I'll be a Sportsman

Homeroom ended after an eternity. When Tanabe-sensei was compelled to slink back to his lair in the second-floor faculty, the students of 2-C finally got the chance to heckle the new guy.

Sitting like a king on his laminated wood and aluminum throne, Theo pounced at the chance to demonstrate his magnanimity, and it wasn’t long before he was regaling them with tall tales of growing up in the States.

Of course, things were going a lot smoother now that he was actually speaking Japanese. They crowded around him and hung at his every word. Here was a person of mystery and presence, and the various cliques were eager to draw this big bombastic foreigner into their fold.

Theo felt a familiar disdain well up inside him. 

He had seen enough of the lost and the damned, bringing out madness in their search for power, pleasure, profit.  Desperately wishing for what they feared the most to pass them over, never realizing what they did only brought it closer. It always ended the same way, but not without dragging more and more down with them. Not without making the Unit bleed. 

The difference between protected and hunted was that of a few measly steps, alright. For all that they’d done to protect their same kind back in the States, what did these jokers here know of the things Theo had seen? 

He looked into each one of their eyes and found nothing there.

“The hell’s wrong with you!?”

The holler came from a boy. Theo matched the voice with the face of a bruiser, all harsh angles and spiky hair. A troublemaker, if the guy's bandage couldn’t be any more on his straight nose, standing tall over the rest of the class. He was taller than even Theo, at six-feet plus change.

“I mean, the hell do you think you are, acting all high-and-mighty around here?”

With his distinctive accent, the tall boy was addressing none other than Theo.

“Come all the way from America just to look down on us?”  

The bruiser said that as he approached, before giving Theo a light shove and making some of the audience gasp. The way those eyes bored into Theo, he must have been chomping at the bit to test his mettle. Theo approved. 

That’s the spirit. Greenhorns always have to get knocked around a little.

With his eyes crinkled, this guy reminded him of nothing so much as a mad dog.
Was this guy on a short fuse, or was he just looking for trouble? Whatever the reason, a physical altercation on the first day was not in the dockets. Theo made a conciliarity gesture, but matched his stare eye for eye. 

“Of course not. I guess I just got a bit too excited, is all.”

If this guy wanted to put on a show of staying top-dog, then Theo would let him. But he wasn’t about to wilt to this runt’s gaze. Thus the two were deadlocked, both unwilling to back down but neither willing to escalate.

Then the front door slid open.

It was the next teacher letting herself in, and all of a sudden the tension let itself out the door. The other guy looked frustrated, but it was over. He backed off, but not before muttering something at Theo under his breath.

“Wimp.”

Everyone went back to their seats to greet the middle-aged woman. She responded with the first-day pleasantries, none the wiser to the confrontation she’d broken up with her arrival.

Theo rested fist-on-cheek against his desk, hiding a hint of a smirk.

Kohei Hara-san, was it? He might have found someone with some fire in his belly after all.

 

Not too different from the “gentlemen’s courses” after OSUT, classes dragged on throughout the morning and the afternoon. The coursework was nothing too surprising, barring the subjects specific to the Japanese syllabus. Those would have entailed a lot of catching up for a second-year that had received his education someplace else. 

 Lucky for him, he didn’t count on being around for his first report card. 

If they asked him, he did think that P.E. in the curriculum left much to be desired. When 2-C found out that they were first in line for the physical fitness test, he was one of the few who didn’t groan. Here was another opportunity to further his manufactured fame, starting with the changing room.

At one-hundred-eighty pounds, he was far from the biggest guy back in the Unit, even when tier-one special-squirrel types tended towards the leaner side. That was the body type you got, when much of the job was legging it fifty miles to your objective, then legging it back strapped with thirty- plus kilos of gear. 

Nevertheless, his physique still drew eyes as he changed into gym clothes. It was on another level from the afterschool athletes, much less the average fatbodies and skinny-fats. Only one or two varsity boys even came close.

When the class met back up at the athletic field to conduct the test, Theo stamped up for his turn like Hercules come to the Far East for a thirteenth labor. And labored marvelously he did. One after another, Theo reached or breached every record the school had to offer, and barely worked up a sweat doing it.

The first four tests were for the upper body: grip strength, sit-up, sit & reach, and handball throw.

He might have been the one to break the grip dynamometer, since it only started acting up after his turn with it. He had been working on his pinch strength, after all. The incident with the handball was definitely his fault; thankfully, the teacher just made him get a new one than search the patch of woods the one he threw disappeared into.

Next up was the legs portion of the PFT: a jog for one-thousand five hundred meters, twenty meter shuttle run, fifty meter dash, standing long jump, and a side-step agility test.

With even better confidence in his lower body, he put out even more astounding numbers in the latter half. When he passed finish for the endurance run, he looked behind for the first time since go. Second wasn’t even close.

Theo took a breather. He might have been overdoing it, but he didn’t feel up to peak form either. His fault for slacking lately. 

With the last test done, he took a moment to take a sip from his water bottle. It was the first water he'd allowed himself since the start of the test.

He got mobbed again by his classmates for his feats. Only later did he notice Hara in the corner bent over, panting red and soaked through. Theo remembered that he was that second man on the run. Was he trying to match him all this time? Talk about overdoing it.

At the same time, Hara met his gaze. Those eyes burned with an indignation he didn’t bother to disguise, now. He expected another saber-rattling, but Hara instead made himself scarce; Theo wouldn’t see him again until next period.  A whipped dog doesn’t bark after all, he thought.

The school day was about to end. The teacher for the last class had called in sick, and Theo found that much more time for his initial reconnaissance. He was passing through a hallway when he noticed something in the air, level with the rooftops.

Buzzing like an overgrown hornet, a drone of the quadcopter type was drawing a lazy circle. Its single electronic eye wobbled with the wind, unsure and unsteady. On a closer look, he noticed the gossamer cable that anchored the drone to the ground. 

Following the cable down and peering into the quadrangle revealed the pilot, seated at one of a collection of tables laid out in the shadow of the main buildings, alongside a tabletop thick with doodads. His face was masked by FPV goggles, but something about him was familiar.

The driver was surrounded by geekish company– these ones Theo definitely didn’t know. They were stuck to the sight above and among themselves, paying little outside their bubble mind.

Theo cycled through his class roster, and ventured to think that he might have stumbled on something interesting. And so he found himself approaching the group. With a few feet more to go, he could see them tense up at the imminent and foreign intrusion, as if he was about to interrupt their ministries to their machine gods.

Thinking of something to reassure these anxious creatures, Theo held his open palm up, fingers parted, in replication of a sign from one of the few TV shows he’d managed to catch in-between missions and training. The gesture had no appreciable effect. 

Well, it was an attempt. More of an Exo-Squad guy, anyway.

He put his hand down and used his words. 

“Don’t mind me. That’s a nice piece of kit you got up there. Fiber-optic control– you guys expecting to get jammed? ”

His overture finally caught the last member's notice. The pilot laid his controller down to pull his goggles off, and Theo at last had his ID. He knew he remembered that scruffy hair from earlier, and the sallow face that revealed itself confirmed as much. 

 It was someone from his class, and he pegged him as the nerd type the moment he laid eyes on. He was one of the few to keep to himself after homeroom, when the class blew up around Theo. And he alone of the group looked him in the eye with annoyance. Theo guessed that this pilot, the most out of all of them, didn’t appreciate being torn away from his virtual world.

“Sakai-san, right?”

“You’re the American.” he said matter-of-factly, as he put on his glasses.

“The real deal.”

“You’re not fat.” Sakai observed. The jaws of every other person at the table with him dropped.

Theo chuckled. If the abject horror on the faces of his buddies didn’t do it, then the temerity of this boy in glasses would have. He was liking him more and more.

“I’m different.” Theo answered with a smirk, before proceeding with his pitch. 

Theo knew what the nerds liked. He didn't consider himself a specialist in drones or electronic warfare, but a pro had to familiarize himself with the emergent tools of his trade. In short order, he impressed the cadre in front of him with his knowledge of the invisible world of electromagnetics.

He hit it off with his classmate Shigeru Sakai especially, striking up a spirited discussion on the latest advancements in guidance systems. 

“It seems overbuilt to me. I mean, what do they need the SoC for?” Theo opined as they went over the innards of a satellite-linked drone that was making the rounds online.

Sakai took the question up emphatically.

“That's the thing. You don’t need that stuff for short-range work, like say a couple kilometers, but if you’re building something with a loooong-range– how should I put this– you need to translate ethernet slash internet to serial communication right?”

“That will certainly do.” Theo nodded sagely. Even with his background, the torrent of Japanese jargon that Sakai opened up almost outstripped his limited grasp on the finer points of the tech. He could still follow his harangue, if barely.

“Not only that, but it also gives you enough juice to run real-time encryption–really, everything that they used here is easy to get even as a hobbyist– motors, ESCs, all off the shelf– It’s brilliant!”

They’d both lost track of time when the five o’clock chimes sounded the end of the day, and that of their chat. They broke it off as Sakai’s group had to pack up their stuff, but that was how Theo made himself a friend by the end of his first day as a Japanese student. A useful one, for the information he would find the bespectacled devil privy to. 

But that wasn’t the only thing he made off with as a result of that exchange; Theo had also been taking measurements of the hobby group’s largest and undoubtedly most expensive drone– the same one he saw flying– with his eyes all throughout. Truth be told, his interest in drones ended at the pointy end. 

But that one will certainly do.