Sleep… might not be coming so easily, tonight.
This isn’t possible.
The eight-pointed star-in-circle design on his knife was unmistakable in the sputtering torchlight. And oddly unreal. Alibaba could see it, dark as if someone had incised the Seal into the metal itself. Which would have been horrible, you didn’t carve into a blade meant to be used, ever, every bit of engraving weakened the steel-
Yet to his fingers, steel was smooth and unmarked. As if the dark angles and curves were somehow inside the steel, not on it.
It doesn’t have the runes Aladdin’s flute had, Alibaba thought, squinting at the curve of the circle to be sure. But – it’s the same. How? It wasn’t like this before we–
Oh no. Oh, no.
The stories say, people who conquer dungeons find treasure, and Magic Tools… and even sometimes a Djinn’s Metal Vessel.
But he’d seen Amon, tied to… well, it’d kind of looked like an oil-pot, maybe? And he hadn’t touched it. At all.
After all, he might have told Aladdin he had a Sinbad-dream, but there was no way he was anything like Sinbad. He’d come after the dungeon to get the treasure. To pay back Balbadd’s treasury. To prove he wasn’t the desert rat, the unclean worm, everyone in noble’s slippers said he was.
That’s all I wanted. Enough gold to wipe the slate clean… and just the proof I could do it.
Not that he would have minded, oh, an ever-flowing vessel of wine or something. Outfit a tavern, get some busty serving girls and a good cook – it’d be a living right there. A small magic. A useful one. Something that wasn’t-
Well. Scary. Even scarier in the flickering torchlight near the camp boundary….
Amon is a fire Djinn.
It was crazy. Utterly, totally crazy.
Glancing about to make sure no one was watching, Alibaba lifted his knife to the torch.
Dark lines glowed dim gold. There was the oddest, faintest sense of pulling–
Flames blew out, like a gust of storm wind.
A/N: Given Djinn feed off related magoi, it just seems implausible to me that Alibaba couldn’t figure that out on his own….
Crossover Queen's Creative Chaos 
Alibaba: “I hate it when I’m right.”
Don’t sell yourself short there kid.
Sinbad is very good and he might have seven Djinn but he didn’t start off like that. And sometimes he only wins by the skin of his teeth. And Sinbad has gotten his behind kicked. Not fatally, despite some people’s best efforts and only in part because people are very slow to learn about never letting Kings talk.
Okay, maybe that last bit is unfair. Most of the people who could testify to the dangers of that have been talked into following said King around and getting involved in whatever crazy thing they are up to now. But’s seldom boring so we can at least give it that. 😉
Of course, Sinbad is stubborn incarnate. And an almost living example that just winning the battle doesn’t mean you have won the war.
Another I bet the stories of Sinbad that circulate around focus more on the exciting parts than that mundane, boring parts. Or the parts where it was miserable and hard. Besides everyone knows the hero of the tale doesn’t lose. Not in the fun stories. And these are fun stories. Besides Sinbad is still alive so he mustn’t have lost. Or so the logic goes.
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*G* Pretty much all of that, yes. Canon, Alibaba has a bit of hero-worship going on… and yet he still faces down Sinbad rather than see his people hurt, which has to be an eep moment.
Doing my best to keep the bunnies to just slight AU; Alibaba isn’t going to figure out any greater power, he just ought to figure out a bit more of the foundation of “how does this actually work”. 🙂
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But… isn’t it from foundations like Alibaba is building that you get the /really/ cool/intricate stuff?
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🙂 We can hope!
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>. Or the parts where it was miserable and hard. >
Yep. There’s actualy an extra scene in the Sinbad manga somewhere where he’s practicing Full Equip, and much like in ‘Comes Around’ ends up flat on his face because he doesn’t know how to balance.
Difference in the manga is that he has no idea what just happened and the crew is looking on with stunned WTF expressions.
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…I so want to see that manga in English, darn it!
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