Once again, I was somewhat impressed by Sasha’s intuitive intelligence. There was nothing different about my overt actions when I opened the door and entered the room holding her, my routine just as it had been the previous times when I brought food or water for her. And yet, the moment I entered the room to let her out, hoping that she would follow as we continued our journey, Sasha’s reaction was different from all the previous times.
Before, she had generally kept her distance for a minute or two but today, for some unknown reason, she was immediately moving towards me, not fast or threatening but still in an excited manner. A small part of my mind was reminded of a dog, maybe even an actual puppy, bounding towards their owner, excited that said owner is home and might spend time with the dog. With Sasha’s largely humanoid body plan, the display of furry excitement gave off some strange vibes, but again, I wouldn’t be able to articulate just what was so uncanny about them. Maybe it was just that a part of my mind recognised her as a former human while another part immediately classified her as an animal, disjointing my reaction and causing the strange feeling I was having. With that in mind, the idea of putting a leash on her, as Luna had jokingly suggested, felt even worse, making me discard the idea readily.
“Calm,” I ordered in a steady voice, a hand raised with my palm out, causing the excited Sasha to pause about a metre from me, though she remained excited and was almost bouncing out of her fur, “We will go outside. My group will continue on our journey, and we would like to invite you along,” I explained, keeping my voice steady and level while explaining the plan, even if there was a lot of doubt about whether Sasha could understand the language or if she was only taking in the tone in which we were speaking to her. Either way, treating her as if she was able to understand seemed to be the better option. More polite, too.
With my piece said, I turned around, keeping an eye on Sasha through the scrying constructs still present in the room. That way, I could see that she kept bouncing while following after me, but there was still no sign of aggression or hostility, just excitement. And curiosity, which I considered the most important trait of all. She demonstrated hers by repeatedly sniffing the air and ground, clearly trying to figure out who had been here, maybe what they had been doing, things like that.
Once we reached the front door, which was already opened, she moved up, walking beside me, but she, almost pointedly, didn’t try to run ahead or away; she simply kept pace with me, making me wonder about her intelligence once again. It also proved that she didn’t want to run away, though given the lack of overt communication between us, there was little we could do to ascertain her deeper motivations.
Whatever they might be, I didn’t think they truly mattered at this point. We, that is Luna, Lia, Silva and I, had previously decided to let Sasha out of her room and into the open. If she decided to run away, I had planned to stun her and subject her to the invasive experiments we had held off before. Those experiments had, sadly, a fairly high chance of being fatal to her, which is why we hadn’t tried them yet, but given that our plans were to leave the area now, that was simply a sad side-effect. On the other hand, if Sasha decided to stay with us, which she obviously had, the plan to leave the area remained, only with a Sasquatch in tow.
Reaching the point where the others were waiting on a stretch of impossible hiking trail was fairly simple, and Sasha remained by my side the entire time. Even when she saw the others, she barely reacted, only perking up for a moment before settling down to her previous bounciness. However, when we reached the impossible trail, impossible because a sign declared it part of the Appalachian Trail, which should be some three thousand kilometres away from our current position, Sasha’s bouncy curiosity managed to overcome the apparent desire to remain next to me. She still didn’t run off, but she readily bounced across the trail, sniffing the ground and excitedly looking around. If she had a tail, I was confident it would be wagging like crazy, at least if that part were to follow the other seemingly canine traits she was displaying.
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What neither I nor any of the others had expected was Silva’s reaction to Sasha. Sure, we had talked about Sasha in Silva’s presence but Silva had never been interested in visiting the room we had Sasha contained in, nor did she hold any interest in studying the other Sasquatch. She had mostly been busy interacting with a few of the local wolves, though those interactions had, to the best of my knowledge, mostly been by way of scent markers, with little to no direct interaction. Now, however, Sasha’s presence brought out something fascinating in Silva, causing the unnaturally large canine to bound towards Sasha, almost as if Silva was mirroring Sasha’s excitement.
Sasha, in the meantime, was briefly frozen, her arms lowering her torso closer to the ground, though I couldn’t see any display of aggression on either’s part. Only excitement, which was confirmed when Sasha jumped to the side, her arms and legs giving her impressive acceleration, with Silva jumping after her, the pair starting a feral dance around each other while using Luna, Lia and me as obstacles in their play.
“Silva,” I admonished quietly, unwilling to shout, but I felt I should intervene given that Silva had just stuck her nose somewhere I didn’t think it belonged. Quite literally, where the nose didn’t belong, given that Silva was sniffing Sasha’s nether parts, though part of that perceived impropriety was directly related to the part of my mind that classified Sasha as humanoid, near-human or something like that. Otherwise, it would be perfectly normal canine behaviour, making me, once again, wonder just why Sasquatch seemed to have some fairly strong canine tendencies.
At my admonishment, Silva froze for a moment, looking incredibly sheepish before regaining her usual calm and mature demeanour. Given that she had just jumped around like an excited puppy, there was quite a bit of laughter in the air but it was all in good fun.
Luckily, the entire greeting from Silva had somehow pushed Sasha into a mindset of following the alpha, or something like that, meaning she was moving alongside Silva, uninterested in leaving our presence while happily exploring our immediate surroundings as we started to make our way north.
“This worked out better than I thought,” I admitted quietly, watching our pair of furry companions move around on the impossibly displaced trail.
“I’ll admit, I was uncertain whether this would work out,” Lia added, “I thought we’d get a message that something went wrong and we’d have to take the luggage back to our shelter,” she paused for a moment, looking over to me, “Why did you have us take everything and wait for you in the first place?”
“I expected Sasha to be somewhat excited about getting out,” I glanced over to Silva and Sasha, who were sniffing some random brush near the trail. Sasha was trapped for almost ten days. That’s a long time of confinement for a creature used to running wild. Letting her out was bound to excite her, and I wanted her to project some of that excitement onto our group, for her to associate travelling with us with that excitement.”
“It seems to have worked,” Luna threw in, watching the exploring pair just like Lia and I were, “Maybe a little too well. I didn’t think that Sasquatch were that much like canines,” she added, likely because she had noticed Sasha marking a spot right after Silva had.
“Don’t ask me. I thought I understood Sasha to a fair degree,” I said, shaking my head. Part of me tried to wrap my head around this while another part insisted that I didn’t want to know what went on in Sasha’s mind.
“At least we now have somebody capable of guiding Sasha, even if it’s not quite in the direction we expected,” I added, watching the somewhat odd pair go about their business. “It’s going to be interesting where that will lead.”
“I still think we should at least try to get Sasha to regain some of her sapience. I don’t feel like this is the right path for any former human to go down,” Lia argued, looking a tad unhappy at this particular development.
“We can try, though it’s going to be difficult unless it turns out that Sasha actually understands us. We’ll have to see,” I reminded her, not unwilling to teach Sasha but, at the moment, uncertain how to go about it. Maybe looking into a way to boost Sasha’s intelligence would be a good idea.
