A Queen and Her Kings

The Sword in The Stone

"Hand me the map, Deuce!", yelled a very irate Ace as he held his hand out. Deuce held the map away from him.

"No! I can do this!", he said desperately. Ace scowled at him.

"We've been going around in circles for the last HOUR! Clearly, you don't know what you're doing, so just give it to me!", Ace yelled as he held his hand out in front of his friend once again.

"NO, I TOLD YOU I CAN DO THIS!", Deuce said again, only much louder. Ace groaned and tried to wrestle the map away from the navy haired man without tearing it. A few seconds into the struggle, however, they were pulled apart by the scruff of their jackets by a very much done with their shit Griffin, and had the map taken from in between them by an equally done Ash.

"We need to go that way and make a left. After that, we should be there.", the blonde said as he pointed at the rightmost tunnel of the five in front of them. Cassandra rubbed her temples and sighed.

"Lead the way.", she said, wanting to get this over with and go home. She was hungry and tired, and while she couldn't fix the first problem, she was itching to crawl into bed with her lynx and sleep for a week.

Cassandra and the others started to follow the ex-gang criminal leader down the tunnel, and the tribrid felt her mind start to wander. They had been trekking through the mines for over two hours, during only one of which actual progress was made. She had made the mistake of letting Deuce read the map, when little did she know, the fool couldn't read a map to save his life and was just trying to impress her.

Sighing again, Cassandra tried to look on the brightside.

'If Ash read the map right, which he better have, we'll be at the cave soon. One of us can rip a gem out of the wall when Ace and Deuce aren't looking, and we go back to our dorms and rub our success in Crowley's pale-ass face.'

The tribrid smirked, oh how she looked forward to that.

Finally, they arrived at the mouth of the cave. Ace shone his phone flashlight all around it as everyone looked at the interior with varying amounts of awe. It was large, the size of a school gymnasium. The stone walls were coal black, which made the gems lining the stone, floor to ceiling, stand out even more. Greens, reds, purples, blues, yellows, oranges and every color in between glistened in the artificial light.

It was jaw droppingly beautiful, even to a bunch of battle-hardened vampires.

Snapping herself out of it, Cassandra clapped her hands together to pull the others out of it as well with a smile on her face as she began to speak.

"Well, now all we have to do is grab one of these and make our way out!", Cassandra said brightly as she would finally get to sleep soon.

She took the first steps into the cave, getting a few yards in before three white blobs phased through the cave wall in front of her. Cassandra knew what they were the moment they flew through the wall, and she gave them a deadpanned look that conveyed her unamusement. The other Court members did as well, save for Ace, Deuce and Grim, who screamed and started looking like they were about to pass out.

Cassandra glared at the ghosts as they did the stereotypical 'supposed to sound spooky but just sounds dumb' voice and hoped that would be enought to scare them off. Unfortunately, these ones, unlike the dorm ghosts, lacked any ghostly brain cells.

Cassandra turned back to her senior Court, who were just as annoyed as she was. Nodding to Eiji, the brunette got the hint and grabbed Ace and Deuce, making them turn away from everyone else by saying "Go get a gem so we can get out of here, quickly!".