I had this dream. I became a Druid, and my job was to clean the barnacles for whales. Every day whales waited for me on the shore after ebb, I used my family axe to scrape their skin and push them back into the ocean.
I like dreams. You can experience a flat but meaningful life in an hour or a short and bizarre moment of phantom that could never happen in real life. I’m an expert on dreaming, I try to get as much sleep as possible even though sometimes I am incapable of doing so, which makes it also easier to have a bad dream.
Like this one, when Souyo visited me in my dream, I found his companion Scathach holding his arm.
Poor Souyo, he was just taking a nap while being my pillow, being a good family, and the next thing that happened after I woke up was not to hug him but to hop up from his thighs and choke him with bloodshot eyes. The guy next to him, Lord Finnegan Ichabod Boyles, immediately tried to pull me away but only got elbowed in the face and lost two teeth. Even a long time after that, he didn’t seem to mind that incident very much, just put on two golden crowns, and took them off to tease me every time we met.
Until Scathach grabbed my arms and pulled me away gently, my brain was stuck in an automatic logic of “attacking everything on sight.” But things changed when she held me in her arms, like the first few lines of code of a well-designed supercomputer’s running program gone bad. My family is my everything and I am willing to do everything for them, yes, but I just attacked one of my family for someone who is not one of my family. This one not being my family, however, gives me more pleasure than many of my family members combined. This thirteen-year-old teenager tentatively explored this novel thing called love, utterly unaware that his entire world was going to be reshaped.
“I—” I regained my consciousness, “—what happened?”
“We are safe,” Scathach said, although the noise of engines kind of answered that question for her, “you had stone syndrome.”
“I fainted? Was I attacked? Is there some misterious god-like creature within me now? What is a stone syndrome?”
“Do you know what philosopher’s stones are, dear?” she leaned on the bulkhead, slowly slid down to sit on the ground with me, and kissed my hair, “philosopher stone comes from the concentration of the energy we use— imperials call it dynamics, the Chinese call it Ling-Chi, there are many other ways to call it. Please imagine a bathtub with twenty taps running water into it—” She raised her hands a gestured to my bathtub, “—Under a very icy environment, so before the water can get out of the tub, they froze, and burst the tub.”
“In an easier way to say, your excellency,” Cornelia added, somehow the fire in her eyes extinguished and she returned to the very normal state like every other noble girl I had ever saw, “your magical power tried to injure yourself.”
“Ah, tamade,” I cursed in Chinese pathetically, “am I that lame as a magician?”
“Tamade,” Cornelia nodded, probably having no idea what she just mimicked. Souyo looked at me with pitiful eyes with one hand covering his nose, like he was a stray poodle looking at someone with half a sausage in his hand.
“I’m sorry,” He said, “I deserve that.”
“No— I’m sorry,” I leaned back to the softness and instantly got into a good mood, “call Captain Hua, give me a brief report on all we know in five minutes.”
I looked around my plane waiting for Hua to hand over the controlling stick to his copilots. At least the tub was still there, although the towels were all gone and now they were used to wrap younger kids; The washroom was definitely not designed to host five hundred people; my badminton rackets magically disappeared, probably used by someone to toss towards the homunculi when we took off; and the worst of all, people everywhere. Hua didn’t even bother walking the crowded stairs, he jumped down from the cockpit railings handsomely and slipped to land his face on a pile of pigments.
“Why do you feel like you need to do that?” Lady Boyle asked, didn’t stop brushing colours onto her new painting.
“To be honest, there are many attractive ladies on the plane tonight,” his answer was surprisingly straightforward, “so I figure that would be cool.”
“Since the moment you used your white underwear as a surrender flag, you lost all your rights of mating,” I squeezed myself through the windows and doors of refugees, “what are you painting, my lady?”
“Your heroic deeds, my lord,” she replied, “this chaotic whirl of colour represents the dangerous situation we were in, and these beams of life represents you and Mr B— you, saving us.”
I stared at the green semicircle on the painting, tried my best to relate that to me without any elements of St. Patrick’s Day but still brutally failed. “Maybe you should draw something that is more—simple?” I asked, “Like a tree, or a whale, or something like that.”
“Here is the tree,” she pointed at a puddle of pink, which looked like someone’s puke after eating nothing but dragon fruits for two days. “as for whale, I am thinking about adding it. I see you truly understand my abstract art, my lord.”
How is this abstractionist? I thought, I can probably force ten kids to drink dyes and let them all pee on a piece of paper, and the result may come out better than what she drew. I leaned forward, wanting to give out my honest opinion, but Scathach forestalled me, again, like she could read my mind.
“Actually, I quite like it,” Scathach took my arm gently, “what kind of language are you trying to tell, Your Grace?”
God, please don’t do this to me, I shouted silently, anything but the Vogon’s poetry moment—even the opening words are the same. And at least Arthur and Ford were forced to listen to the poetry from an ugly space slug, while I put myself into a position where two gorgeous ladies looked at me with expecting eyes, hoping a seemingly innocent teenager would give his most sincere compliments. And I wasn’t even the hitchhiker on the plane— why are my hitchhikers making my life hard now?
“Ah, well, I mean—” I searched every drawer in my brain, trying to find the appropriate word, “the colour—they represent—”
“I think he means, your command of colour is brilliant and well tolerated with the theme,” Brian swooped out from nowhere and saved my day, “you are transferring the fright of a disaster and happiness of surviving one into the painting, which is a rare talent, only best artists like Van Gogh has.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, he is making my point,” I said, “he is from Michigan. A city in Michigan called Detroit is the centre of arts in the United States of America.”
“And if I may add another cracker to the bowl, mixing whale oil into your pigments infused this painting with your vision of life, Your Grace,” Scathach added, “which also gives the topic of us surviving and continuing living to the art.”
Hua, with his face covered in dye and whale oil, looked at the painting and looked at us, his expression clearly showed that he thought the three of us had simultaneously gone mad. I, on the other hand, looked at Souyo frowning and started to think that I was the only one who just didn’t know art.
“Yes, and these blue dots scattered here and there,” Souyo nailed the last one into my coffin, “the rain of tears. Desperation. But on the other hand, rebirth.”
Bullshit, I shouted silently, these dots were definitely there before she didn’t clean the paintbrush before swinging it.
“Aunty,” Ichabod called indistinctly due to his missing teeth, “May I have the honour to offer fifty thousand pounds for the painting.”
“Sixty,” a gentleman sitting on the stairs said.
“Seventy,” said Ms Josephine.
“One million. In the honour of our family.” Ichabod closed the deal. This was only one out of thousands of deals that happened on this plane, but definitely the weirdest one.
“But I didn’t think this painting would include so many meanings during the process,” Lady Boyle said, busy finishing the last touch.
“My lady, that is the true intention of creating art, let the viewers analyse the meanings in your subconscious,” I said. And for rich people to hype the value, I thought. I felt like throwing myself out of the plane, but there was no Heart of Gold in real life, and it would be lazy copying.
As the plane agreed with my inner thought, Fatty gave a wail of desperation, and the sound of alarm came from the cockpit. Even though we were far away from the window, we could still see the giant fireball raping the left end of the plane’s wing. People started screaming, but Hua immediately stood on the top of the stairs and smashed the metal can of pigment on the railings.
“Everybody calm down!” at that moment the paint on his face helped him to attract the most attention, “It is just one engine—that is what happened when we backed a plane into a detonated building and made the engine breathe in dirty air! Don’t worry, we still have three engines, and Hawaii is right around the corner!”
My head buzzed to the level that it almost exploded, and immediately dragged everyone into the kitchen and locked the door. “Hawaii?” I roared quietly, “What the hell are you guys thinking? What are your brains made of, minced garlic?”
“None of my business, it is all his idea,” Hua pointed at Brian and acted innocent.
“Sir, we don’t have enough fuel to fly back to China, and we can’t fly on the American continent since there were examples of homunculi taking down planes with anti-air. Hawaii is the safest option,” Brian explained, “there are CIA stations in Hawaii—”
“No.” I interrupted. Are you fucking kidding me? If I woke up three hours later than I did, it was exactly like I made a wedding dress for my fiancé and my fiancé wore that wedding dress and married someone else— fuck, my dream was still bothering me. Of course, that couldn’t be told to the CIA officer Brian, since the CIA was going to be the “someone else” who was taking the credit for nothing. “Captain Hua, change course to China, raise attitude, we may need to glide a long distance. Silence your radar and transponder, hook me to Penglai.”
“Can I have a word with you, Ninety-nine?” Souyo asked, pushing everyone out of the kitchen, “I don’t know if it is a good idea to let an active CIA agent get onto Penglai,” he expressed his concern straightly, “we can make him not access the important areas, but I still don’t want to take any risks.”
“Oh, don’t you worry,” I replied, “no one on this plane will be back to their home countries ever. Brian, he’s going to be the second Edward Snowden, whether he wants it or not.”
He opened his eyes wide in shock. “Detain all of them?” he whispered, “On Penglai?”
“House of Hao can feed them,” I said, “once we get onto Penglai, they face the choice of living the top 1-percent lifestyle for the rest of their lives, or in jail and disappearing one day, mysteriously. Compared to giving Americans more than 500 Imperial diplomats, this is more meaningful to us.”
“But—”
“No but, Souyo. Are you with me or not?”
He fixed his eyes on me until he surely knew I was serious and the decision was definite. “Since when am I not with you?” he sighed, “What do we do with Scathach?”
“Keep your close watch on her, cut all her limbs with your time-stopping magic if you have to.” I patted his shoulders to cheer him up, “Remember, these people on this plane— all dead people. None of them survived the homunculi attack. We are shipping nothing but more than 500 House of Haos assets, that we may can use as bargaining chips.”
“What if it comes to Scathach? She has some important scientific research that the empire values,” Souyo asked, “and I thought you made friends with Scathach.”
“Yeah, I had this dream— a bit silly. I dreamed of you two betraying me,” I shared, feeling this useless but restless emotion coming into my mind again, “I know you will never betray me, but the best way to ensure someone who is not a family never betrays me— toy never betrays. And it’s not like she can’t do science in China, we can get her equipment lightyears ahead of whatever the empire can provide from Uncle Gary.”
“So we act innocent?”
“Yeah.”
I guess Scathach couldn’t read minds, after all. The rest of the plane had no idea what we discussed in the kitchen, personally, I give credit to my acting. “How was the talk, boys?” Scathach smiled, “Where are we heading to?”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“China, of course, I am very concerned that Americans can receive us without any ridiculous conditions,” I smiled back, easing up my eyes to make myself look more innocent, “have you ever been to China, Scathach?”
“Not in many years, I left when there was a civil war and never got a chance to revisit,” she walked me side by side, “I actually brushed past your grandfather.”
“Don’t worry, you can stay as long as you want this time, meeting all the Haos you want to meet,” I said. Until you don’t want to stay, then that is another problem, I thought.
Out of all my father’s siblings, Aunty Suer is the one who spoils me the most. In fact, if there is a list of “who spoiled Ninety-nine the most,” Scathach would be the first, Aunty Suer is somewhere in the top 3. I’ll give you a living example: I watched some Vietnam War movies on television, and fell in love with the M14 rifle— when I was a 10 year old I loved guns built with wood, right now I love whichever is the lightest—and, of course, told my family about my love on the dinner table.
The next morning, there were 10 mechanics in the hanger, building up an F-14 Tomcat fighter jet from parts and frames. I still remember that giggling on my aunty’s face, she stood there with hands on her waist, being extremely proud.
“Here,” she said, “F14.”
“What?” the ten-year-old me asked.
“You know, F-14 jet,” She slapped the wing, and the vibration knocked the cockpit canopy down. “don’t worry about that, they’ll fix it,” she said, didn’t feel embarrassed when destroying other people’s work, “it can still fly, it is just that every part of this jet comes from different jets. Americans won’t sell me one as a whole on such short notice.”
“No, I mean, thank you, aunty, but—” I circled around the plane and checked the details, “—What is this?”
“F-14 fighter jet, of course. Exactly the same model from that movie Aunty Victoria gifted you.”
“I don’t even like that movie, the protagonist killed his partner simply because he wants to be an immature arsehole and doesn’t want to fly properly.”
“Oh, of course, that’s Americans for you,” She spread her hands, “maybe you want Pilot Hua to fly around with you above the forest?”
Yes, back then he was still Pilot Hua.
“Oh, right, forest,” I suddenly remembered the key to this problem, “I wanted a M-14, Aunty, not this.”
“Is that a tank model?”
“No— M14 rifle, the wooden stock rifle Americans used in the forests of Vietnam,” I extended my arms and gestured the length of it, “not F14— you are an arm’s dealer, Aunty, how can you not tell the differences between a rifle and a fighter jet?”
She went stupefied there. “So you don’t want this jet?” She asked.
“I mean, yeah, it is extremely cool, I guess,” I said, “thank you.”
She still got me that rifle. Pilot Hua took me for three barrel rolls and one Split-S after the jet was finished, and my grievance basically got thrown out of my body with the breakfast cereals I ate that morning. Back then Pilot Hua still had the balls to do Split-S with a forty-year-old jet, and back to the timeline we are talking about, the promoted Captain Hua couldn’t even land a plane that was built 8 years before the assault happened in 2013.
“Just land the goddamn plane,” I felt my temper getting over my body, “how hard can that be?”
“The runway on Penglai was built for private jets that hold, like, 20 people max,” Hua explained to the amateur patiently, “for example, if we are flying a Gulfstream G550, a Dassault Falcon 7X, a Bombardier Global Express, you know what? Even that F-14 jet you had since you were 10— I can land them on the island and you won’t even feel a single jump. But this— C17 is five times the size of a business jet, we have one engine and one side of the landing gear completely gone, we are significantly overweight— you are asking for something physically impossible.”
“If I play Danger Zone with my iPod when you land, can you land it with that mentality boost?”
“No, this is not a problem of mentality here,” he turned around and looked at Scathach pathetically, “Please, professor? It seems like he only listens to you right now.”
“Would you mind walking me to go get some air, dear?” she gently requested, “I never thought the cockpit of a plane could be so warm.”
We stood by the hole in the entry hatch, and I curiously tore the covering tape and craned my neck out. “Please don’t try to convince me to land in Hawaii,” I said, “that part is done.”
“I’m sure you had mull that over, dear,” she gently held me so I wouldn’t fall out, “do you like flying?”
“I flew with this plane a lot, so yeah.”
“Have you ever tried flying by yourself?” she asked, “Not on a plane, just flying, like Superman.”
“You mean like skydiving? Never tried that before.”
“Well, very similar to that,” I felt her arm getting tighter for a bit, “do you mind if I propose something harsh?”
“We talked about this, no Hawaii.”
“No Hawaii, but we may need to abandon this plane,” She blew cold hair to my neck to make me shrink and giggle, “I know how much this plane is worth to you, but Ninety-nine, the 532 Imperials on this plane also worth a lot to the people waiting for them back home.”
I turned around and looked her in her eyes with a pretended hard face, looking at her embarrassing herself asking so, and smirked in my mind silently. Poor people’s mindset, right? How adorable. She thinks the plane is important based on its market value being an unaffordable figure for her, not knowing that figure is nothing to me. Peasants and monarchs can never put themselves in each other’s shoes, that’s the problem of the society, but no matter if you are a peasant or monarch, if you show your weak spot to me, I am going to jab everything into it until you collapse.
“This plane is around 370 million dollars,” I said, pouting my lips, “and, you know, Americans usually don’t sell stuff to us. There need to be a lot of black operations behind the curtain to get one plane, bribing, taking the plane apart to ship separately and reassemble when all parts arrive in China, not to mention we need to spend millions for decorations and remodelling. The price is going to double after all these procedures, only if the procedures can be finished in decades.”
But the truth is, back in 2013, there were three C-17 Globemaster III and three C-5 Galaxy somewhere in Virginia, ready to deliver to Haos in less than 24 hours, and it wasn’t the first time a Hao broke an American-made plane. The reason here is very simple: Americans make the best planes and appreciate buyers who actually enjoy their design, as long as the buyers don’t load bombs that would track back to them; and Americans don’t want big clients to switch to the Russian market. Both Americans and Russians didn’t know that Haos were purchasing both of their products, but that was just politics. Besides, there was no reason for Scathach to know that.
“I understand,” she looked away, dejected, “I’m certain that the empire will make up with something—”
“I’m not really good at math, Scathach, but around 1 billion dollars divided by five hundred, the outcome should be close to two million dollars per person, only if the empire is willing to pay the ransom.” I felt myself being a fisherman, reel in, reel out. The fish can resist, but I have all the time in the world. Of course, that was only my illusion, because any real fisherman who ever fished above the ocean would tell you, to be aware of seagulls.
“Then we may give you something else that you are interested in,” Ms Josephine, the seagull, chirped, “but what are you going to gain from landing this plane?”
“What do you mean?” I said. Which side are you on? I asked in my mind quietly.
I’m on the side that helps most people, that wink of hers answered silently. “Let’s say, best case scenario, we managed to land this plane without it becoming separated into a million parts. How confident are you to fly the plane again? I mean, the engine is on fire, landing gear destroyed, and structure failures here and there.”
“That makes some sense,” I said. I tried my best to find some countermeasures against her, but she was making every point by going around my thesis built on unit value. Maybe it was time to start loss prevention, my mind told me., “But, life is important, like Scathach said, right? We are simply discussing the best way to save more people, and giving you to Americans is definitely not the best option here.”
“Indeed, many people think life and time are the most valuable things in this universe, which is why I need to mention that we may damage the runway and even the Penglai island itself, what was that commercial line? ‘Penglai, where the 1% lives.’ If we harm the life and time of that 1% of humanity just because we want to land a plane that isn’t worth as much, how much will that decay your prestige?”
This person is—abnormal, I thought, her mindset is extremely similar to mine. Look, there are three kinds of mindset— ask yourself a question for me, please. If someone would buy one day of your life with one million dollars, would you take the offer or not? If your answer is yes, then the mindset you have is what we call a normal mindset, a mindset that values revenue more than time and often values an object with whether she could afford the market value. Oh, don’t be sad, most people in this world have this mindset. If you think one million is not worth one day of your life, even if you may not be able to earn more than 1 million a day, you have a wealthy mindset, which values time and life more than money, knowing you already have a wealthy life and one million is just a drop of water to your huge pond. Do you see the irony here? Scathach here has infinite life, yet has a normal mindset. And now you know why it is so effective to intimidate Boyles back in the colony. Using a gun to intimidate a hundred people with a normal mindset wouldn’t work, they’ll jump you and take the gun. Boyles, however, have wealthy mindsets, therefore they value their lives more than anything, and when you threaten their lives, they give up easily. This woman, Ms Josephine, though— I sensed her powerful mindset. She was born in the swirl of authority, just like me, and I felt like she didn’t even have a huge backup like House of Haos when she started her everything. She was bypassing this question itself, the value traps I dug for Scathach’s normal mindset, not wasting time to use something I didn’t care about to build the opposite thesis, instead threatening what Haos valued the most, prestige. On the level of authority, this person was the biggest threat on the plane.
“Do you know why Hao purchased this plane, Ms Josephine?” I asked.
“I would assume all plane owners purchase planes to showcase strength while saving time, but please enlighten me for anything I missed.”
— She neither was in any official diplomatic groups nor had her own diplomatic channels, I thought, that was odd. Even Scathach, being friends with Souyo, knew about Haos moving equipment to the Empire. Maybe she was setting a trap, or maybe she was not, either way, this was my bargaining chip.
“Haos are not like the normal Chinese people you would see, who spend too much time bragging about their wealth, Ms Josephine. The history of Haos and the empire are equally long, therefore Hao also carries obligations like your empire, like conducting humanitarian missions, fighting against natural disasters, and of course political conflicts, which all cannot be done without this plane, which will make us lose more prestige if we stopped.” I stared at her smiling face and felt like I was staring at bottomless pools, “Also, at least until this moment, the plane you are standing on is Hao’s property, and I would appreciate it if you respect Hao’s business and do not make suppositions on what we do.”
“Of course, Your Excellency, I was simply making suggestions.”
“Please don’t ‘Your excellency’ me, Ms Josephine, we are good friends,” I faked a smile, consolidated my gain while imagining skinning and disembowelling this annoying seagull and frying whatever was left in her stomach on a skillet, “Look, I don’t wish anyone to lose their lives right after I saved them, so we are going to ask for my aunty’s opinion, we find the best options, and we discuss compensations later. Is that acceptable for everyone?”
The next hour, Ms Josephine tried her best to keep Scathach away from me. That didn’t work so well, Scathach likes children, and I am good at playing innocent. She started to grow this conditioned response, that when I curled my lips and showed any kind of loneliness, she would appear next to me with a candy bar or something.
“You don’t dislike me, right?” I asked, pretending to be pitiful.
“Of course not, dear,” She held me in her arms for the third time, “I apologise for Ms Josephine, I don’t know why all of a sudden she is acting weird against you.”
Oh, but Ms Josephine was the sensitive guard dog, who smelt the danger before the herd did. “Maybe you can ask her what is wrong?” I pouted, “The kitchen is empty, and you can lock the door if you want.”
I looked at them entering the kitchen and pulled the receiver out from the cupboard in the washroom. It was a little business I was running, Hua’s wife paid me with her homemade rice cakes to put an eye on whether he was cheating again, and somehow he always fuck stewards in the kitchen. The sound that came out from the headphones became clearer, I squinted at the machine, like a hyena looking at its prey falling.
“Why did you say these things? Ninety-nine is upset.”
Ms Josephine sighed, “The last thing you need to worry about is him getting upset, professor,” she said, “I would suggest you not see him as a child. In the first decade of his life, he was absorbing politics instead of water from his family.”
“Before you forget, he is the reason why people on this plane are still alive.”
“Believe me on this, ambitious people don’t have a love for people—”
That was wrong, I thought, I do love my family.
“—Except for their cared ones, usually ambitious people like themselves.”
Oh, snap, she actually got it right.
“And everything they do is for a reason. Tossing this plane away for Hao is like wasting a drop of water for you, there is no reason why he would hesitate about it.”
“He is a teenager, who wouldn’t want to waste his family’s assets and his beloved transportation, and I would really like you to stop blackening his character and apologise to him.”
The conversation ended with a slam of the door, I paced out from the washroom, and locked us in the kitchen after Scathach walked to the cockpit and before Ms Josephine could get out. “You are right, Ms Josephine,” I said, “I don’t have a love for anyone else on this plane. Whether my loved ones are ambitious, though, that is very debatable.”
She didn’t even bother to ask why there was a tapping device in the kitchen. “Then I seriously hope we can survive this,” her smile looked uglier than a cry, “what are you planning to do with all these people?”
“Oh, I don’t give a shit to people other than Scathach. The rest would probably become bargaining chips, we toss one or two when the Empire is not being submissive,” I grabbed a banana on the counter, “I just want to make Scathach my family.”
“Family?”
“I worship powerful things. Guns, cannons, fighter jets, I grow up collecting these.”
“Do you care to hear some of my life stories?” She asked, “It may or may not help you.”
“Go ahead.”
“I divorced once, even though my husband and I still loved each other,” she took off one side of her emerald earring and cherished it in her hand, “people can’t even force a loved one to stay as a family, not to mention forcing one to join a family.”
“Straightly cut to the point, I like that,” I said, finishing peeling the skin off the banana, “I’ll take my chances. Meanwhile, you are a powerful opponent, Ms Josephine, I’m surprised that the Empire never hired you as a diplomat. I am really not in the mood at this moment to fight with you, so I do my business, you do yours, and I promise you will get back home safely.” I passed the banana, “Eat, you need some energy. Look at your pale face.”
“Are you two okay?” Scathach asked when we stepped out of the door, “I couldn’t find you in the cockpit, so I figured you were here.”
“Yeah, just made sure Ms Josephine still sees me as a friend,” I closed my eyes and grinned into the most innocent face I could, “water under the bridge. Right?”
“Yes, and I apologised for my behaviour,” Ms Josephine added, she was smart enough to not try to expose me but only to make her image to Scathach worse.
“I’m glad to hear that. Captain Hua wants me to tell you, that Penglai Island will be docking us in five minutes.”
The plane circled in the air for only two minutes, before the dark surface of the ocean suddenly simmered and thin lightnings flashed across the water but making no sound. We heard a thump, as loud as a piano falling from the 22nd floor and landed right next to us, followed by a series of continuous buzzes that made my eardrums tickle. After the black fog of the void wafted, the island showed herself from the inside of void, along with all its luxurious and bright.
“Well, that is it,” I said, “welcome to Penglai.”