A/N: This is my newest and very meticulously planned story. As for genre, think 'The Brotherhood', less rape, more fighting, with nelves… and comedy. But then think again.

The Infamous Lucelia Dawnfeather & Co

Chapter One

"Elune's knickers," Lucelia Dawnfeather cursed under her breath as she found that a knot had somehow appeared midway along the tripwire she was setting up. She unhooked the end she had just spent ten minutes fiddling with and undid the tie, being careful to keep her eyes trained on the nearly invisible thread.

It was the thick of night, but Darnassus seemed never to change, ignoring the cycles of daylight, eternally closeted in a twilight-drenched corner of Azeroth. Lucy's eyesight was, as was the same with all night elves, excellent, though lately she had been straining it a bit too much, sneaking around in very dim conditions. Despite constantly sneaking out to play tricks, Lucy was chubby, for a night elf, and so unfit that even walking around Darnassus taxed her mostly ignored muscles. She liked her life, though, one of relative luxury with no responsibilities. Her doting parents made it even easier.

Tonight was her biggest trick, however. She had suspended a long tripwire from one side of the only open entrance to the city to the other, the thread unnoticeable unless you were expressively looking for it. She'd done her research; the sentinels around this area had a twenty-minute shift change lag, which she was exploiting now.

"Finally." She breathed out the breath she had been unconsciously been holding and stood up, dusting her cloth trousers off. Smiling wickedly, she hopped over the low wire and looked back once, snickering at the thought of the parade of guards that would trip over it tomorrow when they finished their march from Shadowglen. It would be hilarious, and everyone would know she'd done it, but there would be no evidence, because her parents wouldn't even ask her. They were like that, far too soft on their only daughter.

"Well, who do we have here?" A bright light shone onto her face as she tiptoed around the edge of the high, white wall, just a foot of grass between her and the pond. Startled, Lucy jumped and slipped, but was caught by a grip of iron and hauled upwards before she hit the water, coming face to face with a vision of hell itself. "Caught you, little troublemaker."

It was a sentinel, with closely cropped grey hair and a predatory smirk on her lips. "Wait until everyone hears that the famous miscreant Lucelia Dawnfeather got caught."

"Lemme go," she argued, wiggling in the sentinel's inhumanly strong hold. "You got no right-"

"Your grammar is appalling, also…" The sentinel sighed and pulled Lucy's hands behind her back, effectively stopping her from doing anything at all. A panic set in as the sentinel roped them together.

"Hey, what're you doing?" She asked obviously. "You can't just take me… wherever you're going!"

"I think you'll find I can." The sentinel smiled and led her off the bank, striding twenty times faster than Lucy even ran, pulling the frenzied young elf behind her. Through the streets of Darnassus she trailed, swearing with her limited vocabulary at the grey-haired monster sentinel, who merely smiled and laughed at her foolish antics. They ended up in front of the city guard's housing, where much to Lucy's chagrin, she was dragged past groups of chatting sentinels, getting ready for the shift change. They looked at her and raised their elegant eyebrows, tittering behind their hands. Everybody in the city knew the illustrious Lucelia Dawnfeather: prankster and brat extraordinaire.

"When I said 'go and patrol for trouble', Grey, I was talking about hostile horde, burning legion or scourge. Not tweens." Lucy was placed roughly in a nice enough chair in front of a big, desk that was hewn from the same wood as the floor. Behind it sat a sentinel, out of armour, with her bare feet up on the table, leaning back on her own comfy chair. Lucy knew that the city guard wasn't unmoving and stony-faced all the time, but she hadn't quite suspected this.

"Oh, I assure you, she's trouble enough," her captor, who had been referred to as Grey by the woman in charge, rolled her eyes and leaned on the back of the chair. "Setting up a tripwire by the main arch."

"No doubt that would have been highly amusing." The leader turned to look at Lucy. "I have to confess that you have surpassed yourself. That doesn't, of course, mean that you won't be subject to a punishment."

Punishment? Lucy didn't like being punished. Usually, if her parents asked her to do something she didn't want to, she'd either throw a tantrum or stomp out of the house or to her room. She didn't reckon that these women were the type to let her storm out. Lucy swallowed apprehensively, thinking that she'd blown her eight-year streak of petty pranks.

"You can call me anything in your word bank, but my temperance prefers ma'am or miss. Tanalia here has been hot on your heels for the last couple of weeks, and in that time has produced quite a disturbing portfolio." She rummaged in a drawer on her side of the desk and pulled out a thick folder of stiff parchment. "Things don't bode well for you, Lucelia. May I call you that?"

"Y-yes," Lucy stumbled over her words, looking at all of the reports in her file. She glared at the beastly woman Tanalia, who grinned back.

"Yes what?"

"Um… yes you can?" the leader's eyes narrowed and Tanalia took it as a sign, swiftly backhanding her across the face. "Ow! What the hell did you do that for?"

"It's 'yes, ma'am." Tanalia said threateningly. "Treat your superiors with respect."

"Oh… yes, ma'am, then." She cringed and wondered if the slap would leave a bruise. Not like she hadn't had bruises before, but her parents would fuss over it.

"Good. Now, Lucelia… petty theft from market stalls, four instances of meddling with external affairs, obstruction of justice… and now a major impediment of city plans, all in these past two weeks we've been watching. Do you know what would happen to you if you were an adult?"

Lucy thought for a minute. "Uh… I'd go to jail?"

"Correct." Ma'am smiled grimly and tapped her file. "There's not much threat from the horde any more, so we're taking inter-community issues more seriously."

"You can't send me to jail, though!" Lucy protested. "I'm still a child… and…"

Ma'am's lips quirked. "Correct again, but we are authorized to oversee minor reprimands."

"Oh." She paled considerably. "So… I have to do chores?"

"Not quite. I'm giving you…" Ma'am looked over her file again. "Hmmm… three or four months of community service, Grey?"

"Five."

"Six it is, then." Lucy gasped.

"Six months? I'm not doing six months of… whatever!"

"Yes, you are."

"No, I'm not." Lucy leant back on her chair, feeling cheeky again. "Sorry… no I'm not ma'am."

"Would you like Tanalia to accidentally misplace her hand quite quickly at your face again?" Ma'am asked smugly, and Lucy was quick to shake her head. She had an aversion to pain deeply routed in her aversion to… everything she didn't like. "Well then, I'd suggest you agree to the terms."

"But… I don't want to do six months of crap! None of the stuff I did was really bad, right?" Lucy asked desperately. "Like… shouldn't you give the service to someone who… I don't know, killed someone?"

"Those ones aren't going to see the sky for a while, little miss. I wouldn't trust them with a rake." She pulled out a form and a quill, making three small marks. "You need to sign this form in the three places that I have marked out, and then you can begin your hours. And besides, you don't have anything else to do- you've finished your initial schooling…" Ma'am looked at her file. "Second bottom in your class of seventeen, impressive… repeated your fifth year due to truancy. No interest in training in any class, no interest in following your mother or your father…"

She slammed the folder shut. Tanalia walked around to untie Lucy's hand so that she could sign the paper. "Your parents have already agreed… look here, both of their signatures! My, my, what a lucky girl you are." Tanalia thrust the quill into her hand.

"What?" Lucy looked at the paper, dumbfounded. Her parents would never do anything against her. They'd gone behind her back, the… the…! She didn't have a word in her vocabulary big enough to express her rage. "I'm not signing this."

"We could do a deal." Ma'am's eyes began to sparkle mischievously. "What, to you, lies in your future, miss Dawnfeather?"

"I dunno… stuff."

"'Stuff' will not help anyone. You have a very long life ahead of you, and you can't possibly stay in Darnassus getting fat and playing silly tricks for all of it. Instead of six months of public humiliation, I'll shorten it to one week. How does that sound?"

"What's the catch?"

"At the end of that week, you'll go to Ashenvale with Tanalia and her rotation. To train as a sentinel."

"Elune's nipples, are you pissing with me?" Lucy outright laughed. "Me, be a Sentinel? You've taken too many blows to the head, I think."

"Language, miss." Ma'am warned her. "I can't say that it was an easily made offer. Everyone here laughed their glaives off at me."

"Then why offer in the first place?" Lucy asked, perplexed. Her, be a sentinel? That was laughable, at best. She wasn't tall or graceful with perfect a perfect muscle-to-softness ratio and an eternally superior gaze. She was normal height, normal build and, if she was honesty, a little tubby. Plus she couldn't even lift a sword without her arms and shoulders burning. The idea of her being part of the elite fighting force that protects night elves all over Kalimdor was… stupid.

"Because you're clever, Lucelia." Tanalia flicked her on the forehead, but Ma'am merely rolled her eyes and continued. "You're not smart; in fact, you're a dullard. But you're quick-witted and very good at what you do. Even Grey had to shadow you for two weeks before you got complacent enough to get caught. Training can sort out the rest."

"You're serious, aren't you?" Lucy asked. "Ma'am."

"Deathly so." She replied somewhat sarcastically. "But think on it. I don't like to see the youth waste their lives, especially when they aren't eternal any more."

Lucy looked down at the contract and though about it. That was hard, because she wasn't someone naturally prone to inflection. Her mind worked fast when it came to planning tricks and drawing out plans, yes… but she couldn't apply her enthusiasm for that to anything else. And then, she thought about her life- what was she actually planning to do once she got older? She'd spurned the few offers from trainers already and had merrily waved off most of her childhood friends when they'd left for Shadowglen (well, she'd been merrily waving because they were about to be rained on by little pellets of dye, her parting gift), thinking that she had no need to learn such things.

Perhaps, she thought, she should go. Then again, she was naturally lazy. Just looking at Tanalia and her poise, her grace perfected by years of training, her inhuman strength… she would never be any of those things, she knew. She wasn't naturally strong or beautiful or anything that all of the sentinels seemed to be.

"I can't be a sentinel," she explained as though it were the most obvious thing in the word. "I sleep until midday and I don't use a knife when I eat… which I do, a lot… and I hate exercise…" she paused going through a list of her faults. "I don't talk right, I hate taking orders… um, I… I like shiny things. I hoard them. Like a magpie. I can't hold a goblet right and I-"

"As impressive as your list of faults is…" Tanalia said in her silky voice. "And as long as I'm sure you could continue, we still need you to sign for your service or agree to our deal."

"But I-"

"Lucelia," Ma'am said in a nice voice. Lucy grimaced as she realized they were playing good-guard bad-guard. "Make your choice."

"I…" she looked at the sheet and the pen in her hand. Lucy, being… Lucy, let laziness win over common sense. "I don't want to do the six months."

Quicker than her sore eyes could catch, the first paper was whisked away and a fresh one was pushed under her nose. This one was longer… and also already signed by her parents. "The sold me out!" she realized. "How long have these been signed?"

"Since you first pelted that young gentleman… Fahrahrah, I think, with nightsaber dung. We just had to catch you."

"…This is a set-up, then."

"Just sign the form, girl." Tanalia snapped, becoming irritable.

And so, Lucelia Dawnfeather signed her life away.

-

"Scrub harder, wench!" Kolya giggled and the little ones behind her fell about themselves laughing. They sat, at their leisure, on one of the riverside walkways that wound around Darnassus, dipping their feet in the crystal clear pools, watching a damp and unhappy Lucy scrubbing barnacles off the side of the bridges. It was the worst day of her life to date. She had been woken up at half past six and given a set of itchy, androgynous clothes that she was to wear to identify her as someone doing community service. Now, as far as night elves go, Lucy did not have a particularly anally retentive sense of fashion, but she was perceptive enough to know that neon orange and purple did not mesh well.

Tanalia, who she was now convinced hated her, had given her a pair of gloves and a chisel and shown her the bridge. She was expected to have this side spotless by nightfall. It had been all right until about midday, when her usual crew of admirers and assorted miscreants had come to see and laugh at her. She had gotten caught, and the first rule of doing tricks was not to get caught. They sat taunting her, eating sugared pastries and drinking milk, chatting idly, coming up with new tricks to play.

Tricks that, Lucy thought bitterly, she would not get to help with. Already a new leader of the dozen or so of them was emerging with her removal: a stocky little runt of an elf called Pylli, who had caused a stir by superseding Kolya, Lucy's appointed second. She didn't really care for the hierarchy any more, though, seeing as she'd be out of here for good in six days. Six days of humiliation would probably diminish the glut of pride she'd accumulated, though, which was probably Tanalia's intention.

As she hacked another nasty barnacle off the white stone, Lucy frowned and muttered under her breath, cursing everything she could think of with as many funny body parts of Elune she knew. After a while, though, that didn't comfort her. The little ones eventually got bored of laughing at her and ran off to do whatever trick they were planning, but Pylli and Kolya stayed to talk to her.

"So, the great Lucy is leaving us, hmm?" Pylli raised his long and elegant eyebrows, a move every night elf but Lucy seemed to be able to do without looking stupid.

"Yep," she 'accidentally' let a chip of barnacle ping at his face. "I'm going to be a sentinel."

"And I'm Illidan's daughter." Kolya snorted.

"You are his… eighth cousin's granddaughter." They sat in silence, trying to figure that out, but in the end they all gave up. "Seriously."

"Lucy, you're not going to be a sentinel. You're… at least a foot too short, to start. And you don't use a knife when you eat." The younger girl was about to start listing her negative qualities when a shadow loomed over them.

"Not trying to help her, are we?" Tanalia asked, leaning over the side of the bridge. "What kind of progress do you call this? You're supposed to do the whole bridge by tonight!"

"You said just this side!" Lucy argued, definitely sure that she had said the one side.

"Did I?" She smirked. "I meant both sides. Now you'll have to double your speed, at least, to be done by midnight."

"But-" By that time, Tanalia was already miraculously at least twenty metres away. "Elune's nostrils, I hate that woman."

"That's The Torturer." Pylli said in slight awe and massive fear. "The bane of a thousand children having fun."

"The Torturer?" Lucy snorted. "Agreed, she's a bit of a furbolg… but not a torturer."

"You're siding with her? Suck-up!" Kolya swung down from the bridge so she was right next to Lucy. "You really are going to leave, aren't you?"

Lucy nodded and felt sad. Koyla, while not her best friend, had followed her loyally since she could toddle, with hero-worship that became friendship as she got older. Leaving her behind would hurt, and Lucy didn't like hurt… but she was leaving, and that was that. A mostly-unused sense of responsibility flaring, she worked furiously at the bridge while imparting her wisdom to the two younger elves.

"Remember to always check the guard shifts… and that once a trick is finished, it isn't, because you still have to not get caught."

"Can I have your penknife?" Kolya asked.

Lucy bit her lip. "It's supposed to go to the new leader… I got it from Iridolan, and he had it from, um… Yerria."

"They're both grown-ups now." Pylli said with a certain disdain. "You're going away to become a grown-up, too, aren't you, Lucy?"

"Not if I can help it." She winked and smiled, but her heart was breaking. She remembered when Iridolan had left them to become a druid… two years ago now. And Yerria… she'd already completed her priestess training. She was old. "Pylli, why do you want to be the leader?"

He looked embarrassed. "You noticed?"

"I did elect Kol as my second, but you claimed leader when you found I was leaving."

"Kol isn't good at talking like you. She has ideas, but she can't tell us them proper. I just thought…"

After smashing a barnacle to pieces, which provided a few seconds of silence for him to trail off, Lucy opened her mouth again. "So you're claiming Kol's ideas because she can't tell them properly?"

"No, I never said that!" Pylli said indignantly, and then realized that was exactly what he had been doing. "Oh… have I been bad, Lucy?"

"Yes." She cuffed him gently over the head; his dark purple hair messing up more than it was already. "But I forgive you. I'm going to make it different now. There will be two positions at the top… a planner and a speaker. The planner gets the knife, because it had rulers and compasses and useful things for planning."

"Then what does the speaker get?" He asked. She understood the want for a physical representation of his power within the little group. She thought hard for a while, pre-occupying herself with more scraping, before deciding. She was changing the hierarchy for the first time in ages, which she wasn't entirely sure about doing. "The speaker… he or she gets this, but only on their birthday. They have to be underspeaker to the previous speaker until then, because then they can get taught how to speak properly."

From her pocket she took the brooch that she seldom went without, given to her on her tenth birthday by Iridolan, who in her ten year old eyes, had been a god. He wasn't the leader then; he was far too young, but he was the best tricker she knew. Personally, she thought, even better than Yerria, but she daren't say that in case unkind ears were listening. The brooch itself had been handmade by him from the bendy wood of the willow trees that grew by the river, wound around a metal frame that had the pin on. It was made in the shape of a flower.

She handed it to Pylli and he turned it over and over in his hands as though it were made of gold. Then, he burst out crying, which Lucy didn't expect because she was no particularly friendly with him.

"Pylli? Are you okay?"

He sniffed. "Y-yes, Lucy… it's just that I remember Iri leaving, and everyone was quite sad… but everyone loves you so much, you always did the best tricks."

"And you'll do better in your time, I'm sure of it." She had finished about half of the first side of the bridge by now, and it was mid-afternoon. "I have a dare. No, not a dare… a rite. Like a graduation."

"What?" Kol's eyes got big. She loved applying her mind to challenges, puzzles, anything. "Like a thing that we have to do to be speaker and planner?"

"Yes. You have to do a hundred tricks in seven days, and each trick has to be bigger than the other, leading to an absolutely huge one at the end."

Kolya immediately began planning that while Pylli fingered the brooch and bit his lip. "That's impossible."

"No. It's easy. There's ten of us, excluding Lucy, and if we all do one trick per day… the youngest can do the least one, then it goes up by age."

The two of them thought on that in silence for a bit while Lucy applied herself to scrubbing. She had just done her job as a leader properly, not just because she was oldest and best at tricks… she felt quite happy with herself, and she hadn't made anyone trip up or cover them with dye. This was quite a new sensation.

"We have to get started now. We've already missed most of the first day." Kolya and Pylli wished her farewell and she watched them go fondly, thinking that she'd left her charges in good hands. Tired already, she started picking at the hard-shelled mollusks with renewed vigor, causing passers-by to jump slightly when they heard her grunting with the effort.

By nightfall, she had finished that side of the bridge and moved to the other. Lucy was lucky that nobody was around when she lost her footing and toppled into the water, causing her to feel about three stone heavier than she actually was and look like a drowned rat. By the time she was done with that particular bridge, it was nearer to three in the morning and she was aching all over. Her arms would drop off as she slept, which would be for a mere three hours… Lucy was quite glad she only had a week of this to go. Six months would have killed her.

-

Evidence of the seven day trick-a-thon was spattered, smeared and otherwise proudly professed around Darnassus. You couldn't walk under an arch without getting wet, dyed, tripping over or having your facial features swapped for the person who had walked through before you. Far from being alarmed (or amused, for that matter) the citizens of Darnassus welcomed the change from their daily lives, and said a silent prayer of thanks that Lucelia Dawnfeather was leaving. It would be a good time of peace before her contemporaries tried to do anything big.

Lucy herself was having a marvelously miserable time. By the fourth day, she could barely move her arms and had dropped the chisel into the water a total of seven times, meaning she had to dive in an retrieve it each time. Adults would frequent the bridge she was working at that day, smirking, for a chance to see the prankster get her comeuppance. They all knew, though, that her biggest challenges would lie ahead, when she would return with the rotation of the sentinels at the end of the week.

A tradition was soon established; due to all the paint and dye flying everywhere, Darnassus banners became kaleidoscopes of colour. They were swiftly replaced by the children in Lucy's group with banners they'd made themselves, ranging from fauvist swirls of technicolour to plain pieces of linen on which each child had made a handprint in different coloured paint. For that week, the ranks of the little group of pranksters would swell with children of all ages and creeds, eager to cause as much controlled havoc as possible.

Lucy vehemently denied re-stringing the tripwire over the main gate when she was asked, giving all the credit to her group. As luck would have it, she was cleaning the nearest bridge to the city entrance that day and saw the whole spectacle. Tanalia was, of course, not happy, but Tanalia was never happy. She would come and taunt Lucy sometimes, and the young girl idly wondered if she actually did anything useful in her job.

Eventually, the seventh and last day came around, and the whole city woke to a day in which they knew it would be most prudent not to leave their houses at all. Above every door there were charms and petty magics to cause all sorts of havoc, but strangely no children around to giggle and laugh. Traders nervously opened their stalls and trade and commerce began as it usually would, but something was definitely amiss.

"Everyone has gone," Lucy sang in a monotone. "Nobody appears when I call. I'm stuck here on this bloody bridge, scraping barna-caaaaallllssss."

She was quite pleased with it.

That night she had been told to go back to her house and say goodbye to her parents and then meet the returning rotation of sentinels at the guardhouse, dressed for the road. She puzzled at that. Dressed for the road? What did the road want her to dress as? She had asked it, but to no response. Roads, trees, bridges and arches in Darnassus were sometimes partial to an idle conversation, but today they were all silent. There was mischief on the wind.

Kolya and Pylli did not come to visit her and bring lunch, like they had the other days. They were insanely busy coordinating all of the tricks at the fact that the ten people in their group had suddenly become a hundred. There was one thing that they had discussed in depth.

"What are we called?" Pylli asked on the afternoon of the fifth day. "We need a name. And our holiday week-dare-thing needs a name, too."

"Lucy's Badass Bandits?" She'd suggested, to much mirth, but then she thought seriously. "Maybe…" She'd looked at the brooch Pylli wore proudly. "The flower-people?"

"Too girly!"

"The pen-knife people?"

"Lucy, for all your expertise… you suck at naming stuff. No offence." Kolya had rolled her eyes. "How about the Guild of Foolish Youths and Unnecessary Risk Takers?"

"That sounds like a union." Pylli had said. "But I think being a guild would be cool. We could have a tabard and everything. And we have the ten-member minimum."

They thought for a while. Lucy spoke hesitantly. "Why not just the Prankster's Guild? And our week can be the Seven-Day Trick?"

"Simple… but I guess it's with children in. It should be simple. Pylli, you agree?"

He shrugged. "I guess. And we can do that handprint thing for our tabards."

And just like that, Lucy had found herself signing something for the second time that week. She was the third name on the guild charter and would stay an honourary member for life. Pylli had thought of finding Iri and Yerria, but Lucy said they were adults and they had better things to do.

When she'd completely finished the seventh bridge, Lucy had stood on top of it and jumped a little for joy, then wearily trekked back to her house. Her parents weren't home, so she'd taken off the horrible clothes and debated as to what she'd wear. Despite being completely naïve, she knew they would be traveling, so she'd forgone a dress- she didn't really like dresses much anyway. She'd picked fine cloth breeches, a pressed linen shirt with an overcoat and some leather boots. Thinking she looked like an explorer, she'd pulled out her penknife one last time and used every one of the fittings. She'd miss the ingenious little thing, for sure.

Packing a spare set of clothes and a few luxuries for herself into a medium-sized backpack, she hoisted it on her back after a good, hot wash. She's forgone doing anything with her scraggly hair, dark purple like her father's, but with an interesting layer of blue from when she'd been messing around with her mother's inscription materials. It seemed that not even a good wash would get the enchanted stuff out- she'd have to wait until it grew.

Downstairs, she had a last meal by herself, wondering if her parents were actually ever going to come home. Dutifully, when they didn't, she had said goodbye to her furniture instead and walked across the city to the guardhouse.

"Here comes the little miscreant!" She was greeted by Tanalia's dulcet tones, and grimly turned to face the woman she had nightmares about. "Did you say goodbye to your parents?"

"They never came home." She explained. Around Tanalia formed a rank of Sentinels: ten very scary-looking women wearing their armour on top of softer traveling clothes, each with a massive pack, grim-faced and hard-looking. Lucy gulped. With a silent command, the leaving sentinels turned to salute the woman Lucy knew only as Ma'am, then the rest of the barrack, and then turned to leave.

The march across Darnassus seemed to Lucy more like a marathon, each sentinel doing one stride to four of hers. She ended up skipping stupidly in a shuffly sort of jog, being poked from behind by Tanalia, who seemed to have brought a walking stick solely for this purpose. They arrived at the small structure that acted as a portal to the Rut'Theran village and Lucy paused, still needing to give the penknife to Kolya… and she actually found herself wanting to say goodbye to her parents.

"Nobody came to say goodbye, awww." Tanalia cooed at her. The Prankster's Guild in its entirety chose this moment to burst into the scene, all one hundred of them clinging to an Ancient Protector, who stood as tall as twenty of Lucy and as wide as five of her. He or she, it was hard to tell with elementals, had been adorned with so many different flowers that it looked like a mountain made from rainbows. On its head sat Pylli and Kolya, their hair streaking behind them. The assembled just stood in awe for a good minute until Kolya jumped into the Protector's hand and was let down onto the ground, stumbling slightly.

"Lucy." She said loudly, which was pretty amazing for Kolya, who was usually quiet amongst adults (especially sentinels). "Do you have something to give me?"

Lucy took the penknife from her pocket and looked at it forlornly. She offered it out to Kolya, feeling one era of her life end and another start. She was no longer a child, with the relinquishing of the penknife, and it made her sad. She didn't want to cry in front of Tanalia, though. "For you, Kolya Rootwalker, new leader of the Prankster's Guild."

The smaller girl took the penknife from Lucy and cradled it close to her chest. Immediately, the whole guild leapt down from the Protector and came to stand before Lucy. Pylli came out of the throng and the din of child voices and offered her something. It was encased in a linen pouch and he looked practically ecstatic, so she took it warmly and looked inside.

"Elune's- arrgh!" she cried as a puff of darkness powder came out, blinding her momentarily and making her face blacker than Tanalia's heart. Everyone started laughing at her and she realized that this was part of the massive, last prank. They had played it on her. They were worthy to take her place. "Thanks, Pylli."

"No problem." He grinned as she wiped the powder out of her eyes. "Serious, look inside."

Tentative now, she reached inside and pulled out a brooch. It was like the one she had given to Pylli, but entirely wrought in metal, shining in the moonlight. She felt the charm of shininess in it and instantly liked it, already being predisposed to coveting shiny things. The likeness of the flower was plated with seven different colours of what she thought might be mother of pearl; seven petals for the seven colours of a rainbow. Despite herself, her eyes filled with tears. "Thanks, Pylli, for real, no sarcasm. This must have cost a fortune."

"With ninety extra people, it was easy." He beamed at her and they hugged for a moment before he gave her a salute and stepped back, allowing Kolya to talk to her. There was no need for talk; the penknife had been more emotion than the smaller girl could take. The hugged for a long while as the sentinels waited patiently.

"Become a fun grown-up, okay?" She asked, and Lucy promised she would, turning away so the guild would not see her tears.

"You ready, then?" Tanalia asked, bored, but her eyes were not so hard as before.

"Yes." Lucy steeled herself and looked back once. She could have sworn she saw her parents a little way off, but before she could think any more on that, the once-again stern sentinel had prodded her through the pleasingly tingly portal and into the great unknown.

-

A/N: Yes, chapters will be shorter than Brotherhood chapters, because school is starting, blah blah, you've heard it all before. I hope you liked/hated Lucy and felt what her world is like. I have much, much planned out for her in the coming arcs (and yes, arcs plural, not like Brotherhood that really just had the SW invasion arc), so stay tuned for hopefully weekly or fortnightly updates.

~Emmy