Chapter 6 - This Is Not A Sitcom Where Everything's Alright

Finally, after being holed up in Doctor Livesley's clinic for days after her body had stopped violently removing everything she put in, Meryl was finally free.

Of course, there were rules to that; she wasn't allowed to cook unsupervised anymore, which meant either coming down to the Dead Admiral for meals or letting Raine handle it, and even those weren't allowed to be anything spicy or rich until she passed yet another exam a week down the line, but it was still freedom, even with the vaguely condescending guidelines attached.

So Aunt Brenda hadn't given her proper cooking lessons before she'd died, that was no big deal - Meryl had learned enough to manage the basics; boiling water got people more places than it didn't, cookbook recipes worked better than experimenting, and reheating leftovers was easier than making meals fresh.

Still, there was a part of her that worried that she'd learned wrong, that this wasn't one of those random things that just happened to people sometimes but something caused by very avoidable error…

No! No time for that kind of thinking, Meryl thought harshly, shaking her head as she brushed off the thought. That was just inviting unnecessary negativity!

Instead, she should be thinking about things she should be doing, things that didn't revolve around messing up or breaking down -

Meryl sniffed the shirt as she pulled it down over her head and grimaced. It still smelled like someone had been violently sick in it, even after Doctor Livesley's assistant had laundered it, and that effect wasn't exactly helped by the fact that the purple blouse was probably on its last legs anyway.

A trip to the second hand clothes store instead of feeling sorry for herself, then. Maybe they'd have something nice in her size for once - though she wasn't necessarily holding her breath on that front.

But that would require money. Money that she didn't feel like going home and digging into the hidden cache to get to.

Well, Meryl thought with a sigh as she pulled her shoes on, there wasn't anything wrong with honest work. And, considering that she hadn't been down there for almost a month now, Allardyce probably had a list of flags orders lined up.

Flexing her Devil Fruit power for the first time since she was hospitalized, she pulled a bird from her sketchbook as she left the door of Dr. Livesley's office, a big black raven that would blend in perfectly with the local birds once in flight.

Perfect for getting an idea of what was happening around town.

Meryl threw the raven up in the air and it noisily took wing, leaving a phantom thread of her power hanging between them, only the lightest pressure behind it to remind her of its presence. With only one, there was no forgetting -

She grimaced as another older thread tugged, a reminder that it was still active even if she didn't have any command over what was on the other end of it.

Alright, two. Both unforgettable, for very different reasons, but only the bird mattered right now.

Letting the raven coast along on updrafts to find its premium vantage point, Meryl made her way to Allardyce's sail and rope depot.

The old rope and sailmaker grinned at Meryl as she walked in, worn hands never pausing once in the work of braiding another reel of would-be rigging even as she swung her long serpentine neck around to have a clearer look at her. "Oh, Meryl dear. It's been forever and a day since you've been in, even without that sick business."

"Hi, Al," Meryl replied. "Have any work for me?"

"Oh, yes, actually, a customer just came in for you. And there's a short list of people who put their names down for whenever you were free - I can send one of my kids down to ask Zahlia if any of them are in town right now after you're settled into your first appointment. Don't want to get anyone too worked up just to have them wait right after."

Meryl nodded as she passed the desk, stepping lightly over the hemp rope strands that crossed her path.

In contrast to Pew, who preferred to keep his statements short and sweet, Allardyce was one to talk - which Meryl didn't mind, really, given that Al was always friendly about it and usually kept to harmless small talk without expectation of interruption which often turned into a comfortable sort of white noise.

Other times, it had a way of stealing Meryl's ability to speak right out of her mouth.

Taking a second to steel herself, she pushed open the doors to her workspace and waiting customers.

"7,000 beri is the starting rate - covers an hour of design session with one flag and one sail painted with the final design. Anything else on top of that is additional and you bring the sailcloth and flag material yourself," Meryl listed off as she walked into the backroom sailmaker's shop set aside for flag work, every word long memorized.

There are protests, of course. 'You're not doing that much', 'I could get one of my crew members to do that for free', 'that's not worth half that cost!' are standard among the ignorant.

"If you had someone in your crew that could do a design properly, you wouldn't be talking to me in the first place," she pointed out as she sat down and flipped a sketchbook open to blank pages. It wasn't like the profession of flagmaker wasn't unheard of - rare, perhaps, but not vanishingly so.

Letting the murmur of a faltering protest wash over her ears, Meryl arranged the rest of her supplies within easy reach. "So tell me… what are you looking for in a design?"

The process for designing a pirate flag was relatively simple, though there were enough variances in the process to make pinning down a single way of doing it impossible. First, you asked what the focus was; usually some sort of skull, which could be human or animal, though there were plenty of crews that took other symbols in various levels of abstraction. Then you got a list of things important to the crew - what was their 'theme', what was their captain's most distinguishing feature, what features did they want attention called to.

Then Meryl took over the process, putting together a handful of rough sketches of potential routes to follow. Would this skull look better in profile or from a straight-on view? What colors would be the most appropriate in what spaces? Were bringing all the listed traits into the design too busy or was it just a matter of how they were arranged in the space?

Once those were done, she'd bring the commissioner back into the process, letting them pick apart the designs for the parts they liked best - this skull with this detail, bring in this color from this other sketch, etcetera, etcetera.

And Meryl would take over again, refining their choices into more polished sketches; not yet the final form of the flag, but a closer step in the chain.

So the process would repeat for a cycle or two, until the design was declared 'perfect'.

Then came the actual process of painting it the flags and sails the crew provided.

Physically? Easy. Mentally? Annoying, because first time buyers always questioned her at this part, unless they were recommended by another who knows better.

'Will the colors run? How long until they fade?'

The answers are 'no' and 'never' - anything that Meryl touched with her power stayed as it is was in that instant forever, barring its complete destruction. She didn't even need to use those powers in the usual way; all it took was her breathing into to her art as she would any other piece. It didn't matter if it was canvas or paper or even human skin; Aunt Brenda had died with a finger-paint bird on her arm, colors just as bright as when Meryl had put it on almost ten years before, even as her other tattoos faded under Ravenser's rare sunlight. Cloth and canvas were nothing compared to that.

Three hours later, slightly after one in the afternoon, Meryl Dacey was 22,000 beri richer and on her way to the clothes shop to get a shirt that didn't smell like the business end of one of Zahlia's mops.

"We got some fresh musimoufon wool and hide in from our supplier just today," the owner said, smiling behind the counter. "It'll take some time to deliver, but we are good to take orders on custom jackets and shawls."

Meryl thought it over for a moment, chewing the knuckle of her finger as her mind chewed on the idea. Red scarf aside, Raine seemed ill-equipped for Ravenser Odd's colder weather and harsh winds. Of course, she didn't know the older girl's size and tastes well enough to make an order just yet, but…

"I'll think about it," Meryl decided before she moved to the end of the store made for humans in the five to six-foot height range.

The problem with living in a world as diverse as theirs was that there was no promise that anything would fit off the rack. That didn't say that it never did, but it was impossible to know going into any given store. So that meant looking around and learning how to eyeball sizes at range along with regular runs to the changing rooms.

A pair of dark blue sweatpants with stripes down the outer leg looked and felt comfortable, but were a couple inches too big in both directions to be an instant buy - though maybe Raine would find them a better fit.

Meryl would have to drag her down later for more reasons than just the potential shawl, she figured as she finally found the clothes in her size range.

There wasn't much, but thankfully there was a t-shirt in a pale green that had a cute design of a bird hatching from an egg near the bottom corner while the word 'SPRING!' scrawled down the shoulders. A quick duck into the changing room proved it a near perfect fit in the right direction - a bit loose around the waist, but close enough where the slack didn't just look natural but felt that way too.

She paid at the counter for it and walked out with it on, throwing away the old one as she left. Then, she turned her attention back to her bird's eye view of the island.

So far, there'd been nothing of note. If Raine was in town, Meryl had missed her by some margin, leaving her with nothing left to do but to just… wait.

That was fine. Absolutely fine. No problem at all.

At the very least, it'd give Meryl a chance to get away from people for a while.

Walking out of town - not down the coast towards the place where Raine's boat had been but in the other direction -, she headed towards the side of the rockier side of Ravenser, where there was even less cause for strangers to come and explore.
If nothing else, it was an easy way to get a little privacy without having to make a full day's trip of it.

Meryl settled on the cliff's edge, letting the salt air flow up and over her as the waves crashed against the stone below. The ocean was no friend to her, not with her power, but here, on the cliffs of her island, it wasn't an enemy either, which meant that even if Meryl couldn't touch it, she could still let the sound and smell wash over her and carry her thoughts away for a while.

Lost as she was in the world around her, she almost didn't notice her grandfather arriving until he was settling himself down to sit beside her, ragged coat swaying in the wind.

"Garathair [great-grandfather]."

"Aye, éinín [little bird]?"

"Has anything happened while I was away?" Meryl asked. "You didn't visit me."

The druid dipped his head. "Tá brón orm, gariníon [I'm sorry / literal - 'sorrow is upon me', granddaughter/adopted-daughter/niece]. It is troubling to me at times to walk among too many souls, living or dead, but that is poor excuse for my neglect."

The apology wasn't much, but it was something. "And Raine? Marshalsea and Pew think that she's another one of…" Meryl cut herself off. She couldn't have used her power without knowing, right?

"She is not. Stranger to these shores and touched by death, certainly, but not in the ways they think and certainly not through any action of your own," her grandfather replied, the glass eyes of his mask staring out towards the sea, reflecting all as they took in nothing. "She is a child of my homeland, though, if somewhat removed."

"That's something." A thought occurred to her. "Do you think she has the Sight too?"

Here, the druid hesitated. "She has reacted to me directly, but only in sleep, which draws many minds closer to the shoreline between the worlds by its own nature. In waking? To turn her head my way without clear cause for a scant moment is not full proof for such a thing in either direction."

Meryl frowned.

Another child of her great-grandfather's homeland… removed, likely, by many generations, but it wasn't like Meryl's family was any better off in that category.

Did that make Raine something of family by merit of blood? It was hard to say. There was a sort of magnetic quality to the older girl - she couldn't have been too much older than Meryl was, maybe a few years younger than Zahlia at most - but it could have just been loneliness talking.

Or, a sort of desperate thought whispered, she'd use the word 'family' anyway. To declare someone Mo Mhuintir [literally; My People - relatives where the exact nature of their family tie is unclear] did not require an exact genealogy, only the knowledge of some manner of familial connection and, if she wanted to stretch the definitions far enough, to be a child of the same land as Meryl's ancestors, however far removed on either end, would satisfy the spirit of the term.

And if it didn't, well, there was no one left alive to tell her otherwise.

"Do not do anything foolish," the old druid said, apparently picking up on Meryl's line of thought. "The matter of making friends is not one that can be rushed, only be allowed to grow in its own time."

And who decided that, Meryl pointedly did not reply. And besides, it was different with family.

As Raine had mentioned off-hand during one of her earlier visits, she'd been taking lunch at the Dead Admiral with Zahlia for most of the last week, first because the kitchen in Meryl's home had been, quote-unquote, 'unusable', and then just for the sake of convenience and company when visiting Doctor Livesley's office to check up on her.

So, it just seemed natural for Meryl to try and catch her there.

The Admiral was less busy than usual, and it was easy to see why; part of the main floor had been turned into a sort of workshop, where four rather familiar figures sat working at rebuilding the furniture that had been destroyed in the flashy and rather talkative fight that Meryl could just barely remember coming before… the Incident.

The woman who Meryl had puked on over a week ago glared at her as she passed before turning back to the process of running a carpentry plane over the surface of a table, the blade gouging an ugly slash into the wood as she pushed down too hard on it.

In contrast, the others seemed content with the work. The Tearer was grinning as she sanded down a section of replacement flooring while Chiell and the girl with the horns - wasn't it Daria or Darea or something else like that? - worked together at the process of applying coatings of varnish to a set of otherwise finished chairs.

It was certainly one way to work off a debt and was probably Zahlia's idea of a deterrent from doing it again - though some people, in Meryl's experience, just never seemed to learn.

But that wasn't important; finding and talking to Raine was and thankfully, it was very easy to find her.

Raine's bright green, orange, and pink streaked hair was unmistakable even from the back, but she wasn't the only person at that table with multiple hair colors; the woman in the maillot swimsuit and spiked jacket talking to her had four or five rows of deep purple stripes slashing across the pale blue of her hair.

She was pretty enough and had a fairly nice body, Meryl supposed, if you liked the rougher type. Probably had something wrong with her eyes, hiding them behind her fringe like that.

More concerning, however, was the person sitting to Raine's right - a person who Meryl was familiar enough with to know exactly what was wrong with his face; Doctor Shimon Shelley. After all, as the only person who could make glasses in town, she'd gotten too many good looks at it though every fiddly little testing lens he had.

Doctor Shimon was, to sum up her opinion of the man as simply as possible, creepy.

Oh, he didn't have any ghostly grudges dogging his heels like other people in town did - Mr. Crowley in particular had a vicious and eternally growing collection of latent curses trailing behind him - but Meryl didn't doubt that the doctor had crossed the line somewhere along the way, either as a side effect of his job of poking and prodding at corpses until they gave up their last few secrets before they were sent to their final rest or through a much more… conventional method.

Whatever he might have done and whatever was wrong with him - she was pretty sure there was a lot -, she'd never cared for his company, only putting up with him, his hideous scars, and his office full of nightmares long enough to get new glasses whenever she needed them.

So why had Raine, who seemed so reasonable aside from the matter of the cat, decided to have lunch with him? Couldn't she feel the wrongness about him?

Apparently not, as Raine seemed happy enough talking to Zahlia. "You have any lemonade?"

"Sure, gotta keep a stock around for the different cocktails. Not exactly seasonal, but I suppose a little summer in winter doesn't hurt anyone," Zahlia answered, jotting down her order on her little notepad. "And you, Dr. Shimon?"

"Tea, please. No milk, no sugar."

"More than just something to drink, Shelley," Raine scolded gently. "Calories are your friends."

"What are you, my mother?" the doctor muttered before sighing. "Fine - I'll take the sandwich special with the tea."

"And I'll take a Cat's Eye with tequila, fries on the side," the woman in the bathing suit said before reaching over to pet Raine's cat. "Not yours, lil' puddy tat; you and your lady are too cute for that."

Meryl was still sure that the little thing was fey-touched somehow. The little creature had a far too canny look in its eyes for anything less. Maybe that was just additional evidence that Raine, family or not, just didn't possess an ounce of good taste or good sense.

"You sure you don't want anything to eat yourself, Raine?" Zahlia asked.

Raine hesitated. "I'll have to think about it - kinda think I should go for some protein today but I'm not the most adventurous when it comes to new food…"

"Oh no, I get it. Talk with your friends - they might be able to recommend something," Zahlia said before catching sight of Meryl. "Oh, Meryl! I see Doctor Livesley's let you loose finally. I like the shirt!"

Meryl smiled. "Just bought it - the last one needed replacing."

"Well," Zahlia said. "I'll let you chip into the food recommendations - you've been down here enough to have a better grasp of my menu than some of my waitstaff, so I'm sure you won't steer Raine wrong."

Meryl felt her insides warm at the praise. "I definitely won't," she replied as she took the seat next to Raine, away from Doctor Shimon.

"Meryl! Good to see you properly!" Raine said brightly as she turned to face her.

Meryl, for her part, blinked. And then blinked again.

Raine's glasses were… dark. Mirrored, even, making it nearly impossible to tell what was going on with her eyes at all. It didn't cut off her expression entirely - the eyes were only a small part of one's face, after all -, but it made the emotions feel more distant, even if she was smiling now in a way that was much brighter than Meryl had seen before.

"Why did you choose such a dark color for your glasses? It hides your face." The whole point of getting her glasses was to let Meryl see Raine's eyes properly, without squinting or pinched expressions getting in the way. This… this was the opposite of that!

Raine's smile flattened out into a frown, any trace of happiness on her face snuffed out like a candle.

"I like 'em," the stripy-haired woman said, leaning back in her chair to cross her legs in a manner that put her bared inner thighs on broad display and forcing Meryl to adjust her seat to avoid physical contact. "Get a flash of real nice color when the light hits 'em juuuust right. Real sexy lil' effect."

Raine's smile - a shy and flickering ghost of what it was before, not showing a single tooth - returned for a moment with a hint of blush, though it wasn't even close to being aimed at Meryl now.

"I do so appreciate when my hard work is noticed, Mimzy," Dr. Shimon replied, his mouth twisting into a small smile that was quickly hidden by his tea cup. "So unfortunate that people usually only open their mouths to complain whenever they decide they don't like something that's none of their business."

"That's true - you'll always find someone coming out of the woodwork to bitch about something that ain't their problem," 'Mimzy' agreed before tossing back a third of her drink. "And it only gets worse the 'nicer' a town is, 'cause rich nobles got nothing better to do with their days 'cept make everyone else's worse. That's why I like things 'round here better, even with the weather; nobody's a big enough idiot to put on airs that say they're better than anyone else. Well, almost nobody."

"Shut the hell up, Mim!" Boma yelled, chucking the carpentry plane she'd been using at the other woman. "You ain't the brightest crayon in the box either!"

Mimzy ducked the tool, not losing even a splash of her cocktail.

"Least I'm not stupid enough to brag about causing trouble in Marshalsea's personal digs when all you did was get puked on by a little kid!" she shot back.

"Sixteen isn't little," Meryl muttered, more to herself than anyone else.

Raine, for her part, seemed content to rest her face in her hands, muttering an indistinct prayer to some unnamed god in the hopes of a quick and painless death.

"Figure out what you want to eat yet?" Zahlia asked as she returned to the table.

Raine opened her mouth, breathing in before starting to make a noise -

"She'll have the meat and bean soup," Meryl answered for her before turning to Raine. "It's really good, fills you right up-"

Zahlia frowned, eyes darting between her and Raine for a moment. "Are you sure about that? I don't think Raine's familiar with the menu down here and that one's not exactly..."

"What? The soup is good-"

"Hey, kid," Mimzy said, cutting her off. "Let the lady choose her own meal. Gal knows what she likes better than you do, I wager."

As Meryl threw a quick glare at the interloping lesbian, Raine blew a bit of air between her teeth.

"What kind of meat is in the soup?" she asked, voice tight.

"Musimutton," Zahlia answered.

Raine grimaced. "Mutton, but to the left?"

"Just about. Not really your thing?"

"No. I can't stand the gamey meats."

Zahlia nodded. "Can't blame you; if there were any other options for protein around here, I'd pick those instead. But it's down pretty much to musimutton or fish most of the time for meats, unless there's some kind of special occasion or someone decides to trade some to us on their own merit."

"Had a feeling beef was out of the picture," Raine said, sighing. "What kind of fish?"

As Zahlia and Raine discussed the various merits of the catch of the day and their different forms of preparation, Meryl turned to glare at Dr. Shimon, who, for his part, simply seemed content to ignore the fact that Meryl existed as he slowly turned through the pages of whatever magazine he was looking at, sipping delicately at his tea the whole while.

Why did it feel like he was judging her? He shouldn't have been judging her for anything, considering what his, well, everything was like and it wasn't like Raine had said anything about her food preferences.

"And what will you have, Meryl?" Zahlia asked, drawing her attention back to the matter of lunch.

"The meat and bean-"

"She's on clear liquids and light foods for the next few days, as I understand it," Dr. Shimon said, turning the page of his magazine. "Excessive seasonings are to be avoided as well."

"Oh right," Zahlia said, looking thoughtfully down at her notepad. "I think I remember Doctor Livesley saying something about that…"

Meryl sputtered. "That… you shouldn't know that-"

"You might be under the misapprehension that your experience was a one-off completely unique to you, but food poisoning is extremely common, as are the guidelines as to how to treat it. You are to avoid dairy, heavy foods - by which I mean primarily 'rich' or 'greasy' types, such as musimutton stew -, and excessive sugar for the next three to five days to allow your digestive system time to recover from its ordeal," Doctor Shimon recited before lowering his reading material low enough to cast a single unimpressed eye over her. "As low as my reputation may be in this town, I do actually know what I'm doing in my field."

"B-but-"

"Sometimes, there is a good reason to interfere with someone's choices - fortunately for us all, they are far and few between," he said, lifting his magazine again. "Personally, I would recommend some manner of chicken noodle soup, for both protein and mildness, but -"

And now it was her turn to be rude and interrupt. "But I don't eat birds," Meryl spat.

"Jesus Christ on a fucking cracker," Raine muttered as she smacked her head down against the table and raised her hands to cover it. "Shut up and pick somethingyou will eat, then."

Throwing one last glare Doctor Shimon's way, Meryl arranged her hands in perfect posture and made her choice; "I'll have what Raine's having."

"For fuck's sake-!"

Finally, after one of the most uncomfortable lunches of Meryl's life, they escaped.

Well, Meryl escaped. Raine mostly acted like she was a drag-along; at first, in a very literal sense as Meryl pulled her along behind her by her hand, insisting on waving back at Mimzy and Dr. Shimon as she was pulled out of the bar.

The cat was still there on Raine's shoulder, of course, but some things couldn't be helped.

"So where are we going?" Raine asked, following behind at a sedate pace now that they were away from the town limits. Her shoes occasionally scuffed loudly against the wet sand. "It's somewhere different, because your house is the other way."

"Somewhere important," Meryl said as they made their way further down the beach, closer to the crumbling remains of Stonecutter's village. The sky was beginning to darken a bit now, winter's short daylight hours already running short for all it wasn't even fully five PM yet.

"You got anything more specific than that?"

Meryl chewed on her lip for a moment. The nemeton - closer to a shrine than a proper temple, now, with its lack of consistent care - at the top of Skellingar Peak was traditionally a secret kept to the people of the islands. After enough deaths, the secret had become more so, eventually falling squarely on Meryl's shoulders alone.

Well, her grandfather's too, she supposed, but dead people usually didn't have to worry about that.

There was a fair chance that Marshalsea and the few members remaining of her old crew were aware of it, being close friends and long-term confidants with her aunts Brenda and Enda, but they'd never spoken directly of it, never made reference of it beyond asking if Meryl was 'going climbing' again and reminding her to be careful on the cliffs and not to stay out after dark, but the warnings were always too vague to confirm or deny the extent of their knowledge.

So really, Meryl wasn't technically wronging anyone by bringing just one new person into it and she had sort-of adopted Raine into the family anyway, it was probably alright to tell her.

"It's a sacred place for my family," she said finally once they'd crossed the causeway. No pirates came this far, but it felt wrong to speak of it on Ravenser all the same. "Or maybe just me, now. I wanted you to see it."

Raine went quiet at that for a while, leaving Meryl nothing to do but listen to the sound of the wind, the birds, and their footsteps for a time.

As they got closer to the cliff path, Meryl glanced back at Raine, watching the older girl slowly trudge behind. There was a weird stutter to her walk, a pause half a breath to long whenever she went to use her right leg, but it wasn't anything that really worried Meryl at all.

Yet, anyway. It could prove a problem once they were up on the cliffs proper.

"How much further is it?" Raine asked, looking up at the mountain with an uncomfortable curve to her mouth.

"Quite a way. And it gets trickier the further up you go."

"And how far is that?"

"All the way."

The curve became a proper grimace as she took in the whole of the mountain. "I can't do that."

"What? What do you mean 'you can't do it'?"

"I mean that I can't make that climb."
Meryl looked at the path. It was long and winding, but not really properly steep. "You don't have to climb straight up."

"Yeah, I figured, but that doesn't change the fact that I physically cannot make that distance and then make it back to your house."

"But you could do it for Doctor Shimon!"

Raine's face froze before settling into a stony expression.

"So that's what this is about; you're jealous."

Oh, Meryl did not trust that tone. If those words had been playful, maybe, but they were a realization and a condemnation on Raine's part.

"I'm not - what's there to be jealous of!" she yelled. "He's a freak! He's a weirdo that always talks like he's smarter than everyone, doesn't have any friends except that horrible Crowley, and he stinks of chemicals and decay and looks like a corpse with all of those ugly scar-"

Meryl's voice stuttered and failed as her eyes caught on a glimmer of silver around Raine's neck and chest. The subtle, but unmistakable sheen of scar tissue. There wasn't as much as there was on Dr. Shimon or even Marshalsea, but it was enough. The pale thin lines of cuts and the pucker of an old bullet wound were more than enough.

Oh.

Oh no.

"I'm - I'm sorry, I didn't mean-"

"I know exactly what you meant," Raine replied.

Her face hadn't shown anything - though maybe Meryl might have seen her eyes widening in shock if those glasses had been clear - but her voice… oh, there was no missing the pain in that, even if it was carefully contained.

"You don't like that I'm hanging out with someone you don't understand and don't care to understand. You throw out your justifications, the little things that make it 'okay' to treat Shelley like dirt - except then it turns out that some of those things also apply to me, so now you have to walk it back, to say that it's different for me."

Raine's voice was climbing as she got angrier, the wind around them seeming to whip up in time with that emotion, whirling her hair around her face in a swirl of color, as the temperature dipped.

"Well, guess what? It isn't. When my scars were new and just as red and ugly as Shelley's, everyone around me decided 'well this kid is a freak'. Because I didn't have the courtesy to die nice and normal-like instead of survive busted up, broken, and traumatized as hell because I was a little kid that almost goddamn died to a freak accident."

A gust of wind blasted across the hill, cold enough to burn.

"And you know what happens after shit like that? You get weird. Because that's the only thing you're allowed to be unless you let someone else decide what your new normal is - and that never lasts, because dancing to someone else's tune always runs out the minute they get too bored with you to give you commands anymore. So I can't say that was too happy going through that shit again today - though I was willing to give you a little leeway because of your age before you decided, 'hey, I'm gonna fucking drag D-" Raine stuttered for a moment, the anger flickering at the slip of another sound before returning full force. "Gonna drag a fucking cripple up a goddamn mini-Matterhorn to visit my family's super secret mystery clubhouse because she didn't pay enough attention to me today'!"

"You…you're being dramatic," Meryl said, skipping over the fact that she had no idea what a 'Matterhorn' was because there was just so much other information being launched at her.

Raine was crippled? A different name cut short at the last moment? More than that, all the backstory information was making her head swim and that was without the storm of emotions - and what felt like a very literal storm blowing in - on both sides further muddying the waters.

"Newsflash, asshole! I'm being dramatic because anything less has been bouncing right off of you without changing a goddamn thing!" Raine yelled, throwing her arms out to the side, forcing the cat on her shoulder to scramble for its balance in the wake of the motion. "And you know what? Shelley walked with me across a very small section of town - which, I'll admit, not great on my joints either - but he was considerate enough to go at my pace and not risk killing me on a forced march to god-knows-where 'cause he fucking noticed that I was in pain the whole time, which is more than what I can say for you right now!"

Raine stepped back, breathing heavily.

"You know what? I don't need to put up with this - or waste my time trying to lecture you," she said, turning sharply on her heel, stumbling to the side as some loose stone slipped under her shoes before catching herself. "I'm leaving."

With that, she started her way down the hill, back towards Ravenser Odd.

Whatever Meryl could have said to that - to any of what Raine had said - was lost as the older girl slipped again.

This time, though, Raine did not catch herself before she hit the ground.

Shimon Shelley stood in his office, taking advantage of yet another lull in work to take inventory. There likely wasn't much change from the last time - really, there wasn't much room for anything to change in a twenty-four-hour span -, but it was important to keep track of supplies with the kind of budget he was living on. A single wasted item was too valuable to simply -

An inhuman screech saw him drop a large bottle of instrument grade disinfectant to the floor where it shattered, leaving glass shards scattered and bright green liquid splattered across the floor.

Well at least that bit of floor would be clean enough to eat off of for the next two weeks, barring any accidents.

"Crowley, I swear to the gods of healing and hell, if you've brought in another one of those patchwork abominations-" Shelley snapped as he started to turn… and, instead of his usual unwanted guest, found himself looking at Raine's troublemaking kitten, unattended, unannounced - well, besides the horrifying noise -, and utterly terrified as it paced around on his work table, desperately mewing for his attention.

That, combined with the utter absence of its owner, was enough to put him on high alert.

"Where is Raine?"

The cat jumped off the table and ran to the closed door, jumping up and down as if to say 'hurry up!'.

Shelley did just that, just taking enough time to grab his one mobile doctor's kit before rushing out into the street and out of town, chasing the little black blur as it ran back to its owner, leaving Shelley with nothing else to do but run and think - which wasn't fun, especially as the distance from town grew and the lingering daylight continued to disappear.

What the hell, he asked himself as they crossed the causeway to Stonecutter, was Raine doing all the way out on the dead island?

Actually, he didn't need to ask himself that - all he had to do find the two and shake the answer out of whichever one was in the least need of emergency surgery.

The cat scrambled up the base of the mountain, Shelley following close behind as fast as he dared on the loose stone path. Already, the environment was painting an ugly picture of what he was liable to find, though the fact that they hadn't gone off trail yet was a small reassurance; it likely meant that, at least in Shelley's mind, that whatever happened to Raine probably didn't involve falling off a cliff.

He was good, but… there were limits. And one was that you couldn't do anything for a patient who was already dead.

Unless, of course, you were Crowley, and then you'd go through their pockets for loose change, steal their valuables, and sell the body to whatever degenerate had the best price currently on offer.

Shimon Shelley, however, made a point to be as unlike Crowley as possible.

It didn't take long to find Raine and Meryl; even if they hadn't been near the center of the path, the sound of Meryl's panicked rambling and keening whine would have been impossible to miss.

With Raine collapsed, curled up on her side and unmoving, however, keening was probably the appropriate response.

"What happened?" Shelley asked as he rushed to meet them, falling on his knees at Raine's side.

Raine opened her mouth to speak, only to snap her teeth closed in obvious agony.

"I don't know," Meryl answered for her. The girl looked almost as bad as Raine, though that was likely more the product of stress than actual physical distress. "We had an argument and she went to leave, but she slipped and - and then she couldn't get back up again. Even just moving her arms or legs was too much a-a-and every time I tried to help, I only made it worse."

Back injury then, if the limbs weren't reacting right. Ideally, the damage would be a simple sprain, not anything that ran deeper, but…

Well, there was no way to know more without actually looking at the afflicted area.

"Is it alright if I touch you?" Shelley asked Raine. "I need to see what the situation is."

She nodded and the doctor gingerly lifted up the back of her shirt to show her skin.

It didn't look like anything was wrong, but there had been a reason why he'd asked permission to make physical contact - eyes could only cover so much, even under ideal lighting conditions, and these were hardly that. Raine flinched as he gently pressed down, testing the alignment of the spine and the condition of the tissues around it.

"Her spine does not appear to be broken or damaged, but her muscles are inflamed and spasming badly." Not to mention that he'd handled corpses less stiff than Raine's back, but that was a secondary issue that fit with what he knew of her medical history and pain issues. "So any chance of her walking home after this under her own power is entirely out of the question."

Meryl made a high-pitched whining noise that Shelley would excuse as the result of stress and not a deliberate attempt at being an annoyance.

"But what do we do then? I can't just leave her here-"

"I'm going to carry her, you nit. Just because you lack the muscle strength doesn't mean I do," Shelley said before turning back to Raine. "Alright, I'm going to pick you up and move you to a seated position…"

He described the carry to her, Raine making small noises of assent whenever he paused to check that she was following what he was saying. Thankfully, the pack-strap carry wasn't particularly complex, though it wasn't one the average civilian would be familiar with, it was close to the much more common 'piggyback' ride, even if the intent behind it was generally more serious.

The actual process of getting Raine into the carry was a bit less painless - in both the figurative and literal sense of the term - but they managed it quickly enough, so they were soon headed back to Ravenser, where Shelley planned on taping both of the idiots to their beds for the next week.

For Raine, it was treatment. For Meryl, it was simply preventative medicine.

Author's Notes

Aaaand today's title is brought to you by Oingo Boingo once again - this time from the song 'Stay'.

This chapter was entirely of Monica's outline, with my main contribution mostly being translating that outline into prose, with her pointing out any point where my tone was off (it was quite a bit at first). If our upload times happen to speed up, it's more than likely thanks to the fact that Monica's helping with the writing/outlining process more now that she has a feel for the story pacing and characters.

Allardyce is another Treasure Island shout out, though not named after a major character. She's also a member of the Snakeneck Tribe.

Brenda and Enda are Meryl's lesbian aunts, both formerly part of Marshalsea's crew despite not being Treasure Island-themed. Unfortunately, both are dead by the time of the fic. Brenda was a Birkan Skyperson (which was why her wings were mentioned off hand in Chapter 2) and Enda was a Zoan - one of the Tori Tori no Mi Models (and trans). They'll be sketched out more in later chapters.

Musimouflon and musimutton are plays on 'mouflon' (a kind of wild sheep) and a heraldic creature called a 'musimon' which is… pretty much just a goat/sheep hybrid with a double set of horns, which in real-life (minus the horn bit) is usually called a 'geep' or a 'shoat'. Monica came up with the idea of a guy on the island taking care of sheep and/or goats and the discussion treated them as sheep/goat for convenience and it just spun out to a hybrid creature because 'why not, it's One Piece'. I then stumbled across the 'musimon' when looking for made up creatures that could serve as name inspiration… only to discover that it looked almost identical to the creature I designed. There was mild yelling.

Maillot swimsuits are basically your standard one-piece swimsuits - I turned to the older and largely obsolete term because, as Monica pointed out, constantly using 'one piece swimsuit' was potentially confusing.

That little wrinkle didn't stop us from redesigning one of the later OC crew members to have one-piece jumpsuits as one of his regular fashion things though.

Me, drawing on various past experiences where people carelessly shattered my fragile self-image and left me with a long lingering insecurity with literally every aspect of my appearance: wow, I hope this doesn't awaken anything in me.

(it awakened a desire to hit those people with bricks).

A nemeton is one of those weird things where it's like 'yes it exists/existed' and 'we have a vague idea of what it was for' but all the contemporary historical records were from propagandizing assholes and the remaining sites aren't exactly abounding in evidence themselves. They were definitely Celtic sacred places though (with a tendency towards sacred groves) and were often situated to feature and focus on natural features.

Unfortunately for us, fucking Lucan described one the same way as one would describe the monster in a campfire ghost story and nobody else was doing much better (besides giving approximate locations of certain sites), so that's all we really know for sure.

The pack-strap carry is recommended in cases where the person in need of moving may have a spinal injury, which can be worsened by using a fireman's carry or a bridal carry. However, your first choice when presented with a potential spinal injury should be to avoid moving the patient until medical help arrives, unless there is an active danger to the patient in the vicinity (ex; you are in a burning building). The More You Know!

*Monica's Notes

The main thing to change from my outline to final, besides like, more detail, was DD deciding to give shelley more screentime and combining two scenes into one, that being "seeing raine's new glasses" and "the lunch from hell".

I suggested the shirt change idea, for a few reasons, for one i wanted to keep DD's redesign from last year canon while also having our recently changed design be used as well.

Secondly...to get a sense of how to use money in this fic for the long term, which lead to have to hammering to DD's brain that beri is based on the japanese yen for convenience, and as well, that things in one piece are reasonably priced to real life, and that luxury brands are not a good metric for how much you need. If you want to know how much something costs, use the number in the fic and do currency conversion from Yen to your local currency for perspective.

Irish Notes

Irish Kinship is an interesting subject that I ran across while prepping for this fic and I finally got a chance to use it.

Besides the concept of Mo Mhuintir - relatives who you would definitely invite to family gatherings and celebrations even if you're not 100 percent on where exactly they sit on your family tree -, there's also the fact that the terminology for family members is very loose - my research doesn't indicate that there's a lot of emphasis on things like 'second cousins' or 'removals', but people's familial titles outside of the immediate household are largely based on age group, ex: relatives in your parents age, even if they're cousins, would be Aunt/Uncle, while relatives in the age range of your grandparents would be Great-Aunts/Uncles, people your age would be Cousins, people the age of your children would be Niece/Nephew, so on and so forth.

I'm not going to be leaning too heavily on Irish culture, ancient or modern, in this fic beyond the level of what's been established in the style of it so far (very quick uses of language, cultural touches, etc.) so far, but I hope this explains some of Meryl's 'flexibility' in mentally sorting Raine into a familial role so quickly.