Ocha

2023

On that first day, the sun was so brutal.

When she crawled up out of the sewer and the light met her eyes and skin, she thought she would fry instantly. And then she thought, This is real living. The love and the cruelty of it, all at once. And she raised her arms high, opening herself to the sun, and hoped it would mark her red.

You get poetic when you’re delirious with exhaustion and hunger.

She was in fact still sunburned four days later, which made getting out of her sleeping pool an uncomfortable business. The dry air was harsher than her pool of ink – anything would be – so she winced as she went kidform and sat up and let the magenta start to drip off her.

She got up and stepped out and toweled off, then got dressed. The room was a 4.5 tatami and an old one. The orange wallpaper with its subtle clamshell pattern was mottled and chipped. The clothing rack was dented and the window didn’t open, but the door to the balcony opened fine, and she went out to hang the towel on the line to help the ink evaporate.

The balcony ran along all ten rooms on this floor. She looked side to side, but nobody else was out this morning.

In the city beyond the balcony, countless people were out.

She had distant memories of an army: rows of girls, shiny red tentacles, black glinting visors. And the rows in her memory seemed to go on endlessly, seemed to fill the world. This was nothing like that, because this was chaos. Under the harsh white light of a vast tangerine sky stood buildings of concrete and metal and glass, each one a different stack of windows and balconies and spires and roofs, awash from head to toe in a rainbow of murals and graffiti and banners and posters and hanging clothes. Everywhere there was movement as people walked about on every floor, as people rushed along the sidewalks like blood cells, as taxis hogged the street. Cephalings and cuttlefish and crabs and urchins and flounder and anything else that could walk and talk were walking and talking and filling the air with blended noise.

She got done hanging her towel and went back inside, ducking out of the heat. Then she went downstairs, stepping lightly on the creaky steps. The stairway was old metal, some of it rusted, but nothing sharp. She eyed a wobbly reflection of herself in the chrome ceiling. She was a small girl with thick tentacles on her head, cut short in back, with a forelock curling in an S on either side of her face. Their ink veins ran a deep magenta.

The cafeteria and the lobby were the same room, a big warmly-lit space. One end had scruffy red carpeting, bright glass double doors, and an empty concierge stand. On the other end, the floor became tile. A few residents – all older fish – ate at the plastic cafe tables, and Muna, the apartment manager, manned the food counter.

“Morning, Ocha dear!” called Muna. She was a middle-aged grey pufferfish. Her fluffy black coat was folded on a table nearby, leaving her in a faded Off the Hook t-shirt as she packed burritos into foil wrappers.

Ocha walked to the counter. “Good morning, ma’am,” she said.

“How are the clothes working out for you, dear? They fit alright, don’t they?”

“They do, thank you,” Ocha nodded. She moved her arms to the side to give a clear view of her shirt, a thick ocean-blue polo missing a button, which did fit much better than it really should have. On the second day, Muna had helped her pick out clothes that were unclaimed in the lost and found. She had scored a couple shirts, a skirt, jeans, and even a pair of shoes that were nice and snug with a double pair of socks. Today she was wearing the blue polo, the black skirt, and the shoes, which were puffy gold hi-tops.

“May I have a burrito?”

“Of course, dear! For here or to go?”

Ocha thought.

“To go, please.”

Muna handed her one of the wrapped burritos.

“You have a good day, hon.”

“You too, Muna.”

Ocha gave a small bow and headed out the front doors.

Welcome to Ocha!

This is a work of webfiction originally published in Inklish by WashiWashi. I received his blessing to translate it into English so that more people can enjoy the story. I will accompany each section with comments on my translation process and on cultural elements that might be opaque to terrestrials.

Color

We learn off the bat that Ocha’s favorite color is magenta. Colloquial color words in Inklish are extremely specific, so we actually know that her color is somewhere in the range of #f49ac2 to #cf3476.

In more stylized or cartoony works of fiction, a cephaling’s favored color tends to fall within the simple primaries and secondaries, and corresponds pretty directly with her personality. For example, purple goes with a quiet and thoughtful type, and red with a determined or aggressive one. In more naturalistic stories, colors have no such meaning. The tone of Ocha lies somewhere between those two extremes, so it’s possible her magenta has meaning.

Because highly specific color words are conspicuous in English, I only use them for colors that are focal points of the scene, and use simple words for background colors.

Squidform

In Inklish, changing between your humanoid and cephaloid forms is described by a pair of simple intransitive onomatopoeic verbs which naturally don’t exist in English. Here, I use a variety of grammatical constructions as befits the context. I lean on the pseudowords “squidform”, “octoform”, and “kidform” to help convey the motion with the proper quick and casual feeling.

Note that I use “squidform” for groups that may contain both inklings and octolings (such as the teens that Ocha follows in this section). My intention is to reflect, not to support, the inkling-centrism inherent in current Inklish.

Off the Hook

Off the Hook is one of the most popular idol duos in the marine areas and you very likely know about them already. I bring this up not because it’s essential to the story, but because you really should give them a listen if you haven’t already and you like aquapop at all.

Ocha’s Living Situation

A marine reader would recognize this as free subsidized housing. In a major city like Kingman, anybody can take up board in a tenement like Muna’s. Many of the marine people I know are pretty proud of this system.

She unwrapped the burrito as she walked, tearing the glittering foil, feeling the sun on her skin cook away all the residual ink from the night. She bit into it wolfishly. It was better than anything had any right to be. That’s how all food tastes after a month of dehydrated nutrition cubes and snacks stolen from vending machines.

She’d been in Kingman City for four days. That was long enough to get settled. She had no real memories, no reference for a normal life, but she figured it was now her task to create one from scratch if she didn’t want to become depressed, or neurotic, or crazy.

The first priority would have to be building a circle of relationships. Normality should follow from there, she reasoned. She had no idea how to make a friend, or what you did with one when you had one, but it couldn’t be too hard. Everyone did it.

The burrito was gone before she knew it. That was always disappointing. The taste was replaced by the smell of diesel and a hint of frying meat that could be coming from several of the surrounding apartments. Car horns and voices filled the air. She walked briskly along the sidewalk, hurrying across the street as the walk sign flashed. (She had learned about crosswalks very quickly, that first day.)

She walked aimlessly, threading amongst the crowds, searching for one particular thing. Then she found it. A group of kids her age. They were four cephalings, dressed colorfully, and carrying weapons: a huge roller, splattershot, brush, and charger slung over their respective shoulders. But they were chatty and playful, and nobody on the street reacted with any alarm, so they plainly were not soldiers. She followed them from the opposite sidewalk.

She followed them through the city for some time, immersed in the noise and unable to eavesdrop on their chatter. Then through an alley, and on the other side, she was caught off guard by a huge empty space.

The streets were still crowded here. But where several-story buildings loomed on every side, almost a whole city block was taken up by a much lower structure, making the expanse of sky above it feel jarring. It was a park of some kind. It was ringed by an old mottled fence lined with wooden boards, so she couldn’t see what was inside.

The four teenagers crossed the street to the park. They, with all their gear, ducked into squidform, dipped into a streak of green ink on the ground, and swam through the bottom of the fence.

Ocha took a moment to consider her next move. She did not want to use the primary entrance uninvited. Instead, once the street was clear of cars for a moment, she jogged up to the fence, gripped it with her calloused fingers, and clambered up. The fence extended above the boards, so she soon had a clear view of the action.

It was an all-out turf war.

Green and blue drenched the ground and splattered through the air in a chaos of shiny ink. Green-haired and blue-haired cephalings swam and shot at each other. The ground itself was a complicated arrangement of ramps and platforms and columns, the playful terrain of a skate park. She heard the wet pop as players splatted one another, and watched them reform at either end of the pitch.

It was a mock-battle. She realized then that she had never conceived of a concept that should have been so obvious: the notion of play-fighting. Of tamed, friendly violence. There was something about it that made the octopus inside of her wriggle in its den; made her hand clench a little on the fence lattice.

“Alright up there?”

An octoling, dark-skinned with a bright yellow topknot, was looking up at her from below. She realized there were other kids besides the combatants chatting at the outskirts of the arena, leaning on their weapons, their hair colors marking them into teams of four, and he was one of them. He was grinning like a person who found life funny.

“Cruz,” the grinning boy said. “And you are?”

“Ocha,” she said in a guarded voice.

Cruz leapt up onto the fence himself, clambering up to Ocha’s eye level.

And as Ocha’s eyes tracked him, she suddenly noticed something far, far behind him.

On the roof of a six-story apartment building, its clotheslines fluttering in the wind, there was a figure silhouetted. She – Ocha somehow believed it was a she – was sitting rested but alert, one knee up and one knee lying down. Ocha wished she could see the girl’s eyes, instead of just the white blaze of the sun behind her.

Cruz reached his hand through the chain link of the fence. “Come on through.”

Meeting his eyes, Ocha took it, and then went octoform, allowing him to pull her through.

Cruz leaped off the fence and they both landed on concrete with a slap of their soles, Ocha releasing octoform in the air and flipping a quarter-turn to land on her feet.

“Hey! Nice move!” he said with a slanted smile of admiration.

Ocha bowed, and realized she was smirking a little. She didn’t mind admiration, she found.

She met his gaze seriously. “I’m new around here,” she said. “What is this game?”

She was almost cut off by a splattering of ink as two dueling players sped past their edge of the rink. It was clear suddenly that the wooden boards, quite psychedelically colored on this side, were less to keep onlookers’ gazes out, and more to keep torrents of ink in. In fact, there were quite a few people watching the bout. They were up high on their balconies – oldsters and younger kids, plus a smattering of teens and adults taking a quick look on their way to other things.

“This, sister, is what we call the beautiful game.”

“That’s chess,” Ocha said automatically.

“Uh-uh.” Cruz grinned. “It’s turf war.”

Teenage Independence

There is no standardized schooling in the marine areas. Everyone is homeschooled. This naturally means different things for different parents, but generally, by the time they're teenage, kids are given quite a bit of independence, as this is seen as one of the fastest and strongest ways to grow.

Hair

Yes, it's true that cephalings have tentacles and do not have hair by a mammalian definition. That doesn't change the fact that ‘hair’ is a natural way to refer to the styled and decorative protrusions on one’s head in English. Do not bring this discourse to my page, please.

Some twenty minutes later, she was sitting in a hard plastic chair at a little round table in an outdoor food court a few blocks away from the arena. There was a parasol above the table, but it was having a hard time fitting Ocha and all four of her companions under its shade. The backs of her tentacles were baking in the sunlight.

Cruz and his teammates had matching topaz hair. Seeing him in context, she realized he was rather short, a quality offset by his big, puffy black and white track jacket. His face seemed built around his frequent grin, an easy expression that suggested he was always in his element.

“Let’s make this proper,” Cruz said, taking a sip of his ambiguously frothing orange drink. “Here’s fearless leader Benke.” He gestured to the tall inkling on his right.

The boy wore short sharp bangs and a red buttoned sweater, and there was something tense about him; he sat straight upright. He gave Ocha a perfunctory smile. The drink sitting between his hands was a latte.

“Lotus. The smart one.” Cruz gestured to his left.

The inkling girl was pale and hunched down self-consciously, hiding within long straight tentacles and a yellow raincoat. She gave Ocha a slow, almost mournful nod. Her hands were half-hidden in her sleeves and cupped a ramune bottle.

“And the best of all of us,” Cruz beamed, “Sephora.”

“Saphira!” the inkling girl snapped, looking not at Cruz but at Ocha, making sure she got it right.

“Right, Sephora,” Cruz winked. “We call her Bath Bomb.”

Gritting her teeth in frustration, Bath Bomb flung out a hand for Ocha to shake. She sparkled from head to toe in a glittery pink tank top and a sequined khaki skirt. Her hair was in artificial spiraling curls and her face was soft with makeup. Ocha shook her hand and felt the bite of the rings on her fingers.

“Very pleased to meet you, miss Ocha,” she said, pointedly polite, as she sat back and took a hard sip of her huge blackberry-vanilla smoothie. The bright sunlight fell across her and shone on her smooth tentacles.

The food court around them seemed like a blur from within their little bubble of shade. It was loud here, but not loud like the street, and if it smelled like anything, it was a sweet smell.

“Very pleased to meet you too,” Ocha said automatically, taking a sip of her chocolate milkshake. It was better than anything had any right to be.

She looked at the four faces in front of her. Were these her new friends? She had very little idea whether she liked them, but when you get a gift horse, you ride it. And this, broadly, was nicer than nice. The beautiful taste of free chocolate. Having somewhere to be and something to be a part of.

“So,” she said, “Turf war is played in teams of four?”

“If you want to get into it, you’ll find a team in no time,” Cruz assured her.

That was the obvious problem. If social groups in this subculture were limited to exactly four people, they had no reason to adhere to her.

“You’re welcome to practice with us today,” Bath Bomb suggested. “You can learn how to handle yourself on the field.”

“What?” Benke said, irritated. “I’m sorry, no offense, but no she’s not. We have a tight schedule and we have it for a reason.”

“Come on!” Cruz groaned. “We have time to be nice! You’re being so rude.”

“I’m not. We–”

“Please don’t start one of these.” Bath Bomb pinched the bridge of her nose.

“I don’t know if you have grounds to be dismissive, after our last match?” Benke raised an eyebrow at her. Bath Bomb went pink through her makeup.

Cruz held a hand in front of his mouth and hissed in a comical stage whisper, “Banksy, stop embarrassing me in front of a girl.”

Ocha’s hearts sank. She found she was allergic to whatever this was. It was making her itch. She was tempted to keep the chocolate milkshake and lose the friends. She sipped it quietly. Still illegally good.

Lotus was silent too, pointedly avoiding the argument and sipping slowly at her ramune with a straw. There was a glint of something murderous in her hooded eyes. Then she caught Ocha looking, and they held each other’s gaze for a second.

Lotus looked up at the group. “I bet it'll help us practice to have a newbie around,” she mumbled. “It'll force us to go over the basics.” Her eyes slid back to Ocha. “Or we can at least use her for target practice.”

Ocha felt herself crack a smile. That was funny.

Lotus might have shown the faintest hint of a reciprocating smile before she turned back to her drink.

“Fine.” Benke threw up his hands. “Far be it from me to be a tyrant!” He looked at Ocha. “And really, kid, I mean no offense.”

Cruz caught her eye and gave her an apologetic grimace.

“None taken,” Ocha said neutrally. “You're all very kind.”

When they came out from under the parasol a little later, there were clouds. The heat was finally settling down and the orange glare upon the city was softening into blue shadows. Ocha gazed up at the sky for a moment. Things changed so much aboveground. The whole world kept shifting around you. She really liked it.

“Come on!” Cruz called as the group set off.

Bath Bomb

Localizing puns is a hell of a job.

If you’ve ever been to a mall in the marine areas or your local marinetown, you’ve seen a Bubble Ring machine. They sprung up in Great Barrier in the mid 10s and were an enormous hit. It’s a game a little like a claw machine, where you pick out colorful charms to string on a water-filled plastic bracelet. Friends often make bracelets for each other as a bonding activity. It’s mainly for kids, but also popular among the 52gyaru subculture (think preschool-core valley girls).

Saphira’s name in Inklish is elegant and pretty, but it also sounds like the word for Bubble Ring machines. So Cruz is kind of calling her “Friendship Bracelet”, teasing her for her glamorous style and suggesting she’s childish. “Sephora” / “Bath Bomb” doesn't have precisely the same connotation, but I think it works well.

The team’s practice space was a cul-de-sac – a wide alley with tall apartments on either side and the back of a department store, with its dumpsters and trash cans, at the end. The apartment walls were covered with graffiti art: messy and amateurish but elaborate, a flowing sweep of arrows and squid trails and eyes in a bright mix of pastels. The black asphalt was hard under Ocha’s feet. It was mostly uncracked and it was curved, convex.

The team set their backpacks down against the wall and set to retrieving their ink canisters and attaching them to their weapons. Cruz darted into his adjacent apartment to get a weapon for Ocha. It was a standard splattershot, smooth white plastic with a wavy red stripe. She ran her hand along its length, thinking about how it would handle.

She really was quite interested in playing turf war. The one match she had watched had sent her hearts racing. It felt good to have a weapon in her hand again. She did her best work with a weapon.

This is play-fighting, she reminded herself. No kicks, no chokes, no scratching, nothing brutal. It would be okay if she lost.

Not that she expected to lose.

“Can I show you how to use that?” Cruz asked, his own octobrush slung over his shoulder.

Ocha smiled, amused. “I know how.” She squirted a jet of her magenta ink in the air to prove it. Cruz gave her a thumbs-up.

“Best to learn by doing!” He backed up to the far end of the alley. “Now see if you can splat me first.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Benke check his watch. Lotus was hunkered down against the wall, watching like a turtle. Bath Bomb leaned on the wall and went on her phone.

Cruz had his brush against the ground and his stance was already angled. He was going to dodge and weave as he approached. That made sense.

“One, two, three, GO!” he called out.

Ocha pumped a stream of ink straight ahead. Cruz was out of her range, which he probably believed was an error. He dashed forward, curving left and then swerving right, leaning on his fast-sliding brush for momentum. She could hear it swish along the ground.

In a moment he was within six feet and she felt flecks of his golden ink sting her face. She lunged down into her ink, zoomed forward, and leapt up behind him. She twisted in the air and unloaded her tank at Cruz’s back, hearing the ink hammer against his tank and jacket and head, and then he popped with a sudden splatter.

Ocha’s boots hit the magenta ground with a wet thump. She braced against a skid. Benke was staring at her, unbalanced as if he had done a cartoonish double-take. Bath Bomb was looking up from her phone, eyes wide, as if she had processed a little late what had happened. Lotus was still being Lotus.

Threads of Cruz wrapped up where he had stood and pulled his body back into being. He was laughing in disbelief.

“What happened to ‘never played before’?!”

“I didn’t say I’d never used a weapon,” Ocha said softly, trying to hold back a grin and hide how damn cool she felt.

He clapped. “Well played, man! So how good are you?”

“Pretty good,” Ocha said neutrally.

“I have an idea,” Bath Bomb called out with a mischievous half-smile. “Why don’t we use her for target practice?”

A challenge was devised. Ocha would try to make it from one end of the alley to the other, with all four players against her. She stanced up to shoot and swim, ignoring the smell of the trash cans. Four teenagers stood watching her, spaced out along the length of the alley. The sun was coming out from the clouds again, casting stark shadows and making the metal walls and everyone’s tentacles sparkle.

She felt herself settling into her old rhythm. She put aside everything but the test. Her body was a perfect machine. Not something still, but something in cyclical, precise motion. She felt her blood circulating calmly.

Benke yelled GO! and Ocha’s muscles tensed into action. She squeezed the trigger and splashed a wide swath of magenta ink in front of her, giving herself options, as her adversaries washed the rest of the alley in yellow. Bath Bomb, the closest, watched Ocha with a determined look, planted her feet, and popped open her brella.

Ocha feinted forward, taking a single abortive step, and then dove left into her ink. It was cool, smooth, as it should be, muting the light above in shades of crimson. She rocketed forward and left, feeling the ink slip past her. She could see the world above her in watercolor impressions as it sped past. The first cracking shot from the brella rang out behind her. The wall came up ahead of her and she leapt to her feet, popping into kidform to ink a curving path along its horizontal surface, splattering across the messy mural. She dove back into octoform and into her path, and she jetted forward and up in a wide arc. The metal was hot against her little octopus body. She heard the second crack and felt the stinging spray as Bath Bomb’s next shot drenched the wall behind her. She leapt out of the wall and twisted to her right to shoot Bath Bomb from behind. The girl was covered in red before she could turn. As soon as she confirmed the splat, Ocha turned her aim to the ground, plunging into the puddle as soon as she’d made it, kicking up a splash, again trading the bright shafts of sun for cool darkness.

She hadn’t had the chance to look to her left, up the alley, so she didn’t know how the remaining three were positioned. The first priority was to stay in motion, which was reinforced as she felt the ink shake and heard the muted thumps as shots from Lotus’s blaster burst behind her. She raced forward, gunning for the righthand wall, and swam right past somebody’s boots. The edge of her ink came up fast. She spun 180 and flung herself out of it backwards. Cruz’s octobrush missed her by an inch as she unfolded into kidform in the air, drops of red spraying off her. She landed hard in a combat crouch on a somehow dry patch of ground, her back all but touching the righthand wall. She had to squint against the blinding glitter coming off the alley full of ink. Cruz was three feet in front of her, ready to leap forward and corner her with a swing of the brush, but he was not close enough yet, and she raised her splattershot and unloaded all she had –

Then a hard metal BAM.

Ocha felt herself squeezed by a coat of burning gold for an instant and then burst. The world dissolved into pinpricks in a black void, just little samples of colors. She was weightless and touchless.

She willed herself back to Earth, pushing through the void to focus on the spot where she had been standing, and with a shove through an intangible membrane, the world returned and her body swirled back together.

Benke was ten feet away, down on one knee to prop up his charger, which still pointed straight at Ocha. He looked proud of himself as he got to his feet.

“Good try, Ocha,” he said casually. “You’re a lot faster than I expected.”

Cruz was down in octoform splashing the red ink off himself, and some ways away, Bath Bomb was reforming and Lotus was sitting cross-legged with her blaster, as still as a flower.

“Thank you,” Ocha said graciously and diplomatically.

After that, Benke took control of the practice. He made Ocha the enemy player, having the team train against her in solos and pairs, running scrimmages and drills. He cycled her through as many weapons as they owned, and she enjoyed Cruz’s repeated look of awe as she displayed her proficiency with each one.

Benke was a yeller. The more the evening went on, the more it grated on her. He called out instructions in the heat of battle, shouting over the splashing of ink, and he repeated himself constantly, as if his teammates were too damn stupid to get it. It was Bath Bomb whose patience broke first, and then there was an argument that rose in pitch until Lotus splatted them both with a sloshing machine. They let practice end after that.

By then the air was cooling as the sun snuck toward the horizon, and the red and yellow ink that drenched the alley was already beginning to evaporate. She hadn’t realized it had started getting dark, and it still wasn’t hard to see, but now yellow lights in the windows of the city stood out brighter, like the eyes of the world.

“Hey, so,” Cruz said to her as he packed his ink tank into his backpack, “tonight there’s a big match. We’re gonna go see it.”

“Cruz –” Benke glared at him from the other side of the alley.

“Relax!!” Cruz hissed, his patience clearly frayed. “I’m not trying to make her the team mascot or whatever! I’m inviting her personally, as my friend.”

Then he gave Ocha this look that was not exactly an apology, not exactly a request, but mostly just I promise, I really do want you around. And that did it.

“Yeah, sounds good,” she said, her tension softening a bit.

The arena at night was breathtaking.

She had no idea it would look so different. No one was rushing on the surrounding streets; only a few fish walked and loitered, and the road was a silent strip. The arena fence now held three huge floodlights pouring light inside. The balconies all around were much more crowded than before – stuffed, with people who must not all live there – but in the darkness they were just glittering eyes and fins and a wave of hushed chatter.

The thump of a boom box resonated from inside the fence. Its volume was at medium, restrained, and Ocha guessed that it was setting the informal limit for the night. Some kind of compromise with neighbors who actually wanted to sleep.

Benke splatted a line of gold under the fence and they all swam through it, Ocha shifting her ink to match the shade.

Within the arena, the music clarified into hyped-up hip-hop. The light was as stark and flat as a drawing against the cement contours of the pitch. Other cephalings, other teams, were ringed around the sidelines and talking, but now they did not have their weapons, and many of them were sitting. Some had picnic blankets and sodas and candy. Tonight they were just here to watch.

Cruz’s team did not have a picnic blanket or snacks, but they found themselves an empty space and claimed it. Ocha sat by Cruz cross-legged. Behind them, Benke leaned against the fence, and Bath Bomb leaned against the fence a few feet away, and Lotus sat somewhere. The sense of disunity was glaring, Ocha felt, compared to most of the other teams around them. Somehow that made her kind of embarrassed.

“So how often does this happen?” she asked Cruz. “Is this a big deal? Who’s playing?”

“Check it out.” He nodded toward the left end of the pitch, a certain pride in his voice at getting to show her around.

Four cephalings were coming through the fence and bubbling up out of deep violet ink to a muted chorus of cheering hoots. They were tall and they were tough. Ocha wasn't quite sure how old she was, but they were older. The boy in the lead saluted the crowd with a toothy grin. His violet tentacles were long and wavy and his pecs pressed through his thin shirt.

“That’s Hammerhead. They’re consistently one of the best teams in Kingman. Some years they take the belt, some years they don’t.”

Ocha grinned slowly. "Oh yeah? Then who's the giantslayer?"

Cruz nodded toward the other end. Another team was rising out of a pool of emerald green.

As soon as their leader came into view, Ocha stared, her mouth slightly open. She was a white-skinned inkling wearing a black skirt and a closed jean jacket. Her tentacles were chopped into a flat shoulder-length cut and sheer bangs.

It was the girl from the roof. She knew it was.

It was far enough Ocha could only barely see her expression. She was humorless and focused. The four players were in streetwear, but it almost felt like a uniform – identical silhouettes in muted blacks and blues. They weren't bruisers like the Hammerheads, they didn’t stand out, but they moved like a squad of fighter jets.

“The Piranhas,” Ocha guessed. “The Barracuda.”

Cruz chuckled. “They’re called Squidbeak.”

“Squidbeak,” she murmured. “What's the leader's name?”

“Well, get this. People just call her ‘The Captain.’”

“The Captain.”

“Yeah. Get ready.”

The anticipation she saw in Cruz was rippling all the way around the arena.

The music clicked off. She could feel a silent countdown in the synchronized breath of the watchers.

3. 2. 1.

The music clicked on, and this time it was frenzied, joyful aquapop. The teams lunged onto the pitch.

In a blur, torrents of purple and green burst across the field, the colors turned luminous and pale in the electric light. Fans muffled their laughing shrieks as ink splashed across them. The thumps and rattles of weapons firing became part of the music. The arena was a compact world of heat and activity under the hard black dome of the sky.

She couldn’t keep track of a single thing the players were doing. And then she realized it was because she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the roof girl. Everyone else just rushed in and out of her field of view.

The Captain was still. She was kneeling on a high platform a quarter of the way into the field, her long charger balanced on her knee. Her mouth was moving constantly, speaking into a compact headset mic. And every few seconds, she shot. She would jerk back slightly, catching the recoil against the wiry muscle of her arm. Ocha began to realize that the shots were almost perfectly regular. Something like 9 seconds. As if that was the exact amount of time she needed to refill her chamber.

She started watching where the shots landed. She couldn't be sure in the mess of ink, but it seemed like pretty much every time, a Hammerhead would vaporize, stolen straight out of the skirmish as if raptured.

An excited shiver went through her. And as she took in the scene, she realized they were steamrolling the opposition. The majority of the pitch was a lurid mess of emerald. The other three Squidbeaks were hovering near the Hammerhead spawn point, patrolling in squidform like little rubbery sharks and drenching the violet bruisers as soon as they reappeared.

The excitement in the crowd was catching and their volume was pushing upward in small bursts, threatening to wake the neighbors. There didn't seem to be particular factions rooting for the Hammerheads or Squidbeak – people were just excited.

And then, in the same moment she glanced at Cruz to see his reaction, there was a loud, thick splattering sound, and somehow Hammerhead had broken through. The three guarding Squidbeaks had popped, and four powerful violet cephalings were sweeping down the pitch like a tsunami.

The Ocha gasped, her eyes darting back to the Captain. But the Captain was gone.

As the Hammerheads reached the halfway point, the silent inkling popped up behind them, knelt, and aimed her charger, harsh light glittering along its barrel.

1. 2. 3. 4 –

Not enough time for a full charge. The four were already turning on her, and she let loose the blast and hit the imposing leader with a splash of green ink. Then she vanished into the ink underfoot as he unleashed a torrent from his splatling.

The cheers and gasps of the crowd rose again as his purple ink hammered out the small island of green. The Hammerheads fanned out, scanning for the Captain's ripples in the ink. Ocha scanned too, her hearts thumping. The pitch was an even half purple, half green, and once Hammerhead had a full team wipe, they'd correct that ratio.

But there – two feet behind a square-jawed Hammerhead in a jersey. The tall pillar was splattered with violet, but there was still a thin streak of green along its length, and a quick shape darted through that green, climbing for the top! Ocha held her breath as the Captain popped out, and in a frozen instant, braced herself against the vertical surface and aimed her gun.

1. 2 –

Bam!

Even less time before the enemy rounded on her. She loosed the shot and dove back in, swimming around the pillar as a wave of purple crashed down from the Hammerhead’s sloshing machine. She’d hit the leader with another charge and he was beginning to drip with green, and he pushed his hair back out of his eyes, looking mad as a bull.

An open-mouthed grin was spreading across Ocha's face, but she knew the roof girl couldn't drag this out much longer. She glanced toward the Squidbeak spawn point. When was the team coming back? It seemed like ages.

The leader and the remaining two Hammerheads dove through the ink, and in an instant all four surrounded the pillar. The leader's splatling fire hammered out the streak of green. Ocha braced herself for the telltale popping noise, but instead, the tiny green shape of the Captain's squidform leapt up above the pillar, glittering in the floodlights, and landed straight on top of it.

The energy of the crowd had become a chant – not a coordinated one, no one said the same words, but suddenly their voices matched the rhythm of the music in rising anticipation. Ocha found herself thumping her fists against her thighs to join in.

The Captain hunkered down as the first volley of violet ink sprayed past her on all sides. Then gravity brought it back down. Ocha winced as she heard the ink splatter onto the Captain's back. She must be soaking, but she wasn't down yet.

And then, as the sound of the leader's splatling revving for the next volley echoed around the arena, the Captain jumped.

Ocha and the fans around the arena and the watchers up on balconies in the dark drew in a breath. The floodlights glittered on all the buttons of the small inkling's jean jacket. She was upside down in the air. And she was aiming her gun straight down.

1. 2. 3 –

In a flash, the leader went squidform and leapt to one side in a practiced dodge. The Captain's shot hit him straight-on as if he had never moved, and he burst in the most satisfying splash of emerald green Ocha had ever seen.

“WOOMY!” Ocha yelled, pumping her fist into the air.

The Captain splashed down straight in a sea of purple, and splatted on impact.

And by that time, the three other Squidbeaks were charging onto the pitch.

The arena erupted again into a chaotic mess of flying ink. Ocha's whole face was hot. She shot an incredulous look to Cruz, who laughed and punched her in the shoulder.

Before she knew it, the song had ended, and the players skidded to a stop where they stood, lowering their weapons and breathing hard. Squidbeak won with a good three quarters of the pitch painted green.

A wave of applause raced around the arena and then found its way higher, spiraling all the way around the darkened balconies of the square. It felt thrillingly eerie in the sudden absence of the music, like the rattle of an enormous snake. The Hammerheads assembled and briefly bowed to their opponents. The leader, with a wry, good-natured smile, made a threatening next time gesture at the Captain.

Squidbeak bowed in turn. The Captain responded to the leader with a single curt nod, and then she raised her face toward the watchers on high, and lifted one stoic, triumphant fist into the air.

That was what really did it.

As both teams were leaving the spotlight and making to exit the arena, Ocha jumped to her feet and booked it toward the Captain. She shifted her ink to emerald so she could swim across the inky field and get there in time. In a shadow by the arena wall, suddenly free of the floodlights' heat, she jumped back into kidform and skidded to a stop.

The team stared at her, the Captain's forbidding eyebrows slightly raised.

"Hi!" she said. "I'm Ocha. I found you very impressive."

The Captain didn't say anything. She gave the barest nod of acknowledgment, and then tilted her head in impatient question.

"Do you have a name? The Captain is a very cool title." She was aware she was being a complete idiot. But she thought probably everyone was a complete idiot in contrast with the Captain.

The Captain lazily shook her head.

Another of the Squidbeaks, an octoling girl with braids, gave Ocha a look that might've been sympathetic and might've been mocking. The three teammates dove down and swam under the fence, leaving their Captain to catch up.

Ocha faltered. "C-Can you not talk?" Clearly she could talk. She saw her doing it during the match. But maybe her voice was worn out?

The Captain pointed at Ocha, and then gave a more exaggerated shrug, expecting answer.

"Oh! Well – I'm, like, I'm new in town, I guess. And I'm new to the game, but I'm pretty fantastic with a weapon. And –"

"No," said the Captain. "I mean: Why are you worth my time?"

Her voice wasn't hoarse. It was even and low and direct.

Ocha blinked, her mouth slightly open. She wasn't shocked, exactly. She just didn't know how to answer.

And with that, the Captain turned into a squid, swam under the fence, and left.

Woomy

“Woomy” and “Veemo” are Inklish expressions of triumph, like a “Booyah!” or a “Hell yeah!” You’ve heard them if you’ve ever watched marine sports. There’s a pretty nasty debate among translators over whether it’s classier to transcribe them directly or to translate them into an English equivalent. Some people think using (the romanized bastardization of) the Inklish words in an English translation is cringy and just makes you look like a seaboo. But I’ve chosen to use them for two reasons.

• There’s cultural nuance that isn’t easily expressed otherwise.

• They just have a really fun sound. Woomy!!!

If you don’t know, “Woomy” is traditionally used by inklings and “Veemo” by octolings. “Woomy” has a more smug, calculating feel to it, and “Veemo” a more brash, aggressive feel. The cultural politics there are about as messy as you think.

In the decades since the war, some people have chosen to use the exclamation associated with the other race. We see that Ocha is one such person, colloquially called a wumikko.

Some of the younger marine people I consulted about this project have told me they switch up their exclamation of choice based on the tone they want to evoke in the moment. I haven’t really seen this done personally. I guess I’m “old.”

It was another hot day. She was grateful to step into the shade of the entryway, with its merciful awning. The smooth skin of her tentacles was still warm to the touch.

It was an old building, with the slightly crumpled metal and welding marks found in some parts of the city, which Muna had said were old ship scrap. And despite this rough look, it didn't seem like a cheap place. The windows and the awning and the doors were all nice and new, and so was the panel of call buttons and surnames by the side of the door.

Pushing down a shiver of nerves, Ocha pressed the main desk call button.

"Hello?" came a tinny voice.

"Hi. I'd like to speak to my friend, if possible."

"Your friend lives here?"

"Yes."

"You can press the button next to her name, honey."

There was a pause.

"Do you know a resident who goes by 'the Captain?'" Ocha said.

"You don't know your friend's name?"

There was another pause.

"We don't take solicitors, honey," the voice said. Then the line went dead.

Ocha bit her lip, thinking.

Several hours into the morning, the Captain was on the roof again.

The square was full of fish coming and going, but the turf war arena was empty today, sitting still like a big skeleton in the desert, like all the teenagers had somewhere else to be. So Ocha had spent the time loitering at an outdoor café table and watching the TVs in the store window across the street. The cashier kept telling her to buy something or leave, but she kept saying 'just a moment,' and it had worked so far. The show on the TVs was a surreal spectacle in which people earned and lost frightening sums of money based on the way a wheel spun.

When she saw that the Captain had appeared, she was relieved to tear her eyes away from the TVs and get up from the wiry chair. About five minutes later, she had climbed up to the roof of the building next door, which was a quiet mall of clothing and furniture stores. The city was a dizzying, beautiful map spread out on all sides, blurry with heat, fading out into the lakes and canyons.

The two roofs were only 7 feet apart. On the other side, the Captain was sitting cross-legged beside a heavy-duty camo backpack, only the door to downstairs and a satellite dish and the wide open sky behind her. She saw Ocha and watched her with little expression. She did not seem approving.

Ocha had brought a plastic water bottle of her own magenta ink, and she uncapped it and splashed it in a long streak from her to the edge of the roof. She took a few long, calming breaths. There shouldn't be much chance of failure, but still, nobody likes getting splatted by gravity.

Without letting herself think about it a moment longer, she dove into octoform and into the ink, the world turning to hazy red above her. She pumped her tentacles and zoomed forward, felt the edge coming up, and pushed off from the metal as hard as she could.

Her stomach lurched as she flew, sailing like a baseball, and trailing ink as the world turned beneath her.

And then she processed her trajectory, and realized she was going to miss the lip of the roof and probably slam into a window frame several feet below.

She had time to cringe, bracing for a pain that was quite familiar. Come on – not in front of her!

And then, with a hard whap that reverberated through her boneless body, she was caught.

She blinked her wide eyes, collecting herself, and realized she was held in two hands, and the Captain was looking down at her, jean jacket buttons glinting and green hair shining in the bright sun. The green filling her irises felt almost radioactive. For a moment, Ocha felt very, very, very small, and her face got very, very, very warm.

Then the Captain dropped her on the roof. She awkwardly changed back to kidform on the way and landed hard on her tailbone.

"Thanks," said Ocha with a maverick grin.

The Captain made a face with a quirked lip and raised eyebrows that very clearly conveyed an exasperated, amused ounce of respect.

Ocha was quiet for a moment. She could stand up, but she'd like for the Captain to sit down with her.

"Is there a reason you don't talk?" she asked.

The Captain did sit down, resuming her cross-legged posture. She held Ocha's gaze but did not do anything for what felt like a very long moment.

Then, in no hurry, she said, "When you make people look at you, they pay better attention to you."

And she was right. The mere fact that she spoke felt like some kind of privilege.

"What's your name? The receptionist wouldn't tell me."

The Captain made a face that said Yeah, that's on purpose.

Ocha chuckled. "Yeah, okay."

Once again, the Captain pointed an emphatic finger at Ocha and tilted her head and widened her eyes in questioning. But now there was something just a little teasing about it, like it was a joke between them.

"Well," said Ocha, leaning forward over her own crossed legs, "I have a question for you. What do you value?"

The Captain raised her eyebrows.

"I need to know that, if I'm to lay out what my value is to you."

A guarded grin spread across the Captain's face. Her gaze drifted up to the clear sky, thinking for a moment.

"I'm not looking for anyone," she finally said, locking eyes with Ocha again. "So what is it you want from me?"

"I'm not sure," Ocha said enthusiastically, having thought this question through already. "I think when I see you play, it makes me a little insane, and then I want to get your attention. So I think I want to be around you. I don't really know what happens from there. But I think I'd like something to happen. So that's kind of an exciting surprise."

The Captain didn't respond for a moment, taking it all in with bemusement.

"And now I sound all stupid," Ocha carried on, color rising in her cheeks, "because you're all silent and cool and I'm the one who needs something and I'm getting in my head about it. When normally I'm extremely silent and cool, and you don't even know that, because now I'm being like this!!"

The Captain laughed. It was a brief, subdued, almost silent laugh, but it was there. She kept eye contact all the while, clearly having no concern for sparing Ocha's pride.

But then it subsided and her expression closed off again. Ocha clearly had not proven her value sufficiently. That was the terrible thing.

She swallowed.

And there was a long pause, because the Captain loved long pauses.

"Are you good at turf war?" the Captain said.

"Fantastically," Ocha replied evenly.

The Captain thought for a moment.

"If you can beat me in turf war," she said, "I'll go on a date with you."

Lightning jolted through Ocha's body. "You'll what??" she said, involuntarily making a big, stupid smile.

The Captain lazily tilted her head to the side. You heard me.

"Well, I will," said Ocha, still involuntarily making a big, stupid smile.

The Captain slid her eyes in a big upward arc. We'll see.

"See you on the pitch," said Ocha.

The Captain pointed a finger straight at Ocha's chest. Then she jerked it to the side, opening her hand in a flutter of fingers, with a jaded hint of a smile.

She was dismissed.

unused future plans

I – that is, Washiwashi let me know he didn't have a full idea of where this thing was going, but he'd had a few more steps drawn out before he turned his attention to other things:

Now with a purpose, Ocha marches right back to the team and challenges that douche Benke for his job. Cruz is openly cheering for her. Saphira is more like 'what the fuck.' Lotus thinks it's hilarious.

Benke has the raw precision and reflexes, but Ocha identifies a specific weakness and exploits it. Afterward, Benke looks at his team irritated like 'okay, we're not taking that seriously, right?' But they're already turning their hair magenta.

She starts training the team in everything she knows, and making up how to be a leader. She hangs out with each of them to figure out how to work with them. Saphira takes her shopping for better clothes. She goes to Lotus's house to learn about something mechanical with the weapons, and it starts raining, so she has to sleep over.

Meanwhile, Ocha has recurring memory nightmares about being an octarian soldier and getting her ass kicked by mysterious 'Agent 3.' She loses the same way every night, getting feinted and dodging the wrong way, and only as she does it does she remember that it happens every time.

They finally battle Squidbeak, and they lose. But Ocha and Cap go head-to-head, and Cap uses the exact feint from her dream, and Ocha instinctively dodges the right way and actually splats Cap. That earns her a date. (Although it doesn't change the pattern in her nightmares.)

On the date, she sees Cap's name on her credit card, but she doesn't say anything. Later she uses it to buzz her apartment though.

At some point, Ocha and pals are becoming a known team. Somehow Saphira's nickname goes public, making her furious. Except... it turns out people find it totally intimidating.

Bath Bomb

And here’s the secret layer to Saphira’s nickname: it actually sounds pretty badass in the context of turf war.

Bubble Ring bracelets are notorious for leaking all over you. Not a bad thing to have on your team, eh?

Calamari Inkantation

As a bonus, here's my localization of the Squid Sisters' "Calamari Inkantation."

Quick marine history lesson: The Inkantation was used in 2015 to break octarian soldiers (as Ocha is implied to have been) out of DJ Octavio's mind control, which people like to say prevented a second war. Is that kind of a convenient narrativing of history? Not for me to say. Anyway, I asked Washiwashi if, by any chance, this was the song playing at the Hammerhead/Squidbeak match; he said "No, it would have given her war flashbacks."

To make a long cultural music lesson short, Inklish has a thing called 'slip-words' (or 'slip-lyrics' or 'squish-words,' but nobody likes saying that) where the voicings of the words fit together in a certain way, distinct to a given musical genre. Closest analogue would be hip-hop rhyming.

In the Inkantation, the Squid Sisters switch to a different genre pattern with each verse, making it kind of a tribute to music itself. I took the liberty of adapting this as music puns.

Chorus

Run, and swim, and jump, and run again

You cry, you call, you need a fearless song

And so, we come, with amplifiers crying

Clearing foam from your ears

Play the magic and we'll party all night long!

Verse

Bound by the chords

The tentacles of one who would snare the lyrics from your lips

But you're not controlled

Together we can make ourselves free

Make his wretched record skip, skip, skip!

Chorus

Bridge

So sing, fight back, and superjump

Right up, and out, into the great beyond!

You're here, alive; as long as we keep trying

We can drown out our fears

Form a chorus for together we are strong!

...

Fight on!