When the Parasect coalesces out of the crimson glow leaping from its pokéball, Tatenda and Jagdish are near the front of the cathedral, taking in the afternoon light through stained, colourful, but sun-bleached glass. A fine veil of dust lies in the air, making the slanted light visible. The pokémon is roughly a metre tall from ground up to the top of its doming mushroom, and fixes a curious, active gaze upon Tatenda almost immediately after appearing. A chitter in equal parts excited and curious spills from it.
Tatenda's thoughts are busy remembering this place and its very own magic, the uneasy feeling that crawls out of every gloomy corner, paired with the awe-stricken silence and ironic peace - ironic for the fact that pokémon fights take place here every now and then.
But then his awareness turns back to the present situation and the former gym leader smiles politely and calming. “It's a pleasure to meet you, Salt,” he addresses the pokémon directly. “I'm Tatenda, a friend of Jagdish, and I would like tot alk to you about your experiences. Are you okay with that?”
The Parasect peers to Jagdish as if uncertain, perhaps curious whether he should be engaging this stranger at all on the one hand, or whether it might be a new master for him on the other, given that he's expressed a desire to stay with a human. Then, after a pause almost too long to be polite, his attention veers back to Tatenda and he chitters.
“He's all right with that,” Jagdish 'translates', though at this point it's hardly necessary given the clear tone and context. “And wondering what experiences you mean, exactly,” he adds. A brief burst of sound from the Parasect results in Jagdish adding: “He suspects it pertains to Dakarai, but as that describes most of his life so far, he wonders what exactly you're curious about.”
The dark eyes of the nearly black-skinned man wander back and forth between Salt and Jagdish, while they speak to him. Then his head leans sidewards as he nods and focuses again at the Parasect. “Well, I'm generally interested in you and your life, but what I'm most interested in at the moment is everything you know about Dakarai's weapon, the whip he built. Also, how were your experiences, how did it feel… - everything you can tell me related to it… please.”
Predictably, Salt twitches a little, his large foreclaws clacking against each other ever so slightly in a nervous gesture. The eyes of the Parasect take turns in being half-closed and wide open, then he blinks. A soft chirr escapes him, trailing off. “He's not sure how to speak of that thing,” Jagdish translates, his gaze on the pokémon. A steady but hesitantly intoned series of sounds sound from the pokémon. “He doesn't know anything about the technical details, as he didn't witness its construction. From his perspective, it was just there from one day to another.” Jagdish pauses, letting Salt get some more unfiltered word in, before continuing with his translation: “He didn't feel its bite often, but it burnt like fire those few times, without ever being fire.”
Tatenda nods slightly and pauses a moment, takes a deep breath. “I'm really sorry about what happened,” he finally states, then takes a seat on an old bench - carefully to not destroy it. “It is the energy of fire, but not fire itself that hit you. Within the whip there are crystals filled with the energy of different types of pokémon.”
As Tatenda settles down on the corner of one of the seats the arena provides, it becomes apparent that it's not brittle as the chipped, cracked surface might suggest - most of it is made up of a solid block of stone, not wood, with only a layer of latter atop the same to make sitting less inherently uncomfortable. The railing separating it from the wide, open ground of the arena is to his right now, Jagdish and Salt roughly a metre away, the slanting light spilling in from the high cathedral wall with its windows behind Tatenda caressing the carapace of the pokémon.
More chittering. “He does understand how it functions,” Jagdish explains, the phrase intoned less like a direct translation and more a reflection of meaning, transitioning a moment later into an explanation: “I've explained the mechanics to him before, but he'd already deduced some of it on his own. He wasn't previously aware about the way the energy was stored, exactly - that was the major point of contention - and he doesn't believe he can add insights about technical details that you and I can't better explore with our hands.”
Salt's shifted a curious gaze to Jagdish, then glances up to Tatenda and makes a motion with his head that looks a little like someone nodding.
Then Salt is talking again, and Jagdish is back to translating: “He's a bit embarrassed to disagree with you on a slight technicality, but… he says it must surely be the illusion of fire, not the energy of fire. He believes it cannot be the energy of fire; fire is practically nothing but energy. But he presumes that is what you meant?” Jagdish seems slightly amused at the comment he's translated - perhaps thinking of the many inhabitants of Sehto that would presume he's making it up, given the belief pokémon were far too stupid to grasp physical abstractions. The amused smile doesn't last very long, though - after all, the common observation is mostly true. Not every pokémon was the shy, nerdy type, and Salt was leaps and bounds ahead of a lot of them in his grasp on physical reality. Then, across a concerned, catiously chittering Salt, Jagdish says: “He has a question for you: Is the underlying technology common knowledge?”
For a brief moment Tatenda's awareness drifts down to that bench to realise its nature, then he moves himself to a full sit in an elegant, but still natural, normal-acting way. Then he listens carefully, smiled slightly at some point, just to get back to seriousness in the end to shake his head gently. “No, the opposite, it's very uncommon, Salt. I really haven't expected this to work at all.” He lifts a hand in a gesture of topic change.
“May I ask you, if you still like Dakarai? How do you think about him?”
That jolts Salt into an abrupt tension. His left foreclaw sets down on the ground a moment later, scraping across the stone floor a little as he tugs the limb a little closer to himself, peering at Jagdish almost nervously and guiltily, then apologetically to Tatenda. The silence maintains itself a little longer, almost past its welcome, for a moment of discomfort giving the impression that Salt perhaps did not want to answer the queston at all.
Then a fresh, gentle touch from Jagdish's fingers against the dome of the pokémon's mushroom registers as encouragement, and a soft, shy chitter escapes the Parasect, sounding a little distorted at the edges. “Yes,” Jagdish translates - not out of necessity, it's obvious even to Tatenda, after all, but out of consistency and a drive for completion. He drops the third person approach to the translation that he'd been using so far and shares a more direct one instead: “Understand, we do share some traits, such as a love for precision and an appreciation of tools, and there are not many people - human, pokémon or otherwise - that enjoy such topics unconditionally. But I prefer to think of the man who shares my interests as separate from the one who sits in that cell… separate from the one who hurt me and the others… separate from the one who anchored his obsession onto something as vile as he did. I just cannot yet fully look at him and see only the man in the cell.” While Jagdish's translation is mostly smooth and unbroken, unaffected by the gym leader's concern and bitterness on the topic (though his face is not), the original speech is punctured with hesitance, hurrying forward in that compact, precise, insectine language between those pauses.
A mild, outright understanding and therefore also bitter smile lifts the corners of Tatenda's mouth and also reaches his dark eyes. It is obviously he really feels with Salt and his colleagues, when he nods gently again. “That's a form of self protection. To separate someone's varying behaviours as personalities or even persons to cope with the fact of someone acting totally different. And I think it's best for you to remember the aspects of him that you like.”
Another chitter, sad and small. “I'm not sure those aspects ever existed anywhere but in my head,” Jagdish translates, glancing down at the Parasect with an expression eroded into furrows of concern. A moment later, he's crouching, resting the palms of his hands on the creature's forelimbs near what might pass as their elbows, fingertips caressing the joints soothingly, glancing up at Tatenda with a spark of encouragement.
Still the gently smile rests on the dark face, showing off the bright white teeth between the slightly parted lips. “Still it convinces me, there's a part of Dakarai that's not evil or cruel. Ans as long as you believe in these aspects they do exist.” A short silent pause. “If it was you, who decided, what would you want to be done with Dakarai?”
A flicker of a disapproving glare crosses Jagdish's features, but vanishes almost quickly enough to let one doubt that it was even there. Apparently, he doesn't currently talk kindly to the idea of viewing Dakarai as a human being just yet - there's a dangerous undercurrent to him in that regard. He is, after all, the Arbiter, and if he's made up his mind that Dakarai is an irredeemable criminal, that has the potential to evoke disturbing mental images.
Either way, he's back to a normal demeanour, glancing down at Salt with curiousity, continuing his gentle caress of the pokémon's joints. Salt, fortunately, didn't pick up on that moment, lest he might feel disinclined to respond truthfully - instead, he chitters his response cautiously, prompting Jagdish to translate for him, only a hint of tension in his voice betraying that he'd rather these topics were left purely to the Council, even while remaining hypothetical: “I cannot say. Perhaps a swift death.”
Tatenda takes a deep breath, slowly and almost noiseless, while his look wanders back and forth between the two uneven living beings in front of him. “Sorry, if I dug too deep,” he then says in a low voice, watching his own dark fingers in the end, where his thump brushes over the other thump's nail. “Is there… anything else you'd like to tell me?” he then asks the Parasect, glancing at it again.
There's an almost pregnant silence for a long moment, the Parasect's gaze travelling in uneasy patterns across Tatenda, then at Jagdish, then back to Tatenda. Finally, it flicks back to Jagdish and the creature gives a soft, plaintive sound, barely audible, twisting into something high-pitched and pleading for a moment, only to transition into a soft chatter, attention swerving cautiously back to Tatenda. “I apologise for burdening you with this, but I am still looking for a home. Would you have me, at least temporarily? I have no desire to return to the wild,” Jagdish translates, smiling lightly again, any traces of unpleasant air evaporated, replaced by a concerned flavour of sadness.
Tatenda blinks for a moment, then looks at Jagdish as if requesting his permission, until his focus turns back to Salt, when he starts to smile softly. “It would be a pleasure to give you a new home as long as it's needed and you want to stay with me.”