People often ask how I got my starter pokemon. Sometimes they are just curious, sometimes they are angry, but most of the time they are jealous. Hah, jealous, as though I'm lucky or something. My response is always the same: blunt honesty. It's fun because it makes people uncomfortable.
My story starts with my parents. Like most people, I had two of them, and they were pretty good parents. They took me fun places, and bought me candy, and were really embarrassing in public, and also made me do chores and my homework. You know, normal parent stuff.
Like most people, I also lived in a region with a large criminal organization; mine was Team Rocket. If you listened to the news, it was full of lowlifes who only cared about profits and would kill, maim, and abuse pokemon and humans alike. If you had half a brain, then you knew that most of the members were also pokemon trainers that had been away from school for so long that they couldn't get a real job. Unless you were in complete denial, or were incredibly lucky, then you also knew them as cousins, friends, siblings, or parents.
When Team Rocket was finally busted, we were living in Celadon City. It had just been my tenth birthday, but mum had said that if I postponed my training journey until she got back from this business trip, she would get me a really, really good starter.
When she got back, she'd had to put a few hours in at the office, but called in home before she went to say hi and give me my starter pokemon. Me being me, I spent the rest of the day playing with him in the yard, even though he technically wasn't even mine yet; we were all going to go to the pokemon center the next day to fill out my licence.
Later that afternoon, my dad called me in to the living room where he was watching the news in shock. There was a load of cops on the news, and they were arresting a lot of people in what looked like the game corner. Some of them were in normal clothes, but most were in Team Rocket shirts. My mum was being arrested. She was one of the ones in a Rocket shirt.
I was too busy being a naive ten year old to really understand what was going on, but dad told me to put on my shoes, which I hadn't bothered taking off, and my coat, which it really was too warm for. He told me to return my new pokemon to his ball, then we went down to the police station.
When we got there, dad argued with the cop at the desk, while I sat in the lobby kicking my feet together and slowly growing hungrier. Eventually, the cop led dad away. I think he'd forgotten about me, to be honest, but dad had always told me that if I was ever in danger, then to find a cop to help me. In hindsight, mum had always been a bit hesitant about the whole 'find a cop' thing. At any rate, I figured I was in a cop station, so I was probably about as safe as you could get. He came back pretty quickly though, with a stoney look on his face.
We drove home in a silence that was only broken by me asking questions. Questions like: "what are we having for dinner?" and "when am I leaving for my pokemon journey?"
I didn't ask about mum.
The news report and the drive to the police station might have been a bit of a rush, but I'd had time to think during my stay in the lobby. Team Rocket stole pokemon. My mum was a Rocket. My mum stole pokemon. At school, Tracey had had a vulpix stolen by Team Rocket; what if mum stole it? No, I wasn't going to ask about mum.
It took months for the courts to get through all the trials. Mum, like many others, was sentenced to ten years in jail, with no parole, and a lifetime ban on owning pokemon.
I postponed my journey to help out around the house as dad got over the shock. Mum had been the breadwinner in our family, and now that she was gone, dad needed to find a job, too.
Around my eleventh birthday, dad started drinking, and he wasn't exactly a cheerful drunk.
I stopped postponing my journey and left my imprisoned mother and blooming alcoholic father for the relative peace of the gym circuit. I was determined that life with just me and Cedar, my dratini, would be somehow better, that I could make my own family, one that wouldn't mess everything up.
Yeah, I'm super lucky, aren't I?