There is a lot about me you don't know -Tales of Arcadia ENG

5-Group Photo

TRACK 5

Run like me, like hell, like everybody else

Hair metal on a Japanese boom box

Kicks like you, like me, like everybody else

When it gets loud, I turn it up

Shake it like a bad girl up in Harlem

(Harlem- New Politics)

********

"Okay, that's enough for today," asserted Douxie, after casting a glance at the time. It was 4:30 in the afternoon. Counting that they had started at about eleven in the morning, they had done even too much for a first teaching round. But time had flown by... and it was strangely easy to push Claire to use her magic, developing it as she went, letting it dance in her own Aura and then letting it out. Her sound was just a little bit similar but at the same time totally different from Morgana Le Fay's.

It was probably so easy to teach her because she had had the Shadows Staff to give her a taste of it already, allowing her to perceive the mechanisms of Magic... Or perhaps because she was extremely talented and gifted.

For a moment, the girl seemed about to retort but stopped herself. "All right," she said, nodding in the process. She still looked tentative, her head down... and her expression appeared somewhat uncertain. Unless Douxie was reading her wrong. He might as well have been.

Douxie smiled at her. "You're doing great," Claire lifted her head sharply, staring at him with something unintelligible. "I know it may seem like you're not, but I assure you, you are. You've made a lot of progress."

Claire opened and closed her mouth mechanically. Then she opened it again to speak. "It's just that I'm afraid I don't have enough time to make new improvements... If we were attacked tomorrow..."

"If we were attacked tomorrow, we always have the Jumps to our advantage. And Merlin, who may or may not be liked as a person, but who is still the most powerful Sorcerer of all time," Douxie tried to reassure her, even though he knew that he had felt agitated in the same way and for an identical reason. Fuzz it, he had even calculated the idea of dying in the midst of it. A thought, however, that had not yet disappeared and would probably continue to lodge in a small side of his brain, coming back up every time he wasn't sufficiently occupied to stop thinking.

Claire made a snort-like sound and he chuckled faintly, barely shaking his head. Yes, on some things she was just like Zoe. She was less mean , though.

"...And I don't think any of us will let them win without a fight. We will come up with something. Even a little improvisation is enough to snatch a victory. A stroke of luck can work as well as a particularly complicated spell. Of course, the latter has higher success rates but..." a pause, in which she continued to watch him, waiting for him to finish. "...But to achieve it, we must be at full strength. Tiring ourselves to the bitter end does no one any good."

She nodded, appearing thoughtful. Then she smiled.

"You were lying, though..." the girl said suddenly, wrenching a startled gasp from him.

The simple comment caused him to tilt his head in total confusion, blinking a couple of times and arching his eyebrow, becoming extremely stiff, so much so that he wasn't sure if he was taking in and throwing out oxygen regularly.

' Uh?'

Douxie tried to think what lies he might have told as quickly as possible.

He didn't feel like he had told any. Not to her. Nor to the rest of the Guardians. Not in those days, at least. He had even tried to avoid revolving around truths -a difficult thing, counting that he had been accustomed to doing so since the Middle Ages, so much so that some of it came to him as instinctively as breathing, though it bothered him as a fact- so, no, he had no idea what she was talking about.