Room 504, Sunday Night

[intraspective]

Ino was sprawled out in her jammies, hair damp against her skull, and idly rereading her notes on the latest things her father wanted her to practice on.

Nibbling on candy (she'd totally got it on sale and ha, it was just as good bought as it would've been had she gone around to get it), Ino was in a good mood.

From the candy, from the studying, from what she'd gotten up to today?

Totally all of the above.

[Open door, open post!]

Comments

[raspberryturk]

That earned a snort of disdain from Reno, right there.

"Rookie, I don't pull none of that babysittin' duty, yoto. There's a difference between stickin' to the Rookies an' changin' diapers. I like to think you're a big enough girl you can wipe your own ass, yo."

[intraspective]

"I should hope so," she muttered. "Considering, if not, what the hell am I doing 'llowed out on missions?"

Seriously!

"You're mostly the one that gets to make sure your crazy monsters aren't crazy-monsters-that-will-not-die."

[raspberryturk]

"We don't get too many of that type around Midgar," Reno replied. "I mean, they do happen now an' then, but usually they're easy enough to tell apart from the rest. Either they're crazy-lookin' dudes with wings, or they're like a million freakin' kilometres tall an' lookin' to destroy the planet, yo."

There... wasn't really much in between, so far as terrible unkillible monsters went.

[intraspective]

"In which case," she said, "if they are giant and tryin' to kill everyone, I am fleeing. 'Cause I am not stupid."

Foolhardy and reckless, yes. Not stupid.

[raspberryturk]

"Atta girl!" Reno approved. He'd lost entirely too many rookies in the past. People trying to be heroes. Trying to save the world.

At least it had worked.

"Only a damn idiot goes an' gets themself killed over somethin' like that, anyhow."

[intraspective]

Her lips twitched at that.

"I'm not a hero, Reno," she reminded him. "If orders said to stick there and die, I would. Or if you said we could take it and it wasn't a world-killer. But other than that, use my own discretion, and that discretion says I like living and run if it looks like it can maul me without even trying."

[raspberryturk]

"Someday, I'm gonna get my hands on a Bahamut materia, an' I'll show you some of the shit I ran away from in the past," Reno mused.

Because dragons weren't about to try to end the world, but they were totally fine to run the hell away from, too.

... Which kinda made him a heel for leaving Rikku, Romeo, and Dojima to deal with Bahamut Sin while he and Rude dealt with the remnants, didn't it?

[intraspective]

At least he'd been dealing with something?

"What's a Bahamut?" Ino asked promptly. "I'd tell you it's creepy to carry monsters 'round, but I don't think I can all things considered."

Her world carried animals around in scrolls that could be summoned with blood. Ino couldn't throw stones.

[raspberryturk]

"Bahamut is a breed of really fuckin' huge dragons," Reno replied. "Some of 'em are capable of blowin' frickin' craters in the ground from space."

Which didn't make much sense to him, but it was damn effective.

[intraspective]

"I don't think running is quite the right word if that happened 'round me," Ino noted dryly. "Fleeing, more like."

Lots and lots of fleeing.

[raspberryturk]

"Fleeing for your freakin' life," Reno agreed, smirking faintly. "We're gonna start you off on Kalm Fangs and work our way up from there, I think. You get enough experience, you might be able to handle somethin' that big anyhow, someday."

[intraspective]

"You can take on a dragon now?" Ino wondered. "And win? Easily?"

[raspberryturk]

"A regular, run of the mill dragon, sure," Reno mused. "But I ain't outta my friggin' mind enough to try to take on Bahamut on my own, yo."

There was a difference between the garden-variety dragons that trundled about the wilds of Gaia and what was practically a draconic deity. Summons were for crazy people and idiots to try to fight. The end.

[intraspective]

"...how many sorts of dragons do you got?" Ino asked dubiously, at that.

[raspberryturk]

Oh, don't make Reno try to count them. He was terrible with numbers.

"Uh... is that including mini dragons and monsters that I ain't bothered to get up close and personal with to be able to tell the difference?"

There were a... couple? At least? Or was that a few?

[intraspective]

She was one of his Rookies! She had learnt from his sterling example to be a nit. (Nevermind she was fairly good at it even before, really.)

Of course she wanted him to count them.

"Absolutely!" Ino said. The laughter evident in her voice. "All of them."

[raspberryturk]

Reno's eyebrows furrowed a little, and now he was pouting, yes.

"Shit, I dunno. Maybe I can guess, instead? There's gotta be at least twenty, an' that's without countin' the summons. Or maybe with the summons, too. Uh... At least five different kinds of Bahamut, and I think Leviathan counts... Um..."

This could be a while.

"That's six so far, right?"

[intraspective]

Ino was just going to blink incredulously at that.

"Um."

...

"How do you get six from twenty and five and one?" A beat. "Well... six is part of the number, at least."

[raspberryturk]

Reno. Counting. Now he was making faces while he tried to add everything up on his fingers.

"Without the twenty, I mean. Dammit, now I'm confused. That's five Bahamuts and Leviathan. Six."

Clearly, he had to take this bit by bit, or else they would never know.

[intraspective]

Ino was just going to... pull her pen out and write this down just so he couldn't confuse her.

"Okay," she said, scribbling that out. "Five kinds of Bahamut, right? And one Leviathan. Got that. What next?"

[raspberryturk]

Right. Okay, next!

"Next, I guess there's all the stuff that we actually call dragons. Just your generic dragons up on Mount Nibel, and then blue, red, and dark ones, in other places. The dark ones are real sons of bitches, yo. They cast Ultima."

[intraspective]

"So that's... four more types, right?" Scribble, Ino, scribble! "And... Ultima--that's a materia-spell-thing, yeah? One of the most powerful?"

It was called Ultima. It had to be powerful.

[raspberryturk]

"Let's just say you don't wanna be on the recieving end of an Ultima attack," Reno replied, his tone a little dry. "You can get your hands on the materia, but last I checked, the market price was over fifty-thousand Gil, yo."

Steep cost. Totally worth it if you had something that was freaking huge to kill.

"Pressin' on in our little list of dragons, now? There's the dragon zombies, up in the Northern Crater. And the dragon riders seem to have their own breed that they fly around on. Bagnadranas are these kinda six-legged lizard things, so I guess they count. And adamantaimai are giant turtle-things with horns, but they drop dragon scales, so they gotta count, too..."

[intraspective]

Fifty-thousand was... ack. Something to aim for if you had totally no life and were content to spend it kicking monster butt? Which the mun has totally done, so.

"Dragon zombies?" Ino paused. "Wouldn't those just be dead ones of other breeds? Reanimated?"

[raspberryturk]

"Maybe," Reno mused, but if that's the case, then they get bigger, meaner, and uglier, an' they learn a whole shitload of new spells. Might be that they live in the Northern Cave, too, an' the mako there made 'em change. Either way, they ain't like any other dragon I ever saw. Monsters kinda work funny, like that."

They defied logic and reason. If they made sense, then they wouldn't be monsters, would they?

"From there, I guess we got deenglows, flapbeats, wind wings, lessaloploth, and rapps." He was ticking them off on his fingers as he went, with the phone sitting on his chest as he leaned back even farther. His seat was going to topple backward, at this rate. But at least there was speakerphone? "Ironites are kinda dragon-like, and so are them big critters than the Hell Rider VR2s ride on. Oh, an' I totally managed to forget about the Ancient dragons and Ark dragons. Too many friggin' dragons. I don't think I'm half done, yet."