Siobhan
Being the leader of a group is nowhere near as glamorous or interesting or exciting as Siobhan expected it to be. Don’t get her wrong, part of her scoffed at the romantic ideal she’s built up in her head. She isn’t so stupid as to think that being a leader was all accolades and adventures. But, damn it, she also never thought it would basically come down to being at best a favorite teacher, at worst a frazzled mother, herding cats who seem determined to be their cattiest at every given moment of the day and night.
Between the demands of work which includes the demands of twenty students and the demands of her side-hustle which had become so much more, thoughts of which took up every spare minute and some she didn’t have to spare, she needs a break. Just a little break. Which is why she is, at the moment, hiding – not hiding, more like strategically remaining out of sight; yeah, that is much better – in the shadow beside the pub.
Drawing her legs up, she clasps her hands over her knees and rests her chin on the knuckles. The cool of the shadows settles into her skin, into her bones, and her shoulders relax as she takes her first deep breath in… a while.
She just… needs… a break. A moment to just be Siobhan and not Siobhan the Leader; Siobhan the person who has to make all the decisions; Siobhan who everyone looks at to focus on the details, the mundane, so they can do the ‘higher level thinking’. She knows that’s mean thinking. She volunteered for this. She’s *good* at this. But sometimes, like right now, she just needed a little, tiny break.
“I need help! Can someone help me?” The voice carries on the breeze, getting louder on the last word. Siobhan cracks an eye, squinting in the direction the voice came from.
One moment. Just one… freaking… moment.
Without conscious thought Siobhan’s mind shifts into assess mode. The voice seems attached to the person jogging down the hill towards the tavern. He is average height, a little on the thin side. His clothes are plain. When new they would be that – plain. As he draws closer she can see signs of mending, careful and meticulous mending suggesting care was put in to maintaining them. Either they are all he could afford or he has someone at home who takes pride in their maintenance. His pants are a bit short, as if he’s grown since first getting them and, combined with facial features that still had a bit of youthful roundness to them, she assesses he is probably just a little past his teens and has probably just experienced a growth spurt. The hay dust obscuring the color of his boots speaks to him being either a farmer or someone who works with animals. All together not a very proposing character.
But, at least he isn’t a member of her group. So, she doesn’t have a compulsion to rise from her hiding – *not hiding* – place to see what is up. Which makes it really weird when she *does* rise from her – not – hiding place as he approaches.
Her gaze shifts to the side, her mouth twisting, as she gives her legs a suspicious look.
“Listen”, a soft-voice whispers in the back of her brain, a touch like the brush of a feather she might have missed if she hadn’t found the moment of quiet in the shadows.
As if drawn by her movement, the boy – for that is what he is – turns to the shadows and squints. “Can you help me?”
“I don’t know. Can I?” Okay, so there was a little salt there. The “voice” – which, no, that wasn’t freaky at all – has said to “listen” not to “jump on whatever the kid was about to say.”
“Uh…”
Siobhan sighs as the boy’s expression goes dim. Taking pity on him she adds, “Yes. I can.” She falls easily into the role it seems her damned destiny to fulfill, immediately taking on a soothing voice and tilting towards him to show her openness to help. “What’s your name?”
“I’m, uh, Mike. And, uh, I need help.”
Siobhan suppresses an eye roll, instead softening her lips into a reassuring smile. “Okay, Mike. How can I help?”
As if her words are a key that unlocks the mystery that is Mike he spills details. He lives on a farm. There is a big guy named Blunderbuss – a GIANT, the boy insists but Siobhan takes that with a grain of salt – who has stolen his ma’s quilt and it was a special quilt because it had been his granny’s and her granny’s before that and this GIANT has stolen other stuff from other people and… really, Mike just needs help! Please?
Siobhan looks inward, listening for “that voice”.
Yep, crickets. Guess it’s on her to make this choice.
She guesses she could take some of the…
“No. You. Alone, Siobhan.”
Alone? She questions Magick (she’s never actually *heard* Magick before, but what else can this be but some Magick she’s not familiar with trying to get familiar? And, hello, sending flowers first was a nice ‘I’d like to get to know you’ opener. Just saying. Flowers.), tentative but, really, when you don’t ask questions and just rush into things blindly someone can end up plungering themselves to death in the face.
“Alone.” A wry note enters the voice tickling her brain. “You wanted an escape. Here you go.”
Okay… So there are questions and questions are good. Questions are kind of her life blood. But this is Magick and sometimes you don’t question Magick if you want to actually learn something. Or you question Magick, but it doesn’t answer you. Or it answers you, but only after you’d fallen on your face and skinned your nose and then its answer is pretty much ‘See?’. Magick, like some instructors she’s had coming up, is a pretty crappy teacher and yet in the end imparts wisdom to those bold enough to say “Sure. Why not? Let’s do this thing!”
Which is exactly why she gathers her bag and says to the kid, “Lead on, Mike.”
…
Siobhan can’t say where it all went wrong. Mostly because she doesn’t know where it all went wrong. One moment she was walking up to a small farm with a kid named Mike; the next she is regaining consciousness while her body makes hard contact with a floor.
Oof, her breath slams out of her. She pushes up on her arms, her hair hanging in her eyes and her flowers falling to the floor. Damn.
By the time her eyes adjust to the dimness of the room all she can catch of whoever it is that had brought her there is the back of a rather large body as it exits the door in the far wall.
“Hey! What the…?!” Her vision swims as she rises on wobbly legs, her hands going out to brace her against the air that was full of sparkly motes that slowly resolve themselves into dust particles that drift from above. As she turns her head to get a view of the room there is a twinge at the back of her head. She prods gently at a spectacular lump just above where her skull meets her neck.
“Magick?” she tentatively calls out, immediately sorry for that whisper as the sound somehow goes into her ear and then proceeds to run around like a chipmunk on crack, scrabbling its little frantic claws over every part of her brain and skull as it careens around.
Of course, there was no reply. Why would there be a reply?
“So… Siobhan, time to save yourself,” Siobhan counsels… herself. Well, that was as circular as the chipmunk in her brain.
Assess…
Her bag is still over her shoulder and resting on her hip. Meaning between her achy brain and what is in the bag she has everything she’ll need to save herself.
“Are you testing me, Magick?” she mutters beneath her breath, then pauses a moment just in case Magick answers.
Nope. Nothing. Okay…
The room is small and dim. It has a stone floor and stone walls. Pretty typical “dungeon”. Or “cottage”. Yep… cottage not dungeon. Uh huh…
High above her head are stained wood beams; the wood matching that of the single door into and out of the room. In the wall opposite the door is a window, set deep and high enough up that it clearly was only meant to let in light, not to be looked out of.
Siobhan assesses that she’ll have to jump for it, grabbing the sill so she can look out. She’ll leave that for after the door, which is a much easier thing to reach.
She hobbles over to the door – damn, her head – and tries the wrought iron latch. It rises a little but then stops, as if it has run up against something on the other side. A short push at the door confirms this as she feels the resistance of a bar, that familiar slack push stopping short with a clunk sound that says she isn’t getting out that way any time quick.
Sure there are tricks to popping a bar from the inside of a room but… a visual sweep of the room comes up very short of any type of device that would make that easier. A quick mental inventory of her bag and she knows she didn’t have anything in there that will work either. So, on to the next logical escape – the window.
She stops next to the wall and tilts her head back to eye the sill. Well, that is a jump… Taking three steps back she vaults upwards. Her fingertips slide along the bottom of the sill and she smacks her nose into the wall.
Rubbing her nose, she steps back further and then tries again. Again, failure.
She steps back. Does another visual sweep of the room, looking at the floor, the corners, the barred door, and then the beams up high. Those, she considers with narrowed gaze, might be the best bet. But… how to get up there? She can’t jump as high as the window – how is she going to jump up to a beam, which is higher?
Why hadn’t she studied Parkour when she had the chance?
Again she assesses her assets. She has her bag, her wits, and… she looks down… she guesses she has her clothes too. And – a thought occurs to her – her boots.
A plan starts forming in her brain… one that her hands quickly start putting into effect as she shimmies out of her skirt then sits down and pulls off a boot. Using the lace of the boot she ties it to the hem of her skirt then stands back up.
She hefts her skirt experimentally in her hand, letting the boot swing like a fulcrum as she eyes the distance to the beam. She adjusts forward until she is standing about three feet from the wall with the window in it and then alley-oops the crap out of that boot in the direction of the beam.
It bounces off and falls back, kicking her in the forehead.
Ugh. She rubs her forehead absently as she takes a step closer to the wall and then flicks the boot upwards again. It bounces off again, but this time she scurries to not get hit in the face.
“Once more with passion!” she counsels herself.
This time the boot loops over the beam, pulling the length of her skirt with it as it starts falling back toward the floor. She knits her fingers into the hem of the skirt before it can go sailing over the beam. This stops the boot’s descent. She eyes where it swings a little below the beam then springs for it, grabbing the toe with her free hand and pulling to get the skirt firmly situated on the beam.
She lets go of the boot and leaps for the piece of skirt that is on the opposite side of the beam. Her aching brain protests. She sternly tells it to shut up. She may also add a curse word or two, but there is no one there to look at her askance for it so… fuck it.
It takes three jumps but eventually she manages to grab the cloth so she is holding one part of the skirt on one side of the beam, one on the other. Tightening her arms she swings her legs up until one hooks on the beam, thanking her childhood gymnast dreams as she does so.
Ha! She hasn’t lost it!
Humping and bumping she manages to get herself up onto the beam. She lays on it on her belly and just breathes.
Has she been bored? Wanting a break? Did Magick have a really freaking wicked sense of humor? Eh…
Okay. After catching her wind she shimmies along the beam until she is eye-to-sill with the window. Eyeballing it she decides the narrow casement would make a tight fit but she can get through it.
Another adjustment and she is able to press her hand to the latch. It doesn’t move. Well… crap. She pushes her hand against the window, testing the seal between the glass and the wall. It is solid. Really solid. She runs her fingers along the edge, hoping to find a break in the caulk, but it is like the window has grown out of the stone – that’s how tight the setting was.
She drops back to her belly on the beam, considering her options. Considers some more, because why not? Break the glass? Would she cut herself if she did? And would it break completely or would there be ragged edges she’ll need to clear? Will it make noise and alert whoever dumped her here? As she considers she retrieves her skirt and boot and carefully gets the boot back on her foot.
She eyes the window. Eyes her boot. Eyes the window. That… could… work…
Shifting carefully she rolls from her belly to her back on the beam and then wiggles until her head is pointing in the opposite direction of the window and her boot is within kicking distance of the glass. She is hauling back to kick it out when the door to the room opens with a rattle and a squeak.
Her startle response is a thing of magic and beauty in that moment. She jerks, tumbling backwards, and her instincts kick in. Like a cat she twists mid-air, bringing her feet around in an arc over her head and down like a pile-driver into the head of the man… lump… thing that had come through the door.
Look… she doesn’t waste time assessing the ‘individual’ whose head she has caved in by… accident? By… Magick’s blessing? Eh, she isn’t going to question it. Instead she just springs off the body she has foot-planted on and dashes through the open door. Then dashes back to yank her skirt off the beam and throw it over her shoulder as she hauls out of the room.
She runs through the halls, looking for the front door, stopping to snatch up a shiny statue and then a cool looking stone and then a fairly impressive gold pitcher and shoving them into her bag. What…? Free loot! It was as she is stuffing the pitcher in the bag that she hears it – a very muffled “Let us out, you pig!” accompanied by the sound of a fist bouncing against wood.
Siobhan follows the sound and comes to a door that is… surprise… barred from the outside. No thought to the process she yanks the bar out of the brackets and the door falls open from the weight of the two women leaning on it. A third comes tumbling out after them.
As Siobhan eyes them scrambling up from the floor and righting their clothing it suddenly occurs to her that she hasn’t actually checked to see if the individual whose head she jumped on is actually dead. And then it occurs to her that maybe they may not be dead. And maybe she should get out of there sooner rather than now.
Before the women can say anything, and potentially slow down *her* escape, she spits out, “So, I just kicked in some guy’s head and I don’t know if he has friends or if he’s actually dead so I’d say… run?”
Putting words to deeds, she turns and starts dashing away, only to be pulled to a halt by the strap of her bag cutting off her air supply.
Grabbing the strap and pulling it away from her throat, she turns with a glower. The woman who had come tumbling out last, whose hand was grasping her bag, stammers out, “Who are you?”
“Me?” Siobhan yanks her bag out of the woman’s grasp. Her mind goes back to what Mike had said to hook her on this little solo adventure, “Siobhan, the Giant Killer.”
And with that, she scoots.
Enter The Woods 