Chapter 17: Remembering
Hello, and welcome back to our irregularly scheduled nonsense!
Very irregularly scheduled in this case. Sorry about that.
Last time, Kelsey & Co. battled a kraken who'd somehow gotten displaced into Chinese mythology and passed the blue dragon's test (which, granted was actually a test in this book, so points for that). This time, Houck apparently gets bored of the amnesia subplot she's been milking for the first two-thirds of the book. So look forward to some more Relationship Drama for the foreseeable future.
Chapter Seventeen: Remembering
So, uh, spoilers in that chapter title, I guess.
We open up right where we left off, with Ren and Kishan heading back downstairs in the dragon's tower. Kelsey's leg is injured from the kraken fight, so Kishan insists on carrying her downstairs like an infant over her protests. If Kishan's refusal to listen to Kelsey surprises you, you really haven't been paying attention.
Kelsey isn't happy about getting back into the water to swim back to the boat, which, fair (for once). Fanindra, the only useful character in the whole series, retrieves Kelsey's goggles (um, if you're diving I'm pretty sure it's called a mask) and flipper, which both fell off during the fight. Kishan notices that Kelsey's tank is low on oxygen, because of course it is.
Ren elects to take the sky disk (their prize from the blue dragon) because it's really heavy. This makes no sense, because he also says that Kelsey will share his oxygen. He's carrying something really heavy, so he'll be using up more oxygen--why isn't Kishan carrying it or sharing oxygen with Kelsey?
They go back underwater and start making their way through the cave system again. There's no sign of the kraken anywhere, so they just follow Fanindra, because remembering how to swim in a straight line through a place they just swam through is too difficult for these idiots.
My nerves stood on end.
That's, uh, that's not how that phrase goes. Mixing metaphors doesn't really go well! It's "my hair stood on end"! I just have a horrific image of her nerves sticking up all over her. Ew.
I felt like I was one of those dumb high school girls in a scary movie that opens doors she shouldn't, putting herself in harm's way, deliberately taunting the monster chasing her.
I've seen a number of horror movies, and in no movie have I seen the main characters "deliberately taunting" the monster for no reason.
But then, Kelsey's air tank runs out, oh no! Now she has to share with Ren and Kishan. So Kelsey's in a pretty tight spot--she's in a dark, underwater cave with no air in her tank, waiting for an unseen attack from a giant monster.
Being underwater without my own air was frightening.
It's like I'm actually there.
Okay, granted, that's not the only description we get, but the rest of it is almost as bland. They get to the end of the caves without incident, but Kishan's tank also runs out of air! Oh no! But somehow Ren, who's carrying an object heavy enough that even his super strength doesn't completely compensate for it, still has air. Which makes no sense.
But, oh no, they're going to run out of air right before getting to the surface!
Death by drowning was much less exotic than death by kraken. It was almost an embarrassing way to go, as if your death was somehow your own fault. I'd fully expect the other dead people to say, "Drowned? Well, what did you go and do a thing like that for? Couldn't ya find the valve? It says A-I-R on the side. Did you forget that apparatus under your eyeballs? It's called your nose. You breathe through it." Oh, sure, I'd try to explain what happened, but I'd go through eternity being the butt of dead people's jokes. My mother would think it was hilarious.
Lolwat
Also, fuck you for belittling drowning. According to the WHO, drowning is the third most common form of unintentional injury death, and accounts for 7% of all injury deaths worldwide. It's also much more common for people in low-income countries to drown, as they make up 90% of drowning deaths. And here Kelsey is calling people, essentially, lazy for drowning. What the fuck.
Also also, this doesn't even make sense. You have the literal entire history of the human race's worth of dead people, and we see that drowning is still very common today, when people take the time to learn how to swim. Kelsey is stupid.
On the other hand, these might just be the hypoxic ramblings of someone whose brain didn't work properly in the first place.
Fanindra leads the way to the surface, but Kelsey's lungs are burning from the lack of air.
I would have liked to have thought my brain was dominant, that I could face the inevitable drowning serenely, calmy.
HA. As if Kelsey's brain has ever been dominant in anything.
She starts struggling against her mask, and is only saved when Kishan grabs onto her and hauls her up to the surface, because Kelsey is physically incapable of doing anything for herself. But yay, they're back on the surface now, and they only have to make it back to the yacht. This is difficult, however, due to the fog created by the blue dragon as it sleeps. Rather than use, uh, any kind of logic, they just follow Fanindra back. That sure was easy.
Ren and Kishan help Kelsey up the ladder since she can't put weight on her leg. Rather than showing Fanindra any respect for 1) leading them through the cave system (twice) and 2) being the only reason they beat the kraken, Kishan scoops Fanindra out of the water with a net, like she's a dead lizard in a swimming pool.
Nilima joins them out on the deck and gets them towels like the subservient non-character she is. She takes Kelsey to her room, undresses her, and looks at her leg wound. I have no idea if Nilima even has medical training.
A glob of green goo dripped from my nose onto my arm where I'd been cut, and I screeched in pain. It stung.
Showing, and then telling again, ugh. If the first sentence says that Kelsey screeches in pain, we can use our brains to infer that it hurts! You don't have to then tell us that it hurt in the next sentence! That's why she screamed!
Nilima says that it's "probably some kind of acid," which. What? It's blood! That's been in the ocean water for some time now, so it'd be pretty diluted by now! This isn't a xenomorph!
Nilima bathes Kelsey (which, um, it's just her leg that's hurt, so she doesn't exactly need a bathroom attendant scrubbing her), because Nilima exists to make Kelsey's life easier. Nilima cleans out her leg wound and goes to get Mr. Kadam, who knows how to do stitches. Um, there's not a whole lot that happens for a really long time--Kelsey gets prescribed an antibiotic and Mr. Kadam says that he'd like to stitch up her leg but they don't have any sutures. Um, why not, exactly??? He knew they were going somewhere dangerous!
Ren says that he has an idea. Kelsey says that he explains the idea to her, but doesn't say what it actually is, so it's guaranteed to succeed. Kelsey continues to be useless as Ren tells the Scarf to stitch up her wound. It works, natch, and Kishan carries her to bed like an actual baby again.
Kelsey wakes up the next morning and sees that her injuries look like they've healed about a week's worth. I'm not terribly annoyed, because, well, spirit world and all that, I guess. Kishan gets her breakfast and...some aspirin.
I was not expecting aspirin to be such a reoccurring character in this series.
I had told Ren that once I committed to Kishan I'd stick by him, and I wasn't the kind of person to play games with people's feelings.
Didn't she have an entire conversation with Wes where he called her out on doing exactly that, and she just laughed in response? Also, the remaining book and a half left in the series is almost nothing but her whining about how it's ~so haaard~ being in love with Ren while dating Kishan, blissfully unaware of the fact that this is the literal definition of playing with people's feelings.
Then Nilima comes in and helps Kelsey play dress-up for her date with Kishan! She wears a bronze dress and some satin slippers that match the dress and a flower from Durga's lei and it all looks amazing and bleehhhhhh
Then she meets Kishan and we're treated to a description of his outfit (black slacks and a copper shirt if you're curious).
More bland prose:
The moon was out, and the sea was calm. It was beautiful. The dark sky was clear, and the stars were vivid. It was the perfect setting for a romantic dinner.
It's like I'm actually there.
Kishan's set up the deck to look nice--fancy tablespread, candles everywhere, and conch shells. Kelsey's impressed, and Kishan says that he's made up a menu with the Golden Fruit, and for once we're not treated to an exhaustive list of everything they eat. He says that they have the deck to themselves, since Mr. Kadam and Nilima are taking the night off from keeping watch, and Ren is probably off sulking somewhere.
So yeah, this would be a great time for some character development--Kelsey is repeatedly thinking about how she needs to open up to Kishan and get over Ren, so this would be the perfect place to do that. But, uh, Houck gets bored because Kishan isn't ~special enough~ since Ren is Kelsey's True Love, so this entire scene is skimmed over. Ugh.
We dug in and talked about what we might find with the third dragon. At first we were being serious; then we started wildly guessing crazy dragon scenarios such as, "What if he is toothless? What if he is the size of a house cat? What if he is a scaredy dragon who tells jokes like the Eddie Murphy dragon in Mulan?"
So, uh. There's that. Also, did Houck just call Mushu a "scaredy dragon"? Mushu? Who's ready and willing to throw down with literally every character in the movie? Because his character motivation is to protect Mulan?
Also, STOP REMINDING ME OF BETTER MOVIES AAARGH
Kelsey and Kishan decide to dance and it's very Romantic. He apologizes for not being as good a dancer as Ren, and she tells him to stop comparing himself to his brother since she doesn't want to date a copy of Ren. He says that he first fell in love with her waaay back in the first book, right after that stupid fight where Ren decided to kill Kishan for daring to touch a girl he wasn't even dating at the time. Kishan saw her crying over Ren and he was surprised that someone could feel sorry for them.
Kishan launches into a monologue that rivals JRPG villain monologues and it goes on for way too long.
"I'd been alone for so long, I felt like I was the last man on Earth. Then when I saw you, it was like a dream. You were an angel who'd come at last to rescue me from my miserable existence. I didn't even care if I was alive or dead as long as it would bring an end to my isolation. Then, when you left, I thought I could go back to the way I was before. I didn't really have any hope that you could someday be mine. It was obvious Ren had claimed you for himself. So I ignored the pull. I ignored my feelings. But it didn't matter. I was drawn to you."
It goes on like this for quite some time. It's really boring to read because absolutely none of it is new information. We already know Kishan loves Kelsey because he doesn't shut up about it.
The only useful information we sort of get is when Kishan talks a bit about what Hugin or Munin or whatever did to him in Shangri-la. He saw that he wouldn't be alone in the future and that Kelsey had feelings for him, but he botched it by pushing her too hard too early. Oops.
Kishan asks if she loves him in some incredibly stilted dialogue, and she says that of course she does, so they kiss. It's not overly purple like when she kisses Ren, though, so this relationship is doomed to failure by authorial fiat, I guess.
It's still pretty purple, though:
My heart jerked wildly, ad a fire burned suddenly within me. It consumed me, and I blazed inside with a heat I hadn't felt in a long time.
That "long time" being, like, a couple of months, I think.
It was consuming and powerful. My heart opened. My connection was back. My frame shook from the intensity of it. I was whole again. Time seemed to stop.
Yikes, vary your sentence structure! This is a big moment (for, uh, non-Plot stuff) and I feel like I'm being hammered with blunt sentences non-stop.
Something huge hit the deck behind me, and several candles extinguished in a sudden warm wind.
Oh, no! What could it be???
Kelsey immediately thinks it's a dragon or a meteor, but she's wrong.
I blinked unbelieving [sic--there should be a comma there] as a deck chair flew past with a whoosh and landed in the ocean with a splash, taking the china, goblets, cake, and candlelit shells on the table with it.
Unnecessary repetition of the word "with" aside (seriously??? three times???), who on this boat would be enough of an asshole to throw a temper tantrum about Kelsey kissing Kishan by throwing all of their date stuff into the ocean?
Of course, it's Ren! What a dick!
Kishan looked at me in confusion and then froze as we heard an enraged, intractable voice in the dark somewhere above us threaten, "Let. Her. Go."
Um, well, the chapter ends before Houck decides to tell us it's Ren, but it's Ren. Seriously, the guy is enough of an asshole that any sentence said angrily that contains a threat is obviously from Ren.
Closing Thoughts
The chapter is called "Remembering" when that, uh, doesn't actually happen in this chapter. It happens in the next chapter. But yeah, Ren's mysterious amnesia has mysteriously disappeared. The explanation for why is really stupid.
Other than that, most of this chapter was Kelsey whining about how her leg hurts. Really boring, in other words. Still better than the scuba lessons, though.
Next time, Chapter Eighteen: Making Up Is Hard to Do! Ren's memories are back, and boy is he not happy that Kishan is dating Kelsey.
Very irregularly scheduled in this case. Sorry about that.
Last time, Kelsey & Co. battled a kraken who'd somehow gotten displaced into Chinese mythology and passed the blue dragon's test (which, granted was actually a test in this book, so points for that). This time, Houck apparently gets bored of the amnesia subplot she's been milking for the first two-thirds of the book. So look forward to some more Relationship Drama for the foreseeable future.
Chapter Seventeen: Remembering
So, uh, spoilers in that chapter title, I guess.
We open up right where we left off, with Ren and Kishan heading back downstairs in the dragon's tower. Kelsey's leg is injured from the kraken fight, so Kishan insists on carrying her downstairs like an infant over her protests. If Kishan's refusal to listen to Kelsey surprises you, you really haven't been paying attention.
Kelsey isn't happy about getting back into the water to swim back to the boat, which, fair (for once). Fanindra, the only useful character in the whole series, retrieves Kelsey's goggles (um, if you're diving I'm pretty sure it's called a mask) and flipper, which both fell off during the fight. Kishan notices that Kelsey's tank is low on oxygen, because of course it is.
Ren elects to take the sky disk (their prize from the blue dragon) because it's really heavy. This makes no sense, because he also says that Kelsey will share his oxygen. He's carrying something really heavy, so he'll be using up more oxygen--why isn't Kishan carrying it or sharing oxygen with Kelsey?
They go back underwater and start making their way through the cave system again. There's no sign of the kraken anywhere, so they just follow Fanindra, because remembering how to swim in a straight line through a place they just swam through is too difficult for these idiots.
My nerves stood on end.
That's, uh, that's not how that phrase goes. Mixing metaphors doesn't really go well! It's "my hair stood on end"! I just have a horrific image of her nerves sticking up all over her. Ew.
I felt like I was one of those dumb high school girls in a scary movie that opens doors she shouldn't, putting herself in harm's way, deliberately taunting the monster chasing her.
I've seen a number of horror movies, and in no movie have I seen the main characters "deliberately taunting" the monster for no reason.
But then, Kelsey's air tank runs out, oh no! Now she has to share with Ren and Kishan. So Kelsey's in a pretty tight spot--she's in a dark, underwater cave with no air in her tank, waiting for an unseen attack from a giant monster.
Being underwater without my own air was frightening.
It's like I'm actually there.
Okay, granted, that's not the only description we get, but the rest of it is almost as bland. They get to the end of the caves without incident, but Kishan's tank also runs out of air! Oh no! But somehow Ren, who's carrying an object heavy enough that even his super strength doesn't completely compensate for it, still has air. Which makes no sense.
But, oh no, they're going to run out of air right before getting to the surface!
Death by drowning was much less exotic than death by kraken. It was almost an embarrassing way to go, as if your death was somehow your own fault. I'd fully expect the other dead people to say, "Drowned? Well, what did you go and do a thing like that for? Couldn't ya find the valve? It says A-I-R on the side. Did you forget that apparatus under your eyeballs? It's called your nose. You breathe through it." Oh, sure, I'd try to explain what happened, but I'd go through eternity being the butt of dead people's jokes. My mother would think it was hilarious.
Lolwat
Also, fuck you for belittling drowning. According to the WHO, drowning is the third most common form of unintentional injury death, and accounts for 7% of all injury deaths worldwide. It's also much more common for people in low-income countries to drown, as they make up 90% of drowning deaths. And here Kelsey is calling people, essentially, lazy for drowning. What the fuck.
Also also, this doesn't even make sense. You have the literal entire history of the human race's worth of dead people, and we see that drowning is still very common today, when people take the time to learn how to swim. Kelsey is stupid.
On the other hand, these might just be the hypoxic ramblings of someone whose brain didn't work properly in the first place.
Fanindra leads the way to the surface, but Kelsey's lungs are burning from the lack of air.
I would have liked to have thought my brain was dominant, that I could face the inevitable drowning serenely, calmy.
HA. As if Kelsey's brain has ever been dominant in anything.
She starts struggling against her mask, and is only saved when Kishan grabs onto her and hauls her up to the surface, because Kelsey is physically incapable of doing anything for herself. But yay, they're back on the surface now, and they only have to make it back to the yacht. This is difficult, however, due to the fog created by the blue dragon as it sleeps. Rather than use, uh, any kind of logic, they just follow Fanindra back. That sure was easy.
Ren and Kishan help Kelsey up the ladder since she can't put weight on her leg. Rather than showing Fanindra any respect for 1) leading them through the cave system (twice) and 2) being the only reason they beat the kraken, Kishan scoops Fanindra out of the water with a net, like she's a dead lizard in a swimming pool.
Nilima joins them out on the deck and gets them towels like the subservient non-character she is. She takes Kelsey to her room, undresses her, and looks at her leg wound. I have no idea if Nilima even has medical training.
A glob of green goo dripped from my nose onto my arm where I'd been cut, and I screeched in pain. It stung.
Showing, and then telling again, ugh. If the first sentence says that Kelsey screeches in pain, we can use our brains to infer that it hurts! You don't have to then tell us that it hurt in the next sentence! That's why she screamed!
Nilima says that it's "probably some kind of acid," which. What? It's blood! That's been in the ocean water for some time now, so it'd be pretty diluted by now! This isn't a xenomorph!
Nilima bathes Kelsey (which, um, it's just her leg that's hurt, so she doesn't exactly need a bathroom attendant scrubbing her), because Nilima exists to make Kelsey's life easier. Nilima cleans out her leg wound and goes to get Mr. Kadam, who knows how to do stitches. Um, there's not a whole lot that happens for a really long time--Kelsey gets prescribed an antibiotic and Mr. Kadam says that he'd like to stitch up her leg but they don't have any sutures. Um, why not, exactly??? He knew they were going somewhere dangerous!
Ren says that he has an idea. Kelsey says that he explains the idea to her, but doesn't say what it actually is, so it's guaranteed to succeed. Kelsey continues to be useless as Ren tells the Scarf to stitch up her wound. It works, natch, and Kishan carries her to bed like an actual baby again.
Kelsey wakes up the next morning and sees that her injuries look like they've healed about a week's worth. I'm not terribly annoyed, because, well, spirit world and all that, I guess. Kishan gets her breakfast and...some aspirin.
I was not expecting aspirin to be such a reoccurring character in this series.
I had told Ren that once I committed to Kishan I'd stick by him, and I wasn't the kind of person to play games with people's feelings.
Didn't she have an entire conversation with Wes where he called her out on doing exactly that, and she just laughed in response? Also, the remaining book and a half left in the series is almost nothing but her whining about how it's ~so haaard~ being in love with Ren while dating Kishan, blissfully unaware of the fact that this is the literal definition of playing with people's feelings.
Then Nilima comes in and helps Kelsey play dress-up for her date with Kishan! She wears a bronze dress and some satin slippers that match the dress and a flower from Durga's lei and it all looks amazing and bleehhhhhh
Then she meets Kishan and we're treated to a description of his outfit (black slacks and a copper shirt if you're curious).
More bland prose:
The moon was out, and the sea was calm. It was beautiful. The dark sky was clear, and the stars were vivid. It was the perfect setting for a romantic dinner.
It's like I'm actually there.
Kishan's set up the deck to look nice--fancy tablespread, candles everywhere, and conch shells. Kelsey's impressed, and Kishan says that he's made up a menu with the Golden Fruit, and for once we're not treated to an exhaustive list of everything they eat. He says that they have the deck to themselves, since Mr. Kadam and Nilima are taking the night off from keeping watch, and Ren is probably off sulking somewhere.
So yeah, this would be a great time for some character development--Kelsey is repeatedly thinking about how she needs to open up to Kishan and get over Ren, so this would be the perfect place to do that. But, uh, Houck gets bored because Kishan isn't ~special enough~ since Ren is Kelsey's True Love, so this entire scene is skimmed over. Ugh.
We dug in and talked about what we might find with the third dragon. At first we were being serious; then we started wildly guessing crazy dragon scenarios such as, "What if he is toothless? What if he is the size of a house cat? What if he is a scaredy dragon who tells jokes like the Eddie Murphy dragon in Mulan?"
So, uh. There's that. Also, did Houck just call Mushu a "scaredy dragon"? Mushu? Who's ready and willing to throw down with literally every character in the movie? Because his character motivation is to protect Mulan?
Also, STOP REMINDING ME OF BETTER MOVIES AAARGH
Kelsey and Kishan decide to dance and it's very Romantic. He apologizes for not being as good a dancer as Ren, and she tells him to stop comparing himself to his brother since she doesn't want to date a copy of Ren. He says that he first fell in love with her waaay back in the first book, right after that stupid fight where Ren decided to kill Kishan for daring to touch a girl he wasn't even dating at the time. Kishan saw her crying over Ren and he was surprised that someone could feel sorry for them.
Kishan launches into a monologue that rivals JRPG villain monologues and it goes on for way too long.
"I'd been alone for so long, I felt like I was the last man on Earth. Then when I saw you, it was like a dream. You were an angel who'd come at last to rescue me from my miserable existence. I didn't even care if I was alive or dead as long as it would bring an end to my isolation. Then, when you left, I thought I could go back to the way I was before. I didn't really have any hope that you could someday be mine. It was obvious Ren had claimed you for himself. So I ignored the pull. I ignored my feelings. But it didn't matter. I was drawn to you."
It goes on like this for quite some time. It's really boring to read because absolutely none of it is new information. We already know Kishan loves Kelsey because he doesn't shut up about it.
The only useful information we sort of get is when Kishan talks a bit about what Hugin or Munin or whatever did to him in Shangri-la. He saw that he wouldn't be alone in the future and that Kelsey had feelings for him, but he botched it by pushing her too hard too early. Oops.
Kishan asks if she loves him in some incredibly stilted dialogue, and she says that of course she does, so they kiss. It's not overly purple like when she kisses Ren, though, so this relationship is doomed to failure by authorial fiat, I guess.
It's still pretty purple, though:
My heart jerked wildly, ad a fire burned suddenly within me. It consumed me, and I blazed inside with a heat I hadn't felt in a long time.
That "long time" being, like, a couple of months, I think.
It was consuming and powerful. My heart opened. My connection was back. My frame shook from the intensity of it. I was whole again. Time seemed to stop.
Yikes, vary your sentence structure! This is a big moment (for, uh, non-Plot stuff) and I feel like I'm being hammered with blunt sentences non-stop.
Something huge hit the deck behind me, and several candles extinguished in a sudden warm wind.
Oh, no! What could it be???
Kelsey immediately thinks it's a dragon or a meteor, but she's wrong.
I blinked unbelieving [sic--there should be a comma there] as a deck chair flew past with a whoosh and landed in the ocean with a splash, taking the china, goblets, cake, and candlelit shells on the table with it.
Unnecessary repetition of the word "with" aside (seriously??? three times???), who on this boat would be enough of an asshole to throw a temper tantrum about Kelsey kissing Kishan by throwing all of their date stuff into the ocean?
Of course, it's Ren! What a dick!
Kishan looked at me in confusion and then froze as we heard an enraged, intractable voice in the dark somewhere above us threaten, "Let. Her. Go."
Um, well, the chapter ends before Houck decides to tell us it's Ren, but it's Ren. Seriously, the guy is enough of an asshole that any sentence said angrily that contains a threat is obviously from Ren.
Closing Thoughts
The chapter is called "Remembering" when that, uh, doesn't actually happen in this chapter. It happens in the next chapter. But yeah, Ren's mysterious amnesia has mysteriously disappeared. The explanation for why is really stupid.
Other than that, most of this chapter was Kelsey whining about how her leg hurts. Really boring, in other words. Still better than the scuba lessons, though.
Next time, Chapter Eighteen: Making Up Is Hard to Do! Ren's memories are back, and boy is he not happy that Kishan is dating Kelsey.
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