12507. SCIENCE!girls, do not attempt to bypass regulations by recruiting civilians as test subjects. If they're less-reluctant than military personnel, it's only because they aren't familiar with your reputations.
12507a. Civilians, when a SCIENCE!girl asks you if you want to help test an invention, YOU SAY NO.
Devonport Naval Base, New Zealand, 18 Months Ago
The base was a hive of activity, buzzing with the panicked, frantic energy that the war had brought to so many formerly-sleepy coasts all around the Pacific. As an isolated, oceanic nation of five million people, the Australasian Combined Forces were well aware of New Zealand's precarious status amidst the turmoil of the Abyssal War. The small base on the Waitemata Harbour had quickly expanded since Blood Week to house not only the Royal New Zealand Navy's returnees, but allied ships and personnel from Australia, Britain, and the Pan-Pacific Command.
And today, amidst the hustle and bustle, there were yet more new faces at Devonport Naval Base. Three young people— two white men and a Maori woman, clearly civilians if their visitor badges and very un-military uniforms of sneakers, dark shorts and black polo shirts were any indication. They followed their uniformed escort across the base, smiling and waving at the passing naval crowd. Many times, the escort— Captain Vernon, a gray-haired helicopter pilot with a stern face— had to wave off those who approached with paper or pens in hand.
"Aw, c'mon, Captain, we can sign a few things for them, right?" The shorter man objected, smiling and nudging Captain Vernon's back with a well-muscled arm. It was a lighthearted, friendly request— but then, much about Blair Tuke was. Well-tanned, with a pair of mirrored sunglasses perched in his tousled dark brown hair, the Olympic sailor had the look of a surfer, and the cheerful enthusiasm of one, too. "We're here to raise morale after all."
"You're scheduled to sign autographs at 3 in Building 10. Right now the next thing on your sched is touring the R&D Complex, and I'm sure there's a lot of people there who'll want to meet Ms. Aotearoa." Vernon said, not slowing his walk.
"Well, alright..." Aotearoa said, a bit disappointed. Even with her rigging dismissed, there was no mistaking the America's-Cup-winning sailgirl— her light-brown face, sky-blue eyes, and short dark hair dyed with streaks of lucky red would have marked her as the Heroine of Bermuda from the front pages even without her Team New Zealand uniform.
"Yeah, well, I'm pretty excited to see the R&D place, too, y'know? I saw an article the other day about the Aussies experimenting with active camouflage." If Tuke was the trio's heart and Aotearoa the soul, Peter Burling was decidedly the brain. Pale and tawny-haired, with a long, angular face, Burling was the quiet and analytical sort, always glad to have his more extroverted teammates around to handle the bulk of press inquiries. "Pistol Pete" was the rare stable nerd-jock fusion, a maths whiz at school before going pro and now excelling in a sport that was as much mental as physical. "Hey, Tukey, imagine having an invisibility cloak!"
"Yeah, it'd nice to be able to sneak away sometimes..." Blair rolled his eyes sarcastically in Captain Vernon's direction.
Flashing their badges at a guard (who looked quite sleep-deprived), the visitors were led through another gate (probably best not to question why it was barbed-wire), and into a large concrete building, just in time to hear what sounded like a loud crackle of electricity, and then-
"AHAHAHAHA! IT WORKED!"
A black-haired woman in a labcoat was jumping up and down and clapping her hands together excitedly. "IT WORKED!" She shouted, with an American accent.
A circular metal platform stood at the center of the room they were in, made of three steps that rose to a flat top about a meter wide that was about as far off the ground. It all looked something like a stage waiting for a band. Tubes and wires snaked away from the base of the platform, connecting to strange machinery that stood against the wall, and technicians in boilersuits sat at computer consoles monitoring the data that flashed across their screens. On the surface of the top platform, concentric circles set into the floor glowed in a light that seemed to be slowly cycling between neon green and fuchsia.
And on top of the platform, a very confused little monkey was blinking rapidly and scratching its head.
"Gordito! Aww, come here, you little-" The woman cooed, approaching the monkey, who smiled and started chattering happily. On all fours, it leapt down the steps and jumped up into the woman's arms, where she petted its head and handed it an apple from her labcoat pocket.
Blair turned to his friends, raising one eyebrow. "D'you feel like we just missed something really weird..." he whispered.
As Gordito ate the apple, the woman handed the monkey over to a man in a boilersuit, giving it one final pat on the head. "Aw, Gordito, ¡que mono!* Such a good little test subject! Once we get back to San Diego, you can tell all of your friends where you got to go!"
"How is he, Phoenix?" The voice came from a large computer screen on a console along the left wall. The screen showed another dark-haired woman in a labcoat, this one with brown skin and holding a bag of potato chips with a cartoon sun on the front. Before anyone could respond, she popped a chip into her mouth and bit down with a loud crunch.
The first woman bounded over to the screen, grinning widely. "He's A-OK, SoDak! Test 5 is complete!"
The woman on the screen mumbled something with her mouth still full, swallowed, and tied again "Add monkeys to the list! A-HAH-AH! SUCCESS!"
"...something REALLY weird..." Blair whispered again. Aotearoa squinted her eyes. If her instincts were correct, then the lab-coat-woman running around in front of them was a shipgirl, and looking with the special sense their kind had for each other, she saw the hull of a massive warship, far bigger than her own carbon hull.
So... pretty much like all of the other warships on the base, then.
The shipgirl in the labcoat counted off on her fingers "Alright, so it works with steel, with shipgirls, mice, chickens, and monkeys, all that's left is to try to send-"
"Ahem." Captain Vernon cleared his throat "I've got the VIPs here, I think someone was supposed to meet them for a tour."
At the sound of his voice, the woman whirled around, the ends of both her labcoat and the skirt she wore underneath spinning around her. As she looked over Peter, Blair, and Ao, noticing their outfits, the look of confusion on her face was rapidly replaced by a small, slightly sinister smile, and then a larger, overly-friendly one.
"Well heyyy, new people! USS Phoenix, US Navy, glad to meet you!" She waved, hurrying over to them.
"Phoenix... Phoenix... why does that name sound familiar...?" Aotearoa muttered to herself. Oh, right! While she hadn't spent much time in the USA outside of her historical research and interviews with veteran America's Cup avatars and crewmembers, she had still heard of Phoenix's reputation as a mad scientist. Hadn't she been banned from Indonesia recently for causing a volcanic eruption?
Ao remembered that the Auckland metro area was built on top of fifty extinct volcanoes. She suddenly hoped Phoenix didn't know that.
Cautiously, Aotearoa shook the sciencegirl's hand and tried to hide her unease. "AC-50 catamaran Aotearoa II, Ao or Aroha informally. I'm a racer with Team New Zealand across the Harbour in Auckland." She nodded in the direction of her friends, standing behind her. Blair, always a sucker for a pretty face, was staring at Phoenix, while Peter, ever the techno-geek, was staring at the machine. "These are my crew and best mates, Pete Burling and Blair Tuke."
Blair started to step forward, but felt Pete's hand on his shoulder "What? I can't talk first?" He whispered back, harshly "I'm really good at international diplomacy with pretty gir—Ow! Okay, okay, I won't embarrass us, right, no need for the Vulcan nerve pinch..."
Trying to laugh off that moment of tension with his friend, Blair smiled widely and waved politely. "Welcome to Auckland, we're glad to have you."
"Glad to be here!" Phoenix said, her exaggerated cheerfulness clearly hiding some other scheme forming in her mind "G'day and all that, right? Love the accents! You guys got shrimp on the—"
"That's Australia." Pete corrected.
"Common mistake." Aotearoa said. "You know, Australia II told me she actually did a cameo in one of those ads. She was right behind Paul Hogan in the background, she pointed it out to me."
"Haha, ANYWAY... you're here just in time to witness HISTORY! Using this teleporter, my colleague South Dakota—" Phoenix stopped to wave at the screen, and the other woman waved back, in-between eating potato chips. "—and I just transported Gordito there here from San Diego in just a moment! The next step is to try a human!"
"WOAH!" All of the visitors gasped.
"You mean, you sent him all the way across the Pacific with that?" Pete stepped closer, gray eyes wide and sparkling as he stared intently at the machine. "Yeah, how did you handle the transmission and the reassembly? I heard the scientists were still working on the quantum—"
Blair rolled his eyes as he watched his best friend launch into a conversation about the physics of teleportation with Phoenix that he couldn't make heads or tails of, complex terminology flying around him like snow in a flurry. Pete was off to Nerd World again, somewhere he couldn't follow, but at least this time he seemed to have a fellow traveler to trade jargon with. Who needed all those fancy words when "teleportation" was an exciting enough one on its own?
After about five minutes of this, he'd had enough. "Hey, Earth to Pistol, Earth to Pistol Pete! Let's not get caught up in the details here, mate!" Blair snapped his fingers next to his friend's head "These ladies here have presented us with a great opportunity! Just think about it, Pistol, we could go anywhere in a flash... Timbuktu, Tokyo, Tahiti..." He hugged one arm around Pete and Ao as he waved the other in the air to emphasize the fantasy. "No more long flights, no more baggage fees! We could be on the beach in Bermuda and then back in Kerikeri for dinner!"
"So..." The slightly-sinister smile returned to Phoenix's face again "...you ARE volunteering to test it?"
"YE—"
"No!" Aotearoa broke in "No, I've heard about you two and your experiments!" She glared at Phoenix. "Didn't someone almost have a heart attack the last time you guys tried teleportation? And when the British tried it, anybody who tried got duplicated?"
Phoenix laughed nervously "Just some, uh, small mishaps along the way to the current design..."
"That was years ago! We've gotten the system refined and ironed out the wrinkles. As you can see, Gordito is fine, and so are all of the other animals we tested it on. I sent myself there and back just this morning!" South Dakota said, from the viewscreen, before popping another chip into her mouth. "If you want, you can come over first to be here waiting for your crew. After all, we know it works on shipgirls."
"Well, on steel shipgirls..." Phoenix clarified.
"Not helping, Phoenix!" South Dakota snapped at her colleague "I doubt a carbon-fiber hull will make a difference... we've been sending each other all over the US for weeks with no problem! We picked New Zealand for the first big trans-oceanic test because the Australasian Combined Forces were interested in studying ways to keep the islands resupplied even in the event of an Abyssal blockade."
"Shouldn't we call back to base and see what Dalts says?" Pete suggested, referring to Grant Dalton, Team New Zealand's gruff, no-nonsense manager.
"Aw, c'mon, Pete, Dalts let us do the Volvo Ocean Race and round Cape Horn, you really think he's gonna say no?" Blair said, barely able to contain his excitement. This was actual teleportation and the chance to make history, if he could only talk his friends into not being so blasted cautious...
"Thousands of people have been around Cape Horn over centuries, Blair. They just said no human has ever teleported across the Pacific Ocean before." Ao said, shooting him a disapproving look.
"Really, guys? Aren't we sailors? Where's your sense of adventure?" Blair brought them into another hug and swept his arm through the air again "They'll list us right up there among the pioneers of science—Rutherford, Pickering, Beck... Tuke and Burling!"
Well, as concerned as she was, Aotearoa felt a rising wave of injured pride. If there was one thing no AC-50 could ever stand, it was being considered unadventurous, afraid to push limits, overly conservative...
"Well... Pete?" She looked at her helmsman, hoping he would be able to talk Blair down, but he just shrugged. "Alright, fine! You said I can go first?"
As Phoenix put the final touches on readjusting the teleportation platform, Pete took the time to text Dalton, as he had planned, but no reply came.
"Well, if this goes sideways, at least it's me and not our AC-75." Ao said, stepping up onto the platform. She had already won the Cup and retired, while her successor for 2021 was under construction. Still, it would be a shame to get disintegrated or something and never get to meet that boat's avatar...
"Woah, woah, Aroha! You need to say something cool and historical, like 'One small step for man...', y'know?" Blair said.
"I dunno, that's kind of American, isn't it?" Aotearoa said, raising an eyebrow as she took the spread-feet-and-arms position Phoenix had recommended. The lighted rings started to cycle faster between pink and green, glowing brighter now.
"Huh, then..." Pete shifted his voice to sound a bit like an old-timey radio reporter "Well, now, what do you make of it, Tenzing?" He said, smirking.
"Ha! Ed Hillary, nice one, bro!"
As the electronic whirring started up, she shut her eyes as instructed, as much for protection (against what, she couldn't say), as to calm herself down. As she felt a strange tingling at the tips of her fingers and on the bottoms of her feet, the last thing Ao heard before the mighty WHOOSH of air and crack of lightning was Blair's voice, shouting "GO KNOCK THE BASTARD OFF!"
As it turned out, the process was painless, although the feeling of pins and needles in one's feet stuck around for about a minute on the other side.
Sitting in a swivel chair in a corner of the lab (much bigger than the room they had been in back in Auckland) Aotearoa tapped her pencil on the edge of her clipboard idly. Pete was sitting in another chair behind her, still filling out his "experimental subject questionnaire" about any symptoms he might be experiencing.
He had been very excited about the whole experience, and was no doubt hoping to be able to look around the rest of the lab after he finished the questionnaire.
In another life, Pete had told her once—if he had grown up somewhere landlocked, perhaps— he might have become an engineer or inventor himself. He certainly understood yacht systems and design, and he had started classes in mechanical engineering at university before Olympic campaigning had put his studies on hold. She wondered if he ever regretted not finishing his degree—with how driven he was, at twenty-eight he might have a PhD already.
But then, if Pete hadn't gone pro, someone else would have been at her wheel in Bermuda, and who could guess how well they would have done?
Aotearoa yawned, feeling the same sort of listlessness she always did when she spent too much time in confined spaces with little airflow. Looking down between her sneakers, she saw a black ant carrying a crumb from South Dakota's potato chips. The battleship girl seemed to be addicted to the chips— the trash can was full of empty packets, and upon stepping down from the platform, Ao had heard a small crunch as she had stepped on crumbs. It seemed a bit irresponsible around such delicate equipment, even if it was South Dakota's own lab.
Seeing another ant crawl by, Ao got up from her chair and walked towards the control panel, where South Dakota was preparing to teleport Blair.
"Hey, you've got—"
"SHHH! Not now!" The American girl shushed her, holding up a hand to say "stop".
On the viewscreen, she could see Blair in the ready position as the rings began to glow brighter and the humming started.
"Heheheheh..." South Dakota cackled, rubbing her hands together.
Looking over at the platform on their side, Ao saw that the rings were glowing in the same way, circling through their color cycle faster.
And climbing across one lighted ring, she saw another ant.
"WAIT! Stop the machine! Stop the machine, there's—"
But it was too late. With a rush of air, a glowing spot appeared in the middle of the teleportation platform, cracking with electricity. It resolved into a humanoid shape, and Aotearoa squinted, hoping to see Blair safe and sound.
"Blair?"
Strange chittering sounds came from the platform, and as the light faded, she saw a man in Blair's familiar uniform... with the head of a giant ant.
Ao screamed. Pete screamed. South Dakota later insisted she had screamed with surprise and delight, but in the moment, it all sounded the same, the lab split by one huge—
"AAHHHHHHHHHH!"
Fifteen Minutes Later
"You said it was safe! 'The monkey was okay, we worked out all the glitches Just step onto the platform and come out in my lab in San Diego! No more 15-hour flights from New Zealand to the US!'" Aotearoa berated South Dakota, pointing her finger angrily in the American's face. While the battleship's hull utterly dwarfed the catamaran's, in humanoid form South Dakota was only about half a head taller. "Not 'Hey, want me to turn your teammate into a bug-man?'"
"Listen—" South Dakota glared back at her, returning the angry finger-pointing "I didn't see the ant! It was an ant, they're small! The platform's big!"
Away from the argument, Ant-Blair sat glumly at one of the desks in the lab, leaning his grotesque insect's head on his fists with his elbows on the desk surface. With compound eyes, he stared into the bowl of sugar water in front of him and took another sad, resigned sip with the red-and-white straw clutched in his mouth-parts.
He really, really hoped that this was all a nightmare and that at any moment, he was going to wake up and—
Pete patted him on the back. "Look, mate, we're doing everything we can to turn you back. Want s'more sugar water?"
Letting go of the straw, Blair made clattering sounds with his mouthparts out of instinct before remembering nobody except the ants on the lab floor spoke ant. Reaching for the pencil and pad beside him, he scrawled: "HURRY UP! THIS %#^*ING SUCKS!"
They had all agreed that after being unexpectedly mutated into an insect-man, Blair needed SOMETHING to drink, but giving alcohol to an ant-human hybrid whose biology was totally unknown seemed inadvisable. At least Ant-Blair seemed to be able to breathe, move around, and drink sugar water.
Up near the teleportation platform, Aotearoa paced angrily back and forth as the sciencegirls discussed her friend's condition over their video link.
"We've got the ant with his head right here—" Phoenix held up a small jar in the feed from Devonport.
"But mes amis, he is so intriguing! Can't we wait until I can give him a medical examination in this form?" The Frenchwoman on the other screen was Provence, the science circle's resident "mad biologist" and expert on mutations.
"Well..." Phoenix stared back at the human-headed ant in the jar and rubbed her chin, thinking.
"No!" Ao shouted, pointing now at Phoenix's screen. "He's my flight controller and you're going to turn him back as soon as you can or I'm going to come back over there and the next two things to merge will be my hydrofoil and your face!" She barked, her sky-blue eyes looking like the blue flame of shock diamonds in rocket exhaust.
"Well alright, alright..." Phoenix ran a hand through her dark hair. "But we're going to have to align this exactly right to turn him back, and that's going to take some time."
"How much time?" Pete asked, having wandered to the front of the lab, sounding concerned.
"I'm going to estimate at least two hours." South Dakota said, pulling up a tab showing the teleportation parameters as a detailed spreadsheet.
From the back of the room, Ant-Blair gave a very loud, very angry set of squeaks.
Twenty Minutes Later
Aotearoa couldn't take it. She just couldn't handle waiting around in the lab anymore as the sciencegirls debated, couldn't stand seeing Blair like that, couldn't bear to breathe the stuffy air inside. She needed to move, she needed fresh air and wind and the sky.
So, she had excused herself and stepped out to take a walk. The lab was underground (they always seemed to be), but a brisk 20-knot jog up four flights of stairs had gotten her to ground level and an exit to the base outside. It had been late morning in New Zealand, but in San Diego it was nearly dinner time (dinner time yesterday, technically...)
Her previous trips to San Diego had been for research, to see the waters where her aunts KZ-1 and NZL-20 had raced in the America's Cups of the 1980s and 90s— and where her big brother Black Magic had won, of course. This trip was shaping up rather differently.
The sailgirl walked along a tree-lined sidewalk just off a parade ground, climbing a small hill to see, not far away, the mother Pacific on the horizon beyond the docks of the naval base. An evening breeze greeted her, blowing through her dyed bangs, and Ao took a deep breath, savoring the cool and comforting feeling across her face and limbs. She itched to summon her rigging and feel the wind on her sails and hydrofoils. With a running start, she could fly, maybe even glide right down to the water from here with her wingsails extended...
But no, South Dakota had told her to keep a low profile, warning that their teleportation experiments were "Not exactly official..." (Sure, NOW she told them...)
Instead, Ao reached into a pocket of her shorts and pulled out two strings with loops at one end and small plastic balls at the other. While she enjoyed traditional Maori poi-spinning at ceremonies, accompanied by prayers and chants, in her daily life she mostly spun the weighted strings in the modern, nonceremonial way, as a casual exercise to find focus and burn off some of her energy. She flicked the switches on the balls, and they lit with soft purple light from LEDs within.
With another deep breath, she faced the sea on the horizon, slipped her fingers through the palm-loops, and took one string in each hand, swinging them in synchronized arcs until the strings and balls were glowing blurs around her. She twisted around, swinging the strings in different arcs and loops, always careful to make sure the two lines missed each other as she swept geometric patterns in the air. Breathing in the sea breeze, Aotearoa felt her worry fade away as she started to whistle, the magic whistle of wind across hydrofoils that racing catamarans saw as an expression of the joy of speed.
And, after a few minutes, this whistling and the glow of the poi balls caught the attention of a blonde girl in a black dress who was walking by.
"Poiiiii?" The Japanese girl asked, intrigued by the light show.
"Yup!" Aotearoa said, stopping her whistle for a moment.
"But, like, what are you going, poi?" The girl asked, again.
"Yes, this is poi. Like you said." Aotearoa explained, slowing down her spinning to talk.
"But what are they, poiiii?" Now the other girl seemed really confused.
"These... are poi?" Aotearoa caught her strings in her palms mid-arc and held them out to show to the girl.
"Poiiii?!"
The confused conversation went on like this for about a minute before Aotearoa finally realized what Yuudachi was saying.
"These are called poi. You take one in each hand and spin them, like this. It's an art form we have in the South Pacific that's become a fad in other places recently."
"Can I try, poi?" Yuudachi clapped her hands, delighted.
"Sure, go ahead." Aotearoa handed her the strings, with a smile.
Two Hours Later
Blair Tuke had had many reasons to celebrate in his young life. He had won Olympic medals, lifted the America's Cup trophy, hugged his mother again after circumnavigating the world— but he had never felt relief as he did now, watching the glow of the teleporter fade again and seeing South Dakota's lab, at last, only once, instead of duplicated many times by an ant's compound eyes. His fingers immediately went to his face, feeling his stubbled chin, his cheeks, nose, and finally his dark hair.
"YEAAAAAHH!" He cheered, finding it very comfortable to have lips and a tongue again. Pete and Aotearoa were cheering, too, as South Dakota gestured at him and bowed, proud of her handiwork.
And then, an alarm went off.
"Oh %#^*! The Admiral's coming!" South Dakota announced, looking back at the computers.
"They have to hide!" Phoenix shouted, alarmed even on the other side of the Pacific.
South Dakota pushed her visitors towards another machine in the back.
"Oh great, what does THIS one do?" Blair grumbled. He's just gotten back to being human, he didn't want to lose that.
"It's just an automatic tailor! It'll give you uniforms so you can blend in!"
"Well, that doesn't sound too—" Drawing on her superhuman strength, South Dakota shoved the three of them into the booth before Blair could finish the sentence.
A green laser suddenly shone in the eyes of the heads of the three New Zealanders.
Scanning... Scanning... Three subjects identified A computerized voice announced. The laser ran up and down their bodies, from the top of their heads down to their feet.
"Now I know how paper feels in the copier..." Blair muttered.
Subjects identified as... subjects identified... sooobjeeecttss iiiiidddeeennn... The voice sputtered, seemingly having a problem.
"Uh-oh."
With a crash, Blair and Pete tumbled out of the booth into what looked like a dressing room, wearing gold-buttoned black blazers and matching creased pants.
"Huh... what are these?" Pete asked, rubbing his head as he tried to untangle himself from the others and climb up.
"Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve, circa 1942." Aotearoa read off a tag on the back of his jacket. She seemed to be dressed similarly, but with a three-quarter-length skirt instead of the pants, a tie that was more of a kerchief in a bow, and a Maori greenstone pendant around her neck. "I guess it's set to WWII and that was the closest it could find for civilian yachties." She looked at her own jacket and skirt "And I'm guessing this is what yachtgirls who became auxiliary vessels wore."
"Hey, not bad..." Blair brushed the dust off his pants as he stood and looked in the mirror "Kinda dapper..." He grabbed an accompanying skipper's cap off a hook and tried it on. To tell the truth, he was just happy to see his own face in the mirror, no matter what he was wearing. "Hey Pistol, look at these stripes on the sleeves, I think you outrank me..."
"What's going on over there?" They heard a male American voice ask, from outside of the dressing room.
"Uh, just some visiting, err... officers from, ahh... New Zealand..." They heard South Dakota explain. "They're checking out the instant-tailor machine!"
"Do we, like, salute him?" Blair whispered, to his friends.
"You think I know, mate?" Pete whispered back.
Stepping out with as natural a smile as she could muster, Aotearoa waved at the Admiral talking to South Dakota. "Uh... g'day, Sir!"
"Well, hello to you, too. I didn't know there was anyone from New Zealand visiting us today." The Admiral said, biting his lip in thought.
"Oh yeah, it was a last-minute thing, real last minute!" Blair said, walking hurriedly towards the exit.
"This technology is remarkable, yeah?" Pete added.
"Sir, I'd love to stay and chat, but we've been touring the lab all day and we've missed dinner by now, so I think we should be getting to the cafeteria—"
"Mess hall." South Dakota hissed, under her breath.
"—to the mess hall, right away. OkayGreatToMeetYouAdmiralThanksGoodbye!" Aosaid, hurriedly, rushing her two crewmembers ahead of her and out the door.
The Admiral watched them leave and then turned to South Dakota with a stern look. "What did you do?"
December 2020, Auckland Waterfront
"...and two days later, we came back by plane." Blair finished. Telling the whole story had worn him out, and he took a swig from his water bottle.
"Wow, that's quite a story, mate." Jimmy Spithill let out a whistle between thin, pale lips as he went over it again in his mind. "And all that really happened, he's not just pulling my leg?" He asked, turning to Pete.
Pete and Blair hadn't seen much of Jimmy since the last America's Cup in Bermuda, when he had lost to them as the skipper of the American Team Oracle. After three years of training, he was back as helmsman of the Italian Team Luna Rossa. Despite the Australian's friendly demeanor, Pete could tell the older man was constantly hoping that the 2021 America's Cup would be a rematch between the two helmsmen— with the opposite result.
"Yeah, God's own truth, Jimmy. You can ask Dalts or Aroha if you see them." Pete said, bracing for a punchline. The redheaded Spithill was famous for using jokes and taunts to put his opponents on-edge, but in Bermuda Pete has found the best defense was to be his calm and quiet self, keeping stone-faced and speaking as little as possible.
"Ha-ha! Well, I'm glad you got back to normal in time for the Cup!" Jimmy looked at the high-tech watch on his muscular arm "Well, gotta run, we've got a workout at three! 'Catch you two around!"
"Haha, that's right, Jimmy, back to normal!" Blair joined in, laughing along as he clapped his competitor on the back. As he watched Jimmy's gray uniform shirt recede into the crowd, Blair smiled to himself "Well, not quite normal..." He raised two fingers of his left hand to his forehead and stared off towards the Luna Rossa team compound.
"And he got turned into an ant, Max! Crazy stuff!" Jimmy repeated the story to his skipper Max Sirena as they walked towards the workout room, duffel bags over their shoulders.
"Oddio!" Max suddenly exclaimed, staring at the step up to the temporary structure of the gym in astonishment.
"What the—?!"
In small clods of dirt, as if assembled carefully with fine tweezers, a message was spelled out on the step. A single ant scurried away, like a stagehand caught by the opening curtain.
"TEAM NZ YOU"
* "How cute!" but also a pun because "mono" means both "monkey" and "cute" in Spanish.
** "Oh my god!", roughly.
(This whole story was inspired by this typo— "ant Tuke"— in a Tweet from the New Zealand Olympic sailing team.)