I am once again so sorry for the delay. I don't know why my summer has been so busy and I have no clue where my motivation went. Gotta keep it chained when I find it.
Little call back to the title of Fact #58 for you guys.
Fact #166: Even now, there's still always something bigger.
Season: 5th Season
Grace stepped up onto the bus with Tate right behind her. The early morning heat surrounded the outside and penetrated the inside while the AC blowing from the vents provided only a meager amount of relief. Though she had moved from Jersey when she was young, younger than she currently was, she remembered the mornings being cooler than this in mid-October. Sometimes Danno had a point. The heat and humidity were occasionally downright miserable.
Most of the seats up front were occupied with pairs of kids, two parents, and a teacher. Grace slumped slightly. A handful of the popular girls had claimed the spots in the back of the bus. They sat in singles on the edge of the bench seats talking.
She glanced over her shoulder. Her and Tate would have to split up. The only other seats left were by the teacher and by the boy who got car sick all the time, and she really didn't want to sit by him.
Tate didn't let her turn around.
"Move."
The girl on the edge of the seat looked up at Grace and then behind her. She pivoted and joined her friend on the other side of the aisle.
Grace scooched in by the window and Tate dropped down next to her.
"Your dad meeting us at the beach?" Tate asked.
Grace fiddled with her backpack, debating whether or not to shove it under the seat in front of her or set it beside her on the seat. She finally just settled it on her lap.
"Yeah, he got today off, so he's going to meet us there and then we're going to go out to lunch," she said.
"Lucky. Wish I could skip my afternoon classes and go to lunch instead," Tate said.
"I just wish it wasn't five thousand degrees today," she said.
"Ugh. I know. I think I'm going to sweat to death."
Danny took a sip of his coffee and nearly spat it back into the cup.
"Woah, you okay there, bud?" Steve asked.
"Sure, sure, other than this coffee has five pumps of pineapple syrup instead of one pump of vanilla," Danny groused.
He swung into a parking space near the exit of the drive-thru of the coffee shop.
"Danny, are you seriously going in there to complain?"
"I paid good money for this coffee and it's not even a little wrong, it's very wrong," he said and popped open the door, grabbing the keys as he did. "And, the baristas will never learn if they don't get some constructive criticism."
Steve shook his head.
"Hey, I'll keep my criticism to a PG level, but getting a mouthful of blond coffee with a puddle of pineapple at the bottom when I expected smooth, rich, decadent dark roast with a splash of vanilla and cream means my day has not started out well," he said.
The coffee shop was one of his favorites he had found when he had first moved to the island. Sure, Starbucks was a familiar face, but this place was less expensive and it had been the first one he had stumbled into after getting lost for a second time. The fact that it was on his way to the office was another plus.
It was a favorite amongst many others, too. Customers cluttered the small building, sitting at tables and chairs, standing against the wall, pointing at pastries behind the glass near the register, though he seemed to have missed the major morning rush.
He managed to get to the cashier without too much of a wait time.
"Aloha, what can I get started for you this morning?" the cashier greeted.
"First of all, I just want to say this is my favorite place to get coffee, but you need more parking out front," he said. "And for that reason, I usually come through the drive-thru and have never had a problem before, but got the wrong order this morning."
"Oh, I'm so sorry about that," the cashier said. "Do you have your receipt? I can get a replacement order going for you."
Danny handed him the offending drink and his receipt. "A blond pineapple is not the same as a dark roast with vanilla."
"No, it is not," the cashier said. He squinted at the receipt and turned around. "Yo, Emma, this one's yours."
The cashier, whose name tag read Joel, turned back around and offered Danny a grin. "Sorry, again, Sir, it'll be right out over there at the end of the counter."
"Thank you."
Danny stood with the other expectant customers. Grace's class was probably already at the beach, and he would have been there, too, if not for this little mishap. Of course Steve's drink came out fine, though he wasn't sure if Steve would've said anything if it hadn't. Some of the swill he'd seen him drink horrified his more refined pallet, which in itself was amusing if he thought about it. Steve was the one with the ultra sensitive receptors on his tongue in dragon form while Danny's tastes were far less sensitive than in human form.
But pineapple where pineapple was not expected was an insult to his tongue in any form.
Of the many harried baristas tending to the drive-thru and everyone inside, it was the older woman who finally broke away.
"I've got a replacement medium dark roast with one pump of vanilla!" she said. When Danny walked up to collect it, she winced. "I am so sorry about that, Sir. I haven't been a barista very long."
All the constructive criticism in his head dissipated. She looked closer to his age than all the young twenty-somethings manning the shop and had the dark rings under her eyes to prove that she was still settling into the early morning job.
"Maybe you should suggest moving the pineapple syrup away from the vanilla syrup, huh?" he said.
"And then I really won't know where anything is," she said and returned to the tangled mess of baristas.
He took a sip before he left the shop just to make sure. He nodded to himself.
"Do I need to go back in there and apologize on your behalf?" Steve asked as soon as he got back in the car.
"I was very cordial, thank you. And it was a new girl who made the mistake, so I cut her some slack," he said and pulled out into traffic.
"You never cut me any slack when I was new on the job," Steve said.
Danny flung a hand out. "That's because you were being a pompous Neanderthal animal and got me shot on the first day! And might I remind you -"
"I'm sure you will."
"- that you were aiming a gun at me the first time I met you! You warranted no slack in my book."
"What about now?" Steve asked.
Danny looked across the car at the furrowed brows and pouted lips. "Yeah, well, now you just look like a mutt that's been kicked and dragged around by life."
"But you like dogs."
Danny snorted.
Steve smiled.
Grace wrinkled her nose. The smell was horrendous. Like a cat litterbox that hadn't been cleaned in a month and old bacon grease. The creature on the beach was barely recognizable as a humpback whale, though she already knew that's what it was. Thankfully, they weren't allowed to get any closer than this spot.
"I'm reconsidering marine biology," Tate said. She had pulled her shirt up over her nose and mouth.
"Yeah, me too," Grace agreed. When she thought about being a marine biologist, she had imagined herself working in the ocean with living animals, not standing downwind from a dead and decaying one.
"Okay, class, what you need to do is draw the whale as you see it, and label the parts you recognize," Ms. Wong said. Even she looked a little green, and she had majored in marine biology before becoming a teacher.
Grace breathed out of her mouth and started sketching on her clipboard.
"Sorry, Miss, the winds were blowing the other way earlier," one of the officers guarding the cordoned off shoreline said to Wong.
"It's fine. It's just been a while since I've gotten a good whiff of a whale carcass," Wong said. "At least there doesn't seem to be much methane build up."
"No. Looks like we don't have to worry about an explosion."
Tate nudged Grace.
"My mom would get a kick out of an exploding whale."
"My mom wouldn't," Grace said. Her mom probably couldn't even handle being on the beach with her class that morning.
"Neither would your dad."
She glanced over her shoulder. "Danno! Uncle Steve!"
"Wow, that is ripe." Her dad waved a hand in front of his face.
"Smells like this jar of old lard my dad used to have in the corner of the kitchen," Steve said.
"Yeah, it's pretty bad," she said.
"Mr. Williams, Commander McGarrett, pleasure to see you both," Wong called. She waved a hand for them to join her.
Grace and Tate slipped through the other kids to stand next to them.
"I think I know why we were the only adults to sign up to come on this particular field trip," her dad said.
Wong laughed. "No, you're just the only ones that don't know my reputation as always finding something smelly during a field trip."
"It's true," Tate said.
Grace nodded.
"Thanks for telling me," Danno said and ruffled her hair. "So, what's going on here?"
Wong's face sobered. "A juvenile humpback whale beached itself yesterday afternoon and passed on through the night."
"Why did it beach itself?" Steve asked.
"Well, the protesters over there think it has something to do with the tour boats." Wong gestured to the opposite side of the cordoned off zone. "But, some of my old colleagues are of a different opinion. See there just behind the head?"
Grace stood up on her tiptoes to see where she was pointing.
"That looks like a wound caused by another animal. Possibly an orca, or a pod of them," Wong said.
Grace's eyes widened. She'd never seen orcas around the islands. Or in real life. Only on documentaries. Now that she was looking, the ragged tears around the whale's neck and head were impressive. Orcas must have been even bigger than they looked on YouTube.
"Yep. Never going swimming again."
Grace rolled her eyes. "Danno."
Outside of Los Angeles, fairly removed from the dense traffic and out of the reach of most passing by, was a satellite facility of Chimera Laboratories. It wasn't something out of a sci-fi novel with white walls and sealed corridors and holograms and all the bells and whistles like that. Rather, it was a modest sized building with offices that looked down over the hills, its research lab being hidden underneath it in the hillside.
Currently, the offices were humming with activity. While the scientists stared at cells and bacteria through microscopes down below, the tech guys monitored bigger things. The dead humpback in Hawaii was up on several monitors.
"Once is chance, twice is coincidence," a young tech with a mop of blond hair said and looked up at his superior.
"And three times is a pattern," his superior said. He stalked off towards his office to make the call to the parent lab in New York. "Looks like we have a Marine dragon surfacing."
Next time on "Dragons", bad weather moves in and it seems like the rescue season starts early.
Ehehehehe...I've been wanting to go this direction for a long time, I'm just sorry it's taken me this long to pick up the Chimera Labs herring I left in Fact #102.
I am sincerely hoping to continue working on this at a more expedient pace. I can't believe I used to do two chapters a week. This once a month thing is ridiculous. There was a point where I waffled with wrapping up the series, but honestly? I just like working on it too much, even if I am slower than I used to be, lol.
Thank you all for sticking with me and continuing to read this fic! I hope you enjoy what I'm (attempting) to cook up!