Conquest of Avalon

Florette IX: The Fire Fighter

Unless Florette wanted to be hauled off to Cambria’s dungeons, forcing her way past the guards at the gate wouldn’t work, as far as solutions went. With Glaciel’s ring, she could probably skate past before they caught her, but Srin Sabine’s identity would struggle to last the night.

Yet another reason to just go back to the dormitories, as if she were looking for one, but it was a feather weighed against hundreds of people trapped in a burning building by their blatantly evil Avaline bosses.

With no time to lose, Florette doubled back, running away from the crowded gates until the guards thinned out a bit. Gawking spectators were still present enough that one might see her scale the wall if they turned around, but there wasn’t time to get completely out of sight. She’d just have to bet that the flaming factory would hold their attention, which seemed like a risk worth taking.

Now the wall…

Florette fished out Glaciel’s ring and slipped it onto her right hand, watching her fingers curl into icy claws. Not for the first time, she wished she had another one to complete the set and make all of this cleaner, but at that point, she might as well have wished that Fernan was here to fly her over the wall and quiet the flames.

Instead, she grew a sharp hook shape from the palm of her hand and swung it towards the intersection of the stones in the wall. When it held her weight, she jammed the fingers of her left hand into a different gap, trying to find whatever purchase she could. With daylight to examine it and hours to plot a route, she might have been able to climb up without the ring, but there was no time to waste.

“Hey!” one of the onlookers hissed from beneath her, but Florette didn’t stop. All she could do was hope that the darkness cloaked her enough to occlude any detail and keep going.

“Sabine!” the same voice hissed, causing Florette’s left hand to slip off the stone it’d been trying to grab, leaving her dangling by the hook. Her ears were starting to ring again, but there was nothing to be done about it.

At least they didn’t say ‘Florette’, though this isn’t much better. By this point, she was definitely far enough up that a fall would seriously hurt, so making a run for it wasn’t much of an option.

Trying to ignore the voice calling to her from below, Florette swung herself up, her hand finding purchase on the rock, and resumed her climb.

Her right hand was doing most of the lifting and it was starting to wear, even with the ring’s power behind it. Her shoulders burned, sweat was drifting into her eyes, and it looked like there was still a quarter of the wall left, but Florette pressed on. It was so close, she knew she could make it.

Though how much I’ll be able to help once I do is an open question.

If its performance during the Battle of White Night was any indication, the ice magic from the ring wouldn’t be nearly enough to put out the fire on its own, or even make an appreciable dent. A few handfuls of ice wouldn’t count for much with the whole building on fire.

That meant evacuation had to be the priority, which meant breaching whatever measures were keeping people trapped within. Plus the fire, of course.

The roughest beginnings of a plan were forming by the time Florette reached the top of the wall, summoning all her strength to swing her leg over the metal spikes at the top of the wall successfully, though they did graze her ankle.

“Florette!”

Her heart dropped into her stomach.

“I know you said not to ever call you that, but you weren’t listening, and—”

“Shh!”

Christophe had copied her, hands and feet spiked with ice as he climbed up the wall, only a few steps below her now.

Breathing heavily, Florette hoisted him up after her, then started descending the other side of the wall. “Why are you here?” I was very explicit that he should minimize even leaving his room. The wrong word of his baroque dialect of Avaline could get him taken away. The Territorial Guardians had done worse for less.

“Everyone on the block was heading this way, and you said to blend in with them, so I figured it was better to follow them.”

“Why?” Florette asked tersely, though she didn’t really have any high ground here. Neither of us should be doing this, but here we are.

“Mostly it was family that was late coming back from work. The neighbors started to talk, and realized that no one who worked at the Princess Lizzie’s plant had come home yet. Shifts are always 10 hours flat, apparently, and they were due back hours ago.”

Florette frowned, descending another step. “That’s a lot of detail you have there.”

“Yeah, well, if it were just Danny’s girls, they’d probably be out at the pub, but Gerry would never miss seeing his new baby, and Smittie promised to make his wife an anniversary dinner. Something was obviously up.”

“Something like you completely ignoring my instructions to keep to yourself and not risk talking to people?” Florette dropped down the last few feet, feeling her leg lance with pain up from the cut in her ankle. “Damn it!” she hissed.

Christophe dropped down beside her, sending icy cracks through the cobbles as he landed gracefully. “I came here to help! Not sit inside that dreary apartment all day waiting for you to remember I exist. And now I find you’re pulling big moves like this without me! What am I supposed to think?”

Florette glanced towards the burning factory, then back to Christophe, catching her breath as she tried to ignore the high-pitched whining in her ears. When did I become the cautious naysayer anyway? “You know what? I’m not your mother. Obviously you did it well enough to get away with it, so I’ll leave it there for now. We can figure out what to do with you next when there’s not a building on fire.”

“Great!” Christophe said with no trace of irony in his voice. “So why are we going back inside? Did you miss a spot the first time you were in there? Or just to spread it further?”

“I didn’t set the fires, Christophe. There are people trapped in there, and the Cambrian guards aren’t lifting a finger to help.”

“But—”

“And if you have a problem with saving them, I’m not interested in hearing it.”

“No, of course I don’t want them to die. I didn’t realize anyone was still inside. But aren’t you supposed to just be a boring student? What if someone recognizes you?”

I’ll deal with that then. Still, in the interest of making that less likely, Florette threw the hood of her Cloak of Nocturne over her head, trying to shroud her face in darkness. “You should probably take your mask off too. That way no one from tonight will recognize you tomorrow when you put it back on.”

“No,” Christophe said immediately. “A visible Hiverrien would raise too many questions. We don’t want the people inside killing me for sorcery.”

“Aren’t you, like, thirteen generations removed from Glaciel? I can’t imagine you look so spirit-touched that a quick glance in the dark is going to be an issue. And no one’s seen you without it, so there’s nothing to match.”

“I’m not taking it off!” he snapped. “Trust me, I don’t look right without it. I’ll take my chances.”

“Now you care about being cautious?” We don’t have time to debate this. “Fine. Try to make any ice magic you do look like it’s coming from me, if you can.”

Christophe, thankfully, nodded in acceptance and followed her towards the building, gliding smoothly across the stone path.

Avaline guardians were clustered around the front, spraying water through narrow floppy pipes attached to their wagons, probably some kind of binder artifact. All their water was focused on the tattered patches of fire on the adjacent buildings, though, with Princess Lizzie’s apparently already a lost cause. Sounds about right for them.

Florette approached the rear of the building and reached for a door handle, recoiling at the hot metal’s touch before she got burned. Why couldn’t it be easy? She encased her hand in ice, consciously lowering its temperature as low as she could, then pulled on the handle again, managing to give it a good few tugs before her insulation melted away.

But the door stayed closed. Locked. Of course.

“Where are the fucking windows?” None on the ground floor, certainly. But one had shattered earlier… Florette jumped back a few paces, tilting her head towards the upper floors, which seemed to be the only ones that warranted the luxury. No windows for the first three levels, and only slits on four and five. After that it would be too high for anyone to survive a fall down, let alone something she could expect to scale the same way she had the wall. Any hooks would be melted before she could even make it halfway up.

An idea jumped to mind, using a rapidly expanding pillar of ice to launch her into the air towards the upper levels, something at a scale Christophe might actually be able to pull off.

In theory, but it’s not like he’s practiced aiming it. Most likely I’d just be flinging myself to my death, or splatting against the side of the building.

The whining in her ears was getting louder, but punctuated by a loud pop not unlike the crackling of wood in a fire. Even though the building’s made of stone… Wood inside? Joints and fixtures? Support beams?

Her question was answered with a shower of blood as a body hit the ground right in front of her.

Florette lept back with a yelp just in time to see the next woman jump from the top floor. “Khali’s curse.” Stop wasting time thinking and do something. You used to be good at that. “Christophe, can you make a ramp up there? Do you have enough… Magic? Material? I’m not really sure how your technique works.” It wasn’t as simple as Camille’s obviously, since he hadn’t brought any ice with him, so maybe he could conjure enough from thin air?

“Not without a lot of water. There isn’t much in this air.”

“Is there usually? I guess it does feel wet when it’s foggy.” Florette shook her head. “Nevermind. Do what you can to make a safe landing. I’m going inside.”

“How?”

“I’ll worry about that. You try to get the water you need without getting seen. I recommend springing a leak in one of those wagons somehow… A spike up from the ground, maybe. Hard to notice, and you can freeze it into a little viaduct to bring what you need over here. If you get spotted, yell for me.”

“For Sabine? Or Florette?”

Neither would be safe. “For… The Blue Bandit. See you on the other side.”

Christophe furrowed his brow in concentration as Florette willed herself to slip into Nocturne. That wasn’t the hard part, really. The Cloak felt like it wanted to go there. But she had to hold onto reality, or she could slip away forever.

But if it can detach me enough to survive Glaciel’s fortress crumbling into rubble after the explosion went off, it should damn well get me through a two-inch thick door.

And it did, though not as easily as Florette would have expected. The closer she got to the heat, the more the Cloak resisted her, her body casting shadows in the flickering light as though it was still fully present. It hurt too, though that was less of an issue, and neither stopped her from eventually pushing through.

Immediately, the smoke was so thick it was hard to even see, harder still not to choke on it. This was worse than what the flame sages had pulled after Camille’s duel with Lumière, and Florette had only gotten out of that because she had a friend who could see the fire and crowds through the smoke and fly, both of which would have been really convenient to have right now.

Instead, you're all stuck with me. She pulled up her shirt over her nose, which helped the tiniest bit with the smoke and more importantly hid her features, then ran a melting icy hand over it to cool down the air passing through it, though it had the unfortunate effect of getting it wet as well.

A look back at the door showed that it didn’t have a visible locking mechanism to undo on the inside either, though the handle was connected to a clock set into the wall, itself already on fire. Prodding it didn’t accomplish anything, and smashing it did nothing for the door either, so Florette cut her losses and started looking for people.

“Does anyone need help?” Florette called as loud as she could? “Trapped?”

She heard nothing, even straining to hear it underneath the drone in her ears, but her eyes managed to glimpse a body on the ground through the smoke.

Florette flipped it over, revealing a woman in her forties, still unresponsive. But still breathing, barely. She lifted the woman up with both hands and started shuffling as fast as she could back towards the door. At the last second, she phased into Nocturne and tore her way through, earning a few more burns for her trouble, and set the woman down a little ways from the building.

“Ready, Christophe? I could use a way up to the roof. Easier to go down than up.”

Christophe sputtered inarticulately, gesturing to the modest pool of ice beneath him, slowly being swelled as a tiny half-pipe carried water from the wagon, as yet unnoticed.

“I think you need to pick up the pace a bit,” Florette said, trying to find another way up the building. But actually, if I’m starting at the top, I don’t need to go up that building. There were two other factories next to it, the ones that the guards were working so diligently to protect, and the one on the left had a higher roof than the burning one. Perfect.

Florette dashed into Nocturne through the door without even making sure it was locked first, since it definitely was, then sprinted towards the stairs, only to meet another locked door before she could reach them. That was nothing another trip to Nocturne couldn’t solve, though it left her feeling lightheaded on the other side, and the hurried sprint up fifteen flights of stairs didn’t exactly help either.

By the time she reached the roof, she could see dozens of people clustered on the adjacent one, some trying their luck jumping to the other building. It was hard to tell, but it looked like two people were kissing each other. By the time Florette was close enough to see it better, they had both jumped.

And failed to reach it.

No time to waste, she leapt to the other roof, cushioning her fall with darkness, and ran towards the gap, where most of the rooftop refugees were clustered.

They just needed a way across.

The Ring of Glaciel could only do so much, but all she needed to turn jumping the gap from a fruitless last chance to decent odds was a few extra feet.

She leaned over the side of the roof and conjured ice to her hand, spreading it in an arch for support and then closing the triangle, making it as thick as she could. The fire wasn’t too bad at this corner, and the ice seemed to be holding for now, but who knew how long that would last.

“You!” She grabbed scrawny-looky boy and pointed him towards the ramp. “Take off your jacket and lay it down. I don’t want people slipping on the ice.”

“What the fuck? Are you crazy?” Despite his words, he threw his jacket over the ice, and Florette ran up it, feeling it hold her weight before she leapt the last few feet to the other building. And now that she was on the safe side, she could repeat the bridge process even more sturdily, until the gap was closed.

She quickly ran across it then back to test the weight, then directed three more people to throw down their jackets for traction.

“Come across!” she yelled. “One at a time!”

With a pulse of power to reinforce it each time, the bridge held long enough to get everyone over, though one man nearly slipped and fell before the woman behind him caught him and led him the rest of the way across.

“Is that everyone?”

“Everyone on the roof, but the elevator snapped before the last trip. There’s still people on the eighth floor.”

“Got it, thanks,” she said, running back across as the ice collapsed beneath her feet, then letting herself slip through the roof to the floor below, which hopefully no one saw.

She didn’t see anyone on the top floor, so she ran towards the doors at the corner, hopefully the staircase.

It wasn’t.

“Of course,” she muttered, staring down the vertical shaft. The massive winches at the bottom suggested that this was another birdcage lift like the one in the hotel, though the cage itself was nowhere to be found.

Florette doubled back towards the door next to the shaft, surely the one with the staircase behind it, but it was locked firmly in place, which meant dragging herself through Nocturne again, leaving her panting and coughing on the other side as she tried to catch her breath.

Need to move faster. I’m no good to anyone if I pass out and die in here. Why the fuck were all of these doors locked?

Worse, she had found the staircase, but it was covered with oily rags, already ablaze. If a couple hot doors had been that much trouble, Florette didn’t even want to think how hard it would be to sprint down and then back up ten floors of stairs with every third step blanketed in fire.

“Hello?” She yelled down the center of the stairwell, trying to see where the people were clustered. “Is anyone down there?”

“Thank the Binder! They’re here!” At first, Florette could barely hear the voice echoing down the stairwell from what sounded like the eight or ninth floor. “They didn’t send the elevator back down once they reached the roof. We’re stuck here!”

Explaining the choice to jump rather than burn.

“Please!”

“I’m coming!” she yelled, trying to think of how the fuck to get them out safely. Was a sprint up the stairs worth a try, now that she knew for a fact that people were counting on her? She could make it down by slipping through more floors, though every contact with Nocturne carried further risk than the last. “Does the fire thin out as you get lower?” If they were in the stairwell, maybe it did.

“Can’t see up there too well, but it looks about the same!” The same voice called up. “There’s fourteen of us here, but eight have already passed out, and the rest aren’t strong enough to carry them all.”

Ok, so I definitely need to get up there myself, even if Christophe can come through. Great.

“Hold on! I’m finding a way down.”

“Can’t you just spray the stairs?”

If only. “Don’t have the water. Cambria’s finest are using it all to protect the other factories. They already gave up on you. I’m going to try the elevator. What floor are you on?” I might not have a way back up the shaft, but at least it’s not actively on fire, which is more than I can say for the stairs.

“We’re on eight!”

Alright, I can manage that. She pushed through the locked stairwell door and back out to the floor, head swimming as she returned to the smoke, then ducked into the elevator shaft, staring down it to carefully count exactly eight floors up from the first one on the ground. Once she was sure she had it, she jumped, slowing her fall each level with a quickly-shattering hook of ice.

She landed on the eighth floor with a roll, then readjusted her hood and mask to try to improve her breathing.

“Did you see that?”

“She just jumped right down!”

Florette hopped up, scanning the floor for the trapped workers, but it looked empty, with nothing moving save a lone sputtering loom. Where the fuck are they?

“Are you coming up?” A voice called down. “You were really close, almost made it.”

“I did make it! This is the eighth floor, I’m positive! I counted from the bottom.”

“Did you start from the first floor, or the ground floor?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?!” she yelled incredulously, feeling smoke encroach into her throat. I guess not.

There wasn’t a response for a moment, but ultimately the details didn’t matter.

“We’re one level up,” they said, apparently done mocking her mistake. Whatever. That was so far from what was important here it wasn’t worth sparing another thought.

The important thing was getting up to where they actually were.

Florette rounded the corner into the shaft and jumped, trying to hook onto the rim of the first floor above her with another hook of ice to extend her range, but it shattered the moment it touched it and sent her falling back down, barely landing back on the edge of the shaft. A dip into Nocturne sheltered Florette from the worst of the fall, but the smoke was getting to be so thick that she wasn’t sure how much more of this she could handle. That didn’t bode well for trying the jump raw, either, since her hand probably wouldn’t fare much better.

Which leaves trying the pillar trick. Inside the burning building, with way less magic at my disposal. Experimentally, Florette pushed ice from her hands as she pushed off the wall, seeing what kind of energy it could add to the motion, but it was sputtering water the moment laid her hands on the wall, and it didn’t do much for her momentum. So that idea was out, unless she could get Christophe in here to try it.

Fuck!

Florette was running out of time. The people up there were running out of air. Out of hope, if the jumpers were any indication. But I can’t. There’s no one else to help them.

She tried the ice hook again, seeing if sliding into Nocturne could lower her weight enough for the hook to support it, and managed to pull herself up a whole six inches before it broke again, impotent water raining down on her head as she fell.

It’s like what Magnifico said about approaching spirits with tools suited to deal with their nature. I’m fighting a fire with ice and shadow, and they just aren’t up to the task.

But she had what she had, and whining about the misfortune of it wouldn’t do anything for those people trapped up there.

Still, it did raise the question of what would work best here. Fernan’s mastery of fire was an obvious choice, letting him calm the flames and fly straight up, but Florette didn’t have any way to copy that with the tools she had, so she kept thinking.

Something to raise the stone beneath her, or carve a path for her to climb? An earth spirit could do that, but there weren’t exactly any on hand, save the slumbering Terramonde beneath the floor.

Fourteen helpless people were depending on her, at the very least, and—

Helpless… I’ve been thinking about this like I’m all on my own, but I’m not.

Florette ran back to the stairwell and cupped her hands around her mouth, blinking burning tears from her stinging eyes. “I’m only one floor below you! Can someone stick out their hand and pull me up?”

It only took a moment to get her response, a young bearded man poking his top half out the edge of the shaft from a floor above. “Jack’s holding my feet. Ready when you are.”

Thank fuck. Florette jumped, reaching for the hand above her and trusting it to hold her above an eight-story hole. Her fingers were sweaty and weak, and she could feel the same from the man above, but he grabbed on with his other hand and began to pull despite it.

By the time she made it up, he had rolled over onto his back, coughing heavily.

“Thank you.” Florette turned to see who was left, and it looked like only two more were still conscious. Time to move.

She ran towards the window and called a ball of ice to her hand, throwing it out before it melted in a signal to Christophe.

She could see him down there, so very far below, in an expanding circle of ice connected by a thin thread to the water wagon around the front. By the angered looks of the guards searching under the carriage, she wasn’t the only one that could see it.

But we’re moving now regardless.

Following her signal, Christophe started to condense the disc of ice beneath his feet, pushing himself up towards her as it narrowed into a thinner and thinner pole. By the time he reached the ninth-level-that-they-called-the-eight-level, it was barely any wider than his waist, obviously inadequate to safely lower fourteen people.

“Make it a slide!” she called out to him, making a curve motion with her hands to underline the point.

Christophe, thankfully, picked up on her idea, widening the base into a somewhat gradual curve as the pillar hollowed out beneath his feet. As he converted it, he leaned closer and closer to the window, until the icy slide was nearly touching it.

Its walls were already starting to sweat, melting in the ambient heat, and Chrisophe could only make them so thick, so Florette wasted no time lowering the first unconscious body down into it, the man who’d helped pull her up.

He went skidding across iced-over stone at the bottom, sliding nearly forty feet back. Not the safest descent ever, but certainly safer than being in a burning building.

Christophe was somehow keeping his footing on the narrow, melting pipe, dancing around the top as he tried to keep shoring it up.

A thickly-built woman was already ready with the next unconscious body, handing it Florette fast enough that she barely even had to move. When she was done with that one, a black-haired boy had the next person ready.

Florette wasted no time, dropping the next bodies as soon as they touched her hands, hoping that they were still capable of recovering. One, two, three, four, five… Each descent weakened the slide a little more, but Christophe made sure it held. Khali only knew what the guards were even doing, but they were a problem for later.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen… Florette waved down the conscious man and woman, the final rescuers, and drank in lungfuls of air as she reached the window for the final time.

“Wait.” The woman stopped at the threshold. “We never thanked you. Not often you see a binder step up like that. Who are you, anyway?”

“The Blue Bandit,” she said, in case anyone had heard Christophe call her that. Best to keep things simple. “No more time for questions. You have to go.” She waved the woman onto the slide, waited until she saw her skid across the bottom, then directed the boy to jump.

As he hit the slide, the top of it finally shattered, sending Christophe flying.

He managed to grab onto the back of the slide lower down and use it to slow his descent, but it was quickly collapsing behind him, so Florette wasted no time jumping down after him, using the Ring of Glaciel to emulate his technique.

She was breathing heavily by the time she landed, water gushing around her feet. Christophe managed to spin a bit of it around himself to land fluidly next to her, swearing loudly when he saw the circle of spears surrounding them.

“Don’t move! If you set down your weapons and come quietly, you will be treated fairly by the crown.”

“Weapons?” Christophe hissed confusedly.

“They must think we’re binders,” she whispered back. “Listen, I want you to push a pillar of ice up beneath our feet, as fast as you can. I think we can launch ourselves up.”

“And then what?”

“Towards the ocean. You can pull up a strip to land on, and I’ll be fine with my Cloak. Trust me.”

Christophe laughed, sending a wave of fear through the surrounding guards, but they didn’t have long to react to that before Florette found herself sailing through the air, hurtling past other factories as they got smaller and smaller beneath her, black waters rapidly approaching.

She saw Christophe pull a spike of brown ice towards himself up from the waves, catching himself close enough to the apex of the jump that he managed to land safely, sliding down towards the dark waters.

Florette had a less pleasant way down, marshaling her will to slip one final time into darkness’ embrace as her feet hit the water. It smelled putrid, and she could feel it clinging to her hair, but she wasn’t hurt, which counted for a lot.

By the time she reached the shore, her shoulders were burning and her lungs were ash, but she made it. And despite how disgusting everything else was in the frigid night air, the Cloak of Nocturne remained completely pristine.

She lay on the rocks for as long as she dared, slowly recovering enough of her strength to walk back home, then slinked through the shadows of the street until she’d returned to Mourningside. After a moment’s hesitation on account of the cold, she dove into the water once more, here actually clean enough to get rid of the worst of the filth, though she’d probably have to bathe thrice with lye to get rid of it completely.

Opal was asleep when she returned to the room, so Florette kept her footsteps mouse-quiet as she undressed and dried herself off as best as she could, then flopped down in bed.

When she woke, the sun was high in the sky, her body so exhausted she could barely move. The cut in her ankle was stinging and aching at the same time, but she could still move it, and it wasn’t too swollen, so she could probably get away with ducking the doctor until it healed up a bit.

Eventually, she felt alert enough to grab the book at her bedside and open it to where she’d left off. Introductory Physics. And then she remembered.

She’d missed her exam, in one of the most important classes for learning Avaline science. All that studying for nothing, and she’d have to work twice as hard to even have a chance of passing the class at all.

Fuck!

Florette tossed the book aside, pulling the covers over her head, and went back to sleep.