Open The Docks Hazing Out for a Hero

[Tizzi Poof]

It was a glorious day for Tizzi Poof and the seagulls of Bully Harbour. In the wreckage of the Non-Fish Fishstick stand, they basked and squabbled and stuffed themselves. Where once they had been natural enemies, the guttersnipe and the gull, they were allied in their task of cleaning house.

Briefly. So very, very briefly.

It was Tizzi who started it. The feral little scavenger had begun hissing and spitting, war-dancing and challenging the seagulls who were idly pecking. Despite a full belly and a full mouth, and arms full of fishsticks greedily clutched to its chest, Tizzi could not bear the thought of sharing this bounty. It ran back and forth, charging at groups of gulls, scattering them. The gulls, nonplussed, only took off for a moment before settling back down to peck.

Then the Big Gull appeared, and regarded Tizzi, it's fur covered in grease, crumbs from the batter sticking all over it, as a miracle of nature. A walking, talking Non-Fish Fishstick!

And this was how Tizzi found itself flying high above the harbour, its tail caught firmly in the beak of Big Gull. Its armload of fishsticks rained down on the riot below. It took some concentrating, but eventually Tizzi managed to chew up the fishsticks in its mouth and twisted around to bite the neck of its captor. Weasel and Gull spun in the air, both refusing to let go of the other. Feathers disengaged from Big Gull like an explosion of eiderdown.

Big Gull gave up first, but Tizzi didn't. Focusing on flying despite the needle-teeth burrowing into its neck, Big Gull flew higher and higher, until finally -

"Tchk! Tizzi never share! Tizzi is - "

Tizzi is no longer gripping onto Big Gull, Tizzi realized. The weight of the little beast's own hubris brought it tumbling back down to earth, plowing through the cloud of drifting feathers, which stuck to its greasy, matted fur where the fishstick batter hadn't already. Tizzi rolled over, limbs spread wide, catching the wind against its belly and paws, and the feathers did what feathers had evolved to do.

"Tizzi is not falling with style! Tizzi is flying!"

The air filled with excited zheeping as Tizzi performed a loop-de-loop, and promptly crashed into the back of the skull of whoever needed reinforcements the most. This development quite infuriated Tizzi, and the beast's eyes and ears took the brunt of the feral guttersnipe-gull's claws and teeth.

 

[Calara Driftsong]

It was when the next strike grazed Wiley and another left a new gash along Calara's own rudder that she faced awareness of their own mortality with violent certainty. This wasn't a scuffle in the Bilge or a mess hall argument gone overly enthusiastic. The Vulpinists wanted blood and would take it by any means necessary. The debt-collectors may have been less blindly murderous but were no less viciously inclined. The big otter felt a twinge of shame; she should have recognized the full danger sooner. It was one thing for death to be a possibility. It was another thing entirely when it was your opponent's explicit intention.

Calara redirected another questing blade with her buckler and slammed the haft of her javelin against the knee of a Vulpinist who got too close. At least the debt-collectors weren't so focused on anybeast but the Alkamarians. Small blessings.

"Aye, good to move. Best we do it quick-like, I think."

She grinned again, a show of sharp, white teeth with less feral mirth in it now than there had been a minute before. So far she had done what she could to avoid applying lethal force of her own. That wouldn't last. The price they would have to pay to see another day, then.

"Shame we don't have another beast or two at our backs."

Clang. Thock.

One step forward. Then another. Sideways. Backwards.

The fox was clearly an old paw at watching a companion's back, and Calara had done enough of the same that she was more of a boon than a liability to her ally. Yet the odds were terrible and it was only a matter of time before the dice came up adder eyes. They weren't moving fast enough. And it seemed a few of the Vulpinists had marked them as easier targets, isolated as they were from friendlier bodies. Any number of angry foxes were converging on their position and forward progress gave way to desperate defense.

Then, a strange and eerie sound coming from above. Above? Calara had the presence of mind not to spare it a glance. Presence of mind or focused panic, perhaps. The opponent standing in front of her wielded a long saber with a skill and precision that spoke to actual training and he had already carved a half dozen new cuts into Calara's hide.

It did nothing to help him when zheeping chaos struck him from the sky and wreaked bloody mayhem on his eyes and ears.

Calara shouted out a string of curses that could have only been learned over decades on the sea, and the otter felt the tiniest wash of pity for her fallen attacker. The wave of gratitude (and fear) that followed lasted somewhat longer. The creature's timing was impeccable. Now they just had to make sure to keep the critter on their side. Or at least to stay out of its way.

As if sent down from heaven, a fishstick tumbled through the air in a parabola providential enough some beasts might, with straight face, claim a miracle. The bit of mysterious, breaded protein(?) lodged itself just near the pawhold of Calara's buckler, and the otter knew what to do.

"Aye, beastie, fishstick?"

It may or may not have been the sort of thing to bite the paw that fed it, but it was worth a try. It looked very much like the sort of creature to rip reality itself apart in the name of a little bit of food, and so Calara threw the fishstick into the throng of beasts standing most obviously between them and the way away from the docks.

 

[Wiley Briggs]

The docks had passed the point where momentum favored anyone still standing.

What had begun as a furious surge of bodies and blows had thinned into knots of violence that refused to break, each step forward answered by two more beasts surging in from the sides. Wiley felt it in the drag of his boots against the planks, in the way Calara’s movements had shortened and sharpened, less about clearing space now and more about simply keeping it. They were fighting well. Too well, perhaps. Fighting well, but not fast enough.

A blade rang off Calara’s buckler, close enough that the vibration sang up Wiley’s arm as he shifted to cover her flank, shoulder dipping as he checked a fox hard enough to send him stumbling back into another. No time for flourish. No room for pride. Just pressure, measured and relentless.

They were moving too slowly.

The thought came unbidden, unwelcome, and impossible to ignore.

Something shrieked overhead.

Wiley spared it half a glance at most, just long enough to register feathers, flailing limbs, and the unmistakable sound of chaos deciding to take a personal interest.

"Aye," he muttered under his breath as something small, greasy, and furious slammed into a Vulpinist’s face a few paces away, claws and teeth doing what blades could not. "That tracks."

No time to watch it work. No sense pretending it would last.

A fox lunged in too close, eyes wild, swinging without thought. Wiley stepped inside the blow on instinct, shoulder driving up, forearm snapping out in a tight, brutal motion that dropped the beast like a sack of wet sailcloth. The fox hit the boards hard and didn’t get back up.

The flagon bounced once beside him, miraculously intact.

Wiley blinked at it.

The press surged again. Calara shifted. Still no opening.

With a huff of breath that might’ve been a laugh in another life, Wiley scooped up the flagon, tipped it back, and downed the contents in one unceremonious pull. The liquor burned sharp and fast, more defiance than comfort, and he wiped his muzzle with the back of his paw as he tossed the empty aside.

"Right," he said, voice steadied rather than lifted. "Back to it."

He was already moving as he spoke, boots scraping, shoulder settling back into place beside Calara’s, eyes scanning for the next threat. The chaos from above bought them seconds. Maybe half a minute if they were lucky.

Not enough, but it was something.

And for now, something would have to do.

 

[Hashwin 'Hazie' Freemont]

Hazie’s muzzle closed. There was a kind of relief in his eyes, as though his regular flow of chipper banter only existed to fill a preferable silence. He signed back a quick acknowledgment, and took the lead back into the fray. His face resumed a glazed impassivity, though there was something colder about it now blood of Vulpinist, dockworker, sailor and soldier alike mingled on the cobblestones.

Tucking his injured left arm behind his back, Hazie fought one-pawed. In the blur of a few minutes of chaos, the pine marten came mask-to-mask with the fistfighting vigilante who had saved him from the sniper. He returned the fox’s nod, and for a moment there was just the three of them, not a word needing to be said. Then, Hazie noticed that his pugilist ally had brought a friend, a vixen who was having a perfectly reasonable and expected reaction to battle.

An encroaching line of Vulpinists, who had been coming frighteningly close to flanking the whole melee and mopping up everybeast missing pointy ears and bottlebrush tail, were given a surprise practical demonstration in the dangers of ropes under tension. Hazie’s ears and whiskers twitched as he saw foxes go flying - some swept from their paws, others making the jump of their lives from a welt-raising smack to the buttocks.

“That’ll do,” Hazie muttered, before raising his volume to an ear-pounding bellow of command. “SEVENTH! SEVENTH TO ME! CLEAR THE WAY!”

Hazie gestured to his new ally, a hand thrust forward like the chop of a knife, followed by a raised index-claw twirled in a circle, then outstretched claws brought into a fist. Push through and regroup. The direction? Well, even with his cross-fox fur, Wiley Briggs might have been hard to spot in such a piling-on of vulpines. A large otter however…

“Briggs! Otter! We're with you!” Hazie shouted, dropping the formalities as his motley band barraged their way to the woodlander warrior and Navy officer, with only seconds to spare before the Vulpinists overwhelmed their position. Besides the pine marten, he had brought along the wildcat whack-ball star, the caped fist-flinging fox, the vixen with the upturned stomach, and five of his best (and roughest) green-jackets. Hazie smiled, in that untroubled way a young officer does when the enemy misses his shot, and confirms in the young buck’s head that he’s invincible. “We’re almost through! The cat’s deaf and the vixen’s sick, but…”

Hazie’s ‘but’ was interrupted as he caught sight of… It. It was a tiny waif, a delirious speck of energy in twisting musteline form, it was utterly filthy, and it was wrecking somebeast’s face. Time might have been slowing down for Hazie, judging from the bewildered look on the pine marten’s face, as the Non-Fish Fishstick left the big otter’s paw, and twirled end-over-end through the air.

It plonked into the fantastically poofed up, fluffy tail of a fox, and stuck there in its own grease.

Soft tail. Delicious tail?

Hazie’s eyes made contact with Wiley’s, and the corners of his muzzle twitched. “We ought to rescue that little firebrand on the way out, oughtn’t we?”

The pine marten gave one more paw signal, known to all the military beasts present.

Charge!

 

[Lily Lesse]

Lily Lesse still felt dizzy as she was pulled to her footpaws by the wildcat. Only her lingering nausea and sense of being overwhelmed kept her from pushing the cat away with a snarled racial slur. The supremacists on the dock were in chaos, and Lily felt an odd sense of deja vu. Was this how they'd always looked from outside: violent and disorganized? No wonder Scythe was always harping on that the worst enemy of the movement was their own lack of structure. It was a humiliating demonstration of the principle in action.

Taking a deep breath, Lily focused. She'd wound up on the wrong side of the moment, yes, but she just needed to get out and get away. Snarling, she charged at the group, her home-field advantage immediately coming into play. She recognized a number of the Vulpinists, memories of a bum knee or a vicious but slow right hook coming back. She dove in, letting her memories of what some of these males had done to her, what she'd let them do out of a reluctant desire for inclusion plus more than a little fear, fuel her rage as she struck, tore, and bit at them with a fury she'd kept caged for years.

 

[Jill (The Beast)]

Beast didn't have much time to regroup or recoup when, suddenly, the vixen they had just rescued charged madly into the fray. Alarmed, Beast ran after her. Gaining speed, Beast spotted a particularly riled up todd with an axe stalking towards Lily. Locking onto their target, Beast lept through the air, kicking out their leg and slamming their foot into the todd's head before landing behind Lily, watching her back. Raising their fists, Beast swung at anyone who got too close, but more and more of them were coming with weapons. The situation was getting precarious, and fast.

 

[Oreva]

Oreva cheered on the vixen who turned out not to need a weapon after all. The cheer was cut short by a fist plowing into the side of her face from behind her vision. A moment's distraction...

She grabbed the offending beast by the front of their shirt and headbutt them straight in the snout, following it up with a knee to the gut and bodily lifting the creature over her head and throwing it into the crowd.

Oreva did not like being punched.

It took her a moment to realize it was not a fox, but a ferret. She didn't care to understand why this was - she didn't care to understand why it was mainly foxes, or why they had decided she was a target in the first place, or why some of the beasts on her and the marten's side were also foxes. It was a lot of trouble to think about, and Oreva was not a big fan of thinking too deeply. Thinking led to realization, and realization led to anger, and oh no she was doing it, wasn't she?

She spat some blood off to the side, wiped her cheek off on her shoulder, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with a stoat jill and a curly-headed rat in fine green uniform. A roar welled up in her throat, and pointing to the two vixens who had rushed off, she signalled her intent to charge; the soldiers charged with her. The docks thudded underfoot, and blood and spittle splattered her face like raindrops. Her fist and whack bat fell a lot harder.

The important thing was space. When there wasn't room for a swing, she was pulling rather than pushing, so they didn't have the room to take a swing at her or those next to her either. And then altogether she was bundling the smaller beasts up like the ferret, using the numbness of pain and frustration and the bitter cold air to crumple them up and hurl them away, and it only took doing this once or twice before those who witnessed it were making quite a lot of space, and this was progress.

It was not long at all before the soldiers had Lily and the Beast's backs, and the drooling, growling, towering tortoiseshell wildcat with a badger's bloodlust glinting in her eyes gave the vixens room in front of themselves to breathe - and take their next swings.

 

[Tizzi Poof]

It was a fox's head whose head had interrupted its flight, and so it was foxes that had Tizzi's ire. Plus, the tall, greyish-brown, roundish weasel-looking one had offered a fishstick. Well, thrown, but that was how most beasts gave Tizzi food. And then it had landed in a fox's tail floof, and memories of joyous moments wrapped in the warm, tumbling fuzzball of winter's molt came rushing back.

Tizzi zheeped with joy and threw itself to the ground, spasming uncontrollably around the feet of the adults. Every time it seemed it would get stepped on, surely... another twist of the spine, a jolt of footpaw, would send its noodle-like body curling around in the opposite direction of danger. It was in this manner that it made its way through the crowd towards the tail dangling the delectable non-fish snack.

For as much height as Tizzi had lost in its fall, the fox gained when Tizzi's jaws clamped around the base of his tail. The vulpinist sailed heads over the crowd, arcing with a whoop, falling and smashing into two of his comrades, knocking all three down. There was a horrible, terrible, wretched scream, a great thrashing of limbs, and Tizzi burst from the cloud of cussing and fisticuffs, holding a prize in its mouth.

It trotted back towards the woodlander, climbed up her back, where it draped itself over her shield shoulder, and spat out the fox's tail, in order to delicately nibble on the fishstick it had now clutched in both tiny paws.

"'Gates! The demon's tore off my prosthetic tail!" came a mournful howl from the collapsed trio of vulpines.

"Since when did you have a prosthetic tail?" was a muffled retort.

A sad whimper: "Now..."

Tizzi grinned at Calara, with a face full of innocence and non-fish pulp. Its teeth were red.

"Poof."

It climbed up to Calara's head and leapt off, back into the fray, where its size meant it was immediately lost track of - save for the occasional yelp and squeal of indignant pain.

 

[Calara Driftsong]

There was an energy as the tide of battle shifted, and Calara rode it like a skiff breasting a wave. The battle wasn't over. They weren't out of the proverbial woods. But what had moments before been grim and hopeless was now exhilarating.

"I'm all for takin' it with us, marten, but I don't think I'd call it a rescue. Not a rescue of the beastie, at any rate."

Any further quibbling was lost in the literal fray. They charged, fierce and ferocious, armed and dangerous and so very close to escaping the docks. It was a truth she'd seen proven again and again: psychological warfare could let you do the same work as a crew twice your size; never underestimate it. And Tizzi Poof was the purest incarnation of psychological warfare the otter had ever seen. She was very, very glad the creature seemed to have decided to be on their side.

What was less certain was whether or not the creature could understand speech. It was worth a try, she supposed.

"Oy, beastie! If'n you come with us, I'll make sure you get all the fishsticks you can fit into your belly!"

 

[Wiley Briggs]

As the fight continued, what had been an organized, snarling wall of foxes moments before was now coming apart at the seams, fear rippling through it in uneven waves. Some fled outright, scrambling over crates and bodies alike. Others fell back together, glancing over their shoulders as if waiting for a signal that never came.

Wiley felt the shift before he fully saw it. Years of decks underfoot had taught him the difference between chaos that burned itself out and chaos that redirected. This was definitely the latter, and they had better take the opportunity while it was being presented to them.

His gaze slid, briefly, from the foxes pressing in front of them to the beasts moving at his back.

Hazie was still signaling his command. Still being obeyed by the Seventh Battalion with undying loyalty. The green-jackets repositioned without hesitation, flowing around one another with practiced ease despite the blood and noise, already angling their movement outward instead of inward. They hadn’t ever panicked. They hadn’t become overcommitted. And they certainly hadn’t looked surprised when the floodgates gave way and the fighting broke out.

"You all were ready for this," Wiley thought, the realization settling heavy and unwelcome in his gut. "Question is… why?"

A sharp, ragged scream cut through the din, high and panicked, and Wiley’s ears snapped toward it on reflex. Every fox instinct in him recoiled at once, tail stiffening, breath catching as he spotted the tiny feral... weaselly...thing with russet fur and bright red blood smeared in tatters around it.

“It tore off my tail!”

For half a heartbeat, cold dread seized him.

Then came the muffled, incredulous reply, shouted over the chaos.

“Since when did you have a prosthetic tail?”

With a flash of relief, Wiley barked out a rough laugh, sharp and sudden, the tension breaking cleanly as the truth snapped into place. His eyes found the flailing fox, and the ragged stump where his brush most certainly should have belonged. He spared a quick glance toward the path of the feral little terror, a flick of his ears and a brief, unmistakable grin offering tacit approval.

“Ye’ call that rag a brush!?” he hollered, voice carrying with a sailor’s practiced ease, mockery sharp as a knife. “It weren’t foolin’ no beast, matey. Ha-harr!”

Wiley’s focus snapped forward again as the pressure thinned ahead of them. This was it. The sliver of space before the dock swallowed itself whole again. He moved without ceremony, planting himself where the path narrowed, shoulders squared to the action.

“Keep it up,” he growled, the word pitched low but carrying all the same. “Don’t stall. Keep pressin’. We’re through if we keep the energy up!”

Whacking the flat of his blade over the rear end of another fleeing Vulpinist who was clutching their clearly broken paw, Wiley cast one last look sideways, eyes catching Hazie’s for the briefest instant, the name Seventh lodging itself firmly in his mind.

"We’ll talk," he thought grimly. "Once we make it out of this, I ain't lettin' ye go without a goon 'n' clear explanation. Something smells fishy here, and it ain't the non-fish fishsticks..."