Chapter 1

I knocked on the door, but no one answered. It was late in the evening, so it didn't make sense that my family was already asleep. Thirty seconds later, I gave up on the door and walked around the house. I kicked open the side gate and checked my backyard. There was nobody there. I was halfway to the back door to see if it was locked when I heard a short, electronic whirring from behind me. I froze for a second. Silence. I turned on the balls of my feet.

Whirriii… whirrii…

The trash can shook, like a firecracker was about to burst out of it. I instinctively placed my hand on my pokeball. This was more than a little weird.

I gulped, then advanced towards the quivering can. I lifted the lid. A bolt of lightning shot out and started flying about my backyard.

"Bucky!" I shouted. The rotom stopped in front of my face and laughed, which sounded like me when I had a cold and I coughed and sneezed at the same time.

"Where's Cray?" I asked. Bucky flew up to the back porch and floated through the door. I had lost my key to the house a few months ago in an unfortunate encounter with an oddish, which had to be the most embarrassing moment of my career.

"Could you maybe open the door?" I asked. The lock clicked in response. I went inside and into the kitchen. All the windows were closed and the shades were drawn, so it was darker in than outside. My stomach growled, and I realized that all I'd eaten today was brunch right before the battle and food. I felt faint. I hope there was leftovers from whatever they had today.

"Bucky?" I called out. I put my finger underneath the light switch, then stopped. I deserved a little fun.

I wandered into the living room where I could see the rotom's faint glow from behind the couch. I walked over and leaned over the edge. "BOO!"

Bucky launched off the floor in alarm, spinning in the air and making a noise more suited for a unfezant than a rotom. I laughed, sinking to my knees on the floor.

Suddenly there was clattering, shushing and footsteps behind me. I stood up and spun on my heels. It was my turn to be shocked out of my pants.

"What in the-"

The lights came on and the cheering started.

I really wanted to get that raspberry cake in me a little bit faster, but no one would let me since they wanted to hear all about my victory. I set my half-eaten plate on the table and started talking.

"It was all thanks to Eclipse, really. Steven's metagross couldn't land a decent hit on him, and this umbreon kept on using his dark pulses. And the rest of my team was unable to fight, so it was just him."

"Why don't you let your pokemon out?" Cray asked once my recap of the battle ended. Bucky danced happily on his head while he said it, so I couldn't decline.

The kitchen was crammed to the breaking point with aunts, uncles and cousins, so I led them out back to show them my pokemon. They appeared in bright flashes of white light. I knew what everyone's response to Eclipse would be before he even came out. And I was right. Everyone gasped. An extremely rare pokemon had just appeared.

"That's a shiny pokemon, Mom!" my little brother said.

I smiled proudly and put my hand through Eclipse's hair. "It's all thanks to him that I won."

I knew Eclipse as a pokemon with a very serious and shy attitude, but he sometimes broke character when he got praised. This was one of those times as the crowd went something to the effect of: "Aww! He's so cute!" I could see a blush through his fur and decided to let the other pokemon out before he collapsed from all the attention.

Out came Jaqueline the lucario, Lenny the flygon, Glade the absol, Harpy the staraptor, and Patriot the swellow. I had already rested them at a pokemon center, so they were ready to party.

"HARPY! COME BACK THIS INSTANT!" I shouted. But she was already inside the cake.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dad walk through the back door. He wasn't known for a volcanic temper, but I did know that he probably paid good money for the cake. I ran to get in front of my disgusting staraptor, but it was too late.

"What in the sam hill is going on?"

I smiled at him with a plate of cake in my right hand. "Care for some cake?"

Everyone was trying not to laugh-including my dad. "Sure, son." He took it from me. Then a blob the shape of a bird landed on my head and screamed. Diagnosis? Too much sugar.

After about thirty minutes into the party, some cousins around my age challenged me to a battle. Everyone gathered around the basketball court.

"Okay," I said, "this court isn't earthquake resistant, so no ground types, got it?" Canyon nodded. Clover was also challenging me, and I knew that her pokemon wasn't anything to laugh at. Then another person stepped up. My dad.

"A triple battle?" I said exasperatedly.

"That's right!" Clover said. "And we each get to use all six of our pokemon!"

I shook my head. And how was this fair?

"Oh well. HARPY!"

She poked her head out from behind the chimney on top of my house. Her whole body was covered in cake and gravy. I groaned.

"Get over here."

So she flew to her position on my side of the battlefield.

"Lenny! Glade! Get over here!" They jumped over the people and took their positions. I groaned again when I saw that they were also bloated from the food.

"What are you complaining about?" Canyon asked. "Bucky can't even levitate anymore. He ate too much laundry."

I shook my head. "Fine. Let's begin."

The small crowd of family cheered. Most of them rooted for Canyon and Clover since they were the underdogs.

"Go scrafty!" Canyon shouted.

"I'm not the kind of person to announce what I'm about to use," Clover muttered. She threw out an ultra ball, which turned out to be a noctowl.

And Norman sent out his ace pokemon-a slaking. That's when the fun began. Noctowl set up a light screen, which was unfortunate for me since I told Lenny to use the boomburst. Harpy protected herself, and Glade went for the sucker punch on Norman's slaking. Norman was immediately put out of action. The boomburst didn't do as much as I hoped, though it looked like the scrafty took the hit badly.

The crowd gasped as Harpy pushed the "NUKE" button in her brain. Also known as the horrifying brave bird. It was pretty funny to see the bullet of gravy and frosting to completely knock the noctowl out.

A few minutes later, Lenny fainted due to a pidgeot's hyper beam. And glade couldn't take the heat wave from Canyon's charizard. Each of my opponents had only one pokemon left, though. I knew how to end it quickly.

"Harpy, use return! Patriot, use aerial ace! And Jaqueline, use aura sphere!"

They responded and each took one down.

The party was great, but it had to end sometime. At nine, with everyone's pokemon healed up, they started to leave. I was about to walk back inside the house and get up to my room when Norman announced for everyone to stay put.

Oh, that's right. The prize money for winning.

Dad handed me a fancy envelope. "Open it."

So I did, and stared. I didn't actually know what the prize money was until now, and boy, was it a lot.

"Three-hundred-million dollars…"

This could buy me an apartment, and I hadn't even settled down yet.

My little brother ran up to me. "Brendan! I still can't believe you won! Maybe we won't have to be poor anymore!"

I shook my head at stephen's comment. We weren't even remotely poor. We had a six bedroom house, and another upstairs family room.

"I know, right?" I responded.

It was getting late, and soon it was time for bed. I walked into my old dusty room. It looked exactly like it did when I left home three years earlier, back when I was twelve. For me, that was ages ago. Sure, I did day visits sometimes, maybe once every two weeks, but for the most part, I was on an adventure somewhere. I beat his bed sheets against the wall to rid most of the dust, then laid down.

Wow, and I'm not even close to being as tall as the average sixteen-year old. I need a bigger bed.

I was about to fall asleep, but then I remembered that my umbreon made me promise to let him outside for the night. I always slept with my belt on, so he just reached down and took the timer ball from one of the three pouches hanging from it.

Then I pushed the button in the center of the ball. My umbreon appeared in a soundless flash of light. He looked up, then shot a quick nod as if to say,

"Hey dude."

"Hey Eclipse. How are you tonight?"

The umbreon nodded, then jumped off the bed to find something interesting.

"Tone it down a bit," I said sleepily, referring to the bright blue lights that Eclipse was generating.

I felt guilty for letting only my umbreon out, so he just decided to let them all explore for the night. I took the remaining five poke balls and released all of them. They were happy they were out and began to chat loudly to each other. I sat down heavily on the carpet and just let my pokemon mess around.

I pulled out my Pokenav Plus and began browsing the Internet. I was looking at lopunny memes when I noticed the time at the top right corner of the screen. 12:30. I looked up. Eclipse was calmly inspecting the snorlax. Everyone else were just chatting like no one else was sleeping in town.

"Shh!"

The pokemon fell quiet.

"We need to sleep."

Reluctantly, the birds quieted. The absol shot from the ground like it was just stung by a beedrill. I shook my head. I realized that if I was going to let my pokemon sleep out of their poke balls, I would have to clear more space. My eyes fell on my life sized snorlax doll.

Why do I even have that?

I had used this trick before to get my way when I pranked someone, and I would just use it again to make more room.

"Eclipse, use minimize on the snorlax."

The umbreon looked back, confused.

"We need more space to sleep tonight."

That seemed to make sense to him. I knew my pokemon could understand human speech perfectly-not just battle commands. I even swore that once I saw Patriot laugh at a joke that my friend texted me over the Pokenav. I moved from my thoughts and found that the Snorlax doll was already only half of a foot tall.

"Good umbreon."

Eclipse nodded serenely.

"So, who wants the doll?"

Harpy flew down from the enormous ceiling fan and snatched up the doll like it was another rattatta she would normally eat for supper. She then landed on my desk, and began to make herself at home. She had some old homework papers from Brendan's last year of school gathered around her. She would probably make a nest out of them right on my desk. Great, another mess to clean up tomorrow morning.

"Heh." Patriot snickered to the absol.

"I know. She has never really shown an interest in anything else-other than battling and eating food," Glade whispered back.

"H-hush please?" Eclipse said as he started to lie down at the place the doll previously occupied.

Patriot listened to Eclipse's advice and found a perch atop Brendan's old T.V. Glade was being stubborn as usual.

"I thought that umbreons never slept at night."

"J-just napping. During the night, I can sleep too."

Brendan hushed the conversation. For the most part, Glade liked having a fellow dark type traveling alongside him, but Eclipse was incredibly boring and shy. If Glade ever wanted a joke, he would have to go to his trainer for internet memes or listen to Harpy rant about some other unnecessary irritating aspect of life. For some reason, he had the suspicion that his trainer liked Eclipse more than his other pokemon. Eclipse was the most obedient, true, but that just made him look more robotic than the others. What was likable in that? But it was only a suspicion. Maybe Brendan could relate to the umbreon in some way...

He glanced up to see what Brendan was doing. He was on his Dexnav again, probably looking for a cool place to vacation to in celebration of his new crowning as champion of the Hoenn region.

I'm sorry. The real fun will only begin in like 6 chapters.

By that, I mean that the official plot is revealed in 6 chapters. Thank you for the clarification, Farla.

-PatrioticSwellow