[C] Black Sheep

Ah, the Chinese neighborhood of Tokyo. Darren loved it.

He had a few days to kill in Tokyo, now that his father was back on a plane to somewhere in the US where a big rock festival was taking place, and he decided he’d kill this particular day walking around Yokohama Chinatown. Getting in bar fights with beehive girls was nice, but even Darren wanted a modicum of peace and quiet sometimes.

He passed the Goodwill Gate in the early afternoon, his hands in his pockets, looking at the sights all around him. He didn’t know Chinese culture for shit, but he had been raised on Hong-Kong action cinema; in other words, kung-fu movies, so he loved the Chinese imagery.

He wandered from store to store, picking up random martial arts books and looking at the pictures. He couldn’t read Chinese for shit either, but the drawings were nice. At the end of the day, he had bought himself a pair of wooden nunchucks and a cool-looking Bruce Lee poster, like any good tourist in any Chinatown ought to do. The nunchucks weren’t nearly sturdy enough to really be used in a fight and the Bruce Lee poster was a bootleg. He didn’t care. He had a taste for bootleg stuff and he only wanted the nunchucks to hook them around a nail on his wall.

All in all, Darren was the perfect tourist.

He heard the East Gate looked like a shot from a Hong Kong movie at night and he wanted to see, so he still had a bit more time to kill as the afternoon sun was dragging closer to the horizon. He decided to see what his favorite past-time was like here, so he got off the main streets and started walking around the little back streets and alleyways. Not only did you get to see a bunch of Hong-Kong movie clichés, such as a delivery boy hurriedly hopping on his bike as a cook shouted at him in Cantonese -- or Mandarin, fuck if he knew -- from the back of a take-out place, but walking the alleyways like this often landed Darren in trouble.

Darren loved trouble. He decided he had his fill of peace and quiet for now.

He found it around a corner, in a shaded alley. The first thing he saw was a guy pulling a girl by the hair, which wasn’t very nice. The girl was pulled on the ground. She asked them to leave them alone, which did not have the desired effect, as there were three of them and they didn’t seem very keen on listening to her. Then there was a mention of boy toys, which struck Darren as a little weird, and then the girl was ordered to get on all fours like the pig she was -- well, the pig these men considered her to be, at least.

It was then that it struck Darren that he was about to witness a rape or some sordid shit of that effect. Oh, well, white knighting was a way like another to pick a fight, wasn’t it?

A few seconds later, one of the men was bonked on the back of the head by a flying nunchuck. As he turned around to see where it was coming from, he saw a wild Darren sprinting toward him. The young delinquent summoned the half-power of his quirk and leaped upwards with his knee on a collision course with the big guy’s jaw, without crouching beforehand to use the spring in his legs like a normal person. As if like God himself wanted him up there -- why? Fuck if I know -- and was personally pulling him up. The nunchuck he threw landed on the ground beside the curled-up girl, like a cheap holy weapon fallen from Heaven. Heaven was apparently Darren's plastic bag, and the only other thing in it was a bootleg Bruce Lee poster.