Practical Studies Abroad

Jack Mackenzie had been given a prestigious grant to attend the London School for Boys, a plainly named institution who's rich history traveled all the way back to the kings of yore and truly the cuisine had to come from the same era because it was truly wretched. Meat pies, meat paste, haggis for the Scots. Truly a horrific welcoming for the boy after a fresh jump across the river from Ireland his home.

Feeling homesick and sick sick from the display of disgusting meaty food, the young man made a swift exit from the premises to head to greener pastures. As he walked he felt the itch of his school uniform, a blue blazer with white pants coupled with a taut black belt, Jack pulled at the tight tug of his collar in order to allow some air into the extremely uncomfortable ensemble. As he rounded the corner he noted some gentlemen carrying crates out of a building, walking the long way around them he saw a small old woman in the corner looking as the men took her stuff.

How nice he thought These two men here are helping this old lady take her things out

As he continued to walk he noted a nice looking cafe with a clever name The Regal Eagle complete with a dapper looking bird of prey wearing a crown. Walking in he saw a bunch of older folks all probably on lunch break, heading to the back of the queue, Jack leaned out of the line to see it's great length and felt the rumble of his stomach, it certainly was lunch time.

As he leaned back he saw out of the corner of his eye one of the men bearing a very large dresser, as he turned back he heard a muffled crack and turned again to see it broken on the ground, the other man yelling at him. At firs this just seemed unfortunate then Jack realized something strange. The old woman did nothing in response, she didn't even look on in horror, she merely stayed placid on the wall.

Operating on suspicion alone Jack sprang into action, while he was hungry for food the young hero was always all the more hungry for justice.

Rushing into a nearby alley Jack checked to make sure he wasn't being spied on by any pesky hobos or CCTV cameras before ripping off that hot blazer and pants so that he could swiftly put on his green tights and mask. Looking sufficiently heroic the young hero charged out and rushed the two 'movers' and declared,

"Stop right there meat heads!"

The two hulky men stopped and turned to look upon the weirdly dressed kid

"Halloween ain't for another month," the man said, his partner chuckling

Salad Lad unabated leaped and gave a karate chop to the man holding a crate sending it clattering to the ground,

"Hey!"

"You two aren't movers, you're thieves!" Salad Lad declared noting the old woman now had true fear in her eyes.

The two men on the other hand both thinned their eyes to hide their malice as they both leaped at the kid. Hop skipping away Salad Lad backed off and declared,

"In the name in all that is wholesome and environmentally friendly, I bid you to halt your illicit behavior and turn yourselves in,"

This complicated and somewhat convoluted threat/ suggestion was met with more punch and grab attempts forcing Salad Lad to sigh and reach into his pocket to find. Nothing. Then he remembered his tofu was sezied at customs.

"Oh dear," he declared as one of the men tackled him.

In a less dignified fashion that the young boy he was about to meet, Naris had come to London by the transport service supplied by one of his favoured summons, Moon-Moon the flying Doge, a product of an incredibly enjoyable hallucinogenic trip combined with his powers sourced from radioactive space-mushrooms. Even before he had known about cocaine, his life was unduly tainted by recreational science, down to the last molecule. Why had he flown across from America? With Naris, reason was hardly something to consider; it was a simple case of his fancy demanding a change of scenery. Saying that, it was not as if the bins smelt any different or the concrete was any harder here than back in the city of Chicago.

What the boy whom he had not yet met seemed to perceive as "greener pastures", Naris saw only inanimate things for him to interact with, be that merely to look at, or to piss on when people weren't looking for the sake of it. His life was directed by chaos, though his emotions stayed absolute in their shallow, lethargic state. Not being able to create stimulation from the whim of his spiritual side, Naris had always sought for action in an attempt to create a spark in the murky swamp of cocaine-inebriated mind, and action he did receive as, while shuffling down the alleys in search of a full bin to rummage for food, he came across a fight.

For a second, he just stood there, gawking, wondering if the super-speeding child that dodged about was just a figment of his imagination, but as soon as the kid let out a sound and was tackled to the ground by two bigger guys. Honest to whatever deities do and do not exist, Naris could not care less about the situation of the boy; it was hardly in his mental capability to feel an emotion to a normally-detectable extent. However, he, as a person, was incredibly dedicated to trouble-making. "Oi, slags!" Naris yelled out at them, hoarsely. "You should only pick on people that are smaller than yourselves!" There was a pause of confusion, where the two men stared at the hobo and, in response, Naris wavered and squinted, before realising that the boy was, in fact, smaller than the two thugs. "And... By that... Uh..." Naris started, his speech somewhat fractured by his inconsistent concentration, as he dug a hand into his pocket and pulled out a small phial. He uncorked it with the flick of his thumb, and lined the length of his opposite forefinger with a white powder that came from said phial. He then snorted up the powder, gave a violent shudder, before tailing his sentence with the words: "By that, I mean dick size."

The men, in a total uproar, immediately threw the scrawny, weirdly-dressed kid on the ground and started towards the hobo guy who insulted the size of their penises. Before they could reach him, however, Naris wove his hands as a melodramatic spiritual mystic would over a crowd of fanatics, and burst from his fingers an arced ray of bright, neon colours, angling the vibes up into their eyes. The sudden luminescence and vibrancy caused them to stumble, temporarily blinded, to which Naris immediately grabbed a hand-sized shard of glass which had shattered out of its pane from the dresser they dropped, and proceeded to lacerate the men while dodging around their aimless punches. "Join in, kid! This is great fun!" He cackled with glee, as the good role-model he is.

Upon the ground Salad Lad epically struggled against these beefy fiends who's grabbing hands felt like the claws of lobsters which are made of meat and thus very non vegetarian to all those who claim vegetarianism and still eat fish, you are monsters all of you.

Upon the ground being pushed down and smashed about like a cow in a slaughterhouse that is significantly mistreated as are all cows in slaughterhouses because meat is murder and ranchers are fiends in cowboy hats, Salad Lad dipped and dived, squirming to escape the bear hug of the brutish meat eating slags that out weighed him by many pounds.

Alas without his Tofu, Salad Lad could not use his To-Fu, the ancient kung fu fighting style of the Vegans, utilizing the the Whey of the Warrior, this technique would surely allow him to escape the meaty mitts of these dastardly do-badders.

As the brutes continued to torment the valiant vigilante of veganism, the eighties called in a rather unusual fashion. A coked up bloke who looked as if he had gotten off a long flight, but was still miles high began to yell obscenities at the men, claiming their man doo dads were not up to snuff. Salad Lad snickered at this, but the two brutes found it less than amicable and responded in kind by trying to beat the living piss out of him.

Salad Lad, allowed to lift himself as the meaty marauders sought to harm this fellow, narrowly dusted himself when a blinding light erupted, rubbing his eyes, Salad Lad opened them to behold a horrible sight as the two men were being cut up like the slabs of meat they were. This was wrong however, no one deserved this not even meat eaters and such vengeful actions was not the vegan way. Not wishing for these men to be peeled like the potatoes in Ireland, the young man declared,

"Stop, these men have the brain of cabbages, but that doesn't mean they deserve to be chopped into a delectable salad like one, especially because human blood is a poor dressing!"

As he said this the young acrobatic vegetable muncher grabbed a box from the loading truck labeled: Things kids left on my lawn it was surprisingly full for a woman who lived in an urban environment with no lawn to speak of, but having little time to question this Salad Lad declared,

"Salad Toss!"

Before chucking the contents at the fiend with greater force than a bamboo stalk gives as it grows out of the ground. Consequently this isn't a lot of force, but the contents were a great deal of softball, baseball, tennis balls, and oddly enough seven bowling balls. As the massive amount of balls headed towards the men at which point a lewd pornographic remark would be apropos, Salad Lad instead declared,

"Cease and desist your fighting or face the wrath of my balls!"

In Naris' perspective, there was hardly any other way to react to what was said by the boy other than the bewildered "Huh?" that he gave then, pausing in his people-peeling as he stared at the little kid with balls rolling around his feet. Being so heavily influenced by cocaine, the walls were rippling and the blood that ran out of the men by his feet was rising like a mist, the light from the lampposts refracting through the vapour into a spectrum of multicoloured bliss. As the words "Salad Toss" left the boys mouth, a speech bubble escaped from his lips and spelt out the words in elaborate script font. From his hands, crystal spheres were thrown from a pirate chest, flying towards Naris in slow-motion, in which he had the time to widen his eyes to full-circles and grin like the Cheshire Cat as his pupils crossed onto the ball headed directly into his face--

THUD!

Gravity shifted to align with Naris's back, the coldness of the pavement bleeding up through the back of his head. Though he was only hit with the force of a bamboo shooting up through the ground, it was enough to shift the balance of an inebriated crack-addict. Reflecting on the stilled frame, two thugs and a homeless person now lay upon the ground, the latter generously sprinkled with the blood of the two former, as well as having a nice coating of filth and debris from his last night's choice of slumber: a particularly cosy spot in a landfill site. After giving a groan and a large sniff, Naris sat up and looked either side of him, able to catch the site of two bowling balls rolling off of the two men that were attacking the young lad that threw them.

Though the process wouldn't have been difficult at all for the average person, Naris was not average in any sense of the word, thus had to go through the elaborate procedure of fumbling his hands over the walls and gripping at the mortar in the bricks to pull himself up to his feet, the backs of his nails digging rather too deeply into his cuticles and producing dribbles of blood from underneath his nails that he did not feel. Eyes and grin still wide, he stared at the boy, irises of electric lemon reduced to mere slivers by the fantastically dilated pupils. "This ain't a place for little kids, young'un," he started, his voice hoarse from the sudden rush of white powder he snorted up. Naris squinted through the veil of senselessness that had dropped around him, leaning forward a bit as he made out the clothes that the child was wearing. "Especially little kids in tights."