Ch 26: Slums
Falling asleep next to a girl whose very last memory of being awake was being beaten and kidnapped by a member of Team Anonymous turned out to be a pretty terrible idea. I woke up to a few strong kicks to my back from a shrieking teenage girl who thought I was that asshole Snake, with Lapras frantically flapping her front flippers in panic, unmoving since she didn't want to attack someone she knew was an ally. After a few painful moments of confusion involving screaming, pleas to 'stop' or 'relax', and Lapras sliding her big blue head in between our spat to separate us - Eliza at last began to calm down when she realized my frame was far too short and thin to be the older, burlier Snake's.
"Eliza, it's me! Adam! Fuck, you play soccer or something?" I rubbed at the spot on my back I knew would bruise by the morning.
"Adam?" Eliza asked incredulously, craning her neck to get a better look in the darkness. I had forgotten how pleasant her voice was, but there was a hoarseness to it now. I cautiously stepped closer to her so she could be positive I was who I claimed. She smiled in relief as I drew closer, confirming she recognized me as the friendly guy from the Peltagrow Pokemon Center, and not the creep who had snatched her. "Where are we? What happened to-?"
"It's a long story," I answered, unsure where to begin. But I did my best. I gave her the best rundown I could manage in that situation on my relationship with Snake and Marvin Bloom, and Eliza gave a cruel little chuckle of irony everytime I mentioned the numerous times Marvin threatened me with violence or abused his Axew or Jynx.
"I think I need to go to a hospital," Eliza croaked out when I finished recapping her on our situation, clutching at her left side and wincing. "So much hurts."
I sprung to my backpack, sifted through its few contents since I had gone through most of the supplies on my travels from Wintervale to Goldenleaf, praying I had at least one revive left. I so often got the short end of the stick and had to struggle so hard to get what I wanted. Just this one time, please, let me have a single revive in here somewhere. And miracle of miracles, I was down to one last revive. I grabbed the small purple spray can, inserted the nozzle into a tiny outlet hole in the back of Tropius' pokeball, and sprayed the contents of the Revive can into Tropius' ball. It only took a minute, and Tropius was only halfway recovered as standard Revives were no replacement for a proper visit to a pokemon center despite being quadruple the cost. But Tropius emerged from his pokeball no longer fainted from that Swanna's deadly ice attack, and he had just enough energy to do what I needed him to accomplish.
"Listen, I know you're good with direction and this is an easy one for you," I pulled Tropius in gently with a brotherly arm around his long neck and coaxed him toward Eliza, who looked up at the Tropius with a kind smile stressed through gritted teeth over her potentially broken ribs. "Fly her over to Goldenleaf, it's not much further from here. Just fly straight south until you see the city, then take her to the local center for treatment. She's hurt really bad, so I need you to take this seriously and get her there fast but safely, you got that?"
Without even using up a spare moment to nod yes to me, Tropius used his long neck to aid Eliza in getting on his back, then with a strong slap of his wings, he took to the air and began his flight to the center in a fifth of the time it would take me to get there. I would be fine. I was certain that No Man's Land was a complete wasteland with no pokemon or plant life at all, meaning I would be okay here even without Lapras at my side.
I checked the time on my pokedex. 4:42 in the morning. It was still dark as sin outdoors, but there was no way I could fall back asleep, so I recalled Lapras to her pokeball, then continued in the direction I had sent Tropius. I would probably arrive at the center in three or four hours, at which point Eliza better be well into treatment.
The walk through No Man's Land was rather uninteresting as the sights were mirrored all around: desolate wasteland with rocky hills occasionally bubbling out of the group, but otherwise a sore sight for the eyes. And I was wrong about the trip taking three or fours hours; it took seven.
When I found myself taking my first few steps into the land that was officially labeled Goldenleaf City, I hadn't even realized that I had left No Man's Land yet. The first giveaway that I had reached Goldenleaf City was a few small huts that were all so covered in dust that had blown in from the wasteland that they matched the dull brown of the ground and surrounding hills. It had never occured to me that Goldenleaf City would be...so depressing looking. The area reeked of poverty, since as I squinted my eyes and looked further down, I saw a child exiting from one hut and trotting over to a neighbor hut. The child looked ragged and dirty, as if he had not seen a bath even longer than pokemon trainers out in the wild who rarely get such luxuries. There seemed to be no vehicles or roads in Goldenleaf, just the Greyhoundoom Bus Route that stopped just short of where I was currently standing and what I presumed to be the entrance to the city, however anticlimactic the town seemed compared to the likes of Peltagrow or Wintervale.
Goldenleaf was by far the smallest of the four cities in Ilragorn, making one of the perks of the city being how easy it is to navigate through the long rows of huts that all looked identical, despite using some weird alphabetical system for the addresses that I just could not comprehend. It wasn't long before I recognized the familiar white roof and the usual architectural techniques used for pokemon centers. The Goldenleaf Pokemon Center stuck out like a sore thumb, being the only government funded building in the entire city, like a beautiful statue surrounded by piles of garbage.
I hurried to the front desk as I entered the pokemon center, and explained that my Tropius had dropped off my friend earlier in the morning and asked how she was doing. Nurse Joy reassured me that Eliza needed to catch up on her bedrest and should stay a few nights while the Chanseys on staff tended to her, but would otherwise be alright. Nurse Joy permitted me an hour long visit, escorted me to Eliza's room, and shut the door behind me as I walked in so that me and Eliza could have some privacy.
The slamming of the door jolted Eliza into alertness from her semi-conscious state, which made me momentarily want to go back out to shout at Nurse Joy to be careful around her own patients, but Eliza called me over and I had to just walk over and hug her her while she cried into my shoulders and thanked me over and over for saving her life while I could do nothing but let her get it all out.
"You saved my life," she finally managed when she pulled away. I noticed a tissue box on the stand beside the hospital bed she was tucked into, and handed her one. She blew into it appreciatively.
"You've helped me in the past, too. I don't know if my stubborn ass would have ever had the initiative to go out and get a rock type so I could beat Zach if you hadn't have told me about Duggie's Ruins." I replied, not wanting her to feel obligated to me in any way. I was reminded suddenly of her declining to leave Peltagrow and come with me on my journey. "And I totally get it. Why you didn't come with me when I offered."
Eliza lowered her head shamefully, still adjusting to the fact I knew about her relationship with Marvin.
"But I'm offering it again. And this time, I hope you know you can trust me. I'm not some asshole that's just going to run away and leave you in the dark if we run into tight spots. I really think it would be mutually a good thing for the both of us if we just sorta - stuck together this time. We're both solid trainers. We both have the same goals, right? The Ilragorn League? The Elite 4? The Championship - Ava? The glory of it all. Why not work together? Especially if freaks from Anonymous are interested in you and me anyway, may as well make it harder for them to sneak up on us."
Eliza had a flattered smile on her face as she leaned back into her pillow, taking in everything I had just thrown at her. But her face was also blank, unanswering, not wanting to even give me a hint with her eyes on if she was being swayed by my offer.
"Adam," Eliza began after a long pause. "I don't really have a passion for beating all the gyms anymore, or the League, or any of it. I've lost my interest in competitive battles, it just doesn't excite me anymore; it just makes me mad. I don't like seeing pokemon, or people, getting hurt anymore if it can be avoided. But at the same time, I don't think it's just a coincidence that we keep bumping into each other like this. I mean, I'm not even religious or spiritual or whatever, but how many times does fate have to keep pushing us together before I realize that there has to be a reason this keeps happening? It's too much to be a coincidence, Adam."
There was a moment of silence while we both let that statement hang in the air, until Eliza cut it by doing in my opinion one of the strangest things to do in a moment like this.
"I caught this Passimian a while back. Great pokemon, good movepool, but we never really clicked. He was more into fighting than I was. You know, I've had my Staraptor and Golem for ages now and I just can't part with them but I honestly feel like Passimian could do a lot more on your team than he could on mine. I wouldn't offer this if I didn't truly think he had a lot of potential and would work well with you. So I'm asking, would you take my Passimian?"
I accepted her Passimian instantly and with no regrets, and she had me use the PC box right there in the room to transfer him from her registry into mine, and I opted to release him into a pokeball that I attached to my belt as my official fifth pokemon. I was surprised with myself that for usually being so picky with my selection, I had accepted Eliza's pokemon without hesitation.
After that, Eliza was beginning to fall back asleep as the painkillers were kicking in. She promised that she would think about what she would do regarding traveling together when she was released from the center, but insisted that I at least prove her to that I'm a trainer who can get the job done by bringing her the Goldenleaf badge before she was out of the hospital, since I had several days to schedule a battle with the gym leader and to prepare my team. The extra pressure from Eliza filled me with a renewed energy that I knew would help me going into the upcoming gym battle.
While Eliza rested, I placed all of my pokemon except the new Passimian in Nurse Joy's care to treat them all back up to 100%, then took a walk around Goldenleaf until I found the nearest herbal store to stock up on potions, revives, and food. Everything in the herbal store was dirt cheap and had a funky smell to it, but at least I had supplies with me to last until I reached the fourth gym.
On my walk around the area, I was starting to look at it as less and less of a city and more and more of a ghetto, as I witnessed two young trainers who were also filthy and thin as a Stunfisk, had their pokemon duking it out in the worst way.
"Mothim, Air Slash Jimmy!" one trainer ordered his Mothim, who then did the illegal move of slashing his wings at the opposing trainer, the strong wind current slashing at the trainer named Jimmy, slicing his arm, and causing him to fall over.
"Ambipom, go for the eyes!" Jimmy countered, whose Ambipom then leaped on top of the hovering Mothim with superior speed, dug his thumbs into the Mothim's eyes, and pressed hard into it until the Mothim was screaming while blood was seeping down Ambipom's forearms from popping Mothim's eyeballs.
Jimmy and the other trainer were slugging fists at each other while the Ambipom was killing Mothim right on the sidewalk in front of a residential hut. The people living in this slum were definitely on the lower spectrum of all there in the head. Maybe living out in the middle of the wasteland made people and pokemon alike go insane.
Nevertheless, I made my way back to the Goldenleaf Pokemon Center without calling upon the assistance of Passimian to fend off any dangerous townsfolk, but I found it best to just rent a room in the back and spend the night there rather than wandering about the slums guessing which identical hut was available for rent.