Surprise Surprise [Gazimon]

Wasn't every day Gazimon encountered something interesting out here in the sticks.



Well, wasn't every day that Gazimon found himself trekking through the sticks. Admittedly, the odds of finding something of merit on the maybe one or two times he'd been out this far in the Server Woods was low. Maybe that made him feel lucky this time.



Truth told, this wasn't his usual scene. His usual territory was a little dangerous for him right now. He'd done that to himself. So here he was, skulking through the backwoods with his pack hauled over his shoulder like some kind of low-budget guerrilla with nary a cause. The calm stillness of nature was nearly enough to drive him mad. No ever-burbling stream of voices or familiar hum of power cables. So when he'd first heard the quiet, distant voices, he wondered, idly, if he had gone crazy. Then he wondered if he had been followed.



After a few moment's discretely approaching the source of the sound, though, the disquiet of those thoughts eased. Instead, it was two figures... One distinctly digimon, and one not. That piqued his interest just enough to bare the risk of being detected, and sidle quietly closer. Just quietly closer enough to conveniently overhear snatches of their discussion. Slowly, a grin overcame his features. What a dutiful boy. This was the first opportunity for, well, opportunity in... however many kilometers he'd marched in the quiet today.



Taking the laughter as his cue, he screwed up his face before breaking into an easy smile, just friendly enough to counteract the inherently untrustworthy caste of his face. With that, he simply walked on, moving into open view of the duo as easily as if he was simply passing by, hefting the heavy pack on his shoulders.



"Well, whaddya know! Another couple travel--" The Mammal digimon's voice was cut off as, mid-wave to the pair, his foot seemed to catch on nothing in particular, sending him stumbling up before them to land rather roughly on what should have been his face. Fortunately, well practised in such endearing pratfalls, he'd turned it away just in time. A few odds and ends from his pack were sent scattering about him, completing the scene: various scraps of junk metal, a heating element appropriate in size to a hairdryer, and a half stuck together notebook that looked like it had been fished out of a brackish pond.



Grumbling, he started to pick himself up, the mischievous glint in his vermilion eyes fortunately difficult for the pair to pick up. "Agh, I really oughta watch my step..."

Just the reaction the Gazimon had been hoping for. He had to struggle not to seem too pleased as the human reacted with the near-immediate empathy only a truly kind heart could produce... Or a sucker, as they were more likely to name them down in the depths of Tenebrous. Instead, he shook his head, the grey and fuzzy stalks of his ears bobbing slightly with the motion as he pushed himself into a quadrupedal position and raised his head to get a better look at this 'Gar' and 'Ruby'. Sure enough, that was a digivice straddling the kid's hip, and the Dobermon's protective attitude affirmed just who the digimon it was bound to was.



"Haha, don't worry about it, was just a little slip," Gazimon assured Gar past the imposing form of the looming Ruby, and except for a few scuffs and patches of dirt marring his (already admittedly less than pristine) gray coat, he didn't look particularly worse for wear. He swallowed and avoided openly wincing at the tooth-and-hackle intimidation the doglike digimon was displaying. His own dark red eyes locked with that narrowed pair for only a moment before he glanced aside, a small shift in his position accompanying a hoarse little "Gah!" as he put more weight on one of his fore-limbs... Intentionally providing a small cut on the palm of the hand-like member by pressing it tight to the jut of one of the several rough-edged metal objects scattered about him.



Only then does he wince, standing into his bipedal position and lifting both of his hands in a gesture of disarmed mollification, the effect of which is slightly dampened by the fact that each limb shows a row of long, sharp claws. Nonetheless, the movement revealed the small but not completely unsubstantial cut that had been inflicted. "Say-say-say! Easy there, big guy! I ain't here to start trouble..." Really, he wasn't. Ideally he'd turn some quick gain on this situation /without/ trouble. Maybe something to help keep him going for his next run-in with civilization. He just had yet to formulate just what that might be. Maybe with a little more time and talk...



"... Alright, ya got me," He admitted with a sigh, large ears lowering perceptible. "I was passin' by and heard talk about the market, yeah? Just seems your friend there, he could save a few bits doing a little foraging in the forest here. Lots of good stuff, fruits, nuts, berries... Heh, even some mushrooms, you know where to look!" Slowly, very slowly, he raised his gaze again to the piercing crimson glare of the Dobermon. "I'm no fighter, so scavengin' that kind of thing alone, out here in the woods, it makes me real nervous! But with a strong champion like you, well, I guess I just thought we could all help each other out..." His eyes moved, carefully, between the digimon and his human partner, watching each of their reactions carefully.

"So then why's the whelp the one bringin' it up?" Gazimon asked, his brow raising fractionally in a display of near-genuine bafflement. Admittedly, he felt some relief as the human pushed his canine partner aside, at least reducing the proximity of those vicious fangs by a half-meter, give or take. It was almost enough to make him test his luck with another conceivably innocent jab... But the second show of those chompers convinced him not to pretty quickly.

"Sure, sure, no funny business," He promised as sincerely as he could muster.

Seeing the human already working to dig up some bandaging, Gazimon let his expression slowly transition back into something approximating a friendly smile, showing his own sharp teeth in an admittedly more amiable way as Gar reveals a strip of bandage. He offered out the lightly damaged limb in question, showing the thin slice drawing a few inches across the gray pelt... And he did so very slowly, lest Ruby get the wrong idea and decide to remove the problem by biting it off. "Hey, thanks kid! Don't be too hard on your pal though, he's just lookin' out for ya, really. We Gazimon do get a pretty bad rep." Never mind that he was normally only too happy to play into that reputation.

"Either way, nice to meet ya. Sorry for startling you guys. Guess it's not too normal to just bump into a friendly face out here in the middle of nowhere, huh? If I can ask, what brings you out this way, then, if you ain't scroungin' up food?"

"Sure sure, makes sense. Not exactly my first pick, but I could see it," The rookie said, turning his gaze to their surroundings as if considering it for the first time. It figured that the Dobermon preferred a spot where he could get the jump on anyone approaching. Gazimon didn't particularly want to think on what might have happened if it had only been the digimon without a human partner that he'd happened upon.

He blinked those sharp red eyes as an additional object came into view; wow, the kid was going all out, even using medicine. "I'm Gazimon, by the by--" His ears gave a discernible twitch to the offered warning before the sting in question is on. A small yelp of surprise punctuated the application of the disinfectant, his face scrunching into a rather animal snarl and his arm tugging at the natural urge to escape the bite of pain, only to find the human's grip unaccountably strong. A digimon accustomed to some of the longer-shadowed quarters of the digital world, he was no stranger to pain... Didn't mean he liked it, though, and it showed through clearly in his verbiage, "Jeesh! Easy, hey, easy with that stuff! Been bit by Kunamon with less sass!"

The initial pain of the sting quickly died away, but it left him looking grumpier than he had been before, and with that self-satisfied Dobermon looking on it felt like some small defeat.

Gazimon was about to go on to complain further when Gar instead carried forward the conversation, introducing himself and his partner, and causing Gazimon's glinting gaze to shift from one to the other. Garrote? The low-level virus digimon couldn't help but wonder if that was his given name or something he'd earned... And then go on to wonder which would be worse. Between that and the unexpected strength behind his grip, snug enough to match the name, he began to wonder... Had he misjudged this young human? His worried frown showed through for a long moment as he watched the boy go about bandaging him, careful as could be, and his gaze flickered from injured paw, to the human's face, and then back again.

... Naw, definitely a total softie.

"Gar, eh?" He managed to salvage an expression much more approaching the smile, which was quickly twisted on its side into a slight smirk as the digimon is introduced in turn. "Ruby," He repeated, before adding with appropriately weighted appreciation, so that it was difficult to determine just how genuine he is, "Pretty name."

His voice came in a raspy little chuckle at their back and forth. He could see in at least rough clarity how the boy kept the digimon cooperative, a thought that sees him offering a few additional looks towards the mysterious device pinned at the human's belt.

Gazimon was quick to tug his forelimb out of Gar's grip once the bandaging had reached it's inevitable completion. He gave a few testing flexes of the limb, moving his claws each in turn to test how the tape-job handled his movements. "... Hey hey, no worries, not bad! Thanks, Gar," Gazimon sounded practically genuine in that rough approach to praise, and offered the human a beaming, white-toothed smile--the most winning he could muster--and a wink. From there, he was quick to start moving again, beginning to gather up some of the assorted trashy artifacts that had spilled immediately around him. "You some sorta backstreet saviour goin' around out in the boondocks with that sorta stuff? Or all you humans got a clinic in your pocket?"

"Heh, guess that follows! Maybe I oughta carry a heap of gauz and tape around, 'stead of this crap," Gazimon's laughter followed Garret's, a sound that was perhaps surprisingly warm. Friendly. Disarming. Of course, it was also his best defense against Ruby's hackly reaction, and he laughed a little louder still to make sure to drown out any oncoming snarls to follow.

"Easy, easy, I still gotta get all my stuff!  And there's still that thing about rootin' up some stuff, right?"  The smaller Mammal digimon pursed his lips in a display of distaste at the canine's continued needling, simply moving about and going about sluggishly gathering his things. The human's sudden exclamation caused him to drop one of the heavier pieces of junk on his foot, and it was only the boy's quick recovery of his digivice that stopped the rookie from swearing loudly in turn. He peered with some evident interest at the little electronic--a rarity that was practically unseen even on the ever-moving MalMarket of the night city. He sidled a bit closer. Those shifty red eyes shone with a light of greed and covetousness, but what was more, a genuine and far more innocent curiosity.

The drab gray of his ears picked up, subtly shifting like they were tuning, homing closer and closer to a frequency decoded by each sound produced with a press of one of those buttons, while Gar was simply looking through the functions. "Where... Did'ja get that, anyway? Humans... Most of 'em, anyway, they get those things when they come here, uh? There some lottery where they give 'em away on the other side, or they crash down in a shooting star or what?"

"Jeesh, just curious, don't mean nothin' by it," The Gazimon bit back a snarl of his own, deciding, instead, to lean a few extra inches away from the on-guard guard-dog. He gave a sniff, sounding just a bit put-out by Ruby's (admittedly to be expected) blow to his stature.



"Where I come from, these things ain't taken for granted--that's a mysterious and powerful piece'a tech there. Kinda thing you don't just go down town to buy," Those smouldering cinnibar orbs traveled away from Ruby's diminishing snarl to the inconspicuous little object under discussion. "... Yeah, yeah, don't sweat it, Ruby-cube. You're just getting the kid's back, I get it." Gazimon was, of course, aware in passing of Dobermon's nature; really, he had never gotten along with 'their sort', and that was as natural as eating or breathing or loading data as far as he was concerned. It still wrankled him a bit, though, being treated like the virus he was. It always would.



"... Don't suppose you'd be willing to tell me where you got it, eh pooch?" That little furry gremlin shot a look in the laying dog's direction, only to glance back to find the newly materialized portal floating innocuously before Gar. Gazimon abruptly dropped all of the junk he'd been gathering up on his feet with nary a whimper, gazing, transfixed, through that door: the distinct and measured lines of a city peered back through from the other side, a stark contrast to the greens and browns and organic rounds of the forest surrounding them. A city, but not a city he ever knew. The city of another world. "So, it, er, it can just do that?" He mumbled on, fascinated.