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Description
– It’s true, I heard this Volbeat guy tried going through here and it dumped him out again over open sea. You never know where you are going to emerge.
    – Who did you hear that from?
    – What — someone else in the guild.
    – I don’t trust anyone in our guild.
    – Not even me?
    – …
    – Hey you wanna bet?
    – What — that if you run in the fog is gonna spit you out at sea? If you win you’re gonna drown idiot.
    – You don’t believe it’s possible anyway, so why care?
    – It might still keep you inside for hours before you get out again.
    Millesio cut into the conversation that was going on beside him,
    – I’m willing to head in.
    The two speakers turned toward him, two of those guild mates that he had a hard time remembering. He could make out a pair of thin, furry bodies, so he knew they were smaller than him, but their faces where mushy-blurry, features that flowed, bended and dissolved as if someone with an invisible spoon was blending them together. It made it hard to know what kind of expression they made at his suggestion. He returned to staring into the fog like he had been doing before these tiny munchkins arrived. Couldn’t help it; was his first time seeing it.
Since everybody assumed everybody had arrived through it he’d never heard someone make pains to describe it, only make theories about what it was and the mysterious ways in which it worked. He, who had not come through the fog — he liked being the outlier — had only grown more curious the more he heard while having no idea what it actually looked like to the eye
    It’s only fog, he’d reasoned with his imagination before it painted a picture that would make reality monochrome. Maybe it’s nothing but white wisps and terrible wet cold.
    Well now he stod before it, and this was fog but not only-fog. It had a will of its own, this white wall, unbreachable even when you walked through it. It tasted wet-blanket on his tongue and promised sweetly to his ears and eyes to erase the world. When he sniffed it was like the air was turning into a pond.
    – Would you really be willing to try, Millesio, one of the munchkins asked.
    – Oh bother. You’re going to make him go in there for you?
    – That’s a problem?
    – Just because you’re Wimpod and he’s mad — no offense.
    Millesio didn’t turn his head. The munchkins started pushing each other.
    – People are looking at us — no, stop — you wanna start this — that what you want?
    While shouting one of them was already wrestling down the other. If they hadn’t been amusing to look at he might have leaped into the fog already. Now he was looking at their whimsical struggling and considering biting one of them in the leg he let kick carelessly behind him just to see how that would escalate things.
    Then there was something …
    His head swung back toward the fog, ears swaying forward. It had been laughing, hadn’t it? Bell-giggle, chime-flutter — fairy laugh. That the couple behind him were in the process of breaking noses and ripping ears off seemed of less importance. He focused intently to hear the sound again, everything else became a dull droning and he found that his gaze didn’t stop at the edge of the fog. No it was pulling him deeper, welcoming him, parting for him, he spotted the barest speck of purple, bobbing and fluttering about, giggling, and he thought: floating candle, and he thought: fairy, and he would have jumped right into the fog, but that was when he realized a whip was wrapped around his leg.
    His mighty leap toward wonder was interrupted, then his nose was buried in yesteryear leaves. Spitting sand from tongue, then bending his neck over his back — a flexibility he couldn’t understand how any non-Quilava lived without — he took a good look at that offending thing which had snagged his leg. Not a whip, but a nasty tail, one of unacceptable length. He followed this rude appendage through the snaking country road, all the way up to Chateau Carmenelle.
    – Ah, he though, looking up at her wonderfully apparent face and barely concealed contempt, she is nearing her limit.
    Their madame overseer was wearing a carefully put-on smile, made herself out to be in a jovial mood outwardly to all the guilds, aware of what she was representing, all the while sheeting on the inside like a can off fermented peach. Some of that rotten ichor was seeping out of her hands, the blackest of her colors gathering between fingers. With a sure-aimed flick of the wrist, she hurled this Octazooka right at the fighting munchkins.
    He was sure they were going to be splashed by sticky paint that took many, many baths to clean off, now that Carmenelle had, on some other end, burnt all her fuses; but it turned out to be a warning shoot, and the two troublemakers flew apart, staring down at a smeared patch of grass that could have been them. Millesio readjusted his impression of her on the verge of mind-melting, not there yet but definitely enduring hot-pan conditions.
    Smiling blithely, she cleared her throat, a bit hoarse, then shouted:
    – When we said “don’t fight anyone” we meant “don’t bend a single finger the wrong way, don’t scratch a single millimeter of skin, don’t even put a spot on their clothing.”
    They had all learned to tremble at the sound of her angry voice. Her tail trashed from side to side behind her, the tip changing color with each toss – nauseous lime green, then frustrated pink, then vicious dark blue. Tiny droplets flew off and landed on tree trunks and blades of grass which gradually became polka dotted.
    – I want no more lounging around. No bad behavior. I gave you a task half an hour ago and the only thought in your brain right now should be to carry it out. Understand?
    The munchkins nodded while embracing each other for courage, forgetful of having fought a second ago, and when she directed them to the carts delivering material to the camp they scurried away like Yanma on Speed Boost. Millesio watched them leave, then sent the fog a forlorn glance, but the little giggling candle was gone.
    – You though, Soothweasel, remember Arsene informing you that you can’t be our lovable, unstable freeloader anymore?
    Millesio sighed in accepting resignation and stod up. Carmenelle stood with her brow furrowed and regarded his sickness-fur, and gave his bandaged arm a look that asked “when did you last clean that?”
    – You can go help setting up the tenths, she decided. Less strenuous than other things.
    She did not let him go on his own, instead herding him like the runaway-happy monster he was back toward the camp he’d strolled away from. The pokemon working there hadn’t made much progress, and every guild had made its own set of clusters that did their own thing. She was about to bring him to one such where people were arguing about the best place to put this and that, but hesitated then led him off to the side of them, to a pile of funny metal sticks which was attended by currently nobody.
    – Here, do this for a couple of hours and then were good. She showed him how to fit the sticks on top of each other and insert them into the tents to make them stand up; then she hurried away, having spotted the next fire to put out. He regarded her as she confronted another guildmember who had just pickpocketed an Aristocrat and demanded that they would discretely return the score.
    If there was anyone capable of disciplining their band of testy thieves, battle-on-the-brains, insane infernalkits, waltzing assassins, despairdrinkers, and white terrors, it was her. She had that changeable nature that let one pick different moods to suit different situations. For example, there was big sister Carmenelle painting personal name plates for everybody to hang on their beds, cooking Aspear soup on damp mornings where half of them caught the influensa, and lightening the mood with playful jabs and a cartful of good humor; then there were others like nag Carmenelle who did not let anyone leave dinner before all the dishes were cleared away and washed, ordered everyone about on chores and snarled at those who didn’t comply. Right now was a step further, this was death-threatening Carmenelle. Apparently playing nice with the other guilds was important enough to Arsene’s plans that every expression she wore carried the promise that she would personally liquidate her closest friend if it got in the way of that goal.
    Too bad she was doomed to fail; there was simply too much dry-haystack tension, the official guilds afraid to as much as look at the Outcasts, and on the other hand the Outcasts bristling at off hand comments or smelling fear. She was holding onto a piping-hot saucepan trying not to scream, juggling Voltorbs praying not to drop one …
    That she felt she was loosing control was clear because she lost her shape too. That was the new fun thing he’d learned about her, that her form became as unsteady as her mood. The rude tail could stretch out to four times her size, then coil and shrink to a knob, and did so repeatedly like how legs paced and hands wringed when nervous. Ripples moved through her fur, enlarging when she was running up to someone taller than her, shrinking when she took a moment to breathe, and sometimes it looked like flesh and bones followed suit. She rushed around so much she soon did it out of his view.
    It really only lasted ten minutes, him doing his task as told, but it wasn’t entirely his fault because it didn’t take longer before other pokemon were hovering around, and he noticed how much they were hovering because they did it in that back and forth, fretting way which always make it seem like they want to be needlessly annoying. Each one was blurry, with sand-in-water faces and buzzing same-y voices. Somebody humming faintly in hope that he would be the one to adress her first – “can I help you with something” – so that she wouldn’t have to; another person pacing, looking at him then at what he was doing, taking a step closer to say something, then back regretting himself; a third thinking nobody could see him staring at the scars — Millesio tried to gauge which old wounds in particular had entranced him. The ugly stitched-up lines were his biggest attraction point, but like with paintings those watching scaring never stepped too close.
    The apparent issue, which was obvious enough, was that the tents he was in the process of raising had nowhere to stand yet, and ultimately someone would probably need to undo all his work or they wouldn’t be able to move them through the untamed greenery. Carmenelle hadn’t thought of that because nobody had coordinated with her. To be fair who coordinated in this gathering? As a couple smarty-pants were drawing a map of the whole area to calculate where the best placement of the tents would be, others were dumping off logs to the fires in those exact spots, because why wouldn’t they leave stuff where the ground were the flattest; one person snatched a hammer off the ground then three others ran around for several minutes looking for it; then people who were supposed to be assembling a field kitchen but ended up building two different things because they refused to as much as glance at each other …
    He turned around to the ones who found him to be a similar problem and showed them a smile of all teeth.
    – Um sorry but, the female’s voice was trembling, I think that’s supposed to go to be over where we are putting up the medicine tent and it’s ways off so …
    – Oh, he said, spiking his ears as if in genuine surprise, but he wasn’t really looking at her non-face but past. At once it had come back, not within the fog anymore, but was whirling up in the canopy, dancing to the orchestra of playing leaves. A mote of enchanting joy. He could hear its laughter as if it floated right next to him. Oh, my mistake. Let me fix this.
    The one talking to him squealed and scrambled back when a flame cam to life from the corner of his mouth and licked at the stick he was holding. The metal became blackened and bent, smoking bitterly, and the thin line connecting each stick burned and snapped.
    – See, now we have something else to be bothered about instead, he declared joyfully as he dropped the ruined equipment to the ground.
    One of the males made a series of offended sounds, but Millesio felt he was much like Carmenelle at this moment — didn’t have time for this — and so brushed past them all without another word, setting off into the forest to where the fairy-light was promising to be.

Task 2 reward: 5 poke & (First Aid Kit)

(1 strike)

Description
– It’s true, I heard this Volbeat guy tried going through here and it dumped him out again over open sea. You never know where you are going to emerge.
    – Who did you hear that from?
    – What — someone else in the guild.
    – I don’t trust anyone in our guild.
    – Not even me?
    – …
    – Hey you wanna bet?
    – What — that if you run in the fog is gonna spit you out at sea? If you win you’re gonna drown idiot.
    – You don’t believe it’s possible anyway, so why care?
    – It might still keep you inside for hours before you get out again.
    Millesio cut into the conversation that was going on beside him,
    – I’m willing to head in.
    The two speakers turned toward him, two of those guild mates that he had a hard time remembering. He could make out a pair of thin, furry bodies, so he knew they were smaller than him, but their faces where mushy-blurry, features that flowed, bended and dissolved as if someone with an invisible spoon was blending them together. It made it hard to know what kind of expression they made at his suggestion. He returned to staring into the fog like he had been doing before these tiny munchkins arrived. Couldn’t help it; was his first time seeing it.
Since everybody assumed everybody had arrived through it he’d never heard someone make pains to describe it, only make theories about what it was and the mysterious ways in which it worked. He, who had not come through the fog — he liked being the outlier — had only grown more curious the more he heard while having no idea what it actually looked like to the eye
    It’s only fog, he’d reasoned with his imagination before it painted a picture that would make reality monochrome. Maybe it’s nothing but white wisps and terrible wet cold.
    Well now he stod before it, and this was fog but not only-fog. It had a will of its own, this white wall, unbreachable even when you walked through it. It tasted wet-blanket on his tongue and promised sweetly to his ears and eyes to erase the world. When he sniffed it was like the air was turning into a pond.
    – Would you really be willing to try, Millesio, one of the munchkins asked.
    – Oh bother. You’re going to make him go in there for you?
    – That’s a problem?
    – Just because you’re Wimpod and he’s mad — no offense.
    Millesio didn’t turn his head. The munchkins started pushing each other.
    – People are looking at us — no, stop — you wanna start this — that what you want?
    While shouting one of them was already wrestling down the other. If they hadn’t been amusing to look at he might have leaped into the fog already. Now he was looking at their whimsical struggling and considering biting one of them in the leg he let kick carelessly behind him just to see how that would escalate things.
    Then there was something …
    His head swung back toward the fog, ears swaying forward. It had been laughing, hadn’t it? Bell-giggle, chime-flutter — fairy laugh. That the couple behind him were in the process of breaking noses and ripping ears off seemed of less importance. He focused intently to hear the sound again, everything else became a dull droning and he found that his gaze didn’t stop at the edge of the fog. No it was pulling him deeper, welcoming him, parting for him, he spotted the barest speck of purple, bobbing and fluttering about, giggling, and he thought: floating candle, and he thought: fairy, and he would have jumped right into the fog, but that was when he realized a whip was wrapped around his leg.
    His mighty leap toward wonder was interrupted, then his nose was buried in yesteryear leaves. Spitting sand from tongue, then bending his neck over his back — a flexibility he couldn’t understand how any non-Quilava lived without — he took a good look at that offending thing which had snagged his leg. Not a whip, but a nasty tail, one of unacceptable length. He followed this rude appendage through the snaking country road, all the way up to Chateau Carmenelle.
    – Ah, he though, looking up at her wonderfully apparent face and barely concealed contempt, she is nearing her limit.
    Their madame overseer was wearing a carefully put-on smile, made herself out to be in a jovial mood outwardly to all the guilds, aware of what she was representing, all the while sheeting on the inside like a can off fermented peach. Some of that rotten ichor was seeping out of her hands, the blackest of her colors gathering between fingers. With a sure-aimed flick of the wrist, she hurled this Octazooka right at the fighting munchkins.
    He was sure they were going to be splashed by sticky paint that took many, many baths to clean off, now that Carmenelle had, on some other end, burnt all her fuses; but it turned out to be a warning shoot, and the two troublemakers flew apart, staring down at a smeared patch of grass that could have been them. Millesio readjusted his impression of her on the verge of mind-melting, not there yet but definitely enduring hot-pan conditions.
    Smiling blithely, she cleared her throat, a bit hoarse, then shouted:
    – When we said “don’t fight anyone” we meant “don’t bend a single finger the wrong way, don’t scratch a single millimeter of skin, don’t even put a spot on their clothing.”
    They had all learned to tremble at the sound of her angry voice. Her tail trashed from side to side behind her, the tip changing color with each toss – nauseous lime green, then frustrated pink, then vicious dark blue. Tiny droplets flew off and landed on tree trunks and blades of grass which gradually became polka dotted.
    – I want no more lounging around. No bad behavior. I gave you a task half an hour ago and the only thought in your brain right now should be to carry it out. Understand?
    The munchkins nodded while embracing each other for courage, forgetful of having fought a second ago, and when she directed them to the carts delivering material to the camp they scurried away like Yanma on Speed Boost. Millesio watched them leave, then sent the fog a forlorn glance, but the little giggling candle was gone.
    – You though, Soothweasel, remember Arsene informing you that you can’t be our lovable, unstable freeloader anymore?
    Millesio sighed in accepting resignation and stod up. Carmenelle stood with her brow furrowed and regarded his sickness-fur, and gave his bandaged arm a look that asked “when did you last clean that?”
    – You can go help setting up the tenths, she decided. Less strenuous than other things.
    She did not let him go on his own, instead herding him like the runaway-happy monster he was back toward the camp he’d strolled away from. The pokemon working there hadn’t made much progress, and every guild had made its own set of clusters that did their own thing. She was about to bring him to one such where people were arguing about the best place to put this and that, but hesitated then led him off to the side of them, to a pile of funny metal sticks which was attended by currently nobody.
    – Here, do this for a couple of hours and then were good. She showed him how to fit the sticks on top of each other and insert them into the tents to make them stand up; then she hurried away, having spotted the next fire to put out. He regarded her as she confronted another guildmember who had just pickpocketed an Aristocrat and demanded that they would discretely return the score.
    If there was anyone capable of disciplining their band of testy thieves, battle-on-the-brains, insane infernalkits, waltzing assassins, despairdrinkers, and white terrors, it was her. She had that changeable nature that let one pick different moods to suit different situations. For example, there was big sister Carmenelle painting personal name plates for everybody to hang on their beds, cooking Aspear soup on damp mornings where half of them caught the influensa, and lightening the mood with playful jabs and a cartful of good humor; then there were others like nag Carmenelle who did not let anyone leave dinner before all the dishes were cleared away and washed, ordered everyone about on chores and snarled at those who didn’t comply. Right now was a step further, this was death-threatening Carmenelle. Apparently playing nice with the other guilds was important enough to Arsene’s plans that every expression she wore carried the promise that she would personally liquidate her closest friend if it got in the way of that goal.
    Too bad she was doomed to fail; there was simply too much dry-haystack tension, the official guilds afraid to as much as look at the Outcasts, and on the other hand the Outcasts bristling at off hand comments or smelling fear. She was holding onto a piping-hot saucepan trying not to scream, juggling Voltorbs praying not to drop one …
    That she felt she was loosing control was clear because she lost her shape too. That was the new fun thing he’d learned about her, that her form became as unsteady as her mood. The rude tail could stretch out to four times her size, then coil and shrink to a knob, and did so repeatedly like how legs paced and hands wringed when nervous. Ripples moved through her fur, enlarging when she was running up to someone taller than her, shrinking when she took a moment to breathe, and sometimes it looked like flesh and bones followed suit. She rushed around so much she soon did it out of his view.
    It really only lasted ten minutes, him doing his task as told, but it wasn’t entirely his fault because it didn’t take longer before other pokemon were hovering around, and he noticed how much they were hovering because they did it in that back and forth, fretting way which always make it seem like they want to be needlessly annoying. Each one was blurry, with sand-in-water faces and buzzing same-y voices. Somebody humming faintly in hope that he would be the one to adress her first – “can I help you with something” – so that she wouldn’t have to; another person pacing, looking at him then at what he was doing, taking a step closer to say something, then back regretting himself; a third thinking nobody could see him staring at the scars — Millesio tried to gauge which old wounds in particular had entranced him. The ugly stitched-up lines were his biggest attraction point, but like with paintings those watching scaring never stepped too close.
    The apparent issue, which was obvious enough, was that the tents he was in the process of raising had nowhere to stand yet, and ultimately someone would probably need to undo all his work or they wouldn’t be able to move them through the untamed greenery. Carmenelle hadn’t thought of that because nobody had coordinated with her. To be fair who coordinated in this gathering? As a couple smarty-pants were drawing a map of the whole area to calculate where the best placement of the tents would be, others were dumping off logs to the fires in those exact spots, because why wouldn’t they leave stuff where the ground were the flattest; one person snatched a hammer off the ground then three others ran around for several minutes looking for it; then people who were supposed to be assembling a field kitchen but ended up building two different things because they refused to as much as glance at each other …
    He turned around to the ones who found him to be a similar problem and showed them a smile of all teeth.
    – Um sorry but, the female’s voice was trembling, I think that’s supposed to go to be over where we are putting up the medicine tent and it’s ways off so …
    – Oh, he said, spiking his ears as if in genuine surprise, but he wasn’t really looking at her non-face but past. At once it had come back, not within the fog anymore, but was whirling up in the canopy, dancing to the orchestra of playing leaves. A mote of enchanting joy. He could hear its laughter as if it floated right next to him. Oh, my mistake. Let me fix this.
    The one talking to him squealed and scrambled back when a flame cam to life from the corner of his mouth and licked at the stick he was holding. The metal became blackened and bent, smoking bitterly, and the thin line connecting each stick burned and snapped.
    – See, now we have something else to be bothered about instead, he declared joyfully as he dropped the ruined equipment to the ground.
    One of the males made a series of offended sounds, but Millesio felt he was much like Carmenelle at this moment — didn’t have time for this — and so brushed past them all without another word, setting off into the forest to where the fairy-light was promising to be.

Task 2 reward: 5 poke & (First Aid Kit)

(1 strike)