This is an old revision of the document!
(forked from 2019-09-23)
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.”
With Adelaide pressing her back to a rock, Yarver had moved to sit down on a nearby boulder, looking deceptively harmless. He'd brought her here, knowing at least to some degree what it entailed, but his body language almost seemed to pretend as though he were uninvolved in her fate. A fate that would likely be worse if Farsight whisked her away at a moment's notice, sealing some grisly outcome.
By now, Yarver had leant forward to rest his elbows on his thighs, hands dangling between his knees, in the curve of his dress's droop. He really should have grown a beard to match to his long white hair, lean more into the wisened sage aesthetic, but instead he just looked a little like an aged hippie. Maybe that was part of his shtick - look harmless.
Part of the reason she'd wanted to hide somewhere with a cup of tea and a mindless manual task was to starve off the tangled mixture of panic, fear, and 'how DARE he'. That was not conductive to diplomacy, or to saving lives, or to a job interview (if there had ever been a job to begin with). A few minutes to have a quiet breakdown and rebuild her mask, that's what she'd hoped for. A few minutes and then she could handle the crisis, at least long enough to get out of it and have a proper collapse once safe.
In hindsight, it did not help that her last true 'crisis' was a hasty evacuation of a few dozen reluctant tourists, right before a cliff tried flattening a few of them. Farsight had shrieked panicked warnings but even that might not have been enough to convince the rest of the staff if one of the guest's Absol hadn't kicked up an even larger fuss. Things worked out okay then, and Adelaide had thought that they'd worked out okay when she fled Taqnateh, but…
From what Yarver was saying that may have made tensions worse and left Jagannath time to stew. Except that was an uncharitable thought that would not resolve a hostage situation and also might be projection, because if SHE had kept butting heads with him Adelaide knew that her temper would certainly get the best of her. So. Time out to calm down. It was… not quite as successful as hoped.
The discussion with Yarver on pokemon neurology and social interactions was… fraught. Interesting but strewn with emotional landmines; something she'd be willing to engage in and defer to a gym leader's obviously more experienced judgement if it were not for the circumstances. Well. No, she'd still defer to Yarver on the topic and deal with her own dismay but preferably without the kidnapping and menacing.
And they weren't talking about Yarver's judgement, but Jagannath's. And potentially multiple Legendary pokemon, which was a concept that her mind was still shying away from. Knowing they existed was one thing, glimpsing one from a distance was the stuff of lifelong memories, seeing one standing next to a cranky gym leader and being told that gym leader regularly talked with them? It did not make him any LESS terrifying.
Cerise was doing some kind of coarse braiding of Yarver's hair to pass the time while the two spoke. The tone had gradually shifted from Adelaide's panic to a corresponding wariness. “Let's talk about a pragmatic solution to the current spat,” Yarver was offering, his voice reconciliatory. “The easiest - but, I imagine, also not the only - way to defuse this situationis to accept a trial. Given your experience with your pokémon so far, and stressing that I went through one myself, as did most other gym leaders, is that an option at all?”
They had touched on a bit more of the structure - that it was the Legendaries who gave the verdict, not Jagdish, and that despite his grumpy scepticism, Jagdish would defend her case, not undermine it, and that if Yarver wanted to attend to further mediate, he could and had done so before - but the concept of a pokémon court was deeply foreign and Jagdish's biting remarks from earlier had done much to undermine any emotional credibility it might have otherwise had. Yarver's patient, slow insistance on its fairness was the only thing whittling away at the bad first impression, but he was certainly whittling with a remarkable consistency and devotion.