A Picture's Worth

Usually the only mail Ash gets is from his family, but checking it with his host sister has become a habit.

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Ashton Ward

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Ash Ward
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[The Japanese message may not have the best accent, but it certainly sounds well-rehearsed.]

Hi, you've reached Ashton Ward, or Terayama Ashton while I'm in Japan, I guess. I can't get to my phone right now, so please leave your name, number, and message after the beep, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can get someone to translate. Thanks!

[But wait, there's more: The cellphone's owner sounds a lot more comfortable with English.]

Hi, you've reached Ash Ward. Sorry you had to sit through that, I'm currently staying with the Terayama family in Japan. I can't get to the phone right now, so please leave your name, number, and message after the beep, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks!

[The phone beeps.]

School has been crazy, winter's been cold, and my girls back home are on vacation, on the beach, in the middle of summer. This bites.

Oh, and a belated RIP to Heath Ledger.

I hope everyone's had a good start to their new year!

Christmas, or the Terayamas' attempt at it, was pretty fun. We opened presents around Meg-neechan's decorated bonsai tree before kaasan and tousan had to go to work. Thank god my Australian presents for them got here on time. Meg-neechan got me a Koda Kumi CD as a joke, but then pulled out a kimono for me from the family and another voucher for the local darkroom. :$ Kaasaan and tousan also got me the Death Note manga, which considering my experiences trying to find certain doujinshi for it kind of made me splutter a bit, but from what I can read it's actually pretty good. I can see why Tegan likes it so much. Apart from the pretty boys.

Mum and Dad got me a new watch, and for no apparent reason car wax. Kenzie just turned eighteen this year so she sent me porn as a joke. That was fun to open. -_- She also got me car seat covers...? Do they know something I don't? The usual five rolls of film from Nic and Dani - let's see if it survived customs. Billabong voucher from Katia, always useful; bracelet thing from Tegan. Good haul this year :)

Meg-neechan left for Melbourne a couple of days ago (but not before telling me she knew about Pukamon! Pukamon, why didn't you tell me?!), apparently she's settling in well there. Kenzie loves her, always a good sign. It's been sort of awkward with kaasan and tousan ever since because their English isn't as good as Meg-neechan's and my Japanese isn't as good as - well, Pukamon's - so I've sort of been moping around the cake shop instead of staying home.

On the upside, Tsubasa-kun and I have had a couple of goes at making a pav! Largely unsuccessful, but fun, and I now know a lot more Japanese for baking.

Merry Christmas!

Merii Kurisumasu!

Buon Natale!

From Ash and Pukamon :)

I just got off the Skype with my family, and Kenzie was on one of the trams that got hit by lightning in the thunderstorms. She's fine, everyone on the tram was fine, but even with her acting face on she still sounded shaken. I feel so helpless, and it's only going to keep on coming.

...this was pretty funny though.

Heehee, ash hasn't noticed I've been using his phone! Actually ash hasn't noticed a lot of things lately, he's been all about oh my god eight shopping days left and my ankle is twisted before Christmas and his precious Tsubasa-kun and WE BEAT NEW ZEALAND AT THE CRICKET and I don't know how I feel about the Wallabies getting the old All Blacks' coach. Confusing! No wonder he keeps leaving his techy stuff at home lately.

It's so cold here! At the time of the year we should getting sunburned, not burned on the heater! Okay, so maybe I shouldn't have been playing in the bathtub when Yuka-san got home from work but it's not my fault she works weird hours. It's almost a good thing Megumi-chan thinks I'm a stuffed animal, because it also means she thought I'd look adorable in a sweater! Of course, I do, but that's not the point.

I still haven't found Ash's Christmas present for me! :( Has he suddenly gotten really good at hiding them? Is he getting mine from Australia? Somebody tell meeeeeeeeeee.

Oh Huanglongmon, Megumi-chan is coming what's she doing home from drama club so early

( To talk or not to talk? That was the question. )

Who: Anyone in Japan!
What: Shopping
Where: Some random shopping mall in Tokyo - unspecified ward so you don't have to try and justify your character being there :)

If there was anything Ash found harder than saying no to his girls, it was shopping for them. Or shopping for anyone but himself, really. It didn't help that his brain insisted on converting every pricetag into Australian dollars, wondering if things would be cheaper at home.

As a distration from his own instinctive arithmetic, Ash flopped onto a bench and looked at his shopping list. The Japanese half of the list would hopefully be easy enough, as he was fobbing them off on Kenzie and Katia, but on the Australian side, he'd so far only managed to get Pukamon out of the way, buying his partner the rather tongue-in-cheek gift of a Tamagotchi. That left his parents, his sisters, Katia, Tegan, and possibly Wallace. He had a rough idea of what to get most of them, now he just had to find them.

Ash checked the list again. Kenzie had requested a yukata, but apparently you shouldn't buy them just going off measurements, and he didn't know any girls in Japan her size. He was enlisting Meg-neechan's help to buy Katia some silk, and his host parents' help to get his parents' presents. So unless another visit to the toy store gave him some genius ideas on what to get Nic and Dani, that really only left Tegan's present. She'd asked for Death Note yaoi doujinshi, and he'd naïvely agreed before finding out what exactly yaoi was. Now, on the way to K-Books, he was beginning to have third thoughts (the second thoughts having hit him when Tsubasa-kun had blushed and told him what yaoi entailed).

He stopped in front of the bookstore, tossing up whether to go inside or to just tell Tegan that you could only get doujinshi at conventions and he'd managed to not go to any. After getting bumped into and probably sworn at by three people, he moved off the main walkway, but continued to simply stare at the bookstore...

(OOC: Come shopping! Even in the likely event that Ash has never met you!)

WE WON THE NETBALL WORLD CUP!! Ha! Take that, New Zealand! Maybe England knocked us out of the Rugby World Cup but we've still got it when it comes to netball!

Who: Wallace, Ash, and Pukamon
What: Being tourists!
Where: Around Minato - the train station, a train, and the rugby stadium
When: Sometime towards the end of October but before Halloween/Ash's birthday - we only just finished this week :3

This just wasn't Ash's day. Finally, that project was handed in; finally, a chance to hang out with someone who spoke fluent English; finally, a chance to get out of Shinjuku without Meg... Then of course Pukamon just had to come along. It wasn't that Ash minded hanging out with his partner - much - but he did mind the stares that came with it. Bad enough that he was blatantly a foreigner, but did he have to be a foreign teenager with a stuffed animal supposedly velcroed to his shoulder as well?

At least he wasn't lost. He'd made it to Minato Station without major incident. If "discovering your school bag had been so heavy all day because your Digimon had stowed away inside it" didn't fall under your definition of "major". And, at a total guess, he'd found Wallace. If that blonde guy over there wasn't a random tourist, or an exchange student through a different organization. It was possible, but Ash wasn't willing to think about the other possibilities. Just in case, he checked his digivice - yup, there was a flashing dot in the blonde guy's direction. It had to be him.

Trusting his accent (if not his height, his hair, or Pukamon) to give him away, Ash cupped his hands around his mouth and called out to the American. "Wallace?"

( This RP log is not lost in translation. )

For lack of anything interesting to post about (the Halloween party was confusing and Shinjuku Ni-chome is never to be spoken of again), I shall picspam. A picture's worth a thousand words, right?

( Mmm, photos. )

Who: Ash and Ryo and a few NPCs including various bar folk, a transvestite, and Ash's host sister
What: Meeting under unsavory circumstances
Where: A gaijin magnet bar in Shinjuku ni-chome
When: Friday night, November 2nd

In retrospective, Ash should have figured out what kind of scene Shinjuku Ni-chome was when he noticed there were too many guys around. But while he was a fairly visual person, he never thought that much about what anything meant, just what it looked like; and as soon as he'd started to wonder, Meg-neechan had shoved her sake cup into his hand, declaring it a sign of friendship, and he'd been reduced to wondering where the hell she'd gotten her fake ID instead.

God, he was drunk. After the sake there had been the Asahi Super Dry and the Orion Southern Star and the...the...the kanji on the bottles were starting to blur together. He'd decided a while ago that getting drunk was probably the best way to cope with guys hitting on him and his host sister thinking he was gay, and this stuff was stronger than the Carlton Draught he leaned towards at home. (This logic would make a lot less sense once he sobered up, but damn it had been a while since he'd had a drink.) He couldn't exactly leave, either - he didn't know how to get home on the train and didn't have enough money for a cab, and if he got picked up by the police, he could be deported! What a stupid way to finish the exchange.

Tsubasa, damn him, was asleep at this time of night, and he was never very good at the 'pretending to txt to avoid eye contact' thing. So that kind of left his digivice as a potential plaything. Maybe he could pretend it was a Tamagotchi?

( Ash is stupid on foreign public transport. )

Unlike some people, I didn't forget my own birthday. :P Especially as Katia and Tegan rang me to tell me this at six-thirty in the morning. They claimed to have forgotten the time difference. Personally I think they just wanted to make me suffer. I don't know how Tsubasa-kun found out it was my birthday (my money's on Meg-neesan) but he brought me a tiramisu from his family's cake shop and oh my god it was made of awesome, never mind the eggs and the coffee and everything.

This laptop was my birthday present really early, so I wasn't expecting anything from my family, but I just checked the mail and they sent me a care package and it's making me all homesick for Melbourne. There's the Wallabies jersey I'd had my eye on for ages, and a pavlova recipe, and a jar of Vegemite. :D I have no idea how it got through security, I thought one of the ingredients made it banned or something.

And then there was my old stuff that Mum or Kenzie or someone must have decided would be helpful, like my school scarf (well, it is getting kind of cold), and my old Pokemon cards (I think I might try and teach Pukamon how to play, or try to play with Tsubasa-kun), and my restricted licence which apparently arrived in the mail the day after I left. Which is, you know, great, because the Terayamas don't have a car...

( Nothing to see here! )

Anyway, I'm being dragged off to a party dressed as Syaoran Li from Card Captors Captor Sakura, so see you.

Meg-neesan informs me that this Halloween, I'm cosplaying. Somehow, she thinks that the fact that it's also my birthday means I have even more reason to dress up, no matter how much I tried to tell her that it means I get to choose, and I get to choose to not cosplay.

You'd think with three or four sisters depending on whether you count Meg-neesan or not, a best friend who's female, and the next closest friend also being female, I'd understand Girl Logic by now. But nope, I'm just as confused as ever.

She has conceded that I get to pick my own character to cosplay instead of her picking one for me and no doubt putting me in something I'd never wear in public.

Of course it has to be someone from a game, anime, or manga. And where is my otaku friend when I need her? Australia. I wish T would get a Livejournal instead of just stupid Bebo which I hardly ever go on.

Buuuuut kaasan and tousan are going away the weekend after, so Meg-neesan says she'll take me clubbing A) for my birthday and B) to make up for the cosplay thing.

...but I still need to find a decent costume.

[Pukamon had been intending to filter this to just one person, but the voice technology on Ash's laptop wouldn't do what he told it. But hey, as long as it filtered one person out...]

Koushirou-san, could you (and Tentomon!) come to the apartment some time afterschool to install the portal on Ash's laptop? I-- I mean, Ash decided he wanted it after all.

Livejournal is sending me alerts that it's Jou(-sempai?)'s birthday. So: Happy birthday, Jou! ...sempai! -san! Yup, I'm confused. Sorry!

Nothing much has been happening with me, though I still haven't found kaasan a birthday present. But I did one of those stupid Internet...memes? to practice my Japanese.

Choose a fictional character that you believe is similar to you in looks and/or personality and answer the following questions. Then tag 5 people to do the same. I'm sure you have better things to do with your lives.

1. How is this character like you?
We both didn't trust our partners until they saved our lives. And, uh, it has yellow fur and I'm, well, blonde-ish. At the moment. Somebody tell me when my roots are showing because I don't pay much attention. Oh yeah, and I'd hate to be shoved into a tiny ball too.

2. What differences are there between you and this character?
...I can't electrocute people without technological aid.

3. Do you like or dislike this character?
It always annoyed me that it beat everything.

4. Would you date this character if they existed in real life?
I'm sure there's laws against that sort of thing.

5. Are there any canon relationships this character has that are similar to ones you have?
We both spend half our time trying to keep something smaller than us out of trouble?

...yes, I watched Pokemon as a child. :/ I was always Ash, never mind that I look and act nothing like him, but I had the name and that was all that mattered when we were eight. My sister Kenzie was always Misty because she's got red hair. Oh, but you call them something different in Japan, don't you? Satoshi and Kasumi or something? (Wow, Tegan's ramblings came in useful for once.)

Wallace, you've been in Japan longer than me and I'm a little tired of Shinjuku, want to show me around your ward? I know I want to check out the rugby stadium, but I'm sure you know more tourist attractions than me.

(OOC: Ash isn't linking that himself, Wallace-mun, I'm just trying to help out ;D)

Jun, how's the job hunt going?

( Private )

Anyone wanna deface a giant rugby ball for me? I'd do it myself except, you know, the whole Japan thing.

Actually, it doesn't look like we're too far behind - dare I say it - New Zealand. And they'll probably beat the runnerup of Pool D (my money's on France, I'm pretty sure they'll outplay Georgia but they're not quite as good as Argentina), so if when we beat England, it's all down to us and the Kiwis at the Stade de France!

...though I suppose I should probably still hold out for October 6th. Who knows, England may pull something out of its collective arse. Then we'll know the apocalypse is coming.

Staying up to watch the rugby is stuffing up my sleeping patterns. Between that and trying to tutor Matsuki-kun in photography, I haven't had much time for shopping, which is bad, because it's kaasan's birthday soon and I don't really know what to get her. Meg-neechan can't help because of bukatsu, and plus she has more money than me so she'd either end up suggesting stuff out of my range or buying it for me, and that's not fair. So does anyone good at buying presents want to come shopping with me afterschool some time this week? I'm quite keen to get out of Shinjuku, and Meg-neechan reckons it's time for me to fly solo on public transport. I'd be inclined to disagree.

On the upside, I have made a friend. I think. We barely understand each other but that's okay. His name is Matsuki Tsubasa (I am finally getting the hang of this 'surnames first' thing) and he's in my photography class. We bonded over the uncanny likeness between our shirts and how pathetic his photos are. It's confusing, because I've seen his art portfolio and it's amazing. I've tried to tell him that it's just like drawing what you see with a camera but he doesn't seem to get it, my pronounciation must be horribly wrong as usual.

On the downside, I only ever seem to attract attention from girls who aren't my type. How do you say "I'm sorry but I don't want to go out with you" in Japanese? Meg-neechan and Pukamon are too cruelly amused to tell me. I'm glad I won't be around when oneechan and Kenzie meet, they are way too similar to each other.

* Cinderella eventually got to the ball.