I just realized this should be in here, not in the actual fanfic section since this is a WIP...
Yup, that's right, at a time when I thought I could just skip Chpt 13 (Trickey) and go straight into Chpt 14 (working title Kaeru), this is what I've written...It's basically an introductory scene for Kaeru...Not a lot, mostly it's just a descriptive scene more than anything...I think it sets up Marcy & Elle's scene (they're sorta in it, see if you notice!) and I was probably going to make Kaeru eventually meet Gil there, but they wouldn't meet up with Marcy & Elle until later...But I have forgotten Marcy & Elle's exact situation after Trickey, so this is all I have until I get the blasted thing out of my downed comp...enjoy...
<600A.D.>
TEMPORAL VORTEXT REPORT
-REPORT NO. 14-
[UNKNOWN TRANSFER RATE, SYSTEMATIC DATA MALFUNCTION]
CRYPTIC TEXT SYNCH RESULT - MULTIDIMENSIONAL TIMELINES
CODE - MAGNESS
CODE EX. - "KAERU"
Two girls blundered into The Truce; it was a rathouse, a dive, a heap, a shithole, pure and simple. They went to a counter to the left, away from the bar itself, and asked the man sitting behind it (he was picking at his teeth with the nail of his pinky finger) something no one in the bar could hear. They exchanged pressed gold coins the man had never seen before, but after biting one, asked no questions, for one of the rooms upstairs. The rooms were more often rented by the hour, but the two girls arose no suspicion in the man behind the counter. He began to scrape wax from his inner ear and wipe off his findings on the underside of the counter.
Another man, who sat in a dim booth in the bar turned away from the scene. He wore a dark green hooded cape; the hood hid his eyes in deep black shadow. The dull, gold plate armor, covering his upper chest, bore a diagonal slash across its middle. His white pants ended at the knee and green thermal underpants dissappeared into his boots. He was drinking slowly from a dirty glass.
"You again?" A man was standing to his left. The standing man was nearly twice his size and the man sitting in the booth could smell the booze seeping out of the large man's pores, could, in fact, almost see it.
"Aw, leave him alone, Cecil, his money's as good as yours." A woman with a mole on her cheek said; the mole had three hairs on it. The woman, she was the current barmaid, wore a wig of stingy red hair because she was bald. There was no one else in the bar.
"I don't think so, Rose, I told this muttonhead to clear out." The man, identified as Cecil, turned to the other man and gave him a smile that showed a yellow & black set of teeth & gums that had a stench like mold. The man sitting in the booth gave no sign that he smelled the odors coming from Cecil and put down his drink. Cecil's face turned from general amusement to obvious anger, "If ya think you're such a bigshot that you can't make descent and talk with me, then you ain't got no right to drink here."
"I paid for this drink, that is my right." The man said, his voice was low, something the woman named Rose would have called smoky. He could see Cecil's anger as a kind of low, stupid red color that flickered. He touched a thin box strapped to his right wrist, over his glove.
"So, you think you've got a right, huh?" Cecil's eye moved to the box-thing on the man's wrist, "What is that?"
"Nothing you want." He replied.
"Give it to me." Cecil said the words the man sitting down figured he would say. The large man's grubby, thick fingers reached for the thing.
In a quick movement the sitting man flipped a switch on the metal box and four of Cecil's sausage fingers were seperated from his hand. Cecil yelled, holding onto his right hand, he ran out of The Truce, a trail of blood followed him out.
Rose stood up, shocked; suddenly she was a small, frightened rabbit, eyes sharp, heart racing, ready to run, but too caught in the headlights, too caught in the fear. The man stood up as well; the metal 'box' on his arm had a short blade coming out of the front; it was a kind of archaic switchblade with an actual switch at the side rather than a button. There was no blood on the blade. Rose noted that he had a sheathed sword dangling from his hip. He had a small gold-plated shield next to his dirty glass; it absorbed rather than reflected the soft candle-light of the bar.
He walked to Rose and stopped close enough so that Rose could have reached out and tucked the stray strand of his green hair back into the darkness of his hood if she so chose. She did not, could not. Rose looked into the hood and could see past the shadow to where his eyes would be. But there was nothing there. For a second, perhaps it was longer, it felt much longer to Rose, her heart actually stopped-the man sensed this. Rose thought that what she saw was some kind of demon, but she saw that his eyes were covered with a strip of dark cloth, she could still not tell its color. She had not noticed it when he entered, had not, in fact, looked the man in the eyes at all. He had simply walked in, took a seat, and when she asked if he wanted something, he had asked for a drink and paid for it up front. Had he done all of that blindfolded? She thought to herself. The man pulled back the switch and the blade dissappeared into the little device. Impossible...He couldn't have...But he did.
The man's hand shot out and grabbed her wrist firmly, she let out a wimper, but made no protest. It was the hand with the device on it and she feared if she moved too much, that something of hers would be seperated from her body. Rose had been in similar situations and, when she thought back, decided that this wasn't so bad. But his eyes...The fear would not be denied. She was going to die, she thought, but maybe, he would just take her and then, just, maybe, cut her a little and forget all about her. Worse things had happened to her and she had survived them and she wanted to survive this one too. She mentally promised God that she wouldn't tell anyone about this stranger if he spared her. Rose wondered why she had made such an absurd promise.
The man opened her clenched fist and placed a bag with several hundred Zenny in it.
"I'm sorry for scaring you..." He looked back to his seat and winced when he noticed the fingers still there in a small pool of blood that was making it's way for the seat opposite the one he was sitting in, "And the mess..."
Although she couldn't see his eyes-if he has eyes she thought-the rest of him showed that he was embarassed.
"I could...leave, if you want..." He said, and that almost knocked her out of her shock.
"No, it's okay." She was working on some base level where the animal insticts are more pure, but again, she didn't know why she said it, why she didn't want him to leave, "That's Cecil's own fault for toyin' with you."
He smiled and it was a bright smile that would have made her forget about the whole thing if not for the fact that his eyes were covered. The man sat back down and brushed the bloody fingers onto the dusty wood floor. Rose offered him another drink and he said yes and produced more money against her thin, automatic, protests. She took out a glass when she was behind the bar and made an attempt to wipe off the dirt and grime with the cleanest part of her apron.
She kept the absurd promise she made to God until the day she died.
So, I don't exactly like the whole cliche kind of 'drunk who gets what's coming to him' bit, but I like the barmaid part, so I think it'll probably stay that way in the end...Oh, and I guess that my nod to FFIV should be fairly obvious (Cecil & 'Rose'). It also doesn't get into Kaeru's character a lot really...I plan to flesh him out more over the course of the chapter and others as well (he'll tell Gil his tale of fighting Magus with Cyrus, for instance).
Tell me what ya think.
