Chapter 2

"Sweetie?"

Knock. Knock. Knock.

"Sweetie, are you alright?"

My mouth was dryer than a Dodrio's dust when I came to.

"Sweetie, could you please open the door?"

My head was throbbing.

"Sweetie?"

Was it a dream?

"Joshie, can you hear me?"

Whatever it was, I could not think with the questions coming from outside my door. "I'm fine! Go away!" For the brief moment of silence after I spoke, I looked around the room, now awash in the golden light of late afternoon. Too many bags to count, I needed to find the one that wasn't like the others.

"Josh, you need to open this door right now!"

"Go away, I'm busy." If it was a Pokémon, if I hadn't imagined it, I could, I could... I could catch it! I tripped over towards my closet and grabbed one of the empty balls.

"How could you be busy? Josh, I don't mean to get mean, but you don't do anything in there."

I ignored her. Somewhere in my room was a second chance.

"You don't have a job. You don't have any friends that I know about."

When I realized that looking was getting me nowhere as long as the nagging from beyond my door kept cutting through my thoughts like claws through cupcakes, I switched to action. Grabbing each bag I saw and tossing them towards a single corner in my room, over on top of the bed. As I was throwing them, occasionally the lining would rip open, old food, tissue paper, and other bits of unwanted matter would spill out into the air and across the sheets.

"Maybe you're looking something up on the internet, but I'd really prefer if you wouldn't. You get such strange ideas from the sites you visit. It's really not healthy. I asked your doctor about it, and even he said it's not healthy, so you know that means it's really not healthy!"

Bag after bag, behind me they went as I threw and threw, until finally I saw it. It was sleeping. Beneath a large pile it had curled up and gone off to Drowzeeland. The noise hadn't seemed to stir it at all. It looked more comfortable than I had ever been in my entire life. A low murmuring sound came from its mouth as it snored, its body slightly inflating and deflating with each breath.

I drew back my right arm, ball in hand, and threw it directly against the creatures side. The impact made a dent, and as the creature squeaked in pain, its eyes opening, the ball bounced back into the air, opened up, enveloped the Pokémon in red light, and then sucked it in.

The ball hit the floor, whirling and swirling as it tried to steady itself. Each time it was almost still, the ball shook. Like something was trying to break out from inside.

"Josh, you know I have the key to this door. I only wanted to let you do the right thing and open it yourself, but fine. I'll do it myself if I have to." With that, I turned around to hear the clinking of keys.

"No! Wait, Mom!" The knob turned, the door opened, and at the same moment I saw my Mom's face, I heard the Poké Ball behind me break open.

"Trubbish!" The Pokémon blurted out angrily as it flew through the air and landed on top of my head, knocking me face first into the hardwood floor. Twisting my neck upwards towards the door, I saw my Mom go flat against it as the Pokémon zoomed past her and sped down the hallway.

My mom shrieked, and I stumbled to my feet, grabbing the Poké Ball and running out of the room.

In the hallway I caught a glimpse of the mischievous little thing, hopping and waddling towards the stairs, occasionally using its two tentacle-like-arms as longer legs than its nubby little stubs.

"Hey, come back here!" I shouted.

It turned its face towards me, made a dry spitting sound with its mouth, then hopped up and slid down the stairway handrail.

I followed after it, tumbling down the stairs and bumping my arms and legs the whole time. Once at the bottom I frantically surveyed my surroundings. It had been longer than I could remember since I'd been downstairs, and yet everything looked exactly the same. The wholesome decorations, the tidy atmosphere, it was one-hundred percent Mom's making.

When I heard her Snubbull Sophie barking in the kitchen, I knew where to go. I ran into the room and saw the living, breathing, trash bag inhaling air and getting ready to expel a cloud of gas just like it had done to me the night before.

"Oh, no you don't!" I threw the ball as hard as I could, a direct hit against its green skin. And once again it was sucked up into the cloud of red energy. And once again, the ball rolled around a few times before the creature broke free.

I tried to think back to how this was supposed to work, what Sarah had said about catching Pokémon. "As everyone knows, you've gotta wear them out before you catch them!" Her voice sang through my head and I felt a little more at ease.

"Okay, I can do that."

The Pokémon stared me down, ignoring Sophie's barks. It was also planning its next move.

Before it got a chance to act, I ran forward and slapped it across the kitchen with the full force of my left arm. It flew over the sink, hit the window, then fell into the soapy water.

Once again acting before it could, I ran over, grabbed one of its tendrils with my right hand, and swung it around in the air, bringing its butt down onto the kitchen counter it had previously been standing on.

Spirals in its eyes, it rocked back and forth trying to orient itself, but before it could manage that, it was back in my Poké Ball. The ball shook and spun just like the previous attempts, but this time it finally came to a halt, made a clicking sound, and the thing was caught.

"I did it! I freaking did it!"

"Josh!"

My satisfaction was short lived. I turned around to see my Mom standing behind me, Sophie cowering behind her legs.

"What is going on?" She asked, apparently unpleased.

"I just caught a Pokémon!"

Her face was blank in its expression, save for the the twitching in her right eye.

"What? Why are you looking at me like that?"

"I haven't seen you in months! You haven't taken breakfast, lunch, or dinner for days! Your father and I were worried something terrible had happened, and now-now, you're-you're just-I don't know!"

With each word coming out of her mouth my mood fell further and further down, away from the high heights that for just one glorious moment they had been soaring at. "What do you mean by days?"

"I mean days, Josh! Days! Almost three days!"

"I ate the breakfast you made yesterday, Mom. The leppa berry juice, the pancakes. It was great, really good. Sorry I didn't say thank you or whatever." I was sighing, looking around the kitchen, rubbing my eyes, and squinting each time I glanced at the window, everything outside of the glass being a bright blur. Realizing how much it hurt my throat to talk, I started drinking water directly from sink nozzle.

"That was two and a half days ago, Josh! Your father wanted to break down the door, but I remembered what happened last time we thought something happened and how angry you got when we opened the door and saw what you were doing. So I waited as long as I could, but now... Now that I see you're fine..." Her eyes seemed to wander off towards the floor as she went silent. "No, you're not fine. But you are the same..."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I started back up the stairs.

My mom didn't say a word or try to follow me, she just collapsed into a chair at the end of the dining table as Sophie hugged her legs, but when I came back down wearing my jacket over my pajamas and my shoes over my sockless feet she seemed shocked. "Josh? What are you doing?"

"Finding out what I just caught." I stuffed the ball into my right jacket pocket and went out the front door. Closing it behind me before I had to hear another word. My own thoughts were negative enough on their own.

Outside, the world looked fake. The colors too saturated, the light too bright, the streets too clean. Every so often I had to pause and try to remember what road led to what, and make sure I wasn't going in circles.

Trying to follow the same path I had taken so many years ago, I could feel eyes looking at me. From all sides I could feel them there, in the corners, but I didn't look to see who they belonged to. I kept my own eyes planted on the sidewalk, on my feet, and just kept going.

Every so often my hair would fall in front of my eyes and I'd have to brush it behind my ears, only for it to fall back down and obscure my sight. Not that there was much I wanted to see out there in the world anyways.

Watching my shoe laces bounce, and paying close attention to the change from cement-to-asphalt-to brick as I moved closer to the edges, and closer to the old parts, of town, I only actually looked up when I finally came across the broken gate that invited me up the path towards the old laboratory.

I couldn't be sure if it had changed since I'd last seen it, it'd looked bad back then too. Run down, I mean. But despite its outward appearance, in the past it had held some kind of majesty. Now, I wondered if I ought to even bother going in.

Long blades of grass were growing out through the brick pathway while vines were going down, or maybe up, the building's walls. Nervously grasping the ball in my pocket with my right hand, I knocked on the door with my left.

There was no immediate answer. My mind started to wander, I heard the sounds of an ice cream truck behind me, and the shouts of children chasing after it. I didn't turn around to look, but it made me wonder. What did I look like? I never had to think about that in my room, but now people could see me. They could see me the same way I saw everything else.

I started to sweat, my heart was beating faster than a brisk walk should make it beat, and I was just turning around to start running home when I heard the terrible sound of the metal door grinding against the floor beneath it.

"Are you here for the eggs? Because I already told your boss I don't have them. I can't just pop them out myself, you know? I would if I could, but I just can't."

Looking at the man halfway hiding behind the door I felt a little more at ease, but also a little strange. He was dark skinned, portly, and had coarse black hair growing in a curved pattern behind his ears and the back of his head. "Professor Buckeye?" I asked, truly not sure. I had remembered him differently, with white hair, and being so very tall. Now I was looking down at him.

"Yes..." He moved more of his head from out behind the door. "So, you understand I don't have the eggs, right?"

"I don't want any eggs."

Now his body began to move out from behind the door, slightly. "Then, what do you want?"

"I caught a Pokémon, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell me what it is. What type, or name, or whatever."

The door opened further and he started to ease up a bit. "A Pokémon?"

"Yeah, it sort of looks like a bag of trash, but, messed up?" I pulled the ball out and held it forward. "Caught him with one of those old balls you gave me."

"You caught him? And you don't want to take anything from me?"

"Yeah, and uh, no."

He began to scratch the part of his head without any hair on it. "Balls I gave you?"

"I guess it's been a long time. It's me, Josh."

"Josh?"

"Phailsen."

His eyes got big. "The Tepig kid!"

I cringed.

"Sarah's friend!"

"Yeah, that's me."

"Oh geez, I had no clue. You look... Different. Come on in! There's so much to talk about." He opened the door completely and guided me in, flipping some switches as he closed the door. "I haven't had a friendly guest in... Oh, I don't know how long!"

Across the ceiling plastic light panels began to brighten and then flicker as they illuminated the laboratory. The way it had looked on the outside was actually a pretty good indication of what the inside was like as well. Although, I'm pretty sure the outside had less bird poop on it. From the floor, to the tables and their electronic devices, to the computers and panels across the walls, and the bookshelves throughout the place, almost everything was coated in yellowish white droppings. Most of it dried, some of it, not so much.

Cleaning its wings and standing atop one of the numerous PCs in the lab was the Rufflet that must have been responsible for the state of things. In-between feathers it would glance up at me with narrow eyes.

"Did, uh... Did it always look like this in here? Even when I was a kid?"

"Oh, no. Arceus, no!" Buckeye's mouth and hands moved in every direction imaginable while he spoke. "You see, I, well, I used to be funded. Back then. Now, not so much. I mean, with the funding I could afford assistants. I could rely on a helping hand to clean up while I worked. And of course there was Sarah, always happy to lend a helping hand, that Sarah. Don't really have any of those these days, helping hands of any kind. You could say I'm between projects. Between donors. Between... Uh, between..." He trailed off for a moment, then looked straight into my eyes. "You say you caught a Pokémon?"

"Yeah." I held up the ball again.

"Excellent." He pressed a few buttons on one of the PCs then pointed me towards a glass cylinder, just the right circumference for a Poké Ball, that hovered over a slight indentation in one of the tables. "Place your ball below that."

I did as he asked and then he pressed a few more buttons. The cylinder shot down over the ball, and what looked like electricity shot throughout the glass and down into the ball. On a monitor against the wall an image of the Pokémon popped up, or at least at the image of another member of its species.

"Ah, Trubbish. The trash bag Pokémon! Aptly named. You don't see many of these outside the cities. Waste Management usually sends a Grimer or two around town to eat them up. Where did you say you found this specimen?"

"Um, in my bedroom."

Buckeye looked at me for a moment, bit his lip, then looked at his Rufflet and the state of his laboratory and smiled. "No judgments here!"

It was only after he said that that I began to feel subconscious about it. "So, is he a rare Pokémon then? You said there aren't many of them out there?"

"Rare? No, not rare. Just uncommon in our area due to local ordinances. But, in terms of the world at large? Very common, very common."

"Oh, okay."

"Also, not a he, a she. This one here's a girl."

"Does that affect how I should care for it?"

"Mhhhmmm, not really. Say, how did you manage to get her in a ball anyways?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, do you have another Pokémon? That you used to battle it? I suppose a lot of time has passed, so that must be the case, correct?"

"Actually, no. I just did it myself."

"Repeat that."

"Uh, I just did it myself."

"I don't understand."

"I, uh, I just sort of slapped it around a bit."

Buckeye turned away from the computer and towards me. He seemed to be growing taller while standing still. "Is that a joke?"

"No."

He turned back to the computer and pressed a few buttons that led to the end of the electricity and the cylinder rising back up. He grabbed the ball and then walked over towards me, placing it in my hands. "You need to go release her, Josh. Right now."

"What are you talking about?"

"The bond between a trainer and their partners is important. And a great deal of that bond is based on first impressions. You can't start a relationship with a Pokémon by abusing it. And that's what you've done."

I felt my heart sink. The adrenaline that brought me out of my room, out of the house, all the way across the suburbs and to this rotten old lab at the edge of town was depleted. "You don't know that." I couldn't look him the eyes as I talked. "You don't know that."

"You told me yourself, Josh. Were you lying?"

"She's the first the one I caught. She's my first... My second partner."

"There will be another. And the offer I gave you those years ago still stands, I don't have any Tepigs at this point, but Ruffles over there has a few roommates. Mostly Pidgeys and Pidoves, but they're all great guys. And they trust humans."

"You said that they use Grimers to get rid of Trubbishes around here?"

"Yes. They're both poisonous Pokémon, but Grimers are a bit more manageable. Less erratic. Slower to move, easier to track."

"You want me to release her, so she can get eaten?"

"That's just nature. Happens to Caterpies every day out there in the forest. Just yesterday Ruffles here-"

"So it's okay for Pokémon to battle other Pokémon... It's okay for Pokémon to eat other Pokémon... And it's okay for the government to wipe out entire species from our area..." I felt my grip tightening around the ball. "But it's not okay for me to work to make things right with this Pokémon here! Because what, because I made a mistake? Because I made another stupid mistake, I have to let this one go... Let her out so she can run away and get eaten by a freaking Grimer!?"

"Josh, I-"

"You're full of it, Professor!" Tears were streaming down my cheeks as I ran out of the lab. My feet knocking over things that had fallen on the ground, my arms bumping against what was on the tables and sending the material down for my feet to kick and trip over.

Outside, it seemed even sunnier than before. As I burst through the door I caught a glimpse of children down on the street staring up at me. Their gaze made my tears burn. I turned around, running not back into the laboratory, but behind it. Behind it, and into the woods.

It was in there, under the shade of the densely leaved branches that I sat down. Burying my head in-between my knees and bawling uncontrollably. The snot soaking my pants and making it difficult to breathe.

I hated the professor for everything he said, I hated myself for going to visit him, and I hated what was inside that ball for giving me false hope. In that moment I was sure that it must hate me too. In that moment, I was certain that I did have to release it.

So I held out the ball, pressed the button, and let the red light carry it away, out into the world. Then I dropped the ball without looking up. I couldn't watch that Trubbish run away just like my Tepig had all those years ago. I couldn't go through the same thing again.

I just kept crying, and that went on for a while, but eventually it stopped. Maybe I just wasn't well enough hydrated, but no matter the reason, eventually the eyes went dry. And when they finally did, and when I looked up, I wasn't alone.

Slouched in front of a tree just a few feet away, shaded, but clearly visible, was that tentacled trickster. It was watching me.

"What's wrong?"

It didn't reply.

"You're free to leave. You can go."

It didn't budge.

"Fine, the forest is yours. I'll go." I stood up, leaving the Poké Ball behind me amongst the dead leaves and dirt. I didn't think I'd need it. But as I was walking away, something hard hit the back of my head. I yelped, then turned around to see the ball fall to the ground, and the Trubbish standing right where the ball had been before, amongst the dead leaves and dirt, with a smirk on its face.

My face felt strange. Like it was doing something unnatural as it mimicked that Pokemon's silly expression.

I picked up the ball, looked at it for a moment, then looked back at the little thing who'd thrown it. It spread its arms out like it was ready to catch a big sack of potatoes, and I threw the ball right at it. It bounced off, opened up, and sucked the creature in. Hitting the ground, the ball didn't shake this time. It didn't shake a single time before going steady.

That ball was where it wanted to be.