DoA Careers: Trapper 2 | Tatlitli, (Laverito)

"Badallaioc never had magic," Laverito muttered.

 

For reasons that Tatlitli hadn't yet pried out of the land-hopper, he harbored an intense resentment of what he called 'magic'. Evidently, aqrion elements also fell under this broad land-hopper term.

 

"I'm not Badallaioc," was Tatlitli's nonchalant reply, as the aqrion reached deep within herself, drew energy from the pearl that capped the wellspring of her being, and willed the ocean to change around her. 

 

Turtli sailed at her left side. No matter how fast she swam, the turtle wisp was able to keep up without issue. And with every swipe of her fins and lash of her tail augmented by her water element, Tatlitli could swim quite fast indeed. Simply increasing her forward speed was insufficient this close to the seafloor; Tatlitli had to execute some very unintuitive maneuvers to get herself between the great craggy rocks.

 

Laverito clung to her horn with his arm-fins. He was a terrible swimmer, far slower than Tatlitli without the aqrion even trying, so the land-hopper clinging to her for transport like a spindly remora had become the norm. It would have taken Laverito a quarter of a sun-arc to get this far out, even though the nearness of the shore was obvious by the debris scattered around: half-buried wooden ship-bones, glinting glass pieces, warped bits of metal...

 

The land-hopper could and did scavenge such things on his own, but Laverito had come to Tatlitli for something else today.

 

Below them, a slurry of octopuses fled across the seafloor in all directions, chromatophores shifting and juddering until it was impossible to distinguish limbs from sand flurries. Tatlitli couldn't trap an octopus with nothing but her water element, but their own water-spitting propulsion eventually ran out, and increasing her own speed allowed her to catch up when it did.

 

Turtli dove to force an octopus to veer directly into Tatlitli's long teeth. Then she waited for a moment. Laverito sawed off one of the eight twitching limbs, and then, grimacing and griping all the while, pulled the octopus off of Tatlitli's "nightmare-causing mouth-spears" and popped it into her patient maw.

 

It was difficult to get impaled prey scraped off her teeth so that she could swallow it properly. Laverito's tiny hand-fins were perfectly suited to the task, and if Tatlitli was being so generous as to help the land-hopper gather ingredients for whatever inane quest he was on now, he could do her this little favor in return.

 

Laverito complained constantly, but he cooperated. The land-hopper made it no secret that he absolutely believed Tatlitli would eat him if sufficiently irritated. Tatlitli had not yet attempted to dispel that delusion. Turtli found the whole situation incredibly entertaining, and expressed this by spinning into happy spirals whenever Laverito appeared.

 

Laverito stuffed yet another octopus arm into a bag, cursing as the water allowed said bag to roll and twist and generally be quite uncooperative.

 

“How many more do you need?” Tatlitli asked.

 

Laverito crammed the last few inches of the arm inside and huffed with immeasurable frustration. "Half-a-dozen... at least. Stupid witches, and their stupid potions, and their stupid wizard accomplices and their stupid artifacts that let me survive under impossible conditions, to steal stupid things to sell at stupid black markets..."

 

Tatlitli had to wonder how land-hoppers got anything done when they spent so much energy complaining about doing anything. But, Tatlitli was nothing if not selectively deaf, and tuned out her seething passenger with ease that was unfortunately quite practiced by now.

 

Turtli swooped under Tatlitli's throat, coming up alongside opposite to Laverito. Tatlitli hummed at the turtle wisp. "Yes, quite so. We'll do that, then."

 

"Do what?" Laverito piped up, jarred from his mutterings.

 

As usual, Tatlitli didn't bother to answer. Turtli flapped out of the way as quickly as the turtle wisp could, and then Tatlitli aimed her angler bulb towards a smattering of octopuses who were attempting to hide on the seafloor, and doing a very good job of it. But Tatlitli had been watching, and she was fairly confident that those particular rocks were actually still octopuses.

 

And if they'd since stopped being octopuses, they'd still make good target practice.

 

But how to do it? Tatlitli wasn't totally ignorant of her own element. Granted, her main point of reference was questionable rumors passed to her during the occasional encounter with another aqrion, but the raw ideas seemed sound enough. 

 

At the pearl of the clam, she was really just doing the same thing the octopuses had been doing, but with the intention of moving something other than herself.

 

So Tatlitli did just that. She gathered up energy from that swirling pearl at the center of her self, threaded it through the surrounding water, and gave it all a single hard shove.

 

Her jaw worked of its own accord, as if the effort required at least the semblance of a shout to announce it. The water rippled before her, almost like waves on the surface, normal ebb and flow harshly interrupted.

 

A smattering of octopuses were squashed against the seafloor by the sheer weight of water, like a giant invisible flipper had come down upon them. A few on the very outskirts of the little group were lucky enough to escape, but the rest began to drift without aim, dazed or dead.

 

Turtli did three consecutive barrel rolls of excitement, before swooping in to start pushing the octopuses into a more consolidated cloud. As Tatlitli leisurely approached, Laverito muttered something unflattering. Staying behind Tatlitli's horn had shielded the fragile land-hopper from the blast, but he hadn't appreciated being so close to it.

 

Laverito's distaste for magic was nearly as strong as his dislike of fire. Aqrions had no fire, but Tatlitli had watched the light of shoreline wildfires dancing across the surface of the sea, and aqrions with thermal magic at work. A pity that her best potential source of information was loathe to speak of the exotic stuff.

 

Ah, well. The land-hopper's disapproval would remain limited to grumbling, which would not be silenced by reminding him that the only reason he could breath underwater right now was because of the magical artifact latched onto his throat.

 

Instead, Tatlitli asked, "Why do the arms need to be from different octopuses?"

 

The question only served to increase the volume and target of the incensed land-hopper's complaining, but at least it was a change of pace.