The lonely path of the Mew
Copyright- Pokemon and its characters/Pokemon do not belong to me in any sence of the word.
The lonely path of the Mew
Susan jerked forward suddenly awake, her eyes wide and staring, her paws clutching… Outside the rain drummed ceaselessly against her window. Occasionally the dull crack of thunder could be heard as the storm exploded its fury. In the hot close confines of her room she could feel the walls pressing in on her, surrounding her, cutting out her breath. Concentrating on the faint shape of her door, she fought back against the claustrophobia forcing herself to take deep breaths. In the dark twilight of her bedroom her panicked breathing started to slow as the faint residue of terror from her dream started to recede. Wiping a film of sweat from her forehead she paused as she looked at her hand. Yes, she thought, it was a hand…. Suddenly awake she tried to remember the details of her nightmare but already the facts were slipping away from her slipping through her fingers like so much sand. She could barely remember anything about her dream. Turning her head to the bright red figures of her bedside clock she saw that it was just past three. Letting her head fall back to the pillow she closed her eyes and tried to dispel her last feelings of fear. Outside the rain continued to fall lashing the buildings below, like a beast trying to prize open the chest to get at the soft inner flesh. Combined with the seething mass above it helped mask the large shape floating high in the sky. The dark blue eyes of the great bird like creature stared down at the window far below, ignoring the rain which splattered against the psychic shield surrounding it. The tail with two horns swished as the creature hung in the air its great pale blue wings still. It didn't worry about someone happening to catch sight of it. Unless someone had one of its feathers or it chose to reveal itself, it was invisible to human eye. At the moment though, being seen was the least of her concerns. The psychic waves were fading away now but a minute ago they had been emanating from this house quite clearly. Was this a sign or a warning? The great Pokemon sighed as it stared through the pelting rain. The Gods had chosen her to see this, but for what purpose? She couldn't risk revealing herself. Her wings started to beat through the air as she turned from the building and lifted off into the air. As long as the girl didn't relapse, everything would be fine she thought with naïve hope. Even as she flew her mind started to become engrossed with more simple desires.
Her village was too small to host a Pokecenter, the nearest was in the neighbouring town of Skycaps. Miss Violet who ran the centre had begun a scheme a couple of years previously to help trainers who were going to start their journeys. It compromised of four one-hour classes, which any potential trainer could attend. In these she helped them with maps, how to recognise if their Pokemon was sick and needed to be taken to a Pokemon centre and even how to set up a tent. In the final class she had managed to get Professor Oak to visit with all the different Pokemon that would be handed out the following week to the trainers. She felt that it would help the trainers if they had a brief introduction to the Pokemon and perhaps help them with their choices, especially for those who had never met a Pokemon in the flesh before. For Susan the day had been an abject failure. When she had crowded in the reception area of the Pokecentre with all the other ten-year-olds, she had felt her excitement start to build. This would be the day that she would see her Pokemon partner for the first time, she told herself.
But when she finally got into the garden behind the Pokecentre, where Oak was presiding over all the Pokemon, she was conscious of a dull feeling of anticlimax. By the end of the hour she had felt no warm feelings toward any of the Pokemon. Instead she had felt angry and frustrated and was glad to finally get out of the garden. At different points she had become quite incensed at her fellow trainers. She had felt absurdly jealous to see how much enjoyment they had got from interacting with the Pokemon. It made her feel that she was missing something important. They were just animals, pets that obeyed orders, she had thought. At first she had tried to summon interest, watching the small Pokemon bound about. But it had been a deeply unsatisfactory experience for her. She had felt her anger build and by the end she was glaring at any Pokemon which dared snuffle toward her.
Moving into the hedge to let a car drive past, her mind returned to the present. She continued along the road, her eyes staring unfocused before her. Her experience had started to sow doubt in her mind about her Pokemon journey. Do I really want to be a trainer, she thought to herself? What could she really get out of it? Since Oaks presentation they were questions, which had begun to plague her. Before she hadn't given it much thought, she had just assumed that training Pokemon would be fun. Wasn't that what adult's always said, she thought bitterly. Whenever a Pokemon journey was mentioned, adults went misty eyed and recalled the wonderful adventures they had and the bonds they had built up with their Pokemon.
She hadn't been able to understand her own feelings behind the Pokecenter. Why didn't she fall in love with the Pokemon like the others? It felt like a failure, as if they had got one up on her. At first she had tried to persuade herself that it was just one day, that when she finally got her Pokemon, everything would be different. But as she thought back she had realised that she had never been particularly interested in Pokemon. They had been present in her life, in books, on the TV and her parents still had some of their Pokemon. She had known that she would eventually become a Pokemon trainer but she had always regarded Pokemon as something secondary when she was younger, something that she would get into later in her life.
Still, she thought, what else could I do here? Even if the Pokemon were not very interesting, the journey would still give her a chance to do some exploring. To stay here would be seen as a failure by everyone else. They would laugh at me, she thought feeling anger boil up again, they would say she was scared. She would show them.
She was passing the main street of her village, Turquoise now, almost at the end of her walk. On either side of her different buildings clung to the dark tarmac, the bight modern facades of the shops contrasting with the well-worn architecture surrounding it. As she passed by the corner shop several children her own age waved at her to join them inside. She ignored them, turning her head away jealousy sparking up in her heart. She could be a better trainer than any of them, if she really wanted to.
Finally clearing the last outlying buildings she turned left off the main road and up the steep side road toward her house. It stood halfway up a series of hills, which rose up from the valley floor. Masked from the road by a handful of trees and bushes, her house had once been an old tenant cottage. Though renovated extensively it still retained its thick stonewalls, covered in a brightly reflective whitewash. Unlike her parents Susan had no love for the rusticity of her house. Despite new windows, the interior still felt dull and dark to her and the constant use of the bright electrical lights was trying on her eyes. Moreover she still recalled how confined she had felt by the thick stonewalls the first time she had stepped though the door. Since then she had grown used to the house but still preferred to spend as much time outdoors as possible. Immediately to the back of the house was a paved area leading to her mother's garden. Striding up the slightly overgrown lawn, past the brightly coloured plants arrayed on either side she made for her section of the garden. Separated from the lawn by a number of spindly trees stood her plot. With the end of the soft spring warmth and the approach of the cloying summer most of her plants were in full bloom. Arrayed haphazardly across the slanted ground grew a number of different wildflowers, intermingled with some other indigenous plants and weeds.
When she had first seen the ground, it had been a barren stony wasteland. It had been her first day in the countryside, new from the town. She had had no experience with gardening but to her surprise she found that she had a real fascination with plants. At first she had aided her mother in the main garden before soon tiring of it. She had enjoyed the growing of the plants but had soon become frustrated at the constant maintenance of the flowers and the battle against weeds. Deciding to develop a patch for herself she had moved to the patch of ground beyond her mothers, where she had tried to make it hospitable for plants. It had been hard work for her, toiling through her chosen patch trying to soften the ground and remove all the stones. In the beginning the ground refused to work with her, its barren furrows free of all traces of greenery. She still remembered with a faint trace of shame, walking away from it through her mother's garden and in a fit of rage stamping on some of the more delicate flowers. The next season though was mild and green shoots had made their first surface. To the annoyance of her mother she had refused to tend to or weed her patch letting it grow wild. For Susan all that mattered was to see plants grow, to watch the first tentative green emergence slowly transform into strong, confident survivor proudly displaying its blaze of colour.
As she looked down at it now, three years since she had begun she could see some large patches of sweet violet and snow drops, wildflowers that she had bought from their local garden centre. Their growth was already starting to get impeded by weeds, which had started to regain control. The growth of the weeds had been inexorable; spreading quickly across uninhabited areas of freshly dug earth. At first it had looked like the wildflowers could defend against the hostile invasion but already she could see weeds infesting areas among the flowers bristling in their light studded armour. In every bright purple grove, the dark bottle green of the weeds could be seen, starting to make their presence felt.
Suddenly as she stared at the plants she saw something move in a mound of violet to her right. Moving over she caught a glance of pale whit fur. Her earlier frustration exploding into anger she took a violent kick at it. Lifting itself up from the ground, her mothers Meowth gave an angry hiss and flared out its fur.
"Get out of here!" she shouted at it "now!" Recognising her the Meowth hesitated before slinking away. She glared after its retreating form before moving over to look where it had been. How dare he come in here, she thought to herself as the anger steamed inside her, this was her private garden!
As she moved her fingers through the paths of plants looking to see if the Pokemon had made any disturbance, she suddenly felt a sharp pain. Retracting her hand quickly she discovered a line of blood emerging from her pounding finger. A droplet of the dark fire welled up and plummeted, leaving a faint rusty residue as it dripped down a plant stem. Sucking at her finger hard, she thought angrily on how she would get her revenge on her father's partner.
Shovelling the cereal into her mouth with her spoon, Susan concentrated her eyes on the bowl and away from her parents. There was an awkward silence in the room broken occasionally by her parent's attempts at conversation and her monosyllabic replies. She normally got on well enough with her parents. It was just that Susan didn't feel particularly close to either of them, certainly not enough to confide her fears to them. She felt that they wouldn't understand her feelings about being a trainer or her recent fit of nightmares. They had been occurring almost every night now leaving fragmented images and strange feelings of fear. She was aware that her parents knew she was keeping things back from them, they had questioned her in the past about it but she still wasn't prepared to say anything.
There were a number of reasons she didn't feel particularly close to her parents. One of these was that she was adopted. It was something, which she had been told at an early age, she was so different to her parents in her appearance. Both were tall, with brown hair and clear blue eyes. In contrast she was quite small for her age, with black hair, which fell past her shoulders in a ponytail and dark green eyes. At a time she remembered whishing that when she woke up she might look like them, that she was in fact their child. But that had been many years previous and adoption had been something that she had grown used to, it didn't really bother her anymore.
She also felt she had no need to confide with her parents. She was strong enough to deal with her problems on her own; she didn't need to go running to her parents for help like a baby.
As she rose to wash her bowel, her mother took it from her, smiling weakly "Don't look so worried, I'm sure you will have a wonderful time" her mother said, her voice sounding a bit too bright, even to her. Will I, she thought to herself, ashamed at the tight feeling in her throat. Her father reached into his pocket and handed her a creased brown envelope. "Just some extra spending money for you. There's also a call card in there so you can call us whenever you need to." Reaching up she hugged him tight before moving over to her mother. Lastly she moved over to her parents Pokemon, her mothers crusty old Sandshrew and her fathers Meowth. Both had been waiting made anxious by their masters. As she petted them she couldn't help but notice their tiny jerks as she touched them. As she heaved her pack onto her shoulders she realised that she had scarcely spoke a couple of words to her parents. Turning back to them she noticed their anxious looks toward her. "Thank you very much for the money, I'll call before I leave Skycaps to tell how I get on." As she walked resolutely up the path from her house toward the village road she waved back at the people who had been the centre of her universe for 10 years, her cheek still tingling from her mothers parting kiss.
This is the second draft of this chapter. I'm not too sure if I am going to change the other chapters just as much as this one but I will probably upload a fourth chapter before then Can you please review it and tell me what you think of it so far?
Copyright- Pokemon and its characters/Pokemon do not belong to me in any sence of the word.
The lonely path of the Mew
Susan jerked forward suddenly awake, her eyes wide and staring, her paws clutching… Outside the rain drummed ceaselessly against her window. Occasionally the dull crack of thunder could be heard as the storm exploded its fury. In the hot close confines of her room she could feel the walls pressing in on her, surrounding her, cutting out her breath. Concentrating on the faint shape of her door, she fought back against the claustrophobia forcing herself to take deep breaths. In the dark twilight of her bedroom her panicked breathing started to slow as the faint residue of terror from her dream started to recede. Wiping a film of sweat from her forehead she paused as she looked at her hand. Yes, she thought, it was a hand…. Suddenly awake she tried to remember the details of her nightmare but already the facts were slipping away from her slipping through her fingers like so much sand. She could barely remember anything about her dream. Turning her head to the bright red figures of her bedside clock she saw that it was just past three. Letting her head fall back to the pillow she closed her eyes and tried to dispel her last feelings of fear. Outside the rain continued to fall lashing the buildings below, like a beast trying to prize open the chest to get at the soft inner flesh. Combined with the seething mass above it helped mask the large shape floating high in the sky. The dark blue eyes of the great bird like creature stared down at the window far below, ignoring the rain which splattered against the psychic shield surrounding it. The tail with two horns swished as the creature hung in the air its great pale blue wings still. It didn't worry about someone happening to catch sight of it. Unless someone had one of its feathers or it chose to reveal itself, it was invisible to human eye. At the moment though, being seen was the least of her concerns. The psychic waves were fading away now but a minute ago they had been emanating from this house quite clearly. Was this a sign or a warning? The great Pokemon sighed as it stared through the pelting rain. The Gods had chosen her to see this, but for what purpose? She couldn't risk revealing herself. Her wings started to beat through the air as she turned from the building and lifted off into the air. As long as the girl didn't relapse, everything would be fine she thought with naïve hope. Even as she flew her mind started to become engrossed with more simple desires.
Her village was too small to host a Pokecenter, the nearest was in the neighbouring town of Skycaps. Miss Violet who ran the centre had begun a scheme a couple of years previously to help trainers who were going to start their journeys. It compromised of four one-hour classes, which any potential trainer could attend. In these she helped them with maps, how to recognise if their Pokemon was sick and needed to be taken to a Pokemon centre and even how to set up a tent. In the final class she had managed to get Professor Oak to visit with all the different Pokemon that would be handed out the following week to the trainers. She felt that it would help the trainers if they had a brief introduction to the Pokemon and perhaps help them with their choices, especially for those who had never met a Pokemon in the flesh before. For Susan the day had been an abject failure. When she had crowded in the reception area of the Pokecentre with all the other ten-year-olds, she had felt her excitement start to build. This would be the day that she would see her Pokemon partner for the first time, she told herself.
But when she finally got into the garden behind the Pokecentre, where Oak was presiding over all the Pokemon, she was conscious of a dull feeling of anticlimax. By the end of the hour she had felt no warm feelings toward any of the Pokemon. Instead she had felt angry and frustrated and was glad to finally get out of the garden. At different points she had become quite incensed at her fellow trainers. She had felt absurdly jealous to see how much enjoyment they had got from interacting with the Pokemon. It made her feel that she was missing something important. They were just animals, pets that obeyed orders, she had thought. At first she had tried to summon interest, watching the small Pokemon bound about. But it had been a deeply unsatisfactory experience for her. She had felt her anger build and by the end she was glaring at any Pokemon which dared snuffle toward her.
Moving into the hedge to let a car drive past, her mind returned to the present. She continued along the road, her eyes staring unfocused before her. Her experience had started to sow doubt in her mind about her Pokemon journey. Do I really want to be a trainer, she thought to herself? What could she really get out of it? Since Oaks presentation they were questions, which had begun to plague her. Before she hadn't given it much thought, she had just assumed that training Pokemon would be fun. Wasn't that what adult's always said, she thought bitterly. Whenever a Pokemon journey was mentioned, adults went misty eyed and recalled the wonderful adventures they had and the bonds they had built up with their Pokemon.
She hadn't been able to understand her own feelings behind the Pokecenter. Why didn't she fall in love with the Pokemon like the others? It felt like a failure, as if they had got one up on her. At first she had tried to persuade herself that it was just one day, that when she finally got her Pokemon, everything would be different. But as she thought back she had realised that she had never been particularly interested in Pokemon. They had been present in her life, in books, on the TV and her parents still had some of their Pokemon. She had known that she would eventually become a Pokemon trainer but she had always regarded Pokemon as something secondary when she was younger, something that she would get into later in her life.
Still, she thought, what else could I do here? Even if the Pokemon were not very interesting, the journey would still give her a chance to do some exploring. To stay here would be seen as a failure by everyone else. They would laugh at me, she thought feeling anger boil up again, they would say she was scared. She would show them.
She was passing the main street of her village, Turquoise now, almost at the end of her walk. On either side of her different buildings clung to the dark tarmac, the bight modern facades of the shops contrasting with the well-worn architecture surrounding it. As she passed by the corner shop several children her own age waved at her to join them inside. She ignored them, turning her head away jealousy sparking up in her heart. She could be a better trainer than any of them, if she really wanted to.
Finally clearing the last outlying buildings she turned left off the main road and up the steep side road toward her house. It stood halfway up a series of hills, which rose up from the valley floor. Masked from the road by a handful of trees and bushes, her house had once been an old tenant cottage. Though renovated extensively it still retained its thick stonewalls, covered in a brightly reflective whitewash. Unlike her parents Susan had no love for the rusticity of her house. Despite new windows, the interior still felt dull and dark to her and the constant use of the bright electrical lights was trying on her eyes. Moreover she still recalled how confined she had felt by the thick stonewalls the first time she had stepped though the door. Since then she had grown used to the house but still preferred to spend as much time outdoors as possible. Immediately to the back of the house was a paved area leading to her mother's garden. Striding up the slightly overgrown lawn, past the brightly coloured plants arrayed on either side she made for her section of the garden. Separated from the lawn by a number of spindly trees stood her plot. With the end of the soft spring warmth and the approach of the cloying summer most of her plants were in full bloom. Arrayed haphazardly across the slanted ground grew a number of different wildflowers, intermingled with some other indigenous plants and weeds.
When she had first seen the ground, it had been a barren stony wasteland. It had been her first day in the countryside, new from the town. She had had no experience with gardening but to her surprise she found that she had a real fascination with plants. At first she had aided her mother in the main garden before soon tiring of it. She had enjoyed the growing of the plants but had soon become frustrated at the constant maintenance of the flowers and the battle against weeds. Deciding to develop a patch for herself she had moved to the patch of ground beyond her mothers, where she had tried to make it hospitable for plants. It had been hard work for her, toiling through her chosen patch trying to soften the ground and remove all the stones. In the beginning the ground refused to work with her, its barren furrows free of all traces of greenery. She still remembered with a faint trace of shame, walking away from it through her mother's garden and in a fit of rage stamping on some of the more delicate flowers. The next season though was mild and green shoots had made their first surface. To the annoyance of her mother she had refused to tend to or weed her patch letting it grow wild. For Susan all that mattered was to see plants grow, to watch the first tentative green emergence slowly transform into strong, confident survivor proudly displaying its blaze of colour.
As she looked down at it now, three years since she had begun she could see some large patches of sweet violet and snow drops, wildflowers that she had bought from their local garden centre. Their growth was already starting to get impeded by weeds, which had started to regain control. The growth of the weeds had been inexorable; spreading quickly across uninhabited areas of freshly dug earth. At first it had looked like the wildflowers could defend against the hostile invasion but already she could see weeds infesting areas among the flowers bristling in their light studded armour. In every bright purple grove, the dark bottle green of the weeds could be seen, starting to make their presence felt.
Suddenly as she stared at the plants she saw something move in a mound of violet to her right. Moving over she caught a glance of pale whit fur. Her earlier frustration exploding into anger she took a violent kick at it. Lifting itself up from the ground, her mothers Meowth gave an angry hiss and flared out its fur.
"Get out of here!" she shouted at it "now!" Recognising her the Meowth hesitated before slinking away. She glared after its retreating form before moving over to look where it had been. How dare he come in here, she thought to herself as the anger steamed inside her, this was her private garden!
As she moved her fingers through the paths of plants looking to see if the Pokemon had made any disturbance, she suddenly felt a sharp pain. Retracting her hand quickly she discovered a line of blood emerging from her pounding finger. A droplet of the dark fire welled up and plummeted, leaving a faint rusty residue as it dripped down a plant stem. Sucking at her finger hard, she thought angrily on how she would get her revenge on her father's partner.
Shovelling the cereal into her mouth with her spoon, Susan concentrated her eyes on the bowl and away from her parents. There was an awkward silence in the room broken occasionally by her parent's attempts at conversation and her monosyllabic replies. She normally got on well enough with her parents. It was just that Susan didn't feel particularly close to either of them, certainly not enough to confide her fears to them. She felt that they wouldn't understand her feelings about being a trainer or her recent fit of nightmares. They had been occurring almost every night now leaving fragmented images and strange feelings of fear. She was aware that her parents knew she was keeping things back from them, they had questioned her in the past about it but she still wasn't prepared to say anything.
There were a number of reasons she didn't feel particularly close to her parents. One of these was that she was adopted. It was something, which she had been told at an early age, she was so different to her parents in her appearance. Both were tall, with brown hair and clear blue eyes. In contrast she was quite small for her age, with black hair, which fell past her shoulders in a ponytail and dark green eyes. At a time she remembered whishing that when she woke up she might look like them, that she was in fact their child. But that had been many years previous and adoption had been something that she had grown used to, it didn't really bother her anymore.
She also felt she had no need to confide with her parents. She was strong enough to deal with her problems on her own; she didn't need to go running to her parents for help like a baby.
As she rose to wash her bowel, her mother took it from her, smiling weakly "Don't look so worried, I'm sure you will have a wonderful time" her mother said, her voice sounding a bit too bright, even to her. Will I, she thought to herself, ashamed at the tight feeling in her throat. Her father reached into his pocket and handed her a creased brown envelope. "Just some extra spending money for you. There's also a call card in there so you can call us whenever you need to." Reaching up she hugged him tight before moving over to her mother. Lastly she moved over to her parents Pokemon, her mothers crusty old Sandshrew and her fathers Meowth. Both had been waiting made anxious by their masters. As she petted them she couldn't help but notice their tiny jerks as she touched them. As she heaved her pack onto her shoulders she realised that she had scarcely spoke a couple of words to her parents. Turning back to them she noticed their anxious looks toward her. "Thank you very much for the money, I'll call before I leave Skycaps to tell how I get on." As she walked resolutely up the path from her house toward the village road she waved back at the people who had been the centre of her universe for 10 years, her cheek still tingling from her mothers parting kiss.
This is the second draft of this chapter. I'm not too sure if I am going to change the other chapters just as much as this one but I will probably upload a fourth chapter before then Can you please review it and tell me what you think of it so far?