April Catch-all

[firealone]

Who: Firepaw and all his various friends (including an open prompt!)
What: Quests, training, feelings jams, etc etc etc
Where: All over the place!
When: April
Warnings: References to cat injury/death in the Exhaustion prompt

(This is a fake cut, there's prompts below!)

Comments

[outbounds]

"I am not surprised. You have been pushing yourself very hard lately."

There are at least a few conveniences that come with these forms. His dense pelt, for one, means that those tiny claws hardly even register whereas they might have been at the very least a bit uncomfortable were he still human-shaped. Once the Litten is secure, Emmet picks his pace up a bit now that he's not having to adjust for Firepaw's much shorter legs.

The Zoroark's quiet for a moment as he continues along their path, sorting out how he wants to try to approach this. He's not really any good at this sort of thing, but... That's definitely quite the hallucination to deal with, huh. Fear of an— authority figure on a murderous break? Fear for a friend. Hard to reassure anyone about that when the worries wouldn't be lingering this long if there wasn't the possibility of at least some hint of truth in it. What ifs aren't that easy to shake.

He knows.

"Sorry," he says instead. "That sounds like a lot. I am sorry we did not find you sooner when that happened." They'd made the best decision they could with what they knew at the time, but still.

"You think it would be better for Ravenpaw if he showed up here?"

Hard thing to really properly address when they still don't know what makes people show up here, but, well.

[firealone]

He has to think on that for a while. Even though he's answered it a few times, to different people, he never feels completely sure about his answer and it keeps changing slightly.

"Maybe. I don't know if I just miss him, or if he'd really be better off here." Maybe it's a bit of both. "Our other friend, Graypaw... I miss Graypaw all the time, but I don't think he'd like it here. He likes being a cat, he likes being in ThunderClan, and... most of the cats like him, I think. Ravenpaw, though... he never seemed very comfortable."

He stews on this a little more. It makes him wonder if they're thinking about him this much, too.

"...Do you think time keeps passing while we're here? They're probably warriors by now... which means they have new names, and I don't know those names."

[outbounds]

"Hard to say. Might not matter. There are legendaries and mythicals who have power over time, space, wishes— things like that. Maybe they exist in this place too, or maybe they don't. Maybe this place has different but similar beings."

If their—the offworlders, that is—presence here is because of such beings, having been pulled here from across so many different spaces and times, maybe it's entirely possible they all might be put back exactly the same way if it comes to such.

What would he prefer? If time is passing, those back at home must be worried. That's no good. Are their Pokémon taking care of each other? Having a trainer go missing so abruptly cannot be any easier the second time around. That isn't even beginning to touch on everything, everyone else. There's nothing anyone can do about any of it, but still, it's not a fun thought, thinking about how time passing must be affecting those back where they came from. But if it isn't ...

"Wouldn't it be strange, though? If it were stuck so you didn't miss anything. And maybe you went back, and you were older than all of them.

"Nothing has changed, except for you."

[firealone]

Firepaw is quiet for a while, turning that idea over in his mind. He's already been here long enough that he feels apart from the cats of his world, full of knowledge that no one else would understand or care about. If he went back to the exact point in time he came from, he would be months older than his friends, probably quite a bit bigger than them, and that makes a big difference to a kitten.

"I think I'd rather if time kept passing." He decides finally. "Then when we finally get home, my friends will have all sorts of things to tell me, just like I have all sorts of stories for them."

Even though he's pretty sure the only thing they'll really be impressed by is his new ability to hunt things bigger than himself. Of which there is very little back home anyway.