Author Topic: A Magician's Secrets  (Read 3923 times)

Shifting Sands

  • Mage of Caerreyn, Level 2
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on: September 28, 2016, 07:51:07 PM
Pony warning and all that




It was nice to have some place that was actually my own again. I’d spent long enough mooching off of other’s homes and hovels. Rather than having me crash in Daisy’s practical-mansion, she would have her own space in the decently sized home that I’d managed to buy. Granted, it wasn’t with the cleanest of money, but that wasn’t something I could keep concerning myself with. Stolen or not, it was going to get spent, and I’d worked to get it.
   
The home was an investment, anyway. I was sure Daisy could do a better job staging her flower stand with a place to rest and relax from inside the city. While some other thieves bothering with Dirty’s jobs spent their coin on fueling their cider or ale addiction, I was supporting myself and a friend.
   
That was good enough for me.
   
While I spent most of the afternoon lounging in the… well, lounge of the house, based on how it connected right into the kitchen, with a small hallway back out into the other rooms, Daisy was busy out and about, selling flowers and whatever else. Despite my bunches of free time during the day, I’d never bothered with trying to pick up and learn much about her plant life. It was due in part to laziness, since I figured she would be the one to know and she wouldn’t need any help if she hadn’t before, but I was also busy trying to work on magic and reading up on assorted literature.
   
One of those was much more successful than the other, of course. I’d learned to read and write when I was young, and I’d picked up on what made life into an experience by just living it out, so I could enjoy (or at least understand) things like Trotstoy and Marey Shelley. Magic, however, was something that I’d seen maybe once or twice in my life before. Pegasi were, unsurprisingly, not very acquainted with magic, considering they didn’t have any way they could possibly cast it. Coupled with a lack of experience was the recency of my discovery of being able to cast in the first place.
   
Simply put, I was struggling with magic most of the time. After I fumbled a couple of spells, I would take a break and bury myself in a book, preferably a huge tome that would occupy even more time in between attempts. And maybe hide my face away even if there wasn’t anyone else to observe.
   
After a good chapter of fiction reading, I tried to pick up the solid tome off the table across from me. “Try” really was the operative word there, as I was trying my best to use all the magic I could to keep straining those mental muscles. After some invisible nudging and trembling lifts, the tome started to come off the furniture and gain a pale green aura about it. Semi-confident about it, I kept up all the effort I had already poured in and figured I could just let it drift on over.
   
Somewhere along the line I guess I screwed up, because the spine of the thing landed on my nose and knocked me down to the ground with it.
   
Grumbling with renewed annoyance, I forced myself back up, grabbing the book in my teeth this time. At least something so physical couldn’t fail me.
   
But yet again I was proven wrong. Where my magic had been a few seconds before, there was now a glaring reddish-orange grip on it. It didn’t hesitate to yank the tome away from me and my mouth.
   
“AGH!” I said, smartly, moving both hooves up to my gums and teeth. I didn’t know how to soothe them, but I wasn’t going to let the tome have a second shot in the same spot either. I threw myself back onto the couch and looked around the room for whoever might be breaking in and trying to assassinate me, one tooth at a time. My magic was pretty sad – too sad to even bring up a shield to protect myself, so I had to use the very fluffy couch as my only cover.
   
Just in the front hall of the house was a mare, a deep gray in color. Her silvery mane and coat were all disheveled, along with her lashes, giving her a pretty maddened look. Considering she had ripped a book out of my mouth, I was quite ready to attribute the word “crazy” to her already. She had on an ebony cape, though, and it looked completely spotless, rather contrary to the rest of her. There were also a couple of spiky-antennae like bits of her mane that came up over her eyes, lined up perfectly above the eyelashes.
   
So, yeah, crazy was probably the right word for her.
   
She had a glare ready and prepared for me by the time I met her eyes. I winced and slunk back a bit further down the couch. She reminded me of my old scolding teachers, somehow. Just add a few wrinkles and bam, you had a pegasus instructor.
   
Oh, and she had a horn instead of wings, of course. The power holding the tome was pretty obviously coming from said horn, and she toted it like a weapon as she marched further into my home.
   
“Um, hello?” I tried. Probably not the best way to deal with infiltrators, but I was the one who did the infiltrating.
   
The unicorn tilted her head, appraising me, and then the rest of the main room and the adjacent kitchen. “You’re Shifting Sands? The thief?” She looked to me again and frowned. “Apparently you’re a bug? I thought you were… not.”
   
I blinked a couple of times before realizing I hadn’t bothered with any sort of disguise. I threw on the typical one in a flash of color and flapped my refeathered wings. “Yes, I am,” I announced proudly, right before biting my tongue and flying into a different tirade. “But who are you? And why did you break into my home? And why are you here in the first place?!”
   
Still holding the tome and moving to circle around the couch, she looked back to the front door, which was open a crack. “Well, your door wasn’t locked.”
   
I stammered a couple of times before I could respond. “Yes, but – but this is a nice part of the city! You don’t just test locks like that! And then amble on in!” Meekly, I reached out with my magic to try and shut the door, but was caught with a book at my throat, making me cough and gurgle.
   
“Stop that.” The book let off a little, and the mare stared me down. “I don’t trust you trying to magic your way out of this.”
   
I cleared my throat and very, very slowly stood off the couch. All my movements deliberate, I went to the front door. She lifted a brow by the time I reached it, but I only pushed the door shut and locked it up. Then I repeated the same sort of walking back to the couch and leaned into it. She looked at me like I was stupid, but I knew damn well what I was doing and I didn’t want any more unwanted visitors. “Okay. Now, who are you, and why are you in here?” I reiterated.
   
She mumbled something under her breath, though it was too long to be her name and it wasn’t long enough to explain why she was about. Probably just calling me stupid or something and hoping I wouldn’t notice. Then again, she didn’t seem particularly sure of herself either. Maybe she didn’t have a plan together in the first place.
   
Maybe she really WAS a total nut.
   
I pressed for an answer again, and she gave me another death glare. “Virmare,” she grumbled, through tense teeth. “Virmare. That’s my name.”
   
“That’s an odd one,” I trailed into speaking, not really thinking. “Usually the ponies around here have some combo name, like me, with the something-this, something-that, like – I don’t know, looking at you, maybe something like Sootcoat or Whitemane or –“
   
“Yes, well, I’m not from around here,” she interrupted, and used a quick burst of her magic to slam my jaws together. It absolutely hurt. I must have been talking pretty fast for her to have taken so long to have shut me up. “And because I’m not from around here, I’m looking into this thieving thing you and your, ah, friends do.”
   
Rubbing my jaw and letting it set back into proper place, I perked up at her last few words. “I don’t know if you could call half of them my friends. I’m buggy and all that, like you noticed. But if you really want to get into the same sort of business that I participate in – and I’m not sure how you even know that I do, but I won’t play stupid – then you need to talk to Dirty, not me.”
   
Virmare didn’t seem to have calmed down in the slightest from the very moment I had noticed her, and yet she still managed to tense up further. “No. The fewer know about this, the better. I’m already here, so you’ll do. You won’t speak a word of this to your friends. We don’t need any further help.”
   
She looked panicky by now. Maybe even… embarrassed? I wanted to push some more, but my throat and jaw told me not to, so I just let it slide. “Okay. But it’ll have to be something simple if you want only my help. I usually have lots of assistance and favors called in to accomplish a job.” Really, it was mostly just some digging in books and asking around, but if I couldn’t “speak a word” to my accomplices, such stuff wouldn’t be possible.
   
“No, no, I’ve done my, um, research. I know that it’ll be fine with just you.” She shook her gaze away from me and stared out the window to the street, pulling the blinds down with magic. I didn’t disagree with that but I didn’t feel much more comfortable with her moving anything about in my house.
   
“So you know what we’ll be trying for, what we’ll be avoiding, all that sort of thing?” I asked, sliding on the couch to a spot closer to the hall and door. It was a just-in-case. Hopefully she didn’t think I was inviting her for a seat. “Or maybe you’ve done some of those scrying spells? You seem pretty capable with your magic.”
   
“Uh, yes!” She lit up and nodded enthusiastically. “Scrying. That’s it. Up in my tower, far, far away from everything here… but yes, that’s what I did, where I did it. I saw that I would only really need help from you, so I went straight here.”
   
Apparently I’d given her a pretty perfect excuse. I didn’t really know how I’d challenge her in the first place, so going along with her every word would be much more in my interests. “Right, just me. So. With just my help, where are we going, what are we doing, and what’s going to be needing my help?”
   
Checking the door and window once more and finding them very secured, Virmare walked back to the center of the living room and slumped down, finally letting some of her muscles relax. “We are going into the center of this city, to one of those big museums. I think it’s called the ‘Metroponitan Museum’ or something stupid like that. We’re going to get inside, ignore all of the fancy paintings and showy items that they have on display, and we’re moving to the back to find a special tome. You’re the one who’s going to be doing most of the sneaking and getting.”
   
Oh, of course. I was being enlisted into a special squad of me, myself, and I while this crazy mare just hung out on top of the building, if I had to guess. I’d done this sort of thing before, fortunately and unfortunately, but it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better about the whole thing. There wasn’t a way I was going to get out of it, too. Either I showed up to this plan of hers and did my part, or I didn’t and she came back to find me. If she found me once, she could do it again, and I really didn’t want to lose this sweet house I had just gotten.
   
So, fine. I was committed; unhappy, but committed. “A tome?” I brought out my books, sufficiently smarmy-like, and shook them about in front of me. “Like these?”
   
Virmare frowned and knocked them out of my grip and onto the ground with a heavy crash. “The same, but different. We’re getting an old looking one, brown cover, ragged pages…”
   
“So, like pretty much every book ever in any library or museum or what-have-you.”
   
She rolled her eyes. “The inside cover has my, urm, brother’s, initials in it. K.V. And the very first page is burned. It should be unique enough to pick out from all the rest, I would hope.”
   
“Yeah, but now you’re saying we’ll have to pick out old brown books, then open each one of them until we’ve got the certain one we need? You narrowed it down by a lot, sure, but there’s still plenty more we’ll have to sort through. Why do you even need it?” I moved down to pick my books up, comfortable enough in how she was sat down that she probably wouldn’t try and roast me for any movement by now.
   
She wasn’t very forthcoming with her answer, taking her sweet time and mulling over plenty of words before she even opened her mouth. “Well… I need to…”
   
Something rattled on the front doorknob. Virmare leapt up and immediately lit her horn, bright orange and specks of fire dancing around it. I hoped they weren’t strong enough to set anything on fire.
   
“Whoever it is, I’ll take care of it,” I reassured her, dropping my books, and jumped up to check the door.
   
Before I could reach, it opened of its own accord and a bundle of plants came spilling through, soil and leaf scattering across the floor. I could briefly hear a little “oops” from the obvious culprit, but it wasn’t as loud as the jolt from my previous visitor, followed by a heatwave and a very telltale FWOOSH.
   
I swore a couple of times and leapt in front of Daisy, putting my reading skills to use. A sickly green barrier came up in the way of her and me, and though it didn’t throw all the fire magic off, the result was only a disgustingly strong, choking pulse of heat that sucked the breath from my lungs. I coughed and let my magic go. It was plenty obvious how weak and poorly made my spell was when it fell apart into little flickers, like a quilted weave being burnt over a fire, each little speck becoming nothing in the span of a second. The plant matter that had spilled over the floor and I hadn’t bothered to protect was charred back, shriveled sadly and clouded in smog.
   
I didn’t die in a fire, though, and neither did my housemate. And that was plenty.
   
Shaking away the smoke that I hoped neighbors wouldn’t see, it was my turn to shoot a glare at Virmare. She was surprised, and not much more beyond that. “You know who this is?” she asked, trying to change from her very aggressive combat pose.
   
I scoffed. “Yes. I do. And if I didn’t, would that make it fine to just roast her?” Daisy snuck by me with wide eyes and darted off into the hall, presumably down to her room. She hadn’t even bothered to grab her stuff. I scooped what I could of the fallen plants together and shut the door. I grabbed a fresh breath of air while I had my nose outside, too, then came back to sit and stare at the very-much-insane visitor I had.
   
She didn’t seem any more perturbed by my choice of words. “You steal from people you don’t know. Is that okay for you?”
   
I grit my teeth. “It’s different. I’m not turning anyone into kindling, first of all. I’m redistributing things. And I would do something else if I wasn’t worried about being found out as a changeling. It was just the only thing open to me.”
   
“Sure,” she said. And she didn’t say anything more. She just looked me down.

Stupid mare was going to drive ME crazy.

“You’re not one to give me a lesson in morals, alright?” I finally recovered my tomes and set them down on the table, giving the one in the middle a solid thump as way of thanks for giving me some good instructions on how to bend my magic. It was much easier to create a dome around my immediate area than put up a huge wall in front of me as a projected barrier. “You – sort of – broke into my home, threatened me, and then demanded that I help you with something I’m not concerned about in the slightest. That’s just ignoring the last part that happened.”

“You could have said no,” she argued, and shrugged. “But now you agreed to it. And you may want to play the hero, but I don’t shoehorn myself into that role.”

I wanted so badly to smack her in the face. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I watched her calm herself back down and head back to the front door, stepping around her handiwork that rested to the side of her exit. “You’ll want to get to the museum before dark. After the moon’s in the sky, they push out all the visitors and keep a few guards on night watch. I assume you can find some way to stick around while they’re escorting the guests out.” And then Virmare let herself out, scuffing up a little dirt on the way.

I climbed off the couch and let out a long-held breath, moving straight to the windows and opening them wide. I didn’t want the smell of smoke stuck in my brand new place, and the room was terribly hot with her in it. The sun was still high up in the sky when I peeked my head out to check. I had a while to relax. I could try and come up with some way out of this, or get prepared for an impromptu break-in and robbery. I still had so many questions for the crazy unicorn, but with how she acted, I would probably only fry my own brains in the process. Maybe this was what it was like to run up against someone else who had an ounce of coercion and smarm in their veins. Then again, she utilized it in a different way than me. She was trying to be a strong-arm type. I didn’t like it.

But as much as I loved to delude myself, I didn’t have a choice.



Shifting Sands

  • Mage of Caerreyn, Level 2
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Reply #1 on: September 28, 2016, 07:53:15 PM
It was very well into the evening by the time I slipped into the museum in mind. There was a fee at the entrance, which Virmare had conveniently forgot to mention, but it wasn’t hard to pass that by. Just a bit of some bending of the light was enough to appear inconspicuous to the toll-takers up front. Once I was inside, I found a spot behind a statue display to undo that light-bending and appear perfectly normal and disguised again. I stepped out and did a little bit of scouting.
   
By that, of course, I meant that I looked around the exhibits. I was already there and it would be a while longer until the sun was down, so I might as well enjoy it.
   
There was a mild crowd being brought through the place while I explored. I caught a few glances from the group, but it wasn’t anything suspicious or questioning. Probably just some tour of the place going on.
   
I gave a small nod to the crowd as I slunk by them. It was the only-barely-genuine sort that absolute strangers gave to one another, accompanied by a weak smile or a tightening of the lips. They bought it, as much as one could buy it, and kept staring over the painting in front of their faces.
   
From there I just kept moving along through the place, most of the purveyors heading towards the entrance, maybe unconsciously. I was doing just the opposite. It made me stick out, of course, so the solution was simple; I waited until the guests were out of sight, out near the front, and before the guards had trickled out to look around the halls, I threw on the stronger version of the light bending spell I had used before. It made me feel a little woozy with both the magic it took and the effect it had, but when a guard, decked out in fanciful blue cloth and matching hat, came marching through the hall, he stuck to the center of his route and didn’t notice me moving about at all.
   
That was one part of the job done. I stopped myself from sighing in relief, resigning to simple, slow breaths instead, and headed further into the museum. The next step would be to find that stupid book the crazy unicorn needed, failing finding her first. Based on the very, very obvious fact that this building wasn’t housing any history exhibits beyond the artistic sort, this was going to be the fanciful eye-candy art type. If we – er, if I – was lucky, then maybe the book would be considered too ugly to be put up as a display. If that was the case, it would probably be in some back room among the dusty pieces of ancient art needing some reassembly.
   
Yeah, I could picture it now: a bunch of shelves, mostly empty, in a corridor deprived of guards. What a nice and easy job it would be.
   
After some half-hearted trolling of the halls, I caught sight of some double-doors off on the right side. On a tiny golden plaque next to it read “EMPLOYEES ONLY” in that odd mixture of off-putting capital letters mixed with flowing font.
   
That could be it. It could be the store room equivalent, or the guard break area. After seeing a couple of said patrols pass, though, I considered it a pretty safe bet that this would be the spot I wanted to get to. Once again, taking time and caution, I waited until both of my sides were clear of guards and noise before I gently grasped the handle on one of the doors and pulled it open, only barely.
   
I slipped in while the door was swinging back, catching it and letting it click closed. Only after it had shut did I look forward to check out the new environment.
   
I was, at best, over half right. This area must have been somewhere near the back of the museum, and was devoid of any traffic, be it guard or guest. The floor was covered with dust, as were the shelves – and the shelves went way, way, way up. Most were as empty as the floor, though a few held ceramics or covered paintings and assorted works of art. Between the shelves wasn’t much room, unlike what I had imagined.
   
That little difference would have been fine, of course, if not for the section at the back that was cluttered full of tons and tons of tomes.
   
Well past the sparse shelves of art were entire shelves of books, parallel to the other, stacked from the bottom to the top. There wasn’t a single empty space or any separators, either. Whoever had set these up had clearly intended for them to use up every inch of area they could, even though there was very clearly some open areas in this storage.
   
I felt confident enough in my assertion that I was alone to mumble some unpleasantries about the idiot responsible for stacking things back here. If they wanted to have a library, then they could have just moved it into the castle and saved themselves their “precious” space here.
   
“Why does an art museum have this many books, anyway?” I spat, before there was a loud sound I could only describe as something like a particularly airy sneeze.
   
I jumped forward and nearly knocked into a mostly empty shelf, only barely stopping myself with a push of my wings. I was still invisible, but that didn’t last long before I put all that gathered energy into a spell for flooding someone with air – ideally, something like the opposite of having the wind knocked out of them.
   
But I didn’t get to use it. The source of the noise was also responsible for completely sapping that power I had gathered, leaving me drained. I fell face-first onto the dusty floor and coughed, followed by more coughing and gagging thanks to said dust. I looked up, feeling thoroughly beaten and humiliated.
   
Of course it had to be Virmare. She looked down at me momentarily, just to be sure I wasn’t dead, probably, and then looked at the books right ahead. “Oh. Great. I thought you would have found it by now and I could just get on my way, but at least we should be pretty close,” she said, calm enough to be clearly taunting me.
   
I wiped at my mouth and nostrils to clear out yet more of the dust before I worked on standing up. “How did –“ I started, but she just shushed me as she began checking out the collection.
   
“Earlier today I grabbed one of your hairs – which wasn’t really a hair, of course, but I didn’t really think that one through before I did it.” Oh, now she admits to doing anything wrong in the slightest. “But it didn’t matter. It was still a piece of your magical work, therefore your essence, so I could track you down with it.” And even then she hadn’t really messed up. “When you started heading to the museum, I made my way here, too, and waited just outside. As soon as I could pick up you talking, I figured it was safe to teleport in on you.”
   
I stepped next to her and looked over her shoulder, clearly aggravating her. “Why don’t you start on the other shelf? …and why does an art museum have this many books, anyway?”
   
I rolled my eyes and did as she asked. Old, raggedy brown tomes where was I started, but there wasn’t exactly a lack of them. Plus, it was an ordeal to tug them out of the tight confines that were the accompanying books.
   
The first I managed to pull free was something written by one “Hoofdini,” which wasn’t the first genie in Equestria, I was surprised to find. Instead, he was some sort of magic performer. Rather than put it right away, I looked into it. Pages were loaded with flashy spells and his best recollection on how he had done them, for what, and even how the crowds tended to receive them. It was something between a diary and a spellbook.
   
I set it aside, saving the hassle of potentially finding it again, and dug into some more. They were all related, at least somewhat. Every single one was all about magic, whether it was spells themselves, or a history of the stuff, or suggested reagents, focuses, and their replacements.
   
“They must be planning some sort of showing of the art of magic,” I concluded, stating it aloud just in case Virmare hadn’t realized the same thing. Maybe I could get that much over her. “Spellweaving, showy magics, it’s all here.”
   
She scoffed. “Where I come from, magic isn’t some innate thing. I can’t imagine that you would have made it into an art form before us.”
   
I looked behind me and right at her, lifting a brow. “Unicorn aren’t born with magical ability where you’re from?”
   
Her arm seized up before shoving aside a bulky bunch of books. “No. They’re not. I speak from experience.”
   
Based on the tension that stuck around in her muscles, I guessed that must have been the case. That explained… some things, at least. I certainly wasn’t about to push her on the subject of magic if she believed it to be her hard work and nothing to do with nature.
   
Even so, I’d never heard of a unicorn born without the ability to do magic – or a changeling. Perhaps she was the exception, which made the topic even more of an obvious hazard to tread on.
   
I carefully let the subject drop and went back to sorting through the lines of books.
   
It took much longer than I would have expected, but it’s not like I had ever gone spell book hunting before; not that specifically, anyway. Apparently brown was the color of choice for magic practitioners. I found one that matched a little more closely, with scorch marks near the front. I brought it out and near to Virmare, but she had done the same. She opened her book, looked on the inside cover, and her face lit up. She immediately shut it and kept it suspended in her magic. It wasn’t any normal lift spell – it looked like it was could take a beating from a dragon and still hold out. She valued that thing.
   
I shrugged and started moving back to the shelf I was at. “If you’ve got it, I guess we don’t need this one,” I said, and opened it up before putting it back.
   
Unfortunately, it exploded in my face.
   
The book had a real doozy of a warding spell to protect it ready to go, and it must not have been opened in quite some time with how much force it had stored. It blasted me back into the shelf with all the force of a cannon, crushing my chest under the power it put out. Books, wood, and dust went flying while the shelf took its sweet time to swing and knock against the floor. There was a fairly nasty squelch that sounded too familiar to me from my time fighting and escaping changelings a few months back, and there was only a few brief seconds of numbness in my shoulders, hips, and chest before they lit up with searing, pressing pain.
   
It really HURT. I ended up sprawled out on top of splintered wood and burnt paper, coughing yet again. This time, though, each cough was like my lungs got to contract and expand atop a bed of burning spikes, and made my whole body seize up around my center.
   
Oh, yeah, and then I remembered I had senses beyond pain and sight. Everything smelled dusty, burnt, and awful; I could most definitely taste something ichory and burning stuck in my mouth; and my ears were painfully ringing.
   
There was something else, too, but it wasn’t coming in right away. I waited in pain for to adjust, only to pick up the noise of yelling and general alarm. And a literal siren of an alarm, too.
   
“…me? Can you HEAR ME?”
   
And OW was that loud, too. I raised the less pained arm to my head, very softly trying to cover where the sounds came in. “Yes, I can hear you pretty well, thanks,” I grumbled, trying to look away from the ceiling that was holding my attention. Virmare was standing before me, appearing less smarmy and more… concerned, oddly enough. Panicked, maybe.
   
Ah. Right. Things slowly started to piece together in my shaken head. That enormous explosion was loud enough to warn the entirety of the guards and maybe even anyone outside the museum, too.
   
“We’ve got to go.” Obviously, but my head was still all swimmy, and I just said the first thing that came to mind. I moved to stand up, feeling plenty ready to leave the sorry state I was in, but the pain that shot through the whole of my being and then some put any desires to move all the way out of my head and halfway across the planet. Anything I did simply made it hurt more.
   
“The only part of you that isn’t burned is your whole backside,” Virmare commented, which I’m sure came from the fact that she was panicked like I was, and not that she wanted to see me flipped over like a cooked vegetable and finished grilling on the other side. Either way, she approached me and – to my surprise – lifted me up in her magic in the same sort of spell that she’d had on her book.
   
“You’re… real heavy,” she complained. Not too long after, her magic flickered and nearly died out, making her gasp, huff, and take a deep breath to maintain that level of power.
   
“You don’t have to hold me in that same sort of bubble,” I told her. In response, she glared at me and started to let the concentration slip on it, degrading the spell. I could start to feel the pain in my back intensify, and I bit my lip to prevent some sort of unmanly whine escape. She put the same level of power back into the spell, and the pain lightened back to the level of intolerable it was at prior. “Fine,” I gasped, and put all my focus into carrying the book instead.
   
She was hesitant to let go at first. It was pretty easy to tell, considering her aura wouldn’t leave her tome for a good few seconds. She did, though, and with her effort all in one place, and my lackluster power backing up that which she had held before, she brought us back out through the only door available.
   
“You’d think they’d have a fire exit,” I managed between panting. Virmare didn’t laugh. “Can’t you… teleport us out, or something?”
   
“I can’t teleport on something without an exact idea of where I’m going. I’m in a city I don’t know, in a building I don’t know, carrying some crazy idiot I only barely know.” Guards were flocking to the store room now, cones of bright light projected in front of them. I got the feeling they weren’t just for seeing in the dark, either, based on the particles that bounced off of the surfaces the light touched. “Plus, I’m not teleporting anywhere when I’m already focused on carrying something YOUR size. And I’m not the one holding my book.”
   
I had to concede that that was fair. She looked to the right, the left, and then the right again, huffing in exasperation. She just decided to head down where was closest, guards be damned.
   
It wasn’t the best idea. A cone of light caught her on the shoulder, and she froze up - not even her whole body; just the left foreleg, which sent her to the ground, and, by effect, me too. While I couldn’t imagine how that stunning magic must have felt, I also couldn’t imagine it hurt more than having my already aching body subjected to more impacts. I completely forgot about holding that book in the meantime when I was much more concerned with holding myself together.
   
I was able to roll my neck enough to look away from an ornate pillar and over to Virmare instead. She took the fall rather gracefully, all things considered. She was already back up on her hooves and spent just a second to blast the guard responsible for our fall with a cone of flame. It didn’t incinerate him, thankfully, but it did make him drop the cone and focus on blocking off that fire. She spun back to the book and I, looking the both of us over.
   
I could see her look between the tome and me a couple of times. The deliberation and consideration she was doing terrified me for much too long. We were here for her book, not for me. She could easily grab it and run off without the dead weight I had become.
   
But she didn’t. She grabbed me up in her magic again, pulled me around the corner with her, and ran at breakneck speeds towards the entrance.
   
In the oddest way, we were lucky that the way I had come in was the longer path around. Most of the guards were moving to fill up the shortest space between the entrance and the store room. Our run had fewer blockages than it could have otherwise had, and Virmare was quick to blast any more watchponies before they caught us. Each one ended up subdued under a blast of flame, and she kept moving while they recovered.
   
Along the way, she may have destroyed some priceless artwork with stray embers. I couldn’t hold that against her. I ignored anything alight and did my best to not pass out from the pain and the growing smoke while she carried me.
   
The toll gates were filled full of guards, once we had finally reached them. They stood shoulder to shoulder, blocking our exit.
   
Virmare grunted and slowed herself as she rounded another corner, catching sight of them. “I don’t suppose you have any energy at all? I just spent most of it getting us here, and…”
   
“Sure,” I managed, forcing myself to keep my eyes open. With any luck, I’d pass out after I used up all my magic and I could get some rest in. “Just get me a little closer.”
   
The nightwatch didn’t want that to happen. They yelled about staying in place while a few of them came forth to restrain her and stop her magic, but they didn’t dare move, holding barriers up to block the possible fire they saw trailing behind her. Still, she inched closer, the guards holding their ground and looking very uncertain and worried about it.
   
“Cover our ears and eyes,” I whispered, and squinted as I focused.
   
It started as a tiny sparkle behind the guards and their barriers and slowly grew to the size of a melon. As soon as the magic covering from Virmare went up, the melon popped with a bang that was still loud and painful, making both her and I wince while the guard yelled and curled up to try and block their senses off after the fact from the best flashbang I’d ever been able to create.
   
My rescuer (bleh, it felt bad to call her that) didn’t waste any time carrying two of us out while fatigue settled in over my pain. My bed was going to be holding me in its warm, loving embrace for a good few days very soon, if I made it out.
   
Our chances didn’t look too bad, now. There didn’t look to be any guards outside, and the ones we hadn’t incapacitated were funneling out over the blinded blockade up front. Virmare just ran, far, far, and farther, down dark streets.
   
“You got the book, didn’t you?” she asked, looking up and to the left to me, still very suspended in magic.
   
“Of course I did.” I presented the tome to her through my waning magic. She slowed to a halt, and I dropped it onto her back.
   
She looked like she might collapse then and there in relief. “Good.” She turned back to me again and frowned. “I didn’t pick you over it for any reason other than the fact that I could easily come back for the book, and not for you. So don’t think that for a second.”
   
I probably laughed or smiled or something, but I wasn’t anywhere near lucid enough to process it. Instead I readily fell asleep.



Shifting Sands

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Reply #2 on: September 28, 2016, 07:53:52 PM
Like pretty much everyone else in the world, my first action when I woke up was to open my eyes… and to stay completely still in my bed, maybe moving a limb or two to adjust. Beyond that, it took me a lot longer to get moving, especially without something like the academy or a real “job” to worry about.
   
Thanks to that, it took me much longer to remember the previous night and my stockpiled pain. As I tried to sit up, my chest felt like it crumpled in like cloth, making me gasp and throw myself back down into bed. I coughed up more of that ichory stuff before trying to hold back the rest of it, wincing and laying back.
   
I was, at least, back in my own bed, in my own room, in my own house. The very distinctly bland decoration and subpar paint job did a good job of reminding me of that. If I was here and I could try and siphon off passersby and Daisy, very slowly like, then it would only be a couple of days before I was all better. If I was lucky it could be just a few hours.
   
My leg brushed up against something leathery as I tried to get comfortable for more rest. I denied my first instinct to pull it up with my forelegs and used my magic instead, floating it free of the covers.
   
It was some sort of bound book I’d never seen before. I pulled open the cover, and a little note fell out.
   
The writing on it looked… well, atrocious, but it was readable. “Thanks,” it said. “I might need your help again some other time. You like writing? Use this for that magic you were trying.” It was signed “Virmare,” but the last half of her name looked like it was scribbled over a couple of times, and then had another color of ink to replace the ruined letters.
   
The book was entirely empty. I swished the pages back and forth a few times to fan myself before reaching out and grabbing a feather and ink on the far desk of the room, dabbing the tip before working at writing in the gift.
   
Ugh, and I’d never really know what was in that book of hers until I could get in contact with her again. I didn’t grab a hair from her mane the night prior, nor did I have the slightest clue on how I could use it to track her. I’d have to just wait until she came into town again.

She was insane, that was for sure. But she was tolerable, and that was how most of my friends were.



Virmir

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Reply #3 on: September 28, 2016, 09:47:04 PM
This was great!  The second half was really fun and exciting!  I think you caught what I'm envisioning with Virmare very well and quite like the dangerous and unfriendly but dependable portrayal.  Also very nice how you draw up a lot of hints and suggestions but don't outright say anything.  Great stuff!

[fox] Virmir