Elemental Charizam
Sudden Genre Shift
A/N: The second chapter will be uploaded two days from now, as the first is so short. After that, this will be updated on a weekly basis until I clear my backlog of chapters, slow down and inevitably lose interest, leaving the story incomplete for all time.
Chapter One: Rest In Peace
She was much too hot in her black funeral dress, and her palms were clammy with sweat. Larissa hated the part of her that noticed the heat, the sweat, the glare, when her mother’s ashes lined the urn before her.
It had been her that found the body crumpled on the kitchen floor. She’d been told all her life that she looked like her mother. Alongside the shock and the grief had been the thought, like poison, that what really upset her, deep down, was not that her mother was dead but that she would one day join her. She tasted tears in her mouth and felt their cool paths on her cheeks. She hated the part of her that said she was making herself cry because it was expected of her.
She remembered snatches of her conversation with the grief counsellor, about how people dealt with it in different ways. Was this normal? She doubted it. Part of her had always been detached, watching herself from afar. She had always had a little too much control, so that misery seemed somehow self indulgent. It was awful, of course, but a piece of her seemed to take perverse pleasure in languishing in misery. If it didn’t, why did she stay, when she could pull herself out so easily? Nothing ever felt entirely genuine, entirely real. But her mother was dead. That was real. Her mother was dead.
She tried to remember happier times.
Her mother ran a comb through her black, silky hair, freshly treated with products from the salon; it looked like her mother’s, but shorter. She had decided to be patient and grow it out, but it still had a long way to go. The room smelt wonderfully of lemons. She was eight.
Birds sang from blossoming trees and swooped merrily through the clear summer sky. The countryside was laid out below them, a patchwork of green and yellow meadows. They had laid a tartan quilt on the warm hillside and that was where they lay, surrounded by the crumbs of their picnic. Larissa felt her mother stroke her hand gently and knew that all was well.
The image of the body rose treacherously in her mind…
She burst into a fresh bout of sobbing, crying now in earnest. Tears flowed faster from eyes that stung from rubbing, to be mopped clumsily away with her damp handkerchief. No one seemed to notice.
And then, as if from nowhere, anger surged up to drown her sorrow; anger at the priests that extorted and wheeled and picked like vultures at her mother’s bones; anger at the sun that shone on without sympathy; anger at being a helpless child; anger at being alone.
***
It was a month later. Larissa walked along a winding path through the countryside, paying little attention to her surroundings. The urgent sorrow, the anger and the confusion had faded to be replaced by a slow sadness, a great emptiness.
A pokéball was attached to the belt at her waist, given to her by the local professor. He had been nervous when they met, a man who had trouble dealing with children under the best of circumstances. He’d given fumbled condolences as he showed her the starter pokémon. She had chosen the cyndaquil, though she placed little import on the decision. Larissa didn’t hate pokémon – the opposite, rather – but she’d never planned to go on a journey in earnest. She had felt no need to find herself, and if she had she would have sought to do so in quiet contemplation, or within the pages of a book, rather than by travelling. She was competitive, in her way, but that was more of a reason not to pick up a new hobby, where she would fail again and again before she could truly compete. But now, with her immediate family all dead, she had little to tie her down, and it was one of the few ways a child could pay their way in the world. It was that or live with her great aunt in her lonely old house that smelt constantly of cabbage. The thought did not appeal.
Larissa wasn’t travelling anywhere in particular – she already lived in Violet City, where the first gym was held – she just wanted to get out of there for a while. Maybe train a little or catch another pokémon, she wasn’t really sure. The sun was setting and yet she, having set out at dawn three days earlier, hadn’t attempted either.
Her foot caught on an unseen rock and she half tripped, stumbling as she caught her balance. That, she decided, was as good a sign as any that it was time to pack things in, or out, rather, for the night. Deciding on a camp site was an important part of setting up a tent, and so any experienced camper would have clucked their tongue disapprovingly had they seen the way she slung it down any old where a handful of steps from the path. A large rock hid her from the road but only a scattering of elm trees gave any protection from the wind or, should it start to fall, rain. After hammering the tent pegs haphazardly into the earth, Larissa crawled inside, dropped her heavy pack on the floor and crawled into her sleeping bag.
Predictably, sleep proved difficult. The wind howled through the tress and made the tent walls ripple violently. More than that, though, she was scared of going to sleep, as she had been every night since the death. So she lay awake, counting the stains in the tent fabric, trying not to think.
That was quite difficult, too.
An hour passed. She sighed. Even though her life was ruined and she’d never be happy again, Larissa would have preferred not to be exhausted in the morning.
***
Larissa awoke feeling better than she had in a long time. For the first time, the body hadn’t haunted her dreams. In fact, she couldn’t remember dreaming at all. She peered through the tent flap. It was bright but cold. Still, she thought, the temperature would rise with the sun. It would soon be warm.
As she packed the tent away into her backpack, she caught herself humming.
Only later, when she hoisted her pack onto her back and moved to leave, did she notice the gastly. She froze, startled, feeling the frantic beating of her heart. He didn’t seem threatening – he just hung there, scarcely visible in the sunlight. She relaxed a little, breathing hard. How long had he been there? Longer than she’d been awake, most likely; she probably would have noticed movement.
Should she try and catch him? For the first time it struck her just how risky capturing a pokémon would be with only one of her own. Gauging the gastly’s strength was impossible until they started fighting, and if he proved too strong she’d have to run for it and hope the repellant kept him at bay. Despite this, she found she wasn’t scared. Perhaps the shock was taking a while to wear off.
Calmly, she reached for the pokéball at her waist.
With the press of a button her cyndaquil was by her side. They hadn’t spent much time together yet – she’d been in no mood for company since she got him. He didn’t even have a name. He looked game enough, though, crouched low and growling. Fire burst forth from the spots on his back, making the air shimmer with heat. If the gastly saw the threat implicit in Cyndaquil’s actions he gave no sign of it. He just floated there, his expression unreadable.
“All right, use ember,” said Larissa. It was hardly a difficult choice – it was the only attack her pokémon had that would affect the gastly at all.
Her cyndaquil took in a great gulp of air, held it for a few seconds, and then spat out a cloud of swirling embers. It wasn’t an especially precise attack and so it was really quite embarrassing when it missed the ghost entirely, burning nothing more offensive than tree bark. She wondered briefly if her pokémon was so stupid as to require exact instruction on what to hit, but discarded the thought. He had simply missed. The gastly, meanwhile, had begun to drift closer, almost casually, as if nothing present was a threat. She called for another ember, but to no avail; her cyndaquil’s confidence had evaporated quicker than midsummer rain, and he cowered, whimpering, rather than obey. Defeated, she returned him to his ball.
The repel it was, then. She reached surreptitiously for the clasp of her backpack; the gastly was still moving slowly and she didn’t want to give him any reason to speed up.
“I don’t want to run. This pokémon means me no harm,” she thought.
She creased her brow. That was an awfully strange thing for her to think, and she could see no reason why she had thought it. Well, the latter half was a reasonable inference, given she hadn’t been attacked yet, but if she couldn’t capture him there was really no reason to hang around.
“Perhaps it would come willingly, if asked,” she thought.
Would he? It seemed unlikely. Why would anyone want to hitch a ride with an untried trainer – no, worse than untried, one whose most recent failing they had been a party to. No, she wasn’t that naïve. There was something wrong.
“What about your dreams? Surely that is reason enough for both of us.”
Realisation dawned. She’d slept undisturbed for the first time in over a month and here was a pokémon that ate dreams for lunch. That was hardly a coincidence. Could she really be rid of them for good? It sounded too good to be true.
What didn’t make sense, though, was referring to herself in the third person. That was the sole province of the criminally insane.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she said, pointing an accusing finger at the gastly. “You’re speaking in my head.”
For the first time, something seemed to have an effect on the pokémon; his lips split in a manic grin and he began to laugh the rich, loud and above all long laugh traditionally associated with stage villainy. Did ghost types need to breathe? She made a mental note to check up later.
At long last the laughter faded, though the grin remained.
She’d read a little on telepathy in school, and so she knew that he wasn’t exactly talking in her mind. Telepathy only conveyed vague thoughts and emotions – it was the recipient that shaped them into words. There’d been a special word for it, but she’d long forgotten it. Whatever it was called, that was what he did. His voice, if it could be called that, was lofty and magnanimous, but with a hint of amusement that suggested he was enjoying some private joke.
“Very clever, little girl! Yes, I’m the one you’re looking for. I can eat away those nightmares of yours, no problem at all – so long as you take me with you.”
“R-really? You’d do that for me?” she said, surprised to find her voice trembling. “Even after…”
“Of course, of course!” he thought, still grinning madly. “I’m used to that, believe me. Now, do we have a deal?”
He hadn’t promised to fight for her, but he didn’t need to. The deal was sweet enough already. In truth, she would have done far more for a holiday from her dreams.
When the ball hit, he didn’t resist. The device did not shake, as she had been told it would, when it hit the floor. There was just a brief flash of red and an electric ‘ting’, and it was over. It had been suspiciously easy.
She picked up the ball gingerly, half expecting it to explode in her hand.
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