Chapter One – Traveller From Afar

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1.

Traveller From Afar

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As far as Espurr was concerned, and she figured she was rather smart for a kid, unusual things just didn’t happen to people like her. They happened to people who were completely ordinary and turned their homework in an hour before the due date; or to people who were completely unordinary and did squats at the bus stop while wearing a snorkel mask. But they just didn’t happen to people caught in the middle. Those were the rules.

Espurr was only sixty-three percent ordinary, which was about as in the middle as you could be. She lived in a normal house in a normal neighbourhood in a normal city that had won an award for being the most boring city in the entire world. Her parents wore identical pairs of spectacles, and both were accountants for a company that sold luxury lightbulbs. Espurr read her favourite book about insects in a corner during recess, thought Wednesday was a deep purple colour, and had been kicked off the girls’ football team for not showing up to practise. She never had the same answers as anyone else in class, wasn’t allowed to wear her hair or clothing in any of the popular styles, and hadn’t had friends since the third grade.

Her life was the same, day in, day out. Unlike those around her, nothing strange or exciting ever happened, and the world seemed to pass her by. There were no sudden wrenches in her plans, no camping or trips out with friends during summer vacation, no ghosts or plays or sleepovers. No secret texts under a blanket to boyfriends at night, no long-distance phone calls to close friends far away. There was just the bus to school, the walk home, and hours and hours of books and stupid cat videos.

Credit where it was due; the neighbour’s tabby cat, a lazy, roaming, ill-tempered beast, often kept her company as long as she fed him. But her life was solitary and uneventful because, as far as she could tell, she was already unusual enough to be a few buns short a batch, and the universe needed to set the scales straight.

So when she finished recording her day in her old, battered notebook, like she had all the days before, when her old, chewed pencil left the yellowed paper, she shut it and the lamp off and fell backwards into bed. She laid there, waiting for the icy blue covers to warm up, and stared at the spiderlike shadows of branches reaching across her ceiling. Quietly, she reflected on how empty her day was, just like the page she’d been writing on.

She drifted away slowly listening to the wind blow softly against her windowsill, the branches swinging back and forth as if waving their hands to a crowd she couldn’t see. It never occurred to her how much of an ordinary thing it was to wake up the next day where she’d gone to sleep.

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Espurr stirred, groaning and shifting in something that didn’t quite feel like her mattress. Her bedcovers were missing. Had they fallen off? Her eyes felt glued shut. Her head ached and swam with fog, her legs tired, her throat scratchy, like she was sick with a fever. A pounding headache knocked between her eyes.

She took a breath, and her nose wrinkled up. There was a scent in the air that was revolting. It smelled like something had died long ago, and the stench was now floating on the wind, mingling with the other plant smells, poisoning the air.

Plant smells? Was she outside?

Her eyes shot open, then quickly squeezed shut, blinded by sunlight she wasn’t expecting to see. It was filtered through the branches of dense, intertwining treetops, the canopies blending and swirling together into a strange painting.

Fright rushed through her. Her eyes went wide open, and she shot up into a sitting position, scrambling on the ground and looking around frantically. Where was she? Had she been kidnapped? How did she get all the way out here?

But there was no-one around to answer her questions. And if there were kidnappers, they must have left. She was in the middle of an empty forest clearing, overcast by shadows, covered in dead leaves, mossy tree roots, and low ferns. The place was silent, barren of even wildlife. Not even the crickets chirped here. The sound of the wind left as quickly as it came, leaving only the eerie rustling of dead leaves in its wake. As the complete, total silence set in, Espurr’s heavy breathing slowed, and her fear was replaced with quiet, tense unease.

Her throat screamed for water, so she crawled through the forest ground until she came to the edge of a slowly-flowing river – the only thing that made any sound here. Her body didn’t seem to move right on the way there, but she found the source of water quickly. Something she couldn’t put into words told her to lower her head and drink rather than cup the water in her hands.

Drinking felt weird. Her tongue acted differently, scooping the cool drink up backwards into her mouth. She was too thirsty to care.

It was only when her hand passed in front of her for the first time that she sharply gasped. It didn’t look like her hand. She was missing a finger, and the ones she still had were much shorter and chubbier than before. They were completely covered from tip to palm in fur. And that caused her to snap awake and look at herself for the first time.

Her reflection in the river’s cool, slowly-moving water betrayed her: from head to toe she was coated in bushy lavender fur, extending into white on her arms and legs. Her ears were large and floppy, hugging her head. A fluffy, catlike tail swished behind her, unnoticed before. Now she could feel it swish, every motion alien and unwanted.

She stared at the purple tail in disbelief, her mind racing to find any solution that made sense. That tail couldn’t be a part of her, humans didn’t grow tails. It wasn’t possible. Which meant… something was on her back? The tail swished, lowering, and she felt it lower, which meant it couldn’t be something on her back, it had to be her tail, which meant… which meant…

She felt lightheaded staring at it, stumbling to keep her balance, every part of her body feeling unfamiliar, unnatural, wrong. Her breathing sped up into gasps and a terrible pit formed in her stomach as her mind raced and she tried to understand what was happening, what was happening? She’d become some kind of monster, she wasn’t even human anymore, no-one would recognize her as a furry, tailed freak! Where was this? Who had done this to her?

Swish.

The sound of long grass and low ferns parting from behind Espurr snapped her out of her panic. A spike of fear cut clean through the shock, her senses returning to her crystal clear. Were there kidnappers after all? She went still and silent, her tail puffing up, twisting her head towards where the sound had come from.

In the darkness of the woods, where the trees leaned inwards and the light didn’t dare venture, her new, sharp eyes made out the outlines of three figures watching her. They stood three times her height, their posture like full-grown men, but they were thin and bony, crooked at the shoulder, and out of their heads extended tall, pointy hats. They didn’t move a millimetre, and they didn’t make a sound. Unsure of what to make of them, Espurr took a step back on shaky, unfamiliar feet for the first time.

“Hello?” she asked with a trembling, scratchy voice.

There was no response from the three figures in the shadows. They simply remained fixated on her, their heads and pointy cones following every miniscule movement she made. Then, after a long, uncomfortable silence, they turned to themselves, and held up their arms.

Lights flickered from bulbs on their palms, alternating and blinking in strength quickly—red, green, yellow—almost like they were speaking. And as the lights illuminated them, Espurr saw them clearly: shrivelled faces shrouded behind gleaming, pinprick eyes, thick and angular cloaks, limbs long and bulky, and each with a crooked skin-cone that stretched far above their heads.

Her eyes widened, and in her fright she made a terrible mistake: she screamed into her paws, scrambled back, and tripped on a stick.

Crunch. Thud. The loud sound brought the Coneheads’ attention right back to her. Espurr froze on the ground, eyes wide, breathing violently. The lights in the darkness vanished, nightshade swooping back in, and all the sudden the Coneheads were shrouded by the shadows, impossible to see. A whistle was her only warning: a ball of darkness flew out of the shadows, headed straight for her—

If there was one good blessing about any of this, all cats had good instincts. Espurr’s new body kicked into gear, and before she knew what was happening, she threw herself out of the way just in time, hitting the ground and covering her ears. She didn’t see what happened to the bush behind her. The sound of roots twisting and branches snapping told her it wasn’t good.

Swish. The Coneheads glided out of the shadows, moving swift and silent and uniform, like they were one. As they brushed up against the shrubbery, Espurr saw how they floated—shrunken, underused legs dangling beneath sleek cloaks as they loomed—and nearly fainted with terror. Time seemed to slow. She watched her life flash before her eyes: her earliest memory of her parents, her eleventh birthday cake, the day she took a train through the woods and pretended it would transport her into a fairytale.

Her body snapped into action, and she broke off into a run.

On unfamiliar legs, she stumbled to her feet and took off into the woods. Her legs failed her. She tripped several times. Her body hit the ground, painfully. Sticks and pebbles and leaves scraped her over and over and over with each fall and still she ran. But she continued to pick herself up, running desperately until she could no longer hear the swish of parting ferns behind her, no longer see the gleam of a light from behind a tree trunk.

When she stopped, it was in the middle of another, narrower, darker clearing. Espurr collapsed to her paws and knees, panting wildly as the fear wore off. Her chest hurt, her lungs couldn’t take in enough air, and the aches and pains in her body were complaining loudly.

But even though her legs were sore, and her arms and sides hurt from where she fell, she had to keep walking. She just felt more lost than ever now. The next clearing looked like the last two, dead leaves, thick foliage, and tall, mossy tree trunks decorating every inch of the eerily silent forest. The light was slowly seeping away, the trees looming further and further with each lost beam. Espurr’s stomach rumbled, and she felt her tail and ears flop down miserably with the hunger pangs. She’d been walking for hours now, wasn’t there anything to eat?

Nothing she could tolerate. A ginger nibble off the nearest fern leaf made her scrunch her face up in disgust. Gross. The neighbour’s cat used to eat beetles, but she didn’t even want to think about eating those. Just because she was a cat didn’t mean she had to act like one.

Soon the air turned colder. The sky became darker, faster and faster. Her breaths came out in cloudy puffs. It was like a sudden icy freeze had descended over the woods. She looked up to the forest roof, where the sun was now orange and setting through the abstract treetops. It was going to be night soon, and she wasn’t any closer to getting out of here. Those Coneheads could find her out in the night, in all this cold… she hadn’t realised she was shivering until now. Was it fear or chill?

A tendril of wispy mist swirled around her angular, unfamiliar feet. Espurr looked behind her. From behind approached a massive wall of fog, stretching from the ground all the way up to the branches of the treetops. It was so thick she couldn’t see anything through it, and from its direction she caught that scent again – rot. The smell of something dead.

The wind that moved the fog ruffled her fur, battering her face with the smell. Espurr retched, stumbling back and desperately trying to cover her nose with her paws. It was so strong! That was enough to convince her the fog was bad. This was evil fog, and she couldn’t get caught in it. She had to get away. But where could she go? It was approaching fast, too fast.

She looked up. The trees around her, stretching higher than the fog, had branches large enough to hold her. If the treetops could hide the sun, could they conceal her too?

Anything to get to safety. She didn’t know if she could climb with her shorter arms and strange, tip-toe feet, but she had to try. So Espurr scurried over to the nearest tree, a great twisted oak, and put her first foot on the trunk’s mossy roots.

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Night fell in minutes. Curled up in a tree branch just large enough to hold her, silence hung around Espurr, with only her thoughts to keep it at bay.

It was finally sinking in that she might not get to go back home. She didn’t even know where she was right now, let alone how to get there from here, and even if she did… A look at her paws and dirty lavender tail was all she needed. How would she even convince people that she was human, let alone her?

How was she going to get home to begin with?

With sickly ruminations swimming around in her head, it wasn’t long before the exhaustion of her trek took over and she slowly drifted off to sleep.

Her dreams were made of impossible things. She dreamt of an In Between, a horrible, darkened place where only void and suffering dared to venture. It was a nightmare that terrified her, one she madly clawed to escape from but couldn’t leave on her own. Not until something woke her.

The sound of rustling below wrestled Espurr out of her nightmares. Her eyes opened blearily to abstract moonlight, blurred and scattered by the branches above. Her heart sunk as reality set in. The canopies seemed dark and twisted now, and so too was the whole forest. The ground was blanketed by a sea of thick, white fog, snaking insidiously through the trees as if searching for something.

But what had woken her? She focused her hearing and her vision, looking over the branch…

Swish.

A faint yellow light blinked and lit up the fog below. Other lights followed, flickering away as quick as they’d appeared. Espurr’s heart fluttered and dropped and skipped a beat. Quiet horror flooded through her body. She quickly scrambled away from the edge, her heart pounding in fear, paws clasped against her face, vision spinning. She didn’t dare to breathe. The Coneheads! They had found her! How?

Swish.

More dead leaves and ferns rattling against the tattered cloaks of slender floating bodies. She could see the image as clear as day. All three of them were standing at the bottom of the tree. A strange psychic sense told her. Their dark auras fuzzed at the edges of her sight.

But they weren’t doing anything. Peeking carefully over the branches as far as she could muster the bravery for, she could see their crooked, dark, pointy cones poking out of the fog, still as shadows. They were just standing there. Were they waiting for something? What for?

The wind picked up again. It blew against Espurr, bringing with it that rotting scent, and this time it didn’t stop. She looked in its direction as the wind got stronger, and with the horrid smell came a horrid feeling, like something was coming with the wind. When the branches began to bend against the gale and a roar rose with the wind, Espurr started to realise: she couldn’t stay here.

She surveyed the ground from her cage of branches. The fog still blanketed it completely, and she didn’t want to get any closer to the Coneheads. And though she really would have liked them, she hadn’t grown any wings yet. Why couldn’t she have become something with wings?

That only left her one option, which made her tail bush up: the branches of the trees were just close enough to each other that she could hop across, if she was careful. But if it was that or escape on the ground, where the Coneheads were…

Getting onto her paws and knees, Espurr tightly clutched onto the branch for dear life as she edged her way along it towards the limb of the next tree. The rotting scent of the wind had stopped torturing her nose after a bit, but the gale was getting stronger, her fur ruffling wildly, a loud howling rising louder in the distance like a demented roar. Reaching the end of the branch, Espurr realised she wasn’t going to be able to clear it with a single stride. She’d need to jump. And fast.

Fear seemed to reverse polarity. Before Espurr knew what she was doing, she was balancing unsteadily on the branch, preparing to jump to the next. Her muscles tensed, but fright froze them before she could jump. What was she doing? If she didn’t make it, if she lost balance… she began to wobble, her heart picking up speed—

A howl of the wind blasted through the trees, and all of the sudden Espurr jolted and her new, springlike legs launched off the branch and threw her into the air.

She jumped entire feet higher than she was expecting. The leap propelled her far into the sky, and taken by surprise, she lost her control on the way down. Catlike reflexes kicked in, and in the final seconds she twisted and thrust her paws out and grasped for the branch—

A gust of wind, as if summoned out of nowhere, slammed into her with the force of a truck. Her outstretched paws missed the other branch by a hair’s length. And with a flipping feeling in her stomach and the horrifying, gut-wrenching realisation she’d missed, Espurr whimpered and began the long, heart-wrenching trip towards the ground.

Crack.

A loud yowl pierced the abstract night canopies.

Pain. It was white hot, racing through her and concentrating in her arm—her arm. It was at a funny angle. It wasn’t supposed to bend like that! Crimson flashed across her vision, and somehow she knew what it meant. Pain.

Fighting back tears and sobs, Espurr staggered to her aching feet. The pain made it hard to think, see, feel. It hurt so much. Why was this happening? The pain. Red. It hurt. It hurt! She clutched her arm, but that just made it feel worse. How could that make it feel worse? Thick fog was all around her. The rotten wind swooped down and swirled around her, letting out a ghostly laugh like it was taking delight in her suffering. And then she heard it: Swish.

Espurr didn’t have to see it; just the image of it in her head was enough to overload her mind and send her into flight mode. She bolted, fleeing through the woods wherever her legs would take her. The gnarled root of a tree sent her tumbling to the ground. She landed on her bad arm. Crimson flashed across her eyes like splattered blood. She grunted and bit back her yowl of pain, crying quietly and letting her tears flow. It hurt so bad.

She heard it again: Swish. She looked back. Her tear-blurred vision framed an image that burned into her mind: an emerald cape attached to a large, lean, dark figure, striding towards her through the ghostly fog. She felt the evil flow out from them. Their overwhelming aura of darkness singed the ends of their cloak, searing itself into her vision.

Espurr, barely lucid, hanging on by the barest of grips, shut her eyes tight and stumbled into a run again, only able to flee for her life.

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An audino quietly picked the herbs and weeds from around a small bush in the forest, slipping them into her exploration bag. It was the full moon, and her herb stores were running low again.

Fresh-picked herbs were always available east of the Lively Mountain Range, but rarely grew anywhere west of it. They were so vital to Audino’s medical practices, but somehow they were the hardest thing to get a hold of. She could always get them from Kecleon, but the miser overcharged for them and everymon knew it. She had been lucky to find this clutch of them sitting around the nearby mystery dungeon. Mystery dungeons being what they were, Audino had returned once every month at the full moon—she was superstitious—and found the exact same bush with the exact same clutches of herbs awaiting her.

Of course, finding the bush was a different beast entirely—every time Audino came looking for it, it was always in a different place. But that was to be expected of a dungeon. The places were always rearranging themselves however they saw fit. Audino was just grateful she’d found the bush quickly this time. Something was different tonight, and she could smell it in the air. It was like the dungeon had grown darker, making her fur bristle, and her surroundings put her on guard.

The lack of apparitions around at this time of night made her ears twitch with uneasiness too. The dungeon’s natural defence apparitions mostly came out when it was dark. The ones here were weak enough for a child to defeat and they knew their limits, but all the same they were never beings to shy away from a fight they thought they could pick. Audino had been in enough dungeons to know… if there were no dungeon apparitions, there was usually something worse around.

And whatever it was, Audino didn’t want to meet it tonight. She kept the escape orb she had bought from Kecleon’s specifically for this occasion in one of the bag’s looser pockets, just in case she’d need to make an impromptu escape.

She looked up from her herb picking in confusion as an unnatural wind blew past her, shaking the trees with visible anger as it went. It stank of vicious rot. In the distance, she could see what looked like a thick wall of mist. Worry flooded through Audino, her paw slipping into her weathered explorer’s bag and clutching her escape orb tightly. This dungeon wasn’t supposed to do that… this dungeon was too weak for that. Something was very wrong here.

There was suddenly a loud thump in the distance, accompanied by a sickening crack. Audino had half a mind to just smash the orb right now and forget her herbs. But that notion disappeared once she heard the yowl of pain that followed. Whatever pokemon had made it sounded rather young… But a dungeon apparition, even a weaker one, could spell trouble for her at this point.

Suddenly, Audino saw the silhouette of a small pokemon running straight in her direction through the fog. Was it a dungeon apparition? Her grip on the escape orb became tight enough to whip out on command. She watched as within seconds, an espurr stumbled out of the distant mist and into the immediate area, running frantically through the woods. For a split second, Audino hesitated. Espurr weren’t apparitions native to this dungeon. So why was one here?

She only had to see the look in the espurr’s eyes to understand completely. Their eyes glimmered in the moonlight with a look of terror, an intelligent look. By now, the espurr had seemed to realise Audino wasn’t a hostile apparition, and changed their course directly towards her.

“Help!” the pokemon hoarsely cried out in terror that wrenched Audino’s heart, clutching their left arm to their chest as they stumbled up to her. Audino studied the arm with a nurse’s precision, identifying the fracture in a matter of seconds. It wasn’t easy to break a pokemon’s bones. That thump, that yowl… had something done this to her?

Something that was approaching from the fog at this very moment. Hints of the strongest wind yet began to blow through Audino’s fur as she hurriedly beckoned the espurr towards her. Behind the terrified child, she could see a trio of silhouettes approaching, framed by flickering lights. Red, yellow, green…

The espurr reached Audino, violently shivering from cold and terror. Audino hugged her close, keeping an eye on both the wind and the approaching pokemon.

As the wind grew stronger, the pokemon approached, and Audino got her first good look at them: a trio of beheeyem, ghostly lights flickering in the fog. Their crooked cones stood tall into the night; their eyes gleamed brighter than lights and sent chills down Audino’s spine. Those weren’t wild looks either; they were too shrewd, too calculated. Whatever they were… they knew what they were doing. Audino’s eyes narrowed. Her arm around Espurr tightened.

“Stay close, and whatever you do, don’t let go. Understand?” Audino instructed loudly. The espurr nodded, staring at the beheeyem and holding back tears.

There was no more time to waste. The howling of the wind was picking up, turning into a rancid gale, and it brought the creeping, looming wall of fog with it. Any longer, Audino knew, and the approaching pokemon would be the least of their worries. In one swift motion, she hugged Espurr tight and whipped out the escape orb.

“Shut your eyes!” she yelled to Espurr, hurling the orb at her feet. It shattered and exploded into a plume of brilliant, blue-white smoke, and when the smoke cleared, Audino and Espurr were nowhere to be found.

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Music of the Week!

The Smell of Fear – Heitor Pereira