Pokemon Fan Fiction / Pokemon Fan Fiction ❯ The Water’s Reflection ❯ The Native ( Chapter 4 )

The taste was bitter in her mouth. Even so, the seaweed had an almost comforting effect on the girl as she carried it in her teeth under the clear water.

This was her favorite time of day, when the sun melted upon the meeting place of the greater water and its smaller river brother.

Dipping up out of the surface for only a moment's breath of air, her red hair flashed in the breeze. Then, like that which the oldest legends called a dolphin, she was gone.

The Masters called her kind Water Gnats, and with good reason, as they were the clan of the fastest humans to ever take to water, holding their breath for nearly eight cycles.

In a small corner of its mind, this girl held a feeling very near to pride at that title.

Swimming swiftly, the human hummed a silent melody as she gathered jade colored planets from the river bottom. Her clan would feast well that evening she knew.

(Master calls me early,

Yes master you only I please

Wash you so you may be great

Carry you so you're never late

Master calls me at mid-day

Yes master that be your wish

Cut your leaves for you

Hold out the dish...)

She paused in her singing, letting herself be pulled face up to the waters top to float lazily as she tied the bundle of greens to her front. At this carefree moment she allowed herself a thought, a rare thing in the life of hiding and forging that all humans lived by.

(Is what the Old Ones say true? Does death really follow getting a master?)

The blue sky above her whipped with veils of clouds offered no answer. She blinked and the thought was gone as quickly as it had formed, like a wind upon grass.

Then...Before she could wonder at the existence of life without freedom any longer... her own was gone.

The weight of the cords that suddenly appeared around her were heavy, like the death she had once felt long ago, griped in the jaws of a hunting Houndour.

The girl's body reacted like lightening, one lean wild human soul screaming a single thought:

(Getawaygetawaygetawaygetaway.)

She dived completely under water again, pulling with a raw toned instinct with the rivers certain. Pulling, testing the limit of the Masters net. Clawing, biting, kicking, anything...

Her green eyes shown with a light of bright young defiance as precious bubbles of air drifted upward from her mouth.

It couldn't happen like this...not now...

What about her clan? What would happen to them?

Her vision blurred for a moment, but she fought on.

To surface in a Master's net,

Is to die and not regret.

The Old Ones rhyme of warming sang in her head.

(No..no..Jam..Jess..) She whispered, no longer moving.

Her eyes were open then, unseeing, as the world became darkness.

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When she came among the living again she found herself, not in a net of strong cord, but trapping of even stronger rock. Turning about wildly in it's soil of dried grass, she pulled at the trappings bars with all her might..and then..out of the corner of her eye...saw Him.

(A male?...)

Slowly, slowly, her spent arms still grasping the bars, yet now a bit less focused on their reason for doing so, she turned.

Yes, he was indeed a male, clothed in the traditional way she had once since on the human clan of the Grasslands, who wore no wrappings around the chest. His skin was a dark ivory with hair a shade of black she had never seen before. But his eyes were somehow so bright, like suns of brown, that she found herself looking into them before she could stop.

She felt a strange kinship now along with this odd male. Not wanting to appear unfriendly, she quickly made her way other to the male and kneeled. In the common fashion of her people, she pressed her forehead against his in greeting and spoke.

(I am called Mist. Who are you?)

Mist sat, puzzled, as the male's face grew a bright pink color...