"What can you tell about your past?" Alvin asked, having waited for the Wisp to tell more about himself.
"Well, you could say I was quite lucky," Linfel began to explain. "From where I came from, Wisps are actively hunted nonstop because of the primordial energy in our bodies. It is very pure, so pretty much all races like to use us to train. Naturally, once our energy is used, we cease to exist. However..."
Linfel continued. Back then, he was born on a lush planet mainly occupied by nonintelligent creatures. Nonetheless, pretty much all beings used Primordial Energy to get stronger, so even if the beasts around weren't intelligent, they at least knew that swallowing a wisp was a great boost to their power.
Linfel just so happened to take shape in a rather concealed place. Naturally, he had no knowledge about anything. Every single sight was a new one. It took him over a week to be able to learn how to use his core's Primordial Energy to float and move around. Until that moment, he simply looked like a sphere of primordial energy fallen to the floor.
That alone already put Linfel within the top 1% luckiest wisps in the Universe. A ball of concentrated primordial energy wasn't exactly something hard to perceive, especially since it would always stay put in the same place until the wisp learned how to use it to move.
A particular characteristic of the wisps, though, was their memory. Pretty much all intelligent races in the Universe only started to create permanent memories a few years after being born. Yet, wisps already had the capability of creating such permanent memories from the very first minute. It highly contributed to the fact that Linfel already had an adult mind by the age of five.
Once Linfel came out of his hiding place, he found himself in a dense forest where the sounds of primordial beasts echoed everywhere. Yet, the wisp knew nothing, so such sounds only made it more curious. It didn't take longer than an hour for the wisp to be facing a primordial beast. The beast, seeing the great meal in front of it, obviously attacked.
"Was it luck or instinct, I don't know," Linfel recalled of that day. "But when that beast attacked, the first thing I thought to do was to run. I knew nothing and didn't even know the meaning of being attacked, but I felt the danger. The primordial beast itself was quite slow, though. And the fact I could float, even if just a few meters from the ground, already helped me to run from it."
"However, I was very poor at absorbing the environment's primordial energy, and floating while moving at full speed spent a lot of my own reserves. After thirty or so minutes of pursuit, I was finally about to run out of energy. It was then that it happened."
From the sky, a ball of fire made its way down to the forest. All beasts in the place looked in this direction, feeling the danger it presented. Even the beast pursuing Linfel immediately understood that its life was at risk and turned around, running for its life.
Linfel, on the other hand, didn't know what it meant, so he just looked at that thing coming down. Yet, it was also thanks to that that he saw something different. As the ball of fire came down, a very small part of it detached.
"Was it curiosity? Was it destiny? Did something call to me? It didn't really matter," said Linfel. "I just thought that I should go after that small thing that came out of the ball of fire. The giant ball of fire passed above me and went further in the back while the small part fell somewhere a few kilometers away. I just ignored the giant ball of fire and went after the part that fell nearby. You have no idea just how correct that decision was, even if it wasn't exactly a conscious one."
When Linfel arrived at the fallen place of that small part of the ball of fire, he saw something like a capsule, very similar to the one he was put inside on this planet. The capsule was opened, and inside, there was a purple-skinned humanoid being. He approached with curiosity and soon got into the capsule with that being.
*Cough, cough...*
The being was of a race known as the Dajoras. He was unconscious and losing blood nonstop. Of course, the wisp had no idea that the man was in bad shape or anything; he just found the sight peculiar.
*Boom!*
Suddenly, an explosion happened far away. The sky turned red as a wave of powerful primordial energy swept through the forest, killing everything in its path. It only took a few seconds to reach the capsule, and it definitely would have killed Linfel and the Dajoras man inside.
However, the capsule was still active, and when the danger reached its sensors, it immediately closed again, trapping the wisp inside. The wave of destruction arrived in the next moment, blasting the capsule away together with the man and the wisp inside. Anywhere in the nearly thousand kilometers was a death zone, so it wasn't wrong to say the wisp was saved by its curiosity and lack of knowledge.
The capsule hit the ground tens of kilometers away again and kicked nonstop as the power of the explosion kept blasting everything in its path. The Dajoras man's body was being protected by some kind of foam, but the several impacts definitely didn't help with his condition. As for Linfel, he found himself trapped within the same foam that appeared to protect the man.
It wasn't before fifteen or so minutes later and hundreds of kilometers of distance that the sweeping force finally calmed down, allowing the capsule to land in some messed corner and stay there.
"I remember that capsule kept itself closed. Now that I think about it, the capsule seemed to know that it couldn't be opened at that moment. The pushing force of the explosion was over, but the environment outside was anything but hospitable," Linfel commented.
With the capsule now fixed on a place, the foam around the purple man and Linfel disappeared. "My old friend looked terrible, although I wasn't aware of what being injured meant. All I could tell was that I couldn't leave the capsule and had to wait there. It was then that I noticed that his body was absorbing the primordial energy of the surroundings even while unconscious."
The wisp sighed... or at least showed a movement that indicated it. He didn't really have lungs for such a thing. "I didn't know that having my Primordial Energy absorbed was a bad thing, and seeing the man absorbing energy similar to what I had in my core, I decided to give mine to him."
"Why?" Felia couldn't help but ask.
Yet, Linfel shook his head. "I don't know... I just felt that was the right thing to do."