Ninjas of Love

Shady Business

"And you're honestly suggesting that Patchian is a useful subject?" Charlie continued throughout the team's fourteenth consecutive minute of wandering listlessly and aimlessly, all four of them having seemingly forgotten that Emily still needed to purchase a gift for Yang. "Bhuel... dheas. Is maith liom paichlá, ach is fearr sibh. Agus, ba mhaith liom a bheath múinteor me." Emily answered confidently, despite knowing that her Patchian skills were not quite perfect. After all, Charlie would never have out.

"Cool. Glad we're on the same page." Charlie responded to Emily's Goidelic diatribe, sarcasm dripping from his voice like fat dripping from a cheap burger. "Besides," he continued, as if the thought he was about to convey had been in his head all along and had not, in fact, just sprung back into his consciousness for unknown reasons, "shouldn't you be leading us to yet another of these strange stalls to buy something for your... workout partner?" The fatigue permeated throughout Charlie's voice, and Emily wasn't sure if he was even trying to concede it anymore. "Sure, yeah. Let's go find a shop to get Johnny Chest a gift." Emily responded, her natural Patchian accent seeming thicker than usual. "Who?" Charlie asked, confused. "Oh, you know! Johnny Chest. James Blonde." As Emily allowed more and more words to leave her mouth, the expression on her older brother's- admittedly, only by nine days- face grew blanker and blanker. "Yang." Emily enunciated her girlfriend's name slowly and carefully, so that she could be absolutely certainly that Charlie understood who she meant. "Oh! Johnny Chest! A pun!" Charlie seemed very excitable. "You've been spending too much time around Busty Rhodes." Or maybe not. Maybe he was just an irritable old fogey who wanted his own shot at a bad pun based around Yang's not insignificant... erm... assets.

"Fine, still." Emily replied, sounding downtrodden by a day of her teammates behaving like the annoying gits that they very much had the potential to be. "That one'll do." She unenthusiastically extended her non-dominant right hand toward a stall of larger than average size, with a notably large back- like the one Rosie's Inhumane Butchers had featured, just hopefully sporting less Haribo-fed dogs. "Then lead our way, Emily." Charlie said, stepping aside to let her take the front of the line. "I mean," the younger sister sounded apprehensive, "it's literally about thirty metres away. None of you are that dim. Well, three of you aren't that dim. Kerian, just follow us please. No getting distracted by shiny objects."

Emily was visibly shaking as she approached the undeniably scary-looking man in charge of the stall. He was probably about six feet and four inches tall, and very well-built. His short, ginger hair wrapped round into a even more ginger moustache and beard that encompassed his double lip piercings- snakebites if you want to be technical/edgy. His shirt was black and bore a simple motif- one of a pug dog sitting on its hind legs with one foreleg stretching straight outwards. Charlie looked over in concern, but ultimately chose to let Emily deal with it on her own. After all, he thought to himself, the real world doesn't have a safety net if you're just too scared to talk to someone.

"Hello there, wee lass." The shopkeeper's voice was gruff and had a Scottish accent thicker than Liam Munn. "My name is Dan Kula. Welcome to my stall for absolute mad lads. Oh come on, lass. There's no need to be so worried." Somehow his voice seemed almost soothing. "Don't let the anxiety take you over. You understand? Don't be a fucking pussy, you...." The shopkeeper paused to take a sharp intake of breath. "THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTT!" Emily was somewhat taken aback and surprised by the mating call-like scream of "thot" by Dan Kula, but felt almost at ease as a direct result of the sheer uncouthness and strangeness of the redhead proprietor.

"I'm not too sure what I want to buy, Mr. Kula. Can you help out with that at all?"
"Aye, we've got a storeroom through the back. Wanna go have a look? I promise I won't Purple Aki you."
"Purple Aki?" Emily was thrown by the obscure references that the ginger was making as he tried to conduct serious business. "Yeah, Purple Aki." Dan Kula explained dulcetly. "What I'm saying, lass, is that if you go and look in my storeroom, I promise wholeheartedly to not go in there and nonce you up."
"That's awfully noble of you." Emily remarked dryly. "Don't think it's because I'm a good person." Dan warned her. "You're just too ugly to rape. The girl from that Team ABRN, on the other hand? My dick does a Nazi salute for her."
"Ok, I'll add that to my list of newfound knowledge from today. Would you mind letting me through the gate to go look in the storeroom?" Dan Kula granted Emily's request, and even held open the tarpaulin curtain for her. Proof that chivalry isn't dead, from a man who claimed he'd rape Emily if she was less ugly.

A good ten minutes later, Emily emerged from the mysterious stockroom with a gift she had presumably deemed to be the perfect own for Miss Xiao Long, a pair of beautifully polished mirror shades with rims of polished steel. "Finally. Someone's buying those gay-ass sunglasses. You know what, I've had them so long I'll give you a discount on them. 69 Lien, please." Emily nodded her head as a thankful acknowledgement of the discount, and handed over the requisite amount of Lien in plastic cards, and coins- though they were mostly just to reduce the shrapnel in the front pocket of her bag. "Thank yous." Dan Kula said, quickly following up with another one of his incredibly wise statements. "You can fuck off now."

Quickly retreating, Emily simply remarked to her team, "It smelt of piss in there, and stale piss at that." That told BECK all they needed to know about the state of Kula's Store For Mad Lads. "Right then," Charlie said, slapping his hand on the nearest available flat surface, "we should get the ship back to Beacon, shouldn't we?"
"Charlie Gorm-Mhara Copson!" Emily exclaimed, shocked. "Please never use my middle name again. You know I hate it. Anyway, what do you want now?"
"We don't need to get a ship back to Beacon! It's a short walk."
"Well, Emily Marina Aoife Kostov, I'm not completely ignorant. It's just..."
"Just what, Charlie?"
"Forget it."