Spur of the moment chapter. Didn't really plan to actually put it in, but I sort of like this chapter, so...

In the Nature of a Landing Session

"There it is! There it is!"

Buddy craned his neck, the stress and fatigue apparent behind his goggles. "Rikku, I can't see! Get out of the way, will you?"

Rikku rolled her eyes.  "It's not like it'll vanish 'coz you can't see it, Buddy," she commented. "'Sides, you've seen Besaid Island tons of times before, so I don't see why you're so excited." She looked back out. "Ooh! I think I can see the village! I can see Keepa." She laughed. "Haha. No, it's just a rock."

"I can say the same about you, you know," he retorted, leaning to one side in a futile attempt to see past Rikku and her abominably obstructive hair. "You've been to Besaid more than I have. Please stop blocking the view, Rikku." Bolts, how he hated landings. He gave her a pained look. "I really need to see the island."

Rikku stared absently out the thick glass view. "It doesn't really look like it changed much."

Buddy sighed. "Just move, Rikku. There's another view over there."

"But it's not as nice as this one!" she protested, turning around to stick her tongue out at him.

Buddy slowly clenched and unclenched his fists. He absolutely hated landings. "Rikku," he said in as steady a voice as he could manage. "Unless you want me crashing this baby into Besaid Temple, you really should step back and let me look."

Rikku gave him a startled look and quickly scampered away from the window. "I thought the computer took care of the landing," she protested. "It always has before."

"This time I'm landing the ship," Buddy explained patiently, just glad to have her out of the way. "All those other times, we just dropped you guys off and flew elsewhere until you contacted us."

"So why can't the computer take care of this one?" she asked curiously. "Isn't it the same thing?"

"Do you really know so little or are you just naturally this stupid?" came Picket's robotic tin-can voice—and for a robotic tin-can voice, he sure could make it sound irritatingly snotty. Smug little hunk of junk.

She stuck her tongue out at him, too.

Nhadala wore the same exasperated expression present on Buddy's face as she reprimanded her robot. "Be nice."

From the central pilot's seat which he always insisted was his, Brother demanded in a sulky tone, "Did we really have to bring him along?"

He and Picket had been chewing each other out within seconds after the take-off (which was a record, since Brother was usually busy wetting his pants to be anything other than pitiful), which explained rather well the Buddy's and Nhadala's haggard appearances and Rikku's surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) upbeat disposition.

Nhadala winced- a fact everyone could observe if they wanted to because once she saw there was no sand anywhere in the ship to blast into her eyes and permanently blind her left eye, she took it off, but kept it close by, just in case.

She was kind of prissy in an obsessive way like that.

Nhadala turned to Rikku after a short mental debate on which case to deal with: Brother and Picket—too futile, nothing could pry the two apart from their scream fest—or Rikku—unimaginably annoying, but sporadically rational, so...

"Besaid is an island village," she told Rikku. "Kilika is miles away, so it's relatively isolated, what with the water surrounding the island to close it in. The village is primitive, and not a very tech savvy one, at that."

Rikku blinked. "So?"

"What she means," Buddy spoke up from where he stared intently through the window, "is that Besaid doesn't have any of the advanced radiowave intercepting technology to autopilot a landing through mere computer calculation of global positioning and physical, or logistical, rather, speculation."

The Al Bhed girl's eyes lit up. "Ohh," she nodded brightly.

"That, you get?" Nhadala couldn't really believe it. Rikku's only response was a helpless little shrug and a typically cheesy grin.

"I'll get right to it," Shinra promised, looking up from his computer console. "Once we land, that is. It shouldn't be too hard to whip up a landing station." He paused thoughtfully. "At the beach, maybe, there's enough space there to handle the Celsius, but the Airship is a different matter..." He trailed off contemplatively. "Hmm..."

Buddy gave the boy a startled look. "I didn't really mean—"

But Picket suddenly interrupted him, flying from where he had been arguing with Brother with an arrogant little flicker of his jets. "The Celsius is tilted seven point twenty-three degrees too much to the north if you want to land this ship without creating gouges the size of a hover across her hull," he informed the pilot. "Unless, of course, you don't mind messy landings. I, however, have always found them quite the mark of an inexperienced pilot."

Buddy's fingers twitched, but before he could say or do anything to the supercilious mess of spare parts, Shinra piped up, objecting to the robot's calculations. "The angle is perfectly fine! It's the velocity of the ship that'll bring it crashing down. The momentum will carry it," he paused, calculating fast enough to counter the speed of light, "about seventeen inches too forward, and not to mention the chaos that implicates when we land at all."

"It's the ship's degree, human boy, and that's seventeen point eighty-four inches," Picket informed him in a patronizing tone, hovering oppressively at the boy's shoulder.

Rikku rolled her eyes. "Nerds," she muttered. She wondered, though, why Picket hadn't been so abrasive when they first tromped into Bikanel as sphere hunters. The little ball of short wires had been annoying, but not this annoying.

The two were still at it. "I rounded it off, you hunk of scrap metal," Shinra shot back, his fingers flying across the console. "And the degrees make up for the wind speed—we're flying too high, and you know it."

"The head wind coming in from alongside the starboard isn't half as quick as the tail wind, and that's dragging it back!" Picket snapped hotly. "And we aren't flying too high, we're flying too low."

"We are not!"

"We are!"

"Not!"

"Are!"

"Not!"

The ship began to tremble a little. Buddy quickly ran over the engines—no, just turbulence. But wait, how—?

"See? I told you we'd crash!"

"We will not! And your little degrees bit makes no headway!"

"Oh, it does too, you little baby!"

Nhadala tried to pull them apart. "Hey, none of that really matters—or at least, it doesn't make sense."

Brother, however, drowned her out, with the triumphant (and obviously short-sighted) exclamation of, "Who cares if we crash? As long as we plow headfirst into the temple, so it'll be fun. We'll be perfectly fine!" He laughed cheerfully.

Buddy gave his friend a withering look. "Not on my ship, you won't be."

"My ship? It's my ship! Why do you say it's yours?"

Buddy rubbed his temples. "Because you don't have the slightest clue on how to even start to learn how to fly a ship without autopilot, and Rikku, get back from there. You're blocking the view—again." He looked ready to explode.

"Ooh, sorry," Rikku apologized and skipped back. "I just wanted to take a closer look, and the view's not so good from back there, because all you can see is Brother's big ugly head."

"I can too run a ship!" Brother howled. "And my head isn't as big as yours with all that undead yellow hair!"

"That's because you're prematurely going bald!" Rikku yelped, offended that he attacked her hair—it was sacred ground! Just like she never trespassed into snapping about his dorky Mohawk. Hair was an untouchable subject.

Okay, so maybe striking back with another hair jibe wasn't such a good idea.

"Rikku, how dare you??" he practically screeched.

Buddy closed his eyes. Ladies and gentlemen, it was possible to get a hangover without ever consuming an alcoholic drink. All you need is one unhealthy dose of Cid's bratlings. Take a Shinra and a Picket and smash'em together, if you want the hallucinations.

"Would you two stop?" Nhadala was scolding the two obsessive little idiots at the back of the bridge. "Buddy will land us without any help from you two. He's done it before, I think, so we won't get too bruised."

Okay, now that, in Buddy's opinion, was a little offensive and totally uncalled for. What had he done to her? His head began to tremble along with the rest of the ship, and he had a feeling that he was making the same whining noise as well.

Or it was just Brother and Rikku.

"It's not my fault the little technological infant has no idea how to calculate a simple landing flight!" Picket was objecting.

"Technological infant?" Shinra repeated. "Well, this technological infant can have you dismantled in the span of time it would take you to calculate the velocity of a commsphere radio wave molecular transmitter on a G-level frequency!"

Picket tried to find something to say to that, but either way, he would lose, so he quickly dodged behind the weary Al Bhed woman. "Nhadala!" the bot cried. "This tinkerer is threatening me with bodily harm!"

There was a fascinating little tic in Buddy's right eye that Rikku had never seen before (hard to miss now, though) and found absolutely fascinating. It seemed to contort his whole face into this odd sort of expression which reminded her of a constipated sand worm she had seen once.

And, as she recalled, when the state of constipation dissipated from the worm's digestive system, things got real messy.

"Would everyone PLEASE shut up and let me fly this thing without all the 'helpful' advice??"

Smack in the face with the dried up constipation!

That stopped everyone in their tracks. Brother even forgot to whine for a moment—seeing someone so laid back as Buddy explode was a little scary for someone who hated hexapods and the like. Or just him.

"Um," Rikku decided to break the stunned silence. "Wouldn't you know it, that doggie that always wandered around in front of the temple has puppies?" She pointed out the window. "With spots and swishy tails."

Buddy turned to her, still looking decidedly murderous. "Rikku, get away from the view. How could you see if they have—"

And then it was a sort of funny moment (to Rikku, at least), when his face morphed from this crazy psycho expression into this totally pale and panicked one, with the eyes bugging out and all—well, they would be if she could see them, but she couldn't since he was wearing goggles and all.

It was a little understandable, she guessed. Buddy adored the Celsius, and he went ballistic (sort of, in a Buddy-esque kind of way) whenever anyone even thought of leaning on her newly polished surface. So if the thought of smudging the ship made him a little nuts, imagine what the actual event of it crashing would do to his sanity.

Buddy had every right to turn all pale and buggy—especially since the ship was heading straight toward the temple doors without any sign of slowing down.

Well, Rikku did move out of the way a lot, so it wasn't her fault.

"Honestly, if you were going to crash the ship all along, why couldn't you let me stay here and look?"

Little note:

Okay, I just felt like writing something fun and absolutely pointless. I have no idea if whatever Shinra and Picket were yammering on about would actually be consistent in real-life piloting but it sounded almost smart, so whatever. Good enough for me.

Oh, and to those who want to pull my brains out through my nostrils with a hook pointed knife (XD) because Gippal isn't here yet, relax. I want to do it, too. Hah. I promised Gippal, so you'll get Gippal—later, though. But you can be sure he'll be popping in to help with my de-braining.

Mind informing me of any grammatical mistakes?

(Gee, it's so much better to write that word than say it. I always end up saying something like 'grammaretical' or whatever.)