paixaorpg | An Escape of Sorts [Active]

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An Escape of Sorts [Active]

Character(s): Flynn Rider, Hercules, Balthier
Content: Flynn is back home for all of one day, then finds himself abruptly back in Paixao.
Setting: Vanaheim gate
Time: Week 27, Just a little while after this log.
Warnings: ...Snark. Oh god the snark. And with Herc around we of course can't guarantee the city's safety.

That was...odd. Once second, he's fighting the guards, the next he's staring at the domed city of Paixao again. And...still in handcuffs. "All right, either I'm dreaming, or this entire thing is somebody's idea of a sick joke."

This gate was different from the other one, but it led into the same city, and he got the same "welcome" that he had before. It even looked like he was handed the same journal. "Right...now to figure out where I'm going."

Using the journal while wearing handcuffs wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but then, most of the things Flynn did wouldn't exactly qualify as "easy." From what it looked like, he hadn't even been back in the Kingdom for that whole day before coming back here. With any luck, that meant he had time to sneak back into the the hotel before...

Rapunzel! No, what about her back in the--

But she was here, safe and sound. She was probably still in her hotel room, sleeping. Then, what did that mean about...? How did this place work? He put a palm to his forehead and decided it was best not to think about it too hard, and worry about the Rapunzel that was here, and the one that was back home when he made it there again. He hoped that this wouldn't happen every time he went to sleep, that could make things very frustrating.

The question right now was...how was he going to get these handcuffs off by the time he got to the hotel? Sure it was all the way on the other side of the city, but where was he supposed to get a set of lockpicks in a place like this? He started scanning the crowd for a woman wearing hairpins. They were hard to use, but better than nothing...

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Considering how long the boy had been in the city so far, it was amazing that there had been no major collateral damage. Yet.

All good things must come to an end.

It wasn't on purpose of course, it was never on purpose. He had just leaned up against a statue a little too hard and dislodged it from it's base, starting a chain reaction that managed to destroy every statue on the fountain. Hercules looked around nervously, hopefully no one around had seen that.

Well, that was an interesting thing to have happen when you're walking around minding your own business (and looking for things to pick a lock with). Flynn's jaw dropped wide open as he watched a random lanky kid in a toga lean up against a statue on the outside of the fountain, then knock it, and every other statue there over, creating a large pile of rubble.

Talk about a unique talent. But wait...if this guy was strong enough to do that just by leaning against it...

With that idea stuck in his head (and hopefully it would prove much safer than it sounded), he sidled his way over to the guy. "Hey there kid. I couldn't help but notice you seem to be kind of strong."

Hercules winced when Flynn spoke up, so much for no one seeing that.

"Yeah, and?" He replied nervously, looking up at the man in confusion. Though, out of the corner of his eye he noticed the handcuffs on the man's wrists. It made Hercules rather... apprehensive about this.

"Well, I just wanted to know if you'd be able to help me out." Flynn put on all his charm, which...was probably kind of useless on a kid like this one, but it couldn't hurt to try, right?

"You see, the reason I'm in these handcuffs is actually a really good one, and it's kind of important that I get out of them so I can get back to where I was staying when I was here last time...which was actually only a couple hours ago, I think. But anyway, I wanted to know if you could do me a huge favor and break them off."

Yeah, it pretty much was useless on him. Hercules looked at Flynn in confusion, he talked too much.

"Break them off?" Hercules couldn't be sure if this guy was trustworthy or not, "W-why are you in those handcuffs anyway?"

"Well...the original reason was that I stole the lost princess' crown. thing is, there isn't any lost princess here. There isn't even a castle. So...it doesn't exactly matter anymore, and there's no reason for me to stay in them." Flynn looked kind of imploring down at him, getting annoyed that some kid with random super-strength was his best hope for getting these things off.

C'mon, kid, just break the things already, not like it's gonna do you any harm...

Well, if the guy was brought here in those handcuffs, having him stay in them would be kind of pointless, given that whoever put him in thoe handcuffs weren't here. It would make things difficult. So Hercules supposed he could help this guy.

"Okay, I'll help" He complied.

"Thanks a lot, kid. What's your name, anyway? I need to know who I owe a favor to." Not that it would help the kid to have Flynn owing him a favor, seeing as he wasn't exactly the "keep a promise" type, but it felt like something he should say anyway.

"Um, I'm Hercules," He replied with a bit of a smile, as he turned his attention to the cuffs on the man's wrists. How to do this without breaking his wrists in the process? He looked around the area when he spotted a fairly large rock. That could work, it would make breaking the locks off a lot easier.

He dragged the man over to what was left of the fountain to make use of a fairly flat elevated surface, and used the rock to break the locks off the cuffs.

The (rather loud) noise accompanying the statues' fall had quickly caught Balthier's attention, the boy who'd caused it following not too long after. The sky pirate had been somewhat careful not to make it obvious he was watching the boy and what seemed to Balthier to be a newcomer, glancing over from time to time from his spot on a nearby bench and keeping his ears open to the conversation. The exact details were a bit hard to hear, but the fact that the newcomer had arrived in cuffs had been noticed.

"That's quite the trick you've got there," Balthier observed, his head cocking to the side slightly. "Not often you see chains broken so easily by stone." Shame the fellow hadn't thought to bring a lockpick. Obviously the man hadn't oft seen shackles.

"Hercules, huh? Flynn Rider, nice to meet you." Flynn quirked an eyebrow when the boy picked up a rock, and almost protested when Hercules started pulling him over to the fountain. But a few seconds later, the cuffs were off, and he was rubbing the sore spots on his wrists.

He looked up as another man joined them. "I would've done it myself, but this guy seemed like he could get them off a bit quicker."

Hard to hear by Balthier's standards, perhaps. Fran had managed to catch most of the conversation, once her ears had recovered from the thunderous din of the falling statues. An interesting turn of events, that. She couldn't think of many humes who would have had the power for such things, much less the strength to so effortless break the shackles with nothing more than a bare rock.

"He does seem to have quite the talent." And an equal share of misfortune, if he hadn't meant to so handle defeat the statuary. "Though fast may not always be for the best."

"It's a good thing your new friend has a fair amount of accuracy to match that strength of his," he added. Even if there was a fair amount of clumsiness there as well.

"You're telling me." Painless wasn't exactly how Flynn would describe that, either. His wrists were probably going to hurt for a while. Where was Rapunzel when he needed her? ...Right, back at the hotel, probably wondering where he went. She was not gonna be happy with him, that was for sure.

"Imagine if he'd hit me instead. I'd have to try to find another one of those potion things." Flynn figured they were common knowledge, since that Craig guy had just handed him one without a care in the world.

"I hear such things can be less than easy to find," Fran answered. Oh, between the both of them, she and Balthier had a few to their name but she saw little reason to mention it just at the moment. Sore wrists was a better fate than crushed bones and one that was far easier to let heal on their own.

And besides, there was more pressing problem at hand, as it seemed that the young man who'd broken the manacles had simply... vanished, although Fran would hardly be the one to choose to comment.

“At least the sort used to mend bones rather than skin. Don’t have any where you come from, do you?” Balthier asked, giving the man a once-over. He looked almost like he could come from Ivalice the more Balthier thought about it, though there were a handful of noticeable differences in dress, and it certainly didn’t match the sort of thing any Dalmascan (as that was the closest approximation Balthier was able to make with this Flynn character’s accent) would wear.

He noticed the other young man’s disappearance not too long after Fran did, but chose to say nothing on it. No doubt he would be doing little more than stating the obvious, and it was quite easy to come up with an idea as to what might have happened to the powerful youth.

"I wish. The closest we've got where I'm from is my girlfriend's magic hair." Flynn said the sentence so nonchalantly it was like that sort of thing was an every day occurrence, and like it hadn't made him freak out as if the world was ending when she healed his hand. come to think of it...how did that work? He'd gone back, and the hand was still hurt there...but he'd gotten it healed while he was here. That...didn't make any more sense than suddenly showing up here or a boy with super strength. Or, as he was just now noticing, a voluptuous woman with rabbit ears wearing skintight leather clothes and high heels.

In Fran's opinion it was best to not think to hard about the impossibilities of the place. The explanations were painfully hard won at best, and at worst were simply absent. Thus why go to the effort of worrying, when it brought little by way of proper results? Besides, she was more interested in the idea of magic hair.

"Is such magic common where you come from?"

Any thoughts that Balthier might have had were all but silenced by the man's statement, and for a moment, the always-ready-with-a-witty-comment sky pirate could think of nothing to say. One would think that with all of the things Balthier had seen that he would be desensitized to such comments by now, but it was the combination of the idea of "magic hair," already fantastic in itself, and the man's acting as though it were not at all special somehow managed to catch him completely off-guard. He glanced over at Fran briefly and found himself relieved his partner was able to ask the question that had seemed to slip his mind.

"Cat got your tongue?" There was a pause. "...Or maybe a rabbit?" Flynn grinned for a second, then faced the...ahem, faced eye to eye the female who'd asked him the question.

"No, it's just her. Kinda freaky, when you think about it." The feigned nonchalance was now giving way to something of how Flynn had actually reacted to Rapunzel's magic glowing hair. Which was pretty much the exact opposite of how he wanted to come across.

While Fran was at least relieved to see that here ears weren't the focus of the man's gaze she couldn't much say she was particularly amused by his addition to the more common phrase. Even here, where her kind was rarer still than on Ivalice she had little patience for remarks on her appearance.

"She bears a rare magick, then."

Rare and nothing like anything she'd heard of, although that was less surprising in a place such as this.

Balthier returned the less-than-impressive change to the phrase with a less-than-impressed look, which quickly became even less so once he realized what exactly the man was looking at.

"In an equally rare place," he said, half-distractedly. There was a short pause before Balthier spoke again. "I wouldn't suppose that girl of yours knows about those wandering eyes?" Not that Balthier really cared about the status of this man's relationship, but...

"Wandering eyes? No idea what you're talking about. But the magic glowing hair thing? Definitely unique." Flynn had a really bad habit of getting caught red-handed, but he wasn't about to let that get in the way of a somewhat decent chance at conversation.

No idea? Fran wasn't buying that in the slightest, and her expression as much as said so as she frowned at Flynn's words. She was hardly blind, after all, to not notice when she had become the center of attention. And yes, it did occasionally have its uses. But this was hardly the time for it.

"You stare."

Or the girl could. Great. He gave a bit of a sheepish grin.

"All right, all right, you caught me. Just...don't tell Rapunzel, okay? She's gonna have enough of a reason to hurt me when I find her again without that."

"Keep those eyes where they should be and I'll consider," Balthier muttered, glancing once over to Fran before looking back at the man. But in an instant Balthier was back to a more amiable attitude. "Now, what exactly did you do to earn that kind of ire, might I ask?"

Fran, for her part, said nothing more on the matter, although she offered a very slight nod to Balthier in response to his glance. Provided that their companion kept his eyes where they ought to remain she had no problem with not mentioning his lapse to anyone.

Mind, if he didn't keep them where they ought to be, then it might not be the only thing he'd need to explain, but for now it seemed that Balthier had things well enough in hand.

"What, from Rapunzel? She uh...doesn't get out much." Flynn had to hope that would be enough of an explanation, because he couldn't really explain himself as to just why she was so partial to hitting him in the back of the head with a frying pan. She hadn't done it to him since they first met in the tower back while they were in the kingdom, but he wouldn't put it past her in the least to do it again, and was fully expecting it to happen at his first major slip-up.

"I was looking for something closer to an action, but an explanation is an explanation, I suppose." Balthier couldn't imagine that someone with "magic hair" would make themselves anything other than scarce--whatever it was that having "magic hair" entailed besides the obvious.

"And would thus mistake your intentions?"

Not that Fran was assuming that this man's endeavors were necessarily well-intentioned. After all, he seemed to have some reason to worry about her reaction and that hardly boded well. But she wouldn't call him out on it. It would have been hypocritical at the very least.

"All right, I broke into her tower because I was being chased by the castle guard after I stole the lost princess' crown." Flynn was hoping that being so nonchalant about this would make them think he was lying, though he wasn't entirely so sure that he needed to.

That caught Balthier's attention more than anything the man had said yet. A crown, eh? Even if it was a lie, it was a potentially profitable one, with a treasure much more interesting than this place usually had to offer. A small smirk appeared on the sky pirate's face and he placed his hands on his hips and cocked his head. "Is that so? And how does a man such as yourself come into the possession of such an item, hm?"

Ah, now there was something more like it. True, a tower seemed like hardly the thing to climb to escape from the guards, but the fact that he was here at all seemed to imply that at the very least, they'd decided not to climb after him. Odd, yes, but who was she to say what the guards might or might not do?

Or, for that matter, if he hadn't had a plan ready for if they had followed him.

"Not by honest means, I should think."

"I just told you, I stole the thing." Flynn shrugged. It was an everyday thing for him, though stealing the crown had been a rather more complicated operation than normal. He didn't have much intent on ever running into the Stabbington brothers again, at any rate.

Balthier took a few steps closer to the man. "Which takes a certain amount of talent, I should think. Otherwise you'd hear of plenty of people claiming that they stole a crown. Now. It just so happens that I have quite a bit of time on my hands at the moment--just enough for a long story, I'd say." He took another few steps to the right. "I wouldn't suppose you'd care to oblige?"

"Unless the brave thief is less bold than he claims?"

Not that it much mattered to her. A tale was a tale, yes. But to not speak up was just as much of a mark of character was doing so would have been. How this man chose to mark his exploits was up to him. Still, she followed Balthier's lead, stepping closer herself, albeit on the other side.

Flynn sighed. All right, if they wanted the details they could have them. No skin off his back, especially since it seemed like they were much more interested in the theft itself than the consequences the theft should have had. Of course...this required him to go into melodramatic story-telling mode. He planted his feet on the floor, and started punctuating his speech with wide gestures, talking in a hushed, but excited voice.

"Okay, so there we were, me and the Stabbington brothers, a couple of the most wanted guys in the whole Kingdom. It was the day before the lost princess's birthday, bright and sunny, and not even eight in the morning. We climbed up onto the roof of the castle, and the Stabbington brothers lowered me into the room on a rope, right behind the guards. I nabbed the crown, they pulled me up, and we started booking it out of there like there was no tomorrow."

There was a beat, where the excitement was suddenly lost, replaced by a much more placid, bemused expression. "How was I supposed to know I'd fall in love with the person the crown belonged to that same night?"

At least this man was able to tell a good story, even if Balthier doubted a few of the details (the names of the brothers in particular). The part about love seemed a bit dramatic to him, too, but he supposed more fantastic things had been known to happen. "Both a crown and princess. Impressive. I take it this princess is your magical-haired girl?" It wasn't that hard to figure out, really.

"Not often you come across that kind of talent, wouldn't you say?" He looked over at Fran with a small smirk before looking back at the man. The two sky pirates might not have stolen a crown, but a princess they had had--requested or not. "Any particular motive behind the theft? Fame, fortune, adventure, anything like that?"

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An Escape of Sorts [Active]

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