Leaning 05: Wake Up (Frye)

Elsewhere, Frye wakes up with something worse than a hangover.

Swears, hurt, get used to this location, we'll be here for a while. Editing? (evil laughter, I'm so sorry about the wandering tenses)

All the good things belong to Monolith Soft.

Frye has woken up feeling worse, he tells himself.

And he's been in darker places. Literally and figuratively. He tells himself.

Right now, he's just gonna concentrate on breathing. Getting used to it happening. It's a little unclear when he stopped doing it, but from the fact that each lungful feels novel, violent even, he guesses his body shut down for at least an hour.

So, hell yeah, breathing. Lungs fill up, lungs empty, he's done it a million times in his life. Problem is he needs to cough so hard on the outgoing round, choking out water until he almost passes out. Nix on the almost, he felt his head smack the ground one time.

He decides to stay flat, roll on his side, while he relearns this respiration trick. In between rounds, he tries to come up with a timeline. It doesn't matter that it's only between breaths. The timeline is short.

Timeline, let's see... He remembers it in pieces, but they line up pretty well, now that he isn't bothering to try to do much more than stay conscious. They were flying across the ocean, heading home, and he'd been muttering away next to Sal, trying to keep out of Sal's lap. It was nice enough that Sal hadn't exiled him to the storage space in the back of Sal's skell. Instead, Sal had let Frye cram himself into the jump seat in the pilot's capsule and get a view of the ride home. Sal is a good guy that way. The problem is that the passenger seat isn't built to hold that much Ostrich, but you don't take over piloting a guy's skell just because you're taller. Especially when you blew up your own ride and the shorter guy did not. He's proud of Sal for doing so good on the mission. Frye wishes he'd said that.

Reason number 1 to get out of here. Excellent way to start the list. Frye has four more things on the list by the time he finishes reviewing the mission.

Reason 2: Apologize to Alexa and buy her lunch because the plan to make the Ostrichmobile has suffered a major setback what with him blowing up his skell in Sylvalum. Frye has been almost as excited as she was about building a custom skell for him. Now he's gonna be behind on credits in a big way. He supposes getting those credits back should be reason number 3 but that's a hella boring reason so nah.

Reason 3: Phog. Frye is real proud he's taken this long to get to Phog, because his baby brother is also a hella boring reason, or at least one that Frye uses constantly. To keep going, to get back on his feet, to cap his flask (and sometimes to open it), to throw a punch (or hold back).

Thinking of Phog is definitely an overused reason to get out of wherever trouble he lands in, but today Frye has a specific excuse to conjure up his brother's worried face. Two excuses, back to back. Wherever it is that he's heaving and panting, it feels like a cave, maybe. No light anywhere, absolute darkness in every direction. A solid rock floor (Frye hasn't moved yet, still working on getting respiration down solid, but his face knows what various floors feel like). Not a mechanical click or electrical hum to be heard. Phog loves a good cave. He might be interested in this one.

Little snot might also shrug and look blank if the cave doesn't meet some techno-geo-gibberish standard.

Frye is looking forward to getting angry that Phog doesn't like this particular cave. Frye is loving this cave, personally, and it is only the list that makes him consider leaving. Once he can sit up.

Reason 4: Still Phog, but different. Phog has some other little nerd friends, in the Curators, who would be thrilled about an unknown underwater indigen. Frye really doesn't know them that well. They can't hold their liquor, can't throw a punch, tended to talk around him. But Phog seems to think they were okay in limited quantities, and a friend of Phog is a friend of Frye. He wants to bring them back and see if they can't coax the massive underwater indigen into poking out its head at them. He's sure they'll find some important information for the ECP and BLADE and all that crap.

The real reason is that there's something about watching nerds get excited that really tickles Frye. It reminds him of guinea pigs, cute critters. He likes to watch them wriggle with repressed delight and make those high pitched squeaks he doesn't understand.

So Frye would really enjoy bringing them along so they can check out the cool cave, check out the cool indigen. And then blast the demon whale to hell.

Because that's the fifth reason. Reason 5: Revenge. Frye gives one massive and mostly dry cough. He's gonna need to get out of wherever he is so he can come back and shave a few teeth off that sea monster. This was gonna be good.

a/n: This is two stories mashed together, and wrangling the tense was a horror show, not completely successful. Oh well, I'm gonna play Live-A-Live now.

Next up: I hope you like caves because we are staying here for three more chapters.