Fic: The Last of the Unplucked Gems (Part Two)
Part two of the serial for this week, featuring Boots and Hearts again. It's shorter than last week, thankfully, but I'm not entirely happy with how this turned out.
Word count this week is: 1281. To read part one: click here
Near the metal town of Impossiblium was the forest of Cherub Rock, which was an odd name for a forest if ever there was one. It was neither cherub- nor rock-like.
There was nothing special about Cherub Rock. It had trees with leaves, mold with spores, and squirrels with tails - standard for any forest in the entire world. The only thing perhaps worth mentioning (but only if one was predisposed to flowery prose) were the trees themselves. They were tall, elegant things that mimicked Impossiblium’s metallic construct in their silver-toned bark and fluttering golden leaves.
It was in the forest of Cherub Rock that Boots and Hearts had their secret hideout. It was called Terrapin Thirty-Three and was located near a … it was located somewhere and that somewhere was a secret, hence it being a “secret hideout”. Suffice it to say that Terrapin Thirty-Three, whose name has absolutely no significance beyond Hearts being especially fond of alliteration, was hidden away amongst these creaking, wannabe-metal trees.
Hearts led the way toward their hideout. Her overly large boots scuffed confidently through the leaf piles, kicking them up to expose the worms beneath. The worms didn’t at all appreciate being exposed by heavy, clomping feet and quickly tried to squirm below ground. Those who weren’t swift enough to burrow away ended up suffering a horrible death via crushing-by-boot. It wasn’t intentional on her part, and had she known … well, she still wouldn’t have changed her gait or been more mindful of where her boots landed. They were on a mission and missions required very purposeful steps.
Boots liked watching the leaves cascade around them. It made him feel like they were in a giant snow globe. He then thought about what living in an actual snow globe would be like and decided he didn’t like the idea of being turned upside down at random. There was also the fact that snow globes tended to be filled with water and, as far as he knew, neither he nor Hearts could breathe underwater. He decided then that living inside a snow globe was not a very good idea and went back to watching Hearts make a general disturbance of herself.
“Now, if we’re gonna face a pirate to Save the Planet, we’ve gotta fit the part!” Hearts declared as she ducked into the opening of Terrapin Thirty-Three, which was really nothing more than a great, gaping gap beneath tree roots. At one point in time it might have been some furry forest animal’s home. Now it was the staging area for all of their adventures.
Boots didn’t need to ask what she meant, but it seemed important from a storytelling perspective for him to do so anyway. “Whaddya mean, Hearts?”
Hearts, pleased that he had asked, in answer kicked the Trunk positioned in the middle of the space hard enough to snap the lid open. If it hasn’t been noticed yet, she liked to kick things.
The Trunk was an old-fashioned one commonly used to traveling. It had a lock plate on it, but there was no lock. The majority of the dinks and gouges over its wooden surface were from being tossed about by baggage handlers who were less than diligent in their duty, but a few of the newer marks were from the two adventurers - Hearts in particular. She’d been the one to take a stone and cut the jagged ‘B&H’ on the lid. The other scars it sported courtesy of her weren’t done so deliberately or with such good intent.
Inside this Trunk were all sorts of things, some stolen and some legitimately salvaged from garbage cans. The contents never remained the same, always changing to suit whichever style Save the Planet was taking that day. There’d been loads of socks for sock puppet style, rubber insects for spider style, and face paint galore for clown style. Once, the Trunk had been completely empty. They’d played Save the Planet: invisible style that day. It’d been tricky though; it was very hard trying to Save the Planet from an invisible menace.
Today, the Trunk’s contents were suitably pirate-y. There were blouses with billowy sleeves (lifted from someone’s laundry line, naturally), all manner of scarves and sashes in brilliant colors, hats that had been stripped of their floral decorations to make them more fitting for pirates, and pieces of gold plastic jewelry. There was even what at first appeared to be a poorly taxidermied parrot, but was actually just a bunch of reddish feathers glued into the semblance of a bird. It was obvious, despite its shoddy appearance, that some thought had been put into its construction.
A tiny smile crept across Boots’s face, which for him was synonymous with riotous laughter. He crouched down in front of the trunk and pulled out an especially frilly shirt. “You’ve been planning this for a while, huh, Hearts?” he asked.
Hearts ignored him (he was right, but admitting that would ruin her spontaneous-ness) and began chucking more pirate wear in his direction. “We’re gonna need pirate names, too,” she explained as she began tugging his t-shirt overhead, despite his grumbled protests.
“We do?” Boots asked.
Hearts scowled and poked him hard in the ribs, right in the spot that made him squeak. “Yeah, we do! Every pirate has an alias for the high seas!”
Boots supposed that made sense, seeing as pirates were wanted and all. If people were hunting for a Dross Honeyspider (which he thought was a very proper pirate name), they wouldn’t bother with someone named John Pug - even if they were one and the same. “So… what should my name be?”
A wide grinned stretched across her face as she yanked his goggles off. He immediately gave a protesting, “Hey,” and made to grab them, but she, being the taller of the two by several inches, quickly held them out of reach.
“You’re gonna be Jackboot Jellybelly and I’m gonna be Porcelina of the Vast Oceans!” she declared proudly. She’d spent all night coming up with those names and was quite proud of them.
He wasn’t as proud, though that could be because he hadn’t been the one staying up all hours trying to create them. He frowned and looked pointedly at his very non-jelly belly.
“It’s ironic,” she explained.
Oh. Boots nodded his acceptance of that very logical (and well placed) use of irony and finished turning himself into Jackboot Jellybelly.
For the final touch, Hearts tied a bandana around his head. It flattened his hair so thickly across his eyes that he could barely see her. Boots frowned. She made an exasperated sound and fit his goggles back on over the bandana. Boots smiled. That was much better.
“Pirates don’t wear aviator goggles, y’know,” she informed him.
He shrugged and said, “I can be the first ever then.”
Hearts - pardon, Porcelina of the Vast Oceans - considered this a moment before giving him a thumbs up. “Maybe you’ll start a trend, just like whatever pirate started wearing a peg leg. It’ll be a fashion statement!”
Boots, now assuming the role of Jackboot Jellybelly, had never thought of creating a fashion statement before, but that he was he quite liked it.
Tipping her hat at a very swashbuckling angle, Porcelina’s eyes narrowed into a very adventure ready glare. “C’mon, Jackboot. We’ve got a cunning, cutthroat cat to catch!”
Jackboot nodded solemnly and followed her out of their secret hideout, keeping one hand on his pants to prevent them from falling down. That would be a most unpirate-like thing to have happen. Together, they stomped back through Cherub Rock and began hunting down the elusive pirate known as the Eye-patch Wearing Cat.