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Waverly Earp emerged from the sparkling waters of the Atlantic Ocean, her yellowish bikini clinging for dear life onto sun-kissed skin, a perky song about mango trees humming from her lips. She had just liberated a couple of beautiful shellfish from a poacher and was about to put them back into their watery home because she definitely didn’t support the decorative shell industry when she heard a voice lightly joining her in song. She looked up in surprise.
“Underneath the mango tree, my honey and me...” a smiling Nicole Haught sang to her as she emerged from the trees at the edge of the beach.
“Nicole, there you are.” Waverly returned her girlfriend’s appreciative gaze. “Where did you get that light blue polo shirt you’re wearing?”
“I took it off some Scottish guy who was napping under those trees. Wynonna had us pack in such a hurry I didn’t get a chance to grab enough blue shirts, and you know how I feel about wearing anything that isn’t blue.” Nicole flattened the shirt against her body with her palms. “Plus the Scottish guy was really drunk and sexist and didn’t seem to mind me taking his shirt off so I just went with it.”
“Well, I’d love to make some sort of pun about how hot you look but I feel like it would only work for certain accents so doesn’t really translate well in written form.”
Nicole cocked her head to the side, “sometimes I really don’t know what you are talking about, and I love it. Do you want to go behind these trees and get up to shenanigans?”
“As much as I’d love to we have a hard word count limit that we have to stay under.”
Nicole blinked, sighed and took Waverly’s hand as they walked down the beach towards the town, “yep, no idea what you’re on about.” She looked down at her other hand. “Oh, I also took this tiny little pistol from that Scottish guy. He really shouldn’t have been armed in his condition. I think he needed medical help but he kept saying ‘Doctor, no’.”
Waverly shrugged, “weird.”
The two preposterously good looking people walked into the local law enforcement office in the small Bahamian town that Wynonna had directed them to during an urgent string of coded twitter messages mere days before. They found the rest of their preposterously good looking team waiting for them, standing around maps and charts of the local area.
“Where have you guys been? We only have 3 580 words left and we haven’t even introduced the shark yet?” Wynonna snapped, getting right down to business in a plot-advancing but out of character way.
“Jeremy,” she turned to the fresh-faced non-specific-general-science genius, “tell them what you just began telling us about where and how we are going to defeat the final Revenant, the last of the seventy seven.”
Jeremy turned to a map that was hanging behind him. A large triangle was outlined over the ocean.
“You know how the Revenants were trapped in the Ghost River Triangle?” He began, pausing as everyone nodded in agreement and Nicole opened a bag of baby carrots. “Well, it turns out the important thing about it wasn’t the Ghost River, it was… the triangle!”
“Are you trying to say Revenants can be trapped in any triangular shape?!” Wynonna cried out, in a conveniently explanatory way.
Jeremy turned to her, his face deadly serious, “yes Wynonna, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Damn it, motherfucker!”
Nicole threw the baby carrots to the ground and grabbed a mirror from the wall, randomly smashing it against the side of a table in frustration. All this time she could have been fighting the forces of supernatural chaos by employing her trusty pup tent and forcibly camping with them. She had been carrying that pup tent in her backpack for over two years. She had a lot of shit in that backpack. And she loved camping.
Jeremy continued, “It turns out there was one Revenant that was never anywhere near Purgatory, it was created and has lived it’s un-life out in the open ocean. Now we have discovered this one Revenant has been trapped all this time, in one of the most supernatural triangles of all!”
“A love triangle!” Wynonna cried (incorrectly).
“The Bermuda Triangle!” Waverly simultaneously cried (correctly).
Waverly gave her sister a look. Wynonna looked back. Their silent communication continued while the rest of the team shuffled nervously about. Nicole picked up her bag of baby carrots. Soft crunching of the conveniently portable vegetable snacks was the only sound to be heard.
Doc cleared his throat. “I feel like I should apologise for not sharing this information sooner,” he drawled. “It never occurred to me that that time Wyatt and I went shooting fish off that wharf one night over the Gulf of Mexico we would be creating a revenge-based undead fish monster.”
Dolls frowned at his erstwhile bromantical friend. “Typical Doc Holliday, always creating fish monster problems, but never admitting to them.”
“But I did just admit it,” Doc said quietly. In a louder tone he continued, jabbing his finger wildly, “you’re one to talk about trust issues and fish.”
Dolls looked slightly shamefaced.
“Look, ever since I faked my death in order to go undercover in California as a rising Hollywood star I feel like there’s been a little bit of tension.”
Wynonna turned to the Marshall of all their hearts, “Can you blame us for being annoyed? We had a whole episode devoted to mourning you. You know we only get twelve episodes per year right? And then Jeremy sees you on the red carpet during his ‘Canapés and Cocktails’ Golden Globe watch party!”
Dolls shuffled his feet a little. “I didn’t think you guys would mind. Professor X used to fake his death and fool the X-Men all the time.”
Jeremy’s head swivelled and his eyes bugged out “Dolls, a pop culture reference?”
“California changed me, man. I went to Comic-con.” Dolls blushed and smiled at Jeremy from beneath his IDW logo cap.
Jeremy’s eyes sparkled and they embraced.
Twenty minutes later the gang were speeding across sparkling aquamarine waters in three sleek powerboats.
“This could be the marketing video for the Fyre Festival.” Waverly shouted over the drone of the engine.
Jeremy scoffed “That reference is so dated.”
“No, no I just watched the Netflix documentary, it’s relevant again.” Waverly and Jeremy went off on a tangent about social media influence and psychopathic con artists while across in the second boat Nicole turned to Wynonna.
“So, how exactly are we supposed to destroy this Revenant? Last I saw Peacemaker was a sword, but I’m not exactly sure where it is because you betrayed my trust by drugging me and leaving me to be kidnapped by nefarious unexplained forces.”
“Nicole,” Wynonna sighed, “all that happened a long time ago.”
“Wynonna,” Nicole returned, “all of that happened last Thursday.”
“It has been a busy week,” Wynonna agreed, “I still can’t believe how integral those baby carrots were to rescuing Waverly and Doc from the garden.”
“Thanks for that by the way,” Doc piped up from the third boat.
Wynonna turned back to Nicole, “so it turns out that Peacemaker conveniently transforms into whatever weapon is required at the time to deal with whichever monster of the week is currently threatening us.”
“That is convenient.”
“So when I woke up and found Peacemaker had transformed into this,” Wynonna held up a silver tube of toothpaste, orange sigils covering the outside, glowing ominously, “I realised that the final Revenant would have something to do with teeth.”
“So you went from finding a supernatural tube of toothpaste in your bathroom to figuring out that we needed to destroy a one hundred year old un-dead fish trapped in an ocean thousands of kilometres away. Of course, it makes perfect sense.”
At that moment a giant fin cut through the water off to the left of the boats.
“Cut the engines!” Wynonna yelled.
“What’s the plan?” Nicole eyed the giant toothbrush Wynonna had drawn from the holster that usually held her gun.
“Waverly read about a situation exactly like this that happened in ancient Mesopotamia.”
“Really?” Nicole questioned, “that seems a little coincidental and hard to believe.”
“So you’re happy to accept that Doc lived in a well for one hundred years, that Dolls is a dragon, that Jeremy has a psychic groin and that Waverly really went back to work at Shorty’s on the day of her uncle’s funeral, but you feel like two separate un-dead sharks in the whole course of human history is an unlikely coincidence.”
“You have a point.”
Wynonna waved the toothpaste around her head. “We just have to get this,” she pointed at the paste, “onto those.” She pointed to her left where the giant supernatural shark had reared out of the water, displaying it’s multitude of jagged teeth with almost unnaturally suspicious timing.
Wynonna carefully applied the magical glowing paste to the oversize toothbrush, her tongue sticking out just a little as she concentrated hard. A silent hush came over all the boats as they waited for the shark to appear again. Wynonna and Nicole scanned the horizon. In the second boat Waverly and Jeremy looked over weathered Sumerian scrolls checking for any final clues. In the third boat Doc and Dolls held each other tightly.
“There!” Wynonna flew into action as an enormous fin cut through the water a mere five metres from their boat. She dove forward, aiming for the snout of the great beast and shoved her arm, toothbrush and all, into the gaping maw.
“Wynonna!” Waverly cried in horror as the fish dove down, taking it’s surprise passenger with it into the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. Nicole grabbed the teeny tiny pistol she had stolen from the drunk Scotsman and surveyed the water with desperate eyes. Doc and Dolls clutched each other even tighter.
For a few heart stopping moments nothing happened, just the sloshing of waves hitting the side of the boats and the cries of gulls occasionally cutting through the calm. But then a bubble arose from the depths, and another, and another until a stream of foam erupted from the general area of the heir’s disappearance.
Nicole reached down to scoop a little foam up, she sniffed it and looked across at Waverly.
“It’s spearmint flavoured.” She said, wide-eyed. “Wynonna did it. She really did it.”
“But where is Wynonna?” Jeremy spoke the fear that they were all feeling. They continued to scan the water, hoping desperately.
“There, look!” Doc broke free from Dolls’ strong embrace and pointed out to sea.
There, a lone arm clutching a ragged toothbrush broke the surface of the water, then all in a rush of water and foam the triumphant form of Wynonna Earp emerged from the sea riding on the back of narwhal.
All the inhabitants of the boats erupted in cheers but Nicole frowned, “narwhal habitat is the arctic ocean.”
Wynonna dragged herself onto the boat and shook her head at her friend, “what’s more important here? That we tell a factually correct carefully researched story, or that I am rescued by a sea-unicorn?”
Nicole smiled and nodded, as Wynonna raised her arms in a Rocky pose and the narwhal cavorted in the water just off to the side.
Looking over at Waverly and Jeremy celebrating their victory, Nicole caught Waverly’s eye and performed a quick backflip to jump from one boat to the other.
“Well, the story’s over and we still have 2 057 words to work with.” Waverly raised her eyebrows suggestively.
“I still don’t really know what you’re talking about,” Nicole murmured, “but as per usual it’s getting me very in the mood. Shall we deposit Jeremy in one of the other boats and then do something about that?”
“You can’t,” Wynonna interrupted from the other boat, “there’s still the T rating to consider.”
Waverly smiled a knowing smile. "Don’t worry about that, I’ve got that one covered.”
All around them the light began to fade.
“What’s going on?” Wynonna looked all around herself frantically, “what’s up with the lights?”
Waverly took Nicole in an amorous embrace. “Don’t worry about it Wynonna.”
“Is it Killer Miller? Did we miss a revenant?”
Waverly dipped Nicole and pressed their lips together as Jeremy slipped over the side and began dog-paddling towards the other boat in the increasing darkness.
“Guys?” Wynonna cried as the scene faded to black. “Guys? Guys??”
“Guys? You know we blew the rating with the swearing right?”