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Character: Jijikko
Stage: Khehora
Luck: 30 (+10 LUK)
Creature: Gaili Dragon x 10
Success Rate: 6 - 100

Win x 10: (60 x 10) = 600/2 = 300exp
Total: 300exp

Word Count Required: 3,000 (Current: 2,800)
Final Word Count: -

Jijikko drew a breath, filling his long throat and chest as he beat his wings back. ‘Come on,’ he encouraged himself mentally. ‘Just one more try. You have got this. It can’t be that hard.’

With that, and a rallying cry, he dove towards the earth, gripping at it with his magic as he plummeted lower. Be one. Be one, be one, be one. Be one with the earth. He knew this move could be accomplished. He just had to make it happen, and—

CRASH.

The earth cracked under the impact of Jiji’s weight and magic, but instead of melding with his body and allowing him to travel through it as intended, it more…swallowed him. Nearly whole. He winced, neck deep in the brown-red clay of the desert close to the Terra Expanse’s edge, and whined, struggling to wriggle. It felt a bit like being caught in quick sand, with the primary advantage that at least he could control it to an extent. This, just hadn’t been how he’d intended.

Snorting, Jijikko squirmed for several more moments, trying to get a stronger grip on his magic — enough to pull at the earth successfully from all angles of his rock-encased body — and then yanked, cracking his way open like a fault line. As he crawled out of the earthen crack, shaking off his dusty wings dourly, Jiji took the time out to glower at the earth. It was supposed to be his friend. His ally. His weapon and his shelter. Why was it refusing to cooperate with him?

He knew gaili could meld with the earth, just as peisios could become one with the water. He’d seen it happen. And yet, so far all his attempts had only resulted in bruised muscles, dirt wedged under his scales, banged up wings, and a wounded ego on top of it all for extra spice. He sighed.

Things had been going so well overall. True, his first fight had been more or less a disaster, where he’d not only managed to get himself nearly killed, but wound up getting Kilian — the fierce oblivionite who’d come to his aid — injured gravely in the process, thanks only to his own stupidity. But since then, he had trained hard. Made progress. Travelled great lengths around Eowyn’s desert, tested his strength against an impressive variety of beasts, and even made new friends. Well, he considered them friends, anyway.

Regardless, he had made a great deal of personal progress, and knew it. Surely, this spell was close on the horizon for him. But, perhaps, he admitted grudgingly to himself, a bit more training was in order first. No use bashing himself uselessly against the rocks all day if it wasn’t getting him anywhere. Perhaps a bit more practice against gaili dragons themselves was in order. He wasn’t entirely sure he could take them on on his own yet, but impatience itched at him like a spot beneath his scales that he couldn’t quite reach.

He wanted to progress faster, and relying entirely on others to fight his battles for him wasn’t going to get him anyway. This in mind, he pointedly ignored the fact that the sun was already starting to dip low in the sky — bleeding red orange out over the long desert like a bloodstain — and started off into the open air, nose testing the scents on the breeze and searching for anything that might provide him fight enough to truly test his talons and push his training to the next level.

Anything less was unacceptable.

Jijikko squawked, darting around at the unanticipated voice and company. Female, bright glittery orange, and kiandri from the smell of things. As the meaning to her words sank in, however, alongside her tone, he huffed, ruffling his scales indignantly and holding his snout a fraction higher as he stretched out his wings, instinctively trying to make himself look bigger and more impressive.

“It’s a spell,” he said, tail swishing behind him. “Gaili can do it — make their bodies and the earth one and travel massive distances under the earth, through mountains! I’ll get it, too. I feel very close.” ‘Maybe. Slightly close-ish. Or, well, at least better than before, after all this practice, surely?’

He left his uncertainty out of it, not want to increase the others doubt in his capabilities.

“But nevermind that for now,” Jiji said, dismissing the topic. “I can’t talk too long with an unfamiliar lady in my company without introducing myself.” Giving the feral equivalent of a grin, Jijikko stepped up and in close. After giving the newcomer a proper sniff and once over inspection, he stretched his wings out again happily and dipped his snout in the mock equivalent of a bow. “I’m Jijikko: explorer, adventurer, and native to this desert. Anything I can help you with, just give the word — I’m always on hand to help a fair lady in distress.”

Jijikko tilted his head at her assertion that she hadn’t sensed him casting anything. The statement struck him as incredibly odd — and that was an understatement. True, he hadn’t been successful in executing the spell he had been attempting to cast, but he had been actively pouring out magic. That much was beyond doubt. Most — his parents and siblings in particular, likely — would go on to argue that his method and degree of expenditure were beyond ineffective, but wasteful in quantity, the great sum of it spilling out to do everything but what he was attempting to accomplish.

If she hadn’t managed to sense that, well, perhaps she was just…especially inept? Or unpracticed — that was certainly a possibility. Or perhaps her senses, when it came to magic, were especially dull on the whole. That, and she was kiandri; there was always the chance that kiandri were less capable on the whole of picking up on the magic of other clans, despite it seeming like a fairly natural instinct to him. Other khehora exuded their natural magic so far as he could tell, something that could be smelled a mile away.

Regardless, however, it seemed like a particularly rude thing to comment on, overall, and it didn’t honestly bother him. She had found him, after all — magic sense in tune or not — and even expressed concern in his affairs by coming down to check on him of all things, so he saw no reason to go out of his way to insult her on what might be a tender subject. Perhaps that was even her reasoning for being so brusque to begin with, and if so, it was only in both of their best interests to let the topic slide and move on to more positive things. So instead, he grinned, unabashed.

“I’ll work it out eventually. Can’t learn anything if you don’t try, or just give up,” Jiji said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I—”

Unfortunately, Jijikko did not make it much further than that. Before he made it into so much as the second word in his intended sentence, a low, none-too-distant rumble and quake in the earth alerted him to ‘company’ of the sort he and his companion would likely rather not have. He whipped around, snout lowered warily, talons digging into the earth and tail sweeping the sands as he waited. When the ground beneath him gave another warning quiver — as though it, too, trembled at the thought of what was to come — he growled low his throat, stretching his wings protectively and tensing in his stance.

He had just met this girl. Woman. Lady. Khehora. Kiandri? He shook his head. Title aside, did fate truly intend to throw beasts at them already?

Apparently, it did.

All but a few seconds after the first few quakes, the sand not a full fifty paces in front of them rippled. After an initial bulge, it sank and then bubbled up, billowing outward as fluidly as the wake of a raindrop on an otherwise glassy lake. The surrounding sand vibrated, something beneath cracked, followed by another something.

Then, the shape of the cause came into view, blanketed with sand and broad as a house, sunlight catching and glinting off of what few brown and gold scales showed from beneath the coating of sand, and Jijikko stood still as a rock, staring. After a matter of a few seconds of uncertain stillness, the dragon — clearly gaili, not only from appearances alone, but also size, smell, and the fact that it had emerged from the earth, perhaps the strangest mode of sleeping Jiji had ever heard of — shifted its weight and stood from whatever ‘resting’ position it had been in beneath the shelter of the sand. It shook its wings, sending a rain of golden kernels back to the earth, resettled its stance, and roared.

If nothing else, Jiji supposed, at least this would call for some more hands on practice. So, grinning and choosing to focus on the giddy adrenaline rush rather than the other — likely far more rational, but who cared about that — underpinning of highly justified fear, he reached out with his own magic, and prepared for a fight. This could be fun, and — best come to best — he might even impress the unimpressible!

Despite Jijiko's initial thoughts — that the appearance of a great dragon beast of only arguably insurmountable size and strength in the middle of the blazing yellow orange desert would be a fantastic opportunity to impress the feisty new kiandri female in his midst — practicality and a general base desire to live as opposed to die on the spot dictated that, after the beast actually appeared and attacked him immediately after, his attention narrowed in necessarily and he found himself all but entirely tuning her — and whatever else she did — out for the most part. This wasn't to say that he wasn't still aware that she was there of course — a large part of him considered it his immediate duty to protect her — it was just that having a massive, fanged snout about the comparable size and weight of his entire body lunging for him did tend to narrow his priorities into a more focussed segment, at least temporarily, and he leaped aside, snarling at it.

Seconds later, he was up. Up, up, up, three beats of his wings, and then diving down again, calling on his magic — albeit slightly sloppily given his still (embarrassingly as the case may be) fairly limited control of it — in an effort to yank up a snaking arm of the surrounding sand and barrel it into the great beast.

Sand, as Jiji was finding — and had always found, for that matter, from the moment he was old enough to begin attempting to work with his element in any conscious fashion — was such a tricky thing to call upon as compared to nice stable, solid, pre-clumped earth and silt. With silt or other types of earth that came in clods, at least the entire mass of it tended to want naturally to stay together in clusters as part of its inherent god-given characteristics. Controlling it — even if one's control was shaky and only partial — was made easier since, even if the pull of magic wasn't even over the entire area of it, the entire clod wanted to move with its brethren. There was a sort of natural unity and oneness there — of dirt. A brotherhood of dirt, if you will.

Sand was different.

It was a shaky, disloyal, treacherous, betraying, unreliable, and unpredictable sort of substance prone to falling apart to its own whims, something which would just as happily abandoned its others as anything else. Each individual kernel seemed to have a mind and will and goal of its own, readily falling apart everywhere, getting into everything, sifting apart and sinking so as to do nothing useful instead of actually moving with the pull and command of a spell and acting in concert with the general goal of the thing. Whatever that happened to be.

Jijikko — for all that he had lived all his life on Eowyn and spent the great bulk of his time on, around, and in sand — hated sand. It was a disastrous and messy creation which got onto, into, between and around everything, and should not even—

When the 'arm' of sand he'd summoned shattered messily and loosely apart against the dragon's hide — about as effective as trickling water against a wall of a century’s old brick fortress — the beast snarled, spreading its great wings, bounding up, and temporarily shrowding Jijikko in the wake of an alarmingly dark and needlessly ominous shadow before swooping down and plummeting towards him. Jijikko yipped — a frustratingly high pitched sound, not that he would readily admit it under most any normal circumstances that he could imagine off the top of his head (and not that he was imagining those circumstances at the moment or thought he had any reason to be or even really cared if the female in his midst heard because there was a massive dragon attempting to eat him and he happened to care a good deal more about that than anything else).

He darted down, zipping beneath the great gaili’s belly and back towards the earth before coming to a messy, skidding landing and then gripping at his magic again — ‘Come on…’ — attempting to draw up something like a spike. Something, anything other than sandy uselessness of useless.

In retrospect, Jijikko made a mental note to himself for later reference that perhaps he ought to practice a good deal more with sand on his own in the future under safer and less hostile, life-or-death circumstances, since he spent so much time in it. It might, just might, turn out to save his — or someone else's life one day. For the time being, however—

His gaze darted around, looking for something he could actually work with — something large and concrete. Useable, dependable, and— There.

Several paces out, the sand beneath his feet gave way to more of the cracked earth that he'd been working with earlier and, in that, the jagged spires of earthen stacks that littered large portions of the burning desert landscape. Great, towering stacks of clay, heavy and solid, and dangerous — if utilized appropriately. Jijikko darted towards them.

Up, up, and around, he let out a trill of sound as he swept past the gaili dragon which was now, again, summoning a wave of its own magic and attempting to sweep him beneath it. Seconds before it swallowed him whole, however, he tunneled through it like a surfer in the middle of a rolling wave and made it out in the last instant, edging the beast on and working to make sure that its attention was on him and chasing him over to where the stacks were.

“Come, come, come on,” he chirped at it. “You move like a rock.” He hesitated, thoughtful. “A dead rock!”

The gaili dove, smashing towards him and as it moved in, Jijikko yanked at one of the spires — pulling, pulling — and there! With a great CRACK the earthen stack shifted, bent, and then came swinging down, down, and CRASHing atop the dragon, breaking itself over the creature’s back. It staggered, shuddering under the weight and dropping briefly to the earth. But then, it was shifting, ushering the clumps of earth down and off of it, and Jijikko darted low, yanking the rock chunks back up under the call of his magic and hurling them at it: one, two, three, four.

The process seemed exhausting, but finally, finally the massive dragon lay still. Jijikko panted, scales rippling before he shifted to hold his head up high. That, he thought, would surely…

Then, at long last, he caught full attention of all the dragons attacking his companion, and his wings sank. Why were there so many? Snarling, he leapt up again and off towards where Grrel was fighting.