Random My Hero Academia note: How are Todoroki's pants still on him after he goes flamo in the semi-finals of the sports festival? Anime plot armor? Also, why is emotionally constipated, jerkwad, temper-crazed Bakugou so hot to me? I'd never be able to even be friends with that kind of person in real life. My psycology makes no sense. --from LoweFantasy, not Tyndali, because Tyndali knows her own psychology so well it's disturbing, and kind of sad, because she still has no control over it. _________________________________
"So then you jump over the other player like this." Neara hopped the flat rock over the bark chips and smiled. "Like that."
"And you call it checkers?" Tony peered closer at the board, feeling the rough wood with his hands. After a few days of endlessly being bothered for company, she'd decided to introduce some games. And hopefully encourage them to make their own.
"What if I eat the other players?" Orson grabbed one of Tony's pieces and chewed with a smile. "Do I win then?"
"Then I'll eat yours!" Tony grabbed a handful of Neara's rocks and slammed them into his mouth, the painful crunch and widening eyes marking the moment he realized his mistake.
Benedict bent in half with laughter, Ethel seated on a hide at his feet. "Oh sweet mother of glory, that was amazing. Did you do that on purpose, stone-head?"
"The world may never know." Orson smirked.
"The desert isn't far off." Winston returned from patrol and shook the twigs from his hair. He'd started putting it up in a bun to keep it out of his eyes, which exposed his frighteningly-attractive shoulder muscles.
"Winston! I'm glad you're safe." Neara pushed herself off the stump and ran to him, feeling the grit of sand underneath her arms when she wrapped them around his torso. "Did you go into the desert?"
"Just a little." He flushed and laced his arms through hers although the movement was awkward. "I wanted to make sure there weren't any Scorpions nearby."
"You could totally take them on."
"I'll take you on Winston!"
"Take on me! Takeonme. Take me on!" Tony began belting with Benedict joining in.
"I regret teaching you guys anything!" Neara rolled her eyes. "Thanks for looking out for us. Are we near the ocean yet?"
"In a week, we'll be there."
The chorus line now included Orson, who always protested he didn't remember the songs she sang for them, yet somehow managed to hit every note.
"Ugh, guys!"
Winston just shrugged and stooped to peck her cheek. She blushed and watched him walk to check the roast shortbird.
The chicken wheelbarrow clucked angrily when he passed, following him in an angry mob. The coop had been Winston's idea to keep eggs close at hand for Ethel, who only recently started talking. Benedict still served as her main protector, though she didn't seem to want anything romantic to do with him and Neara couldn't blame her. She'd never met a more annoying male, and that included Parker, who was an idiot on accident whereas Benedict was stupid on purpose.
"Food's almost done, Ethel. Holy cow, you've woven an entire basket already!"
"It's not so hard once you get into it." She smoothed a section of hair from her face, ignoring it when it fell out again. "I've only heard about doing this for babies."
"Yeah, I just figured if it's good enough for babies, it's good enough for cotton, right?"
"Right." Ethel's fingers flew as she spoke, the weave tighter than anything Neara could come up with.
"Seriously, you're really good at this."
"Thanks." Ethel's eyes still held her sadness.
"So... we're pretty close to the ocean. We can use this to make carbon and cotton filters for the sea water."
"That's a good idea." Her eyes strayed over Neara's marks and she felt a need to cover up.
"I hope it helps people."
"Mhm."
The conversation tapered off, their easy banter from before gone in the tragedy of the City of Beasts. She still flinched whenever a bird called nearby and even with her hunger for eggs, she still hesitated when fetching them from the coop.
"Let's go see the sand!" Neara stood, gently taking the basket from Ethel and setting it down.
"What?" Ethel's hands hung in the air.
"The sand! I bet it's warm and full of cool things to see! Come on; we need a break from all this green!" She pulled on her arm until they were both upright. "Winston! Can you show us the sand, please?"
He looked up from where he was crouched by the fire. "The sands?"
"Yeah; you already said it was free from Scorpions, so please can we go?"
The boys, who had finished their song to no applause, stood from their resumed checkers game, most of the pieces wet from being in Tony's mouth. "Maybe we can bury Benny."
"Yeah, that's right, manhandle me, Orson." Benedict playfully bit at him.
"I want to carry Neara!" Tony stood so fast he upset the board, then ducked down to pick it up.
"You always want to carry Neara."
"Better than carrying you." Orson rolled his eyes. "You've essentially been useless since the City. Even before then; what was your point again?"
"I kept Ethel safe!"
"Yeah, like that's so hard for a sixer." The Sheep rolled his neck on his shoulders and popped it to the sides, grinning at Neara's flinch. "I can't believe you hate when I crack things."
"Because breaking bones is such a pleasant sound," she replied sarcastically.
"Depends on whose they are." Orson shot a look at Benedict, who winked.
"I like it rough."
"Shut up, you disgusting mange-coat."
Benedict laughed and clapped Tony on the back. "Got him!"
Whatever Neara expected when she saw the desert, this certainly wasn't it. Forest and sand met abruptly with only a few scraggly bushes marring the line. It looked golden, like each grain was electro...whatever that word was for plating with gold. Foiling? Gilding? Each grain looked gilded. Ugh, the poetry was gone.
"Let's play!" Orson plucked Neara from Tony's back and ran into the sand, his scrawny limbs immediately sinking. "What the hell?"
Tony transformed and pounced after them, flailing on the unstable terrain. "I'm going to drown! Help!"
Winston stood near the edge, keeping his face turned to the edge of the desert. He'd given up painting the marks on himself, not needing to deceive any Kings out here. The quiet power rolled from him in waves, the strongest ones following his gaze and breaking the will of most small creatures. The shortbirds were... an insolent exception.
"You need to spread out!" Benedict bounced over the sand in his beast form, Ethel laughing on his back. "It's just like walking in the snow!" He barely made a dent on the surface, frollicking like a damn deer, which Orson told him.
Tony flashed into a bear, spreading his toes to keep himself upright. Small avalanches of sand followed his footsteps as he picked his way to Neara, arms clasped around a frustrated Orson.
"Gods-dammit." Orson grumbled before flashing into his behemoth Sheep form and melting back to beastman once he surfaced.
"Orson, it's fine, we just have to walk slower," Neara giggled, following Tony's lead as they walked to the largest pile. "Watch this!" She pulled a handful from near the bottom and demonstrated how the sand tumbled in a triangle. "See? Isn't this cool?"
Benedict leaned closer to see and Orson eyed the dune behind him mischievously. With a shove, the Snow Leopard flew into the dune and Orson hoisted Ethel onto his shoulders, her white legs looking bright pink next to his blinding hair.
"I'll save you!" Tony began digging him out, increasing his efforts when the sand erased whatever mark he made. "The sands ate Benedict!"
A white paw clawed its way out, sinking into Tony's arm. The Bear shouted in surprise and backed away, dragging the coughing Leopard out.
"What the hell, Orson," he managed to sputter out, scraping his tongue against his arm.
"I thought you liked it rough," the Sheep snarked, setting Ethel lightly on her feet. Her patched pink skirt billowed around her in the hot breeze bringing smells of something herbal and dry, like medicine. It made Neara cough, and clutch at her chest. She remembered Shay's fascination with the desert and the people who managed to make a living here, always writing stories of dusty lands, scimitars, brave heroes, and belly dancers. She'd even taken a few classes and joined the local chapter in their town. Remembering Shay meant remembering everything...
"Winston?" her voice seemed too small and silver for these suddenly oppressive hills.
He was at her side in an instant. "Yes?" He bent his head close to her face, silver eyelashes gleaming in the sun. Holy freak he was beautiful up close. And from far away. And in firelight. And whenever.
She blushed at his loving gaze. How could someone like him... but she had to let that go. She didn't have a problem with Tony and Orson, so why was Winston the one she faltered over? "I want to make signs... I know Shay taught her mates to read and I don't know if she had time to teach her babies before... everything..."
He waited through her pauses, gently clasping her waist to reassure her.
"I mean, I think it would be easier to find them if we told them where to look. Like if we made a sign that said 'Go to the ocean' or something like that."
Winston nodded. "You are right. I've been thinking of her children as well. I know Curtis would be a sufficient father, but the ferals, with the exception of panthers, are not known for keeping them close for so long. I know you care for her. I will make as many signs as you think adequate."
Heart swelling at his thoughtfulness, she kissed his cheek in gratitude. "Thanks, Winston."
He turned with a smile, nose brushing against her lips. "You missed." His mouth met hers slowly, his hands cupping her arms with all the tenderness in the world. She melted against him, pressing her body against his and letting him pick her up, his fingers anchoring themselves in her hair and wrapping around her thighs.
"Oh my gods, you guys, you just mated!" Orson yelled. "Get a dune!"
"Yeah, get a dune!" Benedict echoed.
A muffled groan showed where they'd buried Tony upside down, a small tunnel leading to his nose which Ethel kept open, giggling as she prevented sand from tumbling in.
"Guys! He'll get burned!" Neara pulled away from Winston's face and it felt like ripping the Velcro of her soul from his. He let her down easily, walking at her side until they reached Tony's paws.
He reached down and pulled up Tony easily, like an ant lifting a huge crumb, and set him carefully on the sand.
"Thanks; it was starting to get hot under there."
"Didn't you mention something about sand for concrete or something, Neara?" Benedict looked at the sand suspiciously, then picked up a handful, watching the grains sift through his fingers.
She shook her head. "No; this is too round. It gets blown around into a little ball shape. We need sand that's more flat. I don't know why there's a difference... but there is."
"If you don't know why there's a difference, how do you know there's a difference?"
She looked at each member of the group in turn, thinking carefully. Winston, kind and gentle, Orson, brash but thoughtful, Tony, Benedict, Ethel, her chick friend in a world where she thought she'd never have that again... it was time to tell them. Tell them everything. And hope they didn't think she was too weird.
"I'm... "
"Deluded, depressed, dainty... dang it, I wanted it to be something negative..." Benedict snapped his fingers playfully and she threw a handful of sand at him.
"Be quiet! Look, this is important. Please don't interrupt me."
Tony sat down on the sand and clasped his hands over his mouth, panicked when he couldn't breathe, then lowered them to expose his nose.
Orson raised an eyebrow expectantly.
"I know y'all think I have a lot of good ideas, but..." she sighed. She'd kept this secret for... two years? How long had they been here again? Whatever, she'd kept it for... a long time. Shay spilled the beans pretty early on, if she remembered correctly, but she always felt like Star Trek boldly going where no modern man had gone before, so she didn't feel safe just... telling them and risking the disruption of the whole planet. Now there didn't seem to be any hope of her going home, her potential portal sight being blown to smithereens by either the earthquake or taken over by the City of Flames... it was time. And if she went down in history as the worst colonizer ever... she'd be dead by then, so hopefully it wouldn't hurt her feelings.
"I'm not from this place. I'm not from the Mer Clan, or any Clan here." She gestured upwards, though only Tony looked. "Benedict thinks the feral species come from the moons, and that's kind of right. There's a world like this one, probably pretty far away in the sky, and somehow... I came here. In my world, everything is made of stone, and we have all these inventions that make it so some people never have to go outside. We bring food to each other and stories and entertainment and pretty much everything we'd ever need. But we pay for it with money, our version of salt, and for every male born, another female is born too. There's no special strength and the males can't turn into animals. Females go into heat 12 times a year. Most of my inventions are things my people already came up with and I'm just replicating them here. I'm not creative like you guys think; I'm just copying what I saw. Shay... Shay was my friend there... she came with me. I don't know how or why we came here because traveling through the sky like that isn't possible yet on my world, but we appeared here and... I'm sorry."
"Bloody hell." Orson mumbled, eyes drifting down to her feet.
"Wait, there's... so 50 males are there and 50 females too? How do they take care of them all? How do the fe... women decide who gets all the males?" Benedict scratched his beard, something he only did when he was nervous.
"The standard relationship is one female to one male, although relationships come in all shapes and sizes where we're from, since we don't need male strength or female fertility to provide for each other. There's a lot of trading, but because we're not as strong as y'all are here, we use money to signify the things we'd like to trade and use that instead."
"And the money is made of salt?" Winston said.
"No, it's made out of paper, which is really thin wood."
"So you write on the money what you want to buy with it?"
"That's how it kind of started, but a community somewhere decided one piece of money was worth a handful of salt, as an example, and whatever you'd trade the salt for is what you trade the money for. So like forty pieces of money is forty handfuls of salt and could buy you a female or extra meat."
"A female costs a great deal more than forty handfuls of salt." Orson pointed out, no sarcasm evident in his voice. "More like forty jars, if you're lucky."
"You get the idea. If we decided a piece of money was worth forty jars of salt and we got ten pieces of money, we could trade it for ten females without having to carry four hundred jars of salt."
"I could carry that much salt." Tony flexed impressively.
Benedict palpated Tony's arm with an exaggerated impressed face. "Yes, yes, so he could. Very nice, bear-boy."
"What if I chopped all the trees down and made them into money? I could trade for a lot of things, even if I didn't have any salt, right? They wouldn't know."
Neara pursed her lips and pushed air through them. Now they were getting into inflation... and trust Orson to be the first to come up with a way to cheat the system.
"Say we made it so each piece of money had to have Winston's paw print and scent on it; then other people couldn't make copies and Winston would only put his scent on pieces of money that could back up their claim to salt. Then it would be authentic."
"Ok, so we know the wood equals salt, but how do we get other people to know that?"
"We're just glossing over the fact she said she's from a moon, right? Like nobody is questioning that? Because I don't understand what that means, mostly, but I just want to make sure the story's straight." Ethel finally spoke.
"Yeah." Neara said, "I'm from..."
"No wonder Shuu was attracted to you." Orson smirked and kissed her cheek. "We all know about wolves and the moons."
"We'd have to teach other people about the salt money, right?" Tony offered helpfully.
"Yeah, Tony, and then..."
"Then we could chop down their trees so they wouldn't make more money without our permission and keep their salt so they could only get money by giving their salt to us and we'd give them money, but we could also let other people 'borrow' the salt money as long as they brought us more salt to insure they actually kept their promises." Tony looked pleased and Neara kept her horrified expression to herself.
Tony inventing banks. That was a little out of left field.
"Enough about the money though...I'm sorry for lying to you for so long." She took Orson's hands in hers, ignoring the goofy expression he gave her in return. "I'm especially sorry for lying to you... I didn't mean for it to go on this long. I thought Shay and I would be back to our world by now."
"I tore a mountain down to find you once; I wouldn't hesitate to pull down the sky, if that's what it took to bring you back." He brought her hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles. "And if I had to train Bozo and Bingo to six stripes to do it, that's what I'd do."
"Which one's Bozo and which one's Bingo?"
"Whichever one you want," he murmured against her skin. "Now the sun is setting and you're hungry. We should go back to camp. I'm glad you finally told me this because it means you probably won't be going away anytime soon." He gestured to Winston. "Pick her up for me, would you? This damn sand is going to take forever to shake off." With a soft sound, he kissed her cheek and melted into his massive sheep form, kicking his legs so he rolled towards the forest on his massive wool coat like a dryer ball.
Tony followed the path and Benedict's snow leopard form followed with Ethel on his back.
"Neara," Winston said softly, waiting until she faced him to continue, "To remember the knowledge of your people and bring it to ours... is intelligent. They are your ideas because you understood them enough to teach them to us. I never tasted anything as wonderful as the fish soup you make, and I've never heard of anything so miraculous as turning wild seeds into something puffy and edible. You amaze me every day with your talents."
She climbed into his arms and he held her in one, the other adjusting his kilt. "But in my world, those things are everywhere. You wouldn't think they were special over there."
He walked towards the forest, keeping her gripped in one arm. "But you are here, and they are in you. And if those things weren't special in your world, you would still be precious to me."