I'm From 12 AD And What Is This

"Grrraaoooo."

Procyon's discomfort is obvious. The Growlithe keeps shaking himself and doubling back in circles every ten paces or so. Rhee presses on regardless, only glancing over her shoulder to make sure Procyon isn't too far from her. This is the place, she thinks... There aren't too many other locations with all those things she saw from the psychic flash of insight. She narrows her eyes behind her bangs and halts. Procyon bumps into her legs, and an inquisitive whine escapes him.

There is someone else here, but not who she expected. Just some... random person... lying on the ground.

...Rhee's eyes scan the girl's clothes first before crossing to her face. From the past, definitely. When, exactly, she's not entirely sure, though... she couldn't have been here for a terribly long period of time if no one else has gotten help for her. There's enough people investigating Time's Scar that surely someone would've seen her.

Or they just decided to ignore her because it'd be too much effort to bother with. Rhee rolls her eyes and approaches the motionless girl. That'd be pretty typical of Trizzica D'Crocio, honestly.

The grey soil underneath her feet parts with every step, and it's not until she's a good five or so feet away from the girl that Rhee realizes she isn't even sure if this person is alive. Rhee frowns, and she signs to Procyon. He sniffs the girl, pressing his nose against her neck and giving her a firm nudge to try and wake her. With a long sigh, Rhee glances around, looking for any telltale sign that the area's going to surge again. The last thing she needs is to end up hurtled into some other part of time because she stopped to make sure someone wasn't dead.

"Grrrooooo," Procyon rumbles as he gives the girl's face a solid lick as a final litmus test to see if she's alive or not.

Rhee nearly lunges forward to forcibly get the violent girl away from Procyon, but the weak blow soars well past the Growlithe's head, and Procyon clearly interprets this as a sign of it being time to play. He pants excitedly and doubles back, arching his back as he waits for Nameless to continue the game. Rhee only stares with mounting confusion at the words spilling forth from this girl's mouth.

Some sort of runaway slave..? She's pretty sure that she heard the first Lualdians made slaves out of the people there, but... Rhee furrows her brow, and she sighs with defeat. There's no way to get the girl's story out of her -- not in a state like this. Not sure if a slave would know how to read at all, Rhee steps forward with her hands held out, palms facing the girl. Knowing her luck, that'd be some kind of ancient vulgar sign, and she would just make this girl think she intended her harm more. Rhee kneels down by her and sets her backpack on the ground next to Nameless. She rifles through her belongings and eventually finds what she's looking for. The bag's contents rustle, the sound of a plastic bag brushing against her hands, and finally, Rhee pulls out what she needs.

She holds out a water bottle, the top already unscrewed. Just to make it clear what it is, Rhee pours a bit of the lukewarm water on the ground. It splashes on the parched earth, absorbed into it within in the blink of an eye. Slowly, so as not to alarm her further, Rhee tips the bottle slightly in the direction of the girl's face -- either to let her sit up and take it herself or to pour the water into her mouth on her behalf.

Procyon whines and rolls over, clearly confused about this game.

A lord? Rhee curls her lip at the idea. Lords don't live in abandoned townhouses with boarded up doors and windows to make people think they weren't worth going through. And she certainly wouldn't be haunting Time's Scar if she had enough money to her name to be a "lord". But being a smartass isn't going to facilitate communication with this girl, especially seeing as how she might not even be able to read...

She withholds a sigh. Procyon is already getting bad vibes about this place, and she can't very well leave someone this confused and potentially violent on her own. At this point, it's probably better to just call today a loss and head back home, even if it's with an extra person. At the very least, maybe Rhee can get her to someone who actually knows how to deal with people from hundreds of years ago. Enghia City has exhibits on Lualdi's history, right? Maybe there.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Procyon sniffing the empty water bottle. Rhee just shakes her head to Nameless' "assessment" that she could still be some kind of... slave-catching nobility, or whatever, and she holds out her hand to help Nameless up.

Almost instinctively, Rhee opens her mouth just enough to stick out her tongue for Nameless to see that yes, she is still intact there. It's kind of an extreme conclusion to jump to, though... Most people would probably just have guessed she didn't want to talk, or that she was deaf -- despite clearly responding to things this girl was saying aloud. Just what kind of hell did this girl crawl out of for her to think the most reasonable explanation for Rhee not talking was that someone had cut off her tongue? The more Rhee thinks about it, the worse the situation looks, not to mention bewildering.

Once Nameless looks like she's not going to just fall over now that she's back on her feet, Rhee lets go of her and tilts her head back slightly, revealing more of her neck. She crosses her finger over her throat in an X shape. Maybe that'd get the idea across that she definitely can't speak despite appearances -- not that she really expects someone from the past to understand something like "My vocal cords don't vibrate and make sound like yours do". Procyon helpfully barks at Nameless, as if trying to interpret Rhee's rudimentary signing for her. With a bit of a sigh, Rhee drops her hand to her side. Thanks, Procyon. Hopefully she won't interpret that as a sign of aggression.

Procyon's bark alerts Rhee to the arrival of another creature, and Rhee instinctively hunches down and away from the Gastly as it swirls around her head. She tenses, hand poised to signal to Procyon to strike, but Nameless' tone indicates... familiarity. She feels her heartbeat return to a more normal pace as the Pokémon hovers over...

...whoever this is. Rhee sighs, and now comes the hard part of trying to figure out things more complex than 'I don't want to hurt you' or 'Here, that's my harmless fat dog'. Neither of them know anything about what the other is even here for or who they are. They really need to get that sorted out. Where this girl came from is a mystery, as is who she even is other than probably some time-displaced runaway slave. And there's no way to convey how she can get help for those wounds without a more effective means of communication. Charades is only going to go so far. So now comes the question of if this girl can even read...

Rhee pulls out a small notepad from her back pants pocket and flips to an empty page. She slips out a pen that was previously resting behind her ear, and she scrawls out a message with her left hand. Reading it over again, Rhee sighs. Blunt and more direct, but... Rhee flips the notepad around for Nameless to see.

'Can you read?'

Ceman.

The name clicks in Rhee's mind, and she shakes her head to the question. There aren't too many periods of Lualdian history where Camani was called Ceman, and there are even fewer still that, to her knowledge, would single out a Growlithe like Procyon as something from where Camani is now. This is tedious, especially since by this girl's own admission, reading is difficult for her, but progress is progress... She pauses, and she taps the end of the pen against the page as she thinks of what to say next. After a few moments, Rhee's hand begins to write anew.

A scowl forms on her face as she writes, having to cross things out or double back on rewording things because there's no way of telling what the biggest words this girl knows are. The less this girl gets confused, the better. After flipping to a second page to redo the entire note from scratch, Rhee manages to figure out an easy way of conveying her point. As with before, she holds the notepad for Nameless to see.

'No. I'm from the city near here. It's called Trizzica D'Crocio.'

Underneath the name is a phonetic spelling of it -- 'trit-zi-cuh dih cro-show'. However, there's a second part to the note; Rhee isn't going to waste time going back-and-forth like this is a real conversation. If she has to write, then she's getting as much crammed into this little space as possible.

'You're hurt. If you come with me, we can talk more where it's safe. Here isn't safe. It gets dangerous.'

How she worded this note sounds positively primitive, Rhee supposes, but primitive people need primitive words. She waits for Nameless' response.

Rhee sighs and brushes her hair out of her face, mindful of the pen between her fingers. This is going to be a long conversation; she can already tell. With a sharp whistle, she calls Procyon back over to her. The Growlithe looks up, tongue lolling out of his mouth. He pads over to her, his bouncy steps taking him past Nameless and Eyes without so much as a glance in their direction. With the Growlithe now with her, Rhee sets the pen between her teeth. She leans down and picks up her bag off the ground, also taking back the discarded water bottle. She slings the bag over her shoulder and takes hold of the pen again. With a slight shrug, she starts back in the direction of Trizzica D'Crocio... though she keeps writing as she walks.

Procyon barks every time it looks like Rhee might stumble over a piece of scrap metal or medieval slab of stone, and she sidesteps the obstacle without even looking up at it. With her concentration mostly not disrupted, Rhee has a new note for Nameless before they've even left the sight of where Nameless had been laying. Knowing that this one might take a while to read, Rhee just hands off the notepad to Nameless.

'This is hard to explain. But this is Mortand, now called Domorto. You are in the future. The tomorrow after a lot of tomorrows. The time you come from is hundreds of years ago.'

As with before, Mortand and Domorto have phonetic spellings above them just in case.

'The place we are leaving is called Time's Scar. You're not the first person from another time to end up there. But you're the first one I have met directly, even if it wasn't on purpose.

'My name is Rhee. The fat fluffy thing with me is called a Growlithe, and his name is Procyon. He isn't a hunting dog or anything like that. Mostly he just likes to sit and eat, and sometimes he barks when he finds something he thinks I should know about.'

...Procyon also has a phonetic guide to his name, but it seems that Rhee has decided her name is self-explanatory enough to not necessitate a written pronunciation. And at the bottom of the note are three simple words:

'Who are you?'