Illusions and Lies (A Super Smash Brothers fan fiction)

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR: TOGETHER, WE RIDE.

Two days after the ball, Robin was the first one to arrive in the briefing room to officially be drafted into the Rebellion's army. To be fair, he did live the closest out of all of them, so he had a head start. He'd surprised himself by getting out of bed on time this morning, as he'd accidentally lost track of time while reading some of the books Robin had checked out from the library. 

He actually had one of those books with him right now, since he was anticipating a little bit of a wait. Casually, he opened it and started reading. It was about military strategy (he'd picked it up yesterday morning, since Robin had thought that studying up on that kind of thing would be useful in the days to come.)

Robin hadn't even finished the page before someone came crashing into the room. Annoyed, he looked up to see Ike and Link grinning and high-fiving each other. 

"What did you do?" Chrom asked without looking up. Shocked, Robin looked over to him. He could've sworn Chrom wasn't here when he arrived. Only Shulk and Caeda had been standing around the table where Chrom had been when they first arrived here. 

"We beat Samus and Zelda here. They were talking about how they bet that we'd be too slow to make it here before us, so we decided to prove them wrong." Link explained. 

Robin sighed and returned to his book. Those two literally couldn't back away from a challenge, could they? Shortly after Link and Ike got settled, Samus and Zelda arrived. They both looked rather put out by the fact that the two boys had beaten them, but they didn't say anything about it. All of this chaos was making it pretty hard for Robin to read his book, which annoyed him. 

Corrin, Lucina, and Sheik all wandered in at the same time. What were the odds of that? Seriously. The three of them appeared to be having a conversation about the pros and cons of paperback books versus hardcover books. An odd thing for them to be talking about, considering that books were usually Robin's thing. Not that he minded seeing other people talking about books, of course. 

And everybody knows that paperback books are superior to hardcover books, anyway. 

Speaking of odd things, where was Marth? It was unlike him to be late. 

Almost as if Robin's thought had summoned him, Marth appeared in the doorway. 

"Sorry about that." Marth was breathing hard, like he'd just been running. Didn't he live about three miles away from here? If so, that was a long way to run. 

"Where were you?" Lucina asked, looking over at him with concern written all over her face.

"Woke up late. Had to run over here." Marth said in between gasps. He kind of looked like he was going to pass out. 

"Three miles? After just waking up?" Lucina looked a bit incredulous. Robin didn't blame her, it seemed like a bizarre feat to him as well. 

Marth could only nod. "Used my Gift a bit, too. It's not helping now, that's for sure." he said, once he was able to speak. 

"Right, well, now that everybody's here, we can get started." Chrom said, cutting their conversation short. "Caeda, I'll let you explain a little bit before we get into weapons and everything else."

Caeda nodded in acknowledgement and turned to face the others. "So, as you all know, you've been drafted. Unfortunately, this is how we've managed to get most of our soldiers. I know you're probably wondering how we draft people when we're rebelling against the government, which usually does the drafting. The truth is, the government is widely despised. We have plenty of supporters here in Ebonfell and the other cities. Whenever someone new says they want to support our cause, we put their names down in a virtual registry. At the end of each month, if we see the need to add more soldiers, we pull names from this registry. Usually it's around twenty to thirty people added in this way, but we're kind of gambling on the fact that you all have incredibly strong Gifts." Caeda explained. When she finished speaking, she stepped back and nodded to Chrom.