YOUR QUERY: fantastical, zone 1
2 RECORD(S) FOUND
…NOW ACCESSING 1 of 2…
LAST MODIFIED: 10 yr(s), 136 day(s), 2 hr(s) ago
On the outside, Deanne was just like all the other little girls. She played on the swings and ran in the rain, made crowns out of paper and had always wanted to ride a unicorn. The neighbors called her sweet while her mother laughed modestly, prompting Deanne's little brother to stuck out his tongue and proclaim Deanne was just annoying. Deanne would smile, then give him a hard jab in the ribs when the adults weren't looking. After that, it'd be back to being a princess or mage or lion tamer –whichever role best suited the moment.
And for a while, Deanne really was like any other little, albeit imaginative, girl. That changed when she started seeing the monsters.
They'd come at night -always at night- creeping into her head as she snuggled below the bedcovers. There was no telling which ones would find her first, or what they'd look like. The monsters could wear a variety of sizes and shapes and a rainbow's worth of color. Some scampered in on padded feet or clattering claws, beady eyes gleaming eerily. Others swept down from the darkness above, wings of leather, feathers, and finely-veined gauze fluttering. Still more wriggled over on bellies of scales and stone, while their companions swan in through cold, black channels.
Deanne had never seen anything as fascinating as the monsters. She peeked into her neighbor's yards and scouted out the local park, even asked her apathetic mother if the monsters came to her, too. When it became clear that the monsters didn't exist in Deanne's world, she decided to remedy the situation herself by bringing them into it herself.
So she drew. She sketched and dabbed and chewed her markers until she'd successfully reproduced the likeness of the monsters she remembered best in her favorite notebook. Her little brother soon became interested as well. He wanted to know about the monster with a lightning bolt for a tail, or the round pink one with the enormous eyes. Deanne would bite her lip and cross her eyes. She didn't know where the monsters came from, or why they only came to her. All she knew was that she had to keep on drawing, lest she forget them.
And then the man in the mask came.
He didn't find his way into her dreams like the monsters did. He didn't even show up at her house. He walked up to Deanne in the park, while she was sketching a picture in the sand. This time, it was a lizard-like monster with flat, sharply defined wings. Its bulging, lifelike eyes seemed to bore into the girl, as if loftily granting its approval of her rendition. In her head, Deanne could even picture the monster springing up from the sand and sailing away with a buzzing hum.
"You're very good at drawing those," a man's voice came suddenly.
Deanne looked up and nearly dropped her stick in surprise. It was very strange to see an adult wearing a mask. And his was a bizarre-looking one at that: light lavender and shaped like the face of a cat, with two holes for eyes, but none for a mouth. Nervously, she tightened her grip and tried not to stare.
The man in the mask walked around the sand box, cocking his head as if to get a better angle of the sketch. He chuckled a little. The sound was distorted by his mask, making it sound more like a low grumble. "You must have spent days copying pictures."
"I didn't copy it from a picture," Deanne told him earnestly. "It came to me."
"It…came…?" It was clear that the man hadn't been expecting Deanne's answer. Suddenly, his voice took on a steely edge. "Where did it come from?"
"My head," Deanne replied uneasily. "The monsters come at night, when I'm sleeping. I try to remember them all so I can draw them, only there're too many for me to keep track of."
"386," the man in the mask whispered, shaking visibly from head to toe. "386 and counting." Taking a sharp breath, he forced his limbs to steady. "Would you like to know a secret about the monsters, little girl?" he asked.
Deanne nodded eagerly, her momentary nervousness fading. "I want to know everything about them!"
"First, you must draw more monsters," the man commanded. "Draw me as many as you can remember."
Deanne obeyed. She maneuvered the stick through the sand until it was reduced to a blunt stub. All the while, the man in the mask paced around her, scrutinizing her drawings and muttering to himself. When the sun began to disappear over the horizon, he held up a hand.
"Good," he said. "Come back tomorrow and draw the rest."
So Deanne did. She returned to the sandbox at the same time everyday for a long, long time. Each time the man in the mask would be there to circle and grunt and mumble, and each time he'd ask her to come back and finish drawing the monsters that she hadn't been able to do.
"Where do you go everyday, sis?" Deanne's little brother asked her one day. "What are you doing that's so important?"
"I'll tell you," Deanne answered, not wanting him to interfere, "when I'm done."
Finally, there came the day when Deanne felt she'd drawn about all the monsters she could. She was a little afraid of disappointing the man in the mask; he seemed like he needed something to pace around and grumble about to keep him happy. And if he didn't leave happily, then he might never tell her the secret that he had originally promised.
Reluctantly, Deanne let her curious little brother tag along as she racked her brains for what to do. Perhaps it'd just be best to tell him the truth: she couldn't draw him any more monsters, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Snow was falling when Deanne and her brother arrived at the park. The man in the mask was already there, hands bunched up under his cloak and body practically twitching with impatience or chill; it was hard to tell which.
"So you're sis's friend," Deanne's brother said, brazenly walking up to the man in the mask. "You look kinda cold, mister."
The man in the mask ignored him. Instead, he nodded to Deanne, urging her to start.
Feeling trapped, Deanne bent down over the snow. She shivered a little as the winter wind swept past, blowing a handful of white flakes into her face. Extending her index finger, then setting it into the blanket of snow before her, Deanne paused…
…then began to draw.
As the sketch began to take shape, the man in the mask didn't pace or mumble. This time, he seemed frozen in place. And while his uncharacteristic silence stretched longer and longer, his eyes grew wider and wider behind his mask.
"That…that monster came to you in a dream, too?" he asked in a deathly quiet voice.
Deanne nodded, feeling sick to her stomach. "Y-yes," she admitted, sitting back in the snow. "But it…it told me you might be mad if I drew it for you. I…I didn't…"
"Sis, you wanna go home now?" Deanne's little brother called from where he was making a snowman at the edge of the street. "My nose is getting cold, and I think it's gonna fall off!"
Silently, the man in the mask bent forward. Deanne stiffened as he clamped one hand over her shoulder, fingers digging in so tightly that she was afraid he might rip her arm right out of its socket. She wrenched her head around to tell him it hurt…but screamed instead when she saw a silver blade flashing underneath his cloak.
"Sis! Sis!" her brother yelled. A sprinkling of ice crystals grazed Deanne's face as a tightly-packed snowball slammed into the man's shoulder. Scooping up another batch of snow, Deanne's little brother ran forward. "Let my sis go!" he shouted, face red with both anger and fear.
One hand still gripping Deanne's shoulder, the man stepped forward, dragging Deanne along with him. His spare hand shot out, catching his young attacker's wrist before he could even throw the snowball. In one motion, he twisted the boy's arm back and flung him into the icy street –right into the path of an oncoming truck.
"Do you still want to know the secret, little girl?" the man in the mask hissed, forcing Deanne to her knees. Eyes filling with panicked tears, the girl struggled to squirm away.
"Watch out!" came the inevitable shriek. There was a screech of tires, then a blur of color, as the vehicle failed to gain enough traction on the slippery surface. And, suddenly, the thud, the snap, the child's fading scream, and that flicker of silvery metal above her throat were all gone. There was nothing left except for a blinding, blinding red.
The snow kept on drifting down, sighing as it gently covered everything below.
Notes: 386 is the number I found on Serebii, and that only takes into account up to Ruby/Sapphire. The number keeps on growing...