-AN: Thanks for the lovely review(:
Aaaand we march onwards.
[|] Exceptional [|]
( where do we go from here )
When I come to, my mouth is sour and dry, and the ground beneath me is rugged and tangible.
It's warm, oven-level warm. The furnace isn't just on; I'm inside of it.
I open my eyes, but the view doesn't change. It's still all darkness and emptiness and nothingness.
And then the feelings from the last time I was conscious come flooding back, so that my heartbeat races painfully and I have to fight with my lungs to get enough air in. I automatically assume the worst.
I'm alone.
I'm trapped.
I'm dead.
That last thought makes me scrabble against my dark surroundings, trying to fill my nerves with sensations, searching for reassurance that I'm still alive.
The cocoon that I'm in shifts in response to my movement, and suddenly all I can see is bright white light. I squeeze my eyes shut aggressively until the red spots die out and my brief headache fades away.
Once I'm confident enough, I open my eyes incrementally to allow them to adjust to the new stimulus. I'm in a cave, I realize as I scope out the area, although I'm not very far from the mouth, probably to ensure a quick escape route should there be an attack from deeper within. The predominantly sand-colored rocks are striated with tendrils of red and white and grey, and past the jagged lip of the cliff this cave is perched upon, I can see the top edge of some body of water.
Making observations is comforting—concrete facts are predictable and stagnant—and the panic attack begins to subside. Unfortunately, as the adrenaline seeps out of my body, so does any facade of warmth that my biology had tried to maintain.
Something warm presses around me, a heavy appendage draping itself across my shaking shoulders. I flinch at the contact before recognizing Icarus's powerful form lying to my right.
His streamlined, serpentine face is both comforting and unnerving; I should have noticed him sooner, should've checked all of my surroundings before allowing myself to relax. He's a damn colossal dragon, a literal burning beacon. In my panic I'd had tunnel vision.
It's a rookie mistake. Being in this situation is unsettling, throwing me off in a time when I need most to stay perfectly balanced.
"How long was I out?" I ask him, trying to shrug his wing off.
'Not long enough,' Icarus says dryly, and places his wing back in place with finality. 'Stop squirming.'
He matches the glare I give him and I sigh. "Fine, then come with me. I wanna see where we are."
'It's an island chain,' he recalls promptly, snorting out a plume of smoke.
A manic laugh bubbles in my chest. Of course they dumped us on the Sevii Islands. Backwater and isolated, there were probably a total of 1000 people living on all seven islands before they were cleared off. Arceus forbid that people on the mainland find out what really goes on outside of their gilded cage.
It's hard to choose whether or not to stay in the cave. On one hand, it provides a relative level of safety from the elements, and I'm fairly certain we can sustain ourselves by hunting nearby. If I'm lucky, I could wait for everyone to tire out their pokemon.
On the other, it makes us easy targets should we be surrounded; the cave's mouth had to be large enough to accommodate Icarus's wingspan, so it wouldn't act as much of a bottleneck.
A cursory check of my backpack reveals that most of the supplies I'd had when they grabbed me were still intact. Potions, pokeballs, status removers, food, a thermos of water in the side pocket, and a few human supplies: a notebook and pens, toiletries, a stack of hair ties. Digging around the zipped compartments, I even touch the cold edge of the knife I'd learned to always keep on hand and a packet of gum.
I have possibly the shittiest memory known to mankind so I can't quite tell if anything's missing, except for the glaringly obvious absences of my phone and my Pokedex.
Icarus shoves his nose against my neck, reminding me that we're on a clock.
In the end, I don't have to make the decision. A sudden rumbling in the back of the cave and the subsequent beginnings of a cave-in make it for us.
Someone screams for help as we take off from the rubble. There's something familiar about the voice, and I instinctively turn around. We haven't gotten far, and I can make out blonde hair and a black scarf standing above the cave, caught between the earthquake under his feet and the graveler advancing towards him. His pokemon yowls helplessly, equally paralyzed by the ground moving beneath it.
"Wes!" The scream tears itself from my throat before I realize what I've done.
The graveler and its trainer look up, and it immediately begins to lob chunks of rocks in our direction.
Icarus plummets.
"Wesley Chase Ellington!"
I looked up, not because it was my name being called, but rather because the shrill tone of the voice promised a spectacle, and I wanted to watch.
The voice was coming from one of the calling booths in the corner of the Viridian Pokemon Center, where a skinny, short blonde boy was talking to a skinny, tall blonde woman. He cringed beneath her withering stare. His name most certainly dwarfed his demeanor.
"How many times do I have to tell you to call?" she berated, twisting her wedding ring to alleviate some of her frustration.
The boy was trying to look everywhere except for directly at the screen, but he sat up straighter and brightened when a man in a crisp black suit came to stand next to her. I recognized them suddenly when I saw them together. Mom and Dad talked about them all the time, although Mom was more interested in the scandalous home-wrecking tramp who'd married a man twenty years older than her, and Dad thought the man was a Machiavellian corporate sonnuvabitch.
I didn't really know what those words meant, but I thought they looked nice in pictures together.
They didn't look all that nice together now. The man, Mr. Ellington of Ellington Industries, was scolding Mrs. Ellington with an ugly-looking scowl on his face. And when he turned back to the blonde boy with a smile that had far too few teeth to be real. He looked like one of those creepy clefable with the constant smiles on their faces while secretly they were planning on singing you to sleep. Except he wasn't pink. Or chubby. Or soft.
So the simile didn't actually fit that well, but whatever.
"Wesley, as much I wish your mother would remember her place and refrain from making such a public spectacle out of our family affairs," Mr. Ellington said, giving his wife another condescending frown, "she's right. How could you be so careless? We told you, you have to remember where you put your pokemon. This journey was supposed to teach you some responsibility."
Wesley squirmed in his seat and blurted, "I'm sorry dad! I promise I'll find him. I still have Jet, he can help!"
"See to it that you do," Mr. Ellington affirmed brusquely, and then terminated the call.
Wesley sighed, and I couldn't tell if he was disappointed or relieved that it was over.
I looked down to tell Icarus that we were leaving, only to spot him skulking across the floor towards Wesley. He'd just learned how to make an ember, and he seemed bent on practicing his new skill on the blonde boy's sneaker laces.
"Icarus," I hissed at him, trying to be subtle. "Icarus."
He promptly ignored me, and then let out a squeal when Wesley noticed and tried to kick him away. "Dumb lizard."
Icarus was being stupid, but I couldn't help feeling a flash of defensiveness. He was my pokemon. Only I could make fun of him. What did Wesley know anyways?
I rushed over and scooped up my charmander into my arms. And resisted the urge to kick Wesley in the shins.
"Get away from my pokemon you jerk," I snapped, trying to pet Icarus for dramatic effect. It was frustrating because he kept wriggling around, messing everything up. I sent him telepathic signals to stop moving and work with me, but they didn't reach him because he started to chew on my finger.
"Your pokemon started it," Wesley threw back, looking haughty.
He started to say something else, but his words floated over me; I was busy wondering how things would play out if I asked Icarus to set his hair on fire. We could roast marshmallows.
By the time I refocused my attention on him, he was done talking and now he looked uncomfortable at the fact that I was just kind of staring. "What, are you in love with me or something?"
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. "Yeah right. Boys are gross." It seemed like a more socially appropriate response than telling him that I was imagining him as a human campfire. "Don't be mean to Icarus. You're just jealous because you lost yours."
Wesley immediately shut up and looked down at his feet. It made me feel like something was pressing uncomfortably on my chest, so I amended, "Do you remember where you last saw it?"
He looked up warily, like he wasn't sure I actually wanted to help. "...I put her pokeball down when I was buying potions at the PokeMart. But I already looked there."
"I could help you look again," I offered, feeling the pressure start to disappear. It didn't really matter what he said; I was already planning my career as a cool private detective, with Icarus as my fire-breathing Watson. And it didn't really matter that he'd already tried retracing his steps; he definitely just missed something, and I was sure that I wouldn't make the same mistake.
"I guess," Wesley said with a shrug. He looked hesitant as he tacked on the end, "And I guess your charmander's not that dumb."
With grace and poise, I accepted his apology.
0-0-0-0
"This sucks," I said, trying to use my fingernail to carve my initials into the bench we were sitting on.
The man at the PokeMart had kicked us out after we threw his entire stock of PokeBalls against the linoleum floor to make sure Wes hadn't mixed his in with them.
Wes nodded in agreement. He was watching dejectedly as his houndour, Jet, chased Icarus in circles around a tree trunk. "My parents are gonna be so mad."
"What was in it?" I asked.
"An eevee," he told me.
I blinked, impressed and a little jealous. "You have a lot of rare pokemon."
With a brief shake of his head, the blonde dismissed the comment. "Kaia's not that strong though," he confided with a touch of bitterness and a whine.
"Just evolve her," I suggested, dragging up my memories of the eeveelutions. That had pretty much been the only lesson I'd paid any attention to. "You could get a Glaceon."
A look of disgust passed over Wes's face. "Jolteon is so much cooler."
"Glaceon."
"Jolteon."
"Glaceon."
"Hey."
We both stared at each other for a moment, unsure of who'd just spoken. I touched my lips. Maybe I was possessed.
The voice repeated itself, and this time, we tipped our heads up to meet the eyes of a scruffy looking boy, who was probably two or three years older than us.
"Hi," I waved.
"Wanna battle?" he asked, tossing a pokeball up in the air and catching it.
Wes opened his mouth to agree, but I remembered what my brother had told me, and I cut in superciliously, "No. We're not stupid. You think you can just take our money cuz we're new."
The boy chuckled, but it didn't sound nice. It was like the sound my mother made when I told her I was going to be super rich and super famous one day. "Smart. But I promise, I'll only fight you both with this new pokemon I just got."
Wes and I looked at each other, and our two pokemon that had stopped their game to see what was going on. Two against one. Boy, I knew my brother was a liar: people did not get smarter as they got older. Obviously we would win. Two is bigger than one!
"Okay, yeah," we agreed readily.
Jet sprang to Wes's side. Mimicking the little black puppy, Icarus prowled over to my feet on all fours, too. The boy pitched the pokeball he'd been playing with during our conversation, and wisps of red energy slowly dissipated around the pokemon that emerged.
"Vee?"
It would've been just a creepy coincidence that the boy had somehow managed to find an eevee on the outskirts of Viridian, but then the little brown fox ambled over to rub itself against Wes's ankles. Wes's face turned red until he looked like a smoochum.
"You stole my pokemon?"
"Oh, is it yours?" The boy shrugged. "Finders keepers."
Which, apparently, was not a motto that Jet or Icarus seemed to agree with, because Icarus gleefully ember'd the boy's sneakers and Jet snatched up the pokeball from where the boy had dropped it in order to shield his nose from the smell of burning rubber.
Forget being private detectives. Me and Icarus and Wes and Jet could so team up to be crime fighters.
-AN: sorry for the lateness of the update and the jumpiness of the chapter, setting up the background to a story is such a struggle.