*staggers out of band camp*
That was amazing, but unfortunately for you guys I had a grand total of zero hours from my last update to today. So now I cram in to make up for it! Don't you feel special? :p
Just for the future: after this peaceful interlude in which I get to avoid violence for a good time, I'll be throwing the repercussions of the events of the current war back at them, things like the battle at Naggiar, or Ghirlandio. That'll take me a long time – I'm actually hoping to hear more about Valkyria Chronicles 2 before I make it out of the war, so I know exactly what breaks canon.
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"On three, then?"
Eyes bleary with pain, but still scowling with determination, the grey-bearded Fhiraldian farmer Napa nodded. His family, consisting of his obviously flustered wife, Gerda, and three terrified children, looked on as Celes kept his hands on the farmer's naked torso and elbow. Napa's arm, tanned both by the elements and his Fhiraldian heritage, was strangely long, and at a peculiar angle, an obvious symptom of injury.
"This is nothing," he growled. "Nothing like the time I cut myself with the scythe on a rock. Just get it over with, Imperial."
Celes indulged himself by puffing his cheeks out with displeasure, but continued anyways. "Then here we go… one… two!"
One count ahead of time, Celes pushed as hard as he could, yet with more precision than brute force. Screaming, the farmer felt the joint snap back together, and fell back onto the bed, dazed with pain.
Gerda made an unhappy noise behind him, arms flailing with obvious displeasure. "Just what do you think you're doing?! Are you trying to humiliate him? An underhanded trick, just to cause him more pain? You come in here promising treatment and you give nothing but abuse instead? What was the purpose of that, you quack?" He cringed at that. "Out! Out!"
The moment she began to guide her moving arms to beat him out of the house, Celes decided it was best to explain. Even as he put a crutch between his face and the abuse to fend her off – by the middle to defend, as opposed to swinging from the end to attack – he barked, "Hold it, woman!"
The very husband-like scold halted the matronly woman in her tracks, just as he had hoped. Before Gerda could protest his presumptuous comment and renew her aggression, he thrust into the silence to explain.
"If I let him prepare, he'd only tense the muscles around the joint before I pushed it back in. If that happened, not only would he be in a lot more pain, I might cause permanent damage!" He let the crutch slide back to the ground as he used it to stand back up inside the farmer's cabin. "Where would you be then, without his strong arms in the fields?" That was no empty praise, either – Napa's limbs were like tree trunks, and Celes had no doubt that they had the strength of them, after watching him singlehandedly move barrels that would have taken the Imperial a forklift. "I did the best for all of us, damn the trickery."
The language was harsh, but the message behind it wasn't. Although it took a few seconds for Gerda to realize, realize she did, and in an instant she went from matronly angry to matronly thankful.
Celes wasn't sure which one was worse.
Fortunately, he still had to bind and pad the shoulder injury and rattle off the needed instructions for his care until he fully recovered – the farmer wouldn't be doing any heavy lifting for a while, especially nothing along the lines of moving an entire felled tree by himself. While he certainly had the strength to do so, tripping, twisting, and getting the thing caught on another tree had been his downfall, if one would pardon the pun.
"And stop indulging his strength, sah," he berated her, although he made sure to use the Fhiraldian gender-neutral honorific to make the statement less barbed. "I know you're proud you married a strong man, but letting that get to his head causes this."
Her thankfulness drooped, making her look wrathful again, but Celes quickly added in a low voice, "Besides, if you have him ask for just a little help, people get to see him work as well as see the results. Keeping his strength all to your own knowledge isn't exactly going to let people know about him, and be as jealous as they should." He let a cheshire smirk grow across his face. "Isn't that so much better?" he noted in a voice bordering on conspiracy.
One suffocating hug of happiness later, Celes was regretting his decision to give her that idea.
Rescue came in the form of Isara knocking on the door, and the Gerda's sense of courtesy meant that she thankfully had to let go of him and exit the room to answer it. Even as he gratefully collapsed back into his chair, the mechanic came through the door, kindly waving off the woman's attentions.
"No, no, I don't need a drink, I don't need dinner, I was just coming to check up on him," she gently informed the wife, determinedly dodging her embrace to walk into the bedroom in which Celes and the farmer were in.
"Ah, yes, the skilled doctor!" Gerda crowed. "Such skilled hands! Such deep knowledge! Such perfect…"
Such a difference from "quack", he sarcastically added in his head. That was enough of a difference for him, but the sight of Isara's smiling face, starkly contrasted against the dark hair – as opposed to "darkhair", he reminded himself – was a pleasant sight any time of day.
She looked curiously at the man, still out with pain, as if confirming what Celes had told her earlier about being masochistic and headstrong. "How'd it go?" she asked nonchalantly.
He leant back and smiled. "Just fine. Gave him the old 'one-two' treatment."
Isara giggled, letting herself fall into a chair to put her on the same level as him. "Celes! I wasn't aware punching people was part of your job description!"
"Wha – oh." The incongruity of his statement only then struck him, and he broke out into laughter with her. "Come on, you know that was unintended!"
Before they could continue their joke, however, the wife interrupted by doing her best to thank them. It was only after they had both had cups of tea – something Celes enjoyed, although he knew Isara was secretly choking it down without sugar, even if she never gave the slightest hint that it was anything but delicious – that she let them go. His "fee" was nothing more than a basket of food, although she made sure to cram in enough for a week, when all he had asked for was for the day. Not that he minded – the nature of the season meant that all the food that was available would keep without fear of spoilage.
Eventually, they extricated themselves from the house, Celes recovering the wheelchair he had left outside on the main village path – a much better-maintained one than the ones along the hillsides. "So, Celes, how was it?" Isara asked in continuation of their earlier conversation.
Food balanced on his lap, Celes wheeled himself carefully forward, busy fishing his memory. "Napa decided to practice for the festival's weight lifting competition." He grunted a disparaging tone. "Hardly like he needed it, but I suppose he could have used the wood for something. First he chops down a tree – and a pretty big one too – in mere minutes, and then he goes and tries to move the whole thing without even trying to partition it."
"He did, of course," Isara said expectantly.
He turned his head and nodded to her even as they kept moving forward along the road, flanked on both sides by cabins that sometimes doubled as store fronts. One Fhiraldian man waved to him – he returned it in kind. "Yes he did, but then he goes and bumps into a rock, trips, and dislocates his shoulder." Isara winced, but nodded. "Now he's probably not going to be in any condition to participate in the festival competitions." Napa would have won any competition of strength hands down – now, he would most likely be kept on the sidelines. Celes didn't want to be there when he found that little fact out.
"Speaking of the festival," he continued, "did you get anything useful?"
Isara beamed and nodded exuberantly. "I've just found the perfect thing to act as ballast for the dropforge. You're going to help me carry it!"
Celes groaned. Weeks of being with her told him what that entailed.
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It was a grueling trek back, but Celes kept his mouth shut about being used as a packhorse. After all, it wasn't as if she wasn't helping him either.
Still, they must have looked a sight. Isara had manufactured two of what amounted to trailers for the wheelchair to help move larger objects – there was one both in town, in what had become their "office", so to speak, as well as their actual quarters farther away.
The object in question was a huge, antique safe, easily several hundred pounds before whatever was inside of it – and whatever that was, it was heavy. Isara had already gone and picked the lock – its previous owner had no clue where it had come from and therefore lacked a key – but found the door to be stuck shut anyways, probably due to corrosion inside. Taking it as payment as a trade for a new, hastily forged hammer, the huge object could easily be broken apart and recast into a solid shape.
Well, "easily" was relative. The metal, some strange mix of copper and steel, may have been extremely brittle by Isara's standards, but to Celes metal was still metal. Melting it down was out of the question, unless they wanted to spend the entire winter cutting down trees to produce the concentrated heat needed to do so, and heating it would apparently clean out the copious impurities that made it fragile in the first place, so softening it with heat before cutting it apart was out of the question as well.
They'd have to do the job cold, which somehow made him despair. It seemed completely illogical.
"Celes, what do you suppose is in there anyways?" Isara chimed from behind. She was pushing as he wheeled forward, but although they were doing the same amount of work, her ability to use her legs made it significantly easier for her.
He grunted. "I don't know. Something bulky and pointless, I guess." Turning his head back to glare at her, he stated in an almost whining tone, "You couldn't have kept this in town and had some stronger arms do this?"
She gasped theatrically. "Celes, have you taken a look at yourself recently?"
"No, I haven't, Isara," he sighed, almost as dramatically. "There hasn't exactly been a large reflective surface anywhere nearby for me to be a narcissist and admire myself."
Neck starting to hurt, he turned back forward, but not before he caught her smile of humor. "Then you obviously haven't noticed that you look quite strong."
Celes let out a whoosh of air, both from exertion and annoyance. "I don't feel strong at all."
Letting out an impatient noise, she suddenly took an extra step forward out of cadence, essentially giving him an annoyed shove as his chair suddenly flew that distance forward. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Celes," she said in an overly dark voice.
The smile he had been trying to hold back broke free. "I'm not feeling sorry for myself, I'm just trying to dodge work."
"Wha –"
His laughter and her subsequent outrage rang throughout the hills all the way back.
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CLANG!
The sledgehammer impacted on what Isara had called the "stress point" of the safe with a mighty ring not unlike a church bell. More importantly and very annoyingly, the impact had absolutely no visible effect.
Letting out a breath of exertion, Isara grounded the hammer's end into the earth before tilting the handle towards him – the proper manner to pass a heavy tool.
"You know, Isara," he said as he took the wooden grip and dragged the blunt instrument toward him, "I think this is ridiculous. Aren't I the cripple?"
"Only in your leg," she refuted, glancing significantly towards his right knee. The bullet wound higher up in the thigh would have been giving him some trouble, but it really was the destroyed knee that was the problem. It wasn't as if the muscles wouldn't bend his leg if he absolutely had to, but the grinding of ill-healed bone against bone instantly dropped Celes with pain. To prevent as much from happening accidentally, he'd made a brace around the joint to stop it from moving. In reality, he really didn't need the crutches to move around, but they did make travel much faster than without them. "You aren't at all crippled above your legs, anyways."
"Except in my head," he muttered to himself.
"What was that?"
"Nothing!"
Hastily, he shouldered the sledgehammer, almost staggering underneath its weight. "Are you sure I can do this?" he asked skeptically. "I mean, there's being chivalrous and helping a lady out, and then there's just plain suicidal…"
"I'll catch you if you fall," she reassured him helpfully.
"Somehow that bothers me more than you asking me to do this," he muttered to himself. Before she could comprehend what he had just said, he raised the hammer into the air above his head. There was pressure on his legs – a lot of pressure – but he ignored it, swinging his arms down –
Damn. He'd unconsciously tried to bend his knees to increase the speed. With the brace, that blocked that particular movement and sent the energy elsewhere – toppling him over sideways. Even as he fell, he made sure to watch the hammer's descent, ensuring that it didn't end it smashing onto his foot.
The sound of the safe splitting apart completely muffled his squawk of indignation when he hit the earth. So she hadn't caught him after all. Liar.
He rolled face-up, cocking his head at her. "I thought you said you –"
He was immediately struck dumb as he watched her laugh harder than she ever had in front of him before. Angrily, he began, "Hey! That's not funny! I could have been seriously –"
She pointed towards the opened safe. Despite himself, he looked – and began to laugh with her.
Inside the metal chunks of the old safe: was yet another safe.
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Significant plot object is significant. That is all.
