I bolted out the door and didn't look back. The spring air, still mildly chilled, stung as it moved in and out of my lungs. I could hear the rest of the school laughing and chatting behind me, their voices growing quieter as I ran.
"Oy, Cicero!" one of my friends called out.
Though I heard my name, I didn't stop; only slowed. I turned, smiling, my ponytail whipping lightly against my cheek; I couldn't quite pick their face out of the shrinking crowd. "What!"
"We're going to the restaurant in Striaton to celebrate! Aren't you coming?"
"I've gotta run by home first! I'll meet you there!"
"Alright!" By the time our exchange was finished, they were all barely visible, and their words only faintly reached my ears.
I turned my eyes back to the path ahead, bounding down the dirt road fast enough to raise thin clouds of dust before my eyes. Tall trees ran along beside me, and I could glimpse the blurry shapes of wild pokemon skittering about the tall grass surrounding the pathways. Any other day, I might've stopped to observe them, but I barely heard their playful cries as I bolted towards my home in Nuvema Town.
To say that I couldn't get out of school fast enough would make it sound as though I disliked the place which, despite the general attitude, is far from the truth. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to say that over half of my life was spent either studying in its library or mock-battling in its courtyard or wandering its halls. Every day, I'd arrived early and stayed late, simply to talk to the retired trainers and researchers that made up its staff; teachers I'd never even had knew me by name. I didn't have an extremely large amount of friends, but I was close with the ones I had, and they all shared, for the most part, my same passion for pokemon to such a degree that we'd spend whole days together just talking about, studying, and battling with them. In many ways, it was a second home for me, and it was deeply saddening to think that I wouldn't see many of them for years, if ever again; I'd left earlier than ever before, in fact, not long after dawn this morning, just so that I'd be able to go to each of my teachers and find every one of my friends and tell them as much.
That didn't mean, though, that I wasn't overjoyed to finally be finished with it. Today marked the last day of my last year of Trainer School, and I was ready for it all to end; had been waiting for as long as I could remember to cast off the educational system at last. Some would go on to continue their studies—aspiring to be professors, scholars, researchers, and the like—and I would, too, I suppose, though I would be doing so far from a classroom.
I would finally become a Pokémon Trainer! I'd learned the history and the moves and I'd memorized the names and information; I'd gazed at and taken notes on wild pokemon from afar and organized countless mock teams in my notebooks. I was ready to move out of books and speculation and into the real world, and it would finally begin today.
Well, I suppose the actual start of my journey through "the world of pokemon" would have to wait until after the graduation ceremony, but I still considered this to be the true beginning, as I would be thinking about and preparing for nothing else for the next few days preceding the ceremony. In fact, if it were up to me, I'd leave tomorrow and just take the rest of the day to finish the preparations, but my parents wouldn't have me missing graduation. I was their only daughter and it would mean the world to them to see me walk up and collect my diploma and blah, blah, blah. Though they, too, seemed to have every intention of dropping everything along with me and helping finish everything that needed to be finished before the coming day.
In fact, they were nearly as excited as I was. They'd spoken about nothing but for the last few weeks, and made sure to pound into my brain the importance of coming straight home after the last day of school, before going anywhere else. They wouldn't tell me why, and I wasn't really sure what I was expecting. Despite our shared excitement, I knew they wouldn't let me leave just yet, but I suppose I didn't really feel the need to wonder at it too hard. I was filled with far too much raw excitement and anticipation to question it, and the two of them were…interesting, anyway. They could want me home for something as mundane as a picture or as shocking as a fully-catered and well-attended party. In truth, neither would surprise me.
Expecting one or both of those outcomes, I leapt over the invisible border between Route 1 and Nuvema, zooming past Professor Juniper's lab and the other houses until I stood at my own front door, our large house towering over me. Without pausing I pushed on the red-painted slab of wood and entered the house. My chest was burning and my thigh hurt where my bag had slapped it continuously all the way here, but I couldn't care.
"Hey guys! I'm hooome!" I shouted, breathlessly.
Silence.
I paused awkwardly, caught genuinely off guard by the lack of response and lack of my parents' presence right when I entered. Panting, I shut the door behind me and looked around, feeling the adrenaline flooding out of me as the heat flooded over my sweat-slicked, goose-bumped skin. Everything around me was normal, untouched, and I stayed there for a moment, waiting for a voice or a sound; for anything to happen, really. But nothing broke the silence.
Slipping my bag off my shoulder and onto a decorative table next to me, I glanced about the large front room, towards the stairway on the right and the large open space to my left. Both looked untouched and held no signs of any kind of 'bread crumbs' that might lead to the surprise I knew must be waiting for me, whatever that may be.
"Hello!" I called, grinning and wiping at my forehead as I moved towards the kitchen. The loudest sound was my heart still slamming against my ribs, drowning out even the noisy clunk of my boots on the hardwood floors. It was almost eerie, strangely enough, as I couldn't remember this place ever being this quiet; not so much so that I could actually hear any given noise echoing throughout the house. They were really outdoing themselves, I thought. My hopes for something fantastic and over the top rose ever so slightly.
By the time I reached the kitchen, my breath and pulse had slowed enough to stop permeating the surrounding air so fiercely, leaving a heavy peace in its wake. As had been the case with the front room, it was empty and quiet.
In fact, I realized now without the noise of my own blood rushing swiftly in my veins, a tad too quiet and empty. With clearing senses, I became aware of an inescapable…nothing. I couldn't feel the restless, anticipatory motion of the air that would follow the presence of a room full of guests; couldn't feel that same inescapable feeling adding lightness to the heavy wall of silence pushing against my ears. I felt just like I did when Mom left her post of 'total caregiver' when Dad was at work and went to visit Professor Juniper, or shop, or some mixture of the two: utterly alone in a large, empty house.
Grin slowly fading, I stood in the kitchen doorway and scanned the surroundings. It looked just like it had this morning, but in more ways than it should have. Dad's coffee cup sat next to his paper on the table, still opened to the same page of comics I'd chided him about reading before I left for school. Upon approaching it, I saw that it was still half full. Not far from it was Mom's, very much in the same state, and a quick glance to the sink revealed it to be full of once-soapy water; it was now as cold as the coffee and, without the pillows of cleansing foam riding its surface, I could see the breakfast dishes at the bottom of the small, cloudy pool. The only two things that didn't look like a snapshot of a single, perfect moment were the chairs, pushed back at haphazard distances away from the table, and, on the floor not far from the sink, Mom's favorite and only apron lay in a careless, crumpled heap.
It looked like the front of an Oshawott, the shell made into a little pouch meant to carry who-knows-what, and she'd fallen in love with it; handmade by the finest craftsmen in Unova; bought in a little shop I couldn't remember the name of that we happened across while on vacation. At that moment, I remembered with fierce clarity the amount of care she always took, no matter what, to hang the thing back up on a coat rack at the end of the counter.
"Mom?" I called out, looking up, and even my voice sounded off. I, too, had become infected with the strange, palpable wrongness of the place, and I could feel it. "Dad?"
The resounding quiet was resolute and cold.
Without thinking, I ran from the kitchen into the living room. I bit back the urge to call out upon finding nothing and moved through the family room and all the hallways, throwing open bathroom and closet doors and probing the darkness of the basement—it, too, seemed frozen in that state of perfection that made my gut churn with unease. By the time I flew up the stairs, I could feel the light tremors in my muscles, and upon finding more empty, pristine rooms, I experienced genuine panic.
The lack of visible remains of violence was comforting in a way; I could imagine that they hadn't been injured, at least—I made myself do so, in fact. But my inability to find anything new or out of the ordinary meant I had no clues, no leads to go on, and that left me alone and hopeless in the wake of everything. It appeared as though they had just…vanished; disappeared in the middle of the morning routine for reasons I didn't know and could only faintly guess at.
Shaking, I returned to the kitchen; the one place that held any kind of abnormality. My mind was racing now. Either something terrible had happened and they'd had to leave, or they'd been taken. The second option sounded only a little ridiculous. We had a fairly large amount of money, and my father was a well known author; a profession with few enemies insane enough for abduction, but it wasn't impossible that they existed. Just as well, there were plenty of insane non-writers out there who could've wanted any number of things from my father: money, a reputation—'the man who held one of the world's most prominent writers hostage!'—or even just…him in general; a crazed fan, too, was not an impossibility.
But…why my mother? I couldn't help wonder when I saw the apron again.
Well, for leverage, of course, I realized dully in the next second. I knew as well as they did that they could get anything out of my father if they threatened my mother. Anything and everything he owned would he willingly give away if my mother was being used as a bargaining chip. Without question.
In a daze, I picked up the apron. The strings on the back tumbled from the mass and brushed the ground. Dad probably stopped her before she could put it on, saying he would do the dishes, and she had been moving to put it back on the rack when…
I gripped the fabric of the apron hard enough with my shaking hand to wonder dully if my nails would actually rip through it.
Suddenly, a loud clattering echoed in the empty air. I nearly leapt up and actually did hear a small, uncharacteristic squeak pass my lips. Flushing, I looked around wildly, pulse racing as I searched for the cause of the racket, until I froze at the distinct feeling of something bumping against the tip of my boot.
I looked down to find a pokeball, shrunken for easy carrying, resting on my sole. I picked up the little red and white sphere and turned it around in my palm. One of Mom's…? But why would she have it with her while doing dishes? I turned it over again, narrowing eyes scrutinizing it, and when I reached the back for a second time, I noticed something strange about what I'd thought to be a simple scuff at first: There was a definite shape to it, I saw now; certain and purposeful lines. I pressed the center button and watched the pokeball expand in my hand.
As I thought, the back bore a symbol. It was all black; a silhouette of what looked like a Serperior eating its own tail. The center of the circle was filled with a series of shapes. They looked like triangles and squares and nonsensical pointed creations that, if I adjusted my eyes, contained within their seemingly random positions the letter "K", which disappeared and reappeared depending on how I looked at it.
I stood there for a moment, barely feeling the apron fall from my other hand and hardly realizing my thought that Mom wouldn't like it to be on the floor, but my focus remained on the symbol. This was my lead, the only evidence of anything foreign I'd found in the house. I gripped the pokeball tight, clicking the button again and feeling my fist clench to a white-knuckled grip as it closed around the shrinking object. I could feel rage, in the face of something it could cling to, rushing over me like water down a crag, washing over dry, painful fear, though I knew I was still shaking.
The police, I thought. There was a station back in Accumula. With this, they'd at least have something to go on.
I bolted for the door, slipping the little pokeball into a small pocket on the inside of my vest. My muscles still retained lingering weight and soreness from my run home and about the house, but I was barely aware of it. I slammed the door open so forcefully that it hurt—
And was immediately met with a smack in the mouth.
"Ahhph!" I screamed in muted pain against the weight slamming my lips against my teeth, cloth tickling my cheeks.
Two gray-white figures splashed with blue and gold suddenly loomed up before me, and I could feel pressure on my back and my arms. Screaming muffled nonsense, I thrashed against it, glaring at their shadowed faces, but the many grips were like crushing vices, and everything I saw was bleeding together into a writhing fog. My world was quickly becoming the strong scent of detergent as it filled my nostrils and made my head feel light and my muscles like liquid. Then, even that ceased to be concrete, and as the haze darkened, everything faded until I was suspended in growing numbness.
There was the distant sensation that I was falling. Then nothing.