Saltwater Bounty (Ace)

[Gleam]

Jacob laid back on the beach, totally relaxed, his arms folded behind his head. He'd traded out the modest shirt and pants combo for a ragged top and a pair of shorts, and basked in the sunlight as he cradled a fishing rod in between his feet. A cooler beside him carried the necessary tools of any fisherman, and out in the ocean before him laid his target - the high-tide rush of fish looking for food among the small coral reef off the north beach.

He yawned and tugged his cap down tighter over his head, blocking out the bright sunlight, then settled back down, twitching the rod experimentally with a toe to check if any fish had taken the bait. They hadn't.

Fishing was always a patient man's game, but there was nothing that said it couldn't be a tired man's game as well.

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace was walking along the beach, a pocket full of rocks. Occasionally she'd pull one out, whisper something and throw it at something she focused on. "45%.... 50%... " She'd throw the rock twice. Three times. More. The waves coming into the beach and the sounds of the ocean did help her to focus, giving her a strange sense of calm she had only ever felt in mexico before.

Cursing, She pulled out another one, a smooth stone which would be good for skipping. She wasn't looking to do that though. She spotted a target in the distance, a large bulky mass. She figured it was a boulder or a beached whale or something - it was too far away to tell. All Ace knew was that it was easy to focus on. "75%.... 76- no 78%..." She threw the stone, and heard it thunk off something.

She continued walking, drawing nearer to it...

[/blockquote]

[Gleam]

The rock thudded firmly into the object, which proved to be living - Jacob Khorwah shot up and cursed vilely in Italian as he grabbed at whatever had impacted him. Then he glared up the coastline at the approaching figure.

A few more steps rendered her recognizable, and much of the scowl faded from Jacob's face, replaced with only a vague irritation. He jerked the rod again to make sure he wasn't missing any fish, and called, "Have I left a dirty sock or something of the sort on your side of the room, Ace?"

He waved the girl over with a hand and relaxed back onto the sand, though this time he kept an eye on her too - just in case of any more projectiles.

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace watched the rock landed into the boy. Wait, it was a person? She walked closer, hearing him from a distance curse something she didn't understand. "Oh hey it's Muffin Jack! Haha, no no, sorry I was just target practicing. I thought your were a rock or a beached whale or something from a distance." She said with a half-grin.

She bounced another rock in her hand, throwing it up and catching it again. She didn't intent to throw this one, just something to do with her hands. He waved her over and as she approached, she saw the stick propped up. "... That's for fishing, right?" She smirked, "... Please tell me this isn't where you got the salmon from last night..."

[Gleam]

"Salmon are estuary and coast fish, not deepwater." Jacob corrected. "You cannot find them around islands, not even during the spawning runs. And no, I do not plan to catch fish to eat - the kitchen, again, lacks the necessary tools to fillet seafood. I will rectify that soon enough."

His eyebrow ticked at the beached whale bit, but he makes no comment. "Fishing is a habit I have long since grown fond of for the purpose of relaxing. Classes so far have been . . . tiresome. I requested a test out and discovered there is no such thing on Solstice Academy."

Jacob's eyebrow ticked again, and he gave a particularly vicious jerk of the fishing rod. A crab soared out of the water and landed about twenty feet away. He glared at it as it left. "I am displeased at the prospect of being required to sleep through Geometry once again."

['Ace' Julia Dale]

"This looks like a coast to me." She said to him, not believing whatever he was talking about. "And I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I'd really appreciate it if you didn't trail blood and guts about the kitchen..." She said, figuring that's what filleting involved.

"Test out? What like you take a test and can get out of classes?" She considered the option for a moment but then heard the rest of the sentence correctly. "Ah well that sucks..." She watched the crab and laughed a bit at it. "He's a little smartass ain't he." She said with a stretched half-grin, finding something funny about that crab.

"..Again? So I'm assuming... you've taken Geomancy before." She said, repeating the name incorrectly. If he said anything or corrected her she would have just said that he made the mistake first not her.

[Gleam]

"Not a large enough one to attract salmon, nor are there any rivers large enough for them to spawn within. This place is devoid of salmon, I assure you." Jacob said, a wry smile coming to his face. "And . . . no, I would not attempt to fillet anything in our flat. The sink is too small and the garbage can puny. I believe I will patronize the main kitchens for that purpose, should I ever do so at all."

He picked up the stone Ace had decked him with, measured the crab for a moment with a canny eye, and then hurled the rock at it. He missed horribly and frowned. "Never liked baseball."

He didn't correct her misspeaking, instead continuing onward. "I have, yes. I was an advanced student at my previous school." He rebaited the hook with a worm and cast it out again into the water, watching the bobber carefully.

['Ace' Julia Dale]

His words about not cutting open fish and that the salmon was 100% not local assured Ace greatly. She let out a sigh. "Good, because I sure as hell won't be cleaning that shit up if anything did happen." She told him, as though he was somehow going to dump the work on her.

She watched him try to throw the rock at the crab, and laughed some more. "See look? The crab's laughing too," The crab was just crawling away, not up to any harm. If anything he looked a bit freaked out that a rock was just thrown at him.

Ace looked at the crab, then back to Muffin Jack, "You really want to kill the crab?" She asked him, glancing at the stone in her hand. "I mean, he didn't exactly bite you or whatever. If making things die really is how you relax... " She stopped throwing her stone up and down, "87% accuracy..." She said to the rock. She handed it to him, "Throw it then, if that's what you want. You might have better luck with this one." Her expression was flat as she waited to see if he would use it or not.

[Gleam]

"As unenchanted as I am with crustacean amusement at my expense, it is not his life I'm after." Jacob said with a wry smile. "I want him to stop stealing my bait. If he agrees to this, we have no further quarrel." He pockets the stone anyway. "Should he be disinclined to my terms, I will shell and eat him instead. Much more satisfying a victory than merely throwing rocks at him, would you not say?"

Jacob pats the sand next to him. "Sit, you give me vertigo. How has your introduction to Solstice Academy been coming? I haven't had very much chance to explore, considering all the meetings and movings I'm beholden to engage in."

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace noticed him pocketing the rock but didn't say anything about it. Part of her was somewhat relieved that he didn't kill the crab, and yet another part of her felt that she had been taken advantage of, strangely. She had given him the rock with a purpose but he decided to keep it for a more convenient time.

Despite her mixed emotions about what just went on, she sat herself down and dug her fingers into the sand. "It's alright, why?" She asked him in return. She listened to the rest of what he had said and continued, "...The place has some weird shit going on, I will say that much..." She thought of going to Perdu and finding that necklace, and of walking through the forest with Rust and encountering that thing.

Ace brought her knees up to herself and wrapped her arms around them, looking out to the sea. Its sounds were haunting. She was silent for a few minutes, simply enjoying the way the light hit the water... "Have you caught anything yet?"

[Gleam]

Jacob made a gesture with one hand, loose and vague. "I like having a second opinion, for one. And I habitually mother those people that make my acquaintance - you may have noticed this tendency." He smiled ruefully. "There is little I can do to improve any given situation, given my own limited leverage as of yet, but I still like to check."

He stretches lazily. "Yes, beside the fact that the island is stocked with children of supernatural import and designed to train this fledglings into adepts. A certain degree of unusual is, I imagine, to be expected."

Jacob checks the line with a flick of his feet, then sits up and reels the line in, only to cast it again in a seperate direction. "I am afraid I am not having much luck. There is little around the island to attract and feed seaborn species. Maybe if I used one of those Leets as bait?"

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace watched him make the hand gesture and her imagination couldn't help but imagine that the hand would just keep going and eventually fly away in the direction which he dismissed it. The thought nearly brought a smile to her face. "Huh? Not really, I haven't noticed." She said simply. It probably had something to do with never having that figure.

"Yeah, but there's unusual and then there's sharguanas." She didn't explain what she was talking about and left it at that. After a moment she figured she might best clarify, "... Shark Iguanas... The words combine... into sharguanas..." She gestured with her two hands coming together, to symbolize the 2 words. She shook her head, "nevermind."

She sighed. "Do I have to do everything?" She asked him, standing up suddenly and walking towards the water in her jeans and shoes. The wave came in and soaked her nearly up to the knee but she just bent down and lifted a sea-shell or two. It didn't take long for another crab to crawl away in fear, and because she had no emotional attachment, she just pulled rock from her pocket and tossed. It was dead instantly.

Drenched from the knees down, she made her way towards where it had fallen, picked it up and dragged it over. "Give me a rock. We'll break the shell and use the meat." She gave him a look as though to ask why he didn't do this earlier.

[Gleam]

Jacob stared at Ace as she explained with the particular stare that only a dubious Englishman could ever pull off. "I see." he said. "I believe you because the Leets are clearly not a naturally-occuring species - there is no point to their adaptations that I can discover - but whoever had a hand in adding reptilian traits to a deep acquatic creature . . . was a blithering idiot." He shakes his head in disgust.

He watched Ace wade out with a bewildered smile, which faltered when she slaughtered a crab and brought it back to him, like a cat bringing a dead bird back to its owner. "Yes, I suppose that would make far superior bait." he concedes, and reels his hook back in again.

Rather than use a rock he just pulls a Swiss army knife from an inside pocket of his shorts, and jams a short, thick blade into the shell, prying it apart afterwards. He carves the crustecean's meat away from its protective husk easily, and uses a piece of it to bait his hook. "Congratulations, Jane Doe; you have graduated to the status of Useful Human Being, with the rights and the responsibilities thereof. Would you like a diploma?"

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace shook her head, "Not the leats, no, these things, these sharguanas, they're massive... Like something you'd see in a movie." She said simply, as she let the crab go and he began carving it up. She watched the swiss army knife work and wondered if he had worried about the same things she had when she had first come here... Or was it just to be used as a corkscrew? It was indeed a mystery.

"Your right though," She added, "It is pretty idiotic." The meat was coming off the crab easily enough, and Ace seemed to watch the process keenly, ready to pop up to help at any moment. She wasn't sure what made her so invested in the process. She supposed it had to have been the fact that she never had actually gone fishing. This was like witnessing some strange esoteric ritual to her.

She raised her eyebrow at the last bit, taken aback by his hostility. "Graduated? Oh, I must ask what I was before." Her eyes narrowed and her eyes went towards his face, away from the fisherman gear. "Do tell." The hint of a sneer was at the corner of her mouth where the grin might usually be located.

[Gleam]

"Crabfoe, Lobsterbane, Shrimpslayer of the Inland Sea." Jacob said, as he adjusted the fishing rod, getting the string away from a coral stand that could have tangled up and broken it. "Ravanger of the shelled, terror of the crustacean. To all who wear their bones over their skin, you are unnameable and most terrible. But to us forsaken land lubbers, who weep upon the shores for our lack of sustenance, you are the Shore Saviour and Lighthouse: Sailor's Ace, the best draw a man of the water could pray for."

A pause, as Jacob lets that sink in.

"In other words: that was pretty cool. Thanks."

Jacob's mouth twitches into a smile as he lets go of the straight face he had been holding. "I cannot imagine why someone would cross something as lazy as an iguana with anything else ever. It is like trying to make a car using moped blueprints. Your plan is flawed from the premise onward."

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace had her eyebrow raised towards him, sneering slightly, but slowly this became a bemused expression. "That would be fantastic," She began, "If I was a pirate." She positioned herself so that when she rest her elbow on her knee, and face on her hand, she would be facing him.

"And of course you're entirely welcome," She continued, "and I will happily accept the graduation from being a useless fool. No really," She smirked, "I greatly appreciate it. In fact, I humbly request that I give an acceptance speech."

She looked out to the waves for a moment, glancing on her look around to the dead crab meat that he was using. "Oh, once, I was useless, as opposed to the useful soul I am today. A lot had made me change the error oh, dreadful error of my fucking ways..." She furrowed her eyebrows for a moment and gave a pause, as though facing some confusion.

"Wait actually, nothing did and you're just full of shit."

[Gleam]

"Curable." Jacob said, undisturbed. "There are laxatives for curing such a condition."

He smiled and shook his head, before he turned to face the girl beside him and set the fishing rod in the crook of his knee. "Evidently that was the wrong thing to joke about. So I apologize for that - even if you have spent your time here attempting to murder various things with rocks." A hint of a smile, as Jacob inclined his head. "I do tend to joke, but your company is pleasant enough that I would be disappointed to part with it."

Then the fishing rod hissed as the line drew out, and it jerked out of the crook of Jacob's knee, dragged away across the sand. He lunged away, sprawling, and barely managed to catch the tip of it.

He spat out a mouthful of sand.

"Excuse me a moment. I seem to have a fish."

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace snickered, "Yeah and there are these pills you can shove up right beside that pole of yours too." She said rudely. She watched him as he smiled and shook his head. She was wary of him as he began his apology.

"Well I might have been killing stuff... but.." That's what you were looking for right?. She never finished. He said then that her company was such that he would be disappointed if she left. She didn't truly trust those words, but she didn't seem to get up to go anywhere.

"Sure..." She said pointedly.

Then, he seemed to have caught something. Ace pulled herself hurriedly up to a stand, backing up a little and looking out to see if she could see the fish splashing around... She laughed at the way he was approaching the issue, "huh, yeah looks like it!" She said surprised.

[Gleam]

Jacob ignored Ace's various taunts and instead staggered to his feet, then started to reel his catch in. Whatever was on the other end of the lne was huge, and he groaned and sat down again as he resigned himself to a long endurance fight against a hungry fish.

"Well, at the moment, I would be thrilled if you could replicate the feat right now." he said, and extracted the rock Ace had given him from his pocket, handing it back over. "Think you can terrorize one more seabourne lifeform today, or are you going into retirement early?"

He abruptly slid forward six inches over the sand on his ass, then stopped when he got leverage again. " . . . Soon, please."

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace watched him take out the rock she had given him. She hurriedly went to grab it out of his hands. "I think I can just about manage it," She said, pushing herself into confidence. She focused on the rock, which still emanated with her charm. She squinted out to the water, following the fishing line with her eyes to the very end, and then she chucked it. The rock soared into the air with force, coming crashing down on the target.

The fishing line stopped thrashing about left and right for a good few moments. "Reel it in!" She said, pretty sure if anything she had simply knocked the beast out for a few minutes max. She watched Muffin Jack eagerly, hoping he's pull out a monster of a thing. Well, he promised not to gut it in the kitchen, so there was no harm.

Then again, it could just as easily have been a heavy object that got caught in the hook... but then why did it move in the first place? Whatever Ace stopped herself, It's a fish.

[Gleam]

Jacob took no time in following Ace's advice, and reeled in whatever had been beaned on the other end of the line, which peeked a huge blue fin out of the water. "Tuna?" Jacob said, eyebrows drawing downward, before a huge jerk on the line nearly threw him from his feet. He managed to scramble to a rock on the beach and brace himself with it, reeling in whenever the fish got tired.

The monster on the other end of the fishing line was a three-foot-long fish, glimmering with silver and blue scales, that thrashed as it was drawn into shallower and shallower water. Jacob gritted his teeth and held on through the thing's struggles, then gave another mighty heave, and finally managed to drag the thing up onto the sandy coast.

Jacob stared at it as the tuna flopped. "That is a deepwater fish." he said, voice definite. "What in blazes is it doing this close to land anywhere?"

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace curiously watching him reel in the fish. There wasn't really much she could do unless she just pulled out her gun and outright shot it. Regardless, she figured he wasn't fishing because it was easy. At least, she figured.

He said that it was a deepwater fish. He seemed surprised. "Well, I haven't a clue, Jack... Maybe it's another one of these weird things that keep happening..." Her mind went to the Sharguana again, and the thing that was crawling towards them in perdu.

"But... It's a normal fish right? I mean, that's definitely a fish, not some weird freak, right?" She wondered aloud, nervously. If it turned out that the thing had frogs-legs or maybe hands on it's fins or something, Ace would seriously have shit herself. There was too much weird shit going on for Ace to feel comfortable with.

[Gleam]

Jacob popped out his knife and unceremoniously removed the fish's head with a stab and twist. The body flopped for a second or two longer then laid still. "So far as I can see, yes, it is normal." Jacob murmured, and split the fish up the middle, laying it open for his inspection. "Looks like . . . southern bluefin tuna, I would guess. Two years or so old, so it's not a spawning run, just an adolescent. Tuna actually live near this place? There must be an ocean basin or abyssal plain nearby . . ."

The boy settled on his heels and stared down at the fish, absently chewing on a fingernail. "Not impossible, I suppose, but certainly unusual. Tuna feed on the ocean currents, the debris and plankton herded by the jetstreams, and so far as I know there are no major ones in this area. Interesting. Puzzling. I wonder . . ."

['Ace' Julia Dale]

Ace watched him wrench open the creature right then and there. "How the hell can you tell how old it is by looking at it's guts?" She asked bluntly. This guy seemed to know a hell of a lot about most things.

She listened to him list of the climate that Tuna lives in and whatnot, but she wasn't really paying that much attention. "So what's your ability that got you here anyway." She wondered aloud. "Do you have like, endless knowledge, maybe you can read minds or something? Ooh I heard of this thing that cops hire people for, that when they touch shit they know about it. Is it like that?"

[Gleam]

Jacob wrenched a narrow bone right out of the fish's detached head. "Otoliths." he said absently, and waved the still-bloody structure at Ace. "Essentially a bony fish's eardrum. They grow rings like a tree for every winter a bony fish survives. Though, generally, past a certain size you have to section the bone, crack it open, and look at it from inside."

He tosses the thing to Ace without thinking and answers, "No, actually, I learned this the hard way. Biology's been a longtime interest of mine - I enjoy studying life, the patterns and productions thereof. Plus I lived on the coast for awhile, so learning about and dealing with fish was more or less a necessity."

A pause, then he snickers. "Not that England is much of anything but coast, I will admit, so perhaps that is not so remarkable a thing. And, ah, I believe you're speaking of psychometry, or object reading. I can't do that either. Though that would be a useful thing, should I ever play Jeopardy."