Chapter Text
When N awakened, it was to looming white wings blocking the dappled sunlight through leaves from his face and a croon of concern amidst quiet rustling. His head throbbed a little, and his stomach ached, though neither of these were new— a long time had passed since he’d been taught to live off the land as a child, and the forests had not been as kind to him as an adult, now larger and lankier and coming from having his every luxury provided for by Team Plasma.
Reshiram blinked sharp vivid blue eyes at him with another sound of concern. “You’ve awakened,” it seemed to say. A lilt in its hum with a turn of the head— “What do you remember?”
N blinked, blearily bringing a hand to his eyes to rub the fog out of his vision. “I… fell?”
Reshiram hummed an assent low in its throat. “That’s correct.” Its pupils sharpened, an unimpressed expression pulling at its draconic features. Its feathers twisted into shapes that waved in the wind which said, “perhaps this shall serve as a lesson to you in tempering your curiosity, lest you approach too near and fall into an open rift again.”
After sitting himself up with his palms in the grass, N brushed off the dirt and small sticks that clung to his back and brought his knees closer to his chest in an approximation of shame. If he was unharmed after falling from the sky, then it could have only been Reshiram who had saved him. “My apologies, friend. Thank you for protecting me.”
“No need for thanks nor apologies,” Reshiram nodded with a slow blink. “It is my duty to protect my chosen hero.”
N smiled in appreciation nonetheless, and Reshiram understood. He put his feet beneath himself on the bed of grass, and stood uneasily, looking around. “I don’t suppose you know where we are?” The plants didn’t appear to be native to Unova, but N would not claim enough familiarity with other regional flora to be able to clearly identify them.
“No”, Reshiram shook its head— a denial that N mused was likely a learned behavior from humans. “I would not be able to answer when either. Time and Space have been remiss in their duties, allowing rifts like the one we fell into to remain unchecked.”
N hummed curiously, fixing his cap onto his head. “I guess we’ll have to find out more as we go.”
Two things became clear after several hours of wandering and foraging for berries to eat.
First: there were no recognizable berries. Oran berries, which should have been the most abundant berry tree in every region, were nowhere to be found; nor were pecha berries, the second most abundant. N would rather not try his luck with random fruits and plants, but as his stomach pangs became more frequent, he realized he might have to.
Second: there were no Pokémon. This point concerned N far more than the first, despite the more immediate danger to himself if he were truly unable to find sustenance. Pokémon were the lifeblood of an ecosystem, the mechanism of perpetuation for a natural formulaic cycle which maintained the land.
While there did appear to be categorically similar creatures around— bugs most of all, with the occasional bird or mammal— N realized quickly that he could not communicate with them.
Not for lack of trying, of course; N had attempted to speak to them, coax them with gentle fingers into opening up, the way he had with the poor tortured souls that Ghetsis had presented him with in his childhood— the Pokémon whose traumas had sealed their voices and left them unable to say a word.
There was nothing there, however, when N tried. Their behaviors and gestures weren’t mapped to any meaning that N could decipher.
N was forced to contend with the possibility that they perhaps lacked a fundamental intelligence— or for lack of a better word, sentience— about them; an awareness of themselves that should have been bestowed upon them by the three lake guardians at Arceus’s bidding.
When the sun passed overhead and then dipped below the treeline to paint the sky a glowing pink, N stumbled upon a shallow brook, fortunately with clear enough water to freshen up— wash his face of the accumulated sweat of his wandering for the day, and detangle his hair from the stowaway twigs and leaves that had gotten stuck in it. A source of clean drinking water was also always a positive.
As he combed through his hair roughly with his fingers, Reshiram came up behind him with a handful of small berries caged in its claws, held carefully so as not to crush them with its strength.
N blinked as Reshiram offered up the fruits, taking one gingerly in one finger and bringing it to his eye to examine.
“Are you sure this is safe to eat?” he turned back to Reshiram, a bit of caution in his voice.
Reshiram’s tail flicked in an approximation of a shrug, impatient— “we do not have other options at the moment, unless you’d like to finally dispel your moral qualms about eating meat.”
It took one berry and popped it into its jaw as if to prove that the fruits of its foraging were edible. N frowned. “No, I suppose we don’t. Thank you for finding these, my friend.”
With the brook as a source of clean water and a little more observation of the creatures that frequented it as a watering hole, N was able to expand his menu over the next few days to include several different kinds of berries, as well as a few edible plants and herbs.
As the days passed, an ache in N’s chest, which had settled there the first time he’d tried to communicate with a passing beetle on the trunk of a tree, continued to grow.
He had never been apart from Pokémon for long. Even lacking the human interaction which N now knew defined the common experience of most Unovans, he’d never quite felt loneliness gnaw at his soul and chip away at his desire to stand up and move the way he did now.
Reshiram seemed to sense N’s listlessness, and when he wouldn’t open his eyes in the morning, it would resort to nudging N firmly on the back with its snout, then holding its face so close to N’s that N could feel its warm breath on his cheek, hear the rumble of air circulating through its lungs passing through its nostrils right up against his ear, loud and uncomfortable as the roaring din of fire.
He regretted, slightly, that he hadn’t brought any of his Pokémon team along with him when he’d fled from Unova. They had all expressed willingness to go with him, but N had deemed it too selfish of himself, too cruel to them, to condemn them to a life on the run from the international police, as it were.
It had pained both them and himself, but he’d released them all with the promise that if their fates were to align once more and conditions were more favorable— namely, if he stopped being a wanted man— he would welcome their company once more.
He hadn’t planned for Reshiram’s company during his exile. After losing to Zekrom, he thought that he might no longer be worthy of the dragon of Truth’s esteem, and yet…
Reshiram had followed him, wherever he went. Reshiram had cradled him in the warmth of its wings as N became accustomed once more to living with the Pokémon in the forest. Reshiram had offered its back as a steed for N to travel to distant lands, beyond the reach of the authorities which would seek to imprison him once more.
In a thousand lifetimes, N would never be able to repay the legendary dragon for its companionship.
Several more days in, a loud boom startled N awake, the ground beneath his body trembling, almost like a far off Pokémon’s Earthquake.
Reshiram, with the far sharper senses of the two, looked uphill past the treeline to the source of the impact.
“What do you see, friend?” N was alert.
Reshiram’s body was completely still for a long moment— silence, a pause. N watched Reshiram with bated breath of his own, afraid of disrupting the dragon’s concentration. Then, Reshiram hummed, “you may need to be wary. I believe they’re coming this way.”
“What is?” N asked.
“The human children,” Reshiram gestured with a raised wing.
N’s brows furrowed for a moment in bewilderment. What business would human children have in the dense thickets of forest that held no signs of nearby civilization? N was sure that when the time came, he’d have to re-approach humanity if only to better understand when and where the rift had taken him, but he had expected at least to have the time to do so at his leisure.
He leaned his face into Reshiram’s feathery wing, fiddling nervously with the pendant around his neck with one hand. He still wasn’t particularly keen on talking to humans. He didn’t want to find out whether he was still a wanted man or not, whether he was still known as the King of Team Plasma or not.
Where Pokémon were capable of lying to him and each other, it was often not in their nature to do so; or if they did, their lies could be systematically predicted by the advantages they would gain from deceit. Humans, on the other hand, had always seemed to N as more willing to lie for sport, whether they stood to gain anything from it or not.
The internal states of Pokémon, motivated often by their immediate survival and gratification, were far easier to decipher than those of humans, who had developed and thrived so far past the need for concern over their immediate survival, that they instead put their efforts towards exploiting each other and the Pokémon they saw as beneath them.
If Reshiram, legendary dragon of Truth as it was, could sense N’s qualms about humans stirring with his curiosity and desire for knowledge, it did not show it.
N leaned away when his mind was made. “Shall we try to observe them?”
Reshiram looked down at him quizzically. “Is it not in your nature to avoid them?”
The image of a sunset’s glow behind brown hair in the cab of a ferris wheel came unbidden to his mind. “No,” he patted Reshiram reassuringly, a motion that brought more comfort to himself than to his dragon companion. “No, let’s… see what information we can gain.”
He didn’t have to face them, he reasoned— only watch them from afar, and see what he could glean from their clothing, their language, if only to figure out when and where he and Reshiram had landed, and nothing else.
Through the trees, N heard familiar sounds.
Ground, rising up with whip-like roots; physical attacks, breaking apart environmental barriers; even the chirp of occasional lightning. There was no mistaking it— it had to be Pokémon. There was no other explanation for these feats of nature. Humans were not born with the ability to command the elements.
If Reshiram were here, N would not be able to contain his excitement and remain silent and hidden. Alas, for the sake of hiding from view, a 10-foot tall stark-white dragon was not particularly discreet, and so Reshiram had retreated willingly to a Pokeball, the only one that currently resided in N’s pockets.
He leaned forward on the tall branch he was perched on, at the precipice of falling to the ground if not for the grip of his hands on the tree’s scaly bark.
Excitement quickly churned into concern. Pokémon did not often battle at such a scale of destruction for no reason. Reshiram had mentioned humans. Were they battling at the behest of trainers? Were the trainers facing each other, or other wild beasts?
The beasts came into view first. Towering forms of dirt clods and roots given grotesque shape, some humanoid and some less so— they struck with abandon, swinging massive twisting tendrils of roots as arms upon the earth, the trees, seemingly any target they could find.
Then, came the humans. Their voices rang out, muffled by distance and scattering from the dense forestry. Moves, N registered them as shouting, though none that were familiar to him from his admittedly limited experiences in Pokémon battling.
They spoke to each other with short syllables strung into frantic sentences, open syllables leading quickly from alternating consonant to vowel and back again. None of their tongues curled to give the heavy sound of r. N recognized it as Kantonian— the shared language of the continent encompassing the Kanto, Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh regions. That narrowed down their location, but as for the time—
N nearly fell out of the tree when a girl with pink skin and hair slipped between the trees in the distance. A Pokémon? Some Pokémon were known to mimic human appearances, including Zoroarks. No; as she stood still for a moment between the trees, N could clearly see her clothing and her build— that was a human.
“死ね!!!” Behind her, another sound like an Explosion; but this time, it was a blond boy who came up behind her, smoke billowing from his palms. N unblinkingly stared as sharp combustions of light and heat from the boy’s hands, combined with extreme brute force in a running jump and punch, blasted away the beast of Earth that had loomed near her.
It had crumbled. The beasts weren’t living creatures like Onixes and Golems, it seemed, though N hadn’t gotten close enough to test that theory himself.
More importantly, it was humans, as Reshiram had said. Humans who can use moves like Pokémon.
His grip on the tree bark became sweaty.
Humans with the powers of Pokémon. A world where Pokémon didn’t seem to exist at all. A world so fundamentally wrong that it broke every conception N had formed since leaving the confines of his colorful room in the castle, that laughed in the face of his formulas and expectations.
How much time would have needed to pass for humans to evolve these abilities?
He numbly watched several other youths— all around the same age as his opposite, the teenaged hero of Ideals— display their flashy named moves with shouts of triumph and following calls of exhaustion as the beasts around them were felled one by one.
One with six arms and a mask, like a lanky human-flesh-toned Machamp with an extra set of limbs all webbed like Ducklett feet. Another with exhaust pipes growing out of his legs, similar to Blastoise cannons. There were even some passing by who appeared fully human, yet displayed full mastery of the elements, such as ice and fire with a single tap of the foot, or psychic telekinesis from a tap of the fingertips.
If they could use the moves of Pokémon… were they even human at all? Would they perhaps understand what it meant to lack a human heart?
But where had the Pokémon gone?
They must be free then, if the humans no longer needed them for battling… but that wouldn’t explain why they hadn’t encountered a single wild Pokémon in their time wandering the forest.
Had Pokémon become obsolete, driven to extinction by something N hadn’t been able to foresee?
His heartbeat raced in his ear like a drum accompanied by the rumbling rush of blood through his body. Dizziness took a backseat to the clamminess he felt from his chest to the tips of his extremities, despite the summer heat.
And before he knew it, the sweat accumulating on his palm and his fingers began to wrest his grip away from the bark on the tree, and—
“Do not fall again!” Reshiram howled an alarmed cry of dragonsong behind N, its claw gripping his shirt’s back suddenly the only barrier between himself and gravity. It had, in a flash of red light before N had even noticed, released itself from its ball.
N gasped, the air scratching past his throat to fill his emptied lungs. “I—”
“They’ve noticed us,” Reshiram’s claw tightened. “Forgive the rough ride,” was all N heard before a claw grasping at his shoulder joined the one on his shirt, and up they went, the trees becoming smaller. The wind buffeted N’s face as they ascended, and he held his arms to shield his face from the snapping branches as Reshiram whisked him away.
N did not know how long they were in the air before they descended, a much gentler touchdown than the rough takeoff.
He could not see— the edges of his vision buzzed with static, and his breathing had not slowed. It was as though his lungs had forgotten how to breathe, and then when jump-started by the one sharp gasp before he nearly fell, they had promptly gone into overdrive, pumping air in and out at terminal periodicity with no brakes.
He and Reshiram were in the future.
There was no other explanation for how the humans here would have developed powers like Pokémon if not for evolution— the passage of time bestowing upon them new abilities to adapt to a changing world.
Any hope he felt for the fate of Pokémon in a world where humans needed not exploit Pokémon for their abilities, having acquired them themselves, had crumbled at the evidence of days of wandering which implied that Pokémon didn’t even seem to exist anymore.
When N had advocated for the separation of humans and Pokémon— when N had seen to it personally that captive Pokémon held by inept keepers were returned rightfully to their homes, and their humans became self-sufficient and all the more joyful for their learned independence and the discovery of their own strengths— that wasn’t what N had wanted.
It wasn’t! He had wanted a world for Pokémon— a sanctuary for their safety, a habitat for their families, the luxuries of life and liberty that humans seemed to decry as solely their own— he never wanted the world to be rid of Pokémon, for them to somehow be driven to mass extinction—
“My chosen,” Reshiram’s croon came like a garbled signal through a filter, without the full range of communication from viewing the gestures of its body, and N bit down on his tongue, confronted by the one thing he was there for that he couldn’t even do because of the state of his human body— “You need to calm down.”
A heavy wing and opened claw came to rest gently on his chest— a light touch with just enough pressure to push him back. Another claw, bracing his back, careful to not let its sharp talons dig into skin, but still poking through the shirt despite its efforts.
N found himself with his head on the grass, blades tickling his ears past his hair, and the light from the sky through the thick branches and leaves flooded his senses.
The distant rumble of a herd of children in battle. The rustling of leaves in a hot summer breeze. The leaves, which took turns blocking and revealing the sun in periodic sequences, from the swaying of their branches and trunks in the wind, a periodicity arising from a spring constant— like an upside down pendulum, back and forth, eclipsing the burning bright rays that spread in concentric vectors from the sun.
Gradually, N learned how to breathe again.
Reshiram leaned overhead, a gray blot of feathers in front of the sun, providing a shade for N’s head to rest underneath. “Remember yourself, hero of truth. You are an envoy of reality, harsh as it may be.”
N turned his head and averted his gaze to the trees.
“There is a difference between perception and truth. Would you like a reminder of what happened the last time you formulated a truth from incomplete information, resulting in false assumptions?”
N shook his head into the grass, a bitter furrow in his brows.
Reshiram hummed. “I thought not.”
“Just leave me be for a moment,” N whispered, barely audible.
Of course, Reshiram understood. It nudged its snout against the ball in N’s pocket, and with a flash of blood-red light, receded.
N did not get up from the ground until the sun fell below the horizon once more.
“Dude, I don’t think that was an Earth Beast,” Kaminari nervously tugged at Jirou’s sleeve. “On account of it uh… flying.”
Jirou grimaced, letting her earphone jacks shorten back to their lobes. “Gee, it being massive and white and feathered wasn’t an indication?”
“Some of the Earth Beasts do fly!” Midoriya chimed in unhelpfully, and with an unfairly chipper voice for being an hour into an intense downhill hike through the wilderness, as he ran past. “Pixie Bob’s ability, Earth Flow, has been known to generate bird-like forms before, for search maneuvers! It must take a lot of balancing the mass and structural elements like plants to be able to remain airborneeee—!” his voice petered off into the distance.
Jirou and Kaminari fell into step as well, as soon as they were able to catch their breath. They couldn’t afford to be left behind.
Jirou jogged to where Shouji was ahead, scanning for more Earth Beasts with his six arms. If there was anyone else in Class 1-A likely to notice if they had a problem on their hands, it would be the only other person with a detector-type quirk in the class. “Did you see that big white thing too?”
Shouji nodded. “It left in the other direction. I don’t think we’ll see it again.”
“Gotcha, thanks,” Jirou sighed. “We should probably report it to the heroes when we get to the base for good measure. Meet you down there!” she picked up pace again.
Pixie-Bob squinted at the HUD display on her visor. The real-time locations of the twenty students blinked as they updated every second, while the smaller dots representing her Earth Beasts blipped in and out. She still had one paw-gloved hand pressed to the ground, making new ones for each one taken down.
With a low-stakes situation like a training camp for students, it was quite fun to keep summoning her minions of soil and grassroot to terrorize the students. That said, the students were progressing much faster than she’d expected, so good on them! That just meant she had to amp up her game.
Next to her, Mandalay let out a low, impressed whistle. “Look at them go! You can still see the dust cloud where they are. What are you feeding these kids, Eraser?”
Eraser grunted. Pixie-Bob could practically hear the shrug of his shoulders even though he stood behind her, leaned on the bus. “They came like that.”
Mandalay chuckled, and Pixie-Bob restrained herself from a full-on cackle. Eraserhead’s deadpan never failed to entertain.
Suddenly, Mandpalay’s laugh halted.
Pixie-Bob glanced up, past her HUD, and shot her a questioning glance, but Mandalay’s eyes were squinted towards the trees beyond the cliff, where the students were.
“What… is that…?” she quietly wondered aloud. “That’s definitely not one of yours.”
When Pixie-Bob turned her eyes back to the forest herself, there was the slightest flash of white weaving between the trees— much too large to be a bird, too bright to be a natural inhabitant of the forest. They would certainly know if a large white something was on their private property.
Eraserhead stalked up behind them like a shadow. “Will it be a problem? Do we need to recall the students?”
Pixie-Bob bit her lip and tuned back into her HUD. “At the rate they’re going, the base of the mountain is closer and probably safer. We’ll keep an eye out and let Ragdoll know to be on the lookout with her Search.”
N probably should have expected that he would be found eventually. The wilderness as Pokémon knew it in present-day Unova still always had trainers crawling about. No matter how deep you were in the forest, it was a given that if you walked enough miles, you’d eventually reach a center of civilization. Such was inevitable with the world’s industrialization.
Even so, N had hoped that he’d be able to make contact with humanity again at his own pace— to go to them when he felt ready to do so, instead of them coming to him.
In his months of travel after departing Unova, Reshiram had pointed out that he might never be ready if he were waiting for readiness as a condition for action. Change does not occur by inaction, it had said, and N too knew that to be ready could very easily become an arbitrary goalpost which became further the more N ran towards it.
He had set the following simple formula, to define his readiness: a weighted linear sum of his average heart rate when he considered the idea of making contact with humans again, the time that had passed since he last considered it, the number of days since he’d stepped foot into a human town or city, and other boolean variables of smaller coefficients such as whether he was in immediate need of medical assistance or hygiene products.
As such, at least two months had passed, prior to him and Reshiram falling into the time-space rift, of N living in the wilderness among Pokémon. Blessedly, almost all the Pokémon whom N had made passing acquaintance with were friendly to him, treating him as one of their own despite being initially wary of his eccentricities as a human.
In any case, he digressed; human society was, in practice, something of incomprehensible scale and immense unknowability to N, who had witnessed only a miniscule corner of it in his entire two decades of life.
This was why, when he realized he was being looked for, he may have panicked. Just slightly.
“安心して下さい！ヒーローチーム ワイルドワイルドプッシーキャッツのマンダレイです！今向かってるから、そこから動かないで下さい！”
In his defense, a human voice in an unintelligible foreign language, being beamed into his head as if its speaker was right next to his ear, was not exactly calming, N thought, only a little bit hysterically.
As such, he didn’t think it was too unreasonable of himself to stand up, and promptly begin running.
What could he do? Reshiram could fly him away, let him retreat further into the wilderness again, but who knew how long his peace would remain undisturbed if they saw him fleeing on its back?
Moreover, how long could he subsist on berries and plants without the guidance of Pokémon aid him? How long would he go delaying the inevitable— running from the world which had once abandoned him and now coveted him, held him tight like a shackle?
Would Reshiram’s presence beside him be helpful? Detrimental? A 10-foot tall white dragon, legendary to Unova’s creation myth— it was as good as a dead giveaway for N being the lost king of Team Plasma, a sure reason for arrest on sight. Perhaps if Reshiram remained secreted away in its ball, N could maybe feign ignorance until he found a more surefire opportunity to escape.
He was getting ahead of himself. If he was correct in his conclusion that they were in the future, then it was possible that knowledge of him and his crimes had faded enough into obscurity that the local law enforcement would not be able to identify him immediately, international police aside.
Was he willing to take that gamble? Was there any formula he could create to calculate the numerical probability of it going poorly for him?
They were approaching him now— he could hear it, the way soil answered to their whims as though they had control over Ground like the Pokémon of mountains and caves. He wouldn’t be able to outrun them, no— either Reshiram would have to aid his escape, and risk further scrutiny on them later, or he would have to try to reason with them.
After the students had finally gotten settled in at their home base, tucking into their head-earned meals, Mandalay, PIxie-Bob, and Ragdoll nodded in unspoken agreement to each other, and stepped out of the room. For the time being, Tora would be enough to supervise the kids. They probably wouldn’t get a better chance than now to investigate what they had seen in the forest.
While the path down to the base had been a grueling eight hour hike for the kids, for the Pussycats hero team sans Tora, it was a far shorter traversal of just under 2 hours, not only because they didn’t have to fight Pixie-Bob’s barrage of quirk-powered Earth Beasts for training; but also because the entire mountain was their hero team’s private property. With the number of training exercises they’d carried out themselves on the vast grounds, it would be a crying shame if they weren’t proficient at search and rescue maneuvers on it.
Pixie-Bob at the front commanded their transportation: particles of soil engulfed their feet and carried them forward as a unit, roots bending around their trajectory. Ragdoll, their tracker, scoured the trees for signs of life. Mandalay kept lookout at their rear, just in case Ragdoll missed anything. The light of the sun had dimmed, and in the descending dusk, much more was liable to blend into the shadows.
“... I see someone! There!” Ragdoll shouted amidst the rumble of shifting dirt and speedy winds.
Her Search quirk took over from there— now that her quirk had registered the individual, even if she closed her eyes, she’d be able to locate them with pinpoint accuracy, and diagnose their main weaknesses from the current state of their body.
“At our 2 o’clock!” she directed with a pointed finger, “about 70 meters away and lying on the ground.”
Pixie-Bob quickly changed course, while Mandalay sent a precursory message ahead with Telepath: “Please stay calm! This is Mandalay of the Wild, Wild Pussycats Hero Team speaking. We’re heading in your direction; please remain where you are!”
Ragdoll’s eyes shut in concentration. “It’s moving— he’s on the run now. Mandalay, I think your message scared him? He’s definitely malnourished, even just running is sapping his energy too quickly.”
Mandalay winced. “How long has he been stuck here alone? How did he even get here in the first place? Our cameras should have picked it up if he crossed the property borders…”
“Maybe the victim of a teleportation quirk,” Pixie-Bob mused, voice laced with concern. “He does seem awfully wary.”
“Hey!” Mandalay called out when the long tail of green hair on the retreating figure came into view. “Stop running! We don’t mean any harm, we just want to help you!”
She saw it happen as if in slow motion— his toe caught on a root sticking just a bit too far out of the ground, and he tumbled to the ground in a graceless sprawl. Mandalay winced. That had to hurt.
Pixie-Bob’s hands came up as they slowed to a halt, a silent signal: it wasn’t my fault he fell.
Mandalay hoped her deadpan was enough to convey: Yeah, no shit.
“Hey!” Ragdoll jogged forward, concern etched into her face, “are you okay? You might’ve gotten sprained from that— and oh, your head must be hurting,” she frantically read off the weaknesses that her quirk sensed.
When the man flipped himself around to back away with an almost cat-like hiss, Ragdoll stepped back, startled.
Sharp gray eyes stared with open hostility behind surprisingly well-kept tufts of soft green hair. Seeing him merely a few meters in front of them, the malnourishment that Ragdoll’s Search had indicated became starkly clear in the lines of his thin muscles. His clothes didn’t seem particularly well-suited to the outdoors, and signs of their extended use were evident in the dirt and grass stains on his white shirt and the little holes and tears in his pants.
Though Mandalay kept her face in a practiced public-facing smile meant to be reassuring to their rescuees, inside, she held back a severe frown. How negligent had they been, to lose an entire person in their private property somehow, and not come to his aid until who knew how many days or weeks had passed?
“Don’t come any closer!” the young man called, his voice hurried. Despite the frantic pace of his chest and shoulders heaving for winded breath— oh dear, he looked out of shape— he didn’t sound particularly fearful, so much as deeply guarded. Mandalay certainly hoped the sight of them didn’t induce fear; they’d gone with the cat concept specifically to appear disarming.
Moreover…
“Oh no, he speaks English!” Mandalay exclaimed, paw gloves held to her head.
“Ohhh…” Ragdoll backed away from the man still on the ground, shooting a troubled glance to her two hero partners behind her. “Maybe we should have brought Eraserhead along. His husband’s fluent, right? Maybe some of that rubbed off on him.”
“Y’know, I don’t think that’s how languages work,” Pixie-Bob deadpanned.
Mandalay sighed. Never a dull day with them. “C’mon, let’s put our heads together and figure out how we can communicate with him.”
The man in question looked back and forth at the three of them in turn as they spoke. He hadn’t made a move to get back on his feet yet.
Ragdoll, nearest to him, crouched down to meet his eye level. “... Hey! Food! Water! … Shelter! Come with us!”
Mandalay resisted the urge to sigh and hide her face behind her paw gloves. Though it was better than not trying at all, Ragdoll’s stiff and stunted English— or what little of it remained in her mind since their time in high school— gave her unprecedented amounts of second hand embarrassment.
The young man’s eyes narrowed. Whatever thoughts laid behind those eyes and beneath those tufts of green hair, they remained unrevealed in his silence.
From beside her, “pspspspsps, c’mere,” Pixie-Bob beckoned, as if calling for a cat.
Mandalay nearly smacked her upside her head. “He’s not a cat! And if he were, he wouldn’t understand Japanese, anyways!” she turned back to him, and in her own unpracticed and clumsy and heavily-accented English, tried to reassure him: “It is okay! We just want to help!”
He blinked quizzically at her, still silent, and nowhere closer to coming with them. There wasn’t any reciprocal indication of comprehension to their attempts at speaking English to him— not a reply, another question, or even a nod to acknowledge them.
“There might be an easier way to do this,” Pixie-Bob said in a lowered tone for Mandalay to hear— not that it was likely the man would understand regardless.
Mandalay sighed. “I’d rather not resort to it, but I guess if we have no other options… go ahead. Just remember, the priority is rescue, not capture.”
“Roger,” Pixie-Bob winked, “don’t worry, I’ll keep it gentle!”
As she said, the moment her glove touched the ground, tendrils of earth arose around the man, carefully setting his position back upright before entangling around his feet to root them in place. He stumbled, but his upper body found no purchase on the ground with his legs fully stabilized by her Earth Flow.
Besides the clumsiness, which no doubt was not helped by his subpar health, he was surprisingly… calm, about having Pixie-Bob’s quirk surrounding him. Mandalay would have expected more alarm or skittishness, maybe even some arm-flailing, given how keen he’d seemed to be on fleeing, before.
"... Right,” Mandalay collected herself. “Let’s get back down to home base and treat that sprained ankle of his.”
Unfortunately, N had to admit that he felt far more at ease when things reminded him of Pokémon. When the ground around him rose up to swallow him, it was no concern. It was, in fact, more calming than attempting to listen to their conversation for anything he could glean of their tone of voice and body language.
The last time a human had offered him a hand in a forest with the promise of guidance back to human civilization… it hadn’t ended well. N would say that he was well-justified to be more than a little wary of them.
He closed his eyes, feeling the dampened physical waves from the moving dirt sifting by in waves below him through the bed of dust they had fashioned for him. His ankle throbbed— his trip on the root must have sprained it.
It wasn’t long before they reached a large modern-looking building, with warm light spilling out of its windows. At the entrance’s threshold, a larger man in a similar fashion of cat-like clothing and a mask awaited them.
In short order, they transferred him from dirt to a bed, then rolled him into an infirmary where they took his vitals. N looked on with interest at the unfamiliar letters and characters on the digital displays, formed with rigid geometric lines and shapes. Blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature— he followed along their process in his head, as they puttered around him with machines and devices.
It would only occur to him later that his lack of response to their gestures and questions, beyond wordlessly following their most basic instructions, had appeared concerning.
They wrapped his ankle tightly with a thick bandage, and gave him an ice pack to reduce the swelling and pain. He hobbled behind one of them on supplied crutches to a small and undecorated, but comfortably furnished bedroom, where the human with long green hair and round, wide-open eyes— the one who he had hissed at, he remembered— said something: “ご飯を持ってくるから、ここで待ってね！... Stay! ”
Well, that last word was clear enough.
N chanced a glance down the hallway through the narrow opening of the door as she walked off. There was another figure rounding the corner at the end of the hall— one of the youths he’d seen running through the forest before, if N recalled correctly— before N decided he would rather not be seen and quickly ducked his head back into his room.
When the long-green-haired one returned with a tray of food, her headgear and gloves were absent, revealing a much more human silhouette. She left the tray on the table and said a few more words N couldn’t understand.
N took a look at the tray, then looked back to the door with his mouth open to speak for the first time since reaching the building, only to find the door closed and the human absent from the doorway. His mouth shut of its own accord— no use saying something for no one to hear.
He looked back at his tray. A bowl of white rice, another bowl of soup, and a plate loaded with stir fried vegetables with brown pieces of meat mixed in and a slice of pink flesh from a fish: at best, he could eat the bowl of rice, but he wasn’t certain if the soup had been seasoned with meat somehow. The smell of burnt fish tickled his nose and left his stomach churning.
He forced himself to at least stomach the white rice, even though without water it felt cloying and sticky in his throat.
When the human from before, with the long dark-green hair, returned to poke her head into the room, N sat up from where he laid on top of the bed covers.
She took one look at the untouched dishes on the small desk, and quickly turned around and shut the door again.
A few seconds later, N heard incomprehensible shouting echo down the hall, muffled through his door.
“I forgot to ask for his dietary restrictions!!” Ragdoll shouted in horror. “Did we have any more of the vegan food for that one kid left?!”
Fortunately, because the Pussycats always went overboard with their cooking, there was enough leftover to eke out a good-sized portion from the alternate meal that they’d prepared for Koji Koda.
Ragdoll reentered the room with a new tray in her hands.
“This one… no meat!” the human from before said slowly, while carrying a tray in. “Yes?”
N’s mouth opened, then closed. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to provide some form of confirmation or express some gratitude, but if they had gotten it correct, then surely not. He stood up and took the tray from her, examining the food to make sure. It didn’t make him feel sick to his stomach, which was a good sign.
He picked up the fork and dug in, only catching out of the corner of his vision the large smile of relief that had broken out over the human’s face.
“So what are we going to do about him?” Mandalay crossed her arms.
“I’m more concerned with how long he was on your private property undetected,” Aizawa groused, arms in his pockets. “That seems like a major security concern.”
Pixie-Bob winced. “Yeah… our leading theory is that he got hit with a wayward teleportation quirk. We can’t really be sure unless we ask him though, and none of us are really fluent. Do any of the kids in your class know English, Eraser?”
Aizawa shot her a dirty side-eyed glance. “I’m not letting any of them get close to a potential danger unless we really need to.”
Ragdoll held a finger to her mouth, considering. “I don’t know; he seemed pretty harmless to me,” she hummed. Before she could continue, Aizawa interrupted.
“The last time the class got attacked at USJ, it was also because of a teleportation quirk,” Aizawa’s head lowered, retreating into his capture weapon scarf. “I think we need to investigate this man further.”
“Or,” Pixie-Bob held up a pointer finger, “you have connections with the police, right? We could have him moved elsewhere while the students train. If he’s just lost, then they’ll help him get back home; and if he’s dangerous, we’ll be able to talk to him later with a translator present, after the students’ training camp ends. Ragdoll’s got him registered with Search, so he can’t escape, anyways.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Mandalay mused.
“And,” Ragdoll finally got to chime in again, “if you ask me, I don’t think there’s much chance of him working with the League of Villains at all, because…”
The other three all looked towards her expectantly.
“He’s quirkless.”
The next morning began a sequence of some of the worst days N had experienced.