Chapter Five: What to do now?
Finally! I had to rewr this story I dunno how many times till I got it right! Forewarning, no deaths. Enjoy!
Rina awoke from her blackout just in time to see Chuck and the others at the entrance of the pipe system. Chuck was muttering algorithms of velocity and ratios while Fly lugged Rina inside a sock.
"What happened?"
"You fell asleep Auntie," Stella rode on Sasha behind Fly, holding up the rear of the sock to help carry her.
"We figured out how to navigate through the pump system," Chuck explained "The bottle of anti fish potion is on the professor's desk, so we just have to flood the lab using-"
"Wha-wait, hold up. That plan was before I got injured. I'm not strong enough to handle that pump; plus we'd end up in the aquarium with the piranha!" Rina tried to reason.
"Hand me that screwdriver and thread please." Chuck asked.
"What? Did you hear what I just said?"
"It's down by your tail," Fly directed.
"Screwdriver and thread." Chuck repeated.
Rina didn't argue, sifting around the bottom till she found the items she was looking for and handed them to Fly and Chuck.
Stella and Sasha swam ahead into the pump.
"No Stella, wait." Chuck grabbed Sasha's tail and pulled them back. "You cant take Sasha with you."
"Hmm?"
Chuck further explained, "Where we're going, it's to dangerous for little fish like her."
"Sasha's my friend, she's going to stay with me!" Stella held Sasha tightly close to her.
"Let her keep her; it's not gonna make a difference anyway." Rina said.
Chuck and Fly held stubbornly to their final word. "Stella, say goodbye."
"It's, for the best Stella" Fly added.
Sniffling in defeat, Stella rode Sasha aside and gave the most heart wrenching goodbye Rina and the boys ever seen; they almost felt guilty forcing her to part with someone she grew so fond of.
Stella joined Rina into the sock, being the only other fish not made to swim.
"Five hours, six minutes left. Now let's take this slow and steady, we got plenty of time. You guys ready?"
"Do it Chuck." Fly confirmed. With that, Chuck Released from the edges of the pipe, the current pulling them in.
Joe swam down inspecting the thread, then followed them into the pipe.
Thanks to Chuck's algorithms, he calculated just enough thread to stop just short of the sealed off pipe strainer. Quickly, he worked at the lid's screws one by one. Once he successfully opened the strainer, he untied the safety thread, screaming with the others as the powerful current pulled them in. Their attention was quickly diverted to the unwanted guest chasing after them in the pipe.
Chuck redirected his attention back to the pipe, just in time to see the blade fan.
"Hand me the fork fish!" Chuck shouted. Rina quickly yanked it out and passed it to Chuck.
While cranking up the toy, Chuck eyeballed their distance and speed then flung the toy smackdab in between the blades, stopping them just as the current pulled them through.
"Chuck, he's coming! Pull it out!" Rina and Fly, Stella included, began helping Chuck pry the toy out of the blades before Joe had a chance to make it through. He made it just as the blades began running, twirling him up a bit.
"The balloon!" Chuck yelled as they headed toward the turns in the pipe.
Rina passed it up so Chuck could blow into it, making into a makeshift airbag as they hit the sharp turns. Rina smirked amusingly to herself as she heard Joe grunt behind them as he hit the walls with full force.
But they weren't out of the woods yet. After they managed to navigate through the pipes unscathed, they ended up right in the piranha aquarium. The piranhas immediately took notice of their new arrivals, staring at them hungrily.
Chuck and Fly swam around them, leaving behind Rina and Stella in the sock.
"Chuck, Fly, where you going?" Rina called out.
They began making raspberry noises, getting the piranhas attention toward them. They dodged every one, leaving them lodged in the strainer. With no other exit to go, water in the aquarium started to flow over the top, paving the others a path out of the tank, into the lab.
"Five hours, three minutes left. We're gonna make it!" Chuck replied excitedly.
Joe popped in just as they made their way through the flooded lab, quietly following behind as they reached the table holding the antidote.
Fly and Chuck looked in awe, It was right there!
"We did it!"
Rina smiled but then frowned as she suddenly remembered something.
"Guys, wait. That's-" She didn't have time to finish as Joe hoisted the sock over her and Stella's heads, tying the top shut.
"I believe this dance is mine!" Joe grabbed Chuck and Fly, flinging them away from the table. Both boys looked frantically at the bottom for Rina and Stella while Joe took off with the antidote.
"I'll find the girls, you get the potion!" Fly called to Chuck. He nodded then pursued chasing down that fish.
"Stop!" Chuck shouted as Joe pryed the second pipe to the piranha tank off.
"So sorry, I can't stay for dinner," Joe gestured to the free piranhas, noting they were now officially peeved.
Chuck gasped in fear as they all surrounded him angrily. He gritted his teeth, now mad himself; just this once, he was going to be muscle of the group!
Rina and Stella managed to undo the knot on the top of the sock, getting out just in time to see their jellyfish nerd kick some serious piranha tail.
"Take that, you sawtooth suckers!" Chuck shouted, quoting from what Joe called the shark earlier.
Speaking of Joe, the three saw him just as he disappeared into the pipes with the bottle labeled "anti-fish potion".
"You stupid, stupid fish!"
Fly growled, angry they were once again potionless. "I'll go after him, I got an ide-"
"Let him go Fly." Rina stopped him.
"Wha-"
"Look near the tank, just under the pipe is my bag. Hurry!"
Fly did as she asked. He swam to the bag and opened it; he gasped.
"The antidote." Was all he could get out. He uncapped the bottle, taking a sip. He passed it to Stella, also taking a sip. Chuck, who finally walloped the last of the piranhas, gaped in awe at his now human cousins.
"Here Chuck, think fast!" Rina, still a Fish, passed it to Chuck. He gladly took a nice long sip of the potion, reverting back to human.
His relief was short-lived as he noticed one-they were now humans trapped in a room flooding with water, and two-Rina was still a fish.
"Rina, how come-"
"I've got some unfinished business to attend to. Besides," Rina pointed their attention to voices coming from the other end of the lab. "I think you got some visitors to entertain." Rina struggled out of the sock, her wound still not fully closed up. She capped up the remaining potion and brought the other potion in tow with her.
"Auntie wait! Don't leave!" Stella, now human, floated toward her.
"I'll tell Sasha you said hi!" And with that, Rina too disappeared into the pipes.
Just outside the pipes, Joe angrily tossed the empty bottle of antidote to the rocky sea floor.
"Man Joe, you got issues."
Joe turned to see none other than that wrecked fish he was embarrassed to share the same species with.
"Looking for this?" Rina held up the real bottle of anti-fish potion, swaying it tauntingly.
"Why you little-"
"Now now. Calm down, let's not get to hasty here," Rina spat back the same line he used earlier on Fly. "You know, I didn't even think this far ahead" Rina admitted honestly, swishing the antidote around. "I siphoned that bottle earlier, and coincidentally, that made me one step ahead of you! Don't you just love it when things just fall into place? Oh wait, you wouldn't know."
Joe sneered at the weak insult. She was getting on his last good nerve, but he for all his anger and frustrations, he had to observe something about all this. He drank more potion recently and was now twice her size; he could easily just take that potion right now from her, she was injured. She also wasn't as stupid as he led himself to believe; she just finished bragging about having the potion all along, why return to flaunt it in front of him? Was she just messing with him?
Something was off.
"It's getting to you, isn't it?" Rina called Joe out of his thoughts. "These past two days with me is finally starting to show you some errors in your judgment and actions? I could tell; you finally started paused and think about the 'why's' and 'how come's', instead of acting without a second thought. You're finally maturing into your intelligence."
Joe smirked at her tact at trying to use psychological warfare on him. "And you think I'm going to let my guard down and lose my focus just so you can make a fool out of me?! Nice try, my dear, but that's not gonna work on me a second time!" Joe made a beeline for the potion. When he was mere inches from her, he made a quick jab to her side, causing her to double over in pain.
"A second time!? I've been outsmarting you at every turn since you took the antidote! And only just now, you took a minute to start observing your surroundings instead of focusing on what you want!" She managed to wheeze out.
Joe set the bottle down and made his way over to Rina's curled up body. He seethed as he grabbed her roughly by where her neck would be, holding her at eye level. He relished in the choking sounds she made trying to gasp for water.
"You know, you really are a pretty fish. If it wasn't for that smart mouth of yours, I would have pursued you. Even now, you still won't shut up! Get it through your head deary, I won!" Joe finished proudly, crushing Rina's windpipe.
What happened next, Joe could only stare in shock.
Fly and the others excitedly embraced their parents in a group hug and told Mac Krill their amazing story.
"I'm just glad you're all okay," Fly and Stella's mother smiled as she held her children tightly. Their cousin Chuck, however, was having a bittersweet moment. Sure, he was happy being a human again and seeing his mom, but he still couldn't shake the worry he had for Rina.
"I just don't get it mom, she had the potion in her bag this whole time. Heck, she had it right in her hands. Why did she leave without turning back? Do you think she went back to that fish, to give him-"
"Honey! I'm home!"
Everyone's attention was directed to the soaking wet brunette in the doorway, her hands on her wounded side.
"Auntie Witch! Auntie Witch!" Stella pried out of her mothers arms and latched onto Rina's side, careful not to touch her cut.
Chuck stared in awe."Miss Rina, how-"
"I took the leftover potion after I got this," Rina held up a fishbowl, revealing a pilot fish.
Fly and Chuck ran up and stared at the fish in shock.
"You... I don't believe it. You got the fish!?" Chuck flailed him arms dramatically while Fly just tapped the glass, watching Joe swim aimlessly in circles.
"Chuck, relax. He can't hurt anyone in this state look," Rina held up the bowl in front of him, Chuck examining the blank stare the fish gave him.
Stella looked up at the fish and twisted her face in disgust. "Yucky fish."
Rina giggled at her reaction. "It's okay Stella; I'm gonna keep him somewhere-"
"You're keeping him!?" Both Fly and Chuck exclaimed.
She gave them a look, "Do I need to point out the obvious?"
"Professor, tell her she's crazy to keep him!"
Mac Krill, who had been quiet up until this point, stepped in. He took the bowl and examined the fish closely in his now harmless state, noting how, well normal it looked.
"I don't see any reason why not." He concluded, handing him over to Rina. "Even if he does turn intelligent again, he'd be in a fishbowl!" He giggled.
That seemed to put everyone at ease, sort of. They joined in his laughter and headed out to the shoreline.
"Hey professor," Fly walked next to him, his hands in his pockets "you mind if we start hanging out here by your lab? It seems pretty cool, I mean, for a lab."
"Oh! No trouble at all! I love company!" Mac Krill gushed.
Rina lagged behind everyone as Mac Krill saw everyone off.
"Would it be too much trouble to stay here a little longer? I'm not quite ready to go home, and it's such a nice sunset approaching."
"Oh! No trouble at all! No trouble! You are welcome here anytime!" The professor giddily trodded back to his boat to repair the vents and tanks.
Rina took one last look around before walking to the far end of the rock structure. The sun was just above the horizon, slightly tinted with the familiar hues of orange and pink Rina never got tired of drawing. She felt the nostalgia it brought every time she saw it; there always seemed to be some new memory she preserved in its golden radiance.
"Now to deal with you..." Rina held up the bowl; her Fish friend still out from earlier.
Rina began laughing; not the kind that questioned her mental health, the kind you give when you are amused but not really impressed when someone tells a cheap joke. Her cut, which was beginning to turn bruise purple from the hit, suddenly closed up and healed right before his eyes.
"You should've took a little longer to see the big picture," Rina gasped, pulling away from him with a strength he only knew the shark had. She held her fins out, beginning to grow larger in size, glowing a soft blue hue. Her fins grew into arms and fingers, her tail began to disappear, a pair of legs growing into their place. Rina's scales peeled off, revealing olive brown skin sprinkled with freckles. Finally, her head sprouted out dark, luscious curls, cascading onto her shoulders and back like a waterfall.
"Poor naive Joe, just how well do you know me by now?" Rina finished, now fully human before his eyes.
"I-I, but how-I-ah-"
"Oh, did I forget to mention?" Rina used some invisible force to pull Joe toward her, incasing him in a bubble. "I'm... a witch."
Now it was his turn to black out.
Joe snapped out of his stupor and took in his new surroundings. He seemed to be confined in a glass sphere of some sort. His focus immediately turned to the brunette female sketching away in her wrinkled journal, still damp from the seawater.
She turned away from her doodles to pass a glance at him. "Oh, awake finally."
He began thrashing and banging wildly on the glass, wanting to get back to his nation and get the hell away from her. Rina ignored him as he began hitting the capped top for freedom.
She uncapped the lid to the bowl, smiling mischievously as her little captor looked around to see he was above water with nowhere to run. Er, swim. He looked at her in fear for the first time, recalling what happened just before he passed out.
"Catfish got your tongue?" Rina half-joked. "You know, after all you've done, I have every right to turn you into fish bait and dump you in a fish market. You know that, right?" Rina spoke in a hushed cold tone Joe never heard Rina use before. She kept her gaze fixed on her sketch of the horizon, but he could tell her eyes were just as cold as her voice.
"Y-you wouldn't. You said you always think things through! You wouldn't sentence me without a second thought!" Joe desperately offered.
"For once, you're right. While we're on the subject, if I truly wanted to get rid of you, I would've done so the moment you and that lemon shark took that potion. In fact, I was going to, but I didn't. And do you know why?"
Joe shook his head, at this point a bit at a loss.
Rina picked him up and began walking along the cliffs shore, "You may not remember, and I don't expect you to, but some time ago, I came here in the afternoon after a really bad day. I wanted to go for a swim, hoping the cold water would clear my head of the unwanted thoughts. I was just about to head back; my feet were just touching the shallows" Rina recalled in fine detail. "I was that close to missing it- this thrashing sound in the distance. Out of pure curiosity alone, I decided why not check it out? Maybe it was nothing." She turned a corner and walked along a path paving just a bit out to deeper waters.
"I kept expecting it to be some bulky debris washed up on some rock, maybe the tide hitting some rocks just the right way, but I certainly wasn't expecting a lemon shark tangled in a fishnet." Rina stopped walking when she heard Joe gasp a little, almost picturing his thought process of suddenly recalling a moment in his past he had long forgotten.
She continued. "At first, every fiber of my being told me to just leave him be. It wasn't any of my business whether or not he died, and I had no place there anyway," Rina set him down near the edge of the shores, near a wateringhole.
"But..."
"I'm getting there..."
Joe recognized the surroundings of this particular waterhole, with all those rocky walls lining it.
'Oh no, don't tell me...'
Sure enough, the head of a lemon shark, with cuts along its snout, emerged from the waters.
He looked curiously at the visitors, wondering whether or not he should eat them.
"Hello Brutus, we were just talking about you."
"Eh, do I know you?" Brutus inspected the now human Rina, absolutely certain he had seen her before but still couldn't pinpoint where. She looked pretty.
Joe's eyes widened. She wasn't going to feed him to the shark, was she?! He popped his head out the top of the bowl to further protest, but Rina shushed him."Brutus, think hard. Where have you seen me before?"
'Thinking. Mmh, not his strongpoint.' Joe thought to himself.
Brutus tried really hard to pinpoint where he saw this familiar human thingy. His thought traced back through the carnage, his instinct telling him to feed, backtracking all the way to a memory of how he got his scar.
He remembered a time before he was intelligent (well, intelligent enough to speak). He recalled swimming near the cove to feed on a school of tuna passing by; he was so engulfed in his instinct to feed, he didn't notice the nets from the boats gathering up the tuna. He swam straight into a stray net, snapping it right off the reel of the boat.
He remembered the pain; it was like hundreds of needles digging into his face. He tried to untangle himself from the net, thrashing wildly to get the thing off. This only succeeded in entangling him further, the net getting secured on a jagged rock.
Even though he wasn't intelligent at the time(and barely was now) he knew that he was panicking at the time, not being able to see much and the needle-sharp pain becoming unbearable. At this point, he could only hope that if he struggled hard enough, he'd be able to break free from the bonds.
Then out of the corner of his eye, he spotted one of those human thingies swim up to him and stare at him cautiously. Now that he was currently smart-ish, he could tell from his memory that this particular human was a female; what with her tiny frame and those long dark tendrils coming from her head.
Then It hit him.
Brutus snapped back to present time and looked up at Rina, who at this point was sitting patiently with her legs crossed. Joe, however, was sitting at the bottom of his fishbowl tapping his fingers repetitively.
"Has it sunk in yet? Or do you need another hour?"
"Boss, er, is that-"
"Yes, you dimwit! This girl is the same fish who coddled you like a guppy for the past two days and the same girl who saved your sorry hide a while back; this is Rina!" Joe announced begrudgingly.
Rina raised a brow at hearing Joe call her by name finally; usually, he'd call her "my dear", or "deary", not that she minded.
"So I understand sparing the shark because of those sentimental reasons, but what does that have anything to do with me? You think I'm going feel indebted to you just because you saved his life?"
"No. Being nothing but kind and considerate on top of saving his life makes him," she pointed to Brutus, " indebted to me."
Joe saw where she was getting at. Even if Rina was nothing but a pilot fish with no powers, she still had the sharks favor on her side-and that didn't take much. It was true what the shark said; Joe may have been the brains, but he was the one with the muscle.
Rina let out a heavy sigh. "Unlike you, I have mastered the art of strategy; I like to make sure I take everything into consideration. Sound familiar?"
Joe narrowed his eyes at her, knowing she was recalling his impulsive decision to fire shark before thinking of later consequences of his actions. He sighed in defeat.
"Ah, see? Now you're learning! But to be honest, I'd be lying if I said there weren't times I had to improvise." Rina stood waved her hand out. The rocky walls of the waterhole deteriorated and pooled back into ocean, carrying Brutus along with it. "After all, I'm limited when I'm around non-magics. You can't narrow your decisions based on just one component, what if you don't have it anymore?"
Brutus jumped out of the water with glee."Thanks Rina! Uh, what'd ya gonna do with boss? Should I eat him?"
"No, not that," Rina said humorously. "He's coming home with me."
"What!?" Joe cringed at the idea of being reduced to a mere house pet. Rina picked up the lantern fish bowl and swung the strap over her shoulder like a purse. "See you later Brutus, and no eating fish that can speak!"
"You got it boss, Er, miss!" Brutus hopped back into the reef to resume his hunt for his next meal. Rina happily sighed and gathered up her things.
"My dear, have mercy! I-I'll stop building my nation, I'll go back to being an unintelligent fish, anything but reducing me to your bag accessory!" Joe pleaded.
'My god, he makes it sound like I'm gonna cook him up and eat him.'Rina remained silent as she trotted over the ocean on the rocky path back to civilization. Little did she know, there was a whole other problem waiting for her at home.
Well, certainly didn't see that comin, but then again, you know witches. So mysterious in their endeavors, what could she be up to? Find out in the next chapter- don't be shy in commenting your thoughts!