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dragonhaven
Jan. 13th, 2014 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aureately~
Name: Alory
Personal Journal:alory_shannon
Contact: Email - frecklefacefangirl (at) gmail (dot) com
E-mail is the best and easiest way of reaching me. My plurk is private and I'm super-picky about who I add; I'm not on AIM/Skype regularly, but am willing to "put in an appearance" there if necessary. :]
Other Characters Played: N/A
Character: Kida Masaomi
Series: Durarara!!
Age: 16
History: Here! And like Phase, I also apologise for that wiki's general crappiness.
Canon Point: ...Let's make things just a little bit awkward for Kida and say RIGHT at the end of the anime, when he's in the middle ofrunning away like a dumbass leaving the city with Saki.
Personality:
{"Starting today, I'm the class idol! One autograph per person, okay?"}
Outwardly, Kida seems like a fairly shallow, lighthearted, happy-go-lucky and semi-ridiculous person. He babbles on about total nonsense with a liberal splash of Engrish and a lot of extremely animated, over-dramatic gestures; he shamelessly flirts and falls in love with just about every girl he meets; he teases and pokes fun at his best friend at every possible chance. He's friendly and knows a lot of people, and by all appearances, he's nothing more than a happy, normal high school kid.
Unfortunately, a lot of that behaviour is a lie. The truth is a lot more complicatedand sad, to be honest.
{"He wanted a place to be. That was all. Each time he'd told his friend about the new city he lived in, he'd realised that he wasn't really a part of the things he talked about."}
Inwardly, Kida is a lot more insecure, and he's particularly bad at dealing with shame and guilt, which is only worsened by the fact that he tends to feel a great amount of responsibility for the people he's close to, whether that means protecting his friends or holding himself accountable for the actions of the people who follow him. (A prime example of this lack of being able to deal with the consequences of his past actions is seen at the end of the anime, when he's so ashamed of the whole Yellow Scarf fiasco that he leaves the city to avoid having to face Mikado. He clearly feels as though he'd failed his best friend, putting people he cared about in danger due to his inability to face up to his past mistakes--and he views forming the Yellow Scarves in the first place as chief among those mistakes.)
{"I regretted it. I'd been a fool. I'd figured this was just a bunch of middle schoolers fighting. It wasn't. It was a war. And I'd started it!"}
Due to his problems with handling the fallout of his actions, Kida has about a metric ton of emotional baggage in the form of soul-crushing guilt, and all the issues said guilt brings with it. The majority of this comes from his time as the "Yellow Scarf Shogun"--specifically when he failed to save his girlfriend Saki, who had been kidnapped by their rival gang Blue Square. When he learned of her abduction and subsequent torture, at first he ran to save her...but then when it really came down to it, he found himself frozen in place, too afraid to move despite the obvious danger to the girl he loved. This led him to doubt himself and his courage--Izaya calls him a coward a few different times in both the novels and the anime, and this is a touchy enough subject that it never fails to get some sort of a rise out of Kida--and even to wonder if he'd ever really loved Saki, since of course if you really loved someone you'd risk your life and even die for them, right?
{"I couldn't move. What I had just been feeling was gone. Why...Saki was in danger, and I couldn't move. Why? Why am I so scared? I thought I could do anything for her! But really...I was just a powerless middle schooler."}
Because of his overwhelming feelings of guilt for not saving her, he can't bring himself to face Saki for the longest time. Izaya explains to him exactly the position he's in and what he's feeling, and tells him that he can never escape his past or his guilt regarding the past, and that so long as he believes in his version of the past, twisted and skewed and misinformed as it might be, it will be still be the truth for him. In that way, if he bases his life and future choices around it, it will become "his god"...and in this case, Saki, who is a part of that inescapable past, is "his god" too. At the time Kida claims that he doesn't understand what Izaya is getting at, but judging by his actions, he pretty obviously comes to believe this.
{"I'll let you run from the past. But don't run from the present and the future."}
This does start to change once Mikado comes to the city, though. Kida even says that, "Ever since Mikado moved here, I feel like my show of courage is starting to become real," and idly muses on whether he's really protecting Mikado, or if instead he's really relying on him. He does do his best to be upbeat and cheerful for Mikado's sake, and also since he wants to have a normal, peaceful high school life, andthe love triangle his relationships with Anri and Mikado are the focal points of this new life.
{"The bastards dragged me back, damn it...DAMN IT!"}
He doesn't always give himself enough credit when it comes to serious things though, since he does do his best to protect his friends, and is willing to sacrifice a lot for them. Having been a part of the colour gang scene, Kida warns Mikado to stay far away from "the dark side" and not get involved in that sort of thing, since he knows how dangerous, painful, and potentially scarring it is; but then, when the Slasher attacks Anri (or so he thinks), he rejoins his old gang to hunt the Slasher down, despite the fact that he'd intended to leave the Yellow Scarves for good. Becoming the "shogun" again was the last thing he wanted to do, but if that was what he had to do to keep the peace and protect his friends, he would do it, however much he hated it deep down.
{"And now he was working for his dear friend, who was his new life."}
However, he does think of it as a second chance--a way to prove to himself that he won't freeze up again, that he isn't a coward, that he can and will stop running and face his past. And in the end, he does prove this to himself, and then some, taking on the members of Blue Square who had infiltrated the reformed Yellow Scarves at the risk of his own life, and quite literally at gunpoint in one instance.
Another "nice" thing about him--he gives Mikado a "head start" when it comes to Anri, since he decides that his bro is so bad at flirting or even talking to girls that he needs a handicap. Later he tells Anri that since Mikado is clearly head over heels in love with her, he's just standing back and watching how things unfold for now. WHAT A BRO, AMIRITE. X'D Of course, this still doesn't stop him from talking about how "cute and erotic" Anri is...so maybe a little less BROTASTIC than it would otherwise be. |D
{"This reality and the one that exists when I'm with him are both true to me..."}
...That said, to a certain extent, Kida really is just as ridiculous as he appears to be on the outside. His internal monologue is pretty hilarious--while narrating an episode, he says things like, I fell in love at first sight with thirty-seven girls during the opening ceremony and I was totally someone from the Justice League for a second there! Wasn't that really cool of me? So while he's cynical and somewhat easily depressed when it comes to himself and his own behaviour, he does still have a sense of humour (terrible as it typically is) and a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek melodrama in him.
Skills and Abilities:
In a canon where a headless rider (who is actually a type of Irish faerie called a Dullahan) roams the streets on a black motorcycle, demon blades possess people, and vending machines and traffic lights and street signs are casually hurled through the air by the city's strongest man who HATES VIOLENCE!! but is just super-easy to piss off) are par for the course, Kida is basically just a Badass Normal. Even so, he's something of One-Man Army--he was the leader of the Yellow Scarves for a reason, having taken out several rival gangs entirely on his own--and he's clearly an S-Class street-brawler, so if he ever gets hold of a Jimmy Bar after you've pissed him off, you had best watch out.
He also possesses a sort of charisma, though it's one that's not at all supernatural in origin. Mikado mentions it at the very beginning of the series, that when they were kids, Kida was "full of energy, with a special charm that brought others to his side". Since Kida ends up as the leader of one of the most prominent colour gangs in Ikebukuro--rather, he started the gang, and while he was in middle school at that--apparently that charisma hasn't lessened over the years (...except, of course, when it comes to girls, but more on that below).
OTHER SKILLS:
Obfuscating Stupidity (often with a hint of Magnificent Bastard to it).
-Kida plays dumb exceedingly well!...Maybe that's not really something to be so proud about, huh...? Of course, since it's only an act, you really have to pay attention to what he's saying, as well as what he's not saying, or his babbling stream of seeming-nonsense will wash you away in its treacherously-twisting currents and you'll suddenly find yourself MILES away from where you'd started and even farther from where you'd planned to be! At which point he might just smile and cheerfully threaten you with something awful, especially if you're being a creep. ^__^
He really is very good at this, though, to the extent that he can talk circles around most people and gloss his way out of tricky or potentially dangerous situations a significant portion of the time.
Bad Jokes (he spends a lot of time thinking them up, okay, calling them bad is needlessly cruel and hurts his feelings!!).
-Kida likes puns and play-on-words, even if no one else seems to appreciate his sparkling wit and humour. He claims to take a lot of time coming up with "great" ones (once he says that he's been working on a joke for three years), though saying that might just be another sort of joke.
Gratuitous Engrish (randomly speaking in English just shows how ~SUPER COOL~ he really is!!).
-One of the trivia notes concerning Kida says that his favourite subject in school is English, while his least favorite subject is History (o yis i c what u did thar Narita). He uses his powers for evil rather than good, sadly, and sprinkles his speech with a fair amount of semi-mangled English, or "Engrish" as many like to call it. He does this enough that Mikado even calls him on it a couple times, saying that he wishes Kida would just speak Japanese like a normal person.
As for how that works in-game: I realise that since the language barrier won't be a thing in the Havensunless there's an event that temporarily changes that, the Engrish Factor won't be so much of a thing--it'll just sound like he's REALLY emphasizing certain words, sometimes a little oddly. (Personally, I usually write things that should be in Engrish ~LIKE THIS~! |D)
Fail Flirting (but the goal is just to talk to them, so it's not failure at all!!).
-Kida's hobby is "picking up girls". If there's a female around, he can't seem to help flirting with her. Age doesn't bother him at all, either; if she's too young, he'll call her cute and ask her to meet him again in 10 years for a real date, and there really is no "too old" for him--in an extra short story, it's shown that he's quite content to flirt with grandmas. (...And while we saw him act this way in a flashback when he first met Saki, it's...still probably safe to assume he's only gotten "worse" as far as his indiscriminate flirting goes ever since Saki was hurt--it's a big part of that mask of cheerful bubbliness, after all.)
First Person Sample:
-Texting with Mikado
-Voicemail ridiculousness with Mikado
Let me know if you need anything more! I'll gladly whip something up if these aren't satisfactory examples.
Third Person Sample:
[...Which, uh, kinda sorta totally turned into more of a mini-fic. |D; Hope that's okay!]
Sunshine City.
It was the place Mikado had immediately mentioned when Kida first asked him where he wanted his tour to start on his arrival in Ikebukuro. And at the time, Kida had turned him down flat, telling him that it was a place to visit with his girlfriend, not his best friend. But, Mikado being Mikado, of course he was dragging his feet when it came to actually asking out the girl he was so obviously head-over-heels for...so Kida had decided to help things along a bit.
It had been easy enough to get them both to agree to the outing: it was simplicity itself to drag Mikado after him wherever he went, and Anri-chan had always been amenable to going places with both of them, even if she'd been hesitant to go anywhere alone with Mikado. And that was just fine with Kida; he never really felt like a third wheel, and even if he did that didn't matter because the other two were so shy and withdrawn and typically awkward that they clearly needed more than just two wheels to keeping things rolling smoothly. Speaking of which—
"Ah, look, look, Mikado! Look at the penguins! They look like they're flying over us!"
Grinning widely, Kida practically skipped forward a step or two, simultaneously pointing upwards at the large, clear, circular tanks overhead and half-turning to look over his shoulder at his best friend.
Mikado just sighed, his own smile looking a lot more forced and uncertain. "...Kida-kun...you've lived here for years, right...? So why is it that you seem so much more excited about this than I do?"
"A-ah, well, they are very cute..." Anri offered with a small smile, an attempt of sorts to keep the peace between the boys.
"Y-E-S!!!" Kida exclaimed, spinning around and darting back to join them, then spreading his arms expansively and keeping pace with them...while walking backwards. "But really they're not just cute, they're ~SUPER-CUTE~!" After that bit of cheerfully-mangled English, his grin became decidedly wolfish, and he clasped his hands together over his heart as he went on, "Though of course, even so, they're still not even HALF as cute as our lovely, erotic Anri-chan! Their charm is nothing compared to that of a quirky high school girl with a hot body and glasses!"
"MASAOMI!" Mikado half-yelled, half-yelped, colour swiftly rising to his face that had both anger and embarrassment at its source. "Don't talk about her that way!"
Anri went a little pink herself, and briefly looked down, though otherwise she didn't comment or protest, so Kida chuckled and casually waved away Mikado's indignation.
"Anri-chan doesn't seem to mind, though--she knows it's true, and a compliment besides! You're the only one who's making a scene, Mikado~"
Mikado sputtered a bit, but Kida just smiled a lighthearted smile in response. "Right! So never mind the lectures for the day since ~SCHOOL IS OUT FOR THE SUMMER~! C'mon, let's go!"
Still grinning widely, Kida linked arms with the both of them and pulled them inside.
~ $ ~
It wasn't the largest aquarium Kida had ever been to--the Tokyo Sea Life Park or the Shinagawa aquarium were both bigger and fancier and not that far away--but it was still a nice, cool place to visit on a hot summer afternoon like today. Plus, Mikado (who had never gone on their field trips back in elementary school, and doubtless had continued that cowardly trend after Kida had moved away) seemed a little awestruck by the place, despite his earlier comment about Kida being more excited about being here.
Since a tour group was taking up most of the space on the first floor, they'd gone upstairs to see the tropical animals first, ogling the frogs and the snakes, then poked around in the gift shop a little (where Kida had done his best to ignore the curiously cold glint in Mikado's eyes when they passed a rack of sea-creature-themed hats, from rays to penguins to sharks); to break the mildly unnerving tension, Kida had insisted that they all buy matching cellphone charms of a fuzzy, almost painfully cute baby seal. The seals were actually on that floor too, but they were all sleeping, so before long, Kida had hauled them back downstairs, which was fairly empty now since it was lunch time. They stayed close together and took their time at each exhibit, admiring the brightly-coloured coral and even more brightly-coloured fish, smiling at the sea otters, and snapping pictures with their phones as an aquarium employee swam in a tank with some of the fish.
They lingered the longest at the big central tank that held the rays and the sharks, all three unable to look away from the deadly grace of those sleek undersea predators...at least until Kida started humming the Jaws theme under his breath and suddenly grabbed Mikado from behind, eliciting a startled squawk, followed by an unusually irritated shove from his best friend that just made Kida laugh all the harder. (Of course, he knew why Mikado was irritated right then: he'd made Mikado look a little uncool in front of Anri-chan. But well, Mikado wasn't normally very cool anyway, so that was okay. Besides he'd make it up to him soon...)
Kida had continued to link arms with them each time he tugged them from exhibit to exhibit, like a child pulling his parents along after him, and their arrival at their last stop (before going back outside for the sea lion feeding, anyway) was no different. Kida was the only one of the trio who had been to that aquarium before, the only one who knew exactly what to expect, and he'd intentionally saved this exhibit for last: a long, dark tunnel with low lighting and scores of jellyfish drifting all around and overhead.
It was easily the most romantic spot in the whole aquarium.
So, once he was satisfied that his two companions were enthralled with the exhibit, Kida took advantage of the next passing group of visitors, letting the three of them be jostled a bit--enough to casually slip his arms out of theirs and link the two of them together instead.
Somewhat surprisingly, neither seemed to notice, their attention caught by the ethereal beauty of the translucent creatures surrounding them. So Kida just stood back and watched them standing there arm in arm, their backs to him, not even aware that he'd left them, his smile a little sad and faintly but firmly tinged with loneliness as he raised his phone to snap a quick picture, capturing that perfect moment of peace forever.
Once he was satisfied with the shot, he looked down at it pensively, almost meditatively. He'd taken plenty of pictures that day already, to send to her later. But this one was different.
This one, he decided, he would keep just for himself.
His brooding line of thought was interrupted by Mikado's sudden (and more than a little loud and flustered) discovery that he'd been standing arm-in-arm with Anri for the last seven minutes or so, as well as Anri's soft, haltingly-spoken reassurances that it was okay, that she hadn't really minded it. (She'd realised their situation a lot sooner than Mikado, though going by the gentle colour in her cheeks as well as the fact that she hadn't pulled away, Kida definitely believed that she was telling the truth about not minding the arrangement.)
Shutting his phone with a snap, Kida grinned and stepped forward before their mutual stuttering and minor flailing got any worse.
"Maaaan, looking at all these fish is making me really hungry! We've seen just about everything there is to see here, so let's go fishing for a deal with Simon and see if he'll give us a discount on some sushi!"
Draping an arm around both their shoulders, Kida gently pushed them closer together as well as forward, onward toward the warm summer sunlight just visible at the dark tunnel's end.
Name: Alory
Personal Journal:
alory_shannon Contact: Email - frecklefacefangirl (at) gmail (dot) com
E-mail is the best and easiest way of reaching me. My plurk is private and I'm super-picky about who I add; I'm not on AIM/Skype regularly, but am willing to "put in an appearance" there if necessary. :]
Other Characters Played: N/A
Character: Kida Masaomi
Series: Durarara!!
Age: 16
History: Here! And like Phase, I also apologise for that wiki's general crappiness.
Canon Point: ...Let's make things just a little bit awkward for Kida and say RIGHT at the end of the anime, when he's in the middle of
Personality:
{"Starting today, I'm the class idol! One autograph per person, okay?"}
Outwardly, Kida seems like a fairly shallow, lighthearted, happy-go-lucky and semi-ridiculous person. He babbles on about total nonsense with a liberal splash of Engrish and a lot of extremely animated, over-dramatic gestures; he shamelessly flirts and falls in love with just about every girl he meets; he teases and pokes fun at his best friend at every possible chance. He's friendly and knows a lot of people, and by all appearances, he's nothing more than a happy, normal high school kid.
Unfortunately, a lot of that behaviour is a lie. The truth is a lot more complicated
{"He wanted a place to be. That was all. Each time he'd told his friend about the new city he lived in, he'd realised that he wasn't really a part of the things he talked about."}
Inwardly, Kida is a lot more insecure, and he's particularly bad at dealing with shame and guilt, which is only worsened by the fact that he tends to feel a great amount of responsibility for the people he's close to, whether that means protecting his friends or holding himself accountable for the actions of the people who follow him. (A prime example of this lack of being able to deal with the consequences of his past actions is seen at the end of the anime, when he's so ashamed of the whole Yellow Scarf fiasco that he leaves the city to avoid having to face Mikado. He clearly feels as though he'd failed his best friend, putting people he cared about in danger due to his inability to face up to his past mistakes--and he views forming the Yellow Scarves in the first place as chief among those mistakes.)
{"I regretted it. I'd been a fool. I'd figured this was just a bunch of middle schoolers fighting. It wasn't. It was a war. And I'd started it!"}
Due to his problems with handling the fallout of his actions, Kida has about a metric ton of emotional baggage in the form of soul-crushing guilt, and all the issues said guilt brings with it. The majority of this comes from his time as the "Yellow Scarf Shogun"--specifically when he failed to save his girlfriend Saki, who had been kidnapped by their rival gang Blue Square. When he learned of her abduction and subsequent torture, at first he ran to save her...but then when it really came down to it, he found himself frozen in place, too afraid to move despite the obvious danger to the girl he loved. This led him to doubt himself and his courage--Izaya calls him a coward a few different times in both the novels and the anime, and this is a touchy enough subject that it never fails to get some sort of a rise out of Kida--and even to wonder if he'd ever really loved Saki, since of course if you really loved someone you'd risk your life and even die for them, right?
{"I couldn't move. What I had just been feeling was gone. Why...Saki was in danger, and I couldn't move. Why? Why am I so scared? I thought I could do anything for her! But really...I was just a powerless middle schooler."}
Because of his overwhelming feelings of guilt for not saving her, he can't bring himself to face Saki for the longest time. Izaya explains to him exactly the position he's in and what he's feeling, and tells him that he can never escape his past or his guilt regarding the past, and that so long as he believes in his version of the past, twisted and skewed and misinformed as it might be, it will be still be the truth for him. In that way, if he bases his life and future choices around it, it will become "his god"...and in this case, Saki, who is a part of that inescapable past, is "his god" too. At the time Kida claims that he doesn't understand what Izaya is getting at, but judging by his actions, he pretty obviously comes to believe this.
{"I'll let you run from the past. But don't run from the present and the future."}
This does start to change once Mikado comes to the city, though. Kida even says that, "Ever since Mikado moved here, I feel like my show of courage is starting to become real," and idly muses on whether he's really protecting Mikado, or if instead he's really relying on him. He does do his best to be upbeat and cheerful for Mikado's sake, and also since he wants to have a normal, peaceful high school life, and
{"The bastards dragged me back, damn it...DAMN IT!"}
He doesn't always give himself enough credit when it comes to serious things though, since he does do his best to protect his friends, and is willing to sacrifice a lot for them. Having been a part of the colour gang scene, Kida warns Mikado to stay far away from "the dark side" and not get involved in that sort of thing, since he knows how dangerous, painful, and potentially scarring it is; but then, when the Slasher attacks Anri (or so he thinks), he rejoins his old gang to hunt the Slasher down, despite the fact that he'd intended to leave the Yellow Scarves for good. Becoming the "shogun" again was the last thing he wanted to do, but if that was what he had to do to keep the peace and protect his friends, he would do it, however much he hated it deep down.
{"And now he was working for his dear friend, who was his new life."}
However, he does think of it as a second chance--a way to prove to himself that he won't freeze up again, that he isn't a coward, that he can and will stop running and face his past. And in the end, he does prove this to himself, and then some, taking on the members of Blue Square who had infiltrated the reformed Yellow Scarves at the risk of his own life, and quite literally at gunpoint in one instance.
{"This reality and the one that exists when I'm with him are both true to me..."}
...That said, to a certain extent, Kida really is just as ridiculous as he appears to be on the outside. His internal monologue is pretty hilarious--while narrating an episode, he says things like, I fell in love at first sight with thirty-seven girls during the opening ceremony and I was totally someone from the Justice League for a second there! Wasn't that really cool of me? So while he's cynical and somewhat easily depressed when it comes to himself and his own behaviour, he does still have a sense of humour (terrible as it typically is) and a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek melodrama in him.
Skills and Abilities:
In a canon where a headless rider (who is actually a type of Irish faerie called a Dullahan) roams the streets on a black motorcycle, demon blades possess people, and vending machines and traffic lights and street signs are casually hurled through the air by the city's strongest man who HATES VIOLENCE!! but is just super-easy to piss off) are par for the course, Kida is basically just a Badass Normal. Even so, he's something of One-Man Army--he was the leader of the Yellow Scarves for a reason, having taken out several rival gangs entirely on his own--and he's clearly an S-Class street-brawler, so if he ever gets hold of a Jimmy Bar after you've pissed him off, you had best watch out.
He also possesses a sort of charisma, though it's one that's not at all supernatural in origin. Mikado mentions it at the very beginning of the series, that when they were kids, Kida was "full of energy, with a special charm that brought others to his side". Since Kida ends up as the leader of one of the most prominent colour gangs in Ikebukuro--rather, he started the gang, and while he was in middle school at that--apparently that charisma hasn't lessened over the years (...except, of course, when it comes to girls, but more on that below).
OTHER SKILLS:
Obfuscating Stupidity (often with a hint of Magnificent Bastard to it).
-Kida plays dumb exceedingly well!
He really is very good at this, though, to the extent that he can talk circles around most people and gloss his way out of tricky or potentially dangerous situations a significant portion of the time.
Bad Jokes (he spends a lot of time thinking them up, okay, calling them bad is needlessly cruel and hurts his feelings!!).
-Kida likes puns and play-on-words, even if no one else seems to appreciate his sparkling wit and humour. He claims to take a lot of time coming up with "great" ones (once he says that he's been working on a joke for three years), though saying that might just be another sort of joke.
Gratuitous Engrish (randomly speaking in English just shows how ~SUPER COOL~ he really is!!).
-One of the trivia notes concerning Kida says that his favourite subject in school is English, while his least favorite subject is History (
As for how that works in-game: I realise that since the language barrier won't be a thing in the Havens
Fail Flirting (but the goal is just to talk to them, so it's not failure at all!!).
-Kida's hobby is "picking up girls". If there's a female around, he can't seem to help flirting with her. Age doesn't bother him at all, either; if she's too young, he'll call her cute and ask her to meet him again in 10 years for a real date, and there really is no "too old" for him--in an extra short story, it's shown that he's quite content to flirt with grandmas. (...And while we saw him act this way in a flashback when he first met Saki, it's...still probably safe to assume he's only gotten "worse" as far as his indiscriminate flirting goes ever since Saki was hurt--it's a big part of that mask of cheerful bubbliness, after all.)
First Person Sample:
-Texting with Mikado
-Voicemail ridiculousness with Mikado
Let me know if you need anything more! I'll gladly whip something up if these aren't satisfactory examples.
Third Person Sample:
[...Which, uh, kinda sorta totally turned into more of a mini-fic. |D; Hope that's okay!]
Sunshine City.
It was the place Mikado had immediately mentioned when Kida first asked him where he wanted his tour to start on his arrival in Ikebukuro. And at the time, Kida had turned him down flat, telling him that it was a place to visit with his girlfriend, not his best friend. But, Mikado being Mikado, of course he was dragging his feet when it came to actually asking out the girl he was so obviously head-over-heels for...so Kida had decided to help things along a bit.
It had been easy enough to get them both to agree to the outing: it was simplicity itself to drag Mikado after him wherever he went, and Anri-chan had always been amenable to going places with both of them, even if she'd been hesitant to go anywhere alone with Mikado. And that was just fine with Kida; he never really felt like a third wheel, and even if he did that didn't matter because the other two were so shy and withdrawn and typically awkward that they clearly needed more than just two wheels to keeping things rolling smoothly. Speaking of which—
"Ah, look, look, Mikado! Look at the penguins! They look like they're flying over us!"
Grinning widely, Kida practically skipped forward a step or two, simultaneously pointing upwards at the large, clear, circular tanks overhead and half-turning to look over his shoulder at his best friend.
Mikado just sighed, his own smile looking a lot more forced and uncertain. "...Kida-kun...you've lived here for years, right...? So why is it that you seem so much more excited about this than I do?"
"A-ah, well, they are very cute..." Anri offered with a small smile, an attempt of sorts to keep the peace between the boys.
"Y-E-S!!!" Kida exclaimed, spinning around and darting back to join them, then spreading his arms expansively and keeping pace with them...while walking backwards. "But really they're not just cute, they're ~SUPER-CUTE~!" After that bit of cheerfully-mangled English, his grin became decidedly wolfish, and he clasped his hands together over his heart as he went on, "Though of course, even so, they're still not even HALF as cute as our lovely, erotic Anri-chan! Their charm is nothing compared to that of a quirky high school girl with a hot body and glasses!"
"MASAOMI!" Mikado half-yelled, half-yelped, colour swiftly rising to his face that had both anger and embarrassment at its source. "Don't talk about her that way!"
Anri went a little pink herself, and briefly looked down, though otherwise she didn't comment or protest, so Kida chuckled and casually waved away Mikado's indignation.
"Anri-chan doesn't seem to mind, though--she knows it's true, and a compliment besides! You're the only one who's making a scene, Mikado~"
Mikado sputtered a bit, but Kida just smiled a lighthearted smile in response. "Right! So never mind the lectures for the day since ~SCHOOL IS OUT FOR THE SUMMER~! C'mon, let's go!"
Still grinning widely, Kida linked arms with the both of them and pulled them inside.
It wasn't the largest aquarium Kida had ever been to--the Tokyo Sea Life Park or the Shinagawa aquarium were both bigger and fancier and not that far away--but it was still a nice, cool place to visit on a hot summer afternoon like today. Plus, Mikado (who had never gone on their field trips back in elementary school, and doubtless had continued that cowardly trend after Kida had moved away) seemed a little awestruck by the place, despite his earlier comment about Kida being more excited about being here.
Since a tour group was taking up most of the space on the first floor, they'd gone upstairs to see the tropical animals first, ogling the frogs and the snakes, then poked around in the gift shop a little (where Kida had done his best to ignore the curiously cold glint in Mikado's eyes when they passed a rack of sea-creature-themed hats, from rays to penguins to sharks); to break the mildly unnerving tension, Kida had insisted that they all buy matching cellphone charms of a fuzzy, almost painfully cute baby seal. The seals were actually on that floor too, but they were all sleeping, so before long, Kida had hauled them back downstairs, which was fairly empty now since it was lunch time. They stayed close together and took their time at each exhibit, admiring the brightly-coloured coral and even more brightly-coloured fish, smiling at the sea otters, and snapping pictures with their phones as an aquarium employee swam in a tank with some of the fish.
They lingered the longest at the big central tank that held the rays and the sharks, all three unable to look away from the deadly grace of those sleek undersea predators...at least until Kida started humming the Jaws theme under his breath and suddenly grabbed Mikado from behind, eliciting a startled squawk, followed by an unusually irritated shove from his best friend that just made Kida laugh all the harder. (Of course, he knew why Mikado was irritated right then: he'd made Mikado look a little uncool in front of Anri-chan. But well, Mikado wasn't normally very cool anyway, so that was okay. Besides he'd make it up to him soon...)
Kida had continued to link arms with them each time he tugged them from exhibit to exhibit, like a child pulling his parents along after him, and their arrival at their last stop (before going back outside for the sea lion feeding, anyway) was no different. Kida was the only one of the trio who had been to that aquarium before, the only one who knew exactly what to expect, and he'd intentionally saved this exhibit for last: a long, dark tunnel with low lighting and scores of jellyfish drifting all around and overhead.
It was easily the most romantic spot in the whole aquarium.
So, once he was satisfied that his two companions were enthralled with the exhibit, Kida took advantage of the next passing group of visitors, letting the three of them be jostled a bit--enough to casually slip his arms out of theirs and link the two of them together instead.
Somewhat surprisingly, neither seemed to notice, their attention caught by the ethereal beauty of the translucent creatures surrounding them. So Kida just stood back and watched them standing there arm in arm, their backs to him, not even aware that he'd left them, his smile a little sad and faintly but firmly tinged with loneliness as he raised his phone to snap a quick picture, capturing that perfect moment of peace forever.
Once he was satisfied with the shot, he looked down at it pensively, almost meditatively. He'd taken plenty of pictures that day already, to send to her later. But this one was different.
This one, he decided, he would keep just for himself.
His brooding line of thought was interrupted by Mikado's sudden (and more than a little loud and flustered) discovery that he'd been standing arm-in-arm with Anri for the last seven minutes or so, as well as Anri's soft, haltingly-spoken reassurances that it was okay, that she hadn't really minded it. (She'd realised their situation a lot sooner than Mikado, though going by the gentle colour in her cheeks as well as the fact that she hadn't pulled away, Kida definitely believed that she was telling the truth about not minding the arrangement.)
Shutting his phone with a snap, Kida grinned and stepped forward before their mutual stuttering and minor flailing got any worse.
"Maaaan, looking at all these fish is making me really hungry! We've seen just about everything there is to see here, so let's go fishing for a deal with Simon and see if he'll give us a discount on some sushi!"
Draping an arm around both their shoulders, Kida gently pushed them closer together as well as forward, onward toward the warm summer sunlight just visible at the dark tunnel's end.
