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He makes a show of humming thoughtfully before deciding, "No. Too easy." No playful insults about Darcy's intelligence this time. He's trying to be affirming!

He follows along behind them, hands in his pockets despite the hunt they're about to go on. He's a little surprised that Dimitri didn't push the issue, but glad for it. It would be a genuine blow to Darcy's morale if the two of them were at odds.

"An ugly, but accurate word for it. It does help that Sparkles is keeping to itself, but..." He sighs. "I'm hoping that its secrecy won't be permanent. It won't be able to grow if it stays hidden." Much like the Captain -- but at least he makes the occasional appearance.

He earns himself a sharp glare just before they enter the Tommy Bahama, then her attention goes back to surveilling the racks of tropical print clothing, her voice lowered.

"Well, I'm sure as shit not going looking for it. I'm just glad nobody else was around to see the knife thing. Fucking embarrassing. Apparently knowing the fucker for a year hasn't helped me, like, at all, in dealing with any part of him."

Heh. Worth it.

Skulduggery's hand comes up just slightly as he tests the air for any immediate threats. The good thing about the bahanamal is that it isn't like the magic-eating monsters under Gordon's house, so it won't be tipped off by him trying to feel it out. (The bad thing about it is that its name is impossible to spell. Bahanamal. Bahamanimal. Bahamanuel...)

"I don't think you should be embarrassed for trying. It was a good idea, and if we had time to develop more trust between us and Sparkles, I think it would have worked." He chuckles quietly, even though there doesn't seem to be anything shifting around them at the moment. "At least we know the Captain's come a long way from the person he used to be."

"Makes you kind of wonder how long ago Sparkles was, ehn? Like, obviously he's from before the Captain had the ship, but was he already a memory then or-" and then she cuts herself off, freezing in place.

She gestures to a scattered pile of socks ahead, lying motionless in wait, and pinches with her free hand, mouthing 'bahamalings'. Which probably doesn't look like a word in English, but he should hopefully get the idea. She indicates with her head for her to take one side and him to take the other.

He doesn't know the answer to that. Was the Captain already more than the angry child when he locked that part of himself away, or was locking Sparkles away the reason why he's been able to change?

It's something to mull over, but they have better things to do than hypothesize about the Captain's past. For one, there's a pile of unassuming socks to terrorize -- ones that are a jumble of mismatched patterns and lengths. No matter how sloppy the Tommy Bahama gets, it's very unlikely someone's just left a random assortment of mismatched socks in a heap for someone else to clean up.

He nods at Darcy's direction, splitting off from her to circle around. The one good thing about bahamanals is that they're comprised at least partially of cotton-polyester blends -- which makes them easy to set on fire. When he's ready, he looks at her and nods for her to take the lead.

Darcy's hunted the products of her own overactive imagination more times than she can count; at first it was to try and fix her mistake, to try and wipe out the danger she introduced to the ship, but when successive hunts failed to do anything but put them down briefly, the Bahamanals became a whetstone to sharpen herself against.

Although it is a little odd to see the babies out in the open like this. Both S and XL Bahamanals are ambush predators- hiding in plain sight isn't a new tactic, but usually in piles of clothes. That is the behaviour she described, after all. The great hunter of Bahamanals stalks closer, keeping racks of clothing between herself and her prey, rushing out suddenly without warning to pin one of the babies below her boot-

But the sock doesn't move. Behind her, a couple of the clothing racks shift. They were decoys.

"That's new-" she notes, raising her sword up just in time to defend against the pounce of the mighty Bahamanal, sending her back through a separate clothes rack, as she struggles to keep its maw from her face.

Huh. Clever girl.

Skulduggery doesn't want to risk setting Darcy on fire, but he needs to do something before those massive jaws close down around her head. There isn't enough air between them to throw up a reliable barrier, and the thing is generally unafraid of firearms, soooo, he runs with the third -- no, fourth -- best idea he has.

He takes a running jump, pushing the air behind him so that he can rocket right into the pile of clothes. He may not have enough force to knock it off of Darcy entirely, but he can at least dig his burning hands into the silk-polyester heap.

Darcy hears Skulduggery take off, quickly runs the maths for what he's likely to be doing, and settles on 'throwing himself physically at the bahamanal' because like father like kid. Darcy grabs a handful of fabric and tucks her knees up to brace against its underbelly- one of the self-defense things Kael taught her for getting someone off her- only instead of rolling the Bahamanal over herself, the moment of lift provides just enough instability for Skulduggery to knock it off her entirely, and it topples with the stench of burning synthetics, skittering to maintain its footing.

"Okay- well- we found it-" Darcy scrambles back up to her feet- "retreat?"

They found it and added a few new melted bits to its garish hide. Truthfully, that's more than Skulduggery's ever wanted to interact with the thing. He can't help it -- the thing is just awful, and it looks even worse when it's moving around in a frantic attempt to put out the smoldering fabric.

"Absolutely definitely," he replies as the thing snarls and, you know, wiggles in that gross way it probably does. He lifts one hand to brace the air between them and the monster, figuring if he can hold off a vampire, he can hold off whatever the fuck you want to call the bahamanal.

"I'm going to set this whole damned place on fire one of these days," is all the parting shot he has as he starts backing speedily away.

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