Thusly, rather than a hulking Ortoki point guard, the Lovers had a claw-happy Mruka mechanic and in place of a lithe Tebi-Gali devotee, they'd been forced to make due with a witless Myyrigon lout but, nevertheless, seventeen afternoons into their extended shore-leave, Two-Bit Switch and his ragtag squad of rookie athletes met six members of The Yanked Chain's crew on the hallowed field of skoosh. A commandeered and subsequently modified TFS 889 Chaperone-Class Karracki clipper ship captained by an unmannerly brawler of a Braaca simply called Kivad, The Yanked Chain and her crew of thirty-odd reavers were, by a fearsomely cultivated reputation, numbered high among Ott's best pillagers, though certainly not among its brightest and therein lies the Lovers' greatest advantage.
Across the court, the skoosh is hastily recovered by the Chains' main charger, the opposition's answer for Heeko; a latitudinous wrecking ball of a Gung'nooj, probably twenty stone or more but lacking two wits to rub together. He, or possibly she, unearths the ball with a massive tridactyl paw from the gunky corner where the headbutt had wedged it and, literally batting the interposing Danbonte across the court with a swipe from the other knuckle-dragging slugger, chucks the skoosh skyward, toward the waiting embrace of the stacked hoops.
It's certainly a powerful effort and Two-Bit, a full court length away, is effectively powerless to intercede but, even if properly aimed, the skoosh still needs to transverse a sizable distance and inevitably, a Lover crosses to intercept. Anchorage, barreling across the ball's course, manages to snag the orb at trunk's absolute end and, contorting his cumbersome form halfway around to better aim and dodge the squirt of its intestine juices, pitches the skoosh forcibly against the western wall. “Switch!” he bellows over the Chains' vociferous protestation.
At a vicious velocity, the skooshball ricochets messily off the transparent plexishield, sufficiently reinforced to withstand the full brunt of a laser cannonade, and careens crosswise wildly. Two-Bit, heeding Anchorage's plea, vaults himself forward, hoping to shortstop the hurtling skoosh and smack, spike or otherwise propel it into the two-point-hoop but, watching its trajectory, Two-Bit spies another, more choice, opportunity.
Falling ten steps behind, Two-Bit Switch reels his forearm back and bides three seconds worth of time as the skooshball whizzes wildly past him. Unmolested, the ball unwittingly enters the unseen perimeter encircling Heeko, standing listlessly in the middle of the court with apparently little apprehension of how to participate. Its primordial instincts of flight engaged, the skooshball boomerangs instantly back from whence it came and straight toward Two-Bit, repositioned before the coveted five-point-hoop. Two-Bit employs his blind gambit; the minute the skooshball reaches him, he unchains the cocked elbow and, with a wet warble, the ball motors perfectly through the contracted aperture of the five-point-hoop.
“Disqual!” roars Kivad against the harsh bleat of the scoreboard and the scurrilous hurrahs of the encroaching Lovers. “I ain't tellin' you twice, Two-Bit, that Aurik's trunk disquals him!”
“Alright,” Two-Bit complies, stifling a burgeoning complaint from Anchorage with an upraised hand, “then I'm disqualing that geezer of yours what with the grabby feet!” Two-Bit aligns an accusatory finger toward the Chains' favorite forward, a spindly and copper-furred Zourim greaseman, complete with recaptured skooshball gripped in a perfectly prehensile foot. Kivad follows his indication and grumbles something incoherent beneath the noise of the jostling players and before any actual disqualification can occur, the Zourim passes the ball with a vicious snap of his ankle and the game soldiers on.
Skooshball is somehow a popular sport played with the pseudo-intelligent gallbladder of a giant endrozzi slime slug in place of an actual ball. As with all other members of the slug's extrinsic and bizarre anatomy, the skoosh possesses the faintest of instinctual defense mechanisms – minor levitation, a bottomless supply of slippery bile and enough sensory understanding to flee the nearest life form that breaks its three-foot perimeter by the swiftest and most direct means possible. This obviously made for a court almost immediately slick with expelled bile and, should one add a dozen bulky players, in this case all violent criminals, to the mix, one would have the perfect recipe for the slipping, skating, sloppy mess unfolding in Ott's skooshball court. The game's rules ostensibly involved a series of variantly shaped hoops dangling from the court's ceiling and members of each team attempting to muscle, punt or hurl the skooshball through any or all of these hoops to rack up some esoteric amount of points but no professional or collegiate skooshball match in Two-Bit's memory had ever reached the first triad without at least one penalty-laded, tooth-shattering, slime-slinging bare-knuckle brawl and, six minutes to the first bell, there'd already been three.
Still less destructive than the brutal fistball but bereft of all bankshot ball's etiquette and tedium, skooshball presented a third option for the discerning holosports fan, which combined the speed and ferocity of the former with the equipment-based exclusivity of the latter, to create a highly holovised and highly impractical sport that demanded an enormous watertight chamber and a specially-bred organ from an incredibly endangered gastropod to properly play. As such, Two-Bit and the rest of the Lover team were woefully amateurish as regards practical floor experience, especially when compared to the Chains' adept athleticism, but as veteran fist fighters all with roughly two decades of holovision exposure under their belts, the Lovers were quickly picking up the nuances of the game, much to their opponent's collective dismay.
As with most regulation skooshball courts, the bulwarked outer walls of Ott's personal chamber are diaphanous plexishield, allowing spectators in any of the three viewing galleries, including the topmost café, to safely view the bout without fear of collateral reprisals from a rapidly rebounding skoosh or its sticky residue. As Danbonte and the Chains' Phnuki lancer shoulder and elbow for possession of the ball, Two-Bit spots, sharing both a decanter of gin and a ringside table, his Captain and their gracious host, apparently chatting amiably, with Odisseus looming just within his field of vision. Abraham's admonitions from two days previously struggle against resurfacing as the streaking skoosh deflects off a corner and rockets past, inches shy of Two-Bit's inconscient face.
“Two-Bit!” Danbonte bemoans from thirty feet across. “That was right to you!”
Wresting himself from his reverie, Two-Bit Switch tracks progress of the rabbiting ball, dribbling itself against the opposite corner, with Heeko, finally engaging to some degree, clambering to redeem it, though Kivad and his Gung'nooj dash forward, threatening to outpace him. From his remnant position before the five-point hoop, Two-Bit hastily calculates the rates of motion, angles of attack and approach vectors of each individual interested party, rationalizes another stupid gamble in the spirit of Captain Nemo and charges headlong across the court to head off both opponents.
However, one of the several arithmetical factors currently in play is bodily ignored by Two-Bit's heedless sprint and that factor manifests itself in the form of slippery skoosh secretion, coating the distance between Two-Bit and the ball thicker than osteocaulk. Losing his balance in this instance, however, does more than plop him clumsily to his ass – the slick transforms his trip into a sliding tackle. Two-Bit smashes directly into the loping Gungi'nooj with excessive forward momentum, summarily bowling the both of them over into a great heap of thrashing limbs and jabber-expletives.
Literally one step behind, with mere moments to react, Kivad is collisionally unable to swerve in time and all two hundred and twenty-five pounds of fuzzy blue Braaca tumble headlong into the cavorting confusion. Amid a rending knot of knobbed knees, flailing fists, edged elbows and flapping feet, Two-Bit's initial escape attempts quickly become accidental clouts which naturally result in retaliatory strikes until, before long, this purposeless pile-up deteriorates into the match's fourth consecutive brouhaha.
Aiming as precisely as his shellacking surroundings will allow, careful not to impale a sneaker on one of his four hooked facial horns, recumbent Two-Bit fe
eds Kivad a hard heel, walloping the Braaca's woolly rump straight to the thermosteel and purchasing Two-Bit a split second or three to squirm inches away on his elbows. With Kivad left contemplating the lamentable contemplations of the truly trounced in an awkward heap on the floor, Two-Bit need only stave off the thrashing aggressions of the bewildered and incensed Gung'nooj for a dozen seconds or less until the converging Heeko could close the distance and reinforce his position. Before he can even begin to conjure any earthly method to achieve this, Two-Bit Switch, like Danbonte before him, finds himself the beneficiary of a teeth-shattering overhand clobber from a wrathful Gung'noojian meathook and, upon receiving the necessary inspiration, promptly learns to fly.
Finally landing in an unwieldy clump of his own with a sickening splash of goop, Two-Bit predicts a ravishing new bruise staining the point of contact as he props his punch-drunk person up onto his palms just in time to distinguish, through both wavering eyelids and the scummy partition of plexishield separating him from the scene, the Captain and the Galactic Menace clasp hands in agreement. As the brawl several yards over his left shoulder intensifies with the timely arrival of both Heeko and Anchorage, Two-Bit sinkingly suspects that their overlong vacation is likely coming to a close.
–––
Odisseus positively hates visiting new planets. Baz's coral tundra, a comparatively tepid climate when held against the unmatched virulence of the equatorial jungle regions, is still awash with multifarious new stinks, stenches and other unclassified pungencies, all too foreign and exotic for the sniffling Ortok to properly process. The territorial markings of a score new predators, all sanguivores by the flinty twinge of iron in their urine, the bitter calcium carbonate secretions of a hundred new species of land polyp, each at various stages of hardness, the accumulated reek of a million anonymous danders, pollens and spores from an unknown number of unseen life forms, be they plant, animal or fungus, all battle for supremacy inside Odisseus' nostrils, all virtually blinding him beneath the combined weight of an unfamiliar ecosystem.
He snorts, sniffs and coughs every few seconds, tossing his head and pawing at his nose in an effort to dislodge the warring battalions of odorants and regain some limited level of nasal composure, his effective perception relegated to his unimpressive eyesight and a drastically curtailed sphere of olfactory awareness.
“Oh, bloom me out,” the blurred amalgam of spiced gin, abused leather and overconfidence to his left curses, accompanied by the sound of wallowing mud. Standing amid a patch of porous star coral laced with scraps of a phosphorescent fungi, sufficiently apart from the main exhibitions and the tightest knot of the redolently potent Baziron, Odisseus clings desperately to the now-pleasantly intimate odors he'd so long taken for granted, each standing thankfully adjacent; both Nemo's contradictory cocktail and that unsweetened medley of gun oil, sweat and disdain that could only signify the presence of one Moira Quicksilver.
“Well, this solves the case of Kivad's mysteriously orange shoes,” Nemo carps quietly, exhuming his own left boot with a squelching complaint, to reveal a freshly tangerine tint. Moira, her mighty hobnailed jackboots manfully resilient to the tundra's orange advances, smirks mercilessly to his right. Barefooted Odisseus squints down toward his hind paws, praying to all the moons they don't spontaneously combust.
Even this far north, seemingly every square inch of Baz's surface was so thoroughly suffused with doxychoraphum that one could barely expect to stride two steps in any direction without physically feeling the combustible liquid sloshing about beneath two feet of permafrost, spongy topsoil and a layer of various arctic fungi. Vacuous sinkholes in the boggy ground, often deep enough to ensnare a knee and apparently playing host to something vo Qwer described as a “boreal muck leech,” were unnervingly frequent as, in addition to whatever ambush predators may lurk below, the omnipresent danger of accidentally igniting the dormant repellent with a misplaced footfall was only too recurrent.
Beyond this, the doxychoraphum lent the planet's surface the unyieldingly sulfuric tang of unprocessed ordinance, which, paradoxically, played grandfather to a household smell in Odisseus' fragrance vernacular; the signature whiff of a ballistic torpedo. This arresting aroma, however, radiating upward from under the very earth, was unreasonable; practically limitless reservoirs of untapped conflagrant chemical, nearly overwhelming the compounded mélange of residual pheromones, upturned soil, stale manure, fresh carrion, burnt ditrogen and every other nightly scent and stench the northern continent can offer.
“What do you think,” Moira postulates faintly, as if the participants in the distant scene had ears to burn in the first place, “how long until one of these blowbags misfires a chamber into the mud and blows this whole little resistance all the way to Jotor?”
Instantly huffy at the slightest depreciation of his scheme, Nemo creases leather as he entwines his arms together. “I don't know – Two-Bit seems to have it in hand.”
“That was sorta my point.”
At the heart of the village proper, some number of yards ahead of the three onlookers, Two-Bit Switch, posed halfway up a mounting pyramid of Nabdres' gun crates and bulwarked by the joint intimidation of Ebeneezer and Anchorage, extols the apparently manifold virtues of the Halisdro Intermediate Cartridge DU5 Belligerent Semi-Automatic Assault Rifle to a swelling audience of Baziron and their hound-like slodzen below, his every word clumsily translated into their thrumming mother tongue by the attendant vo Qwer.
“Now, when you get zilched,” Two-Bit announces, snapping the dry trigger several times, “you wanna toggle this hicky here and that,” he declares, yanking the weapon's ammunition clip free, “oughta pop the nanner right the fuck outta there, alright?”
Seemingly undeterred by Two-Bit's flagrant inability to speak actual Commercial, vo Qwer appears to focus the emanations of his sibilating throatsac directly at the obese koj Hhenel and his plumed entourage while, simultaneously, he address the remainder of the assembled Dancing-Horizon clan with a maddeningly abstruse string of infinitesimal hand-signals.
“Did we ever figure out what all the hand gestures were?” Moira poses.
“Oh, um,” Nemo begins, tapping a palm against the bicep sleeve of his jacket, as if to remind himself, “it's a, uh... well, Ott explained it–”
“It's a secondary language,” Odisseus provides. “The primary language, obviously, is the throatsac stuff, but it's apparently pretty formal and difficult to communicate finer points, so it's mainly ceremonial. Addressing the koj, that sort of thing.” He shifts his weight, a disconcerting gurgle under his feet. “So, the hand-signals are more expressive, are for actual conversation between peers.”
“And they're all fluent in both?”
“I don't know,” Odisseus shrugs. “He is, apparently.”
vo Qwer's and, by proxy, the rest of the pirates' arrival in the Dancing-Horizon's capital village, whose name the Baziron emissary had mentioned in passing and Odisseus was woefully ill-equipped to pronounce, let alone remember, was greeted with some confused hybrid of awe and suspicion from its approximately four thousand inhabitants, the former for the return of their prodigal son and the latter for his apparent poor choice of playmates.
Teams of Ott's truculent raiders were frequent enough in this region, retrieving loads of doxychoraphum for sale on the black market, scouting the expanses for signs of Imperium presence and attending the odd war council as honored guests of Hhenel. To judge from the frosty reception the common Baziron paid Nemo and his squad of hangers-on upon their own landing, however, after four years of depleted hunting grounds, anti-infantry emplacements bristling off dropcraft and midnight guerilla raids on their relatively defenseless dwellings from teams of highly-trained jungle commandos armed with laser weapons, the local populace harbored an understandably dim view of offworlders in spaceships, no matter their stated intentions.
Solar wind particles, conflicting with some ionized chemical element low in the atmosphere, bespeckle the gloaming sky with efful
gent emerald, scintillating sapphire and radiant ruby, wheeling whimsical capers and aimless gambols, like kaleidoscopic grotesques enacting a shadow play against a curtain of sunset. According to vo Qwer, only along a narrow meridian across Baz's northern continent could such a polar spectacle nightly be viewed and by this sign would intruders realize that they'd trespassed onto the territory of the Dancing-Horizon kojaj.
The terrain they appropriated for themselves was bleak, as remorseless as the grim folk who mustered together their rough-spun existence from its immensities of quaggy, sodden tundra, its full roster of various hemotaphagus predators and its mazelike swatches of terrestrial coral. Entirely too ambitious for a multicellular organism, Odisseus instinctively distrusted land polyps, as, during his youth, a swarm of the aberrant little critters had threatened to overtake and annex the lodge of his birth for their own unfathomable purposes, but these Baziron provincials evidently found a method of domesticating the insatiable creatures.
Through some indiscernible thaumaturgy, the farmers come carpenters of the Dancing-Horizon kojaj could sculpt, or perhaps encourage, the plantlike land polyps into forming tailored shapes of their own specifications which, when the subsequent calcium carbonate hardened, would coagulate into rigid coral hedges. Thusly, nearly every building within their capital was engineered from living coral, in dozens of differing configurations and, though undoubtedly blanched by wintry steppeland winds, thousands of contrasting colors. From where he stood, Odisseus could see puffy fuchsia brains as domed domiciles, tiered turquoise pillars jutting from the slush like the bone-spurs of some slumbering subterranean beast and voluminous saffron tables to shelter those beneath from both oppressive tundra gales and the prying eyes of passing Imperium aircraft.
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