fandomhighdorms | The Salle, Sunday Crack o'Dawn Until Well Into The Afternoon

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The Salle, Sunday Crack o'Dawn Until Well Into The Afternoon

You got used to certain things, in Jaeger Academy. Like getting up at five sharp and spending the next fourteen hours in the Kwoon, working your arse off. Chuck didn't have any instructors now, or any fellow students to practice against-- didn't matter. He'd been slacking for over a week now, waiting for this new school, and it was time to pick things back up again.

Even if he was nursing a minor hangover. In fact, the hangover helped pick up the right level of aggression - that level that he was unleashing on one of the poor practice dummies right now. Going through the forms, hitting at least half of the major ones. Keep going. Keep working at it.

When he got back to the Academy in summer, he had to be in the same shape as everyone else. It didn't matter he'd be forced to stick to a crazy island boarding school, or that his father seemed to have lost his goddamned mind-- he was gonna keep working for it.

Max sat in the corner of the room, his leash tied to one of the benches. Training or not, there was no way Chuck was letting the pup out of his sight.

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"I came here because my father thought socializing would be a worthwhile addition to my education."

You could tell by the italics how much Chuck agreed. Which was not very.

"I should be graduating in a month and a half. But no."

And then he said some unprintable things that were rather creative, all in all.

Alec scowled at that. Not the cursing (though he didn't love it) but the other part. "Ugh. Sorry," he sympathized.

What had socializing ever done for anybody anyway? "It's by and large a waste of time, being here."

He paused to thwack the dummy once or twice, though it was pretty much on its way to being a pile of stuffing at this point. "Sometimes there are threats that we get the chance to deal with, though," he added in the tone of someone conceding a pro among a lot of cons. "Did your assigned sibling talk about that?"

Chuck tossed his towel in the corner and went back to his dummy. "Her?" he said. "I don't need any advice from her."

He dropped back into a fighting stance. "Though she did mention something about invasions among all the other ren faire prattle."

Alec would ask who it was, but he doubted he'd know the person anyway. He didn't get out terribly often.

"Well, she's right about that," he said as matter-of-factly as he could. "There are invasions sometimes. Sort of... deranged corpses wearing car parts, I think were the last one."

Chuck squinted at him. To be fair, this was the first guy who didn't give him the impression of being some roleplaying club geek to give him this rap, and he was putting it in sensible enough terms.

"Is this some kind of training course?"

Alec shook his head. "If it was, it'd be misguided, to say the least," he said. "Most people here have never trained for that a day in their lives. Or for anything."

Sigh. Mundanes. "It's real."

Chuck's expression oscillated wildly between 'sort of believing it and being disturbed by it' and 'refusing to believe it' before settling on a nice, neutral, median expression.

"And here I thought the Kaiju were more than enough for the lot of us."

"Kaiju?"

Sorry, Chuck. Welcome to pandimensionalism.

"How the hell is everybody forgetting the giant bloody lizards?" This had not been Chuck's first time encountering this. "Big monsters? Came out of the Pacific? Wreck cities? Those Kaiju?"

It sounded familiar, but not in the way Chuck was hoping for. More like he'd had the same thing described to him secondhand by someone else.

Alec shook his head. "There's another local quirk," he said, in the kind of dry tone that implied that he didn't find the quirkiness cute at all, "where features of different people's homes don't always necessarily correspond." He looked apologetic at that. "I'm familiar with big monsters that cause destruction, but a different kind of them, I think."

Definitely a different kind. "There's someone who describes her hometown as being like something out of a comic book, too. Not that I read them, but -- anyway. It's like a hundred people from different, uh, universes were all funneled into this one town."

Chuck groaned. "Not this crap again," he said.

He was a little more inclined to listen after that... whatever it was... with the old man last night. But still. What.

Alec looked miffed at not being believed.

"Well, think about where the monsters are probably coming from," he pointed out. "Not from under the ocean, is my guess."

The demons in his world were from other dimensions. So the idea of multiple dimensions converging in Fandom wasn't much of a stretch.

"Now you're starting to sound like my father," said Chuck. Which wasn't entirely flattering. But also not entirely terrible. "Yeah, yeah, Kaiju are comin' into our universe via the Breach, this is the same principle. I've heard it all before. Give me a moment, yeah?"

"Yeah, 'course," Alec said agreeably enough, returning his attention to the dummy he'd decimated and giving it another few injuries. "Sorry. It's easy to get my head around because I grew up with this."

"I grew up with Kaiju."

There was a very exaggerated Australian twang on that last word. "And the Breach. But more than one bloody Earth? That's something else, isn't it?"

It still didn't make any sense.

"Yeah, it's... different." Alec wasn't going to dispute that. "I wouldn't have noticed right away if people hadn't told me. The large destructive monsters in my world aren't public knowledge, so I wasn't expecting anyone to have heard of them."

"It doesn't explain how careless some people are, though," he noted, "because there's not exactly a shortage of monsters here."

"How big?"

It was a relevant question.

"Humanoid zombies in the bar," Alec began listing. "Small creatures about yea high that make you hallucinate. A humanoid demon who used to run a clothing store..."

He ticked them off on his fingers. "Nothing massive, usually."

Chuck processed that. "Nothing I'll need a Jaeger for, then," he said, flippantly, because it was better than another round of what'd you just say?!

"A what?"

Yeah, like a Jaeger could even fit in this town.

Chuck let go of an irritated sigh. "Giant," he said, "Robot."

"Oh."

It was starting to sound like Kaiju were considerably bigger than most demons. Alec took a swipe at a second dummy before he noted, "Never fought anything big enough to need one of those yet."

He didn't expect that to be changing anytime soon.

"Two hundred, three hundred, four hundred feet high," Chuck said. He slid back into the right stance, now that the confusion had dissipated. "We adapted."

Okay, probably Shadowhunters alone couldn't take one of those down.

"Our adaptations were on a smaller scale," Alec volunteered. It was always weird to share this, so he wasn't going to go into all the details, but fair was fair, and it wasn't exactly a secret these days. "More like enhancement. Made some people strong enough to be trained warriors against the things attacking us."

Yeah, he was apparently omitting a lot of details. Chuck had a lot to wrap his head around already.

"That's not gonna work with the Kaiju, mate."

Not that Alec didn't know that, but.

"It's the Jaegers for us."

The Salle, Sunday Crack o'Dawn Until Well Into The Afternoon

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