We were sold on the way up to the village. It was a long walk, but it was stunning, sloping up the cliff and curving under waterfalls and the towers and walkways of the ruins. Someone - or maybe a lot of someones over the years - had carefully carved posts and strung ropes between them to mark the edge of the path. We passed pools and streams running down from the falls; several of them looked big and calm enough to substitute for a blitz sphere in practice. The view down to the beach was nothing like the Luca skyline, but it had the same kind of heartbreaking beauty. It all felt wild. Even the big roadside shrine seemed charmingly picturesque rather than a reminder that this place was ruled by a religion that hated us, that first time.
It was when we got there that I started to have doubts. Bickson had been exaggerating when he'd said it was just six huts and a temple. But not by much.
A woman stopped on her way from one hut to another and stared at us. "New faces! That's a rare surprise. Who's this?"
"This is Linna, our cap'n while Cap'n Wakka's traveling with Lady Yuna. And her sister, Naaga." Interesting that Letty didn't introduce Bickson, even though I knew they'd played on the same minor league team with Jassu. They'd exchanged a few words on the walk up, but not many. I wondered if it was because Bickson's new team was our biggest rival, or if the former Spirals just didn't talk about those days anymore. Maybe with their old captain dead, they'd rather not dig up the past.
"Oh!" the woman said to me. "From the Yevon Cup. I thought you were Al Bhed."
She knew my name, but she didn't recognize me on sight. It took me a second to piece together what that meant - this place didn't even have a sphere where the villagers could watch the tournament matches. Unless they'd gone to Luca, they probably only found out we'd won when the rest of the Aurochs got back on the boat.
"I am," I said.
"But you look so...normal. Except for your clothes." She was looking at me like she'd expected me to have three heads. As I stared her down in turn through my goggles, she ducked her head in embarrassment and smiled. "Oh, sorry. I'm Jirra. I'm one of the weavers here. I'm sure we'll be seeing plenty of each other, though. It's a small village." She continued on her way and disappeared into the hut.
The first Al Bhed some of these people had ever seen, living right in the shadow of the temple, I thought. With the fabric door flaps, your neighbors two huts down would be able to smell what you had for dinner and laugh at your jokes. In a city like Luca, people around you might hate you on sight, but you could avoid your neighbors, disappear into the crowd, be anonymous. If people hated you here, you'd be confronted by it every day.
"What do you think? Right here, ya?" Letty asked, pointing to an empty space next to the last hut on the right.
I realized we were in the company of the town planning committee. "Yeah, looks good to me. Any objections, Naaga?" I asked.
"Which hut's Jassu's?" she whispered back.
Holy shit. I hadn't even thought of this. "Could you guys excuse us for a second?" I asked, dragging her aside for a private conference. "Okay. Ground rule. Now and forever. You can't date any of my teammates."
"Whyyy?"
"Because I have to work with them, and if you break one of their hearts - " A horrible thought crossed my mind, and I added, " - or multiple hearts, it'll kill the team. And you see how these walls are built? If you break that rule, the whole village will know."
She made a face. "I don't know how I feel about this place anymore."
"You can be the one to pick the fabric colors for the inside."
"Well, maybe it won't be so bad." She looked around. "But these houses are so small. Where are the machina going to fit? I was thinking we could rig up a hydraulic system to pipe up seawater and filter the salt out for drinking."
I shot a fast glance around to see who might've heard. "We can't have any, Naaga. Not just here, but anywhere in Spira. It's not safe, especially right now." Also, the idea that either of us would be equipped to build a system like that even if we could get the parts seemed wildly optimistic. I'd spent a lot more of my formative years thinking about blitz formations than I had paying attention to the principles of hydraulics.
"Maybe we should've gone with Rin. I bet his places have them," Naaga said, a little sulkily.
"Maybe, but they don't have a beach. So we win." I gave her an encouraging clap on the back and turned back to the others. "How do we do this thing?"
It takes three days, all day, the Aurochs explained. More if you don't have an entire blitzball team pitching in. First you have to find the best wood - the right age, strength, thickness, color - and cut it. You start with bamboo to make the inner frame of the hut. Cut it to the right length, then soak and bend the poles to get the curve you need. They don't weld or screw or even nail anything, just built it so the pieces lock together and use rope ties to reinforce the joints. Then trim thinner strips of wood and weave them to create the basis for the walls, followed by a layer of palm fronds on the inside for insulation. After that, the cloth goes on: straight off the loom in wide strips and not seamed together, a brightly patterned weave for the inside and a jade green for the outside, rubbed with a plant oil to protect it against rain and humidity. Several larger, thicker rugs for the floor. Then the large rootlike beams as reinforcement - but they're not roots; they're painstakingly built from tree trunks, cut and shaped to fit perfectly. Last, even brighter fabric cut into decorative triangles over the door and staked to the ground right outside.
Once you've done all that, the real work begins. Then it's time to make the furniture.
You make your own shelves, your own baskets, your own tables and seating and beds. You bend bamboo strips around spheres and hang them for lights. Coming from the hyper-mechanized environment of Home, it was dizzying to think of everything we used in a day and how to make it.
"Well, you kids have fun," Bickson said brightly when the team had finished their explanation. "Where's the nearest hammock? I'm gonna get a cold drink, kick back and watch."
Datto laughed. "No cold drinks here, Goer, unless you wanna go collect 'em yourself from a waterfall."
"Forget it, then," Bickson replied with the sigh of a martyr. "A warm drink would ruin the whole experience. Where do we start?"
"First, Cap'n's gonna go into the shop over there and buy herself a couple of machetes," Letty answered.
"Buy? Doesn't anyone have one I could borrow?" I asked.
"Sure," he said, "but then what're you gonna do when you need one again in three weeks?"
Holy shit. I wasn't sure I even wanted to know what I was gonna need a machete for in three weeks. Trees? Giant bugs? Ritual fights to the death? Gulping, I reached for my wallet and headed into the shop.
"Hey, Linna, pick up the pace! This is good endurance training!" Keepa called back from the front of the stack of beams we were carrying.
The goggles kept the sweat out of my eyes, but the rest of me was absolutely drenched from the effort. These people and their damn distaste for machina! I would've given my firstborn for a winch. "Seriously?" I grunted. "You train to break tackles by carrying trees up hills?"
"'Course! Is there any other way to do it?"
His endurance was almost as bad as mine. if this was how the Aurochs were training, you could see why they'd been the worst team in the league until they'd started recruiting shooters. On the other hand, he was kicking my ass at hauling heavy objects uphill, so maybe there was something to be said for it. The guy was strong as an ox. He might have a powerful shooting leg on him, with a little work.
"What do you do with them up there when you're not building a house?" I gasped out as we finally made it up the hill and dropped the beams like they were on fire. Okay, I dropped them. Keepa set them down easily.
"Carry 'em back down again!" He laughed, already starting down the hill for the next load.
"What the hell's an auroch, anyway?" I asked Letty while we were putting together the frame. Most of us were standing around holding the vertical beams steady while Keepa, who was standing on an ominously creaking wooden chest, brute-forced the joints into the sockets we'd cut to hold them together at the top and Datto followed behind lashing them up. When they finished, the skeleton of the hut should stand on its own while we ran the cross-beams in. Assuming we'd cut everything right.
"Beats me," he answered with a shrug. "That's always been the name."
"Think it might be some kinda snail," Botta suggested.
Datto shook his head. "That's just the logo, idiot."
"Well, if you're so smart, what is it, then?" Botta fired back. Datto suddenly got very interested in the knot he was tying.
"You can't be serious." Bickson, of course, with his voice dripping disgust. Kinda like the drop of sweat on the back of my neck that I couldn't take my hands off the beams to scratch. "How can you possibly not know what your own mascot is?"
"What's a Goer, huh?" Jassu asked.
Bickson snorted. "Honestly, it's like talking to a bunch of children. It should be obvious what a Goer is. Everyone knows - "
"Nope. Bullshit," I said.
"It's - someone who goes!" he spluttered. "Like a go-getter!"
His offended dignity was priceless. Jassu laughed so hard he dropped the two beams he was holding and we had to start over from scratch. Still worth it.
The second time we kept it steady long enough for Keepa and Datto to finish. "All right, guys," Datto said finally, stretching his arms out. "Let it go."
It looked stable enough, but still, not even a single rivet. "You sure it ain't gonna fall apart?" I asked.
He shot me an indignant glare. "Been doin' this since I was the same height as a blitzball. It'll hold. Unlike that guy's," he snickered, jerking his head at Botta.
"Ya damn punks," Botta said sulkily. "One time - "
"Ever wonder how that guy got those scars?" Jassu asked me with a broad grin.
Bickson's muttered suggestion was so hilariously vulgar I couldn't've held on if I'd tried. The beams stayed up. I aimed an experimental kick at the base of one of them. It didn't budge. I tried grabbing the nearest two beams again and shaking - still nothing. Incredible.
"Quit trying to pull the house down!" Naaga's voice called from behind me. She'd just come out of the weavers' hut, where she'd been working all day.
"How was the weaving?" I asked.
"Really cool. Vilucha cut up the wicker for us, and Jirra showed me how to weave the cloth. The looms are all by hand."
"Wow." I knew that, of course. Just hard to believe. Al Bhed'd been using machina to make synthetic fabric forever. But I was more worried about whether she'd gotten the same kind of reaction from her first group of Besaiders that I had - her cheerful words didn't seem to match up with the expression on her face. "They were...okay, right? They weren't being jerks to you at all?"
"No. They were fine. It just - just kinda hit me at the end of the day, you know? They were asking lots of questions about Al Bhed, just trying to be nice, I guess, and I, um - " She ducked her head, but not before I noticed the tears in the corners of her eyes. " - I just realized, this is how it's gonna be from now on. All the people we don't have to explain ourselves to are dead."
I'd already wrapped her up in my arms when I remembered I was sweaty and disgusting. Naaga clung back anyway. But I didn't know what to say. It was true that not all of us were dead. A few of us had made it out; others had been living across Spira like we were now. On the airship, some people had already been talking about rebuilding Home. But it'd take years if it happened at all, and even then, no guarantees there'd be enough of us left to sustain a population. She was right, and so I couldn't come up with any kind of response but to hold her.
That was when Keepa did something very kind. "Naaga, right. You blitz?" he asked, setting a gentle hand on her arm. She shook her head. "You wanna learn?"
She let go of me, sniffling a little. "I can't hold my breath for that long." She'd been young enough to miss out on the enforced practice regimen a la Amirel I'd had to undergo, and she hadn't had the patience as a kid for all the hours of practice I'd put in.
"S'okay. We play on the beach all the time," Botta told her. "You can be on my team."
Jassu smacked him on the back of the shoulder. "How's she gonna learn anything from you, mouth-breather? Naaga, you gotta come with me."
"Last time I saw you two jokers tryin'ta teach a girl how to blitz, she was scared to go in the water for a month." Letty held out his hand to her.
Bickson snorted. "No word on whether it was their technique or their faces, though. If you want to learn, Naaga, learn from the best."
Naaga perked up slightly, pleased with all the offers. "Can I be with Linnie?"
"Sure. How 'bout you, Cap'n, me an' Datto against the other guys?" Botta suggested.
"They won't have a forward," I pointed out.
"Last I checked, that guy followin' you around's a forward, right?" Datto asked. "'Less he's givin' up blitz after losin' the Cup two years in a row."
Bickson's smirk was radiant. "What was that, team that I believe has lost every other match it's ever played against the Luca Goers? It sounded almost like a pathetic approximation of a challenge."
Suddenly my aching muscles didn't seem like such a big deal. We slung the ball around in the shallows for two hours. The guys fussed over Naaga enough to make her happy without making me violent, and she picked up enough of what they were saying through her laughter that she could kick a straight shot and throw right by the end. (Blitz is literally a whole 'nother game underwater, but I figured one thing at a time.) Some of the villagers even came out to watch and shoot the breeze. Before we wrapped up, Bickson and I took on the whole team just for the hell of it - even managed to squeak out a victory that had us feeling pretty pleased even though it left our legs ragged. We wrapped up with a gourmet dinner of coconut milk and meat and stumbled uphill into the inn, where Naaga, Bickson and I all collapsed within seconds.
I slept like a rock, and the only dreams I had were about carrying logs.
Most of the second day was for slotting the layers of woven wood and palm fronds Naaga's group had put together into the frame the rest of us had built, then cutting and joining the huge reinforcing beams. Letty was in his element with that one. He had an eye for how to piece together the sections of wood, even down to stuff I wouldn't've noticed like matching the grains. Getting them up over the frame was a real bitch of an experience I don't even want to describe, let alone ever repeat. But we got it done.
"All that's left is the cloth for the inside," Naaga announced once we'd finished, late that afternoon, "but you're not allowed to see it until everything's all ready."
We were all flopped under a tree at the time, drinking water like we'd just been told the oasis was about to dry up. I opened one eye - just one - and saw she was a) dressed like a Besaider in a long skirt and cloth wrapped around her chest, and b) actually serious about what she'd said. Could've tried to argue with her, but there was no point when she was making that face. "What am I supposed to do in the meantime?" I asked.
"Make furniture! Outside!" she ordered, grabbing my gloves to drag me upright. I shrugged and trudged back down the hill to go cut some more wood. My machete and I were becoming old friends already.
I started with a square shelf, which had the advantages of a) being small and b) not requiring any curves. The lattices on the sides ended up being slightly lopsided (or as Bickson put it right before he got punched in the arm, "Who did that part, vandals?"), but at least it seemed more or less rectangular and weight-bearing, which was all I really asked for from my furniture after a lifetime of industrial-grade metal.
When I finished showing it off to everyone I could find, I set it outside the door for Naaga to hang up inside. There was still an hour or two of daylight left, which I decided to spend resting my machete arm by bonding with my fellow construction workers.
Bickson was sitting in the shade of a palm tree at the edge of the village, lashing together bent bamboo poles with an expression of intense concentration he usually reserved for the quarter-second before a shot. "What are you up to?" I asked.
"Making your bed."
Huh. It was roughly bed-shaped, if you knew what you were looking at, but it didn't seem particularly sturdy. Just like him to choose the hardest project, though. "Is that actually gonna hold?"
"In theory."
"Al Bhed don't do theory," I said, draping myself over his back. "Test everything."
He raised an eyebrow. "Listening."
"Multiple times. To make sure the initial results aren't just random chance. And of course, you'd want two researchers there to verify the findings..."
"You wouldn't be coming on to me to get out of doing work, would you?"
"Never. I'm just a lone voice crying out in the wilderness in the name of science." I stood up. "If you need me, my machete and I will be devastating the island's bamboo supply."
"Don't go far," he said, jerking on the rope he was using to lash the frame joints. "We Yevonites don't have much experience with this 'science' of yours. I might need an expert perspective."
After dark, we snuck it out of the village and up to a secluded cave behind a waterfall and tested it. It lasted about three minutes before utterly collapsing.
"What was that again about you being a voice crying out in the wilderness?" Bickson asked. The bastard.
I scowled at him, rubbing my ass where it'd banged on the cave floor. "Laugh it up, Goer. But your construction technique needs some work."
"I'll have to make some modifications and try again," he agreed. "Ahh, science!"
The third day was more furniture, baskets and household goods. Version 2.0 of my bed held up to thirty seconds of jumping, which was the most aggressive test I could put it to in the middle of the day. "Good enough," Bickson pronounced, and carried it in. I spent several hours with Botta and Jassu just working on a large, low round table that would be the centerpiece of the hut. It was built with a spinning top and a shelf underneath - smart use of the small space we had to work with. We could really have used something like that back at Home, I thought.
Keepa also tried to teach me to make clay pots, but my one and only attempt was a misshapen abomination better not spoken of. In retrospect, I probably should've taken my gloves off.
By sunset there was nothing left to do but move everything inside, which I'd been forbidden to do. I was bouncing a blitzball around when Naaga came out to find me. "It's finished. Wanna see?"
"Of course."
"Okay. You have to wear this, though," she said, shoving two folded pieces of cloth into my hands. "Like a real islander!"
I was about to point out that we already were real islanders, coming from Bikanel, but she was so excited that for once I managed to catch myself first. Inside the empty inn, I unfolded them: a halter top and a long skirt, by which I meant "flaps." Clearly not an outfit meant to blitz in, unless the plan called for distracting the other team with my underwear. But I could make it work for a few hours.
"Niiiice," Bickson commented with a wolf whistle when I came out. "Very middle-of-nowhere-chic. No, don't move; I think the breeze is about to pick up."
"Remind me why I brought you again."
"I've done so much to endear you to the locals. And I helped quite a bit with that, as I recall," he said, indicating the hut. The locals didn't seem to be as attracted to sarcasm as I was, but at least he wasn't lying about the house. He had done a ton of work, between sarcastic asides. "Now, your new home awaits."
"Ready?" Naaga asked when we got to the door. I nodded. All the Aurochs and what seemed like the entire rest of the village were gathered around behind us to watch. I got ready to fake it if I hated the place. "Here - we - go!" She pushed the curtain to one side and grabbed my hand, and we stepped in.
It was beautiful. The simple wood furniture stood out against the bright new fabric of the frame and upholstery. The cooking utensils hanging on the wall gleamed - kettles, pots and pans, cutlery and knives, everything on its own hook. Sitting on the shelves and hanging from the frame were all kinds of woven baskets, colorful clay jars and plates, even a few plants and shells. And all of it had been made by hand. Me, Naaga, Bickson, my teammates, and our new neighbors - we'd built this.
It wasn't Home. No hydraulics, no machina, not even a garden - yet. And especially no privacy. But you could have a good life here. You could wake up in the morning and build every day around becoming one hell of a blitz ace. You could finish growing up. And, just maybe, you could prove to at least this small group of Yevonites that Al Bhed weren't so bad after all.
"I picked blue for the walls and ceiling and yellow for the floor so it will remind us of Bikanel," Naaga explained. "And they're Aurochs colors!"
For a long minute I couldn't trust my voice to answer.
"Did I do a bad job?" she asked finally, sounding like a little girl again.
I pulled her into a tight hug. Our strange skirts brushed the cloth floor as we moved. "You did perfect."
Against my shoulder, I could feel her smiling and crying at the same time. "Then welcome home."