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Literature Text
"Daybreak"
"Wake up."
My eyes flew open as a strong, calm voice entered my dreams. I was momentarily blinded by the sunlight streaming in through the greenish canvas of my tent, but when my vision cleared I saw Absol standing over me. His fur had been blackened by soot in a few places, but he seemed otherwise unhurt.
"Get up," the voice said. "I need your help."
The voice in my head was unknown to me but there was something familiar about it...
I sat up quickly. It couldn't be...or could it?
I opened my mouth to speak. My throat felt like sandpaper. "Absol?" I croaked.
"Yes."
My head spun. I started stammering. "Wha...how..."
"There will be time for me to indulge your questions later. Right now, I need you."
"Um...okay," I said uncertainly. "Uh, how long have I been asleep?"
"According to your watch, approximately six hours. I attempted to awaken you as soon as I put out the fire. When you did not wake up, I brought you back here so you would be safe."
That explained how I had managed to get back to the campsite. Impressive, considering I outweighed him by at least seventy-five pounds. I started to stand up, but I was overwhelmed by a sudden wave of dizziness and almost fell. Absol quickly stepped foreward to steady me.
"Careful," he said. "Giving up so much energy to me almost killed you. It will take some time for you to fully recover."
"I'll be all right," I said. Still, I used great caution as I pulled myself up. Absol turned his head slightly; my bright yellow polycarbonate canteen was hanging from his horn.
"Drink," he commanded. "Then finish packing your things. We must go."
"Thank you," I said as I took the canteen. I poured the water down my throat, closing my eyes in relief as I savored the feeling of the cascade of liquid moistening every square millimeter like a monsoon over a desert.
"Hurry." Absol's voice jolted me out of my reverie. I threw the canteen into my backpack and quickly stuffed my sleeping bag into its stuff-sack. Tightening the straps around the outside, I compressed the sack until it was no bigger than a football, then threw it into my bag as well. Absol lifted his head and hooked the camp lantern on his horn; I grabbed it and secured it to its hook on the outside of the bag, then left the now-empty tent.
The sky was completely clear and the sun was bright overhead. We had made our camp on on a rocky outcropping halfway up one of the smaller mountains northeast of Mt. Coronet's central peak. It hadn't been easy to get to, but Absol discovered a series of small handholds that had allowed me to scale the otherwise impassable rock face.
Come to think of it, it was Absol who originally urged me to travel over the mountain range between Solaceon and Celestic rather than simply using Route 210. Maybe...
I turned to face Absol, who was digging my tent stakes out of the ground with his claws.
"Absol..."
He stopped digging and turned to glare at me with his brilliant crimson eyes.
"You knew something was going to happen here, didn't you? That's why you brought me here."
"Yes."
"I don't mean to sound callous, but if you knew a disaster was coming, why didn't you tell me? We were so close...we might have been able to prevent the fire if we hadn't stopped to rest for the night."
His gaze softened somewhat and he turned back to face the ground.
"In addition to the place where a disaster is to occur, Absol are also able to get a vague sense of the time. My senses told me that while disaster was indeed imminent, it would be some time before it would come to pass. I believed we could afford to rest before continuing." Absol closed his eyes in shame. "I believed my senses were infallible. I...was wrong."
I pondered this as I gathered up my cooking utensils from the ring of reddish stones surrounding the fire pit and placed them in a black mesh bag. Absol had never been wrong about the location or time of a disaster before. We hadn't always been able to help, but we had always been able to reach our destination before catastrophe struck as long as it our destination was close enough for us to reach it in time. Perhaps this was why he had been so adamant about fighting the fire, so unwilling to stand by in a seemingly hopeless situation.
Somehow, I got the feeling he wasn't telling me the whole story, but I didn't push the point. I knew what it was to feel responsible for a catastrophe, and I knew there was nothing I could do or say to make him feel better at this point, regardless of whether his senses were distorted by his own self-confidence or some outside force. Silently, I finished packing my cooking pots and pulled the string on the mesh bag, sealing it tightly.
I stepped around Absol to finish packing the tent. He tried to hide it, but I felt him shudder as I brushed by him.
I stopped. "Absol, what is it?"
"Nothing." He tried to keep working on collapsing the tent. I grabbed a handful of his mane and focused my mind on his aura. There. A dark void of pain on his left side, flaring up angrily with every movement.
"You're hurt."
"Unimportant."
"Unimportant, my ass. I'm not going to let you die from an infection for the sake of your pride. Hold still."
Even without my aura senses I could feel the annoyance rolling off of him, but he obediently sat down and allowed me to examine his left flank. Initially I saw nothing but a few patches of singed fur, but on closer inspection I saw that Absol had carefully arranged his mane to cover up the extent of his injuries. I pushed back the mane to reveal several areas where Absol's snow-white fur had been completely burned away, and the dark blue-black skin underneath was badly blistered. I cleaned off my hand with some water and slowly ran it across the damaged skin. Absol stiffened in pain when my fingers touched the swollen flesh around the outside of the wounds, but did not react at all when I examined their dried-out inner areas. That wasn't good; it meant there was nerve damage.
The seriousness of the burn surprised me. There shouldn't have been anything in that forest capable of burning hot enough to cause such extensive damage to Absol's tough hide.
"You have multiple third-degree burns. How did this happen?" I said as I fetched my medicine case from my bag.
"There was a large amount of dark red dust mixed with silvery strips of metal spread around the glade. It didn't seem to ignite easily, but when it did ignite it burned hotter, brighter, and more fiercely than anything I have ever seen. When I tried to put out a pile of it with water it exploded in all directions. Some of it hit me."
I frowned as I coated the wounds with Hyper Potion. Absol shuddered again as the medicated spray sterilized the area. "I think I know what it might have been, but I really hope I'm wrong."
"Why?"
"If I'm right, then it means this fire was no accident." I dabbed the excess Hyper Potion away with some gauze and loaded an auto-injector with Burn Heal. "This will keep the burns from getting worse for now, but we need to get you to a Pokémon Center soon or the nerve damage could become permanent." The injector hissed as I pressed it to each affected area. The swelling around the edges of the wounds immediately began to recede.
Absol stood up and carefully rearranged his mane to cover his wounds once more. "We can worry about that later; right now I need your help to search the glade for survivors. I haven't been able to find anyone, but that doesn't mean they aren't there."
I folded the last tent pole away and zipped my bag shut. "Let's go."
Click Here for Series Folder
In this chapter, Joe wakes up and discovers that much has changed...
I split this section off from the original Chapter 2 and renamed it, since the original was way too long.
Pokémon © Nintendo
Next Chapter: [link]
© 2011 - 2024 chammy3760
Comments6
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Wow.
I'm very happy to see a fanfic geared towards an older audience, and I can't wait to see what happens next
I'm very happy to see a fanfic geared towards an older audience, and I can't wait to see what happens next