Explanation and Apology

[Valles]

Well, I know I haven't been keeping up with the schedule for the FATE/Change Dusk and Rogue Bunny threads, and unfortunately, it looks like I'm not going to improve much in the immediate future. Partly this is due to the fact that I've just replaced my computer's old, damaged video card and have yet to get over the fact that I can once again play, well, anything, but a bigger factor has been my discovery of an opportunity to bribe Aishuu/Lady Quicksilver into returning her work, Renaissance, to her active list... since that fic has been one of my favorites ever since I first read it, you can imagine that I've jumped at the chance.
How's it going? Wellll...

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KAMAKURA, JAPAN, 2012
Hikari groaned and instinctively tried to burrow into her pillow, away from the hand shaking her shoulder. Unfortunately, it didn't work, and the buzzing in her ears soon resolved into her grandmother's voice. "Hikari! Kanzaki Hikari, you wake up this -instant-!"
With a mental sigh, she gave in to the inevitable and pushed herself into sitting mostly upright. "Ugh... Right, sorry, Gran. I was up too late last night. Homework."
Kanzaki Rio nodded, appeased, and then stood back a little to address her only grandchild as firmly as possible. "There'd have been plenty of time if you'd been home earlier," she said.
Hikari refrained from rolling her eyes, but it took an effort. Gran meant the best, certainly, and she was a wonderful woman, but she was constitutionally incapable of seeing something 'wrong' and not trying to fix it, and for the last ten years her granddaughter's ongoing study of the martial arts had rated high on her personal list of problems. It actually wasn't the cost or violence she objected to, so much as the fact that the school her daughter had enlisted the child in was - in her opinion - far too concerned with the mechanics of obsolete means of murder, rather than the improvement of the student.
When her mother was alive, Hikari had never really noticed the way the ongoing argument simmered perpetually between parent and grandparent, which had done a lot to worsen the disaster that had blown up when she had had to step up to defend her studies herself. The fact that she wasn't nearly as reconciled to her mother's death as her careful self-discipline had made her seem had been responsible for most of it, though, since having that connection, the thing in her life that had always made her mother smile most warmly, threatened out of sincere - and, even then, clearly recognized - concern had been much less upsetting than the fact that she hadn't even seemed to have the decency to wait until her mother's body was in the ground before making the attempt.
The crash had been nearly two years ago, now, and it had taken up until her most recent birthday - seven months past, now, in January - for them to get back on speaking terms. "The trains didn't quite connect, Gran. I got back as soon as I could have," she said, taking her master's advice on how to divert the conversation away from becoming another fight.
Rio had never been a fool and at fifty-one was still well short of senility, and she gave her granddaughter an unamused look before she let the evasion slide and let her demeanor soften. "I suppose not," she said. "Anyway, if you eat like a barbarian and run to the bus stop, you should be able to make it to school on time without skipping breakfast."
Hikari swatted her bangs out of her eyes - it was time and past time for a haircut - and tugged the ribbon holding the rest of her pitch-black hair in its ponytail out to let it fall loose. "Okaaaaay," she said, and hauled herself upright to start on getting dressed. Shucking out of her nightshirt took only a moment, and pulling on her school uniform not much longer, so that barely a minute had passed before she was shoveling the stack of completed assignments into her bookbag and kissing her fingertips to press them against the glass protecting the occupant of the display that sat in pride of place on top of the desk. "Miss you, Mama," she whispered.
The small golden disc gleamed behind her in the morning light shining in from the window as she went down to breakfast.

---

Ja, -n
(edited 'cause Hitomi didn't live in Tokyo)

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Rieverre]

Used. Discarded. Oh, woe is me. The humanity of it all.
*snrk*
Eh. No worries. Maybe I'll work on MS some. Actually, am working on MS some ... though the output's nowhere near the sort we had going, which is a bit of a shame.
Soldier on, soldier on ...
... would be nice if you could manage the occasional segment in a while, though.
-Griever
When tact is required, use brute force. When force is required, use greater force.
When the greatest force is required, use your head. Surprise is everything. - The Book of Cataclysm

[Guest]

I would love to help you out griever (esspcially since that would mean more griever stuff for me to read) but I can't quite keep up with Vales. However if you think it would help I'd be willing to give it a try.

[Valles]

---

Used. Discarded. Oh, woe is me. The humanity of it all.

---

*pats on head* Poor baby.

---

Eh. No worries. Maybe I'll work on MS some. Actually, am working on MS some ... though the output's nowhere near the sort we had going, which is a bit of a shame.

---

Hmm. We could trade scenes for that and this, maybe?
Speaking of which...

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Varen read through the scout's report with a frown. It wasn't, directly speaking, the material that was upsetting him - the man had carried off his mission with perfect competence and his handwriting actually wasn't abysmal, which was rare in any army - but instead the agenda that mission had been designed to further.
What the hell was his father -thinking-?! The war with Zaibach had been over for more than fifteen years and they -still- hadn't recovered - even if Fanelia had actually had a large enough army to carry out an actual invasion - which they didn't! - most of the Empire was just desert and scrublands now that their industries had collapsed. The country would cost more to rule than its taxes could produce! But if that wasn't his goal, then provoking a war the way he was was nothing but pointless savagery. And these nonsensical scouting missions into Freid and Asturia were even worse. They were allies, not enemies, long-standing and trusted ones.
Then a phrase jumped out of the text and caught his eye. 'The isolated location and high workforce retention of the Melef plants will likely make their infiltration and capture impossible'... Abruptly, the entire thing made an ugly, awful sort of sense.
Zaibach's role in his father's plan wasn't economic, it was military. However destitute the lands of the former superpower might be, they were still vast and well-populated, and if Father stripped them of enough of their able-bodied manpower, they'd be unable to mount any sort of effective rebellion. Fanelia's army wasn't big enough to take even one of their allies by storm, but it would provide more than enough troops to keep any number of Zaibach draftees in line.
Stopping the plan outright would have been easy enough - as Crown Prince, Varen corresponded fairly regularly with Queen Millerna and Duke Chid, and however fondly they might have looked on his mother's late royal cousin, -neither- was inclined to trust the Prince Consort of Fanelia's intentions any farther than they could have thrown a Guymelef. But, however simple that solution might have been, it would also have involved a war - a war which, ultimately, none of the participants would win. All four of the kingdoms would lose tens of thousands of casualties and bleed their treasuries dry to finance it, leaving them prey for any outsider who felt the urge to step in and snap up an easy conquest. Even the 'best case scenario', where the two faithful allies moved to preempt his father's attempt to conquer Zaibach and fought it out on -those- terms, would destroy Fanelia for the second time in as many generations, and far more thoroughly than the Empire's burning of the Capital had managed.
He couldn't let that happen. He -wouldn't-. Not to his home, not like -that-.
But how to cut it off? Now there was a hell of a dragon to slay - one without any weak points, ev-
He had been holding the report loosely as he bent over the desk, staring through it and entirely distracted by his thoughts, and when the key hit him he dropped the paper and sat bolt upright.
A ruling King of Fanelia must go, alone, to slay a dragon and return with its heart if he wished to hold his crown by right rather than in trust. More, existing precedent, if the dust of those fusty tomes of law hadn't fouled his memory, stated that, so long as there was -some- legitimate claim, the Rite of Dragonslaying bore more weight in disputes of inheretance than strict consanguity.
In short, a King, or Queen, who had -not- performed the Rite could and would be displaced by a Prince who -had-. His father's biggest political supporters were mostly the old noble families, whose farming estates, dragon preserves, and hired men-at-arms had made them major powers in his grandfather's and great-grandfather's generation. They knew that a conquering King-in-all-but-name would be in a position to hand out sufficient lands and industrial holdings to restore the influence they had lost to the mercantile and investing classes - but they were also, thanks to their emphasis on tradition, the power block most likely to be swayed by a rule as frankly obsolete as Dragonslaying.
Van Fanel, legendary war hero, might have been able to shoulder the social aspects a crown brought with it, but -Varen- Fanel, nearsighted scholar and son of a monster and a nonentity, would have a far tougher road to walk.
In short, the only problem with the plan was that it ended up with him as the King.
Well, that and surviving the damn Rite.

---

Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Valles]

---

Hikari stretched and sighed as Midori waved at her and stepped off the train, leaving her as the last member of her class in that car. Mido-chan was a friend and she loved her to death, but she had no desire to be dragged into another 'villain always wins' horror movie fest. Stopping that kind of thing was why people were people in the first place, rather than robots or animals or something. Fortunately, Mido-chan was well aware that not everyone enjoyed that sort of film, and wasn't offended it someone begged off - it was the Twins (who actually weren't even siblings, but that was how nicknames went) who got upset if someone tried to 'shut themselves out', and they'd gotten off three stations ago.
"Um... Kanzaki-san?"
Hikari looked up. She wasn't anyone she really knew, though they were in the same grade at the same school - a shortish, slightly chubby girl with absolutely nothing to make her stand out from a crowd except her demeanor, which was even more nervous than her voice; her name was... "Satou-san, right?"
She had spoken gently, but even that quiet question was enough to make her flinch. "Yes!" she squeaked, and Hikari was careful to keep the frown she was feeling off her face. Whatever this girl's problem was, the last thing she needed was a near-total stranger to start scowling at her the moment she tried to open a conversation.
"All right, then," she said, as softly as she could and still be heard on the train. "What did you need?"
"I..." Satou ground to a halt for a moment, then took a deep breath before plunging desperately ahead. "Could you teach me?"
What?! She froze for a second, too startled by how out-of-character the question seemed, and then the connection formed. Hikari'd underestimated her. She wasn't as weak or broken as she seemed, not if she was willing to try and work her way past her obvious problems by taking a chance and just walking up to someone the rumor mill spoke of the way her friends told her it did Kanzaki Hikari...
Though, from the look in her eyes, and the way she stood all crunched-in like that, she was very, very close.
It was impossible to say yes, of course. She might have known the techniques of her school backwards and forwards, but there was a lot more needed for serious instruction that she just hadn't learned yet - judgement and people skills and psychology and simple experience that a girl her age simply hadn't had time to gather.
Besides, Takamachi-sensei's wife was an abuse counselor. Even if that wasn't what had Satou so scared - which she wouldn't have bet even a single yen on - he and she would still have a far better idea how to go about helping the girl than a student like Hikari wouldn. "Well," she said, "there's a dojo I know near the school that-"
"I can't afford that," the other cut her off, and her face was dissapointed but her voice so flat it made the hair on the back of her neck stand straight up.
"I've known Takamachi-sensei for years," she tried to persuade, but Satou talked right over top of her.
"I'm sorry this was a stupid idea and I'm very sorry to have EEK!"
Hikari caught her wrist as she turned to flee the car, remembering at the last second to just ring her fingers around the joint rather than squeezing the way she would have in practice and maybe pinching the bones together and hurting her.
Satou flinched anyway, and from the way the corners of her eyes tightened and her lips thinned, it wasn't a nervous or put-on one, either.
For a moment the two girls stood in the tableau, meeting each other's eyes, then Hikari looked down and slid her hand up slightly, gently, pulling the uniform jacket's sleeve away from the wrist she'd caught.
Hikari sucked her breath in between her teeth. It was quite possibly the ugliest bruise she'd ever seen, which, considering where she spent her Sundays and weekday afternoons, was saying quite a bit. As vividly colored as a poisonous tropical frog, it ringed the entire revealed stretch of arm, broad most of the way but narrowing where the attacker had laid... likely 'his'... thumb.
The precise same place that Hikari accidentally had, herself.
She took a moment to look at it, thoughts racing a mile a minute, before gently sliding the cuff back into place and meeting Satou's shamed, terrified eyes. "I'll help however I can," she said softly, picking the best approach she could see. "But, unless somebody having his head cracked open is what you really need, I really do think Takamachi-sensei and his wife could help you more than I could."
Then she let go.
Satou drew her hand back and cradled it against her chest with her other one, and for a moment Hikari thought she was going to burst out in tears. Then she caught herself, took a deep breath, and straightened to her full height - which still only came up to about the more athletic girl's chin - before bowing deeply. "I would... like that. thank you."
Hikari grinned. "Okay, then. Would you like to meet them today, or is another time better?"
Satou was eager to begin, and said so, and they changed trains at the next station.
When they got off at their last stop, though, Satou got almost to the steps leading to street level before freezing completely and going utterly white. Hikari glanced back when she felt that the other girl had stopped following her, then traced her fixed, wide-eyed stare to the sturdy, handsome boy standing on the far landing.
Clearly, hew was the one, but, much as she wanted to, giving him what he deserved wouldn't really help at this stage. Unless she put him in the hospital, which would have gone a long way towards ruining her own life, he'd just ignore the lesson and take his humiliation out on Satou.
Besides, she wasn't the one who'd been hurt, so it wasn't really her place to pulp the jerk.
"Come on," she encouraged, and took a gentle grip on Satou's elbow to tug her ahead, "it's not far."
"But, Jiro... He'll..."
"Don't worry. I'm right here."
As they passed him he stopped just watching with an ugly look in his eye and grabbed the shorter girl's shoulder. "Where the hell were you?!"
"I spilled a soda," Hikari lied, stepping around in between them. "Her uniform was a mess, so I took her to my place to clean it up."
"Buzz off!" he snapped, and there was more than a little alcohol on his breath. "This ain't any business of some too-tall bitch with freaky eyes!"
"Anything that concerns a friend of mine is always my business," she snarled back, and heard the irritating, grating buzz that always showed up when she was angriest in her own voice. Her eyes would have stood out badly anywhere in the world, let alone a country as homogenous as Japan - one, the right, was the same bright green as her mothers' had been, but the other was a deep burgandy red that made them contrast vividly at any distance, and she was well aware that she was badly oversensitive about them.
"You ain't her friend," he sneered. "She's mine."
"Who I hold dear ain't yours to control!" Hikari retorted, then caught his arm as he tried to slap her and brought her other hand up for bracing and twisted. He screamed as the tendons and ligaments holding his elbow together ripped and tore, then staggered back, sobbing, once she released the mangled limb.
For a long moment she just stood, watching him and waiting to see if he'd get up to try again, and then Satou pushed past her from behind and crouched to try and help him somehow. Jolted, she glanced around at the staring crowd as her mind began to catch up with what had just happened, and her hands started to shake.
Hikari closed her eyes and sighed. 'Dammit,' she thought.

---

Aaaannnd... cut to commercial!
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[DKnight54]

Hm...
Boy oh boy, Hikari is obviously the daughter of Van and Hitomi(Had to do a little scurrying to confirm the fact that Van had red eyes... BTW, didja know that one of the original char designs for Van actually had him with one red and one green eye?) But how's the Prince consort of Fanelia? And Van And Hitomi are dead? So many puzzles, so little pieces...
BTW, while you are busy bribing the Mistress Aishuu, wouldja mind prodding her to do a bit of work on her Mystic Eyes continuation? That is the best Escaflowne continuation that I have had the chance to read.
* DKnight54 wanders of daydreaming about Van and Allen's epic duel...

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

[Valles]

---

Boy oh boy, Hikari is obviously the daughter of Van and Hitomi(Had to do a little scurrying to confirm the fact that Van had red eyes... BTW, didja know that one of the original char designs for Van actually had him with one red and one green eye?)

---

As a matter of fact, I did, and it's exactly the reason I gave her that trait.
I mean, yeah, I, personally, think that heterochromia looks, for lack of a better way to put it, really cool, but since it's so rare I don't usually indulge the fondness in my writing.

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But how's the Prince consort of Fanelia?

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I'm not quite clear what you mean by this, but the man himself is presumably off scheming and plotting someplace. When Van died (which was two years before the story picks up, and no, it wasn't a coincidence), no one on Gaea had any clue that Hikari was out there (it can hardly be a spoiler to say that that state of affairs will change, can it? it seems obvious...), so the throne went to Van's nearest living relative - since most of the family had died in the attack on Fanelia, that made his cousin's daughter Queen. Since her husband (Ye Plotting Bastard) has no blood claim to the throne, his title is Prince Consort, while their son, Varen, is Crown Prince. The next scene should give you a better look at him.

---

BTW, while you are busy bribing the Mistress Aishuu, wouldja mind prodding her to do a bit of work on her Mystic Eyes continuation? That is the best Escaflowne continuation that I have had the chance to read.

---

I'm already asking the lady a favor; it'd be rude to start getting greedy. ^_^
That's not to say you can't ask her yourself, of course, but since she'd left FY writing entirely up until this, I felt Renaissance was the more pressing concern.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[DKnight54]

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But how's the Prince consort of Fanelia?

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Darn it, that's what I get for typing faster than I think!
*Does a bit of rearranging*

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But who's the Prince consort of Fanelia?

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That's what I *meant*!
But in anycase, I was kinda curious, cause I didn't recall Van having any relatives(Or at least none where mentioned in the series that I remembered)...
Oh well, at least I can always hope that her reading your fic will start the ball rolling on hers.

Be the Ultimate Ninja! Play Billy Vs. SNAKEMAN today!

[Valles]

Ah, okay. Maybe this'll help a bit.

---

---

The faird balked when he tried to guide it down into the ford. Varen closed his eyes and sighed, and cursed his decision to take the packbeast on this expedition for the seventh time in half as many hours. It was stupid, ill-tempered, uncooperative, and had cost him at least as much energy arguing with it as he would have spent just lugging the damned supplies himself.
Somewhere out about halfway across there was a clatter as one of the rounded stones that were throwing up the white, airy eddies from the otherwise clear mountain river shifted and tumbled a few feet down the bed. The beast he had been leading - 'Honeyfoot', which was as big a lie as any his father had ever told - coughed something unhealthy-smelling all over his back, then tried to bite him again.
He stepped out of the way with the ease of several days' practice, then popped her in the nose with his elbow to dissuade any further attempts. "Come on, you stubborn lump!" he snapped, pulling on the creature's halter, but she planted her feet and tried to toss her head, perhaps hoping to yank him off his feet the way she had that first day.
He had to pull her almost halfway across the streambed before she started cooperating, becoming very thankful in the process that it was mid-summer rather than spring, so that the snowmelt on the higher mountains had already had a chance to finish. Not only did that mean that his feeet were only going numb from the chill of ther water, rather than falling off entirely, but this would have been completely impossible if the river had been high enough to drag at his legs on top of fouling his footing like it already was.
Varen had been raised almost entirely by a series of nannies; his mother had been an occaisional fleeting presence at the edge of his life, like a favored aunt who lived far away and could only visit, and he hadn't even met his father until he started assuming the Crown Prince's ceremonial duties and so became a target worthy of manipulation.
He'd been naive at first; had tried everything he could think of to obtain the older man's approval. He had bent himself to his studies, learned the interlocking details of an entire continent's history both military and political, mastered and become literate in all five of Gaea's major languages, had even finally begun to apply real effort to the matial training a disgusted chief armsman had long ago advised him to abandon.
All of which effort had been wasted.
Adrech, Prince Consort of Fanelia and de-facto ruler of that nation, had been born as the penniless younger son of a disgraced minor noble house, and even before marrying into the elite had carved himself a path to wealth and power on nothing but will, ambition and cunning. He had no use or time for someone who could waste any sort of favor or effort with not a thought on how he might be paid back.
Honeyfoot balked again, and Varen wrapped the guide rope around his wrist and hauled savagely. The faird yelped as the bit bit at the tenderer parts of her mouth and stumbled ahead in a rush. Not one to waste an opportunity, he kept pulling until both of them staggered over the last few rocks and up the bank.
He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, then froze in place as one of the bushes beside the path rustled and a rough, quiet voice snapped, "Right there, princeling." Something cold and sharp came to rest against his throat as the words registered.
Varen's efforts in the salle hadn't gone to waste - he was a more than fair marksman and could handle a melef with as much ease as his own body (which, admittedly, wasn't saying much), and after years of work he had finally managed to become something other than a total embarrassment with a sword.
Someone who had to spend three hours a day at hard practice to managed to be even 'adequate' had no room to be sloppy or arrogant, and when his turn had come to be blooded against the bandits that inevitably infested the back hollows of Fanelia's farther hills, he had been careful to pay close heed to the advice and behavior of the veterans around him.
'Ain't no bandit nor soljer alive as is stupid 'nough to go saying' 'freeze' rather'n just cuttin' 'less'n he's fixin' to take a prisoner,' a voice advised out of his memories. 'No, don't you worry none, boyo. The girl's alive, 'n' as long as that's so, there's a chance.'
Besides, he could always do something suicidal later, if that turned out to be the better option.
"All right," he said mildly, letting go of the lead rope and slowly raising his hands into clear view.
"Ah don' befuckin'lieve it," he heard a second voice say. "He's just as much've a pussycat as -"
"Stow it!" a third man interrupted. "Traitors are never safe. Three-Finger, check his sword. Weasel, set the bait."
Varen took a deep slow breath through his nose, then let it out the same way. These were his father's men, they had to be. The old man had gotten word of his plans - letting a certain-sized circle know what he was up to had been a neccessary risk, since the Rite required witnesses' testimony to be legally binding - and sent a few loyalists to arrange his failure to survive the attentions of Fanelia's protecting dragons.
"I don't suppose you'd know," he spoke up mildly, addressing the words to the third of his assailants even without turning his head, since he had sounded like the most thoughtful of the bunch. "Whether it was Marded or Oric who was the agent?"
"Thassa cute kid yer friend's got," the second... be honest, Varen, they're goons... observed, then gave an entirely unwholesome giggle. "Such pretty curls!"
Oric was only a couple of years older than he was, but Marded had a daughter who was only eight. A threat to his children... yes, that was just about the only thing that coupld push his tutor to-
"While you're feeling all chatty," the leader said, stepping out from behind a tree and lowering his crossbow with a smug look in his remaining eye, "indulge my curiosity a moment. What under the Mystic bloody Moon is someone who owes everything he is to this country doing betraying it this way?"
The obvious answer was 'killing a dragon,' but the fellow's meaning was still clear enough. "Trying to save it. If you're here, getting missions like this... then I'll guess that you know where my father is leading with this confrontation with Zaibach - Freid and Asturia, correct?"
"How did you know that, boy?" the first thug demanded, with a tone that made every word a threat. The sword at his throat pressed home just slightly, leaving a pinprick of pain and a trickle of wetness running down to his collar.
"Deduction," he answered, and hated the way his voice scaled up at the reinforcement of his position. "The scouting of our allies, the invasion plans for Zaibach, training our troops for security and crowd control work... all of it adds up."
The leader paled. "Just from that... Weasel, if he gets loose from those ropes, it'll come out of your hide."
"Skies, Boss, if yer so worried why not jez cut the whelp's throat?"
"Orders... Which," and his expression gained a not of dawning inspiration that Varen didn't like at all, "did not say that he had to be awake. Three-Finger?"
"Right!" he heard the first man say, and then the back of his head exploded and the world went away.

---

---

A little cliche, perhaps, but it does give you an idea who Varen is and what he's about. If anybody cares to offer a suggestion for another option on how to handle his introduction, I'd love to hear it.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Valles]

"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him."
- John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

He woke up with a splitting headache, of course. Fortunately there was no sign of nausea or memory loss, so the concussion, if he had one, was minor. After a moment to check on the reports he was getting back from his body, he sat up and looked around.
His father's men had gone. Honeyfoot's corpse lay a few strides away, split completely open by some sharp blade, and the ravens were already starting to gather around it, squabbling greedily over bits of the offal spilled out of the wound onto the ground. From the smell, a dragon would likely arrive soon to chase them away from the kill until it had eaten its fill. The contents of her panniers, the supplies he'd so carefully chosen and packed, had been scattered all across the area, and almost all of them ruined in the bargain.
He checked the weapons first.
The crossbow's sinew string had been broken, along with most of the bolts, but the metal plate protecting the trigger mechanism was only dented and they'd missed the backup string stored at the bottom of the quiver. The steel gaffle to cock it was fine; probably too simple and sturdy a thing to justify smashing.
The sword - he wasn't King, yet, it wasn't his - had been glued to its sheath, from the smell of it, but the gunk hadn't had time to set, yet, and the blade came free with only a moderate amount of tugging and cursing. Evidently they hadn't expected him to wake up so quickly.
Idly he wondered how that little twist was supposed to be explained away by a dragon attack.
The shield was a loss, its opening mechanism had cracked, and actual armor would have been far to conspicous to bring, so thatwas never even a factor, but overall he'd actually come out fairly well. Living off the land was a lot of trouble, but he knew how, and, though he'd avoided it coming out, one of the innumerable mining camps dotting Fanelia's back country wasn't terribly far away.
All that being the case, he was in a fairly decent state of mind as he put the crossbow back in working order and started to gather up whatever looked intact enough to be useful while the sword dried enough to buff the glue off and the river washed the scabbard clean.
There was a good chance that a dragon could show up at any minute, of course, but being a bit sticky shouldn't impair the sword's ability to cut any and what had he come out here for it not to meet one?
So when, some distance up the bank, a triumphant shout of "Gotcha!" was interrupted by a tremendous splash, he grabbed the more comfortable weapon and its remaining bolts and went to investigate.
What he found was a lean, pretty girl with black hair plastered over her eyes and the top half of her chest, sitting on the bank of the river and trying to haul out a bulky bag that looked almost as soaked as she was by the shoulder sling.
After a moment spent appreciating how scandalously short her dress was and the way the water made even the relatively heavy fabric of her light-colored jacket cling to a not-overendowed but entirely female figure, he set the crossbow down gently and stepped up behind her. "Would you like some help?" he asked quietly.
She started, like she hadn't heard him approach, then glanced up and stared. He looked down involuntarily. Plain, unassuming tunic, sword-belt (unoccupied), pants, sturdy boots, and all of it a bit dust-stained after more than a week's travel.If he'd been in full Court regailia or something he could have understood a stare, but what he was wearing now was hardly splendid enough to earn one. When he raised his head again to meet her eyes - one was a bright, striking green, the other the classic Draconian red - she blinked and blushed lightly. "Yes, please," she said in a voice as controlled and satin-smooth as polished steel, then shifted to one side and took a better grip on the bag's strap to give him more room. "On three?" she suggested, and when they did the weight of the thing nearly pulled his arms out of their sockets - and he had hardly been doing all the work.
When they had the thing safely out of the river and were catching their breath, he took a closer - and more respectful - look at her and tried to figure out the puzzle while she opened the bag and started spreading out the contents to dry. The outfit, now that he looked at it rather than its wearer, bore a more than passing resemblance to the standard depictions of the Seeress of the Mystic Moon who had arrived so mysteriously in Gaea during Dornkirk's War... of course, it could also be taken as a prostitute's 'working clothes' layered under a warmer jacket that had been grabbed in a hurry, but there was an innocence in her demeanor that made that seem somehow unlikely.
The two problems with the idea of her being from the Mystic Moon were that, first, Draconians were supposedly unknown there, and second, the calluses on her hands were a type and pattern he recognized well - the sort that formed from weapons' practice, which was unlikely given that Gaea seemed to be the more violent of the two worlds.


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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"

[Valles]

Hikari set her practice armor's waterlogged breastplate on the only remaining available rock and tried to ignore both of the conflicting urges nagging at the back of her brain. In the first place, it was actually more likely that her mother's bedtime stories were true than it was that some reality show would be able to fake the Earth in the sky, so there was no point checking for hidden cameras, and the second, ogling the soap-opera-grade-hunk was not the first impression she wanted to make on Gaea.
Eventually, after she was about halfway through establishing what had been ruined and what had been saved, he saved her from having to find a way to open the conversation by ending the awkward silence and asking, "Is your name Salazar or Kanzaki?"
The textbook weighed five kilos dry and fifteen wet, but it had been clear the moment she pulled it out that the thing was a total loss, so the way she dropped it on the muddy grass wasn't really a problem. "What?!" she yelped. "How...?"
"Your eyes," he told her. "There have been portraits done of the Seeress of the Mystic Moon, and they're very consistent about the shade they assign to hers. Combined with your attire and obvious Draconian blood, and it seems that the rumors of a personal attachment between Lady Hitomi and King Van were based on substance."
Strange clothes plus green eye plus red eye equals... and just from that he was able to guess? This guy was as sharp as he was hot. "Kanzaki Hikari, pleased to meet you. That's a heck of a guess, by the way."
"And I," he bowed slightly. "am Varen Reshida de Fanel. It's a talent of mine; also, in this case, a matter of wishful thinking. Having the rightful queen of Fanelia take up her crown would greatly simplify my own life."
She blinked, then paled. That moment, those words, made her mother's stories, her heritage, suddenly real to her in a way that even the shock of the frigid river and the Earth hanging so blue in the sky hadn't managed. First came the echoes of a dozen different legends - the heady realization that her life was becoming one of those fairy-tale adventures that every child dreamed of at least once... and hard on its heels, the memories of what the real history behind those same tales had cost on Earth. Blood, death, sacked cities, scorched earth... civil war, the very worst sort.
Then the most personal part of the news pentrated. "King Van..." her father, "...is dead?"
"These two years gone by," he told her.
Two years? That would have been about the same time as... "Mama..." she whispered.
Something in her chest tied itself in a knot, and she had to close her eyes as they burned hot and it became hard to breathe for a while. When she had shaken the memories and broken hope off and regained her composure, she opened them and saw him watching her with a concerned expression that he wiped away as soon as he saw her looking. "If it helps... he passed peacefully," he offered after a moment. "In his sleep."
"Mama always said she thought that they were connected..."
Varen had opened his mouth to reply when the sound of snapping brush drifted across the river, clear and sharp even over the chuckling and slosh of the rapids just downriver from the ford. When they turned to look they saw the dragon wading into the water directly across from them. It raised its head and scented, nostrils flaring, and the native Gaean spoke, calmly, just loud enough for Hikari to hear him herself. "Oh," he said, "shit."
"What?" she asked, no louder.
"It's downwind of us."
It took a moment for her to figure it out, and then she felt her blood try and freeze. "What do we do?" There was no shame in letting him take the lead; he was the one who lived here, he almost certainly knew more about dragons than she did. Besides, she was a girl - she was allowed to ignore that sort of macho pride thing if she chose to.
"Hope it isn't hungry?" he quipped.
And then the dragon screamed like a cross between a jet engine and a lion eating a steam whistle and charged across the river at them, and there was no more time for talk.
He went one direction, she went the other, and the monster barreled past where they had been crouching and through a stand of saplings that scattered before it like so many broken toothpicks. Hikari heard a distinct rending crack as one clawed, scaley foot came down squarely on the breastplate of what had been a hundred-thousand-yen piece of a martial arts gear. She spared a mental wince, the turned her attention to figuring out how to duck around the monster and get at the crossbow; she was closer to it, since Varen had gone along the back rather than back in among the trees.
Varen threw a stick at the thing's eye and shouted something that, if she'd had time to think about it, would have made her mind jump a track - by its failure to translate neatly into either of the languages she had realized she spoke. That didn't mean that she didn't understand it, of course, just that the fact that it was as new as it was obscene made her realize she'd been speaking and understanding a language she'd never heard before in her life.
Then, quite sensibly given how annoyed the thing looked, he turned and ran. She wasted a second blinking after their departing figures, then grabbed the crossbow, along with its parephenalia, and chased after. After all, she didn't really know how to use the thing, and stopping something that size would take real skill.
*****
The sword wasn't dry yet, but that shouldn't matter. Moving quickly, as it would have to in a cut, there wouldn't be time for the glue to catch.
Surviving its attempt to fry him, on the other hand, was a rather more troublesome problem. Without a shield or something to hide behind, his only hope was to somehow get out of the way of the blast.
He wasn't hopeful.
Fortunately, there was something he'd missed. He heard his cousin's voice shout something in a melodic language he didn't recognize, and then the dragon screamed in pain and his eardrums just about exploded. With the crossbow bolt in its eye distracting it from its previous intention - frying him to a crisp - the blast of flaming phosphates and hydrocarbons went wide, scattering and spraying into the air overhead. He still ended up diving out of the way, so as to get out from under the falling sparks, but that was only difficult, rather than outright impossible.
He hit the ground and tried to come upright, but had to turn the momentum driving the motion into a quick roll to one side to get out of the way as its tail came down to balance its change of direction back towards the way it had come - and the girl who had turned one of its eye sockets into a leaking blue-green ruin.


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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"