Chapter Text
David had found the box last summer while on vacation. He was hiking up K2, the second tallest mountain in the world and the number 1 most deadly. Known as the Savage Mountain, one in 4 people who climbed it died.
He was climbing the mountain in order to win a bet with his roommate, who had claimed that David did not have what it took to climb a mountain. He had picked K2 over the the nearby Everest mainly because too many people climbed Everest that it had lost it's splendor. Plus the mountain was littered with garbage from the thousands of hikers who climbed every year. Not the most scenic place nowadays.
David had found the box on the way down, after successfully reaching the peak. There had been a sudden blizzard so they had taken shelter in a nearby cave. Inside the cave the wall he had been leaning against had collapsed, it turned out to be a false wall made of rotting wood and paper mache. Behind the false wall, he found a rotting crate and within the crate he had found the box.
The box was about the size of his head and was made of some kind of wood that David didn't recognize and covered by a layer of faded leather stretched across 5 of the sides. The front side had 13 drawers in it, 12 smaller drawers in a 3 by 4 arrangement and one longer drawer on the bottom that went the full length of the box.
David had stuffed the box into the bottom of his backpack and moved on, it had felt like some important discovery at the time. When he got home he threw the box onto the top shelf of his closet and promptly forgot about it as he began to recuperate from his journey.
He found the box again a couple months later while cleaning out his closet. He needed the space where it had been sitting to store another box full of his old manga. He took it out of his closet and moved it downstairs.
David owned the Mots Chaotiques Bookstore across from the Tom & Sabine Boulangerie Patisserie, the best bakery in Paris. The location brought him a good amount of business but other than that it was fairly peaceful. He mostly lounged around all day while occasionally ordering books and doing paperwork.
The box was placed in the backroom and promptly forgotten about once more.
— — —
Two months later, David was cleaning out the backroom looking for a misplaced box of books and once again came upon the leather box. This time, he decided to investigate it.
Forgetting about the misplaced books, David brought the box to the counter and set it down. The store had not yet opened for the morning so David was the only person there. He had a couple of employees but they didn't arrive until around 5 due to still being high school students.
David grabbed the simple wooden stub that served as handles, pulled open the first drawer, and looked inside. There was dust, a lot of dust. He didn't know what he was expecting from a box he had found abandoned in some cave on a mountain.
Blowing into the drawer to remove the dust proved to be a bad idea as the dust flew into the air and directly into his face.
"Gah! Shit!" David cursed as he waved the airborne dust away from his face. He grabbed a paper towel and wiped the dust off his face.
Once the dust settled, he peered into the drawer once again. This time, he saw something. A single feather.
David lifted it out of the box to examine it. It seemed to be an earring, the feather hanging from the stud of the earring. The feather was brown and had black stripes running through it. He wasn't sure what bird the feather was meant to belong to but it looked cool. It was made out of some kind of metal and felt warm to the touch. It was about half the size of his ear and the actual part that he stuck into his ear had a brown symbol that looked like an owl spreading its wings.
David went and grabbed a book from the nature section called 'The Great Book of Owls' and began flipping through it. While he didn't find anything about earrings, he did find the owl feather that the earrings seemed based on. The great horned owl feather looked to be a perfect match for the feather earring sitting in his palm.
He didn't know why he had found an earring based on a North American owl inside of a strange box that he found in the Himalayan mountains. But who cares, the earring looked awesome.
After washing the earring off in the bathroom sink to prevent any kind of weird mountain dust infections, David placed the earring into his right ear.
Suddenly the earring began to glow. A ball of brown light emerged from the earring and floated around David once before stopping in front of him. As the light faded, some kind of small creature appeared. The creature resembled an owl. It had small feathers on its small body, wings on its side, and talons where talons should be. Its head was massive, much bigger than its body, and had a set of bushy eyebrows above its dark brown eyes.
The creature resembled the picture of the great horned owl inside the book sitting on the counter, but its proportions were all strange. Also, it didn't seem to need its wings to stay airborne as it bent them to place one to its chest and one stretched outward.
"I greet the new guardian of the Box of Rejects." The creature said with an accent that sounded strangely British. Why did the strange creature from the box he had found in an eastern mountain have a British accent?
"What are you?" David asked.
"I am a kwami, a creature bound to the miraculous, meant to grant people extraordinary abilities and powers." The 'kwami' answered, "My name is Hoott, the Owl kwami of knowledge."
The word miraculous tickled something in David's brain. It sounded familiar but he couldn't quite remem-
Oh, right the magical terrorist.
Ladybug and Chat Noir, heroes of Paris, held miraculous as did Hawkmoth, supervillain evil guy. Hawkmoth wanted Ladybug and Chat Noir's miraculous for some reason. David hadn't had much experience in the matter. Neither him nor his friends had ever been akumatized and no villains had ever messed with his bookstore. He believed one of his part time employees may have been akumatized at some point, but he didn't know much about it.
"So, you can turn me into a superhero like Ladybug and Chat Noir?" David asked the creature.
Hoott looked mildly confused for a second before their dark brown eyes flashed blue and their confusion faded. "Not quite, I am a special case and cannot transform you. However, I can answer any question you may ask me with guaranteed accuracy, provided I understand the question."
"Woah, awesome. I misplaced a box of books somewhere. Can you tell me where it went?" David asked.
The kwami blinked a couple of times before its eyes flashed blue once again, "It's by your foot."
David leaned down and picked up the box of books that had been pushed under the counter. It was nice that he now knew where they were, but he had lost half an hour searching for them and it was annoying that they had been right there the entire time.
Well, no point dwelling on it.
David carried the box to the shelf where the books inside it would be placed and began to stock the shelf. A few seconds later, Hoott floated up to him.
"Um, is that all?" The kwami asked.
David paused his work to think for a second. He couldn't think of anything else he had lost but he did have another question. "What are your pronouns?"
Hoott was silent for a second, "Excuse you?"
"Your pronouns, what do you prefer? Like he/him, she/her, they/them, or whatever." David elaborated as he stocked the shelf.
"Such interesting customs you people have. While kwamis themselves do not have a gender, I still think of myself as a male being, I use the he/him pronouns." He answered.
"Coolio." David said as he finished stocking the shelf. He took the remaining books and moved them to the backroom before checking his watch. It was time to open the store.
— — — — — — — — — — — —
Hoott watched the new guardian's long brown hair brush against his back as the man unlocked the front door to his shop. He seemed like a good man. As the de facto leader of the reject kwami, Hoott thought it his responsibility to ensure that their guardian was a good person.
And if not, to flee with the box.
The last person who found the reject box in their possession had thought it to be full of demons and had sealed it within a mountain cave. Before that, it was a woman who used Hoott's knowledge to gain political power. Before that was another who used Blubb's power to make great military achievements. Being the leader of one of the only two miracle boxes left on the earth, Hoott had to ensure that any guardians would not abuse the kwami of the Reject box or their powers.
This man David had simply asked where his lost books were and had wondered the preferences of Hoot himself, which had not happened in quite a while. His brown eyes showed no intense greed. He did not seem interested in power nor glory.
The man seemed happy with his life.
Hoott hoped that meant he could grant the kwami inside the box happiness as well.