title: the fair folk
summary: they are beautiful, they are enchanting and they are ethereal, but remember - fairies are not kind.
an1: I was considering aromatisse for clefable's role but c'mon light gengar.
an2: welcome to tf inc., where we strive to give you fluffy pink nightmares.
an3: the jigglypuff line is actually a lot more related to water than I thought they'd be - habitats and dex entries and all.
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Part Three
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banshee
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"Mt. Moon, huh?" the hiker asks the employee of the small convenience store at the foot of Kanto's famous mountain. She's a pretty thing, with brown hair curled and impish blue eyes under thick lashes. The first button of her shirt is open, and the skin of her smooth, long neck is cream coloured.
She smiles back, flirtingly. "Mt. Moon," she says agreeably, handing him his purchases and brushing her thin fingers against the back of his hands lightly. He grins at the interested, beckoning look in her baby blues. "It's a good day to hike through it."
He might say more, but a wheeze behind him stops whatever words that were about to come out. "Ha! A good day?"
The pretty girl's face turns sour, and he turns to see a hag. "A good day, she says," the old woman grumbles. "When the banshees have been howling and death 'bout to come any minute!"
"Oh, grandma," the girl says, embarrassment clear and pink on her cheekbones. She walks around the counter and takes her relative by her arm gently while giving him a good look at her curvy, supple body. Modestly sheathed in a button-up shirt and knee length skirt, but the clothes cling to her figure and his imagination can fill in the rest. "They're just clefairy singing or the local kids making some trouble. Nothing harmful about that."
The old woman, however, is not one to be deterred. She raises one knobbly finger in his face, and he nearly goes cross-eyed.
"If yer not a fool, boy," she says, and spits slightly. "Y'ell stay away from the mountains today. When clefable cry you hide."
The girl pushes her to the back of the store. "Sorry," she says, shame making her eyes downcast. Flirting is over, it seems.
"No problem," he says, ending it amicably and allowing future flirtations in case he decides to return to the area. He leaves the store, armed with more water and snacks in his backpack. He looks at the great Mt. Moon ahead of him, smiles, and begins to walk. His plan is to start at the east of Mt. Moon, go through a few of its famous tunnels, stay for a few hours or a night on the summit, depending on how fast he can manage to get there, and then exit through the west before heading to Pewter. It should take four or five days, six at the most. Hopefully he'll catch sight of an elusive clefairy.
He climbs for a few hours, clinging to rocks and admiring the view since there isn't much foliage. Occasionally the rocks he walks on turn out to be geodude, but his weepinbell takes care of those easily with a quick mega drain.
He nearly reaches the entrance to the famous caves when he sees it, a pink creature. For a minute he thinks it's a clefairy, and reaches for a camera in excitement. The creatures are rare, and Mt. Moon is famous for the little fairies shaped like pink stars.
He raises the camera, and the fairy turns to him. The shape is wrong, he realizes even as he takes a picture and captures its image. Not quite a star – too long at its center.
It's a clefable.
The old woman's warning makes him flinch, but he shakes off the nervous feeling. It's just folktales that say the evolved forms of clefairy lose their playfulness and turn their eyes to signs of death. Their cries don't bring or forewarn of death, and their shadows don't turn into devils that suck the soul out of a fellow's body. They're not even psychic, for Birds' sakes.
He nods at the clefable and is about to walk towards the cave's entrance – he sees it now – when the clefable opens its mouth and screams. Tears run down its dull, almost broken eyes, and its mouth is open to unleash a wail that makes his heart speed up in fear. He almost quakes from terror as it continues to cry in an unholy way, staring at him as it claps its small hands together.
He soon quakes for real when out of the mountains comes a rush of graveller, rolling and bouncing and running. Cursing, he tries to reach shelter, but there is none. Nothing between him and the herd of graveller, and only a steep hill behind him.
He turns and tries to run for it anyways. If he rushes, maybe he can stay ahead. Graveller are walking boulders, and they're not known for their speed. If he can make it ahead, and reach the stream that runs at the base of the mountain, he can reach safety.
He begins running down, and his entire body is filled with adrenaline urging him to run run run because behind him there is danger, there is death. He steps on a rock, and then is flung off as the irritated geodude twists its body. He falls to the ground, ankle throbbing in the pain of a sprain, and then tries to scramble out of the way of the rolling graveller herd.
He doesn't make it, and his screams are abruptly cut off as the living boulders roll over him. The screams are replaced with snaps of breaking bones and crunches of equipment in his backpack. Then, there remains very little to be broken, and soon the last graveller rolls away.
The clefable looks down, still crying, and then it wanders back into Mt. Moon where it will wait for the next death it must forewarn.
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siren
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Route 115 is a route with history. The ancient Draconids at Meteor Falls once broke through the wild with their fierce dragons and cleared the path so they could travel to other parts of Hoenn.
Now, a Draconid woman with olive skin and black hair warns him. "You should seal your ears," she warns him, voice slightly warmed by an accent. In her hand she holds the white feathers of swablu towards him.
He frowns. "I'm good," he says politely. He has no patience for old folklores and wives' tales.
She still continues to hold out the fluff at him, shaking her fistful of the white stuff when he doesn't take it. Just to appease her, he takes it and half-heartedly places it in his ears.
The Draconid woman huffs. "I hope the gods will watch over you," she says, and lets him leave.
"Freaks," he mutters. The Draconids are dying out, and in his opinion, not at a fast enough rate.
He leaves the caves where the waters flecked with starlight falls and walks by the beach, enjoying the fresh breath of air tinged with salt. A jigglypuff comes bouncing his way, curiosity having driven it out from the grass it hid in. He smiles at the round, pink creature, who blinks up with innocent eyes at him.
The jigglypuff smiles back, and then opens its mouth to begin a song. There are no words, no clever rhymes or romantic ballads, just sounds resembling a human's wordless cries, but the meaningless sounds are so melodious, so beautiful that it moves him in a part of his heart that makes his entire body stop to listen.
His eyes grow heavy as he stands, just as the rest of his body seems to droop. Surely, just stopping to take a small break wouldn't be so bad? The sea's waves crashing onto the beach is a rhythm that his heart echoes, and the melodies waxed by the small fairy soothe him so. It's a lullaby from his childhood days, when his mother would hold him near and whisper songs to lull him to sleep.
Eyes half closed, he lies down on the sand warmed by the sun. Just for a moment, he could take a break.
Through the crack open in his eyes he watches the jigglypuff approach him, still singing its song. When he doesn't move, it wiggles in satisfaction before waving at something out of sight.
Still lying unmoving, he watches another pink creature approach, this one bigger than the jigglypuff. It has a more oval body, with longer ears and a white stomach.
A wigglytuff.
The jigglypuff sings as the wigglytuff approaches. The larger pink fairy sniffs him carefully, and nods in some sort of approval. It opens its mouth, and the insides of the pink, harmless-looking fairy have teeth long and sharp like knives.
There is something wrong about this scenery, but it's like a dream. He can't move, can't panic at this as the wigglytuff comes closer, mouth still sharp like the cavern of death from the darkest of his nightmares. The song washes over him and dulls him to the world.
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