Chapter Text
Allie’s well aware she ain’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.
Don’t get her wrong, she ain’t stupid. Stupid people are good for nothin’s. The kinda folks that sit on their ass and whine when shit gets tough instead of trying to figure shit out for themselves. Lazy, unskilled, pity-partying layabouts.
No—she ain’t stupid, not by a long shot; she just ain’t smart.
City smart, y’know? Book smart and math smart and fashion smart and eloquent and all that other carp that never really mattered in Little Bonito when push came to shove.
It’s a bit of a problem, really, when she’s planning on packing up her things to head off for a place where carp like that’s apparently all that matters.
Idly spinning her dualies around her fingers and staring out the window, she gazes over flat roads and flatter expanses of field and does her best to memorize the placement of the stars littering the sky above them.
(According to Mrs. Fern, she may not see ‘em again for a while. City’s too bright for a good view—light pollution or somethin’ like that. Blocks ‘em out.)
She stays like that—waiting, watching—til she gives up trying to sit still and decides to do what she always does when she can’t sleep: get some fresh air.
Heading down creaky stairs with light footsteps, she pries the screen door open inch by squeaky inch, quietly slips outside, and unceremoniously plops herself down on the edge of the porch. An early autumn breeze weaves its fingers through her tentacles and some crickets sing their greetings out to anyone willing to lend them an ear, but she doesn’t pay any of it much mind. Everywhere she looks is grass and field and old barn walls and as she stares up toward a sky full of stars that whisper of endless opportunities, the only thing she can really think about is whether city life is actually worth all the hype it gets.
The turfing scene in Inkopolis is the best of the best, or so she’s been told. Where all the action is. The place every turfer worth a damn’s scramblin’ to get to.
She had torn through the local turf scene years ago. Didn’t take her long, to be honest—Little Bonito ain’t called Big Bonito for a reason; there’s not exactly a whole lot of turf worth fighting over and the bits that are worth it don’t often have many new faces joining the fray.
Turfers in Little Bonito don't have any places to try the fancy new game mode with the clams. They don’t have any of the big fancy stadiums with the big fancy crowds, they don’t have any of the big name sponsorships that come with that kind of attention, and they don’t have any of the big fancy tournaments that offer big fancy paychecks if you win. Folks at home don’t have any of the fancy opportunities that come with a big city turf scene and she knows, deep in her gut, that she can only be crowned Skipjack County Fair’s finest marksman so many times in a row (that one year with Tyler Morgan did not count and everyone knows it) before she runs out of real competition.
She’s a big fish stuck living in a pond with stale water that shrinks by the day and for as much as she really doesn’t want to have to leave the safety of home turf for a real chance to swim alongside people on her level, things are definitely starting to feel a little cramped around here.
Allison Wells ain’t smart, but she’s a damn good shot with the pair of dualies she built and she’s gonna prove it.
Inkopolis, watch out.
As it turns out, the answer to whether Inkopolis living is really worth all the hubbub is a big, fat, in-your-face ‘no.’
For one, everything in the city’s expensive. All that’s sold anywhere she can find is the name-brand fancy shit—clothes, drinks, food, you name it, there’s always a damn logo plastered on everything somewhere or another. When you factor in that the only way to get some stuff at all is apparently through tickets largely paid out by a joint that looks about as shady as Meemaw’s old willow tree, Inkopolis does a damn fine job of making a girl want to just turn tentacle and run along home.
Doesn’t help that most of the folks she’s met out and about ain’t exactly interested in chattin’ much.
The problem isn’t that Inkopolis doesn’t have any squids to talk to. Inklings are everywhere—littered around streetcorners n’ shops n’ alleyways, hustling and bustling like ants through a jumbled jungle of skyscrapers and graffiti; they’re all plenty friendly, but not friends. Folks plenty willing to stop and give her directions when she asks for ‘em, but not ones that linger to ask how Ma’s doing or tell her how she’s grown so much taller for the third time this month.
Everything just feels so… empty. Impersonal. Brightly colored and busy and so full of life it feels like it’s going to burst, but lacking all the things that really make a place feel alive.
(Mrs. Fern was right—you really can’t see the stars for shit in the city. The lights in Inkopolis never sleep.)
The turfing is pretty good, though.
In the end, that’s what she came here for, isn’t it?
The turfing in Inkopolis is good, Allie has learned, because the turfers here are the best at what they do.
Chargers that almost never miss, Rollers that may as well be ghosts for all you see them until they’ve gone and run you over, Splatlings that always seem to conveniently have a full charge—for all she may have been the best in Little Bonito, Little Bonito’s turf scene is little more than a drop in the veritable ocean of Inkopolis’s skill floor.
Which means she gets her ass kicked a lot.
A lot a lot.
Being a damn good shot with a pair of dualies, as it turns out, is a skill that doesn’t really mean much when you can’t manage to get close enough to hit anybody.
She takes a breath—once, twice, thrice, and one more just for good measure before getting back to work demolishing the set of dummies in the training room she had booked for herself.
Bob, weave, and remember to breathe; nice and easy. Just like Pawpaw taught her.
She can do this. She’ll do this. She’ll show all of them.
Each loss makes her bite at the bit to queue up again, adrenaline running through her veins like a livewire, wild and twisting and red-hot as the anger that accompanies it—both from her and at her.
Here’s a neat little fact about the Inkopolis turfing scene she’d had to find out the hard way: city slickers ain’t impolite the way they are back home.
They don’t call you out on your seahorseshit, they don’t tell you to fuck off, no—Inkopolitans leave all their nastiness unsaid behind a farce of kindness and positivity that’s paper-thin at best and it’s downright unnerving.
The momentary sneers at the leaderboards when someone on their team has a bad game, the sly, brief glances over at someone when their splat counts just aren’t good enough, they size up their teammates like sea snakes looking for their next meal, decked out in whatever brand new brightly-colored whoozawhatsit is trending to hide from the fangs that lie beneath their smiles.
Allie hates it. The posturing, the gossip, the ever-turning rumor mill about some team’s infighting drama and someone else’s washed out tourney results. The posts on Squinstagram about their shitty feedin’ teammates, the clips of mistakes and jabs at people doing their best that spread like a wildfire on Squitter. She’d tried logging off, but that hadn’t exactly worked well when who you know—and who knows you—is apparently just as important in the Inkopolis turfing scene as how you do in your matches.
The lack of competition back home had been stifling, sure, but at the very least her opponents there hadn't been her enemies off the battlefield too. (Except Tyler Morgan. Fuck Tyler Morgan.)
But hey, what does she know? She’s just some Lil’billy nobody. A feeding hick with a player name that ain’t fresh who doesn’t dress right and doesn’t play right and can’t do anything right no matter where she goes.
She ain’t good at reading and writing and math. She ain’t smart enough to go to some big fancy school like her brother and she ain’t pretty enough to get a big fancy modeling job like her cousin Jessie and while Allie ain’t stupid, if she’s not good at turfing, then she’s not really sure what else she’s got going for her but for the fact that she doesn’t know when to quit.
So she presses on. Queues up for more games. Pretends her gut doesn’t twist every time she sees a post calling her some new word for garbage, gaslights herself into thinking she doesn’t bite her lip watching as it happens to someone else soon after.
She’s trying. They all are. Isn’t that good enough?
She needs to patch up the tubing on her dualies again. The leak this time is small, nothing she can’t handle with a little duct tape and some good old-fashioned elbow grease, but it is a stark reminder all the same that she is running on limited funds and limited time. If her dualies shit out—really shit out, not another small ding here or chip there she can jerry-rig a fix for or flat out ignore until it becomes an actual issue later down the line—she’s fucked, plain and simple.
She doesn’t have anyone to bail her out this time. There’s no more tools and old spare parts buried in the back of Pawpaw’s shed for her to peruse whenever something starts to give, no more assistance begrudgingly given with old, wrinkled hands when she inevitably screws something up. There’s no more warm cookies waiting for her on the kitchen counter and no more hands drawing her close as they figure out a plan of action, no more cheering from her younger siblings when she takes her repairs for a test run against the makeshift training dummies they’d set up behind the barn a few years back.
Allie’s alone. She’s alone in Inkopolis, living on a tight budget to chase dreams that feel like they’re drifting farther out of reach by the day, and she quite simply can’t afford to mess up anymore.
She’ll need a new roll of duct tape soon, but truth be told she’s not sure how long she can keep patching things up for and it’s a problem better left for another day. She still needs to get groceries tonight, and then she needs to check in on the leaky faucet in her bathroom her landlord refuses to fix properly. She can worry about getting more repair supplies if and when she needs them.
For now, all she can do is save her spare change and try her best to win a few extra games.
She hopes it’s enough, but she’s not stupid enough to say that it will be.
Inkopolis streets are crowded at best and overstimulating at worst and sometimes there’s so much going on that Allie feels like she can’t breathe. Jingles ringing out from storefronts, music blasting from some asshole squidkids’ phones who apparently don’t know what headphones are despite having them hanging around their necks, the whirr of skateboards going to-and-fro and trains passing by, the city is a chaotic melody of sights and smells and sounds that more often than not blurs together into an absolutely awful headache.
It’s one of the biggest reasons why, for the most part, Allie barely notices the woman watching the entrance of Deca Tower at first. Gray tentacles, pretty eyes, stark white face mask, her presence is another blip on a constantly-pinging radar of activity that’s all too easy to overlook until it isn’t.
Day after day, Allie heads to Deca Tower and catches sight of a woman lurking outside the entrance quietly watching squids come and go.
Day after day, an Inkling with gray tentacles, pretty eyes, and a stark white face mask watches and waits and must not find what she’s looking for.
Day after day, Allie wonders what exactly that lady’s after, but does as the Inkopolitans do and doesn’t stop to ask.
Time is money, and she doesn’t have any to waste. Tick tock.
The first time Allie talks to Deca Tower lady, it’s a crisp autumn morning—just cold enough to nip at her skin, but not enough to bite.
Even after sleeping in a bit later than originally planned it’s still plenty early by the time she arrives at the square, the usual crowds nowhere to be seen as the sun starts to peek over the horizon. The early risers of the hottest place to be in the city of color rush for their morning coffee and drowsily start to gear up for the day ahead as the various shop owners and employees show up to open their businesses, and although most folks are still sleeping and won’t be up for another few hours, Miss Mysterious is already firmly planted in her usual spot by Deca Tower, gaze tired, but still searching, as always, for something she hasn’t yet found.
Allie plops herself down on a nearby bench in silence for exactly twenty minutes, idly sipping at an overpriced pumpkin spice latte that really isn’t as life changing as folks insisted in a poor attempt to wake herself up and mind her own business.
It’s an attempt that promptly fails by minute twenty one.
Her latte sits on her tongue like mud, flavorless and too flavorful all at once in a way that feels disgustingly fake, the billboard across from the bench she’d parked herself at switching to its next allotted ad for a product she doesn’t care about and won’t be buying. The square’s clock rings out to indicate the passing of time and maybe Allie’s just bored, maybe she’s just plain nosy, maybe being in Inkopolis for so long has finally driven her completely insane, she doesn’t know exactly why, but her attention finds itself drawn back to Deca Tower lady.
And it’s then—then, when Allie’s running on nothing but sugar, spice, caffeine, spite, and a dream, when she’s grumpy and annoyed and homesick at the asscrack of dawn, that their eyes meet.
The woman’s gaze is piercing, almost feeling as if it can stare right through to her soul. It hunts for something just out of reach as her eyes trail their way down freckled cheeks and broad shoulders, and they light up with a small glimmer of hope as they pause to rest at the dualies strapped to Allie’s side.
(Allie can’t tell for sure what lies underneath the stark white face mask the woman never seems to take off, but there’s a slight upward movement where it rests on her cheeks, a slight squinting of her eyes, that makes her think that Miss Deca Tower might be smiling at her.)
So, like any polite person should, she offers a wave of greeting with a simple, “Mornin’, stranger.”
She gets a small nod of acknowledgement from the woman in response and Allie notes that Miss Towerlicious’s eyes are still searching her over as they turn their attention back to her face—watching, waiting, desperately scanning for something beneath its surface Allie doesn’t know if she has.
“Can I help ya with something?”
“Mm… perhaps.” The woman’s voice is low, smooth, drenched in the type of exhaustion that can only come from too many consecutive nights spent without proper sleep. She tilts her head ever so slightly, the umbrella clasped in her hands idly twirling as she takes a step back and turns away. Allie is prepared to leave their interaction at that until Miss Mysterious sends a sly glance back over her shoulder, a challenge written in her gaze as she asks, “Can you help me with something?”
The woman does not wait for an answer before turning squid and disappearing beneath the grate at her feet.
Allie’s not an Inkopolitan. She doesn’t like preppy coffee and trendy brand name clothes with prices that make her wallet cry. She doesn’t like the crowds and she doesn’t like the noise and she doesn’t like the constant light in a city that never fully goes to bed despite its residents sleeping half the day away. She doesn’t walk right, she doesn’t talk right, and apparently she doesn’t play right either, but if there’s one thing she does know how to do a damn fine job of, it’s sticking her nose in somebody else’s business.
The remains of her shitty latte are haphazardly thrown in the nearest trash can as she gets to her feet, quickly forgotten as she makes her way over to the grate—one step, two steps, three steps, four.
You can take a girl out of Little Bonito, but you can’t take the Little Bonito nosiness out of a born and raised Lil’billy.
With a deep breath, Allie turns squid and takes the plunge into the great unknown.
The grate is connected to a large series of tunnels buried beneath the city’s surface.
It’s a veritable maze, really; a tangle of twists and turns and intersections leading to who knows where and who knows what that appears to stretch on without end, it’d probably be easy to get lost in if not for the trail of faintly glowing green ink painting the path forward.
At the head of the trail rests a silhouette that always pauses just long enough to remain in view, appearing and disappearing with eyes that light up with a glimmer of something curious, twinkling like the stars Allie hasn’t seen properly in months.
They move like a dance as the woman paints the next legs of the journey ahead and waits, a back and forth tango of pause and go that’s almost dizzying. For a moment it almost makes Allie feel like a kid again—like she’s back home exploring the hills and the fields and anything she could get her inky little tentacles on with a crooked-beaked grin, the thrill of adventure setting her every nerve alight with a sort of giddiness she hasn’t felt since she left home, since… No. She’s not going to think about that. Not right now.
Calling the whole experience anything less than fascinating would be doing it a disservice.
It has Allie hooked from moment one.
Miss Deca Tower’s name, Allie learns, is Marie.
She is supposedly some big name Inkopolis singer Allie has never heard of in her life, and she seems downright gobsmacked that Allie does not recognize her, the incredibly famous duo of performers she is apparently half of, or the hypothetically iconic music she plays from her phone in a hasty, last ditch attempt to try and get her recognition that does not work.
It is a realization that, while does seem to make her pause, is clearly not deemed important enough to stop her from once more trailing her eyes over Allie like she had back at the square, something unreadable in her gaze. Just as they had then, her eyes quickly zero in on the familiar pair of dualies Allie never goes anywhere without.
“You know how to use those?”
Allie almost wants to laugh. This woman had led her on a winding chase through suspicious underground tunnels and took her out to the boonies of who the fuck knows just to ask her if she can use the dualies she made?
“Course.” Allie grins, wide and roguish, reaching for the worn grips of her weapons of choice and pulling them out to proudly show them off in all their scratched-up glory—flaking paint, chipped nozzles, duct tape and all. “Wouldn’t carry ‘em with me if I didn’t. A little rough around the edges, but they get the job done.” She holds them out closer to Marie for her to inspect. “League legal and everything—got ‘em inspected a while back since a lotta turf leagues are stingy about lettin’ ya use custom stuff they haven’t signed off on n’ all that.”
Marie accepts Allie’s unspoken invitation to look her creations over, but doesn’t give any indication as to what she thinks of them at first glance other than a small hum and an idle statement of, “I see.”
Allie feels like she’s being circled by a shark as Marie lightly traces her fingers over the engravings on the side of her dualies before she takes a step back.
“How proficient are you with shooters?”
“Too used to rollin’ around to really make ‘em work that great for me, but I can usually do alright with one in a pinch.” Allie blinks. “Why?”
The next few moments pass slowly, the silence between them thick and sticking like molasses as it drips past.
“I think,” Marie eventually says, “that I could use your help.”
Being Agent Four comes with its upsides and downsides.
For one, the work doesn’t pay. It eats through her free time like her brother eats through the pie every year at Squidmas Dinner—voraciously, incessantly, and mostly unapologetically, and she learns very quickly that being a secret agent is not at all as glitzy as it is in the movies.
There are no special effects, no sunglasses, no walking away from explosions unharmed. Fuck-ups where she doesn’t look even remotely cool are numerous and unfortunately common, she has no idea what she’s doing with about half the weapons she’s handed, and her uniform is butt ugly and isn’t at all designed to look nice for an audience. Not that she could show it to one anyways, given, y’know, secret agents being a secret and all.
If not for the boots offering a slight break from the reflective yellow mess that is her new Hero Suit, the whole outfit would honestly make her feel like a walking traffic cone. Well. Sort of new. The jacket has someone else’s agent number written on its inside collar in loopy strokes of what appears to be permanent marker, but hey—there isn’t anything wrong with hand-me-downs if they’re still in good shape and whoever last had this set of gear had otherwise taken good care of it, so it works out.
The gear does have its benefits, though, the biggest of which being that it does its intended job and it does it well. The jacket is lightweight and easy to slip on and off, but surprisingly durable for how comfortable it is. It eats its fair share of hits before it ever starts to crack under pressure, and it’s a testament to the quality of its design that it has already saved her skin more than once as she stumbles through learning her way around the kettles near Tentakeel Outpost.
Another plus: any and all repairs she might ever need on any of it are free. The parts, the work, everything—all free, done by a profreshional, and done fast. So long as she helps test out the Hero weapons for Sheldon, that is, which, considering she’d have been willing to pay every G to her name and more to take a set of dualies like the kind they’ve got lying around for use in agent business for a spin, is kind of a no-brainer.
So she throws her all into things. Scrimmage times and dummy drill sessions are quickly swapped for clearing out kettles; home-cooked dinners are traded for snacks and takeout between her kettle runs. She takes the earlier ranked slots, goes home later, stays awake longer, pushes herself harder. The days of her new life as Agent Four melt together into a mess that—while not perfect, is now more a watercolor blur she’s doing her best to wade through than a mess of murky water she’s actively drowning in.
Marie repeatedly reminds Allie that she can stop anytime she wants, but Allie ain’t stupid and it’s obvious that Agent Two had needed the help for a lot longer than she’d worked up the nerve to ask for it.
(The whole city’s at stake here. While that’s definitely a heavy burden for two squids to bear, it’s one that must have been downright crushing for one to try to lug around on her own. Allie ain’t got anybody in the big city, sure, but she’s really startin’ to suspect that Miss Marie ain’t got anyone either.)
Allie ain’t stupid and she ain’t a quitter either, but she’s always been a bleeding heart with a soft spot for pretty girls, so day by day, hour by hour, fuckup by fuckup, Agent Four presses on.
The Hero Charger, Four finds, is fun.
While she’s definitely a dualies main at heart, chargers were her first love—one she’d never fully gotten over.
If she closes her eyes she can almost feel the ghosts of old, wrinkled hands over hers and the wood of an old Bamboozler beneath her fingertips, can still hear the echoes of a low, grumbling voice guiding her to line up her shots with the cans they’d set up along the fence. A Splatterscope lovingly constructed in the depths of Pawpaw’s tool shed with tiny hands, hand-me-down tools, and big dreams now rests largely unused under her bed, but she’ll never forget how her first game, her first splat, with it had felt magical, thrilling, a rush unlike anything she’d ever felt before.
Turfing was something Allison Wells had fallen into scope-first with shaky hands on unstable footing, and even though she now knows how to roll with the punches and land on her feet more, the feeling of a charger in her grasp is something she’ll never truly outgrow.
Aim, charge, fire. A comforting rhythm that never changes.
(She tries not to think about how looking through a dusty scope sometimes feels more like home than rolling around dummies with the pair of dualies she’d built herself, but doesn’t always succeed.)
“You’re an excellent shot,” Two tells her, as Four hands over another Zapfish.
Four grins, wide and smug, bringing a hand up to point a thumb at her own chest. “Skipjack County fair’s best sharpshooter four years runnin’. Only got dethroned by Tyler Morgan one year ‘cause I caught a nasty cold and couldn’t see straight.” She looks around, exaggeratedly checking for eavesdroppers she knows aren’t there, before winking and quietly adding, “Just between you n’ me… we don’t count that year.”
“What year?” The small, mischievous smile that crosses Two’s face is only there for a few brief moments before it fades back under a mask of careful stoicism, but it’s bright as a dying star and just as colorful. “Quit talking nonsense, Agent.”
Four laughs. “If you think that’s nonsense, you haven’t heard anythin’ good yet.”
Gently placing the Hero Charger back in its carrying case so it can send the data it’d collected today over to Sheldon, Four tries to think of a good story to fill the time before the next kettle as she latches the case shut.
“I ever tell ya the story of how I conned my neighbor’s little brother into climbing a pile of seahorse shit for a popsicle?”
“No,” Two says, “I don’t think you have.”
“It started a few years ago. It was hotter than a fresh-boiled lobster that whole summer, but the day it all went down was toasty enough to pop a cornfield…”
Four’s not gonna beat around the bush here: she has serious problems when it comes to ink management. Her aim’s good, her movement’s getting better—cod knows it better be with how hard she’s been drilling herself on it recently—but her usual game plan of running in first and preparing for the shitstorm she’s actively headed face-first into has been really biting her in the ass lately and is more than likely the reason she’s been hardstuck at B+ in two out of four game modes. (The others, she’s been repeatedly banging her head against the wall at around A rank.)
At least half her issues can probably be blamed on the fact that any weapon other than a charger or a pair of dualies still feels unfamiliar in her hands, but even then, she’s always had a habit of being a bit too eager to go in guns blazing to a fight. It’s a habit, admittedly, that she does not think she will be breaking today considering she’d once again ran in without thinking things through and she’s shit outta ink, is stuck on a shooter so she can’t roll away, there’s still an octoling left on the field, and there isn’t much time left before they’re going to be all up in her face with their guns blazing.
“Shit,” she hisses, her Hero Shot angrily beeping at her for trying to fire it without any ink left in the tank, “Outta ink again.”
“Four,” Agent Two urges, words crackling over the communicator with well-meaning, but unneeded concern, “you need to get out of there.”
“Nah. No need for runnin’. Have a little faith, will ya?” Four holsters her gun and shrugs her shoulders, tuning out Agent Two’s protests and waiting for her enemy to draw in closer as an idea forms in her head. It ain’t exactly a bright idea, nor is it turf legal, but if she didn’t know more than one way to get out of a situation like this from dealing with Tyler Morgan for over ten years, she’d be stupid.
(Allie is many things, but she is not stupid.)
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees it. A small ripple in the trail of ink they’d painted earlier. They’ve closed in. It’s now or never.
“I may be out of ink…”
Four draws back her hand, curls her fingers into a fist, and grins as she moves forward to meet her opponent up close and personal.
“…but I sure as shell ain’t outta options.”
Her fist crashes into the Octoling’s face before they even realize what hit ‘em.
If glares could kill, Four is fairly sure that she’d be dead on the floor right now. The look Two shoots her way as she hands off the kettle’s Zapfish is perfectly aimed to do maximum emotional damage and cuts deeper than any of the scrapes she’d picked up along the way, rubbing salt in her wounded pride as golden eyes trail their way over freckled cheeks and broad shoulders to narrow at the quickly swelling mess over her right eye.
“Are you alright?”
The honest answer would probably be no. Truthfully Four doesn’t think she’s been alright for a while now.
To start the list of things in her life that aren’t alright in any sense of the word, there’s today’s incident. She had messed up and let an Octo get a pretty nasty hit in. She didn’t think fast enough, didn’t move fast enough, didn’t act fast enough, and she paid for it in blood, sweat, and ink upon impact. She’ll continue to pay the Oops Tax in the next few days as the bruising goes through the ugly process of healing, probably mess something up in one of her games when it inevitably fucks with one of the moves she’s been practicing, and when it’s finally all over she doesn’t doubt it will still linger in some report or another, a stain on the competency record of Agent Four.
Her dualies are likely going to start leaking again sooner rather than later, she’s been struggling even when they do function well, she barely has any friends in Inkopolis, the few she thought she had back home don’t bother to keep in touch, and she’s fucking things up like she always does even when the goals she’s daring to reach for aren’t hers. If she keeps up this daydream of saving the city, becoming a pro turfer, and somehow miraculously getting her life together, duct tape and glue aren’t going to be enough to prevent her from falling apart at the seams.
But a shiner is nothing major. Nothing that won’t heal. Nothing she can’t ignore. So she lies through her beak.
“Never better!” Her smile is syrupy sweet and faker than the ingredients of discount Makomart candy. “Where to next, boss?”
“Home, dinner, shopping, whatever you feel like, really.” Agent Two says flatly, taking the Zapfish and gently placing it into a carrier. “You’re done for tonight.”
“You’re benching me? Seriously?” Four’s smile falters ever-so-slightly, mask cracking around the edges. “C’mon, you don’t really think a couple of scrapes are gonna slow me down, do ya?”
“No. A few scrapes won’t slow you down a bit, and that’s precisely what I’m worried about.”
Two zips the carrier shut after giving the Zapfish one last scritch under its chin, getting back up to meet Four’s gaze with a look that pierces like an E-Liter. Marie looks at her as if she can stare right through to her soul, hunting for something just out of reach as her eyes trail over her scrapes and light up with a small glimmer of concern Allie doesn’t need and doesn’t want because she’s fine. She’s always fine.
(She has to be fine because if she’s not fine she’s nothing, and if she’s nothing, then there’s no point to even trying, is there?)
“I know my limits.”
Two doesn’t budge an inch. “I’m glad you do. You’re still done for the day.”
“But—”
“Go home and get some rest. We’ve made more than enough progress for tonight.”
Four looks at Two—really looks at her, and finds no dishonesty in her words. They’ve been running kettles today for a while, and although whatever fancy makeup Two’s got on does a decent job of covering the shadows she’s sure are lurking under her eyes, the slump of her shoulders and the weariness that drips into her tone are a dead giveaway that she’s exhausted too, even if she won’t admit it.
Four ain’t smart, but she knows better than to push someone else’s limits.
“You sure? I can do one more if we need.”
“Positive. You’ve done enough for today. You did well,” a small, amused smile curls its way upon Two’s lips, “even if you were a bit reckless at times.”
Four reaches up a hand to scratch at the back of her neck with a sheepish look. “I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry. I kicked the crap outta that guy.”
“I know.” Two lets out a laugh—more of a chuckle, really, something small and low and absolutely unrefined down to the core. “You pack a mean right hook.”
For the first time in ages, Allison Wells feels like she is seen for her mistakes, but not judged for them.
It’s a nice feeling. She didn’t realize how much she missed it.
The sun still rises, the world still turns, and Allie still misses her grandfather, but day by day, moment by moment, time goes on.
The first sign of winter’s arrival comes not with a nip, but a bite of wind just a tad too chilly for comfort.
Over the next week or so a stark drop in temperature repeatedly taps the shoulders of Inkopolis residents with a not-so-friendly hello and the squids that frequent the square quickly begin to prepare for the cold to come: sleeves are no longer rolled-up for the aesthetic, coats are no longer left casually tied around the waist, and beanies, gloves and earmuffs are once again pulled out of their annual retirement to serve in the line of duty in the seemingly endless war against the chills.
The businesses shift; shitty overpriced lattes switch their seasonal flavors to the next fake preppy flavor trend, the joints that serve them start offering hot chocolate alongside their usual menu. Fall clothing lines are shuffled out of storefront windows in favor of their warmer winter counterparts, Squidmas product advertising, as usual, peeks its head into public view far too early, and Splatoween costume pop-ups fade in and out of sight as fast as the ghosts that make up the theme of the holiday they celebrate.
Allie climbs another rank in two game modes, Four clears out more kettles, and life in Inkopolis, much like the squids who live there, does not stop in the face of the changing seasons.
The sun still rises, the world still turns, and she still misses her grandfather, but day by day, moment by moment, time goes on.
Today’s sandwich is simple. Sliced up meatball from the back of the freezer, two slices of cheese from a small package that had been on sale for being just slightly out of date, the end pieces of her open loaf of bread, her dinner for the night is the definition of a meal thrown together on a budget, but it may as well taste like the cooking of a five star chef considering she’s hungry enough to eat a seahorse.
It’s her own fault, really. She’d been intending to eat her sandwich for lunch, but she’d forgotten to inspect her dualies before her first few matches of the day, failed to notice the duct tape she’d slapped on a few weeks back was starting to fall loose, and then had to spend her usual lunch time patching up her dualies in a hurry before she got back to it. She’d barely managed to scrape things back together before she’d been thrown headfirst into one of the toughest games of Clam Blitz she’d had in ages, the tubing she really should have properly replaced a while ago started leaking again by her last game of the day, and saying that it had been a day—maybe even a week—would probably be the understatement of the century.
“Looks like it’s sandwiches for the both of us tonight, huh?”
Four glances up, dragged out of her thoughts by Agent Two taking a seat next to her with a small exhausted sigh and a neatly-wrapped, but slightly-squashed sandwich clasped in her hands.
“Was s’posed to be my lunch, actually. Just… been a busy day n’ all. Shit happened.” She shrugs. “Didn’t find the time for it.”
“Makes sense.” Two unwraps her sandwich with a small hum, not bothering to look up as she nonchalantly asks, “Your dualies still giving you trouble?”
Four doesn’t fully manage to avoid choking on her food as the question smacks her across the face like a Dynamo Roller. How did she—
“I watch your matches when I get the chance,” Two explains, reading Four like an open book with all the ease of someone simply commenting on the weather. “You do pretty good out there.”
There’s so much there to unpack that Four doesn’t even know where to start, but Agent Two doesn’t give her the time to think it through before she continues casually steamrolling through any anonymity Four thought she had.
“That said, you did seem a bit hesitant to dodge roll in your last few matches today.” Her free hand briefly rises to her chin, index finger stretching out to idly tap a few times as she thinks. “Strategy wise, you’re normally fairly aggressive and often tend to leap before you look. In the cases you don’t remember to check your surroundings in advance and there isn’t an escape route available when you need it, you generally use your dodge rolls to maneuver to a safer position for you to finish a fight in your favor—which is a smart move so long as your opponents don’t read you beforehand.”
Four blinks, trying and failing to process how long Two must have been watching her matches to figure this all out. It must have been a while, sure, but how much had she seen? How much had she seen and how much had she seen through?
The questions sink in her stomach like an anchor, unanswered and unasked, pulling more worries down with them.
“It’d be odd for you to suddenly change your habits like that unless something was forcing you to—things like that don’t change overnight, after all—and you kept eyeing your dualies as if you expected them to fall apart.”
Had Two been watching all those mistakes Four made over and over again? Had she seen all the failures, all the struggling, all the times Four had been just another feeding nobody in a crowd of wannabes that are never good enough to cut it?
The prospect is terrifying. Being seen. Being watched. Being known for her mistakes like she always is.
“Plus,” Two adds, finishing her analysis as her hand drops from her face to reach into her pocket and pull out a mostly-empty roll of gray duct tape with a knowing look, “you dropped this earlier.”
Ah, shoot. That’d do it.
Four lets out a grunt around a mouthful of sandwich before shoving it aside and snatching the duct tape out of Two’s hands.
“Leaky pressure hose,” she admits, after a moment. “Didn’t want it to burst, so I was tryin’ to be gentle with it. Been patching it up as I go and hoping for the best.” The snort that rips itself from her lungs is a tired, bitter thing, something caught between a laugh and a sob and despite her best efforts, her fingers twitch around the roll of duct tape. “Fat lotta good that did me when all I ever do is screw things up worse than I found ‘em.”
Two hums, glancing up to look Four over once more, gaze searching for something Four doesn’t know if she has and doesn’t know if she ever will. “You’re being quite harsh on yourself.”
“Not really.” Four shrugs, turning her eyes to stare out at anything and nothing in a poor attempt to distract herself from the tightening of her chest, from the heartbeats steadily growing louder in her ears. “Just bein’ honest. You’d probably already’ve finished up with all this if you’d grabbed someone else to help ‘stead of me.”
“That’s not true and you know it.”
“I dunno, boss, it sure feels like it is when I keep draggin’ us down and screwing shit up.”
A hand makes its way onto her shoulder, gripping it firmly.
“Four, I need you to look at me. Can you do that for me?”
“Doesn’t matter if I do,” she mumbles, “won’t make much of a difference.”
Two sighs, plastic crinkling as she wraps up her sandwich and sets it aside. Shortly after, a hand makes its way to rest on Four’s shoulder.
“I started watching your matches in September.”
Four blinks, jolting up to look at Two, at Marie, in shock. “You asked me for help in October.”
Marie nods. “The first match of yours I ever saw was on September Fourth—a game of Clam Blitz at the Reef that started a few minutes past noon. You were in low C-rank at the time, fresh on the scene with a pair of chipped dualies and something to prove, and you didn’t play perfectly, by any means, but there was something in the way you moved that was just…” She trails off, trying to find the right words to describe things. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off of it. Off of you.”
Allie suddenly finds herself with the desire to super jump into the nearest hole and bury herself in it, but Marie’s hand is grounding, sturdy, and prevents her from moving with its mere presence.
“I still remember that game to this day,” Marie tells her. “Your team was horribly disorganized and couldn’t get a push together for the life of them, which, while not uncommon for C-rank clams, was still quite noticeable given that your Splat Roller didn’t know how to shark, your Heavy Splatling was trying to act like they were a frontliner, and your team’s Splat Charger had poor positioning and a stubborn habit of keeping to the same spot that let the enemy Splattershot walk all over them. The match looked hopeless, but then there you were: turf name Bonitowned, casually rolling in and out of the fray with her Splat Dualies, single-handedly keeping the game alive with a few picks here and a few splats there, casually slinging around tricks you just don’t see in C-rank.”
Her description rings a bell, but not clearly enough that Allie is able to remember the specific match she’s describing. Her games in September had been a blur of frustration and bad plays, a mess of constantly rotating teammates who wouldn’t work with her because her strategies either weren’t good enough or the mouth they came from not important enough to be worth listening to.
“You were getting more and more frustrated by the moment and you seemed to get saddled with cleaning up after your Splat Charger quite often, but you didn’t complain. You stayed focused, kept fighting, kept your head in the game. There was a look in your eye that said you were personally going to ensure that the enemy team would have to rip their victory from your cold, dead hands.” Marie’s lips twitch upwards. “And then your Splat Charger gave up.”
Wait a minute, Allie remembers that game. That match was… Oh. Oh no.
“They threw their weapon down and said some carp about how it wasn’t worth trying since you were going to lose regardless and you holstered your dualies, picked up their charger, lined up a shot, and took down the enemy Splattershot without so much as a word.” Marie chuckles. “It was the most memorable foul play I’d ever seen in my life.”
“Memorable. That’s a new one.” She bites at her lip in an attempt to muffle the huff that rips itself from her chest. “The refs preferred to call it ‘jaw-droppingly unsportsmanlike’. I got three game’s worth of rank points taken away for that, you know. Other guy only got one.”
“One you clearly made up for given the win streak you proceeded to go on afterwards.”
She raises an eyebrow. “You watched?”
A hum of confirmation. “That first game was memorable. You made an impression.”
Allie doesn’t really know how to take that. “Thanks, I guess?”
“That was a compliment.” Marie says, the hand on Allie’s shoulder giving it a small squeeze. “You made quite an impression, but I assure you it was a good one.”
A breath is let go that Allie didn’t realize she was even holding.
“My point is,” Marie continues, “I’ve been rooting for you far before I ever asked for your help. I wasn’t just grateful you agreed to help me that morning in October; I was grateful that it was you who agreed to help me.”
Oh.
“Admittedly, I was a bit desperate when I asked for your help, but I also asked you—and not someone else—because I believed in your skill. Your aim is phenomenal.” She smirks, honest to cod smirks, and adds, “Trust me. I would know.”
Oh.
“I asked for your help because I firmly believe you have the potential to go pro in the future, Allie.”
Oh.
Heat rushes over freckled cheeks and broad shoulders to settle in Allie’s chest, spreading its wings like a phoenix rising from the ashes of a freshly-lit bonfire. It’s a feeling that’s warm, almost uncomfortably so, and she doesn’t know whether she wants to pull her hands back from it or shove them in deeper.
Her throat tightens and a shuddering breath claws its way from her lungs.
“...Y’really mean that?” Her voice sounds tiny, weak, small, and it makes her stomach roil. She probably looks pathetic.
“I do. Every word.” Marie nods, turning to look up toward the setting sun. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, I…” There’s a story written in the slight hitching of her breath, but it’s one Marie leaves to drown in the moments of silence before she continues. “I sometimes struggle to overtly express my appreciation for things before they’re—when it’s important. It’s something I’ve been working on.”
She pulls her hand off of Allie’s shoulder to dip it into her pocket before pulling out a small slip of paper.
“Here,” she says, offering it to Allie with a twinkling smile and a glimmer in her eyes that sparkles like the stars Allie hasn’t seen properly in months. “For your dualies.”
Four, Allie, everything and everyone in between, reaches for it with shaking hands and tries not to cry upon seeing it’s a voucher for Ammo Knights with enough to cover current repairs and more.
(With how much her eyes are watering, she’s not sure she fully succeeds.)
“I can’t pay you for the agent work, but Sheldon owes me a few favors and with how much you’ve been throwing your all into things, this is the least I can do.”
All at once, Allie’s brain stops. Stops hesitating, stops overthinking, stops telling herself what she should and shouldn’t do because of what someone else might think of her. Her arms launch around Marie with all the speed of the shitty little bottle rockets her little brother plays around with when Ma isn’t looking and she closes the gap between them, desperately clinging to Marie’s shoulders like a lifeline as the past week’s, month’s, maybe even year’s emotions flood past her with the force of a broken dam.
Their embrace is awkward, but beautiful. Something that says a thousand words in none, pressing honey-sweet promises into Allie’s skin that everything is going to be okay and whispering reassurances she, for once, somewhat believes. It runs through her veins like a livewire, electrifying and invigorating and making her feel more alive than she has since her grandfather passed on.
Allison Wells tells Marie “thank you” the only way she remembers how as she falls apart, and as a hand slowly, gently makes its way across her back in smooth, repetitive motions, she thinks that everything is eventually going to be just fine and means it.
She’s not alone anymore.
She’s in Inkopolis, chasing daydreams of saving the city, becoming a pro turfer, and somehow miraculously getting her life together, but she’s not alone anymore and that makes all the difference.