A Slight Case of Sunburn [Sunwell ft. Cata, Ink, and Genz]

"Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand." Tessa scooped up a handful of the stuff and slowly let it drain from her fist. She was bored.

"I noticed, Tessa."

"Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand." She started to skip, drawing out the word as long as she could before running out of breath. Abigail tried to block it out, but the droning noice pierced her focus time and again. Her hand tightened on her staff and she very carefully reminded herself how much of an asset Tessa was. And, well, a friend. Although that last one was getting harder to remember by the minute.

"Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand."

That was about when Abigail's eye began twitching. She began weighing the merits of bopping Tessa over the head with her staff and asking the Yeti to carry her. Surely she'd be just as safe in his hands as on her own feet. He appeared to be a fool, but he was plenty big and strong. It would also deprive them of her Mirror Shield, of course. It was a fantastically useful tool.

Maybe she could convince Tessa to take a handful of sand and try counting it. Or would she find that just as boring? She would likely lose count before she hit twenty. Suddenly she remembered her Ear of Truth could tune things out, and then things got a whole lot more quiet.

Remei blanched as the sand seemed to rear up before them, spewing out a gargantuan fiery worm that looked as though it could very easily have shifted two metres forward and obliterate half of the party simply by touching them. Holy mother of Din! Remei had met monsters in her life but this one took the cake and crammed the entire thing down its gullet with a shit-eating grin. Tom's yell was completely redundant as Remei immediately shoved the fairy in her belt before she tapped her shoulders and threw her arms wide, about to launch herself off the ground with the feathery wings sprouting from her Wing Tunic- before she remembered Meryem. Hissing, she whirled and bodily grabbed the woman, grunting at the exertion- okay, sure, Meryem wasn't heavy and Remei was strong, but what Remei was also was small- before bringing the wings down with an almighty rush of wind. Sand whooshed around them, displaced by the downstroke, as Remei lifted Meryem off the ground, flapping hard to build up speed and swooping after Tom. "Hold on!" she shouted at Meryem, probably somewhat redundant. Remei hoped she wasn't crushing the older Gerudo's chest or anything that would earn her a glare later.

The fairy was wriggling in Remei's belt and the Gerudo suddenly wondered if the thing was trying to work her way into her goddamn pants or something. Instead, the pink figure broke free from the belt and dropped several metres before catching herself, and Remei cursed but didn't turn around. The fairy was apparently death-staring the worm.
"Hello," she said, and then blasted the thing in the face with a Holy Bolt.
"Don't attack it!!" Remei shrieked. "You'll make it mad!!" She swooped lower to yell at Eve. "Control your fairy, Din damn it! She's going to get us killed!"

Tessa stopped in her tracks as a mountain formed from nowhere, staring in awe at the cascading sand.

"D'you think I summoned some kind of sand god? That'd be so cool! Maybe it'll grant me a wish and makes thing less boring!" As the mountain grew the temperature rose with it, but Tessa was shielded from that and failed to notice. Abigail felt it just fine, and she started to back away, pulling on the back of Tessa's tunic. It wasn't until flames began to spew forth that Tessa started to realize something was wrong...sort of. "Farore's holy shit! It worked! Something's happening! Abigail, Abbey Cat, Abby, I'm not bored anymore!"

Abigail face palmed. Hard. Then she turned to run.

"We cannot fight that thing! Discretion is the better part of valor, this time!" Abigail called back. She ran perpendicular to the worm's course, getting herself nice and out of its path. She couldn't keep up this run for very long, and she could already feel sweat building up against her skin as her feet slowly covered more distance. After a few moments she spotted Tessa running with her out of the corner of her eye, apparently matching pace.

This was apparently one of those times where Tessa was a very good friend.

At first, Remei was blindly flying, the wind slicing into her face like the crack of a whip (an altogether too-familiar feeling that sent a chill down her spine despite the vicious heat). Maybe she was imagining it, but it actually felt like the edges of the long white wings were baking in the heatwave, and she clung tighter to Meryem as she pushed herself harder. She didn't know where she was actually going until she realised that the yeti had made a beeline for the building. Smart yeti. She folded in her wings and plunged swiftly after him, landing hard and skidding to her knees before forcing herself upright. She didn't bother putting Meryem down and letting the poor woman wander around blindly until she was cooked by the giant worm. Instead, she just raced towards the building, following Tom inside. They were safe in the dark building- well, as safe as possible in this hellish climate- before she carefully put Meryem down.

"I'm sorry for grabbing you like that," she apologised, wiping sweat-slick hair out of her eyes. Not really sorry. It was necessary. "Did anyone get toasted? Also, more important question; what the hell is that thing?!"
She peeked her head back out the crack, trying to spot their missing companions, eyes feeling like they had been abruptly replaced with a hot ball of fluff as she looked at the towering worm. The fairy was doing what looked like unintentional cartwheels on the thermals, slowly rotating towards them as if she hadn't a care in the world.

Abigail looked over her shoulder to check how far she had managed to come, but it was difficult to ascertain whether she was at a safe distance due to its sheer size and the light it put out. It was like staring into the sun. Tired and already breathing heavily, this moment of distraction caused her to trip on the sand, and she came down hard enough that something made a cracking sound beneath her.

...a cracking sound?

She yelped in surprise as something gave way, dumping her into a hall below the sand. Tessa, having stopped to check on her, hovered for a moment over the hole before plummeting down onto the mound of sand below.

It took Abigail a moment to process what had just happened. She felt sand everywhere. In her boots, in her ears, in her goddess-damned bra. She lifted herself out of the pile, spitting sand out of her mouth even as she tried to catch her breath. There wasn't much to see. The pile of sand she lay on came halfway up the walls- walls of quarried stone as seen across Hyrule. As she scooted off the pile and under the remains of the ceiling, her eyes began to adjust to the darkness.

There, in the darkness, she saw a banner. Upon it was the crest of the royal family of Hyrule. They were in Hyrule Castle.

Remei sniggered at Meryem's comment. At least there was one concept carried from the Fortress to Hyrule- voes were stupid everywhere, apparently.
"If that kills you, I'm not even going to be surprised," she told the Yeti. The fairy sailed in past them and kept going, like a dust mote floating through the air. Remei took two steps forward and snatched the pink creature out of the air.
"This thing is broken, right?" she asked nobody in particular. "I thought fairies were supposed to be wise and mystical,"
"Toothpick," Alice snapped at her. Remei rolled her eyes.
"Where do we go from here, Meryem?" she asked, looking back out at the enormous shining worm. "Where'd the others end up, as well?"

Alice wriggled out of Remei's grip with a sudden barked curse, twisting out between the Gerudo's fingers and immediately flying upwards, straight into the ceiling. She repeated this a few times, moving to the left, before finally managing to go out through the door and fly upwards, attempting to locate Eve. The fairy managed to locate her charge by flying directly into her knee.
"Hello, hello, hello," Alice perched on the floor next to Eve's boot- a perilous location by anyone's standards- and looked up at the Staldra. "Rattle bones? Rattle bones,"
With that, Alice decided that Eve's advice wasn't needed, and pitched a fairy-size Holy Bolt at the Staldra, the light magic bursting into life on the undead creature's jaw.

Abigail had begrudgingly stripped and removed the sand from her clothing, unintentionally prompting Tessa to do the same. She wasn't hugely body shy, and she suspected Tessa to be asexual anyway. She'd never admit it, but she'd snuck a few peaks at Tessa during the process, and Tessa either hadn't noticed or hadn't cared to say anything.

Ahem. Moving on.

They'd wandered away from their makeshift entrance some time ago, navigating by the light of some torches Abigail had lit with Spark. Some rooms were devoid of anything of interest, others were entirely filled with sand. One, a storeroom of some kind, had been littered with skeletons. Evidently as the sand had risen, factions had formed within the castle and fought for what little supplies remained. A pointless endeavor; the undamaged bodies likely starved shortly after the scuffle.

Tessa had, surprisingly, proven to be a rather enjoyable conversation partner during the exploration. Her theories as to what had happened were random and occasionally divorced from reality, but they were sometimes at least entertaining.

The pair of women entered a large chamber; Abigail surmised it to be a library or a sizable personal study. This deep inside the castle, the warmth of the desert had faded, replaced by a chill that only grew stronger the further they delved. Apparently, this had been a source of concern for the former occupants of the castle- nothing remained of the books this room had held but a pile of ash. Several skeletons were huddled around the long dead source of heat, but one sat noticeably away from the others, at a writing desk against the wall.

"Abigail, come look at this! This'un left a book!" She hurried over to the desk, carefully leaving the body untouched as she reached for the single surviving text. A dried bottle of ink sat beside it, but the quill used to write in it had long faded away. She placed her torch in a sconce above the desk, replacing a long ago burnt out husk which sat there, and opened the book.

"No name or dates...but, yes, this appears to be a journal. Perhaps it will shed some light on what happened here."

Alice didn’t seem overly perturbed by Eve’s shout, fluttering with a pensive look on her face above the staldra.

“Rattle rattle rattle,” she hummed. “Horse clothes, yes, you have horse clothes. Wolf devil soon, wolf devil soon, worry not. Hot and nasty, rattle rattle.” She fluttered over and patted at the plume on Eve’s helmet aimlessly. The fairy tilted her head back at their skeletal foe, as if considering further assault on it; while she thought, she started curling the chain of her flail around one arm in a strange, constricting pattern. “No more rattle bones, rattle bones. Worm eat rattle bones, eat horse clothes too, but not eat horse. Horse eat worm.”


--


Remei couldn’t help but just roll her eyes at the yeti. The creature appeared to be dimmer than a wet lantern, and watching him eat the cheese was turning her own stomach- and she wasn’t especially squeamish.

“Just- just eat it already,” she muttered, looking away.


Meryem appeared similarly irritated, turning with a huff, and for a wild moment Remei thought she might march directly into a wall. What actually happened was infinitely more entertaining much more problematic. With a shriek, the blind Gerudo woman was gone, dropped through the floor like a slapstick moblin tripping down the stairs. Remei’s immediate urge was to bark a laugh, which may have demonstrated just how she was kind of a little bit a bad person. Feeling guilty, she hastened over to the hole, taking flight so as to not unceremoniously follow the other woman down. The area was a little small to fly properly, and she whacked her head on a wall in her effort to not whack a wing on the opposite one, but when she was somewhat stable she moved forward over the hole.


“You alive down there?” she called out worriedly. “Give me a moment, I’m coming down!”

She took a deep breath and tucked in her wings quickly, plummeting through the hole before snapping both wings out again to catch herself. She slammed one headlong into something concrete and snarled a loud curse, but managed to remain airborne, if lopsided. “Meryem!”