Chapter 3

Azrael snaked her way through the underbrush, pokeball in hand. It was still too early for most people to be awake, barely even five o' clock in the morning, but she had already been up for half an hour and had tuned out the ache in her limbs. She was still a little sore from training yesterday, but she was grateful for the slow burning in her muscles; it meant she was improving.

Not many people knew—or cared—that pokemon catching was at it's best in the early morning. It wasn't because that was when all the pokemon came out, though. The problem with catching in the mid-day was (as with most things) largely a human one.

Ignorant trainers blundering around in the grass, ignorant vacationers spreading their checked blankets out and having a thousand picnics a day, ignorant people gabbing as loud as they could and making a truly good catch near impossible.

No, Azrael preferred to do her work by the palest of the pale dawns.

There was a noise above her, just the slightest of the rustling branches. Something that was gone as quickly as it had come, almost a mirage. Something that most amateur trainers would ignore.

She leapt back and jammed down the button on the pokeball in her hand. A haze of red light formed around a patch of earth, and the next moment her Eevee was there, ears back, brown eyes fixed as if by instinct on the shadow in the trees above, which had been shocked into a flurry of movement.

"Sand-Attack." Azrael gave the order along with a hand sign: four fingers extended to the figure. This Eevee was still a little young, so she needed to firmly establish the orders and signals that some of her older ones new by heart. As it grew used to the inflection of her voice for each command, she would slowly be able to wean it off of even the hand signals until she and it could literally predict the other's next move.

Eevee shoved forth a flurry of dirt and rocks into the air, and a second later the thing—a Murkrow, it turned out to be—was sailing through the air and cawing loudly, dive bombing Eevee in a haphazard way.

"Tackle!" Two fingers held together and pointed straight at the crazed Murkrow.

In a matter of moments the pokemon was weakened on the floor, fluttering and cawing vengefully. Azrael kneeled down by it and tapped a free pokeball to its beak. A flash of light engulfed the pokemon, and after the button flashed and trembled for a few moments it was still.

Straightening up and stroking Eevee's head in congratulations, Azrael looked to the east and saw (with a little disappointment) that the sun was rising. She wouldn't be able to do any more real catching, so with a resigned sigh, she started the long path back to her home, where her mom, no doubt, was still catching some sleep.

Oh well, she thought. There were other kinds of training to do in the day.

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Azrael pushed the back door of her house open and stepped into the poorly-lit kitchen. The floor was freezing the way it usually was in the absence of the sun, but after walking around for a while, her feet got used to it. Pulling out a pot and filling it with water, she thought on the Murkrow in her pocket now. She was dedicated to training dark or ghost type pokemon, so the Murkrow would be right at home in her arsenal. However, she had the strangest feeling that she wouldn't be able to train the bird as easily as she had learned to train Eevee. She and Eevee had been together for years prior to her official registration as a Junior pokemon trainer, so their bond had already been established and Eevee was quite eager to learn and help her out.

This new pokemon, however, would be the second one she'd caught wild and tried to train. Azrael didn't enjoy the slow, painstaking process of gaining the trust of the pokemon she'd snatched from their homes in the wild… and so far the Sneazel she'd caught was only just beginning to grudgingly accept it's place in her belt. Now the new addition would double the difficulty of her training sessions.

Having placed the now-full pot on the stove, Azrael turned up the old fashioned gas burner and left the water to its business. Padding down the hall and out into the living room, she found her mother where she had expected; slouched over on the couch, a newspaper open on the table in front of her, sound asleep.

Azrael knew what was the only kind of news her mother read, but she leaned over to get a look at the heading of the article none-the-less.

"NEW LEADS FOUND TO THE WHEREABOUTS OF MISSING FUCHSIA CITY GYM LEADER KOGA"

Azrael slanted her eyes and shut the page. The news teams always thought they had a "new lead to the whereabouts of missing Fuchsia City Gym Leader Koga", but they were always, always wrong. Azrael knew that if Koga wanted to be found, he would have shown himself by now. No, he was probably never going back to his city and job.

Or his wife and daughter.

Suddenly filled with a horrible bitterness, Azrael closed her eyes tightly shut. She was shocked that she was allowing herself to get worked up about a stupid headline in the stupid paper made by stupid civilians who thought they could find the man that no one, not the police or detective services, could find. It just wasn't worth blowing a vein over; at least, not yet anyway.

Azrael chucked the paper in the trash can, knowing that when her mother awoke to find it gone, she would be upset for a while, but eventually would agree that the whole thing sounded bogus anyway. And then she'd probably want some tea, which brought Azrael's attentions back to the boiling pot on the stove.

Taking the water off the heat and turning the flame back down, she removed two chipped mugs from their pegs on the walls, and filled them with the steaming fluid. She reached up to pull out the old-fashioned tea strainer and tin of chamomile, prying the lid off and letting the pungent scent fill the room. Her mother would eventually catch a whiff of the aroma and return from the land of the dead. In the meantime, she had something to check out.

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If Azrael remembered correctly, Pallet town was the place to be today. Ten-year-olds from all over the world would be gathered there, yelling and shouting about their new pokemon, and maybe even trying to fight each other already.

Azrael was thirteen now, past the minimal age to get a starter. She could have conceivably picked one up when she turned ten, but she hadn't really wanted to. Starter pokemon were for people who wanted to become great, wanted to hone their skills and attempt to attain the unattainable; the title Pokemon Master.

No, that wasn't Azrael's forte. She was quite happy to train only one type and hopefully become an expert on that chosen kind. Her highest ambition would be to get a gym of her own someday… but she knew they didn't hand those out like candy. If she wanted to be known as the best of her chosen path, she had to be serious as hell in her training, never letting up or taking too long to relax and goof off. That was how her father had become a gym leader; pure, hard training until no one could deny how much his hard work had brought him above and beyond every other person aiming to be the top poison pokemon trainer.

If there was only one thing Azrael wanted to attain from her father, it was that drive.

Sure enough, as she crept closer to Pallet's boundaries, happy babble and shouts floated through the morning to her. Azrael didn't have to walk long to reach this place; her own home was in a secluded alcove not far from Viridian Forest, a place that her family had chosen for its removal from the distractions of the cities. However, if they needed to, they could still walk to the nearest town to get food supplies and such, which was why the walk had taken Azrael maybe fifteen minutes at the most.

Kids were darting around and trying to sneak out into the tall grasses, sometimes held back by a parent, but most of the time allowed to creep outside. There was only so much a parent could do once their kid was an official trainer; the old "You don't have a pokemon, you'll get attacked by the wild ones!" excuse obviously wouldn't work anymore.

Azrael normally didn't keep up with the ritual of the new trainers and such… but this year could be different. She was on the lookout for something, something she had been on the lookout for almost as long as word from her father.

Blake might, just might, be out here.

Sure, it was unlikely. But she wouldn't be able to sleep ever again if she didn't at least check. Blake was nine now, or maybe ten… she couldn't remember, and she didn't want to ask her mother about such a delicate topic. But her half-brother had been extremely important to her, and when his father Falkner had taken him to live in Azalea town with him, Azrael had been furious. She had been six, and Blake three at the time, so she wasn't even sure if he would remember her… but she would not allow the two of them to be separated forever.

At last, the new trainers were allowed to leave Pallet town. Tears and hugs and kisses were suddenly absolutely everywhere, and Azrael sunk behind the tree she was standing by. It seemed to take a lifetime for the parents that were there to let their kids leave, but the ones who were there without parents for whatever reason were already on their way out. Azrael thought if Blake was here, he'd most likely be alone, since Falkner was a gym leader as well, and was most likely extremely busy.

Boy with brown hair and a red cap… no. Girl, girl, girl… no, definitely not. Black haired boy… no, his skin coloring was too dark…

Azrael was suddenly aware that she wasn't at all sure what she would do if she saw her brother. Would she dart out from behind her tree and snatch him up? Would she have to follow him a distance until he was alone? Would he even know who she was…?

Girl, boy with red hair, girl, boy with really, really weird green and blonde hair, girl, boy with brown spiked hair and a smug look, girl… Azrael's eyes were working overtime now, darting from face to face to face, searching long and hard for a pair of darkest brown eyes, black hair with tufts of strange silvery gray by the bangs, pale skin like her own…

But no. The last kids were leaving now, tossing their pokeballs in the air and pushing each other around. A few stragglers moseyed out after them, and then there was no one for a very long time other than the parents huddled by the door watching their young trainers start off into the world. And some time after that, there wasn't even the parents anymore as they each started off on their long ways home.

Azrael felt like something heavy that had been temporarily lifted from her stomach during her frantic search of the crowd had been replaced with a thud. She hadn't really expected to see him there… maybe he was still nine after all, and wouldn't come till next year, when the event would be hosted by Viridian City.

She could wait, though. Pushing off from the tree and turning to walk the path back to her home, Azrael found herself fiddling with the chain of her necklace, which was almost always tucked in her shirt.

Yes, she would wait as long as it took for her family to be whole again.