`cursed
@ccxarin
he’s trying to kick a glitching machine back to life when it happens. he’s always said these pac-man machines are old and decrepit and ready to kick the bucket at any moment, but the managers insist they’re good to go. he’s cursing his managers and the creator of pac-man and the ten year olds who should probably be home studying all at once when the whole building jerks violently, tossing him against the very game he was trying to fix and causing the power to flicker once before everything powers up in a cacophony of sound.
most of the patrons brush it off as a small earthquake, nothing to be concerned about. but with the way the tremor resonates as lingering vibrations in the bracelet around his wrist, he reluctantly accepts the fact that it was no earthquake. it’s something far worse, something he wants absolutely nothing to do with, because he swore off fighting the moment he escaped from the scaly grasp of what had once been his brother. and yet somehow the battles, the fights, the monsters, the ever-growing number of impossibly perky magical heroes, they seem to find him no matter how hard he tries to hide.
he considers ignoring it. someone else will deal with it. it’s not his problem. he has job to do here, scrubbing snot off of joysticks and squeejee-ing sticky colorful handprints off of the windows, kicking old machines until they work again and showing customers how the new machines work. he has no time for being a magical hero, and no one’s paying him for it.
but the building shakes again, and the power flickers for a few seconds longer this time and when he makes accidental eye contact with a high school aged girl he knows he can’t ignore it and he knows he has aku to blame for it all. so he forgets about cursing pac-man and ten year olds and returns to the familiar act of mentally cursing aku instead, even as he slips out of the arcade right from under his colleagues’ noses, hoping to obliterate the creature and return to work before anyone even notices he’s gone.