Fic: The Last of the Unplucked Gems (Part One)
Written for brigits_flame 's Main contest week one prompt of "tragically hip". I reeeeeally skated in at the last second on this, and I'm not at all pleased. Believe it or not, this is only HALF the story I'd wanted to write, but the story was too much for LJ's posting limits to take ... so I had to cut it. And because of that, I'm now compelled to write a serial this month. I've never done that before, so we'll see.
A word about this entry: It's a little different than my usual fair in terms of narrative style. Word count is around 2139, I believe. Also, my take on the prompt might be a little obscure. I'll honestly be surprised if even half the references are picked up.
At the hundredth meridian, there was a town called Impossiblium. It was a metal town, but a quaint one. Brass flowers stuck up from bronzed flower boxes outside of steel framed windows. Copper pipes in varying degrees of oxidization twisted labyrinthine-like up the sides of welded houses. Weathervanes and windmills on rooftops remained still in the breezeless air.
In this town, there lived a cat: an eye-patch wearing cat, to be precise. His official name was Courage Eldorado Mufwampkins, but no one ever called him that. He was always just referred to as the eye-patch wearing cat. He usually spent his days lounging atop Old Lady Magpie’s garden wall. It was one of the few stone structures in the metal town of Impossiblium and was considered by many to be an absolute eyesore. She didn’t care, and neither did the eye-patch wearing cat. In fact, if one were to ask him (which they couldn’t without appearing ridiculous on account of him being a cat and all) he would say that Old Lady Magpie’s unsightly stone wall was the only reason Pigeon Camera Row was worth visiting.
Children also lived in this town. Several children, actually. But only two in particular are worth mentioning, seeing as they are the heroes (so to speak) of the story. Boots, a young boy with a metal arm and hair just long enough to be uncomfortably in his eyes, and Hearts, a young girl with a voice that was impossibly loud for her stature.
Boots and Hearts lived on the edge of Impossiblium - literally. Their houses were directly next door, right out on the Bobcaygeon Cliff, so close to the edge that a hard thought could have sent the tilting, twisting structures over into the craggy gulf below. Naturally, no one ever thought hard about the houses for just that reason. It’d be rude to think someone’s house over a cliff, and the people of Impossiblium were nothing if not polite.
Unless they went by the names of Boots or Hearts, that was. Those two names were not synonymous with decorum, which was why they were unique to only Boots and Hearts. Just as much as no one would think someone’s house over a cliff, no one wanted rude children named Boots or Hearts. Or any kind of children named Boots or Hearts for that matter. They were rather silly names.
But enough about naming conventions and proprietary habits associated with said naming conventions. This story is about Boots and Hearts and The Last of the Unplucked Gems.
The day started as it always did. MacGregor’s steam powered rooster would come to life as the sun’s light warmed its metal feathers. Its shrill crowing woke every soul inside Impossiblium, thus stealing the sun’s thunder. Not for the first time, the sun wished that he hadn’t gone and pissed off the rainclouds a few months back. He wanted nothing more than for that metal bastard to rust out so that he could go about waking the town.
The houses of Boots and Hearts were so close together that Hearts could take a flying leap right into the window of Boots’s room - which she did, and with such frequency that his parents no longer questioned the loud thump that shook every level of their house each morning.
Hearts saw no reason to break with tradition today, so as soon as she was ready for adventure, she kicked the metal shutters to her window open, let out a terrifically fierce battle cry (she’d spent all afternoon yesterday perfecting it), took a gigantic leap of almost five feet, and went crashing through the shutters of Boots’s bedroom.
Boots, who was still in bed, had been expecting her. He took his time sitting up and silently admired the very action-y way she tucked into a roll across his floor. “Mornin’, Hearts,” he said, blinking as the ends of his wavy brown hair poked at his eyes.
Her response was to lock her arm around his neck, drag him forward, and grind her knuckles into his scalp. “Mornin’?!” she growled. “That’s all you’ve gotta say?! What about how awesome my entry was today?! Or my new battle cry?! Are you even listening to me, Boots?!”
He was, despite the fact that her freakishly strong arm was choking the air from his lungs. The only reason it took him a moment to respond was because he had the sudden image of Hearts speaking in nothing but exclamation points pop into his head and he was trying to figure out a patterned code through which they could communicate.
“Geh… It was really great,” he wheezed as he struggled to break free from her. “Real fierce soundin’,” he added when her arm tightened a fraction.
She released him suddenly, letting him fall back on his bed to remember how to breathe. “Yeah, I thought so, too!” she replied, flicking her long blonde pigtails back over her shoulder with an air of grandeur. She yanked the chair out from underneath his desk, flipped it around, and straddled it backward. “There’s somethin’ really great about shouting: Fire in the hooooole!”
Her demonstration was so loud that it rattled the windows of his bedroom.
Boots, suitably impressed, fumbled around under his bed until he found his thong sandals. “I heard you practicin’ yesterday. You sounded just like a real pirate.”
“Well, of course I did! That’s ‘cause today we’re gonna Save the Planet - pirate style!”
Save the Planet was his favorite game to play. It was actually the only game they played, but it was never the same style. They’d done dinosaur style, alien style, ninja style, and even toaster strudel style a couple times. But never pirate style before. If his ticking heart could skip a beat, it would have.
“So, what’re we gonna be savin’ the planet from today?” he asked as he grabbed his aviator goggles from under a stack of sketches. He didn’t put them over his eyes though. Instead, he pushed them down around his head, flattening his hair further into his eyes. A small smile curved his lips: much better.
Hearts snickered and climbed up to stand on top of the chair. The wooden legs creaked in protest, but the duct tape connecting them to the seat held them in place. One would think, after having been broken by the girl numerous times before, that the legs would be used to the abuse.
“We’re going after the sneakiest, wiliest, most villainously vile villain in all of Impossiblium!” she declared, jabbing a fist toward his ceiling in a nicely overdramatic pose.
Boots nodded and said, “That was good alliteration, Hearts.”
Her nose crinkled happily. “Think so?”
“Mm-hm. I liked it.”
“Thanks! Now then, we’ve gotta strategize! Our opponent is one crafty cat-“
“Now it’s a bit too much.”
Hearts scowled and grabbed his cheeks, stretching the skin so wide that it hurt. “It’s rude to interrupt someone when they’re talking!”
He wanted to point out that it was also rude to pull someone’s cheeks without permission, but it came out sounding like, “Ish ood ta hull sthununs cheeths wihoud pamisthun.”
She released him instantly, head cocking thoughtfully to one side. “Hey, that sounds like a secret language! You should work on that tonight and teach it to me tomorrow!”
Rubbing his sore cheeks, Boots smiled and said, “Okay. It can be our language.”
“And tomorrow we can Save the Planet - multilingual style! But today, we have to face one crafty cat - and I mean that literal!” The glower she shot at him said very clearly that if he questioned her use of alliteration here there would be more cheek pulling to come.
Rather than risk having his skin stretched beyond its means, Boots very wisely kept his mouth shut and waited for her to carry on. It was a survival instinct that served those of his sex very well.
Satisfied that she could continue to dominate the dialogue segments of their adventure unchallenged, Hearts dug a crumbled piece of paper from her pocket and tossed it to him to unravel. It took him a little while to make sense of the crinkled folds, but he eventually managed to flatten it out enough to see the crude drawing.
He frowned and twisted the paper first one way, then the other, and then flipped it the other way around completely as he attempted to make sense of it. After a minute or two of watching him try to decipher what was a perfectly obvious drawing, Hearts rolled her eyes, snatched the paper from him, and angled it correctly.
Even still, he studied it silently for several more seconds before finally admitting defeat. “Is it a turtle?”
“No, you idiot! It’s a cat! A pirate cat! See, that’s the eye patch!”
Now that she mentioned it, he supposed those triangle thingies could be cat ears and that circle thing could be an eye patch… His eyes widened, but due to the way his hair fell it couldn’t be seen. “Wait a second, Hearts. Are you sayin’ that the eye-patch wearing cat is a pirate?”
Hearts snorted and planted her hands on her hips. She opened her mouth to reply, paused to consider her stance, and made a slight adjustment to her footing for maximum bravado. “Did you even doubt it?” she countered. “I mean, look at him! He’s got an eye patch, a crusty attitude, and he has a gold tooth!”
Boots’s head perked at that. “He does?”
“No, but it’d be really neat if he did have a gold tooth,” she snickered. “Now, listen up! It’s been said that the eye-patch wearing cat’s got a reputation on the high seas for being veeeery slippery. We’re gonna have to put everything we’ve got into capturin’ him and makin’ him show us where the Last of the Unplucked Gems is hidden!”
“The wha…?”
She grabbed a rolled up poster off his desk and clubbed him over the head with it. “The Last of the Unplucked Gems!” she shouted. “Only the most famous treasure ever! Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it!”
Since he hadn’t heard of it and she didn’t want him to tell her that, all Boots could very eloquently say was, “Uh….”
Hearts sighed, but not because she was exasperated. She needed to stall for time in order to come up with a clever, yet appropriately pirate-y, story to tell. “The Last of the Unplucked Gems are some of the rarest, most beautiful and enormous jewels in all the world!” she began, smiling when Boots’s lips parted in awe. “They were so beautiful in fact that anyone who looked at them directly would die!”
“Die?” he repeated breathlessly.
“Die!” she repeated in the same overly dramatic stage whisper. “It’s said that they belonged to the great Emperor Penguin of Flamenco. Only blind men - and women - were able to guard them since they killed whoever looked upon them. Why, just a glimpse would be enough to melt the skin from your face, boil your muscles, and make oozy puss seep from your - sorry, too much description?”
Boots, looking four different shades of sick, swallowed hard and nodded.
Hearts resumed telling her story sans the gory details. “Anyway, the problem with having blind guards is that they can’t see when someone is stealing whatever it is they’re keeping safe. So, one by one the Unplucked Gems were stolen from Emperor Penguin until there was only one left. They were all destroyed, broken down into smaller fragments so that they were no longer dangerous.
“The last one though… Emperor Penguin had it put under special guard. It was locked in seventeen different chests with seventeen different locks, buried twenty feet underground, covered over in cement. And then a giant was placed on top of it all!”
“Whoa, a giant!” Boots interrupted before quickly clapping a hand over his mouth, having belatedly remembered his survival responses.
Fortunately, Hearts was so pleased with her story that she didn’t notice the interruption at all. “But! All of that was no match for the eye-patch wearing cat, the scourge of every waterway in the world! Somehow, he got by the giant and the cement and the twenty feet of dirt and the seventeen locks and chests and stole the Last of the Unplucked Gems!”
Boots was about to make an appropriately impressed exclamation when he noticed the hole in her plot. “Wait… but if the Unplucked Gems kill whoever looks at them, then how did the eye-patch wearing cat survive?”
He very narrowly ducked the dirty sock she lobbed at his head, but wasn’t so successful in avoiding its twin. “Why do you think he has an eye patch, huh?! Obviously, he ended up looking at the jewel and then - Bam! His eye dissolved into jelly in his socket!”
“C’mon, Hearts. Why’d you have to say it like that?” he complained. She knew jelly on toast was his favorite food, and now he couldn’t eat it without thinking about eyeballs dissolving.
She grinned, completely unashamed that she’d ruined his favorite food. It served him right for poking at a plot hole like that, especially as she was just gearing up for the grand finale. “And that’s what we’re gonna do today, Boots. We’re gonna track down the eye-patch wearing cat and make us hand over the Last of the Unplucked Gems!”
“And then what?” he asked, even as he followed her up onto the window ledge. She grabbed hold of the handlebars that were to one side and waited for him to climb up onto her back.
“And then,” she answered, pausing for dramatic emphasis as she gave the zip line a firm tug, “we save the planet! Fire in the hooooole!”
As the last note of her battle cry rang out behind them, she jumped out of the window with him in tow and rode the swiftly moving zip line all the way to the ground.