trans_9 | Target Practice

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Target Practice

Since living in the new castle with Ruffnut, Mindy had done her best to maintain upkeep, even "borrowing" a few things from the wreckage of Grand Central to spruce up the place. It helped, especially since the events of the homecoming, to keep her head busy. On the one hand, yes, dad had appeared: he wasn't dead, he was proud to know they won, and for just a little bit? She got to be a little girl again, to crack wise with her dad, to show him how far she'd gotten.

But then he was gone again, and the new pod pop didn't bring him out. She shouldn't have hoped for it, but she had, a little. Once that was a no go though, she was either training or helping Ruffnut patch up some of the frayed tapestries or fix up carpeting or overall making sure there were no holes for them to fall through anywhere. It had been good, but even Ruffnut had sort of side stepped asking her about dad. It was something she appreciated: Mindy wasn't known for easily delving into her feelings.

This naturally led to another thing on her mind: what had happened on the mission, where the Castle gun shootout had almost taken her out- SHOULD have, if it was anyone else. She had severely underestimated what she could do: the way she;d moved, the accuracy in each shot, the sheer carnage: that was akin to a limit break.

And now, she wanted to control it.

She emptied herself of all thought: that was how a fight in the dark was, if you had no edge. There were only a few precious seconds to gather your mind, and then you opened your eyes and all hell broke loose. Your eyes and your hands had to work in tandem then, and you pulled back and took out people one by one until you got the job done or you were dead.

Like now: it was those gun slingers from the castle, and she started with ten at first, taking them out easily. The background was the saloon again, only she made it bigger to accomdate the increase in shooters.She cursed to herself (it was too quick!) then brought the number to fifteen, then twenty.

Each took less time, and Hit Girl nodded: she HAD gotten better. She wasn't even using Zetta's gun or her artifact, and she was still taking these bastards down.

"All right: switch it to forty, and place them all over the bar."

Ok. GO.

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Doc smirked.

"My skills are pretty tame compared to what some people around here have too. It's WEIRD. I'm used to being more use in a sticky situation than other people and here it's the other way around."

"Did your parents train you?" he asked after a moment, peering around at her simulation a little. "Or did you go looking for a teacher on your own to get that revenge you mentioned?"

He wouldn't put it past her, she struck him as the kind of kid who would run off to seek her destiny like that.

Hit Girl decided now might be the best time to take a break. The background disappeared and instead they were in a work out gym. Normally Hit girl wouldn't be caught dead in a place like this, but she grabbed at the towel and the pint of water, putting them both to good use.

"Parent," she said. "Dad specifically, he was a cop. And yeah, things get pretty messed up around here. I have a trainer on the ship too though: not sure how he'd feel about this whole run through, but its what I'm good at, so, you know, sharpening the skills and all that."

Oh, she got her revenge, all right. Too bad the cost had been really high.

"Man, I trained with my dad some when I was a kid but my mom was the real slave-driver between the two of them. Drop me in the forest to fend for myself for a week, try to stab me in the middle of the night, so many guidebooks on explosives I thought my head would explode."

He shrugged, taking a seat on one of the spiffy new benches and pulling his katana off his back, rolling it over in his hands.

"Then I got a medical degree instead of taking a ninja career." he chuckled. "She was pretty peeved with me."

Hefting the sword he nodded toward her. "You do blades too or mostly firearms?"

"Christ man, your mouth sounds vicious," Hit girl commented. "Of course, dad did shoot me so I knew how to withstand the bullets, so I guess child services would be pretty pissed if they were to find that out. Why were they doing that to you anyway?"

Hit Girl laughed, taking a sit right under him. "A medical degree? Are you kidding? Well, not that its an easy thing to do anyway. I know being a doctor takes a ton of work, but the money makes it worth it supposedly. Why did you wind up doing that anyway?"

Oh, good question. "I can use a blade pretty fierce actually, but firearms are a specialty of mine."

He laughed. "She is, and she would take that as a compliment. She's the toughest woman I know."

"As to why? McNinja family tradition; we've all been part of the life since birth. Mom's mom married into the family, took the mask, everything, and she got raised just as tough as I did. Probably worse, actually. Grandpa Lowe was pretty scary." He shrugged. "I can't complain, it's just part of the ninja way. It's like being Amish but with way more murder and better pay."

"But mom made the mistake of bringing me around dead bodies to educate me on the physical details of how to take down an armed adult when I was five or sixish and I got a little obsessed I guess. I loved the complexity of the human body and the detail work of medicine. The older I got the more I realized that I wanted to help people more than I wanted to get paid to hurt them so I got myself into pre-med."

He leaned back on the bench with his blade over his knees. "I've got THIRTY degrees, actually." He told her with a grin. "I cloned myself and went to thirty different schools then re-absorbed all my other selves. So I'm licensed to practice medicine in twelve countries and have specializations all over the map."

"It's nice to have specialties." He waggled his brows at her. "You got a favorite piece?"

"I don't know if I was really insulting her or not myself. She just sounds hardcore. Then again, lacking a mom, it'd be pretty sweet having them both train you."

Well that was interesting. A whole tradition of training to be a ninja. She kinda liked that idea, just like she got into the whole viking thing really. "What's with the 'Mcninja' part? What, are you guys Irish or something?"

Now that would be cool: Irish ninjas. Considering her Scottish background, she'd really like that. "You know, I really had no freaking idea you could go and clone yourself and then merge yourself like that. I get your mom getting all pissed that you didn't follow up on all of that cool ass ninja stuff, but thirty degrees in being a doctor is nothing to sneeze at either. You're pretty set for life."

She grinned. "Well, it used to be my glocks, but since then, that changed. Now its these." She pulled out Overlord Zetta's gun, a pretty vicious looking weapon. "I've experimented on the ammo, even though it doesn't seem to run out of its natural ammo. But if I really want to tempt fates, there's this."

She pulled out a card with her picture and yelled out, "Pactio!" A gun came out of thin air, and she grabbed it, taking a moment to feel it beneath her hands. "My artifact gun, a magical item. This literally rips shit up."

"Yep! Dad's famly line goes way back to a bunch of Irish farmers who became ninja to fight off some pirates. It's a weird story. Shamrock shurikens and mysterious strangers and a psuedo Thanksgiving holiday that came out of it."

He'd never ever thought he would miss Katanaka but here he was...

"The whole cloning thing was a special opportunity. My mentor in university - Benjamin Franklin II - basically let me use the technology HE used to cheat death to accquire a ton of knowledge in the space of eight years. I was really lucky that it went off as smoothly as it did, really."

He took an interested closer look at the guns, whistling low.

"Very nice! My sidekick would be jealous. He has six-shooters passed down from his dad, but he's gotten pretty proficient with other stuff too. Magic weapons would be new though."

It panged him some not knowing wether or not Gordito was okay. He ASSUMED so, since he knew that Sean had been in the pods and that meant that probably his family was too and... Gordito was as good as a son to him by now. That had to have counted to their rescuers, right?

He shook off that downward spiral of thought and nodded to the magic weapon. "Mind giving me a demo?"

Ok, she had heard a lot of stuff on the ship, but this definitely took the cake. How the hell were Irish farmers able to become ninjas when ninjas were supposed to have originated in Japan? He was even saying stuff like "shuriken" which was obviously a Japanese word...

Comics. That was it. More impossible things from alternate universes, so why would she turn her nose at something like Irish ninjas?

Because it was fucking crazy. Yes, Stacy, dig her a deeper whole of shit that shouldn't make sense that just DID.

"OK, I'm not going to bother trying to figure out why all of this sounds insane: you would probably just think I was the one that was pulling hairs. So there's a dude called Ben Franklin that gave you the tech that had you get all that information. Your sidekick was probably good with the guns, but I sorta had to be or I'd die. No powers, just will and the ability to use deadly force."

Oh good, THAT much she could do. That, and she had the artifact out anyway, so she may as well use it. She closed her eyes, and a moment later they were aboard a simple sailboat, three massive ships in the distance. She looked at them hard a moment, in her mind measuring the distance and time before kicking the motor up, getting a bit closer. Then she flexed her hands one had Zetta's gun, the other her artifact. She took aim, though it hardly looked that way, and fired at the first ship with Zetta's, and the artifact gun's ammo went for the other ship.

She wasn't guessing: it looked as if she had known exactly that it would hit. What McNinja had not expected, likely, was the very big explosion that happened simultaneously, downing each ship in an engulfing flame.

Doc stepped up to the rail of the ship, leaning out eagerly to try to see where the ammo went as it spiraled off toward it's target regardless of how lackluster her aim had looked on first glance.

The explosions were big enough to blow his coat back some and he whistled sharply in approval, laughing as the debris began to settle.

"That's AMAZING!" He crowded, then teased. "Where do I get one?"

"You have to have skill to do this," Hit Girl teased back. "No seriously, you do. The guns have a lot of firepower behind them, but if you don't know what you're doing with it all, it's going to be for nothing."

It was going to sound weird though, this next part. "It's like the weapon needs to know your intention, your aim, how you would position yourself. I see that in my mind's eye: I can shoot and hurt pretty well. So its really all about feeling out your attack before you do it."

Pause. "Also, Overlord Zetta gave me the gun because he knew what I could do with it."

"Yeaaaaaaaah, weapons that need to be psychically attuned to me are a little beyond my experience." Doc said slowly, eyes round.

"That's something else. Do these kinds of artifacts exist where you come from or did you pick this stuff up only since waking up here?"

"Zetta's weapon and Negi's artifact is new to me too," Hit Girl said, shrugging. "I'm slowly learning about it myself."

Well, that should answer his question. "I got that stuff here, obviously. On my world, it was all speed and strength and luck. Definitely could not go without luck."

"Luck has been responsible for my continued existence more than a few times." Doc nodded in agreement.

"You've making me think I was a bit quick to dismiss Dr. Haruno when she was telling me about the chakra abilities she has." he said thoughtfully, leaning on the rail again to take another look at the sinking remains the other ships.
"I mean, the kind of stuff ninja in her world do is nuts. Far far beyond the straight up training I'm used to and digging into the realm of the mystic where only the crazy power-hungry ninja usually stray."

"Probably couldn't hurt me to learn to literally stick to surfaces like a spider, right?"

"You and me both," Hit Girl said, shaking her head. "It's not something I toss away easily. I need anything I can get. Its why I learn as much as I can."

She chuckled. "Yeah, I'm still starting to get into that kinda stuff too. It's just as difficult as you say, actually. I'm the kind of person that jumps into a fight, just before I take a glance at where I'm going, get the coordinates as soon as I can and then I make things happen. The whole meditating and strength in defense and all is just weird."

Hit Girl grinned. "Really? That sounds bad ass!"

"Defense is highly underrated, really. Takes a long time to learn the ins and outs of it though." Doc grinned. "If I figure out how to stick to things and duplicate myself and stuff I'll pass along the secrets, promise."

"Don't I know it," Hit Girl said, shaking her head. It was all well and good to fight and melee it out, but if you didn't have good defense, you wouldn't be doing it for long. "Thanks. I could really use some information like that. I have a pretty long list of people I spar with: I wanna show them something new."

"Need anyone new for sparring?" Doc asked, hefting his sword. "You said you were good with a blade, that include katana?"

"I always need someone for sparring," Hit Girl said, grinning. It was true too: she never turned down a chance to test her mettle against someone. Of course, a sword wasn't her proficiency, but she still knew how to handle one, and everything else she could wing.

"It's not my favorite weapon, but I could give it a shot."

"Haven't had a proper swordfight in a dogs age. I'd be much obliged. Your choice of weapon next time?"

Hit Girl thought about it a moment. "You know, I'll get back to you on that part. Something tells me if I'm going to go fight a ninja, the weapon I choose will be really important."

A ninja, for fucks sake. That was NOT a decision you made lightly.

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Target Practice

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