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The Adventures of Drustin Fleck
Drustin winced as chunk of his rapidly reducing cover was blown away by yet another extravagantly over the top fire ball. Pieces of white hot stone rained down on him and seared his fur. What on earth had he done to deserve an end like this? He thought about that question for a few seconds. Oh right. Plenty of things.“Can’t we just talk this over? Possibly over a cup of tea. Maybe a croissant?” the shabby grey wolf called over the wall. Perhaps he could defuse this situation before it worsened. He dared to peer over his crumbling barricade.
“TEA!?!” wailed his insane attacker as she flung another miniature sun in his direction. Drustin ducked just in time to avoid the worst of a searing blast of heat that set his whiskers on fire.
“Coffee?”
Another fireball. A large lump of the broken chimney stack he’d been using for protection turned molten and slumped to the ground with a slop. Drustin wailed. He tried in vain to hide behind the one solitary brick that hadn’t been reduced to it’s base components but even with all his wishful thinking he knew deep down this was it.
Putting his hands up in surrender he stepped out into the open. He tried to look as dignified as he could, which as it turns out is incredibly difficult to do with a tail between your legs and big puffy tear filled eyes. His assailant approached and readied another fireball. Drustin squeezed his eyes tight shut and waited.
He felt a faint spray, a drizzle of warm wash over his face. It was pleasant. Was this death? It wasn’t so bad.
“What are you smiling about?”
An odd question. He opened one of his eyes, squinting hard. The mage, now sporting a grievous looking chest wound, lay on the ground in a quickly forming pool of blood. An angry feline stood over her, weapon still smoking.
“Cello, you’re alive?” He said sounding surprised. That was a mistake. She was glaring now.
“No thanks to you” She growled, kicking out at the twitching corpse at her feet. Cello was a feisty creature with a heritage of nobility. Her tanned fur was etched with a crisscrossing of jagged white marks, their pattern was irregular giving her the look of battle scarred warrior.
She blew a strand of mousy brown hair out of her face and fiddled with her firearm. With a flick of a valve-switch her weapons hissed, releasing jets of steam along it’s barrel and discharging a coolant canister onto the ground.
Drustin flinched. He hated it when that thing did that. In fact he hated it when it did anything. The god awful contraption was what they called a mana-lock pistol, a device that fired raw chunks of magical energy. It was an ugly thing designed to be used by those not well versed in wielding destructive magic in the more traditional sense but still had the desire to use it to blow holes in things.
“You left me!” Cello snapped. She violently jammed another canister into her weapon. It hissed again and the locking mechanism engaged.
“Not strictly true” Drustin urged nervously as he wiped bits of mage from his face with his sleeve. “I was simply drawing the mage away. Taking her out of the equation as it were. You’re a big girl you can look after yourself and a few roughians never seemed to slow you down before”
Cello warmed, allowing herself a mischievous smirk. It amused her whenever Drustin spoke prim and proper. His lower cast accent always made it seem a little comical.
“Drust, just do what I brought you here to do” she said aiming a curt nod to the mage’s body.
“I was hoping you’d forgotten about that” Drustin said forcing a timid smile. “You see, when the subject is dead it complicates things. I feel and sometimes relive their last moments and this did not look like a particularly pleasant way to go”
Cello looked, quite frankly, utterly unconvinced “Just do it” she said sternly.
Drustin swallowed hard. “You don’t understand-”
“No I don’t. I don’t understand it at all and in all honesty I don’t care. What you need to understand is that the sole purpose of you being here is because I need your gift. Now use it”
Gift? Drustin hated that word. Gifts were something given, not something thrust upon you. Something that you could choose to accept or not, to embrace or to disregard. This was no gift. This was a plague upon his person, a curse he was forced into using for the greater good. Come to think of it he hated the greater good too.
“I‘d really rather not” Drustin frowned.
“She‘s our only lead!”
“Then you probably shouldn’t have shot her!”
Drustin spotted a ripple of rage run through his feline companion and instantly regretted what seemed moments ago to have been a rather witty retort.
“If you don’t do your job right now I am going to pick you up and throw you off this roof” Cello growled through gritted teeth. It was a compelling argument and one Drustin found difficult to counter.
“Well, as you asked so nicely…” the wolf said with a roll of his eyes.
Kneeling down by the corpse, Drustin began to examine her. The mage was a mess and not just because of the still smoking wound Cello’s mana-lock pistol had opened up. She was unkempt, dirty and her robes had seen far better days. Reluctantly he took her cold dead hand in his, closed his eyes and opened his mind to the flood.
