For Corinth, o'course, and Zali and Chenloeth.

I don't own Pokémon, and as you will see, no one owns Raikou.

This fic is strongly Alternate Universe. It should be Fantasy/Angst/Sci Fi… oh well. Just watch out, the timeline isn't anything you're used to, as the fic is set two hundred years before the Trainer era of the Pokémon World as I see it.

LEGENDARY

Morning.

Knobs of water lay on the trampoline like smooth river pebbles. The 'river' was below them, on the grass, bathing every blade in liquid. Like a real river, light danced in pinpoints across its surface. As if something had moved across it, a V-shape of grass was frosted, a white wake across the water.

Clare went inside and made breakfast, watching the streetlight up on Valley Road from the corner of her eye. She poured Patrick's cereal and peeled the mandarin oranges. The darkness began to dry up a little, but the mist higher up didn't. The streetlight hadn't gone out yet.

Soon, she picked up her schoolbag, heavy with unusual things, and slung it across her shoulders. Mist flamed around Mt Luminary, the hill that gave the suburb its name. The sun was white, but the footpath and the houses and the trees were shaded gray. Blue, green, and brown struggled through in patches.

Through the village centre and across one road, and around the corner. She cruised on autopilot on the muddy border of grass edge and pavement. Here it was brown and macadamia shells were scattered across it. Morning broke the outlines of spiderwebs across the bars of the gates she passed.

Clare looked up and saw the fabulous outline over the summit of Mt Luminary, leaning through the mist, saw the billowing, rippling mane, the pale gleaming of the pronged metal crest. The Pokémon god was dark against the mist, of no particular colour, silent, standing.

Like an instinct, Clare ran. Up the wide path leading to a gate onto the mountain; one stride each on the long stairs; through the gate, nearly tripping as she shut it behind her. She gave up on the track after seconds and climbed vertically up Mt Luminary's side, barely dodging the wild bushes, clawing into the grass. ~Skystrike! Skystrike!~ Clare crossed a flat grass terrace that made her feel, in a peripheral sort of way, as if she was going down a slope; then up again, and up, and up.

She stopped once, her breath causing a cloud of mist that blurred her glasses and reduced the trees above her to brown and green blobs. Her body wanted her to stop forever and then go down, but she went up again.

~Wait!~

She went up the final slope. There were no people on the edge overlooking Mt Luminary's crater; no one anywhere on the hill that she could see. Skystrike wasn't there.

~/~

Ten minutes later she stood at another crossing, waiting for cars that blinked myopically at her as they passed. She didn't know why she hadn't kept looking; it wasn't because of the incentive of school. In the same way that she had known the beast on the hill was the Raikou Skystrike, she knew that by the time she had reached Mt Luminary's summit, Skystrike had not been there.

She felt nauseated; sick the way you usually feel, when your mind and body tell you different things.

Now she was late. Not late for school, exactly - she would miss a meeting with her Drama class group, for which she had brought props and costumes. That was worse. Her Drama group would feel justified, now, in blaming anything wrong with their project on her, and the teacher would only be too glad to listen to them.

Pray for those that (somethingly) use you and persecute you... Clare flung her black curly hair back with her black tense fingers, and set her teeth to endure.

~/~

"Skin and hair, these are the most important things in the world." – Nadine Gordimer

Clare was reflecting on this as she walked home in the mid-afternoon. She thought it was true. But accents were important, too, and history, and a language that no one else knew. If it hadn't been her hair, and skin, and height, then it would have been the fact that a French president born in a French-governed African country had pushed the button and nearly killed Earth. It was the first thing that anyone learned in History; then you went forward to the gathering of the survivors, the creation of Pokémon, the humans' hundred-thousand year 'sleep', and the beginning of this age's civilisation.

Or you went back and studied all that was left of Old World History, from the dinosaurs to the pressures of the 22nd Century AD, with all the gaps.

Gaps, apparently, caused by the actions of one woman. Who had had the same nationality and appearance as Clare's ancestors. Skin and hair...

Usually, walking to and from school, Clare didn't walk over Mt Luminary but around it. It was a small local hill, no higher than a skyscraper but quite broad, set aside as public park-land, and as she neared it this afternoon, Clare's thoughts changed. She stared at its blunt peak and visualised Skystrike standing there. It was still hard to believe that she had imagined him.

She walked through the Mt Luminary shops and into a cybercafé. When she was eight, before the Red Pandemic, she had saved up to buy a storage account on the Web. She had liked to write stories, and had had no computer or extra stationery at home.

It had been six years since she had accessed the particular story that now appeared on the grimy monitor. She scrolled down and read:

[Sara the Legendrider soared through the clouds on Skystrike's back, holding her Spear she carried it for show only. She did'nt need to hold onto her Raikous grey mane beccause she was so use to riding him. they were going to meeting with Zapdos, ask her help for defeat the Tyrant adn Rescue Entei and Yves from his dungions.]

The Legendrider story was the first and most powerful of all her stories: Sara, with her Legend partner, Skystrike, was the Legendriders' leader, and there were five others. All of them had their own Pokémon friends, and they all spent their time upholding justice and doing battle with evil in a mediaeval Pokémon world. Absentmindedly, Clare began to correct the grammar and spelling errors in the document.

Clare remembered making lists of names of Pokémon friends when she was in primary school, shutting out the senseless cruelty of everyone else to her. She had scribbled them down in pencil in the back of her exercise books and got in trouble.

Another bit made her almost giggle as she punctuated it. It was the "Descriptions" area:

[Sara was just below medium height and had long, straight, pale-pink hair. She was very slim with a small, thin nose, and her eyes were green. They were bright and stood out in her pale face. She had a mix of ancestors, North American, Japanese, and Australian. Her feet were petite. She was very beautiful and Shou liked her.]

~Eight year olds can be so transparent,~ thought Clare, staring down at the description of her own Legendrider character, who should have looked like a princess or a child model, and nothing at all like Clare. Clare wasn't so self-ignorant now, but she wondered if she had really changed. Eight year old Clare hadn't wanted to be black, frizzy-haired and French-African. Fourteen-year-old Clare didn't either, and still wasn't quite resigned to it.

She'd made up all the characters, basing them on no one she knew, but to her 14 year old eyes they were obviously the friends she had wished she'd had. And Skystrike had been the most important.

Had she made him up, or written down half-truths?

She still thought of all Legendary Pokémon as more than rare and valuable Pokémon. She secretly subscribed to the idea that they were forces of good, keeping the balance of Nature. She loved reading encyclopaedias that said that Legendaries had never been spotted in groups, only on their own, although encyclopaedias believed, unlike Clare, that there had to be more than one Entei or Suicune or Moltres.

Clare signed off and continued homewards. She had made up the Legendrider world as a way of escape, she knew very well. And the Raikou Skystrike was still her most powerful symbol of freedom and escape, six years on.

~/~

Clare began to leave for school at an earlier time, and come home later. Her family didn't comment. There were only two other people in her family, her younger brother Jerome and her father. Both of them worked - Jerome, as a sort of apprentice to her father's friend, and her father, as a factory worker, on a twelve-hour day shift. It was the only job that was offered to him. He would have done well in school, but low grades were all he was given. Now that his wife was dead, he worked even harder.

Clare felt guilty, but she was smart enough, and school was the only way for her - being female and of a certain conspicuous racial type - to help herself later on. It was painful and made her bitter but it was better than home, where the pain of Jerome and Patrick eddied in the air. She didn't burden them with her problems, and she didn't let them burden her with theirs: deal.

Was it always like this? she wondered, and decided that the situation had changed a little, but the atmosphere had only gradually darkened. Her mother and grandmother had died early in the Red Pandemic that had existed from the time that she had been nine to the time that she had been twelve. Then she, her brother, and her father had left their ghost town and eventually ended up in Mt Luminary.

Maybe it was true that discrimination had gotten worse since the Red Pandemic. Clare supposed that it had something to do with the bad situation, and people wishing for the fabulous medical advances, and general luxury, of the Old Earth.

But they all had hope left. Clare hadn't even realised she had it until she had run towards the outline of Skystrike on the hill.

And she thought over the next weeks that she had lost it again, as on her detours between home and school she found nothing on Mt Luminary's peak.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,

Even there... Psalm 139