Fiery Scales

Ch9.-Work buddies

"""""""Last""""""""" chapter. Hope those are enough quotation marks to make the message clear haha. More info in the end notes. To "end" this story, Ace just being Ace and helping out Marco.

It's only been about two weeks since Ace had joined their crew. Pops officially naming the mer a member of their crew after the impromptu party of the successful bubble had finished. This of course started up another party the exact same moment Pops welcomed him, even if the previous one had only barely finished and half the crew was still knocked out... If Marco had to guess, he thinks many didn't even realise they had been partying for two days straight and thought it was still the first party and it was just a very long day/night....

They still had some things to figure out, such as in what division will Ace be, will he get a tattoo,... but all of that would be taken care of with time. For now, it didn't really matter either, most of Ace's time went to his lessons, so there wasn't a lot of time left to do division work. Like right now, Ace was sitting next to him, working on some small assignments.

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Even though Ace could barely read or write, he would always insist on helping Marco out with his paperwork. And no amount of trying to reason with him, or other commanders trying to make him do something else, would sway Ace away from Marco. No, Ace will 'Help Mahko', enabling him to keep watch and stay close to his favourite commander.
After a pile of paperwork was done, or if Marco was working too long for Ace's standards, Ace would go to Marco and push him to bed with a 'Mahko ressssst'. He had tried to fight it in the beginning, but the merman was very insistent, plus he would steal Marco's pens or make them float away in bubbles if he didn't sit down for at least 5 minutes once Ace deemed him to have worked enough.

Don't get Marco wrong, he loves that Ace wants to help him out and worries for him. And he knows that no matter what he gives as a task, Ace will try and do it with the utmost care and diligence. It's just that, at the moment, Marco only has a lot of reports or stock-counting's to check. And while they are all working on Ace his reading and writing, these papers are too difficult, and too important for Ace to handle.

Luckily, an answer to what Ace could do came in the form of the daily newspaper. One newspaper was always brought straight to Marco so he could skim trough it to see if anything important is mentioned about them and to add the wanted posters to their inventory.

Making up his mind Marco gave Ace the newspaper, some scissors, glue, and a scrapbook.
"Ace, I need you to read through this newspaper and see if there is anything important that we need to know and if they mention anything about us."

Ace accepted the items and studies the scissors for a while before looking back at Marco, tilting his head to the side, "Ace cut out?"

"Yes-yoi. And all articles that speak about us, you can paste them into the scrapbook. Can you do that for me?"

"Ace do that!"

"Thank you-yoi, you can sit next to me while you do it." Pointing to the little table at his side, not especially placed for Ace or anything....

It really was just a little table, there wasn't even a chair with it. Very conveniently, Ace didn't need a chair, he could easily move the bubble and make it into a floating cushion to sit on, it was really neat what you can do with those things. Maybe they could be used to get heavy stock into the ship too... something to think about for later. But even if that didn't work, Rayleigh really saved them and gave Ace a far better shot at a better quality of life out of the sea too.