Walk the Dinosaur [Darren + NPC - Lucas]

These last few days had seen a lot of agitation at school with the school festival. Buildings were being raised out of the ground seemingly overnight to prepare for some grand event, and lately TV crews had been coming in and out pf the school to set up live feeds everywhere. There was no shortage of people coming in an out, and that ended up grating on Darren’s nerves eventually, enough that he decided to retreat to the old man’s gym in Mustafu.

There he could train in peace. After a couple hours of hitting the ropes and jumping the sandbags and the other way around (yes, and), the blonde delinquent went out for his roadwork. He ran along the riverbank for about an hour before he decided to head to the convenience store to refill on junk food. He came out with beef jerky, cheap coke and chips in a plastic bag.

And he couldn’t take two steps outside without something weird happening again, as now he could hear growls coming from the next street. Passerbys were looking and each others with looks of concern, and when they spied the distinctive blonde mane of Daimon Darren, stared at him. He and the other students had received no shortage of media exposure lately, so the residents of Mustafu were starting to recognize them when they were out in town.

The blondie in question sighed, and started on his way. If it was a villain, he didn’t mind taking charge, but the administration was probably gonna pull him out of the tournament, and damn did he wanted to participate. No, he would have to deal with this smartly. As he turned the corner, he loudly declared in a rough Japanese taken straight from a delinquent anime: “Oi, dumbass villain, if you’re here to cause trouble ya picked the wrong day-- Eh?” He paused for a second once he saw what he was dealing with.

A… T-rex. There was no doubt about it. The roars had been a first hint; the fact he was talking to towering scaley beast another; but what sealed the deal was that the dinosaur in question was trying to reach a sewer plate with the trademark tiny arms of the species. Definitely a T-rex. If it has short arms, it’s a T-Rex. That’s how dinosaurs work.

“Wait, ain’t you one of them dudes coming to visit?” he continued in Japanese. He figured it was a good idea to repeat himself in English and stick to it for the time being. He spoke it with a weird accent, a cross between an American and an Australian accent with distinct overtones of Japanese pronunciation. “As I said: ain’t you one of them dudes coming to visit?” he shouted above the growls. “If so, shut the fuck up before people call the police, dumbass!”

If besides the lights of Akihabara -- Darren hadn’t noticed the bags yet, else he’d be sure to make a mocking comment -- this T-rex dude was expecting the typical Japanese politeness, well, he would be all but served. He was a cliché of another kind, though he would vehemently deny it; a stereotypical Japanese delinquent, calling people he just met dumbasses.

Nihon e yōkoso, T-Rex-san!

Oh god, so it could talk, even make facial expressions. That was English, even though it was hard to make out between the growl and god, that accent, even thicker than Kirk’s American accent. Shit’s so thick a lightsaber couldn’t cut through it. It could also stamp on the ground, actually, which cause the delinquent to shout even louder. “STOP DOING THAT, DUMBASS!” A quick glance to the side informed him that passersby were still looking on with worry from adjacent streets, and, more importantly, holding up phones. He switched back to Japanese as the turned towards them, doing his best to conjure a reassuring smile. “Gomenasai! He’s one of the overseas students, he doesn’t understand Nihonjin customs, baka deeees!”

If he’d been watching anime for a couple years, it was pretty easy to piece out for the Glaswegian dinosaur that Darren was apologizing and that he called him an idiot again, though there would be little need for that as the delinquent immediately turned back at him to resume shouting in English. “Now stop doing stupid shit before you get us in a uTube video doing destruction of property, dumbass! Why are ya even throwin’ a tantrum like a baby for?”

A closer examination of the logo on the bags was all it took for Darren's angry expression to turn into a smug one. "Waaaah, I don't believe it, another Akihabara nerd. Gone to buy a waifu? I didn't knew they made em' your size," he snickered, laughing at his own joke.

“Oh f--” was all that Darren could say before his Autokinesis took him away from the path of the T-rex dude’s tail. He was swinging at him now. Darren landed a few meters back with a new look in his eye. He had been a pro hero student for almost a year now, yes -- but prior to that, he had been a street fighting school delinquent for far longer, and old habits died hard.

“Oi, moron,” he called out in English. “You want to throw down, we throw down right here… Is what I would have said a year ago, but fuck, there’s a tournament in not even a week and I ain’t missin’ that to fight a harebrained dinosaur. So here’s what we’re gonna do.” He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “I’m damn pissed I find myself sayin’ that shit, but let’s head back to school, get a training field and then we throw down where we won’t get in trouble for it. I’ll take you on any time you want, dinosaur boy, but you don’t go around fucking up my town and gettin’ me in trouble because you can’t fuckin’ stop yelling for a second!” shouted the delinquent himself, the irony of it flying straight over his head at Mach 10.

Others might have been paralyzed by the sight of a fucking T-rex towering above them and throwing their tail down at them, but Darren, perhaps unsurprisingly given the school that he was attending, had seen worse. He practiced daily alongside a girl who could turn herself giant and someone who could turn themselves into a dragon, and could best both, not to mention he had survived an encounter with a shark man that it took the military to capture. Size and monstrous appearance weren’t so impressive to the delinquent anymore, hence why he was throwing such bold at a fucking T-Rex.

“And what the fuck are you even yelling for? Did you lose a toy or somethin’?”

Finally that dinosaur dude had calmed down. “There you fuckin’ go!” he shot back. Was gonna “bite his wee fat head (?¿?) off” now, was he? King Lizard, he called himself? “Yes, your Highness,” he answered with an exaggerated bow, twirling his hand twice. Few bows in the history of bowing had been less respectful.

These two were like a matchbox and a jerrycan of gasoline.

“What, all this just because you dropped your shit? Jeez, man, you can fuckin’ ask, people here are nice as fuck if you don’t fucking growl at them like a beast escaped from the zoo. You do realize what you look like to the random-ass folks goin’ to buy groceries n’ shit, dontcha? Hol up a second.” The delinquent approached the sewer gate, stuck his foot in the grille, bent his other knee for leverage and with a small activation of Autokinesis, kicked the grille up and caught it mid-air. He squatted down like a slav to pick up a keychain, critically examining the waifu it represented.

“Naoko, huh? At least you got some bloody taste.” He put back the grille in place, stomped it shut with his foot and started walking in the direction of the school, juggling the keychain up and down in his hand with a shit-eating grin. “Now we have a consolation prize for when you lose!”

He’d spent the entire walk to the school playing with it, spinning it around his finger by the keyring and asking dinoboy all manners of stupid questions: did they have custom-made shitters for him at school, or did he just have a designated hole in the backyard? What did he think of Triassic Park? Did he ever have a girlfriend?

Surely by the time they got past the school gates and into the training field, Lucas would be raring to go at him, which was exactly what he was going for. Did I say Darren was a matchbox? Apologies, a better metaphor would be “constantly firing spark plug.”

Even in a bloody T-rex, Darren was good at picking up body language, but such a skill wasn’t needed to notice that Lucas was getting progressively more pissed at him. Figures; Darren had been bantering and insulting him non-stop from the instant they met, and he did just declare he was appropriating his waifu -- or well, the keychain of his waifu as a “consolation prize”. He was also very good at pissing people off to the point where they would give him a good fight, and that T-rex boy had been a prime target. As easy to hit as good old Jacky-chan, yet with backbone.

The delinquent was grinning all the way to the school sizing up his new rival’s teeth, tail and claws as they continued engaging in the fine art of trash-talking. “Fuck no. Pigtails are love,” he declared, spinning the keychain on his finger again for good measure.

He laughed when he asked if his school didn’t have special shitters. “I ain’t know, man, can’t be arsed to check. Regular shitter suits me just fine. I guess we do, though. We have a guy who’s a bear. And a squeaky dragon.”

An idea crossed his head after he brought up them old-ass dino movies people couldn’t shut up about. He stopped dead in his tracks, holding a hand in front of his face, and stood perfectly still. “You can’t see me,” he grinned before trotting back. It was obvious from the way Lucas carried himself that the t-rex scene from the movie was bullshit, but how could your humble author miss the opportunity to reference two dumb memes in one paragraph?

Obligatory girl talk followed. “Good for you that you have hope,” he shot back, ruffling his hair with his right hand. “Don’t be hatin’ cause you already bald.” The gates of UA were now in view.

---

“You sure you still want to do this, dinoboy? It ain’t too late to pull out,” he grinned, dancing from one foot to the other on the sandy arena, right hand against his chin and left hand hanging down in a Philly shell guard. A small crowd of curious onlookers and students had assembled, the prospect of seeing a T-rex and a man brawl more than enough to draw an audience without needing to advertise it whatsoever. Man versus T-rex. It sells itself, really.

“Aye, we’re there. Let’s have a good match, old boy. Hope you don’t move like a fossil.”

Up-close, the T-rex was certainly impressive, but it didn’t keep the shit-eating grin away from Darren’s lips. It towered well above Darren, who was getting kinda used to it -- he was tall for Japanese standards, but UA High was nothing but standard. Still, Lucas was a good measure taller than most opponents he sparred with, Miyu being the only one to compare. And he opened the fight with a move that she used often as well, the good old fashioned ground stomp.

“Whoa!” exclaimed the delinquent after the first tremor, along with the crowd. He looked as if he might fall flat on his ass, but he was pulled back to his feet as if by invisible strings, a couple blue sparks crackling over his body. This scenario repeated itself with the second, third fourth and so on stomps, every time the movement getting more failing and exaggerated and the saves more last-minute.

A bad habit of Darren was showing up: he was clowning. And it was getting very obvious too, Dinoboy was likely to get pissed off, which is exactly what Darren was going for. With the balance from his martial arts, but most importantly, the incredible agility his quirk afforded him allowed him to weather the destabilizing effect of these tremors quite well.

After a few of those, he would stop clowning a little and test the waters, though, suddenly launching at the Tyrannosaurus in a powerful blast of autokinesis for a tentative whipped kick at the jaw, after which he’d pull back. There was no reason to stick around a maw that big and toothy for so long, after all.

Except that it was fun. So of course, the adrenaline junkie delinquent of 1-C would go back to circle and zig-zag some more around Lucas’s head, peppering him with snappy kicks from every angle, never committing himself too much. He did not put much power behind these blows; Darren wouldn’t be able to pull back quickly if he did. On some level, he was actually wary of this opponent he didn’t know and seemed to be plenty strong. These seemingly cheeky lovetaps were his way of acknowledging that he was facing a beast in more ways than literally, and that he was gonna have to be a little smart about this if he didn’t want to ridicule himself in front of his classmates.