Prompt Five: Two characters see something incredible together.

All in all, it was a terrible day. The wind was blowing, kicking up flurries of snow from the ground. The biting chill was horrid to the unprepared, and the two agents trudging up the Skellige hill could feel its bite. Ce'rana, who was wrapped up in several jackets and still shivering madly, was taking the situation rather well.

"I hate this. I absolutely hate this. Why is it so cold?" She'd been dressed up in children's clothes from a nearby town, meant to protect from too much chill, but she'd never felt real cold before, and it wasn't enough to help. Hence the extra jackets, which also weren't enough. "The story is back in town, so why did we come up here?"

Alex, wearing only in a long-sleeve t-shirt, was only slightly shivering. "We're way up north. Skellige is this world's equivalent of Scandinavia, so there are quite a few viking stereotypes here. That includes snow, cold, and it not being safe to stay in town once the drinking starts. I can handle myself, but you're too small to protect yourself if a brawl starts." He stepped through the snow easily since it only came up to a little higher than his ankles, and crossed his arms behind his back.

The dryad huffed as she followed him, her progress heavily impeded by the snowbanks, which came almost up to her knees. "How can you stand this? I am wearing four layers of coat and you are just in a shirt! How are you not frozen?"

"Well, I would be wearing a coat, but you didn't have enough layers. And this is just brisk," Alex laughed, the noise echoing softly off the nearby hills.

"Easy for you to say, the snow only comes up to your ankles." Ce'rana stumbled against a thicker clump of snow. "You know what? I refuse to take another step through this mess. I would rather deal with the people down there, and that sue's pathetic descriptions of flirting, than keep climbing through this."

That drew a laugh from the noiret. "Alright. If you want me to carry you, I can do that." He held out a hand, which she took after a moment of scrunching her face up in frustration. He pulled her up and onto his back, with her wrapping her legs around his chest to stay on.

It didn't stop her from grumbling, of course. "This is freezing. Did you consider that, Alex? Did you consider the fact that it is freezing when you decided to drag me all the way out here? Honestly, why couldn't we have just stayed at the edge of town? There was less snow there, and the trees at least provided some comfort. Do you even feel the weather? At all? You never seem to respond to it. Certainly this... this waste isn't bothering you."

Alex rolled his eyes and kept stepping up the hill. "I've been in colder. It wasn't a long trip to the Alps back home, and those were mountain peaks covered in snow." He paused for a moment, then pointed just beyond the crest of the hill. "Like those."

"Like wha..." Ce'rana trailed off when she saw what was coming into view.

The two were now standing atop a small hill overlooking the town of Kaer Trolde. The town itself was a small, almost sleepy little port that seemed almost snuggled up against the base of a mountain. The river it sat on split the mountain in two, and a stone bridge had been erected between the sides of the mountains, connecting the upper parts of the town with an ancient fortress. The setting sun cast everything in many hues of red, slowly growing deeper as the sun slipped below the horizon. Down below, in the town, the agents could make out dozens of torches as people wandered the town. Lights sprung up in windows, and the distant cheers of the first round of drinkers were carried up on the breeze.

Ce'rana suddenly found she didn't care about the cold. "Oh, wow. I... was not expecting anything like this."

Alex brushed some of the snow away from the peak, exposing the rock, before he set Ce'rana down and sat on part of it. "I wasn't sure how it would look, but..."

She sat next to him, safely scooted away from the actual snow. "Incredible..." After a moment, she leaned against him, both relaxing and taking in what warmth he had to offer.

"So," Alex asked, a soft grin playing across his features, "was it worth it?"

She didn't even glance up at him, unwilling to take her eyes off the sight. "If you insist on making me say it? Fine. You had a reasonably good idea."

Tiger was bored. This wasn’t exactly a usual occurrence, but after that day’s particularly hectic training battle he was both magically and physically exhausted. Quite often in these situations his father sprung some kind of surprise test on him, but this time that hadn’t happened yet.

He was sitting in the library with his sister, who was in the same state as him. They were meant to be researching spells to practice the next day, but neither of them had enough energy to focus and kept just staring off into space.

“Shall we play cards?” asked Holly suddenly.

Tiger looked down at the description of a spell to give your enemy a particularly nasty nosebleed and considered her suggestion.

“Uh… okay?” he said slowly, having lost the will to live but still prepared to try and avenge his earlier, very painful (in more ways than one) defeat.

Holly began to deal out the cards she’d just pulled from her pocket in a neat pattern: three in a row face down in front of each sibling, six face up in the middle, three in a pile to each of them and the rest stacked in the middle.

Tiger picked up his pile of three, the playing hand, and looked at them. Seven of bells, three of swords, queen of flowers. None of these matched the ranks of the central cards, so he flipped over one of his other cards. The six of swords.

There was, thankfully, the six of goblets in the centre, so he played his own six on top of that and, hoped that Holly’s hand didn’t include a third six, picked up a card from the stack: the knight of flowers.

Holly, it turned out, did have a six (of bells), which she played on top of the other two. This feat entitled her to an extra turn: she flipped one of her face-down cards, the queen of swords. There were, much to Tiger’s satisfaction, no queens in the centre. Holly groaned and took the queen into her hand, and then reached for the stack to add two more cards as a penalty for being unable to go.

But, being as shattered as Tiger, she was a lot more clumsy than usual, her coordination a mess, and so her hand hit the side of the stack and sent the cards flying everywhere.

“Typical,” muttered Tiger, and, finally giving in to his exhaustion, allowed himself to collapse on the floor.

Prompt Three: Two characters play a game together. It doesn't go very well.

(Only context one might need is that Caitlin starts out blind due to Tomasevic Syndrome, and part of the book's plot is that she gains sight through use of a novel implant that also ends up letting her see the backdrop of the world wide web.)

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"I spy, with my little eye..."

A cartoon picture of a tree? the Braille letters appeared almost instantaneously before her eye.

"Yeah, you're right," Caitlin said, then sighed and slumped back against her definitely-uncomfortable-by-now seat.

In fairness, you hadn't been paying attention to that part of the room for some time.

"That's not that reassuring, Webmind, but thanks," Caitlin whispered, trying to keep her annoyance out of her voice.

It wasn't that she minded playing the game - it was as good an excuse as any to practice depth perception as she adjusted to having two working, no-longer-blind eyes - but they'd been waiting in the doctor's office for her ASD test results for the past forty minutes, and while she liked to pretend she was more patient than most teenagers, it was starting to grate on her.

But, really, they could have chosen a better game. When one party could see through the other's eyes, and track the eye movements, it could seem somewhat pointless.

"Why don't you try one, now?"

Because the doctor is preparing to come back out, and if you activated your eyePod's duplex mode it might be a distraction?

"Wait, what?" Caitlin replied, somewhat louder, and shifted upright in her seat-

Just in time for the doctor (who looked somewhat bedraggled - and like he was trying to cover it up, a sign for Caitlin to refrain from commenting on it) to come back out of his office with a clipboard full of papers.