I… I failed.
Pokémon
Transgression
By Crukix
|Conceal, Don't Feel|
-O-O-O-
I think that when people designed coaches, they decided to make them as boring as possible. As the minutes crawl into hours that crawl into what feels like forever, I find myself growing ever irritable.
The coach is almost empty, which means that Ali and I have occupied the space of eight seats at the back of the coach. She leans back, her feet up against the seat opposite her, Cap squished in against the window seat and her gurdurr sat opposite him.
"Sam," Ali says, not even opening her eyes. Her gurdurr stops fidgeting instantly and becomes immensely interested in the continuous nothing outside. Hour three inside a tunnel means that the thrill has long worn off.
Kiki sits opposite me, sulking like a little child. I like to think it's because she doesn't like travelling backwards, but I know full well what the actual reason is.
The Duke, or Duke, as I call him now, sits almost curled up in my lap, my history book in front of him. I have a couple of sheets of paper with the alphabet spelt out in large letters, both in lower and upper case.
Ali leans on my shoulder. "You're really determined to teach him, aren't you?"
I nod, practiced enough with Mandy on my shoulder that I don't disrupt her. "He wants to learn," I say, pointing to a letter of the alphabet, not paying attention to what one. Duke croaks an answer that sounds vaguely like an 'o'. When I look up and see that is the letter I'm pointing at, I grin.
"Teaching him to talk will take forever," Ali points out.
"That's okay," I say. "He's picking up reading well. I don't even have to break up the words for him anymore." It reminds me of being back in school and having to teach the younger kids how to read. Thing is, Duke manages to read a lot quicker than most of them, even though I can't really understand him. What he says is garbled, almost senseless. But it's easy to hear the frustration in his voice when he can't understand something. I can't help but wonder if it's a side effect of him having grown up near Cerulean Cave, or if he's just actually so smart.
Duke grunts something, pointing at a picture of a mummified skeleton, its bandages peeled back and exposed. He continues pointing at it with one hand whilst his other moves to the alphabet and points at one single letter.
'Y'. Why.
"Why?" I say it aloud for him. He nods, poking the picture. "Why does this look like that? Or why did they do it?"
He nods twice and pokes the picture twice, grunting all the while.
From my shoulder, Ali groans. I ignore her as I explain to Duke the ways in which ancient cultures treated their dead, and how it differs from our modern day perceptions. I'm pretty sure Ali actually falls asleep at one point.
At the end, Duke looks at me, his eyes wide. Kiki's glower is almost loud enough to break the silence that follows.
Finally, Duke croaks, again pointing to the same letter.
"I just told you why," I say.
He shakes his head, points to 'y' twice. I feel stupid when it takes me longer than it should to process my pokémon's request. "Why… the reasons behind everything I just told you?"
He nods. I suppress the urge to groan. And here I thought that having a pokémon actually understand everything I say would make things easier.
I look up when I feel the coach slow to a stop. More people are getting on the coach - though Ali and I were sharing it with one other person, aside from the driver - and I see the way one boy looks at Duke before he decides to sit in the seats in front of us.
I try to ignore him and instead focus as best I can on teaching Duke a bit more. Ali's tensed by my side, which lets me know that she's noticed the way the boy was staring too. He looks like he's just a bit younger than her, with hair stained in a random assortment of colours, almost like he's been dragged through a berry bush and whatever's stuck to him is what colour he's decided to use. There's some red, green, purple and even some blue hidden in the mess he calls hair.
I hope it's a wig. At least then he'd have the chance to take it off and look normal.
Duke grunts and points at the boy's hair. I struggle not to laugh as Duke points to 'y' again. Ali catches it and is a lot less subtle about her laughter - she snorts and cackles in one breath.
When the grand total of three people get on the coach and we start moving again, Rainbow-Head turns around and smiles at me.
He has one blue eyebrow and one green.
That's when Ali and I both erupt into a mass fit of giggles.
"Take it away!" Ali moans, holding her stomach. "I can't cope!" She doesn't care that the boy seems both confused and hurt by our sudden laughter. I mean seriously, if my hair looked like that, I'd laugh every time I looked in the mirror.
The boy slams himself down in his seat, but that only makes Ali laugh louder. She's actually crying by the time she stops laughing and people in the coach have turned to look at us, apparently fearing for our sanity.
But I know it has to be funny when I see that even Kiki is smirking.
Cap has to endure Ali leaning against him, still giggling randomly. Sam just looks around in what I've realised is a continual scrutinising of everything to see if it can replace the big metal girder that gurdurr are named for.
Moments after we quiet down, the boy spins around in his chair again. Ali manages to bite her tongue, but instead I hear a high-pitched whine coming from her that I wasn't certain humans could make.
For my part, I have to suck in a deep breath and try my best to hold it as he raises his green eyebrow at us both.
"I can't!" Ali wails and erupts into laughter once more.
The boy sighs and shakes his head.
"Come on," Ali says, struggling for breath, "you should be… you should be used to this… by now!" She has to take a deep breath to try to control herself. The only problem is that when we meet each other's eyes, both of us lose all control and begin laughing again.
Duke, for his part, croaks a strange sound that just makes it worse. Even as Kiki titters and undoubtedly tells me off, I just can't stop laughing at the way his blue and green eyebrows do a little dance on his face. They're like little caterpie shrunk down and doing the hula on his face!
"Okay," I say, breathing slowly, "I'm okay." It takes me a moment to try and compose myself. "Hi," I say, pinching myself and trying to pinch Ali at the same time, all without the boy noticing.
"Hi," he says, grumpy.
Duke croaks, searching for attention, pointing to the 'y' again. I have to bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood before I'm sure I won't start laughing again.
"So," the boy says, "you're the girl that caught The Duke, aren't you?"
That's enough to make me stop wanting to laugh immediately. Even Ali manages to sober up and look like she's ready to throw the boy out of the coach at a moment's notice.
I think he notices the way all our pokémon - save for Duke - tense around us. "I saw the video online," he says quickly, "and I just wanted to see if it was true. All the videos have been taken down - someone put a virus in them or something, so when people have watched or downloaded them, it's wiped itself and random data from their computers or whatever they watch it from."
"Really?" I ask, wondering just who could have managed such a thing. I'm pretty sure no one I know has the technical knowledge to do such a thing - even my parents. Unless they happen to have a porygon lying around that I'm not sure about - or Dad's creepy mr mime has snuck into people's houses at night and scared the bejeezus out of them (and it's totally capable of doing such a thing. That thing is Creepy) - I don't think it's any of them.
"You don't know anything about that, do you?" he asks, dejected.
"Nope," I say. I shake my head for good measure. Duke croaks and copies me. He even puts a book on his head and shakes it like it's hair, just to copy me. I shriek and have to fight him to claim the book back. I don't want his slimy skin all over my books. They're my books. No one is making them all slimy or whatever!
I get the feeling that I'm almost like Craig's mum. Where she was the crazy-cleany lady, I'm the crazy-don't-mess-my-books-up sort of person.
That's a really depressing thought.
"So this is The Duke, isn't it?" he asks, staring at Duke. Kiki takes the opportunity to stand up in her chair and glower at him. I notice that she seems to be growing - even to the point where she doesn't really resemble a typical maractus anymore. I need to talk to Dad and see just where he got her from. I know that some pokémon can take on appearances of one of their parents - like sceptile can have pretty draconic looking treecko if they mate with a salamence - so I need to know more about my pokémon.
And of course, that makes me think that since Jerry gave me Mandy, she's going to develop three heads and start randomly drooling on me. Even though I know that's impossible because mandibuzz are all female and Jerry's dodrio is female too, but since lesbian human couples can have babies somehow, can't pokémon too?
"Does it matter?" Ali answers for me. "Famous pokémon celebrity or not, if you've seen the video then you'd have also seen that he made the choice to battle and get captured. Didn't most of the videos show him trying to smack himself with a poke ball in order to get captured?"
"True," says the boy. "I just wanted to know, though. It's not every day that you get a coach and see someone who's gone viral online."
"It doesn't matter," I say, following Ali's lead. "My pokémon here is obviously a poliwag that hasn't fully evolved yet - you can still see his tail where it hasn't fallen off yet. I'm teaching him how to read and write. You can join the dots if you want to, but if someone's going along making viruses from videos about him, that means someone doesn't want people to know who captured him, doesn't it?" I give my best creepy-grin, impersonating the creepy girls in white. "So if people don't want the video to be seen, what happens to the people that try to find out about the Duke?"
The boy's eyes go wide. It's almost comical and I feel just a little bit sorry for him as he throws himself down in his seat. A moment later he gets up and moves to the front of the coach, apparently too afraid to be anywhere near me or my pokémon.
"Holy foongus," Ali whispers, "never smile like that again when you're near me, alright? I'm pretty sure I had nightmares where the people trying to kill me looked like that."
At least you only see those smiles in your nightmares.
Instead of saying what I'm thinking, I just nod. "It worked though, didn't it?"
"Remind me never to get on your bad side." She dives into her bag and retrieves a party-sized pack of lollipops. I give it about an hour until she's eaten them all. "Lolly?" she asks, offering me one. "I think after that I need the sugar to deal - hey! No sugar for you!" She suddenly slaps Cap's hands, fearless in the face of her pokémon that's much taller and more muscly than her. "You don't deserve sugar, mister. Sam gets one," she says, opening the bag and tossing one to her gurdurr. She doesn't even pay attention when Sam eats the whole lolly, stick, wrapping and all.
And I thought Cassie was weird.
"I want to see one of your fists covered in flames, the other in frost," Ali says, pointing a lollipop at Cap. "And then I want you to knock this out of my hand without freezing or burning me, the coach or the lolly."
While she's distracted, I sneak two more out of the bag. Kiki seems to like the lemon ones - freak that she is - and I go for cherry for Duke, seeing as they're the best flavour there is. Kiki, accustomed to human food, manages to unwrap the sweet and pop it in her mouth. I have to unwrap Duke's and show him how to hold it in place before I trust him enough to take it.
And of course, he salivates cherry-smelling spit everywhere in less than a minute.
Ali, for her part, just laughs at me, not even noticing when Cap steals a stash of lollipops from her bag and tucks them into his karate robes. He winks at me when he sees me looking and quickly feigns innocence when Ali glances his way.
I sigh as I try to teach Duke to properly eat sweets. This is going to be a long trip.
-O-O-O-
Day two on the coach is somehow more boring than the first. The problem with sleeper coaches is spending the whole day sitting and sleeping in the same seat-bed-thing. Even the little rest stops we do so people can smoke – mostly the driver – and for us to get something to eat aren't enough for me to stretch my legs and feel like I've done something.
Ali groans from the window seat. I look over and see her lying down across the seats, her legs up against the window. If I had known that our trip was through nothing but tunnels, I would have paid for the Magnet Train to Goldenrod.
"This is like torture," Ali moans, stretching again. "I can't even run up and down through the aisle anymore because the driver gave me dirty looks, the road is too bumpy to do any sort of press ups or sit ups properly and all that I'm left with is trying to exercise myself mentally, which isn't anywhere near good enough."
I make the mistake of glancing in her direction. "I'm a fighter," she continues, about three seconds from angry rant mode, "so that means I need to be doing something. It's not that we get fatigued more… it's just that being laconic makes us irritable. Ever wondered why all the fighters you see are always running or kicking or trying to break blocks of concrete with their faces?"
"I thought they were just crazy," I say.
"There's that," Ali says, springing back into a sitting position. "At least you can let your pokémon out with you. My team are all fighters too. Cap gets testy if he doesn't get to train for a few hours a day. The rest aren't any better, but they're also less able to sit around in a coach than he is."
"Do you not remember the mayhem Mandy caused?" I ask, pointing at the claw marks over several of the seats. As it turns out, leaving her out whilst we slept wasn't the best idea. Aside from sneaking half-eaten food into people's sleeping bags – to which I have no idea how she accomplished it, but I need her to teach me – she also somehow managed to tie a woman's braid to the seat behind her – without opposable thumbs or even hands to speak of – and to cap it all off, she somehow managed to release Rainbow Head's sceptile, which then spent nearly ten minutes trying to eviscerate her and almost everyone else on the coach.
The only reason I'm even still on the stupid coach is because the driver isn't stupid and said that people shouldn't be bringing fully grown pokémon on the coach, especially when they're capable of slicing us all to death. At least Mandy's pranks are mostly harmless.
That and I think the coach driver enjoyed getting to play hero when he untied the woman's braid from her seat.
At least Cassie just turned the spare toilet into a giant ice cube.
"I can only really keep Kiki or Duke out with us," I say, sighing. "Kiki just tries to stab everyone with her eyes whenever they even breathe near me, whilst Duke just wants to learn about everything. He cannot find toilets so interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if Cassie spent an hour watching the water flush out of a toilet, but Duke?"
Ali shrugs. "I guess he was just trying to figure out how it works."
"That's what scares me." I grab his poké ball from the pocket of my purrloin hoodie and toss it between my hands. "After everything Lamya said about the psychic overflow from Cerulean Cave, and that Duke's from there, what if he's planning to like, murder us all and get rid of the evidence?"
Ali laughs, loud enough to wake the few people left on the coach. Given the glares they give us, I don't think we're ever going to be their friends. Good. I can't say I ever wanted a man with ears he could use to fly or a woman who looks like the Wicked Witch as my friends. And that's not even counting the ginger kid my age that I'm still not sure is a boy, but he certainly smells like one.
"I don't think you have to worry about your pokémon trying to kill you," Ali says, patting me on the head. "He would have shown some tendencies towards that by now. I think he just genuinely wants to learn."
I hold out his poké ball. "Then you teach him? You do all the psychology stuff and you said you wanted a poliwrath, right?"
She laughs, pushing my hand gently back to me. "Nice try, but no. You managed with Kiki, even if you've said that was mostly your dad. Yeah a poliwrath would be nice, but you also managed to get Mandy under control and Cassie… well, she's sort of normal now, isn't she?"
"She doesn't seem to be leaping from tall buildings anymore," I mutter. At Ali's confused look, I quickly clear my throat. "I mean, alright, I'll stick with Duke. I'm just tired. Like, in my body and in my brain. It's just so boring in this coach. I mean, I can't even try to study or anything, because there's nothing else to do. I like to have distractions around me, because that makes it easier for me to concentrate." I fold my arms. "I know that sounds weird but it's true."
"It's fine," Ali says, hugging me with one arm. Everyone always says that girls hug gently, but with Ali it reminds me of all the times Jerry went to hug me and then started rubbing my head with his knuckles. Even though I know she's not going to do it, I still can't help but prepare to escape a sudden headlock.
"You're just getting cabin fever," she says. "Once we're off this coach and you've gotten used to the outside world again, you'll feel fine. Then give it a few weeks and you'll probably be waiting for a time in which you can sit around and do nothing for a couple of days." She groans as she stretches again, falls on the floor and just sits there, staring at the floor between her legs. "As for me, I'll probably break the nose of the next person that suggests I spend three days trapped on a coach."
I shuffle away from her a little. "It was your idea to come with me," I point out.
"Then I'll break my own nose," she says, as if that solves everything.
-O-O-O-
When we finally get off the coach, the first thing that I notice is the sweet, fresh smell of the crisp autumn air. The leaves in the trees are turning orange and fluttering in the breeze, even as little tiny baby pidgey chirp and squeak from their nests as their mother pidgeotto vomits up half-eaten caterpie for them.
"Nature is so beautiful isn't it?" Ali asks, seeing what I see. "In fact, I remember my own mother feeding me that way too," she sighs, clasping her hands in front of her heart.
"I thought-" I start to say and then realise just what she means. I make a face. "Gross."
"But it's so beautiful," she sings, like she's got her own crazy television show about ugly pokémon and how pretty they actually are. "Come here," she declares, grabbing my shoulders and pulling me towards her, "and let me feed you."
"Ew!" I scream as her fingers go for the back of her throat. Joke or not, that's just gross. She cackles - I think she's been taking lessons from Mandy - and wipes a tear from her eye. "You're not funny," I tell her.
"I so am," she says, still laughing. "You should have seen your face. I wish I'd taken a picture of it."
"Whatever," I growl, feeling the tips of my ears burning. "Let's just go meet Jerry." I spin around and see the countless fields full of flowers and trees, the river that sneaks out of Tohjo Falls and down to New Bark and nothing that even hints towards a sign of civilisation. "Um," I mumble, spinning again, "he does know this coach drops us off here, right?"
"And you do realise why this coach was so cheap, right?" Ali throws an arm around my shoulders and squeezes me again. I get the mental image of me popping and oozing out like a burst toothpaste tube. "There's a little town near the coach station, but they've only got about maybe fifty people that live there. This coach comes here for Trainers who don't want to walk all that way across Kanto to get here. The fact that there's even a road here is something - all the land here is protecting by the Kanto League."
"Okay," I say, trying to find this mystery town she mentioned and yet failing, "that doesn't help me try and find Jerry."
She flicks out her phone with a shake of her head. "There's this magical invention right here. Calling a number lets you talk to a person on the over side!" She even does spooky-fingers and makes 'ooh' noises as she does so.
I just poke my tongue out at her as she dials Jerry. That was far easier than I thought it would be. I thought she'd at least tell me to ring him - I mean, he is my brother. And the fact that she actually types in a number, rather than selecting it from contacts. Does she have his number memorised? I try not to smirk.
Not even a moment after she says hello, Jerry appears in the clearing in front of us. I can't help but shriek as he appears – and it's only Annie's quick interventions that stop Ali from breaking Jerry's nose in fright.
"Idiot," she growls, punching his arm. I see the way he winces when he's sure she isn't looking.
"What she said," I say, but I hug him instead. "I got all my Kanto badges!"
"And you also caught The Duke," he says, sounding like he's lecturing me, but there's a smile on his face. "You just can't keep to doing the normal trainer things and capturing pokémon in the wild, can you?"
"I so can," I huff, "I even caught a scyther in Viridian Forest!"
"Really?" The way his eyebrow raises tells me how little he believes that. "So where is this mystery creature? If you had one of those, you'd be unleashing it in public and using it to try and get your own way with everything."
I see Ali snort a laugh and glare her way. Traitor. "I so did," I say, fishing out my pokédex for proof. I find the little capture log part that lists all the pokémon captured and recorded to my pokédex. It's disappointingly sparse. Cassie, the scyther and Duke. Mandy isn't even there because she was a gift.
"See?" I say, shoving the pokédex at him. "I so caught one!" If I were a pokémon, I could live off the shock on his face for a few months. "I sold it though," I say, before he asks. I press a few buttons on my pokédex and bring up the pokémon hunting website Pascal signed me up for. "See? That was what I sold."
"Huh," Jerry says. At least it's not just me that's reduced to grunts when I'm shocked or surprised. "You do know you're my favourite sister, right?" he asks suddenly, throwing his arm over my shoulders.
Ali takes the pokédex from him and mutters a few curses I still hear. "Screw you, Curly. She's my friend – I saw her first!"
"How does that even work?"
"Because I said so." She shoves him aside and hands me back my pokédex. "Just remember that unlike your brother, I won't use your feelings to exploit you for money." She smiles. "I will, however, teach you how to kick six foot high and do the splits."
"Ow," I say, wincing to that thought. "Maybe just teaching me how to kick above my head will be fine. Or flying kicks!" I pull Duke's poké ball out of my pocket. "I guess I should try and train Duke in some fighting things too. He's the only one of my pokémon that has arms and can move around enough to throw things around like a fighter."
"Do that enough and he'll be a poliwrath." Annie, apparently bored of us ignoring her, hovers around Jerry's head, seems to grow bored and descends into the shadows of the trees. The alarmed squawks of pokémon let me know that she's out terrorising the wildlife. Jerry doesn't seem concerned. "If you focus more on elemental attacks, he'll evolve into a politoed instead."
At the end of the clearing, I see a stantler and what has to be its baby springing along after it. The huge shadow of a fearow looms over them as it soars down from the top of Tohjo falls.
"I'll let whatever happens happen," I decide. If wild pokémon can evolve how they like, why should mine be any different?"
"Well until that does," Ali says, grabbing both our arms, "there are more important things to worry about. Like the fact that someone is going to be going into Johto and aiming for her fourth badge soon!"
"Seventh," I say, suddenly self-conscious. Didn't it take Jerry nearly a year to get this far? I've done it in only a couple of months. "It's the fourth one I need for my school, but then I've gotten a badge from Pewter, one from Ramos and I just got one from Cerulean too. So that means that the battles will be harder, right?" I sigh. "That means my tests will probably be even harder too."
And Falkner's the next one. As much as I've tried to look online for clues, I haven't seen anything. As long as he doesn't decide on something crazy like a sky-race on a pokémon that doesn't know how to fly or strapping me to a pidgeot and having it fly full-speed around Johto, I might be alright.
"Seventh!" Ali corrects herself, still dragging us across the clearing. I can hear the sound of a stream, though that honestly doesn't mean much to me. I have no idea where we are really – I guess that to get to Johto, I just go in the opposite direction to them. "Did you manage to bring it?" she asks, looking at Jerry.
"I placed the order," he says, sounding a lot like Dad when Mum sent him out for continual trips to buy pickles. She's clearly to blame for my strange habits. "I just need to go back with Ali and collect it."
"Well do so!" she shouts, shoving him. "Get going! We'll get things ready here!"
"Fine," he sighs. A whistle and Annie appears in his shadow, cackling. The sound continues even after Jerry vanishes into black. The space where he stood slowly begins to light up again, as if Annie sucked all the light and joy out of the air when she teleported.
"Just what's happening?" I ask.
"We're celebrating," Ali says, throwing her pack to the floor and digging through it. "Now help me set up camp. If you're wandering into Johto and we're heading back into Kanto, we can at least spend one night together, right?"
I don't really even get a chance to answer, because she's already setting up the tents. I wouldn't have put it past her to have convinced Jerry to somehow bring a projector and a DVD player out here.
I let out my pokémon and prepare for the inevitable chaos. Duke seems to notice the stream nearby and ambles towards it, Cassie cackling as she chases after him. Mandy sees Ali trying to set up the tents and of course decides to grab the ropes and untie them after Ali's put them up. Ali just laughs and lets out Cap. The sawk manages to distract Mandy – mostly by using her as target practice.
Kiki meanwhile just stands near me, looming like a silent spectre as I dig a fire pit.
I'm actually surprised she doesn't seem to react when Annie and Jerry reappear. She must be able to sense intent by the teleportation or something – that or Annie telepathically messages her first so Kiki doesn't freak and fill Jerry full of needles. I don't exactly want to go back to my parents with my brother turned into Swiss cheese by my pokémon.
That or the fact that Jerry's holding several boxes of pizza is enough to stop her.
"The hunter-gatherer has returned!" Jerry declares, holding the food to the sky like a trophy.
"Don't kid yourself." Ali marches up to him and snatches the pizza. He seems to understand the cardinal rule of Ali – never get between her and junk food. "I'm the most likely to be a hunter-gatherer here. You'd be at home sewing my ripped up clothes and cooking dinner."
"And just how many times have you dreamt of coming home to me?" He laughs as she starts to turn red. "If you're going to make me a housewife, I want you to buy me all the shoes and clothes I want."
The fact he didn't expect her to pick him up is a clear oversight. "Well then, wifey," Ali shouts, carrying him in a fireman's lift, "I'll make sure to spoil you all the time. But I think you need to wash before you're pretty enough for me to spoil."
He shrieks as she throws him into the stream. Duke, splashed with the full force of water, croaks and spits water back at them. Soaked and laughing, Ali doesn't notice when Cassie runs up behind her and pushes her into the water.
I pick up a slice of pizza and watch the show. "You guys remember that I'm still here, right?"
They look like they've been caught doing something they shouldn't. Oblivious to the change, Cassie makes a few small snowballs and throws them at Duke. His cheeks inflate and Cassie is thrown into the water by a stream of exploding bubbles.
It's enough to make Ali and Jerry start laughing again. They lean on each other as they climb out of the stream, dripping water all over our camp. Ali, predictably, goes straight for the boxes of pizza whilst Jerry shoos Annie away as he tries to find dry clothes to change into.
"So…" I say, grinning at them both. "Am I invited to the wedding?"
I don't know why I didn't think they'd throw me in the stream for that.
-O-O-O-
"What're you doing out here at this time?"
I look up from my book and see my brother stood over the crackling fire, orange flames bathing him in enough light to make it seem like he's caught fire too. Duke slimes away from my side to sit between us. I don't know whether he's offering Jerry a space or protecting me from him, but I'd appreciate the gesture a lot more if he hadn't taken my book with him.
I shrug. "Reading," I say, as if it's obvious.
"But at night? That's going to hurt your eyes."
"I'm teaching Duke," I say, trying not to sigh. Today was fun, even if it went way too quickly. I don't want to tarnish it by getting another lecture off my brother. More than that, I don't want to let him upset me because I'm worried that if Diz finds out, he'll wipe Jerry's brain again and I'll be left with a vegetable for a brother and my parents will so not accept 'Diz was trying to protect me' as an explanation.
"Then that's going to hurt his eyes." I see the way that Jerry gives Duke a wide berth as he walks around him. The fact that Duke doesn't attack means that he must have moved to let Jerry sit next to me. Or he just wanted to protect the book. I don't really know Duke well enough to say.
"I do a lot of training at night," I say, as if that makes everything better. "Mostly it's just the same thing as during the day - having Kiki hit moving targets, getting Cassie to freeze stuff faster and having her freeze hotter stuff." I point up. "You didn't even notice Mandy circling us, did you?"
With the speed his head shoots up to look, the answer is obvious. "You're training her to circle silently?"
"No, silly. I'm training her to be silent. In case you haven't noticed, vullaby aren't the most offensive pokémon around. I need her to be able to try and surprise everything she attacks."
The way he looks at me makes me wonder if he's ever seen me as intelligent at all. "That's actually smart."
"Yeah, well, I don't exactly have massively powered pokémon," I say. One day, when I can have a tyranitar or an onix or something, I can just sit around and have the battle plan of 'squish your enemies by sitting on them'. Until then I actually have to think of ways to try and win battles. "She's also generating some darkness," I say without looking up. "Lamya - the gym leader in Eclipse - has her pokémon make some sort of darkness that makes it so that you can't hear or see or anything whilst you're inside it."
"She makes it so you can't see in the darkness."
"Shut up," I growl, turning red. "My point is that I want Mandy to be able to do that. So mostly she's working on being silent without the darkness first, so that when she's making it, everything gets confused. That's why I'm teaching Duke to read at night and training my pokémon when it's dark too - that way, they're sort of used to it, so if anyone tries it on us again, we're not totally useless."
Finally Jerry sits down by my side. He ruffles my hair in that annoying way, even when I try to shove him away. Grinning, he stops and just hugs me with one arm. "You're really thinking about this, aren't you?" he says, still looking up and watching Mandy.
"Uh-huh." I nod against his shoulder. Since when did he get comfy? He was always skinny and bony. "I have to get these badges so I can get into my school. All the tests so far have made me have to think about things. Blaine's was the hardest, so that made Lamya's kinda easy afterwards, but I still need to try and keep up. The badges I get from them count as actual badges, so once I have all eight, people will be allowed to use stronger pokémon against me. So if I've only gotten the badges I need without really training, I'm not really much better off, am I?"
"Who are you and what have you done with my sister?" He laughs as I punch him. "I can remember a time where you thought about nothing but studying history. Now you're planning out your pokémon training as if that's the only thing you want to do."
"It's not," I say, sighing. "I'm trying to balance everything but I keep forgetting things here and there. It's hard to focus on everything. I want to sit down and just study, but then my pokémon need my attention. And when I start to train my pokémon, I want to scurry away and read. How do people manage to go to school and still be trainers?"
He shrugs. "You find a way. You're just… unfocused."
"It's hard not to be. I don't have Diz streaking after me, but…" I trail away, fully aware of what happened last time I said anything to Jerry. I don't want to jinx anything by mentioning his name and suddenly having him appear. "Basically he said there's nothing I can do," I say, lamely, hoping it's enough.
Apparently it's not. "What does that even mean?"
"The legends," I sigh. "I… I don't wanna say much, because the last time I told someone, basically their mind got wiped to stop bad things from reading their thoughts."
The way he sighs my name puts across all the pity, tiredness and worry that I'm sure my parents feel too. "Wiping minds isn't something that's seen as a good thing," he lectures. "Are you sure… are you sure that Diz can be trusted, if he's with people - or pokémon - that can do that?"
"No," I say, honestly. "But they're the only ones giving me answers so far."
"And there's no one else that you can ask?"
I remember Beel and his continual lectures. The hypno and clefable all seemed to be on one side there. That only leaves the bisharp and gothitelle… which of course makes me remember the way that gothitelle ate the hypno's head and started wearing it under its skin or something. Do. Not. Want.
"I'm not sure," I say.
"Well whose mind did they wipe then?"
"I can't say," I tell him. Before he goes too protective older brother I add, "The thing with the legends is meant to happen, Jerry. It's…" I sigh again, trying to remember what they told me. "I'm not allowed to take sides. I have to watch the legends fall… and then I have to stop whatever's killing them."
"Who told you this?"
"I can't tell you."
He sighs. Not out of anger or boredom, but out of an obvious frustration that he can't do anything. I think I can understand how he feels. If something like this was happening to him, I would want to help him even if he wanted to keep me safe.
"Okay, can you at least tell me how you know all this?"
"I was told it."
He lets go of my shoulder and spins around so he can face me. "And you haven't thought about asking someone else? Checking something?"
"No."
"Then you're an idiot."
I flinch and stare at the floor.
"Because seriously," he goes on, like I'm not already upset enough, "what's happened to you? I can remember the times where if you'd been told something like that, the first thing you'd do would be to go out and check books to see if they're lying or not. Now you're taking it for gospel?"
"Well I'm busy!" I hiss, even though it's a useless argument. I see the way Duke tenses at my anger and force myself to calm down a little. As much as I'd appreciate it now, I don't think that having my pokémon throw Jerry over Tohjo Falls would be a good thing in the long term. "I can't just sit down and read all the time when I've got pokémon to train and badges to get and people that want to find me because I saw legends die chasing after me!"
Before I can say anything else, he hugs me. My face is pressed against his chest and he holds it there so that either I can't talk or because he thinks I'm going to cry.
"I'm sorry," he says, "maybe I shouldn't have said it like that. But listen, you can't do everything at once. You need to make time for things, otherwise you're only letting yourself down. You could have done something on the coach ride here, right?"
"I was bored though," I mumble into his chest.
"That doesn't change anything. You think I don't get bored of the things I have to do? I hate accounting and everything like that, but aside from pokémon training, it's the only thing I'm good at. So I force myself to carry on."
"Yeah, but-"
"No buts."
"-Okay," I sigh. "I'll try and do something. Though it pains me to say it, I admit, "You're right. I should have tried to see if they were telling me the truth. I guess I can now, seeing as I haven't seen Diz for a while."
"Yeah, what happened there?" He pushes me away and bends down so he can look me in the eyes. "Annie had some trouble trying to find you earlier. When pokémon teleport, they can lock onto a personality to make it easier - but yours has been… well, scrambled, is how she described it."
"I dunno," I say. "There's a lot of things happening around me that I don't understand. Apparently that video of me catching Duke got all virused or something, so people have had to pull it from all the video sites."
He looks so confused that I know instantly it can't be him - and that he doesn't know any more about it than Ali or I do. "How… just how did that happen?"
"I don't know. I guess someone is trying to look after me, or something?"
"Maybe," he says, though he doesn't sound too sure. "Just, be careful, alright? If you want, I can come round Johto with you."
I catch myself about to take the offer. As much as it'd be nice to have Jerry around, I kinda do need to do things on my own. But it's not just that - whenever Diz comes along next, if Jerry's with me then Diz might decide to wipe his mind again.
"I should probably do it on my own," I say. "But I can always ring you if anything goes wrong, right?"
"Sure." It's impossible to read how he feels. "Okay." He hugs me and when I hug him back, I almost don't want to let go. It's so easy to pretend that since my big brother is here, nothing bad is going to happen. When Snowpoint happened and the steelix and even the gastly in Eterna, he was always there to try and make sure that nothing bad happened to me.
I can still remember Saffron and what he did to the ultra-creepy dude that followed me around the store. He's my brother, so he'll go to any lengths necessary to protect me.
It's the reason why I wait until after he's gone to sleep and sneak away into the night. If he doesn't know I've gone, he won't follow me. If he doesn't follow me, Diz won't come after him and wipe his mind. Mystery people won't wipe videos off the internet involving him or somehow scramble his brain to make it hard for psychics to find him.
"Come on," I say to Duke, refusing to look back at the little campsite that holds my brother and my best friend. They'll hate me for just leaving them a note, but it's not like I'm breaking my phone. They'll still have a way to contact me – I just think it's safer that they can't find me.
And if I happen to cry a little at the thought of leaving them, at least they're not there to see my weakness.
