Emotions were fickle things, and they went up and down like a roller coaster. Still, a good cry could turn around almost any dive, and Cas was flying high as she stepped out of Sara’s tent; The sun seemed a little brighter, somehow.
Two steps took her beyond the bubble of silence Sara had cast over her tent, and the whole world of crisp sound focused into existence.
The new army camp was an amateur construction. With the exception of the Lieutenant's office, small, personal tents made up the rest of the structures on site. In the end, the new hill ended up looking more like the lower-class section of Coachella than a military fortification.
Fifty camping tents and ten carts hardly made for an imposing site, after all.
And even the camping tents were in short order. There were over a thousand people, after all, and only fifty tents to go around.
Looking around, the area around Sara’s tent was populated by higher ranking officials. Unit commanders, medics, Sergeants, that sort of crowd.
Walking down to the base of the hill, the rest of the army had segregated themselves into two informal camps.
The regular soldiers – who made up about half of the body – were on one side, and on the other the Auxiliaries had gathered.
It was easy to distinguish Auxiliaries from regulars by their identification badges, which refracted their auras in a distinct manner.
Even without such conveniences, however, it would have been easy to differentiate the two camps with her eyes closed; for the atmosphere of the two camps was of a completely different nature, and Cas noticed this as she stepped across the informal border that had been created between the regulars and auxiliaries.
The regulars, in the brief time Cas had spent in their camp before realizing she was in the wrong place were… well, what you might expect of medieval foot soldiers. Cas had heard more distinct swears than she even knew existed in the five minutes she’d spent their midst, and three fights had broken out, each surrounded by a circle of spectators who were either trying to goad the fighters or taking bets.
The auxiliaries, Cas noticed immediately as she stepped into their territory, were not much more civilized, but relations seemed cooler between everyone involved.
They were also a much more diverse group. Unlike the regulars, who were mainly all amber colored, dark haired types – much like the prince had been, the auxiliaries were a comparative rainbow of different ethnic features, and everyone seemed to have an accent of some sort, or at least some unique marker of foreign pronunciation on their tongue.
Cas walked by a tree, where three tentless men were nodding off on the branches. Another woman was taking a nap on the floor. Cas recognized the woman’s aura from the night shift. The woman had been in charge of watching the sector directly adjacent to Cas’. Apparently, the lack of sleep had caught up with her.
Careful not to disturb the sleepers, Cas broke past the copse of trees which marked the informal boundary between the regular and auxiliary camps, and entered fully into the menagerie.
Auxiliary badges shone all round, and even Sara was here, engaging the Chief Auxiliary in what appeared to be a private conversation.
All the surrounding auxiliaries were standing about, engaged in some productive task, or partaking in idle chatter.
And Cas stood out in the open, and kept standing there… and kept standing.
No longer burdened by her melancholy, Cas now felt her awkward self-awareness in full force as she stood on the periphery of camp.
She felt an intense desire to fit in, and looked around for any easy opportunities to introduce herself.
Because of Aura, everyone was in view, even if they werent, so Cas didn’t bother walking around to try and find someone she could fit in with… as always appeared to be the case with her, everyone was taken. The auxiliaries were clustered into little cliques that dotted throughout the landscape, each one circling around a dying fire or lively conversation.
The pretty girls were all in one group, the tough guys in another, and even the smoking club had managed to get a can-sized ash-tray for their convenience, as they lounged about in a self-created atmosphere of tobacco smoke.
Everyone already seemed to know each other, and Cas didn’t know anybody.
It was like the first day of school again.
Cas cursed herself.
What kind of person was she?
Die, reincarnate into a world of magical adventure, and she still couldn’t clear the hurdle called ‘socializing’. Wasn’t she supposed to be over this by now? Wasn’t highschool enough punishment?
Thankfully, for her, a glance out of the corner of her eye revealed another poor, lonely bastard.
They were on the other side of a nearby tree, and only visible by the outline of their Aura. They had a female figure under their armor, and their posture indicated that they had nothing going on in their life.
Cas walked a wide arc around the tree, and the figure came into view.
It was a dark haired woman wearing dark armor, and in fact it was a familiar face, as well.
The girl! Cas remembered her from when Sable had been killing Dalmatian’s unit. She’d been the one who’d transferred out of the unit that morning, and had sat along side her and Sara in the ‘grey area’ of Sable’s death wish. Apparently, transferring out of a unit had saved her from the Black Flag’s inscrutable criteria. Safe or not, however, she had been a member of that unit for a long time, and probably had made friends there… no wonder she looked so dejected.
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Unfortunately for Cas, the girl had already noticed her approaching, and changing trajectories at this point would be far too obvious.
After all, Cas hadn’t known who she was walking up to! What was she supposed to say to someone who’d just watched their entire unit get massacred?
‘I’m sorry your entire unit was horribly butchered,’ came to mind, but that was too forward even by Cas’s standards.
‘My condolences,’ had been popular back on Earth, but that was overly formal and rote.
“So…. how about last night?” was the third option, but – in porridge terms – that would’ve been overcorrecting enough to blow up the hut.
Drawing into greeting range now, and running out of clever ideas, Cas hurriedly settled on the classic: “Hi. My name is Cassandria.”
A credulous expression met her, as the woman leaned back against the tree trunk to look at her. “Anne,” she answered, not moving to take Cas’s hand.
Cas retracted the handshake. “Would you like to be left alone?” she asked gently.
“No,” the answer came quickly, though with an annoyed tenor. “I could honestly use the company. Distractions sound nice right about now.”
The woman spoke with a hard, stacatto accent. Cas would’ve called it German except for the fact that it just wasn’t. “Well, It’s nice to meet you. I’m new around here and trying to make friends.”
The words had barely left Cas’s smiling lips when the the whole world of murmured conversations fell suddenly silent.
And every head in view – and even some that were only visible by dint of their auras – turned immediately to look in her direction.
Some were even more shameless than that.
“You’re looking to make friends, you say?” A man’s head poked past the end of a nearby cart. The outline of his aura hinted at broad-shoulders and a muscular figure, and the sight of him confirmed it as he hopped out of the cart, letting the body of the steel contraption spring up as the suspension decompressed. “Lady Cassandria!” be boomed.
“My name is Dakula!” he announced with a flourish of an imaginary coat, falling down into a performative parody of a royal bow, which – to tell by his demeanor and the dirt coating his outfit – he was obviously unfamiliar with.
He had long, dark hair tied back into a ponytail, and features that exaggerated the hyena smile engraved on his face.
It wasn’t that he seemed like a happy person, but rather that he was simply refusing to hide how happy he was to meet her.
“...nice to meet you,” Cas said, offering another handshake which was similarly rejected.
This surprised Cas. No one had ever been this happy to see her, and that was counting family members.
What surprised her more was how the rest of the crowd was acting. They were subtler than Dakula, but they seemed to show just as much interest if not more. They still kept a distance away, keeping up murmuring conversations, but they’d shifted locations to come closer, and managed always to create a pause in their conversations whenever Cas spoke.
Looking back, even some of the people from the regular unit had caught onto the event, gathering around their side of the copse as they tried to peek between the branches for a better look at her.
Cas, apparently, had misjudged her popularity,
Again, withdrawing her handshake, Cas continued. “I’m surprised you know me.”
Dacula burst into chuckles at this, one that was shared by his two compatriots, and even some of the less subtler listener’s in.
“Right,” he attempted sardonically, “the moon elf princess that appears out of nowhere and single-handedly rushes in to save the prince! And she asks if I know her!” His composure failed him at this, and he burst into laughs, “Ahahahahahaha! If humble had a name!”
Cas recognized a tinge of an accent in his words, different from Anne’s. His e’s always managing to roll themselves into r’s.
“Princess?” Cas said, responding honestly to the barrage of assumptions she’d been thrown. “Oh I’m not really a nobl-”
A sudden, intense ringing slammed against her aura, and Cas picked up the familiar call.
Whatever mental language Sara used to communicate, it moved much faster than words, and Cas had enough time to course-correct her claims.
“Oh, I’m not really nobl- uhhh, part of the main noble family, like that. I was just the third daughter of a…” she reached for the unfamiliar term, “Nebuchado,” she plucked the Nemorian term for ‘Village Elder’ out of her itinerary.
Dacula blinked rapidly. “Oh! Your language. I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware Moon Elves had more than one language. You see my land is quite far from the Elf kingdoms, and we only get the occasional trader. They all spoke your celestial tongue.”
“Moon elves?” Cas asked.
Dacula appeared equally confused. “Well, it’s what you are, isn’t it?” shortly before Anne – apparently tired of being ignored – answered roughly from beneath them.
“Idiot!” she hissed up, the insult coming hard through her rough accent “she’s obviously not a moon elf! Look at her ears! Besides, she’s the wrong color anyway!”
Cas wondered how the woman could see her ears through her hair before she remembered her aura.
Dacula, for his part, seemed to be going through a restart as he stared at her ears and rapidly blinked at the new realization.
“You’re a human!” he yelled suddenly.
Immediately, that declaration set off a bomb through the local community, as even the most subdued cliques abandoned all attempts at subtlety and rushed in closer to look at her directly.
Cas almost tripped back at this reaction. Apparently, she was even more interesting than an elf would have been.
The crowd, now close enough to get a proper look, degenerated into a speculation. “She does have round ears!” “Look at her ears!” “I’ve never seen a human like her!” “Maybe she’s been working on her tan?” “How old is she?”
These were all individual conversations, but eventually someone managed to brave a statement directly at Cas.
“You said you held the title of Nebuchado?” A distinguished looking smoker asked in between tokes. Raising a skeptical brow over the rim of his pipe. “What manner of rank would that be? And from what sort of far off country are you? I’ve certainly never heard of a Nebuchado anywhere in Human lands. And I’ve been to all the lands anyone here could name.”
Happy to get a question she was prepared for, Cas went into her spiel. “I’m an adventurer from a continent on the other side of the world. As to my rank, my family would have been… two levels below what you call a King.”
If the fact that she was human had been shaking, the word ‘continent’ set off an avalanche as the previously subdued questioning quickly transformed into an auction-house of desperate attention seeking.
“How many languages do you speak?” an excitable short woman raised her hand, hopping up and down to be seen from her clique of robed figures..
“Do you have a Regalia?” An officer from the regular army asked.
“What is the name of your kingdom?”
“Why are you so bl-”
“Where is this continent?”
“How did you survive the bay of monsters?”
“Did you-”
A sharp, stinging whistle cut across the air and through every conversation.
“Listen up!” An assertive voice drew all eyes.
She was a short woman in her mid twenties, and with a level so high that Cas couldn’t see anything except question marks when sizing her up. She was all mid-tones, and had the same features as the regular soldiers, though she wore a gleaming pendant that identified her as the Chief of Auxiliarys.
No one looked happy to see her.
Unlike her Sergeant, the Chief spoke in a gentle tone that skated across the sudden silence, trotting out measured statements in a no-nonsense manner.
“I have been informed that the Lieutenant is preparing orders. I suggest you make yourselves ready for action.”
Immediately, the crowd dispersed, as all the various soldiers scattered to their work units.
Soon, Cas was left alone, feeling confused as to where to go. Looking back, she was surprised to see Anne still sitting at the base of her tree.
“Should… we be running somewhere?” Cas asked her.
“If you want to,” Anne shrugged, seeming unable to muster a fuck to give. “Everyone is just running because they don’t want the Foreman to see them?”
“What happens if the foreman sees you?” Cas asked.
“Well you’re about to find out,” a third voice turned Cas’s head.
It belonged to the foreman, a surprisingly stealthy two hundred and fifty pound man who – having seen them – had an almost cruel smile garnishing his face.