Wrath of the Empire

II. Horrendously Boring

~~~~~

"Ugh!" Maddie grumbled. "That's boring!"

"Well, the beginning is going to be boring," I replied, "but there needs to be some way to set everything up."

"Lion's right, Maddie," Isabel agreed. "I know that until we reach the part where everyone starts dying to Infernas and his enormous army, we're not really going to have anything that exciting. All we're going to have is the parts of the story that set the stage for all the interesting things. We can't just jump right into the part where fire consumes the Five Lands, Land by Land."

Maddie groaned again. I shook my head and started to continue.

"Wait!" Alphonse called before I resumed speaking. "Shouldn't we know what happened in the Grand Council meeting before we continue?"

"I wasn't there," I told him.

"Maybe not, but I was! I'll tell the story for this point, then we'll go back to you when we have to speak about the training of the Rangers before the Scorch attacked."

"I see what you're saying. Fire away, Alphonse."

Alphonse sucked in through his teeth at my joke that was in quite bad taste, but then began to tell the next part of the story.

~Alphonse~

It was, as a normal person that was a functioning part of society might think, directly after the gathering of all the Rangers. All of the said Rangers had just now absconded, some clearly avoiding the way that the rider had left, likely in fear of stepping over the hoof-prints of the rider's steed. I thought that those choices and fears were acts of folly, though I did later see that the hoof-prints of the steed had burned through the floor, and were rather large and marginally unavoidable.

Anyway, the Rangers had just absconded. I turned to the rest of the Grand Council.

"So," I asked, "when are we going to begin this promised meeting about finding out how to defeat Infernas?"

"In just about five minutes, Alphonse," the grand councilor told me in reply. "Start the clock now."

I took out my watch and set it to wait five minutes, then promptly begin to ring. I placed it gently back into my pocket and began to speak with Isabel.

"Quite the scare, that rider was," I mentioned to her as a means of beginning a conversation.

"It was," she replied, "but not so much as the message he delivered. If Infernas has the audacity to say such things, then he must have some means of being able to back those claims up. After all, Infernas is not the type of...man?...to make an absurd bluff just to scare his enemies off. He is more the type that would warn people of exactly what he was going to do, then proceed to do just as he had told everybody, and no one would be able to stop him, because he had warned them of something they could not stop."

"That's very true," I replied, not really knowing what else to say. She had pretty much covered the entirety of what I was thinking on saying: Infernas made these claims, and because of the type of man(?) he was, he most definitely was going to back those claims up. That was what made both Isabel and I afraid.

I continued to speak to her. "Do you have any ideas?"

She shook her head. "No, only that you and I should look through every single book and cranny, if you catch my drift, just to see if we can find a way to defeat him. You and I have collected hundreds upon thousands of books from our predecessors, and there must be just one book that will show us the way to defeating Infernas. Do you know what I'm saying?"