Windy.
That was what she felt. Nothing but the powerful, bizarre sensation of all of her hair being forced in the same direction. Everywhere. All over her body.
She opened her eyes. Before her, she could see the world, sprawled out before her in gorgeous detail. Forests, mountains, deserts, and seas were all perfectly visible from her view. She would have gasped in awe, but quickly realized that she couldn't actually pull in any air. The wind was taking her breath away. Why was the wind that strong? She looked around. Was she on a titanic mountain?
Then it hit her. She was falling. Really, really fast. Panic set in. Why was she falling? She didn't remember. The ground far beneath her was growing closer at a deceptively slow rate. It looked like she was falling very slowly, but somehow, she could tell exactly how quickly she was losing altitude. She was losing altitude very quickly. A scream built up in her lungs, but she heard nothing when it escaped.
A moment of clarity- If she was falling from the sky, then surely she must have a parachute. There was no way she'd just go jumping from an airplane without one, right? She scrambled around, trying to find it. Before she could, though, she was put into an awful tumble by her frantic search. The sudden disorientation rendered the whole thing impossible.
Her head spun as she tried to understand exactly what was going on, while at the same time scrambled even more, trying to escape the dizzying tumble that her scrambling had gotten her into in the first place. Her head and limbs were flying all over the place, desperately trying to get a hold of something, but they found nothing but air.
Fortunately, finding that air was exactly what brought her salvation. As she tumbled, one of her then-outstretched arms suddenly caught the wind, bringing her all over the place crazy spin into a more predictable one. Rather than an air-rolling-down-a-mountain, she was now in an air-pirouette, if when doing one you rapidly rose in the direction of your head like some sort of ballet-helicopter. The more controlled motion cleared her head just enough for it to occur to her to try doing the same with her other arm.
The sudden decelerations made it feel like a giant had just punched her in the stomach, and her eyeballs were trying to evacuate with all their might. Despite this awful, painful movement, she suddenly felt a rush of calm. Control over her own fall was back in her grasp. She let out a breath she had only been holding because she couldn't properly breathe enough to let it out. Her panic melted away, as she looked around. Suddenly, the thought of falling wasn't quite so scary anymore. She was still falling, but much slower. She was in control, thanks to some sort of silly looking flappy wings on her arms she didn't remember she had. They seemed quite familiar now that she was looking at them, though.
Flying through the air on her own control made the air breathable again. The wind was still there, but weakened by the significantly slower speed. She looked around once more.
The ground, which hadn't looked much like it was getting closer to her, was much, much closer to her before her tumble. She was gliding over a thick, murky swampland, with what looked like a town nearby. The ground was close enough that she could pick out individual shrubs, and they were going by very quickly.
It occurred to her that she was going to crash land very soon. She had figured out how to not fall to her demise, but landing was another story. She wracked her brain to try to bring any sort of memory of it to mind, but it was to no avail. It felt as though she was trying to remember a dream, which was utterly unhelpful given the speed at which she was approaching the disgusting-looking mud. She wasn't plummeting straight towards it anymore, but she was certainly going to be very dirty soon. The thought of it was somehow abhorrent to her, that she would be covered in mud.
Fortunately, her trajectory had different plans. Rather than plummet into the filthy ick, she suddenly became aware that she would instead be crashing into a big, menacing wall that she hadn't noticed before. She instinctively pulled her arms over her head, trying to prevent total disfiguration from the crash. Rather than just weakly shield her, though, this instead acted like a parachute. Her speed vanished, and she hit the wall with enough force to knock the wind out of her, but not much else. She then landed in the grass below, which was fortunately not nearly as muddy as where she had thought she would end up.
The fall was still enough to daze her a little, but she managed to get out of the bottom of the grasses quickly enough. The grass itself kept tickling her nose, but she could still see.
She took note of her surroundings. The giant wall she'd crashed into was really tall, with a big shiny part on top. The area just around it wasn't very muddy, unlike the great bog she'd flown over. Perhaps this was the key to leaving the mud's influence?
She decided to find out. Wading through the thick grass was a bit of a chore, but at the same time it wasn't a bad thing. It could be worse, she could be drowning in filthy mud instead. Before long, she reached the edge of the grass. There was a cleared, dry(in comparison) path now, directly below the shiny part of the wall. There were a few odd looking devices lining it, and a sign which was covered in some alien script. Just where was she?
Searching for a way away from the muddy gross revealed a very tall, very big shiny surface at ground level. Unlike the one high above it, this window could be seen through. The wall, or as it was now revealed, building, had a fairly plain interior, consisting of some really boring tile and paint. There was also a counter, near to the door she was squishing her face against.
Inside, there were a number of people of varying ages. One man in a fancy uniform, behind the counter, looked thoroughly bored and was reading a book. Beyond the counter, there were a couple of younger men, engaged in a talk with each other. She was unable to discern exactly what they were doing other than stand around putting on their best angry faces at each other.
Before she could make anything more out, the door suddenly moved, making her fall backwards in surprise. She quickly recovered and searched for the reason why it had done that, but there was none to be found. Now curious, she decided that going through the now-open doorway was a good idea.
The interior of the building smelled just as utterly bland as it looked. She immediately ran to the counter, poking her head around its corner to get a good look of the situation she was in. She could now actually hear the arguing boys, who were yammering at each other about something crashing.
Not forgetting her original mission of getting away from the muddy mud, she immediately came up with a plan. She would run to the similar door on the far side of the room, squish her face against it to get it to open, and keep going in that general direction in order to find somewhere not-muddy.
As she slowly crept on all fours, she could hear the argument escalating, and a sigh from above her. They were more clear now, and she could sort of understand what they were yelling at each other so vigorously about.
"This is a waste of time!" said the older(or at least, taller) of the two.
"Is not! I can't beat Wake without a grass type!" said the shorter, waving his arms.
"You can just try again! It's not like he's going anywhere," said the older.
"It's been eighteen tries already," the shorty said, "If I could beat him with Morty and Grapes, we'd know already!"
"Just one more try!" the big guy said.
"It's just a few hundred to go in, I've spent loads more than that on medicine than this," the little guy reasoned, "Besides, I think Wake might be getting tired of me. He probably knows all of my weaknesses now..."
"It's cheap on money, not on time! It could be days of camping in mud before we find something suitable, not to mention that we can't even bring out pokemon to make the whole thing easier," taller said. It seemed to her that they were arguing whether or not to go into the place she'd just come from. Was this some sort of exclusive place that you had to pay up to enter? Who'd pay to go to a big mud bath?
"We have time! It'll take me waaaay longer to figure out some way to beat Wake without one. If I lose too much more, he might even throw the match just to get me out of his hair," Shorty said. She couldn't really be calling him Shorty, though, as he still towered over five times her own height.
Suddenly, she realized that she was holding still, just listening to them. She mentally scolded herself for getting so distracted from her somewhat arbitrary goal, and began to move once more. She still listened in on them, though.
"You might have time for that, but I don't," the taller one huffed.
"What do you mean? Your job is just to follow me!" Shorty said.
"Maybe, but I'm getting really tired of Pastoria. If we take much longer here, I'm taking us both back to-" He suddenly stopped in the middle of his sentence. She looked up, wondering why.
The bigger one was staring directly at her. Oops. Maybe she hadn't been as stealthy as she thought. Come to think of it, did she really have to be stealthy here? She was sneaking unannounced in, but that wasn't, like, illegal, right?
"Roan," he said, not taking his eyes away,"
"Take me where? I'm not going back to Jubilife!" the Roan pouted.
"Shut up and look! I think I just found your ticket to the Fen badge," the older one said.
Roan looked where the older one was looking, also known as directly at her. He immediately gasped.
"Is that...?"
"It looks like an electric type to me. Here, little mouse thing..." The older boy said, beckoning with one hand behind his back. While one part of her mind was screaming to her that this was an awful idea, she was also really curious as to just what was going on here, and what he had behind his back. She stepped forwards, looking at the two of them.
"Now!" the old one said. Suddenly, there was a great flash of light, and a towering purple monkey appeared before her. It looked at her. She looked at it. A big, scary grin opened upon its face. Roan barked something at it, and all of the sudden it was upon her, biting her face while somehow making a terrifying noise just behind her ears. She screamed, then rapidly tried to compose herself.
Her face hurt now, and she looked around wildly trying to find the bad monkey that bit her. Roan said something again, and the monkey appeared in front of her, now brandishing sparkly claws from both hands. She barely had a moment to see this, before it was attacking her with them, slicing into her skin and scratching at her. She tried to fight back, to make it stop scratching her, but he immediately avoided her feeble attempt at a punch.
The monkey was nowhere to be found again, despite her attempts to find it. Suddenly, it was slicing into her back, and she whirled around to face it. The glittering knives in its horrible paws sliced into her face, provoking a pained cry from her. In sudden compliance with her yelp of pain, the monkey's attack instantly stopped. She looked up.
The look upon the purple monster's face was absolutely murderous, with the grin twisted to an angry grimace. Despite this, though, it wasn't making a move to hit her. She rapidly looked around, at both of the humans behind the monkey, and decided that this was her chance to get away. The boys had apparently no good plans for her, as they had sent a killer monkey at her with no warning or reason whatsoever.
She took a few steps backwards, towards the doorway, then spun around and ran. Her whole body was in awful pain, which made the whole running thing somewhat difficult. Before she made it a few feet, the boys behind her yelled out.
"It's running!"
"Grapes, catch it!"
"Throw a ball, idiot! He's paralyzed!"
Something red flew by her head, missing by a wide margin. She ignored it, she was nearly at the door, which was miraculously still open. Just as she ran through the gap, she heard a loud thud from behind her, accompanied by a voice she hadn't heard before yelling out. She put that behind her, though, at as fast a speed as she could manage. She no longer cared about how gross the mud was, and sped towards the tall grass she had probably landed in as fast as she could.
There were far worse things than being muddy, far, far worse things. Things like horrible demon-apes from the land of grape soda, and hostile boys in control of them. She kept moving through the tall grass, despite it being much harder to move through it. She wanted to distance herself from the awful monkey as fast as she could.
Before long, though, she collapsed in the grass. The painful scratches all over her body felt even worse after running through the thick grass. She let out a defeated sigh, hoping that she had gotten far away enough that the demon-monkey wouldn't find her.
...
She had. Kind of. The monkey didn't find her, something else did.
"Well well well, what do we have here?" a deep, croaky voice that sounded on the verge of laughing suddenly came out from behind her.
She in the direction it had come from. Above her was a big, blue face with brightly colored cheeks. Her eyes met his. They were yellow.
"Looks like there's a squirrel on my lawn. What's a squirrel doing on my lawn?" he questioned.
She was about to try to think of an answer, but he interrupted her before she could.
"Well, I can't let a convicted trespasser keep trespassing. You're a lot scratched up. You wanna come serve your sentence over by my place?" he asked. She nodded in response, not sure if he would allow her to speak.
In an instant, her yellow-eyed host had picked her up and lifted her above his head, making silly wee-woo noises as he walked. From this position, she could see that they were in a fairly big patch of grass, encircled by both mud and trees. The building she'd come from was nowhere to be found. They were headed towards a particularly large tree, which was just on the edge of the muddy water. Upon reaching the tree, the blue pokemon suddenly threw her up into the air, eliciting a squeak of surprise from her. He caught her long before she began to fall, though.
Once they were on an unusually thick branch of the tree, her captor set her down, and tapped the trunk. A moment later, and there was a hole just large enough for the blue frog thing to fit in. He turned to her, and beckoned.
"Come on in, convict. Welcome to your cell, which doubles as my house," he said, "Let's get you patched up,"
She stood up, and followed her host inside.
Within the trunk of the tree was, somehow, a massive, completely furnished home. There was a big, comfortable looking bed, many shelves of various things, some chairs, some crates, and a mysterious orb set in the wall that illuminated the whole thing with yellow light.
The frog walked over to one of the shelves, and pulled away a couple of bright blue fruits.
"Here, eat these. Lousy prison food, but you'll heal up in no time," he said, offering them to her. She didn't know how she was going to fit them both in her stomach, but they looked and tasted delicious. She could feel the pain from the scratches melting away like they'd never existed in the first place. Examination via rubbing revealed that they were completely gone.
She was only able to finish one, though. The frog took the other, and ate it in a single bite.
"Nice to meet you, by the way. I'm Munk, resident vigilante around these parts," he introduced himself. She would have taken the cue and introduced herself as well, but she was suddenly struck with the realization that she didn't quite know who she was. In fact, she realized, looking at herself, she didn't know what she was.
She blinked rapidly. Who was she? Where was she? What was she?
Munk noticed her confusion, and ushered for her to sit on one of the brightly colored floor cushions.
"Shy? Oh well. We have plenty of time, what with your sentence being a few million years. Take a seat," he said, joking. Probably. Hopefully.
She decided to recount exactly what she could remember, out loud.
"I, uh, I woke up while falling from the sky," she started. Her voice was really high pitched, especially compared to Munk's.
"I landed in the grass out there, and saw a building. I went inside, but there were these evil boys and they attacked me with a purple monkey that scratched me up a lot before I ran away," she said, summarizing her terrible experience thus far.
"I ran out of there and went to hide in the grass, then I fell over and you found me," she finished, letting out a sigh. She hoped Munk had some idea of who she was.
"Did the monkey have one tail, or two?" he asked, instead of something reasonable like asking if she knew anything from before she fell out of the clouds.
"Uhh," she said, unsure. She hadn't been paying much attention to the monster's tail, she was too busy being slashed apart by his claws.
"I see. We're dealing with a Aidodecahepom," he said, looking worried.
"Anyway, it's nice to know why you were trespassing, but you're still a felon. We've got plenty of time here. What's your name, for starters?" Munk asked.
"I don't know," she said, hoping he would.
He looked at her, in the sort of way you'd expect a sleepy doctor to.
"I see. Your name must be Lulu, then," he said, after a moment's pause.
Lulu? That sounded... Weird. Where had he come up with that?
"Anyway, you can stick around here if you want. You're allowed free recess whenever you want, even though you're a criminal. I'll set up a bed for you," Munk said, opening one of the crates, which was full to the brim with packing straw.
Suddenly, a great, booming shake resounded through the tree, accompanied by an angry roar. The shaking subsided after a tense moment, then the crashing noise came once more.
"I think someone's knocking on my door," said Munk, looking completely relaxed on his cushion.
Another crash. Some berries fell from their shelves onto the floor.
"Does this happen a lot?" the newly dubbed Lulu asked.
"Nah. Never heard someone this rude before. Give me a minute," he said, standing back up.
He walked over to one of his many shelves, pulling out a big ceramic pot. He then hauled the massive pot out to the door, and proceeded to pour the contents out on an unseen target. Whatever he poured it on roared in indignation. He soon returned.
"What was that?" Lulu asked.
"Some idiot human brought a Rampardos to the great marsh. It must be mad or something, cause it keeps hitting my tree," he said, "So I poured some honey on it,"
Honey?
A low buzz suddenly started to roll in. It rapidly grew in intensity, and was soon accompanied by the same angry roars that the Rampardos had made before.
"I bet Yanultrasupermegama will like that. He owes me a favor later," Munk said.
Noises of an incredibly one-sided battle filled the air, accompanied by a human's cries.
"So you don't know your name, you fell from the sky, you don't remember why, and you got attacked by some human's pet monkey. You sound like you could do with some revenge,"
Revenge? On the humans?
"Anyway, hear me out here. I think we can help each other," he continued, sitting back down.
"So, I like humans. What I really like, though, is messing with humans," Munk said.
"You probably wanna get back at the monkey, right?" he asked, "I'm kinda bored of this swamp. I've been here a while, but the only thing more boring than this swamp is travelling alone."
"Nobody else really wants to go with me, so you're kinda the ideal pokemon here," he continued.
"Wanna come?" he asked, looking at her intently.
The question had sort of surprised her, it seemed natural for a frog to want to live in a swamp. Even so, she had been meaning to leave in the first place, and she doubted that she would find any sort of answers as to who she was while she stayed around. Perhaps with Munk on her side, she could find out.
Plus, she really did want revenge on that evil monkey and his also-evil trainers. She didn't know anything about fighting yet, but maybe Munk could help out with that.
She was nearly decided on going on with him. Before she could actually say anything, though, he suddenly stood up.
"Well, I'll let you think on that. I'm gonna go get Girdle, you sit tight here," he said, moving to the doorway.
"Oh, and, uh, there's a door behind you. Don't open it," he said, before leaving the room entirely.
For a while, she just sat there, obediently, pondering why Girdle was. Before long, though, she grew bored. Was Munk going to take a while? Perhaps she should explore a little. This was supposed to be her cell, after all. Surely it wasn't rude to examine her own domain.
The shelves, upon close inspection, held a good collection of weird, unidentified objects. There were fruits of various colors, containers like the one that had held the honey, a few bags of huge seeds, and some shiny, mysterious bits of machinery. Beyond that, though, there wasn't much to be seen.
Still not content with simply looking at the shelves, she also decided to unveil what was inside of the crates.
Unfortunately, her size betrayed her, and she found herself completely unable to get any of them open. Frustrated, she decided to assert her dominance over the wooden cubes by sitting on one.
Doing so, however, gave her a wonderful view of the far wall, where a shoddy, rough looking hatch covered a hole in the wall. The little door was far from enough to prevent her from seeing the hole was there, but more than enough to block sight of what was inside. This must have been the door Munk was talking about. She should probably ignore it.
...
Lulu found herself completely unable to ignore the hole. It was there, in full view, and her boredom and curiosity both burned intensely, urging her to at least open it to see what was inside. She clenched the edges of the box, trying to think of something else to occupy her mind, but it was to no avail.
She stepped off the box. The door was right in front of her. What could be behind it? What could Munk be hiding in there that he didn't want her to find? She wanted to find out. She had to.
She opened the doorway a crack. The space inside was dimly lit by a deep orange light, and appeared to be some sort of barren earthen tunnel. The tunnel went on for a ways, then made a sharp turn out of sight. Was this some sort of secret passageway? Lulu's heart leapt with excitement at the thought. In an instant, the door was flung wide open.
The passageway stood wide open before her, with the light from her cell lighting it a little better. If opening the door was breaking Munk's rule, then going through it was surely even worse. Still, though, she really wanted to know what was inside of the tunnel. Her curiosity far overwhelmed the little voice telling her to stay behind, and she dropped back to all fours and began her move through the mysterious tunnel.