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Hijinx Fantasy Presents:
Vicki the Sorceress
and the Swamp Men of Mictlan
Chapter 5:  Wherein Enemies are Defeated and a Plan is Made
by Noir

Vicki was falling, rushing towards a ground that was far, far too far below.  After so many adventures, death was an old companion, its presence familiar, but it still stole her breath away with a dark spike of fear into her heart.  The racing pulse of danger, the tight grip of terror, tended to focus the mind incredibly upon the task at hand.  Thus, it was quite surprising to her that, as the air rushed past her ears in a fierce roar and she spun dizzily, she was thinking about clothes.

Master Order Mages tended to wear robes.  They are a garment that tends to speak of solemn dignity, setting them above the common spell slinger.  On a more practical note, if an order mage ever needed to break their fall, robes provided quite a bit of cloth to catch the column of wind upon which they would need to balance.  Vicki's robes tended much less towards utilitarian purposes, and much more towards a striking appearance.  She didn't think her robes bespoke dignity so much, but 'elegance' certainly fell under sexy, right?

Neither striking appearance nor sexy elegance helped when one is falling hundreds of meters towards the uncertain murky swamps below.  Even if she gathered the wind in time and made a rather undignified landing, she wasn't entirely sure the land her feet put down on would actually support her, and not plunge her into suffocating death.

Flying, for an order mage, was not about power.  It didn't take a master to summon up a windstream strong enough to hold up a caster, it was more a matter of balance - which, fortunately, Vicki had never had a problem with.  On the other hand, like most mages, she'd never had much of a reason to practice flying - she mostly used it to boost her jumps or break a short fall.  All of this consideration was mainly academic, though, as Vicki's casting rod had escaped her fingers when she'd been scrabbling for the railing, and was even now falling further and further away from her.

Without her casting rod in hand, and the wind stone built into it, Vicki couldn't pull up enough wind to jump a few meters into the air, much less soar through the sky, but perhaps she could bring up enough of a breeze to guide the rod into her hand.  She closed her eyes and desperately tried to clear her mind, ignoring the fact that the ground was rushing up towards her.  Desperately she strove, focusing her will.  There was no swamp, there was no sky, there was only her, the casting rod, and the mighty power of the wind rushing past.  The magic thrilled through her in a fierce, incredible rush of life, the force shining around her in a green glow from the overflow of unfocused energy.

Fingers closed around her wrist, and suddenly the energy flowing through her rippled and warped, and she felt her body become absurdly heavy as two opposite magics rejected each other.  Vicki's eyes snapped open and she saw the rod spinning away from her, trying to push more energy into the spell to get it back together.

"Stop dat, chere!" cried a voice above her, "You crash us bot'!"  The accent was Nova's, but his voice was strained, high-pitched.  Vicki dropped the spell as Nova dived, dragging the skunk behind her, for the casting rod.

"Ha!" Vicki crowed, recognizing the effect.  "I thought you said you weren't a chaos mage!"  She looked at her childhood friend, and the single bark of laughter threatened to swell to a fit of giggles.  The odd voice had simply heralded that the tall, lean panther she'd grown up with had shrunk to a petite, curvy, feminine form almost as small as Sara, a tuxedo-patterned housecat of black and white, her too-big clothes flopping loosely around her.  Moreover, that cute little housecat was suffused with a glittering golden aura, flecked with sparkles of pink, soft green, pale lavendar, and other gentle colors.  Those glittering sparks spread from the grasp on Vicki's wrist, coating the skunk, making her feel weightless and floating in the air, despite diving faster than one could fall.

"Nova?!" she exclaimed, "what- ?"

"Not now!" the housecat cried.  "De casting rod!"

Vicki nodded, and focused on the rod coming closer and closer.  "Dis may hurt a bit," Nova called, to warn her, but Vicki already knew what to expect, steeling herself.  As her fingers closed about the rod, sparks erupted that stung her hand and burned her fingers, and the golden dust that had settled about her arm whipped away in a cloud that the wind instantly stole, like a started swarm of insects.  Vicki felt heavier than ever, groaning under her own weight as the order magic and the chaos magic fought within her.  The fierce wind in her ears slowed as Vicki's arm felt almost pulled from her socket.  The conflicting magic was opposing the intent, and Vicki was actually several times heavier than she should be, instead of light as a feather.  Nova strained mightily, letting out a long, low groan as she tried to pull Vicki upwards towards the airship far above, and the battle no doubt raging on its decks, but despite all her effort, they still drifted slowly towards the murky ground below.

Searching for an option, Vicki spotted Nova's belt, low on her hips, as poorly fitted as the rest of Nova's clothes, but more specifically she saw the many pouches decorating the belt for all of the cat's inventions.  Hoping the pouch contained nothing volatile, she slipped the casting rod into it as far as it would go, leaving much of it poking out and sparking against the motes of golden dust around it.  Immediately, Vicki felt that floating feeling once more lifting her, and the two of them shot upwards like an arrow released from a bow, but Nova's belt, now suffering from extra weight much as Vicki had just been, slipped from her rounded hips and down her slender legs, left behind and carrying her pants with them as the two shot towards the sky.

"My inventions!" cried Nova, desperately, stopping in mid-air, Vicki's momentum carrying her above Nova for a moment.

"My rod!" cried Vicki, similarly, and then they were diving down towards the belt, and Vicki was all too aware of just how low they'd fallen.

Vicki had never been one for just staying passive when things were dangerous.  She'd never used chaos dust much, but the principles must be similar - a focused mind.  She drew upon her will, taking charge of the chaotic aura Nova put around her, and pressed hard.  It resisted at first, and she felt like she was pushing the aura away rather than pushing energy into it.  Seeing the futility of the act, she withdrew her will, and a bit of the chaos energy tingled into her aura, filling her with a slightly euphoric feeling.

No wonder you don't get mages who use both magics, Vicki realized.  Order magic presses outwards, chaos magic pulls inwards!  Feeling awkward, she pulled in on the energy, filling herself with a giddy feeling.  She pulled on Nova's hand, too, drawing herself forward.  Flight was the easiest of all the chaos magics, and Vicki'd always been a faster learner.  She felt like the energy was rushing through her in an exhilerating flood, then expelled out behind her, propelling her forward.  She worked with nova, and rather than being dragged behind the cat, she came up alongside her, and then was ahead, reaching out her hand determinedly.  They were suddenly amongst the trees, the branches whipping past them.

Her fingers hooked the belt, and Nova instantly was pulling her upwards.  Vicki  felt stretched taut between Nova's upwards movement and the belt's unnatural weight and momentum pulling her downwards.  They hovered for a moment in mid-air as Vicki let out a strained cry of pain, losing her tenuous grip on the chaos magic.  Nova's pants slipped loose of the tangle of fabric and leather, dissappearing with a wet noise into the apparantly solid ground below the grass brushing against the bottoms of Vicki's feet, irrevocably gone with a wet, ominous gulp.

After that moment's pain, the momentum was broken, and the belt was merely an unusually heavy weight - difficult, yes, but bearable.  The two rose upwards, slowly at first, rising ponderously past trunk and branch, and then faster, picking up speed, rising towards the airship floating so very high above.

Vicki, looking up, could see all too well that underneath the very long tunic, Nova wasn't wearing any sort of pants at all.  She had gotten a pair of very nice legs with the transformation - one leg black, one leg with a white sock, and just peeking from under the hem of the oversized tunic, a hint of white at the insides of her thighs.  

Looking up past the cat that was flying her back to the airship, she saw they were not alone in the skies.  The swamp men were still sliding down the boarding ropes that had attached to the airship, descending to wooden platforms hanging underneath a cluster of balloons, the whole mess covered over with a ceiling of leaves.  From this angle, Vicki could see how they had hovered just over the canopy, anchored in devious ambush for innocent passing airships.  As soon as the airship had been close enough, the platform had released and rapidly lifted through the air till they were close enough to throw up the boarding hooks, but still anchored by longer anchor ropes to the trees below.  Even worse, from this lower angle, Vicki could see, far off over the canopy, several other platforms waiting low in villainous wait.  

"Be ready, Miss Vicki!" Nova cried.  "Once I drop you off, I'll distract de chere, an' you give her a lil' love tap, no?"  Her words were almost completely whipped away by the rush of air about them, but Vicki understood enough.  She readied herself, focusing her mind, her body taut and quivering with adreneline rushing through her veins.

They crested the rail, then, floating abreast the embattled airship, witness to the ferocious battle raging on its deck.  Syndra fought against three floating boathooks, animated by glowing aqua threads of magnetism.  One of the fennec's two sabers had snapped in twain during the pitched battle, but with skill, speed, and desperation, she still managed to keep the hooks from her pelt, to fight them to a standstill.  The sexy serpent sorceress had lifted her cruelly hooked staff and was using it to fire a shimmering blue-green field of intense cold at Feren.  It hit the panther dead-center of his chest, but he opened his chest into a dripping, liquid hole, his whole torso flowing and rippling like the surface of a wind-swept pond, letting the blast pass through him without harming him.  Despite his agility, he was anchored in place, a sheet of ice spread across the deck and anchored in large blocks of ice around his feet.

Nova released Vicki and the skunk landed lightly on the wooden deck, the belt instantly lighter in her hands as the chaos aura no longer sparked and battled against the elemental stones.  She reached into the pouch and pulled out her casting rod, even as Nova pulled her dagger from its sheath.  Vicki dropped the belt to the floor, pulling her mind together into the framework of a good, powerful attack.

The serpant shaman was gathering ice together, now - Vicki could feel it building within her staff, could almost see the shimmering in the air as the temperature dropped immediately around the shaman.  Mist started to gather around the priestess, swirling inwards as the power gathered for a much larger ice blast that would no doubt completely encase the entrapped panther.

Nova was hurtled through the air towards the shamaness, leaving a bright golden trail of dust floating lazily through the air behind her.  With a clash, the two met, Nova's dagger catching the cruel hook of the feathered serpent's staff with a roar of golden sparks and a flash of brief, bright flame that washed over both figures, leaving the two slightly singed.

"No more of dat for you, chere!" cried Nova cheerfully, floating in the air next to the serpant.  "You spellcasting license, it is revoked!"

The serpant snarled and tried to pull her staff free, but Nova pressed forward, keeping her dagger caught in the curl of the barbed hook, sparks flying liberally from the meeting of chaos and order.  "I'll cut you from the sky!" cried the serpant, drawing a finely crafted saber from her own belt.

The pause, though, the distraction, gave Vicki all the time she needed.  She had to adjust her spell slightly, since Nova's chaos energies would disrupt the fine matrix of her originally planned spell.  All along a path between Vicki and the serpent, green tendrils of mist formed, whipped forward into a wind tunnel that pulled in air all along its length, terminating at the serpent.  By the time it reached her, the wind was already caught up and moving, and it hit the swamp shaman like a giant hammer.  Nova's dagger went flying over the edge along with the feathered serpant, and Nova herself tumbled head over heel through the air, her oversized tunic catching up around her armpits briefly before Nova righted herself and tugged it down over her thighs again.

"Wait for it..." cautioned Vicki, gathering together another spell immediately.  As she expected, the feathered serpant rose over the edge of the railing once more, her feathers in disarray, but she was, evidently, able to fly under her own power.  The serpant was hissing her fury, but her eyes widened as the jet of flame caught her full in the face.  She screeched in agony and fell towards the swamps below, the shrill cries of her pain receding swiftly.

"Wow," cried Nova, "Now dat was a spell!"  There was a rapid series of clattering noises as the floating boathooks fell to the deck, and Syndra let out a whoop of victory.  Feren just gave a sigh of relief, looking down awkwardly at the ice encasing his feet.

"Not done yet!" Vicki declared grimly.  In her mind, she pulled together a whirling vortex, then pushed the idea through her casting rod, triggering the air stone within.  Under the ship, air swirled, fiercer and fiercer, faster and faster, as Vicki pumped energy into it.  First mist, then dark clouds coiled underneath the airship, a very localized little storm.  Below, on the platform, the snakes and lizards and other swamp-men looked up fearfully, seeing the clouds, letting out exclaimations of fear.  The last of the retreating pirates were flung from the ropes and landed heavily on the platform, save for the unlucky few who were pitched over the side and fell screaming into the swamps below.  Then Vicki touched the flame stone, and the roiling, swirling clouds erupted in flame, a burning inferno that instantly cut the boarding ropes, freeing the airship.  Shifting her idea, Vicki hailed magic down upon the slaver platform below in the form of a burning hailstorm, igniting the concealing leaves and rupturing the balloons full of swamp gas in a roaring explosion that echoed through the swamp.

There was a long moment of silence as the other three stared at her... "Did you get her?" asked Syndra, quietly.

"Doubt it," Vicki stated grimly.  "I won't believe she's dead till I see her corpse.  But we've got time to get out of here, fast as possible."

"What?!" asked syndra.  "but we just kicked their tails but good!"

"That platform," Vicki said, "But I saw at least three other platforms in the immediate area, and who knows what sort of reinforcements they might bring to bear?  Let's get out of here."  She turned to face Nova, raising an eyebrow.

Nova was self-consciously fastening her belt around her waist, snugging the oversized tunic close so it wouldn't flap about her quite as much.  Pouches and bags sat at the deck at her feet, the little housecat unable to fit as many of her inventions around her much smaller waist.  Even landed and no longer using her chaos magic, small motes of gold and green and pink floated lightly about her, and there was a faint glow in her green eyes.    Her pelt was still mainly black, as was her long hair, but her left ear was now white, poking up out of it blatantly.  White decorated her face, and the front of her throat, and no doubt followed down the cat's belly till the point where it peeked out at her inner thighs under the ragged and singed hem of the long tunic.  Her right hand had a white-furred glove, and her left foot was marked similarly with a sock of pure white.  The tip of her flicking, agitated tail was white.  As Nova settled the tunic into place more modestly, Vicki noted inwardly that the lil' femme feline had a very cute and curvy little body, to go with the nice legs.

"So," Vicki said, her voice amused.  "This is your big secret, is it?"

Nova sighed, hiding her face in one hand.  "Yes," she groaned.  "It is so degrading..."

Vicki and Syndra both bristled.  "Degrading?!" Syndra demanded.  "What's degrading about being a girl?"

Nova looked up, a startled look on her face.  "No, no," she stammered, nervously.  "It's, uh ... how do I explain..."

"He was a panther, a great cat," Feren said with a deep, rumbling voice that almost, but not quite, managed to hide his own amusement.  "A noble jungle cat with a rich black pelt.  And now he's nothing more than a little domestic house cat, which like to pretend that they're great cats."

Nova nodded.  "Exactly," she affirmed.  Syndra and Vicki looked at each other uncertainly.  "It's a cat t'ing," Nova explained, a little abashed.  Sighing, Nova turned and started searching through the weapons now littering the deck, picking up daggers to find a replacement for her lost blade.  She found one that seemed to meet her standards, and tucked it into the sheath at her side.

"Syndra!" Vicki said, then, breaking free of the brief distraction, "Get us out of here!  Nova, you fly down by the canopy, scout out any more of those ambushes and keep us clear of them!"  Nova nodded and dove over the railing, and Syndra turned about and headed back the way they'd come from.

Vicki pushed gently through the casting rod to bring waves of heat against the ice locking Feren's feet in place.  "And you," she said, "So this is what chaos did to you?  Quite a curse."

Feren grinned fiercely.  "Cursed with awesome," he affirmed.  "Living ink."

It took over an hour to get out and away from the swamp men, with Nova coming up a couple times to get Syndra to adjust her course, or to lay down on the deck for a short break.  Apparantly, long-term flying could get very tiring.  "Floating in place is one thing," Nova tried to explain, "I can rest in mid-air, but I can no keep up wit' you an' do dat."

During one of the rest periods, they mused over the situation a little.  "But where did they come from?"  Syndra asked in confusion.  "I've been working these swamps for almost two years now.  I've been all over them.  There's no big towns sitting out there.  Plenty of abandoned temples, but nothing inhabited at all."

"Perhaps dere were a lot of small villages dat only recently unified?" suggested Nova.  It's a big enough realm dat small villages could be hidden in de marsh jungles.  We better go warn de merchants."

"So they can send an army?" asked Syndra.  "No fear, but the swamp doesn't want an army of mercenaries any more than they want an army of alligators."

Vicki nodded her agreement.  "And what would we tell them?" she pointed out.  "That there's ambushers out here?  They're already staying away from the center of the swamp, so it doesn't matter to them anymore.  We need to find out where they came from, where they're based."

"There's only one place a force that size could be based," Feren said, his voice distracted as he examined the damage to the ship.  "The Great Temple."

There was a long, quiet pause as the three others looked at each other.

"He's right," Vicki said at last.  "And they'll see us if we come in through the air.  There's only one thing for it.  I'll go in on foot."

"On foot?  You're crazy!" cried Feren.  "Dere's a reason we travel by airship.  De swamp, it's lethal!"

"No without me you will no," Nova stated firmly.

"Nor me," agreed Syndra.  Feren just grunted unhappily.

Vicki shook her head.  "You guys have to stay here and make sure the ship's ready to go.  I might need a fast escape."

Syndra looked like she wanted to argue, but sighed and nodded.

"I go wit' you, Miss vicki," Nova insisted.  "You father would kill me if I let you do dis alone.  Besides, how you get up to de ship to escape?"

Vicki hesitated, but nodded.  Backup was always handy, and Nova had shown she could take care of herself.  Or himself.  "All right, Nova," Vicki agreed.  "Get your things together.  We leave in fifteen minutes."