Howler

après moi le déluge ;; howler && el taco taco

^{DESPITE ALL MY RAGE, I AM STILL JUST A RAT IN THE CAGE
anything at all to never feel like that again}

---

N A M E

Nagamura Yoroi

D A T E O F B I R T H

07 JUL 2151

P L A C E O F B I R T H

Kakunodate, Japan, Earth.

B I O L O G I C A L S E X

Male

B L O O D T Y P E

AB+

H E I G H T

188 centimetres

W E I G H T

74 Kilograms

I M P L A N T S

L2

Keep your chin up. Hands up. Guard your head, boy, don't let them in.

Chin up. Friends, family? Long gone, won't help you now. They watched you leave in a shiny tin can and slept better that night. Dressed you up in devil's clothes, so they shipped you off to make it real.

Hands up, boy. No time for tears.

Live on your feet, son, bob and weave. You got teeth to cut, no time to sleep. Gotta grow up fast, grow up hard, 'cause those devils are right there with you. Every day, hour, minute. No time to rest with a devil on your back.

Head down, nose to the grind stone. Shoulder to the wheel. No time for chit chat. Do your drills, son, be a man. Won't make it out of this as anything less.

They shipped you up to the monsters, boy. Come back one of 'em.

Hello!

Lord, I never comment on these things. What on Earth has come over me.

At any rate, welcome to the site! I'm the local elitist jerk, feel free to poke me in the Advanced section sometime or shoot me an idea for a 1x1 you're willing to put some moxie into.

après moi le déluge ;; howler && el taco taco

Yoroi was stepping onto the faux-leather padding as soon as Caelnus gave his blessing, not bothering to watch Court disappear back into the mass of waiting students. Good that he'd gone for it--did the turian know it was better this way, or was he just looking for something more entertaining to watch? Yoroi didn't know or care. It had worked. Now it was just him in Kalyani.

Good.

He wasn't going to win this match. Say what you want about her, Madan knew her shit. You didn't get to Step Nine any other way, even taking five years to do it. Most of the time she was all limp kitten, putting in the bare minimum to pass the muster and make the hawks happy, but there were more than a few hard boys who'd found out the that when it came right down to it she was a fucking natural. Even now, watching her prime, Yoroi could tell by the way her aura _flowed_ that she was starting to get into it. He remembered his parents, his friends, the teachers at school after Conatix got through with their civilian party line--they might have gotten the kids there with promises of glory and distant horizons, but they'd gotten the signature on the permission form with fear.

Do you know what your child is capable of?

You've no idea what he'll do if he doesn't learn to control himself.

What if he flips out or something? I'm out, man, I'm not screwing around with no freak.

I'm not trying to alarm you, but in certain cases biotic episodes have been known to turn violent.

Yeah. Fucking cases like this one.

Yoroi had watched more than his fair share of the older students training--the instructors didn't like it, worried that some Step One jackass would lose it and breach something probably, but he'd seen some of what they were up to. He knew Madan was more than the wet blanket she pretended to be, and now he was going to feel it. Ready to dance, he settled himself in--

And she was already on him. He'd watched that glow slide right through her pale olive skin, eezo nodes jacked up and raring to go, and still he almost missed her first shot.

Almost. If there was something Yoroi was good at, it was barriers. Projection was his problem, controlling those rippling bolts of force she seemed to rattle off so easily, but his body was his turf. Like a samurai, he always thought to himself, never quite able to voice the stupid cliche aloud. Knight in shining armor. O-Yoroi. Can't beat what you can't hurt. Last moment or no his barrier was strong as anything, dissipating her torrent of strikes like water around a rock. It wouldn't hurt him, it couldn't hurt him--she might have all sorts of spin over Newtonian physics on her side of the court but her right to play with the spatial laws ended at his face.

She could do better than that. He knew it, and he was going to make her prove it.

Someone else would have taunted her. Al-Tariq would have said something shitty, called her a her something disgusting enough to make her mad, but that wasn't Yoroi's game. He didn't want to win, he wanted to win. To be so damn full of biotic fucking badassery that he could rip that taloned foot off his throat and take the leg with it. You didn't get there by being a brat--you got there by knuckling down and putting in the hours. Say what you wanted about him, Yoroi worked his ass off at BaAT and it showed.

Where Kaylani was flowing, natural, easy, Yoroi was sharp and efficient. His barriers came with a sharp clench of his right fist, his strikes with his left. His main issue in the ring was that he hadn't quite figured out how to manage one without weakening the other--focus he had plenty of, but multi-tasking? Firing without using that raw strength he had in his shield? It was tough, it took training and time he hadn't had, but that didn't mean there was nothing there. Kaylani's barrage was measured, sustainable, but each blow was weaker than his barrier by a good margin and there were enough of them to give him a good sense of how much strength he could spare. All he needed was to wait for the moment between one impact and the next--

Bingo. Kalyani was flowing-Tai-Chi, very Kung-Fu--Yoroi was Krav Maga, all sharp efficiency and vicious counterattacks. He primed-aimed-fired in the time it took him to snap forward his fist, a straight jab turned into a sledgehammer by the little eezo nodes humming under his skin. Though he didn't know it, there was one thing he and Madan were in complete agreement about.

There was nothing quite like that biotic ripple under their skin. Potential energy, literally--all potential.

It could be anything. It could do anything.

It could make Kalyani Madan wake the fuck up and try.

Mass Effect: Brink

More than anything, I want the crack-shot pilot to turn out to be an elcor. >>

#ELCOR4LIFE

après moi le déluge ;; howler && el taco taco

Yoroi had never known what hate was until he reached Jump Zero.

Seriously, in every day life, how much can someone actually say they hate anything? Little girls might hate to eat their peas, boys might hate pink, you might hate having to stay late after school, but please. The average person couldn't give enough of a shit about even the worst things in their life to muster the kind of consuming, fueling, burning hate that Nagamura Yoroi had learned for turians. The soldiers, the First Contact vets and the Shanxi survivors back home came the closest talked about the bird-men, the hawks, and he could relate. But for them the war was over, the enemy in memory.

Yoroi breathed his every day.

Nobody had known what to expect when they arrived. It was all very hush-hush, plenty of grand overtures about 'the future of humanity', 'pushing the limits' and 'broadening horizons', but the result was more boot camp than Brain Camp. You could almost forgive it turning out to be the sort of quasi-military bullshit it was; biotics were a future weapon, a staple of intergalactic interpersonal warfare. Of course it was the military that was funding the game, and of course the game was testing battle viability. If the uniforms and blank halls and efficiency bunking wasn't exactly marshmallows and ghost stories, you could at least see where it came from.

The turians, though. Nobody had expected them to be there. They were kids, not soldiers, though Yoroi was pretty convinced that turians didn't see much of a difference between the two.

On earth, Nagamura Yoroi had been a nobody. He was a stupid fucking teenager who'd grown peach fuzz and discovered extranet pornography ahead of the curve. He wasn't one of the real hoods--hell, he hadn't been old enough to be a real hood!--and instead filled in that awkward role of classroom cut-up. Smart enough to know he could do better than he had been and lazy enough not to bother, he was funny and friendly and muddled along just fine. He had as much brains as any fourteen year old, which was to say not a lot, but he wizened the hell up the first time one of those fucking hawks but a taloned boot on his throat and he realized he couldn't have shoved it off if he'd wanted to.

This was not supposed to be fun. They were not supposed to enjoy this. They were supposed to be tested, and pushed, and pushed further, and put back together when they broke so they could keep pushing. And they were, or at least Yoroi was.

If someone had told you who Nagamura Yoroi had been two years ago, anyone in hearing would have laughed in your face. Nice guy, wise-ass, joker? You been huffing 'zaust, man? Yoroi was one of the hard boys, the assholes. The ones that buckled down and [/i]Sir, yes Sir![/i]'d and asked How high?. If he'd ever cracked a joke, if he'd ever been a buddy or a good shoulder to cry on, it was so long ago that nobody remembered. Not after the full-contact training sessions or the stupid-powerful barriers he threw up during practice--he was the worst kind of partner, the one that tried. The instructors fucking ate it up, alien bastards, and they made it clear that he was one of the ones that 'had a future'.

Other kids had friends. Yoroi had himself, and the loose association of kids like him figuring out the pecking order and racing for the top. More than anything, he had his hate, and if hate meant being cliche then so fucking be it. Careful fighting monsters, gaze into the abyss, blah blah blah.

Anything to never feel like prey again under steel talons and pinprick pupils.

---

"Again."

Two mats away, Court was fucking up. Again.

"Half your ration says he cries like a bitch."

Al-Tariq was a shit. Most of the hard boys were, the ones that buckled down and fed into the training program. Everyone knew who they were and the mixture of disgust, fear, and hate was palpable. They were one of them, just as bad as the asshole instructors. Little turians in human clothing, earning their predator eyes. Up until recently Al-Tariq had kept lockstep with Yoroi, the up and comers of their batch, but that was last month. This month Yoroi was Step Five and Al-Tariq was dealing with it, which meant being fake-friendly until he got close enough to fuck him up. It was as obnoxious as it sounded.

"It's Madan." Yoroi tried not to roll his eyes, but not very hard. "She'll get herself sent to the med-bay before she lets that happen."

Fucking Madan.

There were a lot of reasons Yoroi didn't like Kaylani Madan, the most obvious being that she was weak. She wasn't really, but that was the problem: one of the few, the proud, the Step Nine, everyone knew Kaylani had chops. She could throw up a barrier in a heart beat, punch through all but the toughest just as easily. There were rumors saying that she'd managed to make a black hole, but those were just rumors--the upper division training couldn't be that far gone, could it? At any rate, it was obvious she outclassed even the try-hards and equally obvious that she really just wanted to pussyfoot around. It hadn't done her any good, she was still one of them to all the scrubs she babied that were too stupid or tired or hungry to see that she was trying for them, but to Yoroi she was personally offensive.

Yeah, she'd had a head start, but she was still flat better than him. Demonstrably, meaningfully, and yet here she was playing with fucking kid gloves so she didn't hurt the poor baby's feelings. Didn't she get that it was better her than the hawks?

"I'll take that bet." Al-Tariq snorted before snapping to life, fist crackling into vibrant blue that streaked towards Yoroi with mnemonic flick. He was fast and had put some oomph into it, but Yoroi was ready. It met his own swiftly-raised barrier in a flash, dissipating in a swirl of warped physics like a heat-shimmer in the stale station air.

"Fuck off."

Before the boy could respond, Yoroi had dissipated his barrier and stepped off the training mat. His back was straight as ever, his arms at his sides as he made his way without ceremony or hesitation towards the Commander and the now-focal training pair. The hall had grown quiet at the little confrontation, waiting to see how things panned out (and secretly happy for the break), so his request was clear as day as he snapped to attention by Caelnus' side.

"Sir! Permission to take over as Madan's training partner and show Court what a real biotic can do, sir!"

It was always a toss-up with the turians. Some days they ate that macho-crap up and others they bitch-slapped you for interrupting training. But it was the only way this was going to end well and Yoroi knew it--if Court broke he'd be punished, and Caelnus would not be gentle. He probably wouldn't ever really recover. If Madan went full Monty on him he'd end up in the med bay and Madan wouldn't look anyone in the eye for the better part of a week. And if Court had it in him to begin with while he was as exhausted and tired as the rest of them, he'd have given it.

So it was a gamble, but fuck it. Give her someone she didn't have to play soft-ball with.

His eyes didn't leave her for a moment as he waited for the call.

Mass Effect: Brink

@The Nebulous @Gowi @Howler @Zorogami Out of curiosity where is everybody from?

@DirtyDingo

I was a New Yorker, once upon a time. These days I'm in Washington State.

[REVIVAL] Coven: Shattered

Color my tentative interested expressed. I'm curious to see the system of magic that will be provided in the OOC.

Mass Effect: Brink

@Howler That was hilarious. Cracking writing there bud.

@DirtyDingo

Zik is already one of the funniest characters I've ever had the pleasure to read about

@Zorogami

Glad y'all enjoyed it, I certainly had fun going through yours. A good round of introductions, we're shaping up with a colorful cast!