Chapter Text
“Mrs. Daver, I’m sorry for your loss. I really am.” Pearl said, though she wasn’t sure how true her words were. After all, they had known each other for less than an hour. This made her attempts at pity and how close the recent widow was holding her to her chest seem overly familiar to say the least.
“Calvin! Oh my metaphorically poor and poetically sweet Calvin!” Mrs. Daver moaned, clutching the Crystal Gem even harder.
Pearl managed to twist her head just in time so that only her right cheek was pressed against the much larger alien woman’s abdominal area. Had she been a little slower, she might’ve wound up with a face full of sweaty undulating velvet. “Y-yes, what happened to Mr. Daver was highly unfortunate. I know-woo-getting a little close here-.” Pearl said sideways before stopping herself. The lady very much in front of her was clearly in great emotional distress, so it was understandable that she’d want to vent some of that grief. She’d just have to bear with this unsolicited embracing for a little while longer “I mean-I know what it’s like to lose people you care about, espe-he-he-hey-! Especially when it seems to happen so suddenly.”
“Seems?! So do you think it’s true?!” Mrs. Daver asked above her. “Do you also think that it might’ve been-that it might’ve been-.”
Though she couldn’t see the woman’s face, the shuddering of the fabric beneath Pearl’s cheeks told her that a fresh fit of sobbing was all but imminent if she didn’t try to cut her off. “I’m just saying that given Mr. Daver’s…constitution, it could be said that this was a long time-.”
“MURDER!” Mrs. Daver finished.
“Murder?!”
“Yes, murder!”
“Murder,” Incidentally, Pearl’s confusion at this statement served as a merciful distraction from how her head was being pelted by the tears coming down from Mrs. Daver’s six eyes. “Who said this was murder?”
“Your companion,” Mrs. Daver sniffed. “The one with the tacky coiffure.”
The word ‘companion’ failed to register, but the mention of ‘tacky’ did. “Is that so?”
After letting the tentacle-headed mistress of the house cry on her for a few more minutes, Pearl escorted her back to her quarters for some much need rest. Once she was sure Mrs. Daver was sound asleep, Pearl gingerly slipped out of her scaly four-armed hold and made her way downstairs to the receiving room. There, she found Dandy squatting by the corpse, looking it over and occasionally making “hmmm” and “ahhhh” noises as he did so.
“Why in the world did you tell Mrs. Daver that her husband was murdered?” Pearl asked, certain she wasn’t interrupting anything important.
“I didn’t say that Calvin here was murdered,” Dandy claimed, his back still to Pearl. “I said that he MIGHT have been murdered.”
Pearl slapped her Gem and tried to tell herself that there had been enough death for one day. Probably. “I leave you alone with her for five minutes to find a phone and the moment I come back she’s all over me like lichen on boulders because you told her that Mr. Daver MIGHT have been the victim of foul play. Did I miss anything?!”
“Look, I’m as upset as you are with how that went,” Dandy said, turning to look at her. “There I was, ready and open to be her shoulder to cry on and she chooses to latch on to you instead. I mean you didn’t even hug back or nuzzle. Talk about your missed opportunities.”
Pearl took a deep breath. She didn’t need the air, but it made for an excellent coping mechanism for stress and frustration; one that had gotten a lot of mileage as of late. “Please tell me that was your sole motivation for telling her something so preposterous,” she pleaded. Yes, it was an absurdly distasteful aim and towards one so emotionally vulnerable no less, but if that had been the case, they could call the authorities, answer a few trite questions, and leave before Mrs. Daver had the chance to grab her again. Perhaps Dandy was just scrutinizing the corpse out of some morbid curiosity or to mourn the wulongs he’d never get due to the untimely demise of his bounty. Of course, this still left one little abnormality unexplained. “Where did you get that monocle?”
To her horror, but not her surprise, Dandy pointed to the recently deceased in front of him.
“YOU LOOTED HIS CORPSE?!”
“Not all of it. I left the rest of his stuff alone.” Dandy countered. “Besides, it’s the least he can do. I’m going to use it to avenge his untimely death.”
Pearl groaned. Over the course of their brief, but terribly eventful association, she had quickly learned that if there was one thing that rivaled Dandy’s love of getting paid or getting ‘lucky’, it was his love of getting even. Thus ‘avenge’ was one of his most favorite verbs, especially when the person he was avenging was himself regardless of how legitimate or imagined the injury actually was. “There’s no way that’s going to happen.”
“Sure it can.” Dandy said, tapping the side of the monocle’s frame. “It’s actually pretty cool. This thing’s got a zoom-in feature, infrared, microwave, nightvision, x-ray…whoah, easy, I was kidding about that last one,” he clarified when he saw her cross one arm over her chest and raise the other to strike. “Needless to say, with this little doohickey on my eyeball, finding the killer will be a cinch.”
“There is no killer,” she insisted.
“How would you know?”
To make sure that she gutted that question thoroughly, Pearl briefly reviewed the events of the last few hours. Following an anonymous tip, she, Dandy, and QT had come to this planet in search of a rare infamous alien that had dodged every attempt to capture it so far. Upon arriving, they had followed the trail to this address and discovered that their target was one Calvin Daver. Mr. Daver took finally being cornered at ray gunpoint very well and proved to be very graceful and polite in his defeat. He invited them inside, requesting that he be allowed to talk to his wife and partake in one last meal before his “legend ended”; of course his captors would be more than welcome to join him.
Predictably, Dandy agreed to his proposal. Pearl herself politely declined the offered food and drink – if they were poisoned, that was Dandy’s problem – and waited patiently for the lunch to end so they could get going. At last, having taken his final glass of brandy as an unregistered alien, Mr. Davers waddled over to the room’s mahogany coat rack, grabbed his bowler hat off one of the hooks, put it on his balding feathered cranium, gave them all a warm smile, and then promptly dropped dead on the spot. That had been alarming and would have been just a little bit suspicious if not for the fact that Mr. Daver had been eluding alien hunters for several decades. “Dandy, Calvin Daver was nearly a hundred!”
Dandy snorted, forming a poignant and unintentional contrast to his high-class eyewear. “Says the magic lady that’s several thousand years older than that.”
“W-Well I certainly don’t look it.” Pearl said with a turn of her nose and an unconscious jut of her hip.
“So what? This isn’t about you. This is about Calvin. He might actually look his age and yeah, he’s starting to smell a bit burnt, but he deserves to have his murder solved as much as the next posh, extraterrestrial, albatross guy!”
“It.Was.Not.MURDER!”
“Punctuating those words doesn’t make them true. And shame on you for leaving Mrs. Daver all alone. Who knows? She might be next.”
Pearl thought back to the seven-foot, well endowed, many-eyed, multi-armed gorgon mistress of the estate whose iron hold she was only able to free herself from after she had fallen unconscious. “I’m pretty sure she can take care of herself.”
“How can you be sure about that? About anything?” Dandy asked. “The universe is full of secrets and facades; cons and false fronts; ill-fitting ambiguities for every occasion. The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty. And my Space Inspector instincts are telling me that the only thing that can pierce through this smorgasbord of deception and lies-.” He stood and turned, pointing a finger in Pearl’s direction, his stolen monocle fiercely glinting in the light as he spun. “-Is a Dandy Eye!”
Pearl was almost impressed at how coherent and nigh-thoughtful that had been until the end. “Space Inspector Instincts?”
“Yup, from my time as in intergalactic detective.”
“Last week you were supposedly a ninja.” Pearl reminded, letting her tone all but state that he had been a rather lousy one at that.
“I can be both.”
Pearl was about to say that he could also be neither, when she heard a faint creaking to her left. When she and Dandy looked to where it had come from, they saw QT, part of him obscured by the door he was hiding behind. “Oh, um, Hi Pearl. Hi Dandy,” he greeted.
“Finally, someone sensible I can talk to,” Pearl exclaimed. “QT, would you please come in here and help me convince Dandy that he’s being even more ridiculous than usual?”
“O-okay.” QT wheeled himself into the room. When he fully exposed himself to his crewmates, Pearl immediately regretted asking him to enter.
“QT, why are you holding a knife?” Pearl asked as both she and Dandy began to back away from him. Her fists clenched and one of his hands began to drift to where he kept his blaster. Neither were strangers to killer androids or crazed synthetic beings, and the little robot’s reach often belied his diminutive stature.
“I-it wasn’t me!” QT squealed, waving his hands – and the knife – in front of him. “They were like that when I found them!”
“They?” Pearl asked, oblivious to the widening grin on Dandy’s face.
QT tilted his body forward twice to nod. “While you were getting glomped by Mrs. Daver, Dandy sent me to snoop around for anything suspicious. I thought he was being silly, so I just looked for a phone since the two of you were busy getting hugged and looking at dead bodies,” he whimpered. “And when I finally found one, I tried to call the police, but I couldn’t get a signal because the PHONE LINES HAD BEEN CUT!”
“HAH!” Dandy barked. “That right there is a classic sign of a murder mystery in action!”
“That doesn’t prove a thing!” Pearl shot back. It just couldn’t be a factor in an era where much more advanced forms of telecommunication were available. “A small rodent could’ve gnawed through it before we got here.”
There was a loud autotuned gulp. “A-all of the other phones had their lines cut too.” QT waited for Pearl to counter this piece of information, but she was silent, clearly just as confused as he was. “That’s why I stopped by the kitchen on my way here. C-can’t be too careful, right?”
Pearl sometimes forgot how emotional QT could get. It was fascinating really; she hadn’t known many machines that could mimic feelings to such a degree. “QT, we’re going to need you to calm down. You can put the knife away. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
“Except there probably is.” Dandy insisted, causing QT to whimper and regard every door, window, and shadowy crevice with frantic suspicion.
Wonderful, Pearl thought. Now there was a paranoid robot rolling around the room with a knife. “Why do you want this to be a case of man…bird…manslaughter so badly?” she asked.
“Two reasons,” One of Dandy’s fingers popped up. “First, the pursuit of truth and justice,” a second finger rose. “Next, there might be a substantial reward for the killer’s capture.”
“What if there isn’t a reward?”
“Then we can keep the murderer in the brig for a few months until one comes around. Give him a little taste of incarceration to prepare him for the celestial Sing-Sing.”
“Well isn’t that generous of us.” Pearl grumbled. “Too bad that there isn’t an actual criminal to do that to.”
Dandy made a pronounced noise of disappointment. “I know we just met, Pearl. But trust me on this. My mind is like a bear trap basted in baby oil, slipping through the cramped labyrinthine crevices of confusion, and never letting go of the truth once it gets its big, pointy, greased up teeth around its ankle.”
“That sounds both painful and disgusting,” Pearl said. Though she had to admit, maybe that made it an apt description of Dandy’s headspace after all, sans the finding truth part.
“Hate on the allegory all you want, but the point still stands. With enough information and time, no mystery’s beyond my ability to solve. Why, with just the few clues available to me right now, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that this was murder. Plain and simple.”
“Really?” Pearl was about to argue that just about anyone could make the same claim, but thought of an even better way to disembowel Dandy’s latest delusion of brilliance. “So if I gave you enough data, you could figure out the solution to any problem, correct?
“You got that right. There’s no question I can’t answer.” Dandy said. “See? I just did. Just like that. Easy. So if one ever stumps you, feel free to come to me.”
“Okay,” Pearl lightly bit the inside of her cheek to stop herself from smirking. “What’s the square root of 36,168,196 minus 8?”
The question had come rather fast, but Dandy thought he got the gist of it. He took the straightforward shreds of information he’d been given and ran them through the electric tunnels of his mind. Synapses buzzed and trembled as they rolled the numbers among them, punting them back and forth to shear off babel and excess. This roughly rounded form of the question was then dunked into the greater reservoirs of his intellect for further distilment and stirred lightly with a silver spoon. He waited a few moments before lifting it out of a vast pool of profane ultra dense cosmic knowledge, a heavy and boiling ocean of information. There, free of impurities and now heavily churned, shining like a disco ball star was the answer. Kind of. Truth be told, that’s just how Dandy envisioned the process going. It was really tiring, but with all that mental strain and lack of distraction, what he came up with during his elaborate fantasy must’ve been right to some degree. And so it was, with a complete lack of shame and a triumphant glimmer in his eye, did he point to Pearl and answered,
“The Square Root of 36,168,196 minus 8, of course.”
“I tried to explain, ‘No, I mean, what is 36,168,196 minus 8.” Then he said, ‘I already told you, it’s the square root of 36,168,196 minus 8.’ I tried again, he just said the same thing. I said I wanted the answer, he said that was the answer. I told him I wanted it solved and he said that’s what he did. Then when I told him what it actually was, he goes all indignant on me and says, ‘If you knew what the answer was, then why did you bother asking? Stop wasting time, we’ve got a mystery to solve, baby!’ Simply unbelievable, wouldn’t you agree?” Pearl exclaimed.
Amethyst grunted noncommittally in response. It was unbelievable, deranged, mad even, but having known her for so long, she really shouldn’t have underestimated Pearl’s ability to suck the fun out of pretty much anything. It had started out innocently enough, well, okay, that wasn’t entirely right, but the intent wasn’t explicitly malicious. They had been sailing for a few minutes and things had been quiet. Annoying quiet, Amethyst had thought, but oh how she would do anything to get that back.
Pearl had persisted in gazing at the Aloha-Oe for telltale signs of Dandy trying to escape until Beach City was little more than a blurry outline on the horizon. With nothing left to fixate on and the Slammerhead an indeterminate distance away, she was at a loss. She tried to keep a strong face, perhaps to make up for how hasty and panicked she had been for most of the day, but there was no hiding how fidgety and stressed she felt. Out of boredom, curiosity, and a desire for fresh blackmail material, Amethyst had asked in the gentlest and most concerned tone she could muster, if Pearl wanted to talk about her time with Dandy.
Ideally, Pearl would have tiptoed around the question, Amethyst would have lightly pressed the issue, and Garnet would have assured her that she was among friends and shouldn’t feel the need to hide anything. In her drained and inattentive state, Pearl would let her guard down and then accidentally give away some embarrassing and compromising anecdotes from her short stint as an alien hunter. Amethyst had expected a trickle of information that would gradually grow as time wore on. She had also expected absolute refusal; easy come, easy go. What she hadn’t expected was the flood.
It Came From PLANET MOUTH! That’s what she was going to call the movie. Oh you bet there was going to be a movie. Even if she had to write, direct, produce, star in, film, and distribute it all by herself; there was going to be a movie. If so much as a single person saw it, she’d consider it a success, because Amethyst would know that there was at least someone out there who knew; someone out there who understood the catastrophic monotony that was being trapped on a boat with Pearl and having to listen to her drone on and on and on. Maybe she could trick Connie into screening it.
“I don’t think there’s much to tell, really.” Pearl had said. Famous last words, or to be more accurate, infamous first words. They were just the prelude, the wind-up, the waves pulling away from the shore en masse. “Although, now that you mention it, there was this one time…” was what she said next. That was all the warning Amethyst ever got, because after that one time was another time and another time and another. Before she knew it, she was all ready under, submerged in a torrent of noxious reminiscing.
Conceptually, it shouldn’t have been as bad as it was. Pearl loved space to the point of obsession and from what Amethyst had gleaned from the barrage of self-absorbed yarns, she and Dandy had travelled several parsecs and visited dozens of worlds before they broke up. That was a lot of time and space to have something interesting happen to her, and Amethyst suspected that a lot had. However, that potential was completely wasted in the telling. There was a distinct lack of focus on where they went and what they did, and a heavier emphasis on Pearl expressing her feelings than anything else. Expressing her feelings being a very polite way to phrase that she was endlessly complaining about something Dandy said or did in her presence. Again, this had the makings of something passably entertaining, but that’s where these stories had the tendency to stall. Trying to get Pearl to move on from these points and tell them how the overall misadventure had went resulted in the question reminding her of a totally different episode that she’d immediately jump into.
These tangents that left the stories largely incomplete were far from the only problems with Pearl’s tales of Dandy woe. They had a tendency to jump all across the span of her time on the Aloha-Oe; sometimes prefaced with references, peppered with allusions, and capped off with hints to events that she hadn’t and wouldn’t elaborate on. It was ‘As You Know” ad nauseum, skipping back and forth between the near-beginning and the near-finish with the only consistency being that she wouldn’t tell them how it all started or ended. Amethyst wished she could ask QT about the details Pearl couldn’t – or most likely wouldn’t – give, but the lanky loudmouth had set herself squarely in the middle of the boat, keeping the Crystal Gems and the alien hunters seperated. If either side was to communicate with the other, they’d have to shout over Pearl, which Amethyst had tried to do a few times to get some information out of QT. The robot had tried to answer, but fierce condemning glares from Pearl silenced him whenever he did. Wasn’t that just the way? If Pearl was making an effort keep the lid on her former crewmate, that all but proved that some truly juicy things had happened, but no, they’d be getting none of that if the lanky loudmouth could help it.
However, the biggest offense of all was how Amethyst was apparently the only one suffering under this oratory onslaught. Garnet was too busy trying to use her powers to find the Slammerhead, though she seemed to still be getting a bit of interference from Dandy even at this distance. With no further questions being thrown at him and with all of Pearl’s attentions on her fellow Gems, QT had turned to double-checking and triple-checking his gear; Amethyst suspected that he had a means of switching off his robot ear things or whatever you called them. Meow was fiddling around with his phone, ostensibly to look up information on their target, but he had been smiling way too often for someone who was supposedly working. This left her as the sole member of Pearl’s audience and she had no choice but to listen. What a dark day this was if Pearl’s diatribes were the sounds most worthy of notice, but they were. The waves were dull and the wind was boring, and even if they weren’t, Pearl’s voice would overpower them regardless. Amethyst had settled for trying not to engage Pearl all that much. Being silent had somehow caused her to rant harder, so she came to the conclusion that a few choice and blasé mumbles could ease Pearl back into shutting up and looking dour until they got to the fighting. The pale Gem was all ready winding down from her exhaustive lecture on how to solve the problem she had posited to Dandy and so long as nothing outright provoked her, this could very well be the end of it.
“So was it murder or not?” Meow asked behind her, not looking up.
Amethyst was going to kill him. She would find his neck in that soft, inflated cucumber body of his and get her hands around it the first chance she got.
Shockingly, this didn’t cause Pearl to start talking about something else entirely. “No,” she admitted reluctantly. “Not exactly that.”
“It sort of was though.” QT said.
That got Amethyst’s attention, and incidentally, might have saved QT and Meow’s lives. “Care to explain?” she asked.
“Uh, well, that’s, you could say-,” she trailed off, speechless for the first time in what felt like ages to her shorter compatriot. “The burning smell Dandy mentioned.”
Meow’s eyes never left his phone as he asked, “The one coming off of the dead guy?”
“Yes. That one.” Pearl folded her arms across her chest and looked to the side. If she had bothered to save any money, Amethyst would’ve bet that she was doing this to avoid looking at them than to take a gander at the sea. “It was really odd that he’d smell burnt. Rotten? Maybe. But it hadn’t even been an hour, the inside of the house was nice and cool, and his bowels hadn’t even-.” She grimaced. “-moving on. After we, I mean Dandy, blundered around the house, we thought to reenact Mr. Daver’s final moments.”
“By having me stand in for him.” QT added grumpily.
“You were about the same size.”
“You could have shapeshifted.”
Pearl meekly shrugged. “So we taped the monocle to his visor, went through the motions of the meal, and at the end we took – after a bit of arguing – the bowler hat from Mr. Daver’s cold scalp and put it on QT’s head. Then-.”
“I got shot in the face.” QT interrupted.
“Don’t exaggerate, QT. It was just a highly concentrated beam of light fired from the lens.”
“That got shot into my face.” QT stated.
Amethyst moved a few of her bangs away from her eyes as she considered this. “Wait. Why did the monocle start shooting death rays all of a sudden?”
“It was just the one ray.” Pearl said. “And it only went off after QT put the hat on.”
“It nearly fried my circuits!” the robot exclaimed. “I’m only here today because it barely missed my CPU.”
“Good thing that it did, right?” Pearl gave off a nervous chuckle. “Miss your CPU, I mean,” she clarified.
“Okay,” Amethyst chewed on this latest revelation. “So the hat causes the fancy eyewear to blast whoever’s wearing them both.”
Pearl nodded. “What happened to QT happened to Daver. The beam went directly through his eye and into his brain. It was intense and hot enough that it fatally seared through some very essential parts of his grey matter, but it was so quick and slight that none of us noticed it doing so.”
Hearing about this new and violent dimension to Calvin Daver’s passing brought a grin of morbid anticipation to Amethyst’s lips. “Wow, that’s terrible. Did you find out who set him up? Was it his wife? His best friend? His evil twin?”
“It was Calvin.” Pearl answered stiffly.
“What.” Amethyst and Meow asked.
“Yes, that was our reaction as well when we found out.” Pearl said. “Once we made sure QT was still functioning, we confronted Mrs. Daver about the device and she gave us this outrageous story about how Calvin had some terminal disease and wanted to give a bunch of alien hunters the slip one last time before he died. She claimed that they were the ones who sent the anonymous tip that brought us to them so we’d come all the way there just for Mr. Daver to die and leave us confused and penniless.”
“You didn’t believe her, did you?” Meow asked. “She could’ve just made that all up to get away with lasering her beau.”
“No, we didn’t. Why would we? We said that her story just made her even more suspicious and demanded proof. She told us that she didn’t have much except for some receipts for the hat and monocle in her husband’s name…and a handwritten diary whose final entries corroborated with what she said…and a video farewell to her made the previous day that asked that she not hate him too much for designing such an ego-driven end for himself.”
She didn’t sound like she was convinced by the listed evidence and neither was Meow. “Well she could’ve just forged those herself or had some accomplices fake them.”
“If she had accomplices, then the local constabulary, the district attorney, and several judges were among them since they said that Calvin had warned them of what he was supposedly going to do a few weeks in advance.”
Meow whistled. That would’ve been some racket. He turned to QT and asked, “What happened next?”
QT flicked the brim of his cap up to better look Meow in the eye. “We left. If she was telling the truth, she certainly had a lot of evidence and testimonials backing what she said. And if she wasn’t, eh, it’s not like we could’ve brought her to court what with all the lawyers and justices that supported her story. We didn’t get any reward money, but Dandy considered solving the ‘mystery’ and getting a free meal as a win and called it a day. Never mind the hole in my head,” he bobbed his body in Pearl’s direction. “Thanks for fixing that by the way.”
“Think nothing of it.” Pearl replied, allowing herself a small smile at those words of gratitude.
“Hmmm. So either way, whether it was to troll you guys or get his money, someone blew Daver’s mind. What do you know? Dandy was right all along,” she casually pondered out loud in Pearl’s direction.
“That’s one way to look at it.” Pearl said, voice neutral.
“I guess he’s a lot smarter than you gave him credit for.” Amethyst smirked.
“Smart? Hardly. Witty is what he is. Not intelligent enough to be trusted to do anything useful, but capable of enough thought to irritate.”
Amethyst thought that she could appreciate a level of mental aptitude like that. Then she recognized that a familiar harsh energy had returned to Pearl’s speech.
“Now that you mention it, there was this one time-.”
Amethyst screamed internally. It was starting again. It had been on a decline and would’ve fizzled out, but she had screwed it up.
“-that Dandy finally got around to washing his filthy wardrobe. The odor was – ugh! – you don’t want to imagine the odor.”
It’d be preferable to this, Amethyst thought.
“Then it transpires that he didn’t have any clothes that weren’t covered in dirt and horrible fluids. Save for a pair of glittery….neon…hotpants.”
To Amethyst’s envy, QT and Meow were back to distracting themselves, uncaring or jaded towards the image of their captain walking around their ship in stretchy short-shorts.
“Naturally, after a few of his pants and shirts come out of the dryer, I ask him to put some clothes on. Then he says, ‘Your wish is my command, baby,’ puts on his jacket…and nothing else. For four straight days, that’s all he wore. Thank goodness we eventually landed on that tundra moon.”
The purple Gem was close, so close to snapping. At this rate, she wasn’t going to survive another stupid story.
“That’s what it all boiled down to. Don’t let that lean physique fool you. Dandy’s a slob and a slacker. A completely undependable louse.”
Amethyst blinked. Was she being serious?
“Can you imagine having to live with such a slovenly deadbeat, Amethyst?”
Maybe she was being serious. Maybe Pearl really was just talking about Dandy. Amethyst felt insulted all the same. “Wow, hey guys, don’t you think the wind’s totally phoning it in today? I say we bring out the oars and show the ocean who’s boss,” she said, taking out one of the Gem Sloop’s paddles. “Whadya say, Garnet?”
“I dunno.” Garnet said. “I think we’re going at a pretty swift pace.”
“And when he isn’t being a lazy bum, he’s a pretentious poser.” Pearl continued, ignoring Amethyst’s suggestion. “Acting like he’s all that, but guess what? He isn’t. No matter how often he wears sunglasses indoors.”
Pearl didn’t notice that Garnet was now staring at her.
“We’re going through an asteroid belt and this is an immense, truly IMMENSE, field of supermassive space rocks. Warp drive’s broken – AGAIN! – QT’s at a loss, I haven’t navigated through something like it in a moon’s age. We defer to Dandy – big mistake, I know – ask him what we should do. And he unfolds his arms for the first time in hours and gestures.” Pearl snapped her fingers and pointed them at Amethyst and Garnet. “That’s it. I thought he was intolerable as a loudmouth, but he was just as bad when he tried ‘playing it cool’ by barely saying anything at all.”
“All right.” Garnet had the mast and sail retract into the boat. She picked up the other oar. “Let’s roll.”
“Initiative. I like that. Very good, Garnet.”
“Actually it was Amethyst’s-.”
“I can certainly tell you about someone who barely has any. Which reminds me of this one time-.”
The sloop was launched into the air where it remained for a few dozen feet.
*SPLASH!*
When it landed, Amethyst and Garnet were all ready digging their paddles into the waves for another row. After their oars had found purchase, they pulled again, propelling them over the waves once more. Due to their days serving on a slipshod spacecraft having acclimated them to such turbulence, Meow and QT were silent.
“-that just ain’t Dandy way, he said. What kind of lurid excuse is tha-?!”
The same couldn’t be said for Pearl, whose droning discourse proceeded unhindered and could still be heard outside of one merciful moment.
*SPLASH!*
“-sometimes I think I can still smell the-.”
*SPLASH!*
“-none of which would have happened if he hadn’t elbowed that Yeti’s-!”
*SPLASH!*
“-your fault for putting your tongue there!”
*SPLASH!*
“So is that a ‘no’ on the multiplayer?”
Steven once asked the Gems why they rarely locked the front door. After all, weren’t they worried about being burgled? Pearl said this was because thieves wouldn’t be able to access the innermost depths of the temple anyway due to how its defenses worked. Before she could finish saying such, Amethyst interrupted and claimed that the fearsome and bodaciously spectacular reputation of the Crystal Gems – and Pearl – was more than enough to keep bandits away via sheer intimidation. As the two bickered, Steven snuck away to get Garnet’s perspective on the matter. When asked, she shrugged and said. “Thieves don’t usually break into places where there’s not much to steal.” She didn’t say any more, but Steven understood what she meant.
The Temple was huge and grand, but its protracted existence for several millennia had caused the people of the surrounding counties to grow largely ambivalent of it. As far as they or any burglar knew, there was nothing to see there; just a trio, formerly quartet, of strange angry hermit ladies that didn’t like people very much. And the house, a fairly new addition to the structure, wouldn’t have been a very appealing target either. Honestly, what was there to take? An old TV, some rundown furniture, a couple of well-worn game consoles, a few books, and a number of tacky knickknacks. Hardly the score of the century, and more easily procured from domiciles within the town itself where you didn’t have an ocean in the way of your potential escape if things went pear-shaped.
The Crystal Gems didn’t even really have any money, certainly not enough to constitute a substantial horde. Their disposable income that wasn’t stuffed into piggy banks or stuck between the couch cushions came from several smart long-term investments Pearl and Rose had made over the years just in case they’d ever need human currency. These profits went into paying the bills and rarely made their way into any of their wallets.
True, there was a number of dangerous Gem artifacts and devices in their possession, but practically nobody knew about those. And even if they did, they were help deep within the recesses of the Temple. Ergo protected by what Pearl and Amethyst believed were the primary deterrents to stealing from them. So for the longest time, Steven felt perfectly safe in the open confines of the house.
Until today, because the man on the lower deck of his home wasn’t there to try and break into the Temple or make off with the refrigerator. If Pearl had been telling the truth, Dandy was here for him specifically. With the Gems gone and him trapped indoors by the very barricades they set up to keep Dandy out, the distance to the warp pad seemed to double in Steven’s eyes. “D-Dandy, hey. What’s up?” Steven put down the controller. “How’d you do that?”
Much to his relief and confusion, Dandy was more fixated on looking around the darkened interior of the house than kidnapping him. “Ship’s got a built-in teleporter,” he explained, leafing through one of Steven’s discarded comics. “Say, there a light switch around here? All this poor illuminations starting to get me down,” When his host didn’t answer right away, he turned to look in his direction to see that the boy was halfway down the steps leading up to his bed. “You hungry, Steven? You’re rubbing your stomach a whole lot.”
“Oh that’s just because of-.” Steven rubbed the fabric atop his Gem a little faster, a little harder. If he could activate his shield, he wouldn’t need to get to the warp pad. He could hide out in his bubble until Gems came back. But it just wasn’t coming. He was in danger wasn’t he? Dandy hadn’t attacked him yet, but he was capable of it. Though even if he did manage to get it up, how long would he need to wait for the others? What if they never returned? What if Dandy had a way to break through his barrier? What would stop him from teleporting into his bubble to nab him? Or maybe he’d just teleport them back to his ship. Was it even broken? Pearl said Dandy wasn’t to be trusted, what if he was lying about it not being able to fly? “-it’s just a little indigestion.” His hand fell away and he tried to will his weapon into existence. No luck. “I am a little hungry though. Why don’t you look in the fridge and see if there’s anything there for us to munch on?”
Blinded by the promise of free grub, Dandy didn’t see this for the diversion that it was and set the comic down on the table. “I am feeling a little peckish…” he said as he made for the kitchen. “Though maybe you should go easy on the snacks if you’re stomach’s giving you the runaround.”
A sudden growl stopped him in his tracks.
Steven’s own careful shuffling towards the warp pad came to a halt when he saw Lion awake and staring intently at Dandy. The animal’s features were impassive, but the way he was posed on all fours, head low and hind legs coiled to spring, hinted at an imminent and very feral pounce. Steven bit his lip. Just because he didn’t want Dandy to capture him, that didn’t mean he wanted the guy to get eaten by Lion. Thankfully, that hadn’t happened yet. Lion appeared to be sizing Dandy up, trying to determine if he was due for a thorough mauling. The alien hunter would be fine if he didn’t make any sudden moves or do anything stupid. Like walking to where Lion was, the heavy footfalls of his metallic soles setting the feline further on edge. Or squatting in front of the big cat to look it in the eye, effectively putting a very big and growingly agitated animal in a corner.
“And a good day to you, your majesty.” Dandy greeted in his horribly close and vulnerable position. “Didn’t see you skulking over here. My fault.” Lion continued to growl in spite of this apology.
“I don’t think you should get that close to him, Dandy.” Steven warned. He was so close to the warp pad now. A few more yards and he’d be able to escape to, well, a desolate and dull location of his choice. “You did try to shoot him earlier.”
“That’s practically ancient history, kid. You gotta learn to put that stuff behind you. He tried to kill me, I tried to kill him, he ended up attacking Meow and got half a pizza. Everybody won, Besides, if I was too far away, I couldn’t give him this.” he said as he reached into his jacket. Lion snarled at the gesture, tail whipping dangerously behind him. Carefully, Dandy pulled out a small stick topped with a thick plume of white fluff. “Check it out, big fella,” he said, wagging the miniature feather duster in front of the much less angry Lion. “And that’s not all.” Dandy took both ends of the cat wand and snapped it in the middle. The sudden harsh sound caused Lion to flinch, but instead of breaking, the toy started to give off a brilliant golden glow. To Lion’s further astonishment, the glimmer travelled all the way up to the wand’s tuft of feathers. “Pretty neat, huh?” Dandy asked as the billowy bundle of bristling light arrested Lion’s attentions. Steven was relieved to see his animal companion relax his stance and retract his claws.
Dandy set the glowing wand on the floor, but didn’t let go. He slowly moved it left and right in wide delicate arcs. Lion’s eyes followed the fluffy bulb of light, entranced by the miniature spectacle. The tip of the wand brushed against some of his toes and finding the sensation pleasant, Lion gently brought a paw down to catch it. However, the moment Lion’s paw was about to connect with the wand, Dandy quickly flicked it, causing him to barely miss his target. Lion tried again, carefully watching the wand’s position before he swiped at it, only for Dandy to move it away at the last second once more. He giggled at Lion’s third failed attempt and began to erratically alter the speed of his sweeps. As he waited to thwart the cat’s next effort, he didn’t notice that Lion was no longer looking at the wand, but at him.
Lion studied Dandy’s pleased expression. He looked down at Dandy’s hand, the one waving the wand around, and squinted. Then he started to lift his paw, lifted it higher than he had during his past attempts. He pulled it back as far he could, leaning into it with his torso to bring it up even further. Then he brought it down and slapped Dandy hard on the face and across the room.
*CRASH*
“Hrrrk…” Miraculously, Dandy failed to hit any furniture as he was sent tumbling towards the other side of the house, though the sound of splintering wood indicated that he had caused significant damage to the wall he had crashed into. “Clever…cat…jerk…cat,” he groaned.
Seeing the man he had been so afraid of moments before upside-down and dazed, Steven couldn’t help but laugh, though he did his best to stifle it.
“That’s just plain cruel, kid.” Dandy reprimanded groggily, but what he said next was peppered with notes of dark cheer. “Though I’d probably do the same if this had happened to somebody else,” he admitted as he started to awkwardly kick out with his upturned legs.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get back up,” Dandy answered, attempting another kick. “It’s no good. I think I might be stuck.”
“Do you need any help?”
“Nah. I’ve pulled myself out of tighter spots than this.” Dandy winked. He braced his feet and hands against the wall and pushed, pulling himself free of the wall, but leaving a small hole where his rear had been lodged. “Well,” he said as he got up. “At least we finally got some sunshine in here. Seriously, you guys should really think about investing in a skylight.”
Steven imagined having one of those in the house and he liked what he thought. “That idea doesn’t sound half bad actually,” he stole a glance at Lion, who had taken Dandy’s glowing cat wand in his mouth as he moved it back and forth with his lips like a luminescent makeshift metronome. “I could try getting that back for you, if you like.”
“Eh, it’s fine,” Dandy assured him as he rubbed his slapped cheek. “It was one of Meow’s anyway.”
“Oh.”
While he clearly didn’t see anything wrong with taking one of his crewmate’s possessions without asking, Dandy was quick to recognize Steven’s light dismay at him doing so. “Don’t make such a big deal out of it, Steven. He’s got like a thousand of them stashed around the ship. Besides, I don’t think he’ll want it back now that it’s covered in lion spit.”
“I guess that kinda makes it okay.” Steven said as Lion continued to play with the toy unabated. At least he seemed to be having fun. “Soooooo…um, what brings you here to…the…Crystal Temple? Sh-shouldn’t you be with Pearl and the…uh…others right now?” he asked stiffly, mentally reminding himself that he was just a few feet away from the warp pad if the answer was, ‘TO CAPTURE YOU!’
The response was nothing so succinct. “Well you see, an hour or so ago I got locked in my ship. Couldn’t use any of the exits. At first, I didn’t really mind, less work for me after all. I watched a little TV, but it wasn’t long before I got bored. I thought I’d maybe fire up the old teleporter and beam my way into town for a bit, but then I realized that I didn’t know the locale very well. I gave it a little thought and quickly deduced who’d make for the perfect guide,” he said, pointing to Steven.
“Guide?” Steven had to admit, that sounded a lot better than prey or meal ticket, but it was a lot more confusing. “Why me?”
“Steven, no offense to your Beach City, but little coastal burgs like these are notorious tourist traps, carefully designed to suck a wallet dry until there’s nothing left. To get the most out of my time here I need someone I know, someone I can trust. Someone…like you. ‘Steven Universe,’ I thought to myself. ‘There’s a Gem with a heart of gold. He must know his way around here. He won’t steer you wrong.’ So how about it? I’ll make it worth the trouble.” Dandy offered.
Steven tried not to feel too bad at Dandy’s accusations of honesty. Not telling him the reason he had gotten trapped in the Aloha-Oe wasn’t actually a lie, was it? “If you need someone you know, why don’t you try asking Pearl to show you around when she gets back?”
Dandy shifted his feet, his boots making the subtle motion ring loud and obvious through the house as they scraped across the wooden floor. “Yeah…as nice as she was last time I saw here, I’m pretty sure she still hates my guts.”
“Don’t take that too personally. She hates intestines in general.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” Dandy snickered at remembering that particular hang up of Pearl’s. “Though she’s probably not a big fan of the rest of me either.”
“Why though?”
Dandy’s slouched frame perked up at the question. “She still hasn’t told you?” Steven shook his head. “Figures…you do want to know, don’t you?”
“I guess that’d be neat.” Steven tried to say casually, remembering that earnestness hadn’t worked so well in getting answers from Pearl.
“Not really feeling the enthusiasm from you, but I think it’d still be healthy if I got some of this off my chest,” Steven would’ve been jumping up and down if doing so wouldn’t break his bluff. At last, some answers! “To my trusted tour guide.”
“Oh come on!” Steven demanded, breaking character.
“Heh, so you do care.” Dandy noted. “I’ll tell you what, you show me around town for an hour or two and I’ll tell you all about my previous adventures. Some of them even involve Pearl.”
“This is extortion!” Steven accused with a little too much seriousness.
“It’s business, kid.” Dandy said. “If you really don’t want to know, that’s no skin off my back.”
“Yeah? Well…well why don’t I just ask Pearl about them later?” he challenged.
“You really think she will if you do? She’s managed just fine without telling either you or her Gem pals for eight years.” Dandy reminded, not even looking at Steven as he closed his eyes and rested the top of his index finger to his forehead. “And given how touchy she is about the subject, you just know that the few morsels of info she’ll let you have will be biased, incomplete, or worse, untrue. Whereas I’d be more than happy to talk the talk.”
“Hmmm…” Steven gave this some thought. If he turned away Dandy now, would that mean that he’d have to wait another eight years to get some answers from Pearl? Or would she simply feel no need to give any once Dandy had left? He didn’t think he could deal with not knowing for another day, much less another near-decade. So after a bout of pensive pacing back and forth, Steven said. “Okay! Consider yourself the recipient of the first ever Steven Universe Super Tour! Beach City Edition.”
“Awesome!” Dandy cheered. “Let’s start by you finding us a way out of this creepily fortified house.”
“Why don’t you just teleport us out of here?”
“I don’t want to stress the Aloha-Oe’s energy reserves any more than I gotta. ‘Sides,” he sniffed. “The teleporter’s got a couple of kinks we haven’t quite hammered out yet.”
“What kind of kinks?”
“The kind that pops you 50 stories up from where you wanted to go or gets you stuck in a wall.”
“Yeesh.” Steven grimaced. “A regular break-out it is then.”
“We could try widening the crack I made with my butt.” Dandy suggested. “Got any spare crowbars or battering rams lying arou-!”
*CRACK!*
Both Steven and Dandy jumped at the sound and they turned to its source just in time to see a pink leg and tail slink out of a formerly boarded up window.
“Your lion pal’s got the right idea!” Dandy made his way to the freshly made opening. “Hang on a sec, Steven.” He said as he started to use the metal soles of his boots to sweep away the shards of glass from the sides and bottom of the ruined frame. “I’ll head out first, clear out a path. Shards of glass getting under your toes and between your feet and slippers can hurt like hell.”
As Dandy swung himself over to the other side, Steven took a look at the Warp Pad. A few steps to the right, and he’d be on it. He could flee with Dandy being none the wiser. He’d be safe, if ignorant. It’s what Pearl would’ve wanted.
“Yo Steven! Way’s all clear. You coming?”
Pearl would probably be cross with him if he did, but from a certain point of view, it was technically her fault that Dandy even had the chance to offer him the opportunity. She had failed to keep him witlessly contained, and she wouldn’t want him causing havoc in Beach City if it could be helped. He was practically doing her a favor when he approached the alien hunter and said. “Right behind you, Dandy!”
“Great,” Dandy said as he helped Steven climb out the window. “So about that meal. Any good grub in this town?”
“Well…”
“Buildings.”
“Families.”
“Buildings!”
“Families!”
“BUILDINGS!!!”
“FAMILIES!!!”
“What are you two even doing?” Pearl asked. Ever since Garnet’s restored powers had led them to this spot on the ocean, QT and Meow had been yelling these words to each other nonstop.
QT was the first to answer. “All the data collected on Slammerheads so far strongly suggest that they attack towns so much because they’ve got a taste for ravaging and looting them specifically. Ergo, buildings would make for the perfect bait.”
“Ergo?” Meow spat. “Do you know how pretentious you sound right now? Besides, that data’s got holes in it bigger than the craters these creeps leave behind. I’ve got it on good authority that Slammerheads have a huge crave-on for breaking up families so that the resulting widows, widowers, and orphans try to hunt them down. Then they kill them too. For sport.”
“That’s dumb.”
“No dumber than yours.”
“What rumor mill did you scrape this info out of?”
“Several ask blogs of people who suffered the loss of a loved one to a Slammerhead attack. All of which stopped updating when they each said they were going to go after the beasts that destroyed their families.”
“They might have just been RP-ing.”
“None of the disclaimers said so!”
Pearl grit her teeth. “Irregardless of how dumb either of your ideas for bait are, what does they have to do with those snow globes you’ve been shoving into one another’s faces?” she asked,
The two alien hunters raised their trinkets to give Pearl a better look at them. Meow’s globe had small plastic family playing in the city plaza while QT’s had a miniature model of Beach City amidst a whirl of hokey white flakes. “We got them at a gift shop while we waited for you guys to get back.” QT explained.
“That doesn’t really answer my question.”
“I thought Dandy would’ve told you while we were busy lifting the Aloha-Oe.” Meow said.
“You mean while WE were lifting it.” Amethyst corrected, making sure Meow saw her grip her oar menacingly.
“We kinda loosened it.”
“Barely.” Garnet said as she put her own paddle away.
“Whatever,” the Betelgeusian grumbled. “Anyway, Slammerheads have a weird sense of depth perception. Because it doesn’t take them much time to go from being really far away from their target as they position themselves in orbit to actually colliding with what they want to squash, they don’t really understand the concept of distance,” he pulled back the paw holding his snow globe family. “So they’ve got a tendency to think that something’s far away,” Meow suddenly thrust the globe as close to Pearl’s face as he could manage from where he sat. “When it’s actually just tiny.”
The Gem remained skeptical. “And you’ll just reel it in on the off chance it goes after your souvenirs.”
“I don’t see why not.” QT said, fiddling with his rod. “They’re Leviathan-class poles made with nano-diamondglass fabrication techniques. And we’ve almost kinda practically caught bigger lunkers than most see or nab in their lifetimes.”
“But you didn’t actually catch any of those.” Pearl pointed out.
“Details, details,” Meow said. “Our last near success was literally a once in a blue moon kind of deal. Compared to that, bringing in this wall-eyed dimwit will be a cinch,” a clawed thumb popped out of his fuzzy paw and gestured to the sea behind him. “I mean it’s just somewhere down there, right?”
“Yup. At the bottom.” Garnet said, strapping a pair of goggles over her eyes and around her hair. “The very bottom.”
Meow took a second, more careful look over the edge of the sloop, and saw that the water’s clearness only went so far. A great dimness pervaded the rest. “I can’t even see the regular bottom,” he noted, suddenly thankful for all the extra line QT had insisted they bring along
“That’s why we're leaving the two of you on the boat.” Pearl said. “Neither of you would be able to reach the Slammerhead, let alone see it in all this murk.”
“That’s okay.” QT said. “I might be made of metal, but I’m actually pretty buoyant.”
“And I hate water.” Meow stated.
Amethyst wasn’t about to give the space cat’s latest hypocrisy a pass. “Then why didn’t you just stay at the beach instead of bumming a ride to a place covered with the stuff?”
“Same reason Dandy was gonna,” Meow began. “If the Slammerhead manages to recover and get away from us, I’d rather be as far away from Beach City as possible, if you catch my drift.”
Pearl didn’t want to admit how depressingly prudent this cowardly move was. So she didn’t. “How gallant of you.”
“Cut me some slack. I’m a survivor, not a fighter. Certainly not a swimmer,” And even if he was one, Meow didn’t say. He wouldn’t chance a wet stroll through the merciless primordial melting pots of any world. “That said, how are you guys gonna get down there? I know you don’t need to breathe, but it’ll take forever to swim it.”
Amethyst leapt off the side of the boat and into the water with a shout, free at last. “Wooo!” When she emerged, she smiled at Meow amidst a dusky fibrous pool of her own hair. “Maybe for a Gem,” her form became concealed by a robust purple glow. When it vanished, there was a violet smarmy dolphin in her place. “But not for a fish! Akakakaka!”
“Dolphins are mammals.” QT said.
Pearl sighed as Amethyst guiltlessly flipped and leapt amongst the waves, heedless of this simple fact. “Well that’s more or less the idea. Amethyst and I will go down there in the forms of swift aquatic wildlife to find our mark.”
“What about Garnet?” QT asked, seeing that the crimson Gem had stood up, arms to her sides, her gaze forward and fixed. Then she took a small deliberate hop out of the sloop and sank like an anvil.
“Oh.”
“Damn it.” Dandy swore. Steven winced as the man tugged at the light gun’s cable to try and find a better angle to fire.
Showing Dandy around town had proven to be a little trickier than Steven had anticipated. The biggest difficulty of course, was that he had to stop Dandy from coming within detailed seeing range of the Aloha-Oe, lest he spot what the Gems had done to it. Dandy had parked it a considerable distance from and between the Crystal Temple and the boardwalk, effectively barring a large swath of the Beach from use. Steven had to convince him to take a more scenic route, which was made even longer by his having to avoid his father’s carwash. He wasn’t about to let him find out he was half-Gem now that he knew he was ignorant of that fact.
Restricting as all this was, there were still a number of landmarks and shops available to them; a good thing to, since as laidback as he tried to look, Dandy was a rather restless individual. Thankfully, Beach Citywalk Fries was one such establishment. Mr. Fryman and Peedee were as courteous as always and took Dandy’s presence and fanciful introduction in stride. Coupled with a generous helping of fry bits, it looked like the first stop of the Steven Universe Super Tour was going to be a complete success.
Then Ronaldo showed up. Shoving his father and kid brother side, he reached over the counter and yanked Dandy towards him by the shirt. Steven could still hear him now, “I remember you! You’re the little yellow robot’s ornamental meat slave from the beach!” he had exclaimed with desperate elation. “What’s its endgame?! Who is it working for?! Where are the rest of his fellow infernal machines hiding?! If you’ve got a mind vice stopping you from answering or an injected nanobomb that will explode if you say certain things, BLINK ME THE INFORMATION IN MORSE! OR BINARY! EITHER’S FINE!”
An initially shocked and then gradually irked Dandy didn’t answer or blink. Instead he flicked Ronaldo’s glasses off his nose and into the deep fryer, grabbed the bags of bits, and ran off while yelling, “Blink on that, weirdo!” Unable to think of anything else to do, Steven followed suit minus the jeer, dreading how much of a nightmare this was going to be on his credit.
They pointlessly continued running down the boardwalk for a few more minutes until Steven had them double back and duck into the Funland Arcade. “We can hang around here until the heat dies down,” he had said. “And have a little fun while we wait.”
Dandy was all too eager to partake in what the arcade had to offer and even used several of his recently earned fivers to get them some quarters. He proceeded to acquit himself admirably in every cabinet and game he tried, much to Steven’s astonishment.
The young Gem marveled at the first 200-hit Teens of Rage combo he had ever seen.
“Holy cow! N. Jinson was a cyborg the whole time!”
“Yowch! Dude’s head popped off like a zit on homecoming!”
He joyously cringed at the unprecedented path of destruction Dandy carved out in Road Killer.
“Awesome! Monster Truck Power-Up!”
“They’re gonna need eight lanes to contain THIS!”
And he was wowed by his dancing prowess being more than a match for Rhythm Psycho’s toughest levels.
“I can’t believe it! You’re the new Hitchco*ck of the Walk!”
“Dial ‘D’ for Dandy, baby!”
He didn’t even mind that Dandy was earning more tickets since the guy just gave him all his winnings anyway. And as reams of papery triumph flowed from the redemption games like root beer from a broken soda fountain, Steven was of the mind that Phase Two of the tour was coming along nicely. Then they hit a snag at Dead Manors: Condoverkill. Like the cannibalistic domiciles that littered the game, this arcade shooter was eating up their tokens with rabid fervor. Or rather, they were feeding it quarters every other minute because Dandy seemed incapable of actually hitting anything.
It wasn’t like Dandy wasn’t trying, if anything, he was trying too hard. He kept tilting the plastic pistol at odd angles, jerked his arms in all manner of directions, pulled back from the screen, then went as close to the screen as he could; all in service of getting a better shot. He was currently using the game’s two controllers to dual wield against the game’s second boss, a sluggish bloodsucking barn whose broadside weakpoint managed to avoid getting hit despite its large bloated size and Dandy’s additional weapon. When it was close enough so that it was completely filling their view, Count Barncula opened its fanged doors wide before slamming them shut, sending a purple splotch across the screen, and robbing Dandy of both of his final lives.
“Looks like you bought the FARM, Agent of D.E.D.” the game mocked. “Continue?”
Dandy roared and rapidly fired his twin pistols at the screen, causing the descending numerals to crash down to zero.
GAME OVER
The Department of Exotic Demolitions has fallen to the forces of Unreal Estate…
“Awww…” Steven moaned. “That was the last of our tokens.”
“I didn’t see you helping.”
“You took my controller.”
“Oh right. My bad.” Dandy returned the two light guns to the cabinet’s holsters with a hard shove. “Eh, game was totally unrealistic anyway. Everything was on rails. I couldn’t even take cover. Now if I was allowed to do any of my finely honed advanced firefight techniques, things would have ended very differently.”
“Advanced firefight techniques?’ Steven gasped. “Could you show me some?”
“Get me a few bottles and cans and I’ll do more than show you.”
Steven was more than happy to comply and after riffling through some vacated tables and burgeoning trashcans, they had several pungent and somewhat sticky bottles at their disposal. They took these motley containers out to the beach where they placed them atop a busted pet crate that Dandy had found discarded on a nearby curb. With their improvised firing range all set up, Dandy led them a little over a dozen yards away. Then he turned around, feet and arms set apart, his fingers twitched hungrily for something to grab. Steven held his breath.
Suddenly, Dandy dove forward, rolling across the sand and into a kneeling position, his ray gun at the ready.
“Armadillo!”
He whipped out his blaster, pulling its trigger in the middle of the swing.
“Vaunted!"
He fanned the firearm’s nonexistent hammer no less than seven times.
“Stardust Six Shooter!”
He tossed the weapon into the air and bounced it back into his hand with his foot.
“Ow-ow-ow-ow! Erm-Hacky Zap! Nailed it.”
He leapt sideways and aimed midair.
“Doctor Dove!”
And no true display of gunshowmanship would be complete without:
“Gangsta Style!”
Steven applauded. “That was great!” he said. “But why didn’t you actually fire your ray gun?
“Just saving all the ammo for you, big guy.” Dandy explained as he lobbed the blaster to Steven.
“Whuh?” Steven asked, barely catching it. “Me?”
“Sure. You were mowing down emo architecture like a fiend back in the arcade.”
“That was with video game lasers.”
“And now you get to fire one for real. Lucky you.” Dandy boasted.
Steven thought to tell Dandy that had actually fired a laser before, but feared that this wouldn’t discourage him in the slightest. Then again, why not give it a try? Live out every cowboy, mobster, space marine fantasy he’d ever had with a couple of free shots? He was curious as to what firing beams would be like outside of virtual reality and it couldn’t have be all too different from using his mom’s cannon. Granted, it was a lot smaller, lighter, and more fragile, but the underlying principle ought’ve been the same. “All right. So what’s basic way to fire this?”
“Basic? You don’t need basic. Just skip right to the good stuff I showed you.”
“Shouldn’t I work my way up to that first? Start with a more…normal firing stance?”
Dandy chuckled and shook his head. ‘Steven, the thing about that boring old firing stance is that when you use it, people expect you to always hit your target because of how much accuracy it allegedly gives you. So no one’s very impressed when you succeed and if you miss, you look and feel like an idiot because you had everything going for you. Take a chance to do something a little riskier and more awesome, and then everyone will think you won’t actually hit your mark, but if you do, it’ll be absolutely amazing. It’s simple math, kid. And if you’ve seen Pearl fight at least once, then you really can’t rag on me for my love of dramatics.”
Steven couldn’t deny that Pearl and the other Gems did seem to enjoy posing a whole lot and he thought that Dandy’s reasoning was kind of deep and sensible in a really bizarre and roundabout way. But he also thought of how painful blowing his foot off would be if he did the Hacky Zap wrong. ‘I’d still like to start with the basics please.”
“Have it your way; feet apart, hands on the blaster, shooting arm straight, not shooting arm not so straight, knees bent. Bang Bang.” He quickly acted out each step with palpable disinterest.
Steven mimicked his movements and asked, “Am I doing it right?”
“Possibly, maybe, I wouldn’t really know. I don’t use it that much.” Dandy said apathetically. “Ah, almost forgot,” he snatched the ray gun out of Steven’s hands, popped open a compartment on its stock and slid two metal cylinders into it before snapping the lid shut. “Fresh batteries.” He gave the fully charged firearm back to the kid and switched his attentions to the faraway targets. “Fire when ready, Mr. Universe!”
Steven settled back into position. He now felt calm and confident enough to attempt the shot. He closed an eye and pointed the blaster to a jumbo mouthwash bottle at the center of the lineup. As he was about to fire, Steven recalled that Dandy hadn’t actually taught him how to aim with this thing and there was a question he had seen in a lot of action movies that he had forgotten to ask.
“How do I turn the safety off?”
“What’s a safety?”
*ZAP!*
It is a really bad idea to give an underage youth something like a loaded ray gun. Note that “Like” and “Loaded” are meant to be the two key words in that sentence. Perhaps some might think that “You shouldn’t give weapons to underage youths at all” would be the finer statement, but through strange coincidence or the depraved orchestrations of some demented entity, objects of great power did have a habit of coming into the possession of those barely old enough to drink. Maybe they were rooting through the family attic or exploring a derelict location surrounded in local superstition. The long and short of it is, child finds thing, thing turns out to be a receptacle of might, and then child has to struggle with what to do with it while dealing with their own personal hang-ups.
Enchanted swords, cursed talismans, ancient books, eldritch trading cards, magic wands, and giant robots are among the sort that will forever change that young man or woman’s life and most likely get them hunted by interested parties. Many of these items have infinitely more destructive power than a simple over-the-counter ray gun, but they are still not as dangerous due to several informal ingrained safeguards. For one, they’re hard to come by. Even if you took out the whole “chosen one” factor, not every gangly teen or molting prepubescent is going to have access to Frisbees that can shatter moons. Next, even if there was an endemic of violent godlike pets and railgun robot pals that people would set against one another, collateral damage be damned, there is still a small, but palpable delay between giving the command and having it obeyed. This leads to the final and most significant of these protections, conscious action. Casting a spell, firing up the 8th hyper state of your atom slicer, or even pressing a button to unleash your personal colossi’s ultimate attack takes a modest measure of concentration and thought. While none of these completely eliminate the object’s hazards, they made it so that you’d actually have to try to kill yourself with them.
Contrast those qualities to how ray guns can be purchased fairly easily. You could get one from a vending machine if you were in a rush. Then there are the many thousands of years of research and painful trial and error poured into the pursuit of accurate and expedient eradication, aka closing the gap between pointing at something and making it dead. While the resulting discharges had gotten faster and more deadly, the simple trigger persisted as the most practical method of bridging that gap. Pulling the trigger is easy and there lies the real issue. A finger twitch in the hierarchy of thought out motions is but a miniscule tier above a muscle spasm; a lobbed off arm can do one if you run enough electricity through it. Alien Hunters also made it a point to make the firing mechanism as sensitive as possible in case they needed to make a quick shot. Dandy putting in fresh batteries removed the last of the firearm’s all ready meager failsafes.
So despite what the man said, Steven had every right to be nervous about hurting others or himself with the device. Though accidentally squeezing the trigger might not have been all that disastrous if he had been warned about the blaster's recoil. Of course, he hadn’t, so when his bewilderment towards Dandy’s ignorance of what a safety was caused him to involuntarily pull the trigger, the kickback nearly took him off his feet.
“AUGH!”
“Ow, missed it by a mile.”
The shock he experienced from this made him squeeze the trigger again, releasing another brilliant blue beam of death.
“WHOAH!”
“It’s cool, third time’s the charm.”
Adrenaline and a growing sense of panic made it impossible for him to think of anything else to do, let alone stop, leaving his body no choice but to fire again.
“EHHH!”
“That one came pretty close actually. Keep it up.”
And again.
“AHHHH!”
“The bottles, not the crate, kid.”
And again, with Steven feeling his grip loosening with each shot, barely clinging onto the pistol by his finger. So when it finally did slip out of his hands, he wasn’t surprised so much as utterly horrified. Had the ray gun landed in cushiony sand, those fears would’ve been frivolous. Instead, the back of the weapon fell on the surface of a very hard seashell, putting sudden unwelcome stress on the gun’s shoddily assembled insides and causing it to bounce and fire with reckless abandon.
“Watch out, Dandy!”
Steven rushed to tackle him to the ground and ideally out of the death ray dealer’s sights.
“Get down, kid!
Disastrously, Dandy had the same idea. They ran into one another hard though Steven proved to be the greater force, taking himself and Dandy off their feet. Within moments of them being sent sprawling on the sand, Dandy clutched Steven close to his chest and rolled over so that the boy was between him and the ground. Panic at not being able to see was swiftly overtaken by the realization that Dandy was trying to shield him with his back. He felt something in his belly twist at the notion.
The sounds of laser gunfire were abruptly muffled, but didn’t stop for a full minute. When the shooting finally died down, Steven felt Dandy loosen his hold and pull himself off of him. “You okay, Steven?” he asked as he got up to stand.
Steven took a few deep breaths before saying, “I think so.”
“Great. Whew. Great…On that note, did you do this?” he asked, tapping on something solid behind him.
Steven then noticed that they were surrounded by translucent pink. “Yeah, it’s…it’s one of my powers,” he acknowledged, bewildered that they had suddenly activated after his lack of success back at the house. “I can create shields and bubble barriers.”
Dandy whistled. “Handy,” he ran his fingers over the inner curvature of the bubble. It was smooth and comfortably warm to the touch. “Smart of you to throw it up when you did.”
“Well you did try to protect me first.”
“I’d hold off on the gratitude if I were you.” Dandy warned. “From what I saw while I was covering you up, that cruddy blaster of mine just kept firing upwards and no place else.”
“That’s…that’s good.” Steven said, morbidly disappointed that the lack of actual mortal peril made their attempts at heroism largely unnecessary.
“Hey, don’t get all mopey on me, dude. It still takes serious cajones to put yourself between a laser bolt and some guy you just met.” Dandy was pleased to see this bit of praise chase away the beginnings of Steven’s pout.
“Aw, it was nothing,” he tried to say modestly. “Hey, now that your gun’s stopped firing lasers, I’ll get us out of here so we can continue with the tou-.”
*THUNK!*
They looked up and saw that a small charred object had landed atop the roof of the dome. It slid down the force field, leaving behind a grimy streak of soot. Along the way, its form unfurled to reveal that it was in the possession of a crispily friend wing and the ashen remains of an orange beak. “What the hel-?” The came a second thud, then a third, followed by a fourth, a fifth, and so on, mostly on or around Steven’s growingly useful barrier.
“Maybe you should hold off on popping your bubble, Steven. At least until it stops raining dead seagulls.”
*THUNK!*
“And pelicans.”
The fall and the sudden stop was more than the string could take. Thinned and weary from a day of violent tribulation, it snapped and fell away, taking Dandy’s bogus beard with it. The many glow sticks glued and tied into its fibers created a vibrant multicolored vortex as it spiraled after the grav-cuffs he had managed to slip out of. Even as he desperately clung to the edge of the plank, straining against the pull of the chains that bound his legs, Dandy still found it in himself to feel somewhat sorry to see the bedazzled prop get torn apart by the unrelenting torrential nimbuses of Planet Maelstrom.
Not so much that he wanted to share its fate though. He steeled himself for what he had to do next, grit his teeth, and used every ounce of his remaining strength to pull himself back onto the plank. His limbs scrambled to grasp at the narrow width of the platform so they could anchor the rest of his efforts to board. Alas, the weight of the chains caught up with him and he barely managed to get his chest over before further progress became impossible. He groaned upon feeling the plank’s edge dig into his solar plexus, where it would remain unless he got his second wind or gave up and let go. Trapped, short of breath, he lifted his head away from the faux-mahogany he clutched on the off chance that his fortunes had changed and the guy that had pushed him over it had spontaneously combusted in the interim. The untarnished tie-dye greatcoat and the intact space pirate inside of it told him that Vlak Vart was still very much alive. He hadn’t even moved, and now he was laughing at him. Dandy hated being laughed at.
“Ohhhhh ha ha. Do excuse me, ‘Glowbeard’, but ay was bracing myself for Act Two of yur daring escape,” he explained in his whatever-it-was accent. “To my pleasant surprise and mild disappointment, it seems like yu couldn’t go all the way with it.”
“Still…holding…on…aren’t I?”
“Yee, but fur how much longer?” Vart’s smoke-grey lips parted to flash Dandy an unfriendly, rhinestone-encrusted grin. “This hasn’t been a very gud day fer yu, has it? Yu lost yur ship, yu lost yur crew, yu lost yur stupid lookin’ parrot, yu lost yur weapons, yu lost the synonym swordfighting match that could’ve won that all back, and yu even lost that glitzy beard of yurs to the famished clouds of the thunder wurld below. Not to worry though, yu’ll be joining yur phony facial hair soon enough.”
Dandy heaved as he tried to lift himself onto the plank again.
“Euch. Can’t yu face defeat with a little murr dignity? If yu were a real pirate, yud know I’ve been terribly courteous. Used a tractor beam instead of torpedoes, fed yur pet some of my finest avian delicacies, and despite yur hold being devoid of treasure and yu coming here to poach aliens in MAH TERRITORY, I’m still giving yu a proper seadog’s demise. Mostly cuz ay feel sorry for yu. Came here lookin’ for a beastie that was long extinct. Ay should know. Ay ad the last of ‘em fer dinner!” he laughed. “Additionally, it’d be cruel to run yu through and have yur former cabin bot clean up yur remains. Which reminds me, how goes the waxing, NEW CABIN BOT?!”
“Fine! It’s going fine, Mister Vart!” QT squealed from somewhere Dandy couldn’t see.
“That’s Captain Vart to yu, goldie.” Vart stomped his ivory peg leg onto the deck of the Bleak Fortuity. “And yu best not forget it, lest I keelhaul yu by yur own copper wiring!”
“You’re not going to be his captain for much longer if I can help it.” Dandy groaned. His efforts had won him a few more inches. That made it a little easier to breathe and talk back to this eyesore dirtbag.
“Again with the empty threats. Again with the rrrrrudeness.” Vart tsked. “Forgiving as ay am though, I’m willing to do yu one last favor. A choice as to how yu will fall,” he ran a nail along the guard of his Veebro Saber. “Ay can either walk over there and cut yur arms off with this or…” he pulled a gun on his entrapped audience, and Dandy was furious to see that it was his own. “If an ironic end is what yu desire, I could always shoot them off from here with yur own wee blaster.”
“I’ll show you a ‘wee blaster’, you preening privateer!” Dandy clawed in Vart’s direction.
Had Dandy not been swearing and grunting so loudly, he would’ve heard the faint rustle of cloth and a slight creak as Vart’s peg leg took a step back. “Send you gibbering to yur doom with yur own weapon it is then.” Vart carefully pointed the weapon at Dandy’s reaching arms. “Farewell Glowbeard…or whatever the hell yur actual name was,” he pulled the trigger. Nothing. “What the devil?”
“Having performance issues, MISTER Vart?”
“Yu dare mock me?!” Vart tossed the empty ray gun aside and unsheathed his sword, his eyes full of murder and wounded pride. “I’m Vlak Vart! The most wanted and dangerous space pirate across eight systems! Master and Commander of the Bleak Fortuity!” he started for the plank.
Even enraged and with only one foot to his name, his steps across the platform were confident and controlled, betraying no weakness. Dandy tried to grab his ankle anyway, only to get his hand stepped on by a heavy leather boot loaded with platinum buckles. “AUGH!”
“Yu thought yu were gonna outsmart me? Yu thought yu were gonna beat me?!” he ground Dandy’s fingers under his heel, getting another scream from the dangling deadman. “I’ve been doing this for hundreds of years, killing all that came after me and outliving the rest! A poofy-haired ponce and his fat vacuum? HAH!” Vart boasted as he raised his blade, ready to chop off Dandy’s trapped hand at the wrist. “Yu two never stood a chance!”
“Three,” a cold, feminine voice said from behind him.
“Wha-?!” was as far as Vart got before he was yanked backwards by a powerful pull at the scruff of his shirt. He tried to stab at this phantom opponent, only to be flipped over and slammed onto the deck of his ship.
*SLAM!*
“That was for calling me stupid!” he heard the voice say. Then something he couldn’t see picked him up by the boot and slammed him into the ground again.
*SLAM!*
“That was for putting me in a cage!”
*SLAM!*
“And that!”
*SLAM!*
“And these!”
*SLAM!*
“Are for every-!”
*SLAM!*
“Single!”
*SLAM!*
“Cracker!”
*SLAM!*
“YOU SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT!”
*SLAM!*
*SLAM!*
*SLAM!*
*SLAM!*
*SLAM!*
*SLAM!*
*SLAM!*
Vart’s body, which now had a lot more broken bones and significantly less rhinestone teeth, slid down the mast, the floor around him perforated with face-sized craters.
“And that last one was because I felt like it,” the voice spat.
Dandy was really glad he hadn’t blacked out from the pain or the blood rushing to his constricted legs. True, he would’ve died if he had, but more than that, if he had been unconscious, he wouldn’t have seen one of the “most wanted and dangerous space pirates” in the galaxy get flung and smashed around his ship by an alabaster, orange-crested bluejay a fraction of his size. “That was one grade-A beatdown, matey.” He weakly praised.
The white bluejay flew towards him, shining brilliantly as Pearl morphed back into her humanoid form. “Enough with the ‘matey‘ talk, Dandy,” she demanded as she lugged him over the edge and back onto the safety of the galleon. “I think we’ve had more than enough of that for one day,” she paused at Vart’s defeated and wheezing form. She turned her nose with a “hmph,” and carried Dandy to the main deck of the ship and away from the vanquished captain.
“Thanks for the save by the way.” Dandy said as she laid him down near the chained up Aloha-Oe.
A thank you? From Dandy? That was a first. “You’re welco-.”
“But now you can’t deny that having you disguised as my pet pirate bird didn’t end up working out in the end.” Dandy interrupted. “Sure I wasn’t able to use you as a dart or ninja star or emergency shiv like I thought I would, but the guy got beat. And that’s what matters.”
Ah, that was more like it. Pearl thought. “I would have trounced him sooner if you had let me from the start.”
“I wanted to see if he knew where our alien was.”
“And now we know that he ate it.”
“But he knew.”
“Just shut up and give me your hand,” she gently took the damaged extremity into her palm. A thin bar of light shot out of her Gem and ran over the hand from its wrist to the tips of its fingers. “Nothing broken and he didn’t break the skin. You’ll get some heavy bruising, but not much else,” she assured, finishing her scans.
“There’s some ice in the Aloha-Oe’s freezer. I’ll just put some of that on this after we cut it loose.”
“That should do it. But let’s get these chains off of you first,” she wrapped her hands around one of Dandy’s manacles and squeezed, breaking it apart.
“What? No lockpick this time?”
“I’m in a brutal mood,” she glowered as she got to work on the second cuff.
“Got it, won’t say anything…more?” Over Pearl’s shoulder, Dandy saw that Vart had managed to drag himself around the mast to face their direction. His peg leg was pointing right at them and Dandy could make out that the broken fingers around its shaft were starting to press. “Pearl! Behind you!”
Pearl whipped her head back to assess the danger, but it was too late. As Vart’s leg fired, she was able to determine that the discharge was solid, fast, pointed, and with her hands having just broken the last of Dandy’s restraints, unavoidable. Nothing to do, but brace for the inevitable and hoped she survived it. There was a sickening snap. Pearl blinked.
Just inches from the star on her chest, Vart’s ivory leg hung in the air. As confusion and gratitude at not being impaled by its wicked tip grappled within her for dominance, Pearl saw that the object hadn’t stopped on its own volition as it was being held in place by a long metal arm that extended to her left and all the way up to a familiar minimalistic face.
“Wow, I can’t believe I caught that!” QT exclaimed.
“Where the hell have you been?” Dandy demanded.
QT drew back his arm and began rolling towards his crewmates. “I was getting more floor wax for Captain Vart. When I came back up, I saw him try to shoot you with this and I kind of just reacted,” he gave the leg a little shake. “Not bad for a robot with no depth perception, huh?” QT asked, pointing to the sharpie eyepatch Dandy had drawn on his face.
Pearl giggled. “Good job, QT.” she said, giving his bandana-covered head a gentle rub. “Though I have to wonder why Vart tried to hit me with this of all things. Even if I didn’t know this wouldn’t hurt me that much, a laser blast would’ve made for a more practical attack.”
“Maybe he couldn’t reach his gun.” Dandy suggested.
“Or maybe he just wanted to give you a really nasty splinter.” QT joked.
Pearl chuckled. “Oh you.”
They all laughed.
Then a number of pointy vicious legs burst out from the prosthetic, along with a set of slavering, gnashing pincers among a head of slick tongues as the thing writhed and lashed out in QT’s hand.
It screamed.
The three of them also screamed.
Then it started swearing. “Yu puss-guzzling, numb-loined, log-eyed pack of walking cavities. Ay will murder each and every one of yu!”
“That lack of diction…” Pearl began.
“That barrage of piratey curses.” Dandy started.
“AUGH!!!” QT shrieked. “What is this thing?!”
“Vart?” Pearl and Dandy asked the feral pasty insect at the same time.
“Yeah that’s me. Vlak Vart!” he twisted against QT’s hold with tremendous aggression. “The Marauder of Maelstrom! The Pirate King of All Cosmos! Looter of Wurlds-!”
“The little centipede-looking psycho with a voice way too big for it.” Dandy interrupted.
“If you’re Vart, then who was-.” Pearl tore her eyes away from the cacophonic creature to where the alien it was once attached to lay. “Oh my goodness. Dandy! Look at his body.”
Dandy obeyed and instantly regretted it. “Ugh, gross. It’s all rotten and slimy looking,” he gagged as the flesh on its face fell away and exposed its remaining rhinestone teeth.
“Th-that must be how he did it. Living for centuries…” Pearl speculated. “Stealing the bodies of fellow privateers, taking over their minds, and draining them for all they’re worth until he jumps into the next one,” she scowled at Vart. “And you tried to do that to me?!”
“Would yu look at that. Bird-wench over here’s got a brain after all.” Vart hissed. “Would’ve fixed that for ya if it hadn’t been for this incompetent cabin bot of mine.”
“I’m not your cabin bot anymore, jerk!” QT shouted, earning a fresh series of zealous and unnervingly creepy escape attempts from the parasitic pirate. “Nnuaugh! Would someone please take this thing away from me?!”
“Hang on. Did you say thing?” Dandy asked. “You don’t know what he is?”
“He’s disgusting and horrible and gross and I hate holding him!” QT screamed.
“Yeah, yeah, he’s a morbid little bugger.” Dandy agreed. “But is he registered?”
“I-wait.” QT stood stock still as he looked through his databases. “I don’t think so.”
“Hmm. Hey Mister Vart.” Dandy provoked.
“CAPTAIN!”
“Whatevs. There more of you?”
“I’m one of a kind! Killed the rest of me kin the first chance ay got to thin out the competition.” Vart boasted
“That true?”
Pearl scratched at the area around her Gem in thought. “Maybe it is, Dandy,” she said, taking note of where they were; a space-worthy pirate ship of dark steel and bleak alloys the size of Beach City with only four people on it. “Those ex-crewmates of his back at the salon did tell us he tried to get rid of them so he wouldn’t have to share his loot.”
“Traitorous wretches!” Vart screeched at the mention of survivors. “After me horde, they were. Wanting all of me treasure! The leeches!”
“Strange words from a confessed body thief.” Dandy countered. “And while we’re on the subject of treasure, since we took you down and are currently holding you prisoner…I guess all the gold in your hold belongs to us now.”
“WHAT?!” Vart yelled.
“And with you being the last of your kind, getting you registered will make our new nest egg even larger,” Dandy bragged.
“YOU’LL NEVER GET AWAY WITH IT!”
“You’re absolutely right. Since you’ve been doing this for so long, there’s no way we could fit all your valuables into our ship,” Dandy lamented. “Doy! What was I thinking?” he gave his forehead a playful slap. “We’ll just take yours. Wow, I am really getting the hang of this pirate thing.”
“RRRRRRGH!!!”
“C’mon Cap’n. Can’t yu face yur defeat with a little murrrrrrrr dignity?”
“RkflrkmrfgltprkFDMNK!” Vart babbled.
Pearl’s reaction to this was much more coherent. “Take the whole ship? That seems a little much.”
“Vart built this tub so he could use it on his own. It practically runs itself. And just think of the possibilities. All this cutting edge navigational equipment and firepower at our fingertips will make dealing with the Shatterlite a cinch.” Pearl’s features brightened, as they tended to do whenever Dandy seemed to take a vested interest in the monster she sought. It was time to reel her in. “And don’t you want payback for all those godawful crackers he fed you?”
Pearl wretched at the memory of Vart’s ‘treats’ and what she had had to do to get them out of her. “So soggy and moldy and-and-ugh! I’m in.”
“I call shotgun.” QT said. “Upgraded software, hardware, and everything else, here I come!”
“Fantastic. I hereby rechristen this vessel the S.S. Superfly!” Dandy beamed. “Parking it at the Alien Registration Center might be a little tricky though.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that, Glowbeard.” Vart barked.
“Why’s that?”
“DEAD MEN PARK NO SHIPS!” he shouted, stretching out one of his many legs.
“Hey, look over there.” QT pointed to a small metal band around the miniature limb. “He’s got a tiny communicator. That’s kind of cute.”
“I’ll show yu cute!” Vart screamed as he pressed a button on his bracelet so hard that it cracked its surface.
The S.S. Superfly shook.
“What was that?” Dandy asked.
Vart sneered. “That would be the lifeboats.” The ship shuddered again. This time, the crew of the Aloha-Oe could hear a distant rumble from down below. “And there goes the first engine.”
QT accessed the ship’s network remotely to check on the engines and saw that one of them wasn’t there anymore. Another of them vanished from the system. “He’s blowing up the engines!”
“Not all of them, cabin bot.” Vart said. “About half. Just enough so me old Bleak Fortuity will fall out of orbit. The other half’s meant to go off once it makes landfall to make sure that anything too stupid to die from the heat of reentry, the tireless wispy dynamos they pass through, or the crash itself will be blown to smithereens along with loyal ‘ol Maestrom.”
“You’re insane!” Pearl screamed.
Vart gnashed his pincers at her. “And you’re running out of engines.”
The next explosion was strong enough to floor them. “We got to get out of here!” QT yelled. “The Aloha-Oe’s are only chance!”
“I got it!” Pearl yelled as she ran towards the massive chains that bound the Aloha-Oe to the Bleak Fortuity. Another boom rattled the ship, but she stayed the course and got her hands around one of the man-sized links. She pulled, she clenched, and she tore. Nothing worked. “They’re too tough to break!"
Vart snickered. “You’d have to unlock them from the central control room. If yu hurry, yu might be able to-,” he started to say, but paused as a tremendous detonation sounded from behind them. “Nope. Too late.”
“I can try cutting through them.” Pearl stated, eyeing the chains closely.
“Even if yu got me Veebro Saber, you’d never manage it, bird!” Vart claimed. “Ahahaha, isn’t this grand! A funeral fitting for a Vertex Viking or a wealthy arsonist. In life, I’d never part with any of it. In death, ay never will! Not a single coin, jewel, or prize will fall to anyone else’s hands! They’ll burn before they do! And we’re all going to burn with it! AHAHAHAHAHAHA-!”
“Oh would you please shut up, you grotesque little crook?!” Pearl cast out a cylinder of light from her Gem and grabbed the end of it. At her touch, there was a luminous burst, leaving behind a white spear with a long, pearlescent blade wreathed in curved, glowing steel. She slashed at one of the chain’s links. Its bottom half and the others it was connected to clattered to the floor. She dashed beneath the ship and cut through the bindings on the other side, and leapt on top of the vessel to sweep away the unbound remains of the veebro iron ribbons. The Gem somersaulted off of the craft and next to one of the cable’s restraining the back of the Aloha-Oe, sliced it apart, and with a spin, brought her blade to bear against its twin across the way. “QT!” she yelled, yanking the last ungrounded length of chain off of the transport. “Now!”
“R-right.” QT stuttered. “Lowering the landing platform.”
The bottom of the Aloha-Oe started to descend, but Pearl had all ready leapt onto it. “I’ll start up the ship. Meet me at the co*ckpit! Hurry!” she commanded, jumping further into the ship and out of sight.
It needn’t be said that with Bleak Fortuity about to capsize into a perpetual monsoon after being repurposed as a gargantuan deathtrap with enough explosive power to end a world, Dandy and QT didn’t have much time to spare. Yet even with everything shuddering and shattering all around them, there was still a window of time afforded by the lowering and raising of the platform. Just enough time for the two to look at the unyielding, unbreakable chains strewn around them and attempt to process how that had come to pass.
“Uh,” Vart murmured, equally flabbergasted. “Yu-uh-yu two know she could do that whole knife pulling out of face thing?”
“No.” they both answered.
“Kay.” Vart was almost at a loss for words, but even captured and bewildered, he was still unwilling to break his decades-long streak of always having something to say. Baffled and dazed, he forgot to inject any bravado or malice into his next sentence. It was a sincere statement, and that might be why it cut Dandy and QT deeper than any taunt or quip.
“Ay wonder what else she’s keepin’ from the two of ya.”
To be continued…
