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randomwriteronline · 11 months

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“Now,” Arezu began whistfully, “Not to pit two exquisite Ladies against each other, but - if they had to fight, who do you think would win between Lady Lilligant and Lady Sneasler?”

“Sneasler,” Ingo replied instantly.

There was a hot second of stunned silence.

“No hesitation, huh,” Mai noted.

“I am basing myself purely on typing,” the man began explaining as he briefly stopped carving the second wooden spoon he would give as a traditional wedding gift to Palina and Iscan: “If both had been pure Fighting it would have been a perfectly fair fight, but Lilligant has the disadvantage of being part Grass, which Poison happens to be supereffective against.”

“That’s why your Tangela hates me,” Melli commented.

“She does not,” Ingo replied.

“Why does she suffocate me then?”

“I have told you already, her hugs are not an attempt at your life, she is simply made out of a mass of vines which can sometimes result in hazardous situations despite her best intentions.”

“Is there someone Lady Lilligant could take on?” Arezu distracted them.

Ingo turned to her without missing a beat: “Avalugg, Basculegion, and possibly Kleavor, though it would be a very tight match.”

“No she could not take on Lord Avalugg!” Gaeric blurted out.

“He is doubly weak to Fighting and his Rock type would not do him many favors against Grass,” the other man replied, shattering his hopes in one fell swoop.

“But he’s-!” the warden fumbled on his words for a moment, waving his arms vehemently to find a comprehensible enough way to explain himself before having to resort to just: “Big!”

“Fair argument!” Ingo admitted. “But typing wise, he’d be done for. It’s a very unfortunate pair, mostly on account of neither type covering the other’s weaknesses. He would similarly lose against Sneasler, Arcanine, Basculegion, Electrode, Kleavor, and... No, that should be it, I believe. Ursaluna would would put up a valuable effort, but wouldn't survive the Ice. My condolences, Miss Calaba.”

The woman didn’t even move from where she napped, just gave him an ok.

Melli laughed at the disheartened Gaeric.

Mai smacked him to get him to stop.

“He’d be good against Braviary,” Sabi predicted.

That got her a gentle pat on her head, away from the braids she was getting done: “Indeed,” Ingo nodded, “Flying is weak to both Ice and Rock. He’d also fare pretty badly against Kleavor - Bugs are awful for Psychic types.”

“But he’d be good against Sneasler?”

“Oh, he’d decimate her. Both of his types are supereffective against her. Wyrdeer too, she’d have no chance against him. For more information on how weak Poison is to Psychic please refer to Melli and his many defeats at the spoons of Alakazam.” and he ducked to evade a halfhearted slap. “Also Ursaluna! Ground is another powerful weakness of the vitriolic type. Congratulations, Miss Calaba.”

She gave him a thumbs up and continued not caring.

Palina hummed, struggling for a moment with Sabi’s green hair as she tried to untangle a knot: “How’d my young Lord do?” she asked with genuine curiousity: “He hasn’t been mentioned much, has he?”

“Fire type seldom has trouble in matchups, so he’d be fairly fortunate in a fight against most of his fellow Nobles...” the expert mumbled: “Lilligant, Kleavor, Avalugg as I’ve mentioned, Electrode - Ursaluna would asphalt him, though. Together with Basculegion they are his worst enemies. In a fight, of course, I’m well aware they’re on excellent terms.”

Iscan waved a little to reassure him: “The Lord isn’t a big fighter anyways, he probably wouldn’t do too well.”

“Oh, he’d be quite good actually! Plenty of the Nobles would be in trouble against his Water and Ghost combination, he’s rather fiersome! Electrode is the only one to be a total threat to him - those two are probably the ones to look out for the most. Terrific typings, the both of them.”

His sleeve was tugged to take him out of his musings: Lian twisted his mouth at him to properly figure out how to express his question, looking particularly pissed as he side-eyed what Ingo refused to look at but knew was probably a very smug Diamond warden with a burning desire to bury the guy alive, which would have severely worsened not just inter-clan relationships but also the fairly relaxed gathering they were having.

“So - this is all just, theories, right,” the kid began.

“Yes, based on types.”

Lian hummed deeply, pressing his mouth flat, and a fairly well-known feeling he could only denominate as Oh No took over Ingo as he dreaded the question.

“So you could tell who would win between Almighty Palkia and Dialga?”

Now that was something not to be touched with a 25 and a half foot pole, as evidenced by the other Pearl wardens shooting a glare at Lian and most of their Diamond counterparts paling notably.

Ingo, bless his heart, completely lost the religious implications somewhere in the cogs of his battle-analitycal machine churning in his brain.

“That would require an actual battle to be determined, actually!” he answered without missing a beat: “Both of them are Dragon types, meaning they have at the same time a massive advantage and disadvantage on one another, so effectively the chance at one prevailing over the other just based on that is rendered null, and since their secondary typings of Steel and Water are completely neutral to one another, a fight between the two of them would end up being rather balanced. It would also probably be an incredible spectacle with a very high chance of completely tearing reality as we know it apart according to professor Laventon’s studies, so it would be best for them and the rest of the world to remain on good terms and never have the chance to settle the score between them if they had any to settle.”

The young warden mumbled an agreement.

Not the way anybody expected a bomb like that to be defused.

But oh thank fuck it worked!

“What about the third one?” Iscan asked meekly. “The worm?”

Ingo buffered for a second: “Dragon-Ghost,” he recalled. “Same exact situation as the other two. No certain prevailing, and we should hope not to find out.”

“Ghost is good against Ghost, right?” Palina intervened.

The man nodded. A funny thought striked him: “With enough determination, it could be taken down by Basculegion. And by Avalugg as well.”

Gaeric cheered at his Lord’s good honor being restored.

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randomwriteronline · 1 year

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What Gaeric first saw in the blizzard was an unstable cone of black striped with rust struggling to stand upright in the snow.

When his screams in its direction did not elicit any kind of response from it, he put two fingers in his mouth and let out a whistle as long and loud as his lungs allowed him to do; the strange thing turned around, a sudden icy pale line erupting from the darkness of the coat in a sort of thin rectangle. It attempted to settle into a rigid formal pose as it rose an arm into the air - in a motion that seemed like a greeting, a signal to stop, a call.

Through the flakes howling and shrieking with the winds, the approaching warden recognized a hazy glare pointed nowhere and lashes covered in frost.

Then the person swayed and stumbled back, visage unchanged in its frowning expression as if carved into stone, but eyes fluttering. Gaeric's speed and outstretched arm were the only things that kept them from plummeting face first into the snow as they lost consciousness.

They breathed still, thankfully: clouds of condensation left the rattling teeth behind pale lips, even if rough and labored. Their entire body shook fiercely in his hold as he wrapped them in his tunic and hoisted them over his shoulder, running through the storm back to the settlement.

In the haste, he did not notice the hat had fallen off their head.

Warden Calaba was quite busy with a crisis regarding the Ursarings of the Mirelands, and it would have been at least a day before she had a chance to cross the region - a journey that, without Ursaluna’s aid, would have taken two more at best and three at worst.

The stranger could do nothing but wait for her, and spent that time shivering uncontrollably in an unoccupied bunk inside of Gaeric’s hut, sweating themselves into nothingness like a pane of ice in the warming spring sun, breaths heaved in harshly through uneasy bouts of unconciousness as the warden tried to ease their pain.

The settlement children looked at that weird rambling creature quietly when they snuck in the warden’s abode, all standing near the door (even if that meant Gaeric would have caught them instantly if he returned too quickly, shooing them all away with angered reproaches) with their boots still on, half terrified and half devoured by curiosity: they watched careful and ready to bolt away as fast as they could while it laid on its side under the quilted covers, creating bumps and chasms as it sometimes kicked or tried to turn to no avail, body torn between being fully taken by either a paralysis or a frenzy. They listened to it rave and sob murmurs of gibberish with a heavy growl in its voice, like a beast out for blood after being mortally wounded, and each tried to make sense of the sounds that fell from its babbling mouth under the fabric.

When through the opened door a gust of wind stronger than usual made the fire within the hearth tremble to the point of extinguishing, the thing the warden had saved seized suddenly in the chill and gave a gurgling roar, a sort of guttural howling lament that had them all hastily making their escape screaming.

“The Baneful Fox!” they cried at the top of their lungs: “The Baneful Fox! Warden Gaeric brought home the Baneful Fox!"

Young Irida pulled their ears for being so nosy and inattentive, for allowing the only source of warmth to go out so carelessly; Gaeric was too busy making sure the feverish thing did not freeze to death to reprimand them himself, and only once the fire was restored to its prime and the wailing stopped and the trembling quieted could he give them a talk as icy as Lord Avalugg's favorite treat.

But now the fear was snaking through the settlement, like an Onix digging deeply across the weak earth of a hill.

The stranger had not talked yet, had they? No, it had sobbed and rambled, but never spoken a word. Its voice was low and mumbling, reminiscent of a restless brook - but anything resembling a human sound never came out of that dead pale mouth no matter how talkative it seemed to be; only whines and whimpers, and croaking howls when the fever burned its limbs.

Was it truly the kin of a terrifying monster, a phantom of vengeance and hatred? Was its humanoid appearance the work of an illusion, its sickness a ruse to infiltrate their homes?

The hut was circled, surveyed.

Yet none entered.

The murmurs and whispers sorrounded it.

The thought of sharp teeth and sharper claws being tended to by Lord Avalugg’s own warden...

Maybe they should have abandoned that cursed abode now... Covered its door and windows with snow and ice, to suffocate it... Trap it within...

"Fox or not, it is dying," Gaeric replied curtly, hushering the deafening mumblings seeping into his own home with his proud sharp voice. "And the less resentment we instigate from such a beast, if a beast it is indeed, the better. Who knows - it may even understand my kidness and refuse to harm us once it is back in its wild home. Either way it is weak and sick: if it wasn't, it would have leaped out of bed and torn me to shreds already, don't you think?"

Nobody had the guts to argue with him.

The stranger cried weakly, shivers taking over its frame; Gaeric laid another wet cloth on its forehead and gently squeezed its shoulder in his hand to soothe its anguish.

He was kind to it.

Irida struggled to follow in his example.

She stayed with him and the beast more than anybody else of the settlement - he was her teacher, after all, and with Palina he was most of her family, and it was her duty as his student to aid him, but the glances she could spare at the thing did not ease the questions and worries that gnawed at her stomach.

She sat away from it, prepared soothing balms and warmed the water if it was needed: not once did she dream of coming closer, of attempting to feed it somewhat through its confusion, and risk losing her face to a sudden attack.

Although the few times it did manage to sleep a little (something she could only be sure of because its perpetual babbling would quiet into weak intermittent howls, and even then she could tell it was never a true slumber, so thin and easily crumbling), she did try to approach it, and carefully analyzed the fake visage with which it disguised itself.

It was an honestly awful illusion at that - with skin so pale it couldn’t be real and white fur crawling all along its cheeks, clearly escaping the attempt at a human mask. That nose could have not been anything but the poor correction of a snout, and those hands too, so thin and curled upon themselves, claws struggling to hide their real nature -- and its eyes...

Irida had yet to see its eyes, but she would have bet they were a vibrant and mean saffron, so close to gold, yet lacking the gleam and shimmer completely.

She did not say any of that. She did not want her teacher to reprimand her.

She was there when the beast awoke.

After countless struggles it finally managed to turn upon its back without any help; as soon as its snout was pointed towards the top of the bunk, then, its body jolted upwards with a start, wracked by a bout of dehabilitating coughs, croaking and full of anguish and ripping through its throat with the fury of a stampeeding Rhyhorn, seeming as if they would never end.

Gaeric shifted it on its stomach so it would not choke, one hand holding a rag that he pressed to the white mouth without covering its nose, the other on its back. As the creature weakly tried to claw the wrist off of its maw, still sputtering and heaving and struggling to inhale into the fabric, the warden sustained it on his legs and slammed his palm on its spine.

The air was knocked out of it once, twice, thrice; then, when at last he felt a weight heavy and wet and slimy through the cloth, Gaeric pulled the beast back up from the scruff of its neck as gently as he could.

It heaved and hacked a little still, but it finally breathed.

WIth the help of his student he laid the creature back down, the girl watching him clean the foul phlegm trying still to drip from its maw. It inhaled deeply, mouth wide open, flat teeth peeking through its lips, and it opened its eyes slightly to fix them on the two faces it could vaguely make out between tears and illness.

(Irida found herself entranced by how white they were.)

It tried to call out to the two of them, make a sentence of sorts with broken syllables; what it managed was a painful growling wheeze.

Gaeric put a hand on its forehead and felt it warm: “Don’t speak,” he ordered, though kindly: “Rest. Warden Calaba will be here soon, she will cure you.”

The beast whimpered quietly; its pale hand rose to tap its chin, slipping down after a moment. It repeated the motion again, again, again, trying to communicate something that neither could understand.

“Breathe,” the warden insisted: “Rest.”

Irida listened to it heave until it finally fell, after days, into deep sleep.

Calaba appeared when the fever began picking up again; she entered the hut despite the frightful rising murmurs trying to pull her away from it, with a somewhat bitter yet amused smile pulling at the wrinkles of her face.

“You’ve moved on from Glalies and Froslasses, I’ve been told,” she simply commented. Her bag on the floor, her boots carefully removed, she spared a glance at the trembling coughing lump of quilts and covers: “Were they not dangerous enough for your bleeding heart?”

“It can barely breathe and its blood is boiling under its skin,” the man replied. “Even a Fox should have the right to enjoy air in its lungs without suffocating, should it not?”

The older warden rummaged through the ingredients for her many remedies: “I never claimed otherwise.”

Palina was strong enough to turn the mush of pulp into something easier to gulp down without breaking the mortar, but refused any further involvement. She insisted still to remain, keeping Irida behind herself - an arm outstretched lightly before the girl, legs ready to spring up from where she sat just in case the thing jumped out of bed to snatch her sister’s throat with one bite.

It struggled to drink - made a mess, really.

But some of the medicine did manage to go down, coating the mucus in its pained throat, slowly beginning to crystalize it so that it would come off in chunks rather than amorphous globs sticking to everything they could on their way out, stubbornly refusing to leave the walls they clogged.

Calaba manhandled the beast with no fear. She turned and swayed its head in her ancient but not yet frail hands while the haze and fatigue and illness and foul taste on its tongue made it too confused to react properly. She got a better look at mostly flat teeth, forced an eyelid shut tight to lift upwards, examined the snowy iris looking back at her without seeing.

“This is no Fox.” she sentenced at last, leaving it to digest the medicine. “Unless your deepest desire is to care for a foreign man with a leg on his deathbed, but I doubt it would have had reason to bait you for so long, let alone grow so engrossed in its own illusion to make itself truly sick.”

“Maybe it’s fallen for him like he’s fallen for it,” Palina joked, but there was no levity in her voice.

Gaeric gave her a glare, but did not say a thing.

The stranger slept slightly better, after Calaba’s visit.

Sometimes it would still awaken coughing up a storm, making Irida jump, and she would have to help it turn to stand on all fours and spit out the phlegm in a rag before the chunk fell down its throat and choked it. (Strangely it tried to hide its face from her when caught in a fit, mouth weakly shoved against its elbow so that she wouldn’t come in contact with its disease.)

Then, once its back was on the mattress again and the air flowed more easily, it would drag a hand over to its chin and extend it towards her, over and over.

“I don’t know what that means,” she told it finally one day, fighting against her fear of talking to a Fox - a stranger, it was just a stranger, as Calaba said - with short quick sentences. “Nobody knows what that means.”

The stranger’s expression did not change, but they seemed slightly distraught.

A wet croaking sound managed to get through their neck, but the mucus in their throat did not appreciate that, and they hacked some more. The sting softened with a long quiet hum and a sip of something bitter and almost thick.

They hummed again after swallowing, nodding intermittently. Irida looked at their display a couple times before turning to get a clean freshly drenched rag, imagining the confusing behaviour to be just another effect of the fever starting to build up again.

She laid it on their forehead carefully, earning a relieved sigh and another thankful hum. Two, actually -- two hums, repeated a couple more times. And now that she was close enough to the pale tired face she could see that the first of them was accompanied by a stretch of their closed mouth, while the second had them shrink it in length, as if to turn it into a circle. Curiosity had her analyzing the combination of sound and movement that seemed to mimic...

The stranger repeated it all again, now moving their hand in tandem, up to their chin and then towards her.

“Thank you?”

The stranger nodded with a noise like a praise, white eyes lighting up.

Irida smiled back at them, somewhat flustered.

“They thank us,” she told her teacher eagerly when he returned, arms full of provisions. She was grinning, sitting beside the stranger laying peacefully on the bed, who turned to him and waved a hand weakly in his direction as greeting; Gaeric straightened his already good posture and nodded deeply at them, in a sort of bow.

The stranger learned their names, learned to somewhat hum them; their throat was still too cluttered and pained for them to communicate with ease if at all, and their own name was still a mystery, but it was a start.

They were weak, but eager to move - especially it would seem that they ached to make themselves useful. A couple times Gaeric interjected them as they tried to stand on uncertain legs and get the water once it boiled or open windows if they heard him say it was a bit stuffy, or would suddenly see them sit up despite the strains in their muscles and offer to make food or the medicine themselves if he seemed tired. Their face was unreadable when he insisted they just rest, locked in a frowning expression not helped by the signs of fatigue the illness had carved into it, but they did not appear to be angry; in truth, the way they rubbed a fist on their chest in a pair of clockwise circles was almost bashful, apologetic.

Their posture was awful, hunched forward, shoulders closed in on their chest. Maybe that too influenced how bad their cough was. An attempt at rolling them back cracked something the stranger was not too keen on hearing crack, and so they preferred keeping them as they were.

Palina did not trust them still. She would come to drag Irida outside, to train her, as she would have likely become Lord Arcanine’s warden soon; her eyes would narrow coldly at the stranger waving the girl bye as she did the same to them.

Until the stranger talked, it would have remained a Zoroark to her.

That seemed to be the opinion held by most at the settlement - even after Calaba had reassured them there was nothing to fear.

But at the very least it kept nosy kids away from Gaeric’s hut, and if people insisted on murmuring they did not do so all at once, nor did they circle the abode anymore, and when they heard the rough growls and whines of pain coming from it they scurried off like frightened Kricketots.

The ancient warden was getting ready to leave when she heard her own name being shouted out in the middle of the settlement.

“Calaba! Calaba! Come quickly!”

Irida did not explain it well enough, scared as she was.

From what she gathered, the elder understood that the stranger had provoked a nasty fit on purpose, to get sooner rid of the foulness in their throat: they had coughed, and coughed, and hacked out some more into a rag, with a crescendo of noisily spat out air; then with a horrid noise a chunk of Sinnoh knows what had finally ripped itself out and fallen into their hand, and Gaeric had instantly bolted at their side afraid for their life, and Irida had ran as fast as she could to get the old woman so savvy in curing even the worst ailments.

When she arrived the stranger was holding their own head over the floor, blood pouring from their mouth in rivers.

They choked and gargled on it when their chin was forced upwards so that they would look at the ceiling of the hut, a hand still uselessly attempting to catch the thin scarlet brooks dripping along their neck. A fungus, a special type of rot was thrust down their throat to repair the ripped skin.

“Do you want to kill yourself!” Calaba barked at them. Trying to still keep their head held up so it would not spill on the bed as they struggled to breathe, the stranger recoiled at her tone and tried to shirk away from her as she forced their forehead down onto the bowl she was collecting their blood in so that it would not suffocate them. “To provoke a cough like that! When your body is still fragile after days spent barely able to stand! If your goal was to end your misery you could have done so before we wasted resources and effort keeping you alive!”

“They were trying to get better...”

She shot Gaeric an icy glare, so cold he hushed immediately.

“Don’t you dare excuse them! Do you not understand how big of a threat to their life that was?!”

Her reprimands were so loud, Palina and Irida barely had to apply themselves to eavesdrop on the scolding.

They could all but see her as she pointed her gnarled finger at the stranger’s nose with such might that lightning could have erupted from it while she shouted: “There better not come a sound from you in the coming days, not a peep, not a hum! And don’t you think of going outside with this cold - let that poor throat of yours rest, for the Almighty’s sake!”

The stranger must have been terrified of her wrath, because from that moment on they followed her orders to the letter and did not make a sound.

And while at the very least his thunderous cough had passed and it could no longer shake the entire settlement down to its foundations at random intervals, the sudden perfect silence which enveloped Gaeric’s home when nobody else was there was awfully eerie.

The children claimed the wardens had killed the fox-man because it had bitten Palina in the hand, which was why she had gloves on now, and why it was no longer heard snarling. They said they would have taken it away in the night - or maybe that they had taken it away already, but they hadn’t cleaned the blood, or that Gaeric was too sad that it was dead and so he had put it in the snow so he could drag it away alone later, to bury it properly.

They muttered that if someone were really brave, they would go in and see if the blood was still there.

But nobody volunteered.

The stranger seemed a bit angry when Lian came into view, their frown running as deep in their horribly white face as a river carving its was across the slope of a mountain, but they tilted their head curiously; so maybe they weren’t that mad that he was here.

The kid blinked to make sure he wasn’t dreaming them up, to make sure they were really there, and glared intently up and down their frame from where they sat on the bed, with that coat closed tight around their neck and their legs trembling a bit.

“Hello,” he greeted finally.

The other bowed their head politely to greet him back.

Lian hummed and rocked on his heels, holding the hem of his tunic. They decided it was too cold for them, and covered the lower half of their shivering body with the quilt sitting upon the covers.

“You don’t look that much like a Fox to me,” he commented.

The stranger agreed by shaking their head.

Emboldened by the reassurance that this wasn't a bloodthirsty ghost, the kid crossed his arms on his chest: “But you’re no Pearl for sure,” he noted. “Are you one of those Diamond Clan people?”

The stranger denied that by shaking his head, almost confused.

“Hmmm. And you don’t have bags so you can’t be from the guild. Then you’re a foreigner,” the boy decided. "Then you don't know anything."

The stranger didn't exactly respond to the accusations, but their gaze fell to their feet, toes curling on the floor.

"I bet you don't even know about Lord Kleavor then," Lian continued.

He bit his tongue immediately, remembering reprimands for being too rude with his excess in straightforwardness, afraid he had made a wrong move and the offended thing would have snarled, dropped the act, and jumped to devour him whole in a single bite.

The stranger simply shook their head and tilted it, as if inviting him with genuine insterest to tell them more.

The boy blinked.

"You really don't?"

They shook their head again.

Palina shrieked when she saw the child sitting so close to the bed, gesturing emphatically as he spoke of the magnificent creature he admired above all other beasts in the vast land of Hisui; with her eyes enormous and her brows furrowed in a strange emotion that was at once horror, anger and something that didn't seem like it was either, the sound that came from her mouth was supposed to be reminiscent of 'Lian', but ended up sounding like the roar of a furious creature that made both stranger and kid jump for the sudden scare.

“You should not be here!”

Lian scrambled to his feet and grabbed a dark clad arm to shield himself behind it: “I didn’t do anything!” he promised, terrified: “They didn’t know about Lord Kleavor so I told ‘em!”

She shot the stranger a glare as they tried to hide the kid from her fury.

“Didn’t you hear Calaba when she yelled at it?” she snarled. “It mustn’t speak! Not even hum!”

“They didn’t! I talked all the time like mama says I shouldn’t!”

The stranger was quick to reassure her with a nod, a hand to their heart to strengthen their vouch for Lian’s honesty. They held Palina’s gaze, as chillingly fiery as frostburn, for a time that seemed infinite.

“You still should not have come,” she hissed at last, chin held high. “Intruding in someone else’s home is an affront to their space. You know that. And you shouldn't bother sickly people with your ramblings.”

The child lowered his eyes to the floor, picking at his own fingers.

"But they liked it," he mumbled: "I was keepin' 'em company... I was gonna show ‘em my rocks..."

It isn’t interested in your rocks, Palina held herself back from saying, because on one hand he was only a boy, and she didn’t need to be so harsh; on the other hand, the stranger had turned in genuine surprise at the news and seemed, indeed, very interested in the rocks.

She guarded them closely for what felt like hours, sitting exactly next to the bed, at the stranger’s side. With her eyes narrowed she looked carefully as Lian settled on the mattress and began rambling about minerals and gems and stones of all kinds, shapes and textures, placing each one in the stranger’s hands as he explained everything about them so that they could better feel and look at it themselves. Young as he was, he was far from a skilled orator - interrupting himself over and over or losing focus halfway through to change topic entirely; despite that, Palina noticed, his improvised student listened very intently, nodding along with interest and following instructions carefully on how to handle each specimen.

They only spaced out slightly when presented with two wildly different stones - first with a translucent one, what seemed like electricity trapped within the greenish crystal, which had them pensive for a little while as they turned it slowly in their hands; second was instead a purple gem, its dark core mesmerizing them to the point where they had to be snapped awake.

Lian noticed - of course he did. Quickly snatched the rocks back.

“You can’t keep ‘em, they’re mine,” he reminded them.

The somewhat saddened nod he received as a reply must have tugged at his heartstrings a little while he bit his tongue, Palina noted, because he played with the stones and twisted his mouth for a moment, deep in thought.

“I mean,” he mumbled, “I’m gonna find more, ‘cause I can dig ‘em up, but they’re... Well, they’re not easy to - but since you’re, since you like ‘em...”

The stranger pointed at themselves, head tilted - a flabbergasted question. A gift? For me?

The child held the minerals a little closer: “But not these!” he repeated: his words were met with an understanding nod: “ ‘cause I found these first and they’re mine! But if I find some smaller ones, then I’ll give ‘em to you maybe. ‘cause you were nice and listened about Lord Kleavor and liked my rocks. But not these. I gotta find others and then I’ll give you those.”

The stranger bowed deeply, twice or thrice, without a sound (as Calaba had demanded), thanking Lian in their language of signs enthusiastically.

Palina had never seen anybody as interested in pieces of rubble.

Anybody aside from Lian, of course.

(The stranger seemed truly, awfully genuine in their excitement.)

The stranger slept like the dead. Fortunately, Gaeric might have added, seeing as several of their days in the hut had been spent in the grip of restlessness.

They wheezed through their slumber, quietly enough for it not to keep one awake and irritated at night or further tear at his massacred throat - yet remaining still so noticeable that one could easily tell when it stopped, and thus when they were awake once more.

“Do not move,” the warden ordered as he heard them shift noisily behind himself - no doubt trying to get up and attempt to do some chore or other. “Your medicine is almost ready.”

“Thank you,” a ghastly, horrendously raucous noise replied.

It took Gaeric a moment to hear it properly, buried in the crackling of a damaged neck and the struggle of a tongue that hadn’t spoken in a while. He turned to the stranger to find them sitting up on the bed, blinding white eyes still closed and brow furrowed, and looked at them with a slight smile on his tilted face.

“You speak.”

The stranger blinked at him, and opened their bloodless, colorless mouth: “Please do not tell Miss Calaba,” they begged slowly.

Gaeric laughed, soft and elated: “Of course not,” he assured them as he handed the bowl containing the remedy over to the grateful pale hands. “She would be able to strangle both of us with no trouble at all if she discovered your voice got out before your throat was fully mended.”

The other did not answer, sipping the foul liquid little by little until every last drop was completely gone from the recipient by the time it left their lips with a rather unhappy groan (no doubt due to the flavor) that made them stifle a cough.

The warden seated himself more comfortably on the carpet; his glacial eyes studied the human form before him.

“But since you did gain it back, fully healed or not - I would quite like to properly make your acquaintance.”

A raucous ‘oh’ and ‘of course’ left the stranger as they nodded, settling the bowl in their lap: they strained to lean forward and extended a hand towards the muscular man. This must have been how their people greeted one another, wherever they came from; so to be polite he reached out and took it in a likeminded grip, and his arm was lightly shaken by the person before him.

“My name is... My name is Ingo,” the stranger nodded to themselves, speaking very slowly as if unsure of their own words. “I am a... I am... Unsure of my current whereabouts.”

As he had imagined then, a foreigner; with a name like that, and such a lack of geographical awareness, they couldn’t be anything else.

“These are the Alabaster Icelands,” Gaeric explained. “In the North of Hisui.”

“I see,” the stranger nodded.

Bright white eyes seemed just as lost. Gaeric furrowed his brows.

“Where do you fare from?”

“You do not know?”

The tone of that question, despite being half hidden by the garbling of a ruined throat, struck the warden as incomprehensible. It was laced with a kind of surprise, a strange sort of panic navigating in a suspended cloud. The warden’s frown deepened in puzzlement in the silence that seeped into their bones; a breath sucked in too fast and the quiet cough that followed snapped him out of the bubble of his confusion, and he watched thin white fingers fidget.

“I apologize for such a strange question,” Ingo said, softly enough. “I simply fear I do not know, either.”

#pokémon #pokemon legends arceus #warden gaeric #pokemon irida #warden calaba #warden palina #warden lian #submas ingo #blood tw #random writing #ableism tw #possibly. idk.#part 2 coming never. or at least once i can unclog my brain enough not to struggle through finishing wips or writing in general #anyways! ingo appearing in hisui fic. hes very sick and loses his voice

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