The mission report was short and honestly concerning. "Talk with Sir Frasier at the mansion past Marianne's bakery. You will get your mission and payment there." Even more concerning the mansion is on a hill with no real footpath to be seen. Anya's cane is gripped in their hand tightly while they wait for the rest of the group, the carvings on the hand hold being her only real grounding under all this stress. Quickly the rest of the group appears, her legs almost buckle when Arte looks a second too long at the cane and she tries to lean less on it. Though other than that everyone doesn't bat much of an eye at it, though the only others that didn't know are a bit too busy staring into each others eyes and hyping each other up for the talk with our future boss.
They go through the tall grass with Arte leading, the grass attempting to tickle er's chin. Noctis stays by the back of the group, if only to make it seem like Anya isn't going as slow and to hold her shoulders if he sees her close to falling. The gesture is combated with a scowl the first few times, but low nods of thanks after saving a tumble that might've rolled her back down to where they started.
Once the whole team is at the front walkway, Anya is praying to every God she knows that she never has to walk that ever again. Once Blix knocks on the door it opens, as if this stout man has been waiting the whole whole hour we've been getting up his hill. He invites us in with a hand and a smile that wrinkles the corners of his eyes. Before we can all sit down he starts speaking. "Thank you for agreeing to help. My son is in a difficult position." He temples his hands, elbows rested on the purple and gold chair he's sat in.
Anya's cane sits between their thighs as they lean forward resting on the hold. Jas and Blix sit on the couch with her with the other two standing at either side. When Blix speaks up everyone starts to realize they had waited a bit too long to elaborate. "What sort of trouble has he gotten himself into specifically?"
The man quirks an eye at Blix, clearly not expecting her to lead on speaking. "A few days ago he just ran off somewhere, saying he was going to pick some flowers with his friend, Neil or something like that. It would've been normal for my little Aleksei to be gone with him for a day, even two sometimes but this is just concerning..." The old man chews on his fingernails, eyes darting a bit and landing onto Noctis. It's understanding at least, he's all imposing and dread to look at, not to mention how his image fades out of your eyes once he goes past your immediate vision. He doesn't even try to look sorry for his disconnect with being perceived, he just keeps that dumb neutral face and nods.
"If that's all the info you have, could you point us to where he was going." At Blix's words the man's eyes dart back to her too fast.
"Yes the meadow he usually goes to isn't too far. There's a big silo that you can see from here." He pulls himself out of the chair to walk and point it out. Thank god there's a path but it doesn't look as even as it should.
Turns out it's even worse than Anya expected. Her legs were already tired so when Noctis offers a hand she doesn't care about the soft whispers between Blix and Jas the moment they notice. Soon enough and really far too late the sun starts to set and Jas grabs the tents and bedrolls from his pack. "Ok everyone!" He yells with three tents behind him. "How are we going to split these up? I'm voting 'he's, 'she's, and 'they's."
"I'm a 'she' and a 'they', where would I go?" Anya raises their hand from the lazily spread out bedroll they're laying face down on.
"I'm none of those." Arte half-yells, poking at the fire Blix started.
"I'm only a 'he' out of convenience." Noctis says rubbing Anya's back lightly.
"Ok so fuck all y'all and your fucked up relation to gender," He thinks for a moment. "Actually I have no place to speak here, my relation to gender is pretty fucked too."
Blix coughs. "Me and Jasper in one tent, Anya and Noctis in another since they have history, Arte's alone." She crosses her arms. "Everyone okay with that?"
"Hell yeah." Arte cheers while Anya wishes she had some sort of fight for this.
Soon all but the bedroll under Anya is placed into the respective tents. Noctis threatens pulling her to the tent himself but Anya gets up and groggily moves it over.
Once morning comes Anya doesn't exactly feel any more rested but she feels better than if she hadn't slept at all. Apparently Jasper and Blix went out to hunt and forage before anyone else woke up and Anya looks up to see Jas holding about a million berries with his shirt pulled up like a makeshift basket, Blix not too far behind with a few fish and extra firewood. Arte sleeps in the longest and only wakes when ji smells the food almost finished.
"Woah, how'd ya snatch this so early?" Ji's sniffing at the plate like some cat who's been willingly given human food for the first time. Once the bastard finally grabs a small berry off the plate and chews it, ji breaks the breakfast silence yet again. "How do you know these aren't poison? They don't grow in the forest near the town."
"Jas studied foraging for a few years in his youth, the teaching spanned most if not all plants on this continent." She smiles with berry stained teeth. "He also keeps the written guide on him constantly just in case."
Jas is face first in the food when he pokes at his partner. "It's best to double check, no one knows when my brain is just gonna zap those memories out of my head." When he talks he spits food into the fire accidentally. Though the rest of the meal stays pretty silent.
The meadow doesn't seem too far off now, it'd take less than a day to get to it at this pace. Once Jasper gets everything methodically back into his pack and asks annoyingly if anyone needs a restroom break or a water refill before they leave, they're off. Arte takes this day to fall behind a bit and pick up any rocks ji sees and either throwing them as far as they can go or shoving them into jix pockets. Whenever someone asked about it ji just shrugs and leaves it at that.
Once in the meadow they heard singing, tenor notes filling the air of not quite the right lyrics to a folk song. The closer they got the more they saw of the two, short choppy red hair hiding pointed ears, brown hair pulled into a low bun with almost every piece fallen out. It felt like walking in on something you shouldn't see. Something exclusive to plays or storybooks, that if you breathed wrong it would all crumble. Arte though, didn't see the untouchable beauty of it all, walking straight into their line of sight. "Neither of you would be Aleksei and/or Neil would you?"
The two winced a bit when the names were spoken, but the redhead smiled confidently. "Not anymore." His hand holding so tightly to the others, as if he let go they'd shatter.
Before Arte could ruin things Blix walked up to the two with a twinkle in her eyes. "Would you tell us your names then? We'd love to talk with some good company." She waved down everyone else to walk up.
The redhead looked them all up and down, calculating the decision. "I've taken a liking to the name Phoenix," He looked over to the other, ruffling their hair. "This one picked it for me." When he pulled the hair from their face the team got their first look at the person's eyes, green like the stems of the plants around them, green as the old man's eyes.
"Sunflower." They smile for the first time since they realized other people were here. "This one calls me Sunny though." A genuine little laugh comes from them, and Phoenix is just fed off of their energy, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
Arte looks into Blix's bright, bright eyes. "You're not letting us finish this mission are you?"
She looks to the two and back at Arte. "We never promised the old man that we'd get them back, all he said was he was worried that his child may be in danger." She comically looks around. "I don't see any danger, unless someone got a pollen allergy."
The couple's faces went from dark to joyous. Sunflower spoke softly. "I don't have to go back?"
"Not if me and Jas have anything to do with it." She hooks an arm over Jasper's shoulder. "You remind me of when we were young, and if it was anything like what we went through I wouldn't let you back if you asked. But you two need a plan, we can help you temporarily but you guys need something to call home. A support system."
Phoenix puffs out his chest. "We have a sort of plan, some nymphs offered us a wedding and enough food to get by until we found a home."
Arte looks at them like they just killed jix first born child. "And what's the catch? Nymphs don't do shit for free, you're lucky we found you with both your souls intact."
"What do you know about them?"
"That they feed off the easy to trick, runaways for example." That one got a glare from Blix but we all know it's true. "We can offer better than whatever dumb ass deal you can strike with them."
Noctis coughs, gaining all eyes on him. "You all act like we could just adopt them, we can barely feed ourselves with the work we do and judging by how this is going we're not getting paid for this one." His hand touches his temple. "I really don't want to be a stick in the mud but it's the truth."
Blix sighs. "We can feed them and bring them to the next town over, pool money between the five of us to pay for at least a few nights at an inn. They can freelance just like us and get however much pay they can work for."
"The next town over? Anya has almost passed out a handful of times just getting here and you want us to go farther? We can't risk their health like that even if they insist they're fine."
The couple look between them, there's a heavy silence in the air. When Sunflower breaks it everyone looks surprised. "We can stay in your, our town. My fa- Sir Frasier never comes into town and Phoenix isn't from there. It could help us to be introduced into the guild instead of coming in blind."
"They make a point there." Anya states. "It took me weeks to be accepted into the guild as a former out-of-towner."
Blix looks back at Anya then back to the couple. "If it's really okay with y'all?"
The sun is setting behind their heads, a false halo. Phoenix looks directly into Sunflower's eyes for a second, maybe three, and they nod at each other. "It's perfect."