Turf

Having a space of your own is important.
The more you have to yourself, the more important you are.
Be it a bunk, a cubicle, or a full room, protect it.
It is yours, and yours alone, to grow in and nurture yourself.
This is the one thing you must never share with another.
They will taint it.

"PEARLIE!" Marina drops her phone, vaults the turntables, and wraps Pearl in a hug. "We did it! Ebb and Flow's a turf war track!"

"Yooooo!" Pearl hugs Marina back before squirming out of her grip. "I told ya we'd make it! Lemme grab my phone, didja read the whole e-mail or just stop there?"

"I just stopped there," Marina says. "Y-you read the rest first."

Pearl scrolls through her phone. "Nuh-uh. Oh, here it is." She grabs Marina's sleeve and plops on the floor, dragging Marina to a seat beside her. "We'll read it together. Okay, 'Dear Pearl and Marina of Off the Hook, it is my pleasure to tell you your single, Ebb and Flow, has been selected for our newest turf war track. It will join the selection of new music to premiere after the Final Fest next week.'" Pearl stops and hands the phone to Marina.

Marina takes a deep breath and lets it out. "Per our argument-er, agreement with your agent, Miss M. Dusa, you are invee-invited to design... de-sine? Disig..."

"Designate," Pearl supplies, and repeats the word, tapping each syllable as she pronounces it, then brings up the dictionary. "No silent letters in this one."

"Can you take over?"

"Nope."

Marina sighs. "Per our agreement with your agent, Miss M. Dusa, you are invited to designate the inita-initial stage it will be played at." Pearl shouts out a booya, but Marina sighs again. "Initial?"

"We get to choose the first place they play it!" Pearl shouts again. "This is awesome!"

"We get to choose?" If Marina weren't already sitting, she may have fallen over. "That's so much power..."

"We should go with Arowana!"

Marina laughs. "And be drowned out by their top-20 muzak? Pearl, no!" She thinks for a moment, twirling the headphone cord around one finger. "What about Piranha Pit?"

"You just want an excuse to play with the conveyor belts," Pearl says, and Marina doesn't even try to deny it. "We should do Kelp Dome. Can you imagine the sound of it bouncing off the walls there?"

"No one ever hears it unless they're at the spawn point," says Marina. "We should do Blackbelly Skatepark!"

Pearl makes a face. "Rina... do you know how to ride a bike?"

Marina feels herself blush. "Could you teach me?"

"No. Because I never learned. And I know neither of us are good with skateboards and crud."

"Especially not waterfall boards," Marina says.

Pearl grins back at her. "And if that's our first stage, you'd better believe we'll need to show off some tricks. Let's see, what other stages will be up that day?" Pearl opens a new page on her phone and starts scrolling. Marina does the same.

They both see it at the same time. "Camp Triggerfish!"

"You were so nervous, you dropped your junior," says Pearl.

"And you were too busy laughing at me to ink any of the stage for the first thirty seconds!"

"When you went over that wall? I can't believe you didn't get splatted. But you just called back where the members of the other team were, and I superjumped and booya!" Pearl puts down her phone. "It seems like so long ago."

"I still don't like splatting people," Marina says, leaning against Pearl.

"Yeah, but you've come a long way since then," Pearl says. "Looking at you now, I don't think anyone would know you only came to Inkopolis a year ago."

A year.

Has it been a year? Marina closes her eyes, thinks back. It would have been August or September when she reached the surface... and it's July now.

She can't say how long she spent below ground, trying to find her way out, but Pearl is right. It probably has been a year since she heard Calamari Inkantation.

If that had never happened, she'd still be underground with her splatoon. She might be leading her own splatoon by now. She would never have seen through her goggles.

She wouldn't be wearing hypnoshades now.

But she also wouldn't have created her own music, or eaten Pizza, or spoken to the Squid Sisters, or even met Pearl.

A year since she was brainwashed, a year since she was respected, a year since she left her home turf to walk the paths unknown.

"Marina? Are you okay?"

Marina blinks, and that's when she feels the tears on her cheeks. "I'm fine," she lies. "It just... hit me, all of a sudden." She takes a deep breath and lets it out, wiping her eyes and brushing away her emotions. The loss of her hypnogoggles, a way to hide, hits her again. She ignores it. "So, Camp Triggerfish?"

"Camp Triggerfish," Pearl says. "They won't know what hit them. Come on, let's read the rest. I'll do the next sentence."