Chapter Text
It was getting late. The evening’s guests had been gracious enough to fuck off, some needing a bit more encouragement than others. It was Floyd’s turn to mop the Lounge. A real pain in the ass, that was. He wasn’t in the mood; he was never truly in the mood for mopping and he’d been even less in the mood ever since some asshole had sent his steak back to the kitchen, citing it was “raw”. He’d show him raw. One more comment and the shitter was getting a hands-on raw experience.
And he’d only gotten off easy because Floyd was tired. TIIIIRED. It was his nth shift in a row, courtesy of Jade, because he’d asked Jade to cover for him last week then forgotten completely about the matter. Jade could’ve forgotten too, but nope, he’d chosen to be petty about it. Fuck Jade. So there he was, running ragged enough for his mopping performance to take a nosedive and no one around to ruffle his hair and offer some praise and encouragement after a whole week of hard work catering to Azul’s whims. Parsley didn’t make a fancy enough garnish, he’d said? Well gee, he’d gladly have added fresh basil leaves instead. If only they hadn’t run out of fresh basil leaves with the previous day’s lunch menu, which—guess what?—Azul had come up with. Fuck Azul too.
Being a teen chef was hard. And teen kitchen hand. And teen barman. And teen waiter. And teen cleaning staff. He wanted a raise.
He balanced both forearms on top of the handle, the mop sliding a few steps ahead as he let out a sigh. The blurry unmopped expanse of the dining hall looked so daunting. Blurrily daunting. His eyes weren’t at their best on land.
Those tired eyes set on a pale lump on the floor, narrowing as they tried to make out more detail. Some idiot must’ve forgotten their sweater. Great, more crap to the Lost & Found. Enough crap had been sitting in the box long enough to justify a bulk sale, or perhaps their long-awaited debut at the flea market. That one would be fun. He dragged himself towards the lump, mop trailing behind.
And, as Floyd daydreamed about the finer points of human retail bartering, the lump moved.
Had it really…?
He squinted, cursing the atmosphere and its shitty visibility. It was kinda funny, really: an accomplished nocturnal predator, terror of the deep benthos, stuck on land relying on nerfed eyes and a mop in place of his sharp claws. Eyes were failing hard, mop looked stupid. He had a keen nose, sure, but his nose wasn’t an option in a room that still reeked of cooking oil, detergent, and an amalgam of people he didn’t care about.
…Ah! It moved again! He knew he wasn’t seeing things. Well, true, he was seeing diddly squat, but y’know. Figurative. He approached his target slowly, step by careful step, body stiffening as he intently watched for signs of change. If it tried to dash away, he’d be ready.
No dashing happened. Once he was in range, for lack of a better idea, he prodded the lump with the mop.
The lump cooed.
“Waah!”
Cue movement from the kitchen area: his yelp of surprise had alerted a lone straggler—ah, Jade. Those footsteps had his unmistakable cadence.
“Is something the matter?”
“We’ve got a rat!” He shot a lightning-fast glance at his brother, approaching as he promptly drew his magical pen into a pest control stance, then set his gaze back on the living lump, eyes peeled. No scurrying away on his watch. “A big one.”
“It must have come in through the Hall of Mirrors. Poor thing, choosing the option with the lowest odds for survival… Some creatures are simply fated to meet an untimely demise, I suppose.” Jade planted himself beside him, pen crackling with magic, free hand on his chin as he, like Floyd had a minute earlier, inspected the misplaced quadruped with narrowed eyes. “My, this is one hairless rat.”
“…A naked mole rat?”
“Hm.” Jade bent down for a closer look, and he instinctively applied on him a layer of Bind the Heart. There was no telling whether that mystery mammalian could shoot acid. As Jade got closer, the beast batted its front paws: perhaps it had a rudimentary enough intelligence to sense danger, though its fight or flight response had been potato tier so far. “Unlikely. This specimen’s incisors are pitifully underdeveloped. However, the closer I look, the more familiar its features seem. I wonder…”
“Dunno, mountain critters are your thing, not mine.”
“Oh. I’ve got it now.”
“Yeah?”
“It appears to be a male human fry.”
“Oooh.” He crouched down next to Jade, the earlier fatigue and wariness replaced with a healthy dose of curiosity. A ‘baby’, right? First time seeing one up close. “Duh, of course it’s a fry. I mean, look at the size of this head!”
“Be careful, Floyd. I hear human fry are frequent carriers of disease, as well as being highly toxic themselves.”
And, as his brother put a hand on his shoulder and gently pulled him away, the wariness came back as fast as it had disappeared, accompanied by a nasty sort of realization. One that involved disinfectant spray and lots of scrubbing. That’s the fatigue coming back, too. Of course, neither his frown nor the reason behind it made it past Jade’s radar:
“May I remind you it’s still your turn to clean the hall today.”
“Piss off.”
He pulled Jade's scarf from around his shoulders and, with it, he picked up the baby, very much the same way one would pick up a scorching hot plate from the oven. The baby squealed, and Floyd flinched. He still had no proof that thing wouldn’t shoot acid. But a few seconds passed, no corrosive beam greeted his face, and so he allowed himself to relax and take a long hard look at their mysterious afterhours guest.
Well, he looked. Squinted. Turned his head a few degrees, trying his luck with a different angle. Same result regardless of method chosen: the baby had a blurry face. Blurry, yet in a more deliberate way than the rest of blurriness in the room. Indistinct. There was a pair of eyes on that face, he knew there had to be, and yet his brain refused to process them.
“Perhaps it’s a simple matter of cross-species familiarity,” Jade said, “but I have trouble writing it off as such. I feel like I’ve seen this baby before.”
"Yeaaah, I get you.” He turned the baby upside down, seeking a spark of inspiration. The baby giggled. No inspiration came. He turned the baby back upright. “For a moment I thought the lil' shrimp had shrunk on us, but even the lil' shrimp has more of a face."
"Our dear friend does have a face, indeed."
At Jade’s plain delivery, he burst out laughing, and the baby followed. That was the moment Floyd decided he liked the little thing. He brought a hand down to pat the tiny-yet-relatively-humongous head, ruffling the sparse mat of hair. It was rather soft.
“So where’d you come from, huh, little one? Did you just pop outta nowhere?”
“Goo,” the baby replied.
“It says spontaneous generation theories were debunked long ago, Floyd.”
“Ahha! Well maybe we’re about to debunk the debunking,” he beamed. “Imagine if humans just spawned into existence like that.”
“Oh dear, the very suggestion sends a chill down my spine.”
One land-dweller, two land-dwellers. Suddenly you had ten, then seventy, five hundred, nine thousand of them all clumped together in an exponentially growing fleshy mass as more and more dropped from the skies onto the wailing pile, a throng of wretched beings expanding across the increasingly scarce surface, struggling for a piece of land to plant their feet on. Okay, yeah, scary.
“Eugh.”
They sought each other’s eyes and nodded, a horrified grimace meeting a tight, tight, tight smile. Whatever Jade had visualized, it must have been just as terrible.
“I do however wonder,” his brother mused, “how human fry manage to get around. They are far too weighty to ride the wind the same way we rode the currents.”
“Ah! About that…”
He’d once discussed that very subject with the little shrimp, he had. From what Floyd had gathered, in that distant, magic-less world, one would occasionally find human fry in a basket floating down the river. Sometimes it was cat or dog fry, sometimes in a cardboard box. And sometimes inside a giant peach. Listen, he was willing to believe the part about babies in boxes, but he drew the line at the giant peach.
“…Nah, doesn’t apply here. No river and no basket,” he concluded.
“Baa!”
“That’s right, tiny.” Floyd poked the baby’s squishy cheek, and found he liked it, so he did it a few more times. “No basket, no nothing. How’d you end up here at Octavinelle, huh?”
“Baabaa.”
“Baabaa,” Floyd repeated, still prodding the babe’s cheek.
“It is quite the conundrum. A lone, unassisted human fry would be highly unlikely to make it here from the surrounding waters, and yet the Mirror Hall entrance has remained undisturbed since the dawdlers at table 15 deigned to vacate the premises. Which means that either—”
Well, out of the smiles Jade had been throwing at their little guest, the scary ones were progressively losing ground to the non-scary ones, though Floyd had some gripes with the pace. They both took their sweet time warming up to new presences, sure, but Jade truly took the cake. He could do with a nudge. A speed boost. Not even his nettlesome brother would deny the creature’s charm once he got a closer look, right? Right. In one swift move, he pressed the scarf-wrapped baby against Jade’s chest, and he had no choice but to accept the bundle.
…Then Jade, in a move just as swift, planted the aforementioned bundle on top of the nearest guest table. Meh.
“—That either our trespasser has been here longer than we realize, or that this is the work of teleportation magicks.”
Floyd picked the baby back up a moment before he rolled off to his demise—or, at least, to a nasty bump on his forehead. “Infiltration countermeasures doing a bang up job as usual.”
“Are you implying I was implying our illustrious headmaster might have slacked on his duties?”
He simply snorted.
“Perhaps, if we were to be charitable,” Jade suggested, “we could consider the alternative: it is not that the college’s apparition barriers are weak, but that the power used to forward us the fry was enough to override them.”
“Can’t have been his doing,” he said with a nod towards the baby. Sure, the thing was cute, and sure, he did seem to have a few traces of magical power in him, but those traces were impressively mediocre.
“Its parents, then? Had unexpected tragedy befallen them, I imagine they would do anything, no matter how impossible, to convey their progeny to safety.”
“The power of love, huh?”
Floyd took a long breath and closed his eyes, letting his mind paint the scene in all its poignant, gut-wrenching glory: two unfortunate human souls, assailed by ravenous wood creatures, or perhaps caught in a building in flames, or a sinking vessel, or a sinking vessel in flames. No way out. They’d look into their mate’s eyes, resigned to their fate yet determined to do what must be done so that their little fry, fast asleep and blissfully unaware of his surroundings, would have a chance at survival.
Overcome with emotion, Floyd scrunched up his face until he couldn’t scrunch it up more, and stuck his tongue out.
“Bleuurghhhhhhh.”
“Revolting, I know.”
“Humans are weird. Weak, stupid, and weird.”
“Weak, stupid, and rather fascinating, yes.” A beat. “I’m glad we were born in the ocean.”
“Yep.” Floyd let his shoulders sag and shook his head, unable to comprehend his surface-dwelling distant brethren. They had enough spare energy for last ditch teleportation efforts into entry restricted areas, yeah? Surely it would have been better spent fighting off monsters and putting out flames instead, the absolute chuckleheads. Or, y’know, warping the whole family into the nearest danger-free public space. But nope, the idiots went for the route where all of them might end up kicking the bucket. “Ah well, their aim was pretty sweet, I’ll give them that. A few steps off and the little guy doesn’t live to tell the story.”
Across the glass, the ocean floor extended before them; behind, the thick hardwood bar counter. Below were the foundations of the building, and right above, a very pointy-looking chandelier.
“If we’re being honest, we should attribute this one to luck.”
“Yeah, but imagine you spend your last droplet of magic to save your kid, then the kid goes and appears inside a block of cement.”
Jade had a laughing fit.
Floyd watched over him for a minute, ready to whack him on the back in case he choked. Again.
“Nnnnhffhehehh, hehehheh… A block, nnfufufuh—Inside a—PFFFFHAHAHAHAH (cough) hhah, ahaah! (cough, cough) Hee… heeheehee… NNFGHHGHHEE—”
It was taking too long. It wasn’t even that funny.
“Geez.” Okay, he’d had enough. He left his brother to deal with the last few coughs and wheezes on his own, and turned his attention back to the baby. “Anyway, where’d you leave Mummy and Daddy? They got eaten by a bear? Caught in a freak fire? Were they in trouble with the land mafia?”
The baby let out a joyful laugh, incipient teeth in full view, seemingly very amused by the idea of his parents’ demise.
Oh, and Jade was done. Fiiiiinallyyy. “Fear not, little fry. Should you have no home to return to, I’m sure Azul will find it in himself to take you in as spare ingredients.”
The baby looked just as pleased to hear that, and so was Floyd, who nodded along—until he registered the last three words, that is.
“You serious?!” he spat, outraged.
“I am serious.”
“As if! You know how he feels about fatty foods.” He pinched the chubby cheeks to make his case. And, y’know, just because.
“Oh. That’s a fair point. However, I was referring to potion ingredients, rather than—”
Floyd wasn’t listening anymore. The pull of the tender, pliant goodness was too strong. “Look at ‘em, stretching out like molten mozzarella.”
Chubby cheeks. Stretchy chubby cheeks. Soft, tasty, stretchy chubby cheeks.
He hadn’t had dinner and it showed. Those little mozzarella bites looked more tempting than they had any right to. If anything happened to them, it was Azul’s fault. His fault for denying him a meal until he was done mopping. Okay, true, he’d been filching bits and pieces from the odd plate, but…
Thunderous tummy rumbling rang across the hall.
Had that been him? Could have. He was hungry enough. The baby was grinning from ear to ear, which made those fat little cheeks look even meatier. He was so hungry and the baby was smiling and reaching out with his tubby little fingers and, fuck’s sake, it had to be bad manners to munch on something that just smiled at you, right?
In that moment of weakness—lucidity, as some would call it—he came to realize one thing: the rumbling had been loud. Like, LOUD. Far louder than his tummy could produce. And he knew the culprit well:
Jade’s eyes were fixed on the baby, his lips parted, drool threatening to drip from the corner of his mouth.
“Aw, man.” Floyd gave his brother a sympathetic slap on the shoulder. “I’ll make us some sandwiches later, ‘kay? We’ve got some leftover roast beef.”
“The roast beef is no more,” Jade replied, a little guilty.
As his hopes for a well-deserved mopping reward went up in smoke, Floyd was more than a little miffed.
*
Azul had been spending a dull yet productive evening at his desk in the company of paperwork when, augured by the clacking of four dress shoes, the door to the VIP room flew open. He did not bother to look up: only those two would dare enter without knocking first.
“Azul! Look what I got!”
He, very begrudgingly, disengaged from the documents and squinted at the parcel Floyd held out in his arms. The parcel had a face. A… fry of sorts?
Oh, worse. A human child.
“Put it back where you found it.”
“Was on the floor,” he shrugged.
Azul followed the direction Floyd’s finger pointed towards. It was, unfortunately, that of the dining hall.
He set his quill down and let out a deep sigh.