Little Witch in the Big City [open]

Roxas really didn't want to sleep in the street.

At least, not the street in Thebes. Everything was sort of dirty; some roads were well constructed venues made of cobblestone, but the majority of them were covered in a light layer of dirt and ash that made them unappealing. Alleys were out of the question; besides the fact that they were generally less comfortable than they looked, he knew better than to board up in an unknown alley. Alleys were the first stop of ne'er-do-wells everywhere, and generally the first place that criminals went to rob unsuspecting tourists when they stopped to check their map.

In the spirit of sleeping somewhere moderately comfortable so that he didn't have to travel on two sleepless nights of fatigue, he'd made his way to a boarding house. It was decent enough looking, covered in the same sort of veneer that the rest of the city was. Clad in the same black, white, and red getup as always, he navigated his way inside and made a hesitant approach toward the desk. Were it not for the fact that he'd just gotten through with smashing some sort of blackened, heartless infested lion, he would've probably taken the risk and summoned a dark corridor to make his way back to Twilight Town. Unfortunately, the battle hadn't been kind on him.

Cuts, some covered by bandages, covered his face; bruises littered the underside of his ribs like devilish kisses, planted there by a number of violent headbutts and back-legged kicks that had thrown him across a now ruined vestibule. Even his clothes, once pristine, were now covered in the same layer of whatever it was that coated the streets outside, an unfortunate result of the battle he'd just fought. He was pretty sure that there were a number of creatures still wreaking havoc throughout the city somewhere, but there was only so much he could do, and the day was nearly over.

At least, he hoped that was the case.

An unfamiliar looking girl with mint-leaf hair and eyes to swell a heart stepped away from the counter while he was still patting the dust off of his jacket. He glanced up at her just in time to get a full look of her face, take stock of her, and watch her fall flat a second later. She rolled over and a big, hairy chested man laughed, delighted by the fine display of cocksurety that he'd been so kind to put on. Normally, if he were wide awake and the day weren't so long, he might not've cared. No, definitely, he wouldn't have cared.

But seeing it all in that moment, from the point at which he stood and with the subtle weight of a familiar charm hanging from his neck, he couldn't just let it go. His friends would've never let him live it down, and for as much as he didn't want to admit it, he wasn't the type to let it go either.

Roxas's lip curled and he stepped forward while the other man boasted about his own heroism. It didn't take him long to lean over and extend the girl a hand, shooting the man and his tree trunk arms a pointed glare.

"Yeah, big hero you are," he muttered, unable to help himself. "I'll be sure to tell Hercules that some guy with a dumpster for a face has been going around tripping girls. He'll be so impressed."

Rolling his eyes, Roxas looked down at the girl beneath them, hand still extended. He didn't want to throw in with her lot... but it was hard not to. He knew that she needed a room, and he sort of needed one too, but he wasn't about to stay the night at a place where people thought bullying girls was a fun game to play. It was hard to escape the thought that the boarding house they currently found themselves in would eventually be filled with drunkards and noisy tourists anyway.

"C'mon, stranger. Let's get you up off the ground and take our business elsewhere."

A balmy light washed over him like the stroke of a brush, wiping clean the sharp slate of pain that wracked his body. He barely held back the relieved sigh that threatened to break free of his lips, instead releasing it as a hefty breath that laid bare his thanks. He offered the defeated looking girl a subtle nod in place of an actual, verbal expression of gratitude. It wasn't that he didn't want to let her know plainly that he was thankful; he just didn't want to spend more time than he had to inside of the boarding house's crowded interior. Besides the distinctly Theban scent pervading the room, there was the distinct smell of body odor and unwashed armpit, probably emanating from the fellow now scolding them.

Eyes heavy and burnt from fatigue, he barely offered the burly man another glare. The energy was already spent. Dickering with the guy wasn't going to get him anywhere. It was better to let the guy stew in his own mental filth, in a way. People like him weren't the type to change their minds on a whim. They thought themselves bigger and better than the mortal men around them, unaware of their own bigotry or failings. More to the point, the guy was sort of a dick, and Roxas was far too tired to show him the error of his ways.

"Yeah, yeah, burning down houses, pillaging your children, I'm sure," he mumbled, following his new acquaintance out of the boarding house's front door. "What a guy."

They weren't two steps free of the doorway when Roxas shook his head, condescendingly removing the thought of the guy from his mind entirely. Some people were just... xenophobic. He'd been there, once or twice, even if most people generally put up with him. He figured it had something to do with the fact that he looked like a kid. Technically, he was one, but being one and feeling like one were two different things. Aside from that, he was pretty sure that most of the people that bothered to look down on him weren't half as capable as he was anyway.

Surely, the case was the same with the strange girl walking alongside him in that moment. She was clearly a capable mage of some kind. Healing magic was hard, exhausting, and... well, quite frankly, he sucked at it. Obviously, she had some sort of patience that was alien to him, evidenced both by the slight display of her magical talent and the fact that she hadn't decked that burly dude before Roxas had even walked in.

After a second or two of silence, Roxas crossed his arms over his chest.

"Hercules would've wrecked that guy," he finally said, sounding a little fed up. He wasn't the biggest fan of the people in Thebes. It wasn't that they were bad people. They were just... they were afraid of new things, convinced that their Gods were the only ones who would dare curse them. The truth was a lot harder for most to swallow; bad things happened to bad people, whether they knew it or not. That was what made it tragic when bad things happened to good people: it was genuinely a thing worth bemoaning, a subtle sort of tragedy in its own right. Then again, there was something else to it, too. Good people were often the type that nobody wanted bad things to happen to, the sort of people that didn't deserve the harshness of the dark worlds they often found themselves thrust into the cores of. "I'm shocked you didn't wreck that guy."

He paused. Gave the stranger a chance to speak, if she wanted to take it. The follow-up question that fumbled free of his lips was involuntary, brought forth by a childish sort of curiosity and a genuine respect for the stranger's restraint. It was possible that she was just a healer, or that maybe she knew only one spell, but Roxas didn't get that vibe from her.

No, the girl beside him was someone walking on egg shells for a reason other than inadequacy.

"Why didn't you?"

Roxas grew more relaxed as they plodded away from the boarding house. Before long, his hands were in his pockets and his steps grew more winding, less deliberate than they had been when the two of them were walking away from potential danger. The girl beside him seemed nice enough. In a way, she reminded him of Zexion, albeit with a more pleasant demeanor. She came across as more bookish than not, with just a hint of idealism attached to her that Roxas couldn't shake off of his own shoulders. The longer she spoke, the more apparent it became.

She reminded him of someone else, too, whose name he couldn't recall.

He put the thought out of his mind and walked with her toward the summit in the distance. They were momentarily following its heading as if it were a star itself, allowing it to guide them toward some sort of nebulous place where the night would be more kind to the two of them. At least, that was how Roxas felt. He'd already thrown in with the stranger. He didn't intend to rest until they both found a place to sleep, whether it ended up being in a pair of comfortable, pillow laden beds or across a hay bale.

"Rambling's fine. I won't judge you for it."

The blonde stopped as they came to an intersection, peering down both sides of the empty street before he took the time to answer her question. Absently, his index finger rose to his eye, wiping away some of the tiredness with a heavy handed rub.

"Roxas," he said, perhaps a little curtly. "My name's Roxas."

Instead of extending the usual niceties, he thrust both hands back into his pockets and appraised her, resuming their conversation.

"And, uh, I hope you find that. People who rely on you or whatever. I don't think you need to be a hero for that kinda thing, but I hope you find it."

The words he needed weren't there. He wanted to bring up Ven or somebody that relied on him to prove his point, but, for as much as he was sure Ven looked up to him in some way or another, he was starting to believe that their reliance on each other was mutual. His fingers clenched in his pockets, kneading the base of his palm with his knuckles. It wasn't a sore spot, it was just... strange to think about, and difficult for him to really work through. He took friendship for granted more often than he didn't.

Perhaps he was doing the same thing now, drumming up a new friend in his little crusade against whatever it was that they were all fighting for. For the time being, though, he was just content in learning more about her. She was a little more interesting than the Greeks, and obviously more tolerant. The personality, the minty hair, the magic — it all marked her as being different from the mundane men that surrounded them.

He averted his gaze and started down the leftmost path. There was another inn somewhere along the road, a place for them to stay. He was pretty sure he could see a sign for it at the next corner.

"So, Terra. Where are ya from?"

She was an Olympian.

Or something.

Her explanation, the backstory... it all added up to her being a child of one of the Olympians, the pantheon that presided over Thebes and the Grecian world. Roxas couldn't say he knew any of them personally, but he'd... he'd sort of encountered Hades, through Sora, and he had a general idea of the other guys. Hercules was pretty forthcoming about his godly parentage, and demigods weren't an impossible circumstance. Roxas, of course, hadn't met any besides Hercules, but that was hardly evidence that more weren't out there. After all, Phil constantly bragged about training others, the ones that had come before Hercules and his triumphant string of successes. Was it impossible that Terra, the girl who so obviously didn't belong, was one too?

The blonde didn't react visibly throughout the majority of her story. Were it not for the fact that his eyes kept flickering back and forth between her and the cobbled path before them, it would've been easy to mistake his silence for inattention.

When she issued her second, maybe third, apology of the night, Roxas nodded his head to accept it. It was sort of interesting to see the difference in personality between her and her potential cousin, Hercules. Both were very much the apologetic sort, but Hercules had a different kind of confidence about him. He'd already gone through the wringer once. Terra was still in the middle of hers, battling to find her place in things that she didn't yet have figured out. Roxas definitely empathized.

"The stars," he said, frankly. "It's a long story."

Keybearers weren't supposed to meddle, but, for better or worse he'd never really asked for the title. It was thrust upon him, like Terra's current plight. It was better to be honest and ostracized than hidden and... and something about Terra's demeanor coaxed the truth out of him before he could stop himself. Maybe it was the idea that he didn't want to start things off poorly, leaving a potential friend entirely in the dark when he went away for months or weeks at a time, potentially never to return.

In the distance, the inn they were looking for became faintly visible. A long, brass sign stretched out from over the main doorway; hung from it was a cloth banner, emblazoned with the image of a bedroll surrounded by berries. There were some Greek letters surrounding the icon itself, but Roxas couldn't read them, and deemed their content irrelevant. Unless they'd stumbled across the Grecian version of Bed, Bath, and Beyond, the building in the distance was definitively an inn.

"I think that's the place we're looking for. Do..."

A shrill screech from down the road interrupted him.

Roxas turned on a dime, eyes narrowed, hand outstretched across Terra's frame in an effort to guard his new friend from whatever dangers might've been incoming. He didn't take her as fragile, but he wasn't going to take the risk that the one person he knew could heal somebody would get ambushed next.

"You hear that?"

"Yeah," Roxas breathed, responding to Terra's question while he still had the chance to talk. "I can handle myself."

Fighting was something he could definitely do. If anything, he was a lot better at that than he was small talk. Battle came to him naturally, as if he were built for it. The fingers on his outstretched hand clenched slightly as he prepared to summon his Keyblade. He hadn't yet summoned it when a bland looking woman came bolting out of the alley they'd emerged from just moments prior, pursued by three dog-like monsters that were literally nipping at her heels. Roxas's gaze narrowed just as she secured a subtle berth, giving Terra the chance she needed to throw down a lashing of fire that filled the space between the Heartless and their quarry.

The three dogs backed away from the dancing fire, their black little bodies cowering as the lash-like tongues of flame continued to sway before them. Embers drifted away from the blaze, carried by the gentle, summer breeze toward Roxas as he went dashing toward the heat. He leapt into the air a few feet from the flames themselves, lifting his left hand over his head and summoning the Kingdom Key in a flash of brilliant, dazzling light.

"Let's go!"

A sheath of white light wrapped itself around him as he crashed through the fire and slammed the shaft of his Keyblade into the cobblestone path beneath his feet. An array of light spread out from around the impact site like a shockwave, rising up and disheveling the three Heartless that had sought to devour their prey with the same voracity that they wanted to devour him. They howled and rolled, pushed back by the force of his arrival, and regrouped a few feet away. Roxas drew himself to full height.

His free hand reached up to peel a burning bandage off of his face; it'd caught fire when he'd passed through the remnants of Terra's fire spell. He chucked the gauze to the ground and stepped forward, knuckles white around the Kingdom Key's grip. Though his new friend's spell had done wonders for his wounds and eased some of his fatigue, he still wasn't in top shape. Hopefully, the battle ahead wouldn't be a long one, but... if he knew his own luck, the odds of things ending quickly were slim.

One of the dogs dove at him and Roxas rolled to the left, laying into its flank with a razor sharp strike that dissipated the poor beast into a pool of slithering darkness. With only two of them remaining, one dog surged forward, leaping into the air in an attempt to take Roxas down by the shoulders. The youth lifted his Keyblade to defend himself, catching a would-be bite with the Kingdom Key's shaft, but went down under the monster's weight regardless. They weren't tough, not particularly — but he hadn't expected such an aggressive move.

Meanwhile, the remaining Heartless turned its gaze to Terra, eager to devour her while its comrade focused on Roxas. It surged forward, hopping jovially around the flames and narrowing its beady, golden eyes.

---

Roxas:
1.) Spark Rush @ Doggos A-C
2.) Counterstrike @ Doggo A (Kill)
3.) Block vs. Doggo B's Tackle!

Doggos:
A.) Quick Attack @ Roxas (RIP)
B.) Tackle @ Roxas
C.) Prepares to attack Terra

The dog's breath stunk like rotten fish and burning garbage. Like a gaseous fume, the awful odor rolled free of the creature's maw as it struggled to bite through the Kingdom Key's metal shaft, barred from progressing any further by the enchanted steel and Roxas's bare determination. Normally, he would've just rolled over, kicking the thing off with the momentum he needed to shift onto his side... but the creature had him pinned by the shoulder, and every time he moved, the beast's claws sank a little further into his shoulder.

He was still debating how exactly to free himself when an icy barrage blasted into the creature's side. It let out a pained howl and Roxas seized his chance, rolling to the left and pinning the thing to the ground by its face. His fingers clenched tightly around the monster's snout as he clambered to his feet and pointed the Kingdom Key's tip at its exposed side. Icy shrapnel still lingered along the ridges of its cartoonishly proportioned dog-hips, accompanied by tiny swirls of mist that rose up into the air and melted away.

A surge of white light spread from the tip of his weapon like a shotgun blast. The kickback rocked Roxas's shoulder while the blast itself disintegrated the blackened monster beneath him, giving the youth a chance to breathe. Halfway into the street, Terra was still doing battle with the final remaining Heartless. Her weapon, one unfamiliar to him, slammed into the dog's underside and sent it flying through the air. Roxas held back an appreciative whistle as the thing floundered and hit the ground with a happy-go-lucky bounce, only to come bobbing back at the mint-haired heroine a second later.

It took her to the ground in a flash of shining teeth, biting into her shoulder with all the ferocity of a raptor. It snarled and growled as it wrestled for some sort of control, eager to find some sort of success where its comrades had failed.

"Heads up!"

Roxas advanced a step and hurled the Kingdom Key through the air. It whistled as it flew, soaring over the cobblestone to smack the dog's side and knock it clean off of Terra. It growled and tried to shimmy along the stone road, unsure of how to right itself. Darkness festered in the spot where the Keyblade found purchase, and soon black smoke furloughed out of the crevasse it had carved in the beast's side like blood clotting a wound. It disappeared with a gentle pop a half second later. Relieved, the youth once again approached his new friend, leaning forward and extending a hand to help her up.

His clothes were a little singed from jumping through the fire and his shoulder was bleeding, but he was otherwise fine. There was a bit of lingering pain, but it was nothing that he couldn't ignore.

"You alright? There are probably more nearby," he said, sounding displeased. "I don't know where they came from, but... but it's never just three or four of these things."

---

Roxas:
1.) Throw off Doggo B
2.) Dia @ Doggo B (RIP)
3.) Facade Raid @ Doggo C (RIP)

Roxas pulled Terra to her feet with a gentle heave. She healed him a second later, once again casting the healing spell she'd performed inside of the inn from before. Roxas offered his thanks with a nod and a mumbled "thanks," happy that he wasn't going to have to limp around with a bum shoulder. Left hand still gripping his Keyblade, the youth rolled his shoulder in its socket, flexing the muscle and working the joint to make sure that no injuries remained. His clothes were a little torn, but Terra's spell had removed all evidence of the wound itself. Patting the exposed flesh on his shoulder for good measure, Roxas turned his attention back to his new friend.

Terra fired off a handful of questions as they came to her, but Roxas didn't yet answer. Instead, he waited, making sure she got them all out. They were all relevant questions, smart, incisive probes into how he was capable of fighting the Heartless so effectively. He didn't mention the fact that he would've had more to worry about than some ripped clothes if she hadn't been there with him in the first place. She'd done a lot of the work herself, separating the Heartless from their prey and battling them from afar while Roxas closed the gap. Sure, things had gone sort of haywire after that, but few plans lasted longer than a couple of seconds to begin with.

Twirling the Kingdom Key in his grip, Roxas bid the weapon farewell and it disappeared in a swirl of sparks.

Her questions weren't exactly hard ones. The thing that made them difficult to answer was the simplicity of it, reminding him of how much he'd taken for granted regarding his own ability. More importantly, it was how her genuine curiosity struck him. Was she looking for answers to his strength because of the questions surrounding her own? Roxas inhaled sharply and then promptly let out a sigh of relief when she deflected, changing the subject and reminding him that they still hadn't gotten to the inn they were looking for.

Honestly, with all the adrenaline flying through his veins and the quickness of their fight, he'd forgotten about sleep entirely. That realization, however, brought on a new wave of fatigue.

"Yeah," he responded, absently. "We should get where we're going."

A few minutes and one awkward check-in later, Roxas found himself at the edge of a semi-comfortable bed. Legs crossed and elbows resting on his knees, the youth struggled to find the right words to explain everything to Terra. The jacket he'd been wearing earlier was strewn across the bed behind him, leaving him in the lower half of his normal outfit and a black t-shirt. His hands were clasped together in front of his face while he thought of all the things he needed to clear the air about.

The weapon thing probably wasn't a good place to start. Whether or not he could do magic wasn't a bad place, but it was sort of the least pressing part about the info she needed to get caught up on... though it was the easiest thing to answer, and he was silently glad that she'd thrown him a softball or two in her pop-quiz earlier.

"Okay."

He paused, as if reconsidering where to start.

"Those things were called Heartless. They're... they're like the little shadows in people's hearts, but real, and real scary," he continued. "When someone gives into the darkness inside of them, they create a Heartless. I think. There's a lot going on there that I still don't know about."

Roxas leaned back a little, easing up as he got further and further into his explanation. It was a little easier to talk about than he thought it would've been, but then again, he'd been dealing with them for the majority of his admittedly short life.

"There are all sorts of Heartless out there. Most of 'em act like animals. They're not really good at thinking things through, but they'll follow orders, sometimes. Some people can control them. Like, if you know Hades, I think he's got some control over 'em, but I'm not sure."

Did she know about Hades?

Yeah, she probably knew about Hades.

"Most Heartless are just wild, though, and they really don't want to listen to anybody, like the dogs we saw. Those are the dangerous ones. They're all over the place, infesting almost every world. It's harder to keep 'em out, nowadays."