Oi, you lot, bet you didn't think you'd ever see this story again, did you? Well, I've been replaying Ni no Kuni for the first time in 5 years and decided it was time to finish what I started. And by finish, I mean I deleted all the chapters after chapter 5 and have started afresh. Except that's not entirely accurate because a lot of the scenes from the original version of this story are still intact. I just didn't like the direction it was going, so I have a lot of changes incoming that I think are much better.
With that in mind, this chapter remains largely unchanged, except for the addition of the mention of the Tombstone Trail and Gascon's meeting of his older self. Frankly, I had assumed the whole time travel thing hadn't happened yet, not until Swaine met Oliver and Esther, but honestly, it would be interesting, and logical (as far as time travel is concerned), to assume that the whole "time travel loop" was already in full effect 15 years prior to the events of the game. Anyway, more notes later.
Chapter 6: Where Fate Leads
Gascon had long believed that he had been born sick in the same way some children were born colorblind and others were born with an extra toe. His affliction, however, was not a physical one, but of a variety entirely of the mind, a disease of restless longings that only grew more and more powerful with each year that passed.
Sometimes, he dreamed of visiting Castaway Cove, where he would learn the seafaring ways and become the world's most cunning pirate. Other times, he imagined how he might one day travel to the Miasma Marshes and slay the mystical two-headed water monster he had read so many stories about. Legend said the beast could all too easily be mistaken for just another fog-enshrouded island rising out of the muddy waters and had brought about the end of many a weary traveler who had failed to take notice of a landmass that had not been there mere moments ago. Of course, if dreams even were a time for being practical, he had to admit that at this point in his life, having thus far fallen short of his full height (if he wished hard enough, surely he could grow another few inches at least), perhaps he would be better off sticking to merely searching for the creature for now and leaving the slaying for later.
In fact, his very first adventure had already just reached its conclusion, a trek through the infamous Tombstone Trail to really give Marcassin's magical skills the push they needed. It had worked, as his little brother's stubborn insistence at sabotaging his own efforts had finally been set aside in favor of vanquishing a particularly ghoulish haunted candelabra when it refused to go down easily.
They had met three people to accompany them in their endeavors that day, four if you counted the fairy, a wizard just a few years younger than he was, a girl from the desert, and a haggard man in ragged clothes whose name he didn't quite recall. It was that last one who stuck with him the longest, for the wretch actually had the audacity to give him advice, advice that was neither requested nor welcome. The notion that such a pathetic excuse for a human being would claim to understand the troubles of royalty was, frankly, insulting.
Though Gascon had no idea what would become of him once he left home, one thing was for certain. Prince or not, he would never stoop as low as that man had.
He had left Hamelin and their new companions behind with no more than a single glance backwards, his only accompaniments his newly completed gun for defending himself against monsters and bandits, along with a suitable sum of guilders the former would be perfect for protecting.
As for Marcassin, he had given him no more forewarning than a farewell when it was time to go and the promise that he would return if ever his little brother had need of him. He wasn't certain if that was a promise he could keep, but he couldn't imagine what needs the boy would have at that age, when he had the ruler of the world's largest empire to dote on him. The promise really should have been the other way around, he had attempted to joke with himself, but at the moment, the thought really wasn't very funny.
Before he had gone, he had been sure to give Marcassin the sword their father had bestowed on him four years prior. It had, in fact, been a better idea than he had expected, for a reason few would have guessed. It kept his hands full. It was this important detail that made it impossible for his younger brother to grab hold of him, either to hug him or to grasp at the end of his sleeve in an effort to prevent him from leaving. Because it might have worked. If Marcassin had been given the chance to delay his big brother's departure, he might have succeeded, and Gascon couldn't afford any more time to second guess himself.
Father could forget he ever existed, for all he cared.
While he certainly had no intention of visiting the Miasma Marshes anytime soon, and the ship that visited from Castaway Cove wouldn't be back for another several months or so, he decided his first destination as an ordinary teenage boy, not a prince, not royalty, needn't be chosen ahead of time at all. He would simply venture wherever fate brought him, and so he headed straight for the coast with the hopes of boarding the first vessel he found.
It seemed today was one of the few rare instances in which Lady Luck had decided to favor him, for he just managed to catch a few sailors loading their jolly boats with a shipment of coal from one of Hamelin's numerous mines before their eventual return to the ship awaiting them some distance from shore. They would only take him along if he was sixteen, they had said, and he hardly counted it as a lie when the truth was only a year off. Twenty guilders was enough to put a stop to any further questions they might have.
That was the funny thing about nobility. Everyone knew who you were, but when you found yourself standing face to face with someone else, no one could recognize you after all the time you spent keeping your distance from the world.
The voyage across the sea took just over two weeks, and aside from a rather vicious bout of seasickness near the beginning, Gascon had never felt so alive. Each morning brought the sun's warmth on his face, and he watched every sunset from the ship's prow, where he relished in the feel of the wind through his hair and the spray of the ocean on his skin as the sky would ignite with the final flames of an ebbing day. He had hardly slept a wink that first night. In fact, he had probably spent more of it above deck than below, just staring up at the myriad of glittering lights floating high above. He had never imagined there could be so many stars, and he wondered why Hamelin could ever shut them out as they did. He almost considered never spending another night indoors again, if he could help it.
The former prince ate his meals of salted fish and hard biscuits alone to avoid the suspicious glances the sailors gave him. His father had all his "beggar's clothes" burned a good many months ago, along with the set he had loaned Marcassin, meaning he had been left with no choice but to begin his journey with nothing but the clothes on his back, all of which maintained the same impeccable condition no one but those of higher breeding enjoyed. The most obvious offender was his short red coat with gold trim, and as such, it was the first thing that would need to go. His current appearance would hardly do if he wished to become no different from any other boy his age, and as he picked at his food, he contemplated how he might find something he was good at, for being a prince was certainly not something in which he had ever had any success.
He had wandered onto deck the morning of the sixteenth day without bothering to tidy his hair after another night lulled to sleep by the rocking of the boat. It was the racket that had woken him, the excited chatter of a dozen voices and the pounding of feet that wished to carry out their task with a greater level of haste than usual. He was forced to step out of the way more than once as he attempted to cross over to the bow of the ship, and it was here that the cause for their apparent hurry became known to him.
Land. A great mass loomed ahead as if it had risen up from the sea itself to greet them. It stretched out between both ends of the horizon, a great continent he felt deep in his chest would be nothing like the one he had left behind. Gascon placed his hands on the railing and leaned forward, as if bringing himself just a few inches closer would allow him to study it that much better.
A small town waited for them, comprised of little houses speckled amongst the cliff side. His eyes were drawn skyward a moment later by the sound of screeching just in time to catch the first group of white birds with black-tipped wings flapping and wheeling their way towards them through the misty morning sky.
"The gulls are here to guide us home, men!" he heard the captain call out behind him, and a part of him felt that he might have a place in that statement himself.
When Gascon first set out to find his place in the world, he had believed the task to be a relatively simple one. After all, the world was massive and full to the brim with possibilities, and it stood to reason that, out of all those possibilities, there would be at least a handful he might fancy as the role best suited for him.
The town to which fate had carried him was small, possessing only a fraction of the population of Hamelin. The people here were so few in number, in fact, that the entirety of the residents could have lived comfortably within the palace he had once called home. A questioning of the sailors told him the place went by the name of Lari, while it was experience that told him how very foul a fishing community could smell even in just the mild warmth of late spring. Only future days would allow him to discover to what atrocious levels the odor would surely climb in the dead heat of summer.
The smell was so ingrained in the town's very essence that even closed windows couldn't keep it out. The majority of it, he believed, was simply because the odor was a distinguishing fixture of the town, like an old landmark or the thriving population of sea gulls Lari's residents held in so high regard. The rest came from the perpetually simmering pot of fish stew wafting from the ground floor of the inn in which he currently resided.
Named the Cat's Cradle just like Hamelin's most popular inn, this one distinguished itself by a tavern on the ground floor that kept returning sailors fed on the pungent "bounties of the sea", of which they so raucously boasted over their abilities to net. Gascon suspected the perpetration of that ever-bubbling stew, even in the wee hours of the morning, was not so much for flavor and preparation for evening as much as it was to force one into alertness from the moment they woke up.
He believed this with every fiber of his being, as he had experienced proof of his convictions every morning since his arrival. Waking up to such a smell was enough to jolt one's nerves, and he began this particular morning by pressing his nostrils into his pillow, along with the rest of his face, without care for the potential for suffocation he was inflicting upon himself, just as he had every morning prior.
The dull light filtering through thin, somewhat moth-eaten, curtains was the first indication that morning had arrived, even if it was not the first thing responsible for him being awake to begin with. It was one thing being aware of the lower standards in which the rest of the world lived; it was quite another experiencing it.
His new room, the sole space he could now award the lukewarm title of home, was small, hardly larger, in fact, than the canopy bed he had left behind. Or so it certainly felt. The furniture, which was not his own, but was available to him, consisted of a narrow bed of about the same hardness as the floor, but without the potential for splinters, a wash basin on a table, a chair kept steady thanks to the dusty tome beneath one back leg, the title of which had long since worn away, and a wardrobe. The room was drafty at night, humid during the day, and he was never awarded the privilege of a securely closed window because the buckling of wood in the perpetually damp air had led to a gap in the left side too thin for him to plug up with a spare sock, but too thick not to notice. In short, his new life could not have been more different if a law had been made declaring it.
Gascon washed his face and got dressed, his princely attire having since been replaced by a plain shirt and pants that would attract far less attention, the first ritual of every morning before he faced another day spent searching for that mythical state he had left home to find. Discovering what one was good at sounded a lot more monumental when going about it in an unfamiliar setting, and as he combed the many terraces of the cliff-side village in search of a job that might be right for him, he was often stopped by the small, painted houses of those who dwelt here, if only to give his focus over, even if just momentarily, to a task that required a fraction of the thought.
He had remembered first spotting them from the ship nearly a week ago, but the only thing he had been able to make out at the time was their primary colors of white and blue. From that distance, he had been unable to recognize the thatched roofs, chosen for their ability to attract the gulls as a place to roost, or the waves painted across their surfaces.
Nearly every house had some form of seascape painted upon it, some of the depictions simple and crude, while others displayed clearly the care in which the painter had placed it there. Some were painted in swirls of blue and white and sometimes green, which blended together where the colors had mingled with their neighbors. Some were clean and precise, while others were wild like the sea they represented. There was one in particular he had no choice but to stop and study upon his first pass by, and several more occasions afterward. Each and every time he came upon this particular dwelling, he couldn't help but marvel at the way the water seemed to shimmer and sparkle before his very eyes, the entire scene painted with such artistry that a small part of him worried that, one of these days, it might spill forth and engulf him.
He had yet to find a single soul willing to hire him by that afternoon, though he couldn't say any available option held much appeal, either. When he had set out to find his place in life, his aspirations weren't quite as vague as they might have sounded when he spoke them aloud. He might have given up his status as a prince, but that did not mean he wished to replace it with the occupation of a fisherman or baker. Would that make his father proud, when his youngest son would one day take on the responsibilities of Emperor and Great Sage, while the eldest ranked no higher than the common laborer? It seemed a futile effort to even attempt to compete with his little brother to begin with. Marcassin could wield magic. Marcassin was the favorite. Gascon was neither of these things.
Who was he fooling?
Gascon had no choice but to shake such uncertainties away every time they attempted to take root in his mind. It was still far too early to allow such doubts to overwhelm him. There had to be something out there for him, and if there was, he would find it. He wasn't one to give up easily, after all, considering the countless times he had managed to track down Hamelin's black market when even the soldiers themselves had trouble finding it in their ongoing efforts to shut it down.
Nevertheless, he supposed it was about time he learned to be a tad less picky. At least for now. Perhaps his preferences as to what was and was not worthy of a former prince had yet to be fulfilled, but money was money no matter where it came from. Although he had brought along a tidy sum of guilders to get him by, it wouldn't last forever without a means of replenishing it.
It was the uncertain period between late afternoon and early evening that he spotted a girl of about his age, though it was her unlikely location that drew his eye most of all. She was currently sitting upon a rooftop, and from this distance, it appeared she was weaving thatch into a bare patch roughly half a meter in diameter. Though her fingers moved with nimble skill, her green dress and brown curls, both of which had stray fibers of straw sticking from them at odd angles, didn't seem particularly well-suited to the task.
Gascon stopped to squint up at her against the backdrop of the late sun, hands to his waist. She took no notice of him, and even less to his intentions, of which he was well aware he must make known before her task progressed any closer to completion.
"For a few guilders," he began, "I could help you with that. Together, we could probably finish before sundown."
Her eyes lifted from her task, and she looked about the rooftop on which she was perched, as if the ground below had been entirely forgotten to her. As if in a moment of revelation, she looked his way, absently picking a few strands of thatch from her hair. "You're certainly direct, aren't ya?"
He shrugged. "I thought money was too important a detail not to mention."
She blinked down at him before turning back to the job still left unfinished beside her. "Well, how 'bout…if you do all of the work, I'll pay ya a little. I don't have much money t' spare, so I'll happily do it myself if I have to."
"Point taken."
"If we have a deal…do we have a deal?"
He grinned. "Why, of course, I wouldn't dream of haggling any longer with a shrewd negotiator such as yourself." With a hand to his chest, he bowed low, and he heard her giggle.
Without further delay, she climbed down the awaiting ladder. "I'm glad ya got here when ya did," she went on, the glimmer of a smirk in her blue eyes, "I'm sure ya can't see it from here, but there's a hole that needs repairs. Water damage from all the rain we've been gettin' lately, y'see. I was just gettin' the thatch outta the way, but now you can do the hard stuff."
His own grin had proven temporary, for a frown had begun to form in its place the entire time she had been speaking. "The…'hard stuff'?" he repeated.
She smiled, batting her eyelashes in a manner that made her appear that much craftier. "The wood and nails are over there." She pointed to a pile of timber stacked up beside the house he had failed to notice until now. "Well, I guess you'll wanna get started. Ya won't get paid 'til ya finish."
She wiggled her fingers at him and, with a quick farewell, disappeared inside.
Flip, mun, this story is chockful of heaping helpings of irony, en't it?
Ahem, I was too lazy to revisit the time travel section of the game to see if Gascon knew his older counterpart's name. (At the bare minimum, I know Esther said Swaine's name in front of Gascon, but I dunno…) But I decided it would be more interesting if he didn't, partly for the sake of irony later on and so that his name change was more meaningful and not because he purposely named himself after this guy he met when he was a teenager.
Still don't get how Gascon gave Swaine the recipe for the Rogue's Revolver. I mean, Swaine should possess the same knowledge as his younger self, shouldn't he? Why would teenage Swaine know something adult Swaine didn't? That makes no sense! And if it doesn't make sense, then I'm ignoring it!
Okay, started to veer off topic a bit. Anyway, don't forget to leave a review! Ta, mun!