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bau·ble (noun; ˈbôb(ə)l,ˈbäb(ə)l):
a small, showy trinket or decoration.
[HISTORICAL] a baton formerly used as an emblem by jesters.
Last time he answered the call of the emergency sirens, the howl of a King Salmonid had nearly knocked him down the way it pierced through his eardrums and pinned his heart to the ground—but that was months ago.
Now it wasn't his first rodeo; he'd been through the wear and tear of days on the job like this already. He'd been in and out of the Academy's green spaces for the past forty-eight hours. He knew his way over its walls and atop its vantage points as if he'd spent his college career exploring it.
Now, in the wake of the Horrorboros' mangled warning cry, underneath the glimmer of its baubles and the glare of its scales in the wine-dark ether, Ramen Water stared it in the face and grinned.
"You're dumb as fuck if you think learning anything about this language will help you FIGHT them better," sounded a voice from several feet above his head. A pair of O.R.C.A. socks entered his field of vision. "If anything, wouldn't understanding more conversation on the clock make you less focused?"
"What would you know," he replied from the living room floor without a trace of malice, amidst Funyun and the mess of papers he'd compiled and printed from the internet. "You haven't clocked into work a day in your life."
Glory suppressed a laugh. "Maybe not, knothead, but I most definitely have learned a language."
Interested in nothing more than bloodlust and proper aim, the Horrorboros wound around the uppermost threshold of the Academy as its prey flailed against the might of the Salmonid militia. Natural as lightning formed the projectile between its jaws, and cool as a cucumber it glanced at the world below for an advantageous spot to let its cargo drop—
—but soft! one of the wrigglers had a sniper beam trained point-blank at its face. Before it could register its predicament the bomb exploded in its mouth. The King's eyes squinted shut, recoiling from the sting of enemy ink, but all too soon another unseen shock rocked their composure; that cocky little thing with the sniper turned his shielded face to the sky and spoke. Real, intelligible words. High-pitched, garbled half-nonsense words, sure, but by the tides it would know the sound of its mother tongue out of the smallest worthless mouth in the world.
< Hey, --- --one,> he taunted, baring a full set of miniscule razor-sharp teeth from the far end of his weapon, <what- --at mouth do??>
Half in shock, half in aggravation, the Horrorboros whipped about in the sky and stared its enemy down mere inches from his fragile head, with a fleeting impulse to snatch the thing up in its maw and reward his bout of vulgarity, but instead of flesh its teeth met the cold steel of a sniper rifle—
—and lo! the pest braced his foot on the barrel and propelled himself upwards, knocking the damned weapon against its gums with a sickening crunch— and a roar at a sudden burst of pressure on its skull—the infernal creature had climbed atop its head!
Enough! Violently it shook the thing free before he could cause it any more humiliation; his puny form compressed in mid-air and shot to safety behind the stock-still forms of his battalion. His weapon laid mangled on the surface of his perch, and even from the skies the King could make out an angry buzzing from whatever sort of communication system the land-dwellers used. Somehow, that didn't seem to bother him at all.
Amidst the stunned silence he'd created, despite the tension (or because of it, even!) the strange and terrible little creature howled with laughter.