DISCLAIMER: I do not own Pokémon. Pokémon is published and owned by Japanese video game company Nintendo, and was created by Satoshi Tajiri in 1996.
Marie looked around erratically as she entered the emergency wing of the hospital, her dark purple hair looking frizzled and her Team Instinct black and yellow uniform a little disheveled. She'd gotten the call while she was in St. Frederick, having just won the Gym for Team Instinct, and pretty much forewent using her car to get back, instead flying back to Loyalist City on her Charizard. She ran to the front desk, immediately greeted by a doctor.
"Marie Hicks!" Marie exclaimed.
"You're here about your brother and daughter?" the doctor asked, getting a quick nod. "They're both alright. He's in the waiting room with his friend, and she's being checked over for anything major, but it's looking good so far."
"Oh, thank goodness!" Marie sighed. "Where is she?"
"B-7, just down the left hall," the doctor explained, Marie heading down it pretty much immediately. She quickly came across Jaros and Harmony in the waiting room, the former looking straight down at the floor and clutching his hat in both hands and the latter putting her cell phone away.
"Jaros, Harmony," Marie said, taking her brother into a hug. "Are you alright?"
"We're fine," Jaros muttered, not making eye contact with his older sister.
"I just got off the phone with Spark," Harmony said. "He thinks he has a lead on that creep who attacked us."
"C'mon, I need to see my daughter, NOW," Marie replied, grabbing the two by the hands and hauling them to room B-7. Entering the room, the trio was faced with Thea asking lots of different questions to the doctor looking her over about the different machines and instruments sitting around the room. The doctor turned to face them, smiling amicably as she walked over to them.
"...Marie Hicks, right?" the doctor asked, getting a nod. "I'm Doctor Renee Jackson. I've been...entertaining Miss Thea here."
"Renee's been telling me all about concussions," Thea added, giving her mother a hug from the bed. "Mom, have you ever had a concussion?"
"I think your uncle has once or twice," Marie joked, holding her daughter tight. "Are you okay?"
"I'm alright," Thea answered, looking down a little. "But...I'm worried about Mew. That man took it away. We need to find Mew."
"We're working on that, honey," Marie explained softly. "I promise, we're going to find Mew. First, we need to know who that man was."
"His name is Tetch," a voice said as someone entered the room. The group all turned to see, to their surprise, a blond young man wearing a black leather jacket over a yellow hoodie and a Zapdos necklace.
"S-Spark!" Harmony exclaimed. "I wasn't expecting you to come here to brief us personally."
"Well, this is a rare situation," Spark, the leader of Team Instinct, replied. "Doctor, I'm going to have to ask you to leave for a couple of minutes."
Renee looked confused, but did as he said, shutting the door behind herself as Spark continued. "Tetch is a member of Team Risen. They're made up of former members of Teams Instinct, Mystic, and Valor."
Marie blinked, baffled. "Another team of Trainers? I've never even heard of them."
"And there's a reason for that," Spark explained. "They're a group of underground operatives led by a man who thinks ordinary Trainers shouldn't have access to Pokémon, that humanity only serves to hold Pokémon back, and that only members of Team Risen can truly bring out a Pokémon's wild power."
"Wild...power…?" Harmony asked.
"Their leader, a man named Trask, believed he knew of a way to unleash a Pokémon's full potential without the need to train them," Spark went on, digging out his cell phone and showing the picture of a middle-aged man with a silver goatee. "Believing that using standard human training weakened them in the sense that they no longer truly battled as nature intended, he felt that by harnessing a strong enough source of primal psychic energy and transmitting it across the world, he could undo what humanity has done to Pokémon. Because this likely meant he'd need a Legendary Pokémon to achieve this, only high-ranking members of all three teams, and Professor Willow himself, know about Team Risen."
"So why are you telling us?" Jaros inquired.
"Because we need to stop them now, before they can use Mew for their plans," the leader of Team Instinct answered. "Luckily, we've managed to find Team Risen's HQ, and the other team leaders and I are putting together a group of Trainers to storm their building and retrieve Mew. And since you're all already involved, and are aware of Mew's existence, my options are either to let you join Team Instinct's squad, or have you all placed in protective custody. Not exactly thrilled with that second option, though."
Thea stepped up to Spark, staring up into his eyes sternly. "I'm in! Let's go save Mew!"
"Hold on a second!" Marie admonished. "This sounds like a really dangerous mission, and you don't even have a Pokémon of your own yet! And even if you did, I'd be VERY concerned about the idea of you being anywhere near that place!"
"But Mom, Mew is my friend!" Thea cried. "I have to help it!"
Spark smiled sympathetically, kneeling down to put a hand on Thea's shoulder. "I'm sorry, Thea, but I have to agree with your mother. Without Pokémon of your own, if you ran into trouble, you'd be putting yourself at risk.
Thea looked down at the floor sadly, Jaros patting her head as a thought occurred to him. "Hey, wait a second. How did you even find Team Risen's base, anyway? I thought you said they worked all secret-like?"
Spark nodded as he stood up, showing the group the image of a map with a pink line on it on his phone. "By kidnapping Mew, Team Risen have led us to their hideout. As far as we can tell, Mew's psychic cries are basically acting as a distress beacon, and it's showing up on practically every radar in the world."
"Then Team Risen should know about it, right?" Harmony asked, getting a nod in reply. "Oh man, then they must be desperate to pull this off."
"It's entirely possible they saw Mew's interactions with Thea as their only chance," Spark explained. "How they even found out about Mew being in Loyalist City, I have no idea. Regardless, we need to hurry to meet up with Blanche and Candela's squads. I have a helicopter headed here to pick us up in about 30 minutes, so you should get ready while you can."
"Right," Marie said with a sigh. "Honey, I'm sorry, but-"
Marie stopped as she looked down to where Thea was standing. The only problem was, Thea wasn't there anymore. The group looked around the room, but it didn't take long for them to realize, with the door slightly ajar, that Thea had taken off.
"...HOW?!" Spark demanded, confused as to how Thea managed to sneak out without anyone seeing.
"Word of advice: Never try to play hide and seek with that kid!" Jaros answered as the four ran out of the room, looking up and down the halls. "Darnit, she could be anywhere!"
"...I think I know where she is," Marie whispered, her eyes widening.
Thea tried her best to will her tears back as she ran down the hill from the library, reaching a bridge that extended over a small brook. She'd heard rumours of Pokémon who would occasionally appear down there, but that they were the kind who could only enjoy the polluted muck that ran down through the river from the nearby refinery. Not usually her favourite kind of Pokémon. And yet…
Sure enough, as she slid down to the grass on the edge of the brook, she saw him: A Grimer. He was a touch gross-looking and smelled bad, likely why he liked the brook, but he was nonetheless the first Pokémon she saw, the easiest for her to find. She reached into her pocket and pulled out an empty Poké Ball, which she'd stolen out of Jaros' pocket, but before she could throw it, Grimer spotted her and chucked mud at her, causing her to dodge out of the way.
"THEA!" she heard her mother yell as she saw Marie, Jaros, Harmony, and Spark run down the hill toward her. "What do you think you're doing, young lady?!"
"Mom, I have to do this!" Thea argued. "Mew only got caught because of me, because I was playing with it outside! And I couldn't save Mew because I was too scared to become a Trainer! I thought Mew might never come back, but if I had Pokémon, maybe I could've done something last night!"
Before Thea could continue making her point, Grimer managed to smack her in the back hard with a Mud Slap, knocking her down. Marie grit her teeth at the laughing Grimer, about to summon her Charizard on the Sludge Pokémon, but Jaros caught her wrist, stopping her.
"What are you-?!" Marie demanded.
"Let her do this, sis," Jaros said, eyes on Thea as she fought to get back up in the slippery mud. "I get it. She wants to make up for feeling weak and helpless. I...I should've been able to save Mew, too. I failed. Not only did I fail, I got my niece hurt when I was supposed to be watching out for her."
Marie's expression softened as Jaros went on, finally putting his fedora back on. "But I'm gonna make up for that. And we have to give Thea the chance to do the same thing."
Marie sighed, understanding Jaros' position. She looked back to Thea as she got back to her feet. The 10-year-old wiped the mud from her face on her sleeve and stared a hole through Grimer, more determined than her mother had ever seen her before. At that point, Marie knew beyond all doubt that her daughter was ready for this.
"...You can do it, Thea!" Marie shouted, cheering her daughter on. The others soon followed suit, Thea smiling a little at this as she readied the Poké Ball again. Once again, Grimer threw a handful of mud at her, but instead of dodging, she raised her left arm and braced herself, taking the hit. She then chucked the ball at the Poison-type Pokémon, pulling him inside in a flash of light as it opened. The ball then fell in the grass, shaking around for a few seconds before lying still, releasing a small pinging sound.
Thea jumped up into the air and cheered loudly before running over and grabbing the ball. She smiled widely at it, her first Pokémon, before turning around to face her friends and family as they came down to greet her, giving them the peace sign.
"You did a great job, Thea," Marie congratulated, cleaning her daughter up a bit. "And somehow, you managed to come out of this looking cleaner than your uncle did with his first catch."
Jaros harrumphed as everyone else laughed. "You guys are NEVER gonna let me live that down, are you?!"
Spark chuckled a little before looking skyward, spotting a black helicopter with a yellow Zapdos silhouette painted on the side. "The chopper's here. We need to go, now. Marie, what's it going to be?"
Marie sighed, kneeling down to look her daughter in the eye. "...Alright, Thea. I understand how important this is to you. But just remember, this isn't going to be like the battles you've seen Jaros and I in. This is going to be dangerous, and if you're coming, I need to know that you're going to be careful. And you'll have to stay by me or your uncle at all times. Understood?"
Thea nodded, keeping a serious expression. "...Okay, Mom."
Marie smiled, giving her daughter a tight hug. Thea hugged her mother back, all the while looking up at the helicopter as it slowly lowered down to the nearby road.
...Hang on, Mew, Thea thought, clutching Grimer's ball tightly. I'm coming to save you.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: So, here was basically my thought process for Team Risen: We've had the team that tried to liberate all Pokémon because they essentially were animal rights activists that were taking things to a violent extreme. Granted, turned out they were working for a complete liar in that regard, but by and large, that was their motivation. So I thought, why not have a team who is trying to liberate Pokémon from humans because they think humans make Pokémon WEAKER? They want Pokémon to go back to being primal animals who don't focus their efforts through different techniques humans come up with, but instead through sheer brutality, and think themselves as the only Trainers who can handle that kind of power and not hold them back.
Also, Marie is of course loosely based off of my sister, and the nurse in this chapter is based off of Emmybomber. Not something she explicitly asked me to do or anything, I just thought it'd make for a cute little cameo. And Hicks is actually my mother's maiden name, so that's why I used it here.
Anyhow, that's all for this chapter. Check in next time as the assembled Trainers of Teams Mystic, Instinct, and Valor take on Team Risen in an all-out brawl. Ja né!