Chapter 109: Children's Story

Don’t come over here. Don’t come over here. Arthur willed with his entire being for the cub to just stay with its mother. Maybe, he thought, it could just curl up for a nice cuddle and nap. It could lay so still and warm that its mother would fall asleep too, leaving Arthur the opportunity to recover his strength before slinking off back to the safety of his human friends.

It was not meant to be. The baby made a pleased little mewl as it toddled chubbily towards Arthur. The mother watched with interest as the cub strolled along, not quite snarling. Arthur sat as still as he could, expecting an arrow to come sizzling through the air at any moment to save him. None came. Instead, the cub reached him, made a half-hearted attempt to untie his shoes with its mouth before climbing into his lap and licking his face. Satisfied, the cub curled up in his lap and closed its eyes.

It appeared to fall asleep instantly. Arthur, on the other hand, had never been more awake. Apparently, the mother had decided that he wasn’t much of a threat at some point during the encounter, which was reassuring in the sense that she didn’t seem to feel the need to immediately end him. It was less reassuring in the sense that she must have realized that she could do so if she wanted to, and get a pretty good meal out of it in the process.

Instead, she sat up. She looked down at Arthur’s ruined flask, then at the baby, and then took a much longer, harder look at the human. Arthur could tell this animal wasn’t running on an enormous amount of mental horsepower. Still, he could see her trying, the rusty gears in her head turning as she contemplated the animal which her baby did not seem to fear, and who had healed her.

Then, with exquisite slowness, she began to close the distance between them. She took her time, pausing for several seconds at a few different points in the journey. She couldn’t have been twenty feet away at the start, but somehow the entire trip took over a minute. Arthur held every muscle in his body still to the extent he was able. He would have stopped his heart if he could have. As it was, he barely managed to stop the trembling.

Finally, he was face to face with the animal, so close he couldn’t see anything past its giant head. The mother looked deep into his sharp human eyes with its dull bear ones, huffed, and bent down to lick its cub. Lifting her head back up, she considered something one last time before moving her head even closer. After a second-long eternity, the tip of her snout finally brushed Arthur’s face.

Cooperation Pact

A confused Prata has proposed a mutual protection and cooperation pact with you. Its exact terms are unintelligible to non-ursine creatures, but are generally friendly in nature.

Do you accept?

Arthur considered this turn of events for a long moment before assenting. It couldn’t, he thought, be worse than the alternative.

As soon as he did, the bear huffed in satisfaction, licked his forehead, and flopped over on its side. Like its baby, it took it almost no time at all to fall asleep.

Arthur sat there for what felt like hours before he heard a voice whispering from the edge of the pit above him.

“Arthur. Are you okay? Just nod if so. The Prata shouldn’t be able to hear me.” Lith wasn’t visible to Arthur, but he nodded slightly, assuming his friend could see it. “I couldn’t shoot. After the crocodiles went down, I couldn’t be sure I could take down the Prata in a single hit. As long as it wasn’t charging, I couldn’t take the chance.”

Arthur nodded again, hoping Lith would get the message that he didn’t blame him for the lack of firepower.

“Anyway, I don’t know how to get you out of there. I’ll figure something out.”

“Might be okay.” Arthur decided to risk a whisper. “What’s a cooperation pact?”

Lith went silent for a moment. “It’s not a bad idea. But it won’t work. You aren’t a tamer. The Prata would have to initiate it itself, and that won’t happen.”

“Did happen,” Arthur whispered. “Accepted it. What does it do?”

“You are sure you aren’t imagining this? It basically never happens.”

“Happens. Happened.” Arthur clenched his teeth in frustration. “Lith. What. Does. It. Do?”

“It’s usually a tamer thing. Something they can make happen once they’re a shepherd or a packmaster or whatever. Or it’s something as part of getting their class. Once every approximately never, it happens to someone else just because an animal likes them a lot. And if it does, it means the animal won’t hurt you. If anything, you’re allies, and it will protect you and things you want protected. Except that you need to be really, really sure that this is what happened because, I can’t stress this enough, it basically never does, and….”

Arthur stopped listening. He could understand where Lith was coming from. The Prata was a stressful thing to be around, and people sometimes hallucinated things when in extreme danger. But the one thing Arthur couldn’t imagine was coming up with some obscure demon-world thing he didn’t even know about. Without hesitation, he reached down and pet the giant Prata asleep on his foot.

It jerked awake, bent its face to look at him and yawned before lazily licking at his hand. Arthur patted its giant furry head, internally resolving to brush out the matted hair as soon as he figured out if the thing would actually let him.

“Good gods, it’s true. I thought you were going crazy. Well, then. Tell it I’m an okay guy if it tries to eat me, alright?” Lith dropped into the pit, prompting a questioning look from the Prata to Arthur.

“He’s fine.” Arthur patted its head again, and the Prata huffed and got to cleaning its cub with its tongue. “Actually, how are you going to get out of here? Are we all trapped now?”

“No, of course not. I spend half of my days in trees, Arthur. I can scamper out of here,” Lith snapped his fingers, “just like that. But do you even know what you’ve done here, Arthur? I wasn’t kidding about this basically never happening. It’s like a children's story thing.”

“Oh, I’m full of those kinds of things. Happens all the time.” Arthur started petting the cub next. It was everything he had hoped. More than he had hoped, really. It was like his hand was taking a nap in battle-raccoon heaven. “Could you tip over a tree? I feel like it’d still be a good idea to get out of this hole.”

It was slightly more difficult than that. Toppling a tree wasn’t within Lith’s powers, but it was within the realm of what Coldbrook’s only lumberjack could pull off. After a few minutes spent convincing the lumberjack that he wasn’t going to get eaten alive for doing so, they managed to get him to drop a tree down the hole and release Arthur, the mother Prata, and the cub.

Arthur was exhausted beyond what he thought was possible, something that Lith would later tell him was normal for someone who had spent the better part of an hour flushing their cardiovascular system with raw, pure adrenaline. After Lith left to escort the lumberjack to safer, less Prata-filled parts of the forest, Arthur staggered towards home, neglecting to dismiss the bears to go back to bear-things.

So Arthur got an accidental test of the limits of the mutual protection pact when the human and bear group met Spiky and Milo, who were carting stone back and forth while waiting on Arthur’s adventures. Luckily, the Prata mother lost all of her interest in the two as soon as Arthur indicated they were friendly parties. The cub didn’t even seem to notice, as its interests in non-Arthur people seemed to start and end at playing with their pants legs.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, Arthur, but I don’t think you can keep this giant death machine,” Milo said. “It’s too dangerous. And, again, I can’t believe I’m the one saying this, but there’s just too much at stake for us to have guardian Prata stationed outside of our settlement.”

“Not that I’m arguing because I’m too tired for that, but why?” Arthur asked. “They didn’t eat you or Spiky.”

“Because they might have if you weren’t here. We have no idea if they remember who you consider to be a friend when you aren’t there. Or when you’re asleep. None of us can survive hits from huge beasts, Arthur,” Milo said.

“Even Lith?”

“Especially Lith. That guy has like every single point in Perception and Dexterity. Believe me. I’ve seen him try to carry rocks.”

“All right, then. Lily will never forgive me, but fine.” Arthur turned to the Prata. “Daisy, could you please take Rumble back to the woods? I’ll be around. If you need me, just find me at the town.”

The Pratas looked up at him, dully, then slowly turned and ambled back into the woods, crashing through the brush and disappearing into the wilderness.

“Daisy? Rumble?”

“I’m really tired, okay? They were the best Prata names I could come up with.”

“Why do they need them at all, Arthur? They’re the only Prata you know. They could just be the big one and the little one for all it matters. It’s not like you guys are going to hang out.”

“I don’t know,” Arthur said, looking thoughtfully after the bears as they disappeared. “I feel like we might, eventually. If things work out a certain way.”

—

Not a single house was finished being built by the time Arthur got back home. Part of that was because one key laborer who was originally meant to move stones had been tied up all day, and that laborer had also taken the lumberjack off his work and prevented him from bringing in components they needed to finish the roofs.

A few of the houses were getting there, nevertheless. Mizu had finished up her well work earlier than Arthur had thought, and had got quite a bit done beyond that. Everyone else had contributed a few bricks here and there to Lily, who had tagged along with anyone who would take her to get more bricks of her own. Her house was approaching Arthur’s knee height, as far along as any structure they had.

It wasn’t a lot, and it would take them days and days of the same kind of work before they had most of the houses done. It still looked like a lot, regardless. The outlines of almost every residence were drawn out in stone, and suddenly the shape of their town was visible.

Arthur sat and ate a meal of badly charred fish. Mizu and Rhodia had taken one look at him as he staggered into town, forced him to tell the barest summary of his story, then banned him from doing a single other thing that day. He was now getting teased for almost every choice he had made by people who were very clearly relieved that he hadn’t been clawed to death by a monster thanks to his decisions.

Between the camaraderie and the growing visual indications of stone and soil, Arthur could see clearer than ever what this town was shaping up to be. Despite being exhausted, bruised, and propped up on a log eating badly cooked fish, he thought he liked what it was becoming. He liked it a lot.