Focus Your Chi [Finished!]

[Bee]

It was perhaps the most impressive thing Jin had ever seen in his life. His brother was a hulking bipedal Lowlander, with thick fur, thick muscles, and an ugly mug, and he was still the biggest wimp Jin had ever known. He was shrieking like a girl whose doll has been smashed up about his date planner. Jin near froze to death on a daily basis, and he never bitched about it.

"Jin knows not to touch it, Mom. He knows. Do you know what he wrote? On Tuesday I am scheduled to do unspeakable things to sheep. I would never write that. I would never engage in sexual intercourse of the anal variety with such a beast."

"Oh, shut up, Abner. I was just doing it for laughs and you know it."

"Jinny," said their mother, a thickly-furred canine who always ended up as their moderator, "go outside and destroy things for a while. Abner, why don't you go knit me another lovely sweater?"

Thus it was that Jin found himself at the town pub. This was, he supposed, the punishment he received for letting his mother convince him to remain living at home after he had graduated to adulthood. He should have moved to the Midori Beach.

He turned to the man sitting on the stool next to his. "I think she's looking at you, man."

This was actually not true at all. The woman in question had a boyfriend and was looking at an interesting picture on the wall about two feet away from the lonely, half-sodden man that Jin was talking to. But he was bored.

So the lonely feline next to him was just going to have to suffer. For the moment, though, he looked terribly drunkenly happy.

"Really?"

"Totally. A wink and a nod and you two can spend the rest of the night fucking each other's brains out. Why don't you go talk to her?"

He watched everything unfold with quiet enjoyment. The man trying to pick up the girl, the boyfriend punching the man in the face, the screaming, and several nearby pub-goers joining in.

"Ben," he said, cheerfully. "'Nother drink, please."

[Dark]

Alcohol was becoming a rather unfortunate constant in Hadyn's life, and he starred into the dregs of his pint rather morosely. He had never really cared for the taste of beer, but the swill they served in these sorts of establishments was cheap and was just strong enough that he walked away at least mildly buzzed. Drugs might have been an easier escape, but he couldn't risk going down that path. Not now. He shouldn't even be drinking, but with such a strong tolerance for the stuff there wasn't much of a risk. He would ruin his kidney before he managed to get properly trashed.

He really was pathetic. A year ago he hadn't cared about the consequences, and now he was only too aware what could befall of a moments carelessness. Those consequences were why he'd ran.

The last month was a blur of abysmal roads, worse weather, and seedy bars. He was on the other side of the world and he still hadn't figured anything out, his life was still in shambles; he was exhausted, both mentally and physically, and he hadn't slept in a real bed in weeks. He was tired of running.

Hadyn was signaling the barkeep for another round when the sounds of the fight finally drew his attention. He was just about to turn around to see what all the ruckus was about when someone broke a chair across his back.

Ten months of grief and rage bubbled up to the surface, alcohol making it easy to stamp out what was left of his flimsy self-control. His fist connected with the man's face in a sickening crunch, but he was already spinning around to lash out at the next moron to get in his way.

Hadyn smiled.

[Bee]

Jin watched curiously as a brightly colored cat-beast started to dominate the fight. He looked a bit younger than Jin, but he had the weathered, bitter look of some of the pub's older, more down-and-out patrons, the kind that eventually slunk off to die of hypothermia or frostbite behind a dumpster. And he brawled in a manner that he thought Abner might be capable of if his brother both condoned "mindless violence" and didn't weep when he scraped a knuckle.

He wondered if the kitty would be able to take the entire pub. That would be entertaining.

"That's the one," he said, leaning over to a man a few feet over. "You said Leona left a note saying she'd hooked up with some Morganberry outsider, right? I think that's the guy."

Freyr was out of his chair in an instant, launching himself at the brawl. Jin smiled at the Ben the bartender. "Six coppers on the cat."

[Dark]

The Glacier feline that launched himself at Hadyn was hard, compact muscle and outweighed him by at least a hundred and fifty pounds. Hadyn dodged the first blow on reflex, almost too slow, and felt a claw graze his skull; the hind-leg that followed caught him straight in the gut. He scrambled backwards in a clumsy retreat and considered his options. The feline wasn’t attacking because of some drunken vendetta—booze played a part, but behind the glaze of alcohol was rage and cold resolve. This guy was mean, and he was angry, and Hadyn hadn’t a clue what he could have done to warrant such hatred. And he didn’t care; he was more set on surviving it.

Feinting and dodging would only get him so far, but Hadyn kept up the charade, watching the guy become clumsy with embarrassment and rage. He swung with too much force, throwing himself off balance. Hadyn pounced, grabbing the extended arm and using the man’s momentum to twist them around. Using the combined force, Hadyn slammed him head first into the bar top. The guy slumped, and didn’t move again.

[Bee]

Well, that was disappointing. He needed to find someone for the cat to fight who would actually put up a good one. As much as Jin despised the cold of the region, some sense of pride was being affronted by the fact that one of his own had just lost to some outsider who had no purpose in this hellish wasteland anyway.

He glanced around the pub. By the intent, scowling faces of some of the other patrons, he was likely not alone in that sentiment. This could go very poorly. If everyone in the bar started in on the sickeningly-hued feline, he would hardly stand a chance, and that wouldn't be a hell of a lot of fun for anyone involved.

A thick wolf looked ready to fight, eying the intruder with particular distaste. Jin said, casually, "I wouldn't bother. So the cat beat on a drunk. It's like fighting a little girl, yeah? Even if you beat him, you still lose."

The wolf grimaced, grunted, and sneered at the cat as he sat back down to drink some more. Jin took a swig of beer as another of the patrons slid out of his chair, this one not listening to him at all. Nothing to do but hope for the best, he supposed. He had tried to help. It was the damn cat's own fault for straying so far from home.

[Dark]

Hadyn sensed that he might have gotten more than he had bargained for; a few isolated scrapes were still in full-swing, but the majority of the patrons remaining, those that hadn't slunk out the door at the first sign of a disturbance, were beginning to focus their rather unsavory attention on him. Unease skittered across his back, fur fluffing at the perceived threat.

He dodged the first to charge him, but the ranks were closing in. A broken bottle flew past him head, and he huffed in mild distress. They could put an eye out, doing that. Too slow, a swift kick to his midsection sent him flying into the wall. Hadyn wheezed, and barely rolled out of the way of the next blow. He dodged, and reached deep inside to tap the power that resided there.

Everything slowed, flipped. Hadyn struggled to control his breathing as gravity reversed itself and the cold, thick mist that nipped at his heels constantly erupted to fill the room. Not that the cold probably bothered people that lived on a glacier, but that aspect of his ability wasn't something he had control over.

He loped for the door before his attackers had time to sort themselves out up on the ceiling.

[Bee]

Jin had never before experienced the joys of altered gravity, and he had to say that he didn't much care for it. Everyone seemed to hover at different points in the air--Jin himself had managed to propel himself to the ceiling, where some force held him. He did not appreciate the sudden upheaval of the laws of nature. He appreciated whatever the fuck was making the room so damned cold even less.

And now the cat that had gotten everyone into this predicament was strolling merrily out of the pub. Well, that wasn't going to happen. Jin crawled along the ceiling, blood rushing to his head, passing people who were trying most painstakingly to get down. He made it to the door quickly enough, grabbing the frame and pulling himself outside the pub where--

Gravity abruptly corrected itself. Jin scarcely had a moment to breathe in one gulp of thin, cold air before he was falling gracelessly from his doorframe perch and into large and very friggin' frosty pile of snow.

He spat out snow and profanities as he got up.

"Leaving the party early, are we?" he asked the cat, casually. "You're missing out. You would've stuck around for a while, old Olaf would've started pawing at Ana Leiv's breasts and you would have seen a real beat down. Of course, you might have been unconscious by then."

[Dark]

Hadyn considered the snow-encrusted whippet from a loose defensive stance. Deciding the creature didn't pose much of a threat, he went back to adjusting his pack straps and wished he had been quicker in clearing the premise. Indecision had slowed the process considerably.

When he had left the capital he hadn't had any concrete idea of where he was going and now, several hundred miles later, he still didn't have a clue. Instead, he had taken to picking meaningless fights and drinking copious amounts of alcohol in a fucked up attempt to not think at all. Bah. He really was pathetic.

Hadyn gave the canine a second looking-over, noting that he didn't bear any tokens from the brawl--a spectator, then--and decided that if he had any energy to spare, he might waste it on disliking the guy. The canine reminded him a bit eerily of his colorful family, though Hadyn couldn't quite put a claw on what exactly set his fur the wrong way.

"Was there something I could help you with?" Dismissal.

[Bee]

The cat was, if one could judge by his tone and all his posturing, genuinely an asshole, which sat just fine with Jin, for the time being. Solandarians were not known for being the friendliest of people, and the newcomer had the benefit of being amusing. If the entertainment the Morganberry provided him with became more trouble and effort than it was worth, Jin would just leave him the ice and find something better to do.

He shrugged. “Just satisfying my curiosity. We don’t tend to get a lot of visitors in this hellhole that aren’t corpses plucked from an icy grave.” This was true. Jin’s general rule of thumb was that any wayfarer to his homeland was either a lifeless popsicle or being “cared for” by his mother. And a lot of the time the latter became the former. Sana herself had pulled Irina’s father from the frozen pond he had fallen into. Jin occasionally wondered if his own father’s slowly decomposing body was strewn somewhere on the mountainside.

[Dark]

Ah. Well, he supposed he should be flattered that someone actually found him interesting, even if the reason behind it was only because nothing ever happened in this remote part of the world. Oddly, he wasn't.

"Sadly, I'm afraid you're going to have to satisfy your curiosity elsewhere. I'm leaving." He didn't need someone to tell his life story to; it wouldn't make him feel better about himself. And it's not like this asshole actually cared either way. He was just looking for a distraction.

Hadyn turned his back, and considered his options again. He had been standing still too long, and the fog had begun to gather at his heels. It was time to move. He started moving left without really ever making a decision, heading deeper into the mountains. Maybe he would find his answers. Maybe he would die up there. He would find out when he got there.