Usually Diluc would put the blame on Knights of Favonius for being inefficient, but an outlander child stealing his grapes seemed to be outside of their jurisdiction. Not that he wouldn't look for ways to blame them anyway, but that could wait until later.
It was the maids who found the boy lying asleep on the ground. He appeared to be around 10, severely malnourished, and was really good at fighting. The bruise on his arm wouldn't be there otherwise when the maids brought the boy to him. His mastery of the local language too, or lack thereof, made communication a hassle. It was a good thing he has next to no idea how to use his vision or their fight would have been worse.
"Are you sure you don't want to inform the Knights?" Elzer asked at dinner.
The boy himself, after much calming down, finally stopped trying to run away and was now sat next to Diluc, fumbling at his cutlery. When not fueled by adrenaline and fear, he was actually quite a shy one.
Diluc took it upon himself to cut the steak on the boy's plate, not finding the whole situation a déjà vu from his childhood at all.
"If miss Lisa wants her apprentice back, then she will have to ask me first," he replied as he returned the boy's plate. The boy said something unintelligible but he assumed it was a thank you.
Truth be told, he would rather not leave the boy with them if this was how the boy lived. His respect to miss Lisa might have risen when he heard her taking on a feral child as a student, but it fell down hard seeing how a healthy diet wasn't part of their training plan.
"We'll keep the boy for now," Diluc said. "He can use the guess room. My old clothes should be in a box somewhere."
Unexpectedly, miss Lisa didn't appear to be aware of her missing apprentice when they crossed path the next day. In fact, she even recounted how they just finished training not long ago when he mentioned the boy.
Elzer at the mansion told him a different story. The boy had never stepped out of his room except for breakfast, lunch, and toilet breaks. What the boy had been doing however was crying his heart out for reasons unknown.
At dinner, Elzer looked at him expectantly as he gestured to the boy. Diluc rolled his eyes.
"Alright, I will bring him to the Knights tomorrow."
The maids were unanimously disappointed, Adelinde surprisingly being the most vocal.
"If they treat you badly, just run straight here, okay?" Adelinde said to the confused boy.
"Okay…?" he replied. Or rather, repeated.
It was Kaeya who greeted them when they arrived at the Knights' headquarter the next day.
"Oh, to what do we owe the pleasure. Never would I imagine master Diluc himself in the flesh to visit our humble abode." He turned to the boy, a curious glint in his eyes. "And who is this?"
The boy grabbed Diluc's arm and hid behind it, looking at Kaeya warily. Diluc did much the same.
"If you are done scaring children, we would like to visit miss Lisa. Her apprentice wants to see her."
"Her apprentice?" Kaeya shifted from Diluc to the boy, then to Diluc again. There was mirth in his eyes. Or rather, a mischievous glint. "Well then. I shouldn't keep you. In fact, why don't I be your tour guide for the day? Come."
Kaeya led them to the door and went inside first. When he was out of hearing range, Diluc patted the boy's head before gently pulling his arm.
"Kaeya may seem scary at first, but he's a good man inside. So don't worry," he said, not sure if the boy could understand half a word he said. He then made sure to send a glare to the guards around them. "You may speak a word of this, but you won't be getting a discount at my tavern."
They nodded quickly.
Kaeya led them to the library which was surprisingly not empty.
Miss Ella was in the Hilichurl corner practising Hilichurlian, while a young lady in need of clothing that wasn't an undergarment was reading a book with her electro pet. On the counter was miss Lisa herself, talking to a person covered in a hood. An electro vision hung behind his jacket.
"Good morning, miss Lisa. If I may interrupt, a certain someone insisted that," Kaeya paused as he gestured at Diluc, the humor in his voice never ceasing. "your apprentice wants to see you."
Miss Lisa raised a brow but smiled upon seeing the boy Diluc brought. She turned to him with much the same amused expression as Kaeya.
"My apprentice, you say. I'm sure he wants to. After all, he did come all the way here today." She gestured to the person in front of her. "Say hi, Razor."
The person turned around and waved. He was a teenage boy with a feral look about him. Definitely malnourished from his pale complexion. As was the case with the young lady, he was in severe need of a shirt.
"Hi. My name Razor," he said before sniffing at them. "You smell like grape."
"Hi," the boy replied, finally getting a grasp at greeting in the local language.
"Now, now, Razor. No sniffing at strangers. That's rude." Miss Lisa chided the boy to which he nodded. Determinedly too.
"Okay. Razor understand."
Lisa chuckled. She then turned back to Diluc. "As you can see, my apprentice is here standing next to you. It seems you have mistaken him for someone else."
It was then that Razor started conversing with the not-Lisa's apprentice.
"You like wolves?"
The boy surprisingly understood and shook his head, fear flashing on his face.
"No, wolf don't like. Wolf scary."
Miss Lisa blinked. "Huh, I can see why now."
Razor went into a long argument why wolves weren't scary and they should be everyone's lupical. Eventually, the girl in the undergarment chimed in along with her pet, speaking in a language he barely understood.
"Canis Lupus may well be beasts bestowed with grace, but it is ravens that your auge should gaze upon."
"Mein fraulein said that she likes ravens. And you should too."
"Ah, idiolects. Truly fascinating, wouldn't you say so?" She said to the adults, a notebook in her hand as she recorded the children's conversation.
Kaeya laughed. Diluc just wanted this to be over with.
While Razor and Mein Fraulein argued about their favorite animal, miss Lisa approached the boy and bent down to his height.
"What's your name, sweetie?"
The boy blinked, his eyes cast down in shyness. "Name?"
Lisa nodded, speaking out her words slowly as she used body language to explain. "Yes, name. My name is Lisa. What is your name?"
"Name. Namae… Takato. Matsuda Takato."
Diluc watched as Miss Lisa gently coaxed the boy to speak. He admitted his respect for her went up a bit. But just a little.
Kaeya hummed.
"Matsuda Takato. That's an Inazuman name, isn't it?" Which only opened up a whole other can of worms.
"The question is, what is an Inazuman child doing in Monstadt? They're supposed to be on lockdown," Diluc added.
"Smuggled out, perhaps?"
Or perhaps a planted spy, Diluc didn't say.
The boy was having trouble with his words, scratching his head every now and then, but he managed to put them into intelligible sentences.
"I… help. Friend find."
Miss Lisa nodded, urging him to continue. "Who is this friend?"
"Draw. Can?" He made a motion of holding a quill.
Miss Ella heard their conversation and handed hers along with a notebook. "Use this."
A minute later, the boy presented some crude drawings of what Diluc assumed were his toys. They all looked like animals of some sort except for one that looked like a knight in full body armor.
"Gigimon. Guilmon. Growmon. MegaloGrowmon. Dukemon," the boy said, pointing to each of the drawings and saying their names, almost none of which sounding Inazuman. "This friend. Name many. Body many. But same friend."
Kaeya held his chin. "A shapeshifter, huh."
"Friend find?" The boy looked up to miss Lisa, his eyes watering.
Miss Lisa nodded with a smile. "We will find your friend. We promise."
"Friend find, she said. Cry no. You wait, friend come home," at hearing miss Ella's words, the boy's face slowly brightened. When Diluc gave her a look, she just shrugged.
"I'm a linguist for a reason, you know."
As the boy's dam broke, miss Lisa let him cry into her chest. She patted his back. "There, there."
Diluc's respect for the whole Knights of Favonius went up a lot that day. Except for Kaeya. The respect was never there.
The children joined in too.
"Razor can smell friend too. Razor help."
"The Prinzessin shall not allow her subjects to wallow in sorrow, so she will cast her eye amongst the heavens."
"Mein fraulein said we will look for this friend as soon as possible."
If the boy knew how to say "thank you", he probably would have repeated it many times. As it was, he kept saying it in his original language through all his choking.
"A-arigatou."
After leaving the boy with the maids, Diluc called Elzer and told him of his little trip to the Knights' headquarter.
"Did he mention anything about his family?" Elzer asked as he took a seat next to Diluc. The table outside the mansion was already set with some drinks courtesy of Adelinde.
Diluc sipped his tea, pyro coursing through his fingers to heat it up to his preferred temperature.
"No. He only mentioned his friend. We suspect it's a shapeshifter of some kind. But I did confirm with miss Lisa about his vision."
Elzer nodded, urging him to go on.
Diluc pulled the folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to him. Elzer studied the drawing of the boy's vision on it. If the Shnezhnayan vision was rounder and had a pair of stubs in place of its double inverted arcs, this would be it.
"So it isn't a vision from any of the seven nations?"
"No, not even a variant." Diluc's memory flashed to Kaeya's slightly different Monstadt vision. "From his name, we assumed he was from Inazuma, but that doesn't seem to be the case."
Elzer returned the drawing to Diluc, giving him a sideway glance. "I guess this is where you say we take him in?" When Diluc didn't comment, he continued. "I've already asked the maids to measure him, so his clothes should be ready in the next few days."
Diluc let a little bit of smile grace his lips before it disappeared along with the tea he was sipping. He nodded.
"Good. As for his language education, miss Ella Musk has volunteered to be his teacher until he has a better grasp of it."
Elzer looked scandalized at the mention of miss Ella's name.
"That Hilichurlian linguist?"
"Don't worry. I doubt even she would dare to bring any Hilichurl to the Winery."
Elzer wasn't convinced.
"Tell that to the Hilichurl child she kidnapped to Monstadt."
Diluc felt a headache rising remembering the incident, but decided to put his trust in the little woman for the time being.
"It'll be fine." He hoped.
"The Hilichurl child was never found, wasn't it?" Elzer reminded him.
Diluc sighed.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
When he crossed that portal, it was to find his partner. But now it looked like he had to find a way out of here first.
Not only the was water here not breathable, it was wet and in every way behaved like normal water would. The most obvious clue was the fact he couldbleed.
Wherever the portal brought him to, it wasn't the Digital World.
Worst still, his D-Ark, the only lead to his partner, was replaced by this pulsing purple orb thingie.
"I'm so stupid." He smashed the extra pillow on the bed onto his face.
He sniffled, all his tears dried out after days of doing nothing but cry. If the owners of the mansion ever heard him, they kept quiet about it.
This was his punishment for being selfish. Now he was lost in a strange world that spoke English with no way home. He doubted anyone would waste their time rescuing him.
He hoped the Digimon were here at least. If he ended up in this place, then they could have to. If not, then…
He would rather not think about it.
Matsuda Takato
Voice: Tsumura Makoto
Birthday: 7/22
Affiliation: Dawn Winery
Vision: Electro
Constellation: Lancea Exitii
An outlander child who doesn't speak the local language. A shy and polite boy. No one knows where he came from, but he lives at the Dawn Winery.