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“Alright,” Jonny said, looking TS directly in its eyes. “When we’re in there, we need to keep low. If we don’t stand out too much, Tim won’t see us coming.”
“Sir, Yes, Sir!” Toy saluted happily.
“He likely will see you, though,” Brian said from his spot in the shade. “That’s like, his whole thing.”
“We’ll just be really inconspicuous then,” Jonny rolled his eyes, “duh.”
“He’s so going to kill you,” Nastya said. “Like, you, specifically. Toy might just make it out alive.”
“Have you put on sunscreen yet?” Jonny asked, pouting. “No? Thought so.”
Nastya stuck her tongue out, “I don’t need to put on sunscreen. I’m immortal. Now fuck off to your very avoidable death.”
“Not to get into your adorable familial back-and-forth,” Ivy said, looking up from her book, “but Nastya, while you won’t die from it, you will with 96.7% guarantee get badly sunburnt within the next half an hour if you don’t put on sunscreen.”
The archivist then looked at Jonny.
“And Tim absolutely will kill you,” she told him. “I can cite off percentages for each type of death, but dying itself is inevitable for you today if you set this plan in motion.”
“Wet blankets, the three of you,” Jonny muttered, arms crossed over his chest.
“Let’s Do It Anyway?” Toy offered.
Jonny blinked, “You know what? Yeah! That’s the spirit! Let’s do it anyway!”
“Let’s Do It Anyway!” Toy cheered, and the two of them ran off, down the stairs into the pool, water pistols in hand.
“You wanna come to the bubbles section with me?” Ashes asked Tim.
“Bubbles?” Tim’s eyes glimmered, and he turned around onto his front, so he wasn’t just floating on his back anymore. His eyes went over to the more secluded, circular section of the pool, “Seems kinda full right now, though…”
Ashes just shrugged, “For now.”
They started swimming towards the bubbles section, and Tim decided to go swim after them.
It was such a nice day, really. The planet’s sun was shining bright, and while there were barely any clouds in the sky, it somehow still wasn’t too hot outside. Perfect timing for Aurora to fake an engine fault and “crash land” so her crew could go touch some grass for a few hours.
Ashes got to the edge of that circular section of the pool. They cleared their throat, and the few people that were already there all looked at them. Ashes gestured with their head to the open waters of the rest of the pool, and to Tim's amazement everyone immediately swam away. The quartermaster entered the section and got comfortable inside, and just then the bubbles started up.
Right as Tim was about to enter the little enclosed section to join Ashes, though, he felt a small patch of his scalp get wet.
He’d gone to great lengths to put his hair up in such a way that would prevent it from getting wet that day. He’d even put a shower cap on, so the fact that the water spray somehow destabilised his whole setup spoke of great aim.
Tim took a deep breath.
Then immediately turned around, pointed at Jonny and TS (because who else could it be, at that point), and cried out, “This means war!”
Jonny just grinned.
“You know it does!” he yelled back, then shot water directly in Tim’s face.
Tim threw himself to the side to take cover behind a pool wall, and shook his head to get some of the water off his face, as it was getting somewhat annoying. He could also hear a pool guard shouting something about the kids’ pool being close by, and about water pistols not being allowed in the calmer pool for grown-ups, but Tim doubted that that would be enough to convince Jonny and TS to stop their watery barrage.
Okay, think.
Jonny was standing closer, and quite in the open. The idiot was too used to his immortality to make good tactical decisions. Toy, on the other hand, seemed to take pride in incorporating actual military tactics into anything and everything it did. Taking out Jonny first seemed like a good idea, then.
Tim dove under the surface and swam towards Jonny to go for his legs, but the first mate must have seen him just in time, because Tim suddenly felt a hand gripping the shower cap, and pulling.
“You did not just–” Tim half-gurgled as he shot up through the surface of the water to glare at Jonny’s face.
The other just grinned.
“And what are you going to do abou–”
“Cannonball!” came a cry from high up in the sky, only a moment before a Marius-shaped blur crashed into the middle of the pool.
And 'crash' was certainly the right word. Way up above the pool complex, Tim could see a winged shadow that was much too big to be a bird. Raphaella must have dropped Marius from up there, and it was equally likely that Marius had or hadn’t agreed to it beforehand.
Tim wouldn’t just let such a great distraction pass by, though.
The pool guard that had been berating Jonny and TS started blowing on a whistle and gesturing with their hands that jumping into that specific pool was also not allowed – the fuck was, then? But, as Jonny laughed at a somewhat dazed Marius (who was still trying to figure out whether he’d managed to get himself paralyzed or not and was therefore ignoring the more and more confused-looking pool guard), Tim decided to jump the first mate.
The chlorine-rich water didn't do anything to Tim’s mechanical eyes, but Jonny’s… Well, they were decidedly more organic than Tim's.
The gunner’s aim was immaculate, and while the pool guard was still busy berating Marius, Tim pushed Jonny’s head underwater and used the first mate’s water pistol to spray water at a quickly-approaching Toy Soldier, who dutifully pretended to have gotten shot and fell over, “dead”.
Looking away from the two-ish dead bodies, Tim could see that Marius could, in fact, still move his legs, even if the man’s knees seemed to be bending at somewhat odd angles.
(Marius’ knees were fucked up most of the time anyway, though, so everything was normal, really.)
“Marius!” Tim called out, making the fiddler look up at him.
“Yup?” Marius called back.
“You’re a good swimmer, right?” Tim asked, having no actual clue about how good a swimmer Marius was, especially with likely being unable to use parts of his lower extremities. “Take these two to some other pool, would you?”
Marius looked at TS’ pretend-dead body and at Jonny’s actually dead body and gave a too excited salute.
“Will do!”
Tim returned a thumbs-up, then looked down at the first mate’s floating body.
“You are so drying my hair, twat,” he said, giving his best to kick Jonny’s body underwater.
Tim then watched as Marius swam Jonny over to the edge of the pool and shoved him up onto concrete (and in the process accidentally pushing the first mate into the next pool over), then decided to let Marius do whatever the guy wanted to do, and turned to swim back over to Ashes.
Right as Tim sidled close to them in the bubbles section, the bubbles stopped.
Ashes gave an offended look.
“Bossman!” they called out to no one in particular, but Tim was somehow sure that the person in charge could hear them and was listening. “You didn’t just stop the bubbles, did you? Keep ‘em coming.”
For a short moment, Tim thought the crew would have to be leaving early (not because they’d get thrown out, but because the pool would be filled with too much blood, and only Jonny and TS really enjoyed swimming in that – and the two of them were dead at the moment anyway), but soon enough, the bubbles started back up.
Tim just gave a small content sigh, and Ashes sent a wink his way.
Marius grabbed the edge of the pool and hauled himself back onto "shore".
He still wasn’t quite sure how exactly to use the snorkel he’d stolen on the way from Aurora to the pool resort, but he was fairly certain there wasn’t supposed to be water trickling down the thing.
He was probably going to have to adjust something. What was it that he was supposed to be adjusting? No clue.
After leaving Jonny’s dead body mostly in a shallow pool and partially outside it for the other pool-goers to trip over, Marius and TS had decided to go off on an adventure of their own. They’d found a very deep pool, one that was so deep that Marius’ fingertips barely remained above the surface of the water if he raised his arms and tried to touch the ground with his toes.
It was perfect for snorkelling.
Toy hadn’t really had a snorkel of its own, so the two of them had come up with the marvellous idea of taping a banana to the side of its face, so it could pretend that it did, in fact, have a snorkel. And off they’d gone.
Except… Marius was having some aforementioned trouble with his own snorkel, so TS was getting in some exploration time that Marius was going to have to catch up on.
Taking the snorkel off and adjusting the… strap of it? Maybe? Was he supposed to be adjusting something else? Whatever, it was a good enough try.
As he was adjusting hopefully whatever it was that needed adjusting, Marius looked to the side and found Brian sitting up under his beach umbrella. The pilot was just taking off his sunglasses and looking directly at the fiddler, looking – for some reason that wasn't known to Marius – highly confused.
Marius smiled and waved with the snorkel, then decided that he’d messed with the thing for long enough and that it should probably work just fine now. He stood up on the edge of the pool, put the snorkel on, gave Brian a salute, then let himself fall backwards into the water, joining TS in the exploration.
The floor tiles of the pool were honestly very pretty, especially from up close. And they had a funky texture, which was really fun to brush his palms over. Marius would have tried to steal some of them to replace the broken ones in the backsplash of the Aurora’s kitchen, had the pool tiles not been so firmly cemented into the ground of the pool.
… And his snorkel was still pouring water into his face. Great.
He was sure he was wearing it correctly!
He tried to grumble about it, but the action itself lightened his mood, because he’d made bubbles, and now he was able to watch said bubbles making their way up up up to the surface of the water. And then TS swam over and joined him at the bottom of the pool.
“Wook Whad I Founf!” it said, and even if Marius hadn’t understood the water-distorted noise, he would have known to look down at Toy’s hands.
It was holding a conch.
“A conff!” he exclaimed excitedly.
And then he realised he was going to have to go up for air, because of his obviously dysfunctional snorkel.
Marius unhooked his legs from under the wall ladder, then pushed off the ground, and TS soon followed him to the edge of the pool. The fiddler decided to take a few deep breaths before diving any further – but! The conch!
“Show it to me again?” Marius asked, giddy.
TS happily did as it was asked.
“Is It Not Beautiful?” it marvelled.
“It’s so pretty,” Marius nodded. “How about we carry it over to someone for safekeeping and then come back to try and find more stuff? Brian might be our best best, I think he’s on MJE right now.”
“That Sounds Like A Splendid Idea!” TS beamed.
Marius pushed himself fully out of the pool once again.
“Brian!” he called out, hands cupped around his mouth.
Hopefully the man would be able to hear him through the open door of the pool building.
“What!” the pilot called back from the outside.
“TS found a conch! Can you look after it?”
“It found a what?”
“A conch!”
Brian kept staring at the pair for a few seconds, then dropped backwards into his beach chair, mumbling something that Marius couldn’t pick up over the distance and the general noise of the pools and the public around them.
Marius turned back to TS with a smile, “I think that was a yes. Let’s go over there.”
“Gah!” Jonny gasped for air when he came to.
He blinked and blinked, but his vision didn’t get any clearer. When he started coughing up water, his regeneration-muddled brain finally caught up to the fact that he was still partially submerged.
Jonny sat up, emptying his lungs of not-air.
He was sitting in a kiddy pool. Okay, it wasn’t a pool for actual toddlers, but the water was much shallower and there was much more splashing than in the previous pool. And there were also lots of colourful slides.
And a bunch of kids with water pistols, apparently playing sea pirates on some giant climbable wooden ship in the middle of the pool. Huh.
Jonny’s heart ticked as his brain was still kicking into gear to fully form the idea.
“Oi, kids!” Jonny yelled finally, and all the children paused in their play to look at him. “If you let me be captain, I’ll let you shoot water at an adult.”
The not-quite-teens looked at each other, then back at him, and the oldest-looking kid chucked their weird-looking black tricorn (with a cool-looking, if somewhat simplified white skull on its side) overboard down to him, and gave a salute.
Raphaella perched herself on top of an artsy marble arch that stretched out above one of the swimming pools. She looked down towards the quite far away ground.
A shuffle to the left.
She made a little bird shape with her hands, and–
“Raphaella, I am trying to stay warm,” Nastya grumbled loudly. “Stop making shadow puppets all over me.”
“Shadow puppets?” Raphaella laughed. “Me? Never.”
Hypothesis confirmed. Nastya was highly annoyed.
Shuffling along further to the left, Raphaella made herself comfortable once more. She put her hands up, forming the same bird shape as she'd used with Nastya–
“Love, no.”
It was all that Ivy said, without looking up, even. Raphaella quickly reeled her hand back in. She didn’t want to be butchered right then and there for disturbing Ivy’s reading time – she still had an experiment to finish!
Speaking of... Hypothesis denied. That book must have been much more interesting than Raphaella had thought, because her hypothesis had only stated that Ivy would be getting annoyed and not that she would be radiating lethal vengeance.
Very well, then. Not all hypotheses were always proven correct – it was part of the scientific process. Moving on.
Raphaella wanted to shuffle even further along to the left, but she stopped mid-shuffle. Brian was lying under a beach umbrella, so there was sadly no chance for any shadow puppetry there…
Way down in the water behind her, she could hear cheeky screams and sounds of water splashing about. Upon looking down at the scene, she found Jonny wearing a pirate hat (a proper pirate hat, not whatever that cowboy bullshit that Jonny sometimes liked to wear was) and leading an army of... Hm. Preteens? Yes. Probably. Leading an army of by now mostly dispersed probably-preteens against a very annoyed Tim.
Interesting. She would have to look into what the pair was doing once she was done with her current experiment.
Her head turned back to Nastya, whose eyes were closed again. Time for round two of recording responses.
A small shuffle to the right. And another small shuffle to the right. And another one. Aaaand another, so that she was positioned exactly where she was supposed to be.
Raphaella wiggled her left shoulder, just to make sure her shadow wouldn’t be falling onto Ivy, and then she spread her wings, turning them slightly upwards, casting the whole of Nastya’s body in shadow.
The woman way down frowned and opened her eyes.
“Raphaella…” Nastya said, breathing very deeply.
Raphaella started chuckling, but didn’t move her wings. She just happily watched Nastya grow more and more frustrated.
No one had been allowed actual weapons during this trip and Nastya had no way of getting up onto the arch that Raphaella was sitting on, so Raphaella could continue conducting the experiment with ease. This was going to be a highly amusing few minutes–
Raphaella ducked down as a shoe flew just over her head. She blinked downwards.
“Did you just throw a steel-capped boot at me?” Raphaella cried, trying to keep the offense in her voice while also trying not to start laughing at the “oomph” that sounded out somewhere far behind her on the ground.
“I’ve got another one!” Nastya threatened back, and threw the other boot at Raphaella as well.
Now better prepared, Raphaella even more easily dodged this second projectile so that it missed her. It – once again – did not miss someone down on the ground (in the pool?) behind her.
And suddenly, there was laughter.
Raphaella turned around to finally see where the boots had landed, and found Jonny shaking from laughter, kneeling in shallow water next to the two thrashed boots. There was a darkening bruise forming on his shoulder. Lying flat on the ground of the pool the pair had apparently found themselves in was Tim – fully submerged, if just barely, with how shallow the water was – and there was a stain of red spreading from his head into the rest of the pool.
Raphaella shook her head. So unsanitary. No respect for proper hygienic procedures.
… Could be a fun experiment to keep track of water currents in as chaotic a system as a pool full of people was, with the help of the red pigment, though.
She would have to come back during the night to record only the effects of the water pumps without any people inside the pool. And maybe she could try to see if the pigment would converge into any specific shape when the pool was presented with periodic motion! First she could introduce only one person to the experiment, and then slowly more and more people, while still trying to keep some order to the movement to maybe get a bit of a feel as to how the whole system behaved–
A quick curse from Nastya’s direction pulled Raphaella back out of her head and away from the new experiment idea.
The engineer practically threw herself off her beach chair, and ran off.
“You better run!” Jonny shouted after her, still excitedly laughing. “Tim’s so going to kill you. And I can even join in on the fun this time!”
In the end, Nastya had decided her best bet for staying alive was at the bottom of the deepest pool she could find.
The water there was colder than she would have liked, though, and because it was an indoor pool, it also didn’t get a lot of sunlight. Perfect for hiding, not so perfect for trying to stay warm.
At least Ivy wouldn’t be on her case about getting sunburnt this way.
Nastya crossed her hands over her chest. Why did the Aurora have to kick her off, too? The vents and the engine room were very comfortable, and Nastya was already missing her girlfriend…
“Fey, Toy!” Nastya heard a gurgled call.
She looked to the side and came almost nose to nose with Marius. Who was wearing a snorkel for some reason, even though he was completely submerged under the water.
“Toy, I founf a Nafftya!” the fiddler happily called out again.
“Shud uph!” Nastya shushed him.
If the guy blew her cover, she was going to kill him. Slowly and painfully.
The Toy Soldier swam over then, a… banana taped to the side of its face.
Could have been worse, Nastya supposed.
As she watched the pair happily passing gurgled messages and pantomimes, her consciousness started to slowly drift away.
Right. She should probably go up for air soon.
Nastya sighed, then pushed off the ground with all her might to follow the bubbles upwards. She caught the edge of the pool and managed to hold onto it even as her body kept wanting to sink back down.
Marius, now also with his head above water, was staring at her with fascination.
“You don’t float on water very easily, do you?” he asked, only slightly pulled to the side by his own mechanism, but mostly effortlessly staying afloat near her.
“Quicksilver is a bit denser than most other types of blood, and it's definitely denser than water, yes,” Nastya said with a roll of her eyes, but her answer seemed to bring a sparkle to Marius’ eye.
There was no doubt in her mind that the ship’s official doctor was planning some experimental medical procedure.
Nastya smirked to herself. He’d have to catch her outside of Aurora’s vents to do that, and she was very skilled in traversing those vents undetected.
… Then she remembered why she was at this pool in the first place.
“And keep your voice down,” she hissed at Marius, but also looking at TS in warning. “I’m trying to avoid Jonny and Tim’s attention at the moment.”
“So…” Marius’ head tilted. “You’re hiding?”
“Yes, I’m hiding,” Nastya huffed.
“Can We Hide With You?” asked Toy excitedly, also having to hold onto the edge of the pool because of its many metal parts.
“And we can even have a ‘longest underwater’ competition!” Marius suggested.
If it was going to keep the two of them occupied…
“You know what?” she said. “Sure.”
She took a deep breath, then let herself sink back down to the floor of the pool. Toy and Marius quickly followed her down, TS also simply letting gravity do the work, while Marius had to keep himself near the bottom of the pool by holding onto the end of the pool ladder.
Nastya used this moment of relative peace to try to figure out whether or not Jonny and Tim had heard their ruckus or not.
From what she could see through the water, there weren’t any suspicious figures walking towards the pool. She (of course) couldn’t check in all directions, but from what she could see, she’d seemed to have gotten lucky.
Then she heard some gurgles from the side, and immediately tensed and got ready to pull herself out of the pool to start running again, but the noises simply turned out to be coming from Marius. Who was already having trouble keeping his breath.
Nastya just shook her head. The key to holding your breath for longer periods of time was to stay calm and collected, and Marius was all but that at any point in time.
The man kept fighting his body, though, but it didn’t matter for very long. Nastya watched him convulse, then go limp, his hands slipping away from the pool ladder.
The buoyant force carried his unmoving body up to the surface, where he remained in a very literal deadman float.
“Mariuff Iff Oud!” Toy cheered.
It then very intensely looked at Nastya. This would be a competition lost only through boredom, then, alright.
Marius’ body did seem to attract a pool guard, though.
A muffled “Sir? Sir, are you alright?” sounded through the water.
And then a, “Yeah, he’s fine, don't worry. We’re just going to go pick him up now.”
It wasn’t Jonny, nor was it Tim, but that did sound like a very done-with-it-all Brian.
Nastya turned her gaze upwards again, and, leaning slightly to the side to see past Marius’ dead body, she could see Brian and Ivy’s water distorted forms coming closer to the pool. And they were carrying a four-person yellow inflatable boat.
(Canoe, maybe? Kayak? Nastya really didn’t know her boat shapes. Especially the cheap, inflatable ones.)
The pool guard seemed more stunned into silence than actually convinced about the “wellbeing” of the dead-looking body, but as long as Jonny and Tim didn’t notice what was going on–
“Hey! What are you two doing over there?”
Speak of the devil. Or, well, d’Ville.
The inflatable boat was lowered into the water at the other end of the lengthy pool.
Ivy and Brian were planning to row over, then. For some reason.
Nastya wasn’t complaining, though. The boat was positioned right between her and the glimpse of Jonny she’d caught a moment ago, so this was quite perfect.
As Ivy and Brian sailed over the pool, Nastya looked over towards TS. It was the only variable that could ruin her cover at the moment.
“... Nastya?” came a voice from directly behind her, from outside the pool.
Nastya slowly turned around to look up at Tim.
Fuck.
“Okay, no, you guys really have to leave,” Ashes heard the pool guard say sternly. “I’ll have to be calling security if you don’t.”
“Oh, no…” Jonny said, mostly successfully holding back laughter. “Not security…”
The quartermaster walked through the pool hall, and watched as Jonny very obviously internally debated with himself whether or not he would be spraying the pool guard with the water pistol or not. Nastya and Tim were sitting on the floor behind Jonny, looking like two little scolded kids. And they were still exchanging small shoves and pinches and hushed words. Like two little scolded kids.
Toy was very happily sitting at the edge of the deep pool next to a still somewhat groggy Marius, both of them swinging their feet back and forth under the water, while Ivy and Brian looked like they were relaxing on the inflatable boat – Brian spread out like a seastar over most of the thing (with a... conch? resting in the middle of his chest?), and Ivy comfortably tucked away in a corner, her back to the water, a book in her hands.
Raphaella was standing on a windowsill, staring intensely through one of the large windows near the ceiling. It was… actually kind of creepy, but the rest of the pool-goers didn’t seem to notice her.
“I mean it,” the pool guard stared at the trio who’d been the most disturbing of public peace.
Ashes just sighed. They’d been having such a great time at the resort – why did their idiot crewmates have to get everyone kicked out?
They decided to walk over to the pool guard, discreetly pulling their wallet out of the waterproof ziplock bag they’d been carrying around in the back pocket of their swimming shorts.
“How much do you get paid here?” they asked the employee.
“I’m not sure that’s really something I should be disclosing–”
“Okay, okay,” Ashes interrupted. They opened up their chequebook, “Whatever it is, take the year’s worth, triple it, and write down that number.”
They signed the still empty cheque, ripped it out of the chequebook, and held it out.
“How’s that sound?”
The pool guard just stared at the piece of paper. They blinked. Blinked again. Took a deep breath.
“Pool closes at nine,” they said, looking anywhere but at Ashes. “And please try to get your friends to behave just a bit better?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ashes nodded, absolutely not about to be telling their crewmates what they could and couldn’t do.
For now.
As the pool guard walked away, Ashes could see Brian give a cue with his hand, almost like an orchestra conductor.
“Thank you, Ashes,” a little choir sounded out.
“Go fuck yourselves.”