Lemons
Archmage MC
AlternateMan
Eviledd1984
ctrlsaltdel
op2024
Ariamis
Double
Lord Zee
Goldeagle1221
wordcount: 3,524 (+4)
Bowser Jr: Level 14 EXP: ////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(151/140)
Rika: Level 10 EXP: ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////(70/100)
Location: The avenger -> Mafia town: Bancho Sushi
Friday, lunchtime
Dr. Amelia Yu, alien hybrid eldritch mind devouring horror and avowed vegetarian and pacifist due to her psychic empathy, halted her hand before knocking on the bedroom door. Steeled herself. Then completed the motion, wincing as each rap forcibly exposed her to the emotions locked up inside.
“Excuse me, might I come in?” she requested, before adding just a moment later (having already tried and failed this before, and having this time come with an incentive) that “I have brought you lunch” fully aware that the room’s denizens had not been eating properly thanks again to her psychic empathy.
As she’d hoped, the ‘bribe’ got her access, and her reward was the wave of dower malaise and roiling frustration that swept out of it and over her. She winced, then grinned and bore it (not that the lipless mouth behind her mask could have any other expression) and stepped on in.
The room within was a strange mix of childs bedroom and workshop, discarded toys and games scattered among tools and mechanical components. The latter of these things could have lived in any of the 4 separate rooms on the ship dedicated to all things technological, and yet the duo had more or less locked themselves inside here to tinker instead.
She didn’t know the specifics of the pair’s trip down to and then return from Camp Whispering Rock, but suffice to say it had taken the upset and betrayed feelings they’d had and made things so much worse
three days earlier
The two children sat on at the top of the tower they’d taken over by virtue of there now being a giant whale with gun turrets mounted on it blocking the ramp up to the top. The kids' summer holidaying at Camp Whispering Rock might have been a little weird, but they were no psychics (Galeem had put the regular deinzines of this place up in Midgar) and so there was no getting past the pair's stonewalling of them.
It was something of a self sabotaging move, because if there was one group who might be able to relate to what they were going through, it’d be kids away at summer camp, because who among them had not felt at least a little bit homesick at some point. Still, even then, who could really understand how Rika, a girl, teen, or woman with roughly a week's worth of memories she could really call her own, and a person whose was a mess of spirits all jammed into one personality that had had little foundation to build atop of, was going through.
The koopa who’d freed her both from Galeem and from the warmachine that was, or had been, the abyssal fleet, and in doing so made her a person rather than a weapon, was gone. As was the koopa who’d named her his daughter. Both off out there somewhere on an adventure with an ally turned enemy turned maybe ally again, with no idea if they’d come back, and all in the name of this thing called love she still didn’t really understand.
The two of the rocks that had held her steady in this strange new thinking existence she was in had vanished from it, and now only the smallest (or was he the largest?) remained.
Unfortunately her brother was also suffering, but at least he was used to it (or did that make what had happened worse? She didn’t know).
”Urrrrgh” the prince groaned loudly as the sun began to set on the camp, signaling their third day of waiting there, slumping back onto the spikes of his shell, tossing his arms up and declaring ”he’s done it again!”
”Does this happen a lot?” Rika asked, her arms wrapped around her knees, her mighty gauntlets sat on the deck behind her.
”Yeah. Well no? But sometimes!” the prince groaned ”Papa will just go off on some adventure or attempted conquest and won’t bring me along and its soooooooo lame!”
”This time was supposed to be different! I mean I never got to be a part of any of the times papa got to do hero stuff and save the world! But this time I was and it was so cool! We were actually winning fights and taking names and no one could stop us and it was so much better than being the bad guy who gets beat” he said, turning to his sister who didn’t really get it for validation ”Right?”
”I liked… not being part of the fleet more than being a part of it? And they were ‘bad guys’ so I think so, yes? I mean I think now and didn’t really then so that’s, um, just better by default” she replied, before sighing and saying ”I mean I owe everything to, well, Kamek for letting me be free and feel things and stuff, but now that he and papa are gone, I dunno i just feel like… empty inside again”
Her brother didn’t really know how to respond to that, empathy wasn’t exactly his strong point, but he at least got that maybe going on with his rant wasn’t the best. So he floundered, kicking his legs that were hanging off of the edge of the platform a few times, and then agreed that ”yeah, it's lame”
They sat there quietly for a bit, till they spotted movement down below, and one of the camp counselors popped into view, calling up to them to come on down from the tower now that it was getting dark. His tone indicated that he did not care a bit that they were a heavily armed boat girl and a spiky fire breathing turtle, because bedtime for children was fast approaching.
”I don’t wanna go back” Rika said quietly in response to this, not at all loud enough for the councilor to hear.
”yeah, I know, who’s he to tell us what to do!” jr agreed, misreading her reasons for this entirely.
”No I mean I don’t want to go back at all. I mean it was fun playing with the others here before when I thought we were just waiting for papa and Kamek, but if they aren't coming then… I dunno, I just… don’t think I could stand being around happy people, or to waste time playing while they’re out, doing whatever important stuff with Peach or P or whoever she is now”
”Mmm” Jr agreed. Well. Partially. He had enjoyed doing kid stuff with the campers, it’d had distracted from the looming certainty that his papa wouldn’t be coming to pick them up, but his sister had a point. They should be doing something productive, and there was nothing productive to be done here.
”Oh, I know!”
They’d come back after that, and jr had immediately thrown himself into work fixing up his clown car first, and then setting about working on upgrading and overhauling Rika’s gauntlets. Dr. Yu had helped with this, but her attempts at cheering up Rika as she sat about and was worked on had only managed to drive the girl away. After that the pair had been through all four of the various labs and workshops before finally ending up in their room all day for much the same reason.
Even now, as the Doctor entered the room holding the bag of the first meal they’d be having in the day, she could feel she was not wanted, and yet she approached anyway. Rika’s mood had not improved the past three days, and Jr’s had turned to obsessively tinkering and working, unable to deal with his own feelings, nor Rika’s feelings, nor his feelings about not knowing how to deal with her feelings and so using his engineering to tire and distract himself.
Given what she saw as she peered over and assessed his work, he was very much running out of things to do. The gauntlets had been a mess of fusion combined and merged components to start out with (fully articulated fingers, 2 different guns, a grappling hook, 2 hangers for scout the doctor had reverse engineered for her to replace a lost one, a magitech charge systems she did not understand) and he’d only added to them by installing the controls of 6 rocket propelled sword drones to them, but everything was all neat, tidy, and comprehended at this point.
She could tell from the blueprints, even if they themselves were a bit messy. While eyeing those, she also spotted sitting next to them sat a pair of ankle bands that (if she was reading their plans right) replicated her ship girl floatation power.
Given he’d come back to the gauntlets, and from what she could see/feel he was very much clutching at straws when it came on what else to do to them other than quadruple check everything in them, it seemed like he was out of projects. He’d probably throw himself at something at the armory next, or, worse, the ship itself. Not something you wanted someone doing while it was flying around that was for sure.
Neither of those would help the pair’s situation. Indeed this entire return to the ship plan had frankly made everything worse in the good doctor’s analysis of their moods, and so for their and everyone’s sake, they needed to be off it again. Get some fresh air. See the sun. However to suggest they do so directly would very much not work, this she very much knew thanks both to intuition and her psychic abilities, and so she set about performing the manipulations they needed.
“Hungry?” she asked as she set down the paper bag, and tactically popped it open so that the smell of the meal Bracket Brace had prepared for them specifically could waft out temptingly. The prince, leaning over the cracked open gauntlet, grunted in response, while the morose princess laying on the bed beside him said nothing at all.
Then both blinked as the smell of the hearty meal the ship's cheerful Mimiga chef had prepared for them, their mouths watered, and within moments they were chowing down on the skillfully prepared chow.
As they did so, the Doctor made an active show of looking over the gauntlets, even though she’d got most of the details at a meer glance, and then just as the satisfaction of stating their hunger was peaking she said, “Well, now that looks like quite the fine piece of work” and before the prince could swallow and respond, added the vital question of “now how are you going to test it?”
”Huh? Oh. the training room I guess?” Jr said, clearly having not actually thought about this.
“With that amount of reach?” she asked gesturing vaguely at a part of the blueprints listing the considerable distance the rocket blades could be launched out at, criticizing the idea by saying that it was “hardly the best place for it in my humble opinion” and then going for an early killshot by saying that “if you want to make sure they’re of use, I suggest getting as much space as you can when testing them out”
“Might I suggest you head on down to maffia town?” it was, out of the three places, somehow the one that she suspected was most safe. No lethal static to the north, no corruption, just blue seas and ineffectual thugs. Plus “you could make use of those new floatation devices while you are there as well. Plenty of room to test them out on the open ocean I’d think?”
She again focused on the usefulness, on the making use. That was, she correctly guessed, the prince’s motivation for focusing on working, but that work was hardly letting Rika actually feel useful, and it was draining Jr’s mental facilities to be doing it all day. That it got them out and about was the actual point, but that it lined up with what their misguided desires was what actually got them down there.
friday afternoon
The sun shone down upon the slowly bobbing waves of the sea just outside of mafia town, glinting off of 6 red metallic blades that were whirling around a panicking flailing figure who screaming ”ahhhh! How do I control this alllllll!” at a turtle standing on top of the water way back from his freaking out sister.
”stop waving your arms around, they're linked to those!” he called back as his sister tried to block the blades coming at her with her gauntlets despite that very move being one that sent them racing towards her.
”No no, hands away from the body!” he shouted again before realizing he could communicate it by telling her to ”think of it, like, shoving them away”
That did indeed do the trick, the princess thrusting both palms out in front of her, and sending the blades blasting off into the distance across the waves. Unfortunately it only worked for a moment as they reached their effective range, and then came blasting back again.
”no no no no stay away” their control shouted at them, before thrusting her hands ”down!” and sending all six splashing into the waves.
She stood there, panting for a moment, as the drone’s engine sputtered under the water, stopping them from returning to her, only for her to go ”oh no!” as they started to sink.
This at least jr was prepared for, it was sort of the risk of practicing over water, but they’d wisly not done this over the blue hole, so they could only sink so far. Plus he did have a way to sort things, clicking on a cassette tape to turn into the fish monstress warrior Undyne, and then as her diving into the waves after the drowning weapons.
He (as she) emerged a few moments later with the blades under her arms, and then struggled to keep a hold of them till Rika remembered she could switch them off herself.
”So, uh, that was kinda my bad” Jr admitted (to Rika’s relife) as he returned to being himself, floating upon the waves next to her on the very successful ship girl tech he’d copied from her, before suggesting ”Maybe we should start with just one?” which got him a moment of hesitation and then a nod from the ship girl.
That, as it turned out, had worked out far better, and as the sun set, the princess had that single claw more or less dancing to her tune. What had not been worked out, because the good doctor had not known, kids had not thought about it till it was too late, was how they were going to fund their stay here. The pair had money of course, but unfortunately for them, having absolutely piles of geo didn’t really help them when the local currency was pons.
Fortunately they found this out because a certain cat girl encountered them while returning from her daily fishing trip, and took pity on them enough to cover dinner and lend them a room to sleep over in. The only cost for this was some light pun-ishment for their lack of foresight. That and sleeping in the furniture store Nadia was squatting in, which might be fine for the street cat, but caused no end of griping from the royal prince.
In the name of getting their own room and board they’d have to engage in some child labor to pay their way through. Given their sailing skills, spear prowess, and access to a cassette beast tape and a hood that would let them both dive underwater, a fishing job seemed like the obvious choice. Well. except for the fact that their last experience with doing actual work had taught them a possibly rather poor lesson.
”That job we did transporting stuff wasn’t worth it at all, but the cheese Purse stole from it and that she gave to us was, so, shouldn’t we just do that?” Rika pointed out, referring to the time they and the aforementioned mouse girl Purse had done a delivery of cheese through a canyon, only to be attacked by rat bandits and sentient cheese revolutionaries.
”Yeah that was a rip off. I mean someone died doing it and what was it worth? nothing” Jr agreed, though this perception was maybe impacted a bit by how they’d been paid in now worthless geo ”Plus you heard how Nadia and people in Bancho Sushi were talking about this ‘Mafia’? Total bad guys. We could mess with them and people’d probably thank us!”
”Yeah. Well. except the mafia, don’t they, like, run this place? If we raid their logistics, they’ll come after us in town. Where we want to sleep and eat and stuff” Rika pointed out, brain briefly flicking to her inbuilt military thinking.
Jr ”hmmmm”ed at this for a few moments, before clicking his claws as he realized that ”Then we just need to use disguises!”
They’d seen the mafia fishing ships out on the water, big barges with dozens of fishers all lining the side. You could tell it was one from the single mafia mook hanging around on deck. Technically he was there to keep watch over the seas for danger, but given that this was very much a protection racket, he was mostly keeping watch over the fishers to make sure they didn’t pocket anything in an attempt to deny the mafia their 20% cut.
Said mook happened to spot a large dark shape in the water while lazing at his post, watched it for a moment, and then determined it was simply “eh, just a whale” before getting back to his actual job of people watching.
He was right about what was in the water as it turned out. The problem was that the whale was coming right at them, something which he only noticed too late.
The the Pacific Princess’s great white whale, moaby dick, beached the surface a moment later and upon its back, looking far more pirate with her eyepatch than royal guard captain, was Undyne, who lept off the back of the whale with a “nyeeeeeeh!” and landed on deck between the mafia goon and the fishers.
“Hand over the fishies, and no one gets hurt!” Undyne demanded while brandishing a spear. Behind her, the mafia mook squared up to try and sock them in the back, only for a brionne named Dazzle to corkscrew leapt out of the water and nail him with a big bubble of water, knocking him over right in time for Undyne to then turn and point the spear at the now downed mook. They cocked their head in question, and got an “ok ok, you win” from the thoroughly shamed mafia mook.
“Good. As for the rest” Undyne said, before waving a spear at the gun turrets mounted on the whale circling the ship, which quickly got her her piratical bounty of the sea, riding off into the sunset with a container of fish spirits in the whale’s jaws. As it did, two high flying bird sized scout planes followed after it, and Rika, who’d been clinging to the underside wearing the water breathing permitting blooper hood and using said planes to observe and direct their minions, joined the cassette tape disguised Jr up on top of the whale as they made for a sneaky landing spot.
Evening was setting in by the time they’d made landfall, put away their disguises, landed the scout planes and put the ocean-going mammal minions away in their pokeball/spinner. Then all they needed to do was offload their haul.
Which they had no idea how to do, because their day had been spent training and heist planning. Thus after a dinner of flame breath roasted fish they had to spend another night squatting.
Fortunately for them the next day they ran into Therion, or rather he followed gossip and rumors their failed fish selling from the previous night created in-order to find them. With his help, the duo managed to offload the remainder of their haul, learn a bit more about what was actually worth grabbing next time they did a smash and grab from the fence they sold their stock to.
As such, when Monday evening rolled around, and the duo rolled into Bancho Sushi for the first time since Nadia had fed them on the first night, their financial situation was more than good enough that they could afford to pay their own way this time.
”Hi there, good to ‘sea’ you” Rika said when they got their turn to order, asking ”what ‘wave’ you been up to since we ‘shoar’ you last?” prompting jr to grouse that it had been ”Three days of this, and it's all your fault” despite not seeming to be actually that annoyed by his sisters off the mark attempts at puns.
”Annnyway, don’t worry, we’re good for it this time, so we’ll have-” Jr began to say only for Rika to intercede with ”One of everything” which was a bit less of an absurd request than it sounded when jr brought out 3 more mouths to feed in the forms of his pokemon: Dazzle, Mimi and Peeka who respectively got their own seat, sat on the table, or floated above it.
As for Juri, well, due to having their own thing to deal with while she’d been on the ship, and having been out at sea either pirating or practicing for most of the day while she was land lubbing and thuging, they didn’t really have any idea what her deal was. However, as they’d waited in the queue, and unsurprisingly no one else wanted to sit next to the mafia's new enforcer if they didn’t have too, the pair + jr’s mon ended up at more or less the closest seats to her, resulting in RIka offering the newest seeker a ”Hi there” of her own while Jr was busy corralling his minions.
