Life was just about as perfect as Elijah would wish it to be, really. He had everything he wanted, more or less. The Circus was open again, at long last, which meant he was once more employed to do what he had spent years training for. He had an audience of rapt guests who stared as he twisted himself into odd and seemingly impossible shapes and clapped when he performed some extraordinary feat. When he wasn't working, he was in class and when he wasn't in class, he was in his nice little student apartment watching TV or practicing. On occasion, he was even to be found out and about in the city, enjoying some of the local bars that catered to students and the clubs were pretty girls danced in their oh-so-short skirts. All in all, it was exactly what Eli wanted from his life, but there was really only one hitch to all of it...
That hitch happened to be the fact that Elijah was Ys, and Ys was a knight of Saturn, which meant that like it or not, he was a soldier in a war he could really care less about.
It wasn't fair, really... he hadn't asked for any of this. He wasn't known for being particularly altruistic, so really had no idea who's big idea it had been to shove a wooden mask at him and over him in bells. What was with that anyway? It put a great big 'shoot me' sign on his back, that he jangled ever time he moved. Meggido and Luxor, and to an extent even Zia, took this whole thing a whole lot more seriously than he cared to. Luxor, at least, only cared about keeping the Carnival safe, which was one thing Eli could actually get behind... Monsters roaming the grounds meant people didn't feel safe and when they got scared, they avoided the source of it. Less people meant less audience and less adoration, which he thrived on... so despite his misgivings and dislike, he still powered up on a regular basis to do a bit of vermin extermination.
It almost would have been fine with Eli, powering up just to do clean up and ignoring the bigger war entirely, but once in a while that war chose to rip him out of his comfortable little carnival and shove him into things he didn't care for. Like dragging him to Mars without so much as a by-your-leave. Luckily he hadn't been doing anything that would miss him, but still. And then it had happened again later, when that girl had called for help finding something in her Wonder. People had actually died in that and it had put a sour taste in Elijah's mouth. He was not interested in giving up his life for anyone and anything and it was entirely rude for these magical... things to be hauling him all around the Galaxy to demand he do things he didn't want to. There was exactly zero motivation to go along with any of it and really zero incentive too. No one had stood up and said 'hey, this is why you should give a bloody ******** about this stuff'... so he chose not to.
Too bad people didn't seem content to let him coast by... Meggido found his lack of progress as a knight unconscionable and taken it on to beat him into advancement. Not that he minded so terribly? But injury was not something he care to court. His body was a finely tuned machine, carefully maintained for peak performance... injury was not just a time out for him like it was for some other people. Injury put him off practice and time working, which made muscles stiff and less elastic, which meant harder practice and recouping lost time. There was even the chance that a wrong injury in the wrong place could cost him everything... If he lost his ability to hyperextend in the wrong place, that was pretty much it for contortionism. At least she hadn't beaten him too hard during their sparring match... he even thought maybe he had learned a few things from it, which was all to the good. He'd decided he needed to learn something about fighting just so he could better defend himself.
Hopefully, with the bit of work he'd been putting into it, reaching Squire would come finally and then everyone could get off his back for a while. He could sit back a bit, so to speak, as a knight and get back to what he felt was really important in life. And, hopefully, there wouldn't be any more hauling him around by the short hairs by the Code. He could dream, right?
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