Double Helical Salt

"Fighting arm in arm with someone you like... It's a great feeling, isn't it, Pyra?"

And when Fiora put it like that, Pyra had to consider that maybe these butterflies, fresh since the Linkring, weren't just to do with the strangeness of the Archsage's little platform.

Now, wasn't it only natural for the Aegis (no matter that she wasn't the truest, most powerful form thereof) to be a little bit spooked by the arrival of a dimensional portal she'd never heard of and had no idea how to quantify, to parse? That was the easy excuse, anyway. Pyra, a master at hiding her innermost feelings, had been quite content with it, for the past couple of days.

These people from the other world...they're special, obviously. The Archsage wouldn't pick helpless, random people to be thrust into battle against mammmoth squoods, just for fun.

Would he?

Mythra had been intrigued, even a little bit shaken, by Shulk's sword. Pyra won't deny a share of the same curiosity - it's her sword that's the matching red, after all. And Fiora just fights with plain hunting knives (in fact, she'd used them to cut up samod for hotpot the prior night, and Pyra had just smiled companionably, because she wasn't really sure how to accomplish food safety via the ingestion of whole fried whitebait, scales and gills and all, anyway).

These people- rather, Shulk and Fiora, they aren't Blades. They fight like Blades, though, handing off their weapons thrown through the air and harnessing the elements for shocking displays of force.

How could they learn that so quickly? It should be impossible. Probably, Father doesn't even know.

But Pyra won't deny that it is a great feeling. It's magical. She can't fight alongside Mythra, and never has been able to see outside the sleeping eyes of her half of the mind, in that way, so watching Fiora...

It is, to recall the apocryphal announcer's booming voice (a particular idiosyncrasy of the Land of Challenge's arena), awesome.

Never mind the fact that Fiora defends the honor of girlhood by denouncing Rex's compliment - who's stout, now? Even though Pyra agrees that Fiora is striking, all the weight of a tyrannotitan flying out of two petite handle-grasping fists.

Mòrag has her at her back, which means that the Arts are enormously dramatic, yet enormously serious (not like Zeke's flash and flam, which has its own merits). Every lunge is one thousand and ten percent chest, calves, quad muscles, universal courage and WHAM.

Nothing tricksy - not that she couldn't be! Just maximum effort and an affinity magnet. Pyra very nearly forgets that Fiora's a healer. Actually, Pyra forgets that anybody's supposed to be a healer, right about now. Try another dose of critical fortitude, boom boom boom.

So now Pyra steps a little more bombastic. Pyra tosses her Godspeed Sword like it weighs nothing at all. Who's stout? We're stout.

Pyra has always known that Blades were special. Never had the occasion to believe it about herself, but she's known it. Even if Fiora isn't one, really, she's bringing out something in Pyra that she'd never known she could feel. Almost takes her out of battle, but then again thrusts her right back in.

(And of course Mòrag's got that dreadnought-devil focus, while Pyra still hasn't even got a knife.)

You can't really get to know someone without having a few skirmishes together, right?