FicWad

Disclaimer: Chrono Trigger and all its attendant goodies belong to Square-Enix. I'm just playing in their sandbox. Further information can be found in the header for Chapter One.



"So, Flea," said Nadia as the group came to the flatlands at the base of the Denadoro range. "Are we talking about someone really small and itchy, or what?"

Lucca cast a quick glance skyward before shaking her head. "Let's just say he's good with magic and would look better than me in a bikini."

"Oh? Um." After a moment of apparent cognitive dissonance, Nadia asked, "Would he look better than me in a bikini?"

"I'm not sure I should answer that."

Frog coughed politely. At least, that was what Lucca assumed he was doing; the noise sounded more like a croak trying to echo in the wrong sort of throat. "Pray speak ye less merry of the devil," he said, coming up to walk beside her. "The fiend hath stricken entire regiments with madness before mine eyes. To hear such laughter as brother slayeth brother..."

And those are the memories you keep. Lucca sighed. "Yeah, I know. But-" Whatever words had intended to follow slid back down her tongue as she caught sight of a white flicker in the eastern sky.

"What's wrong?" asked Nadia, and Lucca realized that she had halted mid-stride. "Is something-"

"Probably just a cloud." Turning away from the speck, Lucca resumed walking at a greater clip. "But I'm not going to hang around and stare at it."

The spooked mood hung over them the rest of the way to Sandorino, causing Nadia periodically to squint over her shoulder and make small noises of false alarm. Frog remained silent, which proved a much more debilitating distraction. Every line of thought that Lucca tried to trace threaded itself through the hole left by her Red Gate.

The only bright spot- and there had to be a bright spot, since Nadia was with her- was that history was unlikely to suffer another immediate crash. Even if Magus understood the function of the Gate Key, the access code and rows of cleverly unlabeled buttons would stymie him, at least for a while. As far as Lucca could recall, Magus had never had any particular problems adapting to technology, but he considered it inferior to the dark arts and had never left any doubts as to his opinion. That he hadn't seen anything more advanced than a drawbridge lately would make his grasp on electronics shaky at best.

Logically, the accidental destruction of the Gate Key ranked as a more pressing concern than its misuse, but Lucca found it hard to take much solace in that.

When they reached the village's outskirts, where old farmhouses and world-weary cows were the only signs of impending civilization, Lucca signaled a halt. "Try not to look dangerous," she said, removing her helmet and stuffing it into her knapsack. Nadia's not-quite-suppressed smile suggested an advanced case of hat-hair. "With the war starting, everyone's going to be jumpy around strangers. That means no weapons out. Right, Frog?"

Frog seemed suddenly aware that he had been winding his hair around his fingers. "Aye," he said, letting his hand fall to his side. "Today's bitter loss is yet unknown to these, but 'twould be ill-advised to give them cause for suspicion."

Nadia nodded and held out her crossbow and quiver. "Hey, can one of you guys hang on to these for me? I, uh, can't really put them anywhere." The hand holding the quiver waved helplessly at her outfit, then quickly righted itself as several quarrels began the slide to freedom. A nearby cow mooed unconcernedly.

As Frog tucked the weapons away with the Masamune, Lucca untied her scarf and presented it to Nadia. "Hide your hair with it," she said. "You and Leene are about the same age now, and you don't really have any major distinguishing marks."

Nadia twisted her ponytail up into a bun. "Except for the mole."

"True, but the mole is not in a publicly accessible place." Out of the corner of her eye, Lucca watched Frog's cheeks bloom crimson.

Once the scarf was in place, Lucca gave a critical look to her party, one-third of which was still blushing, and wondered if they wouldn't do better passing themselves off as traveling performers. A quick flashback to her and Nadia's impromptu duet of "The Cursed Fiddler of Porre" disabused her of the notion. "All right," she said. "If anyone asks, we just got off the boat from Choras."

Nadia brightened. "Ooh, I used to listen to this radio show-"

"This is going nowhere good," Lucca pointed out.

"-about these pirates from Choras, and I think it was supposed to be in the middle ages, maybe, but what matters is I can do the accent!" She took a deep breath and began a brutal assault on her vowels: "Ahooo-oy, I am from Choras! How are you, yarr?"

Several gobsmacked moments later, Lucca's hand found its way to her forehead and refused to come down.

"Choras is the land of my birth and nurture," said Frog at last, "and by my troth, thou hast the wrong of it."

"But the pirates said-"

"Ne'er," continued Frog, with special emphasis, "hath son nor daughter of Choras given voice to 'ahoy' without the confines of a ship, nor 'yarr' on land nor sea."

Nadia regarded him thoughtfully. "So does everybody sound like you? I mean, does everybodyeth-"

"No. Absolutely no." A cold breeze left Lucca acutely aware of her exposed head and throat and killed any amusement the conversation offered. With what she hoped was a surreptitious glance at the sky, she started again toward the town and said, "Just so we're clear, I'm doing all the talking."



Sandorino, apparently, wouldn't change much in the next decade. Lucca's visit to 601 AD was still fresh enough in her mind to make her aware that some of the buildings were due to shift in color or shape, but the town itself had remained and probably would remain constant- at least outside of the bubble in Lucca's memory in which it collapsed into ash and blackened glass, or the even more fragile bubble in which it was devoured by the earth. The same streets were still neglected, allowing her to attract a minimal number of stares on her way to the inn.

Which had changed. Was going to change. Lucca was in no mood for the grammar of time travel.

Apparently the inn wasn't the R&R Hotel yet; the name must have come with later, less seedy management. "The Queen's Head" also seemed to be represent a recent change in nomenclature, as Lucca could still make out the ghosts of letters underneath the new paint. Other faded areas suggested that the silhouette purporting to be a bust of the queen had once been significantly bustier.

As they watched, a cloud of foul smells that might have contained a person seeped out through the door and drifted down an alley. An incoherent argument was audible until the door swung stickily shut.

"My father would have a /fit/," said Nadia, with something uncomfortably close to excitement.

Frog nodded. "Aye, 'tis a place most unfit for virtuous maidens such as thee. Let us-"

"Find something a little more upscale?" Lucca laughed. "Anywhere that screens out the weirdos is going to screen out /us/."

Pressing his lips into a line (awkwardly, as if he had expected them to fit together differently), Frog glanced from his companions to the wooden sign and back again. He sighed. "Then pray remain near me. I have no doubts of thy prowess in battle, but 'twill go poorly with thee if thou art compelled to display it here."

Lucca refrained from pointing out that Frog's current form was unlikely to prevail in a physical confrontation with anyone much bigger than Nadia. When her brain began a fruitless query of how muscular Crono had been, she distracted herself by saying, "Right, so let's just make sure we don't draw attention to ourselves."

"Um, you mean like by standing right outside the door and whispering a lot?" asked Nadia.

"Exactly." Lucca took a deep breath, adjusted her glasses, and pushed open the door.

While the Queen's Head predated cigarettes, the smoke from the poorly ventilated fireplace lent the common room the same thick, dim atmosphere as a pub in modern Porre. Clumps of patrons, most of them cloaked, hunched over the tables, while a few loners populated the barstools. A flash of movement and a thunk drew Lucca's attention to a cork dartboard and its attendant players. As she stepped inside, the patrons seated nearest the door gave her a look of discourteous disinterest and went back to their card game.

A hand caught her arm gently, and Frog's disapproving face appeared in her peripheral vision. "With me," he whispered, "and guard well thy pockets. Such men are sleight of hand and slighter of conscience."

Nodding, Lucca set her hand on the flap of her knapsack and headed for the bartender, who seemed a more likely authority figure than the enormous scowling man stirring an equally enormous pot of what smelled like stew. The young woman who would one day run the R&R Hotel was nowhere in sight. After glancing back at Nadia, who had attracted quite a bit of discourteous interest and looked as if she would have appreciated a squirt-bottle of bleach with which to repel it, Lucca decided that the Queen's Head must have been purged with fire before any attractive female owner had set foot in it. Just not enough fire, not after I charged in.

Clearing her throat and her thoughts, Lucca rapped on the counter and said, "We'd like a room."

The bartender finished redistributing the filth inside a mug before gracing her with his attention. "One bed per room. And I'm running a respectable establishment here." In response to a snort from a nearby drinker, he added, "Despite appearances."

A fly landed on the bar. Without missing a beat, the bartender twisted his rag into a whip, splattered the insect, and went back to cleaning glasses.

Lucca crossed her arms. "I wasn't finished. We want a room, and he wants one next door to us."

"He's our uncle," said Nadia helpfully. She began to append a "yarr" before Lucca kicked her.

The bartender glanced at them and shrugged. "Thirty gold. Meals included, drinks not." He accepted Lucca's coins, slid her a pair of keys from the dark recess beneath the bar, and turned back to his other customers.

Once they had navigated to the private, less hazy darkness of the hallway outside their rooms (totally unfamiliar, either because memory had failed or the inn had indeed been destroyed and rebuilt), Lucca said, "There, that wasn't so hard."

"No, just icky." Nadia made a face and shuddered. "It's like they slimed me with their /eyeballs/."

"Darker days were these," said Frog, with a contemptuous glance back at the door to common room. "An had I not been dazzled by glory, ne'er would I have mourned them." He sighed and shook his head. "Mayhap vice birtheth monsters, and we did beckon the spilling of our blood."

There was an argument to be had about the appropriateness of using seedy pubs as social barometers, but Lucca didn't feel up to making it. Instead she rolled her eyes and said, "Yeah, try downtown Porre back in my era. I think someone would have noticed all the monsters by now."

He shook his head again. "Mine apologies. I do forget myself in my weariness."

Not yet, I hope. Lucca wondered if his archaicisms would fade with his memories and whether he would still affect them for his friends' sake, crafting his sentences during pauses in conversation to ensure that he never missed a "thou." Given Frog's dedication, his quirks of speech were likely to prove as unreliable a barometer of his mental state as the patrons of Queen's Head were of social mores.

Silence draped itself over them all like a too-large coat.

"Yeah, I guess we're all pretty tired," said Nadia, shrugging it off. "So has toothpaste been invented yet?" At Lucca's look, she explained, "I just thought we might all feel better if our teeth weren't fuzzy."

Movements in Frog's lips and cheeks caught Lucca's eye, and she was certain that he was running his tongue over his teeth, reaffirming their existence.

"Judging by what was going on in the bartender's mouth, I'd have to say 'no.'" Lucca turned to Frog and said, "You've got your notebook, right? Don't try to access any new memories until you've written everything down. We'll look for Glenn tomorrow unless you remember he's about to die or something." Nadia's expression suggested that this had been insensitive. "But I'm sure he's fine. You're fine."

Frog gave her a crooked half-smile. "'Tis charitable of thee to use such a word. If aught aileth thee in the night, I am e'er at thy beck."

"And so are we," said Nadia. She gave him an encouraging look, and Frog nodded to her before he let himself into his room, leaving the door cracked open behind him.

"If it makes you feel any better," said Lucca as she unlocked the neighboring room, "I'm pretty sure this place is going to burn down in the next decade."

Nadia followed her inside. "You know what would make me feel better? /Soap/." As she flopped down on the bed, she frowned, poked the mattress, and added, "Also, something not hay."

In ten years, the R&R Hotel would have down pillows, reasonably clean sheets, and a small desk in the corner of each room. The Queen's Head seemed secure in the knowledge that its clientele would do just as well with straw, a stool, and approximately half the square footage. Although extra light was unlikely to improve the room's appearance, Lucca made her way to the nightstand, settled on the wobbly stool beside it, and sent a wisp of flame rolling down her finger to light the candle. "Well," she said, swirling a bit of leftover fire over her thumb, "I could go head and burn the place down now."

With a quick glance to make sure Lucca was joking, Nadia replied, "Nah, it still beats sleeping outside." Her expression grew thoughtful. "Where do you think Glenn is sleeping tonight?"

Lucca snuffed the excess flame in her hand. "If he's smart, not smack in the middle of Denadoro."

"I just hope he's okay." Nadia picked at a strand of straw that poked through the mattress. "I keep thinking we should have stayed to look-"

"Don't. If we ran into Flea, he'd kill us." Lucca's battle against the meretricious magician had dimmed in her memory, but the feeling of wind magic slicing at her body and the realization that she was fighting against a force powerful enough to rip through the Guardian army remained with her. According to her notes, Crono had been struck by some mind-twisting spell and come roaring at her with his sword.

By all accounts, Flea had been crushed as easily as his namesake during his next fight with the party. Lucca hadn't been present for it; having gotten thoroughly sick of Magus, she had stayed behind and tinkered while Crono and Marle, being too nice for their own good, accompanied the warlock on his personal henchmen-removal business. Of course, that fight had taken place after Flea had been badly injured and in hiding, while his opponents had spent their time collecting exciting new weapons and mastering elemental magic that maimed the laws of physics.

Reaching into her bag for her notebook, Lucca went on, "If Frog were still, you know, /Frog/, or if Spekkio suddenly showed up and gave you magic, we'd have a chance, but-"

"Well, how hard can it be?" Nadia sat up cross-legged on the bed and held her hands out in front of her, wiggling her fingers."C'mon, ice! Abraca-freeze! Coooold!"

"It's not quite that simple," Lucca flipped to the page about her trip to the End of Time and said, "See, it's right in here. Humans lost their magic after Zeal fell, so Spekkio had to give it to us."

"But I can try, right?" Nadia screwed up her face and pointed both forefingers at the candle. "Alakaz-ice!"

"Just try quietly," said Lucca. "I've got thinking to do."

As Nadia waved her hands like an amateur interpretive dancer, Lucca tapped her pen against the paper and tried to generate a plan that would protect Glenn, keep Frog from falling any farther apart, and retrieve the Gate Key from the stronghold of the most powerful warlock in recorded history. She and Nadia were experiencing identical success rates.

Any plan that required entering Magus's Castle, a step that seemed inevitable, could not include Frog. He was too physically weak to storm the gates, too awkward in his new skin to be stealthy, and, depending on what had become of Glenn in this new timeline, potentially too unstable to resist a suicidal attempt at revenge. On the other hand, Frog would never allow Lucca to enter the lions' den alone. Nor would Nadia, for that matter. Hell, /I wouldn't let myself do it. We just don't have anyone else./

They didn't have any other options, either. Even if Lucca could find substitute materials to construct a new Gate Key, there remained the possibility that she would be using it to traverse a timestream springing an untenable number of leaks. Her brain fixated on the image of thousands of tiny, Magus-shaped worms boring through Melchior's kitchen table.

We find Glenn first. At least we can keep that problem from getting any worse.

Out of the corner of her eye, Lucca watched Nadia challenge the pillow to a staring contest, her mouth silently forming the word "ice." Lucca looked down at her current page, which had been pockmarked by her increasingly frustrated pen-tapping, then pinched the bridge of her nose and said, "I can't concentrate in here."

Nadia dropped the pillow and looked over apologetically. "Am I being too loud? I could-"

"It's not that." Lucca snapped her notebook shut with a little more force than she had intended. "I just need to clear my head."

"Um, are you sure that's a good idea? I could go with-"

"You look just like the queen, remember?" Lucca said, throwing her knapsack over her shoulder. "Someone's going to notice if you hang around in public."

"No one out there noticed anything."

"They weren't exactly looking at your face, either. And I need you to be here for Frog."

Nadia's worried frown was almost audible. "You're not going to do anything silly, are you?"

"Lucca the Great? Silly?" Lucca turned and stuck out her tongue. "Never."

That provoked a bit of a smile from Nadia, at least, and Lucca was out and closing the door behind her before anything else could be said.



Why settle for "silly" when you can cut straight to "stupid"?

Aiming for an aura of uninviting but harmless eccentricity, Lucca clutched her bag close for safe-keeping and made her way to an empty stool at the far end of the bar. She still felt naked without her helmet, but its presence would have attracted the worst sort of attention. Guardia's partriotic fever was already high enough to cook brains and burn away anything with the stink of sorcery.

She could have burned the entire inn down before anyone had a chance to escape. It bothered her less that she was dwelling on the idea than that she was dwelling on it so earnestly.

In an act of perfunctory self-deception, Lucca set her notebook on the counter and opened it to a blank page before signaling for a drink. The bartender obliged with the nonchalance of a man who believed that anyone tall enough to sit on a barstool was old enough to provide him with business.

Lucca sniffed the probably-ale, regretted it, and took a tentative sip. The drink's only similarity to poi was an abundance of bugs.

"Bleh," she muttered, banishing the mug from her immediate reach. After digging a pen from her knapsack, Lucca stared at the blank page in front of her, tapped a cross rhythm against the counter top, drew a crooked cube in the left margin, scratched it out, wrote "WHO CONTROLS TIME?" in the center, surrounded the words with stars, scratched the entire mess out so furiously she left indentations three pages down, sighed, tucked the pen behind her ear, and grabbed the mug again with both hands.

Stupid, self-destructive behavior, she decided after another unpleasant gulp, was meant to be enjoyable. Debauchery had gone straight downhill in the last sixty-five million years.

Lucca's second mug was markedly more tolerable, and by the end of her third she had scrawled, "Queen's Head inn four stars excellent service would recommend" in the lower margin of her paper. No one had attempted to bother her yet, and the bartender kept track of her consumption only out of financial interest.

Her alcoholic haze could therefore be blamed for her failure to shoo away the dissolute-looking man who sidled up to her left and said, "What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"

"Performing a mercy-killing on a few lucky brain cells." Clearly Lucca wasn't drunk if she could still manage all those syllables. She gave him a smug look until she had to stifle a belch.

"Not much of a drinker, are you?" he said, giving her a wry smile as he settled himself on the stool beside hers. "Tell you what, kid- you pick up my tab, and I'll make sure you stay out of trouble. Lots of unsavory sorts in a place like this."

Lucca snorted. "Present company includuded." After a pause to sound the word out again in her head, she said, "Included. Dammit. Getcher own money." The niggling doubt that she had overestimated her powers of articulation was brushed aside as she squinted at her unwanted companion, whose face roused a few bats in the belfry of her memory.

"You look familiar," she said before he could protest her assessment of him. "Were you- are you- will you still be alive in ten years?" Lucca frowned at her ale. "Forget I said that."

Scooting closer to her in what Lucca assumed was to ploy to suggest "joint tab" to the bartender, the man grinned and said, "Toma Levine, fearless explorer and legitmate adventurer." Lucca did not take his proffered hand. "Perhaps you've heard of my daring exploits, eh?"

Eyebrows furrowed, Lucca consulted her notes. When she noticed the man peering with interest at her handwriting, she snatched the notebook off the table and held it somewhat unsteadily in front of her face as she skimmed the pages. Robots and reptites blurred together as she fumbled through the fractal maze of her personal history.

Ah. The flakey guy with the Rainbow Shell. Lucca's cursory written description indicated that Toma was destined to lose an eye some time in the next decade and develop a rather more robust mustache, but his personality seemed to have already reached maturity.

"Yes, thank you, it's on my friend here." Toma accepted a drink from the bartender, who moved on to another patron before Lucca could put together a coherent argument, then turned back to her and asked, "So what kind of problems are you drinking away?"

Lucca snorted and swatted ineffectually in his direction.

"And just how many drinks have you had now?"

Studying her fingers, Lucca said, "Thr- four. This's four." When she caught his expression, she scowled and added, "They're big."

"Of course they are," Toma replied in a tone that was probably meant to placate. "Look, I come through here a lot, and you're really not the type this place usually attracts, you know what I'm saying? I figure you're up to something."

The gentle fuzz settling over Lucca's vision made it hard to stay angry. "Yeah, I'm saving the world."

Before Toma could reply, the absurdity of her statement sank in, and she nearly fell off her barstool laughing. Several nearby drinkers glared at her.

"Right," said Toma, propping her back up. "I think you've had-"

Lucca brushed him off and took a clumsy swig of her ale. "I'm not drunk," she said reasonably. "When I'm drunk, I... dance. With cavemen. Funny whatcha remember." She frowned and reached up to pat her cheek. "My face is numb."

Toma let out a long breath, as if she were making his evening much more difficult than it had to be. "Look," he said, as Lucca's interest began to drift to a knothole in the counter, "what I'm saying is I'm between jobs now, right, and you look like you could use the reasonably priced services of an adventurer like myself-"

"Hang on." Lucca opened her notebook again, frowned, turned it the right way up, flipped back and forth between the same pages four times before realizing her lack of progress, gave up, and finally regarded Toma as critically as she could a subject that would not quite snap into focus. A brief consultation with her memory felt like an attempt to teach gophers how to use a card catalogue. "I'm having an idea," she said at last, because she couldn't seem to think unless she did so out loud. "I dunno if it's a good idea yet."

"Payment in advance is always a good idea."

Ignoring him, Lucca listed to her feet and said, "The thing, see, the thing is, the thing..." She disengaged the clause. "We're not enough. And we're always /losing/." She punctuated the final word with a sweeping gesture that would have cost a drinker his ale if Toma had not caught her arm.

"Careful," he said, and she laughed again. It's too late for careful.

Walking proved more difficult than standing, as Lucca's legs expressed an increasing dissatisfaction with remaining perpendicular to the ground. "You should meet my friends," she said, staggering away from the bar at compromise angles, "before I lose them, too."

Spin away, Crono, and your eyes are redbluegreen-

A stray chair caught Lucca in the shin and sketched some of the edges back into her haze. Grimacing, she limped toward the residential hallway.

"What the hell," she heard Toma mutter behind her. "I've seen weirder."

"I'll bet you- ohgod." Lucca barely managed to collapse against the sill of the hall window before her last few bad decisions rushed up her esophagus and redecorated an unlucky shrub. The shudder that went through her body shook some of the fog from her head. As she dug through her bag in search of something with which to wipe her mouth, Lucca made a mental note to invent toothpaste.

Her fingers wrapped around a handkerchief and several coins, the former of which went to her lips and the latter of which she pressed clumsily into Toma's hand, saying, "Here, you're hired. Don't run off anywhere." You're flakey, not a cheat. Unless I broke that, too.

Without waiting for a reply from Toma, she stumbled to the door to her room, found that Nadia hadn't locked it, and pushed it open far enough to glimpse the princess sitting on the bed with her knees drawn up, playing with Lucca's scarf.

"Oh, good," said Nadia, looking up, "you're finally-"

"Sweet holy hell." Toma's voice startled Lucca and sent her sprawling forward until she caught the doorjamb. "You kidnapped the goddamn queen!"

Nadia leapt up with a start, her ponytail whipping dangerously close to the candle. Her gaze darted between the figures in the doorway as she yanked the scarf back over her hair and violated pronunciation: "Ahoy-ahoy, what is this 'queen'? We do not have them in Choras, I am sure. Yarr."

The slight undulation of the floor Lucca attributed to hundreds of pirates rolling over in their graves.

"Oh, I get it," said Toma, the picture of fascinated perspicacity. "You're gonna kidnap the queen and replace her with this fake- what are you, some kind of naga-ette?"

Indignation undermined Nadia's dialectal efforts. "'Naga-ette'?"

Undeterred, Toma went on, "And now it's up to me to either do the heroic thing or sell out to the Mystic spies-"

"'Mystic spies'?" Nadia snatched the scarf off her head and crumpled it in her fist. "Lucca, who is this?"

"Shh," said Lucca, in deference to the small, sober part of herself that remembered how to worry about fights and riots and blown covers. "We're not kidnapping anybody. We're saving the world." A noise like a laugh tried to escape but fell to pieces in her throat. "He's Toma. I hired him. He's just the same as he wa- will be, only now he has two eyes." Something else occurred to her. "Doesn't he?"

The floor rolled up at Lucca like a wave, but Nadia caught her and said, "Oh, my God, you're drunk."

"Am not. Maybe. A little bit."

Nadia bit her lip, then dragged Lucca the last few feet to the bed and pushed her up onto the mattress. Balance pulled Lucca down on her side, rotating her view of the world by ninety degrees. Perspective, everything in perspective. World spins but you can't feel it. At the moment she felt a lot of spinning that didn't seem to be echoed by any visible movement.

"Okay," said Nadia, turning back to Toma. "Lucca's kind of crazy right now, 'cause for a super-genius she can be really dumb sometimes, but I'm not the queen and I'm really not-"

Further refinements were cut off by a startled noise from Toma. Twisting her head, Lucca caught sight of Frog looming in the doorway like a vengeful spirit, his broadsword gleaming in the candlelight. The haggard face and not-quite-human posture that had given him a pitiable appearance by day now gave him a desperate, predatory look.

From Lucca's angle, the doorway became a hole in the world out of which Frog had crawled, and she envisioned the entire planet in all its eras, from birth to dusty death, sucked piecemeal through it, while she stood on the edge trying to fish out the bits she wanted. Like a stage magician, building Crono out of rabbits. Crono might not have liked rabbits.

"'Twas a fearful din that roused me," Frog said, and the doorway was a doorway again. "Doth this knave molest thee?"

Toma raised both hands in a conciliatory gesture. "Hey, I was just looking for work, here, but since you're all nutcases-"

"No one is molestering anybody," Lucca cut in. Something sounded off about one of those words, but she couldn't be bothered to investigate it. "I am having an idea."

"See? I'm an innocent party here." Toma's words failed to remove the blade from the space just under his chin.

Frog's face softened with worry as he shifted his gaze to the bed. "Lucca, art thou well?"

"No." The word washed honest and clean. Using the moment of clarity to prop herself back up and set the world back on its axis, Lucca added, "He's harmless. I hired him."

"Yeah," said Toma, glaring down the length of the blade, "funny definition of 'hired' you people have."

Frog glanced between him and Lucca, then lowered his sword. Toma made a huffy noise and a show of brushing imaginary dust from his shirt.

"Well," said Nadia with cheerfulness that must have been forced, "it looks like we've had a big misunderstanding, and everyone must be pretty tired, so maybe we should talk about it tomorrow when we're all not so grumpy."

Although Frog's face suggested that he would have rather resolved matters before anyone left the room, he only nodded and stepped aside to unblock the doorway. Toma took a final look around the room, shrugged, muttered something about a stranger time had in Porre, and wished them all a flippant good-night as he strolled out into the hall and back toward the bar.

"Until the morrow, then," said Frog, and his courteous failure to demand a reckoning cut Lucca deeper than the most pointed question would have. As he sheathed his sword, he added in a soft, distant voice, "I find no crisis to compel our hand this night, yet I confess that I am made to search in darkness and briars."

I'm sorry. Lucca tried to give voice to the words, but she found it easier to turn her face away and stare at the candleflame.

The bed shifted as Nadia sat down on it and said, "Everything'll look better tomorrow, right?"

"Mayhap."

Once the door had clicked shut, Nadia's face appeared in front of Lucca's with jutted chin and narrowed eyes. "You are in so. Much. Trouble."

"I know." Lucca flopped backward on the mattress and watched the air swirl between herself and the ceiling, exhaustion creeping up over her limbs and temples. As she let her eyelids fall, she said, "I think I'm done screwing up now."

There was an unappeased pause. "What on earth were you-"

"Shh," said Lucca. In the darkness she felt herself dancing away from the outside world in ever-widening spirals, and tendrils of dream had already begun to entangle her thoughts. "I'm saving the world."