Vote results
Quick summary:
[X] Retreat for now and head back to the staging ground to rest and pass along updates, before getting back to work wins at 31 votes. |
Standing there, you catch your reflection in the shiny, cheri berry-red top of the pokeball in your hand: a bandaged face with tired eyes, exhaustion written deep into your expression. On your shoulder is B.B., still adamantly holding tight to your hair with one paw, his head constantly swivelling around to scan his surroundings, unable to relax in a hostile environment.
There is really only one good answer to 'what now':
It's time to go back, touch base, and rest; both for your sake and the sake of your partner.
Yet, there's still a part of you that's reluctant to leave—the same part of you that stopped you from considering leaving when you caught the Toxapex and Muk, urged you forwards despite the injury and close calls. That same part of you points out that you're already out here, deep in the ruins of Pacifidlog, it nags at you with the memory of
just how much it took to get here in the first place.
But what quiets it is a more simple, utilitarian truth: the imagined amount of effort it will take for you to trudge back to the wharf if you
keep pushing on, if you put another hour or two of effort in. How tired will you be then? Exhausted, you can only imagine, and even further away from the staging point to boot.
You still have the energy to make the trip back now without complications, but it's not hard to imagine how quickly that energy could be lost in another encounter.
Decision made, you breathe out long and slow before tucking the freshly-caught Mareanie away in another pocket of your bag, separated from the rest. While you're there, you pause to take inventory, rummaging through your bag to confirm your memory of where each occupied Pokeball is—the two eggs in your medicine bag, the sick Toxapex in a mesh flap in the main compartment, the Muk in a side pocket—and try to burn the locations into your mind, just to be sure.
Back at base, you know it's protocol to check pokeballs to make sure the contents are what the ranger says they are, but after a day like today? You
really want to reduce the opportunities where human error - yours or anyone else's - can rear its ugly head. Frankly, you don't think support staff will complain about you being organized, either. It seems like a good habit to get into.
Once you're certain everything is where it's supposed to be, you wordlessly zip everything back up again, re-tighten the strap of your bag, turn around, and start moving.
Your pace carries you back across the route you came through, wandering along the raised causeways of this part of the reef, tides tickling your ankles. Recent memories help to make landmarks out of rubble as you scan the horizon with your eyes, tracing familiar locations and charting out the landscape. Before long, you can piece together the path you'll need to follow back to the wharf proper—a path that's all the more easily traced on account of the higher elevation.
Your walk grinds to a halt as you reach the edge of the raised portion of reef, and your eyes dip down, dubiously taking in the trench between you and solid - if heavily submerged - stable ground. Beyond that are the fragmented walkways between more rips and tears in the environment, and you're briefly reminded of how relieved you were to finally haul yourself out of that mess and onto something less destroyed.
The buzz of exhaustion grows stronger for a moment, but you roll your shoulders, swallow down a sigh, and begin lowering yourself down into a squat.
"Time to do all of that again," you mutter with unhidden distaste.
It takes you what feels like half-an-hour to finally work your way back to the staging ground. You say
feels because you're not quite unhinged enough to think to time your return trip—
not yet anyway—and didn't bother to check the time on your P★DA when you started heading back.
None of that time comes from unexpected surprises, thankfully. Your walk back is uncontested by the local wildlife, a fact which you are eternally grateful for. It's instead the unwelcome terrain - which channels you through winding paths for relatively small amounts of forward progress - and your own unfamiliarity - which had you stopping to check the map for minutes at a time to make sure you weren't lost - that makes the trudge back feel like a marathon.
But it got you back nonetheless.
You trace the same path you took out of the wharf, walking along the raised edge of the reef's fringe, the ocean on one side, the reef on your other, and the wharf, interspersed with bobbing boats and lashed rope, dead ahead of you. Already, off in the distance, you can hear a dull murmur of conversation—not comprehensible from the distance you're at, but nonetheless audible over the crash of the tides.
The sky above is overcast, the lone break in the clouds being just that: a break, a
respite that hung around temporarily before being washed away by the pull of the storm to somewhere else. The clouds have graduated from a middling grey to something darker, thick with the promise of rain, but refusing to release their payload as they sag with unspent storms.
You'll freely admit you are unused to the sight of—well,
noncommittal clouds, for lack of a better term. Rain clouds, when they appear in Orre, means
rain, simple as. There's none of this will-they-won't-they going on, and with each passing day you find yourself missing the simplicity of weather back home more and more.
Weather in the Cyffineal is simple: dense fog banks rolled in during the morning and evening, and that fog is denser during the "winter" and "summer" seasons, and less so during "spring" and "fall" seasons. The fact of the matter is that you grew up in a desert and the four-season system really doesn't work there, with Cyffineal instead being mainly split into a foggy season and a foggier season, but that's a digression. Because of the sheer amount of fog, it tends to stick around all day, though it ebbs to its thinnest by mid-afternoon. If rain clouds came with the fog, they would normally break within a few hours of arrival, and it isn't rare for it to be accompanied by some light thunder and lightning, maybe some hail if you're unlucky.
Things are even more simple out in the rest of the desert, a fact you know from the two years you spent at ranger school. They didn't even get
fog, and rain? A very rare event, you saw it rain maybe three times at the most while living on-site. Weather there is more defined by how windy it is on any given day - which could mean sandstorms and related meteorological phenomena - but is otherwise decidedly stable month-by-month.
Admittedly that is all couched in the fact that during summer it is literally sometimes too hot to go outside, and as such most of your summer classes were in fact afternoon and night classes to make field work less miserable. Not to mention the horrible combination that is summer and high winds, where the sand has been cooked hot enough to nearly burn you and now has the singular mission to throw itself into the most uncomfortable places possible but—
Well, that's home. You love it all the same.
Stepping off the reef for the first time in several hours, you turn onto the wharf to find the table where Mahana had given you your walkie-talkie and antivenom empty. You see no signs of anyone having been there recently, either; only the table itself and a few chairs beneath it remain, all the supplies and reference material look to have been taken away at some point since you left.
Craning your head around, you purse your lips. The distant drone of conversation is louder now, though no more intelligible than it had been further out.
You briefly consider heading straight for Ibai's boat first—you reckon you could find it on your own—just to get the ridiculously heavy structure foam gun out of your bag, before discarding the thought. He might not be at his boat, and it's probably just best practice not to go wandering around when you can avoid it. You can just follow the noise and ask somewhere there where he is, after all.
So you do.
You head in the direction of the sound, walking along the wharf until the noise drags you off to your left, onto a narrow path between a series of anchored boats. The path forward quickly has the chorus of voices gaining more detail, until they eventually resolve into something you can actually parse—a "
what would you like?" here and a "
did you hear about..?" there. With proximity comes a scent, too; carried towards you by the ocean breeze, the smell of cooked Magikarp - a smell you know by heart - suddenly reminds your body that it is, in fact, quite hungry.
Even B.B. begins to perk up on your shoulder, casting his head out in wide sweeps as he snorts, whuffs, and sniffs at the air, food rousing his attention.
Passing through the tail end of the vessels, you arrive at a more open, pavilion-like expanse of wharf. The area ahead of you is surrounded on all sides by additional boats and other vessels, ladders and fold-out stairs leading up to them. People stand both on the wharf and on the boats themselves, many wandering between the two, with chatter shouted across the gaps, often joined by the tinkling of good-natured laughter. Chairs and tables clutter up the space, while in the centre of the pavilion stands a series of barbecues, manned by a trio of older men all wearing aprons and look to be about your father's age, grilling a variety of food—Magikarp just one item among things like vegetables, berries, cuts of beef and other seafood.
There's no shortage of Pokemon, either. You spot, off to one side of the pavilion, a large rigid plastic tub
just big enough to fit six Corsola, all of whom relax happily beneath the spray of a garden hose, manned by an elderly man with a dense, puffy beard that reached down to his ribs.
Off to the side of the tub, a herd - you count eight - of Skitty watch the spray with intense focus, many with their front legs perched up on the rim of the tub, occasionally swatting at the water as it tumbles past in front of them. Just behind them lounges a larger Delcatty, joined by a tiny girl - who looks to be no older than three - who has one fist in the Delcatty's fur and another halfway buried in her mouth as her focus jumps between the nearby Skitty and the Corsola.
Further back, near one of the boats, a pair of teenagers shout back-and-forth as they play on handheld game consoles, chatting about something called a 'Rathalos'. A Psyduck, deaf to their chatter, sits between the two of them with a bucket of mixed vegetables floating in water, occasionally leaning down to messily gobble some up.
You spy a pair of Wingull - one wearing a blue bandana tied around their neck, and the other red - relaxing on the roof of a nearby boat, only for both to puff up wildly as a cackling Chingling hurtles over their head, red-and-white braids whipping behind them. An Aipom, moments later, scuttles up from the side of the boat in a playful frenzy, rocketing after the Chingling and promptly making both Wingull take to the skies, barking out outraged squawks of "
gull!" and "
wing!" as they flap wildly down to the shoulders of what you can only assume to be their partner standing on the boat's deck.
Your visual exploration of the scene eventually drags your gaze down towards a corner of the pavilion, the opposite end to where you stand, and it's there that you spot Tomiko joined by her grandsons and, to your relief, Ibai, as well as the heavy-set teenager you saw before—Aspen, you vaguely remember Tomiko calling her.
Considering Ibai's there, you can get the structure foam gun off of your shoulders and ask Tomiko, who seems like the functional leader of this group, where you might be able to settle down and rest for a bit.
You start working your way over, and most people largely ignore you, though you do get a few curious looks before gazes are drawn elsewhere. Tomiko, of course, notices you before you're even half of the way over to her, her face lighting up a bit as she does, raising one gnarled hand to wave at you from where she's seated, her other hand busy scratching Driftwood - who is splayed out across her lap luxuriantly - on the belly.
Her wave, in turn, makes the rest of the group orbiting around her turn to look your way, and it's not long before their gazes all hone in on you. You even get a wave from one of the twin grandsons, though which is which you've since managed to forget.
You can't be blamed, you've had a lot to do since you last saw them and had to identify them based on shirt colour.
"Welcome back, Miss Parsons," Tomiko greets you genially once you're close enough that no yelling is involved, her hand dropping back down to her chair's armrest. "I don't remember you being so bandaged when you left, what happened?"
Ah, you did sort of expect that, though her bringing up the injury on your face has the knock-on effect of making the dull, aching throb act up now that you're focused on it. "It's from what I have good reason to believe was a heavily petroleum-poisoned Toxapex firing a spine at me—I didn't manage to dodge quickly enough on account of how close I was while restraining it," you explain matter-of-factly, coming to a stop just in front of Tomiko. "Caught it in the end, and the injury's fine, we're taught how to clean and dress wounds as a matter of practicality. The antivenom stopped the injury from being any worse than it could have been."
"So it's as we feared, then?" Ibai prompts you, looking your way with a concerned expression. "How bad was the spill?"
"Spill
s, plural," you tell him plainly, pausing to reach into your bag and haul out the structure foam gun, as well as the containers with the foam inside of it with both hands. "Though I only had to deal with one. The decommissioned mail boat had sprung a leak along the hull, and a Toxapex decided to make a nest in it, eggs and all. Two eggs were viable enough to be put in a pokeball, the others were already expired when I arrived."
Stepping closer, you extend the gun and the containers over to him. Ibai takes them graciously, his eyes lighting up as he inspects the gun for damage and finds none.
After a moment, his reverie fades. "And the other spill?"
"Cleaned up before I got there. The storms didn't just drag in aquatic Alolan Pokemon, by the looks of it—the fishing vessel was torn completely in half, but instead of finding a region of petrol - which I do think would have been the case, if circumstances were different - I found an Alolan Muk hiding in the nose. From what I can tell, the Muk is an industrial Pokemon, non-combat, and probably lived in one of those coastal facilities Alola has for trash and pollution clean-up."
You close your bag up again, before looking back at Ibai.
"They got to the boat first, cleared out the spill by the time I got there, and kept any Mareanie or Toxapex from taking control of the area by virtue of being, well,
a Muk. The Muk is very timid, but I managed to get them to willingly be caught after fumbling through a line I heard once in an Alolan movie. Hopefully, Mahana will know how to handle getting this Pokemon back to their partners—I can only imagine how happy they'll be to find out the Muk survived."
"Are you completely done yet?" one of the twins ask, though which one you still can't tell.
You can only shake your head. "I got about... half of everything done, I think. Both of the boats have been inspected and patched up wherever necessary, so the one that still has petrol can no longer be used as a nesting site and won't fall apart and spill everywhere when the reef's torn apart. I also took a survey of the area nearby in search of other Mareanie and found part of the reef that did not collapse with the rest, some kind of residential area up in the northern parts of the dockyard, a surprising amount of it is still standing, if damaged. Anyway, up there, I ran into a Mareanie, caught it, and decided to head back to rest. I've had a few close shaves, I'm tired from mucking through deep water and stumbling across the reef for hours, and it just didn't seem smart to keep pushing myself that hard."
"One can hardly fault you for that, dear," Tomiko says gently. "By the sounds of it, you've already done more than enough to earn a rest and some food."
You
were going to ask if you could have some, even if only for B.B.; he's probably burned a lot of energy protecting you. Now that you know food appears guaranteed, though, you shelve that line of thought for a moment. "Are any of the other rangers back yet? I'd like to offload at least some of the pokeballs I have on me," you ask. "The condition of the Toxapex and the eggs won't get any worse while in stasis, but it's better to get them in a position to be helped as soon as we can, just to make sure they have the highest chance of recovery."
"You just missed uh—young? Something?" Aspen pipes up, sounding uncertain.
Ibai clicks his tongue. "
Yeong-Chul," he corrects idly, before turning to look at you. "He came back to return the town's pearl to us before heading back out. None of the others have come back yet, though that's normal from Mahana, judging from the last time I worked with her—she prefers to rest out in the field. Since Wei is working with her, we should expect them to come back together, whenever that might be. Amadeo, meanwhile, is back working with local trainers much deeper into Pacifidlog proper, so we don't expect him to return until much later into the evening."
"Yeong-Chul is a nice young man, but he did manage to leave before I could get him lunch," Tomiko says idly, though her tone implies she takes that as a failure on her part. "He left about ten minutes ago or thereabouts, slipped away while everyone was getting the pearl put away, saying something about getting back to work. But speaking about things to do—Tsuneo, do go grab Dayna and tell her about Miss Parson's injury."
Tsuneo—who you now can identify, so you can once again tell the twins apart—jerks to attention, then nods before sparing you a glance with the expression equivalent of a shrug. Turning on his heel, he departs, heading back towards the entrance of the pavilion.
"Dayna?" you ask, curious.
"The wonderful woman who ran the local clinic here," Tomiko explains to you. "She no doubt has plenty of opportunities out in the rest of Hoenn—they've been trying to poach her from us for years—but she's stuck around to see this through. Now, young lady, how do you feel about some grilled Magikarp, and do you have any allergies?"
You blink.
The first thing that springs to mind when anyone asks you how you feel about Magikarp in a food setting is the traditional dish of Cyffineal: a dish simply named 'fish and biscuits'. The name of the dish tended to inspire different feelings in people depending on what part of the Galarian-speaking world they came from.
For Galarians proper, the term 'fish and biscuits' generally inspired acute horror. After all, a biscuit to them was a cookie to you. Unovans, comparatively, would generally think the dish is weird, sure, but since
their biscuit is what the Galarians - and Orrians - call a scone, they'd probably assume the dish is being served with gravy and consider it weird if inoffensive regional food.
But none know the truth like you do, because fish and biscuits is a terribly deceptive name. The correct, no,
true name of fish and biscuits is, in fact,
dried fish - almost exclusively dried Magikarp, to be clear - and
ship biscuits. Dried fish is self-explanatory: it's fish that has been dried, usually using salt, for preservation purposes. Meanwhile, 'ship biscuit' is the polite name for what is more commonly known of as
hardtack.
Historically, the hardtack was cooked extra inedible and stone-like to make it hard enough to use to re-tenderize the dried fish, which is done by beating the fish with the hardtack like some kind of paleolithic human discovering stone tools. With enough violence, the fish would go from the consistency of flexible plywood to something closer to boiled shoe leather. At that point, your impromptu hammer could then be soaked in water, broth or milk - that last one is uncommon - to re-hydrate it. You could also use your own spit, whatever worked. Then it would technically qualify as edible.
You ate a lot of fish and biscuits as a kid. Mostly less extreme versions of it, admittedly—the fish would be dry-aged for the taste, not because you lacked refrigeration, and the hardtack would be substituted for a dense, very chewy bread, but you've tasted the original version more than a few times.
"Miss Parsons?" Tomiko asks, dragging you out of the sudden burst of memories.
You blink once again, this time more sluggishly. You feel a pang of homesickness, but it's gone as quick as it appears. "Sorry, Miss Shiratori, got lost thinking about food. Grilled Magikarp sounds perfectly fine, and I don't have any allergies you need to worry about. Would you happen to have anything B.B. here would be able to eat? He's done a lot to keep me safe over the course of this mission, and he deserves some food too."
You feel B.B. perk up in attention, evidently smart enough to recognize when his name and the almighty word of 'food' are used during a conversation.
"Hungry, I see," Tomiko says smilingly. "As for that young man on your shoulder—does he have a preference in terms of food?"
"He's a huge fan of anything sour, but he'll also eat close to anything presented in front of him when he's given the a-okay," you explain, reaching up to scratch at the scruff of his neck, earning yourself a focused "
murr!" of happiness. "I don't want to be picky, but loose berries or insects - if you have either - would be ideal, even if they're not sour. I'm careful about his diet."
Tomiko nods, then turns to look at her remaining grandson. "Souta, does Sveta still have that bag of aspear berries she was complaining about?"
Souta pauses, brows furrowing in thought. "She should? Unless she's thrown them out, which doesn't seem like something Sveta would do. Want me to go and check?"
"I would, yes. While you're there, could you also ask the boys manning the grill for some of the grilled Magikarp and some of the vegetables?"
Souta nods. "Easy enough," he replies, turning your way to incline his head politely before departing.
Tomiko turns her attention onto Ibai, this time. "Ibai, would you happen to know the people who lived up in the lamplighter neighbourhood?"
Ibai jolts up from where he's been fiddling with the structure foam gun, expression blank and confused for a moment before he parses what Tomiko has just said. "Well—yes, I believe so?" he replies haltingly. "There are a few families here, but most
did stay behind at Lilycove with the others."
"Please go and find them for me, get them up to speed on the state of their neighbourhood—they deserve some closure." Tomiko's face is brittle for a moment, before relaxing back out into that same genial mien she's worn around you. "Bring Aspen with you, she knows some of the kids who lived up there, right?"
Aspen blinks, staring at Tomiko like a Deerling caught by headlights. "Uh—yeah, I mean... Junko's around, I think? And I know Fran is too..." her words fade out into a mumble low enough that even you can't hear it.
"Then please help Ibai pass along the information, if you could?" Tomiko interrupts ever-so-gently.
After a moment, Aspen's spine straightens, and with new conviction written on her face, she nods. "I'll—I'll try my best," she says.
Ibai, to his credit, takes it in stride. "Alright, we'll stop by my place so I can drop off this stuff first, then we can go looking, alright?"
That earns him a nod from Aspen, and you watch as the two depart, chattering idly.
"The seats around here are all unused, so feel free to pick one as you'd like," Tomiko tells you, breaking the growing silence before it even has time to set in.
Nodding once, you pan your gaze around until you find a seat next to a small, fold-out table. After arranging it closer to Tomiko for the time being, you lower yourself down into it. The second your legs no longer need to support keeping you upright is the moment when you feel a pulse of palpable relief saturate you, muscles along your back you hadn't known to be tense uncoiling while tension fizzles out across your joints.
You breathe a long, heavy sigh of relief. You didn't notice how tired you were until now.
Prying your bag off of you, you place it down near your feet, and finally extract B.B. from your shoulder, dropping him down into your lap, where he then spends the next few moments making himself comfortable. You reach down to comb your fingers through his fur, focusing on the space between his ears, eliciting a soft noise of contentment out of your exhausted little trooper.
"You look like you needed that," Tomiko points out idly, and you glance over to find her smiling at you. "You start to pick up on when someone needs to sit down when you get to be my age. Call it personal experience, with my joints the way they are."
"Thanks," you say after a moment's hesitation. "You're doing a lot." And she is, is the thing—you're not sure this situation would be nearly as organized as it is without her around.
"I'm just doing what I can, like you," Tomiko says with a noise of amusement, glancing back down at her Pokegear before turning her eyes up to scan the pavilion. You follow her gaze to find it settled on the tub with the Corsola in it. "...I do wish we could let them swim out in the open, like they want to, but we all agreed it's too risky with the Mareanie around. We can't lose any more of our colony."
The words
is that all that's left are on your lips, but you barely manage to stop yourself from blurting them out.
Tomiko continues anyway, as if she read your thoughts. "There are some Corsola still in Lilycove with other families, but even including those, we don't have many left anymore, so we just can't risk it at the moment."
Silence settles in after that proclamation, and out of your depth to offer advice or even say something without being weird and intrusive, you let the silence sit as it is.
You turn instead to the goings-on around you. The Chingling you saw coming in dances around an exhausted Aipom in delight while the pair of Wingull watch the entire thing from a nearby perch. A Skitty makes a valiant attempt to clamber into the tub with the Corsola, only for the Delcatty nearby to quickly reach out with their tail and pull them away, the Skitty crying out with dramatic intensity and outrage as they're denied the right to fall into an already-packed tub full of water and Corsola.
Before long, though, you spot Tsuneo appear out of the crowd heading firmly in your direction, joined by a weary-looking woman with tanned olive skin and warm orange hair, carrying a white bag with her in one hand. The two don't quite jog or run, but they are walking fast enough that it's a close thing.
"Dayna, thank you for coming on such short notice," Tomiko says once the two arrive.
The woman—Dayna—waves Tomiko off with one hand. "It's nothing, you just caught me between naps. Now, you were the one who got hit by the Toxapex spine, right?" she asks, pivoting to look at you, quickly coming closer and crouching down.
You feel B.B. begin to tense in your lap, still on edge and terribly defensive about anything living being in close proximity to you, but you comb more thoroughly at his fur with your fingers, and his bristling subsides into a disgruntled "
whis" that rumbles out from his chest, earning him a look from Dayna.
"A glancing blow from close range, but yes," you tell her, bringing her gaze back to you.
Dayna inspects your face for a moment, before leaning over to open her bag and start pulling supplies out. You spot a pair of unlabelled bottles and a few stick-on bandages. "Your bandaging looks good—but then I suppose that's part-and-parcel for rangers. Did you take the antivenom
before or
after being injured?"
"Before." You watch as she places one bottle back into her bag and pulls out a different one. "Seemed like a smart idea, considering how they work."
"
And yet, I have had to drill that simple logic into everyone else's brain," Dayna mutters under her breath in annoyance, quiet enough that you're pretty sure you weren't supposed to hear that. With her supplies ready, she refocuses on you. "That's good,
keep doing that. Do you mind if I take off your bandages? These ones here are waterproof, and I want to look it over just to double-check you didn't miss anything."
"Go ahead," you say. You'd be stupid to be insulted by the assumption you might have missed something a medical professional didn't. You might know how to keep yourself alive in the field, but that's a very different thing from actual medical practice. Also, it would be aggressively stupid not to accept her help when you've been stomping around in murky water full of dead Pokemon detritus and chemical pollution.
Dayna quickly peels away the bandages on your face with practised ease, humming a tune under her breath as she does. The injury on your face throbs like it got sprayed with lemon juice once the air hits it, and not helping matters is Tsuneo, watching the scene closely, hissing like a startled Meowth when he sees the wound.
Tomiko reaches over and promptly smacks Tsuneo's leg with enough force to be heard, Tsuneo yelping in surprise. "
Tsuneo Shiratori," she barks, tone flat, "you do
not look at a woman's face and make a noise like that. Am I clear?"
"Yes Grandmother," Tsuneo blurts out quickly, sounding almost panicked.
Tomiko huffs.
"Tomiko, please stop battering your grandchildren, I am busy enough as it is," Dayna says, her fingers gently tracing the injury on your face. "Right, you got lucky here, this is shallow enough that it doesn't need stitches, but I'm going to replace the bandage with one of my own. I do feel the need to point out that you nearly lost an eye here—a bit to the side and we'd be having a very different conversation."
"Yeah, I know. Watching a Toxapex line up a shot with your head is... unpleasant." You try not to think about it, even, as Dayna quickly pulls out what looks to be a sheet of paper with a number of strips cut into it that could be separated from the rest by applying force.
Dayna starts by applying some kind of cream to your face—"It's antimicrobial," she explains when you hiss—and with that accomplished, she inspects her work before pulling out an adhesive bandage that miraculously manages to be almost exactly the size you need it to be. She applies it carefully, but swiftly, with the same practised ease with which she removed the bandages from your face, using her thumb to smooth down some wrinkles. The bandage applies some pressure to the injury, though paradoxically the amount is just enough that it actually makes the entire thing hurt less, rather than more. It might as well be magic to you.
With the new dressing applied, your face feels quite a bit better. There's no chafing from a bandage moving around in place, and your injury feels as though its a lot more stable, less likely to pull open if you move the wrong way. You reach up to touch it and find that the adhesive bandage is slightly warm to the touch.
"Thank you," you say as you watch Dayna zip her bag back up. She then peels the gloves she wore off and stuffs them in her pocket, to join, you realize, several other pairs stuffed away in there, presumably until she can find a place to safely dispose of them. "This is much better," you add, belatedly.
Dayna merely shrugs. "It's my job. I recommend you get that checked out by someone in an actual sterile environment as soon as you can, and try not to move your face too much. As it is now, your wound should be held comfortably in place, but there's always a risk of widening it, and at that point stitches do become necessary. Anyway, I have to go and check on some others now. Keep yourself alive out there."
With that, Dayna departs, leaving just you, Tsuneo and Tomiko, though the latter two are still busy arguing in hushed tones.
"Whismur," B.B. grumbles, reminding you that he exists and has gone unscratched for some time. Dutifully, you reach down and start combing your fingers through his fur again.
You're part of the way through a chunk of grilled Magikarp when Ibai and Aspen both reappear, joined by a small collection of other people.
B.B. sits next to you, finishing off his pile of chopped, unripened aspear berries. Apparently, aspear berries were even more tart and sour when they were unripened - you wouldn't know, they didn't grow in Orre, to put it lightly - and by the sounds of his messy chewing and the fact that you've had to clean his face several times by now, he's enjoying himself.
Aspen keeps to the side of the group, walking with a slight hunch in her posture, while Ibai approaches more directly, leading the group with a smile plastered across his face. Once he arrives, he shoots you and oddly grateful look. "Miss Parsons, I've brought some people here with me who used to live up in the area you found," he explains matter-of-factly. "They have some requests for you, if you feel like you can accomplish them. There's no pressure, I should stress—we all understand you have a job to do, but they wanted an opportunity to ask all the same."
Staring up from your plate, you swallow the last few chunks you've been chewing. There's two adult women and one teenage boy next to Ibai, and though it can be hard to tell, the teenager looks similar enough to one of the women to be family. "Sure," you say finally, motioning at them with your fork.
The taller of the two women steps forward and smiles. "My family would like to ask for you to check to see if you can grab some items from our house. We have a map..." she pulls out a slip of paper from her pocket and extends it to you. At a glance, it looks mostly identical to the one Ibai had given you to track down the boats, though this one has a single building up where you'd caught the Mareanie circled rather than a number of dots on it.
"I've been over there—I can't say for sure if your house survived, though," you tell them, staring at the map. The building circled is close enough towards the centre that it could have survived, but it's not a guarantee. "What are you looking for?"
"There's a picture of Doggone, our late Walrein, which was in the living room on a shrine we kept after he passed," the woman explains. "He used to be my father's Pokemon and outlived him by several years, and it wouldn't feel right not having anything to remember him by. There's also my wife's dot-bead necklace—a religious item, which should be in our bedroom on the bottom floor, in a suitcase beneath the bed. Finally, our son would just like a piece of the house itself, it's a family tradition we take a piece of our last home to bury beneath our new one, to keep a piece of our journey with us. Normally, we'd ask for a roof shingle, as that's traditional, but we'll take anything, honestly."
Glancing up from your map, you consider your plans. "I..."
Choice:
[ ] "...Will try to find these items when I get back up there."
[ ] "...Don't think I have the time to look, I'm sorry."
You spend, all told, an hour and a half at the wharf, most of which you and B.B. both spend either resting or eating. In that time, you don't manage to see any other rangers return, so you're left with your quarry of caught Pokemon, at least for now.
Standing on the edge of the wharf, nobody is here to see you off—they already had when you left the pavilion, receiving a few well-wishes before you headed out.
You're as rested as you reasonably can be without actually going to sleep somewhere, something you don't really have the time or privilege of doing. You've got a job to do, after all.
It's still in what you'd consider the early-mid afternoon. You have what looks to be another five or so hours of daylight left. You think you can make it to parts of the reef you've already visited in much less time than you took going over and coming back, now that you're better rested, but you do feel the need to make it back before the sun sets, just to avoid having to navigate this place in darkness.
All that's left for you now is to decide your path forward.
Choice:
[ ] Head back to the raised reef to keep looking for Toxapex and Mareanie, using the Mareanie you caught before
[ ] Go searching for invasive Pokemon elsewhere
-[ ] (Write in a location)
[ ] Start working on setting down tethers now, and manage the invasive Pokemon later
