Hello everybody, and welcome to my first ever Pokémon fanfiction! This fic revolves around the 'Ash-Coma Theory' where all of his adventures have just been inside his head all along. If you don't like, then don't read. Anyway, let's get into the first chapter!

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Familiar Face

Delia Ketchum, a woman in her late forties, made frequent visits to the Viridian Central Hospital every day for the past nineteen years. Today was no different. As she drove in her crimson minivan on the road to Viridian City, she couldn't help but think that maybe today would be the day she'd get to the hospital and see her son, awake. But another part of her thought that finally, at long last, his heart would have stopped beating. She wiped a tear from from her eye, shaking her head.

"My little boy is not a quitter," she mumbled to herself, her knuckles turning white from gripping the steering wheel. "He'll get through this."

Keeping her dear son in the hospital costed a fortune, but with help from various family members, Pallet Town's very own Professor Oak, and several family friends, she was able to pay for him to stay until he woke up. The doctors had told her several times to give up hope, and to let them pull the plug all together. Delia was way to stubborn to listen to them. She never stopped believing that he would get better.

Delia pulled into the parking lot and found her usual parking space that everyone in the city knew not to use. After years of coming to this place daily, it had become reserved for her and only her. She stepped out of her vehicle, slung her brown purse over her shoulder, and shut the door behind her. Making her way to the front doors, many people along the way stopped and stared at her, mumbling amongst themselves.

"She's back again."

"I feel sorry for her."

"I hope Ash is okay."

"You'd think she would have given up by this point."

"Miss Ketchum is as much a fighter as her son is."

Delia blocked out everybody as she pushed through those double doors and marched her way to the front desk, taking the clipboard without saying anything to the woman behind the desk and signing her name in. She placed the clipboard down and began walking to the elevator. She pressed the up arrow and in seconds the elevator arrived with no one on it. She stepped into the small square space and clicked on the sixth floor.

Delia was so sick and tired of the elevator music that played on one continuous loop. It was that same track that they had playing on the loudspeakers in the town Pokémon centers. The first few weeks she enjoyed the music, but now she had a burning hatred for it. The elevator came to a halt at the sixth floor. The sliding door could not open fast enough. Delia was already squeezing herself through before it was actual open all the way.

She dashed down the hall, turned a corner, and kept walking until she reached the seventh door on the left. She barged in, startling the nurse that was in there who had been checking on Ash. "Miss Ketchum!" the nurse gasped. "I know you needed to see him but haven't you ever heard of knocking?"

Delia took no time to look at the nurse. She knelt by Ash's bedside, staring into the stone-hard face of her beloved son, Ash Ketchum. He was twenty-nine years old now, and had been admitted in this hospital for just over nineteen years. She remembered the day the hospital called her, saying her ten-year-old son had been terribly injured. Electrocuted. But he didn't die. He had been in a comatose state ever since. He had a regular heart beat and his breathing was the same as any other person, but he was subconscious, asleep, for far too long. Just seeing her baby boy caused Delia to break down just then, pressing her now wet face onto her son's chest.

Every day she saw him, she cried. It was like she was seeing him like this for the very first time.

"Joy..." Delia mumbled under her breath, standing up on her wobbly legs and turning slowly to face the nurse in the corner of the room sitting at her desk. "How's...Ash been?"

"Same as always, Miss Ketchum," Nurse Joy replied, looking down at the work on her desk. "His vitals are all the same. He has a steady heart beat. Sometimes the beat gets faster, but that is most likely due to whatever he sees in his subconscious. As you know, like every other person, he still undergoes REM sleep at random points during the day or night. But still...we can't find a way to wake him."

"Does he have any hope?" Delia asked.

"I'm sorry, Miss Ketchum, but I just don't know," Joy said in sad tone. "All of the doctors and professors across the region are stumped. Normal Awakening potions don't work on humans. And nothing the doctors have tried have succeeded in waking him up. Johto, Hoenn, and Sinnoh professors are just as stumped as we are. Tomorrow we have a meeting with a Kalos doctor, a specialist in comatose patients."

"You think he can help?" Delia asked.

"I'm not sure," Joy answered. "So far we've been reluctant to request help from Unova and Kalos. But this doctor from Kalos heard Ash's story on the worldwide news and took an interest in it."

Delia chuckled to herself, wiping her eyes. "It's funny. Who would have known my little Ash would be famous worldwide?"

…

A woman in her early thirties sat in front of a mirror in her bedroom, raking a brush through her very tangled hair. Her bed always made her hair a mess. After trying and failing to get her hair straight she growled in exasperation and threw her brush to the ground. "Well this sucks," she growled to herself. She stood up, scratched her back, and walked over to the window overlooking a big and bustling street. The cost for living in this very expensive apartment in Lumiose City was through the roof. Though she made more than enough money acting. She was the famous star, Serena Yamada, of course.

She has appeared in several Kalos movie productions as the lead role, had been a main character or special gust star on several sitcoms and teen dramas, and she has even voice acted on a number of animated shows and films. Just about everyone in Kalos knew of Serena.

Serena made her way to the bathroom and ran her water. She undressed and walked over to entertainment center on the wall directly across from the bathtub, which held a huge flat screen television. She switched it on to KNN. Serena would always find interesting stories on the Kalos News Network, so she made it a habit to watch it every morning at eight o'clock to bathe while watching the news. She placed her bath towel and the towel to dry herself off with on a small dresser to the side of the tub. She stopped running her water dipped a toe in the bath, feeling its warmth. With a yawn, she stepped into the tub and sunk back, letting the back of her head rest comfortably on the side of the tub.

She absolutely loved to relax in the bath. Soaking in warm water allowed her to forget all of her troubles and worries. She closed her eyes and sunk deeper into the water, letting it go over her mouth. She opened one eye to look at the TV. Some old bald dude was talking to a reporter in what looked to be the main lobby of the Lumiose Hospital.

She reached for the remote on the dresser by the tub but all her fingers touched were cold wood and her soft towels. "Oh come on!" she complained, sitting up peering over the side of the tub looking all over the ground the dresser. She noticed it was still by the television. "Great. Just great."

Serene sighed, and then cleared her throat. "Meowstic! MEOWSTIC!" Serene saw the bathroom door creak open ever slow slightly. Hr Psychic-type Pokémon had the respect and decency not to open the bathroom door all the way. "Can you please raise the volume of the TV? I seemed to have forgotten the remote again..." She chuckled in embarrassment and scratched the side of her head, feeling her face blush crimson. She hated asking Meowstic to do things for her. She didn't want to make it seem like she treated her Pokémon like slaves.

Meowstic used her psychic powers to raise the volume of the television to just where it wasn't too loud. Serena could suddenly hear what was happening on TV. "Thanks, hun!" Meowstic closed the bathroom door shut.

"And do you have any idea as to how to awaken him?" asked the news reporter. Serena smiled. She loved seeing an old friend on television. When she was a kid, she had no idea that Shauna would grow up to become a news reporter.

"I can't say anything for sure," the doctor she was speaking to replied. "But I will try everything I know to bring him out of this coma."

"Now for anyone who's just now hearing about this, how exactly did this boy even get into a coma?" Shauna asked, putting the mic she held right next to the doctor's face.

"I've been told that Ash Ketchum was just ten years old when it happened, around nineteen years ago," he explained. "He had just received his first ever Pokémon and left to go on his journey to challenge the Kanto Indigo League. But before he even made it to Viridian City, he was electrocuted. It is unclear if it was due to a lightning strike or an electric move used by his Pikachu, but it sent him into a coma that he has yet to wake up from."

"Ash Ketchum..." Serena mumbled to herself. The name had such a familiar ring to it. She began thinking back to where she had heard that name. Did that guy say he was from Kanto? As in the Kanto region? And then she had a sudden flash to the time so long ago when a young boy gave her a handkerchief after scraping her knee in the woods. But she couldn't place a face, or where those woods were. She looked over to the entertainment center, to the side of the TV and right next to a bunch of bottles of shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. And she couldn't believe it. It was that same handkerchief that boy had given to her...and she forgot all about him.

"Ash Ketchum..." she repeated to herself. "Pokémon Summer Camp...in Kanto. That was so long ago..." She looked back to the TV and the reporter Shauna was no longer speaking to the doctor. Instead a picture of what looked to be a ten-year-old boy was covering the screen, along with a picture of a man in his twenties to its right. Both seemed to be the same person. Both had a very familiar face. "Ash...that is you."