Fable - Ask Pinnacle

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Zael Castomir

Slayer of Ganfarred
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(Art Credit)​


Nowhere left to run. Time to stand, or die.

"LIGHT IT UP!" exclaimed Captain Grinko, the last man of the mercenary company backing the College. "DO IT NOW!"

Zael didn't have access to his magic—neither he nor any of the College mages did anymore—but he had a firestarter kit strapped to a pouch on his belt as a backup. He knelt down and his hands, calmed by years of overcoming harsh adversity at Vel Anir's Academy, worked swiftly with the kit. The vegetation at the flat mountaintop's southern end provided ample material to burn for a signal fire, and soon one was born. From the plateau's northern end could be heard the chilling, systematic marching of the Ancient Dead, the legion of guardians awakened by the expedition. The signal fire would take time to grow strong enough to be seen, to provide ample indication of their emergency to the expedition's base camp far down in the valley. So that left everyone with no choice but to hold the ground they had long enough for help to arrive.

Zael stood. Turned. Drew his sword and stepped up to the front of the gaggle of magicless College mages, the Captain, and the few other freelancers.

"Gentlemen. Ladies," Zael said. "These are the most important moments of your lives."
 
COLLEGE OF ELBION
WEEKS EARLIER​


Yuna Fairweather practically shot up and out of bed. Beaming. Excited.

Somehow she managed to not wake up her roommate, Heidi, as she put on a robe and left and took a bath in one of the washrooms and came back and got fully dressed. Heidi must have been exhausted! Studying for some kind of big test or putting together some big arcane project. Didn't she say something about that earlier this week? Maybe she didn't. Yuna didn't know. She honestly kind of forgot. Oops. But it wasn't her fault! She was busy! Probably just as busy as Heidi! Alright, point being, Yuna often would wake Heidi up or Heidi would wake her up, both just by accident, but that didn't happen today. Which was good! Heidi deserved her rest!

But Yuna. Oh, ho, ho, she had a little something to do to-day!

Yuna stood in front of the mirror in her dorm room, fussing over minor details about herself. She had just recently gotten her hair cut, put into a different style. Did the barber do a good job? Did she? Did she do a good job? Yuna turned her head this way and that way and back this way and so on. Her hair was shorter now—she never liked it to grow too long—and, looking at it in the mirror, yes, it looked good, she thought it looked good, but was it good? Was it? She pawed at it for a few minutes before ultimately deciding that, YES, it was good, NO, it wasn't just good, it was stunning! Incandescent even! Alright, that settled, what should she wear: tie, ascot, or bowtie? Heidi chided her sometimes for dressing a little too "boyish". Well, boo her! Heidi wore these big, loose robes that made her look like a traveling blanket merchant, so how did she have any room to talk? Anyhow, Yuna thought her ties and such made her look cute. She ended up grabbing one of her little scarfs and loosely wrapping it. That's it: a nice, casual look. Yeah, leave her hat too.

Finally ready, Yuna departed from her dorm. Departed from the College grounds. Walked with lively steps, a little bit of a skip in her stride, down the streets of Elbion.

She was off to meet someone she knew. Zael Castomir. An Anirian. And she was going to tell him about an expedition, a mission, an opportunity coming from the College's Department of Acquisitions. Something big and thrilling. Something dangerous.

Just the sort of thing he liked. What could go wrong?
 
Elbion had a lot of cookshops. Big ones, small ones, some with large interiors and plenty of tables, some that were little more than kitchens with windows and counters facing the street. Zael could only take a guess at it, but he felt like Elbion had close to double the amount of cookships, restaurants, diners, whatever your local flavor of Common liked to call 'em, double the amount over Vel Anir. Yeah. Somethin close to that.

Presently, Zael stood on a street along with a loose group of other patrons outside of one such cookshop—the kind with the windows and counters facing the outside. This one came recommended to him by none other than Yuna Fairweather and a few of her acquaintances. He could see why. He was munching on these wrapped sausage things, and they were sweetened with something Zael hadn't even tried down in ol' Vel Anir, and they were delicious.

When he saw Yuna coming—more or less on time—he almost wished she was late. Woulda gave him a good excuse to get a few more of those sausage wraps and turn his breakfast into a meal that both started and ended the day.

She got close, and Zael wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. Swallowed. Then offered up his last, and half-eaten, sausage wrap. "These are good. Want one?"
 
"Hey, thanks, Firebutt!"

Then Yuna saw that the offered wrap already had a few big bites taken out of it.

"Aw come on! Can't I get a whole wrap? I'm hungry. I haven't had breakfast yet. Listen! Listen...can you hear my stomach growling?"

In perhaps the worst display of ventriloquism, Yuna mimicked the sounds of a rumbling stomach.
 
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Zael smirked as the jest formed on his tongue. "Thought you'd like the one with my lips on it." He snorted out a laugh and then asked, "What the hell was it that you called that? Sharin food like this?"
 
Zael liked getting Yuna all wound up on one thing or another. Kress it was fun.

"How's that make any sense?" he said, poking further. "I didn't kiss nothin, I bit into this. Or is that what 'Heidi' is into? Bitin? Damn, what's the College library full of? Those vampire books? How the hell does she get any studyin done?"
 
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"NO! I don't—HEIDI! Heidi doesn't like vampire books, that's gross. And you know what?"

Yuna snatched the half-eaten sausage wrap out of Zael's hand. She scarfed it down quickly and swallowed and said, "THERE! What now? Huh?" She started to mimic Zael's rural accent, "'What're you gonna do now, hotshot? I stole a kiss off yer sausage wrap and there ain't nothin you can do about it.'"
 
Zael started to mimic Yuna's Elbionese accent, "'First of all, I don't say your like yer. And second of all, you can notify 'Heidi' that her notion about half-eaten food is ludicrous.'"
 
"Why don't you tighten up that scarf and hide those vampire hickeys first and then I'll go."

Yuna smacked him on the chest, giggling and flustered all the while.

And with the banter at a close, Zael jerked his head toward the street-side cookshop and said, "Come on. We'll get you one and then we can meet up with Gier and Herrim."

Might as well treat Yuna to a little something. Because things might get a bit ugly later, when he pulled out that letter sitting heavy in his pocket and showed it to her. She sure as fuck wasn't gonna like it.
 
Yuna took her time with this wrap. They were walking pretty leisurely so she had plenty of time to savor it. And! Aha! Her plan worked perfectly! She was as beautiful as she was intelligent (no matter what stodgy old Professor Kerebor said about her)! She acted like she didn't want Zael's half-eaten sausage wrap and then she managed to get it anyway. Sometimes she astounded herself with her genius.

And just wait. Just wait! Zael was going to be in her debt for helping him get in on this Department of Acquisitions job like he wanted. Mwah, hah, hah, what oh what was she going to spend her favor on? Only she knew, and Zael would just have to find out!

"Soooo..." Yuna said, "I haven't exactly told Gier and Herrim yet. I didn't think that'd be a good idea. Not without you here to back me up."
 
"They're not gonna be happy to see me."

That's all he really had to say on that, huh? What happened in Rostok, well, that woulda left anybody sore. Yuna herself had been furious when he first met up with her again after the fact.

Betrayal tends to do that.
 
"You've got that right. Oh, hold on, you've got a little something..."

Yuna reached over and used her thumb to wipe off a bit of syrup from the corner of his mouth. Except there wasn't any syrup there—she just wanted to fabricate a reason to touch his face. All on a whim. Teehee.

"There," she said. And she took a big, sloppy bite of her wrap and consciously made sure she got a little bit of syrup on the corner of her mouth. She turned her head and looked up at him just enough to make sure he could potentially see it and said innocently, "These wraps are soooo good. Thanks! I stayed up late last night and, oops, I forgot all about supper. How do you forget all about supper? Well I did."

Come on, look her way, look her way!
 
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Yuna wiped some syrup from the corner of his mouth and he grunted out a "hmm" in shorthand thanks.

Zael kept walking, taking a bite out of the wrap he had gotten for himself, eyes forward on the street ahead, and he said, "How are you plannin to sell the idea of me comin along to them?"

This would've been way easier if Gier and Herrim weren't on this mission, but, as luck would have it, they were. And since the two of them, like Yuna, knew about what Zael did in Rostok, they could easily discredit him (fairly enough, Zael would say) and make damn sure he couldn't come, or really work at all in any capacity with the College.

Suffice it to say, a lot was riding on convincing those two, and it was guaranteed to be as uphill a battle as they came.
 
Drat! He didn't look!

"I've got a secret plan. A secret, secret plan. But first!"

She grinned.

"Do you think my hair looks nice? I got it cut yesterday."

Now he had to look!
 
Zael glanced over. Yeah, he saw the syrup on her face, and he knew what she was doing there. Time to get her wound up on that by "overlooking" it. So, dutifully, he examined her hair, his eye looking over it. Assignment followed perfectly. Perfectly enough to piss her off.

"It's a bit fucked up. Looks like somebody ruffled it."

He said, right as he reached over and ruffled it.

"Oughta see yourself in a mirror—it's all over the place."
 
"Hey! What? ZAEL!"

Her plan. RUINED. Her hair. RUINED. Her wrap. DELICIOUS. But her wrap wasn't important right now.

What was important was the sweet, sweet taste of revenge.

"Well if I'm gonna be fucked up, we're gonna be fucked up! Together!"

She said, right as she reached over and fucked up Zael's hair.
 
Unphased by his hair now made extra unruly, Zael said, "Hold on, you've got some stuff on your lip."

And then he plucked the hanging edge of Yuna's scarf and dabbed at the splotch of syrup beside her mouth.

"There you go. You can lick that clean if you want. You're welcome."
 
OH COME ON! She had devised her plan perfectly! How could this have happened?

"Uhhhh...thanks, I guess," Yuna said, holding the flap of her scarf and glancing down at it and the stain of syrup upon it and ruing the implosion of her plan. Well, that was the thing about genius. Sometimes plans devised were so smart that they undid themselves. But that was okay. She was already thinking of another plan, a better plan, one guaranteed to work! Grandpa would be so proud of her, living up to the Fairweather name like this!

But in the meantime.

"Okay, so," she took another bite out of her wrap and spoke while chewing, "Gurr an Erhem."

"What?"

Yuna finished chewing and swallowed. "Gier and Herrim. Alright, so, this would be a lot easier if one or, even better, both of them had a crush on me, but they don't. I think Gier is gay and Herrim might already have a girlfriend."

"Is it Heidi?"

"What?"

"If it's Heidi, I figure it'd be hard to sleep if they're fuckin in the bed right next to yours."

"ZAEL! No, it isn't Heidi! She's on her third boyfriend and it isn't Herrim." And then, adding perhaps too much information, "And that only happened once and I slept right through it and Heidi told me I slept like a rock and I told her he better have been cute or I was gonna puke."
 
"No. Well not over that. Later that same day there was a bad batch of broccoli being served in—okay, well, me puking on an upperclassmen isn't important. What is important is that Heidi's second boyfriend was cute and I was jealous and I'm just a liiiii~ttle bit glad that they broke up. Because it's not fair. Heidi gets so much attention! And so does Iliana, you remember Iliana, right?"

At least Iliana and Eric were pretty well known. Not that it stopped other boys from looking Iliana's way if she was wearing anything other than the loosest, least form-fitting robes available. Ugh! It was so annoying to be asked questions about Iliana just because they knew that Yuna knew her! Rude!
 
Zael needed to get her off this particular subject and back on track or else they could walk all the way to Alliria and Yuna would still be on it.

"Yeah. Iliana. She looked great naked."

Probably not the best joke to make in the effort of getting Yuna off the subject. But, look, Yuna was the streaker here, she oughta know that came with consequences.

"But enough about her. She's not important. We're talkin about Gier and Herrim. We need to work out a strategy."
 
Yuna finished her sausage wrap, and then she clapped her hands together. As much as she loved to complain about the whole assortment of things in her "bitch about this" jar, there was this little teeny tiny thing to get settled before Zael could safely come on the Department's mission and therefore be in Yuna's debt.

"Right. Those two. Okay, so they were both mad. I was mad. But we made it all better so I think we can make it all better with them too. And, first off, Gier was the one who was reeee~ally mad about it. Herrim wasn't thrilled, yeah, but it was Gier who had his eyes set on the Burning Heart in Rostok the most. And Herrim also really looks up to Gier; you know, kinda envies him a little bit, really respects him. So, in my most humble and most brilliant opinion, if we can get to Gier, then we can also get to Herrim. That's how we do it."
 
"There's a feelin knockin on my door, and it's tellin me Gier isn't gonna be persuaded by a bunch of I'm sorrys and ass kissin."

Zael (and Ollie, but mostly Zael) had done Yuna, Gier, and Herrim dirty in Rostok. Offering to team up with them to find and fight the Stalker of Minds, the monster lurking in the depths of that forsaken city, making it seem like they weren't interested in the Burning Heart, the artifact the Stalker had been hoarding. Then, right after the battle, Zael and Ollie suddenly pilfered the Heart and fled Rostok—which was still crawling with smaller monsters—with the artifact and got back across the Sayve River and left the three Elbion students high and dry.

For Zael, times had changed since then, but Gier probably wasn't going to have a lot of sympathy for that. Couldn't blame him really. For all he knew, Zael was here to use them again.

And right at that thought, the awareness of the letter in his pocket came right back to him.
 
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