A Rose Made of Shadows

Chapter Eight

The bottom of the steep cliff was enveloped in a soft veil of mist, and the air was quite humid. The forest itself had received a major transformation from what it was up above. While the forest from earlier was a simple broadleaf-tree forest, this one was a rainforest. How could such a difference exist between such a short distance is unknown, but it was there nonetheless. The cliff itself was around 50 stories tall, the only thing that separated these two distinctly different worlds. There was the sound of a waterfall in the distance and birds sung high in the canopies of the trees. The rain had stopped.

With the cliff being so tall, a truck falling off of it would most certainly crush up like tinfoil from the force of the impact, if not exploding outright. Yet, amazingly, the truck survived the fall almost intact. Almost. The tires were flattened like pancakes, the wheels bent, the fuel had all leaked out, and the motor was crushed beyond repair. Aside from those damages, however, everyone inside was okay minus from shock.

From the driver's side, Ellis popped out with Haroff following.

"We're alive!", proclaimed Ellis.

"That's good, but where are we?", Haroff said.

The rest of the group came out of the truck shortly afterward.

"How are we still alive?", Sapphire said as she got out of the damaged truck.

"I think this truck was sturdier than we thought," Tyler added.

Ellis felt a strong sense of proudness knowing that the truck had saved them. "Welp, for a truck that came out of a trashy dealer, it did more than what I originally imagined," he said.

"I'm really curious now as to where this 'trashy dealer' actually is," Haroff said, looking back at the truck.

"At least we're all okay. That's the important part," Fireblaze added.

"Yeah, we are. We can't say the same for the truck though. It looks like it won't be drivable anymore," Ellis said as he looked at the hood of the vehicle, bent up and with smoke filtering through the slight openings.

"I'm good at repairs," Scraggy said. "I could repair the motor pretty quickly."

"But we don't have any tools," Ellis replied. "We don't have anything that could be used for repairing the truck, unless you can make tools out of sticks and leaves or something from this forest."

"Oh... well, there goes that idea," Scraggy said in disappointment. "Had I known that something like this could've happened, I would've brought my toolkit."

Raizel walked to the back of the truck and opened the back doors, and grabbed some burlap bags. "It doesn't seem like this truck will be repairable anytime soon. Besides, the mountains aren't that far away now. We can get there on foot."

"Fine. As long as it doesn't rain again, we should be okay," Haroff said.

And with that, everyone packed materials from the truck into the bags, such as weapons and the short amounts of food available. No one other than Raizel had a Pokémon with them; they all left them back home.

The truck had fallen into a clearing that was in-between the cliff face and the rainforest. The floodwaters had resided by then, and, despite the high amounts of water that fell down the cliff, the ground wasn't as muddy as you'd expect. The group moved onward through the mist-covered forest, which had the sounds of birds and insects everywhere.

"I never knew this rainforest even existed," Sapphire said.

"Even weirder that it's so close to the other forest we were on," Haroff added. "From a normal forest to this, it seems pretty suspicious."

"Forget the forest, it's what could be in it that I'm worried about," Ellis said as he looked around nervously. "There could be giant insects, native people, monkeys, that one random hobo down the street that stalks me—you get the point."

"It better not be tick season," Sapphire said in disgust.

Suddenly, some bushes rustled up ahead.

"Who's there?" Haroff said, looking at the bushes.

Raizel then remembered the Zoroark she met earlier at the abandoned beach. She had her hand on her sword just in case anything risky happened.

The rustling continued for a while as the suspense grew. And then, as suddenly as it had started, it stopped.

"Uh... I guess it was just a wild Pokémon or someth-"

But just before Scraggy could finish his sentence, an arrow shot out from behind the group and hit a tree just inches away from Ellis's head.

"Whoa! The heck was that?!", Ellis said as he flinched after the arrow hit the tree.

3 more arrows hit some nearby trees as everyone was frightened by the fact that they were getting shot at.

"Who's trying to kill us??" Sapphire said nervously.

"You might wanna ask them that question," replied Haroff as he pointed to someone.

The person he was pointing at was the one who shot the arrows. And he wasn't alone. A few more people came out of the bushes. They appeared to be natives as indicated by their clothing—or lack of clothing in this case. They had short leg robes around their waists, bearskin over their elbows, and a band of red and white feathers on their heads. Their faces were bleached white with red and black markings on them, and in their hands they were holding spears, although some of them also had a bow and arrows. More of them appeared from all directions and formed a circle around the group.

"Ellis, I guess you were right about the natives idea," Haroff said as everyone was being backed into a corner.

"Well, better than being attacked by that hobo I was talking about earlier," Ellis replied. "I'd rather get speared to death by these guys than getting mauled by a homeless fat man."

"Ellis, this is serious! If we can't convince the natives that we're not a threat, we're in for it!"

"Can't we just use our weapons and fight back or something?" Fireblaze added. "I have no intentions of being a sitting duck waiting to get stabbed to death."

"We don't know how many of them there are. There could be hundreds, maybe even thousands of them, and I'm not in the mood for making waste of native people," Haroff said. "Besides, we need to save as much energy as we can to deal with Rosa's kidnappers."

"So what can we do?", Raizel said worryingly. "Maybe they know a little bit of English?"

"I doubt it," Haroff replied.

"I don't want to die like this!" Sapphire said as she hugged Haroff tightly.

As the natives moved in closer, however, a single person made his way through the spear-happy crowd.

It was their chief.