Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, Spira, blitzball, and all related characters and locations are owned by Squaresoft, with the exception of a few original characters who will be noted as such. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Happy new year. You've stumbled onto the beginning of the third and final volume of the Green Eyes trilogy. Again, I've tried to provide as much backstory as possible without getting tedious, but if you're really interested it might help to read "Hey, Green Eyes" and "Green Eyes in Overdrive."
If you're not familiar with Linna yet...hey, no sweat. You will be. *evil laugh* Our story begins about a week before the beginning of Final Fantasy X-2--i.e., two years after the end of X.
Enjoy, everyone.
Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.
Green Eyes Plays Dress-Up
by flame mage
spherechange 1: First Steps
**********
Up until about ten minutes earlier, I was under the impression that there were no such things as different shades of black. Yeah. I thought that until I cracked my grill open and saw the interesting colors my carefully-planned dinner was turning as it burned to a nasty diseased little crisp.
"Cred, my prawns!" I moaned, aiming a Nap Shot 3-quality kick at the grill stand and knocking it into the nearby pool of water. This is bad for the environment, but try telling that to an angry Al Bhed blitzer who's just screwed up Calm Day dinner. Besides, the water's so clean in Besaid that no one really cares about a little charcoal and several badly-cooked fragments of seafood anyway. I hoped.
Calm Day: the anniversary of the day High Summoner Yuna defeated Sin and brought the Eternal Calm--this would be exactly two years before the day I spent ruining perfectly good entrees in Besaid. Besaid: cute little isle in southern Spira where I was spending five days of my work week during the blitz season. And that angry Al Bhed blitzer? Yeah, that would be me.
"Linnnnnniiiiiie! What's that hissing noise?!" And that would be my darling younger sibling Naaga, who I still referred to as "my kid sister" despite the fact that she was eighteen and an entire quarter inch shorter than I was. My real name happens to be Linna, by the way. Don't let 'Linnie' and 'Cap'n LinLin' get to you. I did, until I realized that my chances of stopping them were roughly the same as the chances of anyone getting the Besaid Aurochs to actually win a game before Tidus showed up three years ago.
Tysh, I missed that guy.
Anyway, we were talking about me. Until about two and a half years before this, I'd been a street rat--blitz slang for an amateur blitzer who plays informally with anyone--back Home. Our parents had been killed by Sin when I was ten (my mother, Amirel, had been pretty famous herself as a forward for the Al Bhed Psyches, not to mention as a heavy drinker), and for the next decade Naaga and I pretty much took care of ourselves. A few months before the Calm, I'd joined the Besaid Aurochs as a pinch forward for the Yevon Cup tournament (don't ask how this happened; it's a long story involving a kidnapping plot and a lot of cold weather) and I'd ended up staying. Now, I was twenty-two years old and co-captain of the Aurochs.
"Nothing!" I called back, lying through my teeth. The hissing sound was the steam rising rapidly from the grill as the fire went out. A couple of seriously hardcore catfish nibbled on the jet black catch of the day floating out, then wisely decided that to eat any more would be to take their lives in their fins and moseyed the hell on out of there.
"Well, you better hurry your nothing up already. That stupid gorgeous boyfriend of yours is gonna be here in half an hour and there's not gonna be any domestic bliss around here if someone doesn't come up with something to eat," Naaga called back. She was standing inside my hut in Besaid Village, a place whose name is the ultimate in hyperbole for any location that consists of about eight wooden houses and a temple.
I muttered a couple of choice words about little bimbos who are perfectly fine with hanging around during Calm Day dinner hitting on other people's well-muscled significant others but who couldn't cook prawns if their lives depended on it when it occured to me that: a) I couldn't cook prawns either, b) she was probably doing more of the cooking than I was, and c) If I provoked her, she would probably leave and go find some of my teammates to hit on, and I would be stuck trying to salvage a main course on my own. There are no pizza delivery services on the isle of Besaid. I would be royally screwed. I kept my mouth shut and dragged the grill out of the water. "Got everything under control out here, sis."
"Linnie, quit lying. I already know you messed the whole thing up. That's why your job is the laundry and my job is cooking." Naaga leaned out the window, nearly blinding me with the full force of her several feet of unruly blonde ponytail. "Oh, man, is this some new kind of prawns flambe thing you're doing out here? Remember what happened the last time you tried to set food on fire?"
"Oh, yeah, Miss Organic-Health-Food-Nut-Until-She-Burns-Her-Own-Damn-Cooking-And-Sheepishly-Asks-Her-Big-Sister-If-They-Can-Order-Pizza, like you could grill a prawn."
"Something tells me you will not be adverse to a little potluck?" someone suggested from the doorway. I walked around the side of the hut, jumping carefully over the still-sizzling pool, and got to Rin at about the same time Naaga did.
Everyone knows Rin. He's THE Rin, the Al Bhed travel agency mogul, former blitzer, and sometime gamer. He's also the guy who (sorta) raised me and Naaga. Okay, and he and my mother were involved, but we don't talk about that much.
"Tyssed, Rin, you're early," I growled at him irritably. "We're still in the whole try-not-to-kill-anyone stage of dinner prep."
"Perhaps you should not quit your day job, Secc Linna," he teased me, giving me a hug. "Everyone who lived at Home knows you are destined for greater things than mere cooking. You have to be. While I was there, the fire alarms were set off more times by the smoke in your apartment than the rest of Home combined, were they not?"
"Nice to have a record for something," I muttered.
Naaga tugged on Rin's sleeve. "Where's Miyu? Weren't you supposed to bring her with you?"
Miyu--my best friend. She used to be a Crusader, but these days she was a goalie for the Guado Glories. Rin was supposed to pick her up in Guadosalam and then head to Besaid. "I've no idea," he answered. "When I arrived at her domicile in Guadosalam, I was informed that she has been absent for some weeks now. Have you heard from her?"
"Man, they're just dropping like flies, aren't they?" Naaga asked cheerfully, sounding totally unconcerned. "First Yuna, now Miyu."
"The High Summoner is missing?" Rin wanted to know.
"Yeah, she's been gone for a couple weeks now too. She took off in the night without a word to anyone. No one knows what happened to her, although I like to think she found Tidus and they eloped," I told him.
There was an awkward silence. "Sis...Tidus isn't coming back. He's gone," Naaga said quietly after the pause.
I ran a hand through my hair. "Yeah, I know. C'mon, let's go inside and get Rin a chair and find a place to put whatever delectable gourmet offering he's brought us."
"Egg muffins," said Rin of the delectable gourmet offering.
"Good enough." I spun on my heels and started for the hut.
"Hey, not to be chauvinistic, but you mind getting that door? This stuff's heavier than it looks, even for a bronzed god like me," said another muffled voice. I turned and saw a large stack of passages with arms attached meandering down the path. When I ran around behind it, it had red hair, so I had a feeling I knew who it was.
"Tell me it's food, babe," I greeted the aforementioned 'stupid gorgeous boyfriend,' who apparently thought that carrying packages that probably weighed as much as he did made him macho. Said boyfriend is named Bickson, and he's the captain of the Luca Goers. Along with my buddy Wakka, who'd been mentally and athletically AWOL since his wife got pregnant, I was co-captain of the Goers' biggest rival team, the Besaid Aurochs. Needless to say, this was the cause of slight amounts of friction between the two of us, mainly becase he refused to admit that his team sucked.
"My grandmother's herbal tea and some corn chips, plus Doram's cherry pie and a couple of burgers sent special from my main man Mitza in Luca--free of charge, because he complains that he doesn't get to see stunning celebrities like you enough. The rest of this stuff is Calm Day presents, and I'd kinda like to put them down now. Hello to you too, by the way. I'd say it's nice to see you, but I can't."
Hint, hint. "Okay, c'mere." I took a couple of boxes off the top, kicked the long blue hanging tapestry that served as our door aside, and ushered him inside. He unceremoniously plopped the rest of his stuff next to Rin's offerings on the table.
"So, you want this now or later?" he asked, scooping up a small box and offering it to Naaga. He'd figured out a long time ago that sucking up to Naaga couldn't hurt--despite the fact that my complete lack of culinary prowess irritated her and her borderline obsessive boycraziness irritated me, we were still pretty close.
"Ooh, Bickson, you shouldn't have!" she cooed, giving him a peck on the cheek and smirking at me when he wasn't looking. I cracked my knuckles warningly and she shuffled over to the other side of the room before ripping open the paper and holding up a small pair of red earrings. "I love them!"
"I thought you might. Gotta keep myself in good graces with your sister. Speaking of which..." He handed me a package too. "You've been mentioning this lately."
I took the box, opened it, and immediately sat down and started cracking up. "Tysh, babe, we've been around each other too long. Go get that box on my bed and take a look."
He did and started laughing too. "An identical pair of movie sphere recorders," he chuckled. "That's a little scary."
"Hey, they say to get people gifts you'd want yourself," I told him, picking the recorder up and aiming it at him. "Is it loaded?"
"Yep. Just point and click."
"Smile!" I ordered, pressing the RECORD button.
He grinned and flexed his muscles until I threw a boot at him. Wow, my laundry was still on the floor. I should probably fix that. Naaga, predictably, pounced on the camera and started in on her idol singer routine. I rolled my eyes and turned toward Rin for some sanity. He just smiled complacently and waved.
I turned it off. "Well, that was fun."
Her pop star act having come to a premature end, Naaga pushed Bickson over to my bed. "Here, have a seat or something. I've gotta go outside and...umm...check on the prawns."
I slipped 500 gil into her hand for the pizza as she passed. "Yeah, Rin," I sighed, "you can sit down too."
"Finally," Bickson sighed, sinking down on the bed, "a little peace and quiet. Luca's been crazy lately."
I looked at him with interest. "Yeah?"
"You haven't been there in the last few weeks, huh?"
"I've only gone a couple times since last season ended. What's going on?"
"The same thing that's going on everywhere. Luca is a Youth League hotbed--the urban blitz crowd's pretty young and the nearest temple's in Kilika, so we're their prime demographic. The idiots from New Yevon have been pressuring the sphere networks to broadcast their propaganda. 'One Thing at a Time.' Shelinda's getting desperate to run anything other than ads. Actually, while I'm thinking about that, she wanted to know if she could get an interview with you."
"And you're just the messenger, huh?" I snorted. "Yeah, sure. I always have time to kill."
"Wait. I'm not following this," Naaga interrupted, banging the door as she came back inside. "The Youth League? New Yevon?"
"I take it you are not much interested in politics, Secc Naaga," Rin said gently, then explained, "New Yevon is a religious faction that was formed perhaps a year ago. It is very similar to its old counterpart, with a few minor differences--it is now led by one man, a praetor, instead of four maesters, and it uses machina."
"Which they call machines," Bickson reminded him. "And isn't it led by a chairman?"
"Up until a few days ago, at which point the chairman and his son were forced to leave the party. Rumor has it that they were attempting to seize too much power, but of course it is only a rumor. To continue, the Youth League was formed in opposition to New Yevon. Its members are primarily glorified sphere hunters and ex-Crusaders. The two groups have...well, it's a long story, but suffice it to say that New Yevon has been hoarding sphere records of Spira's history. The Youth League, whose purpose is attempt to discover Spira's true past without the temple's deceit, has been demanding that these records be released to the public. New Yevon refuses, and this is the crux of the argument."
Bickson asked, "So I'm guessing things have been pretty quiet here, right?"
"Unh-huh. Nothing ever happens in Besaid. Wakka's wife has maybe a month left to go in her pregnancy, and other than dealing with that we've all been about as active as a convention of Tonberries." I got up to take the cold food outside to the ice pool. "I'd kill for a little action around here."
"Be careful what you wish for, Secc Linna," Rin warned me as I headed out back. "You might get it."
**********
Translations:
cred, tysh, tyssed - respectively "shit, damn, dammit." Linna seems to curse a lot. -_-;; (Note: henceforth these and "Secc" will be used so frequently I'll probably stop translating them here. Words to know.)
Secc [Linna, Naaga, Miyu, etc.] - Miss [Linna, Naaga, Miyu, etc.]
Happy new year. You've stumbled onto the beginning of the third and final volume of the Green Eyes trilogy. Again, I've tried to provide as much backstory as possible without getting tedious, but if you're really interested it might help to read "Hey, Green Eyes" and "Green Eyes in Overdrive."
If you're not familiar with Linna yet...hey, no sweat. You will be. *evil laugh* Our story begins about a week before the beginning of Final Fantasy X-2--i.e., two years after the end of X.
Enjoy, everyone.
Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.
Green Eyes Plays Dress-Up
by flame mage
spherechange 1: First Steps
**********
Up until about ten minutes earlier, I was under the impression that there were no such things as different shades of black. Yeah. I thought that until I cracked my grill open and saw the interesting colors my carefully-planned dinner was turning as it burned to a nasty diseased little crisp.
"Cred, my prawns!" I moaned, aiming a Nap Shot 3-quality kick at the grill stand and knocking it into the nearby pool of water. This is bad for the environment, but try telling that to an angry Al Bhed blitzer who's just screwed up Calm Day dinner. Besides, the water's so clean in Besaid that no one really cares about a little charcoal and several badly-cooked fragments of seafood anyway. I hoped.
Calm Day: the anniversary of the day High Summoner Yuna defeated Sin and brought the Eternal Calm--this would be exactly two years before the day I spent ruining perfectly good entrees in Besaid. Besaid: cute little isle in southern Spira where I was spending five days of my work week during the blitz season. And that angry Al Bhed blitzer? Yeah, that would be me.
"Linnnnnniiiiiie! What's that hissing noise?!" And that would be my darling younger sibling Naaga, who I still referred to as "my kid sister" despite the fact that she was eighteen and an entire quarter inch shorter than I was. My real name happens to be Linna, by the way. Don't let 'Linnie' and 'Cap'n LinLin' get to you. I did, until I realized that my chances of stopping them were roughly the same as the chances of anyone getting the Besaid Aurochs to actually win a game before Tidus showed up three years ago.
Tysh, I missed that guy.
Anyway, we were talking about me. Until about two and a half years before this, I'd been a street rat--blitz slang for an amateur blitzer who plays informally with anyone--back Home. Our parents had been killed by Sin when I was ten (my mother, Amirel, had been pretty famous herself as a forward for the Al Bhed Psyches, not to mention as a heavy drinker), and for the next decade Naaga and I pretty much took care of ourselves. A few months before the Calm, I'd joined the Besaid Aurochs as a pinch forward for the Yevon Cup tournament (don't ask how this happened; it's a long story involving a kidnapping plot and a lot of cold weather) and I'd ended up staying. Now, I was twenty-two years old and co-captain of the Aurochs.
"Nothing!" I called back, lying through my teeth. The hissing sound was the steam rising rapidly from the grill as the fire went out. A couple of seriously hardcore catfish nibbled on the jet black catch of the day floating out, then wisely decided that to eat any more would be to take their lives in their fins and moseyed the hell on out of there.
"Well, you better hurry your nothing up already. That stupid gorgeous boyfriend of yours is gonna be here in half an hour and there's not gonna be any domestic bliss around here if someone doesn't come up with something to eat," Naaga called back. She was standing inside my hut in Besaid Village, a place whose name is the ultimate in hyperbole for any location that consists of about eight wooden houses and a temple.
I muttered a couple of choice words about little bimbos who are perfectly fine with hanging around during Calm Day dinner hitting on other people's well-muscled significant others but who couldn't cook prawns if their lives depended on it when it occured to me that: a) I couldn't cook prawns either, b) she was probably doing more of the cooking than I was, and c) If I provoked her, she would probably leave and go find some of my teammates to hit on, and I would be stuck trying to salvage a main course on my own. There are no pizza delivery services on the isle of Besaid. I would be royally screwed. I kept my mouth shut and dragged the grill out of the water. "Got everything under control out here, sis."
"Linnie, quit lying. I already know you messed the whole thing up. That's why your job is the laundry and my job is cooking." Naaga leaned out the window, nearly blinding me with the full force of her several feet of unruly blonde ponytail. "Oh, man, is this some new kind of prawns flambe thing you're doing out here? Remember what happened the last time you tried to set food on fire?"
"Oh, yeah, Miss Organic-Health-Food-Nut-Until-She-Burns-Her-Own-Damn-Cooking-And-Sheepishly-Asks-Her-Big-Sister-If-They-Can-Order-Pizza, like you could grill a prawn."
"Something tells me you will not be adverse to a little potluck?" someone suggested from the doorway. I walked around the side of the hut, jumping carefully over the still-sizzling pool, and got to Rin at about the same time Naaga did.
Everyone knows Rin. He's THE Rin, the Al Bhed travel agency mogul, former blitzer, and sometime gamer. He's also the guy who (sorta) raised me and Naaga. Okay, and he and my mother were involved, but we don't talk about that much.
"Tyssed, Rin, you're early," I growled at him irritably. "We're still in the whole try-not-to-kill-anyone stage of dinner prep."
"Perhaps you should not quit your day job, Secc Linna," he teased me, giving me a hug. "Everyone who lived at Home knows you are destined for greater things than mere cooking. You have to be. While I was there, the fire alarms were set off more times by the smoke in your apartment than the rest of Home combined, were they not?"
"Nice to have a record for something," I muttered.
Naaga tugged on Rin's sleeve. "Where's Miyu? Weren't you supposed to bring her with you?"
Miyu--my best friend. She used to be a Crusader, but these days she was a goalie for the Guado Glories. Rin was supposed to pick her up in Guadosalam and then head to Besaid. "I've no idea," he answered. "When I arrived at her domicile in Guadosalam, I was informed that she has been absent for some weeks now. Have you heard from her?"
"Man, they're just dropping like flies, aren't they?" Naaga asked cheerfully, sounding totally unconcerned. "First Yuna, now Miyu."
"The High Summoner is missing?" Rin wanted to know.
"Yeah, she's been gone for a couple weeks now too. She took off in the night without a word to anyone. No one knows what happened to her, although I like to think she found Tidus and they eloped," I told him.
There was an awkward silence. "Sis...Tidus isn't coming back. He's gone," Naaga said quietly after the pause.
I ran a hand through my hair. "Yeah, I know. C'mon, let's go inside and get Rin a chair and find a place to put whatever delectable gourmet offering he's brought us."
"Egg muffins," said Rin of the delectable gourmet offering.
"Good enough." I spun on my heels and started for the hut.
"Hey, not to be chauvinistic, but you mind getting that door? This stuff's heavier than it looks, even for a bronzed god like me," said another muffled voice. I turned and saw a large stack of passages with arms attached meandering down the path. When I ran around behind it, it had red hair, so I had a feeling I knew who it was.
"Tell me it's food, babe," I greeted the aforementioned 'stupid gorgeous boyfriend,' who apparently thought that carrying packages that probably weighed as much as he did made him macho. Said boyfriend is named Bickson, and he's the captain of the Luca Goers. Along with my buddy Wakka, who'd been mentally and athletically AWOL since his wife got pregnant, I was co-captain of the Goers' biggest rival team, the Besaid Aurochs. Needless to say, this was the cause of slight amounts of friction between the two of us, mainly becase he refused to admit that his team sucked.
"My grandmother's herbal tea and some corn chips, plus Doram's cherry pie and a couple of burgers sent special from my main man Mitza in Luca--free of charge, because he complains that he doesn't get to see stunning celebrities like you enough. The rest of this stuff is Calm Day presents, and I'd kinda like to put them down now. Hello to you too, by the way. I'd say it's nice to see you, but I can't."
Hint, hint. "Okay, c'mere." I took a couple of boxes off the top, kicked the long blue hanging tapestry that served as our door aside, and ushered him inside. He unceremoniously plopped the rest of his stuff next to Rin's offerings on the table.
"So, you want this now or later?" he asked, scooping up a small box and offering it to Naaga. He'd figured out a long time ago that sucking up to Naaga couldn't hurt--despite the fact that my complete lack of culinary prowess irritated her and her borderline obsessive boycraziness irritated me, we were still pretty close.
"Ooh, Bickson, you shouldn't have!" she cooed, giving him a peck on the cheek and smirking at me when he wasn't looking. I cracked my knuckles warningly and she shuffled over to the other side of the room before ripping open the paper and holding up a small pair of red earrings. "I love them!"
"I thought you might. Gotta keep myself in good graces with your sister. Speaking of which..." He handed me a package too. "You've been mentioning this lately."
I took the box, opened it, and immediately sat down and started cracking up. "Tysh, babe, we've been around each other too long. Go get that box on my bed and take a look."
He did and started laughing too. "An identical pair of movie sphere recorders," he chuckled. "That's a little scary."
"Hey, they say to get people gifts you'd want yourself," I told him, picking the recorder up and aiming it at him. "Is it loaded?"
"Yep. Just point and click."
"Smile!" I ordered, pressing the RECORD button.
He grinned and flexed his muscles until I threw a boot at him. Wow, my laundry was still on the floor. I should probably fix that. Naaga, predictably, pounced on the camera and started in on her idol singer routine. I rolled my eyes and turned toward Rin for some sanity. He just smiled complacently and waved.
I turned it off. "Well, that was fun."
Her pop star act having come to a premature end, Naaga pushed Bickson over to my bed. "Here, have a seat or something. I've gotta go outside and...umm...check on the prawns."
I slipped 500 gil into her hand for the pizza as she passed. "Yeah, Rin," I sighed, "you can sit down too."
"Finally," Bickson sighed, sinking down on the bed, "a little peace and quiet. Luca's been crazy lately."
I looked at him with interest. "Yeah?"
"You haven't been there in the last few weeks, huh?"
"I've only gone a couple times since last season ended. What's going on?"
"The same thing that's going on everywhere. Luca is a Youth League hotbed--the urban blitz crowd's pretty young and the nearest temple's in Kilika, so we're their prime demographic. The idiots from New Yevon have been pressuring the sphere networks to broadcast their propaganda. 'One Thing at a Time.' Shelinda's getting desperate to run anything other than ads. Actually, while I'm thinking about that, she wanted to know if she could get an interview with you."
"And you're just the messenger, huh?" I snorted. "Yeah, sure. I always have time to kill."
"Wait. I'm not following this," Naaga interrupted, banging the door as she came back inside. "The Youth League? New Yevon?"
"I take it you are not much interested in politics, Secc Naaga," Rin said gently, then explained, "New Yevon is a religious faction that was formed perhaps a year ago. It is very similar to its old counterpart, with a few minor differences--it is now led by one man, a praetor, instead of four maesters, and it uses machina."
"Which they call machines," Bickson reminded him. "And isn't it led by a chairman?"
"Up until a few days ago, at which point the chairman and his son were forced to leave the party. Rumor has it that they were attempting to seize too much power, but of course it is only a rumor. To continue, the Youth League was formed in opposition to New Yevon. Its members are primarily glorified sphere hunters and ex-Crusaders. The two groups have...well, it's a long story, but suffice it to say that New Yevon has been hoarding sphere records of Spira's history. The Youth League, whose purpose is attempt to discover Spira's true past without the temple's deceit, has been demanding that these records be released to the public. New Yevon refuses, and this is the crux of the argument."
Bickson asked, "So I'm guessing things have been pretty quiet here, right?"
"Unh-huh. Nothing ever happens in Besaid. Wakka's wife has maybe a month left to go in her pregnancy, and other than dealing with that we've all been about as active as a convention of Tonberries." I got up to take the cold food outside to the ice pool. "I'd kill for a little action around here."
"Be careful what you wish for, Secc Linna," Rin warned me as I headed out back. "You might get it."
**********
Translations:
cred, tysh, tyssed - respectively "shit, damn, dammit." Linna seems to curse a lot. -_-;; (Note: henceforth these and "Secc" will be used so frequently I'll probably stop translating them here. Words to know.)
Secc [Linna, Naaga, Miyu, etc.] - Miss [Linna, Naaga, Miyu, etc.]