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catflowerqueen · 4 years ago

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Guess what I did last night instead of working?

Hidden in Plain Sight

Chapter 2: Children are Precious

A/N: If you are confused about the "Sudowoodo" thing Wigglytuff mentions in this chapter, it might be good to go back and read chapter 41, "Brutal," from Missing Scenes.

Chapter 2: Children are Precious

The morning may have been bright and cheery, while the breeze held a pleasant coolness that could cut through even the thickest bouts of heat and humidity, but it did nothing to penetrate the tense and awkward air of Wigglytuff's quarters that morning as he and his head of intelligence attempted to act naturally and un-flustered around their youngest apprentices. For all that the two of them had made plans and preparations for this conversation during the return trip from the expedition, it was a lot different to try and implement any of them while staring the two bright hopefuls in their slightly-tired, yet still eager faces. Even Wigglytuff, usually so vibrant and at ease when talking to his recruits, was at a loss for how to start.

Luckily, though, his best friend and right-wing man was able to put his usual flustered and slightly anxious attitude towards all things pertaining to the running of the guild to good use when he finally ruffled his feathers a bit before clapping his wings together and saying, "Well, then! I'm sure the two of you are wondering why I called you in here this morning, yes?"

Paula, ever bright and eager, twitched her ears in confusion. "Huh? Didn't you call us in here to find a good hiding spot for the Time Gear?" She turned to her partner, who gripped the bag holding the Time Gear—which she hadn't set down even once since placing it inside—even tighter, as if she was reluctant even now, in the safety of the guild, to let it out of her sight for fear of something happening to it. "That's what he said when we got home last night, right, Laura? Or did I mishear that?"

Both girls turned expectantly towards Chatot, seeking confirmation, but the action only served to make the flying-type even more flustered.

"That is… er, well, yes, that is one of the reasons," Wigglytuff's closest friend and partner finally managed to stammer out. "But there's also the matter of the two of you to consider, in light of the information we learned from Uxie."

The two girls looked confused, and their expressions… well, looking at them now Wigglytuff couldn't believe he'd never realized how young the two of them really were. Competent, budding explorers they may be, but the fact that they didn't—or couldn't—consider the implications behind making all of the decisions they had at such a young age… well, if anything, it certainly made Wigglytuff feel a lot more sympathy for what his parents had gone through when he was a kid, off exploring with Master Armaldo. While he would always remember his master with fondness and gratitude for all his lessons, looking back at those times now, with these two kids staring so bright-eyed and naïve in front of him, he could admit that he definitely hadn't thought things through as a kid, and his parents had been completely right to worry about what he'd been up to. But at the same time… he had, in his own roundabout way, told his parents and friends what he'd been doing. He could even remember one time outright telling his father that he was spending the day with Master, but his father had apparently thought he'd just meant he was spending the day with a friend he "respected a great deal," or something along those lines. The most important thing that he and Chatot could do right now was to listen; while there could be perfectly reasonable and innocuous reasons for the girls to have made the decisions they did… it was equally, if not more, likely that something else was going on that the girls just didn't have the experience or knowledge necessary to understand the full implications of.

It wasn't really something that he wanted to consider, but… as he and his partner watched the girls sleeping at night during their trek back to the guild—because despite how good a job Bidoof and the girls had done in getting to the campsite safely, there was no way they were going to let Team Rainbow out of their sight after learning how young and vulnerable they really were, let alone when one of them currently had custody of such a precious artifact—the two of them couldn't help but compare interactions they'd had with the duo since they joined the guild and belatedly notice some dangerous red flags that popped up. Oh, Wigglytuff had definitely noticed a few concerning things before, especially regarding Laura, but with the additional knowledge of their ages and Laura's species change and memory loss to consider, things that he'd initially just thought were some bigger than average stumbling blocks he and Chatot would have to help the two smooth out in order to become top-notch explorers were now suddenly blaring warning signs that something was probably seriously wrong with their situation.

"I suppose we should start with the simpler—for a given value of the term—situation," Chatot said, bringing Wigglytuff out of his thoughts and back to the present moment. His friend took a fortifying breath and turned a worried gaze to the Electric-type in the room. "Paula… are things… okay, at home?"

Paula looked even more confused now, and shared a baffled glance with her partner. "Huh? What are you talking about?"

And, really, where could they even start without upsetting her? At the fact that the Raichu-line wasn't native to the area, so she likely would have had to travel some distance before even reaching their guild, and none of the other apprentices had noticed any other pikachu or raichu in or around town on the day that Diglett first reported seeing her footprints? Or the very fact that since Diglett had admitted to seeing her footprint appear multiple times before she finally joined, despite there still being no reports of her species-line in town—or, for that matter, reports of anyone from another species-line who looked like they could be parents or guardians, but who did not already have their charges close at hand— it heavily implied that she had been left to fend for herself for a few weeks at the very minimum? Or even the fact that—and this was an especially sickening one to worry about, but… The fact that, normally, if a pichu evolved as young as Paula had—Paula, who was already straddling the line of what was considered the minimum age for a pikachu, but who had to have evolved even younger considering the current issues with anyone evolving at all—when their requirements included not only experience and knowledge, but also an extremely strong bond… it implied that something had seriously gone awry. Something along the lines of what the first outlaw they'd capture had attempted to do with—no, even worse than that, for he, at least, was going to return Azurill to his brother immediately after laying claim to the supposed treasure of Mt. Bristle. This was more like… Wigglytuff shuddered to think it, considering how blasé he'd been about the situation (and how, unbeknownst to him at the time, Laura did, in actuality, fit within the usual demographic perfectly) but… it was more along the lines of what Sudowoodo, the Kidnapping Mastermind, did to his victims—had planned on doing to Laura if she hadn't defeated him on that mission with Croagunk—if over a longer period, and with no plans for ransom.

But he supposed that Chatot had a point with starting with what was easiest. So, rather than bringing any of those possibilities to light, Wigglytuff instead offered, "We're concerned because, normally, pokémon don't join guilds until they're a few years older than you are now." Paula looked absolutely baffled at this, so Wigglytuff gave her a wry sort of smile and leaned closer, as if confiding a secret, and admitted, "Even though people call me a prodigy… I didn't start exploration work in earnest until I was at least sixteen. There was that period when I was a lot younger, yes… but! Even then, I had Master Armaldo with me. And my parents were super upset when they found out. It took a long time and a lot of learning and studying before they felt okay with letting me do it again, and do it on my own. And if there had been a guild like this one nearby, they probably would have wanted me to wait even longer so I could study there first before setting off as an explorer. It can be dangerous work, after all!" At that, the Balloon Pokémon nodded once and then leaned back. "So, Paula, you can see why we're a bit… worried, yes? You're our precious friendly-friend, so when we see that your parents let you leave so soon, and without—"

"But—!" Paula suddenly interrupted, looking a little shocked, "But this is the age everyone joins the guild back home!"

Wigglytuff reeled back a bit more in absolute shock. "Oh, oh?" he asked, mildly, for the sake of the child in front of him, though his anger was starting to rise at the thought that there was any guild out there taking advantage of the young like this—or, even worse, that there was a community which condoned it to the point of the practice being so widespread.

"Yeah!" Paula affirmed, nodding rapidly before suddenly wincing. "I mean… I guess my brother was a little older," she admitted. But she was quick to add, "But only by, like, a year. And only because Ricky was mom and dad's firstborn, and they were worried! But he told us that he was still one of the oldest kids at the entry level for the Torterra Guild at the time, and—"

"Wait a moment! Paula, did you say the Torterra Guild?" Chatot suddenly interjected. He, like Wigglytuff, had been gearing up in anger over the apparent malpractice of a fellow guild, but upon hearing the name of the guild in question, he felt nothing but confusion. "Paula, are you sure you have that name correct? I have never seen an apprentice from the Torterra Guild who was younger than Bidoof's age—and even he would be right on the edge of acceptable!"

Paula rolled her eyes—her anxiety and confusion in the situation momentarily forget that she was standing in front of an authority figure whom she would normally show more respect to, if only to avoid a lecture on decorum. "Well I mean, yeah, obviously they don't let you become an apprentice until you've passed all your tests and things, and that can sometimes take years, but—"

"Squawk! Wait a moment, what—? Tests? I… what?" Chatot shared a bewildered look with the Guildmaster.

"That's… yes?" Paula said, seeming unsure now herself. "You know… for all the classes you have to take before you can move onto the explorer track?" At the duo's blank stare, she tried to break it down further. "The life skills classes? Where they teach you things like foraging, map-reading, tool making… stuff like that. Then, if you decided to join under the 'Exploration Team' track, if you pass all your tests, you get to actually call yourself 'Apprentice' for real, and do more of the explorer-specific training, instead of just the public stuff you get to do as a 'recruit' or 'member.'"

"The… the 'public stuff'?" Chatot questioned, still trying to wrap his mind around the information Paula was giving him.

Paula shrugged. "Yeah. I mean… not everyone who joins the guild wants to be an explorer. A lot of pokémon just want things like the life skill classes I just talked about, since they're also really helpful for people who want to be, like, shopkeepers or something. Or who travel a lot. Or who want to be able to mend their own scarves and blankets, or whatever. Stuff like that. They're really useful, so lots of pokémon join and graduate—but only the ones who go on to join the Exploration Team track actually get to say that they apprenticed under them."

This explanation did a lot to calm Wigglytuff and Chatot down from their earlier rage—although, rather than completely remove his agitation Chatot seemed to turn it more towards mumbling something about "inflated graduation rates" and "no wonder they seem to be everywhere" But while it might have dispelled some of the red flags regarding why Paula joined a guild at such a young age, there were still plenty of others—such as, "Why did you decide to join a guild so far from home, then?"

Paula rubbed the back of her neck, putting some serious thought into Wigglytuff's question. "I mean… I did almost join the Torterra Guild. There are lots of good things about it! Some of the teachers I met with said I'd probably even be fast-tracked because of how good Ricky did, and how I already knew some of the stuff from when he accidentally sent us his homework, instead of letters. But… then I just would have been under his shadow for the whole time. I want to become an explorer on my own merits!"

That was a familiar sentiment to Wigglytuff, and he spared a surreptitious glance towards his partner. Just as he'd thought, Chatot had frozen at the words, calming down slightly and fixing Paula with a sympathetic stare. He had his own brother issues after all. But Paula wasn't finished.

"Also… I mean, I was already considering your guild a little bit, too, Guildmaster Wigglytuff. Basically every explorer hopeful does! And all your graduates are always really great at exploring, and I wanted to focus more on the exploration stuff anyways. And then there was this dream I had, where…" she trailed off, blushing a little, "Um, I guess that part's not important… but anyways… that's why I decided to try and join here, instead."

"Yes, well, that's all perfectly understandable," Chatot suddenly cut in, preening a bit at the praise. "We are a very prestigious institution, after all! But," he calmed down and gave her a serious look, "Paula… you do realize that most guilds do not actually offer classes of that sort… yes?"

Paula looked stunned; apparently, she had not, in fact, realized this. Chatot's eye started twitching a bit. "In fact… most guilds expect you to join with those skills already in hand. There is no 'recruit' or 'member' phase before you can become an apprentice. When you join, you are an apprentice from the start. And, from the sounds of things, in terms of actual apprentice work, the Torterra guild is not too far off in terms of expectations—they still require their apprentices to know certain skills beforehand, skills which take years to learn.

"So, Paula… if you thought that you would be spending a few years on classwork before you started exploration work in earnest… then why didn't you say anything when the first thing I had you do was take an actual job off the job board, rather than giving you any of those lessons?"

Paula blushed even harder. "I kind of, um… I thought that maybe that was your version of an entrance exam? Like… you were gauging how good we already were as explorers, and since we successfully completed the mission, it meant you were fast-tracking us?" Chatot just stared at her. "But I guess… that's not what you were doing?"

Chatot's wings met his face, and he started muttering again about backfiring plans. If Wigglytuff hadn't wanted to keep up a calm, assuring persona in front of Team Rainbow, he would have winced in sympathy at Chatot's plight. After all, Wigglytuff well-remembered the discussion he and Chatot had after the whole Star Cave incident regarding Bidoof, and the way they'd been handling training their apprentices up until that point. Paula's assumption about them having an entrance exam of sorts wasn't exactly unwarranted… it's just that until Team Rainbow had joined, it had never been quite so formalized, or focused on the outright "exploring" aspect of their line of work.

Normally when Team Perfect Apple admitted new recruits to their guild, they conducted a sort of "observation period" to see what sort of skills the pokémon came in with, the areas they were most in need of improvement, if there was anything in particular they already excelled at… things like that. This typically took the form of assigning some menial tasks and then observing them as they completed them. It was surprising the sort of information one could glean from such things if they were truly paying attention. For example… having a new recruit run small errands for the other apprentices involving fetching them specific items let Chatot and Wigglytuff know how good the new recruit's skills were when it came to identifying the differences in seeds and berries—after all, it would be terrible for an explorer to think they'd stocked up on Reviver Seeds or Oran Berries when, instead, they'd accidentally packed their look-alikes! Sending a recruit to Kecleon Market in order to check their stock helped gauge things such as memorization and information retention, since while they would be sent out with a list, they would still have to remember the responses of the proprietors—or, if they were extremely clever recruits, they might think outside the box and bring a writing implement to scribble down the answers on the back of the list. Then, of course, there were the tasks such as general maintenance, which told the Guildmaster and his Head of Intelligence anything from whether or not the recruit knew how to sew, to their physical fitness levels. Once the duo had a baseline, they could begin implementing specific training programs and slowly begin sending the recruits out into the field, where these basic skills would provide a firm foundation as they started proper exploring.

It also let them see what other areas would need improvement. For instance, while Loudred was incredibly strong and could rattle off the exploration basics if directly asked, putting such things into practice had… mixed results. He was often impatient, and went a bit too much with gut feelings instead of taking a moment to plan, or think things through. Not to mention that his brain to mouth filter wasn't the greatest. But, depending on what sort of work he wanted to specifically focus on after graduating, some of these skills would be… not "less important," per say, but less often used. This was why they had offered him the chance to take the graduation exam last year, after Sunflora turned the opportunity down. It wasn't entirely surprising that he'd failed—their guild had strict expectations, after all, and it often took more than one attempt to pass successfully—but the fact that it had still been mostly due to his impatience meant that this was an area he needed to double down and improve on. So, Chatot and Wigglytuff had discussed it and opted to put him on sentry duty—where he would have to really think things through in regards to whether or not someone should be allowed into the guild, and where he would have to take the time to think before he spoke his mind when it came to assuaging the fears of panicking pokémon coming to the Wigglytuff Guild seeking assistance, or those who needed reassurance that, yes, their friends and family really had been found safely and would be returning soon. As well as, of course, maintaining the proper dignity and respect when faced with officials like Officer Magnezone or his deputies, or other esteemed visitors to the guild. For the most part, it appeared to be working… although recent events—specifically with some of the things the Big Voice pokémon had said or implied about Laura on this last expedition—made Wigglytuff think that he had backslid a little, and that he and Chatot needed to actually sit him down and spell it out for him why he'd been put near-permanently on sentry duty in the first place.

In any case… this system had worked just fine until Bidoof joined the guild. Now, to be perfectly fair to Bidoof, part of the problems he'd had stemmed from the fact that while the Bibarel-line did ultimately end up as both Normal- and Water-type… their skill set when it came to daily living typically geared more towards life on the water. But since they could comfortably spend time on land, many of them tended to have unrealistic expectations for what life was like for those living there full-time. This was especially true among the young—and, considering that Bidoof himself was just barely at an age any sane or reasonable pokémon would reasonable for someone to start exploration, he was definitely counted in that category. This meant that there were a lot of skills he didn't have, simply because he wouldn't have thought he'd need them—or, in cases such as berry identification, because he hadn't realized that there was more for him to know.

Although, really, his biggest issue upon joining had been his stamina and mobility. While the Bibarel line was surprisingly agile in the water—considering their size and seeming lack of aquatic appendages—they couldn't really move all that quickly on the land. While this typically wasn't a problem for them, since, again, most of their time was spent in the water, what Bidoof hadn't considered when choosing to join the Wigglytuff guild was that most of his exploration work and training would be taking place in dungeons where water was scarce—at least in terms of being able to swim in it. Corphish actually had a similar problem when he first joined, if to a lesser degree. While the Crawdaunt-line shared general habitats with that of the Bibarel-line, Corphish in particular had lived beneath the waves given that his father was apparently from a different species-line, one that needed to live underwater full time. As such, Corphish already knew from the start that life on land would likely be very different than life underwater, even if he couldn't quite manage to imagine what it would actually be like. In preparation for this, he'd tried to learn all he could and keep an open mind about things so that he could quickly learn about everything else. With no preconceived notions, and the knowledge that there was a lot he didn't know, he was able better able to outright ask for information and help, and to admit from the start that there was a lot he needed to learn. With Bidoof, however, since he had lived partially on land his whole life, he'd had a lot more misconceptions about the wider world that weren't as easily shrugged off. This meant that he ran into the issue of not knowing the sorts of things he didn't know—meaning that he came in with fewer skills and had a harder time when it came to asking about what sorts of things he should know or learn, even after getting the physical aspects down.

With Corphish, they could start to send him out on easy missions once his physical abilities had improved enough since he knew enough about the other subjects that it would only be a benefit to him, even if he didn't know absolutely everything that could prove useful. Heck, at that point, he still hadn't known most things that he would need to in the long run. But when it came to Bidoof… he'd started at a disadvantage on both fronts, and it had been long enough since Corphish had passed that point (coupled with a few nasty incidents in those early days that led them to regret sending him out as soon as they did and that had made them even more wary when it came to planning for Bidoof) that they hadn't really realized they'd kept Bidoof back from the more hands-on aspects of exploration work for far longer than they should have until he decided to rebel and had almost gotten seriously hurt during the whole Star Cave thing.

With that in mind, when it came to Team Rainbow's observation period, Chatot had suggested—and Wigglytuff had agreed—that they should let them try and fulfill a simple job request from day one, and then to gauge how they did from there. If they happened to fail, then not only would it help establish a baseline for them as far as Wigglytuff and Chatot were concerned, but it would also hopefully teach the girls that they weren't ready yet for the hands-on work, which would hopefully keep them from getting as impatient or disheartened as Bidoof did.

Except Paula and Laura succeeded with aplomb—and even more so the next day when they successfully defeated their first outlaw with no outside help, despite the fact that Chatot had intended for Bidoof to go along with them after helping them pick a job, as outlaw missions could be tricky for new recruits. The two achieved success after success, and while normally that would be something to applaud… considering what they knew now, Chatot had a point about the plan backfiring spectacularly.

Given everything they had achieved so far, is was clear to Wigglytuff that these girls, like him, were exploration prodigies. But the fact that they were prodigies with so many successes behind them only served to mask the very real issues they were facing. If one didn't know their true ages… just looking at the surface level, it seemed that the two of them were just your average recruit. Perhaps below average, even, for how naïve and ignorant they could be about common exploration topics. But that wasn't the case at all; yes, there was a lot they didn't know, but that was in no way their fault. They were literally children. There was no way they would have had the time to learn everything they needed to know. But because they were prodigies and Paula had admitted to having access to a few higher level bits of learning via her brother, let alone whatever skills Laura had brought to the table, the two of them were able to effectively pool their resources enough to make it look as though they had more training than they actually did. Furthermore, with Paula's explanations of the Torterra Guild and her expectations going into the Wigglytuff Guild… it made sense why neither of them would have asked for additional lessons or training. He and Chatot thought the girls already knew the basics, while Paula assumed that since neither he nor Chatot had brought it up it meant they thought Team Rainbow hadn't needed to know more than they already did. And given Laura's still unaddressed amnesia issues, it was unclear how much she actually knew about guilds in general, let alone what sorts of expectations she would have had at the start of training.

Wigglytuff nodded to himself as the pieces clicked together to form a clearer picture of what happened. Assuming it was all true—and Wigglytuff didn't really have any reason to doubt that it was—it made complete sense why a parent would allow their child to join at such a young age. There was one thing that still bothered him, though…

The Balloon pokémon clapped his hands together, bringing everyone's attention back to him. "Well, now that that's been cleared up, it makes perfect sense why friendly-friend Paula would have come all this way to join us at such a young age—especially if your parents thought the same too! But…" his gaze turned serious again, unnerving Paula enough that she actually gulped in apprehension. "That still doesn't explain why they would have let you come here all on your lonesome. After all, friendly-friend Diglett said he'd seen your footprint lots of times before you and Laura actually joined us, Paula. Enough times that it had to have been weeks since you'd arrived in town—meaning that you would have been alone for all that time." The "And having to fend for yourself for all that time when that is never a child's job" part went unsaid.

But it didn't go unheard, because Paula picked it up immediately and tried to go for a world-record in "most blushes within the hour" when the rest of her face turned as red as her cheeks once more. "Oh, yeah, that's mostly on me."

Wigglytuff raised a skeptical brow.

"Okay, so, my parents did want to escort me here, but I thought it would be kind of… embarrassing. I'm kind of the baby of the family, and they can get really fussy and just… uh… a bit much when it comes to my accomplishments. Like… right after I evolved, they wanted to throw some sort of big party, and I just—" she shook her head, as if trying to dispel an embarrassing memory. "—Anyways! The point is that I convinced them not to come. But they were still really worried, so they made Ricky escort me as a compromise. But I mean… he's, well, him, so it would have been even more embarrassing if he'd come in with me. So, I told him that I would be fine if he just left me at the crossroads, especially since his team probably had a lot of missions to do that they needed their leader for. But then after I made it to the grate I kind of… chickened out a little. Or… a lot." She winced. But then she turned to her partner, a huge smile on her face, "But then I met Laura, and we decided to join together!"

The explanation and accompanying smile eased a lot of the guildmaster's fears. It still wasn't great that Paula had been left to fend for herself during that period of time, but coupled with the rest of her explanations, and how bright, happy, and—most importantly—healthy she'd been upon finally joining his guild, it probably meant that Paula's situation wasn't nearly as bad as Wigglytuff had been fearing after learning her true age. Even considering her early evolution… well, there wasn't really a tactful way to bring it up anyways, especially in the face of everything else they'd learned. But considering her sincerity about everything, he was willing to believe there was a reasonable explanation for that as well. After all, it wasn't like there hadn't been any cases of a pichu evolving young in perfectly benign circumstances—it was just rare for one to both gain the knowledge and experience necessary and then form a close enough bond that quickly when there wasn't something… else… hastening it along. But given Paula's stories about studying her brother's homework, it was clear that, if given the chance, Paula could happily devote time to learning of her own volition. Also, considering how close she had become with Laura—close enough to form a team and partnership, even—after only knowing her for such a brief period of time, he could easily see Paula having formed a close enough friendship with someone to act as a catalyst in her younger days.

But, speaking of Laura…

"What's the next issue?"

All eyes turned to the treecko in the room. She briefly looked away under the scrutiny of her Guildmaster and his Head of Intelligence's gazes, but then she gripped her team's Treasure Bag harder for a moment, seeking comfort, and continued, "You said that Paula's situation was simpler, and considering what else we learned from Uxie, I'm guessing the next thing we're going to talk about is me, but…" she looked away again, shrinking back slightly, "…since I can't remember my past, I don't really know why I was alone on the beach when Paula found me, or about what my home life was like."

"Well, yes, that is among our concerns," Chatot acknowledged, "but more importantly…" he trailed off with a wince, unsure how to continue.

Paula shuffled closer to her partner, leaning against her shoulder a little to provide moral support as Laura looked between Chatot and Wigglytuff in trepidation. The mystery was definitely concerning, since, as far as Wigglytuff knew, humans aged at around the same rate as pokémon and were just as protective and nurturing as them when it came to their children. Even disregarding the weirdness of the species change—which was a concerning mystery in and of itself, but one which they were unlikely to solve any time soon given that even Uxie, who was so knowledgeable and had literally looked inside her head for answers had no idea—there were not many circumstances which could be deemed "good" which would leave a child as young as Laura in such a lonely, vulnerable position. Especially considering that she had amnesia, since there were even fewer circumstances in which such a condition could be deemed as "good."

But that wasn't the most important thing at the moment, and, even as it pained him to say it, the question had to be asked: "Laura," Chatot finally continued, putting as much gentleness into his voice as he could, "do you actually… want to be here?"

Laura blinked in obvious confusion, and Chatot started wincing again, as if it physically pained him to have to clarify his meaning. "That is… do you actually want to be an apprentice at the guild?"

Laura still looked confused, but hesitantly answered, "Y-yes…?"

But everyone in the room could sense how unsure that answer was—including her partner, whose eyes suddenly widened as she looked towards the treecko in shock and… guilt? As if suddenly realizing something for the first time. Given what Paula just told them about her past, and her obvious dedication to the vocation considering she was willing to devote herself to it so young, it was a feeling Wigglytuff could sympathize with. It was always hard the first time you were confronted with the fact that not everyone was as interested or passionate about exploring as you were; the fact that friends who had decided to become teachers or shopkeepers did so not because they felt themselves ill-suited to the work of exploration and thought that this was a better way for them to contribute to help other explorers, but because their actual passions were, in fact, shop-keeping or teaching. The fact that it wasn't just unavoidable or important duties which kept pokémon out of the field, but that there were some pokémon who were, at best, indifferent to exploring and, at worst, outright hated it. It had to be an even harder realization to face that it was entirely possible that one's best friend also fell into those latter categories, at least to some degree. But considering how dangerous being on an Exploration Team could be—how dangerous it had already proved to be, for these two (because even though Uxie's Groudon illusion was just that, an illusion, it was still an incredibly realistic and dangerous foe, considering how effective it had been up until that point at keeping visitors away from Fogbound Lake, and it wasn't something that two kids should have had to deal with—especially not on their own. And that wasn't even getting into the fact that they had apparently been targeted by Team Skull—more than once, if their behaviors while interacting with them while the trio was staying at the guild were any implication).

"I mean," Laura's voice grew quieter and even more unsure and faltering, as was typical for her when placed unexpectedly into the spotlight, "Paula's my friend, and we work well together… and she's helped me out so much and… so when she asked… when she needed help… how could I say no?" Laura looked around, confused and desperate, trying to meet first Chatot's eyes—which were turned away, his face an expression of deep pain despite how hard he was trying to hide it for young Laura's sake—then Paula's—though she quickly turned away herself after seeing the absolute devastation in the pikachu's eyes—and finally Wigglytuff's.

Though it was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do (because, how, how could he have missed something like this? The entire reason he'd let her join his guild in the first place was because he'd sensed she'd needed help, and yet when it came down to actually helping her…), he met her seeking gaze dead-on, his own eyes as gentle and apologetic as he could make them.

"It's great that you wanted to help your friend," he assured her, pleased as some of the tension drained out of her frame. "But that's not what Chatot and I are concerned about." He leaned back a little in thought. "Hm… How to put this… Okay. So, you know what we were just worried about with Paula, right? About how she was left on her own, and how we were worried that her being here as young as she was meant that she didn't have anyone back home she could rely on?" He waited for Laura's hesitant nod before continuing, "Well, it's the same sort of thing for you, friendly-friend; we're worried that the only reason you joined is because you felt like you didn't have any other options."

At the dual wince Team Rainbow gave—each colored by their own varying shades of guilt and shame—Wigglytuff gave a sad little sigh. "I understand that things were probably really hard for you then, and that you didn't know what to do. And, again, it really is admirable how you were willing to help out your new friend like that! But… it seems like most of Paula's struggles when it came to finally joining us was that she needed a little boost of courage to take those last few steps and actually stay and stand firm until Loudred opened the gates. And… I can see how your amnesia might have meant that you didn't really know what being on an exploration team really meant at first," he paused as she gave another little wince. "But, Laura… after being with us a few days, and seeing how we worked and what sorts of things we did… surely you knew that if you'd just asked us for help, we would have given it to you… right? You know you don't have to trade working for us—putting yourself into danger on a daily basis—for help… right?"

Laura's face grew red, and she mumbled something too low for Wigglytuff to hear. But apparently Chatot heard it, as he finally stopped wincing at the absolute shock of it and whipped around to face her. "I'm sorry, could you please repeat that?!"

Laura's face grew even redder as she gave a little cough and repeated, in a voice barely louder than her previous attempt but just loud enough for Wigglytuff to hear this time, "I mean… it does seem like most of the clients offer rewards for work… and since I wouldn't really have any money or anything if I wasn't taking jobs, I just…"

She trailed off into mumbling again, but it was enough for Wigglytuff to get the gist of what she meant. The thought of it made him feel a little sick, and even more worried about this precious child than he already was.

Chatot flapped his wings to get her attention, looking a little queasy himself. "Laura, I know that in the past I may have seemed a bit, ah, too concerned, shall we say, with the state of the guild's coffers and reputation and… things of the like. But I assure you: we—and any self-respecting guild or explorer—would never turn someone away who needed help because we didn't think they pay us for it! In fact, payment is never a prerequisite for asking for our help! And beyond that," his eyes turned serious, "you are a child. Even if we hadn't already assumed a duty of care for you when you signed on as an apprentice, you still would have been able to depend on us for assistance simply because children should never be forced to fend for themselves. That's the job of the adults—whether or not they also happen to be excellent explorers. Do you understand?"

She didn't entirely look like she did, honestly, but… she looked like maybe she could start trying to. It was enough for Chatot to be able to give an exasperated sigh and say, "Well, whether or not you understand, can you at least believe me that, whether you actually want to be an explorer or not, we of the Wigglytuff Guild will still take care of you until you decide you want to leave? And that even then, we will still ensure that you are in a safe place before we actually leave you entirely?"

She looked much more confidant at this, and gave a little nod. The two adults in the room all but sagged in relief, and Chatot said, "With that in mind, I'll ask again: Do you actually want to be here, to be an explorer?"

Laura took a moment to actually consider it, this time. Her eyes were thoughtful, and she even went so far as to put her hand on her chin. "I think… I don't actually know," she truthfully admitted. "I mean… I like exploring—especially when I get to do it with Paula," she stopped here to give her partner a quick grin, which was tearfully returned—it seemed as though Paula had gone through her own whirlwind of emotions during Chatot and Wigglytuff's explanations, especially in regards to feeling guilty that she might have dragged Laura into a life that she actually hated because of her own selfish dream of being an explorer, when it was obvious that Laura was in need of serious help. She still felt kind of guilty about everything, but Laura's assurance that she did, in fact, enjoy exploring helped lighten her heart a little, and she vowed that whatever Laura's answer, she would do her best to support her.

"And," Laura continued, unaware of Paula's silent convictions, "I like hanging out with everyone every day, and getting to learn from them, but as for the future… I don't really know. Maybe one day I'll hear about a job or something that I really want to do instead, or," she paused again, giving a little shrug, "maybe if Uxie's right and I do get my memories back in a few years, I'll remember that there's a job that I'd already decided I really wanted to do, but just can't remember right now. …Assuming it's even a job I could still do, considering I'm not human any more, and I don't know if I ever will be again. But… I think for right now, at least, I want to continue being an apprentice," she finally decided. But then she seemed unsure of herself again, toeing the ground and shyly asking, "Is… is that okay? Even if I change my mind later?"

It was everything Wigglytuff could do to hold in his sigh of relief, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't hold back his smile. That was all right, though—he was known for his happy smiles, and this was definitely something to be happy about. "Of course it is, friendly-friend! We'd love to have you stay and learn with us, for however long you'd like to! But!" he said suddenly, cutting off her own sigh of relief and making her choke on air a little. "That does bring us to the third issue we need to discuss."

Team Rainbow shared a confused look before Paula blinked and her expression cleared as the likely topic hit her. "Right, now we have to talk about hiding the Time Gear!"

"Er, well… yes and no," Chatot said, drawing their once-more confused gazes towards him. "That is part of it, yes, but more importantly… do you recall what I said about the Torterra Guild being an outlier in terms of offering classes to recruits as part of guild membership?"

"Yes…?" Paula said, still confused, before she realized something and her ears drooped in sadness. "Oh… so since the Wigglytuff Guild doesn't offer them, and you weren't actually giving us an entrance exam, you're saying that we'd need to leave and take those classes first before coming back and joining again as apprentices?" she hazarded a guess. But then she scrunched her nose in confusion once more. "But, wait, you just said that Laura could still stay here as an apprentice, even if she wasn't sure she wanted to be an explorer when she grew up. So how would that��?"

"Well, yes, that's where the Time Gear complicates things." Chatot explained. "Normally, that would be exactly the case—considering the way you described those lessons from the Torterra Guild, the skills involved are vital ones for explorers to have, and ones which we for the most part expect our recruits to already have a firm foundation in. That doesn't always happen, admittedly," he trailed off a little, thinking back once more on the Bidoof situation, before he shook his head free of the memories and continued, "but in that case we would expect the recruit to either do a self-study in order to gain those skills, or to ask us or another apprentice for help directly. Considering our focus as a guild, we are not really equipped to handle large numbers of blank-slate apprentices. At the same time, however… it's not exactly safe to send either of you away from the guild, at the moment."

"Huh? Why not?" Paula asked.

But Laura was the one to answer. "Because of the Time Gear, right?" she guessed.

"Exactly right, Laura," Chatot confirmed. "If Uxie was right about the thief already knowing where they're hidden, then if they went to Fogbound Lake and found the Time Gear missing… even though no one in the guild would reveal that we now have custody over it, the fact that we recently went on an expedition to Foggy Forest is well-known. It wouldn't be out of the question for them to assume we had some information on what happened to it. From there, it would be simple for them to find out the identities of the guild members, especially since the entire guild went on the expedition. And if the two of you suddenly left the guild… well, even if that wasn't suspicious enough on its own, it would still be far too much of a risk that the thief could track either of you down and, well…" He shuddered, and the girls shuddered along with him. The implications alone were terrible enough without needing them to be spelled out.

"But… since you don't normally take apprentices as young as we are, wouldn't it also be suspicious if we stayed?" Paula asked.

Chatot shook his head. "It shouldn't be. It's a bit unusual yes, but… well, considering how adept the two of you are already at exploring, I believe it is safe to say that you could be considered prodigies. Considering that our esteemed Guildmaster is also a prodigy, it makes a certain amount of sense that he would be interested and accepting of teaching others like himself."

The girls blushed at the praise, but Chatot took no notice as he continued, his tone more businesslike, "That being said, there will have to be a few changes in your schedules. As good as you two are, we cannot, in good conscience, keep sending you out for missions until we are assured that you have the basics down. Honestly, I'm not sure why I didn't notice sooner that there were areas where the two of you were sorely lacking in your educations. The Apple Woods fiasco, for one, should have been a major tip-off! So, we will have to make sure that the two of you are properly educated, so that you can become top-notch explorers! Of course, assuming that's what the two of you still want to do in the future. We've discussed your feelings on the matter already, Laura, but the same applies to you as well, Paula! If at any point you change your mind, we will make sure that you are safely settled somewhere else, or back at your home—after the current crisis is resolved, of course. And in either case, Laura, we will do our best to help you figure out your past—after all, there is a chance that Uxie's theories are incorrect, and even if they aren't, you still shouldn't have to wait years to find that out if there's any chance we could find the answers in the meantime."

Paula, who had bristled at the Apple Woods comment, calmed down by the end of Chatot's speech. She didn't believe that she would ever want to be anything other than an explorer, but… it was still nice to know he was at least giving her the option. "Thank you, Chatot," she said, her partner nodding in agreement.

Wigglytuff suddenly clapped his hands, startling everyone in the room. "It's so great that we've got that settled now!" he exclaimed once he had everyone's attention. "But now we really should take care of the Time Gear. Laura, if you could bring it over here?"

The Grass-type still seemed a bit reluctant to part with the precious artifact, but she did ultimately nod in assent and take it out of the bag, heading over towards Wigglytuff. He took it from her, and then moved over to one of the many treasure chests in the room. "We'll make some more formal plans later, but it wouldn't hurt to start teaching you a bit now. Let's start with a lesson on finding treasure," he said as he opened the chest and then started sifting through some of the treasures inside.

"Now, the best way to find treasure is to first know how to hide it. A lot of times when you see something like a chest or a map, there will be secret tests or traps involved. Like maybe the map will be coated in a false layer with incorrect directions, or there will be a bunch of different fake traps in a room, or the room will have a solution which seems really obvious but is actually a cover for a different sort of trap. I came across lots of those when I was just starting out! Actually, it might be good for you to hear that story—there's a lot in it that we can apply to now. Hm… where to start…? I guess the best place should be on that peaceful prairie, back when I was still just Igglybuff…"

#pokemon mystery dungeon #explorers of sky #what if...?#hidden in plain sight #writing #fanfiction #procrastination at its finest

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whateverthought · 6 years ago

Text

A full(ish) outline of my ‘Evil WestAllen’ AU or Earth 6. It's kinda long.

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On Earth 6, 11-year-old Bartholomew Henry Allen awakens to a ruckus downstairs only to go and see his mother encompassed in a whirlwind of electricity and color. He calls out as his parents scream for him to leave. And there he sees, the Yellow Man thrust his hand into his mother’s chest before finding himself down the block from home.

As he makes it back he hears police sirens and screeching tires. He watches his father, stunned and resigned, get put in the back of a police car. He goes inside and sees Mr. West, a family friend, standing over something covered in a blanket.

Something- His mom.

He knows. He knows she’s under the blanket.

And Mr. West turns, sees him, and rushes to move him out of the house. Away from the crime scene. Away from his mother. And wasn’t that what his mother told him last? To leave?

Months later he is living with the Wests, with Joe and Iris, but his father is in jail. His father who did nothing. Who was innocent. But he pleaded guilty. Barry saw him plead guilty. Saw him in a prison jumpsuit, in that courtroom. Saw him look anywhere but at Barry.

And he had tried to help. Barry told them everything. The lightning, the wind, his mother and the Man in Yellow. But no one believed him. No one truely let him finish. They only doubted him. Telling him what he did and did not know.

He couldn’t have seen the crime, all the police officers saw him run from down the street. He wasn’t in the house, he must have ran away when he heard his father attack his mother. There was no way a Man in Yellow stabbed his mother with his hand. It was ridiculous! Except it wasn’t.

And he tried to see his father. Ask him why he lied. Why he wanted to be in jail. Why he would rather be in prison than with his son. But each time he would be stopped. Each time Joe West would force him back. He’d sit him down and tell him he couldn’t see his father. Because he was dangerous. Because he was a criminal. Because he didn’t deserve it.

And Joe, much like every officer and detective, didn’t believe him. He believed his father was a monster and kept Barry from visiting.

Each time he did get closer. Until, finally, he got to his father. Finally, his father laid eyes on Barry. In the months since the crime Barry was looking at his father in the eyes. Yet, his father sat down, picked up the phone and told him to leave.

He shouldn’t be here, he shouldn’t have come, he should just forget about him, his father. And then he got up, and left. He left Barry there, sitting in the plastic chair on the other side of a plastic window in a cold concrete room inside a prison.

At 6 years old Iris Ann West loses her mother. Her mother had been sick for weeks, on and off for years. And one day she wakes up to see her mother gone. Maybe she went out, her father doesn’t seem too bothered. But later that week her father sits her down, and tells her her mother died. And she cries.

But life keeps going and nothing happens. They move some her mother’s things but there’s no funeral. Dead people have a funeral, right? And she asks her teachers, and they say, sometimes people have Wakes or Memoerials.

Her father does neither.

So, at 6, her mother is just gone. And she loves her father. He was a cop, a detective, a hero who fought bad guys. So he couldn’t be wrong.

And then her bestfriend loses everything. And now he lives with them. And then she wonders, a man who she knew, a man who was nothing but good to her was now a murderer. Not just a murderer, but someone who killed his wife. His love. Something, Iris thought, was nothing but evil. And her father agreed. He told her he did it. He put him in jail himself!

But, Barry didn’t. Barry told her what he saw, what really happened and, truly? Really truly? Iris believed Barry.

At 15, she hears her father talking to Barry’s therapist. He was worried, too many fights, too many bloody noses, and broken wrists. She knows she shouldn’t listen. But its Barry. Barry tells her everything, more than the therapist espesially. So she listens, because what if her father tries to send Barry away again? Another “Summer Camp” full of doctors and bodyguards. Another few months of being alone.

She asks, what about a mother figure? Well, he has Iris, but what about a good female role model? Iris almosts gets caught when she snorts at that. Barry had a mother, and he’d never take some replacement. But thats not important. What is, is that her father admits its been hard since her mother left.

Left.

And Iris knew her father, he said it like that for a reason. So one night, when her dad was asleep, she searches the Internet. And thats when she saw it. Her mother. Her mother after 9 years.

Francine West. 39. Mother. Of a Son.

Alive.

Iris yells, and raves and sobs and screams but in the end, he lied. Her father lied to her. A good man who believed in justice and honor lied to her about her mother. But worse, he looks her in the eye, and tells her to not reach out. She left, and she didn’t deserve Iris’ love.

He was right. She didn’t. Neither did he.

At 16, Iris decides to reach out to her brother, not because she cares, but because her mother doesn’t deserve to have a family after leaving Iris’. Later they move back to Central, and Wally slowly joins Iris and Barry’s little bond.

During Prom, Iris goes with a girl covered in piercings and Barry takes an older boy with a record. Francine looks uncomfortable as all hell, and Joe looks one second from getting into a fist fight. Neither of them get home before 1 in the morning, and they do it in a police car.

As collage approaches Barry decides to go to Med School, he’ll take after his father if it kills him. Iris decides to go for law. They leave together, far from Central and there they meet other students from the area. One is Political Science major Lisa Snart, Iris’ PA for her floor. Soon, as things tend to be, they grow close. Lisa tells them about her brother, Leonard, who died young, protecting Lisa from their crooked cop of a father. Of what she saw, of dirty cops and criminals working together. The law wasn’t on their side. Not Barry’s, not Lisa’s and definately not Leonard’s.

They all go back to Central, Barry becoming a surgeon and Iris a lawyer. On that day, December 11, the S.T.A.R. Labs particle accelerator explodes, sending chaos through the city. At that time Iris is driving with her father, in a rare moment of happiness. Then the storm starts, and a wave of chaos begins. A car in front of them swerves and in an instance, multiple cars are crashing and flying. Iris and Joe included. As their car stops, Iris realizes she’s stuck. Pinned by the car and varying metal parts inbedded into her body she sees her father take his last breathe. She stays there for hours, barely concious, and stews. Her father, who moments ago was actually having a nice time with her, is dead. Her father who she loved and hated in equal measure. Who, maybe, just maybe was finally reconnecting with her. Who she might have finally forgiven.

Barry is in the hospital when it happens. Moving between emergancies, he stops for a breathe. And the power goes off. The silence lasts a moment before everyone is scrambling to check on patients. Everyone, but Barry. Because he knows something bad has happened.

Later Iris is brought in for surgury and, days later, has yet to wake up. As Barry watches he feels a knot of bitterness and resentment tighten in his chest. They, the hospital staff, tell him to leave. He can’t help. And he watches Wally and Francine cry over his Iris. Francine doesn’t deserve to cry. If nothing else she should be the one in the bed. Iris is worth 100 of Francine.

Iris is out for 7 months. In that time Barry turns back to their, Iris and his, old criminal conntacts. They are small, and few but are in no way insignificant. He builds it, and reaches out. He sees the growing number of freaks and weirdos who can do things they shouldn’t. With that, he makes enemies and allies alike.

One of those is Talia Al Ghul, the run away daughter of the Demon’s Head. He watches her take down mobs of people. He has her come back with information she shouldn’t have. He sees her take down small, powerful criminal organisations. So he makes a deal, he will protect her and she will teach him. She gets shelter, protection, money, connections and he gets to learn how to snap a man’s head between his thighs. She gets a shadow to hide in and he gets a well of toxicology knowledge.

When Iris wakes up, its to a growing criminal organization. Its during a meeting for this that she first shows her power. A bullet flies toward her Barry and as she jumps infront of it her skin turns silver. Flawless and smooth Iris West becomes The Woman of Steel. As the group lies dead at her and Barry’s feet they realize. The game had changed.

Over a year later, the Central City Underworld finally descends into chaos. Whispers of a sadistic doctor, his right hand robot and pet assasin lerking in the shadows spread. It’s like a plague, causing fear and paronoia everywhere you look. Crime Lords getting trigger happy and cops twitching at every noise.

Barry Allen is the leading surgeon in Central and Iris West is a prominant member in many court proceedings. Lisa Snart is campaning for Mayor and Talia Al Ghul is as good as dead to the rest of the world. And its at this time that the Man in Yellow starts showing up.

Slowly it becomes obvious this is the same man. He always happens to arrive in Barry’s radious. Taunting him. And they bite. Every villian and criminal in their way gets struck down. Every lead and every possibility is followed. As this happens Barry is asked by Harrison Wells to join his business. Deciding the labs can be used to find the Man in Yellow, he agrees.

Soon Central City gets a hero. Hot Pursuit, a man who can run at lightning speed, who drives a motorcyle going just as fast. The man seems to have a grudge with Central City’s biggest criminal trio, the Good Doctor, Titanium and Shadow Hunter. Never succeding, he still breathes down their neck.

Despite their bitter resentment, the CCPD is too easy to manipulate. Captain Edward Thawne is a rough man with an agenda against the rising metahuman problem. He hates Hot Pursuit just as much as he does any criminal. This leads to the idenity of the Man in Yellow.

Its Iris who finds out. From his fights with Hot Pursuit and Barry’s memories, Iris finds the pattern. And as she searches S.T.A.R. labs she finds him. Harrison Wells, standing in all his yellow glory, working on a machine Iris knows doesn’t belong. He catches her, and while he can’t kill her, her powers beat his, he does imprison her. He laments he would rather just kill her, everything has already gone wrong.

When Talia finds Iris they learn the truth. Eobard Thawne killed Nora Allen, got stuck in time, and killed Harrison Wells. He blew up the accelerator early, on purpose but everything was wrong. Barry was wrong. Wrong job, wrong powers, wrong life. And now, now Eobard could never leave, and Barry couldn’t fight back. He would just run. Leave.

Barry wouldn’t run. He was tired of running. Wouldn’t leave. He poisoned the man, and Iris mutilated his arm and he still got away. They would never get a chance like that again.

So Iris decided to get rid of him. She hunted down Thawne’s ancestor, Captain Edward Thawne. A good man, but if it would kill Eobard then Titanium would make it quick.

Its during this that Titantium found out Hot Pursuit’s idenity.

Wally.

“Harrison Wells” left them everything. S.T.A.R. labs, millions of dolars and a confession. Henry Allen was let out of Iron Heights. And Hot Pursuit now has partners. Bomba, a woman who could blow up anything she touched. Solarflare, a woman made of fire who could change anything into something completely different. And two very condensading hawk people.

As Lisa becomes Mayor of Central City, politicians from around come and go. One such person is Jennifer ‘Stormy’ Knight, stone faced daughter of Senator Henry Knight and former Wild Child. After an accident, and an attack, Stormy took on the moniker ‘Phantom Lady’ and fights crime in the battle against dirty politicians. An ally of Titanium and future member of Iris’ ‘Furies’.

Barry proposes to Iris in a beautiful club they recently claimed, and murdered the former gang of, with a private show, just them, and they made love on the stage.

They have a small beautiful wedding and honeymoon in France. Of course, the wedding was inturrupted but nothing Titanium and her Good Doctor couldn’t end.

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Barry becomes a bendy assassin who uses needles, poison, scalpel, and knowledge of the body to fight. He doesn’t like to back down and is petty when he feels like he’s been insulted.

Iris is a metal tank. She’s sharp, observational, a great detective and an amazing at deception. Silver tongue, y’know? She’s ruthless and protective. She doesn’t trust people easily and usually, she only believes Barry. Also, the only person who can tell Barry what to do, not only that he also always listens (100%).

Decided to add Talia cause no one ever lets her make her own decisions not based on her father or lover. Also added Lisa cause I mean?? Lisa. Also, I’ve recently fallen in love with Phantom Lady sooooo.... bias

Heroes include Wally West as Hot Pursuit, Bette Sans Souci as Bomba, Lily Stien and Valentina Vostok as Solarflare and Carter Hall and Kendra Saunders as Hawkman and Hawkwoman.

This is in reference to lostinthespeedforce ‘s post about Evil WestAllen. So. Feel like I could have done better but...

@lostinthespeedforce

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jjkfire · 8 years ago

Text

Saltare

Reader x Taehyung // Jumper!AU // 5583 words

Summary: You’ve always hated your birthdays until you turned 15 and found yourself in the place you had always dreamed of.

Genre: Fluff, Angst

A/N: Based off the movie called Jumper! This is me trying to get out of my writer’s block sigh ): Reposting because guess which idiot accidentally deleted the post while trying to edit it?

Present

“Who sold me out?!” He screams. “Which fucking brother sold me out?!”

Yoongi laughs darkly, an evil smirk on his face as he stares down at Taehyung.

“Who ever said it was one of your brothers?”

“They’re the only ones who know what I can do,” He sneers, tongue darting out to lick at the dried blood at the corner of lips. “Was it Jimin? Jungkook? Who was it?!”

“Are you sure you want to know?” He laughs. “I have a feeling you won’t like the answer.”

“Just fucking tell me so I can cut off the bastard’s tongue when I get out of here.”

“If you insist,” He smiles and gestures for you to step out of the shadows.

You take small steps, cautious and afraid. The Taehyung you see all bloodied and tied up was not the same Taehyung you know, not the same Taehyung you love. The Taehyung you love is soft and jovial but this one, this one in front of you, scared you. From the moment you saw him in the chair, his expression was fierce and the words he spit out dripped with venom. Even though you hadn’t locked eyes with him, just standing here from afar and seeing the dark expression in his eyes sent shivers down your spine. Maybe you didn’t really know Taehyung at all and maybe he didn’t really know you at all either.

15 years ago

You sit there awkwardly staring at the 7 candles flickering in the wind as you hear the birthday song echo throughout the room. You’re not sure what to do so you fold your hands on your lap and smile as you look around the room. Although everyone here in this room was not related to you by blood, you still love them all the same. After all, they are the closest thing to family you have.

♪ ♪ Happy Birthday to you…. ♪ ♪

Make a wish!

As you blow out the candles on your very modest home-baked birthday cake, you are filled with warmth and love. You smile as you watch the people around you clap and congratulate you once again for making it through another year. Everything was perfect except… you only wish your parents were here clapping along with them.

If you shut your eyes and think hard enough, you’re able to see them, the only memory you have of them playing over and over again like a tape on repeat. The memory is warm, calming even and you imagine that’s what being loved must feel like. Though the memory is old, you have spent years trying to decipher it. It’s not much but really it’s all you have to remember your parents by.

You’re probably around 3 in the memory and you’re just staring out at the canals with your parents, laughing along with them and just as you turn to face them, everything fades to darkness and you’re filled with emptiness. It’s in Venice, that you’ve managed to figure out and you hear melodious laughter coming from two adults. The canals looked majestic and you’ve seen it in your head so many times now that you could probably draw it by hand. If you could draw that is... Your parents’ faces however were blurry at best and you’ve spent years scolding yourself for not turning quicker to look at them. All you could ask was why didn’t your 3-year-old self spend more time looking at your parents, remembering every single detail that made up their features?

Every year you made the same wish as you blew out the candles. You wished that your parents would come collect you. You would forgive them for the years that they had left you in this godforsaken house, if they would only come and collect you. They probably had a good reason for leaving you here, they wouldn’t just abandon you, would they?

The day after your birthday was always the worst. On your birthday night, you would always have dreams of them coming to the foster home so that they could take you back to your very opulent home. The three of you would sit at the dinner table and have a family meal like you always wanted. It would be reminiscent of something out of a commercial, the three of you all dressed fancily and laughing together like a perfect family. Ridiculous, it was and yet you always wished that you would never wake up from that dream but you always do. Your dreams were always so vivid, often times you wake up and you’re left with a sense of longing, wishing you could go back to where your heart seemed at peace. The day after your birthday is bitter and it always feels like you have a literal rain cloud over your head. The day after your birthday just feels like disappointment because whenever you wake up, you’re reminded once again of the fact that you’ve been abandoned by your parents for yet another year.

The resentment grows every year and you go from hating the day after your birthday to hating your birthday itself. You thought if you didn’t celebrate it, the immense pain you felt every year around that fateful day would fade but it doesn’t. So, you grow numb. You shut yourself off from the world, wishing to feel nothing rather than to feel all that pain. They tell you to smile, to be friendly so that it’ll make you look more adoptable but you can’t bring yourself to. Really, who would want you if your own parents didn’t want you?

You hated your birthday with every fibre of your being, you really did… until you turned 15.

Like any normal night, you had slipped under the covers at lights out and tried to go to sleep. It usually took you under an hour to go to bed but tonight your body was just buzzing with energy. You willed your mind and body to calm down but it was no use. It felt like every single nerve was crackling with an unknown electricity. In the dark, you looked at yourself to see if you were glowing, to see if anything was out of the ordinary but it nothing looked out of the ordinary.

“Hey,” You whisper as you reach over to prod the younger girl in the bunk bed next to you. “Is there anything on my body? Like do I look weird or anything?” You ask.

“Yeah, your face looks weird,” She says maliciously and laughs.

You let out an annoyed grunt as you roll your eyes at her and pull the blanket over yourself in frustration. God, you hated little kids.

An hour or two passes by and you still feel wide awake. You watch as the second hand ticks away, your precious hours of sleep drifting along with it. Now you’re just annoyed. You just really wanted to sleep so you think of the only thing that can calm you down. You think of your parents and Venice and—

A scream tears through your lungs as you feel your bed disappear underneath you, well you’re trying to scream but you can’t hear yourself. You must’ve rolled off your bed or something like that mid-dream. You feel yourself falling and you feel like your stomach is doing multiple acrobatic flips, much like when you’re on a roller coaster. You’re falling fast, too fast so you squeeze your eyes shut, bracing yourself for impact and the impending embarrassment that was to come.

The falling sensation stops and with a light thud you feel a surface beneath you, one that isn’t the smooth floor but rather a jagged surface. Slowly you peek out of your previously shut eyes and spot brick red roof tiles underneath you. You exhale, thinking this must be another one of your vivid dreams. But this time everything seems a little too real. You’re too aware…

You reach to pinch yourself and ouch that hurts, so this isn’t a dream? Maybe it was one of those lucid dreaming things that you’ve been reading about lately. They say in those dreams you’re able to float around or fly but looks like you’ve got the short end of the stick because gravity seems to be at play here, *sighs* damn it.

Curious, you glance downwards and you absolutely regret it because you’re aware of how dangerously high you are from the ground. You crawl along the top of the roof, inching forward slowly as you feel your palms begin to sweat. The sound of your heart beating is so loud that you can hear your pulse ringing in your ears. You do a quick glance around the roofs, making sure you do not dare to look anywhere other than at your eye-level. A few feet away from you, you spot a nicely decorated open top balcony and you begin to crawl faster towards it, wanting nothing other than to feel a stable surface beneath your feet.

As your feet touch the solid tiled floor of the balcony, you feel your heartbeat slow down and you breathe out a sigh of relief. You sure hope the owner of this home doesn’t come out any time soon to find you standing here because god knows how you’re going to explain how you got here in the first place.

Sinking down onto the plush couch, you finally let yourself look out to the horizon and you almost feel your jaw drop at the sight. You’ve seen something similar many times before, those domes in the distance, the numerous tiny bridges with striped-shirted men rowing gondolas underneath them and the glistening blue waters that surround the buildings that have stood the test of time. This is the very place you’ve been dreaming to see in person since you could remember. This is Venice.

You jump up from the couch immediately and venture forward. Clinging onto the balcony railing, you look out as far as you can. It’s exactly how the pictures on the internet and the books look like… okay maybe the water isn’t as clear but everything else looked perfect. The mind is such a beautiful thing, you thought… to be able to make a dreamscape look as real as this was really something else.

Standing there, you are simply in awe. You take the time to memorize every single building, to memorize how you feel in this moment because you’re unsure if your brain could recreate a dream like this ever again. You take a deep breath, gathering the courage to look down so you could see the streets and you look over the edge, stepping up on the bottom of the railing to get a clearer look.

You hear a loud crash, your head whipping around to the other side of the balcony where the noise had come from. You hear a young boy curse rubbing the spot on his head that had hit the railing of the balcony. Slowly, you walk yourself over, cautiously watching the young boy who was dressed in the oddest mismatched pajama set you’ve ever seen. You looked down and realized that you too were dressed in your pajamas and this whole dream is really beginning to confuse you.

“Where am I?”

“Uh, Venice, I think,” You answer.

He looks around, nodding to himself as if he could confirm that this is in fact Venice.

“Who are you?”

“I asked first,” He frowns.

You let out a deep sigh. You can tell you’re not going to like this guy already.

“Fine, I’m Y/N.”

“Okay Y/N, why are you in my dream?”

“This isn’t your dream, this is mine!”

He looks at you completely bewildered, as if you had just accused him of a crime.

“This is my dream thank you very much, no way you could’ve built Venice to look like this” He gestures wildly with his arms.

“Please, if there’s anyone that could do this, it’d be me.”

The boy scoffs, completely unamused.

“I’ve been playing Assassin’s Creed for months now, if there’s someone who knows what Venice would look like, it’ll be me.”

(Info: Assassin’s Creed II is a game wherein it takes place in 15th & 16th Century Italy)

Assassin’s Creed? You scoff mentally at the boy before you.

“I’ve read every article, book and magazine about Venice. If there’s anyone who knows what Venice would look like it’ll be me,” You boast. “Anyway, if it was based of Assassin’s Creed then why is everyone dressed in modern clothes?”

Taehyung looks over the edge of the balcony, watching the people below buzz around and you were right, they were all dressed in modern clothing but heck this is a dream and he was dressed in pajamas for god’s sake.

“Because, this is a dream and it doesn’t have to be accurate.”

“Look here—“ You pause, pointing at him, searching for a name.”

“Taehyung,” He answers.

“Alright, look here Taeh—“

A shrill scream jolts the both of you and you turn back to find a very shocked Italian woman screaming what you assume to be Italian profanities, some of which you recognize because aren’t those always the first words you pick up when trying to learn a language? Anyway, that’s beside the point because now she’s swinging her broom at you and you’re not sure what to do. You turn to your right, searching for Taehyung, hoping he would come to your rescue but the boy had disappeared. You rush backwards, ducking to avoid the broom as fear starts to course through you veins. Out of the corner of your eye, you watch Taehyung retreat to the other side of the balcony, hiding behind a giant potted plant. You scream his name, asking for help but you only see him watch you from his hiding spot.

What a douchebag.

“Oh my god, Miss really I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to trespass and—“ Another loud scream (that really, you feel is loud enough to shatter glass) leaves her throat and now the neighbours have all come to their windows to see what the commotion is all about. “—Please stop screaming, miss!” You beg. The broom gets closer and closer to your face and you move further and further towards the corner of the balcony.

She lifts her hand swinging backwards and you know the blow that’s about to come was going to hurt like crazy so you shut your eyes and hold your hands up to cover your head, hoping that it’s enough to soften the impact.

You wait and wait but you don’t feel anything. In fact, her shouting seems to have faded. Weird. Slowly, you peek out from behind your hands to find that you are no longer on the balcony, that you were now standing in the very alleyway you were looking at just before the woman had come at you with the broom. What the? How did I even?

You look up to see her still very furious as she screams in Italian at the passers-by, pointing at you and almost in unison they all stop to stare at you like they’re about to pounce. You back away slowly, shaking your head furiously while apologizing. You glance up once more and — oh god she’s going to throw the broom down.

Another loud scream sounds from above, one that sounded even higher in pitch, diverting everyone’s attention and you see the woman grabbing Taehyung by his ears, dragging him out of his hiding spot. Taehyung sinks to his knees, begging for forgiveness as the woman threatens him in Italian. He squeezes his eyes shut, wanting nothing more than for this nightmare to end. For a moment, he thinks he’s in the clear and that he’s back on his soft bed but when he feels his body crash into the ground he knows that truthfully this nightmare had only just begun.

The both of you have no time to think, to try and process what had just happened. How the both of you got from the fifth floor of the building all the way to the bottom was a mystery and was one not worth thinking about because this was just a dream, that’s what it was... a dream bordering on becoming a nightmare. The Italian women screams at the passers-by before running back into her house, presumably to chase after the both of you and you begin to feel panic rise within your chest. The crowd divides into two, one half looking at you and the other at Taehyung. The passers-by inch closer towards you, their eyes fixed on you, screaming profanities at you and without a second thought you take off running in the opposite direction that Taehyung had chosen to.

You run as far as your feet can take you and you don’t dare to glance back, afraid that they were only inches away from catching you. You turn at random corners and skid across the pathway as you try to avoid the oncoming foot traffic. Your tiny little feet slamming hard against the cobblestone as you propel yourself forward, putting more and more space between you and those pursuing you or at least you hope so.

After what seems like hours of running, you settle down on a bench at one of the small plazas littered throughout the city. You wipe the beads of sweat that have begun to drip down the side of your face with the back of your hand. You pant heavily, ducking your head down as you try to draw as little amount of attention to yourself as possible. Though that was a challenge since you were the only one dressed in a matching polka dot pajama set in broad daylight.

When you decide that the coast is clear, you get up from the bench and begin your long awaited chance at exploring the city. Everything seemed so different, so quaint and no matter how many times you had watched videos about the streets of Venice, nothing quite compared to being able to walk through them. Venice was everything you dreamed of and more. It was perfect in every single way, well except for the droves of tourists that seem to take up every inch of the walkway. Other than that, it was exactly how you pictured it to be.

You loved the way it smelled, the scent of the salt water canals wafting through the air. You loved watching people communicated in Italian animatedly, ah what a beautiful language. You loved the tiny stores that sold knick-knacks and the busy restaurants that sold food that made your mouth water. You loved how it was bustling city but you could escape the hustle and bustle easily by disappearing into some lesser known alleys. You wished you had a camera with you to capture all the sights and sounds, you wished you could live in this dream forever because you’d do anything to escape your sad reality.

A young family walks by the canals and you spot the young girl that seems to be right about 3, holding onto her parents’ hands. As they swing their arms in the air, you could only wish it was you in her place, that it was you holding onto the warm hands of your parents. Funny how reality had a way of affecting you even in your dreams, like it took pride in taking away every ounce joy you’re able to acquire.

Your feet begin to ache and your body begins to hurt as you feel your parched throat burn whenever you swallow your saliva. The world around you starts to spin and you find a bench to plop yourself down on before you pass out. Resting your elbows on your knees, you bring your hands up to shield your eyes from the sun that was blazing down on you. In your haze, you wonder where Taehyung was and if he had managed to get away like you did. This really was the most physically exhausting dream you’ve ever been in and maybe Taehyung was right and that this was his dream because none of your dreams had ever included this much goddamn running. You close your eyes, giving yourself a few moments to catch your breath but your head won’t stop spinning and you bend forward, thinking you might just throw up any minute now

Just as you stand up and take your first step, your feet wobbles and you feel like you’re suddenly being lifted into the air. You try to scream, pushing all the possible air out of your lungs but nothing leaves your throat, not even a squeak. You feel the same gust of wind, that falling sensation returning once again and your heart sinks because this probably means the dream is over. So you shut your eyes, letting a sense of disappointment wash over you.

With a light bounce, you find yourself back on your springy mattress again but it takes a moment for you to readjust and get your bearings right. You feel around, making sure that you really were in your room once again because as odd as it sounds, you felt like you just had an out of body experience. You lie there for a few seconds, trying to recap your dream and no matter how much you think about it, there really is no way to explain the chain of events that had happen. No way to explain how you had ended up in someone’s dream or how someone else had ended up in your dream. Glancing around, you see everyone still fast asleep, dawn fast approaching as the sky starts to fade to a lighter shade of blue. Quickly, you shut your eyes and settle down against your pillows, hoping to get a few more hours of sleep or perhaps hoping to return to the dream again.

“Up, up, up! Everybody up!” The matron shouts. “If I see any of you going back to bed, you’re not getting dinner tonight,” She adds.

There’s a collective groan that comes from the room and slowly but surely, you all exit the room one by one. You sit up, feeling like you’re slightly in a daze. That dream really took everything out of you. You were exhausted and oddly enough your legs ached and your throat felt like it was on fire.

You make your way down the rickety wooden stairs to the dining table where a simple breakfast had been laid out. You waddled across the room to your assigned seat, everyone waiting for you so that they could begin the meal. Just as you took your seat, your teeth almost sinking into the sandwich, the matron calls for you from the kitchen. Her voice had that tone to it, the one that made you shake with fear and everyone at the table sends you worrying looks.

Oooh, someone’s in trouble, you hear someone whisper.

You shuffle nervously towards the kitchen and when the matron sees you, she immediately pulls you into the pantry. Your eyes are wide with fear as you stare back at her in the dimly lit closet-sized room with cans upon cans of processed foods.

“Where were you last night?”

“What do you mean Miss? I was in bed,” You answer.

“Don’t play dumb with me kid,” She sneers. “When I did my rounds last night, you weren’t in bed so I’m asking you one more time. Where were you last night?”

“I was in bed, I swear miss!” You exclaim, your palm held up facing her as if you were saying an oath.

“Then why are you all sweaty?”

“I-I…” You swipe at your skin in confusion, wiping away the beads of sweat. “I just had a really crazy dream and I guess I—“

She looks at you, examining you features carefully to look for any sign of uncertainty in your face but your features only spelled out one thing, pure confusion.

“Your dreams… do they always feel very… real?” The matron asks after a long period of silence.

“Yes like—“

“Last night when you were dreaming, before you got to where you were, did it feel weird? Like you were on a—“

“—Rollercoaster,” You both say in unison.

You smile back at her, delighted that she understood what it felt like but she only looks back at you with eyes filled with worry.

“Go and finish you breakfast,” She sighs. “We’ll talk about this later.”

You chew on your sandwich slowly, mind somewhere else as you think about your dream and your short conversation with the matron. Something just didn’t feel right and it irked you so you just shift in your seat uncomfortably as you try to finish your breakfast.

As the bus approaches from the end of the street, the matron starts shouting, rushing all of you to put on your shoes. You being your usual nonchalant self, you take the time tying your own shoelaces and she shakes her head at you. As she pushes almost everyone out of the house, you stand there adjusting the straps of your backpack and she calls your name, beckoning you to come closer with the curl of her finger. She passes a small piece of paper to you carefully, telling you to stop by the library in town on the way back from school. Confused, you simply shove the paper into your pocket and run after the bus as the driver honks the horn for the umpteenth time.

As you settle down in your seat in the bus, you pull out the piece of paper from your pocket. Smoothing out the creases with your hands, you examine the words carefully. It said nothing more than a series of numbers which you assumed must be the book’s number code at the library. You slip the paper back into your pocket and decide to think about all of it later.

You were buzzing with curiosity the whole day, so much so that you simply couldn’t bring yourself to focus in any of your classes. You wondered what the book could be about and what it had to do with your dream, your teacher’s voice being reduced to a mere background soundtrack to your thoughts. Under the desk, you stretch your feet as best as you can to dissipate the aching feeling you felt. You wondered if somehow you had acted out your dream in your sleep because your body ached with every single move you made.

Before you knew it, the final school bell rang and everyone was rushing out of class. Still in a daze, you slowly get up to push everything on your desk into your bag. When you step out of class, you had a skip in your step as the prospect of finally being able to go to the library excited you.

The walk to the library seemed to take a lot longer than you remember and you’re not sure if it’s because you were itching with excitement or because you kept taking the wrong turns. When you finally reach the library, your school uniform clung to your body as the sweat dripped down your back. You shut your eyes in bliss as you felt the cool air coming from the air conditioner blow against your sweaty skin.

Standing on your tip toes, you pass the piece of paper to the librarian, asking her if she could point you to where the book was and she gladly points you to the shelf in far corner of the library. You nod gratefully and move towards the end if the library. The books in this section seemed like they had been untouched for years. The musty smell invaded your nostrils and you place your hand lightly above your nose to stop yourself from inhaling the thick layer of dust that has seemed to settle on all the books in this area.

You moved down the aisle slowly, your fingers grazing the spines of the books arranged neatly on the shelf, collecting dust as you moved along. You stop abruptly when you spot the same numbers on the now crumpled paper in your hand. You remove the book from the shelf and it is a lot smaller than you had expected. You thought it was going to be one of those grand hard cover books with emboldened gold letters but the one you held in your hand was rather simple leather bound book with no title at all.

You take a seat on the bench at the end of aisle and flip through the book. As you scan through the book, the language gets increasingly complex so you rely on the hand drawn pictures to fill in the blanks. Being 15, you’re not very sure about what you’ve just read but here’s the gist of what you think you understand.

For a long time now, there had been a group of people who simply have the ability to jump from one place to another so, essentially teleport. This phenomenon only takes place on said person’s birthday but there have been reports of some people being able to do so whenever they want to. Having vivid dreams is a common factor that many jumpers have because apparently, it’s their subconscious jumping to certain locations. As a community, most jumpers have chosen to be silent about their abilities after well-known members started to disappear mysteriously.

You shut the book, feeling more confused than before and also slightly more afraid. This all felt something a little like the beginning of an introduction to a cult. The first thought that comes to your mind is why did the matron know about this book and was this why she was always a little kinder towards you? Second, if you were meant to only be able to jump on your birthday then was today your actual birthday? If so, why did you celebrate your birthday on a different day. A hundred and one questions were swirling around in your mind.

When you return home, you try asking the matron about it all but she feigns ignorance, choosing to ignore your desperate pleas for answers. You don’t dare to tell anyone about your abilities, afraid some burly men were going to come and take you away to a hidden secret facility which is probably unlikely but you’ve watched far too many movies for a kid your age. After a while, your curiosity dies down and all the questions you have are kept away in some far corner of your mind. It didn’t seem like anyone was going to or capable of giving you the answers you wanted any time soon so what was the point of dwelling on these questions?

One year later

Your body was buzzing with the same energy like the year before. It was a minute away from midnight and you were already too excited, barely able to contain yourself. Sneaking past row after row of bunk beds, you made sure to hold your breath and tiptoe all the way until you reached the door. Stepping out into the hallway, you take in a huge breath and stood in the hidden corner of the house, occasionally glancing around to see if anyone had followed you out of the room. A loud chime sounded from the grandfather clock downstairs and your eyes lit up, it was finally time. With clenched fists, you think hard about Venice, choosing a quiet alley this time because god knows you didn’t want a repeat of the whole balcony scene again.

A second or two ticks by and you felt electricity buzz beneath your skin. You felt your body shake with excitement, your skin tingling and before you had the time to process anything, you felt your body being flung into the air, like a big gust of wind had swept you off your feet.

With a soft thud, you feel your feet land on a tiled surface and you groan aloud. Christ, not again. It was the same balcony, the railings were much higher this time and you guess that was probably due to the mishap last year. You had just begun to shut your eyes, picturing a small alleyway within your sights when you hear a yelp, accompanied by a crashing sound as a wisp of green smoke clears to reveal Taehyung. You groan in distaste, clearly still unhappy to see him because he had abandoned you last year on this very balcony.

“Jesus, not you again,” Taehyung says as he locks eyes with you.

“Yeah, don’t worry I feel the same way,” You snort.

“Look, I believe you now, this is your dream or whatever because hell, my dreams are never as crazily vivid as the one I was in last year,” He heaves. “Please, get me out of this dream, I don’t want to go through this again,” He groans.

You laugh uncontrollably, barely able to catch your breath as you take in the worried look on Taehyung’s face.

“What’s so funny? Don’t tell me you enjoy mentally torturing people or something?”

“Uhh...Taehyung was it?” You ask and he nods, slightly confused. “This isn’t a dream,” You laugh.

“What do you mean this isn’t a dream?” He asks when you simply continue laughing, not stopping to give him an explanation.

“It’s your birthday isn’t it?” You smirk.

“I-It is... How do you know that?” He gasps.

“Because Taehyung, you & I are Jumpers.”

6 years later

You stepped forward, into the light but your gaze remained fixed on the floor. You didn’t dare look in his eyes, too afraid of what he would do, what he would say.

“Y/N…” The tone of his voice filled with disbelief and the way he says your name comes out as a mere whisper. Taehyung stares at your guilt-ridden face, your hands folded in front of you as you nervously twiddled your thumbs together.

Taehyung feels the ropes around his arms loosen as Yoongi stalks over. His subordinates standing around the room aim their guns at Taehyung for good measure, a silent warning for him to behave.

“I hope you’re not thinking of doing anything stupid,” Yoongi says as he gestures around the room.

Taehyung doesn’t reply and remains still in the seat, his legs still tied to the chair. His mind is reeling as you shift nervously from one feet to another in front of him. Your eyes never once leaving the floor. How could you, why would you?

“Since you were so insistent—“ Yoongi places a small knife in his hand. “—go ahead and carve out her tongue then.”

You let out a yelp of pain as Yoongi’s men kick at the back of your knee and force you to kneel before Taehyung. Your eyes flicker up to look at Taehyung and you’re sure he can see the fear you’re trying so hard to hide. You bite down on your lower lip to stop it from quivering and try to control your breathing.

“Go on,” Yoongi laughs. “Or are you just all talk?”

Taehyung roughly grabs your face, fingers digging into your cheek and despite all your effort, a whimper escapes your lips.

The cold blade rests on your lips and you shut your eyes, struggling against his hold.

“Hold her down! Hold her mouth open!” You hear Yoongi shout and you feel tears threaten to start streaming down your face.

I’m so sorry, Taehyung, you wanted to say but you couldn’t get it out. At this point, Taehyung was probably confused, hurt and blinded with rage. Nothing you say or do could stop him from cutting out your pretty little tongue but you wanted him to know that you didn’t think Yoongi would have done all of this to him. He promised you he wouldn’t hurt you or Taehyung but you guess you’re a fool for believing the words of a man who tortured people for fun.

You feel your tongue being yanked out of your mouth and the tip of the knife being pressed to the side of it.

Forgive me, Taehyung, forgive me.

#btswriters #kwritersnet #bts fanfic #bts scenarios #bts fluff

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clairedmaddox · 5 years ago

Text

The Goose

The following is an excerpt from The Lund Loop Newsletter. To learn more click here.

In one sense, the hole in the television was beautiful, almost artistic.

The impact – from what I first assumed was a broomstick, but later turned out to be a hammer – had punched a perfect circle in the center of the tube, radiating a sunburst of fine cracks towards the edge of the screen.

That it hadn’t exploded in an electric storm of glass shards puzzled me. All the TV’s I’d seen smashed by guitars in bad 80’s music videos had done so. But the lack of dried blood or bits of flesh in the shag carpet in front of the television cabinet convinced me otherwise – and somewhat disappointedly I must confess.

None of my roommates were home to help solve the mystery, but explicitly understanding the dynamics of a house shared by four twenty-something males, I started to backfill a theory as to why the only TV in the house was now inoperable.

And it wasn’t just any TV. It was a 32” Sony Trinitron, arguably the best set you could buy in 1986. And even though my roommate got it for free by pulling a credit card scam at Circuit City, it was still a loss.

Occam’s razor suggested an overly inebriated partygoer had backed into it while playing air guitar with a broom, but that’s as far as I could take my mental exercise as I was tired and numb. To the point that kissing sixteen channels of cable TV goodbye for the foreseeable future didn’t even register.

I had just arrived home after a six-hour drive from Arizona, where my girlfriend and I spent a week trying to make Castaneda-like connections with the spirits of dead shamans, but instead got drunk and crashed in cheap motels.

I was disappointed by the experience, though the fact that Castaneda’s tool of transformation was peyote and ours was Crazy Horse Malt Liquor did not occur to me at the time.

It was upon climbing the stairs to my room that I realized the damaged TV was just the beginning of a tale that would end with the spilling of avian blood and a public shaming, the likes of which Huntington Beach, California had never seen.

—-

The older you get, the more your circle of friends solidifies. Though you still might pick up some acquaintances later in life, it’s very rare to develop true friendships after forty. Rarer still is meeting true friends of your true friends – those whom you’ve never met before. That’s because, by the time you hit forty, you’ve known your true friends for a long time and are much more likely to have met anyone else meaningful in their lives.

Meeting friends of friends is something that happens in your early 20s.

That’s the time when your world is expanding, first by leaving high school, and second by entering college or the workforce. That’s when you first start to meet people who don’t know your parents or siblings, aren’t familiar with your hometown, and don’t share a common history with you.

Meeting a friend of a friend is a dicey proposition when you’re young. They come with implied approval due to their relationship to your new friend, but not a guarantee. After all, you haven’t really known your new friend that long, so how can you be sure they are a good judge of character – present company excepted.

For me, it worked like this…

In my early 20s, I picked up some new friends whom I ran with for a few years. One was from across town, another from one county north, while three or four others were transplants from out of state. Those were the ones you had to worry about.

The transplants were trying to get away from something. Usually a small-town mentality or small-minded people.

But small-minded people aren’t very good at getting the hint, and every spring break or 4th of July holiday a friend of a friend would arrive in town, excited to see what Southern California was all about.

That’s how I first met Snap. His real name was Sean.

Sean was a good guy. A solid guy. He was intelligent and polite, even thoughtful at times. The type of guy you’d introduce to your mom and she’d tell you the next day, “I really like that Sean.”

But Sean was a different person when we went out drinking – which happened quite a bit.

One moment everything would be great. Everybody would be laughing, joking, and having a fun time. Then in an instant, it would all go bad.

Sean would fly across the bar and crack a random guy in the jaw. Or scream “you’re a fucking bitch,” to a girl whose only crime was to order a drink next to him. Often, he’d break down and sob incoherently to his friends, who, while trying to console him, would suddenly be accused of mockery and challenged to a fight.

The worst part was that you never knew when it would happen. On some nights it only took one beer before things went off the rails. On others, he could drink all night long without incident.

But when it did go bad, it always happened without warning. There were never any signs or telltale clues that he was about to go off. He just snapped.

So, we called him “Snap.”

—-

As I came to the top of the landing, I noticed that three of the four doors to the bedrooms were open, an unusual occurrence in our house. Though all my roommates knew and mostly trusted each other, it was best practice to keep your door shut.

And it was no coincidence that the only door that was still closed had a lock on it. Or that it was mine.

Walking past the open doors, more damage was revealed. In my roommate Andy’s room, his pride and joy, a five-component stereo system, had been destroyed.

All the knobs from the tuner were on the floor, and the posts that held them in place bent downward as if hit by a hard object.

Both the windows on the dual-cassette player were cracked, like some solid metal object had been smashed into them.

The five-disc CD player had dents all over its case, the type that would occur if a hammer type instrument had struck it.

Hmmm?

And finally, both speakers had multiple holes punched in front and back, each the same size and circumference as the hole on the TV tube downstairs.

Double hmmm?

Then I passed Greg’s room and saw that the strings on his prized guitar were hanging by the tuners, as if ripped out from the bridge. There were also round impact marks across the face of the guitar which matched up with the stereo and the TV.

I was sensing a pattern here.

My third roommate, Jeff, has a couple of things askew in his room but no damage as far as I could see.

As tired as I was, I couldn’t help but modify my theory. Besides, it was simple.

Andy worked five days a week and had to get up at seven each day. Because of this, he was always in bed by 9:00pm. However, Greg was currently in between jobs, and liked to watch TV downstairs until early in the morning. On more than one occasion – sometimes multiple times per night – Andy would come out of his room and ask Greg to turn the TV down.

Sometimes once was all it took. But other times it might be four or five times before the request was acted on, and by that time they both were screaming at each other like maniacs.

Like I said, it was simple. Andy finally had enough of the loud late-night TV, came downstairs, and in a fit of rage, smashed Greg’s TV screen with a hammer.

Greg then took the hammer, ran upstairs, and went to town on Andy’s stereo system. After he was done, Andy took the hammer and attempted to destroy Greg’s guitar.

My roommate Jeff likely tried to break them up – physically – which is why some of the stuff in his room was knocked around.

Simple.

So I unlocked my door, went into my room, and crashed for a well-needed rest, unaware that the real culprit in this mayhem was “Goose.”

—-

I met Goose for the first and only time when I woke up from my nap. His real name was Eric. I never did get his last name.

He was a friend of a friend – a transplant – who had been hanging out and partying at our house for the last three days.

Our house sat on the corner of our tract’s outlet street, right next to a main thoroughfare. Sitting on our front lawn, you could see a wall across the street which ran along the length of that thoroughfare denoting our neighbor’s backyards.

It was in one of those backyards where a honking sound began on the Saturday night I was trying to commune with dead Indians (sorry, that’s what we called them in 1986).

The sound was made by a goose.

Apparently, Goose – the friend of a friend, not the animal – was in the front yard drinking with my friends and roommates and got annoyed by this sound. So he announced to anyone who’d listen, “I’m going to go over there and kill that fucking goose.”

With that he threw down his beer, grabbed a club out of an old golf bag in the garage – I think it was a three-wood – ran across the street, and jumped the fence into a random neighbor’s backyard.

Immediately, he was confronted by a full-grown male Canadian goose, honking, and using its long neck to lunge and peck at him. According to Eric’s police deposition, he freaked out, took a swing, and despite never having played a hole in his life, connected flush with the head of the goose, immediately silencing it and in the process, separating it from life.

Eric claimed that he never meant to hurt the goose, just to scare it, but when it lunged at him, he panicked, causing him to take the fatal swing.

But that wasn’t the end of it and retaliation was swift. In addition to reporting it to the police, the owner of the goose got his brother and a buddy together, grabbed some tools, including – c’mon, you know where this is going – a hammer, broke into our house when everybody was out, and proceeded to do as much damage as possible to our highly prized consumer goods.

But he didn’t stop there. He also called the local newspapers – when local newspapers were social media – and begin a shame campaign.

So though Eric returned to the shithole from whence he came, never to face justice – or return to HB again, my roomates and I had to endure the scorn that arose from a series of front page articles about the goose murder, each one accompanied by a photo of the neighbors holding up their photo of Susie – their deceased pet goose.

The Goose published first on your-t1-blog-url

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jacewilliams1 · 6 years ago

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One last airplane ride for Dad

We had slipped between two showers near Van Wert, ducking under a cloud that was surely about to burst itself, and emerged into open sunshine to the west, and a long, gray annular cloud laying across the Ohio farm fields ahead and below, looking a bit like an exhausted roll cloud, its enthusiasm depleted after the afternoon’s deluge, hovering too low to glide beneath, yet still a bit too Janus-faced to climb above. As expected, a line of training storms had redeveloped late on this August afternoon over northern Indiana, but they had not scooted along into Michigan as fast as I had hoped. Best we follow the sunlight for now and keep our options open.

Over the farms of Ohio, Mother Nature showed who was really in control.

The Fort Wayne controller said the precipitation further north, between us and our destination, Steuben County airport, was extreme; back toward the east it was light, at least on his radar. Pirouetting our trusty old straight-tailed Cessna 150 around and commencing to motor back the way we had come, I started looking for signs that that long, low roll of a cloud wasn’t as duplicitous as I thought. We only had about 30 miles to go as the crow flies, after a three-day trip from Vermont. We had spent the previous day weaving around rain showers and other remnants of a lethargic trough for a good part of the way, stuck between model train villages and the spectacular papier-mache topography of central Pennsylvania below and an annoyingly persistent ceiling above.

Thirty miles over the ground to Steuben County, and, as it happened, with a dash of not-so-subtle déjà vu, a bit over four decades back through time.

My grandfather Russell, Grandpa Green, my father’s father, passed away in August 1975. He had been in Tampa, working on city water system surveys, as he had nearly every summer for decades. He was an only child from a relatively loveless home, narrowly missing deployment during World War I, an engineer who spent most of his life teaching high school and college applied mathematics. He always seemed old to me, balding, with snow white hair and rimless glasses. His ability to sustain a handstand well into his 60s more or less escaped my notice as a child.

I had seen him a few weeks before he died, when I had flown over to Tampa from George Speer’s old Palm Beach Gardens airport. By that time, I had realized what a treasure of history he was, and I peppered him with questions over dinner. But I think I knew. I remember his grip as we shook hands before I climbed into my airplane, and I remember thinking, briefly, that I would never see him again. Within a few weeks, it was clear that when he shook my hand, he knew that for certain.

When he died, I was on a solo hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We knew things were not good; after my first night, I came down to civilization to call home and see what was up. “You’d better come home,” Dad said. I thumbed my way back to my old ’65 Volkswagen and set off on the four-hour drive back home.

Dad and I took off from Chester, Connecticut, in N5072D, our old 1958 Cessna 182, the next morning, headed for Steuben County Airport in Angola, Indiana. Angola was the home of Tri-State College, where my grandfather taught and where both he and my father obtained their engineering degrees. It was near Fremont, where the Jordan Cemetery was, and most of the family on my grandfather’s side was buried there. My grandmother had died four years before, and we buried my grandfather right next to her a couple of days after everyone had gotten there. The morning afterward, Dad and I set off back to Connecticut. He had to get back to work, and I had to get back to college.

The weather was going to be a problem. Neither of us, or the airplane, was qualified for instrument flight. In those days we were still intimate with the sound of hammering teletypes, and when you dialed… as in spun the dial on the phone… the Flight Service Station, a live person answered. But a weather briefing at the Steuben County airport was sorely lacking in visual aids. We ended up landing at Van Wert, Ohio, and later at Lima.

Sliding offshore to avoid clouds – surely they’ll break up…

As I recall, the weather we were encountering was not the weather we had expected, and the frequent stops were to review the situation and wait out some change. One way or another, we ended up going past Cleveland Lakefront airport a couple of miles out over the water at about 500 feet, to slip between showers; immediately to the east the clouds broke up and lifted. We climbed comfortably to 7500 feet, on top of a broken layer, and I distinctly recall that we were certain these clouds would disappear completely as we motored east.

At some point, the generator failed. And we didn’t notice, until the battery failed as well. And there we were; on top of what had become multiple layers of broken cloud, no radios, no fuel gauges, and about three and a half hours of flight already behind us. It wasn’t particularly hard to spiral down through gaps in the broken clouds; the real problem was what to do once we got down below the bottom layer. We were about 1500 feet above the rolling countryside with only a vague idea where we were. We spent 15 or so minutes wandering about looking for some kind of recognizable landmark or any usable airport. We found neither. And then we made what was probably the smartest decision we ever made: we picked out a good farm field and landed.

The farmer was thrilled. No one had ever landed in one of his fields before; it seemed like the high water mark of his entire summer. We quickly determined where we were on the sectional, and saw that there was an airport about ten miles down the river. Dad took a look in the tanks, saw we had a couple of inches of fuel left, and we decided to set off for the airport. Dad had plenty of experience from his teenage years hand-propping airplanes with no electrical systems, and of course that was the only option. First though, we walked the entire length of the field to make sure there wasn’t some hidden ditch that nobody remembered. And then I held the brakes, ran the switch and throttle, Dad propped us off and climbed in, and I lifted us gently and easily out of the farm field. A straight tail 182 is a magnificent airplane, particularly when it doesn’t have a lot of gas in the tanks.

Sure enough, in a couple of minutes there was the airport, and we rolled up to the fuel pumps hoping to keep our little secret… until we got out of the airplane and saw the leading edges thoroughly covered with cow manure. The farmer had wisely called ahead, of course, so there was no secret anyway. We fueled up, cleaned the leading edges a bit, Dad propped the engine once more, and later that evening we landed back in Connecticut.

That was 43 years ago, at pretty much the midpoint of my father’s life. This past winter, Dad finally finished his own journey, after a lengthy bout with Parkinson’s disease. He had absolutely no interest in formal funerals, ceremonies, wakes, or burials. He had, at one point, mentioned that he thought it would be nice if we affixed a small plaque to his parent’s gravestone out there in Indiana.

I spent the day after he died doing the things one does, particularly trying to figure out what to do with his ashes. I chatted with the cousins and sent messages to friends that I knew would want the news. One friend, a pilot at my airline, asked what the funeral plans were. I told her that we would probably inter Dad out there at the Jordan Cemetery in Indiana. Knowing something of his aeronautical passions, she texted back, “Oh, that’d be nice. He’d get one last airplane ride.”

And in that instant, staring at her message, I knew there was only one way Dad was going back to Indiana.

I hadn’t flown a light airplane in nearly three decades, but a couple of very talented young flight instructors at the local flight school soon had me straightened out. They each had just a bit more total time than I report on a year’s worth of first class physicals, but they know their stuff, and gently steered me away from pilot-induced oscillations and back to rudder-controlled stalls, with an occasional reminder about other faded memories like P-factor, primer strokes and control positions when taxiing in wind.

Suddenly, I was aloft over Lake Champlain, quite literally on my first solo flight in 28 years, with the approach controller putting the finishing touches on my Rip Van Winkle awakening by calling out crossing traffic, at ten o’clock, coincidentally also at 3000 feet, subtly nudging me to the realization that there was no TCAS, and that perhaps I ought to actually do something.

Getting reacquainted with a Cessna 150 after a lifetime flying airliners.

By a stroke of luck, my friend Doug Smith happened to have recently acquired a wonderful old straight tail Cessna 150, and he offered me the use of the airplane for the week or so I would need. Doug’s wizened old 150 was perfect. And pretty close to our 182 in shape and style, if not in floor plan and power. Manual flaps… I love manual flaps. Old radios. Airspeed in miles per hour. There were a few welcome additions… a shoulder harness STC. Great big sun visors that I’ve never seen in any 150 before. Dad and I had learned to fly together in a 1967 Cessna 150. A 150 of that vintage seemed like a perfect ship for the occasion.

And so Dad and I had set off on a Wednesday morning, starting a three-day aerial journey across America, retracing a good bit of his life, just the two of us, in a manner of speaking, taking a last airplane ride, making about 95 miles per hour give or take the wind.

Dad’s first flight had been a memorable ride in a PT-19 at Austin, Texas, given by his big brother, my uncle Wayne, the future physics professor, who was a C-46 instructor during the war. Dale Mollenkopf, the manager of Branch County Memorial Airport in Michigan, had taught Dad the basics of wrangling Pipers, Ryans and Aeroncas during his high school years, and in the blink of an eye Dad was an engineer at North American in Los Angeles, listening to George Welch describe his near-death experience the morning after a gear door popped open when flying an F-100 through a Mach calibration run.

By the time I came along, Dad was part of the powerplant systems group at North American’s Columbus, Ohio, plant, in what is now known as Air Force Plant 85. After straightening out the Navy’s fuel problems with the T-28, he was tasked with fabricating and running the fuel systems mockup for the A3J Vigilante, shortly after I had discovered fire by sticking my finger in the single candle on my first birthday cake. Ever the avid cameraman, Dad had photographed the whole sequence, leaving a wonderful legacy of my learning style in vivid black and white. Thus began the infusion of the family tradition of prudence.

And so it was that, 60 years later, on our second evening, we alighted on runway 28L at Columbus, immediately adjacent to Air Force Plant 85. The following day it rained quite a bit. Careful analysis of several forecast tools and discussions indicated that an afternoon respite in the showers would give us a chance to make a dash north to Indiana, with numerous alternates open along our route if things didn’t move as fast as we hoped.

Sure enough, the exhausted, breathless roll cloud was dissipating, but there was a crisp palette of grays in the sky beyond, while Fort Wayne was clearly visible in sunshine to our right. If that was light precipitation, we didn’t need to mess with it. And beyond that, what if we succeeded? Once we were on the other side of it, what would we find then? We puttered along for five or six minutes, cogitating, as Grandpa Green would have said. Let’s see… two hours airborne, at 5.6 gallons per hour, so we’ve got about an hour before we have to be on the ground if we want to land with any reserves.

Even if we could get around the precipitation, it would take 20 minutes to go this way, and another 20 to go that way. This was not a winning plan. Finally, I said aloud, “You know, Dad… I can’t think of one good reason why we would want to be over on the other side of that weather with an hour’s worth of fuel left. What do you think? Close enough? Let’s land and get a car.”

And with that, I keyed the mike. “Fort Wayne, Cessna 43T… you know what? I think we’re gonna come visit you today…”

More rain arrived as we got the airplane tied down, and the hour drive to Angola was rather wet. My cousin was at Ruby Tuesday’s, and we had a late dinner. The following morning, we revisited many of Dad’s childhood haunts, including the Branch County airport, where Dad had become briefly famous in his Air Scout troop after he succeeded in getting the APU started on the surplus, donated C-46, so the Scouts could power up the rest of the aircraft systems.

The trip home included many personal stops, like this one in Columbus, Ohio, where the North American plant still stands (left of runway).

We buried Dad that afternoon, back at the Jordan Cemetery, in front of his parents’ grave, next to his grandparents’ grave. It was just the two of us, my cousin Nancy and me. We didn’t have anything else appropriate to say, so I read aloud a poem, written by our grandmother and found so many years ago in our grandfather’s wallet. It seemed to fit. We then retired to a surprisingly delightful restaurant, Timbuktoo, of all the names in the world to choose for a restaurant in the farmland of Indiana, and we spent the late afternoon upholding the family tradition of solving most of the world’s deeper problems over dinner and coffee. Nancy drove back to Chicago that night.

The weather was good the next day. I took off at nine in the morning, stopped three times for fuel and arrived back in Burlington at around seven that evening. It was a long day, but peaceful, certainly no more challenging than a four-leg day in the MD-80. My landings had improved markedly, until the last one at Burlington, on a beautiful, clear summer evening, absolutely windless, smooth, and so I managed to squeeze three landings into one approach, just in case I was getting an airline pilot’s fat head.

It took a few minutes to unload 43T, to pull out my overnight bag, cameras and survival gear. I slipped the towbar around the nose strut and rolled the ship back into its tie-down. I had to knot the ropes back into the lugs in the ramp, since I had taken them with me. Window shades in place, pitot cover on, ropes snug, I gathered my kit and slipped out the back gate.

I had wanted to give Dad a simple, old school flight back to Steuben County, keeping faith with his curmudgeonly dismissal of modernity. And yet, in the end, there was the August weather again, stirring the pot, laying down the gauntlet, and one way or another we ended up making the same decision we did 43 years ago… to quietly and discreetly land, before we got into trouble, before we drew attention to ourselves. Funny, that. Maybe that was the way it was supposed to be all along.

The three pillars of prudence, taking counsel, judging of what one has learned, and exercising command, held great value for Grandpa Green, my father’s father. If I remember anything about him, it was that he had a prudent demeanor, and a prudent expression. His eyes belied an expectation of patience, honest effort, and cautious judgement. He strongly suggested questioning assumptions. He persistently urged the investigation of how you know what you know.

These ideas were the subject of many evening discussions, of which I was but a privileged observer, over copious amounts of coffee and curling pipe smoke. Drawing attention to yourself, on the other hand, was rather plainly frowned upon. Now that I think about it, I suspect that drawing attention to yourself was frowned upon by pretty much everyone buried in the Jordan Cemetery.

Alas, it seems that perhaps we arrived in grand style after all. In any event, Dad is home now. And, thanks to a simple old Cessna, so am I.

The post One last airplane ride for Dad appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2019/02/one-last-airplane-ride-for-dad/

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