The smooth white bark of the aspen trees shone in the mid-morning sun. To Poppy’s left the hills tumbled into the distant horizon, and to her right a steep ridge loomed. Lichen carpeted the rocks in hues of emerald and celadon and made them smooth underfoot. The clean, resinous scent of juniper tinged the air. As a leafeon, Poppy was more suited to forests than mountains, but she appreciated the latter’s quiet austerity. Here would be a good place to meditate, she thought, or to watch the clouds. If she hadn’t been on a rescue mission—
“Do you smell that?”
Poppy glanced at Lavender. The delcatty’s nose was upturned and wrinkled. Poppy raised her nose as well and sniffed, but only when a breeze came her way did she catch the rotten, acrid scent.
“Do you know what it is?” Poppy asked.
“No. It smells like a poison-type, but I’m not sure which it could be.”
Poppy sighed.
Lavender turned toward her. “You’re not looking forward to this, huh?”
“No.”
Lavender smiled a little. “Then I’ll take point.”
As they started up the ridge ahead, Lavender in the lead, the smell intensified, burning Poppy’s nostrils. Up ahead stood a thicket of aspen trees, and a purple fluid had been spattered against the earth below them to form a vague trail. The moss was black and withered where the fluid had touched it. Something hissed faintly up ahead, like a punctured hose.
Lavender lowered her body and tail until both were nearly touching the ground, then prowled forward. Poppy, though no hunter, copied Lavender’s gait as well as she could. Fortunately, it was spring, and the absence of leaf litter on the ground made it easy to walk quietly.
Something flashed in the thicket up ahead. Poppy thought it was a poison-spattered tree-trunk at first, but as she drew nearer, she realized it was moving, bobbing slightly in the air. The creature had a small pinkish tail, cyan eyes that glowed like neon panels, and an oversized egg-shaped head from which three metallic stingers protruded. It aimed these stingers downward and sprayed poison at something that Poppy couldn’t see.
Electricity crackled around Lavender’s mane, drawing the creature’s attention—but not quickly enough for it to avoid her thunder wave. The corners of its mouth turned down and its tail twitched, and then it dropped to the ground.
“Nicely done,” Poppy said. She scanned left and right and looked behind her but saw no other threats.
“Thank you.” Lavender glanced at Poppy with her head inclined. “You wouldn’t happen to know what species that thing is, do you?”
“No. I was hoping you’d know.”
Lavender shook her head. “But it does match the description in our client’s letter. If all three of us don’t know, that might mean it’s rare.”
“We should be careful about harming them, then.”
Lavender nodded. “Ecology and all that, right?”
“Yes. We don’t know how resilient the species is, so until we learn more, I’d err on the side of caution.”
“As you like.” Lavender stepped around the creature’s paralyzed body. “Now, let’s see what that thing was spraying at.” She led Poppy down the poison trail for a few meters, behind an aspen—and then she jumped, tail and ears stiffening.
“What’s wrong?” Poppy rushed to her partner’s side.
But Lavender quickly relaxed and gave Poppy a bashful smile. “Sorry—I just almost tripped over this guy, is all.” She gestured toward a tiny, rounded object on the ground—since it was covered in poison and frozen from fear, it took a couple seconds for Poppy to recognize it as an aron. “Looks like that was its target.”
“That thing was trying to poison a steel-type? Must not be very intelligent…” Poppy frowned. “Maybe the venom is corrosive or something. We should wash it off, just in case. There’s enough water around that we can refill after.” She removed her water pouch from the bag around her shoulder, unscrewed the cap, and poured water over the aron, who shut its eyes tightly. “Sorry, little buddy,” Poppy murmured. “It’s washing off good, though. I’ll just be a second.”
By the time Poppy’s pouch was empty, the aron was mostly restored to its original color, and its exoskeleton gleamed in the sunlight. Poppy turned toward Lavender. “Do we have anything to dry it with?”
Lavender checked her pouch. “Um, I don’t think so…”
“Hm.” Poppy looked back at the aron. “Well, it should be okay. Can’t be worse than poison.”
“Right—at least it won’t have to live with that stench on it.” Lavender wrinkled her nose. “I almost hope these things are rare, so we don’t have to keep smelling that.”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up. There’s bound to be some near our client—that’s what made him call for rescue, after all.”
Air rushed through Lavender’s nose—something between a snort and a sigh. “Ever the realist…” Then she held up her head and straightened her tail. “But I shouldn’t be complaining. Either way, we’ve got to do our duty.”
“On that note…” Poppy gestured with her nose toward the edge of the thicket, prompting Lavender to take the lead once more.
The trees grew more abundant as Poppy and Lavender walked, yet the birdsong had hushed. Poppy swiveled her ears as she walked and checked her surroundings regularly.
“Oh, what’s that?”
At her partner’s question, Poppy stepped to the side and peered past her. A lump of fur lay on the ground ahead of them, tawny and flecked with black. As Poppy approached, Lavender beside her, the animal gazed at her with dull yellow eyes but did not move its head. She was struck by how scrawny it was.
“A coyote?” Poppy inspected its flank and found a small puncture wound, ringed with purple. “It must have been poisoned.” She opened the pocket of her pouch where she stored her medicine.
“Poppy, what are you doing?”
“Getting some pecha for our canine friend here.”
“But Poppy, we don’t know if he’ll pull through, and we might need that for ourselves…”
“We might need it, but this guy definitely does. He’s breathing pretty well, so I’d give him good odds with treatment.” Poppy looked up at Lavender’s face and saw that the corner of her mouth was turned down. “Are you still worried? Think about it this way—we’ve split the pecha fifty-fifty, so this will be coming out of my half. So if I run out of my pecha and get poisoned, then you can just leave me to die.” She removed a vial from her pouch and uncorked it.
Lavender stomped toward Poppy, and her tail flicked testily. “That’s stupid, Poppy. You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“Then you shouldn’t—” Poppy began as she leaned over the coyote to administer the treatment—but then she jumped back, spilling drops of medicine.
Lavender’s head pulled back, and her ears twitched. “What’s wrong?”
Poppy shook her head as she backed up. She stabbed the cork hastily toward the mouth of the vial—missed, missed again—and then finally found her target. “S-sorry,” she said as she stuffed the medicine back into her pouch. “You shouldn’t look. He’s hurt more than I realized, on his belly. We’ll have to euthanize him after all.”
It was, technically, true.
Lavender’s head and ears sagged. “O-oh. Okay, that sucks. Since you already saw, did you want to…”
“Yeah, I’ll take care of it. Just stand back.”
Lavender complied.
For a moment Poppy imagined using her blast seed powder, but she knew that would be excessive. Instead she widened her stance and focused on the sun on her back, channeling it into a bright, burning point. When the energy grew too unstable to contain, she let go. Her vision went white for a few seconds as flesh and skin audibly sizzled, and she wrinkled her nose at the mess of grotesque scents. When it was finally over, all that remained of the coyote was a skeleton, smoke curling between its ribs. A streak of scorched lichen stretched for meters behind the bones.
Poppy took a deep breath, momentarily dizzied from her exertion. Solar beam was also an excessive choice for the job, but she didn’t regret using it. Given its fate, her target had deserved swift and painless obliteration, and she was glad nothing remained.
Poison stained the rocks and trees in many places now, and the air stung Poppy’s lungs. She almost wanted to cheer when a ferruginous hawk ambushed a parasite from the skies and tore through its head. Were predators able to eat them without poisoning themselves? Once she started looking, she noticed signs that others had at least tried—disembodied stingers and shards of exoskeleton.
But the corpses of other wildlife also grew more abundant as Poppy and Lavender climbed. A mountain goat was rotting not far away, ribs poking through its hide like oversized maggots, but the purple things’ favorite prey by far appeared to be caterpie. Ahead, their abundant corpses lay twisted like a haphazard maze. With a tang of bitterness, Poppy realized that she had begun to miss the city.
“Three o’clock!”
Poppy jolted at Lavender’s warning, then spun to face a purple creature just as it aimed its stinger at her. She struck out with a vine; the creature’s exoskeleton crinkled from the impact. It ricocheted off an aspen, dislodging leaves, and trailed indigo hemolymph as it rolled to a stop on the ground. After that, it lay still.
“Oh, another casualty,” Lavender said. “I’d feel guilty if they weren’t so aggressive. Did you have anything like that where you came from?”
“Sort of.” Poppy paused. She didn’t want to talk about it, but neither did she want to seem rude. “I think most of the times I’ve been attacked like that, it was from a mother bird—a decidueye or hawlucha—defending its young. If we’re close to their nest, then things could get bad fast, so let’s just hope they’re reckless predators.”
“But we must be getting close to our client. We should start looking for his cave—” Lavender’s head jerked up suddenly, and her eyes widened. “Look out!”
Poppy spun towards the streak of purple in the sky, an energy ball already building in her mouth. A moment later, she shot the attack toward it.
The energy ball hit, and the streak exploded into a spray of poison. Poppy shut her eyes and guarded her face with vines, but droplets spattered her head and neck, followed shortly by itching pain. “Lavender, where did that come from?” she cried as she opened her eyes. The leaves of trees nearby withered where the poison had touched them.
“Purple pokemon, five paws up!”
Poppy raised her head. Their assailant hovered in the clouds, too far away to attack. Its coloration was a familiar purple, but it was larger than the other creatures Poppy and Lavender had encountered, and its stingers protruded not from its head, but from a bulging, wasp-like abdomen. Its wings blurred into twin crescents as it aimed its three stingers at Poppy again.
“We’ve gotta find cover!” Poppy turned tail and leapt from rock to rock, using vines to keep her balance.
Another purple streak struck the ground in front of Poppy, spattering stinging droplets onto her back; she leapt over the puddle it left behind and then risked a glance back. Lavender was keeping up so far, but the terrain took a steep dive up ahead, and the delcatty didn’t have vines to help keep her grip.
Poppy and Lavender bounded down the mountainside at an almost suicidal speed, but even so their enemy’s shots were never far off the mark. The stinging sensation on Poppy’s back deepened into a burn, like undiluted bleach. The image of her own corpse flashed in her mind—her own corpse, eyeless, belly-up, flesh dissolved into patchwork. A sense of sickening helplessness accompanied this image; Poppy wanted to speed up even more, to make leaps faster than she could plan them, but that would have surely meant leaving Lavender behind. Poppy glanced back again—already her partner, despite her catlike agility, was lagging, slowing to keep her footing—
The moss beneath Poppy’s paws gave way, and she let out a gasp. She stretched her vines up over her head but found nothing to latch onto. After a short drop into darkness, she hit the ground, and though the impact stung her ankles, she was grateful not to have suffered worse.
The stones above scraped, and she raised her head, vines at the ready. But it was only Lavender, who dropped fearlessly down from the crack above and landed beside Poppy.
“Good thinking, Poppy—we can take cover here.” Lavender exhaled with a sort of twitchy shiver. Her face was flecked with purple. “Anyway, we’ve got to get this poison off. I still have—”
“Hold on, I can help!” came a hoarse, high-pitched voice.
Poppy turned; a shock of cold water hit her face and sent her stumbling back. She opened her mouth to protest, but the words came out as gurgles.
After a few uncomfortable seconds the water finally stopped, and Poppy squinted into the darkness to discern what had soaked them. She recognized the silhouette—the large snout and stout stature—as a totodile.
“Convenient,” Lavender remarked as she shook herself dry. “We found our client and got a bath out of it—startling though it was.”
Poppy had trouble making out the totodile’s face in the darkness, but she thought she saw him wince. “Sorry I didn’t warn you—but that poison is some nasty stuff. I just…” He scratched his head. “Well, it would be a shame if you two made it all the way down here just to die like that, wouldn’t it?” The sadness in the totodile’s voice defeated any humor the statement might have carried.
“True enough.” Lavender stepped toward the totodile. “My name is Lavender, and this is Poppy. You never did mention your name in your letter…”
“Brier.” He gave an awkward smile, or maybe it just looked awkward because of the shape of his snout. “And goodness, am I happy to see you two.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Poppy, “because we might be spending a while together, depending on how stubborn that… sniper-thing is. As much as I’d hate to leave at dusk, that may be our best option…”
“W-well, there’s a problem with that. Check out the entrance.”
“Hm?” Poppy examined the crack above them and realized that a faint, multicolored film shrouded it, like a soap bubble. When she reached out with a vine and pushed against this film, it rippled slightly but did not yield. She squinted at Brier. “You neglected to mention in your letter that this was a mystery dungeon.”
Brier’s hands shot up to his head. When he spoke, his words tumbled over one another. “Oh god, it is?! Shoot shoot shoot… Sorry, it’s just, no one’s mentioned them to me in years, so I didn’t think…” He smacked his head between his hands. “Damn it. Damn it. How screwed are we?”
“Relax,” Lavender said. “We’re trained for things like this. Just take a deep breath and calm down.”
Brier complied, straightening up. “Okay, s-sorry… What do we need to do?”
“To start with, why don’t you tell us what you know about this place? You’ve been here longer than we have. Any information at all would be useful.”
He thought for a moment. “I haven’t gone far from the entrance—it gets really dark once you’re more than a few paces in. There’s a place nearby where the runoff pools from up above. You can get away with drinking it if you let the poison settle out, and if you don’t have too much at once.”
“So, there’s an opening that’s not blocked off?”
“That’s right. That’s how I sent his— the carrier pigeon out. But the hole isn’t big enough for me.”
“I see. Still, that’s good to know. We might find one that’s larger, or we could make one with blast seed powder. Was there anything else you noticed?”
“A few wild pokemon. The dunsparce haven’t bothered me, but I had to fight off a few golbat. What worry me are the sableye; one sneaked up on me yesterday and cut me as I was turning around.” He showed his flank, and now that Poppy’s eyes had adjusted, she could see a scar ran along it. She noticed that he carried two pouches, and wondered whether, if she got close, she would catch the scent of a different pokemon on one of them.
“Fortunately, we have something that will help with that.” Lavender reached into her bag and fished out a small blue sphere. When she rubbed it, the sphere began to glow with watery blue light that just managed to illuminate the walls. “With this, we won’t have to worry about something sneaking up on us.”
Brier’s shoulders relaxed a little. “Yeah, that’s great. Maybe if we’d brought one of those…”
If Lavender noticed the strange way in which he trailed off, she didn’t acknowledge it. “Anything else you remember before we set off?”
“No. Aside from the entrance, I thought it was an ordinary cave.”
“Okay, thank you. Let’s go, then.” Lavender stepped past Brier. “Stay between Poppy and I. She’ll guard our rear.”
The three proceeded quietly. Every time they reached a junction, Poppy marked it with a bit of vine. Holes perforated the ceiling of the cave, but so far none were large enough to escape through. The air felt particularly chilly where the poison had touched Poppy earlier, and when she looked she saw bald patches where her fur had burned away.
The first few miles were no problem. Lavender’s swift made short work of the hostile golbat. She chased off a few sableye too with little more than a flash of her fangs. But despite the team’s speedy progress Poppy remained on edge, her eyes and tail flicking restlessly. When they reached a dead end, Lavender told Brier to wait a moment and led Poppy off to the side.
“Poppy, what’s up?” Her head was tilted slightly, and there was a comforting trill in her voice. “It’s not like you to hide your thoughts…”
Poppy snorted quietly. “You smell it, don’t you? There’s more of those purple things up above.”
“Yeah, but we should be okay. They’ll have a hard time attacking us from above. And who knows—maybe they can’t see in dark places?”
“I’m more worried about what this means for our escape. We can’t slip out now without fighting a swarm, and if we go all the way to the end of the dungeon, it might spit us out somewhere worse.” This wasn’t exactly what was weighing on her, but she figured it was enough to justify herself.
Lavender frowned, head still tilted. “True, but it can’t be helped. Try not to worry about it. I know you’re not strong against poison, so I’ll do my best to protect you.”
Poppy felt a twinge of guilt at Lavender’s consideration. She stepped forward and brushed her cheek against her partner’s. “I know you will. Thank you.”
The scent worsened as Poppy, Lavender, and Brier penetrated further into the dungeon. Poison oozed from the ceiling and pooled on the ground, stinging Poppy’s paws. Shadows flitted across the jagged walls. Poppy missed the sunlight, the greenery, and the vast open sky; when she saw light seeping from around the next corner, she prayed it was an exit.
But it was only another corridor, identical to all the others except for a lumpy purple mass on the ground. For a moment Poppy thought it was just another puddle of poison, or maybe a cluster of rocks that had been coated in the stuff, but something stirred underneath—matted red and yellow fur, the colors washed out. Ears that lay flat on the ground like marigold petals battered by rain. A pair of glassy eyes that gazed at nothing, the fur around them burned away and replaced with bulging scar tissue.
Help, came the delphox’s psychic transmission. I can’t…
Poppy shouldered her way past Lavender without looking at her, raised a vine, and slammed it into the delphox’s temple. The psychic transmission stopped. Blood oozed from the delphox’s head and trickled, then streamed down its brow. The lumps along its abdomen wriggled aimlessly, then gradually stopped.
Poppy stood with her teeth bared, and her shallow breaths reverberated along the walls of the corridor. The delphox’s blood gradually pooled on the ground.
“Poppy…” Lavender’s voice wavered like a sick pokemon stumbling just before it fainted. “What the hell—”
“I’ve told you about parasitic wasps before, Lavender. Do you remember? This is the same thing. The purple things… They’re larvae. Those pokemon paralyzed her and injected her with their young. They chewed their way out from inside of her. I don’t know how she wound up in here, but…”
Poppy inhaled and extended her vines once more. She struck the delphox again and again, mashing blood and hemolymph into a dark, must-like paste. A putrid scent filled the air and brought tears to her eyes; despite this, she did not stop until the last larva had been destroyed.
Lavender had turned herself to block Brier’s view of the carnage. Poppy wondered if she was also glad for the excuse to look away, but she put that thought aside. “That delphox is the worst we’ve encountered so far, so there was no way not to notice. Let’s hope we’re not unlucky again.”
“Poppy, if you already knew, you could have told me…”
“I was going to later. Right now we just need to get back home.”
Poppy walked down the corridor with leaden paws, hugging the wall farthest from the mess she had made. Brier and Lavender followed, but Poppy did not look back at them. As the scent of blood faded, her footsteps slowed, until she found herself standing motionless in the middle of the corridor. She heard the light scrape of Lavender’s claws behind her, and then the delcatty brushed against her shoulder. Poppy didn’t turn her head, but she closed her eyes and leaned into the touch. For a moment, Lavender’s scent overpowered the noxiousness in the air.
“Brier,” Lavender murmured. “Are you holding up?”
Brier stepped wordlessly toward Lavender, and she curled her tail around him, bringing him closer. For some time the three pokemon huddled together in mournful silence.
The walk seemed to take hours, but the light coming in through the cracks indicated that the sun was still up when they reached the final cavern. A turbulent distortion marked the end of the dungeon. It was like peering through shallow rapids.
Lavender picked up her pace when she saw the exit, but then her ears twitched, and she halted. “Poppy, do you hear that?”
The sound was dry and crinkling, and came from their right. Lavender followed it to a small recess in the wall and passed out of sight. A moment later, Poppy heard her gasp. “Oh my gosh, Poppy. You’ve got to see this.”
The recess led into a large clearing, open to the sky. At its center towered a massive dome, composed of papery layers like black chanterelle mushrooms. The layers oozed with purple creatures crawling in and out and over one another, spilling out over the decomposing caterpie on the ground. Some of Poppy and Lavender’s most grueling expeditions had at least ended with scenic views—scintillating, snow covered mountaintops; verdant gullies buzzing with dragonflies; cliffsides fiery with autumn leaves… That this one should culminate in such a sickening sight felt like a slap in the face.
“Well, I’ve seen it,” Poppy said bitterly. “And now I wish I hadn’t.” She turned away, and Lavender followed—but then Brier tugged on Lavender’s pouch. “Wait,” he said to her, his voice urgent, “you said you have explosives, right?”
“Yeah, but we don’t need them now. The exit is right there.”
Brier scowled and shook his head like a wolf tearing flesh off its prey. “I don’t mean for escaping. We should blow them up.”
“Blow them up?” Lavender inclined her head and squinted slightly. “Why do you suggest that?”
Brier winced as though offended by the question. “Why? You saw what they did. They’re monsters. Are you alright with letting them torture pokemon like that?”
“No… But nature is full of things like that, isn’t it, Poppy?”
Poppy sighed deeply. “Parasitism? Suffering? They’re not exactly rare, but I would be a different pokemon if I thought those things defined our world. This is more extreme than anything I’ve witnessed.”
“Oh. Do you think they’re invasive, then?”
Yes, Poppy was tempted to lie. But she recalled the caterpie. She knew what they could do in large numbers; on her home continent, they had stripped whole forests bare. Trees could survive a year of that, maybe two. Any longer would wreak havoc on the ecosystem. The parasites might be invasive, or they might be preventing vastly more suffering than Poppy had seen today. So, grimacing, she shook her head. “If I were more familiar with this continent—this ecosystem—then I’m sure it would be obvious. For the time being, we need to avoid acting rashly.”
“We don’t have that kind of time,” Brier said. “This might be our only chance to hit them back.”
“I don’t care about ‘hitting them back’,” Poppy said, her tone hardening. “We need to act responsibly.”
“And it’s responsible to turn a blind eye? You’re rescuers—you’re supposed to save pokemon from monsters like this! That delphox back there—how would you have felt if that had been your friend, huh?” He gestured toward Lavender.
Poppy’s face twitched. She had contemplated Lavender’s death before—mortal risk was inherent in rescue work, after all—but to picture her lying there for minutes and hours and days on end while the larvae hatched and squirmed and chewed…
“Poppy?”
Lavender’s voice almost made her jump. She turned swiftly back toward Brier. “You feel that strongly about it? Then tell me, how much is that hive’s destruction worth to you?”
It took a moment for Poppy’s words to register, and when they did, Brier’s face contorted like he’d swallowed a mouthful of poison. “Is this a joke? You want to make this about money?”
“If destroying the hive harms the ecosystem, we can use money to offset that. Conserve land. Restore habitat. It’s the only way I can go along with it.”
“Then how much do you want?”
“Six thousand.”
“Six. Thousand.”
“Remember, it has to account for the cost of the blast seed powder too.”
Brier crossed his arms and sneered, flashing his teeth. “And your own greed, I’m sure.”
Poppy’s tail twitched in irritation, but her face remained flat. “Don’t think of it like the money is going to me; I’ll spend it on conservation, like I said. Consider it a charitable donation.”
Lavender interjected. “Do you really think that will be enough to make up for it, if this turns out to be a mistake?”
“Maybe not. It’s a risk. If you’re not on board, then I won’t do it.”
Breath whooshed through Lavender’s nose as she inhaled. She closed her eyes but didn’t sport a scrunched expression like she usually did when deep in thought. Her face seemed meditative, Poppy thought.
“I want to make the world safe for travelers and for the settlers who come after us,” Lavender said at length, “and I believe this will help. Regarding the negative repercussions, I trust your judgement.” She nosed through her pouch and extracted a small metal box. She unlatched it to reveal a pair of glass vials filled with yellow powder.
Poppy grabbed the vials with a vine, then combined them with two more from her own pouch. “Well, Brier? Make up your mind before I think better of this.”
He tossed his head. “Fine. I’ll give you the money when we get back.” He mumbled something under his breath—likely an obscenity—but Poppy didn’t care.
“Good.” Poppy turned toward the hole in the wall. Then she stuck her vine outside, curled it up above her, and threw.
Maybe this would eliminate this subpopulation, and maybe it wouldn’t; either way, it would cause a lot of deaths. But, Poppy thought as she watched the vials sail through the air, it didn’t feel like killing. It felt like picking up trash in a forest, or cleaning up a polluted stream.
As the explosion hit, Poppy closed her eyes. Warmth washed over her like the sun breaking through clouds, and the light beneath her eyelids was a bright, pure white.