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Chapter 2 - The Little Treehouse by the Beach

Publishing date (Month, Day, Year)

Robin didn’t catch any waves that evening, but that was alright – days like this would always come back around. Sparky was lucky that she’d floated ashore on such a day.

When the treehouse finally came into view after hiking back up the hill, Sparky gasped in awe.

“You live up there?!” she exclaimed, eyes seeming to sparkle. “That’s so cool...”

Robin chuckled, shifting the surfboard so he could see her a bit better. “Uh, yeah! I found it abandoned, so I made a few fixes and decided to stay here for a bit...”

“By yourself?” Sparky asked. When Robin nodded, she then added, “How old are you??”

“Fourteen seasons.” Robin straightened up a bit. “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

Sparky looked a little dumbfounded. “I have no idea how long a season is.”

“It’s like, when the sun is highest in the sky in its cycle until it’s lowest,” Robin clarified with a small shrug. “And vice versa. You know…there’s always a warm season and a cool season, cycling back and forth.”

This still didn’t clarify for Sparky exactly how old Robin was in human measurements of time, but she was quickly growing overwhelmed by trying to wrap her head around these new terms and decided to skip over it for now.

“Well, I’m 13,” she finally replied matter-of-factly. “And I can take care of myself, too!”

The two of them reached the base of the tree, where a set of wood steps began spiraling up along the tree trunk towards the house. Robin led the way, sure-footed in spite of the large board hefted over his head, and opened the door to let Sparky enter first.

It wasn’t a big treehouse, but it was just enough space to accommodate two small pokemon in cozy quarters. The windows had shutters rather than glass panes, and everything was made of a light-colored wood. Simple shelves adorned much of the wall space, some with a few small trinkets, but many more still empty, and the furniture consisted of a low table with some worn cushions sat around it, a workbench built into the wall, and a long chest tucked underneath it. A ladder leaned up against the far wall gave access to a loft.

Robin let Sparky take in her surroundings while he went to prop his surfboard back up in its resting spot above the big main window. It took center stage there, one of his few prized possessions from home, glistening as a few stray rays from the setting sun shone from the loft window above.

“It’s nothing fancy yet,” Robin admitted with a sheepish grin. “But I like living here!”

Sparky was staring up towards the loft with great interest when Robin turned back around, and he watched her seemingly puzzle a bit over the ladder before she hopped and beat her small, down-feather wings. It was not at all enough to give her the lift she needed, but it did stir the dust off of an empty shelf nearby.

She tried again, reaching no higher than the last jump. She stretched her wings out to their full span and examined them with the curiosity of someone who’d never seen wings or feathers up close before. Robin noted the claws at the end of each wing; another out-of-place trait Sparky possessed...or at the very least, Robin had never heard of a torchic that had hands before.

“I have wings, but I can’t fly,” Sparky muttered. Before Robin could answer, she’d taken to climbing the ladder using her beak in place of hands. Though clumsy-looking, she managed to make it to the top on her first try and beamed triumphantly down at Robin.

Robin shook his head. “You have claws on your wings…couldn’t you have used those?”

“I tried that,” Sparky replied. “It...didn’t feel right.” She looked introspectively to her wing-claws again. “These...move differently than my arms and hands did before.”

Robin climbed the ladder after her, light and nimble, and began shuffling items away from the right side of the loft to the left, where his nest was located.

“We should make you your own nest,” he began, using his feet to sweep dust out of the corner. He paused to give Sparky a reassuring smile. “You can stay here as long as you need to, until we can figure out what’s going on with you.”

Sparky nodded vigorously, then turned her attention to the empty corner. “How...do you make a nest?”

Outside, it was already pretty dark, and Robin hummed, thinking to himself as he stared out the window.

“I’d usually go out and gather some grass, and dry it out in the sun for a bit,” he explained. “Buuut it’s dark out now. The grass wouldn’t be dry...and there’s scary Pokemon that might lurk out there.”

“R-Really? Big ones that’ll eat you??”

“No!...maybe?” Robin grimaced and shook his head. “They’re territorial, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of them eating any pokemon around here.”

He tamped his foot down in his own nest. “U-Um, if it doesn’t bother you, you could share my bed with me tonight? I’ll start gathering grass first thing tomorrow morning for you!”

That didn’t seem so bad in Sparky’s mind, and she nodded again in agreement. Robin sighed with some relief.

“Phew, alright, that sounds better than going outside in the dark.” His front paws fidgeted. “Hey, are you hungry? I have a bit of food I could share, if you don’t mind the berries being a little overripe.”

Robin hopped down the ladder and busied himself with finding a particularly good bunch of berries in the larder. He hadn’t been to town in a bit, so he didn’t have much else to offer at the moment-

THUD!

The startled pikachu whipped around to find Sparky in a feathery heap on the floor. She stood up on her own before he had a chance to rush over and check on her.

“That didn’t work, either,” she leered, flexing her wings again. “Maybe if I jumped from a higher spot...”

“Please don’t,” Robin interrupted her, exasperated. He handed her one of the rawst berries he’d found. “H-Here, this is what I have left. I need to go into town to get more food tomorrow...”

Sparky accepted the berry with some hesitation, turning it over in her claws. It was plump, bigger than her fist, and a brilliant shade of sky blue. There was a familiarity to its shape that she couldn’t quite place.

She watched Robin take a bite of his own berry, the sweet scent quickly enticing her appetite, then bit into her own. She managed to take a nice big chunk out of the fruit, but soon after found difficulty chewing. Sticky juice had gotten all over her feathers by the time she managed to swallow the first bite.

She clacked her beak together. “...oh.”

Robin observed all of this, and the way Sparky then began taking more careful pecks out of the messy berry. It...really did seem as though she might not always have been a torchic.

The thought followed him all the way to bed, as the two of them finally settled down for the night. Sparky, for her part, was out like a light within minutes, leaving Robin to ruminate on the evening alone.

Was it really possible for a human to turn into a pokemon? How, and why? Where would a human have come from in the first place?

Up until this point, “human” was a word Robin had only heard of in reference to old mythologies, and he’d never been sure if such creatures could even have been real.

But here was Sparky, a pokemon claiming to have once been human, with no memories beyond that fact to prove herself. It all seemed quite fantastical, and anyone else would probably not believe her.

Robin himself wasn’t entirely sure if he believed what’d happened, but he believed Sparky. He couldn’t quite place his paw on it, but something about her had immediately drawn him in. Maybe it was just purely curiosity, or there was the sliver of a sense of something bigger happening. He just couldn’t wrap his head around it.

And then, an idea floated to the forefront of his thoughts as he began to drift. If either of them wanted to try and unravel this mystery, then he knew of a way to do so...he’d just have to convince Sparky of it, and hope she didn’t think him crazy for suggesting it...

A small spark traveled up his tail, betraying his excitement at the thought of Sparky agreeing to his suggestion.

Maybe...I’ll finally do it...