The rest of the trip went by without further incident. They weren’t the only ship either. The port of Pirth was busy with the bustle of expectation. Isaac watched as all the brutal, cunning, and otherwise terrifying individuals from Gorge’s martial arts & child rearing stepped off. They were smiling, some of them with a tooth less here and there, and others were laughing and cracking jokes, punching each other in the arm, or splashing each other with their water bottles. There were so many like them, so many similar scenes playing out across the large commercial harbor.
They’re just like us. Maybe they were just playing the fear-factor up.
He thought of calling out to them. ‘Hey, you got duped, the exam is being held somewhere else. Come aboard, I can show you and we can go there together.’ But he was pretty sure that if he did that, Vincent would fail them anyhow.
The weight of a small bird landed on his head.
“You’re not leaving,” Bird said, having materialized out of practically nowhere. “A smart choice.”
He found Andri as well, hanging upside down from the netting right above him.
<>
“Who would?” Isaac looked around, rubbing his fist.
“I fought a person for real for the first time today,” he finally said. “A grown-up, not just some brawl between stupid canker kids.”
<>
“We’re going to have to do some more fighting, right?”
The cat boy gave a growl of acknowledgement.
“Against other participants too.”
“The exam always has something you will find yourself unprepared for.” Bird shuffled in his hair, before leaning down with a conspiratorial whisper. “Andri doesn’t want a group he cannot trust. That cost him last time.”
And yet Andri was here, talking to him, when he could have just hid wherever. It did take two days, but the fact that he showed up at all gave Isaac the feeling that he had something to say, but couldn’t. He was practically bouncing on his footpads the way he was shifting his weight.
“I’m not going to force you, or guilt you into anything,” Isaac said. “So how about we get to know each other a bit better?”
The next text message took a while longer to arrive.
<
Clearly, he wasn’t much of a talker but there had been one instance earlier where he seemed content, happy even. “Maybe with an introduction and a friendly spar?”
The catman didn’t react much, but his ears did perk up at attention. Isaac went through a few stretches, then got his bat before looking up at the netting again.
“I’m Isaac, and I’m looking for someone to call friend.”
Andri dropped, landing perfectly on the tip of his toes after a casual half-spin.
<>
+++
It was going to take them close to a week to get to Wett-city, which was enough time to rest, recuperate mana, and plan for the future. Or beat each other up under the thinly veiled pretense of training. Isaac would have felt bad for how much of the catboy’s time he was reserving for their bouts if he didn’t clearly enjoy lording over him how much he still had to improve.
There wasn’t much else to do.
Since beating each other up with sticks wasn’t a riveting way to spend their time, they’d made a game of it. If he didn’t land a hit on Andri after one minute, the catman got a sandwich.
“Miss!” Sophia yelled as Isaac’s bat whiffed what he thought was a well-set-up sweep. Andri was as twisty as he was slippery. Fighting him was like trying to fight a leaf in the wind. “Aaand time. Point to Andri.”
Isaac groaned. He plopped down on his ass, panting and huffing. “Alright. What am I doing wrong?”
“You’re not hitting, for one,” Sophia noted dryly.
“Har har. Any constructive criticism?”
The question was leveled at Andri, who took his time stretching and going through other post-workout habits. He bent over to the side, then bent so far back that his head hit the floorboards.
Bird hopped from Sophia’s arms and settled on the railing. “If I may add my opinion, you hesitate too much, Isaac. In combat, hesitation means death.”
That was a fair point. Claire and Hammond both had told him often enough that every time he tried to think before executing every swing, he was giving his opponent valuable time to react, time Andri knew very well to exploit with brutal efficiency.
“Your swings are clean, quite fast, and very predictable,” Bird noted.
<
Isaac cringed. He tried to get up, but every part of his body groaned from the punishment of Andri’s rather dishonest counterstrikes. Sophia’s pok-ball short-bats were thick and flat, but he really knew how to jam them in between ribs and everywhere else as well.
“Is there anything you’d say I’m good at?” Isaac asked.
Bird hummed. “Your skill guarantees you a free opening on first use. After that, your opponent will be wary, and brace if you give any tells. If you can catch your foe off guard, all you must do is secure the kill in one hit, so to say. But if your foe reads you correctly, you have little recourse.”
Don’t reveal my cards early, and always keep them guessing.
“Anything else I’m screwing up?” He didn’t mean to say it with as much vitriol as he did.
Thankfully, Andri either didn’t pick up on it, and Bird didn’t care to comment. The mink cocked his head, smoothly transitioning from a pretzel-like bridge stance into a handstand, despite the gently rocking ship.
<
Is that supposed to be a… compliment?
“Yes, if you manage to hold out, many species might be forced to disengage,” Bird said.
“Huh. And Andri specifically?”
<> Andri texted with a straight face.
“Endurance is the human bloodline’s strong-suit.” Bird nodded wisely. “Perhaps if you could lean into that, you would find yourself winning the odd bout or two.
Considering most bloodlines outclassed humans in at least a couple other categories, that was more than fair. He would never be as strong as a minotaur, nor have as sensitive a nose as candids. But if he managed to string them along, he could run circles around them all day while they collapsed onto the ground, panting their souls out.
I don’t think I could evade Andri all day though, not without a movement skill. Or if I managed to blind them with my light ring.
“As a mink, what’s your thing?”
<
Shakily, he removed one hand, stretching it out as well as a leg to counter the weight. His shirt slipped, and Sophia tried not to stare too hard.
“Young Andri’s claws are useful for climbing, but only while going up,” Bird noted. “They get in the way more times than not”
That’s why he’s wearing those padded gloves. Huh.
“Hope I wasn’t too boring an opponent.”
<
Andri huffed, slowly balancing on one hand, then on five fingers. The boat rocked, and he remained completely still.
<
<
<
“Uhhh,” Isaac uhhhed. “I got my essence from some crab-shrimp.”
Andri nodded, as if that made sense to him, and pointedly did not elaborate.
“Hey, what does that mean? Am I going to start growing a shell? Are my eyes going to elongate into stalks? Hey, hey tell me please.”
+++
Nobody saw the coastline as they entered Wett-city harbor. A storm had been brewing for a while, and though the Foggy Dreamboat tried to keep ahead, eventually the sky boiled over, and they were enveloped by a wall of water.
The rain was so loud Isaac couldn’t hear himself think, let alone talk.
“Moored and ready, captain!” someone yelled.
“That’s your sign.” Vincent clapped Isaac on the back so hard he almost fell over the railing. “Good luck to you and get off my ship.”
“What?”
“Get off before you miss the next hurdle!”
Isaac, Sophia, and Andri hurried down the plank with all their luggage, waving Vincent goodbye as they sought out the nearest shelter. They reached a bar with a giant smiling fish holding a tankard on its door, but not before being absolutely drenched.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“There it is,” Sophia yelled. “Classic Wett monsoon weather. Hot and humid with a one hundred and two percent chance of rain.”
Isaac wrung out his shirt. “I’ve never seen it rain sideways that hard before. Your umbrella wouldn’t have helped anyways even if it didn’t snap in half from the wind, eh Andri?”
The catboy looked like a wet towel. An angry towel. Downright furious.
<
“Not sure that’ll help much. Your bag got pretty wet too.”
<
With a yowl and a grumble, he took Bird with him and tromped off while Isaac sat down at one of the nearby tables. This was one of those ‘no service without orders’ places, so he quickly picked three random drinks in the fruit section and smiled nicely at the cute waitress so she wouldn’t notice how much they were dripping on the cheap upholstery.
He changed his shirt for a dry one and watched her scamper back into the kitchen.
Sophia rolled her eyes.“Isaac. You’re making that face again.”
“You mean, a smile?”
“Yes, that smile, the I’m-trying-to-flirt smile.”
“Sounds like grumpy-person propaganda to me.” That wasn’t… he was just trying to appear friendly. “Hand me the towel so I can change my pants?”
“I will not.”
They weren’t the only people who’d looked for shelter. Some regulars were gesturing wildly at the barkeep while he handed them a towel. An elderly woman was sipping something hot and steamy, holding a sort of lizard-dog critter in her lap. The lizard turned to Isaac, flicked the air with its tongue, and blinked.
“Wett-city’s a lot less busy than I’d expect around this time of year,” he whispered to Sophia.
“The richies have all migrated north to escape the weather,” she said, fussing with a squeaky chair. “This is why I wear dark shirts this time of the year.”
“And here I thought the weather just made you edgy.”
“It’s so people can’t see my bra when—” she trailed off, looking past Isaac over his shoulders. “Hey, do those merfolk look familiar to you?”
There were four of them standing in the doorway, all different shapes and sizes, their heads craning about clearly in search of something. He thought they must have been rather happy because of the weather. Claire always moaned about how much moisturizing gel she had to use to keep her gills and skin from drying out when she was younger. He’d read that most of the few merfolk that opted for a more semi-aquatic or even the rare land-based lifestyle complained about the price-gouging for what to them were basic necessities.
Baby powder was apparently an effective stopgap against chafing and rashes, but too much would cause other, more difficult to cure issues.
“I wasn’t exactly peeking far enough over the railing to see any faces in the netting.” For evident reasons, Isaac had spent as much of the journey as possible in the comfortable middle. “Aaand here they come. Brace yourself.”
He didn’t know why he was dreading this. They were probably sent by Ortho’Wuur, which was a definite point against them. But then again, judging them by the actions of just that one sour merman wasn’t fair.
It wasn’t healthy, the kind of visceral distrust that was bubbling forth. He didn’t even know he could feel this much about anyone. It felt like Ortho’Wuur had pissed in his pool and was now offering him a truckload of lemonade as an apology.
The group came to a stop, predictably, right next to their table.
“Souphia. Aisaach. You?” the tallest one – likely their leader — said in the most terribly enunciated, broken standard. Their drinks came. He dripped into them. He didn’t even notice.
“My name is ‘Saac, actually. The I is silent.” That earned him four blank and decidedly unimpressed faces. With a sigh, Isaac got his brick, and engaged the translation system. “What do you want?”
At the brick’s garbled translation, the group of four broke out into wild chatter.
“Is my <
“Air is such a <
“— told you, you should let Hrisp <
“Hrisp has no <
“— and you’re a thirteen, bred and true. We are not in Beds-beneath-the-hollow. <>.”
The honest tablet-transponder-reader-caller-alarm-clock almost couldn’t keep up. Isaac was entirely fine with letting them jabber among each other. The longer they took, the higher the likelihood that the waitress would kick them out. She was already eyeing them from the kitchen door, a quiet conversation with the barkeep boiling in the back.
Be it through bad luck or simple coordination, the group of merfolk eventually put someone forth. He was a rather average sized merman, though the average was as tall as a tall human. His indigo skin-tone was intercut with lighter stripes around his back and a lighter tone around his belly that disappeared into his underwater-camo-shorts. His eyes were green and though Isaac wasn’t all that experienced in telling features on a merfolk’s face apart, he thought that he looked rather pudgy.
He looked about Isaac’s age.
“Hello, Isaac Quillson. I am Hrisp. Under the orders of the honored advisor and in lieu of duties owed, we have come to help.”
For a moment, Isaac just sat there and blinked. Help? Him? Why? And why was he — was Hrisp — talking in near perfect standard? He even had a mainland accent, from the north, with its heavy emphasis on R’s and unvoiced fricatives.
“Hi. I’m… not Isaac. You’ve got the wrong guy.”
The honest tablet-transponder-reader-caller picked that up and dutifully translated it into merspeak, which was less than ideal.
“We know who you are, <
“Yeah,” their shorter (possibly) girl piped in, “you’re like a prince <
“I am not chubby, nor am I a — where do you even get that idea from… that slimy asshole.”
Ortho’Wuur was spreading rumors now. Isaac could imagine him walking across the ocean floor, showing some random passerby pictures of him that he kept in his wallet. ‘Here, I have caught this one just last year, look at how gullible-thick he is, so perk your ears, and sing his name.’
Isaac groaned, grumbling face-first into his arms. “This is all a terrible misunderstanding.”
The leader, a tall merman who gave off a rather serious vibe, whispered something in Hrisp’s ear. He looked confused, but in an awfully human way.
Some things stay the same no matter what species you are.
“I…” Hrisp frowned, before taking the honest tablet-what-have-you and pressing the off-button, much to the vocal dismay of two of his friends. “I am supposed to say that it is our birth-goal to serve, but I disagree with this statement. I do not know you, I do not care for you, and frankly, you do not seem to be worth that kind of investment.”
“Birth goal?” Isaac asked.
“It means our lives are yours.”
He waited for a few seconds, in case Hrisp wanted to add any addition, any caveat.
“Oh, yeah, people entrusting their lives to me?” Isaac chuckled nervously when Hrisp wasn’t forthcoming. They were all a bit too heavily armed for Isaac to truly feel comfortable around them. “Nooo, no thanks, no siree, nope.”
He wouldn’t be much of an adventurer if he let someone else hoist him up by his bootstraps. The association probably filtered for that as well.
For a moment, he imagined himself walking around with his own underwater hit-squad like some mob-boss. That was… not at all adventure-y. And he already had an assassin friend.
Oh Maerdon, I hope Andri was just joking.
Isaac groaned into the table and sighed a desperate sigh. “You should just leave and forget all about me.”
“We cannot do that. The order was rather exact, and coming from someone so… infamous, we are hardly in a position not to try. But you and I, we agree then that this cannot go on as planned.”
Isaac lifted his head. “Go on.”
“If we were to lose your tracks for a good enough reason, say, if you ran away or got a head-start, we might be able to call it bad luck. You will try your part on your side, I will do mine here. This is acceptable, no?”
Isaac nodded. He was starting to think that “no diplomatic experience” was either an understatement, or it didn’t count for how shrewd some people were born.
“Good. Then we ought to start by sowing confusion. Do something unexpected.” Hrisp flicked the translator back on. “You leave in the morning then? Are you sure that it isn't too late for your exam?”
Crap, at least give me a warning before — ah screw it.
“I, uhh, yeah, it says so on the invitation,” he stammered, handing the singed slip of paper to Hrisp, who gave it a glance, then passed it around to his friends. Isaac was about to yell at him for being an idiot, but when it came back, the date had switched to tomorrow, wiggling in place as it slowly faded back to normal.
A skill, some kind of illusion. Hrisp was definitely not inexperienced in a special kind of diplomacy. Maybe he was some sort of secret agent. Maybe he was going to switch sides and sabotage him after someone activated his sleeper code.
“Benerific?” Isaac asked. No response. “I guess I’ll see you then.”
“You will,” Hrisp answered curtly. “You best sleep close by. If anyone tries to knock you out of the competition through illicit means, we will knock them back twice as hard.”
“What, like getting delayed?”
“Or shot in the back of the head.” Hrisp shrugged and, at the look on Isaac’s face, broke into a smirk. “Relax, we’re a kill-team, but we don’t kill-kill people, we just ‘kill’ them. We’re on your side, courtesy of the venerable Ortho’Wuur.”
“That slimy asshole!” Sophia, who’d been listening intently while slurping her orange juice, shot to her feet. “You’re working for him!? He’s a creep, a liar, a dastard, a bastard. He cost our brother an arm. He came to our island and tried to fuck our mom!”
Her sheer unbridled anger could cross any language barrier. She was playing it up, tossing straws and ice cubes at them for theatrical effect. But they shrunk back and before long, were engaged in another hush-hush discussion.
“What did you say, why are they angry?”
“I knew he was <
“Apologies, leader. There are… <
“Who is? The man’s a <
“I hear he’s got it bad for one of the princesses.”
“Eugh. The oldest batch is like half his age.”
“Talking <
“That is my worry, <
She had run out of ice cubes to toss and was halfway through the table’s supply of sugar packs. People at other tables were either watching with bemusement or trying very hard not to make eye contact. Isaac felt equal parts thankful to Sophia and infinitely awkward.
“You have no idea how much you sold our story there,” he muttered.
“I can at least be useful for telling people off, right?”
Isaac chuckled and buried his head in his arms again. “We are so out of our depth. We don’t even know where in the city the exam is being held. If the starting line is still ahead, I don’t know if we can make it.”
Isaac sighed, slumping back in his chair just as Andri returned from his extended drying-off session. The catman gave him a confused and moderately inquisitive stare.
“Nothing happened. Just a misunderstanding.” Isaac leaned back against his chair. “I’m feeling pooped.”
“The blowdrier in the men’s room was quite good,” Bird said, “though the ‘familiar’ setting was not quite to my liking.
<
“Tango-mango and Hubbub-fruit-maracuja-kiwi.”
<<... it isn’t bad.>>
He looked surprised. Then his eyebrows narrowed at the chairs, which were now all wet, and he elected to keep standing.
<
“We? Does that mean you’re joining us?”
Andri scrunched his nose.
<>
<>
<
Obviously.
“But where do we start?” Sophia asked “The note said that the exam is taking place in the capital, but Wett-city has five-million people living in and around it. How are we ever going to find this place when we don’t even know what it looks like?”
Someone behind Isaac cleared his throat. It was a middle-aged man, wiry, but with a friendly weather-worn smile. The waitress behind him gave an all-too-quick nervous wave.
Boy, aren’t we popular today.
“Apologies for eavesdropping lads, but I happened to overhear that you’re looking for the adventurer exam? You’re a bit late, but you can still make it. I’m Five-finger Mike, I’ll show you the way.”
Andri frowned and probably sent the man a clipped text wording his suspicion. He read it on an old, old tablet that had seen better days , before he laughed, propping up the badge on his chest.
“Boy, I get a smile on my face for every native Wettlander that takes a spot over some of those tourists from outer space. And my fisher-friends have been groaning about how the fishmen have been getting pretty anal about limited fishing quotas, protected species, and so on, so you can see I’m no friend of those neither. C’mon, I’ve got a cab out back, I’ll drive you there in under half an hour.”