The Mothmon Travel Guide
Everyone has a weird cousin, Mothmon comes to realize that he is the weird cousin; what kind of cryptid prefers bright sunny beaches?
Author's Notes
This chapter is still a WIP but I wanted to post it anyhow.
September Seventeenth
Red eyes.
Two pairs of them.
They glint in the canopy. They blink. The figures hunch over, waiting. Not so far below a young doe-eyed girl links her arm with a rather lanky freckle-speckled boy. The canopy shifts.
“Shelton.” She whispers with a pointed glance at the treeline. It is vacant. “Shel...”
“We’re fine.” He insists for the twelfth time. “We’re fine.” Thirteenth. And he can say it thirteen more times and it won’t ring any truer. They have long since left the manmade paths behind, swapping trail markers for the odd tree or the strange stump. This far into the night, a strange tree stump is jarringly uniformed.
“Where’s the tent?”
“It’s...uh...that way.” He says with a shaky laugh and a shakier smile. His extended finger directs her opposite the campground. Directs her much further into the forest where the maples grow with a deeper density.
The creatures know this. They know it well. It is the same tired spiel week after week. He knows that the girl will go tense before her legs even lock up. He knows that she will lament about how they should have paid the extra dollar for a map. Not that they could read it without the flashlight they’d dropped some miles back.
He sighs and spreads his wings.
Twin shadows befalls them.
“Sh-shelt…”
On the seventeenth of September, year twenty-o-eight, two names appear in the Point Pleasant newspaper; Lara Muritin and Shelton Harewell, a promising young couple just shy of high school graduation.
His glasses were found near a rusty old TNT factory.
.oOo.
The palm fronds rustle and wave, he can’t imagine why any soul in the world would choose the musky drabness of maple forests over the vivid bursts of color that only a jungle can offer. He finds that a dusting of stars viewed between swaying palms has more fulfillment than looking up only to find a thick and impenetrable cloud of leaves. He supposes that those are good for concealing and hiding, for swooping and spooking. But he has never been the stalking, creeping sort. Not like his cousin.
His cousin insists that there isn’t a place better than the mist-shrouded, thin-limbed forest of the TNT area and no better beach than the Point Pleasant Riverfont Park. Mothmon vehemently disagrees. Especially now that he has traded the chirping of tree frogs is a fair swap for spring peepers. And the incessant hoots of an owl for the crooning of potoos and nightjars. Certainly he doesn’t miss being mistaken for a really big, mutant owl.
If that’s the life his cousin wants then he will leave him to it. But he will take the lovely and fresh fragrance of blue mahoe and yellow passionflower over the stale chemical laced air of the TNT factory any day.