‘What they think is everything.’ ‘It’s what makes you,’ Aramael’s father once told him. ‘When you’re out there and terrified, you have to trust the one who comes to pick you up. You have to believe that they can pull you out of whatever hells you’d fallen into, because right now, there’s nothing else you can do. You’re trapped, or lost, or in something too deep to get out of yourself. And that’s why what we do is so important. Because we’re that hand they can grab onto when they’re down. But the half of it is they just have to trust you.’
What they think is everything. And looking at himself, Aramael couldn’t see how thoughts of him were going in any good direction. For one thing, he was still fucking pink. But that aside, his training was hardly going the way he’d hoped; in fact, the place he came to was NOTHING like Torsang said it’d be, and he didn’t have any idea where else to go. He had a team there, he couldn’t just abandon them, but.. who knows if they’d want him now anyway, being like… this. They were probably off training to be a bunch of ninjas or whatever secret craziness the guild taught those who were worthy, and here he was, still shocking the socks off anyone who touched him, and about as stealthy as a fat dog wrapped in fluorescents. Has it been mentioned that he was still fucking pink?
He’d run off after the attack on his home to get stronger, to get Sjoln back, because hells if he could take anymore of sitting behind and doing nothing. But what did he even have to show for it? … He looked ridiculous now, barely got any stronger, might’ve even gotten worse for all he could tell. But by the gods and the hells, he came this far and it couldn’t get any more terrible (…wait, no no, he isn’t tempting the gods here; let’s just say it probably could get more terrible, but it’s pretty bad right now and he knows it) so he might as well just stick it out and come up better on the other end. At the very least, he’ll stop trying to make himself look any manlier in front of the mirror (cause Arceus knows that’s not working) and see if he can’t find a map of possible surrounding places he might make a trip to. Just to peek and find out if they’re any more suited to what he’s after. May as well bother Naira and the others (if he could even find them) to see if they’d be up for a little trip around too.
Perhaps there he could make something of a decent impression, or if not, maybe find out what will so he can grow into it soon enough. All this secret ninja stuff was waaaay too over his head.
