I got way into Pokemon Go, and I frikken love Blanche and Spark (don't worry, Candela is awesome too and she will appear). These two are total tropes, but they're also some of my favorite tropes. However there is one thing that gets me - there isn't really a narrative for Pokemon Go. The team leaders don't have a lot of backstory, yet they seem very interesting with extremely distinct personalities. Figured I'd add my own little story to the vast expanse of the Pokemon universe.
-Static
/*\
Blanche did not view herself as a friendly person. She was always busy with her research, watching and studying her pokemon and entering data into electronic files late into the night. She wasn't sociable, and spoke in short and often blunt words. She comes off as rude, though that's not how she means it at all. Candela once deemed her an "antisocial workaholic" a term she thought was meant to be endearing but didn't feel like it at all. And Spark…well she wasn't entirely sure if she had ever even spoken with Spark outside of hallway pleasantries.
A soft rapping on the door broke her out of her train of thought. Contrary to popular belief, Blanche did enjoy the few breaks she got. She could simply sit back in her chair and close her eyes, not having to look at the bright computer screen. She could sip her tea peacefully and let her mind rest even for just a moment.
She sighed and called for the intruder to come in. She had assigned some of her trainers to catch a large sample of magikarp for her newest study. Blanche was hoping to evolve a red gyarados. She would love to figure out what sort of gene caused the mutation, or if it was even caused by a gene at all.
The young trainer entered and presented a bag full of pokeballs.
"Hello Team Leader Blanche!" She got out breathlessly, removing a cheap-looking backpack and setting it on the desk. "So far, I've managed to collect about forty magikarp. It's still a long way to go, but it's a start yeah?" The trainer looked nervous and hopeful, as though she were anxiously awaiting praise. Blanche did her best to give her a reassuring smile. Smiling for others had never been her strong suit.
"Hello Trainer Lily," Blanche greeted, "This is absolutely fine. Forty in one day is excellent work. Thank you for your assistance." The girl smiled shyly back and nodded. Lily rushed out the door, excitedly assuring the white-haired woman that she would return with more magikarp, and let the door close softly behind her retreating form. The team leader sighed in relief. She had never been good at even formal communication, but her newest recruit understood her words and attitude perfectly. Where she might have sounded dismissive to others, Lily recognized her appreciation.
She stood up and stretched, her coat hanging stiffly between her shoulders. Blanche grimaced and decided to take it off. It was warm in the room anyways, and it wasn't as though anyone would come in any time soon. Left in her waistcoat and bodysuit, she took the sack in hand and methodically began loading the pokeballs into a storage unit. She did not want the magikarp getting out yet. They would die very shortly outside the ball, deprived of water, and then they definitely wouldn't evolve.
Her task finished in a matter of minutes, Blanche returned to her computer. She quickly checked that there was no more work to be done just yet, and glanced at the clock. Damn. It was only 9:00 pm. She still had another three hours to go before she could leave. More trainers were scheduled to return with more magikarp. She sighed. How to pass three more hours? Her eyes flickered over the towering bookshelf. In fact, most of the books were unread. She always found interesting reads on her trips alone to the bookstore, and always ended up leaving with at least five new tomes. She would tell herself that she'd find the time for them, but in the back of her mind she knew they would end up collecting dust on her shelf. There was always so much work to do, that no matter what promises she made herself she could never get further than a chapter.
Now she was faced with the prospect that she might have three whole hours to herself.
Smiling, Blanche made a pot of fresh tea in the little kitchenette of her office and picked something out. It wasn't too lengthy – only about two-hundred pages – and sat down on the couch, just a little to the side of her desk. She set her tea down on the table, and sank into the sofa. She pushed her long white ponytail aside and tucked her legs under herself. She couldn't remember the last time she'd gotten to relax with a good book.
An hour passed, then two. Blanche had been so sucked into the story that she only had a few pages left when she noticed the time. Her eyebrows knitted together. Eleven O'Clock? That couldn't be right. At least one more trainer should have returned by now. She shook her head softly. No, she thought to herself, it's fine. Maybe they found another Pokemon worth catching, or they stopped to get something to eat. They know I don't mind such things. Perhaps this is just the universe letting me finish my story for once. She continued, though she had a sinking feeling that she shouldn't.
She told herself that they were fine and had just been delayed. These things happened, and she had been granted the pristine privilege of getting to read one of her own books for once instead of checking a science text she had memorized 20 times over. She never got to have this much free time to herself and there were only about nine pages left. She did want to get to the end, after all.
But as Blanche finished her book and got through three more chapters of another, the worry only knotted in her stomach. At this point it was now 11:45 and still nothing had happened. The trainers weren't technically due until midnight, but they usually showed up early. She did not like it when they were late, nor did she like it when she was forced to stay later than necessary. They knew that.
As the clock ticked and the final fifteen minutes passed the leader could feel the dread building up to the point where she could almost taste it on the tip of her tongue. She tried to tell herself that she was just being paranoid. They were fine, they were just late. It was now midnight, and she couldn't even hear the elevator down the hallway. She closed the book and retrieved her trench coat from the chair.
What if they'd gotten lost in the woods? The voice in the back of her mind whispered as she shrugged on her coat. What if they ran into hostile pokemon? What if they ran into the rogues?
No. Blanche thought, trying to reassure herself, smoothing out her clothing. If they had run into trouble, they would have called. They had their Pokedexes. They can use those to call here in case of emergency. Those things had been redesigned for that very purpose, even if they were rendered physically incapable of tapping the call button. They monitor the adrenal glands of their owners. If they were in danger they would have been afraid, if they had been afraid the Pokedex would have gone off and I would have been notified. Hell, I'm even notified when it isn't an emergency.
Blanche took a deep breath, almost blushing at the thought of the few false alarms they'd had so far, and finished her tea and checked the hallway. There was nothing there. Not the faintest sound of even the vent system, and it looked as though even Candela and Spark had gone home.
Where were her trainers?
Blanche made her way towards the elevator, the hairs on the back of her skull rising like a nervous jolteons fur. She never got this feeling, this feeling of wrongness. She couldn't shake the sense that something truly awful had happened. A poster on the wall caught her eye for a split second.
Trust your instincts. It read. Spark's poster. As obnoxious as the man could be, perhaps he had a point.
Though it made her uncomfortable to work with anything other than cold hard facts Blanche had never experienced this before, this intense sense of unease. Her trainers had been late before, and she'd felt nothing but irritation.
Why was this time different?
She patiently waited for the elevator as it faintly dinged again and again and again. When it finally opened Blanche let out the breath she'd been holding.
It was far too quiet in this building.
She stepped inside the metal doors and hit a button. She was going to the roof. Her intuition told her that she might need the assistance of one of her pokemon. One with the ability to fly.
/*\
To say that Spark was not a patient human being would be a massive understatement. He glared at the television and clutched the controller in his hands. More tiny cracks began to appear along the plastic seams.
The console was taking absolutely forever to update, and Spark was only a few minutes away from jumping out the window in sheer frustration. He growled and set the controller down, clattering a little too harshly on the coffee table. Maybe he could get this to work in his favor. While he was waiting for the damn thing to finish updating, he could find himself a snack. Something a bit more filling than flavored tortilla chips.
After a few minutes of searching, he found some pizza rolls in the freezer. He silently fist pumped, and dug around in the cabinets for a cookie sheet and tin foil. He popped the rolls in the oven for twenty minutes, and played around on his phone until they were done. He let his food sit for the allotted amount of time, and then piled his snack up onto a plate. Yes, much better than chips.
He sat down and silently congratulated himself on his patience. After all that time he spent, the console should at least be close to ready. He looked to see how far the updates had gotten.
The console was at 15 percent.
/*\
Spark was on the roof staring out at the city, and scarfing down his food. The night was clouded and in addition to the cheese and sauce, he could detect the ozone in the air, the light and crisp scent of rain. Thunder sounded in the distance and light flickered in the corner of his eye.
An electrical storm. He stared to his right, watching as bluish white light crackled across the horizon. The wind was blowing in his direction, so it wouldn't be long until he would have to go back inside. It was coming closer every second. He set the plate aside and looked out at the fading lights of the city, and the stationary pillar that marked Professor Willows public lab. Spark kept only a few eggs there, the rest hidden inside of the secret Instinct HQ, but with the growing number of burglaries and murders, Spark couldn't help worrying.
He wasn't sure who was committing all the crimes. No one was. Dead people and pokemon were being found all over. Just that morning, one of his own trainers had been two hours late for a meeting. It wasn't that important, he wasn't presenting anything and it was just a small schedule change, but Spark had noticed. This was a man who was early to everything. If he was late he pleaded for forgiveness, in spite of the fact that Spark was notorious for being too forgiving. If he happened to be sick or if his family needed him he called in a day off or sick day, and he always ensured that it was Spark who knew. He always knew where this guy was whether he liked it or not.
Today though? The leader had been worried. He'd had a terrible feeling, and he'd been right to. Not thirty minutes after the meeting ended, Officer Jenny and her lackeys entered the scene, asking him what he knew about the trainer. He found out that his trainer had been found dead on his morning run. He'd been stabbed in the neck with a syringe, poisoned by some kind of drug no one had ever seen before. Unlike every other murder, there was no evidence of a fight.
Even more disturbing, the pokemon too had been killed. The common ones such as rattattas, pidgeys, eevees and the like had been torn into near unrecognizable pieces by what he could only suppose were predatory pokemon. From the pictures he'd seen, it looked like it had been done with obvious zeal. The blood, the fur patches, the splintered bones and pink innards, it nearly made him hurl.
On the other hand the "more valuable" creatures had been taken, not killed. Given that one piece of evidence, all that anyone knew about these guys was that they were probably pokemon traffickers, or involved in illegal experimentation. Yet it didn't match up with any gangs style. Team Rocket, Magma, Plasma, any of them. They did awful things. They stole pokemon from their homes and trainers, tried to create more landmass and disrupt the ecosystems, tried to break the bonds between pokemon and human, but ultimately there was always a line. They were thieves and idealists, not murderers, and none of them especially would kill a pokemon.
It almost looked like the strange rogues were having fun, and it's shaken even the other gangs into silence. No one has heard from any of them. No graffiti, no propaganda, not even any grunts on the streets. Whoever this new criminal syndicate was, they were feared, and they remained anonymous. No one knew what it was they wanted, and in addition to their bloodthirsty "sport" it had a purpose: they had left no witnesses. No one knew who they were or even what they looked like, and to him that was the scariest part.
Spark took his empty plate and stood up, preparing to return to his apartment. Surely the console had to be done by now, and he could change back into his PJs and relax with an FPS or maybe an RPG. Either way, he wanted to be able to scream "REKT" at the television. He almost smiled at his plan when a flicker of movement caught his attention high above.
It looked like a bird. A bird with a very familiar trainer on its back.
/*\
Never written for Pokemon before. In fact I never even played Pokemon until about a year ago – I watched the anime, but never played. I was one of those kids whose parents disapproved of video games of all kinds. In turn I ended up wanting to be a game designer. Lol.
-Static