PART III - A BABY’S BOTTOM
“At least the rain didn’t last very long,” Lhawni said as she pulled a bundle of lunch provisions from her backpack. She looked up at the now-sunny sky peeking through the openings in the overhead awnings, which had been extended over the bleacher seating not long after a brief, heavy downpour had started.
“This new hat is all soggy,” Lena said with a pout, pointing towards the top of her head, where the maroon hat embroidered with a pair of yellow crossed swords she was wearing sat.
“What do you call that hat again, Callie? Some weird Gnome word,” Fynisse asked, before chomping down on a dried stick of meat.
“It’s called a ‘beret’,” Callie replied. “I remember that it’s a military uniform hat.” She then gestured towards Lena. “Just wring it out and set it in the sun. It will dry fast.”
“But then people will … will see,” Lena whispered with a sullen tone.
“They are going to see eventually,” Ambria pointed out calmly, resting her hand on Lena’s shoulder, trying to be comforting.
“I know,” Lena replied quietly, her face showing how embarrassed she was. “It’s just … I feel so stupid, because of how it happened. All this just because I wanted to get laid.”
“I can think of a lot of worse reasons,” Ambria grinned.
“He did send you flowers, though,” Callie pointed out, causing Lena to blush a little. “And there was even a note!” Callie added with emphasis to the rest of the group, trying hard to embarrass her friend.
“What did it say?” both Fynisse and Lhawni asked together.
Lena chuckled. “‘Know you are beautiful’.”
“Oh that’s an absolutely awful note,” Lhawni laughed with a groan, “although I guess he at least tried. Why would he give you flowers, though? It seems like a strange gift if he’s trying to apologize.”
“Hey! What’s wrong with giving someone flowers to apologize?” Callie asked, a little defensively. “Flowers are nice! They’re pretty and smell good. Who wouldn’t want flowers?”
Lena narrowed her eyes, needing no effort to see right through her cabinmate. “You put him up to it, didn’t you! Some strange custom of yours!” Then, as if to clarify, she added, “Some Gnomish custom, I mean.”
Callie immediately realized she was trapped. “I may have suggested it?” she replied with a careful, questioning inflection. “I mean, guys can be kinda dumb when it comes to saying something meaningful, right? He needed a nudge.”
Callie was sure she was about to get yelled at, but instead Lena leaned over and hugged her. “Thank you, all the same.” She looked at the others. “Thank you, all of you. This would be a lot worse without you all here to support me.”
Smiling, Callie blushed a little herself, before locking eyes with the Elf. Encouragingly, she said “Lena, take off the hat. Be that badass bald bitch.” The others sounded off in agreement.
Swallowing hard, Lena took a deep breath. Standing, she screwed her face into something flat and showing no fear, before walking down the seats to the ground. There had already been a lot of whispers throughout the morning as people saw her wearing the strange Gnome hat with no hair peeking out, and the rumor mill quickly filled in that her hair was gone and that it was due to firelice. Lena, for her part, had done what she could to stay above it and focus on the morning’s training. She was already really close to Silver, so if she was driven, she’d probably make it in the next day or so, before the Midsummer break, and that goal served as a good distraction.
With one final deep breath, Lena removed her beret, revealing her blemish-free and hairless head, a little overly-pale from lack of sun. At once the general conversations from the rest of the recruits petered out as everyone looked at the Elven oddity. Lena focused on ignoring them, squeezing and wringing out the hat, before setting it on a section of the seating that was exposed to the bright sunlight. Callie was right, the hot sun would dry it out quickly.
“Like a baby’s bottom!” someone suddenly yelled out, followed by some chuckles. But after a few seconds, the vibe turned sour as Callie and the other girls each stood, their faces focused and dark. They moved into an angry line of friends, with even Artemis taking up a ready stance. Lena, for her part, snapped her head up, looking into the crowd for who had hurled the comment. It took only moments, but people nervously parted, leaving a lone Fairy, one of the Paladin recruits, quickly abandoned by his friends.
Lena narrowed her eyes, and began to walk with stiff, heavy steps towards the heckler. There was now serious tension in the air and everyone could see that Lena was absolutely livid and not taking it. Off to the side, Major Celeste had been chatting idly with both Trainer Terrin and Vanis, and their conversation petered off as all three likewise grew tense, first at the callout and then even more so when they saw the look Lena was wearing.
“Recruit,” the Major said simply. It wasn’t quite a warning yet, or an attempt to stop her student, but it was putting her on notice she was being watched. Celeste glanced up at Lena’s posse of friends, seeing they were equally tense. This could actually turn into a fight! She quickly scanned around, looking for Tazrok, but not seeing him. He would have been able to end this with nothing more than crossed arms and a grunt.
“What did you say?” Lena snarled out as she continued walking stiffly, pounding her fist to her armored chest a single time as a challenge. The Fairy didn’t reply, and he looked around for his friends to come to his aid.
“You’re on your own, kid,” Koda, who had been eating with his fellow Paladin, said quite coldly as he took a step back, raising his paws in a universal ‘I want nothing to do with this’ gesture.
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“I’m sorry!” the winged recruit said quickly, eeping out an attempt at apologizing. Lena was half-again as tall as he was, and a wall of solid, lean muscle. The heckler felt quite utterly small.
“What. Did. You. Say,” Lena said again, pausing after each word as she came to a stop a couple meters away. “Please, tell me,” she added with an obviously fake, saccharin smile.
“Um ….”
“Lena!” Major Celeste called again, growing more tense and taking a couple steps away from Vanis and Terrin to be in the open, on the chance she had to take some kind of action.
“Say it again!” Lena growled.
“I said it was as smooth as a …” His voice seemed to trickle away as Lena glared right through him.
“As a what?” Lena hissed in a loud whisper.
The Fairy swallowed hard, his eyes slowly growing wide as he was stared down. Lena hadn’t gotten in his face. In fact, she had stopped approaching, still a good one-and-a-half meters away, but she might as well have been on top of him for how ominous and irritated she looked. The height difference just added to her imposing image. “A baby’s bottom,” he finally whispered. His words were so quiet, but that didn’t matter. Even the birds had stopped their songs as everyone heard what he said.
“Really? A baby’s bottom? That’s the best insult you could come up with?” Lena looked up at Koda. Then, she leaned towards the Bearkin, pointing at the top of her head. “Koda, is it really that smooth?” She gestured again when he put on a confused look, the big Paladin not sure what to do and not wearing his usual big bear grin..
“Er …” Koda stumbled verbally, before slowly reaching up and putting his huge paw over Lena’s bald head. “It is very smooth,” he said equally slowly, pulling his paw back.
“But is it that smooth?”
“Probably?” was all the big Paladin could respond with, a questioning tone in his voice. “For a non-Beastkin bottom, that is.”
“Ahh, I see,” Lena said, nodding with exaggeration, as if just learning this fact. She took one, single menacing step forward before slapping the smaller Fairy on his armored upper arm, almost seeming good naturedly, sending him staggering a bit. “Thanks for letting me know.” She turned, started to stomp away, and then glanced back once, adding a cold, growling, “Asshole!” She added a gesture for emphasis.
Slowly, the tension started to ebb. Major Celeste breathed a small sigh of relief as her student stormed away. She had been just about to break in and end the exchange before the rest of Lena’s friends stepped up and things turned into an actual fight, although a good part of her would have been happy to let Lena get one or two good hits in first. Paladins can heal themselves, after all. Thankfully, Lena had backed down before things escalated to that.
In fact, Celeste couldn’t help but smile at how Lena handled it. She had indeed made the Fairy heckler look like a complete ass for his comment, while basically setting the bar for everyone else in camp that there wasn’t really any point in teasing her. It may not have been a purposeful action by her student, but Lena had managed to completely seize control of the narrative about her hair loss, as well as strongly point out she wasn’t going to take any shit about it. Her friends obviously weren’t either.
In the stands, the line of Lena’s lunchmates began to relax slightly, but still seemed ready to leap to their friend’s defense if needed. But around the rest of the seating area, several dozen others, most of the females as would be expected, but also a surprising number of the males, had risen to attention. Their eyes were all narrowed, focused on the Paladin heckler. They’d been ready to take Lena’s side, too. The Major was finding herself quite pleased to see how many had rallied to the now-bald Elf’s aid.
“That would have been one hell of a fight,” Terrin chuckled quietly as Celeste returned. You could see his appreciation for a good brawl in his eyes.
“That Fairy didn’t stand a chance,” Celeste said, her eyes still carefully watching the crowd, although the tension was quickly fading. “Lena would have laid him flat.” Looking at all the people standing in support for Lena, Celeste grinned, “It would have been a hell of a fight, though, you’re right.”
Lena was still angry, and you could see the adrenaline flowing through her as she returned to where she’d been sitting, feet hitting the seating floor with heavy thumps. She glared back and down at the Fairy Paladin several times, who was now being given a firm and obvious scolding by Koda. In fact, Koda was talking to several young male recruits and delivering the same message to each of them using low growls and jabs with a claw into their chests. That message was simple - ‘Don’t be an asshole’.
“Are you alright?” Jesca asked Lena as the group slowly began to stand down and sit.
“I’ll be fine. I should have been ready for that, though. I knew someone would say something, but part of me hoped it wouldn’t happen. I hate that I lost control, even for a moment. I’m just glad I didn’t hit him, but I sure wanted to. I don’t know. Maybe I should have anyway.” She then looked at her friends. “You all stood up for me?”
Callie grinned, putting up her fists in a boxing pose. “I thought we might have to throw down for a second.” She then gestured towards a few others in the area. “A lot of them would have joined us, too. We had your back, girl.”
“Even Artemis was ready to spear someone, if she needed to,” Jesca said, still glaring down at the Paladin. You could still hear a subtle, angry, cat-like growl coming from the Cheetahkin’s chest as her own adrenaline slowly waned.
“Hey, speaking of Artemis, it just occurred to me,” Callie began, her face getting ‘that look’ on it. “Did we ever try Artemis’s horn on your head? To heal it, I mean. I didn’t even think about it yesterday.”
Lena waved the suggestion away. “It wouldn’t work. Cheena tried the one we took from her mother and it didn’t help. It’s acid damage, so nothing can heal that very well. It would have been too fast, too. They had to cut all the skin off my scalp and then grow new using Cheena’s slow-heal magic and some kind of a regeneration tonic she made. At least I was asleep while she did that! She said it would have been agonizing if I’d been awake.”
It was then that Lena noticed Artemis staring at her with a look that could best be described as a combination of horror, bewilderment and anger. “Shit,” Lena winced as she realized she’d mentioned the unicorn’s mother and that they had parted her out. They’d all agreed to try to avoid doing that. “I’m sorry!”
Quickly, Jesca grabbed the unicorn’s head and turned it to face her. There was some very intense staring between the two of them for several seconds, it quite evident they were having a telepathic conversation.
Finally, Jesca threw her arms out in exasperation. “Fine! You can have my tail when I die, then!”
“What?” Lhawni asked, her face quirking into a confused smile.
“I was trying to explain that things can still be useful even after someone is dead,” Jesca said with a sigh as she rolled her eyes. “Now she wants my tail so she can use it to brush flies away.”
There was a momentary pause and then everyone, save Artemis and Jesca, broke down into rolling laughter. In fact, Callie and Lhawni both fell off their seats.
“What?” Jesca gasped, going wide-eyed with horror as she stared at Artemis. She put her paws up to either side of her head. “No! You can’t have my ears! … No, they wouldn’t help you hear any better, you goof! It doesn’t work that way!”