Several days later on Sunday, Jon found himself at Henry's house. It had been two days since he last spoke with Henry when the man asked him to come over to his home to speak with him. He already knew what it was about but Henry, not wanting to make it sound like it was something else entirely or to set him up, did tell him it was about the recent events and that they really just wanted clarification on somethings.
Jon didn't want to actually be here to discuss this but he knew he really couldn't afford to ignore it. If he chose to ignore it, the suspiciousness of avoiding conversations about the recent events would only make the neighbors and the involved parents more concerned and possibly more noisy, which he really wanted to avoid. He certainly understood that they were curious and concerned, and he couldn't blame them for wanting to know since they were all semi-involved in each other's lives. He had taken the time since the last conversation to think of plausible excuses so as to get them off his family's back.
Looking up at the storm clouds, which rolled in yesterday, through drizzle, he could tell it was about to get rough and heavy. He hoped he could make it back home soon.
*Celia and Ellie are sitting at home, Ellie goes outside in the rain*Meanwhile, Celia and Ellie were at home relaxing in the warmth of their home.
"Hey blueberry, it is pretty stormy outside with the big, dark clouds rolling in, I think hot cocoa and some blankets would be really nice while we snuggle up for movies," Celia said, looking over at Ellie. "I bet you would love that, wouldn't you?"
"Yes momma! I really, REALLY love your hot cocoa!" she replied. She then continued saying with her excitably flailing arms in the air, "the clouds outside are really dark; don't know why but they make me want to stay under the blanket to feel warm and cozy."
"Okay then, I will go get the hot cocoa ready while you just sit there, okay?" Celia said.
However, Ellie remembered that a couple of her toys, specifically her beach ball, were outside and knew that the winds could blow it away if she didn't bring it inside.
"Actually momma, can I please go outside really quick so I can get my ball, I don't want the storms to blow it away, please?"
Celia stoodd there with one of her fingers on her chin, pretending to be in deep thought. After a minute of making Ellie pout and wait, she chuckled and said, "yes, but come right back because the rain is gonna be cold. And don't you dare forget the raincoat, little miss, you will get wet and then sick if you run out there without one."
"Ugh. Yesss momma," Ellie responded with as little enthusiasm as possible. She really didn't want to since that meant she would have to go all the way up stairs to grab it and the rain boots too.
"Hey now, just because you are a big girl now does not mean you can sass me, I don't want you to grow up and lose that blueberry sweetness you have!" Celia snapped back, playfully of course since she only wanted to joke with her and keep her nice.
"Okay momma, I am going outside now. Please don't forget my cinnamon and marshmallows like daddy always does," Ellie said over her shoulder as she was walking out the backdoor.
Ellie goes outside.After slipping on her rain boots and coat, Ellie went out the backdoor and started looking for her beach ball. It was a gift from her friend, Ren, when she had her birthday party so she didn't want to lose it.
Looking for the ball around the patio at first, she figured it wasn't there and started looking around the edge of the yard in hopes of spotting it so she could hurry and get back in. For her though, it was difficult to make out because of the ever increasing rainfall and the dimly-lit skies.
However, after a minute, her eyes adjusted to the lack of bright light outside and, paying more attention, spotted the ball. She immediately ran toward the ball so that she could get it and run back in. Yet, right as she reached it, a strong gust of wind blew it toward the woods.
Not to be deterred in getting her ball, she continued running after it causing her to leave the view of her backyard. Had she looked up in the sky before chasing the ball, she would have noticed that the oncoming clouds flying above the woods were getting much darker. Not thinking and wanting her ball though, she gave chase.
*Celia notices Ellie hasn't returned, goes outside and runs after her*"Hey blueberry! I have your hot cocoa with your smushy marshmallows and the swirl of cinnamon on top just like you live it!" Silence.
"Ellie? Are you still there?" Again, silence.
She didn't think anything of it and, after washing the dirty dishes, grabbed both Ellie's and her cup of hot cocoa to bring to the living room. When she got there though, she expected Ellie to either be entranced in a picture book or asleep, but she found that Ellie wasn't there.
Thinking to herself that it was odd that she wasn't there, she decided to go check her bedroom since it was very plausible that she got bored waiting and went in there to draw. Celia walked down the hallway, up the stairs, and walked toward her bedroom door to go check but immediately could see through the open doorway that she wasn't there.
Confused, she figured that she must have gone to the bathroom and must have not heard her call for her.
Walking down the upstairs hallway to the bathroom, however, was when things began to crash around her. She saw that the door was open and the light was on, but no sign of Ellie. Expecting her to be hiding , she walked in but didn't see her daughter anywhere, or her raincoat and rain boots for that matter.
It has been a little over fifteen minutes now since she walked outside to get her ball… walked outside…she walked outside to the backyard, while it was storming, and isn't back…
Celia immediately began to panic.
"ELLIE!" she screamed. "ELLIE! Where are you!?" Running down the stairs, she instantly sprinted toward the backdoor on her feet as fast she could push herself. She remembered that she told Ellie she could go out there to find her toy and immediately became terrified knowing that it was storming and was going to get worse.
When she ran out the backdoor, she immediately began to scream for Ellie amidst the wails of the storm's loud winds.
"ELLIE! ELLIE PLEASE COME BACK INSIDE! ELLIE!" No response and no sight of Ellie.
She then began to go into a deeper state of panic as she started running around the yard looking for her daughter, hoping it was some bad prank and that she was hiding under one of the outside appliances or something. No luck though, she turned her eyes toward the woods. She knew immediately where to go next but the thought that Ellie ran into the woods terrified her.
Without a second thought, she frantically started running through the woods to look for Ellie.
*Ellie realizes that she is in trouble, finding herself in a dangerous situation*"WAIT! Stop rolling away from me!" Ellie screamed. For the last several minutes, the light weight beach ball that Ellie wanted to grab had consistently been blown further and further away by the winds. Running further into the woods, she began to close in as the denser woods inside stopped the winds from blowing the ball at the same speed. Once within range, Ellie was finally able to stop the ball in its tracks and grab it.
"I got you! Can't believe a dumb little ball made me run so hard." She knew yelling at an inanimate object didn't make anything better but she was frustrated beyond measure at it. It was when she finally collected herself and started walking that she knew that she was somewhere unknown, lost. "Where am I? Where did I come from?" she thought.
She looked around the little cleared area of woods that she was currently in but couldn't remember which direction she ran from trying to catch the ball. Having no idea, she tried to think of where she was but she never made it this far into the woods, even with her momma's or dad's help. Trying not to get scared, she clutched the ball hard and tight to her chest and started walking in the direction that seemed less dense in the background.
It was soon, though, when she began to run into problems. It was getting harder to see both around her and through the trees, and she was getting cold despite the raincoat. Trying to walk through the woods while freezing was getting to her and soon she started feeling scared.
"Mommy!"
Hoping that her momma would magically appear, she started crying out for her mother, getting more scared as time passed. "Mommy! Please mommy, I'm scared! I want to...hic..hic..go home, please!" It was the sound of a frightened and desperate girl and, yet, all that answered her was pouring rain, roaring winds and thundering skies.
It was a couple of minutes later when she finally found herself at the clearing she thought would be home, but turned out to be the bank of a creek. She was happy to finally be out of the woods but she soon realized that she wasn't even near home. Walking to a lone pine tree to take cover, she looked at the creek. She didn't feel so scared anymore since she was no longer in the woods and at a creek that, if correct, was the same creek that ran near her home. She was still cold and scared but she decided to use the edge of the creek to walk along back to her home.
Ellie felt worried, she knew storms could be bad but never this bad.As she was still walking, she remembered that the creek wasn't this big. Looking at it as she walked, she just assumed that it was bigger over here than where she normally saw it.
This would prove to be a mistake. Walking more and more, she began to shiver and felt some of her clothes underneath the raincoat getting damp. She knew she had to get home as quickly as possible since her momma would be scared and she could get sick.
Continuing on her path, she turned around when she heard a loud rushing noise. A second later before she could think, she saw a large wave of water rushing toward her, which then swept her up in its journey downstream.
Before she could get pulled down into the water, however, she felt something that slammed into her stomach, stopping her from getting pulled further down the flooded creek. It hurt a little but she couldn't have felt more lucky than she did at the moment when she noticed that she had been stopped by a tree branch, one just barely high enough for the water to reach but not cover once the initial wave evened out. She could do nothing but she just lay on the branch, wrapping her arms and legs around to stay on while the water down below raged on. It was terrible and scary for her. At that moment, she felt hope was lost as she began to cry again, begging for anyone, her mommy, her daddy to come save her.
*With her last bit of energy spent, Ellie plunges into the water*Ellie couldn't scream for help anymore. Her throat started hurting and her voice hoarse. She was tired and was still hanging on the limb, now over a calmer, but still flooded creek. Little by little, she felt her muscles start to give out and soon she would fall into the water, something that terrified her since she wasn't the best swimmer at age six.
After a few more minutes of freezing and loosening of her grip, though, she slipped off the branch and plunged into the water. The last thing she saw before losing consciousness was something flying from the sky getting closer to her, blue and white stuff coming off the thing before something yellow came toward her and opened up to darkness…
*Celia pushes forward*"ELLIE! WHERE ARE YOU ELLIE?!" Celia screamed as she came to a stop to look for more signs of her daughter's whereabouts. She knew it had been a long time, at least twenty minutes since she first ran into the woods and, still, she was running and screaming for her name occasionally. It was getting darker and darker by the minute and while she could see reasonably okay in the dark, she knew it would be a different story for Ellie since her eyes were one of the things Ellie didn't inherit from her, only the unique eye color.
It made her feel helpless and miserable knowing that her poor little baby was terrified and alone outside, perhaps even hurt. She shouldn't be in this storm, ranting to her she started screaming, "I let her go outside in this… it's my fault… I allowed this to happen… oh Arceus, why did I do this? Why-"
"NO! No matter what, I cannot start thinking like that or else I can't save my baby." she thought to herself.
Continuing on with her search, she couldn't help but hate the storms that made it even harder for her search and was wishing she could have the power to cause them to disappear or to immediately track Ellie. She occasionally came across broken twigs and footprints in the softened dirt patches but even they were getting harder to use as the sky got darker and the heavy rain threatened to wash away the very little tracks she had been able to spot with her eyes. Regardless of the situation though, she knew that she must push herself forward to save her daughter or else she wouldnt know what to do.
Try as she might, unfortunately, the search was starting to wear on her energy, not being one of the creatures on this planet blessed with immense stamina. Before she could think about her stamina dilemma, though, she came across a clearing where there was a much higher than normal creek flowing.
It was the same creek that Ellie had occasionally played in when she would take her daughter into the forest to go adventure seeking and plain-old nature walks. If it ran toward where she thinks it does, then perhaps Ellie would have, in a way, understood this and started walking with the flow downstream toward their home; it's her only hope, she believed, to find Ellie at this point.
With a bit of renewed energy at the hope of finding Ellie, she calmed herself of the despair she was going through and started trekking down stream.
*Celia faces a threat to her mission, she will not be deterred*Determined now more than ever, Celia screamed for Ellie, doing her hardest to make her voice hard over the crackling lightning and the booming thunder. The storm had seemed to hit its peak as Lightning cracked across the sky every minute, making the screams she gave useless but giving her flashes of light to help her see the environment around her. None of it would stop her from her mission, she couldn't afford to slow down.
Yet, she didn't know if it was luck, fate, or her yelling for her daughter when three poochyenas decided to jump out from the tree line that ran parallel to the creek. Maybe they were running from the storm, maybe they were out hunting before the storm became too unbearable, or maybe they came across her by luck and assumed she was an easy target. At the moment, however, she didn't care because they were costing her precious time and, perhaps, her child's life.
The three canine pokemon began to slowly circle her, looking for weaknesses, openings, and the moment when the others would pounce. Celia thought this was their biggest mistake, for she wasn't in the mood to do this and was focused on a different matter entirely.
In the flash of the lightning above, the poochyena in front of her could see the unbridled rage that was written across her face and felt intimidated by the gardevoir that stood across from it. The pokemon knew that pokemon from the ralts line were not easy but they always used the numbers against them, even against their evolved form like the one in front of them.
This time felt different, it felt that the gardevoir was not an enemy to be targeted. Before it could communicate this in its yelp to its fellow packmates, though, the gardevoir snapped.
In a second, Celia, who had made eye contact with the poochyena in front of it, threw out her strongest moonblast, an attack she learned on her travels with Jon, at the creature. Turning around on another one, she picked it up with her psychic powers and threw it hard enough that it broke several tree limbs behind it before coming to a stop at the foot of a tree.
The last poochyena, terrified but unwilling to back down either due to arrogance, fear, or hate, got ready to attack. As the mutt prepared to attack, Celia immediately prepared her own as she didn't want to wait any longer to resume her search.
They both stared at each other, each looking for the right time to initiate their attack.
But, before they could attack, a mightyena came out growling and barking. Celia saw that it walked out from the same treeline that the poochyena came from earlier.
Like last time, she readied herself to fight but then saw that the mightyena was looking at the smaller canine pokemon and not her. Looking over at the poochyena, she saw that it looked confused. It growled and yipped back at its senior then looked at her before getting another growl from the mightyena that forced it to walk back into the woods.
The mightyena, giving a wary look to Celia, was able to sense that she was desperate, angry, and vicious, and went to grab the injured, unconscious poochyena near her by the scruff of its neck before walking off with the limping one. Giving one final look back at the gardevoir, it left, sensing that the gardevoir had a purpose in mind and that the purpose was willing to make it, a normally shy and empathetic creature, become murderous.
*Celia finds Ellie, hurt but still alive, and takes to the one place she can think of*Grateful that the mutts left her alone, she began to start running again before seeing a Pelipper circling in the sky a hundred yards away, amidst dark storms and thunder. She has no idea why but with all other options and possibilities exhausted, she took the chance and ran to where it was circling. When she got there, however, her eyes went wide and she began to scream. On the bank of the flooded creek was her daughter, drenched and unmoving. Her heart nearly shatters but she holds it in, finding the will to rush over to check on her.
"ELLIE! Are you okay!?" She tried to wake Ellie but it was no use, she was unconscious and couldn't even respond to the basics of her mother's prodding. Realizing she wasn't going to wake up, Celia began checking all over Ellie while shielding her from the rain, finding that she was cold to the touch but with vitals present. Seeing her taking shuddered breaths in her unconscious state, She immediately picked her up and readied both Ellie and herself for a teleportation.
She was tired, emotionally distraught and scared but she remembered that one of her neighbors is a RN nurse at the local clinic, and the parent of one of Ellie's friends, Gloria she thought.
This place has to work or else I don't know what to do.Teleporting to the front of her house with Ellie in her arms, she ran to the door and began beating on it. Startled by the noise, Stephanie ran to the door to open it and saw a terrified gardevoir, Celia in fact, with something in her arms, the split second look easily confirmed it was Ellie, Jon's kid.
Not wasting a second more, she rushed Celia inside. Celia starts crying, begging Stephanie to help her, saying she was extremely cold and unconscious.
"Stephanie…please, I don't know what to do here. Ellie is freezing over here and isn't waking up. I went outside to look for her when I noticed that she wasn't inside when I allowed her to go outside to grab one of her toys she left outside…please help."
Stephanie was heartbroken hearing the poor gardevoir begging her to help Ellie. She was confused with the situation in general and didn't understand why Celia and Ellie would be here, but is able to instantly recognize that Ellie is suffering from hypothermia. When she thought about what Celia asked, she remembered that she told her about her work as a ER nurse.
Taking the girl from Celia, she immediately moved her over to the sofa and got blankets to cover Ellie with.
While this was going on, Celia was sporadically walking back and forth, trying to think of anything to help, but the stress of the situation got to her and she just started sobbing. For her, it was a nightmare because she could only standby and watch as another person had to do what she couldn't in order to save her baby.
Once Stephanie got Ellie covered up, she told Celia that it looked really bad and that she would have to get Suiteya (sue-te-ya), her ninetails, to lay with her to share her higher, natural body heat.
"Look Celia! I know you are scared and frantic right now but I need you to listen to me, okay?" Getting the vaguest sign of a nod from Celia, she continued, "right now, Ellie is suffering from hypothermia, it means that she has been exposed to the cold for too long and her body is struggling to keep up the energy needed to keep her body's internal heat going. That is the reason I am going to have her in bed with Suiteya." Looking over at the warm tea she made earlier, thanking herself for the coincidence of needing it, she continued, "and while that is happening, I am going to soon prepare her to pour some warm tea down her throat so she can get more heat. I can't say for absolute certainty but I am positive you got her to me in time."
*Please save my daughter*All of this, however, began to overwhelm Celia and nearly breaking, she spoke "please, just save my baby…I can't lose her! She is my everything and I won't be able to live if she dies!" Taken aback by the cry, Stephanie was about to ask her to elaborate on what happened earlier when Celia, ignoring her, moved to Ellie's side. Stephanie could only watch as Celia broke down, crying into Ellie's ear.
"Please baby, mommy's here… please…please come back to me! Don't die, you were the best thing your father ever gave to me, please don't die now…"
Shocked was an understatement, Stephanie couldn't help but be speechless at what she heard. She knew some of the parents talked about Celia and Ellie at the party but she just thought it was a quasi-familial bond thing but she saw it went deeper than that.
She took a better look at the cold, still unconscious child and saw her ears. They were pointed unlike any humans she saw before. She looked at her now damp hair and could see, as clear as day, the blue tint in her hair. Looking back at Celia, she saw the pointed ears, much pointy than Ellie's but still pointy and with Celia's hair damp, she noticed that she too has blue in her green hair. Before she could even ask, Celia, still in her frantic but now exhausted state, said one final thing, "please save my daughter," before she passed out from everything.