Chapter Text
“This,” Meta Knight drawls, "is ridiculous."
Jecra cranes his neck around from where he’s smushed himself against the rock-face to peer down at the shorter Knight, indignant. “It is not! You are just annoyed you didn’t think of it first!”
Garlude whirls from his other side, having previously been sneaking glances around the boulder they were hidden behind, and smacks the shield bearing Star Warrior in the back of the head. “Shh! We are hiding, you Knuckle-Head!”
When she turns back to her watch, the other two share a glance, chastised. Sometimes, when Meta Knight and Jecra can’t sleep, they try and figure out just how the woman manages to both snarl and whisper at the same time. It’s like the hiss of a battleships automatic door mashed together with a dog’s low grumble. Jecra had pencilled in Garlude’s Mad Voice as the 48th Universal Mystery in one of Meta Knight’s Encyclopaedia’s the nerd likes to read, having crossed out Interdimensional Planetary Alignment and the Effects on Local Gravity Fields.
Jecra got a bowl full of Hygyean White Brandy in his breakfast when Meta Knight found out instead of the milk he had been expecting. The liqueur was famous for its burn, and the shield-bearing Knight has made quite the spectacle of himself in the canteen that morning.
Worse, Jecra doesn’t know what bothered him more: That he had no proof Meta had done it, or that Meta had wasted half a bottle of White Brandy making Jecra think he’d been poisoned.
The way Meta Knight’s eyes brighten ever-so-slightly behind that mask of his makes Jecra scowl. “It will work, Bright-Eyes.” He’ll be damned if he lets his midget companion mar his confidence, even if the puff is likely right.
“A simple myth, surely?” Meta Knight presses, seeming concerned that this whole thing could end badly for the lot of them. The puffball pauses with a gentle sigh of resignation, albeit with a dash of poorly contained humour. “But, if you're really set on it, don't complain to me the next time we pass through a town and you can't afford a drink.”
Smug level: Intense.
Jecra huffs, pulling out a carefully hoarded gold coin. “After this, you are going to owe me that drink.”
Garlude seems to have come to some sort of decision and turns back to the two, and Jecra senses that it’s now or never. Meta Knight will let this slide just to watch the fallout, Garlude will not.
Before the lavender fighter can stop him, Jecra leaps up onto the boulder currently shielding them from enemy sight. The sight of several hundred, small rodent-like demon beasts, meet him as they turned to gaze up at him in unison, astonished at his sudden appearance. They had unintentionally trapped the trio against this hiding spot, wedging the Star Warriors between the demons and a cliff; with freedom several hundred demon beasts away.
The beasts were small, weak, and undeniably stupid, but their numbers were not something to shake a stick at. Sometimes, it’s the small fry that do the most damage.
The creatures ripple like a wave across a sea, before they fall eerily still, realisation beginning to settle in their tiny brains. Jecra uses the sudden quiet to thrust his hand into the air, thousands of eyes following the gesture in bewilderment, attention drifting from attack to confusion.
“Look!” Jecra exclaims, the blasting sunlight gleaming off the small reflective coin. “Shiny!”
Garlude's splutters of disbelief are drowned out by a collective entranced “ooh,” from the demons. It’s such a bizarre sight that she forgets to be angry about it.
Conscious of the tiny attention spans before him, Jecra waves the coin like a stick in front of a dog, before casting his arm back and hurling it straight off of the cliff with a rather harried “Fetch!”
Another, briefer, bout of baffled silence rattles the area; and for a moment it seems Meta Knight’s doubts were well founded. The coin flips through the air, flashing in the light, before it’s beyond the cliff edge and out of sight.
Garlude is beginning to remember to be angry.
Then, as one. The demons scramble after the coin in a mad dash, throwing themselves clear off the cliff's edge in their utter enthralment of getting the shiny object, trampling any of their hapless companions that can’t move fast enough.
Those that hadn't heard Jecra or seen the coin, seem to follow their brethren off the edge out of what must be only instinct, until not one was left.
Leaving three very gob-smacked Star Warriors waving away the dust.
“I-I can't believe that worked” Jecra mumbles from above. Meta Knight and Garlude only stare at the recently vacated cliff-top in weary disbelief. Regaining composure in a desperate scramble, the shield bearing warrior leaps to the ground to whirl on Meta Knight. “Ha! I told you that it would work! Lemming demons do jump off cliffs!”
Meta Knight and Garlude can’t even spare him a glance, still eyeing the expanse before them as Jecra howls his way back to their make shift camp across the now vacated strip of land between it and the boulder. The confidence rolls off him in obnoxiously loud waves.
“I-I thought that was just a myth.” Garlude manages weakly, voice cracking under the strain of what she has just witnessed. It was…stupid, and juvenile, and dangerous, and yet infuriatingly effective.
Meta Knight sighs for the third time in as many minutes. “That’s it, Garlude. We're never going to hear the end of this.”
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