From the Vast

Chapter 14: Humanity

Thirteen votes.

Just thirteen votes to decide between redemption and damnation of an innocent child, already spurned by life.

The topic refused to wash itself from Aria's mind as she ventured further away from the village, diverging heavily from her usual route. She had to see to something important before starting on her duties, someone important in fact. With just thirteen votes, seven would seal the deal in either direction- numbers weren't her strong suit, but she could figure that much out at least. Her, Marco, Sprout, and Cypress were shoe-ins for letting the girl stay, which just left three more. Just had to sway three more souls towards her side, and there wouldn't be anything to worry about anymore. Anne would be safe for certain, and they would both be able to rest easy.

At the same time, the three elders and Lumi were all but certain to vote the other way. They, too, needed just three more voices, and to Aria's despair, it felt like their task of finding said voices would end up being much easier than hers.

Lucere was almost certainly going to agree with them. She hadn't spoken much with the Altaria. Their scouting routes only very rarely intersected, but from the little she had, the deep distrust of humans as a whole was clear to sense. On the one hand, hard to blame her for perceiving humanity as a virulent plague when her day job was playing the proverbial medic and doing anything in her power to stave it off. On the other, they weren't dealing with the abstract, shapeless mass of humans and their constructs.

They were dealing with a lone, lost child.

Ruby gave Aria the impression of being generally on board with letting Anne stay, but she wished she could be as sure of that as she wanted to be. Shutting Lumi down and raising objections towards what the elders got up to back at their meeting was one thing; genuinely having no objections was another, and Aria was much less certain of the latter. Whichever points of contention she might have had, though, Aria was confident enough in the Weavile's level-headedness to be reasonably sure that they would get argued through.

Ori was... opaque, to put it bluntly. Even someone as deliberately logical as him was still driven by emotions, and it always peeved Aria a lot to have the Scizor almost never acknowledge his. It could be that he simply didn't know how to do it. It was a possibility that fundamentally confused the Gardevoir, but a possibility all the same. From what she sensed at their meeting, Ori was uncomfortable about the whole human mess, even if these emotions never breached the surface of his expression or words. Regardless of how well he could drape them with logical-sounding rhetoric, the underlying feelings were there all the same. Maybe bringing these up with him would help him sort through them and figure out how he really felt, deep down.

That left the other two scouts absent from the meeting. The idea of ever lowering their guard all the way down and withdrawing all patrols just to debate how cruel they'd be didn't sit right with Aria the more she thought about it. Still, if that's the procedure, then that's the procedure. She disagreed, but her energy was best spent elsewhere- such as on what she was heading towards.

Lariat... would be tricky to persuade, she feared. The Lucario wasn't dim, but he tended to be single-minded at times, and protecting his in-group was the sole transcendent motivation behind his becoming a scout. An in-group that a human was unlikely to ever be accepted into on an emotional level. Still, Aria could try to use Ember's predicament to appeal to his soul. She wanted to think that not even someone as stern as him would argue to repeat the misery the Braixen had been through, but it remained to be seen.

And he was the scout she was less worried about of the two.

How do you convince someone who had spent over a decade and a half of her life as a "trainer" pet to ever feel empathetic for a human? Aria had no idea how to answer that question, and thoughts in that direction threatened to start roasting her mind. The Skuntank might have been easygoing, but it's not like they ever had to deal with stakes this big before. She knew full well from experience how easy it was for smiles to be replaced with a cold focus on a whim if the situation called for it, and replacing smiles with seething anger fueled by one's own past was likely even easier.