Exotic Tastes

Chapter 1: The News

There was still a chance they could pull it off.

The golden statuette was sitting near the center of the arena where it had been dropped, surrounded by three members of the enemy team, and there were only fifteen seconds left on the clock. Its barrier had been burst by the enemies just moments ago, which resulted in a large splatter of hostile turf that kept the four of them effectively at bay. Among their opponents was a Dynamo Roller that kept showering the gap with thick globs of ink, a .96 Gal with range that seemed to stretch on forever, and a Decorated Heavy Splatling user that abused an annoying abundance of splash walls. They didn't know where the fourth opponent was, but at the moment, it didn't seem to matter. Time was ticking, and with many of them outranged and outgunned, they knew their fate was going to rely on a miracle.

The spot under the railroad bridge along Inkopolis's most prominent waterway, Snapper Canal, was not exactly Aurora's favorite place to have a rainmaker battle. Her preferred Saturday afternoon was either a good, old-fashioned turf war at Arowana Mall (followed by an unbridled shopping session)...or a nice martini by the pool on top of Albacore Hotel. Unfortunately, the day had been kind of dry in terms of available opponents, so when a tight-knit team of shaggy inkling boys came forth with an insistence on playing over at Snapper Canal, she and her friends had no choice but to oblige. They had all gotten out of bed that morning with the intent to brandish their weapons for the day, so they bit the bullet and accepted the terms.

The battle had been rather uneventful in its first half, with both teams splatting each other's members at a relatively equal rate. Without any clear advantages to work with, nobody had had the guts to pursue the rainmaker. The arena had some decent side-lanes for flanking the objective, but no one had managed to make use of them without getting caught by an attentive back-liner. However, just shortly after the battle had dragged into its third minute, Aurora's opponents had landed a hefty group-splat on her and her friends, causing the rainmaker to slip through them and into their spawn. With the battle nearing its end, their opponents had scored ninety-one units of distance with the rainmaker, while Aurora and her friends had only hit fourteen.

One of Aurora's friends, an octoling girl with thick, wavy tentacles of hair on her head and an abundance of concealing, black clothing from head to toe, sunk into the ink and swam several feet backwards, away from the front lines. She wielded a weapon that complemented her dark-colored ensemble rather well: the fiery Grim Range Blaster. Following a hectic episode of ink-on-ink action around the rainmaker, she was the first of her team to build up her special weapon in the little time they had left. She emerged from the ink at the back of the slope that led to their spawn, stowed her clunky weapon aside, and deployed her deadly Tenta Missile launcher.

"I'm about to cream-pie the rainmaker!" She called to her teammates, loudly enough for them to hear her from a distance. "Does anyone have an opening?"

"Hold up, give us a rain check on that one!" The octoling fighting nearest to Aurora shouted back. She sported a loose-fitting sports jersey and a maroon bandana over her mouth, offset by a pair of heavy punk boots on her feet. Despite her attempts at a sort of "gangster" look, she was always known for wearing her hair back in a cute ponytail. She was also an enthusiastic user of the classy, Enperry-brand Splat Dualies.

The octoling with the Tenta Missiles stamped her foot on the ground. "Your puns are not appreciated right now! Do you have an opening or not?"

"I'm being serious, though!" The ponytail octoling shot back, drifting between a snarky grin and a concentrated frown. "If you could see through those dark-ass shades for once, you'd see that they have ink armor active at the moment! Hold off for a sec, and fire on my signal!"