The Skinned Lizard was busy, much of the traffic through the inn, that served as a restaurant during the day, was because of the night before's closure.
Left and right people were coming in to speak with Tek, Tenra, and Gehne, searching for the reason why their favourite spot had been closed on a night that was generally quite busy. The answer they gave was half-bullshit, half-truth, something about an important meaning about the future of the restaurant, and then a follow up stating that, no, the Skinned Lizard wasn't going anywhere soon.
We hoped, anyway.
The morning was quite nice, with it being the day that most took as their weekend, though most barely got a day off a week if they were lucky, so the atmosphere was quite nice as I sat at my table and drank a warm tea as I regarded my surroundings.
I was the only human within the store, at least at the moment, I could see the small families of Gek and Tiliquans who'd made their way here for the breakfast, relaxing amongst those they might consider their own kind, adding to the community that already existed.
My presence got me more odd looks than it had when I'd first walked into the inn, I wasn't even dressed in my suit at the moment, but I recognised faces and expressions, people that I'd passed by on the street while in my upper-class persona.
There was one young Gek boy who'd caught my attention, his massively oversized eyes staring directly at me as he knelt on top of the wooden chair, fiddling idly with a wooden toy in his hands while his mother dealt with what seemed to be his little sister. A difficult delineation to make, especially so young, but I'd made a point to learn to separate the two.
The young boy was more brazen about his interest. It was a mixture of bewilderment, trying to grapple with just why someone who he'd seen walk the streets in a suit would possibly wear anything less, and curiosity. Curiosity was a natural extension of his mind, manifesting in its own whole set of emotions.
It was pretty common for a child to experience a powerful, almost overriding curiosity. Many had it stamped out of them quicker than most, but the majority retained at least a little bit of it. This child though… he was a little more than that. Honestly, the sense of curiosity was so powerful that it almost didn't register quite right in my own mind, but when I did the equivalent of playing with the connectors, it all hit me at once.
It was something different, to watch his emotional state move with his mind in such a clear and distinct way, forming and unforming ideas like nothing else I'd ever truly witnessed. I'd delved as deeply into the minds of legends, Mayer, Keeper Armament, Gallar, even Rethi now, but all of them didn't quite match this little boy's mind, exploding with a pure curiosity and creativity that I'm not sure someone could ever reproduce artificially.
Without his mother's attention on him, he gently slipped off of his chair, locking his eyes with me and walking forwards with steps of only slight hesitation. The curiosity in his eyes were too strong, compelling him forth like a moth to a flame. I wonder what it was that he specifically saw in me that compelled him to move, but he did regardless of my understanding.
I felt a few sets of eyes move onto me, watching as the child toddled towards me as I waited for Rethi and Alena to appear from their rooms. There was worry, and a fierce protectiveness in those gazes that I'm not sure was something that was all that present in the reptilian species on Earth, but the Reptilia here certainly were.
It only took a few steps for the boy to reach me, his mother still entirely unaware of who her son was approaching. I remembered the boy, his bright green skin contrasting slightly against his mother's forest green skin-tone was she pulled him away from the side street he'd been playing in, forcing his head down into a bow as I passed by in the much poorer district. I had wished I could ease the mother's worry then and there.
But that child hadn't been scared in the least, only wishing that he could catch one last glimpse at the strange human that'd walked down the streets of a notoriously Reptilia dense sector.
The young boy made his way to the seat opposite mine, placing the wooden toy on the table and then clambering onto the wooden surface of the other chair, kneeling like he had at his own table. Then, the boy didn't talk, at all. In fact, he didn't even open his mouth.
I could see the emotions and his mind working, shifting like a dense cloud so full to the brim with water, but unable to say a single word. I rose an amused eyebrow at the child, watching and waiting for something to happen.
But his mind only continued to swirl. Over the course of months, my empathy had grown to an incredible power, to where I could understand emotions so well that it may as well be complete telepathy. It's one downfall was my inability to conjoin a coherent sentence or thought from someone head, but what I had found that I could do, was pull from their emotions and memories.
I blinked once at the child, then a second, and much like I had with the table of tense figures the day before, I pulled on the strings of his mind and felt as he felt, experienced as he did. For a moment, I was him.
I chuckled, "Well, of course I'm here. Do men in nice clothes not need breakfast too?"
The boy's already wide eyes pulled open just a fraction more, but enough to make it look as if they were going to pop right out of his head. His features pulled into a frown, an odd look on a Reptilia, though he did open his mouth to display a set of tiny teeth at the ridges of his mouth—an uncouth display for a Reptilia, only acceptable in children.
With another flash of thought and memory, I tapped the underside of my jaw, and his own snubbed snout clacked close like an inbuilt instinct after hundreds of warnings from his mother in just the same way.
"Are you out for breakfast with your mother?" I asked innocuously and he answered with an honest nod. "Bored?" I asked just after, a grin sliding onto my face warmly. He took a moment before answering in the positive, nodding quickly and eagerly while keeping his own gaze locked with mine.
"Does the toy help keep the boredom at bay?" I said, gesturing at the wooden toy sitting on the table. I had looked at it closer while the boy was clambering into his seat, realising that it wasn't just any old toy, but a bona fide puzzle box. A pretty complex one at that.
The Gek boy looked down to the wooden box before picking it up and, with an amazingly fast set of inputs that were no doubt aided by his sticky fingers, the box popped open revealing the empty interior. He looked back to me and screwed up his nose with distaste.
"I guess not." I chuckled with amusement, "Well, we had a puzzle back where I'm from that, to some, never got old." The Gek boy tilted his head to the side, his attention laser focused on my words.
"It wasn't a particularly hard puzzle, though it could be very difficult to do it without a proper strategy. But once someone figures it out, it can just be rearranged into a new puzzle altogether." I mused thoughtfully onto a very niche part of my memory from Earth, something that was hardly interesting to even Rethi or Alena who seemed endlessly interested about the world I'd come from. For some reason, it was these small things I could talk about with nostalgia, rather than the crushing sadness that sometimes still got to me when I was feeling low.
"Ah, anyway, I don't want to bore you–" I began saying, but the boy beat his little fist on the table with an expression of complete rapture. I grinned mischievously, knowing better than to keep the goods from such a terrifying bandit.
"Well," I said slowly, drawing on the boy's curiosity even further but picking up the opened puzzle cube and closing it, "it is a puzzle cube made of other, smaller cubes." I drew on the cube where each of the nine small faces were on each side, making it clear that there were shared surfaces.
"Then, each of the sides is given a colour; red, green, blue, yellow, white, and orange." I continued, tapping a side of the imagined puzzle cube, watching as something almost as tangible as an image appeared within the young child's emotions, revolving around it with his intense curiosity. He waited impatiently for me to continue. I grinned teasingly.
"Each of the faces can turn, and every vertical or horizontal section can as well," I motioned the two actions, making sure that the boy understood how I was explaining the puzzle, which was very poorly mind you. However, the boy barely needed the explanation, the curiosity in his mind absolutely humming with the possibilities.
"Now, you randomly twist the cube many times so that none of the colours match anymore, and your goal is to get back to each side being all one colour." The boy wasn't even looking at me anymore, instead his eyes were fixed on the puzzle cube I held, but not the physical form of it, but the imaginary one that I was now holding for him.
I watched as his mind tried to process the information, using his incredibly sharp mind to conceptualise the cube, yet kept running into a wall of frustration when he couldn't actually play with the cube in his mind, the randomness and difficulty of it alluding his understanding.
"Don't worry," I laughed gently, opening the toy for a moment, then closing it again to put it back onto the table and slide it over to him, "That puzzle can be quite difficult to solve, so you'd probably need a real one to–"
In the course of my explaining, I was interrupted by a sudden spike of wariness, then one of pure horror as the boy's mother realised that her son had gone and sat at my table. Not just anyone, either, because she remembered my face and was absolutely mortified at what punishment her son's actions might incur upon him.
"Oh Gods, I'm so sorry sir!" She practically squealed as she bustled over to my table and roughly grabbed her son, practically lifting him by his shoulders in a feat of agility and strength. I just laughed warmly as she forcer her son to bow, though he seemed totally disconnected.
"Oh no, it's no worry," I said, waving her anxiety away mostly unsuccessfully, "he's good company to have." I finished, tweaking something small inside of her. Almost disbelief.
"Pardon, sir?" She asked, confounded, her face still pointed at the floor despite her own curiosity eating at her to look me in the eye. Now that I got a good look at his mother, I started to see the small similarities between mother and son, though the boy's own curiosity was a league more potent.
"Your son." I said easily, sipping at the slightly cooled tea generously, "He's an excellent conversationalist." As the eyes of the others around our tables turned their sight and hearing to us, I felt a wave of humiliation from the woman. I got the impression that she thought I was intentionally lambasting her and her son in front of the entire inn, though of course I wasn't.
"I'm sorry sir. My son is… daft." That… made more sense. If I was reading the subtext correctly, which I probably was, she was doing the equivalent of saying that her son was mentally disabled, which was so far from the truth as I understood it. At least from my small encounter with him.
"Is that so?" I drawled, letting the genuine befuddlement leak into my voice, "I swear that he speaks just fine with his eyes." The forest green-skinned woman snapped her neck up so quickly that I would have been concerned if she were human. Her face was filled with a terrible shock, as if something deep within her, a quiet suspicion, were being confirmed—despite her logical mind telling her otherwise.
"We were talking about puzzles, weren't we?" I said to the young boy, and his mother turned towards him with disbelief, looking down at the box in his hands. He hesitated a moment before nodding almost imperceptibly, though it was enough for his mother to be shocked right to the core.
She turned back to me, her jaw slightly agape with the revelation that her son, as different as he might be, was hiding a real intelligence from her. It was something that she'd dreamed of, I could tell. That her son might one day wake up normal and they would live as a normal family, and now he was showing a simple sign of being more than a body she fed who would remain that way for the rest of his life. I tapped the bottom of my jaw, just as I had with her son, and her jaw snapped closed with a look of embarrassment.
"I–" she stammered, "he's never responded like that before." I smiled, small lines appearing at the sides of my brown eyes.
"Well, you'll have to learn to ask more interesting questions now, won't you?" I asked, flicking my own eyes to the boy along with his mother's as he nodded again, more surely this time.
"What's his name? And your own, if you don't mind?" I asked quietly, the young boy losing interest almost instantly, reverting his gaze back to the imagined puzzle in his mind.
"I-It's Jovum," she faltered, "his name is Jovum. Mine is Glerr." I tilted my head slightly, trying to determine whether the names were Gek names or just standard names for the area. Not my business, though.
"Well, Glerr." I said easily, meeting her large, bright orange eyes with a gratuitous smile, "I believe that your son may be quite a smart boy, possibly very smart." Her eyes filled with a dangerous hope that I instantly quelled with a shake of my head. "But I do not think that he will ever be what you consider normal. Jovum will have to find his own normal, and I think I have a nice way to start for you." I turned back to Jovum, the boy intent on the box in his hands.
"Jovum," I commanded softly, though he didn't react, "I have a special puzzle for you." The instant I mentioned a puzzle, the boy's eyes were locked to my own, something that would have been uncomfortable if I couldn't sense the intense interest behind them.
"When you get home, I want you to show your mother how you open that little box of your, okay?" I asked, and he nodded afterwards, though still waiting for the special puzzle I alluded to. I waggled a warning finger amusedly, "You'll find your special puzzle inside the box. You'll have to help your mum with it too." The little boy glared at me, the curiosity of what was inside the box already eating away at his intensely focused mind. After a moment of silence, Jovum shook the box lightly, and the small clinking sound inside made the minds of him and his mother twitch with interest.
"Good lad." I winked at him, and shortly after he nodded before staring at the box again, mind split between the two interests.
"Have a good day, Miss Glerr." I said, nodding my head with a goodbye, and while she desperately wanted to ask me a million questions, a glance around her told her that this was neither the time, nor the place to do so. She bustled back to her table awkwardly, and moments later the Skinned Lizard was back in normal conditions.
After a few minutes, both Alena and Rethi emerged from the stairs leading into the dining room floor, plonking themselves down in the chairs opposite me. Alena opened her mouth to speak, but Rethi was the one to break in first, his tone hushed.
"Why is everyone giving us looks?" He asked, staring at me intently, almost with accusation, but I shrugged flippantly.
"No idea." I brushed the look away, continuing on with what I originally planned for, "Now, down to business. I have a task for both of you."