Angry Ikari

Diary

The vein at Ikari's temple throbbed like a war drum before anyone even saw the rat, before the shadows in the trees turned out to be nothing but wind and his own paranoia dressed up as ninjas. He screamed threats into the bamboo grove of some forgotten Japanese hillside, katana raised at enemies who had long since stopped existing, and when the rat finally scurried across his boot he stabbed it clean through out of pure reflexive fury, the kind that used to win him battles and now just wins him strange looks. "Anger is a wind which blows out the lamp of the mind," some old master once said, and Ikari knows this, quotes it bitterly to himself between bong rips, and then immediately forgets it the second someone looks at him wrong or the vending machine eats his last yen. He tells anyone who'll listen that he's rebuilding his reputation, one imaginary ninja at a time, one dead rodent at a time, discipline just around the corner, any day now. The vein never goes down. The reputation never quite comes back. But the rat, at least, died knowing true samurai commitment, and Ikari counts that as a win, shouting it to the empty trees like they might finally applaud.