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Mouuuuu ... this took a while, less because I was having very much trouble with it and more because I was rewatching HiME and doing my 'plot evil developments while laughing like somebody who's had too much coffee' thing.
Ooh. Lightbulb moment.
See, I'd been planning on sort of doing four 'arcs' - the one where he arrives and everything gets intoduced, a sort of character-building arc to set up all the later interactions and avoid your classic 'fuck off, Marissa Picard' cheese, then two seperate sequences of heavy plot... sort of combining the anime and manga's major final arcs in sequence rather than as a mushy whole.
And I had some really cool ideas for the third one in particular, and wanting to get to it was interfering with my ability to write the intervening bits.
But, if I can just flash back to particular scenes at appropriate moments, showing why something's happening the way it is in a particular scene, I think it can work.
...
Mweh. Heh. Heh.
I can't really tell you anything else as direct about most of the other fights happening on the ground at that point, just because I couldn't see any of them - sure, I have an idea what went on, from the TV footage and things the girls said after the fact, but there were too many buildings and trees and shit in the way to have any real clue as to what was going on below the horizon. Then again, their analyses of things are what you wanted to hear in the first place, aren't they?
Mikoto didn't think that hers was any trouble at all, naturally enough - to hear her report, it had been nothing but a huge lump of muscle with some fur and a nasty set of claws, sort of like a cross between a tree sloth, an abominable snowman, and a giant Koosh ball. She pretty much just said that she had played with it a little before killing it, and left it at that.
It's much, much too easy to look at Mikoto and the way she looks at and thinks about the world and conclude that she's really not much more than a typical housecat in a people suit. And, honestly, there's a lot of truth to that - not perfect truth, of course, since I don't think that cats are really built for that utter, perfect loyalty that's so much a part of her, but there's a hell of a lot more about her that's feline than just her eyes. The thing is, though, that 'feline' does not really mean cute, cuddly, oraffectionate. Nor, despite what some might like to think, does it mean anything approaching aloof and dignified.
The real felines are the ones that your badgers and groundhogs get to know - briefly. The ones that arrange for the mutilated corpses of unwary songbirds to arrive on otherwise un-stained doorsteps. The ones that are, arguably, pound for pound the most lethal killing machines in the animal kingdom.
That sort of cat. Modulated through a physical brain designed pretty much from the ground up for pack behavior and heavy-duty feats of abstraction and memory.
In a lot of ways - far more than I had any clue of at the time - I think she was genuinely feral. Not, of course, in the way that term is usually applied to humans to indicate an individual whose childhood had not included certain vital elements like, oh, language, but in a slightly more subtle sense... Maybe a barbarian would be a better term? Certainly if you look at 'culture' as being the collective memory and beliefs passed on to a child from their parents, she had none to speak of... aside from being really good at haiku, which was just creepy.
She knew exactly what she wanted, I guess, and literally didn't care at all about anything outside of that... We were just lucky, truly lucky, that those wants boiled almost entirely down to 'Food, Family, and Fuck'.
Yes, she has a libido.
No, I will not tell you how I learned that.
And I don't think you need to worry about the drama levels question - while, yes, they are perhaps a little intense by ordinary standards, this is a story, not real life, and that scene fit its timing perfectly... if that makes sense.
Ja, -n
(Now, which one was Midori's, again? *grumblestupidbrainmutter*...)
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"Puri puri puri puri... Bang!"