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--- plot:mawne:2019-09-23 [2023/03/18 22:16] – pinkgothic
+++ plot:mawne:2019-09-23 [2023/11/04 23:46] (current) – Restored tag pinkgothic
@@ Line 166: / Line 166: @@
 "I'm sure she does," Yarver cut through the budding toxic conversation, firmly, his own posture visibly tense, some instincts of his clearly filing this as a threat even to his own well-being. "But we've given her a lot to digest. She's defensive. You're defensive. I implore you, //give her some time//." He had shifted by a few inches as though following an urge to use himself as a shield. "Let me talk to her. Alone, maybe for an hour."
-Jagdish kept his gaze firmly anchored on Adelaide. There was something strange about him, a fundental, unsettling mismatch of how he //felt// and what he was //saying//, stronger the closer he was to Adelaide. There should not have been the slightest chance of trusting him given the circumstances, but something about him demanded that it remain an option.
+Jagdish kept his gaze firmly anchored on Adelaide. There was something strange about him, a fundamental, unsettling mismatch of how he //felt// and what he was //saying//, stronger the closer he was to Adelaide. There should not have been the slightest chance of trusting him given the circumstances, but something about him demanded that it remain an option.
 Only an option; only a flimsy thread.
@@ Line 194: / Line 194: @@
 "Come," Jagdish gestured to the dark-skinned Psychic pokémon, and began to walk past Adelaide and Yarver, evidently intent on disappearing into the battered building without further discussion. If anything, it proved that he trusted Yarver.
-The labyrithine, smooth hide of the threatening pokémon rippled a little as she rose. Perhaps in disregard for Jagdish's request, or simply as an excursion of her own, she took sure, steady steps directly toward Adelaide - not in themselves threatening, but she was a large pokémon that had triggered Farsight's anxiety before, and her approach was unexpected now.
+The labyrinthine, smooth hide of the threatening pokémon rippled a little as she rose. Perhaps in disregard for Jagdish's request, or simply as an excursion of her own, she took sure, steady steps directly toward Adelaide - not in themselves threatening, but she was a large pokémon that had triggered Farsight's anxiety before, and her approach was unexpected now.
 Yarver reached a hand to grasp for Adelaide's shoulder. "No," he said, addressing the pokémon. "Later, please."
@@ Line 294: / Line 294: @@
 <color #884400>This was, Adelaide knew, one of the most stupid things she could do. Against an ordinary trainer? Yes it was an option of last resort but it may work. But this man was a gym leader. A supreme pokemon trainer. A trainer with a grudge, who it was strongly implied had beaten the best of Sehto repeatedly in battle.</color>
-<color #884400>And THAT meant his team were likely unwaveringly loyal monsters liable to go on an uncontrolled rampage if she harmed him, with Taqnateh at its epicenter. If she was sufficiently heroic and self-sacrificing then her ALSO being in Taqnateh may be an acceptable cost, given how isolated this place was from anything important. But she wasn't. And if she ran away that pinkmon might just transport the rampage to wherever Farsight managed to drop her which was a fate undeserved by... Vale if was being terribly optimisic but probably some poor hiker's head.</color>
+<color #884400>And THAT meant his team were likely unwaveringly loyal monsters liable to go on an uncontrolled rampage if she harmed him, with Taqnateh at its epicenter. If she was sufficiently heroic and self-sacrificing then her ALSO being in Taqnateh may be an acceptable cost, given how isolated this place was from anything important. But she wasn't. And if she ran away that pinkmon might just transport the rampage to wherever Farsight managed to drop her which was a fate undeserved by... Vale if was being terribly optimistic but probably some poor hiker's head.</color>
 <color #884400>The question now was still... what now? Yarver seemed to be angling, at least a little, that Jagannath's temper was because she had declined his 'deal' and thus evaded his trial, which suggested...</color>
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 They had, after all, already significantly affected the culture of Sehto, both by authority - the gym leaders taught the philosophy to anyone who listened - and by dragging everyone who resisted the first method through the coals.
-<color #884400>Well. That suggested what priorities Jagannath - Jagdish? - had, very clearly. It appeared he should find some way of dismantling the entire league and start running a pokemon daycare instead. True, the location was against him, but perhaps that pinkmon might enjoy being a daily shuttle service from Vale. The sheer novelty factor would gain him *plenty* of customers.</color>
+<color #884400>Well. That suggested what priorities Jagannath - Jagdish? - had, very clearly. It appeared he should find some way of dismantling the entire league and start running a pokemon daycare instead. True, the location was against him, but perhaps that pinkmon might enjoy being a daily shuttle service from Vale. The sheer novelty factor would gain him //plenty// of customers.</color>
 <color #884400>Ah, but then he'd have to stop threatening people under dubious pretenses, even if the fact there WAS a league was, she felt, a major enticement for people do COMPLETE the league.</color>
@@ Line 334: / Line 334: @@
 <color #884400>Psychic gym. This was the PSYCHIC GYM. They'd mentioned the Sehto Legendaries being involved, the... they... they were said to be raptorian, weren't they? Adelaide scrambled to compare the stylised artwork she'd seen in some museum with that mysterious possibly-a-Psychic pokemon. It... maybe fit. Potentially fit. And if there was anyone able to psychoanalyse a bonded pokemon, presumably it would be the plausibly Psychic-type God of Souls, who might have been preening the absolutely terrifying Taqnateh gym leader.</color>
-<color #884400>That was a stab in the heart. But how *could* a mere human tell? How could she tell? </color>
+<color #884400>That was a stab in the heart. But how //could// a mere human tell? How could she tell? </color>
 <color #884400>Instead of being frozen she found her back pressed to the rock, and couldn't even remember moving. Belatedly realised her breathing had shifted almost to hyperventilation, barely realised that Farsight had fallen silent. "But if most... then, how can anyone tell?" Adelaide repeated, softly. "Humans, I mean. Not-" she waved her hand vaguely in the direction they'd come from, "potentially the physical embodiment of souls and air."</color>
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 <color #884400>She didn't notice her Natu silently vanish.</color>
-**✘ IN PROGRESS**
+Not too far away, inside the cathedral, near but not in the kitchen, a Natu silently appeared. It was easy to assume there had been no intermediate steps - that Farsight had known precisely where to go - but this was unfamiliar territory, and there had been a few stops in places, some of which had been rather unpleasantly close to stone walls.
+Jagdish, indeed a few steps away from slipping into the kitchen, paused. His face knitted together slightly - not in disapproval, but perhaps in mild confusion. For as long a silence as the Natu let him get away with, he looked toward it, rather without turning to face it properly. What a human might have considered rude was only polite, really; this way, it took an additional second to potentially attack the Natu if he were so inclined, and by not pre-empting that second, he could make it clear that he had no intention of attacking, even if he was looking straight at it. He blinked his eyes slowly in another, similar gesture, then said: "Hello."
+Back outside, Yarver had brought one hand up to scratch at his right brow.
+"That's a complex question," he said. "It's hard to have proper empathy for something that doesn't share your neurological quirks. It's possible if you don't--" He paused. "This sounds patronising, I'm sorry, I don't mean it that way: It's possible if you don't make assumptions.
+"But no one is asking people to understand that bonding often doesn't work the way we think. That realisation makes it //easier// not to do battle unless you're coerced, but at the end of the day, it's the battles and the associated... 'training'... that we condemn." 'We', not 'Jagdish'. From the tone of his voice, at least, he wasn't doing a lot of condemning. An intellectual exercise, perhaps. Just one with high stakes.
+At least Yarver had gone back to having a calm air. It wasn't quite outright soothing in the current situation, but it certainly prevented it from spiralling into a worse state.
+"But let me circle back, before we lose ourselves in the tangle of this," Yarver suggested, pinching the bridge of his nose briefly. "Bluntly said, Jagdish is used to judging people. It's part of what the Legendaries expect him to do. It doesn't typically happen that he sees someone and then //doesn't// get to judge them.
+"Yet that's what's happened here. You came to Taqnateh before, but you declined his challenge. It's good that you did and Jagdish wouldn't think otherwise, but it's still //deeply strange// to him, and it's hard for him to shake the scepticism, so he pokes and probes, trying to understand the anomaly."
+<color #884400>"What sort of pokemon are you?" the Natu chittered at him. "She said you're human, everyone said you're human, but you don't feel right. You feel //safe//. But there's no such thing as a safe stranger human! And you're spiky with my Adelaide, which isn't safe, so safe-feeling means someone is //doing something//."</color>
+<color #884400>The little pokemon flicked her wings slightly, the personification of an anxious ball of feathers. "You felt the same before, and she //listened// when I said to runrunrun. Is that why you're upset with us now? Did I ruin things?" Farsight asked in a terrified fit of bravado. </color>
+At the Natu's nervous chattering sounds, a tired little smile appeared on Jagdish's face, accompanied by a somewhat larger sigh. "I'd like to know," he said, softly. "I haven't found the mirror yet that will show me what I am." He was still paused near the doorway in his non-combative posture. His lips pulsed against each other for a moment, revealing that he was still thinking about something Farsight had said - which was good, because the main question remained unanswered. Then, a little more severely, but rather more in a tone of sceptical curiosity than accusation: "She left because of you?"
+<color #884400>The Natu paused before responding, as if reviewing her memories. "I begged her to leave and said this place was unsafe and you were unsafe and bad things would happen, and then we left and nearly fell down the mountain in a dark but that still felt better. But it might not //just// be because of me," Farsight answered honestly. "But she's listened to my warnings before! Like the time with the cove and big slabs of rock falling and lots of people got //wet// but nobody got //hurt//."</color>
+Jagdish made a contemplative noise, then tipped forward and sauntered into the kitchen as he spoke: "To answer your question, yes, I suppose that's why I'm upset with your human friend now. A little less now that you've confided that in me." He sounded much calmer than before, meandering to his fridge and opening it. Some carrots surfaced, half an aubergine, a vat of something like curd... it looked like he was going to make himself some food. "Are you hungry?" he asked, conversationally.
+<color #884400>Less upset was good. She carefully hopped after the less scary (but still scary, just less) man-mon. This would probably be a good time to return to her human, but there was still Danger. The frustrating sort where she //couldn't// see what it was, just that it was lurking just out of reach. Either he was a pokemon or it was something one of the pair of strange pokemon were doing.</color>
+<color #884400>"I thought we were sitting down for a picnic but then the Pink One arrived and TELEPORTed us here," Farsight half-answered, suspiciously. "If I say yes, will they steal the food or me again?"</color>
+The question prompted a fond chuckle from Jagdish. He was sliding a pan onto a gas stove and turning it on. Some olive oil went in. "Mew //is// a little mischief-maker, but teleporting people and things is usually not her flavour of mischief - and since I haven't requested any teleportion, you should be safe." A pause as he rinsed the pre-peeled carrots for good measure, then beginning to chop them up. "What do you eat?"
+<color #884400>"Seeds and spike-fruit and soft greens and all the shoots I can sneak out of Taio's feed," Farsight admitted. The Stantler couldn't mind //that// much or he would hide his food. But those weren't really humanfoods. Sprouts were but most humans looked oddly at Adelaide snacking on them. Maybe they were hard to eat without a beak?</color>
+Jagdish nodded along with the comment. "You might like what I'm cooking up for myself here, it's mostly in the soft greens camp and I think some seeds would only improve it. If it's not to your liking, I'll make you something else. Sound good?" He popped open a cylinder, drizzling sunflower seeds into the pan, adding a pleasant soft crackling to the dish.
+<color #884400>New foods were //probably// not dangerous. Humans were easier to poison than pokemon, so if it was safe for him it was likely safe to eat. Except even he wasn't sure if he was human.</color>
+<color #884400>But food seemed to make him calmer? So food was good, calmer wasn't angry at her or her Adelaide, and if it was badfood then her Adelaide had Antidotes and they'd know for sure that the man-mon was evil. Or bad at being in the kitchen, but if he lived here on his own he couldn't be THAT bad unless he could eat souls or sunlight or dreams- wait, no, dreams still required someone else to do the dreaming.</color>
+<color #884400>Decision made, Farsight cheeped agreement and, with a few hops and flutters, relocated herself to a perch on a cupboard handle. A safer view was worth being slightly sideways.</color>
+Jagdish weighed a glass canister with a mix of herbs in one hand, his eyes trained on it, while his other pushed food around in the pan so it wouldn't stick. The container wasn't labelled, it seemed to be a generic one he'd filled with herbs of his own design. He turned the canister, making its insides shift. Then he shook his head, set it down, and picked up another with simpler contents, gave it a muster, then paused with the stirring to unscrew the top and drizzle a small helping of its contents into the pan. He set it aside again, explaining: "A lot of herbs aren't good for pokémon. While I don't keep too many of those around, given my company up here, usually I'm not sharing my food this spontaneously. I added a safe variant, without any essential oils."
+The food was getting the first hints of crisp ridges by now and one hand went down to turn the pan's heat down and off. The pan itself wandered to another spot on the stove. Two bowls appeared out of cupboards, a spoon coming to decorate one of them. Then Jagdish hoisted the pan up and poured its contents first into the dish without the spoon, then the rest, along with the remnants of olive oil sloshing at the bottom, into the one with.
+A knife and fork surfaced from one of the drawers, delved into the dish with less oil, and Jagdish busied himself for half a minute in cutting the large pieces of vegetable into smaller ones that, if perhaps not fully beak-sized, would be less of a hassle for a bird to eat.
+"See if you like this," he said, moving the dish from the countertop on which he'd assembled it to another closer to Farsight. Then he propped his hip against the one he was at, picked up his share of the food and began to eat it with the spoon. By expression, he was attentive, maybe a little concerned-by-default but not expecting issues, not fishing for praise.
+<color #884400>He was eating the food, so it definitely wouldn't poison /him/. Were humans easier to poison than pokemon? Farsight wasn't sure. She thought they got poisoned /less/ but that was because they were better at dodging, and her Adelaide had said humans cooked their food to avoid poisoning - and she'd seen some very sick looking humans on the ship - but that wasn't helping her decide what category to put him in.</color>
+<color #884400>And she couldn't trust her instincts to prove the food was safe or unsafe because HE felt just as safe as her Adelaide, when he wasn't, which meant something was wrong. Sharing food was a way to prove you were safe so this was a way he was trying to soothe her and might be a trick, but the trick only worked if the food wasn't poisoned so that meant it was okay to eat. And it probably worked the other way too, humans were happy when a pokemon ate with them (they made delighted noises and took lots of photographs) and he did seem closer to human than pokemon? So if she ate with him he'd calm down, and then she could tell Adelaide he was still dangerous but eating with him would probably not hurt, and then maybe things would get better and they could run away in daylight instead this time.</color>
+<color #884400>Also she was hungry. So she ate.</color>
+Jagdish watched Farsight nibble the food, scooping more of his own meal into his mouth. Personally, he preferred it without the seeds - the problem was less the flavour and more that the texture didn't quite fit the rest. Unless he spontaneously had to whip up something for another bird, he wouldn't do it again.
+After some more mouthfuls, he said: "Is it edible?"
+It was maybe a queer question to ask a bird. There wasn't all that much of a sense of taste to sample the food with. What Farsight could taste was a mild, pleasant sweetness and umami, promising a good deal of energy. The bowl was not all that good for pecking, making little chiming sounds each time Farsight's beak tapped at it. The herbs were imperceptible - a good sign.
+All in all, it was quite pleasant, registering due to its soft and oily nature as some strange but good mixture of crop milk and raw foodstuffs, something that meshed more with Farsight's last memories before being captured than with the seeds and grains that she was usually fed.
+<color #884400>Farsight turned her head sideways as she considered the question. "Yes, it's edible," she confirmed. "It's different. Not badwrong different, just... different." A crinkled leaf squished under her beak. Humans seemed to like soft foods. If he proved actually-safe in future, maybe she could ask if that's why they cooked everything? As well as stopping it from poisoning them.</color>
+<color #884400>The bowl remained between her and the gym leader, more an automatic nervous habit than a belief it could work as a protective barrier. "What happens now?" she asked cautiously, hoping that the food-sharing was working. Farsight did not want to have to find hiding places for two humans on top of a mountain. Humans were a lot bigger than she was and couldn't TELEPORT and many pokemon were much better at seeking than humans were at staying still.</color>
+Jagdish paused his eating to shoot a glance at his bare left wrist by way of a gesture, shrugging lightly. "We wait for Yarver and Adelaide to come back, mostly," he said. He sounded quite neutral about it, not like someone who had just been reminded of a subject of great anger. It meshed with his earlier air - the mundanity of it all, the way all of this gravity was just an everyday thing for him.
+"If she consents to a trial, will you let that happen?" he asked. It was a conversational question by tone, but it was easy to imagine that there might be consequences if the answer was 'no'. From all Farsight had observed of him so far, spiking paranoia aside, it would probably just involve a TELEPORT-suppressing enclosure for the duration of the trial at worst, though, and likely something milder still.
+<color #884400>"What //sort// of trial?" Farsight asked. "The very sunny green islands had trials, like not falling off a Lapras or chasing pokemon with a camera. But that's not dangerous enough. Because things feel dangerous."</color>
+Jagdish paused, by body language as if to consider the consistency of what he'd just put into his mouth. But after long seconds, he swallowed and said: "It's not that kind of trial. It's a... conversation with consequences. Adelaide and I would have a long conversation with some of the Sehto Legendaries, about the things she has done with her pokémon, and for what cause, with which motivations."
+He let his gaze drop into his bowl as though to scry something, fishing for an explanation of 'consequences' that felt accessible. Then he nodded mildly and said: "Most people who come up here for a trial have been very mean to their pokémon. Sometimes even the pokémon don't realise it, because they've never seen any pokémon be handled differently.
+"The unfortunate truth is that some people don't care at all whether their pokémon get hurt or die, and what they want is the little piece of plastic they can pin to their chest that tells them their pokémon let them win a gym's challenge." He sounded quite calm about it, like a professor explaining a tough subject in physics to a student.
+"And we punish those people in proportion to how //much// they were mean. The worst of them, we kill. The best of them usually get a couple of scratches. Most gym leaders you've seen are people of the second type, in fact. But to ascertain what they've done and what they deserve, there is a trial, and we ask opinions of their pokémon, and sift through the information we have of what they did during the gym challenges."
+"All of that is to say: The trial is a threat to Adelaide and I have no interest in misleading you about that. We will probably hurt her, but I suspect we won't hurt her much." There was a mild annoyance in his voice, a pale shadow of his earlier anger, this time stemming from that he was wary of making promises about outcomes. But the Natu seemed well-adjusted and none of the data he had on Adelaide made her out to be one of the worse candidates. 'A couple of scratches', while still a bit of a euphemistic simplification, felt like the likely outcome.
+<color #884400>Farsight's first reaction was outrage. Hurting HER Adelaide was not acceptable! Feathers puffed out in an instinctive attempt to look larger (somewhat successful) and more intimidating (...significantly less successful) she opened her beak to protest, and nearly immediately clicked it shut again.</color>
+<color #884400>She was a very average Natu, and he was a scary man-mon with a VERY powerful Pink One who'd just confessed to having lots of conversations with Legendaries. He'd said he wanted a conversation with Adelaide's other pokemon too, but when angry people had yelled at her human Adelaide had told them off and said that conversations were not shouting and made them go away. And shouting wouldn't work, because she (somehow) knew that he could beat her in a fight even without his own pokemon coming to help.</color>
+<color #884400>"Unhappy puffball," Farsight muttered to herself, attacking a particularly crooked feather with her beak. That was what her Adelaide would say to her, gently, then ask what was wrong. She was a GOOD human! Not like the ones on the ship that kept trying to pick fights with everyone!</color>
+<color #884400>She looked back up. "Adelaide is scared, and she's angry, and she's afraid you're going to hurt US, like the volcano-gym-man threatened." He was mean, so he can't have been one of the gym leaders put on trial. "Even if she's scared because //I'm// scared, she won't let you touch our pokeballs while she's afraid of that." Because she didn't want Adelaide hurt at ALL, but wasn't hurt better than killed? Yes, but not good enough. She should have seen further and warned her Adelaide //sooner//. But maybe if her talked to the others and found their trainer wasn't mean then he'd be less angry and it would be easier to run away? Because... he wouldn't let her say no, would he?</color>
+Jagdish nodded amiably, taking another bite of his food - the last. He set the bowl aside, taking a deep breath that led into an equally deep exhale. "I imagine Yarver is explaining to her that that's not a threat. No one here is interested in harming pokémon in anything but, at most, acute self-defence and I haven't seen that happen in the past three decades."
+He did not look like he could be much older than three decades.
+<color #884400>"You would have better ways of hiding from a very angry Tauros than a Cargodon and a forklift," Farsight agreed.</color>
 {{tag>[raw]}}