#The Sky Islands would be so uncanny for the guy
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Linktober Day 8
Constructs
Way too late if ya ask me because Nayru and Hylia have decided to forsake me but it's done. *Collapses* This one did NOT want to write itself no matter how hard I tried even if I have so many feelings about constructs, in the end Hozier, the SS and TOTK soundtrack carried this to the final stretch even if it's just a small drabble lol.
Mostly referenced this time though, something soft and nice about Sky and Reader and Constructs, can be interpreted as platonic or romantic. Day 9 and 10 prompts will be released on the same day if it all possible though depending if I actually get some darn rest and have the time (because Legend is being a bit difficult on the Linktober Shadow one in contrast to how deity is going and I have irl stuff to get done, hopefully this is good enough until then.).
Wild’s Sky Archipelagos couldn’t be different from Skyloft, though no less breathtaking. The eternal beauty of the sky ringing true and everlasting over the cloud barrier enforced by Hylia, though if the sky found in your favorite Godslayer’s was beautiful due to the life that thrived in the loneliness in spite of it all, of creating a community that would outlast the wish for entropy Demise attempted to enforce into the world with the black hole heart of his greed, then Wild’s was because of the echoes of what once was there, that it was lovely and beautiful even in ruin as nature reclaimed what belonged to it by right. That even if the people were gone they existed, they thrived and lived and loved and even in tragedy, that mattered.
And nothing reflected that better than the Constructs which of outlasted the civilization. Made out of now decayed copper and sturdy ceramic, made cute, so the people would remember to treat their new helpers kindly, and made sturdy so they’d remember the people who loved adored them and their built in sense of duty and kindness to aid any guest of friend in need and given voices so they could listen to them speak, to make them just a little closer to humanity.
‘Many of them are deactivated now,’ Wild had told you, the first time you’d all stepped foot onto the main island, it was disorienting for you and most of the Chain (except for Sky, because of course your heavenly, cloud trailblazing boy would have taken to the abandoned, atmosphere cold and echoing sun gold clear beauty of the sky island the quickest like a fish whom was questioned on their ability to swim or a falcon on their ability to hunt, you were almost jealous if not for the fact you or Four always made lunges for his collar – Crimson didn’t come with through the portal after all, nor First’s Russet’- when he attempted to follow Wild’s lead and in consequence give you heart attacks), the little beings of ceramic and old bronze completely non hostile, going about tending to the islands with their faint whirs of gears and whistles of self sustaining magic batteries, voices cold but calm, almost comforting and the first pieces of technology far away from Sky’s them that weren’t immediately hostile towards your boys, ‘Mostly the soldier ones, the Stewards have remained though. Carrying on with their duty, making the place homey even if the people are gone.’
Something about that gave you pause, lagging behind your group in a long abandoned garden, the scent of Sundelions and lavender tickling your nose and a deactivate Soldier Construct coiled up in slumber. Remembering the ancient robots in Sky’s Era, carrying on in their little pockets of time, unaware that the people they were created to aid have long since gone, that their time had long gone, of Fi, everlasting, ever sleeping Fi, bound to duty, always remembering the one’s who created her, of Sky who treated her as a friend, and always watching as people so very unlike him but achingly similar came and went, unable to do anything. Loving like a ghost.
“Guest?”, came a little mechanical chirp, you blink yourself back into awareness, a Steward floating over with a tilted head, jade ceramic earrings clinking, “If I may, you look troubled. May I offer unsolicited aid?”
You can’t help but chuckle, shaking your head gently, an idea stitching yourself in your mind like threads of silk upon a gown, “No no, sorry, I’m alright, I was just wondering. Is it alright if I come on by to pick some flowers? They’re lovely, you did a great job caring for them.”
It inclines their head, chiming, something close to delight, as much as it can express as a machine, “Ah, I see you were admiring them. If I may offer a bit of trivia, Sundelions were the queen's favorite, you may. Will you take care of them?”
You smile, gently reaching a hand to pat it’s head with a nod, it clicks and whistles, surprised, but doesn’t pull away, “Of course, may I ask you a few questions as well? I’d like to know how many Soldier Constructs are resting now.”
You should also ask Sky what Fi’s opinion is on flowers, as well.
It might be a bit silly, but they deserve it after so long.
(Later, much later, when the Chain notices you’re gone after talking to Zelda in the Temple of Time high up in the. Sky finds you in the garden, gently weaving blossoms into a crown, the construct from before amicably chatting with you as it tends to the Sundelions with a ring of flowers around it's long, long neck.
He joins you, and when asked what his and Fi’s opinion is on flowers, he tells you she won’t mind, much less him.
Later that day, Fi’s gains a crown of yarrow, bluebells and morning glories
It’s not much, but it makes Sky smile, you hope she likes them.)
#linked universe x reader#technically#lu sky x reader#drabble this time because irl stuff and me needing a nap because I'm cutting close to the mark where humans have hallucinations lmao#Yes I call First's Loftwing Russet what of it? Gotta keep with the theme#I think Sky would absolutely be the type to forget Loftwings don't exist in TOTK Hyrule and just instinctively leap off high places#The Sky Islands would be so uncanny for the guy#The Chain ain't used to non hostile machinery but they think constructs are neat#Fi technically counts as a construct even if she's a sword now just saying. She deserves a gift for all her hard work and everything else#Next time they go to the Sky Islands Reader and Sky find out all the constructs wear flower crowns and collars and are delighted lol#Including the sleeping soldier constructs now#sure they're hostile but they were just doing their jobs alright? I say they deserve some too#summer writes linktober 2023#summer writes#after I rest next one up is Deity and I am having way too much fun writing it *cackles like a maniac*
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Does anyone ever think about how the clans used to actually have differences in culture and lifestyle and how all of that got erased in the newer books?
Imagine how cool it would have been if the Erins had explored these cultural differences between the clans even FURTHER because that would have given the series so much potential.
Here are some examples of just how cool cultural differences can be:
RiverClan
I want to see RiverClan using their skills in swimming way more than they do currently, let them swim to the gathering island every full moon, let them attack other clans from the depths of the lake and drag cats down into the water to drown them. Let them still have their easygoing and relaxed attitude but show how formidable they can be in a fight and make it clear that they are not to be messed with.
Give them their own traditions too, let them celebrate the coming of spring each year because of ice melting and the river thawing so that they can fish again. Let them collect pretty flower petals on this day to decorate their dens and have them celebrate it by all going down to the river to fish.
Show their clan’s love for pretty trinkets and have them gather pretty shells and pebbles from the river. Let the apprentices play games this way by seeing who can find the prettiest shell for their den and boasting about it later. I imagine the other clans would view them as relaxed and easygoing, always having a ready source of food thanks to the river but at the same time they know to fear them for their almost unnatural fighting skills in the water.
WindClan
Imagine WindClan still keeping their old tradition of tunnelling even at the lake territory, imagine WindClan tunnellers accidentally discovering the old forgotten tunnels that run under the forest and finding out pieces of their history this way, possibly even before Jayfeather does. I wish they had kept the tunnelling tradition alive because that was what made WindClan so unique.
Show just how fast WindClan can be, let them use the tunnels to invade other territories and let them be almost impossible for the others to catch up to. They might be considered scrawny but show that they have an advantage in battle because of their uncanny speed.
In general let them have a closed off and cold approach to the other clans. Show that they think they are closer to StarClan than the others because they live and sleep under open skies. They might seem almost mysterious to the other clans and deeply rooted in their traditions. Let them have oral storytelling nights and let them chart constellations in the night sky, keeping alive the tales of their ancestors.
The could even believe that the wind which blows over the moors is holy, the echo of the voices of their ancestors. I picture them as a religious clan, even more than the others. Perhaps they pray by listening to the wind and leaving offerings to be blown away in the breeze (usually the feathers of birds of prey)
ShadowClan
Next up is ShadowClan, the stereotypical bad guys. I would have loved if ShadowClan had been shown to follow a more nocturnal lifestyle, being active mostly at night. They would be masters of stealth, blending into the shadows and coating themselves with mud and leaves for camouflage due to their territories limited undergrowth. This might be what gives them their stereotypical bad smell, that ThunderClan always complains about.
Their territory is very marshy and due to little undergrowth it would be harder for them to stalk prey. This has caused them to be the stealthiest out of all the clans and the best hunters. But they are also able to use this stealth to their advantage in a fight. They attack without warning from the shadows and rely on surprise, always striking at night when it’s hardest to see them.
Their tradition could be the celebration of the winter solstice, the longest night of the year.
ThunderClan
And finally we have the main protagonists ThunderClan. This clan has always felt bland to me in terms of tradition because they don’t seem to have anything that really makes them stand out. I imagine they are probably the best trackers due to having to hunt and track prey in thick bushy undergrowth.
But honestly I would have loved if they had been given something to make them special and unique. Any ideas?
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it could be the sleep deprivation! but it is also possible. that i unironically like space waltz BECAUSE!
[spongebob holding hands out dot jpeg]
it reminds me a lot of red dwarf. WHICH!
[spongebob holding hands out dot jpeg]
isn't to say that it's good like red dwarf is. only that, as a parody of the space exploration/space opera genre, it also manages to be its own thing. you look at, for example, unser traumschiff. it's a one-to-one parody of star trek tos. the characters, set design, costume, even sound effects. when you watch unser traumschiff you are essentially watching Bad, unliscenced Star Trek, on purpose. red dwarf, while a sitcom that parodies, goes out of its way to make New Lore. New Characters. New Motivations. (and is also a pastiche of many scifi works.) when you watch red dwarf, you are just... watching red dwarf.
and that's the weird thing about space waltz. because it strikes a weird balance between an unser traumschiff and a red dwarf. the primary parody is star trek tos, and this is obvious. you have a character standing in for uhura, a character that references sulu (a botanist that also flies the ship), a character that appears to reference both data from TNG and kryten from red dwarf in the form of an android.
but.... the costume design, the sound design, the set design, even the props.... they don't follow the norm for a parody in this genre. you have this weirdly haunting music that plays over most skits. a bright white ship interior that ALSO differs from more modern blockbuster takes of sci-fi, it's like its own... uncanny sort of thing. and then the uniforms are a mashup of navy, pirate, super hero??? reflective tape??? rubber/PVC???
and then we have the characters. the captain isn't there because he's skilled... he's a nepo baby with absolutely no expertise. a māori descendant, weirdly, of the colonizer captain cook. he has a literal pirate ship steering wheel (which... may? or may not? work?) and his first officer, a pāhekā with a te reo name, Rangi. meaning sky/heaven and, as one fanfic author pointed out, one letter away from "ranga" (derogatory slang for a red-haired person). he's a knowitall, spent 6 years at the academy, and resents his inexperienced captain for outranking him. also there's a guy that has kirk and spock "dollies" that he plays with at his station.
then plotwise, the purpose of their mission is specifically to find a planet to evacuate the aoteoroean population to, as rising sea levels have already swallowed the north island and are beginning to swallow the south island. in one skit, the PM says that they are doing this so the kiwis won't have to go to australia. but, paradoxically, we do also see a group of australians in space? and most of australia's population is concentrated on the coastline. so perhaps the australians, too, are in search of land to evacuate to. unclear.
anyway. all of this is like. genuinely kind of compelling to me? which is weird to say because this was made as part of like. an objectively terrible, unfunny, aged-like-milk skit show. the goal of which was to be as LOL RANDOM XD and offensive as possible, apparently. so even though space waltz is undoubtedly the best skit segment, it's still........ well. it's still radiradirah. the premise of one "episode" (collection of related skits?) is that the ship has been infested by tribbles (called "meeple" here) that can only be killed with human farts. the premise of another episode is that captain hemi """gets schizophrenia""" from looking into a black hole (which results in. what you would expect. unfortunately.). and in the same episode, the uhura stand-in character makes a comment that she's worried about being sexually assaulted if first officer Rangi mutinies and takes over the ship. (which like. deeply upsetting to begin with. but also there's no basis at all for the character to do something like that. it, like many other radiradirah skits, chucks in SA as an Edgy Shock Humor Joke).
if you do check out space waltz, i recommend doing so by watching the compilation someone made on youtube. radiradirah itself isn't worth it. i gave up on episode 4. and also... do be aware that it is still radiradirah. and with it comes... well. what it comes with.
now all of that being said. i do kind of want to see a take of space waltz that's more like red dwarf. like, still silly. completely absurd. but also... a little more effort put in. some more lore building. little less trek. really showcase the bits of the world that are actually interesting and new.
like, it's fucking strange that captain hemi talks into a vacuum cleaner hose on his belt to record his captain's log. that's awesome. give me 500 more details like that
alcohol is illegal? why? what happened? prohibition 2? give me the fake earth history
but more importantly. put men back in those shiny suits and hats. for me, specifically
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Lore about Ruby from my fallout ocs since I absolutely love him part 1
Theres gonna be a LOT of horror/cosmic horror in this and will have themes abt identity and that whole philosophy.
[This will probably also be moderately absurd but thats my jam(Also anyone sends asks abt him i will answer them SOFAST) Also this is the oc x canon oc [heart eyes emoji]. He is dating maccready. ]
So Ruby is a bit of a strange one, even in terms of Boomhealers. And that’s saying a lot since the family has stuff like people without bones(good ole OWB), cowboys, ghouls, pre war specimens that by all accounts should not exist, vault dwellers that defy most laws of the universe, cosmic horrors beyond comphrension, etc. Ruby mainly stands out because hes the only (so far, anyways) synth in the family, as well as being one of the few with connections to Library7.
When Ruby escaped the institute, he opted to keep his memories of being a synth. He did his normal rounds around the commonwealth until he found something that kinda…beckoned to him in a way. In an unknown location, he found himself being drawn to a part of the ocean. Ruby knew that just jumping in there was a bad idea but he had this overwhelming, cosmic urge to pursue whatever it was that was calling to him. So, he said fuck it. He didn’t have much to lose in the first place.
And so he entered the depths and went on the long and treacherous journey to the man made island stuck in an ethereal, terrifying reflection of the old world—Library7.
The journey there was, difficult to put it lightly. You ever try to avoid getting killed by mirelurks, terrifying abominations you never even knew could exist, alongside fucking raddolphins that were way too good at scaring the shit outta you? Ruby did. He’d be dead if the world wasn’t having too much fun laughing at the guy.
The real fun began when Ruby actually made it to the island. Whatever was beckoning to him was louder than before. A horrific, ethereal sense of awe took over him when he saw the island.
Buildings with uncannily pristine conditions with lights that resembled the eyes of a radscorpion peering over the world in the darkness of the night, the only thing obscuring it being the mixture of fog and smoke that floated throughout like a ghost. In contrast, they stood in the middle of a series of untouched yet aged concrete buildings. Fences of rusted steel, extending towards the sky like the gates of hell guarded the majority of the land.
If there was a hell for synths, it would look an awful lot like this.
And maybe he did deserve that hell. Who knows. He didn’t know anything about the original Ruby—not much anyways.
So when Ruby did truly enter the island, he was met with the sight of…people? They looked like people from a distance. But they were certainly not. Some moved in uncanny ways, some straight up looked like nightmares. They acted like they never saw another living thing besides themselves, and took Ruby in as a bit of a “project.” Modifying his DNA, asking him questions, having him do strange tasks—things one might compare to big MT, the major difference being that they seemed weirdly…managed? Moral? Contained? It was hard to describe. The specimens felt more like AI trying to fulfill a request, despite its team being long dead.
Ruby didn’t understand what the hell was going on for the first hour. That is, until he was called upon from the dark, looming pristine building. Never a good sign, he thought. And when he reached it, he saw what can only be described as a portal to hell. Eyes. There were so many eyes. They were everywhere—on the floors, the ceiling, the wall—it was a sight to behold. As he ventured deeper, he saw the source of them all—a woman who could only be described as a cosmic horror extension of what it meant to be human.
Her robotic voice echoed as the eyes connected to the surfaces of the room honed in on Ruby. “I’ve been waiting for someone like you.”
The feeling was indescribable.
Specimen 101 was her name. She wasn’t one for beating around the bush, but she knew best answer the questions before they were asked. 101 explained how the island was a pre war experiment to create near immortal, highly intelligent researchers that would aid the government post war.
Of course, we all know what happened to the government after the bombs fell. Before then, they had made an emergency vault. Like vault 111, they froze the specimens. The previous 100 specimens were all failures, with the remaining 14 being their only chances of success. Of course, there was more complexity to it, but 101 figured it was unnecessary to go into that level of detail.
How this relates to Ruby is simple: 101 worked hard to make sure the other specimens would not leave the island and turn the rest of the world into their hellish lab. However, she could not stop 114 from leaving. Ruby was to keep an eye on 114, so to speak. Thankfully she had calculated that 114 was the least likely to cause harm to the world, but she needed to make sure.
And how was Ruby going to do this? He wasn’t. 101 was going to do all the work. Her plan was to use Ruby as signal. The specimens had a distress signal built into them already—that she knew. The purpose of Ruby’s signal was to attempt to find 114’s exact location, and from that send that data to 101.
101 didn’t trust Ruby, and in a way, wanted to apologize (in her own strange way) for the behaviors of the other specimens. She somehow found a way to retrieve the original Ruby’s memories and implanted them onto him alongside his own while erasing his memories of Library7. 101 did this as a way of ensuring that Ruby would continue to behave in a way that wouldn’t make 114 suspicious of what she was doing with the signal. Adding some extra things to him to make Ruby juuuuust a bit more resilient (afterall, 101 was likely never going to have this opportunity again).
And thus, Ruby was sent back out (in a device that would stop those damn raddolphins from destroying him for sport) into the commonwealth.
#fallout#ruby boomhealer#fan lore#fo4#fallout 4#cosmic horror#horror#tw eyes#body horror#ruby bh#Library7#scifi horror#Library7 is almost every kind of horror tbh#this is only part one since theres a LOT to talk about regarding ruby#mainly focused on how he came to exist since that’ll provide context for everything else#fan project#fallout fanlore#fallout oc#rubys not the only one with lore this in depth#i will absolutely write about everyone else eventually
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LoL Chapter 56- Ancient Quarrels
Masterpost
A Wizard Hermits tale (AU, designs, ideas belongs to @theguardiansofredland)
Ex returns home with new friends, but struggles with the reality that his old stomping grounds have grown up without him, all while learning more about the history of dark magic.
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“I thought I told you to come alone.” Xisuma states, staring at the rainbow haired twins. No matter how much the two try to blend in, the ever shifting colors of their locks always stand out.
“I thought you could use the help. You clearly need it if you reached out to me.” Ex steps off the pirate ship, followed by the king and his brother. Ex tries his best to keep his gaze on the ground at his feet, the grass, sand, and dirt. He doesn’t want to see what Xisuma and all his friends have done to the safe haven they found together. As brothers. He doesn’t want to see what he's missed, what he’s been too afraid to claim for his own. He doesn’t want to see how much time has changed the island he once called home.
But Ex stumbles over a rock, his books scattering from his arms, while he plummets to the ground. He could let go of his remaining scrolls and books, but these articles are ancient and invaluable. He’d rather break his nose than let go of them.
Lucky for Ex, he doesn’t have to choose. One of the hermits grabs him before he gets a mouthful of dirt. Ex opens his eyes, forced to look at the island. And he sees everything.
It looka exactly the same. It looks completely different. The grounds were the same- the same rocky shores, soft beaches, hills, forest, even the lake at the center on the north side of the island. The grass the same green color, the sky the same blue, the distant mist and waves dancing together. But dotting the island now stood a menagerie of buildings. Where there used to only be the tower of stone he and X built, now a glass biodome rests on one side, a barn on the other. Smoke rolls free from the chimney of a weaponsmith’s house, and just off the island a cloud floats low, the white tower upon it open to the breeze of the sea.
Ex collects his books, and slinks off to the guild hall. Sor follows Grian to help with Apatia, to make the decision on how to move forward with his recovery. Tris follows behind Ex, taking in the open sea and sky. So unlike Milliara.
It was exactly that which drew the void twins here in the first place. They dared enter the Ashioll sea because it was quiet, peaceful, unlike Milliara. Back when there were only two- they didn’t need anyone more. They didn’t want anyone more. In the end, Ex got to be alone, moreso than ever. Without even a brother.
Being back on Eremita was painful, but as a healing wound would be. For the first time in years, his brother reached out to him. For the first time, they were putting aside the argument so long ago and working together. Like they did when they were young.
At the same time, both X and Ex set out their books on the same table. At the same time, like mirror images of one another, they set out their maps, their inkwells, their quills, even their books ordered the exact same way. The similarities between the two were uncanny, leaving the hermits baffled as they watch them. If it wasn’t for Ex’s white hair, it’d be impossible to tell them apart.
Ex speaks first, pulling the red fabric of his cloak away from his face so the hermits can hear him. “The last known insurgence of dark magic was over a thousand years ago. Before Lairyon became a kingdom, near the end of the ancient ones’s time. As we all know, Addows is the only place that still has significant and readable history of the ancient ones. Everything disappeared just like them.”
“And no one knows why.” Tris adds in, sitting down and plucking a book. He flips through the pages. “The ancient ones had magic more powerful than most wizards. Very few forms of ancient powers survive today- including angelic magic.”
The hermits look at Grian, but he simply shrugs. He knows nothing about the ancient ones, just that they’re… well, ancient. Iskall speaks up, resting his cheek on his hand. “Could it be that it was the dark magic that wiped them out?”
Both of the void twins and Tris shake their head, and begin to answer at the same time. Ex and X glare at one another, and Tris takes the moment to answer instead. “No, it’s not like there’s a sign of a fight, or a struggle, or anything. Just...one day they were all over this kingdom, and then- poof, gone.”
“But the ancient ones weren’t the only people here. The kiplings have been living in these waters longer than anyone. And if we cross reference the information King Sormena gave me access to in the royal library, and the deep sea libraries of the Kiplings, we can start to get an inkling of understanding.”
“My gods you’re so boring even now.” Xisuma groans. “We dont need the whole story, and Lairyon doesn’t have time. What did you learn and how can we use it to defeat Dolios?”
“Well…” Ex bits his lip. “We didn’t learn how they defeated the dark magic all those times before. But we did find the location of one of their lost cities. Tris and I believe it could even be the ancient capital of theirs.”
The hermits groan, some even dramatically flopping back in their chairs. It seems all they ever have are breadcrumbs, leading them around in circles all across Lairyon. TFC speaks up first, though even he seems exhausted. “It’s better than nothing. It’s our only hope at this point. So where is it?”
“Tris had pinpointed the general location of the lost city in the Ashioll Fjords, but together we were able to determine the exact location.” Ex plucks a quill from the table, dipping the tip in the ink and marking one of the many divots and crests of the northernmost part of Lairyon. All the hermits lean in, peering at the location. It looks no different from any other part of the fjords, or even the rest of Lairyon.
“If anyone knows how to defeat Dolios’s dark magic, it has to be the ancient ones.” Etho states. “They did it before, we just have to do it again.”
It gives the hermits hope to know this isn’t the first time, they aren’t the only ones in all of history to face dark magic. Ex looks up at the hermits, a question that’s been dancing in his mind finding its way to his tongue before he can stop it. “Why did you guys ever decide to do this? What in the world made you guys think you could take on a dark wizard? Be the chosen few like the ancient ones?”
The hermits look at one another, as if they’d find an answer in the stares and faces of their peers. But no one has the answer. Though Joe is more than willing to come up with his own. “Perhaps, in this story, there are no chosen ones. No destiny or prophesied heroes. Perhaps it is just by the choice of normal man, who chooses to make a difference, who chooses to stand up and fight, that is really what makes a hero?”
“Is this what I missed when I left?” Ex questions Xisuma, who nods solemnly.
“What will we find in the lost city?” Grian questions.
“I dunno, it’s lost.” Tris quips, causing Grian to blush when he realizes his question. “But if it’s anything like Addows, you should be prepared for ancient ones magic and the stone buildings they made their cities from. Apart from that- you just gotta look in the right place.”
The hermits realize they’re going in on this blind. Once again, they have little more than a hope, a thread of a lead, taking them somewhere in search of answers. Whether it was Gildara, or the Champion’s Cup, or even the Forest of Memories, they’ve always been chasing the same specter of knowledge. Hoping to find something more.
“But you won’t be alone this time.” Ex points out. The hermits turn to face him, his face so familiar, yet so vastly different. “King Sormena volunteered to go along with you, to give aid on your search.”
Tris averts his gaze, his jaw set tight at the mention of his brother joining the hermits. Doc raises his hand, almost condescending. “Won’t Dolios notice the king is gone?”
“He’s not in Milliara right now. The Wanderers informed me of that- where he is, I don’t know, but this is a rare opportunity that we can’t waste. You’ll need every mind and magic to figure out the puzzles and clues that the lost city may have. I’d best get packing if i were you guys.”
Groups disperse off, back to their homes, caves, ships, and clouds. Once again preparing, as a whole guild, to go off on another adventure. Even Tris disappears, either to go find and argue with his brother, or get a pint of beer from Cleo. But one person stays behind.
Xisuma doesn’t ever look directly at his brother, but he always turns his head just slightly to be able to see Ex shuffling papers. His body is aimed out from the guild hall, looking over, across the island of Eremita. After a few minutes of uncomfortable silence, X speaks up. “Will you be able to take care of Apatia while we’re gone? I don’t think he can go back to Milliara with you.”
Ex raises an eyebrow. It almost sounds like an invitation to stay on the island. Almost. “I guess if no one else will, I can offer my help. And glean information from him about the magistrate. Perhaps I can talk to Ian about engineering a prosthesis… Kiplings aren’t really meant to live without their fins.”
The void mage shakes his head, listening to his brother continue to ramble on under his breath. So many years apart, and yet the same old Ex. For the first time in years, after so long hating his twin, refusing to talk to him, removing every sign he ever existed on this island, now he’s standing in their guild hall. And for the first time in years, Xisuma feels like he can let go of the anger and tension from that fight so long ago.
Ex steps up beside Xisuma, and the two gaze over Eremita. They watch as Keralis and Zedaph round up sheep for their midday meal, Iskall, Mumbo, and Grian arguing over what kind of redstone they could possibly need on their journey, Wels and False sharpening the blades of their own weapons and others.
He doesn’t want to admit it, but Eremita looks more alive than it ever was when it was just the two of them. The colors of all different wizards, from all walks of life. All a part of this guild that Xisuma has found. All this, that Ex was afraid of. “You’ve done a good job building yourself a home. Finding yourself a family. Guess you didn’t really need me.”
Xisuma turns, and removes his mask. For the first time in years, Ex can see his brother's face. They can both see the scars they left on each other. On their skin and in their hearts. Xisuma’s fingers run along the scratched out marking in the metal. Wishing he could take that fit of anger back and fix it. “I didn’t do this without you, though. When I wasn’t sure what to do, it was always your annoying voice that guided me to the right decision.”
“We have the same voice.” Ex points out.
“Exactly. No matter what, no matter what I did, you were still with me, a part of me. But when I didn't know what to do, I thought about what you would choose. And it always led me in the right direction. Even though you weren’t here, I still needed you. I still needed my brother.”
To hear that word come from Xisuma’s mouth, to hear him call Ex that- brother. All these years, all he ever wanted was his brother back. To have a family again. Ex can feel tears stinging at the corners of his eyes, but he doesn’t want his brother to see him crying over such a simple thing. “I think it’ll be nice to have a family again. It...it feels good to be home.”
#hermitcraft#hermitcraft au#light of lairyon#wizard hermits#wizard au#hermitcraft fanfic#wizard xisuma#wizard ex#xisuma#evil xisuma#wizard tfc#wizard etho#tinfoilchef#ethoslab
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Kirby had arrived on the Rainbow Islands completely focused on the idea of a vacation, but found himself unable to speak at the sight laid out before his eyes. The formerly beautiful Rainbow Islands had completely changed: The ground was covered in cracks, and the plants were wilting; The rivers and lakes were almost completely dried up, leaving only a few puddles, in which the small fish were hopping about, seemingly suffering.
“This is really bad...”
Kirby sat down on the dry ground in protest. King Dedede had been merrily holding his life preserver in one hand before seeing the terrible sight, causing his expression to turn grim.
“Yup... We can’t just ignore this. This isn’t the right time for a vacation!”
Bandana Waddle Dee looked up at the king, anxiety present in his eyes.
“Great King, what’s going on?!”
“I have no idea, but I’ve got a feeling this isn’t just a natural disaster…”
King Dedede took off his sunglasses and looked around at the scenery with a sharp gaze.
“Someone must’ve done this. If we don’t find out who did this, it won’t rain here forever!”
“Indeed. I agree.”
A heavy voice came from behind the king and Kirby. The two looked back. There stood the masked swordsman Meta Knight, along with his men. Kirby quickly stood up.
“Meta Knight!” he yelled. “You came to help us!”
“I have received a report from Captain Vul. He seemed more excited than usual to save the Rainbow Islands.”
Meta Knight looked back at Captain Vul.
“Uh-Um-Umm- It’s simply my responsibility as a member of Dream Land’s military to save the citizens when they’re in trouble! Lord Meta Knight, surely you would never abandon the Rainbow Islands!”
“Indeed.”
Meta Knight waved his cape as he turned to face Kirby.
“The damage is more serious than I had thought. If we do not act fast, the Rainbow Islands shall fall to utter ruin.”
“Uh-huh!”
Kirby nodded his head in agreement.
“We’ve gotta do something! But how can we make it rain?”
“First of all, investigate. It is possible that someone has put a curse on the Rainbow Islands. Look for anything unusual.”
“Got it! Let’s go look together!”
“The Rainbow Islands have a lot of ground to cover,” Rick said, “let’s split up and investigate. I’ll try to look around this island with Kirby. Meta Knight’s team, Dedede’s team, go look around the other islands.”
“Alright.”
“Leave it to me!” the king said. “I’ll take out the bad guy behind this as soon as I find them!”
Meta Knight led his subordinates North; Dedede and his Waddle Dees went South; Then Kirby, Rick, Kine, and Coo searched around the hinterland of the central island.
Split into three teams, the investigation had finally begun.
~~~~~
Kirby and co. pushed aside the withered trees as they made their way toward the heart of the island.
“OWW!!! OWIEEEEEEEE!!!!”
The loud yells came from Kine. Despite how he had been training so that he’d be able to live on land, he still wasn’t that good at moving around on the ground. Every time the group would push past a withered tree, his fins would get stuck on a branch.
“You’re not really built for looking around on land,” Rick said, “you can sit this one out.”
“Not a chance!~” Kine responded stiffly. I’m a member of the research team, after all- OUCHIE!!!”
“If we’re ‘investigating,’ what are we looking for?” Kirby asked. “Meta Knight said someone probably cursed the islands, but-”
“Basically,” Rick said, “you’ll have to find evidence of there being a curse.”
“What would be evidence?”
“Something like... a dark magic altar, or some kind of evil mystical barrier? A doll nailed to a tree, some kind of ritual sacrifice-”
“Whaaaat?!”
Kine, having forgotten to complain about his pain, got up, trembling.
“I-I’m scared~! I don’t wanna get cursed~!”
“It’s ok! If we find the magic altar, I’ll destroy it on sight!”
“I-It’s no good, Rick. I’ll just end up getting cursed anyway~.”
He appeared to be on the verge of tears when the group heard a voice call out from the sky.
“I see something strange ahead of us.”
It was Coo. He continued to fly over the trees, surveying the land from high above.
“What is it?” Kine asked as he trembled. “A cursed altar?” A doll?”
“No, nothing of that sort. It seems that someone has fallen from the sky.”
“Huh?”
“Come this way.”
Coo flew up high. Kirby and the others followed him. Then… past the withering plants, someone in white clothes could be seen on the ground.
“Oh, you’re right!”
“This is the girl who fell. Is she ok?”
Kirby and the gang hurried toward where the person fell. Coo also swooped down from the sky. There, they found a young girl in white clothes. She was round, yet healthy, with short limbs, transparent wings on her back, and ribbon tied in a bow in her curly hair.
“C’mon, wake up!”
Rick shook the young girl awake. She opened her eyes lightly. She blinked repeatedly, looking around at the group, and spoke with a frail voice:
“Thi… This place… Where…? You all…?”
“This place is called the Rainbow Islands,” Kirby replied, “I’m Kirby, and these are my friends Rick, Kine, and Coo. And you are-?”
“I… am Pirka.”
“Why did you fall asleep in a place like this? Are you hungry?”
At the sound of Kirby’s happy-go-lucky voice, Pirka narrowly smiled.
“No, I wasn’t sleeping. I-”
Pirka looked up at the sky.
“-fell down.”
“Fell? From where?”
“From the clouds above.”
Pirka pointed at the blue sky. Just above, a small cloud was floating. It was a strangely ominous blueish color.
“From all the way up there?!” Kine shouted in surprise. “Are you ok?!”
Kirby and co. took another look at Pirka. She had a couple injuries here and there. There were a few scratches on her hands and face, and her wings appeared to be aching as well. Both her clothes and bow were dirty. Rick looked worried.
“You’re lucky you survived after a fall like that,” he said, “it’s a miracle.”
“High places aren’t a problem for me. After all, I have wings.”
“But you have all those bruises-”
“These weren’t caused by the fall. I-”
Pirka was about to speak, but Coo interrupted her.
“We’ll listen to your story later. First of all, you need treatment for those wounds.”
“Yeah!”
Kirby nodded his head.
“If you wanna get better, you’re gonna have to eat something. I know that I feel better when I’m full!”
If that’s the case,” Rick said, “let’s go to my house. My girlfriend Pick makes great snacks. She can bake a delicious cake for you.”
“My wife’s a good cook too~,” Kine said “I bet she’ll make you a whole healthy meal. Come on, Pirka.”
“...thank you.”
Pirka took Kirby’s hand and stood up. Together, the group made their way back to the village where Rick and the others’ homes were. Meta Knight and King Dedede, who had received the news, had already gotten to Rick’s house. The king stared at Pirka scrutinizingly.
“Is that girl the culprit?” he asked. “Did she put a curse on the Rainbow Islands so it wouldn’t rain?”
“Nah,” Kirby said, “this is Pirka! She fell down here from above the clouds.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“He means-”
Pirka got cut off by none other than Rick’s girlfriend, Pick.
“Don’t rush like that. Pirka, take a break and have a bite to eat. You need to recover your strength. I made cream puffs. Please, help yourself.”
“We have sandwiches too,” said Mine, Kine’s wife, “and nutritious soup and salad.”
King Dedede, seeing all the tasty-looking food, licked his lips.
“Oh, now doesn’t this look tasty! Maybe I can just have one bi-”
“NO YOU CAN’T!!!” Pick and Mine shouted together, blocking the path of the king.
“This is for Pirka, not you!”
“Yes. We made these for Pirka, so hands off!”
As one would expect, King Dedede was overwhelmed by the two’s force.
“Wh-What? If that’s the case, then what do I get?”
The persistent king was stopped by Meta Knight.
“Wait, Dedede. Now, let’s hear Pirka’s story first. I find the part about her falling from above the clouds concerning. Pirka, would you mind sharing your story as you eat?”
“Yes.”
Pirka nodded her head in agreement before speaking.
“I am a traveler. I do not have my own house, so I travel all around the stars. I had a lot of fun visiting the Rainbow Islands and watching the pretty blue sea, but…”
Pirka’s expression became clouded.
“One day, some uncanny creature happened to see me.”
“Uncanny…?”
“Yes. That thing floated high into the sky, floating on the wind. While I was wondering what it was, it disappeared into the clouds. Erm, immediately after, it stopped raining in the Rainbow Islands.”
“What’s that?” King Dedede asked, leaning forward. “I mean, you’re telling me that whatever that creature was, it’s the one that cursed the Rainbow Islands? Can you tell us what it looked like?!”
“King Dedede, please be quiet for just a little bit,” Mine said to the king.
“Please let Pirka finish speaking,” Pick said, nodding in agreement, “she’s gone through a lot. Let’s all be quiet and listen.”
“U-Um… I understand.”
As his friends, Meta Knight and Kirby usually let the domineering king do whatever he pleased. However, this pair proved to be too much for the king to handle. He meekly backed down. Pirka continued to tell her tale.
“I had come to the same conclusion as King Dedede. I assumed that the creature was up to no good, so I tried to pursue it.”
“By yourself?!” Kine said, astonished. “That’s dangerous~! You should’ve asked someone to go with you.”
“I’m a traveler, so I always act alone.”
Pirka took a bite of her sandwich and continued.
“Looking over the clouds, the most peculiar sight was laid out before me: There was a beautiful lake, with lots and lots of water stored in it.”
“A lake? Above the clouds?” Kirby asked. Pirka nodded her head.
“Yes. There was so much water, it looked as if it were about to overflow. I was wondering how there could be so much water there if it wouldn’t rain… when…”
Pirka turned pale.
“Um, the uncanny creature appeared. It obstructed the waterflow from the lake. That’s why it hasn’t been raining.”
“What’s that??” King Dedede barked. This time, neither Pick nor Mine bothered trying to stop him. “Who even is that thing anyway?? Why would it even do that??”
“I don’t know. Quite loudly, I asked, ‘why would you do such a thing?!’ but the creature wouldn’t answer. It just attacked me without warning.”
Pirka quivered.
“I didn’t have the powers to fight it. It easily beat me in combat, beat me up, and pushed me off the clouds. Since I had wings, I managed to avoid plummeting head first into the ground, but it was too much for me… I fainted. Since then, until you all saved me, I had been unconscious.”
For a moment, Kirby and the others were silent, deep in thought. The one to break the silence was Coo.
“Vital information. We cannot ignore this. We must capture that scoundrel who’s blocking the flow of the lake!”
“Yeah.”
Meta Knight nodded his head.
“We must attack immediately. Kirby, Dedede, are you ready?”
The two both nodded yes.
“Yeah, I’m ready!”
“Obviously! Now’s my time to shine!”
“I’ll go too!” said Rick. Then, without a moment’s delay, Kine joined too.
“Me too~! We’ve gotta get that bad guy!”
“Of course, I’ll be joining as well,” said Coo. Pick and Mine chimed in, concern evident in their voices.
“Rick… How will you get above the clouds?”
“Indeed. Kine, you can’t fly.”
“We’ll be fine~!” Kine said. Rick nodded and puffed out his chest.
“We’re lucky to have Coo on our side! I know he’ll be able to get us all up there!”
“Don’t say such absurd things,” Coo said sternly, “I am incapable of flying to such a height while carrying all of you.”
“But-”
Meta Knight interrupted Rick.
“I can provide assistance. I’ll prepare a smaller boat onboard my battleship, the Halberd. It should be able to take you above the clouds.”
“Thanks a lot! Now that that’s decided, let’s not waste any more time!” Rick said, full of energy. Meta Knight looked at Pirka.
“Pirka, you may rest here. We’ll punish the culprit by any means necessary.”
“...no. I’ll come with you all too,” Pirka said, deep thought evident in her eyes.
“Pirka, it’s fine if you don’t come~,” Kine said, “Stay here, Pick and Mine can make you a nice home-cooked meal to help you recover. You’ve gotta take it easy-”
“No.”
Pirka shook her head.
“I’m the only one who can give you the directions to where it happened. I want to make myself the slightest bit useful. Please, take me with you.”
Rick nodded his head.
“Pirka has a point. She’s the only one who’s seen what the culprit looks like. Let’s bring her with us, just in case.”
“Just don’t be a hindrance,” King Dedede said, “hide behind me when it gets dangerous.”
“Yes sir!”
Pirka nodded her head strongly.
“If you’re going to go out on an adventure, Rick,” Pick said, “then take this.”
“Huh?”
Pick took off a small bag from her own neck, then hung it around Rick’s.
“I knitted this. It’s a pouch with a charm inside. It’ll surely project everyone.”
“Pick…”
Moved, Rick took Pick’s hand.
“Thanks. I’ll be back!”
“We'll do our best~!” Kine said in an uncharacteristically valiant voice, “I know we’ll bring the rain back, won’t we?”
“Kine, please be careful," Mine said.
“Great King,” Bandana Waddle Dee said, looking up at King Dedede, “please stay safe. Kirby, you too.”
“Got it! We’ll do our best!”
Kirby cheerfully raised one of his hands up.
“Everyone, let’s go above the clouds! BYE-BYEEEEE!”
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#kirby#rick (kirby)#pick (kirby)#kine#mine (kirby)#coo#king dedede#meta knight#bandana waddle dee#captain vul#pirka#Kirby: Save the Rainbow Islands!#kirby light novel#translations
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For prompt what about a tiny hometown glory oneshot? It doesn’t even have to be canon to your real au idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
wordcount: 1400
“Listen,” Kai says very seriously, staring the boatman in the eye and holding up his fancy invitation, “Do not sail off until me and my sister get off this thing, Okay? I am not interested in this little fight club or whatever, I just came to bring Nya home.”
The man blinks back, “We depart in six minutes sir.” he drones, obviously uninterested in Kais very real personal stakes.
“No- ugh! I’m the master of fire, right? That deserves some respect. So maybe you could just hold off? Until i’m back on solid land?”
Eyeing him for a long moment, the boatman pulls out his pocket watch and pops it open, squinting down at the time and evaluating his own schedule. He snaps it closed and looks up at Kai, “We depart in five minutes, sir.”
“Oh come on!” Kai slaps a hand over his face with a groan, glancing at the boat with a grimace. He shoots the boatman a sharp glare before bolting up the gangplank and running into an immediate throng of people. He rolls his eyes as the cuts through rudely, it’s not as if he would be here long enough for any of this to matter. Just get in, find his sister, and get out. He knew she’d been feeling restless cooped up in Ignacia, but he never thought she’d go so far as to dig out their invitations to this ‘Tournament of Elements’ circus and hop on the first bus to the harbor. What was the point? They were perfectly fine back home, and Kai was getting the whole smithing thing down pat, finally.
He sidesteps a girl with bright green hair and bolts around a corner- only to be bounced off a man he hadn’t been paying enough attention to avoid, and he goes sprawling across the deck.
“Oh man, are you alright?” the lumberjack worries, leaning over Kais prone form.
“Fine.” He snaps, physically shaking off the impact and making his hair stick up even worse.
“Have a nice trip?” The lumberjack's small friend quips, offering a hand which Kai shrugs off, standing and weaving past them, “See you next fall!” He calls, and Kai can hear him laughing about it as he tears around the next corner. He’s running out of time!
“Hey!” The mammoth calls, chasing after him, “Wait- what are you looking for?”
“My sister. We’re going home.” He doesn’t break stride, and while that’s no problem for the tall one, the small one has to race to keep up.
“Is she cute?” He asks, and blanches under Kais scathing look, “I mean, what does she look like? So we can help.”
“My height, short black hair, she should be wearing a red dress- guh!” he’s cut off as the big guy grabbing his arm and swinging him around to face a little sitting area right above deck.
He points up to where Nya is leaning against the railing with her back turned towards them, staring out to sea, “Is that her?”
“Yes!” He cries, taking a scrambling step forward, “How do we get up there? NYA!”
The short one waves him over to a set of stairs, “This way, man.”
Kai races up the steps, all too aware of how time was moving. It shouldn’t be long before the boat departs, and if they’re not off by then- well, Kai’s not the best swimmer. He explodes up onto the second deck, breathing a sigh of relief when he catches sight of his sister, who’d heard his yell and was standing with her arms crossed, facing him with a sour look on her face.
“Kai.” She says icily, well aware of his intentions, her expression turning more curious as she looks past him, “Who’re your friends?”
The shorter of the two smoothly steps in front of Kai before he can respond, pinning her with a dopey smile, “Hi,” he says, not at all very suave, “I’m Jay. Do you like blue?” a very subtle question, considering his blue attire.
Nya fixes him with an amused smile, “It’s my favorite color.”
“My name’s Cole,” Jay’s friend introduces himself, “Sorry about my brother.” Brother? now that was a surprise, considering they didn’t look much alike-
“Who cares? We’re leaving, Nya- Now.” He goes to take her hand and she takes a step back, frowning.
“You can leave if you want, but i’m exactly where I want to be.” Nya informs him crossly.
Kai stares at her in disbelief, “What are you talking about? We belong back home, at Four Weapons! This tournament of elements thing isn’t for us.”
“Kai.” She says, gently but firmly, “You know I’ve always wanted more. This is my chance.”
He looks into her eyes for a long moment, searching her gaze. Determination, calm assurance, excitement- when has he last seen her excited about the forge? “Okay.” He says with a light sigh, “Okay, if this is what you want, well, I won’t let you do it on your own.” he smiles at her reassuringly, and she grins back, throwing her arms around his neck for a quick hug.
he pulls back slightly, “You sure you don’t want to head home?”
She gives him a flat look.
“It does not look like you have that choice.” A new voice chimes, and Jay jumps into Cole's arms with a shriek as the man appears at his side, “We are departing.”
They all stumble as the boat lurches beneath them, starting it’s long trek out to Chens island. He’s- taller, taller than Cole, with blue eyes that seem to glow in the low fog of the early morning. He’s wearing a white jumpsuit more suited towards the ice plains than the swampy air of the harbor, with a parka thrown on top. He tilts his head, pinning each of them with his uncanny eyes that almost seem to recognize them, “Oh, hello. It is nice to meet you, I am Zane.”
He sticks out his hand, and kai breaks his hug with Nya to shake it, “Uh, hi. I’m Kai.” He shoots his sister a look and she shrugs as the others introduce themselves, Cole still holding his brother as he shakes Zanes hand.
“Are you all participating in the tournament of elements as well?” Zane smiles, and when he looks at Kai he seems to look through him.
“Yeah!” Jay swings down from Cole’s arms finally, “I’m the elemental master of lightning!” He puffs out his chest, “Cole’s the master of earth. We make a pretty good team.”
“Water and Fire.” Nya informs him, gesturing to Kai and herself respectively.
Zanes eyes spark with interest, “I am the master of Ice.” he tells them openly, holding his hands over his stomach idly, “But I have no intentions to fight, I came to meet all of you.”
Cole blinks, noting how weirdly specific that was, “You mean like other elemental masters?”
“Yes.” Zane nods but they each get the distinct impression he was talking about them, specifically. Weird. His eyes snap up and he seems to focus on something out in the fog, “Excuse me.” He says politely, holding his arm up and out to the sky. A long moment passes.
“Uh… you good, man?” Kai asks slowly.
The fog parts and a- a hawk!? breaks through the mist and sinks it’s talons into the soft of Zanes jacket, perching on his arm. Zane seems overwhelmingly unaffected by this, bringing the bird closer to him and offering it an affectionate rub, “Not to worry, Falcon is harmless. He is my best friend.”
Jay pokes his head out from where he’d taken cover behind Cole, “You’re… a little weird, huh?”
Zane’s expression pinches ever so slightly, and he offers them an awkward smile, as if suddenly aware how strange he was acting in front of his new acquaintances. “My apologies.” He offers, raising his arm so Falcon can take back to the air.
Cole cuffs Jay across the back of the head lightly, frowning at him, “Dude.”
Jay goes to say something but there’s a commotion on the lower deck, and they all peek over the railing curiously.
It looks like someone’s causing a scene. A girl with purple hair glares down at a boy in black and green who’s looking back at her like she’s dirt on his shoe.
“Watch it, kid.” She snaps, not too unkindly, more of a warning than a true bite.
“Do you know who I am?” The kid fires back, haughty.
Kai claps a hand to his forehead, “Oh man.” He says, “He’s going to get himself thrown overboard.”
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Hey @oriigami, I was your Secret Santa for the @opsecretsanta2019. I hope you enjoy your gift, and have a Merry Christmas
Title: Deliverance
Rating: T
Characters: Sabo, Koala
Summary: It stood to reason that Sabo and Koala would get a cupcake for their first mission. It also stood to reason that nothing would go as planned.
Or, the story of how Sabo got his first bounty.
“Promise me you won’t go off script.”
“I told you already, I promise.”
Sabo fought with an ill-fitting workman’s cap, which despite his best efforts to pummel into submission did not want to sit nicely on his head. It was new and stiff, without any of the give his usual tophat had. He heard Koala give a nearly inaudible sigh. Standing on her tiptoes she swiped it out of his hands, giving him just enough time to bend down so she could force it on, pulling the bill so low it nearly covered his eyes.
And his scar.
“When did you get so damn tall?” she groused.
“I’m perfectly average, thank you very much,” Sabo said. “You’re just short.”
Koala punched his arm a little harder than was necessary, but he got her to smile. A real, honest-to-god smile, and not the strained bastardization she resorted to when she was nervous. “Seriously, Koala,” he said. “They gave us a cupcake of a mission.”
“We’re going in alone. There won’t be any backup this time around,” she pointed out.
Sabo scoffed, “Hack will be a snailphone call away, not that we’ll need him just to make a delivery. Seriously, Koala, we’ll be fine.”
“I will be fine,” Koala corrected, jabbing her finger into his chest. “It’s you they don’t trust not to run off towards the nearest explodables.”
“That was one time! How was I supposed to know that ship was transporting gunpowder?”
“I rest my case.”
She took a step back and looked Sabo with a critical eye. He considered making a quip about how cute she looked dressed up like a little peasant girl out running errands, but decided he would rather start his first solo mission without any conspicuous bruising.
It was a simple enough job, all things considered. The Revolution had gotten wind of a few nasty rumors regarding some upstart nobleman on the Isle of Doulos and sent an agent to infiltrate the household, who was now in need of some extra reconnaissance equipment that Koala and Sabo were to smuggle in to the estate.
“I’m not going to screw this up,” Sabo promised for what felt like the dozenth time. “I don’t plan on having Hack babysit me forever so might as well show them we have what it takes, right?”
“Right.” Koala adjusted his collar before giving her final nod of approval. “Remember, we absolutely cannot blow Bunny Joe’s cover. So no hitting douchebags in the face.”
“I won’t,” Sabo promised for the thirteenth time. He paused. “I mean, unless they really deserve it.”
Sabo set sail to Doulos with a sore arm, but it was worth it to hear her laugh.
Xxx
There had been some question on how the Revolution would smuggle supplies into the mansion of Lord Chandler, the recently turned nobleman who was promoted from the merchant class after performing some kind of service to the crown. Preliminary scouting missions reported an exceptionally thorough snailphone system that covered every inch of the nobleman’s vast estate. Stealth was technically possible, but it would be difficult to sneak around without arousing suspicion.
Further surveillance uncovered a surprisingly simple solution: Supplies from the nearby port city were often delivered by children the same age as Sabo and Koala. All they had to do was get in, drop off a few snails of their own, and get out again.
It wasn’t exciting, or brimming with danger and glory. The Revolution was still treating Sabo and Koala like children even though they’d been around longer than most of the adults, training and studying for the day they could officially join Dragon’s army.
“This is almost embarrassingly easy,” Sabo complained as he carefully loaded a cart left by other agents in the area. Beside him, Koala was readying the donkey that would lead them to their glorious future.
“Would you rather get a free pass?” Koala asked. “There’s already talk about how you get preferential treatment. Boss doesn’t give out one on one lessons to everybody, you know.”
“Talk? From who?” Sabo asked.
Koala gestured vaguely. “You know, people. Is this really the best time to be talking about this?”
“No. And I don’t want any free passes, either,” Sabo said. He took the reigns from Koala and helped boost her into the cart.
“I know that, the boss knows that. Everyone who matters knows that.” Koala’s expression softened, and she placed a calming hand on his forearm. Sabo forced himself to relax, not wanting her to feel the tension that had him all wound up and irritable.
“Yeah, well I’m going to prove it. Yee-freaking-haw.” And with a gentle snap of the reigns, they were off.
It was a pleasant trip, the air of the spring island crisp and cool while the sun danced its way through a cloudy sky. Sabo and Koala picked their way through town and out into the countryside where Lord Chandler’s estate was nestled between rolling green hills, away from the polluted pall of the city and the dirty peasants who lived there. It was about an hour of slow, deliberate plodding on a bumpy and unpaved road, but time with Koala always seemed to fly twice as fast. Their most arduous task was trying to lead the stubborn donkey pulling their cart.
“I think he takes after you,” Koala teased.
“I’d like to see you do better.”
And so she did.
Their first roadblock came at the estate itself. Koala knew better than to lead them through the main entrance, following down a well-worn servant’s path farther back. The security guard manning the gate, a burly man who seemed to have more muscles than brains, looked down at his clipboard and frowned.
“I don’t have any deliveries scheduled for today.”
“We were only called for this morning,” Sabo said. “We probably didn’t make it on your list.”
He flashed his most winsome smile while Koala gave a small nod in agreement. The guardsman’s frown deepened, and he squinted harder at his clipboard as if it would spontaneously give him the answer he was looking for.
“Who ordered the delivery?” he asked after a long moment of thought.
Sabo shrugged. “Some guy named Joe, I guess? We were only told to bring the stuff over to the kitchens.”
He climbed to the back of the cart and showed the guard their wares: A dozen bags of flour, sugar, and other staples, plus a few rarer items imported just that day from a faraway island that they could pass off as the reason for the emergency delivery.
“I don’t know...” the guardsman said, stretching out the know so long it almost became two words.
Sabo was not about ready to have his first mission waylaid by some no-name grunt. He took a deep breath, gearing himself to launch into another argument when he was interrupted.
“What seems to be a problem here?”
Sabo turned sharply toward the new voice. All the color left the guard’s face as a newcomer slid out from the shadows of the gate, seeming to glide across the ground as if he were a glob of human-shaped oil instead of a real person. He wore an expression that could technically be described as a smile, provided whoever was doing the describing was blind, standing very far away, and had never known the pleasure of genuine human kindness.
It took a small measure of effort for Sabo not to recoil in disgust as the newcomer observed both Sabo and Koala through heavily lidded eyes. There was something eerie about his expression, magnified by a pair of the palest blue eyes Sabo had ever seen in his life, so clear as to be nearly devoid of color. His gaze flitted from Koala, to Sabo--lingering a moment his scars--before returning to Koala and staying there. His lips stretched to reveal a few more teeth, and it took every scrap of Sabo’s will not to break his promise and punch him in his big, leering face.
Koala, bless her, feigned a look of desperate pleading. “Please, sir, we just want to make our delivery and go home.”
Only Sabo heard the sarcastic edge in her servile tone. The newcomer took another gliding step, the guardsman instinctively shying away as he got too close for comfort. “Ah, yes. The extra supplies for our guests tonight. You’re early.” He made a motion like he were batting away an annoying fly. “Hurry up and let them in. You’re causing a scene.”
“Yes, sir!”
Koala and Sabo exchanged a look of surprise, but they didn’t have any time for anything else as the guardsman snapped at them, “You heard the man, get a move on! You’re causing a scene!”
The newcomer’s eyes never left them as they made their way toward the kitchens. Sabo could feel him boring a hole into his back even as they disappeared out of sight.
Xxx
For as long as Sabo could remember, he had a cat’s instincts for people. He was able to decipher tells with uncanny accuracy, the little pushes and pulls of body language that said more than words ever did. It was something that came to Sabo naturally, but he didn’t think it was Haki. Dragon had taught him some of that, too, and while the ability to Observe had its roots in the same place deep in his subconsciousness they were not the same.
Sabo was one of the only people in the world who could tell when Koala was only pretending to smile. He could read the minute changes in Dragon’s expression to know if he was pleased or upset. He could look at two strangers and dissect the power dynamics between them after only a few minutes of observation, and he didn’t need a Devil Fruit or any supernatural willpower to do it.
It got him into trouble more often than not, his instinctual gut reactions making him act without thinking, but he never regretted plowing ahead when he knew in his heart of hearts he was right. The Revolutionary Army was in the middle of a war; they didn’t have time to wait around for opportunities that would never open up of someone didn’t force the issue.
“Don’t,” Koala hissed under her breath. “I know what you’re thinking. Do not go off-script.”
“Do you see Joe anywhere?” Sabo asked serenely, the picture of perfect innocence. “I don’t want to lay this stuff out where anyone can find it. Someone should go look for him.”
Before Sabo could move, Koala’s hand was around his bicep, her grip tighter than an iron vice. “I swear to whatever god cares to listen, I will murder you in the most painful way I can imagine. For once in your life, listen to me: There’s someone already here investigating. We know there’s some bad juju here and there are measures in place to take care of it.”
“Not fast enough, by the looks of it.”
He felt rather than saw Koala’s reaction, his gaze straight ahead to the men and women scurrying around Lord Chandler’s estate at the same frenzied pace as a colony of ants whose nest had just been overturned. The servants had their heads ducked low, hurrying from one place to another like they were scared to be caught loitering. No one had the time to make small talk with one another. No one seemed to be happy at all.
“Who do you think the guests are for tonight?” Sabo asked, his voice barely carrying the distance between he and Koala. “There wasn’t anything about that in the report.”
“Maybe it was need-to-know, and we didn’t,” Koala said.
“Or maaaybe something’s going on. Joe really should have been here by now,” Sabo said. “If we stick around much longer someone’s going to kick us out.”
He kicked a pebble at his feet for emphasis. It dinged against the side of the great building Lord Chandler used as his kitchens, the heat of a dozen ovens making the air ripple and haze. He hated waiting out in the open like this. It was hard enough trying not to be conspicuous with his face half-fried. They might as well have flashing signs over their heads saying that they didn’t belong.
“Then I’ll go look for him,” Koala said. “You stay here and guard our stuff.”
“But…”
Koala silenced him with a raised finger. “Do you even know the right staff person to ask?” She allowed him a moment to answer, and when he couldn’t said, “Exactly. Of the two of us, I have the most experience with...this kind of thing.”
Her mouth twisted in a way that meant she had unwittingly dredged to the surface the horrors of her childhood. Koala shook herself slightly, like a dog would to dry off, and immediately her more familiar smile was back.
Sabo hated when she looked like that, more than he hated the possibility of flubbing his first mission. “You’re right, you’re right. I’ll be a good boy and stay put.”
Koala’s soft flit of laughter lifted the dour atmosphere of the estate, if only for a moment. “I doubt that.”
She bounded off towards the servant’s entrance, moving with a warrior’s poise and grace. She would have to work on that if they ever went deep undercover; a layman would never notice, but an experienced fighter would and might ask questions they dare not answer.
Sabo was tucking that tidbit in the back of his mind when he saw a blur of color at the edge of his vision. The scarring on his bad eye rendered him nearly blind on that side, and by the time he got turned around the weird man with the blue eyes was nearly at his cart.
“Sorry, sir, we’ll be out of your way as soon as we can,” Sabo chirped in his most simpering tone. “Just trying to find who we’re supposed to drop this off with. It’ll only be a moment more.”
The hairs on the back of Sabo’s neck prickled as he felt the Presence of three others walking up behind him. A quick glance showed that none of them were Bunny Joe, and Sabo didn’t trust the strange man’s smile any more than he had before.
He took a deep breath to calm his racing heart, remembering countless lessons with Hack and Koala and Dragon. He couldn’t lose control. Sabo felt his focus narrow as adrenaline hummed in his veins, sharpening every detail to its finest point.
The strange man stood directly in front of him, while three of the estate’s security detail formed a half-circle at Sabo’s back. Blue Eyes was empty handed, but the rest either held guns or wore them at their hips.
“Does there seem to be a problem, sir?” Sabo asked. Too late he remembered that he was supposed to be a normal city boy making a delivery, and the question came out more impertinent than fearful.
It seemed Koala wasn’t the only one who needed practice.
“Walk with me, boy,” Blue Eyes said. “I think I know where to find your friend.”
Sabo took a sharp breath. He had a split second to make his decision, and a not-so-small part of him wanted to fight. The mission was obviously compromised and Bunny Joe missing, and he’d foolishly allowed himself to be separated from his partner with no easy way to get into contact with her.
A voice that sounded suspiciously like Koala’s told him to wait. There was no turning back once he decided to turn things into a slug fest. There were still too many questions he didn’t have answers to; if there was a chance of salvaging anything out of the mission, then he should take it. For the Revolution’s sake and his own curiosity.
“Um, okay. Sure thing, boss.” Sabo jumped down from the cart, carefully palming the baby snailphone hidden under the bench as he did so. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shuffled forward with his head ducked low and his shoulders rolled in defensively.
The Blue-Eyed man’s eyebrows crept up toward his hairline. “Hands where I can see them. I’ll not have any funny business now.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but have I done something wrong?” Sabo asked. “It’s just...you see, my sister’s the worrying type, and she’s going to wonder where I’ve gone.”
“I assure you, your sister is in the best of hands,” he said, before giggling at his own poor attempt at a joke.
Blood thundered in Sabo’s ears, and he couldn’t stop a smile of his own, feral and just as unnerving as the one worn by the man who stood before him. Sabo got the satisfaction of seeing something that was very close to fear flash across Blue Eyes’ face, quickly covered by an imperious mask of self-importance.
Sabo was shoved forward while guardsmen came on either side, boxing him in and marching him away from the kitchens, his cart, and Koala. All of a sudden they were alone; the servants had decided it was best to batten down and wait for the storm to pass.
“Who are you?” Sabo asked. “Lord Chandler won’t be happy to see you interfering with his business.”
The man laughed a cruel and terrible laugh, high-pitched and cold like iron scraping against ice. His guardsmen aped him like a trio of trained monkeys, their low guffaws a mocking harmony. Sabo’s stomach sank when he realized his mistake. He should have known an ass of such massive proportions had to be titled.
“The better question is who are you?” Lord Chandler hissed once he regained control of his facilities. He bent close enough to Sabo that their noses were nearly touching and he was seeing double. “Who sent you? Was it El Jefe, or that upstart LeBlanc? I’ll have my answers one way or another; if you’re smart you’ll save me the trouble of beating them out of you.”
“And I told you, sir, I’m just here making a delivery,” Sabo said.
He saw the blow coming in time to turn his head with the hit, but Lord Chandler’s fist still caught enough of his nose to bloody it. Sabo dutifully let his head snap back to sell the hit. He didn’t really know how much to fake it, but erred on the side of caution. The supercilious grin that spread across Lord Chandler’s face as Sabo pretended to writhe in pain told him all he needed to know. The bastard was the kind of man that liked hurting people, and Sabo wasn’t the least bit surprised when he followed it up with a blow to his solar plexus.
This time Sabo didn’t need to fake a wheeze as all the air was forcibly excavated from his lungs.
Lord Chandler rubbed his knuckles. “The first was for your cheek. The second was for making me touch you.” He gestured for his guards. “Come along. I’ve wasted too much time already.”
Sabo drug his feet, making them work for every inch. Somewhere along the way ill-fitting hat fell off of his head and floated gently to the ground, accompanying the trail of blood that would lead Koala to wherever these idiots were taking him.
A curtain of hair fell over Sabo’s eyes and obscured his mad grin. This wasn’t over. Not by a longshot.
Xxx
Sabo had to applaud Lord Chandler’s ingenuity. He kept his prisoners in a slaughterhouse.
He smelled it before he saw it, the metallic stink of warm blood that never went away no matter how often the floors were scrubbed clean. The building itself was unassuming and plain, windowless, made of concrete with a roof of corrugated tin. Sabo was grateful for the island’s mild climate, but once he was forced inside there was no circulation to help keep cool. The air was stale and suffocating, and while the deadly machinery had been removed the long, narrow corridors remained. A true death row.
Sabo could hear other prisoners through the thin walls. He expanded his senses and thought he felt the Presence of fifteen, maybe twenty people in total. Did Lord Chandler have that many enemies, or was he snuffing out competition? His noble title was still sparkling new, after all. Maybe he was afraid of losing it.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my years of business, it’s the importance of taking a hands-on approach,” Lord Chandler said in a conversational tone. He rolled up his sleeves past his elbows with deliberate slowness, savoring each moment. “That’s the problem with nobles these days, they’re afraid to get their hands dirty. But I’ve made an effort not to forget my roots.”
Sabo braced himself, not for any sort of blow, but the pain of the pretentious monologue he was certain was coming his way. He was considering saying something rude in hopes of making Lord Chandler shut up and hit him, but was saved the effort by the unexpected ring of the snailphone.
The snailphone that was currently in his pocket.
The snailphone that Lord Chandler did not know he was carrying.
Blue eyes narrowed into slits. “Search him!”
“Left pocket,” Sabo said with a longsuffering sigh.
One of the thugs growled in a way he probably thought was intimidating and forced one of his meaty paws into Sabo’s pants pocket. He looked at the baby snail as if he’d never seen a phone before in his life, causing Lord Chandler to bark, “Well, answer it, you buffoon!”
The guard did as he was told. He listened to the voice on the other end, thick eyebrows growing closer and closer together, and after a moment said, “Boss, it’s for you.”
Lord Chandler snatched the phone out of his hands and shouted into the receiver, “Who is this?!”
Sabo would have loved to hear what was said on the other end, but after a moment Lord Chandler’s face went ghost-white. He thrust the snail into one of his men’s hands without saying a word and rushed out of the slaughterhouse.
“Uh, boss…?”
“See, that’s the problem with doing everything yourself,” Sabo said. “A leader has to trust their underlings to do their job when they’re not around. Unfortunately, you’re just not up to the task.”
Sabo was moving before they had time to even process what he said. He broke out of their hold effortlessly, not even bothering with covering his fist with haki before ramming it into the nearest face. He had a brief moment of yearning for his metal pipe before thrusting the palm of his hand beneath the jaw of another. The third tripped over his own feet trying to run away, and Sabo decided to help him down, palming the back of his head and smashing his face into the concrete floor.
He took a step back, surveying his handiwork. They were all alive and twitching, so he took advantage of the abattoir aesthetic, wrapping them in the chains hanging from the ceiling. The hooks once used when draining blood of freshly slaughtered animals long-since repurposed with iron shackles.
Iron shackles. The idiot didn’t even invest in proper sea stone cuffs.
“Amateur,” Sabo muttered to himself. He wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand and went in search of Bunny Joe.
He found him in the locker, standing over an uneasy group of prisoners. There weren’t enough rooms for individual cells or even chains to bind them all, so they were kept together in one huddled mass.
For a moment Sabo was irritated that Joe hadn’t freed himself of such a pathetic prison. The man himself was talking quietly to a young woman, wide-eyed and trembling like a frightened doe, and Sabo forced his annoyance down. There were some things that were more important.
“Hiya, Joe!” Sabo said cheerfully. “Lovely place you’ve got here.”
Joe whirled around. Confusion flashed across his face, before his eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, hey. You’re the boss’s brat. What are you doing here?”
“Trying to find you,” Sabo said. “What’s going on? Chandler’s goons jumped me ‘n Koala before we had a chance to explain ourselves.”
Joe muttered a string of expletives and drew a hand over his forehead. “He got me early this morning. Must have seen me snooping someplace I shouldn’t and decided to tag you too. I’m so sorry, kid. I’ll get you out of this mess here in a bit.” A pause. “Wait, you said there was someone else with you? Where are they?”
“With a little bit of luck, out causing chaos and mayhem,” Sabo said.
“That’s no good. I need to get you guys out of here before the auction tonight.”
At the word auction the woman beside him burst into tears. Sabo saw her wobble like jelly, before the strength left her legs entirely and she collapsed into a sobbing mess on the ground. Bunny Joe knelt beside her and started rubbing her back in slow, steady circles.
“I’m going to get you all out of here, I promise. I need you to stay strong for me for just a little bit longer. Okay?”
She nodded, and Joe helped her stand with tears still streaming down her face. Taking her by the elbow, he led her back to the other prisoners. “I need to, uh, confer with my colleague for a moment. We’ll sort things out and get you home.”
“This was my home,” she whispered hoarsely.
Her expression crumpled into a look of wretched misery, and she buried her head in her hands. Joe handed her off to another one of the women, an older, matronly-type, his motions stiff and awkward. He returned to Sabo rubbing the back of his neck, uncomfortable and out of place.
“I’m no good at this sort of thing,” he admitted. “But I couldn’t just leave them here.”
“Lord Chandler’s hosting an auction?” Sabo said. It took enormous effort not to start shouting, the spark of his previous indignation ignited into a roaring fire of fury and rage.
“An art auction, yeah. It’s his third in the last two months.”
“I don’t get it.”
Bunny Joe sighed, scratched temple and tried to explain. “Chandler was a smuggler, yeah? And a damn good one at that. He opened up all sorts of illegal trade on this part of the Grand Line under the name Mr. Mooneyes.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” Sabo said.
“Yeah, well, the king turned a blind eye so long as he got his piece of the pie. That was how Chandler earned his title, and now that he’s got it he’s decided to expand his business.”
He looked back at the people behind him. “Auctions are the perfect way to get dirty money clean, and art is easy because the value of any given piece is so subjective. You know, the eye of the beholder, that sort of thing. I was digging through old records, and nearly every piece sold was going for about B500,000. I thought that was a little suspicious, so I tried to find out who was buying, but Chandler runs a tight ship. Everything’s anonymous, supposedly to protect the buyer and their new investment.”
“So you tried to find out who the buyers were.”
“And apparently got caught doing it,” Joe said wearily. “Sorry, I didn’t think he’d go as far as gathering up you guys. I’ll make sure you get home safe.”
“I don’t need your protection. What I need to know is what’s your plan to blow this out of the water, and what can I do to help. Lord Chandler isn’t going to stay away for long, and my guess is he’s going to bring backup. We need to be ready when he does.”
Joe peered down at Sabo, as if he were seeing him for the first time. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”
“Deadly.” Sabo said. “And here’s our backup now.”
Sabo felt Koala’s Presence before he saw her dance into the locker. She faltered for the briefest moment at the sight of the room before quickly finding Sabo and Joe. She didn’t appear seriously hurt, but it was impossible for Sabo not to see the blood on her knuckles. He wondered who it belonged to.
“I assume that was your work at the entrance? You were always good at tying people up.” Koala said.
“And I assume you were the one who called me?”
“I was surprised when you didn’t answer, but I think it worked out better this way,” Koala said, a look of pure wickedness on her face. “I wish I could have seen Chandler’s expression when I told him someone had knocked out his surveillance system.”
“And Hack?”
“I convinced him to hold off just a little bit longer. He’s at the harbor now snooping around the ships coming into port. Hopefully he can identify a few of the people on Chandler’s guestlist for tonight.”
She brushed a stray hair out of her face and scanned the room, noting each detail with a methodicalness that Sabo was sometimes jealous of. “But that’s enough about me. What’s all this?”
“A slave market,” Sabo said. “Seems like that’s how Lord Chandler is making money these days, with the approval of the crown.”
Her eyes hardened, the bright blue of her irises frosting over with an icy coldness. Her lips pursed together into a nearly invisible line, every muscle in her small body tensing. It was so rare to see her truly angry Sabo had almost forgotten how scary she could be. Bunny Joe took an involuntary step back as fury radiated off her in waves.
“The auction is this afternoon. I don’t think Chandler can afford to cancel. Not with so many VIPs coming in from all over the Grand Line,” Joe said. “But he’ll be ready. How bad did you mess up his snails?”
“It won’t be back up anytime soon,” Koala said tersely. “And I’ve brought you all a present.”
Without waiting for their response Koala turned sharply on one heel and walked back to the corridor near the entrance. Sitting next to the three guardsmen strung up from the ceiling was a man who’d been stripped down to his skivvies and hogtied, his clothes folded neatly beside him. Sabo almost laughed. “Who is he?”
“A visiting prince from the Moorlands,” Koala said. “I assume he came for the festivities later today.”
At the sight of them, the prince tried to yell into his gag. Sabo knelt down and picked up the man’s waistcoat with his thumb and forefinger, holding it away from his body as if it were diseased. “Is there a reason you decided to strip him?”
“He looked to be your size. Had this in his pocket.”
Koala handed him a card written on thick stock paper, the words TICKET OF INVITATION written in fancy script. Sabo took it from her skeptically. “His Lordship knows what I look like.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Joe said. “Everything is done anonymously. They wear masks.”
“It’s in there somewhere, just keep digging,” Koala said.
Sabo found a porcelain carnival mask, white a black domino pattern around the eyes, trimmed in gold. “Oh my god, it’s hideous.” He grinned up at her. “I’ll take it.”
Xxx
The clothes didn’t feel all that different from what he usually wore, albeit in black instead of his usual blue. Koala had even found him a cravat. But Sabo felt stiff, like he was wearing someone else’s skin.
He had to remember to walk like he had a stick up his ass, to look down at everyone else like they were bits of mud to be scrapped off of his polished boots. He stood in the spacious halls of Lord Chandler’s mansion, taking in the marble columns and the shiny crystal chandeliers, the smell of sandalwood in the air.
Even with his invitation he was afraid of someone seeing his disheveled hair, or that a guard would somehow see through the mask to see the imposter that lay beneath. The scars on his face and shoulder itched every time someone so much as glanced at him.
Security had been tripled, both inside and out of the mansion, but was thickest around the ballroom where the auction would take place. After a moment of consideration Sabo bypassed it. He was distinctly aware that they were running out of time, seconds ticking off the clock in the back of his mind. Following the directions left by Bunny Joe, he walked up a winding wrought-iron staircase to the second level of the mansion. A servant gave him a questioning look that Sabo dismissed with an aristocratic flick of the wrist. He ignored the stammared apology, stomach curling with guilt.
He hated acting like this. Hated more how good he was at it.
Sabo’s foul mood had nearly reached a boiling point by the time he reached the upper foyer. Two guards in white masks stood at attention by rich mahogany doors. At the sight of him they shifted their rifles, ready to raise them at a moment’s notice.
“No guests on the second floor,” one barked.
“But I have an invitation,” Sabo protested.
“No guests on the second floor.”
“I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with,” Sabo said softly. Dangerously.
He was moving before they had time to a look of confusion, twisting a hand into a dragon’s claw. Haki coating his hand black, he struck the middle of the rifle. Wood snapped into splinters under his hand, metal warping and bending with the force of the blow. The guardsman was thrown backward, head cracking against the doorpost. Pivoting sharply, Sabo grabbed a fistful of the second guardsman’s uniform. WIth a roar of fury he hurled him into the door with as much force as he could muster.
The door didn’t break, but the guard did. Shaking his head, Sabo stepped over him and jiggled the handle. Locked. Grinning behind his mask Sabo cracked his knuckles, surveying the door while he rolled his shoulders to loosen them.
One hit to break the lock. Another to blow the door off of its hinges. Mr. Mooneyes himself stood at a table at the center of the room in abject shock, the remnants clattering at his feet. His security was a little better, but Sabo hadn’t spent the past two years training with Dragon to be beaten by a handful of scrubs.
The last man fell before Lord Chandler could make his escape. Sabo grabbed him by the back of the waistcoat and whirled him around, pinning him up against the wall. Somewhere in the scrum the mask had fallen off of his face, and Lord Chandler’s eyes widened in recognition.
“Ha...You won’t get away with this,” Lord Chandler said, gasping for air. He looked down at Sabo with those clear, soulless eyes, a terrible grin twisting his face into something that was more monster than man.
“I think I will,” Sabo said.
“Marines are coming,” Lord Chandler said. “They’ll get you and the girl. No one will come to rescue you when you’re locked in Impel Down. I bet they have her already. I hope they make the little bitch suff--achgh!”
Somewhere along the line Sabo’s hand had found his neck and began squeezing. “I think you’ll find that girl doesn’t need rescued. Now tell me, who are your buyers? Who’s letting the slave trade expand this far from Mariejois?!”
“Hypocrite” Lord Chandler sneered. “Hubris like yours stinks of the Revolution. Where do you think Dragon gets his weapons? His supplies? Men like me...like my benefactor...are the grease that turns the wheel of society. My father always said you need a little bit of shit to make the garden grow, so don’t pretend you’re innocent. What sort of monster sends children out to do his dirty work?”
“What sort of monster puts free men and women in chains for profit?” Sabo spat through gritted teeth. “I’m not going to ask again, who’s the one letting you get away with it?!”
Lord Chandler laughed a dry, wheezy laugh. “Someone bigger and scarier than you. I’ll not breathe a word, boy, to you or your Revolution, so you might as well end this charade and kill me now.”
Before Sabo could answer, the snailphone in his pocket started to ring.
At the sound of it, Lord Chandler cackled like a madman.
“You’re too late, little Revolutionary. You should have known better than to challenge me when the World Government is on my side.”
Sabo kept one hand wrapped around Lord Chandler’s neck as he answered the phone. “What is it? I’m a little busy here.”
“We need to get out of here now,” Koala said. “Hack and I have the ship ready and Joe’s just about got the last of the slaves on board, but there’s half a dozen marine ships coming in hard. We’ll hold them off as long as we can, but they outgun us by...a lot.”
“I’ll divert their attention here,” Sabo said.
Hack’s voice cut in past Koala’s protests. “Sabo, you’ve done enough. It’s time to cut our losses and--”
“I’m going to burn it to the ground.”
Sabo hung up the phone. He looked at Lord Chandler like he were a newly discovered insect he was about to pin onto a specimen board. ���I’ll admit, you’re clever. Joe said you have a code during your auctions, a whole system for bidding so that an outsider looking in would have no idea what was really going on. What was it, oil paintings if they were women, acrylics for men, that sort of thing? I have to wonder why even bother with all the subterfuge if the World Government is really on your side.”
Lord Chandler opened his mouth to answer, but Sabo stopped him with a little bit of pressure against his windpipe. “I didn’t say you could speak. See, I’d say you were scared of the Revolution, but you didn’t even suspect us to start with. You’ve got enough goons here and the approval of your king, which makes me think it’s not the local competition you’re worried about. You’ve got too many resources for them to ever be a true threat.”
Sabo leaned closer. “The slave market’s pretty much a one man show these days. You were a smuggler once, right? I’m sure you’ve heard who’s in charge.”
A spasm passed over Lord Chandler, all-but-confirming Sabo’s gut instinct.
“I’m going to give you one last shot,” Sabo said. “Either you come with me and tell us everything you know, or I leave you here for Joker to take care of. You have thirty seconds to decide.”
Sabo dropped Lord Chandler with an unceremonious thud. He kept half an eye on him while making a quick sweep of the room, gathering up any sort of documentation that looked to be important and stuffing it down the front of his shirt.
Everything else he gathered into a pile. Sabo found the nearest candle and carefully lowered the wicking flame. The paper caught, curling to black ash and smoke.
He would have to help it along if he wanted to make good on his promise to Koala, but Sabo figured he could make it work. He turned back to where Lord Chandler sat whimpering in a corner.
“Time’s up, your Lordship. What do you decide?”
Xxx
“Wanted for kidnapping, assault, and impersonating a noble.”
Koala slipped Sabo’s newly-minted bounty from between the pages for closer inspection before handing him the rest of the paper. “I thought you would be happy. Why are you not happy?”
“I don’t know,” Sabo admitted. He propped his head on his hand and scanned the news, trying to read between the lines of lies to find the truth that lay underneath. “It was all...vaguely unsatisfying.”
“You burned down a mansion.”
“I burn down things all the time. I wanted something...more. Something meaningful.”
Koala quirked an eyebrow. “Saving eighteen people from slavery isn’t meaningful?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m not sure I do.
Sabo set down the paper and looked at her helplessly. A bandage covered one cheek from an errant bullet, a result of her staving off the marines long enough for everyone to escape.
He felt himself getting angry all over again, but it was an impotent anger. They’d completed their mission, but it wasn’t enough.
It would never be enough.
“Lord Chandler’s one man. One. He’s not even that important in the grand scheme of things. How many others are out there just like him, trying to get their piece of the pie because the Government says it’s okay to sell people like chattel? He’s a symptom, not the disease.”
He tried to go back to his paper, but after a few seconds feeling Koala’s eyes boring into his side gave up and tossed it aside. He leaned his chair back on two legs and groaned. “I want to do more. Go higher. Punch more dochebags in the face.”
“And you will.”
Both Koala and Sabo whirled around where Dragon’s massive body filled the doorway. How he managed to be so sneaky in a base full of Observation Haki users Sabo would never know.
“I’ve gone over Bunny Joe’s report. You commended yourselves well, both of you.”
Koala bowed her head. “Thank you, sir.”
“When’s our next mission?” Sabo asked at the same time.
Dragon’s lips quirked in one of his almost-smiles. “Now. It turns out Mr. Mooneyes made sure to get dirt on each of his clients as a means of protecting himself. With this information, we’ll be able to climb a little bit closer to our goals. Now go pack your bags, you leave tonight with the tide.”
Sabo let out a whoop of joy and jumped to his feet, but before he could make a mad dash to his room Dragon placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Patience. A lion may stalk for hours waiting for the perfect time to strike. Our work will not be in vain. The Celestial Dragons will fall.”
Sabo nodded once, sharply. “And I’ll make sure to be there when it happens.”
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Not Your (soul)Mate {11/15}
Killian Jones doesn’t like the idea of soulmates. He sees how happy his friends are with theirs, but he still doesn’t like the idea, not when he’s found love and lost it time and time again only to still not know his sign. He has no markings on his skin, no voices in his head, but then one day he meets Emma Swan and everything changes. Because, well, he may not have ink on his skin to tell him who to love, but the very first time that he hears Emma’s voice he knows that she’s the one for him. Then again, that could simply be his desire talking. After all, for every word she speaks, he becomes aroused.
It’s not the worst thing in the world to be incredibly attracted to a beautiful woman, but things aren’t that simple when she doesn’t have any interest in being his soulmate.
He’s screwed. And not in the good way.
Rating: Mature
A/N: Hey, hi, hello! This is one of my favorite chapters in the entire story, and it’s accompanied by one of my favorite pieces of artwork by the lovely @captainsjedi 💙 It perfectly captures the chapter and the story, and I still can’t believe she’s kind enough to make these pic sets for me!
Found on AO3: Beginning | Current
Tumblr: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15
Tag list: @initiala @snowbellewells @karenfrommisthaven @skyewardolicitycloisdelena91 @scientificapricot @captswanis4vr @a-faekindagirl @emmas-storybook @searchingwardrobes @spartanguard @ultimiflos @jamif @idristardis @dreameronarooftop15 @nikkiemms @resident-of-storybrooke @tiganasummertree @wellhellotragic @bmbbcs4evr @onceuponaprincessworld @jennjenn615 @mayquita @captainsjedi @teamhook @kmomof4 @ekr032-blog-blog @superchocovian @ultraluckycatnd @cs-forlife @andiirivera @qualitycoffeethings @jonirobinson64 @mariakov81 @xellewoods @thejollyroger-writer @galaxyzxstark @cssns
-/-
After loading the last children’s life jacket into the back of his jeep, Killian closes the hatch and listens to it slam in place before opening his front door and climbing in. He’s got his windows and roof down, his radio turned onto a station that’s playing hits from the eighties since he’s really into that lately, and he doesn’t think Storybrooke has ever experienced a more perfect day weather-wise. It’s not going to get above eighty degrees, and there are no clouds in sight as the sun rises higher and higher in the sky.
If he had to put how he feels about today in a word, the word would be excited.
And he’s not entirely sure that it encapsulates how he feels like there’s a bit of a bounce in his step and that he’s gone back five and a half years to being in his twenties and thinking that everything in his life was ahead of him and simply waiting for him to achieve it. Technically, that’s true, but it also wasn’t true back then. It’s fine, though. The past is the past, and he’s ready to, not forget it, but move on from it. Tomorrow, when the festival is over and the sun isn’t shining as brightly, the breeze not as pleasant, he may feel differently, but that’s something for him to worry about on another day.
Some of the streets are closed today, especially the ones around the beach and his apartment, so it’s a bit of a difficult situation to get to Liam’s house to pick up Luis and Luca. He’d wanted them to simply be dropped off at his apartment since it’s infinitely easier, but just because today is the summer regatta doesn’t mean that everyone in town has off of work. He’s not sure the place would function if that were true, but it’d be nice for the twins to get to spend time with Elsa instead of her having to go into work. He thinks that he and Liam are pretty awesome, but they definitely don’t compare to Elsa.
He might be slightly too fond of his brother’s wife, but she’s felt like his sister since the day they met.
When he gets to their house, he turns his key to turn off his jeep before getting out and walking toward the front door, his sneakers melting into the dew-covered grass before he’s walking up the few steps on the porch and stepping into their house. At one point in time, he was mortified of walking in on Liam and Elsa, but now that they have kids, he doesn’t really think he’s going to find them going at it in the entryway before eight in the morning.
Well, he hopes not. And he’d really rather not think about it. Some things will never not be scarring.
No one is running around the entryway or the living room, but he does hear a bit of movement from the back of the house near the kitchen. That’s where he finds Elsa and the kids sitting at the kitchen island with bowls of cereal and a plate of fruit in between them. Yeah, they’re definitely going to beg him for junk food later. At least he’s not the one who has to put them to bed while on sugar highs.
“What? Nobody was going to invite me to breakfast?”
Three blonde heads turn to the side to look at him, and he smiles a bit at how similar they all look. It’s uncanny really.
“You can have some of mine,” Luis offers, holding his bowl up.
“Thank you, lad.” He walks over to them and stands next to Elsa behind the counter, pressing a kiss into her cheek before reaching forward and grabbing a grape from the plate of fruit. “But you can eat your food. I think you might need it so you have energy for today.”
“What are we doing?”
“Oh, well, I’m going to have you two racing the sailboats. You’re just going to swim right along with the boats.”
“Are we really?”
“No,” Elsa laughs, hitting him in the back, “you guys are not doing that.”
“Mom,” they both whine, the way they match up eerie.
He nudges Elsa’s shoulder. “Yeah, Mum.”
Elsa rolls her eyes before leaning down to prop her elbows on the granite, her blouse sleeves riding up a bit. “You two are going to the festival with Killian and going to play the games at the booths and eat lunch with him until your dad gets off of work.”
“What about you?”
“When I get off of work, I’m going to come to the pier too, so you guys have to make sure to save some fun for me.”
“Eh, maybe,” Luca shrugs before flicking her braids over her shoulders. “I heard that there’s going to be a sandcastle contest, and I want to do it.”
“What time is that? Do you know?” Elsa asks him.
“Not until the evening, so you and Liam can likely do it with them.”
“What? You don’t want to spend all day with kids who aren’t yours, and you’re just going to shove them off to the parents?”
He winks. “Exactly.”
After getting the twins dressed in their swimsuits and cover-ups, being handed two backpacks full of things that he knows he’ll have to carry around all day instead of the two of them actually carrying them, they all bid Elsa goodbye as she heads to work and Killian drives them back to his apartment, working through the already congested traffic to pull into his parking spot. The twins barely let him turn the key before they’re hoping out of the jeep, and he has to shout for them to stay still while he gets their bags and their life jackets from the trunk. He idly wonders if they would be okay wearing the life jackets all day so he doesn’t have to carry them, but he thinks that’d probably be a little excessive since they won’t need them until Liam takes over.
Probably.
He still might do it.
“Can we get something to eat?” Luis asks when they turn the corner on the pier and start walking down the pathway full of booths, colored banners hanging on strings between every stall to bring a bit more brightness to the area. “I’m hungry.”
“You just ate.”
“I’m a growing boy.”
Killian rolls his eyes and pats Luis on the back over his bag. “We’ll get lunch when we can. What do you guys want to do? Do you want to play games?”
“Can we go out on a boat?”
“Not until after the races.”
“I want to play the ring toss game.” Luca points up ahead of them to a booth where several other kids are standing. “Do you have any money?”
“Darn. I knew that I forgot something.”
“Uncle Killian,” she whines, tugging on his t-shirt, “please.”
“I have money, love,” he laughs as he gently yanks at one of her braids. “Luis, do you want to play that one too?”
“Sure.”
If Luca and Luis were anyone else’s kids, he knows that they would not be nearly as calm as they are. He loves Roland, thinks he’s the sweetest thing, but he’s also got a bit of a wild streak that can be hard to contain. Luca and Luis, though, are basically small eight-year-old versions of Elsa and Liam. They’re calm, collected, usually very focused on the task ahead, and he swears that he could spend all of his time with them.
No part of them are calm, collected, and focused today.
Scratch that. They are extremely focused, but it’s usually on what game they can play next. They finish one booth, get their prize (which he carries), and then they have to move onto the next one, nearly sprinting back and forth on the pier while sweat gathers at the nape of his neck. A part of him wishes that the games were like carnie games where everything is rigged, but since the Storybrooke city council puts this thing together, everything is always fair and kid friendly. Even if it would cost him more money, he kind of wishes that maybe it took them a little longer to push the boat toys across the small man-made ocean in their miniature race.
But they’re having fun, and that’s all that really matters to them, and when it’s time for the actual race to start, he has to tug the two of them away from a booth that is selling goldfish (there is no way in hell he’s going to be carrying those around all day for them to simply die from the jostling) to head toward the end of the pier that juts out into the ocean so that they can have a better look.
Really, Killian should notice her before he does, but with the sounds of the waves crashing around them and all of the extra people in the town for the festival and holiday weekend, he doesn’t hear her until he’s standing right next to her at the railings.
“Hey, Killian,” Ruby greets, and when he’s lifting his hand in greeting, Emma turns her head around to look at them, her lips parting the slightest bit. And if she didn’t have on sunglasses, he’s sure that her eyes would be widened. “Why aren’t you racing? Aren’t you, like, the boat guy?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t own my own.”
“And he’s watching us until our dad gets here,” Luca adds in for him. “Hi, Ms. Emma.”
“Hey, guys,” Emma cajoles, a bright smile on her face as she waves at the twins before she tugs on one of her two braids that’s resting over her shoulder. “I like your hair, Luca.”
Luca gasps, almost like she’s seen a unicorn, before coming to his other side and looking up at Emma with all the admiration in the world. “Your hair looks just like mine, but you have a different color blonde.”
“Well, that’s because you have your mom’s hair.”
“I like yours.”
“I love yours,” Emma promises, reaching down to adjust the bands on Luca’s braids while he smiles down at her, his stomach fluttering the slightest bit. Of course she perfectly gets along with children. She only fluctuates on her feelings when it comes to him. “So you guys are stuck with your boring uncle all day?”
“Just half of the day.”
“Hey,” he groans, pressing his lips back in into his face as he tries to take a few breaths to calm the bit of heat that’s rising on his cheeks, “don’t act like you’re not excited just because someone else is here.”
A whistle blows, and he twists his head to the side to see several sailboats start to make their way out of the marina, slowly maneuvering around the water and over the waves, and he takes the opportunity to point it out to the twins, Luca moving back to his right so that she’s in between he and Luis while Emma shuffles a bit closer to him, the crowd pushing everyone around. She smiles at him, this soft little thing that he wishes he saw more often, that he wishes he could elicit from her more often, before turning back to talk to Ruby, her voice quieter than usual, though it doesn’t mean he can’t hear it. He fully expects her to move away, to try to find another place to stand, but as the minutes go on, she doesn’t move.
Huh.
Today must be some kind of weird day, but he’s not going to complain, not since he currently isn’t sporting a hard on from having her talk to him for a bit.
The twins are fascinated with the race, something he knows that they get from Liam, and he barely has to explain anything as they spend most of the time trying to explain things to him, using technical terms that make his chest puff up in pride. Since they seem to know everything, he relaxes, leaning forward on the railing and letting his hands fall over the railing as he taps his fingers against the wood next to Emma’s. She’s got such slight fingers next to his, and her skin is paler, almost porcelain even with the tan she has, and it surely doesn’t help the difference that his forearms are covered in dark hair while he can only see the slightest bit of blonde over her freckles. She’s covered in freckles, really, like a miniature constellation spread out over his arms, and he finds that her skin imperfections are much different than his, the red scars stretching over his wrist and onto his palm far less attractive. They’re more obvious today, something that happens in the sunlight, and for a moment, his mind flashes back to the accident and the awful pain that he felt before he focuses on something else: particularly, the proximity of his left hand to Emma’s right.
Is he fifteen years old? He may as well be.
She sometimes makes him feel that way.
In what he hopes is a sly move, he glances to his left to look at Emma only to see her looking down at his hands, her gaze obvious now that her sunglasses are resting on the top of her head, mixed in with her braids. He almost yanks his hand away, but then Emma’s reaches to cover his, her finger tracing over the red lines. His skin vibrates, all of the hair standing on end, and he swallows the gulp that’s stuck in his throat as he watches. It’s been...no one has traced his scars since Milah, and Emma’s currently doing just that. Why? He has no idea, and he’s obviously in too much shock to say anything.
There’s also the fact that it feels so damn good, and he could melt into her touch.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps, dropping his hand and grabbing onto the railing. “I don’t know - I - it wasn’t - ”
“It’s fine,” he promises, smiling at her to try to calm her down a bit even as his body aches for the loss of her touch, the flames still flickering down his spine. “I was in an accident, in the Navy. We were being shot at, and I was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was an explosion, and my hand got crushed in some metal. Luckily, I only managed to get these gnarly scars when I very well should have lost the hand.”
Emma nods her head, her jaw ticking a bit, and he wonders if he’s spoken too much, both because of how much he’s told and how aroused he’s likely making her. “I’m sorry. Thank you for sharing that with me. I - ”
“You think the scars are hot,” he teases, hitting his shoulder into hers to try to keep her from bumbling around for more words. “I know, I get that a lot.”
“Shut up.”
“That’s your go-to phrase.”
“Uncle Killian, do you have my Sour Patch Kids?”
“In the backpack, Luis.”
Luis nods his head before shuffling around in his backpack until he pulls out the bright yellow bag that he won after throwing darts at one of the booths. Killian doesn’t think anything else about it as the sailboats circle back around toward them, until Luis hands him the bag, offering him the gummies. He reaches in to take one, offering the bag to Emma and Ruby, before popping one in his mouth and letting the slight sourness melt on his tongue.
“You’re like a Sour Patch Kid, Swan. You’re all sour on the outside, but when you get to the core of things, you’re actually pretty sweet.”
He hears Ruby snicker, but Emma huffs, reaching for the bag again and taking several more into her hand. “You’re comparing me to sour candy?”
“I said you turned sweet.”
“That’s a pretty accurate comparison,” Ruby adds in, leaning forward so he can see her wink. He likes the lass now that he’s gotten to know her a bit. Ruby. Not Emma. Though he’s fond of Emma in a way that he isn’t with Ruby.
“Exactly.”
“Well, you’re like the nasty tropical fruit version of Sour Patch Kids.”
“Oooh, not your best insult, love.”
“Whatever.”
Hot and then cold.
That’s Emma. Just like the damned candy.
Sour and then sweet.
“Killian, do you want to bring the twins to get lunch with us?” Ruby asks, and he doesn’t miss Emma stomping her foot down on her friend’s.
“Can we please get food?” Luca begs, leaning a little too far over the railing for his liking so he has to pull her back. “Can we please? Please? I want a burger.”
“Sure, love,” he smiles, switching his gaze between all three ladies while Luis continues to watch the regatta, not a care in the world other than the ocean in front of him. “Let’s go get lunch.”
They turn around to make their way back down to the food stalls that surround the regularly standing restaurants only to find that everyone else seemed to have the exact same idea about getting food. But they’ve promised eight-year-olds food, so he, Ruby, Emma, and the twins make their way through the crowd, Luca holding onto Emma’s hand and Luis holding onto his, and after getting pushed and bumped around for fifteen minutes, they finally make it to the little stand that’s selling all of the junk food and is not-so-coincidentally the most crowded. He tries to convince the twins to go somewhere else, but since they’re pretty set on it, all five of them wait in line for thirty minutes before getting their baskets of food and then facing the issue of finding a place to sit.
There’s nowhere.
Absolutely nowhere.
“What about down that way?” Ruby wonders, holding her basket of food and pointing to a little alcove of seats.
Emma shrugs. “We might as well try. It’s too hot to sit on the pier.”
They quickly wander down the few feet to the new section of seating, and while nothing catches his eyes immediately, Ruby, ever the one to take charge, grabs onto Luca’s hand and starts weaving in and out of the crowd where she finds an empty table...without enough chairs. But it’s likely as good as it’s going to get. Ruby sits down in a chair before telling Luca and Luis to share one, and that leaves...oh, well, that leaves one chair left.
At this point, he’s starting to believe that his life may be a bad romantic comedy.
He turns to look at Emma, and she motions toward the chair, nodding her head instead of speaking.
“No, you can have it, love. I don’t mind standing.”
“I sit all the time. I can stand.”
“Swan, please, let me be a gentleman.”
“So you’re a gentleman now?”
“I’m always a gentleman.”
“Oh my God,” Ruby groans, tossing a fry at the two of them, “just suck it up and either one of you sit down or share the freaking chair.”
If he was chewing on food, he’d definitely choke on it, probably never to be revived. His entire body is already heated from Emma talking and the sun, the workings of an erection beginning even if he thinks he’s controlling himself pretty well today, and Emma sitting on his lap would definitely be a recipe for disaster.
Definitely.
“I’ll share with you, Rubes,” Emma offers, reaching to place her burger down only for Ruby to shove it across the table.
“I’m not letting your bony as - bottom sit on me. Uh, uh. If you wanted the seat, you should have gotten here earlier.”
“Seriously? You took Luca and ran.”
“Luca and I are just awesome like that. Right kid?”
Luca reaches up from her food to high five Ruby. “Right.”
“Just suck it up and share the chair,” Ruby murmurs, dipping her fry into some ketchup. “I swear you guys have so much sexual tension going on you need something like this. I mean, really, you need to sit on another part of Killian, but I can’t say that with children here.”
“Ruby! Oh my God!”
“What’s sexual tension?” Luis asks, and he seriously contemplates going to dive into the ocean to get away from all of this.
“Eat your food,” he deflects, huffing enough and feeling enough frustration that he hastily takes the empty seat, letting the back of his thighs burn a little bit at the heat of it. “It’ll get cold.”
“Are you seriously not going to give me the seat?”
He looks up at Emma and pats his thigh, a cocky smile forming on his face because as torturous as this day is, it sure is a hell of a lot more fun than he thought it would be. “I did, darling. You didn’t take it, but I am more than willing to share.”
Emma pulls her bottom lip between her teeth, her foot tapping on the wood, and when she looks up at the sky, he knows the decision she’s made. “Fine, but don’t be weird about it.”
“I would never.”
Emma moves her food on the table and slowly settles herself down onto his thigh, her skin under her dress pressing into him and making a warm buzz fall over every inch of him, his stomach pleasantly rolling and his heart wildly beating in his chest. It’s insane how being this close to her is affecting him after weeks of simply texting and writing those damn letters, and if he didn’t need air to live, he may stop breathing.
It might be worth it.
“I can feel your dick,” she quietly huffs, adjusting herself on top of him while his hand moves over her stomach to keep her still. By now he realizes they probably could have simply had Luca and Luis sit in their laps, and if the smirk on Ruby’s face is any indication, she realized it from the beginning, the crafty lass. Not that he’s going to complain. She’s basically been his secret little helper with Emma for weeks now, always encouraging them to be closer together. It’s probably because she heard him joke about fucking Emma on Granny’s kitchen counter.
He leans into her ear, his teeth clenched from trying to live with Emma sitting on top of him, and whispers, “It’d be kind of hard not to.”
“Is that a size joke or a hardness joke?”
“Definitely size.”
“Shut up.”
“Stop squirming.”
“There’s not enough room.”
“Are you Killian’s girlfriend?” Luca asks, and he nearly breaks one of Emma’s ribs from how tightly he squeezes her into him, making her cough up what must be one of her lungs and the cheeseburger she just took her first bite out of.
“No, no, no,” Emma sputters out, hitting at her own chest, and he squeezes her a little bit more then, wondering if he should have made a joke about how hard he is because her voice and her ass sitting on top of him are definitely not the best combination. “I’m not your uncle’s girlfriend. Definitely not.”
“You don’t have to act so repulsed about it, Swan.”
“I’m not repulsed.”
“So you do like me then?”
“Oh my God,” she groans, leaning back further into him, and even if he feels like he’s being tortured right now, this might very well be one of the best days of his life. “You know what I mean.”
“Do you know how to sail a boat, Emma?” Luis asks, bringing him out of how distracted he is over Emma. God, he likes her, and it’s so hard for him to even attempt to deny that, not that he even really wants to. He’s gotten to know her so much lately, and all of these random little quirks that she has are making him fall harder and harder. Them spending the day together like this is both a dream and a nightmare. “My dad makes boats.”
“I don’t know how to sail one, but I’m very good at riding.”
He knows that she doesn’t mean it, but at the same time that she says the last word, she adjusts herself in his lap, and it’s his turn to nearly hack up one of his lungs. He might as well hack up both and accept that fate is taking him over because damn, this could not possibly get any worse (better.)
“Killian,” Ariel shouts.
Okay, it could get worse. It could definitely get worse.
“Killian, Emma,” Ariel repeats, moving through the crowd with her nearly eight-month pregnant stomach with more ease than either of them had. When she gets to them, he notices her eyes scan over the two of them, but then again, which one of their friends wouldn’t do that? “Oh my gosh, what are you guys doing out here? You should come into the restaurant and get some air conditioning. It’s crowded, but I can let you sit in the office.”
“Hey, A. The kids didn’t want to eat at Eric’s place. No offense.”
She waves them away, a bright smile on her face even though he knows she’s seriously hating the latter stages of her pregnancy. They went out and bought her a new chair for her desk two weeks ago because her back was killing her. He’s definitely going to steal it when she’s on maternity leave.
His temporary secretary can have her old chair.
“No, I get it. Hamburgers and chicken are much better than fish. Are you all going out on the water later?”
“I’ve been trying to hint at it to Killian,” Ruby nudges, raising a perfectly groomed eyebrow at him, “but I don’t think he’s gotten it.”
“Ruby has never been subtle a day in her life,” Emma quietly says into his ear, her breath hot on his skin as a shiver runs down his spine.
“I heard that.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Anyways,” Ruby sighs, waving her finger in the air, “apparently we’re dropping the munchkins off with their dad after lunch, and then I’m pretty much going to beg Killian to take us out sailing since he’s the only one who knows how.”
“If you bribe him with some kind of fruity dessert, that usually works.”
“You are not supposed to use your knowledge as my secretary against me.”
“What else am I supposed to use it for?”
“Your job.”
“You keep saying that like it means something.”
He rolls his eyes, unable to stop himself, and he can feel Emma’s stomach move with her laugh, the muscles twitching underneath his fingertips. He still can’t believe that this is his day. But he’s simply going to roll with it.
-/-
“Oi,” Will shouts, leaning over the railing a bit too far in a way that makes Killian’s insides twists, “I think we’re out of beer.”
“You don’t need anymore, sweetie,” Belle placates as she pats his knee.
“I’ve only had the two.”
“Yeah, but your personality really doesn’t need the help of alcohol,” Emma teases him as she rises from her seat and adjusts the strap of her dress from where it’s fallen off of her shoulder. “It’s already like you’re drunk when you’re sober.”
“Shut it, Swan.”
“Creative insult there, Scarlet,” Ruby sighs, propping her legs up in the seat that Emma just abandoned while Ariel works on another bottle of water. She’s gone through at least five.
They’ve been out on the water for three hours now, their little ragtag group. They’d tried to get more people to join them, but everyone else was working, unable to get off for the afternoon. Or, like Liam, they’re with their kids. Emma almost didn’t join them, making some excuse about taking a shift so that David could spend time with Leo, but then they’d run into Ashely who had very kindly let them all know that she and August were handling patrol since they are, after all, patrol officers while Emma and David are detectives. Sometimes he wonders about this town’s law enforcement. Everything seems to be all over the place, and yet there is very little crime.
He probably shouldn’t think about it too much.
So they’d all loaded up onto a rented sailboat, even Ariel despite the fact that she is extremely seasick whenever they’re idling and rocking on the waves, so he makes sure to keep them moving as much as he can without using the engine since they’ll likely be out here for a good while. It keeps him away from everyone, at least a bit, but he’s honestly okay with that. He can join in on conversation whenever he wants to, but he doesn’t have to be an active participant.
Which is good because of Emma and what happens when he hears her voice. He really doesn’t think they’d like to give into their desires on a rented sailboat in front of all of their friends. He doesn’t know about Emma, but he’s not much of an exhibitionist. That’s something he should probably know about her, right? He feels like he knows several little trivial facts that make up who she is, which really makes the facts far from trivial.
Every part of him is fascinated that she’s so particular with her sweets, especially hot chocolate as he learned, and that she has read more novels than him despite him having several years over her. She’s secretly a history buff, thus her obsession with the History Channel, and she loves running and boxing more than any other workout, though running has been her thing lately. But not in the mornings, as she’s not really a morning person, and she prefers cold weather to hot so that she’s not dying in her jeans and can wear her boots. He also knows there was apparently an incident with karaoke, but he’ll likely never know anything more than that.
So he feels like he knows her, knows more little things that he’s discovered through her letters and her texts, and even if he doesn’t know the deep secrets of her past like she doesn’t know his, he feels like the little things are enough to firmly cement the fact that he is absolutely enamored with Emma (no middle name apparently) Swan. It’s obviously a physical thing, a spark that they can’t help, but she also makes him feel almost giddy in a way that he hasn’t felt in years.
And he’s still confused by her. Some things never change.
Emma: Are you going to sail us too far away from the shore, Captain?
Killian looks up from his phone to look toward Emma, but she’s not looking at him, her gaze turned toward the sea so that it’s silhouetted around her, her small frame miniscule compared to the vast blue of the ocean. Beautiful. And if her hair wasn’t in braids, he can imagine the curls blowing in the wind.
Killian: Absolutely. How do you feel about England?
Emma: Are there more people like you there?
Killian: Swan, there’s no one like me.
“Are you supposed to be able to text and sail?” Ariel shouts at him while her hands run over her belly. “I feel like that isn’t safe.”
“The only way we won’t be safe out here is if we let Will be our Captain, love.”
“Hey!”
“Oh, honey, you know he’s just telling the truth.”
Emma: Are you sure that’s a good thing?
Killian: Absolutely.
He moves his fingers across the screen to text her back, to try to get the conversation to keep going, but his eyes follow her as she gets up, using Ruby’s shoulder as a bit of leverage before she’s walking toward him and stepping up the few steps that lead to where he’s sitting behind the wheel, casually turning them so that they can make their way back to shore since he’s pretty sure that Ariel isn’t going to make it that much longer out here. And he’s definitely not delivering a baby out here.
Emma doesn’t say anything, simply sits down on the seat next to him, and he twists in his chair to look at her, pressing his lips into a smile as she seems to be playing with her split ends before her lashes flutter up to look at him.
“So I hear that we’re the best man and maid of honor in some impending nuptials,” he starts, unsure of whether or not to talk to Emma, unsure of how much he can talk to her.
“Those are the facts, Jack.” He raises a brow at that particular phrasing, and she shrugs her shoulders, her lips parting in a beatific smile. “So Will asked you then? They’re not even getting married until next summer.”
“It’s never too early to start planning.”
“Considering I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow, I don’t agree with that philosophy.”
“Work? Or is that just optional for you?”
“Shut up,” she laughs, and the sound sends vibrations down his spine, and when Emma reaches over to slap at his leg, he has to bite his cheek. “I meant besides work. Like, after work. Wait, scratch that. I have to pick up Ariel’s baby shower gift.”
Shit. He needs to do that.
“Well, then, it sounds like you have plans.” His eyes glance over toward Emma to see if she’s folding her hands together in a fist or clenching her jaw, and when she seems to be fully relaxed, her shoulders not tense and her feet propped up on the dash, he wonders why they’re not as affected by each other’s voices today when they’ve talked more than they ever have. Maybe Emma’s better at hiding it, and something with him is...not working today. That’s not something he really wants to think about. “So, Swan,” he continues, “at this wedding do you think I’ll get a shot at dancing with a pretty lass?”
“Eh, I’d say your chances are slim. According to our friends, you struggle to get a date.”
He barks out a laugh loud enough that he’s sure all of the creatures in the depths of the ocean can hear him, but none of their friends seem to pay the two of them any mind, all of them continuing on in their own conversations.
“That is a subject for another time, but for the record, I have no trouble getting a date. It seems that the only thing I’m interested in is seeing if a certain blonde will dance with me at a wedding.”
“I don’t really dance.”
“Oh, Swan, all you have to do is pick a partner who knows what he’s doing. Besides, I wasn’t even referring to you.”
Emma maneuvers her legs around to kick at him, but he easily grabs onto her ankle, keeping it away from him as he rests it on his thigh, his thumb running over her ankle without much thought. And when Emma doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t stop. They sit in companionable silence as he guides them back to shore, the buildings over Storybrooke coming back into view as the sun sets behind them, an orange glow falling over the water and over all of them as he watches Emma yawn, placing her hands over her mouth while her nose and eyes scrunch up. He’s exhausted from spending his entire day outside, but there’s something about right now that has him never wanting to spend a second wishing that he could be asleep in bed.
After he docks, he helps everyone off of the boat, especially Ariel, before they all start moving in opposite directions so that they can go home. He notices that Emma lingers with him, her steps a little slower than they should be, and he smiles a bit to himself at this development that they’ve had today.
“For the record,” she starts, kicking at the boards on the dock, “if you asked me, I would dance with you. As long as it wasn’t for a dance where I had to grind my ass on you.”
“Damn,” he laughs as he stops his steps, “you’ve foiled my plans.”
“I thought so.” Emma brings her bottom lip between her teeth, rocking back and forth on her heel. “Thanks for today. It was fun.”
“It was my pleasure.”
Without really thinking about it, or maybe thinking about it too much, he dips his head down and quickly brushes his lips over Emma’s cheek, feeling the softness of her skin and the slight taste of salt before he quickly pulls back, tucking her hair behind her ear and murmuring a quiet goodbye before she does the same, waving at him before she practically jogs down the docks to get away from him.
Maybe. He doesn’t really know, and he’s a little bit too scared to find out. He’s going to try not to question anything about today, even if he already is, and enjoy the fact that Emma’s cheeks flushed red after he kissed her.
God, it almost felt like it was the first time, that it was the most intimate thing, but he’s already kissed her once in a way that was much more passionate and intimate than that.
Right?
“What the bloody hell was that?” Liam questions, a hint of teasing evident in his voice as Killian turns to the side and sees Liam walking down the docks, a smug smile on his face. Of course. Of course his brother saw that. “Did you just kiss Emma goodbye?”
“A kiss on the cheek isn’t kissing someone goodbye,” he lies, shaking his head a bit as he takes a deep breath. “I kissed Elsa on the cheek this morning. It’s simply a friendly gesture.”
“Whatever that was, well, it was not a friendly gesture.”
“Bug off,” he groans as he reaches up to push back his hair, the exhaustion from the day beginning to hit him as he tries to figure his way out of this one. “What are you even doing down here? Where’s your family?”
“Elsa took the kids home early, and I was doing inspections to make sure no one damaged any of our boats today. But I’m really rather more interested in what’s going on with you and Emma. I didn’t know the two of you were courting.”
“Are you from the eighteenth century?”
“Possibly.”
“We’re not courting. We’re - ” He hesitates, not sure what to say and really rather distracted by the twist in his stomach that comes from the thought of he and Emma dating. That’s what he wants, what he desperately wants, and even though he’s not sure what’s going on in Emma’s mind, he knows that she must feel some of it. “Shit,” he mumbles under his breath. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Liam raises a brow and crosses his arms, something he always does to make himself seem bigger and like more of an authoritative figure. He’s about to use it to get Killian to spill what’s on his mind, but Killian is already halfway there. Before Liam can say anything, though, Killian waves his hand and shakes his head, the disbelief mixing in with the twisting and fluttering stomach.
“Let’s go to my apartment. I’m going to need a drink for this.”
-/-
“Wait, wait, wait,” Liam chuckles, throwing his head back as he wipes tears from his eyes, his rum glass nearly full while Killian’s already working on his second, “when the two of you hear each other’s voices, you start sporting a boner? Are you fifteen years old?”
“Obviously not. I can’t help it.”
“That’s what a fifteen-year-old lad would say too. Why does this happen?”
“I, uh.” He reaches up to scratch behind his ear. “I can’t tell you.”
“Excuse me? Why the hell not?”
“I told Emma I wouldn’t tell anyone, back when we first figured out it was happening, and I’ve probably already told you too much.”
“Killian,” Liam sighs, placing his glass on the coaster on the coffee table, “something is obviously bothering you, and you can’t just tell me that you two turn each other on for no reason and then not explain more unless...holy fuck,” Liam gasps, slapping his knee while Killian sinks a little further into his couch, “is Emma Swan your soulmate?”
Heat immediately rushes to the tips of his ears, which is the opposite of where heat was rushing earlier today, and he wonders if it’s possible for him to melt into the couch cushions. It was a mistake to invite Liam up here, to tell him about the predicament that he and Emma are in. Liam knows him better than anyone else on earth, and he should have known that even spilling a little bit would be too much.
The rum was likely a mistake, too.
“Yes,” he admits, knowing it’s pointless to lie, before downing the rest of his glass in one gulp, the rum burning him.
Liam’s face breaks out into a smile while Killian’s stomach fills with dread, and he doesn’t think there’s ever been a larger dichotomy between reactions over the same fact.
“Killian, that’s fantastic. I mean, you were so heartbroken over Milah, over the loss, and if there’s anyone who deserves to have found their soulmate, it’s you. I can’t wait to tell Elsa. We’ve been hoping for this for so long.”
“No,” he insists, sitting up and holding his hand out, “do not tell Elsa. You can’t tell anyone. Seriously. No one.”
“Because Emma doesn’t want anyone to know? I’m sure that was just when you two first started dating she wanted to keep it a secret, but you two have been spending so much time together. Surely, she’d be fine with it now. This is something to be celebrated.”
“We’re not dating. We’re not...we text a bit, spend some time together, but it’s all very confusing. We used to say one word to each other and were ready to sleep together, and now we can have conversations and that only affects us a little bit. I don’t - Liam, I don’t know what’s happening. All I know is that I’m very well falling in love with this woman, and she has no interest in any of that. What am I supposed to do if my soulmate doesn’t want to be with me?”
Saying the words doesn’t make any weight lift off of his shoulder. In fact, it makes him feel heavier, his shoulders unable to hold his head up high. He knows that Emma feels some kind of affection for him, that they are getting to know each other, that she’s willingly getting to know him, but not knowing what’s happening, not knowing if Emma is ever going to accept the two of them, is terrifying.
Falling in love again is terrifying, especially since he’s not guaranteed a soft landing even when this is the one time he should be.
Even thinking the words shakes him to his core.
“Killian, I don’t have any great words of advice because I’ve never been in this type of situation before, but if the blush on Emma’s cheeks and the smile on her face were any indication as to how she feels about you, I don’t think you need to be worrying yourself sick over this A man unwilling to fight for what he wants deserves what he gets.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
He’d like to fight for Emma’s heart if she’d let him.
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darling won’t you lay with me in the mess that we both made - chapter 3
Also on AO3
nsfw
Jon had been more than a little disappointed when the phone number Alayne had given him after their encounter turned out to be a fake one. Now it all made sense.
Of course you don’t give out your real name or number when you’re out cruising for extra-marital liaisons in the bathrooms of Dragonstone Island’s dive bars.
First, when he’d seen her dressed in that fancy silky thing, Jon thought he might’ve been hallucinating. But then the world came back into focus and his god-awful father along with it. Seven fucking hells he hated that man, and even more so when he heard him utter the word ‘wife’ with her standing right there in front of him.
He’d fucked his dad’s wife? He’d fucked his dad’s wife?!
The best sex, with the most beautiful woman Jon had ever had the privilege to lay his hands on, to kiss, to taste... was his father’s wife?!
A dark part of him found this all highly amusing whilst a large part was also in despair. Why is she married to him? Why does a guy old enough to have a son in his twenties have a wife more than half his age?
Money.
Everything comes down to it. He can see it in her sky blue eyes as she stutters a greeting here in his father’s fancy study.
Why else would she be rushing out to pick up some stranger to fuck?
His cock twitched as he bent to lay a kiss to her hand, remembering how tight she’d gripped at his hair when they were panting and grinding down on one another. Jon’s eyes flick to his father. The lucky bastard can have her whenever he wants.
“Have we met before?” he asks her with a sly grin.
“Um, no, I don’t think so.”
Jon cocks his head to the side. “Are you sure? You look familiar... not related to anyone called Alayne, are you?” She shakes her head, eyes darting to her husband. “It’s just... you look a lot like this girl I picked up at Hobb’s Bar a couple of weeks back. It’s... uncanny.” He looked her up and down with a smirk.
“Hobb’s?” Rhaegar chimed in and not for the first time Jon really wished he didn’t need this fucker’s help. “What are you doing fishing for bites at that dive, son?” He said, chuckling. “I’ll take you to some classier hunting grounds with finer prey.” Rhaegar finished his Gods awful statement with a wink before taking a swig of his whisky.
Shit, you really are an idiot, huh? If he didn’t need him right now, he’d like to give Rhaegar a piece of his mind. Instead, Jon holds his tongue and glances back towards the beauty in the room.
“So, do I have to call you ‘mom’, then?” he smirked, taking a sip from his own drink as he watched her. The woman whom he now knew to be ‘Sansa’ flushed a deep pink. It was a pretty colour really and Jon decided he liked seeing it very much.
“I...” her mouth opened and closed before she could finally push through and get those pesky words out from between her pretty painted lips. “I have to go.” And with that she practically bolted from the room.
Jon chewed at his lip. As much as he would love to carry on the rest of the evening sat beside a roaring fire pretending to be interested in what his dear old dad is saying, he wanted to talk to her more than anything right now. “Excuse me while I use your restroom,” he said as politely as possible, complete with a serviceable smile.
When he opened the door, Jon found that he’d stepped out into the corridor in time to see Sansa yank open another door down the hall. She glanced back at him, chest rising and falling as they stared at one another. He wasn’t going to be the first to break their eye contact, that’s for sure.
She stared at him for a long while, making Jon wonder what was going through that pretty gold-digging head of hers? Does she think her game is all over now? Does she think he’s going to tell his father that the ‘bite’ he caught at Hobb’s Bar was actually his wife? Jon could imagine all these questions and more running wild in her mind before she slipped into her room and closed the door behind her.
Well, I know where I’m visiting tonight.
***
She heard the door open and click shut again and Sansa knew who it was that had crept to her room an hour after their surprise reunion. She should be calm, Jon could really land her in the shit here (well, even more in the shit than she is already anyway), but Sansa has spend that past hour stewing in her own nerves. “What the fuck was that in the study?” she blurts, whirling around.
Jon’s brows shot up. “In the study? How about, what the fuck was that in the bathroom of a seedy bar a few weeks ago?” He stood squarely, shoving his hands in his jeans pockets.
The hair at the back of her neck prickled upward and she swallowed down the scorching hot guilt that threatened to burn her throat. “You tell me,” she said, crossing her arms, “you were the one who couldn’t stop grunting and groaning about how tight and wet I am, how good I feel to fuck.”
Jon straightened at that. He looked like she’d slapped him. Good. His right hand flexed and twitched at his side. She should’ve never gone to that dumb dive of a bar, she should’ve never even entertained flirting with the handsome guy fresh out of prison. She definitely shouldn’t have slipped her wedding rings from her finger and hid them in her clutch and then led Jon Snow to the bathroom to allow him to-to.... knock her up!
“That was before I knew you were married to my father!”
“Well, how I was I meant to know you were his son?!”
“How about – and here’s a novel idea, but hear me out for a second – you don’t fuck other people while you’re married?! Period.”
Sansa stalked forward. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”
“Is that right?” he snickered. “I know nothing, huh? Why don’t you tell me, mother-dearest? Enlighten your new son about the ways of the world while trying to forget how good it felt to have me sucking on your clit.”
She slapped him for real that time, his expression of shock a short-lived treat before he was smirking at her again. “Why are you here, Jon?” she asked. “After all these years of wanting nothing to do with your father, and now you come sniffing around?” She narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you? You don’t want to reconnect with Rhaegar, you’re in it just for the money.”
Jon’s eyes briefly drop to her lips. “Well, that makes two of us, don’t it, sweetheart?”
She wants to strike him again. He’s right. She knows it, he knows it, the staff at Dragonstone Manor know it, and even her husband must know it, on some level. Rhaegar’s many things, but he’s not so naive to think that Sansa is with him through love and desire alone, if, at all. This all makes her want to strike Jon harder. She raises her hand to do so, but Jon catches her wrist with a hand so burning hot she felt like her whole body had been set aflame. He was breathing heavy as his eyes dip to her mouth again.
He was going to kiss her.
She could see it happening before he even began to lean in. Sansa didn’t know if she wanted to shove him away or welcome that sinful mouth of his. This was wrong - all so wrong. This is what got her into trouble in the first place.
And yet she kissed him back anyway.
It wasn’t the urgent, yet sweet desirous kisses from the bathroom of that dive bar a few nights ago – Jon kissed her like he meant to bruise and bite, bend and take. He kissed her like he was furious about the very fact that he was kissing her. And she loved it. A part of her wanted him to be mad – mad at her and mad for her. She sunk her fingers into his hair and yanked on a fistful of it, making him grunt. They parted momentarily, she could see all the heat in his grey eyes staring back at her as they both panted a beat, maybe two, before diving right back in for more of the same.
She’s made this mistake once already. Will she ever learn?
Sansa bit down on his lip, making Jon hiss. He only pulled her tighter to him and it felt like her body instinctively knew every muscle, every hard plane of his as she moulded against him. “Fuckin’... gold-digger,” he murmured between hungry kisses. It felt like he was trying to pour himself into her tongue first, both their breathing becoming laboured as they kissed and pushed and pulled, and yanked and clawed. And in all of that – in all of his kiss, Sansa could forget the mess she’d already made with him. She’ll deal with that later. Right now there was only Jon with his hungry hands and hungry mouth and hard cock pressed against her thigh.
Somehow, Jon had manoeuvred her over to her vanity table, she felt the edge of it dig into the flesh of her ass as his hands roamed her body, palms gliding hurriedly over the silk of her negligee. Her robe is quickly pushed from her shoulders, fluttering to pool at her feet and Jon’s fingers find the zipper at her spine, yanking it too hard. There’s a tearing sound and Sansa gasps.
“Just suck on daddy’s dick, he’ll buy you a new one,” Jon murmured into the column of her throat. Sansa shoved him for that. There was a brief moment where it looked like remorse for his words passed over his eyes but they soon turned steely again. It didn’t matter. Sansa grabbed him by his shirt and yanked him back to her lips.
“You know,” she said moving to mouth and nibble along his neck, “I would sit on your face just so you’d shut up, but judging by last time, you’d enjoy that too much.”
Jon chuckled as he lifted her up to sit on her vanity, knocking over a couple of expensive perfume bottles. Sansa wrapped her legs around him as he leant in. “What can I say?” he said, grinning. “Mommy tastes so damn good.”
Sansa shoved at him again. “Don’t be so disgusting!”
Jon softly huffed out a breath, his eyes flitting between hers as he smirked down at her and began to lean back in for more kisses ever so slowly, daring her to stop him, knowing that she wouldn’t.
Gods damn him!
“Don’t be like that, darlin’,” he murmured, the devil in his eyes as he nipped at her stubborn lips, “I won’t tell daddy if you don’t.”
Urgh. She hated him. She hated him and she wanted him.
“Just shut up and fuck me.”
Jon smirked. “Do you always get exactly what you want, princess? You just flick that pretty red hair of yours, wear a short skirt and suddenly old men like my dad fall at your feet, handing you their wallet?”
She shoved him yet again, hard this time, making him stumble back a step. Sansa hopped off from her precarious perch on the vanity table and pushed Jon square in the chest again. He glanced back, seeing that she was indeed forcing him to stumble backwards towards her bed. He grinned as he allowed himself to fall, landing with a bounce on her pristine sheets.
Her hands were fast and she didn’t stop to ask permission. Soon, she had undone his belt and jeans, rucking up the silk of her negligee and moving to straddle him as she freed his length.
“Sure do know how to make your new son feel welcome, don’t you, sweetheart?” Jon quipped.
One of Sansa’s hands covered his mouth, his breath feeling hot and his beard ticklish on her palm. “You’re done talking,” she told him, using her free hand to guide his cock where she wanted it. They groaned in unison as he filled her.
She knew he could stop her if he wanted – could pull her hand from his mouth and flip them so she was under him. But Jon didn’t do any of that. Instead, he lay there as she rode him like her life depended on it, eyes locked and his grip digging into her hips as he helped her along, panting under her palm.
After it was over, after he’d started to buck up into her, a grunt with every thrust, after she’d had tensed and tingled all over, Sansa collapsed beside him, both of them gazing up at her bedroom ceiling, trying to catch their breath, feeling her sweat at the small of her back and his cum on this inside of her thighs.
“What now?” Sansa asked, panting.
“Don’t worry. I don’t plan on draining your husband dry, if that’s what you think.” He sat up, breathing still laboured as he twisted his torso to look down at her. “I just need a little leg up, is all.” His gaze swept over her body, laying there completely wrung out, skin flushed like a burning sunset and feeling twice as hot. The way he looked at her made Sansa shiver. “Sansa, I-“ there was softness in his eyes – just a flash, before he shook himself of it. “I have to go.”
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The Great Koala Rescue Operation
https://sciencespies.com/nature/the-great-koala-rescue-operation/
The Great Koala Rescue Operation
I arrived on Kangaroo Island bracing myself for the sight of acres of blackened trees and white ash, but I had not expected the parasitic bright green vines wrapped around almost every charred trunk, glowing phosphorescent in the sunlight. This was no parasite, I learned. It was epicormic growth, bursting directly from the burnt trunks themselves, a desperate bid for photosynthesis in the absence of a leaf canopy.
The growth looks nothing like a eucalyptus tree’s normal adult leaves. It’s soft and waxy, with rounded edges instead of long pointy tips, and it blooms from cracks in the trunks or right from the tree’s base, rather than along the branches where leaves typically grow. It is beautiful, and also very strange, in keeping with the surreal phenomena that became almost commonplace over this past apocalyptic Australian summer, even before the coronavirus pandemic further upended life as we know it. A few weeks earlier, in Sydney, I’d watched red-brown rain fall to the ground after rain clouds collided with ash in a smoke-filled sky. During a recent downpour here on Kangaroo Island, burnt blue gum trees foamed mysteriously, as if soap suds had been sprayed over them.
Even in less strange times, Kangaroo Island can feel like the edge of the earth. Although it sits fewer than ten miles off the southern coast of Australia, about 75 miles from Adelaide, it is a geographical Noah’s Ark; its isolation from the mainland 10,000 years ago because of rising seas transformed it into an ecological haven. It is vast and rugged, with dramatic views of bush or sea- or cliff-scapes in every direction. National parks or protected wilderness areas make up a third of the island’s 1,700 square miles. Much of the rest of the island is farmland or privately owned backcountry. In recent years, the island has rebranded itself as a high-end tourist paradise, with unspoiled wilderness, farm-to-table produce, fresh oysters, and wine from local vineyards. But while there are luxury accommodations here and there, the island’s few small settlements feel decidedly unglamorous, befitting laid-back country and coastal towns.
Left, Kangaroo Island sits a few miles off the coast of South Australia. Right, at the height of the fires, in January, most of the island’s western half was ablaze, as seen in these images based on data from a NASA satellite.
(Guilbert Gates; NASA Worldview (2))
The fires started here in December, after dry lightning strikes on the island’s north coast and remote western bushland areas, and then escalated and jumped containment lines, ripping through the island in early January, with high winds and hot temperatures fueling the front. Two people died, and hundreds of properties were affected, many of them farms. Tens of thousands of stock animals were lost in the blaze. While the bushfires all over Australia were horrific, burning more than 16 million acres—nearly eight times the area lost to fire in Brazil’s Amazon basin in 2019—people around the world focused on Kangaroo Island because of the relative scale of the fires, which consumed close to half the island, as well as the concentrated death and suffering of the island’s abundant wildlife, including wallabies, kangaroos, possums and koalas. Wildlife experts worried that certain vulnerable species endemic to the island, such as the glossy black-cockatoo and a mouse-like marsupial known as the Kangaroo Island dunnart, might be lost forever.
Flinders Chase National Park, the vast nature preserve encompassing the island’s western edge, is closed indefinitely. There were rumors that parts of this natural bushland, which depends on fire to propagate, might never fully regenerate, because the heat from the fires was so intense that the soil seed bank may have been destroyed. Climate change researchers are warning that while fires in Australia are “natural,” they’re now so hot and frequent that even fire-adapted plants don’t have the chance to recover. A major fire burned 85 percent of Flinders Chase just 13 years ago. Matt White, an ecologist at the Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, in Victoria, told me the fires are almost certainly decreasing biodiversity, despite “the oft-repeated rhetoric about the resilience of Australian flora.” Now the fires are out, and the immediate danger has passed, but life on the island is very far from normal. On certain parts of the northern coast, coves are silted with ash, black tide marks on the sand. Outside several towns are signs directing people to a Bushfire Last Resort Refuge, a chilling reminder of how bad things can get.
A lone koala clings to a charred trunk in a severely burned plantation of eucalyptus trees.
(David Maurice Smith)
Kangaroo Island’s east coast, where I disembarked from the ferry, seemed relatively unscathed, but as I drove west through the central agricultural area, known as the Heartlands, I crossed a line into devastation. The color palette shifted from the beige and olive green of roadside scrub to charcoal trunks and scorched leaves in shades of orange, an uncanny simulacrum of autumn. The deeper into the fire grounds I went, the more the shock of that green epicormic growth scrambled my perceptions, as did the long green shoots of grass trees, emerging from their blackened, pineapple-shaped trunks. These trees are pyrophytic—they thrive after fires.
In Parndana, a small agricultural town, I saw a handwritten sign outside a makeshift store offering free groceries to families affected by the fires. A newsletter posted in a gas station reported on wineries going under, tourism businesses destroyed, and burned buildings requiring asbestos cleanup. In a roadside café near Vivonne Bay, on the south coast, I found mental health pamphlets and notices of counseling services and depression hot lines for a community reeling from losses. An Australian Psychological Society handout was stacked on the counter: “Now, a few months after the fires, many people are feeling tired and stressed, and they know that their daily struggle isn’t going to be over any time soon.”
The news media’s fixation on the island as the fires raged has created a complicated legacy for any reporter who turns up a month or two later. I was aware of being viewed with distrust by locals who’ve felt justifiably used in the media storm’s sudden descent and then abrupt disappearance. The press attention, combined with social media’s refraction of certain stories into trend roller coasters, has had the undeniable upside of an outpouring of genuine sympathy and generosity. An effort to recruit 120 volunteers to set up food and water stations for wildlife throughout devastated areas, organized by Australia’s Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was inundated by more than 13,000 applications in a matter of days. Online crowdfunding has raised close to $2.5 million for Kangaroo Island bushfire recovery. But there’s a downside, too: a trading in the suffering of others. In the midst of the fires, one foreign journalist demanded of a shellshocked local resident, “I want to see burnt animals, and where those two people died.”
The immediate compassionate response of people pulling together in a crisis is now wearing thin. Tendrils of suspicion are snaking their way through the community, as locals assess the distribution of government and crowdfunded resources. Almost everybody has their heart in the right place, but the reality is that these decisions are political and contested. Old divides are widening—between, say, stock farmers in the Heartlands and those motivated to protect the island’s unique wildlife, to say nothing of the divide between locals and outsiders.
Tens of thousands of koalas were killed in the island blaze, and an additional number perished from starvation or dehydration after the blue gum plantations where they lived were destroyed.
(David Maurice Smith)
The remains of a Tammar wallaby. Where the fires raged, populations of kangaroo and wallabies were devastated; up to 40 percent of the island’s unique kangaroo subspecies may have been killed.
(David Maurice Smith)
In every conversation, whether with a lodge manager, the owner of a feed business, or at the corner-store café, people wanted me to know that they’re upset about the way resources were being distributed. Special anger was reserved for rogue operators who have raised huge amounts of cash for wildlife work on the island, but with no real right to be there. Many singled out a Japanese outfit, reportedly run by a guy who turned up on the island with good intentions but zero clue. He had set himself up in a house in Kingscote, the island’s largest town (pop. around 1,800), and without coordinating with any recognized wildfire rescue operations was bringing in koalas from the wild that were healthy and didn’t need rescuing. Yet he had raised a small fortune through his organization’s website, from good people donating to the wrong cause. One islander told me, “I never realized disaster would be like this. At first, everyone helped. Then it got scary. It became about money, fame, randoms making an absolute killing.”
* * *
Kangaroo Island was given its modern name by the British navigator Matthew Flinders, who sailed the HMS Investigator to its shores in March 1802. The island was then uninhabited, but archaeologists later found stone tools and other evidence that ancestors of modern Aboriginal Tasmanians lived there thousands of years ago, at least until the island was cut off from the mainland, and possibly afterward. Rebe Taylor, a historian, writes that the Ngarrindjeri people of the coast opposite Kangaroo Island call it the “land of the dead,” and have a creation story about rising seas flooding a land bridge to the island.
Flinders and his men were amazed to find kangaroos—a subspecies of the mainland’s western greys—that were so unused to humans that they “suffered themselves to be shot in the eyes,” Flinders recalled in his expedition notes, “and in some cases to be knocked on the head with sticks.” In gratitude for this meat after four months without fresh provisions, he named it Kanguroo Island (misspelling his own). The French explorer Nicolas Baudin, sailing the Géographe, was disappointed not to have arrived before his English rival—their ships crossed paths as Flinders was leaving the island—but Baudin took 18 kangaroos with him, in the name of science. He made two of his men surrender their cabins to the animals in a bid to keep them alive. Baudin himself died from tuberculosis on the return journey, but some of the kangaroos survived, and they reportedly became part of the menagerie outside Paris owned by Napoleon’s wife, the Empress Josephine.
The recent fires killed as many as 40 percent of the island’s 60,000 or so kangaroos, yet worldwide attention has focused mostly on the fate of the koalas. At least 45,000 koalas, or some 75 percent or more of the island population, are thought to have died, and the crisis has revived an old controversy, with battle lines drawn anew between those who believe the koalas don’t deserve all the attention they’re getting and those who do.
Koalas have always had the species advantage of being considered cute, cuddly Australian icons, but they are not native to Kangaroo Island. They were introduced by wildlife officials only in the 1920s, from a breeding program on French Island, off mainland Victoria, with a founding population of fewer than 30 animals. The effort was an early attempt at conservation; habitat loss and hunters trading in their fur had driven koalas on the mainland to near extinction. Since then, the island had become overpopulated with koalas, which some people think are in danger of eating themselves out of house and home. In fact, since the late 1990s a government-run koala sterilization program has tried to stem population growth, not only for the koala population’s sake but also because the animals wreak destruction on native vegetation, including rough-bark manna gums, a type of eucalyptus that is key to preventing soil erosion, and paddock trees.
Charred eucalyptus trees sport green epicormic growth— shoots emerging from cracks in the bark to give the trees another chance at life.
(David Maurice Smith)
New growth springs from the trunk of a charred blue gum tree after the bushfires on Kangaroo Island.
(David Maurice Smith)
In addition, tens of thousands of koalas lived in eucalyptus plantations owned by a timber company with plans to harvest and export those trees; those animals would have to be moved eventually. Finally, the Kangaroo Island koalas are so highly inbred that some experts argue they may be of little use in bolstering northern Australia koala populations, which are classified as vulnerable.
Some wildlife advocates believe that preventing species extinction, or saving species that are endemic or unique to the island, should be the priority. They argue that funding would be better channeled toward specialists working to save the few remaining Kangaroo Island dunnarts, or Tammar wallabies (which are almost extinct in mainland South Australia), or pygmy possums, or endangered glossy black-cockatoos, which mainly feed on the seeds of casuarina trees (many of the trees burnt), or Ligurian bees, introduced in 1885 and believed to be the species’ last genetically pure population in the world.
Island farmers, meanwhile, feel that wildlife has unfairly consumed all the attention when so many stock animals burned during the fires. Many local farming families are descended from soldier-settlers who were given parcels of land after each of the world wars, which they worked hard to make productive in difficult circumstances. (The island’s natural soil quality is so poor, and the lack of surface water so severe, that most British colonists backed by the South Australian Company who settled the island in 1836 left after just five months.)
One islander confided to me that, while he felt bad for the farmers, stock animals are “replaceable,” and often covered by insurance, but wildlife is not; and while it may seem from news media coverage that Australia cares about its wildlife, the government in fact has an appalling track record when it comes to protecting wildlife and biodiversity. “Australia is a global deforestation hotspot,” Suzanne Milthorpe, from the Wilderness Society Australia, told me. “We are ranked second in the world for biodiversity loss, and three unique animals have gone extinct in the last decade alone. In comparison, the United States’ Endangered Species Act, which contains real protections against harm and habitat destruction, has been 99 percent successful at preventing extinction.” (Critics of American species conservation efforts point out that less than 3 percent of listed species have recovered sufficiently to be removed from protection.)
The koalas on Kangaroo Island were also fortunate in being able to be rescued at all; many were found sheltering high enough in the treetops to have escaped the flames. Hundreds were saved, treated and survived, and many were set free. Even young, orphaned koalas that must be bottle-fed and tended by hand would survive in captivity. By contrast, kangaroos and wallabies often couldn’t outrun the fires, and most of the rescued animals were badly burned and had little chance of recovery.
All of this helped me understand why legitimate, professional koala rescues on the island really do matter, and why the stakes feel so high for those who are skilled at and committed to this grueling work. For people desperate to help in the aftermath of the fires, rescuing and treating injured koalas and relocating koalas stranded in devastated forest areas has become a kind of humane religion, something to cling to and thus avoid descending into despair. Each and every rescue becomes a small but holy and tangible act to stem the wider suffering.
* * *
As soon as the story began to circulate, during the fires, that the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, outside Parndana, had become the impromptu center for the emergency treatment of burned wildlife, the place was inundated with journalists. The largely open-air park, which was already home to 600 or so animals, including snakes, wombats, cassowaries and an alligator, is owned by Dana and Sam Mitchell, a couple in their late 20s who moved to the island in 2013, after meeting while working at a wildlife park in Victoria. Journalists turned up even as the fires were burning, sleeping uninvited on the floor of the park’s café, barging into the Mitchells’ house at all hours.
This, to be fair, had some positive outcomes. An Australian TV channel, for instance, arranged for a popular home renovation show to build a wildlife hospital in the park, and the Mitchells have raised more than $1.6 million through crowdfunding to pay for professional veterinary costs, new buildings for wildlife care, and an islandwide koala rescue and rehabilitation program.
Yet it was overwhelming, too. Dana had to evacuate twice with their toddler, Connor, during the peak of the fires, while Sam stayed with staff and other family members to defend the property; the park and its animals were spared only after the wind changed direction as the fires were bearing down.
Meanwhile, hundreds of injured wild animals were brought to the park by Army personnel, the State Emergency Service and firefighters. As the roads reopened, many locals also began to arrive with injured wildlife, unsure where else to take them. Since the start of January, more than 600 koalas have been brought to the park, though not all have survived. Kangaroos with melted feet and koalas with melted paws had to be put out of their suffering. Orphaned baby koalas, called joeys, arrived with ears or noses burnt off. There were severely dehydrated older koalas with kidney disorders, and possums and wallabies blinded by the heat. “We were having to make it up on the spot,” Sam told me. “We were just a small wildlife park. These animals weren’t my responsibility, but nobody else was doing anything. The government wasn’t giving any direction.” In the first weeks, they operated a triage center out of a tin shed, with no power.
Sam and Dana soldiered on, and by now they have an impressive setup for koala rescue, treatment, rehabilitation and release. Behind their house is a series of brand-new buildings and dozens of koala enclosures, tended to by vets and veterinary nurses from Australia Zoo, Zoos South Australia, and Savem, a veterinary equivalent of Doctors Without Borders, as well as trusted local volunteers.
Oliver Funnell, a veterinarian at Zoos South Australia, and veterinary nurse Donna Hearn attend to an injured koala at the Wildlife Park.
(David Maurice Smith)
A hospitalized koala has pink spots on its paw that are healed burn areas.
(David Maurice Smith)
Sam has a grim sense of humor to help deal with the trauma of the past months, but he and Dana are physically and emotionally exhausted, as is everybody I met on the island. I felt bad asking them to retell their experiences during the fires, the ins and outs of how they survived, aware of the symbolic violence of being forced to perform your own private trauma for outsiders over and over again. Yet they did so, graciously, describing the unusual warning of white ash hitting the park even before the smoke. Desperate for sleep after staying awake several nights, Sam eventually brought a blanket outside and laid it on the grass, setting his phone alarm to go off every 15 minutes. He was worried that if he slept inside he wouldn’t see the fire coming.
In spite of their fatigue, they welcomed me into the joey clinic one morning. Dana was in the middle of individually bottle-feeding some 15 baby koalas while also caring for Connor. He was toddling around holding a branch of acacia and following the family dog, Rikku, who is remarkably tolerant of human babies and a tiny kangaroo named Kylo that likes to practice its boxing on the dog’s face. Staff and volunteers swirled in and out of the clinic, eating breakfast, getting medical supplies, asking about treatment plans. Dozens of rescued, slightly older joeys under 18 months old live in enclosures outside, since they no longer depend on milk, along with 30 older koalas with names like Ralph, Bonecrusher and Pearl; the number changes constantly as they recover enough to be released. Dana sat on a sofa cradling a baby koala they’d named Maddie, feeding it a morning bottle of Wombaroo, a low-lactose formula. When Maddie was rescued, she weighed just two pounds. “She had no burns when we found her,” Dana said, “but also no mum.”
Dana Mitchell feeds an injured baby koala at the Kangaroo Island Wildlife Park, which Mitchell owns with her husband, Sam. The park has treated more than 600 koalas since January.
(David Maurice Smith)
Nearby sat Kirsten Latham, head keeper of Australia Zoo’s koala program, holding 10-month-old Duke, who was swaddled in a towel. He was rescued in January with second-degree burns and was missing several claws—which are crucial for tree-climbing—and had to be fed with a syringe before he started taking the bottle. “You have to really concentrate when you’re feeding them, as they can aspirate the milk when they’re young,” Kirsten said. “It helps to wrap them in a towel and keep a hand over their eyes, because when they’re drinking from their mums they keep their heads tucked right into the pouch, where it’s dark and quiet.” These feedings are done three times a day, and it can take each person three hours to feed all the baby koalas during a mealtime.
* * *
In the clinic’s kitchen, I found Kailas Wild and Freya Harvey, both fit and sunburned, wearing black T-shirts and cargo pants. They were studying a map of the island’s plantations and natural bushland, planning their next koala rescues. They are old friends and skilled climbers, and have been on the island for weeks, doing the dangerous work of climbing the tall, burnt blue gum trees to reach koalas perched at the very top, sometimes as high as 80 feet.
Kailas is an arborist and volunteer for the State Emergency Service in New South Wales, and Freya is currently based in New Zealand, but they both dropped everything to go to Kangaroo Island as soon as they realized their tree-climbing skills could help save wildlife. Kailas drove the 900-odd miles from Sydney to the ferry terminal in Cape Jervis in his pickup truck, sleeping in the back along the way, and bringing it across to the island on the ferry. It took them a little while to earn Sam’s trust; his classic Australian suspicion of “blow-ins” has been compounded by having been let down by others who turned up offering help but haven’t followed through. But now that they have it, I can see the three of them have formed a close-knit team, daily coordinating koala rescues and treatment.
Kailas Wild, an arborist from Sydney who aided rescue efforts on the island, with a young kangaroo. He saved more than 100 koalas.
(David Maurice Smith)
The ground rescue crew that Kailas and Freya have been working with is a local family of four: Lisa and Jared Karran and their children, Saskia and Utah. They live near Kingscote, where Jared is a police officer. They’ve spent almost every day since the fires out in the bush rescuing animals. At first, the ground was so hot it was smoking, and they had to wear special boots so the soles didn’t melt. Now the risk is falling trees. They work up to 12 hours a day, the kids uncomplaining and involved, outfitted with gloves and hard hats, handling the koalas like pros, and accompanying Jared for long drives at the end of each day to release rehabilitated survivors into a distant unburned plantation. As of last count, they’ve helped rescue 143 koalas.
Outside the clinic, in a nearby field, a Robinson R44 helicopter had just landed after an aerial survey using a thermal-imaging camera to locate koalas by detecting their body heat; this is one of several ways that Sam and the rescue team are now experimenting with technology to find where koalas are clustered and whether those habitats are burned or still viable. Sam was paying a lot to rent the helicopter, and the results have been promising, but Sam is still learning how to operate the infrared camera from the air—it’s no easy feat to adjust the focus and pan-and-tilt speed while fine-tuning koala heat signatures from inside a moving helicopter—and the data is complicated to interpret.
At this phase of the recovery effort, the goal is no longer strictly to rescue injured koalas and get them to the hospital for treatment. The team is also trying to figure out if koalas remaining in the wild have enough food to survive. The fear is there will be a second wave of koala deaths, from starvation. The team is also experimenting with drones, and Thomas Gooch, founder of a Melbourne environmental analytics firm called the Office of Planetary Observations, has donated recent satellite-observation maps that display vegetation cover to identify areas that have burned.
California wildlife rescuer Douglas Thron and environmentalist Freya Harvey launch a drone outfitted with an infrared camera to spot stranded koalas.
(David Maurice Smith)
A newer member of the koala rescue team is Douglas Thron, an aerial cinematographer and wildlife rescuer from Oakland, California, who was brought to the island by Humane Society International. In the 1990s, Thron used to take politicians and celebrities up in a little Cessna to show them the impact of clear-cutting old-growth redwood forests in California. Last year, he spent months after California’s devastating fires, and in the Bahamas after Hurricane Dorian, using a custom-made drone to spot dogs and cats trapped in the debris.
Douglas had been on the island since late February, using his drone—configured to carry an infrared camera and a 180x zoom lens and spotlight—to help the team identify where in the vast acreage of burnt blue gum plantations there were koalas needing rescue or resettlement. So far, he had spotted 110, of which 60 had been rescued.
Douglas, Kailas and Freya had spent most of the previous night in the bush, using the drone to do thermal imaging and closer spotlighting of the treetops in the darkness, when it’s easier to see the koalas’ heat signatures. From the ground, Douglas used a video screen attached to the drone controls to identify ten koalas in one section of a burnt eucalyptus plantation. Today, it would be up to the ground rescue team to head out and see what they could find by daylight.
* * *
“We were calling it Pompeii,” said Lisa Karran as we drove past a tragic tableau of carbonized Tammar wallabies huddled in a clearing beside rows of burnt blue gums. The hardest part, she said, was seeing the incinerated family groups together—baby koalas holding onto branches beside their moms, dead possums and kangaroos with their young beside them.
Standing amid rows of charred trunks, Utah, who is 13, was readying the koala pole—an extendable metal pole with a shredded feed bag attached to the end, which the climbers shake above the koala’s head to scare it down the tree. Saskia, who is 15, held the crate at the base of the tree. Jared had spotted this particular koala—“because I’m koalified!” he joked—curled right at the top of a black trunk with no leaves.
Upper left, a climber wielding a “koala pole” persuades an animal to leave its towering hideout and descend to the ground, where rescuers could examine it and crate it for later treatment. Upper right, Rescuers placed vegetables in devastated areas to feed animals. Some 13,000 people applied for 120 openings for volunteers to distribute food and water. Below, Utah Karran, 13, releases a recovered koala into an intact blue gum plantation. Karran and his sister and parents spent two months rescuing animals at risk.
(David Maurice Smith)
The luminous epicormic growth was sprouting from many of the trunks around us. The rescue team had begun to wonder if this growth, which is known to be more toxic than mature leaves, as the tree’s natural defense against insects and animal browsing while the tree itself struggles to survive, might be making the koalas sick. Some of the koalas they’d seen eating it, and had subsequently brought in for treatment, had diarrhea or gut bloat. They’d also observed koalas eating dead leaves rather than epicormic growth, suggesting the animals may not find it an ideal food source. Koalas are naturally adapted to the toxins in eucalyptus leaves, with gut flora that help digest the leaves and flush out the toxins. But the higher toxicity levels of the new growth may be beyond their tolerance. Ben Moore, a koala ecologist at Western Sydney University, said that there are no detailed studies that directly compare the chemical makeup of epicormic growth with adult leaves, but he hypothesized that any dramatic change in a koala’s diet would change that individual’s microbiome, and in turn affect its gut function.
In recent weeks, the group has rented a mechanized crane, which makes it easier to get to the tops of the trees, but there are still many rescues where the koala is so high up that Freya or Kailas need to clip in and use the arborist’s technique of throwing a weight and line to climb the burnt and brittle trees, and then shake the koala pole above the animal’s head. Typically, a koala grunts or squeals and climbs down a trunk amazingly fast. After Lisa or Utah plucks it off the trunk at the bottom and places it in a crate, it becomes surprisingly docile, gazing up at its human saviors.
The first koala rescued that day was underweight, and others had pink patches on their feet signaling healing burns, but some were healthy enough, the group decided, to be released elsewhere without needing to be checked by vets at the Wildlife Park.
Out of the hundreds of koalas that volunteers and staff have rescued, many are being raised in captivity. Older koalas are released into intact eucalyptus plantations.
(David Maurice Smith)
Hours and hours passed like this in the hot plantations. It was gripping to watch. Each rescue had a unique emotional texture—a dramatic arc of growing tension as those on the ground waited for the climbers to encourage the koalas down, the adrenaline spike of grabbing the animals behind their strong necks and getting them into the crate, and the communal relief if they were found to be healthy. Each of the ten koalas rescued that day was found almost exactly where Douglas’s drone had spotted them the night before.
During one rescue, a koala kept up a plaintive high-pitched wail but would not budge from its perch. Freya and Kailas both had to clip in and climb up in order to coax it down. Once on the ground the team knew this koala was seriously unwell: its paws were covered in fresh blood, from the loss of several claws—a sign of previous burns or infections. Kailas, in particular, was devastated, and sobbed openly. They knew from experience what fate awaited this koala. Later that night, after its condition was checked at the Wildlife Park, it was euthanized.
The next day, Kailas made his 100th rescue. It also happened to be Jared’s last day doing rescues with his family. The next Monday, he’d be back at work as a police officer. “There’ll be criminals robbing the bank, and I’ll be gazing up into the trees, looking for koalas,” he said wistfully. He’d been scrolling back through his photos, and had been struck by a picture of Saskia and Utah swimming in the sea the day before the fires started, two months before. “Every day since, it’s just been so different,” he said. “I was thinking this morning that I want to get back to that.”
At dusk, the Karrans drove out to one of the only plantations that didn’t burn, called Kellendale. They had six healthy koalas in the back seat and the trunk of their SUV, rescued from plantations with no leaf cover for food. After the eerie silence of another long day spent in burnt plantations—not a single insect hum or bird song—it was a joy to see a flash of pink from the belly of a rose-breasted cockatoo, and to hear the soft, wavelike rustling of living eucalyptus leaves in the breeze. It felt like paradise.
Utah and Saskia released the koalas from their crates one by one, and the family laughed together as one of their feistiest rescues, a female koala with lovely fluffy ears, sprinted for a tree, climbed about 15 feet up, then stopped and stared back down at the humans for a good long while. Then she climbed higher, cozily wedged herself in the fork of a branch, and held on tight as the narrow trunk rocked in the wind.
#Nature
#05-2020 Science News#2020 Science News#Earth Environment#earth science#Environment and Nature#Nature Science#News Science Spies#Our Nature#outrageous acts of science#planetary science#Science#Science Channel#science documentary#Science News#Science Spies#Science Spies News#Space Physics & Nature#Space Science#Nature
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The sides get marooned on a desert island for ten days. What happens :D
OHOHO OK
Well, straight up?
Roman would be the one to pull a ful-on Robinson Crusoe - he sets out to find materials for a lil hut (or a grandiose hut, knowing Ro), keeping an eye out for anything that can help them, all while complaining about his lack of makeup and various other hygiene products. (Sure, as soon as he’s alone, his overdramatic persona slips, and he has to crouch over to control his breathing because how are they gonna get off the island? What if they’re trapped here forever? And as soon as he hears footsteps behind him, he’s back up, fanning himself like bored royalty, because that’s what he is. That’s what he has to be.)
Logan follows along, trying to recall any and all information he’s learned on edible and useful plants - turns out, that’s quite a bit. He has to pull Roman back from a few patches of poison ivy, but other than that, their foraging goes smoothly, and they return to the HQ (as Ro keeps calling it) with an armful of edible albeit unpleasant greens. He boils the salt out the ocean water, sets up a little grill-type contraption over their campfire (though Patton has uncanny Boy Scout skills to aid him); he scopes the surrounding area out for signs of life other than them, for abandoned boats or campfires or something, and he’s glad the others are at the tent as he drops his head into his hands and forces the pressure behind his eyes to subside when he finds nothing.
Patton stays behind, waiting with Virgil for the other two to get back when they go out on their excavation. He’s the damage control and, surprisingly enough, the defender - with every rustle that catches their attention, Pat is up, a rock or stick in hand and eyes full of determination, because by God no one hurts his family, yOU GOT THAT, WILDERNESS? (But really, he’s a bit too willing to put himself on the line for his famILY, and it takes Logan physically dragging him away from his “post” as watchman come nightfall for him to actually sleep.)
Virgil doesn’t do well at first. There’s so many what-if’s and dangerous uncertainties to the wilderness - wild animals, poisonous plants, people (”Have you guys ever read The Most Dangerous Game? Did you read that? What if that’s here? Was that based on a true story? Logan what was it based off-”) and he panics nonstop. But then, just as the moon rises, his wariness turns to vigilance, a keen eye that sees the shadows between the trees and knows when to be afraid; he’s a light sleeper and ends up taking over for Patton when he starts to doze off at his self-assigned post (it’s still a bit nerve-wracking to be out there alone, and he doesn’t exactly complain when Roman comes out an hour later, situating himself a tree over and simply sleeping against its trunk. It’s nice to have something, someone, familiar to ground Virgil to the illusion of safety.)
And they make it! They’re not exactly Swiss Family Robinson, but they scrape by, until the glorious sound of those helicopter blades sing in the sky above them and they’re out, safe and sound if not a bit shaken (and in need of a shower).
#this was so fun!#sanders sides#thomas sanders#roman sanders#patton sanders#logan sanders#virgil sanders#my writing#prinxiety#logicality#au#i guess?#ask
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The Future Acts Like You - How To Live in the Future Part 7
My friends and I were walking dogs the other day on city greenbelt trails, observing how polite and well-behaved the female dogs were when compared to male dogs, how much less likely they were to get riled up by meeting strange pets — and the thought occurred to me (as surely it must have for many others) that if it were up to choice, most people might prefer a female dog for this one reason. How, if we could breed the ratio down to the market’s preference, or find some way to pre-arrange the sexes of a litter (like they can by turning off one gene in turtles), it might be 80/20 females/males, or hardly any males at all. And then I realized that we’re here already – modifying mammal genomes is old hat by now, and all that stands between us and deciding if your baby will be born a boy or girl (or intersex, or some new thing) is just a few years’ of Moore’s Law driving down the price of lab tests and in vitro or in vivo interventions. We are very close to giving women what they’ve always wanted under patriarchy: the ability to reproduce without a man involved.
Sure, birth control was liberating, but imagine how it’s going to be when a sufficiently large XX population can clock out and then womyn-ufacture Amazons on their apotheosis-feminism, GMO coral vulva artificial island. But of course, Athena born from Zeus’ brow is quintessential patriarchy — equally the goal of men, since written records started, to extract themselves from their dependence on the mysteries of reproduction, to appropriate them with the scientific program, finishing the murder of Sophia and then peacing out, and up to some transcendent Man Cave in the sky, Elysium in orbit, hanging out in virtual reality with perfectly obedient and caring AI girlfriends. But of course, this is The Matrix, and it doesn’t get more Cosmic Mom than that. It isn’t hard to see the dawn light of an age in which both sides stand hands on hips, across the atmosphere from one another, shouting, “We don’t need you anymore!”
Nor is it hard to see why it’s ridiculous. It won’t work like that, because time’s not so much a centrifuge that pulls polarities apart as it’s a live volcano, constantly erupting, spreading novel opportunities and forms to make new landscapes that include the past, but ooze beyond it. And as each side of the War of Sexes clusters further from each other on the graph, a huge magmatic bell curve upswells in between them, opening our options. We will have our age of clones, chimerae, and designer babies; and we’ll go on dating one another, even when it seems archaic posed against the novel kinds of families in a Cambrian Explosion of communal “body plans” that place the nuclear “Mom, Dad, & Kids” at the top left of a new periodic table, opening a vast new chemistry of love and reproductive options.
First, though, we will suffer through an era that empowers narcissists to make more narcissists with even greater ease, and without having to recruit a partner to help raise the lovely little bastards they create. I see it now: instead of virtue-signaling as single parents, people running solo with their mini-mes will be the objects of suspicion, probably contempt:
“I’m raising him to inherit my dangerous and lonely life of bounty hunting!”
“Can you believe he paid the carbon tax to make a copy of himself? If everybody did that, we’d need eighteen Earths to make it work…!”
“I thought she was amazing on our first date, till I realized that her little girl was just a backup. No way, dude, I’d only be a plaything for that woman.”
People will look wistfully back on The Good Old Days, when you knew that the cute guy with his kid in Central Park was not just readying the vessel for his memory-and-wallet transfer in another fifty years… And yet none of these biotech shenanigans will ever guarantee the realized dream of solipsists: to carry on forever, and thus matter to the story, True and Timeless, an immortal in the flesh, around which everything ephemerally spins. The best that we can get’s a domino chain of compelling duplicates — in just the same way kids are now already the extension of their parents’ unexamined death anxieties and unfulfilled desires — the iteration of a process changing gradually enough (and also, paradoxically, flickering fast enough) that we’re fooled into interpreting it as continuous.
But history does not repeat itself; it rhymes, and rhyming couplets will appear in longer lines, or shorter, and embedded in more, or less, complicated schemes, as we convince ourselves that we’ve achieved eternity, or push rebelliously opposite, to try and offer something fresh to who, or what, comes next. For meditators this is already the case: the ego is an “optical illusion”“caused” by oscillations in the coming-in-and-out-of-being of sufficiently-alike appearances. You only act like you already, since your “you” is based on feedback and experience, and you can’t ever know the whole you all at once;and you treat your future selves like children, whose responsibility it is to carry on your legacy, as if you owned them, or they owed you; or to break the pattern of a self divided, self-assessed as “broken,” somehow.
Future You, by contrast, is emergent, rhyming, under zero obligation to agree to contracts you imagine it inherits — just as “mind uploading” falsely presupposes that it is desirable to have (or be) some magical computer that believes it’s you for the two seconds that it takes to leave that personality behind. (Why not just die?) Or worse, preserved in static non-life at a ghastly price, unchanging in direct proportion to the violence required to export entropy indefinitely, to transform from human being into humanoid refrigerator. (In this sense, death is life: because participating in the transformation cannot be escaped, and we’re alive as much as we’re aware of our participation.)
Increasingly high fidelity echoes of people further disrupt attempts at linear history.
You already have a fossil of you made of data, “shaped” like you but in n + a million more dimensions than a human can imagine at a time. Everything you do is tracked, and this is common knowledge, and the reason is that information “wants” to integrate, that evolution tilts toward senses and intelligence as adaptations to the ever-more-complex occasions senses bring upon us in the first place. It’s an ever-loving ratcheting of quickening self-inquiry that isn’t always pretty; curiosity comes in the form of turtle-persecuting birds and other more deliberate sadism, the police search and The Eye of Sauron and so on. And this results in things like Cambridge Analytica, which learned to please its masters by presenting them with cunning models of us, insights into how to press our buttons, how to literally steer us into multiple non-overlapping narratives and kill our opportunity to have an easy argument as citizens of a consensual reality.
But people hammer cannons into bells and back again, and round and round…and weapons like the profile advertisers use on you, the cast impression that you leave of every decision that you’ve made since you first intersected with the Internet… (I realize that for most of you, you never intersected but have always been not-two, but this applies to you, as well — and, arguably, The Acceleration is a transtemporal object and exudes time, draws us into it, our attention on it is our fascination to a serpent, and we’re in the belly of the beast Already Always, and there never was no Internet, no Noösphere, no highly patterned information at the intersections, striving.)
…and every decision that was made about you, also part of the Big You you can’t see, You The Elephant, officially and formally transfinite in complexity as we explore down magnitudes of scale, a multitude of multitudes…
…all that can be turned into the instruments of art, and your hard-forked personae generated with assistance from an always-more-complete (but also always-incomplete, retreating, deepeningly weird) recording can be the new media, The Last and First New Media. Remixed along a functionally infinite set of dimensions and indefinitely, you-not-yous proliferate.
Most of you will likely get along.
But fleshy clone or software “mindclone,” the best that we can get is to extend life into non-life, until (as has already happened in the sciences, and will soon pounce out of them to snare us all in its unpleasant truth) these definitions snap, and leave us navigating a deterritorialized liminal zone, an uncanny simulacra-land where “living things” become deprived of their priority, not known transparently and fully as controllable/predictable, but found beneath our microscopes to be composed of ever weirder and unknowable phenomena no would comfortably call “life.” The soul escapes to everywhere, diffuse, without allegiance, coming into focus on the shores in crashing surf, and every bit as happy to inhabit fog computing meshes as our mess of flesh and blood. Complexity “emerges” into our awareness, not into “reality” — it enters from the theater itself, from the occluded, at the “boundaries,” in between the voices of a choir, where sea meets land and oscillating waves reveal by contrast “difference(s),” Gregory Bateson says, “that make…a difference.”
The closest we can get, again, is with provisional, loose, working definitions that stay open to the force of revelation. When Alan Turing asked, “Can a submarine swim?” — when Timothy Morton says that we are “weak” before the Great & Terrible reality of “hyperobjects” like the Biosphere or Singularity — when Kevin Kelly tells us science manufactures questions exponentially faster than it answers them, and so experiment and prayer converge at Mystery worship — this is their message: we lose solid footing in the future (ever-more the loudest part of now), and first to go is the container of belief in sure things that has cradled us for centuries. What once were “sure things” still appear as traces, tracers like the afterimages left on a retina from staring at the Sun, the spectral fossils of modernity, luminous vestiges that haunt the shadows cast by the Atomic Age’s Angel as it enters, interrupting histories and worlds to deliver us into the crowded Noösphere.
The human form will live beyond humanity…often imagined as a diaspora of freed slave replicants.
We might consider this, as Erik Davis does, “re-animism” — a revival of the lived experience of haunted stones and forests, all reincarnated as the silicon chips, fractal aerials, semantic tress of “virtual machines,” and sigil-magic logo mascot animals, quite happy to return to our mundane realities in forms more suited to their nowhere-in-particular-ness. But maybe it’s more accurate to say the disenchantment of the modern world has run its course by finally erasing itself (and the world) as the last spell spoken to protect us from the spooky mess of things, a failing ward — not a “re-animism” so much as an accidental welcoming-back as we all become transparent (and thus sensitive, aware of, maybe even wise) to forces that we never truly banished.
So, the future acts like you because as we grow meek in our attunement to it, we allow a conversation to occur. It learns our mannerisms, like the metamorphic mannequins of Terminator 2 or Alex Garland’s version of Annihilation, or (more heinously) John Carpenter’s The Thing, or (sentimentally) the aliens of Carl Sagan’s Contact — weirdness taking shape to interface with us, inquisitive, its motives totally unknowable.
Rave Egg Wants For Nothing. Rave Egg Is INEFFABLE.
To drive this home with repetition, this is already the case: the alien reality of our own bodies, papered over with a sense of home and deep familiarity, disclosed by our collaborations with nonhuman scientific instruments to be endlessly-shifting puzzleboxes, deeply Other.
“What do you want,” we ask — and, straining to discern an audible reply, we might hear something about selfish genes, or entropy, or childhood attachment issues, or The Lord’s Good Work, or (similarly) our participation in the future history of unborn gods. But these are all refractions and distortions, echoes of the ghost notes of the choir-roar of the black hole that has already swallowed us and who-knows-what-else. The deeper that we listen, the more we empty subjectivity into the object and accept its speech, the more apparent it is that the future acts like you because you act just like the future, too; you can’t not. Consequently, it is “for” no-thing and for all things; it is the All-Thing, and all things are rendered equally mysterious and strange before this knowing.
Uncanny even for the uncanny: The liquid metal mimetic T-1000 mistakes a mannequin for one of his kind.
What this means “in practical terms” is that we will spend this interregnum between Ages either in the bardo, lost within a maelström of appearances; or in the zendo, learning to appreciate (and be) “miegakure,” the aesthetic of the garden in which thirteen stones are carefully arranged so that you never see them all at once. One of the thirteen stones is always hidden, and that incomplete view thus points past delusional “completeness” to a hyperspace in which what we call time is the rotation of a mystery afloat on deeper mystery — just like the “glass chrysanthemum” that meets some DMT explorers at the moment that they’re born out of their lives and into what always-already IS, mistaken as a death because we pass through the distracting clarity of that peacock mandala into no-space/all-space, no-time/all-time, in which everything’s already happened.
It is the water that the water swims in. We are made of it, including you and your AI assistants and your clones and children and the other other-selves more distal still, distilled until it’s easier to see the ghost in the machine, the you you can’t convince yourself is you, in all its splendor and its overwhelming strangeness…
Each zendo is a bardo and vice versa; we are always traveling, always invited into deeper seeing. This gets more and more apparent — or comprises more of the apparent — as things weird around us. We meet weird halfway, accepting our perversity and bottomlessness in just, equal measure to accepting the surprising life of the “inanimate.” We get a hell of a lot cozier with living in a noisy void of whirling, breathing unknowns vying for attention even as they dodge our scrutiny. It’s just another day in the profanely sacred Pandemonium.
SalviaDroid knows what it’s like to have everything trying to distract you. Don’t give in to astonishment!
From here to there — at least if we pretend that prophecy (in speaking of the timeless, evergreen, and always-true) can be prediction (and thus stretch from past to future “forward,” as with time-space synesthesia, and can be read like Doppler-shifted history) — we stand to suffer some extraordinary shocks.
Expect the sci fi usuals: love bots that take the shape of your departed partner(s); mansions full of talking toys that remix “Beast” and “Beauty;” 3D-printed “respawns” that arrive too soon and sue for your identity; software-person genocide; high-resolution body scans that live online and let you run scenarios until you lose track of which basement level of the dream you’re in; Siri making calls on your behalf and forging your identity (with and without permission); intelligent memorials you visit in VR sets dressed up looking like your parents in their old house; an entire menagerie of slightly-out-of-focus junior holograms of you that sit on either shoulder and debate like parliament about what you should do next. And you listen even though they’re out of focus, because they are privy to a wider view than you, they help translate the flood of information, some folks run a lot more at a time than you, but you’re conservative and two seems plenty.
(It’s already this way — ask any neuroscientist — but soon you’ll have two intuitions, neither of which you can be entirely sure hasn’t been suborned by hackers. Oh well — at least you can compare them to each other for a third opinion, always weighing new perspectives, forking when you all can’t reach consensus, delegating runtime on the fogmesh to the version that refuse to play so they can spin off into some human but solipsistic microverse, your self an integrated legion, cross-platform ecology, that blurs and fringes at the margins, no concrete delineation other than what we place somewhat arbitrarily between the “I” and “it,” the things you are and your appearances.)
Do I really look like that?
(This is a draft chapter from my first book, in progress, and a companion text to Future Fossils Podcast. Learn more at Patreon.com/MichaelGarfield.)
The Future Acts Like You – How To Live in the Future Part 7 was originally published on transhumanity.net
#agi#AI#eva#t1000#westworld#crosspost#transhuman#transhumanitynet#transhumanism#transhumanist#thetranshumanity
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I don't know if you've been asked this before or not, but I'm genuinely curious on your take if they had Camicazi play in the film/tv series instead of Astrid? I understand that Astrid is "based" off of Camicazi and switched with her story to adapt better to the film/tv franchise, but I wonder how things would have been different if they stuck to more of the books, if that makes sense. I just find your opinions/analysis very interesting.
OOOOOH MAN, YOU ASKED THE QUESTION.
Quick preface: Astrid is not Camicazi, or vise-versa. I don’t care what role they’re trying to fill. Both the characters and their part, are so, so different.
Another quick sidenote: Someone once asked about introducing Camicazi in the TV show, which I outlined an episode for.
Now, you’re asking if Camicazi were to replace Astrid, not exist alongside of her? That’s something I have not talked about, as all of my movie!Camicazi adaptions exist within HTTYD-movie canon. To be honest… as far as background goes, I don’t see an immediate difference:
Camicazi is still a Bog Burglar, from a different tribe, an allied tribe, also battling the War on Dragons.
Camicazi has a whole Bog Culture behind her (created along with @ch4rmsing)
Camicazi and Hiccup both knew each other as heirs, seeing each other at the yearly Thing, always hosted by a different tribe.
Camicazi was one of Hiccup’s first real “friends”. She, at least, respected him for who he was (or saw opportunity in what he was capable of), and they remained pen pals through the years.
Hiccup was Camicazi’s first kiss from a boy. That follows whether Astrid exists or not.
In the movie!canon timeline, Camicazi’s dragon is a Hobblegrunt… lest a Mood Dragon come to existance, which, in this non!Astrid one, maybe we can… and it’s name is Stormfly! YEAH!
So, should Astrid not exist…
Hiccup is still fighting the good fight to Fit In™, just sans the Crush. But we’ll say that when no one believes him about shooting down the Night Fury, that, after he drops his “I just want to be one of you guys” line to Gobber, and forlornly shoves his way back into the Haddock Houshold, he first writes Camicazi a letter (and uses pigeon messaging? Pre-terrormail) gushing about his victory because at least she’ll listen.
Hiccup has already started dragon-training, met Toothless, and has slowly begun to work on the tail-fin before Camicazi assaults him mid “See You Tomorrow” montage.
Turns out, his letter was inspiration enough to get her to commandeer a small ship and adventure her Tiny, Tangled way over to Hooligan territory (it didn’t hurt that Hiccup’s letter mentioned his father would be away). Camicazi wants in… on whatever nonsense Hiccup is starting now (also she has her own Coming-of-Age background nonsense she’s running away from)
Hiccup knows, in the back of his mind, that Camicazi was just looking for an excuse to break the rules a bit more. That was the basis of their friendship after all: he had an uncanny way of finding trouble and pissing people off, and Camicazi was all for getting them out of it. She loved the challenge. But he wants a human friend in on this. And he wants more people to know about Toothless the more he uncovers dragons.
Camicazi loves hiding away on Hooligan Island, harassing Hiccup where she can, learning about dragons, and aiding in the magic of flight/helping-Toothless. She doesn’t reveal herself to Berk. Not while Stoick’s away. It’s her escape time.
she also loves whispering into Hiccup’s ear how to handle his new popularity with his peers. She knows he loves it deep down; she also knows he feels false about it. She’s there to mediate.
When Stoick returns, she wants to go further with Toothless. Ultimately, Stoick will receive word from her mother that she’s missing and people will be on high alert. She wants one last Hurrah.
That’s when they discover the Queen.
They decide to bring it to Hiccup’s father first after a small argument over which tribe to inform first. Hiccup’s not alone in breaking this news; both heirs need to carry the burden of truth.
There is no Final Exam incident. It’s the witching hour and Stoick can barely contain his rage as Camicazi (the brat was on his island the whole time; Bertha’d never let him live it down!) practically shouts over his son’s mumbles absolute hearsay: Dragon Queens and taming Night Furies and generations of ideals wrong. But in the next instant his son is gone, a shadow in the sky that left him hoarse and looking like a lunatic.
A week later of his son missing and Stoick certain he’d gone mad, an envoy of the Bog Burglars arrive. Bertha’s furious, talking of her daughter and his son flying around on a Night Fury of all things.
Apparently their children had done a Truth Bomb on the Bog Burglars as well and demanded the two tribes meet lest they want to see their heirs again.
It isn’t until dusk that Hiccup and Camicazi and Toothless come to Berk, remaining high, and barely visible, where they’re safe. They address the parties, and explain what they’ve seen, what they’ve learned, hoping for cooperation.
It’s cooperation they’re given… up front. They’re careful play isn’t as well thought as as it seems, and the adults take matters into their own hands the following morning and steal away the Nightmare (meant to be slaughtered a week earlier) to find the nest.
Kids follow, asses are kicked, feet are lost, in the chaos Camicazi bonds with a Mood-dragon/Hobblegrunt and helps save Phlegma the fierce (a Bog defector that was on her mother’s Shitlist)
Hooligans and Bogs are forced to reconcile with dragons, with Camicazi and Hiccup colluding through Terrormail in the following five years
Their meetings get hotter, let me tell you
(tldr; adding an outside heir would be hella sweet js)
There’s a side thought that Hiccup won’t meet Camicazi until HTTYD3, which could involve Romans… as they truly met ;)
Even if Astrid exists, Hiccami could happen with the right spin (less so after HTTYD2)
Camiret can also be a thing
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#pizza-is-my-buziness#skimmons#❤💛💚💙💜#i did this whole thing on my phone#im exhausted#i hope you like it
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Kingdom Hearts: Next Generation
Chapter 2 - Sassing the most powerful wizard in the worlds
Okay, before we move on, I should explain.
First, my monsters. I mentioned them last time, but I never really went into detail. See, when I was little, I actually had monsters under my bed. Really. But they weren’t like the big scary child-eating monsters you’d typically think you’d see. Nah. They were just cute little creatures who would just kinda be there when I slept. When I was young I used to see them every night, just kind hopping on out from under my bed after my dad shut the door. I remember staying up late to play with them-- for a while they were my only friends. As I grew up they stopped appearing as often, but every once in a while they come and check up on me. I always know when they’re around too. They have a comforting sense of darkness.
Which brings me to my second point. You probably noticed that last time I was describing emotions in great detail. I’m not sure why, but as far back as I can remember I’ve had this unique ability to sense emotions. The best way I can describe it is like... Like a feeling on my skin. It can feel like a wave washing over me, a jolt of electricity, a soft breeze, a pinch or prickling feeling, even a burning sensation. It’s hard to explain, and I have no idea why I have this ability. Were I actually a part of my father’s bloodline, I’d be certain it wasn’t hereditary. I had asked him once before, and he’d told me he’d never heard of such a phenomenon. And it’s not like it’s the aftermath of a spell gone wrong, my aunt takes the upmost precaution when training me. It’s just... There. I can only assume I’d inherited it from my blood parents. It’s not usually bad, but at times it can be... Overwhelming. Almost painful. It’s only with really powerful emotions however.
Alright back to the story.
After the big fiasco with John, the Oni, and I on the roof, the principle announced that the school would close early that day, and a police investigation went on to find John. Not that they would. He was probably far away from our small world of Destiny Islands by now. The police asked me some questions, and with my dad’s permission I told them what happened. I had to leave out a few things, mainly about John disappearing to another world. My dad says we have to keep the existence of other worlds a secret from civilians, in order to keep world order. Well. We’re supposed too. My uncle let it spill that they didn’t really treat that as a rule in their days of journeying, and more of just a... A guideline. Once in a while they’ll let it slip that they’re from a different world.
Once the questioning was through, I walked out of the school and onto the grounds with my father, my uncle, and Jill to wait for Darrien. I was still rather shaken, so she’d sat me down by the gates while Dad and Riku kept watch.
“Are you okay..?”
I couldn’t help my faint chuckle. This was the fifth time she’d asked me this question. I leaned my head on her shoulder, her arm draping around me, “I... I think so now...” My voice was mumbled. I was confused, and I was scared. To recap, I was attacked on the roof by a guy who had once been a normal bully: John. He turned out to be an Oni; a human trapped between life and death. He tried to throw me off a roof, saying that I was ‘it’, whatever that meant. I assumed it had something to do with my birth parents... Perhaps I wasn’t as ‘ordinary teenager’ as I thought. Not that my pseudo family was normal in society’s standards on the islands.
“Liar.” She huffed, rubbing my shoulder a bit, “You’re shaking.”
I couldn’t deny that. I hadn’t been able to still myself since John disappeared. I had even had a hard time trying to tell the police what happened. I only made a small noise of acknowledgement as I turned my head to hide my face in her shoulder.
“... So... What’s gonna happen now..?” She mumbled, squeezing my shoulder.
“... I dunno...” My reply was mumbled, “I guess... I have to go away now...”
She was silent for a while. I could feel sadness coming from her. She didn’t want me to leave. That was something I could understand. I didn’t want to just leave her here to wonder how I was. She’d become something of a sister to me. We even had the same natural hair and eye color. Well. One eye. I forgot to mention, I wear an eyepatch over my right eye. I have my reasons. But my left eye is blue, like hers. I’ve never seen her right eye either. It was always covered by bangs. Kind of uncanny how similar we were.
“... I want to go with you.”
I flinched when she finally spoke, moving to sit up just enough to look at her. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see My father and uncle turn to look at us in interest.
“I’ve been wanting to go to outside worlds the moment I found out they were there.” She admitted, looking at me.
I sat up suddenly, “Wait, how do you..?”
“When I was younger, I met someone who told me about them. He was kind... And seemed rather sad. He had to leave soon after I spoke to him, but he told me that one day I’d get to see them for myself...” She admitted. I could feel her determination burning on my skin. She turned to look at Dad and Riku, standing up slowly, “You’re going to another world, right? That’s what those weapons you hold can do. Please, take me with you!”
There was a long pause. I looked at my father. I could see him trying( and failing ) to hide a small smile. There was a feeling of familiarity and understanding coming from him. It reminded me of something he’d told me once before, how he my mother and Uncle Riku tried to go to other worlds on a raft. How they’d dreamed of going out there as children. Looking at my uncle, I could tell he was thinking about it too.
But then they looked at one another... And something passed over me. They weren’t apprehensive at all. They almost seemed like... They were waiting for this. Like they knew something the two of us didn’t. Thinking back? I probably should’ve asked them what they knew. But I didn’t.
“What about your Uncle?” My dad more than likely already knew the answer to this question. Jill’s Uncle was... Not exactly the best. Her parents had died a while back, leaving her in the care of her Uncle. Dad had wanted to take her in himself-- He’d become good friends with her mom and dad after she and I met --but, custody ended up going to the closest blood relative. Whether he’s an alcoholic ass of not.
Jill gave a wave of her hand, “You already know that answer, Mr. Akari. He wont miss me. I want more outta my life than what he could possibly have to offer.”
They smiled. My father put his hands on the back of his head, “Y’know, you two sure remind us of ourselves when we were younger.” He said, grinning wide. Jill and I looked to one another, then to them again, “Always wanting more.”
Riku nodded, holding a hand out to Jill. The girl glanced at it, then smiled happily as she took it, “Welcome to the crew, Jill.”
------------------------------
“I swear if that guys ever shows his face again I’m gonna--”
“Darrien.”
My sister sighed angrily as Kirimi interrupted his train of thought. She’d been this way ever since she met up with us outside the school. Darrien was very protective. It could actually be kind of annoying sometimes. I scratched my arm a little, feeling the burning of her anger on my skin. Her emotions were often the strongest of those I’d ever felt. She was a very passionate person.
The three of us were currently waiting outside of Jill’s house, while she packed up her things. Dad and Uncle Riku had gone to get us a ride to Yen Sid’s. Well... At least I assumed they were. They weren’t very specific.
“We don’t know anything about this guy. If we just jump into a fight with him without thinking we’re going to lose.” The eldest woman pointed out, folding her arms across her chest.
“I know I know, I just...”
As Darrien searched for the right words-- the right excuse for her temper --I gave a smirk, my hands going to my pockets, “You’re just overprotective.”
“I think that’s putting it nicely, Sky-boy.” My cousin grinned, giving a weak shove to my sister’s shoulder. The two exchanged a couple shoves, stuck their tongues out at each other-- Figures that Jill and I, the actual children in the group, were more mature than the two ‘adults’. Not that Jill and I were... Much better.
Speaking of Jill, here she came out the front door, carrying nothing but a small bag and a small suitcase. She grinned, a warm feeling of pride and happiness emitting from her, “Alright, I’m all set! Are Sora and Riku here yet?”
“Hey, Jill. Nah, we’re supposed to meet them by the beach. C’mon.” Kirimi smiled, jerking her head slightly as a gesture for us to follow her. As we walked, we were relatively merry and up-beat. Kirimi picked fun at Darrien, Jill and I talked about my decision to go Watermelon for my next hair color-- My sister said she could do much better than a simple gradient, and it’s awesome --It... Almost felt like nothing had even happened earlier that day. But I know it had. I still felt weak from the immense hatred that... Creature had felt for me. I could still fell the burns on my neck, arm, and back. The hoodie, shirt, and binder I’d been wearing earlier were ruined from the molten metal... And I could not erase the vivid memory of hanging over the school grounds, the only thing keeping me from falling being the hand of the one called John. It had happened. It was real.
And it scared me to death.
“Sky?”
I flinched as I suddenly heard my name, looking to the one who’d said it. It was my dad. I hadn’t even realized that we’d reached the beach. My family was looking at me with concern on their faces-- I must have been letting my fear show through my expression. I looked at my hands. I was shaking. My father tugged me off to the side, kneeling down to look at me at eye level, “Hey, are you okay kiddo..?”
I searched through my head for an excuse... ‘I was just spacing’. ‘My neck and arm hurt a bit’. ‘It’s nothing’.
“He’s gonna come back.”
The words escaped before I could keep them back. I saw my dad flinch just the slightest bit. I felt his concern and understanding-- with a soft wave of sadness underneath. His hand softly squeezed my shoulder, “... Yes. Yes, he probably is.” He didn’t sugarcoat it. He didn’t deny it. He knew that if he did, I would only feel worse.
My hands moved to hug my arms, and my head hung as I looked at the ground. I hated this. I couldn’t stand showing this kind of weakness in front of my family, but... I hate to admit it, but I am still a kid, “What am I supposed to do when he does..? I’m scared, dad...”
“Do just what you did today.” I blinked, lifting my head to look at him again, “Take a deep breath, and think. You were able to figure out his weakness when your Uncle and I couldn’t, even though you were scared. You did great, buddy. And I’m... I’m not gonna lie to you: What’s coming up is... It’s gonna get scary. You’re going to see things that are going to terrify you, people are going to get hurt, and...” He drew in a deep breath, his eyes closing for a moment. He shook his head, opening his eyes and putting his hands on my shoulders, “Just remember to keep trying. Try to push through your fear, try to find a solution to a problem, try to keep moving forward. Remember, it’s okay to be scared. It’s okay to run away. As long as you’re trying.”
I nodded a little, and my dad smiled a little. He paused, then rummaged through his pockets and pulled out a small star-shaped charm. It kinda reminded me of the charm Darrien always carried. Except his was made of seashells. He placed it in one of my hands, smiling as he did, “Here... This was... Your mother’s.” I blinked, staring at my dad. This was... My mother’s. My birth mother. I looked back to my father, who was smiling, “It was... One of the gifts I wanted to give you at the party today.”
I looked back to the charm, carefully clipping it to the belt loop of my jeans. I looked back to my father, smiling as I hugged him tightly, “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome kiddo.” He hugged me back, then let go as he stood up and ruffled my hair, “Now then... Let’s get you guys to the tower. I still have one more birthday gift for ya.” He winked, and all at once the excitement I felt this morning came welling back up inside me. Dad had said that I’d be getting my birthday gifts from him at the party. Knowing that this wouldn’t change just because of today’s events got me excited all over again.
We re-joined the rest of our little group, and after a bit of fussing from Darrien, Riku gave everyone these... Strange. Armor pieces. They looked like the ones Uncle Terra, Uncle Ven, and Aunt Aqua wore. One for each of us. Well, except Kirimi. Seems she already had one. Probably because she’s already a wielder. I was rather confused that they had one ready for Jill however. Examining the piece in detail, it seemed improbable that they were easily made. It made sense to me that they’d had ones made for Darrien and I, but they couldn’t have known that Jill would be coming with them...
... Right?
The two experienced wielders helped us put them on, then dad grinned as he spoke up, “Alright, you three. What we just gave you is called Keyblade-Armor. This armor will protect you from the harmful elements in the Lanes Between. The three of us will show you how to activate it.”
We spent a little while learning how to activate the armor. I’d tell you exactly how to do it, but it’s actually incredibly difficult to explain. Basically you have to use your will. You focus on activating the armor, than press your hand to a special circle on the armor piece. Then the armor forms around your body. That’s the easy part. Taking it off is the difficult part. There’s no button, no off switch, it’s all will. You have to will the armor off of yourself. Dad gave us a tip to say “off” to make it easier. Even with that, I will admit that it took me a couple tries to get it right.
Once we’d all activated our armor, the three older wielders did something awesome. They threw their keyblades high into the air, and while in midair the blade transformed into unique individual gliders. Dad’s reminded me of a surfboard, Uncle Riku had a sort of speeder, and Kirimi had what almost looked like a flying motorcycle. Screw being ‘mature’ or whatever about this, this was just cool.
Each of the wielders took one of us onto their glider-- I went with Dad, Darrien with Uncle Riku, and Jill with Kirimi --and before we knew it we were all speeding off into the air. A line of light shot from the tip of Dad’s vessel, and a portal opened up at the end. Without much hesitation, but much excitement, the six of us sailed through the portal.
Words just can’t describe how beautiful the Lanes Between are. We were essentially in outer space, sailing high above the worlds. There were so many stars out there-- All of which were individual worlds if my father’s words were to be believed. Any worlds we passed by were just their own little planets-- though they all seemed to have little barriers around each of them. Some of them were strange. Some worlds-- very few and far between, however --were a bit... Strange. It wasn’t simply just one world inside the barrier. It was many smaller worlds. It served to prove that we were not, in fact, in outer space, but were instead inside a space between universes. It was difficult to explain. It was almost as if each world had it’s own ‘space’.
Though amazing as it was, we didn’t travel very far. It wasn’t long until we were approaching a world with a weird tower on it-- seriously who builds a tower with such a weird structure; that thing could not be considered structurally safe if there wasn’t the possibility of magic being involved. We entered another portal, landing safely on the new world. I’d never been here before, but I already knew we were here to see Yen Sid. They’d said about it before. Yen Sid-- sorry, Master Yen Sid is supposed to be an all powerful wizard who knows pretty much everything about the keyblade and the worlds. Too bad he’s biased. He treats darkness and light as two separate elements, instead of as two sides of the same coin like they are. In his eyes, dark and light are entities, not elements as they truly are. As if they had sentience, and moral alignments.
Needless to say, I definitely had a goal to sass and one-up this guys every chance I get.
Deactivating our armor, we all paraded our way into the tower. When we first walked in, it seemed like just a normal spiral tower. But going farther up, it became wildly clear that there was some kind of magic used when building it. The structure of the tower itself wildly contradicted the look of it from the outside. There were stairs leading from doors suspended in midair, mini-stars sprinkled throughout the air-- It was actually pretty impressive. Still didn’t explain it’s weird outside appearance. Seriously.
Reaching the top of the tower, we entered what looked like just a a normal circular room. We must have been at the very top. Yen Sid sat in a fancy chair behind a desk, hands folded and with a ‘no fun allowed’ resting face. This guy needs to lighten up a little. Jill, Darrien, and I lined up in front of the desk, whilst the older wielders stood behind us near the wall. Kirimi and Riku seemed rather formal about being in the presence of Yen Sid, but Dad just kinda leaned against the wall with his arms folded.
“Welcome.” The sorcerer’s voice alone seemed to demand respect, “I am pleased to see you all arrived here safely. I trust you all know why you’re here.”
“Not really.” I shrugged as I mumbled the words. It was true. The adults hadn’t told any of us exactly why we were coming here, “But we assume it has to do with the creature that attacked me.”
There was a touch of amusement from the elder wielders. Perhaps they found it humorous that I chose to speak so casually to the old man. He didn’t seem to fazed by this. He just nodded a little, “Well, in that case, I’ll explain. As you may already know, the being that attacked Skylar is known as an Oni. Oni are creatures pulled into limbo, whilst on the brink of death. I shall explain more on these creatures as time goes on, however for now, let us move on to why this is important.”
“In order for an Oni to exist, there must be a master behind them. Someone with the magical ability and skill to pull a creatures heart into limbo; removing it from the body while still keeping the two connected, to prevent a Heartless and a Nobody from being born in the Oni’s stead. This master is who we’ve been trying to find for years now. Wielders have been disappearing throughout the worlds. We can only assume that whoever this master of Oni’s is, they have been kidnapping keyblade wielders for their own purposes.”
I felt my eyebrow twitch as I listened. So wielders were going missing, and our enemy was some powerful wizard capable of creating Oni’s. The way he spoke about this to us...
“You’re... Expecting us to be able to stop this person?”
#{[ My journal is my private place ]}( Stories )#kingdom hearts#fanfiction#kingdom hearts: next generation#chapter 2
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