Chapter Text
✿✿✿
If your personal outlook on life could be lumped in with the ‘glass half empty’ folks, or if you subscribed to a belief in Murphy’s Law, or especially if your name was Mizole, you may find yourself frequently in the resignation that, when in doubt, you can more than often assume things will go as things usually do, that being poorly; but Ryann Torasurii of Wet Floor dabbled very frequently in what you could call ‘optimism’[1], which had its upsides.
Presently, optimism was what was getting her through the morning: sure, they were running extremely late. Sure, yes, the Triggerfish Express Train had decided it was in dire need of renovations the one week out of the year it saw the most traffic. Sure, yeah, it had been raining on and off since last Friday, and the ‘on’ spurts were getting worse and worse as things progressed, and they could barely see ten feet in front of the car, and they still had at least twenty minutes driving time to go at this crash-avoiding snail’s pace, but.
It could be worse. Mostly Ryann was just glad she didn’t have to be the one driving in this mess. Plus, it was Wednesday. Wednesdays were her favourite day of the week[2].
The rain fell hard and fast, just like it had been doing for the past week, drumming on the roof of the car like a snare staccato with something to prove, occasionally punctuated with a great, blundering roll of timpani. It obscured not only the view[3], but also, apparently, the sense of all the other drivers on the road. Highway I-164 was hazardous in its own right, even in sunny skies, and water pooling on the road now hid some of the potholes, reduced a great deal of traction, and mostly frightened people, which did nothing to help with the swerving and abrupt stops and motorized incompetence in general.
Mizole, the poor soul currently in the driver’s seat of the Wet Floor Carpool Vehicle[4], swore and jerked the wheel to one side to avoid an oncoming car drifting disagreeably into their lane with its highbeams on, so blissfully oblivious it honked at them.
“Yeah, and your mother!” he snapped, biolights along his forearms flashing in a threatening manner that neither the other driver nor their mother could appreciate, given the separate vehicles. Though staring rigidly past the struggling windshield wipers at the rain-slicked road ahead, he spared the second to flick the bird at the car as it passed, which it did appreciate, or at the very least notice, because it honked again. “Fuckin’- god, it’s not that difficult!”
“Not everyone is a first-rate driver like you, Mizole,” Ryann hummed kindly from the passenger seat, and giggled when Kazami, behind her, met that with a bark of laughter.
“Yeah, and apparently not everyone has an IQ above room temperature,” responded Mizole, with another angry flash of his lights, tone scathing. The hairband he wore meant she got a clear view of his deeply furrowed brow and dark glower, which he directed at her for the minutest fraction of a second before darting back to the road.
Ryann began to quip back about ‘the average is an average’ but found herself stopped, lurching along with everyone else in the vehicle with an “Oop,” because Mizole had slammed on the brakes in order to avoid hitting the truck in front of them[5]. The innumerable air fresheners and the string of flowery beads hanging from the rear-view swung forwards and back very dramatically; the salmonid bobble-head on the dash (a slightly sun-bleached goldie with paint scraping off the toga) stayed very firmly sticky-tacked where it was, discounting all the bobbling.
Mizole laid on the horn with a growl, lights under his eyes fluttering frustratedly; but the truck was already doing the same for the vehicle in front of them and, in fact, taking the next step, which involved rolling down their driver’s side window, sticking their head and a fist out through it, and hollering.
“Oh,” said Kazami, as a storm of muffled curse words floated through (or rather, dinged off of, such was the strength of them) the windows, the fist waving and pointing and demonstrating several explicit gestures. “Is that Fin Bottom?”
“Looks like,” snorted Kagi, who along with Kazami, sat in the second row of seats behind the driver. “They’re gonna get wet like that.”
“Don’t think she cares,” Kazami grinned, an amused clicking of her mandibles accompanying the smile. “Ooh, yeah. Get ‘em.”
“Get on with it, more like,” Mizole grunted, as Fin Bottom opened their door, landed with a splash beside his truck, and marched around to the front of it to confront whoever it was that had prompted the fist shaking and hollering. In fact -and Ryann had to admit she was impressed you could hear her over the rain, the closed windows, and the distance- he was still hollering as they rounded the vehicle, teeth bared, tail flaring and flashing furiously behind her as he sloshed through puddles up to the ankle of his scarlet boots. And those things had heels.
Tsumabushi, in the third and final row of seats (if you were abiding by local laws, anyways, and disregarding the hatch-back), stuck his snout between Kagi and Kazami and added his two gesos: “C’mon, Mizo, this is first rate entertainment! They make you pay for stuff like this in the city.”
“S’different out in the countryside,” nodded Ryann, grinning to herself when Kagi scoffed in amusement. She leant forwards in the hopes she could see the impending fight through the windshields of the truck; alas, they were tinted. “I’m betting on Fin.”
Mizole just muttered something under his breath and thumped his forehead on the steering wheel a few times.
“There’s no one behind us, at least,” Kazami tried, and Mizole just lay on the horn again. Ryann had the sneaking suspicion he’d been up earlier (or maybe later, though eventually late trended in the direction of early anyways) than was good for him.
“I don’t care who’s behind us,” Mizole hissed through his teeth, hunched over the wheel, each italicized word emphasized with a balled fist slammed against the horn, flaring his lights dramatically. Ryann thought he was making rather a big deal of things. “I care that these fucking idiots keep stopping in the middle of the damn road, and-”
“Please stop punching my car,” said Kagi from the back.
“I can do whatever I want to your stupid car, ‘cause you’re making me drive it,” Mizole retorted, and gave the horn another whack. Ryann reached over and grabbed his wrist. And then the other one, and flashed her beak at him when he tried to yank them away.
“In fact,” he went on at a growl, struggling in Ryann’s grip, “when we get to the bridge, I’m thinking about putting this wretched thing through the railing and into the river as fast as it’ll go.”
“Sounds good,” said Kagi amiably. “If you can get it above 100 kilometres in this weather before bits start falling off, colour me impressed.”
Mizole scoffed. “You’re already blue,” he muttered, though apparently somewhat mollified, and Kagi gave a grunt of agreement in reply.
“Oh, hey!” Tsumabushi pointed with an incline of his head. “Fighting fish at twelve ‘o clock, sopping wet and simmering per usual.”
Ryann glanced back and found the cutthroat nodding towards the truck, which, indeed, Fin Bottom had returned to. Instead of the rampant glee usually gracing her expression post-fight (typically, post-fight-win, though the glee would be there regardless), she had a vaguely confused air about her, not to mention a fistful of papers. Ryann pretended she didn’t feel a twang of disappointment[6]
“That was quick,” said Kagi. “Think she just one-shot’ed them, or what?”
“I don’t think she got to do anything,” Ryann mused, and turned the teeth-bare into a grin, releasing one of Mizole’s straining wrists to send a wave over the dash in Fin’s direction when he sent a glare towards the Carpooler. “Doesn’t look self-satisfied enough.”
Fin returned it with what could have been a grin, had the weather been a little lighter, but as it was the combination of overcast skies, the red light from so many taillights going past reflecting off her storm-shadowed face, and the general disposition of Fin Bottom[7], it came across in really quite a malicious manner and Ryann, though maintaining her grin, slowly lowered the waving hand to make herself appear smaller and less fightable.
With a glare, Mizole jerked his hand out of Ryann’s grip as Fin went about shaking himself off before getting back in her truck (not, Ryann suspected, that it made much difference while he still stood in the shower). “I cannot wait to hang out with him for a week.”
“We’re hardly gonna see each other,” Kagi scoffed. “Opposite ends of the camp for most of the day, probably. Frankly, it’s really not much more than, like, four days total.”
“You’re not enough of a threat to get her after you, anyway,” added Kazami, with an amused clicking of her mandibles, and Mizole’s lights seethed quietly, muttering something under his breath that a crash of thunder rolled conveniently over.
“Was that friendly?” Ryann asked, watching as the truck revved its engine and sped off, splashing water up everywhere as it went. “I think that was friendly. Right?”
“It was a lot of teeth, at the very least,” said Tsumabushi, elbows on the headrests on either side of him, grin resting in laced fingers. “Lotta teeth. Maybe too many, really.”
“Oh, and you’re a fine one to talk.”
“Please. I’m not in the habit of putting them in people, thank you very much.”
Kazami clicked a claw and pointed between the front seats through the downpour. “That guy’s waving.”
Ryann scoffed at Tsumabushi but relented, following her claw.
Jutting halfway into their lane was a small car so beaten and weathered that a faint, hitherto repressed memory of her highschool science class popped into mind, whispering the word oxidization in shuddering tones.
It also put the Carpooler to shame in terms of the bumper-sticker-to-not-bumper-sticker ratio, which Ryann had foolishly presumed an impossible feat to manage. Possibly, the owner of the poor thing thought they could disguise how the rust had almost worked its way into the passenger compartment (and appeared to be attempting to hotwire things) by plastering enough Hello Kipper stickers on it, which created what frankly could be most kindly described as an eyesore.
Maybe they just really liked Hello Kipper, though Ryann had her doubts.
At any rate, in the driver’s seat, waving lazily at them through a rolled-down window, sat a fishfolk, somewhere between their late teens and early forties. Ryann waved back when Mizole only scowled, and they turned their wave into a ‘come here’ gesture, backing out of the lane to give the Carpooler space.
Exuding an air of utter detestation as he did so, Mizole pulled up alongside it, rolled Ryann’s window down for her via the driver’s-side control panel, and barked, “What?” at the fishfolk (from this distance, Ryann could guess they were a rummynose tetra, though still found herself lost as to how old they were) loud enough to be heard over the rain.
“Sheesh,” said the fishfolk, looking them over with a sort of half-lidded expression of unfocused disinterest, which somehow matched the fin-slicked-sloppily-to-one-side thing they’d done with their semi-translucent hair. They turned back into their car, produced some papers, and passed them through the windows to Ryann. “You’ll be needing these.”
Ryann inspected the papers, slightly dampened from their brief excursion between windows. They had Camp Triggerfish logos plastered on all sides, but she still felt the need to ask, “These are…?”
“Who the hell are you?” Mizole demanded, leaning over Ryann’s lap to get a good look at the guy. Ryann, shuffling through the pile of papers for the important things, handed Mizole the pamphlets. Come A Stranger, Leave A Friend! one of them read across the front, which had about as much depth as corporate mottos usually did.
“Pamphlets,” observed Tsumabushi, when Mizole tossed them into the back with a fluttering of Camp Mottos.
“Oh, yeah… sorry.” The tetra plucked at a badge on their shirt which, Ryann had just noticed, had Camp Triggerfish embroidered on the left side of the chest, gold impact font set on army-green cotton. “I’m Fogo. I’m your campgrounds admission guy.”
“Sure,” said Ryann politely, trying not to make eye-contact with one of the innumerable Hello Kippers (and friends) staring blankly at her. Hanging over her lap, Mizole snorted disdainfully.
“Yup,” said Fogo agreeably, casually hanging an elbow out their window[8]. “Well, that’s got your registration forms, you sent ‘em in online, technically you’re supposed to give me your driver’s license so I can compare, but, like...” they waved a hand vaguely “…you guys are the guys. You’re Wet Floor, right?”
“Yup,” nodded Ryann, and Mizole muttered, “Do we look like fuckin’ DoorDash?” She planted a hand on his forehead and pushed him gently back into his own seat.
“Cool,” said Fogo. “Nice, yeah, uh. Big fan. Anyways.” They pointed vaguely towards Ryann. “So other than reg and the big waiver, you’ve got maps in there, menus, uh… the vehicle register thing. Think that’s it. You can give it to the Main Office when you get to Camp, I guess. Or shove it in the mail slot ‘round back, at least. There’s, like, nobody there, it’s nuts. All this delay ‘cause the rain, I guess. We don’t even have any Inkopolis Café trucks there yet.”
“Hey, yeah,” Mizole demanded, leaning over Ryann’s lap again, “why are you the camp admissions guy if you’re not at the camp? Not your natural habitat out here, is it?”
Fogo nodded slowly. “Just a shift switch, dude. I’m heading in for the day, ‘cause if we’re getting flooded in, I’m not sticking around. Brook should be there in a couple hours, she can get all your stuff up to date, or… whatever. She was supposed to be here, like, ages ago, which is why I’m hangin’ out on the road. Figured you folks would cruise down this’a’way sooner or later…”
“Don’t call me dude,” muttered Mizole, after a second’s silence had been used to absorb that. Kagi made a noise that sounded like a strangled laugh, which presumably it was, and so then had not been strangled very well.
“Hey- Where’s our cabin key?” Tsumabushi called suddenly from the back. “Or are we sleeping in the river?”
“Ohhh, yeah,” said Fogo. “Yeah, I gave the big keys to the folks in 4.1, so those are there already. Yours should be the one with the lil’ blue cover. I think.”
Ryann looked to Tsumabushi and back and raised her voice over the rain. “So we can just… go in? Sorta thing? Once we’re there?”
Fogo nodded. “Once you’re past the Little Triggerfish Bridge -few kilometres up that’a’way by now- you’re all set. Just stick the vehicle registration form in the mail-slot at the main office, ‘cause someone else should be in pretty soon, and then they can get them all sorted through before other folks start showin’ up.”
“Sure,” returned Ryann, with a nod.
They stared at each other for a few seconds. The rain drummed ceaselessly.
“…Yeah,” said Fogo, breaking the pause with a slap to their rusted car door, and Ryann thought automatically of antibiotics. “So, like… I need to get going, uh, I‘ve got… stuff… to be doing. So.”
“Thank you!” said Ryann, only partially lying. They’d filled the registration papers in ages ahead of time, at Mizole’s neurotic request, and the papers had been folded neatly in the cup holder for the length of the conversation- but the pamphlets might come in handy.
“Sure,” said Fogo, or at least that’s what she thought they said, as Mizole had already rolled up the window, laid on the gas, and had the Carpooler screeching off around the rusted, Hello Kipper-plastered corpse of a car and onwards down the I-164 Triggerfish Exit before they could get the word out properly.
A sign just beyond where they had parked whizzed past in the rain: Camp Triggerfish, 5km; Triggerfish River Bridge, 1km.
“…the average IQ is an average,” Ryann murmured after a while, when Fogo and their car had been left far behind, finally finishing her earlier thought. It seemed appropriate.
“You’re an average,” Mizole sneered immediately, and Ryann, quickly realising the tease as a friendly one (he seemed calmer now that the main road and its fools were behind them), snorted.
✿✿✿
The Little Triggerfish Bridge, a slimmer, shorter affair than its more substantial sibling the Big Triggerfish Bridge on the main road, provided an excellent cut-off between the rest of the world and the crumbling, grassy side-road to Camp Triggerfish. It both kept out unwanted visitation and prevented patrons of the Camp from escaping[9]. On the other side of the Triggerfish Exit, past the North-East mountain ring, a similar bridge (the Other Little Triggerfish Bridge, unofficially) bridged a gap over a not-quite ravine that deterred all but the most eager of escapees.
The Little Triggerfish Bridge cut a simpler, dryer path over a not-quite ox-bowed portion of the Triggerfish River, some 15 metres below its stainless-steel supports. Its concrete pillars and piles were stained up and down in all sorts of graffiti, much of which was thought-provoking- not in the manner that made you think about the graffiti itself, mind you; rather more it made one pause and ponder the question of how on earth the artist got to a spot maybe a metre over the rushing water, and if the answer was more likely to involve rappelling impossibly down to it, or swimming.
The Little Triggerfish Bridge, centrally bascule in nature, sat in a default state of raised, because you only needed to use it if you were a) going to Camp Triggerfish, which required important papers or an embroidered shirt or b) looking for a necessary, slightly quicker route through the North-East mountain ring, which was sort of suspicious. Thus, the Little Triggerfish Bridge had a gatehouse on the western side of the river, and a large, well secured terminal on the eastern side that required at least three sets of keys to get into and use.
The Little Triggerfish Bridge staff presently wanted the Triggerfish Spring Music Festival Hullabaloo vehicle registration papers, and so for this reason the Carpooler was now idling damply by the side of the road, with Tsumabushi leaning over the back seat into the trunk to dig around for Mizole’s bag, which, upon finding, he was to dig around in that for a pen. Or a pencil. It didn’t really matter. Ryann found herself with nothing to do and so settled for watching this in amusement.
“You think it matters if it’s pen or pencil?” Kagi asked him, and Tsumabushi only responded with a grunt of annoyance. “If you find any, that is.”
“What even is the license plate, Kags?” Mizole, who had been placed in charge of filling out the Carpooler’s registration form properly- not due to the tidiness of his handwriting, or something reasonable like that, but more so because he tended to fuss excessively if anything was done in a way he disapproved of. “It’s W-F-F-S, and then…?”
“W-W-F-S 2-2-7-3,” corrected Kagi.
“…I thought it was W-F-F-S.”
“It,” said Kagi, in disbelief, “is my fucking car. I know what the license plate is.”
“Pen!” cried Tsumabushi, triumphantly holding it aloft. Kazami cheered. “It’s red, but, like, can they really be that mad?”
“Not my problem.” Mizole stretched an arm back to take it and had to take a couple grabs for it because Tsumabushi kept tugging it just out of reach. “So, license plate, signatures, date… alright.”
The proper boxes were filled in or ticked as the situation required. The ‘felonies’ portion was mused over and ignored. The glove box was opened for scrap paper to scribble on when the pen tried to die halfway through signing the form. The Carpooler finally, finally, pulled forwards to the Bridge gatehouse.
“Hulllloooo,” said the operator when they pulled up and rolled the window down, turning away from the computer he’d been fiddling with. A middle-aged giant trevally fishfolk with a receding hairline, a shirt that matched Fogo’s, and a nametag that read ‘Jack Caran’ took the fold-creased papers from Mizole, and, looking them over, said, “I just don’t think it’s reasonable.”
“Sorry?” said Mizole, and Ryann shared the sentiment, wondering if she misheard through the relentless pounding of rain on the car and, now that they were closer, the muffled rush of the river.
“Oh,” said the trevally. “Sorry, not you. These are looking good. Do you have your driver’s license on you?”
“Sure,” said Mizole, and dug in a pocket. Ryann considered the question briefly, and after a second’s thought decided yes, that was a bit of a stupid one.
Someone else in the booth behind the trevally sat suddenly forwards into Ryann’s line of vision: a yellow-tinted inkling of maybe twenty (though that might have been pushing things) in the same uniform as the trevally, sans the nametag. “Have you folks seen any?”
“…Sorry?” said Mizole again, eyebrows pinched, in the process of handing his license to the trevally at an awkward angle to keep it as much out of the rain as possible.
The trevally shook his head. “Nothing,” he scoffed, a smile teasing on his lips as he stamped the papers, one after the other. “Denay here’s big on river fish, so he’s keeping an eye out for seasonals. Keeps thinking he’s seeing zapfish, but they aren’t due until next year, so he’s just losing it.”
“Am not,” protested Denay, taking the driver’s license from his senior and running it though some photocopier-esque device, along with the papers. “They were late last round. They’ve been tracking them for centuries,” he intoned severely; “if they’re late one round, they tend to be early the next. That’s how it works.”
“It’s a bright yellow fish,” said Jack Caran, in a tone that suggested they’d been having this conversation for a while and, so far, found it led nowhere but back around to the start of it, and was beginning to wonder if could be more efficiently described as an argument. “You’d think a bright yellow fish would be easy to spot, and I haven’t seen any.”
Denay huffed. “They’re muted when they’re spawning, I’ve told you. Helps to avoid predators, and-”
“I’ve heard it, Dee,” interrupted the trevally. He took the driver’s license back from a scowling Denay and returned it to Mizole, along with the papers. “Teenagers, right? Give ‘em a spring break job, just bein’ a good godfather, and all they do is talk about the spawning habits of zapfish.
“You’re all good to go,” he hummed, and gave the door of the Carpooler a friendly pat. “Take it slow in this wind, though, will ya? Last kid through here tore past like they had hell on their tail, made me real nervous.”
Ryann considered this. “The driving, or the driver?”
“…yes,” said the trevally. “Didn’t know they allowed so much teeth to show on driver’s licenses, either.”
“I’m sure they make exceptions,” Ryann smiled. “Thanks!”
“I’m just saying!” Denay exclaimed, while they were pulling off, “if they do show up, it’s gonna be a problem…”
The two rain-stained halves of the Little Triggerfish Bridge eased down to slot together in the centre, halting with a faint clunk that shook rainwater from its parapets and sent it running in rivulets to the concrete. Slowly, the bright red crossing barrier bar raised, followed by its twin on the far side, and with a wave from Denay in the booth and a rumble from the engine, the Wet Floor Carpool Vehicle lurched forwards in its way and went gently across.
Ryann glanced out her window as they went over. Most years, the snow sloughed down from the mountains under the warmer skies of mid March, but this year’s recurring cold snaps meant nothing melted properly until almost the end of the month. Combined with the unseasonably wet weather they’d been having for the past week, the river had climbed its banks a good few feet, swollen and swelling further as the rain still hammered down.
Most years, it meant that Inkopolis residents with basements (or, cod forbid, in subterranean homes) on the north-west edge of the city, near the Triggerfish, found their late March/early April paychecks went towards shop vacs, dehumidifiers, and large area fans as the water snuck into sewers, crept up lowland roads, and generally made things quite damp. This year, the flood bracket had extended down the length of the Snapper River too, into the canal, even temporarily decommissioning it as a Turf zone; or so Ryann had heard.
The river foamed and spat with the rain pelting into it, the surface bubbling like a great, roiling pot set to simmer. Bits of trash and plant debris being tossed downstream made for a sort of river potpourri, careening southwest, sloshing and swirling out towards the coast.
“Lookin’ pretty wet out there,” noted Kazami, which more or less summed it up.
Tsumabushi made a thoughtful sound, peering out his own window. “Yeesh. If it doesn’t let up by tomorrow, we’re going to have trouble with the equipment.”
“They’ve worked with that before, I think,” Ryann said. The Carpooler thumped gently over the Bridge on the far side, and she watched it disappear in the side mirror, barrier bar falling back into place and bridge raising again. “Put up a big tarp or something a few years back, when we had a storm like this.”
“Wasn’t that when they had that lawsuit where the chick got electrocuted?” Kagi asked. “Like- Hullabaloo won thanks to the waivers, but I’d prefer to avoid being, uh. Electrocuted.”
“C’mon, Kags!” Tsumabushi reached between the seat to knuckle Kagi’s shoulder. “It’s the fiftieth anniversary! They can’t cancel just ‘cause of a little casual electric shock, huh? Just toughen up a little.”
“She got second degree burns, dude. And her bass got toasted.”
“Ooh,” Ryann shivered, “not the bass.”
“Second degree burns,” Kagi repeated.
“Those heal, though. Basses are expensive.”
Tsumabushi wrinkled his snout and looked to reconsider things.
“Yeah, I heard about that,” Kazami butt in, leaning around to join the conversation. “I think it was her bass that got her, actually, bit of a power surge and-” she made a ksshew noise “-got the bass, her amp, her hands. Lots of fun. S’why I play drums,” she told Kagi, “drums can’t get you.”
“Drums can absolutely get you,” Kagi huffed in the back. “Tendonitis, carpel tunnel…”
“Tendonitis,” scoffed Kazami. “Speak for yourself, soft boy.”
“Don’t you have tendons?” Tsumabushi said. “I mean, they’re called, like, apodi… somethings? But they’re basically tendons.”
“Apodemes,” Kazami supplied, with a clicking of her foreclaws.
“You admit it!” Kagi cried, triumphant. Then, “…soft boy?”
Ryann sighed and left them to their squabbling, turning her gaze back to the front.
The windshield wipers went back and forth, squeak, squeak, squeak. Spruce needles and cherry blossom petals tumbled down and stuck to the glass, knocked from their branches as the wind whipped through the trees along the side of the road. Squeak, squeak, squeak, went the windshield wipers, and swept them away again.
“If I drive all the way up here, in this weather,” Mizole grunted, just loud enough for her to hear him over the others’ argument, “and then they turn around and cancel, I’m never accepting an invitation again.”
Ryann regarded him quietly for a moment, then smiled. “It’ll probably be fine,” she told him. He only snorted vaguely. “My phone was saying it’s meant to clear up soon. Definitely overnight.”
“Hope so,” sniffed Mizole, and turned the windshield wipers up a notch. The road went on rolling on in front of them, shimmering and rippling in the rain.
✿✿✿
As far as Ryann was concerned, there was no need for this much fussing, and in fact she intended to volunteer to put a stop to it, but wanted, for the sake of her own entertainment, to see this particular argument through to its end.
“I’m driving!” Mizole snapped, slinging an arm out at the Camp driveway in frustration, lights flaring; “I’m not going anywhere! Do- do rock-paper-scissors, or something! Just hurry it up, will you?”
“I’m not getting out in that,” Tsumabushi huffed.
“I’m not sure I can,” hummed Kagi.
“It’s the spirit of the thing,” Kazami said evenly. “And Ryann could crawl over to your seat, you know.”
“I could,” agreed Ryann, with a nod in Mizole’s direction.
Mizole glared at her. “If someone doesn’t get out right now and lift that fucking bar, I’m turning this damn rustbucket around and dropping you lot off at the nearest bus station.”
Looming in front of the Wet Floor Carpool Vehicle at the moment, just as bright red and obvious as its comrades back at the Bridge, a barrier bar. It stretched across the Camp’s driveway and typically would have been controlled by someone in the admissions booth it was connected to; alas, as Fogo their campgrounds admission guy had said, there appeared to be no one to do this, and as such the bar went on hanging offensively in the way.
“Rustbucket?” repeated Kagi, pressing a hand to his chest. “Definitely not doing it now.”
“Ryann, push him out of his seat and just drive through it,” instructed Tsumabushi.
“Yes,” said Kazami.
Mizole leaned around to look out the back windshield, a determined look in his amber eyes, and began to back the Carpooler out of the driveway.
“Alright! Alright, alright,” Ryann laughed. The argument had ended. She unbuckled and popped her door open when Mizole stopped rolling back, putting a hand up to shield her eyes from the rain. She tromped forwards in the soaked gravel, boots sticking slightly as the rain pummeled it into mud lite, and put her hands around the barrier bar. It was cold.
Ryann lifted from the point nearest the booth, with some effort; the point of the barrier bar largely revolved around keeping people out, which meant it was hard to lift manually. Ryann went on lifting anyway, because a species with no bones puts a lot of responsibility to the muscles.
“Does it go any higher?” Mizole shouted at her from the dry, effortless shelter of the Carpooler.
“No!” Ryann called back, miffed. “Just go! I think it’ll fit!”
Mizole shrugged, pulled her door closed, and scraped agonizingly under the bar.
“If anything,” he grunted, when they were trundling along again, after Ryann had made it back to her seat, a great deal wetter and muddier than when she had left it, “it probably cleaned some of the dirt off the roof.”
“Dirt doesn’t get on the roof,” Kagi sighed, who hadn’t taken his head out of his hands yet.
“Sorry,” said Ryann, guiltily. The metallic screech of barrier bar on Carpooler roof would resound in her ears for a while, she suspected.
“S’okay,” said Kagi, with another sigh, “it’s not as if it would’a gone any higher if anyone else had done it.” He didn’t take his head out of his hands.
“Not as if it’ll reduce the value of the thing any further,” Mizole offered, rolling with a rhythmic crunch into the main parking lot.
Kazami elbow Kagi. “Yeah, he’s probably right about that,” she grinned.
“Probably impossible to make it worth any less, at this point,” Tsumabushi added, and Ryann giggled despite herself.
Mizole laughed softly at that, guiding the car to a parking spot. “I dunno- you did see what’s-‘is-name’s car, right? How was that thing driving?”
“Fogo,” supplied Ryann.
Everyone reflected on Fogo’s car for a moment.
“Anyway,” said Kazami, and leaned into the front seats. “Anyone else notice there’s, like, no one here?”
That produced another second’s silence as everyone glanced around the paring lot. Other than a pile of gravel in one corner, nothing else notable joined them in the parking lot.
“So, like,” started Ryann, and then momentarily strayed from her train of thought when hail started dinging around them. “Er. So should we get out and look around, or…?”
Kazami tapped one of her foreclaws on her window. “Looks pretty rough out there.”
“Coming from the one with natural body armor, no less,” Tsumabushi said. “I’m not exactly reassured back here.”
“I was thinking of you soft-bodied freaks, actually,” Kazami hummed. Her mandibles clicked together happily when Tsumabushi shook his head in amused disbelief, and Ryann snorted.
“I think I’m gonna get a headache if I spend another second in this fruity fucking car,” Mizole exhaled, turning the Carpooler off. He leaned around his seat. “Not letting up anytime soon, I’m guessing,” he said, looking past Tsumabushi’s head out the back window, “so I’m getting to the cabin.”
“Fruity?” Kagi scoffed, sounding scandalized. “Oh, says you.”
“I mean these,” Mizole retorted, reaching up with one untrimmed claw and tapping the collection of air-fresheners hanging from the rear-view. “I know you’re probably desensitized at this point, but the rest of us still have olfactory function. I’ve been up here for forty minutes.”
Ryann barked a laugh at that in time with another disgraced snort from Kagi.
“Desensitized is a big word, Mizo,” Kazami hummed. “And I don’t know what you’re complaining about, at least you’ve got a nose.”
Mizole rolled his eyes and opened his door, swearing under his breath when hail immediately took the chance to bounce in. “Look, whatever. Join me or don’t, but I’m not spending another second cramped in here- with you people, no less.”
And then, arm up to shield his face from the oncoming weather, he got out of the car and slammed the door behind him.
“He’s left the keys,” Kagi said, as soon as the door was shut. “Ryann, crawl into the driver’s and throw it in reverse.”
“Ooh,” giggled Ryann, and was halfway over the clutch when the sound of hail roared into the back of the van with the opening of the back-hatch.
“Mizole,” Tsumabushi called to him, breezily, “would you mind stepping back over there for just a second? You know, out of the way. No reason.”
Ryann glanced back: Mizole stood at the open trunk, already soaking wet and staring at them, unimpressed. Between Kazami’s chortling, the way Ryann was perched over the stick-shift on her haunches like a guilty sea slug, and Kagi’s… and Kagi, he must have figured it out, because all he did was stoop down, stand back up again, and sling a handful of melting hail at them over the back seat.
footnotes
1. If only because saying things like ‘wilful ignorance’ or ‘blatant disconnect from reality’ made people look at you funny.⤴︎
2. Thursdays came second, even though she’d heard less than amiable things about Thursdays. Ryann had a good hold of Thursdays.⤴︎
3. Which was really quite unfortunate because the view on the way to the Camp could be chalked up to one of the best parts of the experience: mountains, usually just dim shapes on the horizon in the city, rose up to fill the sky on all sides, coupled with the dense, verdant spruce along the embankments where the road had been carved into the earth, an occasional cherry tree in near-full bloom adding a blurred yet welcome splotch of pink to the palette… alas, not today. Today was grey.⤴︎
4. Kagi’s ten-year-old, dirty, off-white SUV, which seated up to eight plus baggage if you didn’t mind the visibility loss, had enough bumper stickers to wallpaper a small apartment, took rear-endings like a champ, and was covered in so many dents and dings Ryann wondered if it had been rolled down a particularly unforgiving hill the first time she saw it. Maybe more than one hill. During a hailstorm.⤴︎
5. The truck had been in front of them for a while and, until now, had been one of the few competent drivers on the road. Ryann felt a strange stab of betrayal.⤴︎
6. Had she really expected Fin to take someone on in the middle of the highway? Well- okay, not even the middle, rather more off to one side, but still. No, not really. It was probably just wishful thinking.⤴︎
7. That was, never very far from threatening, along with broad, strong hands (typically balled in fists when not playing the fiddle) and a face containing some impressively sharp teeth that really drove the threat home.⤴︎
8. Which would have been less strange if it hadn’t been pouring down rain and the door wasn’t rusted in such a way that it appeared as though you could potentially exfoliate with it and subsequently contract tetanus.⤴︎
9. Although this never came up in Turf War or the Spring Hullabaloo, it was an issue of surprising scale for some of the summer kiddie camps. Children (typically of age range 12-15, because however much they wanted to, younger kids tended to give up only a couple kilometres out on account of having shorter legs and a weaker resolve) are oftentimes a great deal more determined than expected, especially if they are being terrorized by Camp Counsellors and the impending fate that is nature-oriented team-building. Whatever the hell that meant.⤴︎