Chapter 12 - Flying Polka Dotted Weasel Bunnies and Other New Friends
Author's Notes: Hee! I think this is finally getting back on track. I'm rather proud of this chapter, and no, it isn't JUST because of the vaguely 'shippy moments between Amarant and Freya! It has something to do with the weasel bunnies alluded to in the title. ^_^
"When do you expect us to reach the bottom of this staircase?" Freya asked, the question echoing off of stone walls, steps, and ceiling, as they rounded another corner in the narrow, pitch-dark stairwell.
"Any time now," Amarant replied tersely. Then he chuckled slightly.
"What?" she demanded.
"I was just thinking, it's the first time since all this shit began that I'm glad for these damn handcuffs."
She blinked, honestly bewildered, nearly missing a step in her bewilderment and stumbling slightly.
"Why?"
"I know we didn't get separated."
"That is a positive aspect, I suppose," she admitted guardedly.
"What, you'd rather be lost in here by yourself?"
"No," she replied emphatically. "I definitely wouldn't."
"Good."
A silence hung between them, broken moments later.
"Can you see a thing in here?" Freya asked, peering into the darkness.
"Yeah," he replied.
"Really? What?"
"A whole lot of darkness."
"Not funny."
"Don't blame me; blame Rhianwen. She's the one writing this crappy dialogue."
"Amarant! Fourth wall!"
"Right, right," he sighed. "Sorry. Ow! Dammit!"
These last two exclamations were brought about as Amarant learned in a very painful way that involved squishing his nose flat on a hard, cold, and very stone stone wall, that he would not be able to progress any farther forward.
"Ow!" Freya echoed as she walked headlong into him, not prepared for the stop. "Sorry."
"Don't mention it," he tossed over his shoulder as he ran his free hand over the wall, searching for a door, a window, or a latch of any sort.
Several minutes of unsuccessful searching later, he sighed.
"Sorry to have to tell you this, rat, but we've gotta turn around. Can't go any farther down here."
"We...can't," she repeated slowly.
"Nope."
"Just wonderful!" she exclaimed, throwing her free hand up in exasperation and moving to lean against the stone wall, that same free arm crossed.
Smirking in satisfaction that she very nearly had the gesture mastered by now, he mimicked her.
However, the instant his back touched the wall, something happened. Something mysterious. Something unexplained. Something...completely unrelated in any way.
The day had been a very cold and snowy one way up in the northwester most continent of the planet of Gaia. The lost one, this author believes. This was nothing new, as the weather up there tended to be always excessively cold and snowy, with frequent blizzards. A trapper named Cedric Kaughnee, a fellow well known about those parts for his extraordinarily bad luck, had set out that day in the hopes of actually catching something.
"For once in my whole bloody miserable life," he muttered to himself as he trudged along through snow knee-deep in areas where the snow had been the lightest. "Is just a tiny bit of luck so much to ask?"
Repeating this mantra to himself over and over, Cedric set his traps, and found an excellent place to wait completely out of sight, foolishly chosen right next to the side of a snow-covered mountain.
"Ah, well, the day is calm," he reflected with a nod of satisfaction. "No way an avalanche will happen."
And so there he crouched for many a long hour, watching his traps with a keen eye and cat-like reflexes, ready to leap the second the traps were set off.
As the day wore on, though, Cedric began to get a little discouraged, and finally gave up entirely.
Just as he pushed himself by his crouch against the side of the mountain, however, in the basement of a spooky mansion far, far away, a tall, muscular redheaded bounty hunter and a Burmecian dragoon garbed in a scarlet hat and coat leaned against a stone wall, and as though on cue, a faint rumble started above our unfortunate trapper.
"Oh, bugger," Cedric sighed, glancing up and rolling his eyes at the sight of a massive pile of snow descending rapidly upon him.
And thus followed a scene of extreme violence and refrigeration.
When the dust finally settled, or the fine, powdery snow settled, as it were, a little white bunny bounced merrily across the top of the newly formed snow pile. It stopped and gazed in confusion, its little bunny-head tilted to the side, at a fur hat with a long racoon tail, the only testament that there had ever existed such a person as Cedric Kaughnee, the unfortunate trapper.
Oh, yes; and as Amarant and Freya leaned against the brick wall, it also spun about at a dizzying rate to deposit them into a hallway, lit dimly by a number of flickering torches mounted on the stone walls.
"Damn trapdoors," Amarant muttered, climbing to his feet and dragging Freya up after him.
"Look on the bright side," she suggested, wincing as her arm was nearly torn from its socket. "At least we found a way through the wall."
He turned to glare at her, the effect much less intimidating than he probably imagined with the play of light and shadow over his features from the torchlight.
"Shut up."
"So you keep saying," she muttered tiredly, crossing her arm. "Well, then let's get moving. We don't have time to stand here and wait for a way back to the others to show itself."
And with that, Amarant found himself dragged down the stony hallway by someone little more than half his size, and wondering, very befuddled, why exactly he felt a slight pang of guilt at having requested her silence on less than polite terms, as well as why exactly she seemed to mind at all.
"Raff-Riff," Leander began in a very affected calm, stately fashion from the head of his massive cherry oak dining room table, "do be so good as to search for our guests. They seem to have gotten themselves quite lost. I am afraid this house has that effect..."
With a silent nod and an equally silent glower, Raff-Riff turned and started out of the dining room.
"I do hope," the thin, almost ghostly-pale Lord Wesley murmured to himself, "that they haven't wandered down to the basement. I don't believe we have quite managed to rid it of all the weasel-bunnies..."
"Hey."
Freya stopped, but didn't turn around.
"Yes?"
"Something wrong?"
"No," she replied quickly and utterly unconvincingly.
"That's a lie."
"What do you mean? Of course it isn't. I'm having the time of my life spending every waking - and sleeping - second with a man with an extremely large chip on his shoulder, against both our wills, and having him continuously waver between being relatively civil and utterly impossible. I absolutely adore having no idea which mental state he's in now, and whether or not it's safe to talk to him. And mostly, I love having him take the entire situation out on me when it's the latter."
"What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded. "I know this isn't your fault."
"Yes, well, one would never know it, with the way you've been telling me to shut up nearly every time I try to talk to you for the past two days."
He bit back an angry retort that rose immediately to his lips, and then stopped and frowned. Then, with a sigh, he began to speak, but stopped as a flurry of movement caught his eye, which narrowed...along with his other one, of course.
She peered up at him questioningly.
"There's something down here with us," he explained, gesturing slightly to the left.
"Yes, I know," she informed him with a shrug.
He gazed at her incredulously.
"Then why didn't you tell me?"
"Well, they haven't bothered us yet, so why go looking for trouble?"
"So they don't ambush us when we least expect it?" he suggested, throwing up his hand in exasperation.
She arched an eyebrow.
"That sounds like an excuse made up by someone who's looking for a fight."
"Oh, shut up!"
"Fine," she bit out before turning and storming off in the other direction...or trying to, at any rate. As one might expect by this point, since there was no cooperation from Amarant, who instead watched her with an amused smirk, the chain of the handcuffs quickly pulled taut, and Freya found herself quite unable to go any further.
"Damnit," she muttered, starting back, carefully keeping any trace of embarrassment from her expression, although she was blushing slightly.
"Bet you feel pretty stupid now," Amarant commented, chuckling.
"Yes, I think someone's beginning to rub off on me," she returned pointedly.
"Shu-"
"If you finish that, I'll shove this-" She brandished her spear. "-so far up your nose, it comes out the top of your head."
"Fine," he sighed. "Can we get moving?"
When she didn't reply, he glanced down to see if she was possibly giving him the silent treatment. Instead, her gaze was fixed on something beyond his shoulder.
"Uh, Freya? What is it?"
"Amarant," she began quietly, "do you remember those creatures that we didn't go after because they weren't bothering us at all?"
His eyes narrowed and he nodded hesitantly.
"Yeah..."
"Well, I think they're ready to bother us."
He glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, there, huddled against the wall of hard, grey stone, were several strange-looking little creatures with large, floppy ears, glassy little black eyes, soft, fluffy tails, sharp, vicious-looking teeth, and hides sprinkled liberally with large blue polka- dots.
Combined with the dim, flickering light of the torches, these little menaces made for an altogether uncanny picture, particularly when Amarant noticed that the glassy little eyes were fixed on him and Freya, and filled with an expression of malice and mischief.
"What the hell are they?" he demanded of no one in particular.
"They look like some sort of diseased cross between weasels and rabbits, don't they?" Freya replied, shaking her head in bafflement.
He smirked.
"Yeah. Whatever they are, let's get rid of 'em and get the hell out of this hallway."
"Oh, this won't go well," she murmured forebodingly, reaching for her weapon.
Five minutes later, the two warriors gazed about them at all the little pieces of rabid polka-dotted weasel-bunny lying on the surrounding floor.
"You were saying?" Amarant chuckled.
"I stand corrected," Freya admitted, pleasantly surprised. "Well! On with our adventure. There seems to be a room at the end of the hallway. Shall we go investigate?"
"Right," he agreed, shaking another of the strange little creatures off of his arm, where it was hanging by its teeth, and following her down the hall.
Darkness...
What time was it?
More darkness...
For that matter, what day was it?
Still more darkness...
Hell, forget days; what YEAR was it?
To age-ambiguous Vincent Valentine, it seemed as though he had been lying in this dusty, musty, cramped coffin for an eternity. At least, if the decided crick in his neck, the aches of disuse shooting through his shoulders and back, and the desperate need to relieve himself, were any indication.
"I certainly hope that young blond fellow I was supposed to meet up with decides to show his face soon. I need a cup of coffee. Badly. And a toothbrush. I KNEW that drinking a glass of warm milk before going to sleep was a bad idea. But no, Hojo told me it would make me nice and relaxed and drowsy for my eternal slumber. Idiot," Vincent finished in a resentful mutter, staring moodily up at the inside of the lid of his coffin, his home for the past thirty years, had he but been aware of it at the time. Then he sighed. "I do wonder what woke me up, though."
A loud thump interrupted the train of his thoughts.
"Ah," he said. "That would be it. I wonder what that was. Likely another weasel-bunny tripping over something."
Another thump reached his ears, this time followed by a bellowed string of profanity.
"Amarant!" a second voice admonished.
"What?" the first voice growled.
"Just because you were foolish enough to stub your toe on that old coffin doesn't mean you have to scream dirty language at the sky."
"Can't see the damn sky from inside this fucking fun-house, can we?"
"You know full well what I meant," the second voice, obviously female, shot back icily.
Vincent sighed. This penance deal was difficult enough to accept without being woken up every few minutes by a rogue weasel-bunny, or a random wanderer.
"Will you kindly take the lady's advice and be quiet?" he called to them, rapping gently on the roof of his coffin.
Two startled yelps echoed through the room outside of the coffin.
"Is there someone in there?" the woman called softly.
"Oh, wonderful," Vincent sighed. "Now I suppose they'll want to know all about the enigma that is Vincent Valentine. Maybe if I act like I'm dead, they'll go away."
No such luck. A knock that nearly deafened him boomed through the small box.
"Ouch!" he shouted without thinking about it.
"Who the hell's in there?" the first voice he had heard demanded.
"Er, no one. Now, if you aren't a young man with spiky blond hair, please leave quickly and quietly. I need to get back to sleep."
"If there's no one in there, who said all that?" the woman demanded humorously.
"A...figment of your overactive imaginations?" Vincent tried lamely. "Heh- heh-heh...ugh."
"We're opening this damn thing," the man informed him coolly. "Hope you're not naked in there."
"..." Vincent said, finally slipping into character.
Seconds later, the lid of his coffin was jerked away, and he lifted one arm hastily to shield his eyes, unaccustomed to any light, from the nearly overwhelming glow of the torches hanging about the small room.
As the spots before them gradually faded, his vision righted itself, and he stared incredulously at the immensely tall, immensely muscular man with a thick tangle of red hair tumbling to his shoulders and effectively hiding his eyes from the world.
'Strange...' he thought. However, his tact, as well as the fact that an in- character Vincent rarely said anything to his acquaintances, and said even less to strangers, prevented him from voicing this comment.
When, however, his gaze left the tall man and shifted to his companion, who seemed to be a human-sized white rat garbed in a red coat and hat, he couldn't quite resist commenting.
"I knew there was a canine creature in the group I am to join, but I had no idea there was a giant rat..."
"Er...group?" the rat-woman repeated. "I believe you must have the wrong people."
"Yeah," the redhead agreed. "Already got all our damn party-members."
"Er, alright," Vincent said slowly, climbing out of his coffin. "I had wondered, anyway, where the young blond man - Storm, or Rainbow, or Cloud, or something to do with rain, I think - was. Not to mention the cute little ninja girl I was told was travelling with him by this point," he added, smiling and nodding to himself as he recalled the picture he had been shown by the directors of a young Miss Yuffie Kisaragi. Then he frowned. "I have just one question, then. If you aren't involved in all of this, what are you doing in the Shinra mansion?"
Amarant blinked.
"The...Shinra mansion," he repeated.
"Yes," the dark-haired red-caped man confirmed with a nod.
'Er...is that what Leander Wesley calls his home?" Freya asked hesitantly.
"Leander whom?" the pasty fellow asked, perplexed.
"Leander Wesley," she repeated. "The man who owns this mansion."
"No, this mansion is owned by the Shinra Corporation," the man insisted.
Freya and Amarant exchanged glances.
"Of course it is," Freya agreed soothingly. "I think you'd best tell us your name now."
"...Vincent," he said. "Vincent Valentine."
"Alright, Mr. Valentine. Now, I must admit that, although it is entirely possible that Amarant here and I have accidentally hopped to a different big scary mansion through the use of the dimensional portals apparently planted in the doorways, this is, as far as we know, Wesley Manor."
Vincent blinked.
"Could it be...? Could I...have the wrong address?"
With that, he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and studied it intently. Finally, he shook his head.
"No, that's impossible. I suppose that blond boy and his group must simply be late. Well. If it isn't too much trouble, could you please leave so I can go back to sleep now?"
Exchanging another glance, Amarant and Freya each shrugged their free shoulder, and as one, turned to leave the room.
"We apologize for disturbing you, Mr. Valentine," Freya called over her shoulder as the lid of the coffin slammed shut.
Vincent nearly smiled to himself as he heard the faint sound of a door closing. Had he gotten the wrong address! What an absurd idea!
Then he frowned.
"Were those two wearing...handcuffs?"
Meanwhile, at an entirely different big, spooky mansion, a young man with a full mane of spiky blond hair gazed about a stone-encased room, repeatedly returning his attention to the coffin in the center, utterly perplexed.
"Anything yet, Cloud?" a girl of sixteen with short dark hair asked with a weary sigh.
He shook his head.
"Not yet, Yuffie."
"Dammit!" exclaimed a large, dark-skinned man with a gun mounted onto where his forearm had presumably once resided. "We got better things to be doin' than this!"
"Look, Barret," Cloud began calmly, placing a hand on the taller man's shoulder, and then jerking it abruptly away as he read certain violence in the dark, angry eyes. "We KNOW we're supposed to be meeting a new party member here. He's in that coffin! We just haven't found the proper trigger to make him open the lid and engage in witty repartee with us yet."
"He's obv'ously not here," Barret noted, bringing his fist down on the lid of the coffin. "We'd be betta ta give up an' try again later!"
"But I want him to join NOW!" Yuffie insisted, the statement falling just short of a whine. "I saw his picture! He's really cute in a dark, moody, pasty kind of way."
"An' that means what to me?" Barret demanded, crossing his arms. Or rather, his arm and his gun.
"Not to you! To ME!" the teen exclaimed. "Without this guy, the only men around are you, Cloud, Red XIII, and Cid!"
"We haven't met Cid yet," Cloud reminded her mildly.
"Shut up!" she barked. "And go talk to the coffin again!"
"Fine, fine," Cloud sighed, sidling over to the coffin and rapping softly on the lid once again.
All of this is beside the point, although it does serve to illustrate the importance of double-checking the addresses of ones destinations.
Back in the manor that actually concerns our tale, Amarant and Freya had quite given up on ever making that wall spin back around to let them into the long, winding, dark, cramped stairway again. This suited Freya quite well, as she wasn't terribly fond of long, winding, dark, cramped stairways. Amarant, however, was becoming rather annoyed with the weasel- bunnies continuously clamping their teeth onto his arm, and considered the staircase to be the lesser of two evils.
He had assured Freya, with a dry smirk, that he would hold her hand on the way up, if she liked.
Her response had been, predictably, to shake her head with a small smile and cheeks slightly redder than usual, and then to increase her efforts to make the wall spin back around.
This, she assured Amarant when he asked later, was simply because she was becoming worried about the others. However, we all know better, and it is to be expected that Amarant does, too.
At any rate, just as the situation was becoming hopeless, and Freya had turned from the wall to tell Amarant that they'd better find a new way out, the wall creaked into motion, and began to spin, knocking Freya forwards, and directly into Amarant.
Not quite prepared for this, Amarant went down easily, with one disgruntled, but strangely happy Burmecian dragoon on landing on top of him.
When the two managed to regain their senses enough to look at the wall to see if the doorway had indeed reappeared, they found themselves staring up at the expressionless eyes and thin white face of Raff-Riff the doorman.
"Am I...interrupting something?" he asked tonelessly, but the slight quirk of his eyebrow spoke volumes.
"You knocked her over when you came through the wall," Amarant growled, climbing to his feet and dragging Freya up after him.
"Ah. Very good," Raff-Riff said dully.
"Not for those of us knocked over with a stone wall," Freya muttered, pushing a strand of hair away from her nose.
"I have come to escort you both to dinner," the doorman went on.
"Er...you have? What of our friends?" Freya demanded.
Amarant simply glared suspiciously at the man, who stared back with no expression whatsoever.
"They are already in the Master's dining hall. Now, if you will follow me? The Master hates to be kept waiting by his guests."
"I bet he does," Amarant muttered. "Anyone goes near my neck, I break theirs."
"Be polite," Freya hissed at him, then frowned thoughtfully. "So, does this mean you're finally taking the threat of inside-out upside-down vampires seriously?"
Silence hung between them as Raff-Riff re-opened the door to the staircase through some mysterious means. Finally...
"Shut up!" Amarant requested.
Author's Notes: Hee! I think this is finally getting back on track. I'm rather proud of this chapter, and no, it isn't JUST because of the vaguely 'shippy moments between Amarant and Freya! It has something to do with the weasel bunnies alluded to in the title. ^_^
"When do you expect us to reach the bottom of this staircase?" Freya asked, the question echoing off of stone walls, steps, and ceiling, as they rounded another corner in the narrow, pitch-dark stairwell.
"Any time now," Amarant replied tersely. Then he chuckled slightly.
"What?" she demanded.
"I was just thinking, it's the first time since all this shit began that I'm glad for these damn handcuffs."
She blinked, honestly bewildered, nearly missing a step in her bewilderment and stumbling slightly.
"Why?"
"I know we didn't get separated."
"That is a positive aspect, I suppose," she admitted guardedly.
"What, you'd rather be lost in here by yourself?"
"No," she replied emphatically. "I definitely wouldn't."
"Good."
A silence hung between them, broken moments later.
"Can you see a thing in here?" Freya asked, peering into the darkness.
"Yeah," he replied.
"Really? What?"
"A whole lot of darkness."
"Not funny."
"Don't blame me; blame Rhianwen. She's the one writing this crappy dialogue."
"Amarant! Fourth wall!"
"Right, right," he sighed. "Sorry. Ow! Dammit!"
These last two exclamations were brought about as Amarant learned in a very painful way that involved squishing his nose flat on a hard, cold, and very stone stone wall, that he would not be able to progress any farther forward.
"Ow!" Freya echoed as she walked headlong into him, not prepared for the stop. "Sorry."
"Don't mention it," he tossed over his shoulder as he ran his free hand over the wall, searching for a door, a window, or a latch of any sort.
Several minutes of unsuccessful searching later, he sighed.
"Sorry to have to tell you this, rat, but we've gotta turn around. Can't go any farther down here."
"We...can't," she repeated slowly.
"Nope."
"Just wonderful!" she exclaimed, throwing her free hand up in exasperation and moving to lean against the stone wall, that same free arm crossed.
Smirking in satisfaction that she very nearly had the gesture mastered by now, he mimicked her.
However, the instant his back touched the wall, something happened. Something mysterious. Something unexplained. Something...completely unrelated in any way.
The day had been a very cold and snowy one way up in the northwester most continent of the planet of Gaia. The lost one, this author believes. This was nothing new, as the weather up there tended to be always excessively cold and snowy, with frequent blizzards. A trapper named Cedric Kaughnee, a fellow well known about those parts for his extraordinarily bad luck, had set out that day in the hopes of actually catching something.
"For once in my whole bloody miserable life," he muttered to himself as he trudged along through snow knee-deep in areas where the snow had been the lightest. "Is just a tiny bit of luck so much to ask?"
Repeating this mantra to himself over and over, Cedric set his traps, and found an excellent place to wait completely out of sight, foolishly chosen right next to the side of a snow-covered mountain.
"Ah, well, the day is calm," he reflected with a nod of satisfaction. "No way an avalanche will happen."
And so there he crouched for many a long hour, watching his traps with a keen eye and cat-like reflexes, ready to leap the second the traps were set off.
As the day wore on, though, Cedric began to get a little discouraged, and finally gave up entirely.
Just as he pushed himself by his crouch against the side of the mountain, however, in the basement of a spooky mansion far, far away, a tall, muscular redheaded bounty hunter and a Burmecian dragoon garbed in a scarlet hat and coat leaned against a stone wall, and as though on cue, a faint rumble started above our unfortunate trapper.
"Oh, bugger," Cedric sighed, glancing up and rolling his eyes at the sight of a massive pile of snow descending rapidly upon him.
And thus followed a scene of extreme violence and refrigeration.
When the dust finally settled, or the fine, powdery snow settled, as it were, a little white bunny bounced merrily across the top of the newly formed snow pile. It stopped and gazed in confusion, its little bunny-head tilted to the side, at a fur hat with a long racoon tail, the only testament that there had ever existed such a person as Cedric Kaughnee, the unfortunate trapper.
Oh, yes; and as Amarant and Freya leaned against the brick wall, it also spun about at a dizzying rate to deposit them into a hallway, lit dimly by a number of flickering torches mounted on the stone walls.
"Damn trapdoors," Amarant muttered, climbing to his feet and dragging Freya up after him.
"Look on the bright side," she suggested, wincing as her arm was nearly torn from its socket. "At least we found a way through the wall."
He turned to glare at her, the effect much less intimidating than he probably imagined with the play of light and shadow over his features from the torchlight.
"Shut up."
"So you keep saying," she muttered tiredly, crossing her arm. "Well, then let's get moving. We don't have time to stand here and wait for a way back to the others to show itself."
And with that, Amarant found himself dragged down the stony hallway by someone little more than half his size, and wondering, very befuddled, why exactly he felt a slight pang of guilt at having requested her silence on less than polite terms, as well as why exactly she seemed to mind at all.
"Raff-Riff," Leander began in a very affected calm, stately fashion from the head of his massive cherry oak dining room table, "do be so good as to search for our guests. They seem to have gotten themselves quite lost. I am afraid this house has that effect..."
With a silent nod and an equally silent glower, Raff-Riff turned and started out of the dining room.
"I do hope," the thin, almost ghostly-pale Lord Wesley murmured to himself, "that they haven't wandered down to the basement. I don't believe we have quite managed to rid it of all the weasel-bunnies..."
"Hey."
Freya stopped, but didn't turn around.
"Yes?"
"Something wrong?"
"No," she replied quickly and utterly unconvincingly.
"That's a lie."
"What do you mean? Of course it isn't. I'm having the time of my life spending every waking - and sleeping - second with a man with an extremely large chip on his shoulder, against both our wills, and having him continuously waver between being relatively civil and utterly impossible. I absolutely adore having no idea which mental state he's in now, and whether or not it's safe to talk to him. And mostly, I love having him take the entire situation out on me when it's the latter."
"What the hell are you talking about?" he demanded. "I know this isn't your fault."
"Yes, well, one would never know it, with the way you've been telling me to shut up nearly every time I try to talk to you for the past two days."
He bit back an angry retort that rose immediately to his lips, and then stopped and frowned. Then, with a sigh, he began to speak, but stopped as a flurry of movement caught his eye, which narrowed...along with his other one, of course.
She peered up at him questioningly.
"There's something down here with us," he explained, gesturing slightly to the left.
"Yes, I know," she informed him with a shrug.
He gazed at her incredulously.
"Then why didn't you tell me?"
"Well, they haven't bothered us yet, so why go looking for trouble?"
"So they don't ambush us when we least expect it?" he suggested, throwing up his hand in exasperation.
She arched an eyebrow.
"That sounds like an excuse made up by someone who's looking for a fight."
"Oh, shut up!"
"Fine," she bit out before turning and storming off in the other direction...or trying to, at any rate. As one might expect by this point, since there was no cooperation from Amarant, who instead watched her with an amused smirk, the chain of the handcuffs quickly pulled taut, and Freya found herself quite unable to go any further.
"Damnit," she muttered, starting back, carefully keeping any trace of embarrassment from her expression, although she was blushing slightly.
"Bet you feel pretty stupid now," Amarant commented, chuckling.
"Yes, I think someone's beginning to rub off on me," she returned pointedly.
"Shu-"
"If you finish that, I'll shove this-" She brandished her spear. "-so far up your nose, it comes out the top of your head."
"Fine," he sighed. "Can we get moving?"
When she didn't reply, he glanced down to see if she was possibly giving him the silent treatment. Instead, her gaze was fixed on something beyond his shoulder.
"Uh, Freya? What is it?"
"Amarant," she began quietly, "do you remember those creatures that we didn't go after because they weren't bothering us at all?"
His eyes narrowed and he nodded hesitantly.
"Yeah..."
"Well, I think they're ready to bother us."
He glanced over his shoulder. Sure enough, there, huddled against the wall of hard, grey stone, were several strange-looking little creatures with large, floppy ears, glassy little black eyes, soft, fluffy tails, sharp, vicious-looking teeth, and hides sprinkled liberally with large blue polka- dots.
Combined with the dim, flickering light of the torches, these little menaces made for an altogether uncanny picture, particularly when Amarant noticed that the glassy little eyes were fixed on him and Freya, and filled with an expression of malice and mischief.
"What the hell are they?" he demanded of no one in particular.
"They look like some sort of diseased cross between weasels and rabbits, don't they?" Freya replied, shaking her head in bafflement.
He smirked.
"Yeah. Whatever they are, let's get rid of 'em and get the hell out of this hallway."
"Oh, this won't go well," she murmured forebodingly, reaching for her weapon.
Five minutes later, the two warriors gazed about them at all the little pieces of rabid polka-dotted weasel-bunny lying on the surrounding floor.
"You were saying?" Amarant chuckled.
"I stand corrected," Freya admitted, pleasantly surprised. "Well! On with our adventure. There seems to be a room at the end of the hallway. Shall we go investigate?"
"Right," he agreed, shaking another of the strange little creatures off of his arm, where it was hanging by its teeth, and following her down the hall.
Darkness...
What time was it?
More darkness...
For that matter, what day was it?
Still more darkness...
Hell, forget days; what YEAR was it?
To age-ambiguous Vincent Valentine, it seemed as though he had been lying in this dusty, musty, cramped coffin for an eternity. At least, if the decided crick in his neck, the aches of disuse shooting through his shoulders and back, and the desperate need to relieve himself, were any indication.
"I certainly hope that young blond fellow I was supposed to meet up with decides to show his face soon. I need a cup of coffee. Badly. And a toothbrush. I KNEW that drinking a glass of warm milk before going to sleep was a bad idea. But no, Hojo told me it would make me nice and relaxed and drowsy for my eternal slumber. Idiot," Vincent finished in a resentful mutter, staring moodily up at the inside of the lid of his coffin, his home for the past thirty years, had he but been aware of it at the time. Then he sighed. "I do wonder what woke me up, though."
A loud thump interrupted the train of his thoughts.
"Ah," he said. "That would be it. I wonder what that was. Likely another weasel-bunny tripping over something."
Another thump reached his ears, this time followed by a bellowed string of profanity.
"Amarant!" a second voice admonished.
"What?" the first voice growled.
"Just because you were foolish enough to stub your toe on that old coffin doesn't mean you have to scream dirty language at the sky."
"Can't see the damn sky from inside this fucking fun-house, can we?"
"You know full well what I meant," the second voice, obviously female, shot back icily.
Vincent sighed. This penance deal was difficult enough to accept without being woken up every few minutes by a rogue weasel-bunny, or a random wanderer.
"Will you kindly take the lady's advice and be quiet?" he called to them, rapping gently on the roof of his coffin.
Two startled yelps echoed through the room outside of the coffin.
"Is there someone in there?" the woman called softly.
"Oh, wonderful," Vincent sighed. "Now I suppose they'll want to know all about the enigma that is Vincent Valentine. Maybe if I act like I'm dead, they'll go away."
No such luck. A knock that nearly deafened him boomed through the small box.
"Ouch!" he shouted without thinking about it.
"Who the hell's in there?" the first voice he had heard demanded.
"Er, no one. Now, if you aren't a young man with spiky blond hair, please leave quickly and quietly. I need to get back to sleep."
"If there's no one in there, who said all that?" the woman demanded humorously.
"A...figment of your overactive imaginations?" Vincent tried lamely. "Heh- heh-heh...ugh."
"We're opening this damn thing," the man informed him coolly. "Hope you're not naked in there."
"..." Vincent said, finally slipping into character.
Seconds later, the lid of his coffin was jerked away, and he lifted one arm hastily to shield his eyes, unaccustomed to any light, from the nearly overwhelming glow of the torches hanging about the small room.
As the spots before them gradually faded, his vision righted itself, and he stared incredulously at the immensely tall, immensely muscular man with a thick tangle of red hair tumbling to his shoulders and effectively hiding his eyes from the world.
'Strange...' he thought. However, his tact, as well as the fact that an in- character Vincent rarely said anything to his acquaintances, and said even less to strangers, prevented him from voicing this comment.
When, however, his gaze left the tall man and shifted to his companion, who seemed to be a human-sized white rat garbed in a red coat and hat, he couldn't quite resist commenting.
"I knew there was a canine creature in the group I am to join, but I had no idea there was a giant rat..."
"Er...group?" the rat-woman repeated. "I believe you must have the wrong people."
"Yeah," the redhead agreed. "Already got all our damn party-members."
"Er, alright," Vincent said slowly, climbing out of his coffin. "I had wondered, anyway, where the young blond man - Storm, or Rainbow, or Cloud, or something to do with rain, I think - was. Not to mention the cute little ninja girl I was told was travelling with him by this point," he added, smiling and nodding to himself as he recalled the picture he had been shown by the directors of a young Miss Yuffie Kisaragi. Then he frowned. "I have just one question, then. If you aren't involved in all of this, what are you doing in the Shinra mansion?"
Amarant blinked.
"The...Shinra mansion," he repeated.
"Yes," the dark-haired red-caped man confirmed with a nod.
'Er...is that what Leander Wesley calls his home?" Freya asked hesitantly.
"Leander whom?" the pasty fellow asked, perplexed.
"Leander Wesley," she repeated. "The man who owns this mansion."
"No, this mansion is owned by the Shinra Corporation," the man insisted.
Freya and Amarant exchanged glances.
"Of course it is," Freya agreed soothingly. "I think you'd best tell us your name now."
"...Vincent," he said. "Vincent Valentine."
"Alright, Mr. Valentine. Now, I must admit that, although it is entirely possible that Amarant here and I have accidentally hopped to a different big scary mansion through the use of the dimensional portals apparently planted in the doorways, this is, as far as we know, Wesley Manor."
Vincent blinked.
"Could it be...? Could I...have the wrong address?"
With that, he pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and studied it intently. Finally, he shook his head.
"No, that's impossible. I suppose that blond boy and his group must simply be late. Well. If it isn't too much trouble, could you please leave so I can go back to sleep now?"
Exchanging another glance, Amarant and Freya each shrugged their free shoulder, and as one, turned to leave the room.
"We apologize for disturbing you, Mr. Valentine," Freya called over her shoulder as the lid of the coffin slammed shut.
Vincent nearly smiled to himself as he heard the faint sound of a door closing. Had he gotten the wrong address! What an absurd idea!
Then he frowned.
"Were those two wearing...handcuffs?"
Meanwhile, at an entirely different big, spooky mansion, a young man with a full mane of spiky blond hair gazed about a stone-encased room, repeatedly returning his attention to the coffin in the center, utterly perplexed.
"Anything yet, Cloud?" a girl of sixteen with short dark hair asked with a weary sigh.
He shook his head.
"Not yet, Yuffie."
"Dammit!" exclaimed a large, dark-skinned man with a gun mounted onto where his forearm had presumably once resided. "We got better things to be doin' than this!"
"Look, Barret," Cloud began calmly, placing a hand on the taller man's shoulder, and then jerking it abruptly away as he read certain violence in the dark, angry eyes. "We KNOW we're supposed to be meeting a new party member here. He's in that coffin! We just haven't found the proper trigger to make him open the lid and engage in witty repartee with us yet."
"He's obv'ously not here," Barret noted, bringing his fist down on the lid of the coffin. "We'd be betta ta give up an' try again later!"
"But I want him to join NOW!" Yuffie insisted, the statement falling just short of a whine. "I saw his picture! He's really cute in a dark, moody, pasty kind of way."
"An' that means what to me?" Barret demanded, crossing his arms. Or rather, his arm and his gun.
"Not to you! To ME!" the teen exclaimed. "Without this guy, the only men around are you, Cloud, Red XIII, and Cid!"
"We haven't met Cid yet," Cloud reminded her mildly.
"Shut up!" she barked. "And go talk to the coffin again!"
"Fine, fine," Cloud sighed, sidling over to the coffin and rapping softly on the lid once again.
All of this is beside the point, although it does serve to illustrate the importance of double-checking the addresses of ones destinations.
Back in the manor that actually concerns our tale, Amarant and Freya had quite given up on ever making that wall spin back around to let them into the long, winding, dark, cramped stairway again. This suited Freya quite well, as she wasn't terribly fond of long, winding, dark, cramped stairways. Amarant, however, was becoming rather annoyed with the weasel- bunnies continuously clamping their teeth onto his arm, and considered the staircase to be the lesser of two evils.
He had assured Freya, with a dry smirk, that he would hold her hand on the way up, if she liked.
Her response had been, predictably, to shake her head with a small smile and cheeks slightly redder than usual, and then to increase her efforts to make the wall spin back around.
This, she assured Amarant when he asked later, was simply because she was becoming worried about the others. However, we all know better, and it is to be expected that Amarant does, too.
At any rate, just as the situation was becoming hopeless, and Freya had turned from the wall to tell Amarant that they'd better find a new way out, the wall creaked into motion, and began to spin, knocking Freya forwards, and directly into Amarant.
Not quite prepared for this, Amarant went down easily, with one disgruntled, but strangely happy Burmecian dragoon on landing on top of him.
When the two managed to regain their senses enough to look at the wall to see if the doorway had indeed reappeared, they found themselves staring up at the expressionless eyes and thin white face of Raff-Riff the doorman.
"Am I...interrupting something?" he asked tonelessly, but the slight quirk of his eyebrow spoke volumes.
"You knocked her over when you came through the wall," Amarant growled, climbing to his feet and dragging Freya up after him.
"Ah. Very good," Raff-Riff said dully.
"Not for those of us knocked over with a stone wall," Freya muttered, pushing a strand of hair away from her nose.
"I have come to escort you both to dinner," the doorman went on.
"Er...you have? What of our friends?" Freya demanded.
Amarant simply glared suspiciously at the man, who stared back with no expression whatsoever.
"They are already in the Master's dining hall. Now, if you will follow me? The Master hates to be kept waiting by his guests."
"I bet he does," Amarant muttered. "Anyone goes near my neck, I break theirs."
"Be polite," Freya hissed at him, then frowned thoughtfully. "So, does this mean you're finally taking the threat of inside-out upside-down vampires seriously?"
Silence hung between them as Raff-Riff re-opened the door to the staircase through some mysterious means. Finally...
"Shut up!" Amarant requested.