Chapter 5 – The Wrath of a Shrine Maiden Scorned

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   "Hey, how did we get back here?" Serge demanded the next morning as he woke up in his own, comfortably familiar bed.

Well, perhaps not quite…

   "Serge, you'd better get up quickly," a Leena said nervously as she burst into the room. Then, catching sight of the boy's state of semi-dress, she averted her eyes delicately. "Why did you decide to sleep half-naked right now?"

   "Y'know, I'm not sure," Serge replied thoughtfully, dragging his rather wrinkled shirt over his head. "I don't remember taking anything off before I went to sleep."

   "Well, I'd say Kid might have something to do with it, but she's not here," Leena said thoughtfully, turning once Serge had indicated that it was safe to do so.

At this, the blue-haired youth sat up a little straighter.

   "What? Where did she go?" he asked.

Leena giggled.

   "Worried, are we? I guess she called that one pretty well!"

   "Leena! I was just afraid that she'd gotten hurt. I'd worry the same about any of you freaky people I just met yesterday. And anyway, remember that I've got a nice girlfriend back at home!" Serge protested. "And another copy of the same girlfriend right in front of me," he finished, shaking his head in bemusement. "Speaking of that, which Leena are you? The one who showed up in my room yesterday, or the one we found on the pier, claiming she'd never met me?"

   "Oh, I'm the one from your room," she assured him easily. "Lynx thought that another one of me in this universe – from this universe – might screw something up, so he took out the other one."

Serge bolted from his bed.

   "What?! He killed her?!"

   "No; he took her out to the restaurant and bribed her to go away for a while. We're paying her fare to a big city somewhere that our journeys won't take us. She's going to spend some time doing some soul-searching. Maybe she'll find a nice boy!"

   "Uh, yeah. Maybe," Serge echoed. "So, you're our official Leena now?"

   "Yup! And Karsh is our official Karsh – he went with those two slightly dim soldiers the other Karsh showed up with – and Kid's our official Kid. That's why she went to Termina. If she had stayed, I couldn't have come with you any further, and we're going to meet up with her again later anyway, so we decided that it was best for her to go off alone now. And just between you and me, I think it was better to get her away from Lynx before she killed him. I don't know what the heck is between those two, but somehow I get the feeling I'll find out."

   "Yeah, I get that feeling, too," Serge agreed grimly.

   "Anyway, as I was saying, you'd better hurry up and get your things together. The stranger whose house we're in isn't too happy."

   "Stranger?!" Serge echoed. "This is my house!"

Leena peered cautiously out the door, and then ducked quickly back inside.

   "Tell that to the man waiting outside with a shotgun." 

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Ten minutes, a daring leap from a window, and several near disasters involving an angry man and a shotgun later, Serge and Leena trudged over to the very large campsite that the rest of the group had set up for the night, just outside of the village. Poshul accompanied the two, but having joined them after they had managed to shake the man with the gun, she bounded exuberantly, full of the joy of being alive, rather than trudging wearily, inwardly lifting hands imploringly to the upper regions of the sky and demanding in a voice ringing with all the agony of the ages,

   "WHY ME?!!!!"

As the two dusty, weary teenagers collapsed by the bonfire, by now nothing but glowing embers and curling smoke, Macha halted in the act of packing up the remains of breakfast, alarmed.

   "WouldCHA tell me what happened to you two?"

   "Don't ask," Serge implored. "This day just began, and I already can't wait for it to end."

   "You know, I don't remember him being such a whiner," Lynx muttered aside to Harle, who seemed torn between loyalty to the boy, and the bitter truth.

   "So, where do we go now?" General Viper asked briskly.

   "Um…" Serge began lamely.

   "We're going to Termina," Leena replied calmly.

   "We are?" General Viper asked, turning to Serge with one eyebrow raised bemusedly.

Serge turned to Leena, similarly bemused.

   "We are?"

   "Of course! I told you, didn't I? I have some errands to run, and while we're there, we're going to…um…well, I don't quite know. But I'm sure something will come up."

   "At least we have a plan," Radius chuckled, eyes twinkling.

   "Why don't you tell us what we should do, then?" Leena suggested, rather miffed.

Radius merely chuckled again.

   "No, Leena, I think you're right. Something should come up on its own."

   "WhatCHA talkin' about?" Korcha demanded. "We're just supposed to wander around Termina until 'something happens'?"

   "Yes, that would about cover it," Radius replied with a thoughtful nod.

   "Okay," Serge said slowly. "All of us? Because that might draw attention…"

   "No, Serge, you'll take two others with you, and the rest of us will wait nearby," Radius replied.

   "Sure," Serge huffed. "You get to relax, while we have to work."

   "If you'd like, Serge," General Viper spoke up, "someone else can take your place, and you can stay with the rest of the group."

Serge's eyes roved over the multitude of strange people. He recalled the fun they had all had together hunting Komodo dragons. He recalled the day they had all met…which only made sense, as it had been yesterday. He recalled all the happy times, although the two mentioned were the only incidents worth mentioning, and neither was particularly happy to the boy's mind. Finally…

   "To Termina!"

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   "You know, Serge, I think you were really mean to everyone this morning," Leena said seriously as she and Mojo followed the shock of blue hair through the mellow summer morning.

  "Yeah, I know," Serge sighed. "I guess yesterday just started off really weird, and I haven't recovered yet."

   "Yeah," Leena agreed sympathetically. Mojo cart wheeled around the path less sympathetically. "I remember how edgy I was the last time forty strangers invaded my room while I was sleeping."

   "Rrr!" Serge rrr'ed, drawing his oar and glaring daggers (which he had stolen from the vanquished Kid the previous night, the victorious Kid having shrugged and said that she guessed he could have them if he wanted to) at anyone whose eyes lingered for a longer moment than necessary on the redhead at his side.

   "You know," she said thoughtfully, "I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be in love with Kid by this point."

   "How fickle do you think I am, Leena?" Serge demanded, hurt. "It's only been, like, two days!"

   "Ah, but you remember, I've never known you as anything but some delusional guy who claimed to be my dead childhood friend, and then Kid's man. If you want to be protective of someone, be protective of your girlfriend!"

   "I just said, Kid's not my girlfriend! I'm not letting it become a self-fulfilling prophecy just because everyone tells me I'm going to end up with her! I won't be controlled like that! I have a mind of my own, and a heart of my own, and a—"

   "A dramatic streak a mile wide," Leena murmured, pressing a hand to her forehead. "Look, I didn't mean Kid. I meant the me from your own world."

   "Oh, right!" he laughed sheepishly. Then he frowned at her suspiciously. "Hey, hold on! And just why have I gotta stay away from you?"

Leena rolled her eyes. Mojo rolled in the grass at the side of the path.

   "You mean, aside from the fact that I don't want me to be angry with me? Or something like that…"

Serge's expression turned crafty.

   "I don't think that's it. You've got someone you're secretly seeing, haven't you?"

Leena looked away, blushing slightly.

   "Well, it's not exactly a secret…"

Serge stared at Leena as something different in her appearance caught his attention at last.

   "Hey, what's that in your hair? Is it—it is! It's a bellflower! Now, who would have given you a bellflower, I wonder?" he mused, hiding a grin.

   "It could be any number-um of people-um," Mojo laughed, leaping in front of Serge and Leena so suddenly and unexpectedly that both leapt a foot in the air with simultaneous startled exclamations.

   "He's right," Serge said mock-seriously once he had recovered. "It could be…well, maybe it couldn't. Unless you're getting friendly with Lady Riddel, it pretty much has to be…Glenn! Hey, way to go, Glenn! We've got matching Leenas!"

Leena fixed Serge with a cold glare.

   "Please don't refer to me and…well, and me as if we're some pretty accessories."

   "Okay, fine," Serge said, hands up in a placating gesture. "It was just a joke."

   "Well, if you've had enough 'joking'," Leena began airily, crossing her arms and turning away, "we've just reached Fossil Valley. Are we going to go in or would you like to stay outside and have some more 'fun'?"

   "I guess we should probably go inside," Serge said seriously before approaching the start of the valley.

   "You don't know aggravation," Leena said through gritted teeth, "until you've travelled with someone with no concept of sarcasm."

Mojo rocked back and forth on one foot, having long ago lost interest in the conversation. Perhaps it was he who had the most to deal with on this trip…

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Meanwhile, somewhere else entirely, so entirely somewhere else that it was in a parallel universe, Steena was annoyed. Very annoyed. So exceedingly annoyed that people had begun to cross the street to avoid getting in her way due to the nearly palpable waves of annoyance rising from her.

It wasn't merely that, after consuming at least fifty gold pieces worth of ice cream, Guile had left her with the bill and a bunch of children who didn't carry money while he "went to freshen up", although this had been bad enough, considering the drain it had been on her savings of two-hundred and fifty. As a shrine maiden, she didn't consider large quantities of money to be a necessity, and only carried enough at any given time to cover emergencies.

Ice cream, she quite decidedly felt, was not an emergency.

Still, this was not what had caused a faint steam of anger to curl up from her ears.

Nor was it the fact that, after they had left the little Termina ice cream shop, the children had proceeded to scatter every which way. After all, they were children, and children had a tendency to do this.

Nor was it even that a dour old man seated on a bench outside the shop where he could easily see and criticize everyone that happened past, had told her with a scowl that she ought to keep better control of her children.

As if it wasn't clear to anyone who might look at her that she was a shrine maiden, and thus child-free and likely to be for a good long time.

Not to mention that she was far too young to be the mother of a fourteen-year old boy.

What had annoyed the disgruntled sword-swingin' shrine maiden was the fact that, when she had turned to the place that Guile had been previously occupying, set on venting her annoyance at old men that had nothing better to do than tell other people how to raise children that weren't even theirs, and then perhaps even getting started rounding up the scattered crew, she had found him quite unmistakably gone.

Thus, she had been forced to go through the pain, aggravation, and stress that inherent in the task of gathering together four children of varying ages, as well as one drunkish old man with a speech impediment who had wandered in and introduced himself as Sneff, apparently forgetting that they had met before, alone.

   "But just as soon as I find him," Steena vowed darkly, "I'll show him that the white magic of an angry woman can be just as scary as black magic anytime."

And somewhere, somehow, Guile shuddered in horror at something that he could barely define, as though sensing his doom from far off.

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End Notes: I feel that I really must apologize for how Leena-centric this is becoming. I absolutely adore Leena; she's my favourite, along with Luccia, Fargo, Glenn, Steena, and Guile. Anyway, she won't be this much in the spotlight for much longer. The way I see it, Leena is one of the few people Serge actually knows to this point, so he wants to keep her around. That, and the party is trying to only use the people they've encountered up until this point. As soon as they run into some more people, the air time of the rest of the characters will increase.

So, yeah. As much as it may hurt, I promise I'll use Leena less next chapter.