[Just to let everyone know, I am going to use measurements from the American system of measurement (i.e. feet, miles, pounds, Fahrenheit, et cetera). I'm sure anyone who uses the metric system (et cetera) already know the conversion factors, or if not, your already on the Internet. Also, when I say degrees, I'm talking about the angle degrees, not the temperature. I'm just trying to limit confusion, because I'm sure most of the people who read this will get those parts fairly intuitively]
Night was creeping back upon the duo as they approached a small hamlet on the outskirts of the Crimean capital Melior. Ike and Mia had travelled nearly 20 miles, and were both extremely tired and ready to rent a room at the nearest inn. Mia just wished that the nearest inn didn't happen to be in the middle of a veritable cesspool of a town.
"Come on Ike! The next town is only another two miles down the road. It can't be half as bad as this, um, erm-" she paused trying to find an adjective that would properly describe the disgusting village.
The village consisted of a grand total of 11 buildings, all on one torn street. Most towns in Crimea had enough combined money to at least pay for some basic cobblestones on the main road. This main road looked more like a swamp than anything else, and it and the single guttering torch outside were really the only indications that there actually was a town in the gathering dark. The small amount of the buildings that they could see weren't any better either. The walls were grimy, the roofs were uneven and unkept. Either of the two travelers would have been fine with the town being poor, if the swampy conditions didn't give them as obvious an indication of potential bed mates in the night.
"errrr-" Mia continued searching her mind for right descriptive word.
"Slovenly, squalid, disgusting, nasty, putrid, dilapidated, insalubrious-"
"Insalubriwhatis?" Mia asked incredulously in answer to Ike's list of adjectives.
"Insalubrious. It means unclean or unhealthy," Mia continued to stare at Ike like he had said that he was the moon and wanted to play in a volcano. In other words, like he wasn't making sense or had gone completely insane. Ike did not know big vocabulary words. Mia was pretty sure that the biggest word he even knew was mercenaries , and he probably only knew that word because it was in the name of of the mercenary group that he commanded.
"Yes, I am still Ike," Ike said patiently with his eyes looking straight up in an expression of irritation, "And don't worry, I only knew that because Soren was talking about Boyd,
after he got that weird disease thing,"
Mia let out the breath she had just realized that she had been holding and grinned back up at Ike as she remembered Boyd's skin changing color to match his hair, and the weird ooze that had come out of his nose. It hadn't been anything serious for his health, just funny to look at.
"Well, good, I was a little worried for a minute," she said.
"What did you decide?" Ike asked, getting back to the previous part of the conversation where Mia had been searching for her particular adjective to describe the ramshackle town they were currently trying not to stand in. Which, considering its diminutive size, wasn't very difficult.
"What was I deciding?" Mia asked blankly. Ike sighed. Mia always was a bit of ascatterbrain, except when it came to fighting, dueling, and anything related to fighting or dueling. She brought a focus to those topics unseen in the rest of the world.
"Your word for describing the town. I gave you a few suggestions,"
"Oh yeah! Um, well I liked dilapidated, it sort of gives the right feel for the buildings, you know?" she said glancing around at the now officially titled, dilapidated buildings.
Ike nodded and started walking toward the the dirty inn.
"Hey! Ike! The whole point of this conversation was to point out how disgusting this town is so that we can go to the hopefully much cleaner, next town," Mia called after him. He didn't stop, and continued walking to the inn, where he opened the door. Even for supremely over-muscled Ike, the rusty hinges of the door proved difficult to open. He still opened the door without too much of an issue, and then entered the poorly lit room, leaving the door open for one grumbling trueblade to follow him into the dismal tavern.
Mia poked her head in after Ike and glanced around the room. The first thing she noticed was the lack of a proper floor. Instead of stone or floorboards, all there was to cover the dirt was a few thrush branches spread haphazardly throughout the room. There were also some poorly made tables sunk into the muddy floor. In fact, they would have been useless as tables, except that the chairs had sunk into the slop covering the floor just as deep the tables themselves. The room was poorly lit by a single dying fire in a shoddy fireplace that looked like it had been made out of the mud that covered the entire town. There were maybe half a dozen other people in the room, including Ike and a man that was talking to who she supposed had to be the barman, because he was behind an inset little space underneath some old stairs that led to the rooms upstairs and had a bar in front of him. Literally, a single board of wood that bared the entrance to his little corner. She walked over to Ike and the barman who was wiping a dirty mug with an even dirtier cloth while he talked to Ike.
"So what is the price for a room?" Ike was asking the barman. The barman shrugged and started speaking in a supremely bored and uneducated voice.
"I duhno, fitty, sitty, sumtin like dhat," which translated as far as Mia could tell, to something similar to, "the price of renting one of the rooms at this establishment is 60 gold". Or something like that anyway.
Then his eyes moved to look at Mia and widened slightly. Seeing a pretty girl approaching him, he next addressed Mia in an obvious attempt to start talking her up.
"Well, hallo miss beautiful lady, what cen I be a gettin ' a you this evenin'?" his grinning eyes drifted obviously down to goggle at her chest. Mia took a deep mental breathe to keep from using her sword that was hidden behind her bright red cape to crush his brains against the nearest barstool. Or even just her fist. That might even be more fun.
"Actually sir,I'm with him," she said pointing to Ike. The man glanced away from her chest and looked at Ike, who was standing there passively, with arms that appeared to be as big as his own legs, and a very large sword strapped to his back. He decided there was valor in not going in that particular direction, and turned back to Ike to tell him somewhat more intelligibly that the price was 60 pieces of gold for a night's stay. Ike thanked the man bluntly and tossed the bits of gold to barman, who caught them and began to count them.
"Room 4," he muttered gruffly, looking closely at one of the gold pieces as if to check its authenticity.
"Hey Mia, see if you can get us something to eat for dinner, I'll take your bag upstairs," Ike said. Mia tossed her small bag to Ike who caught it and started walking up the protesting stairs.
Mia looked around the room to see if there was any food anywhere, and since there didn't appear to be any, she turned back around to look at the barman, who had been looking at her butt this time.
"Do you have anything for dinner?" she asked, trying to be polite but letting some of her anger show through to get the message to the idiot before her that she was not interested. She absolutely hated it when men started looking at her like that. It was the one thing guaranteed to get her out of her generally cheery manner, and was not something she tolerated. The barman looked back at her face, and grunted and pulled a bag out from one of the crates behind him and handed it to Mia. Mia opened the bag and saw that it was full of raw potatoes. She looked back up at him incredulously, and he shrugged.
"15 gold fer da sack, 40 fer cooked 'taters," he grunted again and went back to wiping his filthy mug. She set the sack of potatoes back on the board that served as a board,
and turned around to walk up the stairs after Ike. 'I'll just have to settle for some of that hardtack that I packed I suppose,' she thought to herself. Suddenly, a hand came out of nowhere and grabbed her arm and wrenched her back around. She found herself staring at a big, fat, man along with two friends, one fatter, the other bigger. She also noticed that all of their eyes were unfocused. 'Oh joy,' she thought, 'drunk idiots who think they are getting lucky. Geez, does this town have girls?'
"Hey, beautiful, wanna come over with us? You don't need to hang around that blue haired chump, come over with us, will make you happy," he leaned forward as he said that last bit, and tried to whisper it in her ear. She caught a massive whiff of alcohol rolling off his breath like a fog on the sea. She hated alcohol, even the smell of it could drive her off the wall. The other thing guaranteed to get her off her happy mood. She was starting to get really mad at these filthy idiots. 'Okay Mia,' she thought, 'calm down; they're drunk, they probably don't get many girls staying in the area, try to let them down nicely, maybe I won't have to smash their balls their skulls.'
"No thanks, I was just heading up to see my friend," she said, trying to make her voice sound as bright and cheery as it usually was when she wasn't around ogling and drunk men. She tried to pull out of his grasp, but realized that he had an iron grip on her arm, and wasn't letting her go. In fact, his face was starting to get even redder than the alcohol could account for.
"I don't think so," he slurred angrily, "I think you are gonna come wid us, and you are gonna open them pretty little legs for me and my friends," he said as a grin came over his red mottled face. He pulled her close to him so that she was pressed up against his filthy body. She glanced quickly around the room to see that the four of them were the only ones in the room, as the barman and the few other people in the room had apparently departed as soon as the big, fat man had started sauntering over to her with his big and ugly cohorts. Realizing that she was on her own, she started feeling happy again. Happy that she was going to be able to pulverize them without any bearing on her conscience.
Mia was at the point in her career where she was almost unstoppable in combat. For that matter, the only person in Tellius that could realistically beat her was unloading their supplies upstairs. She was also, unquestionably, the fastest fighter in the known world, and turned upon that speed to get her out of her present, disgusting situation. She made her body go limp, and slipped out from the man's sweaty grip. She then spun her legs clockwise at the big man that had been holding her arm, and knocked his legs out from under him. As he fell forward over her, she rolled forward underneath where his legs had been, and came to her feet facing away from the first man's two big and fat respectively friends. As she came to her feet she drew her blade, the Vague Katti, out from its scabbard.
The Vague Katti was an immensely powerful blade, as it was an expertly crafted swordin its on right, and it had also been blessed by the goddess of chaos, Yune, which made it indestructible, and capable of cutting through any armor imaginable. Stefan, the branded sword master of the Grann desert in Begnion, had given it to her after the defeat of the goddess of order, Ashera.
It would more than suffice to beat these three unarmored, belligerent, drunks.
She spun around, and swung the sword in an unbelievably fast pattern that reflected the firelight and ended the movement holding the sword at precisely 30 degrees. To anyone who wasn't drunk or stupid, this would have signified that they were facing a master swords women, and that they had no chance at all.
However, both of the men who were still standing were both stupid, and drunk, and charged the purple haired girl.
Mia grinned at the 'challenge' and set about whacking both of the men with the flat of her blade, until they had been knocked unconscious by repeated blows to the head from the flat, but still hard metal of Mia's blade.
A brief show of combat that had lasted less then 10 seconds.
Mia then walked over to the first man, and kicked him over so that he was laying flat on his back. He started to get up, only to find the very tip of her sword lodged in the fat under his chin, and it was not moving. At all. He looked up at the trueblade that was standing above him, and even drunken, realized that he could die right then, and all she would have to do would be to realize her hold on the blade that was right above his jugular vein, and it would slide right though his neck just as easily as it could cut through melted butter. Mia grinned sadistically at him.
"Well, what have we learned here today? I'll start. Don't mess with Mia, get sober, never drink again, when you try to hit on a girl, you stop when she says no, and you definitely do not try to gang rape her afterward. Did I miss anything?" she said like he was simply a student that had not been paying attention in class. Her actions demonstrated otherwise, as she let the blade slide forward enough to cause blood to start spilling out of a small puncture wound under his chin.
"Uh, uh, no ma'am, that's, uh, everything, ma'am, and I will never do any of that ever again," he gulped as the blade didn't move for a moment after he said that. Was she going to kill him?
Suddenly, the blade moved away from his neck and the blood was flicked off of it to go sailing through the air to land on the unconscious back of one of his friends.
"Wonderful, now, I want you to leave, and if I ever see you again, and you are doinganything I disagree with, I will kill you. Do you understand?" she said sweetly to him,
but the hard glint of fire in her eyes, gave away her true emotions. He nodded very quickly, and she smiled at him again and said, "Good! Then you can drag your little friends out of here, and tell them the same thing when they wake up from their little nap, he nodded again, and Mia let him get up. He then grabbed the collars of his two friends and quickly dragged them out of the mud in the inn to the mud that was the the street outside.
Mia started humming to herself as she wiped the tip of her blade off with the dirty cloth that the barman had left on the bar, and re-sheathed the blade in it's scabbard. She always enjoyed the adrenaline rush of a fight, even a fight against a bunch of sexist, (attempted) rapist, drunks. She climbed up the stairs above the bar, and walked down to room four. Or at least she assumed it was room 4, because there was no number on the door, but the one before it on the same side of the hallway had at least had a 2 written directly onto the door. She knocked on the door and heard Ike mutter some sort of curse as she heard a loud thud. She opened the door to see him holding his foot and hopping around the room muttering more curses to himself. She also saw that he had dropped her now bag on the floor and quickly put two and two together.
"Boss! Were you going through my stuff!" she yelled at him. He stopped hopping and tentatively set his foot back on the ground and tested putting his weight on it. He then looked back at her like he had his hand in the cookie jar, and she had just caught him.
And in a sense she had.
"Um, well, um, er, you see, um, that was, um, um, how was your day?" he said with a big fake grin on his face as he looked at her. She lowered her face at him, and looked angrily at him through her eyelashes, crossing her arms and tapping her foot as she did so. Ike looked around for an escape route, only to realize that Mia was still standing in the doorway, emerald eyes blazing.
"BOSS! WHAT WERE YOU DOING IN MY BAG!" she shouted at him.
"Um, well, I was, uh, oh fine, I was hungry, and I saw that you had a loaf of bread in there, and well, um-" his face had become a solid red of embarrassment, but she quickly lost her anger, and let out a quick laugh.
"That's what you were doing in my bag? Oh. Well, Boss, that really isn't too bad, I was going to give you some of that anyway, because, well, I had an experience downstairs," she then proceeded to briefly tell him the story of why they had no dinner, and why they would probably be getting an extra bill for having a bar fight.
"I thought I heard a bunch of loud noises coming from downstairs," he said when she had finished. During the story, he had moved to sit on one of the two beds in the small room, and he now looked up at her as she finished.
"Well, yeah, I wasn't really focusing on keeping things quiet you know, and I didn't really want to get raped. That, and I was getting mad. I'm glad I didn't kill them though," she said. With that, she left the door frame that she had been leaning on and walked over to the bed that wasn't currently occupied by Ike, and collapsed on it, tired from the long walk and the bar fight, w which, while brief, still caused a huge spike in her adrenaline. She crawled to the top of the bed and shoved her limp body underneath the covers, only to find that, while unoccupied by Ike, the bed itself was still occupied, as a grey and black mottled cat leaped out of it and started hissing at her.
Mia shrieked in surprise and fell off the bed, and quickly crawled backwards towards the other bed, where Ike had jumped back up to see what had scared Mia, only to seethe hissing and spitting cat crouched on the now ruffled covers of the other bed.
"Shut up! It jumped me!" Mia said as Ike fell back onto his bed howling with laughter.
"Well, at least it got you to laugh, that doesn't happen very often," she grumbled as she stood back up and slowly approached the bed with the cat perched on top of it. Then she dove forward grabbed the cat, and tossed out of the conveniently still open door, running after it to close the door behind it. She moaned as she slid down the door to glare at the still laughing Ike.
Boss! Stop laughing before I do the same to you as I did the cat! she growled menacingly at her commander. Ike muffled his mouth with one hand and held the other up in a gesture of peace as she stood up and started approaching him. She grumbled again and walked over to her bed, blowing the candle that lit the room out as she went. After taking her scabbard, cape, and leather armor off, she checked the bed for any more unwelcome guests, and seeing none crawled into it. For being a disgusting place, the inn had somehow managed to keep the sheets relatively clean, and the bed didn't have any bugs or rodents any it (probably thanks to that vicious cat). She settled into the feather pillow and fell asleep within a few moments.
Author's Note; I would like to point out that everything in this chapter came entirely off of the the top of my head, except for the nasty inn, and the basic outline for the bar fight, so if any of it doesn't make sense, put it in a review, and tell me so, so that I can fix it. Also, sometimes my brain gets farther ahead of my fingers, so sometimes words can get jumbled up. I tried to avoid that as much as possible, but sometimes it still happens.
Thanks for reading if you are reading.
Another note; I am not sure where I am going with this, and I rated it M, primarily because I don't know where I'm going with it. It might get really heavily romantic, or it might only have hints of that sort of thing (by romantic I mean sex and making out in general, because I know about as much about romance as I do about Quantum theory (as in none, 0, the derivative of a constant, et cetera)) If any of the interactions seem weird, odd, stupid, boring, unrealistic, whatever, bear in mind that I really don't always know what I'm talking about, and have to go off of movies, watching other people talk, and guessing. It can't all be wrong, but I highly doubt all of it is right. Rambling, ignore me please.
I published this story about 20 minutes ago now, and as soon as I pressed the button, I realized that I had once again forgot to go over it for the crushed words and the lack of quotation marks that is the result of the nonsensical way I have to deal with to even get stories on here, so if anyone has read it since I posted it, I'm very sorry about that (again), and I hope I got most of the issues from that.