damned_institute | Day 28: Bus 2

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Day 28: Bus 2

Momo tugged on the collar of the light blue sweater she was wearing as she followed her nurse to wherever these buses were, winding her hair up into its customary bun as she went. It was an odd feeling, knowing she was about to go outside of the institute's borders. Maybe the Head Doctor was about to make an error and the shinigami, as well as everyone else, would no longer be limited and they could finish what they started several nights back.

That was probably too much to hope for. She was feeling better this morning, even with the blood moon, and was mildly looking forward to the bus ride. Captain Jack said he was going to be here this morning and even if it wasn't customary breakfast in the cafeteria, she's be satisfied with him sitting next to her on the bus.

The nurse handed her a muffin, some napkins, and a small box with a straw. She stared at this box for a moment before shaking it. From the sound it contained liquid. How odd... Momo wasn't sure why they would but liquid inside a small paper box - it didn't make any sense to her and she wasn't sure how one was supposed to get it out of the box.

Clambering onto an empty bus, Momo chose to sit in the very back near the emergency exit. Maybe she could force her way out of it as they were moving and escape the limiter enough to come back and level the institute, freeing everyone. Or maybe she just wanted to be able to see everyone that was on the same bus as her. Wishful thinking versus reality.

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"Wow!" Bridget beamed. "That sounds so neat. It's kind of like how on my world, the different countries are isolated not by water, but by vast streches of empty land air or even the places in outer space." He laughed slightly. "Every place is so different it's always amazing to travel."

He brightened at the mention of giants. "One of my best friends is a giant! His name is Potemkin and he's the biggest human that I've ever met!"

"Outer space?!" Usopp was awed again. "We do have sky islands back home! It's hard to get to them, though, so hard that a lot of people back on the ground don't believe they really exist. But how could you get to outer space? It was tough even breathing on Skypiea at first--wouldn't your lungs explode or something?"

Finishing off his muffin, then licking his lips to clean off any crumbs, Usopp added, "There's an island of giants in my world too, called Elbaf. On Elbaf, honor and a warrior's pride are the most important things of all, even more than life itself! What's Potemkin like, is he a warrior too?"

"Oh no," Bridget said with a smile. "You can't breathe in space, but they have fake air up there that you can breathe so it's okay. I've only been up there a few times myself," he added. "It's neat, but I think that seeing an ocean like yours would be even better."

He thought that the Elbaf place sounded like Zepp used to, but it didn't sound liek a place that Potemkin would like. "He's really nice and only fights if he really, really has to." He beamed. "He likes art and is really good too, even if he has to be really really careful."

If they could make fake air, why couldn't they make fake water? He didn't ask out loud, because he could imagine possible answers by himself and didn't want to make Bridget focus on depressing things.

Instead he smiled some more, and nodded. "I wish you could see it too! You know, if this place can bring people from one world to another world, maybe someday you could come and see the oceans back home. I bet the others wouldn't mind if you stayed on Merry with us a little while!"

He leaned back in his bus seat, contemplating. "Being a giant artist must be tough. But you could paint or sculpt such amazing, huge things, too..."

"Wow, that would be so neat!" Bridget sounded pleased by the idea of travelling with Usopp and his crew. "The Merry? That's your ship? It must be huge to fit all your crew aboard it."

He smiled at the thought of Potemkin. "Yes, his gentle grip has about four tons of pressure to it, so he's got to be very careful. I don't know if he likes to sculpt though."

Thinking about his friends led to thinking about his family and that made him feel a bit lonely. He tried to keep his bright smile.

"Oh, well, I left my loyal crew behind to guard the castle of a beautiful princess I had saved from a wicked adviser. Luffy helped me in that fight, so I agreed to join his crew. Going Merry is the name of the ship Luffy sails on--a few of the other crewmembers from Merry are here too, now." Usopp took out his notebook. "Going Merry is a really small ship, actually, she's only a caravel, and we only have seven crewmembers. Even with so few crewmembers, though, we're an unstoppably tough crew and we've already all got huge bounties! With our help, Luffy's going to become the next Pirate King!"

Explaining all of that, Usopp started to sketch as he talked, finally turning the notebook to show Bridget a drawing of the Going Merry, with its smiling sheep figurehead and the Strawhat Jolly Roger on the sails. He couldn't get all the details down exactly, but he thought it was a good representation. It was for the sake of speed that he left out the damages and repair marks, he told himself. "This is Merry."

"Oh, I see." Bridget nodded listening to the explaination. "That certainly sounds like something the kind and generous Captain Usopp would do." He beamed.

He looked at the ship. "Wow! You're really good at drawing! That looks like such a fun ship too." He knew nothing of sailing in the ocean, but he assumed that such a contraption worked.

"Of course, it might be kind of odd if I'm with you if you have such large bounties on you." He laughed lightly. "Back on my world I'm a bounty hunter after all."

Usopp laughed too. "Don't worry about it! Our swordsman was a bounty hunter too before he became a pirate. You wouldn't hunt down bounties who weren't bad guys, though, right?"

He closed his notebook again. "The government's just afraid of pirates right now. There's plenty of rotten pirate crews out there, but being a pirate is more about freedom than anything. We wind up in a lot of fights with other pirates, more than with the government really."

"Of course I wouldn't hunt down good guys," Bridget said, nodding. He chose not to mention the horrible mistakes he'd made the first time he'd tried his hand at hunting.

"That sounds like the Jellyfish to me," he said with a delighted smile. "They are good guys too, well, girls." He laughed softly. "With the exception of the captain, the whole crew is made up of girls." He blushed despite his smile. "It's why I'm just and 'honorary' member of the crew."

"An entire crew of just girls? That must make the bathrooms really hard to get into," was the first thing that came to Usopp's mind, because Nami and Robin used the toilet on the ship far longer than any of the boys ever did.

"I've met lots of female pirates, and I know some crews that are captained by women, but I can't think of any all-female pirate crews in my world." Usopp did have to give it some thought. Reading about pirates had been a life-long hobby, after all, and he knew about quite a few different famous crews. Surely a crew of all girls would be notable enough that he'd have heard of it somehow? "There's still a few crews that only have men because of superstition, but I think most modern crews are smarter than that."

Bridget pulled a face. "I don't like supersitions much and they are good enough without men on board." He smiled. "They're pretty good at what they do after all. They have almost total command of the skies. Or they did when I last saw them."

"Yeah, I don't know any reason why there shouldn't be an all-female pirate crew. Maybe there are some, and I just haven't heard of them." Usopp shrugged. "Two of our crewmembers are women, and we have... I guess kind of an 'honorary crewmember' too who's a woman. She wasn't able to come sail with us, but she's welcome as our crewmate any time."

He knew Sanji thought of women as delicate creatures to be protected, and Usopp did think, as a man, he had some responsibility to protect weaker women and definitely a responsibility not to hurt them. But he'd also had enough battles with women that he wasn't about to underestimate the 'fairer' sex. Besides, Bon-chan was male and female, and he/she said that made him/her stronger, right?

Just to change the subject, in case Bridget got the wrong idea about Usopp's gender views, Usopp asked, "So, if you're a bounty hunter, what kind of a fighter are you? Do you do martial arts or something?" And were stuffed animals involved?

Bridget brightened ~~could he get any more cheerful?~~ and his voice took on a proud tone. "I'm a distance fighter," he said. "I use my yo-yo's and Roger here," he gently jostled the bear in his lap, "to fight."

He frowned slightly. "Of course, most people don't take me very seriously becasue I don't like to right up close and personal..." He looked back at Usopp. "I can, I'm just not as good at it."

"Hey, me too!" Usopp perked up again himself, grinning wide. "I'm a sniper!" And he'd been right about the bear being a weapon. It sounded like Bridget's world wasn't very different from Usopp's in many ways, just instead of the ocean they had the sky and outer space to explore.

Crossing his arms, he nodded sagely. "There's nothing wrong with fighting from a distance if that's what you're good at! Some people are good at punching with fists, some people are good at slicing things up, and some people are meant to fight from far away!" In Usopp's case, ideally very far away. Perhaps from another island entirely. "How do you use the yo-yos, like bolas?"

Say, now there was a weapon he could design fairly easily...

Bridget nodded. "Kind of," he said. "My yo-yp's were given to me by my family before I left and they're both about this big," he placed his hands around six inches apart, "and are fitted with the latest weapons tech avaliable." He smiled.

"Flame throwers, explosives, blades, things like that." He hugged Roger once more. "And Roger is my partner, or ... well, he was. This place shut him down somehow."

"Flame throwers," Usopp sighed wistfully, his mind for a moment transported to another world, a world where he had all the tubing he needed and time to work on his favorite pet project... Even back home, he'd been thinking of how to incorporate some Dials into his weaponry for better flame throwing.

He did look sympathetic down at Roger. Was Roger maybe some kind of super robot bear or something? Anyhow, Usopp could understand feeling a strong, personal connection to an object. He wondered if Roger could talk.

"I use a slingshot, usually. I don't really like using pistols, you can't improvise with them and if you run out of bullets you're in trouble. But with a slingshot, as long as you have something around that's sort of aerodynamic, you're still armed!"

Bridget smiled and nodded. "I don't like pistols and guns either. Too limted." Those stupid robots used them and they were so annoying.

"I've never used a slingshot though." He put a finger to his lips and thought. "I think my brother had one when he was younger." He smiled again. "He was very good with it, but he doesn't use anything like that anymore."

"Oh, really? I don't have any brothers and sisters, I'm an only child." Usopp smiled back encouragingly. "What's your brother like?"

Even among the weird weapons used back home, a slingshot was a pretty childish weapon, but Usopp had always used it and didn't really like the idea of changing. The new weapon he'd been making plans for before coming here had also been a sort of super-slingshot. Then again, he did fire the cannons on the ship too sometimes, maybe that counted...

The bus gave a lurch and then they had finally begun to move. Bridget guessed it had been hard to get everyone on board. He smiled warmly at Usopp.

"We're twins," he said brightly. "Identical twins!" Bridget gave a light laugh. "Of course, he is a bit more manly than I am, but we're really close."

Moving. They were moving. Usopp's head jerked towards the window automatically, watching as they progressed past an opening barred doorway to... what? Doom? The urge to keep his eyes trained outside the window, just in case of cliffs, was very hard to overcome, but he managed for the sake of his seatmate. Turning back, he did his best to smile at Bridget, although the smile was forced.

"Twins... that must be a lot of fun. You must be able to pull some great pranks with an identical twin around."

"Oh, no. We didn't really pull any pranks, except we would sometimes run away and hide for hours or days."

It hadn't occured to Bridget to be frightened while on the bus. He'd reasoned that if they wanted to kill them, there had been plenty pf chances before now and dying on a silly bus ride just seemed, well, kind of stupid to him.

But, seeing Usopp look so nervous made him remember that not everyone thought like he did and he smiled warmly at the other boy. Reaching out, he lightly grasped Usopp's hand and gave it a friendly squeeze.

"It'll be okay."

There were cliffs. They were driving near cliffs. He could see cliffs. That there appeared to genuinely be a town at the bottom of the mountain path didn't reassure him much.

Struggling to keep his breathing under control as his eyes were now locked on the view outside, he added shakily, "H-hiding? For days? That's a long time."

His hands were clenched into little nervous fists, but he didn't pull away at Bridget's reassuring squeeze. Instead he glanced towards the other man out of the corner of his eyes, not wanting to look too far away from the window again in case of unexpected plummeting death. "... I really have a bad feeling about this trip," he added in a slightly squeaky voice.

Bridget's smile and voice were gentle and, after adjusting Roger so that he was safe in his lap, he reached out and took both of Usopp's hands in his.

"We're going to be fine," he said. "This trip? This isn't anything for the great Captain Usopp, right?" He gave another smile. "If anything happens, you have the bounty hunters Bridget and Roger at your side, okay?"

"I-I-I'm not scared! I'm just ... aware of all possibilities! The great Captain Usopp is legendary for his keen, alert mind!" Usopp denied, although it wasn't very convincing lying considering how he was shaking. "I... I mean, if something happens... h-how will the great Captain Usopp save the bus? If, say, we went off the cliff, or caught on fire, or gas came out of the ceiling, or explosive gas came out of the ceiling and caught on fire and then we went off the cliff--"

He stopped by biting on his tongue accidentally, wincing at the pain. Still, he managed a very weak smile once again after he'd paused, realizing himself how silly he must sound. "It will be easier to help save the bus with legendary bounty hunters around, at least."

"Exactly," Bridget chirped. "And I know that we're going to be fine. This bus? It's safe, and nothing will happen to it like that." Of course, he didn't know that for a fact... Tech like this was unheard of in his world. So.... old fashioned, but it looked new so... it had to be okay.

"Between the three of us, nothing can stop us." He put on his best confident smile and squeezed Usopp's hands again.

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usoppsenchou.livejournal.com - 2007-10-31 01:15 (UTC) - Expand

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