And Vyctori's back with another update! This current chapter is a joint effort between Suzaku and I--anyone wanna try to guess who wrote what? A cookie to everyone who gets it right! We'll probably be doing this for the rest of the fic, so keep an eye out.
I can't really do review responses for the chapter, since Suzaku wrote the previous part (I've tried...it's just too hard), so instead, I'll just say thank you very much to:
BishouNeko, Yoshimi Takahashi, Katsu Solaris and Lunaris, Feral Claw, and Allexandra Radcliff!
Thank you very much for taking time to review this--it means a lot to me and, I'm quite sure, Suzaku.
Er, can't think of anything else to say. Enjoy the chapter; I had a lot of fun writing my part. ^_^
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"Hard luck, Ryou!" Karst chortled. "Guess you had better think twice before challenging me to a battle, huh?"
Ryou watched her with narrowed eyes, saying not a word. At first, Karst thought he was still rather sore over his undignified loss, but became concerned when his silence continued.
"Ryou? Hey, Ryou? Are you okay?" When he still didn't answer, Karst moved closer to the riverbank to check on him.
It was exactly what he had been waiting for. Faster than she thought possible, Ryou's hand snapped forwards and closed around her slender, booted ankle. With a speedy jerk, he yanked her into the stream alongside him.
Karst surfaced with a screech of outrage and gave Ryou a deadly look. The ordinarily kind young man was snickering quite loudly, knowing her distaste for water, and cold water at that. In revenge, she seized a handful of his snowy hair in both her hands and shoved downwards with all her strength. Ryou was cut off in mid-laugh as his head vanished beneath the frigid water.
Karst waited until he was half-drowned before letting him up. "There, you moron! Next time think before bringing me in contact with cold water."
"Karst? Ryou? Where'd you go?" Agatio's voice rang out through the woods. A couple of moments later, he ambled into sight. "Hey, what're you two doing, having a bath?" He snorted. "'Cause it's standard practice to take your clothes off first."
Ryou blushed at his words and scrambled out of the river. Then he held out his hand to help Karst out; she ignored him.
"I can get out fine myself!" she snapped at him. "Just because I'm a girl..."
Ryou seemed surprised. "That has nothing to do with it. I was just trying to be nice..."
Karst flipped her dripping fringe away from her eyes, embarrassed. "Sorry. It's just the half of the men who don't run away from my odd looks try to do every little thing for me, just because I'm a 'lady.'" She made a face at the word. "I just thought that was more of the same."
"It's all right. Don't worry about it." Ryou gave her his sympathetic smile and then wrung out a sleeve of his tunic.
"Sorry to interrupt, but Alex is probably wondering if we've been eaten by a bear right now. We had better get back to camp," Agatio reminded them.
They began the small walk back to where Alex was patiently waiting. Ryou's footsteps squelched unattractively until Karst ordered him to hold still while she used her Mars Psynergy to dry him off. Ryou was grateful, but the heat caused his fine hair to bush around his head like a berserk halo. This provided Karst and Agatio with much amusement as they packed up their supplies and headed towards the next town. Finally, thanks to Ryou's map skills, they were back on track, and it turned out, they were less than a day's hike to Contigo.
With the change of a new person in their group, the normal trudging march was actually entertaining. Ryou told them comical stories of his travels south of Prox. The time passed quite quickly and by the time evening had begun to close in, they had finally arrived in Contigo.
Once there, Alex volunteered to track down the local inn and reserve them rooms. Agatio decided to explore the town and question its occupants for information on Jupiter Lighthouse. Karst tried to dissuade him--subtlety had never been one of his shining qualities--but Agatio was stubborn. Normally, Karst could best him in a battle of wills, but after a long day, she simply did not want to bother. That left her and Ryou to check the weapons and armour shop, to see if there was a way for them to upgrade their gear.
Inside the shop, Karst fingered the swords and axes with a frown. She tested their edges and picked up two or three of them. However, there weren't any that she liked as well as her scythe, so she let them drop. Ryou, too, seemed unimpressed by their quality, preferring to stick with his Tensuiga blade, muttering something about "second-rate weaponry."
But Karst did find a good set of armour that she liked very much. Normally, she disliked the restriction of the weighty metal, but this armour was lightweight and surprisingly flexible.
"I'll take it," she announced to no one in particular. "Hey, shopkeeper!"
The man in charge of armour ducked out from a spare room, smiling. Then his smile faded and vanished when he saw just who was addressing him.
Karst attempted to ignore his attitude. "I'd like to buy this piece of armour. How much is it?" She set it on the wooden counter.
To her shock, the man snatched up the gear and held it away from her. "Too much for the likes of you. Get out of my shop, you freak!"
Karst clenched her fists in anger. "Give me that armour! My money's as good as anyone else, so hand it over!"
"What, may I ask, is the problem?" asked Ryou, who was walking over after testing an axe. "Karst here has the money needed to purchase this armour, so why can't you sell it to her?"
"I will not sell you this armour, miss," spat the storekeeper, sneering at the two. "Is that clear?"
"I would recommend doing what my friend requests," Ryou suggested coolly. He leaned with a deceptive casualness on the counter, a warm smile masking growing contempt. "She doesn't take snubs well, and neither do I."
"And why are you friends with her anyway?" the armour man asked Ryou.
With a disdainful glare towards Karst, he stated, "You seem like a normal enough guy. But, she's a...a..." stuttered the armour keeper, searching his feeble mind for a word deemed appropriate to call the fiery Mars Adept.
"A what? Freak? Daemon? Barbarian? Is that what you were going to say?" the white-haired Adept demanded.
Sneering and nodding, the man added a few more expletives to the list towards an already pissed Karst, who was a few seconds away from losing her patience and proving his idiotic beliefs by burning the store to the ground. Feeling her temper and Psynergy flare up, Ryou decided to end this idiocy before someone (mainly the armour man) got barbequed. Enraged that someone would speak this way to another without just cause (and especially being Karst), Ryou walked up to the arrogant man, smiling for all the world like a cherub.
The white-haired angel continued to grin as he delivered a swift blow to the armour man's gut, sending him to the ground.
Placing two fingers on the storekeeper's wrist, he pushed down on the pressure point, causing a slight surge of pain. His normally calm façade dissipated into pure furore, and his normally soft eyes became cold and sharper looking, giving him a malevolent aura. As he held the guy up, Ryou spoke with a calm voice as sweet as honey, yet as deadly as an adder's bite.
"I don't know where you get off calling Karst a 'daemon' or 'freak', but it was quite inappropriate. Your actions and words, sir," he stated, spitting out the word as if it were a curse, "demonstrate a complete lack of intelligence and a disturbing amount of ignorance and bigotry. Not only was your behaviour self-defacing and demeaning, it was rude and racist to the utmost degree."
Pressing down on the man's wrist and relishing in the whimpers he made, Ryou continued.
"Karst is my best friend and has been for my whole life. She's not a freak, daemon or barbarian. In fact, she's quite beautiful. She hails from Prox, and if you weren't living in a constant haze of stupidity, you'd know that. If you bothered to see past her looks, you'd see a girl who's funny, smart, kind and an incredible fighter. But I guess having your head that far up your ass could make that quite difficult."
Ryou smiled a bit at Karst's roar of laughter, trying to calm her down while "educating" the armour keeper.
"What more, I truly do not give a damn what you or others may think about my friendship with Karst or anyone else. She is my friend, and will be forever. If you understood that, difficult as that would be for you, you'd be a lot happier and easier to deal with. So we and the rest of the world would appreciate it if you kept your unfounded ignorance and bigotry to yourself."
And with that, Ryou dropped the poor asshole on the floor and dusted his hands as if he held something diseased, leaving him bruised in many senses of the word.
The armour seller frowned and began a reply, but the looks on both their faces and the pain and verbal lashing brought on by the white-haired boy quickly caused him to snap his mouth shut again. Biting his lip so hard Karst thought it would begin to bleed at any moment, he handed over the equipment.
"How much?" Karst snipped the ends off the two words.
"Six thousand coins." The shopkeeper's answer was equally short.
Karst dropped six pouches, each containing one thousand coins, on the desk. She grabbed the armour quickly, in case the man changed his mind. But just before they left the shop, the redhead couldn't resist a parting shot.
"I suggest that the next time that you feel an urge to embarrass yourself and bore others, that you summon all your might and resist," she stated as she and a laughing Ryou exited the shop.
Once they were outside, Ryou burst out, "How could that man possibly treat you that way?"
Karst looked tired. She turned the chest plate over and over in her hands. "You're not a Proxian--you could never know. In every town, we get the same treatment. Sometimes it's from a storeowner, sometimes an innkeeper, often just random people on the street. To them, we're unnatural beings, less than human...cursed..."
Ryou moved and laid a tender hand on Karst's shoulder, careful not to rest it upon her razor-edged shoulder scales. "I do know."
"How?" Temper made her sharper than she intended. She sighed. "Ryou, I'm sorry."
"No, it's all right." For a moment, Ryou's eyes seemed slightly unfocused, as if he was gazing inside a place he didn't want to go. "Karst, I never told you why my cousin and I, along with our mothers, came to Prox, did I?"
Karst shook her head. "No...we all just assumed you were lost. Why? Was there another reason?"
Ryou's hand on her shoulder tightened slightly, unconsciously. "You know that we were originally from Imil, correct? Where there is supposedly only a Mercury Clan. Yet because the powers of my cousin and I were different from the pure-blooded Mercury healers, we were labelled 'daemons' and were cast out from Imil, along with our mothers. We were forbidden to return under pain of death. We wandered for a long time, searching for a new home, when we came to Prox. You were the only people to welcome us, and so we stayed."
Karst reached a hand up and placed it over Ryou's. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. It was a long time ago. I'm past that now." Ryou moved his hand away suddenly, embarrassed, and gave her a sweet smile. "Why don't we go see if Alex was able to reserve us some rooms at the inn, all right?"
"Sure." Karst stowed her armour safely, and then the two of them strolled through the streets of Contigo, ignoring the stares Karst's foreign appearance drew.
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Vyctori: Aww...how sweet!
Menardi: *grumbling*
Vyctori: What's that?
Menardi: I don't like the thought of anyone dating my sister. I changed her diapers! It's hard to see her like...that.
Vyctori: *grins* Now there's a thought. Karst in diapers. Anyway, review, please.
Menardi: Or you shall be most thoroughly thrashed, by me.