"This is the ocean, and we're at a port."
"Whoah." There was a breathy awe in the fox's voice as it looked out over the tumultuous masses, sights and smells completing the vibrant seaside market. "So many words! The patterns are making patterns in the concepts!"
Sighing, Kiyo just continued to drawl about life in the seaside city, pointing out vendors and buildings and reinforcing what she'd already told her. "We're going to have to find somewhere to stay tonight."
"Just stay awake!" Kiyo had to refrain from gritting her teeth- child or not, the fox tended to not understand some of the most basic concepts. "The stars are pretty… they burn so nicely. So densely…" Kiyo got the sudden impression that she'd meant that part literally.
Scary.
That was another way to describe the fox- it was unnerving to be in her presence. As if there was something, seething, just beneath that pelt and kind voice, a shifting absolute, law of reality, that said against this being she would not survive. "I… uh… we need to sleep, though. I need to, you can do whatever-" she winced when the fox perked up at that. Nothing good was going to come from letting her roam, but it was too late now.
Well, maybe she was looking forward to it. Just a little- it'd been far too long since they'd been run out of town.
They reached the inn quickly enough, a rickety structure propped up half by a nearby warehouse and half by the whims of the ocean breeze. Worn wood creaked as they entered a bustling common room- busy, yet mostly clean. It was clear why this had been the place recommended to them- the vibrancy, the energy in the atmosphere along with that edging half step above total anarchy… it was a lively place, and Kiyo couldn't help but smile.
Slipping into a seat, she set the fox on the stool beside her and ordered a large drink. Immortal soul though she may be, this permutation of her body was hilariously fun when drunk. Barely three seconds into her mug and she was already spewing it across the table as the fox copied her motions- awkwardly, for certain, but it was hilarious to see the barkeep do a double take at the vulpine paw raised in the air. "I'll pay for the kid!"
The barkeep gave her a wary eye before sliding another mug down for the fox to eagerly grasp between its paws and slam its muzzle into. Kiyo lost the battle to laughter then, slumping against the bar as tears of mirth streamed down her face- then yelped as the glass exploded in a snap of brilliantly hot flames that caught the attention of the entire bar.
There was a long minute of awkward silence as the fox looked more and more embarrassed under the patron's scrutiny, sheepishly wiping its tail across the faint spatial anomaly left where it'd scorched cohesive reality. "It… tasted bad? Taste is strange."
Kiyo muttered a curse and scooped up the fox, throwing down a few bills to pay for the damage and quickly moving to their room. "So! Today we're going to have a lesson about property, and why you shouldn't destroy others'. Or take it. Usually…" the look of befuddled confusion plastered over the fox's face was adorable.
Fire soaked up the lesson, and Kiyo hoped she'd internalized it- forlorn hope, maybe, but hope nonetheless. "You patterns are strange. Nice! But strange. You can follow your sleeping patterns, and I'm going to go explore." Kiyo groaned in exasperation as she tucked herself beneath the covers, watching those burning eyes as she drifted into unconsciousness.
………
Sleep. She rolled the word on the edge of her mind, and tried to speak it like the patterns did- sleep. "Yiip." Frowning, she tried again a few times, unable to get it to sound like more than a petulant squeal. Why sleep, anyways? Seemed like such an absolute waste of energy and time- definitely time. Who would sleep when they could… not sleep!
Satisfied with her resolute logic, she pawed open the door and slipped downstairs, trotting into the near-empty commons room. The tasteless-drink man was still rubbing at small entrapments with a cloth and carefully counting out the squat metal cylinders that formed the base of the economic patterns. Patterns run by patterns- an artform made accidentally.
She was cut from her musing by the realization that the barkeep was staring resolutely down towards her, expression unreadable. "So… you're back. I'm not even sure what you did to my table. Everything's… wonky there." He hesitated, but her genius deduction to sit on one of the barstools prompted him to continue. Success! "That fire was really something else. I can see why that woman picked you up- you'd make a great firestarter in the wilderness." A short laugh, tinged slightly with a bittern emotion she didn't quite understand and didn't want to feel burbuled out of him. "I don't even know what I'm doing, talking to a fox. I know everyone, and only a few know me-"
"Hey! I can totally talk! Not with words, but I can totally talk!"
The barkeep jerked, glass dropping out of his hands to shatter on the floor. "By the divines… I… what?"
"I did say I can talk." A moment passed in silence, fox gazing evenly at the barkeep, barkeep looking back with the sort of complete shock that signified his worldview had been entirely uprooted. The fox shrugged. "A few seconds ago, but if someone says they can talk, they can talk. Because they're talking to you- that's how talking works."
"I… what?" A distinct undertone of exasperated confusion was starting to bleed into his speech.
"I get it! You're one of the defective patterns. Don't worry, I'm pretty sure several-" a concept, like healer, like magic- "can heal you! Like… put the patterns back into proper alignment and all that."
Nervous, now. "What?"
"I already said you were a defective pattern." A second's pause. "And I said I could talk, which you seem to keep forgetting. Don't worry, I'll say it again. I can talk."
"I get that! I'm just… confused?"
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The fox grinned. "Great! I'll go an look for someone to fix your pattern, because you're one of the pretty patterns on this planet- the other planets have patterns, but they're so much less interesting than the patterns on this one…" she rambled on for a while about all the planets she'd been to- and the stars, couldn't forget the many variations of stars she'd visited over the years. They had a unique sort of austere beauty to the turbulent flow of their inner layers, and a simple manipulation of the fire as they burned could create all sorts of interesting patterns…
At the end of that, the barkeep was completely lost, likely due to the lack of advanced astrophysics classes readily available to medieval innkeepers. “I… you think I’m pretty? Sorry, I’m rambling-”
“Hi Rambling, I’m-” the fox’s mischievous cheer faded, replaced with a frown. “Well, I’ll go find someone to fix you Rambling, bye! Have fun with the taste annulling liquid!” She leapt from the bar and bounded out the door, ignoring the spluttering and general protests from the barkeep as the streets’ night enveloped her.
Patterns shifted beneath the pallor of dark, constrained works of incredible complexity settling into simple things of behavior, drifting off to sleep even as a few didn’t. Shadows skulked at the edge of vision, yet in the faint tinge of fire that clung to the chemical reactions within their cells she knew them on the deepest level.
She saw the dockworkers as they carried the last of the cargo off the ships, the lamplighters as they carried her flame- she spent a few minutes following behind a lamplighter and sniffing out everything he lit until he noticed. The sound of pure fury had been hilarious, as had been the wonder as a storm of sparks drifted in iridescent white to reignite the flame, casting the street in a brilliantly warm glow.
She liked the wonder more.
Watching as she walked through the empty streets which showed the weakness of their age, she saw the few businessman and bureaucrats still awake at this time of the night, carrying their precious load of very important paperwork. She loved those human patterns, she really did, but there was something funny to seeing just how they panicked when she lit their stuff on fire. Honestly, they should be thanking her- a suitcase of fire, especially the stable, material stuff- that was hard to make- was so much better than paperwork.
Upon seeing a particularly important person in especially fancy clothes step from a larger mansion she set to work on her master plan, carefully following the man as he slipped away into a back alley to meet with some rather disheveled looking folk. They took the suitcase, which had a bunch of those paper slips which made the backbone of the economic pattern, before whispering softly to the man and setting off in a different direction.
Curious, she followed the disheveled humans, plans for replacing the paperwork with fire paperwork mostly forgotten. Probably because it hadn't been paperwork in the end, but that wasn’t important- she could always make money out of fire! People would like that so much more than they liked paper money.
Fire was superior in every way, even if it couldn’t fix Rambling’s patterns. Perchance these people could do that… she continued to pad after them as they ducked into some incredibly secret and hidden nook in the wall, guarded by shadows and spatial twisting that literally put the place in its own unstable spatial pocket.
Pursuing from an outside perspective she moved with absolutely no stealth through the hidden tunnels outside of realspace, deftly avoiding black-swathed figures and armored guards by stint of being both adorable and ankle height. The amount of people who didn’t attack her when she gave them her make-Kiyo-tell-stories puppy eyes was frankly ridiculous. If they couldn’t even notice her… she felt her hopes for fixing Rambling begin to crumble- but she persevered, ducking out of the tunnels just out of phase to the two thugs.
Thugs… there was something she remembered about them from Kiyo’s stories- she’d been one! That must mean they were as cool as Kiyo. Watching with bated anticipation as they entered a tall tower, flickers of reality-warping power undoing locks and slicing steel doors asunder. The higher they climbed the less subtle they tried to be, blasts of flame and light blowing apart walls even as viscous traps responded in kind.
Naturally, she walked through them without regard. They couldn’t hurt her… the only thing that had hurt her was that one time she’d tried to burn time out of existence. Shivering at the memory of pain she burst into the final room, an expansive dias of shattered stone and falling flames, the edges of reality pressing in tightly around them under the weight of so many attacks flung and countered.
Computing that the time for subtlety- which she had lots of- was up, she stepped between two of the largest attacks- an intense beam of scintillating light roaring like shattered glass, and a tsunami of fire.
They hit her, and disappeared in a flash of fire, burnt out of existence so thoroughly that their casters didn’t remember throwing them. Two more attacks started to build up, only to pause in sudden confusion as the sudden dissociation of doing the same thing twice hit them. Maybe the fox that’d appeared in front of them also contributed to their general state of confusion. “Hello.” There- a polite greeting would help things.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it didn’t.
The wizard-looking fellow recovered first, propping himself up on his staff as his eyes bored into her own, head tilted a few degrees in puzzlement. “...what?”
In a stunning display of camaraderie between enemies, the two assassins also managed to recover quickly, flipping back to a defensive formation behind the shattered creations. “What?” And, from the slimmer one which looked the most like Kiyo- “What is this critter doing ruining our very high profile mission to kill the grand wizard?”
“Oh, angry you couldn’t kick me off the tallest tower in the city? How dramatic, finding the one day I’d be up here with most of my energy trapped in projects.”
“It was supposed to be poetic!”
“Nice! I need someone to help me fix Rambling- the patterns are off. So, I was talking to him earlier in the night, and he kept…” she stared in dawning horror at the blank faces she received. “No! Not you too! Kiyo’s perfectly sane, but everyone else is always like-”
The assassin stared at her in complete and total befuddlement. “What?”
Unfortunately for the two assassins, the wizard managed to quickly parse the request for what it was. “I’m a rather capable doctor myself. I’m sure if you could help me with this unprovoked and unfortunately competent attack, I’d be perfectly willing to assist your comrade.”
“Thanks!” Spinning about with hackles raised, a itty snarl ripping itself from her maw, glaring at the two assassins who tensed for a fight- before she spat a beam of white-hot incandescent starfire fifty feet wide through where they’d been standing. They, half the tower, several large mountains in the distance, and every window in the city were obliterated in an instant- the beam of seemingly endless power slicing through the atmosphere for several more seconds before it flickered out.
The wizard gaped. “How… what was that! I’ve never seen something with that much power!”
The fox, the Fire pranced a bit- “fine brush, for touch-ups-” all too happy to explain.
A singularly unimpressed gaze found itself focused on her. “That was an attack of the largest scale.”
“No- I got really good at it, though- it’s meant for fine details when carving planets… melts too much ice, but it’s really nice for planets with a high iron…” she gave much the same rant she’d given to the innkeeper, except to someone with some context of the ridiculous power she was speaking of. “... and I thought, any of my larger tools would blow up the city. The people living there would probably find that mean.”
“...what?”
“Not you too!”
“Apologies, I must simply say that your power is remarkable- I don’t have a ‘broken pattern’ as you seem to put…” he squinted then groaned in exasperation as he noticed the spark of mischief behind those eyes. “...you’re way too clever for your own good-” a thought came to him, unbidden but extremely tempting. “Do you think you could take me planet carving on the way back to the inn?”
………
Kiyo woke to screams of terror, rapturous prayer, heartfelt confessions, and general chaos. Groaning, she looked out the window- saw the whirling patterns getting slowly burnt into the moon, and decided she’d rather be asleep.
At least they hadn’t been kicked out of the city.