After having been in the arena for triple as long as he had before, Luke finally decided it was time to try meeting this unaggressive fraxion. Every so often over the last decade, they had seen each other from a distance. Small glimpses of each other as they went about their own daily lives. The fraxion mostly lived inside the arena, rarely venturing out to go spend a day or two at the beach. Every time Luke noticed the fraxion, it was already looking in his direction before turning away after Luke had spotted it, as if signaling that it knew he was there, that it wanted him to know that, and that it would not chase after him.
The first few times startled Luke. Out in the wasteland, he was a lot more carefree than in the arena, since the chance of meeting the fraxion were low. But a low chance over a long period of time built up, leading to more than a handful of encounters like that, of Luke seeing the fraxion gathering wood or enjoying a day at the beach and making its intentions of pacifism known. Or, at least, that was what Luke had retroactively interpreted them as. In the moment, they were startling at first, knowing his foe had spotted him before he had spotted it, before becoming simply strange behavior.
But today, he waited for the fraxion to start a fire and went back to the arena. As always, it was looking straight at him when he came over the tops of the trees. Beyond the time he was injured all those years ago, this was the closest he'd ever been when doing so. The fraxion was cooking a chunk of meat over a fire, significantly larger than the chunk of Luke's leg meat he ate from himself. The fraxion was over triple his volume, so that was to be expected, but still something Luke noted.
Their eyes lingered on each other for a while as Luke slowly approached, his speed of transit lowered to attempt to not be taken as hostility. Eventually, the fraxion turned away from the human and back toward the meat. A fraction of a second later, a chair appeared for Luke, rising out of the ground opposite the fire from the fraxion. It was improperly proportioned for a human, made from the imagination of a beast - no, person - that had never interacted with real human furniture before.
Luke inspected the chair, making parts of it invisible to confirm it wasn't trapped with enchantments, before adjusting it to fit himself and sitting in it. Luke inspected the fraxion before him, across the fire from him. He obviously wasn't familiar with fraxion body language outside pain and combat, but even so, he felt it was tense. He was tense, too. If things went well, this would be the first non-aggressive contact between the two species, period.
Luke tore off a section of his own leg and threw it over the fire, telekinetically catching it to float it next to the cooking meat of his fraxion acquaintance. Getting a better look at the person across from him, he noticed it had its own seat, it just didn't look like it from afar. Horse biology was not made for sitting, so the fraxions had taken on a long, somewhat thin table-like design for chairs. It looked like this one was conjured directly under the fraxion ahead of him, as it didn't have any obvious way to get off it without magic.
The seat his acquaintance sat on was like a large plus with each bar of the plus going between the two sets of legs in orthogonal directions. It was only slightly lower than where the fraxion's torso would have been had it been standing fully, making it loom over Luke, and it seemed the bar orthogonal to its torso would have been non-standard back in the world of the fraxions, as it prevented escape from the chair without jumping, climbing over one orthogonal bar, or flying upward. Maybe it had become standard now that magic was everywhere, but it seemed like something their horse body could straddle before simply being dropped onto.
They sat in silence as their meats cooked. Despite the head start the fraxion had, Luke's meat was significantly smaller, allowing him to finish his first. He stood up, becked up a few feet after making sure the chair wouldn't get in his way, and flew away, marking the successful end of the first peaceful contact between species.
Over the next few years, Luke joined in more and more often in the time around the campfire. A few attempts at verbal contact were made, but neither had the biology to properly communicate with the other in their tongues. They were able to communicate objects through pointing and naming things, but they were never able to properly talk. The syntax between nouns that let complex thoughts be communicated, and even the nouns for abstract concepts or objects they did not have and could not mimic, was impossible to properly share, making communication hard. Not impossible, but simply stunted. Reduced to caveman speak. Pointing and saying objects, hoping the other person would understand their intent.
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Eventually, the fraxion would occasionally join Luke when he was out and about. With the extra time, he'd conjured a house to make his semi-permanent base of operations. It wasn't originally made for fraxion biology, so Luke demolished the first and made a new one. They didn't trust each other enough at that point to live in the same house, but he made the front room and some connected areas accessible to his new fraxion companion.
He'd conjured a pool table and figured out how to make thin enough pieces of wood to be used as cards, allowing them to play a few Earth games. Seeing this, the fraxion made its own home off the side of the clearing in the arena. It wasn't as fancy as Luke's, their society simply not as advanced and used to luxuries the same as earth was, but minimal changes needed to be made to accommodate Luke. Primarily, a chair with stairs leading up to it so Luke could join in at the table.
While Luke had an emulation of a stove by heating metal plates with a fire, the fraxion simply had a fireplace. Where Luke now had a fridge he kept cooled with conjured ice and stocked with extra leg meat so he could eat without hurting himself immediately beforehand, the fraxion simply tore off an armor plate and some meat before throwing the armor plate away and cooking the meat when needed. It also brought some of its own games from its planet into its own home.
They would occasionally meet at the beach and Luke showed the fraxion world every man's tradition of digging holes when left alone on a beach. The fraxion didn't understand the first few times, attempting to help my simply digging it magically, but the point was the physical labor and satisfaction of having done something with your own hands. The fraxion never joined in Luke's absurd task, but it did sometimes watch as it enjoyed being near or in water.
Eventually, Luke managed to convey the idea of going on an adventure out far away from the arena, to see what this world had to offer. He wasn't exactly sure how much of what he wanted to accomplish by doing so had gotten through, but they agreed. No single expedition could explore an entire planet, but they went far while extremely high up to expand their horizon - literally. They saw some crumbling mountains and a few places where the water once flowed through now-dried river beds, but never found anything truly interesting on the day side. Beyond the arena, it was simply dead.
On the night side of the planet, they saw clouds for the first time. Higher than they flew, air currents must has still existed, because all the evaporating water should have condensed into clouds under the constant vigilance of the sun before eventually falling back down. As they neared the twilight zone between the night and day halves, the clouds that should have been everywhere finally began to form. As they went deeper into the night side, it began to rain and eventually snow.
It rapidly got too cold for the pair to continue without either constant heating magic or stopping every so often to conjure a fire to warm up beside. Despite how little the sun actively increased the temperature on the day side, the fall to cold darkness was oppressive. Despite this shift, they still never found anything interesting. Luke wasn't certain how only the upper atmosphere had winds, but he figured the gods were doing something funky with the world and didn't investigate. He wasn't a scientist, after all.
They eventually returned to the day side and back to their homes. It had already been a couple decades of exploration, so returning home was a nice return to semi-normalcy. They were certain there was more to see, but figured all of it would be blank wasteland like before. Well, maybe not completely blank, as Luke had left a marker at places he'd been. An indicator of life having once been where he had. He was certain it would disappear when he and/or his fraxion companion died, but it made him feel good to do so. Add some sense of accomplishment to an otherwise dull and pointless task.
Signs of old age rapidly set in on his fraxion companion long before they did on him. It had been 40 years since the fraxion joined him in this purgatory, 45 years of living without any human contact for Luke, but it seemed old age hit fraxions harder and faster than humans. Luke, now in his 70s, was starting to feel the effects of old age, sure, but nothing like the fraxion beside him. He could still walk, if slowly - age hitting harder without modern medicine to keep such problems at bay - and his magic capacity only slightly dipped. Maybe if he'd had true medical knowledge, rather than just a picture of what his organs should look like, he could have staved off the ravages of old age on everything but his mind.
But the fraxion beside him was falling apart. A new armor plate fell off every day, almost like they were going bald, and they had been bedridden for weeks and their magic capacity was plummeting at a rapid pace, making them only able to lift food to their mouth before needing to rest the whole day. It wasn't even an illness, as bacteria and viruses simply didn't exist in this weird purgatory world the gods had decided to use for their sick games, but simply their body failing.
After only a month of being unable to fend for themself, Luke's fraxion companion died in Luke's sleep.
Luke followed soon after, unable to defend himself from the attack from the not so friendly fraxion that came after.
