Author's note: I use a Nietzsche quote improperly in this chapter. For the record, "God is dead, and we have killed him" is meant to be a positive, uplifting quite from Nietzsche's The Gay Science.
"You'll never believe it," I began, my fangs chattering with happiness. It was night in the Haunted Woods, and my short coat of fur never did much to provide me warmth, even though these were the peak hours for the Esophagor sending me out for snacks.
"I've believed a lot of more ridiculous things than you could ever utter before, and that's a difficult task," said the Brain Tree blandly. No longer would his tone contain out-and-out spite towards me—he had keyed it down to a casual apathy. "In a word, I've believed in socialism."
"God, that sucks BUT—" I began, speaking rapidly, "—but here's the funny thing. You know how the fuzz have been helping Fernypoo search for Vali over here?" Vali turned towards me at the mention of her name. She was playing with the mud and dirt around the Brain Tree's base as if it were sand, stacking it up into a rusted pail. Out of the mold of the pail, she was created primitive castles, poking her fingers into the side of the sculptures to give them windows for inhabitants born from the dirt. "Apparently Fernypoo had a plan of her own. She just called me from the Esophagor's stockpiled phone!"
"Oh?" answered the Brain Tree, most of his attention invested in Vali in the flesh.
"Not, oh, whoa!" I corrected, too excited to notice that the Brain Tree had little interest. "I'm going to get my money, you understand? Then I'm going to buy my way out of the Esophagor's slavery, and then paint myself back to Spotted!"
"When do you plan on doing that?"
"Tonight. That's why I came." I held out my arms towards Vali, who, seemingly disturbed, moved in closer to the Brain Tree. "Come to Daddy, little lady!"
"Daddy doesn't love you so much," the Brain Tree murmured to Vali, and the Baby Grarl looked up to the Brain Tree loyally. He patted Vali over the head with a branch, giving her an almost endearing look. I raised an eyebrow at the couple, perplexed.
"Hey, hey, wait a second." I moved my finger between the two to indicate both of them, suspicious. "What's going on between you two here? I thought you hated this little tyke over here, Brain Tree. Now you're almost … fatherly."
"What!" The Brain Tree suddenly snapped out of his paternal stupor of staring stupid with love at Vali. The ornery look of the typical Brain Tree reappeared, carved into his bark like initials of split lovers. "Don't be ridiculous, Kacheek."
"Didn't you just say you—"
"Quiet, Kacheek! I'm trying to think."
"Well, while you're thinking, how about you hand over Vali? I need to get to Maraqua, pronto, and that involves a long trip by train 'cross the ocean. The sooner I get scooting, the more time I have to check out my surroundings, and see if I can escape quick if I need to." The Brain Tree looked at me suspiciously, as if I had done something incriminating behind his back.
"Did you confirm that it wasn't a set up? You may be walking into Jetsam-infested waters."
"Don't be paranoid, Brain Tree. This Acara's too wimpy to try anything like that. She probably just wants her sister back, and I just want my money. Now c'mon, little girl," I cooed, motioning towards Vali. She gave a little whining noise in my direction, and then concentrated herself on the Brain Tree, abandoning her makeshift villages. She clung to his bark, looking back at me with a lack of trust. I frowned, and then tried again, this time squatting so I was at Vali's level. This only seemed to cause her more distress, and she cried loudly, pressing herself hard against the Brain Tree.
"She doesn't want to go with you, Kacheek," the Brain Tree said calmly. "Please leave her alone now." I found anger rising to the back of my throat, especially in the face of the easy and cool way the Brain Tree stated his observation.
"Hey, hey, hey! Look, she's not your pet or baby to say what happens to her! I'm thankful and all that you took care of her all this time, 'cause I don't have a permanent home, and I'll pay you back with some of the money I have, but I gotta give her back! This wasn't a permanent deal, this was borrowing her until I got some benefit outta it. Now I've got it—so give her back. She isn't yours, and she isn't mine—and now it's time for her to go home." I was practically stomping my foot in my insistence, a stubborn look on my face. The Brain Tree looked back at me with annoyance, the sides of its lips pulled down nearly to its roots. His brain throbbed incessantly, indicating fury.
"She may not be my infant, but she certainly isn't yours—she belongs to you less than she belongs to me. You abandoned her upon me like she was nothing more than a nuisance, and then demand sporadically to have her back when suddenly it's convenient to your budget. If you wanted to use her in this way all along, you should've undertaken her as your own burden. As it stands, it is of my opinion that she is my responsibility—and under my authority, I think you have no qualification to have her back. Come another day, Kacheek. Good day."
The Brain Tree seemed satisfied with the point he had made, and swung back a branch, ready to throw it forward. I saw the branch swinging towards my face, growing rapidly in perspective—I ducked, lunged forward, and fell into the dirt, feeling the swish of the air behind me. Vali gave a scream, as I had accidentally rocketed towards her, smashing her mud castles. She darted out of sight, striding behind the Brain Tree—I barley saw her movement, my eyes clouded with mud. Something bent and cracked beneath my stomach, and I heard the Brain Tree roar from above me.
I scrambled to get to my feet, getting ready to run at any second. The Brain Tree was groaning overhead—more mournful and desperate than angry. It didn't seem to be threatening to bonk me over the head any time soon, so I took a moment to look down on what I had landed on. It felt surprisingly soft, yet with a sharpness to it that stabbed me in the belly.
I had to pull back layers of mud to find what I had landed on—and when I revealed its nature, my eyes widened. Beneath my stomach lay a squashed flower—not one of the carnivorous, disturbing flowers of the Haunted Woods but, when I brushed the dirty away, one of astounding beauty. It appeared as one of the flowers I had attempted to nurture in the ground—but they had either died, killed by the soil, or been wiped out by the malevolent Esophagor. This one, however, had been a healthy specimen, with fine petals and a thick stem—now, though, I had stimulated it into the early stages of dying, breaking it from its life source at the stem.
The words were shocked out of me: how had such exotic and gorgeous wildlife eluded me, sitting right next to Vali? My surroundings dissolved around me as I studied the flower, rubbing its petals slowly against my chin although it was soaked in mud. It was a rarity, and by contact I somehow expected to absorb its radiance, absolving me of the sin that colored me Mutant. Even in its death, it retained its wonder, magnificently unmarred by its time on Neopia.
I had little time to appreciate its beauty, though, because the Brain Tree was thundering above me, redirecting his attention towards me.
"What have you done to Vali, Kacheek! What have you done to my flower, Kacheek? What have you done to them?"
Its branches began to fly at me ceaselessly, creating a maze of boughs slapping hard against the ground. I barely managed to navigate out of the gauntlet of its branches, finally darting out from between the arms that threatened to squash me with quite a few cuts and bruises. I didn't dare look back as I darted off, plowing through the brush towards the Esophagor. (In the face of the Brain Tree's wrath, the Esophagor's stomach pangs seemed a safe haven.) I raced away on all fours, my muscles focused on escape while my brain, reasoning out of danger, wondered about that curious flower and how it had flourished.
The cursed Kacheek, with his avoidance of my branch, had sent a fearful Vali stumbling into the depths behind me, on a grim path towards the Beast.
There was a reason the Beast had no formal name. Though there were rumors it was because none had come back to see its face alive and thusly no one could name it properly, it was more than the Beast already had a name, and had had one for millennia. Its name and face were familiar to so many who had slipped by in close shaves, and viewed its ghastly visage.
Its name was Death.
Warnings from an elder often fall onto deaf ears, and in a time of desperation to escape, Vali had burst through the verbal caution tape I laid over the brush behind me. I could only watch her disappear into the tangle of shrubbery, stones and dirt, reaching out a branch to protect her far too late. Almost immediately, I spun around to deliver a severe punishment onto the Kacheek, throwing my branches down at him blindly. Somehow, he managed to escape from the labyrinth of my limbs, leaving me with nothing but a broken flower doused in mud.
My concerns weren't centered on the fate of the flower, though. The real Neopian beauty had just scampered into territory where adventurers rarely, if ever, returned from. Frantically, I called out into the air behind me, unable to twist my trunk far enough to aim my voice directly to the area. No response came back to me but a deathly silence. Death always struck with cunning and quiet, sometimes relieving its victim of life without a scream. For all I knew, Vali was already in its clutches.
My branches were shaking without my willing, and without the aid of a breeze. Though the season wasn't right, I felt sap welling in the back of my eyes, as if my trembling had stirred the sap against gravity. I pushed it back as best I could, but then it just began dribbling from my pores, throwing an unacceptable sweetness in the air. My eyes fell to the flower buried in the mud, another casualty of the moment. I picked up its corpse and stared at it blankly, the sap flowing freely.
Then, I began to bellow. I could not express emotion quietly for long—it involuntarily found its way to my throat in roars of grief that sent a shroud over the Haunted Woods. The weather seemed to shift to suit my mood, thunderheads bubbling over the sky and striping the dark sky with lightning. At that moment, I hoped that those signs from heaven would strike my highest branches and scorch me like the dead trees around me—lifeless and leafless. I goaded the heavens to release their wrath on me, howling curses up at the clouds. "God is dead!" I taunted loudly. "And I have killed him!"
But the storm refused to grant my self-destructive wish. Instead, it subsided in a time, giving way to a light rain of deepening depression. I tried to sleep—tried to cut out the world and substitute it for the world of cotton candy and delusions, but as a tree, insomnia was a common plague. I stayed up, wide-eyed, throughout the night, waiting for Edna, waiting for somebody but that wretched Kacheek to soothe my pain. Mostly, though, I waited for a signal from behind me—even that of Death, proclaiming its latest catch, so that I may at least have closure.
Just as I was nodding off, however, I heard a shriek. Footsteps came from behind me, frantic footsteps, and in the immediate distance from these footsteps came a hollow sound, one that removed the core and soul of anything pursued by it. I turned around as best I could to see a figure racing towards me, slowing becoming larger in perspective; behind it loomed Death, black and faceless, with only a gaping maw to suck in its prey.
Though the form racing against death was ashen and at first unrecognizable, I nearly choked (or would have, if I had a conventional digestive system) to see that it was Vali, tears streaming down her weeping face. I reached out instinctively, grasping her as soon as she was close enough from the clutches of the Beast, and swung her around to deposit her in front of me. The Beast screamed with rage at me once again denying it its catch, and sunk its claws deep into the criss-crossed, scarred back of my trunk, swiping its claws a few more times until it had satisfied its anger and then retreated.
I barely noticed the pain in comparison to the shock and elation of seeing Vali again. In the hours she had been missing, I had all but distinguished hope of seeing her again. Yet in minutes that hope returned and was fulfilled, even seeing her bruised and shaken. I scooped her up off of the ground, still sticky with sap, and threw her up into the air, almost finding a laugh at my lips.
Her demeanor lightened quickly. Though children are prone to deep scarring at early ages, as long as they are consoled immediately following and never exposed to such horrors again, such wounding traumas are easily and quickly absolvable. Within minutes, a smile was finding its way back onto Vali despite her physical bruising, and she was screaming and giggling with as much alacrity as she ever had once ten minutes had passed.
She opted to play the game of licking the sap off of my bark, apparently finding it appeasing. Once she had licked her fill, she sidled up against my tree trunk with a swollen belly and rested her chin on her gut, sighing contentedly. Internally, I wished I could have so easily soothed—my nerves still stood on end and my mind reeled with the alternate endings to the drama, unable to calm my mind. I was glad when Vali drifted off into a dream world, though envious, for then I could privately express all of my anxiety in pained facial expressions.
Beneath Vali's taloned feet, sunken into mud, I noticed the crumpled corpse of the flower where I had dropped it. I dipped my branches into the mud to excavate it, lifting it from the ground. It seemed now to be saturated in mud, but the mud had dried slightly and was now cracking off in flakes. I sympathized with the flower—something so pure and precious cracked in the middle, perverted by the wear of the world. It was nearing death, and already its delicate, idealistic petals wilted in my hands. Yet somewhere beneath the earth, or deep within it, a portion of its roots still existed—perhaps, someday in the future, they'd be able to regenerate: to be something stronger and more glorious than it was in its rebirth.
I was demoted at the National Neopian. I almost laughed with joy.
There was a rigid hierarchy in the National Neopian. You started as an intern—then a mail boy—then a processing boy—then a gate boy—then finally, a teller, after your so-called 'people skills' had been developed with your nose buried in paperwork. I had labored hard to ascend the ladder of the Neopian, putting in extra hours to impress unfriendly bosses. I had been ambitious back then, striving for the carrot at the end of the stick. But now I had stepped back to see in perspective, and found myself laughing. I had been blindfolded for so long, groping out for that alleged carrot that was just beyond my grasps. With nothing covering my eyes, I saw the stupidity of my struggle: there had been no carrot after all. It was all stick, whipping me brutally into line on the rear end.
So I let my performance slip. I insulted clients with the level I felt they deserved to be insulted, depending upon how stuck-up they were. Some I were kind to, but as it turned out, most of my clients with the most money and influence were also the biggest pieces of dung. After treating them to a day's worth of insult (not nearly enough to equal what they deserved), my manager started getting troubling phone calls from angry, snotty clients. He confronted me about it with more irritation at my existence than normal.
"Max," Lester said as evenly as possible given his frustration. He touched a finger to his temple as if to calm his chi. "Have you been insulting clients?"
"It's a definite possibility," I said casually. I was on lunch break, and I leaned back in my chair, propping my feet up in relaxation on the table. I had just finished a meal of salad, carrots and broccoli, and my body had never felt better. "Which clients are you talking about now?" I tapped my forehead mockingly, and whispered in a juvenile tone. "There's a lot to remember!"
Lester tried to keep his cool, but his golden skin was beginning to visibly rouge. He turned to his clipboard, following a trail of his finger down a list. "Well, let's see … Mr. Potato, Mr. Fleshlicking, Ms. Bebe, Ms. Uilikee for the second offense, Mr. Canara …."
"Oh, right. Those jagoffs," I said, bouncing my finger on my lip as if remembering. I shrugged. "Oh well. They probably deserved it at the time."
"That's a moot point, Max," Lester said harshly. "They're customers, and they're meant to be treated with dignity. 'The customer is always right'—an old slogan, and perhaps only for retail, but if you're not careful, that's where you're going to end up, Max."
"Look, Lester, I'm not going to kiss the butt of everybody with a Mega Millionaire-Platinum account. Just because their account is gilded doesn't made their manners any less crude. What sort of message are we sending these jerks by doing that, and society as well—that if you've got a silver spoon shoved in your mouth—and maybe some other places—that you'll get by scot-free with any breach of common courtesy? Heck no. I'm sick of it." I said it plainly and factually, with little emotion behind it as if it were generated from pure logic. Lester was fuming.
"Frankly, Max, I don't give a rat dung what you think of how the wealthy should be treated. They should at least receive the same etiquette you would give to someone with a Junior Saver account—maybe more, to ensure further business."
"Heck, I'd rather we'd have this bank full up with Junior Savers. They don't have some false impression of themselves as some sort of sparkling demigod."
"Max, you can't talk about our customers that way!"
"Oh yeah? Well, I think I just did."
This was about where Lester gave me my demotion, lowered my salary, and gave me a stern lecture on the treatment of customers. I listened to him, amused, and once he stormed out of the lunchroom, casually walked to the staff refrigerator, pulled out the sandwich marked "Lester—DO NOT TOUCH" and began a second course of my midday meal.
The next day, I was turned to guard duty. This basically involved sitting boring hours in front of a desk that contained six different buttons for six different doors. Whenever a shady character appeared at one of the doors, the guard's task was to push the button for the corresponding door and alert the manager. 'Shady' was a subjective term, so I never liked the job very much. It involved color and species profiling, and I felt dirty whenever I pushed a button to slam down the gates. Often, it was just some poor and shoddily dressed Jetsam who's owner couldn't afford a decent meal but wanted to start saving—but he was made to be interrogated anyway, because of the guard's prejudice decision.
Since the job made me uncomfortable, I decided to perform poorly. I had already begun to define my own dress code—plain colored ties were replaced with something flamboyant and patterned, and I began to buy novelty suits in powder blue and checkers, preferring them to boring black—and now my task lay in neglecting what I was assigned to do. I let striped-shirted Techos and masked Scorchios pass the gates undetected while I drank diet soda and played solitaire underneath the desk.
Finally, though, trouble came through the doors of the National Neopian. I unwisely and intentionally disregarded a Usul dressed in a green body suit entering the doors—criminal attire I had continuously been warned against so long ago in training. I watched almost complacently as the sinister Usul approached a teller and removed a weapon from his pocket, discreetly pointing it at the teller. The teller went ashen, gave a stupid shout, which only spurred the Usul to spin around and begin flailing his weapon around with an almost comical (to me) viciousness. Neopets dove to the ground, protecting their owners, and I was left the only one in the room, besides assumedly the Usul under his disguise, smiling.
The Usul turned back to the teller, demanding of him a certain extra ordinate sum of money. The teller began frantically compiling these Neopoints, the Usul occasionally swinging his gun around the building to make his point. Everything was deathly silent. I watched on the scene for a moment, bemused, and then lifted my bulk from my swivel seat.
The Usul didn't notice I had risen until I was directly behind him. Startled, the Usul shoved his weapon in my face, throwing it around in a mockery of violence.
"Don't you move a hair, fatty, or I'll shoot!" shouted the Usul. I could see his eyes glare from underneath the slits that served for his sight.
"Are you threatening me?" I asked, cocking my head quizzically.
"What do you mean, 'am I threatening you?' You stupid too, Skeith? Of course I'm threatening you!" The Usul practically pushed the weapon into my chest, and the crowd, watching, gave a gasp. I barely rocked backwards on impact—the Usul, unarmed, would be astoundingly weak.
"That's kind of cute, you know," I said condescendingly.
"Cute, huh? Well this bag of cute is gonna make you regret the last few minutes of your life!" challenged the Usul, and made a motion as if he was lunging at me. I knew he wouldn't follow through completely, so I dodged the attack, considered responding snarkily then didn't, and then proceeded to deliver a solid punch to the Usul's face.
It wasn't a knock out—the Usul stumbled backwards, trying to regain his footing—but my next punch to the stomach managed to force him to curl over and drop his weapon. Putting my foot over the weapon and sliding it towards me, I grabbed the hunched-over Usul by the back of his costume and flipped him over completely head first, making him land in stunned shock on his back. He gave a little breath of air, and a sigh, and then his eyes closed beneath his mask. I put a foot over his chest triumphantly for a moment, and then backed down, picking up the weapon. Calmly, I walked to the terrorized teller and handed him the gun, smiling.
"Here. I think you might need this for future."
The crowd had watched in stunned silence the whole time, the criminal now knocked out and incapacitated on the ground. They continued to watch me without a word as I headed over to the front desk and collected my things from it spontaneously, draping my suit coat around my shoulders. I shut my briefcase with a snap, a sort of complacency to my movements, and began to head for the door without additional comment.
Somebody stopped me on the way, grasping my elbow firmly. I turned around in surprise, wondering if the Usul had regained his consciousness already. But no—in the background, the Usul was still sprawled out on the floor, security guards closing in on him and chattering back and forth on their walkie-talkies. The Neopet that had grabbed me was Lester, a look of utter astonishment on his face. The muscles were so lax from this shock that I feared, for a moment, his countenance would come apart and fall to the ground in a pile of features.
"M-max," he managed to stutter out, "what the heck was that?"
"My two weeks notice, Lester," I announced coolly. "Except I'm leaving today."
I wrested my arm from his grip, and strode out the door with visible confidence that seemed to flow from every muscle. I left behind my job with no sense of remorse and with loose ends, for myself, all neatly tied, the only strings frayed the ones I didn't care for. Now, free of the yoke of a job, I could turn my face to the sunlight and live and earn Neopoints the way the conventional Neopian did:
Relaxation, games, and treasure-hunting.
When, in the first ten minutes the kidnapper didn't arrive, my stomach was performing flip-flops in an Olympic fashion. I could only speculate what his tardiness meant—perhaps he—for the voice sounded masculine—would come up from behind, slip something lethal into my back, and take the money without returning his promise. I was in a remote area of Neopia, only the passing bum or drifter crossing my path, and if I was attacked, I would have no one to answer my screams. As I thought about it, I wasn't even sure if I could strike out with the knife I brought in defense—the prospect of attacking another, even for my safety, was a chilling thought.
But ten minutes turned into twenty, and then thirty, then an hour. I was ready to leave at this point, afraid to be affronted by any passing shady Jetsams or Flotsams as to what I was doing, a respectable Neopet standing alone in the Ruins, and be mugged or something worse. Something, though, raced towards me in the distant, panting heavily. Like all land-dwelling Maraquan tourists, he carried a jug of potion at his side and took periodic swigs from it. As a resident, I had taken a more potent potion that made me completely able to breathe water. Or maybe this ability to live underwater was derived from the lab ray—either way, living in Maraqua was a breeze.
The figure was undefined as to what species it was, as it was wearing a black garb that covered its whole body. From what I could decipher from the voice, however, it was probably a male. I wondered if this was the kidnapper, and if so, where Vali was. I stood my ground, keeping my hand close to the pocket where I kept the knife.
"Do you have Validated?" I demanded, stepping forward insistently. The cloaked figure gave a snarl, which repelled me backwards, and then spoke.
"Yes, yes, I have Vali." Its voice was clearly male, and I tried to mentally record the voice in my mind to report it to the authorities if necessary. He seemed to be rushing, as if nervous. "But I don't have her with me."
I backed off slightly, holding tighter to the briefcase. "What do you mean? Our agreement was that you bring her here."
"Well, there were some … complications—"
"If she's not alive, you'll see your life behind bars, crook!" Outbursts were atypical of my lady-like manners, but my nerves were on edge, and not a thing to be tampered with. I was about to lunge at him when he took an intimidating step forward, effectively sedating him.
"Don't talk to me like that! I'll get you your girl—give me the cash now, though, upfront. I'll get you your little baby later."
"How can I even know I'm not paying you for someone who's not even existing anymore?" The thought made tears bud in my eyes, shaking me to the core. The cloaked figure sighed loudly.
"Look, I don't have any pictures to anything to ensure you of her safety—I don't have a camera—but you've gotta trust me on this. I've got no interest in hurting Vali—she's a nice kid and all. I just couldn't get here; like I said, there was some complications."
"If I find she's not alive … I'll have you arrested for so long …."
"Jeez, settle down! She's fine, she's fine! If you keep bugging me like this, though, with your neurotic little comments …"
"I'm neurotic! You're the one who stole my sister!"
"Touché." He held up his hands, as if defeated. "Well, I can't give you much else right now except to relieve you of this suitcase." He said it so fast that it took me a moment to register what he meant, and in that moment he made a dive for the suitcase. Instinctively, I pulled it back, and he wiped out into the coral overgrowing the area, tearing his costume. I shrieked, and then turned around, reaching forward to pull the top of his costume off of his head and reveal his identity.
Surprisingly, it was no one I had ever seen. (I figured the job had been done by someone close to me, perhaps in an attempt to exact revenge.) I grimaced as I saw that it was a Mutant Kacheek, reeling back slightly from the sight of its throbbing brain. I could never stand Mutants, and made sure to never even make acquaintances with their person. Once, for a day, the lab ray had rendered me a Mutant, and I had stayed in my bedroom all day, sobbing. My owner had tried to enter with Hot Chocolate and Marshmallows, but I would not have kindness from the person who had caused me to become hideous. I could find no sympathy in that body, and much to my relief, I was turned to a Rainbow Acara the next day, and could stride the streets against with pride. Still, I gave my owner the cold shoulder the rest of that week to make it clear that I would not tolerate such treatment.
After that occurrence, though, I went up to the first plain pet I saw, strolling out with its owner. It was a Yellow Techo—an astoundingly common pet, but one that I had also seen consistently with its owner over a period of three years. They would play a game of ball in Neopian Square, and they ended up living in some of the poorer apartments of Maraqua. From what I could gather from the owner's tatty clothes and the Techo's often disheveled appearance, they hadn't the Neopoints to paint the Techo, let alone feed themselves free of the Soup Faerie. They made the trek to the gigantic soup pot at the Marketplace every day for a meal at noon.
One day, when I saw the Techo alone, going to fish for food with a fishing pole that looked as if it had seen better days. I approached him cautiously, hoping not to catch fleas. (I didn't have my Moltenore with me, and besides, it already had a Mootix of its own.) Politely but directly, I asked him why his owner kept him and didn't opt for getting a better pet in the Pound. (Besides, I had though privately, even a plain Peophin or Yurble is better than a Techo.)
He hadn't taken offense and instead had smiled, a strangely sympathetic and pitying smile that insulted me without trying. With infinite patience, he explained that his owner had never had any desire to adopt another Pet, even if they had had more Neopoints to support a second.
"But isn't your owner saving for a Paint Brush or something?" I demanded, eager to know. "Or a morphing potion? Maybe even some Chia Flour to throw at you."
The Techo seemed amused, and chuckled to himself. "Oh, Craig and I"—unlike most Neopets, he referred to his owner by his actual name—"have no need for fancy stuff like that."
"You're kidding me," I said, just barely preventing my jaw from dropping. He shook his head, smiling calmly. Light refracted onto his face through the water—I noticed he had a scruffy wreath of something seaweed-like around his neck to help him breathe. It was the poor man's way of adapting to Maraqua. On his necklace, however, there was curiously beautiful flowers running its length, blooming seemingly without root.
"Nope. We live like we do, and we're comfortable with it. It doesn't matter that I'm just a Yellow Techo. Craig could save the money, but he likes me as I am. Even if something were to come along to change me, like a Faerie Paint Brush, he'd probably keep me just like this." He held out his arms to indicate this was all he had to offer, and shrugged. "We're used to it—comfortable with it. And we didn't even have to ignore what we wanted."
At this point, I thanked him, still baffled, and tried to press some Neopoints into his hands for thanks. He brushed them away, and it was an almost generous gesture despite his poverty.
"Thanks, Princess," he said kindly, "but you need them more than me."
His words were contradictory and stupid, and he didn't apologize or correct himself. (Perhaps he had been too poor for Neoschool as well.) Yet somehow I felt he knew exactly what he meant as he walked to the Underwater fishing hole, whistling a tune that sent sparks of contentment into the water.
Even a day as a Mutant, I couldn't quite comprehend what the Techo's words had meant. I sometimes thought about them at night, lying in bed, anticipating in fear what might come the next day from the Lab Ray. But nothing bad ever endured for more than one day, and by some streak of luck I continued my life as an Acara, though various colors. To the world, my excuse was that I had enough money to pay for a new Paint Brush every day if I pleased—and to some extent this was true. My owner, however, refused to spend money on 'superfluous luxuries' when she could get free results from the Lab Ray.
All of this flashed through my mind at seeing the Mutant Kacheek. He regained his footing, gave a startled look back at me, and then thrust into the air and began swimming off furiously, keeping low to the ocean floor. He took nothing with him but a few remains of his cloak, but I, grabbing the suitcase first to protect the money, plunged after him, weighed and slowed down by the Neopoints.
At first I assumed I would have the upperhand, as I was a resident of the area. I pursued him through a forest of tangled seaweed and burst through field of coral, but eventually he slipped through my grasps by way of the Ruins, darting into crumbled architecture that threatened to yield at my weight. Finally, I turned away and considered him lost, frustrated and tired, my arms aching from lugging around the suitcase.
I retreated back to my apartment complex, huffily throwing the Neopoints on the dining room table when I got there. I rushed to my bedroom to give my pillow a quick beating, waking up my Moltenore on the other side of the room. When he tried to comfort me, I pushed him away moodily and he gave a little yelp of insult, turning to his Mootix to play with.
After letting loose a few tears and angrily clawing at my bed sheets (no need for concern—though they were fine silk, we had plenty more in the linen closet), I turned to the telephone on my bedstand and called the police number I was instructed to dial if I had gotten any tips on the kidnapper. Though he had gotten away from my grasp, perhaps the police would be able to right this folly.