“Where have you been?” Gary asked as soon as Sadie was close enough to hear him without shouting. “I have been so worried about you.”

“I know. I would have commed, but I lost my disc.”

He noticed then the bundle she was carrying. It looked like a pile of blankets. She was also limping slightly, and her clothes were dirty and torn. He closed the distance to her at a run.

“Your ankle is injured,” he said. He had already put his Power to work mending it.

“Not for long,” she said with an affectionate laugh.

“Okay, so whatever happened apparently wasn’t that scary, since you’re laughing. What’s this?” he gestured toward the bundle.

“This is the fella to whom you owe your gratitude.”

Gary furrowed his brow, looking between the bundle and her face. “What do you mean?”

“He saved your wife’s life.”

Gary’s heart began to race at her words. They were at the door by this point, but he still wasn’t sure what was in the bundle, or if it could come into the house. Sadie finally pulled back the top cloth, which Gary realized then was her cloak, and a furry face looked up at him.

“Is that…a dog?” he asked.

Sadie nodded. “A wild one. A dingo, maybe, but it is a baby. It is weak and in need of water, probably food too.”

He ushered her inside and to a chair in the sitting room. Then he quickly filled a shallow bowl with water and brought it in to set on the floor. Sadie lowered the dog to the floor and unwrapped it, coaxing it to the water bowl. While the dog drank, Gary sat down next to Sadie, desperate to know what had happened.

She told him a harrowing story of being out in the wilds, searching for kamphas herb. She fell into the ravine past Potter’s Grove. She woke up to the dog licking her face, but couldn’t move. Her cloak was ensnared in a thick nest of brambles, and she’d broken several bones. They were already starting to mend, slowly, but she couldn’t move well enough to free herself.

“I think I would have been stuck there all night if it hadn’t been for this little guy. When he saw me pulling on the cloak, he started doing the same, using his teeth to free it from the thorns.”

“What was he doing in the ravine? Did he fall when you did?”

She shook her head. “I think he’d been stuck down there for a while. Probably days. I don’t think he would have lasted the night either.”

Gary was silent. He knew that Sadie would not have died in that ravine. As a Cleric, her wounds most likely would not have killed her. And he was only minutes away from getting some others from the village to help him look for her when she showed up. But he had no problem whatsoever with Sadie attributing her survival to the small animal, or with her wanting to nurse it back to health. He was just grateful that the initial fall into the ravine hadn’t killed her.

“I don’t know what I would do without you,” he said as he pulled her closer. She rested her head on his chest. “So what should we call the dog?”

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Prompt used: What if your character adopted a new pet?