It is updated! I am sincerly sorry for such the long wait, I know you all want to kill me, but then it will be an even longer update so think about that.

Pain…numbing my body everywhere. My head felt heavy, I felt like I was drowning. Something then began to crawl its way up my throat. I choked and started to cough. I continued to cough until the sludgy stuff had spilled out over my face. I slowly opened my eyes as my arm reached up and wiped the fluid off of me.

I tried to sit up and immediately fell back to the ground in pain. Glancing at my left side I saw a big tear in the skin creating a big hole. Looking at it made me feel more nauseated and lying down I could feel another wound on my back.

Where the dammed stick had gone through…

I closed my eyes again and a wave of images blinked into my head.

The yellow budded pikmin lying motionless on the ground.

The white pikmin being brutally beaten by a couple of cyans.

They are all dead…

A red pikmin's body exploding vividly as it got hit by a bomb rock.

What can you do?

The voice was back.

Nothing…

I am insane.

No, you are…

"He's awake everybody, look!"

Reopening my eyes I saw a red pikmin jogging towards me. I felt a smile condensate on to my face. They were still alive, I was alive.

Your friend is dead…

"Can you stand up?" The red pikmin was right over me and looking down upon my broken body.

"…Don't know…"

"Stay down then, can I get you some nectar?"

"I'm…fine"

"Don't be stubborn now; I'll get you some now"

Too tired to turn my head I lazily watched from the corner of my eye. I saw the red pikmin judging which chunk of nectar was softest, two blues were helping him.

He returned and shoved the piece of nectar into my mouth. "Chew," was all that he had to say.

The nectar was as good as it had always been. The more I chewed the weaker the pain and the stress got. Eventually I swallowed and then I fell back to sleep.

Another blur of visions. Of death, pain and suffering. They scarred my mind and I felt the pain too. There was no stopping it.

The world is just a shade a grey

It's in my head I don't care

Just because it's in your head doesn't mean it isn't real

I don't care!

Really?

And then the yellow budded pikmin appeared in front of me. His chest was torn open and worms were crawling out…

I was awake in an instant. The realization was sudden and it glowed in my eyes. The yellow budded pikmin, he had been with me. That means he might be around here.

He's dead

No…

It was night time and I tried to stand. That was simply impossible though and I fell down again.

He's dead

"No!"

Dead like everyone else will be

"Never…"

"He's dead, listen to yourself!"

I looked up; the red pikmin was standing over me. A grim look was on his face.

"What did you say?" I choked out.

"You were blabbering out loud. The budded pikmin, the yellow, he is dead."

I swallowed hard and suddenly I found it hard to look at the red pikmin. "Where is he?" I managed to breath after a while.

"What do you mean?"

"The body! Where is his body?" I was now fully alert and awake, my body filled with some of the strongest emotions I could experience.

"Are you sure you're strong enough?" The red asked.

"Yes damnit! I survived all this, I think I can make it!" I was swaying between anger and sorrow, yet I did not seem to know.

"It's…over there. Listen its night, can we not wait until morning?" The red pikmin said in a nervous voice.

"No, lead me to it," I replied while trying to get on my feet. This time it was simple.

Clouds covered the sky so there were no gems to light the way. The path was dark and the way ahead lay unseen. The red pikmin was easy to spot against the deep blues produced by the night sky. I slowly limped behind him, the snow soothing my raw legs.

The yellow pikmin's body had been buried on a small mound. The red pikmin waited at the base while I climbed up. At the top the budded pikmin's stem poked out of the snow. It was not straight up in the air but lay limply on the ground, shriveling up ever so slowly. It had just given up, not like its owner, the yellow pikmin, who had kept with me until the very end.

The more I stood there, the more memories that came floating in. And slowly those memories seemed to sag on me as I felt my body go limp. Before I crumpled to the ground I managed to turn away, everything now seemed fuzzy and unfocused. My vision was laced with haunting things.

The red pikmin approached me, his face bearing a look of indifference: "You done?"

"Yes," I breathed out.

The red pikmin gave me a puzzled look, "You seem really…"

"Of course I am, there's a dead pikmin right there!" I snapped back.

The red cocked an eye, "Yes and there are three other pikmin buried nearby, I've had my remorse but I've gotten over it."

"This is…different."

"How so? Pikmin die every day, and we'll continue too!" The red said. "The world is full of predators, stop imagining it as the perfect place. It hardly ever will be."

"That's our problem don't you see! We need stop treating ourselves as a group! We need to be seen as individuals, individuals of our own style and personality."

Another funny look from the red pikmin: "How long have you been thinking about that?"

"Since this whole thing has begun."

"Funny how one experience can change someone."

"You don't seem to have changed," I remarked.

"I have," the red replied. "Besides you have never talked to me before."

That was true, but yet this red pikmin did not seem bugged at all about…everything.

"We should head back," the red said. "Predators could be anywhere."

"Okay, let's go," I said. When we left the area, I didn't take a single glance back towards the grave…

Morning came brutally fast and exhaustion had swept over me again. I had a miraculously dreamless sleep, not one full of death, and I did not want to wake up.

I cracked open an eyelid and glanced around. Other pikmin were doing various tasks and seemed busy. Watching them work made me even more tired, so I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was still in "recovery" and fell back asleep.

And I dreamt…of my first memory, ever.

I am alive, this is me.

It was warm. It was dark. It was home. Yet where was I?

My body felt ripe and afresh, I wanted to move and jump but I couldn't. I was stuck in this…dirt.

Yet, my body loved it. It absorbed energy from the dirt; it kept my body in this state. It seemed satisfied down here. If my body was satisfied, then I guess I should be too…

There was one part though that was not covered in dirt. It was above me, not in the warm moist darkness, but in a cool, open place.

A light breeze whiffed through this open area and gently tickled my upper appendage. This sparked a new thought in me, a yearning to get up there and reach the open myself. To taste it, to bathe in it, to see what could be seen up there. But I could not budge an inch, I was hopelessly trapped.

My wish was granted a few moments later though. Something grabbed on to my upper appendage and began pulling it. I felt my body get released from this prison, and then with a pop! I was into the open!

All my senses became active and I squeaked with pleasure, it was so vast. So many things to see everywhere, there was no nothing, just everything. My body wanted to do so many things at once and I had to restrain myself. My body itself seemed perfect; a cool beautiful colour and it fit into my surroundings perfectly making me feel at home.

"Welcome."

Another one of my senses picked this voice up and there was another wave of joy as the sound reverberated in my head. I turned around and saw something that looked just like me. Or maybe I should say "someone".

My identical partner looked at me: "Do you know how to speak?"

It came out as a soft squeak, surprising me the most: "I…guess."

He smiled and then said, "Welcome fellow pikmin, to your new life!"

"Pikmin? That's what I am?"

"That is what we all our!" He pointed all over the clearing and indeed there were other "pikmin" around. Some were the same colour as the two of us; others were either one of two different colours. I wondered if we all got along. That's when I noticed someone funny, someone that didn't seem as organic as the rest of us. My senses gave a surge of suspicion.

"Who's that," I asked, pointing at this strange being.

"Who's that?" The pikmin laughed. "Your instincts should be telling you that he is our- that he is your leader."

"Instincts?"

"Things that our body just knows, and has known since the beginning. Like what's dangerous and who's the enemy…"

"This leader thing. Is he someone in command?"

"Definitely"

"Okay…"

And he began to explain the things pikmin do, and what we have always done.

It was later on in the day when I began to get bored. It had been tiring repeats of following the whistle, being thrown and picking up heavy stuff that we carried back to base.

While bringing back a dead creature to our "onion" with five other pikmin I asked some more questions.

"Is there ever a chance," I squeaked. "That we'll get to do some exploring on our own?"

A red pikmin groaned, "Oh no it's a seedling…"

A yellow pikmin snapped at him, "Shut up, you're only four days old." He turned to me: "What was your question again?"

"Do we ever get to explore independently? You know, not following the leader?"

"We aren't capable of doing such things," the yellow pikmin said. "We would die by ourselves. We need to rely on the leader, and that is how it has been forever."

Another yellow pikmin, this one with a bud, decided to say something. "Forever, is a long time. There must have been a day when we did not have a leader."

The other yellow pikmin: "That would have been harsh times for us…"

"Not necessarily," said the yellow budded pikmin. 'We have everything we need to take care of ourselves; the leader gives us more than we need."

"The leader gives us life!"

The yellow budded pikmin ignored him. "We have grown lazy. We have leeched off of the leader and now we do not have a sense of purpose anymore. Some day we will go back to the harsh times and we will not be prepared…"

"What makes you think that?"

"The leader won't need us forever. He will dispose of us one day like he has with all the creatures we have killed."

No one had anything else to say, but there was an electrical tension strong in the air. The yellow pikmin gave me a sly smile…

I awoke again unwillingly. Tiredly I decided I had enough sleep and struggled to get to my feet. I wasn't hungry so I didn't go immediately to the nectar pile, but I did want to talk and get filled in on our next action and what had happened.

The surroundings were still the same, the sky wasn't clear though. The trees towering above cast great shadows upon the ground. The snow still remained a giant white tarp over the landscape.

White

It began to trickle in slowly; a horrifying revelation that caused my motives to be turned inside out.

I realized that I needed to talk. Now.

"It is not going to work," A blue pikmin said simply. All the pikmin were gathered around me, their gazes full of doubt, uncertainty and fear.

"Why not?" I said. "We cannot wait here for the rest of our lives! Besides, sooner or later the cyans will come back for us!"

"We're going to attack them, just to rescue one pikmin?"

There it was again, not treating ourselves as individuals. I wanted to give a cold remark back to the pikmin but I needed to convince them. That was my priority. "Not to rescue the white pikmin. But listen, those cyans probably have a lot of resources with them, if we could defeat them we could take those resources for ourselves!"

"Yes, but look how many of us there are. Compared to how many of them."

"Who said we had to defeat the cyans. We could just steal from them at night. We don't have to make a full scale attack." It was not me who said it, but the red pikmin I had talked to last night. The red turned to me, "I'm liking this idea."

Looking at my fellow pikmin, I was happy to see that a lot of them now looked interested. A couple still remained doubtful.

"How in the slightest idea, do you expect us to find this colony?"

"It hasn't snowed in a while," a yellow chirped in. "We should be able to find the footprints and track them."

"What about our incapacitated pikmin," a different red said. He pointed across the clearing to where that unconscious mushroom pikmin lay.

A chill went down my spine as I remembered the giant mushroom. Half of me wanted to leave the mushroom pikmin there and to never see it again, but the other half reminded me that I still was like him and that I should care for him more than any other pikmin.

"We can take turns carrying him," a blue said. "It won't be too hard."

Everyone seemed to be nodding now. They liked my idea. I smiled and said: "So, we leave tomorrow?"

My words were followed by a chorus of agreement.

Review if you want, but thanks for reading!