Freyja's nose wrinkled. A thousand different particles were floating in the early evening air, all of them decayed and outputting. She could smell budding tetanus in the rust flecks that mottled every bent and broken piece of scrap metal left littering the sea of trash all around her. The sky was twilight, and huge mounds of junked car parts and miscellaneous busted appliances towered above the crowded dirt isles of the junkyard like maze walls. Deep within the heart of the dump jungle, a great pit was dug out from which clogs of loose dirt, overburdened by stray refuse, collapsed inwardly here and there. Within the maw of the earthen arena was a sea of twisted metal and shattered glass that was filled to the brim in some spots, stratum of junk layered so deeply that the actual ground below couldn't be seen. Somewhere, a car-crusher groaned in the chilly wind, and the setting sun made the shadows of parked bulldozers, cranes, and steamrollers grow like the grasping claws of great big monsters. Just over the peak of one of the encircling garbage walls, the girder tower tops of the adjacent construction site could be glimpsed.
"Find some sheet metal and bolts, he says." Freyja muttered to herself. "It's like searching for a needle in a used needle stack. Seriously, all this place needs is a minotaur and we can call it the poor man's labyrinth. Literally."
Freyja groaned, raising the collar of her shirt as a makeshift mask to cover her nose. Lately, her human and canine perspectives were beginning to bleed into each other, and nowhere was this more apparent than her increasingly-sensitive nose. It was like olfactory echolocation, practically. Nevertheless, as she rummaged, she bore Cuppy’s rationale in mind, knowing that in their missing link’s absence it fell to the two of them to make good on the apartment restoration project. With all three of them sharing the commonality of their wayward excursions into the unknown of the Backyards, they seemed to be targeted by forces that could smell it on them as clearly as Freyja could smell the putrid malevolence of the black gunk seeding Station Bay’s darkened underbelly. Who was hunter and who was hunted was something in flux now, and there was safety in numbers, and in shelter. Cuppy’s wards worked. Freyja didn’t pretend to know how, but they worked all the same, like sealing wax locking out stray leaks of evil intent from penetrating into their home. It was well-hidden and incidentally off the grid of the wider city at large, an island in a strange valley of wilderness that had reclaimed some kind of urban exclusion zone, and the literal backyard it straddled seemed to be some kind of revolving door into the parapsychological meta-land of the Backyards beyond.
Shelter, privacy, and close access to their shared unknown frontier, and the answers that might be waiting for them within. Freyja realized even as she complained that this was worth doing after all, and that for the first time she could recall, she was doing something that gave her a feeling of importance; of mattering. She had significance in this world, and ties to people and their goals. She would look for her campfire in that.
What exactly was sheet metal? There was metal, plenty of it, but most of the sizable pieces Freyja could see were utter pieces of crap that looked like they’d as soon bite the handler as offer up refurbishable supplies for the generator construction project. Cuppy had already managed to carpenter up himself a fully-functional water wheel adjacent to the freshwater storage tank, and a fountain system that siphoned water up a hose to redirect it down the length of a raised wooden sluice spilling the artificial waterfall upon the wheel, turning it in perpetual motion. Yet, they still needed an engine to hook it up to if they wanted to resupply electric power to the unit. Until then, it was a glorified arthouse piece.
Identifying usable pieces that could be salvaged from this scrapheap really should have been Cuppy’s job, but he couldn’t get four feet out the door before falling flat on his face. With his body out of commission for a while, he was only a liability outside the warded shelter of home base in the event shades or any of the fantasy monsters that man in the suit had designated “Ferals” decided to pick a fight again. With her demonic shapeshifter abilities, Freyja found it a blessing and a curse to discover that she had slightly accelerated healing in comparison to Cuppy and baseline humans. Whether it had something to do with her inexplicable infernal nature was an unknown field, but she got the impression it was more like an awakened aspect of the natural vitality hunting animals like wolves already possessed. Her blade wounds had already begun to close, and would soon enough render Cuppy’s suture-patch job obsolete. That was great news to realize, because it halved the risk that she might incur more ugly permanent scars, but in this particular instance it also meant that she was the default gofer.
And if there was one thing Freyja never wanted to be, it was a gofer. If pressed and put on the spot, she’d freely admit to a couch potato being her true spirit animal. But this potato wanted air conditioning, so it was as much her cross to bear as it was the actual engineer’s.
So be it.
Still though, Cuppy could have at least given her a couple photographs of ideal materials, maybe a comparison chart on metals and mechanical pieces to run through. She had the idea that she was on the hunt for something like relatively flexible rectangles of copper alloys or some such, but the best produce here seemed to have already been picked clean. Dumpster diving wasn’t a brand new innovation, and it was silly to think that this place was a secret to any other drifters or packrats looking for much of the same material. A few abandoned camp chairs and tents were enough to confirm that much. There was even a can with the smoldering embers of a hobo fire still flickering at the bottom a few blocks back, so Freyja was far from the first scavenger to pass through. Whatever reason, mundane or magical, that the apartment complex, forest, and greenhouse were missing from Station Bay’s known map, the same could not be said for the junkyard. It would make for pretty poor business if it had.
Freyja got tired of scanning the rows and horizon for usable pieces after a spell, and set about doing what she really did best - wandering about aimlessly in a daydream. She slid down a discarded metal pole of some kind forming a kind of rail down from one heap of trash to the next, arms spread out for balance, and hummed to herself as she traipsed about a wooden pallet bridging the gap between two rising mounds flanked by a circle of big rubber tires. It was easy enough to imagine this place was a desolate alien landscape, a cesspool in some far-off dystopian world where plague rats breed incessantly in the wastes, the rows patrolled by gasmask-wearing bandits and scavengers with big refurbished weapons, even that giant, monstrous robots moved like metallic mountains about the literal mountains of junk they resembled, gears grinding and meat grinder teeth gnashing, braying for man-meat of any pests foolish enough to enter their line of sight.
Freyja allowed herself a little grin as she zoned out, immersing herself deeper into her little mental worldbuilding exercise. When she thought of this vaguely post-apocalyptic sci fi scenario, suddenly it made the task of sorting diamonds from the rough of waste metal and junk an intuitive task, but not for generators, no, nothing so mundane - weapons, and armor, she needed functional laser guns and magnetic bombs and rays, and hard light shields to protect herself in this desolate alien hellscape! The robots would be upon her soon, she had to equip herself. In every mound of trash, there was potential.
Look there! A stray trash can lid. Except, that wasn’t what it really was, no - Freyja saw a perfect circular shield. It was a start. But next she would need - there we go! Some simpleton had just chucked an entire paintball gun into the heap! It had no ammo, but that was ok! Oh, and there were some tire treads - artillery belts!
Freyja, thus armored and ready to take on the robotic overlords, stalked about the canyons of the ruined alien planet, every crunching of broken bottle glass in the background a sign that bandits or mutants might be around any turn. Mutants? Sure, why not! She passed an exposed sewer drain line earlier, and some oily runoff caught in the flow had leaked down the hills. It had a greenish tint in this strange twilight lighting, so why not go ahead and call that mutagenic ooze? Damn megacorporations and their ethical bankruptcy! Polluting the slum districts like this with nary a care of who they poisoned into shambling flesh monsters!
She turned a corner and - there! One of the scavengers!
A discarded coat rack had caught torn, filthy strips of bedsheets in the wind, now draped about its body like an incidental scarecrow.
“Engage the enemy!” Freyja cried out, making radio signal sound effects into her imaginary transmitter pinned to her chest. “Pew pew pew!” she concentrated heavy plasma fire on the bandit asshole. “Oh no! It’s a trap!”
She fled the reinforcements, ducking through a narrow tunnel of junked cars stacked on top of each other that had slid off base and collided into a rusty canopy above. Freyja had to return to the underground, one of the molehills into the rebel base below the wasteland. The underground rebel encampment was one of the last pockets of the resistance to the tyranny of the megacorporations and the robot overlords left, and it couldn’t be discovered no matter the cost! Freyja would lose her pursuers in the winding tunnels, and then-
A flock of nesting crows, startled, flew out of the shelter they had taken in the cab of a ruined retro van, bursting out the empty window and flying into Freyja’s face in a mess of loose feathers.
“Ack!” Freyja grunted. “Ambush! This sector has already fa-”
She meant to say “fallen to the enemy”, but at that exact moment she accidentally swallowed a crow halfway down her throat. Regurgitating the unfortunate corvid, she hacked up a lungful of feathers and slumped against a slanted pallet, only barely avoiding sticking herself on exposed nails without notice. She suddenly took the risk of planes being downed by collision with avian hordes a lot more seriously.
“Watch where you’re going!” Freyja barked at the crow.
It stood on an outcropping of unidentifiable twisted metal, tilting its head at her with resentful eyes that she had the gall to pin their collision on him. She was, after all, a bull in a china shop intruding into the murder’s abode.
Freyja folded her arms. “Don’t you look at me like that.”
The crow squawked at her.
“Slander.”
It squawked again.
“Look here you little shit!” Freyja jammed her finger into the crow’s chest.
It bit her finger.
“Ouch!” Freyja retracted her finger.
Then the thing flew at her face and started pecking at her eyes and ears, biting and pulling on loose strands of hair when able to mix things up a bit.
“Knock it off!” Freyja bat at her face, stumbling blindly through the rusty tunnel, trying to ward off the audacious crow.
She finally managed to close her hand around the wee beast, and allowed a smug look to come over her face.
“Victory is mine!” she lauded over the crow. “...why are you looking at me like that?”
The crow squawked to the heavens, and the rest of the flock - numbering at least in the dozens - dive bombed Freyja in vicious kamikaze waves.
“I’ve underestimated the foe! Oh no!” Freyja shrieked.
The other end of the tunnel exploded outward with a feathery black wave of angry crows, Freyja hidden amidst their obscuring feathers like one caught in a sandstorm. A sandstorm that pecked and scratched with deliberacy.
“Ouch! Ok, I get it! Knock it off! Stahpit!”
Freyja lost her footing thanks to a treacherous curved piece of rebar sticking out of the ground like a half-buried hook, and it spilled her tumbling down the side of a hill on the outer wall of the great arena at the junkyard’s center. Freyja tumbled off a few slanted pallets and lucky platforms of scrap before entering freefall some fifteen feet down or so, landing with a tremendous bounce in the intact net of a bent trampoline frame. She was launched half again the drop distance, then fell onto the net again. This time however, its remaining durability gave out, and the net gave way from under her, ripped free of its rusted old frame. Freyja landed on her back in the dirt, and an upturned rock jabbed into the small of her back and butt.
“My tailbone…” she groaned. “That’s going to leave a mark.”
Freyja looked up toward the sky - it was almost nighttime, and she could begin to see the twinkling stars peeking out from behind the clouds. Then, her vision was swallowed by blackness. No, it wasn’t suddenly night - it was those damn crows again. They followed her, like bees swarming after their hive has been provoked, and were funneling through the circular frame of the broken trampoline to finish off their target in one final swoop. The ring of metal above Freyja was a targeting reticle.
“I surrender!” Freyja gulped.
No quarter given.
…
Freyja was lying in a heap with her bruised ass pointed up in the air, her body covered in bumps and scrapes and welts, with literal crows’ feet indenting huge swathes of her skin like trendy henna tattoos.
“Lucky shot.” she grumbled to the crows.
A single crow lagging behind the rest of the murder, one that Freyja could identify as having been the scout she had first interacted with, took a few hops toward her, then, tilting its head at her a few times, stuck its beak into the ground and retrieved a lugnut. It walked over to her and carefully dropped the metal ring down in front of her, then nudged it closer with its beak.
“I don’t need your pity, bird.” Freyja rolled her eyes.
The crow, presumably offended that its offer of peace between their nations was rebuffed, picked the lug nut up and chucked it at Freyja’s head. It bounced painfully off of the front of her skull.
“How dare you!” Freyja frothed. “I’ve not yet begun to fight!”
And so, the Thousand Seconds' War was declared and fought.
When it was finished and Freyja found herself ambling around the junk piles again, she found herself on the rim of another exposed landfill. What looked like an industrial fan was buried under broken cross beams weighted down with heavy metallic junk. Cuppy needed fan blades like that if Freyja recalled correctly, and she'd feel too sheepish to come back empty-handed after spending so much time playing with the birds instead of salvaging parts. She owed it at least a try to tug the fan out from under the refuse.
"It's in there pretty deep." she whistled.
She tugged fruitlessly at one of the beams, and it hardly budged an inch.
"I need something to break up the debris, like a hatchet or something."
She scanned the junkyard for any applicable tools. A crowbar, maybe a dull machete, anything like that would work just as well.
"There." she spied the handle of a rusted pickaxe sticking straight up out of a shallow rubbish mound.
She slid down the slope toward the find on the trash can lid she had claimed, surfing the junkyard. At the bottom, she took the tool grip in her warm palms and tugged hard. The mining implement was wrenched free easily, and the recoil almost threw Freyja off balance. After tag-teaming an angry walrus monster, accidentally impaling herself on some twisted metal sticking out of the dumping grounds would be an unacceptable way to go out, she thought to herself, privately embarrassed and thankful no one was here to see her clumsy fumble. She looked at the pickaxe in her grip, satisfied with the fine point at the end and confident that it would break up the obstructing boards and beams no problem.
Before she returned to the matter at hand, however, something caught Freyja's eye. The removal of the pickaxe had destabilized the mound and caused a section to slide away, exposing what looked like an old stack of newspapers. They probably wouldn't have warranted a second look if it weren't for the picture taking up the front page of the top paper.
"This is…"
Freyja dropped the pickaxe and quickly dug out the buried stack of newspapers. The dirt and weathering made large sections of the text illegible, but the debris had still done a surprisingly good job of preserving the papers. The one she was looking at dated back to the thirties, and the image it bore was that of the same apartment complex Cuppy and Richie had commandeered.
"Azure Heights housing company settles out of court... bodies… still not found…?" Freyja read through a throat that felt like it was closing.
What she sifted through were articles detailing the complex - and why it had been sealed off.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
As it happened, after a scandal on the west coast, the housing company had relocated their headquarters to the east. Financial mismanagement, including alleged debts to the local mafia bosses, and unexpected flooding had crippled attempts to convert a large stretch of woodland preserve into a high-end series of condominiums for those who could afford to pay for the privacy the gated community offered. It was speculated that the mob's interest in securing the plot of land stemmed from the local plant species that were readily accessible to harvest for narcotics synthesis, and that the project had been a front from the start. Exactly how much was pressure put on the executives and how much was complicity remained speculation, like everything else. Police investigations into the allegations were repeatedly blocked by Station Bay's local government. A whistleblower claiming corruption and conspiracy never got to go on record - his body was found utterly dismembered in the forest.
Freyja gulped.
A raid chased the local crime lords out of Station Bay, and Azure Heights continued the project to save face. By this point, their profits were tanking, and they cut the same corners that had blacklisted their business practices in the west. Several workers died under mysterious circumstances on the job, and the units themselves were only habited for a season or so. Naturally, asbestos was found in the building as well. The company went bankrupt, but the locals wanted nothing to do with the place. Too many bad omens. The property was sealed off and left to decay.
Until it came into the spotlight again in the nineties. As it turned out, other vagrants did have the idea to make their roost in the complex. At this point, some eccentric entrepreneur decided to clear out the bad air and tear down the complex to make a new park. The homeless encampment, numbering over a hundred, refused to vacate the condemned premises. Ultimately, SWAT were called on to remove them by force.
"Violence escalated, and both the police force and the squatters broke into all-out warfare. One section of the units ultimately caught fire, trapping thirty homeless victims inside… and burning them to death…"
Court proceedings saw the defending officers swear by horrific visions, paranoia, and of an unmistakable dark presence in the area. Lawyers argued for the presence of toxic gasses that had accumulated in the area and induced hallucinations and excited delirium. Ultimately, charges were dropped for all but one of the officers on trial for the mass murder - the captain of the unit at the time. He claimed full responsibility for the atrocity, and was executed in 2000.
When asked if he would like to make a final statement upon the gallows, he answered yes. His last words were,
"Someone had to take the fall. There is a sickness in this city. It should have been left to burn. It mustn't get out. Contain it. Don't let the demon out!"
Freyja dropped the papers, having gone through the entire stack. The last photo of the complex had been a smoldering ruin, burnt to a crisp.
But that can't be. We've been living in it. Did someone rebuild this place? What kind of reason would they have to do that? Or… is the entire complex just another part of the Backyards?
Freyja fretted.
"No, that can't be right either. The creep in the fancy suit saw it too, and the monster emerged from another fog cloud. Richie's alligator, and the freaky jester didn't need fog to come through. What's going on here?"
What did all of it mean?
When Richie fought the Phantom Pain, he had turned a crooked old metal bat into an Excalibur replica with all the legendary cutting power that implied. He had dragon tattoos that augmented his brawling abilities, but none of that accounted for the ability to transfigure objects into different objects. Besides, he hadn't even done that, really. The bat was still a bat, he just perceived it as a sword. It was just a bat after the battle was finished, after all. Yet, the imaginary sword still had enough physical presence to slash the ghost.
But normal people could SEE it! They could walk there by following the fog in the horizon! Every time any of us have gone into or come out of the Backyards, it's been automatically while we were daydreaming. It's not a place you can directly find on purpose. But the jester moved through it on purpose, didn't he? Isn't that how Cuppy said he's collecting his victims off the streets? How the massacre that began in a police station ended in the forest?
Freyja's mind was circling, and her head began to ache. She rubbed her temples.
I'm coming. one of Freyja's thoughts went rogue, and spoke to her.
"Richie?" she asked.
…
"Are you sure this is what you want to do?" Leon asked Richie skeptically.
They were facing a large set of ornate stone double doors that sat on the bay's surface like the threshold of some great invisible mansion. The frame surely went to the seafloor, but the doors themselves - marked with the emblem of Tide Town down the middle - only blocked a long pier that continued on under them. The rest of the nautical city was far at their backs, and the only visual marker was the Sapphire in Silk that still held fast in the sky.
"Of course." Richie said, stretching out his legs.
They had taken an underwater passageway of clammy, slick masonry that seemed incredibly ancient, far older than the carpentry of the floating civilization attached to it. This was the way to Coral Road, the only strip of solid ground for miles in every direction, and a land bridge to Richie's destination in Blue Terminal.
As Leon had mentioned, the seas were turbulent and deadly at certain times of the year. Keeping Richie preoccupied and distracted with the party he had well-earned was not only a case of giving him time to recover his strength, but a necessary delay to allow for stocking and preparing the ferry that would have to carry him across the wild waters to the train station. That would be a six day voyage, at a minimum. Richie couldn't wait that long. He'd wasted too much time here already when the last he had seen of Cuppy had been sinking through the fetid murk of the sewer, same as himself.
That damn leprechaun went too far. For his sake, he better have drowned. If I see his stupid face again, he'll wish he had!
Morning in the tavern - measured strictly by the clock on the wall, when circadian rhythms orphaned by the absence of the sun were unreliable here - had brought the sight of everyone passed out on the floorboards to Richie's waking senses. Alicia and Jennie had been the first ones up, barely suppressing girlish giggles as the unconscious Clark and Nuuchi carried on a functional - if absurd - conversation in their sleep.
"Do you sell stamps?" Clark was desperately trying to ascertain.
Nuuchi mumbled.
"Stamps!" Clark said.
"You have the wrong number." Nuuchi answered.
"Can I talk to your supervisor then?" Clark asked.
"No, he's a penguin." Nuuchi explained.
"Fine, I'll hold." Clark sighed.
The girls were making little snorting sounds as they desperately clamped their hands over their mouths, not about to wake the men up with their hysterical laughter before they saw this talk play out in full.
My head… Richie grumbled in his own mind, wincing as the thought seemed to ricochet in the walls of his skull like a rock crashing down a well. He wasn't handling his first hangover very gracefully, in no small part because he hadn't expected to get one in the first place. After accidentally getting liquored up on mead, his tongue and inhibitions had been numbed enough that his body went on "fuck it" autopilot, guzzling beer on tap and even getting wrangled into tequila shots spurred on by Kokumo. He could still hear her delighted fit of laughter at the disgusted face he had made, the spirit paradoxically knocking him sober for a moment with the sheer aggression of its taste. Refreshing it was not.
"The dead rises. Good morning." Leon greeted Richie, gesturing him to take a seat at the bar.
"Debatable." Richie grimaced.
"Here." Leon gave Richie a glass of raw egg with a shot of tabasco sauce in it.
Richie shrugged. Why not?
He swallowed the evil concoction.
"Oh dear g-" - he hurled.
When he finally finished vomiting and dry-heaving, he stood up, a sticky rivulet of saliva still hanging from his lip, and propped himself up against the bar table.
"What kind of shitty remedy was that supposed to be?!" Richie barked through stabs of heartburn.
"Remedy?" Leon asked.
"Oh there's a special place in Hell for you." Richie growled.
Leon had a dumb little smile on his face. "I know." he said, sounding genuinely happy for a change.
Then the topic of reaching Blue Terminal had come up, and Richie felt like breaking bottles.
"You never told me I'd get boxed in by the weather!" he shook Leon by his collar when given the estimate for a good journey across the waves.
"On the contrary, you didn't put the pieces together." Leon smacked Richie's hand away. "The shades were originally going to time their attack to the eclipse, as they had every time before, remember? Even novice sailors and meteorologists know that the tides are affected by the moon. Telling you in advance wouldn't change the wait time." Leon said.
"What happened to the foot route?" Richie asked.
"Well, it's perfectly usable, and cuts the trip from six days to four, accounting for pacing, supplies, and rest." Leon said.
"So what's the problem?" Richie asked.
"Drowning. The road will be submerged in two days, seasonally flooded with the rise of the eclipse. You'll get halfway out there and then experience the same horror marooned sailors dropped on a temporary sandbar felt before getting sunk. You've seen what the weather can be like, and what the sea life can be like if that deep sea abomination the shades hijacked is standard fare. I'm telling you to just wait for the ferry. Trying to cross the road in two days is signing your own death warrant."
They had argued of course, but eventually Leon washed his hands of it. It was the kid's life.
Now, here they stood at the edge of Tide Town's city limits, the milky pink hue of the land bridge of polished coral, flecked with sparkles and fenced by barriers of wild coral growing freely, standing in stark defiance of the ambient dark as the doors opened wide. A stone platform rose out of the sea at the lip of Coral Road's starting edge, forming the platform to bridge the road with Tide Town's end.
"Do you really think you can make the run in two days?" Leon asked.
"Two?" Richie waggled his finger. "I'm sprinting that mother in one."
"Technically that's called a marathon." Kokumo exclaimed, patting Richie's head.
"I'd just call it suicide." Leon sighed.
"Thanks for the vote of confidence." Richie rolled his eyes.
Sparta was at Leon's back, sitting on his haunches and sniffing the salty air.
"It's not certain that we'll ever see each other again. Bearing that in mind, I think you had questions regarding the nature of your Dragon tattoos." Leon said. "Consider what little I can tell you a parting gift, and my thanks for your help here."
"Have the planet's aligned? Is the magnificent demigod Leon being nice to me?" Richie said in faux-awe.
"I will suplex you again, don't put it past me." Leon glared. "Anyway. There was only one other man I ever saw who bore similar markings, and a symbolic connection to Eastern-style dragons. Incidentally Japanese, like you, but a pure-blooded one. That was some time ago, and you both moved and fought very differently. He used fire, for one thing, while you seem to be affiliated with the element of air if anything. You called your markings 'Seiryu' - Azure Dragon. That psychopath I mentioned, the one who let the shades flood into our home world, didn't act alone. His colleague fielded research on some kind of paranormal pseudoscience that revolved around an initiative they dubbed Project Dragon. Whatever it ultimately was, this man like you - Shinsei, I think his name was - was some kind of key to it all. I don't know where Shinsei is. Nobody does. He dropped off the grid even before the shade apocalypse."
"So why tell me about a missing wanderer who might not even exist anymore?" Richie asked. "Not exactly a solid lead to go off of. And that boogeyman said-"
"The guy with the claws?" Kokumo asked.
"No, a different boogeyman. An actual boogeyman, as far as I can tell. We know a lot of weirdos between us, you know that?" Richie noted.
"Kid, focus." Leon folded his arms. "Please, continue with whatever you were thinking through."
"Right. Well, the guy in the cloak said that my tattoos - runes, I guess, which share a lifeline with me - have a will of their own, and could sense their creator within the wandering corridor. I wouldn't have known it from the sewer tunnel in my closet, but it's a safe bet these doorways go to and through the Backyards. They'd have to, for my runes to pull me here from what should have been certain death. My mom said to me that my dad was a great warrior, and her nickname for me was her 'little dragon'. Do you think it's possible that's no random nickname? If ghosts and rude leprechauns can seep into other worlds than-"
"Why not dragons too?" Leon guessed.
"Yeah, exactly. Are these instincts and combat skills really mine? Or are they some kind of genetic memory? If my dad isn't of Earth as I know it, he might be a dragon. And if that's the case, I have a thousand questions. Hell, maybe your Shinsei and this Project Dragon have something to do with it too, for all I know." Richie guessed.
"It could be like Zeus seeding Hercules," Leon mused, "or it could just as easily be a sea turtle laying dozens of young and looking the other way, content that a few will survive."
Richie gulped. "I want to know what my place in this world is. Was my birth divine intervention, or just some kind of depressing mistake? What is my lease on life?"
"Go seek the answers, then." Leon said. "There was another among our party, around half a year ago..a voodoo witchdoctor who calls himself Moses, though he left without explanation. Took Coral Road, in fact. If he was anything like his namesake, good for him, cause he had the same retarded idea you've sunk your teeth into to make the trip right before the eclipse."
"And this affects me how?" Richie scratched his head.
Kokumo stretched out her back a bit, then, apparently restless to the point of fidgeting, decided to burn off some energy doing a one-handed handstand-style series of pushups. The extreme exertion didn't hamper her speech in the least.
"Moses was - is - a bit of a quack. While his roots were in Haitian mysticism, he always considered himself someone open to the idea that there are many doors to the truth. During his time here with us, and for who knows how many years before, he made an extensive study of world myths and religions around the globe." Kokumo said.
"And their commonalities to each other." Leon said emphatically.
"I don't know their history, but Moses and Shinsei were on speaking terms at some point or another. If anyone might have an idea of exactly what your tattoos are and where to continue the search, my money is on Moses." Kokumo clicked.
"Noted." Richie turned around - and bowed his head. "Thank you both. I'm in your debt."
"We'll call it even. Just don't die on your way to Blue Terminal or these tips won't amount to much." Leon said.
Kokumo flashed a peace sign, then unexpectedly hugged Richie to her by the neck and planted a kiss on his cheek. "Don't forget to write!"
Richie flashed vivid scarlet and made choked-off seizure noises. "H-Hey! D-Don't-"
"I do what I want." Kokumo chuckled, watching the flustered boy squirm.
"Bit of a bully, aren't you?" Leon grinned despite himself.
"You knocked him out and fed him a raw egg." Kokumo slugged Leon's shoulder.
"With hot sauce." Leon corrected her.
"You both suck equally." Richie narrowed his eyes at them.
His gaze held a bit longer on Leon, glazing over in a hesitant, plaintive expression.
"...I'm not going to give you a kiss." Leon said.
"Oh." Richie said. "I could have sworn you-"
"Tread carefully." Leon's eyes burned hellfire.
"Geez, just kidding." Richie scratched the back of his head.
Sparta trotted up to Richie and licked his big bristle tongue across Richie's face like wet sandpaper.
"Blech!" Richie stuck his tongue out, making a disgusted face.
"Before you go, I actually do have something for you." Leon slid a silver case from his sleeve and popped the lid open.
Inside the purple velvet cushy interior was a beautifully ornate silver dagger with the outline of a rose etched into the blade.
"What's this for?" Richie asked.
"You lost your pocket knife during the attack. Call it a Tide Town souvenir." Leon bade him take it.
"It's light. And very well-balanced." Richie whistled, balancing the dagger precariously on his finger. "And very tacky." he added, quite done with Leon's obsession with roses.
"Fuck you too." Leon rolled his eyes.
He held his hand out expectantly.
"What? I'm still keeping it, it was a gift." Richie cradled the dagger protectively.
"Not the knife. The knuckle dusters I loaned you back in the Sniper Tower. Ima need that shit back now." Leon said.
"What knuckle dusters?" Richie smiled suspiciously.
"Your poker face leaves a lot to be desired." Leon folded his arms again. "They'll just weigh you down anyways. After all, I'm still not sure how you intend to pull a straight shot to the station in one sprint before the tide sweeps you away. Don't you think you ought to lighten your load?"
"Nah. I'm just gonna cheat." Richie smiled, revealing two vials of the green kelp potions.
"What the-?!" Leon searched his pockets and folds, patting them down.
"I'm a pickpocket veteran. A little misdirection goes a long way." Richie said, arming himself with the silver knuckles and popping the corks from the potion bottles."
"Richie, stop, you don't know what too many of those elixirs will do to you." Leon warned him solemnly.
"Oh, I have an idea. Massive blood pressure spike, burning through calories like water, possible organ damage," he rattled off. "Still though, guess I'll just have to wait and see. If I can't cross the sea in time, this gamble will have been for nothing. I've got a friend waiting for me in Station Bay," Richie said before his eyes darkened, "and a psychotic ass to kick." he said of the jester. "Bottoms up."
Richie tipped the contents down his throat, both vials at once, and drank them down to the last drop.
Instantly, his pupils constricted, and he saw the world through a dark red filter. His breathing became labored as he broke out in a cold sweat. He could hear the blood pounding in his ear drums, and he suddenly felt like he was burning up. He imagined this was what werewolves felt like in horror movies when the full moon rose and they started to transform against their will. His muscles rapidly broke down and regenerated themselves over and over again, making actual crashing noises inside his body. Hot bile piddled in the back of his throat, and flecks of saliva were thrown from his twitching lips. He cracked his knuckles.
"Alright, let's do this shit!" Richie decreed, taking a crouching position at the proverbial starting line.
It hurt so good, and he could see his goal like a light at the end of the tunnel through the pain. He'd clear the distance in twenty four hours, or he'd drown. All or nothing. And if his chest started acting up, he determined, he'd just have to outrun the heart attack.
The gun bang of his mind went off, and he exploded into a sprint down Coral Road, pushing 21 MPH. The empty bottles crashed and shattered to so many shards of glass behind him.
"I'll bring back help someday!" Richie called to them over his shoulder, then was gone into the horizon.
"Kid's got fire." Kokumo said. "Reminds me of someone else I used to know, eh Leon?"
Leon was already walking back, ducking through the undersea passage back to Tide Town proper.
"You must be confusing me with someone else." Leon grunted.
Sparta was at his heel when called, leaving Kokumo behind to shrug.
"Can't just be honest with yourself, can you?" she said into the vacant air.