Exploring
Jared remembered his apartment looming behind him. He turned around and saw that the screen portal between the two realms was missing like it had never been there in the first place. Well, shit. Looks like I’m not going back there anytime soon. He thought another week would pass when another onesie and the others he’d collected would appear, but would they? It had been more than a month since this Vaporeon suit had showed up. Worse still, he didn’t have a home to send a suit to anymore. Even in the tigertaur universe where he roamed an entire swathe of territory on his lonesome there was a bit of shelter for Leland to send his letter. If this is anything like that time, I’ll probably have to go looking for it. That’s if he sends me anything this time.
But that was a concern for a later date. Right now, Jared had a whole new realm to adventure through. The forest clearing he’d found himself in offered an infinite set of directions for him to go through, lively trees having surrounded him. Pokémon birds tweeted in the sky above him. Leaning his head back and squinting into the blue sky he saw their shrunken black silhouettes droning past. “Sparrow! Sparrow!” they would squawk and squeak. Part of Jared wished he had a pokédex like in the anime to help him catalog everything he saw. Maybe I’ll bump into Ash Ketchum, he mused. He can let me borrow his.
Before Jared went searching for any anime protagonists, first he was going to do some exploring. He did an about face, swinging his broad tail out behind him and heading towards the bit of forest closest to him. The trip, however short, took a bit longer than he expected given the brevity of his legs. What should’ve been long strides as a human or other such bipedal species were now short waddles. They could walk upright, but these limbs were made for swimming. Just trudging his way through the grass triggered an instinctual need to dive into some water. If I found a pond or a river right now that would be so great. God, I feel like a little kid.
He wasn’t going to let it stop him from exploring. Into the tutelary trees he expected a muffling of the open breezes which lofted the birds and their songs. He found the opposite, a menagerie of colorful Pokémon big and small, their dwellings among the trees, their roots, their branches, and the very Earth beneath Jared’s feet. Like walking through a busy city street he had to be mindful of his tread lest he bump into or step on some unfortunate creature. A starly tweeted in the branch above him. A spinarak descended from its string of web. One curious bunch of dugtrio burrowed their way out of the dirt, shook the loose grains from the top of their bald heads, then regarded Jared curiously.
Written by TheGreatJaceyGee on 04 September 2024
