Izumi Airi — Magical Block Party@All
"Fuck. In hindsight, I should have asked if you could sense command spells, or something." Airi replied to Ruler, now holding an impressive stack of styrofoam plates that had been ruthlessly emptied of their contents. On her eighth burger now, she was slowing down, but Airi simply wasn't a person to let food go to waste.
That woman from the church was here...this was the second time they had seen each other. Airi briefly paused to note her conversation with the Archer-class servant, but no more than that — eavesdropping was in poor taste. More and more people were arriving in general, which was a good thing, to her.
Matsunaga stuck out to her in particular. There was something about a person who practiced martial arts — not just 'knowing the moves', but truly making the practice a part of you. It affected the way a person walked and stood, and held themselves. And for her, at least, there was a certain level of respect to be had in that alone. She nodded at his arrival, leaving it to Ruler to explain it to everyone once the congregation had—
what the shit, is that a guy with blue hair!?...Well, he's hardly the most ridiculous-looking guy here.
"Need a way to sense magi or Masters, huh..." Airi frowned, for once not thinking out loud simply because there was nowhere to start. She didn't live in that world. She had no idea what to even ask about for getting to something like that. Honestly, as far as the Grail War proper went, her plan for drawing out 'enemy' masters had just been to stomp around until someone came after her.
"...You know anything, Ernest? Crocs?" Maybe one of them would have an idea. It was certainly a more manageable proposition than trying to sense the Black-Haired Man himself.
“Berserker sort of was one but that thing, that black haired man was it?… If it was a demon then it’d be under that other girl. If it’s really not part of any servant then it can’t be a demon.”
Airi turned towards Nakae, who was still quite a bit taller than her despite being younger than most of the other Masters. Honestly, she had been starting to wonder why it was all 30-year-olds here.
"Oh hey, we saw each other at the church! You said you were heading to a convenience store." The girl recounted, with a grin.
"You missed out, man. Ruler announced the free food like, right after that. You coulda saved some money."The guy's outfit was a little thrown-together, and he looked...kinda ill? Well, he
did lose his Servant, that couldn't have come easily to him.
"Uh...well, that's good. I don't know a whole lot about Demons, I just know they're bad news." The girl admitted, slowly munching on the further half of burger number eight.
"Apparently a bunch of my relatives died from one...Or like, a half-one...I never knew 'em or anything, but still, like, damn, you know?"It was small talk for her, at least on the surface. But the memories of what had been in that box in the rubble of her home, the family history that had been hidden away, were still very fresh in her mind. There was so much that her mother hadn't told her. Maybe she had planned to, once Airi was older, but...
“So, are you confident in winning once we deal with this stuff?”
That was a question that threw Airi for a bit of a loop. She actually blinked at Nakae for a moment, as though he had brought up something that she hadn't expected. Her answer, though, didn't take much consideration. In a moment of being caught off-guard, the girl simply blurted out her feelings on the matter.
"I'm, uh, not really thinking about it."She shrugged, finishing off the eighth burger, and looking for a moment like she was contemplating a ninth. But her stomach was already about to explode, it felt like. If she started eating another one, she wasn't sure whether or not she'd be able to finish the whole thing — and she'd much rather just stop than have to leave something half-eaten. She had gotten as much as she could out of the free food deal. With any luck, she'd be able to coast on it for a while before she had to spend money on food again.
"Well, you know...treating this like it's some kind of opportunity to get ahead, using it to scout people or throw them under the bus, or shit like that...that kind of teamwork doesn't get you very far." Airi said simply, setting the stack of empty plates aside.
"I ran with a crew back in Western Tokyo...sometimes, we'd tussle with gangs that weren't put together very well. And you know what? It showed. It showed in the way they walked down the street together, in the way they fought...and you damn well better believe it showed in what they were able to accomplish." It was a rural area, or at least, as rural as Tokyo could possibly
be, which wasn't very. There had always been the sharp and painful contrast between the Shinjuku high-rises she saw when visiting Yuko, and the empty lots that littered the place she and Hana called home.
"A team like that is just the sum of its parts. We took 'em down like it was nothing, no matter how many of them there were. My crew was just three people, but our teamwork wasn't some half-hearted bullshit. I didn't roll that way back then, and I'm not changing up my style now."Wistful memories...she kinda missed the simpler days. Before
the box. Back when it was just the three of them, taking on common street thugs and tracking down drug dealers. No complicated magical shit to worry about. No meandering family histories. Just a lot of life lessons for the wrong kind of life, ones that she took to heart anyway, because that's how she had survived in that world.
More than that, though...more than she missed those days, she missed the days that had come before them.
"Yeah, there'll be a time when we're all enemies again. And I'll think about being enemies at that time." Airi admitted,
"But, right now, it's the time for us to be friends. And I'll think about being friends at that time. There's no sense in tripping myself up on anything else."
That's why, I have to do this right.
What would she tell me, if I brought her back that way...?
With a rare smile, the girl extended out a hand to Nakae, offering a handshake.
"So, how about it? Wanna be friends?"Izumi Airi's voice was oddly devoid of its usual roughness at that moment. It was still unmistakably her, but at the same time, there was an earnestness there, a simple joy that she partook in as any human did. In that crystallized moment, she was just a youthful person who enjoyed making connections with people for its own sake.
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