Pacific Swim
"A group of teenagers on a Hawaiian vacation encounter a strange rift that changes them forever. Rated N for No Giant Robots."
EDIT: Now with art! Look at the art.
Masquerading as a man with a reason My charade is the event of the season -Kansas, "Wayward Son"
Wilmington Drake was hiding from monsters in a bush.
It was a nice bush, he admitted. Very tropical. You didn't get bushes like that in North Carolina. Still, it wasn't exactly what he had expected when he had suggested they all head out to an island in Hawaii for some swimming.
When he woke up and saw the things coming out of the water, he had assumed he was seeing things. But when they got closer, and he realized that they were real, and they sure weren't costumes, then he had promptly bolted.
And left the radios behind.
Good job, Wil.
His first thought, as he was running away, hadn't been something along the lines of "monsters!" but "Where's Reiko?" She and the others had gone off swimming, and if anything had happened to her -
Well, her dad would kill him, for starters. Assuming he escaped the monsters.
The Wu triplets might've escaped. They were gymnasts, they needed to be fit. They could just climb a tree. And he wouldn't put it past the Kaparovs to just headbutt them into submission. Or Arkady and Sonya could do something even more lethal, like challenge them to a drinking contest.
Wil chuckled, winced. The hangover was why he had taken a nap in the first place. Arkady had an amazing capacity for Jagerbombs. Funny how you don't notice headaches when you're fleeing for your life.
Something moved in the jungle.Something big, and red, with its head low to the ground.
His scent.
Of course.
It moved closer and closer, and Wil got ready to run. He stepped back, right onto a twig, and the thing's head came up like a shot. Well, one of its heads. The other two kept down, while the center one stared straight at the bush he was hiding in.
Wil was almost certain that it could hear his heart beating.
The other two heads looked up, and the thing decided to check out that suspicious nose, and Wil bolted.
it wasn't a good idea, really. It could probably outrun him, on level ground. In the jungle, it had to fight through the undergrowth more than he did, but that wouldn't last forever, and it could still track him. Maybe he could climb a tree?
One of the trees shook, and Wil glanced upward to see something like a gorilla, up in the canopy. Great.
That was when he tripped.
Well, it wasn't technically tripping. It was technically scratching his leg on a broken branch, then stumbling, then falling into a clearing where he laid for a few seconds until he got his wind back.
He rolled over onto his back and blinked. There was a strange bat-thing in the sky. Except it seemed a lot bigger than it should. Great. They've got air support.
The red thing burst into the clearing and headed straight for him. Even in sunlight, it was just a blur. Wil had just enough time to wonder if it was a good idea to play dead like with bears before it was upon him.
Death, as it turned out, was rather wet.
It hurt less than he expected.
In fact, it didn't hurt at all.
All three of the thing's heads were licking him.
"Hey, what - cut it out!" He might've well have been pushing a brick wall, given how huge it was, except the thing actually backed off, and sat there stating at him, tongues lolling. It had what looked like two rear legs, but three pairs of forelegs that looked like arms. The heads themselves had all sorts of golden, glowing lines on them that -
Come to think, it looked like a cross between an octopus and a chinese Foo Dog statue.
The...dog sniffed at his ankle, licked the cut, and stood over him, panting all over his bare chest.
It seemed large, powerful, yet somehow lithe. And even though it was covered in scales and hide, it still smelt like wet dog.
Wil looked down. The heads on its shoulders wasn't the only thing it had three of.
Wait.
Three.
"Chao?"
One of the heads tilted.
"Huang? Jun?"
The other two tilted at him. All three nodded. Then they moved forward, presumably to try and drown him in slobber again.
"Down, krasnyj," said Sonya's voice.
The dog immediately stopped and sat, and what seemed like a cross between a gorilla and a bear strode into the clearing, walking on its knuckles. It had some sort of blue glowy thing coming out of its head, not unlike a certain Russian's haircut, tiny eyes, and the rest of its body was covered in leathery hide, albeit with blue-green glowing veins running through it.
Swooping out of the air came a sort of batlike creature. It seemed sleeker than the leatherback, with a similar crest and skin texture, and somehow, was unmistakably feminine. Maybe it was the sway of its long tail. Something blue and glowing dripped from its lips.
Wil stared at it. "Sonya?"
"Da," said Leatherback. "There have been some...changes."
By process of elimination, and the head-thing, that meant the bat was Arkady...somehow. And he already knew the dog was the triplets...somehow. Which left -
"Where's Reiko?"
"Right here."
Reiko Kita stepped into the clearing.
The first thing Wil noticed is that she, somehow, had the bearing of a queen, for all that she was walking on claws instead of feet, though there was something...else. The second one was that she was the only one still human enough to keep wearing their swimsuit, oddly enough. The same one she had swaggered down to the beach in, like she knew he had been watching. It contrasted nicely with the traceries of golden light that flowed up her dark grey body and clustered around her upper torso.
She spun as she walked, and her tail swung wide behind her, spines leading up to her head. Do your little turn on the catwalk...
"Do you like?" she said, softly, with her usual accented English.
Wil barely even noticed that the others were, somehow, deferring to her before he said "Reiko...what happened?"
Was it just his imagination, or did she loose some of her pose, become a little bit less confident? Was she looking for his approval?
"We're...we're not sure." She reached for her hair, remembered it was some sort of seaweed-like thing now, and dropped it. "There was some kind of...thing. A rift, maybe. Glowing, on the ocean floor." She stared off into the middle distance. "And then we changed, and then we..." The light coursing through her veins flickered, quickened briefly. "Anyway, we came looking for you, and here we are. How's your leg?"
Fine, actually. In fact, the skin around the cut was already darkening, and the cut itself was looking oddly...blue.
Reiko knelt next to him. Despite the fact that she seemed almost inhuman, he could still make out the "science look" on her face, the one she used when she was thinking really hard about classwork, and he'd tease her and make her blush.
"I wondered about that. It seems we - or at least Triphoon - are contagious," she said apologetically.
"So...I'm going to turn into one of you?"
"Maybe," she said, standing. "I wonder...if this would work on anyone other than humans?"
"Reiko, are you sure you're okay in there?" Wil ventured cautiously.
"I'm not sure about Reiko, anymore. I've been thinking about...Knifehead."
"There's nothing on your head."
Her claws parted the ties of her bikini bottom easily.
"Wrong head," she said softly.
Wil swallowed, stared. The only thing he could think was how did that fit under there?
"I think," Reiko said, as her servants bent down, "it's time you go for a swim."
By Eulalie "Nequ" Quentin 2013 Creative Commons By-SA-NC Loosely based on Legendary Pictures' "Pacific Rim" "Pacific Swim"