So Nippy.

[desolate]

"Gross," was his reflexive statement to Big Bro holding up the severed beard. Isaiah shook his head and took a step back. That he could smell the late Rutherford B. Hayes' aftershave made it all the more unpleasant. And he recognized it. . . Calvin Klein. Escape. Where the fuck had he gotten Calvin Klein? Weird ice people. So weird. "Yeah, bro, I'm gonna leave the logic to you and all that, so you hold on to that beard thing and impress me when the Ice King shows up, alrighty? Great. Until then. . . at least 5 feet. At least."

Isaiah was relieved when the beard disappeared into the Infinity Pocket of the Aurelius Extradimensional Wardrobe. Then his face paled. "Wait. Wait. I'm sorry. Off topic, but I just learned about these stupid pockets. Are all of our pockets connected? Can Daddy Dearest get into our pockets?" The thought horrified him. "Could he. . . could he grill us right now if he wanted?" Anxiety turned to mischief. He smirked. "Could we grill him?"

Critical thought mode was over and Big Bro went Genius all over those fire prisons. Fire met fire. Fire extinguished fire. It was ridiculous, but Isaiah could see what was going on. Something about the underlying spell geography; the terrain had been modified to accept certain variables, reject others, and just like tectonic plates, the right kind of stress caused a quake. The ice princesses fell on the floor. Most of them were unconscious. Isaiah walked over to the fattest one, probably ate too many ice cubes or whatever, and nudged her chubby face with his penny loafer. He considered kicking her. Nudge, nudge. No response.

The room shook. Rhythmically. Like. . . approaching foot steps. Isaiah recognized the aura, just like he had recognized the bloody face on the wall. He cringed. "Incoming again. This seems like it's going to be really unpleasant. The aura. . . it's huge. Dude is huge. Do you feel that? Hugeness. I hate fighting big ones, but we have about a minute, going at the speed he's going. I'm gonna. . ."

First thing was first. Isaiah moved all of the ice princesses to a corner. He piled some of them up. Some of them woke up, but he didn't care to waste time conversing with them. Ice King, on the way, no time for small talk, no, no, shut up, please, jeez woman, gonna get smacked. . . yeah. Isaiah felt better after that. One gentle tap on the temple and the bitching broad fell back asleep.

Second thing was second. No, really? Isaiah knelt down and plunged a fist into the floor. Faint red rings emanated from him, shifting aforementioned spell geography. The field element shifted dominance from ice to fire. It got rid of the resistances they had witnessed. He also switched the fire pillars' locations and made them controllable for the both of them. "Traps set. Ready?"

[supernal]

Malachi looked up. The ice-king's aura slapped him in the face like a cold fish. Tossed his head to one side and everything. Nearly knocked him off his feet for that matter. He experienced the same reaction one did when confronted by a solid wall of absolute stench, an overpowering aroma that could not be faced without cringing, save that his reaction was based on a sense that operated without the use of his carnal organs. But it made his eyes water either way.

"Jeeeezum crow that guy's aura needs a thorough cleansing. It smells like . . . it smells like if you could light vomit on fire, and mix in some aged cheese, and put all of that in an old man's mouth. That's what his aura smells like."

Malachi shuddered. He walked over to a corner, put his hands over his knees and had a moment to himself. Battling dry heaves and forcing the contents of his stomach to stay where they were. During this time Isaiah stacked the princesses up like folding chairs or potato chips and then proceeded to change the topographical layout of the spell architecture.

By the time Isaiah finished up with everything, Malachi straightened up and wiped a line of drool from his chin.

"Uuuughhh. Yeah . . . yeah, yeah I'm ready."


The ice-king was massive and hairy but distinctly humanoid. His knuckles scraped against the ground, thick cords of muscle roped around his chest, back, and down his arms. He was covered in white fur, explaining his tolerance for the arctic chill of his homestead and his breath, billowing out as a white cloud of condensation from between jagged, rotting fangs smelled like heaps of week old garbage.

He had a scholar's cap, much too small for his head, positioned precariously atop his skull and a monocle that looked as if it could only fit over his pupil placed directly in front of his eye. He had a beard as well, one distinct from his fur for it bore any number of oddly colored patches. One would be struck simultaneously by curiosity and horror when one realized that the ice-kings beard was a pastiche of the beard's of other men.

Down the large hallway the shadow of a normal man stood, silhouetted against the light that flooded behind him.

"Hey."

Malachi need not scream; the crystalline acoustics of the hallway carried it well enough. The ice-king paused and lofted a heavy, shaggy brow.

"Who dares to tresp—."
"Sure. Anyway, you stink. And um, ya mama. Oh and me and my brother freed all of your princesses and then let them go and we killed all of your little smaller ice-giant things, and the machine that makes them too. Bye!"

Malachi ran back into the room at top speed and positioned himself next to Isaiah to wait.

[desolate]

"Um, bro, you don't look so good. . . hey! Wait!" Never mind. There he goes. Isaiah stood up and did a few stretches while Malachi horsed around. Ouch. Since when did his legs get so sore? He was glad they rode horses here or else he'd be tired as a. . . his stomach rumbled. Horses reminded him of food. Yeah, despite the smell. Food. Food. Ice King was in the way of some ill eats. Isaiah's eyes narrowed as Malachi barreled back in and took position in the safe zone. "I'm. . . I'm hungry! Fuck this guy, let's go to Dominoes!" He jabbed a finger at the Ice King as he entered, about to scream a savage war cry of mega-wit and ultra-tastelessness when his mouth froze and his jaw dropped.

Isaiah felt a mixture of confusion, "Dude. . . your beard. It's skittles." and horror, "Whoa. WHOA! Those skittles were people! Gross. Gross. Gross. No, stay away, you stay away and you die," Isaiah ordered as the Ice King crashed through the door which was, let's face it huge, but still too little for the Ice King's hulking physique. He wasn't stopped by the thick ice at all. It just crumbled and he walked right in. Isaiah flailed his arms in what might have been an arcane gesture, and suddenly the spell architecture came alive. Everything rushed to one point. All of the fire erupted in the Ice King, consuming him in a super real damn big awesome fiery wrath projection of hot melting doom and he had to turn his face away or else be blinded. The fire shot through the floor, eating the ice, melting a weeping chasm in the floor until it was stopped by solid rock. It rocketed through the ceiling of the tower, consuming the clouds.

The ice king's tower rattled violently and cracked. Isaiah cackled, proud of his handiwork, until the Ice King snorted. He lifted his huge ass hands and clapped. Loudly. The fire was extinguished. The walls shattered. The tower fell apart. The shock wave blew everything away. Ice princesses went flying through the air, tumbling away and splashing into the lake, because Isaiah was too busy being thrown aside like a fly in a wind tunnel. His ears were bleeding. He was seeing a lot of colorful dots, hoping to whatever deity—except the fertility goddess they had pissed off not too long ago—was listening that the dots weren't the Ice King's beard, and slammed right into one of the adjacent, smaller ice towers.

He went right through it. It fell on top of him. The earth quaked, screaming orcs ran in every which direction, ice somethings' lack of faces scrunched in a lack of mild amusement, and Isaiah poked his throbbing noggin out of the rubble and looked around for Malachi while mussatating, "Shit. That was balls."

When he stood up and dusted his suit off, which didn't need any dusting, he took a glance at the lake. All of the ice princesses were still alive. Their auras were pulsing in sync with their hearts and whatnot, so that was all good.

Ice somethings and orcs converged on him. Isaiah frowned. "You know, I've been saving up most of my awesome Ritual power for the Ice King, but I'm getting tired of all of these minions." His eyes lit up fiercely and his aura expanded until it consumed all of the ice somethings and the orcs. They floated around, suspended, and then simultaneously twisted into broken heaps of worthlessness. Isaiah retracted his aura and stomped out of the collapsed tower.

Toward the lake. Couldn't let the ice princesses drown. Or let the Ice King swoop in, pick them up, and run away. Oh fuck no. Because it was time to beat him up.

"Ice King, Ice King, Ice King," he chanted, incorporating that big bastard's title into his mantras. Dangerous, but he didn't care. He wanted Dominoes, damn it all.

[supernal]

"I got some . . . " Malachi whispered to himself, though loud enough for his brother to hear given their proximity to one another. "I got some fucking Dominoes for you right here motherfucker." Again, Malachi meant mostly to speak to himself. As an undeniable force of habit, Malachi tended to echo a contemporaries sentiments and append 'RIGHT HERE MOTHERFUCKER' so as to illustrate the absolute ludicrousity that just left their mouths.

In this particular case it was to suppress the ludicrousity brewing inside of his own mind. This was no time for pizza, man! Or pizza-man! Somewhere inside of that hallway, barreling towards them this very moment if the shaking and thudding was any indication, a giant ice-king had a bone to pick with the two of them. So he focused and hoped his brother did the same.

Malachi cocked a brow as the ice-king stormed into their inner sanctum shrugging off what little resistance the walls of ice offered to him, each wall several feet thick at the thinnest point. Then the elder Aurelius nodded, may have even taken a breath to yell out NOW to Isaiah but the baby Aurelius had been trained just the same as him. Malachi responded out of instinct and so did Isaiah, and this time around Isaiah had a hand to show for it. The elder brother brought his arms in front of his eyes, acting as a visor against the raging light of the focused blast and as a shield against pelting debris.

The "giggle-laugh" (actually termed giga-blast but Isaiah mispronounced his first execution of the attack at 7 years old and Malachi never let him live it down) proved ineffective despite its impressive payload. Jaw slack at the ice-kings resilience, Malachi stood and began reaching deep inside of mind and soul alike, searching either for a spell or arcane application to use in these situation but he didn't get very far down memory lane before the ice-king clapped his hands together.

Made to contend with the shockwave, Malachi felt a little sorry for what he'd put the new line of golems through. Malachi not only felt powerless, tussled around by something whose far-reaching scope and magnitude equated in his mind to a force of nature, he felt punished. Like he'd been punched in the solar plexus a hundred times over, the vigor of his breath felt like it'd been snatched from his throat. He was not simply tossed back. Malachi flew back at breakneck speeds, had not the rest of the tower crumpled in the wake of the ice-king's power, would have embedded the man waist deep in ice.

Isaiah invoked the ice-king's presence. A hand grabbed him by the metaphysical gonads and pointed him in the right direction. Isaiah arrived in time to see the ice-king close a big, furry hand around Malachi and lift him in the air. Malachi groaned, lines of blood trailing down from his nose and ears. He wasn't bleeding currently but the man was out of his gourd. All he could do was groan and put his hands to his head, trying desperately to bring focus and order to the incessant stream of loud songs and bright colors.

The ice-king opened his mouth and tossed the man into his waiting maw like a grape, then turned on Isaiah.

The king smiled the only way he knew how; wickedly. Then barreled towards Isaiah, covering great distance with each stride, and brought his hands down to squash the man,

"LIKE A BUUUUUUUUG!"

[desolate]

"N-no!" The Ice King. . .

Noooooooooooooooooo!

It. . . it ate Big Bro! Stupid hairy stinking bastard. Isaiah wouldn't normally be so worried, but Malachi looked more beaten up than he did by the Epic Clap of Thunderous Doom. Not that he had time to be worried, oh no, because Isaiah was a bug and bugs inevitably get squashed.

At least in an ideal world they would. How many sleepless nights had he spent in a roach motel, belly bulging from delicious pizza—couldn't they just find a save point, quit for the day, grab some pizza and come back to this head ache tomorrow? Isaiah didn't want to play anymore. Anyway, he was more than happy to contribute to the Ice King's insomnia by surviving! Too spooked by his brother's sudden disappearance down the Ice King's indubitably grotesque gullet, Isaiah didn't have time to move. He lifted his forearms to block the hand.

Mistake.

Snap. His right arm fractured and his knees buckled, but he wasn't squashed. Nevertheless, he couldn't help himself from screaming out a harsh, "Ouch! Damn it!" Come on. A broken arm and jelly legs weren't worth crying about, not after so many years in the Organization.

"Ugh. . . first things first. Bro? Where are you?" Isaiah squinted, but the Ice King's aura was too dense to penetrate. The Ice King pulled back a fist, but he wasn't very vast. Isaiah danced around him, and, well, you know how white kids dance, it wasn't very impressive. A bunch of seemingly mindless flailing, like one of those wind socks during a tornado. Hey, wait! Didn't he learn stances for this? Sure did. The first stage was just winding up the energy from his mantras, and now there were spiffy poses between dodges. With gestures and everything. Maybe he even muttered some cool phrases, but they were lost within the swirling gusts caused by the Ice King's haphazard melee.

Then the Ice King. . . glittered? Oh, damn. Magic.

__________

And so Malachi descended down the rabbit hole. . . or a shit hole, given the smell. Hopefully he wouldn't be coming out of one. Seriously.

Ice King anatomy was a strange and wondrous thing. It was all crystalline matrices and crazy snowflake patterns and shining diamond dust. You know, underneath all of the blood and guts and smell bad stuff and whatnot that littered the massive cretin's innards. But wait! Movement! What in the name of Narnia? Or Wonderland? Whatever, the Ice King had some strange kind of. . . cellular make up. Or bacteria. Or something. Something had to decompose Malachi and steal his beard, right? What beard? Well, of course, Malachi would first notice his facial hair suffering from accelerated growth, being primed to join the Ice King's collection.

And who would collect? Why, the glacial amoebas, of course! Or gelid white blood cells. Blue blood cells? Crazy crystal cells? Whatever, they were like swirling shards of ice stuck into an oozing stream of gelatinous mana with hundreds of cryogenic cilia and freezing flagella whipping around maniacally. They made sounds like wind chimes. Hungry wind chimes. Digestive wind chimes. Chime, chime. There were. . . a lot of them. Being cells and all. And they were big. Just like the Ice King. Hey, wait a sec. Didn't the Ice King's insides seem. . . a little too big, even for that big brute? Just a tad? Maybe lots bigger than expected?

Whatever, Malachi was in trouble. If being eaten didn't already make that self-evident.

[supernal]

Malachi surrounded himself in a thin force field. It'd provide no kind of substantial defense in any live combat situation, could maybe stop a paper cut if it was angled right, but it stopped the ice-king's esophagus slime from getting in his hair. The suit cleaned itself; the man had to buy all kinds of shampoo and conditioner to wash his hair free of some of the stuff he'd dealt with.

The feeding tube eventually opened up into the stomach proper. Malachi flipped and landed on his feet. The thud of his landing clapped and echoed all around him. He rose to his full height, the thin shield fading away as its fulfilled its use.

"Interesting. Face feels a little . . . lil heavier than usual. Feels almost like I have A BEARD OR SOMETHING!"

His fingers wormed their way into his facial hair immediately and Malachi pulled down with all his strength. The ground rushed up to meet him and smacked him in the forehead. A combination of the ice-smooth floor and Malachi's strength resulted in him slamming his own face into the ground. This was something that would die with Malachi. No one will ever know about it.

Except Isaiah. He had to tell Isaiah.

He walked around the ice-king's 'intestines' for a little while, his beard now reaching down to the top half of his sternum. This concerned him greatly. Malachi did not yet know what significance this held but he knew that the ice-king used beards for something, some kind of power source or stabilizer perhaps, and that he had on him the beard of a very powerful mage.

The amoebas circled the bend. He could tell with just one glance that he was in for a world of hurt, especially in the condition he was in currently. He got a crazy idea. Fished around in his pocket for Rutherford B. Hayes's beard and strapped it against his face like Velcro. Wind chimes filled his ears as they drew nearer still.

__________

The ice-king glittered. Little jolts of energy shot between the glitter points, first one at a time but then increasing exponentially until the whole of the ice-king's fur crackled with electric light; his beard was the focal point, and the brightest part. Above his head an eye flickered into existence; closed, the eyelid veined with purple lines. It opened a crack, the eyelid fluttering with effort, occasionally hiding and occasionally revealing the purple sclera beneath, and the haunting lavender aura it gave off in waves.

Isaiah immediately felt a draw on him. On every source of strength and energy, stamina and vigor, that slurped up his very essence and intended to leave him a husk. The ice-king truly intended to kill him

Isaiah received only a glimpse of this bottomless abyss, however. Not long after the eye came to being, it faded from sight. What sounded like cannon fire, one after another after another, filled the air. The ice-king's stomach bulged out and smoke billowed from its mouth. The beast then bowed its head and slumped; distant cogs ceased to churn. Then he stirred to life again to the sound of a turned motor. The ice-king extended his hand to Isaiah.

"Baby bro," Malachi's voice sounded out. Distorted and made thunderous, but Malachi's voice regardless. He grabbed Isaiah from the ground but handled him carefully and lifted him to eye-level. Through the iris, acting as a window, Isaiah could see his brother. Face bruised, blood streaking down his face and through his hair, and an equally battered, tied up scrawny orc struggling to free himself from his bindings.

And Malachi had two beards!

"You aren't gonna believe what I found in here."

[desolate]

"H-h-hey. . . that isn't. . . that's not fair!" Isaiah stumbled a bit during his stance dance, receiving some glancing, but nasty blows. The drain was harsh, but it really wasn't so unpleasant. At first he felt dehydrated—thankfully he was right next to a crystal clear lake—and then he felt hung over. Like he had 4-5 glasses of wine, then half a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a half glass of 12 year old whiskey and some other citrusy shit. He tried to fight it, but whoa. The Ice King was strong. Super strong. Like a Gundam powered by Energizer batteries. He coughed and fell over, only to be caught. . .

. . . by the gentle grip of his best friend in the whole wide world, the Ice King!

Wait, what? Isaiah stared, his expression a mix of stupefied and disbelief. "You're leaking." What was all of that smoke? Maybe his simile wasn't too far off of the mark? Was that Big Bro in there? "I'm not a baby," he slurred. "Why are you in the Ice King's eye?" Oh. Maybe his simile really wasn't too far off the mark.

Whoa. Had this all been a dream? Was he actually drunk, back in Some Motel, about to wake up and eat some pizza? He hoped so. Finding this to be all too funny to be real, he laughed and went on to have a conversation with dream Malachi.

"Oh. So he is a robot. Or you're a ghost and you're possessing him and that's a tiny spirit form of him, you know, eyes being the window to the soul and all. Sorry I did such a bad job avenging your death, in that case," Isaiah babbled. "Hey. If this is a robot, does it have wireless? Think you can connect to the internet and order us some pizza? I'll have extra cheese, extra pepperoni, extra sausage, extra bread sticks with extra marinara sauce, make it all an extra large, and two liters of Mello Yello! I'm thirsty. Oh hey, and can you drive me back home? I think I'm drunk. No wait. Not home. I don't think I'm allowed back there after I used you-know-who's credit card to buy a years supply of pizza and Mello Yello. Hey again, how about a bed? Open the robot up, there has to be a cot in there. I'm sleepy."

Snore. He woke back up about two seconds later.

"Hold on! Ice princesses are drowning!"

Wait.

"Never mind, they're elementals, they'll be fine."

Snore. He woke back up about two seconds later.

"Damn, can't catch any Z's. It's just so nippy."

[supernal]

Malachi placed Isaiah on his shoulder and spun the thing around. They walked off into the sunset together.

"You know, I don't even know how to work this thing yet? I'm just gesssing at this point."

Summary

The seer's orb, which they got from their last adventure, transports Malachi and Isaiah Aurelius to a mystical and magical winter wonderland. They are disoriented at first, but react appropriately at the sight and smell of smoke. They run outright towards the source of smoke and find a burning town; an orc shaman the source of all the destruction.

The orc shaman is trounced soundly and the two brothers, ever the detectives as the Organization trained them to be, started investigating. Asking villagers, looking for clues and all that. An ice-king of some kind or another has been kidnapping princesses for his devious dalliances.

Malachi and Isaiah came to the conclusion that the ice-king was stealing princesses and promising them as wives so as to unite the orc-tribes and lead the massive army in a stampede against the kingdom so he could make himself monarch.

So the two brothers move to infiltrate the ice-king's tower and are met by a few giant ice-elementals. They are also soundly trounced. Once inside they discover that the ice-king has bumped up his paygrade and is making a slightly-smaller-but-much-stronger model of his goons. Malachi and Isaiah go to fuck it up, get fucked up in return but pull it off.

Rutherford B. Hayes, an orc-magus that put a stop to Malachi's end-gamer spell with the wave of a wand, and offers his help to the two brothers. Rutherford consequently explodes and the ice-king's face forms out of the blood and gore leftover from the explosion. An ice-bat tries to take Rutherford's beard but Malachi's hold tight.

The two forces finally meet. The tower collapses, the ice-king is trounced (soundly), the princesses have fainted and are strewn about the courtyard unharmed. Turns out that the one ice-king was actually two talented orc-magus brothers, whose beards were critical for the operation and optimal yield of their giant robot ape.

The brothers leave.

Spoils: Giant, mechanized robot that looks like a blue ape and is controlled by beard-power. Has a top hat, monocle, and carries a giant spellbook in one hand. Capable of light magic. It's 'techniques' can be found under Donkey King's move-list in Supersmash Bros, Melee & Brawl.