Ariadne Part 4

Jill was a black-haired beauty, not much older than Alan by the look of her, and dressed as if she’d stepped out of a summer myth and decided clothes were optional. Vines and flowers draped her shoulders and waist with deliberate modesty, but the more unsettling part was how the vines didn’t end: a living trail ran behind her, slipping over the planks and down into the pool. The boat’s pool. The pool that had, a few minutes ago, been… active.

"Ariadne said you're the ship. I am a bit confused about the protocol." Alan admitted.

"I grew it out of my body." Jill smiled. "It was a bother, but it helped me with being taken seriously."

"Um, okay." Alan nodded. "Can you feel people walking on you, her, it..." He trailed off.

"No, I can't." She shook her head. "It's possible, but unwise to construct nerve tissue in public areas."

Alan nodded and looked around the deck. "Why did Ariadne bring me here?"

"Oh, she wants her children to be Crawlers." Jill giggled. "She'd prefer a body with a kangaroo pouch, but an incubator would be fine. She mostly wants you to think of her childhood as normal."

"She seems miserable." Alan winced. "Is there something I can do to help?"

"Don't worry about it. She's only happy if she has something to complain about. You haven't tried to **** or seduce me, so you've made a better impression than Tess already."

"Ariadne was engaged to a girl?" Alan remembered the reference, in the middle of a large amount of information of the last ten minutes. At least that was comprehensible. "That’s… um. Weirdly progressive.”

"She wasn't a girl when they were betrothed, actually." Jill smiled softly. "Crawlers are natural hermaphrodites, but don't tell her I told you. Tess asked her to stay a girl to try and make a scandal. She went back and forth, before that."

"Oh." Alan nodded. He found that kind of hot, but only a little. "Is she shy about that?"

"Extremely." Jill chuckled. "She hides anything she thinks is too gross about her anatomy. It's adorable. Most of her siblings are more confident."

"How many does she have?" Alan looked at the pool that had hosted a birth.

"Five hundred and twenty-two." Jill laughed. "Her father and I have been at it for a while. Crawlers are a lot less work than normal babies. They don't kill themselves if you lose sight of them for ten minutes. Ogre toddlers are far more stressful."

"That's a lot." Alan decided that asking "how old are you" was a bad idea. "How did you and Larry meet?"

"He was a monster girl contestant. I was a Producer on his show, and he started exploring. My mother-in-law made a fine creature, and he made it farther than you would believe before we realized what he was doing. We had to either destroy him, or use him, and I couldn't let something so useful go to waste." Jill smiled happily.

"Huh." Alan nodded along. Suddenly, a brown blur fell onto Jill's head.

"Hi, Ariadne's boyfriend! Hi, real-mom!" The Crawler juvenile chirped in an accent Alan suspected was Russian.

"How did you even..." Jill looked up and saw a large bird flying away.

A pair of Crawlers were carried onto the boat by tentacles a minute later.

"I told you she'd be fine!" Larry laughed.

"Why did you even bring the storkfish!" Ariadne sounded exasperated.

"I brought him so I could see my kid fly. It's not complicated." Larry sounded unconcerned.

"By mirror and katana if you don't-" Ariadne paused. "Sorry, Alan."

"It's fine." Alan shrugged. "You'd just bring her back if she died, right?"

"Well, yeah." Ariadne sounded sullen.

“We’re out of the laundry,” Jill said, brisk as a stage manager. “So we’re on the clock. The universal time helix is counting us now, and it does not tolerate dead air. We can’t waste another month maturing the kids.” Jill picked up the squirming offspring and handed her to Alan.

"Hey!" The creature made a shriek like a goat. "What about my name?"

"You said you hadn't picked, yet." Larry reminded her.

"Oh, yeah." She pouted. "Azure?"

Jill's face twitched. "No."

"Hitler?" The creature made a twisting jump onto the deck that Alan failed to catch.

"That's almost as bad..." Larry shook his large head.

“Skynet?” The juvenile laughed so hard her coils kicked against Alan’s arm. “Skynet, Skynet—”

"You know that's taken!" Ariadne snapped.

"Ooh, what about Nagasaki?" The creature continued to laugh.

"I like it." Larry nodded.

“Uh,” Alan said, because his mouth was still connected to his conscience. “That’s— there’s, um. The war crime thing.”

"Well, if we're..." Suddenly the Crawler stiffened. "Huh?"

"It means 'long cape' in Japanese. Ancient city of liminal nature, a final port of a closed Japan. 'Naga' is a good name for a dragon, too." Jill nodded. "Approved."

"Oh man, I had way more." The juvenile crowed and abruptly flung herself out of Alan’s arms with the slippery grace of something that had never once been in danger from gravity. She slithered off the side of the deck and into the water in loud protest, sending a splash up against the vines.

"Are you really going with that?" Alan shuddered.

"They had it coming." Jill shrugged.

Alan paused. He felt this battle was a losing one, but his skin crawled.

"Ask Sora about her grandfather, if you don't believe me." Jill looked off into the distance.

"Well, um, love you, Mom." Ariadne coiled and gave her mother a kind of bow, before turning to face her father. "Dad, keep Tess out of my shit."

"She still had the key to your room." Larry responded, and Ariadne made a face.

"It was nice meeting you." Alan offered his hand to Jill, who shook it.

"Remember, protection is for cowards!" Larry waved a tendril and Ariadne started pressing Alan's heels in the direction of the pool with their boat.

After disembarking through tentacle lift, Ariadne let out a long performative sigh. "Well, they didn't try to seduce you or kill you, so you still did better than Tess."