John and Roxy ran as quickly as they could, thinking only to save Aradia's life. John however, tripped and fell flat on his face within the first three steps, underestimating the height of the next terrace. Roxy clicked her tongue as she ran. "We'll train that out of you Johnny, don't worry!" she said. With a jump, she was on Aradia's level and face to face with the creature, if it could be said to have a face.
It was a big flower or some kind of pod that opened up like a mouth, deep purple where it met the stem fading to green at the edges, where wicked looking but flexible spines imitated teeth. A long, yellow, flexible tongue like some kind of obscene banana dripped purple slime onto the moss as it tasted Aradia, searching up and down her body; her face was contorted with horror. "Eew," Roxy muttered, drawing her last knife. "You deserve to die so much you creepy hentai plant thing—"
Aradia burst into flame and incinerated the flowery monster, its leaves and petals withering immediately. Roxy stared, nonplussed. "What?" Aradia asked, brushing some ash off the front of her shirt. "You taught us all magic." She fluttered her wings and the rest of the ashes puffed away from her as a little cloud. "Oh hey though," she added, looking a little embarrassed.
Roxy arched an eyebrow. "What is it?"
Aradia leaned in and whispered, "Am I ruined for marriage now?"
John at just that moment arrived, swinging his hammer and bellowing like a madman. The girls laughed at him.
The walk up the path was largely uneventful, although the plant creatures, Boko Babas according to the pictobox, hissed at them from the tall grass, shivering the foliage around them. The group reached the archway and the shallow waters of the stream eddied around their ankles, cool and herbal smelling, tinted just slightly green. They stepped inside into darkness.
The darkness was short-lived; the hollow tree was filled with dim teal light, harsher shades blocked out by the dense canopy of trees above; the Forest Haven was in fact a forest.
The air inside the trunk seemed effervescent; full of tiny orbs of rainbow colors fluttering around here and there. John thought they might be fairies until one landed on his nose and he realized it was a firefly. The carapatian city was built right into the wood of the trunk and melded in with the natural landscape so well that at first the children thought it was uninhabited. The stream began as a vaguely circular pool with an island in its center; all around were enormous, cabbage-shaped flowers whose slate blue petals brightened to crimson-violet at the tips growing on from stalks that could grow taller than the surrounding trees.
Taller that is, except for one. The island within the island was taken up entirely by an enormous tree of stripy, pale wood, thicker around than a house and so tall its topmost branches almost broke the rim of the hollow trunk. Water welled up from its massive roots, the source of the stream. Stranger than its height however, was the tree's face. Someone had carved a huge sculpture of a carapacian man, massive in size and built like a warrior despite his round belly, protruding just over the roots of the tree; it had no legs, making it seem like the giant was slowly bursting through the bark. Instead of a smooth bald head, the artist had left a circle of branches at the top, like a crown. Two branches had been reshaped into arms, though here the artist's skill had failed, as the fingers split and twisted into branches again. The right hand was bare, but the left grew around and into a massive pole like a scepter, topped with a pearl as big as a man's head, glowing lime green. There were three much flaws, much darker green, inside the pearl; it was turned so that, facing the tree-man head on, they resembled three concentric crescents, or a very stylized whirlwind. It was the symbol of Farore.
The tree opened its mouth and groaned in agony, bark and wood moving and stretching exactly like flesh, arms flailing and thrashing, shaking itself all the way to its upper branches. John remembered his strategy not to be surprised at things anymore. "This is completely normal," he insisted. He took a powerful stride forward, unslinging his shield and hammer, a determined look on his face. "Guardian of Farore's Pearl," he declared in a loud voice, "We've come here for the holy artifact. If there's anything we can do to earn the right to it, it shall be done!"
The tree continued groaning. Two slits opened up in its face, showing little round eyes made of amber glowing with liquid light. Its mouth opened wide and bellowed something in a language John didn't understand.
"Fy helpu i!"
His voice echoed through the hollow trunk. "I'm sorry what?" John asked after a few mintues, drawing a blank.
"He asked for help!" Roxy declared, drawing a knife in one hand and her rod in the other.
"Angenfilod yn ysol fy nghnawd o'r tu mewn! Yn gyflym, maent yn dod!"
Roxy gasped. "Holy crap that's gross! We'll help!" No sooner had she said this than a swarm of chuchus, both red and lime green, bored their way out of cracks in the tree's bark; it roared in agony once gain and the things dropped to the floor. "I didn't know they could do that," John said matter-of-factly, his inner fear and disgust betrayed only by the sad drooping of his ears. The slimy monsters floated on the surface of the water like a glob of mucus in water, though their movements indicated a sort of rudimentary intelligence. They slowly congealed to one point in front of the stunned adventurers.
Llysnafedd anferth! Mae pob cael ei golli, ffoi yn awr ac yn arbed eich hunain!
"Hold your horses tree guy, we've fought worse!" Roxy declared, rod flaring pink with her disapproval. "And what do you mean by 'titan'? It's just a big pile of—"
The blob extended upward, assuming a vaguely humanoid appearance, becoming a figure that towered almost as high as the tree man's face. The colors of slime mingled and muddied into a deep, dirty purple. Its arms were huge trunk-like objects with three simple, dripping digits; its feet were just columns like an elephant's, somehow still light enough to float on the water's surface. Instead of a head, three dozen pairs of bloodshot eyes floated to the forefront of its bubble-shaped chest. A cluster of purplish-grey matter floated to the back. Roxy snapped her fingers.
"Attack pattern delta!" Aradia shouted, launching herself up into the air with a leap. She flapped her wings once for distance, and then snapped her whip at a tree branch, swinging towards the monster.
Roxy, determined look on her face, took off running for the left, firing a stream of magic at the monster that severed its arm. John, deciding to just roll with it, ran off to the right, taking a running leap at the monster's knee. His hammer met little resistance and passed right through, severing the limb at the knee. He smiled triumphantly as it came toppling down. He watched it crash and break on the water's surface into a dozen different mucus-y blobs.
"Good job!" Aradia declared. He looked up. She was holding on to her whip with one hand and awkwardly dangling from the tree branch. She giggled. "I forgot I only have one weapon, so I just…hug out for a bit!" John laughed. Roxy groaned. The monster reformed itself and let out a wet, sticky roar, splattering the Hylian children with droplets of purplish spittle. It reached up and grabbed Aradia with a gelatinous. She yelped, more out of surprise and disgust than pain or fear before being subsumed by the much.
"Don't worry Aradia!" John shouted, shaking his fist. "We'll have you out in a jiffy!"
"Or we'll avenge you!" Roxy called. "Whichever comes first!" And with that she let out a blast of pink light from her rod, slicing the monster horizontally in half. The top immediately fell down on top of the bottom and reconnected. It began to take lumbering steps toward them, gurgling bubbles of its own flesh like a horrendous baby composed entirely of slime. Roxy growled and pulled out the pictobox. "John, you distract it while I try to find its weakness!"
John nodded and splashed off to meet the creature. He threw his shield down into the water, deciding it would only slow him down in this battle, and pushed his tiny reserve of magic into his hammerhead. He found himself propelled, screaming, as it burst from the weapon like a jet engine, and he struck the monster head on.
There was slight resistance, uncomfortable wriggling, the scent of burning hair and slime, then something heavy clamped onto him and suddenly he was free, coming out of the monster's backside along with a good chunk of good and a very disheveled looking Aradia. They hit the water with a loud splash and John bruised his shins on the wooden floor of the pool. Aradia was unmoving and still; dissolved slime leached from her soiled hair and clothes like blood from a wound. John muttered a swear and started shaking her. Her heart was still beating, but it was faint, and no breath left her nostrils.
"Enfawr Fflam!"
Roxy's voice rang out, the Forest Haven ringing like a wooden bell, and a huge flare of pink light tore through the monster's upper body. Purplish viscera rained down on John and Aradia; it was wrinkly and squishy and John realized it might be brain matter. The monster's remains began to melt harmlessly into the stream, and flow out into the sea.
Roxy shambled over, visibly exhausted. "Oh crap," she muttered. She wobbled over to Aradia's side and bent over her, a sour expression on her face.
"She's still alive," John said with mounting concern.
"I need to give her…" Roxy trembled from head to toe in a single little wave and was then still; "The kiss of life!"
"What's that?" John asked as Roxy held her nose and puckered her lips. For the next minute, he watched her try and fail to press her lips to Aradia's as the troll girl's face grew deeper and deeper burgundy with asphyxiation. John sighed and shoved Roy out of the way. Then he uttered a quick prayer to Nayru and, blushing fiercely, exhaled into Aradia's mouth. There was a faint tingling from his lungs, up his throat, into his mouth and outward.
It didn't end there; somehow he could still feel the sensation as it spread into Aradia's body through her lungs, cleaning and rejuvenating her blood. Then the girl started coughing and spat a gobbet of purple ick into his mouth and John almost vomited. He was saved from that fate when she delivered a vicious uppercut to his nose. "I don't like you like that get it through your head!" she shouted. "Not even anywhere near that quadrant!" she huffed, crossing her arms. "Or any quadrant because I'm too young for those," she added, playing with a strand of her wooly hair. Her face paled just slightly.
"Thank you small ones," the voice was rich, booming, and deep as the foundations of the earth. The children looked up. The tree-man had spoken. "I am the Deku of this generation, king of Forest Haven."
The giant inclined his head towards John."Fucking called it," John whispered under his breath.
"I heard you ask a boon, little one," he went on. The Deku king lowered his scepter and John looked into the pearl. Close enough to touch. The huge creature gestured at the girls. "Leave us," he said, "this is for his ears only." Roxy looked like she was about to protest, but then she jerked as if about to fall over and gagged. Aradia, looking little better, held onto her.
The king's gaze softened. "You have expended your magic, and you friend nearly suffocated." A huge lotus bloomed on the water as if from nothing, its petals soft and inviting. "Rest. The hero will inform you of what we have spoken."
Aradia nodded. "Good luck John," she said with a half-hearted wave.
"Don't get us into anymore trouble eh?" Roxy added, flashing al her teeth.
They settled down on the flower, and the petals closed over them gently. "They shall be rejuvenated shortly," the king mumbled, noting John's wide-eyed look of discomfort. "The Pearl," the king began, "is a sacred relic, and the punishment for a foreigner asking such a thing of me would normally be to be flayed alive and have your skin nailed to the roots of the island as a warning to others," he said sternly.
John's face fell, and he felt himself slowly adjusting the grip on his hammer—"but these are not normal times," the Deku king said with a heavy sigh that rippled across the pool and down the stream all the way out into the sea, "Caliborn has returned and means to kill the Speaker of the Vast Croak. The end of all things is upon us. The hero must have the Pearls, lest all of time be shattered. And so, I shall give them to him." The Deku king, his woody flesh groaning with age and heavy weight, leaned back against the trunk, holding the scepter like a cane. "And so tonight, at the end of our festival, I will grant you Farore's Pearl, O hero. It has been entrusted to our kind since Farore first breathed life into her game pieces countless eons ago; bear it—"
John cleared his throat. "Um, sir," he added a hasty kneel, remembering he was in the presence of royalty. "I just know it will cause problems later if I don't say it now but neither of us is the hero. He's off doing other heroic stuff. It's just that Jaspers told us that we needed to—"
"Then you are not the Knight of Time?" the Deku king boomed, leaning in to glare appraisingly. His amber eyes burned like tiny suns.
John gasped in spite of himself and took a step back. There was fighting monsters and gods, and then there was staring authority in the face, and while a sufficiently brave child can do one, it takes a true hero-child to do the other. "No sir," he squeaked, "none of us is, like I said."
The king's gaze softened, and he leaned back. "I will give you the Pearl," he said after a moment's consideration. "I owe you a great debt, and I trust in and value honesty. If I give you this Pearl, I know that, somehow, it will be used as it was meant to be." The king reached up into his branches and pulled down a massive horn made from the shell of some sea-monster and blew into it. It sounded loud and brazen, almost like Pyralspite's musical roars, and the air shook. "Tonight the carapacian's gather from all over the sea," he declared. "They hid in fear of the monsters plaguing my flesh, but now, our festival will continue uninterrupted!"
The hard-shelled people sprang from hidden doorways all over Forest Haven, like beetles emerging from a dead log. They clambered and crawled down the steep wooden walls, along vines and down carven steps. From the highest reaches, carapacians hovered down, buzzing like drones, a pair of leafy wings or rotors vibrating so quickly they were just verdant discs.
As they approached, silent and nervous, John saw that all of them had plants growing from their shells, the chitin stretching and gradually morphing into wood and leaves, distorting their joints and edges so their pale, almost featureless faces looked like masks. The few he'd met in his life were simple, doll-like people, almost like blank slates. He noticed however, that each wore a simple gold ring set with a tiny green pearl on their left hand. After a minute of buzzing and clicking steps, a hundred of the creatures stood arrayed around their king in a circle, the tiny island filled almost to capacity by them.
"Once," the king intoned, "the power to change form was restricted to the Carapatian monarchs. Then the cataclysm came, and for the good of the race, it was granted to every member. In this unbalanced world, our forms merge those of plant and insect, a union of land, sky and ocean." He paused and cleared his throat. The whole little island rumbled, and the leaves above shook and hissed. "The festival begins at sundown," the Deku king boomed. "When the festivities have ended, I will grant you the sacred—"
A nasally scream of nearly infectious panic ripped across the air. "Miss Paint is missing!" A carapacian who was long in the trunk yet had stubby limbs made his laborious, graceless way across the water as quickly as possible, stumbling almost every other step. "Miss Paint is missing!" The chitinous 'mask' on his face was shaped roughly like a butterfly, and his wooden growths had a bit more mottled green than silver-grey. He shambled onto the island, accidentally pulling one carapacian into the water and shoving another after him as he lunged forward. "Miss Paint is missing!" He shouted into any face that turned to look at him. The distended little man shoved passed John and the kids, bellowing into the Deku king's face; "MISS PAINT IS MISSING!"
He turned around and saw what a spectacle he had made of himself. "I…" he said, making a feeble, conciliatory gesture, "I thought you ought to know."
Notes: Do recall that Roxy speaks the old tongue, and yeah, she totally still has the rod, why wouldn't she?
The Old tongue used here on FF is just Welsh. On Ao3, it's a font I downloaded from a Zelda fansite. I did not want to go through the effort of figuring out how to html it though, so over there it's just images I took of the sentences as I wrote them. While it's an authentic font, the actual Anceint tongue is a complex construction of the universe, and is in fact a syllabary comprised of Japanese sounds, so if you tried to translate it back into English it would be pure nonsense. Other forms of Hylian have been alphabets and logographs.
Alright y'all, those of you who know me personally know that I can meet a deadline if I force myself to, so *cracks knuckles, cracks neck, cracks back* I am going to finish this beautiful hulk of a story. Now, with Thief of Prospit, I had almost half of it done and I gave myself a whole month to do the rest of it, amounting to 60,000 words. What most of you don't know is the very next month I tightened my author pants and cranked out a whole novel of 53,000 words for NaNoWriMo. However, this fic is approaching 60,000 words and we're still far from finished, not even at the second proper dungeon (I don't count the Forsaken Fortress because spoilersyou come back later/spoilers), so I'm going to give myself a lot more time. I haven't been writing as much lately, and while I could conceivably have done it in a month, with great effort, this time last year, I certainly can't finish it in month emthis/em year. So instead, I'm giving myself until the one year anniversary of this fic's publication, July 1st. Which is…not that far off…
Credit to Lordlyhour for giving me an idea of how to handle the carapacians-as-Koroks by bringing up the magic rings in the Oracle games. Seems obvious now, or it would if I had played them…
And yes that was a Harry Potter reference, you are very smart. There aren't that many named, white carapacians in Homestuck canon, so that guy is just Linder from Wind Waker, and any carapacians with speaking roles will likely be race-lifted Koroks.