The exercise:
Hey, how about we get the yearlong prompt back into the first week of the month again? Sound good? All right then, to The Dream Kingdom we go.
Mine:
Dylan thought for a moment, then focused his concentration on his armor's crest. After a few seconds of flickering (and a brief, horrifying return of Hello Kitty) the emblem transformed into the Q logo from the Quake video game series. Nodding to himself in satisfaction, he returned his gaze to Nystor.
"Now what...?" Nystor began but Dylan cut him off.
"It's not important. What matters now is just: where to next? I'd have to think our arrival here has not gone unnoticed."
"Right," Olivia added, her katanas now in scabbards which formed an X across her back. "We need to keep moving. I, um... think walking would be our safest mode of transportation now."
"Yeah, great plan," Josh said from where he was seated on the ground. He tapped his leg with the palm of his right hand. "Maybe we could take care of this thing first though?"
Nystor knelt beside him and checked the transformed leg once more. Finding it mostly unchanged from his previous inspection, he looked up at Dylan and Olivia. "Are you having any difficulty maintaining your weapons and armor?"
"No," they replied in unison. Hidden in the safety of his helmet Dylan felt his cheeks grow hot. Well, hotter. It was stifling in there. He tried to imagine a cooling breeze flowing through the armor and was successful enough to relieve the worst of his discomfort.
"Then I should be able to restore your leg to its rightful form. Hold very still Josh and pray that nothing in this chaotic wilderness decides to interfere."
"Hold on, I don't like the ssss-aaaaaaaaah!"
"What are you doing?" Dylan shouted. He moved to stop the old man but Olivia grabbed his arm to hold him back. "Let go! He's hurting him!"
"I think he has to," Olivia told him calmly. "I think it's like a doctor resetting a broken bone. Except in this case it's probably a lot more than just one."
Dylan didn't like it but knew she was right. Watching his friend writhe in agony was almost as bad as being tortured himself. Maybe it was even worse. When Nystor finally took his hands away and sat down heavily beside Josh, sweat flooding both of their brows, Dylan released a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding.
"Are you okay?" Olivia asked at the same time as Dylan asked "Did it work?"
"Yes and yes," Nystor replied. "Though we will both need some time to recover."
"Time? We don't have much of that to spare," Dylan said before bending down to scoop Josh up in his arms. "So... which way are we heading?"
"Sure, take the lighter one," Olivia muttered as she lifted Nystor up.
"The nearest village lies... that way," Nystor said, pointing weakly to the west.
"And what are we going to do once we get there?" Dylan asked as he began to walk in the indicated direction.
"Capture a native," Nystor said. "And then make him - or her - talk."
3 comments:
Ok, I've been double-posting all year I think, so this is no exception... sorry. I figured since it's September we're running out of time a little, so this gets us a native all captured (so we have a fighting chance of finishing by December).
I like how you fixed Josh's leg and the effort involved -- I've developed that a little in mine, which is how much I liked what you did :) I had to go back and look up the village's name, but basically the crew should now be near the tower where (hopefully) King Brekstan is being held captive, so thank-you as well for pointing them in the right direction. And thank-you for the entertaining image of two teenagers picking up a teenager and a full-grown man there at the end of yours and thinking they can carry them!
Mine
It took about fifteen steps before Dylan's arms began to hurt, and another five before he was sweating almost as profusely as Nystor had been after working his magic on Josh's leg. He looked over at Olivia and could see her biting her lips and sweating as badly as himself.
"I think we need to imagine that we're stronger," he said. Olivia smiled briefly.
"But if we walk into wild magic while we're imagining that anything could happen," she said. The both looked at Nystor, waiting for a biting comment, but the old man was actually asleep.
"Why?
"Because we'll have to keep imagining it, I think," said Olivia. "The armour's a bit different – we've imagined it and it doesn't take much to, sort of, remember that it's there. But if we forget we're strong then we'll drop Josh and Nystor."
"Hey!" said Josh indignantly.
"This magic is complicated stuff," said Dylan.
"That's probably why Nystor keeps going on about training," said Josh. "I mean, he makes it sound like you just think something and it happens, but look around you – it's not raining coffee and donuts, and I'd kill for a Tim Horton's right now. It takes effort to turn that dream into reality. And it's not easy to change something that someone is imagining either."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I've been trying to turn your armour back to Hello Kitty since you picked me up. It's not working, it's like hard plasticine. If I really work it, it would change but it would take so much effort to get it to change you'd be bound to notice."
"Hey!" Now it was Dylan's turn to look indignant.
"Anyway," said Josh. "If you two are done playing heroes again, maybe you could imagine a trolley or something else you could push? Give it lots of wheels and imagine that it's really, really light and it'll be easy to move. And if anything wierd happens then it's already on the ground, so probably it just gets hard to push and me and Nystor have to walk."
"He's got all the good ideas, hasn't he?" said Olivia
"Maybe we should make him walk anyway," said Dylan, and set him down, not quite as gently as he could have done. "Fine, let's imagine something with wheels."
Sandsekt village lay immediately before the Lichtenturm and before it there was broken, rocky ground to the south and a sparse woodland to the north. Dylan and Olivia had instinctively headed into the trees as it was easier to push their friends across pine needles and through low scrub than it was to keep trying to pick them up and haul them out of crevices and over crags. Small game – rabbits and what looked like large chickens – ran ahead of them, and birds flew up out of the trees. As the woods thinned out and signs of logging began to appear Olivia paused. Dylan pushed the litter a further fifteen feet before he realised she wasn't helping any more and stopped as well.
"We should probably leave them here and go and capture a native," she said. "There's no point marching in there and letting them capture us."
Dylan looked at the litter: he'd been imagining something like an oversized skateboard when they'd created it, and it was clear that Olivia had had a tank in mind. What they had was a flat-bed sat on eighteen wheels aside with tank-tracks wrapped around them, raised edges that rose to waist height at the front and rear, and shields mounted all round the sides. He had to admit it looked bad-ass, but it wasn't what he'd actually had in mind. Josh and Nystor were both asleep, lying side-by-side, and didn't seem bothered by the journey at all.
"How do we capture someone?" he said. "I guess we can't just go and grab them and drag them away with us."
"Dad taught me how to choke someone unconscious," said Olivia. "He said I wasn't to let mum know, but it might come in useful with bullies." Dylan's mouth dropped open. "But... this is all about using our imagination isn't it? Everytime we've done the... the obvious thing it's not quite worked. What would Josh do to capture someone?"
Dylan's mind churned. What would Josh do? "He'd probably imagine a hole underneath them," he said, "or maybe he'd imagine a huge eagle that swooped down and grabbed them?"
"Yeah," said Olivia. "He'd do it without touching them, right! That's what we should do."
"I don't think I can imagine an eagle that big," said Dylan thoughtfully. Olivia grabbed his hand. "That's cool," she said. "Let's go!"
Josh and Nystor were awake and inspecting their "tank" when Dylan and Olivia returned. Nystor's eyebrows lifted almost off his head, and Dylan laughed out loud.
"We found this guy," he said, "he was taking a leak behind a tree. So Olivia imagined a box all around him, and I imagined it was light as a feather, and we brought him back. The box was made from fresh-cut pine and smelled fresh except from a dark damp spot in one corner. "This Way Up" was stencilled on it, the arrow pointing to the ground, as was a silhouette of a machine gun. The box shook now and then as someone inside tried to get out. "He's calming down," said Dylan. "He was much angrier when we first grabbed him."
"Did you remember airholes?" asked Nystor, and Josh burst into delighted laughter at the look of surprise on both Dylan's and Olivia's faces.
Greg - yeah, definitely starting to feel up against the end of year deadline. I'm sure we'll find a way to get things done... even if we have to triple post in each of the remaining three months!
I like how you continued the theme of the effort required to do magic in this world. The image of the two sleeping in the cart/tank is spot on. And I enjoyed the back and forth in the opening dialogue.
Great ending as well. Okay, we've got a local, we're (hopefully) close to the king... on to October!
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