RP:The Soup of the Day

This is a Mage's Guild RP.

Summary: Lanlan and Valrae discuss a new Mage Guild apprentice.

Valrae's Office

Valrae was seated behind her desk, head bent over a growing mountain of paper work. There was a nearly empty cup of tea next to her elbow.

Lanlan didn't knock as he entered, the office door smacking into a small side table behind it. The delicate tea dishes that had been placed atop it clattered nervously. "Look at this name!" He demands, showing her a scroll of newly introduced apprentices. "This one. Right here. Saup Oftadeh."

Valrae shruged her shoulder. "And?"

Lanlan looked incredulous. "Saup Oftadeh? Soup of the day? Someone is making fun of us!"

Valrae snorted, "You're a goblin." But she turned in her seat to shuffle through some heavy tomes on her bookshelf. "It's a common surname from the Nameless Desert." Now she's pointing herself. "And Saup has Frostmaw origins. I think it means something like 'Saving from Hunger And Pain'." Even as she said this she knew what Lanlan would say next.

Lanlan smirked, "That's exactly what soup is!"

Valrae was wrong, she did not know what Lanlan would say next. She begins to feel really silly for thinking he would say, 'Elephants are a lot like you and me, only much bigger'. Why would he ever say that? Probably because she didn't. She knew he was going to make another soup pun. "I knew you were going to make that joke."

Lanlan frowns, shaking his head. "No you didn't."

"Yes I did. I knew it as soon as I said it you would make that joke."

"I think if that were true I'd need to see it written down somewhere."

"Like what? In a book?"

"Yeah. A book or something. A written index for knowledge and information or something."

Valrae rolls her eyes, "That doesn't even exist. That's too broad of a subject for one book."

Lanlan is strolling in the hallway approaching the magister Valrae's office alongside a new apprentice. "So do you have a specialty yet?" Lanlan asks the young man. Though he's young, he's quite tall and with a blue tint to his skin. Definitely frost giant heritage. "I know it's early in your learning, but I like to ask."

Saup Oftadeh was ready for the question it seems. "In fact, I do. I dabble in both hydromancy and thermomancy, sometimes both at the same time. A strange pairing I think, judging by the looks I get, but I do have a talent for it." He confirms it's strangeness by seeing the look on Lanlan's face.

Lanlan's stopped dead in his tracks outside Valrae's door, and has grown utterly silent. From inside her office, he can hear voices. With a periled look, he gets Saup's attention with a brisk touch on his arm, and raises a finger to his lips. Silence. Then he sharply opens Valrae's door to see himself standing in a conversation with her. He was used to seeing himself, in mirrors and reflections both magical and mundane. Yet he's never lost track of one before. "Valrae, who is that?"

The side table behind the door rattles again, causing the dishes to become so anxious they topple to the floor and shatter. Valrae springs from her desk. The book of surnames she'd been holding drops into an already unsteady stack of loose parchment and they fall sideways, spilling over her desk to drift across the stone floor like wide feathers.

"What do you mean?" She asks, her voice pitched high with concern.

Lanlan, the first one who had appeared in her office at least, turns to smile at... The second Lanlan and Saup.

"Okay, haha. Illusions are funny." Valrae's tone implied that this was very far from funny.

The first Lanlan's smile continued to grow. It spread across his face until the skin began to split and tear at the corners of his lips. Valrae doesn't see this though. She only sees the back of his head. This is probably why she's taken so off guard when the first Lanlan sailed through the air toward the second, and by unfortunate extension Saup, with a keening wail reminiscent of nails dragging against stone.

The second Lanlan, the real Lanlan, spins out of the way, casting a surprised double to take his place as the would be assassin plunges through the illusion and into the wall behind. The illusion itself is revealed to be made of more than imagination, restraining the creature in a web of tightening silk ropes. They slide over its limbs as Lanlan draws his wand back like an angler pulls in a fish. Saup is entirely stunned for seconds too long. He should be dead. He would be. Lanlan erupts sharply, "Run you idiot!" And the boy does, his heavy steps increasing in speed until their mere echoes. The creature breaks free, tearing through the bindings with unseen blades. To Lanlan's surprise, it looks at him not with vengeance, but with sickening and sadistic glee. Then it's almost sliding down the hall way with such speed that it will catch the apprentice in seconds if they don't intervene.

Lanlan's recoiling from his spell being shattered, and the glimpse into the abyss that was this unknown creature's visage. He hesitates. Does he even want to reengage this monstrosity? Then he remembers: he's the arch mage, he can't be known to have allowed a death to an apprentice. Not one he was seen traveling with! "Valrae...!" And then he's off--the ground that is. He's speeding down the hall with nary a force seen moving him, as if it was the tower moving under his feet at his command.

Valrae watches in horror as the first Lanlan attacks the second. Things spiral rapidly out of control after that. There was a lot of motion and colors and movement. The witch was as frozen as Saup. She didn't move herself until the second Lanlan yelled for him to run. She moved around her desk but it felt like she was moving through water. Her limbs felt heavy and clumsy and too slow. "Wait!" But no one was listening. Lanlan was yelling again. Or one of them was. The other had broken free and he looked... Wrong now.

The real Lanlan flew from the room and Valrae followed slower. "Lanlan! Lanlan wait!" The hall stretched and twisted. It wobbled in on itself before them, turning dark and shrinking in and in until it might crush them both. Valrae was closer now. "What the --"

"Lanlan?" His name fell from her lips in a misty white cloud. It floated up toward the moons, rising high above a sea of unbroken and glistening white. There were no clouds to break the sanguine and blue-green lights that bathed the snowy clearing and left pools of deep shadow underneath the surrounding pine trees. Her feet were bare, her shoulders too, but she didn't feel any cold. Lanlan wasn't far from her.

Lanlan walks forward, straight into the shadows of the pine trees as if he had no memory of the strange malicious doppelganger that just nearly eviscerated them. Yet as he passes Valrae, he hands her a clanging necklace made of soup spoons bent into a rings to form a chain. There's dried blood encrusted in one of the bowls. "He'd want you to have these, and you'll need them for what's ahead," he says sagely. Then he continues through the snow, kicking it around to make the path ahead and behind much messier than it needs to be.

He wouldn't say much, but if he walks ahead of her he turns to make sure she's following. At once they pass by the trunk of a great tree, and see a row of elvish archers standing with their bows drawn and arrows nocked. They're facing away from the pair in the other direction. Ahead of the archers is a small school building. It should've been seen sooner through the spaces in the trees, but nevertheless. They particularly aim toward a fenced in play area where the sounds of children having fun can be heard, but they're invisible on the other side of the building, and Lanlan doesn't go far enough to see them around the corner of the building. The archers release their bowstrings and the joy is gone. It is understood that these kids were misbehaving; recess ended a few minutes prior.

Lanlan decides to walk in another direction, having disdain towards that place now.

Valrae had taken the necklace of spoons and blood and placed them around her neck without thinking. She was busy pressing her fingernail underneath the flecks of dried blood. She watched it chip away and float not down, as it probably should, and instead up. It floated up and up and away, growing larger as if it were a balloon, happy and round and red, and it sailed away into the clear sky. When she laughed, the sound appeared around her like sunlight to follow it. But where was Lanlan? "What is waiting for us ahead?" She asks, though he was already far from her now and somewhere in the pines. She followed his prints in the snow, thankful that he'd made the path messy as it was trying to slip away mischievously as she went.

The witch watches the archers curiously, knowing that they're aiming for the poor school kids playing unawares, but she doesn't feel panic. "They should go in." She tells Lan, it was growing dark. When the arrows release, the fall on the children but there are no screams. They bounce as they land, harmless as toys, and Valrae looks away. Before she follows, she places a bloody spoon from her necklace at the archer's feet.

The dark came quickly, pressing around them like a wool blanket. It made her skin itch. "Where are we going?" Valrae says, and the words float away a strange and uncertain yellow, dull and sickly. She felt as if they'd been walking for a long time, the snow making it harder, and her feet were heavy. "Why don't we sit?" This time, her words were a hopeful and powdery blue. "Look!"

Where the witch had pointed, a light through the trees appears. The sounds of a fire and many voices filters through the frozen branches. There was the welcoming scent of fresh bread and warm soup. Valrae plucks a cleaner spoon from her necklace.