Inheritors

Part 7

The vulpix crawled out of the blaze, absently shook embers out of its fur, and curled up on the warm ground to sleep.

Deus finished his sandwich. The nidoran was thinking it wanted another radish. The sandshrew was thinking it could escape. He recalled the sandshrew and offered the nidoran another radish.

Deus was heading to Mt. Moon. Pewter had been unremarkable, little different from his home of Fuchsia. The vulpix was still not quite ready to be used, but the sandshrew and nidoran had been enough to win the gym battle.

It was a bit impatient of him (and therefore childish, and therefore missing the point, were it not the point to start with) to rush like this, but while he didn't think he was ready for a fourth pokemon yet, he wasn't expecting to encounter any pokemon he wanted in the area either, so heading through now wouldn't matter and so, he rationalized, wasn't really rushing.

And, well, the way to Mt. Moon was interesting. The whole area was mountainous, and just to get to the caves of Mt. Moon a path had needed to be hewed through the bedrock on the way. Pokemon must have been used, because it was much wider than it strictly needed to be despite the effort it would have taken for them to move rock on their own. Just for the large-scale, though, because the edges were craggy, irregular and unfinished. It was always strange to encounter things like that. Bits here and there had been smoothed, mostly at the corners where trainers would have been staring directly at the wall as they approached and had given in to the temptation to fix things. It only made the contrast more obvious.

It was times like this he had the most trouble understanding their predecessors. It had been possible for them, after all, even if their abilities were like a dim star to the sun. If they'd used pokemon to carve the path, they could have used pokemon to finish it. But they hadn't. They'd just...left it. Like they were satisfied, like it wasn't a grating, present irritant every time they looked, like they didn't even notice.

Either it hadn't bothered them, or they hadn't been able to rouse themselves to fix the problem. Both were as hard to imagine.

Oh, this place was tolerable. There was an aesthetic to the unaesthetic, in small doses, and Deus, for his part, found it easy to leave the sides of the path alone. But this wasn't a used path between places, it was a destination in itself. If he or anyone else had actually made it, intending it for actual travel on a regular basis, they'd never have left it so flawed.

Deus reflected that most of the things left alone as examples of the predecessors were largely examples of their mistakes and sloppiness, then that it was hardly his fault it was their distinguishing feature.

At length he was brought out of his thoughts by a geodude uncurling in front of him and jumping up and down. Deus crouched so that it reached eye level on its jumps, examining its thoughts.

They were unusually fast, more like shifting sand than the slow, gravely minds of the other geodude he could feel around him, and it was easy to see the most recent ones swirling around. It was curious why he was there. In lieu of answering he reached in and pulled up memories of it asking another that same question, tacking the response firmly down onto its poor memory, like pressing sand to sandstone. It was an unusually flighty geodude, which perhaps explained its uncharacteristic curiosity.

It would be an interesting one to take. The slower thinking pokemon were largely ignored as tiresome and faintly abominable if one considered them too long. A tolerable geodude was a rare thing. But he already had the sandshrew, didn't want a fourth pokemon yet, and handling the vulpix's still half-unformed mind was enough for now. He'd leave it for someone else.

He'd grown tired of contemplating the irregularities around him and jumped from the path to the top of the wall above it. He began heading southeast, hopping between the thin trees that clung to the rock.

Deus had no interest in actually going through Mt Moon. Cerulean would have to wait for later anyway - facing water types with a sandshrew and vulpix was a poor choice that would lead to a lot of tedious battling.

Thinking absently of what he'd do next, he trotted along. It was more regular here in some ways, and in others...the lack of any pretense of deliberateness, any thinking hand at work, rendered the entire concept moot. The wavy dimples in the stone where it dipped several feet into a large depression, a bit rising utterly off-center in what was not at all a circle yet rounded in such a way as to not suggest any other shape either, were here simply interesting scenery, not things that lingered uncomfortably close to horror.

The world, Deus felt, was regular in its irregularity, and always moving slowly toward a sameness. Things done by people should be the opposite, a clear brand of purpose across what was assembled by chance and accident. It was in the borders and edges that disquiet arose, purpose mingled with irregularity and unthinking crudeness, signs such a thing was possible.

They were strange things, those that came before, Deus thought to himself, and then put the line of thought of of his mind.