"Michael, my long lost son. I see you've come crawling home." Those were his mother's first words upon his entering the room.

"Don't be like that, Angelina," he grimaced.

She glared at him, her stance rigid, one hand on the mantelpiece. "You missed your own party, you little brat. Do you know how much-"

He cut her off by slamming the door shut behind him, walking further into the room and throwing himself down into one of the easy chairs by the fire, legs over the arm and hair hanging down behind him. Stone help him, he needed a bath. He could feel the road dirt seeping into his skin.

"I know I missed my own party." he looked at her upside-down, hands behind his head, trying to pretend he was less angry than he actually was. "You think I'm fucking ignorant? Something came up."

"Don't you use that language with me." His mother leant back against the cold fireplace, shoulders against the marble of the mantlepiece. The clock by her face told him it was late morning, early afternoon, so they'd made better time than he'd thought.

Already he could feel his anger cooling back to a simmer. It always took him so suddenly.

Angelia carried on speaking, staring down at him. "You storm out when you're asked to help with prep, and you don't come back for over 24 hours? How can I not think it was deliberate, you little shit."

"I had my reasons," he averted his gaze to the ceiling. "Look, I meant to come back. I just wanted to give Roots-"

"Roots?"

He grimaced. Oh, that was going to get him in trouble. "The new horse. Hi- Its name is Roots now."

She wrinkled her nose in distate, "you named it?"

"Look," he closed his eyes. "It's complicated. I had to name it something in the moment, because I'm pretty sure the kid I found didn't know what a horse was, and she kept insisting I tell her his- its name."

"I see, I see." Angelina crossed her arms, face dark. "So what you're telling me is; you missed your own party simply so that you could pick up yet another orphan. One who's so poor they don't even know what a horse is. Michael-"

"And then, after a whole lot of bullshit" he cut into her rant, "as I was bringing her into the city, I got an Achievement notice. Buttercup, if I'm reading it right."

His mother stared at him for a long moment, before flopping down into the chair across from him. Not quite as haphazardly as him, flopped sideways as he was, but without the tension she'd been holding only seconds before.

"Okay," she said, still staring. "Start from the beginning."

He opened one eye to look at her. "I meant to come back, honest. I went down to Denny's place, picked up the letters and cards, and Hana had baked us a luck cake. Then I was halfway back, when I saw some orphan crawling out of the hedgerow."

She sighed, "oh Michael. Not again."

He shook his head, "no no, listen to me. I thought the same, but Angie, you don't get it. Kid was crawling out the hedges halfway to nowhere and looking around like it was a completely normal thing, dusting herself off, and I was curious, so I stopped to ask if she was okay."

Angelina looked at him, expressionless.

"Anyway", he hurried on. "I talked to her for a bit, and get this. She can't speak Resper, and she doesn't speak any other any language I know, either. How weird is that, right?"

He adjusted his position in the chair to be somewhat more normal as he waited for her response.

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"But," Angelina frowned, and then paused. "Huh. A child of traders, maybe? She must be awfully young, to not have been fixed yet."

He shrugged, "I thought six or seven at first, but I'm coming to think she's just small. She seems too bright to be that young. She might've been raised by traders-gone-bandit who didn't want to learn one of the local languages, was my theory?"

Angelina pursed her lips. "There are rumours of a Fragment out in the forest, that they use. She should still have been assimilated via that."

Michael paused mid-adjustment, halfway through kicking his shoes off.

"Seriously? There's a Fragment and the Politeía hasn't done anything about it? That might even be a governmental issue."

"You'd know better than me," she shrugged, leaning back, "focus on your story."

"Right, right. Anyway, this kid starts hooting and whistling at me in lieu of a real language, and I think 'oh, she's just mad'. But then, she's awfully consistent about it. She has a whole different language, if you can call it that, for when talking to Root- the horse, and when I finally get her to repeat my name, she can make the… The sounds of it, mostly, so she's speaking something. Then after we'd swapped names, she wanted one for the horse, so I had to come up with something."

"She gave you her own name?"

He winced, "I think so? It's some horrible two-tone whistle that I apparently cannot get right, as she looks at me like I've murdered her dog every time I try. I honestly gave up pretty quickly on that one."

He wet his lips, considering it for a moment, and then shook his head. "Nope. I'm not even gonna try, that way lies madness.

"Anyway, she was scared of Root- the horse- or something, I don't know, so she wouldn't ride, and I thought 'I can't just leave this bandit kid with no language here on the Road'. She'll get picked up by monster hunters or something and sold for parts."

He stared at the cold fireplace, at the mantlepiece, at the slowly ticking clock. "Look, I know you think it's the same as-"

"Michael you have done this three times."

"-the same as last time, but it's not. Kid looks like she's made her own clothes out of animal skins, Angelina, you have to see it. I don't know where she's been living, but she was truly in trouble."

Angelina glanced over at the door. "What've you done with her? I hope you haven't left her to shed dirt all over my dining room."

He grimaced. "Only a touch, I left her in the morning room with Tebsie."

Angelina blinked.

"Tebsie? The failed hunting dog that has tried to bite every visitor we've ever had? The one you wouldn't let me get rid of, because you 'commiserated with the anger he holds inside'? That Tebsie? Tebsie-Tebsie, Bites the Hand that Feeds?"

Michael shrugged, "they seemed to get along. He was curled up in her lap, last I saw."

Angelina stood up. "Oh I've gotta see this."

She hesitated for a moment as Michael watched with interest from his perch in the easy chair. "Hopefully they haven't run off together on some wild adventure, yet. Maybe she's a future Hero, and this is where she gets her sidekick?"

"Don't be stupid, Michael." His mother reached up, grabbed something from behind the clock and slipped it into her pocket, "are you coming?"

He shrugged, groaning as he got to his feet. Somebody would have to wash that chair later, he was so filthy. Hopefully the covers were removable. He wasn't built for all this wilderness stuff.

"Also, you were going to tell me about your Achievement," she continued from the corridor, already out of the room. "Have you been to the Stone yet?"

He rolled his eyes as he followed. "Of course I haven't, so I don't know what it is either. But if you want to know, I was bringing her up to the city- did you know she has no skills that I've seen her use- and she was whistling something at me in what I think was a different dialect of whatever she normally speaks, and she makes some hand gesture, and ding. Achievement pop. I almost died right there."

Angelina paused with her hand on the wall. "Buttercup, you said? Those normally have decent rewards. Do you think it's repeatable? The highest I've ever gotten is the Lapis, and you know how much that did, for the family."

"We won't know until I redeem it," he shrugged. "It could be anything. Show a wild-child a city. Get whistled at in seven different tones. Get so exasperated that you blow a blood vessel, be so horribly filthy you run the risk of turning into a dirt-elemental, I don't know. I need a bath, mum."

She rolled her shoulders as they proceeded down the hall, "I'll get somebody to run you one when we're done. It's a shame you didn't fall into this madness a day earlier. We had the stone booked for the party, and the fees weren't refundable. Usage for one person between the hours of eighteen and twenty one, and the square for five hours. We gave it to Melissa, in the end."

He winced but said nothing as she carried on.

"We'll pay the fee again, an achievement should make it worth it, but are you going to ask me to pay a third time for some orphan? What if she doesn't understand the etiquette, and decides to take things she shouldn't. I can't afford that, Michael, achievement or not. What if she rummages through the menus and decides to take every skill available? You can't even speak to her."

He blew out through his nose, "If you really think that, then I'll look into the Fragment, I guess. But what if she's something special? I honestly think it might be worth it."

"You always do," she sighed, touching the door to the drawing room. "You always do."