Fox Tales - Chapter 4 (Patreon)

It wasn’t very often, but every once in a while Mom demanded that a few of us patrol around the mountain and make sure everything was okay.

That usually meant talking with some of the pokemon that lived further out for news of any newcomers or humans moving through the area, helping solve the occasional territory dispute (usually by telling Mom about it and letting her do the work), or making sure that no baby pokemon were running around where they weren’t supposed to be. It usually wasn’t an issue, since most babies were kept safely in various nests, burrows, or dens until they were old enough to mostly fend for themselves, but that didn’t stop all of them from escaping every now and then.

And no one wanted an enraged mother tearing through the mountain looking for their baby or going for revenge if something happened to one. Especially like that one time when an Ursaring nearly killed a few residents when she thought her Teddiursa had been eaten by a group of Poochyena.

The dog pokemon had the bad luck of bringing down a deer nearby where the bear cub pokemon had taken a nap under some bushes. The mom had followed its scent, saw red (literally), and then saw red (figuratively).

Mom had to beat her down in an explosive fight we could all hear hundreds of feet away and I was sure it would have been much worse if the noise hadn’t woken the cub up and calmed the angry Ursarang down.

We weren’t expected to step in if something like that happened, but it calmed the weaker and more skittish pokemon to know Mom was watching. And a herd of stampeding Stanler could be just as deadly as a whole bunch of more ‘dangerous’ pokemon when they got going.

So off I was to the foot of the mountain to check up on the pokemon living near the human city.

With any luck, there’d be nothing for me to do but beat up some troublemakers and I could go back to the den for a nice nap.

-o-

&String shot, Caterpie! Try and slow it down!&

Apparently I wasn’t lucky today, because I had run directly into a wandering trainer who got one good look at me and immediatly called out his pokemon to try and catch me.

The Rattata had gone down from a simple Tackle, but the trainer had either just caught it or had no faith it would be enough to deal with me – naturally it wasn’t – and had already called out his second pokemon before I could run off.

I mean I could still run off if I wanted, but it was the principle of the thing. Why should run from a little boy, a rat, and a bug?

I sidestepped the sticky white strings that shot out of the Caterpie’s mouth and gave the trainer a mocking laugh.

His face went bright red at the sound of my barks. &Again, Caterpie! Don’t let it mock us! Keep it up!&

The little bug kept spraying strings wherever I was standing until the little clearing we were in was almost completly covered in white with two major exceptions. The ground right around the Caterpie and the area directly infront of the trainer, where I had ‘coincidentally’ gotten my one paws ‘stuck’ in one of the patches of silk.

The trainer saw this and got excited, &You almost got it, Caterpie! One more time!&

I saw the bug prepare to use string shot one more time and let go of the few strings I had been holding close to my foot with Extrasensory. Then I simply jumped straight up and allowed the mass of white to pass harmlessly underneath to smack the trainer in the chest. In less than a second, his entire front was covered in silk and his flailing afterward meant that he was completely wrapped up by his own pokemon’s attack.

Caterpie looked surprised that it hit its own trainer with an attack, or at least it did until I hit it with a Quick Attack and knocked it out just like I had its Rattata friend.

With that done I turned and walked back to the trainer who was doing his best to wriggle free of the cocoon he had suddenly found himself in and failing spectacularly. Those wriggle stopped when I walked over and sat down a couple feet from his face.

&uhh, nice foxy? No hard feelings right?& He said something I couldn’t understand but I got the impression he was asking for mercy. &and, umm, you wouldn’t mind untying me somehow would you?&

I still didn’t understand him but it wasn’t hard to guess he wanted to be untied. So in response I leaned forward and gave him my best foxy smile.

&you will? Thanks Vulpix, you’re a really nice pokemon. If you wanted I’d love to have you on my–& He paled and stopped talking when little sparks of flame started leaking from my muzzle. Sweat started to bead on his forehead as our eyes met. &...Please don’t light me on fire.&

I opened my mouth enough for some of the fire type energy gathering at the back of my throat to glow orange.

&...noooooo…&

I took a deep breath.

&NO!&

FWOOMPH!

-o-

Leaving the black and crispy (but now totally free) trainer to twitch unconsciously behind me, I continued on my journey towards the edge of the human city. Only slowing down when I got close to a path or clearing because if there was one thing that was true about humans from both this and my previous world, where there was one, more were surely just around the corner.

Besides, the longer I spent dealing with random trainers doing nothing wrong and not the things causing problems for the wild pokemon, the less time I would have for a nap.

-o-

“So there is an issue?” I asked for the fourth time.

“Yes! Humans too close to nests, going to ruin eggs!”

“No, not egg season. Humans steal berries!”

“Berries there sour. They chop down trees though!”

I sighed as the three bird pokemon broke out into another argument over what the actual issue was instead of telling me where the issue was. I’d say it was because they were literal bird-brains, but I had met plenty of bird pokemon that seemed smarter than me.

Pokemon in general seemed to run the full spectrum from moron to super-genius just like humans so it was probably just bad luck that the three pidgy I was talking to had the attention span of the normal birds they resembled.

“Hey, hey! Focus please!” I interrupted the meaningless chatter. “Can you tell me where they are!? Please!?”

Unfortunately I’m simply ignored as the three idiots continue fighting about which transgression the humans cause was the most serious.

I was seriously contemplating burning down the tree they were in when a slightly bigger bird flew down and landed on a nearby branch.

“Don’t mind them too much, dear. The group they are talking about is in the next two clearings that way,” The Pidgeotto said in a matronly voice while pointing southeast. “I hope you can do something about them. They’ve been causing an awful racket.” And with that she gathered up the other three and flew off before I could ask her anything else.

“…”

Grumbling to myself about unhelpful and impatient birds I ran off in the direction the Pidgeotto indicated, and it didn’t take me long to find the group of humans the four of them were talking about.

They were pretty loud after all.

In the clearing there was a group of five fairly big tents all set up in a circle while over a dozen humans were dancing around a firepit and partying while some kind of horrible techno music blared in the background.

To make things worse, it was pretty clear that they planned to stay for a while considering the amount of food and coolers they were hauling around. I wasn’t entirely sure because I didn’t have a good way to look inside them all, but it looked like they had enough stuff packed away for a week of continued partying at least.

Even worse then than that was the number of red and white balls hanging from most of the humans’ belts. Nearly all of them were trainers, which meant I couldn’t just run through the camp light everything on fire and then just wait for them to pack up and go home.

A dark blue scrap of cloth caught my eye and an idea started to form in the back of my mind.

If brute force and a straightforward approach wouldn’t work, maybe I needed to do this a bit more…stealthly.