Aelfheim – page 27

a Transcript"Put it on." She clapped her hands together like a gleeful child. "It goes above your regular belt. Against the skin, I think."
Hans opened his robe to put on the belt. Seidr made a soft "woof" sound.
"Pardon?" Hans asked.
Seidr waggled her fingers at him. "Nothing. Put it on."
Hans buckled the belt and looked suspiciously at it. "It seems, well, right somehow. But I don't feel any different."
Seidr winked suggestively. "Well, at least it looks good on you."
Hans tried to retie his robe, only to find that the robe no longer fit all the way around him. He was stuck with a gap down the front.
"Hello," he said.
Seidr licked her lips. "It definitely looks good on you. I'm just glad we didn't put you in any armor first. That would have been awkward."
aOh this is grand! Now he's really dangerous. I am so glad you dug that up for him.a
Hans flexed his arms. The muscles in them bulged and swelled. He sucked in his gut and it stayed there. Each motion brought more definition. A single squat and his calf muscles could be identified separately. Fortunately the effect stopped short of gross. He didn't want to look like a bodybuilder, much.
"If we could find a way to bottle this . . . I don't see anything to complain about here. Other than the fact that my options for clothing seem to have narrowed." He adjusted his momentarily too tight belt and looked up excitedly. "What else is here? Thor's hammer?"
Seidr shrugged. "That would be too easy. Of all the great weapons stashed away in here, that one is conspicuously absent. Still, there's no shortage of arms and armor in this room."
She had a breastplate in hand already and held it up to his chest.
"Too small," she frowned. "That was the largest metal breast plate I had. I think there's some leather over here though."
She dug out a set of leather breast and back armor pieces. It had been treated somehow to make it rigid. It seemed to fit, barely. Hans held his arms out so Seidr could buckle them together.
She stepped back. With a big grin, Hans flexed. That broke all the buckles down one side. His grin turned sheepish at Seidr's scowl.
She shook her head. "You would think I could outfit an army from this room. It doesn't help that you were already bigger than ninety percent of your ancestors before you put that belt on."
Hans shrugged. "Actually, I'm used to being able to move when sparring. Heavy armor would just slow me down."
Seidr tossed Hans a pair of steel bracers. "See if you can break those. We might as well make a game of it."
As luck would have it, they fit, with a little bending. Bending that he wouldn't have been able to do before. A set of leather greaves, a sort of skirt of leather flaps, and a pair of laced up sandals also fit neatly. As long as he didn't hit any cold weather, Hans figured he'd be good to go.
Seidr moved close to Hans and began stirring her finger tip in his exposed chest hair, "Well, they say the greatest warriors fought with little or no armor. So you look the part. If you could win wars on looks alone, I'd say Gni's worries were over."
That tickled, but it was the joke that made Hans laugh. "Well, now all I need is a good sword."