AFTER STAYING UP UNTIL TWO AM WAITING FOR RPG TO COME BACK ONLINE, I finally made an IC post.

Sooooooooooo... Day 17 of my Christmas advent/challenge thing! Every day until Christmas, I'll make a post featuring either the character from the Arcana assigned to the day (apologies in advance if I fuck up their personalities) or an event of my choosing if no relevant character exists for the Arcana. Arcanas are assigned numerically, as in Fool (0) was the fourth, and the World (21) is Christmas Day. Stories have no set theme and they have no minimum length. Now normally I'd be doing the Tower arcana for this one, but I ran out of ideas for another free day and the only help Sword gave was "dicks", which as you might imagine, was not very helpful. SO NATURALLY here's something completely irrelevant: my first attempt at starting a NaNoWriMo novel from way back when. It both sucks and is really stupid and ends with a sucky one-liner, but it [i]is[/i] the longest thing I've written in one go in a long time. Congrationulations.

Basic updates and schedule can be found [url=https://arcvalerik.titanpad.com/1?]here[/url]!

[hider=Day #17]
Dreh Nicht, the world we live in, has never met the blade of war. It is ours, the Royal Guards, and everyone else’s duty to protect it.

I’ve always had that up on my wall. The first day I joined the guard, we listened to an officer’s introductory speech. I wrote down a bit of it on a scrap of paper, and that same paper has been on my wall for about a month now. It really makes the room look less like a living accommodation and more like a personal room. None of us are really sure whether that’s a good thing or not. Still, there’s never been a good reason to take it down. 

A young girl with thick bleach-blonde hair that went down just enough to cover he ears but was cut so that it never went past her neck yet the natural volume gave it horizontal size— I stopped myself in my own weird observations about hair there— loomed over me. I still don’t know how she always managed to sneak into my room and over to me without me noticing her. She always said “You’re just never paying much attention” but I just think she’d unnaturally sneaky. Like a fox. I knew why she came, though; Kreisen was supposed to train us and two others today. None us wanted to do it but if we couldn’t handle whatever he had in store for us, there was no way we could ever be capable of actually joining the Royal Guard.

Her impish features backed off as I rolled across my bed and onto the floor, taking the pillows and sheets with me. Despite my vision being obscure by layers of cloth, I knew she smiled since she always did a stupid little shuffle thing whenever she was entertained by something. Before I could get up, a pile of clothes and metal was thrown at me; it suddenly occurred to me that it was the uniform. Normally it wouldn’t be so bad, since we all kinda mutually agreed they were kinda cool, but the thing about these ones was that they all had the word “Newbie” written down the back and front in bold black letters. The uniform was practically identical to those of the regular soldiers so the purpose of the words was likely so that nobody would mistake them for fully-trained guards. We also decided that it was demeaning. 

I picked the garments off the ground and replaced my clothes with the appropriate parts of the uniform, changing my pants underneath a blanket to avoid any possible awkwardness, and stood up next to her. She had already put on the uniform as anybody would expect. I stood a bit shorter than her, as always, though I don’t anybody around the castle could tell due to the fact that they were all at least a foot taller than both of us, but she didn’t let me evaluate for long, as we were already rushing down the hallway towards the court yard, hopefully not late.

The court yard was surrounded by the beautiful high walls of the castle, glass windows all around, with flowers decorating the windowsills. There was an exit to the south, though a gate with a few soldiers stationed at it protected it. The sun was just beginning to peak over the walls and with it a warm crimson glow flew over everything. It also highlighted the figures of Captain Kreisen and the two other new recruits. He stood authoritatively with his hands on his hips. It was visible that he was trying to stand as tall as he could. His back was arched in an unnatural and probably uncomfortable way. The shear dedication to intimidating us pretty much did the opposite for me; it made him more approachable to see that he had to actually try to appear in control.

Recht, walking forward right beside me, exhaled a long breath, leaving a trail of smoke-like air behind us in the early cold. We stopped a short distance away from Kreisen and all four of us automatically shifted our positions to form a perfectly straight line, with me on the end. The two others—another guy and another girl—stood the same way as the Captain, and we followed suit, though I didn’t bother trying to emulate the weird arched back thing. I suppressed a smirk.

The older man took a step closer to us—close enough that I could see his calm breathing in the quiet morning’s frigid temperatures.. His face dripped of sweat and a little bit of it had ended up frozen on the bristly short beard that lined his jaw line. It had been below zero at night, so I assumed that he had been out doing physical training in the middle of the night. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to do that, but considering the fact that the first time we did physical training we ran around the castle until one of us literally collapsed, nothing would really surprise me. I wonder what happened to that guy some times. He never did come back after he collapsed…

Kriesen cleared his throat before thumping his chest to get our utmost attention. “Listen closely, since I don’t repeat myself. We’ll be doing some basic weapon training here. You four will split into four and Then move onto something more important shortly after, got it?” His ‘speeches’ were hardly speeches. He didn’t even talk much at all, actually, which is a bit weird for him to be an instructor with that kind of trait. “But first, I’ll need one of you to help with a demonstration.”

Before I could react Recht had already propped up my arm into the sky. I turned my neck to look at her, and I only saw three smug faces. Despite my resistance, Kriesen grabbed me by the shoulder and ripped me away from my comfortable position in the line, pulling me over to where the clearing got wider. He let go of me, letting me stumble forward from the momentum, nearly falling over before I could catch myself. The man ripped out one of two spears stuck into the dirt and thrusted it into my possession. This was all happening way to fast. One moment I was internally laughing over the fact that someone would go running in the dead of the night and the next I had a real weapon in my hands.

“For this demonstration, Ehren will come at me with the spear and I will attempt to disarm him.” Kreisen took a defensive stance, keeping the majority of his armor in front of any of the unprotected parts of the uniform. Apparently that stance was one of the ways you could tell if someone in the military was of high-class blood or not, since most respectable positions had uniforms with unprotected vital spots. I had questioned this fact early on in my already short career, and apparently it had something to do with ancient beliefs or something, and our traditional government was the cause for that. Kriesen waved his hands inwards to signal that he was ready for me to approach in the offensive.

I held the spear in a way that I could attack almost instantly without preparation and shuffled towards him a bit. Actually trying to hit someone with a weapon was still an incredibly foreign idea to me, but I suppose that was the purpose of this exercise. The blades of the weapons given to us are incredibly dull and the armor is top-notch yet that fear of hurting your colleagues is nearly impossible to get over. I propel the spear forward, aiming for what I assume to be the most vulnerable spot of his body, but the attack whiffs as he easily evades. He grabs a hold of the shaft and yanks it towards him, taking me with it and kicks me in the gut, sending me straight to the ground, writhing in pain from the sturdy blow. I’m not sure about the validity of that move but it was likely to show that you should take advantage of your opponent’s weaknesses instead of relying on set actions. While I’d love to mentally applaud the strategy (despite how easy it would be to figure out) to defeat me, the shame of losing makes me a bit too salty to be humble. 

Recht comes over to me and helps me up to my feet, knowing I was far from used to pain. Kriesen walks back over to the remaining two recruits and says some words I don’t catch before clapping. They walk past him as he steps to the sidelines to watch, the girl carrying the spear, and begin to emulate the demonstration. Recht leaves my side to go fetch the other spear from the ground. She throws it over to me (I barely catch it) and takes a stance similar to the one the captain took. Her attempt at copying it looked a bit silly, since she had little idea why we were supposed to do it.

I try to shake my thoughts out of my head once again and take a similar position to hers, holding the spear out in front of me. Recht wasn’t nearly as strong as Kriesen, but she was just as aggressive and she was completely capable of doing the same thing he had done. I thrust out the spear again, but I predict the dodge she makes and curve it in the direction she goes. The blade clangs off the metal off her armor, making a small dent just above the end of the shoulder plate. The strike and subsequent ricochet knocks me off balance, so I steady myself and pull the spear close to me.

	“Does that mean I win the first round?” I ask in an innocent tone. Recht looks at me with a mischievous smirk—she wasn’t one to accept losing. I toss the spear to her (which she catches which much more finesse than me) and we take the same stance as last time. My reflexes aren’t as sharp as hers, nor is my strength, so it would be best to outwit her as best as I can. Based on what happened before, she’s prone to copying others’ strategies to the tee, so if what I did actually worked I can assume she will do the same.

	She thrusts the weapon at me, and I dodge to my left. The shot curves to follow me, though I had assumed that was what was going happen and bounce to the right as soon as I could, effectively dodging the attack. I rush forward and the best she can do to retaliate after her recovery is hit me in the arm with the wood of the shaft, which doesn’t deter me at all. Once we’re in close proximity, I strike at her hand, and she lets the spear fall without much resistance.

“That’s 2 for 2,” I taunt.[/hider]
[s]it also lacks all formatting because I don't feel like going through it and fixing it for posting here[/s]