Disclaimer: Final Fantasy X, Final Fantasy X-2, 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.
A lot of people have mentioned that the Al Bhed is still getting on their nerves. My rule of thumb is to try not to use more than the games do; however, if being confused bothers you and you don't like scrolling, you might want to keep an online translator open in another window so you can input lines as they come up. You can find one here: http://www.j-maxx.net/abtrans/
This chapter is dedicated to: everyone who's reviewed so far, the con photographer Maboroshi, my pet cosplaying Auron-chan because he'll never get this far in the story, and all the lawyers who aren't going to sue me for this.
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 Plays Dress-Up
by flame mage
spherechange 3: Highroad Winds
**********
The hover touched down in front of the Mi'ihen Highroad Travel Agency twenty minutes later. I'd have to transfer hovers there and then hike on foot to Youth League HQ at the end of Mushroom Rock Road, but first I wanted to stop at the Agency and pick up a few supplies. I was totally unarmed and I wasn't looking forward to dealing with fiends or mobsters without weapons or at least some food. Damn, I hadn't even waited long enough to get that free dinner at Mitza's.
I hadn't been to the Mi'ihen Agency in a while, but as soon as I walked in it was obvious that a few personnel changes had taken place since my last visit. I knew Ropp was working as a mechanic in Bevelle, and presumably Clissi the Twit had gotten married and settled down to work as a domestic trophy somewhere with 2.5 cherubic blond children. Or maybe died. I honestly didn't care all that much. They'd been replaced by a very formal, very polite brunette who reminded me of a bowing and less intelligent version of the old Miyu.
Speaking of Miyu, where was she anyway? It wasn't like her to just abandon a house she was supposed to be taking care of and not even leave a note when she knew Rin would be looking for her. Something pretty important must have happened if she'd run off. And if she hadn't...I didn't even want to think about it.
I was browsing the shelves, trying to find any weapon more substantial than a slingshot and maybe some canned pasta (gotta keep those carbs up) when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I spun and came face-to-face with the one person I should have been expecting but wasn't: Rin. Mistake. Everyone should always be expecting Rin.
"Secc Linna," he said by way of greeting, never one to waste time, "I dislike being the bearer of bad news, but Naaga has gone missing."
I scoffed and went back to ravioli-hunting. "And you're bothering me with this why? Give it a rest, Rin; she's a big girl now. She's probably just chasing after another one of her boy toys anyway."
"For two days? She failed to return to Besaid after yesterday morning."
"She told me she was going to visit Naida," I muttered. Even after our exploits together in the Via Purifico two years earlier, the scantily-clad merchant and I still weren't on the most cordial terms--she'd stolen this guy I'd dated once, and...never mind. You don't care, and if you do, you probably shouldn't. Anyway, Naaga's complete awe of her still grated on my nerves.
"Naida is--oh, no. This could be dangerous." Rin's normally tanned-to-a-crisp face was suddenly pale.
I looked at him sharply. That almost-panicked tone of voice was rare for Rin, who was the original master of balanced, harmonious calmness. His mantra, which I'd heard maybe fifty thousand times while he was teaching me blitz, was 'Take two deep breaths and count to ten.' He maintained that it could not only keep you calm in any situation, but also cure world hunger and win blitz matches.
"Whaa? Why?" I demanded. "Where is Nai--"
"I'd better go. Please, don't get yourself into any trouble if at all possible, although somehow I doubt that." And with that, he had dashed outside and launched himself into the hover. The bewildered pilot blinked, shrugged, resettled her aviator's cap on her head, and took off into the wild blue yonder in the direction of Mushroom Rock.
"Hey, that's my ride!" I bellowed, but they were already gone.
Now it was my turn to blink for a couple seconds. Hover gone. Domestic Chocobos gone. It looked like I was going to be doing this the old-fashioned way, I realized, and started walking.
*****
The trek to the gate that separated the Mi'ihen Highroad from Mushroom Rock Road was actually pretty uneventful. Occasionally some disgruntled wayfarer (as soon as I thought that one up, I was so instantly pleased with myself that I spent five minutes translating it into English, hoping I'd get a chance to use it on someone) would charge past me, but they were all in too big a hurry to get somewhere to notice me.
As soon as I got to the gate, I started questioning Rin's definition of 'trouble.'
I heard the mob before I saw it. They were standing--I use the term loosely, since a lot of them looked like the kind of geniuses that still walk on all fours and have prehensile tails--at the gate the Crusaders had set up more than two years ago for Operation Mi'ihen. There were Crusaders there today, too, but--waiddaminute. I came to a screeching halt. The Crusaders had been disbanded after the Calm began. So what was the deal with them being out in full force today--and what was the deal with Miyu being with them, I wondered with a jolt as I recognized one of the faces behind the metal masks.
I ducked behind a pillar so I could hear what they were saying without being seen. The crowd on my side of the gate was really getting angry now.
"Let us in!" You notice how the Yevonites always come up with the good lines?
"We know the Youth League has been stockpiling spheres that belong to the temples! Give them up and no one will be harmed!"
"The wrath of New Yevon will fall upon your sinful heads!"
I wasn't liking the tones of their voices or the exclamation points at the end of their sentences, and I liked the words they were saying even less. This was definitely my cue to barge in and do something incredibly stupid that, if I'd stopped to think about it for five seconds, would have been such an obvious bad idea that I would've slunk back to Luca and none of what followed would have ever happened. "Hey!" I said, stepping out from behind the pillar and facing the unwashed masses, "You guys have some kind of problem with the Youth League?"
"Yes!" spluttered one of the Yevonites. "These sacreligious monsters are withholding sacred spheres that document the history of our people!"
Oh, really. "Hey, wait, isn't that what *you guys* are doing?" I asked.
"Most certainly not! We are preserving the holy tradition of Spira. New Yevon is merely protecting those spheres--protecting them from idiots like these!"
"But those idiots won't let us pass!" yelled another. As I watched, he hurled himself against the gate straight toward Miyu. The iron bars, rusty from two and a half years of braving the elements in muggy Mi'ihen, creaked ominously.
The corner of Miyu's mouth curled dangerously and she brandished the heavy, wicked-looking sword she was carrying. "I don't want to have to hurt you," she threatened the man. She was trying to sound low and dangerous, but I could tell she was nervous and her voice was fluking up higher than she wanted it to. What I could see of her face was flushed. She and the others were sweating bullets back there.
"You see? You see what they do to us?!" The Yevonite turned to me, looking exasperated. "All we wanted to do was talk to their leader. Now we'll have to cut them all down in the name of Yevon!" He whipped out his own sword from the scabbard at his side--how had I missed that before?--and started whanging away at the gates.
He looked like a complete dork, but he and I and everyone else there knew that the gates were in bad shape, and in three minutes he could shatter them completely.
"Hey, creep," I hissed at him. "Look, I'm sure their leader's probably very busy at the moment, trying to figure out how to get back the spheres you guys are stealing from the rest of Spira. But there's no need to harass these poor people. You want to pick a fight with a Youth Leaguer? I'm your girl."
Realization dawned. "Hey, she's the one I saw on the sphere network! The Yevon-hater!"
"That's right! She's the one that's trying to make us all afraid to use machines!"
"Linna, isn't it? The blitzer? Isn't that just *like* an Al Bhed?!"
They say that being a celebrity goes to your head; they're not kidding. It isn't exactly that you think of yourself as better than other people, just more infallible. You get cocky. It leads to recklessness, because you subconsciously believe that because you've done so much, nothing else life can throw at you can do much to hurt you. This had been my mother's problem, it was Bickson's problem when I'd first met him, and it was starting to turn into my problem. This would might help to explain some of the stupid things I proceeded to do.
I stared at the woman who had spoken and calmly pushed my goggles up over my eyes. "Don't you *dare* say that's like an Al Bhed. We spent hundreds of years being your second-class citizens, and damn if I'm gonna take any more of it!"
The moron working on the gates finally took one more mighty swing with his sword and the whole shebang crumbled. Cred. Time to take action. While everyone else was just standing there, I jumped forward with a perfect Nap Shot 3 kick and knocked the gate-whanging Yevonite flat on his back. While I was at it, I snatched his sword and turned around to see who else wanted a piece of me.
The battle had begun. The Crusaders charged forward, surrounding the Yevonites so they couldn't pass. The Yevonites, seeing that now they were going to have to put their metal where their mouths had been, drew their own swords and started slashing.
I'd dealt with fiends before, but I'd never been in melee combat. Turns out it's not really all that different from blitzball. When you have the ball, a lot of people come at you at once. You dodge the tackles you can, break the tackles you can't, and try to give as good as you get.
"How's it going?" I asked Miyu sardonically after ripping a nasty-looking six-inch gash in the coat of one of the Yevonites. This was happening more by chance than anything; I was just trying not to get killed. You always wonder what you'd do if something like this happened. I'll tell you--you'd fight like a madwoman. Or man. Whichever.
"A lot better before you showed up," she hissed back. "Blitz has gotten you way too used to getting a crowd worked up."
"Like you coulda taken them if they rushed you. So this is where you've been the last few weeks, huh?"
She whipped her sword around and slammed the point about half an inch from one of the Yevonite's throats. His eyes kept getting wider and wider until his courage broke completely, at which point he turned tail and fled. "Mmm-hmm," she replied. "The Guado have been gone from Guadosalam for most of the Calm; you know I've been taking care of Nav's place. But when New Yevon came to town and started blaring all this filth about Nooj and the Crusaders, I knew that I had to come here. I fought alongside Mevyn Nooj during Operation Mi'ihen. Maybe I felt like I owed him."
"I'm amazed you didn't freak out about having to attack Yevonites like this," I told her as I forced another one to the wall. He ran too. The crowd was starting to thin out.
It was becoming apparent what was going on: the Crusaders, while they'd always been a motley crew, had at least some training and combat experience. They were fighting civilians. In fact, all the New Yevonites I'd seen so far had been civilians. Were their clergy still boarded up in the temples? I wondered if they had an organized military arm too.
"I was a little apprehensive at first," Miyu admitted. "I might have joined New Yevon if things had happened differently. But...well, I'm a lot different than I was two years ago, Linna."
"So I noticed." When I'd met her, Miyu was this quiet, faceless woman who was--aside from Rin--the only hint of calm rationale or elegance in our little circle. After losing her fiance to Sin years earlier, she had retreated into a polite, almost silent shell, not to mention the fact that she joined the Crusaders and the Guado Glories. She'd also been a devout Yevonite who was devoted to defending Spira from Sin, even though the Crusaders had all been excommunicated for using machina in their operations. It was only two years ago, when she'd discovered that Yevon's teachings were nothing more than lies made up to keep the people quiet, that she'd broken out from that shell with her sword already swinging. And woe to anyone foolish enough to get in her way.
"That the last of them?" she called to the others as the last Yevonite on our side skittered off down the Highroad.
I looked around. Seeing no further opposition, I took my sphere camera out of my bag and recorded the scene--maybe I could show it off to the guys on the team next time we went to the bar in Luca. Miyu glanced at the camera, raised an eyebrow, and made an exasperated face at it. I sighed and put it away. Not the time.
"I think so," one of the men replied. He removed his mask and wiped the sweat off his forehead. "We'd better get someone out here to repair this gate."
"Leave it," Miyu told him. "Anyone who wants to get to us will have to fight their way through Mushroom Rock Road, and the New Yevonites aren't well-armed enough to do that. Even if they could, our border patrol's hard to beat, right?"
"Right!" cheered the other members of the border patrol. She was doing the lets'-go-team-ego-boost thing Tidus had stressed so much in blitz.
"But..." a woman in purple asked, looking at me, "...officer? What are we going to do about her?"
"I'm not sure yet." Miyu looked me up and down. "Linna, are you officially volunteering for duty in the Youth League?"
About this time I made my second or third fatal mistake: I nodded. "Yeah. I am."
"Then we'd better take her straight to Mevyn Nooj," she told the others.
"Uh...ma'am? Don't you mean Commander Lucil?" someone asked.
"I don't, at that. I've got a feeling the Mevyn will want to see her." Miyu spun on her heels and started walking. "Coming?" she called over her shoulder to me.
"Yes, ma'am!" I replied, saluting, as we started down the long road to Mushroom Rock. Belatedly, it occured to me that I'd never picked up my canned ravioli. This thought would haunt my dreams ceaselessly in the weeks to come.
A lot of people have mentioned that the Al Bhed is still getting on their nerves. My rule of thumb is to try not to use more than the games do; however, if being confused bothers you and you don't like scrolling, you might want to keep an online translator open in another window so you can input lines as they come up. You can find one here: http://www.j-maxx.net/abtrans/
This chapter is dedicated to: everyone who's reviewed so far, the con photographer Maboroshi, my pet cosplaying Auron-chan because he'll never get this far in the story, and all the lawyers who aren't going to sue me for this.
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 Plays Dress-Up
by flame mage
spherechange 3: Highroad Winds
**********
The hover touched down in front of the Mi'ihen Highroad Travel Agency twenty minutes later. I'd have to transfer hovers there and then hike on foot to Youth League HQ at the end of Mushroom Rock Road, but first I wanted to stop at the Agency and pick up a few supplies. I was totally unarmed and I wasn't looking forward to dealing with fiends or mobsters without weapons or at least some food. Damn, I hadn't even waited long enough to get that free dinner at Mitza's.
I hadn't been to the Mi'ihen Agency in a while, but as soon as I walked in it was obvious that a few personnel changes had taken place since my last visit. I knew Ropp was working as a mechanic in Bevelle, and presumably Clissi the Twit had gotten married and settled down to work as a domestic trophy somewhere with 2.5 cherubic blond children. Or maybe died. I honestly didn't care all that much. They'd been replaced by a very formal, very polite brunette who reminded me of a bowing and less intelligent version of the old Miyu.
Speaking of Miyu, where was she anyway? It wasn't like her to just abandon a house she was supposed to be taking care of and not even leave a note when she knew Rin would be looking for her. Something pretty important must have happened if she'd run off. And if she hadn't...I didn't even want to think about it.
I was browsing the shelves, trying to find any weapon more substantial than a slingshot and maybe some canned pasta (gotta keep those carbs up) when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I spun and came face-to-face with the one person I should have been expecting but wasn't: Rin. Mistake. Everyone should always be expecting Rin.
"Secc Linna," he said by way of greeting, never one to waste time, "I dislike being the bearer of bad news, but Naaga has gone missing."
I scoffed and went back to ravioli-hunting. "And you're bothering me with this why? Give it a rest, Rin; she's a big girl now. She's probably just chasing after another one of her boy toys anyway."
"For two days? She failed to return to Besaid after yesterday morning."
"She told me she was going to visit Naida," I muttered. Even after our exploits together in the Via Purifico two years earlier, the scantily-clad merchant and I still weren't on the most cordial terms--she'd stolen this guy I'd dated once, and...never mind. You don't care, and if you do, you probably shouldn't. Anyway, Naaga's complete awe of her still grated on my nerves.
"Naida is--oh, no. This could be dangerous." Rin's normally tanned-to-a-crisp face was suddenly pale.
I looked at him sharply. That almost-panicked tone of voice was rare for Rin, who was the original master of balanced, harmonious calmness. His mantra, which I'd heard maybe fifty thousand times while he was teaching me blitz, was 'Take two deep breaths and count to ten.' He maintained that it could not only keep you calm in any situation, but also cure world hunger and win blitz matches.
"Whaa? Why?" I demanded. "Where is Nai--"
"I'd better go. Please, don't get yourself into any trouble if at all possible, although somehow I doubt that." And with that, he had dashed outside and launched himself into the hover. The bewildered pilot blinked, shrugged, resettled her aviator's cap on her head, and took off into the wild blue yonder in the direction of Mushroom Rock.
"Hey, that's my ride!" I bellowed, but they were already gone.
Now it was my turn to blink for a couple seconds. Hover gone. Domestic Chocobos gone. It looked like I was going to be doing this the old-fashioned way, I realized, and started walking.
*****
The trek to the gate that separated the Mi'ihen Highroad from Mushroom Rock Road was actually pretty uneventful. Occasionally some disgruntled wayfarer (as soon as I thought that one up, I was so instantly pleased with myself that I spent five minutes translating it into English, hoping I'd get a chance to use it on someone) would charge past me, but they were all in too big a hurry to get somewhere to notice me.
As soon as I got to the gate, I started questioning Rin's definition of 'trouble.'
I heard the mob before I saw it. They were standing--I use the term loosely, since a lot of them looked like the kind of geniuses that still walk on all fours and have prehensile tails--at the gate the Crusaders had set up more than two years ago for Operation Mi'ihen. There were Crusaders there today, too, but--waiddaminute. I came to a screeching halt. The Crusaders had been disbanded after the Calm began. So what was the deal with them being out in full force today--and what was the deal with Miyu being with them, I wondered with a jolt as I recognized one of the faces behind the metal masks.
I ducked behind a pillar so I could hear what they were saying without being seen. The crowd on my side of the gate was really getting angry now.
"Let us in!" You notice how the Yevonites always come up with the good lines?
"We know the Youth League has been stockpiling spheres that belong to the temples! Give them up and no one will be harmed!"
"The wrath of New Yevon will fall upon your sinful heads!"
I wasn't liking the tones of their voices or the exclamation points at the end of their sentences, and I liked the words they were saying even less. This was definitely my cue to barge in and do something incredibly stupid that, if I'd stopped to think about it for five seconds, would have been such an obvious bad idea that I would've slunk back to Luca and none of what followed would have ever happened. "Hey!" I said, stepping out from behind the pillar and facing the unwashed masses, "You guys have some kind of problem with the Youth League?"
"Yes!" spluttered one of the Yevonites. "These sacreligious monsters are withholding sacred spheres that document the history of our people!"
Oh, really. "Hey, wait, isn't that what *you guys* are doing?" I asked.
"Most certainly not! We are preserving the holy tradition of Spira. New Yevon is merely protecting those spheres--protecting them from idiots like these!"
"But those idiots won't let us pass!" yelled another. As I watched, he hurled himself against the gate straight toward Miyu. The iron bars, rusty from two and a half years of braving the elements in muggy Mi'ihen, creaked ominously.
The corner of Miyu's mouth curled dangerously and she brandished the heavy, wicked-looking sword she was carrying. "I don't want to have to hurt you," she threatened the man. She was trying to sound low and dangerous, but I could tell she was nervous and her voice was fluking up higher than she wanted it to. What I could see of her face was flushed. She and the others were sweating bullets back there.
"You see? You see what they do to us?!" The Yevonite turned to me, looking exasperated. "All we wanted to do was talk to their leader. Now we'll have to cut them all down in the name of Yevon!" He whipped out his own sword from the scabbard at his side--how had I missed that before?--and started whanging away at the gates.
He looked like a complete dork, but he and I and everyone else there knew that the gates were in bad shape, and in three minutes he could shatter them completely.
"Hey, creep," I hissed at him. "Look, I'm sure their leader's probably very busy at the moment, trying to figure out how to get back the spheres you guys are stealing from the rest of Spira. But there's no need to harass these poor people. You want to pick a fight with a Youth Leaguer? I'm your girl."
Realization dawned. "Hey, she's the one I saw on the sphere network! The Yevon-hater!"
"That's right! She's the one that's trying to make us all afraid to use machines!"
"Linna, isn't it? The blitzer? Isn't that just *like* an Al Bhed?!"
They say that being a celebrity goes to your head; they're not kidding. It isn't exactly that you think of yourself as better than other people, just more infallible. You get cocky. It leads to recklessness, because you subconsciously believe that because you've done so much, nothing else life can throw at you can do much to hurt you. This had been my mother's problem, it was Bickson's problem when I'd first met him, and it was starting to turn into my problem. This would might help to explain some of the stupid things I proceeded to do.
I stared at the woman who had spoken and calmly pushed my goggles up over my eyes. "Don't you *dare* say that's like an Al Bhed. We spent hundreds of years being your second-class citizens, and damn if I'm gonna take any more of it!"
The moron working on the gates finally took one more mighty swing with his sword and the whole shebang crumbled. Cred. Time to take action. While everyone else was just standing there, I jumped forward with a perfect Nap Shot 3 kick and knocked the gate-whanging Yevonite flat on his back. While I was at it, I snatched his sword and turned around to see who else wanted a piece of me.
The battle had begun. The Crusaders charged forward, surrounding the Yevonites so they couldn't pass. The Yevonites, seeing that now they were going to have to put their metal where their mouths had been, drew their own swords and started slashing.
I'd dealt with fiends before, but I'd never been in melee combat. Turns out it's not really all that different from blitzball. When you have the ball, a lot of people come at you at once. You dodge the tackles you can, break the tackles you can't, and try to give as good as you get.
"How's it going?" I asked Miyu sardonically after ripping a nasty-looking six-inch gash in the coat of one of the Yevonites. This was happening more by chance than anything; I was just trying not to get killed. You always wonder what you'd do if something like this happened. I'll tell you--you'd fight like a madwoman. Or man. Whichever.
"A lot better before you showed up," she hissed back. "Blitz has gotten you way too used to getting a crowd worked up."
"Like you coulda taken them if they rushed you. So this is where you've been the last few weeks, huh?"
She whipped her sword around and slammed the point about half an inch from one of the Yevonite's throats. His eyes kept getting wider and wider until his courage broke completely, at which point he turned tail and fled. "Mmm-hmm," she replied. "The Guado have been gone from Guadosalam for most of the Calm; you know I've been taking care of Nav's place. But when New Yevon came to town and started blaring all this filth about Nooj and the Crusaders, I knew that I had to come here. I fought alongside Mevyn Nooj during Operation Mi'ihen. Maybe I felt like I owed him."
"I'm amazed you didn't freak out about having to attack Yevonites like this," I told her as I forced another one to the wall. He ran too. The crowd was starting to thin out.
It was becoming apparent what was going on: the Crusaders, while they'd always been a motley crew, had at least some training and combat experience. They were fighting civilians. In fact, all the New Yevonites I'd seen so far had been civilians. Were their clergy still boarded up in the temples? I wondered if they had an organized military arm too.
"I was a little apprehensive at first," Miyu admitted. "I might have joined New Yevon if things had happened differently. But...well, I'm a lot different than I was two years ago, Linna."
"So I noticed." When I'd met her, Miyu was this quiet, faceless woman who was--aside from Rin--the only hint of calm rationale or elegance in our little circle. After losing her fiance to Sin years earlier, she had retreated into a polite, almost silent shell, not to mention the fact that she joined the Crusaders and the Guado Glories. She'd also been a devout Yevonite who was devoted to defending Spira from Sin, even though the Crusaders had all been excommunicated for using machina in their operations. It was only two years ago, when she'd discovered that Yevon's teachings were nothing more than lies made up to keep the people quiet, that she'd broken out from that shell with her sword already swinging. And woe to anyone foolish enough to get in her way.
"That the last of them?" she called to the others as the last Yevonite on our side skittered off down the Highroad.
I looked around. Seeing no further opposition, I took my sphere camera out of my bag and recorded the scene--maybe I could show it off to the guys on the team next time we went to the bar in Luca. Miyu glanced at the camera, raised an eyebrow, and made an exasperated face at it. I sighed and put it away. Not the time.
"I think so," one of the men replied. He removed his mask and wiped the sweat off his forehead. "We'd better get someone out here to repair this gate."
"Leave it," Miyu told him. "Anyone who wants to get to us will have to fight their way through Mushroom Rock Road, and the New Yevonites aren't well-armed enough to do that. Even if they could, our border patrol's hard to beat, right?"
"Right!" cheered the other members of the border patrol. She was doing the lets'-go-team-ego-boost thing Tidus had stressed so much in blitz.
"But..." a woman in purple asked, looking at me, "...officer? What are we going to do about her?"
"I'm not sure yet." Miyu looked me up and down. "Linna, are you officially volunteering for duty in the Youth League?"
About this time I made my second or third fatal mistake: I nodded. "Yeah. I am."
"Then we'd better take her straight to Mevyn Nooj," she told the others.
"Uh...ma'am? Don't you mean Commander Lucil?" someone asked.
"I don't, at that. I've got a feeling the Mevyn will want to see her." Miyu spun on her heels and started walking. "Coming?" she called over her shoulder to me.
"Yes, ma'am!" I replied, saluting, as we started down the long road to Mushroom Rock. Belatedly, it occured to me that I'd never picked up my canned ravioli. This thought would haunt my dreams ceaselessly in the weeks to come.