(A/N) Alright! So, you wouldn't believe how many times I rewrote this.
So, this is a completely alternate universe from normal Pokemon stories, with so many borrowed themes from House of Night that I'm seriously considering dubbing it a crossover (I probably won't, though.)
Summary: With all the natural disasters, people are changing into half-human/half-pokemon mutations much more frequently. Simply touching a pokemon can result in the changing of your entire anatomy. Many towns have enacted glove-laws, where all inhabitants are required to where gloves at all times or face a fine. In older cities such as Fortree, people who do go through the change are killed in a ceremony done by the humans known as Trial by Fire, or rescued by their own kind and sent to training schools across the world. The war between the human and the humanoid has been going on for years, with severe prejudices on both sides.
For fifteen year old Brynn, she can't imagine anything worse than becoming one of those freaks. But when the unthinkable happens, will she side with the humans, or her new kind?
Disclaimer: I do not own Pokemon, or House of Night! Or the idea of the glove thing, I got that from Holly Black's "White Cat." The characters, however, these guys belong to me. (With the exception of Winona.)
Tony
The sapphire-haired boy ran lightly through the marshland woods. Even at his lax pace, the humans had no chance of being able to keep up. He sensed the breath of the humans, roughly fifty paces behind him, begin to get ragged and uneven. Eventually, he decided it was time.
With a smirk, he increased his speed.
He kept that speed for about a mile out, just to be safe. It was his first mission outside of the Dream World and he didn't want to screw it up. Once he was sure that the humans were both far away from him and completely lost in the woods, he ran back toward the campsite he led them away from in the first place.
Tony expected to be congratulated extensively on such a job well done for his first time.
Which is why it was slightly alarming to be slapped in the face by his new squad leader immediately after he bounded into the campsite, yelling to congratulate himself.
"Shhh," she hissed, "You might've just given away our position."
They both listened to their surroundings for a few beats. Upon hearing absolutely nothing out of the ordinary, Tony grinned, "Admit it, Pix. I did good!"
"Did well," she corrected with a roll of her eyes and tossed him a pair of binoculars. "Poe and I are watching ground level. That means I'm going to need one of you two new guys to make your way up one of these trees with this pair of binoculars, and the other one to keep circling the perimeter to make sure those humans don't come back."
Tony glanced up at the foliage around him and groaned, "But even the lowest branches on all the trees around here are twice my height!"
Colin, Tony's best friend after the four years of schooling in the Dream World, appeared from the over growth and took the binoculars from Tony's hands, "I've got it, Adelaide. I finished the last order you gave me a few minutes ago anyway."
Colin easily scaled the trunk of the nearest tree and found himself a niche in the branches to rest while he watched the aerial battle ensuing above Fortree City.
The corner of Adelaide's lip twitched with amusement, "What species was your friend again?"
"Eevee," Tony responded.
"Hmm. Should've been a Mankey."
And with that, Adelaide went over to kneel beside the second in command guy, leaving Tony to go run around in the gross, muddy woods again.
Brynn
Brynn angrily slammed her pokeball into to first slot of the healing machine, catching a small hole into the index finger of her protective gloves, and pressed down hard upon the On switch. Tossing her Feather Badge jacket onto a nearby chair and then taking a seat herself, Brynn thought long and hard about how she screwed up yet again and cost her Swablu the whole match.
If I could just stop freezing up every time I face a new situation… she thought, and scowled out the window at the Johto trainer, now facing Brynn's gym leader.
It was his fault, really. If he hadn't come in with pokemon she had never seen before, she would've known exactly what to do. But instead, she froze up on the spot like a complete idiot.
The Johto trainer was ruthless too, Brynn hadn't liked him from the moment he'd strode in all full of himself. His Raichu had made quick work of all the employees' flying type pokemon even from the ground level. But now, against Winona, he seemed to be using a Dragonite.
Why, Brynn wondered, if his previous strategy was working so well?
She didn't have too much time to dwell on that, however, as her older brother barreled immediately into the room. She quickly covered up the hole in her right glove with her left hand. It wouldn't do to have him angry about that, too.
"What was that?" he asked angrily, "that Raichu was wide open during the second turn!"
"I froze up, okay?" she yelled back. She didn't need him to tell her when she was wrong.
"Like hell you did!" he roared. In an attempt to get him to leave her alone, Brynn stared adamantly out the window to the battle playing out before her.
The Johto trainer had placed a Dragonite out there, one that somehow managed to fight a lot more maliciously than the electric rodent before it. Brynn admired the technique of the dragon's fighting style to see if she could learn anything from it. Swablu was going to evolve soon and she needed to figure out how dragons worked.
"Brynn, are you even listening to me?" her brother asked, "You're going to have to get better at this if you want to be leader someday."
That got Brynn's attention. "But I don't!" she cried.
"Yes, you do. Brynn, you're not going out on a journey, we've talked about this already."
"But that would open me up to new experiences! So I would never freeze up anymore!" Brynn's eyes began to sting slightly, so she reverted her attention back to the window. Screw anger-tears, she thought, I'm not losing this one.
"It's too dangerous," he said.
Out the window, Brynn noted that the Dragonite was over defending its own midsection, leaving it slightly susceptible to attack to other areas of its body. She hoped Winona would see this too.
"People are accidentally getting those damned mutations grafted into them every day from exposure to too many pokemon," her brother continued with the same rant he always did. "Kids, just like you. They'll never grow up. They'll be freaks forever."
"I'm fifteen," she muttered quietly. "Don't you think I'm open to exposure working here anyway?"
Winona landed a hard hit to the dragon's spine. She realized the dragon's weakness, just as Brynn had a turn earlier.
"Brynn, I'm only doing this to protect you. When Mom and Dad left on their trip around the world, they left you in my care, and I'm sure as hell not going to let them down by sending you out on your own."
And just like that, Brynn knew why the Dragonite was guarding its midsection, and just how sick the Johto trainer was in the mind. "Open the window," she yelled to her brother as she jumped up and ran to the healing machine."
"What?"
"Open the window!" she screamed, and as soon as he did so, she tossed Swablu's netball out of the opening as she herself crawled through. "Swablu, stop Swellow!"
"What the hell do you think you're doing, Brynn?" her brother yelled.
"No time!" she called back.
Swablu flew as fast as it could to Winona's Swellow, but it wasn't fast enough. Swellow drove another hit into the mother Dragonite's spine, paralyzing her wings and sending the baby dratini tumbling out of her pouch.
Time seemed to slow down for Brynn. She ran as hard as she could, jumped up, caught the baby pokemon in midair, and then came tumbling back to the ground.
Then she felt the smooth, indigo scales of the Dratini's underbelly through the hole in the fingertip of her right glove.
And then the fire in her cells began to commence, damning her to immortality.
Reviews are always welcome! As are any corrections to my grammar or spellings, because I'm not the best at self-spell-check.
-Asymia