Xenoverse origins / R-048
Zara WildOrigin story
Zara Wild and the Forecast in the Fur
An Exotic Creature Groomer removes the irregular markings that let a rain-bearing creature contain its weather before a Council portrait session.
Read the origin ↓
The portrait fee had already been paid. The frame had arrived. The creature had eaten one corner of the frame, which Zara Wild considered a manageable problem.
A prestigious portrait commission puts Zara’s taste for symmetry at odds with a creature’s living coat.
The rain inside its coat would prove less cooperative.
That isn't a blemish. That's where it keeps November.
From the dossier
Prologue — A Commission in Gold Leaf
Zara set the damaged frame against the grooming-room wall and examined its surviving decoration. It showed the Goblin Council surrounded by obedient creatures beneath a permanently blue sky. Whoever had designed it had never visited the Zoo.
She worked there as Exotic Creature Groomer. Her tools were arranged by size, her towels by condition, her appointments by how much argument she expected. The Council knew her as the woman who had once returned a ceremonial beast with a note correcting the symmetry of its official crest. Zara knew the Council would tolerate any insult that came with an attractive result.
For their new portrait, they wanted the stormback. It was an enormous, tusked creature whose dark coat held moving streaks of cloud. Rain pattered somewhere beneath its fur when it was content. When it was irritated, tiny flashes travelled along its spine.
Zara had groomed it before. She knew the coat resisted matching on either side. One flank carried a bright silver curl; the other held an untidy patch the colour of wet slate. In every previous session she had left that patch alone.
This time the Council's portrait secretary offered a permanent appointment to its presentation committee if she could make the creature look distinguished.
Zara had a weakness for jobs whose names sounded like chairs she might finally be allowed to sit in.
“Distinguished,” she said, “is an arrangement.”
The stormback sneezed. A single hailstone struck the secretary's polished shoe.
He looked down. “Weather is not included in the fee.”
Zara assured him that the room would be dry. She heard herself making the promise and disliked the keeper's expression. It was the expression people wore when they intended to be right later, which Zara considered a particularly lazy form of work.
Act 1
The Wrong Kind of Smooth
Act I — The Wrong Kind of Smooth
The first passes of the comb produced ordinary tangles. Zara collected them in a tray. The stormback settled its great chin on a padded block and closed one eye, trusting her with the other.
Then she reached the slate-coloured patch.
Her comb caught. She changed tools, working with the small silver rake reserved for stubborn knots. The patch shifted beneath it. For a moment she saw a miniature horizon, a leaning tree and a road disappearing into rain.
She should have stopped. Instead she imagined the portrait secretary studying an uneven silhouette. She imagined another worker receiving the permanent appointment because they had understood what distinguished meant.
The knot came free.
It lay in the tray like a fistful of dirty wool. Above the grooming bench, a cloud opened and began raining directly into her best brush drawer.
The stormback stood up abruptly. Its coat was smooth, gleaming and entirely still. Without its moving cloud streaks, it looked like a magnificent object rather than an inconvenient living thing. Zara admired it for a heartbeat too long.
Thunder rolled from the tray.
She put a lid over it. Rain began falling upward from beneath the lid, pattering against the ceiling. She moved the tray into a cupboard. The cupboard developed a horizon.
The portrait secretary arrived to check the lighting. A damp breeze lifted his papers. He asked whether the creature was ready.
“Almost.”
He recognized the word from every commission he had ever managed. “How expensive is almost?”
Zara blocked his view of the cupboard with her body. Behind her, a tiny tree struck the inside of the door.
The stormback scraped one tusk against the floor. Its remaining silver curl had begun to tighten, drawing the coat toward it. The creature was no longer carrying its weather evenly. One side shivered; the other steamed.
Zara dismissed the secretary, locked the outer door and fetched the keeper before she could manufacture another reassuring sentence.
Act 2
An Umbrella for the Wardrobe
Act II — An Umbrella for the Wardrobe
The keeper studied the coat, then the cupboard. She opened an umbrella indoors without making any superstitious comment, which frightened Zara more than a lecture would have.
“You took out its resting rain.”
“It was tangled.”
“It lives in a creature. It doesn't own a dressing room.”
Zara demanded to know how to put it back. The keeper explained that the knot had grown around a season the stormback remembered. It could not simply be combed into place like a replacement ribbon. The creature had to recognize it.
Inside the cupboard, the little road had flooded.
Zara opened the door. The rain rushed into the room, bringing the smell of distant soil and a cold that made the portrait frame creak. She held the knot toward the stormback. It turned its face away.
She tried the familiar brush rhythm. She tried its favourite towel. She spoke with the composed voice she used to make difficult appointments feel honoured. Nothing worked. The silver curl tightened further, and the creature staggered.
The keeper pointed at Zara's immaculate sample board, where matching tufts demonstrated her approved grooming patterns. “What did you ask it to remember?”
Zara stared at the board. The arrangement had no room for roads, leaning trees or a season that had gone badly. She had offered the stormback a flawless version of itself and expected gratitude.
She took down the sample board. From a drawer she retrieved the first comb she had ever ruined, its teeth bent by an animal she had blamed for moving. She set it beside the stormback's chin.
“I wanted you to make me look accomplished,” she said.
The keeper lowered her umbrella slightly.
Zara did not reach for a better phrase. “You were already doing your part.”
The stormback sniffed the bent comb. Its silver curl loosened. In the cupboard, rain struck the road at a slower pace.
Zara sat beneath the leaking ceiling and waited with the ugly knot in both hands, unable to improve its appearance without making everything worse.
Act 3
The Unflattering Portrait
Act III — The Unflattering Portrait
When the creature finally leaned toward her, Zara held still. It breathed across the knot. The tiny road brightened, and the leaning tree shivered as though someone had opened a familiar door.
The rain moved through the room in a narrow sheet. It soaked the portrait secretary, who had chosen that moment to return with the Council delegation. Then it folded into the stormback's flank, carrying the knot with it.
The restored patch was larger than before.
Zara laughed once. She could not help it. The creature now had a spectacularly uneven coat and the calm expression of someone whose furniture had been put back.
The secretary asked whether she was refusing to complete the commission. She offered him two possibilities: paint the creature as it was, or explain to the Council why the expensive frame remained empty. Neither involved a permanent blue sky.
He chose the portrait, but removed her name from the presentation committee's proposed appointments.
The painter, a quiet goblin who had spent the morning waiting behind a folding screen, asked Zara to stand beside the stormback. She began smoothing her wet sleeves. He told her to leave them.
For the sitting, the Council arranged themselves beneath umbrellas. Zara stood beside the creature with the ruined comb in one hand. A small cloud drifted above the least patient councillor. Every time he complained, it lowered.
The finished portrait was accurate enough to offend everyone who had ordered it. The Council hung it in a corridor reserved for negotiations with people they disliked. Visitors spent longer looking at it than at the official blue-sky paintings.
Zara returned to her grooming bench. She left a space in her tool arrangement for things she did not yet understand. It looked irritatingly untidy.
At the portrait unveiling, the keeper came to fetch her. The painted stormback was dry. Rain was falling from the painted Council umbrellas into the real corridor, where negotiators had begun borrowing buckets from the cleaning staff.
Zara studied the widening puddle. In its reflection, beyond the painted horizon, another creature was walking toward the frame. She could make out its enormous mane and the faint suggestion of snow.
The portrait secretary offered her the committee appointment again if she could guarantee that whatever arrived would be presentable. Zara watched a white paw settle on the inside of the gold frame. This time she asked to meet the creature before discussing its appearance.
Weather, grooming and the Council portrait
The stormback’s coat holds an invented landscape rather than ordinary fur alone. Zara’s grooming room becomes the meeting point between animal care and official image-making, where a flattering result can conceal a serious mistake.