#red leafling | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

knotty-pink-hair · 14 days ago

Text

Logs 14-18… “A Monster with Two Heads” FINAL CHAPTER

I opened my eyes in the morning. Shadows played in my periphery for a moment. Despite being smashed, my kopad vibrated repeatedly on my nightstand. A flood of messages coming through. I clicked my tongue.

This seemed like a bad thing. I mean it had to be. But it didn’t faze me, not really, as I felt certain things would get worse. This was validation.

I fell into habit—out of bed, changed into my suit, hot tea left to steep on the table, which I forgot to drink. I stared at the hull door for a full minute trying to process what I had to do today, the harvest quota, Klark’s absence. I tried checking my kopad on my wrist.

Right. I wasn’t wearing it.

I wrenched the deadbolt open.

Outside, I went around to the front of the ship to observe the repaired patch. At my feet laid broken glass and carbon debris from the cockpit. A small chill gripped my spine. The ground didn’t seem right.

It had rained the other day. The ground was soft and muddy. When I knelt for a closer look, I thought I saw pikmin prints. Dozens. Glowmin did not leave prints so it…I shook my head. It was nothing.

I took Yew with me and went out harvesting. Forty blue pikmin accompanied me. We collected 8 pieces of crimson banquet [watermelon] scattered across an open sand valley. There were numerous giant holes, but each appeared empty. Perhaps these were vacant sandworm holes.

In the distance, something orange caught my attention. I was certain it was Lief, but just as quickly it was gone.

“Be careful out here, Lief,” I whispered.

When we returned to basecamp, Yew whined to be let inside the ship. I opened the hull door for her. I felt a migraine beginning in my eyes. I called the bluemin into the onion. They chittered amongst themselves. Then I was unsure if I had called them at all.

I whistled, and they climbed up the onion legs to the bulb. I went inside to get my ivory ribbon. My chest ached suddenly at the thought of Aster.

I was a mess, a piece of shit, for not sending her a single letter. What good was writing them if she never received them? She probably thought we’d broken up. A period of no communication would evolve into a vacuum.

I exited the ship and then sat down by the pile of glass I’d seen earlier. I busied myself with tying the ribbon around the broken shards. All of this work…this was for Aster. Harvesting, juicing. It was for her, and it was for Koppai. I would send her a letter this week then it’d be alright.

The spool ran out of ribbon. I cursed. I needed a lot more.

I went back into the ship and was surprised to see Zileke. She sat at the kitchen table and drank some red juice. I said hello. She turned and looked at me in disbelief.

“You shouldn’t harvest. Don’t go outside again,” she said to me.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I…”

“Did you read something? We had a bunch of messages coming through this morning, but my kopad is smashed so—”

“Thistle, I read a few things. I sent an emergency message to Axiom. Then all communication went down.”

“Oh shit…a satellite must have been damaged.”

Zileke shook her head. “No, this is internal. Rescue Corps shut down messaging.”

We stared at each other.

“I don’t think they would—that doesn’t make any sense, Zileke.”

“It’s illegal for them to do that. We are not soldiers. We have no training for this.”

“Why would they shut down commun—”

“Shhh,” she growled at me. “Do you hear that?”

I bit my lip in frustration. We listened, but I didn’t notice anything. Yew sat at attention, her ears back. Zileke kept listening, her eyes going back and forth as if tracking a sound.

I walked to the storage room and then came back to the hull carrying an armful of cord. I stood at the door again to listen. Yew whined quietly, and Zileke snapped at her. The dog put her tail between her legs.

“I’ll be outside, Zileke. Just keep the door deadbolted when I’m gone,” I told her.

“How will I know it’s you if someone knocks?” she asked.

“You mean…what like if Lief comes back?”

“If anybody knocks, Thistle. I don’t care who it is.”

Should we fear people out here as well?

“You’ll know it’s me because you’ll hear my voice. Zileke, we’re doing everything we need to. Emergency status means we conserve our juice for ourselves, hunker down, and wait for orders. They’ll repair the satellite and have communication back up soon.”

She glared at me. “You really shouldn’t be outside right now.” I sighed loudly. She said something else and then pointed at the hull door. Why did everything have to be an argument with her?

“You stay inside then, Zileke. Juice the items I drop off for you. Easy. Okay?”

I spent the rest of the evening looping the cord around the onion’s legs. I carefully cut the ribbon with the glass shards and wrapped it around the cord, spacing them in uneven intervals. When I had finished with this, it was dark out and time to set the perimeter motion sensors.

I walked along our basecamp and set the individual sensors systematically. I listened to my boots thudding on the ground, to the echo of my breathing inside my helmet. I was acutely aware of the stress creeping into my torso. I made myself stop and do a few stretches in the starlight.

With my eyes closed and nothing but my soft breathing, I finally did hear it. Clicking. Out in the darkness. Set deep down in the throat, harsh snapping of vocal cords. An unnatural noise that settled just above the threshold of hearing, so faint it seemed more like a thought than a sound.

When I returned to the hull, I deadbolted the door and then stood there with my hands still resting on the lock.

***

All through the hours of the night I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to sleep. Every time I began to drift off, I swore I heard the tinkling of the glass shards as something brushed passed them.

The first few times I got up to look outside. Everything was still, nothing out of place. The onion stood in the starlight like some strange crustation exoskeleton. Eventually I stopped getting up to check as the exhaustion weighed on me.

I thought of Axiom and Vivette. What had Zileke told them? Maybe by tomorrow morning the internal comm system would be restored, and I could send them a message that we were stable and awaiting orders from KoCo Freight.

I played this scene in my head—waking up in the morning, typing out a message to Axiom, checking the kopad feed of voyage logs from my teammates reporting in—accounted for, meeting harvest quota—while also noting shimmering meteorites raining down in the atmosphere. Rescue Corps would proclaim an exploded satellite had disrupted communications, but now they were up and running again. It all made sense to me.

Maybe Zileke had sent for Axiom because Lief was still in the area. She was afraid of him, of course, and wanted him taken care of.

For the next three nights, I stared at the ceiling of my room until something set the perimeter motion sensors off. Each time I took Yew with me and walked along basecamp several times. Glowmin hovered nearby in the trees or sat on our ship. They were perfectly quiet. They only watched us. Yew growled continuously on our walks sometimes indicating at the grass or a boulder. But each careful examination revealed nothing. I dug my fingernails into my hips, piercing until it hurt.

It felt like…something was just out of our field of vision.

On the fourth night, I left the sensors off and sat outside with a machete in my lap, staring at the onion. I no longer knew if I was awake or asleep—for hours I heard the chiming of glass. I felt Aster next to me in bed, turning over in her sleep. She whispered my name.

The next morning, Zileke stood over me. She yelled at me through gritted teeth. Her face was red and tear-streaked. I sat upright and saw the cord around the onion had been partially torn down. The length of it stretched along the ground beyond the ship, and I hurried to my feet. Blood stained the ground in thick drops. At the end of the cord, Yew lay motionless. Zileke wailed and would not follow me.

I knelt beside the dog and saw that someone had wound the cord—the ribbon and glass shards—around her neck over and over until her head was swollen from the pressure, and her eyes bulged from her skull.

***

We sat quietly together in the hull. Zileke’s teeth chattered from how badly she was trembling. She went over the information again.

“Thistle, I ne-never sent a message to the Sentinel. I donnn’t know why you think that…I ne-never said that.” She paused to try and get her teeth chattering under control. Then she continued, “Something bad is happening right now, Thistle. I t-told you that a few days ago that’s why I said not to go out and harvest. But I knew you wouldn’t listen to me.”

I was so unbelievably tired. I couldn’t…I couldn’t remember what she’d told me. It felt like we had spoken weeks ago.

“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.

“Before the comm system went down, I skimmed some voyage logs, maybe a dozen of them. They kept saying the same thing—dead creatures and dead pikmin just lying out in the open. No signs of disease or use of explosives. Nobody knows what’s going on…a few said all there pikmin are gone. These logs were coming from all over PNF-404.” She stopped to catch her breath and then said, “I was trying to wrap my head around what I was reading. It was just…it couldn’t be real. I swear I went back to read it again, and the information was gone. Our voyage logs are our testimony to safe working conditions, and someone was in there deleting data!”

“Zileke—”

“Something is out there killing anything it runs in to. Maybe it’s a castaway or a leafling? Who else could tie a cord around…you need hands to do that. You need a higher intelligence to do that.” The life drained from her face at the mention of Yew. She stared at the floor, unblinking.

“Zileke, it’s not a person who is doing this.”

She paused, and then responded, “It’s not…the red pikmin though. Axiom euthanized the infected one. You burned the red onion. They’re all dead.”

“They’re not pikmin, Zileke. They only look like pikmin.” I stood up then. I swayed a moment from being lightheaded. “Stay inside the ship. Deadbolt the door behind me.” I took her kopad from her and fastened it around my wrist.

Zileke did not argue with me, but she asked me to help her move Yew’s body into the freezer so that nothing would tamper with it outside.

***

In an hour the sun would set. I had set out to gather grasses, branches, any kindling I could find in the sand dunes. Even after hours of scavenging, I had so little to burn. I would need so much more.

In my desperation I turned to the onion and called out purple pikmin since this breed could carry the heaviest loads. A jumble of pikmin poured out—not the number or the breed I had specified—there were about fifty of them standing at attention.

My heart pounded in my chest. I instinctually sensed the danger before me though I couldn’t tell by looking which were the copycats. Even the pikmin were fooled—I knew this. A memory came back to me in this moment, of feeling something wrong, of reaching out and pulling Sock from the squad of pikmin. My fingers wrapped around his stem, and I lifted him up. Looking into his face, I no longer recognized him.

I whistled to the pikmin for an hour, and they complied carrying all manner of debris and waste to a burn pile I’d set on the bare sand. As they built up the pyre, I returned to the ship and syphoned oil from the fuel reserves.

By this time, the darkness had fallen. I took a torch and set to lighting the pyre on all sides. The presence of fire alarmed the pikmin. They backed away a few paces but then cried again for being in the dark. They divided themselves into several groups, held each other’s arms. I took out my machete and stared at them from the other side of the growing fire.

As they moved around, I realized some of the pikmins’ eyes reflected red in the light of the fire and the light of the stars. Tapetum lucidum…a biological trait for nocturnal activity…completely foreign to all pikmin but glow pikmin…

I approached one of the groups. They were an undulating mass of terrified whimpers and panicked eyes snapping left, right, and all around. This is what the nighttime meant to them—total annihilation.

In a surge of hysteria, a rockmin shoved a whitemin out of the group. I shot my hand out and grabbed it by its stem. Walking a few paces away, I held the whitemin up to the sky. It pulled its limbs into a fetal position—the eyes did not reflect in the starlight. I repeated this sequence four times before I held up a bluemin, and its eyes flashed red at me. Just like any other nighttime creature that had set out on a bloodlust under the light of the night’s stars.

“You’re clever, aren’t you? You know I’m figuring you out,” I said.

The bluemin cried and bucked in my hands, but I did not let go. I took the machete and raised it to the bluemin’s neck. It put its arms up, scared out of its mind, and I felt a rush of nausea hit my stomach. It was the same feeling I’d had when Axiom plunged the needle into Sock’s shoulder.

I dropped the bluemin to the ground, stomped my boot over its abdomen, and drove the blade into its neck. The bluemin released a piercing screech. The pikmin behind me wailed in terror and scattered in all directions even running blindly into the dark. Two ran into the fire and ignited themselves. As the bluemin’s body went still—reduced to twitches—I heard a series of deep clicks emanating from its throat.

Furious, I tapped on my kopad and called over our conglomerate onion. It took a moment to appear in the sky, hovering with its legs tapping the sand for purchase.

“You mean to…burn it?” a voice asked.

I jumped out of my skin. “Huh—my god!” I gasped.

A few paces away the orange leafling stood with his eyes locked on me. One of the pikmin that had run into the fire fell before him and died, but he did not look at it.

“Lief!” I shrieked.

“That is what I am to be called,” he replied.

“You know some of them are not pikmin! I know you understand this!”

Lief studied me a moment. “They appear as such, but they are something else…entirely. Will you cull them from the herd?”

The surrounding area brightened as a mob of glow pikmin appeared out of thin air. They positioned themselves like a net strung up in the sky.

“We must destroy them, Lief! Humans need the pikmin to survive. Our planet will—everyone on Koppai will starve to death without the pikmin to harvest food. Yes—yes, I will kill these things, these doppelgangers. They threaten our very existence. And…they have done the most unthinkable crime…they have slaughtered real pikmin. Our friends. Our saviors.” I gripped the machete in my hand. “These imposters will all burn.”

I inhaled so strongly I felt my head ache, and I blared on my whistle a long and painful note. The panicking pikmin halted, some tumbling down, some jumping up in shock—they jerked to attention and looked at me.

“We…understand your rage. It ebbs and flows through the currents of our mycelium. The presence of these invaders…is…unnatural across all planes.” Lief said. “They are…an unknown variable in this dimension. A hallucination from the ether.”

The pikmin—the real ones—submitted to my whistle commands even though they shivered with dread. The imposters stayed where they were and refused to come forward. Above us, the net of glowmin had begun to chitter in unrestrained hostility. I watched as a yellowmin turned to look up at the glowmin, and a vertical slit opened in its head revealing pointed teeth. Air sacs inflated on either side of its neck, and it let out a series of clicks.

The glowmin formed chains and then dropped themselves along the ground like fence lines to cut off any escape. Lief, raising his arms, somehow orchestrated the glowmins’ movements using no whistle commands.

I drew my blade and went forward into the fray with nothing but a raw frenzy guiding my movements. Even the blood that leaked from their wounds was a foreign shade of red. I slashed at them to end their clicking—so terrible and loud it was reverberating in my skull! Blood dripped from my nose in black droplets.

When I looked down at my arms—exhaustion threatening to collapse me—I saw within my arms the bones white and glowing.

***

Was it electricity that ran through my body setting fire to my neural system? My soul moved through thickened liquid concrete, pushing at my skin as if it was trying to breathe.

I closed my eyes. This was unreality.

Everything would be better after we landed, I thought. Just like they told us in training. Space travel is liminal.

I sat alone in the hull, the last of the field workers to be dropped off. Though I wouldn’t be harvesting. I was to be a security officer.

My skin prickled. I tightened my hand around the handle of my machete…no…I squeezed my safety harness. In a moment, the pilot appeared in the hull. I raised my eyebrows in surprise.

He said what he was about to tell me wouldn’t make much sense. Our ship had passed through an electric field, which damaged the Chronos Reactor.

“What is that?” I asked him.

“It…well it’s one of those pieces of new age technology that isn’t fully understood yet,” he laughed. “The reactor warps time and space to create energy for our ships so we can travel at hyper speed. There’s more to it than that…it makes an impossible mode of existence reality. Anyway, we need to turn around and get it fixed.” He paused. “Your nose is bleeding, did you know that?”

0 notes

olistar255 · 1 year ago

Note

What do you think Leaflings are capable of? they seem to be fine if left underwater, would that be a gameplay thing, or could some perhaps have bits of Blue Pikmin in them? would that imply other hybrids are possible? wings? the White Sage was there for Ages apparently? wonder if they have an extended lifespan? also some have 4 eyes?

Thank you for the questions!! i always appreciate some Pikmin discussion

So… leaflings are a weird case in the Pikmin ecology. As far as i know, they are the only case where what the Onion absorbs directly influences what comes out (which was even already the case in Pikmin 1). We already know Onions' offsprings get influenced by environment and, through evolution, by the DNA of what it absorbs, but leaflings are unique in that Onions doesn't really decompose/recompose the creature, but rather simply attaches Pikmin attributes to the host, rejuvenating them and usually bringing them back from the brink of death.. which is very important.

I believe what sets the leafling apart is that all the people leafified weren't corpses yet, but either in deep sleep, comatose or about to die. Because the Onion may be too weak to decompose still-living creatures (hence why the Pikmin need to kill them first), it skips that phase but still implants the Pikmin seed/Hermikmin in them before spitting them out. I would even assume this was the same process that birthed Ice Pikmin, Rock Pikmin, and Bulbmins.

Now what does this mean for what leaflings are and are capable of? Well, the logical conclusion is that the leafified person gains Pikmin abilities along with the physical attributes; as seen ingame, the most important one being the ability to breathe PNF-404's air, and like you pointed out also being able to go underwater with no helmet (for the sake of discussion i'll just assume it's a real trait and not just the devs not caring about putting dandori challenges underwater :p)

The idea of leaflings receiving different attributes depending on which Onion transforms them is awesome (and would make for a ton of awesome OC concepts) but i do think those abilities would be limited because the Pikminification is limited. In my opinion, realistically the ability to breathe underwater would just be limited to the blue Hermikmin somewhat adapting the lungs of the host to underwater breathing (more on that later) while the leaves allow air breathing through their stomata. In a similar vein, i assume red leafification would allow for limited resistance to fire because the leaves would somewhat protect the skin, etc.

Not getting the full extent of the Pikmin abilities come with the perk of keeping most of your cognitive abilities (even if you do become dandori-obsessed) and the possibility of reversing the process with glow sap-based medicine.

Now i want to bring up the relationship between leaflings and time. We only have 2 samples of specimen who have been leafified for a while by the time we find them, Olimar and the Sage leaf, so the following more or less will be on the conjectural side.

First the most obvious part is how these two are much more coherent than recent leaflings; and while we don't have a ton of dialogue for the Sage leaf, we see how he's aware of concepts like pupils, leaving, the outside world, etc., while Olimar suppresses anything unrelated to dandori until we defeat him, so i think it's fair to assume a proportional correlation between time passing and the Pikminification brainrot ceasing.

Secondly - and this is harder to prove given the small sample size -, the older leaflings look closer to normal people than the recent ones, who all have the same body type with freaky eyes.

My theory is that because the Onion's attempt at turning a person fully into a Pikmin fails, those Pikminification effects (simple mindedness, modified organs like the eyes or the lungs) simply wither away with time, with only the beneficial effects sticking with the host: the leaves covering their body.

This is pretty much all i can think about when looking at the leaflings. In short they're a hybrid between a person and a Pikmin, down to how they think. I do wonder, though... Are they truly the result of the Onion failing to do its task completely, or is there some conscious decision behind them? Can the Onion choose to refuse to digest a creature, maybe even because they care about their wellbeing? or are the leaflings a result of strategic evolution? After all, their obsession with dandori is very beneficial for the Pikmin; what's the first rule of dandori any leafling will remind you of when you start a challenge? "Gather and make as many Pikmin as possible..."

#pikmin 4 #pikmin 4 spoilers #leafling #theory crafting

91 notes · View notes