The Other Side Saga

[MorriganFearn]

~Angel Testing: Overture~

Raphe smiled cheekily at Ru’owin. The light from the conflagration behind them was casting her delicate face in shadow.

“Guess we have nowhere left to run to.”

“Reminds me of our first date,” he replied with a cruel smile for the gunfire coming closer.

“Our first battle, you mean,” Raphe shook her head as she looked over the brink of the abyss at their feet.

“Hate’s just another word for love. Why do battle and date have to be any different?”

“Because.”

“I’d ask because what, but this is possibly the most ridiculous position I’ve ever been in. Standing at the brink of a sheer cliff, my worst enemy by my side, gunfire coming nearer, a fire raging behind me, and all I can do is play cat and mouse games with you, Firebrand,” Ruo turned his sharp grin at Raphe as he said the old nickname.

“Well, I’ll make it easy for you, our pokemon are missing, presumed dead, and we’ll join them if we let Aumag catch up with us. I didn’t get us out of interrogation sessions with him just to be stopped by a cliff.”

“You mean we didn’t get ourselves out of interrogation sessions with him,” Ruo laughed the laugh of someone who is about to die and knows it.

Raphe shook her head again, and quickly grabbed a hold of his left hand. The abnormal tingling sensation that she always felt when she touched him jolted her body, and the demonic double image that sometimes appeared around Ruo became more -- solid. His grin appeared to have fangs in it, now. The enormous black and red, bat-like, transparent wings fanned out, and his eyes changed from acid green to glowing embers.

In turn, Ruo didn’t dare look directly at Raphe. The ghostly golden wings screening the edges of his vision were enough for him. The fingers entwining around his own were glowing a beautiful white, as if moonlight was radiating from her skin. It always disturbed him when he saw this second image lain over the reality. It made him question which was the reality and wonder if she saw a secondary image over him.

“Ready? We jump, and hope that luck takes hold,” Raphe instructed.

There was a sharp pain in her back, and then she was falling into open space, her back to the water and rocks below. She stared at Ru’owin, who still had one hand outstretched from where he had pushed her off the cliff, in shock. For a second the monstrous second image was the reality. Then he smiled cruelly, and dove after her as the cliff top exploded around him.

~~~

Everyone knows that they are going to die. If life was a train ride, we would all know that we have to get off sometime or other. Problem is: we’re not supposed to know where the end of the line is.

They say that when a person dies their whole life flashes before their eyes. As I fell through the air I kept on trying to see my life, and nothing happened.

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter One: In Which the Villain and the Hero are Introduced~
or
~Nature and Nurture~

Snowflakes brushed up against the window, as Arnold looked out at the overcast skies. The baby’s crying had finally quieted down to a quiet whimper now and then. Now his daughter (his daughter!) was safely tucked away in a basket lined with more mareep skins than he could count. Maria was being doted over as she lay on the bed that she had been moved to after the baby had been born. The rest of the family were hurrying around the house that he had built five years ago, trying to improve it, and arguing over how to cook the celebratory meal that they were planning.

Arnold looked down at the basket containing the little miracle of life. There was a watery gurgle in reply and the girl stared at him vacantly with bright blue unseeing eyes. His mother had told him that it was rare, and a good sign for a baby to be born with their eyes open. Arnold hoped so; he could use a few more good signs.

The last two children had been miscarriages, not to mention that the little mountain farm was short handed. The family rushing around had mainly come by to make certain that Maria’s child actually survived. In two or three days most would be gone, except for the ones who lived near by, like his mother, the matriarch of the mareep farming clan that lived in these mountains. Only his mother and his older brother’s family would be staying the week needed for Maria to get back up on her feet.

His mother’s delcatty watched him from the curtain rod that hung over the window. It was not the average delcatty, having been bred to live in the harsh mountain climate. Instead of the normal purple and cream coloring it was brown and grey. The fur was coarse and since it was winter it was thicker than usual. The large bright eyes were brown, too, instead of the beautiful luminous purple that Arnold had once seen on another delcatty at a fair when he was very young.

Besides all of these outward changes there were subtler details. The delcatty that his mother bred had slightly larger heads, an indication of higher cranial capacity, and their bodies were more compact. The feline creature was all muscle and grace, able to slip through small spaces with the ease of water flowing over rock. They had better stamina than the regular breed of delcatty, and they had stronger, longer teeth than the normally domesticated creatures. These pokemon were built to take care of zangeese without the help of a trainer. Eleanor Lightcastle used her bred creatures to hunt raticate in her barn, and gave every grandchild their personal skitty at the fifth birthday.

Arnold gazed up at the delcatty sitting on the curtain rod like a queen. He wondered which of the skitty his daughter would get. Then there was her seventh birthday to consider, Grandma Eleanor would be letting the young girl choose her own mareep growlithe. Would she choose a growlithe that was pure bred, or a hybrid with a poochyena, or perhaps one with an electrike somewhere in the line? The eletirke interbreeds were his favorite personally. They were haster, and they could take care of any fractious mareep who felt that it was time to let off a little electricity.

Of course, the tenth birthday would be the most important. His girl would have to carve herself a herding staff, and she would be considered an adult among the family. Arnold quite fancied giving her a herd of her own on her tenth birthday. It would be a small one, and probably one that she was familiar with, but it would be her own from that day forward, and his daughter would have to learn how to take care of it in all winds and weathers -- Arnold smiled happily at the thoughts running through his mind.

“Move along there Arnie, I’m trying to wash the windows,” his sister-in-law, Susan Lightcastle, bustled him out of the way. “The men are all goin’ to do the chores, why don’t you go along? Give Maria time with her daughter. Loomin’ around won’t do good t’all.”

Once Arnold was gone, Susan scooped up the gurgling body that was her niece and rushed it into Maria’s weak arms.

“So, what ‘re you goin’ to call her?” Susan wanted to know excitedly.

“I was thinking --,” Maria tenderly stroked the soft baby face in front of her, “Raphaella. After my father, only with the la at the end. Don’t you like that name, little Ella?” Maria cooed at her daughter tiredly.

The delcatty on the curtain rod, who had been watching the girl the entire time, closed her luminescent brown eyes and went to sleep.

~~~

Brix City was an old harbor that had grown into a thriving town, and then into a lively borough as time progressed. It had been the site of riots, and the first shot sounding the freedom of the new land from an old and crumbling empire. The town had grown from there, receiving a large influx of immigrants, and when the civil war broke out, even more immigrants flocked to its docks and canneries, to replace the countrymen being killed over a piece of paper and a bit of money. Now it was a large brooding city, presiding over the north east seaboard of Mincalina, one of the four continents of the eastern hemisphere*.

Brix City was the first sight that people traveling to the country of Callena saw. It was the hub of all activity of the coutry. Everything and everyone passed under the giant iron arches of the Brix Bridge that spanned the immense gulf of the harbor. Tall steeples rose above the harbor in Gothic splendor, and the nearly perpetual cold biting mist obscured the smaller buildings.

The streets were paved, but badly repaired, and the one needed to have a special permit for carriages, since ponyta were a fire hazard. Rapidash were not allowed anywhere outside of either the dockside pens for the rest of the livestock, or the corrals on the outskirts of the city. Those were properly fireproofed.

People came and went in this city. They lost and made their fortunes here, in either the public trades, or the private, furtive ones. Women stood in alley ways, or on street corners in tight skirts and fishnets, while in backrooms men smoked opium, and gambled away their lives. Children born in poverty roamed the streets in gangs, robbing and stealing what they could. Pokemon that had been poached and stolen ended up here at least once in their journeys to masters looking for slaves. A progressive movement was building, to stop the pokemon trafficking, and the human as well, however, it had not gained much momentum, yet.

In one of the dark alleys there was a baby-like wail and then the sound of an angry slap. The wail was cut off, and then there were the sounds of voices that were muffled by the fog. Finally two women emerged from the alley mouth, arguing heatedly, yet there was an edge of fear to their voices.

“What if he wants it?” the blonde asked.

“He won’t. They never do,” Her companion was a brunette with breasts that were barely contained by the skimpy tank top she wore.

“Poor Suzy,” the blonde intoned sympathetically.

“She deserves what she got. Remember, you can't keep the children in this business."

The brunette walked into the doorway of a brick house which sheltered her somewhat from the damp fog. The blonde Annette followed. She seemed to be still learning her craft, while the brunette was teaching her what to do. The blonde’s response to the latest statement seemed to confirm her subservient role.

“Yes, Brianna. I’ll remember that."

Both women sighed and looked down. They had competed with Suzy for space on this very corner. This thought seemed to trouble them.

“It’s going to be cold tonight. What with the raticate coming to Suzy’s body and the child I don’t think we’ll have any custom tonight,” Brianna observed.

They parted, Brianna went to their room in the crumbling brick house. Annette moved off, hoping to get some food cheap. In the alley, Suzy lay listening to the sounds of the corrupt city with ears that wouldn’t hear. Her newborn son moved weakly, hanging on to life with an angry ferocity.

He was covered in the sticky remains of the afterbirth when the raticate found the body of his mother. These were vicious, city raticates, larger than he was by at least three times. They sensed dead food in the form of his mother, and fell on her.

One raticate stood apart, gazing at the boy, its coarse, oily fur slick with fog. It picked up the tiny boy carefully with its teeth and took the baby to its nest. The dead ratatta that had been still born a week ago was gone, but perhaps this would make a good replacement for her child. Part of the raticate that was not really part of the raticate was content. The little demon child was well on the way to becoming the worst thing that the world had ever seen.

________________________________
*Mincalina, Damixtri, Soleru, and Salho are on the other side of the world from Johto, Kanto, Hoenn, Orre and the Orange Islands. The people of the Four Continents believe that the Vast Sea stretches all the way around the world, from Brix City on Mincalina to the shipyards on the western edge of Damixtri. No one in Johto, Kanto, or Hoenn knows of the Four Continents, although there has been some speculation that they do exist.

The thing that has kept people from trying to find what is on the other side of the Vast Ocean are the horrible weather conditions, which have been known to rip ships and airplanes apart. Occasionally, someone survives the journey, and ends up on the other side of the world, however, they have no way to return home, and any stories that they might have are discounted as insanity.

It is important to realize that there are pokemon on the Four Continents that are not found anywhere else in the world, and that they have a very different history and level of technological sophistication than Kanto, Johto, and Hoenn do. In the area of transportation, for example, they are entirely reliant on pokemon. However, they have architectural advantages, and far more dangerous weapons.

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter Two: In Which Time Passes Very Quickly~
or
~And I Opened My Eyes and Beheld Eden~

The winter that had been gripping Raphella’s mountain home gave way to spring in a matter of weeks. Snow and ice gave way to grass and rock. Buds began sprouting on the trees again, and heather and bracken began to spread over the sparse moors.

Seedots began attaching themselves to trees, as spiky thistles reared up from the ground. Some of the spiny weeds were really oddish, and their appearance made the farmers in the area nervous enough to always bring their flocks in at night. Oddish spread poisonous powders into the air at night, and the mareep were too valuable to risk an antidote not working. Plus, a poisoned or paralyzed mareep was just asking for a vulpix, zangoose, or persian to settle.

Caterpie, wurmple, and weedle began appearing in the tall pines, dropping down on unwary travelers if their trees were accidentally knocked into. Pineco also appeared, tiny and green, but growing and hardening rapidly. By the late spring everyone would have to avoid the pine groves dotting the craggy pasture land.

The young mareep lambs scrambled over sheer and rocky hillsides full of curiosity and high spirits incited by the crisp air, promising warmth to come. The ewes watched over their young with care, as their thick, fluffy fleece, which had been shorn in February, grew back. The flaaffy ram watched over the flock with a proprietary air while Arnold walked through his property, planting new lightning rods at regular intervals.

Occasionally he would look up to see spearow and tailow winging their way back north. This left his spirits uplifted, even though spearow were pests, and there was always the danger of tailow trying to attack the torchicks the family kept in the lesser farm.

Even the occasional murcrow flapping its raggedy wings did not depreciate his spirits, although he began bringing his gun, along with his family staff, with him when he was tending to his flocks. Murcrow from the mountains were dangerous, large black birds that were far more intelligent than the city and plains varieties. They could take down a lamb and kill it by pecking out the eyes, stabbing through the weak part of the skull, and into the brains.

Seeing birds flying in the sky constantly awoke the yearning to travel in Arnold. He would then remind himself that he was a mareep farmer, like his father before him, and that he had a family who needed him. However, the fresh spring air still worked its subtle magic on him, making Arnold get up as soon as there was light in the sky, and stay out until the last light had faded.

Maria did not mind too greatly. She loved her husband, and knew that to keep him indoors during the spring would be like caging him. His wanderlust never carried farther than the last lightning rod on his property, and Arnold became irritable shut inside for too long. Plus, Maria now had little Raphella to look after.

Every morning, as Arnold went out to the moors with his two growlithe-electrike hybrid herd pokemon, Thunder and Lightning, Maria walked out to the lesser farm to take care of the pokemon who kept them fed. Little Raphella, on a pouch on her mother’s back, always watched the routine with a solemnity that only a baby could manage.

Maria, with her black curly hair held back by a vibrant red cotton scarf, would always go to the small pond by the tiny mountain cottage first. She fed the three psyducks there, and always made certain that their headaches weren’t too excruciating. Sometimes she would sing while doing this, which seemed to alleviate the pain that the duck pokemon were going through. These pokemon gave her eggs and provided feathers for the mattresses and pillows used throughout the house, so she wanted them to be as happy as possible, not to mention if the three all had a migraine at the same time their telekinetic abilities could destroy the farm.

After she left them serenely swimming about the pond she went to feed the torchicks. They followed her rubber booted steps as soon as she came inside the enclosure, cheeping piteously. Maria would scatter grain from the bucket, and as the torchicks came to get it she would check them over incase any of them was in danger of evolving. Combusken were aggressive, and they already had one old thingy. Maria felt that that was enough of a danger not to let the other torchicks evolve. Their grain was laced with powered bits of everstone, which not only gave them much needed calcium, but also kept any more combusken from appearing.

Raphella always waved good bye to the torchicks as her mother walked around to the swinub sty. This was set on the other side of the small stone barn from the torchick coop for a very sensible reason. The swinnub, and the single philoswine, incited the old thingy and his younger generations to battle every time they saw each other. The normally gentle creatures had been highly aggressive toward all fire-types since a ninetails killed the old boar, Patriarch, a year ago.

They swarmed around Maria every day in a grunting mass of furry bodies, as Raphella laughed and clapped her little hands together. Yet they never ate from the troughs that Maria filled until Matriarch, the old philoswine sow, lumbered upright and switched her mind from contemplating deep matters that only a philoswine can contemplate with ease and a clear conscience, to her breakfast.

Once a week Maria would hose down the furry bodies of the pokemon and groom them to perfection, saving the silky hairs to send down to Susan, who specialized in spinning. The rare yarn created by the pig pokemon, along with the fine mareep wool from the shearing, was then sent to a second cousin of the Lightcastle clan, who lived in the nearest city, Burram. His family would sell what was given to them and pass the right percentage of the money back along the relays of family members.

The Lightcastles were very rich as a family, and as close knit as one of their sweaters. Their pokemon were stronger than average, because of all the careful breeding programs that Eleanor had created, the crafts made from the fur, feathers, and wool of their pokemon were individual masterpieces, and they lived in constant fear of some poacher or trainer stealing their prizes.

Pokemon were the lively hood of this clan, and the family would go to any lengths to protect them. Strange trainers were not welcome, and children were not encouraged to become trainers, in case they hurt a pokemon that they took from the mountains, or worse, told the secret of the advanced breeding techniques.

The last new person to come into the family from some place that wasn’t in the same region as the Crag Mountains where the Lightcastles lived was Maria. She had only been admitted when her father had agreed to give her several pokemon when she moved away “up north.” Only two of these were left now, and they were always her last stops on the tour of the barnyard.

From the swinub sty Maria would walk into the dim barn and open the side door in the miltank stalls. The miltank would rush out happily, and the old tauros, Hercules, would follow. Maria followed him, too, singing and speaking in some foreign language. The tauros seemed to know and understand it. He would respond with a deep bellows sometimes, and others simply toss his head. Whether Maria knew what he was trying to communicate or not was known only to her, however, she always went away from the grassy pasture feeling better and relieved.

Now she would climb the fence and go into a different pasture, distinguished by the burned areas and deep hoof prints in the soil. Sliding a different door open she would go inside the barn to face the other of her southern compatriots.

If the pokemon that her father had given her represented parts of her, Hercules was her better sense. Firebrand, on the other hand, was her soul. A proud, black stallion rapidash, he was normally seen racing about the farm, seeing the split rail fences and high stone walls as challenges, rather than boundaries. The contrast of his fiery mane against his coal black coat was striking and beautiful.

Every morning Maria went to feed him, and he was racing away as soon as the stone door was rolled back. She filled his grain bucket, forked down some hay, and then went to sit on a fence, jiggling Raphella on her knee until Firebrand grew tired of the green pastures. He would then trot briskly over to Maria, as if to say “ride me,” and as always Maria declined. Instead, she groomed him, and then would sit back on the fence, holding Raphella up to inspect him. One little hand would stroke the velvety nose, as Maria sang again in her strange language.

So the mornings were spent. When they finished with Firebrand, Maria would hop the various fences and move back to the mountain cottage, where she would make lunch for Arnold, and feed Raphella. Then Raphella would go once more into the sling on her back, and with Arnold’s lunch in hand, Maria would walk to the sheep pastures in back of the house.

Usually Maria was only able to get little further than the garden where all of their food came from, before Firebrand was solicitously at her side with a spark of mischief in his eyes that was matched by the one in Maria’s. She would grin and then vault onto his bare back. She arranged the sling so that the little girl was now over her chest, instead of her back, and touched her heels to Firebrand’s sides.

After that it was a careening adventure across the rock landscape, and through the few pine groves, Firebrand snapping playfully at the small pinco who gave off tiny pops as they exploded. Maria and Raphella were treated to the marvels of the mountain moors, from the old mossy rocks, to the sheer craggy cliffs towering above them. Sun dappled the sparse grass and heather, illuminating the granite rocks and lighting up bits of quartz trapped inside. They could see ferns in gullies and watch thin streams of snow melt trickling merrily off the rocks. Firebrand would weave between lightning rods, coming within a hairs breath of knocking them over with his fiery tail.

Finally they would come to the highest point of the property, and look across the sprawling mountain side. The bedrock thrust through the earth in some places, creating a softening grey to contrast with the vibrant green of the grass, and the almost brown dark green of the heather and bracken undergrowth in some areas. Tall pines towered upwards in tiny bunches, with birches, oaks, and maples to relieve the oppressive dark green with paler spring green. They clustered around large boulders, and very large granite outcroppings, their roots digging into the stone and slowly destroying the rock. Other than these protrusions the mountain side was rolling hills full of grass, and other vegetation, walled off from the outside world by sheer forested mountainside on three sides, and a dense forest on the other. The cottage faced the forest, as did the lesser barn and the other out buildings.

The only habitation that faced the pastures was the mareep barn, a large hexagonal building, full of hay, straw and grain in the upper loft, and sawdust on the ground floor from the mareep to lay on in cold weather. There were also troughs that were filled with grain every morning from the bins bolted to the wooden walls. This was Arnold’s job. The mareep, and everything devoted to their care were his responsibility. Maria took care of the rest of the farm.

After gazing at the immense expanse for a while, and appreciating the rugged beauty of the mountain, Maria would train her sights on the large grouping of yellow fluff balls and spur Firebrand in their direction. No matter how far away the flock of mareep and Arnold were Firebrand always made it to them in less than five seconds.

From there Maria would vault off her black rapidash, and order him to guard the flock in her queer language. She then danced lightly over to Arnold and after a joyous reunion lunch would be spread on the grass and they would have a picnic together, cooing over Raphella when they could tear her away from Thunder. Lighning was roaming through the mareep, keeping them on task and out of harms way. Firebrand would rush around the mainly placid mareep, establishing a perimeter that they could not wander past.

Lunch, for all of its enjoyabiliy, was always short. Arnold needed to be alert at all times. This early in the year there was less of a chance of a predatory pokemon trying to get a fat, juicy mareep, since most were busy caring for their cubs, but children got hungry, and serious hunting would soon begin.

Maria would mount Firebrand again and gallop around the pasture, looking for the spiky heads of oddish. When she found one she would carefully take it out of the soil, not even waking it from its daytime slumber. Once she had five or six of the grass pokemon she would go to the farm, and transplant them around her garden.

The garden was her passion, and she always had to look out in case stantler or nidoran came from the forest to eat her new seedlings. Firebrand was always around during the day, and Arnold had trained the barn delcatty, Muffin, to come at Maria’s whistle. However, for several years her garden had been unprotected at night. She had solved the problem by planting the oddish around her garden in a border. The powder that they spread at night was easy enough to wash off the plants when she harvested them, and it deterred all pokemon from her garden, even if it did make it a little hard to go outside at night.

Since it was spring Maria worked on making certain that the sun was just right for her plants, and they had enough water. Firebrand always seemed to think that this was a waste of time, but he always acquiesced to his mistress’s wishes to stand still and not try to eat the seedlings. Raphella, from her spot on the grass, was alternatively fascinated by the spiky oddish leaves and the impatient switching of Firebrand’s flaming tail.

Once the garden was finished Maria would finally go inside, and begin to cook supper and clean the house. Raphella was always somewhere in the room, watching her mother, or playing with her own hands and feet, which seemed to fascinate the young girl.

Summer was about the same as spring, only Maria never bothered with oddish, and concentrated only on the gardener’s bane of weeding. Summer also made the dangerous predators, like zangeese, more active. Arnold would come home with scratches or bruises that he didn’t know had gotten. Raphella got an education every summer in the damage and danger that a hungry pokemon could cause.

As autumn wore on pokemon began growing less active, and Arnold returned home earlier. Firebrand grew even more restless and snappish with everyone, even Maria. Maria tried to explain to the relatives who visited their mountain holding that he missed traveling south, the way he had done as a colt. They all nodded agreeably, none of the Lightcastles understanding the concept of wanting to travel, but Maria was from a nomadic family, with some heathen name. The very foreigness of her pokemon explained away all unsocial behavior to the mareep farmers.

The family came to the farm, to coo over Raphella some more, and to trade for Maria’s rare healing remedies, or her wonderfully embroidered clothes. Arnold went to Eleanor’s to give her some of his mareep for the breeding stock, and receive other pokemon in return. Maria made the day long journey to Susan’s house with all of the wool that she had carded in the spring and summer.

Raphella went with her mother in the pouch, as always. She spent her visit being observed by her curious three-year-old cousin William, who had never seen another baby before. Maria received long skeins of Susan’s renowned yarn and a pile of clothes that Susan and Tomas wanted embroidered over the winter. Money also flowed in, too, as Arnold went around to the various family members whom they had sent things to, in order to have them sold, or used in some other great working that would be sold later.

Raphella was ignorant of the commerce being transacted around her in this season. She merely watched things in her intent, solemn way. She saw the leaves change color for the first time with wondering eyes, and Maria began the harvest. Then it was time for making preserves, syrups, and potions. Raphella saw much more of the kitchen, her blue eyes drinking everything in, from her carry chair.

Winter hit hard and early, forestalling any attempts at the Family Harvest Fair, as the large clan called it. The clan would gather once or twice a year with everything that they had made and were willing to part with. It was a time for relatives to see each other again, and give the children, who were mainly isolated from others their own age, time with each other. Raphella did not get to see the boisterous gathering her first year, due to heavy snow that only the swinub were enjoying. She missed the multitudes of cousins, the treats indulgent aunts and uncles handed out, the clacking of staves as two of the adults squared off for a friendly bout over a keg of ale.

As winter set in, Maria spent most of her time by the fire in the cottage, embroidering, knitting, and weaving. She hated the cold as much as Firebrand, and missed her family most during this time. Her talks with Hercules were longer than they had been in the spring and summer, although she rushed through her chores in the barn.

Soon, however, winter changed to spring, and the great cycle began again. By mid-spring the only change from last year was that Raphella was tottering around after her mother like the torchicks. Firebrand tolerated Little Ella, as she was being called by Susan, for her mother’s sake, although he seemed to be getting more bad-tempered towards other humans. He was already six years old, and becoming stuck in his ways. Maria worked in the garden, taking out newly shorn wool on sunny days and carding it then and there, instead of before and after supper, the way she used to.

Summer and autumn came only too soon. Ella was quickly getting into trouble. Her solemnity seemed to have been left behind with the last winter. She wandered everywhere, pent up energy finally being spent. At the Harvest Fair she was named a dangerous menace by several uncles in a laughing way, and Grandmother Eleanor was heard to remark that Ella would be interesting to watch grow up, if only she would change her nick-name. High praise indeed; and Maria endeavored to think up a new nick name, without much success.

Winter rolled around again, and Ella became as stir crazy as Firebrand. She was obviously an active girl, only happy with running through the pastureland and rocks to climb. Maria tired to put her energy to work, and found that as long as the work had pokemon involved in it somewhere, either as part of the exercise, or the reward at the end, Ella performed the task diligently, if not enthusiastically.
They visited Grandmother Eleanor on Ella’s third birthday and Ella came away from the interview insisting that there were ghosts in the house, and that things moved around without anyone touching them. She was not upset by these occurrences, since they had helped her liberate several oatmeal cookies; however, she stated her ghost theory as fact.

Maria left with the impression that Eleanor felt that Ella was a horrible name to wish on a child, and that the ghosts that Ella was so convinced of were really the sleeping manetrike by the fire playing games with the copper cookie containers. She knew enough about basic electric theory to believe that the mantrike could have created sophisticated magnetic fields in order to amaze an impressionable three year-old.

[MorriganFearn]

((Part 2 -- I exceeded the character limit))

That spring saw Maria trying to teach Ella how to ride. Firebrand, at first reluctant, became happy with his new charge as he found that Maria was gaining weight again, while Ella was light and fed him sugar lumps. Maria also taught Ella how to groom Firebrand, a difficult task when he was feeling frisky, as he was liable to let the temperature of his mane and tail flare up at unscheduled intervals, just for the thrill of it.

That was how Ella’s mornings were spent. Her afternoons were a different story altogether. From after lunch until about three she was constantly with her father, “playing” with Thunder and Lightning. The russet red dogs, with their deep green camouflage stripes would run in opposite directions and Ella had to order them back to her without using words. It took her a while to get the secret signals down, and she only managed by listening to Arnold carefully when it came his turn to play the game.

When she was trotted back home by Firebrand and Maria, who always came out for her at the same time, Raphella worked on cleaning and carding wool, planting vegetables, and generally cleaning up the house. This work she found immensely difficult, however, her monthly visits to her Aunt Susan and Uncle Thomas in the summer showed her that she was getting off easily in comparison to Cousin William, who had to spend a full day with the mareep flock, and do the dusting.

In the autumn she stopped seeing her Aunt and Uncle as often as the need for harvesting grew. The mareep were given their autumnal shearing, their wool grew so fast that it was no hardship for the pokemon, and with Ella in the family to take that extra ten percent of the work of carding during the winter Arnold deemed the extra work not too taxing.

The Harvest Fair was sensational. Maria, although her stomach was swelled with a new child, set up a floor for dancing, something unknown as a recreational activity to the Lightcastles. Ella only remembered the whirl of vibrantly dyed skirts blazoned with her mother’s fine embroidery, and the sound of music. She could hear her mother’s voice singing over the crowd of aunts and uncles encouraging the embarrassed to dance.

For one moment she looked away from the heady scene towards the woods, her now green eyes taking in two furred forms watching the festivities. She could have sworn that she saw a ninetails and a roguish-looking vulpix watching the fun. But before Ella could call out that one of the “evil fire nasties” as she called them in her childish speech, they were gone as if they had never been there.

The only reason she even remembered that they had been watching was the expression in the vulpix’s eyes. It had been watching the dancers just as Maria had begun one of her songs from her homeland. The strong music had been floating in the air, as the adults started a swirling, centrifugal dance around Maria. The look in the vulpix’s eyes had been full of pain and longing, as if it wanted to join in, remembering the words to the song and the steps to the dance, and was barred, not because he was a vulpix among a horde of mareep farmers, all with tochicks of their own, but because he was an outcast of different variant.

Of course, it was an absurd notion, and her older cousin, Caroline, who lived in the city of Burram, told her so. Really, Caroline was the daughter of Raphella’s second cousin once removed, but in a family this large no one was picky about the details. Caroline then went on to inform her younger cousin that Maria had been teaching everyone a barbaric dance from Maria’s heathen homeland. No vulpix could make the journey from the barren wastes (where Arnold had found Maria and taken pity upon her for being heathen) to the Crag Mountains and live. It wasn’t possible.

Raphella believed Caroline simply because Caroline was a) older, and b) Hillary, who was a know-it-all and even the youngest children had been taught to despise her, began to poke valid holes in Caroline’s argument. However, when Hillary cornered Raphella after Caroline had finished ripping her to shreds with the scathing argument that she, Caroline, was prettier and more people liked her than anyone ever liked a sharp-tongued frump like Hillary, and rung out a description of the vulpix, Hillary had to agree that the animal was too young to have been able to make the trip.

“It takes three years for a human to get to the Jerran Desert, vulpix weren’t designed for long treks like that. The same trip would take them about seven years, and while that vulpix you described could have been seven years old, it’s unlikely if a ninetails was with it. Plus, why would a vulpix want to leave the desert? The tribes there worship vulpix. They believe that vulpixes are the children of the trickster God, Jin-Roh,” Hillary tried to let this information drop as a lure to get the three year-old to talk more to her, however, it didn’t work.

At six years old Hillary was more intelligent than seven Carolines combined, yet she was very lonely, too. What was the point in being curious about everything if you had no one to share the knowledge that you gained? In fact, if this line of conversation had been about any pokemon except for vulpixes Raphella would have gladly listened. However, a ninetails had taken Patriarch, and thus they, and the vulpixes who gave rise to them, were the worst of villains in Raphella’s mind, besides zangeese.

“Oh well, Raphe,” Hillary continued, seeing that this line was getting her no where, “the dancing’s breaking up; your momma prob’ly wants you.”

“Huh?”

“I said the dancing’s breaking --,” Hillary began again before Raphella shook her head and went off to find her mother.

Grandmother Eleanor watched the six year-old Hillary walk over to her parents.

She appeared to be listening to a voice that no one else could hear. She answered it in an undertone.

“Well, I think,” there was a suspenseful pause, “that Raphe’s a better name than Ella.”

There was a snort from the darkness outside the ring of firelight.

“Behave, I only took you on the condition that you’d be good.”The sensation of the Harvest Fair was soon drowned by a blizzard that settled over the Crag Mountains. Winter set in with a force that none could counter. In the second week of January Maria fell ill, and there was a great in rushing of relatives again. Frightened for the child that Maria was carrying, impatient aunts and uncles shooed Raphe to one side.

She began to spend most of her time in the barn with Firebrand. The stallion was bad tempered because of the cold, but that suited Raphe just fine, as she was bad tempered because no one was paying any attention to her. All her short life she had been the center of attention at the farm. When her mother and father weren’t paying attention to her, the various pokemon were. Now she only had the pokemon, and even then it was much, since Arnold had been ushered out, too, for hovering, and he was constantly with the mareep with Thunder and Lightning panting at his side. The few times Raphe went down to the mareep barn to see if the dogs wanted to play Arnold had asked his daughter how Mommy was. This incensed the young girl, as it was only two months away from her fourth birthday and he should have been asking her what she wanted.

However, soon Maria’s fever was broken and most of the relatives left again, although they all left some means of contacting them behind.

As winter switched to spring Raphe was a year older and now more active about the farm than her poor pregnant mother. She felt very responsible as she fed the psyduck and torchicks all on her own, never realizing that Thunder was always nearby to ensure that the combusken behaved. When Raphe trotted over to feed the swinub the job of watching over the young human was taken by Muffin and Thunder would go tearing across the pasture with the speed that only an electrically charged pokemon can manage.

Maria still managed to waddle to Hercules every morning, though, which left Raphe to take care of Firebrand. She would give him his oats and hay every morning, and then clamber up the split rail fence that separated his field from Hercules and his two miltanks. On the split rail fence she would groom him, and look enviously over at her mother, talking to Hercules. The bull was acting like an over protective combusken hen with her first torchick. Or like a father whose daughter is about to give birth. Actually the second comparison was more accurate, however, Raphe rarely saw other people, so her only points of comparison were pokemon.

Now, when Raphe went out to the fields with her father, the game was changed. This time one of the mareep dogs would make a run at the mareep, causing them to scatter, and Raphe had to signal the other dog to round up the mareep. It took her a while to realize that Thunder responded to the whistles better if they were pitched higher than the ones Raphe used for Lightning. After she figured that out Arnold timed her to see how quickly she could get the mareep back to the main flock.

The flaaffy did not look kindly on this intrusion, however. One day he, instead of obeying the way that Lightning was herding him, ran directly at Raphe and Arnold, the crystalline pink orb at the end of his tail crackling with energy. Raphe whistled in fear, and suddenly there was a deafening roar and the flaaffy stopped in amazement, as Thunder appeared in front of him growling. His fur stood out in spikes, and little electric shocks crawled like caterpies over his russet pelt, which was smoking fiercely. Ghost fires hovered around the growlithe. The flaaffy turned away in fear, and ran back to his flock.

Arnold explained to Raphella, as he led her home late that night, that Thunder and Lightning could use specially directed attacks, used in something called pokemon battles. Since they, like all other pokemon in the mountains were wild, as in had never been captured, they knew how to battle on their own.

What Raphe had seen, or rather heard, was Thunder’s speciallity, roar. He had followed it up with a combined growl attack and display. Thunder specialized in attacks that made pokemon fearful, while Lightning actually knew the truly dangerous attacks.

Raphe couldn’t help asking about ‘capturing,’ she didn’t know the word, but the way her father had said it made the word sound dirty. Arnold replied that some humans shut pokemon in strange object known as bells. After they were captured pokemon became stupid and couldn’t do anything without their Catcher’s permission.

“It destroys the spirit of pokemon to be caged like that. Trainers, as catchers are sometimes called, use their pokemon only to fight, and are very cruel to their pokemon. They sometimes come into the mountains after all of the rare and well bred pokemon that we have up here.” Arnold told his daughter.

The light was fading from the horizon and stars were coming out. Soon the oddish all over the mountain side would wake and begin to pollinate the air with their deadly spores. However, right at this time the star children, as they were called in the mountains, appeared. They were simply little balls of soft golden light that floated through the air.

From the largest pine grove that actually scaled the mountain on one side of the pasture Arnold could see a small brown body, and bright black eyes. Illuminated in the light from the softly glowing orbs the little pokemon sat on the grass, its white tipped ninetails-like tail waved gently as it watched the star children in happy wonder.

“Daddy, what is it?” Raphe couldn’t help asking.

At this the two sharp ears twitched, and the pokemon raced back into the pine wood. Arnold let out a breath.

“That is one of the rare pokemon that Catchers want to capture more than anything else. It’s called an eevee. Your grandmother tried breeding some when she first came here, thought that their jolteon form could make good herd dogs. But it didn’t work out very well, so she let the seventeen that she had go. They’re now all over the mountains. The eevee are a secret that we must protect, just like Grandma Eleanor’s growlithe, mareep and delcatty. There are many strange pokemon here because of Grandmother’s breeding, and we can’t ever let Catchers break them by caging them,” Arnold ordered seriously.

Raphella took this message to heart as she walked across the pasture. She also promised herself to be on the look out for different pokemon in the future. She only concerned herself with the farm pokemon before this. However, she knew that if something like an eevee could be on the property than so could a vulpix, or worse a zangoose. Luckily, persian hadn’t been seen since Grandmother Eleanor came to the mountains to marry the now dead Grampa Lightcastle.

Spring became summer, the way seasons always did, and the only remarkable thing that year was the birth of Raphella’s younger brother three weeks after the flaaffy incident. His name was Mark, and Raphella soon grew tired of trying to play with him as he was as solemn and observant as she had been. Nothing about him was anywhere as near as interesting as looking out for pokemon from Firebrand’s back.

Maria sighed, and said that they really should have taught poor Raphe on a ponyta, since the girl’s legs would become bowed from having to stretch across his broad back. After that Maria taught Raphe how to ride side-saddle, without the saddle, since they cost too much. Raphe didn’t like it very much; however, she obeyed her mother’s will. When her mother was watching, that was.

As summer wore on Raphe was spending much more time with her father out in the fields, learning about everything from curing mareep maladies to tracking pokemon in the dense forest bordering their cottage and barn.

Raphe saw a fearow swoop down and carry off a lamb before her eyes. She watched as Arnold shot it two weeks later when the fearow tried it again. A ninetails got three torchicks from the coop, but evaded Arnold’s attempts at hunting it down. A family of zangoose had apparently staked out a watch around the three farms on the mountain. Grandma Eleanor was beside herself with rage when her newest flock of mareep was butchered by them under the eyes of her Arcanine, Brave Heart, who barely made it out of the conflict alive. His side had been slashed open, exposing ribs and lungs. Obviously these zangeese were desperate. It was rare that they banded together, and even rarer that they were this vicious to anything but seviper.

When Raphella was asked what a seviper was she was answered that it was a type of snake pokemon, like the gartria that Maria encouraged in the garden. The gartria were small black serpentine pokemon with long yellow stripes going back from their eyes. They kept bugs away and were the sweetest things on the planet as far as Raphella was concerned. She couldn’t believe that anything would want to hurt what she assumed were simply larger versions of gartria.

The autumn went on, and the zangoose became more active, not less. They lived a nomadic lifestyle; however, they also seemed to have a den near Tomas’ farm. It made sense, since out of Grandmother Eleanor, Tomas, and Arnold, Tomas had the largest farm with the most mareep. From the reports that Tomas made, it looked as if the zangeese were starving and desperate for food before winter came.

Winter did come, with its biting blast, and the zangoose reports ceased. It was believed that they had been killed by the cold. Raphella was cooped up indoors much more that she liked. She had learned of delibird during the autumn, and would have given her right arm to see one. This wasn’t so big of a sacrifice, she reasoned, since like most of the Lightcastles she was left handed.

However, instead of seeing this wondrous new pokemon Raphella was put to work learning the family history of the Lightcastles, writing, and arithmetic. She preferred the practical lessons, figuring that there was no way that pokemon could be brought into school work to make her life interesting.

So the winter passed until the last week of March when Raphella turned five.

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter Three: In Which Raphella Has a Very Narrow Escape~
or
~When All Is Said and Done I’m Still Blue~

Spring had come unseasonably early that year. Raphella was not complaining, though. It was better to have a birthday when she could go outdoors and explore than be stuck indoors learning how to read, an activity she loathed with a passion because she was slow at it. Both her mother and father gave her most of the day off once she had finished with barnyard chores under the watchful eye of Thunder and Muffin.

Raphe was tall for her age, even among the Lightcastles, who tended to be on the tall side, anyway. Since the Lightcastles and all the other people who lived in that region were so isolated they generally had only one type of “look.” Most people had straight thick hair that was a blazing coppery red. They were tall, and due to the outdoors nature of their work, they were tan and weather beaten. The thing that made them truly distinctive, though, was their intensely bright green eyes.

Raphe only differed from this stereotype in a few areas. Her hair was a darker shade of red, and had a tendency to wave rather than cascade in a waterfall of molten copper. Her eyes were also the same dark green as the pines around the pasture. This darkening of her features was probably due to her mother’s dark skin, eyes and hair. Raphe tried to keep her thick red hair short, and spiky, so it looked as if someone had lit her head on fire, the way her uncles and older cousins wore their hair. It was not working, as the wavy hair refused to stand upright conce it grew past a certain length. This had not discouraged the young girl, yet, though.

This morning she was five years old and rushing across Firebrand’s pasture. She had figured out how to do hand springs last night, and couldn’t wait to show the rapidash before she took him exploring. Once she finished feeding and grooming him Raphe eagerly took him to a corner of the field not covered in his leavings and demonstrated her newly found skill. She then elected to walk over to the Donphan Rock, as the large boulder in one corner of the pasture was called, on her hands. She managed to get there and bounce upright, full of exuberance as any of the mareep lambs.

After jumping around a bit and singing one of her mother’s songs she finally clambered up on the craggy boulder and mounted Firebrand.

“Y sol erti jinla sin a mi,” Raphe finished the song on that proud note, although she had no idea what she had just sung, and then leaned in closer to Firebrand’s head, careful not to touch the flaring mane. “Today I want to look at the stream that feeds the pond,” she ordered.

Firebrand snorted, as if this was the most foolish notion he had ever heard, however he set off at a brisk trot to the pond. Automatically, as they neared the wooden fence Raphe pushed her knees into Firebrand’s back for a more secure position. Firebrand responded accordingly, the muscles under his coat moving smoothly in a liquid motion, as the jolting to Raphella increased. But she easily forgot the discomfort as the landscape rushed past thrillingly, Firebrand’s black legs carrying them faster and faster, until even Thunder and Lightning would have been hard pressed to catch up with them. Then for a moment they were flying. Firebrand cleared the fence with ease and landed; his shiny front hooves first, followed by his back legs.

After that fence it was a few seconds worth of rushing across the barnyard, and then they had reached the pond. Here Firebrand slowed to a walk. They stepped around the pond, to find the rushing stream that fed it. Raphe slid off Firebrand’s back to walk on the mossy bank. The water sprayed over a stony bed to reach the destination of the psyduck pond. The glistening drops flew up to hit Raphe, and she laughed. Taking off her socks and shoes, and rolling up her leggings, she walked into the shallow water, biting off a gasp at the cold temperature.

Firebrand stayed well away from the water, however he shook his head at this interval, and several fireballs flew out of it, to light on the water. They were quickly consumed; however, the water rushing from that point was very warm.

Raphe just grinned and continued to play about in the water, imagining water pokemon all around her. From pokemon her mind turned to nymphs, and mermaids. Firebrand decided that his charge’s mind was getting muddled by the water once she started inventing watery dragons and charging at them with a stick. He delicately trotted to the edge of the bank and reached out to grab Raphe’s bedraggled sweater with his teeth. Although he got an eye full of water for his troubles he managed to convince Raphe to continue the journey.

The young girl began walking through the freezing cold water upstream, until even she was forced to admit that her feet were growing numb. Firebrand consented, just this once, to kneel down like a common tradrom. Even then, it took several minutes for Raphe to clamber on his back.

They continued to follow the path of the stream. It led them away from the clearing that the cottage and the barn was situated in, and took them into the outskirts of the forests. Firebrand picked his way among the trees, watching where he was placing his hooves, in case he broke an ankle in a nidoran hole. The leaves were just uncurling on the trees, and the bright sunlight shown through them. This created a soft green and golden dappled effect on the ground.

Stepping through the forest Firebrand noticed that the ground was getting rockier under hoof, and that they were steadily going uphill. It was only to be expected since they lived on a (guess what) mountain, and they were trying to find the source of a spring. However, something about this made Firebrand uneasy, it there was a zangoose following them he would be nearly defenseless, on rocky ground, near water.

They followed the stream up hill for the nearly a quarter of an hour. Firebrand was beginning to get comfortable under the trees, although his mane and tail were little more than glowing embers, since he was deathly afraid of lightning the forest on fire. Suddenly, there was a break in the trees, and the stream, which had been growing wider and wider, was found to gush from real mountain river.

This was enough for Firebrand, and he began to turn back, however, Raphe wasn’t as easily satisfied.

“Scaredy-skitty, this river has to flow from somewhere. We have to find that.”

Firebrand snorted, and stomped uncertainly. The river coursed from the top of a rocky slope covered with trees. The stones surrounding the base of the slope were too smooth and tall for him to attempt getting a foot hold. He walked to the hill, though, because Raphe wanted him to go there.
She easily dismounted, and began clambering up the rocks.

“I’m sure you can go around and find somewhere less hard for you to get up here. If you can’t, I’ll come down and we’ll go home,” Raphe called down to him in her small voice.

She continued climbing the hill. After she had gotten past the base rocks the going was actually pretty easy. She only had to grab onto the protruding tree roots to help haul herself up the steep incline.

If she had been feeling less excited she would have wondered at the lack of pokemon in a forest normally teaming with them. If she had been more experienced she would have taken this as a warning that there was something around here that was either eating all of the other pokemon, was scaring them off, or was doing both. However, Raphe was neither experienced nor less than exuberant.

When she reached the top of the hill Raphe gasped in wonder. The source of her stream and the river was a gigantic waterfall that tumbled from (probably) the top of the mountain. It crashed into an enormous, yet surprisingly shallow pool. Raphe ran to the closest part of the massive body of water, and looked at the bottom. It was made out of beautiful rocks which looked like sapphires under the water. Paler blue weeds waved like fins in the water. There were strange hills under the water, made out of those large stones. Raphe gazed into the water, working up her courage to reach in and grab the nearest stone. They were all so beautiful Raphe felt obscurely that it would have been like stealing, even though she had no real concept of the word.

Tiny koimarin darted through the pool. They looked agitated, as if there was something wrong, but they could not put their fins on it. Then there was a splash at one end of the pool, and a frustrated feline-like growl.

Raphe started up instantly, stones from the ground in each hand. She looked across the wide expanse of the pool to see what she thought to be a linoone trying to catch a fish. Relieved, Raphe tossed her stones in the pool. Linoone were no threat. If it had been a furret things would have been different.

The stones hit the bottom of the pool. The blue scales forming the bottom of the pool shifted in annoyance at the small impact. An enormous blue eye opened just in time to see a long clawed hand to dig into the soft membrane of a finned tail. Pain flared through the serpentine body at the floor of the pool.

Raphe turned away to find out what was taking Firebrand so long, when the pool behind her erupted with a roar. She took the moment into her mind and memory in slow motion.

The movement of the water fountained ever upwards, until it seemed to reach the top of the waterfall. The drops from the initial geyser flew down as if they were fat diamonds, glinting in the bright spring sunlight. They hit the roiling, churning water of the pool even as the water still powered upwards, forced there by a colossal column of scales and muscle. The water finally cascaded off the fierce leviathan, exposing blue gray scales that looked like a stormy sea. The rage filled blue eyes were glowing red, and the dorsal fins of the great sea dragon were erected in the aggressive attack position. From the end of the pool farthest away from the waterfall, in other words, closest to Raphe, a serpentine section of the body raised itself above the water, the muscles bunching to move the great length of the finned tail, still dripping blood from the miscalculated slash attack.

The large gyarados opened its large maw to the heavens and gave another bellowing roar. The supposed linoone scrambled upright on two feet, the orange stripes on its body clearly visible against their white background. It answered the challenge with a hissing screech of its own.
The red eyes locked onto the tiny white creature, and the monstrous blue head dipped down, ready to eat this miserable pokemon that had dared to attack it. Suddenly, a quick movement from the corner of one enraged eye attracted the atrocious pokemon’s gaze.

Raphe was running along the shore line of the now very deep lake. She had been told to always protect the mountain pokemon from predators, and a gyarados definitely qualified as a predator in her mind. She only barely registered that the pokemon that she had supposed was a linoone was walking on two feet, and its arms were way too long for the skunk pokemon.

She saw the impossibly large head bearing down on her tiny running body. Then she was flying through the air, her left side stinging. The small girl landed in a heap just in front of the pokemon who had damaged the mighty gyarados’ tail.

Struggling upright, Raphe gazed in rapt fascination at the towering column of muscle and sinew covered in blue scaled armor before her. Water was still streaming down the sides of the monster, catching the sunlight to look like a glass covering. The eyes were glowing fires in the sapphire body. The sheer size of the gyarados was breath taking and awe inspiring. One of the orbs was as big as Raphe.

The blocky head rushed down again to headbutt the insolent human away from the prey. Instead of running the way all human insects did, this tiny specimen put out a hand as if to stop the awesome power of the ancient monster. The gyarados did actually stop, in sheer surprise at the recklessness of the act.

He could see the worship in the girl’s eyes. For a moment he was flattered by this mere human. Used to fear and terror, it was nice to know that there was something out there who was inspired with awe. However, the pokemon that she was shielding had to pay for its crimes.

There was a tiny “no” in a breathy voice from the human. Looking down at the tiny figure again he saw strange golden light sweeping out from the back of the human to create insubstantial wings that were three times larger that the girl. Strange, humans weren’t supposed to do that, were they?

The fins framing the great face bristled. However, the obvious awe of his majesty was enough for the gyarados to feel magnanimous. He sunk into the lake, becoming its bottom again, turning it back into a shallow pool.

Raphe turned, still filled with amazement, to the pokemon who she had protected. It jumped back a pace, as did she. The thin white creature was just wasted bones and fur, but the burning orange eyes and the unusual lightning patterns of the orange stripes was enough to tell Raphe that this was a zangoose. The long black claws at the ends of its arms shot out another inch.

Hissing, it bared long canines in a savage snarl. Raphe scrambled back, close to the edge of the pool, trying to grab at some stones. They danced out of her way as a thundering filled her ears. Looking up, Raphe saw Firebrand pounding to where she was facing the zangoose. The zangoose also saw Firebrand, it was impossible not to see him.

The rapidash had sparks flying from his shiny black hooves, his mane and tail were burning white hot, the black horn protrusion from his forehead was glowing as white as his mane, and smoke, pouring from his nostrils, created a billowing smokescreen around him. He looked like a demon out of hell, his eyes glowing just as red as the gyarados’ had.

The zangoose reacted quickly, darting forward and slashing at Raphe. Had he not been so weak from hunger he would have managed to slash her chest open. As it was, his speed was no where near that of Firebrand’s, and the rapidash hit the zangoose with an angry crunch. Whipping his powerful neck around, Firebrand flung the broken zangoose from his head, where the horn had impaled itself into the zangoose’s chest.

The zangoose arched limply across the pool. At the zenith of its journey there was a bubbling roar from the pool, and the gyarados’ head broke the surface again, snapping the zangoose in its jaws, and then disappearing underwater for the last time.

Raphe didn’t even have time to react as Firebrand flung her onto his back, by grabbing her with his teeth and using the same neck twist. He cantered away, hell-bent on reaching the farm. Raphe glanced back at the shady pool before the encroaching trees could block off her view. The pale blue membrane of the tail waved above the surface in triumph, even though the slash was still bleeding.

Firebrand didn’t stop running until they got back to the barnyard. Raphe did not notice, but he had entered from the mareep pasture. If anyone had been wondering where they had been they would have believed that Raphe had been exploring the nooks and crannies at the northern end of the rocky moor, nearest the summit of the mountain.

[MorriganFearn]

((Again, I exceeded the character limit. Part two of chapter three))

Indeed, that was what Maria assumed when she came running out the door, to confront Firebrand.

“Didn’t you hear me calling? Bad Firebrand, and Raphe, I don’t know what’s to be done with you. You’re all muddy and you have to go to your grandmother’s. Not to mention I swear I heard a battle in the woods. There might be Catchers out there. You shouldn’t run off on your own so much. Now go inside and change.”

Despite Maria’s best efforts, when they had to leave for Eleanor’s Raphe was still wearing her muddy sweater, although she had exchanged her torn and dirty leggings for newer leggings and one of Maria’s embroidered skirts to go over it. It was a deep blue, as was the headband that Raphe inexpertly tied around her short almost curly hair. The only reason she stuck to the mucky sweater was that it was it was her only blue one. The gyarados from the morning was still buzzing around her head and influencing her choices.

Since they were running late Maria let it go, although she gave Raphe the look which meant that there would be chores in it for her tomorrow. Maria ran to Firebrand and gave Raphe a hand in mounting, before vaulting on herself. Mark was secure in the sling, and Maria kicked Firebrand into action. He flowed like water over the mareep pasture, along one of the rutted paths that were scattered all over the Crag Mountains and nearly impossible to find unless you knew where they were, and finally over an even larger and rockier pasture where five different flocks were grazing peaceably. At the center of this swath of rooky hillside a stone fortress squatted, like a recalcitrant torkoal.

Lightcastle fortress dated back to before the Crusades, Raphe knew from the lessons over the winter that her mother taught her. She still did not know what the Crusades had been; however, they must have been pretty long ago. But it was not age that made the building impressive, nor was it the architecture, which was squat and ugly. There was an automatic feeling of magic about the place. The lush garden surrounding the fortress, and guarded by the curtain wall helped add to the aura of wildness that could only be tamed by an adventurous spirit. Raphe always felt the urge to run across the hills, never looking back, to see where her road would take her after visiting Eleanor’s.
They cantered down to the fortress, getting pitying glances from the mareep they passed, which seemed to think that they were crazy for trying to be on time, since they already were so late. Mareep were not very concerned with time, as long as they got their food. However, for some strange reason humans obsessed over it, counting hours and minutes, they had even divided the day as far down as to the one sixtieth of one sixtieth of one twenty-fourth. Humans called it the second to save time.

Firebrand, however, ignored the curious stares of the mareep, as he made it into the barn yard with a clattering of diamond hard hooves, and an impatient shake of his head. Grandmother Eleanor raised an eyebrow and clapped appreciatively.

“Good to see you make it, Raphe, you, too, María.”

Grandmother Eleanor was the only person in the mountains who said Maria’s name with the proper accent. It obviously pleased Arnold’s wife, as she always would spread her skirts in a graceful maneuver known as a curtsey when she saw the formidable old woman. Raphe always admired the technique, however she never managed it, nor saw anyone else copy Maria’s example.

Maria gracefully slid off Firebrand, and helped Raphe down, so that the young girl alighted just as gracefully as her mother, without the slippery slithering that usually occurred. Maria gave Eleanor a smooth curtsey, mumbling something about would have been here sooner, except that there had been this issue with Raphe going off to explore.

“Never mind,” Eleanor interrupted, “I wouldn’t begrudge my grand-daughter the right to explore on such a marvelous day. Come inside, I have lunch on the table. After that we’ll go down to the breeding pens and I’ll give you your skitty.”

Raphe’s eyes lit at the mention of her very own pokemon. Well, of course, it wouldn’t be her possession, but it would be her friend, and bonded to her and the farm. She had wanted a pokemon of her very own for as long as she could remember, perhaps a little jealous of the close relationships that Maria and Arnold had with the various pokemon on the farm. Raphe always felt in some obscure way that the farm pokemon were humoring her by allowing her to play with them.

Grandmother Eleanor and Maria were already walking to the curtain wall, and into the lush gardens as Raphe slipped out of her day dreams. She ran after the two women, who were discussing ponyta breeding. Firebrand was the only rapidash on the whole mountain, and while they had let him play stud for some of the churriga, the lama like pokemon which some members of the family bred instead of mareep, none of the foals had been even close to the horse pokemon.

There was quite a contrast between the two women. Maria was tall, dark and graceful, in her deep red skirt and black embroidered peasant blouse. Eleanor was anything but. The old woman was short by Lightcastle standards, her hair was snowy white, and her weather beaten skin was wrinkled, in contrast to Maria’s smooth brown coloring. Instead of a sense of grace and eternal youth, there was an ageless presence of competence and reliability resting on the grandmother’s stocky shoulders. She was still dressed in her barn clothes, serviceable leggings and a tough over coat.

They walked through the bright green gardens to what romantically would be called the keep. Realistically it would be called a crumbling square block of stone. It had been carved from the mountain itself. The valley on the mountainside where it rested had been excavated only by man power and lightning blasts. That was how strong Josiah Lightcastle’s ampharos had been. Lightcastle fortress was made out of some grey rock that had probably been part of the core which the Crag Mountains had built themselves around. Not even Wild One, the ampharos, had been able to blast it apart with his thunder attacks. So, the ancestors of the Lightcastles, instead of building the village that they had planned, used the rock. Their water pokemon had carved the inside of rock into livable space, instead of blasting it away.

Now the large building, instead of holding the hundreds of humans and their pokemon housed only one old lady, her many, many pokemon, and a lot of closed up rooms with secrets hiding in the strangest corners. Raphe was certain that there were ghosts, there. She wanted to meet them, instead of seeing them flit out of the corner of her eye, or watching objects move around.

Lunch was unfortunately devoid of mysterious happenings. Raphe ate her sandwiches quietly, and listened to the anecdotes that her Grandmother was telling her mother. The kitchen where they were eating was a comfortable room with North facing windows. The bright spring sun seemed to give it an airy feeling. Raphe watched the motes of dust dancing in the light. She imagined sprites dancing in airy grace, the dust was glitter falling from their shoes, and had magical properties.

Finally, lunch was over, and Maria tactfully withdrew to curry Firebrand. She was not one of the Lightcastles, and even if she had been she never would have intruded on the ritual of The First Skitty.
Eleanor took Raphe from the table, and led her into the back of the warren-like rock, where the breeding pokemon were kept. It was generally tradition for the first skitty to be very young, so that they were well bonded to their chosen Lightcastle.

“Raphe,” Eleanor said as they walked along, Raphe looking intently in all the pens they passed on the off chance that she could see a new pokemon, “I don’t often get to talk to you much, even though you live so close. What do you like to do?”

“Ride Firebrand, play games with Thunder and Lightning, watch Hercules, herd the mareep with Dad, lots of things, really,” Raphe answered dutifully.

“Do you like to explore? Your mother said something about you being late because of that.”

“Oh, yeah,” Raphe looked down, trying not to blush. Lightcastles were supposed to be solid, steady, and responsible. Her exploration mania did not exactly fit that bill.

“I used to love to explore when I was your age. There’s so much to see, and do. I never understood how everyone could look down on it as long as you did it in your free time.”

“Well, I also do it during lessons, sometimes. You know, sneaking out to run around, instead of doing reading and writing,” Raphe did not sound quite as properly ashamed as she should have been.

“You’re young, you should. Just don’t make a habit of it after you get your skitty, alright? You have to read books in order to help take care of this pokemon. There’s a lot of things that I can’t tell you on caring for pokemon that are written down so you don’t have to find out on your own,” Eleanor pointed out.

“Really?” Raphella looked amazed and interested. “The only things I’ve read so far are things like histories and they’re really boring.”

“None of the interesting stuff is written down,” Grandma Eleanor assured, “for example, did you know that out of a five hundred page biography of Josiah Lightcastle there isn’t a single mention of the water pokemon who helped build this place?”

“Why is that interesting?” Raphe was just trying to be polite.

“Because, Josiah never used water pokemon in his entire life, but he did make a deal with one of them to build this fortress. We’ll never know which one, or the deal that was made. It could be very interesting, because any pokemon powerful enough to carve this place out might still be around.”

Wow. That put a whole new spin on history. Raphe felt that history couldn’t affect her, but if this pokemon was still around, then maybe it could. Maybe she could make friends with this pokemon and they would go exploring together.

“Do you have a favorite pokemon, Raphe?” her grandmother asked into the silence created by her startling announcement of a powerful ancient pokemon possibly roaming around.

“Well, I love Firebrand more than anything --,” Raphe began uncertainly.

“No, I meant, if you could raise one pokemon in the whole world, what would you choose?”

Sapphire bright scales and burning eyes. Water cascading down in shimmering droplets. Sinewy body lashing out from the depths.

“A gyarados,” Raphe replied without thinking.

“Really?” Now it was Eleanor’s turn to look amazed and interested. “They are dreadfully fierce and vicious. Why would you want a pokemon capable of eating you?”

“Because they’re beautiful,” Raphe said, still lost in her memories of that morning.

“You’ve seen one?” Eleanor questioned sharply.

“Yeah! Er –, in a book,” Raphe came stumbling back to the present.

“Ah, the dragon’s curse rears its ugly head,” Eleanor laughed slightly, pretending to go along with the story. “Gyarados are dragon pokemon. Dragons tend to have the ability to enthrall humans who are not weary of their dangers. Easy enough to get captivated by a book. I remember the first time I saw a real dragon pokemon. It was a dragonair. He tried to drown me for coming into his territory. I wanted to be nothing but a dragon guild master after that. However, here I am: a simple mareep farmer. Gyarados are magnificent, yet very dangerous. They can eat someone your size in one gulp.”

“But they are so -- wow,” Raphe protested, forgetting that she was not supposed to have met one up close and personal. “They are just there. Like they are totally in control of everything.”

“Very astute,” Eleanor replied absently.

She couldn’t help being interested in this grandchild. A gyarados of all things. Eleanor had asked the question to every five-year old who came to her. They generally answered one of the pokemon running about their family farm. Hillary had said ninetails, but that had been expected, since she had been reading a book about ninetails all through the cermonial lunch. When Eleanor had asked again, last year, Hillary had replied that she was thinking more along the lines of an Alakzam. Since Hillary had been reading a book called Great Psychics through the Ages Eleanor was certain that the ninetails comment had been brought on by reading.

Just as she was certain that the gyarados had come from real life. Raphe had an unusual number of scrapes and bruises on one side, even for an active farm girl. On her seventh birthday things would probably be very different, however, it wasn’t every girl who managed to see a gyarados. It was interesting that Raphe had been seemingly entranced by the pokemon that would have undoubtedly killed her. How had she managed to survive such an encounter? Eleanor would have to ask Incense once her grandchild left.

[MorriganFearn]

((And I exceeded the character limit again XP. Part three))

Raphe glowed with pride, without knowing what the word “astute” meant. She wanted to start up the conversation, again, however it wasn’t polite to talk to adults before they talked to you.

“Ah, here we are,” Eleanor stood over a wooden enclosure from which one of the grey delcatty looked at her in disinterest. The brown skitty moved their round heads, as if they could see Eleanor through their closed eyes.

“Now,” Eleanor continued, “I think,” she looked Raphe up and down, and smiled to herself, “that you should have someone who fits your favorite choice of colors. Blue, c’mon blue. Found you a partner at last.”

None of the skitty moved, and the delcatty just inclined her head regally downwards to lick the head fur of one of her kittens. Raphe felt a little disappointed. Her skitty didn’t even want to come to her? Eleanor didn’t look too impressed either.

“Sorry, Raphe. You know what they say about skitty: growlithe come when you call, skitty take a message and get back to you. Plus, she doesn’t like the name Blue. You’ll have to give her a new one once she comes. Here skitty, skitty,” Eleanor called again. “Don’t make me get Brave Heart.”

The queen delcatty meowed imperiously. She wasn’t anymore enthusiastic about the skitty’s show of bad manners than Eleanor. Plus, these humans were disturbing her kittens. Finally, from behind a few grain sacks in the corner a blue grey nose poked out, and Raphe held her breath excitedly.

“Blue is a very different breed of skitty. She comes from the country of Russahain where it’s cold all year long,” Eleanor told Raphe as the young girl crouched down, holding her hand out and making coaxing noises. “I got her in January from a friend. She was the runt of her litter, and Mikal said she would need a human willing to put up with a bad temper for the reward of her friendship.”

Raphe nodded eagerly, not really paying attention. She just wanted to see more of this new friend than her nose. Finally, the skitty came into the light, deciding that it would get the tiny human to stop making those annoying noises. She began licking her blue-grey fur, pretending to ignore Raphe.

Raphe, in the mean time was observing this strange creature with enrapt fascination. She was the strangest skitty that Raphe had ever seen. Her head was more triangular than round, and this pokemon was far taller than any skitty Raphe had ever met. The reason for this was obvious. The skitty’s legs were too long for the tiny body, just as the head was too big, and the ears would have been better placed on a nidoran. However, the sleek blue grey fur entranced Raphe, and the whip-like tail made her doubly impressed.*

“Hi, I’m your new friend!” Raphe said excitedly and put out a hand to pet the sleek creature.
The cat pokemon had ignored Raphe to this point, but no longer. She hissed at the intruding human and raked her with icy cold claws. Glaring at the human through slitted green eyes, the skitty-like thing began backing away.

The queen delcatty, Elizabeth, had enough of this young kit’s insolence. Eleanor was Elizabeth’s catcher, and if Eleanor wanted something to happen, then it would. Hissing obscenities at the ungrateful feline, Elizabeth sprang up, and stalked to the blue fuzz-ball. She then head butted the pokemon, as if it were one of her own kittens, to Raphe, who was nursing the bleeding hand and looking hurt.

Elizabeth then proceeded to instruct the mutinous cat pokemon on proper etiquette for treating poor clumsy humans, who could not do without cat pokemon. Turning on one delicate paw, Elizabeth flowed gracefully back to her litter, satisfied that her job was complete.

The blue skitty looked abashed, but still angry at being forced to take care of this silly human kitten. She wanted to be running across the icy landscape of her home, or at least free to roam the mountains of this strange place. Certainly she had no wish to be stuck in this horrible stone house. She was already five weeks old, more than enough time to be hunting risee through the snow.

Raphe, in the mean time, was wondering if this was a bad joke on Eleanor’s part. She couldn’t imagine her grandmother doing something this mean to her. All the pokemon on the farm liked her, and the wild pokemon about the farm were her enemies, so she didn’t feel sad that they didn’t like her. This skitty was supposed to like her. What had gone wrong?

Raphe looked imploringly at Eleanor. Her grandmother merely nodded at the stand-offish skittyish pokemon.

“Pick Blue up. Don’t worry, she won’t bite, this time. Come into the kitchen and I’ll get you something to put on those scratches.”

Raphe put her arms out gingerly, and scooped the skitty up, trying to remember to support its hindquarters. The feline squirmed out of the uncertain grasp. However, that one instant of touching the pokemon forced Raphe’s mind back to the terror and majesty of the gyarados. She could feel the muscle under the dense fur, and the icy claws bit into her, this time not tearing, but they did dig through her sweater and into her arms. She also could understand, somehow, why the skitty was so uncooperative.

Really, this little kitten wasn’t any different from Firebrand during winter. She was in a strange place, trapped and confined. Her natural instincts of hunting and her natural need for independence were being stomped on, and it was driving her crazy.

Feeling better about having been given a pokemon who was not exactly thrilled about life in general and Raphe’s in particular, the young Lightcastle followed her grandmother to the kitchen. The skitty looked longingly at her lair behind the old grain bags, and then followed, after Elizabeth hissed at her.

The three came into the kitchen, and Eleanor ordered Raphe to sit down and eat some of the grilled trouan from the ice cupboard while Eleanor found the scratch salve. The blue-grey feline looked at the food above its head on the table. It smelled good, even if it was cooked. It wasn’t prey, but it was fresh meat. It had to be better than the dried meat soaked in miltank milk, which was what the elder human gave her.

Raphe looked down when she felt something tugging at her skirt. It was Blue. No, wait, Blue didn’t like that name. What would Raphe call her, anyway?

The skitty formerly known as Blue tugged at the blue skirt again, this time pulling with her sharp fangs. When Raphe still looked at her in confusion the little cat rolled her expressive eyes. She made a faltering jump to Raphe’s lap, and then the table. From there, she stalked around the pottery vase of flowers that was the center piece, and lunged at the dead fish pokemon. She managed to hook her small teeth into the head, and began dragging it off the plate. Raphe watched in amazement, and when the fish reached a point where its greasy body might have touched the clean wood table, Raphe took the wooden fork and sthingy to provide support.

The small skitty thing let go promptly, and yeowled her displeasure. The clear claws shot out from between her toes, and the skitty approached the thieving human with murder on her mind.
Raphe looked completely shocked. Muffin never acted like this when she helped the cat liberate chunks of meat from the cutting board.

“I was just trying to help!” the girl protested. “We shouldn’t get the table dirty. Mama would have a miltank if I got Grandma Eleanor’s house messy. That means you, too.”

The skitty gave her a suspicious look, as if to say: I’ll believe you for now, but you’d better watch it. You’re on probation, human. She then pushed the fish back on the plate, with bad grace. She hunkered down, her tail lashing, and began to ravenously tear the flesh off the thin bones.

The fish was all gone three minutes later when Eleanor came back in with the bandages, and the salve. The skitty who-was-not-Blue was sitting in front of the wood stove, washing the slightly longer fur on her bib. Raphe was sitting near by, with a dictionary of names. She was slowly and painfully spelling out possible names for her new pokemon, which the skitty did not reply to.

“Ahh…ell…ell…eh…ss…oh…nn. A’ellll is son. All is son? Allison? How’s Allison sound?”

The skitty gave no response, and Raphe sighed.

“Try a name of someone famous. Cat pokemon usually like to be named after someone important, or something that has some obscure literary reference,” Eleanor suggested, walking over, and gently prying the tome from her granddaughter’s grasp.

“Obscure literar--ary reference?” Raphe asked, confused.

“Some character from a book,” Eleanor simplified.

“Oh,” Raphe said dismissively. “Is Mama here? I want to show her my skitty!”

“She’s still currying Firebrand in the front yard. I think she’s getting a little worried, to tell the truth.”

Raphe jumped up excitedly, and scooped up The Unnamed Skitty, ignoring her protests, this time. The young pokemon was going to dig in her claws, when she saw Elizabeth saunter into the kitchen over Raphe’s shoulder. Thinking her plan over she saw the inherent flaw, and settled for trying to squirm from the five-year old’s exuberant grasp.

She managed it just as Raphe was walking across the front yard. Maria had been whispering things to Firebrand in her language, and turned when she saw the quick movement of the struggling pokemon. Her fine dark brows snapped together. Why had her daughter been given such an unruly pokemon? Was this Eleanor’s way of saying that her daughter wasn’t as good as the other grandchildren because she, Maria, was not a local?

“Mama! Look what I have! Her name is Blue, only not!” Raphe cried excitedly. “She really likes hunting things, and she’s going to be like Aros, only I’ll be able to get her to understand that we don’t want to hurt her, this time, I promise! She already gets it a bit!”

Maria winced at the mention of the half feral flaaffy Ram who only Arnold could go near. Raphe had tried for a couple of weeks to make the ram like her. The slightly crazy pokemon still had burns from Firebrand’s tail after the rapidash had to protect Raphe from a lightning strike. Her dark eyes went to the purported skitty, and then over to Eleanor, who was walking toward their little group. Surprise was clearly written on her features.

“Blue will be a challenge, but Raphe’s up to it,” Eleanor commented pragmatically.

“I see. Raphe, explain to your new friend that we need to go home, and that we have to ride on Firebrand to do that,” Maria said uncertainly, looking at the young katzblauen who was being passed off as a skitty.

“OK, we need to ride on Firebrand’s back,” Raphe explained slowly and clearly to the pokemon, wishing that she had a name for the creature.

The delicate triangular face turned up to Raphe, the unfathomable green eyes unblinking. She seemed to be giving Raphe a pitying glare. It was as if the pokemon felt that she was the one who was smarter and had to condescend to Raphe, instead of the other way. In the coming years Raphe would come to realize that this was generally the case. In the coming years the katzblauen would also realize that generally the case did not mean all the time.

Firebrand stomped angrily, telling the skitty that she could either get her royal tail end on his back along with Raphe and the Mistress or he could toss her on to it, and would send spirit fires to hound her for five years, just to sweeten her oh-so-charming temper. It was amazing how much expression could be put into one simple motion.

The katzblauen acquiesced with bad grace. Would no one leave her alone? This annoying kit seemed to have friends all over the place. It was just her luck that one of them was a vicious fire-type who was experienced and evolved.

Maria helped Raphe to mount, and then mounted herself. The cat pokemon jumped between them and climbed up Raphe’s back to perch on the girl’s shoulder. Raphe tried to hold as still as possible during this procedure, as the cold claws dug into her skin painfully. Her mareep sweater was old and tattered, and the still not fully formed claws of the pokemon pierced the normally unpiercable wool with ease. She had been knitting a new one as her before going to bed project, and Raphe was determined to step up the process.

Firebrand snorted steam from his nostrils. He had been itching for the stuck up kitten pokemon to try something. The killing of the zangoose had made his blood thirst rise. He wanted to really scare that kitten. A little spirit fire wouldn’t have really hurt the young thing. The burn would have healed over in a matter of months. Two years at most.

___________________
*In case you haven’t guessed yet, and you might not have if you aren’t into cat breeds, Raphe’s new liability is based on the breed of cat known as a Russian blue. I will point out that in Russahain these pokemon are not known as skitty, and have a decidedly different evolution than delcatty. Eleanor knows this. However, she took the pokemon because she wanted to breed the traits in with her delcatty, and because this pokemon was the runt, it’s very unlikely that it’ll evolve, so she just pretends it’s a regular skitty. It just easier to say skitty, than explain that katzblauen means a skitty with blue fur and ice type abilities.

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter 4: In Which Blue Matures Somewhat~
~Or~
~Jealousy, Thine Name Is Feline~

The spring came and went. Raphe gained the respect of the-pokemon-who-refused-to-be-called-something-so-undignified-as-Blue by including a stop in the barn loft every day, and letting the feline hunt things to her heart’s content. It did not hurt that Muffin was always near by, watching the young katzblauen like a hawk. Whether this was for Raphe’s safety, or I-will-never-answer-to-Blue, it was uncertain.

Risee weren’t the only pests in the barn. One morning the skitty-ish pokemon ran into a large grey ratatta. She tried to dash at it, planning to pounce on its back when it ran and sever the connection between the spinal cord and the brain with one well placed bite. The only problem with the plan was that the ratatta didn’t run.

It merely gnashed its fangs and tackled her, using it’s far more concentrated weight to bring her disproportioned body to the floor. It probably would have torn the young kit’s throat out if Raphe hadn’t thrown one of Firebrand’s rapidash shoes at it. The accuracy of the throw, even with the uneven object, was true, and it caught the ratatta by the throat, knocking the rat pokemon off the presumed skitty. Muffin was already swooping down on the vermin, and it didn’t even have a chance to shriek as the brown and grey servant of pest control sliced open its stomach, displaying the innards.

Muffin then brought the rat from under the iron shoe, and shoved it before Don’t-call-me-Blue. The barn delcatty patiently displayed how to hunt this new enemy, as both Raphe and the actual student of the lesson watched with interest.

The trick to dispensing with ratatta was to jump directly over them as they were rushing. They could adroitly dodge, of course; however, they could not easily make a total 180 degree turn in the fraction of a second that a feline would need to perform the same feat. By the time a cat pokemon had turned around the ratatta was stopped, and trying to turn their bodies at what a truly experienced ratter would consider a leisurely pace. The ratter would then have to swat the rat pokemon hard with their paw. If the swat didn’t break the rodent’s neck, then the disorientation would allow a good feline time to leap on the back, and biting through the weak spinal column. It was always good practice to land on the back so that it was broken, anyway. This was the method that would work for young hunters. There was a more effective way; however, it needed a fully grown delcatty’s height to be successful.

It might have been the rapidash shoe that gained the katzblauen’s respect, or it might have been the free range hunting rights that she was given, or it might have been the fact that Raphe never under estimated the young pokemon’s abilities at anything, although she sometimes enthusiastically over estimated. However, the respect was earned, and it was not lost, though very grudgingly given.

Raphe, as the summer progressed, began to spend more and more time with the mareep and Arnold, and less time around the barn yard. Eleanor had given Arnold a young, half-trained growlithe that a contest* showing friend of hers wanted to turn into a show pokemon. Eleanor was too busy with her own schedule, she was trying to help Caroline train a young ponyta, who, like all ponyta, was vicious around young children, into a good show pokemon as well. Since the last pokemon who needed extra help had gone to Thomas and Susan, Arnold got this one.

He used the time training the growlithe to train Raphe as well. She already knew all of the whistles needed to instruct the pokemon from her games with Thunder and Lightning. All that was left was to learn how to teach them to the young pup.

It took a lot of time and patience, something that Raphe was occasionally short of, since Maria had taken to making her learn arithmetic as she did her barn chores. Math was an even greater evil than reading, and it made Raphe cross because she was very bad at it.

However, she did manage to find enough patience to start the procedure, even if she did not always finish it. Arnold got angry with her when she did that, and feeling thoroughly rebuked and chastised, Raphe began to knuckle down under the tediousness of the chore.

The first two or three days she worked on getting the eager puppy to come to her. This was done with the help of Lightning (the reason that they used Lightning instead of Thunder was that Thunder had a voracious appetite for the dried meat bribes that were used to train the pokemon, and would have eaten all of the strips in one go if allowed), who would take the young growlithe away from Raphe, and then when he heard the signal he would run back to her.

At first the growlithe didn’t follow, but when he smelled the jerky that Lightning received in tiny strips for coming to the young girl he followed readily enough. In fact, sometimes he came before the whistle. However, he quickly learned that treats only came on the whistle.

Then there was the annoying process of weaning him from the treats, and getting him just to do it for praise. It was around here that Raphe began to get exasperated. Trying to make the puppy pokemon work for any more praise than the usual good job at the end of the day was even worse. This was where Raphe got bored and wandered away to find Arnold. The tongue lashing she received for that kept her on task for the rest of the multitude of commands that she had to make the growlithe learn.
By the end of August Arnold took over, refining and polishing what Raphe had taught the pokemon, and showing Raphe other training techniques. They were to give the growlithe back to Eleanor at the Harvest Fair in late October. He wanted the growlithe to be the perfect show dog for his mother’s friend.

It was not that he wanted, or even needed, his mother’s approval on this. It was simply that Raphe had been the main trainer for this pokemon, and Arnold wanted to show the rest of the family that he was being a good role model, and that only having pokemon as regular friends had not diminished Raphe’s education in any way.

Arnold knew that Susan did not think very highly of the fact that Raphe was growing up without any other human company, and rather wildly, according to Susan’s thinking of how little girls should be raised. He did not want to remind his sister-in-law that they had all been that way. It would have been rude to point out that Lightcastle children, girls and boys alike, were held to a high standard. By ten they were expected to be mature adults. He knew that it disturbed Susan that this five-year old could play perfectly well with her eight-year old cousin, William, who had reached the stage where his games were considerably rougher than playing with dolls.

Susan was from Burram, a fair sized town at the edge of the Crag Mountains. She had fallen in love with Thomas at a fair; they had gotten married, and moved into the wilderness of the Lightcastle Clan land. She still didn’t understand the threat that rogue catchers posed to the valuable resources here. The Lightcastles had to have every able-bodied person available to guard the precious pokemon in the mountains. It was as simple as that.

There was a ring of villages at the base of the mountain range, and they managed to send about three-quarters of the catchers who came to the Crags to other places. The Lightcastle’s had to deter the other twenty-five percent. Once Raphe was twelve Arnold could begin taking his turn at the land guarding again, and when Raphe was thirteen she would do that, too. It would be in shifts. Raphe would be at the borders of the land for two weeks, and then Arnold would take a two week shift. All Raphe would have to protect her would be her family staff, a good scion blade in her belt, and two pokemon (most likely her katzblauen and whatever herding pokemon that she would have chosen on her seventh birthday) at her side. Maria would also take a shift, once Mark was able to look after the farm on his own. This way the land was guarded, and there was always someone in the pasture and the farm yard. The Lightcastles were always encouraged to have large families.

Susan did not understand this, though. She was a good solid farm girl. However, she was no fighter. Maria had been staving off rogue catchers from her clan’s rapidash herds since she was Raphe’s age. To her the only thing that had changed, now that she was married, was the terrain, and the pokemon that she had to protect. Susan never would be put on a shift. She would have been a liability, and she was living up to the other end of being a Lightcastle woman. William had three younger brothers already, although no sisters.

So, Susan criticized Arnold for letting Raphe run completely wild. He took it in stride, knowing that Susan really wanted a daughter, and that Susan did not understand what was needed of a Lightcastle woman, and if she ever did have the long desired daughter the girl would be just the same. However, that was alright, they needed to have someone able to raise children, and devote their entire time to making things to sell. The crafts of women like Susan and her hoped for daughters would be what the Wild Changeling Girl Raphe was going to protect. Susan was a master weaver.

Maria was a wonderful embroiderer, and one of the best herbalists on the mountains. However, she never had enough time to devote to those pursuits, which stopped her from being in Susan’s league. Plus, Maria liked change, she was a natural Jack of All Trades, and proud of it.

So, Arnold finished up the training, making certain to teach it the things that would keep it from being distracted during a herding competition. The growlithe needed to be able to work with different handlers, and ignore the crowd, which might be rowdy, or making delcatty calls, or any number of things. This was the hard part. They had no real way to distract the growlithe, he had been around the farm enough to filter out the distractions available.

However, Arnold had trained show growlithe in the past, and knew what to do. It was amazingly simple, really. All one had to do was provide the distraction of a strange, and preferably aggressive pokemon, who was unable to attack the growlithe, and yet was very visable, and more importantly audible. This was where the swinub who hated fire types were used.

The mareep farmer and his wife took three of the porcine pokemon and put them in a large airy box with a clear quartz side. They set the box a fair distance away from the mareep that the growlithe had to herd, and then set the growlithe to herding. From there it was several weeks of long afternoons with the swineub trying to get out of their box, and at the growlithe, the growlithe being alternately curious, angry, and scared, and a lot of scorched turf.

Finally, though, the growlithe was finished training. He ignored everything but his hadler’s commands, and performed flawlessly under both Raphe and Arnold, even though the swinub were trying to use earthquake on him (the box had to finally be taken off the ground and put onto a bench, since the swinub were managing to cause tremors, even through the thick slab of rock at the base of the box).

“He’s not going to be a champion, he’s too young,” Arnold told Raphe as they walked homewards. “There’s a lot of competition in the Crags, especially south on Greenslide. Janet, she’s your third cousin twice removed, I think, is an obsessive show growlithe breeder. She was rather uppity to your grandmother, and that’s why Grandma has been trying to raise a good growlithe for her friend who lives in the same area. Anyway, this little fellow is too inexperienced to do any better than fifth in the shows. In three years, though, he might make first.”

Raphe nodded, because that’s what she was supposed to do. Most of what Arnold was talking about flew merrily over her head. She had never been to one of the shows, although her father had promised to take her the next time he showed Thunder. They never showed Lightning because he was too apt to see the spectators as threats to the herd.

Her skitty-which-was-not-really-a-skitty-although-Raphe-was-oblivious-to-the-fact appeared out of seemingly no where to wind around Raphe’s legs and nearly trip her in the manner of all felines. While the pokemon did not purr at seeing her human, this was obviously a big step forward. In fact, over the last few weeks the katzblauen had been getting jealous of the strange growlithe who had been monopolizing her human’s attention. She had decided to launch her bring Raphe back campaign this evening.

Raphe, of course, felt good about the world. The skitty her grandmother had given her had been a hard nut to crack, yet it seemed that her policy of avoidance was a good idea. It had taken several long conferences with Firebrand and Muffin to reach the conclusion that the little feline would be more interested in Raphe if Raphe began to gradually become more occupied with another pokemon. These conferences had taken a while, since Raphe did not understand what either of her coconspirators was saying. She had ended up by resorting to a sort of twenty questions, where she would ask yes or no questions and the other two would either shake or nod their heads.

However, her plan was working, obviously. The not-skitty was getting jealous. Next step: find a name for the strange creature. She couldn’t go around calling it Hey You for the rest of her life. Raphe had tried every name that she could think of, and then some strange ones that her mother had suggested, and now had been reduced to painfully working her way through the long and boring Histories that Maria was making her read in hopes that a name would catch the feline’s fancy. The problem was that all of the names were names of men, and like almost all feline pokemon, this not-really-a-skitty was female.

She knelt down to stroke the young creature. The katzblauen hissed, and ran up Raphe’s arm. She perched on her favorite place, Raphe’s shoulder, and her long icy claws dug in. Raphe had no recourse but to carry the katzblauen inside with her, and try to ignore Arnold’s chuckle.

Walking into the tiny kitchen, Raphe started to get the three plates out, and set the table, thinking that the pokemon would leave her shoulder soon. The katzblauen did not. She didn’t move when Raphe finished her chores, and she was still on the human’s shoulder when Raphe sat down to dinner. She was still there when Raphe finished dinner, despite glares from Maria; Arnold’s suppressed laughter, and the twitching movements that Raphe was making under her slight weight. The katzblauen had decided to remain on the shoulder for the rest of the evening as a punishment for the human being so presumptuous as to pet her.

Raphe, after tedious lessons, which the pokemon on her shoulder found incredibly interesting, trotted up the wooden stairs to her loft room. The upstairs of the house was small, and separated into two halves. The first part was the attic, and the second part was her room. It was actually a very large space, however, the ceiling was the sloping roof of the house, and the floor was level with the eaves, which gave very little room in which to stand. This made it seem smaller every year, as Raphe grew increasingly larger.

The feline pokemon merely hunkered down and stayed on Raphe’s shoulder, until Raphe started to get undressed. Then the young cat made a daring jump from Raphe’s shoulder to the bed, and the sweater followed her. The pokemon ignored the intrusion of the knitted human covering. She walked to the feathery pillow, kneaded it, inspected it via sniffing, and finally plunked down on it and went directly to sleep. When Raphe got her nightshirt on and tried to move the purring animal. The katzblauen would not budge, and Raphe ended up spending the night using a tiny corner of the pillow that the furry body did not quite cover.**

This pattern of pillow stealing was repeated for the rest of the week. The only upside was that Raphe was allowed to go through the day without having her shoulder used as a sedan chair. By Friday Raphe got a second pillow from winter storage, and used that.

______________________
*contests on the four continents are different from contests in the regular regions. If you’ve ever seen a sheep dog hearding competition then you’ll understand what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, then all I can say is read Only One Woof by James Harriot.

**almost all cat owners have experienced this phenomenon. It’s either the pillow or the keyboard, and in the case of my cat it’s both.

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter Five: In Which There is a Harvest Fair~
or
~The Naming of Cats~

Now that the pillow stealing was put on hold Raphe began to enjoy the company of the-skitty-who-hates-the-name-Blue. They were not always together during the day, but she did get to talk about her day with the feline while the pokemon was choosing which pillow was hers for that night. As September changed into October the pokemon started following her, from the barnyard, after chores were done, to the pasture. Then, she would leave, having walked the human as far as the pasture, and knowing that there were innocent risees to kill.

Now it was October. The leaves were falling thickly off the trees, and there seemed less pokemon around. Most of the grass types had gone underground. Both Arnold and Raphe watched with longing as the veegee powered their way through the air, heading south in their long ‘v’-like formations. Maria was gathering what she believed she could take to the Harvest Fair, and Arnold was going over what mareep he felt that he might be able to trade. Raphe was also going over the things that she had made over the winter, and trying to decide what she could part with in exchange for whatever a relative might bring. Finally she settled on some old sweaters that had seen better days, but would probably be quite happily used by a younger cousin.

They fed the pokemon early in them morning, and then locked them in their respective barns. None of the sheep pokemon appreciated this; however, it was the only solution for keeping predators coming for the mareep.

There had been several zangoose sightings over the mountains. The family of these feral pokemon must have survived the winter. Raphe had seen the father, in fact, just before he had been eaten by the gyarados, although she did not know this. Not that it really mattered. Two half-starved zangeese running around was probably just as dangerous as three half-starved zangeese. These two had proven themselves incredibly clever, and had never managed to get cornered once, and only seen a hand full of times.

Therefore, the Lightcastles were being extra careful today, as they left for the family fair. Maria and Raphe had finished packing the old hay cart with the craft items, and Arnold was loading the five mareep that he was bringing. His staff was strapped over his back, and Maria had a quiver full of arrows and her small rapidash bow. Raphe was entrusted with watching Mark and the unnamed growlithe puppy in the back of the cart. Arnold would be driving the cart, Hercules strapped between the shafts, as Maria rode Firebrand, her bow cocked and ready for trouble.

Perhaps because of the extra responsibility of being five years old, or because of her ignoble position in the back, watching over the portions of the family who could not watch themselves, but Raphe noticed for the first time how many precautions her mother and father were taking. She tried to remember if they had ever done so before, and realized that yes, they had always gone to the Harvest Fair like this. Raphe then went on to wonder why Maria had no family staff of her own, and just that strange rapidash bow. All of the Lightcastles, women and men, had family staffs, the hard polished yellow or pink orbs held on the top of the carved wood or etched metal by a fine net of wires, each in an individual pattern.

However, no answer was forth coming, and Arnold soon yelled to Hercules that they had to get going. Raphe heard the crunch of the steel rimmed wooden wheels against the packed dirt of the road, and with a lurch the heavy wagon began moving. Mark, who was just old enough to walk, was trying to stand up, and look out the slats as the familiar landscape moved past them as if by magic. Raphe had her hands more than full trying to keep the growlithe puppy from jumping from the moving cart to do really pay attention to her brother.

The little flame headed boy watching in wonder as they came closer to the beginning of the forest, which seemed to swallow up the road. Then the cart was swallowed into the dark green coolness as Hercules began to slowly build to his real pace. Mark cocked his head to one side, turning his body sideways to look back at the farm.

He laughed delightedly to watch a blue and grey blur race after the hay wagon. The mareep that had been loaded on watched wearily. This was an abnormality to their knowledge of harvest fairs, and they didn’t like abnormalities. However, only a brief crackling of sparks betrayed their unease, and Raphe didn’t notice, since she had was busy figuring out that the well trained puppy would probably respond best to the command “sit” if palmed a few treats.

The blue grey streak was level with the slowly moving cart, and it paused for a second in its liquid-like movements. Muscles tensed under the silky coat, and the small pokemon leapt aboard the wagon. Mark clapped his tiny hands and gave a gurgling giggle. The katzblauen nodded regally, and then stepped daintily past the mareep, and walked over to Raphe, who now had the growlithe in her lap. The feline pokemon sniffed in disgust, and quickly commandeered a stack of embroidered clothing to sleep on for the rest of the journey. Raphe grinned, thinking what a fun fair this would be, since she could show her pokemon off. Mark toddled over, and stroked the katzblauen. He rarely ever saw the pokemon, but he did admire it from afar, and since Raphe had her lap full of growlithe she couldn’t shoo him away.

They reached the large clearing full of other families’ wagons about noon. Raphe and Mark, of course, jumped from the back of the wagon to see what other children were there. The growlithe followed, and the katzblauen sniffed daintily before finally taking up the rear.

However, most of the children that were already at the clearing were either younger than Mark, or old enough to have a family staff, and were helping their parents set up booths around the edge of the clearing. Raphe wouldn’t play with anyone Marks’ age on principle, and there was a barrier that not being ten years old created between the other children. The staff wielders spoke with complex words, and walked with authority. They often had a skitty and a growlithe hybrid trailing in their wakes, and sometimes a few mareep that they probably wanted to trade.

So, Raphe and her younger brother walked dispiritedly back to their parents’ wagon, and began to help Maria set up the booth for the craft items that they wanted to trade, and another booth where Maria had her healing potions, and then Raphe was told to get the growlithe to herd the five mareep into the makeshift pen that Arnold had set up as Raphe and Mark were helping their mother.

Now that all the preparations had finished, Raphe and Mark wanted to go roaming again, to see if any of the people who had come during all of this preparation had children who they could play with. However, Arnold forbid Raphe to go until they had a chance to give the growlithe back to Eleanor, and Mark was not allowed to go anywhere without his older sister. The two children sat on the grass surrounding the mareep pen, and sighed as they watched the bustle of the fair continue around them.
Soon there were booths on both sides of their mother’s. The booth on the right belonged to a (great) aunt who baked millions of pies just for this occasion, and another belonging to an old uncle who specialized in carving ingenious wooden toys.

Mark and Raphe stayed still, like good children, waiting patiently for their grandmother, and trying to ignore the wonderful smells wafting from Aunt Sally’s booth. Raphe pretended that it was a great test of will power that an ogre was making them undergo. If they so much as twitched a muscle then the ogre would steal them away and eat them. This little game allowed her to keep quite still, until Uncle Ian came over to their booth, and began to show Mark a new toy that moved if you pulled strings attached to its arms. It was based on a toy from the far away continent of Damixtri and call a Mary-‘n’-ate. Then Raphe moved to touch one delicately carved hand and felt quite disappointed when no ogre came to eat her.

Finally, around two o’clock, Eleanor came by the booth, and Raphe had her place in the spotlight, showing off all that she had taught the excitable young growlithe. Eleanor pronounced herself satisfied, and said that her friend could take the growlithe from there. She also seemed very gratified that Raphe had taken Blue (who hated that name) with her to the fair.

Raphe felt very grown up, and basked in every ounce of glory she could get until she saw two cousins, who were part of her age group, run to Aunt Sally’s booth. Suddenly reminded that she was hungry by the sight of Caroline and William arguing over an oran berry pie, Raphe quickly extracted herself from Eleanor’s queries after Blue’s health.

The young girl ran up to them, her brother following along behind, just as Aunt Sally put away the pie, and brought out a mince meat pie. It wasn’t Raphe’s favorite, however she asked for two slices; one for herself and another for her brother.

William had lost the small oran berry pie, even though Aunt Sally promised to bake him another one. Right now he was trying to avoid Caroline’s annoying gloating, and quickly seized on the opportunity of talking to Raphe about the growlithe. He quite like his younger cousin for the simple reason that she was not loud and bossy, or quiet and bookish, which denoted the only other two female cousins his age, Caroline and Hillary.

So, the two cousins walked along, deep in a lively conversation about how many treats should be palmed over the course of a given day. The shafts of golden light falling through the trees, and in and around the various booths, made everything seem wonderful and fun. As if everything was being slowly covered in particularly fine honey. Mark and Caroline trotted after the two, as did Raphe’s feline pokemon.

Caroline tried to interrupt the conversation repeatedly. She disliked not being one of the crowd, even if it was a crowd composed of the baby Mark, and two rustics like Raphe and William. She wished that Hillary was here, simply because then she wouldn’t be the only girl in the company of two boys, and one girl who should have been a boy.

However, William was thinking on the same lines when he asked the well-known gossip where Hillary was. He was hoping that Hillary would get into one of her famous arguments with Caroline. That was always entertaining, and it would pay Caroline back for having gotten that small pie.

“You know, I don’t know where she is,” Caroline said after some thought. “Her family’s wagon should have arrived, but it hasn’t. I know!” she was suddenly struck with a brilliant idea, “Let’s ask Joseph. His family lives on the mountain right next to her family. He’s bound to know.”
This drew the other three up short.

“But Joseph’s ten,” William protested, only too well aware of the rift between eight and ten years of age.

Raphe was less observant; however, she appreciated the gap. It was the staves; they carried authority that she dared not counter. Another sign of adulthood which she idolized so was carried in those long staffs. Mark just continued taking little bites from his still hot mince-meat pie. He didn’t understand any of it; he was just following Raphe because the pretty blue followed Raphe.

Caroline, however, was not so enamored of the rules that governed being a Lightcastle. She had no intention of growing up as one of this petty and backwards family. Well, she would grow up as one, but she wanted to make a name for herself. As it was her options were so limited here. She could either be a merchant, or a farmer, since she had shown no talent for any craftwork. Farming required far too much with too little profit, and being a merchant was so -- unstylish.

Caroline craved independence, and power, which probably was the reason why in about fifteen years she would make one of the biggest mistakes of her life in disobeying Hillary. However, now she was eight years old, and saw a way to prove how superior she was yet again.

Instead of arguing with her cousins, she looked for Joseph, and when she had found him she ran up and asked if he knew where Hillary was. Of course, she waited until all of the attention of her cousins was on her. Caroline had a natural flare for the dramatic, and knew how to make a good entrance. However, their receptive audience not only took in Caroline’s bravery in asking a ten-year old, but also his surprising answer.

“They sent her off to some school. That’s why they’re so late; her Da needs to pick her up. Say, what kind of skitty is that?” Joseph had caught sight of I-am-not-Blue, who was currently perched on Raphe’s shoulder, nibbling on the mince-meat pie which her mistress had held up to her mouth to take a bite, and had handily forgotten to take that bite.

“Just a skitty,” William answered, as Raphe nodded, dumbstruck that a ten-year old was actually talking to her.

“She was the runt of the litter,” Raphe added, trying to sound intelligent.

“Pity,” Joseph replied, “she looks quite beautiful, but runts are only ornamental most of the time.”

He wandered off, looking wise and commanding. The four children went into a huddle. Raphe was stroking her supposed skitten, feeling a little ashamed that she was only ornamental, whatever that meant. The katzblauen, on the other hand, was more interested in the filling of the mince-meat pie.

Caroline was awed by the revelation that Hillary, who she had always thought of as weak and annoying, was going to a school. Grandmother Eleanor had told her about schools. She had said that there were schools where Caroline could learn the trick riding that Maria sometimes showed off at these events. That Hillary got to go to one of these was unfair. Caroline loved to ride her ponyta, Jewel, and longed to learn everything that one could do when riding. However, her parents did not think that it would be safe for her to go to the mountains where Maria lived, and they did not think that it was safe for her to go into the outside world beyond Burram.

William was thinking of Caroline’s brashness. He knew that his mother wanted him to marry Caroline, since her best friend was Caroline’s mother, and Caroline was everything that Susan thought a little girl should be. However, the idea of spending the rest of his life with someone who was so willful and temperamental was not William’s idea of a good time. He hadn’t quite figured out exactly what marriage meant, however, if his parents were any example then he would be joined practically at the hip with Caroline, who he didn’t like.

Turning his young mind to more pleasant matters, he asked innocently if they should go back, and see if his pie was ready yet. Since Raphe’s pie filling had been eaten, except for the raisins, and both Caroline and Mark had finished theirs, the four agreed that this was a good idea. They wandered back in the direction of Maria’s booth, talking (at least Caroline was), and looking at the amazing sights that their family had provided.

They stopped at one stall where there were some dresses that Caroline wanted to admire. They were beautiful pale green things dyed in a leaf-like pattern that enchanted both the girls. William thought that it was boring, and Mark was more interested with the grain of the wood on the cart. Finally, William had enough, and after much tugging he managed to get Caroline to leave.

Raphe followed, because Raphe was supposed to follow, and Mark stumbled along behind. He had never walked so much in his entire life, and now his legs were beginning to be sore. It was a new sensation, and he didn’t really like it very much, however his young mind had not figured out that he could simply sit down, and not follow the other children.

Their walk led them past several friendly bouts. Raphe and William could not help stopping and watching them with excitement. The clicking of the sticks was a fast and furious rhythm and the movements of the two contestants a wonderful dance. Caroline was bored by the proceedings, of course, however she could not really complain as William continually tried to keep the group moving.
However, despite the best efforts of their cousin, when the group did reach the booths it was almost three. There had been a few ponyta to watch, which had really engaged Caroline, and William had suggested that they saw how the professional herd growlithe did, and coming up to Maria’s, and thereby Aunt Sally’s stand were all the different mareep, which both William and Raphe shared a keen interest in.

With their minds on pie, which they all so richly deserved, the four children walked past Maria, and the young girl who was bargaining for some of the medicines that Maria made. Mark was the only one to turn around and toddle back, when he saw a large mareep skin where he could go to sleep.

Caroline and William began arguing over pies again, and Raphe had to chase her blue pokemon away from the mince meat. The young red-haired girl decided to wander over to Uncle Ian’s stall, and admire the fine wooden bird pokemon that he had carved. She doubted that even ferocious unnamed-Blue would try to attack them.

On her way past Maria’s booth between the pies and the toys, she was tapped on the shoulder and turned to look into a pair of giant eyes behind which the face of her assailant was unimportant. She gasped, and almost screamed, before the person who had tapped her on the shoulder spoke.

“Hey, Raphe, can I see your shoulder decoration?”

It was Hillary’s voice, however, that face --

“Y-your face,” Raphe stammered, as Decidedly-not-Blue looked at the strange apparition curiously.

“My what? Oh, these,” Hillary took off the glass and wire contraption. Her eyes instantly became their normal size and shape. “They’re something that lets me see well. A friend at school gave them to me last Family-day. They’re called bi-foe-cals.”

“Oh,” Raphe couldn’t think of much more to say.

Hillary had grown. She was now taller than most of the Lightcastle eleven-year olds wandering around. She also seemed as sure of herself as any of the ten-year olds. Also, she was not carrying around a stack of books, although she did have a large satchel strapped to her back. This was a changed Hillary.

She seemed totally interested in Raphe’s skitty. Hillary peered at the tiny feline, and then reached into the bag that she was carrying over her shoulder and brought out a bite of jerky. The feline pokemon smelled the meat, and immediately transferred herself from Raphe’s shoulder to Hillary’s waiting arms.

Now that Hillary had the confidence of the pokemon she began to walk away, with the katzblauen, and Raphe had to either run and catch up, or never see her “skitty” again. Hillary seemed totally engrossed with the pokemon. It was not that she really meant to steal Raphe’s katzblauen, it was merely that the pokemon had caught her attention and nothing would do until she had discovered its secrets. Raphe was of nominal interest to Hillary in comparison to the blue feline in her arms.

William was walking to where he had last seen Raphe, his pie in hand, and worried that Maria might blame him for loosing her daughter. Caroline was following, feeling very annoyed because he was not listening to her. Caroline’s annoyance, however, changed to fury as they were nearly bowled over by Hillary, and Raphe tagging along in the rear. Hillary said something about being sorry, and continued to her destination, which seemed to be the thick woods surrounding the clearing. Raphe grabbed Caroline’s hand, and the surprised eight-year old grabbed William’s, and they all followed Hillary into the woods.

Hillary did not stop walking until she reached a smaller clearing which was usually used by the children when the adults began talking to each other about things which the younger generation could care less about. However, since it was still early in the afternoon, and most adults were still either setting up, or in the habit of giving things away to the younger generations, the clearing was deserted. It was merely a small circle of packed earth and pine needles, with a few fallen logs in a loose circle, and the remains of a fort in one of the trees.

Hillary set Raphe’s confiscated pokemon on one of the logs, and absently scratched the pokemon’s head as she routed around in her pack.

“Raphe, didj’ya get this from Grandmum? She supposed to be a skitty?” Hillary asked absently, getting out a book, and beginning to flip through it.

“Er --,” Raphe began, before Caroline interrupted.

“Why do you get to go to school? And I want a real apology for trying to knock me down!”
Hillary turned, looking surprised that anyone else was here.

“Mom and Dad sent me because Grandmum thought that it would be best. She said I’d be an awful herder,” here Hillary blushed, and looked slightly hurt. “So, she suggested that I go to school in Geratram. I’m glad she did! I’ve learned so much! Can you believe, they have an entire room there just for books?!

“I’m thinking about going into pokemon medicine, that way I could help everyone in the mountains. Did you know everyone was really shocked when I told them that we didn’t have a regional healer? I didn’t even know what a healer was until I went there. It’s someone who goes around healing pokemon when they get sick or seriously hurt in a battle.

“But I’m not going to do that forever. I just think that I ought to help out here as the unofficial regional healer until I’ve been able to pay everyone back for sending me there. Then I might go back, and specialize in something. C-Guide, maybe.

“It’d be wonderful to find out all of the different pokemon in all of the different places, wouldn’t it? That’s why I wanted to get a look at her. I swear that I’ve seen a picture of her type of pokemon in a book, and it wasn’t a skitty! Isn’t it fascinating?” school seemed to have made Hillary five times more animated. It was a little scary.

“So you don’t learn fancy riding?” Caroline asked, wistfully.

“Oh no. Who would want to? I barely have enough time to read, let alone learn how to ride more than I already do.”

“What about my skitty?” Raphe asked plaintively, the questions of what the heck battles and C-Guides were completely flew out of her head when she realized that someone else was saying that there was something wrong with Blue (who did not want to be called Blue).

[MorriganFearn]

((Part two))

“I’ll find it in a second,” Hillary replied quickly, continuing to flip through the book. “I wish I had caught a phagebio,” she muttered. “It would make things a lot simpler. OK, here it is,” She flipped the book around so that the other three could see.

At the top of the left hand page there was a beautifully drawn picture of what could have been the feline pokemon, if she was not so disproportioned in real life. The picture was of a sleek grey-blue creature with ears slightly too big for the triangular head; however in every other contrast it was perfectly shaped. The long legs rippled with muscle, and the tail was almost twice as long as the pokemon. The smooth paws had a set of long, retractable icy claws, and the teeth slightly overhung the lower jaw, a milky white against the burnished blue and steel gray. The intense green eyes stared regally out from the page, as if admonishing the children for something that they had done.

Underneath the detailed drawing were several paragraphs of writing. Raphe tried to puzzle these out, however, the flowing script was very hard for her to read. She contented herself to looking at the drawing when Hillary started reading the information contained in the paragraphs.

“This is a katzblauen. In infancy these creatures are often mistaken for miss-born skitty. It takes many years for them to mature, and reach their full height of 3 feet. When first born their bodies are small, although the legs are exceptionally long, as is the tail. The height and length of this pokemon is what truly distinguishes it from true skitty. The coloring, while unusual, has been known to appear in regular skitty, so it must not be taken as a given that a blue-grey feline pokemon is a katzblauen.

“Katzblauen are normal pokemon, however, when catching these creatures, or battling them, it is important to remember their strange claws. Fully grown katzblauen have a chemical covering over their claws, much like a natural version of lava slice. However, instead of secreting lava from their talons, the scratches left by a katzblauen will frost over, and ice will spread from the wound, thickening and growing until a pokemon is frozen solid. This is generally how the older ones kill invaders, even fire types, in their territory. The frost can be counteracted by a lava slice in the same spot. However, since this technique is so new, not many pokemon know it, and it is always best to find the nearest healer, instead of using lava slice.

“Katzblauen are only found in the Ice Peaks mountain range and Russahain. Although they do not mind hot weather they are happiest when it is snowing. Extremely cold conditions are ideal for this pokemon, and they become very irritable when indoors for long periods of time. Therefore most of these pokemon are either barn pokemon, or left totally wild.

“As to evolving, they do not evolve unless full maturity has already been reached. This is why runts hardly ever evolve, because they never reach full growth. This can take many years, and it is a patient catcher who manages to raise them that long without giving up. Growlrioth (the evolved form) are highly unstable, however. If they do not respect their catcher then they are likely to run away, or attack their catcher until they are released. Only about one in thirty is ever happy with their catcher. At least fifty percent of growlrioth run away, and thirty percent maim their catchers before they are released. About five percent of all growlrioth catchers are killed by their pokemon. It is advised that when catching katzblauen that a catcher uses either the bonding bell, or the soothing bell, and that they do not let their feline pokemon evolve,” Hillary finished.
Caroline glanced at the purring katzblauen with a little fear. The tiny pokemon was now nosing around Hillary’s pockets in hopes of another piece of meat. She knew that the katzblauen was a runt from the conversation with Joseph; however, it was just a little freaky knowing that a kid like Raphe had something like this pokemon.

Raphe, on the other hand, was concentrated on the more important matter of why the book was talking about catchers so incessantly. William didn’t seem comfortable with it either. Both their minds were wondering if Hillary, their outcast cousin was going to sell out the family to a band of unscrupulous catchers (not that there was any other kind of catcher).

“Hillary,” William asked, “where did you get this book?”

“It’s pretty common. It’s a book written by -- well, catchers. The good kind, anyway,” Hillary amended, looking a little uncomfortable in the fading light.

“There’s a good kind?” William asked skeptically.

“Yeah. They follow all of the laws. That’s why we never see them. There’s an old law that say no catcher can pass on clan land without special permission. Past the villages all of the Crag Mountains are clan land. The law goes back to the founding of the guilds,” Hillary explained.

Obviously her explanation was not good enough for her younger cousins who continued to stare at her.

“Well, when we first went to school, there was this sort of rhyme that we had to learn. It has the unbreakable laws, the high guilds, and every clan mentioned. Anyway, catchers, one of the guilds, can’t come onto clan land, which is what we are. The thing is, the system is--,” Hillary sought for the words that her teacher had used, “breaking. The unbreakable laws are, well, getting broken. Unlike the other guilds anyone can become a catcher, so anyone does become a catcher, even if they aren’t the nicest of people.”

“So, they allow thieves in?” William wanted to know, almost defensively.

“Technically they aren’t s’posed to,” Hillary said nervously. “They do, by accident. You think anyone who’s a thief is going to say when they apply for membership that they are a thief? The only way to test for the truth is an Alakazam, and those are hard to find.”

“How’d you get your hands on that book, though?” Caroline wanted to know, seeing an opportunity for amusement, and possibly one for advancement of her plans.

“A friend at school’s from a whole family of catchers. She doesn’t want to be one, so she let me borrow her copy of the family book. Catchers get everywhere and meet millions of different pokemon, so their books are always the best when you want to find out about different types of pokemon.”

“There are families of catchers?” Raphe asked, feeling astonished that evil could run in families.

“Yeah. She also gave me a really great collection of histories that you can’t get up here. I copied them out and grandmum says that I should give them to people. It really helps because now I have something to trade for all of the wonderful stuff here. I was just giving a set about the early adventures of Alanna Sea-Gyarados to your momma, Raphe. She was real pleased. Thought that you’d like the pictures,” Hillary said knowledgably.

“Pictures?” Both Raphe and William questioned the strange word, as Caroline looked thoughtful.

“Yeah, we can get your momma to show ‘em to you, if you want,” Hillary said, jumping up.

Blue also got off her tree stump, and decided to magnanimously join them. She favored Raphe with being the one to carry her, this time. The strange talkative human may have had meat, but the smell of that growlithe was still all over Raphe and the katzblauen felt that she needed to remind Raphe that she belonged to the feline pokemon.

The four traipsed back into the avenues of stalls and booths. They soon met other small groups of cousins ranging from six to younger than Mark, with their older sisters and brothers leading them by the hands, and other groups of ten year olds wandering around in small clumps, looking mainly at the pokemon.

Still other groups of people, the almighty thirteeners, wandered around. It was telling how they generally were more interested in survival gear, and food, than the pokemon. They would not be truly interested in other pokemon until they had herds of their own, not watching their parent’s flocks.

However, the band of cousins was intent on finding out what pictures were. They navigated the rows of wagons successfully, and came to Maria’s impromptu booth. She finished trading a jar of pungent green something to a seventeen-year old for a pair of carved wooden forks.

Hillary asked her politely if she could show Raphe and the others the book that she had given Maria in return for the slash heal potion which Hillary had wanted. Maria agreed, and brought out the brightly colored booklet from under Mark’s sleeping form. Hillary eagerly grabbed it, and then moved to the fence surrounding the mareep. Raphe noticed that these mareep were new, and even thought there were only three of them Arnold was looking pleased, so something good must have come of their trading.

Hillary opened the pages reverently, and both Raphe and William were astounded by the splashes of color that greeted them. Some how a moment in time had gotten pressed onto those pages. The detailed painting of the katzblauen was nothing to this. That was just a single pokemon, this was a whole scene. There were ladies wearing funny clothes, which looked like skirts for the whole body, and were most likely highly impractical, although they looked nice enough. The men were wearing what must have been grey gyarados scales all over their bodies.

“Alanna always wanted to be a knight …” Hillary began reading the spiky script on the opposite page.
Hillary’s audience ohhed and ahhed properly as the story was being told. It grew larger every time a group of children passed by the rail fence. These new additions, however, were not as crass as to ask the previous parts to be read again.

There was a collective gasp as it was discovered that Alanna’s best friend had stolen his mareep and was now hunted by the dark knights for not having given it to them. Everyone was surprised when the tiny magikarp that Alanna had only just caught evolved into a gyarados and tried to attack her! There was general muttering about how ungrateful gyarados’s were. The children were all impressed, though, when the plucky Alanna stood up to the monster, and gained its respect. Everyone agreed that this was the only proper way to do things. They were horrified when it was discovered that the dark knights had planted a traitor on the side of the good knights, and the book ended with a giant battle where Alanna proved to herself and her knightly friends that she was worthy of being a squire*.

“Alanna looked out over the scene of the battle. She was covered in blood herself, and knew that her armor would need a lot of work to repair. She sighed, Sir Trey’s armor would require more, and she was his squire, now. Joey climbed up the hill she was standing on, and she helped him up the last three feet. In that battle his mareep had evolved into a flaaffy. It looked as solemn as ever.

"'War’eth’s still in the river moppin’ up th’ last of the rebels,' Joey said numbly. 'You’d better summon ‘im back soon or he’ll start takin’ pieces out of anyone who comes near him. He’s the most vicious gyarados I ever met.’

‘How many gyaradoses have you met?’ Alanna teased half-heartedly.

‘Enough to know that he’s the most vicious. Listen -- all this, it’s wrong,’ Joey said sadly.

‘What do you mean? We won, what could be wrong about that?’ Alanna asked defensively.

‘I think that someone wanted the battle. The Igens are wiped out, War’eth’s wiping out the last o’ them right now. We’re barely in better shape. You know your politics. Who’s the Igens greatest enemy?’

Alanna suddenly realized what he was saying.

‘Joey, that kind of talk isn’t safe. The darks have spies, and if one heard you, you’d be in the soup for good. They might not care about one mareep thief, but they will care about a smart one.’

Joey nodded. Both he and Alanna looked over the landscape realizing that their war against the enemy was just beginning,” Hillary finished.

There was some applause, and then questions began to flow in, mainly from the girls, as the boys were already acting out the bloodier parts of the battle. Blood was always a hook for young children.

They soon began to drift away. Night had fallen, and now was the best time to get what they could from the adults, and then retreat to the clearing, and hold all sorts of contests. Even the ten-year olds joined in that. It was the thirteeners and up who eschewed the children’s clearing.

Raphe wandered around getting roasted nuts and sticky bread, as well as some more meat for her katzblauen. Thinking that she ought to try to be grown up and get something that her mother would approve of she bartered heatedly with a third cousin for a bolt of dark green cloth. Raphe managed to get the cloth but lost some of the food which she had gained, her deep blue sweater, and a jar of the pungent purple gloop that Maria used to treat bruises. However, the praise which Raphe received when she came back with the bolt of cloth more than made up for what she had lost.

Maria also gave her Mark to watch over, along with the praise. This destroyed her plans to go to the children’s clearing. Raphe considered waking her little brother so she could take him and go. However, Maria would probably see her, and there would be Words.

Raphe sat on the fence of the mareep pen in a huff, and feeling very ill used. She watched her little brother sleeping in his mareep skin with jealousy. Even the three new mareep weren’t enough to sweeten her temper. It was unfair. She was supposed to be the center of attention. Why wouldn’t Maria let her? Stupid Mark. Stupid little brother. It was always about him. Raphe stuck her tongue out at the sleeping bundle.

“Careful, Little Ella, your face’ll stick that way and even Firebrand won’t want to be near you.”

Raphe jumped, she hadn’t heard her father’s approach. He was standing in the mareep pen, leaning on the railing and looking down at her. On one loose arm there was a leather glove which Raphe did not remember. Arnold might have smiled in the dim light as he noticed her noticing his new acquisition.

“Agok,” he half whistled, half gargled.

There was a flutter above, and something swooped past Raphe on small neat wings. In the waning light she got the general outline of the bird, and the impression of feathers was reinforced. However, she could not see what the little bird was until Arnold brought his leather covered fist closer.
“His name is Agok. Your second uncle’s idea of naming pokemon after the first sound that they make has struck again,” Arnold’s voice was slightly sarcastic; however, Raphe did not notice. “He’s a pidgey. You mother has wanted one for the bugs in the garden, and he should make a good go-between for the house and the pasture. Don’t touch him!”

Raphe brought her had away as if it had been stung. She still looked longingly at the tame bird. She had never seen a bird stay in one position for so long.

“Until he’s fully trained to carry messages I don’t want him biting your fingers off Raphe,” her father admonished. “Avian pokemon are not like felines and canines. They don’t like being touched or coddled.”

“Oh,” Raphe’s voice was very small.

Her katzblauen hissed angrily at the way the bigger human was making her human smell funny. As if the little kit was ashamed of something. The feline pokemon glared coldly at the little bird, which was looking at her with its head cocked to one side. The memory ingrained to the species to be frightened by luminous eyes of all types, especially the green slit-pupiled ones, made Agok give an uncomfortable chirp, and flutter his wings uncertainly.

Arnold reached down to pat his daughter on her shoulder.

“It’s OK, just try to remember that birds are different from us ground bound, alright?” He glanced at the katzblauen, “Raphe, why don’t you go play with the other children, and I’ll watch Mark. We’re going to have to teach that skitty of yours not to go after this little boy.”

Raphe did not even bother to correct her father with her new found knowledge. She just jumped up, and bolted away, feeling suddenly happier now that she could go have fun and didn’t have to worry about stupid Mark anymore.

In the children’s clearing she entered a race, and came in pretty near last. It didn’t really matter, though, as she then came in third in climbing up one prickly pine tree faster than anyone else. The pinco had already gone into hibernation in preparation for the winter ahead, which made the contest “safe” and scoffed at by the ten-year olds.

There was another reading of the Alanna story, mainly just the beginning bits which many had missed. The small Lightcastles sat around the small fire that a tenner had lit with his staff. Soon the bright ideas were pouring forth.

The first was to mix together all of the drink which the youngsters had scavenged, and then pass it around in imitation of the adults. The result of the concoction was slightly sweet and sour at the same time. It seemed to burn the tongue, and the children competed to see who could swallow it without wincing.

The second wonderful idea of the evening was to tell ghost stories. Joseph started off with a story of a necronan who possessed and ate the soul of an unwary clan girl. The story continued, describing in grizzly detail the unlife of the soul sucking pokemon, walking around in the corpse of the girl until it fully decayed.

Hillary picked the story up, in clan tradition, adding to it, and continuing. Hers was the story of the next person the necronan fed upon. This time it was a catcher, who actually deserved to be eaten. She wove a detailed description of the struggle between the catcher and the necronan. The morbid truths that the necronan discovered, as it devoured the soul of this human repulsed the necromancer pokemon. The Lightcastles listened with baited breaths, horrified and, yet feeling pity for the monstrous necronan. The first soul had been pure and good. Through the girl the undead being had learned of happiness. Through the catcher, who was fighting with all their will against the necronan, the pokemon was learning of deceit, violence, and hate. Her story ended with the necronan nearly pleading for the catcher to say that what the pokemon had uncovered in the human soul was a lie. The necronan was pleading for the catcher to regret his actions.

After Hillary finished there was a silence, no one thought that they could continue after that terrifying story. However, a boy began with the death of the necronan’s victim before the catcher could repent. The story continued, speaking of the necronan’s journey to find some good in the human culture.

The night wore on, the children stopping and starting in the weaving story. The glowing balls of light, the Star Children, hovered around the clearing. Their radiance lighted the most over the head of the current storyteller. In the tradition of the Lightcastles no story could be truly finished until every child had spoken. Therefore no one really noticed this strange preference for the story tellers. It was widely believed that star children were the protectors of the innocent and young, keeping infants from the clutches of disease and death. It only made sense that they would gather to the children.

Raphe was the last to speak. She had been watching the balls of light lazily as she played with her katzblauen. The story had been listened to, and now she was going to finish it with something suitably horrifying. It was a ghost story, after all. She did not wonder at the philosophical implications of the story. She was too young to even understand them, although the story itself was giving her an uneasy feeling. She was certain that there was a way for the humans to be redeemed beyond any doubt. The necronan had given up hope on that count three storytellers ago. He was now back to devouring souls with impunity, although deeply disappointed in humans.

Raphe opened her mouth, hardly aware that the soft yellow orbs were gathering in her general vicinity. She was just trying to think of the most terrible way to describe the latest corpse. It was not what she believed would happen in real life; however, it was the only way that the story would make sense.

However, that was not the story ending that came from her mouth. Afterward she did not think much of it, but at the time she was surprised and scared. The necronan had a new victim, and a ninetails, the most vicious evil pokemon aside from zangeese had saved the boy by sacrificing itself. The necronan had asked “why?” and the ninetails had just laughed, as its blood pooled on the ground.

“Your kind used to know the reason. Used to be the reason. The body gives out but the soul lives on. When you are immortal giving your life to another person is a relief.”

It had been surprising, yet now, five minutes later, as Caroline began another story Raphe could barely remember what she had said, or what the story had been about.

The katzblauen in her lap looked at her human sharply. The human was far too relaxed. All of the humans around the fire were. As if they never realized what had happened. The feline pokemon remembered everything clearly, but she didn’t know what was happening to the humans.

A star child hovered near Raphe, and she idly stroked the ice kitten’s fur.

“How does Alanna strike you as a name?” The Lightcastle asked, suddenly.

Alanna? After the brave girl from the story? The human thought that she, the katzblauen, was as brave as that young girl? Or was it that Raphe thought the feline as capable as the young human. Someone who could tame an angry gyarados to fight for them was no slacker. Alanna purred. It was a decent name for all that it was rather human.

Stories were passed around the clearing until the sound of music from the wagons and carts signaled that the adults were having family entertainment. The children straggled out of the clearing in twos and threes to return to their parents. By the time the moon was riding high in the sky the wagons were moving out.

That Harvest Fair was the only really sensational thing to happen to Raphe over the next two years. Alanna came with her into the pasture land during the winter watches that Raphe shared with her father. Alanna was happy and purely enchanted by the snow, feeling finally in her depth for the first time in a long while.

The feline was growing rapidly, now. Well, she was not growing, so much as evening out her body, her legs remained the same size, but her body had managed to catch up with the oversized head. Alanna looked rather petit, still, but at least she did not look as if she had been put together from the bin labeled miscellaneous.

She became a little depressed when spring rolled around again, and the wonderfully familiar snow melted. However, soon there were too many new things happening for the feline to be bothered about the lack of her natural element. A huge nest of rattata had managed to develop under the barn during the winter. Alanna and Muffin spent two long months in a bloody campaign against them, making the katzblauen entirely miss her human’s sixth birthday.

When Alanna returned to Raphe’s side she had was put to work scaring the lambs into staying near their mothers. This was not her idea of a job. Alanna wanted to hunt down the predators which she smelled or saw, but that was left to the two hybrids, leaving Alanna very bored.

That was the so-called lazy summer. In the autumn the zangeese were prowling again, so none of the farm got to go to the Harvest fair. Besides everything getting deliciously cooler there was nothing spectacular about the autumn.

As time moved on, winter came, and Alanna became nearly sickeningly cheerful. She would rub around Raphe, purring hard, to wake the sleeping girl up. Of course, she woke Raphe up at four in the morning, thinking that no one should be asleep while it was snowing. Somehow Raphe, and the rest of the family, who had been included in the treatment, managed to stay sane enough for spring to roll around, and the long awaited seventh birthday to arrive.

________________________
*For those of you who have read the Song of the Lioness quarter and were quick on the uptake the Alanna Sea-Gyarados story is this reality's version of Mrs. Peirce's great work. This being a fanfiction I can do things like that, and often slip in references. Try to catch 'em all ;D

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter Six: In Which the Most Loyal Character Is Met~
~Or~
~Eldiablo~

It was spring again. Not that this was easy to tell. The snow had not yet melted and the sky was an overcast grey. The occasional puff of wind was chilling, and the air was heavy with the promise of yet another snow storm.

Raphe was shivering as she rode on Firebrand’s back. He was galloping over the rocky pasture land, heading to the forest and that separated the small farm from Lightcastle Fortress. He was enjoying the cold weather less than Raphe. In response he had increased the heat from his mane to match that of his tail. It was dangerous for his young passenger; the chance of a spark hitting her was great.

However, Firebrand did not care, or really comprehend the danger. He was cold and Maria was with the flock of silly maeep tending to a lamb with a gooey eye. The abandonment, even if it was to Raphe, who was the best mistress in the world, made the temperamental rapidash feel very ill-used.

Of the group racing across the rocky fields the only one truly enjoying herself was Alanna. She had to follow in Firebrand’s wake, of course. No one could keep up with the speedy stallion. However, she flowed over the uneven ground, not caring whether the ground underneath her was snow, rock, or ice. She saw no reason to avoid such places, unlike that crazy horse.

The cold air was making the katzblauen feel refreshed and happy. She almost never thought of her previous life, now. It was long past the time when she would have been weaned and chased from her mother’s territory, anyway. In this new place things which had been strange became familiar, and Russahain seemed like a dream. Alanna had discovered that territory was where the heart was. For the moment, Alanna’s loyalty had come to rest on Raphe and her family.

Raphe, however, felt none of this honor. What with the lowering sky overhead and the cold air, she felt rather depressed. She had tried singing to bolster her depressed spirits. However, since her voice was nowhere nearly as good as Maria’s, it was probably a good thing that a flare from Firebrand’s mane caused Raphe to suck on blistered fingers.

When the party of three reached the Lightcastle Fortress Raphe had given up on holding onto the reigns. On the bright side, Firebrand had lost most of his temper. That was, until he saw Alanna looking perfectly at ease and content. He snorted, bathing the feline in boiling hot steam. Alanna gave an angry yowl, and Raphe gave the hellhorse a stern look as she tried to dismount.

“No sugar for you,” the girl muttered, before walking to the curtain wall of the fortress.

Alanna followed her human, her steel grey tail held in the air, a look of smug superiority n her delicate features. Firebrand stamped and snorted aggressively, steam still billowing from his nostrils. As Raphe paid no attention to him, he turned away disconsolately to burn away the snow in search of grass.

Grandmother Eleanor met them inside the curtain wall, bundled in hand kitted layers, and holding a steaming mug of the dark bitter drink known as cluah. Raphe did not like it much, but was glad to hold it as Eleanor fished around in the recesses of her outer coat for the keys to the Fortress armory.
Raphe looked confused as they walked up to the imposing hardwood doors of the ancient out building. She had never been allowed in there before.

Inside was a shelf containing yellow, white, and pink orbs all carefully placed in individual indentations along the shelves.

“These,” Grandmother Elanor picked one up, “are the the final touch to the family staff. They are the orbs from the tails of flaafy, mareep, and occassionally ampharos.”

“What are those?” Raphe wanted to know in confusion.

“The form flaaffy take if they need to become stronger yet again. Josiah Lightcastle had one, it was his first partner. Wild One meant as much to him as Alanna does to you, or Firebrand does to your mother, or Lightning and Thunder do too your father. They are the symbol of our clan, but only a few families have one at the moment.”

“Aww,” Raphe complained, she had wanted to see the new pokemon and had a rough plan in mind to pester the old flaaffy ram to take a new form.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Eleanor chided, as they walked the length of the shed and back, examining the orbs. “When we get a lot of ampharos it means invasion is coming to the Crag Mountains. The same is true if ninetails start appearing, but don’t eat any of the pokemon here, or the eevee begin to multiply. Those pokemon feel a conection to either us, the furture, or the powers that be, wherever they are, or whatever they are. They will protect us.”

“Ninetails would protect us?!” Raphe found this very hard to believe.

“Where do they get their best food from? Who keeps the catchers away from their kits? They understand that life with us is better than life without us, and to be quite frank they are generally too clever to get caught in our hunts. Ninetails are strange and ancient creatures. They can be feirce and deadly as steinwulf, or as kind and caring as a delcatty. It all depends on the mood you catch them in,” Elanor replied. “Now, you close your eyes and walk down the shelves. Stop when you want to and pick up the orb that is beside you. For the next three years you will be learning what goes into the family staff, designing your staff, and then making it, all in your free time.”

The seven year old found this prospect a little daunting. However she closed her eyes and began to walk back toward the door, one hand on the edge of the shelf to guide her. Finally she stopped at a point that seemed as good as any. Opening her eyes she picked up the orb nearest at hand and held it aloft, the dim light sparkling from it. Eleanor stumped over in turn and read the card that had been help in place by the crystaline tail end.

“Hmm, good orb for discharging. Sadly, it won’t be able to cast very precisely. You won’t be able to build a static force field with the engria stored in this one, but it will store quite a lot. Well, this is yours now, take care of it. I expect you to have found a good length of wood by midsummer. Wire had better be found by autumn. Now for the fun bit,” Elanor lead the way out of the armory and Raphe hurried after her after placing the golden orb in her pocket.

They moved through the slushy snow to a pen attached to the house. Different breeds of mareep dogs were barking in furious excitement. Raphe patted a pure breed growlithe, and then scratched the sharp ears of a poochyena-electrike hybrid. After the enthusiastic greeting most of the puppies drew away, leaving only four still clustered around Raphe.

They were all hybrids. Russet coats with green stripes, or pure black pups with the shock of white that was a growlithe’s lot, or spikey poochyena crackling with electricity as they were petted. The two growlithe-electrike puppies were twins, and they growled and played with vigor, inviting Raphe to join in their game by chewing on her boots. The black and white growlithe-poochyena cross watched the proceeding with interest, before he ran at the twins and began to playfully snap and bite. Raphe noted the behavior with a careful eye, remembering what her father had said about mareep dogs who bit, namely that they were dangerous. Meanwhile the electrike-poochyena puppy had gone to sleep, exhausted by the sudden spurt of energy that had left him high and dry once the initial greeting was over.

“Alanna!” Raphe whistled. “Come here a moment.”

The kitten, who had been hanging back, leapt to the top of the pen’s fence, and padded along it until she reached Raphe, when she jumped on her mistress’ shoulder. Immediately there was a hush. The pure breeds put their noses to the wind, and then turned to Raphe, and growled. They hybrid twins followed suit, even snapping at the human. The poochyena-growlithe yipped, and then jumped up, as if trying to get at Alanna.

The cat disdainfully jumped down among the masses. The young puppies drew back, shocked by the display. The steel grey cat minced over to the black and white hybrid and purred threateningly.

He yipped, and growled back.

She smirked, showing her sharp teeth.

He exhaled a puff of smoke.

She batted it away with her tail.

The puppies, Raphe, and Elanor all held their breath as the poochyena cross moved delicately forward and licked Alanna’s face friendily.

The katzblauen jumped backwards in surprise and shock and rushed to the fench, and the safety of Raphe. The seven-year old grined. “I want that one,” she declared, as Elanor chuckled, reaching down and scopping up the tiny puppy pokemon.

He didn’t struggled as he was placed ceremoniously in Raphe’s arms, although he tried to nip at Alanna’s tail with a big doggy grin on his face. The katzblauen looked regal and disgusted, as she tried to wash the poochyena drool off her face.

“So,” Eleanor asked as they moved indoors for lunch. “What will you call him?”

Raphe thought, “There’s a story my mother has of a demon of dust from her destert called Eldiablo. He’s a pretty dusty mutt,” she ruffled the spikey fur to receive another saticfied yip in response. “I’m going to call him Diablo.”

((OMG! A chapter that didn't run on into two posts! Coming soon, chapter 7: In Which Raphe Makes and Interesting Ally))

[MorriganFearn]

~ Chapter Seven: In Which Raphe Makes an Interesting Ally~
~or~
~ Fallen into the Company of Vagabonds and Rogues~

Raphe gave one last polish to the smooth, pale birch surface. She stepped back, admiring the staff. It was six feet exactly, only a foot taller than she was, and capped by the near white blue orb. The real color to the length of straight wood came from the rich copper wire that held the crystaline ball in place. This wrapped around the top of the staff like fire, embracing both wood and globe in its sinuous grip.

Diablo barked his approval from the floor. He had a red cloth ribbon around his neck to mark his first birthday and Raphe’s tenth. Raphe grinned, and scratched behind his scruffy ears absently.

“Let’s see what this can do!” Raphe grinned, gripping her staff in the stance she had seen Arnold take hundreds of times.

The wood swished through the air, first the top, then the bottom. Raphe practiced against invisible enemies in her little attic room, hunched over. One of the airy demons managed to push her off balance ans she fell against the headboard of her bed with a loud thump.

Diablo ran up to her with a laughing grin, and licked her face, which threatened to crumple into very un-adult tears of pain. Alanna sniffed loudly from the curtain rod. Obviously she felt that little humans shouldn’t bother to act like fools if they weren’t prep-ared for a rude awakening.

There was a squawk from the head of the stairs leading to the main rooms of the cottage. Arnold’s brilliant carrot top appeared above the stairs, the small pidgey, Agok, sitting snuggly on his shoulder.

“Perhaps you’d better practice outside. C’mon, adults don’t get the whole day off just for their birthdays,” he smiled down at Diablo, “and neither does this lil’ fella.”

Raphe picked up her staff dutifully, and followed Arnold. Diablo gambolled down the stairs before them, turning around every second step or so to make faces at the jealous and dissaproving Alanna, who followed the procession at a disdainful walk. Some how the two humans and three pokemon made it to the bottom of the sitars without breaking their necks.

“Father?” Raphe asked, as they grabbed some bread and cheese off the kitchen table. “Do I still have to do barn chores?”

“No, that’s your mama and brother’s job now,” Arnold reasured her, smiling as they walked out into the flood of sunshine of the early spring day.

“But I’ll be all day with you and the mareep, then?” Raphe wanted to know, looking at Hercules and Maria conversing earnestly as they crossed the barnyard. Mark was by the torchic coop, Muffin in attendance.

“Yes. Why all of these questions?”

“I wanted to know if I’d ever see Firebrand again,” Raphe answered, quietly.

Alanna rolled pine green eyes. Her human was such a strange creature. Doting over the disgusting mutt one moment and now feeling sentimental about that bad tempered nag.

Diablo barked an agreement with Raphe, however. He liked the fire baths that the hellhorse gave him when he had nipped at Firebrand’s hooves enough. However, the scent of the rolling medows washed over him, and his mind switched into herding mode.

“You can work with him during your free time,” Arnold was saying, before whistling shrilly. Thunder and Lighting appeared out of the grass almost instantly.

Raphe grinned, putting two fingers to her lips and blowing a high C.

All three herd dogs leapt from their tense poses, flowing down the mountainside like wind, aiming for the groups of fluffy yellow blobs. Thunder moved to the left, bounding with his lopping gate. Diablo swerved to the right, running like the mighyena from his ancestry. Lightning took the center, waiting for the fraction of a second that it took the two well trained canines to force the mareep together, before charging forward, lightning crackling from his legs.

Arnold hit two more piercing whistles, as Raphe joined in on a lower note. Alanna had raced for a tree. She yowled that there were no predators from the air. The dogs moved around the mareep in a loose circle, tightening where they felt nessecary, in order to keep the mareep from straying into the forest.

Arnold nodded, and Agok siddled down his arm. Arnold tossed the pidgey into the air, where the guard circled, looking out for things that might threaten the farm behind the two shepards, or the mareep, so far away from the might of Hercules and the internal anger of Firebrand. In either case, Agok would speed for reinforcement.

“There, I think we can leave the pokemon to the defense for now,” Arnold said, leaning back on his staff, a knobbly mapple branch capped with a cage of melted silver wire and an orb of rich gold.

It was shorter than most staves that the Lightcastle’s used, but he used his staff as a weapon, like his gun, rather than as a multi-purpose instrument. The heavy electrical discharges he had made over the years had scorched the treated wood, and melted the wire design into something indistinguashable.

Suddenly the length of wood was sliding underneath Raphe’s weapon, and knocking her legs off balance.

“Tut-tut,” Arnold told her with a mocking smile, as Raphe fell on her back. “A Lightcastle is always prepared. You never know when a predator will come at you. I’m not even very good at hand to hand combat.”

Raphe lay on the turf, looking at the sky. This was exactly like learning to ride Firebrand. She just needed to remember how to fall when she messed up, she told herself. Leaping upright she rushed at her father.

Only to end up looking at the sky again.

“Always hold your staff properly!” Arnold told Raphe, standing over her. “That is a weapon. Never forget it. If you don’t know what you are doing than you shouldn’t use it!”

“But what happened?” Raphe almost cried.

“You tell me,” Arnold told her leaning down to pull her up.

Raphe took the proffered hand, and went flying.

The grassy turf was soft, even landing on it at seemingly 75 lengths a candlewatch. Raphe wanted to cry, but then she remembered watching while William was being taught. Her Uncle Tomas had said then: “The thing that will hurt the most is trusting the enemy enough to let him get under your guard.”

All the working Lightcastles had scars. Sometimes an uncle or aunt went missing to never return. More often it was a cousin. You had to be hard as the mountains unless you wanted to let the mountians take you and your loved ones away.

She struggled to her hands and knees, prettending to breathe heavily (it wasn’t very hard to pretend). “I trusted you to be stupid enough to let me win,” Raphe answered her father.
Arnold grinned. “Got it in one, little Ella.” He stepped closer to lift her off her front and onto her back by using his staff like a spatula.

Raphe beat him to it, jumping upright, and jabbing her staff backward into the soft part of his stomach – only to be blocked by his shorter staff.

“Good!” Arnold encouraged, darting back. “Your staff gives you reach, but it’s still too tall for you, and that extra length makes it unwieldy. You can’t move fast enough to hit me.”

Raphe swung around, using her staff as a pivot, to face her father. How could she change this unequal balance of power? He could outdistance everything she tried. She grinned, letting her staff cover Arnold in sweeping archs.

“Yeah, but I can keep you away until help comes,” she told her father, and was rewarded by his proud smile, before she rushed for him, and brought her staff down on his right hand. “Or I get the chance to do that!”

“You forget,” the short length slid between her ankles easily weilded by only one hand, knocking her balance out from under Raphe, “your advantage is in your reach. Don’t ever close the gap.”

Raphe watched puffy clouds skim across the blue sky, before Arnold blocked her vision.

“And you don’t need to know how to fall properly. You need to learn how to bounce right back up. Staff fighting needs the entire body, not just the staff.”

He offered her his hand and Raphe took it, digging her staff into the turf at the same time. She used the leverage to make her father stumble forward, as the birch wood swooped down to take his legs from under him.

Arnold fell face first toward the grass, but his hands came before him. He pushed into the ground, turning the fall into a front flip, where he landed a yard away from Raphe. Brushing some straight coppery strands out of his eyes, he beamed at his red-faced daughter.

“You’re getting the idea. Since it’s your birthday we’ll end the close quarter combat lesson now. Ready for the projectile lesson? Don’t worry, we won’t shoot at one another. It’s too dangerous with your level of inexperience,” Arnold told her.

Raphe felt dejected. She thought she had been doing pretty well, remembering tricks that she had seen her various family members do with their staves. “Yeah, I’m ready, I think.”

“You’re going to get very sick of hearing this before you get to go out and watch the mountains, but you either know or you don’t. No trying, thinking, or guessing,” Arnold told her. “Now,” he wistled in the lower notes that called specifically for Lightning. The green and russet dog bounded up. “Lightning, thunder wave!” Arnold instructed.

Electricity blasted from the dog’s body before Raphe could sheild her eyes. The knob on her staff glowed, greedily sucking in the energy in the air. The solid wood vibrated in her hands and grew warm as the excess energry was channeled into the core of scionessa and converted from electricity to engria, a plasmoid form of electricity.

Above the noise of the thunder wave Arnold whistled again, and Lightning suddenly stopped, and ran back to do his duty as a mareep dog.

“Now, take your staff, point it at the large rock over there, and imagine pushing the energy all out. The tail ends are all treated with psychic energy from your grandmother’s alakazam. Each staff reacts according to the user’s will power,” Arnold explained.

He calmly swung his staff around as the golden globe glowed white and a beam of energy lanced from the end of the staff to create a charred rosette in the lichen that covered the indicated rock.

Raphe watched, and copied the movement. She pushed with her mind, her eyes closed, and a roaring of consentration in her ears. She jumped as Arnold put his hand on her shoulder.

“Very good, but ALWAYS have your eyes open when you do that,” he told her, as they looked at the charred crater three feet to the left of the rock.

“Oops.”

They continued to practice until Raphe could hit the target, holding her staff in her weak hand alone. After that Arnold said that the next day they could work at gaguing the output of the staff. For now they had mareep to watch.

At noon they broke for lunch, the dogs having first choice, Alanna second, and then the humans last. Agok didn’t need lunch, Arnold said laughing. He was fat enough. Raphe grinned, eating her bread and cheese and feeling very grown up.

With a scream the bundle of brown feathers dove out of the the sky. Agok landed on Arnolds arm, with two scorched feathers and several long creamy hairs in his blunt beak.

“Ninetails!” Arnold didn’t look twice. “Alanna, Thunder, and Diablo will stay with you, Raphe. Protect the mareep no matter what. Lightning!” The electric-fire hybrid dashed after his master.

Raphe gripped her staff apprehensively. Three minutes later the graceful form of malevolence that was known as ninetails was at the rim of the mountainside. Then it was running – flowing – moving down the mountain, the combusken flopping in its long blood covered muzzle. The shape bore down on Raphe, gold and cream with eyes like glowing rubies.

The ten year old narrowed her eyes, and moved her staff into position. The was a fluid motion of muscles, and the fox pokemon sprang. Raphe pushed with her staff, hitting the ribcage of the monster.

The evolved pokemon landed in a skid, turning around to face Raphe. Arnold and Lightning were in pursuit, and the trampling of hooves could only be Firebrand. Thunder had herded the mareep away.

Yet time stood still for the ninetails and Raphe. The hatred in those eyes was rivaled only by hunger. The deadly jaws had already snapped the combusken’s neck. The ribs heaved, visible under the glossy coat, which wasn’t very glossy once Raphe got a good look.

The fur covered neck reared upward, throwing the carcass of the chicken pokemon in the air, the muzzle and sharp teeth leveling with Raphe. She could see the growing glow appear at the back of the fox’s throat. The pilot light before she became charcoal.

Flame roared out the beast’s mouth.

With a roar Diablo jumped in the way, the fire cleaning his scruffy fur. Eventually the monsterous fire pokemon couldn’t sustain the flamethrower against the fireproof Diablo. The poochyena-growlithe hybrid grinned, with his little sharp teeth, and Alanna stepped out of his protective shadow. Where she walked, long claws out of their sheathes, ice formed.

The feline pokemon waltzed up to the ninetails before the fox realized what was going on. An ugly scratch across the creamy muzzle began to ice over almost instantly. The ninetails gave one look behind Raphe, just as Lightning charged, Firebrand hard on his heels.

However the vixen leapt gracefully, evading both angered protector pokemon. When she landed, the combusken was in her jaws again, and she was facing away from the humans and their pokemon. Digging her claws into the turf she kicked it into the air in a sand attack, and took off towards the woodlands with a short burst of speed that couldn’t be matched over such a miniscule distance.

Arnold whistled shrilly, however, to keep Thunder, Lightning, and Diablo from following. He then rushed to Raphe’s side, and scooped his daughter in a hug.

“I’m sorry, I should have left you with better protection,” he whispered into her hair.

“No, I’m fine,” Raphe hiccupped, tears running down her cheeks.

She had been so terrified that she had completely frozen. If it hadn’t been for Alanna and Diablo’s teamwork she wouldn’t have been able to survive. The worst part, she had just known that the vixen hadn’t eaten for seven days. Raphe felt the fear for the kit the vixen was bringing the torchic home to. She realized that she couldn’t have given the order to kill the vixen, even though it was so terribly needed.

[MorriganFearn]

((Fwee, a second part!))

“A ninetails took three early lambs from Thomas a month ago,” Arnold continued. “We’re going to have to hunt them down again. This is getting too dangerous.”

Arnold talked shop with Raphe for half an hour until she got unshaken, and then they stayed on alert for the rest of the day. Taking the mareep home in the evening was a quiet affair.

Maria informed them that the ninetails had gotten into the torchic coop when Mark had forgotten to close the coop properly. At six this was a serious crime and he was sent to bed without supper. This was hardly a punishment, since supper was a quiet affair, as well, and not one of Maria’s better efforts.

Raphe trooped upstairs with the wool she was meant to be carding. Diablo and Alanna followed her. It wouldn’t be long, she thought to herself, before both these pokemon protectors would have to sleep outside with the mareep, the way Muffin, Thunder and Lightning did.

She sat down on her bed and began to card the wool, running the fluff through the teeth of the combs until her fingers were greasy from lanolin and the teeth had collected bracken and heather in sad bundles. Looking up as she tossed the former plantlife onto the floor she saw Agok fly past her window. Raphe nodded to herself. Her father had gone to warn Eleanor and Thomas – and perhaps the four families that lived on the next mountain. They were going to have a hunt.

Alanna snuggled up on one of the psyduck-down pillows. Stars and moon lit Raphe’s way to the dresser, where she put down her skeins of carded wool. She snuck under the warm bed clothes, and in a minute Diablo’s reassuring weight was covering her feet.

Raphe wasn’t aware of falling asleep, but she was woken by Mark’s hesitant tapping on the staircase. She jumped out of bed, and then regreted the swift action. She was sore all over from the staff practice yesterday.

Dressing as quickly as she could she picked up her staff from the floor, where she had let it fall the previous night, and her cardings from the dresser. Feeling prepared for the day, she trotted downstairs, Alanna and Diablo following. The two seemed to have made a sort of truce after the fight, and while if not on best of terms, were no longer out for one another’s blood.

Mark was at the bottom of the stairs, still looking penitant. Raphe ruffled his chestnut hair absently.
“’M sorry ‘bout the coop,” he mumbled as they moved toward the kitchen table and the staple breakfast – only to see Maria and Arnold actually sitting down, looking grave.

“What’s happening?” Raphe asked, taking charge in her new responsible role as The Adult.

“You and I will be taking the mareep to Thomas’ farm,” Arnold told Raphe. “Maria will stay here with Thunder, Muffin, Matriarch, and the psyduck to protect our holding. I will only be taking Thunder and Agok. It’s up to you which pokemon you want with you.”

“We have Hercules, so Firebrand is at your dispossal, if you want,” Maria told Raphe.

“Um, I think I’m fine with just Alanna and Diablo. Uncle Thomas has Loyalty, Dishonor, and their pups, after all. If I’m just going to be guarding the mareep with William – well, he has his electrike, Mammoth. We should be okay with Agok watching from above,” Raphe said, thinking slowly.

“Loyalty won’t be with you,” Arnold told her. “Arcanine deal better with tracking in thick woodlands than houndoom do. Plus, Dishonor’s a vicious fighter. If the ninetails tries to attack you again she’ll be a smear on the side of the fence once that houndoom is done with her.”

“Oh,” Raphe said, feeling a little nervous.

The feirce houndoom had always scared her as a child. There was no other pokemon like him on the mountains, and she only felt safe when dealing with him from Firebrand’s back. Raphe would have much perferred Dishonor’s gentler mate, Loyalty, to be their protection. Loyalty was the sweetest arcanine Raphe knew, even including Grandma’s Brave Heart, who could be a bit rough.

“Have a bit of breakfast,” Maria advised, sliding a plate in the direction of Raphe, and scooping Mark into her lap. “I don’t know what Susan serves on mareep watch, but you can bet it has some kind of preserve for your health in it. And if she starts talking to you like you should be inside just remind her that you have a staff and she doesn’t. That reminds me, don’t forget to get fully charged from Lightning before he’s off on the hunt.”

With this good advice ringing in her ears Raphe followed her father to the barn where they brought the mareep out, and set them on the road that would eventually lead to Tomas’s house. Diablo and Lightning kept the sheep pokemon at a steady pace as Arnold explained the intracacies of using the staff as a shepard’s crook to Raphe.

By ten they had reached the huge swath of cleared land that was Thomas’s farm. There were even fences installed around the perimeter of the feilds, making Raphe realize that she couldn’t be more protected.

Thomas and William met them at the gate, the black bulk of Dishonor on one side, and Loyalty’s white and crimson fuzz on the other. In between, three sleeker versions of Diablo played with one another, and sometimes a smaller electrike, who snapped at them when they landed on his head.

Thomas greeted Raphe perfunctorily, and then began to talk in specifics to Arnold, who nodded, or shook his head, or added his own insight at intervals. Raphe nodded to her uncle in return, as an adult, now, she didn’t have to formally bow every time she was addressed by one of her uncles or aunts.

She then gazed shyly at William. He was the same hight as she was, she noticed with a jolt of shock. His staff had an odd bend in it, better suitted to being a crook than a weapon, and the ball at the end was the same golden color as her father’s, meaning that he had a mareep tail-end. This was encased, like his father’s pink globe, with iron strips, rather than some kind of wire that would amplify power.

How should she greet him? He was three years older than she was. Granted, he hadn’t turned thirteen, yet, but it was only a matter of time before he was out on guard duty with his father. He was so much more mature than she was. Was she supposed to nod, or bow, or –

“Hey,” Willam said.

“Hey,” Raphe answered, and with that the ice was broken.

He led her to the fenced in fields and helped her herd the mareep into them, before calling for his little entourage of canines. All five sauntered past, following Dishonor, their obvious alpha. Diablo, however, stayed apart, sitting at Raphe’s heels, for once looking sober. Alanna looked proudly on from her accustomed perch on Raphe’s shoulder.

As Raphe also walked into the pen, Dishonor blocked Diablo’s way with a low snarl. Diablo didn’t back down, but he didn’t advance, either. He seemed to be weighing the chance of becoming submissive or not.

Alanna leapted down delicately from Raphe’s shoulder. She landed next to Diablo, her long tail twitching at just the end. She looked at the houndoom, and Diablo’s yellow eyes joined her.The staring contest lasted for only twenty seconds, or twenty years. However, at the end, Dishonor stepped aside to let the two strange pokemon go into the pen. He did not look happy at the unresolved outcome. Neither had submitted, yet neither had become the overdog, either.

William and Raphe looked at one another and grinned, then laughed. They watched the mareep with a sense of ease, and yet, an underlying tone of tension. They both wondered how their father’s were faring in the hunt. The both tensed everytime that Agok’s shadow swooped over them. Occassionally they looked up, staves glowing as a rahvenrook wheeled over the mareep, but none were tempted by the lambs.

When Susan called Raphe over she gladly got up just to get moving. Ruturning with lunch the cousins sat and ate, making comments about celery that were less than complementary. They both flopped onto their backs, hands cradling their heads, and listened to the sound of sheep grazing, the houndoom-growlithe pups tussling, Mammoth and Diablo growling at each other, before breaking away to circle the mareep only to meet with a joyful reunion at the other end of the field. Dishonor watched the valley from the vantage of a high rock. Alanna scrapped her deadly claws against the splintery bark of her pine tree look out.

A distressed bleating made Raphe and William sit upright. Dishonor leapt from the rock like a dark shadow. The three raced across the meadow to find a ewe making the noise. She shoved desperately at the low splitrail fence.

“Damnit,” William winced, “a lamb must have gotten under. This happens every so often. Dishonor –,”
“Houndoom aren’t good at tracking in the undergrowth, plus, you’ll need him to control the rest of the flock. I’ll use Diablo, he’s got enough growlithe in him to make him ten times more valuable.”

“Fine, but I know these woods, so I’ll use Diablo,” William told Raphe.

“He won’t listen to you, he’s my partner, remember? I’ll have my staff. If I get into trouble I can signal Agok,” she reasoned.

Anything to escape the boredom of the pasture and prove how responsible she was was a good idea. In fact, just to escape any more argument she was already climbing the fence, and whistling for her hybrid.

Diablo bounded over and wriggled under the fence, just as Raphe landed on the other side. And then they were both off into the cool woods. Here, where Thomas had not carefully fertilized the ground to grow weeds for his mareep to eat, the bed rock thrust up at irregual intervals. The snowmelt had created little streams and gullies.

The two journeyed into the stillness of the wood. Raphe kept her staff at the ready. Diablo kept his nose to the ground, snuffling along. They wandered to the top of a mossy rock, and then Raphe groaned.

The other end of the rock dropped sheerly into a valley. The moss on this side had been kicked up by something that had fallen down it. Raphe strained her ears and heard the bleating she hadn’t been expecting to hear. So at least the dumb fuzz ball was alive.

Diablo yipped, and pointed with his nose.

The sheer rock was a seven foot drop from the valley floor. At the bottom of the rock was a swampy mess caused by snowmelt. The mareep had evidently landed in that, and struggled onto dry land under the portion of rock that projected over the boggy ground. However, Raphe and Diablo weren’t the only ones who had figured out that the mareep had landed there. A vulpix stood at the other end of the marsh. His flat brown eyes were locked hungrily on the spot where the mareep must be.

Raphe didn’t think after she saw the dried blood color of the pokemon’s pelt. There wasn’t room. She leapt over the lip of the rock, and began sliding down the moss, before falling through the air to land with a sploit, knee deep in mud. She brandished her staff at the vulpix as Diablo landed on her shoulder and bounced off onto drier ground.

“You get going or I’ll fry you,” Raphe threatened the vulpix. “This mareep is ours.”

The dead brown eyes looked at her. It was probably her imagination, but there was a flicker of recognition in them.

“Diablo!” Raphe called.

The dusty, and now muddy, mutt advanced on the vulpix, gowling.

The vulpix looked at Raphe, hunger apparent in his eyes, ribs heaving, and bedraggled tails twitching. Pride was in there, too. And something else. A cocky certainty that this was going to end up alright, and probably in his favor, as well.

“What are you?” Raphe breathed. “There’s only one way to end this, pest. Your death. Don’t you understand? It’s your mommy that my family is hunting.”

The vulpix blew out a contemptuous ember, and then leapted onto Diablo’s head, only to use the pup as a spring board to launch himself at Raphe. He bit down on her left hand, and scrabbled with his hind legs at her right arm. Her staff landed in the muddy ooze and the vulpix was down, streaking into the overhang, with the mareep.

Diablo ran barking after him, his teeth surrounded by black energy. The vulpix, tiny mareep being dragged by the wool, stepped back out towards the swamp. Raphe felt around for her staff in desperation. The mareep bleated. Diablo rushed to the edge of the bog land, stepping uncertainly, black and purple energy crackling off his fur.

Raphe grasped her staff from under the muck and brought it out with a squelch. The vulpix glanced at her and then faced Diablo again. Hate and hunger seemed to fill the fox pokemon, battling for supremacy. Destroy the puppy or make off with the food?

Pain blossomed in his side, and he went flying, loosing his grip on the mareep. He found himself staring at the sky between the budding tree leaves. Words came from the human, resquests of her black puppy. Well, her black puppy for now.

“Diablo, guard the mareep. I’ll deal with this Vagabond.”

He could hear the dog agreeing reluctantly.

The large fox ears twitched. He could hear the belling of hounds. Two of them. Two humans. They smelled sweaty. Momma had given them the slip. Of course she would. She was smart. Hungry, but smart. None of those pathetic dogs could catch her. They’d rip him appart once they got close enough to smell him. But they wouldn’t get his wonderful Momma.

He wished they’d hurry up, he knew it wasn’t supposed to end like this. But the pain in his side paraylzed him. He couldn’t fight. He couldn’t run. He wanted his Momma. She’d protect him, even if no one else would.

A bleeding hand crossed his vision.

“What did I do to you?” he heard the whisper, and then pain flared in his side as the fingers pushed in. He yelped in pain.

“Well, nothing’s broken, I just winded you, and gave you a whopping bruise. Pity –,” that remark was cut off by a gasp. Soft green eyes loomed in his vision.

“What are you?” she asked. “I can feel your pain. You can feel pain. You’re just like a real person.”

This startling revaltion was cut off by the howls of an arcanine hot on the trail. The human girl was wearing a heavy weather sweater. It was large and billowing, even for her gawky frame, and covered in the foul smelling leaf mould that made this bog. She threw it over him.

Raphe looked up as Loyalty and Lightning came up to the top of the rock. Uncle Thomas and Arnold came up from behind.

“Raphe, what are you doing here?” Thomas asked with concern. “You shouldn’t be playing. Who’s watching the mareep?”

“I’m retrieving a lamb, uncle,” Raphe nodded. “William sent me, since Diablo’s our best tracker. We’ve found her, don’t worry. I just took a little tumble.”

“We can see that,” Arnold muttered, sounding worried. “Listen, get back to the mareep, Loyalty scented that ninetails close by.”

“I will, once I finish getting my sweater back from the swamp. Don’t worry, I have Diablo to protect me. It’s only a three minute walk back to the pasture. Don’t let the trail grow cold,” Raphe said cheerfully.

Thomas nodded. “See that you do get back soon. Come on, Arnold. We have to go.”

They dashed off, following the rock ridge, not going down it as Raphe had.

Raphe waited for five minutes and then lifted her sweater from the muck. The vulpix had managed to turn around and get onto his four feet under it. He looked at Raphe strangely.

“Look, don’t take from our farm. We need the food, too, you know. Just – if things get really bad – I’m sure I can find some food for you, somewhere. And if you can’t help but take from us – please keep the other predators away, at least.”

Raphe felt very silly, and naughty, making a bargain with something so evil but she didn’t know what else to do. She couldn’t kill him now. He could feel pain and hunger, just like her. He even looked evil, his fur scruffy, the color of dried blood, and his expression a natural smirk. Yet, there was something about him that she shouldn’t help believe good. Raphe couldn’t say what, but she believed it emphatically.

The vulpix looked into the human’s eyes. The little – well, actually she was rather large –fool was crazy. A mad woman. She seemed to believe that he needed comforting. Help. She was offering to feed him. Only the insane did such things – or prophets, but both ended up dead, either way.

He turned, and limped away. Stopping at the edge of the marshy ground he looked back. She really did believe in him, and she had protected him when his mother couldn’t. He shook his head, and continued limping away. She would be his undoing. He already knew that. Why help her?

Raphe turned back to Diablo, who was growling gently, and the mareep, who was shaking.

“Yeah, I know, it was probably crazy, but I had to try,” she told them, before, picking up the mareep in one muck covered hand and beginning to look for a way up the slope.

[MorriganFearn]

((Just as a warning, one of the characters introduced here is not nice at all. He's a boarderline sado-maschocist. Please don't take it against this fic for having a bad guy who is actually bad. He's going to do a lot of nasty things before the series is done, and I want you to know that. He doesn't do anything too bad in this chapter, but he will.))

~Chapter Eight: In Which the Plot Finally Gets Moving~
~or~
~Catcher’s Summer~

The wind swished through the pine trees at the edge of the Crag Mountains, and swirled around a pale birch bark staff propped against a rock. The owner was looking at the clouds, grinning as shapes appeared, her deep green eyes sparkling with light from the sun. The sun also sparkled over cropped auburn hair, and long taned limbs. The arms were bared, because of the heat of the day, and the leggings had been rolled up for the same reason.

Raphe lolled on the grassy sward, the picture of ease. She had finished growing, hopefully, over the last four years. Now at fourteen she was a stereotypical Lightcastle, tall, lean from most of her time spent outdoors, with a sturdy piece of rope wound around one shoulder, and a blade of the odd metal crystal scion tucked into her belt. And the staff, with its blue white orb. She had won a prize at the last Family Harvest Fair for her fighting abilities with her weapon. She couldn’t create the protective barrier of electrically charged particles but that was the only thing that her staff couldn’t do in her hands.

A yowl from a pine near by brought a change over the young Lightcastle. Suddenly the long sprawling limbs were pulled together, and the tall girl bounded upright with grace born of practice. Her staff was already gripped in her hand as she straightened up, the leggings, rolled above the nobbly knees, were pushed back down to ankle height.

She stepped from behind the rock, and walked to the bit of hill devoid of trees. An entire caravan was trying to make its way up the rutted track below her vantage point that led into the mountains, and the homes of the Lightcastles. Raphe gave a low whistle, and as soon as she heard Diablo’s soup plate paws behind her she leapt.

It was a familiar routine with her, now. Protecting the mountain was easy, she knew everyone who was allowed to come and go by sight. These people she didn’t know, therefore they were to be put off. They might be legitamately lost, Raphe couldn’t blame them if they were. From all reports the world outside the Crags was a large and confusing place. However, they might not, and either way, it was Raphe’s job for the next three days to redirect them – or fry them into oblivion.

Skidding down the slope she landed perfectly poised in the middle of the road. Diablo, now the size of a steinwulf, landed beside her. His long shaggy black fur had become tipped with red over the years, and the white patches of his chest had become an ashy grey. With his yellow eyes he looked like a monster standing at Raphe’s side.

Raphe raised an eyebrow.

“Lost your way, strangers?” she asked, her staff leveled at the caravan driver. His ponyta whickered nervously smelling Diablo’s stench of brimstone and blood.

“Well, now that you’re here to direct us, I don’t think we have,” the driver smiled back.

Seven men detatched themselves from the back of the caravan. They all wore bulky shapes strapped over their chests. Handles hung down from no less than five pouches on each of the chest straps.

The driver was the only one not wearing a chest strap, Raphe noticed, yet he was the obvious leader, as he held up his hand and the men stopped. “I think now would be a good time to test the spliced Damixtran maddog the boss sent us.”

“Well, test him fast,” Raphe told the seven as she pushed with her mind, white hot plasma lashing out from her staff to obliterate them.

The men screamed in pain. The caravan driver was certainly no more. Raphe felt slightly sorry for them, even if they were thieves. At least it was a quick way to die. She had learned long ago not to listen to the screams. Well, it had only been a year ago, but it seemed long ago. And on that thought everything went wrong.

The world grew cold, as sound covered the valley, and then the world tunred inside out.

“Onix, make a barricade!”

Raphe stopped fueling her staff the moment the collossus bellowed to the sky. She had seen them sometimes, usually diving into a new tunnel. They were extremely genetle, the danger normally came from their size. Onix generally ignored anything human sized unless it was full of lots of tastey minerals.

However, this onix did not look like the calm rock leviathans. There was anger behind those flat eyes, and the rocks of it’s body were jagged, instead of softly erroded. Obsidian swirled in the granite, and there were bits and pieces that had developed a metal coating.

“Crush --,” the voice, angered and full of pain broke off with a gurgle.

“No one touches the Lightcastle until I’m finished with her,” this voice was smooth and deadly – yet it cracked on the last word.

Raphe watched in astonishment as a young man – boy, stepped over the onix’s tail. He wasn’t like anyone she had ever seen before. Electricity crackled off burnished black hair which was long and held back in a ponytail. His eyes were wild, and although such a deep blue that they were almost black, they glowed with the same yellow electricity as was running over his body like friendly catapillars.

“So, you’re a famous Lightcastle? My name is Zach, just in case you want to know who is going to pay you back for murdering three of the men, and congratualte you for murdering my superior,”

“Diablo,” Raphe said.

Beside her the hybrid opened his mouth and a thin jet of flame blasted at Zach – where Zach had been, anyway.

The boy was directly in front of her, and moving his hand toward her stomach. But Raphe was already ducking, moving her staff to take him off his feet. He fell on his back, but was already bouncing back up, only to meet the white globe of Raphe’s staff coming up to hit his stomach.

Raphe pushed, hard faced, and engria plasma shot into Zach. He vanished in the burst of yellow white light. She was going to need to throw up after this was finished, she could tell. Knowing his name made her feel so awful as she killed him.

Suddenly a cackling came to her ears. Zach was still standing right where he’d always been. His top had been melted away to reveal odd black markings on his chest, which lightning still crackled over.

“Thanks for the charge up,” he grinned with sharp teeth. Holding one hand above his head the yellow light began to collect there. “Let’s see, can you charge up as well, or will you fry?” He laughed again, his mad eyes glowing more intensely than ever. “And just think, your precious family will get to be on the receiving end of this, too.”

Raphe glared, and held her staff up. “Diablo, warn the farm,” she told her faithful partner through gritted teeth. “Get Alanna to take care of the onix.”

“So, you have more allies in this wilderness?” Zach grinned. “Your doggie will need to work hard to over take the carvan now, they got the onix to pull it after you melted the poor ponyta.”

Diablo was racing away, already, barking to Alanna, who had already leapt from her tree. However, Raphe looked up to the caravan, surprised that it had managed to get away during the fight.

“Fooled you!”

She only had time to register that the caravan was still there, the front half a smoking wreckage after her initial engria blast, and then she was sent hurtling down the slope that the track cut across. Her side was stinging, and her staff was vibrating as it absorbed the electricity sent from Zach’s hand.

She she stopped rolling Raphe bounded upright, and discharaged all of her staff’s energy into the mountainside. She wasn’t powering Zach anymore.

Looking over the lip of the crater she had just created Zach’s face was a picture of shock.

“How did you survive?” he asked, jumping down into the soft dirt.

Raphe didn’t say anything as she knocked his feet from under him a second time, and brought the top of her staff to hit him in the shoulder before he could bounce up again. She brought the capped end of the staff down again, aiming for his skull. He rolled aside at the last minute.

“Nice reflexes,” he panted. “Whatsamatter? Cat got your tongue?”

The yowl from the track which the caravan was on told Raphe that Alanna had begun to use her icy claws on the onix. The ground shook, as the great snake’s thrashings brought out an earthquake of magnitude three.

Raphe registered this in the back of her mind as she leapt off the unsteady ground bringing down her staff on Zach, toppling him with her momentum and weight. She held her staff across his upper arms, forcing his deadly hands to lie flat. Her knees dug into his chest. She was close enough to his face to see the demons behind the crazed eyes smile and wave at her. He had a faint shadow where he must have shaved not so recently. She noticed his adamsapple, and remembered how his voice had cracked. He was only a year older than her, if that. Puffy scar tissue in the shape of a cresent moon rested on his strong cheekbones.

Raphe focused on it in shock. Someone must have litterally cut into his face intentionally to leave such a perfect scar.

He was examining her with the same intense scrutiny.

“How did you survive?” he asked her again, sounding pitiful, as if he would die unless he knew. “Are you spliced, like me? Are you? Like me? Or are you something else? An angel perhaps.”

“Angel?” Raphe found herself turning the strange word over on her tongue. “I’m me. Raphe.”

“Oh, I had hoped,” Zach sounded sad, and then he grinned.

Electricity crawled over his skin and collected in a ball between his face and Raphe’s. Then is expanded with a boom, and Raphe was sent flying. Zach struggled upright.

“Well, Angel Raphe, this has been fun. But we have pokemon to take, and a profit to make,” he walked over to the girl, sprawled on the turf, dazed, and burned on one side of her face. Her staff was still held in one hand, and he noticed that she was still breathing. Really, if his lightning wouldn’t kill her, then he’d have to do it the old fashioned way.

Reaching down he slipped her scion blade out of its sheeth, before idly stepping on the hand that held her staff. He looked at her through the clear surface of the blade.

“I wish I knew for certain,” he sighed. “You’ve given me such hope, it’s almost – no, it is a pity that I have to kill you. Or,” he bent down and caressed Raphe’s cheek with the tip of her own dagger, “I just need to incapacitate you. Anything to ask before I knock you out?”

Raphe’s eyes were still fixed on the paler skin of the cresent scar that stretched around his face. She couldn’t even feel her hand trapped under his boot and her own staff.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” Zach crooned. “It shows my allegiance to the one who made me. His pet psychopath carved it into me personally. He has a lot of pets. Do you? I noticed the doggie – and who or whatever Alanna is, is she your pet?”

“She’s my partner,” Raphe snarled.

“Mmm, Nicky the darling psychopath lies like that, too. His precious ralts is as much his partner as a slave is to his master. You know, he named the little psychic Anguish? What a nasty name for such an inoffensive being. Well, I can’t stay here all day chatting.”

With that he reversed the dagger, and holding it by the blade he brought the pomel down on Raphe’s temple.

Satisfied that he had knocked her out, Zach rose. He wipped off the blade on his black rodejo, or sleevless loose vest. Tossing the blade back onto Raphe’s limp body he looked at the hand that had held the blade. The thin lines of blood that it had created didn’t feel painful. He touched the cuts. Still nothing. Amazing. Nicky’s little pain blockers actually worked.

Pity, Zach had been looking forward to having an excuse to attack the empath. Aumag usually let him attack Nikolas if the torturer slipped up somehow. But at least Nick had promised that using the pain blockers meant that when pain came back it would hurt twice as much. Zach hoped so. It made everything more interesting, and the pain felt so good.

He climbed up the slope, and looked at the amazing sight of a small fuzzy cat winning against a large rock snake.

“You fools can’t even handle a pokemon battle against an opponent with no human direction?” He chuckled.

Lightning blasted from his body, enveloped Alanna, and knocked her into the nearest tree. The cat-like pokemon hit with a crunch and slid down limply. The small body hissed as the air cooled the smoking fur.

“Well, get the bells out of the caravan,” Zach instructed. “We have pokemon to collect."

((Oohh. What will happen? And just what the heck is splicing, anyway?))

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter Eight: In Which Raphe Gets up the Nerve to Leave~
~or~
~Out of the Gate~

Raphe blinked. She was lying on a matress, and covered with sheets. Her right hand felt like she was dipping it into fire. The rest of her body was one big bruise, and a headache lashed from a point on her temple.

“You’re awake!” Mark’s voice asailed her, low and filled with concern.

“What?” Raphe asked in a daze.

“What happened to you?” Mark asked, now swimming into her vision the way Zach had before knocking her out.

“A caravan. Some maniac who wasn’t affected by pure engria blasts came. He just mowed me over,” Raphe reported, her mind slipping into nuetral. Despite the pain in her body, her mind seemed dissassociated from the present. “He said he was spliced. I guess that’s the reason he could move so fast.”

“Spliced?” William now hovered in her vision. “Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah, believe me, when Zach tells you something you don’t forget it fast,” Raphe told her cousin. “He’s a mad dog. A ninetails with rabies and bloodlust.”

“Maybe he really is,” William muttered.

“What?” Raphe struggled up, and that was when she noticed that she was in Uncle Thomas’s house, probably on William’s own bed. “Why I am I here?”

“Well, which question do you want me to answer first?” William smiled crookedly. Raphe noticed the fear behind his eyes.

“The one about Zach – the man who did for me,” Raphe decided. “If he comes back I want to be as prepared as possible.”

“Look, he’s not going to come back, so you don’t have to worry,” her cousin said. “As for what he is – When we described the guy who attacked us to Grandma Eleanor --,”

“Wait. He got here?!” Raphe exclaimed. Her home was between Thomas’ and the track the caravan had been about to take.

“Yeah, we’ll tell you what happened later. Look, this is scary, okay? There’s a family meeting happening in the kitchen. I’m not even allowed in,” the seventeen year old Willaim said. “I’m too young, apparently. But when we described him to Grandma she got all quiet. Then she said he might be something called a splicer. Someone who combines their essence with the essence of a pokemon. They gain the basic shape and atributes of the pokemon. She said she couldn’t be sure, because as far as we could tell, besides being immune to electric attacks, he looked like a normal person with a bit of a tattoo issue. Grandma’s worried, though. Really worried. She muttered something about him being possibly the most refined splice she’s ever heard of.”

“He moves like a manetric,” Raphe gulped.

“But his stripes look like an ampharos’ markings,” Mark said quietly.

Both older Lightcastles turned to look at him. His new mahogany staff, capped with a pink flaaffy orb, was clutched tight to his chest. He had only just turned ten, and right now he was shaking.

“I remember watching him from Firebrand’s back as he burned our home. He looked exactly like that picture in Mama’s history about Josiah Lightcastle. The one where Wild One goes berserk,” Mark said.

“He what our home?” Raphe breathed.

“Him and five other catchers came up the road. An onix followed them. Mama was in the garden. He asked where the rare pokemon were. She took one of the stakes that she used for the tomatoes, and flung it at him, before screaming at Agok to get Dad. I was getting lunch in the house. I ran out as he splintered the stake with a lightning bolt and fried Agok with a second blast. I caught Agok when he fell. The catcher was laughing.

“He said the fighting spirit of the women here might make them more valuable than the pokemon. He asked Mama how much she thought she would be worth as a concubine. Or maybe it was porqupine. I don’t know what the word meant.

“She just yelled, and flung another stake at one of the catchers. Then Firebrand came, attracted by the noise. She jumped on his back, and then had Firebrand run up to grab me. This guy, one of his own men had a four foot long metal stake in the side, he just continued to laugh. He said that while a real stallion from the Southwest Desert was a good start Firebrand was too old.

“Mama just had another garden stake in her hands and she kept him at bay, as Dad and the dogs came up from the mareep pasture. They must have heard. Lightning called forth a thunderbolt, and Thunder ran up to take the guy down. He didn’t get a chance. The onix used thrash, and the tail --,” tears were running down Mark’s face, and he gripped his staff tightly, “smashed Thunder. This guy was laughing, Raphe.

“And then Hercules came, and Mama told him to use hyper beam on the spliced guy. Hercules blasted him so hard there was a crater in the ground.

“Dad yelled at Mama to go. He ran into the house to get her bow, and Lightning distracted everyone by going back to herd the mareep into the woods. The onix moved forward, and hit Lightning. He went flying – and then hit a tree. He was still alive, at lease, then there was this – noise, and then the world turned inside out, and then he was gone!” Mark looked stricken. “I don’t know what kind of pokemon has an attack that powerful.”

“It’s how they capture pokemon,” Raphe said quietly. “You’ll learn about it more when you’re thirteen. It’s disgusting. Did Dad get out of the house? Are the mareep all right?”

“Dad got out of the house,” Mark affirmed. “He had both his gun and his staff, and he blasted the men with both, before running to Hercules, and getting on him. Firebrand was using protect, Mama wouldn’t leave until she knew Dad was safe. He was yelling at her as he gave her the bow and quiver.

“And then we heard the laughing again, and the guy with the markings jump up from nowhere, saying we were too slow to catch him. And then he grabbed a bell from one of his lackeys. Almost all of them were maimed or bleeding, and he didn’t seem to know or care. But then the world turned inside out again, and then,” Mark paused again, swallowing a fresh batch of tears. “Diablo was there. This guy smiled at us, and then ordered Diablo down after the mareep. Diablo just went.

“Mama brought her bow up then, and fired at him,” Mark smiled a bit. “He wasn’t expecting that, at least, or doesn’t know much about rapidash bows. The arrow shattered to splash lava all over the arm he put up. It was the first time he’d been really hurt. He screamed, and then smiled again. How can anyone act like that?

“He then asked Dad what mattered more to him, his pokemon, or his family? He called down a thunderbolt, just like Lightning. If Firebrand hadn’t used protect we would have been dead.

“Mom forced Firebrand to run, Hercules with him. When I looked back, the other catchers had gone down to the barn, and after the mareep. This Zach guy was setting fire to the house,” Mark finished his tale breathing out with a whoosh.

“So, we have no home?” Raphe asked desperately.

“It’s worse,” William said [1].

“How so?” Raphe asked.

“All of the mareep are gone too, along with your barn delcatty. The other pokemon were slaughtered,” William said. “Our mareep are missing, as well. The only pokemon we have left is Mammoth. Mother’s dead.”

Raphe started up. Aunt Susan was dead? She didn’t even know how to fight. William was looking at the opposite wall blankly.

“And – we weren’t the only mountain attacked. Seven others had similar caravans come up them. There’s over ten families who have no homes, six whole flocks are just gone, along with other useful pokemon, five other flocks are merely reduced to half numbers at best. All of the other look-outs were murdered. You’re the only survivor, and that’s probably only because they thought they had killed you. You’ve had a nasty blow to the temple, and were covered in burns. And your staff hand was mangled. If Grandma Eleanor hadn’t found a recuella in the woods on her way down here, you wouldn’t be awake even now,” William ticked off the losses on his fingers.

“It wasn’t an accident,” Raphe said miserably, the numbers were too awful to comprehend. “He was going on about angles, and then he decided just to knock me out. All of the other look-outs are dead? That’s over thirty five people. How did they manage it?”

“Bad luck, and psikets,” William sighed.

“Psikets?” Raphe asked.

“It’s the finall evolution of cidids,” William explained. “Cricket pokemon who have the ability to psychically alter probability so they, and their masters, are always lucky. Everyone on the mountains that day was inexperienced, and they all fell asleep after their lunches. All the catchers had to do was sneak up and slit their throats.”

“That day – how long have I been asleep?” Raphe finally wanted to know.

“About three days,” Mark replied.

“And no one has tried to run these people down and catch them for what they did?” Raphe asked, appalled.

“Who could?” Will asked. “We literally don’t have the people. The Lightcastles are scattered. We’ll have to abandon most of the Crags, and come back to the Fortress. Our autonomy is compromised. We would need the entire clan after them – especially if we have to face that monster again, at least with all of the other mountains were able to destroy most of the caravans that came through their passes,” he said bitterly.

“But --,” Raphe began, a sick realization sinking in. “This is summer. If we don’t have the mareep wool ready to ship to Burram, and no gardens of our own – How are we going to feed the survivors? We have nothing to sell. Each family can make just enough to keep themselves together – but there is no way we could manage ten extra families over the winter.”

“That’s what this meeting is about,” Will said tightly. “We don’t have enough people, or enough commodities. With more people we can at least go out hunting, and gather other food.”
Raphe’s mouth quirked. She knew what that meant. The Lightcastles had not come off their mountains en masse for over 90 years, and the last time was to steal food from the richer Guild bound people, and cot holders of Calena. That was the price the outer world would have to pay for stealing food from them.

“Sign me up for the first party,” She told him.

“I’ll remember that, although you probably won’t be let out of bed on order of your mother. Besides, we still have to get more people. Most of the up and coming generation is gone,” William pointed out.
“And what’s the plan to do about that?” Raphe asked.

“Well, I think Grandma Eleanor has a plan. There’s a couple of old laws that bind all of the clans together. And one of them is that if a family is decimated by fear, fire, or plague, than the in-laws must provide any free and able-bodied people to replace those that were lost.”

“But you just said, no one has enough --,” Raphe began.

“Don’t you see?” Mark interrupted. “He means Mama’s family. We do have people who married outClan. Caroline’s Papa is from the Clearwater Clan. The Swamp Traders. Grandma Eleanor is going to ask them for any orphans they’ve got on hand, or anyone who needs a fresh start.”

“We’ll probably get the dregs of the Clans, but it’s better than nothing,” William admitted.

“Is there any good news?” Raphe wanted to know.

“Actually there is,” William snorted with a weak smile. “Alanna’s all right, and before Grandma Eleanor got the call that there was trouble she and Brave Heart found a zangoose in the pasture. There’s no more on the mountains now, so at least what’s left of the flocks won’t have to worry about those, any more.”

“That’s good,” Raphe agreed with a smile, before struggling into a sitting position. The world swam, and she was pressed back on the pillows by both her cousin and her little brother.

“We’ll bring Alanna to you,” Mark promised, “but you have to stay down.”

“Yes Mama,” Raphe told her younger brother, rolling her eyes as they left.

She lay back among the pillows, and tried to put her thoughts in order. She knew she should be greatful that she had survived, but something was nagging at her. That freak had Diablo. She had sent her partner away from her protection – and look what had happened. It was her fault that she hadn’t stopped Zach as she should have. They could have organized some resistance if she had. Now their friends and partners were on their way to be slaves for some good for nothing humans.

The fact was that she had failed. This was her mess, and she should be the one to pick it up. It was her responsibility as the only remaining member of the look-outs. She had already lost three days – but there were at least six slow moving caravans filled with bells. Three days was nothing if she could –

Raphe woke with a start. The room was dark, the only light came flickering from the open doorway. It illuminated the black curls of her mother’s hair. Maria was sitting in the chair that William had been occupying, and knitting. As Raphe tried to move a thick warm sound stopped, and she realized that Alanna, her side bandaged, was spreading out like a pool of fur across Raphe’s stomach.

When the katzblauen’s purring ceased Maria looked up.

“Oh, you’re awake already,” a smile split the tanned face, and tired eyes lit up. “It’s almost midnight.”
“What’s going on?” Raphe asked plaintively.

“Debate,” Maria told her daughter, putting the knitting aside, and tucking Raphe’s blankets more securely around the Lightcastle teen. “I’ve never met any family so inlove with argument before in my life. At home if the Clan chief said something was so we were only allowed to speak our opinions in turn once, and then vote on the matter. They’ve been going for three days straight. Eleanor is wearing them down, luckily. You Lightcastles are too proud for your own good,” she chuckled.

“Mama,” Raphe sighed. “So nothing’s happened? Do they want me to speak?”

“No, you’re far too weak. We’re going to let you outside tomorrow for fresh air, but that’s it,” Maria told her daughter.

“Is it true Grandma found a recuella?” Raphe asked curiously.

“Yes,” Maria told her.

“Hillary told me they didn’t care to treat humans,” Raphe murmured, sleep begginging to tug at her again.

“Hillary has been living in the outside world too long,” Maria told her. “We give back to the land, and so the pokemon of the land give back to us. It’s all about the cycle. We are partners, not masters, not slaves. It’s what the three warriors intended when they let humans come here.”

“Sing me a song about the three,” Raphe requested, enjoying the feeling of being a child again, knowing that her mother was there for her.

“I don’t feel much like singing a happy song tonight,” Maria told her daughter.

“Then the one about Hellis, please?” Raphe persisted.

“That’s a lament, and I don’t want to sing one of those, either.”

“Please?”

“Fine,” Maria acquiesced.

“Darin na Hellis
Ara na chu
Darin na Hellis
Ara na chu
Sorin ima na te
Sorin ima na te

Y sol erti jin
la sin a mi
La sin a mi
Torra acu he
Darin na Hellis
Ara na chu
Ara na chu

Corin sa hu
Sol era teem
Eba na teern
Torra acu he
Torra acu he
Torra acu na Hellis
Sa ri meta ri
Pone teasa hu
Ole te jin

Y sol erti jin
la sin a mi
Y sol erti jin
la sin a mi [2]”

Raphe fell asleep with the lullaby-like lament ringing in her ears.

When she woke again it was morning, and Mark as well as Arnold were on hand to walk her outdoors. She was feeling much stronger already. It took ten whole minutes on her feet before her head began to rebel by sending the world spinning in front of her eyes.

The pasture land had been blasted as if by a lightning storm. The lightning rods, themselves, had exploded. The plaster of his house bore sooty marks. However, the large building was still intact, unlike his razed barn.

No progress had been made in the Great Debate, apparently. Raphe fell asleep again when she was led to a chair in the sun. She slept rather badly, however, dreaming of Zach, Diablo opening his mouth to fry her, and the vulpix she left food for every winter laughing at her, before he morphed into a young man with a six rayed sun burned into his back. Raphe couldn’t see his face, but the burned flesh was fresh, blistered around the edges, and blackened at the center. In places the charcoaled skin had broken and blood ran down in bright red streams.

She ate ravenously when she woke up in the late afternoon, and then was carted back inside. She slept through the whole night, but awoke again as the fifth day dawned, itching to go help or do something. She could walk all the way to the kitchen, now, without the dizzy feeling.

As Raphe cut herself bread Alanna came in and wound around her ankles, before jumping up on the counter top. Raphe allowed her to do so, this time.

“What are we going to do about Diablo?” Raphe whispered to her cat.

Alanna gave Raphe a disgusted look that clearly translated into: “Go and get him, of course.”

“I can’t,” Raphe started to explain.

“Why not?” asked a switch of Alanna’s slim tail.

“Because, a bevy of catchers and that guy would be against me. I’m only one person.”

“You have me,” Alanna’s annoyed yowl clearly stated.

“That’s not enough,” Raphe told her.

Alanna jumped down from the counter, and looked out the window to where Firebrand was cropping what little green grass was left in the predawn light. “We can take the Hell Horse, too.”

“He’s mother’s partner! I can’t just take him!” Raphe argued.

Alanna switched her tail again. “It’s the only way you’ll catch up with them,” the expressive appendage signed. “Besides, why else does he have his saddle on?”

“What!” Raphe peered out, and noticed that this was indeed correct.

“I saw Mark and Vona[3] Eleanor put it on him two hours earlier,” Alanna’s eyes told Raphe smugly. “And the saddle bags were packed last night.”

“But, Grandma Eleanor can’t want me to go out into the outer world!” Raphe protested.

“But she does,” Alanna replied. “That debate will drag on for months, and in the mean time we need our mareep back. Not even raiding parties will be able to recover enough food. You’ve got the best chance out of us. You stood against Zach and know how he fights, now. No one will suspect one little girl to be following an army of catchers, anyway. Why are you wasting time? Let’s go!”

The katzblauen meowed imperiously, and raced to the door leading to the pasture.

Raphe waited only long enough to grab a piece of bread, her staff, her cloak, and a new scion knife, before following.

In the cool air she felt her spirits revived. She whistled for Firebrand, and he came over willingly. “We’re going after them,” she whispered, petting his glossy black coat, before leaping onto his back. Alanna jumped up in front of her, and Raphe tapped her heels to Firebrand’s sides. She felt the muscles bunch under her body, and then he shot away, taking the familiar route over the mountain to her home. From there they would venture into the outer world, and face the challenges that awaited them.

________________
[1] – It’s always worse. As a life long pessimist, let me tell you, nothing is ever as simple as you want it to be.

[2] – Recognize this last line? Those who do get a prize of whatever they want – within reason. I can’t make people supreme commanders of the universe, for example. I just love making up languages. And it’s singable, too. Anyway, here’s the translation, kinda mushy, but it actually has a TON of significance on the plot, kinda over arching the entire saga, really, not just Angel Testing.

Oh dark Hellis
Why must you be so loyal
Oh dark Hellis
Why must you be so loyal
You know I will kill you
You know I will kill you

But I still love you (with my soul)
Love you with my soul
Don’t shelter me
Oh dark Hellis
Loyalty isn’t worth the price
Loyalty isn’t worth the price

They will cast you out
Seal your soul to the ground
Back to the Hell you sprang from
Don’t shelter me
Don’t shelter me
Don’t shelter me Hellis
Damnation isn’t worth friendship
So let me (my soul) go
So forget me (my soul)

But I still love you (with my soul)
But I still love you (with my soul)

[3] – Vona: a Russahanian word meaning Lady. Just so you know, Alanna’s not actually saying all this. It’s just that she and Raphe have been partners for so long now that Raphe can understand most of her body language. I only put it like speech to make it easier for the readers to understand what’s going on.

((Edit: Gah! I forgot my lovelyful Author's Note.

Anyway, only one post for this chapter. See, the plot's picking up, and the chapters are getting shorter, meaning easier to read, right?

Lots of plot hints were dropped in this chapter, and there's only one more chapter to go before we meet one of the main villians in this series. Hmm, my story seems to be kind of based around the villians -- in fact, all most all of my stories are that way.

Anyway, coming up next: Chapter Nine: The Vagabond and the Librarian. I leave you to guess what's going to happen in the next chapter, and you know it's perfectly FINE to post your guesses, slash comments. <Hint, hint>.

[MorriganFearn]

~Chapter Nine: In Which Raphe Becomes a Thief~
~or~
~The Vagabond and the Librarian~

Raphe rode through the twisting trail in the forest between her home and Uncle Tomas’s, Firebrand’s mane lighting the way. She knew the most logical thing to do would be to head directly to the mountain’s base, and then pick up the tracks and go from there. However, she had to see what was left of her home. The idea that it was no longer standing was a vague unreality in her mind.

Firebrand’s hooves pounded down the trail, clacking against the stones. Raphe looked at the patches of lightening sky through the leafy screen of foliage. The predawn air was still cool on her face, and the smell of pine was all around her.

However, Raphe was tense, half expecting some relative to step out of the trees and tell her to stop and go back home. Alanna was not purring, a sure sign of nerves from the feline pokemon.

The journey was uneventful, despite all worries, though.

The destination was not.

They came out into the clearing, and Raphe cried out involuntarily, seeing the devastation. The earth was blackened by scorch marks, and churned into a seething mess.

She slipped from Firebrand’s back, and ran to her house. The charred ruin that had been her house. There were shards of pottery, shapely slivers of glass, ash covered curtains, a doll’s head, spines of burned books lying under beams and timber, with nails exposed to the open air. Raphe found no trace of their wooden forks and spoons.

Turning away from the devastation and towards her mother’s former vegetable garden Raphe broke into tears at what she saw. The tan feathered body of a psyduck lay sprawled between the backend tomato vines.

Her breath caught in her throat, hitching a sob, as she realized that the brown furry things that she had taken for rocks in her haste, were swinub. The bodies lying in piles about the yard were suddenly jumping out at her from every corner. The blood on the neck of a torchic, its head nowhere to be seen, was brought into sharp relief against the burned earth.

Raphe shut her eyes, put her hands over her ears and screamed.

The sound seemed to be caught in a pocket of silence, reverberating around the hill top farm, and down into the pocket valley where the mareep used to graze. Then it carried on and on and on, up into the endless blue sky as dawn streaked in from the east.

As the last echoes of Raphe’s scream died away she stood, biting the inside of her lip. Her face seemed to crumple inward as she stared at the devastation one more time. The scream had not made her feel any better. She only felt empty, now that the pressure had been relieved. The bodies, some slightly bloated for having lain for days in the sun, others mere bones and flesh mauled and eaten by the wild pokemon of the area, were still there, and she could do nothing about that. Raphe turned hearing buzzing wings, and was not at all surprised to see a swarm of biting fly pokemon circling the yard.

An angry whinny from Firebrand, and a yowl from Alanna broke her reverie. Raphe whirled on the spot to look down the slope to the mareep pasture. A forsaken body of a torchic was jerking in a grim parody of life as it was dragged down the slope, towards the cover of the trees. Instinct took over, and Raphe started to run, her staff held high.

A beam of electrically charged energy shot over the torchic, making earth explode near the tree line. Raphe cursed the fact that she had missed, and adjusted her aim, just as the culprit jumped into the open.

Amber eyes glared up at the girl, daring her to take another shot. Thin ribs heaved as the six tails dragged on the ground. The expression on the sharp fox face was one of sneering contempt. Raphe recognized the deep red pelt, matching the brown color of the dried blood on the torchic.

Her staff lowered involuntarily.

“You,” she breathed. “I left scraps for you every winter after your mum was killed.”

It had been a stupid idea at the time. At first a flight of ten-year old fancy, and then just a habit. Raphe had even told herself that she was helping a fiend, and making his life easier. Now she could see her mistake as the vulpix stood in front of her, unashamedly stealing a torchic from her home, her coop.

The vulpix, for his part, sized up Raphe. He definitely recognized the human. How could he forget her? He was even finding grudging respect for her as he saw the horse and cat come down the slope after her, and begin to circle him, in order to trap him. However, he ignored the two pokemon, keeping amber, pupiless eyes locked on Raphe.

Humans had come to destroy her den, and now she must be going after them. It was the only explanation. He had known something like this would happen. Something would have forced her out into the open eventually. But human affairs were human affairs, and the girl’s quest for retribution was none of his concern.

His concern was in finding enough to eat. He mainly hunted wild prey having, much to his surprise and shock, listened to Raphe when she was ten. However, with dead bodies strewn over the landscape just going to waste what else should he do, but help nature out in disposing of the corpses?

The cat hissed behind him, her claws springing from her softly velveted paws with an audible noise for his benefit. The fire horse whickered again, stamping a hoof far too close to his tails. But the truly dangerous one was the human.

Don’t say it, the fox pokemon mentally pleaded. Don’t say it.

“You owe me,” Raphe said, as if in a dream. “For everything I’ve done for you. And this is your home too that has been ruined. My grandma said something once about ninetails, and maybe it’s true. Maybe it could be true for vulpixes, too,” the fourteen-year old licked her lips, feeling as if she was bargaining with something she shouldn’t be bargaining with. “So, come with me. I’m calling in my debt. You help me take back Lightcastle pokemon. If you do then whatever mountain I set up on won’t have no more fox hunts. Not for you or any family you choose to raise.”

The vulpix snorted, they wouldn’t live to see that day, he felt. But he did owe her. This was an impossible situation, and they were going to get themselves all killed. He wanted no part of it.
But he was going to have one, a tiny voice told him. Whether he liked it or not. The three unbreakable rules. He owed the girl.

With a reluctant snarl he walked over to Raphe, and rolled over on his back, submitting and showing his agreement.

Raphe nodded and walked to Firebrand. Mounting the rapidash she looked down at the fox pokemon. Alanna, not looking amused at the sudden change in traveling companions, hopped into the saddle in front of Raphe, and hissed at the vulpix. The vulpix at Firebrand’s feet snorted in derision of Alanna’s defensive position.

Firebrand snorted back. One of his plate sized hooves stamped down an inch from the fox pokemon’s face. The horse wanted to make where he stood very clear. The vulpix yawned, and sat down. He wanted to make it clear that he’d rather put his butt where Firebrand wanted to stand.

“Come on,” Raphe muttered grimly. She clicked her heels against Firebrand’s sides and the horse snorted, before trotting along.

The little group was quiet. Raphe was trying to plan her next move -- but that had already been planned from the moment that she swung onto Firebrand’s saddle. She was going out of the mountains. A chill curled inside her stomach. For the first time in her life she would be leaving. Going beyond the edge of the Crags.

What was she going to do? She stopped Firebrand, realizing that she hadn’t even tried to pick up the trail. It felt as though her mind was clouded, fogged. Nothing felt right. Dismounting she turned to look at the road.

“I’m just looking for -- I’m just looking -- tracks. Tracking. Gotta find--,”

Her stomach flipped over itself and heaved. The stolen bread from breakfast spewed all over the side of the road. Alanna sniffed, while the vulpix backed up a pace, looking contemptuous. Bile continued to bubble at the back of Raphe’s throat as she shook with her hands on her knees. Her breath came in harsh, ragged gasps. She could feel her hands running tremors up her arms and down her legs.

The sun was rising as Raphe’s breath slowed. Practical. They had to be practical. For now they were on the only road that the Caravans could have used. She could look for signs when the way forked. For now speed was important. She had to at least be off her home ground when a search party was sent for her.

“Vulpix -- gah, this is stupid!” Raphe exploded. “You need a name. You’re a liar, and a cheat, and a bandit, and a rogue and a vagabond, but you’re with me now, and you will have a name.”

The vulpix scratched at some fleas, looking perplexed. What did this have to do with anything? Firebrand tossed his head, understanding that Raphe was trying to distract herself from reality. Alanna sighed, and yeowled that they needed to get going.

“Right. You, fox, I’m – you’re now Ban—no! Um. Don’t get any ideas about stealing. And Rogue is too charming for a scruffy evil-minded creature like you,” the vulpix shrugged, a disturbingly human gesture that helped center Raphe’s pinwheeling thoughts. “Vagabond. I’m calling you Vagabond. Let’s go. Get up here,” she indicated the saddlebag that Alanna had not claimed.

The katzblauen hissed. Vagabond breathed a contemptuous ball of smoke. He knew that he was as fast as the horse when it came to the rocky and rutted path. He started off, his ratty blood red tails barely held above the ground. Firebrand neighed, thinking that despite the fact that vulpix all deserved to have their skulls stoved in, this one wasn’t stupid.

Raphe mounted, feeling awkward. “I suppose he’s right. Lets go, Firebrand.”

She tapped the rapidash's sides with her heels, and Firebrand continued his leisurely trot down the path leading to the outside world. Vagabond followed, trying to ignore Alanna's low growling and hissing. Raphe was concentrating on her knowledge of the route. It was easy enough since she merely was going to track the caravan she had met, seeing as it must have left plenty of tracks, especially if they had to use the onix to push it. She hoped the men were still using the caravan, despite the fact that it must have been a wreck. Worries like these kept her from thinking too hard about what must have happened at her home. Her sweaters going up in flame. Her father's furniture. Her mother's kitchen. Her farm pokemon picked clean by birds. Everything they had ever done gone and turned to ash. Ashes and dust.

They continued through the morning, along the pine covered and rocky trails without stopping for lunch. The three pokemon did not require regularly scheduled meals, and Raphe had stopped noticing the time. It was only as they came to the edge of the forest, with the light failing, that Raphe started from her stupor, looking about in surprise.

“Why weren't we stopped?” she wanted to know, feeling odd. Shouldn't there have been some sentries? Didn't anyone realize that she had made off with two very important pokemon? Hadn't anyone seen that she was in league with a vulpix?

Vagabond trotted up in front of Firebrand, who had bent his head to crop the grass, and shrugged. The people who would have stopped them were dead, what more could be said about them? Alanna yowled in agreement and poked Raphe with her nose. She wanted to get a move on. They could be in the open plain surrounding the mountain and searching out the tracks before dark.

Raphe, however, shivered, and looked away. “Let's, let's camp here for the night.”

She could see the plain through the thinning trees, and it had suddenly occurred to her how large and unnatural the sky was. She was going to leave the mountains. It was impossible to think. Leave the mountain and go out into the terrifying wider world with nothing to remind her of home but a katzblauen, rapidash, and a vulpix. Where would the protection of family be in this wide, terrifying land?

Alanna rolled her eyes, but hopped down. She wanted to tell Raphe to get over it, but she had been in this position before, and sometime you had to climb up the tree an inch at a time, before you could dash up it. She looked at the vulpix challengingly. The cat did not like the fox, but she had to agree. They were all about to fight something they had no idea how to fight. The more people there, the better. Besides, they probably would have to follow the humans back to their dens, and humans lived in cities. Something as big as Firebrand would be noticed in a city*. Both Alanna and Vagabond could slip into the area without notice.

Raphe was giving Firebrand a rub down, the saddle and its bags lying in the pine needles under the biggest tree. “What do you think, Firebrand?” Raphe whispered, as she glossed his neck. “The weather will stay clear? No rain?”

Firebrand snorted, assuring her that there had better be no rain on his watch. He would chase it out of the sky. Raphe laughed, resting her forehead against his hot neck until the bubbling noise from her mouth began to match the tears sliding from her face. Her shoulders shook, and she was never more grateful for the horse's presence; Raphe was sure to fall, otherwise.

Alanna began to prepare the area beside the saddle bags for camp. It was the old routine, but it felt odd, doing Diablo's work. He was the one who was supposed to sweep the area down to the dirt with his brushy tail. Alanna blew the pine needles away, rather than sully her fur. Vagabond chose to roll around the area, rubbing his back against the scratchy forest floor. It felt good, and it was fun to watch Alanna's nose wrinkle in distaste as his musk hit her. She took a swipe at him, warning the fox to stop it, but Vagabond ignored her. He didn't take orders from some feline. He didn't take orders at all.

Alanna angrily dug the fire pit on her own, as well, trying to ignore the disgusting foxy scent that surrounded them. It was strong enough for Raphe to notice, and she finally stopped crying on Firebrand’s shoulder. Sniffing, and drying her eyes the Lightcastle girl walked among the trees, collecting dried twigs and branches until she felt she had enough firewood. Firebrand could keep a sustained flame burning from his mane and tail, but it was at an inconvenient height for cooking food upon, and his heat didn't radiate outward as well as a real fire. The heat factor wasn't the problem that it could have been, as the middle of summer was mild and even balmy, this close to the foot of the mountains. Raphe had noticed the difference in temperature changing incrementally many, many times before, when she had been on guard.

This thought caused another strangled sob to burst forth, and Raphe quickly came back to the fire pit, and unloaded her arms of wood.

“Right,” the human said, rubbing her hands together, “let's see about the food.”

She walked over to the saddle bags, and opened the main pocket. There was bread and cheese wrapped up in a neat little cloth on the top, and Raphe plucked it out, before frowning. Underneath this meal, which was only enough for a day, really, was, instead of more food, a book. The girl put her food aside, not seeing both Alanna and Vagabond eyeing with interest, and reached in to pull out the book.

It was a simple affair, bound in red and black striped snake skin, without a hint of a title embossed upon the cover or spine. Raphe knew this because she spent several minutes turning it around in her hands, until she realized that it was unmarked. Okay, she thought, trying to open the book, and thumb it through. The book seemed to be resisting her touch for a while, before it sprang open, and Raphe looked at the illustrated inside. The first image that caught her eye was an elaborate illumination of some kind of serpent. Underneath, in fancy, although legible, copperplate, it said: Milotic – Senorian Sea, 606 L.G. The cramped notes underneath the caption sailed onto another page, and another, and another, interspersed with an occasional close up of a fin, or scale.

“What--,” Raphe's trembling fingers closed the book. They opened the book again, to the frontispiece which bore the legend: “The Book – Being a Guide to the Catcher Elinore Marksman, bound to Library 9573 in the year of the farfetch'd, 599 L.G.”

“Oh necronan!” Raphe yelled in horror, and flung the book from her, trying to get the contamination out of her hands. That was catcher's stuff. Pure and simply evil. The snakeskin cover hit the ground by the unlit pile of sticks in the fire pit, giving Raphe an idea: “Firebrand, burn it!”

“What?! Wait!” the weird echo popped from the book seconds before a massive snake slithered out from between the pages. It was red and black in the shark toothed triangle pattern that was the cover of the book, and it fixed Raphe with three glares, coming from three heads connecting to the trunk of the creature on long necks. “Don't you dare burn me!”

“Yaaaah!” Raphe screamed.

“I am hardly a scream worthy sight,” the snakes hissed dryly, still glaring at the human. “I am the 9,573rd phagebio to hold the name Library, and if you dare to burn me, I shall make life very, very difficult for you, understand?”

“Fiiiirebrand!”

The horse snorted, and blew a small blue flame which evaporated quickly, clearly never intended to hit the target. Raphe looked around and saw Alanna calmly watching her, with Vagabond rolling on his back, without a care. The girl breathed in and out. She knew from experience that if pokemon weren't worried, then she shouldn't be—but she also knew that as a human, she could see the complicated implications that were beyond their mammalian grasps. Vagabond, the wild one of the group was an unknown, but both Alanna and Firebrand were sensible, and farsighted, so she should trust those instincts, but she had read the word “Catcher,” she had seen the word “bound.” Only catchers did such awful things. And this three headed snake could talk, which was not natural.

“Are you finished?” the snakes asked tartly. “I don't know what she was thinking,” the reptile grumbled as it slithered away from the fire pit. The book lay in the dirt innocently. Raphe noticed that the cover had turned brown, and appeared to be made out of tauros hide now.

“What are you?” Raphe asked, her mouth tight. “And what do you have to do with catchers.”

“Firstly, my name is Library, so the question is: “who are you?” Secondly, in answer to your rude question: I'm a phagebio, and I have nothing to do with catchers. They just happen to feed me better than anyone else,” the snake replied, his left head hissing slightly.
Raphe stared at him, and then looked toward Firebrand.

“I eat the written word,” Library explained swiftly, looking cross. “Knowledge, I crave it. And Catchers require knowledge in extreme detail in certain areas. It is a useful partnership.”

“And what Catchers do to other pokemon against their will doesn't matter?” Raphe challenged.

“Look, missy, I'm not going to get into this argument with a backwards, ignorant, self-righteous clan girl,” the snakes hissed. “Now, it's time to answer my questions. What are we doing here? I can't help but notice that this isn't my reading room. For starters, horses aren't allowed.”

“I don't know what you are doing here,” Raphe bristled against the reptile's tone. Library did not seem too sympathetic to what had happened—even if he didn't know what happened, this snake didn't seem too public spirited. “I'm trying to get my family's mareep back.”

“Well, I'm here because your grandmother put me in there,” a head poked in the direction of the saddlebags. “A decision which I protested vigorously, I might add.”

“What?” Raphe looked at the snake, unsure of what she was hearing.

“Well, obviously, your best chance of finding these people is to pretend to be a Catcher yourself,” Library commented. “So, you have me, and an empty set of Elinore's bells. Unless you continue throwing a fit whenever you hear the word Catcher, you should be fairly well disguised.”

_____________________

* - Funny story: apparently there was a cougar living in in the middle of Chicago for months (in 2007? perhaps earlier), and no one noticed. However, Chicago doesn't exist in this world, and most people have to be more aware of the animals surrounding them, if only because the animals here are as intelligent, if not more so, in their own way, as their human neighbors.