Marsh Meetup

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Alki was taking great care to avoid the same mistake she had made last time she'd been in this dungeon. Falling into a hole once had been embarrassing enough, but doing it again...? Well, in all honesty, if no one saw her, it couldn't really be all that bad... Key-word being if. If somebody did see her, then it'd be so much worse! She hopped from island to island, taking the time to measure her bounds as carefully as possible, pausing as she landed, and if she didn't feel comfortable, then she simply teleported to the nearest safe haven from the pockets of marsh-water interspersed throughout the terrain.

It was after one of these bounds that she took a minute to rest, and looked around at the terrain. She was, once again, in the marsh for no reason in particular. "Maybe I just relate to it..." She mumbled to herself, lost in thought. The marsh was cold, wet, and disgusting. That's how she felt most of the time. Maybe that's why she enjoyed this place so much.

Alki flopped onto her back and lay there, suddenly paralyzed by a wave of disappointment in herself.  Nothing had even happened and she was already acting like this. She was so stupid...

The girl sighed before picking herself back up and looking around. It was then that she noticed a shack, broken and run-down that seemed quite familiar to her... Someone she knew lived there! Someone who'd beat the crap out of her last time they'd met, sure, but he'd been pretty nice otherwise! And he had tried to train her... It wasn't his fault that was impossible!

She made her way towards said shack, her mood lifted slightly. That is, until she remembered that the last time they'd met, she'd been an Igglybuff... what if he didn't recognize her? Did she still look like her old self? What if he beat her up for real? Hadn't he mentioned that he beat off ferals who wandered onto his territory? She didn't want to get beat up... Her earlier wave of sadness returned in full force, but by then, she was practically on his doorstep, and with nothing left to do, she called out:

"G-G-Goro...?" She cried out, in as loud a voice as possible, that somehow managed to sound even more timid than her usual tone. It'd be nice to see him again, at least, assuming he recognized her...

Alki sat very, very still as the Croagunk went forth and began to tell his story. She didn't want to miss anything important! More importantly, she didn't want to seem disrespectful at all... That had happened to her quite a few times as a younger child. Saying something unwanted when someone older than her was talking had always seemed to be the pinnacle of disrespect, and doing that had never turned out well for her. So she did her best to be silent. She didn't say anything, and she scarcely even breathed. The more respectful the better, right?

That wasn't, however, to say that she didn't enjoy the story! She nodded along happily at him mentioning that his boss was an Umbreon. She reflected on what other pokemon she'd like to be, and an Umbreon quite often topped that list. She liked the color black quite a bit, and being a quadruped seemed like it'd be very nice. She'd be more like Synd'r or Darcy then, and she was always wishing that she could be more like them all of the time anyways...

And when he described the place where all of this took place, she couldn't help but wonder just how brave Goro and his companions were. Sometimes just getting out of her room at the guild seemed scary enough, and she hadn't gone out on a guild mission with Darcy in quite some time now. Honestly, she felt a bit bad about it but... well, she just couldn't work herself up to do that. And here he and his crew were, going out into haunted houses that were built on the top of hills with mist you couldn't see through! Impressive... And then when the girl started screaming? Alki would've turned her figurative tail and fled the house at that point, but judging by the story so far, that didn't seem like it'd been what Goro had done.

She had begun to lean in without even realizing it, eager to hear more. But... that was when the story seemed to suddenly stop, much to her dismay. It'd been getting so interesting too! Alki leaned back into her neutral position, waiting quietly and still for the story to continue. But it didn't. She began to fidget in her seat, uncomfortable with breaking the sudden silence, in case there would be consequences like at her old house. But curiousity overcame her.

"Y-Y-You're, uh, r-really brave for going into t-that... uh, a h-house like that..." She began, then paused. After a few seconds, she worked up the courage to say what was chiefly on her mind. "B-But, uh... w-what happened next?"

Goro smiled at Alki's tentative courage. "This happened," he said, raising up his bad hand. It was swollen, broken, malformed, and still heavily bruised even after all the time that had passed since the fight. "But I'm getting ahead of myself." The croagunk cleared his throat with a rough sounding croak and got back into the swing of the story. It surprised him, too, that the mere memory of it was enough to get him feeling melancholic and regretful. He was just caught on a bad day, was all. Nobody can perform well all the time.

"The boss told me to get to work right then and there. And I'll be honest; I didn't like the umbreon at first glance. She was whiny and bossy, tellin' us to leave like she owned the place, but she didn't even have the decency to try and chase us off. So I start working on her." His face pinched in concentration as he tried his best to remember the details of that particular battle. It was, unfortunately, one that he had dedicated a lot of thought to, and he didn't have much to show for it. "And it wasn't as easy as I figured it'd be, I'll admit that. Calling her tough just ain't doing it justice. She was a freak. Took everything I had to throw at her off the bat without batting an eye—shit, she pounced on me right back after a swing or two.

"I knew things weren't right with this girl when I laid into her with drain punches—a fighting type attack, and she's a dark type—and she didn't even flinch." Goro sighed lightly and stared down at his broken right hand, recalling the empty feeling that resonated in his fist when he landed that drain punch. Usually, he could feel the rush of energy he drained from his opponent revitalize him, but with her, there'd been barely anything. Even Goro knew that was strange. This umbreon and Krikka were the same kind of pokemon, and when he fought Krikka way back when even she made a point not to get hit by his fighting type attacks.

"It wasn't natural. She had this... this cloak, you know, the whole time. It sorta disappeared and reappeared every now and again, and she had this weird glow about her all through the fight. I think it had something to do with how freaky tough she was." He'd thought about it quite a bit since that night, but never before had he seen or heard of an item that made a pokemon indestructible. It was part of the reason that he had started traveling recently; He wanted to see what was out there. If he could have that power...

"Anyhow, Krikka jumped in the fight then. It didn't do much good, really. Even with the boss blasting her with dark pulses and me wailing on her with punches and earthquakes, she took it all and hit back just as hard." His expression soured as he recalled more and more of the fight, and at the moment Goro just wished he was stronger. He needed as much power as he could get his hands on, and the sooner that happened, the better. "Harder, actually. She got Krikka really bad at one point... In the end, we got lucky. The freak was standing on the edge of the hill toward the end, and I hit her hard enough to send her crashing all the way down and break my own fuckin' hand." Goro clenched his fist at the end of the story, ignoring the sharp, dominating pain that the movement caused. He was not broken.

"Craziest part of it all was watchin' her haul herself up and just walk off. We didn't lose, but it sure as hell didn't feel like we won, neither." He let loose a heavy breath, leaning back and bracing himself against the log he was sitting on. What kind of story had Alki asked for, again? Something cool? In hindsight, maybe injuring yourself on your enemy wasn't exactly cool... it was just the only thing that came to mind.

Alki squirmed in her seat, obviously unsettled by such a sudden display of gruesomeness. That hand looked absolutely horrible! Of course, she wasn't about to tell him that either. Regardless, it just looked all wrong! Deformed, and batter, and bruised... it just looked so damaged! The girl looked nervously down at her own hands. She'd be taking a lot better care of them from now on... The girl wiggled her feet, trying to forget about the hand the Croagunk had shown off. She probably wouldn't be fighting a lot in her own line of work, and that was something she suddenly found herself to be grateful for. If that was what could happen, then she'd pass...

Regardless, the Jigglypuff tuned back in at full focus as soon as the Croagunk restarted his story in earnest, and sat enraptured as he continued to tell it. It seemed so serious, what he was doing... Dangerous and scary and so much more serious than everything that she'd been up to... Alki jumped up and down in her seat, smiling broadly as the Croagunk concluded his story. Alki ignored the finer details of the two Umbreons, and what the one with the cloak had been saying. That wasn't all too important to the story, and besides... she did sound really scary... Alki simply felt thrilled for her friend, who had... kinda won against someone like that! That was more than she would ever be able to manage in a situation like that...

"Woooow..." She said in her usual, quiet voice, her eyes lost in the world of imagination as she reflected upon the story she had just been told. He'd won! Against someone who was breaking all the rules of fighting with some stupid cloak! That other Umbreon had been cheating! Or something. She hadn't ever heard of anything like that before... "Y-You're so cool..." She said, her voice clearly genuine, and perhaps even a bit jealous. Soon after, she fell silent yet again, simply thinking about the story. More specifically, the cloak. "B-But..." She began, her gaze focusing back in on reality. "H-How do you think that umbreon did that? Just... shrug off your punches like that? That's... like... isn't that like breaking the rules?" She asked. She didn't remember all too much about the lessons from that practice fight so long ago, but hadn't there been a talk about how type effectiveness worked? Or something... at the very least, she knew that now. And she knew that wasn't what should have happened, in his story...

"You'd think so," Goro replied thoughtfully, resting his chin on his good hand as he stared out into the marsh. "I thought for a little bit that she was one of those pokemon, you know, the super strong ones where a type difference doesn't mean much when you're dealing with someone...not in your league. But she didn't hit near as hard as she could get hit—not for a good while, anyway. I kept up with her for a bit. So I don't figure that's the case." He let out a sigh that turned into a mighty yawn, as if he was tired out by all the thought put into the question.

"Mighta been that rag she was wearin'. Mighta been the freaky glow she had going for her the whole fight. Maybe it's an umbreon thing that my boss hasn't figured out yet." he went on, his tone deceptively mild as he pondered the matter, as if it didn't mean so much to him. "Could be all of those or none of those. I don't know. Not yet, anyways." He planned to find out, as it were. Ever since that fight, Goro had taken to traveling around as much as he could get away with, meeting and fighting as many pokemon as he could in a desperate bid to both grow stronger and see what the world had to offer in terms of powerful pokemon. Something out there had to have something similar to that monster and he'd find it eventually.

The croagunk didn't respond to the awed compliment, not agreeing with it at all. He knew he was tougher than a good amount of pokemon, surely, but he had a lot to learn and a long way to go. "How 'bout you?" Goro asked suddenly, glancing at the jigglypuff to his side. "You got any cool work stories?"