Go East, Young Ninjette

Kozue flashed a quick glance at the bartender over Jackie's shoulder, who looked like he heard the story and was trying way too hard to pretend he hadn't. He was wiping that single spot so much, she thought he might scrub the varnish clean off.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, get it out of your system. Bitch." She snickered and gave Jackie's shin a playful kick. "Just mad that my family history would make an awesome movie. Maybe a comedy, but still. Awesome."

Kozue finished off the mug and curled her finger at the bartender, getting him to come over and pour a refill. One more, then she'd try something else. Maybe something a little bitter to share with her new playmate. "Anyway, seemed like a natural fit. Used to run with that nickname when I was growing up, sneaking around a lot. Plus, it had the whole bonus of pissing off my Dad, sort of throwing the whole family history back in his face and making it a joke. Moreso than it is, anyway."

Jackie had to fight down to urge to lunge as Kozue kicked her in the shin, managing to disguise the tension as she turned towards the barman and made a similar gesture for another pint. While the details surrounding Kozue's story seemed like something out of an anime, the sentiment behind her actions was something she at least understood.

"Well, looks like we've found another thing to toast to," she said with a grin as the empty glasses were replaced with fresh ones, "To daddy issues. Well, OK, not so much an issue in my case, the old man croaked it years back, but we never really saw eye-to-eye. He shipped me off to a Catholic boarding school first chance he got and we never crossed ways again until his funeral, and even then I only turned up to make sure the buried him nice and deep."

Jackie paused, glass still held out. It didn't hurt her to think back on her father at all, and it was one of the few completely honest things that had came out of her mouth. It just surprised her how easily she'd been able to talk about it. She shook it off - it was just the alcohol loosening her up a little.

Kozue's first instinct was to tell Jackie how lucky she was.

She bit that comment way the fuck back. Just because Jackie and her father hadn't been that close didn't mean she was happy he was dead, no way she'd touch that subject. Yeah, there didn't seem to be any love lost, there, but it was just better to take the high road. She couldn't help thinking how she'd feel if her Dad died, though. It would certainly make her life a lot easier. She could probably even go back to Jersey, not that she would have much reason to stay there. Would be nice to see how her old buddies were hanging, though...

Still. The thought 'I want my Dad to die' just felt wrong in her head. Couldn't even explain why, but it did.

"My condolences. On missing high school." She shook her head and dipped her finger into the foam, swirling it up. "You got denied a real experience. Shitty cafeteria food, barely functional water fountains, bathrooms with all sorts of colorful art on them, getting dragged out to pep rallies. You look like you turned out all right, though."

Jackie snorted out a laugh at Kozue's last words. "Sure, I'm a perfectly well-adjusted woman who has no issues whatsoever," she said sarcastically, rolling her eyes, "Lets face it, the well-adjusted tend not to be drawn to this line of work often. We're all damaged in our own way, just some handle their shit better than others."

Again, the Irish woman was drawing uncomfortably closer to the truth of her own situation, but the words came out of her before she could even consider that fact. She scowled, hoping it would be passed off as irritation on the subject matter, and gave a shrug, "But as for the boarding school, that place was hell on Earth. Entirely Church-funded, far out of the way of anywhere important, no oversight from any outside authority worth a damn, and seriously Catholic. Like hardcore Catholic. The place was a museum to the kind of shit you'd have seen in classrooms back in the days when beating kids was considered good discipline, and the priests didn't spare the rod none."

Jackie paused long enough to take a deep gulp from the Guiness beside her, wiping her mouth with the back of one arm. "So, naturally, there was a hierarchy in a place like that - the kids weren't allowed to leave, and were constantly struck, yelled at, made to feel like rotten little sinners day in and day out. They couldn't take it out on the priests, so they turned all that anger and frustration on each other. You throw a girl who was tiny and frail into an environment like that, what do you reckon happens?"

"You get a tough, crazy, hardcore, badass bitch." Kozue shrugged. "Or a total emotional wreck. Guessing you're the latter."

Yeah, that did sound like it sucked. Sometimes Kozue forgot how lucky she'd been to grow up in a house where the only time she really got exposed to Western religion was when the Jehovah's Witnesses came knocking. "I got lucky, there." She sighed as she leaned back, finally starting on her pint. Just as good as the last one. "Grew up with Shintoism. It's all bullshit, but at least it's not as fire and brimstone as all the gaijin shit."

Kozue took a look at the nearest TV, running some football. American football. Not a sport she cared for all that much outside of the Super Bowl, but it gave the place a homey touch.

"So you wrestle, you drink." She looked back down. "What other kicks do you get into in a town like this?"

"Beats me," was Jackie's simple answer, "Everything about this city is just weird to me. Frankly when I'm not in the ring or a bar, I'm at the gym going through my routine. A body like this doesn't happen by itself after all," she added, giving one of her muscular thighs a quick slap for emphasis. There was not dimpling of softness to it, all lean hard muscle behind the skin.

"I'm sure there's some stuff worth doing, it's just a case of finding where to do it," Jackie continued, "Chances are though that I'll just keep up with the training schedule - can't afford to slack off on it now that I'm in the AFW. Besides, I've got to work off the alcohol calories."

"Wow, that's some bulletproof shit." Kozue leaned over to give Jackie's thighs a look, comparing them to her own. She wasn't bad down there herself, she could put on a good scissorhold when she wanted to and she was a natural runner, but those legs looked Olympics worthy. Small, short, but packed. Jackie was a tiny brickhouse, but still a brickhouse.

"Well, you ever want to come up for air, give me a call. Maybe go to a brewery some time, try out the fresh stuff. Japan can give you some real fun if you look hard enough. Case in point."

She spun her finger around, indicating this lovely little slice of Irish in the middle of Tokyo, then finished off her beer. "Okay, so, haven't seen your match yet. Will, but I'm curious. How do you fight? Like, say I'm a big fucker coming at you. King or some jackass. How do you take me down?"

Taking another drink as she pondered the question, Jackie set the glass back down. "Well if I had to sum it up, it comes down to three things - speed, endurance and psychology. The speed thing is obvious, if you're faster than the person you're fighting then you get to dictate the pacing of the fight, and big fuckers like King are all about power and taking shots, not keeping up with someone like you or me. Having a speed advantage means you can keep ahead of them and dodge their shots, but it's also an offensive tool - when you get enough momentum behind you, it doesn't matter that they're bigger than me, physics still plays out the same."

She extended a pair of fingers, listing off each point as she discussed them. "Then there's endurance. You can't expect to keep up a pace like I do in the ring without pushing your body hard, so a lot of the stuff I train in is to build up and maintain my endurance levels. That way I can go faster for longer, keep up a pace that my opponent will struggle to match, and by the time I need to pause to catch my breath they're typically already in a bad way."

Now psychology is the tricky one to explain, since it covers a lot of ground. There's the stuff you'd probably expect, like baiting an opponent, getting them mad so they don't think straight and exploiting the openings they leave. I play off my size a lot, nothing hurts some big meathead's pride like getting shown up by a woman like me," Jackie grinned as she continued to explain, "But it's more than that, it's about being able to go further than they do. I'll be the first to admit, I can be a ruthless bitch in the ring, but where some people might think that's a bad thing, I see it as an asset. No one really expects someone like me to try and drive their head into a steel chair with a DDT, so when it happens that shakes them up, puts them off their game. Works a charm on the bigger types."

Jackie needed another deep drink after the lengthy explanation before she was willing to continue. "So say you're King, seven feet and three hundred something of muscle? I focus of defence until I get a good read on you, making you nice and mad at me all the while - he doesn't strike me as the type with great self-control. Then I leave an intentional opening and wait for you to throw yourself at me, put all that mass into a lunge, and I meet it head-on with something of my own. A flying bulldog from off the ropes say, something that drags you down hard. Doesn't even matter if it hurts you all that much, the point is to bring that momentum you were building to a screeching halt and replace it with my pacing, so now you're not just going as fast as you can to catch me, you're trying to push yourself even harder to even try and even match me. I keep the offensive up as long as I need to, back off right after, and between you going hell-for-leather and me pounding you with shot after shot, you're burning up gas way faster than you normally would. At that point, I just need to outlast you," she finished her hypothesis with a grin.

When Kozue asked her question, she'd been expecting, maybe, a three sentence answer. Tops. Instead, she got a thesis paper on the fine art of beating men shitless. She wasn't sure whether to be impressed or scared. Both, most likely. Freaky, yet functional .

It was all sound advice, though, and Kozue leaned forward to give it her full attention. A lot of it was stuff that Kozue knew, she'd just never put it into words. She could tell her new drinking buddy had this perfected down to a science, and she would definitely keeper finer points in mind. She almost seemed too into it. Maybe obsessed. That could have been the Guinness talking, though.

"Jesus Christ, you could give a symposium.” She split some focus between Jackie and the menu, hoping she could knock out one more drink before the night was out. ”But all right, that’s good. But not every guy’s big in Tension, and everyone in a while we do the same-sex thing. What about me?” She shot Jackie a wry smirk from the corner of her face. ”Say we have to fight sometime. How do you come at me?”

As the Irish woman wrapped up her lengthy explanation, she wondered what had led her to go into such detail. She wanted to hook Kozue's attention, certainly - her experience with King (and the fact she used him as the example) had affected her, whether she wanted to admit that or not, and it was an easy way into her confidence to give her a step-by-step guide to demolishing his type, even if she would probably need to train like a crazy bitch to build up the necessary condition to use some of it. It was starting to get under Jackie's skin just how much of herself she was giving away, and she couldn't figure out...

It came to her suddenly, a thought out of the blue. Jackie had always had her guard up when talking with others, because for much of her life the only people she talked to for any length were people associated with wrestling, whether fellow wrestlers or officials. She lied and bluffed her way around them, never revealed anything, and that had worked out fine...but here, she was trying to get on someone's good side for once. The gear-shift was messing with her a little, her guard lowered too far as she struggled to adjust. She noted it in the back of her head as Kozue continued with her questions.

"You and me? Well you look like the type that goes for speed over brawn, so I guess the first job would be to shut you down. Catch you early, keep you static - no offense meant here, but I'm pretty sure toe-to-toe I'd hold the advantage. Probably look to lock in a submission hold that goes for the leg or ankle, pick a leg and weaken it to damage that speed some, then blitz you once I'm certain the speed advantage is mine. That'd be the broad-strokes of it anyway."