Isaac had never worked with any sort of axe much before and so his attempts to shape timbers with a hatchet were suitably reserved. He had an appreciation of physics and mechanics that gave him a great deal of respect for the venerable wedge on a lever.
Jin had far less reservations and had unhappily watched Isaac creating more space between where she was working and where he kept relocating. Her zeal for learning had seen her create a working figure 4 trigger for a deadfall trap before him though, and she had already expended the same amount of materials again reiterating to balance a heavier load.
Isaac had been paying attention to adjust his own design mid-process after recognizing one of the same errors that Jin encountered and worked through. It made sense that they both had the same flaw in their designs. She had flagrantly worked off of the schematic notes that Isaac had drawn up while the Witch ran off to find dry timbers. She did return with enough for both of them, though.
After that, they went out hiking through the steppe wilderness, with Vardan providing the cadets with the locations they were to visit and guiding them through planning a walking route based on information the league issued publicly for tamer use. They were not told what they were looking for, just that it was an exercise in identifying herbs and berries. As Vardan expected, Isaac spotted the plant first but his classmates spotted it before Isaac completed his initial observation.
The plant looked completely alien to Isaac. It was aggressively spreading as a thicket of thistle stalks and runners with a completely out of sync spray of green buds, white flowers, and hanging firm berries with waxy rinds colored yellow to red.
Then Isaac realized he had seen a plant of this sort before, but it was well watered, sheltered, and faced no competition for sunlight or nutrients. Not this savage mess of stalks and runners strangling out as much rivaling vegetation as it could. It was a rasapple berry bush.
“Alright, so-” Vardan began moving closer to the cluster of shrubby berry bushes. “This is a rasapple plant, it’s one of several invasive plant species created by James Scott and they are all over. I am sure all three of you know about them. The pollen and nectar from the flowers will cure the temporary paralysis inflicted by pokegirl attacks. You might need to mash them up and mix them with water if whoever you are healing cannot chew. Yellow berries are unripe. You can still eat them and they will end supernatural sleep and hypnotic effects. Sometimes crushing them under the nose of the victim is enough, sometimes you need to get the berries in their mouth. Ripe berries are red. They will treat burns so that you or your pokegirls can move without any further pain or damage to the affected tissue. Hopefully there are enough ripe berries if the burn is really bad.” The junior ranked cadet stated all of the information without any hint of personality but managed not to get hung up on any one particular word while recalling the knowledge to be shared.
“Oh and if you eat anything besides the flowers or berries it’ll give you the shits.” Klim Antonov snickered like he was remembering something comical. “Today though we are interested in these,” Vardan squatted and lifted a berry that was turning brown with black worm holes leaking syrupy red juice. “Overripe rasapples start fermenting while they are still on the vine. Rotting fruit makes for great bait, turns out ferals like to get drunk too. You three get a handful each and watch the thorns. They can be nasty.”
After the three freshmen complied Vardan then continued the lesson. “Another thing about all of the berry bushes is they tend to define territorial claims for ferals. Unless she is really strong a pokegirl cannot chase off all of the other girls that will come to get at the fruit. They do tend to mark they have been here, though.” Vardan pointed towards a tree that had the bark stripped off in criss-crossing sets of parallel gouges. “Claw marks,” he indicated another tree with a blackened patch, “burn marks,” there was a fan shaped bit of exposed sand where the top soil had been blasted away, “or other techniques just to warn weaker ferals who is boss. That looks like it came from a water type. Had we not pushed out all of the ferals, we could have probably found tracks leading away.” The Paza family scion watched the three freshmen study the map and then the group headed away about one third of a turn off from the direction they’d arrived traveling. Isaac Markiyan, Klim Antonov, and Ostap Borisov followed their heading further out into the wilderness.
The rest of the berry bushes were just as easy to spot as the rasapples. They all had the same sort of hyperreality about them. A plant productive past the point of rationality. The herbs were trickier to spot from further away but once Isaac had gotten an up close look of the thing and listened to Vardan’s explanation of where they preferred to grow he spotted a few more clusters through the day.
Vardan also pointed out some of the edible plants and fungi he’d personally subsisted on in the past to complement or take the place of meat. Hunting and gathering while traveling the wilderness meant rations could be spared for complications.
The last leg of that day’s hiking ended with them searching out a suitable campsite. They picked a spot uphill in case of rains which also gave them some distance between the edge of the woods. Elena had told Isaac they were mostly aspen and poplar back three hundred years ago but in a lot of places Elves and other plant types had grown up much larger, harder wooded trees. Still, the quick growing trees had the advantage.
As usual, Isaac and Jin had their yurt set up the quickest so Vardan approached them first. “Markiyan,” Vardan used surnames when dealing with them in his role as leader of the squad of cadets, “I’m supposed to do some one-on-one mentoring with all three of you.” Isaac knew what was coming. For every freshman it was either going to be tutoring if Lieutenant Sobolvich and her sergeants felt the cadet was struggling with retaining information or it would be the physical task they were seen to have performed the poorest. “Let’s go find a target to work on that throw.”
Throwing had been an essential skill in humans for longer than the species of Homo sapiens was projected to have been in existence, with only a brief period when it fell out of use except for athletes and grenadiers following modernity. James Scott’s madness set overall society levels down back to the point where it had become a necessary skill once more. Vardan and Isaac gathered up rocks that weighed about the same as a pokeball and pelted a partially exposed boulder. Isaac got the hang of the motion quickly enough and noticed that his upperclassman’s attention was downhill towards the Dnieper river. He was focused on something far away, something that had him projecting an intensely pensive mood. The freshman cadet asked his senior, “Are we done?”
“Huh, oh, yeah. I should work with one of the others. Sorry, just thinking about tomorrow.” They were close to the edge of where the older cadets patrolled for ferals, The woods between them and the river would be serving as the grounds for the hunt Vardan would be leading Isaac on along with the other two freshmen. He was nervous and searching through the memories of his earliest hunts to try to remember what advice he was given. Talking to Isaac about it might have helped him feel better, but as the leader of the group he didn’t feel it was proper to express his doubts to a subordinate.
He had to review the various methods of contacting and locating league services for tamers with Antinov. Borisov wasn’t seen as deficient in anything so far, so Vardan was to answer any questions he might have. The freshmen cadet didn’t have any, so Vardan went back to his tent. He and Andreea studied terrain maps, along with intelligence on what sort of ferals had stood their ground against the pushing cadets. Most often the territorial ones were eager to reassert their claim once they thought the intruding humans had moved on.
Once the sun was high enough for its light to pierce the canopy of the woods the next morning the group set out. They moved slowly and their focus was on reducing their noise, but as Vardan explained to them stealth would come with practice and they were going to need to screw up a lot.
Isaac and Jin were walking along a small tributary stream just deep enough to submerge in that connected to the Dnieper. Kilm, Ostap, and their girls were investigating uphill. Isaac wasn’t sure what he was looking for. His attention got lost in natural details and he couldn’t make sense of how anyone was supposed to pick out the sign of something passing. He was also distracted worrying about the future. It was less than a week until Jin would need tamed and as her tamer Isaac was already feeling paranoid watching her behavior and wondering if any little eccentricity was a sign of struggle or suffering on her part. The underlying concern about that was intensifying the frustration with searching for tracks and it was all churning together into even more intense negativity.
Then he saw the large, webbed, reptilian footprint in the mud. They lead to a pair of massive glacial boulders with a nook large enough to belly crawl into and would have stayed mostly dry in the rain. The troop of cadets cautiously investigated the natural shelter and found the occupant wasn’t around, but the tracks Isaac discovered were less than a day old so they made a mark on their maps for the lair’s location and continued scouting the woods and river shore for other signs.
They found other signs of ferals, but none as promising as the presumed water type footprints Isaac came across so they returned to the site of the lair. The resident still wasn’t home and there were no fresher tracks so Vardan worked through some strategizing with his three subjects of mentorship. Things had to be kept very simple since neither the humans nor pokegirls had any history of working together. The academy believed introducing this sort of cooperative feral hunting to fledgeling tamers was essential in the first two weeks though, since it was at the end of the first two weeks that the first opportunity to withdraw from the program arose.
Based on the shape of the feet and the fact that it had been swimming in the stream, they had narrowed their assumptions down to a few possible breeds, or their evolutionary lines at least. An aquatic Salalexis, a Titodile, or a Bratini as unlikely as that prospect was. The size of the prints also made any of the high tier evolutions unlikely since a Feraligarter or Whorepool would have much larger feet. Even a Cuntnaw or Surfmelon was unlikely.
It was too open to really do much with setting traps around the layer, but they did identify three different paths that had been worn into the ground now that they knew this was somewhere a feral was dwelling. These seemed to be the routes she habitually took coming and going, based on whether she wanted to go left, right, or to the stream.
They set up behind cover downwind of all three paths to observe for a while. Klim Antonov kept poking and prodding his Doggirl who happily misbehaved in reciprocation. Ostap Borisov, who had a much more appreciable no-nonsense attitude, had finally slugged the other guy on the shoulder. The force was right at the boundary of aggressive play and half-hearted but genuine attack while his Amazon took a ready but firmly planted stance to keep Klim’s Doggirl from aggressing on impulse. Vardan grimaced witnessing the entire scene as he reflected on its implications on his performance as leader. The junior cadet was still trying to decide if a more aggressive check on the clowning freshman’s behavior would have been worth it.
A sulking cadet was quieter than a cadet teasing his pokegirl though. Isaac was letting his gaze wander across the opposite shore when he heard what he thought was a large fish jumping. It was enough to draw his attention to the bright blue girl’s ass, tail, and legs vanish back below the reflected sky on the river’s surface. Isaac gestured for the attention of the others.
Jin, the other two cadets, and the two freshmen’s pokegirls all tensed up as if to move but Vardan waved them back down. They kept watching and listening. The Titodile slipped out of the water and stepped on top of her own dried tracks on the way up to her nook. There was a couple minutes where she seemed to have noticed evidence of their presence and trailed something all around her boulders. She clambered on top of one of the huge stones and sprawled out spread eagle on her belly to dry off in the setting sun. They watched her basking but other than looking around or repositioning a limb the feral didn’t move.
Vardan motioned for them to fall back further downwind and they crept away. “Why’re we-” Klim started to say in a voice that everyone, including the totally unremarkable looking cadet himself, jumped at the volume of. “Why’re we leaving? We could have taken her on with five girls.”
“Because my two girls won’t be helping in the plan. They’re keeping us safe while your girls do the work.” Vardan answered.
“Titodile could really chew up Ivka if she gets her teeth on her.” Ostap stated. He was also rather unremarkable and his Amazon he spoke out of concern for was rather plain as well.
Vardan nodded in acknowledgement of Ostap’s observation. “That’s why we’re going to see about setting up an ambush tomorrow.”
-
The feral Titodile smelled the same intruders and rumbled unhappily in her throat. Then she smelled something else. Something very sweet smelling. She approached cautiously. She crouched low when she spotted something upright on her path, but it was very small and not moving. Something had left sticks on her path. She moved closer to investigate. It smelled like the intruders and the sweet things. One of the sticks had overripened berries sitting on top of it. She gingerly picked one up and stuck it in her mouth. It tasted more sour than she thought it smelled like but it made her feel good so she grabbed for more. The sticks fell into a heap and rocks tumbled forward on top of her.
The Titodile scrambled to get out from under the falling rocks only to tangle herself in the grass fiber rope net the falling rocks were weighing down. Her panicked struggle wrapped her limbs tighter and swung the rocks around to smash into her again and again.
Jin fired off her overcharged Mana Bolt; this time formed over a much more reasonable span of time which resulted in her not losing any body tissue what-so-ever. Ivka launched a Chi Blast from her palm and Vana, Klim’s Doggirl, used Rock Throw to pelt the thrashing water type. Rocks clattered, ropes snapped, and the crocodilian pokegirl bellowed and hissed as she threw herself free of what remained of the net. It’d allowed for the opening salvo so its purpose had been fulfilled.
Based on its panicked, animalistic judgement the Titodile decided to try overrunning Jin. The Witch was the smallest of the pokegirls attacking her and Vana had crowded a bit too close to Ivka during their approach. Jin blasted the charging feral with a Mystic Bolt as she dodged to the side but the blue scaled pokegirl dodged the same way and the two collided.
The crocodilian pokegirl was five times stronger than Jin and the young magic type threw her left arm forward to catch the jaws that otherwise looked to be coming for her head. She screamed her pain into a battle cry as she fired another Mystic Bolt wildly that glanced off the ferals back scales. The Titodile scratched at her shoulders and upper arms with her claws and twisted Jin’s forearm with so much torque it felt like it was going to tear free. She heard Isaac’s voice, he was yelling an incantation. He couldn’t use that spell, he didn’t have enough internal power.
Jin grabbed the Titodile’s reptilian snout with her right hand and roared the incantation precisely as Isaac had. Threads of white plasma arced from her fingers and most of the Titodile’s muscles seized up from the electrical current being pushed through her by Jin’s Shocking Grasp evocation. Ivka ran over and threw the water type off of the Witch and the Amazon pummeled the prone feral before she could resume moving.
A pokeball was thrown and a warm red light blinked while the ball rocked and whirred musically. The feral Titodile was captured.
“Jin, your arm!” Isaac found himself shouting out once again. The conical teeth of the Titodile had done their job of puncturing the flesh to provide even greater hold on the limb when combined with the crushing bite force. The holes had been torn and stretched wider from the thrashing and wrenching the Titodile had inflicted upon her Witch opponent. Jin had her hand putting as much pressure as she could over the wounds bleeding the heaviest.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Jin said through gritted teeth and strained voice. “Can you stop the bleeding?”
Vardan jogged over to inspect the damage as well. “If you put her up in her ball we can call in Sergeant Letitia to the camp. She’s on standby with a PPHU.”
“I can walk with a chewed up arm.” Jin glowered at the idea of retreating into her pokeball. Isaac’s first aid spell was slow and weak and was only disinfecting and closing one puncture or tear at a time. She winced and smothered a cry of pain when Isaac touched a particularly sore spot where the Titodile’s back teeth were exerting the most force. “Ack, that’s broken. I think that’s broken. Apa-itai.” Isaac used a spare shirt to fashion a crude sling for Jin’s arm after he finished closing up all of the wounds. Jin would have a crescent of angry red scars on the top and bottom of her forearm until she was run through a healing cycle.
Sergeant Letitia arrived in her vehicular form, a rugged and lightweight off road vehicle painted with emergency medical technician iconography. Isaac sat and fought down his nerves while Jin was recalled and having her body restored by the specialized pokegirl medical machinery. He kept seeing the spray of blood, the teeth, the claws. He could hear the loudest screams of pain and struggle. His body felt stuck anticipating more threats and couldn’t stop deriding himself for not doing anything when Jin was in such danger.
Vardan sat down next to him and put an arm around the younger boy to pull him close. “You’ve got one tough Witch, Isaac. She’ll be fine, those PPHUs are incredible.”
Isaac flinched away from the unexpected human contact but then leaned into Vardan’s shoulder. Vardan seemed calm and sure and it made Isaac feel better to accept the physical comfort. “I just wish I could have done more. Seeing her in a fight like that while I couldn’t do anything-”
“Didn’t you give her that electric spell she used?”
Isaac had worked with Elena to learn a set of fundamental elemental spells to make sure he could ensure Jin learned them properly. This would give his spellcaster an answer for every element of pokegirls she’d be fighting. The Shocking Grasp evocation was the first of these he shared with her. Not exactly under ideal conditions. “Yeah but, that’s not very much. I wasn’t even sure she’d hear me clearly or recognize it as spellcraft. I just want to be able to do more for her. I-” Isaac caught himself about to share too much. Vardan was nice but that didn’t mean he’d be understanding of Isaac’s peculiar nature and the taming issues it presented. His worry for Jin was causing his distress to overtake him.
“You do more than you think, and you are still learning what to do for each other. Give it time.” This would have been a comforting response but in reality Jin only had a matter of days before her mental state started to decline. Or at least she could only have a matter of days.
-
Isaac was standing in front of the ramshackle wooden hut deep in the darkness of his dreamscape. The only path was forward, through the door. It was the same inside as it had been when he first dreamed it. Totally spartan in its furnishing except for a standing mirror mounted on the wall. The wretched, hunched over hermaphroditic creature wasn’t his reflection this time though. It was himself, but as if he were standing behind a black hole in the shape of his own silhouette. The light was bending around the absence of form and let him know he was the figure behind it. The figure was standing in his own dilapidated hut and Isaac felt an inexplicable dread that he was really the one inside the mirror and the figure was the one staring at his reflection.
The figure was speaking, but they weren’t words. A short story, an entire chain of sensations was communicated between him and his other self. It was as if each time he opened his mouth an entirely new dream sprung forth. Why couldn’t he just talk directly?
Isaac’s alter ego stretched forth one hand. Inside was a pinpoint of white light that grew and swirled until it formed a man. Not a man like Isaac or the other Isaac. Not a man like Vardan, who was really only a couple years older than Isaac. Not a man like Denys or Jarek. Not a man like anyone Isaac knew or could even know. A man that was more of a man than any real man could ever hope to be.
The figure opened the other palm up and there was a complementary figure to the bright white man. A cool dark woman. Again, she wasn’t a real woman. She was too feminine to be real. These were both essences or energies or something fundamental to being a man or a woman. Something fundamental to being human.
The two figures in Isaac’s hands, they were in his hands now, stretched out their arms towards one another, reaching each other with ethereal tendrils that entwined and pulled both of their forms together into a twisted churning blob. Isaac would have called it a representation of a hypersphere, a perfect, rounded object in more than three dimensions, with a Taoist Yin-Yang symbol painted on the surface.
That was to say it was a black and white, incomprehensible, swirling mess.
After folding into and through itself one last time the form actualized into a human. A human made up of a blending of contradictions. Every human was made of these things. Every human had these complementary energies as part of themselves. Every man still had some feminine and every woman had some masculine.
Isaac saw a pokegirl. She was similar to the humans in that she was made of these black and white essences, but as Isaac watched her the light dimmed, the heat cooled, the white faded. When only the dark was left she became an animal. A monster. A human went over to her, maybe it was Isaac who went over to her, and tamed her. Masculine essence entered into her and something activated within the pokegirl and she was uplifted out of her bestial state only for the energy to begin to slowly break down within her being once more.
Isaac moved along through the course of the vision and he saw himself, but he was empty. He did not have masculine energy. He didn’t have feminine energy. He was something empty, devoid of either essence. Was this what was wrong and why he could not tame Jin? Or any other pokegirl who might join him. Isaac saw that things proceeded onward.
He came across Jin, but he could also see Jin as she was in the balance of her own internal energies. What was important was the black and white lacework radiating from the image he saw read itself to his dreaming mind. He could tell after studying it for a while that Jin was still stable when he was expecting decline. It wasn’t a solution, just an unexpected extension on the deadline of the problem.
Isaac’s mind woke up before his muscles did but the lingering sleep paralysis faded quickly. His mind was racing trying to make sense of what had been conveyed to him in the dream and file it away as a lasting memory. It was still totally dark in the yurt and Jin only stirred lightly when Isaac came to. She fell back into deep sleep almost instantly and Isaac focused his efforts on following her example.
-
“Well… I could have told you that.” Isaac had been expecting more celebration from Jin.
“What do you mean? Tell me that we had more time before you go feral, how?”
“Because my uncle must have lied about my age when he traded me. I’m actually a few months younger than Jarek put in the system.”
Isaac’s emotions were a mess and the worry he felt for his pokegirl combined with the frustration towards her. His tone was overly harsh because of that. “Jin, you could have told me. I’ve been really worried about this, I thought you only had a few days. Why didn’t you say anything?”
Jin shrunk away from the anger she perceived. “I didn’t want anyone to tell me I couldn’t be with you even longer…”
Isaac berated himself for losing control to the small extent he did. Even if it was understandable or justifiable to Isaac it wasn’t right. He’d hurt people when he lost control and, more importantly to the development of Isaac’s psyche, he’d been greatly hurt when someone else close to him lost control. “It’s okay, I- It’s okay Jin I’m just… worried. Sorry.” Jin accepted his apology happily. “So, when, exactly, were you born?”
(-[|]-) End 4.1 (-[|]-)
“apa” “아파”: Korean “it hurts”
“itai” “痛い”: Japanese “[it] hurts”