So… what now? Yondu had lured us to Terra with a massive sum of Terran money- which now seems very likely to be fake- like ninety percent likely fake- to clean up his abandoned poaching operation? But then he locks us inside? How were we supposed to remove the stuff if he locked us in?
This made absolutely no sense. I remember one of Quill's books he had translated from English to Xandarian for me, something about "when you remove the impossible, what remains, no mater how improbable must be fact," or something. Yondu wouldn't have gone through the trouble of adding watermarks to fake currency, especially if Quill hadn't seen Terran money in decades. No, the probability the money was real was now hovering at around fifty percent. Quill hasn't been home in what, twenty five, twenty six years?
Wait, when did his mother pass away?
"All right, Quill. It's time to fess up." I barked.
"Fess up? About…what?" I could smell Quill sweating like a Chitauri in sunlight, and hear his pulse quicken considerably. He wasn't in on us being locked in this stupid outpost, but he was definitely hiding something from all of us.
I pumped one of the six swivel seats around the table up to its maximum height, and then, using one of the others, jumped up, onto the table, and then sat on the raised seat so I could be at their eye level. Drax, Gamora, and Peter all sat down around; Groot looked forlornly at the door.
"All right, Quill. I know you're not in on getting us locked in here. Your fear is stinking up the room."
"I do not smell anything unusual, friend Rocket. Is this some sort of metaphor?" Drax said, derailing the conversation slightly.
"No, I can actually smell his fear. Terrans and some other species let off sweat and pheromones- you and Gamora don't, not really, but Xandarians and Skrull I can practically smell halfway across a city when they're getting mugged. Hell, I can tell what Groot is thinking just by how much pollen is shooting up my nose.'
'Also, I can hear Peter's heart beating a mile a minute," I paused and added, "His heart beating a mile a minute IS a metaphor. That just means it's very fast." I said, preemptively blocking Drax's next likely question.
"But look," I said, giving Quill an annoyed stare- one he probably didn't even see through the visor. "This whole thing makes no sense. We were clearly lured here with cash. Yondu snarls at us to get rid of his stuff for him but then locks us in here. And Quill," I said, pointing a clawed finer at him accusatorily, "despite not having seen the slips of paper hidden inside of what may very well be fake money, knew exactly when to return to Terra. It was written right on them."
"There… was a date on the slips of paper?" Quill's voice trailed off and all eyes were on him. He wasn't faking surprise.
"Yeah," I replied, crossing my arms. "Look, it's on the sheet marked with a straight line down. The first sheet, most like."
Quill pulled out the twelve papers, and plucked the first one from the stack.
"Where?" he asked. I pointed to the bottom.
"There's nothing there," he said.
"Nothing?" I asked incredulously. He passed the paper off to Gamora, who then passed it to Drax.
"That spot is blank." Drax replied matter-of-factly.
"I am Groot. /Let me see/" Groot spoke, as he gingerly snatched the paper from Drax's hands.
Groot furrowed his brow as much as someone made of stiffer stuff could, and fished his tablet from the side of his body by loosening the vines around it. Groot didn't need pockets. He could always make his own.
With a tendril, he made neat strokes on the screen, then flipped it to face us all when done. He'd drawn out a copy of the slip of paper, Kree writing in the corner and all.
"That's what I see." I said, irritated, pointing to the tablet. "Why can't you three? Ink's pretty much the same color and everything."
"I am Groot. /I think the ink is infrared, Rocket. In our range of sight, but not theirs./"
"Oh, Groot says he thinks the ink's infrared."
Quill started to mess with his headpiece. "Our stuff always has an infrared mode for working at night. Even these should have it," he said, fiddling with the side of the goggles. "Ok. There." He motions for Groot to pass him the paper. "Well, waddya know," he laughs, "Clear as day. Nice eyes, man. But," he adds solemnly, "I haven't got a Skrull's ass of an idea of what this says."
"It's two days from now," Gamora said matter-of-factly, after she glanced at the tablet Groot was still holding.
"Gamora, I don't think Quill knows Kree." I interjected.
"No, I don't," he responded, fiddling with the controls again, probably to turn off the infrared mode. "I can only read English- my own language- and Xandarian, and I speak both plus whatever the Ravagers do- nobody ever named it. It translates just fine spoken normally, but is intelligible with a few clicking and popping noises mixed in when we want to talk among ourselves without being understood. Translators can't pick that up but we all know it, and it screws with translation implants, too." He huffs, indignantly, and cradles his head in his hand, elbow to the table. "So, why would there be a date written in a language I can't read, in ink I physically can't see?"
"Because it wasn't meant for you." I replied, starting to put some pieces together. If I was right, the probability that the money Yondu had given to us being fake just dropped right back down to 0. This stuff was a gift, but disguised in case any of his crewmates overheard him talking from his command center on his own ship or saw him planning it out. Because, damn was this elaborate.
"First off," I said, "you said there is food in here, yeah? Let's eat, and go over what we know. I think I'm starting to understand what that blasted Centurian was actually doing."
"How do we know it has not been tampered with?" piped Drax.
"Because Quill's initial reaction was right. This is supposed to be our base. Or a base. Just, let me eat, okay? Can't think on an empty stomach."
We raided the kitchen. In the storage cabinet were about twenty meal containers with the familiar "irradiated and safe to eat on class 5 planets" symbol, so we could open these without unleashing a viral holocaust upon the local populace.
Irradiated food was hardly better than raw tubers in the taste department, so I also opened up the refrigerator. There was very little on the bottom portion, except for something that made Quill's eyes sparkle. Metal cans. He swiped two of them out of the bottom shelf gingerly, surveyed the rest of the refrigerator, and then kicked to door shut. I couldn't reach the top handle, and assumed it to be just as empty as the bottom, but Quill looked inside anyway.
"Niiiiiiiiiiice!" he almost shrieked. "Actual food. Well, more 'food' than the stuff-they-pass-as-food in the cupboard."
He pulled out some bags and a box from the top cabinet and I felt a rush of cold air fly by. Much colder than it should be. "Hey, guys, if you wait thirty minutes I can make something half-edible instead of marginally edible. Don't know if you'll like Earth food, and trust me, I won't be offended, but at least it won't taste like sawdust."
Groot grunted, in mock offense.
"That is way too cold to be a refrigerator," Gamora remarked, opening the top of the machine. "Is this how Terrans preserve food? Cryogenically? Seems like a waste of energy for foodstuffs. I've never seen it used outside of surgery or for stasis."
"We have canned, freeze-dried and dehydrated stuff too," he replied, fishing for something in the lower cabinets. "But most people here have a freezer- that- and the food doesn't taste as bad as canned. Plus," he said, pointing to something I could not see in the top compartment, "some of our food is actually meant to be eaten frozen. That'll be our dessert. I can promise even if this tastes terrible, that will be good." He pulled out a flat metal tray, and opened up a large black box. He flipped over one of the packages in his hand, and fiddled with one of the knobs on the box with the other while he read the back of the red bag. A controlled fire started in the box and I realized it was a cooking unit. He slammed the door on it shut with his hip while he fished for more things out of cabinets.
For once, the rest of the team was utterly out of his element. Quill was an odd one, with his music and charms, but he knew the galaxy AND he knew this strange planet.
Quill wasn't a bad cook, (that title was a nice tie between Groot- whose taste buds were wired differently from everyone else's - and Gamora- who never learned) but the best was Drax by far. Gamora, realizing that she couldn't really assist, slinked back to a seat.
"Hey," Quill called behind him as he threw a bag to Drax. "Open this, and treat it like fresh red seagrass. Salt is in this," he said, motioning to a canister with a humy girl holding an umbrella.
Salt! That was something we could store and trade. Quill must have been thinking the same thing as he passed the canister. "Huh. This whole thing was only two dollars?" he asked to himself, as he passed the container over and continued to open frozen food.
"And how much did we have again?" Gamora asked.
"Thirty three… thousand…" Quill responded. "Holy shit, guys, we are going to be rich," he added nonchalantly as he continued to cook.
Rich was nothing. Salt was cheaper than dirt on this planet- maybe even literally, I don't know peat prices on Terra. Fifteen thousand canisters of salt that size? People would honestly think it was fake, or that we'd robbed somebody with how much salt we'd have in one place for trading; we'd probably have to sell in small amounts or risk crashing the market.
Salt has always been something everyone needs when traveling for a long time. Not to preserve food anymore, but to at least save it from being horrible. Spices in general are a great trade commodity (why didn't I think of spices?), but salt could be irradiated without loss of taste, so buying it from Terra would not be contraband or diseased. Probably. I can't believe I thought this, but running it by Nova first might actually prevent scuffles or issues if we took that much salt with us.
Thirty minutes later, as promised, Drax was handing plates and tableware to Gamora and Groot. The utensils looked clumsy, pronged spears, small elongated knives, and spoons. At least something was universal. Cups, filled with ice to chill drinks (that was extravagant), and bottles of what was likely water and more of the metal cans were placed on the table, along with two funny shaped red and yellow bottles with what looked to be their caps on the bottom.
Trays of salty smelling food and very, very green vegetables were placed in the center.
"Before we discuss what the flarg is going on here, explanation," Quill said, grinning. "I don't expect you to like anything, so grab one of those irradiated TV dinners if you don't like this. This isn't high class Earth food, and I haven't made anything like it on my own. I was abducted as a kid, remember? Only cooked with…" he paused and cleared his throat.
"Well anyway, I did read the instructions. This stuff is fast food- in a restaurant they'd usually have it to you in five minutes, and like I said, not fine dining. These are chicken nuggets," he said, pointing to the delicious smelling but relatively unappetizing looking brown shapes, "they're, hm, they're pieces of poultry that's been breaded and then baked." He then pointed to other things in turn. "Egg rolls, vegetables in a fried dough shell. Mozzarella sticks, cheese that's been breaded, and it should be okay, it's not cultured, but I wouldn't eat too many to be on the safe side. French fries, cut and salted tubers. Guacamole, a topping for things made of mashed vegetables, you can dip the other things in it, but usually people dip raw vegetables or tortilla chips- that's pieces of thin bread," he said, dropping a stack of thin, circular bread on a plate on the table, "which we don't have, but these are tortillas, which are close enough. The red bottle is ketchup, the yellow is mustard. Don't drink them, you put a little on the chicken or fries. The cans are carbonated sugar water, and the clear bottles are water. Oh, and some broccoli," he said, pointing to the vividly green vegetation, "because the rest of this stuff isn't exactly the best for you, and I don't need a crew tired from binging on junk food. And save some room for desert, there is ice cream in the freezer."
"So Quill, how do we eat this?" Gamora asked quizzically, holding the tiny spear gingerly in two fingers.
Peter picked up one of the thin bread pieces with his fingers and ripped it into small pieces. He then took the tiny spear and slid some of the breaded food onto his plate, then speared several of the green vegetables. They looked like tiny little trees. I swallowed. I did not want to eat an analog of my best friend, even if Groot himself ate vegetation from time to time. He gingerly picked up one of the "egg rolls", which he made no mention of containing eggs (probably an English-to-Kree translation problem), then squirted the red sauce onto his plate. "I don't like mustard," he said, pointing to the yellow bottle, "but you put it on your food in the same way." Lazily, he dipped a piece of poultry into the small pile of red on his plate and bit, then took one of the ripped pieces of flatbread and dipped it in the bowl of green mush. "Like that."
"What is the purpose of the small knife?" Drax inquired. Quill picked the spear in one hand, and the knife in the other, and deftly cut the tree on his plate into bite sized pieces. Groot was nonplussed but it still made me a little uncomfortable.
"Spoon?" I asked.
"For desert. Well, dig in!" That was a metaphor Drax had already gotten used to, and his silence on the matter was a sign that he was learning. I saw from the corner of my eye a small grin on his face as he remembered that it was not a call to actually burrow through the food.
Gingerly, I began picking through the spread, afraid that it would be worse than the interstellar MREs. Not that I doubted Quill's or Drax's ability to cook, but I noticed how much Quill talked down the food. There are very few things worse than having to resort to that packaged crap for sustenance. I should know. I spent most of my time… there…. on them. They provide proper nutrition, calories, and essential vitamins, sure, but they weren't a table full of people you could now call friend dipping into weird green communal vegetable sauces. Groot twisted open a water bottle for himself, and I grabbed one of the sweetwaters in the cans. Might as well go proper native. If I didn't like it, Yondu can bite my ass. He stocked this hut.
Quill wasn't kidding. It was cloying, almost, in how sweet it was. I wrinkled my nose and passed it off to Groot. Sugar water was good for plants, I'd heard. It wasn't throw-up-on-the-leather-interior-of-the-Milano bad, but if we were having a sweet after dinner I didn't want a sweet drink, too. And my stomach was still in knots from the decontamination. I snatched up two of the cheese sticks, which looked a bit too much like small wooden logs, and the chicken. I grabbed a piece of flatbread, too, and copied Quill in shredding it. Quill was right in how lowbrow this stuff was, and it reminded me of bar food I'd had before. Greasy, salty, fried. Some things never do change in the universe- except for the green dip. That was something else. Even Groot, who rarely ate, at least tasted everything and I was pretty sure he would have snacked on the entire pile of small tree vegetables if we let him, given his reaction. Begrudgingly, I added a few to my own plate as well, as we started to piece together the story.
"So," Drax inquired, as he practiced trying to cut food with the unusual Terran tableware. "You think you understand what Yondu really wants." Statement, not a question. Drax and the rest of our team started taking my tactical knowledge as fact, with no condescendence. It was nice to be recognized as an equal among them.
"Well, for one," I responded, in between bites (whatever vegetables were in that green dip, I wanted ten bags of each, and Quill to show me how to make it), "we aren't locked in here at all. We can walk out and leave whenever we want. Yondu did that for show. Someone on his ship probably walked in while he was starting to talk. I think the initial noise and light show was to get a rise out of Quill as a joke, and only that. I don't think anything he said to you three was fake, and what he said to all of us was some very veiled hints."
"Hold on, Rocket. What do you mean, we can just leave?" Gamora asked.
"Quantum, remember?" I replied, tapping the headpiece. "And the wooden door of the room we share didn't have a lock on it. We take the headpiece off and can just walk right out. No weird deadlocked Ravager outpost with the goggles off."
"Hah. Smart," Quill snipped. "He almost made me… ugh, nevermind. So, hints?"
"Well, first I want to know why you waited so long to tell us, and that you knew the right time to come."
Quill was silent and not eating for a good three minutes, before uttering, "Yondu, when he paid out my bounty, told me he left me a gift in my bag. From my mom. He said I might want to pop by and say hi to her a day or two before the anniversary. I thought he'd given me back my Care Bear he'd swiped from my bag when I was first abducted, since it was almost bursting at the seams. I didn't expect him to have filled my bag with cash, and I just sat there, staring at it in my quarter every morning after I'd changed. I didn't look closer at the money, really. Just quickly counted one of the stacks and added up how many there were. I must have grabbed one of the ones without a note inside."
"But I knew as the day got closer, I either had to go back, or just burn it all and move on. In Centurian customs, a kid is supposed to revisit their parent's grave if they can on the 26th anniversary of their death. Celebrating their ascension into the Centurian version of heaven, or something. Yondu certainly didn't know my mom, but he found out the reason why I was such a wreck on his ship the first few weeks. You're also supposed to camp at your parent's burial mound if you can, right after they're… right after they're gone, and he told me once when I was older that he regretted not letting me have that chance."
"Not to be an I-told-you-so sort of dick, but I figured it had something to do with your mom. Centurians take death rituals crazy seriously, especially now that so few still exist. I figure, he's giving you- or rather your mother, through you- a proper memorial. I didn't know you didn't get to have a proper mourning, man, but I'd bet my tail on a spike that even if you were okay with her passing at the time, Yondu would be shooting himself in the foot with that crazy arrow of his if he didn't let you have a proper funeral," I replied. The pieces were definitely clicking into place.
"But that's only half of what Yondu is doing. I think he's trying to settle two of his problems at once," I added, taking a swig from one of the bottles of water. My stomach was already starting to settle, and I reached for another piece of cheese. I'll deal with the horrific repercussions later.
"What would the second issue be?" Drax asked.
"Oh, that one's a little bit more complicated. But, I'm pretty sure it has to do with me."
