Furnado Animal Shelter, Tuesday

[puppy_fair]

It was Zack's turn to have the fish! The Fish, famous around the island as of a couple of months ago, and when he'd gotten his hands on it, finally, he'd gasped out loud.

Hernando had done an amazing job decorating it, the fish now having a cover of beautiful metallic rainbow scales over its body. There were other modifications he noticed, too, from owners of the fish who had come before. Paint on the plaque it was mounted on, still charred here and there. Whenever he hit the button to make it sing, instead of a dulcet tune it spat out confetti and glitter and a garbled rendition of something that could have been a song, or could have been a horrified screech; it was difficult to tell given how waterlogged the whole thing seemed to sound. And every now and again, from the corner of his eye, Zack couldn't be sure, but he thought the fish was maybe projecting an image of a student having his feet attacked with a Roomba?

At least it could still hover.

"It's okay, pal," he murmured to the fish, giving it a friendly pat on the head. "I know just the thing."

And that was how the fish wound up with a Regen Materia, a small green sphere faintly illuminated with its own internal glow, slotted into the place where its eye should have been.

Before long, it was singing more or less on key again, though it did occasionally still spit water and the odd spent bullet or puff of ash along with its confetti. And, just to be sure, Zack took one of the scales and yanked it roughly off of the fish.

He smiled as it grew back.

"There," he said proudly. "Now you'll never have to worry about getting hurt again."

The animals at the shelter were not necessarily thrilled about the slightly burnt pumpkin spice-scented rainbow fish disco party that the rest of the day became as a result.

[OOC: ENJOY YOUR ETERNALLY SELF-HEALING RAINBOW NIGHTMARE FISH, FRIENDS. Open!]

Comments

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan popped by the shelter and stuck his head in. He was a little relieved to find Zack. Not that Sidon hadn't been just the most adorable squidgey giant shark prince he'd ever met, but he had a reason for finding Zack today.

"Hey, Zack," he greeted, coming all the way into the shop. He gave the fish a mildly startled look, "Y'know, I'm starting to think that thing is following me. It was in the tea shop last week."

[puppy_fair]

"Kaidan, hi!" Zack grinned at him and gave him a cheerful wave hello as he stepped into the shop. "And nah, the fish isn't following you. Hernando and I won it together last week, so it's just my turn to have at it."

The fish burbled out the most merry rendition of Sabotage, ever. With possible telepathic undertones of The Song That Never Ends.

"I think it's an improvement."

It looked more like a My Little Pony daydream now than a nightmarish charred monstrosity, anyway.

[spectre_alenko]

"It's definitely an improvement over the last time I saw it," Kaidan agreed, thinking of the charred wreckage that had been on Hernando's counter.

"I was talking to Iris yesterday, and I have an idea but I'm not sure how valid it is. You up to being an ear?"

[puppy_fair]

"I have two of them for a reason," Zack replied easily. "What did you guys talk about?"

[spectre_alenko]

"It started when I was asking Jono why, on an island with this many war-trained people, there's no standing militia. He mentioned that the students, back in the day, had a team of reserves and that it had pretty much fallen apart for various reasons. Like kids graduating and going home. Kinda makes my teeth itch that it was kids, you know? Anyway, there's a lot of us here in town who could do a lot of good defending the island from these incursions that keep happening, but almost nobody's used to working together."

He took a breath, "Iris thought it wasn't a bad idea to maybe start up an adult version of the reserves. Get people together, if they're willing, see if they could start working together. Training, maybe. I don't know. What do you think?"

[puppy_fair]

Zack's eyes went a little wide as Kaidan spoke, and the moment he'd finished, he said, "I'm in."

A few seconds later, a little sheepishly, he added, "I was a part of them, back in the day. With Arthur."

Pendragon. That Arthur.

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan had no idea who Arthur was without the word 'King' in front of it.

Offering Zack a lopsided smile, he said, "Well, good, I was hoping you might be interested. You said you were bored. Can you tell me about them? Iris said they were divided by like, abilities, and that seems a strange way to do it, to me. I was thinking more groups with different abilities all working to see how they could be most effective."

He fidgeted a moment, "Everyone keeps telling me that we're overdue for another invasion. That it's been a long time since the last one. I don't have a lot of hopes that the next one that hits will be small."

[puppy_fair]

Well, he hadn't been a king at the time. And in Zack's reality he was a legendary summon, so there was some disconnect there.

"I don't either," Zack admitted. "And the divide at the time made sense. Better to have people who know how magic works to round up the people with magic, and the support reserves took care of things like the medics or people who wanted to provide supplies. We all coordinated with one another, but it was a bunch of students. It was important for people to know that they could be useful even without firing a gun or swinging a sword."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan listened and nodded, "Where I'm from, squads are put together so all the bases are covered. We don't have magic, but we have biotic abilities, we have tech squads, and those all get paired with soldiers. We also have medics, engineers, pilots, and sometimes we're lucky enough to have people around who care what happens to us after the fighting's over."

Not always. But sometimes. It galled him that Cerberus had been more proactive about that than the Alliance and Council were. It was not a gap Kaidan would leave, if he could help it.

[puppy_fair]

"The trouble with putting them all together for us was mostly that there wasn't really anybody who could begin to guess at what to do with all of it at once," Zack admitted. "With as many realities and as many different ways of approaching each thing, we wanted to make sure somebody was working with people who knew how to best use their potential."

Because... dangerous kids, sure, but they were still students. Some needed more guidance than others from people who felt comfortable giving it.

[spectre_alenko]

"That's kind of where I think I'd fit in," Kaidan said, still not terribly comfortable with this idea, "I'm used to getting people with pretty radical personality differences to work together. Biotics, at least the human ones, all have issues. Goes with the territory of having abilities that get stronger the more emotion you fling at 'em."

"I'm just not sure I should be in charge. I'm the new guy."

[puppy_fair]

"I mean... I'm very much not the new guy," Zack noted, "but I've been kind of out of touch. That said... I've been in charge before, too. It was me and Maladicta and Kennedy for a while. Not that... that... means a lot, I know."

He shrugged. The fish screeched Sabotage.

"What I mean is, if you need any help at all, I can do that."

Not that he was volunteering to run the thing. Just that he knew what the thing was.

[spectre_alenko]

"I don't know who any of those people are," Kaidan said, "But yeah, I could use some help. I'll see about setting up some sort of meeting this weekend for people to talk about it. Just..not real sure who-all to talk to."

[puppy_fair]

"You could try to get an advertisement on the radio," Zack offered. "Or put up posters. I've found that posters tend to get people's attention pretty well around here, since it is a small town."

He tilted his head a little.

"Do you have somewhere to hold the meeting figured out yet?"

[spectre_alenko]

"That, I don't want to do," Kaidan said slowly, "There's at least two people I would prefer not show up." Rosa and Seivarden. He didn't really care, at this point, if they would be useful or not - it was his meeting, and he didn't want to deal with either of them.

He shook his head, "No? You know a place that'd be good for it?"

[puppy_fair]

Zack smiled wryly.

"If you don't put an open invite, then you'll be potentially missing out on a lot of people who could bring a lot to the table," he pointed out. "And besides... they'd find out from the radio the next day. That said, I'm not afraid to play bouncer if someone shows up and starts trouble. It'd give me something to do."

He leaned his head back, considering.

"I suppose we could try to make use of the gym," he mused. "Or try to find a more permanent space. The community center? Or we can ask about using the room with the stage at the Groovy Tunes. In-- Iris and I live upstairs from it, we're renting from the owner, and apparently there are conference rooms in the basement, too."

[spectre_alenko]

"True, that," Kaidan acknowledged, "but I'd rather get the opinions of people I know, to find out if this is even something worth trying to get off the ground. This isn't 'hey let's do this', it's 'should we do this'. It makes sense to me, but it's my idea, so I'm biased. Iris seemed to think it wasn't a bad idea, Jono probably also."

He considered the spaces, "Conference room is an idea."

[puppy_fair]

Zack considered that for a few seconds, and then he nodded.

"Okay, that makes more sense," he admitted. "You're still plotting logistics, this isn't something you've already got fleshed out, right? Do you know any other fighters around the island? Any other military, maybe?"

[spectre_alenko]

"Hasn't been fleshed out. I'm still in the stages of 'should I even try to flesh this out'," Kaidan said ruefully.

He shrugged, "People who can fight: You, Kanan, Peter, Miguel, Iris, Jono, Liam, Mitsutada, Atton - though he may be out of the count for awhile, who knows. Those are people I know can fight. Will they?" He held his hands up in a 'who knows' gesture. "Military? You, me, Peter, Liam, Mitsutada, Atton, that I know about. Possibly Jono, didn't really ask."

He scrubbed a hand through his hair, "I don't know many people here."

[puppy_fair]

"That's... about as many as I know," Zack confessed, grimacing a little. "Maybe not the same people, but about the same number. And you've had way less time than I have to make friends. My social life these days is, uh, mostly dogs."

He gestured with a hand around the shelter, and then smiled sheepishly.

It was better to be sheepish than to really dwell on the reasons why for too long.

"I know Miguel? And Iris, of course."

And it would never not be weird, calling her that so that people knew who he was talking about.

[spectre_alenko]

"You've been here longer," Kaidan pointed out, "You haven't been treating this whole island as one giant recon mission."

Which he had.

"And dogs aren't so bad. I like them more than people, most days of the week."

[puppy_fair]

"It's easier to tell where you stand with a dog," Zack agreed, smiling faintly, letting his reasons for not treating the island like a recon mission slide, for the time being. "They're not generally shy about letting you know."

[spectre_alenko]

Zack, you got along with dogs because you were a human-shaped puppy.

"Generally, no, and they're usually a good judge of character," Kaidan agreed.

[puppy_fair]

Ah, if only Zack could have inherited that trait from dogs, too...

"I wonder if dogs offer lessons in that sort of thing?"

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan shot him a sideways glance, "Is that something you need lessons doing?"

Kaidan couldn't talk - he went with his gut feeling most of the time.

[puppy_fair]

"I've had some swings and misses over the years," Zack admitted, that smile of his going a little wry. "Maybe I'd get out more if I trusted I wouldn't just do the same thing again."

Which was about as close to 'vulnerable caring and sharing time' as Zack tended to get. Emotions were hard.

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan threw him a lopsided smile, "That'd do it. Good thing you have Girl. And Iris. She seems nice."

[puppy_fair]

"She can be a bit much for some people," Zack noted, though there was some obvious warmth in his voice as he spoke. "But she's the best thing that's ever happened to me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her."

In a very, very literal sense, in fact.

[spectre_alenko]

"She does sort of seem like a force of nature, but in a good way," Kaidan agreed.

[puppy_fair]

"She decides something needs to get done, and she'll do it," Zack explained. "Nothing in the world can stop her once she's made up her mind. When she moved to my reality, she walked in and... pretty much informed the company that she was going to become one of their most valuable assets. She wasn't wrong."

It made him a little sick to think about now, knowing what ShinRa did to their assets.

[spectre_alenko]

"That makes me a little worried, considering she thinks this whole thing is a good idea," Kaidan teased gently.

[puppy_fair]

Zack gave a fond little smile at that.

"Then it must be," he replied. "I trust her judgement. And you're not wrong... even if the island doesn't need it often, it is something the island tends to need."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan scrubbed a hand through his hair, "Yeah. Mostly it just seems like people need to learn to work together instead of being individual pillars."

[puppy_fair]

"The island is really good at attracting pillars," Zack replied, wryly. "It finds fighters, it finds people who know what it's like when life gets ugly, and then it kind of throws us all in the mix with no real guidance. Which would work out better if we weren't almost all used to having to hold our own without backup."

[spectre_alenko]

Kaidan nodded, "Yeah. Thing is, we'd have backup here. Or, we should. I mean, honestly, if you saw me fighting something trying to invade the island, would you stand there?"

Zack did not seem the sort who would stand there. He seemed more the type who'd yell 'Banzai!' and leap into it.

[puppy_fair]

"Of course I wouldn't," Zack replied, tilting his head. "Heck, I've made friends in the fray, even since I came back. Miguel and I did some pretty decent damage in our last invasion, it was pretty great."

They'd played amped-up superpowered baseball. With a sword.

[spectre_alenko]

Spreading his hands, Kaidan said, "See? That's kind of the idea, only let's make all the friends before the fray, right?"

[puppy_fair]

Zack broke into a little laugh at that.

"Hey, you're preaching to the choir," he pointed out. "That's what we were doing before everyone left, after all."

He wasn't sure why the reserves had died out before. He'd been kind of preoccupied at the time.

[spectre_alenko]

"Graduation will do that, when you have a student-run organization," Kaidan..guessed. He hadn't ever been invited to be part of a student-run anything.

"That's another reason I think the adults should step in, though. Continuity."

[puppy_fair]

"Continuity," Zack echoed, thoughtfully. "I guess, so long as we aren't running back home for one reason or another, at least we're not on a deadline the way the students generally are, yeah."