Apocalypse: 2.6 Burnout

Burnout 2.6

August 2015

The quackly or quaxly or whatever tasted fantastic. Like mundane ducks, its meat was a deep, vibrant pink, in that sorta-but-not-quite red meat kinda way. It took a while to roast, even when cooked in pieces, but it was rich and flavorful. My only regret over killing the duck was that there wasn’t much to go around.

The Thanksgiving rule of thumb was to expect to feed one person per pound of bird. Since the weird duck pokemon weighed about fifteen pounds, I could expect to feed fifteen people, provided they found their own starch and sides.

Or, more realistically, I could save a drumstick for the fisherman who’d been firing at it, a wing for Phil and Plue since he “helped” me pluck and gut it, and a few morsels for myself before Rocket, Scout, and Swagsire got their share. Pokemon ate more than their animal counterparts and I couldn’t imagine having one with a truly demanding diet.

X

We were back the next day. We situated ourselves south of the pier, away from the fish pens. We were only half a city block or so away, more than close enough to hear if anything interesting happened.

There, I had Rocket dig us a little trench along the lake, where I could lean several fishing lines and angle them into the water. The bells attached would let me know when we caught something for lunch. Smoked trout and perch weren’t bad, but fish fresh off the grill had its own appeal.

We weren’t just out here to dick around and have a picnic though. I’d have to arrange for another supply run to Truckee in a week or so, but the best thing I could do in the meantime was to train my pokemon. And what better place to train a wooper was there than the lakeside?

First things first, I had Rocket running drills in the thick mud. I noticed that his Double Team suffered when he got bogged down. The illusionary clones looked awkward and choppy, moving in ways that were incongruent with the terrain. He’d be rolling in the mud until he could convincingly use Double Team in conjunction with Quick Attack regardless of terrain.

As for Scout, I was admittedly rather lost. His greatest strengths were his peerless eyesight, maneuverability, and Air Cutter. I didn’t even know where to begin training his senses and he was as maneuverable as he could get. Raw speed was a bit of a problem, but I didn’t think he could get much faster until he evolved into an unfezant.

Until then, I was left with Air Cutter, but even that suited my purposes for the moment. He could, with some buildup, behead a gligar or chop down a small tree. The only thing he could work on was shortening the time it took to charge the move, maybe eventually turning it into an Air Slash.

I resolved to go see Sabrina and Andrew about Scout. Maybe one of them could remember the exact moveset of the pidove line because I couldn’t. And hopefully, while I was at it, I could convince Spade the drilbur to practice more as well.

For now, I turned to Sir Swagsire. The little fellow was the least immediately useful on my team, but I refused to discount him; there was no such thing as a helpless pokemon. I’d already handed off samples of his poisonous mucus to Dr. Lansdowne and Dr. Nguyen. If the substance wasn’t lethal in small doses, I fully planned to coat my bolts in them.

“Alright, bud, show me all of your moves one more time,” I told him, notepad and pencil in hand.

“Woop?” he asked, head tilted to one side.

“Yeah, even if you’re not good at them. We’ll take stock of all the moves you know before deciding on a role for you to specialize in.”

“Woop. Wooper-woop!”

“Yup. Actually, let’s start with the moves you love using. Then we’ll work our way down.”

“Wooper!”

He did a little hop in place and curled his tail to his brow, which I realized was the armless salamander’s equivalent of a salute. Then, he took a deep breath and tensed.

At first, I thought nothing happened. I wondered if he was trying to show off how long he could hold his breath underwater. Or maybe that he could breathe through his skin? That was a thing that some amphibians could do, right?

But no. Looking closer, I saw little, white points poking out of his skin. They were almost translucent, like the teeth of those deep sea fish that showed up in nature documentaries. I had a feeling they were much more durable than they appeared.

They also raised           an interesting question about what exactly constituted a “move” as far as pokemon were concerned. I suspected that, in game terms, a Paldean wooper would have the Poison Point ability, but what was an “ability?”

Surely not every slaking was lethargic lazy to the point of taking hits, right? And if so, why didn’t snorlax also have Truant? Those not-bears were famous for dozing off and blocking entire routes in the pokemon world.

Then there was archeops and Defeatist. The notion that every member of the fossil species was so chronically depressed that said depression was an intrinsic part of their entire species was patently ridiculous. There had to be some leeway for game design.

Game balancing aside, I could only conclude that the distinction between an “ability” and a “move” was largely immaterial. Maybe it served some purpose in the pokemon world, with its society built on trainers, but the distinction seemed largely for human ease of understanding.

In the case of Sir Swagsire, I supposed it made sense that the “move” it loved most was the one that probably helped keep him alive most consistently.

“Excellent work, Swagsire,” I encouraged him. “We’ll call that Poison Point, okay?”

“Woop,” he croaked happily.

“Can you control how much of your poison flows into the spines? Or is that just something that happens naturally?”

“Woop. Wooper-woop.”

I nodded agreeably. The answer was something like, “I could, but why would I want less poison?” Which was a fair enough answer, to be honest. For a species that was probably a prey animal of some sort, having more potent poison was probably the ideal scenario.

“Okay, got it. Poison Point. What’s next?”

He let out a noise that was halfway between a croak and a chirp before leaping into the air. He dipped his head and allowed the momentum to turn his whole body into a front flip before bringing his tail down onto the muck with a meaty thwack.

The mud splattered everywhere but otherwise didn’t look very impressive. He looked up at me with an eager, dopey smile as I tried to guess what he was doing.

“Was that Tail Whip?”

“Woop,” he grumbled, shaking his head.

“Not Tail Whip… It’s an attack though, right?”

“Woop.”

“Can you do that to the tree over there? I think I may have missed something because of the mud.”

“Woo-Wooper.”

He turned and repeated the move. This time, I saw it. His tail glowed with a faint, violet sheen that caught the light. When it impacted the tree, the whole tree shook with the force of a creature far larger than a wooper.  Granted, it wasn’t a very large tree, but the little fellow had some heft to his tail.

I walked over and knelt to get a closer look. There was a decent indent in the tree, but not because it had been caved in by blunt force. Pine wasn’t especially sturdy, but I didn’t think Swagsire was strong enough to just pulp the wood like that.

A good chunk of the bark, maybe three or four layers of it, had been stripped clean, leaving a discolored area on the surface. Sir Swagsire’s tail was quite smooth like the rest of him. I figured that he’d brought his spines to the fore, and those things were short enough to go unnoticed in the moment.

“Was that Poison Tail?” I guessed. 

“Woop!” he cheered, hopping into the air and doing a little bicycling motion.

“Nice, that’s a really impressive move to have in your back pocket. I can see why you like it so much.”

We continued like that until noon. By the time we stopped, I found out that Swagsire knew an impressive array of moves. There were Tackle and Tail Whip of course, but the little guy also knew Poison Tail, Mud Shot, as well as Toxic Spikes.

I didn’t know if that last one was just something Paldean wooper learned naturally or if the dungeon’s reward companions always included a rare move, but I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Whatever the reason, he could make perfect little caltrops that had no trouble puncturing leather soles.

That made me feel much better about Sir Swagsire’s developmental path. He’d make for a wonderful support unit, especially if he picked up Earthquake and other ground type moves. I’d just have to be careful about cleaning up those caltrops after a battle; the last thing I needed was someone stepping on one.

Then we stopped for grilled trout and baked potatoes. I was swiftly learning more about my pokemons’ eating habits. Rocket loved smoked foods and Scout preferred fruits and nuts with a comparatively smaller portion of protein.

Sir Swagsire though, my newest pokemon loved meat of all types. It didn’t matter if it was a smoked rabbit, cured trout, or a pheasant I’d shot in an opportunistic moment. It wasn’t that he couldn’t eat vegetables, he could and happily snacked on anything I gave him, but he seemed to gravitate towards our hunted game. 

I asked. I wasn’t sure if I understood everything he was trying to tell me, but it was because he was so much slower than his teammates. Rocket was a blisteringly fast murder-ferret who could decapitate a moose before it so much as flinched. Scout could and did happily pick off nearby mice and shrews whenever he wanted a quick snack. 

But wooper weren’t hunters. Oh, I had no doubt that a group of wooper could bring down some decent-sized game, but they weren’t suited for that sort of thing. To Sir Swagsire, fast-moving prey like trout, rabbit, and fowl provided novel flavors that hadn’t yet worn out their luster. 

After lunch, I had Swagsire begin his physical conditioning. He wasn’t happy about it, he much preferred to work on his poisons, but a certain degree of athleticism was mandatory. By the time he was ready to evolve into a quagsire, I wanted him to be able to beat a grown man in a fistfight.

X

September 2015

We trained like that for several days and August turned to September. Fall had officially arrived, and with it, the chill of a promised winter.

The sun had begun to set, which explained why I was out here in our new berry orchard. Pat did well enough, but we all knew who the real gardeners were and those guys were nocturnal. If I wanted to catch up with them, the best time was in the twilight hours.

“We’re doing pretty well for ourselves,” Pat filled me in. “Both berry trees have sprouted and we’re in the process of building windbreaks out of plastic tarp and the old golf course’s fencing. We also staked the trees.”

“Windbreaks? Do trees need those? And what’s staking? Sorry, I'm not familiar with that.”

“They do when they’re saplings. Staking is sticking posts in the ground near the trees and tying the trunk to them. Keeps the trees growing straight and helps them not get knocked down, see?”

“Huh. Yeah, I guess I’ve seen them around in the Before with trees planted in sidewalks.”

“That’s because trees planted in cities can’t have large root systems. Really, this is a poor time to plant them in general. If it weren’t for the pokemon doing whatever they want, I’d have told you to hold on to the seeds until spring.”

“The gloom seemed pretty confident it could get the seeds to grow,” I shrugged. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re best off trusting the expert.”

“You’re not wrong. The cold wind up here is still a bit of a problem though, hence the windbreaks and stakes. We’ll take them down in the spring, or maybe when the saplings are strong enough to stand on their own. It’s pretty amazing how much they’ve grown already.”

We arrived. The budding orchard was a little ways off from the field, partially in the forest’s edge. Apparently, that was so the bigger trees around them could shelter them from the wind. I saw several men hanging up fencing between the trees. I could only assume they also helped protect against pests as well.

The saplings themselves were indistinguishable from a normal plant so far. For that matter, I couldn’t really tell which were oran and which were pecha. They were pretty short still, maybe an inch or two taller than my knees. That much growth in about a week or so was already amazing however. I doubted any normal tree could grow this much.

The gloom, now officially the single most important pokemon in the town, waddled over with a sleepy smile. It looked up at me and let out a low, moaning greeting. “Gloo-oom~”

I couldn’t help it. I gagged a little. I’d thought I’d mentally prepared myself for the smell, but being in close proximity to the gloom’s drool made things so much worse. Pat, that bastard, looked at me and laughed, his nose long desensitized to the grass type’s particular aroma.

“S-Sorry,” I apologized to the gloom. “It’s really amazing how much you’ve made them grow.”

“Gloom,” it nodded, waving off my reaction.

“How did you make them grow so quickly? Do you need anything from me?”

“Gloom? Gloom-gloom.”

It waddled back towards a large, plastic bin that had been set out for fertilizer. The bin smelled absolutely foul, like the gloom’s saliva mixed with rancid, half-rotted roadkill.

As it turned out, that was exactly what it was. The gloom made a gargling motion before hawking a loogie into the bin. Said loogie was the size of a volleyball and glowed a faint purple. Acid, the gloom was spitting concentrated acid into a bin full of bones, vegetable peels, and other food waste.

I stared, grossed out but morbidly curious. Even as I watched, the decomposing waste dissolved until the edges turned into a vomit-inducing, brown slurry.

“Is… Is that fertilizer?” I asked Pat.

“Yup. This is how we process compost now. Shit’s the vilest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It works though, by god does it work.”

This was the circle of life, I told myself. We lived. We died. We rejoined nature. And that, that little demonstration was nature in its most basic form.

In the original games, Erika, Celadon’s gym leader, supposedly had a hobby of turning gloom drool into perfume. I didn’t know how that could be done, but I now knew the purpose such a potent concoction served in the wild. Gloom were plants, sure, but they also had their own agency, and they clearly had no problem making their own fertilizer.

I took a deep, calming breath, and immediately regretted it. “Okay… So you guys need more organic waste.”

“Gloom!” it cheered, hopping in place and splattering its drool everywhere.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Gloom!”

Just for completeness sake, I flipped open my notebook full of drawings and asked the gloom to point at shit it wanted me to bring back. Turned out, the antlers of moose and deer specifically made for excellent fertilizer, probably added calcium and other minerals or something. I could keep the choice cuts for myself, but it wanted more of those.

We were just about done when Rocket let out a soft bark of warning. He did that when something was running closer towards us. Several seconds later, one of my rangers huffed and puffed as he tried to catch his breath. Behind him came Sabrina and a girl I didn’t recognize.

“Yo, Jonah, Sabrina,” I greeted. I recognized the man as one of my rangers, if loosely. He liked to guard the wall, saying how it was as cushy a job as he could get. If those two were here, that probably meant my night was about to get longer. “What’s going on? And who’s the kid?”

Said kid was about fourteen or fifteen, skinny and pale. She had auburn hair that caught the evening light, She looked at me, then at Rocket with obvious nervousness before hiding behind Jonah.

“Hey, boss–hrk!” Jonah began, before immediately retching on the ground. The gloom looked up at us with a sheepish laugh. It then spat more acid at the vomit puddle before scooping it into a muddy snowball and placing it inside the bin with the rest of the compost. “Holy hell, what the fuck?”

“Gloom saliva, smells awful,” Sabrina said nasally, one hand firmly pinched over her nose. “Maybe we should go somewhere else to talk.”

“Yeah, fuck…” After we headed out of the orchard, he began again. “Okay, this is Olive, my niece. Her older brother, Dennis, went missing.”

I listened closely as Jonah and Olive caught me up. The way they told it, Dennis and his three friends snuck out of town this morning, swearing his kid sister to secrecy.

The boys wanted to go hunting with a bow, catch a few rabbits and maybe sneak some shots from a bottle of whiskey one of them found lying around. It was only now that dusk came and her brother was still nowhere to be found that Olive felt the need to tattle. Olive found Uncle Jonah and Jonah told Sabrina, who knew where I was.

I wanted to call Olive an idiot, or blame Jonah since he was the guard, but this wasn’t an uncommon thing. The boys didn’t “sneak out" so much as no one cared enough to stop them. This wasn’t some posh gated community with a communal daycare. It was assumed that their guardians, whether that be teachers, parents, or older siblings, would watch their own. 

The wall existed to deter wild animals and the casual pokemon, not to keep the townsfolk locked inside. If a few of the adventurous ones wanted to explore the nearby woods for an afternoon, all they had to do was walk along the shore. It wasn’t like the wall extended out into the water or anything.

“And you’re sure they’re not camping out somewhere?” I asked. It wouldn’t be the wisest choice, but kids had done dumber things and walked away fine.

“They didn’t take any camping gear… sir…” Olive mumbled. It was weird. Survive one damn dungeon and the civvies thought I was a starred general or something.

“I know it’s a lot to ask, boss, but…” Jonah trailed off. I knew what he wanted. If he was my nephew, I’d probably feel this way, too.

The reasonable thing to do would be to wait for morning before heading out, but the trail would be harder to follow by then. But the nights were cold. It wasn’t winter, but mountain nights were mountain nights, seasons be damned. Or worst case scenario, they might be injured or in danger.

I let out a frustrated sigh, resigned to cleaning up this mess. Figured, “ranger captain” sometimes sounded a lot like a fancy name for the town’s janitor.

I tapped Olive and started heading for town. “Come on, Olive. We need to pack a few thermal blankets for Dennis and his friends. Then, Rocket’s going to want one of your brother’s old shirts to track him by.”

“Thanks, boss,” Jonah said. “I’ll talk to my brother about this. He’ll set Dennis straight.”

“When I bring them back, they’ll be shoveling shit here with the gloom for two weeks.”

“Consider it done.”

“Shane, be careful,” Sabrina said. “I know you’re experienced, but it’s nighttime.”

“I know, Sab. Don’t worry, this still beats the dungeon.”

Author’s Note

I… I have nothing to say about this chapter. Huh…

Okay, have an animal fact: The largest herd of wild camels in the world is not in Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or the Middle East at all. It’s actually in the Australian outback. Because of fucking course it is.

If any of you have been on a ranch before and seen a herd of cattle, think about that. Got it? Good.

Now guess how big the camel herd is. For reference, the USDA says that the size of the average cattle herd is about 40-44 heads per herd. Sure, there are megaranches with multiple herds, but you get the picture.

Got a number? Because I can guarantee you’re wrong, and wrong by a few orders of magnitude.

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The herd of wild camels, WILD, I feel like this needs stressing, is approximately 750,000 strong. Yes, this is a single herd. No, I’m not shitting you.

For added context, there are 678,000 people in Washington, DC as of 2024.