Friends and Enemies
It wasn't too difficult for Pela to find the cacti; they may have been the biggest cacti near the pool of water at the edge of camp, but they were only taller than her by about two feet. The plants were huddled about the oasis like old men crouching by a fire during the wintertime. Farther away from the edge of the water, the vegetation slacked off abruptly; there was not enough water to sustain it. Past the oasis, stretching toward the horizon, Pela beheld an endless stretch of stunted trees, the same sort she had run through in her bolt from the wolves. Outspread toward the other horizon was an expanse of sand that looked, in the velvet light of evening, much like the sea; it undulated toward the horizon in swells and peaks that resembled waves. Were it not for this imagined similarity, Pelagia suspected the sheer volume of open space would have driven her to terror.
Shasa stooped at the water's edge, the forked staff she had pointed at Pelagia earlier standing in the sand in front of her. Her eyes were turned toward the setting sun, and failed to initially notice Pela's approach. After a moment, however, her eyebrows quirked, and the thin glaze over both eyes cleared. Shasa, eyebrows raised, turned toward Pela, nodding as she realized who it was.
"Ah. That explains it. Would you go stand over -there,- please. You're throwing my reading."
Confused, Pela obeyed, walking around the pool toward the other side of the oasis. Shasa resumed gazing into the sun until it disappeared beyond the horizon, drawing a blue veil over the whole of the desert. Pela cast her eyes upward, comforted. The appearing stars over the sea of sand were, at least, the same stars she remembered shining over her homeland.
"Nngh." Shasa grunted, extricating her staff from the sand. "Ready, snake-hair?"
Pelagia displayed the dagger she had brought from the cliffs, a sharp wedge of bone the length of her
forearm. But just as swiftly as she had flashed the blade, she sheathed it and tossed it aside in a show of good will, or confidence, or perhaps both. The desert girl's face split into a predatory grin, the glitter she had displayed earlier sparking again in her eyes. Pela returned the grin with a swift quirk of her eyebrows and a tiny smile, really just an upturning of the corner of her mouth. She dug one heel into the shifting sand, and signaled to the water-finder by outstretching one arm and making a beckoning gesture with her hand. "Come and get me, if you can reach that high." She grinned at her diminuitive opponent.
"Oh /ho/," Shasa chuckled, setting her staff aside and shifting her weight to the balls of her feet. "Is /that/ the way of it?" She crouched for a moment after placing her staff upon the ground, one palm resting upon the sand, then sprang toward Pela, aiming not for her chest or torso, but for her knees. Despite her making light of the comment on her height, she knew well that it was true; Pela had a definite advantage in that category. Therefore, Shasa reasoned, the first thing was to knock her off her feet.
Pela went crashing to the ground easily, the other girl's weight all on her knees certainly taking her by surprise. However, leverage by sheer size was hers, and so she rolled the both of them over after a few tries, attempting to end the struggle prematurely by pinning Shasa's arms behind her.
"Nice try!" Shasa laughed, shoving Pela off of her with superior arm strength. "You'll have to do better than that." Soon they were both locked in struggle again, exchanging shoves and kicks and generally stirring up a great deal of sand around them. Shasa's attacks were fierce and tenacious, but Pela was enduring. Finally, when Shasa had shoved her down onto the sand (for the fifth time or so) and made a lunge to knock the wind out of her with a blow to the midsection, Pela managed to catch her with both legs and essentially vault the desert girl over her head and send her sprawling onto the sand. She heard the satisfying *poof* of Shasa hitting the sand, struggled upright, and turned around to grin at her. "Had enough?" she asked between gasps for breath.
"Had enough?" Shasa replied, eyes wide with indignation. She attempted to drag herself into a sitting position, slipped in the sand, and flailed for a moment, arms spinning like pinwheels. Finally, she found reasonably firm ground, both arms thrown behind her to brace herself. "Had enough?" she repeated, eyes narrowing. Pela merely nodded, smiling gleefully. Shasa stared at her another moment, then dissolved into endless peals of laughter, rocking onto her back again to lie there, chest heaving as she attempted to breathe between bouts of gasping and laughter. This display set Pelagia off into giggles as well; the hilarity of the situation was almost painful considering that both girls were short of breath, but not even that could stop them. Finally, Shasa exhaled, a long, expressive release of breath that ended her hysterics.
"Whoooooooooo. So. You aren't a Sky Devil after all, then, I guess."
Pela snorted, shaking the sand out of her ponytails.
"What was your first clue?"
"You didn't whine like a motherless kit when I knocked you over," replied the nomad cheerfully, oblivious of any edge to Pela's words, or choosing to ignore it. "...and you flipped me over your head. That was great. Can you teach me to do that? Oh.... and I've been wondering. Would you sell me your hair?"
Pela blinked at the last question, wondering whether she had heard it correctly. It certainly had very little to do with the topic of discussion from which it had spawned.
"What?" she finally inquired, pretending she was having difficulty with Shasa's accent.
"Your hair." Shasa repeated, pointing. "Would you sell it to me? I mean, it'll grow back, right?"
Pela took one of her ponytails in one hand, almost defensively. "I... I've never cut my hair, except my bangs," she explained. "I don't think I could bring myself to get rid of it..." she tilted her head to one side, puzzled. "Why would you want it, anyways? It's just hair."
Shasa's eyes glittered with something Pela could not readily recognize. "Are you kidding? Pampered city women would pay many coins to have a decoration made from hair of such a rare length and color." She stood up, dusting herself off idly.
"Really?" Pela tried to envision such a thing, but could not. "I'm sorry, still I can't."
Shasa looked unfazed by her reply. "You don't have to answer right away! Just.. think on it, okay?" She went on to mutter softly to herself, "I don't know what you need so much hair for exactly, but okay..."
Pela added, "I would like to repay you for saving me. If I do cut it off, I promise to give it to you, Shasa."
Shasa turned slowly to look at her. "...I'm sorry, I must still have sand in my ears. It sounded like you said 'give'. You mean 'sell', yes?"
Pela held her hands up. "No no, I meant give. I can't accept money from you, you've already done me a kindness."
Shasa's pale azure eyes widened. "You can't be serious."
"Why not?"
"Because! Y-.." she paused, and knelt down to grasp Pelagia by the shoulders. "Because it would be a waste of a great money-making opportunity! You really *haven't* been out of your village before, have you? Do they use money there, use coins? Or are you using those hulking great stone things like those crazy island folk.."
Pela interrupted her gently. "It's not that, I just.. don't have much interest in money. I have enough to pay for my travel expenses, so why should I be out for anything else." She smiled warmly. "Besides, I should like to give you a gift if I can, what's wrong with that?"
Shasa continued to stare at her a while longer, shaking her head slowly as she drew back. "Oh, Pela. You are so lost."
Pela frowned a bit. "What? Why?" She hugged her knees to her chest a bit tighter, clasping her hands in front of her shins.
Shasa was about to answer, when she looked down and noticed the grey stone on Pela's bracelet. She seemed transfixed on it, chewing her lower lip thoughtfully.
Pela was afraid that she'd offended her somehow, and asked again gently, "What is it?"
Shasa gestured. "That stone... I have one very much like it."
Pela looked down at the cord 'round her wrist. "Like this one? But how... I mean, I got this stone in a rather unusual way. You have one too?" Shasa nodded to this, walking off a few feet to retrieve her staff from the sands. She held out the end to Pela, indicating one of the numerous baubles dangling from it's forked ends.
"This one here."
Something sparked in Pela's memory, that dream that had started her journey to a nameless city coming back to her as vividly as the day she had seen it first. She pressed Shasa further for some clue as to the meaning of these stones. "Please, can you tell me what happened when you got it? Or how you got it?" Shasa looked taken aback by her pleading tone, and so she explained further. "..it's.. part of the reason I left home."
"I wondered about that." Shasa admitted. "A nice, marriageable girl like you, wandering around without a clan... then I thought, maybe you aren't married yet because you have an important position in your clan, but then, what are you doing out here without them? And *then* I thought maybe you were just a nasty little shrew," she beamed suddenly. "... like me. But you seem nicer than th... are you all right? What did I say? I was going to say that you weren't a shrew, now that I've talked to you."
Pela had gone slightly pale, and looked as though she might be ill any moment. She managed a tiny smile, though she turned her downcast eyes away from her new friend.
"It isn't that. I was thinking about something else. Would you tell me about your stone, please?"
Shasa stared at her for a few moments, grinding her teeth, then shrugged.
"All right. I found this a long time ago, when my mother was still the water-seeker for the clan, and I was still a child. As I was my mother's only daughter, and therefore next in line to become the water-seeker, I was given special allowances even then. Instead of staying with the other children, I had wandered some ways beyond camp to look for bones. We make many things from bones, and there was something I wanted to make... I can't remember what it was now. I had been poking around in the sand for some time when I noticed a dark cloud on the horizon. I knew from what my mother had told me that it was a sandstorm, but I had never actually seen one before. I assumed that it was like the rainstorms we get in early spring; it would start and end within the hour, and even if it did not, I could wait for the edge of it to hit and then walk back home. I had just found some bones, you see, and didn't want to run back right away.
"I don't know if you, being from the 'sea,' have ever been in a sandstorm, but it is very different from a rainstorm. The wind seems to come from all directions, and it blows sand at you from all those directions so that it seems a great hand is scouring your skin away. The moment the storm hit, I knew I had made a mistake. I could not open my eyes, and could only breathe because I was wearing my mask... you have seen the masks we wear, by now." Shasa indicated the strip of cloth tied about her nose and mouth. "Fortunately, we were in fairly rocky terrain, and I found two to curl between, though by then I was horribly scratched by the storm. My mother told me later there wasn't a scrap of hide on me anywhere that I hadn't been covered, like the back of my neck. While I was curled up there, with my back to the storm, I dreamed that I saw the entire world, beyond the desert. For a moment, it was perfectly beautiful, although it was larger than I had imagined, which took me aback. Then I dreamed that the storm that had caught me spread beyond the desert, engulfing the entire world from end to end, and that the people caught in its path not only refused to take cover, but embraced the storm, as though it were an old, dear friend. I remember that I wanted to stop them. I wanted to tell them not to make the same mistake I had made, underestimating the power and nature of the storm. When I opened my eyes, the storm was over, and though the bones were covered over with sand, this stone had been uncovered, and lay atop the sands as though someone had merely placed it there, after the storm.
"I was so stupified by the aftermath of the storm, and the fact that I had survived it, that I took the stone almost without thinking. How I found my way back to camp with it, I will never know. I don't even remember walking. I carried it in my pocket until I came of age, and when I became the diviner, I tied it to my staff so that I would never be without it. I don't want to lose it. It reminds me that I came through a storm alive, and that I must teach others how to do so."
Shasa licked her lips and swallowed, her throat somewhat tired after such a long tale. "There you have it."
Pela had been watching her companion tell her tale with wide eyes, her attention transfixed. "Shasa, I know it sounds strange, but... I think perhaps we were meant to meet one another somehow. I had a dream a bit like yours when I found this." She held her bracelet out for closer inspection.
"Is that so?" Shasa asked, peering at it. "Tell me about your dream, then, perhaps together they make some sense."
Pela was about to do so, when a strange sound broke the calm of the desert night. "What's that?" she asked, barely above a whisper. A strange whooshing, hissing sound as though several pounds of the sand beneath them were shifting around.
Though Shasa was extremely pained to admit it, she said quickly, "I don't know. Come on, hurry, let's get away from here."
Both girls turned back towards the encampment and started a brisk walk. The rumbling, shifting sound was now louder, approaching them, and it seemed to shake the ground under their feet like a small, mobile earthquake. They broke into a run at nearly the same moment.
They had only gotten a few steps further in their faster stride, when a sudden column of sand exploded into the air a few feet ahead of them. Pela backpedaled with a yelp, while Shasa's cry of alarm seemed almost a growl of frustration. She held her staff out before her defensively, prepared to fend off whatever might be there when the sand cleared.
She soon began to suspect her staff would not be enough. The creature that emerged was several heads taller than the both of them, and more of it seemed to be still buried in the sands. Great insectlike legs grew out all around its body, and it moved the two scarlet pincers in its maw around with a sickening 'click-click-click' noise. It fixed its two beady, yellow eyes on the girls below it and issued a gurgling hiss.
[Ali: Pela, you must defeat the Maker alone, for you are Muad'Dib.]
"Try not to look like prey!" Shasa screamed backward at the shocked Pela, though the creature's hiss all but drowned out the words. The ant lion's monochromatic eyes flicked between the two girls for a moment more before it reared back, emitting another cry, and lunged forward. Shasa flung herself to the side, hoping that Pela had the sense to do the same. Pela, possessed of longer legs, did better than that: she bent her knees and leaped, clearing the creature's arched back entirely as its head slammed into the sand where she had been. She landed inches from where Shasa was scrabbling to her feet.
"Should we run!?"
"Where are we going to run /to?/" Shasa panted. "We can't lead that thing toward the camp!"
The enormous insect raised its head from the sand, its serpentine neck arching backward to mark where the girls had landed; the rumbling of the sands beneath them indicated that somewhere beneath the surface, it was turning around, or so they thought. The head shot back beneath the sand, leaving only their shifting footing to betray its presence.
"It's going to suck us under!" Shasa cried, backpedaling a bit herself. "That dirty son of a..."
"Shasa!" Pela interrupted, staring at the stone on her wrist. "Shasa... ow... this thing is... it feels warm. Is yours doing this?"
"What are you /thinking/?" Shasa replied, although she wrapped one hand around her own stone, still dangling from the fork of her staff. "Who cares about the stones right now, we... ... you're right."
Both girls blinked at each other for a moment, the ant lion momentarily forgotten, this is, until the ground beneath their feet began sucking at them, a funnel rapidly forming where they stood, the sides growing steadily steeper about them no matter how swiftly they tried to clamber over the edge.
Unfamiliar words formed on Pela's lips, and she shouted them almost instinctively - a war cry to bolster her courage.
"Tiamat Primal Power, Make-Up!!"
From her perspective, time seemed to slow down for several moments, Shasa's turning to look at her, and the desert monster's reeling back for another strike occuring in perfectly smooth slow-motion. She also felt the cool hilt of her dagger in her right hand - hadn't she tossed it aside in the sand before? When everything seemed to catch up with her again, she felt... changed, somehow, in a way that was familiar and completely foreign all at the same time. She thrust out her free hand. "Quickly!" she cried to Shasa, grasping for her hand. The struggling desert girl's hand found hers, and with a strength Pela did not remember possessing, she jumped back and away from the expanding sinkhole, pulling the both of them to temporary safety.
"What did you *do*?" Shasa asked, suddenly wary. "There was a weird light, and you changed into..."
Sailortiamat didn't have the words to explain it, nor did she feel now was the time. Instead, she cut in, her voice urgent as she steadied her grip on her knife. "I'm going to try and scare it off." her eyes were already fixed on the writhing sand beast.
Shasa repeated the words, hardly believing that they were coming from the same girl she had met the day before. "/Scare it off?/ You can't be serious!"
"You were right, we can't let it find the camp," Sailortiamat replied, hardly believing her own decision, as well. "You can help me, Shasa, use the stone!" With that, she was off running, her long hair streaming behind her. If she could just find an opening between the plates of its shell...
"Use the stone? What am I gonna do, /throw/ it?" Shasa retorted, glancing at the bit of rock dangling from her staff nonetheless.
The warmly glowing stone on Shasa's staff seemed to be calling to her urgently, offering her some strange, benevolent power to protect her people from the monster. With a deep breath, she reached out and clasped it tightly in her hand, the words flowing from her as though touching the stone had completed the circuit.
"Pazuzu Primal Power, Make-Up!!"
[Laris: The worm is the spice... @__@ Or in this case, the Antlion is the Desert Ruby... OoOoOoh.]
Tiamat would have like to have watched what happened after that, as to get some clue as to why Shasa had been looking at her so strangely, but she had her hands full distracting the ant lion; its head had surfaced again, and it was none too pleased that they had managed to escape it. Despite that, it was not entirely a surprise to her when Sailor Pazuzu sprang from the location previously occupied by Shasa. The giant insect, whose attention had been riveted upon Tiamat, assisted the maneuver by turning toward Pazuzu's approach, its notice shifted by the same music of bells that attracted Tiamat's attention.
The great head turned just in time to see the desert senshi inches from its face, the shaft of her staff pointed toward one of its eyes. Pazuzu's staff was much like Shasa's, with one very noticeable difference: a pointed tip at the end without the fork. It was this tip that she drove mercilessly into the beast's eye. The creature shrieked, thrashing madly, slinging Pazuzu and her staff into the air; she surprised both Tiamat and herself by landing neatly on her feet beside the other senshi, staff in hand. Pazuzu stared at Tiamat for a moment, then breathed, amazed,
"... Great star."
Tiamat grinned, and was about to answer her, when the antlion mounted its second attack, now even more enraged at the loss of its left eye. Great sweeping insect legs came crashing towards them, the creature extending them to their full reach to slash the two meddlesome humans. Each of the senshi dove in opposite directions to avoid the hard-shelled, spiked appendages. Shasa gave a sharp exhalation of relief, as the sharp leg had missed her by inches, but a sudden shriek from her companion's direction indicated that Tiamat was not so lucky. Spinning around in a jingle of tiny bells, she called out to her. "Tiamat? Tiamat, answer me!"
The purple-clad senshi was on her side, lying in the sand, with her arms clenched over her stomach - where the monster had taken its slash at her. She was so caught up in the shock of it that she didn't even see it rear back to drive its pincers into her and finish her off.
Pazuzu had little time to get to where she was, let alone do something to stop the hissing sand monster. "Look out!" she called as she ran, even though she couldn't imagine what the girl could do to save herself, prone and wounded on the ground.
Tiamat heard the warning, just in time to see a hideous crimson maw descending upon her, something which she could not evade in her current state. So, she called on a power that she felt within her reach, a last act of desperation just before she expected to feel herself get sliced in half.
"Tiamat Lifebarrier!"
Though she would not see what happened next, Pazuzu witnessed the birth of a tiny black sphere from Tiamat's outstretched hand. It wavered feebly for a split second, but just as the monster was readying its jaws to rip the wounded girl asunder, it grew abruptly until it formed an opaque bubble over her. Unable to stop its great mass in time to avoid it, the antlion went careening awkwardly against the black void that had been created. Immediately upon contact, violet-colored surges of something like lightning coursed over the black sphere, shocking it in what must have been an extremely painful manner - for the scream that erupted from the monster was very impressive. Pazuzu hadn't even been sure that a giant insect-beast even *had* lungs. It thrashed more, and in doing so managed to swipe the edge of the painful sphere twice more, which agitated it to the point that it was rattling and hissing with every breath. A faint sizzling noise eminated from its shelled body every place it had touched the thing.
Pazuzu shook herself back into reality after watching the bizarre series of events, now readying her staff to deliver another blow to its head, as a flurry of panic and rage seized her. Whatever the black thing was, it appeared to have swallowed Sailor Tiamat. Pazuzu gritted her teeth, and she issued a challenge at the top of her lungs."...*You!* All right, that's enough, NOW I DEMAND BLOODY VENGEANCE!"
The antlion, still shrieking in pain and steaming from various sears along its shell, turned back toward Pazuzu, maw opening once more to vent a tortured shriek of fury. It had been denied once, by what its tiny mind could only deem amother predator, and had no intention of losing the other half of its meal. With a final screech, demented by the agony of its wounds dragging across the sand, it tore itself away from the globular enemy that had stolen half its prey and ripped back at Pazuzu. Fountains of sand erupted from either side of its body, such was the power granted it by blind rage. Shasa stood her ground atop one of the dunes, eyes narrowing to lessen the chance that any of the airborne particles might invade them. She pointed her staff directly at the creature's maw, intending to thrust it down the insect's gullet as its momentum carried it into her, but instead, she found her lips stringing together words with a momentum of their own.
"Pazuzu...Arrid... Sandblast!"
To her surprise, a torrent of sand erupted from the point of her staff, swirling toward the worm with a velocity no wind could have spawned. The current of air carrying the sand was unpleasantly warm; Pazuzu could feel her skin baking in its wake. Unprepared for the backlash of her attack, she was flung backwards down the opposite side of the dune, and so it was that she missed the sight of her spurt of sand and heat meeting the ant lion head on as it flung itself toward her. The creature was caught with no time to close its mouth; the wave of stinging particles plunged down its gullet, thousands of tiny shards of rock pelting its softer insides. The ant lion tried again to shriek from a throat gone too dry to emit sound, thrashed against the sand in a manner which chafed more of its flesh from its external wounds, and fell lifeless to the ground. Pazuzu heard the sound of its impact, muffled by the sand, from the other side of the dune, and scrambled to her feet, using her staff to assist her in climbing again to the crest. There lay the body of the great insect, clouds of sand still shifting about it from the force of its fall, and beyond it still floated the ominous sphere that had swallowed Tiamat.
[Laris: You have killed the worm. Now you must call out the old chieftan.]
Pazuzu hurried down the side of the dune, nearly slipping again on the way towards the mysterious object that had engulfed her fellow senshi. She skidded to a halt a few steps from it, she certainly knew better than to charge in after what happened to the monster. Instead, she slowly reached out with the blunt end of her staff, intent on pulling it away again at the first sign of danger. She nearly yet out a yelp, then, when it suddenly flickered out of existience just as she was about to prod its surface. In its place was Sailortiamat, just as she had been before it appeared - curled up with her arm pressed over her bleeding abdomen. Admittedly, she was now looking more wide-eyed and there was a slight tremble to her movements as she struggled back to her feet.
"You're alive." Pazuzu said, staring at her. "...that's good too."
Tiamat grinned weakly, though her attempts to laugh were cut short by the pang in her stomach telling her not to exert that particular muscle.
"Is that why you were screaming something about vengeance?"
Pazuzu nodded, spreading her hands. "Hey, all I saw was that black thing swallow you up! How was I supposed to know?" She exhaled a slow, drawn-out breath. "That was... that was something. I've never seen anything like it." Holding the forked end of her stick closer to her, she peered down at it warily. "On both counts, even."
Tiamat nodded. "Neither have I..." she felt a sudden wave of unpleasant vertigo. "Um, if it's not too much trouble-" she began.
Pazuzu saw her falter, and rushed to steady her. "Great *star*," she swore, "I almost forgot. Let's get back to the camp, come on."
Just outside the view of anyone who happened to be walking about the Nomad's camp, the two paused. It was Pazuzu who discovered that they could both revert to their normal forms by willing it, and so both Shasa and Pelagia returned with none the wiser to what had happened with the sand monster. Once they had done so, Pela noticed that the gaping flesh wound left by the monster's claw had already closed.
"It's already healed over?" Shasa asked, one pale eyebrow arching. "How do you feel?"
"Tired, but surprisingly well," Pela admitted, reaching up to rub her eyes lightly.
"Same here. I think an early sleep would do us both good. Tomorrow is going to be busy." Shasa's eyes twinkled.
Pela looked puzzled. "Why, what happens tomorrow?"
Shasa's face took on that incredulous expression it had when Pela had mentioned that she had little need of more money. "That's a perfectly intact... monster.. *thing* lying out there! I bet there are all kinds of things we could use it for. If nothing else, Abdul will have to pay me a fine price for pieces of shell from such a rare beast." Her fingers moved slowly as though she already had a handful of heavy gold coins resting in her palm.
Pela could only shake her head, collapsing onto the large pile of overstuffed pillows that furnished the tent. "As long as he doesn't mind the fact that it smells awful."
Shasa waved a hand. "Bah, details to be hammered out later. Sleep well, Pela!" With a brief grin, she disappeared through the tent flap and headed back towards her own, humming merrily all the way.
x
