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| plot:mawne:2024-07-27 [2024/09/21 14:37] – Today's session pinkgothic | plot:mawne:2024-07-27 [2024/11/23 15:43] (current) – Conclusion of scene pinkgothic |
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| Dakarai hooked his thumbs into his pockets and tilted his head back, staring up at the face of the cathedral as though it had any bearing on his thought processes. Then he smiled at her a little uncertainly, for a moment almost with a boyish charm that he'd not exhibited so far, as though she'd tapped into some lingering shyness, and said: "I guess at some point you decide what you want to do and tell Jagdish." | Dakarai hooked his thumbs into his pockets and tilted his head back, staring up at the face of the cathedral as though it had any bearing on his thought processes. Then he smiled at her a little uncertainly, for a moment almost with a boyish charm that he'd not exhibited so far, as though she'd tapped into some lingering shyness, and said: "I guess at some point you decide what you want to do and tell Jagdish." |
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| ✘ **IN PROGRESS** | <color #884400>Her heart had, apparently, decided they already knew what was happening: she'd get the job and go to work. When her brain reminded her heart of what had to come first, that's when she locked up and had to focus on her breathing.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>Dragging someone into a trial was one thing. Adelaide suspected that, given a suitable excuse, Jagdish could quite enjoy dragging her to trial. //Walking// there with partial knowledge was much harder.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>"I am not a risk-seeker," Adelaide grumbled, looking anywhere but Dakarai. "There's a gulf between knowing the trial is the best option, and actually setting my shoulders and walking wide-eyed into hell. Or not hell, but you know what I mean." She stared into space some more. "My last employer would have challenged Jagdish to an arm-wrestle, but I suspect that if he desired he could snap mine like a toothpick."</color> |
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| | That made Dakarai chuckle a little, tilting his head back and savouring what was, for a few seconds, a perfectly private little joke. Then he shook his head mildly and revealed the source of his humour: "I believe you would win an arm-wrestle, Jagdish is all twig." He flexed his hands against his pockets a little, as though testing the strength in his fingers absent-mindedly. "But he's not going to agree to an arm-wrestle. And you need to decide at some point." |
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| | <color #884400>"And how long would it be before the Spirit of Souls-and-Air decides for me?" Adelaide asked wryly. "On a scale of hours or days?"</color> |
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| | Dakarai glanced at her, openly pondering the components of the question. "Jagdish would decide how long until he grows tired of your dithering," he said, the bluntness of the words at odds with the tonally casual delivery. "It's reasonably safe to assume you can bargain for another night or two, if that's what you want." |
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| | <color #884400>Jagdish, not Psynateh. Interesting. Alarming? Possibly not, it could easily be a function of how long a human lived versus a nigh-immortal pokemon; Jagdish would have a better sense of time and therefore a greater degree of impatience.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>Which did not actually help with the dithering.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>Adelaide rubbed her face and muttered into her hands, "Maybe I should go hug Edward." Except then she'd have to introduce him to Dakarai which would be fine, and maybe Jagdish. Which... actually she had no idea how he'd react to the gym leader. Better than Farsight. That wasn't the highest of bars.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>Although... she looked back up at the outside of the Cathedral. "You must have done a good job sealing the building. With the height and internal shadows and general... looming of it, I'm slightly surprised you don't have a resident Zubat population."</color> |
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| | "They don't much like the altitude," Dakarai revealed. "But about once a year or so we find a stray one, usually when someone's left a window open for too long at night in one of the outer wings. And it's all well and good that it's a rare event, and this whole mountain peak is low on pokémon in general; I'm not sure what we would do with our resources, otherwise." |
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| | <color #884400>"A fair point," Adelaide acknowledged. "Zubat may be adorable in small numbers, but in large colonies they're..." She considered her language, and that regularly used by people travelling through long dark caves. "Easily overwhelming," she settled on.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>"Edward's a Crobat," Adelaide elaborated, aware that most people did not consider bats 'cute'. "I don't have nearly as much experience with bird pokemon." There was a faint trace of defensiveness there. "The one time I've been asked to help deal with a stray Zubat indoors where it shouldn't be, calming the distressed human took longer than coaxing the pokemon back outside."</color> |
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| | Dakarai nodded politely, still staring up at the facade of the cathedral for a few moments. It was hard to tell if he was nodding because he had learnt that it was a gesture one made if one had nothing to say but did not particularly object to what had last been said, or if he nodded because he thought she'd touched on some profound fundamental wisdom about humanity that he wasn't sharing the specifics of. Finally: "We're familiar will all kinds of pokémon up here, often dysfunctional. If you'd like to hug yours, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume it's not the rampaging type, which means he's welcome here even without Jagdish to supervise." ...well, that was an endorsement of //some// sort, at least. |
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| | <color #884400>Rampaging? Of course she knew some pokemon would do that - she'd been terrorised by a pokemon doing it - but surely a trainer's battle team wouldn't. Who would want to be near... Well, perhaps if a trainer lost and was desperate and thought they were doomed, maybe then they'd think a rampaging pokemon could be a solution and give them a chance to flee. That would go terribly for them, Adelaide suspected, but it seemed the sort of bad decision someone could have made before. </color> |
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| | <color #884400>On reflection, there were many bad decisions that could be made. But what were the good ones?</color> |
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| | <color #884400>She couldn't stand on the edge forever. Sooner or later she'd have to jump. Or be pushed. Would it be worse to be pushed? Possibly.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>Adelaide went to speak and stopped, several times, unable to quite articulate something coherently conversational along the lines of her pokemon meeting people, or comparing which pokemon gave best hugs, or more light small-talk about the cathedral architecture. Which all converged on the same thing in the end: stalling tactics.</color> |
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| | <color #884400>She thought back to Dakarai's phrasings over breakfast. "I... can't honestly say that //embracing// is the right word, that feels like a dishonest, but... accepting? Urgh." Adelaide rubbed her face again and mustered her resolve. "I'll tell Jagdish that I'll accept a trial."</color> |
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| | This prompted a slow, friendly nod from Dakarai, reeling his gaze back in to look at her. He reached out a hand to pat her shoulder amicably, evidently not stopped by that they had only just met themselves and the gesture was really something one did amongst friends. One conversational step ahead - somehow, despite all the odd blunders of style and convention he'd been making otherwise implying that this sort of social foresight was not his strength - he said: "You'll do fine." |
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