[ti]private[/ti]discrete packaging

Luckily for Muin, it wasn't up to him, and he was forced to hang out with Pace whether he wanted to or not. Unlike his Celtically-named friend, though, Pace doesn't read anything if it's longer than a few lines - a habit which he should probably get out of - and it was currently biting him in the ass. An important thing about quests was that you actually had to accept them to do them. And, well...

Pace watched as the pale-haired stranger walked up to the professor's aide, was greeted politely and then handed a small parcel, delicately sealed. Pace stared for a moment, dumbfounded, then entered his usual labrador mind state and began to laugh. "Well, shit"

The relief that the game wasn't broken and he was, in fact, just a moron, gave way for frustration to fade away. In it's place came, with renewed strength, flirtation. Because it was obvious now, with his eyes cleared from the cataracts of being annoyed by video games, that this person he was paired up with was pretty handsome.

"No problem indeed, huh? You're pretty good at this stuff", Pace responded, with dumb confidence strong enough to destroy the very codes and textures around him if he only knew properly how to harness it. "Guess you'll be needing a hand to take that where it's gotta go, huh? Want me to carry it?" As if the box were titanic, perhaps, and not a shoebox.

Logic was not something that Pace ever really had much of a grip on. He was much more a heart and soul person than a mind person, and so the thought to make his avatar look anything other than himself barely entered his head. The concept of smoothing out imperfections or changing little things here and there, even, didn't occur - why change perfection? It seemed narcissistic, but it was quite simple. Pace loved himself, and had naively never thought to think otherwise.

He takes the box with a smile, ignoring (perhaps by choice) Muin's tone of fine. He gave it a gentle shake to make sure it wasn't too fragile, which it seemed not to be, then popped it under one arm and carried it against his hip.

"Ride pokémon? Hmm..." Pace's mind turns to his party - all quite small and definitively unrideable. Maybe Kharuf? He was pretty big for a Mareep, but... nah. "No can do. My guys are pretty small, would be a bit of a squeeze to fit us both on" He laughs, then catches up with Muin to walk beside him.

"Guess it's just us, then. My tutorial pal! We should add each other as friends - that's a thing, right?" He mindlessly taps through his minimap settings as they wander on. "How d'ya pronounce that, then?" Pace looks up, nodding towards Muin's handle. "Moo-in?"

Pace wasn't the type to notice things like eyerolling, he mostly never realised when people were annoyed with him full-stop unless they told him they thought he was a dickhead. That had happened more times than you would expect, even, despite how wonderful and charming he was.

The guy spoke fancy, which was pretty cute, but there was the faintest lilt change when he spoke his name. Pace didn't recognise it insofar as he knew whatever dialect he was slipping on, but he recognised in the way that he knw what it was to pronounce a language different from English. He'd done so plenty of times with Arabic - refusing to anglicise his father's name, perfecting his pronunciation of Salah despite his Americanisms. For all his ADHD-ness, Pace noticed little details relatively well, he thought, in people he was interested in. And Muin seemed very interesting.

"So what language is that?" He asks with a bright smile.

With a response that was positive, Pace adds Muin to his friends list. "I'm Ibis, by the way. You can just call me Pace, though"

He leans in close to get a look at his quest partner's map - plainly forgetting that he could simply take a look at his own - and nods. "We're not that far! Whattaya think'll be in our way? There's gotta be something, right, it's a tutorial after all. Some huge Snorlax, Red-and-Blue style? Maybe we'll have to battle eachother!"

As he wanders forward, he notices something in their path - nothing. To be more specific, a drop-off, a cliff. There was a boy stood beside it, baseball cap and shorts all denim-blue. "Ledges like this can provide a great shortcut! But it's dangerous to jump down." He claimed. Pace tilted his head.

"Are you fucking insane? That's a cliff!" He turned to Muin with a resounding "Don't jump down there" as if saving his new friend's very life.

Pace's singular braincell doesn't register the word suppose, and is instead just glad that Muin is happy to meet him. He meets his partner's eyes and beams once again "Sure, I noticed as much. But I like my name!" It was, all things considered, a pretty cool name. Unique enough to be memorable, but not so unique that someone could find him out too easily. He hoped, at least.

He doesn't notice that him and his new gardener buddy have gotten close, but he does notice Muin step away. Obviously he needed some space to try and approach their obstacle! That made perfect sense, maybe.

"Good plan" Pace nods, taking a step closer to the edge to peer on down. "That's a hell of a drop. Imagine falling down that fucker, huh? Super dead." Helpful.

Taking a wary step back - he was well aware that standing too close to a sheer drop was dangerous for someone with legs as restless as his - Pace followed Muin's gaze. Of course he'd barely been paying attention to the map, what with a new friend and a scary cliff to distract him. "Aha. That seems a better path. C'mon, let's hit the road. Obstacle cleared! Professor Ash is gonna be pumped"

"Y'didn't answer me before, by the way. What language is it?" he gestures with a nod up to Muin's handle. No attention span, but a decent memory, at least.

Pace wasn't the type to see his confidence as a flaw, though Muin wouldn't be entirely right in his presumption about flawlessness. Pace was well aware of his own flaws, but the one thing that would never be one, to him, was that confident streak. In fact, it was what allowed him to overcome those other flaws, to mask them. Nobody would focus on anything else if all he showed was braggadocious frat-boyyery.

"Celtic, huh? You don't sound Irish to me, though I guess that's a dumb thing to say, nobody sounds like anything, right? Bet you'd never be able to guess where my parents- huh?"

He's drawn out of his incessant rambling by Muin's call to attention with the box, which Pace heeds and grips the shoebox parcel a little tighter. In front of them, growling, an angry Patrat. "Tsk..." Pace smiles. "It's a Patrat. They're harmless, you could probably just walk right past"

They were the Route 1 normal types - on par with Zigzagoon and Bidoof, it wasn't as if there was any actual threat here.

For Pace, work was game was work. He had the good luck to work in a situation where - albeit hard work at times with keeping to a schedule and keeping VOD updates on YouTube in a timely manner - he was entirely in control and was able to be himself. There were some limits, of course - everyone under the sun would tell you to keep politics and religion out of content, stuff like that, but outside of a few details that Pace kept under his hat so-to-speak, he was 100% himself on twitch. So for him, UNOVR had no difference to the outside world, to his job; he could be just as much Pace Mahmoud stumbling around the Birchwild Grove as he could in the streets of Detroit, and on stream.

Unfortunately for Muin, though, that meant he was kind of a lot, only stopped by the Patrat's heated advance.

"Little dude, c'mon, get outta the way" Pace chuckles, looking over to the side to watch Muin step away. Pace shoots a smile at him, then is hit in the thigh by the Patrat, which has launched itself through the air and landed teeth-first in Pace's leg. "Ow- bitch!"

Pace half-drops the parcel in his surprise, and the Patrat scrambles up his side with those sharp little claws, taking it's teeth to the box instead, paired with the satisfying schnk noise of his incisors stabbing through cardboard. "Hey! Get off!"

There's a scrabble for the box - fully grown, six-foot-one adult versus a tiny mustelid-based creature of some kind. Claws fly, scratches are made, teeth find their mark - and that's just Pace! But try as he might, the beast refuses to let go, and if Pace removes a hand to grab a pokéball, Patrat could well make off with the box into the woods for good.

In the saddest, wettest tone; like a cat with it's claw stuck in a blanket, Pace calls for his readily-disappearing partner. "Muin, helpppp..."