Morning
Zangulus smirked to himself as he began to arrive at the sight he had left his captives. This time he wouldn't have to worry about them roaming around and wreaking havoc with his little ambush sight.
"There is no way they could have..." Zangulus stared in disbelief at Tinuviel jotting something down in her notebook and readjusting her spectacles as she scanned the walls, oblivious to the mazoku's reappearance. Kyrie, on the other hand saw him immediately.
"HI!!! Look what I made!!" The little girl pointed at the cutesy kid drawings all over the walls. Zangulus didn't even bother to ask where she had gotten the paints, he had other things on his mind.
"How did you get loose!!" Zangulus shouted.
"Kyrie-chan untied me," Tinuviel supplied helpfully as she continued looking over the ruined building she was "imprisoned" in.
"How'd she get loose?!!" Zangulus demanded. He turned to face the little blonde girl.
"Jol-niisan asks me that all the time," she said thoughtfuly, before going back to her painting.
Zangulus vacated the room, sick to the stomach from all the good feelings in the room.
"They had better get here quickly," he grumbled. "I'm running out of patience."
Amethyst took a moment to try and figure out the point of this stop. Obstensibly they had all been tired and thought to stop and get some sleep so they would be of some use later when they reached Sairagg. Especially Val, who'd have to fly them over the ocean. Of course there was also the problem of Sherra's transformation, which, admittedly, Amethyst hadn't thought of.
Now, that she was sitting here watching the guys glare at each other she wondered if they might as well just get moving. Of course, now they had to wait for Sherra and Xina to return from hunting. So Amethyst contented herself with watching the guys and wondering what to do about them.
Jol merely sulked, and Amethyst couldn't blame him, this was becoming an uneccesary delay. His sister and Tinuviel were being held prisoner by a murdering demon that had several times come close to killing one or another of them all, mostly Xina. The fact that apparently Zangulus was an old rival of Jolrael-san's father made the conflict even older. The young swordsman hefted his sheathed sword and glared silently.
Amethyst was moderately worried about sharing a campsite with a mazoku, even one that was apparently limited in power. Then again, Xina-san and Xalan-san were half-mazoku, so she assumed that meant not all mazoku were instantly bad. Besides, Duofolger tended to look more confused than anything, except about watching out for Sherra. Amethyst sighed at that, it was SO sweet, of course Sherra didn't seem to notice at all. The former sword seemed to be splitting his attention between Val, Xalan and the woods.
Xalan appeared to be relaxed, sitting there and carving a new quarterstaff for use against foes a light weapon would be overkill for. Amethyst smirked, nobody else had probably noticed that he would occaisionally glance off at the woods. The only thing keeping him in place was probably the desire to keep an eye on Duofolger, and maybe Val. Amethyst wasn't certain. It was killing him to not go out and watch his sister. Amethyst smiled at him quietly, and giggled as he embarrasedly turned away from her.
Val meanwhile was probably more obvious than anybody. He kept looking at Duofolger and scratching his head, as if trying to figure something out. Amethyst had overheard tell Xina that the mazoku seemed familiar somehow. Mostly, however, he kept an eye on the woods, even more than Duofolger. Amethyst supposed it was because he didn't have as many former enemies around as Doufolger. He was also fidgeting more than anybody else. Amethyst shook her head amused and turned toward the east.
"Hmm, its going to be a beautiful sunrise," she said, then scrunched her eyes in confusion.
"Its dawn already?" Xalan asked. Now everybody looked into the woods where Sherra and Xina were hunting.
"This is all your fault," Sherra growled. Her focus his directed to where she was clawing through the damnable threads that had the two of them tangled up.
"Who started the fight?" Xina snapped. She was glaring at the ground, and the mass of splattered giant spiders below her. She would have been trying to use her force spears to slice through the web, but the damn things had an uncomfortable habit of ricochetting.
"I remember somebody leading me around to a skunk," Sherra reminded her.
"Oh, shut up and just finish cutting this damn thing," Xina insisted from her inverted position.
"I'm almost finish..." Sherra's eyes went wide and she started picking up the pace of trying to cut the strand she was working on.
Xina was curious until the first restrained sounds of pain coming from the werefox above her. She had seen heard other transformations, and caught the tail end of Sherra's first transformation last night. This was the first time she had seen one up close, other than her mother's. Lina had long ago gotten past any pain in the transformation.
Xina hadn't expected the spasms as Sherra's fur and foxy features retreated into a normal, if blue-haired, form. She couldn't help but feel sorry for the girl as her attempts to cut the web degenerated into spasms and she screamed outloud into the growing day. The kage-kitsune was confused as well, her mother had said that becoming human usually didn't involve any pain. The spasms and screaming didn't stop until a completely human Sherra suddenly slumped, as if she had been a puppet with her strings cut.
"Sherra?" the blue-haired girl didn't answer, merely tried to catch her breath. "Hey, you awake?"
"Yes, I'm awake you damn brat!" Sherra snapped. "I've faced worse pain than that! Try being a mazoku for six hundred years you'll experience all kinds of pain." Of course, she wasn't mazoku now, and not long a werefox, and pain was different when it didn't feed you a little as well. And the human instincts of her body screamed that the change was wrong, and they hadn't adjusted yet. Nor had she was she even close to learning how to control the change yet, after all it was only her first night.
"Whatever you say," Xina would have shrugged, if she could have. The kage-kitsune didn't buy her explanation. "There's something I haven't tried yet."
"What's that?" Sherra demanded after a long, irritated pause.
"This could hurt," she warned.
"What are you going to..." Sherra glanced up as region of darkness spread out above them. She glared back down at Xina. "What's that supposed to..." Then the two of them were falling to the ground and landing with a thump. Sherra growled and tried to stand up out of the mess of spider guts and webs.
"AAAHH! YOU'RE PULLING MY TAIL!!"
"GOOD!!!"
"When I get out of this I'm going pull your hair out by the roots," Xina promised levelly. "AHH!!"
"Oh, I'm sorry, did that pull your tail again?"
"Grrr.."
"Oh...dear..."
Both girls tried to turn toward the familiar voice. Amethyst was staring at them mildly shocked.
"Do we want to know how this happened?" Xalan asked the almost terminally embarrassed mazoku next to him. The kage-kitsune's nose scrunched as the wind shifted. "Gah...who pissed off the skunk."
"I think its both of them," Val said, looking a little green.
"Let's just get them loose and get going," Jol insisted.
"We could just roll them into a package and carry them along," Xalan suggested calmly. Xina and Sherra exchanged glances.
"He pays for that."
"Agreed."
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