"This is Agent 2 of the New Squidbeak Splatoon, filling in for Captain Kuki and the splatoon's personnel reports because she's out at the moment doing, er, captain stuff.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Ahem, anywho.
Kuki started these series of audio personnel logs a while ago and hasn't had the time to continue them.
It's... especially egregious when I consider the fact she's only finished one log during this time frame, seeing as we're both up to our necks with responsibilities, both mundane and professional that get in the way of completing that goal.
So she's made the brilliant decision to push it off onto me, even though I should really be rehearsing with everyone else to get Seven Day Forecast off the ground.
I argued with her about it but then she goes on and on about how I'm the best person for the job because of my experience with podcasting and the fact I made that, and these are her words, not mine, creepily detailed log book about Agent 4 way back when.
Well, sorry for making sure we know important things about the people working for us!
It's not like information security is paramount to our entire clandestine organization or anything."
"Marie, would you stop complaining and just continue the log already? We can't rehearse unless you finish."
"In a minute, Callie. And call me Agent 2, these are highly sensitive- Oh, you know what, just forget it. We've clearly thrown protocol to the wayside so why bother using codenames anymore...
*Sigh*
Alright, better get this over with quick.
Ahem.
Once more, from the top.
This a personnel report on the new Agent 3, or Neo-3, as everyone has been calling him.
Outside of work he's just Tres. No surname, which isn't that uncommon amongst Inklings but it's not something he likes to talk about. Seemed like a touchy subject for him.
Speaking of, while Kuki mentioned he's a decent personable squid in the previous log, at least compared to some other cephalopods on the team, there's plenty about him that we just don't know about.
It's not unreasonable to be concerned about whether or not that lack of information could be detrimental to our cohesion as a unit.
Though I suppose these logs are supposed to fill in the gaps as much as they catalog what we already know about him, which still isn't a whole lot.
Granted, some info is better than no info at all.
We know he's a trash trawler by trade, I'm not calling him a 'Relic Hunter.'
Tres makes a fairly comfortable living schlepping across the blazing hot Splatlands in his ugly as heck junk hauler looking for useful metal scrap and other trash to salvage to sell to prospective clients at his scrapyard.
To add onto that he's shown to be quite handy with a wrench. He'd need to be in order to disassemble all the scrap he's looted and to build and maintain his equipment, something that Marina is weirdly perturbed about.
I find that odd.
Everyone thought she'd see him as a kindred spirit of sorts seeing as they share a gearhead mindset.
It turns out that was not the case.
Rather there have been occasional moments where she has expressed apprehension and even outright hostility against him.
Maybe she's jealous of his skills or something, I'unno.
I mean, if I got shown up by a smelly (Addendum: Even though he spends lots of time around actual garbage he's shockingly inoffensive to the olfactory senses. Shiver says his natural musk reminds her of rocks, whatever that means.) punk from the streets I'd feel inadequate too...
He's buddy buddy with a Salmonid small fry named... Little Buddy.
Real creative, I know.
(Addendum: According to Quattro, 'Little Buddy' is actually an nickname. The Salmonid's real full name is apparently: Biscuits N. Gravy, He Who Ceaselessly Hungers for Battle. Try putting that on a business card.)
Dunno how they met but I suppose half the fun comes from making up stories about how it happened.
The little guy is quirky enough to be considered 'ugly cute' as Callie and Pearl had so elegantly put it but I just don't see it. The way he always stares blankly at things when he's idle or blinks each individual eyelid one at a time in an unnervingly slow demonstration of empty-headedness when he looks at us gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Lastly, as we've come to learn, and by grandpa's tacky retirement shirt did we learn, Tres is a major movie nerd with a, ahem, highly opinionated sense of quality in the cinematic world.
How big, you might ask? Well, the boy's team hasn't lost a single movie trivia night ever since they drafted him for the team...
...I'm going off on a tangent here.
(Addendum: It had come as a shock to everyone, except for Callie apparently, she's always had a nose for mushy groan-worthy romances, when Shiver hooked up with Tres after the incident.
They are... uncomfortably lovey-dovey even in public.
Not in the sense that their outward displays of affection are gooey-gooey-lovey-goo like, you know, regular lovestruck folk, but in a bizarre Splatlander Splatlandian way that I'm convinced is just a very aggressive expression of their love.
They're not shy particularly about getting, erm, handsy with one another.
Well, Shiver isn't. She needs to relearn the definition of personal space.
As for Tres, he may have made it work somehow but if I'm being honest with myself seeing him get intimate with her is like watching a baby hovering their hand over the stovetop if you catch my drift. Not that he seems to mind playing with fire.
(("Ayo, lay off the lovebirds will ya, granny? Just cause you're close to being a Frostyfest cake doesn't mean you get to dump on other couples." - Pearl))
A lot of us are fine with their newfound relationship if justifiably confused. Like, it seriously came out of nowhere. What the heck do they see in each other?
Splatlandians are weird.)
I've been meandering long enough. It's time to get into the real meat of the recording.
I'm going to be blunt. The relationship shared between the NSS and Tres is, er... complex.
It's not terrible, far from it, in fact. But there are minor caveats we've taken notice of throughout our time together.
I think Kuki put it best during our first week together in the depths of Alterna.
She had described him as: a great co-worker but a terrible agent.
What she meant by it was that, while he is competent in his abilities as an agent, to the point of absurdity at times, he doesn't represent how we should conduct ourselves.
There is a level of professionalism that is to be expected with a job such as this and we go to great lengths to ensure we meet that standard consistently.
...I guess grandpa must've forgotten that when he recruited Tres from behind the dumpster. I don't mean to sound rude but at his advanced age that had to have been an act brought on by senility.
So, how does Tres break the mold?
Well, for starters, he's not too keen on following orders...
Tres rolled behind a waist high barrier just in time right as the fuzzy Octocommander sent a salvo of purple ink flying his way, Little Buddy kept his head down in the satchel to keep himself safe from it all. The rapid fire blobs showered the small floating platform in toxic ink, steadily chipping away at his position and reducing the area in which he could traverse.
Several fuzzy Octotroopers began flanking him from both sides, they'd close in on him soon and his options in dealing with his aggressors were limited.
He looked down at his hero shooter, or what was left of it, and frowned. Dang thing had broken into three whole pieces after taking a long tumble into Alterna. For a high performance custom made shooter created using the latest 3D printing technology it's impact resistant polycarbonate frame sure cracked easily.
He'd have to fix it on his own time but for now its firepower was laughable and the shot output even more so. Oh, how he wishes he had his Riot Stamper with him right about now.
"Tsk, Inkopolis-made piece o' junk. Might as well have handed me a fraggin' turkey baster," Tres hissed just as another salvo of ink flew by overhead, keeping him suppressed. He could hear the whirring noise of the Octotrooper's hovercrafts nearby, he had seconds at most to react without getting overwhelmed and ending up a yellow smear on the ground.
"*BZZT!* Agent 3!" The Captain's voice blared through his headset. He flinched at the sound but responded anyway.
"Not a good time, cap!" Tres yelled back, flashing a brief glance over the cover. The Octocommander was still where he was, far ahead in an open space as his goons threatened to overtake his position. He started racking his brain to come up with some sort of plan. "Come on, think, Tres. You've gotten out of worse jams than this before. Granted, I wasn't slapped with below average gear during those times..."
"Agent 3!" Kuki shouted again, her tone of voice laced with both worry and annoyance. "Listen to me; you can't win this fight. There's just too many of them and your equipment isn't up to snuff. Turn around and retreat for now, that's an order!"
Tres scowled and pressed a finger up against his headset. "Keep it down, Cap! I can't concentrate with you yapping in my ears like a hungry seagull! Trust me, I've got this. I just need to figure out the how part..."
He couldn't see it but Kuki looked like she had been slapped in the face. The sheer disrespect she received made her face glow bright red as an indignant expression stretched across her face. She had half a mind to chew him out on the spot but held her tongue. She was the captain after all, she needed to be professional about it. Yet, she couldn't help but wonder if she was like this back when she was an active field agent.
Marie and Callie both wore a grimace as they looked over the camera feeds beside Kuki with growing distress behind their eyes. Tres was outnumbered and outgunned. It was starting to look like the mission was going to end in total failure, or worse.
But as they would soon find out, Tres was capable of making things work out, even when they shouldn't.
After a few seconds of deep concentration, the audible ding of a light bulb going off atop Tres's head could be heard.
What he was about to do was completely reckless and utterly insane. But, as one of his favorite movie heroes had once said;
"Sometimes it's better to do the wrong thing in a crisis than nothing at all."
And so he did.
With a smile that was half mischievous and half determined he reached into his pack and pulled out a splat bomb.
"What's he doing with that?" Callie asked, raising a brow.
"Certainly not throwing it at the Octocommander," replied Marie, looking rather bemused. "It won't be enough to take him out, and even if it could he still has to deal with all the Octotroopers."
"What he should be doing is turn around and hightail it out of there!" Kuki growled, slamming a fist onto the camera console. "That moron's gonna get himself splatted trying to be a hero!"
"Ironic, coming from you," Marie couldn't help but quip, even in such a grim situation.
"Oh, don't you start!" Kuki snapped.
Back with Tres, he primed the yellow splat bomb in his hand and changed his ink color to a bright teal.
"Hold on to something, Little Buddy!" Tres shouted as the Small Fry brought both fins out and gripped onto the satchel for dear life. "Things are about to get chaotic!"
He then proceeded to drop the bomb by his feet and leapt forward over the barrier right as it went off.
The loud explosion that erupted soon after clouded the space around it in a misty spray of yellow ink, causing the Octarian's to stop in their tracks and assess the situation. They would find themselves surprised again as Tres emerged from the yellow mist in his squid form, being resilient enough to survive the mad attempt at heroics covered in his own searing ink as the force of the blast sent him wildly careening forward like a teal rocket.
"Waaaaaah!" Little Buddy whooped gleefully from within Tres's satchel.
"Whooooo!" Tres hollered as he morphed back into his humanoid form, a wicked smirk plastered on his mug before latching onto the bewildered Octocommander that had been making his mission an utterly miserable affair.
"Welcome to the Splatlands, fuzzy!" he taunted as he pressed his hero shooter up against the Octarian's terrified face, who let out a warbly cry of panic right before getting reduced to a purple puddle that was sent every which way.
With the immediate threat neutralized Tres then took command of the former Octocommander's gatling hovercraft and forced the nozzle of his shooter into the shipping end of the weapon before swinging the receiving end around to face the remaining Octotroopers. Every one of the little goobers were frozen in terror at the sight of him and his newly appropriated armament.
"Come on in," Tres grinned, his finger squeezing the trigger, "old painless is waiting."
Kuki, Callie and Marie could only stare in wide-eyed slack-jawed astonishment as Tres wiped out the rest of the fuzzy Octarians in a powerful stream of teal ink.
This would be only one of many nonsensical stunts he'd pull throughout the journey in Alterna in order to save the planet...
Yeah, that was a thing that happened.
It still boggles my mind whenever it wanders back to that moment.
And that was when he wasn't obeying orders.
When he does, um...
See, unlike Quattro or 8, who I can trust to get the job done as quickly and as efficiently as possible, Tres follows the spirit of the order, not the letter. Which usually results in him carrying it out with whichever methods he deems fit through his own unique interpretation.
This has led to a good many, shall we say, memorable moments in the kettles where he completed it through exceptionally unconventional means, if not outright brute forcing his way through and leaving a trail of widespread devastation in his wake.
It's telling about his skills in creative problem solving when they involve invalidating the problem entirely rather than solving it normally.
But it gets the job done so most of us just let it slide.
I mean, if it works, it works. No matter how anxious it makes us.
His behavior and demeanor as an agent paints him as self-sufficient and wholly autonomous in regards to the greater unit he is a part of.
Though it would be inaccurate to call him a lone wolf-fish.
That would imply he works better alone, which, while he can, clearly isn't the case.
Him and Little Buddy are a power duo who are practically joined at the hip. They work better together than alone and become greater than the sum of their parts when fighting in tandem.
Something that Mr. Grizz found out the hard way.
To wit, he's more of a maverick. The tough-as-nails lateral thinking wildcard of our motley crew.
He can, and has, worked with the team to phenomenal success on several occasions. He's an agent of the New Squidbeak Splatoon through and through.
It's just... I wanna say: he's a square peg in a round hole."
"No one's gonna get that comparison, Marie."
"I don't remember asking you for your opinion, Callie."
"I don't even get it. Like, what the heck is that supposed to even mean?"
"Not you too, Pearl.
*audible groaning*
Where was I?
Oh, right.
Square peg, round hole.
That makes sense, right?"
"Nah, girl. It really doesn't."
"Pearl, I swear-!
...
Okay, I guess I should elaborate on that instead of just using metaphors.
As of the time of this recording he's become a trusted member of the NSS, a loyal and dependable friend who can be counted on to finish the mission in spite of his chaotic behavior.
However, he maintains a very cautious attitude when working alongside us ever since the beginning and continues to do so even now, treating it almost like a contract between employees and employer.
Regardless of how strong the bonds forged between us are, his loyalty is still to himself first and foremost. It just so happens that our mutually beneficial relationship keeps him aligned with us and thus sees no reason to rock the boat at all.
Make no mistake, he'll fight with us to the bitter end if need be, going out in a hurricane of ink and prismatic colors that could be seen from outer space without a moment of hesitation because of his own goodheartedness, trust and respect for who we are.
...But if we jeopardize that trust he has in us in any way he'll cut us out at the drop of hat, either amicably at best or bitterly at worst.
The last thing we'd want is to make an enemy of him.
I hope it never comes to that, but if it ever reached a point where the NSS drives him a way I wouldn't blame him for feeling the way he does.
Kuki wondered about Tres's bizarre behavioral quirks, the most I've managed to gather so far is that he's quite defensive about his origins, whatever they are.
I hazard a guess that all of the above is tied to that somehow. But we won't know unless he tells us himself.
Until then, he seems happy with our company. (Addendum: Some much more than others.)
There's a contentedness behind his interactions with the rest of the Splatoon that is genuinely wholesome. I dare say we're practically family to him with how cozy he's been with us in the months since.
I have to say, he's like the oil stained distant Splatlandian relative I never had.
...Still haven't forgotten about the time he stuffed me, Callie and Kuki into a soda bottle though.
I swear, that sticky prison made Octavio's snow globe look like a five star hotel.
If that bulbous lout ever learns about that we'd never hear the end of it.
Aaaaaand, I guess this would be as good a spot to stop as any.
I've said what I've needed to and my obligations are hereby completed.
Let Kuki sort out the logs herself next time
This is Marie of the New Squidbeak Splatoon telling my listeners to 'Stay Fresh!'"
"...Finally, that took forever. Now get your butt over here, we've got a song to record."
"I'm coming, I'm coming! Don't get your panties in a twist, shorty."
A/N: "Sometimes it's better to do the wrong thing in a crisis than nothing at all." - Commissar Ciaphas Cain of the Valhallan 597th, from: "The Devil You Know" audio drama.