Sorry to keep you waiting, as always. Feel free to tell me of mistakes I made or other things like that.

To the one who challenged me to play the FE games and unlock several secrets (your name was given as hf, but seeing as you are listed as 'Guest'...), thank you for renewing my determination to do that. It's been awhile since you asked, but seeing as how little time I have to spare... But I will try and we will just have to see.


It was not long after he had woken up when someone banged on the door. Ike, not yet in a condition to talk to anyone normally, couldn't even shout at the person that they could come in, or the person had already swung the door wide open.

It was the same guard that had brought him up to his room the night before. She was carrying a tray with food, mostly bread from the looks of it, which was balance on one hand and her shoulder. Although Ike was not prude, he suddenly understood why girls could throw such a big fit if the door was opened suddenly at times they did not considered themselves properly dressed or made-up. He was glad he had gone to sleep in his clothes too, if he was very honest with himself and stopped pretending it didn't matter.

"Morning," the female said as if she had not just barged in uninvited. She walked over to the small table in the room and put the tray down with more carelessness than would've been considerate. She sat down in one of the chairs, went as far as to pick up an apple from a silver plate and proceeded to eat it.

Ike was still too flabbergasted by her actions to actually respond properly. "What?" was all he could manage and it sounded ruder than he intended. He had had to deal with all sorts of people barging in his room in all sorts of way for all sorts of reasons, but this, however, was a very first. No one had actually barged into his room and eaten the served breakfast, most likely meant for him. Until now, that is of course.

"Well, most people greet others in the morning, so I figured I might as well," she replied, as if Ike had asked her an explanation and had not just been in shock. She took another bite from the apple.

Ike sat at the edge of his bed while grumbling. He took his time gathering the pieces of armour he had discarded the night before. He felt slightly uncomfortable putting his armour on in the presence of a stranger –she did spent her time looking at the sky through the balcony, as if it would grant him more privacy- but as has been mentioned before, Ike did not sweat over manners like this. Not much at least.

It was as if she could read his mind when she answered the question he had thus far left unspoken. She told him –in between two bites – that since the royal family and close associates more suited for the purpose, the guards had been burdened with 'entertaining' him, which translated to keeping him out of their way, Ike supposed.

"And I volunteered to keep you busy" she concluded.

"I still don't understand why-" Ike began, but was cut off.

"There's a festival in town, the biggest festival of the whole year, and I get almost a whole day off for just making sure you don't get lost. Do the math, will ya?"

She was quite rude. Ike was used to worse, but that was coming from people he'd known for years and years, not someone he'd only known for half a day. On the other hand it felt good to have someone around who wasn't as stiff as pretty much everyone else he'd met this far. It gave him a relaxed feeling that overshadowed the slightly uncomfortable way of addressing.

"So, how about strolling around town for the morning? I want to do something else in the afternoon, but I'll still need to pull a few strings, so I'm not sure if we'll be able to do that."

Before Ike could respond, she pointed to the plate of food she had brought and asked: "You still planning on eating that?"


The streets were, since the day had only just started, more quiet than yesterday. Most of the people who were roaming the streets were not yet dressed in their feast clothing or were wearing their masks. The people who did wear one of the aforementioned were mostly children, who usually weren't allowed to be out after dinnertime, festival or no festival, were. They were truly delighted to be wearing and playing in special clothes. Their mothers were dressed in the duller kind of dresses that they tend to wear from day to day. Call them their work clothing if you will. They were following their playing children at a small distance, granting them the space they needed to play, while still keeping an eye out for them, as they sometimes wandered in and out of small shops for the groceries.

Ike enjoyed the somewhat empty streets and smiled at the playing children. They were not as amazed by his hair colour as Nico and his friends had been, but could not help but smile brightly when he heard a small boy, after seeing him, run to his mother and declare that later he wanted to grow up to have blue hair and look as cool as 'that mister.'

His mother pointed out that it was impolite to point at people. Ike caught her eye when she looked at him. From the look in her eyes he could tell that she was worried, as a mother always is, but when she saw Ike smile at her, she too smiled at bit and nodded, as if to greet him.

This was probably Ike's second favourite reaction to his hair colour, Nico's being his most favourite. He had been told it was beautiful many times before and many times afterwards, but it didn't really do anything to him, nor did the giggles of girls as he passed by. But the fact that as small boy thought his blue hair mad him 'cool' was something he had never actually considered something to be proud of, and that made it special.

As he ran a hand through his hair as he realised that, his guard companion said: "Feeling confident now, are you?"

"I suppose a bit more now, yeah."

She grinned at his answer. Ike looked at her. She had left her helmet at the castle, just like her weapons and the heaviest pieces of armour, something Ike would never even consider doing, but it suited her carefree spirit.

"You never told me your name," Ike stated.

"I didn't?" She looked quite surprised, " I thought I did… I come from quite the big family you see. I had seven brothers, all of them older than me. Everyone always called me little daisy, 'cause I loved that flower so much. But I got off track."

She looked over her shoulder with the kind of grin like smile that only those with the warm facial features of people from the country know the secret of. "My name's Lucy."

Ike smiled back at her, "Ike."

"Really?" She looked at him with big eyes.

"Yeah, really," Ike confirmed. "Is there something wrong with that?"

"No. No. Not at all, it's just that…" she stopped to think about how to put it, "You know, Ike's not an uncommon name at all."

"I know it's somewhat common," Ike said, "but why are you so surprised then?"

"Well, it's just that I had expected you to have some kind of exotic name, not being from here and all, I mean."

"I can understand that," Ike said, but then wondered, "What would you have imagined my name to be then?"

Lucy gave him a confused look, "Come again?"

"What do you consider to be an exotic name?"

"Don't know," she stated, "Something I've never heard of before, I suppose."

"That's kind of broad, don't you think? Most people at least have an example of what they consider an unusual name, if not an exotic one," Ike tried to explain.

"Well, you give an example if you know it all so well," she bit back, although more friendly than it sounds like now, but Ike did not know of any other way to put it to words. She said it with some kind of sharp edge to it, which was playful at the same time.

"I don-" Ike stopped himself before he was going to say that he didn't know any either and took a deep breath before he said the first name that came to mind.

"Ranulf."

"What kind of name is that?"

"It's the name of one of my best friends. It's really unusual, isn't it? I at least always thought it was. At first I thought it'd be a common name among Laguz, but it turned out that it was unusual even for them. You also have Soren, my other good friend. I remember, it took some of the mercenaries months before they managed to remember it when we first met him. And there's another friend of mine, who-"

Lucy cut him off by laughing, "You seem to know a lot of funny folks, you know."

"Funny? I don't really think they are funny, they just have their own distinctive personalities and they…"

Ike could hear the sound of his voice die out as he stared in shock at the man who had just passed him.

He wore clothes the colour of sand, a mantle slung covering one arm and fastened on the opposite shoulder. Brown hair fluttered in the wind as he passed and the wooden staff he carried ticked against the stones of the pavement. He could see something shine in the light on the man's wrists in the passing and a flash of red around the eyes.

Ike stood paralyzed as the man walked passed him. Somewhere at the back of his mind he could hear Lucy calling out to him and her hand on his shoulder, trying to break him out of his sudden trance by softly shaking him.

After barely the blink of an eye, Ike moved. He took big strides as he moved through the streets, not running, but not quite just walking either. Going in the direction he had thought he had seen the man go. He couldn't have been standing still for more than a few seconds and yet Ike could not seem to find the man. The streets were almost empty and yet there was no sign of him. In the back of his mind Ike knew that it couldn't have been the boy from the desert, the proclaimed demon, and yet Ike refused to just give up on this chance. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard Lucy shout and follow him hastily, but Ike could only think of one thing:

Finding him.

There would not be another chance, that had become clear in Ike's mind, and that was why Ike would not let there be any other option. He would find him and he would get to the bottom of it.

Ike was vaguely aware of the fact that he was treading into areas with more people and busier stalls along the side of the road. Ike ignored the on going market, still feeling to stressed out by the sight of that man. He pushed aside person after person and even heard himself getting yelled at for almost knocking over a kid. But every time he thought he caught a glimpse of sand coloured clothes or brown hair, he went after it, hoping he was going after the right person and would not lose and had not lost him. He didn't force himself to push through all the people and ignore all of their remarks without even an apology, because to him this was something that was supposed to happen. He needed to do this.

As it raced through his mind that the crowd was making it harder for him to spot his target, he felt someone grab onto his mantle, which he had gotten on loan from an unspecified maid. He turned around, while still walking towards his goal and, before he could even see who had grabbed onto him, he slammed into something from behind and hard too. Ike realised that the thing he had slammed into was giving way and in a moment it cracked and he could hear whatever was behind him crash down. People screamed and gave small yelps of surprise, one even cried out in utter desperation and a child started crying.

Ike looked the guard that was holding his mantle in the eyes and he knew that he would never see get the chance to see that man again.


After having spent a good half an hour apologizing to the market salesman, his wife and the crowd in general for making their market stall collapse and causing such a disturbance, two guards had taken him away to the castle again. Ike had tried to talk his way out of his handcuffs, not wanting to be seen as some kind of hardened criminal that had to be dragged to jail by two guards, but to no avail. In the end he had had to walk towards prison like every other criminal, with his hands cuffed and two guards at his sides.

Ike had tried his hardest to look straight ahead of him, with a neutral expression on his face. He did not want to appear as someone at the end of his rope, who had turned to crime out of despair, nor as someone without any regard for another persons life. Not that he was either of that, mind you, and because he wasn't that, he would not allow himself to look down or make a face that might frighten people.

The walk towards the prison seemed to take forever and Ike was all too aware of the looks people were giving him. He it wasn't hard to picture them thinking things like: 'See, foreigners are no good' or 'people like him shouldn't be allowed to stay here.'

He felt guilty of course. He had in a strange state of mind all but dashed through streets, people and market stalls alike. He must've hurt more than one person by forcefully pushing them to the side and it was quite a wonder that he had only managed to knock over one market stall.

The prison was build just behind the borders of the castle courtyard, something that did not seem like a logic thing to do if you wanted to keep the royal family save. It was a round building of plain grey stone with small crevices that served as some sort of window, allowing just enough sunlight into the cells to drive some freedom deprived human being insane with the though of outside.

When Ike had been guided inside, it became clear to him that the Prison was much larger than he had thought. It didn't rise into the sky, but had been dug out in the ground, making all but the upper three floors below ground level. The cells were all lined against the wall and safe for a walkway by the cells, there were no floors, creating a round, large space in the middle of the prison.

On one of the lower levels, where less prisoners were and the cells seamed harsher and more threatening, Ike saw the man from the evening before, the first one that had been made to dance. He looked at Ike with big eyes in fear, although. Ike knew he was silently pleading for anything, anything but this.

The guards brought Ike all the way down to the bottom. A reasonable amount of light fell through the ceiling and reached the last floor, but still it was deemed necessary to have a burning candle standing on the table. The table was placed not quite in the middle of the floor, since in the exact middle there was a square hole, covered with heavy looking bars. Ike presumed it was a drain part of a system for water and other fluids to be exported out of the prison, into the sewers.

He was sat down at the table, across from a man in dark grey clothing, who was so occupied with scribbling in the large book in front of him that Ike doubted he had noticed them at all. He indeed paid no intention to either Ike or the guards and Ike used the time to observe him.

He was leaning over his work in such a way that Ike could barely make out his face. Ike had given up on deciphering the signs and symbols the man was scribbling down in the book. The man himself appeared to be of Laguz descent. A few dark lines ran over his face, like Ike had seen with other Laguz, mostly from Tiger Laguz. Aside from that the two reddish ears – pierced with rings of all sorts of thickness and engraved with all sorts of designs and patterns – poking out from the man's hair would've been enough to draw this conclusion from.

He appeared different from most Laguz Ike knew. He was calmer and because of that one who would not let his temper get the better of him. But even if he seemed so, it would say nothing about who he actually was.

"Hey," Ike said, having grown impatient with the man's obliviousness to their presence.

For a single moment he held his writing and then continued.

"Hey," Ike repeated with a bit more force. He could hear the guards, who were starting to become unnerved, try to shuffle backward even the tiniest bit from the table.

The man's head snapped up and for a moment Ike's eyes met fiery ones. Then he looked back at his work as quick and suddenly as he had looked up. His hand holding his quill finished the last sentence.

"Leave," he spoke. His voice was lighter than Ike had expected from someone who was so serious. The guard nodded behind Ike's back at the man and made their way up the stairs as quickly as they could, while still trying to maintain their professional appearance.

The man turned a few pages until he reached a blank one in the section he needed.

"Name."

"What?" Ike asked. He realised very well that this was quite rude, but it was not like he was being treated with any less rudeness.

"Name," the man ordered.

"Uhm, Ike."

"Occupation."

"I don't know." Ike realised this was not something that would satisfy and dug deeper inside his brain. "I am a mercenary back at home, but now… I think I'm just a traveller as of the moment."

The man waited a moment and then scribbled something down.

"Sell sword," he muttered under his breath, just loud enough for someone to hear. Ike felt anger rise at the deliberate insult, but tried to keep his calm as best as possible.

"Crime."

"Crime?" Ike bounced back.

The Protector almost sighed out of annoyance, nor did he show his annoyance in any other way, but he only looked up and spoke very slowly, as if he were speaking to a child.

"What did you do to end up here?"

"I don't know. I happened to crash into a market stall and before I knew it they took me here."

The man looked at him for a moment and then returned to writing in his book, saying, Ike presumed, what he was writing down.

"Admits to causing harm to other people or their property and causing a public disturbance."

"Wait!" Ike began, "I didn't do that! I mean I did, but it was an accident!" When the man in front of him stopped writing, Ike knew he had the mans attention and he continued talking, "You see, I was in town with one of the guard… Lucy, her name was… and then I happened to see this guy and I followed him and then I crashed into the stall when I wasn't paying attention."

The man looked at him, but didn't move his head this time. "You're saying that you were with Lucy."

"Yes."

"You are sure?"

This was the first time the man was phrasing an actual question, although Ike had stated it before, he confirmed it.

"That means…" he mumbled, before scribbling in the book again.

He crossed out the last part he had written – about causing harm to people or their possessions and a public disturbance – and scribbled a few new sentences, from which Ike had no idea what they were saying.

"Stay here until someone comes to get you."

The man stood up and left Ike sitting there. He made his way to and up the stairs quickly, moving in a way somewhere between running and walking.

Ike did not know what to think of all of this. He waited first, but after a few minutes of just sitting around he got bored. He couldn't make sense of the book in front of him, so there was no point in looking around in it. From staring up at the different floors he learnt that from about four floors up from the bottom the guard were patrolling. He could not tell if the cells were empty or not, but if he assumed that they wouldn't respond to him he would make it three floors up at best, four if he was really lucky, without being spotted by the guards, but that would get him into more trouble than he was in now.

Driven by utter boredom he stood up and walked by the cells on the bottom floor. They were all empty and looked more gruesome than the ones Ike had seen at the top, which had been plain cells out of stone, empty safe for a stack of hay to rest on. These did not appear to have a substitute for a bed at all. They were dark and cold, empty, safe for heavy looking chains attached to the wall.

Ike thought that the idea of bringing people all the way down there, except for the fact that there was enough room down here to interrogate them, was to intimidate them. He was not sure how intimidation was supposed to help, but it was obvious that there was a certain purpose to it.

When he had seen about half of the cells and examined them thoroughly, although they all appeared to be the same, he came across a thus far unnoticed set of stairs in that led into the ground.

Ike had a small debate with himself whether to go down the stairs or to stay on this floor. When the one side of his mind reasoned that the Protector had been gone for quite some time already and that he would most likely be back before there would be anyone checking on him, he carefully took a few steps down the stairs and continued his way.

After the floor he had just stood on had become a ceiling above his head and he could already see the first shimmering of the first torch to light his way, he noticed that it had started to get cold and for a moment he believed that he could distinguish the rusty smell of dried blood.

Then he could hear footsteps on the ground above him and he felt his heart stop. He thought millions of things in that fraction of a second. How had they returned so quickly? Who was, or were, it? Were they looking for him? Where? Would they assume he had taken the stairs first and had gone hiding in an empty cell? How long would it take for them to actually realise he was here and go after him? Was he in trouble?

He was. And this meant only more trouble. He had made his decision pretty quick. If going up was no longer an option, he would go down.

His first step was cautious, aimed at placing his foot down without making any noise, and thus not alerting anyone immediately of his presence. His foot still came down harder than intended and the sound echoed down the stairs. That was when Ike decided that safety could go to hell and he rushed down the stairs, no longer caring for the volume of the sounds that he made.

The footsteps of whoever were chasing him, because Ike had noticed that there had to be at least two pairs of footsteps, were also running down the stairs behind him. Ike could only feel the adrenaline rush through his veins faster and ran down the stairs harder.

The bottom of the stairs came quite suddenly and Ike almost slammed into the door at the end of the stairs. For a moment he worried that it might be locked when the door wouldn't open the first time he tugged at it. Another, firmer tug and the door, which appeared to be only slightly jammed in its frame, gave way and Ike slammed the door shut behind him.