Chapter Text
Welcome to my first multi-chapter in the GOAT Universe, in which I hope to do all of the characters justice. Their dynamics have captured my attention and imagination, and I find a piece of who I wish I could be in Modo. In trying to unravel the thoughts of a character so clever yet so intelligent and sly, I am learning to see things from another perspective.
Please enjoy the ramblings of my mind.
Respectfully,
Eliana
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This was his little slice of heaven on Earth, a reprieve that he was once able to enjoy far more often than he could now. The music of nature was lulling him deeper into his dozing, and Modo could feel his eyes begin to close in contentment. They all used their money differently: Jett had bought herself a penthouse, Olivia spent money on cosmetics and silk clothes, and Archie invested his for his girls and bought them all a house.
Modo? Modo had bought this. He had bought acreage above Vineland, acreage that had been largely untouched as far back as records went in this area – a documentation that was so much younger than back home overseas, he realized. He had no interest in money. The love and chasing of money were what had cost so many so much, but nature never asked for anything in return. There was no negotiation or drawback to investing himself into the land itself. It didn’t demand or plead or beckon to be made better. It just…was.
It had been Dennis that had created the artful distraction of turning his confidence and energy outward and it had won him the endearment of many of his ‘fans’, as well as the condemnation of his enemies. His coach had charged him with turning his self-confidence and moxy from the repellent that had given him his reputation to the ultimate attraction, and Modo was gleeful in fulfilling that instruction. He couldn’t really complain. As the sky told him so kindly: he deserved it.
There was still the side of him that enjoyed his own company. He had fewer and fewer moments like the one he was currently enjoying. Oh, what a sweet symphony of gifts it was:
The riding of his bike up the secluded road to the foot of the high cliffs opened his eyes to the joy of owning such a machine.
The stiff climb up that was simple enough for him opened his lungs as he hauled his body and backpack up the ledges.
The swim in the crisply clean waters of the falls comforted his sore muscles and provided him with the greatest of gifts: fish.
The roll and body-drag through the sun-warmed sand scratched and pressed under his scales in the most delicate of ways, yet still not enough to reach that annoying little itch deep in his chest.
The swim after over to the rock that led him to where he was now, basking in heaven. Well…if heaven was a half-submerged river boulder twenty feet away from the shore that was just big enough for him to stretch out over. He was warm and content, two catfish settled in his stomach that rested on the stone, and the sun caressed his bare back and shoulders enough to lull him into what Will had come to call ‘low power mode’.
Modo’s tongue flicked lazily from his maw that rested on his folded arms, bringing him the taste of sweet water and crisp leaves. His tail patted the rock under him absently, eliciting the annoying sound of his swim trunks rubbing against his now-dry scales. From here he could look out over the Greenhouse that lay just over the falls.
This place was rather different from his childhood home – the air was different. The smells were different. The mentality was different. Yet, so, so welcome. Here, he was celebrated for being competent and dangerous… better yet, it was hailed as an amusement spectacle. It took some getting used to, but he found a primal joy in it.
He stretched his body out with a rumbling yawn and a deep stretch of his limbs before going back to his original position. Teasingly, one of his eyes spied a catfish staring at him from not far away. Normally he would have been after it seeing as the two he had caught were barely enough to blink at, but that gnawing fatigue was back and settling into his bones. Today was a far cry from the days that he found himself tearing through these rushing waters that sprinted toward the falls. Today was owned by the nagging weariness that he couldn’t shake.
It had been there for a little while now, and sacrificing most of his off time to try and salvage Flo’s horrid running of the background mechanics of the team had done nothing to help. The days had begun to blur together.
Today was Thursday, and this particular Thursday had Dennis off with family obligations and the team enjoying a day to do nothing… or, nothing for at least part of it. Modo was sure Olivia had locked herself in her condo with that annoying bright Ring light and was doing some sort of make-up video, more than likely Lenny was sitting in a room surrounded by discarded papers and lyric sheets, and Will was probably either playing a video game or throwing a Roarball at some place or another. The Komodo was nothing if not observant.
The sky whispered sweetly to him and the sun warmed away his tension. At some point or another he must have fallen asleep because he was ripped from it rather violently when the alarm on his phone, nestled on the other side of the river, went off loudly. A Ukrainian curse slipped past his lips. What he wouldn’t give to have the full day for himself again… but a glance down toward Vineland reminded him why he couldn’t.
Not yet. He needed more time to get things settled and fixed, with today’s big drama being focused around the absolute lack of financial literacy and book keeping – and a desperate attempt on Modo’s part to convince the ROAR league itself to not leverage a financial bailout by force on his team. He had absolutely no knowledge of anything business related. But Modo was Modo, and Modo was smart enough to learn fast.
With another grumble he bounded over to where his clothes lay strung out on the tree branches in the sun, silencing the alarm that was screaming at him. It was only after he had pulled those annoyingly scratchy clothes on that he noticed the missed calls that had apparently been barraging his silenced device. The few he had left on staff truly couldn’t hold their own on any level.
It was a deft moving of claws that scrolled through the list of missed calls, and an annoyed flicker of his tongue gave him enough release to click the first name on the list. When the elk on the other end answered, he rolled his shoulders and spoke as professionally as he could:
“Ah, good morning. Just returning your call – is there something of need? I know we have meeting later.”
The slow trudge down the rocky path back to his bike felt twice as long as it actually was.
IOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOI
The laptop gave a happy ding when she jammed the ‘submit’ button, and Hannah leaned back with a happy sigh and a deep stretch. Whose bright idea was this ‘school’ thing anyway?
Oh…right. Hers. Well, Will’s that was transplanted to her and that she had taken probably too literally and ran with it. Out of spite she had applied for a scholarship, and when she had actually got it, she then lost a bet with the goat. A bet was a bet, and true to her word she was now almost a year into these blasted classes. She had tested out of the majority of the first year’s cores by a stroke of dumb luck, but now found herself knee-deep in year two financial and business logistics classes. It was mind-numbing.
This current assignment was for her accounting class, one that she surprisingly found that she was good at. The media classes were far more fun, but this business and finance stuff she got the hang of pretty quickly…except for this project thing. That she was still drawing a blank on, and right now she didn’t have any more space in her brain to dedicate to thinking about it.
The couple sets of eyes that were staring her down now had her perking her ears and reaching up to click off the headphones she had on. Pulling them down, she leaned back a bit more in the recliner.
“Why’re you two looking at me like you’re lost?”
Will and Daryl were now staring at her, not their game.
“That was an awfully dramatic sigh for someone with no drama,” Will picked lightly.
“There’s two mammals’ worth of drama locked on to me right now.”
She quickly glanced at the screen behind them.
“Will, did you just lose to Daryl when he was playing the game as you?”
The ROAR 2k screen flashed red on Will’s losing side, illuminating his pouting face while his digital self flexed victoriously on Daryl’s side of the screen.
“Hey, you distracted me with your dramatic sighs over there and I lost my focus!”
“For the whole game?”
“Yes, the for the whole game, miss Dean’s List.”
Will dropped the jabs after that, quirking an eyebrow at her with a mix of confusion and worry.
“Seriously though, you good?”
Hannah flopped back with another sigh, running her paws over her head and ears in a move of tension.
“I’m good, I’m good – I’m just trying to figure out what I’m doing for this final project. The idea of getting someone to agree to give me books to balance while also trying to figure out how to bring in more money is… a lot. They have to sign off on a permission form saying they let me use it, and there’s not a lot of people who are going to do that.”
Daryl snapped his fingers suddenly, and both of his companions jumped in surprise.
“Oh! Oh! Idea!” he set his controller down and crossed his arms in a matter-of-fact posture, “Go tell Miss Carol that you’re going to balance her books for her, draw up some fake plan with the Thorns, then BOOM! Project done.”
The aardwolf stared at him for a long moment, one slow blink trying to process how she would respond to that.
“Good call, Daryl… except that Miss Carol let me use hers for my first class’s project.”
“Just use it again.”
“That’s called cheating, bro,” Will pushed back as he set his controller back on the table, exasperated.
“Nah bro, it’s called ‘using your resources! Hannah, why don’t you just make the numbers up?”
“Do you have any idea how long that would take?! And that defeats the whole purpose of the ‘permission slip’ part!”
“You know what your problem is, girl?” Daryl questioned, flopping up onto the bed and slouching back over the pillows, “you care too much.”
“And your problem is that you don’t care at all,” Will spoke up in her defense.
Watching her two friends lightly banter made Hannah smile… until she spied the time on the TV that had gone into standby mode.
“Hey Will, I guess that means that I care more than both of you that you’re ten minutes late for the match you told Jett you would be at the Greenhouse for, right?”
The realization settled rather quickly, and just as quickly the goat rushed and apology to his friends, grabbed his bag, and was a flash of green and tan as he bolted out the door and toward the Greenhouse.
Jett was going to kill him.
IOIOIOIOIOIOIOI
Jett’s absolute punishment of Will was an amusing distraction that Modo observed from his office window as he took a long drag of coffee. He always admired Jett for her tenacity and rather ruthless corrections, taking most of her corrections on the chin as seasons drug on. She was fairly simple to understand for him when it came to her breathing down his neck:
Don’t be sorry, be better.
Ruthless, but valid. Her treatment of him had never been excessively bad save the few times that the mis-directed anger had come out on him as collateral damage, but he had never taken it personally. She had no good ways of releasing the self-doubt and anger other than to find someone to take it out on. On rare occasion when it had gone too far she had offered him a shallow apology or two in passing, but he had never accepted them.
He didn’t need to. She didn’t owe him anything. He knew a thing or two about anger and aggression. Predator to predator, without a constructive outlet, it could invert itself into something far more dangerous. As long as she was venting it, he was fine with being the outlet. It was far safer for her to take such aggression out on him who could turn around and release it for her than on the others who took it to heart. He had seen that side of affairs too, and been the channel for most of their insecurities.
Before Will had come and melted Jett’s heart of ice that toxicity had begun to leech into all of them, and Modo was the convenient target. He had never had a reason to return the jabs or passive-aggressive remarks… they had actually made for good tattoos. He had learned long ago that when fighting angry, blind animals, it was best to just stay out of the way. The result spoke for itself.
He was grateful that the little goat had become the antidote for the poison that had once made the vines here so poisonous and wretched. Modo loved it and hated it at the same time – all of them shared that poison from the same vines, but in the end their mutual suffering had brought them together. He had made every sacrifice to save it, and now he had to stand on that choice.
The empty coffee cup was tossed deftly into the waste bin by his tail. The desire to chew on the paper and plastic was overridden by the sour feeling in his stomach, accented by that irritating itch that had returned in his chest. The sun leaked in through the window from its hiding spot behind a cloud and he purred to it thankfully.
“Such art you share with Modo today, beautiful colors and light bring him joy.”
It didn’t answer him outside of a consistent warmth coating his face. It was enough. He had yet to meet another that enjoyed such nuances such as this or the taste of lingering coffee on his flickering tongue. For that, he pitied them.
Down below he spied a flash of bright pink and muted orange, signaling the arrival of two more of the Thorns who joined the fun chaos of the impromptu game. They earned a cackling laugh and a flash of saliva-coated teeth when they started a rather bad game of rock-paper-scissors to determine teams – because that was the way these professionals settled scores.
Their happiness was his happiness, and even where he stood far above them his tail wiggled in a reflection of their joy. The sky was sharing its care for him with his team. Such wonderful feelings were alive today, accented with warm sun and painted colors and the song of four animals roughhousing over a Roarball in the court below him.
A knock at the office door stopped his happy wriggling and content rumbling almost immediately, and he sucked his tongue back into his mouth with a roll of his shoulders. His lips briefly twitched in annoyance. No time for play now, there were problems to be rectified before tomorrow night’s game.
All work no play may have made Modo a dull boy, but all work no outlet left Modo with a lost grasp. But he planned to move on full-steam and fix this disaster – the same one that he hadn’t fully illustrated to any of the ones below or away. This was his challenge, not theirs. It would just take more time.
He knew the exact skepticism that would walk through that door. He knew what it would feel like to have their eyes scan over him and to almost hear their thoughts question what he was actually capable of understanding. That, he knew, was to his advantage, not theirs. When they thought him crazy and incapable, they gave him everything. He had made it here on that tactic and it worked… every single time.
They understood only what their eyes told them, so they were easy to fool.
Clever Modo, he hummed to himself.
With a steadying breath and a quick lick over his eyes he switched back to the stoic, professional stance, calling out a beckoning:
“Come!”
Before turned and strutting with confidence to the three suited mammals that wandered to meet him.
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More will come soon, friends. I will hope to do them all justice.
Respectfully,
Eliana