Snippet #1206595

Balthier was a man of many talents, or so he liked to tell himself. As it happened, his general agility and comparative fleetness were serving him well in one sense and not so well in another. His own climbing speed was quick, and only the fact that he was occasionally compelled to examine the area with his Libra technik, just to make sure there were no traps anywhere, hindered his progress up the massive chain.

Unfortunately, the same lean form that made climbing easy also made the gusts of wind that ripped about them with increasing fervor as they ascended troublesome, and the cold was beginning to make his grip numb. Nevertheless, it wasn't quite as frigid here as Paramina Rift, and though his lightly-bronzed hands began to take on a red cast, he paid it as little heed as possible.

The air was thin, all the way up here, but it probably wouldn't have been all that bad if the four of them weren't in the middle of some rather grueling exercise. He checked below him frequently; the others were keeping good pace with varying degrees of difficulty, but nobody seemed on the verge of collapse, so he pressed onwards.

Fran, for her part, was keeping herself consciously a few steps behind the Hume child. While certainly holding out quite well, all things considered, he was the least-adept climber amongst them, and should he fall, she wished to be in a position to do something about it. Even now, the float spell was on the tip of her tongue; it would do none of them any good as a climbing aid, since it didn't work too far vertically, but should he begin to slip, it would slow his descent enough for her to catch him somehow.

The viera herself was not suited to excessively cold temperatures; her species had evolved for a near-tropical forest, and her ears let heat escape a good deal faster than a Hume's would. Adding to her discomfort, the plates of metal that protected various parts of her person were growing chilly, and the wind was slicing against the bare skin that remained, which, if one were to be realistic (as Fran was wont to do) was quite a lot to begin with. None of this made it to her carefully-neutral expression, however, and it would have been difficult to tell she was uncomfortable at all.

****

What must have been a mile of chain later, Balthier pulled himself up onto a solid surface at last. He had a feeling that Light was not the type to appreciate a hand up, but he squatted at the edge of the precipice anyway, there in case anyone should seem to need one. "Well," he offered to the general audience, "we appear to have reached our destination."

Once everyone was up, with or without the sky pirate's assistance, he turned to the massive castle gates and straightened his shirtsleeves whilst giving the place a surreptitious once-over, scanning for likely points of escape. Such things were long ingrained in his nature; even as an Imperial Judge Magister he'd been told that knowing the terrain was one of the best advantages a person could have. In the case of thievery, it wasn't so much knowing the terrain as knowing the way to escape it, but the principle was the same.

Glancing at the others, he cocked an eyebrow. "I don't suppose any of you have an objection to simply knocking?" There were a number of visible ways to infiltrate the place more clandestinely, but it seemed more prudent to know exactly what they were dealing with first.