"You consider you can defeat me Dr. Mandarin? Those do not refer me the Super Fightening Zillionaire Easy-Man Philathtropolis for nothing you realize?"

Kasugano Sakura coughed as a bite of last night's leftovers nearly came out of her nose. The translation was awful, even she could see that, and her English was still in the lower fortieth percent of her class. Oh, she could survive with what she knew, Ken had been very gracious in his "tutoring" when she'd gone to the US with Ryu-san, but it wasn't going to win her any awards either.

"MegaStark Justice Buster!" A whole manga panel was devoted to showing the thoroughly incorrect interpretation of Iron Man firing the giant cannon his arm had transformed into. It'd been a fire hose at one point in the last volume, and a satellite dish before that.

Sakura shook her head as the character kept boasting. It's like they drew a beard on Hibiki-san and stuffed him into an armor.

Swallowing another bite of lukewarm beef bun, which wasn't bad at all for her first unguided trip into the world of cooking, she moved to her English-to-Japanese dictionary. She had to be sure, but there was just no way that "Philathropolis" was a real word.

"Hey, Sakura." She got a light, friendly punch in the shoulder, as Kazama Akira dropped into the seat next to her. "How's the research going?"

"Goofy," Sakura replied, flipping through the dictionary. "I don't think these Korean manga companies know how to translate anything."

Akira snorted and took a pull from her sports drink. She and Sakura usually liked to find a quiet place to spar at lunch, along with Hinata and Batsu when he could make it, but Sakura was already lagging behind with her project and due-dates waited for nobody. Which meant Akira had spent a somewhat lackluster half-hour beating up training dummies, and that had left her with a mind to mess with her poor struggling classmate.

"I told you, proof reading English can be hard."

Sakura rolled her eyes. "That's funny, coming from you. You got a ninety-eight on the last test. I thought our teacher was going to have a stroke."

Akira, with her straight chin-length black hair and love for motorcycles and martial arts, was the very definition of a tomboy. A fair amount of the school had come to the conclusion that she was in a gang, or otherwise some sort of trouble maker. Which wasn't true, but perceptions could be difficult to fight, and Akira hadn't seem interested in really trying. With that "bad girl" persona, nobody, not even her teachers, had expected her to excel in her foreign language class.

"I am gifted," Akira replied in proper American English. She grinned at Sakura's glower, shifting back into Japanese. "I did warn you."

"Uh-huh." Sakura kept scouring the dictionary for a moment, finding nothing, and ran a frustrated hand through her short brown hair. If she'd actually found it, at least she could have been done with this page. "There's no way this is a real word."

"What's that?" Akira had leaned over to look at the dictionary.

"Fil-an-throw-pulis. I... think that's how you say it?"

Akira quirked a black eyebrow. "No, I don't think that is. They might mean "Philanthropist", maybe. You know," she gave Sakura an expectant look, "like Tony Stark."

Sakura brightened, "Right! That'd make sense..." She trailed off as she suddenly recalled something very important about her friend. Tony Stark was sort of Akira's new role model. Not when it came to fighting of course, that space was still reserved for her brother Daigo, but her interests in motorcycles had recently expanded into other mechanical fields. And in the world of mechanics, Tony Stark reigned supreme. Akira also had a somewhat secret love for the Shooting Star Rockman franchise. Though the "somewhat secret" part went away pretty quick once Sakura had seen Akira's room; she'd had no idea there were that many Geo Stelar wall scrolls for sale, let alone that somebody actually owned all of them.

And what had recently filled in the gaps between those Rockman wall scrolls? Imported posters of anything and everything related to Iron Man. Sakura's brown eyes hesitantly looked back at the half covered manga. And what was she currently reading for her English project? A trashy little comic book series that mocked both of those things.

Uh-oh. A small part of Sakura's mind whimpered.

"What are you reading anyway?" Akira looked a little curious now. "It'd have to be pretty bad to screw up like that." She reached for the manga, and Sakura, for the first time, noticed that her friend was sporting a short-sleeved red shirt with a large gold Iron Man helmet airbrushed onto it.

"International schools are great," Akira had said at the start of the year. "I hate having to wear uniforms."

Uh-Oh. A somewhat larger part of Sakura's mind whimpered.

Before she could even begin to think of a way to keep her friend from seeing the comic, Akira had snatched it up and flipped it over to the cover. Sakura watched her friend's gray eyes slowly widen in shock.

"What the..." Akira stared at the cover for a second, seemingly unsure what to make of it.

"Hey, it's just a silly comic, you don't..."

Akira wasn't paying attention, her eyes focused on the book as she began to flip through it. The shorter haired girl swallowed a lump in her throat, and hopped that her friend would just find the manga to be a dumb farce, rather than a complete affront.

"Dr. Mandarin?" Akira mumbled and flipped a few more pages. "Dynamo Man? Who the heck is this guy?" She flipped the comic over at Sakura and pointed at a tall black man in a long coat with an eye patch.

"That's...Doctor Director Fury." Sakura could feel herself deflating as she explained. It sounded even more stupid out loud. "He made MegaStark."

Akira just stared at her, blank-faced, then went back to flipping through pages. She stopped again, though she now looked a bit peeved. Flipping the comic back at Sakura, she pointed at a woman next to "MegaStark" and asked, "And who the hell is this? Is that supposed to be Sonia?"

Sonia Strumm, aka Harp Note, was the guitar wielding sort-of sidekick to Geo's Rockman. The woman was certainly dressed like Harp Note, the heart-themed dress over bodysuit and Sentai-like helmet were recognizable enough. But Harp Note, and Rockman for that matter, were supposed to be about thirteen years old in the cartoons. The woman on the manga page was a very full bodied adult, with much longer hair. And wings... for some reason. Sakura could only look at the page, and nod helplessly.

Akira, now definitely looking irritated, refocused on the manga. She went through another few pages, listing off things with increasing outrage. "Whiplash Man? Hammer Woman? Monger Man? Cobalt Man?" She abruptly stopped, and took a long, hissing breath.

Sakura was suddenly looking at the comic again, though Akira had made sure it was a much closer than before. In the panel her friend was pointing at, "MegaStark" stood atop another man-shaped armor as he flew away from a large explosion.

"Away we Rush Machine! To Victoriousness!" Said the speech bubble above MegaStark.

""Rush Machine"?" Akira ground out. She sounded like she wanted to throttle someone.

Sakura could only shrug and chuckle weakly. "Comics...right?"

Akira stared at her, silent aside from what might have been the sound of teeth grinding on teeth. She didn't quite throw the manga back at Sakura's desk, but it was a close thing. Akira launched herself out of her chair and stomped toward the classroom door, fists clenched in such a way that implied a horrible fate for the Martial Arts Club's training dummies.

Well, Sakura thought as her shoulders slumped, there goes your secret weapon. She glanced back at the manga, then at the dictionary, and finally on the note she'd written with the impending due-date, and sighed.

"Darn it."

Yes, I'm alive. Yes, I'm slower than a rampaging tidal wave of molasses (actually happened once, look it up). I can't offer much on this aside from a heartfelt apology to everybody who's been waiting for me to get off my behind. You guys are great and my excuse of being a scatter-brained blond guy can only go so far to cover for my absentee-ness.

I'm still working on revisions for the main story, and for a while I was stopping myself from writing anything else because I wanted to get back up-to-date with things. As it turns out, that doesn't speed me up, it just burns me out. So, I'm going to try to mix in silly stuff like this so I can still give you guys content while I wrangle the main story.

Hope all of you guys are well and that this makes up for my absence just a little bit.

Bonus Points for spotting how piss-poor my knowledge on anything Japanese High School stuff is. Persona series, you have failed me not just in your in-game tests but in real life as well!