Kyanoko's Travels Across the Paperverse: The Kelpocalypse and the Diva Dragon

Kelptastrophy prompt 1- umpteen urchins

word count: 1978

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When Kyanoko first heard of the situation on Aquella, she immediately pictured the seascape being completely carpeted in a solid mass of floating seaweed. Thankfully, it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was still worse than she reasonably imagined. It was impossible to not notice the unusually high amount of surface kelp, even from where she was standing on the beach. The winds carried the expected briny smell of the ocean, but riding along was the scent of sea rot. 

The tanuki could see people she was more familiar with have already paired off with the natives of the water world. There were fishing boats of various styles fishing out what the dragons below chased into the nets. Soaring over the kelp fields were flying shark-like dragons with people on their backs, surveying the worst of the areas and coming up with plans to best handle the situation. A few dragons and Paperverse travelers were cooking with campfires built on the beach. Most of which were taking a crack at trying to make the sea urchins edible. But many others were frying up fresh fish and drying out seaweed for a snack between work.

Kyanoko was already in a wetsuit that she purchased specifically for this world. If she was going to spend most of her time in the water, a normal swimsuit wouldn’t cut it. It wasn’t as pretty as her usual frilly water attire, but she got one that was a cute pink and green color scheme instead of the standard black. She wore a large sunhat, tied into place to remain on her head.

She skimmed the shore seeking a phin singer, a small cetacean-like dragon. He was described to her as a black dolphin with a colorful tail with wildcat-like spots. He wasn’t hard to spot as he lazed, half-beached with his tail in the air. Hard slates ran down his spine from his first dorsal fin down to his tail tip. They sparkled lazily in the sunlight. Kyanoko waved her arm to get his attention as she approached. He returned no gestures to show that he might have seen her.

“Dice?” Kyanoko asked when she was in earshot. The dragon was far larger than she was expecting, easily twice the length of the dolphin he resembled. He was chatting with another dragon who was staring blankly at a space a thousand yards away. Dice rolled his eyes in an exaggerated gesture, landing them on Kyanoko.

“That’s what you’re wearing?” were the words he chose to be his first to the tanuki.

“What’s wrong with it?” Kyanoko asks, looking down at her wetsuit. Sure, it wasn’t what she’d normally wear, but it looked fine to her.

“Nothing,” Dice responded with a tone where there was obviously something wrong with it. 

“I have an idea for how we could help with the frilled urchins.” Kyanoko decided to move on. She liked her outfit and Dice didn’t, no point in making a stink about opinions. “I was thinking we could set up fishing nets under the floating kelp beds.”

“Mhmmm…” Dice nodded his head somewhat thoughtfully. Kyanoko figured he got the gist of her reasoning and felt like she didn’t need to explain herself further. 

“I say we just try it out with one kelp pile and if it does well, we can move to a larger-scale operation.”

“N-yah, all right. Let’s go.” he nodded and started pushing his flippers against the shore. A wave of water rushed along Dice’s body and he allowed it to pull him back into the ocean. Kyanoko scurried after him, reaching a hand out to him. Dice defensively shifted, pulling his body away and snapping his judgemental eyes to hers.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“You said let’s go.”

“You can swim, can’t you?”

“I’m… not a dragon.” Kyanoko furrowed her brow. She figured the reason why Paperverse travelers and Aquellans were paired off was for the dragons to offer locomotive in the water. But Dice didn’t relent and Kyanoko felt as though she could argue with the phin singer until her fur turned blue and he wouldn’t change his mind. Besides, she was being rather assumptious and perhaps he just didn’t like being touched.

“Where are you going?” he called to her as she made her way back to the beach.

“I’m not a dragon!” she repeated. She caught Dice giving the glaze-eyed dragon a look and an exaggerated shrug. The other dragon didn’t react.

“Chaaarleeeesss, what’s taking so long?” Dice whined for the third time in the past twenty minutes. Kyanoko had scoured the beach gathering materials she knew would help her brew a concoction to help her keep up with the dragons. Several times she requested Dice to help her to speed up the process by getting some of the items for her- he did not. She had everything she needed and was throwing it all into her brewing barrel. She waited a minute, possibly more, for the ingredients to infuse their magical properties into the base. 

The cask gave her a potion and within minutes of drinking it, Kyanoko felt her body shifting ever so slightly. Her feet and hands were webbed and her tail became stiffer but stronger. It was so much easier to breathe as her body used the oxygen she gave it more efficiently. This wouldn’t last forever, but the brew was strong and should last several hours- if not a couple of days. Plenty of time to see if Kyanoko’s solution could work.

“About time.” Dice sighed as Kyanoko joined him in the water, she carried a bag that had a neatly packed fishing net within. The tanuki repressed her own eye roll and followed him out to sea. At some point, Dice began talking to her, gossiping with the same tone that he was talking to Glazed-Eyes. 

She would have felt happy to have had the dragon finally talking to her, but it quickly became apparent he had no interest in having a discussion with her. Slowly, she felt herself tuning out the dragon as he rambled, occasionally zoning back into a random line of dialogue, and tuning him back out.

“And then she slept with his brother. Can you believe that? …And then they showed me like the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen. I just smiled, but I almost puked…. I was thinking that he’d look hot because you know, they usually are- but this guy looked like a thumb. Have you seen a thumb? Thumbs are ugly. Oh, you have thumbs? Ew, you should get that looked at. Gross, stop showing it off like you’re proud of it or something!”

Soon after entering the kelp forest, the water temperature notably dropped as the matted kelps became more frequent and dense. Dice gave a shiver and released a whine about being cold. Kyanoko found the cool water refreshing, but that’s what she sought as a land creature in Summer heat. But this was unnatural and disruptive, it needed to be fixed. Squinting her eyes at the kelp above her, she could see some of the frilled urchins resting in the rotting foliage. Below her, she saw them chewing away that the kelp beds.

Kyanoko searched for a floating kelp pile of reasonable size, she heard a shrill shriek from Dice. Her heart pounded in her chest as she turned to find him. The serene kelp forest suddenly looked terrifying as any number of potential dangers could be hiding within. She spotted his colorful tail and quickly moved to his side. But when she got there, he was fine and clearly not under any attack. 

There were strands of rotted kelp wrapped around his belly as he shook and squirmed to shake it off. Kyanoko watched him struggle for a moment with a frown before reaching her hand out to pull the kelp free. Dice went about making further whines. Despite trying to listen to him and hold onto his words, Kyanoko had gotten so adept at tuning out his voice that she didn’t process any of his complaining.

She flinched when a large shadow passed over them. Still on edge, she looked to the surface, expecting to see a shark that wouldn’t even consider Dice a decent meal. Instead what floated lazily above them was the largest clump of matted rotting kelp she had seen since she arrived. It was festering with the invasive urchins.

“Check it out!” Kyanoko said excitedly, gesturing above her.

“Ugh! Rude!” Dice sneered at her. Clearly, she had interrupted him in the middle of one of his ramblings. The phin singer stole a glance and Kyanoko was sure if he was capable, Dice would have crinkled his nose. “Okay, and? What about it?”

“It’d be perfect to set a net under, don’t you think?” Kyanoko tried to remind him of the plan he agreed to before they set out.

“Charles, you’re lucky you’re-” Dice cut himself off before looking at Kyanoko again with a judgmental expression. “Anyways, that’s not how fishing nets work. You need to either pull it out or put them in a river or something.”

The cocktail of emotions that stirred within Kyanoko from everything that came out of the dragon’s mouth left her flabbergasted. She felt confused, offended, and angry. But all that she could get to leave her mouth in her defense was, “Charles?” 

She had assumed on the beach that the glaze-eyed dragon dice was rambling to was named Charles. Kyanoko found herself wondering if she would be more or less offended if Dice had opted to call her by her personal name. Haru was at least her name. Where did Charles even come from?

Dice opened his mouth, but before anything could leave, a frilled urchin drifted down between them. The tanuki and the dragon both watched the bug-eyed thing fall to the kelp beds below and immediately begin eating at the roots of the plants it landed near. Dice clicked his tongue in disgust at the display of gluttony and Kyanoko scrunched her nose at the witlessness behind the invader’s eyes.

“What a dumb fuck.” Dice mumbled to it, watching as a couple of the frilled urchins around him began to ride trimmed kelps.

“Yeah, if only we could stop them from coming back down in the first place.” Kyanoko pretended to muse. Clearly, this dragon wasn’t going to let her explain herself, so she had to make him think her idea was his idea.

Dice frowned as he watched the urchins go about their life cycle with no disruption. For once he was quiet as the gears turned in his head. Kyanoko shifted her bag, trying to draw attention to her fishing net. A light lit up in Dice’s eyes and he threw his head back.

“Charles!-”

“Kyanoko-”

“Whatever. I have a brilliant idea!” Dice excitedly explained to the tanuki. “We should put that net under the kelp pile.”

“Huh? Why?” Kyanoko played dumb. 

“Wellllll, if we put the fishing net under the kelp, then when they start to fall, they’ll just stay in the net!” he made a gesture that Kyanoko was half-sure was supposed to signal a ‘ta-da!’. “And if they’re in the net, they can’t fuck up the kelp beds.”

“That’s a great plan.” Kyanoko complimented through her teeth.

“I knoooow. Wow, you are so lucky to be working with me.” Dice flicked his tail towards her. “Now come on, we got work to do!”

Kyanoko bit her tongue as she followed Dice up to the surface of the kelp bed. As much as she wanted to be rid of him now, she still needed his help. And if she had to act stupid to get him to cooperate, so be it. As she positioned her half of the net underneath the rotting kelp, she hoped her partnership with Dice wasn’t permanent.