Fic: The Last Of The Unplucked Gems (Part Three)
Man, I am scraping it in again this week. Sorry, hwango , but I'm stealing your Indiana Jones trick for January. You can have it back for February though, if you'd like.
Anyway, part three of The Adventures of Boots and Hearts. It can probably stand alone, but just in case anyone wants to, this is part one and this is part two
Word count this week is huge. It's 2756. Believe it or not, I DID go through and cut out quite a bit from this. I'm afraid it probably reads a little choppy in parts and there's definitely some repetition that needs axing... but it's down to the wire now and I still need to finish up my All-Star's piece. So! Please enjoy, and thank you everyone for reading! Also, thanks to lalalaleigha for the awesome prompts this month! And also for me rediscovering Black Leather by Guns n Roses. It's now become Hearts's theme song. *grins*
While Jackboot Jellybelly and Porcelina of the Vast Oceans, aka Boots and Hearts, were busy turning themselves into proper pirates, the eye-patch wearing cat was engaged in his favorite activity: sunbathing on top of Old Lad Magpie’s garden wall.
Her garden was particularly fine that morning. It was a spacious affair of wild greenery with dollops of color poking through. Old Lady Magpie had a great fondness for creeping plants and vines. Honeysuckle flourished on wooden trellises, ivy wove its way over rocks and trees alike. There was twining wisteria, hummingbird vines, trumpet creepers… All of this gave her garden the appearance of a jungle, hence the personalized outdoor mat by the gate that cheerfully read, “Welcome To The Jungle!” The mat was a gift from Old Lady Magpie’s daughter, Patience.
As a basic requirement to any adventure story, there must be a One in a Million Woman - that beautiful, kindhearted, utterly unobtainable form of feminine perfection whose only reason for existing is to satisfy fan-boys and give those females of mere mortal status severe complexes.
Patience Magpie was not such a character.
She was certainly a pretty young woman with long dark hair and wide dark eyes, but she wouldn’t stop traffic or start wars. Thank goodness for that. Who would want to be a source of civil unrest? She was average in height, average in shape, and had a great liking for fancy buckles. The only One in a Million stereotype that could reasonably apply to her was that she was indeed kindhearted.
A few years prior, she’d spotted a bedraggled bit of furry flotsam washed up on Old Lady Magpie’s back step. It’d been raining heavily for the last week which, in a metal town like Impossiblium, was especially not good. All that water reeked havoc with anything that wasn’t properly sealed. Rusted out supports was the number one cause for housing collapses in the town.
Anyway, as has probably been guessed the furry flotsam was indeed one Courage Eldorado Mufwampkins, better known as the eye-patch wearing cat. Technically, he’d been the eye-patch wearing kitten at that time and probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to become a cat were it not for Ms. Patience Magpie. He’d been a starved, gangly little thing with fur so heavily soaked in rainwater it’d taken everything he possessed just to crawl up onto the doorstep.
It was a very fortunate thing Ms. Magpie decided that stewed tomatoes would go well with the chicken she’d been cooking, otherwise she would have had a completely drowned cat to scrape off the doorstep rather than a half drowned one. It was also very fortunate that the eye-patch wearing cat still had enough strength to give her ankle a good swipe for inadvertently stepping on his tail or else she would have passed him over as rain-delivered trash.
Needless to say, all this good fortune resulted in Ms. Magpie going back inside sans tomatoes but with a very grateful kitten who purred nonstop while she fed him fatty pieces of chicken.
Felines, as a rule, are not particularly loyal creatures. They have even been known to switch allegiances for being shown too much affection. It’s in their nature to be fickle, if only to prove their superiority over human kind. It is because of this that they frown heavily upon the canine sect. Nobody likes brownnosers, after all.
The eye-patch wearing cat, however, was unique in this regard - but only where it concerned Ms. Patience Magpie. In return for his mousing services (he was unparalleled in this arena, he didn’t care what that braggart tiger-striper down the road claimed) Ms. Magpie graciously supplied him with delectables. It was due to a constant diet of chicken skins, leftover pork, and even the occasional fish scrap, that he remained a healthy and admirable size.
He believed his relationship with Ms. Magpie was what one would call “symbiotic” … but then again, he was a cat and had very little interest in things like that. All he knew was that he killed mice and she fed him.
He was just about to rouse himself for a quick perimeter check when a loud, obnoxious sound made his ears twitch: “Prepare to meet your doom, pirate!”
Now, cats have selective recognition when it comes to humanese. Unless the dialogue includes “food”, “yarn”, or “cats are wonderful”, they generally tend to translate any noise made by a human as just that: noise.
So when Porcelina of the Vast Oceans unveiled her new battle cry, it sounded to the eye-patch wearing cat like gibberish. And because he regarded it as such, he saw no need to acknowledge her beyond a you’re-very-loud-but-not-worth-scratching look before stalking off along the wall to do some … well, stalking.
Porcelina wasn’t used to being ignored and very quickly decided she didn’t like it one teeny bit. Here she’d taken the time to come up with a brand new, bone-chilling battle cry especially for the occasion, and the Pirate Cat reacted as if she wasn’t even there! That was unacceptable!
Since epic battle cries failed, stronger words were required. Porcelina jabbed a finger toward the exiting cat and shouted, “Hey, you! Pirate cat! Show us where the Last of the Unplucked Gems are or we’ll make you walk … the plank!”
Jackboots smiled his approval of the dramatic pause and sinister delivery, but he wondered how exactly they were going to make a cat walk a plank they didn’t have. He decided to trust that Hearts - oops, Porcelina - would come up with something.
The eye-patch wearing cat continued on his meandering way with his tail lifted high and his eye fixed on the garden below.
It was safe to say that if Porcelina didn’t like being ignored then she did not like being dismissed. In fact, she was so put off by the eye-patch wearing cat’s neglect that she was, incredibly and for the first time in her eleven years of life, quite speechless. It was such a shocking malady that Jackboot wondered if perhaps the Pirate Cat had maybe caught her tongue.
Thankfully, seeing as she is the primary source of dialogue, she recovered quickly enough to shout at the cat’s backside, “Did you hear me, pirate?! Give us the Gems or we’re gonna do our worst!”
The eye-patch wearing cat dropped down onto the other side of the wall. There was a fat robin bob-bob-bobbing along by the creeping myrtle that looked in need of exercising.
Porcelina was up and over a split second later. Boots (shock at the feline’s audacity caused him to drop character) watched her pigtails stream out of sight. He quickly ran to the wall and pressed an ear to the stonework.
“Hearts- er, Porcelina?” he called.
Not a sound could be heard from between the mortared joints, or over it for that matter. He waited a bit longer, chewing his lower lip anxiously and straining to hear - there! A rustling sound! It came again, this time a little louder but definitely further away.
“Porcelina?” he tried again. At first, all he heard was the shifting plants and typical nature sounds, but then there was a loud crunch: like the sound of someone callumping through foliage with too-big boots. He smiled; Porcelina was alright, but she would probably need his help soon.
Jackboot stretched his arms high overhead and frowned when he barely reached the upper edge. He jumped and managed to very briefly catch his fingertips on the brink before slipping back down again.
Jackboot turned his scraped palms over to study the damage. There were fresh scratches on the surface of his metal hand, but that was nothing. It was his real hand that was the problem. He grimaced at the bright red cuts on his skin, and the very unpirate-like thought that his mom would be so angry crossed through his head.
He looked at the wall again and sighed. Hopefully Porcelina could handle this one without him. That decided, he was just preparing to stretch out for some cloud watching when a scream came from inside the Pirate Cat’s Lair: “HEEELP! He’s out ta get me!”
This was followed up with a yowl of such ferociousness as to make his blood go cold. It hardly seemed possible a cat was capable of such a sound.
An unexpected thing occurred then: Boots (yes, he’d broken character again) felt a strange sensation rush over him. It took him a moment to identify it as bravery - a trait he hadn’t known was something he possessed until his friend had screamed. So, with a determined frown and this newfound bravery, Boots went into action.
He ran toward the wall and took what was most probably the greatest leap of his life. It was so great in fact that it not only took him to the top of the wall but clear onto the other side - and right onto of a poor rhododendron bush. The silk worm, who had been using it for shelter from the bobbing robin, uttered such a string of profanity as to assault the ears of even the most salty sort. Fortunately, silk worms are very tiny creatures with equally tiny voices, so any liberal language uttered by one would go unnoticed by pretty much everyone who wasn’t insect-sized.
Boots stood up, oblivious to the cussing silk worm, and very wisely took a moment to survey the battlefield.
Indeed, battlefield was the only appropriate way to describe the scene. Casualties were littered everywhere, ranging from uprooted lilies to brutally crushed petunias to trampled strands of ivy. There were bedraggled honeysuckles, broken wisteria, and willows that had long moved on from weeping and were now wailing.
And through this botanical carnage, Hearts was running from a thoroughly irate cat.
Upon seeing the wild gleam in the eye-patch wearing cat’s gaze and the size of his impressive claws and how amazing (and sharp) his teeth were, Boots decided it hadn’t been bravery after all. It was stupidity. Suddenly, in his mind’s eye, the decent sized domestic cat transformed into a lethal, Hearts-eating predator. The longer he watched the feline twist around plants, hissing and yowling so loudly that it cut through Hearts’s shouting (which was really impressive, seeing as Hearts was really loud), the more of a monster it became until he could almost swear he saw it spitting fire.
Hearts was running faster than he’d ever seen her run before. He thought for sure she had to be setting some kind of land-speed record. Her pigtails were flying out behind her, whipping in crazy streams as she ducked, dodged, and doubled back (he would have to share that bit of alliteration with her later - if they survived, of course) through the garden lair, always keeping at least two feet between herself and the eye-patch wearing cat’s very sharp claws.
When she tripped over the remains of an azalea, Boots’s heart gave a panicked leap. The eye-patch wearing cat leapt as well - right for Hearts’s shins.
Without a single thought, which was very unusual for him, Boots picked up a half squished tomato and lobbed it at the eye-patch wearing cat. It hit him square on the side and exploded like an overripe pimple. Hearts quickly got to her feet and Boots smiled, pleased that his un-thought idea had worked.
He immediately revised that conclusion when the most terrible, horrible, awful thing happened: the eye-patch wearing cat took notice of him.
The eye-patch wearing cat sank into a crouch. Boots gulped and wondered when his throat had gotten so dry. A bead of sweat slithered down his cheek. The beast gave an eerie, whining growl and wriggled its flanks. Boots closed his eyes and hoped for a quick demise.
A demise of any length never came. Boots heard something splat, heard the eye-patch wearing cat squall angrily, and ventured his eyes open a crack to see what was going on. He opened them fully when he realized that the combination of barely opened eyes and thick hair prevented him from seeing anything.
Hearts was standing between him and the eye-patch wearing cat, legs braced wide and a whole bunch of half-smooshed tomatoes carefully balanced in her arms. She chucked a particularly ripe one at the cat. It splattered on the ground, right where the eye-patch wearing cat had been.
“Head for the wall!” she shouted.
Together they turned and made a dash for the exit, Hearts hurtling tomato bombs in the general direction of the yowling feline. Boots made the mistake of looking back once and when he realized how very close the eye-patch wearing cat was he nearly whimpered.
It was also a mistake because it prevented him from noticing they were at the wrong wall segment until he was face deep in thorns and old lady smelling flower.
Boots yelped and scrambled backward, swatting at the attacking plant, which was yet another mistake on the growing list as thorns caught on his hands and petals erupted everywhere. The bright red blooms floating down around them would have been very pretty imagery were it not for the angry kitty cat and the fact that they were out of tomato projectiles.
“Trapped!” Hearts exclaimed as she took in the massive climbing rose bush that blocked their escape. “Trapped like bilge rats!”
Boots was too terrified of their foe to comment on her stating the obvious, although in the back of his mind he did like the way she made a cliché line more pirate appropriate. His eyes were fixed on the eye-patch wearing cat, whose very body language said that things were about to go very, very badly for them.
Hearts whipped back around and Boots spluttered as one of her pigtails whacked him in the face. The eye-patch wearing cat hissed and swiped a vicious paw through the space between them. The faint whistle of his claws cutting air caused both adventurers to swallow hard. Boots felt sweaty fingers close over his and took comfort that, in their final hours (which was a very odd turn of phrase, he thought, since they would probably be lucky to have more than a few minutes), Hearts was just as scared as him. He didn’t know why that was comforting though; Hearts was supposed to be fearless.
She looked at him and gave a suitably heroic little half smile. “Been nice knowin’ you, Jackboot. Time for Shackler’s Revenge.”
Boots didn’t have the heart (or voice) to tell her that it was actually Davey Jones’s Locker. He just squeezed his metal fingers more tightly around hers. The very last thought that crossed his mind as he and Hearts were steadily backed into the prickly bush was that the saying ‘every rose has its thorn’ was true and then some. He closed his eyes and waited. This time, he was certain, there would be a ghastly demise.
It was a very good thing Boots was a) not the gambling sort and b) too young to gamble even if he was. Luck, it seemed, was against him - or at least against his pessimism.
Just as the eye-patch wearing cat was gearing up for what was going to be the most fantastic pouncing in history, a bewildered voice shouted, “What in the wide, blue world happened?!”
The voice belonged to Ms. Patience Magpie who, once again, saved the day due to a sudden craving for stewed tomatoes. Sadly, the objects of her desire were either all trampled or had been used as artillery for battle.
Her gaze flickered from the trio to the decimated garden and back again so swiftly Boots wondered if it was possible for eyeballs to get whiplash. Hearts was not-so-subtly trying to wipe any evidence of being involved in the loss of tomatoes onto the back of her pants. The eye-patch wearing cat was licking his paw with such force as if to say, “See? I’m far too involved with personal hygiene to have done this.”
Ms. Magpie’s hands settled on her hips, but it didn’t conjure words like “bravado”. It was the manner of a mother preparing to scold her naughty children.
“Well? Who’s gonna explain to me why my garden looks like wild horses came stampeding through?” she demanded, tapping a booted foot impatiently on the garden ground. The sun, having watched the whole brouhaha with great glee, made sure to reflect especially brighter off of the many brass buckles covering her footwear.
Boots and Hearts exchanged glances. Now they really were trapped like bilge rats.