@daily-writing-challenge Warnings: Mention of harassment, violence

Dicenne and Kareenia Amberlight had been through a lot in their lives: Death, loss, injury, attacks, invasions, and much more. Kara was there for him after the death of his wife and son, Dice was there for her after her kidnapping, and they were there for each other after losing their parents. The remainder of the Amberlights had perished in the scourge invasion of Quel’thalas, so for a while now it had just been the two of them.

Dice had always been fiercely protective of his younger sister; while she had some fighting and magical prowess, she had always been a pacifist. People often saw that as a weakness and took advantage of it, but Dicenne was never one to sit on the sidelines when it came to inexcusable behavior. 

So when Kara returned to their home in Ratchet shaking and in tears, he immediately went into protective big brother mode. He made her tea and sat her in her favorite cushy chair with a fuzzy blanket and some of her stuffed animals before getting the story from her. One of the drunk, out-of-towners at the tavern had made a few salacious comments towards her and tried to grab her. Kara was already extremely wary of strange men given what had happened to her in the past, but no one should be treating anyone that way and lessons needed to be learned.

He was looking for a young, human male with blond hair, wearing a slightly stained green shirt and suspenders; probably from one of the ships docked for the night. Shouldn’t be too difficult to find, humans were still a bit of a rarity here even though Ratchet was a neutral port town. 

Dicenne found him leaning against the outside of the tavern, drinking from a bottle tucked into a brown paper bag. Typical. The bruisers were good at running most of the riffraff back to their ships, but it was difficult to witness everything on a busy night like tonight. Thankfully, they all knew Dice well enough to leave him alone when he was on a mission. He was, essentially, an honorary bruiser, and would always look out for the people of the town.

“You think it’s fun to harass women?” Dice stepped right up into the young human's space, staring him down. Being 6’8”  and in shape had some major advantages, he often towered over many and was very, very good at appearing and being intimidating.

“What? Get the fuck out of here man, I didn’t do shit.” The human scoffed and took another swig from his bottle. Drunk people were terrible liars.

“You and I both know that’s not-” Before Dicenne could even finish his statement, the human took a wide swing with his bottle directly towards the elf’s face. Bad idea. Dicenne had spent a good majority of his life on the front lines in the military, and just because he was no longer a part of that didn’t mean he stopped practicing and sparring. It was important to keep those skills fresh given the world they lived in; never knew when one would need to arm and defend themselves. Dicenne easily caught his forearm and forced the human to smash himself in the head with the bottle. It cracked within the bag before dropping to the ground. The human looked surprised and dazed for a moment, before trying to pull his arm free to no avail. 

“What the…?! Get off me you crazy asshole, GUARDS, HELP!” The closest bruiser began whistling a jaunty tune and simply walked away; he would happily allow this. The human attempted to throw a punch with his other fist, but that too was caught. He kicked his feet and knees outwards, although at this point he was too drunk to really do any harm, and any blows that landed didn’t seem to phase the much larger man.

“Shut the fuck up, I’m not going to kill you.” Even if it was really tempting. “Although if you keep struggling I might.”

The human exhaled an indignant growl, “The fuck do you want?”

Dicenne gathered both of the man’s wrists together in one hand, pressing them against the wall over his head. He didn’t respond, instead he just reached into the cuff of his boot with his free hand, withdrew a dagger, and promptly stabbed it through the right palm of the human, pinning it against the wall. He let out a blood-curdling scream as he stared in horror at the dagger protruding from his hand. “The next time you even think about grabbing anyone without their consent, maybe you’ll see that scar there and remember what might happen. The next person might not be so nice.”

Dicenne had his sister to get back to, so he turned on heel and headed back towards his home atop the hill, leaving behind the blubbering human with the dagger still pinning his hand to the wall. The man could figure out how to free himself on his own, the bruisers would be of no help. As far as they were concerned he wouldn’t be bothering anyone else tonight. Or hopefully ever.

Daily Writing Challenge 2022 Day 2 - Protect/Fray

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Years ago, the Brightfall siblings had almost been identical. The oldest wore his hair in a ponytail that draped over his shoulder - a thick braid woven into it’s middle. The youngest, her hair reaching halfway down her back had her braid pulled back to fasten and hold a decorative bun in place. Their eyes, both the same color and each with their own hint of mischief. Some had once thought they were twins, but they were at least a few years apart. Despite not always dressing the same, each sibling would always have some detail on their outfit to match the other. Both had a strong need to protect what they believed in. He was loyal to his family...and she had been too. Once. Her connection had been severed, and his was ordered to follow...but he never completely cast her out. Now she was back, and he was reminded of how similiar they really were, despite all their differences now. The phyiscal ones were only surface level. The Brightfall siblings are powerful in their own right - Aeriden more so than Aria. They both knew this, it was no secret between them.They both had their weaknesses, yet hers were easier to exploit with the right knowledge. But where he faltered, she was more eager and prepared to leap into the fray. Her fierce loyalty carrying her through battles...though, he supposed that was only half of what truly made her a survivor. That was the true difference between them. Power can only get you so far, if you do not have the bravery to step into the unknown.

Emotions frayed as surely as rope, and Khaeris was in the thick of feeling herself unravel. Melancholy, irritation, despondency, hopelessness, worry, anger, love, loneliness. Each emotional strand seemed to swing out from her heart, racing up the strings she’d used to hold herself together. With a soft blast of air the portal closed behind the last of his squad, and just like that he was gone again. No word on how long. He couldn’t tell her much. The squad had all looked serious and focused, their thoughts already at their destination. On their mission. On keeping themselves ready for whatever orders would come. Each career soldier had a sharpness to their movements. Khaeris supposed that some deep part of them was likely eager for action after these quieter months at home. It was a comfort to know they had each other. The people left behind dispersed quietly. Children and parents and partners. She looked at the people leaving with her. She knew their faces, she knew which soldier they worried about. She smiled encouragement at a few, some smiled back. Some couldn’t force it. It wasn’t only Pollux’s squad going out, of course. She looked at the next group filing in behind them with a protective ache in her breast. Alone, she walked her way back home, forgoing the morning market. The knot of her numb feelings felt thick in her core. Climbing up in the wagon she opened the windows but pulled the curtains closed. She started her day as she had so many others. She made tea and she nibbled toast. She fed her sunfur panda and pet his soft head. She turned off her comm and turned on her music machine. She hummed and danced gently through her routine. What she did not do was cry. @daily-writing-challenge

Warnings: none

Summary: Attzi makes some plans… just in case.

@daily-writing-challenge

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Attzi stood in her underwear, looking down at the armor she’d draped across the bed. Dave had made it for her a few months ago, before they’d met in person, and it had seen her through a few mining mishaps by now. She hadn’t worn any of it in the past month and change, though, and that was giving her pause. If she were unlucky, the bottoms wouldn’t fit anymore; she’d been too busy tinkering with her cousin’s pocketwatch and selling for the Frostbite Contingent, which meant she’d gotten less mining and exercise over the past few weeks. She really wanted it to all still fit, because it’d been a gift. She might jokingly call Dave her sugar daddy, but she wasn’t about to take anything he sent her way for granted.

…Well, she should start with the bottoms and get the suspense over with. She grabbed the dark cloth leggings and sat on the edge of the bed to shimmy into them, quietly ordering them to behave as she did. As awkward as it was getting into leggings in general, it still quickly became clear that fit wasn’t going to be a problem. She breathed a sigh of relief as she stood, smoothed the cloth with her hands, and then reached for her top.

“Y’shoulda checked for this before the day of,” Attzi muttered to herself, even though she knew exactly why she hadn’t. Check your armor fit hadn’t been scribbled down in her notebook between the time she learned about the work contract and now. These days she was well aware that if she didn’t write it down, she wouldn’t do it. Ma and Pa kept trying to get her to see a healer about it, but after getting her head knocked around in the family lab explosion, she didn’t want to risk someone coming along and jumbling her brain up even more. She was perfectly functional as-is, anyway.

Attzi made quick work of the rest of her armor, though the stabby pauldrons she’d bought last week took a moment to get used to. On the one hand, they were probably going to be great if something big tried to slam down on her. On the other, if she tilted her head wrong, she’d get a new ear piercing. Still, it’d be a neat way to commemorate her first non-sales work with the Contingent!

The final touch was her pickaxe, because she didn’t have anything else for fighting up close. …She should probably focus on getting a proper weapon after this run. How much would someone working in sales need one, though?

Attzi frowned, hard, as she remembered the Contingent blowing the roof off her house while fighting a kraken in Booty Bay a couple of years back. …Yeah. Better weapon, and maybe talk to Dave about some new armor, too. There was something about the set he’d given her that suggested he’d done more than just fit them to her size. If she focused on it, the armor made her magic tingle. Enchanted armor was nothing to sneeze at.

As for the pickaxe, she could probably rig up a more complicated version with enough time. She didn’t want to learn a new weapon when she was well aware that a good swing would fracture bones just as well as it did stone. It just might need a bit more oomph for big things.

She reached for her notebook to write all this down before it slipped her mind. As she pulled out her pen, the final thing she’d written last night caught her eye. Dave resurrection. She blinked a few times, waiting for a memory to surface through the fog of her mind.

“You’ll have to tell me how the job goes when you get back.”

“Sure thing. If I don’t die, anyway!”

“If you do, I can always raise you into undeath.”

She thought about that as she slipped her cousin’s pocketwatch into her belt pouch. Death wasn’t something she really feared, because she’d been pretty good at avoiding it so far despite the odds. But she was also having fun with her life, and she’d be sad if that was just snuffed out. There were so many people left to meet, and so many things to build.

Attzi bit at her lower lip for a moment, and then made a decision. She went into her little office and sat down at her big wooden desk, pulling two pieces of parchment to her with gold-painted claws. Her mother’d taught her how to draw up official documents, so she made quick work of what she was doing: one to Megahes to tell him where to send her body (assuming there was one), and one to Dave giving him permission to bring her back.

“It ain’t like I need it, but planning ahead never hurt nobody,” she murmured as she sealed the letters shut. She needed to get Dave’s in the mail, and Mega’s into his hands before they headed out on their mission.

But first, the most important thing: she retrieved her notebook, and wrote down her decision, so that she’d remember it, herself.

[ @daily-writing-challenge ] Day 2 - February DWC - Protect & Fray [ Warnings: Violence, Gore, Survivor's Guilt ] How does one explain the sudden shift of winds when they’re inside and asleep? You can’t quite feel it, but, despite the lack of wind on your skin, you still *know* when it shifts and horrible things begin to flitter upon it. The sensation was one similar for Megahes, he couldn’t quite explain it, much like a fucked up sixth sense. There was maybe a three seconds maximum he had after waking up before the roof of his barracks was torn clear off and sent hurtling into the neighboring building. Screams as people were thrown and crushed alike suddenly became part of a chorus of slams, roars, barks and war cries as people fought to defend themselves from the sulfurous green glow of Fel. The Legion had been attacking Azshara, Westfall and several other locations like clockwork, raining Infernals, Felguards and all manners of Demons all across the regions to set up bases in an effort to capture and destroy each faction's primary capital. That is why he’s here really! Megahes never was the best fighter, but he had been conscripted by the Horde Military to be trained formally as a Battle Mage should his experience as an Engineer fail him. In a lot of ways, he was glad for the opportunity to help fight and defend Azeroth. To be an actual hero for a change. Before he could have time to even get his bearings proper, the wall next to him imploded, sending him flying out of his bunk just to find several Mana-Eaters (A variety of Fel hound) storm into the mage-allocated barracks. Men and women, boys and girls alike barely of age, were sickened upon and were made to be meals, ready to eat. The Mana-eaters tendrils flapped and sucked in magic in every direction as Mages tried to defend themselves just to be sucked dry of their powers and then devoured alive in exhausted heaps. Mega finds himself on his back, panic and fear the only things he could feel as he locked up. He needed to move, but he couldn’t. He needed to move his feet, to enter the fray, to fight to protect those he was supposed to be working with. He was stuck watching his cohorts get their guts pulled apart and chomped or slurped up. Those that were making it out, their fates weren’t any better but at least they ended faster. Infernals were literally stomping and ground smashing anyone else fortunate enough to escape the Mana-eaters. It was a crap shoot in every way. Like a camera coming into focus, the assault of smells and magic energies swirling all about him bring him back just in time for him to see a Mana-eater having discovered an untapped meal as well. Head lowered, tendrils coming up ready to devour whatever spell Mega threw at it. It could smell the mana pumping through his body, a ripe source of a meal all for itself. Panic set in and Mega’s heart is stuck in his throat and he begins to crawl backwards, the scene almost surreal to the point he could swear he was watching himself in the third person try to crawl away. His left hand comes up to spray Ice Magic in front of the creature to create a literal barrier between him and it. It didn’t even buy him a handful of seconds as it was melted and absorbed to the point of it being weak enough that it shattered like glass as it was leapt through.

It was funny how terrifying a signature line could be.

She’d faced down hordes of demons on the battlefield, semi-godlike beings, titan creations, dragons, and countless other regularly fear inducing creatures that had plagued Azeroth in the recent decades. But this was beyond even them.

Lyn chewed on the end of her pen and read over the many pages again, and again, curled up in a chair at the dining table in her small kitchen. Rationalizing. Delaying.

This process made the most sense. The potions she’d had to be on to even get to the point of potentially having viable children had seen her mental state tatter and fray. Those had easily been some of the worst months of her life, and she’d been through plenty of terrible times.

It would protect her body, and probably the baby too. What had dying, and being brought back with divine magic, done? There was some risk in there, and that made her too nervous to even think about trying herself.

But it was odd to think about turning it all over to a surrogate. The notion that it was a genuine, fascinating biomagical-medical marvel and equally a tragic loss of a deeply personal experience coexisted peacefully and were equally at war.

Meryn thought it was the best idea too. He was happy to go to the check ins and keep her up to date if she had to leave again soon — and if felt like she was going to have to leave again soon. Between odd dreams and a growing persistent, preternatural feeling that she was in the wrong place, and where she needed to go was far from here, it seemed inevitable.

His name and contact information were printed as an approved contact on the appropriate page. If she dropped dead after serving “her purpose”, he and Xanelen would raise the child, and they’d probably be better parents than she would anyway.

She’d sat on this for weeks already, running through all the potentials on either side of the problem and joy scale. Overthinking, as she did. It was a big decision though, wasn’t it worth the agonizing?

At this point, though, it was getting a little ridiculous. It’s not like ink on the page would spontaneously manifest a baby on the table out of thin air. She still had to take it to the doctor’s office, and they would take it from there.

Lyn huffed and scrawled her name and the date quickly at the bottom of the contract.

February Writing Challenge 2022 Day 2 - Protect / Fray

“I am glad you have come, magister,” the Broker said, elbows resting upon his desk, hands clasped; and with a nod of regard to Jaskian, “And magistrix, as well. Welcome.” His speech was brisk, even more than certain other excitable Brokers Luminash had met.

The room was dark, lit poorly by only a single glowing lantern behind the desk, which cast long shadows, and nearly obscured more than it lit. It was quite different from the rest of Tazavesh, with its bright, overflowing market stalls. Both the mages felt it, each on their own, and each sensing the other, a deep sense of unease.

Protect

It had been ages since Emveah had lived in the city and at this point, she missed the farm life and the constant source of Pandaren food, but Stormwind did offer a touch of variety which nearly made up for the peace of the hillside and her hammock. By this point the tall half-elf had a favorite spot for every meal, enjoying a plate of bangers and mash in Old Town as the evening drinkers began to pour in.

Focused on the delicious meal before her, most of the nearby conversations were just background noise until a prat of a Human decided that the young woman next to Emveah was bound to be his. Nearly choking on her ale as the blonde himbo started using the lame-ass negging tactic on the clearly out of his league young woman who grew drastically more uncomfortable with his every word but appeared to be too 'polite' to speak up for herself.

The pint of ale pulled away from Emveah's lips, her eyes still focused on her nearly empty plate. "Oi, read the room. It's clear the Lady isn't interested in your subtle brand of toxic masculinity." Another sip of ale followed her words as the man stood there, stunned and growing angry at her jabs.

"Mind your own, yeah? If she wants me to leave, she can say so herself." He snarled, causing the young woman to flinch as Emveah slammed the mug down on the bar and swung a steady fist; stopping just short of his face as the young woman stood up.

"I'd like you to leave us alone!" She shouted, promptly sitting back down and ordering a drink, Emveah's fist still looming mere inches from the tip of his pretty nose.

"Fine." He croaked, cleared his throat, and walked away dejected.

Sitting back down and returning to her meal without a second thought as the young woman stared at her. "Thank you."

"He was a dick," Emveah replied with a mouth full of mashed potatoes. "You shouldn't have to have protection because you exist."

The woman nodded with a smile.