Editing Setting:CATastrophe/Writefaggotry (section)

==Shiny Dive==
“So this is it, huh? I don’t see any treasure.” Shansha took off her scuba mask and began scratching aggresively at her ears and wringing out her tail to the best of her ability. Those rubber straps always irritated her ears and the water did her no favors either.

“S’what the wanderer said. Said he didn’t have the gear to go down himself, but he could somethin’ shinin’ down underwater.” Marko stretched, also removing his mask and letting it hang around his neck. Their troupe just hit the air pocket on the old tower. He hopefully wouldn’t need it for a little while now. He liked the taste of this stale air the ruins captured. It tasted like…history.

“You met a guy wandering all alone? Why didn’t you bring him back to town?” J’kai cut in, ears perking up as she suddenly became interested in the conversation.

“Because I'm not evil enough to wish that upon even my most hated enemies.” Quipped, giving her ear a little flick as he walked by her.

“Hey! Meanie! ‘Sides, I never hear YOU complaining.” J’kai countered, rubbing her ear defensively.

“That’s, enough, ladies!” a woman, the only one still wearing her scuba mask, barked at the trio before remembering to add on a “…and Marko. We came here for a reason, so let’s get whatever it is you were looking for and get the hell out of here before any Oldguards show up.”

“You the boss, BB.” Marko shrugged. He seriously doubted there would be any Oldguard in this ruin. They usually only showed up in the ones with real shiny stuff. The only reason this place hadn’t been picked clean by other treasure hunters yet was due to how far off from any settlement it was. They would’ve never bothered to even check if it wasn’t for that tip. Of course, it was Bahi-Bahi’s job to be cautious, that eyepatch of hers was a constant reminder of what happens when you get careless while spelunking. Not that she’s any less aggressive than before. If anything, she got meaner and tougher from the encounter. You know what that say about porcupine dogs…

The quartet wandered around the ruin for a spell, grabbing an energy drink here and some catnip there, but never finding anything to make the trip worthwhile. 

“I think that wanderer sold you bad intel, Marko.” Shansha smirked

“Nah, he seemed trustworthy enough. It’s gotta be around here somewhere…”

She only giggled at his denials “Face it. You got scammed, sweetheart.”

“Aha! There it is!” Marko’s face brightened as he ran forward and hugged a strange looking box with a glass panel on one side.

“A box? That’s what we came all this way for?” J’kai raised an eyebrow in confusion.

“None of you have ever stepped foot in the Archives, have you?” Marko sighed

“Reading about all that old stuff is boring when you could be finding it!” J’kai countered cheerily

“That’s men’s work. No reason to bother myself with it.” Shansha shrugged.

“I keep meaning to, but…” Bahi-Bahi offered weakly.

Marko let out another sigh. “Well, if any of you HAD bothered to listen to all the voices captured on the speakyboxes, you would know that the Earless used these things to store information, if I can only get it to–” he plugged a few wires into his portabattery and began pressing buttons seemingly at random until he was finally rewarded with a glimmer of light from the glass panel “–turn on. And there we go. Time to find out what the Earless saved on this one.” After typing on the tablet in front of him and gazing intently at the screen for a few minutes, much to the mystification of the three girls, Marko leaned back and pulled on his ears in frustration, letting them droop flat. “And the thing is locked. It needs a password, I think, but I have no idea how to figure out what, though”

“Well, if I was going to put a password on something, I would make it something easy to remember like ‘password’.” J’kai offered helpfully, entranced by the gentle swaying of a nearby dangling light

J’kai, bless her heart, was virtually every stereotype about her kind rolled into one. She was scatterbrained, as lazy as any of her kind in even the most dire of circumstances, it was damn hard to motivate her to do anything she didn’t want to do, and Bahi-Bahi would NEVER trust her with an arc rifle. And yet, when push came to shove, she was one of the best treasure hunters around. To this day, no one knows how she managed to lift an entire energy drink vending machine, much less swipe one from the middle of a den of kleptomanders without waking a single one of them up. Marko shrugged and decided to try her suggestion anyways. It couldn’t hurt.

“…It worked.”

“Hah! I'm a genius! In your FACE, Marko!”

Marko just chuckled quietly to himself and got back to work, removing various electronics from their waterproof containers and plugging them into the ancient machine and typing and clicking furiously, pausing occasionally to shoo away J’kai whenever her boredom compelled her to bat at his flitting tail. Finally he let out an exuberant cheer and began packing up his equipment.

“So what’d you find?” Shansha looked up from the rubble she had been occupying herself with, some nondescript object shining in her hand. “Some sorta treasure trove of old words?”

“Nope, something better.”

“Blueprints for some of the mechworks back home?”

“Even better.”

“Just tell us already!” J’kai interrupted frustratedly.

“Fine, fine, but only because you asked so nicely.” Marko hit a button on the speakybox he brought with him, prompting it to emit a bizarre noise.

“Is that…music?” Bahi-Bahi eyed him from her defensive point watching the door they came in from, lowering her arc rifle ever so slightly.

“Earless music.” Marko triumphantly corrected her.

“Oh man, this is gonna be the BEST pool party ever when we get back!” J’kai shouted before falling into jubilant gossip and planning with Shansha. Even Bahi broke down and started discussing what she was going do when they got back to town and who she was going to woo with her loot, her tail wagging so fast that Marko could feel a gentle breeze as he walked behind the group, silently praising himself for his decision of career change from mechano-historian to treasure hunter.