High Impact || Genshin Impact H.S AU

Chapter 2.8

“W-wait who’s Dvalin?” Kazuha asked, hoping to bring some control to the emotionally chaotic Venti whose face was red and splotchy from tears.

Venti’s heart felt on bursting, pumping intensely in emotions. His head was scrambling, thinking, and overthinking, his body shaking and his throat lumping with fear, sadness, and dread. He felt awful to put it plain simple.

“U-uh he’s a pet of mine,” Venti said, gulping a bit to get rid of the lump in his throat. He nervously grabbed his braided pigtails, an iconic part of his look, pulling onto them as a comfort method.

He spoke, adding on while untying the pigtails and then braiding them again,
“I don’t normally talk about him since it can be seen as a bit weird” Venti mutter out, feeling shame course his veins now, embarrassed to admit worrying over an insecure and small thing.

“Oh, what’s wrong with a dog?” Aether asked, his face contorting to show confusion. Venti coughed, clearing his throat a bit.

“Y-yeah, he’s not a dog, he’s a Komodo dragon,” Venti said out loud, awaiting the shock reactions from his group members.

“w-wait Komodo dragon, as in those really heavy and dangerous reptiles, you have that!” Aether exclaimed, his eyes going wide. Xiao just stood there; his face stuck in surprise form.

“W-why and h-how?” Xiao asked, speaking for once. The members looked at each other, Venti could sense their nervousness and fear.

“My parents are zoologists, so they tend to care for peculiar animals, Dvalin has been living with us for a few years” Venti admitted, having never told anyone that. He was able to avoid scaring people off with Dvalin by just tiring out the animal to make it sleep for long enough while his friends hang out.

Thankfully he had learned a thing or two from his zoologist’s parents to deal with animals. But he knew one thing and that was to never let the animal leave the house without supervision.

“Well I guess that’s the only logical explanation for such a weird thing,” Aether said. Kazuha and Xiao nodded, with Kazuha lending a patting hand on Venti’s back for comfort.

It wasn’t what Venti wanted but he had to admit Kazuha’s hand did feel nice and were surprisedly firm. It added a whole new emotion to his already overwhelming cauldron of emotions that he preferred to avoid at the moment.

“U-uh yeah, but seriously” Venti exclaimed, trying to stay on task, “we need to find Dvalin or else he’ll get taken in by animal control and we won’t be able to get him back,” Venti said, then quickly adding, “also he is venomous and can hurt someone, so the public is at risk” mumbling out the last part to avoid the members from not wanting to find Dvalin.

“O-okay um do you have any ideas on how to track down Dvalin?” Kazuha said, having not heard the previous thing Venti mumbled out.

Venti began to search in the far reaches of his mind, remembering the small lessons from his zoologist parents and just general things Dvalin did that would be trackable. Then a lightbulb switched on.

“Oh! Scratch marks and poop!” Venti exclaim, feeling a bit of hope return. “He has claws so we could find those and track via that but also he tends to poop a lot so we can also track that” Venti explained. The members caught on understanding.

“I guess that explains those weird scratch marks I found in the kitchen,” Xiao said, walking over the kitchen and pointing at the floor, claw marks being visible.

“W-what the hell, why didn’t you tell me?” Venti asked, confused about how he never saw it before.

“I don’t know I thought it would be rude or something,” Xiao said, feeling flustered from a furious Venti. Venti sighed, knowing it was Xiao’s fault entirely. He took a deep breath, scanning the claw marks. Then he saw the back door, which had a doggy door.