A/N: Hey everyone! Welcome to my collection of 2024 Adventures in Narnia stories! Let's see if I can beat my previous record of, uh, three responses :P. It's always fun to be writing Narnia again; I really appreciate BrokenKestral and the team for putting this on! Now, forward to the first prompt...

Prompt 1 - A King, Queen, or warrior of Narnia is forced to improvise a weapon.

"Professor?" Peter Pevensie called as the tea kettle began whistling from the other room. Peter had not set the pot to boil; therefore, logically, Professor Kirke must have. There was no sound of him now, though, getting up to retrieve it and relieve Peter's eardrums, and no one else in the cottage to call on instead. "Blast," Peter muttered, and reluctantly began shifting papers and book piles that hemmed him in.

Before he could fully extract himself from the couch, however, he froze. The kettle was still shrieking quite robustly; but something pricked the back of his mind, some sound or lack of it, some movement or stillness, some flicker on the edge of a sense he could not quite place.

(Peter Pevensie, you see, was not merely a young Englishman revising for a particularly hard University exam; he had, erstwhile and elsewhere, answered also to the name of Sir Peter Wolf's-bane, and his knight's skills, though dormant, never quite deserted him.)

Suddenly sharp-eyed and intent, Peter's eyes tracked in a controlled sweep of the room. He tuned out the kettle's shriek, listening behind and through it to catch any unusual noises. His right hand curled slowly around a sturdily-bound copy of Saint Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae Partis.

Click, snick went the scullery door-latch. Peter unfolded himself carefully, bracing a particularly unsteady book-pile as the cushions resumed their shape and threatened to spill it on the floor. Still clutching Aquinas, he slipped around the room's scholastic detritus toward the open door to the kitchen. A mirror hung on the back of the door, Peter remembered; with luck, he could catch a glimpse of the intruder, if indeed intruder it was.

The kettle continued to shriek. That, at least, seemed to indicate it was not simply Professor Kirke returning after a bracing walk in the fresh air.

A glimpse in the mirror—wind-blown brown hair, a well-kept jacket. Wild, wild eyes. A thousand-yard stare.

A pistol trained with wavering accuracy on the whistling kettle.

Peter's heart sank even as his grip on the Summa tightened. What would snap the man out of his fit? Was the weapon loaded?

The shell-shocked soldier advanced intently on the shrieking teapot. Peter froze as his eyes flashed around the room; they could have met his own in the mirror, except clearly the man saw nothing that was truly before him. Then his angle shifted, and he came to stand nearly in front of Peter's doorway. Peter shifted in readiness, whether to speak or spring or strike, when—

Click, snick—the scullery door opened again. "Peter, my boy," the Professor called as he backed through the doorway, carrying a large crate, "won't you get th—"

Three things happened simultaneously. The Professor, turning into the kitchen, froze in surprise and alarm. The stranger, whirling at the interruption, moved his weapon away from the kettle toward the door that now slammed shut with a rattle. And Sir Peter Wolf's-bane, Knight of Narnia, swung the Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae Partis, with all of his considerable strength and skill, in a beautiful upper-cut directly into the pressure point on the man's elbow.

Whack! Aquinas made contact with humerus. The man's startled yelp blended with the teapot's ever-constant shriek. The gun fell from nerveless fingers as the man clutched his arm.

In two quick steps, Peter retrieved the weapon, cleared it, and tucked it in his waistband. Then he clicked off the stove and moved the kettle off the heat. The room fell blissfully silent.

Professor Kirke set down his crate with a thump.

The stranger breathed heavily and swayed.

"It's alright, you're alright," Peter soothed in a low voice, moving carefully toward the soldier. Blue eyes, less wild now but more confused, met his. A gentle touch incited no further violence; Peter, after a glance that found the Professor's face reflecting his own sympathy, directed the man through the kitchen, around the scholarly detritus, and onto the couch.

"Oh, God," the man said. "Oh, God, I'm sorry."

The Professor walked up with a newly-made cup of tea, which he set carefully on one of the least precarious book stacks.

"No harm done," he said, quietly but cheerfully. "I forgive you, and God certainly does too."

The man exhaled shakily, covering his eyes with his hand. "Thank you," he muttered in Peter's general direction.

And Peter, saying nothing, merely shifted a pile of books to join him on the couch, the shoulder-to-shoulder brace of comrades. And if the cup of tea had cooled, and been drunk anyway, and another made and drunk, before the man began, haltingly, to speak of his troubles, that was no matter in the face of the Professor's gentle wisdom and the Knight's silent support. And if Summa Theologica, Secunda Secundae Partis was abandoned in the kitchen where Peter had left it, with the rest of the study materials unopened for the remainder of the day, that wasn't even worth mentioning. It had served its purpose.