Set the Stage: Chicago Sports Night

[notharry]

A college basketball game wasn't really the sort of thing Haley usually showed up for. She wasn't, strictly speaking, much of a sports fan. Too much else to worry about. College sports, particularly local ones, were even lower on the scale than your typical one on television-- not that she could watch those, anyway.

But she had to pay the bills, and she was here as a consultant. A hundred bucks for a couple hours watching some kids play and assuring her client that there wasn't actually any magic going on was an easy hundred bucks. So she'd found herself a seat as far from the electronic scoreboard and announcer's booth, reined in her magic as best she could, and even bought a cheap little churro from the kids selling them for fund raisers or whatever it was. All she cared about was it was food, it was hot, and it was tasty enough to distract her from how stupid it was to expect magic in sports.

Except there was magic going on. She'd never actually seen anyone use magic on a basketball court before, or really in any other sport to be honest, but that's definitely what was going on. Nobody else really seemed to notice. "Great, now I gotta talk to the kid," she muttered, and slipped out before halftime-- to the squeal of a speaker trying to die, as she walked past-- to loiter outside the locker room and wait for wonder boy to come out, after the game. She might've looked a little creepy in the college hallway, in her long black coat and port pie hat, but at least she didn't have her staff or blasting rod or anything. That would just have looked weird.

Comments

[showyousomethingnice]

Accepting a basketball scholarship to attend college in America was a good choice.

Reo had known it would be the moment he decided to do it, but there had still been lingering nerves. America is, after all, the home of basketball; Mibuchi Reo might be something of a big deal in Japanese high school basketball, but how would he measure up playing against guys who had grown up in the country where the sport was born? There had been more than one American college scouting him and his teammates, though, something that never would have happened just five years ago, back before the Generation of Miracles plowed through every middle school team they faced and went on to revolutionize what it meant to play high school basketball in Japan. He may not be among their numbers, but he and his fellow Uncrowned Generals are almost as good, and they were available a year sooner. It made them more attractive than Reo would have expected to colleges who had been paying attention to what was going on in Japan.

And, in Reo's case, he'd been vice captain to the Miracles' captain for two years, which got him a little extra attention from schools who hoped that a familiar face would be more likely to bring Akashi Seijuurou to their team in a year's time. Reo treaded carefully there, ultimately turning down a couple of big names because he simply couldn't be sure that they were interested in him. He would have liked to end up in LA or New York, but the pragmatism of Chicago's scout had appealed to him. She had understood that the likelihood of someone from a traditional family like Sei-chan's attending college anywhere but Japan was minimal at best, and had assured him of that right away before going on to talk about Reo's own game and how Chicago believed it would be an ideal fit for the direction they wanted to take their team in.

So it's Chicago, and Chicago is wonderful, and yeah, he's had to put in a lot of extra work to adapt his style to how the game is played in America, but he grew up watching NBA broadcasts, so that was more of an enjoyable challenge than an overwhelming chore. It's strange, how strongly people here react to some of his signature plays - their confusion when his Oblivion shot freezes them in place, their indignation when the referee never seems to catch him as he draws foul after foul to soak the opposing team for extra points - but he chalks that up to a mixture of cultural differences and the fact that these players didn't grow up with the Generation of Miracles. When he tried to tell people what they can do, about Kise Ryouta's Perfect Copy and Murasakibara Atsushi's Thor's Hammer, they assumed he was exaggerating, so eventually he let it go. It doesn't hurt to have a little mystique surrounding his game anyway.

Today's game is about local rivalries, their college's team versus that of another college on the other side of the city, and though they must have seen him play on the game footage they'd have studied, the other team still stares like what he's doing is impossible. That's something he's gotten used to, though, so it isn't as distracting for him as it could be. It's plenty distracting for them, though; the score is close, but Reo's team pulls it out in the end.

He and his teammates laugh and chatter on the way back to the locker room, clapping each other on backs and shoulders, and Reo almost doesn't see the odd woman loitering in the hall.