Disclaimer: I own everything in this story. If anyone says otherwise, they're probably, but not limited to: Satoshi Tajiri, Nintendo, Game-freak, 4Kids, or Pokemon USA Inc.
-1-
December 4,
Ever-Grande Arena,
11:47
The silver pocket-watch clasped to his waist is an antique. It had belonged to his grandfather many years back; a memento from his days in the imperial army. He does not often wear this watch, but today it seems oddly fitting that he did so.
A bead of sweat trickles down his brow. He's the slightest bit nervous and every bit excited, but his lips remain pressed into a thin line. The weather isn't warm; rather the opposite. It's nearly the end of the year, the time when autumn wanes and winter knocks at the door. The night air grows colder with every breath.
Midnight isn't long due. The artificial lights glaring down from above makes it no different from day.
The pressure at the back of his mind steadily climbs. The sensation is uncomfortable, but by no means unwelcome. It is the feeling of his pokemon bringing their minds to synchronicity. He ignores his throbbing temple and exhales as the ache ebbs down to a low hum.
Synthetic thoughts and calculations fire through his neurons. His mind seems to work at lightspeed. He feels a vague sense of detachment, a profound certainty that he would emerge the victor. He is cold and tempered, power given purpose.
He is unyielding.
He is steel.
"You're down to the last monster, boy!" A voice booms through the arena, and the crowd goes wild. "Can you make the cut?"
Showmanship is half the battle, his father had often told him in his boyhood. Steven personally disagrees. Showmanship could only ever be quarter the battle at best, and sometimes not even that. Nevertheless, he knows the subtle power an image can hold.
"We're both down to the last monster," he replies with a smile that does not quite reach his grey eyes. "I could ask you the same."
Below on the jagged ground, something large and silver moves. Spidery limbs as thick as the columns of a building unfurl and gleam.
Metagross isn't a titan-class juggernaut like aggron or bastiodon, but it matches them in nigh indestructibility. Its adamantine form isn't its sole strength however; it also employs the powers of the mind.
A sphere of hazy purple spirals through the air at his metagross. The attack stops for a moment midair- and is then flicked away skywards. Several seconds later the shadow ball crashes uselessly against the psychic barrier maintained at a height of two hundred metres.
The other pokemon's appearance is ancient, almost wiccan even. Its odd, doll-like body is formed out of black mud. There are nearly a hundred symbols and sigils scratched into the obsidian surface with hot iron, each the mark of a master it had served.
Atlas, the claydol. A monster whose fame well exceeds itself. A pokemon supposedly older than unified Hoenn.
Eight large eyes set around its head roll on their own in different directions. Two are hollow at the middle, perhaps gouged away in a battle long past.
One lone red eye stops on him and remains steady. Steven admits to himself that he is unnerved.
Do not falter, and neither will I.
Mercury is an ice cold presence in his mind. His jaw tightens.
The claydol is knocked out of air the next moment as his metagross crashes into it with the force of a freight train. The bullet punch picks up the dust and leaves a glittering trail; the loud cheers become deafening roars.
Easy now, Steven thinks.There's much yet to be done.
The claydol floats up once more. The solid dent in its form is already filling itself.
He risks a quick glance at his opponent. The man is old; older than his father. There is no slouch in his posture. Proud, ancient and regal, Grand Champion Marvin looks every bit the revered king.
There are no more comments now. A finger taps idly against the rails of the champion's box.
He's nervous, Mercury whispers.
The champion's eyes have a certain light to them, one which Steven has come to associate with those capable of synchronisation; the phenomenon of linking minds with one's pokemon in the heat of battle.
There is no warning but a blink. The next moment, the ground is ripped apart into massive stalagmites each larger than a bus. And then they're hurled through the air.
Steven's fingers press hard into the rails. Mercury closes in on itself. Its gold-tipped claws glow white-hot as the equivalent of a small hill flies towards it.
Spectators scream and shout. The crash shakes the arena, and one of the lights above flicker. Meteor mash tears through the tons of hard rock pulled up with ancient power. Thousands of rock fragments and debris scatter through the air.
Metagross takes control of them with but a thought. Another thought chips away at the sides and forms sharpened tips. A third thought notes the best places to attack, and the fourth directs the rock-shards to descend like a flock of hungry baviary intent on stripping flesh from bone.
Claydol doesn't move. The sharp rocks aiming to rip it apart come to a shaky stop a metre away from its body. A second's pause; then they shatter and crumble into dirt. No, not just dirt.
The dust particles floating in the air grow thousand-fold, and in seconds, a full blown sandstorm covers the arena.
The baltoy line are creatures of the desert by origin. They do not reproduce; baltoy are born from sandstorms. Ancient civilisations near the deserts worshipped them as sand spirits, for they could both bring forth ruin or keep it at bay. Even at zero-visibility, a claydol can navigate the sands with ease by feeling the telltale fluctuations in the particle movement.
A streak of light flashes through the sandstorm. The psybeam glances off Mercury's iron-hide. His metagross keeps moving, dodging more attacks by the breadth of a hair. Atlas can keep up a barrage of beam techniques all day, Steven knows, just as Mercury can shrug them off. There was an ulterior motive at work.
They were being herded.
Gain altitude, he thinks. Metagross further manipulates the geo-magnetic forces, levitating up higher into the sky- and not a moment too soon. The earth itself rises up to swallow it, but Mercury slips away higher. Getting caught by an earth power of that magnitude at this moment would spell the end of his game.
The sudden rift in the ground created by the attack draws in much of the sand. For a moment, Steven catches a glimpse of something before his view is obscured once more.
A dark shape floating above the ground, to the west of the arena.
In his mind, Metagross roars. Calculations are made in a blink. His depth perception is taken into account and the distance from the challenger's box is measured. Hundreds of lines intersect to form a mental grid, and a lone point on it lights up red.
The words spill out from his lips.
"Wreck it."
Like a meteor, Mercury drops down from the sky. A hyper beam is fired straight at its path of descent, but the metagross rips through it like a motorboat through still water. He only sees a flash of silvery-white streaking down like thunder. The sound hits a second later.
The impact makes the ground rattle, and he stumbles. The previously flickering light shatters. The crowd screams.
When the dust settles, Atlas the claydol is no longer floating. Mercury hovers over it silently.
Steven knows that he has won even before the match is called.
-x-
"I knew this day would come someday," his predecessor speaks quietly as they shake hands. "I knew it from the moment I bathed this very field in dragon blood and stole Drake's crown."
Steven stares with half-lidded eyes. "And now I'm taking it from you."
The other man smiles a thin smile, and walks away with his head held high.
A few cameras follow his exit, and then swarm back to focus on their new sovereign.
He looks at his watch once more.
12:01
It's a new day.
"-and trainer Stone will be crowned the twelfth Grand Champion of Hoenn on the twenty fifth of December, as per the League's twenty one day challenge regulations-"
He looks straight at the cameras and his sharp countenance is broadcasted all over Hoenn and beyond. No words are spoken, but the message is loud and clear to every aspiring trainer.
.
Come, challenger.
-x-
It clicks to an end. The quality is a bit grainy, but that does not take away anything from the magnificience of the video.
Steven Stone's championship battle, held in Evergrand seven years ego. I've probably watched this a few hundred times by now, but it never fails to occupy my attention on an idle afternoon.
Half a lobby away, my father excitedly describes three displayed pokemon to a disgruntled looking girl. Our new neighbour's daughter.
Norman Maple's daughter.
May Maple doesn't seem to be particularly enthused about any of the options.
Treecko are trying pests, who skim trees clear of any fruits and berries. They're simply gifted at causing trouble. Sceptile are rare in the battling circuit only because they're so hard to raise. My grandmother puts it quite well: all that speed and power ain't worth the bad attitude.
Torchic are best known as poultry. In fact, I had one for dinner last night.
There are people out there who do not know that blaziken come from torchic. Understandable, really. Only one in a score of chicks is born with the right genes to become combusken. Even fewer live long enough to be the elusive blaziken, since combusken have a habit of running headfirst into danger and picking fights with bigger and badder opponents.
Mudkip, on the other hand, are a rarer specimen- enough to rouse my curiosity when one was first brought into the lab. They're not actually small in number per se; just little seen outside the uncharted territory beyond Fortree.
"I want that one," the girl speaks after some deliberation. She has reached the same conclusion as I had; she's pointing at the mudkip.
It doesn't take well to that. The massive tail-fin stands up rigidly, and I can see the blunt little teeth in its partially open mouth.
"Hey, down boy!" Dad tries to command. The effort is ignored. Its cheeks bulge the slightest bit, and then a jet of water makes May stagger back several steps. The crimson recall light of a pokeball is a second too late.
I'm not too surprised when a few minutes later, the girl walks out of the lab with a fluffy torchick tucked into the crook of her elbow. The little bird seems slightly put off by the droplets dripping from her plastered hair, but otherwise it looks fairly happy.
Nature is strange like that. Torchic are puffy fluffballs of fluff and happiness; I'm not sure how they become dicks like combusken who do little else barring fighting and copulation.
I focus back on my work. It isn't particularly interesting- I'm composing a statistical distribution of the wild population of pokemon that inhabit the routes. The feature was recently installed in the Indigo dex; as such, Hoenn must have it within the year.
Notes and messages are left by different trainers and field researchers in the lab's employ. Sometimes the counts overlap and the data does not match. One man reports several packs of poochyena roving around Petalburg, while another notes absence of poochyena in the same area. One of the data is inaccurate. Or it could be that neither of them are wrong; maybe the packs moved on to a new territory, unlikely as it is.
Other youngsters come and go. Some are as young as eleven, while the oldest was around nineteen; only two years older than me. A pokemon lab is not only a research center but also an authorisation facility, providing prospective trainers with tamed pokemon.
Some boys leave with zigzagoons, while a few others get poochyena. One girl picks up a scruffy lilipup. Jack from the local berry farm takes the exotic cherrim he had placed an order for two weeks prior. Treecko is taken up by one of our own lab aides from the genetic development team. I would have pitied it, but treecko are all assholes who deserve vivisection.
There's an incident around noon, when the previously docile whismur bursts into shrill tears when its trainer squeezes it into a hug. I remained largely unaffected, as I'd been listening to music on my headphones at that moment.
Mudkip remains unpicked. It had attacked another beginner trainer. Whatever conditioning process they'd used hadn't worked. Now it swims around sulkily in one of the large, reinforced tanks usually reserved for dad's foul-tempered huntail.
The lab is emptier around evening. No one here except me, the underwater exploration team, and the ranger guard on duty near the doors.
I walk up unbothered to the tank and peer closer.
Mudkip swims up to me and slams its tail-fin on the glass.
There isn't even the slightest scratch, but I flinch and stumble back. Its beady eyes watch me with a cruel sort of amusement.
This is a wild pokemon. Not one of those 'wilds' who live beside the routes and hop up to passing travellers for morsels of food- and then join them happily afterwards. No. This is a creature that could have very well lived and died without once catching a glimpse of human civilization, brought here only by chance and the fickle hands of fate. It lives by the laws of the jungle, where the stronger, crueller monster is the master.
Hit by a sudden, inexplicable impulse, I slap both my palms hard against the glass and bare my teeth. The bang makes mudkip's tail stand up, somewhat like that of a startled skitty.
I laugh slightly at the sight. The small creature growls- a low, grinding sound, like a heavy sofa scraping against the floor while being pushed to a side. It doesn't hold a candle to the chilling howl of a stalking mightyena, nor the ground shaking roar of an irate salamence. Nevertheless, the tiny vibrations crawling onto my fingers through the thick glass makes the hair at the back of my neck prickle.
Mudkip starts ramming the thick glass in futility, hard enough to injure itself. The tank doesn't break, nor does it tip over. I watch it for some time, and then head out. I don't really feel like crunching numbers the rest of the evening. It's almost time for dinner, in any case.
The dull thuds of flesh hitting glass fade with every step I take.
The ranger on duty sits languidly on a chair beside the entrance. A bulky growlithe rests at her feet.
"Hullo Brendan. Leaving early?"
"Don't think I'll be able to get much more done tonight," I admit easily, shrugging out of my lab coat.
"Alright. Don't let me keep you from dinner, a warm bed, and a good night's rest."
I smile and shake my head.
The growlithe sitting at her feet eyes me with something akin to irritation, and then turns back to gazing out at the road. Its ears twitch once every ten seconds or so.
I wonder if that mudkip is still thrashing around.
Ranger Selene waves me out, watching me with a bored gaze as I strut out into the cobbled streets of Littleroot.
-x-
My bedroom window faces the wide open children's park in front of our house. I stick my head out and blink through the cold air rushing by. The swings sway on their own, and somewhere out there, a lonely hoothoot calls.
With some effort, I lift myself out and climb up to the slanted roof.
The tiles dig into my back, but they aren't really uncomfortable. A gibbous moon hangs eastwards. Above me, the night sky stretches out like a dark tablecloth, one flecked with a thousand salt crystals. I can try and trace patterns out of them if I wish, but I don't. There's a certain mystery to the randomness of the stars. I won't ruin that novelty.
I lay there in the dark for hours. A myriad thoughts drift idly through my mind.
I lay back, and I dream.
I dream of walking barefoot through a jungle.
-x-
# Entry 132: Claydol
Claydol are old. It is in their very nature. Only a baltoy that has lived long enough to master its fledgling psychic powers becomes something more: a claydol. They do not reproduce, breathe, or eat. Periodically, a claydol replaces parts of its body with fresh earth and clay dug up from the ground. There is no accurate measurement of a claydol's lifespan; some claydol just fall inert suddenly, with no determined cause. Other claydol keep on living seemingly forever. Atlas, the oldest known trained claydol, is purported to be at least eight hundred thirty nine years old.
# All-Star Weekly, Volume 43, Page 7
Norman Maple:
Two time winner of the Silver Conference, Norman is an all-star trainer from from Goldenrod. The ace breezed past Elite Four Will last September, and made a spectacular showing against the formidable Bruno, though he fell short of the finish line. The match was impressive enough for him to land a Leader position in Hoenn.