Mind the age rating, some serious trigger warnings on this one. If you just want to go along for the ride, I totally respect that! But if not, watch out for:
(In a dream sequence) Body Horror, Psychological Horror, Surreal Nightmares, Animal Abuse, Parental Abuse, Death, Animal Death, Pokemon Death, Blood and Violence.
I've had this idea a long time now, though I knew I wanted to save it for Halloween. Haven't stretched myself far into extremes like horror and this was a good opportunity. Really leaned into a particular vibe given I wrote most of it after my recent first bout of COVID, sitting out in a garden the day I tested negative and got to leave the house.
After the success of Apples and Olives, this is also the first step toward a larger plan in the works. So, please enjoy my experiment with tone!
Full Disclosure: The version of this piece on AO3 has more sophisticated formatting akin to my original vision. Check the story out there (via my same username!) if you want the complete experience.
"Don't stray too far from the blanket, Arven."
The man's voice distorts into static when it chisels through wind roaring in Arven's ears as he scurries down mycelium-woven grass. Brine from Porto Marinada stings his nostrils and tears run along his earlobes. Two-tone hair whips in all directions as blades drizzled in morning dew send the boy skidding on pudgy pre-teen legs. Whenever Arven comes close to falling, seeing Maschiff ahead helps keep his balance.
Maschiff comes to an abrupt halt at the base of the hill, and the red-clay canine creaks around until Arven can see its crooked neck and strained snarl, blurred by the mid-morning fog. The preschooler can't slow down.
He barrels toward Maschiff.
Arven skids to his hands and knees at ground level, tumbling through undisturbed grass. He toddles back to his feet. No stains or dirt to wipe off.
Maschiff runs up to the boy and forces a pained bark. It comes muffled, distant to Arven's ears. He hadn't hit his head on the way down, nor did any of his salt-and-pepper hair come loose from the ponytail his father tied to keep it from flying everywhere. His pet is playing right in front of him, but also halfway across the region.
Itching, clawing thoughts slip Arven's mind.
He's back on the chase, grasping greedily for the tufts of golden hair billowing off Maschiff's back. In the distance are the lights of Levincia, just cutting through a warped maelstrom of fog.
Maschiff glides over grass, eluding the boy's every attempt to catch his fuzzy friend. Gnarled blades catch Arven's Velcro-strap shoes as Maschiff gets too close. Each hitch quells a churning sick in his stomach whenever his gnawed-down nails dare to breach th between him and the perpetually limping dog.
The Pokemon doubles around, body moving sdrawkcab even as all four paws desperately scrape the ground. Then, in the blink of an eye, Maschiff is already through Arven's legs, running back whence it came.
"Come on, buddy," Arven says in a voice that isn't his. A squeaking, distant voice, deprived of breath.
He shakes the mountain of bramble hair from his face before giving chase again.
Maschiff stumbles over massive roots from a tree they must have passed moments ago. They did pass it, right? These grow all over the South Province wetlands, though not usually into such a curly-cue mess of glass-shard bark and leaves glazed with bloody sap.
Must be a trick of the moonlight.
Arven's undeveloped arms make it hard to surmount the same serpentine roots as his Pokemon. When he reaches the top, a sea of brown spills out before him, all twisted tubes and pockets of decay where mushrooms spread sickly webs.
"Maschiff?"
Arven's voice that isn't his grinds through the molasses of humidity, heat rising in physical waves from every pore of the tree.
"Maschiff?"
Another Arven calls from a distant branch. This also isn't him, but in a different way. An imperceptibly different Arven who isn't himself.
Shadows cut across the warbling jelly of clouds around the bramble of wiry hair that stretch out from a skyscraper pine, painted with Grafaiai markings like Arven has never seen. Concentric colors unbeknownst to human imagining expand until they have no more trunk upon which to show, and then they expand some more.
Drawings of sharp minerals
and airplane schematics
and old-fashioned bone saws
and participation medallions
and collapsing neutron stars
and fine Kalosian meals take their place.
At least, that's what Arven thinks. It's hard to tell through misty eyes.
He climbs off the tree root, arms straining from three days and nights of finding handholds in the mycelium chain of atoms. Once grounded, the boy follows Maschiff back toward the hill, leaving nothing in his wake but the vibrant Casseroya lakefront.
The journey is arduous. Arven's feet squash into deep, snowy muck, but the ground remains solid. It's Arven's hip joints depressing down to his ankles with each step, body melding together and reforming. Like bones breaking into scar tissue, only to shatter each time he moves again. The goalpost shifts, he never gets closer to the top. Arven stares at the constellations above. A roiling mass of flesh fills the sky. Crackling tendons overlaid wit scroll of chartreuse pinwheel stars quilting.
But it's hard to tell. The marine layer is thick, inside and out of his eyes.
The preschooler reaches the apex. Seeing Maschiff at the edge of a red-and-white checkered blanket raises his spirits. Arven waddles toward the Pokemon with arms out hed.
Maschiff doesn't rotate all the way before his crooked neck is stamped beneath the violet heel of a dark boot.
Arven is frozen in his full-body embrace as Maschiff squirms under constant pressure. The Pokemon's forearms undulate uselessly against the blanket. Arven can hear every whimper. All of the pain, the fear, the desperation. Needling his gut.
The boot twists with a sickening crack.
Everything
stops
Arven can feel a moist spattering on his face — red-hot, burning his skin like being inside a steam engine.
His heaving chest cuts the ever-present drumming of his heart. All else is the ghastly whirring of a limping PC.
"… Dad?"
Maschiff's blood puddle sprouts iridescent growths that tear through the picnic blanket, encasing Turo's boot. Arven feels the same crystals shr ed his forehead, his right cheek, and a sliver through his eye.
His gaze drifts from corpse up the purple fabric of Turo's leggings. The futuristic tracksuit is cut by neon lavender hieroglyphs. A night sky under alien occupation.
Arven's pupils drive endlessly up, never led astray on the sidewalk of coat lapels.
The neon swooshes of Turo's suit flicker brighter in beat with Arven's heart.
It keeps going.
A kaleidoscope of cut crystal overtakes Arven's peripheral vision.
It keeps going.
Arven's neck cranes so far, he should be standing on his head three-times over.
It keeps going.
Fiery violet
It. keeps. going.
Maschiff whimpers from the beyond.
It keeps going.
… Until it doesn't.
Arven comes face-to-face with Turo, head twisted 90-degrees right. It isn't Turo.
He can't recall how his father's eyes should look, but the digital blue light pouring out from void reflects brilliantly into Arven's crystal growths. Chunks of Turo's precision goatee scatter off his face and error into the raging fog.
The Turo who isn't Turo's mouth sidles open. Pure crystal dust wafts from his lips like Beelzebub's flies.
A tinny human-robot hybrid spills out of the motionless theme-park animatronic:
"Paradise. Awaits us."
The hulking mass lunges. Servos screech and move to gouge what's left of Arven's eyes.
Arven wheezes at the sound of his creaking metal bedframe, and throws the blanket off his sweat-stained, spaghetti-strap wife beater. His breathing is fit to burst a lung.
His eyes dart wildly around the room, burlap sacks of produce and shapely cookbook stacks bathed in eggplant purple under the dusk of Mesagoza's sky.
It takes a moment to connect that it's just his dorm room.
The older teen scoots to the edge of his bed, legs dangling beneath his silken blanket, its yellow fabric curdled in the dim lighting. He finds Mabosstiff, a charcoal lump that blends into the room, snoring beneath a marked-up poster of Paldea.
A guttural sigh escapes.
Arven lets his scruffy grey pajama pants swing off the side of the bed and plants his feet carefully. He buries his head in both hands, hiding behind a waterfall of unkempt hair. Silent sobs wrack his body.