Where was I? ... Just getting to the lab? Okay. *breathes* Okay, lets continue.
About an hour passed. I had fallen asleep on my mother's lap after on half that hour with her petting her hand through my hair. I can't really say when we finally arrived at the lab the Alakazam mentioned, but I can say that when I would find myself awake the next time, I wouldn't be in my mother's arms.
The hour would pass. While I lay wherever I was then, I would dream. Dream of the forest that I lived in and hoped to one day return to. I was having another game of tag with my family. I hadn't tagged either of them, yet.
When I found them walking right out from a tree to my right and looking at me with playfully taunting smirks, I gasped and tried to run and tag them... but found myself without the speed to catch them as my everything seemed to move half as fast as I wanted them to.
Kimmy stood off from me, 20 feet away at most, taunting me with a raspberry and jogging in place. "Were you always this slow, Rali? I can outrun you in my sleep! Your no challenge at all, anymore~."
I was still running, my feet feeling like they were being slowed by invisible tar. Every step took 2 seconds to hit the ground. I started to get frustrated and tried to force myself to run faster... but only found myself floating up through what felt like very little gravity at all. I would end up 5 feet in the air and tumbling forward slowly while my sister laughed at me. In the views I got while tumbling, I'd see her turning around and sprinting off without me being able to give a decent chase.
10 seconds later, after she had left I fell to the ground, sprawled and dizzy. I lifted my head, which felt like I was lifting four, to see that my mother was running over to me. I hadn't noticed it before, but the area was slowly losing it's color. It was becoming faded and grey. So was my mom. I, however, was staying my normal coloring.
She spoke as if this wasn't happening while she crouched down to me. "Oh my~! Are you okay, my little baby? I saw you trip and-" She had been reaching out her hand to mine, but stopped, pulling it back and getting this snicker going behind an obnoxiously grinning mouth of teeth. They nearly took up half her face. "Ha~. Not that easily, slowpoke~! You have to tag me the right way!" I wasn't even concerned about hide and seek anymore. I saw and knew the grey was settling in all around me and on my mom's skin. I wanted to warn her- tried to open my mouth... but I found no sound when I did.
I looked down at my lip, gaping with wide eyes as my hands flew to my mouth. Suddenly, I was moving normal speed again and could talk, muttering a half-hearted, "What...?" I looked back up, but my mother was gone. She probably ran off when I wasn't paying her mind. Either way. The entire forest was now grey and looked ashy, dust in the air as if foreboding, a message on the wind. Two words popped into my sight. They read, "So alone."
I sat there in a frozen stare, numb to the meaning of the words as I shook my head, brows furrowed in confusion.
Somehow... my vision was now positioned in front of... myself? I could see Something... Or I thought I could. When I tried to look, everything went black...
I opened my eyes wide in the real world, gasping as deeply as I could, feeling like I hadn't breathed in a while. The first thing my waking eyes saw was a dimly lit space with a single dangling light source in a cone far, far above me tied to the ceiling of wherever I was. A grey and featureless ceiling.
When I finally came to remember what had happened before, my eyes went wide with fear! I was so panicked that I sat up in a hurry, adrenaline pumping my vains while I could hear my pulse in my ears! What I saw was a charcoal and dark blue striped room that had a grey, metal floor. There was fur, leaves and even scales scattered about, undoubtedly from recently imprisoned pokemon!
I got to my feet and started to look for a way out, breathing heavily in panic. I found hay before that. Two big nests of it. They were mostly clean and at least big enough to take 4 small pokemon or two big ones. On my second look, I didn't find an exit either... I found another pokemon. The way I found it was that it had come up to me and taken my hands, giving me a reason to look it's way as fast as I could in a gasp that burned my lungs! I don't know how I didn't cough. It was the Meloetta from before.
She was looking at me with an expression that was a little scared and very concerned, with wide eyes whose brows raised and a frown in her lips. "Please calm down. I know this isn't a good place to wake up in, but-"
I didn't listen very long, nor look her way that long when I found a place on the wall that had an indention. A door! My mind screamed, {A way out}, and I listened almost immediately by ripping myself from the Meloetta's hands while she gasped and took a step away, watching in concern as I ran right at the door blindingly fast!
When I reached the door, it didn't take that much thought to start banging and hitting on the door with the undersides of my fists! I didn't make much noise at all, nor budge the door significantly. It was like hitting against concrete to me with how big and thick it was to me.
After a while, though, I grew very anxious. I wanted OUT! I should have tried it sooner, but my mind never registered it. Use my psychic power to try and pull the door out! It was brilliant... except...
I started to try, so hard that a pink aura radiated off of me and sparked on and off!
The meloetta gasped and tried to rush over to me, screaming, "No! You can't! This place is like the cages- you'll-" Too late. I heard a whine from the walls around us, stopping what I was trying to do as my aura vanished. Suddenly the floor lit up with electricity that hit both of us, excruciatingly! I screamed in pain at the top of my lungs! The meloetta was definitely screaming with me and in just as much pain! This was not like being hit by any other electric type's lightning! This was like Raiku himself was angry at me! So unbearably painful and sharp enough to be felt down to the bones in my body! Pens and needles were all I knew! Three inch long pens and needles!
Right when I thought it would never end, The electricity cut off with a low -dong!- sound as some sort of signal. I fell into the door, smacking head first into the cold, metal surface. I was numb as it was, so that pain barely even registered. When I hit the ground, it was in a light -tink- with the metal floor. I couldn't move for a moment or two, but it felt like hours. I was so dumb from the pain that crying or whining didn't even come to mind. My heart may have almost stopped...
The Meloetta was in a similar situation, doubled over in a curled up fashion head to the floor within her knees, just trying to bear through it, only she looked like she had more endurance than I did. She even recovered faster than I did, gasping suddenly while she slowly rose, sweating. Her hair, signaturely light and wavey, was messy now from sweat, the fall she took and the electricity. She was able to shake off most of the pain while I still struggled to get my feeling back. Fixing her hair while she walked toward my sprawled out body, she spoke. "Th-the room.. is designed l-like the cages we were in. It will shock us if we-e try to use any power in here..." When she reached me, she crouched down next to my shivering and pathetically twitching body, placing a hand on my back with a frown. "Take your time... If you want to, you can cry. I don't expect you to be able to deal with this sort of pain the first time or second. Let's try for no seconds, though..." Unimportant right now, but you should know that there was something odd about her hand. At that time I didn't realize it, though. Anyways...
...I remember taking her words the wrong way, thinking she was saying that I was weaker than her. I knew the meloetta was a "legendary", but she wasn't one of the strong ones, so her talking down to me felt sort of ... It made me angry... Angry enough to stop my whimpering and most of those uncontrollable twitching movements my body was making.
I had choked what was about to be me crying like a baby, even if the held in sobs made me cough as if I would gag. My lips opened to show what was an angry grit through teeth. It was also a hurt sad curl of my lower lip, but I did my best to hide that and look tougher than I had actually been. Seconds later, to challenge her words, I forced myself to sit up, then stand, even if I nearly fell back down when my knee twitched and threatened to buckle. My legs were still numb, obvious by how when I got up, there was no longer strength enough to keep them from shaking every now and then. I was blushing and sweating, humiliated that this was all I could force out, so far. "I... am n-ot... weak... If you c-can take it... I-I can!"
...The stereotype that boys were the only ones that had pride was false, even if now, that same thing looked so stupid to me. I hated being called weaker or feeling lesser than everyone else, especially then. Being weak was hard... Admitting it back then, though... That was impossible...
Still, looking back on this, it was a good thing my eyes were hidden under all my bangs. The meloette would have seen that it was a greater struggle than what it looked like already. She saw enough though. Her face contorted with worry as she bit her lower lip. She stood up with me, much easier, then said, "You don't have to force it! I already knew you were strong when you argued with the old Alakazam!"
I heard that, but didn't rest my strength. I felt like a ton of bricks were on my back and my legs were filled with the numbness of needles. However, regardless of my opinion, the meloetta couldn't handle seeing my obviously painful struggle to stay on my feet. Her face turned over a scowl as she shouted with a push to my chest from her hands, "Enough, already! Sit!", making me fall over on my backside, then laid out flat on my back with a struck look on my face. When I realized what she did for me, I just let myself huff there on the metal floor. It was cold, but I would be lying to you if I said it wasn't comforting after trying to force back pain. At least by that point I didn't feel like crying or curling up... That would have been even more humiliating than falling over so easily...
The meloetta huffed and sat next to me, frowning. "I know your strong", She repeated, "but it's stupid to force your body to do what it's saying it isn't ready for. And I KNOW you're not stupid, either." She suddenly gasped at her own statement, pausing for a moment. Then she looked off to the side, curling up with arms around her white skinned legs. "'Taking on more than you can handle is when you mess up...' I guess I owe him for teaching me this very same thing." She sighed and smiled down to me softly. "I am called Aria. What do they call you?"
Confused about her wording, but still in pain, I took a few breaths before I could answer. "M-My name is... Ralina... but... what was that you were... saying?" I had to take several breaths after that.
She looked at me and smiled pleasantly. "Oh. That's something a human taught me. Matthew Garneare was his name." She smiled, looking up for something that probably wasn't even there. "How about I tell you about him while you rest yourself?" I took a moment, thinking of how lucky I got to find another pokemon who didn't hate humans... and one that was so open about herself, come to think of it. My head nodded and followed her gaze, either way, to that boring, stone-color roof above us while I listened and regained what strength I could. "He was a really smart guy, even if he was very strange. It might sound weird, but I can understand some human speech. I don't know what the overly complicated words mean, but I grew up around them. I learned to read the human language known as "Elkro de mundar orlds", but in our tongue, it roughly translates to, "The Old King's Tongue". I was-..."
I looked back at her, because of her pause, and caught her with a blushing smile on her face, eyes closed. "...Well, I was roughly a baby when I started learning the language. I guess I'm still pretty young. I'm only about 13 years old." She sighed and shook her head, her cheeks turning back pale again while she looking at me. "Anyways, I met him not long ago. And kinda... well, gotten hurt after 'running away from home.'" She looked down at her pale calf and pointed at some spot on it.
I didn't see what she was pointing at, so I used the strength I gained back so far to turn my head and look a little closer, though she spoke before I got a look.
"I had broken my leg."
I instantly winced at that, but only a little before looking back up at her. "Sorry..."
She cocked her brow and snirked a chuckle at me. "For what? You didn't do it. Another pokemon did, but to be fair, he got hit by one of those big, metal things like the one that took us here." She hummed and looked off to the side, making a swivel with her lips. "I should feel bad for getting him killed, but he was trying to kill ME and chased me to where he got hit. So, I'd rather just remember to stay clear of his kind." She looked at her leg again and put it out in a stretch. It's skin was flawless, looking nearly like it was silken, just like the rest of her flesh. It could HAVE been silk. "Matthew was the one controlling that metal thing. He called it an, uhm... R-200? He saw the pokemon trying to kill me, so..." She let her leg curl back and then folded both her legs together. "Well, anyways, he took me to some weird dome-shaped building and had someone called, "Nurse Joy" treat my leg. Ultimately, she told him I would be there for a month. If he wouldn't have saved me, I wouldn't even be HERE of all places, now."
I had known humans could be kind, but that was the first time I had heard of a human killing for another pokemon. I turned my head away from her and sighed. "Sure wish the humans that took us were more like our human friends... We wouldn't even be here right now, if they were."
She turned to face down at me and made an honest smile when she heard that. "... You'd better tell me about your human friend, later. I don't get to talk to many other pokemon who have them, so..."
I smiled right back a little, but said nothing as she went on.
"Matthew went to the hospital every day. I guess it was about the second day when I first tried to talk to him using the tiny bits of King's Tongue I knew. I didn't know the first thing about assembling the right words into a real sentence, so it was like talking gibberish." She smirked a bit with a wryness about her. "He.. well, he laughed like crazy. I hadn't realized it came out as something weird."
I turned my head to her and asked, "What did you end up saying?"
She smiled, crookedly and cleared her throat before her eyes gazed up at the ceiling. "... I said something along the lines of.. uh... 'fun trip mack to glad poffen'..."
If only she could see my cocked brow. I snickered into a bitten smile.
She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Laugh it up, har har. I got a lot better, I'll have you know."
"Prove it," I said, without thinking with a big grin that immediately sunk down into a sweating frown. Yup. THAT thought crossed my mind... I couldn't speak King's Tongue.
And Aria immediately let out a huffing laugh or two as she turned to me and smirked, brows raised as she leaned over and close to me. "Yeel clov ahn trovna ose' chie... yahn chie sholve torhela yeel, haa~." And for some reason I couldn't hope to understand, she blushed through her smirk.
I just laid there with my eyes wide beneath my hair, till my bangs fell to one side and revealed one. "U-uhh..." A sheepish smile crossed my face as I furrowed my brows, sweating as I tried to think of what might be an appropriate response. "Well, uh... I guess that o-only makes.. sense? I mean, Torchics ARE flightless, after all."
This time, she had a laugh. And right in my face! At least she wasn't too loud. She sat back into her previous spot and cleared her throat as she opened her mouth, pausing before she spoke. "If... ever you learn what I just said, you are gonna... feel like exploding." She smirked while her face relax... except for that growing smile. "Let's leave it at that." ... I see that look on your face. Come on. Stop. I'm sure that was a joke, given the context.
MOVING ON, I OBVIOUSLY felt very lost, blinking at her with the cluelessness of a wooper. "R-right... Well, uh, what happened next?"
The meloetta hummed in question, sitting there for a moment. With an "oh", she smiled brightly and went on. "Well, I guess you could say that me speaking King's Tongue just now is a good demonstration of what happened next. He taught me more and more about the language, day after day. And the more I learned, the more I could understand what he was saying and even respond to it. And he didn't just teach me the vocal part of it. I even learned how to WRITE King's Tongue, which is a lot different than it initially seemed like it would be." She cocked a brow. "The letters are literally nothing like our own. Some merge, others reverse half the time. Not just that. Their words read virtually backwards to our own."
Just thinking about it made me sweat as I let out a whistle. "Sounds complex. I think I'd love to learn it, though."
Aria smirked a bit as a guilty furrow came over her brows. "You should. Just... not from me."
I blinked. "Why?"
She hung her head. "I uh... never learned anywhere near all of it. Just the letters and a few rules."
And then, a grin crossed my face. "Better watch out~. I might learn it before you and then get my revenge. Then, we'll see who's confused."
With a huffing laugh, she smirked through narrowed eyes. "Try. It's way harder than I make it sound. And I make it sound pre-tty hard already, I wager."
Now, it was my turn to take a mock laugh. "We'll see~."
The meloetta sighed and shook her head before she relaxed and stared up at the ceiling. "Well, either way, it was a month well spent. When you learn how to actually speak a language that complex, it really makes the way we were taught- the language, I guess- seem easy. Maybe even childishly so."
"From what you just said, I think I see why."
She just nodded. She then blinked into a blankness, sitting there for a bit. "... I guess I should say that I skipped around a bit. About half way through the month I spent in that hospital, I tried to levitate my way out the window, because I wanted to see Matthew earlier than he usually came. I thought that since I wasn't using my leg, it wasn't gonna hurt." She shifted around a bit while she frowned. "It... didn't work out. I guess that broken bones are gonna hurt no matter what, if you do something wrong. I fell on the floor before I even got three feet away from my bed. Thank Arceus I didn't mess up my leg even more. Nurse Joy got to me pretty quick and Matthew wasn't far behind her. I don't think I ever asked why he was early that day. The only things I know for sure was that I tried to tell him I was fine and that I could do with the pain. That... Well, it made him mad for once. Scolded me and said that he could see the pain in my face."
Aria giggled through a small grin. "He said to me what I did to you. 'Taking on more than you can handle is when you mess up.'" She paused again, before looking over at me and smiling. "I guess that I got comfortable after that. I had to learn to be patient, because I didn't want to have that happen again. And not just that, but any other accidents that could happen from being that way... So, I made that month by learning." She let her smile shrink and eyes close. "I left that place behind after that and went on my way, back to where I came. I could have stayed with Matthew. He offered for me to, but uh..." She folded her arms and looked straight in front of her at the door to the room. "Well, I know he said that it was just so that no one else could catch me, but the idea of being "caught" doesn't appeal to me. It always sounds wrong. Like I'd be a pet, I guess."
I completely understood, nodding my head before laying straight back and letting my hair totally fall out of the way of my eyes. "Yeah. My mom said to never let any human with a red and white ball in their hands get near us. She told us that they were always a sign of humans called "trainers" that could trap us in one of those and take us away."
The meloetta nodded and spoke. "She was smart to tell you that. Some are better than others and let a pokemon go, if it's obvious they don't want to be caught." Smiling wide, she sighed. "I'm glad Matthew was one of those sorts of trainers."
It made me smile to hear that come from her. For a second, it almost sounded like we were going to start talking about the humans that we didn't like.
A few moments later, I sat up, having regained my full strength... or at least the important part of it... Looking up at my hair, I noticed it was still messed up, strands everywhere. It felt like a few clumps were sticking up on the top of my head. I shook my head a few times really fast to whirl and whip bangs and locks all over, but that wasn't working well.
By the time I started trying to smooth my hair out with my... well, nubish hand, I felt a second pair of hands in my hair. These, however, I could feel had fingers. A full set. The only other pokemon or person in the room with me was Aria. If she could have just seen my eyes them. I bet they would be as dinner plates. "Wait. Aria? You have... fingers?" It still shocks me to this day, since it took so long for me to notice. Her hands stopped for a moment and then dropped into my vision. I just stared and smiled a little, kinda intrigued. "Wow." A full set, as I thought, complete with thumbs and each individual finger had smooth, shiny finger nails, which were actually quite nicely kept. She had small hands and like the rest of her arms, they were jet black in color.
I looked up at Aria, sorta letting hair fall away from my eyes as I craned my neck back to look at her. I felt her hands rest on my forehead as she smiled naturally down at me with her hair draping down around her head. It didn't look like she was bothered by my noticing, so I spoke up on the subject. "I didn't know Meloettas had these sorts of hands."
She rolled her eyes and smirked to one side of her mouth more than the other. "Most of us don't. We're usually born with nubs for hands, just like you raltses. Though, I was born with these weirdos." She brought her hands away from my head and held them up in my sight, wiggling her small, slender fingers playfully while she grinned big and toothily with her big blue eyes crossed. "And if I'm honest, that's fine by me~!"
I snickered and brought my head forward, covering my mouth as I started to laugh into my nubs! I could hear her laughing, too. Then I realized I had the nuby hands in our pair up, looking at them with crooked and laughing smirk. "Yeah-haha! You have the cool hands! I got the nubs! But you know what? I'll have hands when I evolve, so HAH! Take that, evolution! Ahahaha!" I was laughing so hard that I rolled over atop her and flattened both of us out on the ground, her more than me, since I ended up laid out on her as she let out an erk. She blushed for a moment while her eyes bugged, but soon enough, she cracked up, both in laughs and in a cheeky grin. We laughed way too hard, though if I'm honest, the fact about our weird hands isn't really THAT funny. It was mostly the goofy face she made that was funny.
She laughed so hard by the end of it that her face was red in the cheeks and her eyes were tearing up. She grinned through that while she whipped the sweaty tears from her eyes and continued to chuckle for a bit. When she finally settled down, she sighed with a satisfied smile on her lips, eyes calmly staring up. She paused while she placed her hands back on my head, gently. "You know, it's funny."
Calming down myself, I stared up at her face with a small smile. "What is?"
"That even though we're where we are, Ralina, here we are, still able to find something to smile or laugh about."
I blinked and stopped smiling for a moment, getting brought back to the reality that we were in a locked up metal "box" that could still shock us if we used our powers. A blank expression dawned my face for a moment until I finally smiled slightly from one side of my lips, thinking back to her goofy face from moments back. "Yeah. I know that I'm still scared about what might happen to us here, but ... I don't know. I might be going crazy, though I feel like I wanna just forget my place and escape to another world." I just laugh at how deep this was getting, remembering that I'm still just a kid... Yeah, a kid... I think it was about then that I finally looked over the meloetta, just seeing how I measured up to her. With the current position we were in, it was plain to see the size difference. She was, at the very least, half a foot taller than me. My covered feet were nearly even with her nubbed points, but when I looked up, I was missing her straight gaze by a quite a few inches. And there were so many other larger pokemon than her that got captured with us. Aria was a legendary meloetta, though. Her being caught was... harder to imagine. It made me really think, for some reason as my expression fell into an uncertain grin. "... You know, I really should be much more afraid than I am. After all, you're 13 years old and a legendary species. Well, I'm just 7 year old ralts."
She almost immediately gasped and sat up, helping me up as well. "J-just 7? But your speech is so-"
"Developed?" I interrupted, guessing her last word as I slide myself and off of her entirely, looking into my lap.
She blinked with a little sweat rolling the side of her face, blush rising in her cheeks for some reason as she flicked her eyes about. She returned them to me as the blush quickly died while she firmed her lips flat together, then nodded her head.
I looked back and smiled half-heartedly. "We raltses.. are very intelligent. We learn much more much quicker than most other pokemon... My mental age might be somewhere around your actual age, but I'm still just 7 years old. Barely..."
She narrowed her brows in concern and hesitantly asked, "Barely?"
I turned myself around with a few scoots, then nodded, looking down and feeling bad for not telling her sooner. "...If it's not the same day as when we were first caught anymore, then... today is my birthday..."
I think that shocked her too hard, because her face was one of extreme pity, her lips forming a frown with her brows curved up as she struggled to keep her eyes on me. A moment went by, then she bit her lip briefly and closed her eyes tight, bowing her head. "No shame..." Suddenly, she reached out and hugged me close and tight to herself. I could feel she was shivering and somehow, the waves of her anger were very apparent... "These humans... they're nothing but CREEPS..."
I didn't try to hold back tears, because in the moment, they just suddenly came flooding from my eyes. My lips remained blank... I think it was in this moment that the following sunk in: I wasn't going home any time soon and I was far more scared than what I had previously let show... I was terrified... I could just hide it away as long as Aria wasn't being down...
The more we sat together like that, the more I felt small and helpless... I hated feeling like that, but I think that what I truly was... This place that we were in was going to break us if we let it. I was already feeling the pressure... I think Aria was, too...