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wardencommanderrodimiss · 5 years ago

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Witches, Chapter 15: orcas and penguins and pearls

It’s December, so I’ve got time to edit all these 13k chapters I wrote during NaNo! My buffer is assuredly smaller than I expected because it doesn’t take very many 13k chapters to reach 50k.

[Seelie of Kurain Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

[Witches Chapter Masterlist] [ao3]

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What they actually have to do is not complicated at all. All they need is evidence of a murder weapon, any hint of anything that could have been used, because Orla is an orca and only humans and fae use tools to kill each other with. (As far as Phoenix knows. Maybe gorillas are getting more advanced. He might have free tickets for life to a circus but he doesn’t know anything about animals.)

If there’s a murder weapon, it means there was a killer that wasn’t Orla, because Orla is only an orca, not a shapeshifter.

And, well, okay, then after that they’ll need a prosecutor willing to indict, but Phoenix is going to take things one step at a time and not just because he’s coming up empty-handed at the question of any prosecutor who might take this one. Edgeworth might miss being able to stand in court but he cares too strongly about his work as chief prosecutor to take time away from it for an orca; Franziska is abroad, incredibly busy, and cares too strongly about her work with Interpol to take time away from it to kick Phoenix’s ass over a goddamn orca; and Apollo isn’t part of the defense team so there’s no chance of him seducing Klavier into abandoning good sense to indict an orca and also face Phoenix in court again, so his best shot is probably convincing Kay of the merit of the case and letting her drag Sebastian into it.

Sasha takes them for a very brief, circular tour around the top of the orca pool. “I know it looks real small in here, and it is,” she says, gesturing to the tank. Orla has circled it as they walk, keeping close and watching them. “We do a lot of training here, since we can leave the props all out but out of sight. At the front when you come in we’ve got with the aquarium maps a schedule of when Orla’s gonna be where. Here the guests can see her swim underwater, but we’ll only keep her in here for a bit since orcas like to be able to swim straight. So we’ve got the big big show pool, and since we’re right on the water we’ve got scheduled times that we let her out and go out with her in the ocean.”

“Like, take a boat out alongside her?” Athena asks. Sasha shrugs noncommittally. “She’s never just gone off and not come back?”

“‘Course not! She loves us, and the aquarium.” Sasha has a spring in her step as she walks and Phoenix, looking at the floor slick with water splashed up by Orla, bites back a fatherly warning to watch her step. It’d be too easy to slip and crack her head open, or fall in the orca pool. Fall in the orca pool after cracking her head open. “The captain found her beached and he fed her and made sure she was healthy and tried to take her back out to sea to her pod, but she just kept coming back. Ol’ girl got attached to him just like a barnacle!”

Her smile collapses from the corners inward, her eyes unfocused on a distant memory. “I can hear Sasha’s pain,” Athena whispers. “She really loved the captain.”

“Orla played with him all the time,” Sasha says. She’s lost her cheer. Athena might be the one who fully experiences others’ feelings, but Phoenix is pained, too. “She’d steal his hat and headbutt him and go tearing off, and he was the only one of us big and strong enough to keep up with her. She loved him! She wouldn’t kill him!”

Maybe - probably - it’s true that she loved him. And maybe - Phoenix realizes it with a sense of gnawing dread and familiarity - that still doesn’t mean she didn’t kill him. Humans are fragile, and powerful creatures that love them don’t always keep them safe. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes they don’t just die anyway, but because of.

(Does it help, has it ever solved a case for him, to consider whether he is a funhouse mirror image of the situation beforehand? It doesn’t. He does anyway.)

Sasha is in the midst of explaining now to Athena how they give Orla commands for performances - a whistle with a pitch too high for humans to hear, and specific patterns to correspond to her every trick. “Anyone who knows the commands could ask her to do a trick, not just me - you could, Athena.” Athena brightens, standing up straighter, her eyes moving from the whistle Sasha put in her hands to the orca. “Except the commands are a secret, sorry!”

Athena’s shoulders slump.

“You can’t just ask her to do whatever it is, in words?” Phoenix asks, secretly relieved that Athena isn’t going to get a lesson in orca-training because he’s terrified of how that could end. “Since you said she can understand people.” Or Sasha was just fucking with him saying that Orla was offended by his question.

“That kinda breaks the show immersion,” Sasha explains, “if you’re yelling ‘now’s when you do a backflip!’ The whistle’s less noticeable.”

Orla disappears beneath the surface, a moment later launching herself up out of the water and wheeling through the air. When she dives back down she slaps the water with her tail, hard, and a wave splashed up over the three people standing by her pool. Sasha frowns in concentration. “She understands some people, somewhat,” she admits, apparently reluctantly. “Except the captain. He’d have full conversations with her and she’d chatter right back. Cap’n always joked his mom was a sea witch.”

“Are you sure it was a joke?” Phoenix asks.

“Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t,” Sasha says. “But most people get acting like they were zapped by an eel when you say that, then laugh it away all awkwardly. Didn’t expect you both to be cool as sea cucumbers about it.”

“I’ve only worked with Mr Wright for three months but I’ve seen some crazy stuff in that time,” Athena says. “Three months” is definitely debatable - she’s worked with Apollo for three months, sure - but the regrettable amount of magical mishaps she’s been through aren’t. (Why, when he reluctantly agreed to give her office space, had he thought she wouldn’t get into any more shit?) “I could probably believe anything now.”

(An addition to his case notes: make sure Athena knows not every legend is true, so she doesn’t go chasing Bigfoot or the Jersey Devil.)

This first pass through the orca pool room doesn’t net them anything that in any way resembles evidence. They get information about their client, the importance of which he won’t dismiss, because they can’t exactly directly ask their client anything. Seals and whales that eat seals surely don’t speak the same language, or could they? Maybe they all have different dialects of ocean animal language, ones that are partially understandable by each other, but only partially. (There’s a word for that. He’s pretty sure there’s a word that specifically means that and he’s coming up empty.)

With nothing in hand to present to the prosecution, he and Athena leave the pool room, leave Sasha behind sitting on the edge emphatically explaining to Orla that the police won’t let her be moved back to the bigger pool because they’re afraid if they give Sasha an inch she’s going to figure out how to abscond with a two-ton whale. Phoenix crosses his fingers that won’t happen; the last time a client of his disappeared was - well.

Fulbright has set up his investigative base in the lobby near the glass tunnel; Phoenix watches fish swim above his head, bright little reds and yellows darting between huge silver ones, and among all of them, sharks that he’s surprised don’t just eat the rest. Security camera footage from the time of the incident, taken from the first floor, looking in at the orca pool, is downloaded to a police laptop set up on a bench. As soon as Fulbright’s back is turned, Athena pulls up the relevant segment and films the screen using Widget. “There’s nothing you can see that’s absolutely damning for our case,” she explains, slowing down Widget’s playback and scrolling through its projection frame-by-frame. It’s about fifteen seconds when the victim’s body isn’t ever visible, but Orla‘s head tilts down like she’s headbutting something into the props at the bottom of the tank, and plumes of blood billow up through the water. Someone stands in frozen horror, back to the camera, in front of the tank. “This isn’t decisive! What’s Fulbright talking about? Decisive?—”

“I agree,” Phoenix says. “It’s not proof of anything.” But they can definitely expect to hear from that witness who was standing right there.

Athena lowers her fists, abruptly silent, like she hadn’t expected him - even though he’s a defense attorney too, even though he agreed to this mad venture too - to listen to her. “We’ll keep investigating,” he adds, glancing over the police laptop again. The thumb drive stuck in it is shaped like the back end of a fish and labeled return to Pub O’ Danger. Presumably the location in the aquarium that the security cameras are managed from. “Shall we?”

Athena knows exactly where in the aquarium to go - of course she does - and she leads Phoenix up around, back past the orca tank, to the second floor where they find that the "Pub O' Danger" looks really nothing at all like anything he'd consider a pub. A few large decorative bottles, filled with seashells or jellyfish - are those real? - sit on a shelf on the back wall, and one giant one filled with more jellyfish hangs from the ceiling, along with a skeleton of some ocean creature. Or maybe a crocodile. It looks like a crocodile. "Athena," he says warningly, and she guiltily lifts her hand out of the touch tank. "We're here for a job, remember?"

"Of course I remember!" she protests, perhaps a bit too loudly, and Phoenix shakes his head at her. He scans the room again, watching Athena from the corner of his eyes, and thinking he doesn't see her she sticks her hands back in the tank at the center of the room to pet a starfish.

"A-hem!" Someone loudly clears their throat; Phoenix jumps, as does Athena, wrenching her hands back and flicking water up into Phoenix's face. "Do you mind? I'm rather busy here, and you are being quite loud, young lady."

The woman already in the room, who they didn't see off to the side, standing in front of a door marked with Employees Only, wears a long black overcoat and a white scarf over her blonde hair. "Who are you?" Athena asks.

“Goodness, young lady, don’t you have any manners?” The woman huffs and Athena blanches. Phoenix can’t really vouch for any of Athena’s manners, because they’ve had strenuous debates about what is and isn’t allowed in a courtroom, and no, Athena, asking the prosecution to “take it out back” is not, even if they are being jerks. “Aren’t you even going to introduce yourself first?”

She’s really got Athena thrown for a loop. “Oh, I, uh - I’m—”

“Never mind,” the woman interrupts. “I shall save time and space for more important things in my memory by simply calling you ‘yellow girl’, and him over there ‘blue boy’.”

“I’m thirty-four years old, you know,” Phoenix objects, and she ignores him as he expected her to, but at least he can say to his dignity that he tried.

“My name is Norma DePlume,” she continues. “An esteemed guest and frequent patron of this establishment.”

“I’ve got it!” Athena crows. “So you aren’t someone affiliated with the aquarium!”

Solid work on that deduction there, kiddo.

“And what exactly do you imagine you are?” DePlume asks icily.

Athena hikes her shoulders up toward her ears, her hands rising in fists at the ready. Widget might be useful for its functionalities in court, but its changing colors and blurted words aren’t close to necessary; all of its information on Athena’s emotional state, she’ll project plain as day on her face, in her posture. He doesn’t need to read her like he would opponents in poker - nothing is small when it comes to her habits. “I’m not a what!” she protests. Fair enough to get offended; it’s rude way to ask that question, even if what are you is one that’s technically valid to wonder. Better not to ask at all, and besides, Phoenix knows that DePlume didn’t mean it in the way that Phoenix wonders it, because he’s given her a once-over and she’s the one person in this room who’s normal. “I’m a lawyer!”

“And I, uh - run a law office.” Phoenix trips on the words. He sort of runs a law office. He badly runs a law office. It runs itself. It’s still easier for him to get that sentence out than to say that he’s a lawyer. What are you? Isn’t he supposed to know that now, again?

“Well, I don’t have the slightest interest,” DePlume continues, examining her gloves like she can see her fingernails to fix them.

Then why fucking ask what they are and risk offending a fae when they presume she’s asking what are you, human or not? Maybe she doesn’t know. Maybe she isn’t from around here. Maybe she doesn’t care if she offends anyone, human or fae or all the people at the crossroads in between. She certainly doesn’t care if she offends the two right here.

She’s damn lucky Phoenix doesn’t work cases with Maya anymore, even if Athena is growling, actually growling, in frustration and rage. “Just who does she think she is, Boss?”

“An esteemed guest.” The customer who is always right, and Phoenix is glad that the only vaguely retail career he’s ever had is one where he could kick the customers’ asses in a poker game after he offended their artistic sensibilities with his piano “playing”. His friendship with Kristoph was his customer service face: being pleasant to someone who wouldn’t hesitate to throw him under a bus or get him fired. Actually Kristoph did get him fired. And probably wouldn’t have hesitated to eventually get him fired from life.

Right. Murder. That’s called murder.

“I thought they closed the aquarium to members of the public, though,” Athena says, squinting suspiciously and turning back to Phoenix, waiting for him to validate her suspicions. “Why are you here?”

DePlume has a deep, haughty chuckle that balances on the edge of smug before tipping straight into the center of it. “O-ho! But I have special permission to be here, you see.” She sounds less like she’s actually amused and more that she’s trying to signal to them their inferiority, that they are amusing, trivial things beneath her concern. Athena is close to blowing a gasket anyway, so if that’s what she hears she can’t actually get any more heated.

Now that’s interesting. “And why is that?” Phoenix asks, doing his level best to sound like he’s only casually curious. She wouldn’t happen to have seen something, did she?

“Well, it’s of course because of the incide— good heavens, I’ve said far too much!”

The whole world blinks, pauses on an inhale - DePlume, turning away back toward the door she was lurking outside of; Athena, readying another objection - and the hum of the aquarium, the tank filters and the internal air, drops dead away, and almost instantly that still silence breaks with the stark cold rumble of chains and the two red locks that nail into place at the intersection of the chains.

God dammit. Phoenix breathes in, lets his anger hiss out among the background noise of the aquarium that has come back to life. “What’s wrong, Boss?” Athena asks. All she would have seen was his mood drop suddenly, more than a reluctant witness should make happen, because how often do they have a witness who isn’t reluctant?

“Psyche-Locks.” It might as well be a curse word. It certainly is a cursed word - words? (Does the hyphen make it one word or is it still two? He assumes there’s a hyphen. It’s how he visualizes it and that might be magic that plopped the word(s?) in his mind in a written form.)

“Bike socks? Cyborg clocks?”

Athena, what the hell is a bike sock?

“Pysche-Locks,” he repeats, enunciating it clearer and louder this time. DePlume doesn’t care what they have to say and probably already thinks they’re crazy, so talking audibly about magic isn’t going to make any difference. “They’re locks around a person’s heart that represent the secrets they’re hiding from me. An old friend of mine granted me a blessing that lets me see if I’m being lied to - that’s how it manifests.”

“Oh, wow,” Athena says. “I knew you had your eyes thing” - she points a finger to her own eyes and swings it back and forth to signify the changing colors - “but I didn’t know you can tell that people are lying, like Apollo, too!”

Like Apollo, god. Like Apollo. He’d taught Apollo the trick to watching for people’s tics and told Trucy to explain to him the same, on basis of blood and a guess - that he knew how Trucy’s blessing worked for her, that Zak said Thalassa had the same, and Apollo is Thalassa’s child too. Even if Truth was his boon granted by a different source, maybe it worked the same, he figured. And it did, but the larger question has been gnawing at him since. Apollo’s blessing wasn’t from Magnifi; it looks nothing like either Trucy’s or Thalassa’s, and Thalassa confirmed that Magnifi never met Apollo. And when Apollo confronted Phoenix for not telling him about Kristoph, he sounded genuinely confused at the suggestion that he could’ve had any experience with the fae in the past.

Some one of the fae loved Apollo enough to give him a blessing, but even for valuing Truth highly enough to give it to him, didn’t tell him that truth that they were fae and that he had this gift. It’d have to be love, wouldn’t it, because Apollo is human grown up in this world. He isn’t Thalassa, a tactical advantage to be played against an enemy; he looks nothing like his mother who is glamoured to the high heavens for spending so long in the Twilight Realm.

(Note to self: ask Thalassa sometime why Apollo didn’t grow up with her and the Troupe after his father’s death in the Summer Court. Also, bother her some more to see if she’ll say where the Summer Court is.)

“Boss?”

“I’m listening,” he says reflexively, even though if she’d said anything before that, he sure as hell didn’t actually hear it. Apollo, Apollo; Apollo’s a stable functioning kid who escaped growing up a Gramarye and his mystery can wait while Phoenix has a case with Athena. There is enough right here on his plate.

“Can you unlock these Psyche-Locks?”

Unlock, no; bludgeon into shattering with brute force, yes. Maybe that’s what the black ones meant, a warning that it wasn’t worth trying to break them, or that he couldn’t, because Kristoph isn’t great at poker but did know how to keep his cards close. “Yeah. It’s basically the same as cross-examining a witness; you hit them with evidence until they crack.”

Athena smacks her fist against her palm, massaging out her knuckles. “All right! Sounds like a plan!”

“Not literally hit,” Phoenix says hastily. She probably knows that, maybe.

DePlume knocks loudly on the employees-only door. “I know I heard movement back there!” she announces loudly to the door, or whoever might be behind it. “I demand to speak with you!”

“Er, what are you doing?” Athena asks, already moving from the matter of the Psyche-Locks to this next mysterious behavior.

“This aquarium’s veterinarian has an office here,” DePlume snaps. “And he has most ungraciously been avoiding me! I insist on being able to speak with him, and I will not leave until I get such an opportunity!”

“Okay,” Athena says, “but—”

“If you, yellow girl, wish to further badger me in your impolite ways, you will simply have to wait.”

Athena frowns. “We might as well investigate elsewhere in the meantime,” Phoenix says. If she’s not leaving until the vet does, and she acts this overbearing and demanding in every aspect, then there’s little chance the vet wants to talk to her and a much higher likelihood that wherever else they go in the aquarium, when they return, she’ll still be right here. “C’mon, kiddo.”

Athena’s boots smack off the floor louder than she usually walks, but as they move back through the aquarium, past tanks of sea dragons and lionfish and informative backlit wall displays about the represented species and ecosystems, her steps lighten and her pace slows. Light comes from the tanks, and only them, blue on Athena’s face, her eyes even brighter as wide as they are, soaking up every sight as though she hadn’t ever been here before. She’s eighteen, still a kid really, should be heading toward her senior year of high school or freshman year of university, not skipping half a dozen grades to have a law career for - what, exactly? Franziska had a father to live up to, Sebastian too, and Klavier an older brother. Athena carries with her righteous fury to find justice and save the innocent, with no catalyst that birthed it in her heart, no vehicle carrying her down this frantic road. He’s thought it before and will again, but she lives like she’s desperately chasing something always just out of reach. Something Phoenix can’t see.

He lets her smile at the fish a moment longer and then prompts her to get moving. “I wish I could actually visit without the crowds,” she says. “There’s usually so many people here, it’s kinda just eerie now.”

“A man did die here,” Phoenix says, but now that she’s got him thinking it, yeah, he doesn’t like this emptiness. Like wandering through the snow between circus tents, not a sound but their feet and fabric flapping in the wind, when a few nights ago he’d seen the full bustle of the crowd around a show. Like the bowl club in the quiet after closing, his voice echoing in the stairwell after a call to the police, the only sound in the den his heart pounding in his ears as he realized this was the final round, the hand already dealt, and this was his last chance to bind Kristoph to iron. “That eerie feeling isn’t surprising.”

The next sign of human life they find is one of the animal feeders, hauling along two buckets full of fish and alternating rhyming and beatboxing as he goes. Budding slam poet? Soundcloud rapper? “Hello!” Athena calls, her voice ringing loudly through the dark. The man yelps, dropping a bucket and spilling fish across the floor.

Once Athena has apologized for the fright, and he has requested that they purge his attempts at rapping from their memories, he introduces himself as Marlon Rimes, relatively new to working here, not always sure what’s happening on the best of days, and this is definitely not that. He does tell them that none of the aquarium staff have been allowed to go home, while any visitors not related to the incident have been thrown out. “Sasha had to get special permission to go out and get a lawyer,” Rimes explains. “Us staying overnight usually means we leave just after opening, but ‘just after opening’ is when the captain’s body was found…” He blinks furiously and rubs at his eyes. “Haven’t seen our vet, Dr Crab, around at all, though.”

Probably because if he is here, DePlume has him cornered in a back room.

Rimes gives them a few more tidbits of information that could be useful: he certainly believes the orca killed the captain and says that Sasha is the only one here who doesn’t, he’s lost track of a penguin named Rifle who has the run of the aquarium but didn’t come in to get fed at her usual time, and he has a friend he calls “Small Fry”, a high school student - maybe an aquarium intern? - who went off after Rifle and hasn’t returned. “She mighta been going back to the orca pool,” he says. “And, hey, if you’re headin’ back there, or just around, Rifle loves the smell of fish, so if ya have some she might come over.”

Athena’s face lights up. “I would love to feed a penguin! Would that be okay, Boss?”

I’m not your dad - you don’t have to ask me for permission. “As long as you’re the one carrying the fish.”

She seems much less enthused as Rimes plops some very stinky, very dead fish into her outstretched hands. “It’s so fishy.” She wrinkles her nose and cranes her neck to stick her face into her shoulder. “Whew!” Widget cries.

“Can’t be all flower smells and penguins working here,” Phoenix says. Even though he really did manage to keep a straight face saying it, his amusement seeps into his voice and Athena lifts her head with a sour glare. She wants to befriend the penguin, she’s got to deal with the consequences and the method of doing it. Like befriending a fae meant suffering her crouching over him at two am to ask him when he can get more ice cream because there’s none left.

Back at the orca pool, they find Sasha, and a walkie-talkie shaped like a sword that belongs to Rifle in order to locate her. Athena brightly suggests must mean Rifle is, or was just recently, around here; they might not have jackshit to work with on their case, but Athena’s going to feed a penguin if it kills her.

It comes close, when Orla bursts out of the water, chittering loudly and smacking her flippers against the surface. Phoenix flinches, and Athena, with more sensitive hearing, closer to the pool where the floor is wet and slippery, springs back with a scream. Her feet splash down in a puddle and slide straight out from under her, dropping her right to the floor. The fish spill out of her hands across the pool deck, a few landing in the water, and a few falling in her lap. “Oww,” she groans, showing no inclination to pick herself back up, and she must really be hurting if she hasn’t recoiled from the fish yet.

Orla whistles. She sounds confused, almost. Maybe apologetic? “You okay?” Sasha asks, extending a hand to help Athena up. “You’ve gotta be careful around here or you’ll slip right in!”

Athena groans again, scooping the fish up from her skirt back into her hands. “Yeah, no kidding.”

The large pirate hat balanced on Orla’s head, behind her blowhole, slowly slides forward and plops into the water. Orla hasn’t really moved, not enough to upend her headgear like that, but with the hat fallen away Phoenix can now see a penguin waddling along Orla’s back. She puts her nose to the edge of the pool, allowing the penguin to hop down to the floor. “Rifle!” Athena cries. “There you are!” She brandishes a fish at the penguin, who doesn’t even turn at the sound and movement and trots on unperturbed to the doors. “Hey! I have food for you! Don’t you run away from me!”

That gets Rifle’s attention. Its pace picks up to a run - away from Athena. “Now I think you’ve scared her,” Phoenix says, but Athena, not having learned the lesson about wet floors yet, starts running after her. Sasha exchanges a sideways glance with Orla but doesn’t say anything; if the penguin is running around outside of its enclosure on a regular basis, they probably expect or have a protocol for when it’s chased down by eight-year-olds. Or eighteen-year-olds. The penguin’s well-being is not what he’s worried for: for those stubby legs, Rifle moves fast, and Athena looks on course for another spectacular wipeout.

The doors swing inward as Rifle comes up on them, bumping it onto its back. How do they right themselves with those proportions - there must be some way for them in the wild, if they fall over, but Phoenix doesn’t actually get to witness the attempt more than a few seconds of flailing feet. “Oh my goodness! I didn’t know you were there!”

Athena pulls up short, watching the young woman who crouches down and gently lifts Rifle to set it back on its feet. Her eyes lift up to study Athena with several seconds of the most intense stare that Phoenix ever found himself under. Fae eyes only change color to red when their glamours drop, but he knows that scrutinizing gaze. It’s the one she gives everyone when she first meets them, assessing who they are, what they are, and whose side they seem to be on. So much woven into a glance, so much caution and suspicion, but Morgan raised her to be queen, and the throne in Kurain isn’t a shield that stops knives coming from behind.

“P-Pearls?”

“Mr Nick!”

He’s seen her more than he’s seen Maya these past eight years, but in his head she’s still the tiny child she was when they first met. Very little about her has changed in that time - she’s a little taller but still slight and petite, and her eyes are only a little too big for her head, her forehead no longer the same size as the other half of her entire face. And he blinks, and studies her again: her iridescent skin like the inside of a seashell, almost white but a dozen other colors, pale shades of blues and pinks and greens, shimmering with the light, with her movements, up to her horns that curve along her head and once they reach the points of her long ears, they curl up and loop in toward each other, forming almost the shape of her hair. She has six eyes, two where they should be and two smaller above each. All six blink in rapid unison, and she raises one dainty clawed hand to cover her open-mouthed, sharp-toothed shock.

“What are you doing here?”

She asks at the same time he does, their same single thought tangling on itself. Pearl giggles. Her laugh doesn’t quite sound the same as it always used to; some of her smooth refinement has been chipped away, and even a giggle is a little louder and rougher, a little less regal. She’s lived with Maya as her closest family longer now than she lived raised by her mother. That rubs off and for once in this instance he doesn’t think Maya’s influence is a bad thing.

“A summer camp from Kurain Village took a trip here,” Pearl explains. “I came with them because I’d never been to an aquarium like this, but then this incident happened, and I only just got done being questioned by the police.”

She says it so calmly, this incident, a man is dead and she isn’t fazed and she’s steadily watching Phoenix with her big eyes wondering if this incident suddenly makes sense, why it happened, if Phoenix is here. People drop dead around him all the time. She’s been there for a bunch of those, and even though that’s hardly a moral indictment of him - there’s plenty of other reasons to make those - he feels the need to hurry to explain that for once, he showed up after the death. “We’re here investigating the case,” Phoenix says. “Ms Buckler - Sasha - asked us to defend Orla and prove that she didn’t kill anyone.”

Pearl nods, and Phoenix feels a surge of appreciation for her. Finally, the one person who isn’t going to question this entire providing legal representation to an orca thing. All she knows about lawyers, she learned from Phoenix, and that Orla should be one of his clients doubtlessly seems entirely normal. “Who’s ‘we’?” she asks. “This lady here with you?”

“I’m Athena Cykes, attorney-at-law! I’m the newest member of the Wright Anything Agency!” Athena grins; the prospect of a new friend has given them a momentary reprieve from her frustration over Rifle. “Nice to meet you!”

Pearl’s expression lightens after the few seconds it takes to absorb Athena’s introduction, her very human manner of throwing out her full name first. Welcome back to this side of the veil, Pearls. “I’m called Pearl,” she says. It’s not her name, not who she is, just what others call her. She loves humans, tries in some ways to deliberately imitate them - he doesn’t know when or how exactly she got really into fashion, but that might be Trucy to blame - but names are names are rocky ground. “Or sometimes Pearly with my friends! How do you do!”

A moment later, something else sinks in, and Pearl jumps, actually jumps, and she hangs in the air just long enough to be noticeably weird. “Wait, Mr Nick! If you’re here to defend a client, that means—!”

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got my badge back.” Or a badge. A new badge. He’s got a badge again. My badge. Practice saying that some more.

He can’t summon the excitement that he should feel, but at least there’s Pearl, clapping her hands together, all the enthusiasm that he’s missing. “Congratulations, Mr Nick! That’s so exciting! Queen-Mystic Maya told me that you’d cleared your name but she didn’t tell me you were lawyering again!”

“That’s because those didn’t happen at the same time,” he says. “I only just passed the Bar. This is my first case - and my first day back.”

“Oh, I’m so happy for you! Have you told everyone yet? All our friends? We should throw a surprise party for you!”

“That’s not really a surprise if you’ve told me, Pearls.”

“Then - then we wait until you forget! Or we make you forget!”

He still has nightmares about forgetting himself, about walking into court with Maggey’s life on the line not just unprepared in terms of evidence, but his very head wiped clean of everything that would help. “I would prefer if you didn’t,” he says. “But I appreciate the surprise party thought.”

Pearl is distracted any further from protesting by Rifle, plucking at the hem of her robes with its beak. “How did you get her to like you?” Athena practically wails the question and Phoenix grinds his teeth together to keep a straight face, to say nothing, so that this time Athena won’t know just how amusing he finds her penguin dilemma. “What am I doing wrong?”

“You could try offering her some fish,” Phoenix prompts. She carried the stinky meat this far, she’d better not have forgotten about it.

“Hey, Rifle!” Athena waves a fish by the tail; Phoenix steps back out of range so she doesn’t fling it at him while she tries to get Rifle’s attention. “I’ve got food for you! Fish chock-full of love from me to you!”

She tosses it in Rifle’s direction, but Orla lunges, hefting her body almost halfway out of the pool to snatch away the fish. “Oh,” Athena says. “Okay! I guess I’m bonding with Orla instead!”

“Friendship blossoming via exchange of food!” Pearl says. “Isn’t it moving, Mr Nick?”

Yeah, that’s one way to put it. Phoenix wouldn’t really agree, but that’s one way to call it. And this really is starting to sound more and more like a friendship with a fae. The easiest way to make a bargain with Maya is to pay her in food. There’s no cheaper price for a deal than a meal.

“Orla doesn’t usually eat at this time,” Sasha says, frowning at Orla, who is making some chirping noises that sound like begging. “The captain’s the one who feeds her, every morning, and I don’t think he’d forget.”

That implies that the time of orca feeding is regularly before the captain’s time of death, if Sasha is talking about him forgetting, or not, and not the fact that he died this morning. Either he was preoccupied with something else before his death, enough that he didn’t think to feed the very large whale that he works with every day, or they’re all mistaken about his time of death. There’s no evidence at all to point to the latter thought, so Phoenix files it away as a last-ditch argument to pull out if he runs out of every other possibility in court tomorrow.

Athena brandishes another fish at Rifle, who ignores her. Orla chirrups again. “How did you do it, Pearly?”

It’s a good question, and a surprise to Phoenix, too. He can’t say that mundane animals and the fae get along well - he’ll never forget when Gumshoe offered to lend Missile to him and Maya, only for it to start howling and wailing so loudly that half the cops in the precinct poked their heads out to make sure that nobody was physically torturing the dog. And he wouldn’t be surprised if Matt Engarde’s cat was just generally the most unpleasant cat in the world, but it had ignored Edgeworth and gone straight to claw the hell out of Phoenix and Pearl, so he’s again inclined to guess that it was a fae thing. Maybe wild animals, like penguins, are different, but there was also the time Regent the tiger tried to eat him.

So yeah, a good question, one he’s been pondering himself. “Didn’t he say that Rifle is drawn to the smell of fish?” Phoenix asks. Rimes had given Athena the fish for that reason, and there is a bit of a strange fishy smell coming from more than just Athena.

“A - are you saying I smell like fish?”

Phoenix weighs his options for answering. The fae do generally appreciate the truth, even when it’s something rough. But Pearl already looks offended and ready to roll up her sleeves and smack him through two walls, so he’s got to tread lightly. “Uh, maybe a little bit, yeah…”

He tenses every muscle in his body and waits for the deathly strike, but Pearl just slumps over. “Oh,” she says softly, more to herself than anyone else. “I really do need to change my clothes.”

What’s she gotten herself into? Why, of all the visitors to the aquarium, was she kept here and questioned while almost everyone else had to leave? No easy answer comes as he ponders it, listening to Sasha, Pearl, and Athena talk about Rifle and Orla. It’s Pearl, of all people, who’s worried about Orla eating Rifle - maybe it makes sense that she would think about it, orcas being to penguins and seals what fae are to humans, but that’s exactly also why he’s surprised it would occur to her. It would occur to Maya, who for all her chaotic tendencies is well aware of the gaping divide between human and fae, but while Maya likes hanging around with humans, Phoenix has always gotten the impression that Pearl might want to be human.

(And Iris, he knows for sure, wishes she was human.)

“Our Orla’s a big ol’ sweetie,” Sasha says. “She puts up with Rifle picking on her! The captain said he only had to give Orla a talking-to once, when he first introduced them, but he was constantly telling Rifle not to be such a meanie.”

Chalk a few more points up under the sea witch thing was not a joke.

“They seem to be very good friends,” Pearl says. They probably remind her of Phoenix and Maya, except Rifle acts way more like Maya even though Orla is the one with the teeth.

She leaves to escort Rifle back to Rimes. Athena, pouting exaggeratedly, plops a few fish in Pearl’s hands and with pained, obvious longing, watches her walk away with the penguin. The rest of her fish she throws to Orla. It’s Sasha, after Pearl has left, who answers Phoenix’s unasked questions. “I’m surprised you know her,” she says. “I thought she was a friend of Marlon’s or something - heard that she was down in the staff hallway by the food prep room, and that’s why the cops were questioning her.”

“Huh.” She’d said herself that she had never been here before, and Rimes - Phoenix will have to remember to check if he looks like someone who lives in Kurain Village. “That’s really odd.”

“We’d better just go ask her then, right?” Athena says. “Unless you think she’d lie to us when we ask?” She watches his face intently, looking for a clue as to what level his friendship is with Pearls, whether she’d lie, whether he’d expect her to.

“She can’t lie,” Phoenix says, “and she’s not great at hiding things, either.” Through the years he’s found her to be no good at hiding anything from him - he’s not sure how Morgan thought she would ever survive Court politics. Or maybe it’s only him that she’s no good at talking around the truth with. “Maybe if we’re lucky something she knows can help our case.”

They catch up to her near the eel tank, as she’s saying goodbye to Rimes and sends Rifle along with him. “Hey, Pearls.” She flinches at his sudden call and in the dim light her skin flashes to a shimmering surface like an opal, her glamour dropped momentarily in her fright. He’s always wondered if that’s an actual built-in fae defense mechanism - if something startles her, startle it right back by showing her true face. “We just had a real quick question for you about your relationship with Mr Rimes.”

“My—?”

The thing about Psyche-Locks is that they used to show up when someone directly lied to him, by contradiction or blatant evasion of his questions. What was I doing when the murder happened, Mr Nick? Why do you think I was doing anything when the murder happened? But exact words - I did not kill Juan Corrida - left him in the dark. Maybe he’s gotten stronger since then, or Pearl has and by extension so has the blessing she gave him; and he’s seen locks on half-truths when there’s something more buried deep within. He sees them almost proactively now. Pearl has barely begun to speak, to echo his question right back to him, and there it is.

He’s afraid one day he’ll see locks without any prompting at all, that before he knows what to ask they’ll just appear. A visualization of how everyone of course has secrets, but he won’t know whether they’re related to a crime or not, and it’ll drive him out of his mind paranoid.

(It’s a common fae fate, losing their minds to paranoia. It’s practically built into their culture.)

“Pearls,” Phoenix says wearily, “why do I see a Psyche-Lock?”

It’s just one, thank god, one single lock sealed at the intersection of two chains. “Oh,” Pearl says, looking down at where the lock sits over her chest. She’s never been clear on whether she can actually see them or if she just otherwise senses the ones that Phoenix has already seen. “B-but there is no ‘relationship’ between Mr Animal Feeder and me!”

“I don’t necessarily mean romantic, Pearls.”

She laughs nervously. “But I, um - I still shouldn’t talk about it,” she says.

But she doesn’t say that she’s made any promises, specifically, to keep a secret. There will be a way to work it out of her. She gave him Truth, and he’s going to use it.

“What were you doing in the staff corridor?”

The answer is simpler than her behavior makes it seem; she got distracted by the gift shop immediately when she arrived, bought a cute penguin calendar to help her with her understanding of the concept of time, and got lost when she tried to get back to the aquarium exhibits. She found the food prep room, scared the hell out of Rimes on entering, and knocked a few tubs of fish over onto herself, her new calendar, Rimes, his calendar, the floor—

Really, he’s just relieved that her fishy smell isn’t because she’d started eating some of the animal food. Or gotten into a tank and started eating the exhibits. And her mishap has netted them a little more information: Rimes didn’t want anyone to know he was in the food prep room, and Pearl picked up what must have been Rimes’ calendar instead of her own when they extracted themselves from the fish. Meet the captain @ orca pool, 7a, under today’s date. A clue to the victim’s movements before his death?

“You said you came here with your summer camp group?” Athena asks. “Did they get sent out of here with the rest of the visitors? Do you need to let them know where you are, or get back to them?”

“Oh, no, I’m not with them,” Pearl says. “I just traveled here with the group but they shouldn’t notice I’m gone. I’d rather help you and Mr Nick now anyway!”

Air hisses in through Athena’s teeth and she looks helplessly to Phoenix for a verdict. Like now he’s supposed to be Pearl’s dad, too. If she wants to go somewhere, no force on any earth can stop her. Her mother bragging about her powers was a preface to her attempts to get rid of Maya, but she wasn’t wrong, either, is the thing. Pearl has subtle control over her glamours that Phoenix has never seen in one of the fae; her slight manipulations of attention are the kind that Klavier and Thalassa do. There’s a reason that no one, not Gumshoe or Franziska or Edgeworth, ever questioned Phoenix bringing a small child to court and crime scenes. Pearl makes herself seem like she belongs anywhere, and disappear just as easily when it’s time to move on. The biggest surprise is that Sasha and Rimes even noticed something amiss in her presence at the aquarium at all.

(It took Phoenix a while to actually realize what Pearl had done by giving him a magatama charged with the power of breaking glamours. Realize that she handed him the key to undo her greatest strength. Maya has teeth, and Dahlia curses, but in the end there’s little stronger than perception. Little Pearl, raised to be a usurper, raised to strike at what she feared and to fear all the world outside the royal manor, gave a human she just met a magatama and a blessing to see through her both literally and metaphorically. He was so focused on saving Maya he didn’t realize just then how much Pearl wanted to save Maya too, how much she loved her too, to make herself weak to help her.)

“So what’s next?” Athena asks. His silence has answered her as assent, permission for Pearl to stay.

What next? Everything. They’ve meandered around learning all about the care and keeping of aquariums and nothing about the case. “We still need some sort of actual evidence we can point to for anyone other than Orla as the culprit, and her that to Fulbright. And we’ll want to go back and get Ms DePlume to tell us what she saw.”

“If there’s evidence anywhere it’s gotta be in the pool room, right?” Athena asks. “¡Vamanos! We’ll search over and over until we find something!”

Or at some point presumably accept that nothing turning up means that Orla probably did kill the captain. But they aren’t there yet, haven’t hit that wall, so he doesn’t yell after Athena as she careens down the hall, boots squeaking as she makes a hard turn on the sleek tile flooring. Two officers stand guard outside the orca pool room doors, like they expect Sasha to try and sneak Orla out this way. They both flinch away as Athena bodily slams into the doors and tumbles back inside. Neither smiles when Phoenix offers a placating one.

“I’m gonna go check out that mess in the back again!” Athena calls, barely slowed, her sprint picking back up.

“Hey, I’m doing my best!” Sasha hollers back. Her grin tells the rest of them she isn’t offended, but Athena, not looking back, has to hear it in her voice. “There’s a lot of work that goes into this place!”

With a shriek, Athena hits a patch of water and her feet shoot straight out from under her. Another epic wipeout snds her clattering into the pile of props and orca toys. Phoenix presses his hand to his forehead. “Athena,” he sighs, “you are the reason every public pool has about twelve ‘no running’ signs.”.

“Ugh.” She’s slow to get herself back up, kicking a small prop dummy, marked by deep teeth marks, nearly into the pool, in the process of extracting herself from a skull-and-crossbones flag. “Yeah. But I’ve got us a new angle on it, right?” She brandishes a broken plastic sword that he hopes she didn’t break. Its other piece is nowhere to be seen, so maybe she didn’t. What she did do is scuff up the tape that marks the body’s location, which even before her was wet and barely stuck down in several places.

Pearl tilts her chin back. On anyone else it would be haughty, but she is regal until a moment later she inhales deeply and scrunches her nose up. “There’s blood here,” she says, nose still twitching, mouth pulled to one side in a grimace.

“I think I’m just bruised, not bleeding.” Athena rubs her elbow. Then she freezes. “You aren’t, uh, smelling blood, is that what you’re—?” The terrified expression on her face isn’t subtle, and with Pearl standing right next to Phoenix, him noticing means she notices it just as well. Athena steps straight back through the prop pile, over the fallen limb of the ceiling-mounted octopus, until she’s bumping up against a pile of wooden crates with nowhere else to run.

“No, it’s not you,” Pearl says. “It’s dried.” She closes her eyes and inhales deeply again, holding it in with her shoulders up. “Human, mostly.” Athena squeaks, but Pearl’s attention is fixed in the mess. Squatting, she shifts aside a few smaller plastic swords and a volleyball and then, with a soft but triumphant laugh, she holds up something above her head. Not that she’s holding it, exactly: the glinting circle hovers a centimeter above her fingers so as to not leave prints on it. It looks like a coin, another piece of prop pirate treasure, half bright gold that catches the light, and half dull red—

Blood. There’s blood on the coin. “Th - that’s—” Athena sounds faint. “That’s blood. That’s - do you think that’s the victim’s? And how did it get here?”

Phoenix accepts it when Pearl offers it to him. It certainly looks and feels like metal, but one side is emblazoned with a skull and the other an anchor - nothing usable as far as currency goes. “I don’t know, but this might be what we need. It’s blood outside the pool - not like Orla can leave the water. Hey, Sasha,” he calls. She springs up from where she’s sitting on the other side of the room and hurries over, slower and more carefully than Athena hurries. “Do you know anything about these coins?”

“They’re part of the show! Guess I missed a few when I was cleaning up. The cops gave me the go-ahead to put them away after they were done looking at - at—” Sasha crosses her arms tightly. “The coins were all scattered around - around by—”

“Around here,” Phoenix offers, motioning at the outline of Jack Shipley’s corpse.

Sasha nods, and with a shudder, straightens herself back up, propping a hand on her hip. “No time to be a sad blobfish about it!” she says. “Gotta snapper out of it! Captain always says, when it’s showtime, you’ve gotta put on a smile!” She very obviously doesn’t look back down at the tape, the way Phoenix, if not occupying his mind with something else important, takes a wide step over the carpet beneath the window.

“My mentor had a saying a lot like that,” he says. Sasha jerks her head up, barely catching her hat as it slides off. “She always said it was a lawyer’s job to keep smiling through the hardest times.”

“Sounds like a wise lady,” Sasha says, suddenly subdued again. Was the implication, the comparison from the captain to Mia, and the past tense, that obvious - the other thing they share, besides advice about keeping optimistic, that apparent? Hanging onto the words of a dead mentor right after it happened, yeah, Phoenix has been there too. She lets the silence rest a moment longer and then she adds, “I still haven’t managed to find all the coins. There should be about three hundred total.”

“Maybe some ended up in the pool?” Athena, now extracted herself from the trashed corner of the room, no longer trying to hide from Pearl, leans over the water from the top of the ladder. “I think I see something glittering down there. I’ll go in and grab them!”

She is really not learning her lesson today about having an ounce of sense in and around the orca pool. “No, you won’t,” Phoenix says. “Not dressed like that. It’s sixty-five feet deep and your clothes are going to make you sink and drown. Sasha, maybe you can — Athena. Put your clothes back on right now.”

Athena shrugs her shoulder back into her jacket, but she has the audacity to not look even slightly ashamed, just indignant that he would have the audacity to stop her from stripping to dive into an aquarium tank already occupied by a killer whale. What part of I’m her boss, not her father has the universe at large not understood? Apollo wouldn’t be putting him through this. He wouldn’t have to stop Apollo from drowning himself.

“Sure thing, Phoenix, I’ll go grab them!” Sasha peels her crop top off over her head and even though he knows that she’s got a wetsuit on underneath the vaguely-pirate kinda-punk-rock gear, he still looks away - it’s polite. She leaves her shirt and shorts in a heap on the wet floor, her shoes having been discarded pretty much as soon as they made it back to the aquarium from the office, and without preamble or preparation she throws her hands over her head and dives down into the orca pool. Orla had been watching them curiously, and she swims slow circles around the pool, slowly descending, keeping some distance from Sasha but not enough that Phoenix isn’t still incredibly nervous for her.

What’s the longest an ordinary human can hold their breath underwater? The answer for an ordinary human working as an orca trainer is surely longer than Phoenix could imagine, definitely way longer than he could manage, but he doesn’t actually have a number to know if a selkie in human form surpasses that. Sasha is difficult to see, blurry through the deep water, and making Phoenix even more anxious as time ticks by slower than ever and she doesn’t, and doesn’t, and doesn’t come back up. Then Orla sinks further, to Sasha’s level, and she grabs the orca’s fin and lets her rocket her back up to the surface.

“There were a ton down there!” she exclaims, understandably breathless from her venture, and dumping the coins on the deck. “I mean, not actually a ton. They’re all around seven pounds in all.”

“That’s still a hefty bunch of coins.” He watches Sasha hoist herself out of the pool, ignoring the ladder not far to her right. Seven pounds of coins, one with blood on it, scattered all around a crime scene and a corpse. What’s it mean? It’s always something - write nothing off as coincidence. Everything’s good for a bluff, if nothing else. Seven pounds of coins, blood, a corpse, no murder weapon so all the suspicion’s on the orca. Seven pounds of coins, blood, corpse, no murder weapon—

He watches Sasha carry the wet coins over to a small box and dump them in. “What if the coins are the murder weapon?” he says.

“How?” Athena asks. “How could you kill a grown man with a little coin like that? Is this a fae thing?” Pearl shifts her stance, her sandals squeaking against the floor and her robes rustling.

“One coin on its own wouldn’t do anything, you’re right - but if you took all seven pounds of them, and put them in a bag…” He deliberately trails off, leaving her room to logic out the rest of the thought.

“You could use it as a blunt instrument!”

“Exactly. Though I don’t see any coin bag around here.” Maybe in that mess of props, as though they haven’t already gone through it twice.

“If the killer took it, it would look even more like Orla did it, and it doesn’t matter now, anyway!” Doesn’t it? Actually, for the moment, she’s right. “The coin and this theory is enough for reasonable doubt! We’ve gotta go let Fulbright know! This should be enough for him to take it to trial, right?”

“Right,” Phoenix agrees. “And I still wanted to speak with that woman and find out what she saw. She’s hopefully still where we left her. Let’s go.”

“Rapide! C’mon, Boss! Pearly!” In her excitement, Athena has already forgotten that she was, and rightly still should be, afraid of Pearl.

Norma DePlume is still at the Pub O’ Danger, now doubting that the veterinarian she’s harassing is here at all, and her Psyche-Locks snap like tree branches beneath a heavy Kurain snowfall. It was one of the weakest efforts he’s ever seen. She barely tried to pretend she wasn’t a blabbermouth who wanted to spill everything to the first person who crossed her path.

(Still would’ve been nice if she hadn’t attempted the pretense at all and just said it.)

Her claim is that she saw the moment Orla took the victim in her mouth and shook him to death, which - didn’t Fulbright say that the orca rammed him to death up against the tank glass? Until they have an official up-to-date and updated autopsy report it doesn’t really matter but it’s nice to know he can still spot contradictions, still remembers how to fire those connections in his brain. A stroke of fortune means that Fulbright shows up right as DePlume finishes her tale of the violent orca brutally maiming the poor owner, who she had so tried to warn of Orla’s tendencies, only to be so cruelly blacklisted from the aquarium. (And got back inside anyway.)

“I think you can see from this testimony that there’s no way this can be anything but accidental death,” Fulbright says. “But don’t feel bad! It’s the thought that counts and you’ve done all you can, I’m sure!”

Is that supposed to be consoling? Kind of him to try, but also in legal matters, it really, really isn’t the thought that counts. “Actually,” Phoenix says, “I think we do have something.”

Fulbright listens intently to their theory about the bloody coin, while DePlume shrieks and recoils from it. “That’s not decisive evidence of a human killer,” he says, but over Phoenix’s protestations adds, “But your theory does seem enough to warrant further investigation. I’ll give the Prosecutors Office a call about reinvestigating from a possible criminal angle. When we spoke earlier there was one prosecutor interested in the case, if you could find some merit to it - maybe now he’ll be willing to take it to trial. I’ll let you know!”

Phoenix closes his mouth. Of all the batshit bluffs pulling through for him, he’s about to bring an orca to court. They’re not exactly going to be able to sit her in the defendant’s chair. “Thank you, Detective.”

“I really hope they’ll listen to him,” Athena says. “We’re so close now!”

DePlume snorts disdainfully. Pearl has a hand in the touch tank, allowing a crab to crawl up her arm. Nothing even close to fear enters her posture - she acts like she’s right at home here. A pearl happy as a clam in the sea. What’s in a name? Magic, and the fae shape themselves and others by what they’re commonly called.

Athena joins her at the tank, leaning over it far enough that her hair swings across the surface of the water. She could attach a bobber and lure to it and go fishing with her ponytail. The two girls talk in quiet voices, either hoping not to disturb Fulbright just outside in the hall, or to eavesdrop on how the conversation is going. Phoenix paces a large circle around the edge of the room, watching the jellyfish bob lazily in their bottle-shaped tank suspended overheard. Do they ever get bored? Do they have enough brains to get bored? Do they have any brain at all? He can’t make out what Fulbright is saying on the phone, just that he’s talking, and then silent, and then saying something else. Is the length of time this is taking good or bad? Fulbright talking up a convincing case, or the Prosecutors Office going into detail about why this insane venture won’t be permitted.

He reenters with a yell. “You won’t believe what the Prosecutors Office had to say!” Athena snaps to attention. Phoenix hopes this is the good kind of won’t believe, where they won’t believe that Edgeworth actually agreed to allow someone to take a goddamn orca to trial, and not the bad kind of no, you wouldn’t believe that even with some evidence and reasonable doubt they’re just letting this one go.

“What happened?” Athena asks, bouncing on her heels. Pearl eases the crab back into the tank and folds her hands in front of her, waiting expectantly but much stiller than Athena.

“When I explained what you found, and your passion for the case, they said that the prosecutor I mentioned earlier is willing to take it to court!”

Phoenix’s stomach unclenches and then twists up in a worse knot. Holy shit, the day he gets his badge back and he’s got a case. He’s got a case and it’s an orca. “Yes!” Athena pumps her fist in the air. “We did it!”

“Does that mean there’s a human suspect being indicted?” Phoenix asks. Sure, he and Athena have already taken up legal representation of the orca, but maybe there’s a condition somewhere in there, that even a prosecutor who thought sure, what the hell to the initial matter has a line.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Fulbright says. “And to be perfectly frank with you—” He steps closer, posed conspiratorially, but his voice gets louder as he says, “Prosecutor Blackquill said he just wanted to prove the orca’s guilt in court.”

Ah. Of all the prosecutors available, this should not be a surprise. The witch (witch?) with the hawk. What are the odds that Edgeworth’s having a conniption?

“S - Ss—” Athena’s words comes out more like a hiss, no clue as to what words she’s going for, and then the hiss rises to an indignant yelp. “Prosecutor Blackquill?” Widget blinks yellow and immediately cycles to dark blue and then red. Athena’s tone tips past anger to a distraught wail. “It’s Prosecutor Blackquill who wants to prosecute Orla?”

Poor kid. She must still be fucked up from the Tenma trial, facing down the samurai-convict and surely imagining that after that her life would be free of him. But Phoenix is - not looking forward to this, no, but this badge back on his chest is tied inextricably to Blackquill’s fate. For Edgeworth, and Edgeworth wants to help Blackquill. And to help, Phoenix needs to know Blackquill. Needs to face him himself, and not just watch Apollo do the same. “Thank you, Detective,” Phoenix says. “Thanks for getting this arranged.”

“You’re taking this rather calmly,” Fulbright says.

“I’ve been committed to defending Orla from the start,” Phoenix says. With a few doubts and second-guessing what the hell he was doing, but orca or no, doesn’t that happen every case? “It doesn’t matter who’s prosecuting her - I’m not going to back down, now or ever.”

“And I’ll be doing my very best to make sure that justice is served,” Fulbright replies.

It’s finally occurred to Phoenix why Fulbright is a familiar name, why it set off a weird itch he couldn’t scratch when he heard it back at the trial in April. Edgeworth had mentioned him at the same time he first told Phoenix about Blackquill. Fulbright’s the one who’s been backing Edgeworth from the beginning. Fulbright’s the one who volunteered to be Blackquill’s point of contact to the free world, to chaperone him about and keep others safe from him.

(“This entire matter would have been dead on arrival if not for Detective Fulbright,” Edgeworth had said. “I was fighting with the precinct over Blackquill since before I officially became chief prosecutor. They refused entirely to allow any of their officers or detectives to be assigned as Blackquill’s monitor. If Fulbright hadn’t volunteered I’d still be spinning up against an endless argument about liability and rehabilitation for a man who aggressively pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.”

“Understandable on their parts,” Phoenix said. “But you think there’s more to it than that.”

Edgeworth fixed a withering glare on him. “I wouldn’t be letting a killer prosecute if I didn’t.”)

Three months have passed since Blackquill first took the bench, but the negotiations started much earlier, and with all that time spent around Blackquill and discussing Blackquill and acting as the liaison going between Blackquill and the people discussing him, Fulbright’s got to have heard a lot of shit about him. The mundane, and the loftier rumors. After all that it’s got to be a surprise for Fulbright to run up against someone who’s not recoiled in horror at the mere mention of Prosecutor Blackquill, the way Athena draws back against the touch-tank, her hands gripping tight against the edge of it, holding herself upright.

What’s Fulbright’s impression of those particular rumors about Blackquill, the ones Edgeworth barely thought to mention? There’s no way to know for sure without asking - a person appearing untouched by magic might be the most superstitious, easily believing whispers about witches and monsters, and on the other side there’s Phoenix all tangled up in it but still with no idea what in hell Blackquill’s deal is. But the quick once-over he gives Fulbright tells Phoenix that he’s the opposite of the prosecutor he’s tied to, unchanging and unchanged through both sets of eyes. Statistically that’s what most people are supposed to be - according to Edgeworth, anyway - but it never fails to surprise Phoenix when he finds someone human and unmarred by the tricks of the Court.

“Hey, Mr Attorney,” Fulbright says, and Phoenix jumps nearly out of his skin, suddenly sure that he’s read straight into his mind, somehow, even though if mind-reading was any magic Phoenix had ever heard of, he’d probably be able to See it. “Huh. Funny, I thought for sure for a moment that your eyes changed color there!”

“Oh.” Phoenix’s voice comes out poker-table level, and he decides that a smile, even a small one, is trying a little too hard to put him back at ease, so he keeps his face blank. “Yeah, I’ve noticed the lighting gets pretty funny in here, too, what with…” He points a thumb at the jellyfish and shrugs.

He seems dense, the detective, but Phoenix isn’t going to doubt his commitment to justice. Not because he keeps spouting off about it at the barest provocation, but for what he’s done. For Orla, and for Edgeworth. For Blackquill.

They’re left with the hum of the tanks, the last splash of Pearl’s hand in the water, Fulbright and DePlume’s voices fading down the hall. She’ll be a witness for the prosecution. Phoenix would love to see the battle between her and Blackquill as he tries to prepare her testimony. If she’s this fired up about the injustice of the killer orca, what’s she going to think of a murderer-prosecutor?

“So,” Athena says. “You know how we need, like, the signed defense request from the defendant to put us on the docket? Who’s going to sign that?”

“We could get Orla’s flipper and a stamp pad?” Pearl suggests.

“I think we’ll just talk to Sasha,” Phoenix says. She’s Orla’s trainer - she’ll be the next closest thing to the owner, someone who can be a representative of some sort, acting on her behalf. “We’ve got to let her know, anyway, that this is going to court.”

Sasha is thrilled. Hopping up and down - Phoenix once again fights the impulse to tell her to take more care on the wet floor - she turns to Orla and asks, “Did you hear that? They’ve done it! Your case is going to court!”

Phoenix swallows a lump that tastes something like shame. Poor Sasha - she just lost a coworker, show partner, and mentor, had not even her other coworkers believe in her animal friend, and she came to him on basis of a cross-examination of a parrot a decade ago. That’s desperation, and he nearly turned her down. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up too far,” he cautions, and Athena’s grin, directed at Sasha, snaps down into a glare affixed firmly on Phoenix. “We’ll still be fighting an uphill battle in the trial tomorrow, but we’ll do everything we can.”

Sasha plops down on the edge of the pool, dragging a foot through the water. She watches Orla nose a volleyball across the surface. “I feel so bad that she’s got to stay cooped up in here,” she says. “The big show pool outside, since we’re on the waterfront it’s a pretty quick shot to the ocean, we’d take her out all the time, butI think they’re afraid that I’m going to try and sneak her out and free her into the wild to save her.” Honestly, that doesn’t seem that far out there as a possibility. “But she’s so sad in here without the captain to play with - I just can’t keep up with her. You should see her fastball when she’s playing volleyball!”

She must know the word, or understand Sasha in particular, because Orla dives down deep in the water and breaches the surface, jumping high and spinning and smacking the volleyball straight into the back wall. It hits with a booming smack and bounces all the way back to land in the water again. “Oh, wow,” Athena says, a breathless, shocked kind of admiration, but Widget squeaks out, “Yikes!”

“And orcas if they’re kept in captivity in places too small for them, they start going crazy!” Sasha throws her hands into the air and then smacks them down at the pool’s edge. “Whacking themselves up against the walls, and there’s real problems with fin droop where it goes like—” She holds up a hand, perpendicular to the floor, and then swings it down flat. “The captain was always so concerned to make sure she had enough space, and was healthy, and that we were learning from every other sea park that did stuff wrong—”

“Sasha,” Phoenix says.

“I’m smiling, I’m smiling!” She forces a pained grin, more of a grimace, onto her face. “But nobody else knows how to take care of her, just me and the captain. And it’s like he’s counting on me, but I can’t do it right.”

“It’s like any human defendant having to spend a night or a weekend in a holding cell before their trial,” Phoenix says. “We’ve survived it” - or at least I have, three times, and god forbid Athena or Pearl has to go through that - “and I’m sure Orla will too. She hardly looks droopy now, does she?”

“No,” Sasha agrees. Orla chirrups and Sasha reaches out and pats her snout. “Thanks, Phoenix. And Orla thanks you too.”

“I thought you said Orla only understands certain people,” Athena says.

“Yep, pretty much!” Athena’s apparent argument seems lost on Sasha, but a second later she picks it up. “Certain particularly weird people, and your boss is one of them.”

Ah. Great. Sounds like a certain proximity to fae magic is what does it. “Thanks, Sasha,” Phoenix says wearily. At least it’s a better prospect than the animal vehemently hating him for that same thing. If he’s not being attacked, he’ll accept being called weird by an orca-training selkie. “No, weird is good!” Sasha throws up a hand in some sort of rock on! gesture.

“Yeah, Boss!” Athena echoes Sasha with a peace sign. “We’re the weirdest law office in LA and we’re proud of it!”

Just in LA? Where in the rest of the world is she finding any office weirder than the Wright Anything Agency? In complete honesty, Phoenix wouldn’t want to meet them, not while he’s too much for himself to handle.

Sasha grasps at straws to keep the conversation going, reluctant to let them leave and return to having Orla as her only conversational partner. And Orla emits a soft, mournful cry as the doors close on the three of them, ushering them away. In the lobby, as they pass the tank, Orla dives down and puts herself on eye level with them, bumping gently up against the glass. Through the speakers placed around, her sad sounds waft out to them. Pearl meanders to a halt, drifts slowly back and presses a hand up to the tank.

“Mr Nick,” she says. “You have to save her. This isn’t right. This isn’t fair.”

“We’ll do everything we can for her.” Phoenix watches frost form on the glass beneath Pearl’s increasingly sharp fingertips. “Pearls? What’s wrong?”

“She’s called a killer whale, isn’t she?” She grates her claws against the glass before she pulls them away.

“She’s not a killer!” Athena snaps. Has she even noticed the claws? “She didn’t do it! That’s just a name!”

Pearl sets a hard-eyed stare on her. “Names mean a lot,” she says. “They knew what her name is and what she is by nature, didn’t they? And even if they trained her and she still likes them, that’s still what - she still…”

“She still has teeth,” Phoenix finishes for her.

“But she grew up in this aquarium!” Athena protests. Has the subtext missed her? Is she too fixated on Orla and her case to hear that? “She didn’t want to go back to the wild! She wanted to stay! She was raised with people!”

“They were raising her hoping to change her nature?” Pearl asks.

“We’re not still talking about orcas, are we, Pearls?” Phoenix interrupts.

“What else would we be talking about?” Athena looks between the two of them, her eyes narrowing further and further as neither of them express the same confusion as her. She hasn’t been pondering what Phoenix has this whole afternoon, doesn’t think oh, this again. She doesn’t think of Maya’s glossy black hair and killer smile visible in the orca’s shiny skin and mouth snapping open to catch a fish, and she doesn’t think of Phoenix as the dead man bleeding poolside or maybe the trainer who fiercely believes in her despite everything. “Pearly, I thought you believed Orla is innocent!”

“I do!” Oh, god, if this turns into a fight Phoenix does not know how he’s going to stop either of them. Either could snap him in half. “If Mr Nick believes in her, then so do I! But the way they’re treating her even thinking that she did, isn’t fair.”

Who is Pearl thinking about? This veiled way they’re speaking - is it about changelings, sympathies for the devil? Or Pearl herself, walking her personal tightrope between worlds and the fae way Morgan raised her versus the pieces of a human childhood Phoenix offered. Nature or nurture, he always wonders - what makes the fae the fae? They can defy their natures, they can rise above circumstances - that’s what distinguishes fae and human from orca.

Athena blinks confusedly. Phoenix presses his eyes shut and wishes that this conversation had never started. Forget it, forget what he’s thought since the beginning, the parallel running through a funhouse mirror. She’s just an orca. “She’s just an orca,” he repeats out loud. “I think we might be - humanizing her a little much?” Pearl raises her thumb to her mouth, sharpening her claw on her teeth. Phoenix corrects himself. “Personifying her. She’s smart, sure, but she’s still a wild animal and arguing about whether or not she can defy her nature and instinct is—”

“Orcas aren’t just animals!” Athena can harness her anger and turn it on one, and only one, person at a time. She’s playing against Phoenix now, not Pearl. “They have feelings! They have their own songs and languages specific to their own families and pods! They’re one of the only animals that goes through menopause because the older females stick around and help raise kids and look after the pod!”

“We’re not your opponents, Athena.” How long has she been this deeply passionate about marine life to have all these orca facts on hand to spout out. How much does Phoenix not want to be having the moral and ethical conversation about whether it would be wrong to punish an orca for killing someone, and if said orca can even have awareness of what she’s done, if she really did it.

Athena’s shoulders fall; her arms tuck in close across her chest. “I know,” she says. “It’s just, all of Sasha’s sadness, and nobody believing in her, and how Ms DePlume is, it makes me so mad!”

“Save it for the prosecution,” Phoenix says. “Hang onto it all, and then let him have it. Orla deserves someone to fight for her, instead of just writing her off like they were going to, but philosophizing about her is not helping us.” Is she smart enough to be malicious, or is that only people, fae and human, who are? That’s the crux of the question of whether or not she would deserve to be punished for killing a person, but how are they supposed to get an answer.

“Philosophizing - wait, so you weren’t still talking about orcas?” Athena asks. “I thought you both sounded way sadder than you were whenever we’d talk about Orla, but if it wasn’t just her what were you talking about?”

“Us,” Pearl says.

#roddy fanfics #fic: the witches of los angeles

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meta-squash · 5 years ago

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Journal For Plague Lovers & Modernist Literary Style

So I’ve had this theory/idea/whatever in my head for at least a year now about Journal For Plague Lovers and Modernist literature. (Note: I’m talking about the full, unedited lyrics available in the deluxe edition booklet, which you can find my scans of here.) Basically, my theory is that JFPL reflects and uses a Modernist style of writing in order to express feelings and experiences. The Modernist writers really started experimenting with form and meaning and how each dictates or manipulates the other, and there are certain stylistic choices that Richey made in these lyrics that are really reminiscent of the Modernist techniques and experimental styles.

To begin with, JFPL is a notably massive leap forward in lyrical writing for Richey. Which, frankly, is amazing if most of it was written between autumn 1994 when he got out of hospital and January 1995 when the binder was given to Nicky. That means that his lyrical advancement occurred in about 6 months, between the writing/recording of The Holy Bible and Richey’s release from hospitalization, which is incredibly fast. Nicky is always mentioning how Richey’s mind was in high-gear around the time of writing Journal For Plague Lovers, how he was unable to switch off or slow down, which probably accounts both for the advancement and the overwhelming overload of references in these lyrics.

Anyway, I’m just gonna go through some of the main characteristics of Modernist literature/poetry, and sort of look at how JFPL reflects that or utilizes it.

Probably the most obvious is the “cut-up” word/writing style of most of the songs. The Beat poets took cut-up and really ran with it, but it kind of started during the later modernist period. Cut-ups are where a text or texts are cut up and rearranged to make a new text.

I don’t think Richey was literally cutting up texts, but the way certain songs, like Me & Stephen Hawking, Peeled Apples, and Journal For Plague Lovers leap from subject to subject or POV to POV very much seems to emulate that cut-up style. Me & Stephen Hawking is a really good example. In an interview about the album, someone mentioned the weirdness of the lyrics to the song and James responded, “Seriously, you haven’t seen the rest. Seriously, you wouldn’t fucking believe them.” The lyrics clearly have an ongoing theme, but it’s hard to make out at first. They’re very cut-up style, random and almost unintelligible:

Queen mother stuffed for exhibition Three strikes yr out – execution – pizza 2/ Dante III, spider robot, Mount Spurrr Increased plastic surgery for pubic hair Sanitation police, crime of proportion.

Peeled Apples, while clearly political, and Journal For Plague Lovers, clearly personal, also really use the cut-up style. Peeled Apples slams together political/history references with images of personal suffering and popular media as well as just plain bizarre phrases like “Canaries are always behind bars the day of deliverance lied.” Pretension/Repulsion also does this, as it’s just single seemingly unrelated words clustered together separated only by commas. The cut-up sort of style allows a ton of words to be put together where it might not have been so easy before. It’s hard to follow, but it manages to pack a LOT of information into a small amount of space, and creates a sensation of overwhelming reality and/or unreality.

Which brings me to another characteristic of modernism, which was the destabilization of reality, the realization that there is not central truth and that truth is provisional and reality is constructed by the “writer” and the “reader.” Jackie Collins Existential Question Time really utilizes that, as it warps reality into this bizarre sort of talk show asking relationship questions– but you don’t know if you’re the audience or not, or where you/the speaker is, or what the conclusion is meant to be, or what the questions really mean. It’s silly but also serious and you’re not really sure how to take it because it’s so weird. You get a sense of place, of what’s going on, but not enough to feel like your feet are on solid ground and that you’re understanding anything.

Facing Page: Top Left and Virginia State Epileptic Colony do this as well, but in very different ways. In Facing Page, you get the sense of a hospital or institution, flashes and fragments of moments and images from within, but there is never any clarity about what is going on, and the world constructed by the words is obscured from any conclusion or truth or central point, since images of institutionalization are interspersed with phrases like “The scum as jewellery,” “Pig bargaining,” “Christian fraternity meeting Pagan idolatry,” and of course “This beauty here dipping neophobia.” It’s comprised mostly of collections of short phrases, and none of these phrases coagulate or combine to clarify anything or to give the listener-reader any sort of intended message. Virginia State Epileptic Colony also presents a hospital scene, but it is much clearer. Instead, the destabilization of reality comes from spaces in the text, and the repetition. We only get about half an image in 13 lines of text– people (patients) sitting at tables drawing circles in chalk, given medication by doctors, waking to strange lights and being told that they are independent because they are allowed to learn domestic tasks. We have the repetition of “Piggy” (and those double asterisks) 5 times in the chorus, with no true explanation as to what it means, and with two verses, a repetitive chorus, and a two-line bridge, there is so much space in this song, so much emptiness. It is up to the listener to fill that space, that reality, making it something constructed not by the words, but by what isn’t there, the information that the listener has to create for themselves out of the half-image that’s given.

As an extension of the above, the use of stream-of-consciousness (and first person) writing became really popular during the modernist era. Most songs are sort of a form of stream-of-consciousness, but the lyrics on JFPL seem to do it more on a literary rather than lyrical level. More than any of the others, William’s Last Words does it best. It’s literally a Faulkner-style first-person prose monologue without line breaks or a verse/chorus/bridge structure. The original version is clearly a drunk character leaving or attempting to leave a party or show of some sort. It’s sad and nostalgic and self-deprecating but it’s all one unbroken monologue-scene of stream of consciousness speech. This is just a small chunk of the page and a half of text:

Goodnight all, you’re all my friends…remember my wedding day, should’ve heard ole Bill singing, we’ll have a good old ding dong tomorrow, you’re lovely all of you, goodnight godbless I’ll always remember you, hope you liked the concert. I’ll go nice and quiet, I’ll just say cherio, here I go on my way, till we meet again, wish me luck as you wave me goodbye. Yr the best friends I ever had, yes, no, no I’m not a clever chap, I made a balls up again, first, second, third time but not on your time I hope, you’re a part of the world….oo be quiet old Bill, no applause, sleeptight, isn’t it lovely when the dawn brings the dew and I’ll be watching over you. It was lovely singing to you, I won’t forget you.

It’s full of commas and run-on or unconnected sentences, but it is prose that connects to itself rather than lyrics. Still, it seems to start in the middle of a scene and fades away into not much of a concrete conclusion, so we get a moment of consciousness– perhaps the most emotional moment– before turning away. Facing Page: Top Left and Marlon JD do stream of consciousness to some degree as well. Facing Page is not a typical stream of consciousness, but more like a list of things or experiences or associations. In some ways again it makes me think of Faulkner, of the way he writes characters that don’t really know how narrate their thoughts/experiences in words. It never leaves its institutional location or changes the subject to something else, it just rambles about the situation it’s in through fragmentary phrases. Marlon JD is also very stream-of-consciousness, but because it’s already based on a monologue from a film that’s kind of to be expected.

Modernism was also characterized by a sort of “what’s becoming of the world?” reaction, in response to the speeding up of technological advancements and scientific discoveries etc etc, as well as the consciousness of the changes that came from the end of the 19th century and how the new 20th century was shaping up to be. Something that the band specifically notes in interviews about the Journal For Plague Lovers album is the emphasis on information overload, of the speed of technology and information/media consumption, as well as concerns about things like the environment, religion, and global politics/history and the end of the millennium.

Me & Stephen Hawking is the clearest example of this “what is becoming of the world?” anxiety, and the focus on information overload. The main body of the lyric –the verse(s)– never actually made it onto the recording, which just uses the bridge and the chorus. This is probably because the verse(s) are just jumbles of references to history and media and events and ideas. It’s also characterized by swaths of blacked-out lines. Whether the Richey did that or the band did it posthumously, we don’t know. If Richey did it himself, it certainly changes the interpretation of the lyrics, as it adds another layer of “information” (censoring) overload. But the words trip over each other, so many different references all piled in one spot:

2/ Dante III, spider robot, Mount Spurrr Increased plastic surgery for pubic hair Sanitation police, crime of proportion. 3/ Paisleyism and ecumenism and cenotaph bombers [blacked out] wearing policing Soviet labour medals sold for Coca Cola 82 million watch Gorilla Meets Whale

Peeled Apples does the same thing, piling political and historical and emotional and media references in one place until they’re so jumbled it’s hard to make sense of them, showing the anxiety of that information overload and speeding up of communication, creation, knowledge. I’ve always thought that All Is Vanity is a kind of reaction to that reaction, putting the anxiety succinctly into “It’s not whats wrong it’s what’s right / Makes me feel like I’m talking a foreign language at times” and the desire for control or some semblance of order and calmness in “I would prefer no choice / One bread one milk one food that’s all / I’m confused I only want one truth.” Which, again, goes back to that Modernist realization that truth is provisional, reality is constructed, and there is no central point because not only is it all relative, it’s also always moving and changing and growing and shrinking and twisting.

Another characteristic is that of an emphasis on the sexual (in the form of fetish or obsession, usually), and the visceral or grotesque. While JFPL doesn’t really have much of the former, it certainly has plenty of the latter. The most obvious are Journal For Plague Lovers and She Bathed Herself In A Bath Of Bleach. She Bathed Herself really contains the most visceral image in the title, which is, as Nicky calls it, “quite a shocking title.” Aside from the title, the more intense lines are “She thought burnt skin would please her lover” and “Love sat her in a bath of bleach / But salmon pink skinned Mary is still caring.” Even so, the title kind of dictates where the listener’s mind goes with these words, and so with the suggestion from the title, the imagination goes to more grotesque places that the words actually literally contain. On the other hand, Journal For Plague Lovers has some really grotesque imagery. The band sort of cherry-picked lines to record around the more intense parts of the verses. The verses altogether seem to be an image of a rotting self, whether physical, emotional or mental, especially when combined with the “dying relationship” of the bridge.

These perfect abattoirs these perfect actors Babies bones, dustbinned, shorn

Oh such love smeared stimulus Vacuumed pain slow suck luck Wake in hell murder one Troughs o’ bones wade in gore

Weep helpless skewered flesh Milky teeth soured and fetid PG certificate all cuts unfocused Sick in skin embarrassed within

The imagery is really intense but non-specific, creating a reaction of disgust and fragments of gross images without really knowing what we’re looking at or what we’re supposed to be disgusted by. It’s a shock factor that transitions into the bridge, which is a scene of a failing or failed relationship, so that the gross images overlay this moment of romantic collapse, making it even more visceral and pitiful.

Modernism also started really focusing on the meaning and history of words, and how they could be used to create an image without blatantly telling a story. Pretension/Repulsion is the best example of this, especially because James Bradfield specifically noted in an interview that the way the song was laid out meant it felt like Richey was telling him “Look at the words, James, look at the words.” Which makes sense, as it’s just a bunch of individual words divided by commas:

Explored, inclos’d, amaz’d, perturb’d Assum’d, annoy’d, ceas’d, unhinder’d Burden’d, gather’d, agonis’d, lock’d Mix’d, sear’d, receiv’d, unclaps’d

Instead of focusing on a story, the listener-reader is paying attention to the sound of each word and thinking of the meaning behind it. Instead of a narrative, we get flashes of image/emotion for each word. Peeled Apples also relays on knowledge of words and historical references, with lines like “In SB’s Cistine Chapel inabilities wither / Boy smoking cigarette infront of Himmler’s painted ether” and “Nutrition is neuroses for a maelstrom of inadequacy.” Doors Closing Slowly relies on religious knowledge, and its references go very deep. It twists biblical stories and references, and expects the listener-reader to understand the origin and therefore the modified version:

I want your sin third day perfected Lazarus burning Jerusalem Blaspheme, cut dead, Isiah One day birds of prey Israelite

But, like the Modernists, each of these lyrics uses an emphasis on the expectation that the listener-reader will have the literary or historical or vocabulary knowledge to understand the meaning/origin of the reference in order to create a specific image through the twisting or reinterpretation of that reference. It wants the definition and history to expand the story, so that it’s the effort of the listener-reader and not the speaker that will expand the story into something fleshed out and recognizable. Despite the cuts that were made for the studio recordings it’s clear when you read the full versions of the lyrics that every single word is important and researched and meant to be included. There is a history and meaning infused in every reference, and Richey’s brain was going so fast that some of the lyrics feel like they’re piled on top of each other, but at the same time, they seem to build on each other, each reference allowing the listener-reader to glean more meaning the more history or definitions they know.

What I found most telling was seeing the quality of modernist literature that my professor really drilled into us: that modernist lit (especially prose, but also poetry to a large extent) was not necessarily about the plot, and the plot was not the most important thing. Instead of a specific narrative, what was important was the impression or emotion evoked by the words. I always think of the novel Nightwood by Djuna Barnes when it comes to feelings/impressions being more important than the plot; there is a plot, but it’s just a scaffolding or a base for the emotion to build off of, for the reader to interpret and feel from. It’s basically what all of the above is driving to create and express. Instead of having a direct narrative within the lyrics (like 4st lbs or La Tristesse Durera or even, to some extent, PCP or Intense Humming…), it relies on fragments of scenes or references to create an impression or an emotion on the listener-reader. Faster and Of Walking Abortion do this as well, but JFPL manages to take it to another level.

The band, when being interviewed about Journal For Plague Lovers, often talk about how much this album seems simultaneously “of its time” and strangely fitting for the present. In his very last television interview, Richey mentioned that his dream was to “write a lyric which I think is flawless, that makes sense to me, not anybody else. That I think in 15-20 lines sums up exactly how I feel about everything, not just how I feel today, how I’ve felt all my life. Everything I’ve read, everything I’ve seen, everything I believe, that in those 15 lines you just say it all.” Considering the sheer amount of knowledge and imagery and information packed into just the 13 songs on the album (not to mention the 20 or so more in the binder that have never been published), I think that’s partly what Richey was trying to do with these words. We’ll never know if he thought he succeeded, but instead of being left with a clear-cut picture of his opinions (or accusations) like THB, instead we are left with impressions of experiences, feelings, and events created through the fragments of information all slammed together– everything, all in 15 lines.

Aside from one or two songs, the tracks on JFPL don’t really have a defined narrative. Instead, they rely on fragments of images, emotions, references, and ideas to form an impression in the listener’s mind. For example, Peeled Apples, the most reference-filled track on the album, doesn’t actually tell a straightforward story or clear opinion the way the more political tracks on THB did. Instead we get an opening line that is clearly political followed by a much more personal line: “Riderless horses, Chomsky’s Camelot / Bruises on my hand from digging my nails out,” and the rest of the lyrics that follow are a mass of references, from the bible to Japanese post-Hiroshima films to the Birdman of Alcatraz to George Orwell, intermingled with lines that are abstract and emotional. Yet somehow what the listener-reader gets out of is an impression of frustration, political anger, and historical/political/personal entropy. Me & Stephen Hawking is similarly reference-packed, and out of that comes the impression of overwhelming technological/information enhancement and concern for the survival of both the environment and the self.

Doors Closing Slowly is full of religious references, and leaves us with an impression religious and personal doubt, and the overwhelming feeling of rejection and dejection towards both. And they’re so twisted together there are some lines, like “Love the soul not the body / Let me forgive the word ruins / I wanted to kill but my tears love,” where you don’t know if it’s a personal reference or a religious one.

There’s a sense of desolation and loneliness, of overwhelming exhaustion at the uncertainty of truth. William’s Last Words, on the other hand, feels desperate, lonely but wishing not to be alone. As a prose monologue, it is more personal-sounding, able to sound rambling and drunken because of the amount of space the words are allowed to take up. Within the words there’s the impression of nostalgia and a sort of rainy quietness, a mental fading, and a sort of muffled personal mourning.

In All Is Vanity, there is a sense of desperation. For control, for understanding, for being understood. Especially in “I’m confused I only want one truth / I really don’t mind if I’m being lied to,” there’s an impression of simultaneous frustration with monotony and a desire for it, a frustration with and desire for beauty, love, a non-existent central point, a conflict of interest on the personal level. This Joke Sport Severed feels bleak, an impression of rawness or over-sensitivity being dealt with through rejection and repression, hiding or turning away from everything that hurts. It includes the odd bridge, “Repress yr emotion / Repression yr revenge / Stoic shitter nerve end,” which radiates anger as well as dejection and frustration. The song leaves an impression of being curled in a corner somewhere, barefoot, confused, frustrated and lost and nursing wounds and pretending nothing outside of your little corner exists.

As I mentioned before, Facing Page: Top Left absolutely leaves the listener-reader with an image of hospitals and institutionalization and the monotony of that existence. It also gives an impression of discomfort, a body seen in fragments rather than as a whole, and a loss of agency. It feels frustrated, searching, but also pointedly disgusted both with the self and with others. The final two lines, for me, pack all of those feelings in a short punch packed with words and images: “Dipping neophobia. Gillette Cuticura. Flak. PS. Recovery. Huh / Central dissolves. Exceed dosage. Subscribed. Cleansed. Boring.”

Journal For Plague Lovers also reflects that disgust, to a much higher degree. The grotesque imagery gives the listener-reader a distinct feeling of uneasy revulsion, but also a sort of pity or helplessness, both for the self and for others that seem to exist in the song. Especially because it’s difficult to make out who the speaker is and what they feel– which puts all the interpretation on the listener rather than the speaker. It makes the listener-reader feel conflicted, uncertain whether they should feel horrified or sad.

Again, most of the songs don’t really have an obvious narrative, just images you can kind of construct meaning out of. But on the off-chance we do get a narrative, it is left so vague and open-ended it’s barely a narrative at all, but a fragment left open at both ends. In Virginia State Epileptic Colony, we get a momentary picture of a hospital scene, but we leave it before we get anything but an impression. She Bathed Herself… gives an incomplete narrative of a mentally ill woman and her views/attempts at romance, a fragment of her thoughts and feelings and experiences, and a fragment of the speaker at the bridge demanding “Brush her hair, no one else will / Don’t hurt her anymore, stop hurting her.” Marlon JD is also fragmentary, but some explanations can be found in the film it references, because most of the lyrics are a monologue from Reflections In A Golden Eye, or descriptions of scenes from the film. William’s Last Words starts abruptly, practically in the middle of a sentence, and peters out into nothing without the narrator going anywhere or doing much. It’s a long, sad, drunken ramble with no central point (as there is no set or stable truth), in which the narrator seems to circle around whatever it is he wants to say without really saying it, and loses steam before he gets to it. Instead we’re left with this strangely contradictory set of ending sentences, (and, apt for the album and its circumstances) a conclusion without any real meaning or conclusion:

“If I sing a song I’m down a scale or up a scale. I’ve come a long way, really, even for a tone deaf singer, if you want to know.”

Nicky also tends to mention how the binder was filled not only with lyrics, but with paintings, scans of other authors’ literature, collages, drawings, prose, journal entries, and other sorts of clippings. He makes it clear that the binder itself was meant to be a work of art. Again, this places emphasis on the form and the importance of references and of the whole being seen to create an impression rather than each little piece being interpreted. This does make me wonder how much more to the lyrics and art within there really was, and if within the whole thing as a work of art Richey did somehow reach his goal of writing the perfect lyrics or the perfect album or the perfect piece of art expressing himself. Either way, I think the inclusion of Richey’s art and non-lyric writings and things in the booklet are a sort of attempt at allowing the whole to give an impression, because the inclusion of the drawn-upon diagrams of Dante’s Infero with the lyrics to Journal For Plague Lovers, or a Christ figure with Marlon JD, or Richey’s notes from therapy with Pretension/Repulsion, flesh the piece out into art as a whole, in which the visual aspect also informs the creation of the impression upon the viewer (or listener-reader).

In Journal For Plague Lovers, modernist style is used and reflected to talk about Richey’s own experiences and thoughts, but also to capture and express a very specific moment and emotion and idea without saying it outright. There is never any mention of that information overload, of apprehension about the coming millennium, no outward or straightforward reference to his time in hospital or his views on relationships or the self. Instead, each song leaves us with an impression, a feeling rather than a clearly defined narrative or message. There’s an internalization of meaning, of imagery, so that it must be sensed and pulled out of all the jumbles of words and emotions; this time, it isn’t the plot or the message that is important, it’s the impression and feelings of an experience and a moment in time that is simultaneously constant and passed, intensely, vividly present and faded away like a memory.

#manic street preachers #msp #journal for plague lovers #richey edwards #manic street preachers meta #jfpl #old meta repost

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abundantchewtoys · 6 years ago

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HS Epi: Meat p22 reaction

So, John was doing something vaguely relevant to the plot.

Does that mean that whatever that was in the wallet for him to find, wasn't relevant? Or did Dirk really skip to a point in the future in his narration? I'd think that if a living person was captchalogued in the wallet, that'd be plot relevant.

If so, I wonder if it's more than one. But we're not likely to catch up with both Aradia and Terezi in one go. Also, I doubt Vriska somehow captchalogued herself in this wallet to escape the clutches of gravity. Well, except maybe if after reverse engineering the code for the wallet, she also alchemized a regular wallet besides the 8-ball/wallet combo.

But that makes me think of something else. I wonder what the max storage space of the wallet is... If it's functionally infinite, they have a functionally infinite singularity of questionable intent that might be in need of cleaning up at one point. :P Though it's doubtful.

---

"You’ve been drifting so long that you’ve lost the ability to objectively judge time or depth or distance. It’s getting hard to think about yourself as an objectively limited being. The boundaries of your skin begins to thin and disappear." Oooh, is it the lack of milestones in that plane, maybe, that's causing this introspection? Or is it just part of his ascension to his ultimate self?

"If your perception expands beyond the meat sack of your body, then are you really an individual anymore? Why shouldn’t we become gods? Why shouldn’t we become one God." Sounds like something Dirk might say - I know, funny because Dirk IS saying this, in John's stead. Alternatively, if Alternate Calliope is really malevolent, this might be her motivation to devouring everything ever. She wants to become UNIVAC.

"You scrunch up your nerdy face and furrow an eyebrow. It seems you aren’t enjoying this train of thought." John's intrusive thoughts are next level.

"Sorry, dude. That’s what’s on my mind right now. I’m having a phenomenological debate in my third ear that’s way more popping than your little hero’s journey into the belly of a quarter-life crisis." For a minute I thought he meant he was debating this with Kanaya, but he put her on hold so I was like: :? Then I realized he said "third ear", I guess that's something akin to the mind's eye, in that he's currently using the narration for his internal monologue.

"It turns out you don’t have time to worry about the voice inside your head, because you hear one outside of it." Ooh! Someone living, one we expect to be out here? And there Dirk goes, burying John's emerging awareness again, for a moment.

"At first you don’t think it’s real." ... Please don't be Alternate Calliope.

"MEENAH: yo blue guy MEENAH: get the shell down here"OOOOOH! She's alive!! ... Well, no, she's still dead, but you know. She survived Lord English, and the Black Hole. Girl's really got spunk. So, that brings her back in the running for candidates for John to give the ring to. ... Speaking of. Did John just, like, shrugged off Lord English's tooth, or is the poison still in his body?

I'm glad we saw her, it means that more people could have survived that were around before the battle (alive or dead), as well as the B2 kids that died during the battle! But uh... What even is still sustaining their existence? I mean, the dreambubbles were created to house them, only Sollux was able to leave through mumbo jumbo class/aspect magic.

"Your whirl around, upside down. You look up, then down. There she is." Hah, yeah, no point of reference, no gravity, so indeed, she could have been every where, relevant to him, that's also why she shouted "down here"!

"She’s clinging to a random server beacon, looking a little the worse for wear but still grinning. You float on down to greet her." Tsssh, she located the server running the LE code??? What could they even do with that, anymore. (How did it even survive.)

At least, I'm guessing it's that server, not the server hosting Rose's walkthrough. :P

So yeah, uh, that server was connected to Doc Scratch's study. In the Green Sun. ... Has it become a non-letal shortcut to Alternate Calliope now?

"JOHN: thank god. i was beginning to think that no one else was alive. MEENAH: im not alive" Hah! Ba-dum tssh.

"JOHN: oh right. sorry. JOHN: i’m glad to see you, is what i meant to say. MEENAH: same MEENAH: i fuckin guess" Yeah, not many of her friends will be left, probably. If any.

"She narrows her blank eyes. Her mouth twists into a frown. Not quite a concerned one, but close enough. You’ll take it." Is she noticing John has become an adult? ... Or yeah it might just be general concern, the situation is alarming enough. I wonder if she knows about Vriska? And what that exactly means to her, 16-year-old Vriska probably being dead for good.

Oh boy, but this is so cool, she's got potential for just as much as the Condesce, who had ties to Lord English. I wonder if she'll be instrumental in the final stages of the epilogues, if Alternate Calliope ends up being the/a end boss.

Can't shake the idea I'd like her to end up on Earth C, but then she'd not have a good role to play in a utopia, I think. But then what is her role in the story from here on out, exactly.

"MEENAH: damn buoy ya look like S)-(IT JOHN: yeah, i know. JOHN: i suffered a mortal wound, and then i threw up on myself." He didn't get better so much as that he walked it off.

"MEENAH: waterboat lord english MEENAH: he bite the bullet or what JOHN: yeah he’s... JOHN: he’s pretty fucking dead. MEENAH: whale MEENAH: theres that at least

There is definitely that, at least." Must feel like an anticlimax to Meenah too, probably. She wasn't around to see the guy bite it that was responsible for their own universe being forced to be scratched.

"You were kind of hoping you’d discover a survivor you could have an actual conversation with. Not that you aren’t glad to see Meenah, but you don’t /know/ her, and she’s not who you were really looking for." Funny how Meenah grew on John so much, what with how she ran him through on at least two occasions. I was thinking at first John was looking for Vriska, but that's just an automatism, a left over from when John still felt something for her. Of course, I forgot about Jade.

"That reminds you. JOHN: hey, uh... JOHN: mee... JOHN: fish? JOHN: (christ.)" Is that supposed to be a fish pun in her name, him using one cause he knows she likes them? Or is it that Dirk may remember Meenah's name (hearsay, in his case, since he's post-retcon - then again, ultimate self), but not John. :P

"JOHN: have you by any chance seen jade around? MEENAH: who da fuck is jade"PFffff, hah! Now she gets a chance as well to broadcast her ignorance in the names of the people in the other parties. 'THEY'RE ALL NAMED CARLOS AS FAR AS I'M CONCERNED.'

"JOHN: i mean, REALLY? JOHN: you don’t know jade?" The time she spent a lot of time dreaming in the dreambubbles was before the A1 trolls ever became relevant. On the three year trip, the indication seemed to be they just met a lot of A2 ghosts from alternate timelines in their dreams.

"JOHN: jade’s like, a big deal? JOHN: i thought you were kind of important too?" Well, different circles. Top of class vs. top dog on the play yard.

"MEENAH: you didnt even know my name dog" He knew you were an alternate to Betty Crocker, though. :P

"You’ve never been accused of having stellar people-reading skills. But even you can tell the look on her face says it all right now." Well, just be glad he isn't Jake, or even a death glare wouldn't suffice.

"JOHN: wait a minute. JOHN: do you even know MY name? MEENAH: uhhh" Pfffff, hah! Actually, valid question. What with how she referred to even her friends by last name (okay, that's because they weren't revealed yet), and had all those nicknames for them (and Karkat and Aradia)... Maybe she's just really bad with names.

"MEENAH: like MEENAH: joke? MEENAH: joke somefin" Wrong bespectacled nerd, but I can see why she'd mix them up. :P Close enough, though!

"JOHN: joke is my biological father. JOHN: i mean JAKE! JOHN: jake is his name." No, I think jokes might actually have fathered you. :P What with how he's a trickster and all.

"Halfway through this exchange, Meenah pulls out a small, clamshell-shaped accessory kit, and begins to file her nails." This is starting to turn into an awkward schoolyard conversation between classmates that don't really know each other.

"She almost dislocates her jaw by yawning the moment you mention Jake." Which is funny because Jake could've dislocated her jaw when he pounced on her when he thought she was past Condesce. :P

"You decide to do her, as well as yourself, the favor of completely ruling out the possibility of eliciting any valuable information from this person." No, Dirk, I do think she still has an ace up her sleeve, even if she doesn't even know it yet. But at least maybe now they'll acknowledge the server?

"MEENAH: i aint moved from this floatin hunger trunk lookin piece of shit since i got my bass kicked" Hah, yeah, it does look like a fridge, in Andrew's art style. :P

"JOHN: well, you’re the first i’ve seen too. MEENAH: oh" I wonder who she might have wanted to find, besides Vriska.

"JOHN: so what’s your plan now?" Don't think she has any left, now. You'll have to lead, Johnnyboy.

"JOHN: you just gonna hang around here, in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing forever? MEENAH: thats what ghosts is most good at aint they" It wasn't what she set out to do, initially, though! She hates inertia.

"JOHN: you don’t have to stay here. JOHN: i can take you back with me, to my planet." Aha! It would have all sorts of implications, of course, since she didn't "win" by any measure. So the victory state would not account for her presence. It won't happen just yet, of course.

"Meenah stares at you for an uncomfortably long time. She looks you up and down, like she’s making certain calculations. On the one hand, spending infinity clinging to a fridge-like space computer circling a black hole sounds like a drag. On the other hand, will her coolness and street cred be able to survive any prolonged association with this dumb blue nerd? That’s what she could be thinking, you think. You hope not though, because if true, it would hurt your self-esteem." I give Meenah more credit than that - her attitude is part of a facade - but she could indeed be thinking exactly that. On the other hand, she might actually genuinely not know if he's "fo' real", one, and two, what she'd even do on his planet. ... Also, is John really asking a girl over to his place? He truly IS an adult. :P

"She finally appears to make up her mind. MEENAH: naaah" Hah, as if it's a drag for her. And what's her motivation then?

"MEENAH: ok for one thing genius MEENAH: im dead" Well, that's not a problem, though she wouldn't know. John still has the Ring of Life with him. But I wonder what the other reason is.

Hah, Blaperile points out that Meenah at one point told John specifically not to give her the ring, cause she didn't like how she turned out as Condesce. Right, she might think living is no longer her thing. Which is hilarious for a Life player. Still think John might make the proposition.

Also, she thinks she might not fit in with the others, but she doesn't have to worry. They're all disasters, one and all.

"MEENAH: i wont even last on your planet ill just like MEENAH: fade away or some shit MEENAH: i dont know what happens to ghosts in real places actually but ima guess it goes somefin like that" See also: what ever happened to Aranea after Game Over. :P

"MEENAH: anyway while you was floatin there i came up with my own plan" ? There's not a lot of options here, really. The Black Hole... Mugging John... Lazying about...

"JOHN: what is it? MEENAH: cmere MEENAH: gonna whisper it to you" Option A) she screams. Option B) she mugs him for the ring. Option C) she'll stab him again, assuming he's another hologram self.

"You lean in rather credulously, and bring your ear toward her cupped hand. MEENAH: (nerd)

You pull back, unamused by the prank. What is this, you think. Fucking amateur hour?" Hah, chances are high she just swiped the ring. Or the wallet. Once a Thief... But heheh, still funny how Meenah likes to prank. Seems like Condesce and Sassacre really found one another. :P

"MEENAH: reel cute you wanna be my savior blue boy MEENAH: but the fact is you already helped me out MEENAH: got everyfin i need from you MEENAH: sea ya round sucker! 38)" She putting the ring on now? But uh, she'd spawn on Earth C, right? Or right there?

"She’s laughing her ass off. Before you can react, she jams the button down on the beacon and opens the server. She jumps into the hatch and the door snaps closed behind her." ... What! WHAT??? ... She's not in cahoots with Alternate Calliope, is she? She might just be trying to defeat the end boss herself. At least, if the server still leads to where the Green Sun used to be.

"Oh shit." ... It doesn't lead to Dirk now, does it?

"I think I know what just happened. You might want to check your pockets." So, if she took the wallet and not the ring, that means what's inside the wallet is relevant to the plot!

"Sure enough, it’s missing. The Ring of Life you stole back from Aranea has been re-stolen. Bitch just picked your pocket. You got played, man." Wow. So she's actually decided to go through with getting resurrected. ... Although it could actually be for Alternate Calliope, but then what would even the implications of her resurrection be?? It would be a parallel to how Condy worked for LE. But if there's two alive Calliopes that ended up on Earth C, I suspect there might be an impersonation at one point.

Yeah, so if both wear a Ring of Life/Void... Maybe that'd have funky repercussions as well. Not to mention they're both versions of the same "ultimate self" - although 'our' Calliope's not a god tier, there might be a bleedover again, like with Jade. But Alternate Calliope might want to dispose of Calliope, if she wants to become the only version of them. Then again, she did specifically tell her other to go and enjoy life.

---

I wonder if it'll become relevant at any point that having everyone in the dreambubbles follow you would supposedly grant you the boon of resurrection. Since there's so few people left out here, it seems like it could have become a feasible thing to do. In fact, it might be that this is represented by Alternate Calliope's resurrection, if events really play out like that: Meenah might be the only other ghost left. Unless there are still the other A2 ghosts we're missing, from the character list.

#homestuck #upd8 #reaction #spoiler alert #homestuck epilogues #homestuck liveblog #john egbert #meenah peixes #alternate calliope

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mrneighbourlove · 6 years ago

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Red Typhoon: Ch 2. Fellowship of the Sea

Bakura Saibot mediated in the cave. For the past seven years, he carved the ice out, making a sanctuary to collect his thoughts, and looking to the spirits for answers. He had done his best to catch up as a father for Liz and Lex, giving them everything he could, but the girl's hearts wouldn't rest until they found Seer. Adda needed to be found, and when she was... what would Bakura do? All these years, all this anger, and yet he couldn't shake her smile. It haunted him of what could have been.

As Bakura meditated, looking to the spirits for guidance, he felt a murmur, a gentle wave float in his mind. He concentrated, relaxing and letting go of his outward distractions, and focused inward. He heard loud arguing, gunfire, and ships sailing. He saw the snout of a crocodilian man, and a man with a red tie. All these images didn't make sense, until each one repeated over and over, and they linked into an image of Adda and Seer sitting a top a bungalow. Bakura opened his eyes in shock and came back to, the last sound that rang through his ears was the cry of a whale.

"Hey Bakie, don't mean to interrupt your thinking and all, but it's time for supper." Rat's voice echoed into the cave. "Liz is home, and everyone is gathering at mine and Borgie's place." He had little Trygve on his shoulders, his son's arms rested on top of his head. "I'm sure she'd be happy to see you there."

Bakura stood up, catching his breath. "...I saw him."

"...? Eh? No one's in here except you, Bakie."

"I saw Seer and Adda."

"What?" Rat was not following Bakura's words. "You saw them? Bakie, it must have been a dream, they're not here."

"My mediations. It finally paid off. The spirits gave me clues to Seer and Adda!"

Rat never understood mediation and he was never really big on spirits. Though, Bakura seemed pretty hyped. Was it actually possible that he had the location to Seer and Adda?

"I... think you need some a-food, Bakie. And if you do have the location then... eh..." Rat told the assassin. "Forgive me for sounding skeptical, but how can you be so a-sure?"

"Because I want to be. I want to have hope." The three of them headed back to the Kanisa's house. Inside, Revy was proudly describing her successful hunt with her mom and Boof. Liz sat next to Halvar, just content to relax after her long journey, and Lex was chatting it up with Kerugan, asking him if he had a handle on any of the girls his age, and pro tips to make girls comfortable.

"Rat? I thought we were all meeting at your place?" Kanisa asked. "I'm bringing rabbit stew, do you need me to bring something else?"

"No, that's not what we're here for." Rat set Trygve down on his feet. "Bakie thinks he knows the location of... of Seer and Adda."

"Bork?" Boof tilted his head at the mention of Seer's name. He had not see the man in a long time.

"Seer?" Vidar repeated. "It's been seven years, Rat. Corsaire has combed pretty much every inch of the seas and has come up with nothing. What makes you think Bakura knows?"

"Hey, if he has an idea, at least let him share it." Rat shrugged his shoulders. "It could be a-good or a-bad."

Liz and Lex stopped what they were doing and focused their current attention on Bakura. Lex was shocked, and a little excited. "Daddy?"

With all eyes on him, Bakura took a breath. "I had a vision in the cave. I saw a link that lead to Adda and Seer. First was a reptilian pirate with a golden eye. Than a man in shadows with a red tie. Following this, I saw Adda and Seer, clear as day."

"... a reptile pirate?" Vidar was trying to keep a straight face. "Sure you weren't puffing on something?"

"Vidar." Kanisa gave her husband a look. "Be nice."

"Do you have any idea how absurd that sounds?"

"Vidar!"

"Hey, hey, we can at least ask Cap'n if he knows of any reptile pirate." Rat was trying his best to be supportive of Bakura. "Cap'n knew a lot of pirates back in the day, still does."

Liz's mind raced. She thought to all her studies of Adda's known accomplices. Her mother had an army that spawned many loyal to her, with many being creatures and monsters. Some had laid low in infamy to keep a low profile, while others, such as the Dragon Onslaught, had gained a monstrous reputation for raiding military vessels in Adda's name. At her dad's description, she went through her mental list. "I know who he's talking about."

"You do?" Rat actually looked surprised.

"What about the man in a red shadow with a black tie?"

"It was a black shadow with red tie."

"Whatever."

"I don't know. Some pirates hide in shadows more. But they tend to know the location of one another. I think..." Liz stood up, analysing in her mind this development. "I think Dad's vision is telling us an order. If we find the first captain, we find this man in shadow, and from there we find Adda."

Revy stood beside both her moms, with Scarlet having a hand placed firmly on her daughter's shoulder. She regretted not knowing where to find Seer sooner. The paradise island Adda was most likely hiding him on was magic in nature, and slowly moved across the oceans undetected. The old location she gave didn't give Corsaire his friend back.

"Who's this crocodile captain than sis?"

"A captain by the name of Eltontor."

Now it was Lex's term to be excited, and, without a word, she dashed to her house to grab something.

"Okay, we know the 'who' but we still don't know the 'where'." Rat was trying not to let too much hope rise in his chest. All of them had been disappointed before and he did not want that to happen again. "Or what to expect."

An air of silence went through the room, despair leaving its mark. How many times had they hoped before in finding Seer? Every lead they came up with before had dried up. Suddenly, with a force to dispel the sad environment forming, Lex kicked open the door. "Holy crap! We got it! We got it by the balls!"

"Lex, we a-talked about this language." Rat said dryly. "A proper lady doesn't---"

"Just tell us what you have." Vidar interrupted the man.

"Well, through MY hard work, I've been getting information from sailors and travelers. Including some navy officers. And using that information, I've documented every bit of information regarding mom, or any pirate for that matter!" Lex put down charts she had been making for the past two years. "This includes maps, names, and routes. I've triangled many pirate hot spots. And the name of one Captain Eltontor was described to me two weeks ago! He was last seeeeen... HERE!" Lex tapped specific map coordinates. "Right here!"

"Uh..." Rat looked at the charts and then frankly said, "I don't want to know, do I?"

"Okay, I hate to burst a hole in your bubble, but two weeks means we don't have a prayer of catching to wherever he is now." Vidar had to be the one to say it. "Look, even if he is still in that area, he won't be for long. That, and how can we get from here to there in an adequate time? It takes 3 months to sail from here to Hyrule. Danjur is nearly twice that."

"Well, I'm going." Liz stood up, a fire burning in her.

Revy was taken by surprise at how soon Liz reacted. "But Liz, you just got here!"

Bakura nodded in agreement with his daughter. "So am I."

"We can't go without a proper plan." Rat told the Liz and Bakura. "Adda's forces are a-large and vast over this sea. We's going to have to be careful. That, and we need a ship... or more like ships."

"We have a plan. And we have the navies of Uncle Corsaire to back us up." Liz was adamant about going. "If we go in small, we could be undetected an track down these other pirates before we amass on Adda herself."

"You have a plan, Liz, we have to talk this out with Cap'n and be rational." Rat was firm about this. "If we rush, Seer could get hurt. We have no idea what we're going to face with that giant lizard of hers or the number she has behind her. Let's talk to Corsaire, draw up a plan, and then... this old quartermaster might just have to call up his old mates for another sea journey."

"Than what are we waiting for. Let's go to him now." Liz grabbed her coat off Halvar and stomped out the door to be the first to leave the house.

Revy quickly grabbed her coat as Bakura and Lex followed after.

"H-Hey wait! I'm coming too!" Halvar chased after Liz.

"Bork!" Boof followed after Revy, loyal as ever.

"Eh, looks like the celebration is going to have to wait until Seer gets home, Kanisa." Rat said his goodbyes and then followed after the troupe, dragging Bakura with him. "Come on, Bakie, we's gots to get you suited up for a sea voyage."

Scarlet grabbed Rat, unable to stop Revy. "You can't be serious in letting our daughter go."

"Scarlet, it's not a matter of letting her, she's an adult now." Rat told the Iron Knuckle. "She wants to be there to help her best friends. If Borgie was going, wouldn't you want to go with her?"

"I don't want her getting killed! She can't go out there!" Scarlet tried to go past him.

"Scarlet!" Rat stopped her by the shoulders, and gave her a hard look. "Reveka knows what she's doing. Besides, do you not trust me? This 'mousa' as you called me knows how to watch after our little girl. Don't make Revy stingy to you cause you're not wanting her in danger."

"But I..." Scarlet's shoulders sunk in defeat. "She can't get hurt. I should at least go with her, shouldn't I?"

"That's up to you, Scarlet." Rat then gently reminded her. "You don't have to if you don't a-want to. We both know this isn't going to end well for Adda."

"I... I don't know if I can face Adda again. But I have to watch over my little girl. I made promises to myself that I'd never abandon her again."

"You do know that if you go you's... you's going to be against Adda." Rat was not going to sugar coat it. "This isn't going to be a reunion for you two, it's going to be a fight. I may not be your Voe, but I's still caring about you, all of us do. Borgie, Reveka, Trygve... we's your family now."

"I know... she was a sister to me. Someone I loved. But I have you all in my heart now." Scarlet took a deep sigh, trying to not crumble. "We should get going if we want to catch up to them."

"We's all going to understand if you don't want to go. You make up your mind while we prepare, okay?"

"I... I understand." Scarlet walked over to the couch by the fire and sat in contemplation.

At the hotel Corsaire was staying at, he was quickly startled awake just as he was getting an early sleep. It didn't take long for Bakura and his daughters to explain the plan they had in saving Seer from the clutches of Adda.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, one at a time! One at a time!" Corsaire had to yell over the multiple conversations. "Look, I understand you're all eager to leave right now, but the ship isn't ready yet. We need to finish restocking, chart a course, and most importantly, alert Hyrule and Danjur to Adda's location as soon as possible. We're going to need to send word with Stra'tuso's family that delivers cargo to Hyrule and Danjur, it's the only way that's possible."

"Stra'tuso's sister and brother leave tomorrow since they just dropped off cargo a few days ago." Rat told Corsaire. "Not to mention, we's going to have to figure out a way 'round that... Wind Chime thing of Adda's."

"Wind Waker."

Liz took a breath, hoping to come across as clear. "Adda's Wind Waker is one of a kind, and is on her person. When we get that bridge, we'll cross it. First, we need to find someone that knows the location of her secret, hidden island."

"I believe my vision tells me that the man in the red tie will know. And this Captain Eltontor can lead us to him."

"Captain Corsaire, if our target doesn't know an exact way into Adda's island, we have mages in Hyrule and Danjur that could possibly know spells to disenchant Adda's protect dome, right?"

"It's possible, depending on if another mage made the dome or if an ancient artifact made the dome." Corsaire knew little of magic, but his wife Orana had taught him a little. "We have three problems as of the moment. The dragon under Adda's command, the Wind Waker, and the unknown number of ships she has. We're going in blind unless this red tie gentleman can give us more information." The captain grimaced. "One of the first rules of war on the sea is to know exactly what you're up against. We have no clue."

"So that's the a-bad news, what's the a-good?"

"The good news is Adda's arrogance came back to bite her in one way."

"Oh?"

"Remember that sail we made a deal for all those long years ago?"

"Aye."

"Let's just say that this captain might have been collecting the rest... and took down one of her old ships with the last sail, a month ago."

Liz was ecstatic. "Really?! We got them all?!"

"What do you think Hyrule was building me that new, big, fancy, ship for?" Corsaire had to snicker a little at Liz's outburst. In some ways, she was still just a kid. "It took me a long while, but I finally have all of the sails. So that's one surprise Adda will not know of, however... we're not sure what's going to have more of an advantage; the sails or the Wind Waker."

"The Wind Waker for a large scale battle." Bakura thought about the future, and the war that would happen. "We can use this specialized ship to hunt down our targets that will lead us to Adda, and also get in close to Adda herself. If we disable her and her tool, we can stop her from controlling nature. That will even the playing field."

"This might seem like a dumb question to you, but how do we even dismantle this Wind Waker?" Rat asked Bakura. "From what Reveka says, it's damn old and dangerous."

"Well, Dad, according to Hylian legend, its just a baton. If its not in someone's hand to physically wave around, all the spells the current user did should stop, and no one can cast anymore magic. Just, get it out of her hand."

"We can always cut her hands off." Liz offered.

Lex quickly interjected, disturbed by any talk of maiming her mother. "Or we just smack it out of her hands and quickly subdue and arrest her."

"So our first objective is to get the Wind Waker away from her," Corsaire held up his hand to stop the sisters from any further argument. "That way we can get closer. Once that's out of her hands, the second objective is to keep her busy while a few of us find Seer. Last, but not least, we have to make sure that there's an exit. Just because we get in doesn't guarantee us an out."

"You know that there will most likely be casualties. When we reach Adda, we will be at war. At most, her people won't fight. She's already formed an army out of others, so we most likely won't have to kill a lot of Gerudo." Bakura rubbed his hair, thinking about the inevitable reunion. "And Lex, when we face Adda, you have to understand, anything can happen."

"But, we aren't savages. Right? We aren't just gonna assassinate her, right?"

"Either way, once we arrest her, Adda has a death sentence." Corsaire frowned. "You know Hyrule and Danjur both have a warrant for her arrest. Once we bring her to the courts, it will be a death sentence in Danjur due to her shooting Queen Annuciata's brother, Dario. He's very sore about that eye he lost." He then added. "In Hyrule, the best we could hope for is life in prison, but I doubt that is going to be the case."

"I.... I know." Lex looked sad, not meeting anyone's eyes. Bakura gave her a hug. He wouldn't say it outloud, but he understood her feelings.

Liz looked to Halvar, concerned about his well being. "You've never left Uskar before Halvar. Are you certain that you are up to this?"

"This concerns Uskar just as much as it does Hyrule and Danjur." Halvar reminded Liz. "Adda fired upon innocents and some of our people died. We never did a thing to her, and she attacked us outright. Besides, I'm not letting you go alone." He turned slightly red in the cheeks and said sheepishly. "Direnors don't leave their loved ones to fight alone."

Liz processed his answer, and she took his hand. "Ok..."

"I'll get in contact with me old crew mates, have them meet us. Otherwise, once we have any slight idea what we're up against, all that is left is getting more ships and drawing out a battle plan."

Scarlet knocked on the door, peering in. "Captain Corsiare?"

"Yes, Scarlet?" Corsaire stood from his chair. "We're leaving tomorrow as soon as the ship is restocked. I assume you want to talk to Rat and Reveka?"

"Yes."

"If you need me, I'm going to be getting some sleep." Corsaire said goodbye to Rat and the rest of the group before returning to his room.

"Scarlet?" Rat looked at the Gerudo and then at Revy. "What did you decide?"

"Mom. You ok?"

Scarlet sat across from them, taking a sigh. "I worry about you Revy. I know that you're older now. I know that you're strong and smart too. But this task ahead of you... I can't stop worrying."

Revy had her hand taken by her mother. "Revy... I love you. I wasn't there for you for the first era of your life. Now I want to protect you. But even I know that its not my place to protect you forever. And I can't stop you from going. However... will you let me look after you one more time? Please?"

Revy gave a small smile, trying to not let her warmth for her mother overwhelm her. Moving closer to hug her, she nodded. "Of course. I'd feel so much better with you and Dad by my side."

"We's all going to have to be careful and look out for one another." Rat told the two girls and then hugged them both in his huge arms. "First things first though. Scarlet's going to need to go over the basics of a ship with you Reveka, and I's need to find me old guns."

Scarlet felt so happy hugging them both. It felt like the family she could have had, if she hadn't made the biggest mistake of her life.

Revy hugged them both back. "We've been sailing before dad."

"Yes, but being on a war ship is different. And I doubt you ever had to work on a ship. In the morning, I'll take you out. Ok?"

"Ok mom."

The three hugged each other once more, hoping that they'd all return once their journey was over.

"Let's get some dinner and rest before our big day tomorrow."

Onslaught clicked his claws as he sat in the dark, reading the report from the Eastern Front. It seemed that the navies of Danjur and Kikai had gathered together recently to fight off raids. It was disappointing the Kikai Empire had cancelled negotiations with the Collection. Adda had insisted on calling her armies simply, 'her forces'. No name or organization in it. It maddened Onslaught. In time, their forces had grown radically. And as their power increased, Onslaught often wondered if he'd need Adda anymore. Unfortunately, she held respect of many. And most importantly, she held the Wind Waker. As long as she had that, and showed no notable weakness, she held an advantage over him. How could he fight a force that could ground him and send him hurtling from the sky? So the Dragon decided to wait for an opportunity to present itself.

One of the other major lieutenants, code named King Crimson, waited nearby in the shadows. "Onslaught. We need to discuss our most recent hits. Hyrule is allowing dragons to nest on the Charlie and Delta islands."

Onslaught narrowed his eyes. "Unsettling. But not impossible to deal with. We can bomb the islands to drive them off. Do so after they hatch the chicks. They will rather flee forever than risk their young being hurt. We can retrieve our smuggled goods than."

"I understand. Captain Adda wants to know if your fortress can be used to store the cache of diamonds and gold that was recovered from Termina."

"Yes. Of course. I can have my crews airlift it up. Anything else to discuss?"

"No."

"Good. Then go into hiding and gather information on this gathering of Danjur and Hasai."

"Understood."

Now that this meeting was over, Onslaught starred back into darkness. He felt a shift in the air, and felt a feeling in his gut that change was going to take place in the near future.

#crossover #ridersoftheapocalypse #Captain Adda #Bakura Saibot #corsaire #Liz and Lex #Revy #Scarlet #Rat #Borghild #Boof #Halvar #Onslaught: Terror of the Sky and Sea #Seer #comments always welcomed!

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kentucky-the-fried · 8 years ago

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Imperium: Chapter 1

Featuring: @aeviann ‘s Aeviann, @deltheor ‘s Scarlen, and @eienias20 ‘s Jaynix

Chapter 1: Et Non Sentiunt (And I Do Not Feel)

The mornings in the city are always busy. Lots of people are just waking up in the early hours, going about their daily routines - but unlike the other districts, the Administrative District is the place that never sleeps. BLADEs are always up and about, as every day provides new opportunities to get out into the field and help the city to grow and survive. I take pride in being a BLADE, in being one of the lucky ones who can explore the world and help people, regardless of their situation. It is the best feeling in the world, knowing that everything I do makes the life of someone else better.

And so I stand in front of the mission board now, my usual coffee in my hands, waiting for the right mission to pop up. Being an Interceptor, I specialize in defending other BLADEs on dangerous missions, and even though I am capable of taking other jobs, nothing else brings me as much joy. Protecting people is my ecstasy - I think that is the right word to describe it, anyways. Is that not the name of the Earth drug that produces emotional warmth and pleasure? Hmm, I wonder if it still exists. Maybe Frye will know something about it.

Regardless, I know something that makes me feel even happier: coffee. I take another sip of the one in my hands, my eyes closing as caramel hits my taste buds. Caramel macchiatos are the best, I say silently as my eyes open. The mission board looks like it has a new selection of missions available, so I scan over the new options to pick something out. I am itching to get out and do something productive - I cannot tell if I am energetic because of the thrill of adventure, or because I am having my sixth coffee for the day. Either way, I finally spot something on the bottom of the board that looks promising. The details are simple: hunt ten forfexes in Oblivia. I take the mission with no hesitation. BLADE would not post a mission like this if the forfexes had been peaceful as of late. Plus, missions like these are ones that I know I can handle on my own. If I take on one forfex at a time, I could complete the mission with lots of time to spare for other missions.

I switch my coffee to one hand as I pull out my comm device, which had been tucked neatly in the back pocket of my jeans. The details of the mission pop up and I refresh myself one last time. I hardly glance at the rewards for its completion. Sure, credits could be nice. But more tank tops? Definitely not. I do not even wear tank tops.

With a sigh, I place my comm device back in my pocket and turn to leave. Facing Division Drive, I start towards my Skell, parked neatly next to the tents lining the walls. As a Lailah Queen model, it is not classified as the strongest in the market, but I have optimized it to a point I am quite happy with. Plus, the paint job is not too shabby. Gotta love reds and blacks.

On my way there, I glance over at the device to my left, placed conveniently next to the mission board. I remember being introduced to the scouting console back when I first arrived in the city, but since then, I have not touched it. I mean, scouting sounds fun, but I enjoy having the company of the friends I made. Hiring complete strangers seems scary in its own way.

And, ah...it does not work for me.

I tried using it a few times in the past, out of curiosity. But for some reason all it told me is that I was “offline” and could not access the scouts. After that, I shrugged it off and never brought it up. Not like I cared about it, really. Why hire scouts when you can have Elma?

And just like that, as I glance away from the console, I notice her exit the barracks with Lin at her side. I think L would call this a “talk of the Satan” moment? He never explained that to me, but I think it is supposed to be in regards to something coincidental happening? Either way, I turn to give them both a bright smile. It has been a while since we worked together on a mission, with all three of us being busy in our respective lines of work.

But Elma looks different. Ever since she showed us her true form in the Lifehold Core, she has readjusted to walking around in her actual body. I cannot help but admire her new appearance, and as our eyes meet, I am faced with eyes brighter than the stars in the night sky. As they approach, Lin starts to jog, rushing past Elma to reach me first. But I realize that I still have my half full cup of coffee in my right hand, so as Lin calls out my name in excitement I start to slowly move my hand behind my back.

“Pongo!” Lin says with a cheerful smile, “I feel like it’s been ages since we’ve seen you!”

I chuckle. Her childish nature never ceases to amuse me. “I have been busy. Just because we won the war with the Ganglion does not give us the right to slack off, especially now.”

As Elma finally stops next to Lin, she gives a small nod. “Of course. I wouldn’t expect anything less from you.” Her gaze moves downward just as my coffee slides out of vision, but the movement is too slow, and she returns her gaze upwards, scowling. “By any chance would that be coffee in your hand?”

“Whaaaaaaaat? No, of course not!” I try my best to lie, “I have not had coffee for a very long time! You said it yourself, having too much coffee is a very bad habit and it is no substitute for a good night of sleep -”

“He totally has a caramel macchiato.” Lin interrupts. “I can smell it from here.”

“Lin!” I hiss playfully, and she giggles.

Elma, however, is not amused. “I know you’re in a mimeosome, but even mims need sleep.” She holds her hand out, and by now I know the routine. Very slowly, I bring the cup back out from behind my back and give it to her. With a sigh, she continues, “I don’t think I’ve seen you rest ever since we got back from Oblivia, when you…”

“Lost my arm.” I finish slowly. I remember that day so vividly - the pain, the fear, only wondering if Tatsu was okay - but I cannot tell her that it is because of that day that I refuse to sleep. The nightmares were so surreal that I often questioned the difference between the dream and reality. I cannot have Elma worrying over me for something so small.

“Guess you can say I needed a hand after that.” I finish up, a cheeky grin forming on my face.

Lin points fingerguns my way, and I notice that Elma can’t hold back a smile of her own. Gods, her smile is beautiful.

“Anyways Lin, we have a mission to get to in Cauldros,” She informs her, “The White Whale debris won’t find itself.”

“Aww, I know,” Lin says, her shoulders slumping. “Do you think you can come with us Pongo? Just the three of us, like the old days!”

“I would love to,” I admit, “But I have already accepted a mission in Oblivia. Apparently some forfexes have been causing trouble for the operatives - but I can take them down, all on my own!”

That gets them both to frown. I wonder if I have said something wrong - maybe I sound too excited? No, why would that be it?

“You’re going alone?” Elma responds first, “That doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“Maybe you can take some scouts, at least?” Lin suggests. “Even if you’re confident - which, um, big step forward for you if you are! - at least take them for the company!”

I shake my head. It is not confidence, I would say, but more of a caution. Forfexes are quite powerful, and often underestimated - I would hate to bring someone with me only to have them get hurt. Besides, if I told them about the virago I took on solo the other day…

“I will be fine!” I reassure them.

“...you know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you use the scouting console.” Lin comments, “We showed it to you when you first arrived in the city, right?”

I nod. “You did! Just, ah...see, a while back, I tried to use it and it did not give me access, so since then I never tried it. Never saw a reason to, seeing as I have perfectly good teammates around me to go to!”

Elma continues to frown. “That doesn’t seem right. All BLADEs should have access.”

“Might be a system error, Lin says, “C’mon, let’s check it out! I could probably work out any of the bugs!”

She runs over to the scouting console before I can tell her not to. I have heard so many tales of scouting, and for the most part, it involves meeting new people. My hands clench into shaky fists, fearing that when she fixes the problem, it will involve me having to scout someone. I know they only mean well for me, but new people are scary. How am I supposed to interact with them?! What if they hate me?!

As Elma and I follow Lin to the console, she starts fiddling with some of the buttons before asking, “Walk me through what you did last time you tried to use this.”

I nod once before taking her place at the console. She got me to the main screen, where there are four options. The first, being to scout BLADEs, is the one I click. However, just like my last attempt, it gives me an error screen with bright red letters reading “offline”.

“See? It does not work, therefore I cannot scout!” I say, almost with a little relief in my voice.

Lin takes center stage again as she peers down at the letters on the screen. “Hmm...Let’s see…”

She plays around with some of the buttons again, opening a few different screens as she tries to figure out the problem. There is a moment of tense silence as Elma and I watch her work. Elma still has my coffee in her hand - gods, I can smell it from here. I want that caramel goodness, I need it!

But, after a while, Lin exclaims, “What? How didn’t Nagi explain this to you?!”

“What is it, Lin?” Elma asks.

“He doesn't have a scouting account!” She explains, spinning herself around to face us, “They’re essential if people want to access your information and determine if you’re a good fit for scouting. If you don’t have one, you can’t scout or be scouted!”

Elma chuckles. “That’s one of the basics that Nagi should’ve went over with you.”

Huh. Nagi never mentioned anything about a scouting account when he gave me a runthrough before. I guess it slipped his mind. Nevertheless, I fold my hands behind my back, smiling awkwardly. Lin knows what the issue is, and I partially expect her to push me into this scouting business. “I do not recall the Secretary ever walking me through it. But really, I do not think -”

“Here, let’s make your account!” Lin interrupts, turning around and typing into the screen. “Mind telling me your current build?”

I pause - I knew she would do this, no backing out now - before telling her, “Bastion Warrior class. Dual guns and photon saber.”

I open my mouth to speak, but again, Lin speaks before I can protest. “And your profile is set! Your days of no scouting are over!”

“Nicely done, Lin,” Elma compliments her with a grin. Just then, we all hear her comm device buzz, and she pulls it out as the blue screen displays some new information. “Vandham is starting to wonder why we’re not in Cauldros. Looks like we should get going, Lin.”

“Of course!” Lin responds. Turning to me, she informs me, “This is a good opportunity for you to scout some people! Trust me, you won’t be disappointed. I’ve made a lot of friends through scouting people, and it’s so cool to see where everyone has strengths!”

“It’ll be a new experience,” Elma adds, “And a great opportunity to make some friends in the field.”

I look down - not that they can tell the difference now. Just another advantage of having no irises, I suppose. “I...I will try.”

“Good luck!” Lin bids me goodbye as she walks off, and Elma gives me a reassuring smile before following suit and eventually taking the lead. Once they get out of earshot, I face the scouting console again, taking a deep breath. I could turn around now, I do not have to do this, I can just go on my own and lie about this later if they ask - but nope, here I am pressing a button, because I hate lying. As the screen changes, I am suddenly faced with a wide array of names and classes and weapon sets. All these names are so foreign to me, and as I try to overcome the feeling of nausea, I end up deciding to look around a bit more. It would be nice to have a group of scouts that have different talents…

I say as I find a person with my exact same weapon set. Dual guns, photon saber. This scout is of the Mastermind class, however, so I figure that he might be a suitable option. The nametag given is “Scarlen.”

Okay, two more, I tell myself. Four is a nice number for going out into the field. Any more and it might cause a few problems, especially since I plan to take out these forfexes one at a time using stealth. With that in mind, I find another scout under the name of “Aeviann” who uses a sniper rifle and a javelin. The sniper rifle would be good for distance and picking off enemies from afar - a logical choice, but one that fills me with anxiety. Two complete strangers coming with me on this mission - and I am about to make it three.

One more name from the list, a somewhat random choice, gives me “Jaynix”. Equipped with a gatling gun and a longsword, I expect her to be well versed in offense, which could come in handy for getting this done quickly. And with that, I have my three scouts. Now all there is left to do is wait, I think. Will they come to me? Do I have to meet them out in the field? Gods, I did not think this through. What if they refer to me as “captain”, or “sir”? I do not want those titles, I do not deserve them. Would now be a good time to curl up into a corner and cry?

...Well, the last part is an exaggeration, but I can still sense that nothing good will come of this. I just hope I can put these scouts to some use on this mission...and I hope I do not make a complete fool of myself.

“Hey there! You’re the guy who scouted me, right?”

I almost do not notice that someone has stepped up to me. I turn myself around. “I think that would be me - oh my gods.”

The person who stands before me...is absolutely gorgeous. Dark red hair falls past her shoulders, complementing the red fabric of her raim, and her fiery eyes shine with confidence as she crosses her hands over her chest, awaiting a response. I find my gaze exploring her body, noticing how the raim curves to fit her hourglass figure and complement the muscle underneath, and before I understand what is happening, my eyes lock with hers. Gods, her irises are like tiny beacons, full of light. How long have we been standing here? Oh gods, she must think I am weird. I have to do something, otherwise...

I have to hesitate, trying to regain my composure as my cheeks flush up. Of all the scouts, I had to choose a pretty one. Just my luck. Just. My. Luck. I have to say something, anything, stop standing here like a complete idiot!! “Oh, y-yeah! That would probably be me.”

“Well, you’re Pongo, right?” She asks to confirm, “The name’s Jaynix. I’m with the Interceptors!”

“...me too!” I squeak, giving my best attempt at a friendly smile - though, I think it comes across as more awkward than I anticipate. “Interceptor! Me! I am an Interceptor!”

Janyix shifts in her posture, and I notice something change within her gaze. “You are? I don’t think I’ve seen you around before. I would’ve remembered a face like yours.”

My heart is beating faster than it should. My mouth opens as I attempt to speak, but no words come out. All of my thoughts, every fiber of my being focuses on her beauty, her confidence - and in the midst of it all, I wonder if I could ever look the part. Maybe one day, when I am not as much of a human disaster, I can be confident too!

“Um...hi there! You’re Pongo, right?...”

I almost do not notice that someone else has walked up behind Jaynix. I start to give them a friendly smile - ohhhhhhhhh no. Oh no oh no oh no oh no he is just as cute as Jaynix and I want to ruffle his fluffy white hair and I want to stare into those sparkly blue cat eyes forever and ever because gods are they beautiful. Am I blushing I think I am blushing wait was I blushing before or am I just doing it now? Oh gods I probably look like a complete idiot I have to say something anything just need to -

“Yup, this is Pongo.” Thank you so much Jaynix. “I take it he’s never scouted before. Either that or he can’t handle just how sexy I am!”

Ohhhhhhhhhhh my gods I want to cry. This was a mistake and now I look like an idiot and there is no way this can get any worse -

“Aevi! Hey there!”

And before I know it, Jaynix is waving to another woman who is walking towards us. As she grows closer, I take in her image and -

……….fuck.

“Jay! Good to see you again!”

“Feels like it’s been forever. We really need to catch up more. Say, did Pongo scout you too?”

“Oh, he did!...is this him?”

“Yup. Poor guy’s flustered beyond belief. I’m pretty sure it’s his first time scouting.”

“Must be a new BLADE then?”

“Don’t know. I would ask but I think the kid’s in the middle of a stroke. Here, I’ll see if I can calm him down.”

Snap snap.

“No need to be nervous, kid. I don’t bite!...but I could.”

“Jay, that’s not helping. Here, I’ll try.”

She smells like flowers.

“Take a few deep breaths. Everything will be okay. We’ll be happy to show you the ropes if this is your first time with scouts.”

Deep breaths. Okay Pongo, you can calm down. Just take deep breaths. Maybe then you can actually talk to these incredibly gorgeous people. Deep breaths.

I feel my chest expand and contract with every breath I take, and before I know it, my head is clear. I blink once, facing them with a new perspective. Okay, I can do this...I think. First things first, apologize for being the worst BLADE ever.

“Sorry about that...I just...did not expect...to scout three incredibly beautiful people.”

THAT WAS NOT WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO SAY OH GODS

“Aww, thanks kid!” Jaynix chuckles. Meanwhile, the man standing behind her - Scarlen, I assume - begins to smile nervously. Gods he is so cute - no, no, stop that. I almost do not hear his tiny adorable voice above the sounds of the Administrative District growing louder.

“Thanks!...you look nice too!...”

I shake my head repeatedly. “No, I am nothing special!” I do not give them time to say anything else as I whip out my comm device. “So the mission I have is fairly simple. There is a group of forfexes out in Oblivia that have been causing some trouble for BLADE operatives in the area, so the task is to take out ten of them to reduce their population, maybe scare the rest off in the process.”

“Oblivia? Yes!” Aeviann says with a beautiful, wide grin.

I notice, however, that Jaynix does not look the least bit happy with this. Her position shifts as she takes on a frown - which, honestly, she looks just as good in a frown as she does a smile. Wait no, that sounds like I want her to be angry, I do not want her to be angry!

“Well then, let’s go wreck shop!” Jaynix says, beginning to turn away. “I can give you all a lift in my rover by the way! My brother Kruse recently installed this new AI into it…”

As she and Aeviann walk farther away, I almost forget that we are a team, so I have to jog to catch up to them. Scarlen keeps pace with me on my right hand side, shooting me a gentle smile that makes my heart melt.

“Hey, you okay? You don’t have to be nervous. We’ll all help you in any way we can.” He reassures me in that amazingly adorable voice of his.

Taking a deep breath, I do my best to answer him with a calm tone. “I will be okay.”

But, quite honestly, the thought of being in a rover with three beautiful people might kill me before we reach Oblivia.

<-- Prologue || Chapter 2 -->

#imperium: xbcx #imperium: chapter 1 #ken writes

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ryik-the-writer · 8 years ago

Photo

Rumbelle Fic: Marinara on Main (5/?)

Prompt: AU! Mr. Gold has a crush on the pizza delivery girl, Belle. Post-car fire and pizza delivery.

A03 link

-.-.-.-.-.-

The first thing Belle noticed when she awoke was the lack of cold and wetness that had seeped into her bones. The next was the nauseating light overhead. She could just feel her skin prickling under the starchy blanket on top of her. She could hear a buzzing sound to her left that soon blended into the scratchy brogue of Mr. Gold.

“And what about the CT? Did it find any damage?”

“She’s going to be fine Mr. Gold. Like you, she needs plenty of rest.”

“Has anyone contacted her family?”

“They can’t because of the storm-”

“Blast the storm! I carried her two miles through that storm and you mean to tell me you can’t pick up a phone and dial a few buttons? Worthless, all of you!”

“Mr. Gold, if you do not calm down right now, I will call a nurse in here to take you back to your room!”

Belle’s head began to ache from the thunderous sounds and decided she needed to break things up before her head exploded. She tried to turn her head but found it encased in something that stalled her movements. She tried to lift her arms next but found them so stiff that she couldn’t even twitch a finger. Luckily, the two men across the room noticed her struggling.

“Belle!” she heard Gold gasp, following a squeaking sound, like wheel’s turning. Then his bruised face was hanging over hers, blocking out the lights overhead. His left eyebrow was stitched and his socket was dark purple.

Belle wanted to cry at the site.

I did this.

“Oh Belle, Sweetheart can you hear me?”

“Y…yeah…” Belle whimpered, trying to wiggle out of the cocoon of blankets wrapped around her.

Gold’s good eye bulged and he shot around to the doctor.

“What’s wrong with her!”

“Mr. Gold, you know I can’t give you that information.”

Gold wheeled himself to the doctor, grabbing the man’s tie and yanking him to eye-level.

“Listen to me you little rat!” Gold spat. “If anything happens to her I will bury you under this hospital! Hell, I will bury you under this town!”

The doctor shot from Gold’s grip and stuck his head out the doorway.

“Nurse! Take Mr. Gold back to his room!”

A nurse appeared and went straight for Gold, her hard eyes telling him he could not intimidate her so easily. She grabbed the handles of his wheelchair and began to wheel him out of the room. He fought hard, trying to put the breaks down and grab at the walls but the nurse pushed him on.

“Belle! Everything’s going to okay, I promise!”

Belle had never had a panic attack before, but she felt one bubbling as Gold’s yells got further down the hall.

“Wait, no bring him back!”

The doctor stood over her, his eyes filled with pity as he pulled a syringe out of his pocked.

“This is going to help you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep I want to see him!”

She screamed at her limbs to move but they wouldn’t. She was completely helpless to the darkness that clouded her vison.

-,-,-,-

The next time she awoke, things were calmer, quieter. She could hear the beeping of her heart monitor and the sound of people walking back and forth just outside the room. She still couldn’t move her neck and was forced to stare at the ceiling.

“Hello?” she called out, hoping the doctor or a nurse—or better yet, Gold—would hear her.

“Belle!”

Belle sighed in relief at the sound of her father’s familiar brogue. He was standing over her in an instant, his eyes wet from shed tears.

“Oh my girl! My darling girl thank God you’re alright.”

He hugged her from the awkward position and Belle wished more than anything that she could return the affection.

“Papa, what’s going on? Why can’t I move?”

Her father was still for a moment before he smiled gently.

Falsely.

“They’re still running tests. We’ll know something in a few hours.”

Belle forced herself not to cry. She couldn’t cry now. She had too many gaps to fill.

“What about Mr. Gold?”

Moe French’s face turned hard, his jaw setting in a deep frown.

“Don’t worry about him. Just focus on resting and getting better.”

“Is he okay though?” Belle persisted.

“Yes.” Moe answered simply. “Now rest. I’m going to call and tell the guys that you’re okay.”

Belle smiled at the mention of her manly trio. She hoped Jefferson wasn’t blaming himself for the accident. She let her muddled thoughts lull her back to sleep, hoping again that Gold would be there when she awoke.

-,-,-,-,-

Mr. Gold laid in bed of the dingy hospital room, doing a mental checklist of all he had to do and pulling at the restraints on his wrists.

As soon as he awoke from a drug-induced sleep, his first instinct was to pick up the hospital phone and call Dove with orders to tell Bae he was in the hospital and that he was alright (which was only a half-lie) and take him to the Nolan’s immediately.

It was only after he hung up the phone that he noticed that his leg was heavily bandaged and in a sling. He didn’t allow himself to panic, or the fill the lighting-sharp pain that shot through his entire body as he released his leg from the sling, crying out in agony.

If he was in such a shape, he couldn’t even begin to imagine what state Belle was in.

Luckily, there had been a wheelchair right beside his bed, and though his body begged him not to, he edged himself in it. By the time he had his IV pole stable, he felt ready to pass out.

Belle. Stay awake. Find Belle.

He rolled out of his room and began looking into rooms. He discovered from peeking over the circulatory desk that he was in the ICU and that Belle was right down the hall. He wheeled there as fast as his arms would take him but found his mission compromised by Dr. Whale.

After “Nurse Ratchet” as he recalled calling her, slipped a heavy dose of morphine in his IV, he passed out for another unspecified amount of time and found himself restrained to the bed. He was so grateful now that he had called Dove first; Bae did not need to see his father in such a state.

Now, he was alone with his thoughts and fears and self-hatred, not knowing the extent of Belle’s diagnosis. If she didn’t recover from this…

He cursed himself repeatedly. This was all his fault. He knew the storm was coming and that the back roads would flood. He should have gotten their earlier or suggested they stay in town. He should have never let Belle offer to make that delivery. He should have done more to keep her safe.

A knock on the door knocked him from this guilt-trip. He arched his neck up just enough to see Sherriff Graham entered the room.

“Mr. Gold?”

“Sheriff.” Gold gruffed.

“Dr. Whale said you were comprehensive enough to give a statement, what say you?”

“I need to know what’s wrong with Belle.”

“Mr. Gold, you know that-”

“For God’s sake man!” Gold shouted. “I’m the one who pulled her from the car and drug her up a hill and carried her to the hospital with a fucking screw sticking out of my leg! The least you bastards could do is tell me if what I did payed off! Please, is she okay!”

Graham rubbed his temples. When he had arrived at the hospital earlier that day, he had been on his normal rounds, checking that the foundation had power. When he was getting out of his car, he saw Mr. Gold, usually so calm and collected, limping to the hospital with no other than Belle French in his arms, screaming for help.

He signaled for a nurse and then ran to the pair, taking Belle from his arms just in time for the man to pass out at his feet. It had truly been an unbelievable site, the one that the hospital would not stop buzzing about.

The town monster and that sweet girl who works at the pizza parlor. Can you imagine?

Didn’t he lend her his car last month? Unbelievable!

I bet she’s sleeping with him for the use of it.

Do you think he did that to her?

Oh that poor girl…

Graham glanced behind his shoulder before leaning closer to Gold.

“She’s stable and expected to make a full recovery, give or take a few step-backs. Her father’s with her right now.”

Gold nearly cried with relief. Belle would be alright.

“Now, will you please give me your statement?”

Gold nodded, the relief flooding his chest making him more susceptible to cooperation.

“I’ve been lending the French’s my car while their car insurance sorts itself out.”

“So I’ve heard.” Graham commented, remember the first time he had seen the quiet pizza delivery girl behind the wheel of Gold’s signature Cadillac. He wasn’t sure whether to ask her if she had stolen the car or laugh it off, but a quick chat with Merlin had given him all the answers he needed.

“We were going on a date, but someone called in to change their order from a carryout to a delivery. I think his name was Heller, or something.”

Graham nodded, making a note to ask the pizza parlor.

“We were driving and the rain started. It got so bad that I told Belle to pull over and when she did she drove straight off a cliff.”

Graham paused when Gold’s voice broke. “Mr. Gold? Do you need a nurse?”

“I shouldn’t have let her drive!” he sobbed. “I should have never let her get on the rode!”

Graham turned his head. He could stare into a criminal’s eyes all day and not blink, but his resolve always shook when he saw tears. He took a moment to breathe before he grabbed a box of tissues off the night stand, passing them to Gold.

“Please, let me see her.”

“Soon.” Graham promised not quite meeting his eyes. “Now, where did you crash?”

“Um, the road leading to the guest mansions.”

“Madison Lane.” Graham filled in, closing his note pad. “I’ll go talk to Whale about letting you see her, but I can’t make any promises.”

Mr. Gold nodded, grateful for the Sheriff’s assistance and that no threats had to come into play.

Graham paused just outside the door. “And Mr. Gold? It’s not your fault.”

Mr. Gold heard the door close. Despite the Sheriff’s reassurance, he didn’t believe one word of it.

-,-,-,-,-,-,-

A sharp shrill awoke Belle yet again. For one terrifying moment, she truly thought Death was announcing its presence and was about to take her.

“For lamb’s sake Jefferson!” she heard her father roar.

“You didn’t say she was in a damn body cast!” she heard Jefferson cry.

“She’s not in a body cast you bullock!” Will boomed. “It’s just her neck!”

“Would you all shut your yaps before you wake her!’ Moe barked.

Belle’s lip twitched in amusement. “Too late.” Belle yawned.

In an instant, four wide-eyed heads hovered over her.

“Jeez Belle I am so sorry!”

“No Jeff, it’s not your fault. I’m the one who drove off the side of the road.”

Moe’s eyes widened. “You were driving? I was getting ready to go smother that bastard Gold with a pillow for doing this to you!”

“You were? You said Will and I were-”

Will reached over and covered Jefferson’s mouth, smiling very suspiciously at Belle.

Belle rolled her eyes. “Can we get a nurse in here? Looking at all of you like this is giving me a migraine.”

“Looking at them gives me a migraine too.” Merlin commented.

“Ha!” Jefferson exclaimed, picking up a control on the bed-table.

“Jefferson don’t mess with that!” Merlin ordered.

“One of these should help her sit up, right?”

Belle knew in that instant that she was going to die.

The bottom half of the bed began to lift, and Belle could feel a slight tingle in the crook of her legs.

“Jefferson I will fire you!” Moe shouted.

“Wrong button, sorry.” He pressed another and the middle of the bed began to arch. Belle could feel her spine crack. She heard a brief scuffle and everyone yelling at Jefferson to “put the damn remote down” before the top half of the bed lifted, the middle and lower returning to their original setting. Her head spun as she became adjusted to the new setting but she could make out her father and Merlin steadying her and Will snatching the remote from Jefferson’s hand.

“At least I know I have some feeling left.” Belle commented.

“You’re all going to give me an aneurism!” Moe French cried, falling into the chair beside the bed.

Belle smothered her giggle for her father’s sake. Despite the stressful situation, she was thrilled to see her small family together. No matter what the future held, they’d be here for her, or at French Bread’s for the business.

A knock at the door broke the group from the banter and Belle’s throat tightened as Dr. Whale entered the room.

“Good, you’re sitting up.” Dr. Whale commented, missing how Jefferson stepped behind Merlin. “How do you feel?”

“Numb but okay.” Belle stated. “I can feel tingles here and there, but I still can’t move anything.”

Dr. Whale nodded. “That’s expected. You have two bruised vertebra, which is what’s causing the paralysis. As they heal, you should gradually regain movement. Worst case scenario is that you’ll have to go to physical therapy and wear a neck brace.”

The whole room sighed at the proclamation. Though Belle wasn’t looking forward to the therapy and the brace, she was ecstatic that she hadn’t lost her independence.

“Good thing our health insurance is better than our car insurance.” Moe muttered.

“What about Mr. Gold?” Belle asked. “He was here earlier but…is he okay?”

“I can’t give you the details,” the doctor warned. “But I can promise he’s going to make a full recovery. When he agrees to stop cursing my staff, I’ll let him pay a visit.”

Belle nodded gratefully, both excited and nervous about seeing her somewhat-but-not-quite-boyfriend again. She didn’t know what to expect. Would he be angry about the car, about his injuries her reckless driving had caused? Would he even want to speak?

“Alright!” Moe announced when the doctor left. “We have business to take care of! First of all, until further notice, French Bread’s delivery service is canceled.”

“Oh shit.” Jefferson whispered to Will.

“I’m also going to have to cut back the business hours.” Moe said regrefully. “I’ll be taking care of Belle when she comes home, and won’t put the work on you all.”

Belle felt guilt churn in her gut. She knew instantly that Jefferson would suffer the most with a daughter to feed, and Will might have to postpone his wedding.

Merlin stood from his chair. “Sir, we can handle it.”

“Yeah.” Jefferson jumped in. “We’ve been fixing up a bike already, we can deliver off that. And I can bring my daughter to work so that we won’t have to cut hours…”

“Dad.” Belle said quietly. “Let them try. There’s no reason to stop production just because I’m out of commission.”

“I have to my girl.” Moe sighed. “I’m going to have to be at home to help you get up and down the stairs until your paralysis heals.”

“They have assistant living!” Belle protested. “Our insurance should cover it; we’ll find out!”

“Mr. French, we can figure something else out.” Merlin continued to protest.

As the French Bread staff negotiated, Belle wished she had lost her ability to hear in the accident. All of them were standing right in front of her debating what they would do about her family business.

Her legacy.

Her responsibility.

And she couldn’t even add input because she couldn’t move!

Before, she thought she had only ruined Mr. Gold’s life, but apparently, she had ruined four. Her family and closest friends at that.

She wished briefly that her lungs would stop working when she went to bed tonight. That way she wouldn’t have to face the damage she caused.

-,-,-,-,-,-,-,-

The following morning, Belle woke alive and breathing, and honestly, she wasn’t too disappointed. A little sleep had helped clear the dark, negative thoughts from her head and gave her a new outlook on her life. Running away or cowering under the blankets wouldn’t solve anything.

She took a deep breath and began a mental checklist of all that to fix: the schedule for the pizza parlor, paying the hospital bill, apologizing to Gold…

The last one was the one she was looking forward to the least. She decided however, that no matter how he reacted, even if he swore her off completely, she’d stay strong and do what she had to do to fix what she’d done. If that meant using her paycheck to make car payments until dhe was 50, so be it.

A knock on the door broke her from her mental check-listing.

“Um, hi.” She greeted to the air. “There’s a remote beside my bed. The button farthest left sits me up. If you could…”

A squeaking followed. A wheelchair?

Belle felt herself be slowly lifted and Belle pulse stilled as the person at her bedside became clearer.

“Gold.” Belle gasped, tears stinging her eyes at the bruises and stiches across his body.

Mr. Gold’s non-black eye gazed over her. Her neck was in a brace and her right eyebrow was stitched. Her arms were bandaged and one of her fingers was in a splint.

“Oh Belle.” Gold cried, rolling as close to her bedside as he could. “I am so sorry sweetheart.”

Belle focused in on his tear-stained face, tears that, just a moment ago, she thought would be out of rage.

“Why are you sorry, I’m the one that got us into this. You wanted me to pull over.”

“I should have never let us go out into that mess.”

“You were supporting me. This is my fault, not yours. Don’t try to blame yourself.”

Gold shook his head. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to help you. What did Dr. Whale say?”

Tears leaked down Belle’s face before she could stop them. “Temporary paralysis.”

“Oh God.” Gold cried shaking his head.

“It’s okay.” Belle tried to sooth. “I’m going to be okay. What about you? Why is all your hair gone?”

Gold let out a wet laugh, running his fingers over the inch of hair he had left. “I got cut from the glass. They had to cut it all off to stitch me up.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Gold shrugged. “I was due for a cut.”

Belle laughed, her heart less heavy.

“What else?”

He tapped his let. “One of the screws come lose in my leg. It was a simple fix; I should be out of the wheelchair in the next week.”

“We’re a complete mess.” Belle sighed.

“I’m starting to think we’re made for each other.”

Belle managed to arch an eyebrow in curiosity. “Mr. Gold, are you flirting with me? While I’m in a neck brace of all things?”

“Why not?” Mr. Gold inquired. “You’re so beautiful.”

Belle’s cheeks heated with the compliment. They hadn’t had the opportunity to completely develop the teasing, romantic aspect of their relationship (which Belle had planned to fix during their second date). They usually said what they needed to through smiles and small actions, like the pat on his hand she’d give him when he’d hand over the keys for her deliveries. It was simple and uncomplicated but far from the intimacy she wanted with the man who, not only did she have deep-seated desires for, but made her life less-hectic and more fun.

“I…”

“Mr. Gold!”

Gold glanced around to see Moe French’s powerful figure standing in the doorway, his mass barely undermined by the handful of pink peonies he was carrying.

“I…wasn’t expecting you.”

Gold carefully wheeled himself around, staring up at the large man.

Belle noticed that even with her father’s height, Mr. Gold still had an air of superiority and strength, even with a casted leg. She nearly giggled at the contrast, but the look on her father’s face smothered her humor.

“Papa,” Belle stated calmly. “Mr. Gold was just asking me how I was fairing.”

“Of course, of course.” Moe nodded as he arranged the flowers on the bed-table.

Belle noticed the tension in his face. He couldn’t be that nervous about Mr. Gold, could he?

“Everything okay?”

“Of course!” Moe stated instantly, not meeting her eyes. “Everything’s great!”

Belle glanced at Mr. Gold.

“He’s lying!” Gold mouthed, causing Belle’s lip to twitch in amusement. Leave it to a lawyer.

“What is it Papa?” Belle inquired in tone that left no room for more falsities.

Moe sighed, sitting in the chair beside his daughter. “I talked to the insurance company. They said that your hospital stay will be partially covered, but it won’t cover any therapy or assistant living.”

Belle breathed a curse, wishing she could cover her face to hide the tears threatening to spill down her cheeks.

“Don’t worry my girl,” Moe patted her non-bandaged hand. “we’ll figure it all out.”

“Dad, we can’t just put the business on hold. French Bread needs you. And we can’t just cut the guys hours.”

“I know all that. But I can’t just run a business while my daughter needs me! What if you fall trying to go down the stairs? What if you have a muscle spasm and hit your head?”

Mr. Gold listened as Moe French listed all the possible ends Belle could meet. His heart surged for the family. He knew if anything like this happened to Bae—God forbid—he would never leave the house, even after Bae recovered. Business be damned.

“Perhaps,” he perked up when Moe paused, “I could be of assistance?”

Moe held up a hand, his expression stolid. “Thank you Mr. Gold, but you’ve done enough.”

“Dad,” Belle hissed. “This was not his fault. Let him speak.”

“I won’t have you adding to your debt!”

“Your daughter owes me nothing, Mr. French.” Mr. Gold stated, quickly slipping into business mode. “I have a solution to your dilemma, if you’ll allow me.”

Belle gave her father a hard look and he sighed agitatedly.

“I have a downstairs parlor that, with a few minor adjustments, I could turn into a guest room. It’s right near the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. You’d be set. And considering I’ll probably be needing it too, I can take care of the physical therapy.”

Belle wasn’t sure what to say. He was practically asking her to move in with him. They hadn’t even been on their second date yet!

“I…”

“Absolutely not!” Moe boomed. “I will not have my daughter living in sin!”

“Oh my gods, Papa!” Belle groaned, embarrassed.

“I do have a 15-year-old son, Mr. French. We’ll hardly be unsupervised.”

Belle snorted. Somehow Gold always managed to ease her spirits.

It was a scary thing though. She’d be living with the man who made her heart soar and her womanhood tremble. Strangely enough, being temporarily paralyzed and in a neck-brace hardly stilled those feelings.

“What about your work?” Belle inquired.

“I’m sure the great town of Storybrooke can last a few weeks without their antiques and collectables. And Mr. Dove can handle the rent.”

Belle nodded, somewhat more satisfied that she wouldn’t be a burden. “I’ll do it.” Belle said before her father could protest anymore.

“Belle-”

“It’s my health, dad. And it’s for the good of the business. I’m not going to let it suffer just so I can be taken care of.”

Moe still looked unconvinced, and down-right against it. He looked back and forth between the two and shook his head, stomping out of the room.

Belle sighed. “He’ll come around.”

“I hope so.” Gold said, turning back to Belle. “His visits will be very awkward if he doesn’t.”

Belle chuckled, but then remembered the seriousness of the situation.

“Why are you doing this for me? I’ve been doing nothing but taking advantage of you since we started all of this.”

“You can’t take advantage if a service is offered.” Gold stated in a business-like fashion.

“You do realize what you offered?” Belle scoffed. “I’ll be living in your home, using your…things. Are you sure you want that?”

“We’ve been sharing a car for weeks now and I’ve had no problems, up until yesterday that is.”

“Exactly! I could set your kitchen on fire or flood your bathroom! I’m cursed!”

“You’re not cursed.” Gold laughed. “You’ve just had a string of undeserved bad luck.” He wheeled himself closer and placed a hand over hers.

Belle wished she could feel it.

“Let me take some of that burden away.”

“It’s not your…”

Belle sighed. She’d said this already, multiple times in fact . It never seemed to get through to him.

“Responsibility, I know. But Belle, you don’t deserve to be weighed down with all that hardship. You’re too kind and giving.”

“So are you. Do you really want to take on another burden?”

“You’re not a burden, Belle. You’re my friend, and I want to help you.”

Belle stared into his brown eye, wincing at the bruised, purple one. If he really wanted to do this for her, what was the harm in humoring him? Maybe if she’d stay put in one place, she wouldn’t cause any more trouble.

“Fine. I’ll stay with you, but just until I can walk again.”

Mr. Gold smiled, looking smugly pleased with himself.

“Looks like we’re going to be roommates.”

The comment filled Belle’s stomach with heat and her mind with very untraditional thoughts.

Gold lifted her hand and laid a gentle peck to the bruised skin. “I have to go make some calls. I’ll come back later, if you’d like.”

“I…would.” Belle croaked, just barely feeling his lips on her hand. She watched him wheel away, waiting until the door closed before she let out the bubble of nervous laughter expanding in her chest.

Starting Wednesday, she’d be roommates with her somewhat-but-not-quite-boyfriend.

The guys were going to flip!

#rumbelle #rumbelle fic #Ryik's Fics #Belle #Rumplestiltskin #marinara on main

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advocatewrites-blog · 7 years ago

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Simple/Clean Chapter 10

Simple/Clean: An Original Character’s Story

Fandom: Kingdom Hearts (1, with mentions of other installments)

Synopsis: There are many worlds, but they share the same sky. One Sky, one Destiny. And when that destiny is threatened, the universe calls on one hero to save the day. Or, more like, five. When the Earth is consumed into Darkness, Danielle Scott and her friends are given the Keys between light and darkness. If they are going to save the worlds and find her brother, they are going to have to go on a multiverse-wide road trip to find the Door to Light. If only they had a better weapon than keys.

Rated: +K for violence and occasional language

Disclaimer: The Kingdom Hearts series was created by Tetsuya Nomura and owned by Square Enix. The Final Fantasy series was created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and owned by Square Enix. The films depicted were created by the Walt Disney Animation Studios and owned by the Walt Disney Company. Any other work mentioned or homaged are property of their respective owners. This is a non-profit fan-based work that only seeks to entertain. Please support the official releases.

Chapter 10 of 12

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Chapter 10: Lost and Found

When he was much younger, before his sisters were alive, he asked his mother why they didn't have two grandmas.

He was still young, and most of his information about the outside world came from TV. Still, he was pretty sure that most people had at least two grandmas (some could have as many as four if they were really lucky, but TV generally didn't show that one).

At the time, Mom only smiled more and pinched his cheeks. But he was more stubborn than most children, so he insisted. Eventually, she caved in.

“I haven't seen your grandparents in a long time.” She admitted. “They didn't want to see me anymore, and I never wanted to see them again.”

Looking back on it now, he could see that her smile was stretched too thin and felt too forced. Looking back on it now, he felt terrible for even asking the once.

“But I wouldn't want you around them anyway.” Mom said. “There are better people I want you to learn better things from. But remember this.”

Mom pulled him in closer so he could look into her eyes. He had seen her several times before and several times since, but never once was he able to forget that look. He had never forgotten the fire that was lit behind her eyes, all light and hope and determination.

He had never forgotten that look, but he would see it in other places. Dani, mostly, but sometimes Hanna.

“Your siblings are going to be here soon.” Mom said. “And when they do come, they're going to need a lot of help. I want you to be able to help them. Real family stays together.”

He never found out if Dani or Hanna had a similar speech. He realized much later on that few people would get that lesson, and by the time he was in 6th grade, he learned to hold in his shock whenever someone would complain about their siblings. It didn't matter. No matter how much they cried or how bad they were at playing trains, Dim loved his sisters. They were his best friends. They were his family.

A full rigged ship, the kind you would see on the covers of children's books about pirate ships. Three masts, sails hoisted despite the fact that there is no air in space. 10 cannons, all pointed towards them. It made the Gummi ship look very small.

“But what is a pirate ship doing in the middle of space?” Nadine asked. “There aren’t any jets on that thing, how did it get here?”

“Hey, do you think that thing is chasing Monstro?” Katie asked.

The ship charged.

“I think that thing is chasin' us!” Goofy said.

“Oh! So we're the great white whale?”

“Incoming!” Donald cried.

The Gummi Ship crashed. This was far from the first time it had done so, so none of the occupants were terribly shaken.

Hanna was the first to open the hatch to get out. She was greeted by Heartless, holding a variety of swords. She swallowed hard, and raised her hands in the universal sign of surrender. The rest of the occupants of the ship filed out in a similar matter.

“I didn't think you'd make it this far, Sora.” Riku greeted from the steering wheel. “It's good to see you.”

“I can't say the same.” Sora said.

He glared. It didn't quite look like a glare, so much as it looked like a puppy trying to be intimidating.

“Where's our brother, you creep!” Dani spoke up instead, and took a step forward. The swords aimed towards her, but she didn't flinch back.

“Is he really that important to you? More important than letting old friends reunite?”

Dani and Hanna shared a look.

“Yes!” They exclaimed in unison.

“Fine. Then I won't tell you I found Kairi.”

Riku took a step to the side. Just out of the corner of her eye, Hanna could see a human figure, slumped onto the deck.

Sora's eyes widened. “Kairi!”

“While you were off with your new friends, I decided to go and find her.” Riku explained.

“Bet you got the Heartless to help you with that, didn't you!” Dani shouted back.

The light faded from Sora's eyes. “Riku, why are you siding with the Heartless? You're better than that!”

“My heart's too strong for them. I have nothing to fear.” Riku turned his attention back to Hanna and Dani. “Now you can go visit your brother.”

A trap door on the deck opened.

Nobody was anywhere near it.

Hanna stared at the trap door for a minute. Then back to the Heartless, whose swords were now getting a lot closer.

One by one, in a single file line, they jumped to their doom.

“Ya don't say?”

“Yeah! That was definitely her! I've finally found her!”

“All right! A-hyuck! Now let's go up there and talk to her!”

“Yeah!”

“Sounds great! Okay, but first, how about getting off!”

The six piled off of Donald, who grumbled a thanks.

Nadine glanced around the room. The brig of the ship, though bigger than it ought to be, was virtually empty. The only things in the room were a few barrels and crates, that probably held food and water at one point. Not even rope that could have restrained them. There was only one door that could lead out, but Nadine had no idea where it would lead.

“Lookin' for a way out?”

Nadine's head snapped towards the source. “Yes, Mr. Barrel. If you have something to contribute, please do.”

A blur of green shot towards her. It took Nadine a minute to process it was a boy. Far younger than her, dressed entirely in clothes that looked woven from twigs and leaves, and...floating.

“Who're you?” Goofy asked.

“Me?” The boy asked with a cocky smile. “I'm the answer to your prayers!”

Katie scoffed and folded her arms. “You don't look like a unicorn.”

“Fine then. I won't help you break out.”

“Aren't you trapped in here with us?” Sora asked.

“Nah. I'm just waiting for someone.”

The sound of jingling bells filled the room. A yellow blur shot past Nadine, and towards the boy.

“What took you so long, Tinker Bell?” The boy asked.

More jingles. Nadine had to squint, but she could just make out a humanoid figure in the yellow light.

“Another girl?...I'm just not going to leave Wendy behind, Tink!...Wait, Tink--”

The yellow blur shot past Nadine and out of the room.

The boy pouted.

“So are we working together?” Nadine asked.

“Fine. But only until we find Wendy.” The boy said. “Peter Pan, at your service!”

“Fantastic. How are we getting out of here?”

“We can't go anywhere if that door's locked.” Sora pointed out. “Do you think we can stack enough barrels on top of each other to get to the trap door?”

“Can't you fly?” Peter asked.

“Can't you use the magical weapon that can unlock any door?” Hanna asked.

“Oh. Right.”

“After all that trouble of capturing her, you just want me to let her go?” Captain Hook asked.

“She's not one of the ones Maleficent wants.” Riku said.

Captain Hook put hand and hook on hips. “And what exactly, is Maleficent planning, anyway?”

“Who knows? All I know is that she needs seven maidens, and Wendy isn't one of them. Dispose of them however you want. Make them walk the plank, if you want.”

He did want to make the walk the plank, but he wanted to prove his point more. “And what of the other girls we captured. Are they the chosen ones?”

Captain Hook had seen many a great thing in his day. Not only was he a pirate, but he was a pirate in a magical world. He had kidnapped Indians, fought with mermaids, and flown above the seven seas. His arch-nemeses were a boy who never grew older and never grew wiser, and a crocodile. On any day, he would put up with things that would make another pirate look like a landlubber.

And yet the glare that Riku sent him made the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. “Them, I expect you to throw off the plank.”

“Captain, we're having a bit of a problem!” Smee rushed in, nearly knocking into Captain Hook in the process. “Th—the prisoners have escaped. A—and Peter Pan is with them!”

Captain Hook's blood boiled over. He opened his mouth, ready to shout to his crew, the Heartless, anyone, to get those prisoners back. Riku, however, simply snapped his fingers to conjure a Heartless. The Heartless faded into the ground, moving past Captain Hook's feet and almost tripping him, and vanished through the gap in the door.

“He'll take care of the prisoners. You worry about getting rid of the dead weight.”

Captain Hook stood there, mustache twitching. He deserved more respect than to be pushed around by a mere child like that. On the other hand...someone was wrong with that boy. And not in the usual way Captain Hook had to put up with misbehaving children.

“Peter? Peter Pan!”

“Wendy!” Peter jumped up towards the floorboards and hovered there. “Where are you? Are you alright? Are the Lost Boys with you?”

“We're all alright, but please hurry! The pirates are going to come soon!”

“Alright, I'll be right up there!”

“Wendy?” Sora asked, sounding hesitant. “Is there anyone else up there with you?”

“Well, there is another girl, but she appears to be asleep. She hasn't moved an inch.” Wendy said.

“C'mon help me get up here!” Peter exclaimed, still tugging at the loose floorboards.

“We can't fly!” Nadine snapped.

“Oh, that? Tink, can you take care of it?”

Hanna wasn't sure how bells could sound angry, but Tinkerbell in her strange language made it work.

“Oh come on!” Peter snatched Tinkerbell by the wings and shook her. Golden dust fell from her and onto the seven. Katie sneezed, scattering it.

“There! Now you can fly!” He said.

“No, now we're covered in glitter.” Hanna said. “And I've been needing a proper shower since three worlds back.”

“If you believe in yourself, you can try anything!” Peter said. “Now fly!”

From above, Wendy screamed. Peter jumped out of the way as a Shadow crawled through the floorboards and onto the floor below. Not a Shadow, Hanna realized as it grew. Dim. Or what Dim was supposed to be.

The Heartless rushed towards her. Hanna summoned one keyblade to counter it. Another to attack. The Heartless stumbled backwards, and fell forward as another Keyblade struck him from behind.

“Give me back my brother!” She roared.

The fight started. Out of the corner of her eye, Hanna could see the others scurrying up the floorboards and into where Wendy and the others were, but she didn't care. The hall was narrow, and they would have gotten in the way anyway.

The Heartless was quick, but Hanna was quicker.

The Heartless could attack hard, but not as hard as Dani.

The Heartless could attack one of them thoroughly, but that only gave the other time to strike.

The Heartless wasn't strong enough to take them together. And it knew it. It fell to the ground and crawled back towards the ceiling.

“This is the silliest battle against good and evil ever.” Nadine said.

Still, it wasn't every day you got to see a band of pirates get their beards punched off by a group of kids. The charge was led by Peter Pan, who seemed to be the oldest one in the group. He had challenged Captain Hook in what was probably the only real battle in the group; Peter soared over him and fought hook to dagger, Hook crawled through the masts and crow's nest to keep up. The others…well, the three year old with the teddy bear seemed to be doing the most damage so far, followed by the seven year old in a top hat, who managed to find a way to duel with his umbrella. Occasionally a Heartless would show up, but it was usually defeated by either Donald's or Nadine's magic.

“Hey, do you think we can steal this ship when this is over and use it instead?” Katie asked.

“And abandon the Gummi Ship?” Goofy asked.

“I've been sharing the same mattress with six other people for the last few weeks. I think it's worth it.”

“You've also been using me as a pillow.” Donald grumbled.

“You're fluffy and warm. I have no regrets.”

Nadine's eye drifted. Out from where they had escaped came the Heartless that looked like Dim, followed quickly by his sisters.

“Do you think we should go help them?” Sora asked.

“No,” Katie said, her voice gravely serious. “This is their fight.”

Just faintly, over the roar of the other fights, Nadine could hear “No it's not!”

“Oh. Then yeah, we might want to deal with that.”

Four more Keyblades joined the fight.

Seven pointed towards the Heartless.

The Heartless' head snapped back and forth, as if it were trying to figure out which one of them was less likely to break him. The answer was none of them. It settled for stepping backwards into the Darkness.

“You're stronger than I thought.” Riku spoke from above. “But I wonder how much stronger you would be if you didn't have to rely on them.”

Sora turned to him and scowled. “Riku, you're better than this. I know you are. You don't have to work with them.”

“You don't get it, do you? You're not strong enough to get Kairi's heart back.”

A portal of Darkness appeared behind Riku. Sora rushed towards him, dismissing his Keyblade so he could hold a hand towards him. Riku took a step backward. Sora jumped.

He did not fall down. In fact, he kept rising up, bits of golden dust falling off him as he did.

The portal closed before he could get there.

As it turns out, they could not keep the ship. Both the Lost Boys and the Darling family had to get back to their homeworlds, which were apparently different places. Peter had tried to explain it to her, but he seemed to rely on stars in the sky as addresses, and he was having a hard time following along with the disappearing sky. Nadine did not want to tell him why it was missing. Peter had declared himself captain, and while he looked decidedly foppish in Captain Hook's hat, he didn't look nearly as foppish as Captain Hook himself.

“Alright, James,” Nadine said as she dragged the former captain by his jacket. “Tell me what we want to know, and we won't throw you overboard until we're over Neverland.”

Hook twitched. “Alright, alright, just get me away from that beast!”

As someone who grew up in Florida, Nadine could respect a healthy fear of crocodiles. Hook, on the other hand, took it to another level. He shook like a leaf in a hurricane, and every time he heard so much as a clock tick, he would jump. That, unfortunately, was frequently.

“I thought I was the bad cop.” Katie said.

“I thought forced in-terror-gation was bad.” John Darling said.

“It is, so don't watch.” Nadine answered.

Wendy helped turn her brothers and Katie around.

Hook took a breath to prepare himself. It didn't help all that much, but it got him talking. “They're heading for a world called Hollow Bastion. Maleficent's plan involves bringing together seven maidens of pure hearts. Supposedly that'll give her great power, but I don't know how.”

“She didn't tell you the whole plan?” Nadine asked.

“I don't think she told anyone the whole plan.” Hook said. “The boy seems to think it'll allow him to bring back the girl, but I don't know.”

Nadine took a minute to process that. “And Hollow Bastion?”

“Never been to it. I'll be surprised if it's an actual world or just some rock Maleficent found floating in space.”

“The word you're thinking of is meteor.” Nadine said. “Thanks for the help; we'll be sure to throw you into the Mermaid Lagoon.”

She gestured to the two boys in matching raccoon costumes to take him to the brig.

Sora hadn't moved for a long time. He leaned against the port-bow, watching the clouds underneath drift past.

And Hanna wasn't sure what to do about it.

She, Peter, Donald and Goofy had watched him for some time, not sure what to say to him or if they should try. Hanna had settled for standing next to him, a silent reminder that she was with him no matter what. Donald and Goofy had settled for whispering to themselves in voices that weren't quite whispers.

“I still can't believe it.” He muttered at last.

“Sora, I--”

“I flew. I actually flew!” Sora looked up, and Hanna saw all the lights in his eyes turn on. “I can't wait to tell Kairi! I wonder if she'll believe me...Probably not.”

Hanna let out a breathy laugh in relief. She was not sure she could handle watching Sora break down.

“You can take her to Neverland!” Peter said. “Then, she can try it herself!”

“Sure, we've already broken every other rule about world order.” Donald said.

“There's so much I want to tell her, about flying, about the pirates, about everything that's happened!” Sora continued.

Silence fell between them, for it could not fly. Sora's excitement dimmed a bit.

“If you believe, you can do anything, right?” Sora said. “So do you think...we'll be able to get Kairi's heart back?”

Hanna wasn't quite sure the answer to that. “Yes,” she said, because she did not want to accept no as an answer.

“And your brother?”

“Of course.” Hanna said.

Another pause.

“What about Riku?” She asked.

Sora looked unsure. “I don't know if I can justify Riku's actions anymore. But he's still my friend, and he's just as much a victim of the Heartless as anyone.”

“Well,” Goofy said. “We'll just haveta find a way ta help him too!”

“Alright, everybody, set course!” Katie announced as she joined them.

Peter jumped to the wheel. “Where to?”

“Uh, no, we're heading out.” Nadine clarified, and gestured to the seven of them.

“Where to?” Hanna asked.

“Where Maleficent is hiding out. Hollow Bastion.”

Author's Note: I've always liked the idea of Peter Pan more than the actual work. Not even getting into the racism, it always felt a little too "child logic"-y for me. I like the aesthetics and the worldbuilding fine, just not the content. Although one of my favorite high school theater experiences was when my brother was in a production of Peter Pan (I think he was Smee? Definitely one of the pirates) and the final battle at the end was one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen on stage. It was the very definition of high school theater experience. I think that's what Peter Pan excels at: loosely connected shenanigans.

We're in the final stretch for this story now! The next two chapters are the finale! There will still be two sequels that will continue the story. And, you know….probably a little more.

#Fic #OCS #Simple/Clean #Dim Scott #Nadine Anderson #Katie Williams #Donald Duck #Goofy #Hanna Scott #Dani Scott #Sora #featured

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crimsonblackrose · 4 years ago

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This was our longest time at any place on our tour. We had three hours. One would think that’s plenty of time to enjoy an aquarium. But oh, there is so much more to it then that.

The aquarium is built upon the grounds of the Ocean Expo Park. The Ocean Expo Park has many different attractions on it. Let’s say you want to visit the Tropical Arboretum on the Southern part of the park. From the aquarium that’s an over 20 minute walk, that’s if you don’t get lost or turned around on your way. Depending on the route you take it could be 30 minutes.

Let’s start with the aquarium. The tickets to the aquarium were included in our tour. Our tour conductor wanted us to hurry to the Expo Park so that we could see the dolphin show. But first she had to get us from the parking to the aquarium entrance so we had our tickets first. Our tickets were included in our tour but if you go on your own generally tickets to the aquarium are 1,880 yen. To get there it was a twenty minute walk from the parking.

Our tour guide highly suggested we see the dolphin show which wasn’t inside the aquarium. I followed her suggestions went to the theater to see them which I will write about in the next section of this post. When the show was over and I headed back to the aquarium there was a huge rush of people, so many people, heading to the entrancement of the aquarium.

The maps we were given were a bit confusing. They talked about the aquarium being four floors which made it feel huge and I honestly walked back and forth along the path several times trying to figure out how to get up and see more, expecting the aquarium to be similar to the one in Osaka. It was not that big. Or at least it didn’t feel as big as the one in Osaka which is 8 floors in a spiral.

The Okinawa aquarium moves horizontally and rather gently. So you don’t notice moving between floors, especially with the size of the crowd. I feel like their route map found on their website for download here makes more sense then the one in the brochure I was given.

I was convinced that I didn’t have enough time to see everything in the aquarium so I sped past a lot of the stuff at the beginning like the touch pool called Life in Inoh. Inoh is a word in the Okinawan language used to describe “shallow water surrounded by coral reef”. While it’s a bit of a bummer that I missed out on seeing what they had —mostly starfish and sea cucumbers— eating and seeing the stars of the aquarium, the whale sharks, were the priority. So I sped through past the 4th floor straight down to the 2nd floor to eat at the Ocean Blue Cafe.

Because the aquarium is actually a lot smaller than I thought it was the crowds and congestion with getting around made sense. But if you have the time I highly suggest taking a break in the Ocean Blue Cafe, even if it’s just for a drink.

The Ocean Blue Cafe is located right next to the Kuroshio Sea. This is the star of the aquarium. It’s one of the world’s largest tanks and contains several whale sharks and many many manta rays just going about their business. The Ocean Blue cafe is located off to the side of it and allows, depending on your seat, you’ll have a stunning view to enjoy while you enjoy your drink or snack.

If you’re planning to spend your whole day at the Ocean Park here’s what you need to do. Before enjoying the touch pool, before checking out the whale sharks or anything else go straight to the Ocean Blue Cafe and make a reservation.

There are reserved seats and non-reserved seats available. The reserved seats require putting your name on a list as soon as possible and give you the best seats in the cafe, aka seats right up next to the tank. I think if you’ve got the time it’d be absolutely worth it to do. The wait, depending on how busy it is should be about thirty minutes.

If you don’t have the time then you need to watch the seats like a hawk before ordering and then put something down or have someone in your party jump on an available table as soon as possible. After you have a table claimed then and only then get in line to order.

They offer food, drinks, snacks and a few alcoholic beverages. If you want to know what their general menu or prices are check out their online menu here. The menu is in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. It’s fairly simple since they have the menu plastered onto the counter so you can just point to what you want. I was very hungry so I ordered the one Okinawan special I’d seen often but hadn’t tried yet: taco rice. I also ordered a melon soda. While normally I would’ve jumped on one of their ice creams I had already had pineapple ice cream for essentially a mid-morning snack. (And I still had plans to have more ice cream at Blue Seal)

While I wouldn’t say the taco rice was the best available on the island it was still good in my opinion. I miss salty foods so much living in Korea where most things are sweet and having non-spicy taco fillings on a bed of rice was so nice, even if it had liquid cheese on top. The taco rice was 610 yen and the melon soda was 310 yen. Items like forks, water, napkins and wet tissues are available as self serve next to where you pick up your food. This space is small and can get crowded. If you’re with a group I suggest having someone get all of that while someone else gets the food. Since I was on my own I just waited patiently with my tray and then balanced it all on the way to my seat.

I liked sitting there and enjoying the view. There were a lot of people however and not really any single person seating options, meaning I had a whole table to myself. I did however move all my stuff in case anyone wanted to join me, but no one seemed interested. I also think everyone was nervous about so many people being in such a close space shortly after the announcement of a big virus outbreak. So I also get it. (This was in late January before things became a pandemic.)

The reason why eating became such a rushed goal was that for our tour this 3 hour stop was where we were on our own for lunch. We had to eat here, there was no where else with time for a break to eat an actual meal. Snacks? Yes. Ice cream? Always. But an actual meal? Not really possible.

After my meal I finally relaxed a little. There was so much I wanted to do that there wasn’t time for so I focused on taking in the beauty of the whale sharks and seeing if it was possible to speed walk through the other floors not realizing I’d already traversed through them.

The tank with the whale sharks, aka Kuroshio sea, is made of acrylic that is 8.2 meters high (~27 feet) by 22.5 meters (~74 feet) wide and is 60cm thick. (nearly 2 feet thick!) The goal of this tank is to try and unlock the mysteries of the whale shark, several are housed in this space with the goal of breeding.

The other part of the aquarium that I enjoyed was the Journey into the Deep Sea. There is so much of the ocean that we don’t know or rarely get to see and they’ve managed to replicate that pressure, temperature and depth in order to display a lot of creatures we rarely ever get to see, especially alive. It was really cool to see them and learn more about animals I’d never heard of before.

Another part that was within this section that I enjoyed was the Ocean Planetarium which was about bio-luminescent fish and pretty much anything that glowed as if the stars had fallen in the ocean.

When I finally left the aquarium there wasn’t much time left. I still had to save myself about 20 minutes to get back to the bus because our tour coordinator had promised to leave people behind if we were not on time. (Getting back to Naha on my own would’ve included nearly two and a half hours of public transit or a very expensive hour and a half long taxi) So I bought myself a mango bubble tea and explored the outdoor free pools.

The aquarium is generally open from October through February from 8:30am until 6:30pm. The last admission is at 5:30pm. From March through September the aquarium is open at 8:30-8pm with the last admission at 7pm.

The aquarium is closed on the first Wednesday of December and the following Thursday.

The aquarium however does host The Night Aquarium. The Night Aquarium is from around January 12th through February 28th. Except for February 8th, 14th, 21st and 22nd. The Aquarium closes during the Night Aquarium at 9pm with the last admission at 8pm. Note that this is the information for 2020. If you want to go to the aquarium at night double check the dates it’s available.

Marine pools- Dolphins, Sea Turtles, Manatees oh my!

The first and last thing I did at the ocean Expo Park was visit the free sections related to marine animals. One was to see the dolphin show, which our tour guide had stressed out about making sure we got there in time to see it and the other was to wander past the sea turtles before leaving the park.

First off I don’t know how I feel about these pools. On the one hand I feel like the aquarium talked about how much of it’s effort was put into research and studying animals. On the other hand the ethics of a dolphin show is much: no, don’t do it. Yet if they were going to do it anyway whether I was there or not, for free, without charging admission I wanted to see it for myself.

Because I can’t speak Japanese and I don’t have a degree in marine biology or a deep understanding of dolphins and their needs I can’t say one way or another that the dolphin show or the places the aquariums kept their animals in were good or bad. I don’t know if these were all rescued dolphins who can’t live in the wild or if they were captured and were healthy. Not a clue. But what I do know is that I’ve never seen so many different types of dolphins before, like the false killer whale.

I’m use to the bottle nose dolphins that we see often enough when you look them up online. But these weren’t all bottle nose dolphins. There were so many different kinds that I hadn’t realized existed. Also all the kids and families around me and just the people in general seemed utterly delighted by the show. The show I watched took place at the Okichan Theater but there is also a dolphin lagoon where you can go and see the dolphins.

If the dolphin show is happening while you visit and you want to see it then what our tour conductor suggested was to buy lunch nearby and then take it to your seat so you can eat and watch the show, it’s one of the few spaces where bringing food and drink is allowed.

The other space I visited on my way out was the Sea Turtle Pool which just felt very very sad. The goal seemed once again to be breeding. There were lots of different turtles but with open air pools so you could look down on them which seemed unsafe for the turtles. There was nothing interesting in their pools and the pools themselves seemed rather small. Which is something I felt as well with the dolphins that the space seemed rather small for so many dolphins. But again, I’m not an expert. There were eight types of turtles: hawksbill, loggerhead, green, Olive ridely and black turtles

You do not need to buy a ticket to the aquarium to see the dolphin show, or visit the pools to see the sea turtles, dolphins or manatees. These are free.

Trolley

To save some time and energy if you’re planning to be the Expo Park for awhile or if there’s a lot to see you can take a trolley. If you want to take it once it’s 100 yen. If you want to take it more than once and get a day pass it’s 200 yen. It comes once every 5-30 minutes and has 13 stops though out the park. There are two different types of trolleys, one which includes a lift and three different routes. You can check out the map and the routes here.

Ocean Expo Park

The land the aquarium is on is the Ocean Expo Park. It was built in 1976 where the 1975 Okinawa International Ocean Exposition had been held. The park itself is huge at “70 hectares (170 acres) and stretches almost 4 km along the coast”. It houses a lot of things to do.

The Tropical Dream Center which costs 760 yen to visit and houses over 2,000 types of orchids as well as other types of flowers and fruit trees. It’s hours vary depending on season but it always opens at 8am. Last admission is at 5:00pm (It closes at 5:30pm) unless it’s summer (March-September) at which point it’s open until 7pm with last admission at 6:30pm. It’s a fifteen minute walk from the aquarium.

Tropical & Subtropical Arboretum is a space that its title says all. It’s a space full of tropical and subtropical plants. There’s also various services to learn about plants from books to tours to a Green Consultation Desk or even some plant crafting.

Banko Forest- I’m not sure if you’ve heard of the phrase “forest bathing”. It’s a term that comes from Japan, a phrase called shinrin-yoku and it essentially means to take in nature. Just going into a forest and enjoying it with all your senses. Not hiking, exercises or pushing yourself but just resting and enjoying it. I mean you don’t hike in your shower, right? Banko is a word that comes from Hatoma Island, one of the islands that makes up Okinawa, specifically part of the Yaeyama Islands. It means “describing a place where people take a nap or exchange information under the shade of a tree or on a platform set up in the tree, enjoying a pleasant breeze in summer.” It is essentially made for shinrin-yoku. It’s suggested as the spot to go for a picnic or moment of rest or to do some crafting.

The Tropical and Subtropical Arboretum and Banko Forest are about a 35 minute walk from the aquarium.

Native Okinawan Village and Omoro Arboretum – Almost every country has their own “step into the past” place for you to visit. This one is for Okinawa. The Native Okinawan Village is a “re-creation of an old community of the 17th to 19th centuries, during the Ryukyu Kingdom era.” The nearby Omoro Arboretum showcases plants from a famous old songbook called Omorosoushi. In this space you can take a lesson on how to play the sanshin (the snake skin three stringed banjo) as well as some dances, and learn about historical Okinawan life as well as get some free candy. It’s about a ten minute walk from the aquarium. It’s free to visit.

Oceanic Culture Museum and Planetarium – The theme of this place is “People traveled the ocean for a new world – culture developed in concert with the ocean,” and it showcases not just Okinawa’s travel and the cultural exchange among the Pacific ocean but also how they traveled and what they used and how they used the stars to navigate. It has a fee of 190 yen to visit and opens at 8:30am. It closes depending on season with Last admission is at 5:00pm (It closes at 5:30pm) unless it’s summer (March-September) at which point it’s open until 7pm with last admission at 6:30pm.

There’s also lots of beautiful green spaces and beaches to visit.

The Expo Park is open from October through February from 8:30am until 6:30pm. The last admission is at 5:30pm. From March through September the park is open at 8:30-8pm with the last admission at 7pm.

The Expo Park is closed on the first Wednesday of December and the following Thursday. There’s so much to do at this park I suggest giving yourself a full day.

Ocean Expo Park/ Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium 海洋博公園・沖縄美ら海水族館 This was our longest time at any place on our tour. We had three hours. One would think that's plenty of time to enjoy an aquarium.

#aquarium #culture #history #japan #Ocean Expo Park #okinawa #Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium #parks #travel #traveling with kids #沖縄美ら海水族館 #海洋博公園

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