That Old Saying About Memories
Ring-a-ding-a-ling!
A bespectacled man with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair finds his customary greeting dying in his throat. He is a polite shopkeeper, but also a quiet and timid sort that got into this industry because of his love of books and not his love of customer service. And this is not his usual clientele.
What he sees is a grey wall of skin, fat, and muscle squeezing roughly through his antique doorway. One huge mitt of a hand, wider than normal and with fewer fingers, is planted firm against the wall. Boards are creaking. An elephantine head is squashed down into a broad and yielding chest barely clothed in a white a-shirt, and still the small, wrinkled eyes are being dragged open by the bald scalp scraping the doorframe. The elephant man's potbelly ponderously jiggles with the effort to get unstuck.
With a sound like a chair being shoved along the floor, Mammogar gets into the cramped bookstore. The shopkeeper squeezes his mouth shut in a small frown and his eyebrows rise to their peak. Behind the counter, he pinches his leg. Mammogar clips a postcard stand and a scattering of them spill to the ground. His massive, python-like trunk tenderly rubs a mark above his forehead that the door made. His exposed tusks glisten.
There's an oppressive silence in the store. Only the merchant and the mutant occupy it, and they aren't talking to each other. The wooden floors protest loudly as Mammogar shuffles sideways through the shelves and displays. His roundness is such that it's not much better than trundling through normally. The whole time, the man in glasses is staring fixedly as his expression becomes tighter and more set, even once Mammogar mostly disappears behind the bookcases. Except for the dome of his skull and massive ears protruding over the top shelf.
The shopkeeper gets halfway to his feet when Mammogar bumps the shelf and it teeters. A massive hand darts up over the top - smacking the shelf further off balance and scraping against the ceiling - and catches the shelf at a dangerous angle. Rows of books cascade from the top two shelves, messily piling on the ground with a shuffling clatter. Even still, the fuming shopkeeper is silent. His lips have disappeared, the skin going white with pressure around the tight line of his ire. Mammogar mumbles something inaudible, carefully rests it back in the upright position, and begins shuffling back towards the central area crowded with display tables.
The elephant man has two books in his hand: a field guide for bird-watchers and a manual on ultra-light backpacking. He glances over at the line of dumped books and sheepishly rubs his bald head with the end of his trunk. He places them on the counter with the barcodes helpfully exposed. The shopkeeper glares at him with open hatred.
Mammogar looks down at the small, older man in glasses.
He picks up a sports magazine and a peanut candy bar and puts them on the counter too.
"Just these."
The man settles himself fully on the stool behind his counter. He makes no move towards the register, or Mammogar's selections, or the handheld barcode scanner. He says nothing. His face is as if carved in stone. He resolutely puts his hands on his knees, and glares up at the mutant, watching the crick develop in the bigger, younger man's neck from the folded up posture in the undersized store.
Mammogar sucks his teeth. With a loud sigh, he jams a heavy hand into his basketball shorts, and notices the merchant's eyes shift from fury to fear momentarily. They shift back once Mammogar reveals a fistful of small bills and a random collection of coins. Mammogar slams them down on the counter with a bang that emphasizes the quiet around it.
"I'm a paying customer. I want a bag."
The man stares.
"What's wrong with you?"
The man is a statue.
"This is illegal discrimination! You want me to report this fire hazard? Huh?" Mammogar hipchecks the counter, causing it to shiver. He gets closer to the smaller man in jerks of movement. "Huh? Eh? Huh?"
The man's jaw is clenched so much that Mammogar can hear the tooth enamel straining.
"Forget you, grandpa!" Mammogar swipes the stack of goods off the counter and bats the wad of currency at the old man, which bounces off him harmlessly.
Mammogar growls, "Asshole!"
Then he makes a beeline directly for the doorway, this time making zero effort to avoid the displays and clutter. Things topple and jitter out of his way and he leaves a wide path of empty ground framed by unnavigable mess to either side. When he gets to the doorway, his trunk angles over, and Mammogar releases a deafening blast of trumpeting sound that sends the entire collection of postcards flying randomly through the air. He angrily kicks open the wooden door and it smacks against the building's exterior wall. The elephant man is much less careful about jamming his way through this time and the frame wrenches and groans in protest.
The door slowly creaks back towards closed, vibrating as it does so. It is several seconds before the old man gets up, walks through the empty path in the middle of his shop, and closes the door fully. He flips the archaic little sign in the door window from the yellowed 'Open' side to the equally weathered 'Closed'.
"Mutie scum." He engages the deadbolt with a skipping clunk.
People gawp and stare as Mammogar strides aimlessly around town in a bad mood. His new reading material is wrinkling in one fist and he uses the other to bring the candy to his pointed mouth over and over. Between bites he rants under his breath and sways his trunk side to side in emphatic sweeping gesture. People have to stumble and duck, and he ignores their occassional shouts of alarm or protest.
When he's done with the purchased yet purloined treat, he angrily throws the wrapper on the sidewalk mid-stride, still glaring ahead without processing what he's seeing or thinking about where he's going. He's too busy litigating arguments and massaging his hurt pride. A proper business man in a modern suit and hair so fixed with spray that it looks like a polished wooden hat scoffs loudly and berates the angry bull elephant.
"That's littering! Were you raised in a barn?!"
Mammogar wheels around, dropping his books and magazine beside him. His fingers flex out as if he's going to grab up the business man and his broad back flexes with the effort to restrain himself. His yellow eyes are red and veiny around the edges, lids wide open.
"What's that supposed to mean? Huh? Cause I'm an animal? S'that it?" He stomps closer.
The business man, the fight completely drained out of him, opens his mouth and closes it in repetition several times. His voice is strangled in his clenched throat.
"I- Y- It's- That's-"
"SPEAK UP!," Mammogar bellows. Some people are bringing out their phones and start filming, though most are hurrying away.
Mammogar swats the man's briefcase out of his hand with a swipe of his heavy trunk. The man cringes and puts both arms over his head to hide away. His palms are out, placating.
"If you care so much, you pick it up then! I'm BUSY!"
Mammogar struggles to bend over and pick back up his shopping before stalking off again. The man's knees give out in relief, and he falls on his butt. "...E-eh?" The spectators keep recording until Mammogar is out of sight, but the eyes of the public scrutinize the proboscidean mutant wherever he goes, as always. He isn't free of them until he finds a lonely place in a public park and sits down in the grass. The reduced visibility all around him preys on his nerves, but not nearly as much as being watched.
"Damnit!" He smacks the ground with his palm, sending curls of grass fluttering away. Regret washes over him as his temper reflects on his ruined afternoon. He'd lost his head again, and no one was going to understand how hard it was. He presses his palms against his eyes and tilts back his head, pressing hard until stars of blue and yellow burst into the blackness. His trunk curls slack and thumps limply on his chest. He wasn't going to be able to read when he was so pissed off.
Suddenly, his sensitive ears pick up shuffling in the grass. It was faint, like maybe a pair of field mice or park squirrels. He lowers his hands and blinks away the sparkles, squinting blurrily in the direction of the noise. Watching some wildlife might calm him down.
Through his eyes, it's a bipedal shape with a bulbous green head. There's something familiar about it and it makes a spot on his nose itch. It bothers him that it doesn't have a smell; Mammogar recognizes most people by the scents that come off them or the sound of their voice, but the only scents on this silent weirdo are the smell of crushed grass.
They stand there awkwardly, even as Mammogar frowns around his tusks and flicks his trunk at the interloper. "Go away! Can't you see I'm trying to be alone?"
Marumaru is stunned that Mammogar looked right at her. Even she couldn't hear her footsteps, and she was the one making them. "Uh..."
Mammogar scrunches up his face as another bell rings in his mind. He looks more closely at the stranger and slowly climbs to his feet.
"So basically, you need to turn yourself in," Marumaru tries flatly.
Mammogar punches his palm when it finally clicks. "It's the bug!"
"Marumaru," Hoge corrects, one finger raised.
"What the hell are you doing here?" Mammogar slides his feet into a boxing position, ham-sized fists curled in front.
"Would you believe it's coincidence," Maru tries, starting to crouch more. Though Hoge did have the helmet in her bag, along with dark gloves and a kunai, she is still otherwise in her day clothes. Of course, today she was wearing tengu geta, tabi, harem pants, and a trendy cropped tunic, so fashion-blind and near-sighted Mammogar didn't notice any difference from Marumaru's typical ninja aesthetic.
"NO!" Mammogar bellows. "But it doesn't matter! I've had a real bad day, so you're gonna get squashed!"
Mammogar barrels forward with shocking speed for his huge size, his shoes leaving divets in the ground during the charge. As he gets closer, Marumaru briefly falls into his visual acuity and becomes more distinct, before her adrenaline skyrockets and her quirk Wasuremono blurs her out for everyone. In excellent boxing form his massive grey fist pistons forward. The wind strikes across Marumaru's helmet and she twists to the side. The chestnut-sized knuckles almost graze against the arc of Marumaru's side-facing eye and the expressionless cicada face disguises the rictus of excited grin she's wearing beneath.
'He almost took my head off!' Marumaru's inner voice was equally as giddy as it was scared. She stumbled back on tottering feet with her bag bouncing against her spine.
If it had been the beginning of the year, then she never could have pulled that near dodge off. Since then, she's fallen from buildings, sparred with martial artists, fought other ninjas, faced down death, and even dueled in class with the skilled boxer Samp-san. True, he always won on points, but he was faster than Mammogar and had more to prove. In comparison, the shattering punch that Marumaru dodged was as slow as a blow made underwater.
How did the saying go? 'Bobby weave'?
In the split second that Hoge's mind raced through her reflections, Mammogar was planting his lead foot and swinging his hips to drive a left hook after the stumbling Marumaru. The air split again in the gray slice of bone and muscle hammering through it. Yet once again it clobbered only air, as Maru let herself fall to her back, prone in the grass. Fury stampeded through Mammogar's blood. Up came his massive foot. His specially made size 24 basketball sneakers came crushing down. Marumaru barrel rolls ungainly away, leaving Mammogar to devastate the grass and send a plume of wet dirt into the air.
Mammogar's trunk curls furiously back, exposing his teeth. "I'm gonna throw you into next Wednesday!"
"I'm going to sue you for the dry cleaning," Marumaru yells back quietly as she spins up to a three-point stance. The two traded places in the exchange. Helpless to her own curiosity, she glances down at the pile that Mammogar had left.
'Birds?' Marumaru remembers a certain clown.
Even as Mammogar is speedily approaching her again, she swaps her knife to her other hand and picks up the field guide to look at it closer. Mammogar skids to a stop and roars, "That's mine!"
His belly swells and his chest expands as he draws in a massive breath. Marumaru looks up in time to see Mammogar's trunk pointed directly at her, stiff as a rifle, and in a panic she tries to plant her feet into a stable swordfighter's stance with her arms crossed in an 'x' in front of her, blade in one hand and book in the other. Mammogar trumpets in a concussive blast of sound.
The noise moves like a wall. It flattens the grass in a cone, rockets through the air, carries up whipping debris, slams into the trees beyond, and rips stems and leaves away. Stones pelt away from the blast and Mammogar himself tips away from the force. The sonic blast tears the book from Marumaru's grip and sends it flying away, flapping like the birds illustrated on its pages. She would have lost the kunai too if the ring at the end of its handle hadn't caught her fingers and spun about them, bruising the back of her hand badly.
Yet, when Mammogar opened his eyes to look at what he had wrought, struggling to regain his breath, his back spasming with the force of the effort and lungs tingling, he saw Marumaru slid back mere inches on two muddy lines where her wooden shoes cut the turf.
Marumaru lowers her arms and looks at her palms. She pats her torso to check for damage and glances at the sore spot between her knuckles. She seems as surprised as Mammogar when their eyes meet, judging by her posture if not by the emotionless lenses of her helmet.
Wasuremono, enemy of sound, had split the sea of destructive noise and left Marumaru a little chilly but unharmed.
"What the f--" Mammogar started, dumbstruck, before being struck in the eye with a mud clod. He cringes and shakes his head from the sting of it. Marumaru shook her hand, also, to try to get the dirt off her favorite glove. But she prudently did it while running towards her elephantine opponent, unwilling to let her opening go to waste.
Hoge reaches up, catches Mammogar's trunk with her elbow and underarm in a one-armed grapple, and turns to face the same way as Mammogar so as to pin his prehensile nose against her body. With single-minded purpose, she draws the sharp kunai edge precisely against the healed over scar that she had first hacked open with her sword blade months before. Mammogar reels from the sudden pain as Marumaru dislodges, slipping into the shadow behind him. He swats and grabs to both sides of him, eyes blinded by instinctive tears, and suddenly realizes what that itch was from before.
Though people often do, elephants never forget. The elephant mind within Mammogar's human mind had been trying to warn him of the grudge he held against this meddling teenage miscreant. He turned his torso one way, as far as his massive bulk would allow, and suddenly spun the other. His elbows cleaved the air, his fists whipped out in hammer blows, and most surprising of all, his bleeding trunk swung in its own whalloping arc, no less painfully muscular than his well-trained arms. The trunk caught Marumaru in his blind spot, cracking her across the shoulder and side of her head, and sending her sprawling off her feet with her head ringing. The kunai, with a spray trail of red, went spinning off far outside of Maru's reach.
Marumaru landed in a heap on the ground, tumbling out of control and dizzying the girl. In a single solid hit, he had battered her terribly. Her clothes were ruined and she would be turning yellow, green, and purple all over before night fell. She groans and turns to lay still on her back as the world spins around her.
Mammogar stalks over. He stamps every foot fall, taking his time and knowing she was vulnerable.
"All you had to do. Was leave me alone. But you couldn't even do that."
He looms over her, snarling. Wounded. Furious.
She lolls her head towards him and her voice sputters like echoed static out of her mouth filter. A trail of fragrant herbal mist comes with it.
"Phasianus versicolor," she says.
"Huh?"
Hoge limply points off to Mammogar's right, where her gaze is facing. "Green pheasant."
Mammogar's face turns from a wrinkle of confusion to a slack of surprise. He starts to turn his head, then realizes it could be a trick. He keeps his eyes on Marumaru, his heart already racing in his chest from the brawl, but now set on the possibility of spotting a national symbol that had wandered by. He squints at her suspiciously, noting that she's unarmed, and landed badly, and looked exhausted. It would only take a moment. He hears a sound! He glances away.
He sees a grey squirrel.
His head snaps back in a tight grimace. He sees an empty depression in the grass, and rapidly checks all around him. Everywhere he looks, there's nobody to be seen, not even a blurry shape speeding away in the distance. "I'll get you, bug! And when I do, you're jam! Bug jam!" He yells it as loud as he can, not worrying for a moment who has overheard any of this.
For only a moment, he feels a foot between his shoulders. His arms reach up over his wide, soft shoulders and he bends back trying to look. And then, suddenly, darkness.
Hoge rolled to a stop and the world kept tumbling. The gears of her mind kept spinning, too, but with misaligned teeth that unmeshed and clattered, making a mess of her orderly thoughts. It kept kicking up useless things into her conscious attention like how she felt like one big bruise and how she lost at least 3000 yen from misplacing her kunai. She tried to blink her eyes into focus as the iceberg of meat that was Mammogar stomped closer to where she was convalescing. She needed to get up. She couldn't. She needed to run away! No chance. She needed a plan!
'Lie.'
Finally, something useful! By rote, she tongued the release of the aromatherapy that calmed her more by Pavlovian force than by its medical power.
She pointed in a random direction and, remembering the book, said the first bird that came to mind.
"Phasianus versicolor," she finds herself saying. 'That's a bad lie!!' Only an idiot would believe a beloved kiji bird would be so far away from where it would be happiest: anywhere but this noisy city park.
"Huh?"
Hoge doubled down. "Green pheasant," she insisted. At least she was barely smart enough not to be pointing directly behind him. No one would ever buy that one.
He wavered. He looked her over. She tried to look as pitiful and as weak as possible, while her blood thrummed with hormones and her muscles buzzed in tension. He glanced over.
Hoge moved without thinking. She found herself close to the ground, on all fours, barely above the grass. To her great confusion, she wasn't sprinting for the treeline, but darting low like a lizard straight by Mammogar. He turned and began bellowing and Hoge diverted, getting to the blind spot behind his back. As he began twisting about, she scrambled to her feet, silent as a cloud, and began shifting back and forward to stay always directly behind him. She didn't even realize that a part of her brain was taking the complaints of her massive bruise behind a mental shed and shooting it. Hoge, on pure instinct, just moved.
And it was getting too hot to breathe.
She found herself unclasping the Marumaru helmet from her head and releasing her sweat to the breeze. The metal was cool in her gloved hands. The weight comforting. Her ears and her feet worked in concert to keep herself hidden, and she embraced the surreal moment of calm afforded by a draw of clear air. Mammogar was going on about something, but what was much more important was Hoge's mind was once more in alignment. Locked in. A flywheel spun, everything went back to speed, and her thoughts were clipping smoothly away once more.
In the next moment she vaulted up Mammogar's mammoth back and launched herself above his head. Her body twisted like she was going for the high jump, the hefty helmet raised even higher still. She felt her fingertips latched onto the rim, palming the eye. She folded, turned, swung. Mammogar looked up. Marumaru slammed herself full pelt and falling, helm first, directly into his peanut-shaped forehead.
A mountain fell.
Mammogar finds himself waking groggily with his arms bound up against his sides by something soft but pressuring. He moans and snoots, but his nose was wrapped too, in some kind of foam bulb cinched around it with a ratchet strap. He cringes against a splitting headache and feels a bandage taped to his forehead.
"There you go, big guy. Stay still, alright? Don't want you getting hurt. You're going back home." An unfamiliar voice was addressing him in a grating, smiling, professional tone. Fake as hell and unfailingly polite.
"Home?" Mammogar's voice came out thick as syrup, and nasal from his stoppered nostrils.
"Yep. You're a real return customer. We've got a nice firm cot for you all set up for you to wait for sentencing. I think you might have even been in it before."
Mammogar finally gets his eyes focused on the man talking and makes out the dark, crisp uniform of a special transport officer for the Kyoto municipal jail. Scared, he looks down at himself, and sees he was swaddled in some kind of black foam mat, with his feet shackled together.
"What! Come on, man! What is this??"
He hears the condescending, paternalistic voice of the screw clear as a bell through his concussion. "You know better than that, don't you? What did you think was going to happen?"
And so Mammogar thrashes and tires himself out over the entire, too-familiar trip.