Disclaimer: I Asked the Clair Bible if I owned Slayers, and It said no. Then I asked it if I would get in trouble for writing this, and it said no again. And the Clair Bible's always right, isn't it?

Slayers: The Starbird Chronicles

Chapter 8: The Next Day, In the Town of Sybalt on the Northern Coast of Kalmaart.

The stormy skies over the northern sea rained heavy drops on the people in the streets of the largely stalled port cities on the northern coast. However, at least two people in the streets of the city of Sybalt were happy at the rain. One of them was Dulak, who was relieved that it was raining rather than hailing, as it had been as often as not since he'd arrived; hail is naturally dangerous to people with large, membranous wings.

The other... well, the other's not important quite yet.

Anyway, just because he thought it was an improvement over hail doesn't mean Dulak was overjoyed; rain is still lousy for flying in, and it tended to give him headaches. So, he was walking down the street, slightly less miserable than the day before, sulking.

People who are sulking, as any good reader knows, are subject to certain patterns of behavior; Daemon are no exception. Thus, when he came to a tavern, Dulak ducked inside without a second thought (or even a first one, really). Since he was in such a funk, it wasn't until he was sitting at the bar with a mug of hot cider that he noticed. Now, a human wouldn't have noticed even then, but as a Daemon, Dulak had sharp senses, including the ability to sense large astral presences, which brings us to exactly what it was that he noticed: There were no less than seven Mazoku in the room, and one of them was quite powerful. He knew that Mazoku of that caliber were unlikely to give a weak Daemon a hard time, but was worried at the presence of so many. If Starbird and Lina come through here... This could be trouble... He finished his cider as quickly as possible and left. However, before he walked off, he put a sign advertising for a ship to travel too the Northern Lands on the building's wall. Just as he was about to walk off, a voice sounded behind him.

"It is you putting up these signs?" The voice sounded like air being bubbled up through water, and spoke with an accent and in a dialect it took Dulak a moment to recognize. He turned to address the speaker.

Remember the other person who was glad it was raining?

His long, thin arms and legs were the only even vaguely human thing about him. His body was nearly parallel to the ground, covered in teal and violet scales except on the limbs and where the similarly-colored fins - including two exceptionally large pectorals - stuck out. The seven-foot-long body had a strong tail at one end and a mouth and two wide eyes at the other; a belt was wrapped around it from just in front of the dorsal fin on the top to just in front of the legs on the bottom, and from that hung a sheathed cutlass.

Fishmen like rain.

"I am Mahiru, Flying Fishman and Captain of Ship Poisson-Rouge. If you can help protect ship, I take you north."

"Really?"

"I not lie to you. Not lie at all."

"Well, we'll need to work out the specifics, but since I haven't gotten any other offers in eight days, it looks like you're my... Fish-man."

"Perhaps we talk in restaurant? With fewer Mazoku than here?"

"So you noticed it to, huh?"

"Mazoku in there all the time nowadays. Some not even use humanoid form."

"Oh. That's no good." The two walked off, talking, both rather happier for the exchange.

Shortly after they left, another form left the bar, this one infinitely more sinister in character. It appeared to consider two directions of travel, to the south and to the west; and chose the latter after a short time. Even this was not the last in the chain of departures; another person, this one more benevolent, exited as soon as the second was out of sight, and headed south, in a hurry.

Author's Note: This was certainly a short chapter, wasn't it? And yet I still managed to introduce three new characters, all of whom have some relevance to the plot. That's what I call efficient writing. Anyway, there's a battle scene in the next chapter I'm writing (Not to be confused with the next chapter to be posted; I've got a couple written out in advance) that's giving me a little trouble, so the next chapter may not be along for a while (Though I'll try to avoid another break like the one before Chapter 7).

And Now, a message from a reader:

Wraith (No email) Writes:

"Good writing style, not too many mistakes. Personally though, I don't think it was realistic for Lina to be traveling alone after Next. Gourry would never just leave her alone and she likes traveling with him (G + L fan). After all they were together when Next ended and STILL together when Try began."

Wraith also seems to love doubling final consonants before the –ing suffix; I corrected that here, because it was giving my Spellchecker a conniption.

Anyway, Wraith, I explained this obliquely in the "Meanwhile" Extra in chapter four: While it may not be perfectly Canon, I decided to have Gourry escorting Sylphiel back to Sairaag to help with reconstruction during the story, which at the same time allows Lina to be traveling alone and explains why Sylphiel isn't with them at the beginning of TRY. (By the way, for the purposes of this story, Zelgadis left to follow up a lead on a possible cure, and Amelia followed him. I might write that story sometime, if I have a lot of extra time).The other reason I made it just Lina and Naga with Starbird is that I have a hard time writing a lot of characters at once; As you might be able to tell, I'm having some trouble writing Naga as it is.

1) For all you non-French-speaking peoples out there, the name of Mahiru's ship, the Poisson-Rouge, means Goldfish (Literally, "Red Fish," but those silly French people use a different idiom to address that particular variety of carp). In case you were curious.

2) The fact that 'Mahiru' means 'midday' or 'daytime' in Japanese is purely coincidental; I didn't even want his name to be Japanese. I was trying to think of a name that sounded right and came up with that; then, later, when I realized what it meant, I tried to think up a non-Japanese one, but I couldn't. Oh well.

3) As you might have guessed, Mahiru is a Fishman in the vein of Noonsa and Rahanimu, albeit with flying-fish fins; His face is as fishlike as the rest of his body, with large eyes and a fish's mouth. This stands in contrast to the fishmen in TRY, whose faces are almost humanlike from a front view.

Next Chapter: Back to the Main Characters, a couple of major Setbacks, and crazy NPC number two.