III.
Stopover in Witchpyre
This was a rather uneventful day after all. I have always been told I worry too much. Perhaps it is simply that my travels have so recently become more lonely, and that my nerves were getting the best of me.
I came into Witchpyre some short time before the lunch hour, so most mons were in their homes to dine. The border watch (which seemed rather understaffed, but I suppose they know no one ever comes here anyway) gave me only a brief glance before touching their buckled hats and turning their attentions elsewhere. I suppose there is no cause for even polite attention when the foreigner is a naked foot-tall bird. The stiff necks these townsfolk used to give me in the past must have been due mostly to my old traveling companion. One cannot argue that a Grotle has much more presence than a lowly Pidgey. I find I already miss him. And not only because he made a convenient walking chair, mind you.
My friend's increased size also let us move many more items than I currently can in my little satchel. Luckily, I only have very little to keep track of. Besides these papers and some foodstuffs I only have perhaps a dozen other small objects my friend left with me that he thought might come in handy down the line (lenses, safety goggles, an escape rope, a butane lighter I can't use, and some other things). I have also been carrying a number of nugs on me. Most places on the western continent will take nugs as currency, these being little beads of gold. I find they are the best currency to carry, as anywhere advanced enough for paper money will convert them and anywhere that would still take Berries will generally be bartered with with other items. Of course one has to improvise a touch when one comes to one of those underground places that take gems or if one happens to wind up on one of those islands that takes beans, but I digress.
Witchpyre is a rather self-contained community. It does not have a bazaar district or a market street for travelers to come to. Every one of their shops is its own building, and as far as I have ever been able to tell there is no real basis for their position in the town proper. They are largely mixed in with the residential areas, and I believe most of them double as homes for the shopkeepers. I suppose most of them are rather close to the center of town, where stands a truly magnificent church, complete with old bell and straight steeple. I have heard it said that the building has stood since Witchpyre's founding, although I do not know what exactly that entails, as I would imagine it has had a fair number of revisions to remain as stalwart as it does today. I must admit also that it is actually a rather inspiring piece of architecture when seen on such a clear, bright day. I believe every other time I have seen it, it was pointing its black steeple to a cloud-filled, dim sky.
As quaint as the buildings are, the mons inside them are still rather headstrong about their faith. I had three different mons approach me and attempt to convert me on my way to the grocer! What is perhaps most surprising is that they took my refusal of their advances quite calmly. It was not until I was conversing with the grocer over my purchase of Berries and bread that I fully realized how different Witchpyre seemed. She told me that a new preacher had come to the church under the advice of a traveler. From what I could gather, the preachers for Witchpyre had traditionally been the first sons of Boldo Smith's own bloodline, ever since Boldo Smith himself taught the word of his God back in Witchpyre's first days. Evidently, the late Father Zeltstar Smith the Braixen (the Smith Zoroarks married into a Delphox family or some such) never married and was an only child. With him died the last of Boldo's bloodline. Witchpyre had been on the verge of collapsing, as reliant as it is on its church, when a traveler passing through at the time offered a solution.
Now, Witchpyre would never accept an outsider into such a position, but this traveler, a Toucannon, had a most notable gift with charisma and managed to make her voice heard to the village council. She made a very sound argument that Witchpyre was a relic, and that it was doomed to blow away in Dialga's roar if it did not do something to cement itself in the world. As something other than an infamous pit that executed travelers, of course. I must give credit to the village council for having enough sense to see the truth in such an argument: they decided to find the most amicable mon in Witchpyre and make him or her the new preacher. This ended up being Hunfury Simonson the Mienshao, one of the border watchmons. Hunfury, under advice of the interloping traveler, began to preach a friendlier sort of the gospel. Witchpyre did away with the ducking lines and the witch hunts and the nasty habit of looking down on outsiders.
I expressed surprise that so much could change in only the year-and-a-half it had been since I had last been in Witchpyre and the grocer laughed. Actually laughed! I remember my old traveling companion once seriously asked me if laughing was illegal in Witchpyre. The grocer mistook the reason for my shocked expression and apologized, assuring me she was not belittling me. She was laughing because of the remark I had made: Witchpyre had changed so much not in a year-and-a-half, but in only a couple of months! According to her, Hunfury had only been preaching for ten or eleven weeks! The traveling mon who had inspired this new, friendly community was evidently still in town at the hostel.
I excused myself shortly with my refreshed rations. Glancing about, I was unable to readily see any convenient benches. I decided to take my lunch on the roof of the building across the unpaved street. This was no whimsical decision (perching in Pokétowns can be considered equivalent to shouting in a restaurant sometimes). There was a local perched on the building as well, and the only bird I have seen in Witchpyre garb. He was a Tranquill, evident under his wide buckled hat and buckled cape (I admit I do not often see buckled capes, but it was quite comely on him, if a bit narrow to keep out of his wings). He also had white spats on his legs that complimented his black outfit. I must say that although Witchpyre's fashion can be rather somber, it can also be really quite quaint.
I had thought he had been eating, but he had actually been grooming his faux mustache with his pinions. He gave me a rather unfriendly look as I landed next to him and it was only then that I noticed the watch's mark on his cape buckle. The watch-bird looked me up and down a moment but did not protest my staying. I introduced myself and he gave his name as Conkoo. His icy disposition melted readily when I offered to share some of my lunch with him. He had forgotten to bring something to snack upon for his through-lunch shift and did not want to leave his post to go get something.
Conversation with Conkoo told me that most of Witchpyre's mons took a shift on watch duty in the week, with only the dedicated guards taking multiple shifts in the same week. Conkoo was one such guard along with his wife, who had the night shift on account of her being a Noctowl. They had evidently only come into Witchpyre in the last month under the more welcoming hand of the new preacher, along with a handful of other mons that had managed to stretch the local morphological standard away from solely bipedal mammals. A wider range of resident body types can help a Pokétown feel more welcoming. More influence from this mysterious traveler the grocer had described, surely.
I felt that "Conkoo" seemed very different from the sorts of names other Witchpyre mons had and said as much. "They didn't have you change it to something more appropriate?" I asked.
"They gave me the option," Conkoo explained, "but I opted to keep it since I've been answering to it my whole life." He did, however, accept a surname from the preacher after he and his mate entered into proper marriage at the church. "Michaels. Father Hunfury says there's an angel in the Bible named Michael. I can't really remember much else about it though, I'm still learning to read." My passing knowledge on such things was enough to tell me that Hunfury may have a knack for flowery exaggeration, but I kept it to myself. If Conkoo Michaels's family ends up being a line of aerial watchmons, I suppose the name fits, to a point.
We talked for another hour or so. He explained to me the particulars of a romantic relationship with a nocturnal mon as a diurnal one and I shared an anecdote recounting the last time I had been in Witchpyre with my friend (sans the rough encounter with the night watch at the end). Afterward I said my farewells and flew to the hostel. On the way I was stopped by two more mons who tried to convert me, but I now understood that it was more an invitation to stay in the town and convert gradually than one to convert immediately and then move on. Perhaps one might consider the locals' willingness to completely change tact just because their preacher said to to be a bad thing, a certain weakness of mind, but I find I commend their openness to change after having been bound to their old ways for so very long.
I entered the hostel and bought myself a room, but found myself stopping in the common area, where a Toucannon was perched on a chair near a window. She was covered quite thoroughly in bright, colorful plumes and crests on her wings and legs, quite different from the somber black-and-white garb of the locals, and had an extremely exotic headdress that stretched over her beak, and her beak had a vaguely piscine motif carved into its sides. She was eating some Berries idly out of a bowl, reading out of some book, which l recognized to be a Bible. Not surprising of course. I supposed that this was the traveler the grocer had spoken of. Rather obvious perhaps, but still. Still.
I introduced myself to her, expressing my wonderment at her having managed to impact Witchpyre's community. Especially dressed like a pagan rain-dancer (I did not say as much to her face, of course). She gave her name as what sounded to me like "Sarimanok," although she used it as if it was a title more than a name. I do not remember properly, but I think the word means something is some mythology somewhere. Alas! When one knows so much it grows hard to remember particulars. In any case she gave the impression of being much older than myself, and did not seem nearly as amiable as I felt the grocer had implied. Toucannons always have a sort of posture that gives the impression that you are wasting their precious time with your silly trivialities, but I am rather sure that that is only because of the way their eyes naturally set. With that in mind, I forged ahead in the conversation despite the way she was looking at me.
We discussed Witchpyre's history and old traditions, topics she did not seem as versed in as I would have supposed. I found myself asking her why she should have taken an interest in Witchpyre at all, as it was evident she had not known much about it outside of its unflattering reputation. "Are you Christian yourself?"
She made a rude noise and rolled her eyes. I felt that I might be wasting her precious time with my silly trivialities. "I will leave dogmatic misdirection to the humans, as we all should," she told me.
"Then why are you reading a Bible?" I asked her.
"So that I can more properly convince these mons in a language they know," she answered me. She explained that she was more interested in the Pokétown's willingness to accept others than in the particulars of its spirituality. "I've been reading this thing for a few days now and it is certainly very interesting. Problem with it is that it's old. Older than good sense."
"What do you mean by that?" I asked, unsure of if I was following her point.
"Well it's an old story, and as with most old stories it's open for interpretation. That can be problematic then if some mons read this and think it's telling them to kill the nonbelievers, or some such. Faith is a shield, never a sword, and these mons just needed a little help to see that." She said something to that effect, anyway, I find I cannot quite remember word-for-word everything she said. She had a strange inflection on a lot of her words such that I feel I missed a few words here and there when she talked.
"No offense," I said, "but what should it matter to a traveler if Witchpyre is throwing out ducking lines?"
"The world matters to me, traveler or no," she answered (again, paraphrasing). "We are animals, and that means we should all be together in nature. Just because these animals want to play human doesn't mean they aren't still animals. As long as they can be brought around to the proper way of thinking, they need to join the rest of Mew's children in unity. Otherwise …"
Here she just sort of chuckled and shook her head before abruptly dismissing herself to bed. She insisted on banging her beak against mine in farewell (some Toucannon thing, although I've never had one press it on a non-Toucannon) and took her things up to her own room. There was still some light left in the window, so I sat down to recount the day in writing. I ended up having to ask for a candle: it grew dark about an hour ago.
I suppose I was only nervous, to have worried so much. Truly Witchpyre is moving into a new era. It has made me feel easier about my own "new era" of traveling alone. In the morning I will breakfast here and then set out into the wilderness once more. I think I will go to the eastern coast and make the sea crossing before the winter sets in. I am still some distance from there, however. I believe my next destination in the short term, then, will be Evereeze. I could discuss it further here, but it is late now, and I grow tired. I will write more on it at another time.
Perhaps this whole solo traveling thing will not be so bad, after all.