spira_rp | Some legends are told...

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Some legends are told...

Aerith had been right; it wasn't a quick journey back.

Lea's route, achieved by pressing further into what Fang came to know as the Bancouri border-desert and then backtracking along the river was, indeed, longwinded. It was also safer, that much was clear. Ignoring the infrequent swells and waterholes along the route, the number of monsters was greatly diminished from what they could see roaming in the distance. Smaller plate wyrms, wyverns and helms could very occasionally be seen beyond a haze of wind-thrown sand, all species better left alone.

Desert monsters were typically large reptiles, creatures that didn't crave water like mammals did, or smaller pack hunters who got most of their water from their kills and seldom visited the riverside except to hunt at waterholes. The waterholes, while more dangerous than the fast-moving river, were still something of a boon, for they often saw small herds of prey animals, or larger lone monsters, which were of as much interest to them in terms of food as they were the other creatures that hunted there.

Mercifully, the waterside hunters weren't too dangerous. Weird gators with false, hinged faces had come as a surprise to Fang, but the one foolish enough to pick a fight with her was easily dispatched with a spearpoint to the soft, unarmoured flesh beneath. Gigantoads, though slow, were better skirted around. Unlike the gator, they were not edible. Their poisonous skin saw to that.

The long journey didn't bother her, at least. She'd been on the road for longer getting from where she had started to the Chocobo Eater and travelling with a supply of fresh, flowing water was much more preferable to stopping and filling up heavy waterskins every few miles. It helped that the river allowed them to wash the sand, if not the chocobo, away from them more regularly.

The company wasn't bad, either. She wasn't sure they were hardened Hunters like she was, she couldn't shake that feeling, but if they had only recently picked it up as a job, they were learning remarkably quickly. Where she was from, Hunting was a lifestyle, not a job, something you took to from a very young age to build up your strength and stamina. It wasn't the case here. It was lucrative, apparently, but still something you could just elect to take on or give up as you pleased. She felt fortunate to have joined up with a trio with formidable fighting and healing skills, nonetheless.

Abilities aside, it helped that they also weren't bad people. Lea was more social than Saix, and Aerith was more levelheaded and friendly than both of them, for all Saix attempted to look like a voice of reason for the group. All three had one thing in common. They were odd. The boys were very powerful fighters, but the way they handled themselves, and their weapons, and their elements, just didn't feel normal, not when they seemed almost naive about certain aspects of Chakra manipulation while using it in odd ways otherwise. Something told her that they just weren't normal for the world. Being displaced by centuries didn't make her feel any differently about it. Aerith was just different. Absurdly good at healing, that was for certain, and very in tune with the natural world.

She had a feeling that they probably felt the same about her. Even though they were definitely strange, they knew more about the world than she did. The collapsed city had been her tell, she was sure of it.

As she thought about it, she hardly noticed the warmth gradually leaving the air. Night was falling. Travelling at night would probably have been easier on them all, especially the chocobos, but sleeping in the heat of the day wasn't a viable option. It was time to find somewhere to set up camp.

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Aerith sighed, almost wistfully. "I can't wait until we get back," she said. "I'm going to have a bath, when we do," she said, in that same tone, "with bubbles."

She petted her chocobo again and it followed Saix's towards their chosen camping grounds for the night, and she flashed Lea a quick smile. She'd been living with him since arriving in Rabanastre, and it was a cosy arrangement, if not a formal one. The flower selling went quite well when she was there to do it. She'd progressed from a basket to a cart, and she could probably do with a bigger cart.

Nominally, she was making money so she could get a place in Rabanastre on her own, but, well... she liked being at Lea's, and he seemed to have grown used to all the flowers everywhere now. Not to mention that if she left there, she wouldn't be able to come and play healer for them on expeditions like this, not with her own rent to pay.

"I hope the flowers are okay," she said, with a slight frown.

Lea glanced at Aerith worrying about her flowers and smiled a little. If anybody could manage to keep flowers alive in a desert, even when she wasn't there, it was her. She'd managed to grow them in Midgar, where sunlight almost never reached the ground. They'd be fine. A bit dry, probably, but fine.

"They'll be okay," he said.

Making camp wasn't too difficult an affair. The riverbank, at this point, was monster free and largely level, so with a backing of rocks as protection they each unpacked their sleeping things and the food they'd be eating. Lea went looking for dry plant material to burn for the night and came back loaded with it. If there was something deserts had in abundance, it was dry plant material. When he returned, the camp was set up and felt cosy, if cold.

"Looks like I'm lighting the fire again," he said, doing his best to sound put upon. He didn't do a very good job of it. It was hard to complain about lighting fires seriously when you were, well, him.

He arranged some of the dry fuel in the pit that had been made for the fire and put the rest aside, a good distance away. He dropped a small fireball on top and the pile erupted into flame. He added some larger sticks, mostly driftwood that had become stuck in the bank in the wet season and left there when the water receded, on top of the fire and stood back.

Having a fire elemental in the party was certainly useful when it came to making fires, Fang thought. There was certainly much less messing about with the usual kindling, tinder, fuel arrangement when you could produce a fireball so hot it both negated the need to start a fire slowly and burned away what remaining moisture lurked within the wood.

"I can't imagine why you always get landed with that job," she said airily, pulling thick parcels of meat from the saddlebags.

While fruit and vegetables hadn't been easy to come by on the way, they hadn't been entirely absent. A two-season weather system meant that during the wet season things sprouted from the sodden, sandy soil and they'd managed to find a few of these things along the banks of the river. Nothing special, just a few wild onions and edible grass roots, but enough to make a stew or skewered meat a bit more interesting.

"Stew or roast?" She asked.

Saix looked over from where he was lightening the chocobos' burdens and loosening saddles and reins, to much ruffling of feathers and happy warking from the birds, to throw Lea a glance that would have nailed a lesser person to the rocks behind him. He sighed, with a faint rumble of disapproval, and finished his task. He left Aerith the task of feeding the birds, but the weight would be too much for her to attend the task of making the birds comfortable for the night, so as much as Saix preferred not to fuss with the chocobos, someone had to do it. They needed their rest as much as the traveling party did.

"I have no preference," he said, in answer to Fang's question. It wasn't a complete truth; he generally preferred his meat roasted, but the evening promised cold air, and a stew was more warming and filling to see them through it.

He relieved his own chocobo of its burden, finally, the tethered claw of the chocobo eater floating eerily on the end of its tether. The bird warked once before stepping neatly over to join the rest, where Aerith stood with the greens. Then Saix made his way over towards their chosen sleeping area making sure to give Lea a brief dig in the shoulder as he passed him. The fire was already deliciously warm and inviting.

Aerith fed the chocobos as they came up to her, happily chatting nonsense to the birds as she served up their greens for the evening.

"I vote for stew," she said, answering Fang. What she wouldn't give for a plate of salad, at this point. She didn't know how the boys managed with their choice of diet, but she longed for lettuce. Stew with some wild onions and roots was the closest she'd get right now, though.

A nice warm stew and snuggling up in her sleeping bag sounded not half bad, anyway.

"Stew it is," Fang said, not waiting for Lea to weigh in on the decision. She didn't mind, Aerith preferred stew, Saix said he didn't care either way and Lea would undoubtedly either shrug non-committally, or choose the same as Aerith.

She got the stew together quickly enough. She fetched and boiled the water, adding a few drops of potion to purify it, prepared the vegetables, threw them in to flavour the stock and set about cutting up the tougher bits of meat into smaller chunks. A boiling would do them wonders, especially after she ruthlessly tenderised them against a cleaned rock.

Trail food was never going to be five star cuisine, but it was edible, warming and nourishing enough to fill you up and keep you going on a long, or in this case very long, trip.

Before long, all four were seated around a roaring fire in the darkness of the desert, all waiting for the stew to be done.

It never failed to surprise Lea, just a little bit, that monsters weren't attracted to fire. Plenty of moths were, but monsters tended to view camp fires as something they should avoid, not run towards, despite the potential for food sitting around it. He wasn't sure whether it was prior experience, or the fact that a fire in the desert night was unnatural and best avoided.

Either way, the fire was most welcome. It was larger than strictly necessary and nearly engulfed the stewpot that, like the Chocobo Eater's creepy claw, was floating, unheld, above the inferno while it bubbled.

He couldn't wait to get back to Rabanastre, the place that he was starting to consider 'home'. The nights were hardly less cold there, but the paved streets held in the heat of the day and the stone buildings, while they kept the occupants cool in the daytime, did provide a little warmth after being baked by the sun all day. He'd laughed about his little apartment having a fireplace when he'd first moved in, but it hadn't lasted, not after he found himself lighting it more often than not.

He found himself wondering what Fang was going to do when they all reached the city.

Seated in the dark, on the outside of the group - there had been an unsaid but firmly stuck to agreement that Aerith was never positioned on the fringe of the camp when they settled for the night - Saix looked content. The stew was starting to smell appetising, and with only the firelight to see by the night's sky was peppered with stars, splashed across the dark like Saix remembered his school paintings of the night sky seeming when they'd been done with a toothbrush in white paint and flicked with a piece of card. The moon wasn't full, but its odd crescent lent enough light to the landscape that the river was a silver ribbon on the landscape, and the desert sands were an expanse of pale luminescence and shifting shadows from the fire.

He enjoyed this. He was with the people that mattered, and away from the ones that mattered in unfortunate ways, in an environment he enjoyed. It was growing cold, and he wouldn't object to the creature comforts of a bed, and a shower, and washing machines, and not requiring chocobos to get around, but on the whole this was... pleasant.

His face showed it, too. Saix's expression was serene in a way it very rarely was as he looked out across the sands, watching for shifting shadows that were more than moving light or tricks of the eyes in the darkness.

Aerith was seated in the middle of the group. She'd noticed that the boys tried to keep her there, whether they realised it or not, and it was sort of cute that they looked out for her like that.

She didn't need to hold her hands out to the fire. It wasn't cold enough for that yet, and Lea was very, very good at setting up camp fires that didn't require constant tending to get them going properly. They were hot immediately, and you benefited from them straight away. She watched the stew in the pot, with her hands looped around her legs, seeming deep in thought for a moment. The party wasn't silent, but it was quiet. Saix was giving off this sense of serenity and contentment he'd had every night since they'd caught the chocobo eater, Lea was steeling himself for a night in the chill, again, and Fang...

She wasn't sure about Fang. She seemed used to this, like this kind of thing was something approaching normal for her.

They'd be back in Rabanastre before long, now. She doubted Fang knew what to expect from the city. Aerith hadn't known what to expect from the city. Everywhere had been different from Midgar, for her, and yet, even though Rabanastre was in a desert, the world beneath and around it had pulsed with a cacophony of life that had been absent from Midgar and its surroundings. There had been people, and some animals, but the world around it had been muted, drained. She hadn't realised that until she'd got away from Midgar.

"You've never been to Rabanastre before, have you?" She asked, breaking the quiet to turn her attention to Fang. She knew the answer, of course, but it didn't seem polite to jump to the conclusion.

"No," Fang admitted with a soft snort of amusement.

It wasn't a mean little laugh, she had just been waiting for a question like that. She looked down at her hands for a moment and then turned her attention to the fire. She gazed into it for a long, quiet moment. She didn't even know what to expect from a desert city. She'd seen deserts, just small ones on the edge of scrubland, but had only heard about the large, sprawling expanses of sand in the stories of those who had travelled much further afield than she had.

"All I know about it is what you three have told me," she added.

Lea was seated a little closer to the fire than some people would be. He wasn't as near as Aerith, who they did try and keep away from the outside, but he was closer than Saix and Fang, who seemed okay with the nightly chill so long as they had a fire in the vicinity to take the edge off.

He disliked the cold nights, disliked cold. He knew he probably went a little overboard on the fire, but he didn't care. Bigger was better when it came to the two-for-one benefit of warmth and a monster deterrent.

He listened to Aerith and Fang speak, looking around the bonfire at them. It wouldn't be too unusual if Fang hadn't visited Rabanastre. He doubted that the vast majority of the population of Spira had, but it wasn't that point that made her seem a little off, or at least not that alone.

Saix turned his head ever so slightly, listening into the conversation with little more than a perked ear and a glance. Fang was strange; very, very strange, and in different ways to himself and Lea.

Sometimes, Saix still wondered if she was a Ryoka who'd been here for a while but hadn't encountered the big population centres to get the education he and the Order had received. They had gravitated to them, he remembered, but they'd also been separated on their arrival, and had searched for each other. Everyone had descended on Rabanastre, in the end, because it was frequented by the kind of slightly shady but not necessarily outright villainous people that the various members of the former Organization had come into contact with.

Luxord had fallen in with gamblers and sky pirates, Saix remembered. Xigbar had attached himself to the most powerful people in his immediate vicinity. Larxene had found someone best described as her ideal match.

Lea had come to them the long way around, venturing to Rabanastre precisely because it was a good starting point if you were looking for someone due to being one of the trade and travel hubs on the continent.

What if they hadn't met those people that had reunited them? Would they have been able to make their way living in the wilderness, as Fang evidently had? Would they come to know a lot about the flora and fauna of this world, and little about the culture?

Or was Fang something else?

Saix couldn't truthfully tell, and he listened intently, but without giving away that he was paying so much attention.

"I hadn't either," Aerith said, with a smile and a conversational tone. "I'd never been anywhere outside of Midgar before."

Her smile became a little sad as she looked into the fire. "There's a whole world out there I'd never seen, or experienced. I'm only just realising how much I'd missed."

She turned her attention to Fang again, smiling softly. "Rabanastre's a big city. It brims with life, of all kinds," she said. "You can see airships taking off and coming in to land, and people of all species. It never really goes quiet, even at night, although it gets cold," she added. "Even though it's smaller than Midgar was, there's a lot more life. The flowers don't like the desert weather much, but they still grow more easily in Rabanastre than they ever did in Midgar. That's why I'm selling flowers there; I'm one of the only ones who can get flowers to grow in a desert, and in the process, I can fill Rabanastre with a bit more of the kind of life it isn't teeming with."

She looked back at the fire, shyly. "I didn't go to Rabanastre expecting to do that," she admitted. "I didn't really know what I was going to do. I was a little lost when I first arrived."

Lea listened to Aerith tell of Rabanastre, and of her home.

He hadn't spent much time in Midgar, but he had stayed there for long enough to know that it was worlds apart from Dalmasca's desert capital. Midgar was apparently the pinnacle of Spiran modernity, at least on the continent of Valendia. It was a monstrous place, all girders, functional metalwork and pollution below with very neat, very deliberate houses and businesses above. Rabanastre, on the other hand, was an old, old city made from stone, some of it intricately carved and some worn with age, that had been added to over the centuries as the need arose.

They were worlds apart.

Fang listened, not missing the sadness in Aerith's voice when she spoke.

"You won't be the only one," she said.

She wondered how similar the cities here would be to those she knew. Were cities really the same the world over, once you got past the architecture? It would certainly be something to find out. The villages she'd seen had been much the same, but also ... markedly different, in subtle, odd little ways.

A bit like her, she thought wryly.

Aerith looked at Fang and smiled at her. She liked her, even though Fang was a little mysterious, and very strange, Aerith liked her. She didn't feel like a bad person, although most people didn't, but she also didn't feel like someone who was dangerous. Powerful, certainly, but not dangerous.

"It helps if you're not alone," she said, softly. Fang was, she suspected, or had been, but even if she didn't stay with them for long after getting to Rabanastre, they could at least help her find her feet. "We could help?"

She smiled again, a trace awkwardly, and glanced back at the fire, looking into the flames. "It's," she hesitated, "it's hard, feeling alone. I know that better than anyone."

Saix turned his head, looking over at Aerith. His mouth twitched into a frown and he darted his eyes to Lea before he looked back out over the landscape again.

They'd all been alone, at one point or another. Axel had abandoned him, and their plans, in the Organization, leaving him floundering with no idea of what step to take next except to carry on into the emptiness and his eventual confrontation with the keyblade bearer. Lea had landed here on this world all alone, in an abandoned city, and been traded and conveyed like a parcel, with no idea of where he was, how to return, or whether he'd ever escape.

He didn't know much about Aerith's past, but she'd mentioned bits. He suspected that she had a problem with taking in stray puppies just as Lea had, and maybe some of that was borne out of whatever was fueling this now.

"Yeah, maybe," Fang said, non-committally.

Accepting help in the city would make her life easier but, on the other hand, she was ever-aware of the fact that by doing so she would be revealing the depths of her lack of knowledge about the world.

She could get away with some things, like current events or intricate historical facts probably taught in every schoolhouse, by claiming to be from some small village out in the Bancouri Wildlands, but other things, the basics, such as currency, wouldn't fly. Even traders dealt in money sometimes.

She gave a small laugh. It would be easier for her to survive indefinitely out in the sticks than a city in this world. That didn't help her case with looking weird, did it?

Saix's frown deepened for a moment, and he stared, fixedly, at the silvery ripple of the river nearby.

"We know you're not normal for this world," he said, addressing Fang without looking at her, and cutting to a point that Aerith seemed to prefer to dance around. "Rabanastre is a good place for those who are different to blend in, with a little assistance."

They'd received enough of that themselves, and it was true. With a little guidance, most weirdness went by without much comment in Rabanastre. The place was populated by enough different cultures and species, and saw enough mist mutants and other oddities that one person's weirdness simply merged into the colourful background of the city.

Aerith looked sharply at Saix and his butting in. He really did lack patience sometimes.

"Saix," she said, her tone scolding, and then turned back to Fang and sighed. "We all have our secrets," she said. "You don't have to tell us anything if you don't want to, but," she shrugged, gently, "we might be able to help at least a little, if you let us."

Lea stared at Saix for a moment, open-mouthed.

They had all been thinking it, of course. They had been thinking it since they met her and she failed to know what Midgar was and what had befallen it, but he still hadn't quite expected him to just ...come out with it like that.

He should have known better. Isa had always been direct, and in a different way to his own straightforwardness.

Fang laughed then, properly. It wasn't a scathing sound, or a self pitying one, but it wasn't quite bare amusement either.

"I can't even fool you three," she said, shaking her head. "All right, it's cosy enough to be sharing secrets, I guess."

She looked at all of them and cocked her head to one side, almost critically, but not confrontationally. There was something nearly gentle about the look.

"But what do you say we all share?" she gave Saix a bit of a smile. "Because something's not right about you three either."

Saix raised an eyebrow at the word 'even', turning to look at Fang with a look that wasn't sure whether to be amused or offended. He seemed to lean towards amused because he cracked a small smile afterwards.

"It takes one to know one," he said, "where unusual people in this world are concerned." He glanced at Lea before he turned away again, looking down at the ground and the dancing shadows as he spoke. "Ours is a long story," he said, "but it begins on another world entirely. Here they call us 'Ryoka'."

It meant 'traveling evil', someone had said. Saix had been intrigued that there was a word for the phenomenon, but it was also an unfortunately appropriate term for their kind. Every world they had visited had been befallen by something unfortunate.

He hoped this wasn't the case for Spira. He was getting used to life on Spira, and didn't want it to become another Radiant Garden.

Aerith felt the flicker in Saix's reiatsu when he spoke. There was something sad about what he said, something that bothered him. She knew, from talking to Lea, and from what little Saix did say about their past that their friendship had only recently been recovered, and that Saix, well... had been a bit of an ass, and still could be, sometimes.

She hadn't pried, though. She was curious, nosy even, but it wasn't her place to stick her nose in, and so she hadn't.

"We thought at first you might be as well," she said, looking to Fang with a smile, "but you know too much for that to be true." But she also didn't know things she should, which was what made her so strange.

Fang listened, watching Saix more than the others, though she did look at Aerith as she spoke. Saix seemed uncomfortable. She knew him not to be much of a talker from the time she'd spent with the group, but discussing his origins on the world apparently made him feel awkward.

"Another world?" She asked, firelight reflected in her eyes.

She had never heard the term "Ryoka" before.

Some legends are told...

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