Arcane Explorers: An Eeveelution Story

Chapter VII

[??? POV]

A faint knocking sound awoke me sometime before noon. I waited until it occurred again before getting out of bed. I walked out of my room, through the hall, and to the front door. The knocking repeated once more. I opened the door and saw Carbon standing outside. I was just about to greet him when I paused. Something was wrong. He was looking towards the ground, and his usual upbeat mood was long gone. "Hey… are you alright?" He looked up at me. His eyes were bloodshot. He shook his head. "A-Aconi ran a-away…" Oh. That's bad. "Do you know where she went?" He shook his head again. "B-but I might have a-an idea…" I nodded. "Good. Clean yourself up, we're leaving." He stared at me. "W-wha…?" I repeated what I'd said.

Carbon shook his head yet again. "I c-can't… she hates m-me…" I grabbed his paw with my own bright blue paw. "And is she gonna think any better of you if you don't even go looking for her?" His eyes widened slightly. I pulled him inside and closed the door. "Get cleaned up." I walked off into the storage room, grabbing a small bag of supplies before coming back. Carbon was now by the door, waiting. I opened it and we walked outside. "You lead the way, Carbon."

We walked through the gate, which happened to be right next to my home. Carbon led me into the woods. 'Oh good… Well, I hope she's not dead.' Carbon didn't say a word as we continued into the quiet forest.

. . .

We'd been walking for some time now. We were walking along a river, on the other side of which there were trees with some odd markings engraved into them. Carbon had suspected it was Mightyena territory, but I wasn't too sure about that. As Carbon was explaining his reasoning, however, I spotted something. It was a frozen piece of grass.

I was quick to point it out to Carbon. "That means she might have been here at some point…" I nodded. "Let’s keep going." We continued through the forest, which was strangely absent of any other mons. I decided that it was probably just because it was nearing sunset now, so most had gone back to their dens.

. . .

It was almost nighttime now. Carbon and I had begun looking for a spot to camp out for the night. "Hey, Breeze? What do we do if we don't find a cave?" I thought about it for a moment, pondering our options. I decided on the one that seemed to have the best possible outcome. "Well, we'll probably have to sleep out in the open. We'll have to take shifts to keep watch to make sure that we aren't ambushed in the night." Carbon nodded. "Alright, well, it's looking like we're gonna have to do that."

Carbon and I stopped next to a tree and laid our bags against it. "You sleep first, Breeze. I'll take the first shift." I nodded and lied down next to the tree. "Wake me up when your shift ends." I saw Carbon nod. I wrapped my tail up and closed my eyes. It took a couple of minutes, but I soon fell asleep.

—--------
A/N

Hi! This was a bit of a shorter chapter, but I'll make up for that on the next one. Normally, I'd have written this chapter in Carbon's POV, but I was having trouble expressing what he'd be thinking or feeling about what'd happened. My solution to that was Breeze, a Vaporeon if you couldn't tell. I apologize if this chapter seemed rushed, I'm just not very good at writing these kinds of chapters just yet. Chapter 8 should come out sometime this week, as I've already started on it as of me writing this now. Anyway, hope y'all enjoyed!

-Volt

(10/23/23, 22:06, -5 GMT)