Inside the Dreadnought Thalassa's galley, the air smelled of saffron, sea salt, and something Eliane Anđel refused to name aloud because naming it would give it power over her. The twelve-year-old Lunarian stood at the central prep table, her silver hair tied back in a tight braid that swung with every decisive movement of her hands. Her petite frame moved through the kitchen like a conductor leading an orchestra—every motion had purpose, every adjustment of heat or spice happened exactly when it needed to.
She closed her eyes and lifted a small jar to her nose, inhaling the deep, earthy aroma of ground Ozian saffron. The scent wrapped around her senses, and she smiled, satisfied. Good. The harvest had been kind this year.
"Thank you for your flavor," she whispered to the jar before sprinkling a measured pinch into the bubbling pot behind her.
The galley itself gleamed with Void Century technology—crystalline control panels lined the walls, and the stove's heating elements responded to touch commands in the ancient language Eliane had memorized. But she ignored the fancy systems. She had her own tools. Her knives, arranged by size on a magnetic strip, reflected the overhead light and threw tiny rainbows across the flour-dusted counter.
On the far end of the prep table sat a large ceramic bowl filled with freshly caught sea cucumbers, brought aboard during the submarine's last resupply at Kushi Island. They jiggled slightly with the ship's gentle motion, their rubbery bodies stacked like wobbly brown pillows.
Jelly "Giggles" Squish floated near the ceiling, his translucent blue body drifting from one cooking station to another like a lovesick balloon. His massive starry eyes tracked every ingredient Eliane touched. Every time she turned her back, he drifted two inches closer to the prep table.
"You are not getting any," Eliane said without looking up. She was julienning carrots with her Master Knife Hand—blinding flashes of silver that turned orange cylinders into perfect matchsticks in the time it took to blink.
Jelly made a sound like a deflating whoopee cushion. "I wasn't going to ask for any. I was just... appreciating. From a respectful distance."
"You're drooling."
He wiped his chin with the back of his hand. It came away wet. "That's not drool. That's... condensation. The humidity in here is criminal."
From his perch on a high stool near the spice rack, Sanza Kaplan Figarland let out a long, theatrical sigh. The eight-year-old Celestial Dragon wore his armored Gundam-style space suit graphic t-shirt and cargo shorts, his mod-style red hair sticking up in twelve different directions. He held a silver fork in one hand and a pain au chocolat in the other, and he had been using both to critique Eliane's kitchen layout for the past ten minutes.
"The saffron should be stored at eye level," he announced, his posh accent dripping with condescension. "Not on the second shelf. You're wasting precious seconds every time you reach up. Seconds, woman. Do you understand the cumulative cost of your inefficiency?"
Eliane's knife paused mid-chop. Her blue eyes narrowed. "It's my kitchen."
"It's a submarine galley," Sanza corrected, taking a delicate bite of his pastry. "And I am its future Supreme Commander. Which means, by extension, this is my galley. And you are my galley chef. So technically—"
"Technically," Eliane said through gritted teeth, "I can still accidentally drop a knife on your foot."
Sanza's heavy Gallagher eyebrows twitched. He considered this threat, then took another bite of his pain au chocolat. "I'll allow it. Once. For dramatic effect."
Across the kitchen, Ember "The Pyre" sat cross-legged on the counter next to the industrial mixer, her neon-pink hair piled into messy space buns that looked like they might collapse at any moment. Her tattered black-and-crimson Lolita dress was covered in flour—she had tried to "help" earlier by measuring ingredients, which had somehow resulted in an explosion of white powder that left everyone looking like ghosts.
Now she stared at a small bowl of black peppercorns, her mismatched eyes—one icy blue, one gold—flicking back and forth as she muttered to the empty air beside her.
"Josiah says pepper looks like soot," she announced to no one in particular. "I told him soot doesn't smell like this. But he doesn't listen. He never listens."
Her imaginary brother's voice whispered in her ear, sharp and mocking. "You're the one who set the flour on fire last week. Maybe you should focus on not burning the ship down before you critique my observational skills."
Ember's face scrunched up. "That wasn't my fault! The flour was asking for it."
"Flour doesn't have intentions, you absolute disaster."
"It does when I'm around."
Jelly drifted closer to the prep table, his curiosity overriding his self-control. He floated directly over the bowl of sea cucumbers, staring down at the pile of wobbling organisms with wide, starry eyes. His gelatinous body rippled with excitement.
"They're so... squishy," he whispered reverently.
Eliane shot him a warning look. "Don't."
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're thinking about doing something."
Jelly's permanent toothy grin stretched even wider. "I'm always thinking about doing something. That's my secret. Constant motion. Constant ambition."
"You're a blob," Sanza said flatly.
"A motivated blob," Jelly corrected.
One of the sea cucumbers at the top of the pile shifted. Its rubbery body contracted, then expanded, and two tiny black dots appeared on its surface—not real eyes, but dark spots that looked exactly like eyes if you squinted and had the imagination of a jellyfish-human hybrid who saw friends everywhere he looked.
The sea cucumber let out a pathetic squeak. A wet, sad little sound that cut through the kitchen's noise like a tiny knife.
Jelly froze.
His starry eyes locked onto the creature. His body stopped wobbling. The bioluminescent glow inside him flickered once, twice, then started pulsing faster—a panicked morse code only he understood.
Squeak.
The sound triggered something deep in his gelatinous core. Something old. Something he had tried to forget.
FLASHBACK.
A single panel, rendered in hyper-dramatic black and white with jagged edges: Lab Sector 7's Nutrient Chamber. Acidic pineapple slurry bubbling in a massive vat. Failed experiments—small, squishy, wobbly creatures—being dumped over the side by faceless scientists in white coats. One of them, a tiny blue blob with starry eyes, reached out a pseudopod toward the camera, its mouth open in a silent scream before the slurry dissolved it into nothing.
"Disposal pending," a cold voice announced from off-panel.
The flashback ended.
Jelly's face crumpled. His eyes overflowed with glittery tears—actual sparkles that cascaded down his translucent cheeks and splashed onto the floor in tiny, shimmering puddles.
"NOOOOO!" he wailed, his voice cracking with dramatic despair. "It's too squishy to die!"
He dove headfirst into the bowl, scattering sea cucumbers in every direction. One bounced off Sanza's head. Two more landed in the sink. The little one with the eye-spots—the one that had squeaked—Jelly scooped it up in his wobbly hands and hugged it to his chest like a mother protecting her child from a fire.
"I'll save you, little food-buddy!" he cried, spinning around the kitchen in a dramatic circle, his body leaving glittery trails in the air. "Let's get squishy!"
Eliane's knife stopped moving. Her eye twitched. The smudge of spice on her cheek suddenly felt very prominent.
"Put. The. Sea cucumber. Back." Her voice was low. Controlled. Dangerous.
Jelly hugged the creature tighter. It squeaked again, and he burst into fresh tears. "You don't understand! They were going to dissolve it! In the pineapple slurry! The SLURRY, Eliane!"
"The what now?" Ember asked, momentarily distracted from her argument with Josiah.
"Lab trauma," Jelly sobbed. "It's complicated. There was a vat. And a scientist named Karl. Karl had cold eyes. He looked at us like we were inventory, not friends."
Sanza set down his pain au chocolat. His red eyebrows drew together in what might have been concern but looked more like constipation. Then his expression shifted—his small face lighting up with the terrible realization that this situation offered him an opportunity.
He slapped his hand onto his forehead, dramatically framing his eyes with his fingers. "A prison break," he breathed. "Excellent."
Hopping off his stool, he marched across the kitchen, his sandals slapping against the floor. He stopped directly in front of Eliane, placed his hands on his hips, and puffed out his chest.
"As the Future Supreme Commander of the Holy Knights, I officially grant this slimy serf political asylum!" He pointed one dramatic finger at the trembling sea cucumber in Jelly's arms. "That creature is now a protected refugee under my sovereign authority. Any attempt to recapture it constitutes an act of war against House Figarland."
Eliane stared at him. Her white wings flickered into existence behind her back—feathery, beautiful, and completely involuntary. They vanished just as quickly, but the damage was done. The flour on the counter swirled in the sudden breeze.
"This is a sea cucumber," she said slowly, as if explaining basic mathematics to a toddler. "It's food. We're going to eat it."
"You're going to eat a refugee?" Sanza gasped, pressing his hand to his chest in performative horror. "What kind of monster are you?"
"The kind that spent three hours preparing this meal," Eliane snapped. Her back-flame flickered again—a ring of fire behind her neck that she usually kept suppressed. "Now give it back before I—"
"You'll what?" Sanza challenged, his posh accent somehow becoming even more smug. "Stab me? In front of witnesses? The political fallout would be catastrophic. My father would have this submarine melted down for scrap metal."
"I don't need to stab you. I can just—"
"Minions!" Sanza shouted, cutting her off. He threw his arms wide. "Form a phalanx!"
Jelly immediately bounced over to stand beside him, still clutching the sea cucumber. He tried to look intimidating, but his body was too soft and his expression too joyful. "Yeah! What he said! Phalanx! That's a word I know!"
Ember's head snapped up from her peppercorn debate. Her gold eye gleamed. "Are we fighting? Josiah wants to know if we're fighting."
"We're defending political refugees from culinary tyranny," Sanza corrected. "There's a difference."
"Is there, though?" Ember hopped off the counter, landing in a crouch. Her boots clunked against the floor. "Because that sounds like fighting with extra steps."
She slapped her palm onto a cast-iron frying pan sitting on the counter beside her. Her Ignition Touch activated—three seconds of contact, and the pan began to glow with a faint orange heat. Demolition Charge. Not big enough to destroy the ship, but big enough to make a point.
"Ember, don't—" Eliane started.
Too late.
Ember grabbed her slingshot rifle, Helltide, from where she had stashed it behind the spice rack—because of course she had stashed a weapon behind the spice rack—and loaded the glowing frying pan into the sling. She pulled back, aimed at the ceiling, and fired.
The pan launched upward, spinning through the air, and exploded against the overhead light fixture in a shower of harmless sparks. Sparkler Rounds—bright, colorful, completely non-lethal, but very good at startling people.
Everyone ducked.
Everyone except Sanza, who conjured a glowing golden tiger-head shield in front of his face. The Guardian's Aegis absorbed the falling sparks, deflecting them into the sink where they fizzled out in the soapy water.
"I said PHALANX, not FIRE AT WILL!" he shrieked, his accent cracking on the last word.
"Josiah said to shoot!" Ember cackled, loading another frying pan into her slingshot. "He said the squishy one has tactical intelligence! I'm just following orders!"
"Josiah isn't real!" Eliane shouted, her wings bursting out again. She grabbed a handful of kitchen knives from the magnetic strip and threw them in a wide arc—not at anyone's body, but close enough to box them in. The blades embedded themselves in the wall around Sanza's head, forming a silver cage.
Sanza squeaked. A tiny, undignified sound that he would deny later under threat of death.
"Vile woman!" he cried, his voice cracking again. "You nearly shaved my eyebrows!"
"They're too big to miss," Eliane shot back.
Jelly took advantage of the chaos to bounce across the kitchen, using his Bouncy Defense to absorb a flying spatula that Eliane had thrown in his direction. The spatula hit his chest and stuck there, wobbling. His body jiggled violently with the impact, and the motion built on itself—faster and faster, shaking his entire form until—
PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRRRTT.
The fart noise echoed off the crystalline walls, rattled the pots hanging from the ceiling rack, and shook the jars on the spice shelf. It was massive. It was resonant. It was the kind of sound that made everyone stop what they were doing and reassess their life choices.
Jelly's eyes went wide. "That wasn't me," he said quickly. "That was the ship. The plumbing. This submarine has very aggressive plumbing."
"The plumbing doesn't have a mouth," Eliane said flatly.
"The plumbing has many mysteries."
In the corner, Sanza had stopped screaming. He stood frozen, one hand still holding his golden tiger-head shield, the other pressed over his nose. "That smelled like something died," he whispered.
Ember was laughing so hard she dropped her slingshot. She curled up on the floor, holding her stomach, her neon-pink space buns wobbling with every wheezing breath. "Josiah says—Josiah says your face looked like—" She couldn't finish. She dissolved into giggles.
And then one of Ember's stray sparkler rounds—the one she had forgotten about, the one that had lodged itself in the dish towel hanging beside the stove—finally ignited.
The towel caught fire.
Not a big fire. Not a dangerous fire. Just a small, cheerful flame that licked at the fabric and produced a thick column of dark smoke that rose toward the ventilation system. The smoke alarm didn't go off—the submarine's ancient Void Century systems had different priorities—but the smell traveled. Acrid. Burning. Impossible to ignore.
Eliane saw the flame and screamed. "FIRE!"
"WATER!" Jelly screamed back, bouncing toward the sink.
"NO, DON'T USE WATER ON A GREASE—" Eliane started, but it was too late.
Jelly had already turned on the faucet and was directing a spray of water toward the burning towel. The water hit the grease-splattered fabric and the flames leaped higher, spreading to the nearby spice rack.
Sanza's eyebrows—his real ones, not the metaphorical ones—went up so high they nearly touched his hairline. "You've made it worse," he observed calmly. "You've made it significantly worse."
"I'm HELPING!"
"You're an arsonist!"
"I'm an accidental arsonist! There's a difference!"
Ember grabbed her slingshot again, cackling. "I can put it out! Watch this!" She loaded a canister of ash—one of her smoke rounds, designed to release sedative powder—and fired it directly at the fire.
The canister exploded in a cloud of gray smoke that mixed with the black smoke from the burning towel, creating a thick, choking fog that filled the entire kitchen.
"Ember!" Eliane coughed, waving her hands in front of her face. "That's not—that's not how you—"
"IT'S FINE!" Ember shouted from somewhere in the fog. "JOSIAH SAYS IT'S FINE!"
"JOSIAH ISN'T REAL!"
Down the corridor, Dracule Marya Zaleska walked with her mother's encoded notebook tucked under her arm. Her long raven hair swayed behind her, and her golden ringed eyes scanned the hallway with idle curiosity. The leather jacket with the Heart Pirates insignia creaked softly as she moved—denim shorts, a casual white shirt, tall combat boots. Standard attire. Comfortable attire.
She turned a corner and stopped.
Something smelled wrong. Burning cloth, definitely. But underneath that, something else. Something that reminded her of—
A muffled BOOM echoed through the hallway.
Marya's eyes narrowed.
Another sound followed: a long, resonant PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRRRTT that definitely wasn't the ship's plumbing.
Then an eight-year-old voice shrieked, "MY PAIN AU CHCOLAT IS RUINED! VILE WOMAN! VILE BLOB! VILE EVERYTHING!"
Marya closed her notebook and tucked it into her jacket pocket. Her expression didn't change—calm, stoic, unreadable—but something flickered behind her eyes. Curiosity. The same curiosity that had driven her mother to uncover the secrets of the Void Century.
She walked toward the galley.
The smoke hit her first—thick, gray, smelling of burnt fabric and something chemical. She pushed open the door with her foot—no need to use her hands when combat boots worked just fine—and stepped inside.
The scene that greeted her was...
She paused. Her analytical mind processed the image in pieces.
Eliane hovering three feet off the ground, her wings fully extended, her back-flame burning bright behind her neck. She held a frying pan in one hand and a ladle in the other, and her blue eyes were wild with a mixture of fury and despair.
Ember hanging upside down from a ceiling pipe, her knees hooked over the metal, her thumb in her mouth. Her space buns had partially collapsed, giving her the appearance of a very confused flamingo. Her slingshot dangled from one hand.
Sanza sitting on top of Jelly's head—Jelly had inflated himself into a blimp shape, his translucent blue body swollen to twice its normal size. Sanza had one hand raised in a dramatic pointing pose, frozen mid-declaration. His other hand still held his golden tiger-head shield, though it had dimmed to a faint flicker.
And Jelly himself, wide-eyed and wobbling, holding the sea cucumber above his head like a trophy. The creature's eye-spots seemed to stare directly at Marya, as if asking for help.
The kitchen was destroyed. Flour coated every surface. Knives stuck out of the walls like silver feathers. The fire on the spice rack had gone out on its own—probably from lack of oxygen—but the smoke still hung heavy in the air. The dish towel was a blackened ruin.
In the dead silence that followed Marya's entrance, the sea cucumber wiggled.
It slipped out of Jelly's grip, dropped to the floor with a wet splat, and scrambled across the tile on dozens of tiny tube feet. Its body jiggled with each frantic movement, and it moved with surprising speed—a desperate dash toward freedom.
The kitchen crew watched, frozen, as the creature reached the floor drain in the corner of the galley. It paused for just a moment, its eye-spots fixed on Jelly, and then it slid down the drain with a soft, wet pop.
Gone.
Jelly stared at the drain for a long moment. Then his face crumpled again—but this time, the tears that spilled down his cheeks weren't sad. They were joyful. Triumphant. Glittery and bright.
He pumped his fist in the air, bounced off the ground, and threw his head back to bellow at the top of his gelatinous lungs.
"FREEEEEEDOOOOOOM!! BLOOP!"
The shout echoed through the submarine, bouncing off the crystalline walls, traveling down corridors, reaching places that hadn't heard a human voice in centuries. It was loud. It was ridiculous. It was absolutely, unapologetically joyful.
Sanza's expression shifted from frozen shock to exhausted defeat. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he slid off Jelly's inflatable form, collapsing onto the flour-dusted floor with a soft thump. His hand flopped dramatically across his forehead.
"I'm dead," he announced to the ceiling. "This is what death feels like. I'm surrounded by incompetence, and I've died of disappointment."
Eliane's wings folded back into her body. Her back-flame extinguished. She dropped her frying pan and ladle, pressed both hands to her face, and slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor, her silver braid pooling around her shoulders.
"My kitchen," she whispered. "My beautiful kitchen."
Ember dropped from the ceiling pipe, landed in a heap, and immediately curled up into a ball. Her thumb found its way back to her mouth. "Josiah says that was the most fun he's had all week," she mumbled. "I think I agree with him."
Jelly continued bouncing around the room, still crying glittery tears, still shouting "FREEDOM!" at irregular intervals, completely oblivious to the destruction he had helped cause.
And Marya stood in the doorway, watching it all.
She didn't say anything. Her golden ringed eyes moved from Eliane's slumped form to Sanza's dramatic sprawl to Ember's curled-up ball to Jelly's bouncing celebration. The smoke drifted past her face. The smell of burnt towel filled her nose.
Something tugged at the corner of her mouth.
Not a smile. Not exactly. But close. A slight twitch, a tiny upward shift that she suppressed almost immediately. She shook her head—just once, a small motion—and a quiet breath escaped her nose. Not quite a laugh, but not quite a sigh either.
Her crew was ridiculous. Absolutely, completely, certifiably ridiculous.
She turned, stepped back into the hallway, and pulled the galley door closed behind her.
The latch clicked into place, muffling Jelly's latest "BLOOP!" to a distant echo.
Marya walked down the corridor, pulling her mother's notebook from her jacket pocket. She flipped it open to her bookmark and continued reading as if nothing had happened. Her combat boots made soft sounds against the metal floor. Her raven hair swayed with each step.
Behind her, through the closed door, she heard Sanza start complaining again—something about "culinary anarchy" and "the fall of civilization."
She turned the page.
Some things weren't worth getting involved in.
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