CHAPTER FOUR: Mouse.

The three new cards were very quiet, listening to Ailee explaining the situation without a word. The brown-haired male, the demigod, appeared totally ignorant of modern life and flinched every time a car went by.

The two ex-oblivionites were named Aoi and Akai. According to them, they weren't their real names, but it had been so long they had been called by them they had forgotten them.

"I know it's rather strange, having Nihonese names while we ourselves are not, but the theory and practice of Oblivionism came from Nihon, so the codenames they gave us are all in that language." Aoi said quietly, fingering the hilt of his katana absently. He was the more talkative of the two, although that wasn't saying much.

They'd just rounded a corner when the ragtag group came across a girl standing in the middle of a sidewalk, eyes wide. She was pale, except for a scattering of freckles across her nose and cheekbones, with mousy-brown hair tied in a braid. This in itself was fairly unremarkable, but the girl looked both lost and terrified, not to mentioned she looked like she'd fallen out of some medieval movie.

She stood there for a second more, then shrieked and dived for the bushes. "The poor girl might have got quite far, too." Ailee commented. Lanai gave her a puzzled look, before remembering Ailee was the goddess of time and could probably see what was ahead.

What was ahead was that the unfortunate girl tripped over her skirt and faceplanted. Lanai frowned, grabbing her by the upper arm and hauling her to her feet. "Are you all right? That was quite the fall you took."

The girl said began to reply, then cut herself off. She was glowing.

Silana, who had joined him, sighed as the scales materialised in her hands. "Another one." She remarked, resigned.

The process was faster than the two of them remembered. Lanai turned over the card and raised an eyebrow. "'The Dragon'." He read out, slightly sceptical. The girl on the card was the same as the girl in front of him, but her skirt had been shredded and now ended slightly above the knee, the sleeves were gone, and her braid was out, and she looked distinctly like she would very much love to rip somebody limb from limb.

The girl reached out. "That is mine." She blurted out, before taking a step back and covering her mouth. "I am sorry, I should not have spoke to a man in such a way, forgive me…"

Lanai's jaw dropped. "What the hell are you going on about? It is yours."

Silana put a hand on his shoulder. "Drop it, Lanai. She's Elean. They're patriarchal- where she comes from, if she'd spoken to a male that way she would have been severely punished. Give her the card and let me handle this." She ordered.

The girl cringed. "You speak to him with such authority. Are you not afraid he will be angry that you are commanding him in that manner?"

Lanai, in the process of passing her the card, gave her a strange look. "She's Alpha Female. She does the talking and the flashy stuff and the spotlight-hogging. I shut up, think hard, and watch her back."

Silana nodded. "People underestimate him because he doesn't talk much, can't do much magic, et cetera. Lanai's my right-hand man. He comes in and bails me out when I've talked myself into a pickle."

The demigod they'd unearthed earlier spoke, the other cards having moved to join them. "So it's symbiotic, right? Um, I'm Narin, by the way." He shifted his weight onto one foot, a disarming smile on his face.

Tawni raised an eyebrow. "A fancy word for her doing lots of talking and him saving her rear when things turn nasty."

Ailee and Simai exchanged looks of mingled exasperation and amusement. "Maybe we should teleport you back to the house." Simai suggested.

He didn't wait for an answer.

--

Saving Naere, Silana decided, was now the least of the groups collective problems. Her and Lanai were in this for Naere, Akai and Aoi for vengeance, Tawni to break her curse, Cassandra because, apparently, she'd run away from home, and Narin had no idea what was going on and was just along for the ride.

Four days has passed. Cassandra (whom everyone else had begun to refer to as Cassie) had asked for several metres of fabric and disappeared into one of the spare rooms with a box she refused to let any of the others look at or touch.

Funnily enough, the colours she'd asked for were mostly black and gold- colours that had seemed stark against the pastels and neutrals that the other fabrics were.

Silana hadn't paid much attention to this, as she'd been busy helping sort out who was rooming with who- Ailee and Simai didn't need to sleep and simply cluttered up another empty room with various intruments and artefacts. After some bickering, they'd finally got everything sorted. Lanai was by himself, she was with Cassie, Aoi was with Narin, and Akai with Tawni.

After a hectic morning teaching Narin how to operate a microwave, Silana was quite content to flop on her bed and stare at the ceiling. She noted Cassie's arrival, then realised something else and sat up.

"Where'd you get those clothes from? You refused what we offered you…" Silana trailed off, sitting up. "I mean, that doesn't look like anything Tawni or Akai would wear."

Cassandra gave her a strange look. "I made them. I cannot wear that dress for ever, so I asked Miss Lyrra for fabric and found somewhere quiet where I could work in peace." She said quietly, curling up on the floor and separating the mound of fabric she'd been holding into three piles- one Silana recognised as a tough black material that held magic very well, therefore often used by mages. The second was gold, slightly metallic, and there was much less of it, and the third was also black, but plain.

"What are you doing?" Silana inquired, getting off her bed and sitting down next to Cassie.

The younger girl sighed. "From what I have heard, our opponents are dangerous. Very dangerous. Since most of you have some sort of magic, I thought it would be good idea to make you a form of armour that could be passed off as, say, a uniform for one of those sports teams, or a school, perhaps."

She tossed Silana a pile of clothes, missing her by a metre. Silana scrambled to retrieve them. "We cannot avoid attracting attention, but we might as well looks a little less like a bunch of ruffians. Try this on."

Silana opened her mouth to gush over Cassandra's talent when another girl appeared in the window. She had long blue hair, well past her feet, and wore a pastel-blue dress.

Cassandra gasped. Silana narrowed her eyes. The girl just smiled.

"You're Cassie and Silana, right? Cards of Destiny? Well, I was on my way over here- I have a bone to pick with Lord Obnoxious- when I heard something you might not like."

"Doesn't everyone have a bone to pick with Lord Oblivion?" Silana asked.

The girl waved a hand airly and a gale ripped through the room, sending Silana flying into a wall- Cassie had grabbed onto a table leg.

She covered her mouth. "Whoops. Elemental, sorry. Anyway, there's this guy heading your way, looking for his runaway sister, and he's really pissed. Thought you might want to know, Cassie. Oh, and I'm Taewyn, Wind Elemental, at your service."

She pulled a ribbon out of thin air, gathered her hair up with one hand, and tied it back. As she did this, her hair diminished in length and her clothes changed to shorts, a tank top, and a hooded jacket. Apart from the blue hair, she could have been a regular teenager.

Cassie, meanwhile, had turned pale. She walked briskly to the window to peer over Taewyn's shoulder, then stumbled backwards.

"There's no-one else he could be..." She whispered, horrified.

"Who?" Silana asked, bemused.

Cassie sat down, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them.

"My brother."