Grease (grees) [noun] - animal fat in a soft or melted condition.
Immediately after waking up Winter began to hurriedly fill me in on the current crisis we were facing. Evidently, after the fall we landed in a stack of hay and from the shock of the fall I broke my left arm and fractured my left leg. In a panic Winter dragged my body over to this barn where I was unconscious for nearly a half hour.
What Winter doesn't know is that I also definitely suffered a concussion. The left part of my vision was blurry, and my head felt like a tea kettle boiling to the brim with a loud constant ring in my head. I could hardly hear anything Winter said over the noise. Then there's the dream... I didn't like to remember the past, I didn't even want to remember the present, and the future is a nightmare to imagine! If I had any luck the concussion would have made me forget everything up to Mr. Hairball.
Sadly the situation is bleak I thought with a grimace. It's the set up of a horrible joke; A black cat and a brain-damaged, half-cripple with no magic walk into a small military fortress surrounded by powerful mages. Damn, I messed this one up. My father's voice started ringing in my head again.
"Worthless, Worthless." his iron sharp stern voice bounced around my throbbing skull causing me to wince in pain as my chest started tightening.
"Rain? Bean-boy? Can you hear me? Are you okay?" my sister's gentle, airy voice snapped me out of my trance. That's right I thought, I can't put any burden on her. If only I had some magic then we could get out of here.
I responded, "Sorry, I was processing everything. What do you-" suddenly my feline sister stuck her pawn into my mouth as guards nearby started marching by. One of them was a boy with a familiar voice.
"Find that criminal fiend! We may not know his face, but his dark hooded robe does not match our magister's uniform. Find him!" he shouted.
I thought it was strange that he pretended to have not seen my face. Has he forgotten how I look? Either way, they're getting closer to where we are, and we need to find a way out. I tried to look around, but the pounding pain in my head and my blurry vision made it impossible for me to analyze anything around us. Especially in the darkness of night. Winter picked up on this and suggested a plan.
"I think we should start a fire as a distraction. As you saw with that guard captain, he didn't even know how to handle being set on fire properly. These magisters are so used to magic that they don't know about basic protection techniques simply because they have magical defenses." She spoke sternly. She hadn't spent five years cursed without learning to keenly observe her surroundings, in fact sometimes I think she even preferred life this way.
"Won't work sis'. They are mages remember? They'll just use water magic to douse the fire." I retorted. The idea of a distraction was understandable, but they can douse the fire without blinking an eye. I thought of how nice it would be to have a fire that grew bigger with water and at that moment my thoughts synchronized with my sisters. My eyes widened, and I inquired further as I put her thoughts together: "Do you want a grease fire?"
"Look at these lazy magisters. They were too fat and slow to reach the top of the tower and as a result, caused us problems. Let's teach them how to burn fat effectively." The cat's eyes started to glimmer violet as she suggested this and started to bare her fangs and wag her tail. Winter then jumped up onto a wooden table in the barn and bit into some animal fat and tossed it over towards me. "This is where they butcher the livestock; there's enough leftover animal fat here for us to start a decent fire in some different areas."
The pain from my headache and the numbness on the left side of my body seemed insignificant in comparison to the excitement that started to give my whole body goosebumps. I looked at my sister and squinted my eyes in pain before speaking to her with a smile again. "Sister, you truly are the cat's meow." She looked at me with feigned disgust and huffed.
"I should leave you to die for that one bean-boy!" She responded which caused me to chuckle. I winced in pain after laughing lightly and grabbed a wooden pole my sister gave me to use to walk. I pushed all my weight onto the staff and lifted my self up despite the pain ringing throughout my entire body. Leaving my left arm limp at my side, I started to wonder where my sister got such an idea.
"Watching you cook. You may not remember, but when mama and papa went on that mission, you had no idea what you were doing. You refused to let the servants cook and insisted on doing everything yourself. I wouldn't even know what a grease fire was if it wasn't for how often you nearly burned the house down!"
I was shocked, but the more I thought about it, the more everything made sense. In every country and kingdom in the world Craws are roughly 75% of the lower class. Working as ordinary servants and merchants, they learn how to live without magic is a requirement for us. That's why I had to learn to cook organically, as a Craw I wouldn't even have servants if not for my parents. I couldn't use magic tools or conjure fire or animate a meal into a living organism that would prepare itself. In fact, out of all 12 celestial bodies, the crab appears the most, meaning there are more Craws than there are any other types of people. These thoughts started to give me a strange sense of pride in being a Craw.
Most other mages would not understand basic scientific concepts that have nothing to do with magic, only because a majority of those households had servants who knew those things for them. I began to grin as I felt relieved at the feasibility of this plan. After all, this late at night, the servants were probably sent to their sheds and the only people able to stop a fire were gullible powerful mages.
I limped over to the table with animal fat and some scattered greasy cloth and started wrapping the animal fat in the oily cloth. I even pulled some ale out of my bag and doused some of the cloth balls in it for good measure.
"The rest is up to you sis. I'll start limping away and drop animal fat near any wooden huts or sheds I see. All you need to do is knock down the torches onto the cloth. The most important thing is that you start as soon as I get out of this barn. I can't run. I need the guards distracted." I spoke with newfound confidence. I knew we could pull this off, and my sister returned my confidence with a stiff cat tail and a nod of her head.
My whole body started to reject my mission. The ringing in my ear grew louder with each step I took, and an intense pain began to grow in the area where Hairball had broken one of my ribs. I pushed forward, but all I wanted to do was give up and die here. I thought about how much of a failure I was during this entire mission. How much trouble was going to come out of this failure? The world might even be a better place without me. My right leg started to tremble before I spoke to my mind.
"I'm a badass. I'm a badass. I'm a badass. I'm a badass!" With each step, as my headache grew even more intense, I repeated the thought loudly and started to worry that Winter could hear me. However, it didn't even matter as with the next step I listened to the sweet sound of alarmed guards.
"Fire! Fire!"
"Hit it with water spells!"
I smiled as the guards ran towards the burning barn I had left mere seconds ago. I limped around the back of every wooden house and shed on my path to the exit and dropped a small oily cloth filled with animal fat. Then as I worried things were getting quiet, I heard a loud explosion and a familiar teen voice accompanied by a symphony of stupidity.
"Don't use water you fools! The flames grow with water! It must be an elemental flame from an enemy!"
"There's another fire here! No fire is stronger than my water magic!"
"You idiot! It's burning off my hair now, damn it! Aaaagh!"
Some mages finally started to use elemental control to isolate the fire, but at that point, an entire trail of burning buildings was blazing. Safe to say the plan was more than sufficient for facilitating escape. Just as I finally escaped through the now abandoned gated exits to the fortress I felt winter jump on my back lick my cheek. Then a chill ran down my spine as the area behind me felt cold and dim.
I looked back, and everything that we had set on fire was now entirely frozen in a sheet of ice. Whatever mage had done that, was leagues above Hairball I thought. Let's hope I never meet them I muttered to myself as we finally escaped what felt like a neverending nightmare and headed home.