All it Took was a Swimming Pool Full of Cappuccino
by
Blaine arcade
palaver'steam [https://blainearcade.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/palaversteam.png]
Some writers will say that the greatest talents are the most persnickety. Talent’s exponential increase is matched by how trivial an offense can derail an entire work day. If it’s just pulp you’re pumping out, you’re fine to tap paragraph after paragraph into your smudged smartwatch screen with a barbecue sauce coated finger halfway through the longest roller coaster on the hottest day on the planet Scorcher.
But. If you care. If a word with one wrong association twists your spine inside you, then completing even the smallest of projects could take a soundproofed clean room after a gourmet meal and the extinction of every entity that could possibly interrupt you and ask if you want the thermostat adjusted.
Persy Nixpage was closer to the latter than the former, and he wasn’t even a writer, not by trade anyway, only by passion. They paid him to edit, they being the cillimorphs/creative writing magazine called The Rasslin’ Review, and they paid him well enough to put him in a penthouse apartment in Dreamliner City on Planet Urbaniak.
Perks made the work more than tolerable, but if you asked Persy’s heart rather than his mouth what he wanted to do, he would say poetry. Some of it was done already, but never accepted by his own magazine. He smeared his stanzas into pulp zines here and there across the solar system, and only occasionally found them lining cillimorph enclosures.
The problem was twofold. First, he was too good at his job. Going on fourteen years at the Review, shearing fluff and stabbing purple prose with his red pen. He was the chief editor, but didn’t select content, that came from the owners, so while his name was on the front of every issue he couldn’t slip in even a single poem without permission.
Persy Nixpage was a pen name, and he thought he might be the only editor in the galaxy to have one. People loved seeing it, and, according to the owners, wouldn’t want to see it loitering atop a mound of lackadaisical verse.
And second, the writer’s cinder block sitting on the soul: doubt. He hadn’t composed the one. The one they couldn’t leave out of The Rasslin’ Review because it was going to win awards. Weekend after weekend he plugged away at it, growing more and more reclusive, more certain that distractions were costing him perfect syllables.
The subject he had. The Rasslin’ Review did everything from journalism and cillimorph sport coverage to fiction and finger painting from the morphs themselves, no fingers required. So his poem had to be morph-related, and the history of those delightful creatures and their formation across the stars always went over well with the nostalgic owners.
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‘Plowing a Garden’, collaborative finger painting by Persy Nixpage’s Napcoat and Peepinleaf
Nate Sacco. A name everyone knew, though it was probably a pseudonym as well. Whoever they were, they were the first one to try and write a cillimorph field guide, fresh off the ships that delivered man and morph alike to the new solar system some three hundred years ago.
They were probably ordered to do so, as their tone was juvenile, misinformed, dismissive, and scattered like powdered sugar after throwing a donut into a pile of Needlenerds. But it had become historical record anyway, with the tone and word choice remaining recognizable and being the subject of many jokes to that very day.
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Nate’s field guide always stopped when it was about to tell you what you wanted to know, with the author claiming you could make up your own answer, or that they were on break now, or sometimes just the word ‘whatever’. Many contemporary guides used these tropes to breed familiarity with young cillikeepers just hitting the road with their first morphs.
Nixpage’s poem would be about Sacco, or their guide, or both together. He just had to get it right. And for a writer like him, right required the perfect conditions, which his own team of five cillimorphs helped him achieve once he had spirited himself away in his locked apartment eighty-nine floors up.
His diminutive and tidy Napcoat handled his desk cleanliness, hopping about on its little white paws to clear loose staple hazards and vigilantly keep any overdue editing contaminants away from his poetry books and rhyming dictionary. Its outer coat, like a napkin and ring, even kept it from shedding hairs that could cause explosive inspiration evacuation via unscheduled sneezes.
Then there was his Shroub, a stealthy little shrub, and in a way the ultimate houseplant, given that it could fetch its own water and disappear from sight by entering its crypsis form. As long as it picked the right shadow to hide in, Persy wouldn’t even know it was there, beaming confidence his way.
Foamaccino was arguably the most important, as its body generated an endless supply of frothy coffee. He didn’t even have to ask, after all the balled-up poems they’d been through together. Foamaccino would grab his mug long before it was empty and dip into the foamy tub that made up most of its body. Napcoat was the next link in the chain, wiping the mug’s exterior with its napkinish layer to make sure no unsightly rings made it onto the desk or page.
His birdish Maelstromeo, a musically inclined morph if ever there was one, curated his playlist. It could scratch the perfect combination of songs into the sea shell disc it carried around and play them with its beak like a record player. So while he wrote, accompaniment perfecting the atmosphere was dropped by Maelstromeo circling overhead: the artist’s crop duster.
That just left Peepinleaf, the perfect cillimorph for an editor, given its tendency to cover up anything that might be even slightly objectionable and wave everyone else away. If he dared get distracted, dared look up for even one moment, he would get a face full of his flustered Peepinleaf, scolding him for lacking work ethic. Nowhere was safe from its preternatural ability to get in your sight line, as reliable as a bug in the mouth after a yawn. The ceiling. Peepinleaf. The window. Peepinleaf. The television. Peepinleaf. Peepinleaf everywhere but the blank page.
Everyone was in position. He was ready. There was even a head start, as something felt right about the first two lines:
What field can be found with nary a guide
and friends hidden therein
Persy took his perfected deep breath, the exhale to be so brilliantly black upon his canvas, with the only red in sight being his Napcoat diligently going about its tidying. Nib touchdown. Fine line. Expert lettering. Yet not a full word before-
“Deet-deet-doot! Deet-deet-doot!” An alarm on his watch. It wasn’t supposed to go off for anything but visitors, and everyone who knew him knew not to ring on a Saturday. His finger smashed the crown-button.
“What is it!?”
“Sorry to disturb Mr. Nixpage, but you have a visitor asking to be buzzed in.”
“Then who is it!?”
“It’s a Mr. Langcockle. Yes, sir, I hear you. A Mr. Bertold Langcockle.”
“The dreaded Cockle!? On this, the day I write the entirety of my Review-ready poem? I think not. I know not. What do you fellows think?” He looked at his morphs for confirmation and received it. Napcoat snarled, Maelstromeo made a record scratch, Shroub popped out of the shadows to give the evil eye, Peepinleaf tried to cover the smartwatch, and Foamaccino blew disrespectful bubbles in its brew. “Its unanimous Mrs. Doorvy! You are not to let that man in.”
“Well, I didn’t Mr. Nixpage, but he is on his way up.”
“What!?”
“I couldn’t stop him! He’s got his clownface on and some morphs with him. They broke the lock. I think he wants to rassle with you over something. Should I call security?”
“No! If security gets involved we all have to fill out a report. That will take all my writing energy for the day. I can’t lose this opportunity. I’ll take care of it.” With another smash on the crown he hung up, then stood up to boot, and soon in boots, and just as quickly out the door. It only took a minute to gather all his supplies into a pack, thanks to each morph rushing to grab a few of the necessities, like his fur-lined headphones and agave-sweetened peanut dried-pineapple bars.
When Bertold Langcockle got to his apartment door he would find nobody. Meanwhile Nixpage would be following the refined senses of his shuffling Shroub, which always knew the most out-of-the-way and invisible corners. It could collaborate with his Foamaccino, which could identify the best coffee shops by the scent pooling in the little bells over their doors alone. At the crossroads of their instincts was another perfect little mouse hole for a writer to vanish inside.
He already knew what this was about. Yesterday he had turned in a revision and suggestions on Langcockle’s latest piece for the The Rasslin’ Review. It wasn’t even close to the standard he’d been helping maintain all these years. Really Bertold should have seen it coming, since Persy regularly wrote, in his reddest red, underlined five times, at the top of half their correspondence, ‘you’re a hack’.
A hack yes, but also the nephew of one of the owners, and someone with a diploma from Dreamliner University, roughly the equivalent in prestige of that overgrown Ivy League they used to have back on Earth. Apparently, the only writing that mattered was either on that diploma or on the wall in the halls of nepotism.
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Baby boy Bertold had a nasty habit of doing creative journalism and putting words in his interview subjects’ mouths. Really shovin’ ’em in there. In his latest atrocity, he had libeled the commissioner for the local cillimorph fishing rally. It was a dull sport to many, morphs hiding from speedboats trailing fishing lines and lures, honor-bound to leap out when touched and submit to scoring, but that was no reason to fabricate an entire conspiracy based on a few offhand comments.
Which was why he nixed the conspiracy, smothered it with a red blanket. Langcockle wanted to bring it back, and seemed to think he could do so by winning a rasslin’ match. Did Persy know what morphs the man usually ran with?
“No,” he warned himself. “I don’t need to guess because I won’t even see him. We’re so close, almost out of here.” He would’ve leapt out of his window if Maelstromeo had been a large enough morph to carry him on its wings, but alas, the stairs were the best option. It couldn’t be the elevators, not when he didn’t know which one carried a rising Bertold.
A currently-and-often upward failure like him would never climb that many steps. Persy wouldn’t even descend them, not without his helping hands, wings, paws, and leafy fronds. Peepinleaf made an excellently rigid board for him to slide down flight after flight; it could even help him keep his balance.
Foamaccino bounced just ahead, ready to cushion them both against the wall, in case of a crash, with its padded whipped-cream foundation. Meanwhile Maelstromeo flew, not too light to carry Shroub and Napcoat.
70. 60. 50. On 45 they hit a snag. Flooded. How could the stairwell be flooded that high up? It wasn’t a hallucination; Foamaccino splashed right into it and drifted by, looking over its own side for any clue. There was but one possibility: only that one small section was flooded, and from underneath, by the constant upward pulse of a cartoonish cillimorph attack, something with a lot of water to its body.
Then it hit him, a wave he hoped to avoid. There was one cillimorph he had seen in the company of Langcockle at a staff retreat on the beach. A grumpy pink flower-face with petals like manta ray fins, all surrounded by a membrane of endless ocean surge. His Criptide. He’d ordered it to block the stairwell. Persy’s moves were being anticipated, much more expertly than his opponent had written the article in question.
“Ccino, let’s go,” he urged his morph so they could head back up a few steps and take the exit out onto that floor. Too late, when they were already on the familiar green carpet, did he realize that Langcockle would naturally suspect the first floor above the flood he’d created. There he was, stood almost as dumbly stuck in place as his editor. For a moment they stared at each other, amazed at the commitments to get a meeting and avoid it. The more aggrieved of the two was about to speak, Persy could see it, so instead of listening he bolted in the opposite direction.
The writer pursued, faster than he’d ever actually run before, but his quarry got a delayed head start when a shrub with big eyes and loud leaves burst into existence right in the middle of the path of pursuit. Langcockle and his following morphs, of which there were four, nearly fell over in surprise. Shroub snickered to itself with the sound of someone shaking a bush to scare out the birds, then disappeared back into its shadowy crypsis form.
It bought Nixpage enough time to pick a temporary hiding spot, from which he would listen for Langcockle’s frustrated exit, and only when he couldn’t hear the rogue dripping of the Criptide would he sneak out and try to find his coffee shop, to then try to find his one true poem.
The pool. Why would he hide there? It was an extremely public place, and the chlorinated deposit would only add to the power of a morph like Criptide. It was a terrible idea, and thus, by his adrenaline-addled thinking, the perfect hiding place.
When he tiptoed in, immediately flattening his feet after half-slipping on the pale blue tile, he was relieved to see there was nobody to give away his position. The seniors in the building who did their water aerobics there were nowhere to be found, and the only remnants of the tenants’ children were some pool toys abandoned on the surface: inflatable renditions of cillimorphs like Sandime and Phrammal.
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“Spread out and keep your ears open,” he whispered to his morphs. Maelstromeo immediately swept the pool’s perimeter on the wing, with Peepinleaf leaping off and transferring to the domed light on the center of the ceiling. Its body covered most of it, making the place look much more abandoned, but also dyeing it slightly green.
The buzzing brain fog, of being interrupted on the cusp of inspiration, harassed the editor, and definitely not the poet, so badly that he considered dunking himself in the cool water just to alleviate it. So he did. His morphs were all pretty good at hiding, so staying down as long as he could was also his best way of matching their natural silly skills.
How? How to bring Nate Sacco’s field guide to rhyming or alliterative life? An ode? An epic poem, covering his entire odyssey in the ships that seeded their new civilization? An epic sounded grand, and wonderful, but it probably wouldn’t fit on a couple pages of The Rasslin’ Review.
Air, time for air. The dreaded Cockle must have given up by now, given that he didn’t have the patience to fact check his own writing thoroughly. With a little blow drying from a finely tuned version of Maelstromeo’s sonic wing attack, Persy could be dry as a bone at a writing desk in ten minutes’ time.
With a gasp he wiped at his eyes and headed in the direction of the steps, grabbing the Phrammal raft and kicking his way back almost giddily. But the gidding wasn’t good. When he turned around and spat out the taste of chlorine he saw Langcockle standing there, arms crossed, ready to harass him, backed up by four equally grouchy morphs: Criptide, Aukshift, Nautifrac, and a particularly perturbed Whimmy.
“Undo them,” the man said, obviously referring to the edits.
“Or what?” the drab and droopy editor challenged without exiting his wade.
“Or everyone will know I beat the pants off of you in a rasslin’ match.”
“You would have to do that first. Besides, I’m not agreeing to one. You can’t lie in an article like that Langcockle. Go back to school, and then go to detention, and stay there where some surly gym teacher can keep an eye on your immature ethics.”
“I know what you’re about too,” the writer said, glossing over the admission implicit in the statement. “These are the morphs you need to get any work done. That means you’re trying to do your lame poem right now.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that if we settle this, The Rasslin’ Review way, win or lose, I’ll be out of your hair. Otherwise I’m going to keep at it all weekend long, and at the office on Monday, and on Tuesday? Oh boy. You don’t even want to know about Tuesday.”
“You should look into your prose being superior when you’re engaging in schoolyard insults,” Nixpage snapped, “seems psychologically concerning. But, since you’re already trespassing, are you saying that if I win you’ll accept the edits and go away?”
“Yes, and you’ll revert them if I win.”
“I can’t do that ethically,” Persy said as he finally pulled himself out of the water and sloshed over to his gathered morphs. “So I’ll just have to quit entirely if you win.” His team looked at him like he was crazy, which he was; that’s what poetic constipation does to an academic after approximately seven years.
“Even better,” Langcockle said, practically licking his lips. “The pool’s the arena, unless you want people to see your upcoming defeat. And it’s four on four, because I don’t want to go fetch another one.”
“That’s fine. Peepinleaf, you keep up the mood lighting.” His leafy morph yipped and saluted from the ceiling. Nixpage wasn’t granted time to dry off, and he didn’t want it, so within two minutes they were positioned on opposite sides of their aquatic arena. It was Peepinleaf who imitated the bell that usually opened more professional bouts.
“Peep peep!“
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Persy’s Napcoat and Shroub were at something of a disadvantage, not being particularly strong swimmers, so they started aboard the pool toys while Maelstromeo kept to the air and his Foamaccino acted as its own raft. It was a decent enough arrangement, except when you saw what they faced.
Criptide’s body integrated with the water, meaning the flower-ray could turn the whole pool into a single wave if it wanted to. Whimmy could unfold from its pony shape and slither just like a deadly water moccasin. Aukshift was large, and an excellent swimmer, trained in the cold lagoons and ice tunnels of hollow comets. His Nautifrac, with its many tentacles, was even better suited than that to the ways of water. Meanwhile, Persy had a napkin rat and an unpotted plant sitting on two balloons.
Yet his confidence did not waver. Here he saw an actual tangible way to attack his problem. Finally, something physical was in the way of his poem. All he had to do was smash it. His morphs were his sledgehammers, made of pitted working man’s iron, regardless of size or suburban spice garden constitution.
“The early bird gets the worm!” he declared; Maelstromeo knew what to do. The birdish morph went into a tailspin, but it was a controlled maneuver. It plucked Whimmy right out of the water, squawked a compressed jazz session right into its face to confuse it, and then threw it against the least-distant wall. The wormy morph instantly waved the white flag.
But Langcockle had issued his own order at the same time, telling his Nautifrac to leap out and land on Napcoat, a super dunk that could easily unravel the little creature. The move landed on the cillimorph, but only the inflatable one! Napcoat had scampered off at the last second and onto Shroub’s raft, which they didn’t really enjoy sharing, immediately scuffling amongst themselves.
“Stow it you two, we’ve got numbers,” Nixpage reminded them. “Give ’em the caffeinated cannonball!” That required them to hop off, into the next raft over, which was the coffee tub Foamaccino perpetually lounged in. It repositioned itself to catch them, and the two smaller morphs briefly disappeared under its whipped cream lip.
Then they fired back out, having guzzled enough coffee to turn a penguin into a roadrunner. Napcoat slipped right into Nautifrac’s shell and started harassing it from the inside, like a ferret in a sweater. Its panic put it temporarily out of commission, and its teammates couldn’t help, they were too stunned by the new method of locomotion his Shroub just invented.
Coursing caffeine energy convinced the bush it was fast as a fan boat, so it used a similar method, converting the exclamation-petals around its revealed form into the blades of an engine, kicking up a geyser wake. That turned into a tackle right into Aukshift’s gut, but a wave rose behind it to catch it.
That was Criptide, and it had just finished getting used to the pool. One glob of its control, only half above the surface, redirected Aukshift like a torpedo, launching it out of the water so it could smack down Maelstromeo with a flipper, which it did so successfully that the smaller bird collided with Peepinleaf and sent them both flying.
The surge of brighter light hid their little white flags, which Peepinleaf didn’t even have to wave, given that it wasn’t an official competitor. Nixpage’s eyes adjusted, to see that things looked bad. Nautifrac had found a way to expel Napcoat, and was holding its little body under the water, releasing it only when the tiniest white flag of the match floated up.
Only Shroub and Foamaccino remained, versus Langcockle’s three morphs. Down in numbers, even further down in size and mass. But, he realized, it wasn’t about that. It was about the pool’s volume, and who controlled it. Persy turned his own up for the crucial next order.
“If I’m going to write this poem, I need a coffee Charybdis to fuel me!” These were the morphs of a pretentious writer, so they were the only kind that could catch a reference from classic literature. Foamaccino tipped over, produced a flood of coffee equal to what Criptide had dumped into the stairwell.
The composition of the water changed rapidly, became a murky brown producing whitish foam. Criptide was only accustomed to seawater, so it surfaced, hacking up java, having lost control of the arena. Now Nixpage could seize it, by way of Shroub. It sank into coffee once more, drank an unwise amount, and came back up with the intent to change the landscape.
Its fan boat circling both lassoed Langcockle’s remaining morphs and created a giant whirlpool. Their opponents were concentrated into the bottom of the cone, where they were battered against each other over and over, until there were three white flags bouncing in their midst. Only then did Foamaccino and Shroub hop out to stand proudly at their masters’ sides.
“You think you’re so great!” Langcockle spat, waving his Whimmy’s head at the editor while he rolled the discombobulated morph up like a fire hose. “You think you’re the next Nate Sacco, don’t you!?”
Persy couldn’t respond. The name pierced him, the shaft shooting quills of light in all directions. That was it. That was the key! He had to be Nate Sacco in the poem. Presume the person’s famous voice! Use their style, but in verse.
“Thank you so much Langcockle,” he said honestly, relief exploding in every nerve of his palms, and in the pits of his jaw where you tasted vinegar most aggressively. “I didn’t need coffee or quiet. I just needed somebody to shout it at me!”
What field can be found with nary a guide
And friends hidden therein
The last place where you’d want your brain to dine,
To morphs confess your sin.
The End