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flonnebonneAnzai's School for Gifted Basketball Players (Part 2 of 2)
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flonnebonne
Slam Dunk and X-Men (mainly the '90s cartoon) fusion
Characters from Shohoku and Ryonan, plus Kiyota and Mikio
4307 words, PG-13, no spoilers.
(Back to Part 1)
Sakuragi calmed down, the ball was saved, and the game went on. It was a heated game, a game of passion and wills and pride butting against pride. Neither side was willing to give an inch. Dramatic turnovers were turned! Daring three pointers were dared! Audacious alley-oops went oops! Sneaky scams were flimflammed and grievous fouls were foul indeed!
And the insults flew fast and furious across the court!
“Mikio! I didn’t recruit you for your pretty face! Use that fat body of yours to box him out!”
“Jin! Just ‘cause you dress like a ballerina doesn’t mean you have to defend like one! Lower your waist!”
“Sendoh! Did you forget to eat your breakfast this morning? What the hell is wrong with you!”
Sakuragi whispered to Fukuda, “Your boss is kind of crazy.” Fukuda just answered him with a “like duh” kind of look.
“Fukuda, stop consorting with the enemy! Sakuragi, mind your own business!”
“Kiyota! Isn’t a frog supposed to be able to jump?”
“Miyagi! Your may be Jubilee but you got nothing to be happy about as far as I’m concerned!”
“I’m not even on your team!” Miyagi complained.
Taoka’s ire was not assuaged. “You should be on my team! I invited you personally! How dare you turn me down!”
“Geez, Louise, that was way back in my first year of high school!”
“Hey, how come you never ask this tensai to join your team?” Sakuragi growled.
“And you!” Taoka ignored Sakuragi and turned his thunder on Mitsui and Rukawa, the latter of whom was getting ready to do a throw-in. “I asked you two ingrates to join me too!”
Mitsui and Rukawa looked at each other and shrugged in unison.
The master of magnetism was not gladdened by this response; he seemed to crackle with magenta fury, filling the air with a tension that was as heavy as a...very heavy magnetic field. It made Sakuragi’s bones feel mildly itchy. For a moment it seemed that Taoka would unleash his awesome powers and DESTROY these INSOLENT FOOLS who DARED defy him, but then he took a deep breath and said, in a seductively magnetic voice, “It’s not too late, young ones. You can still join the winning side. We mutants will rule this world eventually, and the nationals too. Join me, my friends.”
“I don’t join evil psychopaths,” Rukawa said bluntly, “or basketball teams that keep losing.”
While Taoka was fuming, and the Brotherhood team members were busy going “Hey!” Rukawa inbounded the ball to Miyagi, who made a “niener niener niener” face at Taoka and passed the ball to Mitsui, who happened to be standing behind the three-point line, and you know what happens when Mitsui gets the ball and he’s standing behind the three-point line. The shot sailed true, except that Kiyota made a gigantic! leap! for frog-kind! and managed to graze the ball as it left Mitsui’s hands, causing it to wobble slightly in the air and bounce off the side of the rim instead of going through the net as it definitely would have, because teenage basketball players only miss three pointers when there is some obvious reason for it, like frogs getting in their way.
“Wild monkey!” Sakuragi called out. “You de-evolved into a wild frog but you can actually jump now!”
Kiyota did not understand that this was Sakuragi’s way of praising him. “Shut up!” he yelled back. “Stupid red-furred...wolverine monkey! You’re still stupid no matter what animal you are!”
While the two primate-like players (the two who were on the court, that is) were distracted, the blob-like player grabbed the rebound and passed it over Miyagi’s head to the talented Cajun wannabe, who passed it downcourt to the pyromaniac, who passed it to the witch, who shot his own flawless three-pointer and naturally got it in because there were no frogs getting in his way.
“I kind of hate that guy,” Mitsui said in a fit of dark jealousy that someone should have paid attention to.
“Sakuragi, pay attention to the play and stop being distracted by that moron!” Akagi roared from the sidelines.
“Ha ha ha!” Kiyota cackled. “You got yelled at by the big blind gorilla!”
“Kiyota! Stop acting as stupid as that idiot!” Uozumi’s bellowed from the foul line.
“Nya ha ha!” Sakuragi snickered. “You got yelled at by the bucket-head boss monkey!”
Simultaneously, the aforementioned big blind gorilla and bucket-head boss monkey stomped across the court and whammed their giant fists into their teammates’ heads.
“Children of the Atom!” Anzai called out. “Please try not to kill one another. Resurrections do get tiresome.”
“Now I don’t want any of them on my team anymore,” Taoka told Anzai in disgust. Inwardly, he contemplated flying off to Genosha or Asteroid M or some other place with a Fortress of Solitude where he could sit around and seethe in peace about the war he wanted to start. Or maybe he would just go get some ice cream instead.
Despite the various squabbles, all in all the day went pretty well. No major incidents, no deaths, no destructions of worlds, no time travel, no alternate dimension travel--just an ordinary day of insane basketball shenanigans. Even the rule about not using mutant powers was generally followed, as far as anyone knew. It seemed they would all get to go home with their limbs intact that day.
Until, of course, stuff happened.
It happened when the score was 182 to 180 for the X-men. (No one had been defending well that day.) There were thirty seconds left.
Then Jin scored another three pointer, and it was 182 to 183, for the Brotherhood, with twenty seconds left.
And that’s when Mitsui snapped.
“That’s it!” he screamed. “I know you’re using your stupid witchy powers!” He pointed a finger at Jin, who just gave him a confused, wide-eyed look.
“I agree!” Sakuragi agreed, not yet sensing the danger. “He scored twenty one three-pointers in a row! Even Micchi can’t do that!”
This did not make Mitsui happier.
“You thought you could get away with it, huh?” he went on, unleashing his inner bully on poor Jin. “You’re altering freaking’ reality right in front of us! How could anyone not notice that? You must be shielding your mind from me too!”
Sendoh coughed. “One might say that reading minds also constitutes cheating.”
“Mind your own fucking business,” Mitsui snarled at Sendoh.
“Hey, just trying to play peacemaker?” Sendoh didn’t have much of a sense of self-preservation. He raised his hands in a gesture of innocence and smiled in that charming yet annoying way of his. It reminded Mitsui that Sendoh had scored an awful lot of points this game too, the prick. Mitsui’s eyes started to look distinctly fiery, causing his more prudent teammates, who knew what was coming, to look around for Someone Else to solve this problem for them.
“Where’s Anzai-sensei?” Kogure asked Akagi anxiously.
“Getting ice cream or something with Taoka-sensei,” Akagi muttered back.
“That fucker,” said Kogure, unusually eloquent.
By this point, the green portions of Mitsui’s costume had darkened into an ominous shade of crimson. As they watched, his hair lengthened and became somehow blacker, flowing around his face in a dark silky wave. His front teeth fell out too. It was an awe-inspiring display of primal power and terrible beauty and Kiyota might have wet his pants, no one was sure.
Mitsui slowly walked over to the basketball, which had rolled to the side of the court after Jin’s three-pointer, and picked it up with a palpable sense of doom.
“Mitsui, no!” Kogure cried out in anguish as the air crackled around them. “You’re on probation!”
But it was to no avail. Mitsui suddenly burst into flame, like the Phoenix of legend, and everyone there truly understood why he was called the Man of Fire. Wreathed in a dark blaze of power and holding in his hands the basketball, that symbol of all they held dear, he stood before them fully reborn into his former glory--as his vengeful, team-wrecking, bastard of a delinquent self.
“Fuck you all!” he screeched, soaring up to the hoop like a flaming fireball and dunking the ball in with a ferocious caw of primal fury.
Then, with a flash of light and a puff of tobacco smoke, he zoomed into the distance, probably off to devour an innocent planet or beat up some innocent freshmen, whichever he ran into first.
In the ensuing silence it was Fukuda, uncharacteristically, who spoke first. “And I thought I had a bad temper.”
“You fire types are all the same,” Mikio said. “Just like Pokemon.”
Miyagi complained, “Ugh, I hate cleaning up after him when he does this.”
At this point, Anzai wandered back onto the court with a vanilla ice cream cone, and Taoka with a chocolate one.
"Did we miss something? Oh ho ho ho!”
The X-Jet, in all its sleek and stealthy glory, lingered for a moment over the Brotherhood’s heads in what could only be described as a glum sort of hover before reluctantly clunking off in the same direction that the Dark Phoenix had taken.
“So...did we win that game?” asked Kiyota.
“I did score that three-pointer at the end,” Jin commented.
Taoka gave his team a solemn look.
“We have witnessed true power today. Let this be a warning to us as we set forth on our mission of world domination,” he proclaimed. “For power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“I think I heard that in a book before,” said Uozumi dubiously.
Sendoh nodded. “You know, I didn’t want to say anything, Taoka-sensei, but you might be more persuasive if you didn’t make a dramatic speech out of everything.”
“And if you were nicer to us,” Mikio added.
Taoka made them run laps until they puked.
Aboard the X-Jet, Sakuragi suddenly remembered the score as they'd left it.
“Daaaaaammnn iiiitt!!!”
The ensuing hole in the ceiling was rather large.
Credits
“Sendoh! Did you forget to eat your breakfast this morning? What the hell is wrong with you!”
--Taoka says this during the second Ryonan-Shohoku game.
“Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!”
--Emiliano Zapata Salazar, but also said by Magneto in “Enter Magneto,” the second episode of the ‘90s X-Men cartoon.
(Guess where I heard it first.)
“That which at once giveth him his nature, gives him sin with it”
--Thomas Goodwin
(I found this by googling “that which nature gives,” which is what I wanted Kogure to say. I think this must be how the X-Men writers find quotes for Beast)
“Power [tends to corrupt], and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
--some guy named John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
(So this isn’t from Animal Farm?)
Author’s Notes
A big thank you tojuin for inspiring this giant mutant of a gag fic and for giving such excellent ideas. She's the one who said Mitsui should be Jean Grey!
A list of all the characters in this fic and their X-Men roles:
X-Men
Anzai-sensei: Professor X
Akagi: Cyclops
Kogure: Beast
Mitsui: Jean Grey
Miyagi: Jubilee
Rukawa: Rogue
Sakuragi: Wolverine
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Taoka-sensei: Magneto
Uozumi: Juggernaut
Sendoh: Gambit (sometimes the ragin' Cajun joins the bad guys, you know how it is with the X-Men)
Fukuda: Pyro
Jin: Scarlet Witch
Mikio: The Blob
Kiyota: Toad
by
flonnebonneSlam Dunk and X-Men (mainly the '90s cartoon) fusion
Characters from Shohoku and Ryonan, plus Kiyota and Mikio
4307 words, PG-13, no spoilers.
(Back to Part 1)
Sakuragi calmed down, the ball was saved, and the game went on. It was a heated game, a game of passion and wills and pride butting against pride. Neither side was willing to give an inch. Dramatic turnovers were turned! Daring three pointers were dared! Audacious alley-oops went oops! Sneaky scams were flimflammed and grievous fouls were foul indeed!
And the insults flew fast and furious across the court!
“Mikio! I didn’t recruit you for your pretty face! Use that fat body of yours to box him out!”
“Jin! Just ‘cause you dress like a ballerina doesn’t mean you have to defend like one! Lower your waist!”
“Sendoh! Did you forget to eat your breakfast this morning? What the hell is wrong with you!”
Sakuragi whispered to Fukuda, “Your boss is kind of crazy.” Fukuda just answered him with a “like duh” kind of look.
“Fukuda, stop consorting with the enemy! Sakuragi, mind your own business!”
“Kiyota! Isn’t a frog supposed to be able to jump?”
“Miyagi! Your may be Jubilee but you got nothing to be happy about as far as I’m concerned!”
“I’m not even on your team!” Miyagi complained.
Taoka’s ire was not assuaged. “You should be on my team! I invited you personally! How dare you turn me down!”
“Geez, Louise, that was way back in my first year of high school!”
“Hey, how come you never ask this tensai to join your team?” Sakuragi growled.
“And you!” Taoka ignored Sakuragi and turned his thunder on Mitsui and Rukawa, the latter of whom was getting ready to do a throw-in. “I asked you two ingrates to join me too!”
Mitsui and Rukawa looked at each other and shrugged in unison.
The master of magnetism was not gladdened by this response; he seemed to crackle with magenta fury, filling the air with a tension that was as heavy as a...very heavy magnetic field. It made Sakuragi’s bones feel mildly itchy. For a moment it seemed that Taoka would unleash his awesome powers and DESTROY these INSOLENT FOOLS who DARED defy him, but then he took a deep breath and said, in a seductively magnetic voice, “It’s not too late, young ones. You can still join the winning side. We mutants will rule this world eventually, and the nationals too. Join me, my friends.”
“I don’t join evil psychopaths,” Rukawa said bluntly, “or basketball teams that keep losing.”
While Taoka was fuming, and the Brotherhood team members were busy going “Hey!” Rukawa inbounded the ball to Miyagi, who made a “niener niener niener” face at Taoka and passed the ball to Mitsui, who happened to be standing behind the three-point line, and you know what happens when Mitsui gets the ball and he’s standing behind the three-point line. The shot sailed true, except that Kiyota made a gigantic! leap! for frog-kind! and managed to graze the ball as it left Mitsui’s hands, causing it to wobble slightly in the air and bounce off the side of the rim instead of going through the net as it definitely would have, because teenage basketball players only miss three pointers when there is some obvious reason for it, like frogs getting in their way.
“Wild monkey!” Sakuragi called out. “You de-evolved into a wild frog but you can actually jump now!”
Kiyota did not understand that this was Sakuragi’s way of praising him. “Shut up!” he yelled back. “Stupid red-furred...wolverine monkey! You’re still stupid no matter what animal you are!”
While the two primate-like players (the two who were on the court, that is) were distracted, the blob-like player grabbed the rebound and passed it over Miyagi’s head to the talented Cajun wannabe, who passed it downcourt to the pyromaniac, who passed it to the witch, who shot his own flawless three-pointer and naturally got it in because there were no frogs getting in his way.
“I kind of hate that guy,” Mitsui said in a fit of dark jealousy that someone should have paid attention to.
“Sakuragi, pay attention to the play and stop being distracted by that moron!” Akagi roared from the sidelines.
“Ha ha ha!” Kiyota cackled. “You got yelled at by the big blind gorilla!”
“Kiyota! Stop acting as stupid as that idiot!” Uozumi’s bellowed from the foul line.
“Nya ha ha!” Sakuragi snickered. “You got yelled at by the bucket-head boss monkey!”
Simultaneously, the aforementioned big blind gorilla and bucket-head boss monkey stomped across the court and whammed their giant fists into their teammates’ heads.
“Children of the Atom!” Anzai called out. “Please try not to kill one another. Resurrections do get tiresome.”
“Now I don’t want any of them on my team anymore,” Taoka told Anzai in disgust. Inwardly, he contemplated flying off to Genosha or Asteroid M or some other place with a Fortress of Solitude where he could sit around and seethe in peace about the war he wanted to start. Or maybe he would just go get some ice cream instead.
- 0 - 0 -
Despite the various squabbles, all in all the day went pretty well. No major incidents, no deaths, no destructions of worlds, no time travel, no alternate dimension travel--just an ordinary day of insane basketball shenanigans. Even the rule about not using mutant powers was generally followed, as far as anyone knew. It seemed they would all get to go home with their limbs intact that day.
Until, of course, stuff happened.
It happened when the score was 182 to 180 for the X-men. (No one had been defending well that day.) There were thirty seconds left.
Then Jin scored another three pointer, and it was 182 to 183, for the Brotherhood, with twenty seconds left.
And that’s when Mitsui snapped.
“That’s it!” he screamed. “I know you’re using your stupid witchy powers!” He pointed a finger at Jin, who just gave him a confused, wide-eyed look.
“I agree!” Sakuragi agreed, not yet sensing the danger. “He scored twenty one three-pointers in a row! Even Micchi can’t do that!”
This did not make Mitsui happier.
“You thought you could get away with it, huh?” he went on, unleashing his inner bully on poor Jin. “You’re altering freaking’ reality right in front of us! How could anyone not notice that? You must be shielding your mind from me too!”
Sendoh coughed. “One might say that reading minds also constitutes cheating.”
“Mind your own fucking business,” Mitsui snarled at Sendoh.
“Hey, just trying to play peacemaker?” Sendoh didn’t have much of a sense of self-preservation. He raised his hands in a gesture of innocence and smiled in that charming yet annoying way of his. It reminded Mitsui that Sendoh had scored an awful lot of points this game too, the prick. Mitsui’s eyes started to look distinctly fiery, causing his more prudent teammates, who knew what was coming, to look around for Someone Else to solve this problem for them.
“Where’s Anzai-sensei?” Kogure asked Akagi anxiously.
“Getting ice cream or something with Taoka-sensei,” Akagi muttered back.
“That fucker,” said Kogure, unusually eloquent.
By this point, the green portions of Mitsui’s costume had darkened into an ominous shade of crimson. As they watched, his hair lengthened and became somehow blacker, flowing around his face in a dark silky wave. His front teeth fell out too. It was an awe-inspiring display of primal power and terrible beauty and Kiyota might have wet his pants, no one was sure.
Mitsui slowly walked over to the basketball, which had rolled to the side of the court after Jin’s three-pointer, and picked it up with a palpable sense of doom.
“Mitsui, no!” Kogure cried out in anguish as the air crackled around them. “You’re on probation!”
But it was to no avail. Mitsui suddenly burst into flame, like the Phoenix of legend, and everyone there truly understood why he was called the Man of Fire. Wreathed in a dark blaze of power and holding in his hands the basketball, that symbol of all they held dear, he stood before them fully reborn into his former glory--as his vengeful, team-wrecking, bastard of a delinquent self.
“Fuck you all!” he screeched, soaring up to the hoop like a flaming fireball and dunking the ball in with a ferocious caw of primal fury.
Then, with a flash of light and a puff of tobacco smoke, he zoomed into the distance, probably off to devour an innocent planet or beat up some innocent freshmen, whichever he ran into first.
In the ensuing silence it was Fukuda, uncharacteristically, who spoke first. “And I thought I had a bad temper.”
“You fire types are all the same,” Mikio said. “Just like Pokemon.”
Miyagi complained, “Ugh, I hate cleaning up after him when he does this.”
At this point, Anzai wandered back onto the court with a vanilla ice cream cone, and Taoka with a chocolate one.
"Did we miss something? Oh ho ho ho!”
- 0 - 0 -
The X-Jet, in all its sleek and stealthy glory, lingered for a moment over the Brotherhood’s heads in what could only be described as a glum sort of hover before reluctantly clunking off in the same direction that the Dark Phoenix had taken.
“So...did we win that game?” asked Kiyota.
“I did score that three-pointer at the end,” Jin commented.
Taoka gave his team a solemn look.
“We have witnessed true power today. Let this be a warning to us as we set forth on our mission of world domination,” he proclaimed. “For power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“I think I heard that in a book before,” said Uozumi dubiously.
Sendoh nodded. “You know, I didn’t want to say anything, Taoka-sensei, but you might be more persuasive if you didn’t make a dramatic speech out of everything.”
“And if you were nicer to us,” Mikio added.
Taoka made them run laps until they puked.
- 0 - 0 -
Aboard the X-Jet, Sakuragi suddenly remembered the score as they'd left it.
“Daaaaaammnn iiiitt!!!”
The ensuing hole in the ceiling was rather large.
- 0 - End - 0 -
Credits
“Sendoh! Did you forget to eat your breakfast this morning? What the hell is wrong with you!”
--Taoka says this during the second Ryonan-Shohoku game.
“Better to die on our feet than live on our knees!”
--Emiliano Zapata Salazar, but also said by Magneto in “Enter Magneto,” the second episode of the ‘90s X-Men cartoon.
(Guess where I heard it first.)
“That which at once giveth him his nature, gives him sin with it”
--Thomas Goodwin
(I found this by googling “that which nature gives,” which is what I wanted Kogure to say. I think this must be how the X-Men writers find quotes for Beast)
“Power [tends to corrupt], and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
--some guy named John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
(So this isn’t from Animal Farm?)
Author’s Notes
A big thank you to
juin for inspiring this giant mutant of a gag fic and for giving such excellent ideas. She's the one who said Mitsui should be Jean Grey!A list of all the characters in this fic and their X-Men roles:
X-Men
Anzai-sensei: Professor X
Akagi: Cyclops
Kogure: Beast
Mitsui: Jean Grey
Miyagi: Jubilee
Rukawa: Rogue
Sakuragi: Wolverine
Brotherhood of Evil Mutants
Taoka-sensei: Magneto
Uozumi: Juggernaut
Sendoh: Gambit (sometimes the ragin' Cajun joins the bad guys, you know how it is with the X-Men)
Fukuda: Pyro
Jin: Scarlet Witch
Mikio: The Blob
Kiyota: Toad
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 08:44 am (UTC)And I quite like 'Anzai’s School for Gifted Basketball Players' for the title.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 07:24 am (UTC)I think that's probably the title I'll use.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 10:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-02 10:28 am (UTC)Sounds good to me too.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 07:25 am (UTC)Thank you for the title weigh-in. Much appreciated!
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 07:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 07:55 am (UTC)It was perfect.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-03 08:05 am (UTC)(Come to think of it, the mutant power I've always wanted in the past was the ability to jump across a busy street so I could catch the bus before it drove past me. I am easily pleased. Do you have a secret mutant power?)
no subject
Date: 2012-02-05 12:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-05 07:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-05 08:27 am (UTC)Excellent writing as usual, regardless. Mitsui's front teeth falling out had me in fits.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-05 09:13 pm (UTC)Thank you! I was quite proud of Mitsui's teeth falling out.
Oh god, my sides...
Date: 2012-02-08 10:20 pm (UTC)Oh god, my sides... Seriously, just Mitsui throughout this entire story had me crying. Remember kids:
With great power comes tooth loss.
Re: Oh god, my sides...
Date: 2012-02-09 06:44 am (UTC)