I'm used to functioning with only a few hours of sleep each night, so I woke up the next day at around the time the sun started to rise. Iris shares the same habit of waking up along with the sunrise, something I suspect is due to the fact that she lived within the mountains for the better part of her life until she was caught by human traffickers and subsequently auctioned off. Her body clock had long since synced itself with the rise and fall of the sun. In any case, I decided to supervise her, making sure she brushed her teeth and washed herself up before we headed downstairs to see if there was any breakfast available.
There's nobody in the dining room but there was somebody in the kitchen. Surprisingly, that was Lexus, the last person I would ever expect to find in the kitchen until I remembered that he is aspiring to be a masterchef.
"You are too early. Usually everyone else would only start coming down about half an hour later at the earliest, and that is if they decided to wake up early," Lexus commented as his impeccable skills with the knife made quick work of the ham he was cutting, before looking down to see the child beside him who was trying to observe what he was doing. "Hey squirt, had a good rest?"
"The bed's really soft! I just lie on it and poof! I fell asleep!" Iris answered cheerfully and Lexus simply ruffled her hair with his free hand before putting the chopped ham away in an empty bowl.
"Any preferences for breakfast?"
"Meat," Iris answered with a firm nod of her head and a determined look in her eyes. She's a carnivore and I'm still having close to no progress in persuading her to eat her vegetables.
"Okay, meat it is. What about him?" Lexus asked Iris while jerking his head in my direction.
"Jayce loves those hot… ah! Spicy! The word's spicy! He eats very spicy things! Like, this one time he made a toast and then he just took the bottle of chilli and just squeeeeeeeze the entire thing on it," Iris gestured animatedly with her hands and Lexus slowly turned his head in my direction as if to confirm what Iris said. I simply shrugged my shoulders.
"It's true. Kind of."
"Okay…" Lexus slowly nodded along as if trying to come to terms that he wasn't hearing things about my taste preferences. "I won't be done anytime soon though, so maybe you guys can come back later? Maybe go and feed your pokemon first or something?"
"Oh, I want! I want! I want to feed pokemon! Jayce, Jayce, can I feed your pokemon? Can I feed Drei? Please please please!" Iris bounced on her feet and began to bombard me with her endless questions once more. I decided to just agree for the sake of my ears.
"You can get Kevin to show you where we usually feed our pokemon and where we keep all the pokemon food," Lexus suggested and rang for Kevin, who appeared shortly after and took Iris' hand as he showed her the way to the feeding area. Greninja and umbreon followed after her with greninja holding the pokeballs that contained the rest of my team.
"You're not following?"
"My pokemon can look after her for me and feeding hydreigon will distract her for the next hour or so. I need a break from babysitting too," I replied as I looked over the kitchen. "You don't mind me helping, do you?"
"Of course not," Lexus replied as he shoved a basket full of vegetables my way. "You can first start by helping me to wash and cut these. I will get started on the meat that the girl's been yapping for."
"You prepare all the meals?" I asked as I did what Lexus told and started with washing the vegetables.
"Only when I'm free. Otherwise, the servants prepare the meals. Was it my imagination, or were you talking to sis in her room last night? I thought I heard your voices from next door."
"I did discuss certain things with her last night. Also found out that your sister was weirder than I thought."
"Welcome to the club, fam," Lexus snorted as the sound of chopping knives rang out in the kitchen once more. "If you think sis is weird, wait till you see my Mum during summer."
"Why summer?"
"Mum could never deal with the summer heat. The summer heat in Lacunosa is still somewhat bearable compared to the other parts of the region, but still crazily hot. Her method of dealing with it is to walk around the house topless."
My actions took a temporary pause as I stared at Kevin, simply stunned beyond words.
"You should see Kevin's face when he was in his first year on the job. I will never forget it, man, how he nearly fainted when he walked up the stairs only to find my Mum walking topless along the corridor. Couldn't hold a proper conversation with my Mum or look at her for a whole week until he got over it. Mum found it hilarious and kept purposely bumping into him on purpose during the whole of that summer, topless."
"Poor guy," I agreed as I proceeded to skin the cucumbers because I really have no idea what to say to that.
"Sis just loves to make people uncomfortable with her teasing, it's kinda like her own personal hobby. She loves to see people embarrassed. She did something similar to you too, didn't she? Heard her laughing from my room."
"Something about whether I wanted a goodnight kiss from her and if so, if I want it on the lips and if so, if I wanted some tongue," I deadpanned.
"Pfft," Lexus tried and spectacularly failed to smother his laughter as the sound of his chopping knife took a temporary pause before quickly resuming. "That's just like her. Trust me, she's already going very easy on you if all she's aiming for is to make you feel slightly uncomfortable. If it was me she would never hesitate to make her scolipede circle round me for hours while making those very creepy clicking noises. She knows I've been scared of those ever since that day."
"What will she do to the rest?"
"Amelia's easy. She loves to read those weird trashy romance novels in secret, especially those stupid BL novels that is all the rage these days. Sis will just read out the most embarrassing paragraphs from one of her books and that is enough to get Amelia to hide in her room the entire day. Mikhail… Not as easy. He's relatively unflappable but that nerd hates exercising with a passion. He doesn't like it when we drag him out for a run and sis always manages to get him to run, somehow. So he gets really grumpy whenever she tries to get him to exercise but at the same time, too scared of her to say otherwise. Then as for Elesa… Sis and her, those two are just dumb, period. Put them into the same room and the two smartest women immediately turn into squabbling children."
Ah, right, Elesa grew up with them as well.
"What did they do?"
"The most fucked up thing I saw and couldn't unsee was to witness them comparing their breast sizes and they didn't bloody care if I was there or not. Like, what the fuck sis? If you want to do that, don't do it in front of your brother. Now that's just mentally scarring."
"I have no words," I flatly replied as I tried to imagine both Elesa and Leticia comparing their chest size with no success. This family really is just plain weird.
"Not asking whose is bigger?"
"Not interested."
"The answer is sis'. She says she's two entire sizes bigger than Elesa, bragged to me about it for the entire day."
"Thanks, man, never knew I needed to know that. Thanks."
"Hey you need to help deal with all the crazy in this house cos like hell I'm suffering through this alone. I haven't even get myself started on the stupid things our parents do."
"I don't want to know."
"Alright, fine, you will have a loooooot of time to get used to our brand of crazy anyway, you will find out for yourself. You seem to be the most normal one here so far but hey, I could be wrong. I haven't seen a sane one in our family in my entire life."
"What's the craziest thing you've ever done?"
"Fucked up so badly that I was banned from ever becoming eligible to get a trainer license and not even uncle could help in this matter. This is why I'm only allowed to have three pokemon."
"How many pokemon is a person allowed to have in Unova if they are not a trainer?" I asked, knowing that such restrictions differ from region to region. I'm not clear about Unova's trainer laws and regulations, but what I do know is that getting a trainer licence basically solves the problem of the upper limit of pokemon you are allowed to have for most cases.
"No more than six per person, and that is on the condition that all six must belong to species that are classified by the League as companion pokemon. For anyone with a breeder licence, officially, a maximum of three if any one of those are the battle type. That's where I fall into. For me to be able to bypass the legal loophole and be allowed to train non-companion type pokemon I have to first get my breeder license and I assure you, there was a fuck load of work involved in getting that damn license."
"Mind sharing just what happened?"
"I have anger issues even as a kid," Lexus was frank with his admission as we both continued to prepare breakfast. "I got into fights so often and kept getting expelled that Mum was starting to run out of schools to send me to because I was just that bad, I was becoming so notorious that no schools would accept me. Breaking other people's noses or fingers was like a weekly, or even daily affair sometimes, and by the time I was old enough to choose whether I want to be like sis and become a trainer, everything I did finally caught up to me. I had such a bad record that I was deemed unsuitable and unfit to be a trainer, saying that I couldn't be trusted with the responsibility of raising a pokemon. That's when I finally sobered up and admitted that I have a problem and that I need help. I'm still working on my issues after so many years but I think I'm improving, kinda, after I found that cooking helps to channel all that rage into something productive. Cooking is weirdly therapeutic."
"I can understand why."
"What about you? Have any hobbies?"
"Used to play the guitar for a while. Dropped it entirely for about eight years before picking it up again for about a month or two and then stopped playing it again."
"Guitar? I think I might have an acoustic one in my room somewhere, you can take it if you want to. Hopefully I haven't smashed it or anything."
I didn't bother to hide the small smile on my face. It's been quite some time since I picked up the guitar again and honestly, I kind of missed playing it.
"If you are sure about it, yeah, thanks. Saves me the trouble of finding one."
"Oh dear, you really shouldn't have gone to all this trouble. Just leave the meals to Lex next time!"
Like Lex told me, the family only started to come down for breakfast about an hour later. I also got to see uncle Gavin's wife and Amelia's mother, Addison Brown, who arrived just when breakfast was about to start. I couldn't remember the last time I shared a meal with so many people.
Lex prepared a rather sumptuous breakfast largely consisting of eggs, bacon, ham, steak, sausages, hash browns, broccoli, a few pieces of toast, followed by some coffee and tea depending on our individual preferences. We are all free to choose the combination of food we want for breakfast although I had to stop Iris from eating an all meat only diet. She needs some green in her food.
"Is this to your liking?" Aunt Giselle asked and I nodded in agreement. It's different from what I am used to eating for breakfast due to the cultural differences of Kanto and Unova, but getting used to this is not a big deal.
"You really add a lot of chilli sauce to your plate," Lexus pointed out and I shrugged.
"Jayce only cooks three types of food: No taste, super sweet, super spicy," Iris raised three fingers as she more or less summarised the meals I had prepared for her over the course of us knowing each other and suddenly, I felt very guilty for subjecting her to my subpar cooking.
"He can't be this bad. He obviously knows his way around the kitchen," Lexus said between mouthfuls of his food, looking at me for an explanation and I decided there's no point hiding this from my family.
"I can't really taste anything. That was why I mainly helped in the preparation part and let you do all the cooking earlier, because chances are I will mess up the taste. I can never tell if I had added too much or too little of anything."
"Can't taste anything?" My father repeated my words with a frown on his face.
"It's been like this since about two years ago, but it wasn't that bad back then," I explained as I took another bite from my sausage. "But after a while I realised that my sense of taste was getting… dulled, for the lack of a proper word. Let's say we both eat the same kind of sweets, the normal person might find the sweetness to be okay, but I wouldn't be able to taste anything at all. After a while I realised that the taste problem got progressively worse after every time I used Mega Evolution. Right before the war at Indigo, I could at least taste the sweetness of those sickening sweet Moomoo Milk and most of the food I ate still had at least some taste in them. Now, everything I drink tastes like plain water and most food tastes like… nothing."
"No wonder you added so much chilli sauce. You couldn't taste anything for shit unless you add a whole lot of seasoning," Lexus said in realisation.
"So you could technically eat an entire bottle of chilli sauce but feel nothing," Amelia blinked at me while munching on her toast.
"If it ever gets that bad, yeah, possibly."
"Hey, do a demonstration and swallow all the salt in the salt bottle," Mikhail playfully nudged me with his elbow from where he was sitting beside me.
"I still need my kidney to function, thank you very much."
"Then pepper. Try pepper," Leticia suggested with all seriousness which was met with an approving round of applause by Amelia. I decided that ignoring them would be better for my sanity.
"Here, more chilli," Iris innocently offered me the chilli bottle out of the goodness of her heart, carefully pushing it over the table surface until it was within my reach. I patted her on the head, mumbled a thanks, and proceeded to dump more chilli sauce on my plate, easily spotting how Lexus' face had wrinkled up in disgust and disbelief when he saw me doing so.
"Dude, how did your stomach not make a riot from all that chilli?"
"No idea, it just never happened."
"Your stomach must be made of freaking steel."
"Alright Lex, your job is to find a way to cook something delicious for Jayce without him needing to rely on his sense of taste," Aunt Giselle casually assigned her son with an impossible task that was immediately met with his disagreement.
"Mum, how on earth am I supposed to cook something delicious for someone who couldn't taste anything?"
"I thought you wanted to be a masterchef? How can you be a masterchef when you can't even solve something as simple as this?"
"I don't know about you, Giselle, but I'm eager to see the day Lexus wears that chef hat for real," Gustav seamlessly weaved himself into the conversation and saved Lexus from further verbal maiming from his mother. "Our family has produced all types of people for centuries. Gym Leaders, Elite Fours, billionaires, professors, artists, supermodels, but I don't think anyone ever became a masterchef. Lexus would be the first one in the family to do so."
"If he actually bothers to participate in some cooking competition to have a chance at that title in the first place, or actually get off his lazy ass and enrol in a cooking school to learn cooking properly," Giselle gave her son a dirty look as she took another bite out of her meal and Lexus simply gave an unapologetic shrug.
"Schools and I don't mesh well at all, Mum. I learn at my own pace."
"I don't want to go to school either. Too boring," Amelia agreed as she and Lexus high-fived each other in agreement.
Giselle wasn't amused.
"The difference, Amelia, is that you consistently get top scores in your class while Lex consistently scores zeroes in every single paper. Every, single, one. Zeroes."
"My teacher says that it takes a special kind of genius to get zeroes for everything. I tried it myself before, it's actually really hard to actively try to not score a single mark in your paper. So Lexus might actually be a genius."
"No, that's not what I meant."
"No, that's exactly what Amelia meant. Look, Mum, face it, I'm a genius. Tada," Lexus unashamedly coined himself with the title as I simply remained silent to watch where this conversation was going to go. I even exchanged glances with Leticia and Mikhail, who simply looked unbothered at the conversation as if this is a normal occurrence.
"This is normal. Take this as how they… show their concern for each other," Mikhail sneaked in a whisper as Lexus began to argue with his mother. None of the adults seemed to be taking action to stop their argument either.
"How long does this usually last?" I subtly whispered back and Mikhail drank a sip of his coffee with a thoughtful look on his face.
"Assuming there would not be any outside interference, hopefully, by the time breakfast ends."
There was the sound of footsteps coming from outside the dining room. I was sitting with my back facing the door, so I assumed it was just another servant working in the mansion passing by. It wasn't until I saw my father lifting his head up from the newspaper to look at the newcomer with raised eyebrows did I decide to check just who it was.
"Oh, it's you."
"What do you mean oh it's you. Come on, Grimsley, at least pretend to look happy when you see me!" The annoying woman with that shade of obnoxious yellow hair who I had the pleasure to meet once before wasted no time in stealing a hash brown from Lexus' plate as she walked past, cheerfully greeting everyone present until she realised that there was a new addition to the table.
"Oh, I see why Grimsley was in such a good mood now, Mr IT Consultant."
"Annoying as always, you nosy model," I replied just as snarkily as I dipped a slice of bacon into the humongous pile of chilli sauce on my plate and ate it in one mouthful. That seemed to disgust her.
"How on earth can you eat... that?!"
"Because I can?"
"It's actually because his taste buds are not working, so he needs a huge dose of any seasoning to taste anything," Amelia helpfully informed as Elesa sat down on an empty seat and began to fill her own plate.
"Is that so? Didn't notice that the last time we drank that Moomoo Milk together," Elesa commented as she began to dig into her own meal. "Wait a sec, when did this boring guy return? And none of you bothered to at least give me a text to tell me that he came back?"
"Thought you might like the surprise since we all know you are coming back for a visit today," Leticia replied smoothly as she drank her tea.
"You guys met before?" Mikhail asked as he picked up on what was left unsaid and Elesa answered with a "Well yes" while I answered with an "Unfortunately" at the same time. It only took her one second to implode.
"What do you mean unfortunately?!"
"Unfortunately, which also meant regretfully, woefully, sadly, alas. The basic meaning of that word is that it is regrettable that one has been marked by bad fortune. Surely you don't need me to teach you the meaning of such a basic word?"
"You-! And I was trying to be nice here!"
"O cry me a river. Newsflash, the world's never a nice place."
"Definitely your spawn, definitely," Elesa pointed a finger at me while looking at Grimsley, who merely rolled his eyes at Elesa's antics before looking at me with a straight face.
"Good job, son, keep it up."
"Can't disappoint my old man now, can I?"
"Hmph! And here I was thinking of giving you a souvenir or two I brought over from Johto, not any longer," Elesa childishly turned her head away from us as she started to dig around the bag she brought in with her. She started to bring out the familiar bottles of Moomoo Milk up onto the table and handed it out to everyone except for me and Grimsley in petty revenge. It was then she realised that there was another little addition sitting beside me.
"Whose kid is that? Yours?"
"Your situational awareness is really awful if you only noticed her now."
"Oh shucks, you procreated, the world must be ending. She's such a poor thing to have you as her father."
"She's not mine. Her name's Iris, picked her up from… I will tell you in private later if you want to know. She's here because we need to protect her from the Plasmas."
Elesa looked mildly surprised at the information, but still put on a friendly smile on her face and handed a bottle of the Moomoo Milk to an expectant looking Iris anyway.
"Hello, my name's Elesa. Iris, right? You can have his bottle. Serves him right for being so mean to me."
Iris looked at me for permission and I nodded, telling her that it is alright to accept the gift. Seeing that I had given her the green light, she tore open the packaging without delay and wasted no time in chugging down the milk.
"Like it?" I asked, which Iris nodded very seriously, eliciting laughter from some of the others present from how cute she looked doing so.
"How long will you be staying over this time?" Grimsley asked Elesa while wiping the edge of his mouth with a napkin.
"So eager to chase me out already?"
"My doctor told me that you are the main cause of my high blood pressure. I need to know so that I can start planning in advance on how many pills I would need to keep my blood pressure low."
"No need for that, I will be gone by tomorrow morning. I'm not that free, you know, unlike a certain Elite Four."
"You want to take over my job?"
"Why don't you take over my job?"
"Why are they so angry?" Iris asked me with a low whisper and I inwardly sighed at having to answer another of her questions.
"They are not angry, they are just too happy to see each other," the bullshit I spun came out so spontaneously out of my mouth that I surprised even myself. Hopefully, there was some grain of truth in that lie.
"I am happy when I see you too but we don't… do that."
"It's something special between the two of them."
"Special?"
"Only they would know. We won't," I continued to lie through my teeth, hoping that this was enough to get her to stop asking me questions that I have no answers for. Things were silent between us for a short while as we ate our breakfast until I felt her tugging at my sleeve again.
"Yes?"
"The two of us? Is there anything special?"
I am someone who is used to spinning lies out of my mouth faster than anyone could blink. It is a needed trait in my old line of work if I want to survive. Yet, at that moment, my mind simply could not work. I simply could not lie to her that "Yes, there is" because the only reason I bought her was me simply trying to throw a wrench in Team Plasma's plans. She is simply too important a piece and I cannot allow Team Plasma to get their hands on the ability she possesses.
Yet, at the same time, I saw it in her eyes. I saw the innocence that Jane and I had lost the moment we were abducted to be a part of Project Illusion. I saw the innocence that we tried so hard to protect and gave our lives up for that very cause.
"Not now, no. Maybe in the future," I told her after thinking about it for a few seconds, putting a new sausage on her plate and hopefully this might distract her from asking me questions that I really have no answers to.
"Why maybe? Why not definitely?"
"Why definitely? Why not maybe?" I asked back in return, a little desperate at this point in trying to find ways to keep her quiet.
"Because you take care of me. You make sure I eat, I sleep, and you let me play with Drei and always leave umbreon and shiftry with me when you go to work. So why maybe?"
My unlikely saviour came in the form of that annoying model.
"Griiiiiimsley, look at this! You really are a grandpa now! Admit it, you are getting old. O, L, D, OLD!" Elesa exclaimed while waving her arms dramatically. My father didn't even bother to look up from his newspaper.
"Eat your food."
"Grandpa?" Iris asked with a tilt of her head and looked at Grimsley, then back at me. "Why is he the grandpa?"
"Good question."
"Then does that make you my papa?"
"No."
Iris scratched her head with a blank look on her face.
"So I have no papa."
"But he acts like one, doesn't he?" Elesa quickly interjected and I knew she's doing this just to stir some shit and make my life more difficult than it already is. "You said it, he makes sure you eat and sleep and get to play. Isn't that what a papa does for his kid?"
"But Jayce said-"
"That's the something special between the two of you. Sometimes, he means the very opposite of what he says and you gotta figure it out yourself."
"My head hurts. No more thinking," Iris flopped back down onto her chair as she tried in vain to understand what Elesa meant and began to pull at my arm. "I'm full. Can I go outside to play with Drei?"
"Do you know the way there?"
"The Kevin guy showed me just now."
"Make sure you wear your coat before going out. It's cold outside."
"And you say that you are not her papa," Elesa mocked me with a mischievous grin after Iris excitedly ran out of the dining room. I simply gave her a brief glare to shut her mouth up before returning to my meal.
"No, seriously, how did you come across her? I don't see you as someone who likes kids, much less being willing to take care of them."
"Still don't, but I don't have a choice with her. It's either I take her in, or the Plasmas do it, or someone else at the auction house buys her away to do who knows what to her."
"Auction house?"
"An underground one. She has the same ability as Nicholas Harlow, I tested it out myself. You can figure out the rest yourself."
"That's…" Elesa's jaws dropped and I can see her already piecing the clues together. "Not good. If the Plasmas know about her and brainwash her to fight for them, if her ability is really like what the stories described Champion Harlow to be, then in just a few years she could already possibly…"
"She needs to be hidden. Unova is not safe for Ability Holders, especially children," Grimsley finally spoke as he folded the newspaper he was reading. "She can stay here, this is as safe as she could possibly be now that most of us will be staying here most of the time until this crisis is resolved, but we also have to think about the future. Someone with an ability like hers is bound to attract attention of all sorts."
"Give her the means to protect herself, let her understand the situation she's in. I was actually thinking of starting to introduce her to the ways she could use to train pokemon," I proposed and Elesa immediately disagreed.
"She's too young-"
"Too young to what? To understand?" I argued with Elesa as I finished off the last of my meal and along with it, the last bit of chilli sauce on my plate, finally starting to be able to feel the tingling sensation of spiciness on my tongue. "Since when did that help anyone? Certainly not me. I was too young to even remember why I was abducted, only knowing that I was. What turned out from that? Me, one of the worst terrorists in Indigo's history. Give children some credit, woman, they are smarter than they look, especially when they are forced to grow up and forced into the adult world earlier than needed. If they need to know, then they need to know. Denying them the truth is just a selfish means of escapism to make us adults feel better."
I stood up and left, my mood soured for reasons I don't quite understand myself. I'm not sure if I'm doing the right thing but I don't think I was wrong either. My father's right, someone like Iris is bound to attract all sorts of attention without even trying, like how I had attracted Kain's when I was just a week old. There's no way I can protect Iris forever, so she will need to learn how to protect herself while I am still able to shield her from Team Plasma. At least, I think that is what Jane would do too if she's still here.
Damn it, dealing with children is too darn difficult. Even fighting Giovanni in a deathmatch was so much easier.
I'm really not cut out for this.
Name: Jayce Dandolos
Age: 22
Pokemon Team:
1. Ninetales, female
2. Exeggutor, male
3. Weavile, male
4. Honchkrow, female
5. Umbreon, male
6. Hydreigon, male
7. Drapion, female
8. Zoroark, male
9. Bisharp, male
10. Shiftry, male
11. Porygon-Z, (Nosy), genderless
12. Greninja, male
13. Spiritomb, male