There were Pokémon masters when I was boy.
They were heroes. Sitting on my sofa at home, cradled in my mother's lap, I'd watch them. They were amazing on television, and I always figured in real life they'd be even more so. There was Cynthia, a queen in Sinnoh. Throughout the world she was known as the most powerful woman alive. She battled the great Alder of Unova once; a tough battle. My eyes had drunk it up, being allowed to stay awake past my bed time to witness every tantalising moment of it. Again when Lance the Dragon master and Steven Stone the geologist had clashed. I swear they had the power to tear apart the earth they stood upon. And Diantha, oh the way her Gardevoir had glowed, changing, growing into something more than even I believed Pokémon could become! Those were the elites. They represented the pinnacle of human and Pokémon syncronicity, the purest bond that can ever be achieved. They were the greatest people alive, and I wanted to be just like them.
There are no masters anymore. Or at least, if there are, they've gone into hiding. They've left us alone in the dark.
The screaming dragged me from my sleep. I didn't mind. Like most every night, my dreams had been black and full of terror. At least awake I could see the horrors before me. I rolled from my bed, the rough and battered thing that it was, and knelt on my floor as exposed as my birth, shivering. I took a moment to gather my bearings, accepting the world around me one object at a time. The hard wood beneath my knees. The dawn half-light pushing at my eyelids. The damp smell, the off taste on my tongue, and the screaming. Every morning the screaming. Laboriously I stood, pulled on the tattered jeans which I'd worn only yesterday, and pushed through my door leaving the room behind.
Some room, I thought sardonically. It was essentially a shed. My window was a hole in the wall curtained by a shirt nailed above it, my bed a raised slab of wood covered only by a bed sheet a decade old and with more holes than a tennis racket. It had never been tidied, though I had no possessions to be tidied up, and it had never been cleaned. It would smell of teenage boy, if not for the fact that it was so exposed to the air it might as well have no walls. The only other object in the room was a baseball bat, propped in the corner in case of emergencies. There were often emergencies.
A step outside and the soles of my feet felt the press of hard packed dirt. I would've winced when I felt a small sharp stone dig into my heal if I hadn't been barefoot for as long as I can remember. I'm used to it. A gust of wind sent a spiral of dust rolling along the ground; dry flecks of dirt made visible by the morning sun, which I could feel already beating hot on my bare shoulders. The screaming came from ahead of me, from another small shack much similar to my own. Brusquely I crossed the yard towards it.
Inside, thin beams of light dappled the floor through holes in the walls. Aunt Theresa was there, rapped only in a shawl brown with age. In her arms was the baby, wailing so loud it's a surprise its lungs haven't shrivelled. My lovely kicking little alarm clock.
"Adrian!" My aunt cried. "Please, take him. Take your brother. Calm him!" She shoved him towards me, and like all mornings I took the boy in my arms and rocked him gently side to side, waiting patiently for his sobs to subside. As he was passed into my arms my aunts features relaxed, taking years off of her face. Not that it made her look young though. She was in her fifties, and rough with it. Sun dried skin wrinkled like old newspaper hung off her face, arms and everywhere else. Bags hanging from her eyes so deep and dark made it look as if she was permanently wearing badly applied eye shadow, and her once rich dark hair was rapidly becoming replaced with tufts of grey. Her thick Spanish accent made her sentences sometimes hard to decipher, and she was incapable of using words with more than two syllables. Before the Crisis I'd seen her only at yearly family gatherings, but I can still see that she is a mere shell of the woman she once was.
The boy she handed me wasn't even my brother, but her only son. Every day she dressed him in the same shirt, baby blue with the name DARÍO stitched across the front. Beneath her pillow I knew were two more shirts: one pink with the name VENESSA and another blue with PORTHOS. Those aren't needed anymore.
Gradually, my 'brother' calmed down, settling into an indefinite silence. For now he was content, and I nestled him against my chest protectively. He wasn't my brother, but he'd been born in the early days of the Crisis and so I've known him all of his life. I knew how to hush him better than his own mother, who only got stressed when he started balling. And he was fragile, still being treated like a baby despite being two years old.
I can't blame my aunt for her mindset. War, loss and famine do that to a person.
With Darry resting on my shoulder, I began my morning wander of the village. Our two rooms were positioned on the western edge of the town. By town, I mean an area roughly one hundred meters across from our shacks to the eastern edge. To the north, a narrow stream trickled by, cutting the dry land in two. Beneath it maybe fifty houses, each as broken and decrepit as our own, were scattered almost randomly. The innermost houses ringed the central fire-pit, which we set alight in the cold season on the coldest nights to take the chill off our bones. We don't do this often, as the trees around us are so sparse that we need as many as we can for fruit and shelter. In the far south there are mountains, which we can see at night through flashes of lightning brought on by the endless storm. There's always thunder over there.
For the past three years this run down encampment had been our home. Now, I barely remember what a brick and mortar building looks like. It's been so long since I've seen clean clothes I'm started to believe that they're made torn and faded. I'm beginning to doubt Pokémon were ever our friends.
My first stop was the stream. Each morning I checked that the water was clean, that it was even still running. Before I even saw it I felt the tension ease from my shoulders as the sound of trickling water told me we still have a flow. Sometimes we don't, and those days can be the harshest and the longest of all, especially in the summer heat. I allowed Darry momentarily to paddle his feet in the shallow water, and a squeal of delight told me he'd enjoyed it. Those moments are what I live for. They're the only joy I have.
Looking down, I see myself in the water, watching over Darry. My hair used to be cropped short, but now light brown curls wrap themselves around my ears and tickle the back of my neck. Green eyes looked back up at me. Surely they can't be my own, I thought, as I do every morning. They look so... old. And yet the lean face, high cheekbones and pinched nose were that of a boy. How could a boy look that sad?
Apart from the torn jeans, I wore nothing. Everything above the waist was both skinny and well built at the same time, the result of endless work and limited food. The boy wasn't particularly tall, only five foot seven, but like a man his chest, stomach and arms were riddled with faded scars, bruises and scrapes, so frequent that the body itself was like an abstract canvas of injury. It was the body of a fighter, who had more fights yet to come.
From there I wandered back into town, knocking on the sides of people's houses to get them going. In the early days it was not unheard of for people without motivation to refuse to leave their beds, and were found days later still wrapped up tight, skin cold. Since then it became routine for a select few to do wake up rounds. I poked my head into the huts of the elderly just to ensure they hadn't passed over night. That sometimes happened too. To old lady Alga, our villages resident crone, I presented little Darío. A toothless mouth stretched into a smile as she lifted the child in her arms, and I had to allow her five minutes of playtime with him before I took him back. For some people the young boy is all that keeps them going, a tiny candle of innocence against the night.
On my way I passed Michael, a man in his early thirties who did the majority of construction in the town. His skin was pulled tightly across rippling muscle, and he was so skilled anyone would believe he'd been working in construction his whole life, though he insists he was only ever a florist. I later passed Thalia, a woman small but strong. She was ex-army, and the only person in town trained to use weaponry. For the past few years she'd been slowly teaching a few villagers, including myself, how to wield knife, club, and spear. Her blonde hair and rosy cheeks were the perfect disguise for her viper-like personality.
I passed four more people on the way: Lilly, a mannish woman of pure brute strength; Joe Y, short for Joe young, tall dark and handsome; Joe X, short for Joe Xenakis, shrimpy, blond and not; and the Prince, named so for his obsession with jewellery. The latter was the only person in town that still cared about material possessions, regularly polishing his golden dollar necklace which hung heavily off of his neck, and the steal hunting knife which hung heavily off of his hip.
Each of these people was also in charge of waking up the town every morning. With all the others aged between twenty-five and fifty-five, I was by far the youngest at sixteen. The seven of us together were known around the village as the Fire Bellies, at least by those who still have a sense of humour. When the village came into being three years ago, natural leaders had risen from the ashes of society and taken charge. The seven of us had arranged jobs, lead the hunting, and made sure people stayed alive. And when the attacks came, we lead the fight too. We were the ones with passion, and the will to survive. And when an old man had exclaimed one night around the fire "You seven really have fire in your bellies now don't you!" the name had stuck.
If it weren't for us, there's no doubt the village would have perished long ago.
"Feeling good this morning Adrian?" Jo Y had called to me as our paths crossed. He smiled as he spoke, something which few people in our village could manage with such ease. I smiled back.
"What more could I want? The river is flowing and I'm still breathing. This is as good as it gets."
"I wouldn't go saying that too loudly kid, the universe might hear you!" They'd gradually walked closer together, and now Jo was close enough to quickly lean forward and whisper in my ear. "You know as well as I do we haven't had an attack in over a month. Something isn't right."
A solid lump seemed to appear in my throat, but I swallowed it down. I managed to keep the smile I'd been holding, despite the chill which ran down my back. "Maybe they're finally learning not to mess with us." I forced out.
"I could almost agree... if the attacks were never successful." Slowly Joe's eyes drifted to the edge of town, where our meagre wooden barricades and spikes stood guard. And to behind them, to the square of scorched ground that marked where a hut had burned to dust under a monstrous Flame-thrower. As much wood had been salvaged as could be, but it had been impossible to remove the black stain in the ground. So there it remained, as scar. Valarie, a gorgeous woman in her thirties, had been inside during the attack. Very few people want a hut on the edge of town anymore.
My eyes strayed further, to the desolate landscape beyond. I came to the Esharia region with my aunt after the crisis had already begun, but I hear that it had once been beautiful. Once this area had been a vast sprawling forest. You can tell by the never-ending sea of charred black stumps that peppered the ground like a Ferroseed's thorns. Now it's a wasteland. Could this region really have ever been anything else?
And they strayed further again, until they looked upon the mountains maybe a hundred miles south. A black ring of clouds wrestled the summit, and even in daylight the jagged bolts of lightning could be seen, lashing the earth below. On the edge of my hearing, just beneath the gradually increasing hubbub of life behind me, I could hear the deep growl of thunder crawling across the sky to reach my ears. They always come from the south. Always from the mountains and the storm.
Before I could respond, Jo leaned back and said "Whatever the case, we can handle it. Come on kid, there's a long day ahead." And Jo sauntered off. I watched him go. You say we can handle it, I thought with a frown. But I can still see the scar on the back of your neck from the last attack, the Prince still walks with a limp from the attack before that, and Lilly still has her good arm in a sling. We're being battered down, and if we break... My eyes roamed our pathetic village laid out before me, with around only twenty-five people able to fight, and another twenty-five that need protecting. The children and the old people, the sick and the broken.
They need us. The weak need fighters and the fighters need leaders. I hugged Darry closer to myself, and shivered.
"Come on." I whispered to myself as much as him. "Jo's right. We have a long day ahead."
Little did I know it then, we had an even longer night.