#''sorry i cant hear you over the smell of my armor polish''

[catboygirljoker]

(smiling so smiley) waiter more lamia lore please 😊

:3 !!

uhhh they were friends with lea and isa growing up! mostly lea. i think isa didnt particularly like lamia, but certainly neither of them believed lamia deserved to be bullied by their peers or singled out by their teachers. lea would stand up for lamia, and isa would often get roped in. sometimes lea would hang out with lamia when they were lonely.

since lamia's dad was a scientist, i imagine they lived in the castle, and so did lea and isa after they became ansem's apprentices—but they became pretty busy, so lamia didn't see much of them. and lamia wouldn't have gone to see them at the labs; they tended to avoid people as much as possible, especially authorities, even finding back ways to sneak out of the castle to avoid the guards.

later, saïx reads xigbar's reports that mention lamia, and he doesnt really think much of it. just like, "oh, huh. i remember them. seems they havent changed much." axel might have a stronger reaction to hearing about lamia, but all of that happens during Days, and, yknow. axel's got a lot more on his mind then.

[scriveyner]

shining like the stars p87

Keith inhaled a long breath through his nose, looking around the curve of the arena's wall. It was a polished white stone, once immaculate but now covered with scuffs and stains and actual chunks taken from it; the edges buffed down to prevent additional damage. It was also a good fifteen feet high -- not out of the realm of possibility to scale thanks to the jet boosters on their back, but the added security of a dome sat atop the ring prevented any thoughts of escape. The dome itself was made of a translucent material that let daylight filter in from the planet's star, but tinted so they couldn't see their audience. Keith could hear them, though, his sensitive ears twitching at the dull murmur of alien voices speaking an alien tongue.

                                                   Read on AO3

Lance was leaned casually back against the wall, arms folded. The guards had taken their cloaks, checking for additional weapons and attempted to take their bayards but the weapon had a self-defense mechanism of returning to the digital storage system within the suit, so they could not be entirely de-armed. Keith felt naked without the foul-smelling cloak he had been wrapped in, his purple furred face and large ears protruding from his dark hair now available for all the world to see. He flicked his ears again, canted back, a display of his current emotion that he couldn't stifle.

"It'll be fine," Lance said, recognizing Keith's unease. He was entirely unconcerned, he didn't even smell nervous. He also didn't have the distant recollection of being lined up as small children for their carer's amusement, forced to fight until they couldn't stand any longer. Keith shuddered and pushed that memory back behind its wall, because he wasn't that person any more, no matter the color of his fur. "So we fight the Prince's dudes, prove our worth, and go home. Seems easy enough." Lance gestured to the ring in front of them, empty save for its walls and the doors at the other end, where their mystery combatants were waiting.

"Lance," Keith said warily, hands loose at his sides, hands curled into fists. "When we get out of this memory core, I'm gonna fucking deck you."

Lance looked insulted. "Hey, this isn't my fault."

"Yeah it is, Mister Oh Look We're ~Paladins~," Rian muttered from behind them.

Their third wheel was sitting in the loose, gritty sand, his back to the white stone wall and hands draped over his knees, head tilted forward. Rian had put up a fight before he'd been thrown in behind them, protesting the entire time that he wasn't with them. The guard had little sympathy for the Altean, muttering something about Galra sticking together, and shoved Rian unceremoniously through the door that Lance and Keith had walked through of their own accord. Keith glanced back at him, felt the sting of a familiar scent and Rian glanced up, golden eyes narrowed.

Aside from the eyes, and the fangs he had developed, Rian also had a soft fuzz over his features that only showed as a very pale purple in direct, clear sunlight. The rest of the time it simply looked the same tone of his skin. "So this is one of your candidate for Paladin trials, right?" Keith said, to keep himself distracted from the buzz of conversation above and around him, threatening to overwhelm. "What can we expect?"

Rian snorted, and looked back down at the sand. "They'll send in gladiator bots first, which are usually easy pickings. They save the prisoners for last."

Lance tilted forward. "Excuse me? Prisoners?" He glanced at Keith, who shared the same expression. "What prisoners?"

"Galra, usually. The planetary defense force eliminates every scout ship that comes this way - we're on the edge of a far quadrant, and there are a couple irregular black holes and a dwarf star that's ready to go supernova between here and the regular trade lanes. Ships just disappear in the Far Worlds, everyone knows it." Keith got the impression that if Rian had ears like his, he would flick them nonchalantly. "Galra don't deserve to live, anyway."

"Paladin trials are just gladiator combat," Keith said, amazed. "Seriously?"

"This is the last one," Rian said. "You gotta be good enough to survive this far."

Keith felt sick. He looked at Lance, who looked a little ill himself. "What the hell," Lance said. "I'm not executing their prisoners for them."

"Then they'll kill you," Rian said. "And maybe we can get out of this fucking nightmare." He folded his arms over his knees and rested his chin on them, curled into a small, dark ball. Lance and Keith exchanged glances again, and then looked across the expanse of the arena, toward the large, closed doors. With a low, creaking noise they started to shift on their hinges.

Coran kept half an eye on the monitor feed from the training bay. He'd left it up, the memory core in the corner of the picture, just so he could jump on it the moment he saw the Paladins tumble out of the ancient machine. However, it was not the main draw of his attention at the moment, instead watching the large, zoomed in monitor as the Galra cruiser broke orbit with Eaphus, engines powered to their magenta-hued fullest. To the left of his main screen he had visual feeds on both the Black and Yellow Paladins. "Looks like they're heading for you now, Paladins," he reported, hand flying over the translucent controls at his fingertips. "Princess, what's your status?"

There was silence from the audio-only feed on the right side of his display. Coran's eyes darted to it, widening slightly. "Princess?"

"I'm fine, Coran," Allura's voice was calm but soft. "There are more guards in this portion of the ship, I must be careful." There was another silence on the line, but he could hear the click of boots on tile, either Allura's or someone else's, he couldn't be sure. "Do you still have the commlink location feed up?"

He did. Coran brought the map up, showing a cross-section of the prison ship based on antiquated blueprints. "The Green Paladin and her brother seem to be separated," Coran reported, tapping a button to locate Allura on the map by her comm transmission as well. A small pink dot appeared, closer to one of the green dots than the other.

"I'm aware of that, thanks," Allura said. "Pidge should be heading back to where she stashed the Green Lion; it's her brother I'm concerned with."

The other dot, in the bowels of the ship, had been stationary a while. "He seems to be a few levels down." Coran squinted at it, and frowned. "He hasn't moved in a few dobashes, he could be in trouble." A pause. "You should be cautious, Princess."

"Thank you, Coran, I will." Allura didn't say anything else, and she must have cut her mic because he couldn't hear the feedback from footsteps or the soft hum of background noise from the Galra ship. Coran glanced back up at the main screen; then flicked his gaze over to the left. Hunk was staring into the video commlink nervously. "So Allura found Pidge?" he asked. "What about Matt?"

"No time to worry about Holt now," Illianya's voice came from the second audio feed, directly below the Princess's. "The cruiser has started discharging its drone starfighters. It's time to party."

"Pidge, are you aboard the Green Lion yet?" Shiro asked, and Coran's eyes flickered to the map he still had up. The small green dot was moving quickly in one of the top levels of the ship. There was a rustle and then Pidge's voice came through the commlink, in that same hushed, cautious tone that Allura had.

"Not yet," she said, and the dot on the board went stationary. "I might be a few ticks, there seems to be a small problem. Tiny one. Pretty inconsequential." Another click, and the static dropped out of her audio feed, the tone clearer. "Yeah, definitely a couple minutes. Hang on."

"Hang on?" Hunk said, a rise in his voice. "Hang on?"

"Pidge, what's going on?" Shiro said, voice level.

"There's - oh, I think it's about fifteen if I'm eyeballing it correctly --" a pause on the line. "Sorry, seventeen. Guards around where I stashed Green."

Coran felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. "Are they aware they've surrounded a Voltron Lion?" he asked, watching the Princess's pink dot descend lower into the bowels of the enemy ship.

"I don't think so," Pidge's voice had dropped further in tone. "I have her cloaking shield on, plus the particle barrier -- it's the barrier that's causing the problem, the guards keep kicking it and it sparks but doesn't reveal what's behind it." Another pause, and then a derisive snort from Pidge. "I knew it was strange that there weren't that many guards patrolling, their buddies must have radioed them in to come look at this crazy anomaly in one of the launch bays."

"You'll have to create some sort of distraction," Coran said. "Perhaps if you can craft a Viluvk whistle-"

"Relax," Pidge said, and though her tone was soft it was calm. She popped up on a video commlink display to the right of Coran's screen, above the audio-only feeds for Allura and Illianya. "I've got this, it'll just take a couple minutes." She winked into the display and held up a finger, about to start typing into the small keyboard displayed above the forearm of her armor's gauntlet, where the camera was.

Then, abruptly, a loud klaxon started blaring in the background. Pidge's face froze, then she flung herself back against the wall, the camera angle spinning dizzily. "Pidge? What's happening?" Shiro said, and Pidge reached down and disabled the camera just that quickly; the klaxon still blaring through the now audio-only channel. "Pidge?"

The frequency of patrolling guards escalated the deeper into the ship that Allura ventured. Galra architecture hadn't changed much; the long, curved hallways did not feature smooth uninterrupted walls; instead every few meters there was an almost decorative divider. It gave the hallway the appearance of running down the inside of a vertebrae column; with the main power conduit running along the ceiling like the spinal cord itself. Allura rested her shoulder against one such divider, her hand flat along its edge. She had a regular plasma pistol in her hand, not a rifle, and she kept it close to her chest.

Two guard robots, completely automated, clicked past. They were going the opposite direction, their backs toward her. The lumbering robots did not seem to do an automated sweep -- just walking in a straight line down the corridor in a long, exaggerated loop. If an escape alert went out it would be different, their scanners would detect any lifeforms in the corridor that didn't belong there; but for the moment at least, there was no need to even think that someone would be stupid enough to infiltrate the prison ship.

She found the slim figure clad all in black not long after. He was standing, clear as day in a corridor, where there was an access computer. It was beside a large, heavy door, that like led into the cell block area where the most important prisoners were kept. He had one hand resting on the console, and his face was angled up, the glow of the screen reflected in the opaque curve of his dark helmet.

"Matt!" Allura said, relief flooding her voice despite herself. He jumped a little and turned, but she couldn't see his face behind the tinted visor. "We've got to get out of here, did you free any prisoners?"

He shook his head and touched the side of his helmet, which dimmed the tint so she could see the features that were all too similar to Pidge's. "No, most are kept behind far more complex cell blocks than even the ship I escaped from." He folded his arms and looked at the small monitor, which showed a split screen of at least a dozen cells, full of aliens of all shapes and descriptions. "Dad's not here, though," Matt said softly.

Allura stared hard at the monitor. Because of its size, it was hard to make out the distinguishing features on most of the aliens, but very few were even bipedal, nevermind Terran in form. There was a pull inside her chest - they were inside the Galra ship, a few blast doors from freeing the prisoners, she couldn't be standing here even entertaining the suggestion that they turn and flee, even with Voltron in danger. "Is there any way to get to them?"

"Not without a master key," Matt said. "I don't have access into this terminal, if Pidge is still rooted in to that main system we might be able to get in a backdoor, but without a Galra even present to unlock the console..." Matt put his hand forlornly on the red handprint, but its glow did not change. "All we can do is look at them."

"Maybe not all," Allura said. She set her blaster on the console and took a deep breath. Then she placed her hand on the handprint, and focused.

There were Alteans of the noble house who had centuries to hone their craft, making the transition between species easy and nearly instantaneous. Unfortunately, Allura hadn't had time to learn under any of the masters, and her shape shifting ability was a little more clunky and a lot less subtle. She couldn't just change the chemistry of her hand, but her entire body as she assumed a Galra's form and features, growing in size beside her companion. Her flight suit was modified to keep up with her Altean DNA and as she grew her suit grew with her, keeping its snug fit and not stretching out nor tearing. As the change completed, the handprint scanner suddenly beeped affirmatively, and unlocked the console - not that Matt even noticed, staring bug-eyed at Allura like he'd never seen an Altean shapeshift before. "What?" she said, self-conscious and little sharply.

"How did you..." Matt gestured at her. "How did you do that?"

"All Alteans have the ability to shapeshift," she said. "We are a chameleon-like race-"

He shook his head emphatically. "I've never seen Rian or Ilya or any of the others do that."

The references to others - other Alteans - made her smile despite herself. "No one has shown you this ability? I suppose it's not needed as much around others of our kind." She tapped the console. "I don't know if we'll be able to get them all to the flight bay before anyone discovers what we've done, but..." she typed several commands quickly into the now unlocked-console, opening all the cell doors. They were able to get a first-hand view of the surprise, and wary delight on the alien features of the Galra prisoners as they realized that the system holding them in place had been compromised.

"Quite simple," Allura said, and moved to tap the final commands, unlocking the doors of the cells without camera feeds. Abruptly, the last one was labeled something in Galra she didn't have time to try to translate, and when she flipped the lock on that cage, alarm klaxons went off immediately. "Oh," Allura said, quite calmly given the shrieking sirens, "Quiznack."