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Written for forgottenspirits's prompt: a portal freezing
“The portal's frozen,” a voice called. “Again.”
It was the 'again' that told Rynne that it was Amber at the portal. The irritation in her voice was obvious. Rynne sighed. On the other side it was winter and it seemed to be a much colder winter than normal. She couldn't remember another year when the portal had been quite so badly affected by the world it was connected to. Unfortunately there didn't seem to be anything they could do to stop it from happening, which meant they had to spend several hours defrosting the thing before they could use it.
Thankfully the scouts seemed to understand what was happening to the portals, so they didn't have as many jobs. Having to sit around doing nothing did make some of the girls restless, especially those like Amber, but Rynne was happy that she didn't have to send them out on speed runs. People ended up dead in those sorts of situations and she was determined not to lose anyone, ever. They were supposed to be her underlings, nothing more, but they had become her friends. It made sending them into difficult situations a little harder, even though she knew they had all been trained to do the job.
Rynne walked into the portal room, which had once been the dining room, and stared at the portal. Three girls had already started defrosting it with hairdryers. Amber stood on the other side of the room, also staring at the portal. Every day it seemed to be slightly more frozen than the day before, and Rynne was glad that they had taken the carpet out of the room. If they'd had carpet to deal with on top of the portal... She shook her head. The portal was more than enough work.
“What do you think?”Rynne asked.
Amber shrugged. “It's possible that someone is freezing them from the other side, but I doubt they'd really put that much effort into something so pointless. If they bothered to search for the portal they'd probably find it without too much difficulty and then they'd simply walk through. I think this probably really is just a very bad winter.” She looked at Rynne and smiled. “At the moment they're much happier keeping this on their own turf. When they decide to bring the fight to us we won't be able to do anything to stop it.”
“You're in a good mood.”
“Rynne, we both know exactly why they haven't stopped us.”
“We think we know. There's no proof.”
“They like playing this stupid game as much as we do.” Amber laughed, but it had a bitter tone to it. “Until we find something that is actually useful we'll keep travelling over there and stealing from them, and they'll keep putting useless crap where we can find it.”
“Amber...” Rynne shook her head. “Some day we'll find something useful.”
“Then we'll live happily ever after.”
“If you're not happy then maybe it's time to move on.”
“What else can I do? I was trained to be a thief and it's really the only thing I'm good at.” Amber sighed. “Maybe, if I had a chance to live my life over, I might make a different decision, but right now I'm better off here.”
© K A Jones 2011

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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Date: 2012-01-24 06:53 am (UTC)*giggle* Just like a chest freezer!
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