unrepentantAuthor
A cat who writes stories
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My last-second entry, featuring characters from Dispatch Deferred, but standalone nonetheless.
Barely-finished and with no time to format, but I'm still proud of it. Will edit for italics in the morning I guess.
TEEN for swearing, fantasy violence.
Jesse stared up at a blue, blue sky, his ears ringing and his skull empty. He groaned and clutched his head, still weirded out by its shape and… the texture of his fur. This was turning out to be one hell of a weird day. He hadn’t even worked out what species he’d woken up as, and he’d already had the shit beaten out of him. He turned to see if his assailant was still present.
Yep.
The pokémon standing beside him didn’t much look like any species he was familiar with back home—wherever home was, he’d figure that out later—but the tufted eartips and thick grey-blue cheek fur put him in mind of alpine feline. This was a pretty hot, dry climate for a mountain cat, though. Maybe she’d migrated. She noticed his stare, and growled.
“Lay off,” he drawled. “You kicked my ass already, so what do you even want? I’m not fucking fighting you again, that’s for sure.”
The cat huffed and sat back on her haunches. “I defeated you. Will you not answer? Tell me who you are and why you’ve come to the Windblown Escarpment.”
Jesse shrugged, and winced at the pain. From his prone position, he tried to take fresh stock of his surroundings. Red, dusty plains for miles around, with great flat-topped rock-forms rising from the earth here and there. ‘Wild West’ said a faint memory. But… West of where?
She hissed at him.
“Excuse me Miss,” he answered with venom, “but I’m having a bloody awful day and you aren’t making it any better. I don’t remember who I am, or where I’m from, or what I’m doing here. Nothing except my name, which is… uh. Jesse. Yeah. Jesse something. Fuck’s sake... Why the hell should I answer you anyway, just ‘cause you assaulted me? Is that a pokémon thing?”
“You… are also a pokémon. When we are opposed, we fight.”
She seemed totally sincere, even perplexed. No irony. When her mouth moved, it matched up with the words she spoke, as impossible as that should be for a set of chompers like that to speak understandable language. Weirder and weirder. He sat up, and moaned softly as the blood rushed from his head.
“So, what, you fight to resolve all your conflicts?” he managed.
She glowered at him, as if she thought he was fucking with her.
“Only those that ought to be, Braixen Jesse.”
Oh, he was a braixen, huh? Yeah, that checked out. He had the fluffy tail and everything. He’d become a proper little Galarian Red braixen. (Galar? Was that… where he came from? He wasn’t sure.) He rolled his shoulder and gave it a rub with one hand. Or should it be paw? She'd done a number on him for sure, oww.
“Well, I'm still a tad lost and confused, I'm sorry to say. Your drubbing didn't do anything to help with that, Miss…? What’s your name, anyway?”
“Luxio Sierra. You have a strange tongue,” said the luxio.
“Aye, do I now? Well, let me tell you, of the two of us? I am having by far the stranger day.”
xXx
Gil lay on their back in the blazing sun, soundly defeated, grateful that they were a golett and not a grass-type who would no doubt suffer in this weather. They turned their head towards the luxio who’d put them there.
“I must ask, Ms. Brisa. Do you fight over every conflict?”
Brisa scowled at the ground, as if they'd pointed out something embarrassing. “Just the ones that oughta be," she said. “That’s how pokémon live. Isn’t that how you lived, back in your time?”
Gil scratched their head. “I confess that my memory might not be perfect after a century in a comatose state, but… Well, other pokémon might have. I was only concerned with my duties as mail courier. Battles simply weren’t relevant!”
“Huh. Could be that you were outta step, then.”
When Gil had last visited Desert Knot, nobody spoke like Brisa did now. Her accent was something entirely unfamiliar to him, as was the way in which she contracted and drawled her words. How curious, that the vernacular could evolve so dramatically in only three generations. They patted their ceramic torso firmly in all the right spots. No damage done to their casing on this occasion. Good.
“In any case, I sure hope I met your standards, Ma'am! If not, then I'm still in very much the same predicament I was before you battled me.”
Brisa huffed. “You're a peculiar one, ain'tcha?”
“I suppose I must be! But consider that not only you, but almost everyone I meet, is peculiar to me.”
Brisa thought about this for a moment, then allowed herself a small, dry smile. By her standards, it was a belly laugh. She helped Gil up onto their feet, and looked them straight in the eye.
“Gil, you ain’t tough enough to make this trip. I think ya know that, huh?”
They nodded. It was true.
“Hmph. Well, if you’re gonna insist on taking it, I reckon I’d better accompany ya.”
Gil clasped their hands in humble delight. “Miss Brisa, I would be honoured! Still, please do not consider it any obligation. You have already done so many kindnesses towards me, in restoring me from my slumber, in letting me take up your guest room, in—”
“Yeah, I have. Come on, we gotta get goin’.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
“Wind and weather, Gil. Ya know I hate all those fancy forms of address. Especially ‘ma’am’. Will ya please jus’ call me ‘Brisa’?”
“No can do, Sir!”
“Hell. I guess I can put up with ‘sir’.”
xXx
“Jesse! I need your help!” shouted Sierra, leaping from rock to rock in desperate bounds. With each jump, she cut off a route of escape for the sandaconda bandit, but left the previous path open again. She couldn’t keep this up alone.
“I’m trying!” Jesse yelped. He raised his paw again and fired off another bolt of psychic flame. It went wide of the snake once again. “I don’t wanna hit you by mistake!”
“I can take a hit!” snarled Sierra. “Blast us both if you need to!”
Jesse stammered a non-answer, and stuck out both palms. A little concentration and… whoomph. A plume of magenta fire burst from his paws and engulfed both the slithering outlaw and his luxio companion. His heart pounded in his throat, and then the afterimage faded enough to see Sierra, atop the sandaconda with both paws pressing down on his head.
“Now you’ll answer for your wrongs,” she told him, flatly.
The snake hissed a response filthy enough to turn Jesse’s ears pink. Sierra didn’t balk, but pressed a little harder, and the snake whimpered as his fangs met rock.
Jesse sauntered over, flush with relief.
“How’d ya manage that?” he asked.
“You need a focus for your magic,” she snapped in response. Okay. Harsh, but fair.
“Sure. I’ll start using a fox-staff just as soon as I find a decent tree in all this fucking desert.”
Sierra spat on the ground, beside Sandaconda’s head. “All this was not always desert.”
“Wait, so the climate’s fucked up, or?”
She looked him in the eye, and for the first time since meeting her, he could see fear in her expression.
“This desert labyrinth is known to civilised peoples as a mystery dungeon,” she said. “A space that defies reason and robs pokémon of their wits. And with every passing year, since before I was born, the dungeons have been growing. In generations to come, the world outside the dungeons may be swallowed entirely, and all pokémon, civilised or rough-living, will be consigned to a life of madness, violence, and constant hunger.”
Okay. Wow. This was some heavy shit.
Jesse scratched his chin. It was disturbing how fast he was getting used to his new body, although he supposed it was at least a bipedal one. “Isn’t anyone investigating that?” he asked. “Trying to, you know, find out why and maybe put a stop to it?”
He got a weird look in return. That was two brand-new expressions from the luxio in one day. He was starting to worry.
“Would you do that? Would you search the land for answers?”
Sandaconda muttered something incomprehensible from beneath her paws. She pressed a little harder.
Jesse gave it some thought.
“I mean, I guess? I think I’d want to round up a few allies first, secure some resources, learn how things work around here, search for some leads… but yeah, sure, if nobody else is doing it. It’d be real fuckin’ interesting, at least. I mean, this is one strange world you live in, you know that?”
“I’ve met none stranger than you, Braixen Jesse.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment!”
“It was not meant as one. But if you are sincere, then will you travel with me? I have long yearned for a partner to join me in searching for answers. You may be uncouth, and near-insufferable… But perhaps you could be that pokémon.”
Huh.
Tramping around a godforsaken desert, constantly getting into terrifying fights? Trying to figure out a way to stop the apocalypse, his amnesia be damned? Hanging out every day with an asshole pokémon who kept calling him dumb shit to his face?
“Fuck it,” said Jesse. “Why not?”
xXx
Gil sat on a small rock, twiddling their fingers as they watched Brisa at work. One of the disadvantages of travelling with a companion was that unlike golett, most other species were not capable of walking indefinitely without need for rest and recuperation. Brisa’s accompaniment slowed Gil’s travel time considerably, when only periods of walking and resting were considered. However, having her at their side provided other advantages.
“Don’t let me catch you round here again!” she snarled, slamming electrified paws into the pangoro’s head and shoulders, over and over. Somehow Brisa always got past the pangoro’s fists, which she kept raised to defend her head, and delivered yet more explosive blows. It was a stunning sight, seeing a three-foot luxio bludgeoning a pokémon more than twice her height and four times her weight into submission. Where did power like that come from, Gil wondered?
“Good-fer-nothin’ lowlife!” hissed Brisa, eyes blazing. “Outlaw!”
“I yield!” cried the pangoro. “Let me leave this place and I shall never return!”
“See that you don’t!”
Brisa let up her volley of attacks, and her defeated foe rose, first to stagger, then to run from the copse. Brisa spat on the ground where she’d been fighting a moment before. She didn’t even seem out of breath.
“Miss Brisa, Sir?”
“Yeah?” she snapped, whirling round at them. The battle-fever hadn’t left her eyes yet.
“Might I ask, if it’s not too personal a topic, how you came to be so…”
Brisa narrowed her eyes. “Violent?”
“Formidable! I was going to say, formidable.”
She took a deep, steadying breath. “Guess you’ll find this out sooner or later,” she drawled, instantly subdued. “More or less everyone in Frontier Town knows it. I dare say most folks in any town in this part of the world know it. You were asleep in the ground for the last hundred years, so you missed the peak of the dungeon crisis, but two pokémon—”
Gil couldn’t help but pipe up helpfully. “I learnt about this in Frontier library! Delphox Jesse Stranger and Luxray Sierra Escarpa saved the whole region, if not the world! I remember! Um.”
Brisa’s stony face cut them off mid-flow.
Oops. Probably.
“Have a real hard think for a second,” she said. “And see if you can’t figure out why I might’a brought up Jesse and Sierra.”
Gil shook their head and shrugged.
The luxio gave a sigh, and broke eye contact. “Jesse was human. Transformed, sure, but human in the first place, and human in the head, still. Humans have got minds like no pokémon, all bright and piercing. Sierra is a roughlander, what folks in town might’a called ‘feral’ in your earshot. Roughlanders are tough as nails, they can survive near enough anything. Turns out what happens when you mix the two, is you get a pokémon with a brain and body both damn near perfect for fightin’, and…” she sighed again, harder, psyching up to finish her sentence. “And I don’t have nobody to fight save fuckin’ outlaws and two-piece bandits. No world to save. It’s all done.”
Oh.
“Miss Brisa, I’m so sorry to raise the subject. Please, we need not discuss it further!”
“It’s fine.”
“O-oh, okay.”
Brisa watched the pangoro for another hour in silence, in case she turned back. She didn’t.
“I’m not a good fit for you,” said Brisa, eventually.
“Sir?”
“You want someone like my pa. Smart, easy goin’, talkative. Someone who’d help you figure out what happened in the last hundred years while you were sleepin’. I’m more like my ma. I’m just fuckin’ vicious, I guess. That’s me. Brisa the ranger, here to beat the shit out of every wannabe criminal for fifty miles, and no worries, you’re so fucking welcome.”
She went silent again.
Gil stepped over to her, as fast as they dared.
“Miss Brisa?”
“Uhuh?”
“Miss Brisa, you’ve been nothing but kind to me since you found my buried form. Please do not be uncharitable to yourself. I’m glad to have you with me. You most certainly saved my life from that bandit, did you not?”
“…uhuh.”
“Well, in my eyes, that most certainly makes you a hero.”
“…huh. Thanks.”
Something in the luxio’s rigid posture changed, and while she didn’t speak up again except for essential communication that day, there was just the smallest difference in her eyes.
xXx
The stars overhead were stunning, with so little light pollution in this world to spoil them. (Wait, light pollution? He came from somewhere where there was too much light to see the stars? That was fucked up.) Jesse searched them for constellations he knew—and he was sure, somehow, that he knew many constellations—but not a one was familiar to him. This was a different world for sure.
He did his best to set up their tent as Sierra fetched wood for the campfire. To his surprise, dexterity wasn’t the chief problem. He had that in abundance—even Sierra’s paws could grasp items as well as a human hand. (A human hand? Was he… human, before? What was a human, anyway?) No, the problem was in remembering and implementing the instructions he’d been given by that bloody cacturne at the trading post. That motherfucker had smiled and wheedled and promised him it would be easy, and here he was struggling to figure out the poles. He was supposed to be smart! He was smart!
He could figure out ancient puzzles in the hearts of dungeons, interpret the languages of the strange pokémon they met, come up with foolproof strategies to take down any foe. He was so fucking smart. And here he was, pissing about with a tent he clearly didn’t understand how to pitch. What was he even doing? A quest to save the world? That wasn’t him. He was just a fun, clever, witty sort of person. He had hobbies, whatever they were. He had friends, or he felt like he did. He was… just some guy. Who was he, anyway?
Who the fuck was he?
When Sierra returned with the firewood, he’d been sobbing into his arms for a solid minute.
“I don’t have time for this,” she told him. “Start a fire while I pitch the tent.”
He obeyed, gritting his teeth hard enough to aggravate his mounting headache. It didn’t take much to do as she’d asked. Barely a touch and the assembled logs and sticks lit up. He shifted them until they seemed like they’d smolder in a stable way for a while, and busied himself getting out some of their supplies to cook. Sierra made short work of the tent, somehow, and joined him with her usual stern expression fixed on her stupid fucking face.
They didn’t talk at first. Usually it was Jesse who filled the silences, babbling away about his latest theory, or working out aloud whether something was a legitimate memory or just a stray fancy. Sierra would interject every so often to call him an idiot. It was an ideal arrangement, because it let him talk endlessly about shit that didn’t matter, and it let her call him an idiot.
When he didn’t say anything, it took Sierra a while to break the silence.
“I need you to be a hero,” she said.
He didn’t bother replying. Dumb fucking thing to say.
She stared a hole into his head. She had a way, he’d learnt, of looking right into your skull.
“Well fuck you!” he barked. “You’re the heroic one, all stoic and brave and ready to do the right thing. I’m just… the stupid fox you dragged along for the ride! Some nobody! Some fucking idiot who doesn’t come from anywhere or know anybody—” he choked up and pounded the earth with his fist, achieving nothing, helping nothing. Damn it. Damn it.
Sierra waited for his bunched-up shoulders to sink again before she replied. “You do not have to be one right now. You need not be like me, or like whatever it is you are thinking of. I know you hate to fight. I know you are only interested in your intellectual fixations. I know you did not choose this life, and would leave for home if you could. Nevertheless, I truly do believe that you were sent here to help us. Whoever you were before… that does not matter. You can be Jesse the Stranger forever. But I need to trust that you will stay with me. That you will see this through to the end.”
It was the most she’d said in one go to him since he’d met her. Like all unprecedented Sierra stuff, it was kinda scary.
Part of him was saying that he may as well, it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go. Part of him was saying that the next dislocated shoulder or lacerated ankle would be one too many, and Sierra could sort her shit out on her own, thank you very much. Part of him was prideful and pissed off at the suggestion that recovering his past didn’t matter.
Another, much smaller part of him was saying that no, no, he wasn’t a hero, he’d never be a hero, but… maybe it would be enough to help someone who was.
“Alright,” he said. “If it’s you.”
He smiled at her, in a wavering, teary, vulpine sort of way. In yet another terrifying first, Sierra smiled back.
xXx
“Little Scriven, huh? Nice place.”
“Oh my, Miss Brisa! It’s scarcely any larger than when I left it. I was sure there’d have been urban developments of all kinds!”
The tiny settlement stood on a rocky plateau. Little Scriven’s earth was fertile, and space around its rim was given over to modest allotments and trellis gardens. In the centre was the scriptorium for which it was named, a stone building in the town’s centre that resembled nothing so much as a xatu’s avian head.
In a far, small corner of the town, Gil could just about make out a tiny dwelling, clinging to the plateau, with a little wooden deck and gazebo reaching out over the side, on which one might take shelter on an especially scorching day.
“Look familiar?” asked Brisa.
“Oh. Oh, yes. It looks like home.”
Barely-finished and with no time to format, but I'm still proud of it. Will edit for italics in the morning I guess.
TEEN for swearing, fantasy violence.
What's Past is Prologue
Jesse stared up at a blue, blue sky, his ears ringing and his skull empty. He groaned and clutched his head, still weirded out by its shape and… the texture of his fur. This was turning out to be one hell of a weird day. He hadn’t even worked out what species he’d woken up as, and he’d already had the shit beaten out of him. He turned to see if his assailant was still present.
Yep.
The pokémon standing beside him didn’t much look like any species he was familiar with back home—wherever home was, he’d figure that out later—but the tufted eartips and thick grey-blue cheek fur put him in mind of alpine feline. This was a pretty hot, dry climate for a mountain cat, though. Maybe she’d migrated. She noticed his stare, and growled.
“Lay off,” he drawled. “You kicked my ass already, so what do you even want? I’m not fucking fighting you again, that’s for sure.”
The cat huffed and sat back on her haunches. “I defeated you. Will you not answer? Tell me who you are and why you’ve come to the Windblown Escarpment.”
Jesse shrugged, and winced at the pain. From his prone position, he tried to take fresh stock of his surroundings. Red, dusty plains for miles around, with great flat-topped rock-forms rising from the earth here and there. ‘Wild West’ said a faint memory. But… West of where?
She hissed at him.
“Excuse me Miss,” he answered with venom, “but I’m having a bloody awful day and you aren’t making it any better. I don’t remember who I am, or where I’m from, or what I’m doing here. Nothing except my name, which is… uh. Jesse. Yeah. Jesse something. Fuck’s sake... Why the hell should I answer you anyway, just ‘cause you assaulted me? Is that a pokémon thing?”
“You… are also a pokémon. When we are opposed, we fight.”
She seemed totally sincere, even perplexed. No irony. When her mouth moved, it matched up with the words she spoke, as impossible as that should be for a set of chompers like that to speak understandable language. Weirder and weirder. He sat up, and moaned softly as the blood rushed from his head.
“So, what, you fight to resolve all your conflicts?” he managed.
She glowered at him, as if she thought he was fucking with her.
“Only those that ought to be, Braixen Jesse.”
Oh, he was a braixen, huh? Yeah, that checked out. He had the fluffy tail and everything. He’d become a proper little Galarian Red braixen. (Galar? Was that… where he came from? He wasn’t sure.) He rolled his shoulder and gave it a rub with one hand. Or should it be paw? She'd done a number on him for sure, oww.
“Well, I'm still a tad lost and confused, I'm sorry to say. Your drubbing didn't do anything to help with that, Miss…? What’s your name, anyway?”
“Luxio Sierra. You have a strange tongue,” said the luxio.
“Aye, do I now? Well, let me tell you, of the two of us? I am having by far the stranger day.”
xXx
Gil lay on their back in the blazing sun, soundly defeated, grateful that they were a golett and not a grass-type who would no doubt suffer in this weather. They turned their head towards the luxio who’d put them there.
“I must ask, Ms. Brisa. Do you fight over every conflict?”
Brisa scowled at the ground, as if they'd pointed out something embarrassing. “Just the ones that oughta be," she said. “That’s how pokémon live. Isn’t that how you lived, back in your time?”
Gil scratched their head. “I confess that my memory might not be perfect after a century in a comatose state, but… Well, other pokémon might have. I was only concerned with my duties as mail courier. Battles simply weren’t relevant!”
“Huh. Could be that you were outta step, then.”
When Gil had last visited Desert Knot, nobody spoke like Brisa did now. Her accent was something entirely unfamiliar to him, as was the way in which she contracted and drawled her words. How curious, that the vernacular could evolve so dramatically in only three generations. They patted their ceramic torso firmly in all the right spots. No damage done to their casing on this occasion. Good.
“In any case, I sure hope I met your standards, Ma'am! If not, then I'm still in very much the same predicament I was before you battled me.”
Brisa huffed. “You're a peculiar one, ain'tcha?”
“I suppose I must be! But consider that not only you, but almost everyone I meet, is peculiar to me.”
Brisa thought about this for a moment, then allowed herself a small, dry smile. By her standards, it was a belly laugh. She helped Gil up onto their feet, and looked them straight in the eye.
“Gil, you ain’t tough enough to make this trip. I think ya know that, huh?”
They nodded. It was true.
“Hmph. Well, if you’re gonna insist on taking it, I reckon I’d better accompany ya.”
Gil clasped their hands in humble delight. “Miss Brisa, I would be honoured! Still, please do not consider it any obligation. You have already done so many kindnesses towards me, in restoring me from my slumber, in letting me take up your guest room, in—”
“Yeah, I have. Come on, we gotta get goin’.”
“Yes, Ma’am!”
“Wind and weather, Gil. Ya know I hate all those fancy forms of address. Especially ‘ma’am’. Will ya please jus’ call me ‘Brisa’?”
“No can do, Sir!”
“Hell. I guess I can put up with ‘sir’.”
xXx
“Jesse! I need your help!” shouted Sierra, leaping from rock to rock in desperate bounds. With each jump, she cut off a route of escape for the sandaconda bandit, but left the previous path open again. She couldn’t keep this up alone.
“I’m trying!” Jesse yelped. He raised his paw again and fired off another bolt of psychic flame. It went wide of the snake once again. “I don’t wanna hit you by mistake!”
“I can take a hit!” snarled Sierra. “Blast us both if you need to!”
Jesse stammered a non-answer, and stuck out both palms. A little concentration and… whoomph. A plume of magenta fire burst from his paws and engulfed both the slithering outlaw and his luxio companion. His heart pounded in his throat, and then the afterimage faded enough to see Sierra, atop the sandaconda with both paws pressing down on his head.
“Now you’ll answer for your wrongs,” she told him, flatly.
The snake hissed a response filthy enough to turn Jesse’s ears pink. Sierra didn’t balk, but pressed a little harder, and the snake whimpered as his fangs met rock.
Jesse sauntered over, flush with relief.
“How’d ya manage that?” he asked.
“You need a focus for your magic,” she snapped in response. Okay. Harsh, but fair.
“Sure. I’ll start using a fox-staff just as soon as I find a decent tree in all this fucking desert.”
Sierra spat on the ground, beside Sandaconda’s head. “All this was not always desert.”
“Wait, so the climate’s fucked up, or?”
She looked him in the eye, and for the first time since meeting her, he could see fear in her expression.
“This desert labyrinth is known to civilised peoples as a mystery dungeon,” she said. “A space that defies reason and robs pokémon of their wits. And with every passing year, since before I was born, the dungeons have been growing. In generations to come, the world outside the dungeons may be swallowed entirely, and all pokémon, civilised or rough-living, will be consigned to a life of madness, violence, and constant hunger.”
Okay. Wow. This was some heavy shit.
Jesse scratched his chin. It was disturbing how fast he was getting used to his new body, although he supposed it was at least a bipedal one. “Isn’t anyone investigating that?” he asked. “Trying to, you know, find out why and maybe put a stop to it?”
He got a weird look in return. That was two brand-new expressions from the luxio in one day. He was starting to worry.
“Would you do that? Would you search the land for answers?”
Sandaconda muttered something incomprehensible from beneath her paws. She pressed a little harder.
Jesse gave it some thought.
“I mean, I guess? I think I’d want to round up a few allies first, secure some resources, learn how things work around here, search for some leads… but yeah, sure, if nobody else is doing it. It’d be real fuckin’ interesting, at least. I mean, this is one strange world you live in, you know that?”
“I’ve met none stranger than you, Braixen Jesse.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment!”
“It was not meant as one. But if you are sincere, then will you travel with me? I have long yearned for a partner to join me in searching for answers. You may be uncouth, and near-insufferable… But perhaps you could be that pokémon.”
Huh.
Tramping around a godforsaken desert, constantly getting into terrifying fights? Trying to figure out a way to stop the apocalypse, his amnesia be damned? Hanging out every day with an asshole pokémon who kept calling him dumb shit to his face?
“Fuck it,” said Jesse. “Why not?”
xXx
Gil sat on a small rock, twiddling their fingers as they watched Brisa at work. One of the disadvantages of travelling with a companion was that unlike golett, most other species were not capable of walking indefinitely without need for rest and recuperation. Brisa’s accompaniment slowed Gil’s travel time considerably, when only periods of walking and resting were considered. However, having her at their side provided other advantages.
“Don’t let me catch you round here again!” she snarled, slamming electrified paws into the pangoro’s head and shoulders, over and over. Somehow Brisa always got past the pangoro’s fists, which she kept raised to defend her head, and delivered yet more explosive blows. It was a stunning sight, seeing a three-foot luxio bludgeoning a pokémon more than twice her height and four times her weight into submission. Where did power like that come from, Gil wondered?
“Good-fer-nothin’ lowlife!” hissed Brisa, eyes blazing. “Outlaw!”
“I yield!” cried the pangoro. “Let me leave this place and I shall never return!”
“See that you don’t!”
Brisa let up her volley of attacks, and her defeated foe rose, first to stagger, then to run from the copse. Brisa spat on the ground where she’d been fighting a moment before. She didn’t even seem out of breath.
“Miss Brisa, Sir?”
“Yeah?” she snapped, whirling round at them. The battle-fever hadn’t left her eyes yet.
“Might I ask, if it’s not too personal a topic, how you came to be so…”
Brisa narrowed her eyes. “Violent?”
“Formidable! I was going to say, formidable.”
She took a deep, steadying breath. “Guess you’ll find this out sooner or later,” she drawled, instantly subdued. “More or less everyone in Frontier Town knows it. I dare say most folks in any town in this part of the world know it. You were asleep in the ground for the last hundred years, so you missed the peak of the dungeon crisis, but two pokémon—”
Gil couldn’t help but pipe up helpfully. “I learnt about this in Frontier library! Delphox Jesse Stranger and Luxray Sierra Escarpa saved the whole region, if not the world! I remember! Um.”
Brisa’s stony face cut them off mid-flow.
Oops. Probably.
“Have a real hard think for a second,” she said. “And see if you can’t figure out why I might’a brought up Jesse and Sierra.”
Gil shook their head and shrugged.
The luxio gave a sigh, and broke eye contact. “Jesse was human. Transformed, sure, but human in the first place, and human in the head, still. Humans have got minds like no pokémon, all bright and piercing. Sierra is a roughlander, what folks in town might’a called ‘feral’ in your earshot. Roughlanders are tough as nails, they can survive near enough anything. Turns out what happens when you mix the two, is you get a pokémon with a brain and body both damn near perfect for fightin’, and…” she sighed again, harder, psyching up to finish her sentence. “And I don’t have nobody to fight save fuckin’ outlaws and two-piece bandits. No world to save. It’s all done.”
Oh.
“Miss Brisa, I’m so sorry to raise the subject. Please, we need not discuss it further!”
“It’s fine.”
“O-oh, okay.”
Brisa watched the pangoro for another hour in silence, in case she turned back. She didn’t.
“I’m not a good fit for you,” said Brisa, eventually.
“Sir?”
“You want someone like my pa. Smart, easy goin’, talkative. Someone who’d help you figure out what happened in the last hundred years while you were sleepin’. I’m more like my ma. I’m just fuckin’ vicious, I guess. That’s me. Brisa the ranger, here to beat the shit out of every wannabe criminal for fifty miles, and no worries, you’re so fucking welcome.”
She went silent again.
Gil stepped over to her, as fast as they dared.
“Miss Brisa?”
“Uhuh?”
“Miss Brisa, you’ve been nothing but kind to me since you found my buried form. Please do not be uncharitable to yourself. I’m glad to have you with me. You most certainly saved my life from that bandit, did you not?”
“…uhuh.”
“Well, in my eyes, that most certainly makes you a hero.”
“…huh. Thanks.”
Something in the luxio’s rigid posture changed, and while she didn’t speak up again except for essential communication that day, there was just the smallest difference in her eyes.
xXx
The stars overhead were stunning, with so little light pollution in this world to spoil them. (Wait, light pollution? He came from somewhere where there was too much light to see the stars? That was fucked up.) Jesse searched them for constellations he knew—and he was sure, somehow, that he knew many constellations—but not a one was familiar to him. This was a different world for sure.
He did his best to set up their tent as Sierra fetched wood for the campfire. To his surprise, dexterity wasn’t the chief problem. He had that in abundance—even Sierra’s paws could grasp items as well as a human hand. (A human hand? Was he… human, before? What was a human, anyway?) No, the problem was in remembering and implementing the instructions he’d been given by that bloody cacturne at the trading post. That motherfucker had smiled and wheedled and promised him it would be easy, and here he was struggling to figure out the poles. He was supposed to be smart! He was smart!
He could figure out ancient puzzles in the hearts of dungeons, interpret the languages of the strange pokémon they met, come up with foolproof strategies to take down any foe. He was so fucking smart. And here he was, pissing about with a tent he clearly didn’t understand how to pitch. What was he even doing? A quest to save the world? That wasn’t him. He was just a fun, clever, witty sort of person. He had hobbies, whatever they were. He had friends, or he felt like he did. He was… just some guy. Who was he, anyway?
Who the fuck was he?
When Sierra returned with the firewood, he’d been sobbing into his arms for a solid minute.
“I don’t have time for this,” she told him. “Start a fire while I pitch the tent.”
He obeyed, gritting his teeth hard enough to aggravate his mounting headache. It didn’t take much to do as she’d asked. Barely a touch and the assembled logs and sticks lit up. He shifted them until they seemed like they’d smolder in a stable way for a while, and busied himself getting out some of their supplies to cook. Sierra made short work of the tent, somehow, and joined him with her usual stern expression fixed on her stupid fucking face.
They didn’t talk at first. Usually it was Jesse who filled the silences, babbling away about his latest theory, or working out aloud whether something was a legitimate memory or just a stray fancy. Sierra would interject every so often to call him an idiot. It was an ideal arrangement, because it let him talk endlessly about shit that didn’t matter, and it let her call him an idiot.
When he didn’t say anything, it took Sierra a while to break the silence.
“I need you to be a hero,” she said.
He didn’t bother replying. Dumb fucking thing to say.
She stared a hole into his head. She had a way, he’d learnt, of looking right into your skull.
“Well fuck you!” he barked. “You’re the heroic one, all stoic and brave and ready to do the right thing. I’m just… the stupid fox you dragged along for the ride! Some nobody! Some fucking idiot who doesn’t come from anywhere or know anybody—” he choked up and pounded the earth with his fist, achieving nothing, helping nothing. Damn it. Damn it.
Sierra waited for his bunched-up shoulders to sink again before she replied. “You do not have to be one right now. You need not be like me, or like whatever it is you are thinking of. I know you hate to fight. I know you are only interested in your intellectual fixations. I know you did not choose this life, and would leave for home if you could. Nevertheless, I truly do believe that you were sent here to help us. Whoever you were before… that does not matter. You can be Jesse the Stranger forever. But I need to trust that you will stay with me. That you will see this through to the end.”
It was the most she’d said in one go to him since he’d met her. Like all unprecedented Sierra stuff, it was kinda scary.
Part of him was saying that he may as well, it wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go. Part of him was saying that the next dislocated shoulder or lacerated ankle would be one too many, and Sierra could sort her shit out on her own, thank you very much. Part of him was prideful and pissed off at the suggestion that recovering his past didn’t matter.
Another, much smaller part of him was saying that no, no, he wasn’t a hero, he’d never be a hero, but… maybe it would be enough to help someone who was.
“Alright,” he said. “If it’s you.”
He smiled at her, in a wavering, teary, vulpine sort of way. In yet another terrifying first, Sierra smiled back.
xXx
“Little Scriven, huh? Nice place.”
“Oh my, Miss Brisa! It’s scarcely any larger than when I left it. I was sure there’d have been urban developments of all kinds!”
The tiny settlement stood on a rocky plateau. Little Scriven’s earth was fertile, and space around its rim was given over to modest allotments and trellis gardens. In the centre was the scriptorium for which it was named, a stone building in the town’s centre that resembled nothing so much as a xatu’s avian head.
In a far, small corner of the town, Gil could just about make out a tiny dwelling, clinging to the plateau, with a little wooden deck and gazebo reaching out over the side, on which one might take shelter on an especially scorching day.
“Look familiar?” asked Brisa.
“Oh. Oh, yes. It looks like home.”