[Indigo]

Fex needed a vacation. It was a claim she made fairly often and for innumerable reasons and almost always as a joke, but only recently had she taken the steps necessary to actually make vacation happen, and what had she gotten for it? Well, a promised date with Bethany—or was it Ash? Her friend had called her one thing but she'd introduced herself as another—but before that she'd also gotten shot at, stabbed, burned, and mauled by hunting dogs, and while none of those things could do Fex permanent harm, she certainly hadn't been thrilled to experience them.

So, this trip, a vacation from her vacation, answering the call of a pirate who wanted revenge on a creature that had impeded her piracy. Which was kind of an interesting moral conundrum. Not one she especially wanted to explore right now, though.

[Indigo]

The reasons for Fex's involvement with this task were less than clear to her, honestly. She had met some monster hunters recently but before that had only vaguely been aware that monster hunting was a thing people did in any professional capacity, or really any capacity beyond immediate self-defense. She did not entirely understand the appeal. Though she certainly saw the appeal of the hunters themselves. Lithe was one word.

But she was getting sidetracked. As one was wont to do when one was a coagulated mass of smaller selves, rather than one big self, but really who wasn't?

[Indigo]

Anyway, Fex was here because someone had called the aquarium on the pirate's behalf. There had been, apparently, a misunderstanding about the nature of the aquarium's business model, or possibly about what an aquarium was at all. Scott, when relaying phone calls, tended to be sort of vague and scattered, and this one had been worse than usual on that front, so, unintelligible.

The gist of his message had been: somebody wants us to kill a sea monster for them, which seems not very realistic, but maybe you want to go catch it for us instead?

[Indigo]

So here was the thing: was Fex capable of taking on a sea monster? Maybe. Some of them, certainly, but sea monster was a tricky term that didn't really mean anything specific; even she, disdainful and ignorant of monster hunters, knew that. She'd heard rumors of hrraktha sightings in these waters, or maybe some other waters that connected to these, and she probably couldn't tackle one of those. But depending on the exact details, sure, she and many sea monsters would be equally matched. Except for the problem of logistics.

[Indigo]

Because she could kill a sea monster, eventually, if it was the right kind—everything in life came with caveats, a lesson Scott did not seem fully capable of learning—and she could incapacitate one more easily and faster, but how to get it back to the aquarium? She could envelop and move something large on land, but she couldn't manage it in the water because there was no traction and she couldn't swim without at least one limb. And enclosing something big enough to tear a ship in half wouldn't leave her enough material for even a fin. Probably. She'd never actually tried something that big before.

[Indigo]

So, then, the boat. It was highly experimental and did not belong to the aquarium. Fex didn't know where Scott had gotten it; he had explained, but she'd been thinking about Ash-or-maybe-Bethany again, and she'd heard him mention Ale Flores which left her mostly reassured even without any further details. She'd met Flores a time or two and while the botanist was certainly an unusual sort of person, she was at least some kind of reliable, and knew a lot of people.

[Indigo]

The boat was not exactly a boat. It was more of a submarine, but Scott had objected to the term for some reason; officially it was called an Anglerfish, but that was just too clever to be tolerated. Most of it was an enormous tank sort of contraption under the water, further masked by a magical cloaking mechanism which rendered it invisible unless you already knew it was there. Fex was somewhat dubious about the functionality of this, but then, she did know it was there.

[Indigo]

On top of this tank was attached a thing that looked like a rowboat and, based on its condition and texture and appearance, probably had been a regular freestanding rowboat in its previous life. This was the only part of the contraption that broke the surface of the water, and it was where Fex was sitting now, because while she could technically be submerged without dissolving, it was a lot of work and she just didn't feel like it right now.

[Indigo]

The idea was that she would somehow wrestle the sea monster into the tank, or lure it in there. Scott had been big on the luring angle, presumably because that was the intent of the thing's designer and the point of the whole invisibility thing, but Fex was pretty skeptical about that too. She had very few tactics available to her when it came to persuading sea monsters to do anything; she hadn't brought any kind of bait because apparently this whole thing was very time-sensitive, and she couldn't exactly transform herself into a sexy appropriately-gendered sea creature like some sort of cartoon.

[Indigo]

As she sat in the Anglerfish, pondering all this with the undercurrent of fond irritation—irritated fondness?—that underlay at least half of her thoughts about her job, she saw something moving in the distance. Not a vessel, but something in the water, swimming just at the surface. The monster? Unlikely, it didn't look big enough, assuming her estimate of the distance was correct, which it assuredly was.

Who else, or what else, would be out here? She didn't kick the Anglerfish into gear, because that seemed needlessly antagonistic, but she did watch as the shape drew closer.

[Hunt Complete]

[Indigo]

Glory had made some mistakes.

Mistake number one: paddling this far out to sea. Which by itself wouldn't have been so much of a problem, maybe, if not for mistake number two: taking this trip alone. Or maybe that one was mistake number one, since it had to come first. Either way, two closely related mistakes had been made, but neither of them would have been a huge problem either if not for mistake number three: going for a dive without having anything to tether the boat to, since, you know, the sea.

[Indigo]

She was trying out some new stuff today, absorbing stuff, manipulating water within water and chatting with her mentor from far away and trying to become a fish sort of stuff, although the last thing hadn't gone so well. Glory could never quite let go of her sleek furry self even to become human, so it was small wonder she couldn't manage to be something that wasn't even a mammal. Anyway, she'd gotten very wrapped up and lost track of time and when she surfaced the boat was gone.

[Indigo]

And by gone, she meant gone. Not a single trace of it any way she looked across the whole flat glassy surface of the sea. It was unnerving, really. She couldn't have been gone that long, surely, it wasn't even starting to get dark! And yet...and yet. Her mentor hadn't been able to find it either, when she reached out to him through the currents, and that troubled her a lot more. She wondered if it could be related to the strange creature sightings she'd heard about, here.

[Indigo]

Ah, yes, her mentor—strictly speaking Glory hadn't come out here entirely alone. Brine was not physically present except in the sense that, as a water spirit, he was technically physically present everywhere all the time; but the core of him, the bulk of his mass and his mind, was dozing in a plugged sink in a research station that was closed for the season, and he wouldn't intervene unless Glory was in real danger, whereas all she had right now was a bad feeling.

[Indigo]

She wished and didn't wish she'd persuaded her brother to come along. Rexus was overcautious at best and didn't actually know she was out here, because if she'd told him he would have tried to talk her out of it, but on the other hand he probably would have ended up coming with her in the end. And he would have been annoying, but he also would have kept the boat waiting for her while she practiced.