Act 1: In which strange occurrences are begot.
Muzak
Muzak
A battered pickup truck, painted a dull green, shuddered along the patchy stretch of highway around the ass-end of Rassvet. Sparse civilization gave way to rougher terrain, tweedy tan grass and tall trees that bowed lazily in the breeze, punctuated by the occasional outcropping of chalky stone. Here, there was no sign of the war, just as there was no sign of civilization- other than the occasional road stop with its typical fixings. Just some kids piled into an old truck with a roaring diesel engine, hanging on by straps tied to the rollbars and sitting on their field packs and cases of beer as they headed out for one last howl at the moon together- A road trip around Rassvet, to visit all the places they hadn’t had the chance to before.
Then, after that, they shipped off to the dangerous and very adult business of war. After a decade together, it was going to be strange to part, since they knew they were going to be broken up from Barghest Squad into replacements for depleted WARDEN outfits on the front. Not a promising future.
And so Gideon had broken out a bottle he’d been saving for something like this. It seemed like as good a time as any, with the uncertainty of the future looming.
And maybe that’s why he sat on his pack, with the ease of someone used to that posture, waiting for the bottle to come back to him as the truck chugged along past huge boulders and flats, and the occasional tree along a long stretch of beat up highway. It was early spring, and the winter chill still lingered stubbornly in the air up here, which was why he was wearing a fleece under the camouflage smock he brought, an issue item that was given to every conscript in the Rassvet Defense Forces. Sturdy, multi-pocketed, sized large to fit over other layers, it had a small green patch with a sword upon the sleeve, circled with runes, the flag of the Kingdom of Rassvet. That was normal, people wore those with jeans and hiking boots all the time. His was worn-in from years of field use, totally comfortable. In a nod to the air, he wore a wool cap over his head, blonde hair tucked into it. Since graduation, he’d stopped bothering to shave, released from the rigorous garrison demands of the Citadel.
His had the coveted WARDEN tab slapped onto the velcro. They all had one. During the hours-long drive, when they took stops to relieve and refresh in a village or two along the way, this drew glances from the average folk. Gideon melted into the background during these interactions, saying little.
Setzer, of course, had the music up and loud, but it was better than listening to the news of the war. He’d expected a hasty early graduation and orders to the front, but a truce had broken out and there were apparently talks in the offing. He’d managed to sneak out of Orestia without seeing family, lest he be stage-hooked by the Royal Family’s handlers into some sort of banal, awful ceremony-slash-press function in Class A’s, instead of sitting in a pickup truck bound for the last place anyone would find anyone. It was a choice between tension, dull ceremony and a constant buzz of people around, insisting on this, that, or the other. As a twenty one year-old lad bound for a battlefield, he decided to take advantage of the last freedom he’d have for the foreseeable future and ran for the hills.
There was a text from Fenris congratulating him on his escape. He slipped the old man, which was to say the fifty-something crown prince of Rassvet and the commanding general of the entire Rassvet Defense Forces, a wink by way of response. The man was in the middle of the worst strain of his life, literally tasked beyond human capacity, but he checked in on a nephew. Maybe they were keeping each other sane. Occasionally, Gideon sent him goofy pictures of the group from their various stops around the country.
He’d set “DND” on most of the rest of the texts, largely from the innumerable bastard staff from Orestia demanding his whereabouts and trying to merely schedule him for the rest of his possibly quite-short life so he couldn’t have fun even when he was off-duty, which happened very rarely, and might not ever happen again. He imagined that there was quite a bit of hammering against that function, but no one important enough to just send an emergency buzzer through, which was to say, he apparently was safe for the moment.
The bottle came to him, he sipped, and he passed it on. It was schnapps of some sort, the good quality, monk-made stuff. He almost jammed the bottle’s mouth against his teeth at a hard bump and called out, “Yo, Setzer, you think you can hit every bump on the road or something?”
“Shove it your royal highness!” A voice called back over the cacophony of noise that erupted from the cabin, through the open window that separated the truck cabin with the bed.
Gideon, warm and relaxed from the bottle, slurred slightly, “Off with his head,” to the others in the truck bed.
“You are welcome to try!” Setzer challenged with a roll of his eyes and a snort. Sat in the front seat, Setzer was a colossal fabrication of a man seemingly designed in mimicry of a well-built stone wall of some sort. Dressed in a simple pair of bright red sweatpants and a black tank top, revealing the fresh black ink of a snarling Barghest that was etched onto his left bicep soon after graduation- most of them had the same tattoo somewhere on their body, a sort of symbol of pride for them. There in the driver seat of the truck - the only place he seemingly ever was - his green eyes flickering between the open stretch of country road ahead of them and down at the truck’s gas gauge that teetered dangerously towards empty.
“I hope your directions are right man, because if we don’t get to that motel soon we are gonna be stuck out here.” Setzer spoke aloud to his companion up in the front.
“Of course my directions are right, there’s only one road” Galahad said as he rolled his eyes, pointing down the stretch of road they’d been driving down for the past hour. “Now if you paid more attention to how you’re driving, maybe we wouldn’t hit every damn pothole on the High Road.”
Galahad was sitting back in his seat, his feet kicked up on the dashboard, showing off a pair of nice leather shoes and immaculately fitted jeans, his blonde hair whipping around his face as he casually glanced out the window. Balanced on top of his plain shirt and longcoat was a tablet that was seemingly suspended in midair by its corners, containing a road map of Rassvet.
Taking a sip from his own flask- a small silver deal with a rich honeyed whiskey, he pointed down the road at a small dot forming at the crest of a hill. “There’s the rest stop- that means beds and air-conditioning tonight.”
“Aww the pretty boy doesn’t like it when the bugs get in his hair?” Setzer commented with mock concern, as Galahad rolled his eyes again, responding by pulling a comb out of the Mist, making a show of meticulously fixing his hair before putting the comb away and letting the wind send it flying everywhere again.
"Put your dicks back in your pants ladies and gentlemen. We'll be there in twenty!" Setzer called back towards their passengers in the truck bed, effortlessly shouting over a rising guitar solo as he grinned ear to ear.
