pyr min solemnly swears he is up to no good (twinclaws) wrote in emillion, @ 2013-11-26 12:57:00 |
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Pyr had been nervous, at first, that being squired to Sister Felicity would mean a whole new set of unpleasant tasks he neither wanted nor needed; his punishment-slash-training with Councilor Cassul showed no sign of ending any time soon, and it was exhausting enough without Felicity adding to the mix. Yet so far, he'd enjoyed his lessons with her far more than any of his other classes; he and Thistle had reached a truce in their battle of wills and improvised projectiles (though how long the peace would hold, it was difficult to say) and he couldn’t help but notice he’d improved in leaps and bounds. While he wasn’t anywhere near cured of his flaws, he was getting better faster than he’d expected. He was working his ass off, and he was having fun. And some days, he thought he had everything figured out. He was more confident in his hand-to-hand skills than he’d ever been before, and because of his crazy schedule, the archery training he’d meant to continue on his own had fallen by the wayside, the time he had once reserved for aiming at a target twenty feet away now used to practice katas. And though he felt a little bad for abandoning the bow, he didn’t miss it most days. He enjoyed the training he did, and perhaps that was what Quen had been talking about when she’d said train with the monks like you’re a monk. Or perhaps it was just that the training regimes Sister Felicity came up with were way too cool to dislike. That day, for example, they were headed outside city walls, to train in the Outlands—how awesome was that? Pyr had only ever been to the Outlands one before, during his and Sky’s failed little zombie-spotting trip, and he’d certainly never gone there with the intention of fighting. Would they fight wild beasts? Bandits? A dragon was out of his league, but perhaps they may glimpse one in the sky, flying away. Pyr followed Sister Felicity to her chosen location with a grin on his face and a spring in his step, eager to start training. Having a dedicated victim, ahem, squire, was quite a lot more fun than Felicity had actually anticipated. For one thing, the kid was shaping up pretty well. Of course, that was likely a direct consequence of the second thing: he seemed oddly cheerful in the face of what she’d overheard other students calling ‘baseless sadism’. Either he was made of sterner stuff than the general class of squire, or he really, really wanted to be a monk. Fel didn’t particularly mind which of the two was true. She’d also surrendered the battle to force him into early morning katas more than once or twice a week, because he was a growing boy, and probably needed his sleep. (It might have been slightly kinder of her if she let him know in advance which mornings she’d be yanking him out of bed before dawn, but her way was far more fun.) The kid was probably ready for a more engaging test than setting him on his fellow squires. With that in mind, she’d tossed him a pack to carry and hauled him out past the pilings into the wilds outside the city. They’d been walking for a fair while, and he seemed far too bouncy for what she had planned. Ah well, she’d packed enough potion for him to catch a few injuries without causing too much trouble. She didn’t think he’d noticed that she was paying far closer attention to the ground beneath them than she usually did. Eventually, though, she saw the tracks she was looking for. Looked like they were headed for a stream nearby, and in fair numbers, too. She looked over at his eager little face and smiled. “So, trouble - you ever meet a wild chocobo?” They had been walking for some time, and he'd been wondering where they were headed; still, Felicity's question made him frown, puzzled. "Not really," he said. "Only the chocobos at the guildhall. A few of those are pretty mean, I guess." Leading the chocobos outside in order to clean the stables wasn't always peaceful work; he'd got a peck or two for his efforts more than once. "But I guess you can't really call them wild." He made no mention of the nickname; she'd been calling him that pretty often, and as it seemed to be a term of endearment rather than a sign he was about to be scolded for something or other, he didn't particularly mind. "Are we going to fight a wild chocobo?" he asked after a beat. Amused, Felicity raised an eyebrow at him. “Always about violence with you,” she said. “Fight is a strong word. Annoy, perhaps. And ‘we’ is definitely not the word I would choose.” She fully intended to stand back and laugh at him. Unless, of course, it seemed like he was in any actual danger. Fel pulled aside a branch, and there they were - a small flock of blacks, drinking at a stream. They could be mean and bad tempered, more so than the other colours, but that would just make this all the more challenging. “All right, here’s how this works,” she said, keeping her voice low. “I want you to collect me some feathers. No more than one from each bird. Oh, and if you hurt the bird any more than the single pulled feather requires, then that feather won’t count at all. You got it?” As she described the exercise, Pyr couldn’t help grinning. The mission parameters were quite similar to the basics of any good plan: annoy someone, and get away before they catch you. “This will be easy,” he said to Felicity. It was his chance to impress her, and make up for the mess with the cockatrices. First, he counted the chocobos. There were three, that he could see from where he stood; he waited a few seconds, in case any more appeared, but spotted no movement. And while Felicity had said he wasn’t allowed to hurt the birds, he didn’t want the birds to hurt him. He decided arranging a distraction would be the best strategy. He bent down, watching the chocobos all the while, and felt the earth around his feet until his fingers located a few pebbles; he picked them up and took aim. The first pebble skipped on the surface of the water four times—not his best throw ever—but the trick did its job; the birds straightened up and focused on the water, trying to determine if a threat existed. While they were distracted, Pyr sneaked up behind one of them and plucked a single black feather. It wasn’t as smooth as he’d hoped; the bird let out a loud cry and the other two turned to see what was going on. “Well, crap,” Pyr muttered, and ran back through the bushes to where Felicity waited. One down, but they didn’t look friendly; as fast as he could, he ran and rustled the bushes in several places farther downstream, hoping the chocobos would focus on those sounds and not chase him around. Or better yet, forget about him entirely and go back to chilling by the riverside. Two to go—he crouched hidden in the bushes, the other pebble in his hand, trying to figure out how to continue from there. He wasn’t giving up, that was for sure. “Sneaky is all well and good,” Felicity said conversationally, appearing silently behind Pyr. The birds’ heads tilted towards her voice. “But it only works if you’re stealthier than your target.” Oh, being mean to her apprentice was so much fun. Moving quickly, she pulled a little string of bells from her pockets, and pinned them between his shoulder blades, precisely at the most difficult spot to reach. Grinning, she retreated behind a tree to watch the chaos unfold. “Don’t forget, duckling - if you hurt them, you lose - but they most certainly don’t have the same restriction!” And they were staring straight at Pyr’s bush. He tried to turn his head to see what she’d put on his back—and the moment, he shifted, there was the tinkling of bells, and three black feathery heads turned to look straight at him. “That is so unfair!” he whispered mutinously, but he couldn’t reach the bells no matter how much he tried, and the more he tried, the more he gave himself away. In a last ditch attempt to distract the chocobos, he picked up another pebble and threw it at the water, but the birds didn’t blink. They weren’t falling for the same trick twice—not when there was a much more interesting target in front of them. And since he couldn’t sneak around with bells stuck to his back, and he doubted the chocobos would just allow him to walk up to them and take the feathers he needed, there was only one option left to him. With one last look at Felicity—she would intervene if he was about to get pecked to death, right?—he came out from behind the bush and stared at the birds. “Well, let’s do this.” He took a deep breath, and as the chocobos ran straight toward him, he lunged toward them too. Shouting, he dashed toward the beasts and, at the last moment, squeezed in through the gap between two of them—snatching two black feathers in the process. The chocobos swerved and ran after him. He was fast, but not fast enough to leave them behind. He could not escape pecking as he grabbed onto a tree trunk and started climbing, the birds heaping punishment on him as he did so. One of them went for the bells, and ripped off a chunk of Pyr’s shirt in the process. Once he was up in the tree, safe but with no way of getting down, he shouted, “Felicity! This is abuse!” Meanwhile, Felicity was fighting to hold back her laughter. One of the best parts of staying tiny was that she remained light enough to actually get up into trees. It had taken her quite a while to learn how to navigate branches with her trusty staff still strapped to her back, but by now, it was practically an extension of her body, and she adjusted automatically. But she had definitely laughed herself into falling out of trees before, and that wasn’t exactly the image she wanted to project to her apprentice. “Not abuse!” she called merrily through the leaves separating them. “Would you rather I make you punch a stack of planks until your knuckles bleed and your brain dribbles out your ears from boredom?” She had a feeling Pyr would enjoy that type of training exactly as much as she did, which was to say, not at all. A certain amount of rote practice was necessary, of course, but this type of thing was far more fun. Of course, if she left him permanently treed by chocobos, Drake would probably give her that Look again, and she hated it when he did that. Sighing, Felicity reached back into her tunic. “I want you to take note of who exactly is coming to your rescue,” she called out, “and appreciate it!” That said, she hooked the furry little body out from around her shoulders. “Come on, mischief,” she said, tickling the ferret awake. “Time to earn your supper.” He twitched his furry little nose, and she couldn’t resist cuddling the little bundle of terror. “Who’s the cutest little hellspawn, yes it’s you, yes it is,” she cooed, ferret in one hand, branch in the other, swinging down to the ground. “Want to chase some birds? I know you do!” Thistle most definitely did want to chase some birds. He went after them with gusto. Had Pyr not experienced the furry thing’s wrath first-hand, he would have wondered how something so tiny could be so mean. Yet he knew Thistle to be a fearsome opponent, not to be underestimated—and he watched from his branch as the chocobos learned the exact same lesson. It was like watching a chihuahua bark at a Kerwonian Sheperd; the ferret growled at the birds, tiny claws digging into the earth as if he was ready to leap and take all three of them down. Had the chocobos had eyebrows, they would have been raised. Then Thistle jumped—its butt firmly planted on top of the chocobo’s head, waving its tail and poking the bird in the eye with it, being an infuriating little thing, as usual. Enraged, the chocobo tried to shake the ferret off, but it was to no avail, and as the other two tried to assist, Thistle jumped from one to the other as necessary, annoying them into running away. When Thistle landed on the grass at the base of Pyr’s tree again, the squire could have sworn it was gloating. And so he touched two fingers to his forehead in solemn salute. Thistle returned to Felicity, and Pyr started climbing down from the tree, relieved that, at least, the bells were no longer attached to his clothes. He’d attracted enough trouble for the day. He presented the feathers to Felicity with a grin. “Three feathers, one from each,” he said, preening despite his disheveled state. “But I’m done being bullied by birds.” Felicity grinned at him. “Not bad!” she said. “Inelegant, perhaps, but you got the job done, which is what matters.” She paused, looking him over. Dirty, disheveled, perhaps a few small bruises but nothing was bleeding. He had plenty left in him. “I promise,” she said solemnly, “no more bullying birds.” She paused just long enough to give him some hope, then let her grin shift in a truly malevolent direction. “How do you feel,” she asked, rubbing her hands together, “about wolves?” |