Costa Del Drunk

[Gildarts]

The boat beneath their feet, sailing them over waves and helping them traverse the ocean had something called “autopilot” which meant no one had to drink and drive, no one had to worry about steering them into an invisible island in the umbra pitch of night, and no one (Gildarts) had to worry when they didn’t know how to drive a boat.

Dust rode beside him, his sable hair glowing in the moonlight as the salty spray of waves overcame the boat in small patches of wave cresting the boat’s side. It was hard to believe that he and the kid had made it this far, pleasant to think that they’d both survived this year’s games, and Gildarts was hopeful that he would be able to bond with Dust a little more before training him.

After what had happened with the cotton candy vendor, Gildarts was feeling a little suspicious about people and their intentions. After what happened with Dust when he’d kissed a kid like Molly, Gildarts wasn’t sure what to think. The layers just kept building, drowning his sorrows, being an attentive master, determining the worthy. The chaotic world’s order would probably get even more mixed up once he had his booze.

The man with a new mind contemplated only the surface of his doubts and was already feeling dismayed. He’d left Molly in capable hooves, apparently secondaries had the means to teleport… Or something of the like, with a recall station. This new world, fathoming it all with his newfound cognition, was rough on the mage who had always sided with justice. Now justice was undefined, or always upgrading like the technologies he’d encountered. Heck, boats weren’t even waterproof, who’d thought of that?!

He’d gotten sidetracked from his point, just what exactly was justice now that he saw the world from an entirely new and undefined angle? Justice was what he could only guess it meant. And that meant figuring out how to define people and things and their actions was going to take a lot of effort.

Enough of that solemn sorrow, tonight was his last night of faltered and distracted cognition hopefully for the rest of his life and his first night to celebrate vivid, coherent thought. They were fluid, enough to drive a man mad and Gildarts assumed that’s why he’d met so many corrupted villains along his travels and jobs and missions in Earthland an Omniverse alike. Everyone had their own definition of justice, for some it was genocide, others, it was stealing what should rightfully be theirs, and others still, stood up for the weak.

Before this, Gildarts had always feared that he’d return home to his guild, or was just out and about, traveling through a town or doing a job, and one day, he’d self destruct. Everything he’d admired about the innocent life of the middle-class people would be gone, dead at his hand. Then, he’d still lack control, so he’d either blow up the entire planet, or he would encounter his Guildmates, there to take him down. And he’d slay them too, because that was his power. This fear, this nightmare, was that of Gildarts’ worst imagination in the making. The most horrifying thing was that it was a possibility. He’d even described it to the beach goers around the campfire. No one could ever truly know or understand the depth of his sorrow. Tragedy, at its finest.

Now, though, he had control enough to stop it. So now he had to choose his cause. Just what did he fight for and how would he do it? Gildarts was a hero, it wasn’t hard for him to know where he lay on the three hundred and sixty degree alignment spectrum, but to what extent? Was he a hero to a fault or would he compromise morality for the greater good?

There was an analogy once shared with him. One that spoke of two boats, one bomb, and one choice. Gildarts wasn’t a fan of this analogy, he and his charismatic justice believed that both boats could be saved, but the scary part about that was that this was real those boats weren’t guarded by competent mages, they weren’t in his world where stories tended to get a happy ending. There were consequences to every choice here. Thin ice, quaking earth, air that crumbled with only a touch. Explosions, heroes fighting heroes, chaos making more sense than fluid progress and order. Yes, it was one Hell of a world and before Gildarts would even dare to try and figure it out, he was going to get viciously hammered.