[color=5048cd][b]Ryuji Igarashi - Hitting Traffic - District 19[/b][/color]

[@Krayzikk]

Ryuji Igarashi was, normally, a pretty observant sort. A fair student who managed to comfortably stay on top of his grades and crack into the top 25 in his year come time for exams, he had a knack for both picking things up and noting small details. A Smash Bros enthusiast, such an eye for detail was naturally honed further as he learned to read playstyles and opponent tendencies, turning him into a local nightmare amongst Sakurai Central High's fighting game community. With his job being primarily service-based, he again learned a new facet of this all-important life skill: reading people, reading rooms, reading between the lines of a conversation.

All this he had quietly and unassumingly learned over the course of seventeen years. His perception had just found and fostered an environment where it could grow to an admirable level, nothing more, but that still had its own hand in shaping the boy. It helped him deliver a deadpan joke right when it would inspire the most confusion, it helped him learn when to filter and when not to filter his wholly honest opinion, and it helped him even to understand some of the idiosyncrasies of the people in his life— Takeda-kun liked goofing off and talking about seedy subjects to ease the tension he felt as karate club captain every day, Hanazawa-san's gossiping about coworkers peaked whenever she wasn't certain she was in on something, "Luigi" was still smart enough to sign his name on their checks as "Ryuuji" so they would clear without issue.

Now the point of all this—

He rounded a corner, having returned to the sidewalk upon his entry to District 19.

[url=https://youtu.be/rYKGiLM1wJQ]...And[/url] his gaze narrowed upon a shambling, almost [i]sloshing[/i] figure.

[color=5048cd]"Huh?"[/color]

—Somewhere along the way, it hadn't clicked that District 19 was one of the "weird ones".

Maybe it was desensitization. A quiet street wasn't anything to worry about compared to an angry Level 5. Or a Skill-Out gang. That was all he ever encountered out here, no matter when he was called to make the walk over. Just a quiet, slightly windy, slightly worn, and otherwise unremarkable section of town. He hadn't thought too hard about it at all. It was just kind of nice, easy to move through, and maybe needed a couple lights fixed.

Here, he belatedly realized that he had [i]never heard anyone else get sent to District 19[/i].

Not once.

He skidded to a stop. The hairs on the back of his neck rose, each one standing at attention as a sickening pins-and-needles sensation followed in their wake. While this was the exact reason he must have been the one always fielding this District, he was damn certain he'd never heard anything, either officially or less so, about...

[color=5048cd][i]Mud...men?[/i][/color]

Mudmen walking the streets. Maybe a Golem, but that was the territory of magic. He would only know about the collected details that showed up amongst things like RPGs or books, not any actual, real world rules on it. Putting aside thoughts about finding a "weak point", he only knew that it looked like a godless abomination, something that very much should not have been— he could say those things about his classmate Zippo and his lighter fluid fingers, but this was different. Its form, if you could even say it had one, looked like it was barely trying to be humanoid to begin with. It ambled slowly, brokenly, shifting down the street just as much as its shadow did, long enough to meld into his own in the low light of afternoon.

Not... [i]necessarily[/i] threatening just off of looks, though. If it was a golem, that mean automaton, and basically mud-robot. Academy City was full of those.

Almost as if to answer his thoughts, the clay [i]thing[/i] raised it's "head"—

[i]
A̭̳̺̕A̡̝͙͕̲̯͉̩̅A̮̜̙̹͈̲ͨ̐ͨ̀A̅̈́͒ͥͮͭ̕A̜̅͂ͬͧ̎̊̓A̠͓̪ͬ̀̈̏ͭ̈́͠Ȃ̦̳̰̖̠̃ͪ͗ͣ̃A͈͎̣ͧ̇͋̆̈́̅ͅḀ̪̬͑̍ͮ̔̚͜Á͕̦̫͗̿͐̆̐A̐̇̿ͦ̓͏̥̹̲̦̤̫ͅḀ̫̯͈̜͈͉ͦ̅̃͂̿̓̊Ả̺̰̦͓̬̠A͍̗̦̱A̵̘̔̓Ắ̤A̬̣̳̭̥̤̜A͗̄͆̿ͦͣ͏̖A͕͚͍̙̎͂̎́ͤÄ͙͓̜́[/i]

There was no sound. He was sure of it.

There was nothing echoing off of the buildings. There was no ringing in his ears. There wasn't even a mouth that opened—

And yet he felt his head threaten to split. Every muscle tensed as his eyes went wide, clawing at his scalp to stop not ringing eardrums, but a ringing [i]cerebrum[/i].

He could now scratch "potentially harmless" off the list. Gathering his shattered wits into a tiny pile, he looked up. Amazingly he hadn't dropped the pizza. The construct continued to shamble forward, each lumbering step squelching against the pavement.

He felt his heart grow light as a very specific hormone sent his whole body into overdrive, spurred on by the attack on his very psyche. The primitive part of his brain had immediately known what his conscious mind was realizing— he was in danger.

He wasn't the only one, either.

His pupils probably looked like saucers, as his vision managed to clear further than it ever did on its own. Between short, sharp breaths, his hands found his phone in its pocket on their own, without him taking his eyes off the mudman until they brought up the screen.

There was also his customer. By now, a regular. A beautiful blonde that had surprisingly little accent and clear grasp on most conversational Japanese. A good tipper from the Nordic West with the exact kind of phonetically impenetrable name you would expect. Someone who he didn't quite expect to be normal, because in all honesty, nobody in this town was.

But normal or not, she needed to know.

He didn't know if anyone else lived here, honestly, but he could get ahold of her, and she [i]would.[/i]

He could warn her, she could warn her neighbors.

His fingers flew across the keypad, making use of as much time as he could before this thing noticed him here.

>hey this is pizza guy

This was the upside of being personally accountable by phone to your customers.

>theres something that looks like a golem walking around here. screamed at me
>no sound felt it in my head
>stay inside and warn people around you

Letting them know about the shit you ran into in real time was [i]much[/i] easier.

Raising it, he snapped a photo and sent it to one Sieglinde Driessen.

It was blurry, but so was the thing's outline even when your adrenal gland was going nuts. Probably didn't matter.

It was interesting, absurd in a way, how much of his usual sangfroid remained. Perhaps he hadn't just [i]felt[/i] his blood turn to ice. Or that subconscious bit treated this like an encounter with a wild animal— No sudden moves.

>call the police
>i'm gonna try and find a different route so i can get u yyour food
>Luigi's Pizza apologizes for the inconvenience in advance

With that distinctive flip-phone sound, Ryuji cut communications there, and—

[color=5048cd][i]What if it follows me to her?[/i][/color]

—Froze for a moment, before slowly sliding backwards the way he came, gauging for a response.