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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:38:24 GMT -6
Yet he could not bring himself to attack it. He had the instincts that governed his simple mind that told him killing the thing swimming near him would enrich the soil, but the thought of willingly getting near it caused the shakes of his leaves to turn into shivers. When it swam around him, he could only shut his eyes and hope that if he could no longer see it, it would no longer be capable of seeing him.
She watched the soft-skin take their pliathor in a lazy loop around the crossbreed, just wide enough so that the larger creature would have plenty of time to pull itself away if the crossbreed decided to attack. He made no attempt to, but the trees on his back rustled and shook so furiously that Haix wondered if he would have a single leaf left on his back by the time night fell.
((Marsh-14.0))
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:38:41 GMT -6
It was odd to think of the massive beast as cowardly. The scrap of paper containing all the information the labs had been willing to put out on him had described him in such a way that she doubted he was capable of even feeling fear. Then again, the note had mentioned that his kind was just usually too big and tough to be worthwhile prey for most, and the pliathor was nothing like most. It dwarfed even him, the sail-like fins that crested its neck looking to be just as long as the tallest of the trees that covered his back.
And now he was scared. Not enough to attack the creature and the soft-skin, but enough to shake and quiver as if beset upon by hundreds of different winds. It was a perfect start to training him to learn to ignore such things, for had he shown no fear now, she might have mistakenly thought he was already hardened to such things.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:39:08 GMT -6
The pliathor peeled itself off its repetitive course after a while, starting to randomly dip below the water and raise above it as it drew nearer to the crossbreed. It was well within the range of the roots when it finally stopped advancing and resumed circling it, paying no heed to the twitching crossbreed other than to use it to circle around. The whistles could be heard on occasion, but Haix thought she saw some sort of binding around the pliathors mouth that explained why it changed direction without the noise.
He fought to keep it in sight as it moved around him, the currents generated by its smooth movements tugging him one way and then the other as his roots slipped deeper into the mud. They held him in place even when he panicked and tried to swat at the pliathor, even when his will broke for the time it took water to bead and fall from a high leaf and he had struggled to flee.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:39:22 GMT -6
Yet, somewhere in his mind, he realized the thing was not attacking him. There was none of the sense of danger he had gotten from the incoming balls of cold, only a bubbling panic that moved throughout his belly each time the beast's head came back into view, each shining fang on full display for him. The intruder never did anything more than that, though sometimes it paused and something tiny on its head wiggled and seemed to take a closer look at him with a tiny pale face. It was less intimidating than the beast, but he could only stare at it for a few seconds before looking back at the intruder.
Haix did not like how close the pliathor and the soft-skin were getting to her beast, and the pair reacted as if they had heard her, drifting lazily away from the crossbreed to move between it and the shore. There were more blasts of the whistle, the pliathor settling into stillness as the soft-skin dove off to it and swam to where Haix was standing.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:39:34 GMT -6
The crossbreed did not hear the conversation between the pale thing and the lizard thing. He did not hear the offer that was made for him, nor the subsequent rejection of it and any offer the soft-skin made. But he did begin to start glancing away from the massive intruder to look around the lake bed. At first he only dared to look away for a few seconds, trying to take in all of the fish and weeds near him with a single glance before fixing his gaze back to the intruder. These glances grew in length until he only spared the tiniest of looks at the intruder, the leaves on his back no longer rustling as he gazed on the soil.
The soft-skin took her rejection of a trade well, then proceeded to reject any form of payment. It had, it told her, just wanted to see a beast crossed with a pliathor.
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Post by Alma on Apr 25, 2020 16:40:10 GMT -6
The soft-skin then dove back into the water, and Haix tensed, waiting to see if it planned to steal the crossbreed through the brute force of the pliathor. The soft-skin instead had the beast resume circling the crossbreed a little longer, and even Haix could see from the shore that he no longer quaked quite so much. It was a relief to see that he had resumed his original placidity by the time the pliathor suddenly jerked away from him and took off in the direction of the docks.
The sun had fallen a decent distance towards the ground during that time. The crossbreed failed to give chase to the pliathor when it swam away, instead apparently content to float in place. That, alongside his lack of shaking, hopefully meant he would not panic if confronted by something that bared its teeth at him, which would mean that this portion of training was finally over.
((Hardy-End? Marsh-15.0 Haix-216.0))
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