“When the soldiers pass by, they’ll leave us two to die!”
“…That’s amore!”
“Stop singing!” -- HumdrumLoch
[AN: My site's down again, so I'm mining the #prompt tag on Tumblr until normal services resume. We apologise for the inconvenience]
Lucretia groaned. On one hand, she knew which twin this was. On the other, it was devastatingly shocking how quickly certain types amongst the crew got used to the annual re-set. Two dozen worlds, she reminded herself. Two dozen realities, and some of us are already flippant about death.
Beside her, Taako cast Minor Illusion to make them look like a bunch of rocks, just like the rest of the random scramble of stones where they were hiding. "Gotta laugh at it or I start screaming, Luce. My sister's out there."
If it was Lup in his place, she would have incinerated the guards, blown their cover, and literally burned a path between them and their goal. The Light. Which was now in a heavily-guarded keep in a civilisation more advanced than the one their crew had started from.
Magnus had already run afoul of their weaponry. Mistakenly fired by Lup, who had been investigating the thing, and didn't know that pointing one at something made it... go away. Their good-natured security chief, however, thought he looked real cool with some missing fingers, and laughed it off. His hand would be back to normal by the next universe.
Less than three months from now.
So many of them had been maimed, at minimum, this time around. Barry was dying slowly, which was worse. Caught by a reaction to something native to this dimension that just didn't exist. They couldn't track it down, couldn't come up with an antidote, and Merle's continuous Cure Poisons were only holding back the inevitable.
When she'd last seen him, he'd been begging them to just let him go. But they needed him alive to tell them at least how to fly the Starblaster... because the natives of this world had caught, killed, and dissected their captain.
There had to be innocents on this world, Lucretia told herself. Children. Fluffy bunnies. The little birds that made their nests in the eaves and ate the insects. Something that didn't deserve what was coming.
The guards passed them by without their non-magical visors picking up on Taako's illusion. Which left the chinks in their armour, the backs of their necks, vulnerable to a very quick Magic Missile. Taako, thanks to his alleged childhood, was very quick to drag them off and divest them of everything they had.
One uniform got thrown at her. "Are you seriously--?" she didn't waste time. Arguing even as she pulled the uniform on. Socks first. "You're proposing that we just march on in there and take back what they've stolen."
"I have three pocket tents, two bags of holding, and one of their guns," Taako put on the helmet and grinned through the raised visor. "We can do that."
"You're also out of spell slots and down to cantrips." She, too, put down her visor. "Let's get this farce done with."
"Whoever gets whatever first gets going with it. Good?" Meaning either the Light or Lup.
"Good." Weapons primed and ready, she set out with him. Trying to march like she knew what she was doing. Trying to ignore the fact that Taako was suddenly two inches shorter in the natives' combat boots. Trying to be fierce enough to pass inspection.
She was right, ultimately. It was a farce. But it didn't matter because she got out with Lup and he got out with the Light. This world was saved. It barely deserved it, but it was saved.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / alessandroguerriero]
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