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Wings of the Barfoo
Dark clouds hung over the ocean, the last red-orange
glimmers of a sunset just barely managing to break through. On an old wooden dock, a heavily-tattooed man
sat down and breathed deeply, wiping the sweat off his brow with the only hand
he had left – going by the lightly blood-soaked bandages covering his shoulder,
it seemed that the other one had recently been removed along with his entire
left arm.
“Looks
like it’s over,” he muttered, breathing a sigh of relief as the rough seas
around him gradually began to calm once again.
“That was a close one…”
An
older woman clad in purple walked across the dock and stood next to him, tapping
his wounded shoulder with the scraggly-looking old broom she was carrying. A dim glow surrounded the bandages for just a
moment, and then they vanished and were immediately replaced with fresh ones.
“Wasn’t
expecting the big fish,” the injured man grunted. “Never seen one like that before. Aren’t supposed to be fish that big around
here.”
“Indeed,”
the old woman spoke, gazing out across the ocean. “Dragged here from another world along with
the storm that fool summoned, I’d imagine.
If I hadn’t been able to disrupt the spell when I did, he could’ve
ended up dumping a whole other ocean onto us here…”
“Scary
stuff. Ain’t it supposed to be a real
pain to open a portal like that with magic normally? But with the power of just one Barfoo Point...”
The old
woman nodded, causing her oddly-pointed hat to dangle precariously for a
moment.
“Now
imagine if he’d been able to get his hands on the complete Uggy Barfoo. The lunatic could’ve drowned the Earth under
some other world’s ocean in a matter of minutes. Well, I suppose you’d be fine, but not all of our powers lend themselves to those
sorts of conditions.”
He
chuckled for a moment, but flinched slightly as a sharp pain in his side made
him realize that he must have bruised a rib in the battle. A moment later, he turned slightly, facial
features hardening once again.
“Do you
think you can heal her?”, he said, pointing back over his shoulder toward a
young girl lying face-down on the dock nearby.
She was utterly drenched, her soggy
clothes clinging to her body and a mop of pale blue hair drooping down to cover
her face. Her hair wasn’t the only thing
about her that was blue – her skin had taken on an unhealthy purplish-blue tone
as well. She had been under far too long.
“We both know that’s beyond my
power,” she said, walking over and tapping the girl lightly with her broom, to
no apparent effect. “Even if I managed
to revive her, she’d never be quite right again after what she went through…
she’d probably wake up in such bad shape that she’d rather have just gone ahead
and passed on. There’s nothing I can do
here.”
He stood up abruptly, ignoring the
pain in his side. She turned for a
moment and glanced at him through her dark glasses, tilting her head slightly
to look at the drowned girl lying nearby for a moment before shifting her gaze
to the ocean and then back to him again.
“However… I believe an infusion of
Barfoo Power would do the job quite nicely.”
The tattooed man’s eyes widened and
he nearly staggered over backward from shock.
“Make her a Guardian of the
Barfoo!? No, that’s… J’daahi Bunprego would never allow it!”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said,
smiling slightly.
“We know nothing about her,” he
said. “Bunprego has no reason to trust
her with that kind of power. He wouldn’t
allow it.”
Once again, the old witch smiled.
“You may have noticed that J’daahi
Bunprego is not here. And in addition…”
She walked over to the drowned
girl, crouching down and lightly touching the palm of one of her wrinkled old
hands against her forehead for just a moment.
“…it appears that she didn’t end up
this way by accident,” she continued. “Oh
no, she jumped into the stormy sea entirely on purpose – she was trying to save
lives, you see.”
She stood up and tapped the same
hand on the injured man’s forehead, and a stunned look came over him as flashes
of another person’s memory – the girl’s memory – ran through his mind for
several seconds. She had singlehandedly
dragged half a dozen of those who had been caught in the wave which had
overtaken the beach to safety, and had only been pulled under in an attempt to
go back for another who she hadn’t seen bobbing above the water’s surface before
then. No, it was two others—a man and a
woman, attempting to keep each other afloat but being battered by the
unnaturally-fierce wind and waves called down from the ocean of some unknown
world.
“And it would hardly be the first
time that an old Guardian has passed their position down to a new generation
when they felt they were no longer able-bodied
enough to continue… and without consulting Bunprego beforehand,” she said, staring
directly at him, her smile fading. “You,
of all people, should be fully aware of that.”
He sighed, hanging his head for a
moment, and then walked over to the girl’s limp form and sat cross-legged
beside her. He held out his one
remaining hand and placed it on her sea-soaked head, glancing back to the older
Guardian before closing his eyes in concentration. The witch nodded in approval, then just stood
back and watched as a brilliant golden aura began to surround the two – surging
around the one-armed man at first, and gradually draining away until it had
surrounded the girl’s body instead. As
the last of the Barfoo Power’s light faded from the former Guardian’s body, it
condensed itself around the newcomer, surrounding her like a protective cocoon
for several seconds before vanishing within her. A dim glow remained for several minutes
afterward, and gradually her skin returned to its natural coppery tone and her
hair and clothes dried at an accelerated rate, as if they had just spent an
hour in the sun. Before long, she looked
to be in perfect health.
The one-armed man stood and slowly,
staggeringly, walked across the dock to retrieve something he had left lying
several yards away – a sword, its blue-gray blade marked with a pattern that
resembled fishbones. It was still marred
with a splash of blood from the monstrous alien fish he had been forced to
fight off earlier, but as he sat it down and placed the still-unconscious girl’s
hand on its hilt the glow that surrounded her spread to the weapon, removing even
the slightest trace of blood or damage until it appeared brand new.
“Would’ve liked to pass it on to my
son,” he said, coughing slightly and clutching his side with the only hand he
had left. “But… that was a bit selfish
of me, eh?”
“Perhaps a bit,” the witch
mumbled. “However, I think you will find
that your choice of a successor may end up being part of the family after all...”
He blinked a bit, not immediately
comprehending what had been said.
“The girl no longer has one of her
own, you see,” the witch explained. “The
people she went back to save at the end, who she was unable to reach… they were
her parents.”
With that, she mounted her broom
and began to hover several feet off of the dock. She sniffed the air for a moment, as if
testing to see if it had begun to smell like Earth’s familiar ocean once again
rather than the fragment of another that had been transplanted there earlier
that day, and then took off flying across the sea so quickly that it seemed a
miracle that her hat didn’t go tumbling backward off of her head. Within seconds, she had left the islands
behind, leaving the former Barfoo Guardian and his young successor alone on the
rickety old dock.
“It’s done, then,” he said,
glancing down at the still-unconscious girl, whose hand appeared to have
instinctively grasped the handle of the fish-sword rather tightly. “Whoever you are… whoever you were before. Now you’re part of somethin’ you probably
never knew existed just a couple hours ago...”
He knelt to the ground again,
placing his hand over her head just like before. And, just as she was finally beginning to
stir toward consciousness, he closed his eyes and spoke what would be the first
words she would remember hearing after the storm had passed.
“May the wings of the Barfoo carry
you through this new life…”
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