Part 6 of the Homegrown Help series
Flinch had never left the house on purpose before, and the Darkmoon Faire was not a gentle place to start.
UG had promised he’d be near, and he was, though “near” turned out to mean something different once they were standing in the middle of a roller coaster’s queue with a band somewhere off to the left playing the same song it had apparently played every hour for the better part of two decades. Flinch pressed close to his leg and did not run, which UG counted as a genuine victory before either of them had done anything else worth counting.
The plan, such as it was, had started small. A hundred Darkmoon Daggermaw, fished up patiently off the island’s coast, meant to be traded toward a monkey Lhara kept behind her stall — small, unbothered by anything, wearing a fez for no reason UG had ever bothered to ask about. Flinch had taken to the fishing better than either of them expected, standing at the water’s edge working through the same worry it always worked through, quieter each time a line went taut and came back with something on it rather than nothing.
Along the way, a Faded Treasure Map turned the fishing into a proper hunt. Four rhymes, each pointing to the next — a bag in a dockside tent, a note buried in the sandbox the Faire kept for its tigers, another beside a carnie too careless to notice it had been dropped, a fourth tucked behind a banner on the path in. The last of it sat underwater, on a wrecked ship off the northwest coast, and UG came up from that dive soaked through and short of breath and a hundred Darkmoon Prize Tickets richer for it.
That should have been the end of the day’s ambition. It wasn’t. A hundred tickets, once counted, looked less like an achievement and more like the first tenth of something UG had not previously wanted and now, having glimpsed the number required, wanted rather badly — a Darkmoon Dirigible, purple and rocket-shaped, sold by the same vendor as the monkey for a thousand tickets UG did not have and showed no immediate sign of acquiring through honest fishing alone.
Lichmyface got sent down for his own hundred fish and his own turn at the same four rhymes, on the reasoning that tickets moved freely between characters now and there was no sense wasting a perfectly good jawless henchman’s afternoon on anything less useful. He came back soaked in the same way UG had, and a good deal less inclined to discuss it.
The letter to Nobbybanks went out that evening, drafted by Flinch, who had never written to a banker before and made no secret of not knowing quite how one was meant to sound. Nine thousand gold, requested plainly, for what UG had described to him only as a very important dirigible. Flinch signed it on UG’s behalf, added a line admitting he didn’t fully understand the turn the day had taken either, and sent it off without much hope of a kind answer.
The monkey, in the end, still hasn’t been bought. Bigger things got in the way, same as they generally do around this house.
More in the Homegrown Help series
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