tefifonconnoisseur's nom shanty

You’re such a fool.

Yep. You’ve been walking way, WAY too long in the same forest, searching for a person or a Pokemon to sacrifice for XP, but this journey has been fruitless, only rivaled by the whale ship Essex in terms of lack of fruit. This forest was dark and green, its gargantuan trees obscuring the sun and letting glimpses in only to the moss and grasses below your feet. Your foolishness, however, had begun the second you passed the sign.

This was Kanto’s Melinoë Forest, a place infamous for being mostly barren of Pokemon, save for enchanted ones that caused the condemning of this place. Enchanted Pokemon, demented some of them, had undocumented moves and powers. Without a permit, nobody could enter, and nobody ever would. Except a few people.

One early morning on the couch with your father watching TV, the old man on the screen explored the forest and found himself in deadly (though hidden by shoddy camerawork) perils. The program intrigued younger you and stuck to your mind like an earworm, luring you to learn more. You tried to find the program again years later, only to find it deemed lost media, censored by a higher power, and ever since then your goal was to find out what you missed the hard way: entering the forest.

As you realized pretty quickly, you had stopped paying attention to where you were headed, and with the lack of any paths, you’d gotten yourself lost. With what little preservation instincts you had brought with you, you took a survey of your surroundings. The visuals of tall trees enshrouding you in confusion didn’t change. The smell of clean air was unfamiliar to a city boy such as yourself. Noises around you were minimal, not a creature stirred the grass around you. This was, of course, until a few faint voices hit your radar and made your heart drop a few inches down.

“Where ARE we?!” A woman’s voice shrieked.

Finally, you could connect voices to faces, as you saw a trio of people just as lost as you. Well, PEOPLE is very generalized. There was a girl, the one you’d just heard, with long gel-hardened pink hair and two hours worth of makeup. Leading the pack, though you assumed he shouldn’t, was a blue-haired twink(?), and trailing behind them was a Meowth. Your next surprise was the Meowth’s unexplained ability to speak.

“Beats me” he replied, though his nasally voice made you wish he hadn’t.

“It appears we’ve gone too far and have gotten lost” the guy who you thought was the spitting image of a theatre kid answered to flaming eyes. Eh, they’re ALL theatre kids, you thought nonjudgmentally (or I should hope so). All six eyes in the group eventually locked onto you, and the trio simultaneously screamed.

“Are you lost too?” the male asked you.

You nodded, trying to let your heart rate slow before you said something you’d regret.

“Fantastic. Now we’ll NEVER escape this place,” the woman groaned.

“Well, might as well make introductions!”

They introduced themselves as James, Jessie, and Meowth of Team Rocket. While you would usually be concerned that you’d lose the right to your Pokemon, they seemed benign right now, simply washed up on the same desert island as you. They continued by giving an explanation for their presence: they hadn’t noticed the sign and assumed that this was a regular forest, and only when they’d gone too far in to just turn around had Meowth recognized this place. They’d taken what they thought was a path, only to turn around and find the path vanished.

So now, out of a desire to collaborate on escape, you joined them in trudging forward through the forest. Rather than a breeze, your new constants were complaints from Jessie and Meowth’s smarm, but it sure beat roughing it alone. Odds were that if the four of you went straight long enough, you’d reach freedom of some sort. The forest was a lot of terrible things, eerie, lonely, and positively devoid of noise, but it certainly wasn’t endless.

“The only terrible thing is the risk of finding one of the enchanted Pokemon and getting into a boatload of trouble,” you told the three.

“Yeah, it’s actually been pretty peaceful considering the-,” James replied.

“Dude, don’t jinx it,” Meowth interjected.

The feral scream that echoed through the mid-afternoon sky then signaled that you two had, with combined incompetence, screwed yourselves by triggering the power of cosmic spite.

“Dammit,” you and James groaned simultaneously.

Though a certain rock had a beam of light on it like it contained Arthur’s sword, created by a rare break in the foliage above, what appeared on this rock was most likely going to end up carrying a curse rather than worthiness, that being an unassuming Clefable. The plush-like Fairy type stood somewhat below your height, though appeared taller thanks to the rock, and looked just like an unenchanted Clefable. However, you noticed a defining characteristic: hypnotic eyes, blazingly purple with swirls of cherry red piercing through every soul in front of it.

Perhaps this is how it takes MY soul, you thought.

Your observation period, however, only could last as long as this Clefairy was docile. Sentences like that, of course, lead to peril, and they did here too. The typical voice of the Clefairy, paired with its special Groot-esque language, was replaced with something similar to the haunting wail of a foreign creature, uncannily human in nature (think the screams of a barn owl in the dark hours of the morning). With every shriek from its mouth, your vision blurred exponentially more, until you could only see what appeared to be stars. Then, nothing. All ceased.

…

When you eventually awoke, details began to emerge as you came back to lucidity. Firstly, it was dark, and yet you felt like you were on a fair ride, swinging back and forth. Vertigo struck you like a magpie during swooping season, and your confusion only intensified when everything slowed down.

Light eventually struck your eyes once again, and you yelped: your entire world had grown around you. Or, more logically, you’d shrunken down. Your caretaker through this tumultuous process was the guy who’d been carrying you away from the Clefairy: Mr. James.

“Jesus! What happened?” You asked, your tired daze preventing you from totally blowing a gasket.

“That Clefairy shrunk you. It wanted our head” he rasped, lungs clearly having enough of running.

James took a moment to sit down, slowly as to not give you vertigo. As he didn’t know that you’d already had it, you chose not to enlighten him about that; he’d already had enough mental strain over the past… however long he’d been running, and it truthfully wasn’t his fault. His concerned, face, however, revealed that he knew what you’d not divulged.

“There, there, darling. Sorry about the poor transport; I haven’t any pockets in this jumpsuit,” James apologized.

“No worries, dude, it’s fine. Thanks for saving my life, by the way.”

“My pleasure,” he replied.

The two of you locked eyes, something that seemed foreign to the both of you. You wouldn’t have thought that a man with such an infamous resume would be more callous, but he was more acting as a maid than a thief. You started wondering if your heart would be the only thing he stole tonight. After the tender moment of staring you shared turned awkward, mostly due to your endless thoughts, he finally got serious.

“That Clefairy still has to be on our tail. There has to be a better way to get both of us out of here safely, right?”

You finally took a moment to scan his kaiju-sized person, taking advantage of the necessity for a spot to go to scan his body. You can’t be that desperate, right? Regaining focus, you looked at his defined lips, perhaps covered in a skin-tone gloss. What laid behind them was his mouth, somewhere you didn’t want to be.

Then again. . . if that was the safest place. . .

“You’re probably going to hate hearing this idea as much as I’m hating telling it to you, but I think hiding in your mouth is the only way out of here. Your soft tongue should protect me from your teeth, and it’s much more shielded from the elements and Clefairy’s attacks than your clenched fist.”

“That idea is truly terrible, my friend, but you’re pretty convincing. Very well, proceed when ready.”

You were slowly lifted up to mouth level, and only a moment later his glossed lips parted and out rolled your red, really pink, carpet: his tongue. His mouth was clean, whitened teeth crowned by red gums, that carpet-like tongue leading to a dark and yet vibrant throat that you really wanted to avoid. From there emitted a warm, humid vapor that was minty perhaps a few hours ago. You eased forward until you made contact with that slimy muscle ahead of you. Next, James took that as a signal and rolled you within his maw, sealing you in darkness with a light click of his teeth.

This place felt like what you imagined a log cabin in 1860s Kansas was like: just SO humid and moist. Maybe air conditioning could be installed where his tonsils once were; there wasn’t room for them where the wisdom teeth once sat, providing wisdom only through pain. Your surroundings became less peaceful when you felt the vibrations of movement, like on an airplane. Only, your craft was actually running away from a muffled scream that could only belong to that demonic creature you hoped not to become familiar with. With every step getting harder, you bounced up slightly in the air, and then back on that squishy tongue like an air mattress. You became dizzy in an instant, vertigo distorting your limited ability to see in this dark maw. The turbulence you‘d felt on Spirit Airlines had been worse, but you’d almost prefer that aircraft. ALMOST.

Your grasp on the muscle was equivalent to a sneaker’s on a bowling alley, the constant earthquakes (as you thought of them) causing you to continue easing backwards. Any attempts to army crawl forward, pull yourself from the edge of the trenches, were futile and didn’t get you any closer to James’ teeth. Saliva saturated your windbreaker and everything it contained, including your hairless chest. Wrinkles twisted lines into your fingertips. With James not feasibly able to spit or swallow, what with the precious cargo within his jaws, the water-like fluid accumulated until those same fingers were submerged. You had essentially become lubricated, oiled like machinery to slip and slide.

Then, the inevitable accident occurred.

You quickly realized that the world beneath you was tilting, and attempted to get some sort of grip, clawing and waving frantically for any possible escape, but gravity snatched you by the ankles and towed you to the back of James’ throat. With what little force you could manage, you pushed yourself into the air and clung onto the uvula like it was a rope swing. Ideally, this would cause James to choke and cough you out. Of course, because you weren’t permitted any amount of fortune, all of that effort to grip this thing was for nought. With a massive thump, your fingers were jostled and you fell. A sickening gulp echoed in your ears as you descended into madness.

…

He must have slipped and fallen backwards, you thought, picturing Harry from Home Alone doing so on the icy stairs of the McCallister home. Only, hopefully not on his neck. You were handling being swallowed and massaged downward by the esophagus quite well, somehow not completely blowing your gasket, or at least that’s what you told yourself. Your heartrate said otherwise, practically at phone vibration speed. If any sweat was under the spit on your face, it was making you a liar to yourself. Heartbeats, right. The thump of James’ rapidly accelerating heartbeat shook you through your core, forcing your body to vibrate in conjunction with the fleshy wall around you.

As if your skin couldn’t be more wrinkled, below you opened a…

“I think it’s a sphincter?”

That thought that crossed your easily-amused mind was eradicated when you fell into a pool of acids, saliva, water, and miscellaneous bacteria, somewhere around 4 feet deep. The second you rose back to the surface, your lungs demanded a breath from you and you gasped for air. Odds are you were holding your breath while still in his throat, like the nervous wreck you pretended you weren’t. The humidity in his stomach made his mouth feel like an air-conditioned bubble in comparison. Any remnants of mint never made it here, so your nose was burdened with the stench of oodles of unidentified baterica cells. Your hand reached out and made contact with mucus-slathered wrinkled falls of flesh, stomach walls. Running your fingers along the veins, trying to control your ever-rising heartbeat, all your thoughts were still centered around how goddamn MUGGY it was.

The concoction of bodily fluids ruining your slightly torn clothing began to ripple and splash around as James began another sprint for your lives. Given that the roaring of the demonic clefairy was fading, you figured that James could run well, despite not looking to have gone to the gym as frequently as the gym rats you USUALLY dated.

He’s probably faster than them, too.

Get your head checked; he’s a career criminal.

“Are you alright in there?” James inquired, putting emphasis on the word “there” as if he was British, probably from some form of theatric training.

“YEP” you hollered, hoping he’d be able to hear you.

The echo slapped your ears like they had insulted its mother. There was no doubt in your mind that if prompted, you’d have to go through that again.

“Fantastic. Well, it appears we’re out of the forest, though I haven’t spotted Jessie or Meowth. I should probably get you out of my guts so we can search together.”

“ABSOLUTELY” you didn’t want to leave any notion on the table that you wanted to be in here. This was prime sauna, and lord knows that you’d only suffer through one if your date so desired it.

“Let’s get this done quick, lest your shrinking spell somehow wears off.” James replied.

“I’ve got an idea!” Jesse had returned, though her voice signaled some form of malice.

Suddenly, the stomach wall behind you suffered a protrusion, flinging you against the other wall. Your surroundings then began to squish together, nearly compressing your poor soul. Muscles fought against their will to drag you upward for a moment, until a fountain of mystery liquids launched you up like a bottle rocket. Spinning, your fall was stopped by Jessie’s rubbery glove.

“Don’t leave me behind if you’re not wanting to get kicked, m’kay?” She winked at James, her voice so artificial that it looped back around to being rage-filled.

“O-of course!” He sputtered, spitting another glob of spit onto the evergreen-colored grass.

You’d been freed. Via assault, but better that than nothing. As you stewed for a moment in the filth that you’d been soaked in, you pondered on how this could’ve been prevented. Perhaps wasting some of your grandmother’s Repel stash instead of bringing a half-decent Pokemon would’ve prevented you from having to run. Or maybe you’d still have been shrunken, and that little Charmander wouldn’t have had a chance to help you. Turning back the way you came once you were lost and just strolling? No Clefairy!