Shinji's Training [Open]

Weapon Sprinklets






He was wet. In fact, he was soaked and irritated for it. Shinji wore his usual attire on this casually bleak day. He was clothed in a black, tastefully fitting, V-neck shirt and dripping with condensation. His tan cargo pants, normally slightly baggy, hung well below his knees due to the weight of the water, and his hair draped over his eyes like one of those wayward teens too chill to care for fashionable standards.

He looked uncomfortable. He was uncomfortable. Hunchback and stiff, he moved the way people did when they were soaked. Slow and unconsciously dramatic, his body moved inflexibly. Like some enraged bodybuilder who was nearing his victim menacingly, or rather, as fast as a hulk could. Dragging his bare feet through the dust and dirt, he trudged to the center of the vacant lot he normally trained in. There was a small house, rather shack, fifty yards from the center of the plot where Shinji stood.

Its original hue was indiscernible and all that remained were shades of an ugly teal, infested brown and pale white. From a distance, one might think it had been made of cardboard the way the building seemed to literally slouch to its right. The roof, a standard triangle adjoining at the top, was made of some variously shaded, black tile substance and it had caved on the right side leaving a stereotypically scripted hole in the corroded building. Pieces of plank and rubble littered the immediate space surrounding the structure. However, the lot itself, although barren and lifeless, was level and clean.

The plot of land, an oversized space for a children’s baseball game, was roughly shaped like a circle. Its borders were set by riffraff crosswire iron fences that seemed to have been worn by the likes of mischievously bored children. The cold iron shivered in the wind. Wilting to and fro the fence looked like it should’ve already collapsed. The fence stopped at both the northern and southern ends of the lot. The northern end being where the slouching house had been for some time, and the southern end being a back alley which exited to the village streets.

Erected thirty yards to west of Shinji, were three straw dummies, they’d been adequately distanced from each other at varying depths and angles. The dummies, personally fashioned by the boy, were routinely made. Their base was oval shaped, plump and slightly wider than the red bull’s eye painted on its chest. The head was cylindrically shaped and also marked by a bull’s eye at its center. The arms were straight cylinders, jutting from the sides, placed slightly below where the shoulders would be, and marked with bull’s eyes at the assumed location of hands.

To the far north corner, almost eerily incongruous with its purpose or location, was a well. Shabbily built, its base consisted of a misshapen wooden square just large enough for a child to fall into. The roof, a four sided triangle that adjoined at its peak, was held by four wooden beams placed at the corners of the square. The bucket, as well as the draw string, was missing, however, if one leaned his or her ear to the abysmal darkness that lies below. Dripping water could be heard, falling almost methodically into the small body of water at its depths making that sharp, echoing sound.

Nonetheless, this was where Shinji trained and as soaked as he’d gotten himself for today’s session. He’d better have a good one.