WildBoots
Don’t underestimate seeds.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Partners
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The cliffs over Sinnoh Route 213 have been overrun with a pernicious breed of pest: shiny hunters. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that means Sonny has a lot of painting to do.
—
Word count: 4,865
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG (some cursing)
—
The Chatot and the Honey Tree
The old couple looked gentle and sweet, but Sonny wasn't fooled. They wore matching olive green t-shirts with a logo above the pocket and, of course, binoculars. Assholes. Just like all the others.
No one under the age of fifty lived on the cliffside, but the old couple were still obvious tourists. The locals were poor, tough, and proud. When the younger generations had left for work opportunities, the old heads had stayed, scraping out a living on wurmple silk farming and scraggly vegetable gardens. No car could manage the narrow trails, so to carry down raw silk for sale and bring up things like canned goods and batteries, the less able-bodied relied on Sonny and the other assorted grandchildren. The old folks still called her Miss Sonora no matter how many times she said, "Please, Auntie, it's Sonny." (In fairness, none of them were her aunties either.) Most of them were hard-of-hearing and illiterate—but they would never, ever trample a lum berry sprout.
Mr. Binoculars stood in the midst of the tender leaves, the pink tip of his tongue poking out, too busy writing painstakingly in a tiny notebook to see what lay at his feet. His wife was half a step from another patch of lum sprouts. She shaded her eyes with one hand, binoculars raised halfway, and Sonny knew without having to ask that she was searching for a flicker of red among the branches.
That stupid chatot.
Sonny cleared her throat and said in her brightest voice, "Good morning!"
The old woman hissed through her teeth and let her binoculars fall flat against her chest. "There it goes."
"You folks lost?"
"No, thank you, but …." The woman put on a strained smile; Sonny blinked back innocently. "We are hoping to spot a very rare bird, so we'd like to avoid making a lot of noise."
Louder, Sonny offered, "I just figured you must be lost since the path is back that way."
The old man stood and dusted off his knees. "Er, perhaps further down the trail would be better, dear ?"
The couple exchanged a look. "Yes, I think so. Well, you take care, young lady."
Grumbling, they made their way back to the trail, but Sonny knew they'd step right back into the underbrush the second they were out of her sight. No chatot would sit in plain view along the path. "Watch your feet!" she shouted after them. "We got lots of ekans around here!"
It was worth a try.
Then she crouched to examine the seedlings, or what was left. A few of the plants had been completely crushed, green shreds in the sunken center of a boot print. Others were bedraggled but looked like they might survive … assuming nothing else disturbed them. She sighed.
For a moment she indulged in the fantasy of returning with signposts, police tape—something. But she could hardly put signs around every single lum plant on the cliffside even if she knew where they all were, and the tourists probably wouldn't bother to read her signs anyway. In the meantime, Oma was waiting.
Sonny picked her way through the creepers and hanging branches, careful where she put her feet, until she came to the place where she'd lain her bike at the path edge. She tightened her backpack straps, double-checked that Oma's basket was secured to the pannier, and then she was off. The trail was steep, but Sonny's legs were strong from a lifetime of zipping up and down the mountain, and she followed the forking path as easily as a magikarp in a stream. Over a wooden footbridge, past the lightning-split tree, a sharp right took her to the thatch-roof cabin she knew so well. She leaned her bike against the porch, took up Oma's basket, and started around the back of the house. "Oma!" she called. "I brought your tobacco!"
Oma was exactly where Sonny expected to find her, under the mulberry trees with a step ladder and a sickle. She cut cocoons from the branches and tossed each into one of two wooden baskets, one for the fine, white silcoon and another for the darker, pearlescent cascoon. Their slow-blinking eyes made Sonny shudder because she knew what came next: the hot bath that would both soften the silk and kill the pupae inside. But Oma was methodical and unflinching.
Sonny stood out of the way and waited. Oma's hearing was still sharp—she knew Sonny was there—but she wouldn't come down until she was ready for a break. When at last her sickle couldn't reach any more cocoons without her moving the stepladder, she climbed down and turned expectantly toward Sonny, who bowed her head.
"Good morning, Oma."
"Almost afternoon, ain't it? Well, let's see what you got, girl."
Sonny handed Oma the basket and watched her pick through chocolate bars, duct tape, and evaporated milk until she found the pipe tobacco. "Unova Blue. Good girl—you remembered."
She'd been nimble on the ladder, but as she tried to open the tobacco tin, her hands trembled so badly she nearly dropped it.
"Oma, can I help? Maybe the lum salve?"
She grunted. But after a moment, she doddered to the chair in the shade and said, "It's in the drawer."
Sonny knew the one. By the time she fetched the jar and returned, Oma had settled deep into the chair, pipe between her lips. Kneeling at Oma's feet, Sonny unscrewed the lid. The bitter, medicinal tang of lum berries cut through the earthy tobacco smell—but her heart sank when she saw the salve jar was almost empty.
Oma refused to come down from the cliffs to see a doctor for any reason. Instead, like most of the cliffside silk farmers, she used her homemade lum berry concoctions for almost every conceivable ailment: joint pain, coughs and colds, nausea, and even toothaches. And it seemed to work. Something had kept her going for ninety-odd years.
"Is there more of this somewhere?" Sonny asked, taking one of Oma's knobbly hands in both of hers.
With her free hand, Oma held onto her pipe. "When the berries come in, we'll make a new batch. Time you learned."
Sonny's cheeks heated. She should've made the time to learn already, but class and applications had kept her busy. Maybe it wasn't too late … if the tourists didn't trample all the plants before they fruited.
Lum berries were special. They were delicate and rare, preferring a little cold but not too much, alkaline soil, and the shade of a nanab tree. Native lum berries didn't grow anywhere in Sinnoh but the cliffs over Route 213. The berries imported from Unova and Kalos were expensive even though they were waxed on the outside and tasted like water. Oma wouldn't touch them.
Sonny tried to focus on Oma's hands, massaging the swollen knuckles and papery skin. But she couldn't help muttering, "I wish the chatot would fly south for the winter already."
Oma sucked her teeth. "No chatot, no lum berries."
That halted Sonny. "What do you mean?"
"They got a way of spreading around what they eat, and they love berries."
Sonny saw immediately what she meant: lum seeds were hard as pebbles, impossible to digest. If a bird swallowed one, it could only pass straight through. She wrinkled her nose.
Ignoring Sonny's disgusted face, Oma said, "Balance." With her pipe, she gestured toward the cocoons still hanging from the eaves, never to be harvested. Her neighbors always did the same. Some of the pupae had to be spared to grow into beautifly or dustox and lay the eggs of future wurmple, starting the cycle all over.
"Alright," Sonny sighed. "Then I wish the tourists would go away."
"So do I," Oma said darkly. She took a few thoughtful puffs and then added, "Maybe there's a lesson to learn from the chatot there."
Sonny fought to keep from making a face at Oma. A chatot was the reason the tourists were even here. Carefully, she asked, "Like what?"
"You remember the story of Cousin Chatot and the honey tree?"
Sonny smiled. It had been years since Oma had told her stories. "Tell me again."
Oma switched hands, puffed on her pipe, and then began.
—
Cousin Chatot was a greedy fool who loved nothing more than to fill his belly all day long. When one day he spotted a pecha tree with the most luscious fruit he ever did see, he flew straight down.
But there were two things Cousin Chatot didn't know about this particular pecha tree. The first was that a swarm of combee had recently passed some time there, and the bark and branches were sticky with honey. The very moment he landed, Cousin Chatot was stuck and out of luck. He got to hollering and flapping, but the more he flopped around, the more sticky and stuck he got.
The second thing he didn't know was that pecha tree belonged to an old farmer. And when that farmer came upon Cousin Chatot stuck to his tree, looking fine and fat from stuffing himself with so many berries, he decided he'd found himself a nice dinner.
But Cousin Chatot was clever when he needed to be, and he had other plans. So as the old farmer got him cleaned up and ready for his stew pot, Chatot heaved a sigh and said, "Well, I suppose you're gonna season me up real good with salt and pepper, then."
"That's right," the farmer agreed.
"And I suppose," Cousin Chatot said, all droopy and glum, "you'll probably squeeze sitrus berries on me so I stay nice and moist and juicy."
And the farmer said, "You know, I hadn't thought of that, but that's a good idea."
"Probably all that parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, too."
"Probably that, too."
"And I guess it can't be helped," Cousin Chatot said with a little twinkle in his eye, "that surely you're gonna roast me up with some fresh fennel."
Well, then the farmer had to stop what he was doing to say, "I haven't got any of that."
Cousin Chatot puffed himself up, all offended-like, and said, "Hardly worth the trouble of cooking a beautiful, plump, self-respecting bird like myself if you ain't gonna throw some fennel in with me. It's really the only way to do it."
"I suppose I could pay a visit to Lady Leafeon and see what she has in that garden of hers."
"That's a good idea," said Cousin Chatot. "Why don't you go do that, and I'll wait right here 'til you get back."
So the farmer went to see about some fennel—and he'd hardly turned around before Cousin Chatot was out the window, taking some of that farmer's bread for his trouble.
Remember, girl: just because someone is a fool don't mean he can't fool you, too.
—
As Sonny whipped down the narrow path, Oma's story bouncing around her head, she passed a girl and two boys on their way up. She skidded to a stop and looked over her shoulder to confirm what she'd only glimpsed in a blur: backpacks, athletic wear, pokeballs shining at their belts. Definitely trainers. Still straddling her bike, she drew herself up to her full height and called, "Can I help you folks?"
"Just having a look around," said the girl, as if the cliffs were a trendy little boutique.
"She might have advice about finding chatot, Suze," scolded the first of the two boys. Then, shifting his gaze to Sonny, he asked, "You live around here?"
"Yup, and my advice is to keep to the paths if you don't want to get bitten by an ekans. It's their breeding season."
The third trainer snorted. "Don't worry, we're professionals. I've got a medicham, and Suze has a hippopotas—no ekans is gonna bother us."
Sonny could see by the grins the three exchanged that she'd made it worse: a challenge would only make the red chatot a more worthy prize, one they were certain they had a right to.
She snapped, "It's just a regular pokemon, you know. The color doesn't make a difference."
The boy who'd claimed to be a professional cut in, "Makes a difference to the collector who's gonna pay us."
"Hush," said the girl. With forced politeness, she told Sonny, "We won't hold you up. You have a good day. " Tugging her companion by the backpack strap, she continued up the path.
With the same cheer, Sonny called back, "Go fall in a ditch!" Fuming at them and at herself, she watched them clomp along the trail. Stupid. Oma was right: it wouldn't help anything for her to play the bigger fool.
She channeled her anger into her pedaling.
As always, coming down from the cliffs felt like traveling through time: Dirt paths gave way to pavement and electric cables, the hum of kricketune to the drone of cars. The peaceful shade of Oma's yard was far behind now, but the afternoon heat had left the streets a little emptier than normal, in limbo between the normal rhythms of cliff and town. Sonny breathed in the mossy lake smell that wafted up the hill and allowed herself a smile—
—until she saw the flyer. Large, red text impossible to miss even from her bike: New at the Valor Inn, the Red Bird Special! Cool off with a watmel berry slush! Sonny clawed the flyer down, balled the paper, and tossed it into her bike basket.
But on the next lamppost was another: Valor Inn, home of the red chatot! Ten percent off for trainers through the season.
Sonny's anger rose like a signal flare, then sank and sputtered, leaving her standing limply in the middle of the street with a wad of paper in her hand. She couldn't chase every trainer off the mountain, she couldn't protect every lum seedling, and she couldn't tear down every poster. The inn would have more up by tomorrow anyway.
The managers of Valor Inn didn't care what happened to the cliffs or anything that lived there except to the extent that it affected their profits. And the red chatot rumor was good for business, drawing in shiny hunters like dustox to a flame. If the inn had it right, tourists would move toward anything with the word chatot stamped on it.
And maybe, she realized with a delicious rush of clarity, maybe it was that simple.
—
After all the spindly flowers and vines she'd assembled for her portfolio, Sonny figured she could handle sculpting a bird. She knew her way around a band saw, a lathe, and her father's chisel set, but she needed her chatot to be lightweight enough to carry and hang by herself. Paper, she thought, would flex nicely in the wind. It wouldn't last forever, but if she was judicious with wood glue and sealant, she could get a few weeks out of it. Besides, she liked the idea of fighting paper flyers with a paper mache flier.
She began with a skeleton of wire, cardboard, and aluminum foil. To hold and twist it between her hands was satisfying: this bird would do what she wanted. Then, with a bowl of paste on her left and a heap of paper strips on her right, she settled herself cross-legged under the veranda and got to work.
Eventually, Mom brought out a jug of sweet tea and watched her lay paper over the wire skeleton. "I thought you already submitted your portfolio. You're making starly now?"
"It's a chatot," Sonny said grimly.
"Aha. Well, it's looking good, sweetie. You might even get the inn to sell it in the cafe."
Sonny stopped to wipe the sweat from her forehead and gulp down tea. "The point isn't to sell it. It's more like … a scarecrow. Or maybe an anti-scarecrow."
"I'm not sure a chatot is going to scare off any murkrow …."
"That's not what I—" Sonny made an exasperated sound, but when she looked up, Mom was grinning.
"I'm just pulling your leg, Sonny. Goodness."
"Sorry."
She softened and gave in to Mom's idle chatter, trading news about the inn and the neighbors for news about Oma and her health. All the while, she kept her hands moving: dip, draw off excess, drape, repeat. When the heat became too much, Mom went back inside, but Sonny stayed where she was.
The trouble was that, once she had the shape right, it was too smooth, too unnatural. So she layered on more paper, leaving bumps and ends sticking up to create feathers. Her first attempts were too regular, so she scraped some off and tried again. Between layers, while she waited for the paper to solidify, she napped. Over the winter, she'd had to borrow a neighbor's surly magmar to help the layers dry faster, but now the summer air was doing the job. At dusk, Sonny fetched a clamp light, and its heat sped the drying along, too.
Then, late into the night, came the puzzle of mixing the right shades of blue for the head, the shadows along the neck ruff, the yellows and browns of the beak. The red wings.
Sonny had seen plenty of chatot before, even shooing them from the mago berry trees in Oma's neighbor's yard, but she'd never taken the time before to notice the details: the delicate feathers around the eyes, the slope of its back. She had to admit the birds were beautiful, though she preferred the photos to the real thing.
At times, her vision swam as she threaded each feather with fine pink lines, but her mind was calm and clear. There was only the certainty of her vision and the need to see it through.
She woke the next morning with stiff limbs and a headache, but it didn't matter: in the golden light, her creation looked nearly ready to take flight. Sonny had captured the red chatot. Now, it was time to send it out into the wild.
—
Biking with the thing was harder than she'd expected. The paper chatot wasn't heavy, but every time its half-opened wings caught a breeze, the entire bike wobbled. She took the path slowly, worried the sculpture would slide loose and fall.
Finally, Sonny dismounted and leaned her bike against a tree, setting the chatot down with excruciating care, then continued on foot. She wasn't exactly sure what she was looking for but trusted she'd know the place for her chatot installation when she saw it. She couldn't hang it too close to the path—that would seem too obvious—but it had to be close enough that trainers passing from Veilstone would notice it.
How many people would need to see it to validate a claim that the red chatot wasn't on the cliffs at all but north, near the lakefront? At least a few, probably. She wondered if she should assemble more chatot, one for the road from Pastoria and another for the road from Sunyshore, to better the odds. Even the idea exhausted her. And then there would be confusion about where the bird supposedly was, and tourists would still be mucking around everywhere. She wanted them all in one place, far from Oma and the lum berries.
She found a tree that looked promising, with dense, broad leaves to offer her creation a little coverage, a little mystery. But then she had a bigger question: how was she going to get the chatot up there? Sonny had brought rope, wire, and nails, but there had been no way to bike with a ladder. A rock, she decided, tied to one end of the rope as a counterweight and tossed over a branch. It was a crude solution that would leave the rope visible—she felt a pang of worry—but it would have to do for now. So she marked the trail with a few fallen branches and doubled back for the rope and the bird.
When she rounded the bend, she stopped in her tracks. Under the tree next to her bike stood a trainer with a pachirisu on his shoulder. Something metallic hovered jerkily in front of them, a phone or a dex animated by a rotom.
And in his arms, held up like a trophy, was her paper chatot.
For an instant, Sonny's insides glowed. I made something photo-worthy. And then another thought made her grind to a halt: if anyone sees that photo, I'm done. All that work for nothing.
She surged forward, words ripping from her mouth. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
The trainer whirled to face her, which prompted the pachirisu to leap from his shoulder to his arm, chattering in admonishment—and knocking the paper chatot from his grip. He fumbled after it but missed widely. It landed with a crunch that Sonny felt like a blow to her own body.
Hesitantly, the trainer bent down. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to—"
"Don't touch it!" Sonny snarled, stopping him short. She stomped closer and he skittered back, the pachirisu scampering down his leg, this time to scold her. Sonny's hair bristled with static electricity, but she ignored it, scooping up the chatot and cradling it against her like it was a living, injured pokemon.
"Sorry!" the trainer said again. "I figured it was, like, a promotional thing, and …."
She swatted the air and snapped, "Would you just get out of here?"
With a final, "Sorry again," he ducked his head, waved his pokemon away from her, and hurried down the path.
Sonny plopped herself at the base of the tree and assessed the damage. One wing had bent back, cracking nearly in two. Wood glue would probably fix it, or maybe a paper mache patch and a paint-over, some drying time …. But that wasn't the real problem.
There was no difference between repairing the wing and sticking the broken sculpture in the tree. Either way, it was obviously meant to be a chatot … and it was also obviously an inanimate object, a freaking piñata. No one would mistake it for a real bird. And even if it had fooled a trainer by a miracle of poor lighting, what would've happened when they inevitably tried to catch it?
This had been a waste of time.
She shoved the chatot aside and tucked her chin to her knees, despair and embarrassment weighing too heavily for her to consider getting up and biking home yet.
Sonny had been sitting for quite some time, absentmindedly picking off shreds of the paper mache, when overhead something mewled. A glameow? That didn't make any sense. She'd ever seen a wild one out here, and why would a trained glameow be up a tree? Sonny sensed she was being tricked but couldn't help her curiosity and looked up into the branches anyway. She didn't actually see the chatot, only a flash of blue and gold among the leaves, but that was all she needed.
"Go away," she groaned.
As if in response, another meow rang out, exactly like a glameow.
She jumped to her feet, shouting this time. "Go away!"
In a wild rustling of leaves, the chatot sprang out of the tree and arced into the next like a blue arrow. "Go away!" it called, a perfect imitation of Sonny's voice. Echoes of it rang out from the surrounding trees. Go away, go away.
Even as Sonny set her jaw, flushed and half-ready to chase them off with sticks and stones, another part of her was taking notes: she only glimpsed the birds in pieces, not the shape of the body but the way it bobbed along a branch. She saw fewer of them than she heard. Her approach had been all wrong: she never should have bothered with painting individual feathers.
Not a single bird that she could see was red. Maybe someone had already captured the red chatot, plucked it from a branch like a ripe fruit. But then surely they would've been bragging about it all over town—having a rare pokemon was only half as good as letting everyone know you had one. So, no, it hadn't been caught yet. The tourists would've left by now if it had, and wouldn't the inn hate that.
She wondered if there even was a real red chatot.
Now that she thought about it, fabricating a shiny sighting to draw in customers sounded exactly like the kind of thing the inn would do. It didn't matter whether the red chatot was real as long as trainers far and wide believed it was. An imaginary bird might even be better bait than a real one: it would never be caught.
Sonny scowled down at her paper bird, lying on its back like a trapped turtwig. It hadn't even lasted five minutes.
"Goaway!" The innumerable chatot warbled, trading Sonny's words back and forth until they ran together. Way go a, waygoa. It only sounded like words if you were listening for them, squeezing meaning from the chatter. Her words had already become something else in the chatot's mouth.
As Sonny listened to the chatot, she thought of Oma's story. What was Cousin Chatot without his voice? Dinner. Dead. He was actually pretty stupid half of the time, but he could still talk his way out of anything he could get himself into. Even she'd been fooled for a moment.
Was that what Oma had meant? How was Sonny supposed to convince the tourists to leave, though? She didn't have Cousin Chatot's gifts. Even if she did, she was too late to stop all the tourists who'd come to the cliffs—
And that was when Sonny realized the inn had already given her everything she needed. She didn't need to be a chatot at all when the tourists were so much like them: noisy, arrogant, and ready to devour everything they could. The inn had already promised them juicy red berries. Now, all Sonny had to do was lay the honey to complete the trap.
Cousin Chatot was a fool, but he was never fooled the same way twice. When she was done, no tourist would want anything to do with a chatot of any color.
—
"I told you it was too good to be true."
Among the weeds, Sonny grinned.
The voices and footsteps grew louder until a pair of trainers broke through the trees. A buizel flowed between and around their legs, and a machoke brought up the rear, swatting gnats from its face. One of the trainers, sunburned and sweaty, continued loudly, "I mean, the hotel was advertising it. An obvious sign."
"I said we should go to Veilstone, remember?" snapped the other trainer. "You're the smartass who said we had to travel south."
Time to seal the deal. Stepping onto the path, Sonny said, "You boys looking for a guide? Fifteen dollars and I can show you where to find the famous red chatot of the southern shore."
The suburned trainer glared at his companion. "Obvious. Sign." He pushed past Sonny without so much as a word to acknowledge her, forcing the other to jog to catch up.
As their voices faded, Sonny leaned against the nearest tree trunk and tipped her head back to admire her work. From directly under the tree, the dangling shapes looked exactly like what they were: abstract sculptures of paper and wire mesh. From down the path, though, the colorful pieces aligned and became birds shifting from side to side among the leaves, each seeming to flutter its red wings.
Once she'd stopped worrying about silly things like feathers, Sonny could prefabricate dozens of chatot in a single sitting; her floor at home was stacked with un-birds, curve fitted to curve. Hanging was simple with a little help: in exchange for work around the house, one of the cliffside aunties lent Sonny her kadabra whenever she needed. Regardless of wind, rain, or vandalism, her flock would fly on.
The installation extended far beyond the cliffside, though, Sonny's biggest yet; she'd put up her own flyers alongside the inn's, listing her phone number under the title cliffside guide. To her astonishment and delight, a few trainers had already hired her to lead them to her sculptures, following the path that carefully wound away from the young lum plants. The trainers had made no secret of their disappointment when they saw the truth of her birds, but she felt no guilt charging what she thought of as an admission fee. After all, as she cheerfully explained, she'd made each one with love and care.
Today she'd come up the cliff without any clients—though she was always happy to advise passing travelers about the chatot. Instead she'd brought Oma her basket, plus a screwdriver and a pack of batteries, the two things she needed to maintain the final piece of her multimedia exhibit. She'd memorized where the speakers were hidden, each in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain. If she ever forgot, her own voice would lead her to the right places: "Almost there! Hello! Come closer! Turn left! No, your other left!"
Sometimes, sitting under Oma's mulberries, she caught snatches of her words drifting over the treetops and knew the real chatot were repeating them, too. Between the chatot and the disgruntled trainers, the entire region would soon know that the only red chatot on this cliff were made of paper.
Where the path was quieter than it should be, Sonny knelt to pull the dead speaker from the bushes. As she pried open the back, she sang to herself. "Underneath the honey tree, my honey and I can gaze at the sea. Underneath the honey tree, my honey and I sweeter than two combee …."
Old batteries out, new batteries in, and then the speaker informed her, "Not far now!"
It's true, she thought, grinning. Only one speaker left.
Then from somewhere in the trees came a burst of song. "Underneath the honey tree …." The voice sounded like Sonny's, but she hadn't recorded those words on any of the speakers. One of the real chatot was nearby.
Sonny automatically scanned for the telltale flash of blue but saw nothing. The chatot must've already flown away.
Then, so fast she almost missed it, something red darted through the leaves, calling, "Underneath the honey tree!" When she turned, three red birds rocked back and forth in the leafy shadows, and Sonny couldn't tell which one was singing. From where she stood, each looked equally real.
She threw her head back in laughter, and the red chatot laughed back in her voice. Sonny laughed long and loud until she couldn't tell anymore where her voice stopped and the chatot's began. When finally both fell quiet and the branches stilled, it was like the bird had never been there at all.
—
Word count: 4,865
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG (some cursing)
—
The Chatot and the Honey Tree
The old couple looked gentle and sweet, but Sonny wasn't fooled. They wore matching olive green t-shirts with a logo above the pocket and, of course, binoculars. Assholes. Just like all the others.
No one under the age of fifty lived on the cliffside, but the old couple were still obvious tourists. The locals were poor, tough, and proud. When the younger generations had left for work opportunities, the old heads had stayed, scraping out a living on wurmple silk farming and scraggly vegetable gardens. No car could manage the narrow trails, so to carry down raw silk for sale and bring up things like canned goods and batteries, the less able-bodied relied on Sonny and the other assorted grandchildren. The old folks still called her Miss Sonora no matter how many times she said, "Please, Auntie, it's Sonny." (In fairness, none of them were her aunties either.) Most of them were hard-of-hearing and illiterate—but they would never, ever trample a lum berry sprout.
Mr. Binoculars stood in the midst of the tender leaves, the pink tip of his tongue poking out, too busy writing painstakingly in a tiny notebook to see what lay at his feet. His wife was half a step from another patch of lum sprouts. She shaded her eyes with one hand, binoculars raised halfway, and Sonny knew without having to ask that she was searching for a flicker of red among the branches.
That stupid chatot.
Sonny cleared her throat and said in her brightest voice, "Good morning!"
The old woman hissed through her teeth and let her binoculars fall flat against her chest. "There it goes."
"You folks lost?"
"No, thank you, but …." The woman put on a strained smile; Sonny blinked back innocently. "We are hoping to spot a very rare bird, so we'd like to avoid making a lot of noise."
Louder, Sonny offered, "I just figured you must be lost since the path is back that way."
The old man stood and dusted off his knees. "Er, perhaps further down the trail would be better, dear ?"
The couple exchanged a look. "Yes, I think so. Well, you take care, young lady."
Grumbling, they made their way back to the trail, but Sonny knew they'd step right back into the underbrush the second they were out of her sight. No chatot would sit in plain view along the path. "Watch your feet!" she shouted after them. "We got lots of ekans around here!"
It was worth a try.
Then she crouched to examine the seedlings, or what was left. A few of the plants had been completely crushed, green shreds in the sunken center of a boot print. Others were bedraggled but looked like they might survive … assuming nothing else disturbed them. She sighed.
For a moment she indulged in the fantasy of returning with signposts, police tape—something. But she could hardly put signs around every single lum plant on the cliffside even if she knew where they all were, and the tourists probably wouldn't bother to read her signs anyway. In the meantime, Oma was waiting.
Sonny picked her way through the creepers and hanging branches, careful where she put her feet, until she came to the place where she'd lain her bike at the path edge. She tightened her backpack straps, double-checked that Oma's basket was secured to the pannier, and then she was off. The trail was steep, but Sonny's legs were strong from a lifetime of zipping up and down the mountain, and she followed the forking path as easily as a magikarp in a stream. Over a wooden footbridge, past the lightning-split tree, a sharp right took her to the thatch-roof cabin she knew so well. She leaned her bike against the porch, took up Oma's basket, and started around the back of the house. "Oma!" she called. "I brought your tobacco!"
Oma was exactly where Sonny expected to find her, under the mulberry trees with a step ladder and a sickle. She cut cocoons from the branches and tossed each into one of two wooden baskets, one for the fine, white silcoon and another for the darker, pearlescent cascoon. Their slow-blinking eyes made Sonny shudder because she knew what came next: the hot bath that would both soften the silk and kill the pupae inside. But Oma was methodical and unflinching.
Sonny stood out of the way and waited. Oma's hearing was still sharp—she knew Sonny was there—but she wouldn't come down until she was ready for a break. When at last her sickle couldn't reach any more cocoons without her moving the stepladder, she climbed down and turned expectantly toward Sonny, who bowed her head.
"Good morning, Oma."
"Almost afternoon, ain't it? Well, let's see what you got, girl."
Sonny handed Oma the basket and watched her pick through chocolate bars, duct tape, and evaporated milk until she found the pipe tobacco. "Unova Blue. Good girl—you remembered."
She'd been nimble on the ladder, but as she tried to open the tobacco tin, her hands trembled so badly she nearly dropped it.
"Oma, can I help? Maybe the lum salve?"
She grunted. But after a moment, she doddered to the chair in the shade and said, "It's in the drawer."
Sonny knew the one. By the time she fetched the jar and returned, Oma had settled deep into the chair, pipe between her lips. Kneeling at Oma's feet, Sonny unscrewed the lid. The bitter, medicinal tang of lum berries cut through the earthy tobacco smell—but her heart sank when she saw the salve jar was almost empty.
Oma refused to come down from the cliffs to see a doctor for any reason. Instead, like most of the cliffside silk farmers, she used her homemade lum berry concoctions for almost every conceivable ailment: joint pain, coughs and colds, nausea, and even toothaches. And it seemed to work. Something had kept her going for ninety-odd years.
"Is there more of this somewhere?" Sonny asked, taking one of Oma's knobbly hands in both of hers.
With her free hand, Oma held onto her pipe. "When the berries come in, we'll make a new batch. Time you learned."
Sonny's cheeks heated. She should've made the time to learn already, but class and applications had kept her busy. Maybe it wasn't too late … if the tourists didn't trample all the plants before they fruited.
Lum berries were special. They were delicate and rare, preferring a little cold but not too much, alkaline soil, and the shade of a nanab tree. Native lum berries didn't grow anywhere in Sinnoh but the cliffs over Route 213. The berries imported from Unova and Kalos were expensive even though they were waxed on the outside and tasted like water. Oma wouldn't touch them.
Sonny tried to focus on Oma's hands, massaging the swollen knuckles and papery skin. But she couldn't help muttering, "I wish the chatot would fly south for the winter already."
Oma sucked her teeth. "No chatot, no lum berries."
That halted Sonny. "What do you mean?"
"They got a way of spreading around what they eat, and they love berries."
Sonny saw immediately what she meant: lum seeds were hard as pebbles, impossible to digest. If a bird swallowed one, it could only pass straight through. She wrinkled her nose.
Ignoring Sonny's disgusted face, Oma said, "Balance." With her pipe, she gestured toward the cocoons still hanging from the eaves, never to be harvested. Her neighbors always did the same. Some of the pupae had to be spared to grow into beautifly or dustox and lay the eggs of future wurmple, starting the cycle all over.
"Alright," Sonny sighed. "Then I wish the tourists would go away."
"So do I," Oma said darkly. She took a few thoughtful puffs and then added, "Maybe there's a lesson to learn from the chatot there."
Sonny fought to keep from making a face at Oma. A chatot was the reason the tourists were even here. Carefully, she asked, "Like what?"
"You remember the story of Cousin Chatot and the honey tree?"
Sonny smiled. It had been years since Oma had told her stories. "Tell me again."
Oma switched hands, puffed on her pipe, and then began.
—
Cousin Chatot was a greedy fool who loved nothing more than to fill his belly all day long. When one day he spotted a pecha tree with the most luscious fruit he ever did see, he flew straight down.
But there were two things Cousin Chatot didn't know about this particular pecha tree. The first was that a swarm of combee had recently passed some time there, and the bark and branches were sticky with honey. The very moment he landed, Cousin Chatot was stuck and out of luck. He got to hollering and flapping, but the more he flopped around, the more sticky and stuck he got.
The second thing he didn't know was that pecha tree belonged to an old farmer. And when that farmer came upon Cousin Chatot stuck to his tree, looking fine and fat from stuffing himself with so many berries, he decided he'd found himself a nice dinner.
But Cousin Chatot was clever when he needed to be, and he had other plans. So as the old farmer got him cleaned up and ready for his stew pot, Chatot heaved a sigh and said, "Well, I suppose you're gonna season me up real good with salt and pepper, then."
"That's right," the farmer agreed.
"And I suppose," Cousin Chatot said, all droopy and glum, "you'll probably squeeze sitrus berries on me so I stay nice and moist and juicy."
And the farmer said, "You know, I hadn't thought of that, but that's a good idea."
"Probably all that parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, too."
"Probably that, too."
"And I guess it can't be helped," Cousin Chatot said with a little twinkle in his eye, "that surely you're gonna roast me up with some fresh fennel."
Well, then the farmer had to stop what he was doing to say, "I haven't got any of that."
Cousin Chatot puffed himself up, all offended-like, and said, "Hardly worth the trouble of cooking a beautiful, plump, self-respecting bird like myself if you ain't gonna throw some fennel in with me. It's really the only way to do it."
"I suppose I could pay a visit to Lady Leafeon and see what she has in that garden of hers."
"That's a good idea," said Cousin Chatot. "Why don't you go do that, and I'll wait right here 'til you get back."
So the farmer went to see about some fennel—and he'd hardly turned around before Cousin Chatot was out the window, taking some of that farmer's bread for his trouble.
Remember, girl: just because someone is a fool don't mean he can't fool you, too.
—
As Sonny whipped down the narrow path, Oma's story bouncing around her head, she passed a girl and two boys on their way up. She skidded to a stop and looked over her shoulder to confirm what she'd only glimpsed in a blur: backpacks, athletic wear, pokeballs shining at their belts. Definitely trainers. Still straddling her bike, she drew herself up to her full height and called, "Can I help you folks?"
"Just having a look around," said the girl, as if the cliffs were a trendy little boutique.
"She might have advice about finding chatot, Suze," scolded the first of the two boys. Then, shifting his gaze to Sonny, he asked, "You live around here?"
"Yup, and my advice is to keep to the paths if you don't want to get bitten by an ekans. It's their breeding season."
The third trainer snorted. "Don't worry, we're professionals. I've got a medicham, and Suze has a hippopotas—no ekans is gonna bother us."
Sonny could see by the grins the three exchanged that she'd made it worse: a challenge would only make the red chatot a more worthy prize, one they were certain they had a right to.
She snapped, "It's just a regular pokemon, you know. The color doesn't make a difference."
The boy who'd claimed to be a professional cut in, "Makes a difference to the collector who's gonna pay us."
"Hush," said the girl. With forced politeness, she told Sonny, "We won't hold you up. You have a good day. " Tugging her companion by the backpack strap, she continued up the path.
With the same cheer, Sonny called back, "Go fall in a ditch!" Fuming at them and at herself, she watched them clomp along the trail. Stupid. Oma was right: it wouldn't help anything for her to play the bigger fool.
She channeled her anger into her pedaling.
As always, coming down from the cliffs felt like traveling through time: Dirt paths gave way to pavement and electric cables, the hum of kricketune to the drone of cars. The peaceful shade of Oma's yard was far behind now, but the afternoon heat had left the streets a little emptier than normal, in limbo between the normal rhythms of cliff and town. Sonny breathed in the mossy lake smell that wafted up the hill and allowed herself a smile—
—until she saw the flyer. Large, red text impossible to miss even from her bike: New at the Valor Inn, the Red Bird Special! Cool off with a watmel berry slush! Sonny clawed the flyer down, balled the paper, and tossed it into her bike basket.
But on the next lamppost was another: Valor Inn, home of the red chatot! Ten percent off for trainers through the season.
Sonny's anger rose like a signal flare, then sank and sputtered, leaving her standing limply in the middle of the street with a wad of paper in her hand. She couldn't chase every trainer off the mountain, she couldn't protect every lum seedling, and she couldn't tear down every poster. The inn would have more up by tomorrow anyway.
The managers of Valor Inn didn't care what happened to the cliffs or anything that lived there except to the extent that it affected their profits. And the red chatot rumor was good for business, drawing in shiny hunters like dustox to a flame. If the inn had it right, tourists would move toward anything with the word chatot stamped on it.
And maybe, she realized with a delicious rush of clarity, maybe it was that simple.
—
After all the spindly flowers and vines she'd assembled for her portfolio, Sonny figured she could handle sculpting a bird. She knew her way around a band saw, a lathe, and her father's chisel set, but she needed her chatot to be lightweight enough to carry and hang by herself. Paper, she thought, would flex nicely in the wind. It wouldn't last forever, but if she was judicious with wood glue and sealant, she could get a few weeks out of it. Besides, she liked the idea of fighting paper flyers with a paper mache flier.
She began with a skeleton of wire, cardboard, and aluminum foil. To hold and twist it between her hands was satisfying: this bird would do what she wanted. Then, with a bowl of paste on her left and a heap of paper strips on her right, she settled herself cross-legged under the veranda and got to work.
Eventually, Mom brought out a jug of sweet tea and watched her lay paper over the wire skeleton. "I thought you already submitted your portfolio. You're making starly now?"
"It's a chatot," Sonny said grimly.
"Aha. Well, it's looking good, sweetie. You might even get the inn to sell it in the cafe."
Sonny stopped to wipe the sweat from her forehead and gulp down tea. "The point isn't to sell it. It's more like … a scarecrow. Or maybe an anti-scarecrow."
"I'm not sure a chatot is going to scare off any murkrow …."
"That's not what I—" Sonny made an exasperated sound, but when she looked up, Mom was grinning.
"I'm just pulling your leg, Sonny. Goodness."
"Sorry."
She softened and gave in to Mom's idle chatter, trading news about the inn and the neighbors for news about Oma and her health. All the while, she kept her hands moving: dip, draw off excess, drape, repeat. When the heat became too much, Mom went back inside, but Sonny stayed where she was.
The trouble was that, once she had the shape right, it was too smooth, too unnatural. So she layered on more paper, leaving bumps and ends sticking up to create feathers. Her first attempts were too regular, so she scraped some off and tried again. Between layers, while she waited for the paper to solidify, she napped. Over the winter, she'd had to borrow a neighbor's surly magmar to help the layers dry faster, but now the summer air was doing the job. At dusk, Sonny fetched a clamp light, and its heat sped the drying along, too.
Then, late into the night, came the puzzle of mixing the right shades of blue for the head, the shadows along the neck ruff, the yellows and browns of the beak. The red wings.
Sonny had seen plenty of chatot before, even shooing them from the mago berry trees in Oma's neighbor's yard, but she'd never taken the time before to notice the details: the delicate feathers around the eyes, the slope of its back. She had to admit the birds were beautiful, though she preferred the photos to the real thing.
At times, her vision swam as she threaded each feather with fine pink lines, but her mind was calm and clear. There was only the certainty of her vision and the need to see it through.
She woke the next morning with stiff limbs and a headache, but it didn't matter: in the golden light, her creation looked nearly ready to take flight. Sonny had captured the red chatot. Now, it was time to send it out into the wild.
—
Biking with the thing was harder than she'd expected. The paper chatot wasn't heavy, but every time its half-opened wings caught a breeze, the entire bike wobbled. She took the path slowly, worried the sculpture would slide loose and fall.
Finally, Sonny dismounted and leaned her bike against a tree, setting the chatot down with excruciating care, then continued on foot. She wasn't exactly sure what she was looking for but trusted she'd know the place for her chatot installation when she saw it. She couldn't hang it too close to the path—that would seem too obvious—but it had to be close enough that trainers passing from Veilstone would notice it.
How many people would need to see it to validate a claim that the red chatot wasn't on the cliffs at all but north, near the lakefront? At least a few, probably. She wondered if she should assemble more chatot, one for the road from Pastoria and another for the road from Sunyshore, to better the odds. Even the idea exhausted her. And then there would be confusion about where the bird supposedly was, and tourists would still be mucking around everywhere. She wanted them all in one place, far from Oma and the lum berries.
She found a tree that looked promising, with dense, broad leaves to offer her creation a little coverage, a little mystery. But then she had a bigger question: how was she going to get the chatot up there? Sonny had brought rope, wire, and nails, but there had been no way to bike with a ladder. A rock, she decided, tied to one end of the rope as a counterweight and tossed over a branch. It was a crude solution that would leave the rope visible—she felt a pang of worry—but it would have to do for now. So she marked the trail with a few fallen branches and doubled back for the rope and the bird.
When she rounded the bend, she stopped in her tracks. Under the tree next to her bike stood a trainer with a pachirisu on his shoulder. Something metallic hovered jerkily in front of them, a phone or a dex animated by a rotom.
And in his arms, held up like a trophy, was her paper chatot.
For an instant, Sonny's insides glowed. I made something photo-worthy. And then another thought made her grind to a halt: if anyone sees that photo, I'm done. All that work for nothing.
She surged forward, words ripping from her mouth. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
The trainer whirled to face her, which prompted the pachirisu to leap from his shoulder to his arm, chattering in admonishment—and knocking the paper chatot from his grip. He fumbled after it but missed widely. It landed with a crunch that Sonny felt like a blow to her own body.
Hesitantly, the trainer bent down. "I'm sorry! I didn't mean to—"
"Don't touch it!" Sonny snarled, stopping him short. She stomped closer and he skittered back, the pachirisu scampering down his leg, this time to scold her. Sonny's hair bristled with static electricity, but she ignored it, scooping up the chatot and cradling it against her like it was a living, injured pokemon.
"Sorry!" the trainer said again. "I figured it was, like, a promotional thing, and …."
She swatted the air and snapped, "Would you just get out of here?"
With a final, "Sorry again," he ducked his head, waved his pokemon away from her, and hurried down the path.
Sonny plopped herself at the base of the tree and assessed the damage. One wing had bent back, cracking nearly in two. Wood glue would probably fix it, or maybe a paper mache patch and a paint-over, some drying time …. But that wasn't the real problem.
There was no difference between repairing the wing and sticking the broken sculpture in the tree. Either way, it was obviously meant to be a chatot … and it was also obviously an inanimate object, a freaking piñata. No one would mistake it for a real bird. And even if it had fooled a trainer by a miracle of poor lighting, what would've happened when they inevitably tried to catch it?
This had been a waste of time.
She shoved the chatot aside and tucked her chin to her knees, despair and embarrassment weighing too heavily for her to consider getting up and biking home yet.
Sonny had been sitting for quite some time, absentmindedly picking off shreds of the paper mache, when overhead something mewled. A glameow? That didn't make any sense. She'd ever seen a wild one out here, and why would a trained glameow be up a tree? Sonny sensed she was being tricked but couldn't help her curiosity and looked up into the branches anyway. She didn't actually see the chatot, only a flash of blue and gold among the leaves, but that was all she needed.
"Go away," she groaned.
As if in response, another meow rang out, exactly like a glameow.
She jumped to her feet, shouting this time. "Go away!"
In a wild rustling of leaves, the chatot sprang out of the tree and arced into the next like a blue arrow. "Go away!" it called, a perfect imitation of Sonny's voice. Echoes of it rang out from the surrounding trees. Go away, go away.
Even as Sonny set her jaw, flushed and half-ready to chase them off with sticks and stones, another part of her was taking notes: she only glimpsed the birds in pieces, not the shape of the body but the way it bobbed along a branch. She saw fewer of them than she heard. Her approach had been all wrong: she never should have bothered with painting individual feathers.
Not a single bird that she could see was red. Maybe someone had already captured the red chatot, plucked it from a branch like a ripe fruit. But then surely they would've been bragging about it all over town—having a rare pokemon was only half as good as letting everyone know you had one. So, no, it hadn't been caught yet. The tourists would've left by now if it had, and wouldn't the inn hate that.
She wondered if there even was a real red chatot.
Now that she thought about it, fabricating a shiny sighting to draw in customers sounded exactly like the kind of thing the inn would do. It didn't matter whether the red chatot was real as long as trainers far and wide believed it was. An imaginary bird might even be better bait than a real one: it would never be caught.
Sonny scowled down at her paper bird, lying on its back like a trapped turtwig. It hadn't even lasted five minutes.
"Goaway!" The innumerable chatot warbled, trading Sonny's words back and forth until they ran together. Way go a, waygoa. It only sounded like words if you were listening for them, squeezing meaning from the chatter. Her words had already become something else in the chatot's mouth.
As Sonny listened to the chatot, she thought of Oma's story. What was Cousin Chatot without his voice? Dinner. Dead. He was actually pretty stupid half of the time, but he could still talk his way out of anything he could get himself into. Even she'd been fooled for a moment.
Was that what Oma had meant? How was Sonny supposed to convince the tourists to leave, though? She didn't have Cousin Chatot's gifts. Even if she did, she was too late to stop all the tourists who'd come to the cliffs—
And that was when Sonny realized the inn had already given her everything she needed. She didn't need to be a chatot at all when the tourists were so much like them: noisy, arrogant, and ready to devour everything they could. The inn had already promised them juicy red berries. Now, all Sonny had to do was lay the honey to complete the trap.
Cousin Chatot was a fool, but he was never fooled the same way twice. When she was done, no tourist would want anything to do with a chatot of any color.
—
"I told you it was too good to be true."
Among the weeds, Sonny grinned.
The voices and footsteps grew louder until a pair of trainers broke through the trees. A buizel flowed between and around their legs, and a machoke brought up the rear, swatting gnats from its face. One of the trainers, sunburned and sweaty, continued loudly, "I mean, the hotel was advertising it. An obvious sign."
"I said we should go to Veilstone, remember?" snapped the other trainer. "You're the smartass who said we had to travel south."
Time to seal the deal. Stepping onto the path, Sonny said, "You boys looking for a guide? Fifteen dollars and I can show you where to find the famous red chatot of the southern shore."
The suburned trainer glared at his companion. "Obvious. Sign." He pushed past Sonny without so much as a word to acknowledge her, forcing the other to jog to catch up.
As their voices faded, Sonny leaned against the nearest tree trunk and tipped her head back to admire her work. From directly under the tree, the dangling shapes looked exactly like what they were: abstract sculptures of paper and wire mesh. From down the path, though, the colorful pieces aligned and became birds shifting from side to side among the leaves, each seeming to flutter its red wings.
Once she'd stopped worrying about silly things like feathers, Sonny could prefabricate dozens of chatot in a single sitting; her floor at home was stacked with un-birds, curve fitted to curve. Hanging was simple with a little help: in exchange for work around the house, one of the cliffside aunties lent Sonny her kadabra whenever she needed. Regardless of wind, rain, or vandalism, her flock would fly on.
The installation extended far beyond the cliffside, though, Sonny's biggest yet; she'd put up her own flyers alongside the inn's, listing her phone number under the title cliffside guide. To her astonishment and delight, a few trainers had already hired her to lead them to her sculptures, following the path that carefully wound away from the young lum plants. The trainers had made no secret of their disappointment when they saw the truth of her birds, but she felt no guilt charging what she thought of as an admission fee. After all, as she cheerfully explained, she'd made each one with love and care.
Today she'd come up the cliff without any clients—though she was always happy to advise passing travelers about the chatot. Instead she'd brought Oma her basket, plus a screwdriver and a pack of batteries, the two things she needed to maintain the final piece of her multimedia exhibit. She'd memorized where the speakers were hidden, each in a plastic bag to protect it from the rain. If she ever forgot, her own voice would lead her to the right places: "Almost there! Hello! Come closer! Turn left! No, your other left!"
Sometimes, sitting under Oma's mulberries, she caught snatches of her words drifting over the treetops and knew the real chatot were repeating them, too. Between the chatot and the disgruntled trainers, the entire region would soon know that the only red chatot on this cliff were made of paper.
Where the path was quieter than it should be, Sonny knelt to pull the dead speaker from the bushes. As she pried open the back, she sang to herself. "Underneath the honey tree, my honey and I can gaze at the sea. Underneath the honey tree, my honey and I sweeter than two combee …."
Old batteries out, new batteries in, and then the speaker informed her, "Not far now!"
It's true, she thought, grinning. Only one speaker left.
Then from somewhere in the trees came a burst of song. "Underneath the honey tree …." The voice sounded like Sonny's, but she hadn't recorded those words on any of the speakers. One of the real chatot was nearby.
Sonny automatically scanned for the telltale flash of blue but saw nothing. The chatot must've already flown away.
Then, so fast she almost missed it, something red darted through the leaves, calling, "Underneath the honey tree!" When she turned, three red birds rocked back and forth in the leafy shadows, and Sonny couldn't tell which one was singing. From where she stood, each looked equally real.
She threw her head back in laughter, and the red chatot laughed back in her voice. Sonny laughed long and loud until she couldn't tell anymore where her voice stopped and the chatot's began. When finally both fell quiet and the branches stilled, it was like the bird had never been there at all.
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