Brother, My Brother: Ch.1
Disclaimer: I'm an avid fan of fanfiction, and I have a very good subconscious memory. If any of your ideas, places, names, characters, etc. appear in any of my works, I'm sorry, but it is most likely that I did not use it/them on purpose. As to the major corporations who own pokemon and other things, it won't do you much good to sue me, even my college funds are doing badly. This might be my only Disclaimer.
A man and a woman in their late-twenties sat, arguing, at a table.
"Dammit, Sarah! We can't adopt a pokemon as a kid!"
"But John! Just look at them!"
She pointed out the window. Just in sight was a pair of youthful forms wrestling each other. They laughed as they tumbled about, one or the other occasionally winning before the rose to start anew with a chase. Both were dressed in identical jean coveralls with purple t-shirts. They were of identical height, but were almost entirely different in looks. One was a young Asian featured boy with black hair. The other had feline features. He was white furred with gray highlights. He had delicate hands with long fingers, though still youthfully chubby. The only identical feature between them was their eyes. Both held deep purple eyes illuminated from within by the light of constant laugher.
As he beheld the pair, one his son, the other his possible son-to-be, he realized that neither cared that their looks were different. John Yao knew deep in his heart that they would never see each other as they shou–No, he mentally corrected–as others thought they should.
"Can't you see that neither of them would stand to be separated? They don't care what the world would think of them, they're too young."
John, knowing he was losing this argument, turned back to his wife and asked, "And when they are older?"
Sarah looked out upon the boys whom she considered twins, "Look at them. Do you really think anything could change their bond? They're as close as twins, closer even."
John sighed, admitting his final defeat, "Fine, fine. But how are we going to convince the League Council?"
Sarah smirked, "The same way I just convinced you."
Outside, the two boys, twin brothers in soul and mind, if not body, played, oblivious to the monumental event that had just taken place in their lives. An event that would change the future of the Pokemon World
2 years later
Balgus Masaki stood in the grassy fields of Rookery Island, a large bokken in the Katana style in his hand, practicing. One of the few remaining people on the planet who could be called a Weapons Master. In a world where a ten year old kid could potentially devastate a small city with 6 plasteel spheres, very few people bothered to learn hand-to-hand combat beyond the basic courses taught in Training Basics and even fewer learned the use of weapons and advanced techniques. Balgus was a rarity among a dying breed: he not only taught weapons but also how to make them. His favorite weapon, the famous Japanese sword, the Katana, now was rarely seen outside a museum, and very rarely at that. This lack of interest is what drove him to this small, sparsely populated island. Here, he lived off the sale of his custom weapons to the highest bidder. Here, in near total solitude, he wrote what he considered would be his greatest service. Never having trained a successor, and now approaching his 104th birthday(average life expectancy is about 100), he did not think he would remain active enough to do so for much longer. To compensate, for the last 4 years he had begun to compile all of his knowledge: forging, craftsmanship, care, form, morals, disciplines, and most importantly his 10 strokes(kata), onto a Data Crystal which he would copy and send to all the remaining dojo across the world.
He sighed and begun to weave his patterns. As he moved, he became aware of a presence nearby. He cut his movements short, hearing a strange, high giggle. He quickly looked back and forth trying to identify the source. He did not find it. Shaking his head at the noises, turning aroundonly to find two identical pairs of eyes staring at him from only an inch away!
"Ack!" he yelled leaping back, shocked that anything could've sneaked up on him. As he landed, he noticed that his "attackers" were a pair of boys, identicalin clothes alone. One appeared to be a normal human boy, the other was an oddly human-like feline, obviously a pokemon. They were laughing at his reaction. Only one pair on the island matched the description of these two. He did not know them well, but he had seen them before at town council meetings.
"Alright! Xi' an, Mao! What are you doing here!"
The pair straightened up and became very formal. Mao, the pokemon brother, spoke first.
"We'd like to know if you still take on students, sir."
"Yeah!" said Xi' an, the more energetic brother.
Balgus considered the pair for a moment before replying, "May I ask why?"
"Well, sir, we started the self-defense course in school last month, and we'd like to do more than the stuff they showed us."
Xi' an nodded eagerly, his brother almost invisibly sighing at his behavior. The course they spoke of was video and simulator only. They were the only children on the island in their age group, the last set had left on their Journeys nearly a year before.
Balgus frowned at the pair, "Do you know what you are asking? It'll be allot of hard work for you two."
Oddly, it was Xi'an who replied, soberly, "We know sir. We asked our father about it first. We know what we're requesting."
Balgus blinked in surprise. He knew Mao was identified as a psy-type and would naturally have a high IQ, explaining his vocabulary, but Xi'an was only 5 and was using a vocabulary and structure much more advanced than it should be.
As he understood, the boys' father was once an avid student of hand-to-hand martial arts, but a leg injury during his last Journey had prevented him from continuing. Balgus thought carefully. The boys seem eager, but also determined, a very favorable trait, it is unlikely either of them would become bored and drop their studies when they're older. But I've never taught anyone so young. Balgus' eyes alighted on a pair of practice bokken laying against the fence. They were newly made and he had been planning to test their form for balance before forging a pair in metal since the blades they used were unusually broad.
"Alright you two, take those two bokken and I'll see if you can cut it."
"Yea!" they shouted as one, their voices eerily identical. They ran to the sticks, Xi' an arriving first and tossing one to his brother. They stood in the basic Forward stance that they had just been taught, swords held like they had seen in movies. The swords were slightly longer than they were tall, about the length of a nodachi(Long sword, blade exceeds 52" by definition, feared for their destructive power against infantry, design later abandoned for katana since forging techniques of their time made them susceptible to snapping in two, all but forgotten in the later schools, I've heard of a set of monks who used them exclusively for defending their temple, usually too slow to use effectively in one-on-one combat against some other swords, I believe using modern materials and metallurgy, this would be the supreme close- and medium-range weapon) scaled down to their proportions.
Balgus blinked, Their forms are amazingly good considering how long they've trained. Even more so considering their age. They have amazing potential. What the!?!
His analysis had been interrupted by their perfectly synchronized start. Xi' an went right, Mao left. They struck at the same time too. If he had not been so well-trained, both blows would have connected. Balgus quickly realized that he would have to stop underestimating the pair as he found difficulty in stopping their perfectly coordinated attacks.
"Closer than twins", I believe, is what their mother called them during her petition to adopt Mao. I wonder if she realizes how accurate she is. He commented, while parrying another set of blows. The boys were young and ackward, but their speed and coordination made them hard to beat on skill alone. Eventually, Balgus was forced to overpower them by knocking Mao's sword away with a kick, then tripping up his brother after several unsuccessful tries. Xi' an was send flying, tucked, and rolled to an unfurling stop on his back.
"Ow."
Mao winced, seeming to feel his brother's pain. Xi' an, true to his form, quickly recovered from his loop and sat up, looking at Balgus.
"Do we pass?"
A sweating and tired Balgus wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, "If I can keep up with you twosure."
And the years pass
Balgus Masaki sat in his home, bored. It had been 2 years since he had taken Xi' an and Mao under his wing. In those two years they had progressed in unprecedented leaps and bounds. In fact, they had managed to forge their own swords. It took them nearly a year, but they had taken a pair of irregular metal spheres they had found in the local ruins and forged them into blades exactly 2 meters long and 4cm broad(only the back cm not included in the edge). They had even managed the technically difficult straight temper on the edge. The blade itself was so thin Balgus could not imagine how is could be strong enough to support the weight of several hundred pounds without breaking and then only barely bending. And then there was the polish! The pair had created and entirely new method to clean, polish, and sharpen the blade using electromagnets and lasers. In fact, he had had asked a former student of his to measure the edge width while making fittings for the blade. Meanwhile, the boys had gone off to the mainland to scout possible boarding schools for them. Their mother believed that the pair would not be able to max out their education on the small island where they lived, so she decided that she would try to find them a boarding school to go to during the year.
Balgus sighed, I fear she will find herself out of luck.. Maybe if it was just Xi' an, but he would not go anywhere without his brother. And I seriously doubt any school would accept the pair, no matter their IQ.
Balgus and the twins' parents had discovered quite by accident that the boys would go into violent fits when separated by a distance exceeding a few miles. It got worse the further they were separated. In fact, the first to discover this second tendency was an anti-pokemon group that kidnapped Xi' an to "save" him from "contamination". In the end, after they were on separate islands, both boys stopped their fits and went into a kind of beserker-state trying to reach each other. The pair thankfully had no memories of the incident, but none of the kidnappers got away with anything less than a severe concussion. However, his musings were interrupted by the ringing of the vid-phone. Balgus pushed the "answer" button.
"Hello?"
"Sensei?" asked a man in his mid-30's with green-blue hair and brown eyes on the other end.
"William, good to hear from you. Did you get the package I sent you?"
William nodded, "Yeah, and I must say I'm very impressed. You've really outdone yourself this time."
Balgus chuckled, "They're not mine. My students made them."
William blinked several time before responding, "You took on a new set of students!? The world must be ending. Well, who are they, some promising young world champion in kendo?"
"Nope, a pair of 7 year old children."
William fell over backwards.
"William! Are you alright!?" call Balgus in alarm.
The response was a groan from the rising man.
"A pair of 7 year olds made those! I don't even understand the metal the sword is made of!" he moaned as he pulled himself back onto his chair.
"Neither do they. I had asked them to look into the metal they wanted to make their first live blades from and they came up with a pair of meteorites. Have you been able to scan it?"
"Yeah, it's some form of steel alloy, but it is bonded very strangely. Nearly every atom is directly bonded with every other one. At first I thought the scanner was out of whack, but I tested that little sliver of the stuff you sent. It has a tinsel strength is over 5x that of the most advanced alloys in use today. It's also harder than diamond; the edge is even harder! How the hell did a pair of 7 years olds forge it!"
"I'll do you one better. The blades are folded over 1000 times, and they used just the servo amplifiers, no power hammers."
"Jeez. I can't imagine anyone who could do that. And did you see how the glyph on each side was made?"
"Yes, I saw them do them. They simultaneously slammed the blade from each side with etched hammers. The result was the pattern you see, no polishing necessary. In fact the glyphs are one of the only differences between them."
The glyphs were identical in form: a ying-yang of polished silver and mat-black, a dragon in black on the silver, a tiger in silver on the black, Xi' an's blade had the silver raised close on the right and far on the left side, Mao had the sides reversed. Both images were ornate and very detailed. The other differences were the names etched on the tang: Dragon for Xi' an and Tiger for Mao.
"How thin is the edge while we're examining them?"
"About a single molecule. That's sharper than a surgical scalpel, so how did they sharpen it?"
"Don't ask. I don't even pretend to understand it."
"Well, I guest we can expect great things from them. I'll do my best to fit the blades with my best. Allow we to confirm: they want plain guards of high density superalloy, handles of the oldest heartwood I can find, a wrap of dragonite skin treated and treated to be weatherproofed, sageo of the finest Jumpluff cotton stained black, polished as smooth as possible, and cap of density enhanced layered titanium alloy, and a fastening pin of nano-tech M-alloy(I'll have a short crossover with Metabots later)."
"That's correct; the twins'll supply their own sheaths."
John frowned, "These things won't come cheap, you know."
Balgus nodded, "I have more than enough to pay for them. They are the closest things I'll ever get to successors, even if they use nodachi and not katana."
"I'll do my finest then. I'll call you again soon, Sensei."
And with those last words, the vidphone went black.
And the years pass
Nurse Joy was panicked. She had been called out in the middle of a tropical storm to a difficult birthing. The newest breeding Dragonite at the Big D Ranch had had an unusual pregnancy: although most pokemon give birth to eggs, there are very rare cases when they'll give birth to live young, often at the cost of the mother's life, this was one of those cases. And being a small island, she was the only pokemon medical professional on it.
"Nurse Joy! Do you need anything else!" shouted the head hand of the ranch, Dan.
"Just a full OR and at least 2 more hands, no," she grumbled, her gloved hands stained in blood and other bodily fluids as she tried to loosen the tight muscles, which were preventing the newborn's exit.
Damn. At this rate we'll lose both the mother and child, Joy cursed mentally.
"Nurse Joy? Are you here?" called an oddly familiar voice from outside.
She turned her head and called, "Mao? That you!"
"Yeah! Xi' an too. Where are you!"
"In the barn!"
A pair of 9 year old forms poked their head inside, then hopped in, out of the rain.
"Quick you two! I need your hands, now!"
The pair rushed to her side. Mao left and Xi' an right.
"Mao, grab the muscle relaxant from the kit, Xi' an help me stop this bleeding."
"Are you sure this is okay, Joy?" asked the pair, simultaneously, as they dove into their tasks.
Joy shook her head, their choruses were confusing. "Of course I am! You've been helping at the center for the last year!"
"But we've never help you treat a real patient, just those emergency simulations!" reminded Xi' an, now helping Joy close a ruptured artery, which had been torn by the excessive contractions.
"Here," Mao said, handing her the syringe of relaxants.
"Thank you. You two are more useful than you think!"
An hour later
The Dragonite was resting, her young child in her arms. Panting, Mao, Xi'an and Nurse Joy, rested on the floor of the barn, having washed up under the faucet in the barn.
"I'm glad that's over."
"You said it bro."
Nurse Joy looked at the brothers with one eye, "You know, you two are better than the Chansey I have in the center. I'd like to have you keep on helping me, but at a higher level."
"Can we do that?" chorused the pair.
"Yes, we just got permission last week for an Apprentice system to be established in the island PokeCenter. Care to be the first students?"
The twins smiled and nodded.
"Gon,"
"Joy, Mommy just woke up!" called Xi' an as he trotted over to the majestic pokemon's head. Mao joined him. The Pokemon whispered at them too softly for Joy to hear, but she knew what the mother was asking: it was standard practice for a pokemon mother to ask the medic who helped them to name the born child. Although, this firstborn was an odd specimen, he was dark silver where he should blue
"Okay, what do you think, Mao?"
"I dunno, what's a good Draconian name"
Xi' an looked out the doors of the barn and saw the last rays of the setting sun at the horizon, despite the storm's best attempts to smother them.
"Dusk"
Mao nodded in agreement, and the mother Dragonite repeated the name in her own language.
"Well, come on you two, let's get cleaned up before we go the center and get you registered."
The brothers said their good byes before following Joy out.
And the years pass
Well, it's taken a few months, but here's ch.1. Ch.2 might not be out till summer at this rate, sorry to whoever's interested enough to read. Flames will be met with Hydro Pump.