Dronfey
“We’re going to get in trouble.”
A soft, worrisome voice whispers through the night. The quiet voice of the second princess of Dronfey, Fei, barely echoes through the halls of the fortress-like castle as she walks along the wall and does her best to discreetly traverse her home.
“We’ll only get in trouble if we get caught Fei. Luckily for you, Big Sis Velora is here to guide us to the end goal of this mission.”
A quiet yet confident voice responds to Fei. Determination is evident in the tone of Velora as they both move deeper and deeper into the house. The duo move through the halls with dim lights illuminating their path and the moonlight as their only guiding sources of light.
“You told me to follow you Vel, but you never told me why. What exactly are we doing sneaking inside our own house?” whispers Fei, carefully watching her steps to not notify the roaming guards.
“Think hard Fei. We’re allowed everywhere in the castle due to our heritage.” says Velora
“Right. Being the daughters of the Queen would allow us access basically anywhere in Dronfey. Kind of how royalty works.” responds Fei
“Exactly. Yet for some reason, even our own mother won’t allow us to goooooo…” says Velora as she looks back to her sister with a devilish grin.
Fei takes a moment to think…then stops moving. She then lowers her tone, but still remains quiet enough for Velora to hear.
“Velora.” says Fei.
“Fei.” snappily responding to Velora, not even slowing her pace.
“Have you never been curious? Even just a little bit? C’mon now. We can travel anywhere, we can travel out of the country to Celise or the WFA, but we can’t go inside a single room within our own castle.
“Let that sink in Vel.” Fei responds. "If we can go essentially anywhere we want except that one room, what is really back there? Why would our mother actively NOT-”
Before Fei can finish her sentence, Velora covers her mouth and rushes to hide behind a line of amour within the hall. Fei, irritated and offended from being silenced, slowly hears footsteps from further down the hall. Two conversing and patrolling guards in light weight armor walk past, never catching the twins. When they get down the hall and out of sight, Velora removes her hand.
“...Why would mom keep us from that specific room?”
Before responding, Velora leans back against the wall. She slowly crouches before beginning to sit and looks towards Fei.
“I’m not sure,” says Velora. “I don’t know what’s in that room or what reason mom could have to keep us in the dark about a room, but it must be important.”
Even through the dark, Fei can see Velora’s strong and confident look of determination in her eyes.
“I’m going to find out tonight. ”
Velora begins to rise and make her way from behind the armor clad suits. Fei remains seated behind the suits, not really sure if she wants to deliberately disobey her mother. It isn’t long until Velora and Fei are separated from one another.
Velora, doing her best to slip by any patrolling security with a few close calls, discreetly makes her way through the halls into the grand hall of the castle. The open space allows for many tables and decorations coming from all nations, Celice and The W.F.A alike, so apparel and design incorporated from each territory is shown to some extent within this room. Placed upon the walls and underneath the paintings lie accessories, weapons, and custom made designs from each nation, an indication of trust and loyalty from each nation.
Having spoken to some guards of the castle and hearing general rumors from guests in the past, Velora checks the entire room in extraneous detail. First she examines the paintings. The Dronfeyan Family Portrait has the current princesses standing beside the Queen, Trinity, as she sits calmly neatly with her hands folded in her lap. Djinn, a heavy two handed sword from Trinity’s past hangs along the left of the painting. Asmir and Fyre, the dual daggers of the Central W.F.A. lie at the bottom of the respective portrait of the current 3 leaders that govern the country. Finally, to the right of the vacant space that would uphold the Kingdom’s portrait, stays the Sky Reaver: a tome of immense power and destructive force. Velora knows that there should’ve been a spear paired with the Kingdom’s tome, but it was buried alongside the late King after his death.
Tables, paintings, walls, trays, chairs, if it existed in the room, Velora quietly moved and inspected it. Slowly yet surely, the curious princess began to lose her patience and grew irritable the longer she looked. She looks underneath some of the tables she previously checked already and has one lifter up with one hand with a chair in another.
“Come on already. There’s got to be some kind of-”
The closing of a door can be heard from the entrance of the grand hall. This catches Velora off guard as her nerves are shot and she accidentally loses the grip she had on the table in her hands. Velora doesn’t even make a sound but attempts to reach for the edge of the table to catch it before it hits the floor and alerts the entire Empire of her prescence. She tips the brim of the table prolonging it’s hangtime, but not a good enough grip to recollect it.
A small but powerful gust of wind is blown past Velora. A silent mini vortex makes the previously airborne table float gracefully until it is placed onto the floor and then just as silently disperses. Velora slowly turns to see who her savior is and is thoroughly relieved when she sees her twin as the wind casting mage. She slowly places the chair down and walks over closer to the door.
“Didn’t think you’d come Fei.” says Velora, holding up a closed fist
Fei raises her arm to fist bump Velora
“Let’s figure this out quickly please.” responds Fei.
Even with the twins coupled together, the investigation still takes a generous amount of time. That is until Fei noticed that some tables have markings of weapons on the inside of the legs: two lances and one axe. Not only that, but as Velora feels around the edges of the paintings within the hall and finds that the W.F.A painting and the Celise painting both contain numbers: 4,2,7,0. Fei waves her hand to conjure a single dim flame as two sisters come together and relay their findings.
“4, 2, 7, and 0…yea I got no idea here.” says a stumped Velora
“What would those weapon carvings have to do with…um…let’s see.” says Fei
Fei attempts to rummage through her memories until a hypothesis comes up.
“Velora, the first weapon you picked up was an axe. Mom is very proficient with an axe, though she’s talented with most weapons. And the numbers, give me some time on that one.”
Fei puts her hand to her chin and begins rearranging the numbers in her head, occasionally mumbling her thoughts aloud. Thinking of the number of weapons in Velora’s armory, the amount of elemental and light magic instructors she’s had, and how many guards are employed within the castle, any theme or significance to each of the individual numbers, anything of any significance to the royal family or Dronfey. What feels like an eternity passes through Fei’s mind as she’s only able to come up with theories.
While Fei is constructing possible answers to the clues, Velora continues her search in the room expecting to find more vague symbols to help out her sister. She thinks back to the High Lo-fi Assembly, a gathering event held every year for all the Elders, Rulers, Councilmen, Kings, and other high power officials to meet and discuss political affairs and similar matters. Velora recalls seeing a tall green haired faunus speaking to her mother and Fei talking to a slender black woman with short black hair and glasses paired with a white man in a military formal suit. Velora continues to dig deeper and try to recall the beginning speech her mother gave to those that attended to see if there were any correlations to the numbers.
“...2 daughters…0 sons…4 rulers…7-ow.”
Velora cuts her hand along the side of the painting accidentally as she was doing another search around the Empire portrait. She clasps her hand to limit the blood dripping before too much lands on the floor, some ending up on the longsword Djinn. Subtle, low volume sounds of Vel’s blood trickle, the noise going no further than Fei’s ears.
“Hey Fei, can I get some healing over here?” asks Velora, holding her hand but not showing any expression of pain.
Fei looks up towards Velora and sees the injury through the low lighting of the room. Devoting herself to deciphering the code from the furniture, she makes the executive decision that the injury isn’t deep enough to be treated at the moment. She immediately goes back to decoding and brainstorming.
“...Fei…Hello?” Velora calls out in a quite inquisitive tone
“Busy. Keep pressure on it.” Fei says in a cold tone, devoting more energy to the possible code instead of the minuscule injury.
Velora, annoyed from the searching and the injury, walks back to Fei. Each step attempting drawing closer to her sister, she notices the room grow slightly brighter with a sharper shade of red.
“Fei do you need to get more light? It’s hard to see, I know, but we’re also trying to not alert anyone.”
Fei notices the change in lighting within the room. The flames at her side remain the same intensity as when she first casted them.
“...I didn’t do anything…”
Fei’s eyes widen as soon as she looks up from her table. She bolts up out of her chair and darts towards Velora. Velora panicked freezes seeing her calm and reserved sister make a beeline towards her. Fei shoves Velora out of the way, narrowly avoiding the downward slice of Djinn.
“WHOA! WHAT JUST-”
“It wasn’t me that made the room light up”
Velora and Fei rise from the ground and bear witness to something neither of them would suspect. The royal sword Djinn is floating with a foreboding aura around the blade and hilt of the weapon, glowing and illuminating the room in a dark crimson. The aura from the sword flows out, still connected, until it takes the shape of a human silhouette with two more arms growing from out of its back. It protrudes its arm towards the door of the hall as loud clattering and metallic colliding is heard throughout the castle. Random pieces of armor taken from many places within the home spiral around the crimson cloud and before the royal sword can take proper form…
Velora jumps up to snatch the sword out of the air. Djinn makes a swift movement stringing all the armor behind it like an air current. The human deconstructing and reforming once it’s gained some distance away from the twins
Fei in a staggered state of confusion and worry yells out:
“VELORA!!! WHAT ARE YOU-”
“CHANGE OF PLANS! GET THE SWORD AND DON’T LET IT SIT STILL!” Velora commands as she takes an aggressive stance to charge once more towards the sword, missing once again.
Recoiling from the attempt at getting the sword, Velora dodges an upwards strike from the sword. As she reels back she calls out towards the ceiling while pointing to the spirit.
“Helm Splitter”
The crimson spirit does nothing as it attempts to attach another piece of armor to itself. As a connecting thread sticks to a shoulder piece, a massive cleaver comes crashing through the ceiling, severing the string that connected the spirit to the armor. It backs away in an attempt to gain distance.
Velora sprints after grabbing her Canyon Cleaver and relentlessly assaults the spirit, giving it no time to claim the armor swirling around itself. In an attempt to run, Velora is right there with Djinn. Everytime the sword strikes, Velora blocks or evades the blade. Whenever Djinn uses the armor to block, Velora pushes through with unyielding force, eventually shattering some small pieces of armor. With its circle of defense shrinking little by little, Velora takes the chance to tell Fei to continue her investigation of the code while she does her best to hold off the angry spirit.
Fei gets from her table with the numbers memorized now, still thinking of possible ways to mix and match the numbers, attempting to decipher them in any way that would make the most sense. She runs around the room dodging crashing chairs and metal shrapnel being flinged at her. Fei attempts to concentrate on the move until the spirit charges Velora into a wall, almost colliding into each other. Fei narrowly escapes the carnage to another part of the room when she comes across a dial with a gauge underneath Djinn’s resting place. The gauge beside the dial has a little less than a quarter of blood inside while the dial rests on 2 from a range of 10. Fei’s mind, already frenzied from what little information she has to work with plus the chaos in front of her, slams her hands against her head hoping it’ll bring some semblance of a clue to help her through this situation.
…Fei notices the faint drop of blood dripping from her cheek. As drops fall, the gauge tinges a light red glow before slowing the fall of the blood drop, absorbing it before it even hits the floor.
Fei shouts out to Velora
“VELORA!!! LET THE SWORD CUT YOU!!!”
“BITCH WHAT!?!”
Velora yells out to Fei, barely blocking a slicing motion from Djinn. Shifting her weight and pivoting off her free foot, she redirects the motion of Djinn into the floor holding her composure and fury from that supposedly dumbass demand. While Djinn is pinned temporarily, Velora turns her head to Fei and bears witness to her slicing the palm of her hand with a ice constructed blade, allowing blood to siphon into the gauge. Velora is able to notice the blood flowing straight into the floor, though she’s not sure where it’s going. Glancing up to meet her sister’s eyes, Velora can see the tiredness and fatigue in Fei’s eyes, as well as the sense that she knows what she’s doing.
With a furrowed brow, Velora releases the sword and holsters her axe. Djinn flies high into the air, soaring several feet away and directs its blade straight towards Velora. Akin to a stand off, Velora braces herself for the next hit standing in between Fei and Djinn. The empirical sword bursts towards Velora at an incredible speed. The brute princess braces herself into the ground and catches the sword with both of hands. The force and weight of the sword end up pushing Velora back, her hands sliding across the blades edge all the way down to the hilt. Blood rising from the blade flows from the sword into the gauge beside Fei, who is stumbling to keep herself upright at this point. Djinn’s aura grows at a dangerous rate, streams of red energy flowing throughout all of the room as it drains blood from the brute princess. After some time of non-stop drainage from Velora in addition to Fei’s attempts to add her own blood, the gauge is filled to its peak. At the fulfillment of the phial, Velora feels Djinn’s force lighten and then drop to the floor.
Before Velora can turn in her weathered state to check on her sister, a faint green circle appears underneath the twin sisters. Fei casts Healing Circle and Foundation Brace, slowly yet surely healing the two of their injuries. Velora limps over to Fei before collapsing on her back right beside her, raising a weak fist into the air.
“Your plan worked.” Velora says in a victorious and fatigued tone.
“Couldn’t have done it without you.” Fei says as she too collapses on the floor.
Velora lets out a small chuckle before going into a laughing fit. Fei too is thrown into a hysterics as if the two were plagued with a laughing spell. As the two sisters calm down and rise before looking one another in the eyes and agreeing on one thing since the night has started.
“Mom is going to kill us
