Loosely Lawful | 1

All day, Sera could not shake the feeling that something was off about Kyle. At first, she thought that maybe she was subconsciously noticing a fever, but a quick hand to the forehead dispelled those thoughts. Then she wondered if maybe Kyle had lost a bit of muscle mass, but no. When he ripped his shirt off to splash in a stream at lunch time, his muscles looked the same as always. He hadn’t cut his wavy, white hair, and the spray of silver freckles on his dark skin hadn’t lifted either. His outfit hadn’t changed. Nothing about him had changed.

By midafternoon, Sera had just about given up. And then her eyes wandered to the strap where Kyle usually kept his glaive, and she froze. That was it. There was the damn problem, the thing that had been plaguing her all day.

“Kyle,” she said, squinting at the strange pole with the tiny net on it, “what happened to your glaive?”

Kyle glanced back at her, wide-eyed and innocent. “What?”

“You don’t have your weapon?” Sera pointed out. “Whatever is on your back, it’s not your weapon.”

He still looked confused, but he reached over one shoulder anyway, and his hand closed around the shaft of the weird net stick. Then he whipped it out and looked at it. “Huh. Sick spoon.”

It did look a bit like a spoon. But there was still the problem of this stick not having a sharp, pointy end.

“Great,” Sera said. “You’ve established what it is. Now where is your glaive? You can’t cut down monsters with that, and Librata knows I can only do so much.”

Kyle had the gall to blush. His dark cheeks darkened further, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in a nervous gulp. “Uh.”

“If we have to go back and embarrass ourselves because you forgot your damn glaive,” Sera threatened, “I will let you suffer next time you get hurt in a fight.”

“Brah,” Kyle said, flinching. “Brah, you’d leave me hanging like that?”

With a great sigh, Sera patted Kyle on his impressively wide shoulders, and pushed onward toward their destination. “I promise I won’t let you die,” she reassured him. “I’ll just be less nice when we patch up.”

They kept walking. Kyle threw a mean punch when he tried, and this wasn’t supposed to be a hard job. It might just take longer than usual. And if nothing else, they could at least scout the enemy out beforehand and decide whether or not they really needed the extra slicing power. There wasn’t much to hide behind up here in the mountains, especially when the trees were so few and far between, and scrubby to boot, but if they kept their eyes open and ears peeled, they could probably manage a little snooping.

And then Sera heard the singing.

It was a glorious, mournful song, like that of a woman who’d just had her heart broken and was the dramatic, crying type. It was a perfect aria. It caressed Sera’s soul with its sorrow and seduced her into despair. She wanted to comfort the singer. She wanted to bring the presumably beautiful songstress baked goods to comfort her in her loss. She felt an intense need to walk off the cliff in front of her.

One of those things was not like the others.

She blinked and looked down into a dense, white mist that she didn’t remember seeing before. Her toes were dangerously close to the rocky edge, and her weight was thrown just a few inches too far. The only things keeping her from falling were her washboard abs. She tossed her head up to look for Kyle and found him just a few paces behind her, his face contorted into pure, honest pity. The singing swirled on, blowing past Sera’s ears and gripping at her heart.

She pulled back from the cliff and lunged for Kyle. Her hands went to his ears, and her legs, heavy as they were with her armor, swung around his waist.

“Stop listening stop listening stop listening,” she chanted, bringing her face right up to Kyle’s. “For the love of Librata, shut your damn ears.”

“But Sera,” Kyle sighed, “if we’re gonna wheel chicks we gotta cheer them up first.”

Sera dropped her feet to the ground, lowered her arms to Kyle’s torso, and flung herself away from the cliff. Her weight slowed Kyle down just a little. “Kyle, you dipshit,” she hissed, “that is a cliff in front of you.”

Eventually, she would have to let go. Kyle was tough. He could survive a fall. Probably.

“Kyle!” she shouted, when he managed a few more steps. “Kyle, we’re being tricked! Bamboozled!” She grabbed his face again and knocked her forehead on his nose. “Sometimes, people with pretty voices are actually conniving bitches,” she told him. It felt a little slimy to say that, but she did see the dopey look drop. Kyle blinked at her, looked down, then scrambled back and fell on his ass, Sera in tow.

“Shitstains,” he cursed softly.

“Shitstains,” Sera repeated. She extricated herself from Kyle’s sprawled body and dusted off her butt, then threw a glance over her shoulder at the drop. The singing still hadn’t stopped, and the mist hadn’t magically gone away either. “You think we can get rid of the fog?” she asked.

“Uh, no? I can’t.”

Sometimes Kyle was useless. Scratching her neck, Sera tried to remember what she could do. If Librata was in the right mood, she might be able to clear the fog, but most of what Sera got on any given day was related to healing, or smashing, or identifying magical things.

She scratched her neck again. It was normal for mountaintops to get a little misty. Maybe if she and Kyle camped out, beyond singing range, the fog would be gone tomorrow?

But then again, it was summer, and already late afternoon, and since she hadn't noticed it earlier, the fog must have been localized. Sera hadn’t used any magic yet that day; she could afford a small waste of power. Placing a hand over her breastplate, she felt for Librata’s spirit, urged it to well up in her heart, and pulled the power to her eyes. She blinked, took in her surroundings once more, and smiled.

“It’s magic mist,” she told Kyle, already stretching her arms out and calling upon her deity once more. She whispered a few words, flexed her fingers out as wide as they would go, and then pulled them in to her chest. With a quick tug down, all the magic in the area dropped. Like snuffing a candle, the white fog winked out, leaving behind the stunning scenery of a mountain lake. “Oh, there’s the lake they told us about.”

“I guess,” Kyle replied. He brought a hand up to shield his eyes from the now-blinding sun, and peered at the lake with a whistle. “Get a load of those snipers.”

“Snipers?” Sera asked. “Like, archers? On the lake?”

Kyle shot her an affronted look. “Hot girls!” he said. “Snipers!”

Attractive lady archers? Sera squinted at the lake to see if she could spot them, but instead of archers she spotted a huddle of women, and maybe a dude or two, perched on a rock in the middle of the lake. The afternoon sun created too much glare on the water for her to get a good look, but she really only needed to see their silhouettes to know what was going on. The dark shadow of a fishy tail slapped against the rock, and Sera noted vaguely that the singing had stopped.

The flickering light off the water bounced into the faces of the fish-tailed people, and Sera gulped. Every single one of them was looking straight at her and Kyle. And they had sharp teeth.

“Sirens,” she whispered.

Kyle did a soft, kind of shitty fire truck klaxon impression.

The sirens couldn’t inflict any real physical damage from here, but Sera had no idea if their singing could charm her or Kyle a second time. Before anyone could make another move, she thrust her hands into her bag, fingers searching for the bits of cotton she used to clean up after a fight. She found them, pulled them out, and stuffed two pieces in her ears. Then she jumped Kyle and got him too. His mouth moved in some kind of confused protest, but Sera only ignored him. She pointed at the sirens, then made a line across her throat.

Kyle shot her a thumbs up.

She prepped to climb down the cliff and make her way to the lake, but apparently, Kyle had other ideas. As she pounded her piton into the dirt, he wandered around collecting rocks. As she tied her climbing harness around her legs, he plunked a rock in his weird net stick. When Sera backed her butt over the cliff edge to start repelling down, Kyle readied his stance and whipped the net forward.

The rock flew from his net stick and whizzed like a bottle rocket in a strong, clean arc.  It smacked a siren directly on the head with a faraway thunk. The siren toppled over, screaming something that might have been a bad word, and plopped backwards into the water.

Well, that was one way to do this. Sera crawled back onto solid ground and started blessing Kyle’s rock pile. Maybe the weird net stick wasn’t such a bad thing after all.