first ofuda (action)

[pyreseer]

Outside Crookston academy

[A teenage Japanese girl sits on a bench, just outside the school gates. She's got a book in her hands--it looks like it's in English, in fact by the cover art it looks a lot like Lord of the Flies--and she's scowling at it. She'd quite obviously rather be anywhere than here.]

Little Tokyo

[As it turns out, there's a Books Kinokuniya in Little Tokyo, which is where our girl is just leaving from with the current issues of Ribon, Nakayoshi, Margaret and, oddly enough, Weekly Shonen Magazine now stashed away in her backpack. She'll linger a little on the streets, eying the plastic food in restaurant windows.

More than anything else, she looks homesick.]

Comments

[candothismuch]

[He halts in his tracks and then slowly turns his head.]

R-Rei?

[What was his little sister doing here?!]

since all the dialog will be in japanese is it okay if i don't italicize it?

[pyreseer]

[Part of her, the part of her that's still ten, wants to hug him. But the rest of her, which is a dignified fourteen-year-old and Not At All Happy with him, wins out and so she just crosses her hands in front of her and glares.]

It's been four years, Eiji. And nobody's heard anything from you. Not Papa, not my Grandpa, not our Grandfather, nobody. What have you been doing?

[Besides wandering around. But that went without saying.]

Sure.

[candothismuch]

[He flinches a little.]

Uh--well....

[Besides becoming a Kamen Rider, almost getting turned into a Greeed, and then setting back out to look for a way to bring back his friend? .... Wandering really is all he's been doing.]

Re: Sure.

[pyreseer]

You know the phone number for the shrine. You could have called. You could have wrote. I understand if you wouldn't have wanted to see Papa, but what did we ever do to you?

[candothismuch]

... Nothing. You didn't do anything.

[What happened back then wasn't her fault after all. She had been too young to probably even understand what had happened. And unlike their father, Rei was one of the few he had no bitterness towards.]

[pyreseer]

But you disappeared anyway.

... I'd hoped you'd come live with me.

[She doesn't say that her maternal grandfather was getting older, that he might want to start training a successor, that he'd always liked Eiji, even if Eiji was no blood relation of his. But she thinks it.]

[candothismuch]

I'm sorry.

[That's all he really can say since he won't talk about just how badly wounded he had been from what happened four years ago. Even if he had sorted his issues out there were some things he felt better off having buried.]

[pyreseer]

[She stares at him. He disappears for years and that's all he's willing to say to her? Sorry?]

It hurt, you know.