---

Any Port, Part 2: Taiga.

---

Lennon studied the map with concentrated effort; it could not come with them and the only map feature of Rhiannon’s replacement device was etched into its hinged cover. The girl waited quietly, listening to the sound of envelopes sliding across each other rapidly. Sasha was more interested in something on the wall near the map of the greater Azom Heights and Allylidene Forest area. “That Ford guy must be really good at his job! It says he’s employee of the month in January, and in February, and in March, and in April, and in May, and in June, and in July, and in August, and in September, and in October, and in November, and in December, and… that’s all.”

The shuffling sound paused briefly. “There’s another plaque just like it halfway up the mountain. I think that’s plenty.”

Rhiannon asked incredulously, “The mail service gives employee of the month to a mailman who would scatter Mr. Mortimer’s stuff all over his yard?”

“No, but if I did that it wouldn’t be undeserved.”

“Why?” she asked, “What did he do?”

Another pause. “Something inhumane and inhuman. I don’t want to talk about it, young lady. In fact, unless you need some stamps, I’ll appreciate you minding your business.”

Lennon signaled his readiness, and together they followed Sasha’s lead as she brought them northward. Rhiannon sang softly to herself, quickly missing the accompaniment of Adrina, and kept her mind off of the troubles that weighed upon her mind, spawned equally by her ursaring experience and her time in the cabin. The field where Lennon’s feet failed him provided no challenge, and by nightfall they were high enough to notice the change in the environment and atmosphere. Lennon pitched the tent, Sasha started a fire, Rhiannon fixed their meal, and her eevee delighted in the snow until he was called to attention.

“I got some special treats just for you, boy. It’s a little early, but merry Christmas.” She withdrew from a plastic wrapper a light and fluffy snack cake and offered it to her eevee, which consumed it eagerly and leapt into her lap while licking his chops once it was gone.

Sasha immediately complained across their private channel. “Again you get goodies. You always get goodies. And, you never share.”

The eevee’s only response was to stick out his tongue. That expression, not unfamiliar to their method of banter, was about to change to one of remorseful confusion.

“I wish you would like to share with me. I liked sharing with you when I got goodies.” Sasha wandered away with her ears and tails and spirit half-drooped.

“Sasha? Would you like---”

Hisses of a fully-powered ember turning a little snow into a little steam indicated the vulpix’s departure.

After a short conflict with his mistress that followed, despite it regarding a completely unrelated topic, Lennon’s current expression became similar to Sasha’s last. “I refuse to let my guard down again. When we are home and safe, I will obey, but out here, I will keep you safe at any cost.”

“You can do shifts with Sasha at least. I’m sure the doctor’s right. You can’t keep pushing yourself for my sake.”

“I wish that I could. I wish that I could do more.” He drew close and found her embrace.

“I know, Len. That’s why you’re already doing too much.”

The eevee slipped away in favor of becoming pinned between twain friends. He considered following the melted trail that led to Sasha, she now rustling bushes and making happy sounds that indicated that she found some berries or something else delightful, but what good would that do? It a matter of his actions rather than his words, he sat near the fire and tried to think about a way to show her how he felt.

Despite a reluctance to release him and his warming fur, Rhiannon put the mission first. “Lennon, does the reporter at least have a radio circuit? If there’s more storm on the way, we should try to know while we can get back to town, or Mr. Mortimer’s cabin, in time.”

Lennon fiddled with it for a moment and some sound came out. “I found a ‘WX’ button, but---” as he held it up and rotated it slowly, it interrupted him with a weather report being read by a machine over significant levels of static noise. “More snow is coming, but not tomorrow.”

Rhiannon breathed a sigh of relief, and a small puff of frost. “Alright, let’s sleep now so we can get up by dawn. There is a ice rock near enough that we can get there and at least be on our way back in a day, right?”

Lennon’s delayed response worried her slightly. “Yes, but we have to cross a river. It looked wide and the map showed no bridges. If Adrina could fly---”

“We’ll find a way. Bring the kids back.”

Lennon barked curtly, Sasha returned a whine, and the eevee yielded his attention and rubbed against Rhiannon’s leg before she recalled him.

Inside her tent, Rhiannon tried to get comfortable, but the ground was rather inconsiderate, presenting rocks and sticks that demanded to be felt through the tent’s floor and Rhiannon’s new bedding. Lennon sat padmasana at her feet, eyes shut and aura sensors splayed. Sasha laid on Rhiannon’s torso, tails splayed similarly and her limbs no more orderly. Her natural warmth was comfortable, but rather localized. It also had a beef.

“When do I get to evolve?”

“I thought you liked being little.”

“I’m not the little one, now.”

“Once he becomes a glaceon, you will be again.”

“But he’ll be stronger.”

“And Fire-weak. I’m sure you’ll still be able to put him in his place if he gives you any mischief.”

“I don’t want to put him in his place. I just want to be…” Sasha huffed a tiny wisp to her left side, briefly illuminating the tent’s interior.

“The center of attention like always?”

Sasha shifted a little, warming up just enough to be noticed. “That’s not it.”

“A little bundle of explosives, bringing woe upon he who might underestimate you?”

Sasha yelped a laugh. “Yes. But, that’s not it.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. I can’t make the words. Or, find them.”

Rhiannon placed her left hand upon Sasha’s back and applied a little pressure while scratching her fingernails gently into her nape. “Tell me when you do. And, don’t worry; if what I’ve heard is true, there’s a chance he’ll have a new-found respect for you after evolving. Even before you put an ember between his ears for stealing your spotlight.”

Lennon’s sensors fell and his eyes opened. “Sleep while you can, Sasha,” he broadcast, “your half of this duty begins in a few hours, and then we set out.”

Sasha growled faintly. “I should evolve so I can put you in your place.”

Rhiannon craned her head forward and kissed her vulpix. “We’re all in our places. Sleep.”

Sasha settled down and Lennon’s sensors rose up to hover until the end of his shift.

---

“It’s amazing how the landscape seems to come alive in the morning just as the sun rises.” Lennon stood on a rock behind his mistress, resting his chin upon her head with his paws on her shoulders. His sensors stood in a wide pair of pairs. Before them a large portion of Ocimene’s central area lay like an upside-down map. Far to their left, the tall transmission tower near Hexyloxy Harbor, and the vast Lake Nixymyl, fed by falls pouring over the Dithio Plateau. Between the lake and the spire of Mount Buchu, Linalool’s neon lights battled vainly to shine brighter than the sunlight creeping over the land. On the other side of Buchu, the twin Myrcene lakes flanked Fenchone Plantation. It was quite a vista to share, as best as Lennon could relate it.

“It feels so different here,” she admitted, attentively enjoying the portion of his perception that he could communicate to her through their entangled auras. “There’s so much of it, so much life energy waking up around us. It makes the ocean back home feel so cold and desolate.”

“It’s waking up, and when it wakes up, it’s hungry.” Lennon’s practicality pricked like a pin sometimes.

“I guess you think we shouldn’t sit around enjoying the morning until something mistakes us for breakfast?”

Lennon released his mistress and took her left hand. “We have not reached our goal.”

Rhiannon resisted. “Breakfast is a good idea though. Let’s do some snacks. We can get further before wanting to take a real break that way.”

Releasing her eevee and calling Sasha back from her play, Rhiannon sifted through her pack and found some more packages. She selected one in particular for her eevee, and another for Sasha. She unwrapped them while Lennon peeked inside for something his flavor.

“Sasha, this is yours, and eevee-boy, another something special just for you.” The eevee took his treat in his mouth, but despite its flavor, which he learned from his first to be almost irresistible, and indeed he felt his salivation kicking into overdrive, he turned to Sasha and managed an inarticulate sound.

Sasha coughed a little flame to scorch her own snack and coat it with charcoal. Polite not to talk with her mouth full, she set it upon the snow gently and spoke in her native tongue. “It’s ‘special just for you’; I have my own this time, don’t give me---” she hesitated as her speech T.M. seduced her to think of a notion that was a common-enough word to a human but ill-defined in the tongue of pokemon, “---contempt.” She took her treat up and ran to a halfway snow-covered rock to eat it.

Comprehending what was behind Sasha’s utterance was as difficult for the pokemon it was directed at as it was for Rhiannon overhearing it. Lennon was ignorant of the exchange, lost in a world where a lucario will go when a hunk of previously-foil-wrapped chocolate melts on its tongue.

The eevee ate his treat, but it did not taste exactly as good as he expected. Actually, it was perfectly exquisite but something else was affecting the flavor somehow. At least he could thank his trainer for it, and so he did, rubbing up against her and whistling a few high-pitched tones.

“Len, ask the eevee what’s wrong, please.”

They communicated and Lennon reported, “Sasha wanted his treat last night and didn’t get it. Today he offered it and she didn’t want it.”

Rhiannon picked up the pup. “She’ll be okay. She just needs to learn that we’re here for each other equally. I’ve got one more of those special treats; how about I split it in half so you can both have some.”

The eevee whistled again and said something more, which Lennon related.

“Well, it is. It’s an imported delicacy. I’ve only heard about it because they’re almost impossible to get and they sell out really fast at all the stores that try to stock them. I guess that place had one pack left because there are so few people up here. Anyway, I got them for you because I wanted to make this trip even more special, and Sasha… she’s so picky about what she eats and she burns half of that to a crisp, anyway. She probably just wanted it last night to tease you. We’ll see if she wants half of one later; if she behaves like a good girl.”

With three pokemon whose stomachs were full enough to prevent the grumbles, Rhiannon unwrapped a protein bar for herself and together they began the next stage of ascent.

---

Rhiannon heard the obstacle’s signature sloshing as it neared. “How is it?”

Lennon sighed. “It is wide, rapid, and filled with broken ice. We cannot cross here.”

She sighed, too. “And, the map didn’t show you any bridges.”

Lennon growled faintly at the cartographer, assuming that there were bridges hidden along the river’s path and that they were omitted out of either spite or incompetency.

“Well, which way should we go, east or west? If one takes us closer to an ice rock than the other, we’ll at least make a little progress until we find a way over.”

“It’s due north if the map and the compass in this reporter are accurate.”

Rhiannon was at a loss. “I guess we could flip a coin for it. If I had one. I should’ve had the guy at the market overcharge my account and give me some change.”

Lennon protested. “We do not need to carry more weight and make attractive sounds up these mountains.”

“I haven’t heard much of anything all this way. Do you sense any pokemon or animals around?”

“Many animals, but they are small and stay away. There are rock pokemon beneath the snow, but I have kept us away from them, and the others have kept away from me.”

Rhiannon gave him a hug. “So intimidating! You must be as tough and powerful looking as I think you are.”

Lennon felt his blood rush to his face and stiffen his ears while his body relaxed somewhat, for a moment. His sensors lifted. “Something is coming. It’s large and strong. A pokemon, in the sky. This way.” He led his mistress back beneath the canopy of trees, but it was too late.

With a powerful thud, the pokemon landed and looked around. He could not see Rhiannon or her pokemon behind the bushes.

“Oh! It’s just the mail man!” shouted Sasha.

Rhiannon twitched subtly.

Lennon stepped out from behind the bushes and snatched up Sasha by her scruff as she started to hop through the snow toward the dragonite.

Ford stomped above and slightly into the snow. Although he attempted to make for himself a proper pair of snowshoes, what he wore was clearly more concerned about keeping his feet warm than fashionably floated. “I figured looking at that map would’ve showed you that this isn’t the place to be at this time in the season.”

Rhiannon was undeterred. “We need to get across that river. Where’s the nearest bridge?”

“There’s not one. Well, if you follow it west long enough there’s a hundreds-years-old tree that fell over it and made a bridge, but that’ll have you in the valley, and if you wanted through there you wouldn’t be here. You would have gone up from the forest north of Fenchone.”

“We need to get across that river,” she repeated, slightly discouraged.

Ford exhaled sharply. “I can carry you across. But, I won’t be here if you change your mind an hour later, and I can’t think of why you’d want to be up there. Nothing but failed fortune seekers, their relations, and some recluse crazies live on the range.” Ford stayed his tongue before commenting further, considering that she might be one of those crazy’s relations.

“Please, carry us across.”

“And, I don’t like the idea of putting you over there and leaving and not knowing if I’m at fault for you turning into ice sculptures.”

“Please, carry us across.”

Ford turned and looked up the mountain. “Do you even know where you are going?”

“I have to find a frozen rock that will make my eevee evolve. He wants to become a glaceon.”

Ford turned back and approached her. Lennon took one step forward to remind him of his presence, but did not obstruct him. He lifted her chin with the side of his left index claw. “You truly love your eevee don’t you? Enough that you wouldn’t just send him off to one of those outfits that takes them out by the gross to ice and moss rocks and sends them back all fixed up?”

“I wanted to be there to see it.”

Ford’s eyes narrowed and he glanced at Lennon. Lennon nodded extremely gently.

“Recall your pokemon. I can’t help you find the rock, but I can get you across the water. Just---” He paused while Rhiannon found her pokemon’s balls one at a time. “---be very careful up there. A few years back, there was some trouble between the people and pokemon living up there. A lot of trouble in a few cases.”

She recalled Lennon last. “I’m ready. Thank you.”

Ford crouched and gripped her tightly. “Don’t thank me here. Thank me at the Yureido mail office. If you don’t, what you just said is my condemnation.”

---

Sasha was out of energy in every possible way and begged for rest. However, the terrain was terrible and made setting up camp impossible. Furthermore, the weather was getting cold and the wind strong again. Lennon re-activated the ‘WX’ feature and learned that the predicted arrival of bad weather’s next bout was being revised backward at least a few hours.

“Are we near where it should be,” Rhiannon asked her lucario.

“Yes,” he replied, “if the terrain markers on the map are right, the rock should be there when we get to a flatter part.”

“Is there enough light for you to see where we’re going?”

“You want to keep climbing.”

“I don’t feel safe here.”

“We’re not. Something is following us. It’s smart. It follows our scents. But it does follow us.”

“Are your feet okay?”

Lennon checked his shoes. “They are not freezing but they hurt. These shoes do not fit right.”

Rhiannon gave Sasha a berry and recalled her. “Come on. We’ve got a glaceon to lead down a mountain.”

Beneath the moonlight, Lennon carefully guided his mistress over the various stone outcroppings, freshly-fallen branches torn down by the previous night’s storm, and patches of loose gravel. He did not notice an increase in markings slashed into taller stones and hearty trees’ trunks. He sensed a few pokemon and many animals as they reached a more gentle incline. Mostly birds in both cases, and a few small rodents, too. That which followed them followed them still. The temperature seemed to drop suddenly with a graceful touch of rarefied wind. Lennon tried to sense if it was a distantly-cast gust attack, but all the lifeforms near enough to check were shuddering and shivering as well as he and his mistress were. Reaching to grip Rhiannon and shield her as best he could from the wind, he unfocused his aura sense and opened his eyes.

Yards away, peeking above a low wall of bushes like Mr. Chad Kilroy, stood a stone, covered with ice, not snow, and glistening brighter than the moon that illuminated it.

“Ree, we found it; not a minute’s walk ahead of us.”

The chill tempered her enthusiasm. “Thank God; a minute more is almost more than I can stand.”

Something else tempered Lennon’s as they pushed through the bushes into a somewhat empty area surrounding the rock. He caught her to force her to halt. His sensors splayed. “I feel a shadow ahead.”

“So?” Rhiannon asked half innocently and half naively.

“That means something is there. Something I can’t fight without techniques I haven’t learned.”

“Must we fight it?”

“I can’t sense much about it, but it knows we are here, and it will not let us near the rock.”

“Sasha, Len?” she asked.

He reluctantly agreed, “If the time she spent harassing wildlife at home earned her enough experience, maybe.”

Rhiannon released Sasha, who flopped into the snow as soon as her glow faded. The trainer picked her up and brought her around with a gentle shake and call of her name. “Sasha, are you okay?”

“Tired.”

Rhiannon grunted a saddened whimper. “Can you fight?”

Sasha scoffed. “You’re kidding.”

“Lennon said there is a pokemon between us and the rock, hidden in the snow. He said he can’t fight it. Can you?”

Sasha stepped down from Rhiannon’s arms and looked northward. The rock was there, and an expanse of snow. No pokemon, though. “This is a joke,” she told herself, “they’re making fun of me because I wanted to stop early. There’s probably a glaceon behind that rock with a treat in his mouth ready to swallow it up and hit me with a snowball. I’ll call their bluff and show them.”

Sasha looked to her trainer. “Not unless you brought as much X-special-attack as I can handle without overdosing.”

Sasha looked to her trainer, stunned, as she knelt and opened her backpack. “Lennon, tell me if this is the right one. I bought the physical kind for you but I guess that won’t help her any.”

Lennon confirmed the product. “Just her quick attack, but if I’m right, that move will be useless except for dodging.”

“Um… sitrus berries, too, if…” Sasha said, and, “The one time…” she thought.

Lennon removed the booster shots from their packaging while Sasha ate her berries. She stifled a yelp with each jab as he pressed their cartridges one at a time against her rump and injected their contents with a slap. Each stifled yelp was accompanied by a bit of flame from her mouth, larger every time. With the sixth, the bit was large enough to startle her, and it glowed cyan and blue. Lennon guided his mistress back a couple steps, having not seen a Fire-type so heated since watching a typhlosion fight in a televised pro-circuit match.

Sasha trembled. Were her element any other, but ice itself, one would think the cold caused her to shiver, but this was a mixture of adrenaline, temporary performance-enhancing drugs, and fear of what lay beneath the sheet of white ahead. She huffed. Three feet of snow before her cleared away. “I’m fighting for our lives, aren’t I?”

“Not if we turn around and leave slowly,” broadcast Lennon as he brought Rhiannon back into the bushes and behind a plain rock, for protection. He saw that Sasha did not follow.

“No…” she laughed and coughed up a flame with little reach but plenty of intensity, such that her nose turned red-hot for a moment. “I’m fighting for Christmas.”

“Use all of your power,” was the beginning and the end of his advice to the juiced-up vulpix.

She advanced.

---

“What happened?” Rhiannon asked with an emphatic tone of worry after hearing Sasha shouting with effort and a vast and surrounding whoosh.

Lennon peeked around the edge of the stone. “Fire spin. There isn’t any snow left.”

Indeed, a few of the bushes at the perimeter now featured blackened leaves. The field itself was barren, save for one spot of white in what seemed like a divot beside the ice rock that still glistened, wet but no less encrusted.

Sasha slowly approached the white spot, and the white spot rose, revealing marks of purple, light blue, and vermilion red. It too began to glow, but faintly and with an aetherial shimmer.

“Have you, too, come to defile him?”

Sasha stood fast. “What who? We come for the power of that rock.”

“He came for that power. They followed him. Its power was not enough. My power was not enough. They tore him apart. They made her watch. They tore her apart. They made me watch. They defiled their bodies. They wouldn’t let me rest. I got stronger. They came back. My power was not enough. They defiled their bodies. They wouldn’t let me rest. I got stronger. They came back. My power was not enough. They defiled their bodies. They wouldn’t let me rest. I got stronger. They came back. My power was not enough…”

With each repetition, her voice’s volume and intensity increased. Despite being a ghost, her emotions soon grew strong enough for Lennon to sense, if for no other reason than her shadow seemed to expand, obscuring if not absorbing aura patterns behind her, making Sasha’s seem stronger by comparison.

“…they wouldn’t let me rest. I got stronger. They came back. My power was enough. I defiled their bodies. I let them rest. I got stronger. You’ve come now. Have you, too, come to defile them?”

“I told you, we’re here for the rock.”

The froslass cast a spell and it began to hail upon the clearing. “The rock is now their headstone. Its power is now our misery. Approach it and you insult us.”

“Ree burned her savings for this trip. Len burned a few days off of his life span. And, I’ve burned a path all the way up this mountain. It ends at that rock and I will burn my way through you if you make me.”

“Your power is not enough.”

“Show me.”

The froslass raised its arms and Sasha began to charge forward. She covered a third of the distance when an ice shard struck her, cutting into her chest. Rhiannon recognized Sasha’s cry, but Lennon held her tightly, in case she could not restrain herself. Sasha stumbled for only a moment and became somewhat angry at herself for letting an Ice-type get the first hit. She could feel the drugs in her blood stream surging throughout her body. Something else was burning within her; something she never realized was there. Her body began to shake again. “F-froslass. We don’t have to fight. Jus---just let us use the rock and then we’ll leave you alone.”

The froslass’s yellow sclera glowed bright around her cyan irises. With a blood-curdling scream she shouted to the heavens and cast another spell. “I will use the rock on you!” she yelled as her arms came down, and with it a sudden blast of snow, a blizzard that lifted Sasha off of her feet and flung her against the ice rock. The effect was so strong that even in the bushes, Lennon and Rhiannon were nearly peeled away from their hide. As they were carried from the stone, Lennon used half of his strength to grip his mistress and the other half to bury the spike of his left paw into the nearest tree. He gasped and groaned as the tsunami of snow threatened to tear him from that arm. When the attack subsided, the field was once again blanketed white. With a single ember, Sasha cleared a radius around herself and got back onto her feet. Her resistance to the element kept her conscious, but only barely.

The froslass glared at her. She felt the burning surging again. She was done with diplomacy. The froslass knew; she saw it in the vulpix’s eyes. She was ready to lose again. She was ready to rest again.

Sasha snarled with anger and with pain as she let the burning within her prepare to burn without. Her bleeding chest bulged as she drew in more freezing air than her lungs had ever before contained, and when it came out it came as a flaming star that grew wider, brighter, and hotter as it rushed toward the frigid ghost.

Illuminated by the incinerating asterisk’s glow, the froslass closed her eyes and cast her final spell, at least, for this encounter. She would rest. She would get stronger. They would come back. They always did.

The froslass’s body was carried away upon the arms of Sasha’s fire-blast for a moment before falling into the snowbank. Although at first it glowed from the light of the fire when it was blown upward, a different glow surrounded it on the way down. Not a second later, before Sasha could even turn to proudly tell her friends that she stood victorious, a flash of lavender light emerged from where her foe landed, a quickly expanding spherical shock-wave. When the vulpix was touched by it, her legs gave and she collapsed instantly.

“Is it over?” Rhiannon asked her guardian. He groaned. “Sasha? Sasha!” She shook Lennon to solicit his help, but he howled with pain. “Len… are you---”

“My arm. Something---it’s stuck. My spike. Pull it out, Ree.” Rhiannon gripped Lennon’s left paw and yanked on it four times before it came un-stuck. He howled as his arm, no longer pulled straight, folded and twisted. “Please, Ree, any healing spray…”

“The backpack. It’s gone. I can’t find it. I’m sorry, Len, but---”

The lucario opened his eyes and by fortune saw instantly a glint of reflection, a spot of metal on the backpack, now almost completely buried under fresh-fallen snow. “There,” he reached toward where her aura told him she was with his right arm and directed her, “about ten meters, just go straight that way.”

Rhiannon crawled through the soft, loose snow, afraid to stand for fear of tripping, until she found her backpack. “Len! I have it.”

He tried to bark, but emitted only a cough.

Between desperation and haste, she wasted a paralyze-heal on the way to applying two healing sprays on his arm and another on his leg, which did not announce its injury until he tried to stand.

Rhiannon heard his telepathy after he failed to find his balance. “I can’t, my arm, I need a sling.”

“Will a strap from the backpack work?”

Lennon whimpered. “Please, try.”

Rhiannon found her eevee’s ball and released its captive. The eevee looked around and jumped, noticing Lennon in a vulnerable position: something he had never before seen.

“Find Sasha, little guy. She fought so you could get to the rock. Make sure she’s okay.”

The eevee struggled to get through the snow, heading for the luminescent rock.

With a rescue knife, Rhiannon carefully sawed through the flaps where one of her backpack’s straps was sewn to its body. Pulling it to its greatest length, she tied it into a loop behind Lennon’s neck and rested his forearm at its lowest point. She began to help Lennon up.

The eevee cried out as loudly as he could three times.

“I’m coming!” she shouted toward him. “Len?”

He found her right hand with his right paw. “This will do. Go. I’ll follow soon.”

Rhiannon shuffled into the clearing, following her eevee’s calls.

She reached the eevee’s location and found Sasha’s body in the snow. She picked it up and pulled it close. Sasha was colder than she ever was before; she did not even feel like a vulpix anymore. But, intermittently there was a tiny breeze, blowing against the winter night’s wind in petulant defiance. It came every few seconds and emerged from the vulpix’s tiny nostrils.

Lennon approached, dragging the backpack behind himself across the snow. Once he got there, he was able to translate what the eevee was chittering about. “He wants to know if she’s okay.”

“She’s alive, but she’s out cold. Literally. Len, I bought a couple revival crystals. Please, find one.”

He searched through the bag and came up empty. “They’re already crushed. Most of the things are. There is another spray---but its top came off. It’s all spilled.”

The eevee started again, telling Lennon what to communicate to their mistress. “He wants to take her to town to get better.”

Rhiannon reached around near her side and found her eevee. She began to pull him close, and he hopped halfway into her lap. He nuzzled Sasha gently as Rhiannon spoke. “But, we’re here. We made it. I know, we lost the rare candy to the ursaring, but there’s gotta be something you can fight and beat, and---” her voice broke up, “---she fought so hard to get you your Christmas present.”

The eevee said something softly, speaking with a whine into the vulpix’s fur. Lennon conveyed the same tone in his telepathic translation.

“I want Sasha okay for Christmas.”

Rhiannon broke down further, pulling him close. “You’re such a good boy. You really deserve to get what you wanted.”

He said something more. Lennon did not translate it verbatim, but instead said, “You know what he wants, now.”

While Rhiannon returned Sasha to her ball and gathered her composure, Lennon invited the eevee to follow him and then used his good arm to place the eevee atop the rock. As Rhiannon started to stand, Lennon held her down and turned her head to face the stone. He placed his paw on her shoulder and rested his jaw on her head. His aura sensors splayed. The energy of the rock and the energy of the eevee swirled and entangled, creating a beautiful image for the few who could see auras. But, the eevee’s body at that moment could not become host to the stone’s essence. The crunching of compacting stone served as their goodbye as the three turned southward and left the stone behind.

---