Chapter Text
The events that have allowed me to write another entry in this log, past the point of my life support’s failure, are nothing short of incredible. They were also frightening, painful, and confusing, but incredible nonetheless.
With the Dolphin as repaired as I could manage, when the time came to escape the surface, I prepared to break through the planet’s atmosphere. Something went wrong, but it went by so quickly that I didn’t really process what happened. There was turbulence, smoke, a burst of wind when part of the hull came open, and then I could feel for sure that I was falling. Making impact with the ground was… indescribable. I remember a moment of hot, agonizing pain, tearing and cracking from the ship, my suit, and the body within, and then it all goes blank.
When I came to, I felt as if I were suspended weightlessly in the dark. To be honest, it seemed quite a natural state to be in after death, and came as a relief. For a timeless moment, I luxuriated in the pure lack of noise, stress, and pain. I could recall no sweeter embrace.
However, soon sensations came back to me. A sense of warmth, a faint light from beyond, and voices. It was a faint murmuring, but my body— at this point, I became aware of my body— tensed at the awareness, which seemed to excite the chorus. They began to call for me in tones loving and familiar, and I obeyed, reaching out towards the light above me, pulling myself into it. It was a surprise to find myself not in any kind of afterlife, but back on PNF-404, surrounded by pikmin.
It seems that this is what happened: I crashed, obviously. I was near-death— or, a more spiritual part of me suggests, truly dead— having suffered both severe physical injuries and oxygen poisoning. The pikmin brought my body to the onion, either as an injured pikmin or as a body to be recycled into sprouts. This… worked. I’m alive, but my body is not the same.
I am not a pikmin. Most of me seems to be the same; I can feel my bones and organs, I am taller than them and my face seems to be my own, though I have no mirror to check. On my head, though, is one of their stems. Touching it, it seems to be made of the same plant-fiber muscle, and is fully mobile, often twitching of its own volition. This seems to almost certainly be the mechanism through which I can “hear” the pikmin, though this is not through sound but an entirely new sense that is hard to describe. The idea that this stem has altered my brain itself is alarming, but considering I also seem now immune to oxygen, it would be naive to think the changes the onion made would only be skin-deep.
After I was recovered, I apparently spent most of the later day in the ground, awakening not long before sunset. There was some confusion over how I would leave the planet’s surface, given my lack of a ship. Some pikmin were insistent that I could not enter their onion because I needed a beige onion, whereas others argued that since I was red— apparently, I’ve checked and that does appear to be the color of the stem— I would be fine in the red onion. I was more concerned about being forced into the nest of creatures much smaller than I am, and was generally leery about… being put into that creature again. Fortunately, I had Moss and her experience of surviving the planet’s nights to rely on, and was able to command the pikmin away after some resistance.
I am currently writing this from the cave we’re both sheltering in. She is sleeping soundly, but my mind is restless. I was determined that I would return to my family or die trying, but it seems that even after doing the latter, I’ve been given another chance. What choice is there, other than to take it?