trans_9 | Fish on! [Open]

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Fish on! [Open]

The Kohaku River ran diagonally through most of the City, past Central Park, winding its way between Castle Wyvern and the Bathhouse and Awesome World, and finally ending somewhere in Escherville. Its pristine waters would therefore be an excellent vehicle through which to introduce a convenient new source of protein.

Or so Tarrant reasoned when he began the project. Now, about a third of the way through, the fry he'd introduced into the river earlier (or at least the ones that survived notice by the native carp) were growing rapidly, establishing themselves and their territories.

[The river is open for fishing! The fish species Tarrant is aiming for are the following:

ayu/sweetfish
trout
bass
catfish
whiting
croaker
freshwater eel
minnows and an assortment of small prey fish

They are not all exactly like their Earth analogues, and some may come from alien fish species with unusual colors, fin shapes, habits, or other physical attributes. With every successive generation, however, they will become more and more like their target species in behavior and appearance, barring a few changes to make them better adapted for life in this particular habitat.

Feel free to mess around in the river, fish, or bug Tarrant.]

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One of the storerooms in Merentha Castle had been carefully cleared of its items. Where there had once been containers, ledgers, writing supplies, and maps, there were now shelves covered with fish tanks and other aquaculture apparatus. Some were improvised, some were salvaged. Almost all were filled with water, though only a little less than half contained actual fish.

Many were still small fry, although there were also tanks of strange, alien-looking fish that had certainly never swum in Earth's oceans. Brilliant colors, strange shapes and protrusions -- these were the original stock Tarrant was using to create their more conventional-looking offspring.

Tarrant captured a vial of water from one tank, holding it up to the light as though to examine some invisible property of the liquid inside.

Tarrant was still in the process of introducing successive generations of fish species to the river, but already the specimens he'd placed in the water earlier were growing at a rapid rate. So far, they seemed to be adapting well to their new habitat, spreading out throughout the length of the river and making themselves at home.

[General thread, please note if you'd like a tag from Tarrant. Otherwise, go crazy!]

Fish!!! New fish, tasty fish, all kinds of fish! While it wasn't the essences she craved, favored and desired, fish were definitely a ~~thousand~~ steps above the mess hall slop they called 'food'.

It didn't take long for the resident fox with the nine tails to make her way to the river and call on those natural predatory instincts to go hunting for her meals.

You'd find her in her fox form while fishing, cunning, stealthy, and precise, or simply having a good time in the river by jumping around and swimming.

Or if she already had caught to her heart's content, she'd be in her humanoid form, besides a campfire, enjoying the spoils of her hunt. Clothes left out to dry on the side while she remained solely in her plantsuit while she ate.

Zouichi was sitting on the bank of the river nearby, touching the sole of one boot to the surface of the water rushing by. Maybe if Sakura had stuck around, he could have figured out how to walk on water. As it was, however, he was fairly content to watch the fish darting by.

He looked up at the familiar-looking fox, and waved. "Hey. Having fun? Or are you just looking for a snack?"

Ahri looked up after having her nose well into the river as she tried looking around for her next prey. Her ears perking at the sound of the familiar voice.

After a moment of staring, blue fire enveloped her as she switched forms and gave Zouichi a playful wave.

"A little bit of both. How about you?" she asked curiously.

"Not bad. But I'll be better when we can finally get rid of the Daligig."

For now, though, he could afford to take a brief respite. And watch some fish. "How about you?"

"The Daligig huh? Seems things went sour between the crew and those beings after I arrived~ Or more like, it seems people got tired of being pushed around by them, in any case, whatever happens next should prove to be a once in a lifetime event and I really do hope our wonderful crew comes out on top~" she said with a happy little bounce out of the water, turning to face Zouichi.

"Me? I've been trying to learn everything I can about, well, everything while I have access to all the information gathered in this place. That, and exploring the different locations has kept me rather busy to be honest~!"

"Sounds pretty carefree," said Zouichi, looking back at the water. "Anyway, I hope we come out on top, too. After what they tried to do to Howard, I don't really trust them much farther than I can throw them."

Okay, bad example. "So I guess you've just kind of been holed up on your own, huh?"

"Always have been, only way to live for me I'm afraid. Anything that gets me feeling like I'm cooped up makes me incredibly sick." Which is why she wasn't even giving any thoughts about the fact that she was just in one immense jail.

"I heard about the incident, rather unfortunate but you can't expect things like that not to happen in a war scenario. It distastefully goes hand in hand I'm afraid~" she said as she squatted down near the water to poke at it with a stick, her tails fanning side to side behind her.

"As for me, I usually am. I don't mind being social, as you have seen of course! But when it comes down to my living preferences, well, a fox doesn't really trust much you know? Kind of the same courtesy given to our kin to be quite honest! Not that it bothers me in the least of course~"

"Bullshit," he said bluntly. "What were they going to lose from Howard getting off the ship? Nothing. He's not even a combatant. They didn't do it because they needed him; they did it so they could power trip, so they could wave their power in front of our faces and see how far backwards they could make us bend over. As far as I'm concerned, Yavek got exactly what he deserved."

Well. Not exactly.

"But you just said it yourself," she replied seriously. "Power trips. War is ninety percent face value. If your can keep your soldiers and tools in check, the enemy will think twice before assaulting you. It's a matter of how well you can balance it without risking the chance of a mutiny... Which seems as if they misjudged just how hard-handed they could be, as you said. They reaped what they sowed." she ended without really looking up, simply moving the stick she was holding through the water, making ripples.

"It's not a matter of keeping your soldiers in check. They can only really do their job if you give them the tools that they need and orders that make sense. Power trips do absolutely nothing except stroke the ego of the person in charge to the detriment of the morale of everyone under their command. Moreover, I never agreed to being a soldier, least of all for them."

"No one said whoever's in charge knows what they're doing either, that would be assuming much sometimes considering many times they're in that position of power not by merit, but by other means. Some, not so pleasant or deserving at times." Ahri mused as she looked up for a moment at Zouichi, a brow raised in curiosity.

"You seem pretty distraught by all this, not that I'm assuming here or anything, but you seem like someone who's been through a lot already while being here."

"Distraught?" he repeated in disbelief. "Oh, that's an insightful observation. They were going to vivisect one of my friends just for giggles, and you're sitting here trying to explain the concept of war to me. News flash, this affects you, too, no matter how above it all you want to be. You want to spend the rest of this trip with your head buried in the sand, making excuses for the Daligig? Fine. Good. Have fun. Just remember who has to pull your weight while you're off frolicking with the forest animals."

~~Ollie OUT~~. Zouichi was pretty much done talking. It was time to turn around and walk the other way before the anger he'd felt about the whole situation simply boiled (okay, continued to boil) over. Bad enough that he'd had to stand there helpless, watching what had almost befallen Howard. Bad enough that they were still, for now, under that smug Yavek's thumb. He couldn't stand to listen to this, too.

Just. As. Planned. Sorry Z, you were just becoming a feast of amazing emotional yummies for the fox. Of course she didn't let her satisfaction of being able to enjoy the intense emotions felt to cloud her masquerade. No, she looked downright hurt and frowned and even her tails frizzed up in annoyance.

"Oh right cause you have it so much worse than anyone else here! Because you're the only one that has lost, or almost lost or any other disastrous even that changed your life! That's right walk away just like everyone else who thinks that what happened in THEIR lives matters more than anything anyone else has gone through! You're just like them! You're just fooling yourself to think you're above them!" she yelled back as his back was turned looking furious, reveling secretly on her own burst of emotions.

Regardless, she wouldn't be facing anyone on the ship in any kind of fight, she wanted to keep her abilities secret until she couldn't hold back any longer so she was ready to flee in case Zouichi decided he didn't appreciate her tone of voice or her voicing her own opinions. It wouldn't be the first time she got into a fight due to difference of views.

Who's afraid of water? Not Volanz!

Actually that's a lie. Water was a terrible thing that was probably full of space crocodiles, but his curiosity was enough to overcome that for the moment.

Volanz squatted down on the bank of the river to squint at the water, picking out the little flickering shapes of fish beneath the surface. He didn't see anything large...

Reassured that nothing was going to rush up and try to rip his legs off, he edged closer and reached out to dip his hand in the water. Fish scattered away from the sudden movement and he grinned.

Well. At least some things would always be afraid of him. Now that he saw the fish for himself, he could start forming a plan to get them.

And they were going to be delicious.

But first...

"I have a lot of work to do."

"Work on what?" Zouichi took a seat on the bank nearby, dangling his feet in the water. The fish scattered again, but after a while, they'd no doubt return to explore.

"Did you ever get your question answered?"

Volanz looked up. "I'll pretty much have to make something to catch them with, right? I used to fish by my home sometimes, with my lusus. You had to be pretty careful cause of the riverbeasts but it was an okay way to get food I guess." He shrugged.

The second question made him look away and bite his lip a little. He should've responded instead of shutting the comm off, but he hadn't been able to think of a good argument anymore. It was confusing.

"Yes," he replied. That was true, at the very least. Not the most illuminating answer, but true.

"Guess so," said Zouichi, "Unless Lash's store has a fishing rod or something. I didn't look at all her inventory the last time I was in. ...What kind of riverbeasts are we talking about?"

Well, uh. At least Volanz had gotten an answer?

"That's good to hear. It sounded like your world worked... very differently."

"Oh, lots of kinds," Volanz replied. "The ones that were usually around most often had big mouths like this?" He remembered that Zouichi used different terms for animals, so he figured it was easier to just describe. He put his elbows together, clawed his fingers, and mimed the jaws of a crocodile with his forearms. "Lots of teeth," he added, letting the gesture drop.

"I thought my world was pretty normal? But I guess it might not be," he mused. "I didn't know any other worlds before to compare it with?"

Zouichi blinked for a moment. "Like an alligator? Or a gar?" Well, odds were the animals on Volanz's world didn't look a lot like terrestrial fauna, anyway. "Maybe you can show me in the Sensoriums sometime. We had quite a few waterborne predators, but they didn't really pose threats to large cities like this one. At least, not at the point in time I was from."

"That makes sense. I only had Earth to compare everything else to. But we have people from all kinds of different worlds here. I guess it's only logical that things would be different depending on where you came from."

Volanz shrugged. "There are like... basically a crapton of things that live in water and eat things and also people that are about my size. I don't know those names? But it might be like the bird thing again."

He scratched the back of his neck. "I... my lusus, he taught me about water. You don't go into it if you can help it? You can't always see what's in it. And if you don't see something it might see you first, and if it sees you first... well."

He let that hang, it was fairly obvious (at least to him) what happened when river monsters found you. "It's a little better during the day, though?" he added, trying to be a bit more optimistic about it.

Zouichi frowned. "Your lusus? Is that a relative of yours?" More importantly, was the ship's translation matrix on the fritz?

"Sorry to hear things were so dangerous. So what did you do on your world? Other than avoid the water."

Volanz squinted at Zouichi. "Doesn't everyone have a lusus? You know, it takes care of you when you're still a kid and all that?"

And requires lots of attention and management on your part, but Volanz was sticking with the simple version.

"It was pretty typical, I guess? I was kinda far out from anybody else but it basically worked to my advantage cause I am not exactly the best at fighting. You just kind of grow and not die and get better at stuff until you're old enough to join the fleet?"

"...You mean a mother? The woman who gave birth to you?" At least, Zouichi was assuming Volanz had a mother. For all he knew, trolls budded.

"That sounds like a pretty dismal existence. Didn't you have any hobbies? Or something else you wanted to do besides join the fleet?"

Volanz shook his head. "No, the mother grub doesn't actually take care of us?" he said. "She just kind of lays all the eggs? Don't humans have lusii?" That was a weird idea. Volanz knew about some animals that only had, like... one grub at a time and had to protect it while it was small and weak, but that seemed like a really inefficient system to him. Certainly not something an intelligent species would have.

He watched the fish cautiously reappearing from the many nooks and crannies they'd fled to.

"Well, I guess liked making things. Out of clay and stuff, I was pretty okay at it? But it's not something you can do with your life. I didn't really have anything that I was good enough at to not be a soldier, really."

Mother grub?

"Oh, you're an oviparous species. No, human mothers carry their children inside their bodies. After they're born, their parents usually raise them until they're old enough to take care of themselves. I have no idea what a lusus is, though. A surrogate mother?"

Zouichi placed a fingertip against the surface of the water; one particularly curious fish came right up to him and nibbled at it.

"So you're an amateur sculptor? Maybe you should pursue that while you're here. I've found it gets a little monotonous if you don't have something to do with your free time." He shrugged a little. "I was good at fighting, so I didn't have any qualms about doing it. But before I came here, it never really occurred to me that doing something else was an option."

"Oviparous" was a word that was a bit beyond Volanz, but he was going to guess it was about eggs. "Well, I guess?" he replied. "After you hatch out you basically make a cocoon and when you pupate and crawl out of it, if you survive the brood caverns, your lusus finds you and you go live together until you're old enough to do adult things. Provided nothing like... unusually horrible happens." Not that living with a lusus was all sunshine and rainbows anyway. Volanz was keenly aware, for instance, that one of his friends had a lusus that did little but demand food.

Speaking of food, he smiled at the fish. They got hungry, too.
"Well I don't really know if I was any good at it," he backpedaled. "I mean," he added, "I guess I'd like to keep up with it? I just haven't really looked into the resources I'd need lately I suppose."

Now that he was thinking about it, it would be fun to do that again... He looked along the bank of the river. "Sometimes clay shows up along water bodies?" That was actually a statement, not a question, but this was Volanz.

"That is... very different from the human life cycle," Zouichi said, a little taken aback. "Humans never spin cocoons or pupate. They merely grow for some number of years. At approximately thirteen years of age, they start developing into reproductive maturity." What a nice clinical explanation for an extremely messy process.

He smiled a little. "So you might be able to find yourself some clay to work with. Even if you don't think you're any good, though, I'd be interested to see one of your sculptures sometime. If you don't mind, of course."

Honestly, the first thing Howard did with the fish was figure out which bait they responded to. To his credit, he's forward-thinking enough that he just throws them back to keep breeding and making more tasty protein when he's caught them, but he's been out here for a few hours with strips of beef, pieces of bread and dried worms (don't ask how or why he has fried worms).

He sees Tarrant and briefly considers pretending he's got no idea why he's holding a fishing line and has a bucket next to him. For all he knows, Tarrant might already have ~*rules*~ in place about the fish. He stands up and does a fakey little bow, less out of respect than out of 'oh hey Council guy I thought I'd never see again'.

"Mer Bassem." Howard's greeting this time came in the form of a brief but no less measured nod of the head. "My condolences on recent events."

He shifted his gaze to the fishing line and bucket. "I didn't realize you were such an avid sportsman."

"Oh, yeah. That." 'Condolences'. Howard guesses he can use as many condolences as he can rack up. Maybe he can collect them a la pokemon.

"I'm not. I'm just trying to figure out what kind of food they like. Although I'm guessing if you wanted to be super efficient you'd use nets instead, but that might kill too many at a time."

"Yes. That." Well, if it made Howard feel any better, at least there wasn't any pity coming off of Tarrant. Just contempt for the ham-handed way Yavek had handled the entire ordeal.

"A net, or some other trapping mechanism. I can make adjustments to the fecundity of the fish, if it turns out there's more interest than I anticipated. Within reason, of course."

Howard's down with contempt. Contempt is awesome. "Just means I'll have to be smarter next time."

Not that there will be a next time. For all Howard's talk, he's too scared to make another run for it. Next time Stacy won't be so kind.

"This is all because you ran a merchant city back home, right?" Howard curls up his legs under himself in a criss-cross applesauce pose. "We did fishing back home but it wasn't really my specialty. I did more salvage stuff."

And moonshine. Totally legal moonshine.

Tarrant shook his head. "Aristocrats don't generally learn husbandry or aquaculture. It was a personal hobby of mine. You see, Erna didn't have horses. Or cats. Or any number of domesticated animals. If we wanted them, we had to breed them."

Of course, Tarrant was better at the task than most. Even after all the time that had passed since his first life had ended, society at large had only been able to produce three-toed equines that grossly resembled the Earth horse -- and they'd had his own stock to work with, the animals he'd left behind when he abandoned the Church. In contrast, the horses of the Forest were true horses, down to their proportions and crescent-shaped hooves. It helped to be able to use the fae to guide their evolution.

"'Salvage'? Where I come from, that can be a disreputable occupation."

"Sounds familiar." Howard pulls at a piece of fishing line and cat's cradles it around his fingers before chewing on a part of it. "Wouldn't those be saltwater fishes though?"

Howard shrugs. "It's disreputable everywhere, but it's better than leaving stuff to go to waste."

"Not the ones in the river," said Tarrant, watching Howard chew at the fishing line. Odd habit, that. A little disgusting, actually. "Although with time, I'm sure I could adapt some saltwater species to live in a freshwater environment."

Tarrant considered for a moment. "What do you charge for your disreputable service, then?"

~~fishing line is not gross shut up Tarrant you eat human fear~~

"Depends on what you're asking for. Duh." Probably shouldn't say 'duh' to a Councillor. Oh well. "I got a lot of stuff, mostly just things anyone could have grabbed if they thought of it but a lot of stuff from off-ship too. The only thing I don't stock up on is Stacy credits."

Human fear was so neat and clean, though!

He smiled. "I'm afraid that if we do break away from the Daligig, 'Stacy credits' may no longer be something that we can count on anyway. I was thinking something along the lines of fish tanks, filtration systems. That sort of thing."

"You think the credits come through the Daligig?" Howard actually looks alarmed at this, biting down on one of his fingers as well as the fishing line. Maybe he should invest in dental floss. "Fish tanks? You don't have fish tanks?"

"Where do you think they come from?" Tarrant asked. "Unless the ship is involved in some sort of secret back-room deals, someone has to be providing us our war funds." He smiled darkly. "Plan for the worst, Mer Bassem, and avoid future disappointment."

He raised a hand. "I have fish tanks. But I could use more. Particularly if they're simply lying around somewhere and I don't have to buy them off-ship."

"I assumed they came from Stacy. Probably a stupid assumption." Howard tugs the line tight against his teeth as if flossing. "And you don't have to tell me twice. I got planning for the worst down like an art."

Howard considers for a moment. "How much will you give me for fish tanks?"

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Fish on! [Open]

MERENTHA CASTLE

THE RIVER

Foxy Fishing!

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Open!

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HI TARRANT HI TARRANT

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