Cheren stared blankly at the Fast Ball then to Touko's face, and she merely nodded in reply. Cheren then grew shocked at the sudden sensation of smooth fur nudging his open palm, encouraging it to subconsciously close. He looked to his hand and watched as Rolf purred and rubbed his face and head against Cheren's fist, the vibrations causing him to finally feel the mutual emotions of a tender human heart. But he just as quickly dispatched this idea, removed his hand, and activated the ball. "Did Alder name this one, too?" He never looked up; instead, his eyes were casted down upon the lightning bolt painted boldly on the ball, but he had no sense of the ball's aura from Touko's perspective—he easily assumed that the Pokémon inhabiting it was one of the stronger ones.
"He named all of them," Touya reported as he flipped through every page of the manual, searching for the image of a Fast Ball at the top right corner. "This one's named Shinon." He looked away from the manual and focused on the plain yet striking design of the Pokeball. Possibilities of its inhabitant had finally occurred to him just before Cheren released the ball—Touya automatically assumed that an electric-type Pokemon hid inside of the wondrous metal. But exactly what kind of Pokemon, he thought and mused for a bit before deciding to pick apart the issue with Cheren's critical analysis. "I'm wondering if he ever caught a Pikachu. I heard that they're rare over here." Without blinking, Cheren slightly nodded while he remained deep in contemplation and strong scholarly excitement.
"Fast Balls were designed to capture Pokemon with high agilities provided by their sleek and powerful muscle structure." Touya merely stared at his profile image as he spoke even further, but towards this sight, Bel giggled silently and Touko quickly rolled her eyes. "But I highly doubt that Alder would catch some common Pokemon, like a Pikachu. Considering that he usually favors the strongest of Pokemon, or the rarest—minus the Shinx from both—" Rolf scowled a little after he heard Cheren's quick address stated towards him. He aimed to move his paw forward to take a quick swat at Cheren, but Titania's tail quickly brushed right before him and halted him in his tracks. She looked firmly into his eyes until he backed away and abandoned all attempts of revenge, lest he follow Boyd's fate and end up on Titania's angered side. "My best bet is that he would have trained an Arcanine. Another fire-type wouldn't be a bad idea, since he nearly lost that Quilava. I doubt even if his Quilava survived after that battle."
"But he did." Touko threw her words precisely at Cheren, hitting her mark professionally. He looked startled for a moment as he processed those words, but just as quickly, he reverted back into his cold and calculating state—the very state that she found herself disliking more and more in him with every time she saw it. Like strong gusts of hurricane winds, images of that battered Quilava struggling to go on swarmed around her mind in a tight vortex, letting no other thoughts in or out, and she remained very quiet and very still in thought. She was hardly distinguishable from the dead.
"Sorry." He quickly mumbled with a dismissive tone as he conveniently recalled her reactions and Touya's explanations to Alder's last moment of his public life. He recalled hearing that her thoughts dropped alarmingly below her usual standard of happiness and how she had never been quite the same since. But he couldn't quite pinpoint the cause of these emotional torrents—was it Alder or that Quilava? Nevertheless, she was upset, and he had ripped open those flesh wounds bit by bit. He may have been mechanical on the outside, but encased inside that metallic shell was a tender, beating, bloody heart.
"An Arcanine, huh?" Touya, after once again graphically feeling the afflictions upon Touko, threw the topic back onto its original point, and he was telepathically thanked by his dear sister. "I was thinking more of an electric-type. They're usually fast, right?"
"Most are." Cheren replied quite dismissively with a glint of his eyes directed towards Rolf the Shinx—an offspring of one of the strongest yet slowest electric-type Pokemon. Even Touya noticed this change in Cheren's voice, but, being extraordinarily passive around his close ones, chose not to grace the statement with a reply. After a short interval of silence, Cheren finally presented himself with the green light in opening the Pokeball. With a pop and a snap, the blob of fluorescent white light swiveled and swirled, danced and twirled, morphed and shaped, in speed that sent their patience on the edges in a sort of mocking air that picked on their nerves, before striking the carpet space not too far away from Touko.
As the light shattered into self-destructing orbs, a Jolteon appeared before him, perched on its hind legs without a single intention to move or even to acknowledge the humans.
"It's called a Jolteon. And I was right—it's an electric-type!" After consulting the manual, Touya watched the Jolteon utilize the agility of one of his hind legs to eradicate a discomfort on the skin behind its ear.
But that was the trap. Bel smiled delightfully at this feline creature, and thinking he was about as harmless as the Whimsicott, Mia, she approached with every intention to gently caress the smooth yet slightly prickly fur of his head. However, he had other plans. As she approached, his attention drifted to her direction in the same manner of a drunkard, but the glare he zapped towards her was nothing less than god-awful. It was so powerful and so deadly a glare that even she could register that something malicious churned around inside the head of that Jolteon, and she stopped in the middle of her thoughts and actions. She could even hear a faint growl shaking from his throat. Touko, sensing this immediate danger Bel was putting herself in, quickly approached her friend's side while quietly observing that hostile Jolteon. She could only imagine what her mother must have been thinking.
"What's wrong with him? Are you sure your grandfather didn't—"
"I'm more than sure, Bel." Touko's tone was now irritated—her respect for her grandfather went unmatched, except for Touya's, which may have even succeeded hers by a fraction of a margin. But it still felt god-awful for any doubt to arise on her role-model's character. "Not all of my grandpop's Pokemon are going to be too friendly. You've seen what Boyd did. This one might be no different."
"But Boyd had a reason…" Touko didn't catch these words; she didn't catch the warnings from the manual; she didn't catch the pleas from her mother to be careful. All she did catch was the seemingly calm and slightly curious posture of the Jolteon before her—his head cocked to the side slightly, his coal eyes narrowed with criticism, his throat no longer vibrated with sizzling growls. He almost looked friendly enough.
But that was the bait, and she took it without much thought.
"You're name's Shinon, right?" She spoke confidently as she had done before with the others, and she thought it was working because he didn't seem flighty. "Your previous Trainer, he—well—I'm going to be your new Trainer." Shinon didn't flinch nor intentionally command a muscle as Touko slowly approached. "My name's Touko. I'm going to take as much care as you as did my grandfather—your previous Trainer." She was in range now, ever since she carefully stretched out a slightly confident hand and made smooth and gentle contact with his head. He didn't flinch; he didn't growl; he didn't bite. Instead, the cells of his fur and of the first layer of skin upon his head collaborated into simultaneously releasing several small bolts of electricity into the external environment. Bolts of strong lightning escaped and zapped various areas of the room—one zipped past Cheren's head and struck the wall, another tackled the hat right off of Touya's head, a third whizzed past the mother and coaxed a short scream of surprise, a fourth dazzled in the eyes of Bel as it struck a lamp and overloaded it with power, causing it to spontaneously burst with light, but a good bulk of this electricity latched onto Touko's arm and rode up to her chest.
It was a death scare.
A minute, which seemed like an eternity later, she found herself in tears and guarded by Touya's arms wrapped protectively around her. He had dived forward to yank her away from the sizzling sparks and deadly growls of the now openly hostile Jolteon when the others were so stunned and shocked at eh scene that they were rendered paralyze even without the affliction of the lightning. Yet, Touko wasn't quite in the present—her thoughts blitzed in circles, repeating images of Shinon and Cheren in an endless cycle which slowly ceased and rolled into the present as she detected Touya's voice drenched with slowly growing emotions. As she was coaxed into reality, her sight was immediately attracted to the site of some slight burning sensations—the very hand that had touched the Jolteon. Sure enough, there were stage one burn marks covering the majority of her palm. She flinched, something Touya could feel and worry about at that one moment, but instead of answering him, she, like magnetism, felt her sight drift upwards towards the highest point of the dining room—the tall and slender curio cabinet. Shinon laid there with a triumphant smirk upon his face, but he quickly yawned, flashed a warning glare, and laid his head down to gain some rest. Yet, rest was not an option for him. Immediately and to his utter annoyance, Rolf approached the curio and chirped loud and persistent enough for Shinon's ears to twitch and attention to descend on the creature. However, it was then that Touko, out of all of the humans, noticed a difference in the stature of the Jolteon—as he barked down at the Shinx, there was a considerable change of depth in his eyes. Those coal orbs were more accepting, warmer, albeit only slight, and seemed to reminisce on the past, on grandpop, she happily found herself thinking again. Shinon was indeed her biggest problem yet as a Trainer, but he was still a Pokemon with as much feelings as the others. He was not truly malicious.
Before she realized it, Rhys scurried right over to her and applied his miraculous saliva upon her charred and stinging skin while the voices of the humans that seemed so far away now grew with a magnitude that bumped her back into the present, back into the realization that she was perfectly protected in her brother's arms, and back into the feeling of Cheren's hand and concerned words assuring her of safety that not even Touya could provide. The burns, as Rhys inspected, healed completely after five minutes—she noticed by flexing her hand into a fist then back as her eyes finally refocused and settled upon the face of the angel in Pokemon form. He, maybe even more than the humans, was ridden with heavy concern in his eyes and serious frown, but that was all that she needed to be fully exposed to the two extremes of Pokemon behavior. She mulled over the expression and cunning intent of the critical and cunning Jolteon to the kinder expression and wonderful compassion of the smaller and frailer Audino. She had now experienced just a fraction of what it meant to be a Trainer.
With one last firm clasp of Cheren's hand upon her arm, Touko reawakened fully to her surrounding environment, but she awoke to a startling sight. Every human was staring at her, along with some of the Pokemon, with a passionate care that imprinted a reddish blush in her cheeks and her ears. It was even worse when she became aware that her brother's arms were wrapped protectively around her arms and her waist, effectively binding the twins together. The atmosphere of the attention was so great, Touko purposefully looked away to anything else in the room, but her eyes landed on Boyd and that slight concern he, too, held.
"Touko, Touko, answer me." It was Cheren's voice that seemed to linger in her mind as well as his tightening grip upon her bone. Eventually, after much sorting out the past events based on observations alone, Touko dared herself to look at him, to look at those coal eyes flooded over with emotions she had once thought that he never had, to answer a voice that subtly shook with fear, only it wasn't as subtle to her than to the rest. After all, the very last thing she wanted him to do was to worry about her. "Touko, are you all right? Rhys just healed you; nothing else is going to happen." She knew he meant that, but she didn't want to believe it. But Cheren thought differently—since childhood, Touko developed a fear of being sick or injured, but she especially feared death because it was the end of her world. It was too soon to even consider death, she concluded before, but with this incident, when the lightning struck her skin and used her bone and blood fibers as a six-lane freeway, it was about as close a call as any, in her perspective. Even now, she felt the tingles from the strange sensation of electricity pricking straight through every cell, but one last squeeze of Cheren's hand brought her back to him. "But we still need to know if you're all right."
"I think she's starting to get back into it." She heard the vibrations of Touya's voice flood into his chest and onto her back. It was then she finally realized every detail of her surroundings as if the lightning never happened, and it was a moment that she would not soon forget. "Time to wake up, silly." And she felt anger coursing through her veins towards that damnable but sweet brother of hers, but this anger quickly subsided as she rubbed her forehead for a second in thought before even attempting to speak properly.
"Touya, what did…I do?" Her voice landed insecurely in his ears, leading him to believe that she still wasn't fully returned to reality. Yet, he still moved his arms and firmly held onto her shoulders with a small smile full of cheers, but even he couldn't stop pondering over her image as she stood there, silently, taking every shock at its full force. Her face was contorted in pain, but no words or even cries erupted from her lips. The golden and jagged snakes imprisoned her in this silence and tormented her with the agony of burning, ripping and sledding through every one of her cells with absolute zero difficulty. As her body twitched and jerked spasmodically in rhythm with the waves of static, he called her name, dashed from his seat, and yanked her away from the Pokemon. However, he received a few burns on his palms at the same degree as hers.
That fear never fully claimed defeat before rest, despite any smile or cheerful and silly name he could call her; inside, he found a complex of emotions churning around his heart.
"Touko, I told you not to approach that Pokemon!" Her mother had raised her voice for the first time in ages, but it didn't seem to affect Touko much at all. In fact, she slowly let her eyes fall upon the worry that was her mother's face and found herself smiling a little, but she was more thankful to be alive than to be the target of her mother's rage.
"Mom, go easy on her." Touko's ears perked up even more—did she truly hear the very words that had come out of Touya's smiling, happy-go-lucky mouth? For a moment, she thought she was dreaming, floating in some space in some position that mimicked the pressure of the contact with the other humans. For a moment, she had considered that, but in the next, she swung to the conclusion that it was real—every word of it. However, for the life of her, she could not pinpoint exactly why Touya had defended her—for as far back as she could remember, he had always been trying to drag her down into the mud with him, an action that their mother abhorred to the extremes, especially if they decided to enter the house with besmirched clothes, and usually she complied in the heat of the moment, but in the end, he usually left her to hang high-and-dry with intentions of apologizing later. But for now, he was her shield, her protector, and he wasn't going to let their mother's fierce emotions intimidate him. "You passed out, Touko." His attention was now fully on her as she seemed to steady herself without the aid of both his and Cheren's guide. "I had to pull you out of there. What were you even thinking?"
"If you were thinking anything at all?" Cheren added straight after Touya, but his intentions were completely benevolent. As his grip softened, but not as much a Touya's, she turned to his voice, but once she realized their contact, she couldn't stop herself from blushing into a sweet rose color. But this blush quickly vanished once she saw the genuine concern and even frustration in his countenance—his brow was furrowed quite sternly, the corners of his lips bluntly refused to even budge from their solemn state, and his voice was quite cold and harsh than she would've wanted. Yet, she was still thankful that he cared for her with a passion she was sure he would deny. He may just be human, after all.
"I was too eager to befriend that Pokemon. I didn't think about everyone or anything else. I'm sorry." She looked away from everyone while she concluded the ring of her voice, but relief quickly flushed over her body with every release of held breaths, more so when Cheren released his hold and Touya helped her to stand and patted her back in siblinghood. "I'm so sorry, everyone." As if on cue, the humans snapped their attention back to her, some with warming expressions, and others with serious frowns at her voice completely drenched with emotions threatening to express themselves for the worst. Bel was the first to step forth and gently take Touko's hand in her own with that lovely and genuine smile that lit up even the darkest of pathways.
"It wasn't too terrible, Touko. We still have you around. As for that Pokemon," She looked up at Shinon who glowered at her gentle face silently for a few moments before placing his head back down and trying to feign sleep. There was an uneasy air about the room with Shinon's presence, but Bel ignored it and addressed her most courageous friend. "If your grandfather could tame him, so can you! That's what I believe." To emphasize her words, she periodically squeezed her friend's hand, but she lacked physical power to the extremes where she could barely exert any force to harm anyone else. But her passion was there, and it made Touko smile with refreshed confidence. She no longer was apprehensive of her grandfather's Pokemon.