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How will they handle bearing witness to all the ways he has altered the world, or all the ways the world has altered him?

How will they react as they watch their bright-eyed fair-skinned boy lay down the silver-and-scales to take up the crook and walk his path as man?
", "writing": "[center][b]~ NIGHT ~[/b][/center]\n\n\nOn and on, the going was tough on that long well-traveled road. And yet the tough resolved to keep on going, despite the dangers… and the interesting times.\n\nAfter all, it was their furthest favoritest stop, and the Lumierres would let a rabid bibarel damn their house down long before their friends and family went a year unmet.\n\nThe Merchands? Well, they live by one, olden, golden rule: ‘A deal is a deal and a forsaken friend is a future foe.’\n\nOdétte braids a wreath of flowers into her hair and sketches the world with cheap parchment and pencils of grease and coal. Huddled in a fluffy ruffy pile, she lounges against Apicot’s flank atop the canopy of a brand-new reinforced wagon; the same kind the army shifts imperial coffers around the countryside with.\n\nPermission to commission the imperial wainwright guilds came at the cost of ten fine-woven bolts of mareep-wool cloth. A small price to guarantee that their wheels might withstand months along His Majesty’s most [b]magnificent [/b]roads.\n\nThe girl keeps her keen youthful eyes on the trees drifting by. She is a young lady now; ten years of age. Old enough to care for her own precious lightwool dress. To begin a life spent hiding her decency from the degenerate gaze of a million unworthy men.\n\nThat would be, of course, if she’d dress like a lady for once in her life.\n\nThe middlest-sized pup lets her scratch him right between the ears and they fall over, kicking one leg in delight. “Papa, there is something in the forest line!” she cries, peering through a burnished russet-metal tube.\n\nUsmar grunts, handling Brutus’ reigns with a strung gogoat-horn bow louped around his shoulder. “What do you see, little lady?” he asks, fiddling his work-worn fingers through the prickly carved-bone knocks planted in his side-seat quiver.\n\nApicot, Mère’s beloved breeder, and her two treasured children raise their snouts in perfectly-synchronized search; large, medium, and small, all growling with their necks crooned toward that suspicious something-near.\n\n“A skulking slab of black and brown the size of a boy– no, a man, with a head like a heap of leaves,” Odétte recounts as the droopy monstrosity shuffles out of sight. “Moves upright through the brush with grace, Papa.”\n\nHer father hums, grinding his teeth for the ten-millionth minute of that never-ending tour-of-duty. “A gardenor, no doubt.”\n\n“A what?” she peeps, squinting through her glass to catch sight of that wretched thing again.\n\n“An [b]elder[/b] shrubbish, slunk from the woodworks to dine upon the winter's dead.” He cuts the corner off a block of pressed-mint chew and tucks the blackened wedge up inside his gums. “Harmless, left alone. Even still… my love, stitch her a scatter-bang, would you please?”\n\nUlphia nods, brushing blonde strands of hair, sparkling with gray out of the way of her time-wizened face. She lays a threadbare linen square across her very-pregnant stomach, cutting arm-lengths of twine to sew a handful of sun-dried pop-pods into a sack packed with glittering fragments of crushed firestone. \n\n“Wise.” Mère’s hand reaches out from the depths of the wagon, clutching at Usmar’s shoulder as she slips through the canopy flaps to perch her tired bones beside him. “We show respect to the wild things keeping the world clean.”\n\nSomething in her voice is softer, kinder, as she looks upon him with benevolent nurturing care. “We’ve no need for violence; not so early in the year again.”\n\nUsmar nods and tosses the thing up to Odétte. She alone was left as the surest throwing arm after Bataille stayed behind in Shaymin’s Pass.\n\nFrom the end of the two-cart train comes the voice of a young dark-haired man still budding from his youthful shell. “I am grateful that you are so learnéd of the lands this far south, sir,” he says with his fingers fidgeting around old-Smokey’s reigns.\n\nHe checks for the umpteenth time that their family’s brand-new, broad-leaf, hammer-hardened spear is still well within his reach. “Every sight and smell and sound plucks at my strings,” he laments with an adolescent crack of the throat. \n\n“Like a [b]lute[/b], even!” Odétte giggles as her cousin’s face flushes red. “Needs tuning, too!” she chirps, accompanied by the sound of wheezing furfrou laughter.\n\n“[b][i]Odétte![/i][/b]” Ulphia growls and leans over the cartrails to speak with the brave young man faithfully guiding their second cart; steadfast, despite the relentless raillery suffered in that long last year-or-so. “Fret not, Merle, Uncle Usmar’s throat broke once. Right in front of my father as he reached for my dowry.”\n\nShe chuckles, nudging her man who's taken to matching faces with his nephew-twice-removed. “I swear on a swoobat’s nose he had to yank it from the old man’s grip that day!”\n\nThe caravan jingles with welcome uneasy laughter, like a purse of petty change.\n\nUsmar hands his reins to the lady bearing their precious third-born-to-be. The husband gives his wife a gentle peck of the brow and stands to shove his way back through the wagon.\n\nHe crawls across a stockade of perfectly packed crates and bulging burlap sacks. Practically pregnant with commerce as they jostle along the wheel-split stones and boot-packed earth; on a road that wasn’t even there not-so-long ago.\n\nThe middle-aged man chews in silence a while, trading patient stares for anxious glances with Cousin Merle. “Where’s the weedle eating you this time?”\n\nMerle gives him a nonchalant smile, but fails to summon up the courage and finish his emotional feint. “Sorry. I know we talked about this, but these are dangerous routes, sir. In dangerous times! I’ve heard many things from the mouths of well-traveled men. Like freakish rains, so long and heavy the rivers swallow up the land. Stories of—”\n\n“—of children taken by the ankles at night?” Usmar says, his face devoid of emotion.\n\n“Y-yes, sir,” he stammers. “My father says this is where the trevenant children go, and–\n\nUsmar chuckles. “—and that all the wild things crave bloody human flesh?”\n\nMerle opens his mouth in retort, but Uncle Usmar gives the boy no quarter.\n\n“How about the swarms of savage men that suck marrow from butchered human bones?” He smiles with ichor-stained teeth as his nephew’s lips curl into a defeated frown. “Or was it those women laying the eggs of monsters that steal them away, mounted in the dark of a moonless night?”\n\nMerle’s hair hides his eyes in shame. “I… I’ve never heard such tales.”\n\nUsmar grunts with a nod. “Right, well, one of those things is true, but I’m sure you can sort that out yourself.” He shuckles back past the flaps without so much as a hinting glance.\n\nMerle chokes on the man’s words, mouth agape as Odétte peers down at him from the roof of the front canopy with an elfin marill grin. “Mama used to tie Batty and me to the wagons at night.”\n\n“Young lady, so help me Azelf, I’m half-past making you [i][b]walk[/b][/i],” Ulphia barks, shaking her head as she patches up a torn pair of hose. “You’ve spent too much time with those fairies in the fields!”\n\nMère lets a slow humming chuckle escape behind her breath. “Impossible, child. The bouquets would sooner siege our house than part with their little flower.” \n\n“A thistle, more like,” Ulphia huffs in protest. “Shed those monstrous notions at once, Merle. I’ll have no such words escaping your lips at Shaymin’s Pass.”\n\nUsmar hisses through clenched teeth as he hears his daughter cooing with interest again. “Odétte?”\n\n“I see it again, Papa, it’s closer now!” she squeaks, crawling forward on all fours to get just a little closer with her spyglass. “I see something else too, little yellow flashes in the trees.”\n\nMerle swallows a mouthful of dried nothing, clutching at the haft of his spear as he spots an unsavory discovery of his own trampling out from a wall of evergreens. “Uncle Usmar…”\n\nEveryone is following Odétte’s eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of the monster tailing them as Usmar keeps an arrow knocked. “What is it, Merle?”\n\n“You don’t happen to know [u]them[/u] at all, do you?” he says, pointing to a small army of trouble heading them off down the road.\n\nUsmar spins back around as he hears the thunder of a dozen paws and the clattering of metal plates. Just in time to spot a pair of well-fed broad-chested men gilded head-to-toe in bands of shimmering bronze.\n\nThey lay heavy-headed tamato-spiked maces across their shoulders, pocked with the proof of their use, smiling like they’ve found a tavern full of easy broads and free beer as the carts move towards them.\n\nThe men are surrounded by a dozen, strange, canine beasts creeping forth with meaty blackened feet supporting a broader muscular bulk. They hunch in a half-walking gait supporting ivory-fluffed chests and black bandit-striped faces on massive paws capped in bony spines.\n\nBloody-colored eyes hide behind blobby curtains of fleshy ashen dreads. Chests bearing sharpened ivory spines breathe hot lungfuls of air out in moistened gusts. They snarl up at the merchants with stretched, hungry smiles that bristle with needle-tipped fangs.\n\n“Caaa… Fuuurrrr…” one of the things slobbers out in thirsting monster words. “Riocaaa…”\n\nApicot snorts between bared rows of pearly whites, head low, ready to pounce as she puts herself between the children and the smell of malice drawing near.\n\n“Maaamaaa… What are those things?” Odétte whines behind a wall of fur and teeth.\n\nMère squints with a pruny scowl. “[u]Dogs[/u],” she says with disgust, paying no heed to the monsters as she eyes the men on approach.\n\n“Tidings!” The leader of the pack rolls his shoulders, scraping metal on metal with each miniscule movement, as if he’d been born in a shimmering skin of chesnaught plates. “Toll road.”\n\nUsmar doesn’t waste a single mortal moment, loosing a perfectly-trained arrow right for the largest man’s face. “Drop dead!”\n\nUnfortunately for that old merchant-by-trade, this scoundrel is anything but a creature of peace and goodwill.\n\nWith reflexes that can only be forged in the fires of a lifetime of conflict, he raises a wide shielded gauntlet to his face. He bellows with stomach-churning laughter as Usmar’s broad-tip shot scrapes a narrow ditch in the plates, ringing with an ear-splitting clang. “Fine shot. [b]You [/b]pay extra.”\n\nThen the younger bandit at his side cuts the noise with a toothy three-note whistle and the pack lunges forth.\n\nThree each leap upon Brutus and Smokey’s backs with rote execution. Clamping around the tauros’ skulls like beedril swarming a corpse, they pummel the poor bucking beasts out like a midwinter light.\n\nTwo more stake their wrought-iron claws into the front of each wagon and the caravan comes to a sudden sickening stop as the adults grab each other’s coats to keep from flying off the cab.\n\nWith gray stormy clouds clumping in the sky, Usmar’s hatchet hits one of the animals like a cutiefly kiss as they yank him down off the cart, into the freshly thawed earth. “Riaaah! Furcaaa!”\n\nUsmar bounces against the ground as the stony studs of the road free the winds from his chest and Ulphia shrieks in horror as the last horrible beast leaps for the head of the caboose.\n\n“[b]TWIST OFF![/b]”\n\nEveryone is stunned into silence as Merle vaults one of the beasts up into the air, stuck to the tip of his spear by the neck, and launches them both over the railing.\n\nThe lad falls upon his foe with every stone of his scrawny adolescent bulk. His manically-sharpened speartip pushes down and he crunches clean through, leaving him kneeling atop a gushing lifeless corpse.\n\nTheir trainer coughs with a scowl, spits, and replies with a rolling trill before lifting his mace in a charge.\n\nTwo of the beasts leave the wagons at the command, ready to flank the boy and bite with stinking open maws riddled with bits of carrion and ground meal.\n\nUnfortunately for them, Cousin Merle hasn’t [b]always [/b]lived as a merchantman’s apprentice.\n\n“Yeah?” The young man’s stance shifts, legs spread, and he leaps aside, whipping one across the eye with his weapon's long flexible shaft. “C-c’mon!”\n\nA mutt whines and claps a paw over its face and the other backs away from his reach.\n\n“That was a warning! T-try again and I’ll let you like a butcher’s hook!” he screams and squeaks like a busted wheel with the wild trauma-fueled tenacity of a cornered mawile baring through his eyes.\n \nThe monster standing atop Usmar yelps and crumples like a parchment ball as a banded billy club cracks against the back of its skull.\n\n“Hhh… Hold on!” Usmar wheezes and stumbles away, circling the wagon to meet with Merle, and plunges an arrow point-blank into the deep muscled hide of another beast.\n\nIt doesn’t flinch a bit, breaking the bleeding shaft free with a smile.\n\nThe rest of the pack drops to all fours, abandoning the wagons to pile upon them when the air explodes into a riotous choir of sparkling gods-awful noise, leaving the dogs reeling with covered ears.\n\nOdétte spits on one with unsettling precision from the canopy as her scatterbang whistles and pops, blinding the dogs and their trainer with a blizzard of flares bright as Moltres’ gaze. “Dig a hole and die!”\n\nUlphia cries out as she grabs a corroded copper spade and waddles over the front railing to give one of their assailants an ineffective whack across the cheek.\n\nMère, face tight with resignation, reaches into her blouse for something as she pulls Ulphia down to the boards. “Thy mortal vessel is precious, you [b]foolish [/b]girl!!” she growls, bringing them both down to a knee-creaking crawl as she puts her ancient burlap bag of a body between Ulphia and the snapping maws down below.\n\nIf [b]her [/b]life is the price she must pay to bring another beautiful healthy grandbaby into the world, she’ll happily look Arceus in the eyes on the other side.\n\nWith a soul fueled by the Yveltal’s fire, Merle sends a couple more teetering away with oozing, split faces as they circle him like a shipwrecked corpse. “Uncle! Back to back with me!”\n\n“On my wa— Gnaaah!”\n\nThe storming sky roars, clashing like a tide of rolling boulders as Usmar is snagged up and dragged by the collar, puffing with his scruff caught in clattering bronzen knuckles.\n\n“That’s [u]enough[/u]!” the lead-man barks, socking the back of Usmar’s skull with a fortified fist, and then tosses him to the ground for a good, long, dirty nap.\n\nThe tamer launches himself into the fray and deliberately feints to catch the tip of the spear in the links of his armor plate. He holds the polearm fast in a great bog-iron grip and the man’s other hand lifts the mace high above his head as Merle fights with all his might to yank the weapon free.\n\n[b]CRACK[/b]\n\nMerle staggers back, gawking at a shattered broomstick haft as he’s swept up in a tide of fuzzy gnashing teeth.\n\nThe criminal makes a single, stern, sharp whistle, but not before letting his purebred mongrels have a taste of the punk that cut their brother down. “Heel! Hold him [b]down[/b].”\n\nOdétte and her pups watch with eyes locked wide and their stomachs tied in knots as the monsters wrench and spread her cousin out like a sacrifice in some degenerate Darkrai cult.\n\nMerle growls, jaw clenched in the face of his coming coup de grâce as he fights against the blood-soaked maws and claws clamping him in place.\n\nMère drags Ulphia back through the flaps of the cart behind a din of defiant screams.\n\nLaurie Lumiere grabs the gigots of her daughter’s gown, and yanks the pallid sweating woman to her gaze. “You say nothing. You do nothing. I do the talking. Understand?”\n\nOdétte retches and shrieks as Merle’s voice hitches to a stop, choking as a muffled crunch that sounds like a broken bolt of cloth splits the air, stained with bellicosity and pain.\n\nThe woman is stuck staring at the ends of her own eyeballs for a moment as Mère shakes her blouse in a pair of quivering knobbly fists.\n\n“Do you understand, Ulphia?!”\n\nShe forces a creeping gastly nod, mouth agape, slouched atop a keg of ice-hardened sherry as she takes the weight of the tragedy falling upon them. “Yes, Mama…” she whispers as her babies slip down through a trap flap in the canopy top to curl against her lap into a sobbing nest of fluff.\n\n“No more!” booms the voice of an old soldier who’s used to calling shots with a brisk basalt fist.\n\n“What?!” The baying of hot vengeful hounds is slowly quenched by the sounds of yanked yelping scruffs. “That [b]whelp[/b] snuffed one of my best pups!”\n\n“Cost of doing business; now tie and pile them in the tall grass there while I have a word or two with the neighbors about it.”\n\n“Bah! Whatever. At least cut a pound of flesh for Old Chewy,” the tamer whines as one of his dogs starts dragging their moaning quarter-conscious victim by the tunic sleeves.\n\nThe head honcho stomps to the back of their cart and smacks his mace against the back planks. “Alright ladies, time to pay the piper.”\n\nMère tightens her jaw and stands, shining her silver tongue with a rattling cough as she prepares to parlay their lives away from a pair of purrloin thugs. She slowly scales the ladder rungs, careful not to slip and end up negotiating with a broken hip too. “You’ll be speaking to me only, young man.”\n\n“Suit yourself.” He grins, showing off the gaps of a couple old shattered teeth. “Lotta fines ya stacked up there, cost us a whole lot too.” He looks in the cart, ogling the frightened females and freight. “I reckonnn… [b]Everything[/b]’ll do! I’m a reasonable man. We take the lot and you sod off. Sound fair?”\n\nMère gives the man a kind disinterested sigh. “House Lumiere greets House Vautour. Have you come seeking alms to buy a banner or two, or is it cowardice that brings you here, bereft of markings?”\n\nHe meets Mère’s eloquent mockery with blustering shock. “Spitting qwilfish spines! We make a mighty fine mischief, Madame, but even [b]we[/b] wouldn’t sully our hands with filthy [b]traitor [/b]money.”\n\nHe chuckles for an uncomfortably long time. “Business is good; got no need for that sort of trouble.”\n\n“Oh?” She tilts her head with a cool smile. “Is that so?”\n\n“Of course! Why, it’s always some cushy-assed upstart with a castle calling himself king what gets the world all twisted up,” he responds with a pretentious grin. “Law and orders’ the first thing to go, I tells ya.”\n\nShe nods, rubbing at the drooping skin stretched around her chin. “Well, far be it from me to besmirch the name of such an upstanding citizen,” she says, glancing over at the strange canine breed busy lashing Usmar and Merle together in a heap of cheap flaxen rope. \n\nThe guy guzzles a long sloshy swig from a glazed jug of stinking, road-brewed hooch. “Damn right it [i]uuurrrs[/i],” he chortles with a rancid boozy belch. “Now get’cher arses outs my godsdamn wagon.”\n\nMère stifles a gag as the cloud of wild bilberry swill backhands her across the face; bitter, rotten, probably poisonous, the best he’s got under the circumstances. Exactly how she feels about this plan.\n\n“You see, I’m quite familiar with the creatures hatched in Avignon.” She reaches into her blouse again and shows the man a pewter pendant, cast in the sunray shape of her kennel’s mark. “And I couldn’t possibly imagine Her Highness de Ville suffering the indignation of her prized furcario wasting away, taking tolls on some backwater road.”\n\n“Awww, poor baaaby!” he whines, lips pursed, “not that I care. I’m sure her tits’ll stop hurting someday.”\n\n“Of course, of course… but if you[b] did[/b], I would like to inform you that we offer ourselves up for [b]ransom[/b].”\n\nHe furrows his brow and groans to the storming clouds. “Are you [b]dense[/b], woman? We’re highway robbers! Thick-headed thugs! Can’t tell a noble’s head from a muddy, whooper’s arse!”\n\n“Right, and a fine thing too! It is quite dangerous to refuse a lady her due. You said it best; too much trouble,” Mère pushes straight through his protestations. “House Lumiere would be willing to pay a suitable sum for our safe and sound return… not to mention a [b]generous tip[/b] for our most [b]gentle[/b] captors.”\n\nThat last bit leaves her soul sick as that verbal ichor dribbles from her lips, but the undeniable truth is that a little bit of honey goes a long way in a shitty brew.\n\nThe man’s throat rumbles with stern unwelcome tension as his knuckles grind the haft of his mace down. “How about[b] this[/b]… I let you lot keep anything your little arms can carry and [b][u]you[/u][/b] stop asking dangerous questions. How's [b]that[/b] for a bargain?”\n\nMère hands the man a copy of her trademark coldstone smile. “I’m not asking.”\n\nHe clenches his jaw and grips the haft of his weapon, squinting at that old crone in contemplation as he recognizes the subtle unmistakable glow of the ladies’ lightwool clothes. Then, with a tired sigh, he slides the weapon through that brassen loop on his belt and snaps his fingers. “Hope you like hard tack.”\n\n\n\nTo turn back mid-route; it is a broken, bitter thing. Lost time, money, reputation; all for the thrill of a tiny, dicey time on an unforgiving road. The most miserable kind of waste, in a Merchand’s eyes at least. And it feels ten-times worse with your wrists wrapped like liquor glasses, stacked in a row to be labeled and sold.\n\nMère fears the chance that may be the case, sat-side-by-side with her loved ones like the stock of smoked spoink being feasted-on up front.\n\nOdétte raises her wrist, bruised and bound in twisted grass, and cracks a chip of ships-biscuit, chowing down with a disconcerting crunch. “What do we do?”\n\nLaurie, Matriarch of Kennel Lumiere, leans to let Odétte lay her head in her Mère’s lap, for the first time in four, long winters past. “We will be good guests in a house that isn’t ours. We will wait for his Highness’ generosity to bring us home, and be grateful for the charity of our hosts.”\n\n“[b]Shahdding up[/b] is what’chur gonna do!” the monster tamer bellows back through the flaps. “I got some more socks that need washing out, if ya wanna taste.”\n\nOdétte glances over at Usmar and Merle restrained in the corner with wads of stained, woolen cloth stuffed in their mouths. “Sorry, monsieur...” she grumbles as Usmar promises death with his eyes and Merle writhes with a leg bent twice.\n\nBalls of white blast the nighttime clouds with thunderous claps, unveiling all that hides in the night with great flashes of un-sunlight.\n\nThe leader of the gang gawks up at the sky, his brows furrowing with concern. “T’wernt a hint of rain today,” he mutters and spits a mouthful of stolen chew. “We camp here!”\n\nApicot and her pups bitch and growl and moan, led by the neck with a thorny set of bronze-pronged collars. They’ve traded their sleigh-bell torques for jingling lengths of chain clutched in knuckle-dragging furcario paws, stuck leading the wagon train on foot.\n\nSmoky and Brutus huff in protest under the strain of the forced march, ‘persuaded’ on in spite of their battered swollen faces as the rear driver whistles and tugs at the reins. “Head left! Clear the area!”\n\nThe furcario hoard barks and yips with excitement, each bounding off into a meadow cradled by a wall of trees just off the road; all but the three left wounded by Merle, keeping Apicot’s lot in line.\n\nThe leader watches as the sky starts cracking again and the wagons rumble to a stop. Then the bulls finally slump into tired beaten lumps. “Strange, summer storms…” he says with his eyes locked upwards and his cohort clatters down to march by his side.\n\n“Could just kill’n’bury’em in there, who’s gonna know?” the tamer says with matte listless eyes.\n\nHis older, wiser, very-much-larger compatriot guides him twenty paces out, where their words could only be heard by the snow-spackled pines. “[b]Their[/b] people know where [b]they[/b] are. [b]Our[/b] people know where [b]we[/b] are,” he lectures his younger friend, keeping the spoils of their labor well within sight. “Paranoid brass-hats would [b]know [/b]when a storm of letters starts raining down from Lumiose city.”\n\n“Gaspard; these woods are swarming with pyroars. Why not rough the wagon up, burn a patch or two, and say we found it empty?”\n\nGaspard sighs, rolling his eyes with a ‘I told you once’ tone of voice. “[u]Because[/u] they’re more valuable to us alive, even if it cuts the trip shorter than we’d like,” he says, and then points back to the dogs. “And they got whipped by what exactly, [b]the wind[/b]? Fell down the fucking [b]stairs[/b]? Got room to juggle a couple more lies there, Norris?”\n\nNorris puffs his cheeks in frustration as lights keep dancing through the cloudy murk above. “Didn’t they say we’d ‘better be dead’ if we get found out?”\n\n“Yes, but that’s only if it’s bad for business,” Gaspard continues his lesson. “I count four Lumieres there, plus a couple furfrou to boot. That’s a lot of leverage for the folks back home, and we’ll be the ones giving it to them!”\n\nHe’s a bit too animated by the end of his little spiel, but gets right back to the air of ‘might-makes-right’. “Sounds like ‘promotion’ to me, and the old hag said it herself, [u]we[/u] get a slice too.”\n\nAs the men are busy talking, the monsters skulk toward something very interesting rustling in the grass. They approach the very furthest edge of the glade in a jumbled arrow, sniffing; only to end up chuffing with irritated tingling nostrils.\n\nThe tip of the spear, their oldest, meanest hound, comes within a leap’s length of a rustle in the brush.\n\nSniff. Snufffff.\n\nZAP!\n\nThe leader stumbles back with his paws full of whining muzzle as a yellow shape flips from the bushes in a theatrical acrobatic spin and sticks a perfect two-paw landing.\n\n“Cha cha chaaah!” Pikachu chides, wagging her finger left and right in time with her heart-shaped tail.\n\nThe entire pack rumbles with angry grumbles, watching with intensity at what their alpha male might do.\n\n“Rrrrah! Ca-fa-rah!” the massive muscly beast barks as his front paws shovel muddy pits in the ground.\n\nThe pikachu scans left, then right, and scoffs as she tosses a blasé look over a shoulder of ragged half-healed scars. “Kah?” she chuckles and jabs a finger the old dog’s way. “Chu ka pi, pi ka chu!”\n\nThe mob behind him gasps as their boss is sent into a gnarly snarling rage. “Faaah!” he roars, bringing his good-paw down.\n\nHe feels the crunch of something soft and mushy filled with brittle broken bits and then spits as he lifts his paw to see he’d just executed a patch of snowbells growing in a snowless clump of soil.\n\nTzzzzt! SMACK!\n\nThe big dog stumbles aside and tumbles to the mud, asleep with a smoking heart-shaped stamp in his cheek.\n\nA wave of yelps rolls back through the crowd as Pikachu points her finger around in a daring arc. “Pa, pika cha?” she tilts her ears and sighs. “Cha… Chu ka pi…” she starts again.\n\nA couple of the older more prideful dogs start to fume from the nose and approach.\n\n“Pi… [b]ka[/b]…” She squints with a daredevil smirk. “[u][b]Chu[/b][/u]!”\n\nThe two of them leap in with angry raking claws as the pack starts to bay with frenzied barking yips.\n\nTzzzzt! WHACK WHACK!\n\nDown two more go as the boltbringer lazily steps aside, admiring the sizzling hearts she’d marked their temples with.\n\nHumming arcs of lightning surge from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail. “Chaaah?” she goads beckoning them all forth with a smart, smack of the arse.\n\nEvery single dog still standing stumbles forward to rip themselves a piece of Pikachu’s corpse, even the ones keeping the Lumiere pups in line instantly drop their leads and barrel into the fray.\n\n“What’s distorting them?” Gaspard asks, taking his ears away from a strange sound he’d started hearing, like the rustling of leaves in the rain.\n\nNorris screeches with his teeth and runs toward the sparky bubbling froth of fangs and burned fur. “What in scraftys shorts?!” he shouts as the mob is cast about with raw, stored, lightning force.\n\nA figure, cloaked in freaky lacquered-leather shrouds, creeps out from the trees behind them tinseled with strings of fresh-picked foliage. Their face is covered in a floppy rawhide veil with darkened eyes of rounded polished glass. A charred copper-banded crook pokes out from the flaps of their coat as another leather-wrapped hand preps a fistful of shiny jinkling rings. \n\nGaspard reaches for his mace, peering across his shoulder as a pittering, pattering, chittering, skittering sound rises around the meadow. “Something isn’t ri—”\n\nA sparkling bola made of weighted copper chains winds around his shins. “Son of a wh—” he starts and seizes up, crashing to the ground like an old fallen pine.\n\nThe thing from the wooded edge stabs its stave up beneath Gaspard’s hardened armor plates. Crackling threads of thunder roll down the banding of the shaft, straight through the crook with an ear-splitting crack. \n\nGaspard whoops just long enough to alert Norris of his fate, stuck convulsing as a mysterious unrelenting monster is still standing over him jabbing its weapon through the gaps of his bronze-banded skin.\n\nNorris turns back around and marches a full ten steps before Apicot, Mistletoe, and Holly intercept him to the ground. Screaming with their jaws crushing the bones of his wrists, he watches with a miserable snarl as his furcario hoard is swept up in a torrential downpour of scratching, sparking boltbringers raining from the trees.\n\n“You! Filthy! Turncoat!” the figure shouts between jabs, clutching at the lightning-charged rod with leather-clad hands. “Go! To! Sleep!”\n\nGaspard’s gaze wobbles but stays remains on the enemy keeping him stuck helpless to the ground. He winces, roars, and then grabs at the staff as he hears his partner being actively mauled just out of sight.\n\n“Go to sleep. Go to sleep! Just! go! TO! SLEEP!” it screams, sounding angry and desperate as a nervous whining Emolga slips out from the cloak stuck to the curved end of the crook.\n\nEventually Gaspard's fortitude falls short and a mixture of shock, pain, and physical exhaustion from the seizures leaves him jittering on the ground, unconscious but alive.\n\nThe furcario screech and scream in terrified agony as dozens of pichu, pikachu, and even a raichu or two light the dog-pile up in a humming spiderweb dome of concentrated thunder.\n\nKrrrzzzzzZZZ-BOOM!\n\nThe blob of criminal scum splashes all around the meadow, left shuddering, writhing, wheezing under the weight of a few sparkling parasites who’d stuck on to keep the punishment going.\n\nThe first pikachu to arrive, authoritative and cocksure, marches between the shivering scattered dogs with concussions to hand out for bad behavior.\n\nThe hooded mass of leather straps and flaps runs toward Norris, leaving a muddy bootprint in Gaspard’s cheek as he bounds away on all fours.\n\nApicot yanks her children away by the scruff as she hears the menacing hum of thunder building up.\n\nHis staff is thrust in all the same places and the young tamer gives out far quicker than his bigger, meaner compatriot. But Apicot and her babies are not done, both puppies going in for the man’s legs and the mother taking his throat in her jaws with barely-coherent atavistic rage.\n\n“Apicot! Heel! Heel, Girl!” he says with a rich, woody, tenor tone. The stranger falls to his knees, right into Norris’s groin, and pets between her ears.\n\nThe old furfrou snorts, snapping his glove up in her mouth and then shifts a bit in confusion, kept curious by the familiarity of the person’s voice. Then she smells the air a moment and her look of viciousness melts away to ecstatic joy as she nuzzles the figure’s face.\n\nHer two pups are very confused, unsure how to feel about the strange human hugging their mom, but they politely sit as told.\n\n“Good giiirl, good pups! Watch them now, I gotta find some rope,” he orders, skittering off waving to Pikachu as she replies with a thumbs up, and then he jumps head-first into the wagon.\n\nOdétte shuffles back with a gasp as something brown, floppy, stringy, and leafy flies through the canvas flaps. “Papaaa!” she shrieks. “Papa, it’s the gardenor!”\n\nEveryone looks up shouting, moaning in agony, or murmuring behind a block of unwashed sock. Then Usmar squints with his head tilted as the monster approaches him, mumbling in a ratty chatter.\n\n“Rope. Rope. Lots of rope. There!” and the thing pulls the plug on Usmar’s tongue.\n\n“Haaa! Guh… That’s no gardenor! But who—”\n\nThe stranger jumps to Merle and Usmar’s side, cuts the knot keeping them coiled, and moans as he sees the extent of the peoples’ injuries. “Chuuuuuu…” he whines in monster speech, head shaking as his knapped obsidian blade slices the rope like it were butter. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I’m sorry, we came as fast as we could muster!”\n\nNobody recognizes the voice. It is deep, full, made by a body one whole head taller than Usmar or Merle. Then a ball of yellow, black, and white with a scar drawn down its wing flutters out from the cloak, landing to a snuggle behind the tent around his head.\n\nMère’s face relaxes with a pleasantly surprised smile. “Is that–”\n\n“It’s Batty! It’s Batty!” Odétte squeals with legs knocking bags aside in happiness.\n\nUsmar’s life slows for a moment as the figure reaches for its face and his son removes the mask. “Bataille?”\n\nSomeone resembling Bataille Merchand pushes up a pair of hand-made crystalline goggles set in a blocky wooden frame. Blazing pink scars reach across his cheek, threatening to devour his shining sky-colored eyes. The million other marks peppering his skin belie his youth as he grins with the face of a boy that has grown far too early in life. \n\n“My… my Gods…” Ulphia’s eyes soak and her voice shudders with relief. “It’s my baby boy! Oh thank Mew!”\n\nUsmar is set free and carefully helps his son in laying Merle down, so overwhelmed at the sight of his first-born child so grown up that the words can’t quite fit through his throat.\n\n“Be right back!” Bataille’s long golden hair whips around as he scampers away. “Emeline, Pi-cha chapika ka!” he commands with sharp clarified intent as he hunches down and leaps away.\n\nShe gives him a motivated nod, salutes, and flutters right down to Odétte’s arms, scratching at the fibrous knots holding them fast.\n\nBataille one-arm vaults out the wagon’s back with a bandolier of hempen cords wrapped around his chest, looking for the criminals who’d hurt his family. What he finds, however, is [b]one [/b]unconscious man laid beside three unconscious ‘frou, with the second nowhere to be seen.\n\n“Good day.”\n\nBataille’s head jerks forward, chin smacking his chest as his eyes dance with freckling lights. His ears ring as he is lifted into the air by the front of his cloak and thrown to the ground with a metal grip clamping his throat shut.\n\n“Don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Gaspard growls, slowly crushing Bataille’s windpipe as the boy fights against the guy’s massive muscly form. “Kids should be seen, not heard, least of all [b]felt![/b]”\n\nThe young wild human glares, kicking the armored torso like a skitty held down on its back. “Hel-[b]grk[/b].”\n\n“Let’s [b]fix [/b]that,” he hisses past shattered grinding teeth.\n\nSomething strikes his helmet, clanging like a bell and jerking his head aside with a pop of the joints. A black and white blur smacks domey bowls into the plate covering the man’s skull two, four, six times…\n\n…until the devilish rogue raises his hand and snatches Emeline out of the air, slamming her to the ground with all of his might.\n\n“Mol–[b]gak[/b]!” she coughs as her skull is smashed against a mossy rock. “Gaaa…” she gargles, eyes fluttering shut with her neck trapped in his grip.\n\n“Eemel–[b]ssgggrk![/b]” Bataille cries out, slamming his knuckles bare against the man’s arms and bronze-plated chest with the guy’s face being just out of reach.\n\n“Fu–cking–mon–ster—man [b]trash[/b]!” Gaspard hisses, spitting through his teeth again as his fist synches harder and harder, thumping Bataille’s skull against the ground. “If I had my squadron here I’d stick all of you shit-end hicks up on spikes.”\n\nEmeline stares around with swimming eyes as she sees from around the wagon’s wheel that Pikachu hasn’t yet noticed them. The swarm is too preoccupied with a few of the larger furcario fighting ‘til the bitter end. “Gaaa…” she whimpers, reaching out for her friend.\n\nBataille’s vision begins to fade as his lips call out for everyone, someone, anyone… but one name in particular, [b]her[/b] name, read from his silent quivering lips strikes Emeline’s heart like a heap of dry tinder.\n\nThe little monster’s body twitches back to life and starts to thrash and buck as her claws scrape across the gauntlet squeezing her neck. Faster, harder, faster, harder, until his fingers shake with sparking arcs as the gauntlet comes apart with hot, popping rivets. \n\nBataille’s neck slips from Gaspard’s grip as the criminal brings a wild, haymaker swing for Emeline’s temple.\n\nHe misses and screams to the heavens as she flips around, pries the plates aside, and bites the end of his front-two fingers with loud, celery snaps. \n\nBataille sits gasping on his ass with eyes open wide as the man bends over, gawking in pain, shrieking at Emeline latched onto his cheeks. She growls, snarling, scraping furrows in the man’s head like tent stakes pulled across the mud in a windy storm.\n\nRippling with an angry blue aura, Emeline’s humming imminent strike rises in pitch and power.\n\n“GAAA!” she squeals, locking her claws behind his ears and the line of his jaw. “Looo [b]GA[/b]!” she barks, serving up fresh mouthfuls of Rayquayza’s might.\n\n“Emeline…” Bataille rubs his throat, crawling on all fours as Pikachu finally realizes what’s going on and zips with a speed that kicks the grassy mud and springmelt-snow in a cloud behind her. “Emeline, wait!”\n\n“Gaaa! ” she growls with an awful vindictive rattle in her throat, unable to hear, unable to even conceive of the man’s howling pleas for mercy muffled to silence in her chest. “Lo ga!”\n\nThe man slams his fists against her head and back, lacking rhythm or reason. But no amount of bruised bones or broken skin could possibly bring Emeline’s rage to an early end. Then he runs, stumbling off any-which-way in the hopes something might free him from the living chittering torture device cooking his face to rinds.\n\nPikachu arrives, screeching to a halt at Bataille’s side, just in time to see Gaspard trip over the lip of an icy creekbed in a screaming ball of light.\n\nThen a great amber strip rips the willow trees to bits, shaking the ground with its quaking raikou cry.\n\nEveryone stares in static shock, hair standing straight, eyes locked to the smoldering splintered branches blasted apart by her monumental sky-fire strike. \n\nBataille scrambles over in horror, finally holding his chest in relief as Emeline shuffles up over the ledge and waddles back into his arms, hiding her face in shame.\n\n“Eee!” Emeline wipes her eyes, open-mouth bawling. “Eee ga lo-ga-laaa!” she bellows, gagging at what she’d done.\n\nPikachu clutches her paws, hopping up and down like she’d just seen the coolest thing since baked bread. “PIII?! KA!? CHUUU?!” She slaps her friend across the shoulders with a proud smirk.\n\nEmeline yips and shakes her head, crawling up into the leather cloak with a sickened frown. “Lo mo gaaa…”\n\n“Ka?!” Pikachu coughs, looking up at Bataille with surprise.\n\nHe gives the rodent a loopy exhausted laugh as he hoists himself back up on his fallen staff. “She’ll be ok, let’s— Aaah!”\n\nA second ambush leaves them trapped, wrapped in smothering kisses and chest-crushing beartic hugs.\n\n“Tell us [b]everything[/b]!” his still-standing family shouts, fighting for the right to put their hands on his cheeks and prove to themselves they didn’t dream the whole thing.\n\nBataille simply can’t help laughing from the tension, the terror, and the exhilaration of being in the arms of his family after such a long, long time. “I will, but…”\n\nMerle makes his predicament known again as Pikachu’s extended family stuffs the rear wagon full of smoking compliant furcario and assigns triple-duty watch to a rowdy group of pichu boys. \n\nTheir savior of the night rubs the aching back of his head, wincing as his gloves touch a bloody stain soaking his hair red. “...let’s get back on the road first.”\n\n\n\nThey do exactly that, keeping the robbers and all their things prisoner in a wagon swarming with baby boltbringers looking for any reason to get rough.\n\nMerle is made as comfortable as could be expected, considering his femur is splinted with a pair of boards lashed with silk that a random caterpie agreed to provide. The entire trip he is forced to guzzle gratuitous quantities of fortified spirits mixed in briney juice to numb the pain. \n\nThe family expects Bataille and his friends to sit and chat with them on the long moonlight trip back towards Shaymin’s pass. Instead, their curiosities are left starving with longing stares as he walks ahead of the wagons, nearly out of sight. They hear whimpering Emeline noises, lambasting Pikachu sounds, and the mediating intervention of Bataille’s beautiful voice out in the moonlit night.\n\nEmeline flies on wide searching paths in the sky as Pikachu darts through the bushes, popping back onto the trail on the opposite side she left on. Squads of pikachu, bulbasaur, and even a few pyroar break from the bushes to trade chitters with him and then leave as quickly as they came.\n\nThe trio tries to coax the caravan to sleep, knowing they’ve been frightened and tortured for gods-know-how-long, but the horrible sounds coming from Merle and the wonder fueling the fire of their minds simply won’t allow it.\n\nThey shout out to him, but his answers leave them dry in the mouth.\n\n\n\n“How has your training been?”\n\n“Hard.”\n\n\n\n“Have you missed us?”\n\n“Lots.”\n\n\n\n“Is everything alright?”\n\n“Maybe.”\n\n\n\n“Stunkybutt!” Finally the wagons come to a stop as Odétte points with a maleficent scowl. “Why are you acting like we aren’t even here?!”\n\nBataille whips around with the look of a templegirl yanked out of a divine trance. “Pik– ah… I, uh…”\n\nMère gently pulls Odétte back by the shoulders. “A lot has happened, my flower.”\n\nUlphia’s face would have gone red at her daughter’s emotional flare, but simply squirms with embarrassment as the words she’d been hiding inside were called out like a village decree.\n\n“Ki-chaaa…” he chirps in an eerie replication of natural monsterspeech, wiping his palms over his face and rubbing circles around his cheeks in frustration. “Dot, my family… I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re still in danger and I’m on edge.”\n\nPikachu wipes her nose. “Pi!” she blurts, pointing to the mountainous labyrinthine forests all around.\n\n“Right! There’s probably more out there; the region has been crawling with looters and spies since the western houses broke their vows.” Bataille scratches at his chin, eyes up with uneasy contemplation. “Or… at least I think it was something like that. Tauron knows it all better than me. We don’t have much time for politics these days.”\n\nEmeline chitters with her mouth obscured by his ear and Pikachu rolls her eyes with a quippy rant.\n\n“Yeah, politics [b]does[/b] seem to find lots of time for us, huh?” he says, snapping out of his exhausted blabbering gaze with a cheerful smile. “I’ve missed you all, more than you can ever know, but please… let us work. Rest now.”\n\nHearing him talk like that, even a tiny bit of the old Battaille slipping free from the intensity of his gaze, is just what the doctor ordered, and they all fall asleep.\n\n\n\nUlphia is the first to wake as honey-colored dawnlight shines between the southern peaks.\n\nBataille is walking, scanning, even talking, but the wobble in his step says he’s not manning his own helm.\n\n“Bataille.” Ulphia sits up from her pile of quilted blankets. “Bataille, come lay down, honey.”\n\nPikachu and Emeline both sigh with relief and tug at his leather flaps with tired yawns. “Chuuu.” “Gaaa.”\n\n“We’re almost… there…” Her son slurs, shaking his head and taking big deep breaths to remain conscious.\n\nEmeline nibbles at his ear and he swats her away with barely-cognizant annoyance. Then Pikachu kicks him in the shin, pointing to the towering palisade enclosing the bottom of the valley as he hops around in pain.\n\n“Ooow! Chaaa, chaaa!” he surrenders with his hands up and clatters his weapon / lightning-rod / walking-stick[i] / [/i][b]thing [/b]up onto the platform. “You win.”\n\nBataille heaves himself up on deck with his mama’s help and falls with a longing fawning smile; the kind that yearns for another time. Then, curling up with Emeline at his neck and Pikachu in his arms, he lays his head down upon his mother’s lap for a long overdue nap.\n\n“Sleep, baby. Sleep…” Ulphia hums a catchy shanty she’d heard from her father once, having never learned all the words. Now more than ever she finds it fitting that his favorite lullaby is some mysterious call from a curious distant land. “...down where the bonslys creep…”\n\nShe whispers the words she knows, softer and softer each time, until her little boy finally lets his body rest.\n\nBoth he and Pikachu take turns sawing logs as Emeline starts curling inside the boy’s garments to join them, but she’s stopped by the tender brush of a fingertip across her fuzz.\n\n“Not you,” Ulphia says, tapping Emeline’s ear. “Let us talk, you and I.”\n\nEmeline’s eyes blink out of sync as she brings herself back to the land of the living with a vacant-but-attentive stare. “Go… gala?” she anxiously whispers, trapped inside the woman’s eyes.\n\n“Those scars healed rightly, didn’t they?” Ulphia pets her son’s cheeks and shoulders in a grateful sort of way. “He seems to wear it well.”\n\nThe rodent looks away, silently seething with a strange mix of relief and humiliation.\n\nUlpha holds her fingers out, waiting for Emeline to respond. It takes a long patient while, but eventually the monster who once hated her and haunted her attic nuzzles her fingertips like a hatchling furfrou pup. “We made an agreement. It was a long time ago; do you remember?”\n\nEmeline doesn’t hesitate for a single second, nodding with eyelids locked shut to keep Ulphia’s face away.\n\nUlphia brings the little monster’s chin up with a fingertip and meets her face. “Thank you.”\n\nShock blossoms over Emeline’s face. “Ma?”\n\n“Mhmmm,” Ulphia hums, combing her fingers through Emeline’s fuzz. “You’ve more than kept your word,” she coos, scritching behind Emeline’s neck with a tingling sensation crawling up her wrist. “Welcome to the family, Emeline Lumierre.”\n\nEvery ounce of anxiety is purged from Emeline’s blood stream, flushed clean with cold hard astonishment. Curled around Bataille’s neck, nodding with exhaustion, she wipes a smear of happy tears from her dandelion cheeks, smiling wide, literally glowing with pride.\n\nAnd as the liquor finally grants Merle a little bit of Cresselia's Grace, the family’s questions sit in a patient kindling stack as they savor the silence of a peaceful quiet morning.\n", "writing_bbcode_parsed": "
~ NIGHT ~



On and on, the going was tough on that long well-traveled road. And yet the tough resolved to keep on going, despite the dangers… and the interesting times.

After all, it was their furthest favoritest stop, and the Lumierres would let a rabid bibarel damn their house down long before their friends and family went a year unmet.

The Merchands? Well, they live by one, olden, golden rule: ‘A deal is a deal and a forsaken friend is a future foe.’

Odétte braids a wreath of flowers into her hair and sketches the world with cheap parchment and pencils of grease and coal. Huddled in a fluffy ruffy pile, she lounges against Apicot’s flank atop the canopy of a brand-new reinforced wagon; the same kind the army shifts imperial coffers around the countryside with.

Permission to commission the imperial wainwright guilds came at the cost of ten fine-woven bolts of mareep-wool cloth. A small price to guarantee that their wheels might withstand months along His Majesty’s most magnificent roads.

The girl keeps her keen youthful eyes on the trees drifting by. She is a young lady now; ten years of age. Old enough to care for her own precious lightwool dress. To begin a life spent hiding her decency from the degenerate gaze of a million unworthy men.

That would be, of course, if she’d dress like a lady for once in her life.

The middlest-sized pup lets her scratch him right between the ears and they fall over, kicking one leg in delight. “Papa, there is something in the forest line!” she cries, peering through a burnished russet-metal tube.

Usmar grunts, handling Brutus’ reigns with a strung gogoat-horn bow louped around his shoulder. “What do you see, little lady?” he asks, fiddling his work-worn fingers through the prickly carved-bone knocks planted in his side-seat quiver.

Apicot, Mère’s beloved breeder, and her two treasured children raise their snouts in perfectly-synchronized search; large, medium, and small, all growling with their necks crooned toward that suspicious something-near.

“A skulking slab of black and brown the size of a boy– no, a man, with a head like a heap of leaves,” Odétte recounts as the droopy monstrosity shuffles out of sight. “Moves upright through the brush with grace, Papa.”

Her father hums, grinding his teeth for the ten-millionth minute of that never-ending tour-of-duty. “A gardenor, no doubt.”

“A what?” she peeps, squinting through her glass to catch sight of that wretched thing again.

“An elder shrubbish, slunk from the woodworks to dine upon the winter's dead.” He cuts the corner off a block of pressed-mint chew and tucks the blackened wedge up inside his gums. “Harmless, left alone. Even still… my love, stitch her a scatter-bang, would you please?”

Ulphia nods, brushing blonde strands of hair, sparkling with gray out of the way of her time-wizened face. She lays a threadbare linen square across her very-pregnant stomach, cutting arm-lengths of twine to sew a handful of sun-dried pop-pods into a sack packed with glittering fragments of crushed firestone.

“Wise.” Mère’s hand reaches out from the depths of the wagon, clutching at Usmar’s shoulder as she slips through the canopy flaps to perch her tired bones beside him. “We show respect to the wild things keeping the world clean.”

Something in her voice is softer, kinder, as she looks upon him with benevolent nurturing care. “We’ve no need for violence; not so early in the year again.”

Usmar nods and tosses the thing up to Odétte. She alone was left as the surest throwing arm after Bataille stayed behind in Shaymin’s Pass.

From the end of the two-cart train comes the voice of a young dark-haired man still budding from his youthful shell. “I am grateful that you are so learnéd of the lands this far south, sir,” he says with his fingers fidgeting around old-Smokey’s reigns.

He checks for the umpteenth time that their family’s brand-new, broad-leaf, hammer-hardened spear is still well within his reach. “Every sight and smell and sound plucks at my strings,” he laments with an adolescent crack of the throat.

“Like a lute, even!” Odétte giggles as her cousin’s face flushes red. “Needs tuning, too!” she chirps, accompanied by the sound of wheezing furfrou laughter.

“Odétte!” Ulphia growls and leans over the cartrails to speak with the brave young man faithfully guiding their second cart; steadfast, despite the relentless raillery suffered in that long last year-or-so. “Fret not, Merle, Uncle Usmar’s throat broke once. Right in front of my father as he reached for my dowry.”

She chuckles, nudging her man who's taken to matching faces with his nephew-twice-removed. “I swear on a swoobat’s nose he had to yank it from the old man’s grip that day!”

The caravan jingles with welcome uneasy laughter, like a purse of petty change.

Usmar hands his reins to the lady bearing their precious third-born-to-be. The husband gives his wife a gentle peck of the brow and stands to shove his way back through the wagon.

He crawls across a stockade of perfectly packed crates and bulging burlap sacks. Practically pregnant with commerce as they jostle along the wheel-split stones and boot-packed earth; on a road that wasn’t even there not-so-long ago.

The middle-aged man chews in silence a while, trading patient stares for anxious glances with Cousin Merle. “Where’s the weedle eating you this time?”

Merle gives him a nonchalant smile, but fails to summon up the courage and finish his emotional feint. “Sorry. I know we talked about this, but these are dangerous routes, sir. In dangerous times! I’ve heard many things from the mouths of well-traveled men. Like freakish rains, so long and heavy the rivers swallow up the land. Stories of—”

“—of children taken by the ankles at night?” Usmar says, his face devoid of emotion.

“Y-yes, sir,” he stammers. “My father says this is where the trevenant children go, and–

Usmar chuckles. “—and that all the wild things crave bloody human flesh?”

Merle opens his mouth in retort, but Uncle Usmar gives the boy no quarter.

“How about the swarms of savage men that suck marrow from butchered human bones?” He smiles with ichor-stained teeth as his nephew’s lips curl into a defeated frown. “Or was it those women laying the eggs of monsters that steal them away, mounted in the dark of a moonless night?”

Merle’s hair hides his eyes in shame. “I… I’ve never heard such tales.”

Usmar grunts with a nod. “Right, well, one of those things is true, but I’m sure you can sort that out yourself.” He shuckles back past the flaps without so much as a hinting glance.

Merle chokes on the man’s words, mouth agape as Odétte peers down at him from the roof of the front canopy with an elfin marill grin. “Mama used to tie Batty and me to the wagons at night.”

“Young lady, so help me Azelf, I’m half-past making you walk,” Ulphia barks, shaking her head as she patches up a torn pair of hose. “You’ve spent too much time with those fairies in the fields!”

Mère lets a slow humming chuckle escape behind her breath. “Impossible, child. The bouquets would sooner siege our house than part with their little flower.”

“A thistle, more like,” Ulphia huffs in protest. “Shed those monstrous notions at once, Merle. I’ll have no such words escaping your lips at Shaymin’s Pass.”

Usmar hisses through clenched teeth as he hears his daughter cooing with interest again. “Odétte?”

“I see it again, Papa, it’s closer now!” she squeaks, crawling forward on all fours to get just a little closer with her spyglass. “I see something else too, little yellow flashes in the trees.”

Merle swallows a mouthful of dried nothing, clutching at the haft of his spear as he spots an unsavory discovery of his own trampling out from a wall of evergreens. “Uncle Usmar…”

Everyone is following Odétte’s eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of the monster tailing them as Usmar keeps an arrow knocked. “What is it, Merle?”

“You don’t happen to know them at all, do you?” he says, pointing to a small army of trouble heading them off down the road.

Usmar spins back around as he hears the thunder of a dozen paws and the clattering of metal plates. Just in time to spot a pair of well-fed broad-chested men gilded head-to-toe in bands of shimmering bronze.

They lay heavy-headed tamato-spiked maces across their shoulders, pocked with the proof of their use, smiling like they’ve found a tavern full of easy broads and free beer as the carts move towards them.

The men are surrounded by a dozen, strange, canine beasts creeping forth with meaty blackened feet supporting a broader muscular bulk. They hunch in a half-walking gait supporting ivory-fluffed chests and black bandit-striped faces on massive paws capped in bony spines.

Bloody-colored eyes hide behind blobby curtains of fleshy ashen dreads. Chests bearing sharpened ivory spines breathe hot lungfuls of air out in moistened gusts. They snarl up at the merchants with stretched, hungry smiles that bristle with needle-tipped fangs.

“Caaa… Fuuurrrr…” one of the things slobbers out in thirsting monster words. “Riocaaa…”

Apicot snorts between bared rows of pearly whites, head low, ready to pounce as she puts herself between the children and the smell of malice drawing near.

“Maaamaaa… What are those things?” Odétte whines behind a wall of fur and teeth.

Mère squints with a pruny scowl. “Dogs,” she says with disgust, paying no heed to the monsters as she eyes the men on approach.

“Tidings!” The leader of the pack rolls his shoulders, scraping metal on metal with each miniscule movement, as if he’d been born in a shimmering skin of chesnaught plates. “Toll road.”

Usmar doesn’t waste a single mortal moment, loosing a perfectly-trained arrow right for the largest man’s face. “Drop dead!”

Unfortunately for that old merchant-by-trade, this scoundrel is anything but a creature of peace and goodwill.

With reflexes that can only be forged in the fires of a lifetime of conflict, he raises a wide shielded gauntlet to his face. He bellows with stomach-churning laughter as Usmar’s broad-tip shot scrapes a narrow ditch in the plates, ringing with an ear-splitting clang. “Fine shot. You pay extra.”

Then the younger bandit at his side cuts the noise with a toothy three-note whistle and the pack lunges forth.

Three each leap upon Brutus and Smokey’s backs with rote execution. Clamping around the tauros’ skulls like beedril swarming a corpse, they pummel the poor bucking beasts out like a midwinter light.

Two more stake their wrought-iron claws into the front of each wagon and the caravan comes to a sudden sickening stop as the adults grab each other’s coats to keep from flying off the cab.

With gray stormy clouds clumping in the sky, Usmar’s hatchet hits one of the animals like a cutiefly kiss as they yank him down off the cart, into the freshly thawed earth. “Riaaah! Furcaaa!”

Usmar bounces against the ground as the stony studs of the road free the winds from his chest and Ulphia shrieks in horror as the last horrible beast leaps for the head of the caboose.

“TWIST OFF!”

Everyone is stunned into silence as Merle vaults one of the beasts up into the air, stuck to the tip of his spear by the neck, and launches them both over the railing.

The lad falls upon his foe with every stone of his scrawny adolescent bulk. His manically-sharpened speartip pushes down and he crunches clean through, leaving him kneeling atop a gushing lifeless corpse.

Their trainer coughs with a scowl, spits, and replies with a rolling trill before lifting his mace in a charge.

Two of the beasts leave the wagons at the command, ready to flank the boy and bite with stinking open maws riddled with bits of carrion and ground meal.

Unfortunately for them, Cousin Merle hasn’t always lived as a merchantman’s apprentice.

“Yeah?” The young man’s stance shifts, legs spread, and he leaps aside, whipping one across the eye with his weapon's long flexible shaft. “C-c’mon!”

A mutt whines and claps a paw over its face and the other backs away from his reach.

“That was a warning! T-try again and I’ll let you like a butcher’s hook!” he screams and squeaks like a busted wheel with the wild trauma-fueled tenacity of a cornered mawile baring through his eyes.
 
The monster standing atop Usmar yelps and crumples like a parchment ball as a banded billy club cracks against the back of its skull.

“Hhh… Hold on!” Usmar wheezes and stumbles away, circling the wagon to meet with Merle, and plunges an arrow point-blank into the deep muscled hide of another beast.

It doesn’t flinch a bit, breaking the bleeding shaft free with a smile.

The rest of the pack drops to all fours, abandoning the wagons to pile upon them when the air explodes into a riotous choir of sparkling gods-awful noise, leaving the dogs reeling with covered ears.

Odétte spits on one with unsettling precision from the canopy as her scatterbang whistles and pops, blinding the dogs and their trainer with a blizzard of flares bright as Moltres’ gaze. “Dig a hole and die!”

Ulphia cries out as she grabs a corroded copper spade and waddles over the front railing to give one of their assailants an ineffective whack across the cheek.

Mère, face tight with resignation, reaches into her blouse for something as she pulls Ulphia down to the boards. “Thy mortal vessel is precious, you foolish girl!!” she growls, bringing them both down to a knee-creaking crawl as she puts her ancient burlap bag of a body between Ulphia and the snapping maws down below.

If her life is the price she must pay to bring another beautiful healthy grandbaby into the world, she’ll happily look Arceus in the eyes on the other side.

With a soul fueled by the Yveltal’s fire, Merle sends a couple more teetering away with oozing, split faces as they circle him like a shipwrecked corpse. “Uncle! Back to back with me!”

“On my wa— Gnaaah!”

The storming sky roars, clashing like a tide of rolling boulders as Usmar is snagged up and dragged by the collar, puffing with his scruff caught in clattering bronzen knuckles.

“That’s enough!” the lead-man barks, socking the back of Usmar’s skull with a fortified fist, and then tosses him to the ground for a good, long, dirty nap.

The tamer launches himself into the fray and deliberately feints to catch the tip of the spear in the links of his armor plate. He holds the polearm fast in a great bog-iron grip and the man’s other hand lifts the mace high above his head as Merle fights with all his might to yank the weapon free.

CRACK

Merle staggers back, gawking at a shattered broomstick haft as he’s swept up in a tide of fuzzy gnashing teeth.

The criminal makes a single, stern, sharp whistle, but not before letting his purebred mongrels have a taste of the punk that cut their brother down. “Heel! Hold him down.”

Odétte and her pups watch with eyes locked wide and their stomachs tied in knots as the monsters wrench and spread her cousin out like a sacrifice in some degenerate Darkrai cult.

Merle growls, jaw clenched in the face of his coming coup de grâce as he fights against the blood-soaked maws and claws clamping him in place.

Mère drags Ulphia back through the flaps of the cart behind a din of defiant screams.

Laurie Lumiere grabs the gigots of her daughter’s gown, and yanks the pallid sweating woman to her gaze. “You say nothing. You do nothing. I do the talking. Understand?”

Odétte retches and shrieks as Merle’s voice hitches to a stop, choking as a muffled crunch that sounds like a broken bolt of cloth splits the air, stained with bellicosity and pain.

The woman is stuck staring at the ends of her own eyeballs for a moment as Mère shakes her blouse in a pair of quivering knobbly fists.

“Do you understand, Ulphia?!”

She forces a creeping gastly nod, mouth agape, slouched atop a keg of ice-hardened sherry as she takes the weight of the tragedy falling upon them. “Yes, Mama…” she whispers as her babies slip down through a trap flap in the canopy top to curl against her lap into a sobbing nest of fluff.

“No more!” booms the voice of an old soldier who’s used to calling shots with a brisk basalt fist.

“What?!” The baying of hot vengeful hounds is slowly quenched by the sounds of yanked yelping scruffs. “That whelp snuffed one of my best pups!”

“Cost of doing business; now tie and pile them in the tall grass there while I have a word or two with the neighbors about it.”

“Bah! Whatever. At least cut a pound of flesh for Old Chewy,” the tamer whines as one of his dogs starts dragging their moaning quarter-conscious victim by the tunic sleeves.

The head honcho stomps to the back of their cart and smacks his mace against the back planks. “Alright ladies, time to pay the piper.”

Mère tightens her jaw and stands, shining her silver tongue with a rattling cough as she prepares to parlay their lives away from a pair of purrloin thugs. She slowly scales the ladder rungs, careful not to slip and end up negotiating with a broken hip too. “You’ll be speaking to me only, young man.”

“Suit yourself.” He grins, showing off the gaps of a couple old shattered teeth. “Lotta fines ya stacked up there, cost us a whole lot too.” He looks in the cart, ogling the frightened females and freight. “I reckonnn… Everything’ll do! I’m a reasonable man. We take the lot and you sod off. Sound fair?”

Mère gives the man a kind disinterested sigh. “House Lumiere greets House Vautour. Have you come seeking alms to buy a banner or two, or is it cowardice that brings you here, bereft of markings?”

He meets Mère’s eloquent mockery with blustering shock. “Spitting qwilfish spines! We make a mighty fine mischief, Madame, but even we wouldn’t sully our hands with filthy traitor money.”

He chuckles for an uncomfortably long time. “Business is good; got no need for that sort of trouble.”

“Oh?” She tilts her head with a cool smile. “Is that so?”

“Of course! Why, it’s always some cushy-assed upstart with a castle calling himself king what gets the world all twisted up,” he responds with a pretentious grin. “Law and orders’ the first thing to go, I tells ya.”

She nods, rubbing at the drooping skin stretched around her chin. “Well, far be it from me to besmirch the name of such an upstanding citizen,” she says, glancing over at the strange canine breed busy lashing Usmar and Merle together in a heap of cheap flaxen rope.

The guy guzzles a long sloshy swig from a glazed jug of stinking, road-brewed hooch. “Damn right it uuurrrs,” he chortles with a rancid boozy belch. “Now get’cher arses outs my godsdamn wagon.”

Mère stifles a gag as the cloud of wild bilberry swill backhands her across the face; bitter, rotten, probably poisonous, the best he’s got under the circumstances. Exactly how she feels about this plan.

“You see, I’m quite familiar with the creatures hatched in Avignon.” She reaches into her blouse again and shows the man a pewter pendant, cast in the sunray shape of her kennel’s mark. “And I couldn’t possibly imagine Her Highness de Ville suffering the indignation of her prized furcario wasting away, taking tolls on some backwater road.”

“Awww, poor baaaby!” he whines, lips pursed, “not that I care. I’m sure her tits’ll stop hurting someday.”

“Of course, of course… but if you did, I would like to inform you that we offer ourselves up for ransom.”

He furrows his brow and groans to the storming clouds. “Are you dense, woman? We’re highway robbers! Thick-headed thugs! Can’t tell a noble’s head from a muddy, whooper’s arse!”

“Right, and a fine thing too! It is quite dangerous to refuse a lady her due. You said it best; too much trouble,” Mère pushes straight through his protestations. “House Lumiere would be willing to pay a suitable sum for our safe and sound return… not to mention a generous tip for our most gentle captors.”

That last bit leaves her soul sick as that verbal ichor dribbles from her lips, but the undeniable truth is that a little bit of honey goes a long way in a shitty brew.

The man’s throat rumbles with stern unwelcome tension as his knuckles grind the haft of his mace down. “How about this… I let you lot keep anything your little arms can carry and you stop asking dangerous questions. How's that for a bargain?”

Mère hands the man a copy of her trademark coldstone smile. “I’m not asking.”

He clenches his jaw and grips the haft of his weapon, squinting at that old crone in contemplation as he recognizes the subtle unmistakable glow of the ladies’ lightwool clothes. Then, with a tired sigh, he slides the weapon through that brassen loop on his belt and snaps his fingers. “Hope you like hard tack.”



To turn back mid-route; it is a broken, bitter thing. Lost time, money, reputation; all for the thrill of a tiny, dicey time on an unforgiving road. The most miserable kind of waste, in a Merchand’s eyes at least. And it feels ten-times worse with your wrists wrapped like liquor glasses, stacked in a row to be labeled and sold.

Mère fears the chance that may be the case, sat-side-by-side with her loved ones like the stock of smoked spoink being feasted-on up front.

Odétte raises her wrist, bruised and bound in twisted grass, and cracks a chip of ships-biscuit, chowing down with a disconcerting crunch. “What do we do?”

Laurie, Matriarch of Kennel Lumiere, leans to let Odétte lay her head in her Mère’s lap, for the first time in four, long winters past. “We will be good guests in a house that isn’t ours. We will wait for his Highness’ generosity to bring us home, and be grateful for the charity of our hosts.”

“Shahdding up is what’chur gonna do!” the monster tamer bellows back through the flaps. “I got some more socks that need washing out, if ya wanna taste.”

Odétte glances over at Usmar and Merle restrained in the corner with wads of stained, woolen cloth stuffed in their mouths. “Sorry, monsieur...” she grumbles as Usmar promises death with his eyes and Merle writhes with a leg bent twice.

Balls of white blast the nighttime clouds with thunderous claps, unveiling all that hides in the night with great flashes of un-sunlight.

The leader of the gang gawks up at the sky, his brows furrowing with concern. “T’wernt a hint of rain today,” he mutters and spits a mouthful of stolen chew. “We camp here!”

Apicot and her pups bitch and growl and moan, led by the neck with a thorny set of bronze-pronged collars. They’ve traded their sleigh-bell torques for jingling lengths of chain clutched in knuckle-dragging furcario paws, stuck leading the wagon train on foot.

Smoky and Brutus huff in protest under the strain of the forced march, ‘persuaded’ on in spite of their battered swollen faces as the rear driver whistles and tugs at the reins. “Head left! Clear the area!”

The furcario hoard barks and yips with excitement, each bounding off into a meadow cradled by a wall of trees just off the road; all but the three left wounded by Merle, keeping Apicot’s lot in line.

The leader watches as the sky starts cracking again and the wagons rumble to a stop. Then the bulls finally slump into tired beaten lumps. “Strange, summer storms…” he says with his eyes locked upwards and his cohort clatters down to march by his side.

“Could just kill’n’bury’em in there, who’s gonna know?” the tamer says with matte listless eyes.

His older, wiser, very-much-larger compatriot guides him twenty paces out, where their words could only be heard by the snow-spackled pines. “Their people know where they are. Our people know where we are,” he lectures his younger friend, keeping the spoils of their labor well within sight. “Paranoid brass-hats would know when a storm of letters starts raining down from Lumiose city.”

“Gaspard; these woods are swarming with pyroars. Why not rough the wagon up, burn a patch or two, and say we found it empty?”

Gaspard sighs, rolling his eyes with a ‘I told you once’ tone of voice. “Because they’re more valuable to us alive, even if it cuts the trip shorter than we’d like,” he says, and then points back to the dogs. “And they got whipped by what exactly, the wind? Fell down the fucking stairs? Got room to juggle a couple more lies there, Norris?”

Norris puffs his cheeks in frustration as lights keep dancing through the cloudy murk above. “Didn’t they say we’d ‘better be dead’ if we get found out?”

“Yes, but that’s only if it’s bad for business,” Gaspard continues his lesson. “I count four Lumieres there, plus a couple furfrou to boot. That’s a lot of leverage for the folks back home, and we’ll be the ones giving it to them!”

He’s a bit too animated by the end of his little spiel, but gets right back to the air of ‘might-makes-right’. “Sounds like ‘promotion’ to me, and the old hag said it herself, we get a slice too.”

As the men are busy talking, the monsters skulk toward something very interesting rustling in the grass. They approach the very furthest edge of the glade in a jumbled arrow, sniffing; only to end up chuffing with irritated tingling nostrils.

The tip of the spear, their oldest, meanest hound, comes within a leap’s length of a rustle in the brush.

Sniff. Snufffff.

ZAP!

The leader stumbles back with his paws full of whining muzzle as a yellow shape flips from the bushes in a theatrical acrobatic spin and sticks a perfect two-paw landing.

“Cha cha chaaah!” Pikachu chides, wagging her finger left and right in time with her heart-shaped tail.

The entire pack rumbles with angry grumbles, watching with intensity at what their alpha male might do.

“Rrrrah! Ca-fa-rah!” the massive muscly beast barks as his front paws shovel muddy pits in the ground.

The pikachu scans left, then right, and scoffs as she tosses a blasé look over a shoulder of ragged half-healed scars. “Kah?” she chuckles and jabs a finger the old dog’s way. “Chu ka pi, pi ka chu!”

The mob behind him gasps as their boss is sent into a gnarly snarling rage. “Faaah!” he roars, bringing his good-paw down.

He feels the crunch of something soft and mushy filled with brittle broken bits and then spits as he lifts his paw to see he’d just executed a patch of snowbells growing in a snowless clump of soil.

Tzzzzt! SMACK!

The big dog stumbles aside and tumbles to the mud, asleep with a smoking heart-shaped stamp in his cheek.

A wave of yelps rolls back through the crowd as Pikachu points her finger around in a daring arc. “Pa, pika cha?” she tilts her ears and sighs. “Cha… Chu ka pi…” she starts again.

A couple of the older more prideful dogs start to fume from the nose and approach.

“Pi… ka…” She squints with a daredevil smirk. “Chu!”

The two of them leap in with angry raking claws as the pack starts to bay with frenzied barking yips.

Tzzzzt! WHACK WHACK!

Down two more go as the boltbringer lazily steps aside, admiring the sizzling hearts she’d marked their temples with.

Humming arcs of lightning surge from the tips of her ears to the end of her tail. “Chaaah?” she goads beckoning them all forth with a smart, smack of the arse.

Every single dog still standing stumbles forward to rip themselves a piece of Pikachu’s corpse, even the ones keeping the Lumiere pups in line instantly drop their leads and barrel into the fray.

“What’s distorting them?” Gaspard asks, taking his ears away from a strange sound he’d started hearing, like the rustling of leaves in the rain.

Norris screeches with his teeth and runs toward the sparky bubbling froth of fangs and burned fur. “What in scraftys shorts?!” he shouts as the mob is cast about with raw, stored, lightning force.

A figure, cloaked in freaky lacquered-leather shrouds, creeps out from the trees behind them tinseled with strings of fresh-picked foliage. Their face is covered in a floppy rawhide veil with darkened eyes of rounded polished glass. A charred copper-banded crook pokes out from the flaps of their coat as another leather-wrapped hand preps a fistful of shiny jinkling rings.

Gaspard reaches for his mace, peering across his shoulder as a pittering, pattering, chittering, skittering sound rises around the meadow. “Something isn’t ri—”

A sparkling bola made of weighted copper chains winds around his shins. “Son of a wh—” he starts and seizes up, crashing to the ground like an old fallen pine.

The thing from the wooded edge stabs its stave up beneath Gaspard’s hardened armor plates. Crackling threads of thunder roll down the banding of the shaft, straight through the crook with an ear-splitting crack.

Gaspard whoops just long enough to alert Norris of his fate, stuck convulsing as a mysterious unrelenting monster is still standing over him jabbing its weapon through the gaps of his bronze-banded skin.

Norris turns back around and marches a full ten steps before Apicot, Mistletoe, and Holly intercept him to the ground. Screaming with their jaws crushing the bones of his wrists, he watches with a miserable snarl as his furcario hoard is swept up in a torrential downpour of scratching, sparking boltbringers raining from the trees.

“You!   Filthy!   Turncoat!” the figure shouts between jabs, clutching at the lightning-charged rod with leather-clad hands. “Go!   To!   Sleep!”

Gaspard’s gaze wobbles but stays remains on the enemy keeping him stuck helpless to the ground. He winces, roars, and then grabs at the staff as he hears his partner being actively mauled just out of sight.

“Go to sleep. Go to sleep!   Just!   go!   TO!   SLEEP!” it screams, sounding angry and desperate as a nervous whining Emolga slips out from the cloak stuck to the curved end of the crook.

Eventually Gaspard's fortitude falls short and a mixture of shock, pain, and physical exhaustion from the seizures leaves him jittering on the ground, unconscious but alive.

The furcario screech and scream in terrified agony as dozens of pichu, pikachu, and even a raichu or two light the dog-pile up in a humming spiderweb dome of concentrated thunder.

KrrrzzzzzZZZ-BOOM!

The blob of criminal scum splashes all around the meadow, left shuddering, writhing, wheezing under the weight of a few sparkling parasites who’d stuck on to keep the punishment going.

The first pikachu to arrive, authoritative and cocksure, marches between the shivering scattered dogs with concussions to hand out for bad behavior.

The hooded mass of leather straps and flaps runs toward Norris, leaving a muddy bootprint in Gaspard’s cheek as he bounds away on all fours.

Apicot yanks her children away by the scruff as she hears the menacing hum of thunder building up.

His staff is thrust in all the same places and the young tamer gives out far quicker than his bigger, meaner compatriot. But Apicot and her babies are not done, both puppies going in for the man’s legs and the mother taking his throat in her jaws with barely-coherent atavistic rage.

“Apicot! Heel! Heel, Girl!” he says with a rich, woody, tenor tone. The stranger falls to his knees, right into Norris’s groin, and pets between her ears.

The old furfrou snorts, snapping his glove up in her mouth and then shifts a bit in confusion, kept curious by the familiarity of the person’s voice. Then she smells the air a moment and her look of viciousness melts away to ecstatic joy as she nuzzles the figure’s face.

Her two pups are very confused, unsure how to feel about the strange human hugging their mom, but they politely sit as told.

“Good giiirl, good pups! Watch them now, I gotta find some rope,” he orders, skittering off waving to Pikachu as she replies with a thumbs up, and then he jumps head-first into the wagon.

Odétte shuffles back with a gasp as something brown, floppy, stringy, and leafy flies through the canvas flaps. “Papaaa!” she shrieks. “Papa, it’s the gardenor!”

Everyone looks up shouting, moaning in agony, or murmuring behind a block of unwashed sock. Then Usmar squints with his head tilted as the monster approaches him, mumbling in a ratty chatter.

“Rope. Rope. Lots of rope. There!” and the thing pulls the plug on Usmar’s tongue.

“Haaa! Guh… That’s no gardenor! But who—”

The stranger jumps to Merle and Usmar’s side, cuts the knot keeping them coiled, and moans as he sees the extent of the peoples’ injuries. “Chuuuuuu…” he whines in monster speech, head shaking as his knapped obsidian blade slices the rope like it were butter. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry. I’m sorry, we came as fast as we could muster!”

Nobody recognizes the voice. It is deep, full, made by a body one whole head taller than Usmar or Merle. Then a ball of yellow, black, and white with a scar drawn down its wing flutters out from the cloak, landing to a snuggle behind the tent around his head.

Mère’s face relaxes with a pleasantly surprised smile. “Is that–”

“It’s Batty! It’s Batty!” Odétte squeals with legs knocking bags aside in happiness.

Usmar’s life slows for a moment as the figure reaches for its face and his son removes the mask. “Bataille?”

Someone resembling Bataille Merchand pushes up a pair of hand-made crystalline goggles set in a blocky wooden frame. Blazing pink scars reach across his cheek, threatening to devour his shining sky-colored eyes. The million other marks peppering his skin belie his youth as he grins with the face of a boy that has grown far too early in life.

“My… my Gods…” Ulphia’s eyes soak and her voice shudders with relief. “It’s my baby boy! Oh thank Mew!”

Usmar is set free and carefully helps his son in laying Merle down, so overwhelmed at the sight of his first-born child so grown up that the words can’t quite fit through his throat.

“Be right back!” Bataille’s long golden hair whips around as he scampers away. “Emeline, Pi-cha chapika ka!” he commands with sharp clarified intent as he hunches down and leaps away.

She gives him a motivated nod, salutes, and flutters right down to Odétte’s arms, scratching at the fibrous knots holding them fast.

Bataille one-arm vaults out the wagon’s back with a bandolier of hempen cords wrapped around his chest, looking for the criminals who’d hurt his family. What he finds, however, is one unconscious man laid beside three unconscious ‘frou, with the second nowhere to be seen.

“Good day.”

Bataille’s head jerks forward, chin smacking his chest as his eyes dance with freckling lights. His ears ring as he is lifted into the air by the front of his cloak and thrown to the ground with a metal grip clamping his throat shut.

“Don’t make ‘em like they used to,” Gaspard growls, slowly crushing Bataille’s windpipe as the boy fights against the guy’s massive muscly form. “Kids should be seen, not heard, least of all felt!”

The young wild human glares, kicking the armored torso like a skitty held down on its back. “Hel-grk.”

“Let’s fix that,” he hisses past shattered grinding teeth.

Something strikes his helmet, clanging like a bell and jerking his head aside with a pop of the joints. A black and white blur smacks domey bowls into the plate covering the man’s skull two, four, six times…

…until the devilish rogue raises his hand and snatches Emeline out of the air, slamming her to the ground with all of his might.

“Mol–gak!” she coughs as her skull is smashed against a mossy rock. “Gaaa…” she gargles, eyes fluttering shut with her neck trapped in his grip.

“Eemel–ssgggrk!” Bataille cries out, slamming his knuckles bare against the man’s arms and bronze-plated chest with the guy’s face being just out of reach.

“Fu–cking–mon–ster—man trash!” Gaspard hisses, spitting through his teeth again as his fist synches harder and harder, thumping Bataille’s skull against the ground. “If I had my squadron here I’d stick all of you shit-end hicks up on spikes.”

Emeline stares around with swimming eyes as she sees from around the wagon’s wheel that Pikachu hasn’t yet noticed them. The swarm is too preoccupied with a few of the larger furcario fighting ‘til the bitter end. “Gaaa…” she whimpers, reaching out for her friend.

Bataille’s vision begins to fade as his lips call out for everyone, someone, anyone… but one name in particular, her name, read from his silent quivering lips strikes Emeline’s heart like a heap of dry tinder.

The little monster’s body twitches back to life and starts to thrash and buck as her claws scrape across the gauntlet squeezing her neck. Faster, harder, faster, harder, until his fingers shake with sparking arcs as the gauntlet comes apart with hot, popping rivets.

Bataille’s neck slips from Gaspard’s grip as the criminal brings a wild, haymaker swing for Emeline’s temple.

He misses and screams to the heavens as she flips around, pries the plates aside, and bites the end of his front-two fingers with loud, celery snaps.

Bataille sits gasping on his ass with eyes open wide as the man bends over, gawking in pain, shrieking at Emeline latched onto his cheeks. She growls, snarling, scraping furrows in the man’s head like tent stakes pulled across the mud in a windy storm.

Rippling with an angry blue aura, Emeline’s humming imminent strike rises in pitch and power.

“GAAA!” she squeals, locking her claws behind his ears and the line of his jaw. “Looo GA!” she barks, serving up fresh mouthfuls of Rayquayza’s might.

“Emeline…” Bataille rubs his throat, crawling on all fours as Pikachu finally realizes what’s going on and zips with a speed that kicks the grassy mud and springmelt-snow in a cloud behind her. “Emeline, wait!”

“Gaaa! ” she growls with an awful vindictive rattle in her throat, unable to hear, unable to even conceive of the man’s howling pleas for mercy muffled to silence in her chest. “Lo ga!”

The man slams his fists against her head and back, lacking rhythm or reason. But no amount of bruised bones or broken skin could possibly bring Emeline’s rage to an early end. Then he runs, stumbling off any-which-way in the hopes something might free him from the living chittering torture device cooking his face to rinds.

Pikachu arrives, screeching to a halt at Bataille’s side, just in time to see Gaspard trip over the lip of an icy creekbed in a screaming ball of light.

Then a great amber strip rips the willow trees to bits, shaking the ground with its quaking raikou cry.

Everyone stares in static shock, hair standing straight, eyes locked to the smoldering splintered branches blasted apart by her monumental sky-fire strike.

Bataille scrambles over in horror, finally holding his chest in relief as Emeline shuffles up over the ledge and waddles back into his arms, hiding her face in shame.

“Eee!” Emeline wipes her eyes, open-mouth bawling. “Eee ga lo-ga-laaa!” she bellows, gagging at what she’d done.

Pikachu clutches her paws, hopping up and down like she’d just seen the coolest thing since baked bread. “PIII?! KA!? CHUUU?!” She slaps her friend across the shoulders with a proud smirk.

Emeline yips and shakes her head, crawling up into the leather cloak with a sickened frown. “Lo mo gaaa…”

“Ka?!” Pikachu coughs, looking up at Bataille with surprise.

He gives the rodent a loopy exhausted laugh as he hoists himself back up on his fallen staff. “She’ll be ok, let’s— Aaah!”

A second ambush leaves them trapped, wrapped in smothering kisses and chest-crushing beartic hugs.

“Tell us everything!” his still-standing family shouts, fighting for the right to put their hands on his cheeks and prove to themselves they didn’t dream the whole thing.

Bataille simply can’t help laughing from the tension, the terror, and the exhilaration of being in the arms of his family after such a long, long time. “I will, but…”

Merle makes his predicament known again as Pikachu’s extended family stuffs the rear wagon full of smoking compliant furcario and assigns triple-duty watch to a rowdy group of pichu boys.

Their savior of the night rubs the aching back of his head, wincing as his gloves touch a bloody stain soaking his hair red. “...let’s get back on the road first.”



They do exactly that, keeping the robbers and all their things prisoner in a wagon swarming with baby boltbringers looking for any reason to get rough.

Merle is made as comfortable as could be expected, considering his femur is splinted with a pair of boards lashed with silk that a random caterpie agreed to provide. The entire trip he is forced to guzzle gratuitous quantities of fortified spirits mixed in briney juice to numb the pain.

The family expects Bataille and his friends to sit and chat with them on the long moonlight trip back towards Shaymin’s pass. Instead, their curiosities are left starving with longing stares as he walks ahead of the wagons, nearly out of sight. They hear whimpering Emeline noises, lambasting Pikachu sounds, and the mediating intervention of Bataille’s beautiful voice out in the moonlit night.

Emeline flies on wide searching paths in the sky as Pikachu darts through the bushes, popping back onto the trail on the opposite side she left on. Squads of pikachu, bulbasaur, and even a few pyroar break from the bushes to trade chitters with him and then leave as quickly as they came.

The trio tries to coax the caravan to sleep, knowing they’ve been frightened and tortured for gods-know-how-long, but the horrible sounds coming from Merle and the wonder fueling the fire of their minds simply won’t allow it.

They shout out to him, but his answers leave them dry in the mouth.



“How has your training been?”

“Hard.”



“Have you missed us?”

“Lots.”



“Is everything alright?”

“Maybe.”



“Stunkybutt!” Finally the wagons come to a stop as Odétte points with a maleficent scowl. “Why are you acting like we aren’t even here?!”

Bataille whips around with the look of a templegirl yanked out of a divine trance. “Pik– ah… I, uh…”

Mère gently pulls Odétte back by the shoulders. “A lot has happened, my flower.”

Ulphia’s face would have gone red at her daughter’s emotional flare, but simply squirms with embarrassment as the words she’d been hiding inside were called out like a village decree.

“Ki-chaaa…” he chirps in an eerie replication of natural monsterspeech, wiping his palms over his face and rubbing circles around his cheeks in frustration. “Dot, my family… I’m sorry. It’s just that we’re still in danger and I’m on edge.”

Pikachu wipes her nose. “Pi!” she blurts, pointing to the mountainous labyrinthine forests all around.

“Right! There’s probably more out there; the region has been crawling with looters and spies since the western houses broke their vows.” Bataille scratches at his chin, eyes up with uneasy contemplation. “Or… at least I think it was something like that. Tauron knows it all better than me. We don’t have much time for politics these days.”

Emeline chitters with her mouth obscured by his ear and Pikachu rolls her eyes with a quippy rant.

“Yeah, politics does seem to find lots of time for us, huh?” he says, snapping out of his exhausted blabbering gaze with a cheerful smile. “I’ve missed you all, more than you can ever know, but please… let us work. Rest now.”

Hearing him talk like that, even a tiny bit of the old Battaille slipping free from the intensity of his gaze, is just what the doctor ordered, and they all fall asleep.



Ulphia is the first to wake as honey-colored dawnlight shines between the southern peaks.

Bataille is walking, scanning, even talking, but the wobble in his step says he’s not manning his own helm.

“Bataille.” Ulphia sits up from her pile of quilted blankets. “Bataille, come lay down, honey.”

Pikachu and Emeline both sigh with relief and tug at his leather flaps with tired yawns. “Chuuu.” “Gaaa.”

“We’re almost… there…” Her son slurs, shaking his head and taking big deep breaths to remain conscious.

Emeline nibbles at his ear and he swats her away with barely-cognizant annoyance. Then Pikachu kicks him in the shin, pointing to the towering palisade enclosing the bottom of the valley as he hops around in pain.

“Ooow! Chaaa, chaaa!” he surrenders with his hands up and clatters his weapon / lightning-rod / walking-stick / thing up onto the platform. “You win.”

Bataille heaves himself up on deck with his mama’s help and falls with a longing fawning smile; the kind that yearns for another time. Then, curling up with Emeline at his neck and Pikachu in his arms, he lays his head down upon his mother’s lap for a long overdue nap.

“Sleep, baby. Sleep…” Ulphia hums a catchy shanty she’d heard from her father once, having never learned all the words. Now more than ever she finds it fitting that his favorite lullaby is some mysterious call from a curious distant land. “...down where the bonslys creep…”

She whispers the words she knows, softer and softer each time, until her little boy finally lets his body rest.

Both he and Pikachu take turns sawing logs as Emeline starts curling inside the boy’s garments to join them, but she’s stopped by the tender brush of a fingertip across her fuzz.

“Not you,” Ulphia says, tapping Emeline’s ear. “Let us talk, you and I.”

Emeline’s eyes blink out of sync as she brings herself back to the land of the living with a vacant-but-attentive stare. “Go… gala?” she anxiously whispers, trapped inside the woman’s eyes.

“Those scars healed rightly, didn’t they?” Ulphia pets her son’s cheeks and shoulders in a grateful sort of way. “He seems to wear it well.”

The rodent looks away, silently seething with a strange mix of relief and humiliation.

Ulpha holds her fingers out, waiting for Emeline to respond. It takes a long patient while, but eventually the monster who once hated her and haunted her attic nuzzles her fingertips like a hatchling furfrou pup. “We made an agreement. It was a long time ago; do you remember?”

Emeline doesn’t hesitate for a single second, nodding with eyelids locked shut to keep Ulphia’s face away.

Ulphia brings the little monster’s chin up with a fingertip and meets her face. “Thank you.”

Shock blossoms over Emeline’s face. “Ma?”

“Mhmmm,” Ulphia hums, combing her fingers through Emeline’s fuzz. “You’ve more than kept your word,” she coos, scritching behind Emeline’s neck with a tingling sensation crawling up her wrist. “Welcome to the family, Emeline Lumierre.”

Every ounce of anxiety is purged from Emeline’s blood stream, flushed clean with cold hard astonishment. Curled around Bataille’s neck, nodding with exhaustion, she wipes a smear of happy tears from her dandelion cheeks, smiling wide, literally glowing with pride.

And as the liquor finally grants Merle a little bit of Cresselia's Grace, the family’s questions sit in a patient kindling stack as they savor the silence of a peaceful quiet morning.
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