~~~ Chapter 2 - Frequency ~~~
I had been running for about eight hours when I was forcibly prompted with the realization that no matter how much energy I had, or how good I felt…Bugs probably weren't meant to jog or run all night long. And that included me. Or at least, I hadn't had enough exercise to do that.
How did I learn that? Well, my legs decided they weren't going to work anymore. Not as a loss of accuracy, not wobbliness, no, not anything in particular, I just lost all force behind my movements. My arms and face were introduced to the ground. Learning moments! So there I was, a bug/leaf-type pokemon on the edge of an asphalt trail path, crawling into the bushes and trees of the encompassing woods.
At least we were still deep into the night, and there weren't any humans headed up the trail. Nor did I see any signs of humans stopping at the side and camping.
I'd been following the trail for a while, at least long enough to get bored. There were a few splits along the way, themselves with signs. I couldn't read them either. I just picked a side of the trail that felt right and hoped for the best.
The signs I had passed by had images, or markings on them, but like before, reading just wasn't happening. The sky was getting lighter as the sun threatened to come up, so I figured it was only a matter of time until campers or hikers started heading up the mountain. Do a lot of people work for a living in the Pokemon world?
Anyway, the sun was coming up and my leg joints had decided they'd had enough. I'd made it to a bush with some small but serviceable leaves. This particular bush, though small and with small leaves, it would have to do, even if only a few meters away from the trail.
It was probably a bad idea to be exposed to humans while I was so tired that I was practically defenseless. I didn't want to find myself wholly at the mercy of a person with pokeballs. I wasn't keen on learning how pokeballs worked first-hand. Also, it would suck, to be crawling along the trail, hoping a predator didn't see me and turn me into their next delicatessen.
If I had more food, I would probably have not had the issue. But alas, the wilds as far out from civilization as I was, didn't have much food.
I extended my arm, biting off a chunk of the green at the end of my arm-leaf-blade. I then turned the blade flat, using the goopy silk stuff that my mouth produced. Gluing the piece of leaf to the end, I turned it into a makeshift crutch. All without accidentally swallowing the leaf. As a fairly universal herbivorous animal, I could eat leaves in a pinch.
They weren't very nutritious, however, and well, the thought of eating the leaves I had grafted onto myself… It gave me a bad feeling. Like how a snake swallowing itself would eventually die, I'd probably suffer enormously if that became a habit. At least, that's what my instincts had to say about that thought.
On the topic of being caught? Yeah, I don't fancy myself a fighter. At all. And well. I was just going to avoid it if I could. Even if Ash Ketchum, or one of the protagonists from the video games— I'd never learned the games' protagonists names— showed up with a palm-frond fan and a bowl of sugary cherries...
Well, there were these really great red sugary cherries near where I woke up. That's not the point! I wasn't getting caught or eaten by a predator JUST BECAUSE I overdid it on Leg Night. Nope, not going to let myself look like a three-foot-tall meal platter.
These leaves that gave stupid birds pause and acted as armor were putty under my preening. With the crutch I'd just made myself, I set the arm down on the ground, using a bit of pressure on it, the leaf wrapping the end blunting the pressure a bit, I propped myself up and crawled around the bushes to the other side of the tree. I needed to get up high and lay in the sun while I slept. Biting again into my little leaf-blade-slash-crutches, I gave them little hooks.
I tested one arm hook, and it stayed steady. One arm after the other, I used my upper body to pull myself up the tree. I got to work once I hit a good height and a nice thick set of branches in a spot facing away from the trail.
Cutting off a bunch of leaves and grafting them onto myself and my leaves everywhere I could, the work was quick. The extra leaves would help me to mimic a branch, which should keep most predators from spotting me while sleeping. Another thing about being a pokemon that is pretty nice: instincts make a lot of work practically automatic. All I had to do was hold onto the idea and, with only a little input, I was in auto-pilot.
Like a well-trained soldier automatically reloading a weapon. When instinct signaled the work was done, I bit a little into the cuffs of leaves on my legs, hooked them onto the branch, and attempted to lay as flat as possible, embedding them and my notched-arm-blades. There would be no falling off this branch. Accidentally, anyway. If a bird of prey or any other strong predator spotted me? Could be a different story.
One thing about being a… whatever I am, sleep comes at the strangest time of the day. It doesn't happen too much, but usually at this transitionary period of the day between night and dawn. The first rays of the morning spring sun were hitting my leaves and torpor took me, casting me to dreams of going to the city and meeting Lance, the old Kanto champion. During the day, I feel like I was awake and aware, and I would naturally sleep for a few hours during the night, but this had been the first time I'd felt a real need to get some real sleep so dramatically.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
That hadn't been the first time I dreamt of teaming up with a trainer. I'd dreamt of getting caught a lot, sometimes nightmares, other times they were dreams come true. But what's funny about it is that, well, I'm not a fighter. I guessed I could learn, but everything I've ever done has just been to fend off predators. Seeing myself at the top of a league with a trainer? Not my style.
I had once dreamt of going to the city and meeting Ash. Others were of me getting run over by a miltank. Still others, I was paired up with Blue, from the games. As my vision went from a dark nothing, to a fading-in red, images of leaves and sewing them with my natural silk pervaded my imagination. Sewing them together and giving them to people and pokemon alike, like a clown with balloon animals, a subconscious part of me was constantly thinking of designs even while I had dreamt.
Bits of intonations and vibrations came and went, what I'm sure were humans and voices or the calls of wild pokemon fighting each other off in the distance. Perhaps a morning trainer battle?
Eventually, it was the vibrations of a train—closer than before, but still far away—which led me out of the state of torpor.
The image of a skarmory in my mind, the steel-typed feathers impressed themselves on me. It didn't take much to imagine that they'd give kitchen knives a run for their money. In that quasi-sleepy but waking state an idea came to mind. What if…I had a few extra leaves coating me, sharp, like knives of my own? It would work as a decent distraction keeping birds and others that would want to prey on me as I rested in the daylight, facing away.
Holding in the idea and only initiating the base motions, I went to work; as my leaves were soaking energy from the early afternoon sun, I prepared for the next leg of the journey. Would anyone mess with a bird with feathers of steel that could probably deal slicing and stabbing wounds?
Not likely. At least not without stupidity or raw power to back them up. They were menacing. The new leaves I grafted on were already pretty strong from several hours of being in the sun, so maneuvering around, each new leaf-blade that covered me soon ended on a point. After the leaves on my arms had been filed and chopped a bit, they had the visage of a serrated steak knife. A steak knife ending in a tipped hook.
Say what you will about bugs, half of our abilities feel like they're just pure instinct. I hadn't even done anything but think of the image in my mind, and most of the job was done without thought. This road seemed to have a couple people on it. Some kind of nature hiking trail, or neighborhood jogging trail? I didn't see any houses.
Then again, this was the Pokemon world. Trains and boats are the primary means of mass transportation, so with the increasing frequency of humans, I was likely near a small town. The games, I would learn, really didn't do the scale and size of the actual towns justice.
I crawled down the tree, continuing to think as I progressed along the direction of the trail about a hundred meters off. The land was pretty flat, overall. Not a lot of hiking. Just a few hills here and there. The thick shrubbery kept me out of sight from most humans, and hopefully the leaves looked a bit more menacing to potential predators.
When I saw the first building, it was a little wood shed with some people in green uniforms. Local rangers or some regional park service, I'd guess. Getting around the building through the bushes was pretty trivial, but it was a good sign I was getting closer to human civilization and out of the raw wild.
Then again, the way both the anime and games worked, there were a LOT of wilds between each city, compared to back when I lived as a human in a continuous unending recursive hellscape of the same fast food restaurants and big box stores every ten miles. Civilization being so far apart here was actually refreshing, especially when the only city noise I'd felt had come from a damn train.
Traveling was pretty uneventful the rest of the time, in comparison, though I did see a few more flying silver steel birds. There must have been a mountain that they roost on nearby that I couldn't see. Or maybe they were trainer-owned and ferrying their trainers around, and these had been the same ones I saw the other day?
Closer to evening, I passed a lone human on their way down the trail. I gave them a look, and tried to say "coming up from behind." What came out: "Eaaa v eeeaaa eee cth." Yeah, not speaking human any time soon. The person turned. They had dark black hair and wore a plain shirt with blue jeans.
Their faces felt flat to my perception, their eyes indiscernible, I could not tell what, if any, emotions they felt, and the scent of them in the air was a kind of salt mixed with a light dash of phosphorus. They just whistled and continued on their way, not even bothering to slow down.
This was a man, I'd guessed, judging by their frame and their peculiar, synthetic smell about them. Their body language was a kind of confidence, belayed by their non-threatening posture, whistling as I passed. When I finally got out of whatever this trail was, the sun was falling over the horizon, and the charge from the day's sun was beginning to buzz. Not aiming for another collapse in my legs, I forced myself to pause when I felt-heard another train rushing by in the distance.
I wanted to try and learn to whistle like the guy, but my tongue didn't have half as much mass as I had as a human. Neither did I even have teeth. I could push my tongue up against the hard… uh shell? skeleton? Carapace? Whatever it was that was there in place of human teeth, it was jagged, good for cutting, chopping, and slicing. But whistling, I was not going to be able to do. That said, I already learned how to build up the pressure on the silk vestibules passing through my mouth. My silk had a pretty good range. At least three body-lengths away when I pressed my tongue up against the outlet and sprayed.
This was the second morning but the beginning of the third day of my journey. With only a couple stray birds eying me, the night had gone on well enough. The light from the city showed itself long before I caught the industrial scents: a dense smell of old smoke and hints of dark black fumes I hadn't sensed before.
Once again, the light vibrations of a train in the distance were there to remind me of my goal and direction! What were the humans up to? What was I going to find? It had been too long since I actually played or seen any Pokemon stuff, and I couldn't actually remember that many towns or cities from either the anime OR the games.
Cresting a small hill, I was immediately reminded that my eyes couldn't see long distances for shit. From what I could gather, the sense I felt from both the colors and the smell. Pretty dumpy. A sprawl of browns and grays and what I think were criss-crossing train tracks. In the distance, I could also see a few buildings threatening to be high-rises, but nothing special. I wasn't aware of any towns which had an emphasis on trains.