Learning the Game

A Splatoon story by Foxmane

Chapter 1: Marksmanship

The problem with Inkopolis, thought Gelert as he lay on his belly watching the battle for turf that they were losing down below, was that it was too much like the sniper beside him: it would laugh and clap you on the shoulder and say, 'hello, friend!' – and then it grinned and shot you in the back of the head the moment your back was turned.

'Oooh, you almost had it!' the sniper half-sang as the other team's roller, a girl whose beak-points glinted with a green smear of frustration, crumpled into a smudge on the blacktop. She had gone for cover, just in that place, three times now. She had nearly made it on the last.

'Let her think she's gaining ground,' said the sniper. Gelert could not be entirely sure that the sniper was talking to him. 'Makes them mad. Your enemy gets mad, you get more than just time.'

'I should be down there,' Gelert said. He did not try to conceal the agitated warble in his voice. 'We're losing.' And I'm doing nothing but clenching my suckers, he thought.

'No need to champ your beak at me, son,' the sniper replied, still in that singsong way that made Gelert's eyes swim with green irritation.

'I'm an inker,' Gelert spat. His hand shook on the Splattershot that he carried. 'Those were my orders.' He thought of the look the captain had given him when she first looked him over, like he had just oozed his way out of the warm womb of the hatching-cradle. She wasn't even wrong, exactly. How would he ever get another team to give him a chance after this?

'You? Son, not on your life. I take one look at you, I see a backliner if ever there was one.' There was a shot, a whiff of ozone, and across the field, over on the other tower, a white oxford crumpled to the ground. The long-barreled charger which fell to the pavement atop it misfired and blew with the back-pressure, spraying a spatter of blue to the left of the concrete barrier that made up their cover. It made Gelert realize that there had been an excellent line of sight right to his left temple from where he peeped out for a better look. He edged himself closer to the sniper.

'See, that one? Too much starch in his tentacles. That kind, he thinks stiff. To him, charger's not a back-line job. Him, he wants his chance at the front, even if it doesn't do a lick of good to have his boots on the ground. He'd rather be down and drown in his own glory than dawdle back behind, even when that's where's he's bound to be most good, so he tries to go at his own front. He doesn't cover ground, and not his team, neither. He'll be back, but won't have learned a thing. You watch.'

SPLAT! Just like that, and another of those thousand little half-deaths of a turf war was over and done in a moment. The girl with the roller had come back quickly and had rolled one of their own front-liners to a green paste. Gelert heard the feeble cry of the captain's best mate, the boy who had picked at the seam of his brown jerkin – one of the few things that he had been allowed to take with him from the farm – and smiled at him with what he thought must be a kind look.

'What do you call this?' the other boy said, rubbing Gelert's clothing over in a very forward way that he had had to get used to since coming to Inkopolis. He reminded himself, not for the first time, that they just cared more about these things here.

'It's… just what we always wear on the farms. We wear it on market days in the village, too. It's just normal stuff,' said Gelert. 'We wear much better things on Sol's Day.'

'I've never seen clothes like this!' said the other boy, lost in an ecstasy of admiration. He piped an appreciative whistle as he ran his finger along the good stitching of the pointed sharkhide shoes that were still on Gelert's feet. 'You must have dropped a fortune on them!'

Gelert thought of the way the old squids had saved up and eaten cattails and water reeds to buy hand-me-downs for the hatchlings. He looked down at his feet.

'Something like that,' was all that he said.

'Fresh, cousin!' he said, clapping Gelert on the back with a hearty slap. He was not strong, not in the way that work on the farm would get you, lifting feed sacks and trawling nets, but he wasn't weak, either, the way that some Inklings in the city were. Nothing about him stood out, really: he was dressed in loud logos all over, but compared to the captain – an Inkling girl whose tentacles drooped low and fell like a cataract around her shoulders, and who was dressed in skirts of plain, fiery blue, with eyes to match that burned like seawater – there was so much less of him there. Still, he seemed nice, which was a nice change. Gelert had grinned back at him, but the boy just turned aside to the captain. The two shared a brief exchange that was more in glances than with words. Then they turned, together, and smiled, showing Gelert all of their beak-points at once.

'Hey, cousin,' said the captain, putting out her white arm in front of his nose. The umber ink that coursed beneath the outer membrane came out onto the surface and congealed, making four glyphs. 'Read that.'

BLAM! roared the sniper's charger. As if she had been expecting it this time, the girl with the roller dove behind a yellow inflatable barrier so that only her ankle was grazed by the shot. She put her head out long enough, when she knew the sniper must be recharging his weapon, to shake her fist at the tower on their side.

'Cowards!' The word carried, shrill and with a weird, warbling intonation, up over the noise of the struggle. It stung Gelert as if he had been the one shot.

'Had to give that one a scare,' the sniper said between the basso notes of a humming tune. 'Being scared makes squelchers mad.' A few more bars, and the sniper turned his attention back to the fray. A nut-brown boy in a violently pink hoodie and high-tops inking for blue raised his umbrella up over his head with a wordless battle-instinct. The sniper got him through the stomach instead.

There was a patter of feet and a squelching through ink from behind Gelert. He started and turned his head – just in time to see the look of disgust that the captain's mate shot at the two of them, sprawled out motionless on their bellies. 'You'll never ink in this town again, Wommly,' he said, champing his beak at them both. But he did not say anything to the sniper before he had melted down and was coursing back to the battle for the center.

'Wommly,' Gelert had said, not at all certain, squinting at the close glyphs on the captain's arm. What kind of a word was that, anyway? Why did they keep smiling at him like that?

'Say it again,' the captain purred, this time making the glyphs so large that there could be no mistaking them.

'Pretty please, cousin?' said the captain's mate, with something in the word that seemed awfully like a sneer.

'Wommly,' Gelert said, mystified, and wondering what in the world he had done wrong. The captain and her mate could hardly keep their shapes, they laughed so hard. It was a hard laugh, with sharp corners.

'Cousin says "wommly!"' the captain's mate ululated. He struck Gelert on the back again, hard enough to break the membrane. Gelert winced.

'It's woomy, freshie!' howled the captain, hoisting her huge round blasting-pistol onto her shoulder. Gelert only then noticed just how tall she was. 'Hey, cousin. Can you say, "shibboleth"?'

'Sibbolet', said Gelert, with a sinking knowledge that it would be wrong.

Both roared with laughter.

'Don't pay them any mind, son,' said the sniper. 'They're frontliners – they don't think like us. You show them what a good backliner can do.'

Nothing, thought Gelert as the blue team's roller claimed their captain with a brutish swing that sprayed her mate with a fine spatter of green. He saw the numinous glow waft up from where the captain had stood behind a covering wall, trying desperately to retake lost ground, and he felt the illocal pricks of anger and annoyance, full of wordless worthlesses, slug-a-beds, and good-for-nothings as she flickered back to base to take enough ink for a new body.

Nothing. Do-nothing. Good-for-nothing.

It was no way to win a war.

'Oooh, she's a dense one,' said the sniper, clacking his tongue approvingly. One of his shots had spattered the shoulder of the blue team's roller, but she just snarled and went to ink in a patch of blue. 'That's strategy, that is. Give most of your ink to your main frontline weapon for the endgame. Smart move for the final push. You be ready too, son.'

'For what?' Gelert said bitterly, wondering why he had ever listened to the sniper.

'For her.'

The caterwaul of the final minute of the turf roar seemed to come like a thunderbolt from the loudspeakers.

'Wooo-ong! Wong wong!' One minute left, pealed the eerie and un-Inkish voice of the judge. It had been loud enough when Gelert had just come to watch the daily strife to ink a patch of ground that was all Inkopolis ever seemed to think about. It seemed even louder now that he was in one. He jumped into a crouch behind their cover, and his hands wandered and worried over the Splattershot that was in them.

'I have to go,' he said – half to himself, half to the sniper beside him. Now the loudspeakers were broadcasting the countdown. Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. 'We're going to lose.'

'Steady,' said the sniper. He did not move a micron; he may as well have been made of concrete himself, just like the barrier Gelert had cowered behind all this time.

'But what good is it to…!'

'Just wait, son.' And that was all that he said. And without quite knowing why he did – or knowing why he wanted to – Gelert obeyed.

Fifty-six. Fifty-five. Fifty-four

It seemed to Gelert that there was a terrible lot of time to think in the spaces between the numbers of the countdown. You could hear the heated currents of your own ink in the interstitial silences between the full-throated numbers, each one coming with all the sudden force and insistence of a gunshot. Gelert found himself remembering with something like the urgent blear between life and death when one has had a terrible shock.

For the sake of the Flood, why were they laughing at him? What had he done wrong? Gelert's hands clenched to fists so hard that they lost their tone and his palms began to drip his native violet ink down into the wire grate that formed the floor of the waiting room of the broadcasting tower that was the hub of Inkopolis sport. When he noticed, he prayed the Sea that they hadn't, and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. He focused only on breathing, on the gentle feel of oxygen diffusing across his inner membrane, on the itch of the old threadworn scale-fiber jerkin he had worn from the farm – anything at all to think of anything but the looks that they gave him that, no matter how dim or how fresh you were, you could not mistake for anything but a jeer.

Gelert did not hear the door of the waiting-room glide open on its pneumatic track. His throat let loose a garbled yelp before he realized that a hand, not unfriendly and still warm from the sunshine outside, had planted itself firmly on his shoulder from behind.

'Eeyo! Saw there was a first-come room needing a fourth. You little paint-swodges have somebody yet to swish your mantles, or can one old cadger play?'

The first thing that you noticed was that the sniper stank; he had the stale, briny smell of an Inkling who has lived long enough so that his ink flowed slow like paste. Like any Inkling just come into his majority, Gelert hated that smell. Here in Inkopolis, the young Inklings seemed to have their own town-within-a-town and seldom ventured out beyond the outer bounds of hostelries and the metro line. If you went any further, you began to catch a whiff of that briny smell wafting up out of the metro stations as the trains were coming in. It reeked of workaday despair. And the adults, with their stale, stagnant bodies, were content to have the Inkopolis outside. If Gelert had learned anything since coming to the city, it was that this rule just wasn't broken. Not unless you absolutely had to.

Like most adults, he was no taller than they; but he was thin, even to the point of gauntness, and the blank black clingsuit that clung to his legs and arms only added to the impression of wasting; yet neither the jaunty way his purple shirt with its print of white hibiscus flowers hung half-open off his shoulders, nor the way that the light from the room monitor flashed and glinted off his grinning break-points and mirrored sunglasses, nor the way his fingers beat an impatient rhythm on the band of his black-and-purple camo shorts seemed to speak even a whisper of feebleness. There was, instead, a whipcord strength lying just below the surface, and Gelert found himself standing straighter in front of this intruding, stinking adult without even thinking. An old charger rifle, its long black barrel well used but obviously well kept, lay holstered across his back. A pair of brass dog tags hung on a chain that seemed only a little less thin than his neck.

The sniper smiled. Gelert decided, right then and there, he did not like him.

Fifty. Forty-nine. Forty-eight.

The blue team was pushing. There wasn't any room left to question now: they were good. The captain's mate put up a brief, brave firefight against the blue team's sharpshooter at the bottom of the ramps at the base of the green tower, but he was crushed again in the next moment under the blue roller heavy with ink. The blue brute of a girl who swung the heavy weapon as if it were a bit of string laughed lustily, and Gelert heard their own captain burble a curse and dive for safety into a field of green that was slowly but surely being pushed further and further back.

KRAK! The sniper's aim was true again, crumpling a timid boy clutching a sloshing-bucket who had been acting as the blue team's inker, always standing diffidently back with his toes turned in while the blue line advanced.

'Sweet Santa Mare! We'd have had trouble if I'd missed that,' said the sniper with a low whistle.

They had worse trouble, thought Gelert. It was carrying a roller. And from the sound of it, trouble was on the level below, where it knew it couldn't be shot at from a long-range charger.

'We're still losing,' said Gelert. He wondered if the sniper was one of those people who only care about what they want out of a turf war, rather than helping their team win. There had been some like that even back on the farm. Gelert remembered that he hadn't liked them much then, either.

'Then what are you waiting for, son? An engraved invitation? Get on it if you have time to run your mouth!'

Gelert felt the hot flush of anger course through his neck. He had opened his mouth for a riposte when he saw, really saw the field for the first time. He understood, all in moment, what the sniper had been trying to do – and how one lob of a slosher would have undone it all. He had his orders.

Well, why couldn't he have just said it from the beginning? Gelert grumbled to himself as he dribbled himself down the wall, being very careful to keep out of sight of the girl with the roller.

Forty-one. Forty. Thirty-nine.

'You any good, old man?' the captain had asked, rankling her nose at the old Inkling.

'Just awful. Couldn't hit the fat end of a humpback if I spat at it,' the sniper replied, throwing a smirk that showed just what he thought the question was worth.

'Charger, huh?' said the captain's mate, while the captain herself tried to decide, with some apparent difficulty, whether or not she ought to be insulted.

'Best you'll get in Inkopolis, boy. Want my letters of reference? I also do birthday parties,' the sniper said with a weezy laugh that Gelert could see from the frisson of annoyance that twitched below the captain's black mask – if it had been intended for that – had hit home.

'Old man,' said the captain. She closed her eyes as if to calm herself. 'You shoot a good charger, that's fine by me. You deliver, you can splat with us. You don't, you go. That's the rule for everybody. Understood?'

'Hey, I speak threat just as well as I do Inkling. No need to shout.' The sniper's smile did not waver, but the captain turned her back on him.

'Whatever. It's Moray Towers for this game. Just keep them off our base and we'll take care of the rest.'

'Oh, yes, sir!' the sniper shot back with a crisp salute. The captain seethed. Her mate's eyes twitched to-and-fro between the two, and he wrung his hands in the thick quiet that had suddenly filled the waiting room like a thick, clinging fog.

Then there were three loud pips through the speaker, a sucking, metallic sound, and before you quite knew what was happening, the transporter in the room had rattled to hissing, pneumatic life. The image on the screens shifted to a smiling face with lime-green tentacles. Gelert's stomach sank – lime-green was an awful colour if you weren't used to making it. He always felt wrung-out and queasy and in need of a long soak in cool, comfortable purple after trying to go lime-green. He promised himself he would find a quiet corner of the youth hostel later to do just that, even as the sickly, feverish pricks of lime-green spread itself over his body from the top of his head down to his shoes. As the captain and her mate stepped up to the transporter to the match-grounds, he felt uncomfortably like throwing up.

'Hoy,' said the sniper suddenly as the captain was about to drip down into the pneumatic tubes, which were whistling low and steady like a tea kettle. The sniper pointed a long clawed thumb at Gelert. 'What about him?'

The captain crossed her arms over her chest. 'The freshie can play inker.'

'Even beginners can be useful as inkers,' said the captain's mate – which was about as unhelpful a thing as anyone could think of to say. The captain turned her sneer on him for a moment before she fell into the transporter with a sudden splash. The captain's mate hesitated a moment, unsure if he ought to – or perhaps even if he wanted to follow – but duty, or something enough like it won out, and he dripped down into the transporter after her.

'Phew!' said the sniper, staring at the spot they had been moments before. 'She's a doll, isn't she?'

There didn't seem to be any reasonable response to that. Gelert did not hesitate not to give one.

'Anyhow,' the sniper went on, chroming himself over to lime-green without even an apparent drop of effort, 'what about you, son? Got a game plan?'

'No,' said Gelert, who was liking the sniper less and less. The guilty, itchy feeling that he really didn't have a good reason did not help. 'Inking, I guess. It's a turf war,' he added, a little reproachfully.

'You?' Gelert somehow felt the squinting, searching eyes peering at him from behind the blank face of those sunglasses, turning him this way and that to get a look from all angles like a bait-minnow in a bowl.

'Well, what should I do then?' Gelert demanded, growing rather warm. Who did this shriveled old squid think that he was? How dare he! Gelert turned his back to the sniper and began to stomp toward the transporter.

'You? An inker?' the sniper repeated in a voice that bubbled with derision. 'Not a chance, son. Not you. You're meant for better.'

Gelert had been about to drip himself down into the pneumatics. He stopped. 'What?'

'You go out inking will-i nil-i, this team loses. Inking takes brass guts and eyes like a manta, and you ain't got either. Not yet, anyhow.'

The sniper stepped up beside Gelert and beamed his three toothy beak-points at the younger. Without the slouching coral hat bearing a Grizzco logo that was on the sniper's head, the two were less than a mussel beard's different in height. 'Here's what you do: you hang back with me at the base. You watch; you wait; you listen. Your chance will come, son – I'll see to that.'

Thirty-two. Thirty-one. Thirty.

The difficult part, Gelert thought as he swam through the narrow deer-trail the sniper's shot had cut left of center, away from the fracas that was still being played out for the all-important control of the same, wasn't so much the not being seen. He had always been decent at that in the little turf scuffles the hatchlings had been allowed back on the farms. Rather, it was knowing what to do once you got there. Blue's charger hadn't joined the push yet, either. He wasn't nearly as good as the sniper – Gelert had to think it, even if he didn't want to outright say it – but if he spotted Gelert while he was inking the enemy base…

Gelert swallowed. Being splatted wasn't pleasant, no matter how you wanted to lie to make it less awful to yourself. He ducked his mantle up out of the ink, saw nothing, came up from the trail of lime-green and began to run, as low to the ground as he could, spraying the blue-smeared concrete ramps as he ascended.

By now, the captain and her mate on green had rebounded and, in spite of the odds, were still managing to just hold the line. Both chargers were silent: each was waiting on a hair-trigger to push back the opposing line if a push were to come through in the last moments. It was as perfect a stalemate as you would hope never to see in a turf war, Gelert thought as he threw a quick glance toward the embattled center. But try as they might, even two veterans together could not take down the girl in blue with her awful roller – which came down again upon the captain's mate with a squelch and a yawp of bumptious triumph. Gelert shivered, but he kept running.

And because he was rather less aware than one ought be, he ran smack into the back of blue's charger, who coughed in surprise and fumbled his shot. It sailed high, but the sound of the discharge was loud enough to be heard even over the caterwaul of the last-minute countdown. So, too, was his high-pitched yelp of 'help! infiltration!' that erupted out of the boy before Gelert could put his Splattershot to the boy's temple and liquidate him properly. The boy was splatted, too late, and groaned as he melted – much too loud.

A splat! A real splat! In Inkopolis! Gelert wanted to shout from the battle lust that was ripping through him like a shudder that felt far too good to be healthy. He wanted to be sick – he had just splatted someone! Just like that, cool as you please! He knew he didn't have time to wallow in either; the boy's words had been heard. The girl with the roller had seen him. He could see her predatory eyes glaring up at him from out of the blue that covered the center as her mantle gorged with ink, preparing herself to leap upon him. Gelert expected the weighted heft of a roller squelching through the top of his membrane with every gasp of air, which could not diffuse across his membrane fast enough to keep pace with the oily thrum of his heart. 'Just keep inking,' he said firmly as more and yet more of the ramp, blue like a water-course, bloomed into lime-green, as if struck by a sudden algal bloom. Gelert kept running.

Twenty-four. Twenty-three. Twenty-two.

Gelert heard the dull SPLASH of a landing and the squelching CLOP-PAT CLOP-PAT of heavy boots in ink coming up the ramp behind him. He turned – and that was his first mistake. He froze as the blue squad's roller turned her face up to him. She was bloated with ink. The patches of lime-green that clung to her mantle and maroon jacket might as well have been air for all that she seemed to feel them, nor did the lime-green which sucked at the soles of her boots slow her in the least. Then she smiled, furiously, and Gelert could not help staring – which was his second mistake.

Her beak points, one upon the upper jaw, the other its apposite mirror on the lower, were in the wrong places. Her suckers were on the outside of the tentacles that piled up on her head. Her eyes were cruel, hard, listless, merciless, full of malice – all for him. The word, what she was, came like a startled shout inside his head. Octoling. Gelert's heart skipped. The roller-girl was an Octoling!

Sixteen. Fifteen. Fourteen.

Gelert had heard the stories that the old squids told the hatchlings on warm summer evenings after a cull, when the festal songs were sung and each Inkling gave his thanks to the Sea his mother, and prayed for the mercy of that unseen Lord of the Air who had dealt so sternly with the Precursors, and feasted around the bonfires on the runtlings of the fish harvest which were unfit to be sent into the city. There, under the stars, they wove tales of the glories of the Great War over the land and sang the ballad of the Cuttlefish Charge that turned the tide of the battle of Catfish Quay: and with it came the warning tales and beastly horrors of the Octarians, and how at every curl and furl of a tentacle they meant death and torments for Inklings. In every act, in every cruel stratagem, they proved themselves un-squidlike in every heartless way their brains, which went right down into their arms if you could believe it, could possibly devise. And the Octolings were the worst of all.

'It's their laugh – that's the worst of all.' The old squids relished the telling, widening every lurid detail with expansive gestures that made every indulgent smile for the dripping squidlings into the grimace of a monster out of the deeps. 'They save it for when you've got nothing left to shoot back with, and nowhere left to run to. They have ways to only half-splat you. They'll right over your legs and make you watch while they do it. And worse!' And the squidlings keening cries always went up, and they clutched at one another for comfort even if they had heard it all before.

'I don't want to be rolled up!' Gelert bawled. He always hated this part of the stories.

'Hush, you ninny!' said the girl who had clutched at Gelert, because it was the done thing. The way, though, that she was doing her clutching at the ends of her tentacles, which had not yet fully spread into digitopodes, showed that she did not think much of the kind of boy who would go soft listening to old fish-tales. 'It's just a story.'

'And far worse than that did the Octarians do,' said the old squid telling the old tales with a glint in his eye so that he was not a little like an Octoling himself. 'For they were only a hair as smart as a wee little inksquirt like you, but they were as vicious as any Octoling, and never did one of them know how to stop even if you did wave the white flag. That's because each and every one weren't a bit more than one of the Octoling's tentacles clave off and budgin' about on its own, like nothing more than when your milk-beak falls out. Imagine if it up and tried to bite you back!'

Gelert whimpered; he didn't like imagining either one.

'Pooh!' said the girl, thrusting Gelert aside as if he had been a slimy perambulating Octarian himself. 'And I thought boys were supposed to be brave. Anyhow, it's just stories! The Octolings got theirs in the war. It's not like you'll ever see one walking around Inkopolis.' And both she and the old squid had laughed. Another time, in another place, Gelert may have felt like laughing himself that they had turned out so risibly wrong. But not – he gulped – when there was an Octoling hurling up the ramp toward him, who brought up all the old fears of all the old stories screaming into Gelert's ears. He saw his legs being rolled up under him while he watched, while the captain and her mate stood by, and pointed, and laughed – just laughed.

Gelert ran for his life.

'You do not get to fly!' the Octoling bellowed. She bowed her legs and leapt with a frightful energy, swinging her roller like a club heavy with ink and aspergating the whole ramp with a spray of blue that struck the ground like grapeshot, and stung like hail. Gelert was quick enough to squid himself and dive into the green to evade the payload, but his ankles began to throb with the dull, soapy ache of enemy ink the instant he came up again, gulping air across his membrane. He was lame; and the Octoling was still just a few steps behind.

'Hold on!' rang out the voice of the captain's mate – Gelert thought that he must be dreaming – from somewhere up above. And before he quite knew what was happening, the captain's mate had landed at the base of the ramp, below the Octoling, where Gelert had been only seconds before, and threw a bust-balloon bulging out lime-green ink at her, all in one liquid motion. In another moment, he had dropped into a crouch, madly firing his squelcher-pistols at the blue devil.

The Octoling hardly acknowledged the storm of green being thrown at her. She just turned and threw out a sort of smiling snarl, and raised her roller in both hands–

The eyes of the captain's mate went wide. 'Run, cousin!' he yelled. 'Before she–!'

Then there was a wave of blue, a sound like choking, and the captain's mate was gone. Gelert knew that he had been bought seconds by the mate's actions, if that. But – what should he do?

'You next!' cackled the Octoling, whirling her grotesque body around. 'Sneaking little prawngulper!' She raised her roller, bloated with pride, and Gelert founds that his poor legs, which had never been strong, had nothing left to give in the face of this kind of creature.

I am going to be splatted, he thought to himself. In Inkopolis. It was not a comforting notion. Grimly, he raised his Splattershot, determined to go down fighting, to buy a few more seconds for the rest. No matter what, he couldn't just melt and let an Octoling win – what would the old squids think?

Suddenly, the Octoling's head snapped to the side, in the very instant she had been about to swing. There was a flash over on the green tower that had been bright enough to see in the dwindling light. A moment later, Gelert understood: he, too, heard the mechanical whine that cut through the screaming countdown, and he knew what it must mean. It was too far for it to be possible – but he was sure that he saw the sniper wink at him from his perch on the other tower.

'Rat in the corner!' shouted the Octoling in a blind passion, dropping her roller as well as what seemed to be gallons of blue ink from off her as she dove, so uncannily like an Inkling but with a weird, rounded mantle, in a desperate effort to evade the Stingray-brand Pigmalance that ripped, half-tangible, through the concrete where she had stood not a second before. And because not even the sniper could swing a Stingray Pigmalance fast enough for it to matter, as it was rather like trying to shift a barn support with your bare forearm, she might have even got away, swimming through the oleaginous torrent that had only just instants before been herself, had Gelert (who hardly knew what he was doing) not raised the splat bomb that had hung at his waist for the whole match up to his ear. He felt the ink slipping out of his bladder, into his depleted reservoir, and out again into the little tetrahedron like one who stands outside of his own body from habit. The boy who threw it at the angry full of his strength, who screamed a wordless, raging something and took up his Splattershot, and began to chase after his own grenade – that was somebody else. He frightened Gelert a little.

At the sound of the sudden scream, two white sclera peeped out of the cascading blue, darting around for the source. They went staring and wide, then blank and dazed as Gelert's missile struck the ripple where he somehow knew that she must be. She did not see the percussive wave of green that washed over her as the splat bomb beeped, and lighted, and swelled with the internal pressure of the detonator – although perhaps that was for the best.

As for Gelert, even he was only dimly aware of the wild scream that ripped from his throat as he fired every which way, covering every scrap of blue that he saw. The ink in the reservoir on his back ran dry, but he was beyond noting it. He went on in a blind rage, like one of the berserking Krakens of old.

And as for the sniper, he played his part perfectly, picking off every ripple in blue that was being forced farther and farther back as the last seconds dwindled.

Three. Two. One.

'WONG! WON-WONG!'

When time was called, not a soul in blue was moving. Gelert himself only stopped when a well-aimed shot splattered green at his feet. He stopped, rigid, right where he stood – and shook all over.

The Judge had eyes that could gut you right through like a barbed hook, then look at you as if it were your fault that you had bled out such a mess. Gelert had felt his insides squirm whenever the teams who had played in one of the professional matches beamed onto the great monitor in Inkopolis square came to present themselves before the creature, which for the way it apparently thought of every squid as Gelert thought of a slime-mould, may as well have been a little god. It was a funny sort of god, thought, Gelert, who had rolls of fat around its neck.

It did not stop the deep-grained urge to bow to the fat little deity, though, which was like an itch at the nape of his neck. There were some habits that just took time to break.

'Well?' demanded the Octoling, with about three too many vowels. 'The verdict? It is to whom?'

The Octoling had somehow contrived to place herself between the sniper and Gelert as the teams were lining up before the cushioned dais the Judge's handlers had borne up to the field, breaking with what even Gelert knew was iron tradition, if not principle – teams were supposed to stand together. The furious look that their own captain threw at her, from the far end of the lineup, was nearly as cutting as the eye of complete indifference, yet utter scorn that swept over Gelert as the Judge turned toward her.

'Wong,' said the Judge, gesturing with one long, distended claw. It was pointed at Gelert.

'What?' said the Octoling and the captain at nearly the same instant.

'Me…?' said Gelert, blinking. His legs suddenly did not want to hold their tone beneath him. He wobbled.

'Steady,' said the sniper, laying a hand on him to do just that. 'Told you, son. You got bones; I know a backliner when I see one. And sometimes a backliner has to be a frontliner, too.'

'I want a recount!' Gelert thought that it was the Octoling who had spoken – but it was the captain! She had pushed out in front of the line and threw the little Judge into a long shadow of the setting sun. 'There's no way a play like that stunt stole the game!'

'Grrrfft!' snarled the Judge, flashing all of his long, yellowed, and very, very sharp teeth. The captain flinched back. Then the Judge shook his head, slow and grave. 'Wong. Wong wong.' No, there had been no mistake. There could be no mistake. The Judge glowered at the captain out of the caves of puffy fat and fur around his yellow eyes; she seemed to wither in an instant like dulse on the blacktop.

'But… but…' the captain stammered, clenching and unclenching her hands. Then she whirled around on Gelert, and her eyes were dark and wild.

'What do you take me for?' There was something like a glimpse of a knife under the lamplight in the low tones of the captain's voice. It made Gelert cold. 'Do you think I am a fool?' she went on, thrusting a digit into Gelert's neck.

'Hey, he won for you, didn't he?' said the nut-brown boy of the blue team, looking lost and not a little uncomfortable at this turn of events. 'What's the deal?'

He might have been a car in the street below for all the attention the captain paid him. 'Do you still want to play like you're nothing but a minnow turfer? When there are Inklings in this town who gave up everything to be fresh? Do you have any idea how hard I've had to work to make a name for myself in this town? And then you come, dressed in those stale, rotten clothes…!'

'Hey,' said the captain's mate, warningly. 'Easy.' But she ignored him, too.

'And you,' the captain said, rounding now upon the sniper, 'don't think you're off the hook! What are you – pro? Trainer? League Coach? Does it foam you up to make bait out of the amateur leagues? How long have you and he been working on your sick joke? And enough of the chum-chewing grin!'

The sniper just smiled broader than ever. 'Nothing gets past you, does it, sir?' he said with an easy shrug of his shoulders.

'I knew it!' shrieked the captain in bitter triumph. She turned her back on him, then spat a gob of blackish ink onto Gelert's brown, pointed shoes. He stared at it, unable even to think of a response.

'What did I do?' he whispered, feeling empty as could be. 'What could I have done differently?' He said it so quietly that it should have gone no further than his own ears. The Octoling heard it nonetheless; she jolted as if galvanized and stared at the boy beside her, who (it was becoming hard for anyone to ignore it) was probably one more cruel question away from tears.

'I,' announced the captain, with enormous, wounded dignity. 'Have had enough. I hope that you both feel fresh and proud of yourselves. As for me, I,' she snorted, hoisting her arm onto her shoulders, 'am leaving.' She began to stomp off, shoulders set, then stopped, casting a scornful glance behind her.

'Coming?' she said, testily.

'I think,' replied the captain's mate, 'that you and I need to have a talk later.' The captain's beak gawped open for a moment. Then, just as unexpected, the captain's mate put out his hand to Gelert. He flashed a thin smile.

'Good turfing out there, Wommly. And, er… sorry about what I said during the match. Sometimes… um… sometimes people rub off on you. Even when they probably shouldn't. Saler Takoya. Er… my name. Sal or Saler will do. Sorry,' said the boy with a laugh that did nothing to hide his nerves. 'I was never very good at introductions.'

'And I am called Piev!' warbled the Octoling, grasping Gelert's off-arm and pumping it with a violent friendliness. 'It is not often that I am bested. How much a thrill to be splatted in Inkopolis!' And she beamed her wrong beak-points at Gelert in a huge smile. Oddly enough, he did not nearly feel like running.

'Well, when among Salmonids…' the sniper muttered. He did not put out his hand, but pointed at the tags depending from his neck instead. 'Captain Tyros Mirador. Of the Ninety-sixth Coastal Reserve. Charmed, I'm sure. I'd say, son, we've got more than two scales toward a team here between the four of us. What do you say?'

'It is okay?' said the Octoling, suddenly remembering her old teammates. The nut-brown boy just shrugged.

'Hey, it's free play. Do what you like.'

'If you ever feel up for it,' said the blue charger, 'you're welcome to play with us anytime. You were great.'

'Umm… ditto,' said the timid blue inker, seated on his upturned bucket. Even though they had lost, Gelert saw that all of them were smiling.

'Thousand thanks!' the Octoling cheered. Gelert thought that his arm might turn to jelly. He looked around at all the other three, head in a whirl. Beyond them all, the captain stood, dark and glowering. She seemed much taller than she really was for an instant, like a black thunderhead obscuring the sunset. Gelert swallowed and cast a pleading glance at the Judge.

'Wong.' And that was all that he said, though it did not sound unkind. Of course – it was not in his line to judge such things. But at least he would not care about the outcome. He would be the same curmudgeonly little god, no matter what. It was nevertheless, however strangely, a comfort.

Gelert smiled. It was strange and uneasy like a rubber band stretched too taut, or of a man who has forgotten how to be really happy for a long, weary while. He grasped the hand that the other boy had put out (the other was still in the grip of an enthusiastic, and very foreign Octoling). Saler. Piev. And the Captain. He tasted their names, savouring the warm, fresh pleasure it brought. A team?

Well, why not?

'I am Gelert,' he said. Then, after a pause that was only a little too long, he added, 'I am happy to meet you all.'

'And I,' said the captain, 'am Rita del Mare. And I swear that you all will hear my name again. You turncoats,' she snarled. 'I swear, by my own name, I am going to make my name in this town, without you!'

'No, you, sir,' said the Captain – the real Captain, with the same grin that never faded, 'are an ass.'

[Edited 5/31/2019 - Added horizontal line breaks due to import formatting error.]

[Edited 6/5/2019 - Fixed two typographical errors and changed the Captain's name slightly, as it only became fully known to the author more recently.]