Chapter Text
Needless to say, listening to Gayle Gossip talk about invasive butterflies for 50 minutes straight in an interview with an overly-enthusiastic lepidopterologist isn't how any of the ninja planned on spending their Saturday evening.
Nor was cleaning disgustingly copious amounts of butterfly eggs off of the walls anywhere close to how any of them planned on spending their Saturday morning, but such is life when you're smack dab in the middle of a bizarre invasive species epidemic.
"If I'm not mistaken, the Translucent Echowing was on the endangered species list only two years ago," Gayle says, an obvious 'why couldn't they have stayed endangered,' probably sprinkled with profanities, underneath her professional reporter smile.
"That's correct," Dr. Hilton answers excitedly, oblivious to Gayle's (and the rest of Ninjago, for that matter) lack of affinity for the insect. "That's the most inexplicable detail in this whole situation. We still haven't the faintest idea how they could have repopulated so quickly. No one could have predicted this."
At this, Kai bangs his head against the wall with an annoyed growl. "What's the point of interviewing her if she's not gonna tell us anything? I don't care about the fascinating anatomy of its subspecies, I just wanna stop getting bombarded by stupid butterflies like freaking Snow White every time I go outside."
"Well. At least they're not inside yet," Cole says.
"Yet," Kai repeats, grumbling. "If I wake up one morning with a chrysalis in my hair I'm burning this place to the ground."
"That's what happened to the last monastery. Maybe we should get the serpentine to do it, for nostalgia's sake," Jay suggests helpfully, which results in a pillow being chucked at his face with such force it almost knocks him off the couch.
Not that that would be too terribly unusual, of course. Jay falls off of furniture quite frequently even without any help from aggressive pillow-throwing.
"Hey! That was unnecessary!" he says, an opinion that nobody agrees with him on.
Before he can complain anymore, though, Lloyd shushes him. "Wait, wait, I think they're actually getting somewhere now."
"Is it possible the oni invasion a few months ago could have anything to do with the sudden insurgence of Echowings?" Gayle Gossip asks. An interesting proposition, albeit a little far-fetched. Lloyd turns the volume up a few notches.
"It's hard to say," Dr. Hilton answers. "That thought has crossed my mind a few times. It doesn't seem likely, but that's not to say we're ruling it out as an option. We just really have no way of testing it."
"Hm. You should give them a sample of your blood to study, Lloyd," Kai suggests casually.
Lloyd, who has yet to get his blood drawn without biting at least two people in the process, responds with a death glare.
Kai snorts and ruffles his hair, much to Lloyd's annoyance. "I'm kidding. It probably wouldn't do any good anyway."
Gayle announces that they'll be back after a few short messages from their sponsors, and Kai mutes the TV so they won't have to listen to that car dealership jingle that always gets stuck in everyone's heads.
"You know, I don't even think they're pretty anymore," Jay remarks, glancing out the window at a swarm of Echowings. "Like, they looked cool at first, but now they just kind of make me nauseous."
"Yeah, I know," Cole agrees. "Pretty sure all the butterfly gardens have gone out of business by now. After scraping their gross eggs out of the gutter, I'll be happy if I never see another lepidopteran ever again."
"Actually, butterflies do a great deal for the environment—when they're not invasive, that is. They control some plant and insect populations by eating them, and they are pollinators like bees," Zane informs them.
Jay makes a face. "Ugh, imagine if it were bees instead of butterflies."
"Yeah. I guess it could be-"
Cole's cut off when Kai drops the remote on the ground, picks it up again, and rewinds the commercial that's on.
It's an Epiphany commercial—not very surprising; those make up at least half the commercials that are on TV nowadays.
"Nya!" Kai exclaims, pointing to the employee on the screen giving a testimonial about how Epiphany changed her life. "Look at the name! Jennifer Klingensmith! Isn't that the chick whose sandcastle you wrecked?"
"Oh, yeah! It is! I haven't seen her since I was five!" Nya says.
"Man, she was annoying. She totally deserved you wrecking her sandcastle."
"That was restraint. I wanted to punch her."
"Wait, what?" Jay says, amused. "Context?"
"Oh, so this one time when I was five, we were at the beach, and there was this annoying snobby rich girl bragging about the seashells she found, when she obviously got them from a gift shop at a museum or something."
"She wasn't really rich," Kai corrects. "More like...slightly upper middle-class."
"Well, she had more money than us, anyway. Then she said that some fairies actually gave her a treasure map to find the seashells because they wanted her to make a fancy sandcastle for them, which I thought was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, so I told her, 'that didn't happen because fairies aren't real.'" Nya pauses. "I can't actually remember what she said to me afterwards, but it was something really stupid about me ruining magic or something, and it made me mad, so I stomped on her sandcastle and threw her seashells into the ocean, like any reasonable person would do."
"Yeah," Kai snorts. "It was really funny. Then her mom asked to speak with our parents, and I didn't know what to tell her, so I just said that they were getting turtles at the store and wouldn't be back for a while. Then we left. We never saw her again, but she did leave us a few death threats!"
"Yeah. Apparently she works for Epiphany now. Figures," Nya tuts.
"Heh. I think I still believed in fairies when I was five," Jay admits.
"Well, it wasn't that she was smarter than you," Kai says, "Nya just didn't believe in anything when she was five," Kai tells him. "Fairies, mermaids, unicorns, giraffes, narwhals, politicians, armadillos, puppies, grapes, roses, Chapstick..."
"What...I can get why she wouldn't believe in giraffes, narwhals, and armadillos, I guess, because she'd probably never seen them...but how did she reach the conclusion that grapes, puppies, and Chapstick of all things were fake?"
"I...don't really remember what the deal was with those," Nya says, looking rather embarrassed. She shrugs. "I don't know. I was five. I figured out Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy weren't real because they never came anymore and I guess I just assumed everything my parents told me about was BS, because...um. Yeah..." she trails off, realizing how quiet it had gotten. "Sorry," she mumbles. "Didn't mean to ruin the mood."
"No, no, it's okay," Jay says. He looks down. "I guess I'd never really thought about that...FSM, that sucks."
"I, um..." Lloyd scratches the back of his neck, looking sheepish. "Okay, to be totally honest...I didn't figure out Santa Claus wasn't real until like a year or two after I met you guys. I...I know that sounds super stupid and pathetic, because even without the Tomorrow's Tea I was too old to believe in that stuff anymore, but I just...it never came up at Darkly's. I was really little when I went there, and I thought I never got anything for Christmas because I was, you know...evil? And I kind of...well, I kind of thought I didn't actually change as much as I thought I did when..." he trails off, too embarrassed to tell the rest of the story, but it's pretty clear what he's getting at.
"Oh," Kai says. "You thought you weren't good enough to get presents from Santa? Oh, gosh, I feel awful now."
"Well, it's not your fault," Lloyd says. "It's kind of mine."
"How is it your fault? You didn't do anything wrong."
"Well, I mean...of all the things I was exposed to there, you'd think I'd be a little less naïve," Lloyd huffs.
"Dude, will you stop with the self-deprecation towards your 10-year-old self? You were a kid. No one here thinks you're stupid."
"Whatever," Lloyd mumbles.
It's quiet for a few moments. The TV is now playing a different Epiphany commercial, the screen alit with some kind of weird psychedelic metaphor for who knows what.
Cole sighs. "Well, I'm depressed now. You guys wanna go do something else?"
"Yeah," Kai says, jumping up to turn the TV off. "I'm tired of listening to Gayle pretending like she doesn't want to cuss out that doctor for acting so happy that her lovely Translucent Echowings aren't endangered anymore anyway."
As always, when the box is set on the table, there's a pause, and everything goes still for a few moments before it's opened.
Even after all this time, it never really stops feeling weird when they do superficial things that normal people and normal families do, when they've fought some of the most dangerous people on the planet and have devoted their lives to the protection of a city which finds itself in destruction and chaos an average of three times a year.
This is something that's always been left unsaid, but the quiet hesitation that hangs above everyone's heads—is this even allowed? isn't this a waste of time? shouldn't we be preparing for the next attack?—is as prominent as ever.
Any really, it's more the lack of converse that makes it all the more obtrusive. Laughter drowns out the sound of senseless guilt, but in those few moments, the silence that envelops them coats board games and playing cards with acid.
But again, it only lasts a few moments. Despite the immense responsibility that's been given to them, they are still, in essence, just kids. They should be allowed to have fun every once and a while.
Jay opens the box. "Okay! I can't believe you guys have never played this before; Scattegories was my favorite game when I was little! So, you get one of the lists, and it has twelve categories on the side. When you roll the letter dice, whatever letter it lands on is the letter than all of your answers have to start with. You have to be fast, though, because you only get three minutes. And if you're too boring, you're disqualified." He pauses. "Okay, that last one isn't actually a rule. I just strongly encourage you to be not-boring. Anyway."
He passes out the cards and pencils, humming the theme song to the third Starfarer movie under his breath.
"'Kay," says Kai, after the three minutes are up. "'causes of traffic jams,' starting with R. Jay, what do you have?"
"Oh. I have, um..." Jay struggles to keep a straight face as he says, "radical sur-" evidently he's not doing a good job keeping a straight face, though, because he breaks into a fit of giggles before he can finish his sentence.
"Uh...you okay?" Nya says, amused, as Jay almost falls out of his chair.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm..." he sits back up. "Okay, okay, sorry. I have, um." Jay clears his throat dramatically. "'Radical surfers take on new terrain.'"
This cracks Kai, Lloyd, Nya, and Cole up too, while Zane just sits there looking confused. "But the definition of surfing is 'the sport or pastime of riding a wave towards the shore whilst standing or lying on a surfboard.' Without water present, they would no longer bear the title of 'surfer.'"
"Oh, stop it," Jay says, smacking him on the arm good-naturedly. "It doesn't have to make sense. What do you have?"
Zane looks down at his paper. "Well I have 'rush hour' written down, but I suppose that violates your not-boring rule, especially compared to 'radical surfers take on new terrain.'"—Jay snickers under his breath again—"May I change my answer to...rambunctious penguins escape zoo on account of overly-enthusiastic unprofessional ornithologist?"
This earns him a sloppy high-five from Jay (it would have been more on-target if he was not falling out of his chair again) and more delirious laughter (they're a tad sleep-deprived, for reasons which shall be disclosed later on) from everyone else.
"I have 'ravioli truck blocks path. The ravioli didn't spill or anything, the truck just broke down in the middle of an intersection and now no one can get past it,'" says Kai.
"You have all of that written down?" Nya asks, skeptical. "Word for word?"
"Indeed I do," Kai announces, showing off his teeny-tiny illegible handwriting squished into the space given for his answer.
Nya rolls her eyes. "Okay. Well, I have 'rampaging garter snakes.' I'm not sure why that was the first thing that came to my head, but yeah..."
The mental image of rampaging garter snakes doesn't do much to lower the level of crackhead energy they're all currently radiating, and Jay falls out of his chair for the third time in under five minutes. Two more, and he'll have a new record.
Suddenly Nya winces and presses the heel of her palm to her cheek.
"Dude," Kai says. "You should have gotten your wisdom teeth out like, a year ago. Nothing important is even happening right now, why do you keep putting it off?"
"Well, it's not my fault! The city kind of got taken over by a cult led by a teenage princess for a while, and then everyone got turned to stone by creatures from another realm. Setting up a dentist appointment hasn't been very high on my priorities lately," she snaps. "But yeah, actually I do have the surgery scheduled in a few days. It's at noon on Tuesday. I forgot to tell you that."
"Oh, okay, good. Who's driving you?"
"I don't need anyone to drive me."
Kai blinks. "Uh, you can drive there, but you definitely shouldn't drive back home."
"I don't know. I might not get the anesthetics. I'd be fine with just the numbing shots."
"That's a terrible idea."
"Why? I can handle it."
"Oh, I'm not worried about you, I'm worried about whoever's preforming the procedure. You're gonna punch them in the face."
"I would not!"
"You totally would! You're so reactive! You punched me in the face yesterday because I startled you when I asked if you knew where the spare batteries were. And it wasn't even like you didn't notice me come in the room, you had just forgotten I was there."
"Okay, whatever! I'll get the anesthesia." Nya huffs and throws an eraser at his forehead. "But you're not driving me. I don't trust you not to film me when I'm all drugged up and high."
"I could still film you when you get home," Kai points out.
"I could punch you in the face again," Nya counters.
Kai ignores this. "Okay, well who's driving you, then? It can't be Jay, he's gonna think it's too funny and then get distracted by the butterflies and then he'll crash into something."
Jay shrugs. "Yeah, probably."
"I'll drive," Cole offers. "The butterfly exterminator guys are coming at that same time and I don't really feel like being here for that. Plus, technically Zane's always recording, so whatever you end up saying will be immortalized in his records."
"Oh, thanks, I didn't even think about that."
"Yeah, no problem. Anyway, 'Russian classical composer Tchaikovsky makes epic comeback with first concert in over a hundred years. Lines are brutal.'"
We'll skip over the debate on whether or not Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky has enough fans to cause a traffic jam, because that goes on for an entire unnecessary fifteen minutes.
In fact, we'll skip over the rest of the game, too. (In case you were wondering, Lloyd's answer to that question was ‘rectangles,’ which he did not get points for, because he could not stop laughing long enough to explain what the heck that was supposed to mean. The rest of his answers followed a similar pattern.)
It's much later at night—or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it—when we pick up again.
Deep in the recesses of an amalgation of butterfly nests so huge and crawling with larvae and spiderweb-like material that just a fleeting glimpse of it is enough to make you nauseous, is something other than a Translucent Echowing, in any of its stages of life.
A door, in a place no one with any shred of sanity would think to look.
And a room, behind the door (not that that’s anything special, of course—that’s usually where rooms tend to be) the likes of which are a bit difficult to describe, but I shall do my best:
It isn’t entirely unlike a typical secret lab belonging to a mad scientist, with test-tubes and beakers full of unidentifiable, strangely-colored liquids. It’s also covered in a continuation of the butterfly nest that’s hiding its entryway. Eggs and chrysalises and caterpillars, sewn together by a sort of mutated spiderweb, butterflies flying aimlessly around. There are regular spiderwebs, too, which of course come with spiders and spider eggs. All sorts of other insects crowd the walls, bugs that make the butterflies seem pleasant, even in the presence of their massive, repulsive nest.
It is, put bluntly, an entomophobe's nightmare.
At the very least, it looks abandoned, like it hasn't been touched in years, but the shadowy figure lurking in the background suggests otherwise.
Said shadowy figure peels a beetle off the wall and pauses to watch it squirm helplessly between their index finger and thumb before dropping it into a flask bubbling with a murky black liquid.
Gross.
Unfortunately, since I'm already completely disregarding the second and third laws of narration (the second being "don't talk in first-person when you're not a character and you're not part of the story, you're just the narrator, you can't interact with any elements of the plot, you're just supposed to tell the audience what's happening so shut up" and the third being "don't break the fourth wall every other sentence, please and thank you.") I'd best at least stick to the first law, which is "no spoilers, you idiot."
Because of that, I have no authority to explain to you anything further at this time.
Now, please stand by while I ask the author what the heck they think they're doing.