Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

 
One day, I took a walk in the woods.

Not particularly unusual behavior for me, but the result was certainly unexpected.

  I’d spent more than half my life at that point in close proximity to heavily environmentally protected land, and even before then grew up being taught how to look for bugs and the occasional reptile or amphibian under rocks and dead wood,

how to identify plants, animals, fungi, and even some minerals,

how to refocus my eyes to more easily spot animal movements in the background behind the shifting of leaves and branches,

How to walk quietly… to a degree, anyway.

  I also grew up with the Pokémon franchise, kindergarten age at around the same time as the initial craze with Pokémon cards so prevalent on the bus and playground that many schools, mine at the time included, had to ban them. I never actually played the TCG, but for a time I loved collecting the cards just for the creatures on them. I followed the anime as much as I could with my parents refusing to pay for Cable TV, therefore I did so via the early 2000s-2010s internet and whatever VHS tapes of the movies we could find.

  Never got to play any of the games until I was already an adult though, dad was against handheld gaming consoles in particular and the mainline games were all on Nintendo’s handheld consoles.  What really cemented my attachment to the franchise was probably the Sinnoh anime, Torterra and then later Gliscor becoming my number-one favorite Pokémon. I spent hours upon hours surfing Bulbapedia for fun as well… in hindsight I’m pretty glad for that.

  The day it happened I was hiking a trail that was an old favorite of mine. It’s always been a pretty easy trail, barring the one bit of the small mountainside that turns into a downhill stream when it rains it’s all just pretty scenery and wildlife.  Forest wildflowers and wild ginger and onions partway up, with a blueberry patch at the summit. porcupine dens among the boulders, and Turkey Vultures playing in the updrafts off the side of the cliffs at the summit.

The point is, it was familiar to me, the old crevice in the mountainside a ways off the trail included.

  It was sort of a triangular gap, maybe eight feet tall at its highest point and three or four feet wide. And though it looked from a distance, if you’re the whimsical sort, as though it could be an unassuming cave entrance, it only went far enough back for one or perhaps two people to sit down in, but for the purpose I intended at the time it was enough.

I stepped off the trail, keeping aware of my foot placement so my boots wouldn’t crush or otherwise excessively damage the plants in the undergrowth, making my way around the boulders, which were often topped with a pile or two of porcupine droppings along with the mix of wildflowers, ferns, moss, and lichen… and were therefore generally unusable as spots to climb up and sit atop.

  Nothing at the time really stuck out as ‘unnatural’ or anything to be on guard about, I usually keep my eyes and ears on a swivel in case I spot anything that catches my interest when I’m out in nature, and so I just strolled my way up smiling at the jewelweed and red trillium flowers as I passed them by, spooking a nearby chipmunk somewhere in the underbrush into the usual abrupt twittering alarm-chirps.  An old tutor of mine told me a story once about being chased off the branch of this trail I usually ignore all the way back to his car by a Fisher, which apparently thought he was competition for the Grouse it had been trying to hunt, but I’ve never seen one in the wild myself.

   When I walked up to the crevice there was no sense of danger, I just sat down in there, made myself comfortable, and unpacked the lunch I’d brought. Iced tea… some type with lemongrass and a little honey in it this time, a couple strips of beef jerky, and my best attempt at replicating the wraps I used to get at the deli in my hometown that closed down several years ago. Bacon, Avocado, Spinach, Tomato, and Swiss cheese. delicious as usual.

In hindsight, the lack of a sense of time likely wasn’t just from savoring the food and the moment.

Next I could fully remember, I was waking up… though I didn’t remember passing out.

Chapter Text

[March 19th, Mossui Ranger station, Night]:

“Can’t sleep, huh Carmine?”

“Ugh, no. It’s… it’s weird to be back in Mossui for break but to not be staying at our house and…”

“And you’re worried about your brother?”

“I- uh- wh-“ She bristles momentarily before deflating. “Yeah.”

  Mira, the ranger she’s shadowing for the week, very carefully doesn’t laugh. “I’ll go put a pot of tea on, lemongrass mint sound good to you?”

“Mmhm.” Carmine nods.

  A little known fact about the Timeless Woods of Kitakami is that they do, in fact, have something temporally unusual about them, though it’s not unique: The Timeless Woods happens to be a known recurring stopover for Celebi. The actual surprising part about it to people fully aware that Celebi exists is that the Timeless Woods are as close to a human settlement as they are.  The vast majority of the places Celebi tends to appear are so deep into forests and such a vast distance from human settlements that the Timeless Woods being separated from Mossui Town mostly by difference in elevation make them an outlier.

  The Mossui Ranger station is equipped to monitor when Celebi appears. A few minutes after the previous conversation, while the tea is still steeping, an audio alert goes off in the ranger station for the first time since Carmine’s weeklong work-study started, and Carmine watches Mira spring into action.

“Now? really? Ce… damn it…” is all that she catches of Mira’s muttering before Mira switches on her radio.

“This is Ranger Mira of station Kitakami-OM-South, ID-” Carmine is both tired and startled, so she understandably doesn’t catch the rapid-fire string of numbers. “I’m getting a VOF alert ping, can you confirm?”

Carmine doesn’t hear the response from the other end through the slightly squawk-like and staticky affect the radio gives things, but Mira doesn’t relax.

“Are the barriers already up?” Mira continues into the radio, glancing out the window while running through checks on her gear.

“Ye-… enclo- the entire… additional mov- sighted, going to at- recon-“

Carmine finally catches some brief snatches of what’s being said on the other end, and then a second alarm goes off, this one not exactly louder but somehow sounding more urgent by its exact noise.

“Oh sh-!“

“This is Kitakami-OM-South, I just got a ping from Starfall at the same location, can anyone confirm?!”

“Wh- what’s going on?” Carmine finally manages to blurt out.

Mira’s face cycles through an… interesting sequence of expressions. “I don’t know how much I can tell you right now, it depends on how this plays out.  I need you to stay here while I take Noivern to meet up with the other rangers, and maybe I can tell you what this is about in the morning. I know it’s a big ask, but maybe try to get some rest.”

_____

[March 19th, Timeless Woods, approaching midnight]:

  When the Voice appeared, the grove were the first to notice. Followed shortly thereafter by the mycelium, and the various local fae and spectres. The Song beginning with the little rituals of the equinox seemed a sign of good fortune, the forest sealed within the Voice’s thorned walls a grand theatre beneath the moonlight more than fit for sprouting new life, new dances and stories and merriment.

Then fell a human, nearly dead, in front of the grove from a thundering hole in the air.

A human who felt of branches and dappled shadows, yes, but also of long, drifting wanderings. So much alike and yet so different to the grove themselves.

Chapter Text

[March 20th, Timeless Woods]

  As midnight comes and passes in the Timeless Woods, a theatre of Song and dances makes way for one of healing, of rending and mending. The Voice and the grove get to work.

Bones, blood, and flesh realigned, regenerated, resealed from where they were once splayed open like a wilted blossom, but success lay in a spell innate to Trevenant.

  Humans call it a curse but that is a gross oversimplification at best. The underlying intent of the original spell is to bring the target to a physical, metaphysical, or conceptual state closer to that of the forest. The human’s spirit was already close enough, but his flesh was another story, so in aid of the healing, branches sometimes wove in to take its place. They could weave bark and branches far more dexterously than flesh, after all.

The healing would need time to truly settle, so as a final verse the Voice sang a shield from the forest and the human’s spirit, a twisting thicket of brambles that’s less a wall than it is a blanket.

…

  Down in the valley to the south, a little being of porcelain, powdered leaves, and bitterness gazes raptly out a window, their usual slight sway while in the air abandoned for an uncanny stillness. Something in all that, some small wisp of it had felt… almost familiar.

-=-=-=-

Roughly eight months later…

[November 2nd, Timeless Woods, shortly before sunrise]

  In hindsight, the fact that I wasn’t immediately freaked out by the initial wake-up should’ve been more concerning than it was. To begin with, waking at all quickly had been exceptionally rare for me for years before then, it’s normally a gradual process, not to mention my sleep schedule. Even back when I was little and had a more normal sleep schedule, I still needed to spend a while staring off into the middle distance in the morning before I was cognizant enough to do much. My sense of time without a clock to check may not be particularly good, but it was definitely unusually quick for me.

  Waking up somewhere quite that comfy is perhaps even rarer. My family once took a trip to Europe for the winter holidays, and for one night partway through the trip we stayed in a small but particularly high-end hotel. The beds in that hotel room were just so incomprehensibly soft and comfy to the point that they pretty much felt like cozy semi-solid clouds. That’s the closest frame of reference to the feeling I woke up to… well, that plus several entirely unfamiliar and somewhat alien but not necessarily unpleasant sensations. Those are probably what managed to get my mind to start pulling itself out of the mental fog.

  I opened my eyes to weathered wood and deep blue twilight. I was laid down under a light yet cozy blanket, on top of something incredibly soft, in what almost felt like a… circular tunnel, carved into one single continuous piece of wood? No. More logically and reasonably, it’s the inside of a huge overturned tree trunk, what with the slight splits in the wood, plus how it has the look of something weathered hollow slowly rather than carved quickly and evenly. ‘Weathered’ because it somehow felt of decomposition, but not of rot, exactly.  I wasn’t sure how I knew that, let alone the fact that the idea itself didn’t wholly make sense on further examination, but it seemed to be the case.

I shifted to be at least partially sitting up, and felt my limbs all mildly twitching involuntarily in the process, along with a slight pincushion sensation resembling though not exactly alike to a limb having ‘fallen asleep’ from lack of proper blood circulation.

…Well that’s a bit concerning.

I let my brain catch up for a few minutes, silently alternating between staring off at nothing in particular and glancing at my surroundings… I have no clue how I got here, or even where ‘here’ is, and on another note…

Is my hair a lot longer than normal? It feels a lot longer than I’ve ever grown it out.

Chapter Text

  Leaving that hollow for the first time became one of those experiences that I’ll likely just never forget, not really in any specific positive or negative sense so much as the overall awe of it all largely overshadowing any need I felt to define it between good and bad.

I was mainly drowsy and confused at first, sitting there against the wall with the blanket draped over my shoulders, but… well… I’ve always been a major wildlife nerd, so when I’m outside and I hear an animal call or catch movement out of the corner of my eye, its fun and sometimes actually useful to see if I can recognize it off the top of my head or give a rough guess.

As I sat, I listened. It was faint, likely muffled by a combination of distance and the enclosed space blocking some of the sound, but… I didn’t recognize what species the birdsong outside was from.

There was another noise too, the type of repetitive creaky or perhaps croaky clicks that I’d heard all sorts of different kinds of from recordings of animals ranging from birds, to reptiles, to insects and maybe even a specific obscure mammal or two. Like those little wooden frog instruments you play by running the stick along the ridge on its back that turns the rapid clacks into one amusing little croaky sound that sounds almost nothing like most frogs but still sounds close enough to some specific species that the easiest way to describe it is a croak.

  Sure, worries and my anxiety were there, but curiosity won me over, getting a look at what species of creatures were making the unfamiliar calls was practically second-nature to me. As I stood up and walked to the exit faintly visible by the dim lighting it barely provided the hollow, my steps took a moment to steady properly, but not in just the usual ‘maybe you stood up too fast’ way, it almost felt like there was an extra layer of it.

That’s because there was… but I’ll get to that later.

  Forest soil and leaf-litter have their own distinct smells, not bad smells or necessarily good smells, but perhaps I’m biased in saying that I find them a little refreshing, and there was a sort of healthy heaviness to those scents in the air that helped steady my thoughts. All the prior evidence meant that when I climbed carefully downwards a little from odd-angled branches to the ground, it wasn’t really a surprise to me that I was somewhere in the woods. The problem being that they weren’t woods I recognized, this was an old-growth oak grove… at least it looked like one at my best guess, and where I’d previously been was mainly a mix of beech, birch, and a bit of hornbeam and white pine with a much smaller spread of oaks, plus that section of spruce lowland near the base of the mountain that was the part of the trail I mostly ignored to avoid bug bites and poison ivy, and the white pines near the peak.

It might have looked funny, from an outside perspective, all it took to hit me that I was somewhere very different than I once knew, beyond the obvious, was to turn around and look at what I’d walked out of… It took a bit to really sink in.

It wasn’t just some toppled tree.

A mouth, a long mildly hooked nose, two long wooden ears now drooping, and I’d come out of one of the empty pits where eyes once were. Even without the white mane and with the difference brought by added detail, that shape was unmistakably a Shiftry.

A truly gigantic one.

A dead one.

  And now that I paid much more attention to the shapes of the wood in the other oaks, they were much the same, if not nearly as massive. And looking even closer… yeah, the rattle-croaking noises were coming from the little round shapes swaying up on the branches, likely hundreds of Seedot… not to mention the shapes I only managed to glimpse once or twice flitting between the branches and trunks, probably Nuzleaf or much more alive Shiftry than the one I’d been sleeping in.

In most circumstances I probably would have been quite a bit more afraid, given the lore surrounding Nuzleaf, Shiftry, and Dark-types in general but… I seem to have been their guest.

“Holy fucking shit…”

Of course, there was no way for me to take this entirely in stride.

This became even more true when multi-layered breathy giggling erupted from somewhere behind my feet at my words. I whipped around, looking down after brushing back the hair I’d accidentally whipped into my face, and met several returned gazes from my own shadow.

“Hello there…”

  The Ghost-types themselves weren’t what unsettled me, heck, they just fit right into the bluescreening surprise I was still working through, it was the shadows, and the sudden awareness of an entire sense I hadn’t noticed before. The shadows had a tangible… ‘depth’ in my awareness, and my own shadow felt like standing at the edge of a deep, gaping, vertical pit and looking down into it without being able to see a visible bottom. To my eyes alone, though, it was just far darker somehow than the other shadows of the forest, even if it logically shouldn’t be.

In the preceding moments spent feeling out the ‘edge’ of the pit with my senses, the ones giggling revealed themselves to be a group of Phantump by all popping out and proceeding to hang off or ‘climb’ on me like little kids on a jungle gym but weightless and sort of cuddly, which was perhaps an odd description when their heads were all made of wood with pairs of proportionally oversized ‘horns’ on the sides that curved in mildly different ways on each of them.

Gosh, they’re really cute-

  A growing smile had stretched across my face at the gaggle of little forest spirits, but it settled into something smaller as a bit of the rattle-croaking from the groves main inhabitants audibly changed, becoming something rhythmic… maybe chant-like, which was soon accompanied by a few sharp warbling and whining spurts of what was probably Grass-Whistle from nearby Nuzleaf. I turned once again, most of the little ones retreating back into my shadow, and was met with the sight of a decently large- though not really comparable to the surrounding titans- Shiftry descending slowly from the canopy in a theatrical curving and tumbling glide that reminded me of watching barn swallows flitting around through the air, if somehow gentler and visually enhanced by the movements of a trailing snow-white mane.

It seemed like a form of dance, but there was a hint of something more to it.

The lone Shiftry landed smoothly in a crouch only about eight feet away from where I stood, and then straightened out, but before anything else could occur…

  A shadow stretched from somewhere behind me, looming over my head as if a pillar had silently risen even though the angles of light necessary to cast it simply weren’t there. I’d been turning back and forth so much by this point that I’d largely discarded the notion of whirling around, I’m not entirely the most physically graceful person around anyway, and too much of it could just leave me dizzy, so it seemed wholly unnecessary to turn around any way other than matter-of-factly… or as much as the situation allowed anyway.

My eyes met a gnarled trunk sticking out of my shadow, its bark broken up by darkened cracks I traced, ever so carefully, up to a cracked and jagged maw, and a lone eye with the glow of hot coals inside a black pit of a socket. Contrary to its visage and how it made an entrance, the Trevenant’s expression was kind, if rather evaluating.

Perhaps I might have reacted more to my first experience with a form of telepathy, but by that point my capacity for processing something drastically new beyond the most basic levels had already been exceeded quite a bit ago.

It wasn’t words so much as intent, the Trevenant was glad I seemed to have… healed… properly?

I nodded to the ghost-tree in return, firmly but perhaps a touch absently.

…I was injured?

Chapter Text

…I was injured?

  Something about that thought began nagging at me, rapidly swelling from a feeling akin to when a mosquito buzzes near my ear into-

I could- the memories-

There were flashes of sensations there, pain that gave me phantom aches just remembering it, light and dark and tumbling ass-over-teakettle and then… what’s going on with my arms? my legs? I can’t see much of anything through the…

branches?…

Things got kind of hazy after that, but the sight of branches extending almost seamlessly from my shoulders where my arms should have been? that stuck.

-=-=-=-

  A knock and a presence in the shadows outside the old door brings the faint sound of footsteps from inside, which, not unexpectedly, escalates into a grand cacophony of far stranger sounds…

warbles, a quiet blast turned loud whimper, croaks, low humming, whispering wind with only near-discernible words, playful little laughter, running water, tearing metal, a grand orchestra-

before abruptly cutting out.

Several moments pass in silence, before the door creaks open partway and golden eyes like serrated autumn sunlight peer up past a pale snout that’s framed by slightly ragged ears, as well as a wispy mane and tuft that fade into a blood-red sunset mirage.

Upon seeing the ones that were waiting outside, and the one they’re carrying, some amount of the edge in his gaze withdraws.

“Now, what grand mess have you gotten yourselves into this time, that you need our help?”

The fox leans to one side with a growing grin, his neck seemingly extending like a loosely floating and undulating length of rope with the motion while he examines the duo of forest caretakers and their unconscious charge.

-=-=-=-

  I woke up again at some point to the feeling of a small animal gently head-butting my shoulder. It’s not necessarily an unfamiliar feeling, I used to have a cat that was a bit of a clingy cuddlebug, but he also didn’t really know his own strength, and I swear most of his nuzzling should have been accompanied by an audible ‘thunk’ sound-effect.

Given the sleep and recent-events addled state of my mind, I rolled over where I lay and reached up to pet whatever was there before opening my eyes. My fingers met a ruff of surprisingly silky fur and began scritches several seconds before my eyes opened.

“Welcome back to the land of the waking.” The little fox said. I could almost hear the gekkering beneath, but his lip-syncing looked pretty impressive… not that I would know much about lip-syncing.

“You do understand this, right? Most regions primarily speak this language these days as far as I’m aware.”

“…Yep.” I stared a few more seconds before moving to sit up.

“Ah-bup-bup-up!- Careful, the nurse-log told me you seemed fine physically but-!”

“I do feel fine, if only physically… where am I?”

“My shared den, on part of the ‘Timeless Woods plateau’, as I believe the humans call it.”

“Timeless Woo- that sounds familiar. What region?”

The name brought multiple possibilities to mind, mostly because my memory of specific place names from the franchise wasn’t necessarily as good as my memory of what the places were known for… along with the fact that a few possibilities coming to mind were from games I’d never had the chance to play.  Before the Zorua answered, and given his rather striking appearance, I thought his answer might be Hisui, which was a horrifying idea.

“This is the Kitakami region.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “Oh good, not Hisui…or Orre for that matter. Doubt I’d survive in either.”

The Zorua gives me a… maybe a ‘searching’ look for a moment. “I was led to believe that individuals in your situation tend to have amnesia, how much do you remember?”

“Quite a bit more than an amnesiac but… the specific nature of it is probably going to be hard to believe, not to mention it’ll take a while. I’d also like it if you can answer some questions for me, too. This has all been really disorienting.”

The ghostly fox smiles faintly, pausing a moment to think, and makes a show of seemingly turning his considering head-tilt into a rotation going far past what neck joints should allow for anything not an owl, before standing up on his hind limbs and using his front paws to right it.

I freeze a moment out of surprise, and then-

“Bhahahaha, that was a fun one~!”

The Zorua smiles in a much more genuine but also much more animalistic manner, showing gums and lips that didn’t look like they belonged among the living. “Thank you! Are you perhaps proposing something of a story-time?”

“Yep.” I smile back, something about the fox’s excitement almost infectious.

“Well, we’ll have to wait for my friend and denmate to return, but- hoh… it’s been a long time since anyone asked either of us for a story.”

Chapter Text

  Capital-B Berries in the Pokémon franchise were always a little bit of an odd topic, in my view.

  Mechanically speaking, in the games, the first ones introduced were a renewable healing source or cures for status conditions that could be used mid-battle, automatically even, without necessarily wasting a turn and without requiring your player-character to spend money on potions, but they were expanded over time to do far more than that.  In terms of lore details, they were a much blurrier topic. Some Berries had the names or appearance to resemble loosely magical versions of preexisting fruit of one sort or another, while others were less obviously derivative and more just utterly strange to envision as a real fruit.

The one thing I know for sure? Oran Berries are frickin' delicious!

  In the time between when I woke up and now, my vulpine host had pulled out a rough earthenware jug and basket, left briefly, and returned with a jug of water along with a basketful of chestnuts and what looked like a middle-ground between blueberries and clementines. Oran, as I immediately discovered with the first bite, is sweet, vaguely citrusy, and oddly enough almost herbal in flavor just as much as it is fruity. It’s all gentle enough, though, that I could understand why it would be a cheaper or less ‘trendy’ option flavor-wise.  The gentle balance to it was probably for the best, given the circumstances.

  At some point, sitting there with my eyes closed enjoying a mouthful of Oran and having a moment where I wasn’t being bombarded by yet more new things to process, my attention turned towards poking at the pit in my shadow with my new sense. one of the Phantump from earlier playfully brushed the edge of my awareness, sending me some sort of faint impression resembling a giggle, before seemingly leaving the pit for shadows elsewhere.

That’s when I remembered that my new sense wasn’t just from my own shadow, though the other ambient shadows in my awareness were more like clouds next to my own shadow’s inky abyss. Thinking about it in terms of negative space and how to visually depict what I was sensing, perhaps in a drawing if I ever had the time and inclination, saw me poking about in my new awareness taking in every little odd detail I could of what were almost like a dappling of dark, smudgy, loosely-intertwined puddles, with the occasional presence inside alternating between flitting about or resting so still as to be nearly indistinguishable from the shadows.

  …It was oddly nostalgic, almost.

  It brought to mind memories of spending hours when I was little crouched still next to a pond or on a rock by a creek trying to spot things in the water to scoop up with my net or catch barehanded. Frogs, crayfish, and various aquatic insects or insect larvae, for the most part, with the rare baby turtle. Fish were too quick and evasive to catch on my own with a net at that age, turtles as well with the added issue that they might well bite and bite hard, and in the case of adult snapping turtles were also far too large and heavy for a small child to even attempt to lift, let alone catch. Snakes near bodies of water were also something I never even considered catching, even before I saw a camp counselor mess up and get bitten on the palm by a water-snake with anticoagulant saliva once.

messy business, that.

Garter snakes in the backyard I’d go after, but I learned caution early when it came to snakes I didn’t immediately recognize, even more-so around water.

  I was eventually stirred from my musings when I noticed something odd outside, a large moving spot where, unlike its surroundings, the cloud of the shadows didn’t penetrate at all. The sensation was perhaps like feeling where a rock was in a body of water by the way the current moved around it, because I couldn’t feel any shadows inside the spot either.

And said large gap was out in the woods, steadily approaching my general location.

I opened my eyes, tensing a bit with a faint crackling as I turned to look in the direction of the approaching presence.

“You sensed him, did you? no need to worry, that’s my denmate.” My host says, my actions having apparently drawn the Zorua’s attention.

“What… is he?”

The fox falters a moment before glancing my way again, something in his expression and stance softening yet firming.

“As I said before, a friend.” His voice and posture suddenly lack the almost theatrical quality they held up until that moment. It’s jarring, and perhaps that’s the point… or, more precisely, it’s in aid of the point.

“Okay.” I nod, relaxing a bit with an exhale.

I shift positions, trying to ignore the crackly scratch of dead leaves and tiny twigs on the den floor that definitely weren’t there when I sat down.

“Why not describe to me what you think you could sense? Understanding does tend to help put unease aside.”

“Alright… I was sort of getting a feel for the shadows in the area, which felt sort of like a fog everywhere but also puddles after a rainstorm in the darker spots? Your friend, he’s the only spot I can sense where the shadows are completely absent, like a boulder in a river, but not quite. It… it’s not just him being a Normal-Type, because you’re one too but you don’t- actually, why couldn’t I sense you at all?”

The fox gives me a smug smirk that’s far too laid-back to be anything but played-up at my question “Ah yes, that. Wouldn’t be a proper illusionist if I couldn’t hide my presence properly.”

“That… doesn’t entirely answer the question?”

“Oh it does, though for now I’d prefer it left to interpretation.”

  The deceptively soft yet solid thud of a footstep precedes the door opening in that oddly swift but unhurried manner of someone returning home, and I’m treated to a very thorough visual explanation of why the door and doorway were quite so large, even if the question hadn’t really occurred to me to ask before that moment.

One of the most consistently striking things at first about this whole situation had been just how expressive Pokémon were as real beings instead of pixels or polygons on a screen, but it was more than that, too. The ‘Bloodmoon Beast’ was instantly recognizable given his distinct appearance, but there was a world and more of difference between the mostly smoothed-flat expressions, shapes, textures, and postures of the 3D models, and seeing the living breathing being.

“Well then, you finally woke up from your nap in the briars?”

case in point, the deep and almost musically resonant telepathic snark and the quirk of his brow on the side not encased in something resembling hardened clay.

“Yep.” wow he’s tall… Maybe bigger than some cars, even on all-fours…

“Our guest here asked for a story-time, we were just waiting for your return.”

“Hm, I’ll go light the hearth, then.”