Your People

Banon emerged from the jungle thicket into a huge clearing of exposed mesa mat floating atop a sub-surface lake. It was a common enough kind of terrain found all over the rainforest. But here, the remarkable feature was that the entire clearing was bare of undergrowth, having been stripped away by the Ooura that inhabited this place. Its sheer size and openness always took a moment to get used to, especially after wandering the wilds for days like he had. The flat plane of single-tone dark green mulch and weed stretched almost as wide as the open-surfaced lake Banon had just returned from, and was shaped more symmetrically in a distinct circle visible even from the edges as he was.

Banon leaned on his new staff as he inspected the heart of the Ooura empire. A massive Mew tree towering at its center, dozens of outcropping buildings hanging among its branches. The absurdly wide Mew trunk showed no signs of rootage where it passed cleanly under the mat. Instead, like all Mew’s, Banon knew its trunk extended down and into the lake, all the way to its bottom, where it was rooted to the far more secure sediment of the lake bottom. Dozens more vastly smaller trees sprouted around it, their roots merely clinging to the floating mat. The smaller trees were of several different species, all placed sporadically throughout the clearing, surrounding the central Mew that held the chambers for rites among its branches, and the circle of elders far above that, at the very top. In many of those smaller trees, constructions wrapped around their own trunks, though far smaller and closer down to the mat than the mega-structure among the branches of the Mew looming above them. Most of those were family abodes, with lowerable rope ladders descending down to the mat.

Built directly on the mesa mat, were several utility structures shared communally by the tribe. Smokehouses for meats. Fishing huts with holes inside them cut down through the mat where men dangled lures into the depths. Small clay-walled buildings for mass dehydration and preservation of fruit.

Even though Ooura valued the seclusion of small communities as opposed to the mega-city-focussed empires of the Enka and Pyathens, they still had places in the forest that were more special, even sacred, than others.

The most sacred of which, was located in the very middle of Banon’s own village, here, and carried among its branches the Ooura’s closest construction to a palace.

Pyathen built their spire cities, using dead Mew trees for the internal skeletons, adding their many structures overtop; made from some kind of new dried mud construction. However, from what little he had learned about them, there was far more to it than simply placing normal mud and letting it dry. By the end of the construction, the Mew tree was hardly recognizable as something natural. The bright white color the mud-based substance became from sun-bleaching took away from it even more.

What was left was a series of white spires, with massive, fully enclosed spiral staircases leading up around the great trunks to their habitation disks, built among the larger branches in a far more symmetrical and orderly fashion than the tangle of chambers hung in the great tree in front of him. Each habitation disk extended far further out than the branches could possibly, which Banon had wondered about their methods for something like that to be possible for quite some time. He had guessed they used some kind of internal scaffolding, perhaps using metal purchased in trade with the Enka humans like they used for their weapons and armor, though that was just an idea. What material the spire city skeletons were actually made of, he did not know.

At the very top of each white spire city was a grand palace the Pyathen royals lived in unrivaled luxury. The Pyathen had a unique attachment to royal blood over the Ooura and Enka. It was more than that, though. They treated their rulers like veritable gods, and only leaned more towards so as they progressed in their recent cultural shift towards science as a veritable deity of its own. While Banon looked up at Kimitrius for its abundance of knowledge from all it had seen– and his elders if not that– the Pyathens looked to names, names that had lasted through such time that their mere mention sewed the same feeling of reverse in their stunted hearts as Banon felt when he went to Kimitrius for his knowledge and guidance. Their palaces placed on the peak of each city were only a reflection of that, and each individual spire city had a single name, a single family that controlled it, living at the very top, in every sense.

Mirroring their human constructors, Enka cities were far less elegant, yet more than making up for it in their absurd proportions of construction and sheer numbers of the human populations living within them. It was feral, to Banon’s mind, to have thousands of individuals all pressed into one place, one tribe. The Enka’s architecture, while dwarfing the Pyathens' mere dozen-odd total spire cities, was far below the least elegant. Enka built their temples and holy places the largest; stone constructions made from massive bricks, set straight into the earth since they did not share the Ooura and Pyathen fondness for the floating mats of the rainforest jungle. A single one of their temples extended over an area that would swallow an entire Ooura village. With each new layer of bricks, the entire outer rim layer was removed. What resulted was an evenly tapering structure built of far more stone than Banon found it sensible to move, even with the strength of an Ooura, which the humans certainly did not have. Their sheer numbers, it seemed, made up for that.

Pyramids, the Enka called them. Banon found it a gaudy word that spent too long in the mouth to make you say it.

The circle of elders emerging from the surrounding tree canopies as Banon walked on, however small in comparison to the Enka and Pyathen's best work, was, in Banon’s view, the mega construction of the three that carried with it by far the most character. It wasn’t unimpressive in its architecture either. It was a network of suspended bridges connecting between isolated chambers made entirely from woven fiber and wood pole frames, built more than strong enough to support the weight of the Ooura that would fill their midst in one night after the next. Each chamber was suspended by dozens of wires connected to the strongest branches above and below it.

One chamber stood out, though. Far and above the largest and most heavily built into the canopy, sitting in the bowl-shaped cradle formed by thickest and furthest outward splayed branches located about three hundred feet off the ground. The very same chamber Banon and his entire tribespeople would gather come the midnight of the last day of the summer festival, when and where the second stage of their trial to earn the right of Kothai would begin.

But Banon forced those anticipations out of his mind. The Orux needed to keep its place at the forefront of his focus, for now. That was, after he finished his business here.

As colossal as even the average Mew tree was in comparison to the next largest species in the jungle, the Mew that held the circle of elders and the chamber of rites was truly ancient, and massive to the point that many mysteries and stories had been spun about it. It was also the only species of tree with nearly enough stability and durability to build any kind of mega construction on it.

Mew trees were simply a different class of tree entirely, a similarly radical jump up from its nearest sister species as the living reed was. Even centuries after a Mew tree died, it would not move nor lose its integrity. There were Mew trees that could be found that were in later stages of decomposing, but they were both older than his entire bloodline, and, most impressively, they were still rooted in strongly at their bases despite their upper sections beginning to rot.

And the tree at the center of Banon’s village that held the circle of elders upon its branches was beyond exceptional, even for a Mew tree. Mew trees, in general, were doubling even the next tallest species of tree commonly found in the jungle. This one, however, was half again taller than the largest Mew Banon had ever come across, and he had come across many, many Mew trees. He had no idea how many thousands of years it had lived for, or if it was even still alive at all, given Mew trees lack of leaves to distinguish deadwood from living.

There was a peculiar myth about it, too. One that Banon suspected was almost as old as the tree itself, a rumor Banon himself was unsure of…

But nevertheless, it was still a substantial reason he needed to become emperor. Regardless of the skepticisms Banon had in regard to some aspects of mysticism, he knew and respected the fact that most Ooura viewed every living thing as a part of the spirit of a greater whole, and he didn’t entirely disagree. That was all fine, regardless of there being no way to prove it Unlike Kimitrius, who was very much a real deity.

Even a small chance, however, that he could prove the mythos about this tree true, would be enough to work his whole life in the pursuit of.

The myth, of course, of the last Ooura emporer.

It was, if it could actually be done, the end game of his plan to restore Ooura dominance. And he had been speaking to Kimitrius for months about it. The moon seldom responded to him, but when it did, he found its answers reaffirming of his suspicions.

Banon arrived in his home village to praise and awe, as he always did, because he was never empty-handed after a hunt. He even indulged some of the younger boys with the story of what he had been doing so far during the festival days and showed them his new staff. Even tried it out against solid Mew bark for the first time, reluctantly, after their pleas drowned out his cautions. He hadn't actually tried it on a solid trunk yet, so after the boys followed him over to the huge Mew trunk that held the circle of elders more than a thousand feet above them, Banon made sure they all stood at least two staff lengths away.

“Ready?” Banon asked, smiling at them.

“READY!” they yelled back at him, some of the boys actually jumping in excitement.

Just to be safe, Banon set his simply woven pack full of arapaima meat on the ground first, braced the staff in both hands, and leveled it facing the gnarled black bark at an angle so any shrapnel would divert away from himself and the spectators.

The sound of the two solid masses slamming together was deafening. The staff slid in his hands despite Banon’s determination to hold it fast, and a spray of bark bits exploded outwards. What was left, besides the speckling rain of wood bits, was a gouge into the thick Mew bark about a fist’s depth deep.

Banon almost gasped in surprise at that. The bark, of course, would grow back quickly due to Mew bark’s self-healing abilities; completely independent of the state of the internal tree. That fist-sized hole was, however, a deceptively massive amount of damage.

To an average Pyathen elf or Enka human, who understood the jungle little, they might not have known the significance. To Banon, that had all but confirmed it. If he could just maneuver an Orux into the right circumstance, that amount of force would split its skull in a single blow; he was completely sure of it. He even wondered if it could take down a truly ancient bull if he could just maneuver well enough to make a strike to one of its temples.

Banon sighed and forced himself to reign in his mind as the new chorus of excited screams began.

It would be far too difficult to pull off without a second person holding its attention forward, even he could admit. It was still an intriguing thought he filed away for later, after he had passed his rite and was back to a semblance of normalcy again. He was certain of all of this because, of course, Mew bark was the single hardest material Ooura used in any of their craftsmanship. For centuries, the Ooura Kothai class warriors all carried great shields made from Mew bark into every battle they fought.

Shields that, up until the Pyathen’s new acid weapon, had been able to stop everything the Pyathen and Enka had ever thrown at them, even some of the more recent purely mechanical inventions like the Enka’s crossbows and Pyathen’s notoriously peerlessly crafted metal swords and spears.

Just after the chorus of falling bark-bits landing ended, the chorused excitement of the little boys of his community filled the air to replace it, until the sound was so deafening Banon winced under the scrape it made on his eardrums.

Banon gingerly held the staff up above his own head as several of the more ambitious boys lunged to grasp at it.

None of them even came close. Banon towered over even most adults already. These boys, misplaced by the normally watchful eyes of their mothers, weren’t reaching past his shoulder level, even with their jumps.

***

Banon finished cutting off and handing out the portions of meat to all the closest nearby families in his village within the hour, which went extra quickly thanks to the fact quite a few of the sons of said families had been there already to watch him demonstrate his new weapon.

After that, he began his walk to find an old friend, the wide-spanning massive branches of the central Mew tree looming in the background above him all the while, stealing much of the sun’s warmth for itself.

He was almost disappointed he wouldn’t get to share the glory of his stories so far with the only other of the emporer's sons he found easy friendship in until after the rite was concluded. Until Banon found him where he always found him. Fishing.

Banon was, ofcourse, distinguished already. His ambushes of Pyathen hunting parties with other village boys who had not officially reached Kothai yet made him notorious alone. But friendship? Banon mostly had people who viewed him either as above them, or too dangerous to budge up against too closely.

Banon pulled open the wicker door of the third and final fishing hut he was going to check before giving up, the hut so close to the Mew that carried the circle of elders you could sometimes catch your hook on its roots where they protruded from the bottom of the lake by accident.

The much smaller man– by Ooura standards– gave him a piercing smile and leaned his head forwards until it hung over the hole in the mat he dangled a lure through into the sub-mesa lake water below. “And what is that?” Lonka gestured towards his reed. Lonka’s long, straight, dark red hair swaying with the exaggerated motion.

“What?” Banon smirked, hefting his new staff. “Feeling jealous?” And Banon then gestured, indicating Lonka’s own fishing pole.

“Hah!” Lonka called. “Don’t pretend to fool me. I am the only person who knew what you were really doing out there, spending all this time searching for a reed instead of an ‘Ux!” Lonka exclaimed at a level of excitement hardly distinguishable from a child ecstatic after their father bringing home a successful hunt. Despite being older than Banon by five years, Lonka unmistakably looked up to his younger brother. And unlike Banon’s other brothers, he seemed to have absolutely no shame in doing so.

Banon smiled as Lonka stood and moved over to face up to him, discarding his fishing pole without a thought. “That,” Lonka said, genuine awe on his face, “has got to be a baby Mew tree you misplaced from somewhere?”

They both shared a vigorous laugh as they clasped hands and then embraced at the shoulder while using their other hand to tap the other person's opposite shoulder, Ooura’s way of greeting family.

“So it really worked?” Lonka asked after they separated. “You think that can shatter an Orux skull?”

Banon smiled, letting the staff slide down through his grip until its flat end rested on the mat. “Do you?” he asked, then gestured for the two of them to step outside the fishing hut.

***

Lonka flew through the air for two staff lengths before coming to a sliding halt on the mat. Banon’s staff, on the other hand, was almost triple that far and still tumbling end over end in the aftermath of Lonka’s attempt at using it, the secondary shute receding gradually as it went. Banon glanced at the Mew bark, noting it was barely scratched.

Clearly, most of the force had gone elsewhere due to poor form and even poorer arm strength.

“I told you to brace!” Banon called, knowing full well this was going to happen. He could have saved his friend the embarrassment, but, well, that wouldn't be very fun.

“You shouldn’t have let me try that!” Lonka called, rolling over onto his back in a pained motion.

“No, I shouldn’t have!”

Lonka let forth a wheezy laugh that lasted almost all the way until Banon reached him. After hauling the wheezing idiot to his feet, they went off in search of the staff together, Lonka prying detail after detail along the way.

“Was it one of the reeds you had already scouted last week?” Lonka asked. “I know you were worried that would have all been for naught since the reeds move so often in the summer.”

“I visited more lakes even than I had scouted before the festival days. I found many reeds that were above average in the force their second shute generated, including ones I had already scouted. But this one, as you just saw…”

“Scary strong,” Lonka concluded. “Which fits you!” He added a slap on Banon’s bare shoulder.

The staff wasn’t hard to find, stuck straight up and down as it was. What was more impressive, it was embedded almost halfway into the mat.

“Thing has a vicious tendency,” Lonka complained, rubbing his arm as Banon retrieved it out of the mucky green tangle of intertwined weeds that was the ground.

“Which fits me,” Banon agreed, though his enthusiasm was missing slightly from before.

“You scared about getting an Orux?” Lonka probed, as Banon scanned his staff up and down. He knew it wouldn’t be damaged, of course, he just felt comfort in it.

“What do you think?” Banon asked with a wide grin returning to his face again, feeling a breeze tug at the long tag ends of his bright orange-red hair.

Lonka scratched his scalp with the one of his hands that was missing a finger– arapaima bite. “I think the only thing that scares you is the idea you won't someday be the scariest beast in the jungle.”

Banon thought he couldn’t smile wider, but he did. Then he pulled out his larger obsidian knife, and held it up to Lonka, handle first. “The binding sap on the handle wrapping still look strong to you?”

Lonka puffed out his cheeks. “It been in water?”

“A little.”

“I may not be the expert, but I learn enough when living under one.” Lonka chuckled with some embarrassment– he’d always had a soft spot for his mother. “I think she would say it’s still close to perfect. Besides, you don’t have time to wait for a re-binding to dry anew, do you?” And he jibed that last part home with a poke. It was unspoken, but Banon knew his older brother was genuinely worried Banon had been too ambitious, taken too long, and been too interested in impressing with an overwhelming show of superiority that he didn’t think to worry about his own ego causing him to overlook the obvious risks, leading him to fail at succeeding to reach the moon just because it was not enough unless he could reach the stars as well.

“Good,” Banon agreed, slipping his knife back into its leather sheath.

It was just then that Banon paused, realizing something. “Did you leave your line in the hole?”

Lonka’s eyes widened, and he immediately set off at a brisk walk towards his fishing hut. “It would be my luck to get one now! I just made this rod too, it’s a new one! I layered fifty Moka leaf cutouts, fifty! And between each one, a layer of sap-saturated slee leaf surrounded by two thin strips of wood! Mother let me use the filtered clean sap, too!”

Banon nodded as his irritated friend receeded away, genuinely impressed at the quality of that work. Say many things about Lonka, son of the emporer who wished it weren’t so, not even interested in being Kothai. But say he is a slacker when it comes to fishing, and you would be a liar irrevocably.

Just as Lonka opened the door to his shack ahead of Banon as he caught up to him, the small Ooura made the most pathetic sound Banon had ever heard besides Pyathen’s thin scalps stripping from their thin skulls.

“It’s gone!” Lonka whined like it were a loved one he had found beaten bloody in there.

Banon caught up shortly and proceeded to be the one expected to solve problems, as usual.

***

Banon emerged, Lonka’s new fishing rod in his hands, still struggling with the fish as he barely managed to pull himself out of the hole in the mat with how slippery its bottom edges were.

It was a relatively small fish, thankfully. A mud pillow, no bigger than his forearm; a fish species that looked uncomfortably close to two plantains fused together, end to end. It hadn’t even managed to drag the rod far from the hole, and Banon had found it floating up against the underside of the mat, thankfully not even requiring him to dive to the perilous bottom of the lake.

Lonka made a farting sound with his lips as Banon rose out of the hole, water streaming down his huge frame. “All for a mud pillow! I fish all day just for, erg, one–” Lonka descended into struggling with the fish until he managed to get it under control, then he unhooked it and threw it, still living, back down the hole. “For one of these! Stupid! Fish! Tell your great uncle kraken to stop eating all the good fish!” Lonka scolded after the escaping fish with a raised fist, shaking in only somewhat mock anger.

Banon only laughed, and again was delighted to do so. These little moments of relief were coming on almost rapidly enough to refill his soul after days of single-minded solitude.

Then, both of them just sank back on the seats positioned on opposite sides of the mat hole. Onka, without missing a beat, had already lowered his line back down and was mumbling something more about mud pillows under his breath, something which Banon suspected would make Demnus blush.

“Ah, well, quite the staff. One for you that matches you,” Lonka said satisfactorily.

Banon chuckled. “I would not be called the Konka if I was a runt who needed the staff of a runt, now would I?”

“Konka? Ah, the man who walks among the shadows, a coward killer, you mean. Well, what have their shields and traditions gotten them but death? You have to stop paying attention to what the old women think! Calling you that because of how you like to surprise Pyathen hunting parties with your little ambushes? Is that all they are calling you still? How is it not ‘emporer’ yet? I hear whispers, as of late, that it was you who defended Bodastam village from the Pyathens! Not from a meagerly defended hunting party, from a whole regiment of Pyathen death droppers! It is the first time a tribe has successfully fended them off in years before they could drop even one of their bags of Pyathen death, no?”

Banon nodded, turning serious. “You heard it truthfully. Bodastam’s water is still pure, and their tribe still farming the mesa and hunting untainted fishes and beasts. The Pyathen were hardly difficult to thwart. Relying on the element of surprise only lasts so long, and among the high canopies, we reign, not them. They were thrown from the branches in the night like the gnats they are.”

“I also hear,” Lonka went on, “that it was your guerilla tactics that put their village in the sights of Pyathen eyes in the first place, that you deliberately carried out your ambushes near their woods so that you could attract them to their community like bait, when you could have easily evacuated them before the strike, at least.”

Banon nodded at that. “Right and wrong, as usual. The ambush would not have succeeded if the Pyathens forward scouts had not seen the village as active, so I did not tell them of the threat. But it's not like direct casualties are common in Pyathen bombings either. It was only their water and land that was at risk.”

Lonka chuckled, turning more cheerful as he met Banons eyes. “Good, then. Just do not expect me to ever stop interrogating you. Now that you are forging the new path of war for us before you are even officially a Kothai warrior yourself, it is up to your friends to make sure, in your inevitable rise to power, that you do not lose sight of the goal for the means, you know.”

“I know.” And Banon leaned forward and, with his long and much more muscular arms than his brother, gave him a slap on the shoulder, which Lonka hardly stayed upright under the force of, only saving himself with a propped elbow at the last moment.

“What catches from the festival so far?” Banon gestured broadly at the lacking signs of fish carcasses atop the matt around them.

Lonka made a dismissive noise. “Ehhh, the fish are following the spirits. It's always the same. The summer festival puts the vigor of youth in the air, the water, the matt itself. All the fish, even the oldest and most desperate, have the blood of youth for these days of fire. Even the mud pluggers are too perceptive for my bait, now, as it seems. And mud pillows’ aren’t even fish, in my book.” Lonka waved an annoyed hand.

“Well, if the fish are eluding you, which it is, of course, that, and not that you are eluding the fish again…” Banon trailed off.

Onka waved an angry hand and laughed once despite himself.

“We could,” Banon continued, “do something far more interesting to pass the time?” Banon gestured straight upwards, to where the elders were conferring and undertaking their own rituals related to the summer rite, all the way up in the highest tips of the more than a thousand-foot tall Mew that hung over half their entire village with its furthest extensions.

Lonka puffed out his cheeks, looking reluctant, until he folded and smiled through mismatched teeth. “I’ve never been above a little eavesdropping, but you can’t possibly have time to waste on this? Unless…” Lonka’s face twitched in awe for a moment. “You haven’t gotten your Orux already, have you?”

Banon waved his hands defensively. “You think too highly of me. No, it is simply that I was already here to deliver an aeropaima to the families.”

Banon watched Lonka’s face drop.

Banon smiled back at him and continued. “It seems the only answer to the blood of youth is to have it in your own veins.”

Lonka sneered at him, then broke out laughing.

So did Banon.

“You are in the midst of what, for most men, is the most challenging trial of their lives! And of course! Of course Banon Kerithian would still be hunting Aeropaima just for the fun of it.”

Banon tried to respond but chuckled instead.

“Still,” Lonka continued, only once the laughing was truly over, “you can’t afford the diversion in such important times. Go fetch your Orux and leave me be to my empty hook.”

Banon considered that, but he had already decided beforehand. “I think, to be honest, the heat in my blood now will cloud my mind too much for that moment. No, I have tonight and tomorrow. It will be plenty if I do not sleep. For me, I need to do something familiar as much for the sake of hearing what the prattlers up there are actually saying as for the simple sake of it.”

Lonka pulled his line up and then set the rod against the shack’s woven wall gingerly. “Fair enough,” he said with a cheerfully mischievous grin. “Let’s go learn how the old men plan to deal with the Pyathen enovy. Three golden termites says it is: kill them all and string up their bodies in the trees around their cities, especially if it is true they are sending a royal from the Donai family.”

Banon paused at that. He had heard of the envoy already, three days before the summer festival, and his trials began, which he was forced to prioritize despite begging to lead a scouting party of his own to assess greater detail. His father's single forward scout assigned to watch the Donai’s spire city– by far the closest one to the Ooura’s border– had been the one who brought the startling news.

It would be the first time since the Pyathen had discovered Pyathen death and liquid fire and begun their decades-long massacre under their new guise of scientific pursuit that they reached out in a non-murderous way to the Ooura. Three decades, it had been. Longer than Banon had lived, long enough Banon would never get to meet many good Kothai he might have, if not for their mass losses in the endlessly one-sided battles.

But this part about the Donai coming in person was something new and even more unexpected, given how highly the Pyathen treasured their royalty above their common people.

“A royal? Which one?” Banon could not hold the urgency back from his voice.

“Uh oh,” Lonka said, sheepishly remembering at that very moment the almost constantly present idea Banon had been pushing for permission from the emperor to attempt for years. That being, capturing a royal and ransoming them back in exchange for the secret to their liquid fire’s precise acidic mixture. That or the recipe to Pyathen death, though Banon highly suspected they would be more likely to give up the liquid fire recipe since its destruction was far smaller scale and required the precise technology their launchers used to shoot in streams that rivaled the range of a short bow. Banon, however, had long hoped to use their underestimation of his peoples– of his– intelligence and ingenuity to leverage a secret from them they might part with purely because they thought it impossible for Ooura to reproduce it in large enough quantities nor find effective enough usage methods to be a real threat. He might not be able to reconstruct their launchers, exactly, but he had ideas.

Lonka paled in moments at the same rate Banon’s smile spread across his face.

“Oh, this is going to be more than eavesdropping, isn't it?” Lonka asked, with a hesitant chuckle that he didn’t fully believe in tacked on the end.

Banon was already out the door and shooting skyward using a staff strike, flailing his weight forward mid-flight to make up for his slight miscalculation and only just catching hold of a higher tree branch of the ancient Mew than he had intended instead.

Banon heard the rustling of the fishing shack door being thrown back open as Lonka emerged and looked up at him.

“Now that’s just not fair!” Lonka’s voice came from far below.

“Become a Kothai! Get a staff for yourself!” Banon called as he clambered up to his feet, standing on the thick branch.

“You can’t fish up an Orux!” Lonka whined, as he began to ascend, much slower, one branch at a time and using the texture of the Mew bark alone when branches were too far between to jump.

“No, no, I suspect you can’t. But you could, for once, find something to do but fish.”

“That just sounds miserable!” Lonka said, hanging straight below him from the same branch now, his hands grasping on either side of Banon’s huge bare feet.

Banon shrugged, then planted his staff’s shooting end directly between his feet, and Lonka’s hands. Then he smiled at Lonka.

“WaitwaitwaitWAIT!” Lonka’s voice quieted off as Banon shot high into the air away from him.

He glanced back mid-flight, just to see Lonka shaking back and forth on the rapidly vibrating branch like a leaf in a storm. It didn’t take long for the branch to relent enough for Lonka to scramble off of it, from which point he proceeded to climb after Banon in a desperate pursuit to get revenge.

Together, they ascended the over-a-thousand-foot-tall Mew to shove their noses where they didn’t belong.