Chapter 21 - Album

" Fairy Tail: Paths of the Soul

Reaching the guild seemed to take no time at all, but despite that, Axel, Amber, and Zeke arrived to find the main building practically empty. The three of them stood at the door for a moment, a little dumbfounded by the emptiness, until they heard a pair of muffled voices in the silence. Axel took a quick sniff and looked up at the second level balcony. "Hey Dad? We're here."

A few shuffled footsteps echoed through the ceiling, and soon they spotted Jon's bald head peak over one of the banisters. "Hello there." He called, making his way to the spiral staircase to ground level. "I hope my son's been a courteous host for you, Amber.” He said the second his foot hit the bottom step.

"She made rules." Zeke accused, landing on Axel's shoulder.

"Oh my, how ever will you survive?" He replied with a sarcastic chuckle. "Nothing outlandish I expect?"

Amber shook her head. "No, not really. Just stuff to keep out of each other's hair." She glanced at Axel, finding him with a somewhat apologetic look on his face. Despite the way the morning had gone, Amber couldn't help but giggle at the fact that he was still trying to look sorry. ' Trying to change the subject before he got in trouble, Axel spoke up. "Anyways, we got kind of hungry. Do you have anything on the go right now?"

"No, but a good chef is always ready to make something on short notice." He took half a step towards the kitchen, but stopped short to beckon Axel after him. "A good chef also knows when to ask for help."

"You need help for three meals?" Axel asked in a somewhat annoyed tone.

"No." Jon shrugged. "But I didn't teach you how to cook so that you could come to me whenever you felt lazy. So suck it up and give me a hand."

Though he groaned in defiance, Axel followed along without a word of complaint. Zeke leapt from his shoulder onto a nearby table just before father and son disappeared, then laid back to stare at the roof. "Guess we'll wait here by ourselves."

"That’s rude." A voice echoed from overhead, before a figure flipped over the banister and landed in the middle of the floor. A woman with a long black ponytail and slightly tanned skin spun to face them both, placing her hands on her hips to stare at Zeke. "Who'd you think Jon was talking too?"

Amber was taken by surprise by the woman's sudden entrance, but found herself drawn in by her goofy smile. She had a gorgeous hourglass figure, though this was offset by her somewhat unflattering, ragged clothes, all of which were brown in color.

Noticing she was being stared at, the woman refocused her attention on Amber. "You're the new girl, right?" She asked abruptly. "The one who was getting hell from the council?" Amber nodded slightly, wishing people could remember her for something, anything other than that. "The name's Kat Myre, nice to meet'cha." She said, extending a handshake.

"Kat?" Amber repeated, straining to remember where she'd heard that name from before. "You mean you're one of the S-Class mages?"

"Yep, one and the same." She asked, flopping down into a chair at Zeke's table. "And I don't know what you've heard, but I deny everything."

The large grin on her face betrayed the fact that she was only teasing, but it still took a moment for Amber to figure that out. "Sorry, there's been a lot of new names lately. It's getting kind of hard to keep track."

"Don't worry about it." Amber spun to find Jaina had just arrived with a bag slung over the shoulder of her good arm. "You've met most of the important ones, so don't beat yourself up over it."

"Harsh..." Kat moaned, glancing down at the thing Jaina had brought with her. "What's that?"

Zeke dove out of the way as Jaina tossed her bag onto the table. "Some stuff I want kept out of the rain, and my place is starting to look like a storage shed."

Kat was puzzled. "Rain? There's not a cloud in the sky."

"Trust me, there will be." A sly grin cut across Jaina's face, and she joined Kat and Zeke at their table. "Anyways, I see the fur-ball, but no sparky." She asked, trying to sound innocent. "Why no sparky?"

"He's making us lunch." Zeke said, rolling up into a sitting position.

Jaina nudged Amber with her elbow. "Ah. You've got him working for you, have ya'? Clever girl."

"It's not like that, Jon asked him to..." Amber muttered, beginning to loathe how Jaina's teasing could get to her so much. "You said new members eat free."

"That I did, yes." Jaina nodded, but very quickly became aware that her attempt at humor had fallen flat. "Anyways, you're up and about, so I guess you’re not feeling sick anymore right?"

"Sick?" Kat cut in. "You're first job was a little rough, huh?"

"Sort of..." Amber shrugged. "I felt like crap all the way home, but that wasn't it."

"Yeah, you looked like it too." A voice echoed from the corner. Amber quickly spun around, while Kat tiredly glanced over her shoulder to see Peltin looking over a newspaper at them with his feet up on the table. "We can sympathize though. Riding the high of coming back from your first job, you lose track of how many shots you down. Then an hour later you're tossin' your cookies in the middle of the street." He said with a condescending grin. "It happens to the best of us."

"No! I don't drink." Amber yelled in annoyance. Kat apparently shared Jaina's fondness for poking fun at people, and Peltin rubbed her the wrong way every time she laid eyes on him. "Why does everyone think that?"

"Full discloser; because just about everyone else has done it at some point too. It's sort of like a rite of passage now." Jaina explained, shooting a death glair at Peltin. "Even Shelly's done it." Now that caught Amber off guard, but Jaina changed the subject before she could ask about it. "Anyways, you mind doing me a favor?" She pushed the bad towards Amber. "Davin dropped this thing off to me yesterday. Says he doesn't want anyone tinkering with it, but that it'd be a shame just to throw it out. Man's got the makings of a hoarder, I swear."

Kat stifled a laugh at Jaina's comment while Amber took a look inside, finding the item Jaina was talking about was the old arena alarm bell. The mere sight of it was all it took to put her on edge, so she couldn't even begin to guess what she was going to do with it. "What do you need?"

Jaina had begun massaging the knee of her missing leg, so her answer came out a little pained. "You mind stashing it in the attic? Only a handful of us ever go up there, and there's so much junk there as it is that it'll probably never be seen again." She said, gesturing up to the ceiling. "I'd do it myself but, uh... I'm not too good with ladders."

"I can do it if you want." Kat offered.

"N-no. It's fine." Amber shook her head and quickly threw the bag over her shoulder, happy to be of some help. "I just didn't know we had an attic." She jumped up and made for the staircase, growing somewhat excited about seeing this new level of the guild as she made top step onto the guild's second level. She hadn't been up here yet, but it looked like it'd be far less crowded than the lower lever, even with the large empty space in the center that let her see into the floor below.

"Do you see it?" Kat called, pulling Amber's attention. "It's that bracket on the opposite corner from you." Amber glanced across the room, making her way to the spot she figured Kat was referring to. "Hurry back." Kat called again as Amber ascended into a small hatch on the ceiling.

It took a moment for her eyes to a just to the low light, but when they did she realised that the attic they had talked about was much smaller than the other two floors. It appeared as if the void on the second level had simply been cut out and made into its own floor. For what she was expecting, Amber found herself a little disappointed. Boxes and old furniture lined the walls and most of the floor, and the sunlight streaming in through the window behind her displayed a thin haze of dust in the air. Tarps covered a lot of the bigger objects, betraying that this was a collection that had been slowly growing for quite some time.

Her interest quickly running out, Amber placed the alarm bell on a nearby chair and spun to leave when some thought caught her eye. There was a small stack of books pilled next to the chair, and stuck between one of the pages of a book near the top was a picture of her.

She was stunned for a moment, but was too curious not to investigate. Amber shuffled the books aside until she came to what looked like a photo album with the Blazing Soul crest on the cover, and quickly sat down to investigate. The picture fell out the second the page was opened; apparently whoever had taken it hadn't made much of an effort to attach it to the page. Next to the blank square that she suspected the picture was supposed to be where the words, 'A little timid.' And below it read. 'Shelly likes her, +1'.

Finding herself growing intrigued, she pressed her photo back in its place and turned to a new page. She didn't recognise the person on this page, so tried again. This one had a picture of Raven, who by this point she knew more by reputation than interaction. 'Smartass' and 'Massive temper' where written beside his photo, and someone colored in little demon horns on his head. Below the picture in different colored ink where the words. 'One month later. He hasn't burned the place down yet'.

She flipped back to the first page she opened to look at her picture again. It took a moment, but she realised it was the one taken of her just after she joined the guild. Shelly had one arm around her waist and the other wrapped around Axel's neck, while she herself had the dumbest, most distant look one could imagine. Though it had only been around a week since she had joined it felt like a lifetime had passed, and things began slowly piecing themselves together when she remembered who had took the picture. This photo album belonged to Jaina.

"Hey there." Amber jumped in surprise, too absorbed in what she was doing to have noticed anyone else. Unfortunately a chair had been stacked right above the place she had been sitting, something she had failed to notice until she stood up and bashed her head on one of its legs. She caught herself on a nearby cabinet in a daze, looking up to see Isa half emerged from the entrance with a look of concern on her face. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you."

"I-it's fine." She grumbled, rubbing the sore spot on the top of her head.

Though she sighed in relief, a somewhat sad tone hung in Isa's voice. "Guess you're still kind of jittery around me, huh?"

Amber nodded slightly. "A little." The shock of her whole situation with the council woman hadn't warn off quite yet, but it was a little hard to admit because Isa had always been so nice. "Sorry..."

Isa smiled, but kept her distance. Despite it obviously not being what she wanted to hear, she appeared to appreciate the honesty. "What'cha got there?"

In her surprise Amber had let the album fall aside, something she regretted now that someone else was here. "I found it a minute ago." She said, showing Isa the emblem on the front.

"Oh wow, you found Jaina's scrapbook. She's been looking for this." Isa stepped forwards and took the book when Amber handed it to her, and began absentmindedly flipping through some of the pages when a puzzled look grew on her face. "Wait, what's it doing up here?"

Amber shrugged, despite the fact Isa was more thinking out loud rather than honestly asking. "I don't know, but I saw a picture of me in it so I took a look." Isa handed Amber the book back, and she flipped it to her page again.

The picture of her slipped out the second she lifted the cover, but Isa was quick enough to grab it before it hit the ground. She took a quick look at it before placing it back in the book, but smiled again as she took a step back. "This was taken the day you joined the guild, wasn't it?" Amber nodded slightly, and Isa stepped away and began wandering around the attic. "I haven't been up here in ages..." She mumbled to herself.

Meanwhile, Amber sat down to continue looking through the album, appreciating that Isa hadn't dwelled on her somewhat unflattering picture. She flipped a few more pages and came across one with a picture of Clair on it. She had her arms crossed and was angrily turned away from the camera, and little notes where scribbled all around it, but Amber decided to move on anyways. The next few people she didn't recognise, but one more page turn brought her to one with Carra on it and, oddly enough, Peltin.

He had his hand on the top of her head in the picture, and the eye he now wore an eyepatch over was covered by bandages. Carra was sitting in a chair in front of him, timidly looking down at her lap. Her feet didn’t touch the floor, so Amber guessed she had to have been much younger when the photo was taken, but it still didn't explain what the two of them where doing together. The notes on Peltin's side of the photo read 'Kind of an asshole' and 'older than me, STUFF IT'. Carra's side said 'adorable' followed by 'has said only twelve words to me, in total' in different colored ink.

Hearing Isa tinker with something on the other side of the room gave Amber the thought to ask, hoping to reconcile their rocky relationship. "Hey, what's Peltin's problem?"

"Hmm?" It was apparent that Isa wasn't paying attention at first, and Amber held up the book for her to see when she turned around. "Oh, well... He's a little jaded. And he can be sort of abrasive sometimes." She swept whatever she was fiddling with into a box on the floor, then moved on to another pile. "Davin let him take the S-Class Exam though, so he's not all bad."

Amber knelt down again, a little relieved that someone felt the same way she did... Mostly. "What about Carra?"

"Oh, she's a sweetheart." Isa said quickly. "She's a little timid, but she works really hard."

Chuckling to herself, Amber flipped the page again and saw another picture with two people in it. The first was Master Davin, standing before the guild building with a huge smile on his face. Shelly sat in one of his massive arms, hugging him around his neck. Before turning the page however, Amber realised that something about the picture seemed a little off. Davin appeared younger, while Shelly appeared older and... Taller? Her feet weren't on the ground, but she could tell that she was taller; even if Davin still would've towered over her. "Hey Isa?" She called to the back of the room. "Who's this?"

"Who?" Isa looked over her shoulder again, and Amber held up the book for her to see. "Oh, that's Davin and Shelly. You must know them, don't you?"

Amber looked back down at the book, still not convinced. Written next to the picture was 'A cute couple' and 'Family on the way' further adding to her confusion. "Are you sure?"

This time Isa stepped closer for a better look, leaning over Amber's shoulder for a moment. "Yeah I... Think that's them." She didn't sound so sure of herself now that she'd gotten a better look, and knelt down next to Amber to think. "That's definitely Davin, and..." She trailed off, tracing a finger over Jaina's notes. "Wait, I know who this is. That's Davin's wife, Yoshi. Shelly and Leo's mom."

Amber took another look at the picture again. With the way they looked in the photo, husband and wife seemed much more appropriate than father and daughter. Still though, even if Shelly had told her before, the resemblance between mother and daughter was uncanny. Had the woman been alone in the picture, she'd likely have never noticed. "Wait, didn't she die?"

There was a moment of awkward silence, but Isa sighed. "You heard about that huh?" Amber nodded, beginning to feel like it was wrong for her to ask for details. "Yeah, she died after Shelly was born. I didn't get the whole story though, it happened a while before I joined the guild."

"Oh." Growing uncomfortable with the subject, Amber turned the page again and found another picture that was undoubtable Shelly. "Here, this is her." There was no doubt that it was her, even if she looked to be only eight or nine years old. She also had a big smile on her face, and was holding up her shirt to display the guild mark on her tummy. 'Like Yoshi, except smaller.' Was written below it, which made both of them giggle. "She looks happy." Amber mumbled. "Yeah, she's always been a real go-getter." Isa said, leaning back against one of the chairs stacked behind them.

Turning the page again, Amber found another familiar picture. It was a woman with white hair and red eyes, slumped over a table with her arms folded under her resting head. It was apparent that she had just woken up, going by the dull look in her eyes and the thin trail of drool running down her cheek. "Is... Is this you?" Amber asked timidly.

Isa leaned over to take a look, when a mix of horror and surprise flooded over her face. "Oh, Jaina. You told me you got rid of that one." She complained, hiding her eyes under the rim of her cap. It didn't help hide her embarrassment however, as her face was flushed a deep red color. "Yeah... That's me..."

"You uh..." Amber couldn't hide the smile growing on her face, but Isa hadn't said anything about her bad picture so she figured it was only fair to return the favor. "You look kind'a tired."

"Thing's where a little hectic back when I joined." She said in a hushed tone. "There were a lot of sleepless nights..."

Amber giggled a little, unable to hold back her reaction any longer. She thought back to her brief initial talk with Payla and found it strange that she hadn't realised that Isa and Jaina were related. "Hey, why is your last name different than Jaina's?"

"Our birth name is Wondril, but she got married and changed it when she first started the guild." Isa smiled gently, but it still seemed like she has having a hard time talking about it. "I never really met her husband though, Jaina and I didn't get along back then, and he died just before Davin became guild master." Amber waited a moment, not really sure what to say, when Isa abruptly got to her feet and offered a hand. "Well, we should probably be getting back to the others. They might start to think something's happened to us."

"Sure." Amber nodded, allowing Isa to help her to her feet.

Passing the photo album to her, Amber began to descend down the latter to the second level when she heard her stutter. "It... It was nice talking with you."

Amber stopped suddenly, looking up to find Isa smiling down at her with a somewhat hopeful look on her face. It donned on her that Isa was trying to make up for what had happened with Payla, even if she had next to nothing to do with it. "Y-yeah, you too." Isa's smile grew, and the both headed down the ladder.

The pair of them wound down the spiral stares to find that Axel and Jon had returned, with food that Jaina, Kat, and Zeke where all digging into. Isa had stowed the album in her bag and left it on the second level, hoping to surprise Jaina with it later, Amber figured.

"There you two are." Jaina called as they stepped into the dining room. "We were getting worried. Thought we'd have to get a search party together or something."

"We just had a little talk." Isa mumbled while she and Amber joined them at the table.

"Talking things out." Peltin quipped. "Your twin sis got all the people skills, huh boss lady?"

Amber giggled slightly, but hearing Jaina violently crunch into her food was enough to make her rethink what she was doing. She too started into her meal, and yet again was amazed by how good it was. Just as she was about to lose herself in enjoyment, Kat spoke up. "So, what've you two been doing today?"

"Looking for someone to renovate our house." Axel sighed. To his annoyance, there were no more seats left now that Jaina, Kat, and Isa had arrived, leaving him without a place to sit. He leaned back on the wall next to the table, trying not to sound as bothered by it as he felt. "We’ve been looking around all morning, but nobody's able to start until a week from now."

"Did you talk to that merchant guy near the port?" Kat suggested. "He's always been good to us."

"We did..." Amber mumbled. "But..."

"We sold a bunch of our old stuff to him so that Amber could have her own room, but we think he ripped us off." Zeke cut in.

"Did he?" Jaina looked to Axel, who nodded in response. "Well, he just lost his referral. That's for damn sure." She leaned her chair back on two legs as Kat and Jon began to chuckle, and from there spotted a paper sticking out of Axel's pocket. "Wait, did he pay you in advance?"

Also glancing down at the envelope he'd been paid with, Axel nodded. "Yeah, he said he'd send someone to pick it up later."

She exchanged glances with Kat, who had the beginnings of a grin spreading across her face. "You didn't sign anything did you?" Axel shook his head, left a little clueless as to what she was getting at.

Jaina looked back at Kat again, who looked as if she was waiting to spring into action. "Go on. Do your thing." Kat hoped up and took both Amber and Axel by the hand, leading them both towards the door.

Amber stumbled behind her, having just finished her food and was struggling to swallow after being abruptly pulled to her feet. "Wait, what are we doing?"

"I'm gonna get you some money back." She said with pride, spinning around to face them at the door.

Axel and Amber looked quizzically at each other, before both asked. "How?"

"Using my feminine charm." Not skipping a beat, Kat kicked the door opened and beckoned for them to follow. "You too, Zeke. You should be a part of this." Zeke hopped off the table and soared out the door, with Axel and Amber following after them a second later.

Just as their footsteps droned away, Jon slowly began gathering up the empty plaits that had been left behind. "Have you ever considered that sending them off searching for trouble like that may come back to haunt them one day?" He asked, sliding his pile of dirty dishes off the table and looking at Jaina.

"Learn by experience." Peltin cut in, having returned to silently reading his paper for the last little while. "If something blows up in their face, next time they'll know not to do it again." He said, gesturing to his eyepatch.

Jon sighed and returned to the kitchen, while Jaina slowly spun in her chair to face the back. "You're a real prick sometimes, you know that?"

Slowly folding his newspaper, Peltin leaned back in his chair and rested his hands behind his head with a large grin. "Yeah, I've heard."

Next Chapter – Falling Down