ya_assemble | [LN] Beat of His Own Drums [Open]

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[LN] Beat of His Own Drums [Open]

As soon as the yeti finished that beautiful, beautiful brand spankin' new not liberated from the trash drum kit, Raph had swooped in and commandeered it, dragging it off piece by piece to the room he'd also commandeered as his own when he'd first arrived.

"You can make another one," he'd shot back at the pouting yeti, who'd sighed and gotten back to work as he stole the cymbals.

It was a Pearl Export kit. Not exactly top of the line but solid, had a good sound just like the real thing (talk about trademark infringement, right?), and most importantly of all, it was new. Like so few of Raph's belongings were. In fact, the only belongings he had that weren't, ahem, "recycled," were things April and Casey had given him. Everything else was junk scavenged from the surface by Splinter - and then by him and his brothers when they started going up.

New drums. Actual new drums. And a new cd player. And new cds. He'd managed to grab a few new things, actual new things. For the first time in his life, he was playing on a new drum kit.

All the "you have to save all of existence" stuff aside, this place rocked.

That was why he was in his room banging away, sometimes playing very recognizable drums beats by themselves, sometimes in time with the original music. If it sounded like he was crazy enthusiastic about what he was doing, it was because he was.

He'd left his door open out of a general lack of consideration for others, but the noise didn't add much more noise pollution to the busy workshop than there was - and at least he was good. Very good, in fact.

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It's the rhythm that catches her attention, before she can even properly hear it. Music's always been the way to her soul, and by the time she recognizes what she's hearing, her fingers are already tapping along on the Transistor's hilt.

She smiles faintly to herself and hones in on the sound, following it to the source. It's not the type of music she makes-- made, but she enjoys pretty much anything that has heart in it. And Raph's drumming definitely has heart. (Not to mention a fair share of talent.)

She leans against the doorway and watches him, that little smile still ghosting over her lips, one arm draped over the Transistor's crossguard and nodding in time to the music as her fingers tap slightly more complex rhythms. He's really very good.

When it really came down to it Raph loved being good at stuff and that meant he was no slouch at showing off. Half of why he tormented his brothers so much was establishing that yes, he was just that badass that they couldn't stop him from, say, preventing him from whacking things on their shells like a set of drums.

It had "neener neener neener, look what I can do" all over it.

Right now, for once, he could showboat in a positive way, so he did, improvising a drum solo during a quiet point in the song and adding a little well-timed extra oomph to it.

When it had finally finished, he turned off the music so they could chat. Chatting with people was kinda novel and he was still enjoying it, even if he sometimes needed his time alone.

"So in case you haven't noticed, my drum playing is a whole lot better than my ability to dodge bullets," he cracked.

Cloudbank was all about showing off your skills, though possibly most people would've preferred the term "showcasing" or maybe "using your talents for the entertainment of Cloudbank". But realistically, Red was well aware of the showing off aspect that most of the more prominent voices of the city indulged in. Herself included, she would admit to herself.

The Transistor hummed slightly under her hands.

She smiled at Raph and flashed him a thumbs up along with a little celebratory fanfare. She approves of your drumming skills, Raph. Makes her wish she could sing along.

"Can you talk at all?" Raph asked, putting his drumsticks on his snare drum.

If she couldn't they'd have to figure out a way around it. Maybe pen and paper? Even if it was in another language, the myth magic meant it all translated.

Red grimaced - just slightly, just briefly - and shook her head while some sad string melody made a brief appearance. Red wasn't sure how she felt about the whole... musical communication thing, but to be honest she still hadn't processed the whole not having a voice thing, either.

It hasn't even been much more than 48 hours since it happened.

Still, though the two of them may not know it, the myth magic had probably helped Sandy's little sand shapes be more understandable to his fellow myths and guardians. Maybe it would help give layers of meaning to those little musical flourishes that seem to accompany Red's desires to communicate.

She stepped slightly into the room, glancing around for something she could write on, then gestured to Raph like she was writing. The little chiming that went along with it seemed to ask if he could help her out.

"So I guess you're up for drums if we ever get the burning urge to play 'Rock Band'?"

Nico leaned against the door frame, her sewing tucked up under one arm as she watched him bang away on the drum kit.

"You're pretty good at that."

Raph stopped and turned the music down.

"If 'Rock Band' is one of those lame video games where you pretend to have musical talent, like the 'Rock Hero' games back home, then no," said Raph loudly over the drums. "I prefer the real thing."

Mostly because it was way more satisfying to whack the heck out of real drums.

He put his drum sticks on his snare, swiveling on his little stool to face her.

"And I had to get good at it to prove it was worth it. The only reason I managed to talk Sensei into letting me have a drum kit when I was twelve was by saying it'd help with my dexterity with my sais, so he expected me to get good at both," he said. He took out his sais and started flipping them in his hands to demonstrate, before putting them away, all in on a smooth move like some kind of show-offy gunslinger. "He kept trying to push me to take up anything but drums because of the noise but I wore him down with the ninja angle and by pointing out that you can't play most other musical instruments with just three fingers."

Edited 2014-12-02 02:14 (UTC)

"Ohmygosh, you're good! Do you need a keytaurist?"

Mabel didn't actually recognize any of the drum beats (none of them had corresponding Sev'ral Timez lyrics) but she had a present to give to Raph, and she'd spent all day wrapping it. It showed, given that the present was bigger than her, and she had to carry it on top of her head to move it around the Pole at all. The wrapping paper was tied with approximately a million bows, and there were actual Christmas lights involved in the wrapping of it. Mabel seemed to be powering the lights herself, by whatever bizarre magic the bearer of good cheer possessed.

Being around little kids...was kind of novel. Especially when the reaction he most expected from kids that saw him was screaming. It didn't hurt that Mabel and her brother had saved his and Mikey's lives, either. That alone was enough to make him fond of them.

Fond enough to ignore the fact he hated the keytaur.

He stopped drumming, turning down his music and putting down his drum sticks.

"It depends. I'm looking for one but the job requirements are they they have to be this tall," he held a hand up to roundabout where Mabel's height was, "and wear colorful sweaters. You know anybody like that?"

He looked around his cymbals to see what she was carrying.

"And what is that?"

Edited 2014-12-02 03:11 (UTC)

"Weeeeeeeell, maybe I could give it a shot." And grace Raph's band with her creative genius. "But first, open your present!"

She threw it at Raph. By the way it tumbled gracefully through the air, Mabel didn't have super strength, and the package was very light.

Raph caught it.

"You got me a present?" Cue his being incredibly bewildered. "Why?"

He asked it with all the confusion of someone who didn't randomly get handed presents a lot.

Sensei'd always tried to get them a nice thing here and there for Christmas or their birthdays but "nice" was relative when it call came from the trash and they'd never been allowed out until they were fifteen so he and his brothers had never really been able to exchange gifts with each other.

He started to unwrap it, his expression knitted into an expression of confusion.

Dean had some apologizing to do, which was never pleasant, but at least Raph wasn't hard to find. Dean hadn't seen anyone at the Pole yet who looked like they might work their stress off playing the drums.

"Hey, uh."

He announced himself, awkwardly, at the door. He had tried to kill the kid, after all.

"'Hot for Teacher,' right?" He nodded, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Good, uh. Good ear."

Or lack of them.

"It's Santa's workshop! Do I need an excuse?"

Ok, a big part of it was that she'd never tried the tons-of-boxes-within-boxes-for-a-single-present trick and she had always wanted to.

She barely held back her snickers as Raph opened the first box and found . . . an equally elaborately wrapped one stuffed in the packing peanuts inside.

Dean got a long, inscrutable stare as Raph played - made all the more impressive by the fact he was playing without looking while giving it - but he finally stopped, putting his drum sticks down so that he could get a good look at the man in the doorway.

On the one hand, the guy was an ass.

On the other, he knew his music.

On the other nonexistent hand, the guy was an ass.

One the other other hand, he could at least understand paranoia and when he really thought about it, if he'd been tossed into creepy a situation with one of the characters from Super Robo Mecha Force Five there in the flesh, he might have suspected some weird mindfuck, too, even if he would've been a little less trigger-happy.

That didn't mean he wasn't going to bust the guy's chops. He just reeked of desperate cool, from the way he carried himself to the way he dressed. Like some James Dean wannabe.

So Raph went for the low-hanging fruit, knowing that the thing teenagers were best at was making old people feel old.

"Yeah, well, you know how it is. Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Rush - the best stuff to drum to is the old people music."

Edited 2014-12-02 04:08 (UTC)

He gave her a Look. An 'I know what you're up to' Look.

"Oh no. Nope, taking a shortcut."

He pulled out his sai and used it to rip through all the packaging so he could excavate his way to the center.

"Be careful! You'll rip it!"

Mabel sounded truly just a little anxious. She'd spent a long time trying to make it right, after all. It was hard to find decorations around the pole that could make a santa hat look metal.

She'd done her best, though, arranging the blackest pipe cleaners into a barbed-wire border, fitting a couple of silver stars together so that they looked more like a mace to replace the white puffball on top, and bedazzling Raph's name on the white border with jet-black plastic jewels. And chrome spikes.

She'd even added an angry frowny-face emoticon after Raph's name, to make the whole thing look a little more metal. As metal as a Santa hat could look, anyway.

"New team, new hat!" she announced, whipping hers out and plopping it on. Raph would have to appreciate that Mabel had gone out of her way to not make his hat anything like hers, which was bedazzled so heavily and brightly it was almost difficult to see the original red and white hat beneath. "I made one for all of us!"

Raph stared at it for a moment, in a momentary state of shock over someone just...making him a thing. A thing that seemed to be made specifically with his personality in mind.

Then he laughed and the laugh was not his usual mocking laugh, it was a delighted one.

"It's very..." What was the word? "...personalized. It's very me."

She'd made it just for him, with little chrome spikes on it and an angry face and everything.

"Thanks, kiddo," he said, almost surprised at himself for saying the words. For a moment, all he could do was look at it, as if it was something strange and new and wonderful. Being among so many different people - people capable of all these nice things - was new and strange and more and more, it was becoming amazing. "Seriously. I guess we're the one that're gonna have to help with the whole present thing this year, huh. It's good we'll all have the uniform for it."

"I have a gift for interpreting my friends through art," Mabel said, polishing her nails on her french-fry sweater. "I think I might be the Guardian of Insight."

Yesterday she thought she was the Guardian of Froyo, so her brother at least took that with a grain of salt.

Mabel threw her hands in the air, delighted to be reminded that this year she got to help with Christmas. "Wait until you see the sleigh!"

Dean acknowledged the insult with an inscrutable look of his own.

OK, not so inscrutable. Raph was hitting the "teenage" part of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle" pretty hard and it was already annoying.

"Listen, I wanted to ah." Ugh. He didn't want to so much after that, but. "Apologize. I'm sorry I tried to shoot you." Pause. "And blow you up."

As far as Raph was concerned, he deserved that annoyance and then some, as all true pains in the butt did.

"Yeah, whatever," he said, in true teenager fashion. "I guess it's not your fault. I was on edge when Mikey and I got pulled here, too, and it turned out we had good reason to be because some myths working for Kuk nearly got us killed."

Fun fun.

"So if it had been them, you going on the offensive would've been a good thing. And they would've deserved a grenade to the face."

Edited 2014-12-02 06:15 (UTC)

"There's pretty much nothing back home that would try to take me somewhere in an abandoned field that doesn't deserve a grenade to the face. But, uh, thanks. I know I ain't the nicest guy to meet in an abandoned field and you were just trying to help, so . . . thanks."

Being helped, actually helped, for no reason other than to keep him out of more trouble and because it was the right thing to do, by someone other than Sam or Bobby was . . . really unusual. And Dean wasn't used to it. So not-used to it, he'd almost killed a kid, but of course if anyone was going to mistakenly kill an innocent, helpful kid, wouldn't it be him?

"Which myths?" he asked, veering away from the self-hating train of thought. He needed to know the specific threats of this world, and soon.

Edited 2014-12-02 06:22 (UTC)

"You can stop thanking me and stuff now," said Raph, vaguely discomfited by it.

Mostly because he wasn't used to it. No one even knew they did nice stuff or helped people, let alone thanked them for it. It felt...weird.

"It's weird," he blurted out before realizing that might come off like he was saying that it was weird Dean was thanking him and not that it was just weird to hear it. "I mean, I get you're trying to be appreciative. I'm just not used to it. No one thanks us back home."

Even hunters got the occasional 'thank you for saving my life.'

"Anyway, the myths that attacked us were some weird British action movie villain type guy named Benedict, Bloody Mary - as in the Bloody Mary - and The Trunchbull from that movie with the girl who can move stuff with her brain. They beat us senseless and dumped us in Times Square with these collars that suppressed our myth powers and tipped off these government agents that we were there. Then they took us to this creepy government lab and - and Nico and the twins got us out."

He didn't go into what had happened in said lab because he really didn't want to.

Edited 2014-12-02 06:35 (UTC)

"Hey, it's only right," Dean shrugged, glad to be done with the niceties.

"Bloody Mary? I must've killed her once." He scratched the back of his head, looking back, thoughtful - "Nah, just a ghost pulling her schtick. What's the real thing do?"

He didn't want to ask what had happened in the lab, and didn't need to. It wasn't his business. His business was killing Bloody Marys wherever he met them.

"As far as I can tell she was all about trying to gouge our eyes out. Luckily, she didn't do it when we were out. The Trunchbull was just the muscle. That Benedict guy, though...he kept saying stuff about giving us our fitting bad ending and knowing how stories worked. He was definitely another myth like us but he was talking about genre-savvy and stuff, like he thought all this was a story."

Super creepy.

"He was the one in charge. He said he needed to destroy the idea of us. I think that's why he dumped us like that - everyone saw us get dragged off and were all upset by it. He wanted that to be the last anyone saw of us before..."

He cut that thought off at the pass.

Edited 2014-12-02 07:07 (UTC)

"Makes sense." By then, Dean had gotten the rundown. "We get our power from being believed in, so the guy tries to take down the idols behind the idolatry. Does that mean if we lose in front of kids, we lose harder?"

It was a weird concept. Almost as weird as the concept of his life as something that children watched.

"Still kinda wanna punch a parent who let their kid watch me and Sam do our work in the face though."

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[LN] Beat of His Own Drums [Open]

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