In the beginning, there was darkness.
Not total darkness, though. There was a large rectangle with a bright outline, and just enough light was streaming in for the faint silhouettes of other objects to be seen. Squares and rectangles lined half the room. The floor was smooth and cold. There was a great roaring noise, and rattling, and the squares shook and bounced and fell.
As time passed by, the squares ceased moving, and the noise stopped.
Just as the surroundings seemed to have reached a dark and quiet calm, one swift motion caused the outlined rectangle to fall away, revealing a world filled with blindingly-bright light.
The girl raised her hand in a vain attempt to appease her eyes' longing for the darkness to return.
She had a horrendous headache.
She stood there, her eyes slowly adjusting to the light which they had gone without for so long and her headache ebbing away. The squares proved to be boxes, piles and piles of cardboard boxes of every size. The room's metal floor now reflected the sunlight in sharp painful glints. She stood up and examined one of the boxes. It had a Poke Ball logo on its side, with a word she didn't recognize above it, and the phrase "Hoenn's most trusted Pokemon moving company" below.
Hoenn.
The word evoked vague ideas of a tropical island, palm trees and sand and the smell of sea salt.
So if the boxes were for a Hoenn moving company… she was moving to Hoenn. Or was it just within Hoenn?
She couldn't remember which.
As she searched the recesses of her mind, she realized that she couldn't remember anything at all. The only world that she knew was the room that had been filled with darkness.
Her mental exploration did, however, uncover the voices.
They came to her in a rush, a mass of jumbled voices, speaking garbled phrases and utter gibberish. But after a moment's concentration, she had a vague sense of the pattern hidden within this odd speech, the method to the voices' madness. They wanted to leave the room, to go towards the light, to explore the bright world outside.
Go towards the light… wasn't that what people always said about death, that all it took was going towards the light? Was that what all this was, some sort of afterlife? But she was filled with energy, as if she had just woken up from a long night's sleep. Surely this was life.
Maybe life as well as death started by going towards the light.
Either way, it was a reasonable enough request. The room didn't seem to be changing, and continuing to sit and stare at boxes and gray walls sounded like an incredibly boring experience. She walked towards the light, though her legs were stiff and didn't quite want to cooperate.
After a few steps, she surpassed the length of the floor and promptly faceplanted into the ground.
Her hand made a squelching sound as she set it down for support and turned towards the sun. A quick glance revealed that her surroundings included grass, flowers, trees, and a small wooden house. And mud, plenty of mud, including the bits that were now covering her clothes and hair. It was hard to tell where her hair stopped and the mud began, for the two were intermingled, and one was nearly identical in color to the other.
Looking back, she saw that the room she'd been in was the back of a truck, with the back slightly raised from the ground.
She stood up and looked down, not quite sure what she was hoping to find. The outline of her body had been pressed into the mud. But more importantly, she could see her body itself, examining it up close. From what she could tell through the mud, her skin was on the pale side. Long arms, bright tank top, shorts. A decent look, all in all. Probably would have been better if she hadn't just gone and smeared it in mud like a total klutz.
As the voices kept murmuring, she racked her brain for anything she could remember about her past life, just one moment, one fact, one word. A name, perhaps. They kept saying names, different names, ones she wasn't sure were meant to be her own. But she had to have a name, didn't she? Everybody had a name. And that would be something, at least, something to go on… Focus. She had to focus. She felt stupid, having to concentrate just to remember her own name, but it was better than not having one at all. And after minutes of contemplation, one word came to mind.
A.
It didn't really sound like a name. A nickname, perhaps, but not a name. But if it was short for something, she didn't know what.
A. It was an odd and nonsensical and altogether stupid name. It was one of the phrases the voices kept repeating, one of the most common refrains in their endless chant. It made almost as little sense as they did.
A. And yet, it seemed fitting. The first letter of the alphabet. All language proceeded from that lone letter, the first piece of the puzzle that was communication.
A. The name of a girl who was getting a fresh start on life, in more ways than one.
A.
A new girl.
A beginning.