AN: alrieght every body i have heard enough emssages about youngstet joey growing the beard and how that would not wrok in rl. WELL\ HOLY COW YOU NIT PIKING BASTARDS GIBVE ME A BREAK who cares if it ould not happen irl
CHAPTER 6
Ship of souls… Goodbye, old friend… A delightful floor puzzle… Youngster Joey kills again
Upon Youngster Joey's arrival in the harbor, he was greeted by a crew of terrified chubby Sailors. He came whipping around a corner in the shipyard and had to slam on the brakes to avoid making bowling pins out of the trembling group of men.
"What's wrong with you guys?" Youngster Joey asked as he nervously jerked his bloodshot eyes from face to face. He was getting some terribly discolored vibes from these Sailors, and his haggard expression didn't hide it. Youngster Joey looked something like a wild hyena looks while being given a tranquilizer and manhandled onto a stretcher by a pair of greenhorn veterinarians. His skin seemed to be in a permanent state of flying back from his face, which gave him an uncomfortable, urgent look. Dark circles hung for miles under his eyes. His hair was a grease scrambled mess inside the prison of his backward facing cap. His teeth hadn't been brushed in six days, and a fine stubble of beard growth had begun ghosting up the sides of his chubby little cheeks.
"We want to go sailing," said the Sailor nearest to Youngster Joey, motioning grandly with his arms and rousing several cheers of agreement from his crowd of friends, "but we can't!"
"Why not?"
"Our ship is infested with guh-guh-guh-ghosts!" the Sailor wailed. Youngster Joey cranked his head to the right and looked out over the harbor. The Sailors' ship, the S.S. J. Vegeta, stood statuesque on the rippling water, cloaked and flattened by fog, beckoning him to come, sail.
Youngster Joey shoved one of the Sailors out of the way and pedaled at breakneck speed toward the S.S. J. Vegeta. He exploded through a migrant worker's fruit stand, flew over the heads of some old men drinking Super Potions at a small table, and high-fived a Krabby on his way up the ship's ramp. Once on deck, Youngster Joey was forced to stop and admire the way a hypnotic torrent of blood was erupting from the first mate's quarters in terrible slow motion and crashing up along the walls and sweeping buckets and mops and other debris along with it in its unstoppable explosion across the deck of the ship. The blood was a deep, rich, velvety black that tessellated and transformed before Youngster Joey's eyes. He could hear voices inside the blood, voices that urged him to kill himself and to take everyone he loved down with him.
"I'm not afraid of no ghosts," Youngster Joey shouted defensively. He lifted up his bike and tossed it overboard, as if angered by it. For a while Youngster Joey played a strange movement puzzle in which he had to step onto arrow-shaped tiles that sent him cycloning down hallways into other arrow tiles or onto sticky tiles that allowed him to stop. The puzzle seemed to take forever, and he messed up several times. When at last he had at last solved the ship's puzzle and collected the Elevator Key which someone had thoughtfully hidden inside a Pokéball and left at the very back of the ship's last and hardest-to-reach room, Youngster Joey walked into the elevator and went down to B2, where tradition predicted the ghost was hiding.
When the elevator stopped and the doors opened, Youngster Joey found himself staring into a dark room. He stepped out. Invisible wind currents howled on the deck above. The elevator closed and locked behind him, pinching his source of light to a sliver before killing it completely. He was alone now, and swallowed up by darkness.
"Who's there?" Youngster Joey cried. His voice echoed back: there, there, there.
But the ghost didn't answer.
Youngster Joey didn't have time for this shit. He had to sail to Celadon so he could find the cure for his bipolar disorder. Youngster Joey fumbled around in the lightless gloom until his hands found a large, round object. He picked the object up and whipped it at the ceiling. Amazingly, it landed with a crashing thud against something that was clearly organic.
"Ooooof," cried a deep, wavering voice. Something fell from the ceiling and hit the floor. The lights came back on. Youngster Joey found out that he had thrown a globe at a Gastly and nailed it right in the face.
The Gastly lay dying on the ground. It blinked its large eyes out of sync. It opened its mouth and tried to speak but could not. Youngster Joey ran up to it and punted it like a kickball, knocking it away into the bowels of the ship. The Gastly was dead. Perhaps its violent demise would convince its spirit to someday return to the place of its death to haunt and terrorize the living—but that was a risk Youngster Joey was willing to take.
"I defeated the ghost in a Pokémon battle," Youngster Joey said to the Sailors outside when he had returned. "That blood thing should stop now."
"What happened to your bike?" one of the Sailors asked.
"I threw it overboard," Youngster Joey said.
"Oh," said the Sailor.
The Sailors agreed to let Youngster Joey sail with them across the ocean to Kanto. In return, Youngster Joey let them chew on the Mewtwo blotter squares he had in his bag of fruit snacks. The Sailors ran laughing and screaming through the ship's labyrinthine underbelly, crashing into one another and becoming injured by the dangerous machinery. After a few months, during which Youngster Joey grew a full imperial beard, the ship arrived in Kanto.