It's another long day of work at Yuko's supermarket. Well, technically it's not /her/ supermarket, but her parents's. She just happens to work there. The supermarket is a fair bit bigger than the average mom and pop store, but not quite as big as those belonging to a corporate chain or anything like that. The store itself is also kept immaculately clean, both inside and out, even around the dumpsters along the side wall just outside of the supermarket. There's even a little awning off to the other side with convenient posts for chaining bikes or dogs to!
Yuko's part in the whole thing, of course, is doing most of the grunt work. Cleaning, restocking, things that require someone with a not-yet-injured back. Today is no different, and she's exiting the store with two massive bags of garbage hefted over her shoulders. She's not moving all that quickly, though, since... Well, it's garbage. She's not in any rush to drop it off just to go grab more of it from the inside.
Vespa is out shopping! She was sent out to pick up some groceries for dinner. She inside the grocery store looking over her list and currenly in front of the produce secction. "Why are there so many types of lettuce??"
The first thing odd that Yuko might notice is a sort of.. vibration in the ground. As if something very heavy is driving nearby, or maybe a very distant earthquake. The sort of thing you barely notice, but you /do/ notice. There's also a strange.. vibration in the air. Like a weird humm. It gets louder as she exits the store and proceeds towards the dumpster.
Of course, the /second/, and by far more immidiately concerning thing that she notices is the dumpster she is heading towards suddenly exploding. Not like.. exploding in a ball of fire, or anything like that, no. Rather, there's this loud concussion- only its not really a concussion, its more like a *whud* you feel deep in your belly, like when you're standying way too close to the giant speakers at a concert. At the same time, the air seems to ripple with invisible force, and the entire metal dumpster springs into the air, as if somebody just bounced it on a trampoline.
It seems to hang there for a moment.. then comes crashing back down on its side with a tremendous *blam*, spilling open and getting trash everywhere.
From behind it, comes a joyous whoop. A strange figure stands there- it looks vaugely like a teenage kid, but seems to be composed entirely of shadow and weird, racing patterns of blue light- think something like the outfits in Tron Legacy, except you can't see his face- its just solid blackness with the tracing lines of blue neon light outlining and moving along his body. Plus his eyes glow blue. So does his hair. The outline of black headphones seem to cover part of that hair, but its hard to tell with everything except the glowing parts being pitch black.
"Eff yeah! Did you see that?!" He crowds, his voice sounding oddly modulated, as if being put through an autotuner.
The girl with him -- made equally of shadow and light, though hers is a vibrant sea-green, is already hooting. Her headphones are joined by what, in profile, appears to be a gas mask; her hair's short-ish, a wavy tumble of bluish-greenish light.
A second after the thing thumps down, she waves her hands and more shadows and light coalesce in front of her to form a black guitar-shaped thing with four glowing green strings, and the palm of her hand glows as she brings it down toward them:
"My turn-- oh hey! Stay back!" she calls as she sees a moving person over there with garbage bags (hi Yuko!), but it doesn't stop her.
With the downward and bass-ward motion of that glowing palm, an incredibly low tone sounds, loud and jarring, rattling the windows of surrounding buildings and felt deep in the bones and the chest. She wobbles her hand in front of the strings. The sound wobbles too.
The dumpster implodes in slow motion, the scream of twisting and crunching metal bringing the subsonic bass into sharp relief.
Finally it rumbles to a stop, and the girl's jumping up and down, instrument vanished. "Dude dude dude WE NEED A DUMPSTER that was PERFECT!"
INSIDE THE STORE: "Looking for more lettuce, are you?" Comes an older man's voice from behind Vespa, sounding justl ike what anyone would expect of a practiced, quick-talking salesman. "Well, we've got all sorts! For stews, salads, soups, snacking, decorative..." As he keeps speaking, he doesn't seem to notice that commotion coming from the outside over the sound of his own voice. The sound insulation isn't particularly great, though, so the shouting coming from out there would probably be easy enough for Vespa to hear.
OUTSIDE THE STORE: Yuko's been getting a lot of practice for doing her blank stare to jaw drop technique. A long, distant stare followed by a slight drop of the mouth, then a sudden drop just for that unique emphasis for the irritated "WHAT THE HELL?!" following moments after that dumpster explosion, then implosion.
Strangely enough, the girl doesn't even look scared despite cringing at the sharp noises hitting her ears and in the gut. Just... Incredibly angry at the pair that had just destroyed her dumpster. "What... Was that for? I was just about to throw these in there!" She raises those garbage bags for emphasis as she approaches them, setting the bags down a moment later after remembering just how heavy those things are. She doesn't even seem concerned with her own safety even after that display!
"You two better explain yourselves now. Y... You can't just blow up people's dumpsters like that!"
"What is that all noise?", Vespa seeing and hearing the noise and seeing the widows rallte. Her curiosity get the better of her, she puts her basket down and goes to check out what all the commotion is about.
Keys, for that is indeed the identity of the black, boy-shaped figure with the cerulean blue lights racing around his body, grins. You can't see the grin of course- all you can see of his face are the two glowing blue discs of his eyes, but the grin is plain in his voice as he high-fives Bass-chan. "Sweet! Did you see that thing go like.. ksscch eweerr!" He makes metal screeching sounds with his voice, at least the best he's able to, while crushing his hands together, as if everyone hadn't just seen it happen right in front of them.
Of course, his jubilation is interrupted by the approach of Yuko, who, for some reason, doesn't seem terribly thrilled about what just happened. Keys glances at her, and at the bags of garbage. He turns, and skates over to the side of her- the soles of his black feet glowing with blue light, seeming to let him skate over the ground as if they were rollerblades, each movement leaving a thin trail of blue light on the ground that dissipates a few seconds after he passes.
"Hey, chill out, sista." He says, his voice still full of humor, apparently not finding her anger intimidating, or still just too high on dumpster-exploding endorphins. "We'll pay for it. You can always get another dumpster, right?" He doesn't seem to realize that getting a new dumpster is probably a hassle, paid for or not!
And Bass, for that is what she was just playing and that is what she defaulted to for a name, glides around the remains of the dumpster, peering at the wreckage and -- for just a second -- pretending part of it's a half-pipe and doing a tiny little flip before circling back around and flanking Yuko on the other side. Her voice is a little too unconcerned and alien to be conciliatory, but it tries.
"It's no big deal, right? Plus it looks like modern art, now!" She takes on a tone of voice and accent that Keys will be able to identify as her mother's airy live-and-let-live. "It's remarkably expressive! Don't you think it cries out to be seen and heard? Low-rent urban ennui crossed with the violence of the soul over the wastefulness of modern society!" then conversational again, "or whatever."
Half a second later she's spinning off again, unable to keep still. "Besides that was AMAZING next time I'm gonna try the lava thing out. Hey. Hey wait."
Now she skate/glides very slowlycloser to Yuko. "Excuse me. Excuse me, miss?"
Her voice lowers, and glowing green eye-shapes widen above a matte-black shadowy gas mask. "Do you like..."
A whisper: "...the dubstep?"
Yuko doesn't notice Vespa coming out just yet, her attention fixated on the two bluish people in front of her. Perhaps if the situation was different (such as being someone else's dumpster), she'd probably be in agreement with the boy figure. Seeing as how it's the dumpster next to her parents' store, though?
She could be much happier than she is now. "Chill out? This is a public... -ish place! And now I gotta drag this back in to..." Finally setting the bags down, she presses two fingers to the bridge of her nose in irritation before quickly drawing her hand away from her face. She was just holding garbage, after all!
"... You better pay for the delivery, too. I can't drive yet." Still frowning in disapproval at Keys, her attention is drawn to the girl next when she starts going on about... Some sort of art terms. There's another blank stare from Yuko before she simply lets out a tired sigh, barely following the girl's movements even as she comes closer. The gas mask does appear to unnerve her somewhat, at least in comparison to the whole exploding imploding thing from earlier.
"Eh? What... Dubstep? I don't... Not like it? W-wait. What does that have to do with anything?"
"Is this some kind of werid performance art?", Vespa says looks over the two strangely dressed and slighty glowy figures. She doesn't looks at all phased by this oddness. She walks a bit closer. "Why did yyou do that anyway? It's not nice to destory other people property!", she sounds like a moither scolding a child.
Keys shrugs his shoulders, skating away from Yuko again and leaving those glowing blue trails on the pavement to mark his path. In fact, he seems to be skating in a pattern.. and if you follow the lines he leaves on the ground, over a few seconds he'll spell out "LOL" in huge letters on the pavement in glowing neon light, though it vanishes moments after completion as the 'tracks' only last a few seconds after he's passed.
Then he halts next to Bass-chan, seeming to make a face at Yuko (although again its hard to tell when you can't actually see anything but his eyes). "We'll pay for whatever you want, kid, just chillax, aight? It's cool." He glances at Bass-chan again as she asks an important question, then laughs. "What /doesn't/ it have to do with /everything!/" He asks, although that makes no sense. THen he turns to look at Vespa as she approaches from the back of the shop.
"Yes! You got it, chick. Everything we do is performance art. We are /artists./" He holds his hands up in the air, then slams them down like Beethoven playing the opening of his 5th symphony. At a seemingly random place in empty air, they stop, a blue flash emenating from the spot along with a distorted chord like a piano being put through a gear press. Also some lasers shoot out in a random direction, leaving a smoking hole in the brick wall nearby. He peers at the hole. "Oops."
"We'll pay for that too," Bass says hurriedly, waving a hand around. She leans over to Keys and elbows him; there's a grin in her weird voice. "Nice."
But then she's all business, straightening up and crossing her arms. She's not super tall, but she's compensating a little by hovering. Her hair floats weightlessly around her head, behind the band of the headphones-shape, and her eyes are wide and earnest. "But it's like Keys-kun says, ne? Everything is art and music and sound, and dubstep rocks the soul like nothing else. So it's good that you don't NOT like it, but we'll have to work on you actually LIKING it -- you ever go clubbing? You should totally go clubbing. Lose yourself in the shapes the sound makes, in the forest of rhythmic noise, in the tides that ebb and flow and pull at your mind until you can't help but dance and uphold the Beat."
Then she does a Wyld Stalyns air-guitar startup, but stops just in time before anything melts, and lets out a nervous laugh.
"Performance..? Uh. Huh. So you're one of those-" Yuko pauses, then turns to stare at Vespa. Why isn't she running? Either that girl's got no survival instinct, or there's more to her than she's letting on. Not that she's let on much for Yuko to see just yet, but weirder stuff has happened recently. No sense weighing out any possibilities at this point.
There's another cringe from the green-haired girl when Keys creates that chord-like noise, finally letting out the first yelp of surprise when those lasers shoot out. She ducks down quickly and keeps her head down, taking a moment before looking over at that hole once she's sure her limbs are all there. "W-watch it! Ah... Whatever. Not our wall."
That's some small relief, at least.
"Never really got into modern art, though. Too... Nonsensical." At least she knows enough to identify it. Following Bass' hovering, Yuko peers at the girl figure's feet for a moment before frowning apprehensively. "Clubbing's expensive. Plus, I can't drink. And drinking's expensive. Unless you have a different way to..."
And then she shakes her head. "... Wait. Who are you two, exactly?"
"I see.", Vespa says She has no problem with them playing music, it just the property damage and lasers she not a fan of. She takes a step back after the laser hist a brick wall. "Just watch where you shoot those okay?". she wondering who they are as well.
"Yeah dude, what she said." Keys replies, jerking a thumb at Bass-chan as she waxes poetic on the value of music and dubstep in particular. He asides to her, "That was pretty nice, B, you should write that down, we can probably use it as a sample or somethin'."
When she starts to do like an air-guitar thing, he actually starts to duck, anticipating some kind of magical laser or implosion, but she remembers herself at the last second and he chuckles, straightening, and saying to Yuko, "Sorry, we're still getting used to all this stuff, y'know." As if that can explain away reckless laser-firing and dumpster implosions.
When asked who they are though, he straightens up, shoulders stiff and back straight, and announces, "We're the Subsonic Warriors! Incandescent Defenders of Time, Space, and Deafening Bass!" Then he reaches into his pocket (his hand vanishing into the blackness where you imagine a pocket might be), and pulling out like a decal you put in your window. It says "The Foundation" on it in like, cool electricity letters. "Here, this is our band." He says, holding it out, completely forgetting about secret identities.
Bass-chan's eyes widen again, and she shoves at Keys, HARD, forgetting that she's hovering high enough off the ground to be at a level with him, and only ending up pushing herself away from him. "Bakayaro!" she yelps accusingly, then turns to Yuko and Vespa and holds up her hands as she drops to the ground. "Don't tell anyone it's us, god, that's the last thing we need. But yeah we can totally get you in, and you don't need to drink to dance. Anyway we play all-ages shows too, it's fine. Besides you're what, like, only a couple years younger than us? Whatever."
Yuko gives Keys and Bass that blank stare again, her head lulling sideways slowly for a second before snapping back into place. She opens her mouth and pauses for a moment, then glances towards the front of the store. At least nobody's coming by to stare at them!
"I... I see. Uh." Did these people not care about secret identities or something? That, or Keys is just dense, if Bass' reaction is any indication. Taking the decal, she narrows her eyes for a moment before nodding once. As annoyed as she was a moment ago, it did look rather cool. And if they could blow up a dumpster like that, maybe they could be good allies to keep in mind.
"So... Um. What're you doing here, anyway? And.. Er. You might wanna tone down the glowing." She gestures at the street. "Don't people to know that we-uh... Er. /You're/ here, right?" She pauses again to consider that offer from Bass, glancing over at the door once more before shrugging. "I guess I can try it. There's no cover fees or anything, are there?"
Great more of them. How many magical defenders of justice are there in this citY anyway?
She blinks a few times. They speech was very nice thought. She have to make hers better.
"I see. Oh don't worry I won't tell anyone. I doupt they would belive me anyway.."
"Ow! Hey! What was that for?" Keys demands as Bass-chan shoves him, even though all she accomplishes for the most part is to push herself away and drift a few feet over the pavement. He starts swatting at her, which no doubt devolves into a few moments of pathetic slap-fighting before Bass-chan begs Yuko not to tell anyone their secret identities. "What? Oh. I guess that makes sense. Does it?" He seems unsure.
"Tone down the glowing?!" He asks incredulously to Yuko. "/Tone down/ the.. in what crazy world is /less/ glowing better?" He asks, glowing more fiercly as if in defiance, creating a little neon halo of light around himself that paints the ground blue for a moment before it fades. He points at her. "Listen here, I want people to know we're here. We're gonna be stars, miss, and you're lucky to get in on the ground floor." Hands go to hips.
"Five years from now when we're world famous and like, meeting the Prime Minister and also driving like helicopters and stuff, you'll be able to be like "I knew them guys when they were blowing up dumpsters" and it won't even just be hipster talk."
He seems to be including Vespa in this, occasionally pointing at her rather than Yuko while ranting.
"Besides, it's obviously special effects," Bass-chan says with absolutely zero concern, and she legit flips her hair. "I mean come on, Vocaloid. We're just taking it to eleven. Kicking it up a notch. And with better music. And more dubstep." She surreptitiously swats at Keys again, then glides a few feet away. "At any rate, yeah, no cover charge for *you*. I'm Bass, he's Keys, and Sequencer-chan is out of the country right now but she'll be back and then we'll be even more epic, and in the meantime come to all our shows and bring your friends and WOE. BETIDE. Any static that gets in the way of our gift to the public consciousness."
Then she darts forward and hugs Yuko!! And hugs Vespa!! In sequence!! "Anyway I'll come by later with a checkbook, okay, and maybe your new Dumpster can be chrome and have running lights. Gotta go. More stuff to practice on!"
Now they're just giving her mixed messages. Yuko looks from Keys to Bass to Vespa repeatedly, eventually settling on Vespa with a bewildered look just to make sure she isn't crazy. Granted, this sort of thing would probably seem crazy to anyone /not/ already accustomed to these sorts of things, but still.
"Stars? Uh... Huh. Well... There's a time and a place for everything, you know? Can't make yourself a target all the time or you'll just burn yourself out." She gestures at their distinctly non-glowing surroundings, then at Keys'... No longer existing halo. The point would've made more sense earlier, but that little detail doesn't bother her too much.
"The glowing's good for shows or whatever, sure, but there's paparazzi and stuff running around. You've gotta recharge without all of... That once in a while." There's a light squeak from the green-haired girl at that sudden hug from Bass, and she takes a moment to straighten herself out before sighing. "Oh, right. Ah.. I'm Yuko. Yuko Minami. If any of you need food or supplies or whatever, stop by. We've got better prices than everyone else in the area, and..."
She pauses. "... I guess I could convince my parents to give you a small discount. But only if you replace the dumpster."
"Yeah, it'll be a pimp dumpster." Keys agrees, not having an issue with anything Bass-chan says regarding shows and stuff. Once that's done, he skates over to where she's starting to head off. He doesn't do the hugging thing, because normally when he tries to hug girls he gets slapped. He gives Yuko a look like she might be crazy, at all her talk of 'making yourself a target'. "Listen, kid," He says, his voice chock-full of self-assurance. "When you're the best, of course people are gonna gun for you. I been dealing with that my whole life." (In the world of competitive piano, but he doesn't mention that).
"It comes with the territory! Let 'em come I say!" He throws his arms wide to the sky. "THE BEAT DEFENDERS DO NOT FEAR CHALLENGERS! LET ANY WHO WOULD TEST OUR MIGHT STAND BEFORE US AND BE STRUCK DOWN!" He stomps his foot on the ground, and a "wvrooomwubwubwwub" sound emenates from the place where it hit, causing windows in the nearby cars and stores to rattle (but thankfully not break).
Then he gives a thumbs up. "Sweet deal, Yuko Minami, you're officially on the Good List, and we promise we don't blow any more stuff up here, probably, unless we forget."
Then he turns to chase after Bass-chan. "Hey wait up! Let's go down to the park and see what happens if we vibrate the fountain a lot!"
Vepsa hms. Maybe she should get autograph so she can sell it for a bunch of cash in the future, if they do get famous.
"Well it good to have goals..", she oofs in surpise by the hug! She just got hugged by a glowing person. She watches them run off. "Well that was something. I better go and finish up my shopping.."