Absol Before the Rain

When Absol blocks the mountain road, the village sees another bad sign. Neri notices a new spring, frightened Deerling, and a warning that deserves to be heard.

9 min read · Rescue · October 4, 2026

The fourteenth fence post

Neri counted the fence posts because she had nothing else to count on the way to school. Thirteen stood straight, and the fourteenth leaned toward the road. Yesterday it had leaned away. She stopped beside it, holding her satchel under her mustard coat against the drizzle. At the bend ahead, Absol stood across the path. Its white fur looked almost luminous against the wet rock. Neri had never seen it so close to the village before.

Absol lowered its head when she approached, then stepped between her and the bend. Neri tried the grassy edge. Absol moved there too. She was not frightened exactly, but she disliked being told where she could go by something that did not explain. A cart rattled up behind her. Its driver shouted, and Absol retreated three steps without leaving the road. The driver grumbled about ill luck, turned the cart around, and told Neri to take the upper path.

By lunch, everyone had heard that Absol was guarding the bend. The baker connected it to his collapsed awning. A farmer mentioned two missing hens. Someone remembered a cracked chimney from the previous spring, although nobody agreed whether Absol had been nearby then. Each account made the next more convincing. Neri listened from the school doorway. The leaning fence post seemed too small to add to this collection of misfortunes, so she kept it to herself.

After lessons, she took the upper path home. Deerling gathered along the old quarry wall, a place they usually avoided because there was little grass. Several looked toward the lower meadow. Neri followed their gaze. Between the meadow stones, a brown trickle was running where no stream had flowed in summer. It vanished beneath a patch of flattened grass, then emerged beside the leaning fence. Absol stood above it, facing the hillside rather than the village.

Rain began to fall harder. Altaria crossed the slope low, its cloudlike wings darkened by damp air. It circled above the new trickle and landed on a sturdy rock uphill. The Deerling moved closer to it. Neri remembered how the fourteenth post had changed its lean. She looked at the next two posts. A narrow line of earth had opened behind them, easy to mistake for the mark of a cart wheel. It continued across ground no cart could reach.

Absol turned and gave one sharp call. Neri stepped back from the fence. It did not follow her. Instead, it climbed toward the quarry wall and waited beside the Deerling. Neri could still hear the villagers calling it bad luck in her mind. But a bad sign was something you noticed before a problem. That did not mean the sign made the problem happen. She tightened her coat, returned by the upper path, and went straight to the home of Ada, the village path keeper.

What the hillside was saying

Ada was mending a strap on her work bag. Neri described the post first, then the brown spring, the earth line, and the Deerling. Only after all that did she mention Absol. Ada put down the strap. She had spent the morning repairing a culvert on the other side of the village and had not visited the lower road. She asked Neri whether the trickle had been clear or muddy. Neri said it looked like thin soup. Ada took her rain cape from its peg.

They did not approach the new crack. From the upper path, Ada could see enough. The hillside had been soaked by days of rain, and the ground above the road was changing in several places at once. A low wall bulged where it had stood straight last week. Water carried grit through a gap beneath it. Ada's expression grew very still. Neri had hoped to hear that the fence only needed straightening. Instead, Ada turned toward the village bell.

The council had an evacuation plan for fires, winter storms, and trouble on the mountain road. Nobody enjoyed practicing it. This afternoon, the plan finally had something to do. Ada asked the baker to ring the warning bell and told the cart driver to bring his wagon to the upper square. The lower houses needed to empty before evening. People argued because dinner was cooking, rain was falling, and leaving a warm room for a wet meadow seemed like choosing discomfort unnecessarily.

The driver said this was all because of Absol. Ada answered that it was because the hillside was moving. She pointed out the new spring and the crooked wall from a safe distance. Neri expected her to speak about trusting Pokémon, but Ada spoke about water, ground, and the lower road instead. The argument changed. People could disagree about luck forever. They could see that the wall had shifted. Soon the wagon filled with blankets, baskets, and a very annoyed kettle.

Neri helped carry the school attendance board to the upper square. The teacher used it to check who had arrived from each house. Families brought what they could carry without returning for more. The missing hens appeared in a covered basket, recovered that morning from the smith's shed. This detail should have been funny, but Neri could not quite laugh yet. Absol moved along the edge of the evacuation route, waiting at each fork until the last footsteps passed.

Altaria flew between the village and the high meadow, showing the route to people who had rarely used it. The Deerling went ahead, no longer pressed against the quarry wall. Neri watched one small Deerling hesitate beside a puddle, then follow its companions uphill. She understood the hesitation. The familiar lower road was shorter. Every ordinary habit tugged toward it. Absol stood across the old turn, patient under the rain, while the village learned to take the longer way.

After the last wagon

The high meadow had a shepherd's shelter and a long stone wall. It did not have enough seats, enough dry corners, or any good place to put the annoyed kettle. The baker made room for it anyway and began heating water over the shelter stove. People spread blankets, counted family members again, and looked toward the slope they could no longer see clearly. Neri stood near the wall with Ada. The rain made every distant sound seem closer than it was.

A scrape traveled across the valley. Then came a deep rush, as though a river had appeared inside the hill. Nobody moved for a moment. Through the rain, the lower road vanished beneath a broad brown flow of earth and broken stone. The hillside slumped rather than exploding, which somehow made it worse to watch. A section of wall tipped sideways and disappeared. Where the cart driver had stopped that morning, there was now only moving mud.

Neri gripped the top of the stone wall. She imagined being late for school and hurrying past Absol at the bend. Ada covered Neri's hand with her own, then guided her back beneath the shelter roof. There was no need to look longer. The teacher checked the attendance board once more. Every person had reached the meadow. The farmer counted the hens through their basket lid. All the small ordinary confirmations mattered more than the enormous noise below.

Absol stood at the meadow's far edge, watching the valley. Some villagers approached it, but not too closely. The cart driver removed his cap. He began an apology, stopped because he did not know whether Absol would understand the words, and placed a bowl of fresh water on a level stone instead. Absol sniffed it and drank. Neri appreciated that the moment did not become a speech. The hillside had done enough speaking for one evening.

Altaria settled near the shelter, its wings ruffled by rain. Deerling sheltered along the wall where the grass remained firm. People made space for them without being asked. The meadow began to feel less like a place the village had fled to and more like a place everyone was sharing. Neri found her satchel still beneath her coat, its books only slightly damp. She set it beside the attendance board. She would not be doing the arithmetic homework tonight.

The rain eased after midnight. Ada and two experienced villagers checked the safe routes from the high side, leaving everyone else in shelter. No one would return to the lower road until it had been assessed properly. Neri lay under a blanket, listening to the kettle lid rattle. She had imagined courage as stepping forward when others stayed behind. Today, courage had mostly looked like taking a warning seriously, explaining what she had seen, and stepping away while there was still time.

A different sort of sign

Morning brought clean light and a hillside that looked unfamiliar. The slide had damaged the lower road and two empty sheds. Several gardens were gone. The houses on the higher terrace remained standing, but their residents would spend another night away while Ada and the surveyors checked the ground. Relief did not make the work vanish. The village needed a temporary route, new drainage, and somewhere dry for people to stay. The council began writing lists on the back of old festival posters.

Neri went with her teacher to mark the upper trail, staying well clear of the damaged slope. They hung bright cloth at the bends and cleared small branches from the path. At the fork where Absol had stood, the cart driver placed a sturdy sign directing people uphill. He had suggested putting a picture of Absol on it. Ada said an arrow would be more useful in rain. The driver admitted that she was probably right and painted a very large arrow.

Nobody agreed completely about what Absol had known. Some believed it had sensed the danger before any visible change. Others thought it had heard something beneath the ground. Ada did not pretend to have the answer. She knew what Neri had observed and what those observations had helped the village do. That was enough to begin. When people started retelling the story, Neri always included the fence post and the muddy spring, even though they were less dramatic than white fur under a black sky.

Three days later, Neri saw Absol on the ridge. It was no longer blocking a path. Deerling grazed in the meadow below it, and Altaria drifted over the valley in sunshine. Neri raised a hand from the safe upper road. Absol glanced down, then returned its attention to the mountain. She did not climb toward it or call it into the village. A warning did not become a pet simply because someone finally understood it.

At school, the teacher asked everyone to draw something important from the storm. Several children drew the landslide. One drew the wagon overflowing with blankets. Neri drew thirteen straight fence posts and a fourteenth leaning the wrong way. Under the picture, she wrote the day she had noticed it. The teacher pinned it beside the evacuation map. It was an unremarkable drawing from a distance, but closer up you could see that the ordinary pattern had changed.

The temporary upper road became Neri's route to school for the rest of the season. There were more fence posts to count there and fewer puddles. Sometimes Absol appeared high on the slope, and sometimes it did not. Neri kept looking at the path in either case. She noticed where water gathered, where stones loosened, where Deerling chose to stand. The village had asked for a good sign after so much bad weather. It had received one. Now it was learning how to read it.

An original fan-created story by the Poke Fun Play editorial team. Illustrations generated for this adventure.

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