Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Quenched Torch

Chapter 20: The Joys of Flight

"Hm... I spy something... uh, green," Rye said, leaning out of Cap'n Brine's bill and gazing down at the vast forest below.

"Shaghh..." I groaned, dragging my paws down my face. We had been playing this same game for maybe half an hour by this point, and I could tell we were both bored of it. It was mildly entertaining the first ten times, not so much the next twenty. As if to prove my thoughts, Rye quickly gave up on trying to continue and shifted in his tight spot. Surely there was something else to do other than this?

'Really, why is I Spy the go-to game in the field? Couldn't we just as easily play fire-water-grass?'

I was about to try and inform Rye of this groundbreaking idea when I stopped myself and took notice of my paw, particularly its lack of any fingers to play such a game.

'Again, curse you, stubby paws.'

Without anything else to do, I made sure Cap'n Brine wasn't hitting any turbulence and opened our bag.

"Uh, what are you doing?" Rye asked, giving me a dubious look. I shrugged as I started to dig through the seeds and berries, idly looking for anything to do. As I dug deeper, I felt a flat shape brush against my paw. Pulling it out, I was met with our notebook, stained but still in one piece.

"Oh, wow, I forgot about that thing." Rye said, leaning over to see as I cracked it open, finding my crude stick-figure drawing of a human staring back at us.

"Huh. We never did use it after that, did we? Could have helped a lot, I could have started teaching you to write..."

My ears perked up as Rye said this, my revelation back in Bassa Village coming to mind.

"Ah, Rye! Sheah?" I asked, miming out the act of writing and gesturing to the bag. Surely being able to read Unown script meant I could write in it, too?

"Oh, uh, you want a pen? Um... okay, then," Rye said, handing me a piece of charcoal from the bag's side pocket. Squinting in concentration, I turned to a blank page and started trying to write. Drawing random lines and squiggles, I tried to remember how exactly to put them together into letters, then those letters into words. My inner monologue wasn't much help in writing, seeing as it was mostly just noise and images that didn't translate into words easily, and my primary arm being broken left the characters looking sloppy at best, though with enough effort, I managed to squeeze out a recognizable word among the page full of failures.

'The. Just... the. That's all I could get out? Well, at least I know I can write something, I guess...'

Despite my disappointment in my limitations, Rye didn't seem to care about how little I could do, moreso that I could.

"Wait, are... a-are those Unown runes?" he asked, eyes wide. "Wow, th-this is... this could be great for us! There aren't many Pokémon out there that can understand those; around here, only Guildmaster Arcanine can for sure! You... uh, you can read those, right?"

I nodded, earning an excited grin from Rye as he looked over my shoddy writing. As he did, however, his smile faded, replaced with that familiar troubled look on his face.

"Dill and I would always try to read Unown script like it was Gray-tongue... y'know, s-see the weird things it would say..." he said, looking away from the book. He stared off for a minute before sighing.

"I... you've figured my story of what happened with him is a load of crap, right?" he asked. I shamefully nodded, causing Rye to avert his gaze from mine.

"Uh... I-I wasn't able to get it off my mind after what happened with the Krokorok, so Sinni and I were talking about it back in Bassa Village. Uh, it was just... really nice to actually talk with someone about it, you know? She also told me that... that..."