Some Teacher: Second Semester!

(5.7) Endurance time!

Yatoni sighed heavily as he stared out across the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean, the crimson light of the setting sun bleeding into the sea. Red sky at night, sailor's delight, his father's voice said in his head, we're gonna have nice clear skies and lots of stars.

Fuck sailors and fuck stars and sunsets and the fucking Pacific Ocean too. They could all go fuck themselves as far as Yatoni cared. He took the rubber band from his wrist and twisted it around his fingers absently. This summer he was finally gonna travel, drive all the way across Japan and back again, and he was two days in, and his engine had broken down outside a middle-of-nowhere fishing town that he hadn't intended to stop in for anything more than maybe gas.

Yatoni sighed again and ran a hand through his dark hair. It was getting greasy. He'd have to find a place to bathe himself soon. He would have sighed a third time, but he stopped himself, deciding that he had already sighed as much as the situation warranted, and once one is done sighing, one looks for a solution.

He looked away from the sunset and back into the open hood of his car. It had the body of an old Nissan Skyline from decades before that he and his father had fished out of a junkyard, but he'd replaced pretty much the whole engine and a lot of the interior about six years before when his dad was teaching him how to work in the family's auto shop. He'd been really excited when his dad finally let him do something other than retrieving parts, since he'd always loved cars.

It honestly should have crapped out on him a long time ago, considering it was built by a twelve year old, but somehow it had managed to hold together pretty well so far, with only the occasional problem. Now it had stopped smoking, thankfully, but unfortunately, it didn't look like he'd be able to fix the damage with duct tape. It figured he'd have his worst car troubles at the most inconvenient time, in the most inconvenient place.

From what he could tell, he needed a new cylinder head to replace one that appeared to have about half of it broken off completely. It had probably been cracked already and shook loose when he hit a pothole or something. He should probably double-check the coolant system too if the sweet smell he'd caught on the smoke was anything to go by.

Evidently he had put a little too much trust in his car running the way he wanted it to without actually checking under the hood before he left because the broken cylinder head and the coolant leak couldn't both have happened just in the last two days, unless Yatoni's luck was exceptionally bad, which, well, it generally was.

In any case, he had practically built this car from the ground up, and he could always fix her. He just needed to find the right parts. The real problem was he didn't know if he'd have money for the parts, or where he could even find them in a middle-of-nowhere fishing town like this. It would seem he had one more sigh left in him after all as he grabbed the bag out of his passenger seat that had his most important stuff in it, locked his car, closed the hood, and hiked down the road into town.

Once there, he searched for a mechanic or scrapyard or something that might have what he was looking for, and was surprised when not only did he find one almost right away, but it actually appeared to be pretty busy. The little auto shop was called Chen's Garage, and it was indeed just one garage with a room attached to the side for transactions, but Chen's also had its own tow truck parked nearby with the name of the mechanic painted on the door, and there were six cars waiting to be worked on ranging from an old lemon to what looked to be a brand new Porsche.

A small, balding man in greasy coveralls was standing on a step-ladder, peering under the hood of a large pick-up truck parked in the lot. He was muttering to himself in Chinese as he tightened a bolt. Yatoni didn't really understand Chinese except for a few curse words he'd learned in middle school, but he didn't really need to know more than that because curse words made up most of what the man was saying.