LIGHTNOVELSTORY Chapter 23 – What happens when communicating is possible
A few months passed since Anortha adopted Pochi as a pet, although she stopped seeing Pochi as one, since what kind of pet cooks for their master, or cleans up after them? After all those bathing sessions, Anortha confirmed without a doubt that Pochi is indeed a girl. She was hoping to name her something more than a generic pet name, but Pochi already recognized that as her name, and it was a bit late to change it.
Anortha ran out of easy words to teach her. It was enough so that they could communicate most of the basic things they wanted to say, but the lack of grammar sometimes caused misunderstanding. In the end, she dug out some of her old homework and children’s books and handed them to the lupo and let her study on her own.
With that, they could hold some basic conversations, although it was Anortha talking and Pochi writing on the chalk board in reply. Anortha asked quite a few questions about Pochi’s personal life, although she wasn’t insensitive enough to ask about her abandonment and the events that led up to it.
One of the most interesting things that Anortha learned about the lupo was her age.
Initially, Anortha just casually asked, “How old are you?” and hoping it wouldn’t cause offense. What she didn’t expect was the reply. Pochi simply wrote the number five on the chalkboard.
Anortha couldn’t believe it and replied, “There’s no way you can do all that stuff at five years old!”
The lupo thought for a while, then wrote, “I lie. I twenty-eight.”
“Oh really?” Anortha said. “I am twenty-eight too! That means we are the same age!”
Pochi looked at her incredulously, which caused Anortha to complain, “Well I know that I can’t do a lot of stuff that you can like cook, but that’s because I put more focus on other stuff, like magic. Really!”
Pochi seemed extremely interested in Anortha’s daily life and culture, and since the elf did not want Pochi to make any social faux pas, Anortha happily told her all about them.
Communication did also have its downside, however. Anortha loved giving Pochi a bath, since she had a very good excuse to go and pet her all over. Unfortunately, when Pochi demanded, many times in fact, that as long as Anortha supplied the water, she could clean herself, Anortha couldn’t think of a good reason to stop. Initially, Anortha pretended she never understood, but as the lupo’s language ability got better, she eventually gave up.
Not only that, Anortha now had to get criticized by Pochi by her admittedly less than stellar living habits. If the elf left her clothes on the floor or left dirty clothes in the hamper for too long, she would be greeted in big bold letters: “CLEAN UP CLOTHES” in red chalk.
As Pochi herself was very meticulous with arranging her own clothes, Anortha couldn’t complain much. Granted, Pochi only had four sets of clothes and undergarments, as Anortha couldn’t really afford to buy her that many clothes. This was with the fact that all of them were old clothes that other elves had hanging around and didn’t need, since there were no young children in the settlement at all.
Anortha heavily underestimated the upkeep fees for having another person living with them, and asked her parents if they can raise her allowance. They rejected her, citing the original promise Anortha made when adopting the lupo.
It turned out, however, that Anortha didn’t need to worry about Pochi’s maintenance fees, as her parents directly gave Pochi an allowance, which for some reason was far greater than her own. When she asked her parents, she was told that Pochi had to pay for her own food and board, while she gets them for free.
Cooking also improved as Pochi could read the cookbooks, expanding her options quite a bit. After awhile, her parents began to make specific requests to Anortha of what to cook for dinner. Not only that, they kept praising Anortha of what a good cook she was, which made her feel bad, but she kept pretending that she prepared all the dishes herself.
Probably the most important thing about being able to communicate was the expansion of games that they could play. The elf introduced Pochi to a strategy war board game where the objective is for the defender to escape with the king and the attacker’s objective was to kill off the king. It wasn’t surprising that Anortha won all the initial games regardless of what side she chose. She may have gotten a little carried away, which prompted the lupo to introduce a somewhat similar game she called “chess”. Anortha lost horrifically there, and she had to endure it when the lupo mirrored the trash talk that she used earlier.
That being said, the elf suspected that Pochi might be making up rules as they played in this chess game. It was confusing enough that the common foot soldiers in the game could move forward two spaces initially, but only one space after, and could only capture diagonally, but could only move forward. During one of the matches, Anortha made her foot soldier move forward two spaces to escape being captured by the enemy foot soldier, only for Pochi to take it anyways. She complained that Pochi was not allowed to do that as her foot soldier was to the side, not diagonal, only to be told that in a very special circumstance where the foot soldier moves two spaces and ends up to the side of another one, it can be taken.
Another suspicious moment was the rule of moving the king two spaces and pulling bodyguard type C1aka rook next to it. The elf wasn’t suspicious that that was a rule, as Pochi did it early on when there wasn’t much going on. What was suspicious is when she tried to do it when her own king was under attack and she wanted to do that escape, only to be informed that it wasn’t allowed.
Anortha wanted to catch Pochi in an act of contradiction, but it never happened. The elf suspected that Pochi wrote down the fake rules in that notebook of hers as she was always looking at it when trying to explain the rules.
The elf would have introduced many of the other games that elves normally played, since she would have experience advantage and could make sure that no made-up rules were inserted when convenient, except a good portion of them require magic. Anortha never bothered to teach Pochi magic before, as there was a communication problem, and more importantly, Anortha remembered her parents refusing to teach her magic when she was a child, as her parents said that learning magic when too young would be detrimental. Now that she knew the lupo was actually the same age as herself, there was nothing stopping her from teaching magic to Pochi. Well, except for the fact that Anortha felt bad enough for not actually cooking when she claimed she was, and if she didn’t even participate by providing water and adding magic to the magic stone in the stove, her contribution would actually be none.
In the end, her desire to win and the expansion of entertainment options led Anortha to try to teach Pochi magic. That being said, it was entirely possible that lupoy in general are incapable of using magic, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.