AN: Yay hurray happy day, woo! Er, that is to say, neither Fossil Fighters nor cuddleofdeath's catchphrase belong to me.
Dina awoke to the sound of yells and shouts early that morning. Half of it, she knew, was from Kent and his surfer gang, who'd be out on their boards every day until Christmas. She chose to blame the other half on Rupert. The more trouble he caused, the more likely he'd be kicked out of the operation, after all.
Shrugging a sweatshirt on over her nightgown, Dina crawled out of her tent, yawning. She put her hand over her eyes to shield them from the sun's harsh glare as she walked down the beach. In the Bottomsup area, the autumn sun had been known to be bright enough to blind people (without any particular scientific reason). Having grown up there, Dina had learned to take precautions.
When she reached the water's edge, she looked around anxiously. Part of her was really hoping that Rupert was causing trouble (last night's unsaid "I told you so"s were creeping back into her mind) but at the same time, she didn't want drama. She felt it was an entirely superfluous part of life.
"Dina!" came a cry from somewhere off to her left. "Aw, man, now today's totally gnarlitude!"
She whirled around and grinned. Running up to meet her was Kent in all his strange surfer glory: nose permanently sunburnt and seaweed in his hair. Behind him was a gaggle of other teenaged boys with surfboards, also running towards her. Just like old times, she thought. She laughed. Bottomsup's resident surfing idiots really hadn't changed since they were all eight.
"Hey guys," she said. "What's up?"
"Man, it's so cool!" laughed Terry, Kent's right hand man, procuring a scrap of yellow plastic from his pocket. Upon closer inspection, Dina saw it was a corner of a chip bag, presumably ripped off when Terry hadn't figured out how to open the bag properly. "OK, so get this, there's this guy – fancy suit, fancy hair, you know the type – and he tells us to get off the beach 'cuz he has a job or something like. And we're like, 'no way man', but he says we get a bag of chips if we agree!"
"So we do," continued the gang's newest addition, a gangly brunette Dina knew as Holt, "but we didn't say when we'd leave! Haha!"
"Haha," Dina laughed along, but then the pieces fell into place in her mind. "Wait . . . a suit? A job?" An image of Rupert began forming in her mind. "Oh my gosh, guys, no. I know him. You've got to do what he tells you or I'm going to be hearing about it . . . and somebody's getting sued."
"Whoa nelly," Kent said nervously. "This isn't like you at all, Dina. You're being totally wack! You know, there's only one explanation for this." He leaned in closer to her. "This guy . . . must be your boyfriend!"
"No!" shrieked Dina. Luckily, Terry seemed to be on her side.
"Now you're wack, dude," said the black-haired boy. "He was way too prissy for her. Besides . . . "
Besides what? Dina wanted to ask, but didn't.
" . . . Dina's got Bean!"
Terry was officially no longer on her side.
Dina giggled faintly and ran her hand through her hair in an attempt to not look like the very mention of her ex-boyfriend's name made her want to murder someone. "Oh, actually, we broke up the other day," she said.
"Called it!" exclaimed her cousin Dino, who prided himself on being the strangest member of the gang. "I knew it would happen! Surfers over skaters, that's what I always say – after all, it's the fundamental law of physics!"
"Actually, the only really absolute law in physics is that nothing can go faster than the speed of light," Dina attempted to explain, but the surfers were having none of it.
"That's chemistry, dummy," said Dino, and flicked her on the head. The other surfers nodded their assent.
"Whatever," sighed Dina. Science class could happen another day. "Look, just don't mess with the guy in the suit, OK? You guys could . . . go to the coffee shop instead! I bet Stella would be happy to—"
"STELLA!" they all shouted in unison, dropping their boards in their haste to run across the boardwalk. They had always been infatuated with Stella, who was one of the only girls in Bottomsup who could put up with their strange antics. Not only that, but she seemed to enjoy their company and was pretty, too, with warm brown eyes and a permanent smile. This made her far more popular than the other two tolerant girls in town (Dina, who they all saw as a little sister anyway, and Nevada Montecarlo, who was nearly seven feet tall and sold moonshine – all in all, a force to be reckoned with).
Dina watched them go and shook her head. Tolerant as she was, that didn't make her immune, and even just a conversation with the surfers always made her a little tired, a little dizzy.
"Good," came a voice from behind her, "they're gone."
"Hey," Dina replied, an angry tone creeping into her voice as she turned around to see Rupert, "that wasn't cool. You don't own the beach, Pretty Boy."
"Pretty Boy, huh?" muttered the said junior Fossil Fighter under his breath. "I might as well," he told Dina in a louder voice. "I mean, I could probably buy this entire town with a week's allowance." He said nothing else on the topic, but his gist was clear. Bottomsup is poor man's land, Dina could read between the lines, and it's not like anybody would miss it, anyhow.
"You take that back!" yelled the ginger indignantly, but the cat-eyed boy payed the comment no heed.
"Anyway," he drawled on, "Pauleen wanted me to come get you. Group meeting just finished—"
"You had a meeting without me!?" Dina demanded, but again she was ignored.
"—and we have come to a conclusion," Rupert said ominously. "We're going to need a submarine."
"Why couldn't we take Todd with us?" Pauleen asked for the umpteenth time as she and Dina strolled through the streets of their small bayside hometown.
"Gosh, Pauleen, you're so obsessed with him," Dina joked. "But anyway, he would just slow us down. And that is that, for the very last time."
"Hmph," she said, but she followed Dina's orders.
Dina pulled her hood down on her head and stuffed her hands in her pockets. The two teenaged girls hadn't had a plan when they'd hit the beach, but Rupert and Todd had heard rumours about a sunken ship at the bottom of the bay. They thought it might have been the infamous pirate Captain Woolbeard's – meaning it was bound to be loaded with rare fossils. However, they hadn't taken the fact that the ship was on the bottom of the bay into consideration and were just as landlocked as the girls thought they were.
That was where a one Mr Joe Wildwest came into play. Joe had graduated the Wheatley Palaeontology School for Boys a year earlier than his peers when his teachers had deemed him too gifted to stay in the institution. He went on to become the greatest Fossil Fighter in the world after that, winning every tournament he entered . . . and entering every tournament there was.
However, his glory was short-lived. Nobody knew what happened, but during the third year of his reign as the best of the best, Joe just . . . crashed. He stopped winning battles, then he stopped entering battles at all. He moved out to Bottomsup, which as as far out in the sticks as his manager would let him go, built a three-storey mansion for himself and his Vivosaurs, bought everything he could, and spent his days telling anybody who would listen that he had been possessed by the skull of an ancient sorcerer named Zongazonga.
But Dina could care less about Zongazonga. Even at school, she and Pauleen were avid tabloid followers, and they both remembered how funny they'd found it when the reportedly hydrophobic Fighter had purchased a mini-sub for several hundred thousand G and promptly locked it up in his garage.
And so the two of them were making their way to his aforementioned mansion, their most charismatic, convincing smiles plastered to their faces as they wobbled across their cobblestones in their sky-high heels and stiff tweed suits (they'd wanted to look official, but even Pauleen's wardrobe had its limits). It had to be said it was a challenging walk, but it also had to be done. So it was.
After a good twenty minutes, they reached the winding gravel path that led up to the Wildwest manor. Dina's smile slid off her face and she exhaled sharply, kicking off her shoes and wiggling her toes around before sliding the stilettos back on and nodding to her friend. "Shall we?"
"Yeah, let's," said Pauleen, straightening her blouse. The two of them walked with purposeful strides to the staircase and stopped at the double oak doors, where Dina curled her hand into a fist and held it poised over the door on the right.
No doorbell, and no knocker, either, Dina mused, a slight frown flitting across her face. What happened to him? He used to seem so social!
"Dina. Knock. Now," Pauleen instructed her. Dina swallowed her thoughts and brought her hand down on the door, pulled it away, and repeated. Three times she knocked, before the doors swung open and a tall man with wild hair and wild eyes appeared. He wore a leather duster over a sticky-looking bathrobe, and his face was flushed with anger.
"I DON'T WANT ANY COOKIES!" he roared. Dina narrowed her eyes.
"We're not with the Girl Scouts, sir," she said, smile long gone.
"Not anymore, anyway!" Pauleen piped up. Dina nudged her. Shut it, the gesture said.
"We're here to talk business," Dina went on, wiping her clammy hands on her skirt. "Would you like to talk out here on your porch, in the cold, or may we come in?"
". . . Gimme a second," said Joe Wildwest gruffly. Before Pauleen or Dina could say anything, he stepped backwards and slammed the doors in their faces.
"What now?" Pauleen asked.
Dina crossed her arms. "Now we wait."
"So," grumbled a clean-shaven, fully-dressed Joe Wildest ten minutes later, "lemme get this straight. Yer wanna borrow mah sub for school?"
"Yes, sir," said Pauleen nervously.
"Well, no," said Joe plaintively. "It's mine."
"We aren't asking for it permanently," Dina tried to explain. "Just for a few weeks."
"Have I ever told y'all about Zongehrzongehr?" Joe said by way of response. He had, back when the two girls were actually Girl Scouts and were selling cookies to this very mansion, but he left them no room for argument.
He launched into a tale even more detailed than the one Dina heard when she was nine, filled with treachery and tragedy, romance and randomness. There was a temple in the jungle and some kind of conspiracy . . . Dina wasn't listening. She had problems more pressing than a mad cowboy's tall tales, even when the cowboy was a vital part in her success, and it was a story she knew all too well, anyhow. Joe was a foolhardy explorer whose curiosity had gotten the better of him one day, causing him to open an incredibly suspicious-looking coffin of some kind; Zongazonga's skull leapt out and forced Joe's out of his head, then started some kind of competition to find the most suitable host body.
" . . . So, that'll be twenty thousand G," Joe finished abruptly. Dina's head snapped up.
"Huh?" She looked at Pauleen, who seemed just as perplexed as her friend, then back at Joe. "Huh?"
"Fer the boat," grumbled the cowboy. "Yah've got a week to pay." He stood up and pushed open the door angrily. "Now get outta mah house."
Dina finished recounting her tale with a sigh. That evening they had called another group meeting (including everybody's favourite ginger this time around, something a one Rupert Wheatley was not tickled pink about), and Dina had decided to be blunt and tell them exactly how unsuccessful the meeting with Joe was.
"Well . . . " said Todd, who Dina had come to know as annoyingly optimistic. "Does anybody here have twenty thousand G? Rupert, you're rich, couldn't you get us the money?"
"No," "Pretty Boy" sullenly spat. "I'm . . . well, grounded. Father said I didn't get to borrow any money after . . . well, stuff that isn't any of your busniness happened."
"Ha, ha," jeered Dina, but a cold look from Pauleen shut her up before she could execute any insults.
"Actually," Pauleen said coolly, "I've got some good news." She reached into her bag and pulled out a flyer. "This," she announced, "is a flyer."
"We can see that," said Rupert hesitantly.
"And inside this flyer—" (here the pinkette glared at Rupert for his comment)— "is information on our one-way ticket to fifty thousand G and also Joe Wildwest's submarine." She paused for effect, which Todd didn't seem to understand.
"Well?" he prompted after a millisecond. "What is it?"
"It's a Fossil Fighting tournament," Pauleen said with a grin. "It's called the Caliosteo Cup."
AN: Hey, I updated! It could have been better, I know, but I wanted to update as soon as I could. Thanks so much to those who reviewed, and thanks so much to those of you who just read! Thanks to all of you! Katie out.