(Not) The Easiest Escape Ever
Title: (Not) The Easiest Escape Ever
Story Continuity: Battle For the Sun
Notes: One line taken and slightly modified from bookblather's incredibly awesome Stocking prompt
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Rusty Cyprian voice, cussing, violence, possibly makes little sense without first reading the last installment
Summary: Wherein Cyprian, Kristen, and Jaida escape with minimal damage, Cliff takes a shower and does nothing of interest, Kristen exacts a small vengeance on her folks, Cyprian has a RAGE BLACKOUT, and Jaida has the strangest wallet out of all involved.
Breaking out of the cell turned out to be easier than convincing the wannabe mages in my cell that kicking my ass maybe wasn't the best of plans, then convincing them that, no, really, it wasn't the best of plans for them. This was achieved by casting down a very irate bolt of lightning that was very particular about where - or rather, who - it struck. Which turned out to be all three of my male cellmates, plus some powerful static shock in Jaida's direction.
"If I could use offensive magic, I would so totally burn you alive for that," Jaida said, and glared. "You better get us out of here, you ostentatious, aborted excuse of a man."
"Don't you wield words at me. For one thing, I'm better at it, and you'll just end up looking like a bromidic, limp-brained failure."
"Shut up, Pinky, and get us the hell out of dodge," Jaida sniffed, and flopped onto the only bed.
The bars were solid steel, but a quick spellcheck showed they were also in no way protected against magic.
(A quick scan of the entire cell showed that the only wall in the cell was protected by the same spell bounce as Mr. Morrow - and apparently I had a weak tracking spell cast on me, which I quickly dispelled - and the toilet was magicked to appear more unspeakably abominable than it really was, which just goes to show our extremist jailers were assholes and hypocrites, but not at all very clever.)
After melting the bars, Jaida and I left our cells. We even managed to leave death row with little more than a flesh wound (Jaida), several hundred insults I'd heard as many times before (Jaida and me), and a body count of two (Jaida again, with the excuse of "What? Like they were going to live much longer anyway," and maybe it's not exactly a mystery why we weren't heckled after that). This was where the proverbial Right Honorable Lady Luck flipped me off and fled laughing, probably with the headache remedy I desperately needed.
A few minutes into the larceny cell block, where the cells were full of mostly skeletons and lunatics, I heard a song, sweet and nostalgic and apparently possessed of the ability to make my brain experience technical difficulties, because as soon as I heard it, completely ignoring the fact that it was also possessed of the ability to make a normal man think immediately of corpses and death on all sides, common sense, and whatever one might classify Jaida as, I headed in the direction of the song. It was, to be fair, a mystic folk tune.
Unfortunately, the singer was a ghoul. And ghouls are nothing if not attentive to possible meals.
"I told you to wait, you dumbass," Jaida hissed, looking more than a little sick. To be fair, ghouls had that same effect on my commanding officer from the war, who had disturbing inclinations towards such delightful activities as randomly wounding his own men depending on his mood and rushing headlong into battle without regard for anyone's safety, let alone his own, or the enemy's white flags.
It's bad form to attack a ghoul. It's also karmic suicide unless the situation is absolutely dire, because unlike with vampires, there's still a human in there, conscious but helpless. You can see it in their eyes occasionally - a flash of horrified awe, or a wail of unutterable misery - but the human inside never gets control for longer than a second or two.
I never understood why killing them was forbidden, but I didn't want to risk my luck then.
"Don't attack it," I said, and Jaida scoffed and said, "Are you joking? Look at the damn thing! It's a fucking ghoul!"
"Make sure it doesn't attack either of us," I said, and began chanting the proper exorcism. This was mistake number two - even if I still stand by it. Being stuck in a monster's body and brain for eternity is infinitely more terrible than getting stuck in the brain waves of a thirteen-year-old fangirl high on hormones after winning concert tickets to see her favorite idol (which is a constant stream of squealing, the mental equivalent of a binder full of heart-encircled "girl's initials + boy's initials," and...what probably shouldn't be described as brain waves).
"If that thing touches me," I heard Jaida say, "I will help it eat you. Your skull will be nothing more than a collection of heart-shaped cookie cutters, you understand me?"
I did not respond, being busy with the spell, and I had the dubious pleasure of watching what Jaida's idea of providing a distraction entailed - which involved a lot more screaming, nagging, and fang-teasing than I'd like to have witnessed. And yes, she attacked it - punched it in the face, then mocked it as it continued to try to eviscerate her. When I was through with the exorcism, the ghoul disintegrated into dust.
"I've got ghoul in my eye, thanks to you," Jaida said, rubbing them, and said, "My way would've been quicker."
"My way ensures we won't necessarily be condemned to a life of cleaning toilets at a rehabilitation center," I said. "Killing ghouls is up there with torturing rain-soaked puppies, karmically."
"You're just making that shit up," Jaida snorted. "You clearly just want to impress me."
Before I could educate her on the finer points of why she was an amalgamation of many of the things that made me instinctively want to yell "No," the sound of keys jingling - a warden - came into hearing range.
"Frood?" The warden called. "I'm going to let you at the death row inmates now! No bite!"
Jaida glanced at me coolly, then took out the needles that held her hair in a ponytail and walked purposefully towards the warden. I followed, making "no, what the hell are you doing" motions with my hands, because we could have made a dash for the exit and the warden would never have known.
The warden shouted something else, then Jaida pounced and had her needles - not senbon, but not knives - to his throat. "Hey, baby," she cooed, "You going somewhere?"
"What did - where's the ghoul?"
"My boy took care of him," she said, just as I came into the warden's line of sight. He looked to me, as if I could possibly help him. Against Jaida, hope itself is futile. Jaida noticed the warden's look, and said, "Yeah, that's him. He's not much of a man by the light of day, but by night - well...let's just say he's just not much of a man, period."
"And you make it clear yet again why I don't keep you around for your boundless wit," I said. "What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm gonna make him talk," Jaida said, and then added, "Duh."
"About what? We could have made it out of here by now."
"Oh, sorry. Am I fucking with your karma?" She said, and all I could think of were the many ways in which now was not the time for this shit.
"Just...hurry it up," I said. "Incapacitate him, or whatever it is. Cliff's going to think we stood him up, and I'm worried about Kristen."
"I'm pretty famished. I've been here for a good eight hours, and how much food have I had? None. The serial killer had more to eat than I did. Which begs the question: who do I have to kill to get a good meal in this joint?" Jaida said, and leered at the warden. "I mean, of course, for humans. Not, say, ghouls. Oh, how the press will simply adore this."
"Whatever you want, I won't give it to you," the warden said.
"Yeah? You ever heard me sing Antonin, My Antonin? It ain't pretty. So either you sit through my rendition of the entire Antoninio opera or you tell us the fastest way out. And if you lie, I'll know. I'm a bit magical."
"No."
And Jaida emitted a terrifying screech - possibly meant to be a soprano, but more closely resembling a ghoul's death wail. I thought idly that I might have to kill her myself if I couldn't find any glass to use to dull the pain.
"Okay! Just - just take the elevator down!" The warden said. "Take my keys. I do not get paid enough for-"
"Great!" Jaida said, and knocked him on the head twice - the first time didn't take - so he would black out. She took his keys, then posed with them for approximately too goddamn long before I hurried her along and we found the elevator.
"What the hell did you hit B1 for?" I said, pressing the button that said 1.
"It looked shiny," Jaida said, and shrugged. "It's got a bit of glitter on it. I assume that's where they throw their wild orgies."
I sighed, then the elevator stopped and its doors opened. Unfortunately, Jaida and I didn't plan ahead enough to recall that elevators were not typically designed with escaping inmates in mind, and thus mostly stop at points of interest to people in the building - so when the doors opened, we were as surprised as the room's occupants that we were where we were. Right in front of the lobby, where, yes, there were the doors to freedom, but there were also cops registering the latest criminals and a few sentries.
"God, for a bookish type, you sure are stupid," Jaida said to me, while one of the people who had seen us wasted no time in whipping out her gun and saying, "Freeze!"
Around then, I noticed Kristen, collapsed in a heap and laid out on a row of chairs, her hands cuffed together. I put one and one together, then, and sort of suffered a rage-induced blackout.
Now don't get me wrong, I believe in pacifism. Mostly. It's always best to discuss your grievances with others in a polite and respectful tone, and be as understanding as possible to those who think differently, no matter how fascist or closed-minded you think their beliefs are (or how much they want to see you hang). However, there comes a time when all your words of wisdom fall upon deaf ears, and all your pleas are brushed aside in favor of fanaticism. It is then that you must with a heavy heart and sorrowed soul kill you some motherfuckers and light some of their shit on fire - which, Jaida later told me, is precisely what I did, possibly minus the heavy heart and sorrowed soul.
When I came to an hour later, Kristen was awake beside me, and, judging from Jaida's presence on the opposite bed and the fact there were two beds only, I gathered we were in the Float Inn, we were safe from the law, and I was in the girls' hotel room. This was not quite the way my teenage fantasies began, but, I thought, at least I was relatively free and undeniably alive.
"Hey," I said, making it sound like it might have been a question, thinking of no other way to say what I wanted to.
"Hey yourself," Kristen said. "You...I. Thank you. You saved me from being locked up for thirty years, you know that?"
"Yeah? On what charges?"
"Breaking and entering," Kristen said, eyes downcast. "I would have had unlicensed prostitution added on to my sentence. Dad called in for my arrest, so I went to Mint's place. The only problem was that she'd already been arrested in the Nogales scandal, and the new tenant didn't take well to my being there, and...well, um, I'm sure you can figure it out."
Sometimes, I wondered why I couldn't just burn the world to its core and let rise from its ashes what would, because it couldn't be worse than what the world had now; but it was times like that moment I had the suspicion that the world was already burning, and that I really needed to lay off the maudlin poetry because the world was the way it was, and I couldn't change any part of it. But all I said was, "I'm sorry," and that, in this situation, does not convey.
Kristen said, "It's fine. I said my goodbyes to...to my parents. They'll probably never even know what they're missing. Which is, by the way, their only daughter and my grandma's eighty carat aquamarine pendant. Grandma promised it to me, anyway."
Larceny was not one of the things I found typically cheered anyone up, but I was willing to believe this was just an odd quirk.
"I'm sorry I left you there, but there was no way for me to take you with me - you're heavier than you look," she said, smiling.
"Yeah, I used to get that a lot," I said. "When people tried to use me for bodybuilding purposes. Fortunately, high school is over, and I'm never returning to Daldain."
"That must have been horrible," Kristen said.
"Did you really think I got this irate because I have problems with too many people sending me flowers and chocolate?" I said, and smiled.
"Oh, right," Kristen said, cringing. "I'm sorry, I forgot. Sorensen and the war..."
"You're already forgiven," I said, and decided expounding on my past to her would probably only be wise if she wasn't entirely aware. "We've got more pressing problems. All three of us were arrested. I lost my backpack, but my trenchcoat is intact, because our captors were more than slightly retarded. I've got a pretty marble, a lighter, and..." I rifled around in my pockets, and the only thing I felt was the gold marble, which was much warmer than it should have been. I'd have to get that checked out once we reached Soonah. "Scratch that and add fifty points to our captors' negative IQ points, I've got a gold marble and a worn trenchcoat. What else do we have left?"
"I've got most of what I had on me when I got caught," Kristen said. "I guess they were more concerned with my footwear than anything else, because the only things I'm missing are my shoes."
"I have my senbon," Jaida said. "My clothes. And..." she shoved a hand down her shirt, and I was too intrigued to look away. She pulled something out of her shirt - I followed the motion of her hands with some difficulty - a thick wad of cash.
"You keep money in your bra?" I said, not sure whether to settle on fascinated - because someone may have gotten to secondary second base and might have never known about it - or horrified, because a toddler, through exchange of unwittingly skankified currency, may have gotten to second base and never known about it. Think of the future bragging rights lost. Never mind that, think of the innocence lost, and possibly the health. I still have no idea if fleas are transferable with silver dollars.
"Well, yeah, I don't let just anyone give me a good enough grope for them to steal anything," Jaida said, looking at me like I was the crazy one. "Plus, no one ever frisks my bra. Panties, neither. No need to worry about muggers. Or police."
"Huh," Kristen said. "I never would have thought of that."
"Obviously," Jaida scoffed. "You had people making grabby hands at your boobage all the time, I bet."
"How much do you have, Jaida?" I said, and Jaida smirked and said, "Enough for me. Maybe the rest of you, if you do as I say."
"Whatever. How much?"
Jaida sighed, and said, "You could at least pretend you're fooled."
I glared and raised an eyebrow, waiting.
Jaida said, "Fine! God, you're dull. I've got around nine thousand silver, two thousand in hundreds, 7k in thousands, and an extra fifty."
"That should be enough to get us room and board in Soonah. We can get a job or two from there," I said. "We can discuss it in the morning. Does anyone know we're here?"
"Just the people who saw us flee with you, but what sort of anal retentive person would remember two sexy girls with a floating pink-haired male, anyway?" Jaida said. "It's totally inconceivable, right?"
"All right," I said, rubbing my forehead. "We'll leave now. Is Cliff ready to go?"
"He's taking a shower," Jaida said, then smiled wide enough to nearly break her face. "I'll go get him, shall I?"
Kristen had a few objections to that, and I wondered what the hell was wrong with me for breaking Jaida out, too. Something had to be loose inside my skull.
I recalled then the time I broke some of my squadron out of an enemy encampment a very long time ago, the feeling of needing like water and earth beneath my feet to get my men - and myself, because even then I knew if I didn't have myself, there was no point in it - out of danger.
I might have groaned, if I wasn't crushed under the sudden, intense weight of just how many hadn't made it out of that alive. I'd gotten better at the rescue thing, but that didn't help those who died.
It wasn't my fault.
"It wasn't," I murmured, except I knew the first sign of insanity and the first sign of guilt, and they were one and the same in this case.
Story Continuity: Battle For the Sun
Notes: One line taken and slightly modified from bookblather's incredibly awesome Stocking prompt
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Rusty Cyprian voice, cussing, violence, possibly makes little sense without first reading the last installment
Summary: Wherein Cyprian, Kristen, and Jaida escape with minimal damage, Cliff takes a shower and does nothing of interest, Kristen exacts a small vengeance on her folks, Cyprian has a RAGE BLACKOUT, and Jaida has the strangest wallet out of all involved.
Breaking out of the cell turned out to be easier than convincing the wannabe mages in my cell that kicking my ass maybe wasn't the best of plans, then convincing them that, no, really, it wasn't the best of plans for them. This was achieved by casting down a very irate bolt of lightning that was very particular about where - or rather, who - it struck. Which turned out to be all three of my male cellmates, plus some powerful static shock in Jaida's direction.
"If I could use offensive magic, I would so totally burn you alive for that," Jaida said, and glared. "You better get us out of here, you ostentatious, aborted excuse of a man."
"Don't you wield words at me. For one thing, I'm better at it, and you'll just end up looking like a bromidic, limp-brained failure."
"Shut up, Pinky, and get us the hell out of dodge," Jaida sniffed, and flopped onto the only bed.
The bars were solid steel, but a quick spellcheck showed they were also in no way protected against magic.
(A quick scan of the entire cell showed that the only wall in the cell was protected by the same spell bounce as Mr. Morrow - and apparently I had a weak tracking spell cast on me, which I quickly dispelled - and the toilet was magicked to appear more unspeakably abominable than it really was, which just goes to show our extremist jailers were assholes and hypocrites, but not at all very clever.)
After melting the bars, Jaida and I left our cells. We even managed to leave death row with little more than a flesh wound (Jaida), several hundred insults I'd heard as many times before (Jaida and me), and a body count of two (Jaida again, with the excuse of "What? Like they were going to live much longer anyway," and maybe it's not exactly a mystery why we weren't heckled after that). This was where the proverbial Right Honorable Lady Luck flipped me off and fled laughing, probably with the headache remedy I desperately needed.
A few minutes into the larceny cell block, where the cells were full of mostly skeletons and lunatics, I heard a song, sweet and nostalgic and apparently possessed of the ability to make my brain experience technical difficulties, because as soon as I heard it, completely ignoring the fact that it was also possessed of the ability to make a normal man think immediately of corpses and death on all sides, common sense, and whatever one might classify Jaida as, I headed in the direction of the song. It was, to be fair, a mystic folk tune.
Unfortunately, the singer was a ghoul. And ghouls are nothing if not attentive to possible meals.
"I told you to wait, you dumbass," Jaida hissed, looking more than a little sick. To be fair, ghouls had that same effect on my commanding officer from the war, who had disturbing inclinations towards such delightful activities as randomly wounding his own men depending on his mood and rushing headlong into battle without regard for anyone's safety, let alone his own, or the enemy's white flags.
It's bad form to attack a ghoul. It's also karmic suicide unless the situation is absolutely dire, because unlike with vampires, there's still a human in there, conscious but helpless. You can see it in their eyes occasionally - a flash of horrified awe, or a wail of unutterable misery - but the human inside never gets control for longer than a second or two.
I never understood why killing them was forbidden, but I didn't want to risk my luck then.
"Don't attack it," I said, and Jaida scoffed and said, "Are you joking? Look at the damn thing! It's a fucking ghoul!"
"Make sure it doesn't attack either of us," I said, and began chanting the proper exorcism. This was mistake number two - even if I still stand by it. Being stuck in a monster's body and brain for eternity is infinitely more terrible than getting stuck in the brain waves of a thirteen-year-old fangirl high on hormones after winning concert tickets to see her favorite idol (which is a constant stream of squealing, the mental equivalent of a binder full of heart-encircled "girl's initials + boy's initials," and...what probably shouldn't be described as brain waves).
"If that thing touches me," I heard Jaida say, "I will help it eat you. Your skull will be nothing more than a collection of heart-shaped cookie cutters, you understand me?"
I did not respond, being busy with the spell, and I had the dubious pleasure of watching what Jaida's idea of providing a distraction entailed - which involved a lot more screaming, nagging, and fang-teasing than I'd like to have witnessed. And yes, she attacked it - punched it in the face, then mocked it as it continued to try to eviscerate her. When I was through with the exorcism, the ghoul disintegrated into dust.
"I've got ghoul in my eye, thanks to you," Jaida said, rubbing them, and said, "My way would've been quicker."
"My way ensures we won't necessarily be condemned to a life of cleaning toilets at a rehabilitation center," I said. "Killing ghouls is up there with torturing rain-soaked puppies, karmically."
"You're just making that shit up," Jaida snorted. "You clearly just want to impress me."
Before I could educate her on the finer points of why she was an amalgamation of many of the things that made me instinctively want to yell "No," the sound of keys jingling - a warden - came into hearing range.
"Frood?" The warden called. "I'm going to let you at the death row inmates now! No bite!"
Jaida glanced at me coolly, then took out the needles that held her hair in a ponytail and walked purposefully towards the warden. I followed, making "no, what the hell are you doing" motions with my hands, because we could have made a dash for the exit and the warden would never have known.
The warden shouted something else, then Jaida pounced and had her needles - not senbon, but not knives - to his throat. "Hey, baby," she cooed, "You going somewhere?"
"What did - where's the ghoul?"
"My boy took care of him," she said, just as I came into the warden's line of sight. He looked to me, as if I could possibly help him. Against Jaida, hope itself is futile. Jaida noticed the warden's look, and said, "Yeah, that's him. He's not much of a man by the light of day, but by night - well...let's just say he's just not much of a man, period."
"And you make it clear yet again why I don't keep you around for your boundless wit," I said. "What the hell are you doing?"
"I'm gonna make him talk," Jaida said, and then added, "Duh."
"About what? We could have made it out of here by now."
"Oh, sorry. Am I fucking with your karma?" She said, and all I could think of were the many ways in which now was not the time for this shit.
"Just...hurry it up," I said. "Incapacitate him, or whatever it is. Cliff's going to think we stood him up, and I'm worried about Kristen."
"I'm pretty famished. I've been here for a good eight hours, and how much food have I had? None. The serial killer had more to eat than I did. Which begs the question: who do I have to kill to get a good meal in this joint?" Jaida said, and leered at the warden. "I mean, of course, for humans. Not, say, ghouls. Oh, how the press will simply adore this."
"Whatever you want, I won't give it to you," the warden said.
"Yeah? You ever heard me sing Antonin, My Antonin? It ain't pretty. So either you sit through my rendition of the entire Antoninio opera or you tell us the fastest way out. And if you lie, I'll know. I'm a bit magical."
"No."
And Jaida emitted a terrifying screech - possibly meant to be a soprano, but more closely resembling a ghoul's death wail. I thought idly that I might have to kill her myself if I couldn't find any glass to use to dull the pain.
"Okay! Just - just take the elevator down!" The warden said. "Take my keys. I do not get paid enough for-"
"Great!" Jaida said, and knocked him on the head twice - the first time didn't take - so he would black out. She took his keys, then posed with them for approximately too goddamn long before I hurried her along and we found the elevator.
"What the hell did you hit B1 for?" I said, pressing the button that said 1.
"It looked shiny," Jaida said, and shrugged. "It's got a bit of glitter on it. I assume that's where they throw their wild orgies."
I sighed, then the elevator stopped and its doors opened. Unfortunately, Jaida and I didn't plan ahead enough to recall that elevators were not typically designed with escaping inmates in mind, and thus mostly stop at points of interest to people in the building - so when the doors opened, we were as surprised as the room's occupants that we were where we were. Right in front of the lobby, where, yes, there were the doors to freedom, but there were also cops registering the latest criminals and a few sentries.
"God, for a bookish type, you sure are stupid," Jaida said to me, while one of the people who had seen us wasted no time in whipping out her gun and saying, "Freeze!"
Around then, I noticed Kristen, collapsed in a heap and laid out on a row of chairs, her hands cuffed together. I put one and one together, then, and sort of suffered a rage-induced blackout.
Now don't get me wrong, I believe in pacifism. Mostly. It's always best to discuss your grievances with others in a polite and respectful tone, and be as understanding as possible to those who think differently, no matter how fascist or closed-minded you think their beliefs are (or how much they want to see you hang). However, there comes a time when all your words of wisdom fall upon deaf ears, and all your pleas are brushed aside in favor of fanaticism. It is then that you must with a heavy heart and sorrowed soul kill you some motherfuckers and light some of their shit on fire - which, Jaida later told me, is precisely what I did, possibly minus the heavy heart and sorrowed soul.
When I came to an hour later, Kristen was awake beside me, and, judging from Jaida's presence on the opposite bed and the fact there were two beds only, I gathered we were in the Float Inn, we were safe from the law, and I was in the girls' hotel room. This was not quite the way my teenage fantasies began, but, I thought, at least I was relatively free and undeniably alive.
"Hey," I said, making it sound like it might have been a question, thinking of no other way to say what I wanted to.
"Hey yourself," Kristen said. "You...I. Thank you. You saved me from being locked up for thirty years, you know that?"
"Yeah? On what charges?"
"Breaking and entering," Kristen said, eyes downcast. "I would have had unlicensed prostitution added on to my sentence. Dad called in for my arrest, so I went to Mint's place. The only problem was that she'd already been arrested in the Nogales scandal, and the new tenant didn't take well to my being there, and...well, um, I'm sure you can figure it out."
Sometimes, I wondered why I couldn't just burn the world to its core and let rise from its ashes what would, because it couldn't be worse than what the world had now; but it was times like that moment I had the suspicion that the world was already burning, and that I really needed to lay off the maudlin poetry because the world was the way it was, and I couldn't change any part of it. But all I said was, "I'm sorry," and that, in this situation, does not convey.
Kristen said, "It's fine. I said my goodbyes to...to my parents. They'll probably never even know what they're missing. Which is, by the way, their only daughter and my grandma's eighty carat aquamarine pendant. Grandma promised it to me, anyway."
Larceny was not one of the things I found typically cheered anyone up, but I was willing to believe this was just an odd quirk.
"I'm sorry I left you there, but there was no way for me to take you with me - you're heavier than you look," she said, smiling.
"Yeah, I used to get that a lot," I said. "When people tried to use me for bodybuilding purposes. Fortunately, high school is over, and I'm never returning to Daldain."
"That must have been horrible," Kristen said.
"Did you really think I got this irate because I have problems with too many people sending me flowers and chocolate?" I said, and smiled.
"Oh, right," Kristen said, cringing. "I'm sorry, I forgot. Sorensen and the war..."
"You're already forgiven," I said, and decided expounding on my past to her would probably only be wise if she wasn't entirely aware. "We've got more pressing problems. All three of us were arrested. I lost my backpack, but my trenchcoat is intact, because our captors were more than slightly retarded. I've got a pretty marble, a lighter, and..." I rifled around in my pockets, and the only thing I felt was the gold marble, which was much warmer than it should have been. I'd have to get that checked out once we reached Soonah. "Scratch that and add fifty points to our captors' negative IQ points, I've got a gold marble and a worn trenchcoat. What else do we have left?"
"I've got most of what I had on me when I got caught," Kristen said. "I guess they were more concerned with my footwear than anything else, because the only things I'm missing are my shoes."
"I have my senbon," Jaida said. "My clothes. And..." she shoved a hand down her shirt, and I was too intrigued to look away. She pulled something out of her shirt - I followed the motion of her hands with some difficulty - a thick wad of cash.
"You keep money in your bra?" I said, not sure whether to settle on fascinated - because someone may have gotten to secondary second base and might have never known about it - or horrified, because a toddler, through exchange of unwittingly skankified currency, may have gotten to second base and never known about it. Think of the future bragging rights lost. Never mind that, think of the innocence lost, and possibly the health. I still have no idea if fleas are transferable with silver dollars.
"Well, yeah, I don't let just anyone give me a good enough grope for them to steal anything," Jaida said, looking at me like I was the crazy one. "Plus, no one ever frisks my bra. Panties, neither. No need to worry about muggers. Or police."
"Huh," Kristen said. "I never would have thought of that."
"Obviously," Jaida scoffed. "You had people making grabby hands at your boobage all the time, I bet."
"How much do you have, Jaida?" I said, and Jaida smirked and said, "Enough for me. Maybe the rest of you, if you do as I say."
"Whatever. How much?"
Jaida sighed, and said, "You could at least pretend you're fooled."
I glared and raised an eyebrow, waiting.
Jaida said, "Fine! God, you're dull. I've got around nine thousand silver, two thousand in hundreds, 7k in thousands, and an extra fifty."
"That should be enough to get us room and board in Soonah. We can get a job or two from there," I said. "We can discuss it in the morning. Does anyone know we're here?"
"Just the people who saw us flee with you, but what sort of anal retentive person would remember two sexy girls with a floating pink-haired male, anyway?" Jaida said. "It's totally inconceivable, right?"
"All right," I said, rubbing my forehead. "We'll leave now. Is Cliff ready to go?"
"He's taking a shower," Jaida said, then smiled wide enough to nearly break her face. "I'll go get him, shall I?"
Kristen had a few objections to that, and I wondered what the hell was wrong with me for breaking Jaida out, too. Something had to be loose inside my skull.
I recalled then the time I broke some of my squadron out of an enemy encampment a very long time ago, the feeling of needing like water and earth beneath my feet to get my men - and myself, because even then I knew if I didn't have myself, there was no point in it - out of danger.
I might have groaned, if I wasn't crushed under the sudden, intense weight of just how many hadn't made it out of that alive. I'd gotten better at the rescue thing, but that didn't help those who died.
It wasn't my fault.
"It wasn't," I murmured, except I knew the first sign of insanity and the first sign of guilt, and they were one and the same in this case.