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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 19:42:07 GMT -6
And while it was possible to forge a telepathic connection with a ribbon, Aster wasn't in any hurry to jump into that particular commitment. He had ribbons enough, and knew better by now than to open his mind willy nilly to a creature he didn't know well, whose character was still uncertain. You could take those off, but you couldn't use them on too many different creatures before the magic charge in them wore out or something, and Aster didn't want to open his mind to anything he might regret.
There was already enough going on with him that he didn't want to add more to his plate if he could help it. Not that he'd had a lot of trouble coping as of late, but the nightmares were still a persistent force in his life. That alone was reminder enough about how bad it used to be, and how bad it could still be if he wasn't careful.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:03:22 GMT -6
Besides, even if things were better now, it felt like he had only barely just gotten his own life under control again. Or maybe even for the first time. Yes, thinking back on it, he wasn't sure he had ever really had control over much of anything until these last few years. Which made the current state of things all the more precious for it, really. The grounds here were pretty peaceful. Aster looked around, feeling slightly at a loss as to what to do with himself now that he was here.
Not that the peace was a bad thing, of course. It was preferable to the chaos of some of the other months, and he would never want to be so bored that he went looking for that kind of excitement. Not to mention the fact that a plethora of strange things and loud noises would have made it harder to keep Nightshade under control.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:03:49 GMT -6
But he also wasn't used to this kind of... lack of direction, he supposed, for a lack of anything better to call it. Even when he had last been here with Rhys, the Felusine had been asking questions and chasing after things. By contrast, Nightshade was simply standing there. Maybe he was taking in the scenery. Maybe he was similarly at a loss as to what to do with himself. It was possible that this was his first time being taken out far a walk in the snow. Not terribly likely, all things considered, but still not outside the realm of possibility by any means. As far as Aster could tell, the Wiurn was well adjusted enough, but he didn't have a lick of training to his name before Aster got his hands on him, which meant that he probably didn't get a lot of one on one active interaction with his last owner.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:04:33 GMT -6
Not that this was particularly surprising or even all that rare around here, actually, In fact, it was more often the case than not, just by virtue of people owning so many creatures, sometimes, with little enough time to dedicate to them all. Even Aster was guilty of it, though he didn't keep an extensive collection. It was just a lot of time and effort to train up one creature well, and he didn't see too much sense in training them at all if he wasn't working with them towards a goal. Then again, not everyone trained their creatures period. Many of them weren't so hard to live with even when they weren't trained, by virtue of being small companion animals or otherwise too benign to pose much of a threat to anyone.
A Wiurn didn't fall into this category, but there were a wealth of other creatures who did fit that bill.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:05:59 GMT -6
And many of those creatures made for popular companions among the people of the labs. Not everyone raised their creatures for protection or work, and while Aster couldn't imagine living that sort of lifestyle, he was at least aware that other options existed.
And if some of those people with no time or no desire to train formed sorme of his clientele, especially a few years earlier when he had been doing more of his freelance work as a trainer for hire, well, at least it paid the bills. Fortunately now, between a couple of successful runs at the Pit and some of his other ventures, he had less need for that kind of job. He had been alright at it, but it had been taxing in other ways. Dealing with all the individual clients one on one, for example, had turned out not to go well with Aster's personality, a among other things.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:06:29 GMT -6
"Look at you, you big lug," he said to Nightshade. The Wium turned to him at the sound of his voice. It wasn't a quick or a sharp turn, as it the creature were startled, but merely a smooth, matter of fact signal that he was paying attention.
That was a little unnerving, funnily enough. Maybe Aster was just becoming easier to spook in his old age--- ha ha, very funny.
Though it was true, come to that, that he hadn't actually thought he would live this long when he was a kid. It wasn't necessarily that he expected to die young, but more that he didn't really think of himself as having a future at all. When you were living hand to mouth the way he had been, you didn't think about much more than getting through the next day, or maybe the next week or season if things were going well for you.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:07:37 GMT -6
He had dreamed big, jesting with some of the other kids he ran with back then about getting his lucky break and making it big somehow when he got older, but everyone did that. And everyone doing it knew that they were just dreams, million to one odds, and that no one really seriously expected to get out of where they were. And twenty four was old for a street rat. Twenty four was a grown man who had established himself somewhere. Not a single one of the urchins he'd seen were that old. Not all of them died, but if you hadn't, by then you were inevitably picked up by someone or something else.
Aster held Nightshade's gaze, and tried to figure out what it was about the Wiurn's attention that unnerved him. It wasn't that the Wiurn himself had actually done anything to warrant it, as far as Aster knew.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:08:22 GMT -6
If Nightshade had some subtle psychic ability about him, maybe Aster would be wrong about that, but there hadn't been anything about that in the papers he'd received after he had purchased the beast, at least. And it wasn't the usual intimidation leveraged by large beasts and predators. Aster knew that one full well, living with a Thundergug and some other creatures capable of it, and he didn't sense that from Nightshade.
Maybe it was just that it was the kind of reaction he expected from a creature he'd been working with a lot longer, and Nightshade was still a relative stranger to him. It felt out of place, like they had jumped ahead in a script or something. It was a funny sort of thought to have about a Wiurn, but the more he thought about it, the more that explanation felt right with everything that had and hadn't happened until now.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:09:28 GMT -6
"What's you deal anyway?" he asked. Not that Nightshade could tell him. But the Wiurn did incline his head as though he were listening real close, and the tendrils around the base of his jaw and skull waved gently in the chill winter air. Aster glanced dubiously at those tendrils. As far as the papers indicated, they weren't dangerous. No poison or venom or anything stranger and worse. They were just a bizarre variation on whiskers, made to sense vibrations in the air or something, though whose idea it was to make them like that... No, it didn't bear contemplating.
Sighing, Aster reached out a hand to the Wiurn who nudged it with the tip of his nose. He had done something similar when Aster had first met him, which was a part of what had prompted Aster to purchase him to begin with. Not the only reason, but still, a part.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:09:55 GMT -6
Maybe the strangeness had gane all the way back to that moment, come to think of it. He had never quite felt so much like a creature had chosen him rather than the other way around, but there was no feeling of destiny like so many other people had described.
Instead, he felt more as though someone had taken an interest in him, and he didn't know what they wanted yet. And a lifetime of being stuck in the low end of the power ladder made him instinctively leery of that particular arrangement. He knew that a Wiurn wasn't capable of that level of calculation, but that was something he knew intellectually. On a visceral level, he still felt uneasy finding himself the subject of such regard. Historically, things seldom ended well for Aster when people took an interest in him. In fact, he would go as far as to say they never did.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:10:57 GMT -6
The Wiurn wouldn't be able to answer his questions, of course, and in the meantime he supposed all he could do was push through his own paranoia. In this case, at least, that was almost certainly what it was. "Well, come on then," he said to the Wiurn. Maybe part of getting over it would be spending time with Nightshade until it stopped feeling so off that a creature was actually bothering to listen to ariything he said. Though he supposed it said a good deal about how much his current companions had heeded him in the beginning of their acquaintance.
But he could have told anyone that for free. Some of them still didn't listen to him now, when the mood took them. Sure, they would perform when it mattered, but the problem with training up a creature was that after a while, a lot of them got used to being challenged.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:12:09 GMT -6
They wound up a good deal more clever than they started out. And once they got to that stage, they knew as well as you did whether they were on or not. And if the stakes weren't high enough, then what use did they have for obedience?
Aster took a meandering path through the snow that blanketed the grounds of the mansion's surrounding area. It still technically counted as the mansion grounds, being within the area enclosed by the fence, and being subject to the same dramatic changes as the rest of the property. But this time of year, it was kind of hard to tell it from the surrounding area that wasn't under the jurisdiction of the mansion's strange properties. The snow was present outside as well as within, and everything was hushed, except for the occasional calling of birds which were likely out foraging for what they could find to eat.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:13:54 GMT -6
If there were any, however, they had yet to show themselves to Aster, though he kept an eye out for them, to give himself something to do. And in his wake, Nightshade followed.
Maybe the Wiurn had understood the command somehow. Some creatures managed to work out a little in the way of basics for themselves even without real and proper training, especially if they were custom made and therefore attuned to watching and waiting for cues from a handler. Maybe Aster was wrong about his lack of training to begin with.
Or maybe he was just following Aster of his own volition, for the same reason that he behaved so docilely in general. It was strange to describe a creature that looked as Nightshade did as docile, and it was true that the Wiurn was still no lap pet. It wasn't really that kind of pliant facility that Aster meant.
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Post by Noa on Dec 12, 2019 20:16:28 GMT -6
Nor were his appetites less fierce when it came to food. Aster had watched Nightshade's first few feedings, wondering whether the Wiurn was lacking in aggression altogether, in which case he would be poorly suited to most of the things Aster would eventually ask of him. And he had no desire to drive a creature to fighting that did not naturally have at least a little aptitude for combat. Even Grunty, when sufficiently motivated, could mount an offense on his own. There wasn't much, admittedly, that could actively provoke the Gug, but if anyone attempted to contest his claims on his food, for example.
And while Nightshade wasn't territorial about food the way that Grunty was, but he tore into it with the efficiency of a creature who knew that its primary means of feeding was to kill. Well, maybe he was reading too much into it. There were other tests that Aster could do later.
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Post by Renathan on Dec 12, 2019 20:25:11 GMT -6
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