//------------------------------// // Rain // Story: Roadtrip // by enamis //------------------------------// . It rained today. . It had been overdue for a while now. The way the air grew pressing and how the wind shifted sharp. Distant rumbles carried by the absence of sound all across the globe. How my feathers fluffed up and Kaja’s coat grew stiff as a heaviness set itself deep in our glassy bones. The way the invisible agitation grew between us. Craving. Waiting. Urging. When it broke and spilled across the world and finally washed away all the mess in humanity’s wake I felt clean for the first time since I woke up. A good feeling, to say the least. We sat in the open doorway, fat raindrops drumming against the glass wall and our noses and beaks and muzzles, held into the soggy world outside, and the rest of us cozy in our not-so-stuffy-anymore home base. Carl sat aside from the three of us girls, leaning against the wall. Last time I checked he was reading something on a Kindle. It had only been two days but his nose was already looking better. The flesh had closed together and three dark scabs ran the length of his soft, pink muzzle. I had re-bandaged his hand lathered his face in my favorite brand of healing cream earlier this morning while we all had been yearning for rain. Neither of us still knew how we felt about everything. Although, I was rather content to simply ignore it forever. . The day had been gray through and through, with the faintest hint of blue and light. A welcome contrast to the blazing bright days we had grown used to for the past while. I had brought out my repertoire earlier in the day, ever so softly playing along with the rain. These people were the rare few that didn’t mind the same song on repeat, if they had, one of us would have gone insane. . Peace. . Peace… . It seemed like it was something we had been lacking for the past few days. Leave it to rain. … Gotta’ say, there's a damn good reason people used to worship it. . After we had silently marveled long enough at the world around us we got together and took a nap. All of us. I despised naps. They were such a worthless, senseless, disgusting, revolting, horrid waste of being alive. But with the rain pounding the windows and the utter silence enwrapping the world all around us, I couldn’t help it. Torchlight II didn’t seem very appealing compared to a fluffy blanket and a nice, big pillow. And Bruno and Bruhņo the plush turtles, of course. I had gotten used to sharing a bed with Kaja. At worst I just pretended I was sharing it with Mom. Horse. Horsemom. Hah. We had a pillow divider and only once had I found myself pressed against that most sacred of borders and that had been because I had thrown my blanket off and was freezing. In spite of the entire feathers dealio. . . Once upon a time I’d been a history person, ya know. Well, as much as one could be while having six different classes on seven different kinds of history for the last two years straight. Riga had always been a port town. As far back as our written history went this city had always been the heart of trade. Ships and all kinds from all across the known globe passing through for centuries upon centuries. Invaders and occupiers coming and going, always desperate to claim this prize for themselves. And while our legacy had faded through the modernization of the brand new world it had always clung to us. Like the seawater itself ran through the veins of the natives of this ancient place, carrying within them a forgotten legacy. . The rain ceased early evening. But it was the heart of summer so ‘evening’ didn’t really happen until a solid ten PM. We set off, our mismatch of footwear splashing through the puddles snaking between the centuries worn cobbles, as old as the city itself. The air was fresh and brisk as we all took in deep lungfuls of the warm humidity still clinging to our city. Clouds passed above, the wind chasing away what little darkness of rain still remained. I walked with a horrendously noticeable limp and Kaja made sure to stay to my side just in case I, for some unholy reason decided to use the one of my four legs that I had classified as ‘don’t even acknowledge it exists if you're not ready for pain’. Our dear pack mule Carl had gotten himself saddled with a humongous backpack full of anything and everything and one of my trusty shopping carts with a mysterious crate and supplies to last an unspoken overnight trip. And so we walked, followed by the rattle of shitty trolley wheels across uneven ground and Bella constantly shaking off the water she soaked up from puddles like one of those dreadlock-mops. You know the ones. . Eventually. We reached our destination. Sitting on an outcropping of land peeking into the river lay /Andrejsala/. Close enough to the city center and the actual cruise-liner dock to be paradise for any and all yacht owners and water enthusiasts. Safely tucked in the calm bay waters we were greeted by a sea of pearly white masts and neatly folded sails of every variety imaginable crisscrossed amidst rickety wood footbridges. I honestly don’t know what we expected. Still, this was only step one. Many, many kilometers downstream, nearing the Gulf of Riga was the entirety of the Freeport. A vast expanse of shipyards and rail lines and cranes and warehouses and terminals and dry-docks and god knows what else. Our true goal. We searched. Every building. Every nook. Every boat. The wind picked up. We had to find something. Some way to get to where we were going. One hope towards any kind of usable vehicle. It turned to be a lot harder than we had realized. Again. I don’t really know what we’d been expecting. And that sinking in my stomach was about the same volume as my grand plan dropping down the drain. . But it seemed that whatever god I’d been cursing since day one decided to not be a dick and by sheer miracle we came upon some unattentive bastard who had left his keys in the whatever the specific control panel that boats had was called, to his decently sized vessel. I say we could have fit about two and a half Carls’ in there. The motor gave a few dying spurts in response to us turning the key and the result was… not much of a surprise. So we thought. Kaja had brought this strange… thing with us. In broken words she had managed to explain it was something of a portable charger for car-type batteries. She had found it wandering at some point after my debut, so that’s why it hadn’t come up in conversation much. With that in mind she had jerry-rigged it to function god knows how or why and in what way and as much as I boasted myself to be an amazing tinkerer and mechanical mind I couldn’t really figure most of this stuff out. I was beginning to see far too many glaring holes in my supposed knowledge. And needless to say that was not a very great thing. . After far too much back-and-forth we had a working boat battery. And I couldn’t fucking believe it and I don’t think Carl could either. The following steps were easy. We loaded the cart of supplies in the cabin-bit of the boat and I leashed Bella to a metal thingy just on deck. We raided the guard cabin for life vests and after roping three adult ones together for Carl and fitting Kaja’s melon through the head part of hers we were ready. Whilst Carl was undoing the mooring I monkeyed my way to the topmost part of the yacht where the front window bit curved backwards for aerodynemecism. The sound of water lapping against the boats was truly a unique one. I swept my gaze across the entire lot and the hundreds of vessels forever to be forgotten here and somehow that was the part that saddened me the most. . /Andrejsala/. I had passed here some many times for no other reason than to see it. See these strange white tubs that humans adored. /Andrejsala/… It had always amused me, just the faintest bit, that the peninsula shared the same name as my Dad. Silly coincidences, were they not? . . We set off, and it wasn’t even that dark yet. . Between the three of us, ‘sailing’ turned out to not be that hard. It had taken us a couple of jumpy escalations to figure out how to manage the speed of this thing and it had a steering wheel like a car so we weren’t exactly worried. Okay, we were a little worried, but that had become par for the course as of the last while. Slowly but surely, and defiantly horridly loudly, we made our way towards the Sea. Between the three of us manning the wheel I stepped out every so often just to feel the salty wind ride through my feathers. The yacht jostled and skipped but we managed and eventually I called for the two to slow down. We slid along the side of the river marveling at the sheer scale of the metal beasts around us, ever more frightening for Kaja and I as we had lost a good half of our original size. The warehouses and cranes and freighters the size of stadiums hanging precariously on scaffolding was enough to make us all keep our distance as the groaning of untouched machinery echoed across the inky waters. The sky grew dark as we neared the wide waters near the delta. It was Kaja that spotted it first, those bright gold eyes of hers guiding us in the dark towards the other side of the river. More dry-docks, but in place of freighters there were fishing vessels. Just what we had been looking for. . See, the day after our grand bloodshed, we had not, in fact, sat on our asses with faces in blankets wanting to die, oh no, no, no. Right across the river from Old Town we had a library. But it wasn’t just any other library. It was THE Library. The Glass Mountain, nicknamed by the people after a peculiar bit in our most important of folklores. An impressive building worthy of the name it bore. Spiked slopes of shimmering bright finish and windows stretching the entire fifteen-something stories, it was a sight to behold. And within… We had done our research. More research that I think I’d done in my entire life combined. And for once I was glad I was as old as I was (and Carl too), because had I been a few years younger I probably wouldn’t have known how to operate a library. We had done the general stuff initially. Armed with two backpacks full of flashlights and an extensive list of words for Kaja to match with any covers she could reach and drag back. We’d studied sailing, historical initially but there was a lot of modern day stuff too. We’d rounded up maps, studied currents and the behavior of water and above all else - the ships themselves. With us we had dragged back two carts full of materials on the types of vessels and their use and everything nautical we could decipher with our severely limited understanding. It was fascinating in a way, just how much knowledge one could gain in such a short time. We had spent the night chattering amongst ourselves, sharing what we had found as Kaja typed out the cliff-notes on the MacBook she’d deemed hers. For moments at a time one could almost forget the fact that Carl would probably have a scarred nose for the rest of his life I wouldn’t be able to move my entire arm for a very long while. Almost. . . He was a good jumper. And his psychotic strength could really show as he dragged the entire yacht by a single rope to rest against the tires nailed to the side of one of the smaller docks. Birdhorse and I disembarked shortly after. Unleashing Bella and setting up mine and Kaja’s ‘lighting harnesses’ took not ever two minutes as we had gotten a lot of this down to a science. It was cold here. I was so glad I had brought my darling blue jacket and even Kaja wore her backwards-hoodie, wings sticking out the half closed zipper on her back. At some point I’d joked she could put some snacks in the hood part hanging under her chin and never go hungry. I think she had actually considered it. It took us about twenty minutes of wandering in the dark in a shit-thyself-creepy boatyard before we found the one specific boat Kaja had spotted from across the shore. It was hard to make out anything about it in the pitch black nothingness of night so we ended up hanging one of our flashlights on the path leading up onto the ship and tried our best to memorize the location before heading back. The night was uneventful. Carl slept on deck with Bella while Kaja and I snugged under a single huge blanket in the… cockpit? Yeah, let’s go with that. When morning broke we were too hyped to even function. I chugged some lukewarm tea I’d taken in a thermos with us and Kaja nibbled some biscuits while Carl tanked three liter-cans of corn and we left within ten minutes. Bella sniffed her way around the boat as we clambered aboard, taking in the size of the thing. I was reminded of a gif of a boat not unlike this one dumping a netful of fish in the containers below only to find a very confused walrus amidst its lunch. Now that’s what I called entertainment. I think we all had the same thing in our brain as we booked it for the main bridge. This was the part where everything we had worked for was a single moment away from falling apart. Carl and I stayed in the doorway, not even caring we were side by side again as we fidgeted like never before. Kaja had her space to paw around the controls and whatnots as we had decided she had had the most experience with anything mechanical related, even if it amounted to knowing how to change the oil in her old car. Yet it was beginning to be obvious she was about as clueless as the rest of us. I mentally recalled reading about this ‘Air Start System’ that was supposed to be a given for large vehicles much like this one. To my vague understanding it replaced batteries, which was what we had been banking on. Hard. With everything to gain at this point, I stepped beside Kaja and went over the main controls which consisted mostly of levers and buttons and the occasional dark screen and microwave-looking things with a sea of wires. I scoured the rubbed-off labels for anything that could even remotely resemble anything we had tried our best to learn. I spotted something that looked promising and before anyone even noticed I smacked it as hard as I could. Live without consequence, right? . There was a deadly pause as none of us dared to breathe. And as we stood there, frozen in uncertainty we began to feel it. A soft whistle and then, faint at first, the deep rumbling grew, slowly in crescendo, until one would have to be dead to ignore it. It was as that point I'm pretty sure I let out the loudest ‘YES’ this side of the planet had heard as the trembling of the metal beast began earnest. And like hyperactive children on Christmas we jumped around and screeched and hugged and shouted and cried, and by God was it well-earned. o.O.o