A Cruelty, a Cat, a Truth By Mistake

The paper had none of the dangerous feel of a wanted poster. It was laid out, rather, the same as if for some tournament, presented in the same wholesome, cheery style.

The reward money, even, was listed more as a prize for the feat of capture, and less as a payment for the removal of the persian. Nothing alarming. Nothing threatening.

There was reason for this (there is always a reason, even if that reason is temporary insanity). But perhaps the poster, this time, was just slightly too inviting. Or perhaps it would have happened anyway, a convergence of unlikely events that is so common in this world. It was hard to say which could have been prevented, which should have been prevented.

Firstly, let indoctrination take its due blame. Catching the weakest and raising them had never been a popular view, despite the fact that for certain reasons (ones that could not be said) it was, strangely enough, correct. Perhaps this was a sign they needed to increase the saturation. Between the counter-intuitiveness of the advice and the fact it was not prevalent enough, this belief would not even flicker through most trainer's minds. To make it worse, a competing, contradicting bit of knowledge was floating about, and for all it was wrong, it made a great deal of sense. To be a strong trainer you needed to catch strong pokemon. And so indoctrination failed.

The next was simple coincidence, no blame, sadly, possible. Elliot had had a meowth, had fought with it, had won with it, and yet, had traded it. His few experiences with it had given him the impression it was strong – he would have gotten a similar impression with almost any pokemon, but he did not know this. And here, he had the chance to gain a replacement, an even stronger replacement. The fact he had a meowth, the fact he traded the meowth, and the fact he was there now, all of these things were chance, none dangerous in and of itself.

And then, the final, most definite cause, the one and only cause which can be directly known, the only one for which direct blame may be applied (as it is a simple and clear cause) and still more importantly, the only one where the blame may be placed upon a scapegoat: the poster.

But all was not yet lost. Perhaps these events, which brought him so perilously close, would go no further. A few more obstacles remain. He had only decided to try, and there was no certainty he would succeed. The persian was strong, wary. He had only a collection of ordinary, low-level pokemon. He had no experience with this. Yes, things might still go correctly.

And Elliot was not the first trainer to look at the poster. Three times already, an older trainer, some point below or around twenty, had looked at it thoughtfully, then walked off, out of town and into the mountains. They were experienced hunters, and their pokemon were probably the same, ones chosen for the chase and fight. They had one to find the trail, one to follow it when it runs, one to take its attacks and weaken it. Certainly, they are the ones who will find it. Yes, certainly.

-

-

Elliot wandered through the town, looking for the Pokemon Center. Gabrielle had departed earlier, heading north and leaving him with the strange advice not to trust anyone her age. He was at the foot of the mountain range. Viridian was on the other side. It was late, so he'd start out tomorrow. He planned to wander around until he caught the persian, then go on.

 He passed a pair of trainers battling, their pokemon a houndour and a psyduck. The psyduck kept using psychic attacks, and the houndour kept ignoring them and tackling the water type. Elliot wondered why it wasn't using water moves, but didn't stop to watch the battle. After what happened with the ninetales, the sight of a helmeted psyduck made him feel uneasy, and he kept walking.

As he passed the psyduck's trainer, he noticed how angry the boy looked. No one liked to lose, he supposed.

The Pokemon Center wasn't hard to find. Inside was another Joy, as cheery as the one at the last center and the one before that. She smiled at him as she took the pokeballs. For a moment, he entertained the idea that she was the same one, traveling from Center to Center ahead of him. The familiarity was comforting, but eerie as well.

Who were they? he wondered. They were people, they must have been children like everyone else. What if a Joy didn't want to be a nurse? Or was being in charge of a Pokecenter just part of them?

The ding that signaled his pokemon's return shook him out of his thoughts. He retrieved the pokeballs, released them and set out their food before getting something to eat himself. By the time they finished, it was dark out, and Elliot recalled them and went to sleep.

-

-

"Nurse Joy! Nurse Joy!"

Elliot looked up from his breakfast. A young girl, eight or nine, had just run into the Center. She was carrying a psyduck in her arms, one that must have weighed at least half as much as her.

Its eyes were closed, just like the other helmeted psyduck Elliot had seen. Its skin was dull and slightly tight, so that the outline of its rib cage could be seen. It was shivering in her arms, and Elliot could see it was wet with dew.

The Joy looked mildly concerned, her expression so fixed it looked almost manufactured. The chancey rushed in and took the pokemon. The nurse left with them. When she returned, her worried expression had been completely exchanged for one of adultly anger.

"What were you thinking, letting your pokemon battle until it was in that condition?" the Joy said severely. The girl was shivering herself, her dress wet from the dewy long grass and the psyduck. She must have been exhausted from carrying the pokemon. She was clearly upset, probably one of the children who took injured pokemon personally. Her lower lip trembled. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes. "The psyduck is very sick. It's in critical condition right now. I don't know if it will make it. What do you-"

"Hey," said another trainer, standing. "Anyone can see the psyduck didn't get that way from battling. Leave her alone."

The Joy turned toward him. "The psy-" she began.

"Come off it," he said rudely. "It's obvious someone abandoned the psyduck and it was out all night."

-

-

Caw sat on Elliot's shoulder as the trainer walked, keeping up a monologue. Elliot responded occasionally when he thought he understood a word, prompting the murkrow to flutter his wings excitedly.

The flying type was experienced with this. He'd been through several trainers, so he understood what Elliot was trying to do. He was, as he was then, gratified by the effort.

The mountains they were traveling through were little different than the forests Elliot had been in from the start of his journey. The path was still immaculate. The grass was still rich. Despite the fact the mountain should, in theory, be made mainly of rock, there were no stray stones anywhere to be seen, and despite the slope, there was no sign of erosion on the open dirt of the road.

-

-

It was purely by accident he found the persian. If he hadn't stopped to snack but had kept going just a few minutes longer, she would doubtlessly have heard him. Or if he had stopped, but just a few minutes earlier, she would have gone by, her path never intersecting his.

As it was, she appeared nearly on top of him.

If the forest hadn't been so strange, if the few patches of underbrush hadn't been so thick, if she hadn't burst through so that she was only a few feet away, she might have been better able to take stock of the situation. Perhaps she wouldn't have hesitated, shrunk back and hissed. If she'd kept running, he'd never have been able to follow her, and he himself wasn't a danger.

But she wasn't too familiar with humans, so perhaps she would have done that anyway. She'd seen them before, but wasn't clear on their power, their abilities, their own, very peculiar manner of fighting. She didn't know that they were not dangerous themselves, and that they could carry things more dangerous than she could imagine. And she did not know that caution lost battles recklessness would have won.

She paused, and that was enough. "Howler!" he yelled, tossing the Greatball. She'd stayed long enough for him to release a pokemon.

Normally, it wouldn't have mattered that he had this opportunity. Had she been in good condition, she could have easily taken it out, or even just ran and escaped. But the purpose of the reward posters was not that a single trainer would be able to catch her, it was so that multiple bounty hunters would swarm the area, whose combined abilities easily wore down and overwhelmed their quarry, getting rid of it quickly.

The persian was young but skilled. Thus far, she had managed to evade and fight off the hunters. The obvious traps, huge boxes with bait inside and an obvious trapdoor or skullcrushing weight, those she ignored. But there were other, hidden kinds of traps, and these she could not know of without experience. She'd stepped into a steel-jaw trap. It had been inexpertly set and of low quality make, had failed to close properly, had only bitten down to the bone, not into. The persian had torn her leg free eventually, before the hunters found her, but her paw was a bloody, swollen mess now, bone showing through some of the gouges. It was still intact, but left alone, the infection would grow until it rotted.

She was hungry. With one forepaw ruined and the other needed to stand, she could not attack with her claws. She was sick as well, already developing a fever. She didn't want to fight even something as weak as the growlithe.

She growled threateningly, hoping to scare it off, but it did not retreat, did not even hesitate, instead attacking her with flames. She struggled to avoid these, clumsy and having trouble moving on three legs. Her side was burned. Growing frantic, she jumped at him, sinking her teeth deep into his back and tasting the blood that flooded her jaws. Before she could do more, the meat softened and turned into insubstantial air. She snarled, confused.

"Caw!" Elliot yelled, tossing another pokeball. "Beat your wings and make a gale!"

The murkrow complied, creating a cyclone-shaped gust attack. The winds pulled the persian from the ground and sent her flying into a tree. She slid back down, nearly unconscious and unable to move. Quickly, Elliot threw a pokeball. Even after everything, the Ultraball still tossed from side to side for almost a minute before the button finally changed from red to grey.

-

-

The persian's first feeling was confusion. She was standing on a cold, flat surface, surrounded by bright lights, loud background noise, and unfamiliar, threatening smells.

She had her right leg lifted automatically, and it took a moment before she realized the pain was gone.

No, not gone. Her paw still ached slightly, and felt stiff as she set it down with the other three. Her side felt fine, as if she hadn't been injured at all.

She was hungry, though, just as hungry as she had been in the woods.

She crouched, eyes darting around to take in her surroundings. The boy she'd nearly run into earlier was there, with another human she hadn't seen before. She snarled, preparing to leap, but before she could do anything, she felt the strange feeling of her body breaking apart.

The girl behind the counter at the bounty office looked surprised. "You did catch it," she said.

Elliot nodded, looking a bit unsettled from the snarl. "I wanted to catch a persian."

Alarm bells went off almost audibly inside the girl's head. She was eighteen, maybe nineteen, new at the job. "You aren't planning to keep it?"

Elliot stared at her, confused. "Um…why not?"

"Old pokemon like this are feral. They're just vicious. They won't obey. Most people turn them in to us."

"Oh," said Elliot, looking down at the Ultraball in his hands. He might have handed it to her if she hadn't continued.

"They can't be used. We put them down immediately."

Honesty is not the best policy. Elliot pulled back. "Kill it?"

The girl realized her mistake, but couldn't think how to remedy it, if there even was a way.

"I'm going to keep it," Elliot said.

"You won't be able to use it," the girl said. "It's too old. It won't obey commands. It's vicious."

"I understand," Elliot said. Even if he couldn't use it, he couldn't just kill it.

-

-

"There's a problem."

"With the rogue?"

"In a manner."

"You couldn't even handle that? Who do you need to call in to clean it up?"

"It's not that, it's who caught it."

"What?"

Well, now Elliot's got six pokemon. Technically, anyway.

Next chapter:

A wall may be seen, but the purpose remains enigmatic. The world can be divided up easily into us and them, speaking and dumb, prey and predator. Everyone seeks to change what they don't know into what they're already familiar with.

And how could a persian be there, really?