Kokiri Brats Versus Kidnapping Prats [Eevachu + Electronic Ink]

This was unacceptable. This was not okay. None of this was alright in any sense of the word.
Deanna had a job to do and there were irritating children everywhere.
The thought may or may not have occurred to her to use a few of these more-stupid-than-usual Hylians as bait for her quarry, but she eventually decided that she'd likely be denied her rupees if she was deliberately responsible for further damage.

She huffed irritably as one ran headlong into her, knocking her down, her armour clanking. Except then the kid saw Gomgossa and fled in terror. The way it should be. She moved into the next stall.
"Hey," she said to the owner, who rudely ignored her, the jerk. She climbed up onto the counter, to his shock. "I said hey! Have you heard anything suspicious lately? At all?"
"G-get off my counter!" the man yelped, swatting at her greaves.
"Not until you answer my question," Deanna said stubbornly. "I asked if you've heard anything. A whole bunch of kids have gone missing all over Windfall and I've been told that there's been Suspicious Activity in this town. Tell me!"
"Nayru, Nayru, okay! Yeesh," the shop owner said, raising his hands. "All I know is that there have been a lot more kids around than usual and then they stop being around,"
"Thanks!" Deanna said, hopping off the counter and yanking Gomgossa by the stem to stop it biting the man's face.

She exited the shop only to walk straight into a hoarde of more children.
"More than usual, huh?" she muttered, looking at them. "Hey, you! Yeah you, with the potato-shaped head! Who brought you here?"
"Madame Caroline," the kid said after a moment.
"Where is she?"
"Did you used to live with her too?" another kid asked.
"No. Shut up. I'm not four like you. Where is she?"

One child gave her a curled-lip scowl while the other folded his arms.
"You're a meanie," he said. "She's that way. I hope she gets real mad at you,"
"Stop being so annoying," Deanna said instead, stalking down the street in the direction she had been pointed in. Madame Caroline wasn't hard to spot- she was the only woman not in Windfall fashion on the street with more than two children around her.
"Hey! You!" Dee shouted, stalking right up into Madame Caroline's...well, thighs, since Dee wasn't tall enough to get in her face. She stood on tiptoes and stared upwards instead. "Why have you got all these kids here? What are your plans? Tell me!"

"Don't young lady me!" Dee snapped, standing on her toes to be slightly taller. "These kids don't live here! You brought them here by boat, didn't you? You all smell like seawater. There aren't meant to be this many kids here, and especially now. It's very suspicious!"

When she heard a voice, Dee turned, hand flying to her kukri.
"Don't call me a brat!" she snapped. Great. Another Kokiri. Exactly what she needed right now. "You can hardly talk! Who wears clothes that stupid and red?" She sniffed. "I guess that's why you're working for this Suspicious Lady, huh? You've got to afford better clothes somehow,"

Gomgossa had gone to snap at Caroline and Dee grabbed the plant's stem before it could. She didn't want her suspect mauled before she could question her. "The two of you turning up with all these kids, right now? That's more than just convenient timing. Tell me what you know!"
She glared at Rika. "And you, fool- keep out of my investigation, okay? I don't need another one of you stupid fairy-wusses getting in my way,"
She paused. Hey. Wait a minute. There was no fairy fluttering around Rika's head like a stupid satellite.
Minus one Suck Point.

Oh, well screw him, then! What a jerk! "I'm sorry," she snapped, "did I ask for your opinion at any stage? I know it's a damn orphanage, but it's not an orphanage from here! You got here on the boat! Geez, and you've got the hide to call me dumb? Pot calling the kettle black on that one! I've met Moblins smarter than you, you stupid red moron. Also," she bristled, "you literally are being paid to babysit annoying little brats. That's not even an insult, it's true. How you can babysit yourself is anyone's guess, but I suppose an idiot has to get rupees somehow," Dee pulled out her seed shooter and fluidly shot a seed right at the part of his knees that wouldn't take kindly to a fast-moving blunt projectile smacking into them.

She turned back to Caroline.
"Answer for yourself! Don't let this stupidhead try and bail you out of being a Suspicious Suspect. Why have you brought your orphanage here today of all days? I doubt this is a coincidence, Suspicious Suspect. You better talk fast or I'm gonna assume you're the perp I'm looking for and I'm gonna have to hit you a few times!"

Dee hadn't been keeping a very tight grip on Gomgossa and she wasn't surprised when the Baba lunged for Rika. What she was surprised at is when the Baba was suddenly reduced to ash with a fire spell.
"G-Gomgossa!" she yelped. "You-you killed Gomgossa the First! That's so rude! What kind of jerk kills someone's plants?"
She raised her Seed Shooter higher as she made the mostly unconscious decision to leg it, loosing another seed at Rika's head this time, before turning and stalking away.
"I'll be back!" she threatened. "I will! And you better answer my questions then!"
Ugh. Uncooperative witnesses were the worst.

This was unacceptable. Completely and utterly unacceptable.

Firstly, Gomgossa was toast. Literal toast. She probably could have eaten it with butter. Maybe the pieces were too small to do that, though. So maybe she could have used it as toast-flavoured spice on her lunch. Was toast-flavoured spice a thing? If not, Dee had just invented it.
Secondly, wowie. Dee hated Kokiri in general but this guy was an all new variety of jerk. It took a special kind of idiot to wear those stupid clothes, and a special kind of idiot to be so Suspicious when someone was clearly investigating here, thank you very much.

Dee looked at her open notebook, where she’d scrawled her as-yet lackluster ideas, and put on her glasses. This inn was badly lit, and the cloudy sky wasn’t helping, but the light from the window was enough for her to pick up the charcoal stick sitting beside the paper and scrawl a quick sketch of the Jerk Kokiri.
Suspect? she wrote underneath, then chewed on a fingernail thoughtfully as she wrote down what she knew so far.
Kokiri boy. App. employed to babysit. Orphanage foreign? Jerk doesn’t look strong enough to drag off multiple kids at once. Possible sleeping potion? Kokiri not known for affinity with potions. Large scythe- combat skill. Fire spell- magic talent. Boots fancy- probably expensive, has money. Large pet nearby. Octorok. Affinity with beasts- very suspicious.
She looked over what she’d written with an unimpressed noise. Nowhere near enough information to form a solid theory on. And the stupid interrupting Kokiri had stopped her from gathering any info on the woman too. It was very, very annoying.

And she didn’t even have a trained Baba on hand. She’d left her large plants back in her office in Castle Town, so now she was completely Gomgossaless. She had some seeds on her, though, so she picked up the dirt-filled quiver from where she’d dropped it and stuffed one in it, tipping a bit of water onto it before rhythmically shaking her wrists. The bells on her bracelets chimed in tune to the Sapling’s Song and the little Baba began to sprout upwards, years’ worth of growth billowing outwards. Eventually the plant stood not-quite-as-high as Gomgossa I had. This one kind of slouched more. Maybe it was a lazy Baba. It was a magenta colour too, which was a nice departure from Gomgossa I’s blue.
“You are… Gomgossa the Fire-Eater,” she dubbed the Baba, which lazily reached out and tried to nibble on her sleeve before recoiling at the taste. “I bet you’re tired from all that growing, huh? Take a nap or something. I’ll be back before the hour’s up, so you don’t have to worry about shrinking back down again. Don’t break any of my stuff,” She stood the quiver upright in the middle of the room, away from any furniture that could be eaten.

Killing her Baba had been a jerk move. If she was as much of a jerk as that Kokiri was, she’d have killed his Octorok in retaliation. But she wasn’t a jerk, so she hadn’t. Duh. She leaned back in her seat, pausing, then sniffed her armour. It didn’t actually smell, did it? No. Maybe it smelled a little green- was that rosemary? Did she have rosemary stuck in the hinges of her armour again? She unbuckled the armour piece by piece and set it down on the floor beside her bed. She didn’t really need her armour when she was just sitting around theorising anyway. When she was done, maybe she’d go downstairs and ask the inn owner about the orphanage and the strange Kokiri guarding it.

‘When she was done’ became now, as she snapped the book shut and stood up. There was no point to sitting around doing nothing- she was being paid to find kids and find kids she would. The more time she spent dilly-dallying, the more time she was giving her suspects to get away and hide. It was entirely possible that Jerk Kokiri would be telling all his jerk friends about her, which meant she could lose her element of surprise before she even met the criminal. If she was honest, she was kind of worried about that. She’d never really been on the receiving end of one of her suspects’ ploys, and that stupid jerk had provoked her into making a scene without even gaining any answers. This case could go bad very fast, and it was important that she get moving before she lost all of her chances to that one idiot in the rabbit hat.

She locked her door behind her as she exited, then put her own little trap on the doorknob- a dry leaf stuck to the bottom of the knob. That way, if anyone tried to open her door, the leaf would break and crumble. An easy trap for a foolish fool who wanted to get into her stuff. She barely looked in front of her as she went down the stairs, her notebook tucked under her arm and her glasses still perched on her nose. The bells around her wrists were jangling but she ignored them as she reached the bottom of the stairs and knocked on the door to the innkeeper’s office.

“Hello?” the man called, and Dee pushed open the door. “Oh, miss...Deanna, was it?”
“Do you know anything about a Kokiri in red and an orphanage he’s guarding?” Deanna asked immediately. The innkeeper frowned.
“The island orphanage?”
“I don’t think they’re from the island,” Dee said. The innkeeper’s face brightened.
“Oh, you mean Caroline,” he said, sounding relieved. “Yeah, I know her. Why?”
“Is it normal for her to bring so many kids to the island?”
“She...runs an orphanage, and she brings the kids on trips here,” the man shrugged.
“What about the Kokiri in red? He’s guarding them, apparently,”
The innkeeper’s brow furrowed. “Maybe Caroline’s nervous about the missing kids. It makes sense for her to have hired someone to defend her kids...I guess a Kokiri is a smart choice. A kidnapper would probably mistake them for just another of the orphans,”
“Believe me,” muttered Dee, “you can’t mistake this idiot for any of the kids. You’ll know him when you see him, trust me,”
She jotted down what he’d told her in her notebook.
“Thank you,” she said as it started to rain outside.

“Why do you need to know, though?” he asked.
“I’m a private investigator,” she said proudly. “I’ve been hired to find out what’s happening with the missing kids. Those kids turning up right now was very Suspicious,”
“Fair enough, I guess,” the man said. “I trust Caroline, if that means anything.”
“Not really,” Dee said bluntly, turning around. “Who else I could talk to about her?”
“I think she rented out a building for her kids this time around,” he shrugged. “You could try talking to the owner?”
“Whatever,” Dee left the office, heading upstairs to her room again. The leaf was fine, and she delicately opened the door with only the top of the doorknob. Gomgossa the Fire-Eater had recovered somewhat, and had knocked over the quiver it was rooted in. It was currently rolling around on the floor looking for something to eat.
“Nothing to eat yet,” she told it. It lashed out at her when she got close, only to recoil from the foul taste of her clothing a second time. “You can’t eat me, either,”

She picked up the quiver and latched it onto her belt, and Gomgossa immediately hit its head on the ceiling.
“Idiot,” she muttered, folding her glasses and tucking them away in her pouch. She didn’t really want to get wet in the heavy rain outside, but she didn’t really have a choice if she wanted to keep investigating. She locked her door again and left the inn, heading back towards Madame Caroline’s building. She had a few questions for Madame Caroline and her jerk bodyguard.

Gomgossa the Fire-Eater was poorly named. It was standing straight up out of the quiver with its jaws open to the skies, catching rain in its fanged mouth and swallowing it gleefully.
“You’re genuinely a fool,” Dee muttered, tucking her hands under her arms to hide them from the freezing rain. It was a little bit like the sky had decided to throw really small ice cubes for the shits and giggles, and was having a particularly fun time trying to get them down Dee’s collar. Her pretzel braids were already weighed down with the rain, drooping miserably, and her fringe was plastered to her face, making it necessary for her to repeatedly shove it out of her eyes.


She was so busy trying to see through the pelting rain that she didn’t notice the person nearby until Gomgossa lunged out sharply to the side, almost uprooting itself with its vigor. She instinctively grabbed it where she would have the last Gomgossa and was greeted with thorns to the hand. This Gomgossa’s thorns were in a different place than the last Gomgossa’s and she jerked away from the cutting thorns, shoving her cut fingers in her mouth with a hiss.
“Who’s there?” she said, squinting through the rain, and then she saw what was behind the figure and stopped.


That was Suspicious. Very, very Suspicious. And she wasn’t even exaggerating this time.
“Get back!” She grabbed the boy by the arm and yanked him back around the corner, recognising the Jerk a split-second later.
“Were you going to meet with those Suspicious People?” she whispered accusingly. “Are you involved?”
Gomgossa was straining to get at the Jerk and Dee wrapped its stem around her arms to keep it from biting. “Something suspicious is going on here, isn’t it,”

The pirate would be sorely disappointed, Dee decided with glee, recognising an opportunity to have some fun when she saw it. She was delayed a moment by surprise, but the moment she registered the other Kokiri’s departure she was off, charging after them. She met the pirate halfway, sliding in under the strike with her sickle in hand, bringing the hooked weapon up to catch the scimitar before it could strike Rika. With a swift jerk of her wrist and the motion of her skid against the rain-slick ground, she twisted her sickle and let the point slice into the pirate’s hand, divesting him of his weapon. The alleyway was a little cramped for three people shoulder-to-shoulder though, and she was quick to back off and give herself space even as the pirate yelped in pain.

“You were saying?” she taunted, drawing her second sickle and holding them loosely in front of her, ready to slash at a moment’s notice. The rain was an unwelcome factor for the fight, but Deanna was no fresh sprout and a little bit of water wasn’t going to stop her from kicking this pirate’s butt. “I have a few questions to ask you!”

The pirate looked torn between the two weapon-wielding kids. Rika had a stupid Hylian to look after and Dee felt no shame in swooping forward with weapons raised, even as the pirate fumbled to grab his back-up weapon from his belt. Dee’s sickle missed his face by a whisker as he ducked backwards, but her second attack found its mark, the curved blade biting into the pirate’s tanned forearm. Dee was loath to cause her suspect any great harm before he spilled his secrets, but he was so much bigger than her that it would be impossible to subdue him while he was conscious. Necessities were necessities after all.

The next swipe of her blade was to his knee, and he retaliated with a swift punch with his free hand. Dee’s head jerked to the side, but she got the last laugh as Gomgossa the Fire-Eater turned out to also be Gomgossa the Pirate-Eater, sinking its needle-like teeth into the pirate’s arm. The pirate yanked its arm backwards and several of Gomgossa’s teeth snapped with the motion, the plant making a gurgling noise in pain. If Dee had any sense of karma she’d have appreciated the pirate’s harsh kick to her knee that set her about dropping to the floor, but instead she opted to slash him across his chest as she dropped, yelping. The pirate probably wasn’t expecting Dee to abruptly switch tactics. Rather than push herself back up, Dee hit the ground and stayed there, swinging her sickle around his leg and jerking it sharply back towards herself, cutting the flesh right down to the bone. The pirate cried out in pain as his foot abruptly handed in its resignation, and he hit the ground hard. Dee stood up, planting her rainboot hard on the cut across the pirate’s chest.

“Where are the other children!” she shouted, dripping hair plastered to her face. She probably cut quite a feral image, with her mud and blood-splattered clothes, dishevelled hair, and the ravenous plant clearly trying to decide if trying to consume the pirate’s leg was worth the pain in its broken teeth.

Dee did not swear when her quarry managed to snatch his freedom. She did not. Instead she let out a cry of rage even as she ducked for cover from the crossbow bolts, the sharp ping of their heads meeting stone brick ringing out even through the rain. Beside her, the other Kokiri touched her, and she’d have divested him of his bloody fingers if she hadn’t recognised the sudden lightness to her body. She’d experimented with magic like this before, when she had been splicing Pegasus plants with others- one combination had spawned a seed that had made her almost break her neck on the ceiling, before ultimately withering and dying. This felt much like the effects of the seed, and with nary a hesitation Dee was off, jumping onto the spire and then jumping from that, kicking the thin air in a second jump to propel her to the roof.

“Get back here, you backwards scum!” she shrieked, one hand drawing her scythe while the other wrapped around Gomgossa’s neck to pull it closer, ready to whip the Baba at any foe that dared enter its reach. She reached the edge of the rooftop and kicked off, a second jump easily carrying her to the next of the houses. She was thankful for the shallow slant of the roofs in this district- any steeper and the rain would send her plummeting to the ground below. She really did slip on the third roof, feet flying sideways, but a swift jump sideways sent her back to the apex of the roof, and she grabbed the anchor beam and hoisted herself back upright, cursing about the precious lost seconds.

They were getting away! She jammed her scythe in Gomgossa’s mouth, trusting- perhaps foolishly- that the Baba would bite down and hold it for her as she drew her seed shooter, one hand flying to her belt to grab a handful of seeds. Whether they were her regular tea mangrove seeds, her Deku nuts or her bomb seeds, she could not have said, and she recklessly jammed the first seed into the back of the shooter and levelled it at the pirate in front of her. She missed quite spectacularly, between the wind, rain, and continued running, and the seed careened to the left and detonated with a blast of flame. Bomb seeds, then.

She leaped to the next roof, running along the flat balcony lined with over-watered flowers, aiming the next bomb seed. The roof in front of one pirate exploded and with a shout he pitched backwards, falling from the roof to the ground; she didn’t stop, going after the rest. One seed fired was entirely neutered by the rain when it landed in a gutter; a loud crack was followed by a large plume of steam from the seed as it failed to properly ignite. She didn’t get a chance to fire any more because she slipped a second time, hitting the roof hard. Her seed shooter as well as her handful of seeds clattered out of her grasp; she could feel the freaking seeds in her shirt and boots, they had gone everywhere. She spat rainwater as she pushed herself upwards, looking for where the shooter had fallen; too far away, it was on the ground. Stopping to get it would mean losing the pirates, who were already so far away. Hawking in breaths, Dee clambered back onto her feet and leaped again, grabbing her scythe from Gomgossa’s mouth- several more teeth audibly broke- and pursing the thieves. She couldn’t let them escape!

Dee was finally forced to give up when she fell a third time, because not giving up would probably have gotten her a little bit dead. She was really glad nobody could see her because it was particularly ungraceful; both boots skidding in different directions before she outright fell off the roof. The only reason she didn’t plummet to her death was Gomgossa.

Apparently just as avoidant to falling as she was, the Baba lashed out and bit into the edge of the roof; Dee was left hanging in midair for a few moments, long enough to gather her bearings before she realised something was off. Gomgossa the Fire Eater wasn’t a very old plant, and its roots weren’t very entrenched in the quiver’s soil, and she twisted to grab hold of the bricks on the side of the building. The Baba’s roots tore free before she could, and she dropped again; this time, she only averted broken legs by giving a quick little hop before she hit the ground, the pegasus seed-like magic catching her.

She turned and jumped upwards again, grabbing onto the edge of the roof to haul herself up, but the pirates were nowhere to be seen. She hissed her displeasure as she realised that she had no hope of catching up now, and turned to see Gomgossa the Fire Eater weakening. It would probably hang there limply for a day or so before it died properly; she could already imagine the terror of the townsfolk upon realising that somehow there was a Baba on their roof. She’d have to plant a new one.

“You’re the fire eater, you rubbish thing!” she shouted at it, venting her anger on the poor plant. “Not the dirt eater! What are you doing?!”

Unsurprisingly, she got no response, and she turned her back on the plant. Her scythe was seemingly fine where it had hit the ground, and she strapped it back to her baldric, retracing her path backwards to find her seed shooter. It was soggy and wet but she found it in a puddle, surrounded by more scattered seeds; gods damn, she could still feel seeds in her boots, she was going to get stone bruises. And she was pretty sure there was somehow one in her underwear.

The seed shooter, too, was holstered, and she looked around for any sign of the other Kokiri.
“Hey! Jerk!” she shouted, shoving her hands under her arms. It was really cold. “Jerrrrk! Where are you, you Suspicious fool?!”

She didn’t even consider that he may still be in pursuit, because if she’d failed he certainly had too. Her first clue as to his whereabouts was the literal corpse.
“Ooh,” she said interestedly, nudging the frostbitten body with her toe. “Ice magic, by the looks...ow, you landed badly, didn’t you?”
This was her specialty! By snooping about the corpse, she’d be able to find out both about the pirates and Jerkface!

So. Ice magic was a certainty, given that the pirate was frozen as a Yeti’s butt. That was all she could really find about Jerk on this body, but there was plenty of stuff about the pirate available to her. Firstly, he’d been holding a fairly nice crossbow- it had snapped in the fall but the wood was polished and the bolts scattered around him were of decent quality. So whatever his pirate-y trade was, it was something profitable enough to earn him the roop for nice crossbow bolts, even though the guy couldn’t aim for shit. His clothes weren’t overly fancy but weren’t terrible either, supporting the same conclusion. The guy was somewhat tanned, which meant he spent time in the sun, but his fingernails held no traces of dirt, so he wasn’t a field worker. Given their location, he was probably a seaman, but she had no way of knowing if he had a respectable profession outside of being a Suspicious Dirtbag. Which wasn’t respectable at all.

She dug through his pockets, but sadly no insane stroke of luck occurred. No scraps of paper with his employer’s name, or with proof of who had organised the child kidnapping, or with a list of targeted children. This was, as much as she hated to admit it, a Dead End. Standing up, she glared at the utterly useless corpse.
“You suck,” she muttered, squishing his hand below her boot as she strode on through the puddle-ridden street.

Jerk had to be somewhere around here. Maybe that kid he had saved would be a better lead than this corpse, and he could lead her right to the kid. If he wasn’t enough of a fool to have forgotten about his hire.

Dripping wet and bitter, Deanna spotted the carnage wrought by Rika’s unceremonious entry into that house before she spotted the red figure ahead of her. Someone was gonna have a nasty time repeating their roof. And all the mould from the rain getting in. Gross.

She sped up her pace to catch up to Jerk.
“Lost them,” she grunted irritably, aware that had their positions been flipped she’d be mad at Jerk even though she’d failed to catch them first. Which meant someone far less charitable than herself like Jerk was would be thinking the same thing. “The one you killed gave me some Clues, though. These aren’t your average crappy pirates. They’re making some decent roop with this smuggling stuff, which might mean they’re... more competent than I assumed they’d be.”

She kicked at a puddle angrily, before saying in a contradictory lighter tone “But that’s good! I hate it when I have to catch idiots. Really dampens the mood when they’re too stupid to keep up with themselves.”

She turned a fierce glare on Rika.
“Never got around to asking you, Suspicious. Or rather I tried, but I focused on your leash-holder before you. What are you doing here? What’s your story? Why are you hanging around with the kids and why’d you try so hard to help me chase down that Suspicious Criminal?”