Tales of the Island Symphony

by Light Onthemayo

With Cunimincus and his demonic crew gone, the search is on again for Irleen's home. The following stories have NOTHING to do with that search. This is a series featuring the crew of the Island Symphony at their looniest (mostly), detailing events that may or may not have happened during and after Sky Lines.

19. A Heart of Tuna Cheese

NOTICE: The following is ambiguously canon. If it didn't happen, good. If it did… just… damn!

…

Tale #19: A Heart of Tuna Cheese

Social interaction was not a new concept to the crew. Link always made sure to give his airmen some time ashore, even though he often cringed at the thought of any of them finding some form of trouble. For the Gelto, just about any encounter with a group of tough guys ended with those guys in a clinic drooling into buckets. Cale and Leynne occasionally found trouble just because no one seemed to like the accent they spoke with. Flower, Gold, Lawrence, and Harley usually kept each other in check, but once the bar fight broke out, they would bust heads like any other airman. Helo and Lidago were actually capable of keeping a small profile despite being the largest members of the crew. Line, well… if he was not in trouble for being a pervert, it was because he was being a nuisance to his crewmates.

And then there was Sello.

Link could not deny that Sello often warranted sending along some type of supervision, often just to keep other people safe. That said, Sello, in his ever-present need to stay intoxicated, actually pulled off the unpredictable without racking up serious property damage. At least, not right away.

A delay at Sagacity Island gave the crew a bit more opportunity to explore and mingle. The first day saw Sello attempting to climb a lamppost and press up against the front window of the dockmaster's office just to make ugly faces at the dockmaster. It was not exactly unusual for Sello; by comparison to some of his previous escapades (which tended to involve something moving at ludicrous speeds), it was actually a comfort to know that he could be expected to not cause some kind of mayhem.

The second day, however, Harley and Flower, Sello's chaperones, reported to Link that Sello had a dinner date.

Both men admitted that they had actually dared to take their eyes off Sello. It had not been for long. They had left Sello competing in a staring contest with a wooden horse (which, really, was about as much explanation as Link expected, so he did not bother lingering on the subject) to get lunch at a nearby food vendor. When they had returned to their perpetually-inebriated colleague, they had discovered that some woman had shoved a note in one of his breast pockets. The note gave a time, the name "Thyma", and the restaurant "Warehouse 327". According to Lilly, Warehouse 327 was a warehouse on the docks further south that had been converted into a decent restaurant for visitors to the island. Unsure of what else to do, Link decided that Sello, whether he understood what was going on or not (the latter of which was more likely), should at least meet this woman who had questionable enough taste to ask out a man trying to win a staring contest against a fake equine.

The afternoon was spent preparing Sello for his date. The chaos began when Sello was stripped to his bare skin so that his crewmates could throw buckets of water on him (one of which actually included the bucket when it slipped out of Line's hands, not that Sello was in the right mindset to care or even notice the bucket striking his head). Lwamm volunteered to scrub him clean, mostly because the process involved pinning him to the deck and vindictively scouring the poor drunk's pale hide for reasons largely unknown to the Hylian crew. They hoped that his clothes would cover his raw, red skin. Since the crew did not dare let Sello fester soaking wet in the engine room, they gave him the dignity of fresh underpants and strapped him to one of the Island Symphony's shrouds so that he would dry in the breeze. He was then dressed in an orange, button-up shirt and tan slacks, and Lilly tried her best to tame his long, tangled hair. She eventually had to just tie it back to help Sello look clean. Lilly and Cale were then volunteered to accompany him on the date with the corollary that the sixty rupees Link sent with them could be used to pay for both their and Sello's dinner.

They arrived to find that the restaurant was about as amazing as Lilly had described. The outside looked like any other warehouse on the island: large and drab. However, the massive front door had been replaced by glass windows with a door more appropriate to the regular foot traffic. The inside had been divided into two stories by a shelf built into the back of the building and extended to about the middle of the ground floor. Both the ground floor and the shelf were the dining room; a wall at the back of the ground floor divided the patrons from the kitchen. The office to one side of the front door had been converted to private tables. The concrete floor had been overlaid with thick, red carpet. In addition to the electric lights bolted to the gold-painted metal beams serving as the walls' interior supports, a massive chandelier hung from the middle of the ceiling. In lieu of windows, the walls had been painted scarlet and decorated with landscapes from some of the other islands in the kingdom. Diners dotted the tables, showing that tonight's business was running rather slow.

"Table for three?" asked the red uniform-clad headwaiter after both Lilly and Cale had taken a moment to marvel at the restaurant's design.

"Actually, he has someone waitin' for him," Lilly said, pointing to Sello.

The headwaiter glanced at Sello, who seemed to nod at the chandelier with satisfaction. "Ah, yes, the blond gentleman in orange," he said. He pulled a menu from a nearby rack and indicated the dining room. "This way, sir."

However, when he started walking, he realized that Sello, swaying in place, did not follow. "Sohry, sohry," Cale said as he grabbed Sello's arm. "He's a little inebriated. I will assist."

Sello took notice of Cale's hands on his forearm. "You wanna explain that, zir?" he asked in his throaty voice.

"No," Cale replied as he and Lilly directed him after the headwaiter.

He took them to a table set for two just under the upper dining room. As they approached, the table's single occupant stood. The woman had a curvy frame hidden under a blazing-red dress accented on its single shoulder strap with a shock of yellow feathers. Her blond hair had been braided in the back with a curtain of bangs covering the left of her brilliant, green eyes. Her expression gave off an air of smoking confidence, and even Sello's jaw dropped open along with Cale's and Lilly's.

"I apologize for my impulsiveness," she told Sello. "But I had hoped my message had been clear."

"Trust me," Lilly said, "we gotta been askin' different questions."

"You seemed so preoccupied, sir, that I did not hear your name."

"Lambpos'," Sello replied, his face still a perfect picture of shock.

"'Lamppost'?" the woman asked.

"No, ouh apologies," Cale quickly spoke up. "This is Sello. He is an engineah on ouh vessel."

"Aaaah," the woman droned as she examined Sello from head to toe. "I should have known from the muck on his skin. And you worked so hard to scrub it off for me, too…" Both Cale and Sello had to swallow back the rocks they suddenly felt in their throats. She indicated the table. "Please, Mister Sello, join me."

Lilly pulled out a chair, and Cale had to nudge Sello toward it to make him sit down. Lilly then closed Sello's drooping jaw. "If you'll excuse us," she told the woman. Then she bumped Cale to make him follow the headwaiter to the upper dining room.

The woman, Thyma, returned to her own seat. "I hope you'll forgive my forwardness," she said. "I just… felt that I should meet you."

"Uh… okay," Sello replied, squirming in his seat.

"You had such an intense stare when I saw you. I wondered if you would look at me with such eyes."

"Begging your pardon, madam," one of the waiters said as he stepped up to the table. "Would you like to order beverages?"

"A bottle of the house wine, if you please," Thyma told the waiter. Then she said to Sello, "I hope you don't mind; I'm a little nervous."

Sello cracked a smile. "Heh-yeah," he replied, settling into his chair a little better.

"Right away, madam," the waiter said before leaving.

"So," Thyma said. "An engineer. On an airship, you must have a very hard and important job." She rested an elbow on the table so that she could perch her jaw on the back of her hand. "Tell me about it."

"Well, I wuz doin' da piece in a mountain 'til da mountain went pffft. Den da chugga-chugga juzd did da chugga-chugga, so I made it do da dooga-dooga an' it went whoosh 'til da loogy did a pull. Den I godda chomp-chomp an' sed 'looggit wha' da chomp-chomp cen do' so da chomp-chomp went whoosh. Don' know if anyone did a pull on da chomp-chomp, dough. Affer dat, I godda turdle, took a shiny, an' now I'm a hundred-week pelican wif boxes of boddles. Don' godda smooooooth hat, though."

Thyma's smile had turned awkward while her eyes had glazed over. She could not find one understandable idea among Sello's string of incoherent ramble, although she was partially convinced that he had slipped some innuendo in there with the "chomp-chomp" comments. His slurred speech did not help, but it at least let her know that he was definitely drunk. Still, the expression she mustered was best described as "politely dumbfounded". Her eyes darted around for a moment. Then she asked herself, "Where's that waiter?"

As if on-cue, the waiter returned with a bucket of ice and a bottle. "I am sorry if I was slow, madam," he said as he placed the bucket on the table. He turned over a pair of glasses already resting on the table and popped the cork from the bottle.

"Blue creek!" Sello said.

The waiter frowned and double-checked the label on the bottle. "N-no, sir," he said. "It's Valued Cargo."

"Pour, please," Thyma told him.

The waiter opted to half-fill Thyma's glass first. Then he did the same for Sello, the ting of glass attracting Sello's attention.

Sp.

As the waiter was about to replace the bottle, he glanced at Sello's untouched glass. He blinked in confusion at the empty, untouched glass. He looked at Sello, who had turned his attention back to Thyma. Thyma had not noticed yet as she carefully swirled the wine in her hand, eyes focused on her own glass. Questioning whether he had actually given Sello some wine, he set the cork back down and poured into Sello's glass again.

Sp.

The waiter kept the bottle in his hands as he eyed the glass. Again, despite filling it halfway, it was spontaneously empty. Thyma caught the strange look on the waiter's face and glanced down at Sello's glass as the young man filled it again.

Sp.

Thyma's expression mirrored the waiter's bewilderment. They saw the wine in the glass up until the waiter had stopped pouring. Then it was just gone. Both glanced up at Sello to see that he remained relaxed and focused on her.

"Are… are you doing that?" Thyma asked him.

"Heh-yeah," Sello replied with a chuckle.

Thyma traded a look with the waiter. Then she told him, "Fill it all the way."

"Y-yes, madam," the waiter replied. He did as he was told, careful not to overfill the glass.

Sp. Once again, the glass was emptied just as the waiter finished pouring. Neither one of them had seen Sello move, although the waiter thought he had seen the glass shift.

"Once more," Thyma said.

The waiter nodded. However, just an eighth of the previous amount poured out. The waiter realized that the bottle was empty and opened his mouth to apologize to Thyma.

Kink. Both of them looked at Sello to see him pulling a shard of glass from his mouth. Puzzled, they glanced down to see that the lip of Sello's glass was missing a piece, the shape identical to what he had just produced.

Sello smacked his lips and said, "Whoops."

Thyma and the waiter could only stare at Sello for a moment. And then the waiter told Thyma, "I'll bring you a new bottle, madam." His words barely out of his mouth, he turned and walked to the kitchen as fast as he could.

Thyma stood up and rounded the table. "Mister Sello, are you all right?" she asked as she placed a hand on his jaw.

"I hink ho," Sello tried to answer while she peered into his open mouth in search of cuts. Why Sello let her look made about as much sense; she was only touching his jaw, not holding it open.

Thyma gave him an exasperated look and a shake of the head before she returned to her seat. Sello took about half a minute to realize that she was done looking at his mouth. Thyma picked up her glass. "Well," she told him. "Here's to false expectations." She raised the glass to him.

Sp.

However, she realized that her glass had been emptied before it was even halfway to her lips. Her face scrunched in annoyance as she set the glass down. "Clearly, I was not aware of what I would be involved in when I met you, Mister Sello," she said. "I had thought that keeping an open mind would benefit both of us. However, it seems that, while you are certainly spontaneous and rather attractive, you have very little in the way of personality."

"Heh-yeah," Sello said with a chuckle. Then he put on a worried face. "Uuuuh… wha?"

Thyma sighed. "Oh, never mind," she told him. "I only hope that we might enjoy a meal to help salvage this evening." She picked up her menu. Then she had another thought and told Sello, "And that you might refrain from stealing my drink again."

"Pickle an' sasquatch, my jam," Sello replied with what could vaguely be considered a tone of agreement. Not that Thyma was in the mind to judge intonation; she was busy wondering what the word "sasquatch" meant. Sello appeared to have concluded the exchange as he picked up the paper menu on the table next to his place setting. In spite of the numerous electric lights and the massive chandelier overhead (and quite likely the result of temporarily losing the ability to focus his eyes), Sello could not read the menu and held it closer to the candle at their table.

Thyma noticed a sudden warmth across her face and looked up at a brilliant light which seemed to be uncomfortably close. In her subsequent shock, she was capable of producing only one coherent thought:

This night can't possibly be getting worse.

She then snapped, her voice just a hair's breadth away from absolute hysteria, "MISTERSELLOWHATAREYOUDOING!?"

While Sello's response to realizing that his menu was on fire was little more than a curious tilt of the head, Thyma stood and quickly snatched up the ice bucket on their table. She swung the bucket, dashing the ice across the table rather than trying to dump it on the burning menu. Sello dropped the menu on the table and launched himself backwards. His foot struck the table from below. The tablecloth alight, the table rocked toward Thyma. Thyma jumped out of the way to dodge both glass and fire. Someone hollered, and the nearby patrons stood and moved away from their table. Waiters immediately rushed toward the kitchen and nearly knocked the doors of their hinges running through.

Sello, his mind now abuzz from both the bottle of wine and a concussion from hitting the carpeted floor, rolled onto his side and stood up. He turned around in response to the waiters storming back into the dining room, each one holding a bucket of water. Sello decided that he wanted a bucket, too. It was not to help put out the fire; he simply wanted a bucket. He moved around the table, obscured by smoke, until he was behind the group trying to douse the flames. Then he kept going until one waiter burst through the kitchen door. Sello realized that his bucket was behind those doors, so he ran full-tilt at the door.

"Tuna fork, tuna fork!" Sello hollered upon throwing the doors aside. "I am the grand peanut brittle of the south!"

A couple of the chefs standing closest to the abandoned pass traded confused shrugs. "Do you need some help, sir?" one then asked.

Sello raised a fist and declared, "Flip my spoon, little turkey!"

"You two, finish those plates!" someone hollered at the chefs. Both quickly turned away as an older chef wearing a pure-white coat stepped into the pass. "Sir, can I help you?"

"Two's a moose, and I am blue," Sello told him with a nod.

"We're busy back here," the older chef said in a forceful tone of voice. "If you're blue, go back to your table; I'll have a fresh bottle of wine delivered to you."

"Da spirits compel me to shave a monkey!" Sello shouted as the chef started pushing him backward.

"Sounds like he's already had a bottle, Chef," one of the other chefs cackled.

"Bastard smells like it, too," the older chef replied. He almost had Sello out the door when—WHAM!—one of the waiters hit Sello from behind trying to rush through the door. Sello jolted forward and rammed his forehead into the older chef's face. Sello got a glimpse of the man's cross-eyed expression and thought it was his own face. Then the older chef fell backwards onto the floor with a thud that echoed throughout the kitchen. All activity came to a halt as the kitchen staff realized that their head chef was unconscious on the floor. Sello had frozen in place as well, more in response to the still confusion than actually reacting to the head chef he had just knocked out.

"Did he just knock out Gordon?" one of the nearby chefs asked.

"I think he did," the other nearby chef said. Sello looked up as the chefs exchanged expressions with one another.

Then, suddenly—

"HUZZAH!" The entire cooking staff raised a loud cry of cheer which, when heard from the dining room, caused a few of the close patrons to glance toward the kitchen in confusion. Sello watched in idiotic delight as four of the chefs scrambled into the pass, dropped to their knees, and prostrated in front of him while the rest of the staff watched from the other side of the pass.

"Oh, sir!" one of the chefs looked up and declared. "Long has this man's oppression inspired sadness, disgust, and anger in us. We cannot thank you enough for your actions! Please, what will you have us do to repay you?"

Sello tried to think only to find that his brain did not want to perform the task for a moment. When it returned to work, there was only one thought on Sello's mind. He pointed toward the kitchen and declared, "To da wine cellar!"

"To the wine cellar!" the staff repeated. Two of the prostrating chefs stood and grabbed Sello's arms. The whole kitchen, cooking food and unprepared plates left neglected, then rushed the door leading to a wine cellar. The door hit the wall with a loud slam, and the cooks took Sello down.

They deposited Sello in front of a rack of wine bottles, which Sello stared at with wide, sparkling eyes and his tongue hanging from his drooping jaw. The chefs expected him to start pulling bottles down and drink. However, Sello stepped over to a wall where another rack was resting in the midst of its construction. He picked up an unused board and slid up beside the first rack. The chefs pressed themselves against the wall adjacent to the stairs once they saw what Sello was doing. Which was a miracle, because Sello himself did not really know what he was doing. He just raised the board over his head and then brought it down to smash out dozens of bottlenecks (and a few bottles), spilling wine onto the stone floor. Sello then threw the board onto the floor and grabbed the nearest bottle. He held it up to the chefs.

"Ma buddies!" he told them in a grandiose voice (another miracle considering he was still slurring). "Drink, drink, an' drink, for t'morrow, we spin! Long are da dayz we hug our tuna cheese an' take spridle-vlat in the boosey. But in da chicken feet, you is da rope's heavenly drug! One ver da cushy!" He leaned back and, rather than drink, poured the last splash of wine all over his face with his mouth open in the vainest of attempts to catch some. Then he threw the bottle down. "Two ver da bushy!" He took another bottle off the rack and did the same thing, breaking the bottle on the floor. "Five ver da caca-woozey!" He took yet another bottle, poured it over his face, and shattered it against the floor. "An' dree ver ma yudle!" This time, he jumped onto the floor, rolled over in the puddle of wine, and pulled a pair of bottles off the bottom just to dump them on his face as well.

"You heard the man!" one of the chefs declared. "Drink!"

The single rack was raided for its bottles, which the chefs began downing with the same amount of reckless abandon as their new patron saint. Then, one by one, they decided to return to work while Sello helped himself to a whole barrel by knocking out the bung and lying under the ensuing gush of red wine. It was only then that he considered that he had had his fill and wandered back up into the kitchen. The chefs had returned to each others' stations and started messing up orders left and right, sending them to pass despite the fact that the wait staff were still rushing back and forth with buckets full of water. Sello found an oven in a corner near the cellar's entrance. Then he saw some more unused kitchen equipment, although, in his mind, these were just parts. Without any of the staff watching, he pulled a homemade multi-tool from inside his trousers and began reassembling the equipment he found.

Almost directly above that corner of the kitchen was a small dais where a humble trio played simple, soothing musical pieces to either the comment or neglect of dining patrons around them. They had been playing for three hours almost non-stop, so they had decided to take a break and see if the kitchen had their orders prepared. The third man, lagging behind to make sure his violin was properly secured in its case, was only five steps away from the dais.

BOOOOM! BA-BAAOOOOM! The dais erupted up from the floor at the urgency of a large, metal machine that, despite Sello's attempts, decided to fire early. The second sound was the machine, having done its best to shower diners with broken timber and shattered instrument, ricocheting off the curved ceiling once before punching through the wall on the opposite side. No one had been able to anticipate such violence, so about half a minute after the fact (and after hearing subsequent impacts with the warehouse next door), the majority of diners decided to rise and bolt for the stairs rather than jump over the railing on their way to the exit.

The cooking staff, which was too busy arguing with the wait staff over their inebriated condition, failed to notice the new hole on the far side of their ceiling. The wait staff, on the other hand, decided to slowly back down from the argument and disappear out into the dining room to warn away patrons from what they perceived to be a problem with the kitchen equipment.

Sello, for his part, stepped out of a giant cloud of vapor and glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. He was a little annoyed with the hole's size; he had predicted that the apparatus would have had enough speed to punch a smaller hole than what he saw. He shrugged and looked around at the empty kitchen. He gathered a serving trolley, some funnels, a colander, several empty cans, two bottles of brandy, two cheese graters, a meat tenderizer much larger than most known sledgehammers, three pastry blenders, and a potato masher. He commenced work right in the middle of the kitchen with the chefs watching in anticipation.

For anyone else, what Sello built would have been a wonder of amateur rocketry if recognized by a scholar even the slightest bit interested in the alternative defiance of gravity. To the chefs that witnessed its construction, it was simply something to strap their head chef to in a sitting position while Sello aimed it in the general direction of the dining room doors. As for Sello, well… he was not quite sure what he was building, only that it was powered by alcohol and would likely be moving at an extremely unsafe speed. Which, as far as he was concerned, was reasonable enough to pick up a long piece of tinder from a nearby pile, light it on a wood-burning stove, and try to touch it to the rear-facing end of what could best be described as an improvised missile. Being drunk, Sello had a difficult time holding steady enough to actually achieve the ignition he was looking for. One of the chefs, after figuring out what his intentions were, foolishly decided to step up behind the apparatus and direct Sello's hand.

PWAAAAAAAGH! Within milliseconds of successfully igniting the brandy contained within the tubular sections of Sello's monstrosity, the whole machine accelerated forward while the chef was blown into the back wall, felling a stack of clean dishes in the process.

Now, the wait staff, having advised the rest of the restaurant's evening patrons to leave, had enough intelligence to realize that something was going on behind the kitchen doors even before one brave soul stuck his head in the door.

He survived unscathed.

Sello's contraption burst through the drywall (as the third miracle of the day, completely missing the studs on either side of the hole), knocking the rest of the waiting staff to the floor under a shower of paper and plaster. One of the staff, having relatively light injuries, recovered and pushed up from the floor to find that the head chef, after having been scraped off the contraption by drywall that held, had been deposited right next to him. The serving trolley continued, although its wheels had long left the floor even before the impact with the wall. Tables and chairs were knocked aside, and patrons who were lagging behind suddenly found refuge on the floor just as the trolley was sailing overhead. It formed an arc to the left at first, and then the second nozzle on the back fired, lit by the first nozzle. The power behind the ignition jerked the whole trolley into a turn in the other direction. The glass windows at the front of the restaurant shattered to the will of the out-of-control trolley-rocket flying through, showering glass on fleeing patrons. It continued on for another second before the trolley dropped in appeasement to gravity, and a group of airmen departing their ship for an evening of drinking and fighting dove out of the way just before the trolley smashed into the ground.

Lilly and Cale, having lingered around one corner from the entrance of the restaurant, dared to glance around that corner to watch the patrons and staff fleeing in all directions. Lilly turned to Cale and asked, "You feel that was Sello?"

"When it comes to insane machines defying gravity," Cale replied, "I cannot think of anyone else." He edged around the corner to check that no one was around. Then he signaled for Lilly to follow him back into the restaurant.

When they stepped in, they found that much of the carpet in front of the kitchen doors was black from fire while a few nearby chairs had been lit by rocket exhaust. The waiting staff were slowly gathering themselves together with the cooperation of the drunk chefs, who were calling it a day after having had more than their fair share of fun. They gathered underneath the upper dining room all the way on the left side of the restaurant.

Sello burst out the kitchen door, a silver bucket decorating his head. Cale and Lilly watched as he climbed to the upper dining room, and Cale held up a hand to tell Lilly to wait while he jogged across the restaurant. Upstairs, he found Sello examining a post not far from where they had been sitting. Cale looked up to see that the post, wedged and bolted into the space between the floor and the closest metal beam, was actually a pair of posts held together at about the middle. Just as Sello started taking measured steps away from the post, Cale realized that this unique piece of structure actually had a purpose.

It was supporting the weight of the chandelier from numerous chains.

Cale watched in horror as Sello then turned around and aimed his bucket-covered head at the post. "SELLO, NO!" he shrieked.

"I AM SELLOOOOOO!" Sello hollered as he charged the post. Cale immediately broke into a run with the intention of tackling Sello to the ground.

Sello made it to the post first.

Although the post did nothing to hold the roof up, the strain of holding up a chandelier by about a dozen chains was enough that the post was extremely fragile. When Sello's bucket (and head) made contact, the impact strained the wooden post. Cracks formed where the chains had been bolted to the post. In just a matter of a few seconds, Cale tackled Sello to the ground as the post gave way to the chandelier's weight.

KRSSSSSH! The glass elements of the chandelier smashed against both dining room floors. The chandelier's bronze structure bent itself over the upper floor. The lights above flickered, adding to the horror of the staff huddled in safety below. Slowly, they started toward the exit, keeping pressed against the wall lest something else fell.

Cale looked up to see that the chandelier was nowhere near them, not even the shards of decorative glass. He rolled off Sello and sat up. "Sello, what weh you thinking?" he asked in an exhausted voice.

"Billy two-cups, and I'll be sprocky in da mornin'," Sello replied as he surveyed the scene.

Cale sighed. "Let's just get you back to the ship."

"Pickled nuts!" Sello answered as Cale hauled him to his feet.

…

Tale #19 of the Island Symphony – END (THANK GOD)

NOTICE: The previous story is ambiguously canon. While it may serve to illustrate that Sello has a sex drive like any other man, it may also serve as evidence that Sello can't be trusted around a fully-equipped kitchen. We don't know! We'll never know! And, c'mon, who knew he'd be bringing down that chandelier?