Chapter Thirteen
“I guess it all started off simply enough,” I said. “I was a wild Pokémon and he was a trainer travelling through the forest I called home. Back then, I was younger and more reckless. You could call it cockiness, if you wanted to. I took stupid risks and never planned too far ahead because I was convinced that no one could ever hope to catch me.” I chuckled a little bit at the follies of my youth. “When he entered the woods, every Pokémon knew it and only the weak and the stupid stayed behind. I should have thought more about why I was the only Pokémon who wanted to test themselves against a human opponent in battle. Sure, I had some experience fighting, but it was mostly small scrapes and scuffles with my buddies, nothing serious. When I fought him, however, it was completely different.”

“How so?” Amie asked.

“Well, for starters, he had a plan. Up until then, my experience of fighting was all instinct. Acting in the moment and seizing opportunities as they arose, that was my style. But he was masterful. Used the environment against me, gauged my strengths and limits early on in the fight, and lured me into a number of traps. I wish I could say that I held my own, but in all honesty, I know he was taking it easy on me. And that was the other big difference. Even though I was a wild Pokémon and he was a human, it was a sporting battle. It made more sense when he captured me after I had been weakened enough, but there was still something almost honorable about the way that he and his Pokémon matched wits and skills against my own.

“After he had caught me, he explained to me that he was on a quest to become a great Pokémon trainer. I did not know what that all entailed, but I was more than happy to help out. I had dreams of glory and I wanted to learn more from the training that this human could give me, and for a while everything worked out. We fought as partners in more battles than I can remember, against Gym Leaders, other trainers, wild Pokémon, you name it. After we had completed our trek through the country and placed respectably enough in his division of the League Championships, he told me that there was far more to the world than what I had known. There were other countries across vast oceans, with new Pokémon and new challenges to face. I was hooked on the life. I would have followed him anywhere and I nearly did.”

Amie cocked her pink head to the side at that. “What do you mean ‘nearly’?”

“Well, a Pokémon trainer is only allowed to have six battling Pokémon with them at any time for some reason. So some years I would be left with his parents while he traveled and trained, before rejoining him to lend a helping hand during big tournaments. I missed being part of the team terribly, but I was hardly the only Pokémon he left behind so there was plenty of company. Plus, I got to spend some time with his parents, going with them when they ran errands, went to church, and the like.”

“Church?”

“It’s not important. Anyways, I had the chance to join him again as we set off to the country of Orre, where they had finally succeeded in establishing their own Pokémon League and were offering huge incentives for trainers to come and be the first to take on the challenge. Things were going well at first, but then during one of the gym battles, my trainer collapsed. At first they thought it was stress or dehydration or something, but it wasn’t. He was sick. Really sick.

“That put an end to his traveling and his dreams. He moved back home with his parents, and, a few months after that, into a hospital. He was dying and every day that went by saw him getting weaker and weaker, no matter what the doctors tried. It felt wrong, still feels wrong, that I had to watch him slowly waste away to nothing. He wasn’t even full-grown and had to face the fact that he never would be.”

“Zeke, I’m sorry,” Amie started, but I continued on without hearing her.

“His whole family basically moved into the hospital they spent so much time there, and because he insisted, they brought his Pokémon to visit him. A couple of them refused to go back after the first time they saw him lying in that bed hooked up to all kinds of machines, his hair all gone. They didn’t want to see their beloved master and friend like that, and I don’t blame them. But I kept going back. I felt I owed it to him.

“That’s when I taught myself how to read actually. While I had picked some of it up from our travels and my time around his house while he was gone, there was never really a need. Every e-mail he sent home was read aloud to us Pokémon by his parents and we dissected every word. But once he got sick, no one wanted to share information with his Pokémon anymore. In order to know what was going on, I had to be able to read the charts and reports of the doctors, even if I had to steal some of them from under the nose of the hospital staff, and that meant I had to struggle to figure out what all of these strange symbols and pictures meant. It wasn’t easy, and it meant a lot of time spent pouring over books in the lounge while he slept. It was a lot of hard work, but I did it. Ended up not helping a lick with most of the medical terms, but by then it didn’t matter. Soon it wasn’t just the words on paper but the whispers among the nurses and the doctors outside of his room that sounded dire. All of my work ended up being for nothing because there was no hiding what was plain to see.

“By then, the hospital bills were mounting and his parents resorted to selling off his Pokémon in order to pay for them. They started with the bigger and more impressive ones, but when they couldn’t make up the difference, they moved onto the less rare ones. Like me.

“What made it worse that, by then, he had already given up even if his folks hadn’t. He was barely awake for most days, and I don’t think he ever knew what was going on. Still they kept trying to keep him alive, prolonging his life. I don’t think he was in pain or suffering too much by then, I think he as just resigned to it.

“By the time it came down to selling a Pikachu to keep a dying boy alive, I didn’t complain. I was resigned to it in a way as well. But as soon as the money changed hands, I split from my new owner and headed back to the forest where I had first been found so many years before. But things were different now. I had been changed too much from my time among humans and I didn’t fit in with the wild ones. There were habits and tastes that were incredibly hard to break. Fitting in with the others was no longer an option, but that was fine by me. I was unique among these Pokémon, and that gave me a new sense of pride.

“It was lonely. All of the other Pokémon, even the ones I had grown up with, seemed like strangers to me, and of course I was even stranger to them. I thought about waiting for another trainer to come along, or even going out and looking for one, but I couldn’t. The thought of going through all of the experiences again was awful to comprehend. There was a boy, about the same age as my trainer when he found me, but far less confident and far less skillful. Three times he entered the Viridian Forest searching for a Pikachu and three times I was the lone Pokémon who stood before him. Just like before, I was the only Pokémon who didn’t run as soon as the trainer entered the forest, and just like before it was out of my own pride. Except now, it was tinged with confidence borne not out of petty scuffles and youthful arrogance but out of hard-fought trials.

“Every one of our clashes went largely the same way. He had a few Pokémon, but he was not very good at using them well. It didn’t help that the Pokémon and their trainer both gave off an aura of being used to failure and coming up short, sad as it sounds. After running circles around him, he would take his Pokémon with him and leave the forest with his frizzy red head of hair hung low in disappointment. It was sad, but in a way kind of refreshing to have my routine broken up by his efforts. Maybe some part of me was hoping each fight would be the one where he finally triumphed over me, but I never got the chance to find out.”

“Why is that?” Amie asked.

“Because you showed up and changed everything,” I said, allowing myself to smile.

Not long after I had finished talking, the same automated female voice from before came on over the speaker system, announcing, “Arriving in Saffron City. Transfers to the Green, Purple, and Red Lines are available.”

After the locomotive slowed down to a halt at the Saffron station, my ears perked up in relief after the harsh screeching of metal had ceased. I could hear the doors open and people getting on and off of the train. The door before us did not open, however. “Looks like we have to make our own way out,” I grunted and leapt to the floor of the car. A small panel was next to the exit, slightly above my head. I concentrated, feeling the surge of power in my cheeks, before releasing a small arc of electricity at the display. The screen was overcome with static and the keyboard began to smoke as the smell of burning plastic filled my nose. The important thing was that, with a strained hissing sound, the door slid open, allowing Amie and I to escape the confines of the train.

“Ready?” I queried, turning my head back to my travel companion.

“Ready,” she said, already transformed from a Mew back into a Pikachu. The two of us sprung from the car, far from the bulk of the passengers who were still boarding actual passenger cars rather than attempting to stow away with the cargo. “Do you think it’ll be okay with a door hanging open like that?” Amie asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s fine,” I said as my eyes scanned the electronic board of arrivals and departures hung up on the wall of the station. My excitement was replaced with shock as I found that every time that the express between Saffron and Goldenrod was listed, the area where the time of arrival would normally be listed was reading “out of service” in crimson uppercase letters instead of a time. “No, no, no,” I whispered to myself.

“Zeke, what’s wrong?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I continued. The Saffron-Goldenrod Express was the main line of the Magnet Train. It was how the whole rail line got started. There was no reason why it should be out of commission. I felt nauseous and stumbled as I walked away from the board. Overestimating just how much support I needed, I leaned into a small nearby waste bin and it toppled over with a clatter. Various pieces of trash fell out of the receptacle; leftover food, cigarettes, and all of the other hallmarks of humans. But what caught my eye was the dirtied newspaper that was now laying half in and half out of the garbage can.

“We should go, Zeke,” Amie said urgently. “People are looking at us.”

Instead of answering, I picked up the soiled paper with trembling paws and looked at the front page. Above a color photo showing lines of grim-faced soldiers, menacing Pokémon, and imposing vehicles stretching off far into the horizon, in bold black letters still harsh against the no longer white paper, was the headline, “Johto Closes Border”, and beneath it, in smaller letters, “Is War Inevitable?”.