The scale of the city had been large even from a distance, but up close it was mind-boggling. There hadn’t been any humans on the path to the house on the outskirts, but that had rapidly changed the further she went in. The buildings looked imposing and strange this close up, and some had darkened windows that she couldn't see through, and she avoided those ones whenever possible as a precaution. The vast uptick in humans wandering the roads necessitated more subtle movements and an active tightening of her senses to avoid getting overwhelmed with unshielded emotional broadcasting. For not being Psychic, humans sure had a lot of mental activity!

The Ralts waited patiently, hidden in a shrub at a narrow intersection, houses behind and the bulk of the city ahead. There were a few too many humans walking through to move safely. Absent-mindedly, she reached out and touched a curl of black material that circled the line of bushes she was in. Smooth, shiny, and bendy too. Was this plastic? She had only seen it made into bottles. Why was it in the dirt around a plant?

She glanced behind her, and observed a row of flowers at the foot of a house. She had never seen a purple flower before. Maybe the plastic helped plants grow, somehow? Wait, no, there wasn't any grass here or there, just chips of wood. Oh! It was to stop other plants from growing in between the bushes and choking out the flowers.

The Ralts smiled to herself at a mystery well solved. A few moments more, before her patience was rewarded with a significant gap in the passing humans. She dashed straight into the opposite alleyway, delving deeper into the heart of the city.

The alleyway stood in stark contrast to the streets behind her. Where before there had been small paths of dirt and grass, now there was only a layer of hard dark stone covering the ground. The buildings to either side had no windows into the alley, but a couple doors were inset into the walls here and there.

But something caught her eye—a few large green containers lined one side of the hall, and dust, stones, and bits of paper were scattered in nearly every nook and cranny.

Giving the doors a healthy distance, she moved closer to the green bins. Strange, blocky markings were emblazoned on the front of them both, indecipherable to her brief inspection, so she ignored them to climb up on a handle and crack open the lid. The Ralts gagged as an acrid fume hit her face, and she reeled back for a moment, before steeling herself and peering inside, eyes watering. The source of the smell was revealed to be a deep pit of trash; greasy plates, used tissues and napkins, torn wrappers, a cracked glass pane, and giant piles of moldy food in bags.

Gross. Was this what humans used as a refuse pit? The Ralts spotted a mushroom and grimaced. It wasn’t even a tasty one! Disgusting. There must have been a food preparation area behind some of the doors. Closing the lid, she checked the time again. The sun had moved across the sky much faster than she had expected, and midday had come and gone not long ago. As if to remind her, her stomach began to growl. She blinked and patted herself, checking for the grass-woven pouch full of berries she had most assuredly remembered to bring along, because heading this far away from home alone without any food at all was just plain silly, and—

The completely berryless Ralts let out a small whine, lightly thumping her horn on the metal bin. “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered to herself, each utterance followed by another hollow thunk that reverberated into her skull. The sound echoed through the alley, hammering in the idiocy in more ways than one.

"Hey, did you guys hear that?" a faint voice said from the side alley further ahead. If the Ralts hadn't already been pure white, she would have paled considerably. That wasn’t good.

She looked behind her, only to see an empty alley far too large to cross. Her eyes darted toward the source of the voice, seeing naught but the same. Swallowing thickly, she finally looked down at the metal bin.

"I'm gonna go check it out! Come on, it might be a Zigzagoon!" another voice proclaimed.

"Oh, I always wanted one of those! Maybe we can grab it?" exclaimed a third, higher pitched voice.

For a moment, the Ralts considered just letting herself be discovered. Then she took a deep breath, opened the waste container as quietly as she could, and slipped inside, landing on the refuse below. The smell washed over her at once, a horrible rancid wave that made her eyes water and throat clench in pure revulsion. Reflexively, she pulled her hands over her mouth to choke down the sudden rise of bile.

Unfortunately, she had still been holding the lid aloft when she did so. It came crashing down, the painfully amplified sound echoing inside the filthy container. Three pairs of footsteps came running into the alley, stopping right outside her hiding place. Attempting to ignore the smell—and failing miserably—the Ralts strained her ears to hear the humans outside.

"It must've been scavenging in the dumpster!" said a human boy.

"Is it still there?" another asked, deeper but still obviously childish.

"Well, I don't see it in the alley, so it has to be!" proclaimed a third voice, a match for the higher pitched one earlier. A girl? "You guys better not have scared it off."

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The Ralts hesitated for a split second before burrowing deeper into the trash below her, leaving herself only a small gap to see through—and hopefully obscuring her from view. A crack of light appeared as one of the humans attempted to open the dumpster, but it didn't open very far; from the sounds outside and the way the lid bobbed, the Ralts guessed that the human was too short to properly open it, and was jumping to compensate.

The first boy gave a grunt of disappointment. "I can't see inside, it's too dark. Barry, get over here and hold my cone, I need to climb on your back!"

"Uh, are you sure that's a good idea?" Barry, the deeper voice, asked.

"Come on, I want to see the Zigzagoon!" said the girl.

The Ralts heard a sigh, then a small shuffle.

"You ready?" Barry asked.

"Yeah, lift me up!"

A grunt, and then a small noise as the first boy steadied himself against the dumpster. "Alright, opening on three. One, two, three!"

Light suddenly flooded the interior of the dumpster, and the Ralts heard a cry of triumph followed rapidly by one of distress. The lid came crashing back down, the impact making her clutch at her ears in pain.

"Ow...” the boy outside moaned. “That...didn't go so well..."

"You think!?" Barry exclaimed. "You threw both of us backward! I told you it wouldn't work!"

"Hey, if you had just moved with me, I could've gotten it easy—hey!” the boy exclaimed, “You dropped my ice cream!"

The Ralts blinked. Ice...cream? You could cream ice? Wasn’t that just water?

"Yeah, well someone knocked me over, and I didn't want to fall on my head!" Barry countered, aggravated.

"Guys, calm down!" the girl interjected. "We can get you another one later. Are you okay? Did you see the Zigzagoon?"

"Eh? Oh, yeah, I'm fine,” the unnamed boy said. “Maybe a scrape. I didn't see anything in there, though. Just trash."

"Come to think of it,” Barry said, “all the noise should be making it run around in there, but I don't hear anything."

"Aw. It must've gone down the alley before we got here," said the girl. There was a sharp ping as a pebble hit the dumpster. "Hmfh. Oh well. Let's get going. Oh! I just remembered, apparently Wally got a Poochyena from the Gym Leader earlier."

The still-unnamed first boy made an incredulous sound. "Wheezy Wally got a Poochyena? Oh, I've gotta see this!"

Then she heard footsteps, increasingly distant, marking the humans’ departure. She poked her head above the sea of rubbish, gagging. How long had all this been in here? Grimacing, she wiggled free and wiped the worst of the clinging sludge off her coat—before freezing as the lid opened again.

"They gotta stop leaving trash laying around; what are we, Pokemon?" Barry muttered, tossing something extremely cold right on her horn. "Guys!" he called out, dropping the lid again. "Wait up, I wanna see it too!"

The Ralts stood very still, a wet chill dripping down her head as the footsteps faded away. With a grimace, she reached up and lifted the lid of the dumpster enough to slide out, climbing back out onto the handle, and then the ground below—making sure that the noisy thing didn’t bang shut and give her away a second time. The cold thing had stuck fast, refusing to fall off in the descent. Still grimacing, she reached up, grabbing onto something stiff that crushed when she gripped it too hard.

Pulling the object loose, she stared at it. It was a thin yellow cone covered in a grid-like pattern, hollow but for a malformed and runny lump of blue...stuff.

“Is this ice cream?" she wondered aloud. A portion of the viscous substance was still soaking into her hair, dripping steadily onto her face, and with a final grimace she concentrated and slowly ran a psychic hand through her locks, forcing the majority of the liquid to fall to the ground.

The Ralts felt at her hair, experiencing the unpleasantly sticky residue left behind. “I'm going to have to take a rinse later,” she grumbled.

Then her eyes turned to the cone, thoughtful. It was some manner of human food, but they had just tossed it away because it fell on the ground? What a waste. She had eaten Magikarp that had fallen in mud just fine; it just needed a quick rinse to be good as new! Her stomach growled again. Hesitating, she looked around the alley, as if the children would pop out from behind the dumpster in revenge, or her grandpa would fall out of the sky and scold her for even thinking of such an idea.

She sniffed it.

It smelled of winter, a cool breeze through an overcast, lightly snowing sky. The shade of the trees at dusk.

A taste.

It was creamy, sweet, and soft. It flowed like a liquid but retained shape. It tasted like the early frost, a chilled berry crushed and spread even with flakes, walking through the monochrome forest at the brink of dawn.

"Haaa..." she gasped, shivering as the chill bit at her throat. She blinked, and stared down at the marvelous treat in her hands. She took another bite, then two and three—

A sharp spike of pain washed through her head. She winced, holding her head with her free hand as it died down. Right. Lesson learned: Don’t eat cold things too fast.

She looked at the cone, and wondered. If they could possibly throw away something like this, treat it like common trash when it only picked up a bit of dust, what else did they have that made this so unremarkable?

Ice cream in hand, she crept toward the alley’s mouth. Paths and plans whirred in her thoughts as she searched for a way ever deeper into the heart of the city, and below everything a core of burning curiosity continued to shine ever brighter.

She took another lick. It tasted like clouds.