- Pronoun
- they or she
The Covenant outpost on Teardrop Island could not have been built by the same paws that built Novelux, and the other grand cities of the Commonwealth. By all appearances, its builders had used local materials and simple construction methods – chiefly grey stone and white pine – and the conifers around it concealed it from any distant viewers. It was an unassuming collection of buildings, with a central courtyard, a clocktower, and an outer fence meant more to ward off local wildlife than to prevent entry by a determined trespasser. Plain wooden signs indicated one building to be the 'Quarters', another to be 'Storage', and another to be 'Operations'.
Once inside the quarters, the interior was a touch more unusual, in its own way. Most of the furnishing was ordinary, if faintly unconventional – tables, chairs, bureaus and shelves. The walls and surfaces displayed everything from plains-'mon talismans of soapstone and copper ore, to regional and world maps, a chalkboard for duty rotas, to little hand-whittled figurines of the Saints. A medicine cabinet. A wall safe. A braviary-feather dreamcatcher. A mounted piece of slightly-melted railroad track. A slightly faded banner in white and gold, displaying a gas lamp motif. Still, the room felt more unusual than all that would suggest... It was subtle, but attentive Wayfarers would notice paler, larger lightbulbs overhead, a desktop telephone system in one corner, a clean, black stove (not wood or coal, but gas-burning!) in the kitchenette at one end... even what looked like an electric fridge, too.
Strangest of all was some kind of advanced radio (or primitive computer?) set into one wall, all green-grey metal surfaces and prominent dials and buttons rising out of them, with a lit display of some kind above the interface. An array of glass panels behind which danced ghostly numbers and letters, each a dim but piercing orange like a smoggy urban sunset. The characters seem to float in a void, leaving brief, phosphorescent trails as they ticked from one character to another, like afterimages burned into one's vision. Neon tubes. Cold cathode displays.
It wasn't the slick, modern, digital, consumer electronics of many Wayfarers' worlds, but it was a level of tech that exceeded anything else on Forlas that was neither imported from off world, nor found in some exotic dungeon.
Despite all the tech, the place still had a vaguely homely, rough-shod feel, not so different from somewhere like Frontier Town. Books lay half-read on coffee tables, weather-beaten coats hung from the backs of chairs, and a half-eaten pack of cookies rested on one shelf, with a paper note pinned to it declaring it to be 'COSIMA'S' property, and ordering the reader to keep their 'PAWS OFF!' Whatever else this place was, and whatever else the Covenant might be, ordinary pokémon lived and worked here. For them, it was home.
Once inside the quarters, the interior was a touch more unusual, in its own way. Most of the furnishing was ordinary, if faintly unconventional – tables, chairs, bureaus and shelves. The walls and surfaces displayed everything from plains-'mon talismans of soapstone and copper ore, to regional and world maps, a chalkboard for duty rotas, to little hand-whittled figurines of the Saints. A medicine cabinet. A wall safe. A braviary-feather dreamcatcher. A mounted piece of slightly-melted railroad track. A slightly faded banner in white and gold, displaying a gas lamp motif. Still, the room felt more unusual than all that would suggest... It was subtle, but attentive Wayfarers would notice paler, larger lightbulbs overhead, a desktop telephone system in one corner, a clean, black stove (not wood or coal, but gas-burning!) in the kitchenette at one end... even what looked like an electric fridge, too.
Strangest of all was some kind of advanced radio (or primitive computer?) set into one wall, all green-grey metal surfaces and prominent dials and buttons rising out of them, with a lit display of some kind above the interface. An array of glass panels behind which danced ghostly numbers and letters, each a dim but piercing orange like a smoggy urban sunset. The characters seem to float in a void, leaving brief, phosphorescent trails as they ticked from one character to another, like afterimages burned into one's vision. Neon tubes. Cold cathode displays.
It wasn't the slick, modern, digital, consumer electronics of many Wayfarers' worlds, but it was a level of tech that exceeded anything else on Forlas that was neither imported from off world, nor found in some exotic dungeon.
Despite all the tech, the place still had a vaguely homely, rough-shod feel, not so different from somewhere like Frontier Town. Books lay half-read on coffee tables, weather-beaten coats hung from the backs of chairs, and a half-eaten pack of cookies rested on one shelf, with a paper note pinned to it declaring it to be 'COSIMA'S' property, and ordering the reader to keep their 'PAWS OFF!' Whatever else this place was, and whatever else the Covenant might be, ordinary pokémon lived and worked here. For them, it was home.
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