AN: Oh, nobody noticed Medal Dealer Joe? Oh well, no matter. Thank you for reviewing, and I don't own Fossil Fighters!
"Did you know they were with the BB Bandits?"
"Really?"
"Mm."
"Wow."
Dina crossed one long pyjama-clad leg over the other, idly twirling a strand of hair around her finger as her gaze slid from her feet to Rupert's face behind his newspaper. As usual, he looked impossibly bored. Not for the first time, Dina wondered what he would look like when he wasn't so done with life or about to bite somebody's head off.
"Who are the BB Bandits?" she asked after a moment, furrowing her eyebrows.
"I have no idea."
There was another pause. Dina swung herself up from her sprawled-out pose on her sleeping bag and heaved a large sigh (her third in the past two minutes). She cocked her head to one side and skimmed the two pages of Rupert's newspaper she could see, then got to her feet and snatched it from his hands, staring at the grainy mug shots of the Medal-stealing Hadleys.
"Hey! Give it back, Batterbits!" he snarled, springing to his feet and making a few wild grabs at his copy of The Caliosteo Gazette. "Touchy" was Dina's only comment as she slinked off.
Absentmindedly, she wandered down the beach. Pauleen had woken up early to go fetch Joe Wildwest's fabled submarine, and without Dina to stop her from "fraternising with the enemy," she'd somehow convinced Todd to come with her. She and Rupert, on the other hand, were decidedly later risers, and when they had stumbled out of their tents at nine thirty or so their respective friends were already gone. And so the two probably-mortal enemies were stuck together, neither wanting to leave in case their friend turned up while they were gone.
Dina settled herself down on a weathered bench on the boardwalk and flipped to the horoscope part of the paper – the only part that didn't bore her to tears, though only because the little pictures and fancy font made it interesting to look at. Reading about how she and her fellow Tyrannicorns were going to keel over and die all the time wasn't very interesting at all. She flipped through the other entertainment pages tiredly, feeling her eyes glaze over as she slumped into the paper, scowling with each ink-tasting breath she took.
After what felt like hours but was probably only a few minutes, Pauleen's telltale head of pink hair began to come into view over the sand dunes. Dina took a deep, relieved breath before she got to her feet and ambled towards Pauleen's cries of "Hello, earthlings!" and the spluttering sound of Bottomsup's one and only tow truck (driven by countless generations of Steve McJunkers before the one they had now).
"Pauleen, hey!" yelled Dina, waving. She waggled her fingers and jumped up and down for maximum visibility. "What's up?"
"Nothing," replied Pauleen almost tersely, brushing past Dina. She was clearly trying to keep her tone lighthearted, but Dina knew better. The Digadig girl's face was flushed and her eyes were glittering. Dina grinned. Despite her sensitivity, Dina had never seen an honest tear fall from her friend's pretty green eyes in all the years she'd known her, but she was a world-class fake cryer. No matter what the situation, Pauleen always found an excuse to bring on the waterworks, and it almost always ended with her walking away with a fistful of cash and a free drink, to boot.
"Where's Rupert?" asked the pinkette, and Dina's face fell. The crying didn't work this time, she immediately thought, even though she hadn't the foggiest idea of what was going on. She put it down to women's intution, but she sort of knew that the only reason Pauleen would ever feel the need to ask her about Rupert was something had happened. Maybe she needed bait of some kind, and figured that a pompous, annoying jerk in designer clothes would work as well as any worm. Or perhaps she felt like giving someone a heart attack.
"Over there," Dina said, and Pauleen broke into a jog in the direction Dina had gestured towards.
"Rupert!" she called. "Rupert, how much cash do you have on you?"
"How much do you need?" he asked by way of response, snatching his newspaper from where Dina had left it and blinking bored eyes. Pauleen rolled her own eyes, huffed, "All of it," and grabbed Rupert by the arm, dragging him off to McJunker the Fourth and a probable shouting match.
Tired, bored, and desperate for an inteligent conversation, Dina stiffly turned to Todd, watching him try and fail to walk and hold his phone at the same time.
"It's not raining here, Ma," he was insisting into it. "I mean, it was raining, and now we're under a rain cloud, but I can see the sky and stuff! It's . . . cadet blue!" He paused. ". . . Steely blue." Another pause. "Grey." He stopped walking and shrugged, plastering a smile on his face. Dina mentally nodded her approval. It was a technique she'd used many times: even if the person on the other end couldn't see your smile, they could hear it in your voice, and you sounded a hundred per cent more done with their bull.
"Yeah, yeah, bye Ma," said Todd, and stuffed his phone into his pocket. Dina attempted a wave.
"Hi," she said. "Uh, er, um . . ." She racked her brain for something to say. "What's up . . . um . . ." What's a good nickname for someone whose hobbies seem to consist mainly of repeating everything Rupert Wheatley says? Finally, she remembered his blatantly obvious flirting with Pauleen over their first night's campfire. ". . . Ladykiller?"
Todd, it seemed, didn't need a smile to be a hundred per cent done with Dina's bull. The ginger sighed. It was going to be a long day.
At least the submarine was something to be positive about. It was shiny and yellow, with a spotless glass bubble in the front, showing a dashboard full of fancy-looking buttons and screens. A metal rigging dotted with lights and sonar-looking bits caged the submersible. Dina lifted her chin in pride and triumph.
"Uh, you guys," drawled Rupert, "I hate to burst your bubble . . ."
"Oh, you always do, Pretty Boy," said a flippant Dina, leaning forward to admire her reflection in the dome, frowning at her contorted appearance and smiling after a new coat of her favourite black lipstick.
". . . but the submarine only has three seats," continued the catlike boy through gritted teeth. Dina, who'd known this well before they all started, laughed.
"Oh, Pretty Boy," she said with a smirk, spinning around, waving her hand. "We already have this all planned out."
"Todd will be our navigator, so he'll sit in the right-hand seat up front," giggled Pauleen, patting the small boy on the head. He blushed.
"I am the only one who knows the coordinates of the ship," he admitted. Pauleen straightened her back.
"Dina's driving," she went on. Dina nodded. "She has this innate ability that lets her, like, drive anything." Pauleen tossed her hair. "She's almost as cool as I am. So she's in the left." With an eyeroll from Todd and a giggle from Dina, who was used to this behaviour, Pauleen went on. "And I'm their assistant, who just happens to also be in charge of food. That means I get to sit in the back."
Rupert, who had been nodding glumly up to that point, suddenly bugged out his eyes and crossed his arms. "What about me?" he demanded, stomping his foot petulantly.
"What do you mean?"
"There are three seats, and you've all taken them!"
"You could always stay behind," offered Dina, but Pauleen and Todd had let her have far enough fun already. Begrudgingly, Rupert and Dina agreed to their respective friends' proposition to let him sit on the floor with their sleeping bags and coats as pillows of sorts.
And they were off.
It turned out, Todd didn't know the exact coordinates of what they were looking for. He had one, and then he had an approximate. And so the four little Fossil Fighters spent their four first days of air mucking about everywhere from the Continental Shelf to the some of the shallower hot water vents. Dina filled three spiral notebooks with drawings and detailed descriptions of the stranger sea life she saw, but she was the only one who seemed to be having any fun at all. Pauleen – Pauleen, who weighed a hundred pounds at 5'7" and had been a model since she could walk and smile at the same time – had single-handedly finished two party-size chip bags on their first night, Todd had almost jumped out the rescue hatch to chase after a shark on their second, and Rupert had spent the entirety of their third curled up around Dina's ankles, his hips digging into her bare feet until they were bruised and insulting her until he was veritably hoarse.
Finally, on what Dina's glow-in-the-dark watch informed her was the evening of their fourth day under the sea, their sonar slowly began pinging. Four jaws dropped and eight eyes widened as all four of the intrepid Wheatley School honour students crowded around the little black and green display on their dashboard, watching the little blinking blip draw closer and closer to their sub.
"The ship," Dina breathed. She was the first to react, breaking the spell as she clambered out of her seat and began tugging her wetsuit on over her romper and sweeping her hair up with a multitude of pins so she could fit her diving helmet on her head. "Come on, you guys!"
"Muh," managed Todd after a solid sixty seconds, his eyes locked on the pirate ship slowly coming into view over a stretch of coral reef.
"Oh, my gosh," whispered Pauleen. She, too, was transfixed. Huffing despite her euphoria, Dina pushed up her face mask and turned to the last member of their group.
"Oh, no," he said, tearing his wide yellow eyes away from the archaeological wonder playing out in front of him. "I'm not going out there. My . . . my therapist says I need a full fourteen hours of sleep every night."
"That certainly didn't stop you from staying up until dawn last night," Dina protested childishly. "Besides, why do you even need a therapist?"
"No reason," Rupert scrambled to say, and certain he was lying, Dina grabbed him by the hand and dragged him over to their pile of diving equipment, kicked a diving helmet over to him.
"Come on," she said, and reluctantly, Rupert zipped up his wetsuit and jammed his helmet on over his face, which was inexplicably flushed a pinkish colour that clashed awfully with his silver-white hair. Dina, however, was not one for pondering and she shoulder-checked the hatch as she wrestled it open, then leaped out into the water.
It was cold at the bottom of Bottomsup Bay. Cold and dark. The only light Dina and Rupert had were the searchlights of their submarine, but after ninety-six hours of constant use, they were dimming by the second.
Luckily, Dina didn't need lights. She hadn't gone more than ten meters before she tripped over a large, metal rock-esque object with one of her clumsy flipper feet. She dropped to her knees and squinted at the object, running her gloved hands along the surprisingly smooth edges and shaking it. It didn't budge. She waved Rupert over.
"What . . . " she heard him ask, but Rupert seemed to have a cat's eyesight as well as their freakish vertical pupils and he knelt down across from Dina and placed his own hands on the object, his eyes even wider than they'd been when the four of them had first seen the ship.
"It's a treasure chest," he said, and the smile in his voice wasn't the mocking, fake one Dina used when she really wanted to hang up on someone. It was the smile of a person who'd just found a treasure chest on a field trip.
Some sort of unspoken agreement passed between the two Fighters and they both seized one of the rust-encrusted handles on either side of the metal chest and started swimming as fast they could back towards their submarine.
The hatch was flung open for them, and the faces that met them were worried and scared – Dina figured that Pauleen and Todd must have assumed that something must have gone terribly wrong if they were back so soon. Wordlessly, Rupert thrust forward the box, and as Dina slammed the hatch shut she could feel the fear evaporate from the air.
Chatter bubbled up as soon as Dina and Rupert had their helmets off, and it grew louder and louder the longer it went on. Dina couldn't help but smile. There hadn't been a lot of talking the last few days, unless you counted whispered insults and demands for more chips.
It quieted down when Dina had gotten enough rust off the padlock to jimmy it open with one of her hairpins. Slowly, she lifted the heavy lid of the chest and closed her eyes in anticipation as she reached into the box and found . . .
. . . another box.
"Oh," she said, briefly crestfallen, but she refused to be deterred. It was fully logical to seal the actual treasure in another, more waterproof chest, in case it did fall overboard – think of the waste if everything inside were to rust! So she stuck her hairpin in this box's completely un-rusted lock and forced it open.
"OK, you get the first look, Pauleen," Dina decided. Pauleen had zero problems with this and took the slightly smaller (but still very large) chest from her friend's hands and placed it in the middle of the floor. Then she squealed at the top of her lungs.
"Look! Look, look!" she cried, dipping her hands into the box and pulling them out in a mess of tulle and lace. "Petticoats!"
Dina didn't know what a petticoat was, but they looked fantastically entertaining. She grinned and fluffed the fabric in Pauleen's hands a few times before kicking the chest over to Todd, who stuck his entire upper body into the treasure chest and came out with a basket full of yarn and small crocheted animal figures, smiling broadly. Next was Rupert, who immediately fell in love with a red silk cravat and a matching abalone pin (proclaiming it matched his lacrosse jersey perfectly, and what with their petticoats, crochet, and general Dina-ness, respectively, nobody crossed him). Then the chest came back around to Dina, and she closed her eyes, reached in, and pulled out a feathery fan and a feathery boa, which were quite possibly even more wonderful than the petticoats.
And so it continued, with everyone kicking the probably priceless antique chest around the floor of their submarine and laughing uncontrollably at its treasures. Dina found a diary and Todd unearthed a multitude of ladies' undergarments that hadn't seen the light of day for two hundred years. Pauleen topped even that with a bottle of something possibly alcoholic and probably scandalous for the owner of the chest to have owned way back when, and then Rupert found a stack of highly embarrassing love poems to a one Lord Nigel Scatterly, who was (Gasp!) an intellectual.
Finally, the chest made its final few rounds and Dina came to her last turn. She tossed a trailing end of her boa over her shoulder and pulled a stack of leather-bound journals from the dusty bottom of the box. Her fellow adventurers looked bored at this find, but the orange-haired girl refused to be deterred. She set aside most the journals aside for her own bedtime reading and held one up to the light. She noticed a slight gap in the pages, so she flipped the book over and shook it out, hard. A small, faded, sepia photograph fluttered to the floor.
She picked it up and turned it over, studying the portrait. The photo portrayed a frowning girl with Dina's thin eyes and lips, along with long hair in masses of frizzing ringlets framing her face and a lacy hat plopped jauntily upon her bony, angry face.
"Who's that?" Todd asked. Dina flipped the photo over and raised her eyebrows at the name.
"Felicity-Jane Clarke the Second," Dina read. Then something clicked in her brain. "Why . . . she's my great-great-great-great grandmother!"
AN: Ooh, a grandmother! I'm very sorry for a boring chapter, you guys, and I'm even more sorry for how long it took. I've just been really busy lately! Nevertheless, hope you thought it was kind of enjoyable! Katie out.