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Pikmin, generally, did not handle rain very well.
Wild Pikmin even less so, considering they didn’t have their own Onion to return to when the weather turned foul.
It’s the complete shuttering of productivity that made it difficult to manage. No more surfacing from caves and darting to another entrance, no more scouring the overworld for leaflings looking for little guys to play their Dandori games with, no more fun.
Just sitting and waiting for the weather to pass.
A Red, a Blue, and a Yellow sat beneath the great sloping leaves of an enormous bush on the surface of the Sun-Speckled Terrace. The wind tried to encroach upon their little patch of dry shelter they’d accrued through panicked searching. The black clouds had made them uneasy, moreso when the spitting started and the water started to get on their leaves, blocking their breathing, suffocating them—
The fauna of the planet shivered quietly.
An uneasy truce settled across the terrace, from Burrowing Snagrets staying in the earth and popping their heads into some caves, to Fiery Blowhogs hiding under upturned terracotta pots and trying to keep warm.
No fighting. Just waiting.
The Red Pikmin seemed very pre-occupied with a burning pinecone. He heard that they were all the rage over in the Giant’s Hearth. Gossip spread fast in Pikmin colonies. Excited ramblings about the Rescue Corps - or, to the Pikmin, the Silly Whistle Aliens - were abundant, although Wild Pikmin were perfectly fine without a leader unlike their Onion-bound counterparts that often needed the protection and organisation to propagate.
Still. They talked. When they crossed paths, that is.
Occasionally, an idling Onion-bound Pikmin would swap well wishes with a Wild Pikmin before being whistled away.
In any case, the pinecone kept him warm, even if he knew the flame would be fleeting. He curled up by it. Hungry. The sun had been hiding for the entire day behind ominous clouds, so he hadn’t had a chance to get any energy. And he was too busy keeping an eye out for shelter to focus on finding any nectar.
The Yellow Pikmin sat on the edge of the shelter, the occasional raindrop smacking her across the face and reminding her to shuffle back a little. She had a shard of broken glass held in front of her eye, a gift from the Blue who we’ll get to momentarily. The Yellow watched the world magnify through the convex surface of the glass, the edges softened by years of erosion for ease of holding.
She could see Wolpoles clearly enjoying the weather, jumping up in a futile attempt to hunt some Spectralids that were patiently waiting out the worst of weather. She liked seeing things and then gossiping about them. Interesting contraptions a hundred times her size were especially prized parts of her gossip, sparking and alluring in their mammoth proportions, some of which she saw on the horizon. And she could see the clouds thickening in the distance.
And she could see the Blue Pikmin.
The Blue was having a stressful time.
It’s a harsh world out on PNF-404. Even when you’re a Blue in the rain, feeling the delightfully refreshing rush of rainwater against you as you darted about from landmark to landmark, the sheer harshness can feel crushing. It didn’t help being a species predicated on collaboration - companionship, and especially companionship that requires a lot of compromise (no, Yellow, not everyone wants to investigate the frayed wires over outside the Hero’s Hideaway, so stop asking).
But Blue knew that the other two Wild Pikmin he’d found himself with were struggling. And from little guy to little guy, he knew that there was an easy response to that.
A honeywisp. Or, to Pikmin, a very nice pick-me-up stolen away.
Blue scrambled onto a shelf of rock to try and get a better angle. The blasted thing seemed to be drifting just conveniently out of leaping range that it made the tip of his leaf quiver with frustration. Or perhaps that was just a particularly large drop of rain hitting it.
It lolled through the air, drifting a little closer.
Just a little closer…
A leap of faith.
Pikmin are exceptionally good at soaring through the air, but are equally very good friends with gravity, who tries to be gentle with them even as they face plant into the ground.
Blue noticed the full-body shudder before he noticed the mud. He lay there, a little contemplative of how his life came to be this way. A little guy in the mud. No nectar. Poor aim. Perhaps those Whistle Aliens were good for something after all.
The rain felt soft and amicable on his back. Large drops. Pikmin didn’t often dwell on the whys of the world, and the hows, and the what ifs, but this Blue was an existentialist at heart, somewhere beneath all the nectar-craving and love he had for his fellow little guys.
And one such “why” of the world was this: why had the rain suddenly stopped?
Blue blinked.
It still purred into the grass around him. A gentle lullaby for a Blue, a hissing siren for anyone else. But he didn’t feel it on him anymore.
Yellow and Red huddled together under a piece of sea glass. This was a concerning combination to go unsupervised - an arsonist and a bomb-enthusiast.
They marched over to him, their little feet pitter-pattering through the wet grass. Red picked him up and apologised when a stray flame from the pinecone caught Blue’s hand.
Blue pointed at the honeywisp, who was enjoying the night and blithering sounds that the Pikmin could make no sense of.
They all blinked. It was in friendly unison.
The honeywisp was gone. The nectar too, which stung a lot more.
Yellow pulled on the Blue’s hand and gestured towards the leaves they had stayed under. The Blue, in turn, gestured towards the spot where the honeywisp had seemingly evaporated from this plain of existence.
Pikmin communication is extremely advanced if unspoken, so here is the long and short it:
“Let’s go home, Blue. This glass is heavy.”
“…But… But nectar…”
“Nectar can wait. It’ll clear up soon.”
[Translator’s Note: this is omitting many little hand signals, well-timed blinks, and sounds that literally cannot be transcribed beyond “atatata”, “beekmeen”, and “lookie”.]
This was about as far as the conversation could go before Yellow dragged him off, with Red doing his best to keep his pinecone from burning them all under such a small makeshift umbrella.
And when they got back under the dry sanctuary of the thickets, Yellow and Red made a promise that they would never go out in the rain again. Cross their little Pikmin hearts.
Although they really hoped they got to the nectar first when the rain finally stopped.