Making Up Adventurers writing prompt — Since this mage learned to cast Reverse Gravity, they’ve been using it for every situation
“Underlord’s thundering bunghole, will you stop?” Skoira clutches her knapsack, scowling, at the foot of the inn’s rickety staircase.
“Sorry,” Meeka says, soft and doe-eyed, ducking her head, and Skoira bares her tusks in even greater annoyance.
They’d run across one of Skoira’s kin, at the last campsite before the hills gave out to the farmlands that feed the city, on their way to hand in a report to the tower-cloistered wizards there, who’d recognised them from the memory-knots in Skoira’s braids and the tooth-weave tattoos down her arms and from her reputation — their reputation, both, her and the wizard, even as she recocognised him, though they’d never met face-to-face before.
“How’s Meeka-and-milda?” he’d asked, in a harmless family-teasing-family way, and she’d surprised even herself with a full-tusked snarl of I’ll beat your face in. “Hey, hey now, greensister.” He’d held his hands up. “No harm, no harm. Just a nickname, you know how it is?”
And she does. She does. The wizard’s got a city pinkskin’s kicked-dog mien, and some days it exhausts Skoira trying to discern what the wizard actually thinks, what she feels, when everything’s hiding inside it.
The thing is, Skoira’s been hanging with pinkskins long enough to know it’s not a perpetual cringing appeasement display when they do it; you have to apply their own way of communicating to it. Like dogs. And also enough to know that even when you know that, a lot of Meeka’s is kicked-dog cringing — and dogs don’t get that way without kicked.
Today’s a day when all that exhausting knowledge feels like a grater on Skoira’s skin.
“It’s just practising,” Meeka says. “For all the rot they talk about raw natural talent, nobody ever made archmage material without practise practise practise.“
Skoira makes a dismissive plosive pop sound with her mouth. “Only ever the new, shiny spells you feel like,” she counters. “I don’t need my bag levitated upstairs. I don’t want my bag levitated upstairs.”
She watches Meeka’s mouth form the beginning syllable of a whole shining-eyed earnest explanation of how it’s not levitation, it’s something else. Something about the force that attracts rocks to the ground when you drop them, turned topsy-turvey. And Meeka would, if they were out in the country; but not this close to the wizards cloistered in their towers, the ones who proclaim which wizards are worth anything, and mysteriously decide that wizards cloistered in towers are worth everything, and Meeka’s like, nothing. This close to them, Meeka’s kicked-dog becomes pronounced.
“Fundamentals,” Meeka says.
“Fundamentals,” Skoira repeats, in mocking. “You couldn’t do a fundamental with less than five minutes warm-up to remember the words. You’ve never,” and she dredges her memory for the stereotypical things, the things everyone knows a wizard can do: fireball, sleep— “charmed anyone in your life—”
And Meeka’s head comes up with a look in her eyes Skoira doesn’t know, doesn’t know after wearing out years of boot leather traipsing around with her. Like a kicked dog with teeth and the whites of its eyes showing, about to bite to bone.
“Charm?” she says. “No, I’ve never. You’re right, it’s an easy one, they do it all the time, students. I—” and she jumbles over the next syllable for a few moments, as she reconsiders something she’s already saying, changes it. “I had a friend, when I was a student. Studying alongside me. She worked a few shifts here and there, serving tavern drinks, no — no rich family already filled with wizards, to pay her way, you see? And one day some of her classmates came in, and they were friendly to her until she finished work for the night, and they walked her back to the dormitories, and at some point one of them said oh, you should come in for a moment— and they’d been nice, you know, and she felt among friends, and so—”
The expression on Meeka’s face looks starkly dangerous. Like a person who can flay you with their mind and a gesture, the way wizards sometimes look.
“A while later,” Meeka says, “long after she knew that at some point in the evening, she never knew when, that she’d been — charmed, she realised she was with child.”
Skoira looks at the wizard, gripping the stair rail, and rehearses the mental arithmetic she’s already long done, about Meeka, about Meeka leaving the city, about the money Meeka sends to her sister for her children, about the exact number of children and what colour hair they have and the stretchmarks Skoira’s seen on the wizard’s body during unromantic river baths out on the trail, cold and silt-footed and liable to get riverweed in their hair, and still and all enough to half suffocate Skoira from accidentally holding her breath because the wizard looks like some mythical water-dwelling temptress.
She could say point them out to me, and I’ll kill them all. She could say I’ll get away with it, after a fashion, because I’m an orc, and all your folk know that we’re inscrutably senseless killers, just the way mine know all your folk are cringing cowards. Or simply it wasn’t ‘a friend.’ She would say them, to an orc. Might, if they were on the trail, away from the city that makes Meeka cringe. She should say them. She’s an orc.
She’s spent a long time, hanging with pinkskins. She works her throat, swallowing them as physically and painfully as a jagged dry trail biscuit when there’s nothing else to eat. Grunts.
“Fog, then,” she says, rough and indifferent, and watches Meeka hide herself back inside a ducked head and soft expression, shoulders relaxing. A kicked dog, returning gratefully to slinking.
Skoira feels senselessly, inscrutably violent. She puts her foot on the next step up, and then notices the wizard is levitating her own satchel of books and bag of wizardly sundries behind her, and with no other outlet, snatches them irritably out of the air. “Give me those.”
“Sorry!” Meeka says, and Skoira puts her feet down on the treads harder than necessary, grinding her teeth against the urge to hold the wizard down and bite her until she stops apologising.
