Lesson 2: Do Not Trifle With the Elements

Ten minutes into the horror that was Death Peak did nothing to alter Lucca's premonition that the day would indeed be the longest of her life, or at least an honourable contender. By this point, she was struggling up a very steep, ice-encrusted hill between Robo and Frog who had simultaneously decided that as not only a lady – the mere idea of which had given her a good laugh for several seconds – but a lady whose innate element was fire, it would be best for her to remain protected thus sandwiched.

   "I don't know what we're going to do if one of us has to go to the bathroom," she shouted over the howling wind to the hunched-over form of Frog, trudging doggedly on some two feet in front of her.

At his, Frog ceased his dogged trudging and stopped abruptly.

   "Oof!" Lucca squeaked as she skidded directly into him, not expecting so sudden a halt. "Hey! What are you doing? That kind of thing is dangerous!"

   "I apologize, Lucca," Frog said wearily, reaching out one gloved hand to steady the young woman, who now seemed in danger of skidding back down the considerably steep, windy, and icy hill, despite the grips on her boots, of her own making naturally, that she had informed everyone coolly would hold them to the side of a wall made of peanut butter, if the situation ever came up. Such was the treachery of Death Peak. "It simply seemed a rather odd thought."

   "Hey, think about it, Froggy," she said as the two continued on, and she nodded over her shoulder to Robo's inquiry if they would be continuing at the moment. "We're on a journey that's going to take us a few days at the least. I'd say it's a valid concern."

   "But simply an odd thing to be occupying your thoughts," Frog pointed out, hiding a smile.

Lucca was in the process of asking him if he wanted to find something better to occupy her thoughts, then, when the strong wind that had become a matter of course on this hill intensified tenfold.

Seconds later, Lucca went skittering down the hill, reflecting as she went that things really couldn't get much worse.

Aloud, though, all she said was,

   "Eep!"

Then, as she hit the snow covered rocks at the bottom of the hill,

   "Urk!"

And, finally, as she glanced up to find that Frog and Robo had retained their balance no more successfully than she had, and were approaching the direct spot where she had landed at a dizzying rate,

   "Gah!"

As for what the young Ms. Ashtear had to say when first Frog and then Robo did finally reach the bottom of the hill, her comment muffled by approximately nine hundred pounds of robot and giant frog swordsman who had mercifully lost all their equipment and weapons on the way down, has been deleted in the interest of maintaining audience appropriateness. Not only that, but the chronicler of this grand and glorious quest has no idea how to spell it, and wonders vaguely where on earth a girl from a little village would have learned such a word. Five syllables! Certainly, the most this chronicler has ever heard is two!

   "Lucca!" Frog exclaimed, horrified and just a tiny bit impressed as he first hauled himself out of the Frog-Robo-and-Lucca-shaped indentation in the ground where they had fallen, and then offered her a hand. After all, one must remember that a young man raised as a knight, and thus around other, older, and cruder men, will have it at least partially ingrained in his mind that a person's manliness is measured by the profanities he can churn out. To be sure, the last thing on his mind as she batted his hand away and hiked up her long coat to reveal a good deal of leg as she climbed from the mini-crater herself – for some reason, the idea of replacing her characteristic shorts with pants to prepare a little more for this trip had never occurred to her – was her manliness. However, he quickly realized the ridiculousness of ogling a female acquaintance, particularly one with as short a temper as Lucca had proven herself to have today, on Death Peak, and tore his gaze away.

   "Sorry," she snarled, clearly not sorry at all, and indeed giving the impression that she would very much have liked to put to use a large store of such words. "Help me get Robo out of here, would you?"

   "Of course," Frog agreed immediately, and together, they hoisted Robo, who seemed to be unable to hoist himself, to his feet.

   "Aw, geez, look at this," Lucca complained loudly. "He's frozen solid! And we didn't bring any matches to make a fire! Now what do we do?"

Frog chuckled, quite certain that she was trying to lighten the mood with a little well-placed humour. When, however, she fell immediately silent and fixed him with a death-glare clearly meant to dissuade him from any further laughter, he began to wonder if perhaps she had landed on the wrong part of the head.

   "Methinks we hath another way to start the necessary fire," he told her mildly.

   "Oh, really," she said with deadly calm. "Maybe you could tell me what it is, then?"

   "W-well, what wouldst thou expect us to do, should we be in need of water in a place where we hath none?" Frog prompted gently.

   "What else?" Lucca scoffed. "You're water-innate, aren't you? We'd have you…get…us…some. Shut up," she concluded as his mouth twisted into a grin. At least, as far as she could tell. "Fine, fine, I'll start a fire. But if you laugh at me, I'll throw you in it for fuel."

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Several minutes later, the small posse was pack on their path up the hill. There was a nearly palpable tension in the air that even the wind, steadily increasing in severity, couldn't sweep away. Lucca, when she did happen to glance back, fixed Frog with a series of glares so poisonous, he felt that he must be shrinking to no more than an inch in height.

Since we left our staunch heroes, they have learned some very important lessons.

Frog learned the hard way that when a robot, containing a goodish amount of motor oil as only made sense, was placed too near a source of heat, an explosive situation tended to occur.

Lucca learned the hard way that knights were not naturally suited to the job of a mechanic, and nearly made good on her earlier threat to feed Frog to the fire.

Robo...well, Robo learned that his friends were insane, and that there were fates worse than living in a church, unable to move, and being venerated as a saint for four hundred years. Among them was being slid towards a fire, fully aware and watching in horror, but unable to move as the flames flickered over him, knowing exactly what would happen in a matter of seconds if he wasn't moved.

Then Lucca had the fun of pulling out the welding kit that feminine intuition had urged her strongly to bring along. Of course, when one considers that the welding kit was meant to serve as heavy pieces to throw at Magus before she had learned that Robo and not that same spoiled brat of a warlock was coming along, Lucca's feminine intuition becomes much less impressive, even as her logic becomes much more questionable.

   "Lucca," Frog finally ventured timidly.

She came to a dead stop, causing something of a domino effect and nearly sending the group skittering back down the hill again. Then, catching her balance, she turned around, and Frog shrank back behind a tree in attempt to hide from the fury blazing forth from her eyes, the fires of Hell seeming to be gathered there.

   "What?" she snapped.

   "W-well, I'm sorry. Being a knight and not a mechanic, I was not aware that I was hindering rather than helping by pushing Robo closer to the fire."

Her eyes narrowed, seeming to blaze even hotter. Frog, clearly reading a Flare spell in their depths, which undoubtedly should have been blue but were just now a rather unhealthy shade of fuchsia, bid this mortal coil a melancholy farewell.

And then the wind sprang up again.

Lucca put into use several more multi-syllabic words that this chronicler knows neither how to spell nor how to pronounce as, once again, she found herself swept off balance by the strong gust of wind.

   "Oh, dear," Robo commented fretfully, both hoping that Lucca would be okay, and that if the situation should prove a repeat of the one they had just gotten out of, the girl would thaw him out safely herself rather than letting Frog do it.

Frog, meanwhile, was having something of a resurgence of his sense of chivalry. Ignoring the Voice of Common Sense telling him to stay put because he was doubtlessly angling only to make the situation worse, he took off down the hill once the wind had died down enough for a controlled descent. His eyes, normally the size of saucers, could not widen to that size in shock, and so instead widened to the size of soccer balls, at the sight of Lucca skidding, unable to stop, directly towards a tree, and worse, towards one of its branches, sharp point up, at about the level of a normal person's midsection.

And so, his Voice of Common Sense joined the rest of him in advising that he might want to think of removing her from harm's way, whether or not she might be able to handle it on her own. There was always the chance that she couldn't, and there was no way he would be able to fix Robo on his own if something else should happen to the robot!

He leapt at her...

She gave a startled, rather unintelligible shout of surprise as she glanced up to see Frog hurtling through the air towards her...

Both uttered several more impolite words as pain of no measly proportions radiated through both of them as they collided, first with each other, and then with the icy surface of the hill.

As they skittered down the hill at a dizzying, yet oddly familiar rate, it seemed that Frog's chivalrous instincts had yet to leave, as he wrapped his arms so tightly about the very miserable scientist that she later averred that she heard her bones creaking.

Finally, as they reached the bottom of the hill and added a few more inches down to the Frog-Robo-and-Lucca-shaped indentation in the ground, both were silent for several seconds, understandably winded.

   "Ow..." Lucca finally whimpered, wondering as she did so why the ground was so warm and faintly squishy, and if this were a bad sign.

   "I doth agree," Frog groaned painfully, and then grinned in spite of himself as he realized that the whimper of pain had come from the warm shape that seemed to be lying on top of him. "Although, I must admit that I should not find the situation wholly negative, were it not for the blinding waves of pain."

   "You're a weird guy, Frog," Lucca informed him solemnly, and he choked back a laugh at her expression, blue eyes wide and serious behind her glasses, which had by some miracle survived the fall. Or rather, by no miracle, but due to being made especially by Lucca, for Lucca. Those babies, she would not have hesitated to tell you, could withstand being hit by a meteor!

   "Frog! Lucca! Are you alright?" Robo hollered from the top of the hill.

   "Yeah, fine," Lucca called back, grumbling as she climbed to her feet and hauled Frog up after her. "Let's just continue on before anything else can go wrong."

Frog said nothing as the two braced themselves to tackle the hill again, but wondered uneasily if the phrase "before anything else can go wrong" wasn't something of a pipedream.

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End Notes: Hee! Short, and nothing really happened, but I hope you enjoyed it anyway. Rhianwen's penchant for the Compromising Situation has begun to rear its ugly head. I hope no one shall be deterred by this. ^_^

Anyway, thanks for reading, and see you next time for Lesson 3!