DISCLAIMER: I don't own anyone but the stalkers and the mess in my room, don't sue waste of retainer fee.
Hi, one of my reviewers asked for someone, I wont ruin the surprise to much, but wish granted. Review, request, I'll try.
"You know I think that she's the one." The leader mused.
"Aaahhhcccoooo!" Lina sneezed. Goury stooped down slightly and checked to see if she had a fever. Lina swatted his hand away.
"Nope, no fever." Goury shrugged.
"Gee Miss Lina you sure have been sneezing a lot." Amelia notes.
"Must be dust or something."
***
The next day the unremarkable completely normal nondescript bystanders where, oddly enough not there to watch, who every one in the crowd now considered the only one worth watching. Lina, or Firestorm as her fans called her was beyond a doubt the crowd's darling. When a few of Lina's new fan club had spotted her in her hotel they ran to the nearest flower shop and came running back to her with bouquets of roses and birds of paradise. Some of them hearing that she hailed from Zelfila brought her expensive bottles of Zelfilain wine. Most of them did every thing but throw money at her feet. That would have made the youthful sorceress ecstatic, but as it was Lina was pleased. Also a large amount of people told her that they had and would be betting for her in her next competition. When she had stepped into the arena to have her first Magical Battle, the audience was cheering minus the unnoticeable nondescript spectators that were missing. Lina sized up her opponent. A large man easily twice her age, but that didn't mean anything. Lina knew from past experiences that it wasn't how old you were, or how big you were; it was how much you knew and how much you could learn. It was just a matter of talent and knowledge. Her opponent also sized her up; he looked her up and down and down and up.
"Pip squeak." He told her snorting. "You don't look so tough." He sneered. Lina was annoyed but took a deep breath remembering it was his funeral. "Runt." He muttered.
"READY? BOW, BEGIN!" The ref shouted, and the battle began. They circled each other, considering the best spells to use.
"Oohh I'm so scared, what'cha gonna do to me little girl?" He mocked her. Bad move.
"Just for that I'm going to finish you off nice and slow. Dust clip!" Lina told him attacking. The guy countered with a balas wall.
"So this is all the famous Lina Inverse can come up with? Pathetic!" He laughed. Lina rolled her eyes.
"Earth shaker." She commanded calmly. Her opponent was nowhere near successful at blocking the attack.
"You are so lucky I'm going easy on you." She told him.
"Freeze arrows!" He cast sending Lina rolling away. The man's face twitched with a mean mirth.
"I know you. 'Little girl, little breast, scares the dragon from it's nest.'" He chanted at her. Lina was shocked that he had said that and was still from rage. It was at that moment that he came charging at her from his side of the arena, with inhumane speed, in fact he wasn't running so much as teleporting in small jumps toward her. He was on top of her in less than half a second, puling out his sword and slashing at her. "You're a muzko, aren't you?" She asks hiding her smirk.
"That's right little girl." He told her smiling with a vindictive objective.
"Good now I don't have to take it easy on you." She said kicking him away and casting Dill Brand. Boom he was blown out of the ring, for a few moments before teleporting back. Within the time it took him to get back, and all had deducted that he could and would come back to finish the brawl, something peculiar happened.
"Lina Inverse, please come down to the first aid/judges pavilion." A magically magnified voice called her. She marched out of the stadium wondering why they had called her down, as she walked through the pathway the crowd had made for her. 'I didn't cheat, my opponent did so that can't be it.' She listed off in her head. It was then that she noticed that blood was dripping down her arm. 'Oh.' She hadn't really thought about it before now, the adrenalin blocking it out. It wasn't bad, she could heal it on her own, so what was the problem? 'Best go down and see.' She thought walking closer to the pavilion. Stepping into the large tent she saw the four adjudicators and four men she didn't know.
"Miss Inverse." The head judge greeted her, while the three men came to get a closer look at her one of them dragging a healer in tow.
"Yes." She told him verifying her identification. Three men of the four were now fussing over the slashes on upper arm, and were about to move to look at the gash on her chest just a little below her collarbone. The other man stayed in the background and simply rolled his eyes at the scene his comrades were making.
"What do you think you're doing?" She demanded stepping away. 'I can't fry them they might be festival officials.' She thought.
"Miss Inverse do you know why you have been called down?" The judge asked her.
"No." Lina told him, the strange men were fussing over her again, nattering distractingly at the healer to do something about the "possibly fatal wounds". 'Morons.' Lina though and took another step back. Again they were there, it was very annoying.
"Would you go away and let me take to the judge!" She yelled at them, the three odd men backed away slowly. The fourth looked on, clearly staying out of this, at least for the moment.
"You were about to tell me why I'm here." Lina prompted.
"Umm yes. You are here Miss Inverse because these three tell me that you are the heir to the Zelfilain throne." He informed her, gesturing to the three annoying men she had just yelled at and the man standing aside. Lina did what she felt was necessary. In other words she gave him a blank stare, looked from him to the three and started laughing. She was still laughing when Goury, Zel, and Amelia made their way into the room.
"Lina what's wrong? Why were you called in to the first aid tent?"
"We saw the blood, are you alright?"
"Are you ok?"
"What's going on?" They questioned her asking the last one in unison, at that moment realizing that she was laughing hysterically. Amelia, Goury, and Zel looked at each other.
"Huh?" They all asked looking at the strange scene, Lina's three of stalkers were now over their fear of the petite sorceress and were back to looking at her, apprehensively fussing about her "potentially fatal injuries" and worrying that she might break her ribs if she kept laughing that hard. They were not afraid to voice their concerns either. The fourth looked a little embarrassed.
"Princess, please get up so the healer can treat you." One of them cajoled her.
"Highness, please stop rolling on the floor laughing, what if you get dirt in your abrasions, and they get infected? Or you hit your head and get a concussion? Or crack your rib cage from laughing so hard?" The paranoid one implored Lina. The leader of the group was about to say something but was cut off by Zel when something the fist two had said sunk in.
"Did you say Princess?!" Zel said spraying the coffee he had been sipping all over them.
"That's right Zel, apparently, I'm a princess." Lina enlightened him, momentarily recovering just long enough to reply before lapsing back in to giggles, this time joined by Zel and Amelia, Goury was strangely silent.
"Lina, a Princess. That's rich." Laughed Zel.
"Yeah, don't take this the wrong way Miss Lina but you're not the princessy type." Amelia giggled.
"Yeah, if you're looking for a princess, talk to Amelia." Lina told them.
"Lina a Princess, yeah right." Zel Laughs again. "I knew." Goury told them.
"Huh!?" Lina asks, startled enough to stop laughing. "No Goury, you knew Amelia was a princess." Lina corrected him gently.
"Yeah that too. I also knew that you were a princess." Goury told her calmly.
"How could you have known I was a princess? I didn't even know." Lina asks him sarcastically.
"There are a lot of ways I found out." Goury told her, and began listing them off for her. "You remember my great grandfather Rowdy Gaberive? I think he told me you went back in time to help him? He told me to look for you, fist at Zelfila and then among bandits, he told me you were special in more ways than one. I did look for you at Zelfila when I described you they told me who you were and asked why I was looking for you. I told them and they asked that when I found you, if I ever did that I would watch over you and protect you." He pauses to let this new information sink in. "My Great grandfather told me, the people of your government told me, and you your self told me." He enlightens her.
"How could I have told you that, I didn't even know?" Lina questions.
"You let slip a secret that you didn't even know in a thousand ways. The way you never give up, the way you always know what to do, the way you take charge of even a hopeless situation. It all tells me that you were born and bred to be a leader, and from what I know of you a good one." Goury said giving her a encouraging smile, and a hand up from the floor. The leader of Lina's little band of stalkers seems to recognize Goury.
"Goury, is that you?" He asks.
"Brent? Is that you? I haven't seen you since I left Zelfila to find Lina." Goury said shaking Brent's hand.
"You wouldn't believe how hard she is to track down, it took five mouths for us to find our princess on the lamb." He confided good-humouredly to Goury.
"Lina is easy to find you just follow the path of random destruction." Zel laughed, other people in the room let him know it wasn't that funny.
"It's not that easy, sure Her Highness will sometimes leave hints, but mostly the trail is almost invisible." Brent explained to him.
"There's a reason for that." Lina said shivering at the thought of that reason.
"Yeah, a lot of high ranking mazko want her dead." Goury explains totally missing the other more frightening real reason.
"Lina-chan? I saw a midlevel mazko flying by and knew that you would be involved." Xellos told her getting nice and annoyingly close to her, then he noticed the look of mild shock and surprise. He takes a step back and looks around the room. "Oh, you finally caught and told her didn't you?" Xellos asks.
"You knew! You. Knew." Lina shouted. "Does every one know? Am I the only one who didn't? Oh… wait I get it this is just a stupid joke, or a ruse of one of the other competitors wanting me to quite the competition!" Lina demanded the answer. The looks on the faces of Brent, Goury, and Xellos told her that her hopeful if somewhat wild explanation told her that she was wrong.
"If that's not true then why didn't I know that I was a princess?" Lina questioned, desperately trying to shoot holes in their theories for a change.
"There are many reasons for that, reasons which we will explain on the way home." Brent informed her taking a step closer to her. Lina glared at him.
"I'm not going with you." She told them looking at their faces she softened the comment telling them. "I want to finish the competition first." Lina turned to leave knowing that the midlevel mazuko was waiting. The judge was in front of her in a moment.
"You may finish the competition but you will be required to change classes from S class to R class." He informed her.
"What! Look I'll deal with that later, right now I have a mazuko to kill." She announced pushing past him. "Miss Inverse I can not let you continue to fight in the S class, if you were to be injured or killed your country could in fact wage war on us. You by the rules of the festival are required to make the change to the royalty class." He advised her.
"But listen to the crowd, they all want me to go back out there and destroy the mazuko. I can give you five reasons why I should do just that. 1) I'm the crowd's favorite; if you don't let me you'll lose tourist revenue because after that disappointment they'll just leave. 2) I'll lose my carefully cultivated reputation. 3) I'll get Amelia to tell you all about the unjustness of discrimination based on status. 4) I've fought much, much worse. 5) I can take care of my self." Lina told him listing off the more obvious reasons. The judge looked uncertain but gave in.
"Go, but just to finish this fight." He told her. Brent moved half heartedly to stop her but was intercepted by Gourry. "She'll be fine."
I would like at least four reviews per current chapter. P.S. I fixed it so it doesn't have to be a signed review anymore. Praise, comments, corrections, flames and gifts welcome. Bye!
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'' Guess the creatre!