In the Homewood, sometimes, it rained.
Sometimes was the key word. Guitian had never before thought that rain could come with a sometimes. He'd always thought of rain as something rare and precious, a cause for celebration and frenzy and study. When it rained, the mirror pool swelled, and his family had known to make for the scant bits of vegetation in the barrens before someone else got there first.
In the Homewood, rain was just something that happened, and if it had been too long since the last one - well, there was a gift-bearing noul for that, wasn't there? Sometimes it would rain, and every green thing here (there were so many green things here, Guitian was learning) was nourished for days. It wasn't like Guitian had been thirsty before this latest shower, either. There were rivers and brooks wherever you cared to look, and he knew how to draw the water from a plant, when you starved.
It was ridiculous, and perhaps that was why he hadn't imagined that it'd happen.
Well - he'd expected it to some degree. Nouls did have it easier out here; he had always known that. But the last time anyone he knew had been out here, the Homewood had been a lot smaller. He couldn't have known that the pretty dyes and paints he'd mixed from flowers and insects would come loose from rain. He hadn't known that he'd need to put his things in a shelter to hide from the rain.
Not that this particular thing was something he could hide. It'd been a bit short-sighted, building this children's toy for Scoria out in the open.
How was he to have known, though?
It was all flooded, now, the sap that had attached those lovely dried petals loosened until the flowers Guitian had picked had all fallen to the ground. The tree's long roots were mired in mud, the grasses that had formed around it struggling in the wet weather.
Guitian bent down to nudge a stray petal with his horn, glum. He wasn't even sure whether all of them could be accounted for - and to begin repairs, he'd have to head somewhere else.
"Was this your haunt?" came a high-pitched voice. Startled, Guitian looked up.
The voice was not a noul, but a scuttle scale. It had a dark coat and a pale seafoam-and-lavender underbelly, with a blazing comet trail from its big eyes. It was perched at the very edge of one of the tree's low-hanging branches, its tiny head hanging off to look at Guitian. "I think your choice of decor could be...improved, to say the least."
Guitian felt himself flushing, though he wasn't prone to embarrassment. "I'm new here," he admitted. "I didn't know - I didn't know it rained, like this."
There was a long silence. "...there are noulicorns who weren't born in the Homewood?" the scuttle scale asked. "Hang on - " it added, and it was scurrying off the br - oh, and then it jumped right onto Guitian's nose. "You'll have to excuse me," it said breezily. "Mud is nice for the scales, and all, but I wanted a closer look." It was slipping round his horn and into his mane now.
"I'm not the only one," Guitian said. He had his siblings, and he'd seen other nouls, sometimes, out there. A lot of them were black-horned or wary; few of them wanted to exchange news, so far out. "I'm - I lived in the Barrens, up north. The sky was - " He looked up. "Well, trees are pretty, but sometimes a clear view is nice, too. I wanted a reminder." And he hadn't been sleeping here, exactly, but he wasn't about to bring that up.
"...it was pretty," the scuttle scale allowed, digging through his mane, now. "But, friend, you might be better off inside a tree. Now - er...noulicorns have gifts, don't they?"
The scuttle scale had, well, scuttled so that its eyes were right in front of his. It had to twist itself oddly to get a good view; Guitian would've laughed if he hadn't been afraid to dislodge it. "I do have one," Guitian said, though he didn't understand it very much. "I think. I...I went to the tree, and then there was - " a strange, vivid dream - "blue light." He paused, taking a breath.
"That I know," the scuttle scale scoffed. "You're an atmos. You should be able to do something about the rain. Come on," it harrumphed, its tail whacking against the base of his horn a few times. "You've gotta be able to - "
The fourth whack was harder, and as it happened Guitian jolted. The motion was jerky and sudden and with it came a flood of dark blue light that flowed from his horn into the mushy, sticky mud below -
and then there was no flood at all, light or mud or water, just rich soil and petals scattered across it like the rain had gone and passed days ago, and the plants were blooming again rather than dying from an inundation of water. Guitian gaped.
The scuttle scale did, too. "Hang on," it said. It ran down the side of Guitian's face, and then his shoulder and his leg, curling around as it did. "You're no atmos," it said accusingly. "But that was...that was amazing!"
Its tail flicked quickly as it patted the soil with a little paw. "I'm Dilahi. They/them," they said, extremely matter of fact. "Come on, newbie - let's get packing and head over to my place to reconvene. We've got something to discuss, all right." They were already waddling off.
It would've been easy to stay here, but something about the situation - the scuttle scale seemed to know what it was talking about, and it was...friendly. Kind of. He hadn't received an invitation to anyone's 'place' yet.
"I'm...Guitian," said Guitian, and then he scrambled to catch up.
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