“If anyone in this city is qualified to teach a roomful of people how to become ninja, it's me,” the presenter said.
In the back of the room, Steve laughed, quickly covering his mouth and trying to stifle it. But this seemed like exactly the queue the presenter was looking for.
“Oh? You question the qualifications of Jack Thunder? Assistant?” A man rolled, improbably, out from under the bunting around the table up on the stage, where Jack was speaking into a microphone. At once, Jack and the assistant pulled out weapons: Jack, a foam katana, and the assistant, a rapid-fire NERF minigun, loaded full of foam darts.
“EAT LEAD, DIRTBAG!” the assistant yelled, loosing a volley of several, and then dozens, of styrofoam projectiles.
Jack let out what would be best described as a “ninja battle cry”, and with incredible precision, speed, and reaction times, deflected the attack, Foam dart after foam dart impacted the floor, the wall, the sword, and the occupants of the first two rows of the panel room, but not a single one hit Jack.
After a moment of stunned silence, the crowd erupted in applause.
The presenter was a skinny, white man, with a greasy black ponytail that ran halfway down his back, with an undeniably real yet difficult to ascertain aura of pure Canadian-ness. He was wearing a pair of traditional Japanese hakama pants, and a white graphic t-shirt stating, simply, “Greatest Swordsman on the Entire Internet.” He bowed, in a way both theatrical and vaguely Japanese, before taking his place back behind the presenter's table.
As he was walking back to his microphone, Alan saw someone strangely familiar dart through the cracked-open door, and take a seat near the front. Most of his thoughts were, statistically, “Oh fuck” at #1, “Oh shit” at #2, “Fuck me” at #3, “How much does it cost to hire a lawyer” at #4, and “does googling “did I do a murder” put me on a watchlist” at #5, but there was, just barely, enough of his brain left to recognize the girl as the same one who was sitting next to him at the opening ceremonies. He couldn't see much of her, but whatever pattern-recognition that lay at the deep parts of human consciousness, the same part that got spooked when it saw something that vaguely looked like a face in the dark of night, knew it was her, and he was kind of taken aback at how pretty she was. She had short, boyish hair, but it was thick, poofy, the kind that he'd instinctually want to ruffle in a teasing sort of way, were he an anime protagonist, and from a tiny, brief glance, she looked to have thick, dark eyebrows, the kind of strikingly expressive kind he'd seen on the protagonist of Labyrinth and crushed on as a kid – Elizabeth Berkley? No, uh… Fuck, who was it?
Alan winced, and his concentration broke.
“Jennifer Connelly!” he exclaimed, though as he realized he was talking out-loud, he attempted to tamp down his volume.
Steve smiled. “Fuck yeah, dude, she was so hot in Labyrinth,” he said, raising his hand for a high-five to Alan.
Jeff reached around Alan to answer Steve's hanging hand. Steve let out a “YEAH!” under his breath, and Jeff grinned. As the panel was starting, and the room was quieting, he leaned in front of Alan to whisper into Steve's ear, who leaned to meet him.
“Did you know she had a hit single in Japan?”
“What?” No fucking way,” Steve replied.
“Seriously. I've got it on white vinyl.”
“Bullshit,” Steve said, but then he reconsidered. “Eh, it's you, I trust you. Show me sometime.”
Now was the time for Jeff to give a wicked smile. If there was any sexual tension in the moment, Jeff would be nibbling, like a devil, on Steve's ear. “Only if you watch Mahou Shojou Lyrical Nanoha.”
“Fuck me,” Steve whispered, as the presenter began talking about the historical conditions that led to the existence of ninja. There was still some time before they addressed the memetic confluence of the vague concept with 1980s American action movies that created the modern nerd's idea of what a “ninja” was. “Only the first thirteen episodes, okay?”
“It's a deal,” Jeff said, holding out his hand.
They shook across Alan's chest, and he made no effort to get out of the way. It didn't stop them.
“A ninja, by the modern conception codified in 1980s movies and continued throughout contemporary nerd culture, is effectively considered to be a mythological creature operating on its own rules, like the fey folk.”
This didn't land with the audience.
“You try to kill a ninja, you need to kill the ninja on its own rules. Ask any Naruto fan if Superman can kill Naruto. You'll get an “only if he can hit Naruto”, which is basically fey folk rules. Play by their rules, or don't play at all. But that's not what I'm here to teach you. It is literally impossible to teach you how to obey a fundamentally different set of rules than the rest of reality, and that's something you're just going to have to cope with.”
A strangely realistic sound of disappointment echoed through the room. Even if the groans were only from one out of every ten people, the disappointment hit home.
The presenter swept a greasy lock of hair that had freed itself from his ponytail out of his eyeline. “That's not the kind of ninja you can become. However… Have any of you worked for a wage? Part-time at some convenience store, hating your boss, knowing that only if the world understood your value, you'd be treated better?”
A hesitant, pained cheer rang out.
“That is the spirit of the ninja. You wanna get ninja? Let's get ninja,” he said, gesturing towards a drop-down projector screen to his left. His left, not stage left, to be clear. A convention staff technical assistant darted to the projector, checking the A/V connections and various other things that only they would ever care about, and hit a button.
In quick succession, several clips from the third Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, released in 1993, played, focusing extensively on the weapons used by the titular mutant reptiles.
“Did you notice anything about those?”
Someone in the third row raised their hand. “They're all rad as fuck!”
Jack laughed. “Yeah, but look closer. What's the commonality?”
The video was queued up again, but this time, Jack was controlling it through a remote, advancing the film frame by frame, and pausing strategically. He pointed out a half-dozen different specific weapons, talking about their origin, proper usage, and historical context.
“Each one of these weapons is something obtainable by poor farmers, poor laborers, people who are without power, and the work of the ninja is, among other things, using the implements of their trade to take power back from those who hold it above them. Ninjas are the ultimate revolutionaries. And therefore, even if you don't have training, even if you don't have stealth or resources or anything at all, you can embody the spirit of the ninja just by trying to reclaim the power over your own life that's been taken from you.”
A murmur spread throughout the room as the audience ruminated on this. Jack let this play out, until…
“Now that you know the philosophy of the ninja, want to learn how to catch a sword?”
A roar went up in the crowd, and Jack picked out two people – a short girl who looked like she'd knitted at least five Doctor Who scarves in the past year, and… the girl Alan had been talking to.
Jack handed his foam sword to Sawyer, and gave the shorter girl a glove to wear, before ushering her to the side. Alan couldn't stop staring at the blade. It was foam. It had to be foam. But he kept seeing gleaming steel, a sharp edge, ready to draw blood. His blood. The blood of criminals, of evil, of - “First, to demonstrate, let's have a control! Swing that sword at me!”
Sawyer did, and swung it right at Jack's neck. He raised his hand to block it, and caught it in-between the fingers of his hand, stopping the blade. He also yelled in pain, collapsing to his knees. Before anyone could react, he waved at the crowd.
“That's exactly how it should feel to catch a sword with your hand! Really goddamn painful! But watch how a ninja does it!” He beckoned the short girl with the glove to come forward.
“Again,” he said.
The girl raised her gloved hand to block the sword, but as Sawyer brought the sword down, she deflected its course to the side, and redirected it to hit the shorter girl on the side of the knee, making her fall to the deck of the stage, groaning. He should be up there. He should be the one getting hit. If he was there, it would have sliced right through, taking his shin off just below the knee. And he'd deserve it.
The audience didn't know what to do with this, but Jack pulled them both aside. After a quick reassurance to the short girl, and a longer discussion with Sawyer, he flourished to the crowd again;
“Okay, teething problems happen! If you want to be a ninja, keep in mind that you could get cut. Again!”
This time, Sawyer swung the sword in a deliberate arc, and the short girl caught it in her gloved hand, holding back the strike effortlessly and without pain. She may have caught it with her hands, but Alan couldn't stop thinking of catching it with his neck. It'd bounce off, wouldn't it? He'd heard of an executioner who'd worked his whole life, from the age of sixteen all the way into his eighties. Was there a spot to aim for where the head would come off cleanly, and if so, could that executioner still hit it as an octogenarian? Did practice overcome age? Did it matter to the people on the other end of the blade?
“Perfect!” He ushered them both off the stage, and showed the glove to the crowd, turning it in-side out. Underneath the surface, there was a strip of metal sewn into the fabric.
“You can't catch a sword in your hands, but you can catch a sword with an armored glove. It's all about preparation, and about your opponent not knowing what you have! Same thing as revolution, really. Now, I've got a few other tricks to show you, and you'll get to try them against the voice actor of legendary ninjas across all of anime, Jonathan-”
The staff assistant frantically waved him off.
“What?”
The assistant ran to Jack, and whispered something in his ear. His skin visibly paled, and he took a moment to speak again.
“He uh… Won't be available. I guess… I'll be your opponent?”
The technical assistant nodded.
“Yeah, I'll be your opponent! Now, let's take volunteers from the crowd!”
Steve leaned over to Alan's ear. “That girl gets it. All the demonstrations in the world won't save you if your enemy's unpredictable.”
He tried his best to stop thinking. But every sword swung for his head. Every dagger was pressed to his neck. A move meant to break an assailant's arm would break his. He could feel the bile rising in his throat, but…
Thankfully, overwhelmed, taxed beyond its limits, his mind shut down, and he just watched.
Alan just thought that she probably should have just played along with the panel.
Nothing else of note happened, and forty-five minutes later, the only thing left that stuck in Alan's mind was the sight of Sawyer leaving the room halfway through.