PART 1: BEGINNINGS
Chapter 6
~~ Ethan, Lily, Anthony, Gerald ~~
Aching legs didn't stop Silver from pushing through the wind. And by Arceus, did the wind blow, howling like a mightyena in the night. A light drizzle just started, matting his hair and muddying the dirt. Silver felt as he looked – ragged and weary. He had not stopped to rest since yesterday afternoon, when the attack on New Bark began. He hadn't planned on rushing through Route 29 without sleep, but the circumstances changed. Nothing ever goes to plan, nothing ever goes right for me. The thought was like a nagging ache in ever present in his mind.
Silver hated storms. Such acts of nature reminded him that there was a higher power, and it made him feel subservient. It made him feel weak. Silver hated that.
But no longer, he thought. A smile grew on his face as he looked at the pokeball in his hands, surface slick with rainwater.
The heist was improvised from the start. It wasn't supposed to be that way, but circumstances dictated the events that followed. In the end, he got what he wanted – Silver now owned a rare pokemon formerly owned by Professor Elm. Stealing from the great professor, he thought. Even father would be proud of that. All his life, Silver had studied the art of training and battling pokemon. And it was an art; just as the painter develops the image on their canvas, so too does the trainer develop strategy on the battlefield. For a pokemon battle was a canvas; the back and forth exchanging of attacks added a new line, a new shape to the ever changing image.
But, whereas the painter only had control of their canvas, the trainer had control of their world. Pokemon gave strength, and Silver would no longer be weak.
Silver stumbled over an exposed rock. Gods, am I tired. It wasn't just the jubilation of a successful heist that kept him up and moving. I am literally still in the woods, he thought as he gazed upwards. Thick branches and broad leaves blocked the sky and swayed violently in the wind. A harbinger of things to come? Or, a sign that the worse would soon pass? Silver couldn't decide.
When the attackers descended upon New Bark, he was in his room above the Mareep's Milk, lounging about. He hadn't planned on robbing Professor Elm then and there, but the chaos provided such a perfect opportunity that he couldn't resist. Outside of a constable and a few deputies, New Bark had no true protective services, so the citizens took up whatever they had available – scythes, shotguns, and, if they had any, pokemon – to fight off the invaders. With chaos abound, Silver headed to Professor Elm's lab.
The impromptu plan proved stupid from the start, but focusing only what could go wrong was a characteristic of weak men. The invaders had set fire to multiple buildings and houses along the northern stretch of New Bark, including Elm's lab. When he got to the lab, flames danced along the east wall of the building, rising up its imposing three stories. Silver didn't hesitate to enter.
He was greeted with the stench of smoke and pokeball miasma; one didn't forget the smell of such a potent combination. Amidst the shattered glass and smoldering carpets, Silver recalled seeing one of Elm's aides – black hair flowed wildly, and one of his glasses' lenses was broken – in battle with an invader dressed in black.
He had stood and watched the battle for longer than he should. The aide's kadabra fared poorly against the invader's magneton. The electric-type pressed its advantage with multiple thundershocks, while the psychic-type feebly deflected with reflective shields. The errant electric attacks flung around the atrium with reckless abandon, blowing holes in the walls and doors off their hinges.
A wild bolt had struck near his head, and only then did Silver move to action. He danced his way from the front door to the hallway across the atrium, dodging and diving underneath psybeams and thundershocks. Neither battler nor their pokemon paid him much mind; their eyes were filled with rage and a desire to destroy the other, so nothing else passed their notice.
Once past the battle, the smoke dissipated just enough to make its presence barely tolerable. The lights flickered, and sparks flew from the wires and circuits that ran along the ceiling with eerie regularity. There were signs of battle everywhere in the hallway. Silver's memory grew hazy from there. The inside of the hallway was hot and stuffy, and he remembered the sweat dripping down his face. An odd thing to remember, but memory could be a funny thing, I guess.
The hallway ended with steel double-doors with rubber bottorms and sides, standard in any laboratory. They were unmarked, as if an invisible line stopped the battle from proceeding any further. Silver's memory jumped, and now he was beyond the doors in an alien room. Flashing lights and electronic beeps greeted him. Everything was pristine; a world untouched from the battles outside. A particular domed machine caught Silver's attention, and he moved towards it.
"You aren't one of them."
Silver whirled on the voice, only to find that it belonged to the slim figure of Professor Elm. His hair was slightly disheveled and his lab coat was wrinkled, but otherwise he looked untouched from the conflict outside the lab's walls. He hovered his thumb dangerously over the centerpiece of the pokeball in his hand.
"No, you definitely aren't one of them," he continued. He cocked his head. "You must be here to pay a visit to my lab. Well, you chose one hell of a day. I'm afraid I'm not taking visitors at the moment. Unless, of course, your motives are not entirely sincere…"
Even as Silver replayed the events in his mind, he was still unable to comprehend the sheer luck that he was still standing alive and well. Again and again he replayed the memory, but he couldn't make sense of it all as he could only remember it as one jumbled mess. Seemingly all at once, Elm outstretching his hand, thumb pressing the pokeball's centerpiece; Silver diving out of the way; an explosion echoing from the hallway; Elm being thrown to the ground; a green-haired man appearing from the smoke.
Everything seemed to happen at once, but the end result was the same. Silver and the green-haired man locked eyes and froze in their spots.
"Anthony?" The green-haired man said. His voice was a growl.
"Butch?" Silver said. His voice was barely a whisper.
A blur shot in the air towards Butch, but the arbok slithering by the green-haired man's side intercepted the projectile. The arbok struck the ground hard.
Everyone turned to the source of the attack. Elm stood hunched over, bleeding from his temple, his glasses sitting crooked on his nose. A creature that Silver thought looked like a porygon floated by the professor, but its body was rounded and disjointed, and it spasmed randomly.
Elm growled – a rabid, guttural sound that betrayed his image as the aloof professor – and released a probopass.
"Just want you to know, this ain't personal, professor," Butch said as he released a serperior and a houndoom beside his arbok.
His memory blurred again from that point, although Silver could still recall the stench of pokemball miasma. There were cries and screams and the lab shook with concussive force, but there were no specific details he could recall. His mind was preoccupied with a singular though. The domed machine. It stood there, battling raging around it, untouched, unnoticed.
His memory jumped again, and Silver now stood before it, the dome open. There were three pokeball slots inside, but only two were occupied. Without much thought, he grabbed one.
He wanted to grab the second pokeball – after all, why not? – but a wild thundershock flashed overhead.
Silver knew he had overstayed his welcome at that point. He dashed away from the domed machine, and a second later, another thundershock struck the machine, showering the area with sparks and shrapnel.
Everything blurred again. Silver had dashed through the battling pokemon without taking a hit; the professor and Butch were too engaged with each other to notice him. The only specific memory he could recall was of the burned bodies of Elm's aide and the kadabra lying face down on the atrium floor.
He fled through the building doors and towards Route 29, and from there he kept running.
And now here he was, almost at the gates of Cherrygrove, tired and aching and wet, but successful. He looked down at the pokeball in his hands, its metal coating slick with wetness and glowing even in the dark. He had held it in his hand this entire time because it made him feel strong. For the first time in his life, he felt truly powerful.
A noise from ahead shook Silver from his thoughts. Amidst the pattering of rain, he heard the clomping of feet in mud, plopping with each step. The grasses jostled with the sound. He gripped the pokeball hard.
A lone shadow stumbled from underneath a tree, and Silver relaxed. The shade gave clarity to that of a boy, roughly Silver's age, with dark hair dripping with rainwater from underneath a hat with a golden stripe.
Silver eyed him closely; the other barely seemed to notice him. They walked past each other without saying a word.
Not my business, Silver thought. He had more important things to consider, such as reaching Cherrygrove before the storm grew worse. It couldn't be that far.
"I know you."
Silver stopped, and for a moment, the falling rain was the only sound in the world. He turned slowly, deliberately. "I feel you are mistaken, friend." He spoke to keep his temper in check. "I'm just a stranger on the road."
The boy stepped forward, twisting his hat backwards. "I do know you. I saw you outside Professor Elm's lab in New Bark." His eyes shone with dangerous intensity.
Silver stepped back. I do know him! His hand gripped the pokeball even harder than he thought possible, thumb hovering over the centerpiece.
With each step forward the other boy took, Silver took a step backward. "There was an attack in New Bark the other day. Strange to find you on the road so soon after," the boy said.
The air exploded to life with a flash that blinded in the darkness, accompanied by that noxious metallic stink. A quilava sat next to the stranger, seeming to recoil from the rain. Besides Silver stood a lizard with bluish scales. Massive fangs protruded from hits snout. He had pressed the centerpiece without even realizing.
"A croconaw. Professor Elm had one in his lab," the boy said, although Silver barely heard him over the rain. Louder, the boy said: "Doresey, burn him!"
A fireball erupted, undisturbed by the rain, and slammed into the croconaw. The reptile roared in pain, a high-pitched screech that pierced the ears. The flames rolled off the scales and dissipated to smoke. It looked up at Silver.
Silver didn't know what to do. "Get him!" he said.
The croconaw roared, a deeper bellow that made bones shake. It was silenced briefly as another fireball struck it in the shoulder, but it roared again. It charged, stopping suddenly to duck underneath a third fireball, before standing upright again to counter with a jet of water. The quilava yelped from the dousing, which gave the croconaw the time it needed to close the gap.
"Smokescreen!" the boy said.
With a second to spare, the quilava recovered and expelled a thick cloud of smoke right into the croconaw's face. The reptile slid to a stop in the mud, but whatever effect the smokescreen had was limited as the rain scattered the cloud as soon as it appeared. The two pokemon stared each other down.
The quilava moved first, spitting a fireball. The croconaw dodged with an alacrity that belied its size and dashed forward. Again, the quilava spit a fireball, but it was too late – the reptile's momentum carried it through the blast, and it descended upon the fire-type with a furious rage.
First, it slashed at the quilava with wicked claws,. Then, the croconow's massive jaws clamped around the fire-type's neck, and the reptile started thrashing about.
It was intense. It was frightening. It was life. The raw power of the pokemon battling, even ones untrained, brought an energy that Silver had never felt before. He could only watch in awe as the two battled, and now he was on the verge of victory, his pokemon holding the life of another. All he had to do was give the order.
But the order was hard to give. The words were in the back of his throat, but he couldn't speak them. "Weak!" Silver heard his father's words echo in his thoughts. "That's all you are and all you'll ever be!"
"I'm not," Silver hissed under his breath. "I can take a life. I can." He could do it; he could be strong.
More sounds from the woods broke the battle fog that Silver found himself in. All of a sudden, he felt the rain on his back and hair, saw the smoke hanging in the air. His croconaw still gripped the quilava's neck in its jaw, the reptiles eyes looking the color of blood in the darkness. The hatted stranger was on his knees, tears streaming down his face.
Then he noticed the rapidash standing over him, heat and steam emanating from his body. A man sat on it back cloaked in vapor, looking down at Silver. A snarling mightyena skulked from behind a tree opposite the rapidash.
"If I was you, I'd call that croconaw back," the man on the rapidash said. "I'd call that croconaw back right now."
Silver hesitated a moment, then recalled the reptile in a flash of light. He locked eyes with the boy, whose eyes were dark with fury, and then turned and ran.
Silver finally had that taste of power, of strength, and he wanted more.