"You're going to help me with the animals a little bit, little guy." The cowgirl proclaims, looking down at you with a warm smile that seems almost unsettling given your position. Help her with the animals? That doesn't sound too bad. In fact, it sounds more like a chore than anything else. But in your current position, you cannot help but feel a pit in your stomach.
You are being held several body heights off of the ground, the cowgirl's dirty, sweaty fingers clutching firmly against your stomach and back. In front of you is the woman's overalls, a wall of denim bearing the pocket that once held you. Gazing up at her face, you see her glaring down at you with an expression not unlike that of a toddler who is getting ready to play with a particularly interesting toy, mixed with just enough of a hint of malicious mischief for oyu to figure out that you are probably not safe . Intruding rays of light glisten off of her golden blond hair, as well as the golden buttons on her overalls. The cowboy hat on her head would seem purely decorative were it not for the fact that it reminds you of your apparent status as a farm creature.
You twitch around in grip, but that proves to be damn near futile. Her fingers, while bearing some degree of femininity, are coarse from years of work at the farm Her hands have have lifted hay bails the size of a barn, and shoveled manure mounds the size of entire rooms. But these are not the hands of an clumsy, unthinking brute. This woman has doubtless performed several tasks requiring fine motor skills, from fixing farm equipment to planting seeds to wrangling tiny creatures more unruly than yourself. You don't exactly have an informational advantage either. Deprived of tools, allies, or the luxury of thinking beyond your own survival, you are effectively little better off mentally than a mouse. This in contrast to a woman with years of experience at the farm.
The woman chuckles to herself as she carries you towards a large wooden workbench in the corner of the barn. She rounds the bench, arriving at a chair between the wall and the bench, sits down, and sets you down atop the wooden surface. positioned in a corner of the barn. A large black sack that smells of detergent and animal odors rests on the workbench. The sack has a broken strap, likely the reason for its presence. The bench holds a few tools and trinkets on it. A saw bigger than a schoolbus, keys the size of your body, some scissors, a branding iron with a conspicuously small branding tip, a milk bucket, and something resembling an empty egg carton. You approach the sack out of curiosity, only to earn a chuckle from the cowgirl. "I don't think You don't wanna go in there little fella. That's a manure catcher. Clean, but that thing's seen a whole lot of Mudsdale shit in the past."
You gasp at the thought, feeling more than a little embarrassed that you nearly wandered into it, then turn and head towards the very edge of the workbench and look out into the distance. The far end of the stable seems to have a grid of cages, each containing a mass of furless rodents. But as you examine the cages more closely, you realize that the rodents appear to be humans. Tiny humans, exactly like you, confined into crowded cages as if they were mere pets, and not even particularly well cared for ones. You fall onto your bottom, your legs dangling precariously over the edge of the bench, several stories off the floor. You sit there, your gaze transfixed upon your caged peers. A few of them gaze back, some looking at you and shouting incoherent warnings, some with simple curiosity, others looking on with beleaguered indifference.
Before you can try to communicate with them, you are met with the sounds of a flurry of footfalls coming from two directions. One of the sets of footfalls arrives at the bench, and you look down to catch a glimpse of the rushing maw of a Herdier, looking to snag your feet and pull you down to the ground below. You scream and scoot back, just narrowly avoiding his seizing fangs. The Herdier's pops bursts into view above the bench, his forepaws smashing down its edges and his face turning to glare at you. A Boltund soon follows, prancing over in front of the bench and prancing around, letting out energetic pants as loud as roars, the creature like a kettle of play-energy ready to boil over at any moment. You scamper back towards the middle of the table in a panic, your nerves only calming when the cowgirl finally orders them to calm down.
"Ok boys and girls, that's enough. This here little feller's kinda dumb. Cut him some slack...." the two dogs begin to whine in response to her chiding. She sighs. "...but if he done jumps off the thing, shore, feel free to rip him a new one," She says, completing her sentence with a chilling suggestion. She then turns her attention to you. "Now oyou behave. I got to get some stuff." She says, before getting up and storming off.
The two canine Pokemon patrol the table, each clearly ready to devour you should you show any signs of fleeing. With no way to escape, you simply wait for her to return. And return she does. She quickly sets three things down onto the tabletop, one after the other. An apple, a teaspoon sized container full of honey, or at least something resembling it, and, most ominously, a syringe. You briefly inspect the syringe, wondering if she's going to jab you with its tip... only to find that the syringe does not have a needle tip. Rather, its tip resembles that of a pen with its metal tip retracted. Before you can analyze the pen in any detail, you are interrupted by the cowgirl noisily clearing her throat. She then points her pointer finger down at the honey cup . "Drink up. It's good stuff" She says.
You look up at her nervously. Honey by itself isn't bad... but can you really trust her? She has an entire town's worth of people locked up in cages, and is evidently willing to feed you to her dogs if you try to escape. What could she possibly be planning?
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