After Being Blue
Poke-ball 22: Panoramal
Lavender Tower was full of all kinds of spirits. Vengeful spirits that had been pushed too far. Crying spirits that had been left alone to waste away. Sad spirits who'd left fond memories behind.
It attracted the ghost pokemon. It was one of the few places in Kanto where they could be found, though apparently there was another haunted tower in Johto where the ghosts also dwelled. That was a different sort of tower though: a tower wrought with tragedy and myth and legendary beasts that had burned in a glorious blaze…
Lavender Tower was where the dead were buried, and no-one knew why. They simply were. And the tower honed the ghosts like a beacon. Ghosts that were pokemon. Ghosts that were just bodiless spirits: the personification of lives once lived… or formless grief.
Blue had never put much stock in those tales, until the first time he'd visited Lavender Tower and felt that chill sink deep into his bones.
This time his bones ached, remembering that chill.
Red let him go first. Was that a flashback to how they'd both been, that first time? Or was it out of respect, to let Blue pay his respects to his pokemon before Red followed. Or maybe Red was afraid. He might've teased him about that, before. It was the perfect opportunity, really, to tease him about it. But Lavender Tower was far too sombre. Almost every trainer who came there brought death with it. And then there were the ghosts…
But where were the ghosts? They'd gotten up three floors in silence. Not a single trainer challenged them. Not a single wild pokemon appeared from the gloom.
That made the tower seem even more haunting than when a ghost would appear beneath their feet.
Maybe they were scared of Pikachu, sparking away on Red's shoulder.
Ghosts scared of a little mouse. That was kind of pathetic, even if Blue knew Red's Pikachu was no laughing matter.
And when the thunderbolt Pikachu suddenly sent off cracked the gravestone from behind which Erika emerged, she saw it too. And the look in Red's eyes that promised retribution, as the pair of them were swept up by the confrontation.
The ghosts were afraid, probably, of a champion who could so single-mindedly focus on destruction, even if he'd started it with good intentions.