"So whaddya see Mister Aura-Man?"
In truth? Next to nothing at all. Lucario was never going to see anything noteworthy, just shapes and general feelings which should be clear to anyone paying attention. There's an overwhelming amount of excitement in their heart, but all that he senses is the slate-grey aura of a dark-type staring back at him. Maybe there was something deeper, an innermost feeling locked deep underneath their overwhelming joy, but he can't be bothered to delve no further. This Dieno hadn't paid enough for Lucario to put this much care in.
Sighing in fake exertion, Lucario lets his arms fall onto the table. He gives it a second or two to make it sound like he's contemplating, then he speaks up to the blind dragon.
"Unfortunately for you, I was unable to see much due to your typing."
The little guy frowns. Lucario quickly flips it upside down.
"But I did feel an overwhelming positivity from you, a bright orange aura brimming with potential. While you're not lucky, nor does fate have anything in particular for your future, your jovial aura will enshroud those around you with positivity and may be the key to what you're seeking. Friends or business partners are your greatest resource going forward."
"Really?" Their smile is bigger than ever before.
Nope.
"That's for you to discover."
There is a sense of finality to those words, enough for the fuzzy explorer to get Lucario's drift. They pull out a pouch of coin from under their table, dropping it in front of Lucario who gleefully snatches it. Lucario sneers with greed. "EAT IT" the message carved into his teeth says - eat his dirt for being pokemon number-however-many who's fallen for this stupid scheme.
"Farewell!" Lucario barely keeps the mask on.
With his goodbye, he exits into the shade counting his coins while the explorers and caravaners of Halfway Rock passby. There are no streets here other than the lines between tents, the most of which lead to the foot of Halfway Rock where the only buildings here stand - all of whom built into the foot of the gigantic cliff. This place, other than its proximity between the major places, is known for being the home of Murkrow Mail, whose workers have carved this rock into their base of operations.
The only pelipper stop on this continent was in Calico, so people have relied on local services to get their messages to and fro. Enter the Murkrow Mail. Though they can't carry any package above three pounds, they operate in total darkness which is an absolute necessity in a place named for its seasons of seventy percent night. Murkrow Mail employs just about everyone to help them with more specialised tasks, and it's assumed anyone wearing one of those dark feather hats is in cahoots with the 'krows.
Wearing a Murkrow's hat and matching cape to boot, Lucario walks through the alleys of tents and prop-up stalls to the tall wooden doors leading into the hollowed-out rock. He climbs up a wide open passage, counting coins in rhythm with each big step. By time he enters through the second set of doors into the open-air lobby he completes his count.
"Eight-Hundred, what a total dunce!"
Inside, a gothitelle rolls her eyes at him and a Honchrkow scowls at the boisterous hound from afar. Boss is nowhere to be seen lounging among the couches, but there was an odd gold light flickering in the door to their office and voices murmuring behind the stone. They're in there.
Before he can walk over and put a hand on the brass handle a dark wing stops him.
"Lucario." The Honchkrow nods towards the lobby. "You mind taking a seat?"
"Can it wait till-"
A Sucker Punch from Honchkrow turns his snout inside out. It stings like a beedrill, and the Lucario's reels back from the door.
"Lovechild of a ditto-" the aura mutt squeaks out. "I get it! I'll go take a seat! Just warn me-"
When he lifts a second wing, Lucario takes off to the couches. He slips down into the cushions as the bird takes up the adjacent seat. Honchkrow scans the room before speaking, then clears his throat.
"First things first: don't go screaming about what you're doing." The Dark-type whispers. "Two: find a new hussle. Someone's gonna find out about what you're doing if you keep barging in here, and it won't be pretty."
"When would anyone find out?" Lucario scoffs. "It's worked on everyone, no one's stupid enough to think a Lucario might be wrong on Aura. And look!"
Jingling the coin purse in front of Honchkrow gets him to sigh. He smears a wing down his face, visibly fighting the urge to smack him again.
"I gave you your hat for a reason - anyone who wears that is part of the Family, and I care about family. I'm trying to keep you from getting busted. If I have to slap some sense into you, by Summer's Gales I shall. Boss won't be as nice as me."
Honchkrow is a boss, but not the boss. Lucario only answers to him when the real boss says so, and this was one of those times. The hat's part of the job. There's never any reason to think of it as anything more than a way for Murkrows to see him, and onlookers to ignore him. It's a statement more than it is a statement of fashion; easily replaced by a piece of paper.
There's no reason to place any importance on it, but if Lucario wants to walk away without another slap across the face then he's gotta abide by the laws of the 'Krows. Lucario begrudgingly nods.
"Good boy."
Honchkrow acknowledges, transitioning from one business voice to the other he uses when he's not talking crimes out in the open. He slides something out of his tuft onto the table: a folded up map. Lucario swipes it. It's a standard map of the local area with one particular spot circled out.
"You're familiar with guild jobs, right? Consider this one a guildie job without all the paperwork. The boss wants you to check a place for treasure: Pyrite Passage."
Lucario's bands twitch, he looks up.
"Isn't that the place where dummies go to be disappointed? No one's ever found treasure in those parts aside from the usual dungeon crap, it's a waste of time."
"And how many of those idiots reached the end of it?"
The hound grumbles. Pyrite Passage isn't exactly far from here, maybe an afternoon's walk at most. It's a place where the locals go to chip off the crystals growing outside and where idiots go to find absolutely nothing. It looks cool - that's about it.
"What happens if I find something there?"
"You'll be compensated." Honchkrow's smile makes him want to puke. "One of my family's going with you just in case you faint in there."
Great, a flying snitch. Lucario stuffs the map away, and sighs. This is guild work after all, because he already hates this job.
"Tell Boss I'll be back by morning."
Smeargle work on canvas, not flesh. Hiring one to do tattoo work is completely out of the question, and there's likely no way short of mutilation to permanently mark her heavy scales. A mixture of paint and charcoal is what she has to work with.
She dips her talons into a small bowl, and stares into the mirror. The shoulders - the Haxorus reminds herself while she looks at the faded markings, just the shoulders. Scratches from some previous jobs have stripped the paint off her. and with a quick smear of her claws, are remedied. She does her right, then does her left. By time she's done she looks like she's wearing a pair of pauldrons. Unless she could convince Magcargo to slave six months of his life away working on a set of armor, this is the closest she'll ever be to looking like him.
She had the thought of painting her tusks dark as well but by time she commits her claws to the razor edge the paint has already dried on her hands. It's probably for the best. She wants her enemies to see when she's coming to cleave them into bits.
Halcion grabs a cloak next to the mirror, slinging the chain around her. A small clip holds it in place as it swooshes down her back like a ragged flag, scarlet as the scarves her guild fellows don. She claws open a lock box, then explodes into laughter.
Right, slug-mouth's still fixing the thing. Stupid habits.
Rookies and onlookers marvel at this dragon-type storming out of Team Vanguard's dorm through the guild's halls. Everyone here knows the colour of her cape means she's one of theirs, they may even know of this Haxorus clawing through the ranks - throwing her life on the table for bounties just for the sake of it, but without a badge to show for it all her accomplishments mean squat. She needs it, she can't be without it for a minute.
She rounds the corner, rips open the door, and a thick haze piles outwards. There's two searing-bright glows in the centre of it, one was a forge, the other was who she's looking for. Halcion slams the door behind her, and it makes the pile of lava squirm.
"Hal!" Macargo turns away from the raging forge to a raging dragon. "I should've known the stomping outside was you! Your badge is about ready."
"Who else could it be?" She laughs.
She steps towards the hearth in the middle of the scorched room. Dense, dark smoke rises from the charcoal below to a chute above which runs off somewhere at the base of the isle. There are three clay crucibles in the fire. There's an anvil near the magma creature.
"Hey, so I was thinking..." Halcion leans on a rack near the forge, her natural resistances transforming the blazing fire into a hot summer's day. "You already got my measurements, so how much would it realistically cost you to fix me up some armour?"
"Measurements which are a month old and for a fraxure?" Magcargo chuckles.
"I can get you new ones on a day off, Mac. I'm serious here - I wouldn't be asking you about this everytime I come in here if I wasn't set on throwing my savings into a suit of armour. It's my dream! I'd be ruler of the continent if I had some awesome steel!"
"I'm sure you'd and your creed would woo the masses over, but those times of knights and honour have been gone for ages. I like to think we all had cool armors way back then - that was during Zekrom's time and now is now. We don't have the infrastructure to make legendary weapons; armour's even further outta the question. I can make you a helmet to cover you from getting your head doinked, maybe a sharp thing at the end of a big stick, but that's as far as anyone alive's able to do. Pokemon are too unique for that kind of blacksmithing to be a thing."
Their stone shell quivers, a fire shoots out from one of its cracks. Something's cooking in there. Marcargo shudders.
"I sound like your Minstrel friend, gosh." They share Halcion's disappointment, gazing back at their shaking shell. "Can you-"
"Already on it, Mac."
There's a particular rock on their shell which is always loose. Halcion pries it open, then reaches into the burning hot core of this pokemon, the heat slowly sizzling away at her arms. Her claws grab hold of something, and she pulls it out, throwing the molten crucible straight onto the anvil. Magcargo goes straight to work as she flicks off the slag from her scales.
They crack it open, wielding the chunk she tore out of their shell in a gooey appendage like a hammer, chipping away at the clay till it reveals a spike glowing as intense as the sun. They retrieve a crucible from the other forge with their mouth, cracking it open on the anvil to reveal her three-point badge. Strike, after strike, they hammer these pieces together until they're forced to become one. And once done, the badge is flung into a tray of oil to cool.
"Give it a few minutes." Magcargo mutters.
The sludge bubbles, steam rising up from the basin. Her heart's pounding with anxiety up until the second it's settled enough for her to reach in without losing an arm, and she pulls out a slick metal badge. Four points, each pillar on the setting sun purchased through sweat and tears. Still hot in her hands, she pins it to her cape's chain completing her outfit.
It's back where it belongs, she can breathe again.
"Thanks, Mac."
"Thank you for not tearing my door down." The chunk of stone moves throughout Macargo's amorphous body until it slides back into place. "Since you're four-points now, you can request just about anything from me free of charge."
"Including armour?"
"Armour's not in the policy, but a Million Poke could sway even the darkest of hearts."
Both pokemon have a hearty laugh, a dragon bellowing, the living furnace exhausting actual flames. She'll try again some other day. Halcion can swallow her pride for a friend, just this once. And with a wave of her tail she bids the smith farewell, gently closing the door behind her as she steps into the halls.
And not a moment too soon she arrives at the base of the tour, the ground floor where the lighthouse's spiralling stairs come to a halt and where the two bulletins present in every guild stand. They have three here, one for actual jobs, one for those boring caravan guard deals the Sundown Guild's speciality necessitates, and the only one she's interested in: bounties.
Criminals from petty to actually dangerous rank here. It's about sixty percent thieves, twenty who are pokemon who beat others for the heck of it, fifteen in debt collection, and the remaining bounties are the super serious ones. She doesn't bother with the latter, not out of a fear for her own life or anything of that, she doesn't consider it proper training. Thieves usually fight then squirm away, they don't usually attack with the intent to put others down for good.
The problem with sanctioned sparring is that no one takes it seriously. There's so many precautions, reviver seeds, oran wines and adjudicators to keep battles from becoming out of hand that they may as well be playing board games instead of fighting. If she wants some real training she's only ever gonna get it from criminals who have their whole careers to lose, and a ripe inventory of adventuring goods to gain.
She takes a look a today's bounties:
Killer arachnid on the loose! 900 Poke, 1 Reviver Seed. Basalt Peak.
One fourth's shipment of wine stolen at Turquoise Tundra, bounty 1200. Contact a local Aromatisse for more information.
Some fraud of a fortune teller made away with seven hundred of my hard-earned coin. He goes by Mister Aura and last saw him around Halfway Rock. Get it back, punch his nose in, and I'll give you some Orbs and 300.
The latter catches her eye. Halfway rock is a pretty good stop for any amount of adventuring equipment she might need, which considering she's gone up a size she has plenty of old things in newer sizes she's looking for.. She could maybe sell off an old band or something of hers to one of the locals and recoup the cost of travelling there. Any excuse to travel to Halfway Rock is totally worth it.
But it's this fraudster which catches her eye.
A fortune teller, a reader of some sort, getting away with fake readings because they happened to have been born the right pokemon. It sounds like someone she knows; someone she'd ought to show her new self for.
She's got an old friend to set straight.
"You have a name?"
Getting the Murkrow to chat was like trying to crack open a safe. Out of all the people on the Murkrow Mail's payroll, they choose one of their mailmen to spy on him, and among the hundreds of Murkrow they send him the lamest one in the murder. There's nothing unique about their appearance, their hat's about the same, they don't even give a name nor gender, it's the most bland bird Lucario's ever laid his eyes on. He'd rather take one of those insolent Pawniard than have this flying piece of wood, then at least then he'd be annoyed as opposed to just…
Bored.
This wasn't a rip-roaring adventure, nor is it anything to write home about, it's a walk to some place not too far from work to a hotspot for bored passerby's. It's a dungeon that's of no use to anyone; it offers nothing other than lost adventuring gear. Here's where wandering fools go to lose their luggage, and where apparently there's a treasure no one's been smart enough to find.
This job has to be a way of getting back at him. Maybe they're putting him through boring work with the most boring of partners possible so he doesn't think about bragging about his hussle ever again.. Pyrite Passage wasn't dangerous or particularly interesting, but this is the exact sort of tedium which turns guildies into indies. Lucario is lucky to have avoided it till now.
Dozens of adventurers have beaten the path through the foliage, little ribbons tied to trees prevent them from ever becoming lost, and some gracious people left apples behind for hungry travellers. He made use of the former, adding it to his inventory alongside the Reviver and Sleep Seed he purchased with the idiot's money before leaving.
It was dusk when they left, and night now settled in the forest. A new moon means he has to follow the Murkrow's squawks into the darkness. Through shrubs and a few stubs of his toes, they make it to the mouth of a clearing. They see a pathetic little mountain, rows of formations stand around the cavern like tombstones. Each rock glows like gold in the starlight, although only a fool would think they're worth their weight.
It's a nice spot, but a worthless dungeon. He can see the shadow of the Murkrow overhead, looking down, waiting for him to get a move on.
Lucario leaves the treeline and enters the pyrite fields. He's expecting a Geodude to roll out from behind a crystal at any point, but that would be exciting, this is a droll stroll into a dungeon.
Some of these pyrite formations are shiny enough to beam his bored looking face back at them, others are abundant enough to catch the light from the stars and glow in the pitch dark of night. The cave entrance ahead is littered with them like rotted, yellow teeth. An idea goes off in his head.
"Hey"
He stops at one of the big chunks, motioning at the Murkrow then at its shining surface. The flying-type perches atop of it, watching him tap the brightest crystal of the bunch.
"Do you think if we could lob off a really nice looking chunk of this we could convince one of those stupid vagrants it's real gold?"
The 'krow squints at it, tapping piece with its talons, judging quietly. They squawk.
"Maybe," he says in a man's voice. "Maybe if it's…"
Murkrow taps the one next to it.
"This one-"
And just as his beak touches the crystal there's a loud crack from the woods, and the stone explodes before their eyes.
Chapter 1/4 for Special Episode 1. I would label these as such but they're kinda required reading. Mind the shortness.