EmberGryphon
Meowth Fanatic <3
We Have Diamonds in Our Eyes
Rated: Eeeh. I don't think it's R-worthy. I'll go with PG-15-ish, for mild violence, frank sexual reference/humor, possible mild sexual content, profanity, and drug reference.
Disclaimer: Specific characters are mine, unless otherwise specified. Critter concepts and the general concept of pokemon? Not mine. Although I did create pokegypsies, so there, sucka.
A/N: Feel free to skip over this part. If there's one thing you learn from this fanfic, it'll be that I talk waaay to much in author's notes. xD
I hate posting my fanfics to forums. Actually, I hate posting new fics anywhere. x3 So forgive my indecision, but I'm always worried about how these new ones will be recieved. ^^() I tend to have a weird writing style where my sentences run on for a paragraph and things that make perfect sense to me make no sense to anyone else. And so I get a wee bit anxious.
Y’all might be wondering, “But Ember, why gypsies?” Because pirates and ninjas are too overdone and I didn’t want to do Jedis. So there.
--
Prologue/Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
--
Prologue
--
It floated.
It wasn’t really asleep, because the ocean didn’t let it sleep. The currents jettying around it, the waves crashing above it, the motion of pokemon passing by, jarred it from its rest. And it wasn’t really awake, because the monotony lulled its senses into a weary, lax sort of state of concious. The ocean was alive, it was moving, but it was sedate, it was calm, it was almost playful. It didn’t sleep and it wasn’t active. But it meditated. It felt every inch of the ocean, expanded its mind into every crevice of every rock. It felt every eddy and every wave, because it wasn’t caught in the currents, it was the current. The impossible pull of the ocean, hammering against the land. Not the ocean itself, perhaps, but part of the ocean, the heart of the ocean, the strength of the ocean.
Every few years, it breathed, and its exhale rippled across the surface of the sea.
It was not conciously aware of waking until it finally found itself, not in the push-and-pull of the sea-patterns and riptides, but in a smaller, finite, material form, condensed on the floor of the ocean.
For a moment, it did not know why it had awoken. It was dimly aware of the suppressing darkness of the bottom of the sea, the crushing weight of the water, and a strange feeling that it was at once trapped somewhere very small and very dark, and simultaneously floating in someplace intimidatingly larger than its corporeal self. Deep-sea pokemon, mostly kinds still unknown to trainers on land, skirted past, casting their own eerie, pale glow that sometimes stretched down to cast the sand and stones in pale, conflicting, ill-defined shadow.
And then the ocean trembled.
Every molecule, every plankton, every shaft of light fighting to penetrate the darkness of the deepest crevices. Every stone, and every grain of sand, shook for a moment like the itchy skin of some giant creature. Lugia, the deep-sea guardian of the ocean, the heart of the sea, knew immediately why it had awoken.
Kyogre was angry.
The ocean was in danger.
Another shudder shot through the sea, and Lugia threw its head back, sucked in a lungful of chillingly cold, taintedly salty ocean water, and screamed.
Then it spread its wings and shot, eyes narrowed, for the surface, for the sky, and for its own, more private, battle against the threat to its home and its loyalty.
--
It slept in its mountain, for the land does not move, and the wind is nothing but a whisper in its ear. It felt the coursing of the lava through the earth, a pathway that mimicked the blood that pounds its way through its body- or maybe the creature’s body mimicked the lava. At some point, the order of the correlation had been lost, even in its ancient memory.
On occassion, it dreamed, of fire or of rain, and of a building burning and powerful creatures running, tireless, across the land. And when it dreamed, sometimes it rained, and sometimes it stormed, and sometimes volcanoes exploded in a shower of molten rock- and sometimes it just dreamed, and those dreams were private, and held in its heart.
It might have been sleeping, but it woke immediately, with a jolt of horror, when the sky and the earth trembled under its feet.
The magma inside the earth roiled, surged, settled, and surged again, like a caged animal, panicking but unable to escape. It threatened to break through, it threatened to seep up into the air and swallow the world away. Its fire ignited something in Ho-oh’s mind.
Groudon was angry.
The land was in danger.
Ho-oh spread its rainbow wings and shrieked, hearing the answering scream somewhere far away, under the ocean, but on a frequency perfectly resonate with its own call.
And Ho-oh launched itself into the sky.
---
-------
---
Chapter One
The Gypsy Caravan
--
Frey’s fingers trembled just a little, but his eyes narrowed slightly in concentration and, to his immense satisfaction, the little gold coin flashing between each digit, turning and catching the light through the window as it dipped and tricked from one side of his hand into the other, didn’t falter on its path. He fingers waved back and forth, keeping the coin from wavering or falling from his grasp while he moved it across the path of his knuckles. He was about to make his third and final pass with it, and was using his thumb to flip it back the other way, when the rear wheels of the wagon caught hard on a rock and the wagon flew up and landed with a thunk on the road. The coin clattered to the ground, along with five or six books, one pokeball, his desktop lamp and a small picture frame, the last of which shattered as it hit the ground. A second later, a smaller bump knocked another book off the desk in the corner of the single-room wagon.
Frey felt an irrational flash of anger at nothing in particular, and took a second to force himself to cool off before he got up from the edge of his bed, where he’d been sitting with his legs crossed, practicing his sleight-of-hand. He was frustrated that he couldn’t just play at his coin tricks, and that of course the rest of the caravan was way too noisy to read, and it was still another half hour or so until they finally arrived at Ecruteak, ready to barter off cheap fortune-telling tricks and magic acts during the upcoming festival. He was bored out of his mind, upset that he couldn’t keep anything nice on this wagon without it breaking, and he had a bad feeling about the canival in and of itself- all of which mingled together into a general gray paste of irrational but heady irritibility.
With his luck, the whole city would be flooded an hour’s time into the party. He glanced outside, but the sun was beating down strong; hopefully it would be this nice tomorrow. He couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that it would rain.
With a regretful sigh, Frey tossed the coin back into his little bag of ‘tricks’ and piled the books back up on his desk. When he gathered the picture frame together, he carefully pulled the photo out, slid it into a desk drawer, and tossed the broken frame out his open window, into the woods passing by on either side of the road. The broken glass he swept to the side of the wagon with his foot, then pushed it out into the path after he heaved open the side door to his little home. Then, because it was a nice day and he didn’t have anything else to do, he jumped lightly out of the wagon and slid the door back closed, keeping up with the slowly-rolling wagon easily.
“So you finally decide, come out and see the sun, Frey,” Madame Charletruese said, grinning over at him from where she was sitting, on the back of her own wagon-home, knitting kneedles clacking together in their rhythmic pattern and green wool yarn pulling taunt and looping together, keeping up the pattern unconciously as she talked. Madame Charletruese was an older woman, in her mid-forties, her ash-colored hair pulled up on a bun on top of her head, her face respectably lined, her green eyes somewhat dulled with the day-to-day labor- labor of love, maybe, but labor nonetheless- of raising her seven children- the youngest still three, the oldest now past twenty. She had two kids around sixteen, Frey’s age; both girls, one thirteen and one a few months older than Frey. When they had been younger, they would play together often enough; now, the girls were learning to knit and dance and tell fortunes, and Frey had his own chores to do- and he was trying to raise Loki up besides that, and take care of the wagon and Aegir on his own. The girls were still his friends, and he talked to them and often at carnivals, if they weren’t off giggling at and flirting with and exploiting strange boys, they’d walk around together, but they weren’t as close as they used to be, and, sometimes, they looked like strangers to him.
Frey himself was a slightly too-skinny kid with a thin, pale face, reddish-blonde hair that sat messily on top of his head and hung down in tangled ringlets to his earlobes, grey-green eyes with thick eyelashes, and long, almost gangly limbs. His skin was mostly clear, with a splash of freckles on either cheek and trailing down his neck, and sometimes an embarrassing bout of achne on his forehead. He dressed, like most of the gypsies, in multiple layers of light, translucent clothing, silk and chiffon; silk scarves, trailing sleeves, heavy jewelry, and belled shoes. Frey usually dressed in green- it made his eyes look a little brighter and his hair look a little more blonde. Unlike some of the gypsies- although by no means all- the bells on his shoes were clipped on for easy removal. Sometimes it paid better to not jingle every time you moved.
Madame Charletreuse dressed in grey, yellow, pink, and pretty much every other color imaginable. After the seventh child, it no longer mattered so much whether or not your outfit brought out your eyes. “I worry about you sometimes, Frey,” she said, frowning when she found a knot in the basket of yarn she was using.
He managed the best impression of a genial smile he could muster. “Don’t be.”
Without playing around the topic, she pressed on, “You still angry at your mother?”
Of course he was still angry. “Not really,” he lied, jumping up onto the wagon to sit beside her rather than walking alongside. Aegir, the Tauros that pulled his own wagon, never even seemed to notice if he was inside or outside his home; the bull pokemon just kept pulling without complaint. Madame Charletruese’s Rapidash snorted at the extra weight, hesitated for a moment, then kept moving forward.
Madame Charletruese kept going as if the lie was too feeble to acknowledge. “What she did was terrible, boy, but the world takes all sorts, and if you get desperate enough- and with a kid and no man in her life, she was as desperate as they come, you know- Team Rocket looks awfully inviting.”
Frey just shrugged, but with the chubby, middle-aged, amazingly wise woman’s pale gaze locked onto the side of his face, it was impossible not to rise to the bait. “She could have told me what she was doing.” He tried not to sound sullen, but the resentment crept into his voice nevertheless.
“Boy, you were ten. No mother drags her ten-year-old son into that sorta thing. Would’ve put you at risk- tell me now, when the police asked you what you knew about it and you said not-a-thing, well, Naisha and me, we was happiest we’ve ever been. We was scared, scared you were in on it from the get-go, but your mother, she was a better woman than that.”
Naisha, the matriarch of the little band of gypsies, and Madame Charletreuse had been giving Frey this sort of talk for almost two years, now, and Frey had never let himself be absolved. What his mother had done was unforgivable. But he let them talk, because it made them feel better to think they were helping him out. “If you think so.”
“And I do. Look at that.” She leaned out a little and pointed at a wild Murkrow, perched on the highest branch of an old oak tree. It was late in autumn and most of the branches were bare, the few lingering leaves too sparse that high up to give much cover to the bird. “Murkrow passes on the left, fortune’s ahead. I think it’ll be a good festival.”
“I think it’s going to rain. I had a dream last night,” he plowed forward, before she could scold him for his pessimism. He paused for a second, collecting all the fragments he could remember, and finding to his surprise there wasn’t much he could recollect. “It was about the ocean. It was about Lugia. It woke up.” Beyond that, he couldn’t remember very much beyond a myriad of emotion that he’d felt, in the dream, when Lugia opened its eyes- or maybe, that Lugia had felt. Anger. Horror. Drive. He wasn’t sure how to put it in words, so he just said, “It was angry, and it....” What had it done then? There wasn’t much he could remember except the dark scenery of the dream, the blacks and blues, and Lugia’s frantic fury. “...it did something. And Ho-oh woke up, too, and it was angry.” Feeling stupid for having brought it up, he shrugged it off. “Probably just thinking too much about the thing in Hoenn.”
Madame Charletruese chuckled. “Probably. It was an amazing thing, no?- and wonderful that that Hoenn girl gets a day of festivals just for her, she did something amazing, didn’t she? Awfully brave, to go wake up Rayquaza when everyone else was just trying not to be bowled over by Groudon and Kyogre.”
Frey just shrugged; he felt a little uneasy to hear the woman talk about it, because the fact of the matter was, he hadn’t thought about the war between Groudon and Kyogre recently, or really at all. Johto had barely gotten the tail end of the weather effects and hadn’t been in any real danger at all, unlike Hoenn. “I’m just glad it’s over,” he said, suddenly emphatic. “And that it happened over there.”
Madame Charletruese laughed loudly, startling her Rapidash. “I think we all are,” she said, and dropped her knitting in her lap with a certain air of finality. “I’m going to make lunch for the kids, honey, but feel free to come over to talk any time you want.” She stood up, snatched her half-finished scarf off her seat and hopped off the back of her wagon, half-trotting to get around to the side-entrance into the inside room. Her wagon was much bigger than Frey’s, but it still got extremely crowded in there, with eight people. The beds were crushed into the single room beside the stove and oven, along with whatever other odds-and-ends the family had gathered up.
Like Frey’s mother, Madame Charletreuse was unsure about which vague memory of a man had fathered which child. The traveling, cramped, often smelly, usually poor life of a gypsy discouraged most anyone from permanant relations with anyone in the life, so most of the women and men in the caravan were single and got loved on the road. Naisha had a husband, but they only got along for a few weeks every six months and then tended to revert to sleeping in seperate wagons, and bickering over the head of their only kid, a sardonic eight-year-old named Tucker. The rest of the gypsies tended to regard sleeping with fellow members of their caravan something equatible to incest- most of them had known each other their whole lives and were close as siblings. All the women in the caravan (except Madame Charletruese’s oldest daughter, a nine-teen year old who’d only just gotten to the point where she could be called a woman, but it was only a matter of time, the more gossiping of the gypsies clucked) had at least one kid, and all of them except Naisha raised them alone, with the help of the caravan. The two single men in the caravan might have had children, but never saw them, if they did, and didn’t let it bother them.
Leaving the mother alone to make breakfast for her children- who were probably all running ahead of the caravan, as they usually did, or practicing their tricks at the back of the train- Frey jogged to the head wagon at the front of the line. Naisha’s wagon was the first one on the road, her twin Rapidash, both with silver flame flecked through their mane instead of the normal red and making a statement the moment the caravan rolled into a town, pulling it proudly down the road. Naisha herself, a stately grey woman with her pale hair trapped in an iron-link net, sat at the front, guiding the entire train- the other pokemon pulling the other wagons (two wagons pulled each by single Rapidash behind Naisha’s, the second of which was Madame Charletruese’s, then Frey’s wagon pulled by Aegir the Tauros, a bigger one than Frey’s pulled by two Tauros, and a small one pulled by two Ponyta) would follow Naisha’s wagon until they found their way to the town they were driving for. Beside her was her Jynx, a weathered pokemon almost as old as Naisha herself, whose psychic powers made up most of Naisha’s fortune-telling ‘talent’.
“Mrs. Naisha?” Respectfully, Frey waited for her to smile and wave to him before he climbed up onto the front platform of her wagon.
“Hello, Frey,” she said, and smirked when Jynx made a pleasant sound and smiled wide. The caravan’s pokemon liked Frey, which was heartening in the worst of times.
Frey settled himself so he sat beside the bench on the front platform instead of on it, his legs dangling between the rigging for the Rapidash, his head positioned strategically lower than Naisha’s. As the official leader of the caravan and the dominant personality in her marriage and her family, that sort of gesture was important to the older woman. “Do you know when we’ll get to Ercruteak?” he asked, watching the Rapidash bobbing their heads as they walked.
“Shouldn’t be more than a couple hours,” was the older woman’s response, with a shrug. “Getting impatient?” A knowing smile flowered for an instant on her face, and she flicked the Rapidash’s reins across their backs with a quiet, husky word of encouragement. The horses picked up the pace, and Naisha laughed when the left wheel of her wagon caught on a rock going considerably faster than normal, throwing her three inches off her seat. Frey couldn’t stop the smile. For all her arrogance and forced unapprochibility, there were times of pure, unadulterated charisma that made Naisha impossible to dislike, and that was a large part of what made her a brilliant leader.
She kept urging the Rapidash for another few minutes, until one of the other gypsies from the back wagon yelled that her Ponyta couldn’t keep up, which was when Naisha, laughing throatily, reined the Rapidash in. She turned to Frey with an almost appologetic smile, her eyes glittering. “Give it a few hours.”
He smirked, and said, “Alright,” with a hint of laughter in his voice. With a quick wave, he slid from the wagon, jogging forward a few steps to pat one of the Rapidash on its pale flank. “Thanks, Mrs. Naisha.”
He let Naisha’s wagon roll past him, then the two Rapidash, and jogged over to visit with Aegir. The Tauros nuzzled him on the shirt as he trotted beside his trainer, but seemed mostly pretty antsy in his heavy rigging. “You’re as bored as I am, aren’t you, Aegir?” Frey asked, combing his fingers through Aegir’s thick, tangled mane. The Tauros sighed through flared nostrils. He spent a lot of his time in the harness, and when he wasn’t pulling the wagon he was mostly in his pokeball while Frey played gypsy for crowds and sometimes played at less honest ploys, but at times, when neither of them were working, Aegir and Loki, Frey’s two pokemon, were trained to battle. Aegir, who Frey’d known for the last ten years of his life, had been the beast of burden for Frey’s mother before Frey had adopted him, when his mother was arrested for associations with Team Rocket. He had the raw, brute strength to take on most opponents, and a blind trust for the human who commanded him. Loki, Frey’s second pokemon, wasn’t quite as physically upstanding. He’d gotten the Meowth egg from his mother for his twelth birthday, and had, in the past four years, raised it up to Persian, but somehow the undying loyalty Aegir, and in fact most pokemon, felt for their trainers, never quite made it into Loki’s neural complex. The Persian was snidely independant, intolerant of most other people beside Frey, and sometimes of Frey, too, (which was why he spent a good amount of time, when they were traveling with the caravan, in his pokeball), and ridiculously finicky where food was concerned. Loki knew moves like Toxic, and Confuse Ray, and used physical attacks only when special moves had worn an opponent down to nothing already.
Both Aegir and Loki liked battling, but Frey wasn’t stupid enough to think he could drop out of the caravan and become a pokemon trainer. His monsters might be good, but he’d seen gym battles, and, worse, League battles, and knew that as a trainer, he didn’t have anything like what it took to be that good. He had fun, he even won every now and then, but he couldn’t do anything like that. To win at the Pokemon League, you had to be skilled, intimately aware of your pokemon’s strengths and weaknesses, and of their attacks, effects, and natural talents; just as knowlegable about your opponents, good at judgement calls and aware of what your opponent was likely to do, what would be wise to do, what your opponent might do just because you wouldn’t be able to predict it and, sometimes, it didn’t hurt to be a little bit psychic.
Frey checked his watch, and sighed. These few hours were taking days to pass.
When he got tired of walking, he went back into his wagon and watched the trees pass by through the window. It seemed like a very long time before a muted cheer ran though the caravan, and the entire train picked up the pace a little. Frey poked his head out, and saw the sparse skyline that marked Ecruteak City, straight ahead. He gave the ritual, if belated, cry, and jumped out of his wagon to meet the city head-on.
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Comments and critique are greatly appreciated! ^_^
--Ember
Rated: Eeeh. I don't think it's R-worthy. I'll go with PG-15-ish, for mild violence, frank sexual reference/humor, possible mild sexual content, profanity, and drug reference.
Disclaimer: Specific characters are mine, unless otherwise specified. Critter concepts and the general concept of pokemon? Not mine. Although I did create pokegypsies, so there, sucka.
A/N: Feel free to skip over this part. If there's one thing you learn from this fanfic, it'll be that I talk waaay to much in author's notes. xD
I hate posting my fanfics to forums. Actually, I hate posting new fics anywhere. x3 So forgive my indecision, but I'm always worried about how these new ones will be recieved. ^^() I tend to have a weird writing style where my sentences run on for a paragraph and things that make perfect sense to me make no sense to anyone else. And so I get a wee bit anxious.
Y’all might be wondering, “But Ember, why gypsies?” Because pirates and ninjas are too overdone and I didn’t want to do Jedis. So there.
--
Prologue/Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
--
Prologue
--
It floated.
It wasn’t really asleep, because the ocean didn’t let it sleep. The currents jettying around it, the waves crashing above it, the motion of pokemon passing by, jarred it from its rest. And it wasn’t really awake, because the monotony lulled its senses into a weary, lax sort of state of concious. The ocean was alive, it was moving, but it was sedate, it was calm, it was almost playful. It didn’t sleep and it wasn’t active. But it meditated. It felt every inch of the ocean, expanded its mind into every crevice of every rock. It felt every eddy and every wave, because it wasn’t caught in the currents, it was the current. The impossible pull of the ocean, hammering against the land. Not the ocean itself, perhaps, but part of the ocean, the heart of the ocean, the strength of the ocean.
Every few years, it breathed, and its exhale rippled across the surface of the sea.
It was not conciously aware of waking until it finally found itself, not in the push-and-pull of the sea-patterns and riptides, but in a smaller, finite, material form, condensed on the floor of the ocean.
For a moment, it did not know why it had awoken. It was dimly aware of the suppressing darkness of the bottom of the sea, the crushing weight of the water, and a strange feeling that it was at once trapped somewhere very small and very dark, and simultaneously floating in someplace intimidatingly larger than its corporeal self. Deep-sea pokemon, mostly kinds still unknown to trainers on land, skirted past, casting their own eerie, pale glow that sometimes stretched down to cast the sand and stones in pale, conflicting, ill-defined shadow.
And then the ocean trembled.
Every molecule, every plankton, every shaft of light fighting to penetrate the darkness of the deepest crevices. Every stone, and every grain of sand, shook for a moment like the itchy skin of some giant creature. Lugia, the deep-sea guardian of the ocean, the heart of the sea, knew immediately why it had awoken.
Kyogre was angry.
The ocean was in danger.
Another shudder shot through the sea, and Lugia threw its head back, sucked in a lungful of chillingly cold, taintedly salty ocean water, and screamed.
Then it spread its wings and shot, eyes narrowed, for the surface, for the sky, and for its own, more private, battle against the threat to its home and its loyalty.
--
It slept in its mountain, for the land does not move, and the wind is nothing but a whisper in its ear. It felt the coursing of the lava through the earth, a pathway that mimicked the blood that pounds its way through its body- or maybe the creature’s body mimicked the lava. At some point, the order of the correlation had been lost, even in its ancient memory.
On occassion, it dreamed, of fire or of rain, and of a building burning and powerful creatures running, tireless, across the land. And when it dreamed, sometimes it rained, and sometimes it stormed, and sometimes volcanoes exploded in a shower of molten rock- and sometimes it just dreamed, and those dreams were private, and held in its heart.
It might have been sleeping, but it woke immediately, with a jolt of horror, when the sky and the earth trembled under its feet.
The magma inside the earth roiled, surged, settled, and surged again, like a caged animal, panicking but unable to escape. It threatened to break through, it threatened to seep up into the air and swallow the world away. Its fire ignited something in Ho-oh’s mind.
Groudon was angry.
The land was in danger.
Ho-oh spread its rainbow wings and shrieked, hearing the answering scream somewhere far away, under the ocean, but on a frequency perfectly resonate with its own call.
And Ho-oh launched itself into the sky.
---
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Chapter One
The Gypsy Caravan
--
Frey’s fingers trembled just a little, but his eyes narrowed slightly in concentration and, to his immense satisfaction, the little gold coin flashing between each digit, turning and catching the light through the window as it dipped and tricked from one side of his hand into the other, didn’t falter on its path. He fingers waved back and forth, keeping the coin from wavering or falling from his grasp while he moved it across the path of his knuckles. He was about to make his third and final pass with it, and was using his thumb to flip it back the other way, when the rear wheels of the wagon caught hard on a rock and the wagon flew up and landed with a thunk on the road. The coin clattered to the ground, along with five or six books, one pokeball, his desktop lamp and a small picture frame, the last of which shattered as it hit the ground. A second later, a smaller bump knocked another book off the desk in the corner of the single-room wagon.
Frey felt an irrational flash of anger at nothing in particular, and took a second to force himself to cool off before he got up from the edge of his bed, where he’d been sitting with his legs crossed, practicing his sleight-of-hand. He was frustrated that he couldn’t just play at his coin tricks, and that of course the rest of the caravan was way too noisy to read, and it was still another half hour or so until they finally arrived at Ecruteak, ready to barter off cheap fortune-telling tricks and magic acts during the upcoming festival. He was bored out of his mind, upset that he couldn’t keep anything nice on this wagon without it breaking, and he had a bad feeling about the canival in and of itself- all of which mingled together into a general gray paste of irrational but heady irritibility.
With his luck, the whole city would be flooded an hour’s time into the party. He glanced outside, but the sun was beating down strong; hopefully it would be this nice tomorrow. He couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that it would rain.
With a regretful sigh, Frey tossed the coin back into his little bag of ‘tricks’ and piled the books back up on his desk. When he gathered the picture frame together, he carefully pulled the photo out, slid it into a desk drawer, and tossed the broken frame out his open window, into the woods passing by on either side of the road. The broken glass he swept to the side of the wagon with his foot, then pushed it out into the path after he heaved open the side door to his little home. Then, because it was a nice day and he didn’t have anything else to do, he jumped lightly out of the wagon and slid the door back closed, keeping up with the slowly-rolling wagon easily.
“So you finally decide, come out and see the sun, Frey,” Madame Charletruese said, grinning over at him from where she was sitting, on the back of her own wagon-home, knitting kneedles clacking together in their rhythmic pattern and green wool yarn pulling taunt and looping together, keeping up the pattern unconciously as she talked. Madame Charletruese was an older woman, in her mid-forties, her ash-colored hair pulled up on a bun on top of her head, her face respectably lined, her green eyes somewhat dulled with the day-to-day labor- labor of love, maybe, but labor nonetheless- of raising her seven children- the youngest still three, the oldest now past twenty. She had two kids around sixteen, Frey’s age; both girls, one thirteen and one a few months older than Frey. When they had been younger, they would play together often enough; now, the girls were learning to knit and dance and tell fortunes, and Frey had his own chores to do- and he was trying to raise Loki up besides that, and take care of the wagon and Aegir on his own. The girls were still his friends, and he talked to them and often at carnivals, if they weren’t off giggling at and flirting with and exploiting strange boys, they’d walk around together, but they weren’t as close as they used to be, and, sometimes, they looked like strangers to him.
Frey himself was a slightly too-skinny kid with a thin, pale face, reddish-blonde hair that sat messily on top of his head and hung down in tangled ringlets to his earlobes, grey-green eyes with thick eyelashes, and long, almost gangly limbs. His skin was mostly clear, with a splash of freckles on either cheek and trailing down his neck, and sometimes an embarrassing bout of achne on his forehead. He dressed, like most of the gypsies, in multiple layers of light, translucent clothing, silk and chiffon; silk scarves, trailing sleeves, heavy jewelry, and belled shoes. Frey usually dressed in green- it made his eyes look a little brighter and his hair look a little more blonde. Unlike some of the gypsies- although by no means all- the bells on his shoes were clipped on for easy removal. Sometimes it paid better to not jingle every time you moved.
Madame Charletreuse dressed in grey, yellow, pink, and pretty much every other color imaginable. After the seventh child, it no longer mattered so much whether or not your outfit brought out your eyes. “I worry about you sometimes, Frey,” she said, frowning when she found a knot in the basket of yarn she was using.
He managed the best impression of a genial smile he could muster. “Don’t be.”
Without playing around the topic, she pressed on, “You still angry at your mother?”
Of course he was still angry. “Not really,” he lied, jumping up onto the wagon to sit beside her rather than walking alongside. Aegir, the Tauros that pulled his own wagon, never even seemed to notice if he was inside or outside his home; the bull pokemon just kept pulling without complaint. Madame Charletruese’s Rapidash snorted at the extra weight, hesitated for a moment, then kept moving forward.
Madame Charletruese kept going as if the lie was too feeble to acknowledge. “What she did was terrible, boy, but the world takes all sorts, and if you get desperate enough- and with a kid and no man in her life, she was as desperate as they come, you know- Team Rocket looks awfully inviting.”
Frey just shrugged, but with the chubby, middle-aged, amazingly wise woman’s pale gaze locked onto the side of his face, it was impossible not to rise to the bait. “She could have told me what she was doing.” He tried not to sound sullen, but the resentment crept into his voice nevertheless.
“Boy, you were ten. No mother drags her ten-year-old son into that sorta thing. Would’ve put you at risk- tell me now, when the police asked you what you knew about it and you said not-a-thing, well, Naisha and me, we was happiest we’ve ever been. We was scared, scared you were in on it from the get-go, but your mother, she was a better woman than that.”
Naisha, the matriarch of the little band of gypsies, and Madame Charletreuse had been giving Frey this sort of talk for almost two years, now, and Frey had never let himself be absolved. What his mother had done was unforgivable. But he let them talk, because it made them feel better to think they were helping him out. “If you think so.”
“And I do. Look at that.” She leaned out a little and pointed at a wild Murkrow, perched on the highest branch of an old oak tree. It was late in autumn and most of the branches were bare, the few lingering leaves too sparse that high up to give much cover to the bird. “Murkrow passes on the left, fortune’s ahead. I think it’ll be a good festival.”
“I think it’s going to rain. I had a dream last night,” he plowed forward, before she could scold him for his pessimism. He paused for a second, collecting all the fragments he could remember, and finding to his surprise there wasn’t much he could recollect. “It was about the ocean. It was about Lugia. It woke up.” Beyond that, he couldn’t remember very much beyond a myriad of emotion that he’d felt, in the dream, when Lugia opened its eyes- or maybe, that Lugia had felt. Anger. Horror. Drive. He wasn’t sure how to put it in words, so he just said, “It was angry, and it....” What had it done then? There wasn’t much he could remember except the dark scenery of the dream, the blacks and blues, and Lugia’s frantic fury. “...it did something. And Ho-oh woke up, too, and it was angry.” Feeling stupid for having brought it up, he shrugged it off. “Probably just thinking too much about the thing in Hoenn.”
Madame Charletruese chuckled. “Probably. It was an amazing thing, no?- and wonderful that that Hoenn girl gets a day of festivals just for her, she did something amazing, didn’t she? Awfully brave, to go wake up Rayquaza when everyone else was just trying not to be bowled over by Groudon and Kyogre.”
Frey just shrugged; he felt a little uneasy to hear the woman talk about it, because the fact of the matter was, he hadn’t thought about the war between Groudon and Kyogre recently, or really at all. Johto had barely gotten the tail end of the weather effects and hadn’t been in any real danger at all, unlike Hoenn. “I’m just glad it’s over,” he said, suddenly emphatic. “And that it happened over there.”
Madame Charletruese laughed loudly, startling her Rapidash. “I think we all are,” she said, and dropped her knitting in her lap with a certain air of finality. “I’m going to make lunch for the kids, honey, but feel free to come over to talk any time you want.” She stood up, snatched her half-finished scarf off her seat and hopped off the back of her wagon, half-trotting to get around to the side-entrance into the inside room. Her wagon was much bigger than Frey’s, but it still got extremely crowded in there, with eight people. The beds were crushed into the single room beside the stove and oven, along with whatever other odds-and-ends the family had gathered up.
Like Frey’s mother, Madame Charletreuse was unsure about which vague memory of a man had fathered which child. The traveling, cramped, often smelly, usually poor life of a gypsy discouraged most anyone from permanant relations with anyone in the life, so most of the women and men in the caravan were single and got loved on the road. Naisha had a husband, but they only got along for a few weeks every six months and then tended to revert to sleeping in seperate wagons, and bickering over the head of their only kid, a sardonic eight-year-old named Tucker. The rest of the gypsies tended to regard sleeping with fellow members of their caravan something equatible to incest- most of them had known each other their whole lives and were close as siblings. All the women in the caravan (except Madame Charletruese’s oldest daughter, a nine-teen year old who’d only just gotten to the point where she could be called a woman, but it was only a matter of time, the more gossiping of the gypsies clucked) had at least one kid, and all of them except Naisha raised them alone, with the help of the caravan. The two single men in the caravan might have had children, but never saw them, if they did, and didn’t let it bother them.
Leaving the mother alone to make breakfast for her children- who were probably all running ahead of the caravan, as they usually did, or practicing their tricks at the back of the train- Frey jogged to the head wagon at the front of the line. Naisha’s wagon was the first one on the road, her twin Rapidash, both with silver flame flecked through their mane instead of the normal red and making a statement the moment the caravan rolled into a town, pulling it proudly down the road. Naisha herself, a stately grey woman with her pale hair trapped in an iron-link net, sat at the front, guiding the entire train- the other pokemon pulling the other wagons (two wagons pulled each by single Rapidash behind Naisha’s, the second of which was Madame Charletruese’s, then Frey’s wagon pulled by Aegir the Tauros, a bigger one than Frey’s pulled by two Tauros, and a small one pulled by two Ponyta) would follow Naisha’s wagon until they found their way to the town they were driving for. Beside her was her Jynx, a weathered pokemon almost as old as Naisha herself, whose psychic powers made up most of Naisha’s fortune-telling ‘talent’.
“Mrs. Naisha?” Respectfully, Frey waited for her to smile and wave to him before he climbed up onto the front platform of her wagon.
“Hello, Frey,” she said, and smirked when Jynx made a pleasant sound and smiled wide. The caravan’s pokemon liked Frey, which was heartening in the worst of times.
Frey settled himself so he sat beside the bench on the front platform instead of on it, his legs dangling between the rigging for the Rapidash, his head positioned strategically lower than Naisha’s. As the official leader of the caravan and the dominant personality in her marriage and her family, that sort of gesture was important to the older woman. “Do you know when we’ll get to Ercruteak?” he asked, watching the Rapidash bobbing their heads as they walked.
“Shouldn’t be more than a couple hours,” was the older woman’s response, with a shrug. “Getting impatient?” A knowing smile flowered for an instant on her face, and she flicked the Rapidash’s reins across their backs with a quiet, husky word of encouragement. The horses picked up the pace, and Naisha laughed when the left wheel of her wagon caught on a rock going considerably faster than normal, throwing her three inches off her seat. Frey couldn’t stop the smile. For all her arrogance and forced unapprochibility, there were times of pure, unadulterated charisma that made Naisha impossible to dislike, and that was a large part of what made her a brilliant leader.
She kept urging the Rapidash for another few minutes, until one of the other gypsies from the back wagon yelled that her Ponyta couldn’t keep up, which was when Naisha, laughing throatily, reined the Rapidash in. She turned to Frey with an almost appologetic smile, her eyes glittering. “Give it a few hours.”
He smirked, and said, “Alright,” with a hint of laughter in his voice. With a quick wave, he slid from the wagon, jogging forward a few steps to pat one of the Rapidash on its pale flank. “Thanks, Mrs. Naisha.”
He let Naisha’s wagon roll past him, then the two Rapidash, and jogged over to visit with Aegir. The Tauros nuzzled him on the shirt as he trotted beside his trainer, but seemed mostly pretty antsy in his heavy rigging. “You’re as bored as I am, aren’t you, Aegir?” Frey asked, combing his fingers through Aegir’s thick, tangled mane. The Tauros sighed through flared nostrils. He spent a lot of his time in the harness, and when he wasn’t pulling the wagon he was mostly in his pokeball while Frey played gypsy for crowds and sometimes played at less honest ploys, but at times, when neither of them were working, Aegir and Loki, Frey’s two pokemon, were trained to battle. Aegir, who Frey’d known for the last ten years of his life, had been the beast of burden for Frey’s mother before Frey had adopted him, when his mother was arrested for associations with Team Rocket. He had the raw, brute strength to take on most opponents, and a blind trust for the human who commanded him. Loki, Frey’s second pokemon, wasn’t quite as physically upstanding. He’d gotten the Meowth egg from his mother for his twelth birthday, and had, in the past four years, raised it up to Persian, but somehow the undying loyalty Aegir, and in fact most pokemon, felt for their trainers, never quite made it into Loki’s neural complex. The Persian was snidely independant, intolerant of most other people beside Frey, and sometimes of Frey, too, (which was why he spent a good amount of time, when they were traveling with the caravan, in his pokeball), and ridiculously finicky where food was concerned. Loki knew moves like Toxic, and Confuse Ray, and used physical attacks only when special moves had worn an opponent down to nothing already.
Both Aegir and Loki liked battling, but Frey wasn’t stupid enough to think he could drop out of the caravan and become a pokemon trainer. His monsters might be good, but he’d seen gym battles, and, worse, League battles, and knew that as a trainer, he didn’t have anything like what it took to be that good. He had fun, he even won every now and then, but he couldn’t do anything like that. To win at the Pokemon League, you had to be skilled, intimately aware of your pokemon’s strengths and weaknesses, and of their attacks, effects, and natural talents; just as knowlegable about your opponents, good at judgement calls and aware of what your opponent was likely to do, what would be wise to do, what your opponent might do just because you wouldn’t be able to predict it and, sometimes, it didn’t hurt to be a little bit psychic.
Frey checked his watch, and sighed. These few hours were taking days to pass.
When he got tired of walking, he went back into his wagon and watched the trees pass by through the window. It seemed like a very long time before a muted cheer ran though the caravan, and the entire train picked up the pace a little. Frey poked his head out, and saw the sparse skyline that marked Ecruteak City, straight ahead. He gave the ritual, if belated, cry, and jumped out of his wagon to meet the city head-on.
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Comments and critique are greatly appreciated! ^_^
--Ember
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