duo. However, upon spotting Zura, the officer blanched and began frantically grasping at his walkie-talkie. "We have a Katsura sighting-"

"Oi, why does the author call him something different?"

"-at Otose's snack bar in the middle of La Tama. Send re-enforcements immediately!"

In an unreasonably short amount of time, a Shinsengumi car-

"What's a car doing in the middle of the 16th century?"

-a Shinsengumi horse pulled up, its siren blaring-

"What kind of horse has a siren?!"

-as it screeched to a halt outside the bar. An officer with sandy brown hair, red eyes, and a bazooka got off of the horse, joining the first officer who had already armed himself with a badminton racket.

"NEITHER OF THOSE WEAPONS HAVE BEEN INVENTED YET! WHY EVEN SET IT IN THE PAST AT THIS POINT?" shrieked Gin Quixote as he stood, before paling and squatting down. He covered his mouth with one hand and gripped his stomach with the other. "Ah, it's no good. I'm still too drunk to do tsukkomis."

Ignoring the drunken perm-head's rantings, the sandy-haired officer planted himself firmly in front of the building and leveled the bazooka to aim at the long haired terrorist's head. "KAAATSUUURAAA!" he bellowed as his finger moved to the trigger. "I've got you today!"

"You Shinsengumi dogs will never capture me!" Katsura yelled down in reply.

"Just come quietly, Katsura," the officer said calmly, "or I'll blow you and that white haired guy away right here and now." From the look on his face, however, he was really hoping that Zura would not comply.

"Oi, Zura-"

"It's not Zura, it's Katsura."

"-maybe you should just give up already. I'm supposed to get into boyish hijinks, not federal prison," Gin Quixote said nervously. " And do you know how lame it would be to die in the first arc? Everyone on the internet would make fun of me, yeah? And the mangaka who writes my story won't be able to support his family! Think of the children!" he pleaded.

With a smug chuckle, Zura looked at his desperate companion and replied, "Don't worry, Gin. I have an ace up my sleeve. There is something they don't realize yet."

Gin's face brightened. "Eh? There is? What is it?"

A confident smile spread across Zura's face as he proudly proclaimed, "They can't blow us up...if I blow us up first!"

Before anyone had the time to react, Zura had already thrown a smoke bomb at his feet and vanished, leaving only a couple of ticking metallic balls rolling through the smoke lwhere he had stood. The remaining spectators stared blankly at the balls until, without much warning, they began beeping rapidly. Gin Quixote was already pretty fed up with this bullshit.

All the bombs blew up at once, sending the officers flying backwards and Gin crashing through Otose's roof, a fall that would surely have killed him had he not been the main character with a heavy coat of plot armor. For a moment, silence reigned. The officers stared into the destroyed bar. Otose stared at the fallen man. Gin stared at the speechless Otose. The Muleteer glanced at the hole in the ceiling before returning to his drink. Tama began demurely (albeit ineffectually) sweeping the boards at the edge of the pile of debris. Finally, as the last of the smoke cleared and the last of the dust settled, a lazy drawl broke the silence.

"Oi, sensei, could I get another drink?"

That was it. Otose exploded. "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING DESTROYING MY ROOF, BASTARD?!"

"Hey, hey, I didn't destroy your roof," Gin Quixote said in a conciliatory tone as he calmly pushed himself up and brushed the dust off of his kimono. "You see," he began, looking wistfully through the hole in the ceiling as he recalled the incident which had already been corrupted in his manga-crazed mind, "I was having an existential monologue on the roof when suddenly, The R*d Comet descended in his mobile power suit and said, 'I have come here to challenge the great-"

"If you think I'll let a drunk destroy my bar without even paying rent-"

"Hey, old hag, I'm an adventurer, not a drunk."

"-then you've got another thing coming. And what the hell happened to calling me 'sensei,' huh? You actually realize this isn't a dojo, don't you, bastard?!"

While the mop-head and enraged bar matron argued, the Shinsengumi officers dusted themselves off and took stock of the situation. After a moment, the sandy-haired officer began to approach, removing a pair of silver handcuffs from his belt as he walked. The duo didn't register his approach until they heard the distinctive click of the handcuffs locking around Gin Quixote's wrists. "Alright, you're under arrest," the officer drawled in a bored voice, his previous enthusiasm from the face-off with Zura gone in a puff of smoke. "We've got some questions for you back at the station for associating with a known terrorist."

Gin's calm demeanor vanished without a trace at the mention of arrest. "Wait, waitwaitwait, you've got it all wrong. Terrorist? What terrorist? I don't know any terrorist." Gin stopped chattering for a second to look at the face of the officer. It was difficult to tell whether he was even paying attention, but either way he remained unconvinced. His face suddenly lighting up in recognition, and his memory of the confrontation conveniently unscrambling itself, Gin began again, "Ah, you mean my friend Zur-Joe? A-ha-ha! He's such a character, such a fun guy, and in no way a terrorist."

"How is he not a terrorist?" screamed the black-haired Shinsengumi officer, who was still hovering at the bar's enterance. "He LITERALLY just blew up the roof!"

Gin began to laugh stiffly. "HAHAHA, what a kidder, huh? You know, boys these days, always pulling pranks." Then, a sudden gleam in his eye, Gin leaned in towards the sandy-haired officer and began to whisper conspiratorially. "But, you know, I always thought he was a little weird. I hear that during the cultural festival last year, Nozomi confessed to him, and he said that he 'only dates married women.' What does that mean, eh? But he rejected her just like that! And then, during the inter high basketball championship-"

"Why did it turn into high school gossip?!" yelled the black-haired Shinsengumi officer. He turned to his commander, saying, "Captain Okita, please, tell him to be quiet!"

"Oh, is that so?" replied Okita in monotone, ignoring his subordinate. Gin nodded emphatically. "Well, you can never trust long-haired guys. They act so innocent, then next thing you know they're smoking cigarettes on the roof."

"WHY ARE YOU GETTING INVOLVED TOO?!"

"Oi, Anpan-kun," said Gin, turning to the subordinate officer with an extremely serious expression. "If you keep yelling at us, we're not gonna let you sit next to us during lunch period."

"My name is Yamazaki…" the officer said, his voice quickly losing strength as he relived many painful memories of eating alone in the 16th century Spanish equivalent of high school, "...and...ok, I'll be quiet."

At this point, Otose had had more than enough time to calm down, and was now faced with a tough decision. Although she seemed surly on first appearance, truthfully Otose was a fairly soft-hearted woman, especially towards people like Gin with few to no redeeming qualities. Because of this, she was torn between ridding herself of the burdensome patron once and for all into the hands of the Shinsengumi officers or helping him, an act of charity whose reward would probably be nothing beyond the further destruction of her bar and possibly a migraine. Well, when you spell it out like that it seems like a pretty easy decision, but, again, Otose was a soft-hearted woman, and so she decided to act as her crazed patron's savior this time. "Officers," she said, immediately commanding attention from both the officers and her patron, "don't waste your time with that man. He's crazy." She punctuated this statement with a dismissive wave of her hand. "No matter what you charge him with, he'll just get off on an insanity plea."

Okita clicked his tongue. "That's too bad. I was looking forward to trying out some new 'interrogation techniques.'" With a nod from his commanding officer, Yamazaki came forward and unlocked the cuffs. Gin rubbed his wrists, his eyes nervously flitting to Okita's face. "So, uh, what do you mean by 'interrogation techniques?'" For a moment, a strange look passed across the officer's face, twisting his features to a dangerous cocktail of sadism and bloodlust, but just as quickly he regressed to his normal mask of unshakeable apathy. Without answering Gin's question, Okita politely nodded to Otose and turned on his heel to walk out the door, one of the few major features of the bar still standing. Yamazaki, seeing his superior's exit, quickly gave Otose a stiff bow and followed suit. The two officers then mounted their siren-enabled horse and, in just as comically short a time as it took them to arrive, they were gone.

Gin and Otose watched as the pair rode off into the distance and disappeared around a bend in the road, at which point Gin turned to Otose, his deadpan once again in place. Without a hint of irony, he said, "I think that guy was crazy."

Otose paused to re-light her cigarette, and, after releasing a plume of smoke from her mouth, replied, "Is that so?"

Her composure restored, Otose realized that there was only one way to save her bar at this point, and that was to get rid of Gin Quixote. Otose may have been soft-hearted, but she wasn't a saint, and certainly wasn't looking to support some useless bum for no pay. I mean, what kind of idiot would rent a room to a man with no motivation, skills, or obvious abilities, a man who could probably only earn enough money to survive by putting together some half-assed odds job service? Looking at the man, who was now attempting to deface the remains of her bar's roof using chalk ("It's a prank," he said seriously when he noticed her staring), she knew that it would take months of incessant nagging to get him to give up a dollar, and much more to get enough money out of him to repair her bar. Therefore, she decided to cut him a deal.

"Hey," she said, and Gin once again turned his attention to her. "If you leave right now, I won't charge you for the night, the beer, or the roof."

"Sensei," replied Gin, putting aside his graffiti for the moment, "are you an idiot? Have too many years gone to your head, is your brain rotting in their? Can't you at least wait until the end of the arc to go senile?"

"Oi, you can't just-"

"As I've said," Gin interrupted, "I can't leave until I've established my character as a friendly troublemaker."

Otose sighed, desperately trying to bite back her returning rage. Cathertornes, who had hidden in the back while the Shinsengumi officers were in the bar, finally emerged. "You've gotta get rid of that man right away, for sure," she said, her voice accusatory and irritable (though she was probably more irritated by her lack of lines than by the man himself). "He's trouble, I'll tell you. Anyone who brings the police to this bar is bad news, I say."

"I don't want to hear that from you," Otose retorted, glaring at her employee, who awfully concerned with obeying the law for an ex-con who had tried to pick three separate customers' pockets just earlier the same day.

Cathertornes was about to reply when, at long last, fortune smiled upon the bar matron as Tama finally looked up from her sweeping to, once again, save the day. "Gin Quixote-sama," Tama started, "you have already adequately proven your irresponsibility by destroying our 'dojo' and refusing to pay. In fact, to me, you appear to be what Cathertornes calls 'complete scum.'"

"You're not just saying that?" Gin said, looking at her hopefully.

"No," replied Tama, "you have certainly ruined what would have otherwise been a productive day with your selfishness."

"Yeah, a real dirtbag, for sure," Cathertornes chimed in, nodded emphatically. When Gin turned to Otose, she sighed. Reluctantly adopting the persona of a sensei, she said, "Student of mine, you have been so disobedient that I cannot help but cast you out." She took a drag from her cigarette, and for a moment stared at Gin Quixote in silence, as he continued to look at her expectantly. She exhaled, and, returning to her bar matron persona, finished with exasperation, "So get out of here already."

"Alright," he said, energized by this questionable endorsement. "I guess that's that." Gin Quixote felt very satisfied at having completed the task he set out to complete, and even more satisfied at having escaped the wretched fate of having to take responsibility for his own actions. At this point, the sun was already beginning to rise again, which rid him of the need for a room, and so Gin decided to take the bar matron's advice and make himself scarce. He quickly retrieved his forgotten armor (which may have been a family heirloom, but was still a piece of shit) and once again mounted Sadinante. He turned to the bar matron and her two employees and made a "heartfelt" promise to return to his home dojo again, at least in some sort of "Threat on the Homefront" arc.

"Don't return unless you can pay," was the only response he got.

Hearing this, Gin Quixote decided to return to his home to get some money, less because he believed he should repay his debt to the bar matron cum dojo sensei and more because he didn't think he'd be able to get any more free beers and the thought of life without beer was almost as terrifying as the thought of life without strawberry milk. Which, again, you could only trick people into giving you for free so many times.

So, after a pathetically short journey, Gin turned Sadinante back towards home (which was quite a feat in itself, for, as has been noted, Sadinante was about as good at doing what he was told as his owner) and began his ride, his incipient headache foreshadowing the hangover he would be fighting for the entirety of the ride home.

The three bar ladies watched the man and dog (and some weird purple-haired woman, who was following some distance behind the pair) as they slowly made their way to the horizon. Just before the three turned to go back into the bar and do what they could to return it to its admittedly shoddy standard of cleanliness, Cathertornes snorted and spat in the direction of the slowly disappearing silhouettes.

"Good riddance," she said.

Notes for those who haven't read Don Quixote or don't understand the characters:

Gin Quixote de la Tama - Don Quixote de la Mancha + Sakata Gintoki

Sadinante - Rocinante (Don Quixote's horse) + Sadaharu

Otose & Tama - Innkeeper and Innkeeper's daughter (both unnamed, as far as I know)

(I combined all the innkeepers in the novel into one super-innkeeper)

Cathertornes - Maritornes (Assistant of the innkeeper) + Catherine

Muleteer - muleteer (someone who herds mules) turned into half-mule half-man Amanto

Okita, Yamazaki, and Zura - All not present in Don Quixote. The Shinsengumi isstanding in for the Holy Brotherhood, the religious police force from Don Quixote, but originally, Don Quixote has a run in with a group of muleteers at the first bar, not a bunch of weirdoes-I mean, a terrorist and the police.

The Red Comet is an antagonist from Gundam