-AN: I'm back! After a long hiatus, perhaps with a story I'll try to actually finish this time.
[|] Exceptional [|]
It should've been simple, really. When you started out, they only gave you one rule: don't stand out.
( for whom the bell tolls )
The battlefield is still and frozen for a breathless minute after the starting bell rings out.
I curl my fingers over one of the six pokeballs linked onto my bracelet, uncertainly surveying the twenty-five of us that have been dropped at this arena. There were supposedly four different drop-sites, which meant a hundred trainers total.
Ninety-nine people would have to die.
I don't know what sets it off, a slight change in the breeze maybe, but a ripple of movement seems to pass through the twenty-five gathered here, and suddenly people are alive again. Adrenaline kicks in, filling our bodies with the urge to move, to run, to survive.
We all release our pokemon at approximately the same time, which in hindsight is a bad idea because it feels like a grenade going off. Each capsule opens with an explosive noise that sounds like a gunshot and the red light is absolutely blinding.
Deciding that it's better to run now blind than stick around and wait to be picked off by someone had the intuition to cover their ears and close their eyes, I take off into the forest behind us, screaming Icarus's name.
I can't hear my own screams, but I can feel my throat chafing in protest, and I can feel the vibrations in the ground as he lumbers after me, so it doesn't matter.
Suddenly, there's nothing solid beneath me, a warmth around my waist, and the wind rolling past my face. My body rejects the abrupt change in surrounding conditions and I retch pitifully.
Icarus makes an annoyed noise, bringing his snout close to flick my ear disapprovingly with his tongue, and I laugh through my fear.
The white spots eventually fade, and I realize there weren't actually as many clouds as I had thought. I look up, and the familiar red-scaled face of my charizard stares back down at me.
He noses at the hastily-made cloth bandage around his own arm and then snorts again.
I get the message. He hasn't quite forgiven me yet for the whole "digging into his arm with a knife" fiasco.
"It was necessary," I told him, while giving him apologetic scratches under the chin. This appeases him somewhat.
He growls something, the vocalization intended to carry meaning instead of his simple sounds earlier. I get the gist of it to mean that I should've explained it to him first, but I don't quite catch the literal words he uses because I'm distracted by a sight below us.
A fierce-looking, thick-furred arcanine is busy circling a smaller, velvet-white seel. Probably another victim of the "B-Button" fad, the strange moniker for a trend of not evolving pokemon that swept through Kanto.
The seel is no match for the much faster fire-type, who uses a combination of its agility and its physical attributes to batter the poor pokemon. To be fair, a dewgong wouldn't have fared much better. It's really the trainer's fault for choosing to send out a pokemon much less adapted to land than water, type advantage be damned.
Ruthlessly, the arcanine tears into its opponent's soft body, and the two pokemon gradually become closer in color.
I am saved from the guilt of bad-mouthing its trainer when I black out instead.
I remembered everything about the day I got my first pokemon.
It was a rainy day, which I thought was a bad omen until I actually burst through the doors of Professor Oak's laboratory, thoroughly soaked and leaving squishy wet footprints on the linoleum-tile floor, and saw the row of shiny red-and-white pokeballs sitting in a bed of plush blue velvet.
"I'm not late," I announced proudly, shrugging off my jacket to hand off to a research aid who looked eager to save the floor from my watery wrath. Suddenly, I regretted letting him take coat from me.
"You're the first one here," the professor said, dragging my attention away from my fantasy of being the overlord of the sea to him instead.
I puffed up with pride. "Can I see them first? Can I?"
A genial smile stuck itself resolutely on his face as he told me that I'd have to wait until everyone else got there. I made sure to squish around his building extra loud in retaliation.
Still, it'd been a good day. My brother had come home from his journey that day so I rushed back to my house right after getting my pokemon so he could tell me if my charmander was really strong. I thought he was. He looked really strong. But Andrew was an expert, he always bragged about it.
"He's pretty strong," Andrew, wincing as the red lizard chomped down on his fingers. "Did you name him yet?"
I silently congratulated my pokemon, imagining how big his teeth would be when he was fully grown. Andrew wouldn't have any fingers left, for sure. The thought made me giggle, and then I realized that he'd asked me a question. "Oh. No. Why? Do you know any good names?"
He ran a thoughtful hand through his light brown hair, which was a few shades lighter than my own. He called it "sun-streaked," I called him stupid. "I dunno...how about Icarus? He's supposed to be a boy whose dad makes him wings, except he flies too close to the sun and the wings melt and he dies."
I'd been thinking 'Smoky', or 'King-killer', or something in that vein, which were all cooler names than 'Icarus', but I lit up at his explanation. And plus, I'd be the only one with a mature pokemon nickname. "Okay. Well, Icarus is going to be so powerful that one day he'll fly close to the sun, and it'll melt, and then when people think 'Icarus', they'll think about that story instead."
Andrew gave a pained smile. "Just don't get too strong, okay?" He looked at his own napping wartortle, which had been a wartortle for a long time now.
"Why not?" I asked, wrinkling my nose. Icarus—I'd started calling him Rus in my head—crowed in agreement, puffing out his chest.
He sighed and rolled his eyes, which he always did when he was about to tell me that I had to be a grown-up to understand. Like when he told me I couldn't tell mom that his girlfriend was sneaking in through the bathroom window. It'd looked uncomfortable, and I didn't understand why she didn't just come through the front door. Mom let me have sleepovers all the time.
"You don't need to, I mean you'll probably find something else you'll love doing even more than training." At the time, he was sure that I'd lose interest after a year, maybe two, tops. I was pretty sure, too. I knew lots of people dropped out quickly, and some of my older friends were already back home with a couple fresh pokemon they could keep as pets and playmates.
I huffed. "Fine. But I'm gonna be strong enough to beat you," I told him.
He smiled at that. "Okay, deal."
I looked at his wartortle curiously. The turtle looked back at me, and I stuck my tongue out at it. "How come you still have Reed? He's so lazy. Haven't you caught stronger pokemon?"
Andrew looked blank for a moment, unfocused, like he was trying to see something that was flickering underneath the surface, but it wouldn't stay still long enough for him to really see it. Then he shook his head and shrugged. "I don't know, everyone just does it, like it's taboo not to keep them on your team. Sentimental value, I guess?"
I nodded. And frowned. "What does taboo mean?"
Andrew sighed and rolled his eyes.
-AN: I'm having fun experimenting with writing styles, hope it's not confusing(:
Feel free to send in some OCs, seeing as I have 99 other character slots to fill up. Just a caveat, I may or may not use them, and the main characters are pretty much set in my head, so your character might not have a large role so don't be disappointed.