Chapter 9: Inside the Beast

Slightly panicking, I whistled my forty-eight remaining red pikmin and began sprinting towards the pool. Shortly after, I reached it and looked around for Olimar. I heard no splashing and saw no sign of him or of his pikmin. I crept around the edge of the pool and swarmed all but three of my pikmin around the spring. The remaining three I "pressed X" and abandoned them.

While the pikmin carried the spring towards the rocket, I took several deep breaths to calm myself, still slightly worried about a sudden Beady attack, and jumped into the water. The water was just shallow enough for me to touch the bottom while my eyes stayed above the surface. Cautiously, I walked through the water towards the shadow of the monolith known as the sunken bottle. Upon reaching it, I looked around at all angles, but saw no sign of anything in the games: the dead bodies of the frogs, the treasure, or Olimar's leftover pikmin.

"Where on..." I paused, trying to recall the word Olimar had used earlier. "Where the Murtiv is Olimar?" I assumed Murtiv was a synonym for our Hell, and went along with it.

I scouted an imaginary circumference around the bottle, but saw absolutely nothing besides the bottle and water. I gave up and sulked towards a random direction. After taking few steps, I felt a rumbling beneath me. Looking down, I saw a small cyclone appear in the water, its bottom touching a growing hole in the ground. I jumped backwards just as the hole expanded a vast amount, and then disappeared just as quickly.

Breathing heavily, I got to my feet and observed the ground from a distance. There were no cracks or any signs of movement of the earth, but I was not hallucinating. I pondered this for a bit. Everything that was supposed to be here was gone. Olimar was also gone, along with all of our blue pikmin. This hole randomly appears as soon as I step within the vicinity.

Sighing, though slightly excited, I realized what I had to do. I walked towards where the hole had appeared before and watched as it repeated the process. A small hole, just large enough to get your attention, appears to distract you. Then, some sort of mouth in the ground opens up and swallows you. This is what happened to me, though it surprised me very little.

I was falling down a slide, into what I assumed was a monster's throat. This hadn't happened in the games, but I had no idea I was going to find out why.

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I landed on pink ground just soft enough not to injure me, despite falling many times my height. I looked around, taking note of the pink, slimy walls and equally slimy ceiling. There was only one exit from this "room" aside from the ceiling: a long, red hallway that was throbbing very slightly.

I picked myself up and muttered a Wizard of Oz joke, and then walked down the throbbing hallway. There was only one other exit from this as well, so I followed down it and continued down the boring, one-way path through this monster's body. Only when I reached the end did I see something slightly interesting. Olimar was sitting in the middle of the room surrounded by forty five pikmin, three dead wollywog bodies, and the ship part that he had been searching for in the first place.

He looked at me as I came in the room and slyly smiled. "Welcome, care to take a seat?"

"Not funny," I replied, and he frowned. "Do you know any way out?"

"Well, originally I came here with all fifty pikmin," He pointed at a spot in the floor. "So when I reached this room, I found this exit. Five of my pikmin went before me, and fell into this black abyss."

"Abyss?" I repeated, stepping towards it.

"Be careful," he warned, getting to his feet. "It opens up when you're close enough."

Taking his warning in mind, I crept closer to it. As I was literally stepping at the edge of the spot, it suddenly opened beneath me. I only had a fraction of a second to see that Olimar was indeed correct about the abyss before it almost sucked me in. Olimar must have known that I would get too close, for he grabbed my suit and threw me back into the room. The hole closed as soon as Olimar stepped away from it.

We were both panting from the adrenaline rush. I patted him on the back, gasping my thanks, while looking around the room. There were no noticeable exits to speak of.

"So now what do we do?" I asked.

He shook his head. "I'm afraid we're stuck. We must be in this beast's stomach, so soon its digestive juices will burn us alive. If we're lucky, we'll die before we feel too much pain." He said this with acceptance, but I was close to hyperventilating.

"W-we can't die! Not here!" I shouted. Poor Olimar couldn't drown out my voice with his ears. "Not today! Not on day five! Maybe against the final boss, but not here!"

"Final boss?" He repeated. I winced, and looked away, and winced again. I swore to myself as he stepped closer to me. "What do you mean, 'final boss'? As in, a game?"

"Absolutely not!" I shouted unconvincingly. "A game? Ha-ha! I laugh at your absurd suggestion!"

"Jason..."

"This is life! This is no game!"

"Jason, please."

"We must press onward, if we are to survive this... life, and not game!"

"Jason, enough."

"But you don't-"

"Shut up."

He wasn't loud. He didn't yell. But it was a command, so I obeyed. I apologized and cursed myself for my fit of hysteria. I glanced at him and saw his head was turned away from me, and I hoped that he didn't doubt anything, though I had given him no reason not to. There was nothing I could say to convince him otherwise. My panic might be enough to excuse the outburst, but I doubted it.

We sat in silence for several minutes, and I wondered what the pikmin were doing above. I didn't know what time it was, but I hoped we'd have enough time to get back to the rocket before any nocturnal creatures came. If we came back out at all.

The silence was broken by nobody in this room, but by the wind. There was a sudden push of wind, so strong that it began sucking pikmin into the air and out of the room. Very soon it became so strong that Olimar and I, after struggling to hold onto folds in the floor, were sucked out as well. We hit the soft walls as we bounced down the hallway, having no control over our direction and only hoping we wouldn't hit anything sharp. Very soon we reached the first room possible and were sucked up through the hole in the ceiling and out of the beast's mouth.

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We landed in a pile of brown gunk, but had little time to worry about it. The beast that had sucked us out was heading towards us, and we had to dig our way out of the cohesive mess. We managed to dig our way out and threw ourselves out of the way in time for the beast to storm through the slop and continue on its way.

The beast, amazingly, was a miniature (technically, as it towered over us more than the giant Long Legs creatures) elephant. It did not have eats, it had no tail, it was vastly thinner and its head was smaller, but the shape was similar to an elephant. It was grey and its skin looked rough, it had four pairs of legs with round hooves, it had a large nose with one nostril, technically making it a trunk with a hole in it, larger than Olimar and I combined. It had two sharp tusks that curved in such a way that if it ducked its head down, they would slice through us. It also had a large mouth that covered half of its face filled with sharp teeth.

It had dumped us into a large, upside-down bowl. The bole seemed to be able to fit ten of the elephants and was three elephants high. The high ceiling had stalactites covering the majority of it, with the only uncovered section being a large hole that was the only light in the room. The bowl was underground, so the walls, floor, and ceiling were all shades of brown and black. The ground was rocky, though some parts were smeared with distinguishable feces. There were small boulders scattered around, though many had been smashed into pieces.

It trampled by at an amazing speed, enough so that it came very close to crashing into the wall. Instead, it changed direction, only slightly slowing down, and continued in a wide arc that would inevitably aim for us again. I called several scattered pikmin to me while Olimar did the same, and we began sprinting away. The elephant came at us again, and we crazily waited until the last moment before diving away again.

Only one of our pikmin had been killed by the elephant. I saw it being crushed by one of the elephants giant hooves, with the elephant being completely oblivious. Glancing at the elephant making another wide arc towards us, we gathered the remaining pikmin and I gave all of them to Olimar.

"We need a plan!" I shouted.

"I'm trying to think of one." He replied. "His obvious flaw is his speed. If we can use it to our advantage, then we can kill it."

"The stalagmites?" I offered.

"They're stalactites, but they could play a key role." He answered.

The elephant had reached us by this time, so we dove aside. It yelled exactly like an elephant in frustration and arced once more. Olimar used this time to pull me to him and whispered, "Get into the corner, and hurry."

I nodded and we both ran to the nearest corner. The elephant saw us running and turned to follow us, continuing its drawn-out yell. The elephant's footsteps grew nearer and I couldn't dare look behind. We were so close to the corner and the elephant seemed to be upon us, its footsteps deafening. We crashed into the corner at the same time as the elephant. The elephant shrieked in pain and a few stalactites fell from the ceiling. It hadn't been damaged by the crash into the wall, but the single stalactite that struck its head dropped its health down around an eighth.

Olimar took this time to throw several pikmin onto the elephant's ducked head. They began hitting it, surprisingly bringing its health down. The elephant regained itself, yelled, and shook its head, throwing the pikmin away. Its health was in the yellow now, down just under half. The plan had worked, and Olimar and I knew what to do.

The elephant slowly backed away, shaking its head repeatedly to remove any clinging pikmin, before turning around and gaining speed. Olimar and I gathered all of the pikmin and waited for the elephant to come at us again. Amazingly, apparently forgetting any pain from before, it repeated what it had done before. It crashed into the wall and stalactites fell down, this time three hitting it and dropping its health down a large amount. Olimar threw as many pikmin onto it, and thus its health dropped to zero.

The spectacular creature gave a final yell before collapsing onto its left side. As it yelled, the Anti-Dioxin Filter flew out of its trunk and landed several feet away. As it fell, the resulting shockwave split open a boulder that was coincidently beneath the hole in the ground. Water spewed from the triangle-shaped rock, and I remembered from the sequel, and not the original, that geysers were used in caves to transport the player back to the surface.

"What is that?" He asked, pointing at the geyser.

"Would you call it a geyser?" I replied, continuing the facade even though Olimar probably didn't have any reason to believe me.

He nodded and got out the notebook from earlier and began documenting everything that had recently happened. I studied the elephant, recalling with disgust that we had been in the creature's stomach just a few minutes earlier. What I didn't understand, though, was that hole that led to the abyss. Slightly afraid, I walked to the creature's backside and poked it. The hole from earlier opened up and I gagged.

"What are you going to call this thing?" I asked.

"I am not too sure. This looks nothing like anything on Hocotate." Olimar replied.

"How about 'Elephant'." I offered

"Does it stand for anything special?" I shook my head in reply and he nodded. "Then Elephant it is."

While he continued documenting, I gathered up the pikmin a third time and made them swarm the ship part. They carried it to the geyser and actually jumped into the stream. They then carried it out of the hole and to the surface.

Olimar watched them do this with his mouth open. Even though we had just been attacked by an elephant, he continued to be surprised. He walked up to me and muttered, "How did they know to do that?" I shrugged and looked back at the elephant. There I saw a lone pikmin that I had forgotten trying to lift the dead creature. I looked above the body and saw the numbers 1/3000.

"Three thousand pikmin needed to lift this thing." I gasped. "That's not even possible!"

"It's a shame, though. The creature would creature an awfully large amount of pikmin." Olimar noted.

I whistled the pikmin and we headed towards the geyser when I noticed something out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head to the left and saw a giant snake's head staring out from the wall. The head seemed to be three times our size, with a large slits for eyes and a large mouth with a red forked tongue that appeared and disappeared in an instant. I opened my mouth to scream, but the snake hissed and ducked its head back into the wall before I had a chance to. The whole thing lasted little over two seconds, but I was frozen.

Olimar ran back to me and asked me what was going on. I slowly recovered and told him and he shook his head. "A snake? I've never heard of it. Where are you getting these names?"

"It was a giant snake!" I yelled, yet again close to hysteria. "Can we just get out of here? Please?"

He nodded, glancing at where the snake had been. I saw that he too became more nervous. We wasted no time in jumping into the geyser and rocketing up to the surface.