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Kane doesn’t particularly like Lance. He thinks it’s obvious by this point.
He believes he’s justified in his decision; petty, maybe, but really, what’s the appropriate reaction to discovering the guy you helped kill nearly seven years ago isn’t exactly dead, albeit in the form of a small amphibian now?
The answer is sealing said not-dead-guy-who’s-supposed-to-be-dead in a jar to keep an eye on him, then begrudgingly and aggressively stabbing holes in the lid for air because Rain told him to because Stella asked and because Ciara threatened him to because Stella asked and because Stella asked him to because well—it’s Stella.
- Lance
Lance genuinely thought of nothing in consequence when he decided to help Ceris’ successor and the Coven witch in finding the scattered End Crystals, although that may be because when he settled on doing so, he was only thinking of himself and his own gains.
He’s brooding in self-pity, as any banished prince fallen from grace would do, some few weeks after retrieving the End Crystal from the Piglin King, when suddenly everything in his line of sight seems slightly more warped and a tad bit more grey and unclear.
“What in the skies?” Lance mutters under his breath. Then whatever’s surrounding him jerks back, and he follows suit, his back landing on something cold and metallic. And then, because that wasn’t enough, he’s soon turned upside down and unfortunately faceplants onto what he finally discerns as glass.
That discovery leads him to reasonably determine that he is in a glass jar.
For lack of better, more sophisticated reactions that can successfully convey his current state of emotion: what the fuck?
The jar lifts into the air, and Lance does a full circle around in search of his apparent captor.
Oh, great, he scowls, most definitely with loathing, it’s the dead child who banded with Vanessa to murder me. How ‘splendid.’
“I can teleport out of this rudimentary prison,” he spits, matter-of-factly. (He doesn’t actually spit; that would be disgusting and undignified of him.)
Kane rolls his eyes, and Lance feels his own eye twitch at the blatant disrespect. “I’d stop talking if I were you; I didn’t put any holes for air in the lid.”
Lance figures he doesn’t need to heed the scathing warning. “And again: I am able to teleport; a basic skill every Enderkin possesses.” Except for that Coven witch.
“Uh-huh,” Kane responds, clearly uninterested.
At this, Lance scoffs and names now to make his exit—except he doesn’t get to execute it.
The jar he’s contained in begins to shake violently, and being tethered to nothing, Lance bounces off the walls; he’s quite certain he hits his head at several points.
When the shaking stops, and the jar finally returns to calm, Lance remains sprawled at the bottom, very much in a daze (that may be from the lack of oxygen. He’ll deal with that soon) that he’s been rendered unable to teleport—oh.
That clever bastard of an immortal child. He states as much with a glare, vision mildly hazy and spinning, and only slightly nauseous. If anyone should be holding a grudge and resorting to imprisonment and violence, it should be him.
Kane smiles from the other side of the warped, greyish-blue—or is it a smirk? Lance can’t tell at the moment; either way, seeing the grin strangely reminds him of Vanessa’s sadistic mocking, her false image of good nature. It’s disturbing, now that he thinks about it.
(And simply just tactless. If he wasn’t currently hoping his insides would remain his insides, Lance would have forced the void corruption still laced in Kane’s veins out of his throat so he could choke on it.)
“Told you,” the Undead says, and, well, isn’t someone smug? “Save your air, Lance.”
2. Ciara
Ciara doesn't feel much towards Lance. Nothing strong and opinionated anyhow, if you exclude her thought of how funnily pathetic he is, reduced to a frog of all things.
She finds the mage’s physical predicament hilarious, knowing what he used to be; she learnt most of the End’s narrative through Wayne, well-versed in every realm's history, when she was younger. Although also knowing that, Ciara has harboured more than a few suspicions, here and there, towards Lance.
All her scepticism gets thrown out the window when she spots Kane standing across from her, decides to run at him at full speed, forces him to give her a piggy-back ride by jumping onto his back, and notices the jar he’s holding while dismissing his complaints.
Inside? She identifies the black and purple contents as the black and purple frog she likes poking fun at.
Well. Judgment time.
“What are you doing?” Ciara asks flatly.
Kane, despite his protests, doesn’t shove her off. He waits until she’s settled with her arms wrapped around his neck (“don’t even try to put me in a chokehold,” he warns, and Ciara definitely wasn’t thinking of doing that) before accepting his fate of being her personal transportation for the next few hours.
“Existing,” Kane answers, somewhat hesitant, somewhat casual; very much annoyed and inconvenienced.
Ciara hums and tries reaching for the jar. “Sounds exhausting.”
“It really is.”
She realises her arms are too short for the current task when she starts doing grabby hands. Curses. “Must suck, huh?”
“If you want the jar, you can just ask like a normal person.”
“Oh.” The jar is placed in her hand. Easy enough. “Asking is too boring, though.”
Kane scoffs and offers no additional retort, so Ciara takes the moment of silence to observe the living specimen in the jar. Or at least she thinks he’s still living.
“Ciara! Let me out of this accursed jar!” Lance demands, confirming his status as alive.
Ciara shakes the jar around, only partially feigning a frown. “That’s not how you ask someone to do something for you.”
“Ciara,” Kane joins in, slight laughter to his words, “please don’t let him out.”
Lance gapes when she, grinning with a theatrical nod, returns him in the jar to her older-younger brother. Oh, isn’t he stupidly laughable?
“See, Lance?” she starts cackling, “That’s how you do it.”
It’s hard to tell, because of the amphibian facial features, but Ciara is pretty sure Lance is scowling. “Once I get out of here—”
“Yeah, no,” Kane interjects, giving the jar a firm, forceful shake; Ciara practically sees the stars swimming in Lance’s vision—and hears them, too, somehow.
With Lance down for the count (it’s so much more funnier to make fun of him to his face when he’s conscious), she starts jabbing her finger at Kane’s cheek, enough that he threatens to drop her right there and then.
“Go ahead and try,” she challenges, sticking her tongue out. They both know she’d stab him repeatedly if he did. “Also, what are you going to do when Stella sees Lance in a jar?”
A pause, probably the gears turning in Kane’s head as he realises how valid her question is, before he blurts, “I’ll give you older sister privileges for a week if you help me keep Lance in a jar.”
A very tempting offer.
She bargains for more. “Make it two weeks.”
“Deal.”
And because Ciara’s desire to boss her dead brother around is regrettably stronger than her biromantic panic towards Stella, she nods with haste before the agreement is rescinded. “Deal.”
3. Rain
Rain doesn’t know how (actually, he does: fucking insomnia and hypersomnia), but he slept through the whole afternoon and then some, and despite a grand total of fourteen hours asleep, he’s still fucking tired.
As such, when he, drinking out of a thermos containing the most caffeinated coffee of all caffeinated coffees, comes across Kane and Ciara playing what looks like rugby with a glass jar, he just flicks his dead gaze between them.
He takes a long and purposely loud sip, waits until both the Netherbane members’ eyes are on him, and clicks his tongue. “Don’t mind me, carry on.” They do not carry on.
Ciara’s face scrunches up, her gaze fixated on Rain’s thermos. “What is that?”
Rain looks at what he’s holding and then back at her. “Coffee.”
“Smells like burnt earth.”
As tired as he is, he still sputters, caught off guard. “‘Burnt earth?’”
“Okay,” Kane interjects swiftly. He walks over and confiscates the jar out of Ciara’s hands. “The two of you shut up before one of you throws something at one another.”
“Well, you could have said it a little nicer,” Rain frowns, drinking from his thermos again. Then he notices there’s something inside the jar Kane’s holding.
He does a spittake (he’s drinking hot coffee, mind you) when he realises who’s in the jar: “Is that Lance?”
The silence that follows answers him easily, and it warrants another lengthy intake of caffeine into Rain’s system to keep up with the impending exchange. “You know he can teleport, right?”
“Do you really think I haven't already tried that?” Lance yells from within his glass containment. “Every time my vision stabilises enough for me to teleport out of this godsforsaken jar, this lunatic shakes it around like a hand-held percussion instrument—with me inside!”
“...” Rain takes another sip of coffee. He knows Lance was a royal of some kind prior to his becoming a frog, but his fatigue-riddled, caffeine-fueled brain is comprehending none of this fancy vocabulary.
Kane eyes Lance with scepticism, holding the jar up to eye-level. “You’ve been in there for over four hours, how have you not run out of air yet?”
“Conservation of air by limiting my speech,” Lance explains, as if it’s obvious.
“And why do you talk as if you weren’t banished decades ago?”
“And why are you this insolent—”
Ciara looks like she’s enjoying the soap opera, munching on a bag of chips she manifested from somewhere. Rain, on the other hand, feels the gears work overtime trying to turn in his brain as he processes what he just heard.
“‘Run out of air’—you didn’t put air holes?” he exclaims.
“Well, clearly, he doesn’t need them,” Kane counters, tossing Ciara Lance in the jar. She catches him easily and continues snacking.
Rain stares at the other Undead in a mix of disbelief and horror, except both appear downplayed on his face because of the fatigue. “It's still inhumane.”
“Well, he’s not human,” Kane says. He adds, in an exaggeratedly engaging tone, “Did you know he used to be a dictator and committed war crimes?”
“For a brief amount of time before my banishment!” Lance corrects. “And I wasn’t a ‘dictator.’” Rain doesn’t hear him.
“You used to be a what and committed what?” he snaps his head to the accused, briefly cured of the lethargy. Ciara lets out a cackle in the background.
“Did you not hear me!?” is the flabbergasted response screamed at him, and as stated earlier, no, he did not hear him.
Rain throws his hands up in defence, although, realistically, there’s nothing Lance can physically do to stand as a threat. “I—how else am I supposed to react?”
“Defending me and my good name?”
“You appeared out of nowhere two months ago!”
Lance scoffs. “I expected more of Ceris’ successor.”
“...wow.” Now running on caffeine mixed with spite, Rain decides to simply exit and find Stella. “So I’m just going fuck off now,” he announces. He addresses Kane and Ciara before he turns heel and leaves with a, “Enjoy your game of frog-ball or whatever.”
Ciara perks up, still chomping down on chips. “Oh, we should definitely call it that.”
“I’m sorry,” Lance starts, “repeat that?”
The mage is, justifiably, ignored. Rain walks away, sipping his coffee, with Lance’s protests flying over his head as Kane and Ciara resume their game.
The coherent fuss quickly turns to garbled nonsense. Oh well.
4. Stella
“So the End Crystal responds to you well,” she comments as they’re walking through Dreadfort. It’s late noon, nearing the early evening; Stella had just dragged Rain through the food stalls after running some tests on his effect on the End Crystals and vice versa.
She takes a bite out of her meat bun, chews, and swallows. “I know the End Lords used to use the End Crystals to further enhance their own abilities: Matriarch Ceris, her speed; Lady Skylor, her shockwaves, and Lord Marcel, his strength.”
“You think the Crystal will strengthen my cryomancy, then?” Rain asks before yawning. He promptly takes a swig of instant death from his thermos. “It doesn’t feel any different since the Piglin King’s palace.”
“It could just be time,” Stella says, idly glancing around. The sun had set around an hour ago, but Dreadfort’s streets were still bustling. “We haven’t had that long, and then there’s next week…”
Next week is bound to be hectic, maybe a little bloody as well: Rain, Nostra, and Ciara would be searching for an End Crystal in the old cave systems beneath the Swamplands; meanwhile, Kane has his own gameplan to retrieve the End Crystal in Obsardia (the details haven’t been disclosed yet).
“Ciara, Nostra, and I are just heading down below,” Rain says. “It shouldn’t take that long. We’ll probably be back soon, and then we can do more with the Crystal after.”
Stella shakes her head, pessimism taking hold. “You don’t know what you’ll find in the Lush Caves, not to mention the Deep Dark: cults of old devoted to the gods used to live there, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a band of cultist Undead waiting in the dark; or if Nostra gets sidetracked with research.”
“Sounds like fun,” Rain jokes, and it pulls Stella out of her despairing funk well enough that she laughs.
Her laughter is abruptly replaced by a yelp when what she thinks is a jar of purple and black suddenly enters her field of view and leaves it just as quickly, narrowly missing her face. She freezes in her steps with a stagger. Rain startles with her, only with less noise and more “FUCK, my coffee!” as his thermos spills—now the snow at their feet looks like someone had an unfortunate accident.
“Sorry, Stella!” Ciara yells. Within milliseconds, the Undead runs up to her, and Stella lets out a laugh as she looks her up and down. “Are you okay?”
Rain starts grumbling as Stella assures Ciara that she is. “Where’s my apology?”
The concern on Ciara’s face snaps to annoyance so fast that it’s the harshest of metaphorical slaps. “Quit whining, Dragon Boy,” she advises with a rude hand gesture.
Her gesture is returned, alongside a “fuck you.”
It isn’t appreciated very well. “FUCK YOU!”—and Ciara’s jumping on Rain, oh gods. Stella scurries back a few steps as the two Undeads tumble to the ground.
“Watch out for the hot coffee,” Kane warns, walking over with the jar that instigated this whole mess. The thermos is knocked out of Rain’s hand and spills all over the snow; luckily, not on either Undead.
“Aren’t you going to stop them?” Stella asks. Rain and Ciara have rolled some way to the left, and both appear ready to resort to biting. Looks like a trip to the Infirmary is likely.
Kane looks at the scuffle and back at her. “Aren’t you?”
She’s flustered, but holds up her half-eaten meat bun that’s still steaming and hopes it’s a valid excuse. Thankfully, Kane only nods sceptically, and starts tossing the jar into the air and catching it as the skirmish in the background continues.
It’s at the third toss that Stella gets a good look at the jar; when she does, she almost chokes on her meat bun.
“Lance?”
Kane freezes, fails to catch the jar, and it drops onto the snow. Settled on solid ground, Lance the Gorf is a dizzy mess. When he appears to regain focus and lifts his amphibious head up, he gripes, “I — have been tossed around like a ball — for the past SIX HOURS.”
Stella stares as her brain racks for an appropriate reaction. Plenty of animosity in that complaint, not that she can blame Lance, especially now when she looks down and sees an opaque lid sealing him inside. Her gaze snaps up to Kane.
“I can explain,” he says (careful, Kane, your seventeen-year-old is showing — Narrator). Nothing follows thereafter.
“I would love to hear it,” Stella says.
Lance’s volume only increases with each spoken word. “Yes, please do tell her the story of how you TRAPPPED ME IN A JAR.”
It’s a silent eternity before Kane ultimately excuses himself with a, “I’ve got nothing.”
Okay, so maybe Stella can see why his siblings refer to him as their “younger brother” most times, even if he is older.
She sighs, pockets her meat bun away, and kneels to pick Lance up. The lid’s sealed pretty tight, but she twists it open in the end, and Lance literally hops out with much enthusiasm. “AFTER SIX HOURS,” he exclaims, directly in Stella’s face. Maybe this is how Rain feels after going deaf. “That LUNATIC kept me in there for SIX HOURS.”
Stella, after recovering from the assault on her ears, tilts her head, confused. “Can’t you teleport?”
(Somewhere in the background, Kane calls out to Ciara, “Ciara! Your older sister privileges are revoked as of now.”
The scuffling noises stop, and Ciara yells back, “We made a deal! Two weeks!”
“That was to help me keep Lance in the jar! You wrestling Rain did not help.”
A grumble. “At least that gives me another reason to beat his—OW! Did you just bite me!?”
“The fuck do you think, bitch?” Rain’s voice joins in.
“You little—”
“Not as little as you!”
“FUCK YOU!”
“FUCK YOU!”
The scuffling noises resume, but Kane stays where he is.)
“Believe me, I’ve tried teleporting ever since he put me in that cursed prison,” Lance says. “But every time I’m about to, HE—” he snaps his glare and snarl towards Kane, who just plasters on a smile and waves like he isn’t the culprit, “—shakes the jar around and I end up too concussed to do so!”
Oh gods.
“Kane, that’s animal abuse,” Stella states, exasperated. Since when did she become the responsible member of the friend group?
“Not to him, it isn’t,” Kane justifies; it’s a poor argument, all things considered.
Stella deadpans. “Yes, it is.”
“Deserved, honestly.”
“No—” She pauses for a deep breath to calm herself. “If you know anything about the End’s history, you would know how close Lance was to ascending to godhood.”
“Must you mention my failures out loud in front of me?” Lance laments, sitting in her hand.
“He can try to kill me,” Kane simply says, daring.
“And trust me, I will.”
How did we get here? Stella asks herself as Kane and Lance enter an intense staredown. Then she remembers Rain and Ciara still fighting some feet away.
Their screams and battle cries are mostly intelligible, but very loud; she wonders how she’s ignored them up until now.
“STOP BITING ME!” she manages to make out Ciara’s demand.
“LET GO OF ME FIRST AND THEN WE’LL TALK!” she successfully interprets the following yell from Rain.
Stella moves to hold her head in her free hand and begins her own lament. Maybe she and Rain should have just continued experimenting with the End Crystal.
(Stella learns the origin of Kane’s hostility towards Lance from the Netherbane’s eldest sister Rosetta, when they’re conversing alone after she and Kane return without the End Crystal from Pillager Town; the overall story isn’t pretty, and while Stella doesn't understand fully, she understands enough.
Some days, some weeks, after everything returns to its usual rhythm in the wardance, Kane traps Lance in a jar, again. Without air holes, again. Except this time around, Stella understands why.
Luckily, they came to a compromise for Lance to remain in the jar [he resigned to his fate eventually] in exchange for Kane to make air holes in the lid.
She did have to wring in Rain and Ciara’s help to convince him [“threaten” in Ciara’s words] but it works out in the end.)