capeandcowllogs | /slowly schedules dentist appointments...

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/slowly schedules dentist appointments...

WHO: Bruce Banner (

gallitrap) ((post order))
WHERE: Moonybase → Cold Stone
WHEN: Monday the 8th of March
WARNINGS: Look at the characters. Now look at the location. Now look at the characters.
SUMMARY: Ice cream and monsters.
FORMAT: Words.

It took some convincing to get her brother (only not really her brother; she still didn't quite understand it) to agree to let one of her new/old friends visit and subsequently take her out into the world for ice cream, and even then it was with a condition: he was going to go with them to make sure nothing bad happened to her again! So she agreed, a little surprised, and the two of them waited for the mysterious Doctor Banner to arrive.

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Bruce was a nervous wreck. He was neither good with children nor good with people; it took great lengths to get him to leave his lab hideyhole, and when he did emerge blinking into the outside world he was always briefly dazzled. He tried to remind himself why he had decided to leave home and chaperon a little girl for the afternoon, but all that came up was a litany of stupid Banners.

Then again, Ruka had proven herself not to be just a little girl through their conversations. She was bright and opinionated, her view on life skewed enough that she was cagey with most but trusting of him. Bruce was so rarely trusted by anyone, it was...refreshing. Her trust superseded innocence and age---he wondered, and not idly, where she would place in standardized testing.

Chasing those thoughts around kept him from worrying overmuch. He waited outside of the door, head bowed, and took a couple of deep breaths before knocking.

To say Rua was being protective of his sister in her current state would've been a massive understatement. In all honesty, his gut had told him not to let Ruka leave the house while she was still the way she was, but...the idea of ordering Ruka around was just too surreal for him to take seriously; so, after helping Ruka get suited up for the approrpriate weather, he did the same himself. If he came with her anyway, it'd be safe, right? Of course!

At the knocking, he called to the house (perhaps a little overzealously), "I'LL GET IT!" Then, quick as a bolt, he was at the door, opening it just enough to peek outside.

For a moment, he just stared, then he asked, "You're the doctor guy, right?"

Ruka would admit to being surprised by just how much effort this Rua was going through on her behalf, as well as how many people had responded in the first place. She honestly didn't expect that any of those offers would actually be fulfilled, so when she heard the knock at the door, and Rua's loud rushing around and louder voice, she hurried that way as well.

Of course, older-Rua was blocking most of the doorway, so she couldn't rightly get a look at whoever was on the other side. "Let me see! Is it him?"

"Ah." Bruce drew up short, biting his lower lip. For being two very small people with green hair, he found himself instantly intimidated. Children always made him nervous, no matter how fond of them he was. He'd blame his own childhood, but that---that was vague now, only snippets and half-formed memories since he had died. He waved. It was a trite gesture, but one that he felt compelled by nerves to make anyhow. "Yes. I'm Dr. Banner. You could call me Bruce, I suppose."

He didn't know the other girl, but Ruka's beatific baby face peering from behind her was instantly recognizable. He hadn't known that Ruka had a sister and kicked himself for it. It was something that he should have asked.

"Will you be coming with Ruka and I?"

Edited 2010-03-09 21:56 (UTC)

"Ah - just a sec!" Rua shouted back to his younger sister, before moving back slightly and opening the door a bit more widely. He then looked back at the doctor guy - Bruce, he said to call him.

At the question of whether or not he was coming, he first said, "Ah, yeah if that's ok-" but immediately stopped himself, and said in a far more assertive voice, "Uh - yeah! Yeah, I'm coming! To keep an eye on Ruka, and stuff."

With the door more fully open, Ruka was able to come forward some to look up at the man. Like all adults, he was really tall, but beyond that he seemed nice enough. If he was a friend of the older-her that people talked about then it wasn't like he could be a bad person.

Smiling, she cupped her hands together. "Hello! It's very nice to meet you."

"Oh, yes, of course," he said to the sister, nodding.

He'd realized that she was younger, yes, but he hadn't anticipated her being quite that young. She couldn't have been older than five, mostly comprised of big brown eyes and tiny hands. Bruce knelt to get on her eye level, extending his hand to be shaken.

"It's very nice to meet you," Bruce said, in Japanese. His written was better than his spoken, but he figured that she would understand. "In person, at least."

"Gah! You speak-" Rua started to say in English, but coughed and cleared his throat, before concentrating for a moment. He then spoke again, in Japanese as well, "You speak Japanese?"

He looked just a touch shocked. After being in the city for so long, it was surprising to see someone that looked like Bruce being able to speak that way.

While Rua was getting over his language shock, Ruka was busy being not entirely sure what she was supposed to be doing with the hand offered her way. After a few moments of hesitation and curious staring, she remembered that duelists usually shook hands before a game, so maybe that was what he was doing?

Her hand was nowhere near large enough to shake Bruce's own, but Ruka returned the gesture as well as she could. "Right."

"I do," Bruce said with a nod, "But if I misspeak, forgive me. I don't have many opportunities to practice my spoken Japanese. Shall we go?"

The kids gathered up their coats and such and followed him in duckling-like procession, Ruka eventually tugging on his sleeve until he understood that she needed to be carried. She was a small but solid weight in his arms, making herself comfortable against his shoulder even though he had no idea how to hold her. The day was brisk and clear, some trees beginning to flower in that way that made his allergies tingle. All in all, it was nice.

For anyone with an ordinary sense of time, the walk was not altogether very long, but everything about the world seemed so much larger and longer and overwhelming to Ruka. She'd tried walking on her own for as long as the others, but her small and weak legs were not meant for long journeys.

Eventually, however, they emerged from residential areas and into a more urban sprawl, and not very long after that did they enter a small brightly-lit store. People scattered around the room chattered loudly, as comprehensible to Ruka as a cage of crows; she couldn't read any of the signs, as largely-printed as they were, but the enormous photographs were easy enough to identify.

Ice Cream!!

She made a small noise of awe as she looked around curiously; she'd never been to a place like this before, that she could remember.

For as long as he'd been in the city and as much as he loved ice cream, the journey to the store was quite routine for him - but even as he walked the familiar streets, he couldn't help but repeatedly glance back at his sister and note how awestruck she seemed. It kind of made sense, when he thought about it - they had never gone out that much when they were that little. The first time he'd been here too, it'd kind of given him the same feeling.

"Hey, Ruka!" He said, smiling and putting one of his hands over hers. "D'you know which flavor you want?"

The door chimed when he pushed it open, ushering the kids in.

For obvious reasons---the first of which being that he was not a Spider---Bruce did not have a Spidey-Sense. His instincts had been rewritten and perverted along the way, twisted with the beast the was Hulk. He could not anticipate things in the same preternatural way as Spider-Man, but he could smell a fight coming. The ringing of the alarm was high and thin, too faint for the children to hear, nothing but a dull whine to his sensitive ears, but it was an explanation when the three men in black ski masks yelled "Freeze!" and one of them drew a gun.

"Hands up! Toss your wallet!" one of the men barked, gesturing with the gun. Bruce's nostrils flared hard. He sized up the situation with luminous green eyes, setting Ruka down. He gave her sister a purposeful look, a watch her.

It would figure, really. It would figure that he would try to take the children out to ice cream and manage to choose the one ice cream parlor that was being robbed. He was hyper-aware of the distance between the men and the children, the direction of the gun he was waving. Some rapidly-boiling corner of his mind labeled Hulk dragged its head up and took attention: there was danger, and there were children. The two could not be reconciled by puny Bruce Banner.

"An ice cream parlor?" Bruce asked the assailants, upper lip curling. "You'd threaten kids for whatever paltry amount is in the cash register?"

"Shut the fuck up, man!" one of the lackies quipped with appropriate crassness and timing. "We don't want trouble!"

Being very young, and incredibly sheltered, Ruka hadn't the slightest idea what was going on. Even had she not kept mostly to home in Neo Domino, crime was incredibly rare, and guns even more so. Had she not been prematurely woken from her coma, or indeed had never been brought to this strange city to begin with, Ruka would not have met a single criminal face to face until eight years hence, the first of several who would have soon become dear friends to her.

That would not be the case here.

Not sure what was going on, with the adults all speaking a language she didn't understand and in angry tones (did they know each other? Were they friends? Was someone in trouble?), she looked up to her brother-but-not with mild befuddlement. "Rua, who are they? Why are they yelling?"

A bit of a cliché though it was, while Rua had never seen a robbery like this up close, he had seen enough TV to know what was going on. His eyes locked on to the gun as it came out; again, had never seen one, but he knew what it was. He barely understood what they were saying or even what Dr. Banner was saying. When Ruka spoke, he spun his head back around to her.

"Th-" He gulped, and tried again, making sure to keep his voice low. "I think those're bad men, Ruka." He said. "Just...stay close to me okay?" He said, and wrapped his arm tightly around her for emphasis. He then slowly looked back up at Bruce.

"Dr. Banner..." He mumbled in Japanese, either having slipped into it without realizing or trying not to be understood by any others. "What should we do?"

"Stay behind me," Bruce said in Japanese, struggling to keep his tone even. He was afraid for them, angry at this situation, and neither did well with his notoriously weak self-control.

He weighed the pros and cons very carefully. If the men got agitated, their actions would be unpredictable. If he got agitated, he'd lapse into a state that could end terribly. When he was too angry, too upset, casualties didn't bother him. Meat was meat and humans were just that; there could be fallout from a Hulk episode that he'd regret.

There were three guns to consider. Frightened children. Too many---too much that could go wrong.

Bruce wiped his sweaty palms on the thighs of his slacks, taking off his glasses and folding them neatly. He held them out to Ruka with a thin smile.

"Would you hold these for me, please?"

The bent old frames were big in her hands, but she took the glasses obediently. Turning to the men again, he let himself relax, ripple, and contort. Bruce's shirt and pants shredded, shucking off clothes like old snakeskin, but at least he'd had the forethought to start wearing the unstable molecule shorts underneath. Big, green, and dignity intact, he presented a massive obstacle between the men and the patrons.

Hulk's nostrils flared. Hulk rumbled, baring his teeth.

Not-her-Rua's arm was tight around her, stronger and more protective than she would have anticipated, and at his answer—bad men, bad people with evil intentions—she felt a sparking of fear in her chest, even without knowing how bad, or what they were capable of.

When Bruce handed her his glasses, she held them very carefully, but quite nearly dropped them when she saw what happened next. While seeing one monster released and exchanged for another, stronger one wasn't uncommon in Duel Monsters, she had never seen anything like that happen to people.

For that matter, the person Bruce had been replaced with did look like he'd walked straight out of someone's deck, so where most children would be terrified by something as large and green and threatening as even the back of the Hulk, Ruka felt oddly comforted.

Rua wasn't sure what was about to happen when he saw the doctor give Ruka his glasses. But he had a gut feeling that something was about to happen. If you had asked him what he would've guessed it was, he probably would've made the logical conclusion that the doctor would use his power to somehow deal with the bad guys. If pressed, he would've guess that, obviously, the doctor's power was to shoot beams of some kind from his eyes (cause, c'mon, why elese would he remove his glasses).

One thing was for sure, never in a hundred years would he have guessed the preceding transformation. Even as Doctor Banner's words to stay behind him hung in his ears, he was backing away, holding Ruka's arm tighter than ever. Maybe it was the fact that he had remembered them at all that stopped him from just bolting, or maybe he was too scared to move his legs that fast.

It didn't seem he was the only one that was shocked - one of the muggers turned to the apparent leader of the three.

"Hey, man, you didn't say anything about this, this guy's built like a fuckin' tank!" The way they were shifting, it looked as though all three were considering running right then. Then, something caught the eyes of the one who had spoken up. The two little kids that had come with the freak-transforming guy had moved out from behind him. He acted before he thought on it, practically jumping across the room and reaching out, grabbing the boy's arm. He yelled out, both in surprise and protest, pulling away as he was dragged closer.

"Don't try anything or the kids get it!" He roared at the Hulk, trying to swing Rua around and put him in a headlock while he pointed the gun at him and his sister.

Rua's arm shot out, his hand brushing against the gun. Now both enraged in addition to panicking, he screamed "GET AWAY!" as blue sparks flew from his hand. The man backed away instinctively, but the sparks that hit him didn't do anything. The effect on his gun however, was almost instantaneous. It went off, exploding in his hand and sending a deafening BANG throughout the store. The bang muffled the mugger's scream as he was thrown to the ground by his own weapon.

Rua spun his head. He saw the other two still had guns. Were they gonna try and shoot him now? He flung both his arms out, throwing more of the sparks at both of them. One, at least, was smart enough to throw his gun away before the same thing happened to it. The other suffered the same fate as the first.

Nothing left that he could do, Rua went back to holding on tightly to his sister and...gradually tried to make his way back behind the doctor.

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/slowly schedules dentist appointments...

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reversing twin tagging order!

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WOW I'M LATE

I'M BLAIMING NOTIFS.

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