Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Spira, blitzball, and all related characters and locations are owned by Squaresoft, with the exception of a few original characters who will be noted as such. This is a work of fanfiction, meaning that it is both created by a fan for no purpose other than entertainment, and it is fiction, meaning that all characters and events are purely fictonal and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
I wonder what happened to the marshmallows. Wow. Plot hole. That's gonna bug me. If you sue me now, neither one of us will ever find out, and that'd be sucky.
Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.
Green Eyes in Overdrive
by flame mage
round 13: Victim
**********
The walk back to camp had never gone so quickly. I think we almost ran. Once we were there, it took only a few minutes to say goodbye to the place one final time--in my life, I've found that the shortest goodbyes always turn out to be the most important. I packed my gear bag and we collected the sphere grid and the last of the marshmallows (I never did find out where they came from). Reppi left the fire burning in case we needed to return, but we knew that by the time we could make it back, it would be long dead. I think we were all hoping we'd never have to go back, anyway. Two days in that hell had been enough for a lifetime.
We made our way to the teleport platform, replaced the jar in the hole and set the platform back over the jar. This time, when I set a tentative toe on it, it zinged to life and glowed.
"Anyone wanna go first?" Reppi asked.
She said it lightly, but I could sense the uneasiness behind it. She wasn't a crusader like Miyu or an Al Bhed like me and Naida--aside from basic things like the blitz sphere cannons at Luca, she'd probably never used a machina in her life. The others musta realized that too, because Zalitz quickly stepped up and said, too loudly, "I'll go." He put his foot where mine had been, shifted his weight, felt that zinging sensation and then the electric hum as the pad reacted. Then he stepped all the way into the center until the arrow appeared.
"You better check to see if that's the only one," I warned him.
He checked. It was.
"Okay. Take a torch so you'll be all right," Reppi said.
Naida leaned over and handed him one of the sticks she'd brought from the firepit. He grabbed the end and held it out toward the goalie. "Fira," she said quietly in response, and the other end of the stick caught fire and held, blazing, in the darkness. It was like a ritual of some kind.
And then he stepped hard in the center and was gone.
I waited until I was sure, and then followed.
*****
When I appeared again, it was like the scene hadn't changed at all. Still dark. Still damp. Still nasty. We coulda been in the same spot, except for one difference--now I could hear the sound of water coming from one side of the cave.
"Linna!" Zalitz cried from behind me, grabbing me and spinning me around in total ecstacy. "Ya hear that? It's water! And if there's running water in here, it's gotta come from somewhere, dude! I think we found ourselves a way out!"
"Or at least an underground hot spring," I griped, never one for blind optimism. My head wasn't hurting anymore and there was only a slight bump, but the caked blood was matted in my hair and there was cave grime all over me. "I'm a wreck."
"How is that any deviation from the norm, dear?" Naida commented primly as she appeared in a sudden hailstorm of light from the pad. Then something in her face changed and her eyes lit up. "Oh, does anyone else hear that?"
"The water?" Zalitz asked excitedly. "Ya kidding me? I could be back in Luca waxing my board in no time!"
"Hmm, I wonder where the airship is now," Naida was musing dreamily, only half-listening to him. "I'm sure Aniki-darling must be veeeerry worried about me by now..."
'Yeah, or else he's planning more hostile takeovers of Guadosalam or ogling Yuna,' is what I would have said at any other given moment in time, but they were psyched and it was starting to get to me. What I actually said was something more like, "Yeah. I'm sure."
Reppi appeared at that point, still clutching her own torch. "Whatevah it is, let's go check it out," she said when we told her. "It's the only idea we got, anyway."
We ran.
*****
The adrenaline was pounding in my ears by the time the cave walls opened up about three minutes later. That was good, because it meant my reflexes were heightened, which is probably the only reason I didn't pitch forward and down the fifty feet into the pool of water far, far below me.
"Rumo cred!" I hissed, skittering backwards and clinging to the ground of the cave like at any moment I was going to be blown by a random wind off the edge and down there. "It's a cliff, guys. You want your water, you gotta jump for it."
"No way." Zalitz got down on his hands and knees and gripped the edge of the cliff face to look down. There was a very small but very meaningful cracking sound, and he scrambled back the same way I had.
No one said anything for a minute.
"Well," Naida commented somberly after a while, "this is unfortunate."
"From what y'all told me, though, Zalitz mighta been right," Reppi said. "See how the water's runnin' in an' outta the pool down there? Means it's comin' from somewhere and goin' to somewhere, maybe from outside. I got a feelin' we gotta take a chance here."
"And how do you propose we take this chance of yours?" asked Naida, reasonably. "That cliff face is fifteen yards if it's an inch."
"That's one heckuva bellyflop, dude," added Zalitz. I cracked the knuckles in my left index finger; he shut up.
"Let's think about it," Reppi suggested sternly. Zalitz stopped cracking jokes and I stopped cracking knuckles and we tuned back in. When the mother Chocobo was sure her chicks were listening, she continued, "We gotta get down there somehow. So howddaya get down a cliff likethat?"
"I did some cliff-climbing in the Calm Lands," Naida volunteered. "The easiest way is just to use a harness and rappel down. If one lacks a harness, it's possible to hang-glide down, or climb down with picks, or even ride an animal."
"Like a fiend?" I wondered, thinking of the priest back in Luca who'd flown in on a Zu. "Like a One-Eye?"
"Is a One-Eye big enough?" asked Zalitz.
Reppi shrugged. "If you're small enough. This child," she jerked a thumb at me, "might be able to pull it off; fifty feet isn't all that far. Maybe Naida. You and me, though, gotta find another way down."
"Does anyone have any rope?" Naida asked. No one did.
Suddenly Zalitz brightened up. "Do you guys know how to dive?"
It was a rhetorical question. After years of blitz, we all knew how to dive like pros-- which, come to think of it, is exactly what we were. Since the sphere pools are under the stands in Luca, the spectators above can hear it if you cannonball in. Everyone masters a perfect, silent dive.
"You can dive from pretty high heights if you do it right, dudes," he said. "Like, without getting hurt. Back when I was on a ship, I had a friend who used to dive off the mast and into the ocean. Got really good at it."
"Fifty feet?" Naida looked as skeptical as I felt. "How deep is that thing?"
"Gimme the torch, Zalitz," Reppi asked. He handed it over, and she reared back and threw it down over the edge of the cliff as hard as she could.
We watched as it plummeted through the air and landed with a splash, then sank slowly to the bottom. After a while, it stopped getting smaller and we figured it had hit the bottom. I had no idea what that meant--it could've been three feet deep, for all I knew about it--but Reppi nodded knowledgeably and announced, "'Bout thirty feet, give or take a little."
"You sure about that?" I asked. "That's pretty slim. What happens if you're wrong?"
Naida laughed. "Then whoever goes first goes splat and the rest of us know not to follow."
"Great. You go first," I told her, giving her a little push.
She fought to regain her balance, flailing wildly. As soon as she regained it, she started whining. "Me? Why me? If anything happened to me, poor Aniki would be--"
"--all over the summoner," I shot back. "Come on. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner you get to see him, okay?"
"All right, *fine,* if you *insist.*" I could tell that she was going to start flouncing in a minute, which was why I was hoping she dove quickly. She motioned for the rest of us to back off. When we were out of her way, she positioned herself a few inches from the edge, took a deep breath, and dove.
Later I figured out I was holding my own breath as she fell, but her form was flawless. She barely made a splash as she hit the water. The worst part was still not knowing how deep the pool was, though, and it was a long time before she surfaced again.
"It's fine!" she called up to us, treading water. "It's a little cold, but it's definitely deep enough to dive."
Now that we had that figured out, the only hard part was actually diving. By some unspoken understanding, Zalitz stepped up next. He fumbled a little on the jump, but managed to recover in midair and landed okay. Reppi was already in position for her dive by the time he came up and swam aside, and I had to laugh. We were acting like it was a community pool and a lifeguard was looking over our shoulder.
Reppi's dive went off without a hitch, and now I was all alone on the ledge. It occured to me that maybe it was pretty stupid to go last, because she was the only one who could make fire and now I had to get this over with quickly. I hefted my gear bag in my arms, hoping that the waterproof canvas still worked on impact, and tossed it down as close as I could to the others without conking one of them on the head. Then I edged closer to the edge of the cliff face and looked down.
A word to the wise: Don't EVER look down.
Because while I was looking down, I was getting freaked out of my skull, and I will swear to my grave that that was the reason I fell.
It's a tribute to my training with Rin that I didn't die right then. In midair, with maybe three seconds to impact and my limbs flailing, I actually took two breaths and counted to ten, and while I was doing that I was bringing my arms and legs together into a flawless streamline and getting myself ready for the splashdown.
My fingertips hit the water first, in what seemed at the time like perfect silence, and then the rest of me plunged in at what seemed at the time like all at once. I'm not sure how far down I went, but my first thoughts were that I'd better get up to get some air, and also that I'd be freezing my ass off if it weren't wrapped like the rest of me in vinyl.
Naida's wasn't, and so the first thing I heard when I got around to taking a breath was her whining and shoving every other word between asterisks. "Eeeeek, it's *freezing!* I *told* you this was suicide, Reppi, but would you listen? *Noooo.*"
"Ever just want to hit her?" I muttered to Zalitz.
"All the time," he muttered back, handing me my gear bag. I held it above the water level, shook it out, and took a look at it. It was still watertight. I'd have to be careful if I needed to use my weapon underwater, though, I realized; the spikes would kill the momentum. I started hoping I wouldn't have to take it out again--ever.
Those hopes lasted, at a liberal estimate, maybe thirty seconds before the huge half-rotted blue snake dragon thing from hell showed up.
*****
My hydroponic gardening books said that sometimes, if you planted your crops in natural water, little water snakes would come. The book had been written by an Al Bhed--at the time, we were the only ones in Spira who knew how to cultivate plants hydroponically anyway--for use at Home, so they weren't something I had to worry about until recently. But I was a pretty serious gardener, so I read all the chapters anyway. These water snakes, I learned, lived mostly in places like the villages along the Highroads, where there were marshes and small pools of fresh or brackish water. The water snakes there might build a nest around certain plants, lay eggs in others, and eat most of the rest of what was left.
Just for the record: this was no frickin' water snake.
It should have been too big to fit in that pool comfortably at maybe twenty or twenty- five feet long, which was part of the reason I figured it must have come from someplace else. It was probably closer to dragon than snake, because it had four short, skinny legs with sharp claws coming out of the ends. It had brought with it a faintly putrid smell, like something that had long since died and rotted. It looked pretty rotted too, actually.
'This thing,' I thought suddenly, 'has seriously kicked the bucket.'
You probably think I'm nuts--actually, so did I at the time. It wasn't until later that Reppi told me that it's not totally uncommon to find zombie fiends in Spira. No one has yet been able to explain exactly why it happens. The current scientific theory is that something causes a different kind of Moonflow reaction to occur when the person dies. The ghost story Reppi told me is that a human becomes a zombie fiend when they kick it after eating the flesh of another human being.
All this isn't important in the slighest, but it was the kind of thing that was going through my mind as I sized the HHRBSDTfH up. As it turned out, this was a huge mistake, because while I was trying to figure out what it was and how to make it leave, it whipped its long purple tail around and straight into Zalitz's stomach. He gasped--another big mistake underwater, and one that as a blitzer, he shouldn't've made--and crumpled, the wind knocked out of him.
"Shit!" Reppi mouthed, then gestured to us. "I'll start attackin' this thing, try to distract it. Get him up for air."
Even Naida knew when to follow an order. We bolted, dumping our bags, and got under his arms, kicking frantically to get ourselves up faster. We surfaced with a gasp and Naida pressed his body up against the cave wall while I tried to pump air into his lungs.
I heard a garbled yell from under the water and a stream of bubbles shot up from Reppi's direction. Something heavy followed. It was my blitzball, but attacked to one of the spikes was a Phoenix Down. I grabbed for it, but the HHRBSDTfH was quicker and dove in the way.
Immediately it reeled back and crumpled, pretty much the way Zalitz had, but it didn't float like he had. Instead, it kept thrashing, making waves so big we were knocked like rubber Chocobies against the sides of the cave. Then it burst into a shower of Pyreflies.
"Well," Jassu said, "It's about time."
I wonder what happened to the marshmallows. Wow. Plot hole. That's gonna bug me. If you sue me now, neither one of us will ever find out, and that'd be sucky.
Author's Note: The narrator of this story is Al Bhed, and some dialogue and idiomatic phrases have not been translated into English. Translations of all Al Bhed phrases can be found at the end of the chapter in which they appear.
Green Eyes in Overdrive
by flame mage
round 13: Victim
**********
The walk back to camp had never gone so quickly. I think we almost ran. Once we were there, it took only a few minutes to say goodbye to the place one final time--in my life, I've found that the shortest goodbyes always turn out to be the most important. I packed my gear bag and we collected the sphere grid and the last of the marshmallows (I never did find out where they came from). Reppi left the fire burning in case we needed to return, but we knew that by the time we could make it back, it would be long dead. I think we were all hoping we'd never have to go back, anyway. Two days in that hell had been enough for a lifetime.
We made our way to the teleport platform, replaced the jar in the hole and set the platform back over the jar. This time, when I set a tentative toe on it, it zinged to life and glowed.
"Anyone wanna go first?" Reppi asked.
She said it lightly, but I could sense the uneasiness behind it. She wasn't a crusader like Miyu or an Al Bhed like me and Naida--aside from basic things like the blitz sphere cannons at Luca, she'd probably never used a machina in her life. The others musta realized that too, because Zalitz quickly stepped up and said, too loudly, "I'll go." He put his foot where mine had been, shifted his weight, felt that zinging sensation and then the electric hum as the pad reacted. Then he stepped all the way into the center until the arrow appeared.
"You better check to see if that's the only one," I warned him.
He checked. It was.
"Okay. Take a torch so you'll be all right," Reppi said.
Naida leaned over and handed him one of the sticks she'd brought from the firepit. He grabbed the end and held it out toward the goalie. "Fira," she said quietly in response, and the other end of the stick caught fire and held, blazing, in the darkness. It was like a ritual of some kind.
And then he stepped hard in the center and was gone.
I waited until I was sure, and then followed.
*****
When I appeared again, it was like the scene hadn't changed at all. Still dark. Still damp. Still nasty. We coulda been in the same spot, except for one difference--now I could hear the sound of water coming from one side of the cave.
"Linna!" Zalitz cried from behind me, grabbing me and spinning me around in total ecstacy. "Ya hear that? It's water! And if there's running water in here, it's gotta come from somewhere, dude! I think we found ourselves a way out!"
"Or at least an underground hot spring," I griped, never one for blind optimism. My head wasn't hurting anymore and there was only a slight bump, but the caked blood was matted in my hair and there was cave grime all over me. "I'm a wreck."
"How is that any deviation from the norm, dear?" Naida commented primly as she appeared in a sudden hailstorm of light from the pad. Then something in her face changed and her eyes lit up. "Oh, does anyone else hear that?"
"The water?" Zalitz asked excitedly. "Ya kidding me? I could be back in Luca waxing my board in no time!"
"Hmm, I wonder where the airship is now," Naida was musing dreamily, only half-listening to him. "I'm sure Aniki-darling must be veeeerry worried about me by now..."
'Yeah, or else he's planning more hostile takeovers of Guadosalam or ogling Yuna,' is what I would have said at any other given moment in time, but they were psyched and it was starting to get to me. What I actually said was something more like, "Yeah. I'm sure."
Reppi appeared at that point, still clutching her own torch. "Whatevah it is, let's go check it out," she said when we told her. "It's the only idea we got, anyway."
We ran.
*****
The adrenaline was pounding in my ears by the time the cave walls opened up about three minutes later. That was good, because it meant my reflexes were heightened, which is probably the only reason I didn't pitch forward and down the fifty feet into the pool of water far, far below me.
"Rumo cred!" I hissed, skittering backwards and clinging to the ground of the cave like at any moment I was going to be blown by a random wind off the edge and down there. "It's a cliff, guys. You want your water, you gotta jump for it."
"No way." Zalitz got down on his hands and knees and gripped the edge of the cliff face to look down. There was a very small but very meaningful cracking sound, and he scrambled back the same way I had.
No one said anything for a minute.
"Well," Naida commented somberly after a while, "this is unfortunate."
"From what y'all told me, though, Zalitz mighta been right," Reppi said. "See how the water's runnin' in an' outta the pool down there? Means it's comin' from somewhere and goin' to somewhere, maybe from outside. I got a feelin' we gotta take a chance here."
"And how do you propose we take this chance of yours?" asked Naida, reasonably. "That cliff face is fifteen yards if it's an inch."
"That's one heckuva bellyflop, dude," added Zalitz. I cracked the knuckles in my left index finger; he shut up.
"Let's think about it," Reppi suggested sternly. Zalitz stopped cracking jokes and I stopped cracking knuckles and we tuned back in. When the mother Chocobo was sure her chicks were listening, she continued, "We gotta get down there somehow. So howddaya get down a cliff likethat?"
"I did some cliff-climbing in the Calm Lands," Naida volunteered. "The easiest way is just to use a harness and rappel down. If one lacks a harness, it's possible to hang-glide down, or climb down with picks, or even ride an animal."
"Like a fiend?" I wondered, thinking of the priest back in Luca who'd flown in on a Zu. "Like a One-Eye?"
"Is a One-Eye big enough?" asked Zalitz.
Reppi shrugged. "If you're small enough. This child," she jerked a thumb at me, "might be able to pull it off; fifty feet isn't all that far. Maybe Naida. You and me, though, gotta find another way down."
"Does anyone have any rope?" Naida asked. No one did.
Suddenly Zalitz brightened up. "Do you guys know how to dive?"
It was a rhetorical question. After years of blitz, we all knew how to dive like pros-- which, come to think of it, is exactly what we were. Since the sphere pools are under the stands in Luca, the spectators above can hear it if you cannonball in. Everyone masters a perfect, silent dive.
"You can dive from pretty high heights if you do it right, dudes," he said. "Like, without getting hurt. Back when I was on a ship, I had a friend who used to dive off the mast and into the ocean. Got really good at it."
"Fifty feet?" Naida looked as skeptical as I felt. "How deep is that thing?"
"Gimme the torch, Zalitz," Reppi asked. He handed it over, and she reared back and threw it down over the edge of the cliff as hard as she could.
We watched as it plummeted through the air and landed with a splash, then sank slowly to the bottom. After a while, it stopped getting smaller and we figured it had hit the bottom. I had no idea what that meant--it could've been three feet deep, for all I knew about it--but Reppi nodded knowledgeably and announced, "'Bout thirty feet, give or take a little."
"You sure about that?" I asked. "That's pretty slim. What happens if you're wrong?"
Naida laughed. "Then whoever goes first goes splat and the rest of us know not to follow."
"Great. You go first," I told her, giving her a little push.
She fought to regain her balance, flailing wildly. As soon as she regained it, she started whining. "Me? Why me? If anything happened to me, poor Aniki would be--"
"--all over the summoner," I shot back. "Come on. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner you get to see him, okay?"
"All right, *fine,* if you *insist.*" I could tell that she was going to start flouncing in a minute, which was why I was hoping she dove quickly. She motioned for the rest of us to back off. When we were out of her way, she positioned herself a few inches from the edge, took a deep breath, and dove.
Later I figured out I was holding my own breath as she fell, but her form was flawless. She barely made a splash as she hit the water. The worst part was still not knowing how deep the pool was, though, and it was a long time before she surfaced again.
"It's fine!" she called up to us, treading water. "It's a little cold, but it's definitely deep enough to dive."
Now that we had that figured out, the only hard part was actually diving. By some unspoken understanding, Zalitz stepped up next. He fumbled a little on the jump, but managed to recover in midair and landed okay. Reppi was already in position for her dive by the time he came up and swam aside, and I had to laugh. We were acting like it was a community pool and a lifeguard was looking over our shoulder.
Reppi's dive went off without a hitch, and now I was all alone on the ledge. It occured to me that maybe it was pretty stupid to go last, because she was the only one who could make fire and now I had to get this over with quickly. I hefted my gear bag in my arms, hoping that the waterproof canvas still worked on impact, and tossed it down as close as I could to the others without conking one of them on the head. Then I edged closer to the edge of the cliff face and looked down.
A word to the wise: Don't EVER look down.
Because while I was looking down, I was getting freaked out of my skull, and I will swear to my grave that that was the reason I fell.
It's a tribute to my training with Rin that I didn't die right then. In midair, with maybe three seconds to impact and my limbs flailing, I actually took two breaths and counted to ten, and while I was doing that I was bringing my arms and legs together into a flawless streamline and getting myself ready for the splashdown.
My fingertips hit the water first, in what seemed at the time like perfect silence, and then the rest of me plunged in at what seemed at the time like all at once. I'm not sure how far down I went, but my first thoughts were that I'd better get up to get some air, and also that I'd be freezing my ass off if it weren't wrapped like the rest of me in vinyl.
Naida's wasn't, and so the first thing I heard when I got around to taking a breath was her whining and shoving every other word between asterisks. "Eeeeek, it's *freezing!* I *told* you this was suicide, Reppi, but would you listen? *Noooo.*"
"Ever just want to hit her?" I muttered to Zalitz.
"All the time," he muttered back, handing me my gear bag. I held it above the water level, shook it out, and took a look at it. It was still watertight. I'd have to be careful if I needed to use my weapon underwater, though, I realized; the spikes would kill the momentum. I started hoping I wouldn't have to take it out again--ever.
Those hopes lasted, at a liberal estimate, maybe thirty seconds before the huge half-rotted blue snake dragon thing from hell showed up.
*****
My hydroponic gardening books said that sometimes, if you planted your crops in natural water, little water snakes would come. The book had been written by an Al Bhed--at the time, we were the only ones in Spira who knew how to cultivate plants hydroponically anyway--for use at Home, so they weren't something I had to worry about until recently. But I was a pretty serious gardener, so I read all the chapters anyway. These water snakes, I learned, lived mostly in places like the villages along the Highroads, where there were marshes and small pools of fresh or brackish water. The water snakes there might build a nest around certain plants, lay eggs in others, and eat most of the rest of what was left.
Just for the record: this was no frickin' water snake.
It should have been too big to fit in that pool comfortably at maybe twenty or twenty- five feet long, which was part of the reason I figured it must have come from someplace else. It was probably closer to dragon than snake, because it had four short, skinny legs with sharp claws coming out of the ends. It had brought with it a faintly putrid smell, like something that had long since died and rotted. It looked pretty rotted too, actually.
'This thing,' I thought suddenly, 'has seriously kicked the bucket.'
You probably think I'm nuts--actually, so did I at the time. It wasn't until later that Reppi told me that it's not totally uncommon to find zombie fiends in Spira. No one has yet been able to explain exactly why it happens. The current scientific theory is that something causes a different kind of Moonflow reaction to occur when the person dies. The ghost story Reppi told me is that a human becomes a zombie fiend when they kick it after eating the flesh of another human being.
All this isn't important in the slighest, but it was the kind of thing that was going through my mind as I sized the HHRBSDTfH up. As it turned out, this was a huge mistake, because while I was trying to figure out what it was and how to make it leave, it whipped its long purple tail around and straight into Zalitz's stomach. He gasped--another big mistake underwater, and one that as a blitzer, he shouldn't've made--and crumpled, the wind knocked out of him.
"Shit!" Reppi mouthed, then gestured to us. "I'll start attackin' this thing, try to distract it. Get him up for air."
Even Naida knew when to follow an order. We bolted, dumping our bags, and got under his arms, kicking frantically to get ourselves up faster. We surfaced with a gasp and Naida pressed his body up against the cave wall while I tried to pump air into his lungs.
I heard a garbled yell from under the water and a stream of bubbles shot up from Reppi's direction. Something heavy followed. It was my blitzball, but attacked to one of the spikes was a Phoenix Down. I grabbed for it, but the HHRBSDTfH was quicker and dove in the way.
Immediately it reeled back and crumpled, pretty much the way Zalitz had, but it didn't float like he had. Instead, it kept thrashing, making waves so big we were knocked like rubber Chocobies against the sides of the cave. Then it burst into a shower of Pyreflies.
"Well," Jassu said, "It's about time."