Leah landed onto the ground with a shocking ''thud'' noise that shocked the entire alleyway worth of stray Pokemon, but mostly served to rattle Yuewen''s ankles. They had just exited what most would consider the ''backstreets'' of Striaton City, the terrible, oppressive air of rotting food and rotting Pokemon finally gone, she was practically dancing, wanting to kiss the only slightly dirtied concrete floors and inhale the slightly tainted night air that she took for so granted. So what was this wench doing, leaping off story high buildings like it was the circus and she was the amazing Crobatman at near the pitch of midnight?
"Congratulations, darling, you did it. Here, have a honey-mustard skewer of moo-moo meat." She pulled out a meat skewer out of her ass, or to say, out of nowhere would probably be better phrasing, and practically forced it down Helmet''s throat, holding it just before him as he ate.
"Next time, I want... Um, let''s see. Basically anything but Miltank, please," he said, happily munching the meaty skewer as the wench held him under her naked arm.
Next time? She questioned briefly before stepping in between them, wrenching the meat-skewer away and handing it to Helmet, so that he could eat it normally. How much Miltank does this guy eat? She watched him for a bit, munching on, before clearing her throat.
"Hello," she smiled, remembering her painful beginnings as a volunteer substitute secretary. "How may I help you?"
"Hello there," Leah responded, before bursting into laughter, placing a firm hand on her shoulder instead, only if to keep her upright. "I can''t. You sound just like Jeremy. Are you really such a germ?"
"The bourgeoisie is blind to the concerns of the working class," she growled, trying to shake her hand off, then having to pry her fingers off, one by one. She had an iron grip. "What do you know about Jeremy? Put some respect on Jeremy''s name, he has to serve customers like you."
She was too busy laughing to respond. Yuewen hated this wrench the moment she laid sight of her, or more specifically, the moment she was touched by her grossly, dainty, cool hands. First, she hated when people got in her personal space without permission. It reminded her of her friends'' buddies back in the day or that one particularly insistent traveling ''customer''. Second, she hated how she touched him without her permission also. It reminded her of ways that she treated him and because she hated when she did it, in a roundabout way, it also meant that she hated herself. And he seemed to like it more when she did it.
The wench rubbed her nose as if she did something to be proud of. "Yeah. He said that I was more trouble than his three most troubling customers combined. The champion, Ms. Rose, and Majors. And I was the only one shameless enough to complain that the food was too cold."
"The champion?" he asked.
"Yep," she said, wrapping her arm over his head again. Yuewen wished he would just shut up. "I''m- and you guys I guess, because I''m telling you - are the only people to know, because I broke- bothered- Jeremy so much. Everyone strong, or at least a lot of strong people, who pass through this town eat there eventually. It''s kinda like a rite of passage. Not that you suddenly become strong after going there, but people with strength are attracted there. LIke you guys."
"Uh-huh." He nodded along dumbly. "I handpicked that place myself. First place we went to in the entire town."
"Good boy. Who''s a good boy? You''re a good-"
"And what," she said loudly, the noise sharp and shrill in the quiet night air. "Do you want exactly? I caught the Purrloin just as you asked. Feel free to leave at any time now."
She finally let go of him. But now, she was upon her, rubbing her hair like she was some sort of pet Pokemon. "Oh yes you did. I was watching from the roofs." She pointed at her creepy, wide black eyes that seemed to stare at her soul in the restaurant. She shivered. Being stared at, so relentlessly and completely, made her feel like she was back with Angelina again, playing pretend and laughing along, all whilst they stared at her the entire time, never blinking, never expressing anything but a relenting stare, but she could only laugh along, a puppet on a string, coals eyes not meant to cry. That was probably the third and really, only real reason that she hated Leah. Because she felt as if she saw her. The part of her that she would never let him see.
"-And then, boom. Bam. You knocked him out with a punch. Holy shit, that was the craziest shit. Who punches Pokemon? You''re out of your fucking mind. I was going to give you a reward for being such a good girl but... You cheated on me. You were supposed to do what I told you all alone."
She froze. The wench''s arm tightened across her neck to the point where she wasn''t choking, but where it was impossible to escape if she was choking her. Her hair got tucked away, with such grace, but such power, and a whisper trickled in her ears, the cool tickle of hot air assaulting her.
"Don''t get jealous, babe girl. I love the two of you equally, alright? Chin up."
"D-Don''t touch me there," she squawked, as long delicate fingers caressed the bottom of her chin, not nudging it upwards as she was taller, but stroking her closer to those eyes. Yuewen tried her best not to smile. She was already blushing. "Don''t call me that. Don''t touch him either. D-don''t make me laugh."
They laughed together as Yuewen reflected about how unfair it was. How was it that this wrench could do anything we wanted and just be beautiful enough, charming enough, audacious enough to never face the consequences? By all accounts, she should hate her. She reminded her of her own inferiority and formlessness. That was the final reason she hated Leah. Because she should hate her. But she didn''t.
"Anyways, the reason I''m here." She cleared her throat, wiping away a stray piece of hair that fell to the side. "It''s not only to eat at the Striaton, City of Restaurant, really. I have a proposal. A reward for you guys, but for real this time. Just don''t cheat this time and I promise you, I''ll give you everything you ever wanted."
"I want you guys to complete the first gym on the last day possible. In two weeks time. Juuust before midnight." Her crazy eyes gleamed under the full moon. "Well? Sounds interesting enough?"
-.-.-
Yuewen never felt dirtier or cleaner as she got into the shower. It was nice to let the mind relax for a bit. To have some time for herself.
"Pidove!"
Of course, she was never truly alone anymore.
The skyrat fluttered just beyond the curtains; she could hear the incessant flapping noises of a fat bird trying to elegantly keep itself afloat in a very contained area. Ever since that day Helmet got knocked out by a caterpie, Yuewen had acquired a bad habit of letting out her Pokemon whenever possible, treating them more like pets than the killing machines they were destined to become. Not only was it not very effective, it was also exhausting.
"Pidove. Pidove!"
"Oh no you don''t" she said, but it was too late. The skyrat had flown directly into her shower, getting her sticky, wet feathers onto Yuewen''s only recently, not sticky, but wet skin. They gathered onto her faster than she could brush them off and she was paranoid that they were going to stick onto her back or that by squirming and turning so much that she was going to slip in the shower and split her head open.
"Get out. Get out. Get out." She chased the bird out, stepping out of the shower to yell at it some more like a naked, crazy person. "You skyrat. What do you even want? Birds don''t shower. Wait... Don''t tell me you''re some kind of crazy lesbain like her, right?"
She slammed the curtain as shut as it could get, which was not very much, and thought of the proposal. Of course Helmet accepted it right away, hardly even bothering to think of it before heading back to his own room. Wasn''t this his dream that he valued over everything? Why did he trust her so much then? He was actually like a Lilipup in that fashion, in the palms of her hands, only thinking about ''training'' and ''getting strong'', leaving her with the important questions like ''budgeting'' and ''not getting fucked in the ass by some stranger that they only met today''.
If she were to betray us... Yuewen didn''t even want to think about it. How Leah would laugh and laugh and laugh, maybe even do a backflip, tell them that they were stupid little babies or some shit. And how Helmet would react. The light leaving his eyes. His fist curling without permission. The shock and disbelief on his face.
If she was to let that happen, she would never feel clean again.
Drying and dressing herself, she strode to the bed in her hotel room where her Pokemon laid. Purrloin had been ignoring her from the moment she had been caught. It was not five seconds after she released her and she started strided away from her that she thought Purrloin might leave her forever for real this time and she couldn''t be asked to find her again, so she only let her out when they were safely secured in their Pokemon Center hotel room.
She sank into the beautifully soft bed, letting her hair unravel all over the feather-stuffed pillow. Purrloin sprung up and stalked away, not even dignifying her with a Pokemon cry. Besides her, Pidove was already fast asleep, knocked out cold whilst perched on the bedpost right above her.
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She profiled the shit out of that Purrloin, but she still didn''t know the first thing about it.
She sighed, rolling in the bed of her own. All things considered, today was pretty fun. It wasn''t like she was an idiot, y''know? She didn''t force her Purrloin to take a bath, fed Pidove accordingly whilst cooing it as it feasted. She knew what purrloins and pidoves liked and disliked in general. Purrloins will lick themselves clean and will usually be willing to change behaviours until they evolve. And pidoves... you just had to feed them and keep them clean and they''ll be happy.
Honestly, she couldn''t wait to get to know her Pokemon. To talk to them. That''s what started her on this journey in the first place.
Yet, she wished that she didn''t have to talk to them, not really. If only she could grunt and point at them, pretending to be happy with the vague platitudes and understanding for the rest of her dreaming life, the nightmare of what could have been, never being dreamt again...
-.-.-
"Hi, human. Wow, are we talking? This is so funny. Why am I talking human? Coocoocoo. Haha. Coocoocoo."
"Coocoo?"
"Oh. I am just trying to talk nonsense. But I cannot. Sometimes I say Coocoo. Talk without saying anything. Just because I want to."
"Wow.... Um. Do all Pokemon do that?"
"How am I supposed to know? Coo. I only talk to other pi- pi- pi-. That''s funny. I cannot say that word that I always say. You know what I am saying? The word that I always say."
"Pidove?"
"Yes, that one. That''s the word I like saying. Coocoo. What was I saying again?"
"The Pokemon you have met?"
"Oh, yes. Coocoocoo. The Pokemon I have met. I have met so many other pi-coocoo. They are so boring. I like you the best. Because you are funny. I also like Dwebble. He is super cute. Nice to me too. He talks just like us. Tries to anyways. Is very funny."
"What about Purrloin?"
"She is beautiful. I like her. I have not heard her speak though. But she does not look at me like I am food. I was scared. But she is beautiful. It is funny too. When you punch her. Catch her."
"...What don''t you like, Pidove?"
"I love everyone. Everything. Coocoocoocoo!"
-.-.-
Yuewen slammed her head against her mattress. Again. And again. And again. She was on her knees. A bed was right before her. It was night, right? She should be sleeping in that bed, because it was night. And because she was tired. Exhausted. Frustrated.
She had spent hours talking to Pidove. She spent around half an hour trying to get Purrloin to speak to her. To them.
What was this? It was the worst. She groaned into her pillow.
So this was how it worked: You go downstairs in the Pokemon Center, grab a waffle or something from the buffet and request a training room as you eat, having already fed all your Pokemon in your little borrowed Center room. Eventually, some teenage, volunteer or intern or otherwise unpaid worker will grab you and guide you to the nearest PC training simulations. And, by some innovative revolution brought by Rotom, you go into the PC like a Pokemon going inside a Pokeball. Inside the PC is everything a trainer could ever dream of. You could even talk to your Pokemon, imagine that...
Yuewen wished she could virtual saunter towards Helmet''s PC, slap the glass of his window and be demanded to be let in. Ah, help me. I''m just a stupid sheep. I need someone to base my frame of reference on, so I can project some sort of superiority upon them. I don''t know what to do when left to my own devices. They had no real training schedules, so the only way she''d be able to see him for the next two weeks was if she waited outside his PC, just waiting for him to come out. Unlikely story.
She was always so afraid of letting her Pokemon down. For letting them discover that she had no idea what she was doing. She never considered the possibility that she could be let down by her very own Pokemon. She was rotten. A rotten, rotten trainer.
She was saved by Pidove. She knew it; Pidove didn''t know it, but she knew it. It was really her presence that made all the difference in the world at the time. Why would she ask for anything more? It was enough.
Pidove loved everyone. Really? All of them? Wasn''t she... enough?
There was nothing special about this connection at all. She buried her face deeper into the feathery goodness of a pillow. A good trainer loved their Pokemon no matter what, right? Then why was she so... weird? And don''t even get me started on Purrloin.
This was the worst. She was the worst. The only way this would get any worse is if...
It felt like she just had her heart broken. With a dramatic sigh, Yuewen sat up, dragged out some pieces of paper, and began writing again.
Because that''s what she did best. She swallowed up all the emotion, let herself be consumed by the bullshit, and put her ass to work.
-.-.-
"Hi, human. Did you know that I like to eat bread? You should feed me more bread. Coocoo."
"You don''t really love bread. You love food, Pidove."
"Yeah. I do. How did you know?"
She ignored Pidove whilst Purrloin ignored both of their presences, curled in the corner, and took note of her surroundings or lack of, anyhow. It was her visualization of the default setting, the tutorial of sorts. They stood on a plane, its x-axis and y-axis spanning infinitely, a dark grey blanket that was the only placeholder with solid definition in the virtual world, the z-axis less tainted in colour and materialism, but just as infinite. Dotted lines sliced through the white space. She could expand and retract them at will like zooming in and out of a computer screen.
The only limitation was her imagination and the computing power of the public computers. There was a time where they tried to censor and record the Trainer''s imagination, but as the computers became more widespread in use, it was impossible to limit counterfeits and illegal tampering. So, they decided to just allow trainers to do whatever the fuck they wanted to do in an at least stable environment with trained Pokemon. Is it funny? The freedom of the people is only built on the fear of what that freedom entails. It was freedom to do whatever she wanted, but at the same time, she was trapped in this small, little metal box.
In this emptiness, where nothing really exists, Yuewen would rather bring her chains with her than risk slipping away. Closing her eyes, Yuewen imagined all the measurements, running through her thoughts with her metaphorical hands, feeling the pulse, the angles, the stats, molding it, tighter and tighter, harder and harder, until it practically sliced through her wrists. Until the blurry lines become so sharp that they become real again.
She opened her eyes. It was a dark room with a dim light hovering above, buzzing in that depressing, shitty tune. Boxes and files piled high on metal shelves that lined the edges of the room, her old friends that let her touch, so naughty. Yuewen coughed. It was so fucking dusty. Yuewen creaked the door open slightly to let the air out as she always did. She glanced down the hallway, which existed, but slightly less. She could hear the slight voice of someone calling for her to the front desk, but she knew that the further she went, the less there would be. There was nothing outside there. But here... There was something, at least.
It was consistent. The laws of reality worked here. What goes up came down. What was touched, touched you back, metal being cold, the files satisfying, the boxes stubborn. It was just like real life, the perfect place for her Pokemon to trainer. She heard stories about newbies trying to create their first environment, but creating it in such a way that when they came outside again for battle, they would discover that everything inside was fake, like it was all a physics breaking, reality shifting dream.
The way that most trainers countered that shit is by thinking towards their living situations, the building where they have resided for the majority of their lives and probably thought fondly of. She could hardly remember a thing, however. She couldn''t tell what she imagined was so much worse than reality or perhaps better. All her memories felt like they lurked, hiding from the monsters hiding in that cave, existing only in the context of them and how they treated her...
Here she was alone. Only with the cold, hard materials that she spent years sorting and imagining to the very last detail. Only she could make this place. It was a place that only existed in the context of her and other forgotten women. Practically her second home. And that little prison she would never escape from.
Now came the tricky bit. She closed her eyes again, thinking of all the notes she took. She mentally took those dotted lines faded in the air and yanked them further apart, zooming out of the world. When she opened her eyes again, it was the very same room, but much wider and emptier, a dusty metal room about the size of a battling field, all those boxes and files lined up against a wall, sorted perfectly in categories, chronologically, and alphabetically, a feat she was never able to achieve and would probably never be achieved unless the center got a Rotom for themselves. This type of technology only really existed in the context of Rotoms and there were hardly enough of them to go around.
She closed her eyes again, imagining what she spent all night imagining, drawing it again and again. It was the perfect partner, the ideal training method for Pidove. She drew multiple versions to prevent boredom and tried to replicate the stats within them, the imagined consensus that most people claimed most people had.
She opened her eyes. It was a pack of fidoughs, each growling and looking delicious. She had never seen one in person, but one of the files in the Pokecenter had a report of a foreign trainer healing it and having it marked up for breeding. It took her a week to dig up that file when the little pups decided to run away and catch Pokerus. She knew everything she needed, the height, the weight, the moveset, the stats, the 3d model. They were small, little canines with derpy faces and two yellow donuts for ears and donuts for neck and tail and did she mention that they were completely made out of dough? She recalled the taste of all that bread she had bought Pidove. And for a finishing touch, she remembered, faintly, a scent of flowers and jelly donuts. It was strangely nostalgic for a memory that she completely invented.
"Wow! Pidove has never seen this Pokemon. Did humans see this Pokemon before pi-pi-pi? As pet? As food?"
It was practically drooling.
"Listen up," she said, speaking to the birdbrained directly or at least she was trying to. "This is a real Pokemon, not a dream. I did my job properly. I read all the files. I took all the notes. For all thirteen pups and their mother. They are practically... well, human. Real, I mean. I spent all night adding all the extra shit, the life in them. And I''ll be damned if all this work goes for nothing. So, Pidove. Purrloin, you stray shit, I know you can hear me too. We will train until we get tried from oneshotting these fuckers.
"Can I get them?"
She cleared her throat, almost coughing again from the dust. "Let me repeat. We will grind levels until we get tired from eating so much fidoughs. All you can eat. And I heard that they taste so good that breeding them is worth a small fortune. Better than that bread, better than that shit you strays been eating. So eat. Work for me and you will eat better food, that''s for certain."
"That''s why I love you. Coo!"
"..."
Yuewen sighed and closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose where her glasses had slipped off. Her brain felt weirdly drained in a way that she never really experienced before. In her head, were hundreds of memories spiraling around, all those Pokemon files she painstaking tired over, that shit that no one else would ever read, but she did, for years and hours on end, each and every day. Back then she cared nothing for the Pokemon on those files, reading the words and only taking them to shove in the deepest, darkest corners she could. But now? She could feel hundreds of them, spiraling through her mind. Fighting to be released. Yearning for battle.
Hilarious. For someone who didn''t care anything about Pokemon, she knew so much, it was practically spilling out of her.
She felt a weird danger in her heart that she couldn''t quite imagine, envision into reality. Like a type of hunger. Like a type of pride.
Like a part of her that thought she deserved to be rewarded for what she was.
What a fucking joke.