"Mummy, that buizel says he wants a lemonade."
She blinked at me, before glancing at the buizel lazing by the pond. Then she laughed and stroked my hair.
"Oh my, dear, you can synchronise so well with pokémon already? You'll make a fine trainer when you grow up. Even most veterans can't communicate that well!"
I frowned.
"No, he just said he'd, 'Slap a luxray for a lemonade right now'."
A disbelieving look passed over my mother's face, before she shook her head and smiled.
"Silly boy. People can't understand pokémon language."
1
Unfortunately for my mother, I could totally understand pokémon language, a fact that I'd managed to keep hidden for my entire life. I had no desire to spend the rest of my life in an asylum, or being poked and prodded by scientists in a glorified cell. Or, you know, be bullied at school for being a weirdo. I wasn't the bottom of the pack, but I wouldn't say that I was doing too well, either.
"Wakey, wakey!" cried an annoyingly familiar voice.
At least, it wouldn't have been annoying if something hadn't hit me first. Despite being half-asleep, I immediately slapped back in spite.
"Fu—I only came to wake you up, jackass!"
"At least just shake my shoulder," I mumbled. Wiping at my eyes, I blearily looked around to see a mostly empty school bus and a lanky boy with dreadlocks and a bandana; Lennon. "Please don't tell me no one woke me up and now I'm missing from roll-call so they sent you to get me."
"No one woke you up and you were missing from roll-call, so they sent me to get you," Lennon sang back. His grin was all tooth, before he softened to elaborate. "Actually, I volunteered to come, so you didn't have to feel like a loser. It's alright. You can buy me something nice later."
I groaned. I couldn't say anything to that. Well, actually I could.
"I blame society. No collective responsibility at all."
"Right, right. Get up already, Mister Edge-man." His smile dimmed a little. "Might not be the best to join back up all smiles and shit. Some of the folks are seriously annoyed."
"Well, I know how much you like telling me 'I told you so'," I remarked as I hurriedly collected my belongings.
"This time I might not really want to."
A couple of minutes of hard running later, Lennon and I joined the crowd of uniforms to dirty looks and searching eyes. I kept my face carefully blank as I gauged the reactions of the teachers, most of whom didn't seem too bothered, other than the strict Mr Muller.
"Sweet dreams, Ciel?" asked Mr Gram, my homeroom teacher, with a teasing smirk.
"Better than the classroom chair, sir," I replied, with a tight, humourless smile. I winced as Lennon knuckled my sweaty back in caution.
Mr Gram snorted and looked over where the deputy headmistress stood with a tour guide.
"Right, now that we're all here," she called over the students, "we can start off with our lodging for the next couple of days, then we'll move onto our first destination for today: the Far Amity Ruins."
Far Amity Ruins was a URESCO World Heritage site located smackdab in the middle of Route 245, a quieter path that had once been an ancient trading route between Hearthome and Snowpoint, before the art of training flying pokémon absorbed the travelling merchant business, who were then subsequently put out of business by Steelix Trade & Transportations.
Not that ST&T actually used steelix fleets anymore outside of construction and maintenance. But the name was a carry-over from the early, pre-modern days when they did.
Far Amity Ruins was just one of the far too many national heritage sites in Sinnoh, built by an ancient East Sinnohan tribe called the Amitas. It was notable for being one of the largest temple complexes dedicated to Dialga and Palkia in the region, and the intact buildings were still in use by the pagans today.
It was also one of the most common, cheapest and boring field trip destinations in eastern Sinnoh. No hot chicks on the beach like Sunyshore. No Championship-tier trainer hub like Battle Zone. No urban adventure paradise like Jubilife. Nope. Just boring old rocks and caves, which was why it needed to be cheap to compete.
Dark, damp and cold. That was how most of the tour through the main ruins itself went. I wrinkled my nose at the clutch of the musty cave around me, trying not to look down over the safety railings into the unfathomable depths of the ruins. The tour guide chatted on over the head of the ragged line, history lessons burnt into her brain.
Something cold slapped itself onto the back of my head.
"Should've gotten the hint and stayed on the bus, Sinclair," a solid, slick voice mocked behind me.
"Should've stayed in your dad's balls, Royer," I replied reflexively. "Whoever he is, anyway. Not the guy sleeping with your mum for sure."
Classmates around us groaned and hissed complaints as they skirted around to make space.
I took my tour pamphlet and mopped up the back of my head in disgust. I didn't want to know what it was until I reached the toilet. I turned back to see Royer and his lot, as well as a couple of his groupies to the side doing their own thing. I'd always admired them for their nonchalance in the face of violence, but I knew for a fact that girls liked seeing boys beat each other up, preferably over them.
His face had tightened interestingly at my insult, and more than a few classmates laughed around us. Fortunately, most of them were girls to disguise the few guys that did.
"What, you wanna fight here and endanger everyone?" I gestured around us to the dusty, narrow, dimly lit underground path and the sheer unknown gaping on the other side of the not-quite solid railings. This place seriously needed more budget.
"You seriously think anyone's gonna get close enough to help you?" he sneered.
"Well, I know you don't wanna be a murderer," I remarked. I shrugged after a moment, meeting his eyes searchingly and casually added, "As far as I know, anyway."
His eyes darkened dangerously, reason warring with what he perceived as a taunt. If I was wiser and more experienced man, I'd have known how to de-escalate.
"A-alright, stop," said our class president nervously, thin and nerdy, but always a solid voice of reason. "Take this outside. Ciel's right. Keep any danger to yourselves and your own fists."
"I think we can keep this civil," Royer hissed through gritted teeth.
"I don't," I retorted. "Fights are never civil."
"Oh god," someone muttered.
"I'm calling the teacher."
"Yeah, I'll go with."
"Guys, could you please not do this shit for one fucking day?"
"Please."
"Hey, I'm not the one going around picking fights," I defended indignantly.
"You're egging him on."
"No, I'm replying in kind so that he knows what it feels like. He can either back off or keep it up. It's not a hard choice. Is it, Royer?"
His reply was a fist to the face that I barely dodged. My grades might've been average, but at least my reflexes weren't. Giving him a firm kick in the shins, I decided to utilise the most venerable and beloved of fighting moves passed down from countless generations past.
I ran away.
Well, I would've, if the son of a bitch hadn't managed to overcome his pain mid-howl and tackle me from behind.
And tumble straight into the railings.
Which gave away from the force of two idiotic high school boys ramming full speed into it with a screech of tearing metal.
And through it.
Blackness rushed around me, and abruptly stopped as I grabbed onto the only thing near me—Royer's leg. Who's owner had grabbed onto the nearest thing to him—a precariously hanging metal bar. Screams echoed through the caves, reminding me just how empty the darkness below me was.
My stomach lurched, hands growing sweaty. I tightened my grip around the fabric of his uniform.
"Alright, dude, just don't panic—"
The metal bar gave, and as Royer made a lurch for a higher one, Newton's Third Law literally and figuratively kicked me in the face.
The last thing I saw was a crowd of shocked faces, all of them at once painfully familiar, yet complete strangers.
Well, that was a lie. The last thing I saw was rushing blackness, receding light, then a crash of pain, rolling and the sound of crumbling rocks.
The last thing I remember feeling was terror.
After what seemed like a thousand years later, my eyes blinked open.
Ironic, really, that the first thing in the afterlife would be some sort of a temple. But it made sense, I guess.
The more my eyesight focused back, though, the more I realised I wasn't in a temple as much as I was in some sort of half-cavern, half-shrine. Sunlight filtered in through sweeping curtains of hanging flora and gaps in the rocky ceiling. There was manmade architecture of some sort, but mostly carved into the smoothened walls.
The first thing I realised was that my right arm and hip, although functioning, was bloody and sore, but there was nothing sticking out at odd angles at the very least. There was a ringing in my head that was gradually getting better. One of my shoes was missing.
And I was thirsty.
Gods was I thirsty.
Carefully, blearily getting up, I took in my surroundings. There was fresh air, thankfully. Water trickled through the cavern, but I doubted it was clean. The ceiling was far too high to even think of climbing even with a healthy arm, and the hanging vines only dropped down to midway. The grotto tunnelled off into the distant darkness through water-logged paths.
I shivered, the fall into the hungry maw of the cave still stark in my mind.
I was lucky.
Too lucky for words.
I'd never felt too much like an idiot standing up to Royer, but I sure as hell did now. I had tried to run away, but my bad attempts at reason before he'd attacked had mostly likely come off as taunts to him.
My head hurt a little too much for that train of thought, which could wait for after I'd guaranteed my survival of the next twenty four hours, so I turned back to observing the cavern.
More particularly, the sprawling mural between the carved-in pillars and statues.
An ageless, half-faded carving of the traditional Sinnohan triangle stared back at me, larger than a manor.
I was far from a stellar student, but I had grown up in Hearthome. The Far Amity Temple was a holy place constructed by an East Sinnohan tribe called the Amitas, and they specifically only worshipped the Holy Two. But there was only one Sinnohan tribe that used the double triangle, a symbolism of Sinnoh's three lakes and the fuel of more than a few conspiracy theories about a hypothetical third god that exasperated historians all over the world.
It was an Aishu shrine.
Well, that the Amitas had built their temple of bling over the Aishu one was probably some sort of symbol of dominance thing, or whatever. The Amitas had become one of the dominant ethnicities of Sinnoh before the more modern, unified Sinnohan identity came hand in hand with the end of the Middle Ages. The Aishu had been reduced to a minority of nomadic trainers protected by the government.
If I survived and told everyone about this shrine, I'd probably get some pocket change from some archaeology institution or whatever. More incentive for me to survive I guess.
I looked around again.
If I just started yelling, what were the chances of me becoming onix-chow?
"...H-hello?" I called, slightly loudly. "Anybody here?"
Silence.
Groaning, I slowly got up, and shuffled over to the nearest stream. Looking up, I'd more or less rolled from one of the gravelly slopes of the cavern after falling down the cave. The angle must've been pretty forgiving on the first collision considering I didn't seem to have any broken, well, anything.
I washed my hands in the shallow waters, and took a hopeful lick of the water before spitting it out. Didn't want to risk it.
Phone signal? Dead. At least I had my earphones with me. Small comfort, but it was comforting to listen to some good tunes nonetheless.
I couldn't tell how much time had passed. Rescue operations involved well trained pokémon, so while it was obvious to stay where you were, it didn't often take too long. Even if they presumed me dead, they'd want to collect my body at the very least—
...Actually, I wasn't quite sure on that last part.
So for now, it was just me and the creepy shrine and statues. As well as the setting sun. And possible death by starvation and dehydration.
Right.
I knew for a fact that most pokémon didn't attack humans. They didn't even eat human corpses and preferred to let them rot, sometimes carrying them back to the nearest human civilisation if they were too bothered by it.
Swallowing what meagre saliva I'd gathered, I tried not to let despair seep into my mind and convinced myself to not cry myself to sleep.
I needed to conserve water, after all.
I woke up to crusty eyelids, a fever headache, beautiful curtains of moonlight filtering through the vines, and a moving red dot in the darkness.
A flash of terror flooded my veins, but I stayed as still as I could, heart thumping in the darkness. But as if my flaring emotions were a beacon in the shadows, the red dot fixed towards my position and grew larger.
Before I could scream and throw a rock at it, a metallic voice filled the cavern.
"Who the hell are you and why are you in my happy place?"
I screamed and threw the rock anyway.
And that was how I met my first pokémon.