Kendal: DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN DAMN YOOOOOUUUUU!!111!!11!!1!

Me: PROFANITY IS NOT ALLOWED! (mauls)

Kendal: OW OW OW OW OW OW!!

Me: So what's the ruckus?

Kendal: WHY ARE YOU SO CRUEL TO ME! I THOUGHT-

Me: STOP EXCLAIMING SO MUCH! NOW YOU HAVE ME DOING IT, YOU SH!#, NOW STOP! So, whadja think?

Kendal: I THOUGHT YOU WERE- Oh yeah, I forgot. I- Thought- You- Were- Trying- To-

Me: SHUT UP! YOU'RE HOLDING UP THE CHAPTER! SAVE IT FOR LATER!

Everyone: (groans) And then we get beaten up faster…

Genis: Screamingedge owns nothing of Namco, nor Tales of Symphonia.


If there was anything I wanted to do now, it was to not have met them.

Why?

It was turning out to be exactly what happened to me all those years ago- All beginning because I was a runt, the weakest, maybe the smartest of all Damasci.

And then I became the fastest. The strongest (In a mutated, altered sort of way). The one who would always win.

Why? Because I'd see everything coming right before they actually came. A sort of humanoid/weird-ness version of weather prediction machines (That only was only had in Tethe'Alla at the present time), that this time didn't see weather. No, it saw fists, fireballs, and flailing feet coming at my face in an attempt to beat me into a pulp.

Which never actually happened unless you counted the one time I dropped from exhaustion that I didn't even know was there. Moving on.

VWVWVWVWV

As the image solidified, I drew back, very much scared. What the hell was this?

And then, I fell over. Had I just said a swear word like it was part of normal, conversational language?

As I got up again, shaking, I saw gold eyes. My eyes. Except…

These were cold, as hard a steel. Just like how I wished desperately for my own to be. Was this all a session of imagination? For now, it seemed disturbingly likely.

"Are you calling me a figment of your imagination? Hold on- Our imagination?"

"Our!?" I yelped, scrambling away from the ghostly figure.

A sigh, laced with amusement and cruel sarcasm. And then, when the figure was not yet fully formed, it buzzed out of existence. No, not disappeared- It sort of became a double image, before vanishing.

"Boo."

Slowly turning around, I saw the… thing right there. And immediately, I screamed. Scrambling away in the opposite direction, I fell over myself, crashing on my back. As I struggled to get back, I heard yet another sigh of the same kind.

And then suddenly I was back on my feet, as if I had been pushed by something that was too fast to see-

Wait, a second, that was exactly what happened. A hand had pushed me… A hand that seemed to be half not there, mainly because it was buzzing so much…

The thing, now fully formed, stood a mere five feet away from me… And I suddenly knew what I was seeing. Me.

About ten years older, mind-wise, with the dead cold steel in the eyes, and about twice as powerful/skilled, just from the looks.

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A knock on the door.

I hopped out of bed, my hand already reaching for the familiar hilt of my large, overly deadly cleaver, when I remembered. I wasn't captured. This wasn't camp with the others. No, this was in inn room. The Olive Village, to be exact. In Flanior.

I'd scaled the walls around the Winter City, noticed an open window that a hapless occupant had left open, and jumped inside from the position I held on the top of the wall. To my insanely amazing luck, I entered just as the room's former renter was leaving, bags and all- As I blasted into the room, a gust of snow blasted in, blinding the guy who had his back to me since he was beginning to open the door.

After a quick knuckle to the back of the neck and knocking him out cold, I then began pondered my next course of actions- Should I kill, or not kill?

It turned out to be not kill. Lloyd really had rubbed off on me- I'd seen him spare some random human bandits who had the severe misfortune to attempt to rob us. I killed everyone in my way, no regrets- He, however, was horrified by my apparent lack of empathy, as he only attacked to disarm, not kill.

So, I rolled the guy to the window, hopped down, then, as he woke up, I shoved him into the snow just on the doorstep of the Four Seasons, bags and all, and quickly scaled the city walls, and back into the window.

I shut it, and then I plopped to bed.

And now, here I was, headband off. If there was one thing I didn't want people seeing, it the scar, half burn and half rending of flesh, on my forehead. It was not only nasty, but it was repugnant enough to be possibly vomit inducing, as the charred edges were nothing but blights to the skin.

And, oh, the center of the scar was yellow, as pus apparently had leaked out and then solidified along with the blood. It wasn't just any shade of yellow- It was a blotchy, faded yellow that made you think of puke.

So yeah. Moving on. As I quickly wrapped my headband back around, the knocking intensified, until a voice, a rather gruff, male one, suddenly said in an irritated voice, "God damn, stop knocking!"

A female voice, apparently who had been knocking: "And why should I!"

"The guy in there already checked out! Why else!?"

As the conversation spiraled into the realm known only to people as boredom, I sighed, and relaxed. Besides, the heated conversation (Which now was going into personal matters, which I had no desire to listen to) was beginning to move away, so what was the rush?

Bad move. Really, really bad move. The moment I stepped back, a floorboard creaked under my foot. Time stopped.

But it was quickly second, because before I even had a chance to turn around and fly away, a sudden crash exploded somewhere else in the outside hall.

"GODDAMMIT! THIS IS WHY WE SHOULD HAVE NEVER HIRED YOU!"

Apparently, some sort of vase was busted…

I never knew just how much two humans could make a ruckus loud enough to make my rants look paltry in comparison.

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A night in the wilderness that surrounded Flanior was nothing to easily be spoken of. For one thing, there were the blizzards.

Ohhh, yes, the blizzards, like Genis happened to discover once they had landed. He liked the cold, since it didn't make him sweat, obviously, like the summertime.

But here?

It was pure heaven, since Genis liked the cold even with short pants, even if he was a little man. Until the blizzards. That night, a blizzard hit, hard enough to make sleeping uncomfortable, to say the least.

And besides, the snow was cold but tolerable- The blizzard, with the wind chill, was impossible.

So Genis was forced to settle down for the night, being huddled in the sleeping bag that Regal had somehow managed to store in a spare wing pack. And when Genis was in bed, he thought before he got to sleep.

In this case, he fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow- For Genis, this was quite unusual, given the fact he was so alert most of the time and therefore often didn't fall asleep until a good thirty minutes later.

But then again, noting that the day had been so demanding, physically, mentally, and emotionally, it wasn't hard to see why.

As Genis fell into the abyss know as sleep, he saw… things.

A shrouded, silhouetted man in a dimming sky walked away from where Genis stood. Somehow, without knowing who he was, Genis was shouting at him to come back, as some sort of tail flared behind.

He looked behind, but stopped turning his head a quarter way and said something that was lost, as it was of a ghostly quality- Impossible to figure out. But then...

Wings of a giant phoenix suddenly flared out, as it traced itself against the night sky, the shimmering gold, red, and orange colors making themselves slash a shape through the dark, barely lit skies.

And then, as it began to fade, with one more cry, the man turned around, his eyes gleaming in a hue that seemed to be one with the phoenix-

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The next morning, Genis didn't even remember the dream. But did it matter? The thing was, the group now had a few mild cases of frostbite that had popped up in the night. On who? To name them- Zelos, Regal, and most surprisingly of all, Sheena.

"Wh-what!?" She stuttered, half out of chattering teeth, but also half out of shock when Genis told her that he was wearing shorts and a shirt- Definitely not tights and a padded kimono as Sheena was.

Which meant that a little kid was better adapted at weather than a grown woman- Embarrassing. Quite.

As soon as they were done, it suddenly became obvious that the skies of eastern Tethe'Alla was now the objective- What could lie there?

"Sheena?" Lloyd asked as they finished breakfast, extinguished the fire, and got out the Wing Packs.

Nodding, but stiff-faced, Sheena began:

"I summon the Hammer of Godly Thunder, the embodiment of lightning- Come-"

Lightning suddenly exploded from the sky as the clouds thrashed through the air-

"Volt!"

And then, in the epicenter of the mass of the clouds above them, a bulge suddenly formed as its insides splashed with light that was visible even from the outside.

And then it parted revealing a large ball of electricity with piercing red eyes and a rudimentary physical frame inside. A.K.A., Volt. Even more formal than that, a rather large explosion of sound made everyone cover their ears as it decended.

A burst of buzzing that Raine picked up. "He asks, 'what is his labor for his summoner?'"

Sheena actually turned around and screeched. "HIS LABOR? I'M NO SLAVE DRIVER!"

"Those are his exact words," Raine said, barely choking back a chuckle.

"THEN TELL HIM THAT HE'D BETTER BE QUITE ABOUT HIS LABOR AND JUST SAY 'WHAT IS IT!'"

"You just did," Raine said weakly, her sides heaving from the attempt to control otherwise rampant laughter.

"I DON'T SPEAK BUZZ-BUZZ OR WHAT THE DAMN HELL VOLT SPEAKS! YOU TELL HIM!"

An amused, crackly, but otherwise perfectly understandable "I speak buzz-buzz?"

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Browsing the wares of Hailstorm, the weapon/armor shop of Flanoir, was more like fighting your way through a real hailstorm. With monsters on the loose, and a coincidental upsurge in bandits taking advantage of helpless travelers, armor and weapons were now in incredibly high demand.

Which meant that the place was freakin' crowded to the max- Even the door was open, to accommodate both the people coming out and the ones coming in, who happened to outnumber the former three to one.

As I fought my way to a clerk, intending to ask for a second shoulder guard in addition to the one on my left shoulder, which had been rendered near-useless previously, I heard something, even over the bustle of the shop.

Thunder. Normally, I'd ignore it. But why in the world did thunder hit when there was no thunderstorm that had been forming this morning, or last night?

And then the answer hit me.

Them.

Knowing full well that attempting to force my way out the door was something bordering onto useless and that I had left my cleaver at the room in the inn (Besides, was now the time to make another very violent appearance? It was getting tiring to hide from the bounty hunters). So, what's another way in…

Or out?

A window. As I observed it, the skylight on the room groaned as a squall of air hit it. But I'd rather not risk slamming it through, and bombing the frame to make it drop was no option, since I was trapped under it in a cage of jostling human bodies.

The back door then. I slipped behind the counter, keeping myself low to avoid being seen by would-be customers. There was absolutely no way in heaven of hell that the clerks could see me- They were so busy taking orders, showing samples, and racking up sales that the poor souls wouldn't have done more than say more than "Hi" and run off to tend some other bargain deal, no doubt.

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As the group stared at Volt in total shock, another chuckle eminated from the floating ball of electricity in front of them. "This is not my native tongue- It tires me quickly to to use this clumsy language. But I can manage- Once."

Which meant they'd better learn the most from Volt while they could. "Um, okay," Sheena said, slightly trembling, "But what's the language you speak?"

"It is a form of ancient Elvish that only we, the ancient ones, speak."

Genis turned to Raine, startled. "So that's why you were able to-!"

"Yes," she said distractedly.

But her mind was somewhere else. For example, let's just say a previous defector.

Why had he been able to understand Volt? She knew that Volt spoke Ancient Elvish long before anyone had told them so. She'd seen his eyes when he realized Volt's intention, and he'd been able to realize that Volt's Indignation spell was about to be released upon her brother the same instant as her.

That meant one thing- Kendal Seychell was someone that knew both the language of the ancients and Kratos Aurion. Therefore, he had to be related to Cruxis somehow, which was a solid suspicion given his adverse reaction to the mere sight of Yuan.

Who was he? There was no time to find out, however. As Volt charged the Rheairds, the thought of finally saving Colette jumped into Raine Sage's mind. This was much more important than grieving about the departure of a friend/anti-friend ally, a powerful one at that, and wondering who he was.