THE BERRY PROBLEM: Something Was Growing in the Garden That Nobody Ordered (Pokemon AU) - Part 1
I really like this Pokémon AU, if you can't tell
Read this first: Here
It was Niffty who found them first.
Not because anyone had been looking, quite the opposite. She simply had the uncanny habit of ending up in every forgotten corner of the Hazbin Hotel, armed with a feather duster, a mop, and the terrifying determination of someone who considered dust a personal enemy.
She'd been cleaning beneath a tangle of overgrown hedges when she spotted the first shrub.
Then another. Then five more.
By the time she emerged from the gardens, she was hauling a basket so overloaded with berries that it had started to sag in the middle. Some had been tucked beneath the wild rose bushes.
Others nestled between the roots of Sir Pentious's increasingly ambitious apple orchard. An orchard he continued to insist, with great dignity and absolutely no convincing power whatsoever, that he was not emotionally attached to.
The berries weren't confined to the gardens, either.
They were everywhere.
Little piles had accumulated along forgotten hallways. Bushes had sprouted beside cracked stone walls. Tiny vines crept across neglected windowsills, curling up through gaps in the shutters.
Somehow, berries kept appearing in places no one remembered planting anything.
More strangely still, the hotel's ever-growing population of unfamiliar creatures seemed utterly delighted by them, wandering about happily munching on the colorful fruit whenever they pleased, entirely unbothered by the growing chaos they'd caused.
Blue ones. Pink ones. Deep crimson berries dusted with pale yellow freckles. Round green berries that shimmered faintly in the light.
Tiny spotted ones that smelled of citrus, wildflowers, and something impossible to describe. Many strange ones that didn't correspond to any fruit Niffty had encountered in her long, peculiar existence.
She held one up between her hands.
"Alastor," she asked, "what is this?"
Alastor accepted the berry with mild curiosity. He turned it over, held it up to the light, examined the stem, and even gave it a cautious sniff.
"...I haven't the faintest idea." He admitted.
Niffty's eye went so wide she nearly dropped the entire basket.
"You... don't know?"
"My dear," Alastor replied, with a helpless little shrug, "I assure you, if I did, I'd have already launched into an unnecessarily dramatic explanation."
---
Once people actually started looking, the situation escalated alarmingly.
The berries hadn't appeared overnight. They'd been quietly spreading for weeks, perhaps months, hidden among neglected flowerbeds, forgotten pathways, and patches of soil nobody had paid the slightest attention to.
Apparently, many of the creatures had unknowingly carried seeds along with them when they'd first arrived at the hotel. Wherever they wandered, the seeds had taken root, and evidently, thrived.
Now they had an ecosystem.
Small shrubs bearing round, blue-tinged fruit had claimed the ground around the Berry Division, where the creatures spent most of their afternoons. Clusters of tart pink berries flourished beneath the windowsill where Flapple liked to curl up for his daily naps.
Golden berries covered in sharp little spots had annexed one corner of the greenhouse, thriving there with almost unsettling enthusiasm. Delicate vines heavy with pale lavender fruit climbed trellises that hadn't existed a month earlier.
Broad-leafed bushes laden with glossy black berries had sprung up beneath the orchard trees, coexisting with perfectly ordinary apples as though they'd always belonged there.
Every day, someone discovers another variety.
They came in every imaginable color: red, blue, yellow, green, violet, silver, cream, and shades no one could quite find names for. Looking at them all together, it was as though a rainbow had exploded across the gardens and decided, out of spite, to start bearing fruit.
Some wore stripes. Others were speckled or spotted. A few were heart-shaped. One variety grew in perfect little stars. Some glowed faintly beneath the evening sky. Some smelled like fresh rain after a summer storm.
A lot of others made no sense whatsoever.
By the end of the week, the hotel grounds had quietly transformed into an orchard unlike anything Hell had ever seen, and more troublingly, nobody could explain it.
Not a single sinner recognized any of it, and many of them had spent years wandering the Pride Ring. None of them recalled seeing anything like it during their mortal lives, either.
Sir Pentious adjusted his goggles and squinted suspiciously at a cluster of deep violet berries hanging from an unfamiliar bush.
"I catalogued nearly every toxin, tuber, fungus, and aggressively homicidal plant this realm has to offer," he declared. "One develops hobbies, during a sufficiently lengthy villainous career."
He poked one experimentally, as if it might poke back.
"I have never seen these before."
Charlie frowned as she wandered through the rapidly expanding berry grove, a wicker basket balanced against one hip. She turned slowly in a circle, taking in the impossible orchard surrounding them.
"These... don't exist here."
Everyone looked at her.
"I mean it," she continued. "I've lived in Hell my entire life. I traveled through all Seven Rings with Mom and Dad growing up. I've been to farms, markets, botanical gardens, even weird little roadside fruit stands."
She gestured helplessly at the bushes. "I've never seen any of these."
Vaggie stayed quiet. She didn't recognize any of them either.
A small, uncomfortable knot formed in her stomach.
She still hadn't told Charlie where she'd really come from, and admitting that Heaven had no record of these berries, either, felt like a conversation best postponed indefinitely.
Instead, she crouched beside one of the bushes and plucked a small blue berry from its branch. It felt strangely warm against her fingers and carried a faint sweetness she couldn't place.
She turned slowly toward Alastor.
"You brought back dozens of creatures from... wherever they came from," she said flatly.
"Indeed." He nodded, entirely unbothered.
"And you're telling me you never noticed they were also carrying an entire agricultural invasion on their backs?"
Alastor considered that for a moment, as though genuinely weighing the accusation.
"...In my defense, my dear," he replied, with impeccable composure, "I was rather more preoccupied with the creatures than their garnish."
Several of the creatures looked up from happily devouring said garnish, blissfully unconcerned that they had apparently introduced an entirely new branch of botany to Hell.
---
It was Sir Pentious who, quite predictably, insisted the phenomenon required proper documentation.
Within the hour, he'd commandeered one of the hotel's dining tables, burying it beneath stacks of notebooks, loose parchment, rulers, and enough pencils to supply a small architectural firm. Perched at the center, he meticulously sketched every berry they found, rotating each specimen to annotate its shape, coloration, scent, and apparent habitat.
All the while, he muttered to himself.
"Entirely unclassified flora. An ecosystem wholly absent from infernal records. An entire branch of botany Hell has simply never had access to..."
His pencil paused.
"So much he would love to see and study..." The words slipped out so quietly they barely counted as sound. "...He would find this fascinating."
He stood there for a long moment before giving a small shake of his head and returning to his notes with renewed, slightly forced determination.
Fortunately, no one heard him repeat it.
---
What followed could only be described as an exceptionally undignified science fair. The hotel's lobby became equal parts laboratory, greenhouse, and disaster zone.
Charlie organized collection baskets and tried, with limited success, to keep everyone's findings labeled.
Sir Pentious drafted charts, diagrams, and increasingly elaborate classification systems that only he could fully decipher.
Vaggie spent most of her time attempting, largely unsuccessfully, to stop people from eating unidentified fruit before anyone actually knew what it did.
Niffty, meanwhile, kept discovering entirely new berry bushes in increasingly impossible locations, usually after vanishing into spaces no reasonable person should have been able to fit through.
At one point she emerged triumphantly from inside the grandfather clock, carrying an armful of berries.
Nobody questioned it.
Husk, for his part, contributed exactly one thing. He became the control sample.
Or, more accurately, the forced control sample.
"It ain't volunteering if you keep shoving food at me," he grumbled around his latest bite.
Fortunately, none of the berries appeared to be poisonous. He didn't explode, melt, or sprout mysterious extra limbs. Husk remained, to everyone's considerable relief, perfectly alive.
They did, however, discover something unexpected: the berries all seemed to fall into six distinct flavor categories.
Spicy, dry, sweet, bitter, sour, and smooth.
Charlie frowned at the list. "...How is smooth a flavor?"
Husk shrugged.
"You pick things up after spending a few decades drinking anything that'll dissolve your liver."
"So... what does dry taste like?" Charlie asked.
Husk considered the question with the gravity of a man being asked to explain fine wine.
"You know that feeling when a cheap red sucks every last drop of moisture outta your mouth?"
Charlie blinked. "...No."
"Or when a whiskey leaves your tongue feelin' like sandpaper?"
"...Also no."
Husk pointed at one of the berries. "That."
"And smooth?" Vaggie asked.
"The opposite." He popped another berry into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully, then nodded to himself, satisfied. "Goes down easy. Doesn't bite back. Doesn't leave an aftertaste that feels like regret."
"...You just described fruit like it was liquor," Charlie commented.
"I described it accurately."
Sir Pentious immediately scribbled another note into his journal. Flavor profile appears to correspond with mouthfeel as well as taste. Further study required.
Husk eyed the ever-growing pile of berries still waiting to be tested and let out a defeated groan.
"...I'm gonna need a drink after all this."
---
The first real breakthrough came entirely by accident.
The night before, Husk had gotten himself caught in one of Sir Pentious's automated turf-defense contraptions, having forgotten for, perhaps the twentieth time, that it existed. The resulting skirmish left a long, ugly gash running along his side.
Normally, it would've taken a few hours and several bottles of cheap liquor to stop aching.
Instead, one of the Blissey nurses quietly mashed a handful of round blue berries into a fragrant paste and spread it over the wound.
Within moments, the torn flesh knitted itself back together.
Not perfectly. A faint pink line remained where the injury had been, along with a little lingering redness, but the wound itself sealed cleanly, without infection or lasting damage.
Silence hung over the room.
Husk blinked, then prodded his side once, testing it.
"...Well. That's new."
Sir Pentious nearly dropped both notebook and pencil in his excitement.
"It would appear these berries possess measurable restorative properties!" he announced, flipping furiously through his notes, cross-referencing sketches with increasingly frantic annotations. "Remarkable! Biology and natural science are hardly my primary disciplines, but I confess I could be persuaded to cultivate a professional interest."
The head Blissey of the hotel's growing medical staff watched him for a moment before waddling over with a cheerful smile. She offered him a small, well-worn notebook, its pages packed from cover to cover with what looked, at a glance, like doodles.
Tiny berry sketches. Little symbols. Arrows. Circles. Smiling faces. Handwritten notes crammed into every available margin, in penmanship so catastrophically illegible it bordered on an entirely separate written language.
Sir Pentious stared at it for a long moment.
"...I cannot read a single word of this."
The Blissey looked mildly offended so Charlie accepted the notebook instead.
"Let's see..." She squinted, tilted the page, turned it upside down, then right-side up again. "Huh."
"You can actually read that?" Vaggie asked, incredulous.
"I've had years of practice decoding my dad's sticky notes."
She flipped through another page. The notebook was nothing short of a treasure trove.
Every berry they'd discovered had already been carefully catalogued. Not just with names, but with sketches, flavor notes, medicinal uses, preferred growing conditions, and even recipes.
Somewhere along the way, the Blissey had painstakingly taught herself enough of the hotel's written language to record all of it. Her handwriting simply hadn't kept pace with her vocabulary, which somehow made the gift even more endearing.
Charlie smiled warmly and cleared her throat.
"The blue round one is called an Oran Berry." Everyone leaned in closer. "It heals minor wounds and helps treat small illnesses, like colds." She scanned another line. "Apparently it's also packed with nutrients, so it's commonly cooked into meals."
She turned another page.
"Oh!" She glanced toward the nursery wing. "They've been feeding these to the babies."
"The babies?" Vaggie echoed.
"The creatures' hatchlings." Charlie nodded. "According to this, it helps strengthen their immune systems while they're growing."
"So..." Vaggie folded her arms. "It's basically a healing fruit."
"More or less," Charlie said. "It won't regrow missing limbs or anything dramatic. It's for cuts, bruises, fevers, minor illness..."
She laughed softly, still sounding a little bewildered.
"Kind of like an orange..." She looked down at the berry in her hand. "...except the orange also heals you."
A thoughtful silence settled over the room.
Charlie's gaze drifted slowly toward the sprawling berry bushes that now occupied a worrying percentage of the hotel's grounds.
"...And they grow in our garden."
She smiled with the faintly unhinged expression of someone who'd just realized she'd tripped over a miracle in her own backyard.
"...We have an unlimited supply of naturally regenerating magical medicine growing in the backyard."
Across the room, several of the creatures happily munched on Oran Berries by the handful, blissfully unaware that everyone else had just realized they'd been treating priceless medicinal fruit as convenient afternoon snacks.
---
Charlie reached into the basket again and pulled out a small, peach-colored berry with smooth skin and a faint rosy blush. It looked almost ordinary, compared to some of the stranger fruits they'd found.
Almost.
She flipped through the Blissey's compendium until she found the matching sketch.
"Hmm..." Her finger traced a line of spectacularly illegible handwriting. "...This pink one is called a Pecha Berry, and it..." She frowned, leaned closer, and blinked. "...cures poison?"
The room went still, and Vaggie's head snapped up.
"...Come again?"
Charlie looked down at the page, then back up.
"It says—" She squinted harder. "No, wait." She traced the sentence again. "...Yep. It definitely says, cures poison."
"Charlie, I'm serious!" Vaggie's eyes went wide. "Did you read that right?"
"I'm ninety-nine percent sure!" Charlie jabbed a finger at the notebook. "See? This little doodle here is the poison symbol, and this note says ‘removes toxins from the body.’"
She looked around the room, excitement steadily overtaking her disbelief.
"Oh my gosh..." She laughed, equal parts delighted and horrified. "That's probably why nobody in this hotel has actually died from the mushrooms yet!"
Everyone turned, as one, to stare at the suspiciously innocent-looking basket of fungi Niffty had collected earlier that morning.
"...We really should've questioned that sooner," Husk muttered.
"WAIT!" Angel Dust snapped his fingers so loudly everyone jumped. "I know this one!"
All eyes swung toward him.
"A couple weeks ago," he began, gesturing animatedly, "Val got... extra generous with the pheromone spit."
Nobody looked surprised.
"I took way too much of the stuff. Thought I was gonna croak. Couldn't stand up, everything hurt, my stomach was doing somersaults—"
Charlie winced.
"Then one of the egg nurses comes waddling over, shoves some sliced fruit into my hands, and practically forces me to eat it."
He pointed dramatically at the berry in Charlie's hand. "I'm pretty sure that's the one."
Vaggie folded her arms. "...And then you just magically felt better?"
"Well..." Angel grimaced. "Not exactly magically."
He scratched the back of his neck. "The pain stopped almost right away."
"That sounds promising."
"...Then I threw up." He held up two fingers. "Everything. Both ends."
An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Even Husk visibly regretted asking.
Angel shuddered dramatically. "I swear it dragged every last drop of poison right outta my body."
Sir Pentious's pencil resumed scratching furiously across his notebook. "Extraordinary... An induced systemic purge, coupled with detoxifying compounds..."
"So it doesn't just neutralize poison," Charlie realized slowly. "It actually forces your body to get rid of it."
The head Blissey nodded so enthusiastically her little nurse's cap nearly slid off.
Vaggie didn't hesitate. She reached for the nearest clipboard and uncapped a pen with the determined air of someone updating emergency protocols.
PECHA BERRIES — MEDICAL STORAGE, she wrote in large block letters.
"These are officially going into every first-aid kit in the hotel." She underlined it twice. "We're also figuring out how to preserve them. Dry them, can them, whatever it takes."
Another underline. "And we're starting yesterday."
Around them, several of the creatures casually munched on Pecha Berries like they were ordinary afternoon snacks.
Charlie watched one particularly content, round pink creature happily nibble away and sighed.
"...You know..."
"What?" Vaggie asked.
"I don't think they realize they've been casually eating miracle medicine this entire time."
The creature blinked innocently, offered Charlie another berry with a cheerful chirp, and promptly ate a second one itself.
---
"Okay..." Charlie said, turning another page of the increasingly invaluable compendium. "Let's see what else we've accidentally planted all over the hotel."
She reached into the basket and held up another blue berry. At first glance it looked almost identical to the Oran Berry, but instead of being round, it tapered to a neat point, more like a strawberry than an apple.
"This one's called a Rawst Berry." She traced the accompanying notes with one finger, lips moving silently as she deciphered the handwriting. "...Apparently it cures burns."
"So," Vaggie said, plucking it gently from Charlie's hand and turning it over with the same practiced curiosity everyone seemed to have picked up by now, "another useful one."
"Looks like it." Charlie nodded. "According to this, it's usually crushed into salves or poultices instead of eaten whole."
"Hm." Alastor regarded the berry with polite interest. "These fruits are proving considerably more versatile than any of us first suspected."
His tone stayed light and conversational, but behind the easy smile, his thoughts were already racing.
Healing wounds. Curing poison. Now treating burns.
An entire orchard of medicinal plants that existed nowhere else in Hell. The possibilities were, he thought, rather intriguing.
Charlie reached for another berry.
"And this yellow one—" she held up a pear-shaped fruit dotted with dark spots, "—is called an Aspear Berry." She read a little further. "It treats freeze burns."
She looked up. "...Which is apparently different from regular burns?"
"Very." Vaggie folded her arms. "They're both tissue damage caused by extreme temperatures, just opposite ends of the spectrum. Heat burns and cold burns can look similar, sometimes, but you don't treat them the same way."
"Huh." Charlie blinked. "The more you know."
She made a mental note to ask Vaggie later exactly how she knew that.
---
Before she could turn the page again, Niffty popped into existence beside her, seemingly out of thin air.
"Miss Charlie!" She held up a single plum-shaped berry in both hands.
It was smooth and glossy, with the faintest emerald sheen beneath its dark green skin. A little like a green plum, if a green plum had been dipped in something otherworldly.
Unlike the others, there was only one.
"The only one!" Niffty declared, practically vibrating. "I looked through all three baskets! What does this one do?"
Charlie smiled. "Let's find out."
She flipped through page after page. Rawst... Aspear... Cheri... Leppa...
"Ah!" Her finger stopped. "There it is."
She began reading.
"It's called a Lum Berry, and apparently it's..." She frowned. "...really rare."
She kept reading then stopped. The smile slowly slid off her face.
"...Charlie?" Vaggie noticed the shift immediately. "What is it? Is something wrong?"
Charlie didn't answer right away. Her eyes darted back over the page a few times, making sure she was reading it right.
"...No." Her voice came out strangely quiet. "It's... kind of the opposite."
She looked up slowly.
"This thing is basically a cure-all."
Everyone in the room stared at her.
"It doesn't heal physical injuries," Charlie continued, "but it cures poisoning..." She counted off on her fingers. "...burns, freeze burns, severe headaches, temporary paralysis, sleep-inducing conditions."
She glanced back at the notebook. "Pretty much any minor status ailment."
Her gaze lifted toward the tiny berry in Niffty's palms.
"All of it. With one berry."
Nobody spoke. Every eye in the room turned slowly toward the little plum-colored fruit resting innocently between Niffty's hands, as though it might start glowing under the sheer weight of everyone's attention.
Husk finally broke the silence. "You're telling me..." He pointed one claw at it. "...that we've got a miracle cure sitting in a fruit basket."
Charlie laughed weakly. "I... guess?"
Niffty's eye lit up like a struck match.
"Oooooh." Her grin stretched ear to ear. "Mine."
Before anyone could react, she hugged the berry tight against her chest and curled protectively around it.
"Niffty..." Vaggie sighed. "No."
"You can't keep the universal antidote," she said, crossing her arms.
"Why not?" Niffty whined.
"Because it's the universal antidote." Vaggie held out her hand. "It belongs in medical storage."
Niffty narrowed her eye suspiciously and took one tiny step backward. "...No."
"It's for emergencies." Vaggie stepped forward.
"Mine."
"Niffty."
"Mine."
"Niffty."
"MINE!"
With a delighted shriek, she spun on one heel and exploded into motion, vaulting clean over the back of the nearest couch.
Vaggie lunged after her. "Niffty!" She missed by inches.
Niffty ricocheted off an armchair, darted beneath a table, scrambled up a bookshelf, and launched herself clear across the room with all the speed and unpredictability of a caffeinated squirrel.
"Holy—" Husk barely had time to lift his legs before Vaggie nearly tackled him instead.
Across the room, Niffty clutched the Lum Berry tighter and cackled as she vanished behind the curtains. Alastor watched the chase unfold with calm amusement, hands folded neatly behind his back.
"My," he observed pleasantly. "That one is going to prove... extraordinarily valuable."
Husk snorted. "You mean valuable to you."
Alastor's smile widened just enough to show teeth. His eyes followed the tiny maid as she zigzagged through the furniture, somehow staying three steps ahead of Vaggie despite being half her size.
"My dear Husker..." he said. "...those two things are hardly mutually exclusive."