Look Ma, No Hands!

[Lasair Anubail]

Lasair looked up at the imposing structure some hundred feet away from her. It was big. Like really, really big and surrounded by a lot of grass and a huge fence that apparently kept all the cute little horses inside. She didn`t see any horses right now. Probably had something to do with the fact that the sun had already gone done. In fact, it was almost full on night. Up here in The Jagged Mountains it appeared to get darker earlier than in Radasanth. Still, the darkness would only make her purpose here that much easier to accomplish…yes?

Glancing up and down the deserted streets, Lasair drew in a deep breath to muster her resolve. Then changed her mind and continued to stand under the shadow of a large maple tree. The village of Tol Andana was nice and quaint and quiet. It reminded her of many of the small cities in Dheathain honestly. The people open and inviting and elvish! Well, the people in Dheathain were not elvish, but the people here were. They had pointy ears and long, lithe bodies. She often wondered if Fae and Elves shared some kind of ancient ancestry, maybe one of these days she’d find out.

“You know this is a really bad idea and you should probably turn around and walk away now while you still have the chance.” Came a scruffy voice from her left side.

Lasair turned her head slightly and glanced at the form of Tristram seated on her left shoulder. The twelve inch plushie was regarding the dark house with interest. He’d been protesting this trip the entire time she’d been taking it. All the way through Concordia and up the Jagged Mountains. Through the bitterly cold wind and snow and slush and freezing rain and all the stuff that their weather could throw at her.

“Can it, Tris.” Came another gruff voice from her right shoulder. “If she wants it, she’s going to go no matter what you say to her.”

Lasair nodded her head. Godhand was right, after all. Tristram was just a little plshie with superhuman abilities. What exactly could he do to make her stop? He wasn’t the real Tristram with his Draconian strength and spear and crazy fighting prowess.

“Don’t call me Tris, you waste of material.” The pint-sized Draconian replied, standing up on her shoulder.

“Oh, don’t like it? How about I put a bullet through your squishy face? Let’s see you protest when you don’t have a mouth to talk through.”

Tristram jumped off her shoulder, his little wings pumping the air and propelling him through the air and towards Godhand. Snatching him as he flew in front of her face, Lasair held tightly to the miniature version of her best friend.

“That’s enough, Tris.” She said to him.

He glared at her and shrugged out of her long, thin fingers. “Fine, but I’ll have no part in this. If you need any help, ask him. You clearly don’t need me.”

Before she could say anything to him, the plushie dived behind her back and disappeared into the rucksack on her. Sighing, Lasair took her first step towards the house, her eyes trying to figure out the best point of entry.

-----------------------------

Ten minutes later, Lasair struggled to pull herself through the first floor window. She’d found it unlocked. Well, Godhand had climbed up and found it unlocked and then opened it, giving her the all clear to enter. So she’s tensed her legs, dug her bare feet into the soft grass and jumped up. She’d barely grabbed the bottom sill of the window and now found herself struggling to pull herself up. Small may be her frame and light of weight, but Fae did not exactly have a lot of strength, let alone upper body strength.

“C’mon Godhand, you’re twice as strong as a human, help pull me up!” She lilting voice called up as she continued to struggle.

To anyone who happened to walk by the scene would seem ludicrous and hilarious. Her feet dangled a mere foot off the ground, her small size preventing her from merely jumping up to the height of the window, only 6 feet off the ground.

“You have wings, why don’t you just use them?” Godhand huffed from inside the house.

“I can’t, they’re too conspicuous.” She replied, struggling to hold her weight on the windowsill.

“Too…too conspicuous!?” A small face made of cloth peered over the edge of the sill, sporting a look of incredulity. “Oh, and let me guess, a petite woman desperately clinging to a window barely off the ground, wearing a sea green dress, no shoes and hair the colour of blood is inconspicuous?”

She thought about it for a moment. Honestly, she did. One whole second. “Yep!”

Godhand smacked himself in the face with his delicately sculpted vlince hands. “Sometimes I don’t know what to do with you…”

“What I think you should do is pull me up!” She pouted up at him.

Shaking his head and chuckling to himself, the little Godhand replica reached down and grabbed her hand. Bracing himself with his feet, he hefted her up. Perhaps a little too strongly. He disappeared, flying backwards into the house. She went up, nearly hit the top of the window and then came crashing back down. Her stomach impacted the pointy edge of the sill, all the air rushing from her lungs and one great ‘meep.’

“Ow…”

Winded, Lasair hung there, her dress a tangle around her legs and her butt still sticking out the window and up in the air.

[Rehtul Orlouge]

Rehtul Orlouge, nephew of the famed Sei Orlouge, looked up at the cliff before him with a rueful smile. The craggy rock face taunted him with its height and sheer resistance to climbers. The young man pulled out a pair of leather gloves and slipped them onto his hands, sighing as the wool lining began to warm his hands. He could feel the cold, still, but this was the only way he’d be able to make it to the top of this mountain. He’d heard a few rumors of the cold winds blowing from some of the peaks in the mountains being magical in nature. It was his duty as a researcher to figure that out, though admittedly he thought that it was little more than a simple rumor.

Sighing, he channeled his magic into the air around his gloved fingers, watching with mild disinterest as a set of icy claws erupted from the gloves. He smiled lightly. If there was one thing he had learned during his fight with Ruby La Roux, it was that he didn’t want his own magic giving him frostbite yet again. He turned to the cliff face and stuck his claws to it, sticking instantly to the side as the ice on his hands melded with the frost on the rocky wall.

“As long as the wall holds, I can climb it,” he said as he began his slow ascent to the top of the cliff. The sound of shattering ice, common in the mild springs and summers of the Jagged Mountains, was the only clue that anyone could possibly be scaling this cliff. He pressed onward, his icy hands clinging to the frosted over wall as he looked upward toward his prize.

As he made it to the top, his fingers gripped the snow-covered ledge and he pulled himself over. His hands began to clip through the soft ground and in a panic the young man clawed at the ground, pushing the frozen claws he had grown deep enough into the ground to hold on for dear life.

He allowed himself a moment to hyperventilate in relief before pulling himself the rest of the way onto the top of the cliff. He rolled over onto his back and smiled at the sky.

“I’ve got to stop volunteering for these lone research missions... I could have died just then,” he muttered under his breath as he sat up. He’d made it... to just over the foot of the mountain. “I really should learn to take the easy way up the mountain.”

With that thought finally voiced and out of his head, he smiled and walked up what seemed to be a fairly safe path.

“Then again,” he said to the air around him, “Sometimes... taking the hard path at first leads to some wonderful experiences and lets you take the easy path all the way to the top!” He hefted his backpack over his shoulder and began his long hike down into the valley below. Despite the biting winds above the cliff face, there was little in the way of cold air here, at least not the same way that he had felt before.

As he looked around, he muttered to himself, "Never thought I'd miss green grass so much." His footsteps, instead of being quieted by the crunching snow as it had been during his trek, was now muffled by the green grass beneath his feet. It felt almost as though he was down back in the main part of Corone, walking through the farmed fields of the outlying districts of Radasanth.

About half an hour later, he stopped to rest when he heard two people arguing. He wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from, but it seemed to be from inside one of the tree copses that dotted the lower mountain. He shrugged to himself and decided to ignore it until he heard what sounded suspiciously like someone hurting themselves.

He stood up and hefted his pack, groaning from the exertion, and walked through the tall grass, only to see... what appeared to be a young woman worming her way into a window... on a window sill, of someone else's house. He almost laughed out loud as he watched the tiny being do so, but kept his mouth shut. He hadn't been around anyone else in days, and though he was grateful to have finally made it back to some form of civilization, he didn't want to make himself known... at least not without having some fun first.

He smiled brightly as he channeled a small amount of light energy into his hand, the bright light illuminating the grass he was standing in, and formed a small sphere of energy in his palm. He smiled as he tossed it up and down, waiting for the opportune time to use it.

"I don't usually mess with other people, but someone hanging out of a window, trying to break into someone else's house..." he reasoned to himself, "well, they're just asking for a little bit of shock." He tossed the ball at full force, extending his magic to keep the magic flying in a straight path toward and through the window. As the ball entered the window, he let it float in the middle of the room for a few seconds before gripping his hand into a fist, shattering the magic and allowing a bright, blinding, multicolored light pour through the room.

As it exploded, Rehtul chuckled silently to himself as he fished his book, Elemental Ice, out of his pack and began reading through one of the chapters he had been trying to memorize.

[Lasair Anubail]

Lasair let out a feeble little cough and slowly raised her head. She saw Godhand almost halfway across the bedroom a sprawl and tangle of limbs and vlince cloth. He seemed to be in far better shape than she felt. The sill of the window dug sharply into her stomach and her head felt a little swimmie from the sudden force of her little plushie pulling her up.

Shaking away the dizziness, she placed both hands on the side of the window and attempted to pull herself through. Only she stopped.

A cute little ball of light entered the room over her head and began to float right in the centre of it.

“Ohh…pretty. Godhand look, think it’s an animal I can capture?”

“Oh, crap…Lasair!”

Whatever he was about to say next evaporated.

The light ball exploded. A blinding rainbow of light lit up the darkened interior of the room. Startled, Lasair let out a girly cry before she tumbled ass first out the window and landed on the soft grass and dirt. Though not really all that soft when your butt lands on it after fall about six feet.

Whimpering, the petite Fae covered her eyes with her hands as she curled into a small ball. Her dress a tangled mess and covered in grass and dirt. She didn’t care. Her eyes hurt. She couldn’t even begin to fathom why someone would do that.

“…Lasair! Lasair!”

She could hear Godhand calling out to her a moment before she felt his soft body impact her side.

“Hey, it’s okay, luv. Get up, it just blinded you is all.”

Little hands reassuringly rubbed up her bare arm and Lasair slowly cracked her eyes open. She could barely see anything. Little multicoloured spots covered her vision and when she tried to sit up her head swam.

“There ya go, sweety. Just slowly get up.”

She did as Godhand told her to, even though she’d rather lay back down in the soft grass. As she thought of that though, she realized the ball of energy may have been a defensive mechanism of the houses. Or perhaps the owner came home and found her there and decided to teach her a lesson.
She almost peed her dress thinking about that last one.

Looking around in a sudden panic, she spotted a human standing off to the side of the road just casually reading a book. She instinctively knew he was not the owner, at least not unless all the stories she’d heard about the name were false.

Oh no, but then he must have been the one to throw the ball of light at her. Which meant he’d seen her trying to break into the house! What if he knew the owner? What if he arrested her in put her in jail?

She couldn’t go to jail!

She hadn’t packed an escape kit in her Never-ending Rucksack, she’d have no way to get out! Though…the escape talismans might work. She still didn’t want to test out her theory though!

“Ah you! Standing there reading!” She called out. “Did you do that just now? I mean…the light thing. You saw me in the window? I just…I wasn’t going to steal anything, I promise.” Nothing anyone would notice. “I was only…please don’t arrest me! I don’t want to go to jail!” She could feel herself digging a deep hole. Panic started clawing at the forefront of her mind. Tears forming in her golden eyes. She blurted out the first thing that came to her. “He kidnapped my twin sister!”

“What!?”

She shoved down Godhand’s head and just ran with it.

“I just wanted to get inside while he was gone and get her back, that’s all! Just go on your way and I’ll be fine!”

The tears spilled down her cheeks as her hands closed into little fists in front of her.

[Rehtul Orlouge]

Rehtul couldn’t help but laugh openly at the girl’s display as he clasped the book closed with a single hand. He could feel himself overcome with amusement for the first time since he had begun to scale the mountains. He gently pulled his pack around on his shoulder and shoved the book in lazily before pulling the drawstring closed on the old leather sack. He got down on his knees as he looked the being before him in the face.

She didn’t seem particularly old, but the points on her ears caused the young Ice Mage’s eyebrows to cock upward slightly as he examined further. Her golden eyes were far from something that one would expect to appear in nature, but the most striking feature of her entire body, aside from the fact that she looked like a miniature full grown woman, was her wings. Clearn, membranous wings fluttered in the air, surrounded by what appeared to be a black outline, presumably the solid parts of the wings that kept their shape.

His jaw almost hit his knees as he realized her was looking at one of the fabled races of Althanas, a Fae.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered under his breath, not even hearing the girl claim that her sister had been kidnapped by the owner of the house. He fished in his pack for a charcoal pen and a piece of parchment and began to write down notes on the young woman’s appearance.

For one interested in the magical races, running into a creature such as this was a rare treat, unless one knew exactly where to look in the distant continent Dheathain, a place that had only been discovered a handful of years ago, and wasn’t completely mapped by any of the explorers from Corone. It wasn’t exactly a place Rehtul wanted to go into blind, and with no one for back up.

He sketched a general picture of the being and then jotted down a few notes of what he’d noted about her in the beginning before rolling the paper back up and stuffing it into the pack once more and looking back at her.

“So... what’s a Fae like you doing so far outside of Dheathain?” he asked, before he finally remembered that she’d said something. He remembered that she had a tone in her voice that was less “urgent” and more “panicky.”

“You have a sister trapped inside of that house, and you turn away the first person nearby who might be able to help you?” he asked, his curiosity piqued. There was no way this girl was telling him the truth, at least not the entire truth.

The mage brought a single hand up to his forehead and rubbed his temples lightly, as though trying to fight off a migraine that was forming.

I almost forgot, Fae are supposed to be extremely excitable as a general rule, he thought, though, relying entirely on stereotypes and this one Fae isn’t the way a true researcher gathers his data. He sighed as he brought his hand slowly down his face and let it hang limp by his side as he stared up into the bright blue sky.

“You’re not being honest with me,” he said, letting his blue eyes fall upon the woman in front of him. He glowered at her as he raised a single hand in the air before him, a handful of small ice needles appearing above his palm. “How about we throw a little honesty into your pleas not to be arrested, neh?” he asked, drawing on an expression he had heard from the Akashimans in Radasanth.

[Lasair Anubail]

Lasair’s eyes went wide as she stared at the little ice crystals forming in the air. She didn’t want to get impaled! Why was it every time she hung around humans she got attacked, punched, kidnapped or otherwise maimed in some strange way or fashion? Did these being not know how to be nice? He could just leave her alone. Honestly, she could get inside the window just fine without anybodies help, well aside from Godhand’s really, but either way. It wasn’t his house, why did he care?

She could feel Godhand struggling in her grip, probably trying to get out of it so he could rip the guy a new air hole or something as such. He always said weird things like that but she never really understood what he meant. Though she had seem him rip someone’s face off before. Well, not the plushie, the real Godhand. That had been one big mess to clean up.

“I-I-I’m sorry!” She blurted out. “My sister’s not really in there, she’s safely back home in Donnalaich probably making crystals in her shop right now and watching my store!” She was rambling, but that’s kind of what she did when she got really nervous, or happy, or excited or well…anything. She supposed she rambled all the time.

“I really meant it though when I said I wasn’t going to steal anything, well…I kind of am…”

His eyes narrowed on her and she squeaked.

“He won’t miss it, I swear!”

The look on his face said otherwise.

“I just want to steal some of his hair so I can make another one of these!” She held up Godhand in front of her.

The plushie levelled the human with a cold look, both of his hands holding the twin magnum replica revolvers that she’d made to match the ones the real Godhand owned.

“Drop the icicle act, kid, or you’ll regret it.” The words came out as a snarl, his little fingers pulling back on the trigger just enough for a small click to be heard.