Burnout 2.11
Shayne HayesSeptember 2015
We continued on. After several more minutes of trekking through the dungeon, the maze cleared rapidly. The hedges seemed to pull back, shying away from a central clearing.
There was a small shelter, barely more than a lean-to made of wood and a knee-high clay wall. I imagined that it was something a pioneer might have made when moving out West, before they got around building a proper cabin. Of all the things I expected to find in the dungeon, a farmstead certainly wasn’t it.
“Shane, look there. Are those pumpkins?” Pierce asked in confusion. Sure enough, there was a pumpkin patch, with gourds of all shapes and sizes.
“Yes, they are,” I muttered skeptically. Night was falling. We were hungry. This looked a bit too convenient.
What little I knew about dungeons said they were usually hostile environments with hostile pokemon. They didn’t often have traps, and I’d never heard of one with a built-in shelter for the weary.
Then again, that could just be reporting bias. It stood to reason that if people got caught in traps, they weren’t likely to come back to talk about their experiences. The lean-to was suspicious as hell. So were the pumpkins for that matter. I was pretty sure they were different species and shouldn’t all be growing in the same place.
Then again, did it matter? Pierce hadn’t eaten anything of substance since he left Carnelian Bay. He also wasn’t the outdoorsy type; the kid was running on fumes.
Truth be told, so was I. Yesterday, I fought an ariados. I got a bit of rest back in town, but left immediately after to track him down. I hadn’t packed enough supplies for a multi-day excursion because I hadn’t expected him to be inside a dungeon.
“What do we do? The pumpkins are edible, right?” Pierce said softly.
“We’re in a grass type dungeon,” I reminded him. “How much you wanna bet at least one of those pumpkins is a pokemon?”
“Uh… Are there pumpkin pokemon?”
“There are species we don’t know about. I’m not taking any chances.”
“We need to rest; it’s getting dark.”
“We do…” I agreed reluctantly. “Rocket, can you sniff out the pokemon?”
My partner sniffed the air. His ears flicked back, then straight again. Like most animals, Rocket tucked in his ears when he was feeling anxious, or or aggressive. It usually meant there was a possible threat nearby.
But he didn’t perk them back like this. It was as if he wasn’t sure what to make of the scents in the air.
“Come on, slowly now.”
I thought about it as we approached. Pierce was jumpy, with his hand on the peashooter I gave him. I wasn’t much better. It’d be nice if this place turned out to be some kind of rest stop, but I didn’t want to get optimistic.
The pumpkins didn’t match. I didn’t know much about them, my uncle didn’t grow them in the Before, but I did know that there were several kinds. Some were creamy and good for soup. Others were sweet and went in pies. Those bougie restaurants sometimes liked to serve roasted pumpkins as a savory dish.
There were all those types and more. Carefully, I picked up a little, green one. It was about the size of a bread bowl, with bumpy knobs and yellow streaks. These were… soup pumpkins? I wasn’t sure. There was another that was a butternut squash; those, I recognized. Others were the classic, jack-o-lantern variety.
Carefully, I rolled a bigger one on the ground with my foot. It was heavy, a good sixty pounds at least. It felt normal, exactly like one I’d see at a harvest festival.
“Anything, Rocket?”
“Lin,” he chuffed. I received the same unsure ear flicker.
“Right…” I gave up on that front.
Rocket could smell any number of things. Odor Sleuth was cheating in that regard. Unfortunately, having all that inflow of information meant fuck-all if he didn’t know how to interpret it.
This was a pumpkin patch. These pumpkins were a type of produce. Ergo, they probably smelled like produce. He’d never encountered them before, so if there was something off about them, how would he know?
It was made worse by the fact that we were in a grass type dungeon. Just like the cherubi in Pierce’s arms, a grass type pokemon could look shockingly similar to actual fruit. I didn’t know if there was such a thing as a pumpkin pokemon, but if there was, there was a good chance that Rocket wouldn’t recognize it as a threat until we were right on top of it.
“Cherubi,” I said, remembering the original mission. “Will the kIng of Bountiful Harvests accept pumpkins as tribute?”
The little cherry seemed to consider it. At the very least, it liked the idea better than giving the king the mushrooms I looted from the paras. That was progress, but ultimately, it rejected the pumpkins as a valid offering.
I took this in stride. This told me that the King of Bountiful Harvests was looking for something specific. It was an expected possibility; after all, shaymin were associated with gracidea flowers and Celebi liked a specific shrine in Ilex Forest. Assuming he was a legendary grass type pokemon, it stood to reason that he had his preferences.
While it would have been convenient to end our dungeon dive here, the cherubi's response was helpful in another way: It considered the pumpkin as a potential offering. That told me that the pumpkins were probably not dangerous or poisoned. Even better, the implication was that we could conceivably carry some of these gourds back to the fountain.
Tentatively reassured, I picked up a gourd and walked over to the lean-to. “Come on, we’ll start a small fire to roast these. Remember to save the seeds.”
“Oh! We can take them back to town,” Pierce exclaimed. “We can have Pat and the oddish plant them like you did with the berries. Should we break all of them?”
“Absolutely not. These aren’t ours. This is probably some kind of rest stop, but that doesn’t mean we should be wasteful. Don’t break more than you plan to eat.”
“Alright, if you say so, Shane. We’re still guests in the king’s garden, huh?”
“Exactly. We can cut up a few of the smaller ones in the morning. They’ll work fine as a packed lunch.”
It didn’t take long for us to dig a small firepit. A quiet dinner of roast pumpkins and beef jerky followed. It was better than I could have hoped for. I didn’t know if finding edible plants in the dungeon would go on to be a running theme with me, but I couldn’t complain.
Pierce was a quiet kid. Maybe it was odd to say that about anyone given I was only twenty-three myself, but he felt like a kid, like someone who wasn't ready for this. He stared silently into the fire, eyes empty and mind far away, no doubt replaying every single thing that had happened over the last two days. I’d done that before.
Carnelian Bay was… It wasn’t safe, but it was home. Humans had rebuilt. They’d carved out a little slice of Lake Tahoe for themselves, a pocket in which pokemon were, generally speaking, absent. There, they could pretend the world hadn’t changed around them.
It was almost idyllic. Even in the Before, there were people who preferred to live a more rustic lifestyle, far from the crowded cities.
But what we had now wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was a changed world, full of new megafauna and what may as well be magic. The town was a group of lucky survivors who were trying desperately to avoid confronting it.
That was all well and good, but only for as long as the world permitted it. Eventually, avoidance wasn’t good enough. Eventually, reality crashed down with raw, painful lessons. Pierce and his buddies, they were just the unlucky sods who got to experience that firsthand.
“Shane… Can I ask you something?” he asked, voice almost a whisper. His bowl was picked clean and he sat with his knees drawn to his chest, hunched away from the world.
“Shoot,” I replied. Rocket had his head in my lap, his ears twitching lazily. Sir Swagsire had made a little hole for himself in the ground and Scout dozed at my feet.
“How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“This. All of this. Go out. Hunt. Fight pokemon. Beat dungeons.”
“Dungeon. Singular. I’m not much more experienced than you are.”
“But you go out anyway,” Pierce whispered. “I… I thought I was going to die. The poochyena that chased me in here could have caught me any time they wanted, couldn’t they?”
“Almost definitely,” I said plainly. What use was there in lying now?
“You fight pokemon. How do you do it?”
I gestured at my team. “I have good help. And when–not if–I fuck up, I do my damnest to never make that mistake again.”
“A-And what if that mistake costs you? Jose, he… he died… We fucked up so much, didn’t we?” he laughed, hollow and broken. “We went into the woods… We stole booze… We chased a deer ‘til we got lost… We panicked…”
“You did. I’m not going to lie to you, Pierce. You guys messed up, and you can’t make it right again. You can only move forward and make sure the lessons stick this time. It’s why we don’t want you kids to come with us. It’s not because this shit’s some exclusive club. Truth is, we rely a lot more on luck than we’d like to admit.”
“That… I guess you’re right, Shane,” he muttered as he stared intently into the fire. “You… You know about the snorlax attack in Truckee last year, right?”
“I do. Did you used to live there?”
“No, I was in Carnelian since Before, but a few people I know did. They said… They said the snorlax just came in, ate whatever and whoever it could reach, then headed off. There was nothing anyone could do except run away and wait for it to eat its fill.”
“I don’t know that I’d be able to do anything about a snorlax, either,” I said truthfully. Even in the anime, I remembered Ash’s snorlax being a near-unstoppable monster.
“But you’re strong. Rocket, too.”
“And? Maybe we could hurt a snorlax, convince it that the town isn’t worth the trouble. Or maybe, we’d just piss it off. Either way, our priority would be getting people out of there. The town can be rebuilt; people can’t.”
“Heh. We’re really not on top of the food chain anymore, are we? How do people live like this? Like, in the pokemon world.”
“I imagine with a great deal of humility,” I replied dryly. “Humans aren’t going to go extinct just because we’re not the biggest, baddest things around anymore.”
“Yeah, just mostly extinct. So many people died in just a few years…”
“Most of that wasn’t pokemon. Pokemon didn’t start a nuclear apocalypse; humans did.”
“I guess you’re right. But how are we supposed to rebuild anything like this? The adults are always going on about how things used to be, like they could get it back if they wished hard enough.”
“One step at a time. We need to adapt, become trainers. And hey, looks to me like you’ve got a starter willing to follow you.”
He looked at his cherubi with a complicated frown. “I don’t know where to start.”
“No one ever does. For now, you can start by getting some shuteye,” I said gently. “We’ll worry about the rest once we get out of here.”
X
I was tired. The fire was warm. The roasted pumpkin was that perfect mix of savory and sweet. Sleep came as easy as could be expected in the dungeon.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stick around long. I stirred to the sound of whimpers and rustling cloth. Pierce was having a nightmare, which was… not unexpected. I tuned it out so I could go back to sleep; I’d deal with it in the morning.
Then, I was roused from slumber by the feeling of my pinky finger going painfully numb. It felt like I’d wrapped a live wire around my finger. I rolled away and reached for my knife.
The fire had yet to fully die. The embers, still red in the pit, gave me just enough light to see Sir Swagsire. He thumped his tail on the ground and promptly leapt on top of Rocket’s head.
“What the fuck, Swagsire?” I swore in a harsh whisper.
“Woop. Wooper-woop,” he said matter-of-factly. He turned and pointed towards Pierce.
Up above, there were a trio of dim, flickering lights. They drew near, descending like UFOs. Hastily, I rolled to one knee and reached for my flashlight.
Pumpkins. They were literally floating pumpkins of the classic Halloween variety. They even had jack-o-lantern faces, from which orange light flickered like candles. They weren’t hiding. If anything, they seemed to revel in the flashlight’s beam, making funny faces against the night sky.
“Pum-pum, pumpkaboo~” they sang in an eerie chorus. As one, they descended, but I wasn’t the target.
“Shit, Pierce!” I shouted as my crossbow rose to my shoulder. I loosed a bolt before I fully registered what I’d done.
Rocket wasn’t far behind. He leapt into the air and became a pale, white blur. Quick Attack, augmented by Slash. Against a pokemon that size, it should have been a killshot. Instead, the pumpkin he targeted phased straight through.
Ghost type. I swore. Obviously, the jack-o-lanterns would be grass-ghosts. What the fuck else would they be?
“Odor Sleuth! Focus that one down!” I shouted.
Logically, being good at smelling something shouldn’t have an effect on an opponent who could phase through attacks.
But fuck logic; I was banking on game mechanics being applicable here. Normal types could strike ghosts with Foresight or Odor Sleuth, just like Psychics could strike dark types with Miracle Eye.
Pierce let out a shriek of terror. He rolled away from the descending pokemon, limbs tangled in his sleeping bag. That was another lesson to teach him: Keep the bag half unzipped so he could get out easier.
For now, I focused on keeping my flashlight pointed on the three pumpkaboo. Given that these things were almost certainly ghost types, my crossbow was useless. Scout’s night vision was just as awful as a human’s so this was as helpful as I could be right now.
“Scout, Air Cutter. Sir Swagsire, Mud Shot. Keep them off Pierce,” I barked. I ran through everything I knew about ghost types, which really only reminded me how little I knew.
It was a damn shame. Mud Shot was the only ranged attack Swagsire knew. I’d thought Poison Sting would have been a shoe-in, but no. Those spines didn’t come off his body.
Rocket claimed one pumpkaboo. It did a good job of dodging back and forth, but as it readied a ghostly sphere in its mouth, he finally managed to tag it. Apparently, Rocket’s nose was so good that he could discern the instant something appeared in the material plane.
No, that wasn’t at all how scents worked. Bullshit. It was pure bullshit. But it was our bullshit. That was all that mattered right now.
Scout had an easier time with his pumpkaboo. It took him a second to get used to the dim lighting, but I kept my flashlight on it and the damn thing literally glowed from the inside. With a screech of protective rage and a blade of wind, he tore a gash in the pumpkin’s gourd, sending it packing.
The third was more troublesome. It sank down, avoiding the Mud Shot from Swagsire. The cherubi that Pierce tamed leapt to his defense, but its aim wasn’t any better than Swagsire’s.
The pumpkaboo lowered itself until it hovered eye-level to Pierce. It then let out a haunting giggle that seemed to echo in the pumpkin patch before taking a deep breath.
I wasn’t sure if “breath” was the right word, what with it being a ghost and all, but it inhaled something. I saw a dark-purple miasma flow from the half-awake boy into the pokemon. For a second, it savored the flavor like a fine wine. It bobbed there, heedless of the fight around it, and sang to itself.
I had no idea what it was doing. For lack of other options, I grabbed the still-smoldering coals and flung it at the pumpkaboo.
It didn’t like that. It let out a hollow groan and fired a seed at me. The seed collided with my arm. Instead of punching through my arm like a bullet, its outer layer shattered, revealing a mass of entangling vines that wrapped around my arm.
I immediately felt sharp thorns digging into my arm. My jacket, suited for winter weather, nevertheless wasn’t thick enough. The thorns didn’t bite deep, but barbed wire didn’t need to bite deep to hurt like shit, either. Worse than the pain was the strange feeling of something being siphoned away. This had to be Leech Seed.
Lucky for me, I’d taken the habit of wearing my jacket to bed. It helped keep me warm and was one less thing I had to worry about in the morning. I tore the whole thing off and dove to the side, dodging a second Leech Seed.
The three pumpkaboo let out a sound that was almost musical. The one Scout had been tearing into chose to flee. Soon, the others followed, but not before the one that shot me let out a ball of ghostly energy. It floated into Pierce’s chest but seemingly did no damage.
As quickly as they’d arrived, the ghosts left, leaving behind an eerie silence. In the quiet, I heard Pierce whimper. He was whispering to himself, too low for me to make out. I approached closer so I could hear him.
“Pump-pump… pumkaboo…” he began to whisper. I realized belatedly that he’d fallen into a trance.
His eyes were dilated. He stood and began to shamble after them. It was like he was a weird, pumpkin-themed zombie. He bobbed up and down with each step, arms spread as if framing a big gourd. He looked like a fucking idiot.
Any other time, and I would have laughed at whatever the hell this was. Not now, though. Hypnosis? Confuse Ray? What the hell could convince a kid that he was a pokemon?
I remembered some of the older pokedex entries. A child turned into a kadabra, right? Or was that just an urban legend? I vaguely recalled a hypno or drowzee doing something similar to this in the anime, too. Was this how it started with these pumpkins? They lured a kid out somewhere and he turned into one of them?
“Fuck,” I swore. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt and dragged him to the ground. He thrashed, trying to shake me off. “Pierce, eyes on me, kid. Wake up.”
Lucky me, the chubby kid had no idea how to use his weight. Being hypnotized like this hadn’t magically given him wrestling experience. I sat on his stomach and pinned his shoulders.
“Pumpkaboo,” he continued to drone. His head was still doing that stupid bobbing thing.
I slapped him, hard enough to leave a bruise. “Wake up, Pierce! You’re not a fucking pokemon!”
“Pum–”
“Cherubi!” his little berry companion chirped.
It bounced on his head and released a reddish powder. It smelled nice, like a cherry pie fresh out of the oven. I had a feeling that if we ever made it out of this, the cherubi would be popular back in town.
The stuff settled around him and I watched as his pupils undilated. The bobbing stopped.
He shivered as reason reasserted itself. “Wh-What happened?”
“Cherubi saved your ass,” I told him plainly. “You got hit by something that the pumpkin pokemon did. Then, you started acting like a pumpkin yourself.”
“Oh… Oh, shit. I almost followed them.”
“You did. Had to hold you down. Cherubi dosed you with something that brought you back.”
“Shit,” he slumped tiredly. “T-Thanks, cherubi.”
“Cher,” it chirped.
I slowly relaxed when we saw no other attackers. The danger had passed, but I didn’t go back to sleep that night. It was the second time I’d slept in a dungeon, and the second time I’d been ambushed. At this rate, I was going to develop a neurosis. Besides, my arm hurt where the Leech Seed wrapped around me.
Instead, I stoked the fire again and wrote in my journal, trying to remember everything I could about the damn things. My drawing wasn’t the best, but it’d have to be enough for Sabrina. The pumpkaboo were tentatively labeled as grass and ghost dual types. From what I could tell, they knew Confuse Ray and Leech Seed, maybe more.
That led me to thinking about what they wanted. They were clearly drawn to Pierce. Psychics and ghosts were supposed to be able to eat emotions, or dreams. Ralts was famous for being drawn to happy people and drowzee ate dreams. Hell, gengar were some of the earliest users of Dream Eater.
Assuming my train of thought was correct, there was a good chance that the pumpkaboo were drawn to Pierce’s nightmare. Did they want to eat his dreams? Suck out his vitality? Soul?
I had no way of knowing. For all I knew, they were actually here to make him feel better by eating his nightmare. Or it was their idea of a prank. After all, they hadn’t seriously attacked us and what a ghost pokemon found funny could possibly be very dangerous to the normal person.
For that matter, I had no way of actually hurting a ghost on my own. The one I threw a lump of coal at had shied away, but I had a feeling it’d been annoyed, not hurt. More than likely, it’d only felt a bit of discomfort at the heat thanks to its grass typing, not because the coal had some metaphysical “fire type” to it.
I kept myself busy the rest of the night. I wrapped some more pumpkins in foil and set them by the fire to roast slowly. We’d eat that in the morning.
Author’s Note
Shane is incorrect. Butternut squash are not pumpkins, but they're closely related.
People asked. Not everyone in Carnelian Bay are survivors of the snorlax attack. In fact, most aren’t (because you don’t typically survive a snorlax, at least not on your own merits). Truckee, Sierraville, and Carnelian Bay are three distinct communities.
Truckee was the biggest, and so drew in the snorlax. It used to have a population of fourteen to sixteen thousand people. In story, Carnelian Bay has a population of just two thousand, and it is a town built from survivors from half a dozen little communities around the Tahoe region.
The cherubi knows the egg move, Aromatherapy. Originally, my plan was to give Pierce a Hisuian voltorb but decided against it. It didn’t quite fit his personality and I felt like giving the community a free electric generator was too easy.
Animal Fact: Darwin's bark spiders have the strongest silk in nature, ten times stronger than kevlar. Long time Worm fanfic readers probably knew that because lots of authors try to game Taylor’s power by giving her exotic bugs.
They can spread their webs across entire rivers, up to 25 meters (82 feet). However, only females produce this ultra-strong silk. Scientists found that silk from a female bark spider is twice as strong as the silk of their male counterparts.
This is because females are anywhere from ten to one hundred times heavier than males across bark spider species. They have to catch more and bigger food to support that mass. There’s a joke about thicc thighs and thiccer asses but I’m a polite, gentlemanly sort who’d never resort to crass humor.