Aphrodisiac
The sun was rising over the hills of Renais. A young woman was already up, sweeping the steps and porch outside her house. It was a large and comfortable house, its inhabitants surely more well off than the average villager. Two stories high, with elaborate windows and beautifully finished walls, the building was the pride of the village. Light steadily climbed the walls as the sun soared above the forested hills in the distance, heralding the beginning of a new fine day. The woman paused and stretched small arms to loosen her muscles before returning to the task at hand, blissfully unaware of four pairs of hidden eyes watching her every move...
"Here we are," a slim blue-haired man said.
"Hey, that's-" A golden-haired knight tried to say.
"Ah, quiet, brother!" His pony-tailed brother cut him off before he could finish.
"Hehehehe..." a red-haired mage chuckled sinisterly.
They observed for a few more minutes, then began making plans. Between the four of them, they studied a blueprint that the house's builder had sold them and the surroundings around. A tree provided them with shade from the warm summer sun, and on a branch a pair of songbirds sang and looked at the strangers below inquisitively at the same time. But birds won't give them away, or can they?
"There's a window in the study - that's where I'll enter," the rogue, slim and agile, decided.
"And what'll we do?" the knight asked.
"Of course we'll distract her with a calvary charge," his brother explained, giving him a light smack on the head. "You can emulate all of General Seth's qualities, except that you should be a bit more laid-back like me." He finished with a smirk. "Now, there might be children inside-"
"I'll take care of that," the youthful mage assured them. "It won't be any problem to conjure up toys and distractions for them."
"Then we're set."
"Y-yes..."
"Yup."
"Affirmative."
The orange-haired sage walked through the streets of Renais carrying a bundle of miscellaneous but necessary items related to the upbringing of a second child. His pace was confident and cheerful, as it would be since he had no idea of what fate was about to unleash upon him-
"Artur!" A woman's voice called out from behind him. Artur stopped and turned around to look.
"Ah, Miss Neimi!" Artur replied. Then he noticed two other women behind her. "And who may these companions be-"
His jaw dropped as he recognized them too.
"Good morning, Artur," Vanessa said.
"Hi!" Amelia added.
Artur rubbed his head with his free hand. "Well... it's nice to see you again - how long as it been? Six years? ..." The four talked about and caught up on news since they separated after defeating Fomortiis six years ago. Eventually, they travelled through the six years of verbal time and reached the present day. Artur brought up the question: "So, what brings you two to Renais?"
"I'm following my husband," Vanessa explained. "He's gone off on a trip, or so he claims."
"I'm acting as their local guide, and I'm trying to find where my fiance has got to as well," Neimi added.
"And I'm chasing my boyfriend," Amelia admitted, with a bit of a blush.
"Um... that's... uh?" Artur stuttered, unsure of what to say. Fortunately, Neimi spoke up.
"Are you traveling back to your home now, Artur?" she asked.
"I suppose I am," he answered.
"That's good!" Amelia beamed.
"Huh? Why?"
"Because we think our menfolk headed that way too. And we shall discover what no-good they are up to..." Vanessa's voice trailed off before it became too sinister for a pegasus rider, but it got pretty darn close to that.
"Why would they go to Za'ha village?" Artur wondered aloud, confused. "There's nothing there."
The three women stared at Artur as if he was incredibly stupid, causing the sage to begin to suspect that he had missed some vital point of the conversation. He might have continued standing there dumbly indefinitely if Amelia hadn't exclaimed:
"Gee, but you're married to her!"
Artur pondered the statement for a moment. Then his face turned bright red. "Oh... that. I don't deal with that often... um... let's go?" Knowing how pathetic he sounded, he turned around and began walking toward the stable where he had left his horse, for the trip back from Renais castle city to Za'ha village.
Because his back was turned to them, he never saw the intense look of utter disbelief on the faces of the three women still staring at him.
The sky was cloudless; the air clearest; the thunder of charging hooves loudest-
-BOOM.
Forde's and Franz's horses reared simultaneously, frightened by the bolt of lightling that had just crashed down in between them. Their riders, unable to cope with the sudden transition from full gallop to complete stop, were thrown out of the saddle into a unseemly heap on the ground. They craned their necks to look for their attacker, expecting nothing less than a full-fledged sage wielding the lost tome of Elthunder.
"I don't see anyone..." Forde groaned.
"You're looking too high, brother," Franz moaned in reply.
"Oh."
"Bad man dont hurt mama!" The little boy of five years yelled, a bucket of well water in one hand and a page of scrawly writing in the other.
"Have you done all your writing practice?" Lute asked her child.
"Yes, mama!" The boy replied proudly.
"And what did you copy last night?" She continued her inquiry.
"Papa's thunder to-tom-"
"-tome?" Lute finished for her son, smiling.
"Yeah!"
"Very good!" She positively beamed. "Now, why do you think these bad men are here?"
The little boy looked thoughtful for a few moments. "They too obvious, so they must be a distraction."
A glint appeared in Lute's eye, one which neither Forde nor Franz liked one bit. "Can you keep watch on these men and guard the door?" She asked her son innocently.
"Yeah!" For some reason, the innocent-seeming boy seemed extremely happy.
"Then I'll leave it to my little genius." Lute smiled and entered her house, pausing at a shelf just behind the doorway to pick up a tome before walking deeper in. She closed the front door behind her. The little boy looked even happier as he smoothed out his sheet of paper, much to the discomfort of the two defeated brothers...
"Thunder? The morning seems so fine, but we'll have rain in the afternoon," Ewan noted from his post at the door.
"Keep guard," Colm reminded the magician as he rummaged through the study for the hidden treasure they were all seeking for.
"I think I heard something like screams of pain..." Ewan mumbled.
"Probably old geezers with aching bones," Colm dismissed the sound. He found an object that fit into the category he was looking for. It was a chest, carved with reliefs of various magical symbols all over. And, the part that caught the rogue's interest, the lock was in the shape of a heart.
"Someone's coming," Ewan warned. "The two paladins must have failed - I'll head her off and make sure she doesn't get near him."
"Go, go," Colm grunted, all of his attention focused on the lock and the possible ways to pick it. As Ewan left the study, the master thief inserted a thin strip of metal into the mechanism and began toying around with it. In a few seconds, there was a soft click and Colm slowly eased the chest open, grinning all the while.
"Heh... now it's mi-whaa?"
A blinding light burned into his eyes.
Lute walked into the living room, stopping by the crib to make sure her still-sleeping baby was perfectly fine. She was, and so, after a kiss on her forehead Lute continued on her way towards her destination. She didn't make it far, though, before she met a certain person with red, not orange, hair.
"Oh. The pervert." Lute recognized her fellow/rival mage war veteran comrade of the Second War of the Sacred Stones.
Ewan raised his tome. Lute raised hers.
The former mage-in-training smirked. "I've completed my training and am more powerf-"
-THUD.
The former mage-in-training lay curled on the polished hardwood floor in a fetal position, both hands clutching his groin and the lower part of his abdomen, barely gasping his breaths through the relentless hellish pain he was suffering that he thought would never end. Lute merely rubbed her knee and looked at the result she had accomplished, pocketing Ewan's tome and returning her own tome to its fold in her clothing.
"I'm still superior. Of course I'm not going to use a spell in my own home. You've had six years without the trouble of raising children and yet you're still so inferior?" Lute shook her head as Ewan let out an indistinct howl of pain that might or might not have been meant as words. "Quiet. You'll wake the baby."
The violet-haired sage was about to leave, but on second thought she first opened the window, got some rope and tied Ewan up, then tossed him out of the house. In a stroke of mercy, she chose the shady side of the house to dump the poor pervert, knowing full well that after the noon sun came and went the shade would pass on to the other side.
The rogue attempted to escape his confinement, but for all his skills he was unable to. The sheer walls of light encircling him blocked his movement and there was no lock to pick to get out of this trap. Colm looked at the chest, so tantalizingly close, yet far enough away as to prevent him from seeing into its depths. His hand reached out, yearning to grasp the treasures within, but the rock-hard light stopped his hand before it extended too many inches.
"Ah, my light rune caught something."
Colm spun around in his cylindrical prison to face the speaker, who was none other than Lute, and who seemed quite surprised, frankly, to see him.
"A-aren't you Neimi's fiance?" She managed to say.
"... Yes."
"Then why... why do you need to steal an aphrodisiac?"
"I think it'll do you good to... just leave you... here for a while..."
"Hey! Wait! Don't just... leave me... here..." Colm's voice trailed off as Lute just left him there, trapped within the confines of the light rune.
Artur dismounted his horse and took a long drink of water from his canteen. Behind him Neimi and Amelia did likewise, while Vanessa's pegasus slowly descended from the sky. The four took refuge from the noon sun under the shade of a tall tree as they rested from their journey. They were halfway between the capital and Za'ha, and planned to reach the town before sunset.
Amelia took a hard bite of traveler's biscuit as she sat down beside Artur, blushing faintly as she tried to ask her question. "D-do you think your wife will... you know... make it for Franz and I?"
The sage pondered the question. "Do you or him have any uh, physical problems?"
"No, it's not like that!" She squealed. "It's just-"
"Then I'm sorry. My wife won't make an aphrodisiac for you."
"But why?"
Artur continued speaking, oblivious to the ranger and falcoknight, who were suddenly very attentive to every word he was uttering.
"Aphrodisiacs don't solve emotional problems, so she doesn't make it for that purpose. She only does so for couples who both agree to use it, and who usually need it otherwise. If you want to use it for seduction, she'll refuse to make it."
"Why are you three looking so disappointed for?"
Once again, Artur wished he understood women just a little bit more. This sort of thing was just happening too often.
The sun was finally beginning to set after a rainless day. Lute relaxed on a rocking chair outside the house, nursing her daughter and watching her son's antics. He was still chasing after the two Renaisian knights. The scribbled piece of paper that was acting as an inpromtu thunder tome was surprisingly durable, and surprisingly non-fatal. Not that it was a good thing.
"Run, brother! Don't let the next bolt hit yo-AHH!"
"Save me! Somebod-OWW!"
A certain tied-up magician was feeling like he was being roasted alive under the sun's heat.
"... need... water..."
And a trapped rogue was still confined inside his light rune prison.
"Let me out! Don't just leave me here..."
Pegasi wings cutting through the sky first informed Lute of the presence of more people, and the sound of horses' hooves confirmed it. Artur looked at the scene of chaos before him, bewildered. The three other women did likewise. Lute motioned them to keep their voices mild, so as not to disturb her baby, who was still nursing as if nothing was going on.
"Dear, what's going on?"
"Just some intruders. Oh, Neimi, Amelia, Vanessa, good evening. You're here to pick up your men, aren't you?"
Neimi, Amelia, and Vanessa were indeed disappointed in their menfolk for sinking so low as to attempt to steal aphrodisiacs to seduce them. It showed in what happened next.
Forde looked up and saw an angel...
"Vanessa... coming down from the heavens... you're here to save me at las-"
WHACK! "How dare you!" THACK! "Running off to steal aphrodisiacs!" CRACK!
Forde looked up and saw an angel of judgement. He felt it rather strongly, too.
Franz knew he would have to explain himself...
"Amelia, listen, I can explain-"
(Sob) "I can't believe you did this!" (Sob) "I'm telling Uncle Duessel!" (Sob)
Franz knew he would have to explain himself to the Obsidian. He didn't look forward to it one bit.
"Where's Colm?"
"He's inside. Here, I'll take you to him."
The events that followed within the house were best left unrecorded in history.
After three uses of Artur's healing stave, Forde, Franz, Colm, Vanessa, Amelia, and Neimi were ready to say their farewells to Lute and Artur. The sun had almost disappeared below the horizon, but the six people had already decided that certain unpleasant memories were best left behind them as quickly as possible. The sage couple weren't entirely sorry to see them go, either. There were parting gifts given, however - three small packages in fact. Three small packages of aphrodisiacs, after the situation had been finally made clear to all parties.
In the end the trip wasn't a complete waste, after all.
"You could have just asked," Lute told them all as they left. "I might have understood your situations... may the next time we meet be better than this."
Epilogue
"Oh no!"
"What, Franz?"
"I forgot my helmet!"
Franz and Amelia rode back to Za'ha, where they retrieved Franz's helmet from a certain little boy of five years after bribing him with a small tribute of sweets. They were about to leave once again when Amelia thought she saw a shape in the shadows beside the house. Cautiously, they approached to investigate the object.
"Oh my, that's..."
"Isn't that the pervert who tried to look up my skirt during the war?"
THUD! The indignant soldier of Grado aimed for the offender's weakest, and coincidentally most private, spot.
Ewan learned the hard way that the butt of a soldier's lance was capable of causing much more pain than a magician's knee.