Games and Players (For snappleR)

Japan's a heck of a place. It seems to have cool people, a cool culture, cool fashion trends, and, as Blaise has just discovered, wicked arcades. It's like being an awesome gamer is a mark of pride here! In other words, Blaise has found his people.

"Gonna get you," warns the young American upstart. "Gonna... get... you..."

The buttons on Tekken Tag Tournament 2 have never before seen such consternation. Fingers flutter over buttons in what Blaise would insist are precise strokes. His opponent, a much shorter male wearing glasses, looks to be growing increasingly frustrated. But his button inputs are by far more exact.

"K.O."

Blaise's palms slap the counter, "Nailed it!"

The bespectacled Japanese boy - a lad of fourteen years - slings his backpack over his shoulder and leaves in a huff. "Aw, come on!," calls Blaise as he turns to lean back against the cabinet. "A guy can't win one outt'a five?" The boy gives no response as he moves on to the next game. Blaise's hands lift in a waist-high shrug. "A'ight, then. Who's next!?"

The teen's fashion of the day is modest, if downright uninteresting. Gray cago pants, black sneakers, a white t-shirt, and heavy navy-hued Winter jacket.

For such a small country, Japan had no shortage of interesting things to look at. Island to island, prefecture to prefecture, heck, even city to city, cultural differences both big and small made exploration extremely gratifying. Amy’s initial plan after signing with the AFW was to take extra long weekends whenever she could and go off to see the more exotic, lesser known parts of Japan. But scheduling, resting off fights- and the one hospitalization- had eaten away at her free time, and she hadn’t left the city in at least a month.

But there was plenty of things to be done within the city itself. Neighborhoods were stacked high with similar shops organized into districts. If she wanted, for example, a comic book, she could go to a specific street to pick up the latest issue from one of hundreds of stores. If she needed new clothes, then she just had to hop a bus to the fashion district, and anything she could imagine- and a great deal beyond that- hung on racks all over the street. If she happened to want electronics, well, there was that massive electronics market building, within which the metro train actually stopped.

And there was the arcade walk, full of flashing lights, too-loud music, and delinquent teens. There were the familiar games, like Street Fighter and Guitar Hero. Then there were the unfamiliar ones, like the one in which you had to tap, then flip a table. Amy was taking the day to walk through these alleys. She was dressed casually- a white tee, a light blue jacket, blue jeans, and her Dodgers baseball cap. She hadn’t actually been planning to stop into any of the arcades; there were just too many different games, and, if she’d entered, she didn’t know when she’d come back out.

As she passed one particular storefront, Amy stopped walking. She knew that hair.

She took three steps backwards and peered in. Sure enough, she had correctly identified the hair. And the man it was attached to, Blaise, seemed to be having a great time lording it over a kid after winning a game.

Amy and Blaise had fought not too long prior. Amy had knocked Blaise out, but not before she had broken down over nearly breaking his arm and gone off on Blaise for his recklessness. She had felt bad about that since, and was hoping to apologize. Here was her chance.

He was playing a game she was actually familiar with; well, not quite. She had played the first Tekken Tag Tourney on the Playstation 2, but had not bothered to keep up with the franchise after that. Whatever. As long as Hwoarang and Xiaoyu’s juggling hadn’t been nerfed, she wasn’t going to lose.

She walked up behind Blaise, and said softly into his ear, “I’ll have a turn.”

Then she went around to the front. She held up a fist, wielding coins between her clenched fingers and grinning wickedly.

A couple local kids start to approach, but halt when they find a girl leaning in behind Blaise's ear. The teen in question instantly bristles and gives a startled, "Ack!" The would-be challengers get a laugh out of it and move on to the next machine, roving together in search of easy competitive gaming prey. Like sharks, they are.

"Oh, go on, ya bunch'a hustlers," dismisses Blaise before turning to regard his intruder properly. And once those blue eyes take in the sight of his first opponent in Japan, he's taken aback. He instantly recognizes her, but he didn't expect to see her anywhere but in the ring for a rematch - especially not at an arcade amidst a sea of people. So now that he's face-to-face with the girl who ruined his debut, how shall he react to her? Will he snap? Will he try to throw down here and now to set the record straight?

Of course not.

"Well, stick it in there and let's do this!" Blink. His palm finds his face. "God, don't quote me on that."

The energetic grappler turns to the machine again. His character picks are already set, and the game is attempting to throw him back into story mode. As for those picks? Jaycee and Zafina. He doesn't even try to justify that.

"How've you been since the match?," he chirps. There's nary hint nor shadow of spite in his voice.

"Good..." Amy was busy picking her team. There were so many characters now! She looked up. "Huh? Oh, yeah, I've been good. Well, no, I've had a lot of things on my mind recently, and it may have come through in my attitude in the ring. So I wanted to apologize for that. But I want to do that properly, so I'll do that after." Her game was rusty, but the great thing about her team was that they relied almost entirely on one of two buttons. The round started, and her fingers started jamming on the kick button.

"How about you? I worked you over pretty good. How's your body feeling?"

Blaise watches with interest as she selects her team. He doesn't know a darn thing about them - what their pros or cons are. In his mind, they work mostly the same way as any other. Heck, the reason he picked the characters he did was because (1) one's a wrestler-girl, and (2) they're both hot. Not a lot of science and research went in there.

"Huh?," he asks, stealing a peek over to the blonde at his side. Asking for more detail is on the tip of his tongue, but the match has started!

Obviously these two are Tekken champions. They have to be. Look at how fast they're pushing buttons. It's so blindingly fast, it's impossible to discern any kind of pattern or sequence between them. And yet, it's impossible to mistake this as anything but mastery; the characters - at least on Blaise's side - periodically pull a fancy maneuver, tumble, or aerial attack. This battle is truly a contest for the ages; an absolute nail-biter.

"Nothin' a nice, long icewater bath couldn't fix," Blaise notes while focused on his totally legitimate gaming technique. "I was sore for... several days... but I'm good now. I bounce back quick. What about you?"

Not that he thinks he hurt her. It just felt like the right thing to follow up with. After all, she's the one who beat him.

"Yeah, fine... Uh huh..." She didn't mean to ignore Blaise, but something was wrong; she was losing. Amy frowned. To the untrained eye, theirs may have seemed a battle of the highest caliber, waged between two masters of the craft. But Amy recognized Blaise instantly for what he was- a lucky button masher. He was hitting buttons that didn't make sense next to each other, but he still managed to hit combos- not just the easy ones, but the powerful ones that ate away half of her HP, while also scoring blocks no one should have been able to score. Button mashers existed in every game in history, since before hapless gladiators in the Roman Colosseum closed their eyes and swung wildly with their gladiuses and hoped for the best, but lucky button mashers were few and far between, and impossible to beat except for with expert precision.

Amy suffered 2 KOs in a row- a crushing defeat. But there was a hard counter to lucky button mashers, and that was cheap tactics. Amy turned to face Blaise. "Okay, one more. For real this time. Loser pays for the next game."

"Ohoho, snap!," laughs Blaise, watching his womenfolk preen over their defeated foes. "You my giiirrls!"

Two wins in a row! And not just K.O.'s, but wins! How cool was that? And he was pretty sure Amy knew what she was doing there! Though the technical term for Blaise's Tekken-Fu is "High Roller," he didn't care how he won; just that scorecard. And when she challenges for pride's sake, she's met with the defiant raise of an eyebrow.

"Oh, what's this, you want a fresh serving?" He turns to face the cabinet again, but twerks his hips to the side to bump the girl challengingly. "Put'cher coins in there. Show me what Amy's 'for real' gameface is like."

Amy stumbled a step when Blaise's hip knocked her. It was easy to forget that Amy was a small, light girl when you considered her tenacity in the ring. But Amy laughed and bumped him right back. Blaise's enthusiasm and energy were infectious. "Alright Blaise, you asked for it. No backing out now." The coins were in. The character select was up. She picked Devil Jin and True Ogre. There was some irritated muttering from the peanut gallery behind them, and Amy knew why. Her selection consisted of the only characters with ranged attacks in the game, and therefore was the cheapest combination available. But Amy didn't care. Her yen and pride was on the line.

Amy smiled innocently at Blaise while the loading screen was up. "You should start thinking about which game you want to pay for us to play next."

Of course, Blaise doesn't know that offhand. The groans get a curious over-the-shoulder look, and it puts him a little on guard. Whatever tricks she has up her sleeve makes no difference. He'll meet her challenge, and with trash-talk to boot!

"Baby, I don't need to be thinking about it, because I know I'm gonna be playin' you all day!"

And then the match begins. And then the projectiles.

"What."

There goes half his luchadora's health. "I see what you did there." And suddenly, he starts to add some deliberation to his control: making the character hop.

"Bunny tactics!" It's exactly what it sounds like. He attempts to hop his lady across the arena to resume his spastic button-mashing assault.

Amy did her best, she really did. But, try as she might, she couldn't keep the grin off of her face as her characters destroyed Blaise's. The bunny hops weren't any problem- Devil Jin had wings, and he could shoot eye beams while flying to the other side of the screen. Online forums decried the programmer that put that feature in; Amy wanted to buy him or her a drink.

Amy took the first round. She turned to Blaise, her head cocked sweetly, and her tone only a touch mocking. "You know, nothing turns a girl off faster than a guy who's all talk." She winked and turned back to the console, ready to wreck again. "You know, If you need more coins, I think I saw bill change machines on the way in. Because you got one thing right; we're going to be doing this all day. And I'm going to bleed you dry."