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.

You guys all remember Reppi from the last installment in this trilogy, right? I like her a lot, mainly because I own her. But I don't think I own anyone else new here, so don't sue me.

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 13: Enigma Plate

"Hey, Sanna!" I called as soon as we touched ground. "Got some fresh meat for us?"

"Two different kinds!" she called back. "I gotcha' new diggers and new jerky all in one load. Say hello to Djose's finest."

There were seven of them. Four of them were males, big tough-looking guys who were dressed basically like Nedus in standard Al Bhed clothing and full-face goggles. The others weren't Al Bhed--there was one guy who looked like a total city slicker to me and a Crusader type who was still hefting a thin blade. I snickered to myself as I noticed that they were lined up according to height, with the slightly shorter Al Bhed guys on one end, followed by the two taller guys, and on the other end was a woman who was a head taller than anyone else and...had long black braids and deep brown skin and...a blitzball uniform on...

Ur, hu. It was Reppi.

If you don't know Reppi, I should explain that she's a pretty well-known goalie on the blitz circuit. She was the captain of a minor-league team called the Spira Spirals a couple years ago, but a very complex government conspiracy forced them to disband and actually imprisoned her in the Via Purifico. That had actually been where I'd first met her two years earlier, still kicking, chowing down on fiend meat and becoming a master mage. Since we'd gotten out, she'd started a team in the minors called the Bevelle Barbutas--I know, I know; I guess this time around she'd decided to use a name that wasn't a political protest--that was starting to get noticed bigtime in the Spira League. But what the hell was she doing working on a dig in the middle of Bikanel?

She was watching me watch her, and I caught the flash of recognition in her eyes. I put my hands on my hips and kept going in my slightly different Nhadala voice, "Well, well, looks like a good crowd. Okay, people, my name's Nhadala and I'm gonna be your forewoman. Welcome to Bikanel. Hey, Nedus!" I called, and our camp manager jogged over. "Help me out here. How much room do we have in that shelter?"

"None," he replied. "At least, if you want to have any place to sleep. The thing's full with all the personnel we already have."

"Gotcha. So you new guys are gonna be bunking in those tents over there for a little while." I pointed. "Go ahead and get your stuff set up there, and in fifteen minutes I want you back out here talking to the pilot. I've given him a list of your assignments for the afternoon. Picket'll give you the rundown." When they were gone, I turned to Sanna. "Can you make the upgrades on the new commsphere?"

"Yeah, sure. I don't have all that much new hardware for ya, just food and stuff. Want me to get Redeci and Nedus to unload it? And do you have anything to ship back to Djose?"

"Yes to the first question, no to the second. Actually, wait. I lied. I've got this." I dug the sphere of Bickson, Rin, and Naaga out of my bag. "Take it to Gippal. He'll know what to do with it."

"Will do. Oh, he sent you something too. List of the stuff he's looking for right now and where you can probably find it around here."

"Thanks." I took the list and glanced over it. "Okay, Eastern Expanse. Cool. I guess I got my work cut out for me, then. You should be able to take off when you've got everything unloaded. Oh, hey, Benzo," I called to the interpreter, who was just stepping out of the hover. "I know it's been a really long day, but don't get out. We've got one more date with destiny."

"What's on the agenda for this afternoon, Nhadala?" Benzo asked. "You know, now that we've already been all over the entire island and all."

I consulted my map. "I sent the newbies out to the Western and Southern expanses. Picket's taking care of those teams, so we're on our own. Shouldn't be that hard, though. We're heading to the Eastern Expanse to check out the machina there. Gippal sent me a list of the parts he wants, complete with diagrams and a couple of possible uses for the part. So all we really have to do is find a machina, check all the places on the thing he listed and see if they used any of those parts. If they do, we take 'em off and keep going."

"How are we going to do all that in sixty seconds?" he asked.

"We should be okay for a little longer than that." I reached one hand back to gesture at the water canteens in the back of the hover. "As long as the AC's blasting in here, they'll stay frozen. When we take 'em out, they'll melt and be cold for a few minutes--long enough for us to dismantle a machina. You ever done something like this?"

"Not really," he admitted. "I guess I know the basics, like everyone, but I never really did anything with machina construction besides what they taught us in school. Did you have to build simple machines like pulleys and levers too?"

Actually, I had. My teacher had been maybe ninety years old--pretty unusual for an Al Bhed male--and such a total geezer that he'd talked like a Hypello might if you taught one to speak Al Bhed. "Shuf ehscand bhhynd 17L ehdu bhhynd 19T yht nhudyda bhhynd 147M aqyldmo 224 taknaac ihdem ouish rhhayn y lhhamelgehkhh chuiht..." He'd refused to get denture upgrades when prosthesis technology improved; he was the bitter opposite of Nooj. But I had learned about the basics of machinery, and I'd put that knowledge to use in a lot of ways in my everyday life--like lockpicking and taking apart alarm systems.

"Yes," I answered noncommittally, turning the hover sharply. Benzo gripped the side panel of the hover and dropped the question.

"That looks promising," he said when he recovered. I turned to look down. We were almost directly above a hulking machina that looked like it might be a kind of submarine or boat. Gippal's note had mentioned that craft like these could possibly house some of the defense equipment he was looking for. I stopped the hover in midair and took it straight down the way Jock had shown me the other day. Why hadn't he taught me that first? I wondered as we gently touched the sand. Doing stationary chopper landings was way easier than pretending to be a biplane.

"All right. You ready?" I asked Benzo, grabbing two of the water canteens and handing him one.

"As ready as ever. Let's see what we can find."

I kicked the pilot's-side door open and we jumped out of opposite sides of the cockpit, ready to rumble. This was uberlame, because we were a pair of dorks in the middle of nowhere trying to look like action heroes in the movies and failing miserably because we were already cramming the canteen nozzles in our mouths forty seconds after we left the hover. Even when I'd lived here, I'd rarely left the Home complex; I'd forgotten how sweltering Bikanel is, especially in the hotter part of the year. I was really starting to miss the cool blitz sphere.

As we got closer, I could tell that the machina was definitely a sub. It was laying on its side, half-buried, but at the top of the craft there was a round door hanging open. It hadn't rusted--rust requires moisture, and Bikanel has about as much of that as a piece of paper--but sand had worked into the hinges, and it wouldn't shut.

I adjusted the dimmer on my goggles and peered at the list Gippal had given me. "Says here the main engine room might have something useful."

"Going in?" Benzo asked lightly, already ahead of me.

Thanks to the goggles, my eyes adjusted to the relative darkness pretty quickly. The corridors were tall enough to accomodate our height, but since everything was sideways, we had to crawl on our hands and knees (actually, Benzo could sorta half-walk) and go up a little bit to get through the doorways. Finding the engine room took some trial and error, but once the two of us made our way to the front of the sub it was easy to figure out which door we were looking for. At least it was a lot cooler in there than outside.

"So what now?" Benzo asked, looking around the room. We were actually on top of what should have been one wall. Here the space was wider, and we were both able to stand fairly comfortably without cracking our skulls on the metal plating.

I had the list pressed almost against my nose. The diagrams were pretty technical and I was quickly getting mystified. We should've gotten Ihu to explain them before we left. "Isn't it obvious?" I bluffed in my best don't-waste-my-time-by-being-a-moron voice.

"Not in the least, Nhadala. And you know it," the interpreter replied. Apparently he understood more about languages than just their mechanics. I'd just been busted.

"Okay, okay, so I'm drawing a blank here," I confessed, sucking on the canteen nozzle. We'd better figure something out before too long, or I'd drink the whole thing. "But it looks like we need to find an engine, which is contained in..." I squinted at Gippal's angular Al Bhed chicken scratch. "'...y sadym knyda?' Hmm...looks like there's a grate or a door or something in this kind of sub--old technology, maybe a boiler kinda thing. I can't read his writing all that well, but I think the kind of engines used during the era this type of craft was made tended to overheat, so they kept them inside specially insulated containers. Or something."

"Like this?" Benzo was pointing at a raised, rounded box on the floor--er, the wall. It was made out of sheet metal like the rest of the sub, but it had a hinged top. I shrugged and he braced the heels of his hands against the lid until he forced it open. A small blue sphere rolled out and across the sandy wall.

"Guess that's not it, then," I commented, scooping it up and tossing it in the air so I could catch it behind my back. I almost missed; I must be getting rusty. "Think we could get anything for it?"

"Depends on what's on it," Benzo replied. "Save it; it might be worth something. Let's try that one." He gestured at a similar box high on the wall to our right, which I was pretty sure might have been intended as a floor.

He was having trouble reaching it, so I got up on my tiptoes and stretched until I managed to get the box open and get out what it was inside. My knowledge of machina is nowhere near advanced enough to have any idea what the hell it was, but it looked complex. It also looked sorta like Gippal's diagram, so I decided it must be a good thing.

Benzo walked around behind me to look at the list. "Looks like we can get three parts from this, right? Stuff to up the power level available for attack? Umm...here, here, and here." I steadied the engine while he pried them loose. "Is that all, then?" he asked when I had them safely stored in my now very beat-up gear bag. "I'm almost out of water."

"Yeah." I hefted the bag strap higher up on my shoulder and wiped ineffectually at the sheen of sweat coating my forehead. "Let's bail." In unison, we crawled slowly all the way back and out of the sub and then made a mad dash for the hover.

After sticking my face up against the AC for a full seven minutes, I took us up and did a quick flyby of the Syndicate camp at the Oasis. It looked like they were mostly packed up by now, and I could see a couple of small ships departing in the distance. We passed Sanna going the other way on our way back, and we managed to flag her down and get her to wait until Redeci could get the artifacts packed and ready to go. At least we could finally show Gippal that something was going on around here.

"I'm glad ya finally found something," Sanna told us cheerfully, hefting the bulky packages up and into her cargo hold. "Gip's been on us nonstop because we can't get anything. I hear Nooj is really workin' on him to try to get some heavy artillery at Mushroom Rock, and now that Baralai's been showin' up askin' for rifles and other firearms, the orders are comin' in so fast we can't keep up."

"We're Al Bhed!" I burst out. "Don't tell me we're actually gonna sink so low as to make weapons for Yevonites! For what, so they can turn around and blow our brains out when our backs are turned? Next you're gonna tell me we're giving the Guado machine guns!"

"Nhadala, we're not concerned with politics here," Sanna explained patiently. "We're here for one reason only--to sell whatever we can to the highest bidder. Right now, that's New Yevon, because they're backin' their orders up with temple money. No tellin' who'll win the contracts in the long run--we can't do anything until we got parts anyway. And speaking of parts, I'd better head out if I want to make it to Djose by nightfall. I'll be back in a couple days."

I sighed. "Yeah, fine. See ya." It was still midafternoon and I was in a bad mood now. The camp was almost deserted except for me and Benzo, and I was getting kinda sick of talking to him. Time for a long, hot shower. I was slinking into the shelter to figure out where I'd stashed my towel--

--when the commsphere flashed. Hazily, I noticed that Sanna had installed a new sphere screen so the low-quality image was easier to see. I wished she'd just brought us a new one instead of trying to upgrade Shinra's junk. I was still grumbling to myself about this when the screen started flashing too and gave me the image feedback.

Bickson.

Translations:

"Ur, hu." - "Oh, no."

"Shuf ehscand bhhynd 17L ehdu bhhynd 19T yht nhudyda bhhynd 147M aqyldmo 224 taknaac ihdem ouish rhhayn y lhhamelgehkhh chuiht..." - Literally translates to, "Mnow inmsert pnnart 17C into pnnart 19D and rnotate pnnart 147L exactly 224 degrees until youmn hnnear a cnnelickingnn snound..." But this is Al Bhed with a Hypello accent, which includes a lot of extra "h" and "sh" sounds, so what the teacher really means is "Now insert part 17C into part 19D and rotate part 147L exactly 224 degrees until you hear a clicking sound..."

"...y sadym knyda?" - "...a metal grate?"