Rechargeable

Chapter 1: Go

I, like many other people, believe that those who leave behind decent enough legacies are never truly dead. For this reason, I feel that my story must be shared, for before I can truly conquer my fear of my soul's final judgment, I must leave behind everything I know about being reborn as a Pokémon.

My name is Luci Devilo. It was supposed to be Lucian, but the doctor's pen ran out of ink when scribing my birth certificate. My mother intervened before the doctor got a second pen to revise his mistake; she found Luci to be a beautiful name. And so Luci would be my name. I do not hate her for what she did, and I can see the beauty in the name (I guess…), though as you can very well imagine, my childhood was a bit rough due to this.

Open to a cloudy day, around say 4:00 pm. In retrospect, it does seem that an unusual event is more likely to happen when a place called Sunyshore City has a cloudy day. My father was off on business and my other had long since passed away. My brother Sven, who was in charge of the house while Dad was away, had gone off to "go eat beef jerky" with his friends behind the Sunyshore Gym, leaving me in charge of my little brother, Ben.

Ben's attention span was very ephemeral. I had just put in a Bionicle movie for him (it's called "The Legend Reborn", heh) when he already decided that he was bored and wanted something else to do. Of course, he didn't tell me he wanted to do something else. He just got off the couch and wandered away. I followed him as he went into Sven's room and rifled through his clothes drawer.

"You're not supposed to be in here." I said calmly. After all, the situation had not been enough to annoy me today. It was just too damn gloomy outside to get upset.

Ben pulled an old Game Boy out of the drawer. "I want play game!" he exclaimed.

Sighing, I took the Game Boy, tried the power switch, and stared as the screen did absolutely nothing. This thing hadn't been used in years. Its batteries were dead.

"Sorry, Ben. Wanna play with something else? You can play with my DS as long as…"

"NO! I WANT THAT ONE!" he whined, pointing to the old Game Boy. I sighed again. I wondered if Pokémon trainers had this problem with young Pokémon. If it wasn't for Sven needing someone to watch Ben while he went and did stuff, I could've gone on the Sinnoh Gym Circuit like some of the other kids in my grade.

"If I gotta stay, you gotta stay!" Sven's voice echoed in my head. He wasn't too happy about Dad leaving him all this responsibility, so I guess keeping me here was one of his ways of coping with it.

"I'll run to the store and get some batteries." I finally said. "Then you can play this game, alright?"

Ben shut up and nodded. The trip to Sunyshore market shouldn't take long, so it's not like I worried too much about the fact that Ben would be alone in the house for a bit. Of course, it wasn't going to be "just a little bit", but it's not like I, or anyone else at the time knew that.

Sunyshore market sells batteries in two varieties. One is the store surpluses, once-valuable brand name batteries. The other kind came in a large rubber band, generic batteries that had been recharged by some employee and put out at dirt-cheap prices. Because the rubber band was cheaper and came with more batteries, I bought that pack.

Big mistake.

Walking back home, I began to cross the street. I looked both ways, and I didn't see anything coming from left or right. Looking back, I should've check behind me as well, for reasons you're about to find out.

A battery slipped out of the bundle and fell on the ground. One millisecond later, I slipped and fell on my back. One more millisecond later, a car turned the corner and couldn't brake in time to avoid hitting me.

Didn't come from left or right, but from behind, and turned.

I suppose you're wondering why I glossed over my death and didn't describe it that well. The truth is, elaborating on the event would not have done justice to how abruptly it happened. Besides, the important part of the story is not the part when, as a human, I died.

It's what happened after that does.

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Nervous. This is the first fic of this type I have written. Hope you don't mind the first-person narration...