I’m not sure I’d say Lefty was afraid of water. Nor would I say he hated water. But if fear and hatred were streets, then his feelings about water loitered on the corner between them, looking surly and muttering curses at anyone who got close. I’d suppose I’d describe that emotion as… aggravation? Irritation perhaps? Suffice to say… he really didn’t like water.
And to be fair, I can kind of understand why. Growing up in a desert town, Lefty’s relationship with water had always been one of obligation. It was a resource you needed to survive… not a luxury to be enjoyed. He once told me that the idea of bathing in water seemed as silly to him as sleeping in a big pile of bread. He could see how it might be relaxing to some… but in his mind bread was for eating and water was for drinking; using those for anything else was just wasteful… and weird… and kind of gross to be honest.
And if that was how he felt about baths, then you can imagine his attitude towards swimming. I mean there was a reason he still hadn’t learned to do it despite living with the semi-aquatic deepuns for two months. He had attended countless lakeside parties, but even the allure of fun and friendship couldn’t tempt him to do anything but wade into the shallows. It didn’t help that, so far, his only two experiences with plunging into large bodies of water had almost killed him.
I tell you all this so that you understand just how desperate Lefty was to leave the God Dam. Once he and Blu had gathered their things and met up with Pedra, she laid out her intentions in no uncertain terms. He would be learning how to swim. It was the main skill needed to conquer the Drink Tabernacle, and learning to do it well would require diligent training. It would be necessary for him to spend many hours in the water, each and every day, for the next several months… and also there would be a serious risk of drowning.
She said this in a matter-of-fact way, explaining the terms of her deal as if Lefty had no choice but to go along. Ol Blu expected some resistance from the young man. He was prepared to negotiate a better deal on his friend’s behalf… but Lefty didn’t even hesitate. He agreed to follow Pedra and do as she asked without complaint. Despite his feelings about water, he would rather spend the next few months swimming in it… than spend another minute in the same building as Amor.
Ol Blu was shocked. He and Lefty hadn’t been the closest of friends during their time at the dam, but as far as he could tell the relationship with Amor wasn’t all that serious. The kicken was very curious to find out what had happened; what had caused such a sudden and dramatic break in their romance… but the lad didn’t want to talk about it…
This was to be expected of course. Whatever wounds had been inflicted, they were still fresh. Lefty would need time to heal and clear his mind. In that regard this little diversion with Pedra might do him some good. Lefty could get some fresh air, and in the process perhaps he’d overcome his aversion to water and learn how to swim. “This will be fine”, Ol Blu thought. “The lad will open up eventually, and when he does we can have a nice, long, heart-to-heart about the fickle nature of romance…” Oh how naive he was.
Pedra’s camp was an hour’s walk from the God Dam, about half way between it and the Master Bridge. It wasn’t much to look at. Sitting on the muddy shores of Lake Allende, it consisted of a simple wooden platform shaded by a canvas canopy. It was just large enough to support two small tents and a table, and just high enough off the ground to keep the tents from getting soggy. The thing had been built a few years back, but clearly hadn’t been used recently. It took a little while to clean it up, and even once the dust was cleared, the space was far from cozy. It was cold, damp, crusty, and firm; a far cry from the comforts of the modern city dam they had abandoned. As night fell on that first day and the trio retired to their new bedrolls, Blu lay awake long into the night, finding it difficult to sleep with so much uncertainty weighing heavy in the air.
Lefty, by contrast, slept like a rock. Then he woke up like a rock, proceeded to eat breakfast like a rock, and began his first day of training in a very rock-like manner. The boy had hardened himself after the events of the previous day, withdrawing emotionally from the few people around him. Gone was the anger, the angst, and even the sadness; leaving only a boulder in the shape of a man… a grim husk determined to do his duty.
I suppose his life in Ash-Tab had conditioned him to act this way. He had been raised to live a life of drudgery; to mindlessly obey regardless of his feelings. Obviously he had broken that conditioning when he abandoned his home town, but it seemed that under stress his mind snapped back into old routines. Learning to swim was just another duty thrust upon him, one he would do despite an utter lack of enthusiasm. And Pedra was just another elder to be obeyed without question. Which is why Lefty did as he was told without complaint… even when she worked him to the point of exhaustion.
From the very first day Pedra put Lefty on a rather extreme training regiment. Ten hours a day, most of that time spent out in the water, with only a few breaks for meals and planning. I won’t say that the deepun was devoid of compassion, but her strong ambitions and lack of social awareness made her blind to Lefty’s suffering. The boy was clearly miserable, but she pushed him on regardless.
To be fair, she worked herself to exhaustion as well, so it wasn’t as though she demanded more from him than she was willing to give. But for Ol Blu, it was beyond frustrating to watch these two interact, their self destructive attitudes feeding off each other. Any time he’d suggest to Pedra that they take things a little easier, she would defer to Lefty. If he wanted a break he’d simply have to ask and she’d give him one. But Lefty often refused to ask, even when it was obvious that he was about to collapse. Partially because he felt it wasn’t his place to complain, but mostly because the work gave him an outlet for all his frustrations. Rather than talk about what had happened with Amor or work through his complex feelings, the lad poured himself into training.
As the days went on, and Lefty’s intense schedule slowly morphed into a normal routine, Ol Blu found it harder and harder to speak with either of his companions. They’d spend most of their days out in the water, where the kicken couldn’t join them, and only returned to eat, sleep, and plan for the following days. Most of the time they were too exhausted for idle chatter, and anytime they weren’t exhausted… well that just meant it was time to get back to work.
Needless to say… Ol Blu never got to have that long chat with Lefty about relationships.
As a week came and passed with no sign of change, two things gradually became clear to the kicken. Pedra’s obsession with the Drink Tabernacle was rubbing off on Lefty… and they would not be returning to the God Dam anytime soon. The only saving grace to any of this… was that Pedra did actually know what she was doing… kind of.
To give the deepun a little credit, the extreme training regiment she created was exactly what The Drink Tabernacle required. The structure was a massive maze of unmapped tunnels which were completely submerged in the waters of Lake Allende. Finding the Clavis Imperium within its walls would require a lot of underwater exploration through long dark tunnels. That alone would have made it near impossible, but apparently an aquatic labyrinth was not enough for Scaevolus and his engineers. Some of the tunnels were constructed so that strong currents flowed through them. Any creature unfortunate enough to enter into one of the rapids, as they were called, would find themselves carried away by swift moving water; pushed so deep into the tabernacle's depths that there was no hope for escape.
This deadly aspect was actually what Pedra was most interested in exploring. The rapids used a kind of magic or technology unknown to the deepuns, and she was very eager to get her hands on it… as soon as Lefty removed the Clavis Imperium.
To do that, it wouldn't be enough for him to simply swim competently. He would have to swim quickly. Very quickly. Faster than any human had ever swam before. Fortunately for Lefty… Pedra has a plan for thid. For you see, this was not the first time she had tried to recruit a non-deepun for this task; she had attempted it twice before.
The first time had been an unmitigated disaster. It was something the studious deepun didn't like to talk about, and subsequently, no one but her really knows what happened… just that it hadn’t worked out very well. Her second attempt, by contrast, had been much more fruitful. She had not succeeded of course, but while working with the human swimmer she had invented something which would prove to be quite useful.
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She called them Squid Shoes, so named because of their resemblance to the fabled aquatic creatures. If you've never heard of them, they are said to resemble a disembodied thulhan head. Nothing but a body with appendages, like a kicken of the sea. As the name implies the Squid Shoes were footwear. While on land they simply looked like strange wooden boots, full of tiny holes and wrapped in green braided vegetation, which itself was adorned with several small oddly-shaped trinkets. It wasn't until you got the shoes wet that they took on the squid-like appearance they were named after. The green braids expanded and unwrapped from the boots, forming rubbery tendrils more than a hand long, which dangled from the shoes like a thulhan's tentacles from their face. It was these tendrils, along with the small and carefully carved wooden bits that had been woven into them, which allowed the wearer to swim quickly.
Exactly how the Squid Shoes worked… is a topic which is both highly technical, and ultimately unimportant. I won't bore you with the details…(sigh) like Pedra often did to Lefty and Blu. (groan) Dear listener… she was so proud of her invention. Asking her about it was the only way to guarantee that Lefty got a break. Because once you got her on the subject she would talk for hours about hydrodynamics and the physics of fluids in motion, and… uhgg! Just. No. All you really need to understand is that the shoes allowed the wearer to swim incredibly quickly... provided they swam in a very specific and very unusual way.
Rather than make the instinctive paddling motions that most creatures make when they swim, the wearer of the Squid Shoes had to pump their legs like they were marching on the ground, or stomping something on something beneath their feet.
“Lift your knees higher!” Pedra often yelled, shouting at Lefty while he floundered in the water. “You need to kick behind you! Remain parallel!”
If done correctly, each pump of the shoes would propel the wearer head-first through the water like an arrow… except that, since there was a shoe on each foot, the trajectory was never completely straight. Every kick sent the swimmer in an arc that needed to be controlled by their arms, which had to be kept against their sides and used to steer. It was a difficult technique to learn; unnatural to every species on Att… but it was essential to master if one wanted to reach and surpass deepun swim speed.
For her previous attempt, Pedra had recruited a strong swimmer to don the Squid Shoes. She had hoped that an already talented athlete would be able to gain proficiency with the strange equipment quickly… but this assumption turned out to be horribly incorrect. The swimmer's years of experience had actually worked against her. The techniques required to use the shoes were so far removed from any traditional form of swimming, that not only was her carefully crafted muscle memory useless… it became a liability. For even after learning how to use the boots decently, the swimmer would occasionally slip up under stress and attempt to kick her feet in the traditional way… which was very dangerous. Trying to make a paddling motion with the Squid Shoes on could cause the tentacles to become tangled with each other, transforming the footwear into nothing but heavy wooden weights.
This is why Pedra's second expedition had ultimately failed… and why Lefty's inexperience in this instance, was actually quite valuable. As someone who had absolutely zero swimming instincts… he was the perfect candidate; a blank slate. He could learn to use the shoes without any natural tendencies getting in the way.
And so… that’s exactly what they tried to do. For nearly a month the three of them lived in Pedra’s tiny camp, working from sun up to sun down in the clear waters of Lake Allende, trying to teach Lefty how to swim.
It was slow going at first. Not a day went by where Lefty didn't almost drown. Pedra had to haul him out of the water frequently, and it felt like he spent more time coughing and sputtering on the shore, than he did actually swimming. Still… he never gave up. As soon as he had regained his breath he was back out there again, struggling to control his motions in the liquid he hated so very much. Two developments helped push him past the initial learning curve.
First, Pedra made Lefty a hat. Or rather, she converted his pointlight into a hat. You remember Lefty's pointlight right? The strange metal arc with the two light emitting tubes on either side? He received it from Titus back in The Capital. Well, Lefty still had that. Like his armor he hadn't really used it since arriving in deepun territory, but unlike the armor he had brought it with him when he left the God Dam… mostly because it was a dream crafted item, and that was still an amazing thing to him.
Anyway, one night as they were preparing to go to sleep, Pedra saw Lefty holding the pointlight, and was struck with the idea to place it on his head.
I had only mentioned it in passing before, but being an underwater structure, the Drink Tabernacle's interior was rather dark. A pointlight was needed to see inside it, but since the user of the Squid Shoes had to keep their hands at their sides, that pointlight had to be held in their mouth. As you might imagine, this was rather uncomfortable and only served to make the difficult task even more difficult. Seeing Lefty's pointlight, however, Pedra was struck with inspiration. She found a simple solution… that really should have been obvious from the start. The U-shaped pointlight sat neatly atop Lefty's head like a tiara, and by adding a rubber strap to the sides, she was able to affix it rather tightly. This allowed him to keep his mouth closed while swimming, which in turn stopped him from swallowing so much water.
The second development that helped Lefty to master the Squid Shoes was actually an idea of his own. You see he was adamant on bringing his metallic feathers along for protection. It was rumored that a monster lay in the center of the tabernacle, and he didn’t want to face it unarmed. Pedra was adamant… that doing that would be stupid… if not outright impossible. She spent a lot of time trying to explain fluid dynamics to Lefty, telling him that his feathers would create far too much drag for him to swim correctly, no matter how he tried to carry them. But well reasoned and scientific arguments were useless against Lefty's paranoia. He demanded to bring the feathers out into the water… and with Ol Blu refusing to side against him, Pedra had no choice but to let the lad try.
What followed was several days of failed experimentation. Lefty tried to strap the feathers to his back, but just as Pedra said, the drag they created made steering far too difficult. He tried to hold them in his hands, but once he got moving it became impossible to keep his grip on them, even if he wore gloves. Eventually though, the young man stumbled upon an idea that actually seemed to work: he tied the feathers along the length of his arms, binding them with thin ropes at his shoulders and wrists.
This random bit of trial-and-error, which was only attempted out of irrational stubbornness… ended up working out far better than she or even Lefty could have possibly expected. For you see, strapping the hard metallic feathers to his arms, forced him to keep them straight, which was part of the technique he had struggled with up until this point. Furthermore, with the feathers positioned at just the right angle, and tied tightly enough so that they didn't move, he found that the wider surface area actually helped his steering rather than hindered it. Granted, it put a lot of strain on his shoulders, and it did slow him down a little bit… but the improved control, along with a hefty morale boost, more than made up for all those negatives.
Oh you should have seen the look on Pedra’s face. The polymath was not used to being proven wrong… especially by the likes of Lefty… but she couldn’t argue with results.
Not long after that… things finally clicked into place. Lefty went out into the water one day to practice… and stayed out there until lunch, swimming the entire time without assistance. He came back to shore smiling for the first time in weeks. He was still depressed. He still didn’t like swimming. But at least he was getting better at it… and that was enough to start chipping away at his rocky exterior.
From there… it was like a switch had been flipped. Every day he showed improvement, his confidence allowing him to push the squid technique even farther. Before long he was moving through the lake with ease. Then with impressive skill. Then he was keeping up with Pedra, the human swimming as fast as a deepun… until one day… he surpassed her.
I remember watching it from the shore, the two of them gliding through the clear waters like it was nothing. Seeing them swim so quickly was already amazing… and then suddenly Lefty shot forward, his speed doubling in a matter of seconds. He moved so fast that it created a wake behind him, the water rippling to either side as he cut through it like a blade. Pedra stopped swimming and just floated there, watching in awe as the young man snaked through the water like a sea serpent, far faster than even she had expected.
When he finally came up for air a moment later, he was just a speck off in the distance, too far away to hear Pedra shouting at him to get back to the course.
It was like nothing anyone had seen before… and it was only the beginning.