Interlude – Young Marisa
The sea was shadowed a wine-dark blue in the deepening dusk. Calm lay over the town of St Piran on Red Rock Isle, but for the sounds of the night market filtering through the narrow streets. The waves rolled slowly in from the ocean, slapping lazily into the concrete sea wall. A short pier jutted out from the wall, with a stout lamppost sited at the end.
Hidden beneath the dark waves, a juvenile lugia swam in from the open ocean. Though she was small compared to her mother, she was still twelve feet long with a wingspan to match. The Rangers of the Whirl Islands called her Young Marisa. Her name for herself was expressed as song; for those that could understand, it meant: 'female-young-daughter-female-lord-johtoclan'. She beat her wings slowly, carefully, expending hardly any effort to maintain a gentle cruising speed. From the pier, all that could be seen of her was a vague lugia-shaped silhouette.
An eerie blue glow briefly illuminated the waves. The silhouette of lugia disappeared. A few minutes later, the swimmer that surfaced was human … well, human-shaped.
Young Marisa swam inelegantly to the pier, a large squid clasped firmly in her fist. It waved its tentacles serenely, hallucinating under the effects of Extrasensory. She clambered up onto the pier and sat naked on the stone. In her favourite human shape she appeared as a young woman – she chose a heart-shaped face, with a delicate chin, penetrating eyes and a pink mouth. A sheet of sea-sodden white hair lay plastered down her back; dusted with silver-white feathers, it glittered faintly in the lamp light.
She sank her teeth into her squid, tearing off a ragged chunk of mantle. It realised too late what was happening to it and flailed its tentacles pathetically. It desperately tried to bite – its captor casually popped out its beak with a deft squeeze behind the eyes. Young Marisa bolted her writhing catch, ripping the soft, salty flesh into pieces and wolfing them down. Black ink gushed from the burst sac and dripped over her chest.
Gulping down the last tentacle, she clumsily tried to wipe the ink off her breasts. Young Marisa was rather proud of her breasts. She'd cleverly opted for a big set, so she would appear unmistakably human, or so she believed. She hummed her identity-song to herself – her family wouldn't hear her, not out of water, not with human vocal chords – but it was a comforting habit.
The shape of a human mind brushed against her own. Young Marisa suddenly realised what she'd forgotten. She waved a hand dismissively; now if any human saw her they would think she was wearing a big white shirt. Following the sounds and lights of the market, she wandered through the narrow streets to the town square. Paper lanterns hung in strings from lamppost-to-lamppost, illuminating the square with a cheerful orange light.
Young Marisa lurked in the shadows of an alley, watching the humans shoaling, exchanging things they had made, communicating, sharing food. The novel savour of frying fish was in the air. Young Marisa's social world was a small one. Outside her own family she hardly ever so much as heard another lugia – humanity's constant complicated shoaling fascinated her.
There was a shrine on the far side of the square, the oratory looming up over the stalls in front of the sacred ground. A steel lugia statue surmounted the shrine gate, wings spread dramatically, looking fierce and noble in the lantern-light. Young Marisa wondered why humans tried to be friends this way -
- something was watching her. She mentally scanned the crowd. There, by a drinks stall, a man was eyeing her 'discreetly'. Young Marisa had seen that look before, and she did not approve of it. She clouded his mind with Extrasensory and slipped away.
Someone else was watching Young Marisa as she faded into the crowd. On the southern side of the square Rickard Orme tracked her with his Silph Scope and stroked his beard anxiously. Capturing her was going to be twice as difficult, now that Piers had been arrested, damn him. Piers had gotten greedy – tried to capture all four of the fledglings – and that had got him arrested. The other hunters were probably dead and drowned. He could call off the operation, but … Team Aqua had so many uses for a captive lugia.
Orme watched Young Marisa hovering near a fried squid stall. The Silph Scope showed her for what she really was. She was, after all, still a young lugia …