Inheritors

Part 8

Complex species often have set timespans for development to take place, with distinct points to start and stop growth, and in many cases growth does not take place uniformly. During one portion of life, the growth of legs may be prioritized, or of body. Altering the time spent in various life stages thus alters both final size and comparative proportions.

The sandshrew darted toward one of the tunnel-crevices in the rocky ground. Deus grabbed it and marched it back over. "Stop doing that."

It thought something that, in a more ordered mind, might have been articulated something like How can I escape when it always knows?

"I can read your mind," Deus pointed out, annoyed.

It was easy enough to flatten down such things from moment to moment, and it was, of course, child's play to puppet the sandshrew about for however long he wanted. Actually altering thoughts was a trickier business. Anyone could just carve chunks out and make new pieces to fill in the gaps, but it was messy and almost impossible to do on a small scale. Psychic pokemon could influence thoughts more delicately, like tiny eddies of water pulling away a few grains of sand from river banks, their weaker powers forcing them into more precise application. Had Deus tried, it would have been a tsunami.

There were some adults who had practiced and trained to mimic such skills. A person, after all, could do anything a pokemon did, with effort. But it did not come easily, and minds were not like things, with an easily identified state of rightness that damage diverged from. If he erased something, what he replaced would be a replacement, a second thing made to fill the gap.

It would be losing his temper. It would be missing the point.

Being annoyed was a part of this too. Sometimes, parts of the world would be annoying, but should still be left be.

Mountains were not smooth, and yet they should not be. If they were smooth water would flood down them in torrents. Plants could not grow on them, or dirt collect, or pokemon live. They were not right or wrong, but changing. So it was with much of the world. He had learned this, and he had also learned that merely knowing was no good if he forgot simply because something annoyed him.

He backed the sandshrew out of its rapidly expanding burrow. "Stop that," he said again, wondering if he should find another pokemon yet. A belligerent female nidoran was approaching, and he directed the sandshrew at it.

They continued in this fashion for a time, until something large and armored lumbered out from the shallow cave it had been resting in.

The rhyhorn was enraged. It slapped the sandshrew aside with one swing of its armored head, knocking the smaller pokemon out instantly. Deus was about to recover his pokemon when the rhyhorn barreled toward him in a dead run.

He smashed it through the treetrunks, his eyes glowing blue.

A tendril of adult attention brushed lightly against his mind. "I am not a baby!" he retorted, shoving it away with mingled irritation and indignation. "It was only a few trees, I will fix them I was going to already." He hopped over to the rhyhorn's side, considering the groaning rock pokemon. It was relatively powerful, but he had no interest in that beyond some challenge - you were supposed to catch young pokemon, which made for better owned pokemon. If all of his had been tractable he might have taken it on, but he already had the sandshrew. He pulled the trees back into position and held them there as he reknit the wood until they were almost indistinguishable from how they had been before having a rhyhorn shatter them (He was not able to fight the temptation to fix the bubbles marring and stoppering the older xylem throughout the wood, and a year from now the only thing preventing a keen eye from telling for certain which ones he had first broken and then fixed was that they would not be only trees to put on a strangely large flush of growth. He was, after all, hardly the only trainer to pass this way).

\\Small burrow,\\ said a tinny, echoing voice a bit later. \\Wouldn't fit you. Other not so good at digging, but would've fit you. Walk in tunnel, if'o crouch. He dig up something for you? What's?\\

The speaker was dangling by its roots from a thin branch behind him.

"I do not need anyone to make me a tunnel," he said. He waved a three fingered hand and dirt sprang from the ground, then dropped again.

\\But you've,\\ it insisted. It waved a leaf. \\Keeping. Small sand digger only. Only digging good. Not for fighting.\\

"It can," he argued. He was intrigued. It was funny trying to carry on a conversation with something that thought in such simple terms. It was so strange to imagine being curious at the world and yet not understanding it. "It is just not strong enough for something like the rhyhorn, yet."

\\Not need for fighting. Are can killing, you. Kill trees, unkill trees. Not need. Why?\\

"It is not about killing. I am a trainer."

\\Is why?\\

"To get better."

A while later and one pokemon closer to a full set of seven, Deus felt a mind at the edge of his current range. It was not that of an adult, rounded and perfect, or the hazier fuzz of another child. What it was was...not exactly a square so much as what a square might become if it was remade over itself a thousand times, all flat lines and peaked edges forming into an asymmetric mass that, viewed as a whole, was slowly working its way into a rough approximation of a sphere. A pokemon approaching a person. (He wondered what her mind had been like.)

He sent a gentle greeting to bump softly against the delicate spiky walls. He was rewarded with a torrent of babble that reminded him just somewhat of his few encounters with babies' thoughts, but full of math and endless calculation, trying to break the world down into something simpler for it.

Deus didn't approach it more closely. A pokemon like alakazam should be left alone to do what it wanted. They weren't pokemon, not completely. Clever pokemon like dragonite were respected, but alakazam were something different, something trying to be more than it was. Not a person, necessarily, or not by the same route. But something.