creepy and hatboy – some ninjagirl moments

creepy and hatboy - heroes for a couching world.

hatboy and i live in a house which doubles as both a place within which we engage ourselves in a battle of wits over control of the remote, and as a secret base of operations from where we pursue all manner of evil villains and force them into understanding that violence is not the answer to their own twisted childhood experiences.
sometimes we even make smoothies here.
ninjagirl lives here, too. we call her a squatter. she calls herself a roomie.
hatboy thinks that’s just terrific, especially seeing as how she always cooks batches of tasty ramen goodness.
he says being a super-sidekick can have its advantages, like super-sidekick groupies such as ninjagirl.
ninjagirl says being a super-sidekick groupie might have its advantages, too. that is, if she were a said super-sidekick groupie.
hatboy shifts uncomfortably on our sofa and enquires, reasonably, as to the nature of these advantages.
ninjagirl ponders her answer for some time.
“well,” she says. “for one; groupies would often disembowel sidekicks simply for being referred to as something so sleazoid as groupies. i’d call that an advantage.”
hatboy offers her some popcorn.
he says he’s glad we don’t have any groupies.
he says he’s much more considerate to the female of the species.
he says he’s considering going to feminist reprogramming sessions.
he says he’s even thought of buying a dress.
i tell him he’s already got one.
he says kilts don’t count.
i tell him i think they do.
ninjagirl tells us both to button our lips and put macgyver back on.

ninjagirl

i met ninjagirl on my fifteenth day at junior school.
it happened midway through what was quaintly called a lunchbreak, when a gang of snarly goons cornered me in the hallway and demanded my shiny things. familiar with the ritual, i dug into my pockets to give them up.
ninjagirl, however, had noted their playground antics and took their enterprising ways as a personal insult. when the leader advised her to mind her own business, she quietly skewered him on her sword and held the other two by their ears.
“apologise to creepy now!” she hissed. “or i’ll rip out your intestines and offer them to him as a token of your remorse!”
nowadays she’s not so eager to defend my pockets as she is to raid them.

italian zombie movies

hatboy hides behind a comic as ninjagirl subjects us to her latest zombie film.
there’s a lot of meat-eaty and plenty of splattery skin-stretchy.
i’m not sure why hatboy’s a little squeamish when it comes to zombie films. he seems quite the opposite when it comes to eating his awful noodleburgers.
i tell him about his noodleburgers and he ignores me, especially when i mention the sauce.
ninjagirl tells me to hush. she says, just as the screen turns a delicious shade of red, that the good bit is just coming up.
i have to disagree. i tell her that, considering the colour of hatboy’s cheeks, the good bit will be coming up a little sooner than expected.
hatboy excuses himself as another zombie eagerly munches into the neck of some screaming vixen in white. his flight is followed by ninjagirl’s cries of, “wait! hatboy! you’re missing the bit where it bites off her nose!” and “now it’s using its fingers to tear out her tongue! come back! you’ll miss the intestines scene, soon!”
“oh well,” she says as the happy-go-lucky zombies begin chewing eyes. “at least you’re here, creepy.”
another vixen in white attempts to flee the castle, minus her dress.
the screen turns that wonderful shade of red again and the screaming begins anew.
“ouch.”
“watch as it bites her knuckles!” ninjagirl chortles, perched on the edge of her seat like a vulture.
“that reminds me,” i say. “pass the popcorn.”

ninjagirl’s cookie day

“do you know what today is, creepy?”
“thursday.”
“apart from that!”
“hot?”
“no, silly man! it’s cookie day!”
“since when?”
“this morning. now, put on one of your dreadful shirts, and let’s go get some cookies!”
“what dreadful shirts? my shirts of badguy doom are not dreadful! they’re very stylish.”
“they’re ugly.”
“they’re just brightly coloured.”
“that’s what i said. ugly.”
“i don’t think much for your taste in clothes.”
“but my taste in cookies is working just fine.”
“i don’t see why i have to participate in this silly holiday ritual.”
“because if you don’t, i’m going to make no more smoothies, and you can cook your own ramen.”
“no more smoothies of much tummy tasty? cook my own ramen? why didn’t you say so? pass me that striking piece of mambo horror hanging behind you, and let’s go munch on more of that delicious cookie goodness before your flesh shrivels and you turn out to be a skeleton of the girl you used to be!”
“are you trying to say something sneaky about my hips?”

ninjagirl’s kami of creepy-killy

“so, let me get his straight. they’re in everything?”
“everything.”
“inside me?”
“look, now you’re being silly.”
“in my underpants? i hope you know i think this whole spirits-residing-in-my-underpants thing to be entirely unthinkable if not revolting.”
“creepy, i think you’d best be quiet now.”
“what about my collection of coke bottles? do they live in those? i could live with that, i guess. it reinforces my belief in the coke god. it would certainly explain the strange noises when the wind blows through my window. maybe it’s not wind! maybe the kami are singing to me! yay! i have spirits singing to me through their coca-cola mouths! they’re singing the coke song! coke is it! coca-cola is it! the real thing never lets you down!”
“creepy-”
“coke is it!”
“creepy! shut up or i swear to any kami you wish to believe in that i’ll offer you up to sacrifice to something dark and pagan.”
“are they in my – ouch! hey! what the-”

hatboy loves zombie films, really

ninjagirl paused the tape and said, “see? that’s what i’m talking about!”
hatboy flinched. “ick.”
i shook my head. “disgusting. how they can get away with that kind of special effects laziness is beyond me.”
“exactly!” ninjagirl cried, whirling the remote between her fingers. “there’s not nearly enough blood and it looks like paint. and where’s the splinters of bone erupting from his sternum? nowhere to be seen.”
hatboy turned a funny shade of green.
i grinned at him. “i kind of liked the sound of when they’re chewing out his belly, though. can we hear that again, ninjagirl?”
she began rewinding, frame by frame.
hatboy left the room.
“hey!” i yelled after him. “don’t you want to play spot what this guy had for lunch which is now being consumed by rotting zombies more interested in slobbering on his freshly-ripped-from-his-screaming-corpse liver than that half-digested pizza? and are we having noodles for dinner? you can do that thing where you put tomato sauce on your noodles and put it in a bun. you can play zombies! zombies, hatboy! zombies! eat that intestine, it’s beefy flavour! and squishy, too!”
sometimes, revenge is good.

ninjagirl’s panties of zombie-magnetic powers

“they’ve touched them again!” she screamed, bursting into our viewing of mutant bimbos and the slimeball amazon nude-a-rama.
“huh? hatboy huhed.
“drackenstein’s trespassing zombies! they keep pinching my panties!”
“then why do you hang them outside for?” i asked. “you know they’re going to make a try for them. they can’t resist your panties.”
“they need to dry! how can i dry them inside? those damn zombies keep leaving bits of themselves all over my fresh-washed clothes! argh!”
“we could guard them,” hatboy offered.
“i told you,” she hissed, pulling out her sword and pointing it at his eyeball. “you even sneak a peek at my panties and i’ll do the fulci on you.”

the ninja menace

i sat with ninjagirl and swapped ninja stories.
i told her about the rug i always carried with me. it was very light, like silk. i would unroll it in front of doorways and when security guards stepped on it, i’d jerk it from under their feet. they always landed on their heads. security guards have no sense of balance.
she showed me a ninja mask. it had buggy red eyes and black demon-sized horns. it looked very spooky. she said it was for scaring peasants, but that it worked just fine on lawyers and drug dealers.
tomorrow, we’re going down to ninja surplus, where the best smoke bombs are bought.
i always buy green ones.
ninjagirl gets blue ones because pink is for girls.

a night on the porch

ninjagirl sat on the porch and watched the freaks frolic past.
“what are you doing?” i asked, sitting down on the step beside her.
“waiting for zombies. i’m going to hurt them.”
“can you really hurt a zombie?”
“you can only try,” she said. “hey, is that wednesday?”
i squinted. i could see a big pointy hat flitting through the dead trees. “i think so.”
“who’s she with this time?”
“i don’t know. this one’s french, i think.”
“didn’t you have a thing with her?”
“a thing?”
“yep, you know. a thing.”
“i don’t think so. i have too many hands for it. no, she was kind of wondering about our invasion of drackenstein’s, but other than that, nothing.”
“nothing?”
i waved a mozzie away. “nope.”
“that’s probably a good idea. those addamses, they’re bad feng shui.”

daylight excursions

sometimes ninjagirl and i retreat outside during the day.
on these rare occaisions, we generally drift up to the corner deli to buy a few slushies and some crazy imported candies. we walk down to the beach and sit in the sand watching the loopy people swim with sharks. we try to spot the fins.
sometimes we see dolphins, or windsurfers.
once, we saw a whale. ninjagirl wanted to go and harpoon it, but the sensible side of her said it wouldn’t be a nice thing to do. besides, we’re vegetarians and there wouldn’t be anything we could do with all that whalemeat except try and sell it to passing tourists.
she always shades herself from the sun with a large paper umbrella. she sometimes lets me under it when she’s feeling generous, but mostly i have to make do with my hat.
“one day,” she tells me. “i’m going to impale a surfer on his surfboard.”

the coffee table of mystery

our coffee table looks like one of those places americans like to blow up. there’s a lot of unidentifiable stuff on top, beneath, and embedded into its face. ninjagirl says we should clean up after ourselves some more.
i tell her this was evidence of goblins, and evil ones at that.
she says i’m making stuff up and i should consider joining the zombies in drackenstein’s garden because at least they have the spaces in their skulls which would encourage them to fall for my blatant lies.
amid the ocean of foodstuffs and unwashed glasses, i find a small carving of a frog. it is carved from a piece of pale jade, and has two little chips, like emeralds, for eyes. i ask ninjagirl if she’s ever seen it before.
“no. but frogs are good luck!”
i decide to put it in my pocket and see what happens.
“i could do with some good luck,” i tell her.
she sniffs my face. “you could do with a shower, smellyboy.”

family issues

i ask ninjagirl to explain why she’s being so tetchy.
“i’m not being tetchy!” she screams, leaping at my throat with a pair of chewed chopsticks and a gleam in her eye which offers no thought of mercy. luckily, my super-sidekick skills were up to par and i managed to distract her by the sneaky waving of a choc-covered licorice stick.
she siezes the stick and growls. “you are too smart for your own good.”
she tells me her father’s ill. he wants her to come back to the dojo and look after him. he wants her to wear the jazz fashion.
i tell her i’d wear those slippy clothes of jazz trendy.
she tells me i don’t count as human so my opinion hardly matters.
i tell her she should try it some time. “you’d probably look good in it.”
she prepares to strike off my head, but then she smiles. “thank you, creepy.”
there’s not even any sign of latent ninjagirl-patented cruelty in her smile! i’m in awe of this new smile! it’s too cheery!
her teeth are shiny!
i am confused, and i tell her so while i take two steps back in fear. “you’re supposed to rip out my intestines and paint pretty pictures on the wall with them!”
“i would, but i’m sort of glad we’re kind-of-sidekicks.”
“super-sidekicks. you forgot the super. it’s not like we’re just simple sidekicks, you know. one day we’ll have utility belts and masks which don’t need to be held on by elastic! one day, we’ll have corporate sponsoring.”
“idiot.”

initiation

hatboy and i initiate our new super-sidekick.
“now we’re a trio of crimefighting pals!” hatboy cries, dumping a glass of coke over her head.
i throw some crushed corn chips over her, and give the ceremonial initiation speech of, “couch on, super-sidekick. couch on!”
we squeeze onto the couch.
hatboy shifts, looking for the remote.
ninjagirl’s elbow digs into my side.
we’re going to need a bigger couch.

our first crimefight

“we’ll have to take her on her first real crimefighting expedition.”
“i don’t know that she’s ready for it, creepy.”
“are you kidding? she’s a ninja! how much more ready could she be?”
“but being a ninja and being a super-sidekick are two completely different professions.”
“i guess so. but we should at least let her tag along as an observer.”
“maybe we could take her to roust the black widow woman of poison doom.”
“what about the seven-eyed creature from the orange slime?”
“or the chewy monsters from the back of the cupboard?”
“the chocolate ones, or the toffee ones?”
“there’s a difference?”

Tags: creepy and hatboy, ninjagirl, the fulci move