Boat Naming Convention

After approximately thirty seconds of increasingly alarming noises: clicks, sparks, one genuinely concerning whoomph like a tiny gas stove ignition, Shady cupped both hands below her chin and spat the entire haul into her palms in a single, glistening, spit-soaked pile. Her fluffy, dark ears were smoking.

She held the pile out to me with tremendous pride. I made a ‘this is gross’ face.

“Claimed,” she announced smugly, ignoring my expression, “Scraped off the defense curses.”

I stared down at the slimy treasures. “You just… ate curses off these?”

“Yus. T’was spicy as hekkk. Again, you’re welcome. Now they’re safe to paw at by puny humans.”

“We are literally the same height.”

“For now!” She dumped everything back into the lockbox. “I’ll totally outgrow you someday! Then you’ll always look up at me! Mwa ha ha ha.”

I rolled my eyes at her, not believing her predictions. Only Shady’s antlers had grown longer, the rest of her remained exactly same size as my human self.

I cautiously reached into the lockbox and picked up the key ring gingerly between two fingers. They were slightly damp. No longer jet black. Each one now shone the same soft silver-white as the hull, violet stars glowing faintly all over. The parchment, miraculously, was completely dry.

“How is the paper not soggy?” I asked.

“Has a dryness rune on it.”

I unfolded the parchment. The gray surface held a network of fine silver lines, featuring about twenty-odd islands scattered across a Cloud Sea, linked by curving routes marked in sequences of glowing dots. In the corner, a legend. The words sat in a pictoram-rune script I couldn’t read and more pictograms tagged each island.

“Chart,” I said.

“Treasure map!”

“It’s a navigation chart.”

“Treasure maps ARE navigation charts, Ashy. That’s like literally what they are. Do you not know how treasure maps work?”

Before I could argue the point further, Shady had already scrambled to the stern, yanked the black rope off the root, and thrown herself bodily against the tiller.

“Cast off!” she hollered.

“We ARE off, you lunatic, you just untied us!” I grabbed at the edge of the bench.

The skiff drifted lazily out from the tea-pines. The Cloud Sea spread below us in long rolling banks of bright sunset peach, rose and lavender. Shadashia’s cliffside receded behind us, the tea-pines waving as if saying goodbye.

Shady pointed imperiously at the mast.

“Unfurl the sail, sailor.”

“I don’t know how to unfurl a sail.”

“Figure it out. I’m captain! M’ busy captaining.”

“You’re sitting on the tiller.”

“Professional captaining!”

I fumbled with the canvas. There was a rope. I pulled it. More rope appeared. I pulled that one. The boom swung lazily to one side and smacked me in the shoulder. Shady cackled at my misfortune. I pulled a third rope, which turned out to be the right one, and the sail tumbled loose down the mast in a soft rush.

The canvas had been plain silver-gray when furled. 

“EEEEEEE!” Shady walloped as the sail inflated, igniting with gold coronas. It didn’t catch the wind as I expected it to. Instead, the sail caught… sunlight and then the entire boat was pulled towards Sunny, patches of shimmering fabric reflecting smaller, smudged versions of the sun-girl.

The skiff glided down and sliced through cloud-tops, sending rosy foam up in wispy sheets on either side. The roots blurred past. We rose and curved around Shadashia, following the cliff-line, and the whole island opened up below us like a jewel. The meadow where Shady had died was already green again, looking less like a crater. The Whipping Woods snapped their pinecones at a distant moth. The Mermaid Cove sparkled turquoise, and three little mermaid heads popped up to look at us as we soared past. One of them held up a small crab in greeting.

Shady waved back with her tail because her hands were preoccupied with managing the tiller.

“HI IBEL! HI LASS! HI BUBBLES!” She yelled.

The skiff banked hard. I clung to the bench to keep from sliding overboard.

“WARN ME WHEN YOU DO THAT!”

“WARNING: I AM DOING IT!”

“BEFORE, SHADY. BEFORE!”

“THAT’S NOT HOW WARNINGS WORK ON MY BOAT!”

We circled Shadashia twice at reckless velocity, the golden sail-threads burning bright. Below the Rainbow Bridge, a herd of butterflies scattered. A moth the size of a pony rose off a cliff-shoulder and paced us for a minute before peeling away with a polite little dip of its fuzzy head.

Shady was laughing so hard her antlers kept knocking the boom behind her, fern dress fluttering madly. Silver freckles blazed across her dark cheeks like a working planetarium. Her eyes had their full shine back, filled with pure merriment.

“We have a flying boat!” She shouted.

“We do!” I shouted back.

“Sunny powers the sail!”

“Confirmed.”

“Ashy.”

“Yeah?”

“We gotta see all of them!”

“All of the islands of Neverland?”

The skiff caught a fresh updraft and leapt higher.

Shady threw back her head and let out another whoop of pure joy. “We’ll conquer Neverland together. Lick every island! Make them all ours! Plant flags! So many flags! A flag for each island!”

“We don’t have flags.”

“Details! You’ll make flags!” She waved the problem away. “Asheeeeeyyy! This boat needs a name.”

“Does it?”

“You bet your pink ass it does,” the Wendigo girl laughed. “Boats without names get sad and fall out of the sky. This is a known fact.”

“A known fact according to who?”

“Me. I just made it a fact!” She frowned at the prow with immense seriousness. “How about… Starshadyness?”

“You can’t name a boat after yourself.”

“Why not! It’s MY boat now!”

“Our boat!”

“Did you lick the boat?”

“No.”

“Then what makes it yours?”

I frowned.

“Mwa ha ha ha!” She jumped off the mast and smooshed me. “Got you! I’m kidding, dummy. 

“You’re the dummy,” I grabbed her antlers.

Shady froze, staring at me with wide, silver eyes, mouth open, tongue out.

“My dummy.” I added. 

“No you,” she let out breathlessly.

The boat, the Cloud Sea, Sunny, Neverland. All of it seemed to snap outside of time and space, drowned in the electric-arc connection between our gazes.

“No me… what?” I pulled her face closer to me.

“No you…” She mewled, switching to the voice of Gira the girl robot masquarading as a dog from Invader Xim. “I doooon’t knoooow.”

I released her with a chortle and both of us slid onto the bench. Shady’s head leaned against my shoulder. “Our boat.” She let out, our hands intertwining. “Boat name ideas, First Mate?”

“Uhhh… still kind of mentally preoccupied with processing you chewing your arm off,” I said. “Why don’t you throw some more name ideas and I’ll vote on ‘em.”

She tapped her chin with one long claw, antler-stars flickering as she thought. The Cloud Sea rolled by below and a gray moth the size of a pony glided lazily past our starboard side, waving a fuzzy antenna at us before peeling off toward Shadashia.

“Forever After?” she tried.

“Pass.” I made a buzzing rejection noise. “Sounds like a retirement home.”

“Da Kraken-Puncher!”

“We have not punched any krakens.”

“Yet. Key word: yet.” She made a fist and punched the air menacingly. “Ka-pow! Just wait till we find one, then violence!”

“Uh-huh.” I rolled my eyes at her. “Next.”

“The Infinite Dagaz!”

“That’s kind of cool. A bit mouthy though.”

“SEE, I’m good at this.” She beamed, then immediately frowned again. “But it’s missing… something. Hrm. Gotta have moarr OOMPH.” Her claws drummed on the tiller. “ShadAshkin Snackaroo.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Fineeeeee. What about…” She trailed off, looking ponderous. Then, her cheeky grin softened. The star-freckles dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened, like a heartbeat made of light. She looked at me sideways, almost shy, which was the most disconcerting expression I’d ever seen on her. “The… Always.”

“The Always?”

“Yeah. ‘Cus that’s how long I’m keeping you.” She said it like she was daring me to argue. “Forever is too short. Always is longer. Always means even after forever runs out, I’m still there. Licking stuff. Eating your enemies. Making you breakfast. Proby burning it. You get the gist.”

“Forever is too short?” I let out. “What…? Breakfast? You? Since when are you into making anyone breakfast?”

“Since… I don’t know. Shut up. Forget I said anything ‘bout breakfasts,” she huffed, swatting me with a feathery tail. “Vote on the name submission now.”

“I… like it,” I said. “It’s… Short and sweet.”

“Huzzah!” Shady exploded from the seat and leaned over the side, wiggling her fern-covered behind in the air, tail grabbing the mast so as not to tip over.

“What are you…?”

“M’ carving the name into the boat with ma’ clawses!” She bubbled. “Duh! The Always! To adventure and beyond! One billion years adventures! Me and mah cute pilcrow!”

“Pilcrow?”

“That’s you. Always… leading me onwards, towards new frontiers of… stuff. Like a pilcrow that starts paragraphs in fancy-ass olde books! Get it? Ugh, carving letters upside down is more complicated than expected.”

“We can land, you know.” I commented, processing her pilcrow-me metaphor.

“No time for landering! The boat titling time is now! Then… adventure forever!”

…

Time flew far too damn quickly since the day when Shady carved “THE ALWⱯYƧ” into the prow.

After many crazy Neverland adventures, The Always no longer resembled a plain skiff we stole from Baldie. The original hull was now extended forward and sideways, buried by a thousand upgrades hammered, bolted, lashed with spider-silk, tied and caterpillar-spit glued on.

A spiral shell-house rode atop the hull, donated by Mayor Rolls after I negotiated a trade deal with him involving delivery of sixty house-sized honey-pears and a promise to never, under any circumstances, let Shady die on Shadashia again. The shell served as our cabin, large enough for two people to sleep inside if they didn’t mind sharing one hammock strung between the inner whorls. A cluster of small, luminous mushrooms grew from the shell’s crown and even more mushrooms hung in small tumbleweed nests all over The Always. Whenever the rains came dimming Sunny’s eternal sunset, they lit up the gloom like lanterns and automatically dimmed when the storm clouds passed.

Twin, good old fashioned, stolen cannons sat port and starboard. They fired whatever we stuffed into them via air compression runes empowered by Shady. The projectiles varied from Neverland rocks to pinecones from the Whipping Woods (which continued trying to attack living things even after being fired) to small watermelons donated by a particularly chonky caterpillar farmer.

A prism lens the size of my head was mounted on a swiveling brass arm above the mast. Stolen from a dastardly pirate Citadel on the island of Orcas during a three-hour chase that had involved two shadow-dives performed by Shady and one unfortunate incident with a flock of squid-dragons. The prism caught Sunny-light and focused it into weaponized rainbow beams that could set pirate robes or even enemy sails alight with radiant fire from a few hundred feet away.

Garlands of gems, coins, shells, polished stones, feathers, artifacts and tiny glass bottles dangled from the rigging. Each one, a magical, Shady-claimed trophy from some island encounter. The largest was a fanged jawbone from the leviathan-eel we’d fought off the coast of the Shop island, lashed to the bowsprit as a warning to other leviathan-eels, who, to our knowledge, could not read or talk.

The muchly enlarged sail currently featured a large hole in it.

A clean, head-sized puncture just below the boom, edges singed black from cannonfire. Our latest raid on the pirates had not gone entirely according to plan.

Due to the sail hole, the Always now listed about fifteen degrees to port. 

I sat on the couch-bench by the tiller, one leg drawn up, sewing a design onto a new flag using a needle a caterpillar had given me and thread I’d spun from Whispering Woods silk.

Shady lay sprawled across the deck in front of me, halfway inside the shell, head propped on a coil of rope. She was wearing a dress of sea shells and ferns, far superior to the first dress she’d made herself long ago.

Long ago.

The Architect-me latched onto the word. I stared at my calloused hands. How long ago was this?

“Shady?”

“Yu-huh?”

“How old are we?” I asked.