The fire crackled in front of him softly. Finn sat with his back against a rock and his journal open on his knee, though he hadn't written anything in the last twenty minutes.
Chip was on the other side of the fire, working through the food with absolute ferocity. Finn had mixed the high-calorie paste from the brochure, and Chip had taken one sniff and consumed it at the speed of a starving man.
Finn watched him and let his mind drift.
Six worlds.
The Witcher world had been first, or first that was lived in anyway. Six with people in them. Six with cities and histories and wars already in progress when he arrived.
The Witcher world. Runeterra. Star Wars. Faerun. Westeros. And now this one.
He had not planned any of them obviously. The compass found the doors and he walked through. Though now, most of it he couldn't go back to. Because of his current circumstances.
A stowaway, he thought. That's what it is.
It wasn't a comfortable situation, but it was accurate.
He looked at Chip, who had finished the food and was now examining the bowl to see if anymore would suddenly appear, pressing his jaw against the rim experimentally.
Still, he's now in a pokemon world, even if he can't reach most of the previous world anymore.
The Pokemon world had been near the top of the list since he was a child. He hadn't expected to get here through the particular chain of events that had led him here, but here he was, with a Gible attempting to eat a bowl on the other side of a campfire, and it was difficult to argue with the outcome.
"Ghk", said Chip, to the bowl.
Finn looked back at the fire.
Four years of travelling, and the goal had always been the same: see as many worlds as possible. It had taken him to six worlds that had changed how he understood what was possible. But there was no end to it. No point at which you had seen enough, no number that completed the 'goal'. You could do it forever and the doing of it would never resolve into anything.
Unless.
He'd thought about it before. The idea that at some point you found a world you didn't want to leave and you just stopped. Stayed. Build something for yourself. Stopped being a traveler and became a resident somewhere that wasn't the world you'd started in.
It wasn't a fully-formed thought. More a direction than a plan.
Find the right world and stop.
He didn't know which world that would be. He hadn't found it yet. But somewhere ahead of him it might exist, and that made the map feel less like an endless possibility and more like a search.
Chip had given up on the bowl and wandered over to sit beside Finn, close enough that his side was warm against Finn's leg. He looked into the fire with his jaw slightly open. "Gii."
Finn closed the journal.
"Yeah," he said. "Alright."
He put the fire out and lay back, and the stars above Sinnoh were the same stars that were above every world he'd slept under, or close enough that the difference didn't matter.
He slept.
—
Solaceon looked the same. The square, the Pokemart, the fountain. A Starly sat on the fountain rim and watched him walk past without much interest.
The hotel room was locked, so he used his keys. He pushed the door open and stood in the doorway.
Ciri's things were there. Her sword against the wall, the travel bag on the chair, the species booklet on the nightstand with a folded corner marking a page. There was no Ciri though.
He left his bag on his bed and went to the daycare.
Miren was in the front yard with a Slowpoke and came to the gate when she saw him.
"She's not here," she said, before he asked. "Try the northeast meadow. She goes out there in the afternoons." She paused. "Kelpie's doing well. She should tell you herself."
He followed the path out of town past the ruins and the tall grass until the land opened up into a wide flat meadow, the mountains visible on the horizon. He found her there.
She was running, full speed across the meadow with Kelpie beside her stride for stride, both of them moving fast and loose, Ciri's silver hair behind her and Kelpie's mane burning bright in the afternoon light. She was laughing, playing with the Ponyta with enjoyment in her eyes.
Finn watched for a moment.
Then he reached for Chip's ball.
Chip appeared in the grass and turned and bit Finn's ankle.
"No," Finn said.
Chip bit him again.
"Chip. Go out there and play. Don't bite me."
"Ghk ghk ghk."
Finn put his hand on top of Chip's head and pushed gently down. "No biting."
Chip looked up at him from under his hand. He opened his jaw.
"Don't," Finn said.
"Gii," Chip said, and closed his jaw.
Across the meadow Ciri had slowed to a stop, breathing hard, one hand on Kelpie's neck. She saw him.
She raised her hand and waved.
Finn waved back.
Chip bit his ankle.
—
They sat under a tree at the edge of the meadow. Kelpie was asleep with her head in Ciri's lap. Chip was beside Finn, working methodically through a fallen branch, taking pieces out with his jaw and spitting them to the side.
"Is he always going to do that?" Ciri said.
"It's a work in progress," Finn said. "He's learning."
"He bit you four times while you were walking over here."
"Like I said, I'm working on it." He glanced at Chip, who had reduced the branch by a third.
Ciri ran her hand along Kelpie's neck. Kelpie's ear moved but she didn't wake. "She came to me on her own after a while," Ciri said. "Just walked across the yard one morning." Her hand stayed on Kelpie's neck. "Seo said not to wait too long on the training. Something about them getting harder to manage."
"We can take them both up toward the mountain tomorrow. See what they can actually do."
Ciri nodded. She looked at Chip. "He's smaller than I thought."
"The brochure said Gible grows fast when they're eating properly."
They sat for a while without talking.
"Why Kelpie?" Finn said.
Ciri looked up, and asked back. "Why Chip?"
Finn pointed at the fin.
Ciri looked at the clean notch in it, then back at Finn. "Clever," she said.
"So? Why Kelpie?"
She looked down at the Ponyta sleeping on her thigh. "Every horse I've had, I've named Kelpie," she said.
"Like Geralt naming every horse Roach." Finn commented.
Ciri chuckled. "I suppose so."
The chuckle faded and she was quiet for a moment, her hand still on Kelpie's neck. The expression that crossed her face was brief and she didn't say anything about it.
Finn didn't ask. But it's clear that the mention of Geralt made her melancholy.
The sun moved lower through the grass. Chip spat out another piece of branch.