[Author's note: I am retconning Miho's name to Itana for personal and symbolic reasons. This story is very personal to me and I would feel better after making that change. Thank you for understanding.]
Itana dipped into her home, kicking her coat into a corner of the hallway. The house was silent, aside from the sound of running water in the kitchen. Silently, Itana padded up the stairs with the Egg in her arms, and although she was focused on stealth, her eyes would dart to the fragile beacon of opportunity she held and she would shiver.
A windowsill seat with a strong evening sun. This would do. She normally used it as a desk as she read, but it would have to serve a new purpose now. The Trainers' Manual? On the floor. Biographies by famous Trainers? On the floor. A survival guide? The floor would have to be its throne now. As for Itana's bed, it now belonged to the windowsill; a large enough area to sleep in, if she curled up sideways.
Itana laid the egg in the sun, half-covering it with her quilts.
"No one must know about you," she murmured to it. "If anyone knew what has happened, they'd ruin it for me. It would be my big Pokemon journey or whatever, and that's not what this is about. This is about me making my own way in this world.
"I've been trapped in this village for 14 years and I feel like I'm living dead. Nothing that matters ever changes. I look at the same faces and places every day and hear the same voices, the same Pokemon cries, the same 'funny jokes'. I know there's better out there for me. That's why I need you. When I have a Pokemon, no one can stop me from walking out of here. I've spent so long waiting."
She paused to find the right words.
"You'd better not let me down, or I'll be stuck back here again."
Itana slowly rose to her feet, then spent perhaps 5 minutes simply looking down at her precious Egg. Her life had finally begun, but she could not be passionate. It would be her downfall to get too passionate, lest those feelings show through her cover.
She tiptoed downstairs and greeted her mother as if she had just gotten home and from there, the long days passed. Itana spent most of her time in her room to begin with, but now she spent day and night there, anxiously making sure that her mother would not somehow discover the Egg. Her bed was made, her room was tidy, and she went to bed at reasonable hours – all reasons to make sure that her mother disturbed nothing in the room. Each morning, she would rotate the Egg a little bit, as she had read to do; she kept it under blankets and next to her body for warmth in the chilly mornings, would let it breathe fresh air in the warmer afternoons, and spend all evening with it tucked into her lap, soaking up the warm sunset. Slowly, the egg began to generate warmth of its own. Itana smiled each morning from then on, as she touched it and felt that it was alive. Once, she remembered that she had not smiled for genuine reasons in many years.
On the twenty-first morning, Itana woke up when the birds were singing, but the sun had not yet risen. Still in her sleepy stupor, it took her some time to recognize the unusual noises that had woken her, then a few minutes more to recognize where those sounds must be coming from. When it hit her, she sat bolt upright in bed, peering into darkness for any movement.
It took a few moments to see the dark figure in the wee hours' light, but what she saw thrilled her right away. Her Pokemon had hatched.