Altered Bonds Extras

Omake 6 — A Krabby Goes to the Beach

(Best read after Chapter 12)

(Canon? — Maybe)

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Some days Krabby wondered if he was just a little too curious for his own sake.

Of course, it was curiosity that killed the Skitty. Or the Meowth. Or really any cat-like being. But did curiosity kill the crabs? Nope.

And so with that flawless logic, Krabby scuttled onward, admiring the pleasant day he was having. The grass was green, tree branches were rocking from harsh winds, the sky was being suffocated by gray clouds, it just started raining like crazy and the downpour was slapping his crustacean body, lightning was screaming as it arced through the heavens, he'd forgotten to eat lunch—

Good day, all in all. He usually forgot about breakfast too. Eating for once in the morning had been an exhilarating change of pace.

What else was exhilarating? The weather. It was a stormy mess, same as it was a few days back. And there'd been an earthquake too! The tremors had been crazy wicked, nearly throwing him off his feet. And he had four feet! That was two more than a lot of other creatures — four, if you considered snakes like Seviper or Arbok. Where was he going with this again?

Oh yes, he remembered. He was going to examine the tremors. How couldn't he? It wasn't everyday that an earthquake happened, and even storms were rare around Grassbranch Island. It was like a mystery, but without the dungeon! He liked mysteries, and Krabby wanted to solve this mystery.

Was there a reason the earthquake happened? It'd been so huge, he doubted even a Pokemon could do that. Unless — what if it was an awakening Legendary beast, proclaiming its presence to the world? Wasn't there some funny red dino creature like that? A Grounding? Er, Gordon?

That probably wasn't it, but he liked the name Gordon. Too bad it didn't suit a Krabby, Water-typing and all. No Water-type could ever possibly be called Gordon. His wife would smack him if he had such a ridiculous name. Good thing he wasn't married yet! It wasn't easy for Pokemon who took up the wild life to get married, of course, it took a lucky run-in with the right person and a shared willingness to start a family and—

Ah, distractions, distractions! In any case, he was making his way to the beach right now, having a funny hunch that some kind of commotion might be happening there. He'd heard once from some traveling townspeople that a strange figure had been sighted out at sea, during the storm a few days back. Some people had wondered if that creature had something to do with said storm, and if it was possibly a Legendary. He even heard the term 'Lugia' floated around.

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Now that was an actually cool name for a Water-type. But Krabby figured he probably shouldn't steal an actual Legendary's name. Actually, what if this Lugia thing was the source of the earthquakes? Could a storm Legendary do that? Strike the earth with lightning bolts so fierce that it'd make the very island rumble?

All this thinking made him giddy. He had to go see the ocean. The earthquake must've happened around the beach area, he was so sure of it. He had to go see if he could find this Lugia creature.

He also wanted to collect seashells. So even if he found nothing, he was still winning big-time.

Rude winds kept pushing him back, as if warning him he was dumb to do this. But Krabby kept going, because he didn't care. He was dumb! Probably dumb. Going out alone in this weather was kinda dumb, and wasting time looking around for a Legendary he might never see was kinda dumb too. He also still hadn't eaten lunch, which was definitely dumb, so he was dumb. And he was owning up to it, because he had to see!

Whatever awaited him would surely be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. And so Krabby, happy and content as could be, a goofy smile eternally on his face, marched onward.

The deafening rain was letting down for a moment as he neared a cliffside, seeing the tumultuous ocean in the far distance. Its waves were in a one-sided boxing match against a huge, black obelisk jutting out from the waters — one of the fabled human-warding towers. And even further away, despite the storm's best attempts to veil it behind clouds and rainwater, Krabby was certain he caught a refractive glimmer of the distortion field encasing the entire archipelago. A beautiful sight, worth it on its own. Who else got to see such a wondrous tower, with such a wondrous backdrop behind it?

But he hardly gazed at it this time, the sounds of conflict reaching him. Curious, and not all a cat, Krabby couldn't help but be drawn to the noise, slinking toward the cliffside. Was something happening below him, on the beach shores? It sounded like a battle, a rather fun yet chaotic one at that—

He saw, and Krabby's eyes bulged out of their sockets as if he'd become a slug. A large group of Pokemon were engaged in an all-out melee, furious elemental attacks flying everywhere. There was a blue dog Pokemon, an ice vixen, a dragon-shark, some angelic creature, a green flying reindeer—

And mutants. Abhorrents. One was already down, an electric bird spasming from some ailment, but ten others held the battlefield. One was a brown fox — an Eevee, was he called? — with maddened, haunted eyes and crystal spikes on his head, surrounded by eight other specters that looked like apparitions of the evolutions an Eevee could take. All of them fired non-stop at their opponents, almost mindlessly so, the vixen, angelic, and reindeer hard-pressed to dodge their onslaught.

It was mesmerizing. It was horrifying. And yet, the blue dog and dragon-shark were facing something far worse.

A literal flying dinosaur creature of shadows and bone. A lich of sorts. A monster.

A demon incarnate.

He was speaking inciting words, the sort that made Krabby itch to stick his pincer into his bony eye sockets, but raw fear saved him from leaping in reaction to the Taunt. The dragon-shark and dog? They had no such luck, the former roaring out as he slipped past an Ice Beam and swung his claws with explosive Dragon-type energy, deadly strikes that scorched the sand yet never touched the lich demon. He was so fast, like a murky mirage! The dog ran in too, only for the demon to intercept his and the dragon-shark's strikes, before whipping around with an Iron Tail that clanged against their bodies.

The twosome fell, prone and harried. And Krabby just watched. Afraid.

And then the bone shadow dino swerved his head for the briefest of seconds. The red burning pinpricks in his eye sockets scanned the cliffside above.

He smiled.

Krabby was already skedaddling, vamoosing, and planning a vacation somewhere to the west coast of the island. As it turned out, curiosity could kill a crab too.

That, or he was actually a cat. A scaredy-cat. And he wasn't a scaredy-cat, he was a scaredy-crab.

Huge difference.