Hey guys, so can I ask you to please please please please go vote in the poll on my profile page for WHO YOU THINK SHOULD FILL THE 7TH SPOT IN THE NINJA'S CRUSADE? (and to those of you who want to say Nya, she's already one of the seven. Jay, Kai, Cole, Zane, Lloyd, and Nya have already filled those spots) I've given a list of who you guys can pick from, so PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE VOTE! I NEED TO KNOW WHO YOU GUYS WANT TO REMAIN GOOD!
And to those of you who already voted, you're awesome, and thank you a gajillion times for voting. :D Also, I will be making pictures of Lloyd and Seiko's dinner clothing (as you'll read about in this chapter) so you can visualize them better? (Go have an AWESOME day/night!)
11. The Torture People
GALLONS OF WATER, pints of soap, and one really large bathtub later Lloyd was being fitted with clothing that looked like it belonged to someone important, smelling like a bottle of Kai's New Man soap/cologne combo. There were maids that surrounded him by the dozens, only ever moving in residual pairs, wearing what outfits were black dresses—not kept nice and pretty, mind you—with a white apron over the top. Each of them had themselves a pair of red eyes and devilishly pointed ears, with strangely shaped noses. Imagine them how you like, but they acted nothing like the scary savages they were led to portray. Lloyd would say they were decent to be around, but he kind of thought that came from the fact that they poured over him, touching him in ways that was uncomfortable for a kid his age to be touched. At least, he thought that until he remembered that he was seventeen now. These girls didn't know he previously had been a ten year old just last birthday.
On that note, it's probably obvious he was not okay with having all these maids look at him when he had nothing on. But they scooped up his outfit from a chair sitting in the corner of the bathroom, a pile of black silk in the girl's arms. She smiled disgracefully while Lloyd was still wrapped in the bubbles of that huge bathtub. It made him blush. She untangled the mess of elegant robes from her arms while holding the pair of pants up for him to see. "You like?" she said, struggling with the earthly words. The pair or "pants" he was given was long, silky, and the perfect shade of black, but he found himself comparing it to Seiko's hair. No, it wasn't the perfect shade of black, because the perfect shade of black would've been, as previously mentioned, Seiko's ebony curtain of hair. This seemed like an…off black, really, but nothing compared to—
Get it together, Lloyd, he told himself. You've got a job to do. After the ungentle urging of the maids, Lloyd sighed deeply. This was definitely going to be weird. He finally swallowed every ounce of dignity he had left.
He stood up.
And with the maid's hungry looks, he prayed that Seiko was having a better time than he was.
SEIKO
THEY PRACTICALLY HAD to hold her down the whole course of the bath. It was so hard to manage when she was being attacked by people's hands, cornered in a place where she could easily be drowned, with people touching her in places she let no one touch. Seiko smacked one cleaning lady with such a force, she fell into the bathtub with her, where Seiko shoved her underwater to give her a taste of it. They shaved her legs, her armpits, and even ripped a course at her arms, though that was where the Mitsuhide drew the line. They towed her out of the bathtub and didn't even give her the privacy of having a towel wrapped around her, but instead lathered down—literally lathered to the point of a second skin—with lotion that actually smelled nice. Its scent was that related to a cup of cocoa from her mother's special recipe, the kind she'd make her daughter when Seiko needed something to make her feel better.
The cleaning/torture people then began to lace her into something that she didn't like at all. It went around her stomach and squeezed in her chest, while also itching her skin worse than wool. Seiko fought with her unseen compressors, but they insisted that what the king requested must be done, and after repeating that a million times, she was just exhausted of hearing such a stupid excuse to flow from these people's lips to argue anymore. From there, she felt them begin to slip her into a dress that she couldn't see, fitting it snugly over her body. If she hadn't had that constricting…whaddyacallit… Corset strapping in her lungs, organs, and just about everything else within her body, the dress never would've fit. The torture people—she decided that they didn't deserve such an innocent name as "cleaning people"—started to play with her hair, and some started playing with her eyes by attaching what Seiko assumed was makeup to her skin, but after fighting with her for so long, the demand for eyeshadow no longer existed. They played with her cheeks instead.
A jewelry clerk-tress began to slip different rings onto her fingers in attempt to find which one matched her outfit best. She made plenty of noises of approval, but once the biggest sigh of contempt released, she held out Seiko's hand against the wrench of the owner against it for all to admire. "Pret-ty," commented a maid in stressed, bad human words. Seiko rolled her eyes.
"But what dis?" one commented. They flipped her hand over. Simultaneous gasps revolted against Seiko's psyche until she realized what they were staring at. She exclaimed, "Don't touch that!"
Too late, small fingertips traced the horizontal scar patterns across her wrist.
LLOYD
"You look handsome, Sir Garmadon," giggled one of the blonde maids with the red eyes, peeking at him from beneath her lashes. Lloyd shifted on his feet without the capability to somehow stop himself from blushing. He looked down at the elegant black satin robes prepared for him to wear, already properly applied by the seven hundred maids gathered to ready him, although he doubted he needed more than two. The top half of his robes were so long, they looked like a dress on him, rolling down his body in sophisticated waves in shades of black. It made his eyes and golden hair stand out, with the sliver of skin shown of his chest, in the triangle where the two halves of his robe connected. What, six maids had already touched that bare skin now? Lloyd gently batted away the seventh. It appeared these little things—definitely creatures sprung from hell rather than individual beings of mortalism—were drawn to men. This was obvious when the stout, royally dressed creature in which had retrieved them swung the door to his chambers wide, and all the maids flocked to him with dreamy gasps and comments in a tongue that Lloyd wished he couldn't understand. The little man, whose skin was of a gray shade and belly round as a pot, with bushy brown eyebrows hovering above beady red eyes, seemed flattered by them. Eventually, he learned to shove aside the creepy words to look into Lloyd's eye.
"Thou!" he said loudly. "Thou must attend thy King's dinner with grace and digestion, for thy King speaks of holy release in which thou must be grateful to!"
Grace and…digestion? Lloyd nodded with a respectful bow, earning a look of approval from the little man. His black clothes stretched over his fat stomach. It bulged worse, like Lloyd's gaze added ten pounds for every second he spared staring at it. The fat nosed man beckoned to the large door of the room—which was basically empty except for a random cot and that huge bathtub, so he couldn't really describe it other than a dark-walled room. "Come thou, then," said the tiny voice of the fat man. He only reached Lloyd's waist.
The hallway was better decorated than the room they left the greedy maids in. The walls were painted a silver, with gold trim to every large doorway; a long carpet the color of blood rolled as far as Lloyd's eye could see down the tremendous corridor. Each door was the color black, made not of wood but some shiny surface in which jewels were driven into. Chandeliers made similarly of dangling bones and diamonds hung every ten feet apart on the high ceiling, embracing the passage with dark shadows and illumination. There weren't any wall hangings, no family photos, no random candles. Door after door after door was smacked upon the walls. Everything looked the same.
Lloyd followed the wobbling man in pianist's clothes down the hallway. "Thy King hast requested to see thy face," he conversed. His voice was high pitched, like his nose was squeezed as he spoke. "Thou father ist named that of Garmadon, is it not?"
"Er, yes," Lloyd answered after a pause to decipher what in the heck had just happened.
The little man with gray skin nodded quickly. "Of course. Sir Garmadon was thy King's tutor before he hath disappeared—which, appears, he has spoken truth of his child he once only dreamed of seeing! I wish the best of lucks to your father, wherever he resides," the little man grunted. Lloyd scrounged up something to say.
"I'm sure he's doing fine, wherever he is," he said, hoping that it was true. The little man led the way further down the corridor before taking a left down a hallway Lloyd never would've noticed, jammed between two rooms, had the creature not pointed it out. He scampered to follow close behind into a hallway that looked exactly as the other had before, except the color scheme was slightly different. The carpet along the floor was silver, the walls were gold, and the trims over the doors were red. Lloyd wondered if the palace's designers had any idea what color collaboration was.
"Ah, there thy mistress," said the fat man. Lloyd glanced down at him. "Thy King hast requested to see her urgently."
"See who…?" Lloyd followed the line of vision where the stout thing looked to, and found what he'd previously known as a dirtied, forlorn creature to become a magnificent, glowing beauty. She stepped out of the doorway under tug of a maid, digging in her feet to try and stop herself from behind dragged away to wherever she was going. Lloyd had seen Nya countless times being dressed in something really pretty—though admitting that would only end in some kind of something from Kai's fist to his face—but never once had he seen a dress that configured someone so perfectly, it knocked the breath out of him. Seiko's dress was the most amazing shade of deep burgundy he'd ever seen, the kind of dress that was short in the front and longer as it reached towards the end of the train, revealing her long, attractive white legs. Black, kick-ass combat boots were underneath, making her look like she could knock him out with just one hit to the stomach. Only half her hair was pulled away from her face, leaving the lower section down, and falling over her barren shoulders. He could actually see both of her eyes, and though a shade of translucent gray-blue, they were sparkling with mischief. There were no straps to her dress, but instead the neckline was created in a shape that looked like mini crescent moons stuck up in a fiery formation, two separate sides creating a heart-like shape to reveal where her heart was. That sliver of bare skin sent his heart racing. Her hands were covered in lacy black gloves that were missing the fingers in them, reaching past her wrists. Seiko's body was completely defined by the dress she wore…and even though he didn't know her completely and totally yet—and from what he did know, it was that she needed to be helped with some anger issues—Lloyd had a distant thought in his mind that he wanted to know her better.
Her head turned towards him, though her eyes didn't rest on him. Lloyd swallowed. "Is that you, Goldy Locks?" she called, and he had to give a smirk. It was pretty hard for her to actually call him by his name. Opening his mouth, he found that his throat was dry. He cleared it.
"Yeah, it's me."
Seiko gave a half smirk. She poised her hands to her lips, and Lloyd found himself thinking, Oh, God, don't do that…The way she did it made her look so…He wanted to smack himself for thinking this way. What was he doing? Did he need to remind himself that girls had cooties?
"Well? How do I look?" She asked, twirling for him. Lloyd wrenched his eyes away with a hard swallow. "I can't really see myself, so you're going to have to tell me how completely terrible I look."
"Um…" Lloyd rubbed the back of his neck. Seiko's expression narrowed.
"What?" She asked skeptically. "What's that for?"
Lloyd tried to think of a better way to say it. "Well, you don't look terrible," he said, finding that his voice didn't come out right. He cleared his throat again. "You actually look…pretty."
Seiko stared towards him a moment, her eyes resting on his chest, unseeing. He wondered what was going through her mind at the realization that she was blind. She seemed so cool, calm, and collected about it; what did they do, inject her with something? He was surprised she wasn't tearing out his throat right about now with the angry vengeance of a spider monkey. He felt a blush creep across his cheeks, and even though she couldn't see him, he looked away.
A smirk fell to her lips. "You think I look pretty?" she asked. It was supposed to come out as a jive, but it sounded more like an honest question.
"Oh, um, well…I guess," Lloyd said uncomfortably. He wasn't actually too experienced in the girl department, as you can probably tell. He waited for her to start laughing at him, but there wasn't any of that, only the brief smile. It didn't linger long enough for Lloyd to make the connection that it was mocking or real. The fat man waved at them to get walking.
"Thy must pick up thy pace, or thou wilt suffer the King's anger at thy feast."
Seiko started following the sound of his voice, although her walking was a little off. Lloyd watched her for a few amused, enjoyable moments while she tried to make her footing work. The little man's distance between them grew longer and tedious with the fact that Lloyd stayed behind to match Seiko's pace. God, it had to be hard, not being able to see; he couldn't imagine how painful it had to be to her…
…Or maybe she didn't care at all, because what life Seiko had lived was spent never being seen in the first place.
Lloyd shook his head. That thought didn't belong to him; he glared at the eye on his hand. The maids had gotten quite scared when their eyes rested on the blood red mark of his skin, but quickly they'd adapted around it. He pushed the thoughts away to sigh.
"You're still here, Twinkies?" Seiko cocked her head to listen.
"Why wouldn't I?"
"I thought you ran ahead to warn Pork Chop that the blind girl was falling behind," she said, pointing ahead. "I heard you jog up there."
Lloyd frowned. "I didn't go anywhere. I've been right beside you the whole time."
It took Seiko a moment to develop the grin and eye roll. "Uh-huh. Suuurrrree. Let's play that game, uh huh. But I'm not stupid; my other senses are heightened. I know that you ran ahead. You can stop pretending now."
Lloyd's face twisted. "What are you talking about?" He asked. "I didn't go anywhere. I swear, I was right here the whole time."
It was Seiko's turn to frown. "You sure about that, Twinkies?" she asked, turning her head slightly towards him.
"Positive," he answered.
Neither of them was prepared for the feral cry erupting throughout the deserted hall, the quick shake of the chandeliers above their heads under the weight of the scream. Its bloodcurdling pitches left echoes in Lloyd's ears. The floor trembled with the noise, practically knocking Seiko onto the ground. He pulled her closer. The Eye's emotionless voice whispered a warning in his mind, but by then, his reaction was too delayed.
The shadows created by the magnificent light pieces descended on them with screams ringing horrors of the dead.
