Mask/Off

"Well, I can tell you a bit about it, but your mental image is going to be ruined big time..."

That Karate Kid comparison was probably way off the mark. Yasu barely learned any martial arts, after all. At first he was just trying to dodge hits and escape from his attackers. After a while he started to try pulling a few counters, and eventually he began to learn how to defeat his opponent, more often than not, by using anything around him, like walls, or posts. There was this one time where he beat one of the thugs with a trash can before running off. The memory made him smirked a little, and Kozue's compliment about the food turned that smirk into a grin.

"Great, isn't it?" I come here more times than I can remember," Yasu said after sipping the soup of his ramen from the spoon. "It's quite cheap too, but you probably don't have to worry about that, heh."

For the next few minutes, he ate silently, a bit too hungry to continue the chat. Besides, Kozue might want to eat peacefully too after being in a fight like that.

"Eh." She waved it off. She liked that Karate Kid mental image, so she'd just store it away and save it for later. "Go ahead and ruin it, wouldn't be the first time. I just like to daydream."

Kozue had always been more of a social eater, which was a nice way of saying she often talked with her mouth in varying states of fullness. But Yasu seemed to like eating with the quiet, so she obliged, shutting up for a little while as they chowed. It was good cool down, anyway. Her gears were still running from the match and she was easing on the brakes, winding down to another night with her trusty SNES and a bottle of Jack.

"So." She pipped back up a few minutes later, coming just shy of breaking her personal silence record. "I'm guessing the Mask was still...masked even back then?"

The silence was rather uncomfortable, if he had to admit. Eating quietly by himself? no problem. Having someone else, a girl, on top of that, shared the same table as yourself and not saying anything? That's kinda frustrating. Thankfully she broke the silence first.

"Yeah, been using that very same mask since the first time I... saw him," Yasu replied. "No one really knew where he came from or anything like that. I heard that... he... hunted thugs around the area before joining that league..."

There were all sorts of rumors back then, but only after The Mask made himself quite a name on the league. Before, people just thought of him as some freak. It might be an illegal league, but almost everyone else never gave a damn about protecting their identity.

"Oh, I see. Kind of like a Japanese Batman. Only without the gadgets or the cape or...okay more like the Green Hornet. And deaf, too. Can't think of any deaf superheroes."

Oddity she was, Kozue wasn't in a position to throw any stones over weirdness. but it all seemed so...out there. Deaf guy puts on mask, starts fighting crime, joins illegal underground fight ring, moves up to barely legal wrestling arena. That story had one or two holes that needed filling.

"I guess it's nothing serious." She scraped her chops along the bottom of the bowl, hunting down the last few elusive noodles. "I just get curious easy, is all. Don't like not knowing. I'm the kind of girl that used to tear rip little bits off her Christmas presents so she could figure out what they were before the day came."

"Heh, I see..." Yasu replied. "I'm sure a lot of people are curious. "

His bowl of ramen was emptying quite fast while they chat. He almost didn't realize that he's almost finished eating. Once all the noodles were gone, Yasu was tempted to just pick up the bowl and drank the rest of the soup. Knowing he was with a girl, though, he used his spoon instead. The boy let out a pleased sigh afterwards and drank from his glass.

"I wonder how people will react if he was just some ordinary guy, and that whole deaf thing was part of the gimmick," he said while looking away.

"Huh." She blinked. "That'd be weird."

She let that thought sit for a moment as she took up the bowl and drank up the rest of the sauce in the bowl. Might as well get every drop. Waste not, want not. "Kind of a good setup, though. It'd be like a movie where everyone's trying to find this killer, but they never suspect this blind guy, because you know...blind, but you find out in the last fifteen minutes he's not really blind, and then everything about the rest of the movie makes more sense and you have 'Aha' moment. Kind of like a Sixth Sense sort of thing." She started to fish in her glass for that lemon, looking to finish off the yellow bastard. "And if you've never seen that movie, don't ask me to explain that."

"I saw that. Nice twist, huh," Yasu chuckled.

He used the provided tissue to wipe his mouth, and drank more water from the glass. It was a nice dinner, having someone accompanied him for a change. Could it be that's why the food taste better? It's probably just him feeling things.

"But yeah, it's possible, isn't it? There are all sorts of wrestling gimmick after all. Wouldn't be surprised to see a pregnant woman going into the ring next, to be honest," he said jokingly, before pausing for a bit. "Wait, did someone do that already...?"

She thought about it for a minute - that actually sounded kind of familiar. Something in the WWE.

"Oh, yeah, they did do that." She snapped her fingers. "Lita was pregnant, and then she got hit during a match, and she had a miscarriage, and this big doof with a name I can't remember made it his entire gimmick. Just saying 'It's not my fault, it's not my fault' all the time. That was his entire thing. A gimmick...based on a miscarriage."

It didn't seem all that weird back in the day, but now that Kozue was recalling it out loud? Very poor taste. She complained about the AFW sometimes, but at least they never went there. Who wrote that shit?

"Figures..." Yasu said with a rather disgusted expression. "Good thing I stopped watching WWE after a while..."

A masked deaf guy probably sounded nothing compared to that. It still surprised him sometimes just how some people could be. It's not even funny. Well, there might be people who liked that kind of stuffs. After all the world was full of weird entertainment. And freaks.

"Say, what would be your honest opinion about that mask guy?"

"Me too." She rolled her eyes. "I mean, I catch a match every now and then. Pretty much just to get a few ideas, like I watch a lot of Rey Mysterio matches and borrow slash steal his stuff. Won't lie, no shame." She put her hand to her heart. The man was good. "But every time I look it just gets weirder and weirder. And not in the fun way, in the 'What the fuck is going on?' way."

Kozue then did something she rarely ever did these days - she took a moment to actually think about her answer. "Honest opinion? He's a little weird. The noises he made were grating as fuck, but if he's deaf and that's just a deaf thing, I can't be mad, so that's fine. I've only been here, like, three months, so maybe I'm not the guy to be judging, but he's got talent. Tension could use more guys like him. Guys who can put on good matches. So I hope he sticks around."