showyousomethingnice | breakfast of champions (Reo, Haley)

breakfast of champions (Reo, Haley)

[After this.]

Reo spent extra time on his beauty regimen this morning, contouring and concealing and lining his eyes a touch more heavily than usual, because he didn't exactly get much sleep. He spent the night with the brief but life-changing conversation with Ms Dresden echoing in his head; he gave up on homework early on in favor of questions about magic - how it works, how a person uses it, how common it is.

Around midnight, he focused in on her comments about the Laws, went very still for a moment as several connections came together in his mind, and sat down to make a list of names. He made the list several times over before finally splitting it into categories, eventually putting his pen down with a sigh almost an hour later.

He'd attempted sleep after that, but what little he'd gotten had been broken up by dreams that shoved him back into wakefulness. He gave up at around six and got up to shower and dress. Then, with nothing else to do, he went to Kelly's Diner, arriving nearly half an hour early for his meeting with Ms Dresden.

Now he's sipping coffee restlessly, looking his list over and wondering how complete it is. If any of them know. If any any of them have been seen, might be in trouble, might be in danger.

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Haley sits back, looking satisfied. "Then you're either a great actor, or you aren't one of those ones too far down the path to want things easy, and step on other people to get them. I'm betting on it's that second one. You strike me as a pretty good person, Reo Mibuchi, and that's what's important. But I am one of those people who can take off your head if you turn bad, just to make sure we're both on the same page. I won't want to, but if I have to, I will. So--"

She finally softens a little, to a slightly wry grin. "--keep being a good person, okay? I just hate seeing kids get killed just because they didn't know any better. That's why I'm gonna teach you everything I can, so you will know better."

It is, unexpectedly, reassuring to hear that he's in the hands of someone who is not only empowered to kill him, but willing to exercise that power if need be. He never wants -

"If you have to," he says quietly, "then I want you to."

He never wants to be that.

He takes a breath, trying to dispel the rest of his anxiety. It seems like a good time to ask about how magic can be used to help people, so he does.

"Is it possible to use magic to get rid of an old injury? Completely, the old scar tissue and - to make it like it never happened?"

Exactly the right thing to say. Haley nods soberly and lets that go.

"To get rid of it, no, not really, not unless you've got one hell of a gift specifically for fixing things like that," Haley but depending on how strong your gift is, anything you've got will start to heal, the more you use it. See this?" She holds up her left hand, on which there was some faint scar tissue, obviously left over from a burn. "Used to be I couldn't even use this thing. Every doctor I went to wanted me to take it off. Now look at it."

Reo's face falls a little at her initial answer, but not for long. He will just have to find out how good he can be at using magic to heal.

(He used to keep a well-stocked first aid kit in his dorm room at Rakuzan, for treating teammates who were too stubborn to take their minor injuries to the infirmary but deemed seeking out their vice captain's help acceptable to their pride. It worked well. They always healed quickly and nothing ever went wrong. Maybe that's something he should think more about.)

"Well, that's useful for an athlete," is what he says aloud, examining Ms Dresden's hand with interest. "How long did that take?"

"A couple years. It's slow, and I had to be patient and do physical therapy and all that. But if you've got a lot of power, enough for this sort of thing to happen, you'll have a long life to spend healing from shit," Haley confides. It's pretty important information to share, even if it's not something that's as cool as it sounds. Haley isn't looking forward to watching purely human friends die around her. "My own mentor's a couple hundred years old, now. Doesn't look a day over sixty. So if you're strong enough-- which I don't know if you are, we'll hafta test that and find out-- if you're strong enough, you will, too. Unless something kills you first, anyway. That's always a possibility."

Reo blinks, taking this in.

(His first thought is that Sei-chan will certainly be among the ones strong enough to live so long. He can't imagine a scenario in which Sei-chan isn't among the best and strongest of any group he's in.)

The waitress arrives with their food as he thinks; he waits until she's gone to ask,

"How does the testing work?"

Haley shoots him a grin, still not quite meeting his eyes for more than a second. "All sorts of ways. Mostly making you do magic, see what you're capable of, which can take a while. Weeks or months, as you practice and get better at control. Or I can try the quick and dirty way, but it's not a lot of fun for either of us." A soulgaze isn't something one forgets. Ever. And it's only a 50-50 chance it would give her what she needs to find out his magical strength, anyway, but it would give them both a deep insight into who the other person is, and what they are each capable of. Plus, it might well make him pass out or throw up or something, if he's not got enough magic in him to tolerate it.

He's beginning to notice now that Ms Dresden hasn't been making much eye contact. That's another thing about America he's still getting used to, the way people stare at each other during conversations. Ms Dresden is, he thinks, the kind of person who would normally be doing a lot of that staring. That she isn't doing so is something that he should perhaps be paying a little more attention to; he's been told, and seen for himself a few times, that it indicates discomfort or dissemination for Americans.

He considers this thoughtfully as he takes a neat bite of his omelette, then asks (after he swallows, of course),

"What is the other way, if I may ask?"

"Of course you can ask," Haley snorts at him. "If you're going to be my student for a while, you're going to have to ask questions. I can't think of everything."

She takes a gulp of her coffee and a bite of her waffle-- shut up, it's tasty and filling and she doesn't eat out much-- before answering that one, though.

"There's something wizards can do called a Soulgaze. It's not perfect, and it can be pretty disorienting. One friend of mine passed out when I accidentally did it on her. Another one threw up. To a magical being or a strong enough wizard, it's not so bad, just it's not something that leaves you. Ever. You'll remember whatever you see with crystal clarity for the rest of your life. You ever heard the American expression 'eyes are the windows of the soul'?"

The only judgment Reo is about to pass on Haley's breakfast is the same thing he's thought about Western breakfasts for years now - too many carbs, not enough protein. How is that supposed to get even a non-athlete through until lunch?

He nods in answer to her question.

"Yes, that's familiar."

If that can be done by accident, he thinks, then that must be the reason for the minimal eye contact.

Well. He does appreciate that.

"Well, it's the truth, if you have magic," Haley says with a shrug. "You'd be surprised how many sayings really are true, when you look at it from a wizard's perspective. But in this case, I'd look into your eyes, and you'd look into mine, and if we kept it up for more than a second or two, we'd see each other's souls. It'd be messy, but it'd give both of us an idea about the other person's power, as well as what we're really like, as people. So: quick and dirty way. But you might throw up. That's the dirty part, I guess."

Someone who didn't look any further than Reo's careful appearance and often borderline-fussy mannerisms might expect him to recoil in horror at the very idea of vomit, but Reo is also an athlete who has thrown up during more practices than he can count, especially when he was young. That part gets half a shrug.

"Perhaps," he says with just a touch of dryness, "we should wait until we've left the diner, then."

(He should approach the whole notion with more gravity, maybe, but Reo is only nineteen. He doesn't yet have the life experience to really start to grasp what such a thing means.)

And Haley can guess that. She eyes him thoughtfully. It would give her a better idea of just how likely he was to fall into bad ways, and could be used as evidence if a trial took place despite her early intervention. "So that's what you want?"

"If it's all right with you," Reo says, because while he may not be able to grasp the full implications of the soulgaze, he certainly understands that it's the kind of thing that should ideally be undertaken with consent from both parties. "It sounds like the most efficient way to get started, if it works."

Reo likes efficiency, always has, and finds the thought of it reassuring in the middle of all this - of all this. And if it doesn't work, well, at least they tried, and it sounds as though something can still be learned even from a failure.

Haley snorts around a mouthful of waffle. Efficient. Right. Depending on your definition, she supposes. Once she manages to swallow, she warns, "Don't think that all things with magic can be solved the quick and dirty way, like this. A lot of times there isn't a quick and dirty way. It's just practice, discipline, and a hell of a lot of work."

She forks another piece of waffle. "You know. Just so you know. Once we're all paid up here, we'll go outside and see what we see."

"I'm an athlete, Ms Dresden," Reo says mildly. "I am accustomed to discipline and hard work."

He may not yet understand the implications of everything he's found himself in the middle of, but the one thing Haley won't ever have to worry about is finding him slacking off.

"But thank you for the warning," he adds. "I imagine you've had trouble with people making that assumption."

"Once I actually convince people I'm not faking it, they usually figure they can use magic for anything," Haley snorts. "Doesn't work that way. If I wanted to, say, flip over this table, for pretty much everybody, it'd be a whole lot easier to do it with my hands than tossing a spell at it. Magic's best used for those things your hands can't do, and even then, it's tiring, especially if you go slinging it around in big ways."

Reo considers this as he eats.

"That would explain why my specialty shots are more tiring than my ordinary ones," he says. "Physically, they don't take that much more effort, but if I do too many of them, I'm exhausted by the end of the game. I mentioned the effect the Emperor's Eye has on Sei-chan, too . . ."

His mind is turning back to the list. "I have two other former teammates on that list. I have my doubts about Ei-chan - Eikichi Nebuya - I don't know how much magic you need to eat far too much and develop your muscles obsessively. I added him mostly for completeness's sake; he was considered one of our group of elite players. Koutarou Hayama seems more likely, he can dribble the ball so fast it's just a blur. It never seemed to tire him out, but then he's an eternal bundle of energy. The only time I think I ever saw him slow down was after we lost the Winter Cup in our second year."

He frowns thoughtfully against the rim of his glass.

"Quite a few of the players on my list were in that game. It was a very strange one."

He's always thought that, but had acknowledged that, as a member of a losing team experiencing its first major loss in years, his perspective was biased. Now he's beginning to wonder, though.

Hyperkinetic gifts aren't uncommon. They're pretty low-tier, though, so Haley just nods and eats a few more bites while Reo talks. At some point, she'll have to ask what the hell "chan" means, and why he keeps sticking it onto people's names, and whether she has to worry about it getting appended to her name.

Finally, she swallows, and asks, "Strange how? Stranger than usual? Since, no offense, it kinda seems like your games are already pretty strange, you just never really thought they were since you were used to it. So when you say something's strange, that rings all kinds of bells for me."

Not to worry, Haley. Reo may be more liberal with his use of -chan than the average Japanese teenage boy, but there are some lines he will not cross.

Reo shakes his head a little. "I don't really know how to describe it," he says. "It seemed like a normal game at first, even when we started falling behind - oh, I'm sorry, that sounds very arrogant, but it was the first time all year we hadn't been ahead in the score. We were very good." He sighs. "As we should have been, I suppose, with so many of us doing magic. But even before us, Rakuzan had a reputation. It had been years since they'd last lost a tournament.

"So when I say 'even when we started falling behind,' I mean that was only strange in a, a normal way." He wrinkles his nose, because that is a such a stupid way to put that but he's not sure of any better way to do it. "Seirin had some very fine players as well. Three of them are on my list, but they're all in the group I'm not sure of. But."

He's frowning a bit, chasing a thought he hasn't had a chance to pin down yet. Three of them on the list, but - oh. There it is.

"You said it would take magic to copy a magical play. Would it also require magic to disrupt one?" He had assumed as much when he was thinking about Midorima's perfect three-pointers, but he hadn't actually paused to confirm it.

"Depends on how he did it," Haley explains. "A lot of things can disrupt magic. If you throw a rock at a wizard in the middle of a spell, sure, that'll disrupt it. Physical distractions, things like surprise and pain, they all work really well to keep magic from working. But if he wasn't touching him or shouting at him or throwing things at him, then sure, maybe. Was somebody in this strange game of yours keeping your gifts from working right?"

"Hyuuga Junpei," Reo says, frustrated that, even after soundly defeating Seirin in last year's Winter Cup and taking his revenge on Hyuuga, he still can't seem to completely rid himself of that jerk. "He's not on that list. I don't think - well, if he does have magic, he certainly doesn't use it in basketball. He's a good player, but so are plenty of others. Nothing about him stood out on the court. I had the upper hand with him at first, easily, but after things started to get strange, he broke all my plays. He's the only one who's been able to do that. Just through ordinary gameplay. He didn't do anything unusual, he just saw a flaw in my play and exploited it. I thought - well, up until now I thought it was because he'd observed me closely before. I could see it in how he played, that he'd used me as part of his, his foundation when he was just getting started. It seemed reasonable that that would be an advantage for him. But now I don't know."

He pauses to take a bite of his omelette and gather his thoughts back together before his aggravation can overwhelm them.

"Heaven, maybe. It's a difficult shot, but I've seen professionals do something similar. Earth, too, if I'm using - if, if it's the referees and not the player I'm targeting. But not Oblivion. The one where I freeze them. I was rattled, but I didn't do it any differently. I know I didn't."

He's forgotten that Ms Dresden won't be as accustomed to the names given to his plays as he is. Hopefully she won't find that too distracting.

The play names don't mean much to her, no, but they don't have to, especially since he gives enough context to work with. Besides, she's used to people throwing around unfamiliar words. Usually she'd say something nasty about it, but she's more concerned with what he's describing. It could be nothing-- but it could be something.

"We'll add his name to the list," she decides. "Could be he's just got really clear sight, could be he's got magic enough to disrupt magic around him unconsciously, could be he's not all human. Either way, it's worth looking into."

Reo opens his mouth to answer, then stops, his expression of distaste turning into one of startlement as Ms Dresden's words sink in.

"I'm sorry," he says, "did you say not all human?"

Maybe it should have occurred to him that magic isn't the only thing in this new world he's been dragged into. Maybe it should have, but it didn't.

"Yeah, I did. What, did you think we were the only intelligent species around?" Haley gives him a lop-sided grin. "I mean, most of them don't live here, in this dimension or plane or whatever you want to call it, but they can show up here, and sometimes they leave behind byblows who choose to stay in this realm rather than the Nevernever."

She ticks off on her fingers. "You've got faeries, angels and demons, Outsiders, the occasional werewolf...." And then she gives up on ticking off, and just says: "There's a lot of options for 'not human' if you're looking. Most of them probably wouldn't be playing basketball, but some kind of changeling faerie or younger werewolf might, I guess."

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