The Raven and the Writing Desk

Mickey Mouse

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NPC Story featuring Ravenna.

10 years ago.
Erde Nona.

“Hey! Wait up!”

“That’s not exactly how a race works, little bug!”

A pair of chocobo feet plodded quickly through the dirt, speeding down the makeshift dirt path. Ravenna’s long, windswept black hair fluttered behind her as Fuyuhara bolted through the fields, carving a wide berth between his rider and her sister. A ways back, Oriole’s frantic screeches filled the air of the Hinterlands.

Ravenna glanced over her shoulder with a smirk. At this rate, her sister would never catch up with her. Secure in her victory, she turned her gaze back toward the finish line, just over a hundred meters away. Just outside their barn, they’d set up a line of barrels with just enough space in the middle for a chocobo and their rider to squeeze through, and now, she was poised to take first. Up ahead, she could see her father leaning on the barrel line. No doubt he’d scold her for not going easier on her little sister, but Ravenna held fast: she had to learn that nothing in life would just be given to her.

“But I’m
six, Enna,” her sister would inevitably plead.

“Six years past the time you should’ve known that lesson, Ori,” she would reply like clockwork. Ravenna herself was only ten years old, but already the importance of hard work and diligence had been imbued in her. She supposed that came with the territory of being groomed to inherit her parents’ chocobo ranch, a duty she had begged for the moment she recognized it was a possibility.

Her eyes traveled down to Fuyuhara, and as he sped toward the finish line, she stroked his long, pink feathers and sighed with satisfaction. Another day, another victory.

“Wooooooooooooooah!”

Oriole’s loud exclamations now seemed to be coming from directly above her head. Ravenna glanced up, and watched in awe as her little sister and her yellow chocobo floated speedily past them. The older girl’s eyes grew wide — yellow chocobos couldn’t fly, which meant…

“Dammit, Oriole, no fair!”

“Sorry, sis!” the little bug laughed as her yellow bird-beast plopped down on the ground a ways in front of her elder sister. Ravenna scowled, giving Fuyuhara a slight nudge and urging him to blast as fast as he could after Oriole and her mount. The pink chocobo gave it his best effort, but Oriole had pulled too far ahead; within seconds, she’d passed the barrel line to hearty applause from their father, Ravenna holding up second place moments later.

“Excellent, girls, truly excellent,” their father boomed, rubbing one of his pointy ears. “Oriole, levitating yourself and Kopfooka… a risky move, but it looks like it paid off!”

“Thanks, daddy!” the tiny elven girl replied, sliding off the yellow beast.

Ravenna’s scowl deepened as she slid off her own ride.

“Using magic’s not fair!” she yelled, stalking across the cobblestone path to where her father and sister stood. “She know I can’t use magic — that I was born without it! It’s not fair, daddy, it’s not fair.”

“You’re always telling me life isn’t fair, Enna,” Oriole looked up smartly at her sister, “so why shouldn’t I cheat a little every once in a while?”

Ravenna locked eyes with her little sister.

Dammit, why did she have to be so right?


***

Present Day.
Kraw.


She picked up the rose-colored feather quill and began to write.

She didn’t quite know what would spill out of her mind — she never really did — but like clockwork, she began this week’s letter, word after word flying from her thoughts to the quill to the page. She detailed every bit of what she’d seen in the wilds, feelings that swirled within her, interesting travelers she met. She detailed the quirky mouse and his samurai companion that she’d spent such a short time with but somehow connected to so easily.

The mouse had departed so quickly, without even really saying good-bye, the morning after she’d left him. No doubt he’d gone and signed up for the strange tournament on the Comet as soon as he could, in order to ensure a slot, but she still wondered… had he received what she’d left for him?

Did he know she’d been lying to him? Would he forgive her that?

Her pen flew across the page. She pressed down so hard she was afraid it would break, or that she’d bore the words permanently into the wood of the desk. She brushed a clump of black hair behind her pointed ear, but it fell again just as quickly. For just a moment, she laid the quill down, procuring a tie and pulling her hair back into a high ponytail — she’d need it up for guard duty later, anyhow — before quickly swiping her writing instrument up again and continuing to pour her heart, soul, and mind onto the parchment before her.

He reminds me…, she wrote, pausing after that word. Of what? She knew the answer, but did she have the courage to finish that sentence? Did she have any right to, even?

Her pen touched back down, and she completed the thought.

The constant noises of Kraw whistled through the windows of Ravenna’s office, and the onyx-haired elf signed her name at the bottom of the page. She pulled an envelope from a drawer, folded the letter neatly, and stuffed it inside. On the front, she inscribed, in the clearest writing she could: Oriole.

She lit a fire in her waste basket, dropped the letter inside, and watched it burn.
 

Mickey Mouse

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They were moving him.

Ravenna burst out into the main quadrant of New Abraxas, watching as purple-shirted Syntech employees lugged a huge crate out of the main doors of the University of Abraxas. Stuffed haphazardly into the ruined buildings of the city, Dr. Jones’ pride and joy wouldn’t have looked like much to a normal adventurer, but Ravenna knew all too well their reputation. The way they treated their specimen had never sat well with the elvish woman, and watching the preteen machine’s languid corpse get shuffled off to the producers of this insane death tournament left an even worse taste in her mouth.

She couldn’t believe she had encouraged Mickey and Mugen to go. ‘A test of skill,’ all the documentation said. ‘If you’re brave’ — and well, the mouse had certainly seemed it. She’d been watching the streams, though, seen how mangled Mugen had become and just how on-the-ropes they’d placed poor Mickey Mouse. She felt a twisting deep in her stomach about it, and so she wouldn’t let the mouse’s missing friend fall victim to the corporation’s clutches as well.

“Hey!” she called out, lifting up a hand. The blue-green fabric of her robes billowed out behind her as she approached the group of Syntech employees lugging Proto Man’s stuffy home on their shoulders. “Who exactly gave you the authority to take that?”

She crossed her arms as the blonde girl on one of the front corners grimaced. Melissa rolled her eyes and scrunched her face, slowly signaling to the rest of the group to drop the crate on the ground for a moment. They did so, and then she silently waved them away, dusting off her hands and standing up to Ravenna.

“Someone more important than you, I’d bet,” she shrugged, hands on her hips. “Why? What’s your business with it?”

“I’m afraid that’s none of your concern,” Ravenna snapped.

“Then I’m not concerned,” Melissa shot back, turning and waving her crew of purple t-shirts back toward the box. “Name of our supplier is Leliana. Perhaps you’ve heard of her? Hear she’s pretty big around these parts.”

Ravenna’s eyes widened at the insinuation. Leliana had given them permission to take the mouse’s friend? She glanced, too nervously, back toward the ruined building that made up the assassin guild’s headquarters. She knew Leliana was willing to make moral compromises for the good of the university, but this was beginning to be more troublesome than the woman had yet experienced under the auburn-haired warrior’s leadership. The robot might’ve been mechanical but some part of him was… just a boy.

And he was the mouse’s friend.

Ravenna knew all too well what it was like to have something — someone — yanked away from you with no cause, no warning, and nothing you could do to help. Mickey wasn’t even here to see the Syntech workers cart the preteen machine off to wherever he was being transported to.

“If it makes you feel better,” Melissa called out as she and her three burlier — but somehow less impressive than her — sidekicks lifted the box, “we aren’t keeping the whole boy like we did with his gun. We’re just the go-between. Got a better buyer on another world, from what I’m told.”

Ravenna quirked an eyebrow. Another buyer?

“...but I’m not told much,” she flashed a cheesy grin, “so that’s all I’ve got for you.”

With that, the crate disappeared into the Syntech tent. For days, it had served as a sort of convention center for fans of the competition to gather, but now, as the hours wound down and the list of competitors thinned, it started to show signs of outlasting its purpose. No doubt it’d remain up for the finale and then go with the wind as well.

Ravenna only hoped Mickey could survive till the end, then make it back to here so she could share what she knew, and help him find his friend.

She could no longer be a party to someone losing something they cared about as she’d lost Oriole.

***

10 years ago.
Erde Nona.

“No!”

“Hush, Enna,” her father whispered, “you mustn’t make any noise.”

She snuggled uncomfortably in the back of the wagon, watching as her father shut the back door. Outside the storage department she was being smuggled in, she heard him whispering to the driver terse instructions.

‘To Arcadia.’

‘Don’t stop.’

“I won’t lose her to these damned raiders too,” he said. “It would… it would be too much.”

Visions of Oriole danced in her mind, cut short by the jagged blades of a local group of mercenaries in the Hinterlands. Her mother, too, struck down by hired hands attempting to support one of the dying city-states’ last grasps at imperial conquest. Their little village had been just one casualty of the place’s wrathful intent, her mother and sister no longer names but…

…her father, soon, too, she knew.

She blinked back tears. What was she to do in the city? Where would she go from here?

She clutched the wood of her mother’s bow and sobbed as quietly as she could in the back of the carriage. Hours later, she’d wake up an orphan in Erde Nona’s largest city, and she supposed she’d just have to figure out the answers to those questions herself.
 
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