Disclaimer:

So you really want to know my secret to writing good disclaimers, eh? Alright, I'll tell you.

BUT! You have to make sure you stick with this. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

100 References! 100 Jokes! 100 Negations of Ownership!

And an 'I DON'T OWN POKEMON!'

DO IT EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Or not. I'm lazy, I usually just do one.

Chapter 51: A Writer

The Magikarp begins as the low point of evolution. The single most pitiful set of characteristics that can be grouped together and still constitute a viable living organism. It knows little more than how to breathe, eat, and flop around; recent studies seem convinced that while it has a set of working reproductive organs, it is only dimly aware of what their purpose is. So poorly suited for life is the Magikarp that it begs the question why it was born in the first place.

Yet even in its squalor and lowliness there is a spark. A glint of something more than just the light reflecting off its shimmering red and gold exterior. There's a driving force within it, within all of them, that causes a red tide to inch up the great Highbank waterfall at all hours of the day, each fish seeking desperately to reach the top and become a majestic, powerful Gyarados.

Ambition.

That furnace burning hot within the belly of the beast. That golden apple at the far end of the table that we stretch ourselves to taste. This city is built on ambition as much as stone and brick, even by design it's ostentatious and begging to be seen. Validated. Skyscrapers jut out from a mighty river that could rise and sweep them away, beacons of light looked down upon by the looming mountains where Salvoutian aggression descended from not a century ago.

It's ambition that keeps this city afloat as much as the carcasses of the Carracostae of yore. Every fisher, businessman, musician, Pokemon trainer; each is a Magikarp yearning to scale their own waterfall. To cast aside the ineptitude and inexperience of youth and become a terror, a proud dragon roaring its victory from the top, drowning out the sound of the rushing water beneath them.

But ambition alone does not yield success. And when failure comes, we fall, and the closer we were to cresting the peak, the more it hurts.

This is a city that crushes ambition as much as inspires it. The writhing purple underbelly of the islands mirror the sickening darkness that can be found in even the purest of souls. That inbred instinct to shove another down the waterfall in order to ease your path upwards; ricochet up off the momentum of those beside you. And in that moment when one is pushed aside and begins to free-fall, the glimmering towers of the city become loathsome, mocking eyes, a damning reminder of one's place as a skittering sand beetle on the shore.

The pathway to Highbank's waterfall is not an easy one. But it is not a difficult one, either. A trip across the eddy, a duck under some ropes, a short climb up a rocky path... it's all that it takes to reach this precipice and gaze down on the plethora of Magikarp that will never reach the top. That will spend their entire lives struggling only to fall short and join the other bodies in the pool beneath.

It's cruel, to have a city built on ambition so close to such a stark reminder of its shortcomings. To give the lost and war-torn soul such a vivid picture of futility, and to offer the chance of ending it with a few small steps.

To embrace the ultimate fate of being another body in the pool.

"Jackie?"

I raised my head slowly from my composition book, dabbing at my eyes with the back of my pen before turning my head. "Yeah."

My sister bit her lip as she stepped up onto the rocks and stood beside me, tugging at a braid of her midnight hair. "Here again, huh?"

I sighed, turning away and looking out over the Highbank falls, breathing in the mist. "It's not like that. It's a good muse, is all."

"Doesn't stop me from worrying." Bonny chewed her lip as if it were a particularly tough vine of licorice... Dome knows her lipstick was red enough to give it that appearance. "I trust you when you say you're better now, but you could always trip over one of these rocks."

That'd be a hell of a way to go. And no one would believe it was an accident, not after last year. "I'm being careful, ok? You don't have to be my mother, I can hardly stand the sister part."

She knew I was kidding, despite my tone, and she smiled and wrapped me up in a hug. As horrible as it sounds, I wish she wouldn't: she's like an iceberg, my sister. Constantly comes in at 93 degrees when she gets her physicals done. "Well as much as I hate to do this, I need you to come with me, ok? I know you're in the middle of something, but I just got a ring from Leon over at the gate. New trainer in town, probably going to be hanging around in Beta Market to watch the Milotics."

I returned to my composition book, setting my pen to the paper and hoping words would come out. "Do we really have to greet every single one that comes into town, Bonny? It gets really tiring really quickly."

"Aw c'mon, Jackie, it's been thinning out. We haven't had a new trainer come to town for a solid week and a half now, and it's only one." She rested her head against mine. "You forget, you know. We're not just Gym Leaders, we're ambassadors. The entire point of the Pokemon League is intercultural exchange, so we want to make sure his first night in Ginli is a good one."

My gaze wandered over to my Shellos, curled up on one of the rocks beside me. I poked at him with my pen, the black slug cooing a bit at being tickled and moving, leaving me a trail of black sludge to dip the tip in and continue writing. To become an anonymous face among the fallen and escape the piercing gaze of the mocking lights...

"Jackie, come on!" Bonny tugged at my arm and I sighed, lifting myself up carefully and whistling for Shellos, the Pokemon crawling up my leg and side and settling in my satchel, where I placed my composition book as well.

"Alright, fine. But can we ditch the costumes this time? It's way too cold for that skirt."

"That skirt is a vital part of our image as the Twin Pirates of Highbank and you know it, Jackie." That was a no then. "I know it seems silly now, but one day you'll realize just how important it is to maintain a sort of mythos around you, ok? Trust me."

"Oh believe me, I get it. Mythos is the reason the whole continent's scared of a Pokefur in a Duskull mask, right?"

Bonny shivered. "You've got talent, sis, but... could you come with more flattering allusions? I'm not keen on our gimmick being compared to Death's like that."

I nodded, but not in agreement. I'd just come to the realization that 'flattering allusions' rhymed with 'shattering illusions'. The phrase was begging to be used in a poem about the prophecy of Agatha.

Bonny drug me down the rocky path and back into our rooms at the gym, getting me out of my t-shirt and jeans and lacing me into my... sigh... corset. A ridiculous white one with a brass lining running down the middle and under the bust. My skirt was black with similar steampunk-ish trappings, while Bonny's outfit was identical, but with the color scheme inverted, and pewter instead of brass..

If I'd known five years ago that this was going to be more than just a phase for Bonny, I'd never have agreed to it. Though I suppose at the time even I'd thought it was a cute idea; a couple of steampunk pirates sailing across from the gym nestled in the waterfall's eddy, challenging each and every scurvy dog that had dared set foot in Highbank to test their worth in a Pokemon battle.

It was a hell of a tourist trap, and when we got that commendation from the league for putting in extra effort to welcoming trainers... that was the nail in the coffin. Bonny was sold for life. Hence why, when I should have been finishing up my essay on the ironic harmony of ambition and futility, I was loading up onto our powerboat shaped like a miniature galleon and heading into town. Waste of a perfectly good sunset.

"Do your best, ok?" Bonny massaged at my shoulders, seeing how tense I was. "We've got ourselves a bit of a celebrity this time. Leon says it's Axel Jackson who's shown up."

"Jackson?" I mulled over the name. "The one that crazy guy in the market keeps telling everyone is Death?"

"Well... yes..." Bonny, really, you need to see someone about chewing your lip like that, it's going to come off one of these days. "But also, you know, from the news? The Cliffkiln relief? The raid on Team Musket? They say he's a real powerhouse."

"They say a lot of things." I shuddered just remembering the articles I'd read: journalism had really gone down hill these last few years. So many grammatical errors and so little substance. "The way some people write it's like he's the friggin' Messiah."

Bonny chuckled. "I suppose he won't need a boat to get to us then, hm? He can just walk."

I've done a bad job of describing exactly where our gym is. I've used the word 'eddy' a few times, sure, but as a writer I feel like I've only put a few brushstrokes onto an otherwise blank canvas, so let me fill in some happy little trees, ok?

Right next to the great Highbank Waterfall, there's an island with a large collection of rocks jutting out of the river, Carracosta Zeta, it's called. It blocks a pretty wide swath of the river, so the water actually calms down and forms an eddy where you can float peacefully without worrying about going over the falls. If you climb up on the rocks late at night when everything's still, you can look directly down past the foam and mist and into the dark abyss below, and hear the moronic cascade of 'karp' sounds floating upwards. The Highbank Gym, our gym, is on a peninsula of land attached to those rocks.

We're not connected to the rest of Highbank by bridge, so we have to use our boats to get into town. They used to run a ferry back and forth between Alpha island and here, but stopped when the boat attendants kept failing to spot jumpers on the voyage over: we used to average something like fifty plunges a year, and that's just the ones where they went through with it. Highbank will do that; chew you up, spit you out, and make fun of you for going around in public with teeth marks on your skin. Nowadays, anyone looking to swan dive has to pass themselves off as a trainer, or as someone with official business at the gym. I suppose you could swim, but if you're in good enough shape to cross the two miles between here and Alpha you're probably not the type of person looking to kill themselves.

Our boat puttered past Alpha island first: the central business district where most of the steel and electric towers that made up our skyline were nestled, an imposing entryway for any trainer who'd just tired themselves out crossing the Skarkillon Bridge. When I was younger I'd seriously considered climbing onto one of its ornate arches and etching 'All Hope Abandon, Ye Who Enter Here'. No one would ever see it, though. Alpha and Beta are connected by a bridge that our boat was easily able to slip under to get around to the docks.

The pier at Beta's open market was where most of the fisherman kept their boats, and we had a special place for docking our mini-galleon. Bonny let out a soft gasp as we approached: the Milotics were breaching just as the sun was hitting the water, like clockwork. As we got out of the boat, I heard a woman yell 'HOLY..." and chuckled. It was always amusing to see newcomers react to the size of our river's Tender Pokemon: forty-five feet from head to tail, and glistening with rainbow scales; from my viewpoint, they began as a dark crimson and slowly turned violet as I watched them jump over the narrowest parts of Gamma island, coming up from the water with a sonorous sigh and crashing back down on the other side, sending ripples through the river that rocked the boats even on Beta.

You would think with a clutch of anywhere from ten to twenty of these Pokemon running around, that no one would ever be sad in Highbank. Milotics were supposed to be able to calm the angry and reassure the depressed, according to both lore and science. I, for one, never felt myself becoming happier on seeing them, though. Perhaps it was something wrong with me. Or perhaps they didn't care.

I nudged Bonny's arm and pointed towards the redheaded girl who had yelled out earlier. "She just got into town. This Axel guy could be with her." Straighten the skirt, pull up the corset... force a smile, Jackie, you can do it. I will 'welcoming host' the stuffing out of you people if that's what Bonny wants. My sister yelled 'Avast!' and the people in the market stirred, scooting to the side to give us a better view of our visitors.

And... well, gosh. I guess it was nice to see that I wasn't alone in not being immediately spurred to joy on seeing Milotics, but this was bordering on ridiculous. Axel was leaning on one of the pier's wooden posts, a resigned look on his face while a Squirtle and Cyndaquil clung to him. Farther behind them was a Treecko that was growling to itself, and a Meditite who seemed bordering on tears, burying its head into a Gardevoir's side and leaning against... wait...

"Vanna?" Bonny stumbled a bit, as I'd spoken the word in the middle of her welcoming speech (which is super interesting and well-written, I swear. Ignore that fact that I didn't mention it here.)

"Erm... yes! Vanna Albright! What are you doing on the turf of the Penzance Twins?" Good save, Bonny. Sorry for messing things up again.

"Ooh, you two are always so cute!" Vanna was a beacon of light blazing out of a dark horizon, getting in your eyes and doing its damnedest to make you crash your car. I suppose anyone would manage to be constantly cheerful after winning the genetic lottery like she had, but her forward attitude and the way she immediately jumped from the Pokemon at her feet and grabbed us made me instinctively want to rhyme the word 'chipper' with 'stripper'. "Axel, this is Bonny and Jacquotte Penzance, Highbank's Gym Leaders! Aren't they adorable?"

Axel lifted his head, looking us over. "Yeah, sure." His voice was like a choked whimper. I knew that tone, I'd used it plenty of times over the last year. And to be in Highbank during that emotional state...

I clacked my heels on the cobbles and walked over to him, poking at his shoulder. "Hope you like seafood. We're not letting you leave this town without having some." I wasn't going to let this guy slip any further. Not on my watch. "Come on."

Where Milotics failed, buttered Crawdaunt claws might just bring back the spark.

Author's Note

Ooh boy, we're starting to get going now. Jackie's a character I've wanted to introduce for a while, believe it or not. Well, since the 'Renaissance' anyways. But more on that another time, today we ACTUALLY HAVE A QUESTION HOLY SMOKES.

For those of you who have forgotten, THIS IS SUPER ENCOURAGED AND I LOVE THEM. Ahem. Anyways, this is coming from Schmacklar, who writes:

Don't the two countries have any legendary Pokemon? If they don't, that'd be strange. If they do, then it's kinda weird that they're not trying to stop a psychotic murderer that brainwashes Pokemon to do his/her/its bidding. Unless they just don't care.

This... is actually one of the most insightful questions I've ever gotten, I think. I think it's very revealing of my own personal mindset when it comes to Legendaries: rather than guardian deities looking over humanity and Pokemon alike, I've always thought of them as just, well, really rare Pokemon. Last of their kind, perhaps, or ancient ones with long lifespans.

There IS, however, precedent for this in the anime, so I suppose I do actually have some explaining to do. And it's something I'll have to really consider. The uncaring option is most in line with my own personal take on the Pokemon, but maybe not the most in line with the Franchise and the story's own thematic sense. And it certainly doesn't open up any plot elements. I'll honestly have to think on it... I will say this, though. There's definitely going to be a storyline involving a legendary at some point. Where, when? WHO CAN SAY?

I mean, I could. But I'm not going to.

Viva la feminism?