The next thing April knew, she was tumbling out of the sky.

April liked to approach everything in a rational manner, but the only rational explanation she could come up with was that this was a dream. Or rather, a nightmare. Falling was a common nightmare, right? Which was odd, because she couldn’t recall anything between last evening and right now, and certainly not an early-morning skydiving trip; she had never wanted to go skydiving in a million years.

Tossed around by a bitter wind, April tried to spread her limbs out - that’s what skydivers did, right? - but they all felt wrong, as if they had been hacked down to numb stumps. She braced herself for her inevitable fate as a splat on the ground…

When she suddenly felt something open up on her back.

Whatever it was, it slowed down her fall long enough for her to try to get a good look at what was below. She was falling towards a small town atop a mountain, surrounded by rainbows. Or at least, it seemed so. Everything looked blurry, but she could definitely make out that this town looked far more colourful than anywhere she’d ever been, and not just because of the rainbows.

She strained her eyes to get a better look, but she soon realised there was a downside to whatever was slowing down her fall: she was completely at the mercy of the wind. She felt herself being tossed around left, right, forwards, backwards, and every diagonal direction as the ground came closer and closer…

Until she was eventually sent hurtling forwards, skidding face-first into grass.

April picked herself up. Standing on her own two legs felt fine - she miraculously hadn’t broken anything - but also a weird, like something behind her was getting in the way. In the centre of her blurry vision, where her nose would be, she saw an even blurrier, dark brown, crumpled-up line… huh?

She reached out her hands to straighten out whatever this line was, but they couldn’t reach it. She tried to look down at her body, but her neck felt stiff and couldn’t move as much. Then she realised that she wasn’t breathing, at least not in the way she was used to; she still needed air, but didn’t have lungs.

And how had she survived that fall in the first place?

The sensation of whatever had opened up on her back was still there, and it seemed to be coming from her shoulder blades. She tried to control it, and eventually felt the sensation of something moving back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of something brown, with red and yellow splotches.

Oh! It all made sense now! She’d been transformed into a Beautifly. Her wings had caught the wind while she was falling, which, combined with her relatively small size, had given her more air resistance.

Wait, what?

This wasn’t just any dream; it was a fell-asleep-past-midnight cheese-dream. But wait, wasn’t she supposed to be unaware that she’s dreaming? Unless this was a lucid dream… but how did she influence those? She’d never had one before. She concentrated really hard, and imagined Digit appearing right in front of her… but nothing happened.

April was yanked out of her thoughts by the clip-clop sound of hooves. She could feel the sound as much as she could hear it, like she was hugging a loudspeaker.

She looked around to see a grey… thing coming towards her. She couldn’t make out what it was, but she could see its eyes clearly. They were massive, and there was a red mark around one of them. It seemed to be twice as tall as her - wait, that didn't feel right. It seemed to be twice as tall as a Beautifly.

“What’s this?” he said in a deep and gravelly voice. Wait a minute...

Ah, PokéSpeak. A form of interspecies communication long theorised to exist by hippies who thought that humans had forgotten how to talk to Pokémon, and could relearn it by coming closer to nature or something, turned out to be real after all. April wanted to say “I'm a Beautifly, to cut a long story short”, but then she realised that she now had no idea how to speak. She didn’t have any vocal chords, or a tongue, and her mouth was weirdly-shaped.

“No matter. The traders will go crazy for something like this.”

April’s eyes widened in shock. She flapped those wings, only to discover that she didn’t know how to flutter them fast enough to fly. She tried to crawl away, but those stubby little limbs weren’t the right shape for that. She wanted to attack him, but had no idea how to do that, either. Instead, all she could do was lie flat on the ground, cowering underneath outspread wings, as the grey thing bent down and picked her up by one of the wings with his… teeth? Eww. On the plus side, he was definitely a herbivore, or else she would have felt sharp teeth puncturing the wing, and she did not like that train of thought.

The grey thing carried April across a field and into a dark grey tent, where he tossed her into a cage and slammed it shut. April couldn’t make out what the lock looked like, but it definitely wasn’t a padlock, or else she would have noticed him getting a key out, not to mention that he didn’t have hands.

April felt this body’s antennae twitching as she caught the faint scent of a rose to her left. She had just enough room to turn around, and saw a tiny, yellow and green blob in a cage right next to her. Was it a Budew?

“Hello…” she whispered in a high-pitched voice, sounding slightly scared. “Have you seen a human named Crawford anywhere?”

April wished she could say “I haven’t, sorry”, but all she could do was shake her head. Then she couldn’t believe that she wanted to talk to a Budew, then her words struck her. If she was looking for a human, that must mean that there were humans out there, so why had April been transformed? Did some higher power really hate her?

“Oh… sorry for bothering you,” the Budew sighed sadly, sitting down. “It’s just that no-one else I ask seems to listen…”

Outside, the grey thing was giving a theatrical speech, and a small crowd of differently-coloured creatures who seemed to be members of his species gathered around.

“When Nightmare Moon returned to our world, she unleashed hordes of beasts straight from the pits of Tartarus.” The crowd gasped, as if they were watching a magician. April could picture the grey thing standing on a dimly-lit stage, surrounded by smoke. “But Nightmare Moon’s evil has been vanquished, and her mockeries of nature became tame. Now, the Moonkind can be yours for the small price of any Nightmare Moon memorabilia! We have a short-tempered blazefowl, an ambulatory rosebud, a colossal swallowtail, and more!”

April had so many questions. Who was Nightmare Moon? Where was Tartarus? What were the Moonkind? What did any of this have to do with putting Pokémon in cages? What was a “swallowtail”? Was that what they called Girafarig around here? The Budew definitely didn’t know any of the answers.

The crowd broke apart as its members frantically dashed in different directions, as if several major retailers had all announced that they were having sales. In the meantime, April noticed that there were even more cages containing Pokémon in the tent; she counted about twenty. One of them contained an orange Pokémon who was kicking the bars, creating a grating clink sound, which she figured was the so-called “short-tempered blazefowl”.

After what felt like a few minutes, about a dozen coloured shapes returned to the tent, pushing and shoving and falling over each other as they all brandished various dark blue objects. (That they were holding with their flat hooves… somehow…)

“Single file, please!” the grey thing demanded. The other beings formed a queue so quickly that it seemed like magic, which it probably was. April was willing to believe anything at this point.

One by one, cages containing Pokémon were handed to their new owners, who rushed off as quickly as they’d formed a queue, while the grey thing tossed his “Nightmare Moon memorabilia” into the corner with his teeth before yelling, “NEXT!”

Soon, April and the Budew were the only two left… when a cyan and yellow creature shoved her way to the front of the queue, dragging what appeared to be a brown sack in her mouth. Once she got to the front, she dropped it in front of the grey thing, spilling its contents all over the ground. April heard the sound of glass shattering.

“I’ll take all of them!” she shouted. Despite her chipper voice, she sounded angry.

“There’s only two,” replied the grey thing.

“Do you know how long it took me to get all of this?” she continued. “Two hours. TWO. HOURS! All because those stupid vendors want the most random things in exchange.”

April and the Budew looked at each other in concern. What in the world was she doing?

“So here,” she continued. “Take your stupid lamps and statues and figurines and I’ll leave.” She sighed. “Do you know how hard it was to get those? One of the vendors only accepted pineapples. PINEAPPLES!” She cleared her throat and continued. “They’re clearly more valuable to you than actual, living beings!” With that, the cyan thing yanked the two cages over and flipped their doors open; April realised that the cages had a bar on the outside, that kept the doors locked when it was horizontal. The Budew quickly stumbled outwards, but April, rather embarrassingly, still had no idea how to move. The entire crowd gasped.

“Princess Cadence, we have an unfair trade!” the grey thing yelled at the top of his lungs.

A few minutes later, a pink creature descended from the skies, landing in front of the crowd. She was much taller than the others. Everyone else watched in stunned silence, including April and the Budew.

“What’s all this commotion about?” she said in a stern, yet concerned, voice.

“He,” growled the cyan thing, pointing a leg at the grey thing, “is responsible for not only animal trafficking, but giving said animals away to ponies who couldn’t possibly know how to take care of them!” April swore that she heard the sound of a cage being dropped, somewhere in the crowd. “I wanted to free them all, but I was too late.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” said Princess Cadance, before she turned to look at the grey thing. “What do you have to say?”

“I was just trying to do business!” he replied. “Isn’t it better than having these Moonkinds roaming free to cause destruction? We don’t know what they’re capable of!”

“Alright, you two…” Princess Cadence sighed. First, she looked at the grey thing. “On one hoof, it is wrong to trap creatures from the wild and sell them - or in this case, exchange them.” Then, she turned to look at the cyan thing. “At the same time… he has a point. We don’t know what these creatures are capable of. Releasing invasive species into the wild could have disastrous consequences for the ecosystem, regardless of how harmless they look.” She stepped back to look at both of them. “And please stop calling them ‘Moonkind’. Princess Luna has denied having any association with them.” So “Moonkind” must be what these lot call Pokémon. Are they not Pokémon themselves, then?

“I’m not entirely convinced...” April heard the grey thing mutter, but she wasn’t sure if anyone else did.

“Alright…” the cyan one sighed. “But what are you going to do with them? Put them back in these cages?”

Princess Cadence hesitated for a moment. “Well… That is a good point. I suggest keeping a close eye on these creatures until Princess Celestia and her personal protege can determine how much of a threat they are.” April hoped that the Budew would never accidentally poison one of them. That would definitely cause an overreaction.

With that, the crowd walked away, murmuring about everything they had just witnessed.

“Thanks,” the Budew whispered, but the cyan thing didn’t respond. She turned to look at April. “Aren’t you going to fly away, Beautifly?”

April suddenly wished that she could tell the Budew that no, she couldn’t, she didn’t know how to, she used to be a human and her name was April… and then she realised that she was missing someone, too. She’d been so caught up in the “excitement” of the past few hours, she’d completely forgotten about Digit. Where was it? Did it miss her, too? Did computers exist in this world? She wished she could ask anyone if they’d seen it… but instead, the only response she could give was to shake her head.

The cyan thing reached her forelimbs into the cage and yanked April out by holding her between her hooves, then held her upwards. It took her a moment to realise that the cyan thing was hovering in the air. She then let go of April, as if expecting her to fly away… but instead, all April could do was glide downwards at a steep angle and land face-first on top of her former cage, then she stood up on her hind legs. Gosh, that felt good.

“Oh,” the cyan thing said, sounding mildly surprised, then she trotted away without another word.

April didn’t know what to think of the cyan thing - gosh, she wished she knew her name. On one hand, she was willing to free Pokémon she’d never met before… on the other hand, she was willing to abandon them as soon as it was all over. Still… she had shown her compassion, and April needed someone to protect her in this world, and the Budew even moreso.

The Budew seemed to agree. “Do you think we should follow her?” she asked, her voice sounding slightly more confident.

The only response April could give was also the only one she needed to give: she nodded.

Author's Note

Click here to read the commentary for this chapter.

21/Jun/2019: I gave Sassaflash an extra line of dialogue for humour.