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Frontier Town Greenbough Empirical Orchards

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"Think it's safe to say it's helped you just as much you'll help it," Ghaspius remarked in a somber but sweet tone. He offered a tassel. "We'll help it, together."

He shuffled the basket back into place. "And, ah, appreciate ya sharin' all that. Probably wasn't the easiest thing. I got a few more ingredients I gotta pick up, and a laboratory to check out."
 
"I'm not keeping score with help points," Nova quipped. He leaned over so the tip of his crest touched the tassel. "But thanks for, uh, listening. Sorry if it was a bit of a downer."
 
Ghaspius's smile slid across his face like a snail on ice skates. "It helped me understand ya just a bit. That's all I could really ask for."

He adjusted his shoulder, and the basket along with it. "Now, looks like y'all got a bit of a sweet tooth. If ya help me find the berries on my list, I'd be happy to show ya which ones you ought to pluck for yourself along the way."

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Ch05: Dust devil New
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    • "The way I see it, we're mighty lucky the storm only hit the fields what had already been harvested, otherwise we'd be short on uncanny fruits right about now," Xoco said as she glided ahead of the party that had come to investigate with her. The Gligar landed on a somewhat bent bough, running a claw along the bark.

    "Most of the trees are lookin' alright at least," she said, licking her fangs and squinting out over the fields in the afternoon sun.

    "Dust devils 're usually harmless, but this one was mighty strong..."
     
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    • The idea of helping out Xoco gave Koa an easy excuse to take his mind off everything that had happened. Plus it sounded kind of fun, maybe, in a way. Exploring and investigating some strange unknown phenomenon...

    Koa found himself sniffing around the earth as he listened to Xoco, wondering if he could pick up any scents. He paused and glanced up at her. "This is the first storm to hit here?"
     
    Steven had frequented the orchards enough that when he'd heard about the damage, he'd wanted to tag along to see how he could help in the aftermath of the storm.

    "That is fortunate," commented Steven as he glanced around the orchard, taking in the extent of the damage. The trees had taken a beating for sure, their leaves and branches strewn about the ground. Xoco was right, though, very few berries were among the debris.

    He was sure if Aggron were here, he'd be distressed at the state of the orchard. The giant steel type had a soft spot for plant care; a definite asset in a situation like this. But Aggron wasn't with him, so Steven was left to fend for himself with his limited gardening knowledge. If only there had been a storm in a cave, instead.

    At the very least, he'd be good at helping with the cleanup.

    He already had a few large pieces of debris in his claws when Koa spoke up. Curious, he looked up at their Ranger guide. "Have the storms in the Soja been unusually strong as of late?"
     
    "Not the first dust devil for sure, but this one was big enough that witnesses have been callin' it a full-blown cyclone," Xoco replied. "But, y'know, it ain't the season for it. Not to mention the winds were all wrong for it at the time."

    Cyclones in general were rare this far west, typically forming in the grasslands to the east, where warm thunderstorms collided with colder air. Certainly there'd been none since the Wayfarers had arrived near the end of summer. Something seemed odd...

    Xoco busied her claws with tying up some of the twisted branches as she talked, handing out strips of cloth to the others while she worked. Branches that had been nearly twisted off and hung by a few threads of bark would need to be snipped off instead.

    Koa, meanwhile would notice a wave of unfamiliar scents that were hard to place. Almost as if... the scents had been swept in from countless other places. Soil from fields to the east. Sandstone from canyons to the north. Silt from the river. It was muddied from the wind, but seemed to be stronger in the direction of the hills north of the orchard.
     
    Steven paused in his clean-up efforts. "A cyclone? With odd winds?" Why did the word 'cyclone' tickle something in his memory?

    He looked around the orchard again, tapping a claw against his chin in thought. The area of destruction did seem awfully localized for a weather event of such unusual size. Not a berry was out of place in other sections of the orchard. Was it lucky, or deliberate?

    "You don't think... Something created this, do you?" he asked aloud. "Something that wasn't the weather, I mean."
     
    Dave was a fucking scientist, not a gardener. But the orchards were his place of work, and from what he was gathering this tornado thing was not exactly normal. Xoco had requested some Wayfarers; Greenbough had encouraged him to go help with the investigation when he'd started questioning her about it. And so, he was here with them.

    Did this have to do with Cipher or the Covenant or Alexander or any of the seventeen kinds of wild shit they were already entangled in? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they'd learn something useful. Or maybe he'd just get the satisfaction of resolving a tidy little mystery that had nothing to do with any of that. Sounded like a fucking win-win.
     
    Xoco paused her bandaging, glancing briefly at Steven before looking out over the orchard. "Lotta mon can make the weather do funny things. I don't like jumpin' to explanations outside o' nature," she said in a quiet voice.

    Steven hadn't exactly been implying anything outside of nature, though, so it must have been on her mind already.
     
    "I smell something this way," Koa murmured, nodding to the north. If someone had done this, had they left any other traces, other than just destruction.

    He frowned and paused to try and tie up a branch. "Why though? Why would someone cause storms in an orchard? Unless it was on accident..."
     
    Dave raised an eyebrow. "What's 'outside of nature' mean here? I mean, world's full of Pokémon that can affect the weather, yeah, so if 'something created this' that sounds still pretty fucking 'natural' to me by default."
     
    Xoco had gone quiet, busying herself with tying up branches, almost as if saying what was on her mind risked invoking it.

    As Koa followed the scent trail north, the air had gone eerily still. No wind. No birdsong. Just pure, unbroken stillness, as if the air were a cord pulled taut, ready to snap. Here and there lay a smattering of what may have been footprints, but they were so smudged that it was hard to tell. Claws...?

    Some of the tracks were fresh.
     
    Steven tailed along behind Koa as he moved north, tidying up branches in their wake. Best stick together as a team, right? It definitely wasn't the guilt from abandoning Koa before. He lifted another broken branch and paused. There were some kind of tracks beneath it. Squinting down at them, he was suddenly aware of how quiet things were.

    What was the old saying? 'The calm before the storm'?

    Steven looked to Xoco, slight nervousness in his tone. "Is this stillness something that happens for the season, or is that unusual too?"
     
    Dave did smell something too, once he put his nose to it - a lot of different earthy scents that pinged his Poochyena nose as discordant somehow, like they came from half a dozen different places. What the fuck.

    As he followed Koa north, the air became curiously still and silent. Clawed footprints scattered across the ground. Okay, so it was a Pokémon, then? Mystery nearly fucking solved?

    Just in case, he sniffed the clearer footprints themselves carefully, and immediately felt like some kind of creep.
     
    It didn't add up to Koa. If it was someone with wicked intentions, why not destroy fields full of crops? It sounded as if it happened too frequently to be an accident. He continued to follow the scent and smudged prints, pausing infrequently to try and steady a branch and tie it.

    His mind was more focused on the trail however, and the prints. A bird Pokemon? Koa lifted his head from peering at the tracks. "Is there some kind of pattern to when or where these storms appear?"
     
    Panoramic_Vacuum said:
    "Is this stillness something that happens for the season, or is that unusual too?"
    Click to expand...
    Xoco jolted slightly, as if Steven's question had jarred her from her thoughts. She glanced at the Metang, tail swaying back and forth uneasily. "More like the sort of thing that'll happen right before disaster."

    The footprints led Dave to the edge of the orchard, where the scent suddenly scattered in what seemed like a dozen different directions. The tension in the air was thick enough that it threatened to crack.

    And then the stillness broke when the wind suddenly shifted, whipping into a frenzy as a pillar of dust tore down the mountainside, right toward the party.

    "Take cover!" Xoco yelled, clinging to the tree with her pincers.
     
    Suddenly, Steven was battered by leaves and twigs and dirt as the wind rushed past him from seemingly nowhere. He hardly had time to register the dust devil bearing down on them before he heard Xoco's shout.

    "Take cover?!" Steven echoed, partially in disbelief. They were in an orchard-- there was no cover! It felt wrong to fling himself behind the very trees that had already been hit by the cyclone once, but there was no other choice.

    He darted into the row of trees on his left, trying to put perpendicular distance between himself and the cyclone. There, he cut his levitation, letting his body drop to the dirt like a rock. Maybe his natural weight would keep him anchored in the tremendous wind, and if any of his lighter-weight companions decided to hunker down with him, he'd do his best to hold them down as well.
     
    Koa tensed, his hackles rising. He didn't want to take cover, but he couldn't fight a cyclone either. It wasn't like other enemies they faced, if it truly was strange weather... But if it was a pokemon doing this, they could fight that.

    Scrambling away from the winds, he opted to duck beside Steven and focus on trying to see if there was anything around causing the storm. Maybe a bird pokemon in the air or something else hidden around?
     
    A frenzy of swirling wind whipped through the trees, scattering loose branches as it went. Xoco clung to her tree for dear life with both pincers and tail, eyes screwed shut. The rest of the party hunkered down by Steven using his metallic body as a shield. If the wind wasn't fierce enough to outright uproot anything, then perhaps they could weather it...

    Koa's keen senses would pick up the distinct sound of heavy footfalls through the wind, incredibly rapid ones. A sudden flash of orange, difficult to make out through the swirling debris. Something was nearby, and it was moving fast. There was only a narrow window to act--!
     
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