The Meeting at Fairisles Manor

A quiet residential street in Coi-Coi Village was filled with the sounds of clanking metal, drawing attention from the few villagers outside. A reputable monster hunter, the plate-armor-clad Lorelei, stopped beside a wooden tub bubbling with lye. She addressed the broad-faced woman stirring it with a smooth wooden paddle, and moments later the washerwoman wordlessly pointed a thick finger at a two-story brick house in the middle of the street. The building had an enlarged smoke stack lancing out of its shingled roof, and the expanded yard around it gave the sense that neighboring buildings were edging away from the home.

"Of course. I should have known." Lorelei gave a smile in thanks, but the washerwoman just stared back and wiped her hands on the stained apron she was wearing. Lorelei's smile stiffened slightly, and the clatter returned as she finished her walk to the home of her new hunting party teammate, Adorabella Fairisles.

Standing directly in front, it was obvious that the building was under some neglect. On the second story, a window had been tilted open slightly and all the glass within its panes had been discolored in different hues. Lichen were growing all around the bottom of the house, where the brickwork met the lawn. A metal pipe was slowly rusting in the impression it made on a bare patch of ground in one corner of the lot. On one side, a shed had been built askew and tendrils of white smoke curled out of gaps in the slats. Weeds waved contentedly in the seaside breeze, scattered about the grass which was still yellowed from the retreat of winter. And on the other side, a strange construction of riveted metal and polished stone loomed and a hum spilled from its walls and sloshed into the road. As Lorelei watched closely, a valved pipe climbing from the bottom of the off-putting vat vibrated subtly.

After a beat, Lorelei lifted the armored helmet from where it rested on her hip and wore it properly. Then she proceeded down the cobble path to the house's front door. When almost there, she had to circle around a wooden crate placed directly in the way and ended up standing awkwardly close to the door itself. She lifted a gauntleted hand to knock on the wood, but picked up the sound of hurried footsteps clambering down a carpeted stairway inside and the noise of a piece of furniture bouncing off the floor. With a jerk, the front door was opened inward so quickly that Adorabella on the other side had her blonde curly hair bounced by the gust of displaced air.

Adorabella had a round face with large green eyes and yellow spiralling twists in her glossy hair. But Lorelei knew that from seeing her new teammate among the other local monster hunters, and not from looking at the shorter woman blocking up the doorway. At the moment, the eccentric owner of this degraded house had her features largely hidden by layers of rags tied around the front of her face, and eyegoggles made of thick glass and matte rubber. Adorabella saw Lorelei watching her and swiftly shoved her goggles high on her forehead, letting them tilt across the square of gray-green cloth struggling to hold back her flouncing drills.

"I saw the message from the Elders already. Thank you for coming! Welcome to coming. Hello, I mean. I'm happy you're here, but, why are you here? And how are you here?"
Lorelei stood stoicly under the rush of words, hidden behind her plate armor. Slowly, she pointed back over her shoulder at the distant figure of the washerwoman at the corner of the street, who was still stirring her load of laundry and staring at Adorabella's lot. "I got directions from some of the villagers. I wanted to discuss the Hunt."

Adorabella Fairisles, better known to some as the divisive Bomber Belle, raised her eyebrows and rolled up her eyes in a gesture of deep thought. She leaned back and craned her neck to see something still hidden by the incompletely opened door, hiding most of her own head as well behind the panels. Lorelei, after a pause, leaned away also to look up at the same section of the building from the outside. She spotted the opened window again, and a new outflow of an oily green cloud from its crack.

Adorabella squeezed her way through the doorway then, and crowded near to Lorelei on the front step, shutting the front door behind herself. When she took her goggles off, they disappeared entirely as they cleared the top of her head, and the air filter of rags similarly vanished when Adorabella tugged them down over her chin. Even though the garments were gone, the thin red lines that they left behind on Adorabella's skin had all remained. The young woman grinned brightly, either not realizing or not caring that they were there.

"Sure! We'll have to do it out here though. Talk! Let's talk out here. Have you see my still?" Adorabella reached passed Lorelei - still jammed between the closed door, the wooden crate, and the academic - and brushed a hand in the direction of the worrying humming device in the yard.

With a careful flatness, Lorelei said, "I thought that brewing spirits was forbidden off of pub grounds."

"It's not alcohol!" Adorabella put a hand on Lorelei's back and pushed passed, making Lorelei sidestep and shoulder the door in order to give room. Adorabella hurried to the device and slapped a hand twice on one of the metal panels, making a wide tung tung sound. "It's pure water! Alchemically pure! True aqua. It carries nothing! Warm and clean, right from the tap."

Lorelei was a warrior all the way through, someone who cherished the eternal war against monstrosities and the protection she could extend to others. Many of the words coming at her whizzed right by, uncomprehended. But one stuck firm, and still left her confused. "Warm...?"

That was when Nero called out a "Yo!" from the street. Adorabella and Lorelei both snapped their heads in that direction as the rest of the world asserted its existence. Towards the appearance of the reknowned archer, Adorabella threw up her hands and let them down with a frustrated clap onto the sides of her legs. "What are you doing here?" Lorelei noted the shift in tone.

"I'm here to talk about the Hunt."
"You too? And how'd you find me?"
"It's a village. And anyway, she told me." Nero jerked his head in the direction of the washerwoman, who lifted two fingers in a rude salute towards Adorabella. Adorabella scrunched up her face and returned it, but faster and even higher up in the air.

Nero cleared his throat. "This is important, as it seems our new teammate Lorelei agrees. The Elders have expectations of us, even if they're being unnecessarily coy about how required we are to fulfill them."
Now very pointedly ignoring her neighbors, Adorabella huffed, "I know that. I would have looked for the rest of you when I was less busy."
"When would you have been less busy?"
Adorabella pinched her bottom lip between thumb and forefinger and pulled it out, then let it slip back with an audible pop. "...Later on." Then she squinted up at the cracked window and the mix of red and green smoke slithering out of it.

Nero ran his fingers through his own blond curls and breathed in slowly with his eyes closed. When he opened them again, his hair fell like the artful curve of a river off a cliff and the air seemed to sparkle in front of his blue eyes. Adorabella crossed her arms.
"Now is later," he said.
"Only before is real," Adorabella hurried out, and the other two automatically furrowed their brows.

All three were immediately distracted by odd movement in their peripheral vision. When Adorabella saw what it was, she began a yell that started off quiet and low and built up to a loud growling exclamation like an avalanche. At its peak, she stood in the middle of the road, arms extended out fully in front of her, every finger spread apart in a gesture of disbelieving presentation. "Come on!"

It was Mellan, the enthusiastic lightning mage known to every monster hunter in the village and additionally by every volunteer in the fire brigade. He was marching down the street from the direction of the beach, as if in parade procession, knees kicking up high with every step and twisting his entire torso to jauntily punch his arms sideways and high in front of his face. Even from this far out, where he couldn't be heard, you knew he was tunelessly whistling just by seeing the ecstatic sweep of every limb. When he got close enough to the property that he could be heard, he raised one hand as high above his head as he could stretch it and waved it fully from side to side, belting out a "Hiiiiiii!," so that its echo would reach his hunting party before he could. Nearby, several villagers opened their windows to look outside and see what all the noise was about. Through it all, his knees did not stop pumping up and down, up and down.

"I can't believe this! All at once!" Adorabella stomped across the street to stop in front of a gawking kid who was not sweeping the stoop so much as rearranging the piles of dirt with their broom so little bits could travel around and meet new grit. Adorabella held out a hand and a menagerie of oddities briefly flicked into existence and then disappeared again - a bright red acorn, a brass jingle bell, a scarab beetle that flicked out its wings and failed to fly away before vanishing again, and others - until a geometrically perfect quartz crystal manifested itself and plopped down into her palm. Proffering it to the child, Adorabella said, "I'll give you this if you promise to go find Jackal the Hunter and bring him back here. And if you try to duck out, just remember I know where you live." Then she pointed emphatically at the kid's front door, which the child followed by bending backwards and looking at upside down. Then the youth snatched the shiny rock out of Adorabella's hand, let the broom fall right where it was with a clatter, and went sprinting down the street to turn left at the washerwoman's corner. Who watched the child go, then looked back at Adorabella with a judgemental shake of her handkerchiefed head.

Which reminded Adorabella to snatch off her lab handkerchief and shake her drill curls all free. She returned, empty-handed, to her own yard and confronted Mellan at the edge.

Before she could speak, Mellan interrupted her. "Hello! I, the magnificent Mellan, master of mancy that I mance, ask for your help!"
"Huh? Okay, but is-"
"Thank you! I have been up and down these roads looking for the hunters called Nero, Jackal, Lorelei, and and/or or Adorabella! Do you know who they are and where they could be currently?"
Nero, Lorelei, and Adorabella all turned their heads to look at each other. Their expressions were unreadable, and yet they spoke clearly, and the message was: no of course it's not a joke. It's Mellan. Then, in unanimous agreement to save time, they all nodded at Mellan and pointed at each other.

Mellan thrust out one hip, crossed his body with one arm to place his hand on the other, and held the splayed fingers of his remaining hand directly in front of his face so he could smolder through the gaps. Tiny strings of lightning leaped the gaps. "Then my quest is complete. I am here... to party."

"We're not leaving yet," Nero added in. "We won't go today at all. We're deciding what we're going to hunt and where we're going to go."
"And we're going to wait for Jackal," Adorabella insisted, "So I can finish this all at once."
Then she came in off the street to approach Lorelei again.

"I am not being the ideal host at the moment, am I? If you need anything, we could go to my favorite diner. The White Stag? They-"
Nero came up behind Adorabella and when he spoke up, she startled like a cat and hopped forward, her hair springing in every other direction. "Can you even afford that at the moment? I heard you've been balancing the Mayor's belt lately."
Flustered, Adorabella spun on her heel and ended up standing directly beside Lorelei, who was at least half a foot taller and still fully clad in armor.
"Not that it's any of your business, but my wealth is in tribute and material at the moment." She unclenched her fists and forced her shoulders down, and even her hair settled back into place. "I was going to liquidate some of my less vital stock through my regular channels and turn it into the less-valuable 'walking around money' today."

She huffed again and added, somehow looking down her nose at Nero even though he, too, stood much taller, "Later. On."

Lorelei lifted up the visor of her helmet and a toothless smile visited her brown, elven face. "I'm fine right now, actually. We should focus on the mission at the moment. The Elders had their reasons when deciding these hunting teams, and I suspect that at least one of them was the power that they assembled here. Whatever we choose, we should be careful not to disappoint them."

Adorabella lifted Lorelei's left hand in hers and comfortingly patted the back of her gauntlet. "You don't have to worry about that. I have trouble believing you've ever disappointed anyone." Lorelei looked at her left hand held between both of Adorabella's and seemed confused.

Tung tung. "What's this thing?" Mellan's voice cut through the awkward moment. Adorabella jogged over to him, split between her desire to talk about her project and her concern that Mellan was close enough to touch it.

"It's my water purifier!"
"What does it do?"
Adorabella quirked her head. "It... makes pure water out of impure water."
"Ah, I see!," replied Mellan, who didn't really. "And how does it do that?"
"It's a bit technical, but essentially, it falls through a series of soil filters with increasingly smaller particle sizes and enters into holding chambers where it is heated, collected, cooled, heated, so on."
"Oh? With magic?" Mellan struck another pose with the word 'magic,' almost as if he thought that movement was an essential part of how it was communicated.
"Not at all. Firstly, I want it to be real water all the time, and secondly, it's so anyone can get true water, water that carries nothing else. No animals or algaes, no poisons or scat, no salts, no soils. Just water."
"Scat?" asked Lorelei.
"Soil?" asked Mellan. "But you said you put it through dirt?"
"It leaves the dirt behind because of the smaller dirt, and the smallest dirt because of the heat. I don't heat it with spells, I heat it with this."

Adorabella circled around the large still and pointed at a depression slightly below halfway up. Mellan went to look, and Lorelei stepped over enough that she could peek. As Adorabella lectured, Nero went to stand beside Lorelei and begin a quieter conversation.

"It might be complicated to explain, but the heat comes from this device I've made called a zapjar. The zapjar slots into the still here, so that the metal springs connect with these plates connected to a coil of metal alloy in the holding vat. I can use this lever to seat and unseat the zapjar."

Beneath this, Nero confided in Lorelei. "I know what they're going to want to do. They're going to want to hunt something of the highest tier, like a Strange, or a Dragon. And I say this because I already hunt those: if we go along with them, we'll all be killed."
Lorelei turned away from the explanation of the alchemist hunter's contraptions, eyebrows rising. "Why do you say that?"

Adorabella continued, both her and Mellan oblivious to this second conversation. "...essentially the thinned acid of slimes bathing some especially pure metal plates that I've trapped in this ceramic jar. Together, they make lightning - not by magic, but simply through mundane alchemical principles that drive the world - and the lightning heats up the coil inside."

Nero also continued, clandestinely. "The reason being the state of the group. Capable certainly, but the rest of them are bit unreliable, let's say. Adorabella is a little too much into bombs and her getting bored certainly isn't going to end up well; Jackal is impulsive and doesn't look fond of following plans either; while Mellan is Mellan."

Mellan threw back his cape and turned the zapjar around in his hands. "I make lightning, it makes lightning. I understand that. But why call it a zapjar? Why not something else? Why not call it a Mellanjar, or a stormjar, or just Jar-that-makes-things-hot? What's zap about it?"

Adorabella clapped her hands against his hands and twisted his arms so that the short, shiny metal springs at the top faced right at Mellan. "Lick this spring and you'll find out," she said.
With a moment's thought, he did. And the crackle of lightning that burned his tongue did, in fact, make an audible zpp.

Mellan gave a pained yelp in surprise and tossed the zapjar into the air by reflex. Adorabella, big eyes wide, ran beneath its arc and hugged it to her body to catch it, hopping on her lead foot to kill the momentum of the rush. She hurried to put the zapjar back into its home and clunked the lever back into the seated position, painting the edge of hearing with a warm hum once more. "Don't do that!"

Instead of giving a coherent response, Mellan began drawing circles and spirals in the air with his hands and, occassionally, one foot. "If this device wants lightning, I will show it true lightning! True lightning for true water! Behold: THE ZAP BEYOND ZAPS: KING LIGHTNING STORM!"

Blue electricity danced and sang around his arm, and tangled itself into the shape of a snarling sky-dragon. In a full and overt panic, Adorabella bent low at the waist and charged him, both hands reaching out to their limit. She got there just in time to shove up his arm at the elbow, the white flash of the gathered lightning spell roaring and whipping its electric tail, swimming into the sky faster than thought. It hit a soft white cloud far above the village, and split it the way a stonecutter cleaves a cleft into the toughest stone. The four party members stood in a moment of shocked fascination and were watching the sky when the cloud returned fire with its own lightning bolt, which thundered down at them. Instead of hitting any people, it bent harshly as it passed by Adorabella's home and smote the oversized brick chimney which even now belched green vapors.

Brickwork crumbled and popped from the blast, and the vapors immediately erupted into a loud and smokey flame that spat purple and yellow sparks in random directions. While the entire chimney didn't collapse, an arc of burnt bricks had fallen free and smashed the shingles below them. By the corner of the street, everyone could hear a very annoyed door slam.

Adorabella shoved Mellan in her own annoyance, but only managed to push herself backwards on dead grass. She growled again and stomped over to where Nero and Lorelei were standing. Then she held a hand out flat towards Lorelei. Within a moment, a spiny black bomb rested there.

"Take this bomb. I need you to throw it up at the gas fire; I don't have the strength." Then she pressed a plunger trigger on the outside of the device with her thumb, and let it roll towards Lorelei's chest. The armored woman caught it by reflex action and, expression agog, quickly pitched it hard up towards the house roof. It made a perfect arc towards the colorful flames and transmuted to a ball of white light when it got near. At the last moment, it exploded, not into a bubble of heat and force but into a massive ball of blue water that deluged the fire, gurgled down the chimney, and bounced off the house roof with the sound of a passing rain.

Adorabella sighed so hard that it seemed for a moment she might fold in half. "That's going to ruin the cauldron brew at the bottom."

Nero gave a deeply meaningful look to Lorelei while Adorabella's back was turned. Lorelei, for her part, flipped her helmet visor back down.

Nero continued, "I knew I would have have trouble with Mellan when I requested him from the Elders, but this is three times as much trouble as I was expecting. We won't cooperate well enough to hunt a dragon."

Adorabella popped her hands onto her hips and swiveled around on one leg to join the discussion triangle. "Why not? Learning how to do that is what this whole exercise is for. And if we could get an intact firebladder, I'll be busy in my lab for weeks! Or a few days, at the very least."
"I know all about hunting dragons. And about hunting dragons with Mellan. Please just trust me, it's not worth it. In terms of testing out team cohesion and learning about each other in the field, why not a Behemoth? It would not require as much coordination, and although they're powerful and resilient, there's no trick to worry about. The team is powerful enough even if we don't cooperate well that we could take it down without many issues."
"A tier three threat? That's far too degrading. Can you imagine trying to tell that story in the afterparty? We might as well boast of clearing a cavern of slime!"

Lorelei interrupted the argument before it built too far. "I agree. Any one of us alone could defeat a Behemoth. We need to aim higher. And if not a Strange, then..."
Suddenly, Mellan bellowed out, still not having moved from the place he assaulted the water still. "A dragon! Tyrant of the skies! The only foe worthy of--"
Then, Nero. "A beetle would be ideal. Adorabella can be kept- can focus on bombing the tiny beetles, where her effective area does its best. The rest of us can focus on the main body, as outside of the swarm it's fairly simple."

Mellan laid down on the grass to look closely at a lawn weed sending up its first budded stalk. Heavy feet slapped road stones and the patter of smaller shoes hurried to keep up. The kid overtook The Jackal Knight's stride and ran right up to Adorabella, sticky with sweat and smiling so big that everyone could see a missing back tooth. "I finished!"

Adorabella gave the kid a genuinely warm smile and patted them once on the top of the head. "You did. Thanks. Here, a prize for a bounty completed." With a twirl of her wrist, a cheesecloth sack of jerky meat appeared itself and dangled ponderously from pinched fingers. The neighbor kid laughed and plucked it away, then jogged back across the street to sit on the stoop. The kid gobbled the spiced monster meats and made satisfied little hums, the discarded broom still forgotten. Adorabella's self-satisfied smile disappeared as she turned her attention back to Nero.

"That sounds boring. I stand around making poison clouds for bugs like a fumigator and the rest of you get to enjoy the real glory? What am I supposed to learn from that? Or any of you, since with me there it just becomes another Behemoth fight with shell armor. Come with me to the ocean. I often patrol the waters to make quota, and there are titanic monsters in the deeps that need to be seen to be believed! Any one of them would be worth our time, and worth the telling!"

Jackal wandered by to look around the bizarre sight of Adorabella's even-more-damaged lot. Lorelei replied, "In terms of damage, the group would do well. You have your bombs, effective against aquatic monsters, and both Nero and Mellan use lightning. The inevitable friendly fire from lightning in seawater can be solved with proper preparation and a little expense."
"Granted," Nero shrugged, "but that's where all the advantages end. You might be used to fighting underwater, Adorabella, but the rest of us would be stuck on a ship, and--"
Adorabella made a sharp noise by flipping her thumbnail off the cutting edge of her incisors, and looked deep in thought. "With enough time, I could solve that. I've been making plans for an underwater boat that is driven by a series of small explosions in sealed chambers, meaning--"
Nero emphatically swept a hand across the space in front of him. "Hold. I'll ignore everything insane about what you just said and simply remind you we don't have 'enough time.' So we'd have to rent out a fishing vessel, and we'd be hunting for Kraken. Except for Adorabella, we'd all be limited in our maneuvering. Kraken are known for how easily they sink ships, and it would make everything much harder if we were all in the water, not to mention how we'd get back."
Lorelei shrugged this time, crossing her arms. "It is nearly impossible to defend a party against a Kraken, as well. They can't be occupied by one person, because their multiple limbs can strike out at us at once without being forced to focus."
"I thought of that, too, " Nero nodded. "And there's the ink. It can hide in the ink cloud to set up sneak attacks, or blind any of us. Do you want to fight alongside a blinded Mellan?"

Adorabella moved by some unnamed reflex and spun at the waist to yell backward at her smoke hut. Jackal was reaching out a hand to grab for the latch, his nose flaring repeatedly in the air. "Don't touch that door! You'll trip the trigger!" When he glanced askance but didn't lower his hand, she turned all the way and replanted her feet. In an instant, a bubbly black stone of hematite ore was in her grip, and she looked ready to fling it at him. "Listen to me! It's rigged!"

"Or," Nero cuts in disdainfully, "a blinded Jackal? Adorabella, would you still be able to use your weapons without knowing where they'd explode?"
Without getting out of position, Adorabella glared at him, then disappeared the ore. She turned back to Lorelei and Nero. Jackal stalked over to Mellan and squatted down so they could have a private conversation.

Nero went on, "How much more easily can a Kraken break a blinded foe in two tentacles than it would be able to break an entire sailing ship? We'd need a perfect plan, and you three couldn't follow one."
Adorabella looked out from the triangle to see Jackal and Mellan. They were doing handstand pushups. Jackal tried to push Mellan over with one hand, and Mellan tilted and wobbled and tried to correct himself with a hand-over-hand stumble, then fell into the purifier with a clang.

"You don't know as much about me as you think you do, Nero. You're going to learn."

There's a tense silence.

Adorabella broke it first, while still watching Jackal flip to his feet and loom over the prone Mellan. "We'll hunt a Wurm. It will be unfamiliar to all of us, and is a worthy target."
"Fine."
Lorelei said, "We're agreed, then. What of the other two?"
Adorabella put on a polite smile when she raised her voice for the rest of the party to hear. "We want to fight a Wurm. What say you?"

"Easily done! Nothing that crawls on its belly could ever stand against my AWESOME POWER!" Mellan gave an emphatic thumbs up that scraped the grass, since he was still bent between the purifier and the ground.
Jackal lifted his chin and laughed, "We'll have to find two so the rest of you have something to do!"

Adorabella's smile briefly softened into something more real. "It's decided, then. Now everyone get off my property. I have to go clean up my lab." She turned away from the boys near her still to smile even more up at the chivalrous-looking Lorelei.
"You may come again anytime."
Then she turned her head to give a dead-eyed stare at Nero. And, in silence, she turned away entirely, and walked up her rain-splattered cobble path to her front door. In passing, she kicked a broken fragment of shingle over at The Jackal Knight.
"You two, too. Shoo."

When Adorabella got to the wooden crate near her door, she tapped its nearest edge without even breaking stride. In less than a blink, it was gone. Moments later, she was alone again in her home. Everyone else heard the sound of several locks being firmly latched.

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Pub: 28 Apr 2023 05:31 UTC

Edit: 28 Apr 2023 06:16 UTC

Views: 635