Oh look, a quest! Round two (now with results!)

[Erebor]

We are at war. There will be scars.

He is falling, falling – and when he hits the ground, he can't move. He is facedown on his right side, eerily similar to how he had been in the toybox. But out here, outside the toybox, there is no movement. There isn't even speech. There is just – a voice?

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeee!" he hears the squeal of glee, and feels the thunder of some giant's immense footsteps. "Whoi's there?" he calls, but the thing doesn't answer. He can't see the creature at first, but it's no less terrifying when she does come into view. He's never seen anything like her – terrifyingly perfect, all gold and pink in a way that strikes him as incredibly unnatural.

He keeps himself from panic simply because it is his habit not to panic. She grabs him harshly around one of his front legs, crushing it in a way that no horse's leg should ever be crushed. The pain is unbearable, and even he , the born stoic, screams and screams. But there is no logic in this place, and so although he can feel the pain of being lifted by a leg, the leg doesn't move – it doesn't give way, it doesn't break. Oh but it should, it should.

"Let me go." he gasps out, but is ignored again. She dangles him in front of her face, so close that all he can see is one blue eye, distressing and huge as a malevolent moon. "PONY!" she screams, with the gleeful excitement of a spoiled brat. "Let me go!" he shouts, with all his strength. Again, he is ignored. She giggles, as though she's the most clever girl in the world. "Pretty pony!" her voice is no longer a scream, but still terrifyingly high-pitched. "Don't you understand you're hurting me?" despite it all he is trying to reason with her. And once again, he is entirely ignored. "Pony needs a name!" Everything she says sounds like it has an exclamation mark. "I will call you…" her face screws up as though she's thinking deeply, as though she's pondering impossible mysteries of the universe.

"Miss Pony McBerry Greenington!" she stumbles over the words a little bit, swinging him around wildly, still holding him by that same leg, as she says it. If he weren't so consumed by the pain no doubt he'd be hating the fact that he had been christened with a female name.

She swings him quickly down to her side, accidentally dropping him as she does so. He hits the floor with tremendous force, force that should be bone crushing – but isn't. He is terribly, impossibly entirely intact. And after the shock of the initial impact, the lack of pressure on his foreleg starts to sink in, and he starts to feel, for just a moment, blessedly better.

"MISS PONY!" the little girl shrieks, dropping to her knees beside him. She giggles and seizes him with a hand around his barrel. He can't breathe, and feels on the edge of passing out, but at least it's an improvement over the leg. Talking isn't an option this time, he can barely even seem to breathe. "ARE YOU OKAY?" she screams again. He wants to express to her the myriad of ways in which he is not okay, in which none of this is okay – but words are still not an option.

She giggles, and smiles. "Of course you are." she pats him on the head, almost gently. Almost. "Miss Pony is always okay." She strokes his mane with her free hand for a moment, and then her face seems to light up.

"PETUNIA!" she shrieks, and a moment later a harried looking older woman wearing some kind of white and black uniform hurries in. "Yes Miss Nerissa?" the woman's voice is subdued, the tones of a woman born and bred to be under someone else's heel. "Petunia." The girl greets dismissively. "We’re going to have a tea party. Get everything ready. And you know, they all like their tea extra hot." The girl says that last bit at the end with a strange, cold tone that he doesn't like at all. Petunia closes her eyes for just a moment, a flicker of sadness before duty (and possibly, fear of what happens if she doesn't obey) kicks in. The one called Petunia merely nods, and leaves the room.

"Well, Miss Pony. We need to make you proper welcome!" she claps her hands together in obvious glee. "But it'll take a bit for the tea. So before that it's time…to play!" She giggles and drops him, where he falls over entirely unceremoniously. He's on his side again, still unable to move. He hears her move behind him, toward the toybox, which he cannot see. He hears her muttering to herself quietly, hears her shifting the toys around, as though looking for some very specific ones. He shudders to think of the crashes he's hearing; she's clearly not being very gentle in her search.

Her face is looming over him again just a moment later, a terrible caricature of a smile. "Miss Pony! All the guests are here!" He can see then, clutched in her hands just as he'd been, some of the friends he'd made in the toybox. He recognizes the one-winged alicorn Samaine, rigid as he is in the girl's grasp, her eyes betraying that same deep sadness. It makes so much more sense now, why she'd be so sad. The twin dolls are there too, blue and pink and terrifying. And last, of course…

"Her Royal Highness, Princess Stabby Shooty PrettyHat!" Nerissa announces, dropping all the other toys in a heap next to Erebor as she raises the hand holding Prin, and only Prin. The cowboy-samurai woman hadn't been kidding when she'd said that Nerissa always called her by her full name. And she apparently wasn't kidding about being Nerissa's favorite. She was the only one not currently dumped in an ungainly pile.

"Your highness, there's a new friend in your kingdom." Nerissa carefully sits Prin down and busies herself with something around the room, talking to Prin as she goes. "Her name is Miss Pony McBerry Greenington, but you can just call her Miss Pony for short." The noise stops, and he can just see her. She seems to have a pile of other things in her arms, but he can't see them well enough from the floor to know what they are.

Nerissa sits down then, dumping the pile out next to her. "Well Your Highness, shall we welcome her as we welcome all our new guests?" she seems to be legitimately asking, but it's only a moment before she answers her own question. OF COURSE WE SHOULD!" she squeals with a giggle. "TOURNAMENT TIME!!!!"

Erebor doesn’t like the sound of that. He'd love to run, he'd love to hide, but nothing works.

Nerissa busies herself with something in the last pile she set down. "I'm so sorry, y'all." he's startled to recognize the voice as Prin's. She sounds broken in a way he never thought she could be. "No matter what I do to y'all, remember, it ain't me." He doesn't hesitate, responding immediately. "We can talk?" "Yup, we can. An' boy howdy do I wish we couldn't."

He's about to ask what she means when Nerissa finishes whatever she was setting up and grabs him roughly (again, around the foreleg, with the accompanying electric unbearable pain). He vaguely registers the fact that she's grabbed Prin too.

"Her Royal Highness, The Awesome Princess Stabby Shooty PrettyHat will now take on the newcomer Miss Pony McBerry Greenington in a fabulous welcoming tourney-mint!" Clearly the girl is a bit young to actually sound as prim and proper as she's trying to sound. Words like "tournament" just aren't quite coming out right yet.

She sets Erebor down roughly, with enough force that it should've fractured his legs. And yet they don't fracture – the impossible force shivers up through him. She presses down on his back then, and he sees that he's facing Prin.

Who is held in Nerissa's right hand, along with what he suddenly sees is a pair of nail clippers. Sharp nail clippers.

She always makes me win, Prin had said. Now he understands. He has no chance here, he is entirely under Nerissa's control. And he's going to end up like one of those toys from the toybox, deformed at her hand.

"BLADEGUNN!!!!!" she says with a squeal, picking Prin up and slamming her into Erebor's body in such a way that the clippers hit at the same time. They cut into his side, and he screams wordlessly with the pain. "Oh lawdy, I'm so sorry y'all." Prin's voice sounds on the edge of tears. The stabbing and slashing continues until Erebor is thoroughly scratched. This time, the pain does not fade immediately, as it had when she'd been dangling him by his legs.

"Round one is over, and the winner is…THE PRINCESS!" she announced, as though it were not completely obvious (and preordained). "Round two…ready?" she sets down the clippers, exchanging them for something that looks like a hairpin. "Go!" Once again Prin charges forward (or, Nerissa makes Prin charge forward) and he gasps at the sharp pain that lances through him. Nerissa buries the semi-sharp point deep into his muscles, stabbing and twisting, not content to make surface scars anymore.

"And the winner is…the princess!" she says again, just as triumphantly. Prin is silent, and Erebor is grateful for that – he couldn't have handled speech right now. His body is riddled with scratches and holes, which should easily be bleeding out, and yet are not. It's the most incredible torture, never ending, and yet he cannot seem to die. It's worse than death, easily.

He's worried that they're about to go for round three when there is a noise off past his range of vision, immediately distracting Nerissa. "Miss Nerissa." Petunia's voice is quiet. Nerissa drops the horse and the samurai warrior cowgirl princess, getting up to greet the woman at the door. "Tea!" she says, cheerily. Petunia follows here as Nerissa indicates that the tea is to be set down right near where they'd been having their tournament. Erebor feels the servant woman's eyes look to him, but if she thinks anything, she doesn't say it.

"And plug it in." Nerissa commands Petunia without thinking. "You know I have to stay while it's plugged in miss-" "Fiiiine." Nerissa says with an exaggerated sigh. "You'll just have to stay then." Petunia goes over to the wall, bends over toward something, and then straightens up again. She stands by the door, observing but clearly unwilling to interfere at all. This is Nerissa's show.

And the little girl claps her hands together in glee. "TEA!!!" There is some kind of glittering monstrosity on the floor, a dome of white and pink taller than he is, perched upon a flat riser that shines like the moon. And off to one side sits a large object, steaming and whistling. Tea, he realizes, quite literally. And apparently with a nice electric kettle, which has just been turned on to boil.

Nerissa takes great care to set her toys up in a circle around the tea set. Each of them receives their own cup. Erebor is last, but he is set before a place as well, his cup pink and white and floral. But just after she sets him down she frowns. "Miss Pony, you look dreadful. You didn't do very well in the tourney-mint, did you?" she sighs, picking him up (again by just the foreleg) and looking at him from all sides. "You need a bath Miss Pony. Luckily we've got one heating up right here!"

And without hesitation, she opens the top of the kettle and drops him in.

He screams. It is like nothing he's ever known before, as though every inch of his flesh is searing. He's glad that he doesn't seem to have nostrils to breathe through, or he'd no doubt be inhaling the scalding water as well. But as before, the human girl is either ignoring him or deaf to his cries. Not that it matters – perhaps it will finally be his time, he'll finally be able to die. He feels as though he is melting, as though the boiling water is making parts of him shift, reshaping him. It's a pain like having your bones and skin liquefied, like being lit on fire, like melting. There is nothing he can do but endure.

"Okay Miss Pony, nice and….AAAAAAHHHHHH!" Petunia is quick to Nerissa's side then, as the girl had been about to reach into the boiling kettle. "I'll take care of it, Miss Nerissa." the quiet woman says, and Erebor sees a kind of strange sadness in her eyes. "MISS PONY…" Nerissa is sobbing as though she's just witnessed the most traumatic thing in the world.

He is carried somewhere, still inside the metal container, still unbearably hot. It tilts, and the impossibly warm water flows away. It's then that he notices he can no longer see. In fact, he can barely feel. What little he does feel is so powerfully wrong.

"SHE'S……….SO……………UGLY." he hears Nerissa's sobbing again, and realizes (dimly) that she's talking about him. "YOU RUINED HER. I HATE YOU." she screams at Petunia, who still holds Erebor (or, perhaps, more accurately the boiled, barely recognizable, terribly warped and misshapen remains of the toy pony formerly known as Miss Pony McBerry Greenington, formerly known as Erebor)

"My lady, maybe we can fix-" Petunia begins, but Nerissa interrupts her "She was NEW for my BIRTHDAY and you RUINED her." and with that, Nerissa grabs Erebor's tortured body (by the foreleg, still slightly squishy from the boiling process) and flings him into a trashcan.

He feels himself hit the bottom, dimly hears the clatter of plastic on plastic. Somewhere outside, the voices fade away, and a door slams. He is too broken to try imagining what's happening, too ruined to even think beyond this moment, to wonder what it means for the rest of his life. He is on fire, a flame of pain, too impossible to be described. Every nerve is seared, the damage is surely too much, and yet he does not die. He endures.

Broken, boiled, and ruined, at the bottom of the wastebasket, he endures.    

Erebor

Native Prince of the Chamber

warship x straia