Outline · Standard · [ Linear+ ] Kari Goes to the Dark Tournament, another badifc with mocks up for auction

[Kuramastrassx3]

There are two full chapters to this and a third unfinished chapter, but since chapter one is pretty long… I mean, think about it. TL;DR girl can’t write all short chapters all the time. (Seriously, my fuckin’ oneshots usually run about 9 – 11 pages when in Word. WITHOUT the accompanying TL;DR author’s note. )

Anyway, I’ll only be doing the intro to this one. Like my other mocks of my own shit, the rest of it is up for auction.

And now I present the beginning of another one of my roughly-four-years-old crapfics.

Kari Goes to the Dark Tournament

Such a creative title thar…

Chapter One

In which I start trying to force the canon to remain the same while inserting a Sue.

“Kari-chan.”

Here we go! Strike one, honorifics. For some reason, even in the fics where I don’t have any Japanese words at all – even using Spirit World, etc. instead of Reikai – if Kari’s in it, and Kurama’s speaking, ‘-chan’ gets attached to her name, even if no one else is using honorifics. No exceptions.

She looked up at him. She was seated on the loveseat, but he was taller than she anyway, which was the reason she had to look up. She always had to look up at him, unless she was standing and he was seated. And that wasn’t very often. “Yes?”

I do not have a captain obvious picture handy, so just pretend I put one here. Did I really need to say the same thing like four different times in four different ways?

“I have somewhere I need to go for about a month.” He was reluctant to say this, she could tell, because it had something to do with his man-period. He hadn’t told her yet. He was holding something back from her, but she didn’t press him. Perhaps he wasn’t telling her because she didn’t want to know. “There’s something I have to do.”

She nodded. “Okay.” True, she was curious, but if he didn’t want her to know there would be a good reason for it. She trusted him. Completely.

And despite that, I’m pretty sure that normally she’d go all emo and beg him not to go. Also, she wouldn’t normally just let him leave. He can’t even get up to go to the bathroom without her asking like six questions.

“I’ve already told Mother that I am taking part in a school trip that you are too young for,” he explained to her, as to not blow his cover.

Did I mention I had her skip a grade at one point? So although she is 14 and he’s 16 (at least in all of my warped versions of the canon) they’re in the same grade. Oh, and have all the same classes.

…do they even do the whole skip-a-grade thing in Japan?

She nodded again, a soft “Mmm” escaping her lips. That was so like him.

“It doesn’t matter to me whether or not you attend school while I am gone,” he continued. “Just stay out of trouble, Kari-chan.”

Good luck trying to skip school in JAPAN. I’m not even sure how he’s able to get away with it. And for that matter, how the hell Yusuke’s able to do it like every fucking day.

She stood, slowly, and stretching while doing so. “When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow” was his answer.

“All right,” she sighed. She didn’t want him to go.

He pulled her close to him, kissing her gently on the forehead. “I love you, Kari-chan.

-gags and dies-

This is the first time my own writing’s done that to me. I’m actually starting to feel somewhat ill…

Please, stay out of trouble,” he begged her again.

“I will. I promise.”

Yeah, right. Like she’ll be able to do that.

This is technically the end of the intro, but I’ll do a little bit more because this wasn’t as long as I thought it was.

- -

It was the next morning. Kari made her mother breakfast, not that her heart was in it. She had been awake for not even an hour yet and she missed him terribly. She couldn’t imagine how she’d deal with being separated from him for an entire month.

Hopefully with cutting and then suicide.

After making sure Shiori had been fed (that makes it sound like she’s a dog), she left the house, though instead of going to school she snuck into the backyard. And when her mother left for work, Kari let herself back into the house.

Most likely by breaking in.

It was about ten o’clock when the small redheaded girl took an orange soda out of the fridge and sat on the couch in the living room with it. With a single fluid motion she used one finger to pop it open, then beginning to drum on the side of the can several times, which are all mannerisms of myself. Sigh. With her left hand she reached across the couch for the remote control and she turned the television on.

She instantly punched the numbers for TV Land. And she was in luck: I Love Lucy was on. Or so she thought. She’d seen this episode too many times for her to know exactly how many. So she began channel-surfing.

Before anyone complains about how I Love Lucy got in here, I know that it’s probably the most non-Japanese show I could have picked. But just a few weeks or so earlier (I think, may have been longer or shorter than that), I was half-watching TV Land with my grandmother and home and it was on. We were the only ones home.

My aunt who lives in Iowa was coming into town and I stayed home from school that day to watch her while my parents went to the airport to pick up my aunt. My grandma was surprisingly with it that day, even though she had Alzheimer’s, though I was only kinda paying attention to anything because I was pacing around the first floor. I felt like I was trapped in a box. I’m claustrophobic and rarely alone in the house, and I hate it when I am.

I never really paid her any attention when I was supposed to watch her and just listened for her to fall. I know it sounds terrible, but I guess I felt that the Alzheimer’s had stolen from me the wonderful and awesome person I was lucky enough to call grandmother. By this point, she wasn’t human to me; she was another piece of furniture. Also, part of it was the fact that as happy and with it as she was that day, even though she was acting like the grandmother I loved and remembered, I couldn’t stand to see the sight of the oxygen tank attached to her now. But that was okay, because it was only temporary. In about a week they’d take it away and she’d be fine.

…she died the next week. It wasn’t a temporary thing; it was to try to give her any time they could as her cancer slowly came back to kill her. My parents lied to me; they led me to believe that she’d be okay, when they knew she wouldn’t be. She was relatively fine one minute, and the next thing I knew, she was dying, and they’d given her some pills to put her to sleep. The only thing they could do was make her comfortable, and she probably wouldn’t wake up again before she passed.

I never got to tell her I was sorry. I never got to tell her I loved her. I never got to say goodbye. I was cheated out of that, and even though it’s coming up on four years, I still haven’t forgiven them for that. I probably would’ve freaked out if I had known earlier, sure. I’m an incredibly emotional creature. But at least I wouldn’t have wasted that last week I had with her. It seems to me now almost as though he Alzheimer’s knew she was nearing the end, and it let me have her back for a week before it happened. And I wasted that, all because they lead me on to believe she’d be fine.

I’m sorry. That was an incredibly inappropriate place to go on about that (and I’m crying pretty badly as I try to type this). But this is seriously like my darkest secret. It makes me ashamed like nothing else that even though I loved her I more or less ignored her ever since she moved in with us because of her Alzheimer’s. It upsets me to no end that I didn’t get to assure her that I did love her before she left me forever. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive them or myself.

It’s a really sore subject with my whole family. It’s almost like I have to pretend she never existed in the first place. I can like never talk about her. This follows me everywhere I go. I’ve carried this with me for almost four years and I was sort of at peace with it – I finally stopped bursting into tears with every thought or mention of her, anyway – but lately it’s been worse because I realized I’m starting to forget what she looked like.

And there’s almost nothing I can do! I asked my mom for a picture and it’s been about a week now, but nothing. That was her mom so I’m afraid to push it. She might go off on me. I hate bringing it up, too, because I can still remember the very first words I said to my mother, silent tears running down my face, after she died: “See what smoking does to you?” In response, my mom looked at me steadily. She looked like she might cry soon, but wasn’t quite there yet; she also seemed as though she’d cried herself out of tears. And she said to me, “Eleven more years.” Then she walked away, leaving me alone in the kitchen.

She’d been an 11-year-survivor of lung cancer. And then it came back and finished her off.

…I miss my grandma, guys.

Up in the high numbers somewhere, she came across the Dark Tournament Channel. Kari knew that the Dark Tournament was televised, but she didn’t know that it had its own channel.

I’m pretty sure it’s canon that it’s televised. I totally made up the bullshit about it having its very own channel, though. Knowing the tournament committee, though, it probably does, and across the bottom of the screen a number that people can call to place bets scrolls continuously, with fighter stats and the current odds on one half of the screen, the fight, obviously, taking up what’s left.

Apparently, it did. “All Dark Tournament, all the time!” the station proclaimed proudly. It was only the Dark Tournament... how interesting. But luckily for her, she wasn’t watching last year’s tournament.

This was this year’s. What she was watching was live.

I have no idea how she’d be able to tell just by watching like three seconds of commercials, but okay.

Also, I’m not 100% certain, but I’m pretty sure they got to the tournament well more than a day in advance, and it took like a whole day just to travel out there, plus a considerable amount to of time to get to the fucking dock where the boat that would take them out to the island was. So Kurama leaving the day of the tournament is… well, a load of shit. Sure he’d want to stay as long as possible, but if he left when I said he did, he wouldn’t make it. And then he and his entire family and all his friends would die, courtesy of Toguro. That’s not exactly something he’d want.

This was definitely better than watching I Love Lucy reruns.

Keep telling yourself whatever you want to hear. Also, I’m going to stop now because this is probably long enough, what with my life’s sob story up there. This should cut the chapter up pretty evenly, too. So let the bidding begin! Do I hear $5?

This post has been edited by Kuramastrassx3: Jul 13 2010, 09:20 AM

[Kuramastrassx3]

Out of boredom more than anything, I decided to finish chapter one myself.

I would like to take a brief moment before we begin to apologize for my completely out-of-place emo rant last time. It won’t happen again.

The announcer introduced the teams. The first team was the Jolly Devil Six... No, she hadn’t heard of them. The next team, though... their name sounded familiar...

“Urameshi Team,” she murmured.

Can you tell I read the manga in preparation of this? Hell, I probably had the thing in my lap.

Yes. It sounded familiar. But where she had heard it, she didn’t know.

I swear to God fffffffffffffffffffffffff Kari’s one of those genius-Sues. I believe I mentioned this earlier. I really wish I could go back in time four years, hit myself on the head with a book, and yell “ACCEPT THAT KARI IS A SUE! DEAL WITH IT! SHE’S A GENIUS AND A SUE AND HAVING HER ACT STUPID ISN’T MAKING HER ANY LESS OF A SUE!”

I mean, seriously. She and Yusuke are really good friends.

But did it really matter? As long as last year’s winner got trounced and there was a lot of blood, death, and conspiracy, she really didn’t care what team won.

But that changed when the first match began...

The first opponent was Rinku from the Jolly Devil Six... No, she hadn’t heard of him. And he didn’t look particularly threatening. Judging from his looks, she guessed he was about seven. But if he was here he was most likely a worthy fighter.

Well, he beat Kuwabara. But that’s not saying much since Toguro’s B-class, and Yusuke barely managed to beat him. So I’d say about this time, since it’s the first round, if we’re rating Yusuke on the demon scale even though at this time he’s human, he’s probably about mid or high C-class. I’d put Kurama and Hiei at about low C-class, and Kuwabara, who’s always been the weakest of the four, would probably be low or mid D-class. So yeah, considering how the fight went I’d say Rinku’s probably low C-class too…

But from team Urameshi Team...

Paging the department of Redundancy Department.

Kari spat orange soda on herself, the couch, and the coffee table when Riknu’s opponent was introduced.

“Kuwabara?” she screamed. Kuwabara was a friend of her brother’s, a human. Then she began coughing on what was left of the soda in her mouth.

CHOKE CHOKE CHOKE!!!

But when she recovered, her attention was drawn to the sidelines.

Fighting on the side of Urameshi Team... was her brother.

That was when she realized where she had heard “Urameshi” before. It was the name of another of her brother’s friends, also a human.

Well, I guess they aren’t friends then yet. How was I supposed to know? I screw with my own ‘canon’ even more than I do with the actual canon.

She supposed that must make him the captain of the team. The guest team, that must be who they were.

Great. It was just her luck for her brother to be on the human guest team.

Delicately fingering her cell phone, she brought it out of her pocket. Her brother was first on speed dial. One, send.

I can’t imagine why anyone would care.

And isn’t one on speed dial voicemail by default? Must have been written before I got mine…

- -

The ringing of his cell phone in his pocket startled him.

You’d think Kurama would have better manners and have the thing on vibrate/silent. He is, after all, Kurama.

He knew he should be watching the fight but he also knew that the ringing was probably distracting the fighters. So he really had no choice but to answer it. He could talk to whoever this was and watch at the same time.

He looked at the caller ID.

You’d think that he’d answer it without looking since he knows he’s distracting the fighters.

It was Kari. He wondered...

Kurama: Hello?

*muffled screaming in the background*

Strange Man: Bring me five thousand million yen or the girl dies. Without her virginity intact. Heh heh heh.

Kurama: Well, she already doesn’t have to worry about that. And forget it. You can have her. She probably has AIDS anyway, since she sleeps with pretty much anything that moves. *hangs up*

“You’re not in school?” he asked her, not even bothering to say hello.

Wow. I guess even he’s getting sick of her. Nice.

“I thought you didn’t care,” she answered in a smart-alec tone, her eyes glued to the television. Yes, it was him. It was too much of a coincidence for him not to be.

Because she sees the redhead on the sidelines answering a cell phone. Like the majority of the people watching this channel cares about the people on the sidelines? Wouldn’t it be focused on the fight?

“Enjoying your school trip?” she then asked coldly.

“Not particularly,” he replied with a chuckle.

“Learning anything?” Again, her voice was cold.

He repeated his previous answer, without the chuckle attached. “Not particularly.”

“Yes, I’m sure you can’t learn very much by taking part in the Dark Tournament.”

And we thus establish that Kari is a total bitch.

Her voice was still cold, colder than the last time. And it took him a few seconds to register what she had said. “What?” he asked softly.

“The Dark Tournament is televised,” she answered him, though not as coldly.

Oh. Yes. He had forgotten that small detail.

Yeah, okay.

“I’ve always wanted to go to the Dark Tournament...” she muttered softly. She tried, but it was hard to keep the whine of longing out of her voice.

“I could have someone pick you up, if you’d like.” Then he could watch her, make sure she was safe... Why not? She was the one who wanted to come. But she’d be his responsibility... Not that that was any different than normal, really.

Oh yes, genius move there, Kurama. Bring her where she’s more likely to get kidnapped.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

Kari: Really really?

Kurama: Yes.

Kari: Really really really?

Kurama: Just shut the fuck up.

She was silent for a few seconds. “I’ll... see you then, then?”

“Yes, Kari-chan.” He watched as his friend’s small opponent was lifted high into the air on the end of yo-yo strings.

“Okay. I love you.” And she hung up. There was no way she was getting him to answer that in public.

I’m going to use this as the base of my brand-new anti-Kari/Kurama fangroup. Who else wants to join?

So why not just hang up?

Shutting his own phone and sticking it back into his pocket, he turned to his short friend. “Hiei.”

He didn’t answer but Kurama knew he had heard him.

You know what they say about assuming things, right Kurama?

He knew she was here, in the crowd, as well as Keiko and Shizuru. “Would you do me a favor... and get Botan for me?”

Hiei: Why?

Kurama: I need her to take care of… a little problem for me.

DUN DUN DUHHHH!!

…

Oh God, what have I done? I mean, shit. While I love all of Yu Yu Hakusho, and I’d have a really hard time picking which arc is my favorite, if I was forced to pick one, it’d have to be the Dark Tournament, followed closely by Three Kings. The first episode I ever saw was from the Dark Tournament. When I first really started watching they were airing the Dark Tournament. It’s the longest arc, and yet to me it never seemed to drag like some of the other arcs did at times.

The entire tournament was just great. We got to really see what Kurama was capable of for the first time, there were a few really nice Yusuke/Keiko moments, we were introduced to Puu, the fighting itself was just awesome, we had Toguro (definitely the best YYH villian), we got to watch Yusuke really begin to grow from that hardheaded punk to the really lovable character he became, we got to see Genkai in action, the suspense was great, the way the rules were always stacked against Yusuke’s team was just so irritating it made me want to scream, the whole side-plot with Genkai and Toguro was just beautiful and enchanting without being too distracting from the main plot, and, of course, despite it being just so awesome, high-action, tense, and thrilling, it still had a good number of comic-relief moments YYH fans have come to expect from the series.

And I turned it into this. I want to go back in time and hit myself in the head with a copy of Breaking Dawn so hard I knock myself out (and hopefully scare myself away from the Twilight series forever).

[Soren Highwind]

Dude, you can't be that hard on yourself. I wrote crap fanfiction based on one of my favorite games, but at least it wasn't as bad as some of the other stuff on the site. The same can be said of your stories; at least you know how to spell.

And as for the whole grandmother thing, well...I've had relatives die, too. Whatever helps, I guess.

[Kuramastrassx3]

I want to be a professional writer, though. Sure, I knew how to spell. Doesn't mean my story's good. And Kari's a Sue and I hate her.

And eh, it gives me something to do and I don't have to worry about the author coming here in a fit of rage.

Also, as much as I hate a lot of my older pieces of writing, it's fun to see how I've progressed.

[Soren Highwind]

I want to be a professional writer, though. Sure, I knew how to spell. Doesn't mean my story's good. And Kari's a Sue and I hate her.

And eh, it gives me something to do and I don't have to worry about the author coming here in a fit of rage.

Also, as much as I hate a lot of my older pieces of writing, it's fun to see how I've progressed.

Fair enough.

[Weatherhead91]

Ah, freshman year. I remember reading most of these and at least kind of liking many. Getting older really does make you smarter. Also, I remember all the confusion with kari for about a year because the name made me think of Digimon

[Kuramastrassx3]

You and everyone else on this entire board, dude.

[shiroamasa]

I remember when I was so into YYH. I once wrote a fic about Yuusuke and boys being inside Final Fantasy 1.

This post has been edited by shiroamasa: Jul 25 2010, 06:10 PM