"It's just," began Rook, "that it seems like I have the worst luck." The swordsman looked down at his recently shortened sword. "I wonder why that is." A small stone past his vision caught the boy's eye. He picked it up, testing its weight with a few bouncing tosses. He then launched it out past the shoreline, skipping the disc-like rock twice before it spun furiously back at the group. Rook just managed to duck it in time. "Y'see?"
"Ouch!"
"Who said that?" questioned Rook. He thought that all of the party was in the clear, and indeed they were. "Who... who are you?" he asked, for the first time noticing a rather plain looking person.
"Me?" the non-descript being asked back, rubbing his averagely bleeding head. "Why, I am your luck." Rook examined this man some more.
"Huh, nothing looks that bad about you," posed Rook.
"Are you kidding?" scoffed his Luck. "I'm dead! I'm in frickin' Cwn Annwn!"
"Don't you mean Annwn?" corrected the goblin.
"No... no, I do not." Just then, a rather bulbous Cwn Annwn phased in. Its entire stomach was stretched around Luck.
"Hello," it greeted in a baritone voice and waved a paw before vanishing from site once more.
"How... disturbing," murmured Rook. "So, I guess you are the cause of all my bad luck. I know what this means."
"Yes," agreed Luck. "To will find the palace of th-"
"It means that I shall have to kill you!" screamed Rook.
"Yes... wait, no!" The swordsman brought his blade up and charged at his Luck, swinging wildly but of course falling short of his target. "Hey, what are you doing?" the shocked being exclaimed, unable to move very far from the blows as it was limited by its phantasmal captor.
"Stupid Luck! Why don't the things I hate ever die?" In a frustrated attempt, he withdrew the splintered portion of the edge and hurled it into the Luck's face. The attack caught the being by surprise -- and caught its eye. With its head tilted back, Rook's target came into plain view. He whirled about with a vorpal strike.
The party stared blankly at Rook, wrenching the fragment of Balmung from a loosed head.
"What the blutty 'el is wrong with ya?" finally spoke up Bimblesnaff.
"Huh?" a startled Rook spurted out. "Don't you get it? That guy was my luck -- my bad luck. Now that it's gone, I won't have bad luck anymore!"
"Don't you get it?" 'Ticu pointed out. "Now that you don't have bad luck, you will have no luck."
"... whoops." The boy thought for a moment. "Well, what's the worst that could happen that wouldn't happen to me before?"
"Agh," grunted the goblin. "This guy is just askin' fer it!"
Suddenly, the coastal waters began to boil. A writhing mess of tentacles rose up and fell onto the shore.
"The Kraken?" Koumori growled. "I knew it would take more than one good hit to stop that thing!"
"But I cut the Kraken in half!" sputtered Rook. "How can something I broke into parts with Balmung just suddenly become whole again without any explanation?" He then thought about his words. "Awwww." Rook returned his head from a shameful hang and continued:
"Well, it matters not. This next battle against the Kraken shall prove to be one of the longest and most trying well, that was over fast," he said.
"Yeah, how about that," spake the Ghobling. "And lookit, we're back on the mainland."
"Meh, works for me," the swordsman admitted with a shrug. "Now we can get to wherever we need to be goin', so hows about it, sis?" Articuno was already divining the direction with Gungnir, but remained silent. "Sis?" he repeated. "C'mon! Why do you keep ignoring us whenever we ask for directions."
"Well, you see," meekly mumbled 'Ticu. "I... don't know where the crystal is," she quietly and hastily said.
"How can that be?" roared Rook. "You have Gungnir! Doesn't it tell you where the next crystal is."
"Kinda..." she explained. "It can point to where we need to go, and it can show me an image of where the crystal is, but it cannot tell me where."
"What do you see, 'Ticu?" asked Diamond.
"A squiggly thing," the girl simply stated, "next to a not-so-squiggly thing."
"Wait, then how did you know that the last image was of Annwn?" Bimblesnaff wondered. The girl's eyes drifted upward as she reminisced of her favorite picture book, Things of Morbid Death and Other Hellish Portals.
"Tee-hee!" she giggled with joy. "Whirlwind of lust on the Second Layer of Hell."
"Our parents are great," added Rook, proudly displaying a dopey smile. When he snapped back into reality, he confronted 'Ticu yet again. "So, we just have to follow wherever the spear points us and walk?" His sister simply shrugged. "Aww, no good can come out of this," he complained.
And they trekked toward the East, blindly following the relics instruction. It was not too long into their journey that Rook characteristically tripped, seemingly over smooth ground.
"Uh," he grunted, rolling himself over on the ground, "it is nice to see that I still have no... luck?" He looked down past his feet to see something sticking upward from the trail. The others thought it nothing more than some sort of rock, but he easily recognized it as a hilt.
He immediately took to freeing it from the ground as the others walked on, not noticing his absence at first. As soon as enough was bear to get his hands around, Rook ripped the blade from the earth. Somehow, he was disappointed.
"Awww, a sword?" he complained. "I thought it was going to be candy?"
"Why would it be-" began the dumbfounded goblin, but he digressed. "Why are you complaining?" he screamed. "It is a new sword!"
"Yeah, but I already have the Volsung blade," he responded.
"You mean Balmung," said the surprisingly knowledgeable Bogg, "the blade that could only be freed by and wielded by the Volsungs... the race that died out with Sigurd... thus why he was called 'Last of the Volsungs.'"
"That's the one," the boy answered. "Why? It's better than this one. What can this dirty ol' sword do? I mean, some loser named... At-il-la," Rook slowly mouthed, interpreting the engraved glyphs, "didn't want it. Plus it has this loser picture of a sheep on it."
"You mean... that ram?"
"It's a sheep with horns!" snapped Rook. "I'm sooo-o-o-o scared!" The other two gave up and continued to follow the mystically floating spear. The swordsman, out of habit, sheathed his new find and ran to catch up with them.
OOC[FMC: Mars's/Attila's Sword: No one can look the wielder in the eye without flinching. Also, Wayland/Waylon is not really a Norse god. He is one of the rare Norse evolutions. It is really... a dwarf.... yeah. He sorta got his sinews cut, killed some princes, ravished a princess, had an ugly baby, and was never seen again.]
"Gods" did not really exist in Norse myth. They just had two races: Vanir and Æsir who had common access to Idunna's golden apples of youth. Since the Volsunga Saga is one of the oldest Norse stories around, Norse definition dwarf over the English god. This is a hard one, tho'; every on-line source I saw always called him an Anglo-Saxon god, too, even if also a dwarf. G'd ol' Internet! Leave it to them to mess with the one mythology that only has one written source!
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