#why the fuck does this sound so australian lmao. it wasn't my intention...

[shalegas34]

Smelteon: Origins

“Lydia, get away from the wallaby grass!” a throaty voice sliced through the heat haze.

That was my dad, Sproggo. His voice wasn’t usually throaty; he must have been dehydrated.

“You can’t keep me cooped up inside all day, darl,” my mum yelled back.

“You’re going to start a bushfire.” Dad’s voice was getting fainter as he wormed deeper into the old tin shed. He always seemed to know exactly where mum was, even if he was nowhere near her; he claims it’s because he’s an Espeon and he has special powers, but we think it’s just an abnormally perspicacious sense of smell.

Mum sniffed and held up her tail so it wouldn’t singe the wallaby grass, and continued sorting through the scrap metal stacked in front of her. She loved to bemoan the fact she never asked to become a Flareon, but being caught in a bushfire during evolution kind of precluded any other outcome.

I turned back round to continue my lethargic survey of the steelworks in the distance. School holidays sucked.

My name is Nicky and I am an Eevee. For those of you who don’t know, an Eevee looks like a fox, it’s small and brown and boring, and this part of the bush is completely swamped with them. There’s actually nothing else at my crappy regional school; it’s a miracle the teachers manage to tell any of us apart.

Growing up, most Eevees evolve into one of a number of variants; Flareon and Espeon, my parents, are only a couple of examples. Knowing my luck, I’ll probably catch the once-in-five-year flash floods and become a Vaporeon, then I’ll be instantly vaporised when the sun comes back out.

“Nicky, run time,” mum drawled, lighting a durry with her tail.

“Stop smoking, it’ll give you cancer,” dad yelled, his voice muffled by the walls of whatever contraption he had his head up this time. See, it was definitely the smell.

“Well, not all of us can amuse ourselves playing with toys all day long,” mum replied, taking a deep drag. Dad went back to sulking. She wasn’t wrong.

Mum harnessed me up, then I did her, and we began pulling our barrow-loads of scrap metal towards the steelworks. This is what we did for keeps around here, everyone knew that, including Sproggo – though he liked to fantasise about making his millions from his next great invention.

“So you’ll be done with school soon,” mum started, her breathing steady despite the tonnage of steel laced to her back and her chronic abuse of her lungs. “What are you gonna do next, chook? Take over the family business?”

I just managed to restrain myself from asking, ‘Which one?’ There was a dry thunderstorm forecast for later; we didn’t need to burn down the whole state.

“I want to go to the city,” I wheezed, doing my best to keep up.

Mum’s mouth puckered up in distaste, and she paused to incinerate a cluster of blowflies which had ventured too close to her face.

“You’ll get run over. There’s too many cars in the city,” she sniffed, as if my aunt hadn’t just been flattened by a road train minutes from our house. “Besides, they don’t want people like us out there. No use knowing how to sort scrap or tap a blast furnace in an office, kid.”

I wondered if she was right, if I would be stuck in this Satan’s armpit for the rest of my life.

“I could learn computers.”

“It ain’t the same, chook. Shit happens; you’ve just got to learn to suck it up.”

I furrowed my brow. I couldn’t think of anything particularly shit that had happened recently, because nothing at all ever happened here. Maybe she was referring to my being born.

We pulled up to the eastern entrance of the steelworks. Mum waved to Dazza, the burly Dodrio who manned the boom gates. Nobody ever got past those gates unnoticed.

“G’day Daz,” mum said.

“Hey Lydia,” one of his heads said, and the boom gates flew open.

After weighing and dumping our steel, mum went to collect $21 from the office, puffing on another stinky cigarette. I could picture her counting notes, durry hanging from the corner of her mouth, but unfortunately we could never haul enough scrap to fetch multiple notes.  

“Wanna watch that round the wallaby grass,” one of the blokes called, nodding at mum’s cigarette but looking at her bum. I rolled my eyes, and tried to picture tolerating these vapid inanities for the next fifty years. If I stayed here, I would end up pushing scrap at the steelworks for life.

Mum handed me my share of five bucks and turned me loose for the rest of the day. I decided to crash at my mate Shanny’s place; his uncle was in the habit of brewing bathtub gin and selling it illegally, including to minors.

Shanny lived at the very edge of town, and I’d picked up about six other bored kids from my class by the time I waltzed up to his door.

“Nicky.” Shanny sighed when he saw me. “This is getting out of control. My uncle’s trying to get a proper job, you know, before someone rats him out to the cops.”

In the end, though, he couldn’t turn seven of us away, so we all spent the afternoon getting day drunk in his living room. I wouldn’t have liked to know what we looked like through the window, eight sweaty Eevees draped over the furniture slurring along to Jimmy Barnes in the wrong key.

After the sun had set, someone had the stupid idea to sneak into the steelworks, and because we were drunk, we all agreed enthusiastically. Eevees are brown, we reasoned, so we would blend in with the ground. No fault was found with the plan. We crept up to the eastern fence, waited for Dazza to piss off on a toilet break, then ducked underneath the boom gates.

Liv immediately began to giggle hysterically. Shanny tried in vain to shut her up, and she wasn’t having a bar of it. “Someone go and cut our names into the top of the blast furnace,” she said.

“That’s a sick idea,” her brother Johnno said, as Shanny desperately herded us into the shadow of a workshop. “Not gonna be me though. It’s like five thousand degrees up there.”

It was actually just over a thousand; didn’t anyone pay attention in chemistry?

“Nicky’s mum is a Flareon,” some asshole pointed out.

“So what?” I snapped.

“Nick-y! Nick-y!” It was too late. The inebriated Eevee tide had already raised me off my feet.

“Put me down,” I roared. I was starting to regret all that bathtub gin. The blast furnace was at least thirty metres tall. I was punted onto the stairs leading up the side of the giant cauldron. They only went up the control room; I would have to climb the rest of the way via the maintenance ladder.

“Do it,” Johnno said, fishing a pocket knife out of his fanny pack. I gripped the handle between my teeth and began the garish ascent, wobbling ridiculously on my feet. There was no backing down from a challenge, especially when the drink made me incapable of thinking through a single consequence.

I very almost made it. I’d lodged myself on the chute which chucked iron ore and limestone pellets into the furnace, because the heat was bearable there. I’d etched three names into the rusty metal – mine, Shanny’s, and Liv’s – and was about to start on the next (definitely not Johnno’s), when a shrill warbling from below unnerved me and made me drop the knife. It fell down the chute. Instinctively, I dived after my lost possession, and out of the corner of my eye I watched my mates on the ground scatter, busted by Dazza, as I fell into the blast furnace.

---

“Wh- what is that?”

“I don’t know. I have never seen anything like that before in my life.”

“Is it alive?”

“I don’t know.”

I knew I was dead; nobody could possibly survive falling into a blast furnace. There was a reason they called the coke in there the Dead Man. (I’m actually not sure if that’s the real reason, but it seemed fitting at the time).

I tried to prise open my eyes to take a glimpse at hell, but all I could see was a sort of white haze.

“Nicky?” mum’s voice was shrill. Why was my mum here?

“Mum?” I rasped.

“It’s Nicky!” she shrieked. “Nicky, you bloody idiot. You scared the shit out of me and your father. What happened to you? What’s all that crap on your back? Does it hurt?”

I narrowed my eyes in confusion. Was I still drunk? I could imagine worse things than spending the whole of eternity pissed. At least the squinting helped me bring my vision into focus, and eventually I could make out mum, Dazza, and a gaggle of strangers hovering over me. I wiggled my limbs experimentally. They felt heavy, but otherwise normal.

“I feel fine,” I said.

Two Machoke reached down to grip my legs.

“Oi,” I protested weakly. “Hands off.”

They helped me off my back, and it looked bizarrely like they struggled to do so. Machoke could lift tons of steel, so it was preposterous to suggest a pair of them would have trouble flipping a scrawny Eevee over. Perhaps I had been welded to the side of the furnace.

I averted my eyes to look at my feet and screamed. My fur was short and sandy-coloured, instead of shaggy and brown. A band of shiny metal wound its way round each of my legs. Was this a joke?

“Good one, Shanny,” I yelled at nobody. “Really took the piss there, didn’t you.”

Dazza’s three heads stared at me, concerned. I looked past him and realised the blast furnace had been completely emptied. The tap hole was open, but no molten iron was gushing out as it usually would.

“So, I’m not dead?” I checked, just to make sure.

“I don’t think so, mate,” Dazza said. “I mean, you’re talking and everything.”

“You look like… Just look,” mum said, lighting a cigarette and sucking on it violently while tossing me her pocket mirror.

I sussed out my new appearance. I had acquired a helmet and a shield along my back, of the same metal which adorned my legs. I shook out my ears and they flapped satisfactorily, so my muscles still worked.

“Do you reckon,” Sproggo piped up from the back of the crowd (oh! I hadn’t noticed him there), “this is a new type of evolution?”

“Great, our Nicky is a freak,” mum snapped stressfully. Her eyes darted back towards me. “Sorry, chook, I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Not necessarily,” Sproggo said thoughtfully. He looked like he was enjoying himself. “I mean, nobody’s tried diving into a blast furnace while evolving before, have they? It could be a perfectly natural thing.”

“Nicky is covered with metal,” mum just about shrieked, and Sproggo shrank back into the masses.

“Hey,” I said sheepishly. “At least I won’t die if I get hit by a car now.”

That line might not have been the best call, but three cigarettes later mum had calmed down enough to poke at all my new body parts, checking to see if any of them were sharp.

“The tail packs a punch,” she announced. “But the rest is platy.”

I swished my tail around for good measure as everyone continued to stare at me.

“Cool,” I heard Johnno’s voice mumbling from somewhere behind the front row. So my mates had stuck around too.  

Thereafter, life quickly returned to our trite outback routine, even more suppressive than the heat. Nobody dared try the stunt again in case they got the timing wrong, but the town’s interest had been piqued. I’ve got no doubt more like me will come along eventually.

For now, I have the upper hand in any fight I get into at school, so I’m peachy.