[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Baseball, Part 1

Genre: Comedy

Length: 2927 words

B/D: Giving baseball the heavy comedy meme treatment with QP and company. Please excuse me when I miss the finer points; I've done some research, but I am British. This is going to be a multi-part story, so there will probably be three or four more of these when I get around to doing them.

Syura arched an eyebrow, or at least tried to. She was, technically, an eyebrow impaired individual; hers started out strong, but became so light and pale halfway through that people accused her of shaving them, or otherwise made helpful suggestions involving eyebrow pencils. Arming Syura with an eyebrow pencil was like giving a crayon to a toddler: she would draw on surfaces that were never meant to be drawn on, and smudge things never meant to be smudged. She had accepted the onus of a demi-browed existence, but occasionally the natural urge to wiggle them around still reared its ugly head.

“You’re saying you can beat me? At baseball?” she asked flatly. “QP, you don’t know who you’re dealing with, do you?”

QP blinked slowly, although her tail began to wag. She’d known Syura since they were both little kids, and she’d never shown any particular aptitude for sports. It didn’t seem like a bold claim to suggest that an active and energetic dog with good grades in PE could beat a girl whose biggest muscles were in her palms. But whatever had got Syura riled up, it was at least bound to be interesting, so she decided to play along. “Sure I do. And you’re just mad because Krila beat you at Pokem–”

“She did not beat me,” Syura contended hotly. “We agreed three sets of three, and we got our handhelds confiscated after the first one.”

“Because you were yelling about it and the teachers came.”

“I was yelling because it was unexpected, okay?! Turns out she’s actually great at ’mons games. But that’s not the point.”

QP opened her mouth in quiet wonder. Usually, Syura didn’t have a point, or she lost it halfway through any game-related speech. She was surprised and vaguely proud of her best friend, and wordlessly offered her a carton of banana flavoured milk from her lunch box. Syura knocked it aside, which was fine, because neither of them actually liked banana flavoured milk but QP kept buying it.

“The point is that baseball isn’t your game. You’re good at sport, but you suck at batting and you suck at pitching. You wanna know why? It’s because baseball is about more than raw athleticism.” Syura puffed her chest out, which usually was a sign she was going to say something stupid. “It’s about numbers.”

QP considered this. It was true that baseball had a lot of numbers in it. The score, for example, and the amount of players, and the players always had shirts with numbers on the back. It did seem like too much maths for an honest game. But fundamentally, it was just taking a chunk of wood, hitting a ball with it as hard as you could, and then running around a lot. In summary, it seemed like Syura was out of her mind, a sentiment she didn’t hesitate to relay.

“No way. When you look at baseball, it has one of the highest concentrations of stats of any sports game. You can use past records to predict almost anything to a reasonable degree of accuracy. And on the management front, a good grasp of markets, wages and finance can turn a historically lacklustre team into a real contender in the blink of an eye. There’s strategy on every level. No matter how you look at it, the truth is this: baseball is the sport of nerds!”

She let this declaration ring through the air of the school, which attracted a number of stares. Thankfully, none of them belonged the school baseball team, who would have been happy to inform her that they were, in fact, not just nerds – they were nerds with baseball bats, which accorded them a much higher position in the school pecking order. A man with a big stick is often treated more respectfully than a man without one.

QP’s tail began to wag faster.

“Yeah, but all the stats in the world can’t make you good with a bat. I don’t think you’d stand a chance against me at all,” QP said, and then, without knowing it, said some of the most dangerous words in the English language. “Games and real life aren’t the same thing, you know?”

To say that Syura erupted would probably be disrespectful to volcanoes, which, while usually smelly, were generally large and imposing. Syura generally lacked the sulphurous odour, but also lacked the stature to make her anger impressive. But she tried to erupt, and that was half the battle.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t use the skills I learned as a gamer! Reaction speed, hand-eye co-ordination, the ability to mix a green herb with a red one to fully recover health! Those are my weapons, QP! What do you have?”

She jabbed her finger at QP’s chest as she spoke, which was a very brave and dangerous thing to be doing. For various reasons, QP preferred to keep Syura’s hands as far away from her chest as she could – on another continent, if possible, but if not, detaching them from Syura seemed like a good way to handle the situation. Unfortunately, the knives at the school canteen just weren’t sharp enough to saw somebody’s hand off at the wrist. They never were.

“Well, for one, I don’t suck at sport,” she replied mildly. “And I do regular exercise, which you don’t. And my eyes are good, since I don’t spend all my time looking at a computer screen.”

Syura rose to her full height – for what it was worth – and puffed out her chest. “You’re just one person, though. Baseball is about the whole team. And I bet a whole case of pudding that a team with my leadership would crush one with you leading it.”

QP’s ears pricked up. There were four puddings in a package, and eight packages in a case. A case of pudding was sixty four puddings. That was a not inconsiderable amount of pudding, and she needed to consume it – purely in the interests of world peace and public safety, of course.

“Deal.”

The news spread across the school like wildfire, and like wildfires caused a lot of screaming and devastation. It was Syura’s Sluggers versus the Pudding Packers, two nascent teams that didn’t exist yet and should probably never be allowed to exist at all. Everybody wanted to see it and no-one wanted to be a part of it; bets were being taken, lots were being drawn, and QP and Syura were both being studiously avoided as they beat the drum of recruitment.

“Krila! I want you on my team,” QP bellowed the next day as she stormed into the cafeteria. “You always get picked last in sports, so this time I’m picking you first!”

The cafeteria stood in shock as a single package of red bean bread fell to the floor, with no effort made to retrieve it. For a moment, all was silent, and all was still. Like a deer in the headlights, Krila turned her one, baleful eye towards QP. Whispers began to travel around the massed students – was it really fair to strong-arm Krila, who was a pitiable loner, like this? Shouldn’t somebody stand up for her?

“You… you would harness my power? For a sports game? A pitiful celebration of athletics?” Krila asked, in her most booming and theatrical voice.

“Sure! Sports are more fun with friends,” QP nodded, her tail wagging slowly. “Join my team, Krila. I won’t let Syura have you.”

The silence grew, like suspicious mold on a discarded pizza slice. There were a lot of discarded pizza slices in the school canteen, which was suspicious by itself.

“Very well. My contract… is with the Beast God…!” Krila declared, when she felt the timing was right. As always, she put every ounce of dramatic gravitas into her statement, and did such a good job that nobody even realised she was crying tears of quiet joy, until her eyepatch got soggy.

She lurched towards QP for an awkward but enthusiastic hug, and as she did, students began to sidle out of the cafeteria and quietly re-assess their betting strategies. On one hand, QP now had a single team mate, which was a single team mate more than Syura had managed. On the other, her team mate was notorious for wearing her eyepatch in PE lessons, lacking any hint of depth perception or hand-eye co-ordination, and managing to be both perennially malnourished and somehow pudgy at the same time. The Pudding Packers were still the stronger team, for the moment, but it illuminated that QP was very stupid in her her recruitment strategies. Quietly, but irresistibly, the odds began to shift towards Syura’s Sluggers.

Syura’s Sluggers, however, had their own problems, the fact that they hadn’t really earned their pluralisation. The team motto of ‘Love, Justice, and Videogames’ was not really going over quite as well as Syura had hoped; she had bet on the strength of her management skills, but currently she had nothing to manage.

It was time to enact Plan A: Desperate Measures. (Plans B and C were also ‘Desperate Measures’, but with added exclamation marks.)

“Join my baseball team,” she said, slapping her wallet on the counter.

Arthur looked down at her with barely disguised disdain. Although the sound of a wallet being placed on his counter was extremely invigorating, he was already tired from a long day of capitalism, and had been looking forward to idling away the rest of the shift reading a baking magazine. Contrary to popular opinion, he was a keen baker, with a very large collection of aprons. Somebody had once told him that real man didn’t wear aprons, and he had politely disagreed and then politely applied violence to back up his point. Real men wore aprons because real men wore fine-quality tailored shirts, and weren’t stupid enough to go anywhere near cookie dough without at least some rudimentary protective equipment.

“Does this look like a baseball dugout? Get lost,” he said, and continued his quest to find a cake that had macademia nuts, but wasn’t a coffee cake. Nico loved macademias, hated coffee – even though she insisted on making his morning brew these days. To be fair to her, she made it almost as well as he did, although she didn’t put a shot of whisky in while nobody was looking. The whisky was mandatory, because giving Arthur a stimulant without an accompanying depressant was Bad News, and so he generally tended to tip the coffee into the plant pot. In the name of public safety, of course.

“Listen. I’m going to be totally honest with you,” Syura lied. “I made a bet with a friend. A dumb bet. So I need to beat her in a game of baseball. I put my pride on the line in a sporting competition. Right there, in that wallet, is all the money I made from my last doujin game. It’s the symbol of my entrepreneurial spirit! I’m not asking for much. All I want you to do is come down to the park for one afternoon and knock out a few $8 taxi rides with those old man muscles of yours.”

“I ain’t that old,” he grumbled. But his scheming mercantile mind was already eyeing up the possibilities. If a brat like Syura was playing ball, she was probably wanting to do it on the school field. It would be an event. Parents would turn out to see their kids mess up easy catches and knock fastballs into the dirt. He had plenty of sports equipment in his store backstock – little boys were always asking for bats and catcher mitt’s. Nine players a team meant eighteen bats and uniforms he could sell to the school organisers at ‘discount’ prices, maybe earning some repeat trade. If it blew up enough, the local media might even catch a whiff of it. It’d be free publicity, the best kind there was. He could milk a lot of cash from an afternoon’s work, if he was lucky and diligent. And when you were naturally equipped with a pair of rabbit’s feet, luck wasn’t that hard to find. There was just one last factor to take into consideration.

“How much is in that wallet?” he asked.

Several expressions whirled across Syura’s face, as quickly as the dancing colours on a roulette wheel; after a few seconds of emotional incoherence, she eventually landed on ‘indignant’.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to go!” she said, with a pout that really belonged on somebody twice her age and half her weight. “You’re not supposed to ask questions! You’re supposed to take the opportunity to boost your stupid ego by crushing a bunch of teenagers at stickball, and become moved by my merchant’s spirit!”

“Yeah, well. I’d be a lot more moved if you slipped me a fifty.” Arthur sighed, and went back to his magazine. “Time is money. If you want my time, you pay me. Asking for a fair wage isn’t a luxury. It’s basic self-respect.”

He jerked his head towards the door as if to indicate the matter was closed, and that might well have been the end of it if Aru had not picked that moment to walk into the room, wearing her most thoughtful expression. Aru’s thoughtful expression was the most dangerous one she had, because unlike anyone she hung around with, she was actually smart enough that the thoughts might go somewhere.

“A baseball game, huh? I think you should go, Arthur. It’d be a great chance to spend some quality time with Nico, wouldn’t it? I’m sure she’d love to see what you can do with a bat.”

Arthur’s skill with a bat mostly extended to breaking people’s kneecaps, and Aru knew it. But she did have a point. What kind of father would he be if he didn’t seize the opportunity to show off to his daughter, now that one had been presented to him? If he was lucky, he might even get the chance to be embarrassing, which was worth double the parenting points. Arthur nodded, slowly. Despite all appearances, he was a dad first and a merchant second.

“…Fine. Tell you what. You let Nico on your team as well, and I’ll make it work. Don’t get me wrong – I still expect to get paid. But I’ll set you up some credit. Put it on your tab.”

He held his hand out to shake, and Syura wouldn’t have grabbed it faster if it had contained one million dollars and a thoroughbred pony – which, to be fair it might have, because as hands went it was large and capacious: perfect for catching balls, and also wrapping around the necks of people who reneged on their promise to slip him a fifty.

“Alright! This means our team is 1.33 repeating times as good as QP’s!” Syura declared. “Let’s turn this into a sweep. Aru, what would it take to get you on my baseball team?”

Aru pondered the question, because Syura had just very kindly handed her a blank cheque – an act of true bravery that deserved some amount of respect. And the more she thought about it, the more she realised that she was, at heart, a very practical bunny, at least when she wasn’t out of her mind with worry about her presents.

“I want the rights to the concessions,” she said, with a smile far too sweet to be good for anybody.

Arthur slowly took off his sunglasses, which he wore both indoors and at night, so that the look of utter defeat on his face was known to all. Aru had outmanoeuvred him. The iron law of baseball was that a baseball fan would eat anything you presented them with, provided you called it a hot-dog; with her knack for training Rbits and ReBits, she would have a huge, mobile catering corps that could serve a whole crowd at once, with minimum quality products and maximum quality margins. People sometimes wondered why he, a successful self-employed toy-store owner, would work behind the counter of the Rbit Room at Aru’s behest. The fact that Aru was going to rake in money hand-over-fist while he’d settled for a quick fifty and some nascent opportunities was a large part of his reason.

And the best thing about it – the thing that really marked her out as a master – was that Syura didn’t know she was losing a single thing.

“Done and done! Alright, so we’re now four versus two. My first order as team captain is to go out and find some more team members, because people like you better than me. After that, we’ll start scheduling some practice sessions! I’ll meet you tomorrow at sixteen-hundred hours to discuss our results. Ten-hut!”

After telling them to stand to attention, she turned around and marched from the store, her little chest puffed out as far as it would go. They watched her as she went, quietly boggled by her ability at manufacturing both nonsense and opportunities for delicious, delicious profit.

After a few moments had passed, Arthur took a cigarette from his jacket pocket and pretended to light it. (He wasn’t allowed a lighter behind the counter.)

“You sure this is alright? You’re going up against that dog girl. Isn’t she your friend?” he asked.

“Oh, that’s fine. She won’t hold it against us,” she said, with a smile that was still sickly sweet. “We’re going to lose anyway. Now, grab me the phone book. I have a few calls to make about our catering…”

A/N: Ah... I love doing these silly comedy things, even if I don't get much opportunity. Sometimes it's nice to stop worrying and just crack jokes.