Chapter Three-Across the Sea

There was a room there, a high room, above it all, and cold. Nikki hadn't minded, though, had never really minded it. When she had first arrived at that house, that old house that had looked haunted, she had fallen in love with that high, airy, private little room with the one window that let in its cold sunlight.

No one could really understand her wanting to be in the room, or her attraction to it. On the contrary, it was small, cramped, purposeless…her bedroom had originally been going to be in another room, lower, and larger, with her own bathroom.

But the then six year old Nikki would not let herself be torn from the room she had run to upon first arriving at the new house, and it was there that she stayed.

She liked to think that room had been her first real, true teacher, though that didn't really make sense. She could spend hours sitting on the bed in that tiny circular room, and gazing out the window. Goldenrod wasn't really too exciting, she supposed, but she and her family had lived on the outskirts, tucked safely away from everything…or so she thought.

She had watched things happen from out that low set window. She had observed the clouds rolling across the sky on their journey to Goldenrod, though from her house she could only see the distant tops of the buildings. She had mastered the art of keeping still while wild pokemon and animals roamed about in the pine tree that practically grew against her window, and she had taken to leaving food out on the meager windowsill that protruded on the outside. She had left all manner of leftovers and nuts and seeds for the sentrets and pidgeys and wild birds and squirrels that inhabited that pine tree.

She had watched them with an intense interest, and found that they helped her to think, to take her mind off things and to combat her own loneliness.

She was rather a lonely little girl, for she was home schooled and didn't get out into the city of Goldenrod much. That, coupled with her somewhat shy nature, had kept her away from others her own age, whom she had originally not had much contact with anyway.

She did have a wonderful family. There was her older brother, Arrik. Even though he was only one year older than her, he still acted annoyingly condescending toward her. She tried not to let it bother her too much. Her mother was her inspiration, and always encouraged her to finish anything she set her heart on. Her father she didn't see much of. He was often off at his job, which she thought was called Viuo-Tech. She had no idea what that was, apart from the fact that her father studied rare metals and alternate sources of power and mechanical things. And cloning, and genetic engineering, though she didn't hear much about that and was too young at the time to really be interested.

Years passed. Nikki grew to be ten, and everything seemed to stay the same. She still didn't have any friends outside of her family, and, if anything, her father only became busier.

Arrik, on the other hand, changed somewhat. He grew his thick, straight black hair out long, so that it fluffed out a bit at the sides. He also made the decision to become a pokemon trainer.

Nikki knew she had that option available to her as well, and she might have become a pokemon trainer as well as her brother had not he dissuaded her.

He didn't dissuade her verbally. If anything, that would only have made her more determined to train pokemon in the first place. No, he did nothing like that. He simply did something that turned her off from the idea of pokemon training greatly.

She had become friends with the wild pokemon and animals that took the food from her windowsill, and some would even eat out of her hand. There was a particular little sentret with unusual dark stripes about his eyes that she had a particular affection for. She had named him Fudge, and he would respond when called. He may well have become her first pokemon, which would have been good, for she had already completed the task of taming him. However, Arrik intervened before she could really make the decision to get her trainer's license.

Arrik had acquired a male nidoran and a spearow, one shortly after the other. Already showing promise of becoming a dedicated trainer, he had raised them both up from low levels to their early double digits, and he was looking to catch more pokemon.

One day, he came up to Nikki's room unannounced, when she had been feeding Fudge from her hand. It was a particularly good day for Nikki, for she had managed to coax the little fellow into her room, and was currently spoiling him rotten with more treats than usual. Arrik, seeing the sentret as an unusual specimen and another pokemon to train, had wasted no time in throwing out a pokeball and calling his nidoran, telling it to attack the sentret.

Nikki would have protected the squirrel like pokemon, but he jumped away across the room as the nidoran ran to attack him, and was cornered against one of the walls. There, he was jabbed mercilessly by the small poison horn of the higher level nidoran, his cries of pain echoing about the small room.

Nikki, paralyzed before, had leaped off her bed in a fury she had never really felt in her life. She had grabbed the nidoran with her bare hands, grabbed him and yanked him viciously away from the twitching sentret. That he now jabbed at her with his horn made no difference, and she barely felt any pain through her anger as she made to throw him to the ground. However, the small poison pokemon had dissolved into red light and been sucked back into his ball before she could do him any damage.

A shouting match between the two siblings had shortly ensued, and it may have escalated into something more had not their mother intervened.

Their mother. She was a wise woman, a woman who often saw beneath the surface of things. She had an insight keen as sharpened steel, and a wit that rivaled that of any person she met. She also had a good understanding of things and what needed to be done.

She had come softly into the room as Nikki, cradling the little sentret in her arms, had shouted at Arrik. The boy was trying to rival her, but he found to his surprise that her voice drowned him out. Also, he had never seen her so enraged before, and it frightened him somewhat. He was becoming hoarse and a little desperate when their mother entered the room, shutting the door so quietly that neither of them heard her.

She broke into the somewhat one sided argument in time to save Arrik from becoming humiliated and Nikki from slapping him (for she felt like doing just that at the time.) Instead of reprimanding them, though, she had taken them both downstairs and sat them down, letting them cool off for a while and giving Nikki some bandages and medicine for her wrists where the nidoran's horn had grazed her .

Some time later she had brought them iced chai and cookies and talked to them both in a low, patient voice. She had told Nikki not to interfere with Arrik's trying to catch pokemon, and had made Arrik promise not to catch any of the pokemon near the great pine tree where the pokemon Nikki fed congregated.

This decision satisfied both parties, and the two siblings grudgingly made up. However, Fudge escaped from Nikki's arms and ran away and never came back. And Nikki decided not to become a pokemon trainer, at least not until she was older.

More and more time passed at the big old house. Nikki turned grew to be thirteen and began tinkering around with an old guitar her father had left. She found a bass in time and started on that, too, and then gained an interest in keyboards. This gave her a reason to go to the local music class, and she gained some knowledge of those instruments and others. She also gained a few friends, and found a buried need in her fulfilled at last.

However, she still had a somewhat shy nature, and the old habit of feeding the pokemon at the window and simply watching the world outside refused to be broken. Not that she really wanted to break it. People labeled her a dreamer, though she was simply quiet and a somewhat awkward age.

Her brother had become quite competitive and good at his pokemon training. His nidoran had evolved into a nidorino, and his spearow was now a magnificent fearow. He had caught a whole host of other pokemon as well, and had also gained a tauros.

This tauros was the only pokemon of Arrik's that Nikki really grew to like. Unlike most of his kind, he had a gentle nature, and would have been better suited to be a pack animal rather than a battler.

Nikki gained an attachment to him, and gave him a pet name of 'Puppy,' which confounded and dismayed Arrik to no end. However, the tauros would only answer to that name, and in time Nikki's brother gave in, remarking that the wild bull pokemon might as well have been Nikki's.

That point about marked the end of an idle period in time. Things happened after that, odd things centering in Goldenrod, dangerous things that Nikki didn't want to remember. The girl was fourteen when they began to happen, and, though the odd happenings somewhat disturbed her parents, they weren't living close enough to Goldenrod to really be bothered too much.

Besides, the things that happened didn't seem to be related. A house broken into here, something stolen here, people feeling as though they were being watched, but never quite being able to pinpoint just who it was that was watching them. It all had a feeling of menace to it, but Nikki didn't hear much about it and didn't worry.

Then, people began to disappear. There was a news article about a young boy who had vanished. His innocent face and bright blue eyes disturbed Nikki as she read the news story. The weird incidents after this became more and more pronounced, as people began to have odd 'accidents,' and a haze of unease and general fear drifted over Goldenrod. More people turned up missing.

The near final straw came when one of Nikki's cousins, who also lived on the outskirts of Goldenrod, went missing. Her jacket and an odd, clean knife were found in the yard below the pine tree near Nikki's house. The fourteen year old was the first one to look down and see it. Terrified, she took to staying in her room, refusing to go to her music lessons at Goldenrod.

Her parents gained a tight, pinched look to their faces after that, and Arrik simply looked disturbed.

Nikki did one of the oddest things she had ever done, then. She crept downstairs when her parents weren't looking and, despite her revulsion, she retrieved the knife and stashed it away in her bedroom. She had no idea whatsoever why she had done it, and her parents didn't seem to miss it.

Nikki's fifteenth birthday overtook her like a hunter overtaking its prey, and she had a strained and tense party. Her father, smiling, presented her with a trainer's license, saying she needed pokemon, that she had a talent with them. He also gave her a white meowth kitten with a silver charm and bright blue eyes, telling her that she was genetically engineered to learn moves quickly and to have that color of fur, and a bunch of other things Nikki didn't really absorb. The girl felt amazingly spoiled, disgustingly spoiled, and this was only compounded by the fact that she had to pretend to be happy with her license and first pokemo . She named the kitten Coral and never put her in her pokeball, which became dusty as it sat on a shelf above where the knife was hidden.

A few days later, something horrible happened at Nikki's father's work. She was never really filled in on what it was, and didn't think she wanted to know. She was only informed that they were moving almost immediately afterward, that it wasn't safe here anymore. They would be going overseas in less than a month.

Nikki moped morosely about and stayed up in her tiny room most of the time, wishing she could take it with her and trying to memorize its last tiny details. She took several pictures of it.

Saying goodbye to the pokemon who had become her friends while she was growing up was the hardest thing of all. Arrik's suggestion that she need only catch them filled her with a deep disgust, and she wished she had never become a trainer, that her father her never gotten her her stupid license. It seemed to mark a turning point, a point that turned her life upside down, and was, in her mind, perversely connected to the reason they had to move in the first place.

They moved about a month later, trailing on down to Olivine's harbor with their bags and the moving trucks. Nikki walked as if she was one in a trance, Coral in her arms. Arrik, normally adopting an annoying older brother attitude, had put his arm around her shoulders and guided her into the ship and to her room there, where she would sleep during the voyage.

She didn't cry. She felt hollow, as if she might let loose a flood of hysterics in a hundred years, but she was deadly calm. And, in a few days, she gradually went back to normal again, though there still was that deep lingering sadness and longing to go back to her high room, to be with the wild pokemon. She felt she would never be the same…

But life goes on, and one must adapt to it as best as one can. Everything happens for a reason…

"Ugh…" Nikki clenched her hands under the blankets. They were both terribly numb, for she had slept on them.

Her feet, which had an annoying tendency to hang over the edge of the small bed, were cold, and she dragged them up into the warm cocoon her body had created.

Murmuring miserably to herself, she ran her hands through her thick brown hair, wincing as they caught in the tangles. This was one of those mornings where she wished she had never been born. They were occurring more and more frequently, she found.

Trying to shake her sleep off, Nikki all but fell from the tiny bed. The rocking of the ship beneath her feet snapped her back to reality, and she realized she had been dreaming of the house she had just left, of her high room and the wild pokemon…

She ran a brush listlessly through her hair, wondering for the first time if they were the only people traveling on this ship who were actually moving to some other place to live. The city they were moving to was called Far Reach. What a nice name, she thought sarcastically. It only served to remind her of how far she was from the place she still considered to be her real home…

"Merth?" A little voice alerted her to the second presence in the room, and she looked down at her ankles to see a little white meowth twining around them. Coral. Her pokemon.

"Hey." Nikki bent down slowly and scooped the cat up. Even though she hadn't wanted to become a trainer, she had found herself growing attached to the little thing. She only hoped that Coral wouldn't be ripped away from her, as her home had so suddenly.

She walked over to her bed and sat down on it, aware she had gone to sleep in her clothes again, and not really caring. She stroked Coral's head as she waited for the inevitable sound of Arrik's voice calling her up to breakfast. It had been that way for about five days now, ever since they had set sail. Nikki had forgotten how long it was going to be until they got to there new home. She thought she probably wouldn't have winded if they never did.

"Nikki!" A rap on her cabin's door. "Come on up and eat!" Then Arrik's voice was gone, leaving Nikki with a somewhat wry feeling of triumph at having predicted almost exactly the time he would call her.

Carrying Coral in her arms, the girl blinked owlishly at herself in the mirror. Good enough, she thought. Now to face the world once more…

(I'm sorry about the lack of updates on both stories, everyone. I'll try to update more from now on. Thank you for reviewing!)