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firstnothingThe afternoon before had been ... enlightening. And with the egg he'd acquired hatching just after dark, bringing his team to three (two and a half he supposed; a newborn pokemon wasn't terribly strong), things seemed to be going well. The dusky little fox was more than content to curl up with Sorrow and Regret and sleep there the entire night through, and he'd had no reason to disturb them. Come the morning, all three would be put to work.
That had been the plan anyway. Something seemed off as he set up breakfast; he's almost completely certain there had not been four pokemon sleeping there last night. And now there were. Regret's obvious black-and-white, Sorrow's vivid green, the little zorua's dusky gray, and ... orange, cream and black, all curled up.
Frown.
Ousting the doglike pokemon proved to be more troublesome than it was worth, and Xemnas quickly settled on simply ignoring it in favor of straightening out his own, handing out breakfast, checking for lingering injury from the day before, and heading on his way. Honestly he had intended to catch a growlithe sooner or later, preferably sooner, but this one was ... overaffectionate. And far too exuberant for his tastes, with the way it bounced in happy, barking circles around himself and his bewildered team.
Thus went the day. The constant energetic presence of the growlithe didn't really interrupt the hunting any, as wild pokemon seemed to ignore the noise and darting about for the most part, including one sleeping abra at the base of a tree. Abras, according to his pokedex after a quick scan, wouldn't ordinarily counterattack. And the little zorua was more than happy to test its small claws and sharp teeth on the sleeping psychic-type.
Repeatedly, given the thing kept teleporting. It was annoying enough to all of them (except the growlithe, who seemed impossible to annoy) that actual effective teamwork seemed to be rapidly forged between his three pokemon out of sheer determination to corner and catch the abra. It kept teleporting. How often could it do that?
Quite a bit it turned out. But eventually, with a lot of effort and a well-timed Grass Whistle, Xemnas had the little psychic-fox neatly trapped in one of those red-and-white pokeballs. The first one he'd ever bothered to catch, and that probably due to the frustration levels of chasing it around all day.
As sunset approached and he set out for the distant city again, the growlithe followed.
[Audio]
[From the sound of sharp little hooves on road, he's managed to find a proper route to follow.]
Is it ordinary that a pokemon might decide to join you, whether or not you wish it to be there?
Audio
Date: 2013-09-05 01:00 am (UTC)Audio
Date: 2013-09-05 01:01 am (UTC)Audio
Date: 2013-09-06 05:33 am (UTC)Audio
Date: 2013-09-06 05:35 am (UTC)Audio
Date: 2013-09-06 07:10 am (UTC)Audio
Date: 2013-09-06 05:12 pm (UTC)[There's a pause.]
Nevermind. You will understand or you will not. A being is made up of three parts. The body, which interacts with the world. A soul, which provides the body with both the ability to move and a sense of self-preservation and desire to live, and the heart, which is the seat of memory and emotion. This is not a physical blood-pumping heart, the name is the same but they are different functions and different things. These parts work in harmony in a normal individual.
Should the soul be removed, the individual dies. The heart, freed, returns from whence it came. Should the body be removed, the individual dies. The heart also then returns from whence it came. The soul and the body are deeply connected, but the heart can exist independently. Remove the heart from the individual and depending on the method, both the heart and the ensouled body may survive.
[Not quite a monotone.]
A soul can take over some functions of a missing heart. It can retain memories and act upon them, allowing a new personality to appear. Or more accurately, allowing a personality that was already there to gain dominance, now that the heart doesn't suppress it. But the soul cannot replicate the heart's emotive nature. Such a being has no feelings, no emotions. They are unnatural, and should not exist.
The freed heart in these situations is often swallowed up by darkness, and recreates itself as a creature called a 'heartless', which is driven to seek out more hearts and create more of its own kind.
[He stops there abrubtly, waiting to see if the proper conclusion, if any, is drawn.]
Audio
Date: 2013-09-07 03:29 am (UTC)Can't you take the heart back from the Heartless? What happened to the people who loses their heart? How does that even happen?
[It doesn't sound like something along the lines of being a malicious killer or a robot, it sounded like ripping something out in a more physical sense, and that's probably what the oddest thing was to him.]
Audio
Date: 2013-09-07 03:38 am (UTC)To remove a heart from a Heartless, you need a very special, and incredibly rare weapon called a 'keyblade', which only equally rare people can use. It releases the heart from the darkness. However in 'modern times' there are only two who have and can wield a keyblade. Both are boys of less than sixteen.
[There's a pause, as he mentally reviews what he's already said.]
The people who lose their heart either fade away into death - this is a literal fading, with blackness that gradually engulfs the victim - or become the beings I mentioned, which we call 'nobodies'. Whereas a heartless is a creature of instinct and hunger, a nobody is capable of perfectly rational human intelligence and are very rarely below that. How does what part, precisely, happen?
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Date: 2013-09-09 03:28 pm (UTC)Audio
Date: 2013-09-09 05:54 pm (UTC)Afterwards, any heart stolen by a heartless - and they go straight through a person's chest after hearts - becomes a heartless. Keyblades are magical weapons. The important word being 'magical'. They are aware on some level of who is trying to use them, and are very, very picky about their owners. If you or I or anyone else are inappropriate individuals it will simply vanish from our hands. The keyblades do not care how few individuals there are right now that can wield them, they have their own qualifications and will not be dissuaded from them. They are after all, objects. One cannot reason with a chunk of metal, magical or not.
Audio
Date: 2013-09-10 12:07 am (UTC)Are-- were you one of those Nobodies you spoke of, earlier?
no subject
Date: 2013-09-10 12:26 am (UTC)[He knows that one. He was involved, directly.]
I was. Until arriving here. Part of being human is having a heart, after all.
no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 02:37 pm (UTC)[A pause as he considers that.] How does being human feel to you?
no subject
Date: 2013-09-16 06:19 pm (UTC)...As for being human. It feels very little different, save that now the emotions I once faked are genuine things. I am uncertain of how to explain it to you.